by AA Gill
Dear Uncle Dysfunctional,
I’ve got this problem. A few years ago, I was working for the UN in refugee camps in the Middle East and there was a girl. She was on her own, desperate and pretty. And she was great, it was great. I helped a bit. Made sure she was safe. Got her some medical treatment, a coat, and one thing led to another and we started having a fling. It was sort of secret. Because, you know, they don’t really approve of humping the patients. This was different. Really. We were close. She was beautiful and gentle and understandably needy. I suppose if I’m honest, in retrospect, she had more invested in the relationship than I did. But we knew it was always going to be limited, or I assumed we knew. After six months, I was moved back to Geneva and then to London and I fell in love and got married to a brilliant human rights lawyer. We’d been doing IVF, though without much success. And then – this was five years later – I got a call from a refugee detention centre in London. They said they had my son with his mother. Fuck me. I had no idea that there’d been a child. I’d heard nothing. I had to tell my wife. She was upset, obviously. Actually, she was mortified. Even though it all happened before I ever met her it was the thought of the child. He’s five now. She’s a really good woman, my wife. She said we should adopt him, give him a home. A future. What do you think I should do?
Name and address withheld
How nice to hear from you, Mr Pinkerton. I’d been hoping you’d write. You’ve quite a reputation. I think it’s fair to say you must be the most universally, comprehensively loathed and despised man in all of opera. There can be barely any bloke who has sat in the stalls and not thought, “Give me five minutes alone with that bastard and I’d teach him a lesson.” For the reader who has never quite got round to seeing Madam Butterfly, let me explain briefly how this pans out. Your ex-girlfriend waits and waits for you to come back to her and your child, never doubting your love, until she sees your wife and is forced to realise that the only thing she has – her son – will have a better life with your wife and you. To make that happen, she kills herself. In one of the most coruscating, desperate and shocking scenes ever made up, more distressing than any horror movie, Butterfly plays blind man’s bluff with her little boy and while he is blindfolded and searching for her she silently kills herself. The boy is discovered by his father. But we’re not going to let that happen, Mr Pinkerton. We’re going to apply this column’s patented Richard Curtis Retrospective Happy Ending.
So here’s how it goes. You get the call that your ex-girlfriend and her son are going to be deported. You feel sad in a self-pitying sort of way, and say there’s nothing you can do about it. Crack open a beer, because you need a drink, and turn on the football. Your wife hears this tinkling sound. It’s the scales falling from her eyes. She sees you for the callous, lazy, self-interested, opportunistic little shit you are. She jumps in the car and gets to the detention centre where your son and his mother are being led out to be sent back to the hellhole they escaped from. The mother is secretly preparing to kill herself. Your wife, the lawyer, says she is going to act on Butterfly’s behalf. She asks to interview her in private. And something miraculous happens. At the lowest ebb of both their lives, they look into each other’s eyes and realise fate has brought them to this moment. One with a child but no security, the other desperate to be a parent. Their mutual need leads to love. Your wife gets them out of jail, they set up home together, she divorces you, takes half your money and the house, Butterfly sues you for child support, and takes the other half. They get married in a small church in Gloucestershire and the little lad sings “All You Need is Love”. No one dies. Not a dry eye in the universe, except yours.
Now, for the rest of you this should be instructive. You need to understand why Pinkerton is such a compellingly ghastly character. He’s not evil, or particularly cruel, or a psychopath. He’s just selfish, expedient and cowardly. He’s so shocking because he’s so very close to all of us. It only takes a couple of degrees of moral laziness, a weakness of resolve, a little self-indulgence and we could all be Pinkerton. And that’s what makes him such a repellent character. The cartoon monsters – the Rippers and Hitlers – are miles away. Pinkerton is just a bad hair day away. When Puccini wrote Madam Butterfly, his lyricist pointed out that the tenor playing Pinkerton would have to be a big star, and that would be expensive. But he didn’t have anything to sing in the third act, and that would be a waste. Why not write him an aria, maestro? Because, said Puccini, with great Italian emotion, he doesn’t deserve one.
Dear Uncle Dysfunctional,
I’m a woman in my forties and I’ve decided to become celibate. I’m giving up sex, with the exception of the occasional comfort frot. It’s not that I don’t like sex or that sex has given up on me. There’s no shortage of men who’d jump aboard given half a chance. It’s just I can’t be bothered any more. I can’t be bothered with the preparation, the dressing up, the depilation, the trying to see my bottom in the mirror, all the humiliating business that goes with sex, the time and the emotion invested in even a half-hearted affair. As I get older, I’m less willing to put up with the neediness, the selfishness and the insecurity of men with no clothes on. I’ve realised that dressed men are really perfectly nice, and if there’s no question of sex they behave like grown-ups and turn out to be interesting and funny, dependable and kind. While the men you’re fucking rarely are. And much as I’ve enjoyed sex in the past, I don’t think that the intense fleeting pleasure is worth all the tedious hard work of the prelude and the aftermath. And I’ve discovered there are an awful lot of other women like me. I just thought you’d like to know.
Violet, Cobham
I think you’re right. I meet more and more grown-up women who aren’t interested in having sex with me. When asked if he still had sex, Sophocles replied, “I am only too glad to be free of all that; it is like escaping from bondage to a raging madman.” All sexual relations happen between three people: two lovers and a raging madman. I’ve been thinking for some time that there should be a variation of Tinder for people who don’t want to have sex any more. You can flick left for uninterested and right for can’t be bothered. It would be enormously gratifying and a source of quiet stress relief.
Dear You,
I always rim a fella when I’m giving him a blow job. I mentioned this to a group of my girlfriends. They were all disgusted, saying they’d never stick their tongue up some bloke’s arse on the first date. Do you have a ruling on this?
Rose, via email
No. But I can pass on an old posh prostitute’s trick. You won’t be surprised by how many men ask for rimming from hookers because, obviously, you go out for what you’re not getting at home. And the brasses charge extra for it. The trick is to get the john into the doggy pillow-biting position – arse upwards – then spread the cheeks, make complimentary and delicious remarks about the presented sphincter, and then stroke and tease it with the pad of a finger, avoiding oral-rectal contact. Very few heterosexual men can tell the difference between a tongue and a finger without seeing it, so the sex worker gets her extra, the bloke gets his jollies, and no one gets giardia.
Dear Sir,
I’ve been perusing your effulgent errs for some time with, I must declare, a vanishing pleasure. What was once engorged is now flaccid. When you write about the straightforward mechanics of congress between honest working people, overcome as they may be with inappropriate lust and an abundance of blameless ardour, then oft your replies are useful, passing lyrical, perchance antic with bouquets of heavenly smut. I particularly remember with ribald amusement your injunction on how to delicately cope with rectal effluvia after anal sex in polite company. It had an earthy practicality. And the hilarity of your instructions for plaiting a fairy garland into a harvest festival was a boon for aesthetic spinsters blessed with an artistic bent. But I must tell you, my patience runs thin over all this mawkish sentimentalising about opera plots. Fat, warbling women, freaking with spittle-fleck, lust after fatter, pederastic gentlemen m
ostly from headier climes. It’s not the sort of useful instruction that the hard-working denizens of Dorset need, or indeed wish to know. I hope, Mr Dysfunctional – I demur to name you uncle, you are no kin of mine – that you should offer the experience of your priapic pen that drips the unction of solicitous communion into the ears of simple souls desirous of carnal equilibrium. Take, for instance, my own particular canny conundrum in the fanny-filling department. There was a chap, a shepherd, who was passing interested in introducing his trouser ram to my sheep dip. But then his dog drove his ewes off a cliff. And that’s not a euphemism. Sadly, he now finds himself in straightened circumstances – though not in the man sausage area. And then there is the old gent up the road, who simply adores me and wants to be married, but I don’t sense there’s any capering round his maypole, no top C in his choir. He is, in short, a gangling shag-dodger, though he does have his own linen and fine parlour ornaments. I suppose I could marry him and continue ploughing my own furrow, but then there’s the army officer – tight breeches, with a pert motte-and-bailey. He jerked his sword from his scabbard and lunged at my face. I almost swooned with the excitement as he flashed within centimetres of my quivering lip. I could smell the martial musk on his manly musket. What shall I do? My South Downs have got bloat, and I desperately need someone with a firm hand to relieve them.
Bathsheba, Dorset
Bathsheba, how good to finally hear from you. Of course, we already know your story: you are the heroine of Far from the Madding Crowd, a capricious, contrary little bitch, who makes the shepherd Gabriel Oak’s life a misery; you humiliate Farmer Whatshisname by sending him love letters as a joke; you trap Sergeant Troy, who really loves someone else, so that Farmer Whatsit shoots the soldier dead and gets locked up for the rest of his life. So you have to reluctantly do with what’s left: the miserable shepherd, who’s now your hireling. And that’s the end of the book. Except we all know that you’re going to go on to make his life a slow, rural misery as well. You’re often held up as being a bit of a proto-feminist, a role model, as a girl who wants to remain independent but also has needs in a masculine world. Well, up to a point. Actually, you’re a bit of a prick-tease and want the men around when there’s a haystack on fire or the sheep need de-farting, but then it’s “push off and mind your own business” when they fancy a hand job.
So, we can apply Richard Curtis’ algorithm to this story. For a start, Gabriel Oak, the shepherd (played by Martin Clunes), gets a better dog, probably played by the one who won Britain’s Got Talent. Then his sheep aren’t driven off a cliff and he’s not bankrupted. Then Sergeant Troy (Cillian Murphy) the sword-swaggerer’s great love, the maid, will be miraculously saved from dying in childbirth by said Gabriel Oak who is a natural healer/vet/midwife character. Troy will gratefully marry the mother of his lovechild and becomes best friends with Oak. He leaves the army and they set up a sheepskin coat business together. Farmer Thingy (Kenneth Branagh) realises that in fact he doesn’t need a woman at all, and takes on a Polish handyman to see to his needs. And I’m afraid, Bathsheba, that leaves you where you belong – on your own, with all your judgements and complaining. But actually, I think you can find solace in writing a weekly column for the Mail on Sunday about the funny things that happen in rural life and what dreadful, unappreciative and boorishly thankless bastards men are.
Mon cher Oncle Dysfu,
Apologize! My English is extraordinary. I have a monumental wife catastrophe. I love Emma with a passion, ardour and panache that will be impossible for the cold, Anglo-Saxon heart to comprehend. She is mon lune et étoiles. I am not a confident homme. I was a discreet infant, also a shy student of illness. Feminine learning was not contagious for me. But then Emma comes to my lap, as you say, and my life is engorged. We are a small country doctor in a little bourgeois ville. It is too petite for my Emma. I worry that she may be offering her discreet vagina to afternoon scoundrels. I am at my amusing aperçu’s end and I have a patient with a disingenuous foot. Can you console?
Charles, Normandy
I feel your pain. All men who have heard your story will have felt a little twinge of identification. You are the sorry dupe in the greatest tragic anti-romance of all literature. You are a country doctor who lacks confidence, excitement, personality or competence. So, just like the rest of us really. And you can’t believe your luck when Emma agrees to marry you in an absurdly elaborate wedding that promises a sybaritic life of luxury and social advancement. And you’re right – you shouldn’t have believed it. She is vivacious, impulsive, romantic, coquettish, impossible, contrary, passionate and fickle. And very expensive. So, just like the women we all fall in love with, really. In fact, for us Anglos, Madame Bovary encapsulates all our prejudices about the French. The extraordinary thing about this book is that even though you are the blameless victim and your wife is a cheating puta, we are forced to feel empathy for her and a bored derision for you. Emma goes on and has a couple of affairs. She has a daughter that she neglects. She borrows money you can never pay back. And, finally, when it all unravels, she takes arsenic and dies in agony. You, being a clod-hopping chump, still think she is perfect and give her a funeral as elaborate as your wedding. And then you have to sell everything to pay off her debts. Finally, you discover the letters that prove she’d been taking her love to town, in a big way, and you become a recluse and die in the garden. Your daughter, Berthe – even her name shows how unloved she was – is sent to work in a factory, the final tragic nail, as so much of this story is about keeping up with the Dubois. So, Charles, I wish I could tell you that this can all be fixed with a bunch of garage carnations, a back rub and a weekend’s glamping. But it can’t. However, we can apply the patented Richard Curtis algorithm to your story and see if the maestro’s happy endings are a match for Monsieur Flaubert. As you might expect, the answer is all about her and very little to do with you.
Madame Bovary is a tragic heroine because she has such huge expectations and dreams for her life but the only avenue open to realise them is through a propitious marriage and motherhood, and when these things fail her, she takes the desperate and predictable medication of sex and shopping. She is a woman stifled and cuffed to the restrictions and conventions, and probity, of her time. But with the wand of Richard Curtis we can fix that. Not by changing the plot, as there is nothing in the character or potential of either you or her that can make a difference, and no amount of cash will undo the arsenic. But we simply change the time. Make Madame Bovary contemporary. We can do that now. Suddenly, there are far fewer social restrictions, far more options. Emma really ought to be in show business, and she ought to be in America. She yearns to be a celebrity so, with the new, improved Curtis version, she’ll be played by Beyoncé and living in California. Her fame will be kicked off by an internet sex tape. She’ll have a string of film-star lovers before settling into a cable reality show. She’ll have her own line in underwear, mime a pop song and set up a charity for orphaned miniature dogs. She will finally marry a Florida cosmetic surgeon, played by Jon Hamm. She will adopt a number of multicultural children and live publicly in the unrelenting glare of celebrity, which is what Emma wanted all along. You, of course, will probably remain miserable, and a cuckold. And finally, Charles, lay off the unfortunate with the club foot: like everything else in your life, it’s not going to turn out well.
Dear Uncle Dysfunctional,
Am I normal?
Trevor, New York
No one normal would ever ask that question, Trevor. The definition of normal is not wondering what normal is. Normal isn’t a thing. It’s an absence of things. Mostly odd things. It is odd to ask if you’re normal. So, the answer is no. If it’s any consolation, it’s also odd to write letters to strangers passing judgements on their normality.
Dearest Unc,
My girlfriend is up the duff. It wasn’t planned but we’re thrilled. Thing is, we’ve just had a scan and it’s fucking triplets. Oh my God, three of them. And all boys. She’s in shock. Spen
ds her whole time laughing and then crying. I’m trying to be practical, concentrate on the important shit like, obviously, what are we going to call them? She wants Athos, Porthos and Aramis (she did A-levels). That sounds like a fucking perfume shop. I said, “Absolutely no way.” So then she said Plácido, José and Luciano. I’m from Hull, not fucking Rimini. Apparently, they’re opera singers. The kids’ll be fat knicker-sniffers, bellowing “just one Cornetto”. No. Absolutely not. No Johnny Foreigner names. We’ve had Brexit – they’ll get deported. So she sobs for a bit and says, “I’ve got it: Robin, Maurice, Barry.” Fucking fuckety fuck, fuck, shit the bed. She wants to give birth to The Bee Gees. “Oh, but Saturday Night Fever’s my favourite film,” she sobs. “And ‘Stayin’ Alive’ is such a hopeful theme to play in the delivery room for giving birth to triplets. It’s the harmonies.” She can’t think straight, obviously. They’ll be born with rabbit teeth and ridiculous hair. “No, OK,” she howls, “you choose.” Well, I’ve thought about it, and I’ve got fucking brilliant names – worth having triplets for. Almost worth living with my fucking mentalist girlfriend for. OK, are you ready? Clint, Lee and Eli. Eastwood, Van Cleef and Wallach. Get it? Oh, come on. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It’s genius. They’d go to parties dressed as cowboys: “I’m the good one, he’s the ugly one, he’s the bad one.” That’s a gag that keeps on giving, that will never not be funny; at passport control, school registers, magistrates’ court. Clint, Lee, Eli. She’s just run out of the room and locked herself in the bog. I don’t know what the matter with her is. That is the single, or rather triple-best idea I’ve ever, ever had. (After forgetting that the condom was in my other jeans.) It’s so good, I had to write to tell you. Can you help? Can you improve? And don’t say Groucho, Harpo and Chico – I’m not having them circumcised.