Collected Columns

by Michael Frayn

  You’re acting.

  (1994)

  A good stopping place

  How on earth did I get into this situation?

  I mean, at the start of another piece, which is appearing exactly a week after the last piece, which was exactly a week after the piece before it … How has this come about? I wrote a regular column when I was a young man for a number of years. Then I stopped. I stopped because I didn’t want to grow old and find I was still at the start of another piece, which was appearing exactly a week after, etc. Now I’ve grown old and what do I find? I find I’m still at the start of another piece, which is appearing, etc.

  Let me try and work out what happened. I had a little time in hand last year when I couldn’t start any major new project, because I was waiting for directors for plays, and so on. So I wrote a short piece or two, to keep by me for a rainy day. What sort of rainy day? I don’t know. Sometimes a piece is required. It’s not a bad idea to have one in the store-cupboard, along with the two tins of sardines and the packet of dry biscuits that was best before April 1987.

  Then I remembered a few more ideas I’d put by over the years, and I wrote a few more pieces. I think there were about eight of them. Eight seemed a good round number, not too few and not too many. I sent them off to the Guardian. I had not the faintest intention that this should be the start of any regular arrangement. This was a limited engagement, as they say in the theatre. Eight weeks only. Season must end on such-and-such a date due to prior commitments.

  The articles started to appear. ‘How do you like writing a column again?’ people asked me, in the carefully pleasant tone of voice one might adopt if one was remarking to an alcoholic that he seemed to be holding a drink in his hand, in case he hadn’t noticed himself. It wasn’t a column, I explained. It was a series of articles, a limited engagement. They smiled. I was just going to have the odd drink and then stop again, was I? They’d heard that kind of story before.

  And indeed, as the end of this limited season approached, to stop at that particular point began to seem a bit … odd … Eight didn’t seem to be such a good number, now I’d got to it. Wouldn’t it be more natural to stop after nine, or ten? Ten, yes. Ten was a good, natural, self-explanatory number. I could say to people – I could say to myself, Well, I’m just writing ten pieces … No, I couldn’t. You can’t just casually happen to do ten of something. What you can do – nonchalantly, who’s counting? – is a dozen.

  All right, so a dozen. But then to write exactly twelve pieces seems a penny-pinching, mean-spirited way of justifying talk of a dozen. Make it a baker’s dozen. No, make it fourteen. Then I can talk about a dozen and have the private satisfaction of knowing that I’m generously understating it.

  So, I’ll stop after fourteen. But then fourteen … that’s just about enough for people to have noticed they were under way. So they’ll notice if there isn’t a fifteenth. They’ll think I’ve been fired. Caught stealing the petty cash. Drunk in charge of the fax machine.

  Better hang on for a few more. Slip away after twenty, say. No surprise if I went after twenty. Everyone’s on short contracts these days. No one’s hanging around waiting for the pension and the chiming clock. Nothing has a permanent structure any more. Be a bit of a surprise if I stuck around after twenty, in fact. People might start thinking I’d got into a groove, couldn’t think of anything else to do, was suffering from some form of neurotic compulsion.

  Which I know is nonsense, of course. All the same, once you’ve got up into the twenties it is starting to look more and more like a regular column. The enterprise is acquiring a certain momentum of its own, a certain historical gravitas. Its beginnings are getting lost in the mists of time. There are several million people in the world who hadn’t even been born when this thing started. It would have been all right if I’d stopped after eight, I see that now. Eight’s nothing. But twenty … twenty-five – it’s starting to be part of the great chain of being, a short but significant fibre in the ongoing texture of the universe. It’s becoming an institution. It’s like a chain letter, or the monarchy. Totally pointless, but to break the chain now seems somehow wilful, violent, unthinkable.

  Isn’t this how things start? Alcoholism, relationships – or indeed the monarchy. You have a few drinks with your friends when you’re a young man. You go out with someone a couple of times. You crown two or three insignificant local kings. Then you find yourself in the pub fairly regularly … She comes round to your place, you go round to hers … The kings beget a few more kings …

  And before you know what’s happened the habit has taken over. One moment you’re enjoying the odd Ethelred, one or two Edwys, everything very civilised and delightful – stop any time, no problem – you might put in a nice warlord as dictator instead, if you feel like it, or elect some Professor of Theology as president – and the next thing you know you’ve had eight Edwards, eight Henrys, four Georges, four Williams, not to mention two Elizabeths and a few odd Victorias and Matildas – in fact you’ve lost count – you’re right out of control – and you can’t stop now, not just before your third Charles …!

  I don’t want to be that sort of person. I want to be the sort of person who can take it or leave it. Come and go. Put things down, pick them up. Work one day, have fun the next. Enjoy a king or two, then switch perfectly happily to a General Secretary. Chuck the chain-letter in the waste-paper basket, let the funnel-web spider die out, avoid the cracks in seven paving stones and then cheerfully step on the eighth … tenth … no, no … twelfth … fourteenth … sixteenth … no, no, no! Nineteenth … twenty-first … stop!

  So I’m striking a blow for sanity and freedom. Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse. Before you’re lassé and I’m cassé, I passe. I’m stopping. Not after a hundred, or a hundred and forty-four. Not in the year 2,000, or on my ninetieth birthday, or to celebrate the next coronation. After the howevermanyeth, on the wherever-we’ve-got-to-th of whichever month it happens to be.

  I’ve got a bottle of very expensive vintage champagne that a friend gave me about twelve years ago. I’ve still got it because I couldn’t think of an occasion sufficiently definitive to justify ending its venerable existence, and it looked set to continue undrunk forever. But I’m going to open it today, without any occasion for it at all, except to celebrate a small victory of spontaneity over habit, of reason over obsession, of stopping right here, bang in the middle of

  (1995)

  About the Author

  Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and began his career as a journalist on the Guardian and the Observer. His novels include Headlong, Spies and Skios. He has also published two works of philosophy, Constructions and The Human Touch; and a memoir, My Father’s Fortune. His seventeen plays range from Noises Off, recently chosen as one of the nation’s three favourite plays, to Copenhagen. He is married to the writer Claire Tomalin.

  Also by the Author

  fiction

  The Tin Men

  The Russian Interpreter

  Towards the End of the Morning

  Sweet Dreams

  The Trick of It

  A Landing on the Sun

  Now You Know

  Headlong

  Spies

  Skios

  Matchbox Theatre: Thirty Short

  Entertainments

  non-fiction

  Constructions

  Celia’s Secret: An Investigation (With David Burke)

  The Human Touch

  Collected Columns

  Stage Directions

  My Father’s Fortune

  plays

  The Two of Us

  Alphabetical Order

  Donkeys’ Years

  Clouds

  Balmoral

  Make And Break

  Noises Off

  Benefactors

  Look Look

  Here

  Now You Know

  Copenhagen

  Alarms & Excursions

  Democracy

  Afterli
fe

  films and television

  Clockwise

  First and Last

  Remember Me?

  translations

  The Seagull (Chekhov)

  Uncle Vanya (Chekhov)

  Three Sisters (Chekhov)

  The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov)

  The Sneeze (Chekhov)

  Wild Honey (Chekhov)

  The Fruits of Enlightenment (Tolstoy)

  Exchange (Trifonov)

  Number One (Anouilh)

  collections

  Matchbox Theatre: Thirty Short

  Entertainments

  Copyright

  First published in 2007 by Methuen

  This edition first published in 2016 by

  Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2016

  All rights reserved

  © Michael Frayn, 1962, 1968, 1999, 2000, 2007

  Cover design by Faber

  Cover images © Shutterstock

  The right of Michael Frayn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–32890–1