by Stephen Fry
Meanwhile, in Scotland, Ian MacAllister’s friend Angus was moodily swatting a stone along the ground with his crook when Ian stepped up to him. ‘Angus,’ he said, a strange light shining out of his eyes, ‘you ken yon trusker, away down the brae there?’ ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Angus. ‘You know the rabbit hole over there in the valley?’ repeated Ian. ‘Oh that, aye,’ said Angus. ‘What of it?’ ‘Weel,’ said Ian, ‘I bet you a pound I could get that stone into that rabbit hole in fewer strokes of the crook than you could.’ ‘Yeah?’ said Angus. ‘Yeah!’ said Ian. And the bet was on.
It was a royal battle. Angus moved his head on his first shot, put too much shoulder into his action and sliced the stone straight into an exposed scar of sand in the hillside. ‘Oh bunker!’ said Angus. Ian fared no better, hooking his drive clean into a tinkling burn that ran in dead ground below. ‘That’ll cost you a stroke to get out,’ Angus ruled smugly. After twenty-four strokes Ian tapped the stone into the rabbit hole to win the bet. There was a fraught pause. ‘That was nivver the stone you started out with,’ said Angus. They halved the hole and started again, making for another rabbit warren three hundred yards away. And so the day wore on till after eighteen holes they were all square and friends again. They christened their game golf, because they were Scottish and revelled in meaningless Celtic noises in the back of the throat.
Two shepherds from two different countries. Two games with their crooks. And in these sporting 1980s I only want to say this. A game is a good thing. Golf is a game, cricket is a game, snooker, tennis, football, rugby and association – they are all games. Poker, Scrabble, Boggle, chess and backgammon are also games. There is no generic difference between them. The only difference is that the first set of games are usually played out of doors and involve physical exercise and expertise, the second can be played sitting down and involve only mental agility. Sport, on the other hand, is a different thing. Running about a track is sport, lifting heavy weights and rowing along rivers and throwing javelins and hammers and cannon-balls, hitting people in the face with your fist and bicycling round a stadium – those are all sports. They certainly aren’t games. And what I want to say is – games are good, indoors or out of doors, involving brain power, or muscle power, wit or skill, games are good. They spring from the minds of men and women who want to entertain themselves and express their delight at life. A sport, such as weightlifting or running, is to a game, such as cricket, what a knobbly-knees competition is to a Shakespeare play. It’s interesting that some people possess huge amounts of muscles or speed, just as it’s interesting that they have particularly knobbly knees. Interesting, but not life. So let us have games not sport. That’s all. If you have been, good afternoon.
Trefusis on Exams
And a very good to you. We come to that time of year when the young people with whom I make it my business constantly to surround myself here at Cambridge dive off to their several rooms, bury themselves in wet towels and cold coffee and try in one week to stuff into their elastic heads that which should have been slowly oozing and seeping in over a period of three years. Much tummy-rubbish is talked about examinations by those who know little of them, so perhaps I, as a setter and marker of examinations, should tell those of you who might still be of the opinion that they are difficult or important or indeed easy and unimportant something about how good results may be achieved without the tiresome interference of knowledge or application.
To the young person starting out on an academic career I would say this: education prepares you for life, it is therefore incumbent upon you, in order to succeed, to cheat, copy, steal, paraphrase, adopt, adapt and distort. I enjoyed distinct academic success at this University on the basis of two essays. I presented them for my Lower and Higher school certificate, reproduced them for my Cambridge entrance – and was awarded a scholarship thereon – again I regurgitated them for the Part One and the Final examinations of my degree. At each succeeding grade I introduced longer words, stole quotations from newer authors and redressed sentences according to prevailing academic fashions and tastes. But in essence my entire academic reputation and position rests on nothing more substantial than the achievement of memorising a handful of rather banal, second-hand essays. It is a monstrous overestimation of the wit and percipience of the examiners to suppose that they – ‘we’ I should say – are capable of in some fashion ‘seeing through’ the facility, triteness and falsity of candidates such as myself. If a case is well put, with style and flair and dash, then we award it a First or an Upper Second.
Therefore I would urge any examinees listening to me to look at their most successful essays and calculate how best the first and last paragraphs of them might be polarised and aligned to give the impression of answering any question that the exam, on the day, may pose. Lest I be accused of leading the young astray or be sued for heavy damages for causing disastrous results, let me say that it takes a certain brand of deceitful and cunning intelligence or at least a sound grasp of the technique of examinating to understand the universal applicability of one’s own work and how to dress it convincingly for a gullible examiner: unless you possess these qualities it is better for you to grind away in the approved fashion with honest blood in your veins and diligent industry in your hearts.
‘So unfair!’ you chorus. But look around you, look! There are the men and women with money and power. It is precisely that brand of sly, manipulative, exam-passing deceit that they exhibit in the real, grim and earnest world that they have created beyond the pleached groves of academe. Are these persons honest and diligent, do they strive for truth? No. Our examinations reflect and feed a world stewed and sunk in corruption and moral obloquy. The smart, the plausible, the adaptable and the specious, they are the ones who ‘get on’. Therefore I urge you, if you share my disgust with this brilliantined and smarmy world – abolish our examination system so that superficial, feckless and facile brains like mine are scorned and stout hearts and candid minds like yours or your children’s are venerated. As long as we allow the kind of cogent and presentable detritus that breezes through academic life to walk into influential and powerful jobs then our national soul is tainted.
How can anyone be surprised that Oxbridge graduates so often achieve great political and financial renown? First by passing exams into our universities and subsequently by passing out they rehearse the cheating and swindling that passes for achievement in the wider world beyond that their academic forefathers prepared for them.
But now, I shall have upset my colleagues and confrères: it is, you will not be astonished to learn, not generally liked when one of their number exposes their secret to the world. Fortunately for them the world is so much in their thrall it seldom believes or takes notice.
Now, leave me, I have a whole pile of papers to mark. Top of the list the offering of a man I am sure will rise to the premiership of this country in a brace of decades. See how he starts: ‘If Kraus’s moral shadings are not to be believed, an ethical vacuum exists in pre-structural linguistics: only grammatarian wishing and philological phantasy can fill so gaping an aesthetical lacuna.’ Purest drivel, but an obvious First. I wrote the book from which he paraphrased that very sentence. Flattery will get you everywhere. If you have been, at once.
Trefusis is Unwell
I am sitting in bed this morning, speaking into a BBC recorder, my head more full of undesirable fluids than the Cambridge public swimming baths. The weather seems to have permeated my old lungs and tubes to a most deplorable extent. Friends have been most kind, many have rallied round with patent specifics. I think it safe to say that I have drunk more possets, neguses, toddies and warming tisanes this week than any other man of my weight in the county. The Emeritus Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology was even enough of a poppet to lend me his flannel pyjama suit, a thing of beauty in confident vermilion, so I feel quite the thing.
I am given to understand that this year is Esperanto Year, indeed have received enough Esperanto Propaganda through my
letterbox to convince me of the fact. Esperanto is an amusing attempt to make Spanish sound elegant, and as a philologist people assume that I must be implacably opposed to it and to other hothouse cultivated languages: Volapük springs to mind.
Languages are like towns: they must grow organically and for good reason. Esperanto is like a new town, Telford or Milton Keynes; it has, linguistically speaking, ample walkways, spacious parking, rational traffic flow and all the modern amenities: but there are no historic sites, no great towering landmarks: there is no feeling that mankind has grown and lived and worked here, shaping the architecture according to necessity, power or worship.
The English language, however, is like York or Chester or Norwich or London – absurd narrow twisting streets that strangers are so lost in, no parking, no velodrome: but there are churches, castles, cathedrals, customs houses, the remnants of old slums, and old palaces. Our past is there. But not just our past, these cities are not museums, they contain the present too: estates, office blocks, contraflow cycle paths. They are living things, towns and languages. When we speak English, the old of the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Johnson, Tennyson, and Dickens is uttered in the same breath as the new of advertising and Blankety Blank and Any Questions. In our language the Barbican Centre stands near St Paul’s.
Not so for the French of course, who have fouled things up most awfully; the reason that all but the most banal people are agreed that Paris is an absurd and pointless city is that it has not really changed in over fifty years. No tall buildings are allowed within its centre. It is the same city that people rightly loved in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when it was truly ancient and modern. Now it is just ancient. The ridiculous French language is controlled and regulated too: words are proscribed or approved by a board of academicians roughly equal in understanding to a not very bright pencil-sharpener.
Now of course the Esperantists don’t argue that everyone should speak nothing but Esperanto, merely that it is a natural choice of second language, just as no one is suggesting that all towns should really be like Milton Keynes. Milton Keynes just happens to make an ideal conference centre and Esperanto makes an ideal conference language. And in this sad world there is a great deal of conferring to be done. People who have never read a book in their lives have a dim idea in their heads that it is clever to argue that because there are no great works of literature written in Esperanto it is therefore a bad language to learn. Makes no sense. May as well argue that no one should live in Perth Australia because it has no palaces or abbeys; it’s beside the point, snobbish and illogical – but then that’s what most people are, isn’t it? Perth is busy building its own palaces and abbeys.
I am an old man full of mucus, whisky, honey and lemon, but I have enough belief in the present and hope for the future to say by all means let us learn Esperanto and let us confer in it in Milton Keynes. Now, leave me, I must curl up in my Cambridge bedroom with a new edition of Cicero’s De Legibus. If you haven’t been – achoo!
Trefusis on Boredom
VOICE: Donald Trefusis, Prince Miroslaw Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Cambridge, extraordinary fellow of St Matthew’s College, visiting fellow of St Oestrogen’s, Copenhagen, and newly appointed dialectician-in-residence at Selfridges, speaks with enchanting candour.
Magnificently so to you all, and not without becoming splendour. Do you know, it’s a funny thing but that little muscular twinge seems to have sorted itself out. I can now raise my arm clear above my head. The next step must be to get the arm attached to the shoulder again and then I shall be as right as … as right as rainy ninepence in a trivet. But I really mustn’t complain: what does anything matter as long as I have my wealth? You can’t put a price on wealth, can you?
We have a few moments in hand, so I would like to waste your time with a rather rambling and unstructured discourse on a topic which I know is dear to the hearts of many of you out there, as you lie in bed, drive to the shops, sit in the kitchen, splash about in the bath, rummage around in the potting-shed, dangle your rod over the river bank or, who knows, sit fishing – rewind and delete the inappropriate descriptions – and that is the subject of boredom.
My dear mother, in her singing days, was a very busy and popular opera star: the roles she undertook in Milan, New York, Paris, Bayreuth and London as a leading tenor left her very little time for her young ones. I remember she told me once, while she rehearsed the part of Wotan for what was later to become known as the famous Stupid Production of Die Walküre at Chalfont St Giles, that only boring people could ever be bored. She was always saying things like that: unutterably tedious woman that she was.
But, my loves, when one thinks about it, and strangely, even when one doesn’t, what on earth is boredom? Is it a pathological condition like pain, that warns against idleness? Is it a psychological disturbance like clinical depression? Is it perhaps an emotion akin to guilt or shame? Is suspense the same as boredom? When we wait for a late curtain to rise in a theatre, is that feeling of frustration boredom or impatience? I wonder. Well, as you don’t seem to be answering yourselves, I shall have to undertake to anatomise boredom for you. It is a diverting and capricious paradox typical of this whimsically established world of ours that those who can most profit from this disquisition, namely those most prone to boredom themselves, will already have turned off their wireless in their ennui whereas you, long-suffering listener, all cock-eared absorption and interest that you are, probably do not know what boredom is.
Well, let us take an instance. I am implausibly bored by travel. Not being able to control a motor vehicle, Bendish my driver takes me everywhere, and I sit beside him, listlessly eyeing the landscape – how did Morgan Forster phrase it? ‘heave and merge like porridge’, that was it – as we stir it with the Wolseley. The inaction, the passivity, I find impossible. I would rather watch Gyles Brandreth dry. I think it is something to do with not being in control. The life of a passenger is not pleasant. I become fractious, captious and bumptious, morose, sullen and froward. It occurred to me one day, when slumped in just such a lard of torpor and woe, that to be inactive in one’s life as I am inactive in my car must be as close as one can ever get to hell on earth without actually moving to Oxford. Children are easily bored because, in the wider sense, they are never at the wheel. To be unemployed, I shuddered to myself, is suddenly to be retranslated into childhood. One is fed, one is housed, one is generally speaking cared for, and I should jolly well think so too, but the wild racking boredom of it. It would be like an endless M25. Orbiting about the lights, but with no power to jerk the wheel and pilot oneself whithersoe’er one required.
Recently, however, I conquered in-car boredom by devising amusing games which give me purpose and distract Bendish from the unpleasantness of Sierras trying to park in his exhaust pipe … why is it always Sierra drivers? Perhaps the angle of the head-rests in that make of automobile closes off nerve signals to the brain and causes some kind of mental retardation … however, chief of the diversions with which Bendish and I beguile the time is called Mattishall. In this game one of us becomes Mattishall, a clever international spy disguised as a leading figure in the world of the arts. The other plays the part of Melvyn Bragg and must attempt to discover by interview who Mattishall is pretending to be. ‘Mattishall, Mattishall,’ Bendish might say – and really he does a most passable impression of Mr Bragg – ‘Mattishall, Mattishall: who would you say has been the greatest influence on your creative life?’ ‘Well,’ I might reply, ‘when I was twelve I was taken to see an exhibition of neoplasticist art in Belgium containing manifesto De Stijl works by Mondrian and Schumacher: this was formative.’ ‘Ah,’ Bendish might say, guessing a little too early, ‘you are Michael Jackson.’ And so we proceed, until such time as he divines that I am really Cohn Weiland or Delia Smith or whoever it might be. Such fun. But then I know the car will soon stop and I will be master of my fate again.
Well, what could be fluffier? I’ve been readi
ng the late Mr Ellmann’s chokingly brilliant biography of Oscar Wilde and have decided that each day of my life I shall coin a new epigram, so that one day people will quote me in pubs, launderettes and lavatories the world over. My epigram this week is about compromise. Compromise, my dear Marquis, is a stalling between two fools. A stalling between two fools – don’t you wish you had said that? If you have been, go back to sleep.
Trefusis on Hating Oxford
At this time, as you might be able to infer, Oxford was looking for a new Chancellor, Sir Harold Macmillan (Lord Stockton) having died. The Boat Race was due to be rowed on this particular Saturday.
I have received so many letters from you on one particular subject that I feel compelled, albeit reluctantly, to address it today. Mrs Quanda Earnshaw, Miral Blackstock, Tindy Welmutt and Bruden Wamp all ask the question directly: Why did I not stand for, run for, sit for or otherwise put myself up for the Chancellorship of Oxford University?1
