You might be wondering where all this leaves me. I can’t be doing with the Kabbalah and I’ve passed on Scientology, I’ve decided that the Muslim life may well be a little bit too strict for me, and I’d need daily help with the turban if I joined the Sikhs. I’ve fought my urge to dress as a priest and I would have a problem, frankly, with the no-sex rule there. Is there any religion apart from my yet-to-be-founded Superhero one that can offer me anything?
Well, yes, there is. There’s one I’ve encountered several times that actually does make some sense of how people should live their lives on the planet, and which might offer something to me as an individual, and that’s Shintoism. You may not be familiar with it, because it’s a little off the beaten track. But Shintoism was at one time the state religion in Japan. It was big there before Buddhism started nudging its way in from China a couple of thousand years ago. And now most Japanese folk seem to divide themselves between a little bit of Shintoism and a little bit of Buddhism – as far as I can work out anyway from my trips to Japan.
I’ve taken the trouble to look into Shintoism a little. Essentially, as far as I can work out, it is a pantheistic religion that allows its followers to confer the godhead on to more or less anything. You can worship whatever you wish, providing you think you see the spark of spiritual life there. So if you want to worship rocks, you can worship rocks. If you want to worship rivers, you can worship rivers. If you want to worship women – and who doesn’t? – then you can worship women. You can worship trees, cars, anything you want. And I think it filters down into everyday life in that we-are-all-connected way that they seem to favour in Eastern religions more than Western ones.
I just love the idea that you don’t have to go to any particular church unless you want to, you don’t have to observe any set of rules unless you want to, it’s OK to live your life however you like, as long as you do no harm to others. Ultimately, that seems to me to be about the most grown-up of all religions.
You don’t need an old bloke standing in a pulpit telling you what to do, then handing out a little tray that he wants you to put money in so that he can spend it on something which you don’t have any say over. And with Shintoism there’s none of the status or pecking order involved with being a priest as everyone’s pretty much on a level pegging, and there’s none of that terrible tyranny of information that people seem to love exerting on each other – you know, ‘I know more about God than you because I’ve read the book’, ‘I know more about the Kabbalah than you because I’ve spent more money at my Kabbalah centre’, ‘I know more about reiki than you because I’m a reiki super- duper master.’ This sense of superiority has got to be wrong. Whereas a religion which just enables you to make sense of why you’re here and calms you down and teaches you not to be mean to other people – surely that’s where it’s all at.
So if I do leap, feet first, into Shintoism I’ve already given a little thought as to what I’d like to worship. I will set up a shrine to the Marvel comic books of the 1960s and early seventies and maybe another one dedicated to my wife, even on those days when she’s being especially unreasonable and doesn’t agree with me on everything. Small furry animals of the cuter variety – they should be worshipped. Babies, obviously, should be adored and worshipped and cherished by all that pass them – even really ugly ones. You don’t see that many super-ugly babies, and when you do, politeness dictates that you shouldn’t point it out to the parents. But, in a way, the ugly babies need more of a shrine than anyone else.
And I think, ultimately, my favourite shrine will be dedicated to that moment at the beginning of a movie when you’re sitting in your seat and the lights go down and you’ve got your popcorn and your giant carton of drink and you know that for the next hour and a half or so you can stop worrying about global warming and whether your mobile-phone bill is going to be huge or wars in other countries that you really hadn’t thought we should be involved with or the fact that you need to lose maybe fourteen pounds and shouldn’t be eating the M&Ms you’ve just purchased or any of those other petty concerns you have – you can leave all that aside and hope that with any luck this will be the greatest movie ever made. That’s what I’d like to worship – that moment just before you get to see a new film by someone who might be as great as Sergio Leone or David Lean or Alfred Hitchcock or Federico Fellini, or even Stephen Spielberg or one of the new guys. That’s my favourite thing, probably, and that’s where I find a little bit of peace.
The war to end all wars
Like many men, I’m sure, in my youth I felt I would do something of great worth with my life. I would leave a lasting legacy, an achievement of some kind that would have future generations talking about me with respect and possibly even admiration and awe. I went through all the usual phases – wondering if I might be Jesus, dreaming that I could well be the next James Dean, hoping that I might accidentally find the cure for cancer without really having to work too hard at it.
As those dreams all dwindled away, I began to focus on smaller, altogether more attainable fantasies. Perhaps I might rescue a family of important people from a burning vehicle or a hotel that was about to collapse. Ideally, there would be at least two or three very hot young women in there, all desperate to show me their gratitude in the most straightforwardly physical way – once I’d given interviews to all the news channels, of course. Naturally, I would rise above such base temptation and show my true colours by saying, ‘I want nothing in return – put your breasts away, madam.’ Thankfully, my resolve has never been tested.
But if I’m to take a step back and look at my life objectively, I can see that there has been one heroic struggle in which I have played a prominent, if far from decisive role. The war against nits. I can guess what you’re thinking. That sounds feeble compared to the war against terror. That doesn’t have anything on the war on want. It might not even compare that favourably to the battle to get a bikini-bod back after giving birth that so many female celebrities are keen to share with us in glossy magazines. But it has been a very real, very passionate struggle that I have devoted a considerable amount of my limited time on the planet to, so show a little respect, please.
Yes, my sworn enemies on Earth are head lice, or pediculis capitis to give them their proper name: those revolting, bloodsucking little parasites that set up home and lay their eggs – which are the actual nits – in your children’s hair. The wretched things walk from head to head wherever children gather so persistently that for the last ten, maybe twelve years of our lives, I can’t remember one sustained period when we haven’t either been suffering from a full-blown nit invasion, recovering from a lengthy bout of combing out, or girding our loins for a renewed attack.
I think my daughter Betty first got nits when she was about six or seven. Back then we were blissfully unaware that they were going to loom so large in our domestic life. I remember going to a school play in which she had something approaching a starring role. She had to play a little girl in some comedy turn in which she recited a poem and got dizzy and passed out, and she did very well, but of course I would say that. Anyway, for the rest of the show she was standing on the stage, in front of all her classmates and their parents, furiously scratching and rubbing her head and pulling at her hair. In our ignorance, we thought it was quite cute, just some kind of tic attributable to nerves, but later, when we were informed that she was playing host to a whole army of nits, we realized what the more experienced parents present had immediately known – she had been colonized. It was only when we tried to comb the nits out that we began to appreciate just how nightmarish it is to get rid of the tenacious little fuckers.
Every time we dolloped conditioner on her hair to loosen the eggs’ grip, dragged the fine-toothed nit comb through it and wiped off the comb on a tissue, out would come what seemed like hundreds of grown-up head lice and the baby nit egg things. The tissue would be black with them. It’s really quite stomach-churning the first time you see it. We worked our way across the whole of
her head, sweating and moaning and taking the occasional break, and wondering what we had done, or failed to do, that had caused this horrible state of affairs.
Still, we finished the job, congratulated ourselves and went to bed, feeling exhausted but noble, safe in the knowledge that we had cured our child of this terrible affliction, and agreeing never to speak of it again. What we didn’t know, in our nit naïvety, was that you have to repeat the whole procedure two or three days later, and then again about a week after that, because if you miss one or two eggs and they hatch and breed, suddenly you have another whole regiment. And of course they spread from one child to the next, and can live for days on pillows and towels, just waiting for the chance to hop back on board and start the population explosion all over again. And the grown-ups in the family get them as well, although personally, I got off lightly, because they seem to prefer women and children – they don’t like the testosterone that grown men produce, apparently, or they prefer oestrogen, or maybe they just don’t like me much. But it’s a blessing, as my wife almost always gets itchy once we find them on the kids.
Betty got them first, but we’ve all had them now. My son, Harvey, is a delightful boy in every way, and is blessed with long, very thick hair, rather like his disconcertingly youthful father’s, and the nits just love him. His head is Disneyland for them. There must be dozens of them on every bloody strand. We would spring-clean him regularly, apply the nit-killing juice, then embark on the long, conditioner-based comb-out, and repeat it a few days later, and once more after that, and hope and pray that was going to finish them off. Six months later he’d be scratching away again and we’d be back to the same hellish routine. It’s like a really depressing real-life version of the movie Groundhog Day , but instead of falling in love and learning to play the piano and becoming better people, we just fight off wave after wave of unwanted head lice.
Honestly, though, my wife does most of the grunt work. I’m more of a general, overseeing the campaign from a safe distance. I try to help, I really do, but I don’t have anywhere near Jane’s patience or attention to detail. I’ll comb through the child’s hair, comb it again, then make a rudimentary inspection and have one last go at it. Jane, on the other hand, will divide the head into sections, tying up the hair in elastic bands, a bit like those people in the Bahamas who do holidaymakers’ hair in corn rows. Which is all very well if the holidaymakers are Afro-Caribbean, but unfortunately they tend for the most part to be very large white women who come home, bright red from the sun, resembling overweight lobsters with a game of noughts and crosses taking place on their head. Not an attractive look, really. But Jane deals with those nits with such remarkable thoroughness that I have decided she’s better equipped for the task than me, and seeing as it’s one of those jobs that, if you can get someone else to do it, you will, she’s stuck with it from now on.
Honey, our youngest, doesn’t suffer quite as badly as Harvey, but, having the longest hair of all the children, when she does succumb, the little monsters seem to find it easier to hide from the comb, leaping from lock to lock like tiny bloodsucking Tarzans on vines. Maybe I’m crediting them with too much intelligence, but by God, they’re a hardy breed. And what I’ve found out about head lice – which you may, or more probably may not, wish to know – is one of the reasons why they’re so hardy (in addition, of course, to their craftiness in developing immunity to insecticide, which often only kills the adults in any case, as it doesn’t always penetrate the shells of the eggs). The female head louse needs to have intercourse with the male just once in her lifetime to produce any number of babies. Apparently, when the male has had his pleasure, run away and decided never to speak to her again, the lady louse stores his sperm in a little bum-bag or rucksack or something, which she can dip into whenever she fancies making another batch of nits.
I don’t like to be defeatist, but at times I think we’re fighting a losing battle. We were just about to give up and shave all our hair off and think about joining a cult so we didn’t stick out so much, when we discovered a service in London called Hair Force that will comb out the nits for you. That’s right, the cavalry have arrived.
So we took the kids along and found that, for cash, some lovely ladies in white uniforms, wearing white leather holsters that contain all manner of nit-killing combs, devices and potions, would attack the nits on your behalf. The kids don’t mind too much, because they’re given a portable game machine to play or a DVD to watch while they lie face-down in a sort of massage chair and the ladies set to work, following a very similar method to the one my wife employs with the rubber bands and the sectioning of the hair, and with an eye for detail found only in ladies and male surgeons. They also have marvellous little Hoovers that suck off all the nits. It’s quite a nice sensation, having your hair vacuumed, and I can now see what rugs get out of the experience. It’s still a long and boring endurance test, but on balance, we all prefer being nit-free, even if the kids claim they miss them a little bit.
When the children were fidgeting and begging us to stop after a couple of hours of prolonged, tedious combing, during which our tempers would inevitably fray slightly and they would start to fidget and whinge and plead to be set free, I would take one of the bigger, hatched lice and show it to them under a magnifying glass. Hoping to persuade the children that the boredom and discomfort and general dreariness of sitting still and being groomed like a baby chimp was worthwhile, I explained that the horrible creature under the glass thinks of their head as home, and their blood as supper. These monstrous things, I’d say – and if you’ve ever looked at one under a magnifying glass you’ll know why Disney have never tried to turn one into a lovable cartoon hero – these things have sex on your head. They make babies up there. They are throwing big nit parties while you sleep. Given the chance, they will build nit schools and roads and office blocks, and keep breeding until you can no longer see your hair, but instead go through life wearing a huge nit-and-louse afro, which in turn will keep growing until you have a nit beard, then a hairy nit chest, and then you disappear under a writhing nit mountain, which will spread and join together with other nit mountains until finally the whole planet is one big nit ball floating in Space. So sit still and let your mum keep combing.
This worked for a while, until Betty, who’s a very sweet-natured girl – at one time we believed she might well be the next Dalai Lama – asked why we couldn’t live in peace with the nits and the lice, maybe even save them and keep them as pets. But this is war, I’m afraid, and I cannot tolerate pacifists or collaborators, so the nits are always flushed away, and anyone found trying to keep one hidden in a pocket or the palm of their hand is threatened with baldness. This may well be a war we cannot win, at least in my lifetime. But there is a sense of victory in never giving up, and although I might be imagining it, I think I can sense something akin to respect in the lice I encounter these days. And for that alone, I think I deserve to be remembered.
Middle-aged man seeks perfect hat for long walks, movies and long-term relationship
On the clothing front, my idea and your idea of what looks great on a man probably differ. I like combos that cause a small start of shock when first spotted, which then settles down into a slow burn of admiration. I suspect that I’ve pulled this off maybe two or three times over the last twenty-five years of dressing myself. Not bad, eh? Which means I’ve inflicted a considerable number of fashion disasters on innocent passers-by, many of which I remember with a certain nostalgia. Others I will have forgotten about completely until somebody shows me a slightly dodgy photograph from an old teenage magazine like Just Seventeen, which took a fleeting interest in me when I first appeared on TV. I popped up in Smash Hits once or twice as well. And there I am, preserved for posterity walking out of some über-eighties bar in a bowler hat with a spike on thetop, or flared trousers with an embroidered inset and a high cummerbund waist, or velvet harlequin sleeves. All actual items I have owned and worn, and not for a bet.
Eve
n now, I have several outfits in my wardrobe which I am convinced look absolutely splendid on me, but which I have been made to promise I will never, ever wear when taking the children to school or collecting them afterwards. My personal favourite is a Vivienne Westwood original buffalo-boy-style hat, like a kind of overgrown bowler someone has sat on. I have that in two colours – camel and a dark-chocolatey brown. I have to concede that the dark-chocolatey brown doesn’t quite work – for some reason it makes me look a little bit like Chip, or maybe Dale, from the Disney cartoons. But the light one I’m very fond of. I wore it on TV once: as I recall it was on They Think It’s All Over , the sports quiz on which I was a regular, and about a week later, when I took the kids to the circus that sets up on Hampstead Heath once a year, their professional clown, a performer of some repute, asked to speak to me after the show. He came up to me after a splendid performance – unfashionable though it is, I really like circus clowns – ruefully shaking his head. ‘I saw you on TV last week, wearing that hat thing,’ he said. ‘People like you are making my life very hard. How can I get a laugh dressing silly when people like you dress even sillier? Can’t you please stop?’
I tried to persuade him that I had been wearing it as a style statement but he refused to believe such nonsense, convinced it was fancy dress designed to make me look like an idiot. By insisting it was a collectable designer piece from the eighties and not a comedy prop, I was adding insult to injury. But I needn’t have bothered, because the answer to his question is simply, ‘No. I can’t stop, God help me.’
Why Do I Say These Things? Page 22