But the real coup of the production, coming when it did, was this: by doing Dickens plain and faithful, the BBC reminded us of what it was like to encounter Dickens the first time, recalling to our minds ourselves when we were young, suggestible and tearful. No small matter, this. To reacquaint yourself with yourself in a familiar book is up there with flying balloons with Mr Dick, as one of the sweets of existence. And tears remembered . . . but you don’t need me to tell you that.
Tears remembered must have something to do with my emotionalism around darts. I was a handy player once; even carried my own arrows about my person in a sort of spectacle case made of Bakelite. Nowadays, darts are so slender you can keep a set behind your ear. But they were more like feathered javelins in my day, boohoo. Scrub what I’ve just said about being handy. I was a master. Sometimes I thought it was possible I had a natural genius for the game. Which made me feel bad on other people’s behalf – those who did not have a natural genius for the game – for it seemed to me I was gifted in too many other areas to be gifted at darts as well. I recall an occasion in a pub in Stoke Newington when the weight of my giftedness troubled me as it must sometimes have troubled Albert Schweitzer or Eric Bristow. First of all I couldn’t stop making witty remarks which drew every woman at the bar to my side; then I was unable to lose to anyone at pool, even playing with my wrong arm; then I won a chicken in a raffle. When the darts were brought out, I felt a shudder of anticipation run through the women, a frisson of fear through the men. ‘Time to fail,’ decency whispered in my ear.
An Australian woman I knew had become famous in our circle for losing her darts bottle after exchanging a lover who was a thrower for a lover who was not. As a matter of unconscious psychic solidarity, or maybe just guilt, she was now unable to get a dart to reach the board. No matter how vigorously she tried to launch it, the dart dropped from her fingers like Desdemona’s handkerchief and landed flightless as my chicken at her feet. I would throw limp-wristedly, like her. But here’s a wonderful thing: the less you try to hit the dartboard, the more you find the trebles. The long and short of it being that I couldn’t miss. Every three darts, however faint-heartedly flung, however precariously they hung – One hundred and eigh . . . ty!
Not a pretty sound, I know. One hundred and eigh . . . ty! Not exactly ‘Erbarm’ dich mein, o Herre gott’, which is what normally gets me blubbering at Christmas. But there is a music of the associations, as well as the other sort. I am only flesh and blood. You can’t expect me to hear one hundred and eigh . . . ty! on Sky Sports and not go at the knees remembering when I was as indestructible as a god.
And that’s not all either. For the truth is, associations apart, that while darts is not normally held to be an affective sport, affecting is precisely what it is. Affecting in itself, I mean, not on account of any circumambient Cardiff Arms Park emotionalism, or because previous darts players once perished in an air crash. It’s the fact that fat men with bruised faces play it. It’s the sight of all that bulk concentrated on a needle point, refined into the most fastidious artistry of the fingertips: dainty, discriminating, immaculate. Which is upsetting in the way that elephants contradicting their own natures, performing tricks of weightlessness in the circus ring, are upsetting.
Anything where it shouldn’t be – a fat man squeezed into a double twenty, a Dick on Betsey Trotwood’s lawn, a deity weeping on a cross, someone my age slumped in front of the telly – that’s what’s sad.
Everyone’s Gone to the Moon
Much disappointment in my house when Channel 4 pulled its scheduled documentary about Jonathan King last Monday. Much disappointment from me, anyway. I had a nicely themed week planned. The hidden menace of shyness. With articles appearing in the press telling us what a retiring lad Mohamed Atta had been, and how becomingly, as a teenager, Osama bin Laden had blushed, Jonathan King’s reputed adolescent bashfulness was icing on the cake. Neat, huh? One destroys New York. One destroys the world. And one puts his hand down the pants of pop-crazed teenage boys. Never mind registers of paedophiles, what we need to be told is where every shy kid hangs out, so that we can stone him to death in good time.
Let’s not beat about the bush. I consider the treatment of Jonathan King a scandal. Not just his sentence but our universal approval of it. I do not say he is innocent of the charges brought against him, nor do I say those charges have been trumped up: I say that the crimes of which he has been found guilty do not amount to a hill of beans. I’ll remind you what they are – playing with the penises of fifteen-year-old boys and as a consequence, in the victims’ subsequent accounts (subsequent sometimes meaning after an interval of thirty years), causing them to suffer emotional distress. Just pause a moment and think of the fifteen-year-old boys you know. Those who try to steal your car, and if they can’t get that, your mobile phone; those who throw petrol bombs at one another on the streets of Northern Ireland, or heroise Lee Bowyer, or routinely pack a Stanley knife in their satchels and don’t hesitate to use it; or simply those who lie about in their rooms with their trousers down round their ankles, snorting coke, staring at posters of Kylie and going blind. And now tell me what possible sexual or emotional damage you can do to any of them that hasn’t already been done.
I have inhabited the mind of a fifteen-year-old. I remember its configuration well. (And I was one of the shy ones, not the brutes.) The mind of a fifteen-year-old boy is a sewer.
One sewer is not another. Had Jonathan King stopped me in a record shop, invited me into his Rolls-Royce and asked me my top ten he wouldn’t have got very far. First of all I wouldn’t have been in a record shop. Secondly I wouldn’t have had a top ten. Thirdly I was on principle unimpressed by cars. A bit of a prig, I grant you, but that was my prerogative. Most important of all, I would have known that I didn’t want him to put his hands down my pants. Another prerogative. I just happened to be born pathologically heterosexual. So if a woman the same age as King, let us say of comparable standing and let us even say of comparable looks, had shown comparable interest . . . ? Exactly – I’d have reeled off my top ten and had my hand down her pants long before she’d opened the door of the Roller.
And the emotional damage? She’d have got over it.
It’s a problem, emotional damage. The robust, commonsensical part of our natures laughs the very idea to scorn. ‘Bollocks!’ we shout – or at least we do in my house – when the latest soldier or policeman puts in his claim for having been emotionally scarred in the course of soldiering or policing. But we secretly acknowledge, at the same time, that this might be a somewhat insensitive response. We can locate a bit of emotional distress suffered by ourselves, once we decide to put our minds to it. All’s not well about any of our hearts.
In the end, the two positions are not incompatible. Life is trauma, let’s admit that. Experience is hard, and we are soft, and everything knocks us about. That being the case, let’s go back to a black eye as a measure of prosecutable harm, and chalk the rest down to reasonable wear and tear. Distress, too, is a part of life.
Do not, however, suppose that I am minimising the crime of paedophilia. I am a hanging man when it comes to sexual assault on small children. Hanging, drawing, quartering. Touch a child, and you should expect mankind to turn medieval on you. Tar, feathers, Stanley knives, the lot. But a fifteen-year-old boy – especially a fifteen-year-old boy who keeps coming back for more – is no small child. On that shaky continuum which joins the perversion we call paedophilia to the consensual bliss we call partnership, fiddling with the penises of fifteen-year-old boys is far advanced. It’s not marriage, but it’s heading that way.
Which is not to say I remotely understand why anyone should want to do it. Having shared gym changing rooms with thirty naked sewer-brained teenage boys at a time, I will go to the grave not seeing the appeal. If that were the charge – inexplicable bad taste in sexual matters – then I’d happily see Jonathan King in jail for life. Ditto inexplicable bad taste in music. Not that I hold ‘Jump Up and Down
and Wave Your Knickers in the Air’ against him specifically. I’d see him banged up for having anything to do with the inanity which is pop, full stop.
But by having indulged boys only too willing to be indulged in the folderols of fame and rhythmic simplicity, often with the connivance of celebrity-crazed parents, he has done nothing more culpable than contribute to the cultural lowness of the times.
Good for You, Bad for You
Remember moral certainty? My generation grew up with it. Onanism makes you blind, red wine makes you pissed, and a nicely knotted tie makes a good impression. Thereafter there wasn’t an awful lot you needed to know. Look smart, stay sober and keep your hands off yourself and you’d live to a ripe old age with all your faculties intact and all your grandchildren around you.
I even wrote an essay on the subject for inclusion in the school magazine. ‘The Clean Life’ it was entitled and ran to three thousand words, which was one thousand words longer than the school magazine. But length wasn’t the only reason they refused to run it. They didn’t like the tone of my opposition to such socio-sexual reformers as Alice Bunker Stockham. More than that, they didn’t know who Alice Bunker Stockham was.
‘She advocated karezza,’ I told the editor, who was also our English master.
‘Don’t be smart with me, Jacobson,’ he said. ‘A Japanese invented karezza.’
‘That’s karate,’ I explained. ‘A martial art. Whereas karezza is the practice of withholding ejaculation.’
For which he put me in detention.
On the face of it, a clean-living boy like me should have approved of Alice Bunker Stockham. A doctor and reformer, born in Chicago in the nineteenth century, she numbered Tolstoy among her friends, was instrumental in the spread of the teaching of home economics in American schools, crusaded for the sanctity of marriage and fidelity therein, was active in the saving of fallen women, and otherwise shared my views on alcohol, tobacco and promiscuity. But in this one regard were we divided: she encouraged masturbation, with the proviso that you stopped before you finished – a declined orgasm, in her view, being a step to higher spirituality, and a sort of rehearsal for the coitus reservatus you were going to practise when you took a wife. Though I had no views on the benefits of karezza within marriage – for marriage was the last thing on my mind in the third year – I did oppose it in its solitary form, believing that without ejaculation a man would not feel as disgusted with himself as he ought, and therefore would come at last to see masturbation in a rosy light, with no downside in depression and disgrace. You can’t have a waste of spirit and an expense of shame – this was my point – unless you’ve spent or wasted something. In a word, I objected to her because at the final hurdle she was an enemy of moral certainty – onanism makes you blind, red wine makes you pissed, a nicely knotted tie makes a good impression, and all the rest of it.
Turns out now that it was all a lie anyway. Research published in the last month alone has reversed everything we were taught. It isn’t masturbation that makes you blind, it’s wearing a tie. Masturbation, it turns out, is good for you. Pleasure yourself two or three times an afternoon until you’re fifty and there’s a fair chance you won’t get prostate cancer. There’s also a fair chance you’ll have lost the power of speech, broken both your wrists and developed a pendulous lip, but that’s another matter. We’re just talking prostates for the moment.
If it’s any consolation, Alice Bunker Stockham was no less wrong than I was. Because it isn’t the stroking that helps keeps you healthy, it isn’t the self-love or the daydreaming or the broad-mindedness, no, it’s the release of semen. Leave it in there and there’s risk of carcinogenic effect on the prostatic ducts; flush it through and you’re cooking with gas. So much for karezza. Ha!
But elsewhere in her philosophy Alice Bunker Stockham was definitely on to something. When she wasn’t persuading men to keep their powder dry, and thus leading them on to an early death, she was lecturing against the corset, which she believed to be more culpable in the matter of ‘deterioration of health and moral principle’ than ‘intoxicating drinks’. Forget the drinks. We now know that unless you’re blotto every other evening your heart won’t work. But her argument against corseteering matches the most recent findings on the tie. Overlacing is bad for us.
Researchers in New York have discovered that knotting your tie too tightly can lead to an increase in internal eye blood pressure in just a couple of minutes. And increases in internal eye blood pressure play a significant part in the development of glaucoma. Ergo, look too sharp and you might end up blind.
Who’s to say where it will end? There is always something threatening to make us blind, and there is no guarantee that this time next year we won’t be learning it’s taking a summer holiday or going to the pub. Nor can we be sure, just because of what the latest researchers have been saying, that the old certainties won’t have their day again. Can we really be so scientifically definite, for example, that it’s the tie? What if we were to discover that men who have just masturbated are so concerned to appear clean the minute after, so want to make a good impression and remove all evidence and association of filth, and so need to punish themselves for their weakness, that they find their tightest tie and symbolically hang themselves in it? What if the rise in internal blood pressure is a red herring, a mere coincidence, and it was the post factum horror of ejaculation that caused the blindness after all?
And what if it isn’t the ejaculation that helps the prostate, but the sense of outrage? Not semen that cleans out the cells lining the prostatic duct, but shame. Whoosh! That’s self-disgusted of Tunbridge Wells with his channels clear for another month.
You win some and you lose some. There is no other intelligent position. In the meantime, when you next see someone in the gutter with his shirt torn to his navel, a bottle of red wine in one hand and his dick in the other, don’t waste your sympathy on him. He’s the healthy one.
Anyone Speak English?
Did I recently read, or did I just dream, of a surgeon halting an operation on the grounds that the theatre nurses lacked adequate English to understand his instructions? A fine thing, multiculturalism in action; necessary, too, when you have hospitals to staff and all your nationals are immobilised by dreams of being on Big Brother; but a scalpel is still a scalpel and not a box of matches. Did I also read that the surgeon in question was reprimanded for his action? No surprise there. Language is the last taboo. By decree of right thinking we have brought down the Tower of Babel, come to understand one another perfectly – and anybody who says otherwise is an alarm clock.
Xenophobic of me, I admit, to assume that the nurses in question must have come from foreign parts. And unpatriotic at the same time. Are we not capable of producing our own unintelligibility?
That I am not able to understand half the things that are said to me, particularly when I am on the phone to a helpline, or getting software assistance from somewhere in the Orkneys, or being handed from ‘agent’ to ‘agent’ at a call centre in Romsey, I have now come to accept as normal. It’s my fault, I tell myself, for asking questions and then not bothering to listen to the answers. I am grown incurious. I am losing my hearing. It’s my age. But recently the malfunction has started to kick in the other way as well; increasingly, people are not understanding a word I say to them.
Seasickness, for example. Is that too difficult? Seasickness pills. The chemist’s assistant looks at me as I though I am a madman. She leans towards me, making a hearing trumpet of her face. Not a syllable does she speak. Maybe she guesses, correctly, that if she did form a word I’d be none the wiser. I make a little boat of my hand and send it bobbing on the ocean waves. ‘Seasickness pills.’
‘Ah, pill,’ she says at last. Not in an entirely confident spirit. This might be a pharmacy but only a pedant would take that to mean that they sell pharmaceuticals.
‘Yes,’ I say, encouraging her. I was a teacher once and know how to leap on the back of dawning intelligence and make
it gallop. ‘Pill, yes, good, but specifically pill for seasickness.’
She’s in trouble again, looking around for help. Soon shops are going to have to employ translators to mediate between people born after 1980 and people born before it. ‘Scenic pill?’ she tries. And for a moment I wonder whether there are such things and whether I should be buying them. A pill for improving your appreciation of scenery, would that be, or a pill for calming you down after you’ve been too moved by scenery – a sort of Stendhal syndrome prophylactic? Which reminds me that pills can be for or against and that all this might be my fault for not being sufficiently precise in the matter of which I want. What if the poor girl has been wondering why I want to induce seasickness?
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘It’s anti-seasickness pills I’m after.’ And to help her I make the little boat with my hands again, this time puffing up my cheeks and blowing a gale, then pressing my fingers to my temples and turning green.
‘Oh, headache,’ she says.
‘No, seasick,’ I shout, though of course by now it’s something for a headache that I need.
Whereupon she gives up on me and goes to fetch the pharmacist. ‘Seizing pills,’ I hear her asking him. Which strike me as another good idea. Along with pulverising powders.
Since you will have deduced that I was going to sea you won’t be surprised to learn I needed shoes to go to sea in. ‘Does G mean broad-fitting?’ I ask the boy in the shoe shop.
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