by Alan Coren
Since, at this news, the Prince of Wales gives out a low whimper and has to be helped onto a fortuitously unsellable skunkskin ottoman (a Thanksgiving gift of the Arkansas DAR) while Kleenex Poursuivant mops his gracious brow, let us take on him a little of the pity I besought at the beginning of all this, and tiptoe from the dreadful loft to muster the remainder of it. Why, you ask, did I say that this was the worst possible time for HRH to be forced to compile a list of all the presents he was once given? Because it is also the time when the rest of us are forced to compile lists of all the presents we are about to give. And the last fear of which any of us needs to be reminded as Christmas looms is the annually recurring one that whatever we give, the recipient won’t want; a fear fully justified by the latest national statistics on which I have been able to lay my hands, which show that 31 per cent of gifts end up in lofts, 22 per cent find their way into car-boot sales, 19 per cent go to charity shops to ensure that African tribesmen will all have the same stripey tie, and 16 per cent are passed on next year to daily helps, milkmen, paperboys, and Rumanian hawkers unable to fathom a country which leaves you standing on a front step with more bathfoam than you came to sell.
Consider, then, how the sensitive Sage of Highgrove must be feeling, thrust willy-nilly into his public role as lowerer of the national morale. He has binned the gift of the Magi, and a cold coming he has had of it.
Going, Going . . .
HOW can I bring myself to buy duct tape? How can I walk into my local hardware shop and look Albert in the eye and say I want duct tape? How do I reply when he says, no problem, Mr Coren, what kind of duct tape, bog standard, de luxe, ultra, state-of-the-art, what’s it for? I shall have to reply that it’s for ducts. He will say what kind of duct, and I shall begin sweating, because I do not know what a duct is. I shall not be able to tell him it’s for windows, even though he knows it’s for windows, and I know that he knows. I shall have to say duct tape, duct tape, what am I thinking of, what has got into me, Albert, why did I say duct tape, what I meant was a hammer, have you got a nice one? I shall then buy a hammer, and go home again. Provided my home is still where I left it.
Bottled water? How can I bring myself to buy three months’ supply of bottled water? That is 1000 bottles, even if you wash sparingly. The Waitrose girl will say are you sure, Mr Coren, it’s usually two, and I will have to say we are throwing this big party for teetotallers, we have 300 of them coming over next Sunday, they can’t half shift it, but she will know, and I will know that she knows, especially after I ask her for 1000 candles because I want the garden to look magic, teetotallers don’t have much in their lives, candlelit Evian is as good as it gets. Oh, and it’s a baked bean and sardine party, by the way, so can I have five crates of each?
Have you, too, read Preparing For The Unexpected? It is an Australian emergency manual, but the British Cabinet Office has suggested we download it from the the UK Resilience website, because their own pamphlet isn’t ready yet, and the days grow short as you reach whenever it is. Yes, you are dead right, pardon the expression, it is a flummoxing title, since if something is unexpected, you cannot by definition prepare for it, and what is unexpected to an Australian, anyway? A slow left-arm terrorist with an unspottable googly pitching anthrax grenades outside off-stump? A suicide kangaroo with a gas-filled pouch? A nuclear dunny? I spotted none of these, I discovered merely that what is unexpected in Oz, no doubt because it is an upside-down spot, is what is all too expected everywhere else, and you prepare for it with, ho-hum, duct tape, plastic sheeting, candles, mineral water, tinned tucker, and a portable stove or barbecue – all pretty useless, of course, unless you happen to own a supermarket. But the truly unsettling thing is that they become even more useless the further on you read.
For example, you are advised not only to hermetically seal your premises in the event of anything (un)expected happening, you are also advised to be prepared to evacuate those premises immediately it happens. Now, though I am not perhaps a household word where civil defence experts foregather, I nevertheless feel entitled to be a mite confused by this: just suppose I do become scared enough to handle the embarrassment of showing how scared I have become, how will I know when to tear off all the duct tape and sheeting which have made my newly sealed premises unevacuatable? Oh look, at the end of my street furthest from the (un)expected, neighbours are frantically sealing themselves in, but at the end nearest to it, neighbours are frantically tearing down everything they have just finished sealing themselves in with. Any second now, they will be running out carrying crates of tinnies and cartons of candles, pushing handcarts full of water, portable barbecues on their shoulders, and trailing duct tape behind them like Andrex labradors, but where will they be running?
Towards the (un)expected is where. I bet you didn’t expect that, but it’s what the Australians advise: ‘In the event of an incident, move to an upwind location to avoid contamination.’ Oh, really? If you are downwind of something nasty, surely the only way to get upwind of it is to run towards it and come out the other side? That is how wind works. If, that is, you can tell if it’s working at all: I have never been any good at assessing wind-direction, I cannot count the number of occasions upon which I have licked a forefinger and stuck it up in the air to discover only that I had absolutely no idea which side of it was being blown on.
Let us instead look on a brighter side. Might there not be a touch of good old-fashioned Australian attitude behind this patently daft suggestion? Might it not really be about the best place to light a barbecue when the wind is up, and to hell with the risk of contamination? I offer this not merely as the only sensible explanation, but also because it gives me no small pleasure, amid all the current hysteria, to wonder whether the truth is that the Australians really don’t give a stuff.
Christmas List
THE Rev. Lee Rayfield having told his Maidenhead flock that Father Christmas could not exist because his reindeer would have to gallop at the speed of light to get two billion sacks emptied in the time allotted, and the Bishop of Lichfield having described Jesus as an asylum-seeker and the Three Wise Men as hitmen sent by Herod to knock him off, you may be wondering what else you need to tell your children this Christmas, should they enquire.
Here, then, is a short list.
WHAT ARE GLASS BALLS ALL ABOUT?
A long time ago, questioned by nasty Bethlehem media over the paternity of her little baby, a young woman admitted the possibility that the father might not have been Almighty God, she could have been the victim of a conman she might or might not have met once or twice, she couldn’t be expected to remember all the details, it wasn’t easy pursuing a career as a pioneer Christian aid worker while at the same time being the wife of a prominent cabinet-maker who expected a hot meal on the table every night; she was juggling a lot of balls and it was inevitable that, occasionally, one of them fell to the ground.
In this year’s performances of Peter Pan, children will be told that every time a glass ball falls off the tree and shatters, somewhere a lady finds herself up the duff.
WHAT DO SPROUTS COMMEMORATE?
In biblical times, whenever there was a shortage of stones as the result of an unusually large number of women being taken in adultery and unable to think up a plausible defence, the magistrates permitted the use of raw sprouts. Indeed, since the Aramaic words for the two missiles are very similar, several commentators believe that what Jesus actually said was: ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first sprout.’
WHY TURKEYS?
Turkeys were first discovered by the Pilgrim Fathers, who, noticing they wore feathers, believed them to be native Americans and therefore heathens, and understandably burnt them at the stake. Food, however, was terribly short that first winter, and since the grilling turkeys smelt jolly appetising, the pilgrims asked God for guidance and were given the all-clear, although stuffing was not mentioned. The Rev. Hector Flynn noted in his diary for December 25, 1621: ‘The heathen was really moist.’ The December 3
1 entry reads: ‘Heathen risotto again.’
WHY ROBINS?
Robins are put on Christmas cards to remind us how lucky we are not to be Italian. Italian children have to eat robins at Christmas, also starlings, wrens, gulls, sparrows, budgies, owls, finches, blackbirds, and, if daddy is a bit shortsighted, hot-air balloons and microlite aircraft. If they do not eat these all up, they do not get a tangerine in their stocking, they get a horse’s head.
WHY DID THE ANGEL OF THE LORD COME DOWN?
We cannot be certain, but the likeliest explanation is that an Italian was on a Bethlehem winter break.
WHY DID THREE SHIPS COME SAILING BY?
Seeing three ships come sailing by on Christmas Day in the morning is a sign of good luck. It means that the one carrying 30 million poundsworth of nice new luxury motor cars has not collided with a second one and then been run into by a third.
WHO FIRST DREAMT OF A WHITE CHRISTMAS?
Irving Berlin. When the Berlin family arrived in New York from Russia, they were so poor they had to live in Harlem, where Irving was four feet too short to play basketball. One Christmas Eve, the lonely teenager was staring miserably out of the window watching the neighbourhood kids slam-dunking, when his father asked him what he was dreaming of. Pretty soon, the family was so rich it could move to a lovely big house on Long Island, where Irving took up golf.
IS THERE ANYTHING WE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE CHRISTMAS PUDDING?
Yes. The Bishop of Lichfield has already explained about Herod’s funny little homicidal ways, but you may not know that it was something that ran in the family. Bringing in the Christmas pudding commemorates his daughter Salome’s serving him John the Baptist’s head on a plate. The rumour that her father was not as pleased as he might have been because he couldn’t find the threepenny-bit should be ignored: the traditional insertion of a coin dates from Christmas 1649, when, to express everybody’s gratitude for the decapitation of King Charles I, Cromwell’s Auntie Doreen, in a gesture of unprecedented Puritan frivolity, poked a groat into his yuletide bap.
Lie Back And Think of Cricklewood
COULD I have got into bed with H. G. Wells? Those little bandy legs. That pot belly. A moustache flecked with his favourite nibble, jellied eels. It would be like kissing an otter.
Or Bertrand Russell? All very nice, strolling into the Café Royal on the arm of a celebrity liable to come out with ‘Matter is a convenient formula for describing what happens where it isn’t’ and get all the sommeliers stamping and whistling, but at some point in the evening you would be bound to find that long beak in your ear and a skinny hand whipping up your thigh like a concupiscent crab.
Or Napoleon? Haemorrhoids, as I recall. Or would, no question, were I about to squirt a couple of rounds of Numero Cinq onto my heaving balcon and turn back the eiderdown. And there was also the unusually small matter of that desiccated relict in its tiny casket which came under the Sotheby’s hammer a few years back. Not much tonight, Josephine, one gathered.
Now, were you – a long shot – Professor Irving Davies of the University of Wisconsin, you would find it odd that, in a long fantasy life, none of the above had ever occurred to me. As most men, I imagine, I have seen myself as most men I imagine: I have been up Everest, round the Horn, over the top, behind the stumps, before the mast, between the posts, under the volcano, and am possibly the only man ever to have dreamed of being the author of Walter Mitty. But I have never yet wondered what it would be like to be a mistress, and it is this that Professor Davies would find odd, since he has just presented a paper to a major shrink conference, identifying ‘the common male fantasy of reincarnating as a kept woman’.
Lawks-a-mercy, Professor, you do know how to turn a girl’s head! Having never thought about this before, I now find it hard to think about anything else. What sort of woman would I come back as, petite or voluptuous? There is much to be said for being miniature and thus likelier to kindle the protective flame, but if I were petite I should have to be pert, and I cannot see myself as pert. If I were voluptuous I should have only to be dumb, and it is a lot easier being dumb. Then again, I might run to fat a lot more quickly than if I were petite; I should have to diet to keep the man who was keeping me, and there’s no logic in reincarnating as the desideratum of someone eager to stand me 14 courses at the Gavroche if I have to stick to Ryvita and Perrier to hold him. Alternatively, I could plump for something a mite more recherché. Recherchée. History’s roster of concubinage is pockmarked with the jolie laide, which, for the poorer linguists among you, is of course French for jolly laid. Jósephine Beauharnais had a goatee, Emma Hamilton was built like a Martello Tower, Traudl Mühler-Röstow had a squint so divergent that the Prussian junkers who flocked to her boudoir were all too frequently not the ones she had had her eye on, while the fact that George Sand could easily be mistaken for George Sanders mattered not a fig to top bananas like Alfred de Musset and Frédéric Chopin, who could have had their pick of midinettes with the sort of figures that would get Trappist monks tunnelling under the wire. Yes, all things considered, I think that’s me settled.
But still unsettled, too. What of my ideal man? You will have gathered from my opening remarks that I have misgivings about being Lady Ottoline Coren, or Mrs Patrick Coren, or even The Cricklewood Lily: rubbing shoulders with the great is all very well, but it doesn’t stop at shoulders, and the vast majority of the great, then and now, strike me as satyriatical ratbags of a highly unprepossessing order. I do not wish to be taken briefly and peremptorily between division bells or first and second halves/rounds/acts/races/ wickets/courses/guitar solos, these representing a fair sample of the working environment for a girl like me. Nor, though I enjoy The Desert Song as much as the next girl, do I fancy returning as a common law Begum Aga Coren, spending all day mooching around a requisitioned floor of the Dorchester with Number 89 on my back, waiting to be tannoyed into service. And as for aiming any higher, it should, I think, be made clear that if I had to come back as Camilla Parker Coren, I wouldn’t go in the first place.
What remains? Droning barristers, ponderous telly-pundits, unctuous quacks, preening chefs, honking bankers, celebrity gardeners, viagrated tycoons . . . face it, girls, when you come right down to it, what I’d really be looking for would be some hunky bald sexagenarian with GSOH and several of his own teeth who knows how to treat a lady and doesn’t kiss and tell. Quite what Professor Davies would conclude from that, however, I shrink from imagining.
Shelf Life
MY new stamping ground is quite unlike my old stamping ground. In the high and far-off times, Best Beloved, when I stamped the Cricklewood ground, peeking through this nocturnal window and that, the faces were all screenlit by EastEnders. Here they are all screenlit by their next novel. In my old local, men wept into their Guinness and cursed their foremen; in my new one, they weep into their Chablis and curse their agents. In my old betting shop, the punters queued to back horses; in my new one, they queue to back each other: they are not interested in the Cesarewitch or the Lincoln or the Oakes, only in the Booker and the Whitbread and the Somerset Maugham. Oh, look, there is Beryl Bainbridge, about to lay a pony on A. N. Wilson, who is waiting behind her with an earful of mobile, getting the SP on Melvyn Bragg. Who is sucking his pencil at the counter, wondering if the going suits Margaret Forster, who is sitting in the window, watching the tic-tac man across the street signal the odds on Martin Amis. Who is by the wall, squinting through his rollie-smoke at Beryl Bainbridge, checking her fitness.
In short, this is a booky spot: a square half-mile packed to the chattering gunwales with people who write books, review books, broker books, tout books, publish books, sell books, and – fortunately for all of these – buy and read books. And each and every one of them, producer and consumer alike, is bibliomaniacally competitive. They are all fixated on the dread that someone might be bookier than they are. Which is why a glittering booky couple about to quit this place have, willy-nilly, bequeathed it a passing shot that is felling
casualties on every side.
Mr and Mrs Michael Frayn are decamping from Primrose Hill for Richmond. Having sold up, they are packing up, but while the former has merely made their neighbours glum, the latter is driving them nuts. Because Michael, in a newspaper interview, let slip that the biggest headache of the move was encrating their 250 metres of books. And seconds after this news broke, through every local window issued a low and terrible keening, punctuated by the snap of steel-measuring tapes whizzing back, time and again, into their little cases. But not enough times or agains: for through those same windows the residents could see the Post Office tower, a mile away, and torture themselves with the thought that the Frayn library was taller: stacked, it would have clouds on it. And they have just measured their own, to discover that it would come not even half-way up.
It is the meterage that has thrown us into a tizzy. Hitherto, we have measured books in numbers, since the most important thing about literature is, of course, how many bits of it you have got: 5000 is smug, 8000 is preening, 2000 derisory, and so on. So it was extremely important to know how many books the Frayns owned to see how we ourselves shaped up against a benchmark of the paragon litterati. But meterage frustrates this utterly: people are mooching Primrose Hill, wondering, for example, if the Frayns keep only hardbacks. Were this so, they might have a scant 4000, if the books were really fat (e.g. do they keep all their old copies of Who’s Who?), which would be pretty unimpressive against our 7000 paperbacks, though these occupy only 97 metres. And do they keep their phone-books on the bookshelves, and if so are they flat, taking up thrice the space, and are their very tall books flat, too, atlases and art books and cookbooks and gardening manuals, and if not, are they upright and slanted, and is Frayn including the space left by the slant?