by Stephen Fry
But now I wonder. A set of newspaper advertisements has been appearing in our public presses over the last few weeks. The origin is the Midland Bank, an institution second only to this periodical for its fame as a listener. The Lord alone knows who they’ve been listening to lately, the ghost of King George III, I shouldn’t wonder, but they’ve come up with ‘three new bank accounts for three new kinds of customer’. The full-page advertisements for these new services took the form of questionnaires asking you to identify yourself as either a Vector person, an Orchard person or a Meridian person.
‘Can you programme a VCR machine without getting four solid hours of Ceefax?’ is the first question addressed to those who might be wondering whether (without having known it for all these years) they are a Vector person. ‘Would you take out an overdraft to go to a friend’s surprise party in San Francisco? And maybe live without carpets to buy a CD player?’ ‘Is the amount of plastic in your wallet spoiling the cut of your designer suit? If you’ve nodded to yourself while reading this, call us free … &c.’ Well now, this is bizarre. You don’t have to be an expert semiologist or observer of British society to guess at the kind of customer they are after with these questions. But then nor do you have to be an exp. sem. or obs. of Br. soc. to know that exactly that kind of customer would, rather than ‘nod to himself’, be the first one to vomit quite profoundly all over the newspaper, or at the very least, laugh himself into some kind of nervous spasm. So we must assume that the bank is in fact after the customer who would like to be the kind of person who has friends who hold surprise parties in S.F. But if that’s true the bank is in trouble because it will be enrolling frighteningly sad and unwell people who in all probability will plunge themselves into terrible debt by stuffing their designer suits with plastic in order to spoil their cut, and going without carpets so as to be able to install CD players. And Vector people shouldn’t deny themselves carpets: they need them. And they need them on their walls too: padded.
An Orchard person, apparently, spends Sunday helping the kids build a tree house, is an expert with a shopping trolley and would drum up a protest against a new motorway cutting through their town without expecting their photograph in the local newspaper. This is just babble from the hospital bed. The Orchardese are represented by a photograph of a Sunday lunch with a twee salt pot and carving set. Help me, I fear I shall go mad.
The last category is the Meridian type of person. ‘Do you know the difference between the Dow Jones and Inigo Jones? Do head waiters know your name? Do you care about famine? And send donations, by covenant, without having your arm twisted?’ Now this is sick. I’m sorry but it’s sick. If the advertising industry is attracting people who can write this kind of excrement without irony then all is lost, fly the country. Their minds need some kind of soft, long, absorbent paper which will wipe them clean. I would be happy, if Robert Robinson isn’t available, to do the voice-over for such a tissue for free. It would be in the noblest tradition of public service broadcasting.
Absolutely Nothing At All
Journalist friends tell me that columnists are allowed to write one column of this nature once in their lives. Hum.
This week I am not going to write an article, for the sad and lonely reason that my brain seems not to be working today. I hate to short-change you, but that’s it. Nothing to say. For those of you reading who’ve never had to sit down on a weekly basis and provide 850 gleaming words of discursive prose for an imperious martinet of an editor who is expert with single-stick, fencing foil, field gun and combat sarcasm I may tell you that it isn’t a breeze. A breeze is one of those things which it most specifically never is. It may be that you couldn’t care a busman’s burp what it is or isn’t. ‘It can be a breeze,’ you reason, ‘or it can be a hurricane. Of what possible interest can that be to us? We pay good money for these words and we don’t give a monkey’s god-daughter what pain the production of them may cost.’ I suppose you’re right, damn you; you’re hard but you do have a very good point. After all, I should be most surprised if, as I was tucking into a packet of Abbey Crunch biscuits, Mr McVitie were suddenly to appear on my door-step and give me a solid quarter of an hour on how hard they were to bake, what agonies of composition the devising of the recipe gave him and how unappreciated he and his army of skilled pastrycooks were. Yet I am morally, if not contractually, obliged to give you your eight hundred and fifty whether you want them or not: and if I am going to have the impertinence to harangue you in the first place I might as well harangue you on the painful topic of how hard it is to think up subjects for haranguement.
My ‘copy’, as we scribblers call it, is generally required to be handed in for marking by Thursday morning. I speak to you now on a Wednesday evening, my brain emptier than a camel’s bladder. My usual course is to trawl the newspapers for matter which enrages me. How many times has Kenneth Baker used the word ‘standards’ and ‘Values’ this week and how many times has he used them in a sense comprehensible to speakers of the English language? Has Paul Johnson blinded the world with the shining love of his vision, depth, insight and humanity once more? Has the government been Up To Something? It sounds a tadge pompous, as if I’m a sentry on patrol guarding the gates of decency, but I have to start somewhere. Today I’ve drawn a blank. Nothing seems to have angered me at all either in print or on the television screen. The only really remarkable occurrence was that of the writer to Points of View who ended her letter to Anne Robinson with the phrase ‘Ta muchly’ which caused a strange shudder in my bowels and small green and red lights to dance in front of my eyes, but that soon passed. Perhaps something in my own life can be turned artfully into a sustaining 850-word parable that will amuse, enlighten and entertain? A van driver reversed into the front of my car crushing it like an eggshell this morning. I barked my shin on a table leg at 3.24 p.m. and I dropped a potato behind the sink at 7.50 where it is likely to remain for all time. John Donne could knock that little list of cataclysms into a pretty decent sonnet that would overturn the government and beckon in the thousand-year reign of Christ, I expect, but it’s beyond my powers.
When the newspapers fail to yield fitting subject matter, it is surely time to pace the room like a caged tiger convolving great thoughts or to amble down the road on a letter-posting mission in order to clear the head. This latter course often works, which is surprising as it is the clearness of the head which is the problem in the first place. But today nothing: nix, zilch, sweet zip dang-doodley zerosville Idaho. Tennis players have elbows, house-maids have knees, writers just have blocks. I have to believe that I am not alone, otherwise life would be insupportable. Presumably the day dawns which sees Roger Woddis bereft of an idea – I have yet to see any evidence of that day, I am glad to say, but it must dawn. Does Bernard Levin have seven bottom drawers that he providently filled in the fat months so that the Times readership is fed during the lean ones? Who can say?
Well, my long day’s task is done and I am for the night, as Cleopatra almost said. Eight hundred and fifty words of empty logorrhoea. I just hope you don’t feel cheated. I can console myself with the knowledge that until Douglas Hurd has steered his abominable Criminal Justice Bill through Parliament I have the right to remain silent without your drawing any inference from that silence.
I have nothing to say and I’ve said it.
The Young
I was very worried the other day to read in the Daily Mail – the fact that I was reading the Daily Mail at all is worrying enough, you’d be right to interject at this point – that today’s young people are apparently money conscious, job conscious, less likely to ‘drop out’, more likely to conform, more intolerant of homosexuality, less interested in drugs and have a greater sense of the importance of the family than their predecessors. This is disturbing news. Have things really got as bad as that? You needn’t worry too much, the Mail was merely projecting its own sordid fantasies onto a batch or raft of quite harmless research figures that had fallen out of some statistician’s co
mputer. But then that’s the Daily Mail for you. In many ways it is the worst newspaper in the land because somewhere in its image it has left room for us to suppose that it is a class up from the dirty tabloids. It relies on the laziness of the young estate agent or accounts executive who knows he should be buying the Independent – but it’s a short train journey into work after all, and those big pages take a lot of unfolding, so what the hell, let’s pick up a Mail.
If there is one thing against which the Mail stands as foursquare as a wretched snotrag of a paper can stand at all, it is what we might call the Liberal Conscience. They won’t stick it at any price. I’m an old-fashioned sort of bloke myself. I think young people should spend a great deal of time being outrageous, stoned, riotous, carnally experimental, kind, unworldly, angry, generous, sceptical, unselfish, anti-family, anti-government, anti-power, anti-money, antihistamine, anti-just about everything the established world represents. Being young, in fact. But that’s the traditionalist in me. I have no particular objection to being disagreed with on this one and can sometimes bring myself to look at a nineteen-year-old in a suit and tie without actually laughing myself sick or being reminded of that brutal description of Leonard Bast, the young City worker in Howards End who ‘had given up the glory of the animal for a tail-coat and a set of ideas’. You can call me anything you like for housing these strange doubts. But one thing I won’t be called is trendy. Yes, I may well leave myself open to being described as left wing: certainly I will allow that I have liberal views on Nicaragua, feminism, gay rights, nuclear weapons, the environment, the Health Service, the Third World, greed, trades unions and whatever else might be calculated to win a few columns of gibbering nonsense from George Gale or Roger Scruton. Call me a Communist, a subversive, a weirdo, a useless excrescence, a faded relic of a failed generation. These are things open to debate. But for goodness’ sake don’t try and pretend that there is something trendy about it. If you want to know what is trendy and what has been trendy for ten years now at the very least, it is an implacable opposition to that liberal conscience: if you want fashion, look at the concerted effort in seven eighths of the press to discredit any manoeuvres towards debate on the subject of capital, the family and the notional norms of this island now.
There is one area of the world where a shining example of respect for the family, patriotism, tough punishment of criminals, morality and a sense of religion as part of national life is being set and that, of course, is in Iran and its sister Islamic countries. It may be that by smothering the possibilities of debate, by creating a climate in which doubt is discredited as ‘trendy’, ‘faddish’, ‘communist’ or just plain mad, we are on course to create a western version of Islamic fundamentalism that will see us refighting the Crusades before the century is out. I, in my fluffy, trendy and silly old way, rather tend towards hoping that we don’t. But one thing is certain, the jehads against the Bishop of Durham, gay people, union leaders, Prince Charles, and anyone else who dares pop his head up above the parapet and wonder what the hell we think we are doing won’t enrich this strange and wonderful country of ours by one penny, but will tend towards impoverishing it utterly. The recent budget may have stopped the brain drain, but the high taxation on conscience and doubt is encouraging a soul drain that is surely going to prove much harder to reverse.
Such hysterical paranoia in one so young? I know, I really am most dreadfully sorry. I’ll be seeing blues under the loo next. Perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps there is a graceful tolerance in the newspapers that I have overlooked, perhaps there is a drop of water amongst this rock. I’m unconventional enough to hope so.
Me & A Stapler of My Own
A regular Listener feature.
This week author and broadcaster Tom Murley.
Tom Murley first burst into the public domain with his appearance in the Observer’s ‘Me And My Cuff Link Caddy’. Other appearances quickly followed, including ‘Inside My Bathroom Cabinet’ for the Sunday Telegraph, the Mail On Sunday’s ‘Cousins’ column (with his cousin Leslie) and ‘Things I Wish I Had Known Yesterday’ for the Sunday People magazine. He lives in Kensington, Hampstead, Muswell Hill, Surrey, Camden, Putney, Gloucestershire and Suffolk (and Salisbury if being interviewed for Wiltshire Life).
It’s a Rexel Pagemaster. Shabby now, I suppose. A little battered and scratched, like me. My family laughs at me for hanging on to it, they can’t understand why I don’t throw it out and buy a newer, smarter model, but somehow I’ve retained a certain fondness for the thing. Marina (my wife of thirty years) says it means more to me than she does, and I suppose to some extent that’s true, though she’d kill me for saying so. Perhaps that’s why. This old stapler wouldn’t kill me for anything. It’s more of an old friend than a stapler. It forgives me my odd moods, my caprices and never exhibits a trace of jealousy. It just goes on being a stapler. That’s a comforting, dependable thought somehow.
I bought it in an old stationer’s in Gower Street in my first year at UCL. Four shillings and ninepence and thruppence for every fifty staples. I use it for attaching pieces of paper together.
You simply square up the sheaf and put it between the jaws of the stapler. Being right-handed, I like to use the upper left-hand corner, that way I can easily turn from one sheet of paper to the next without the top sheets obscuring my view of the lower ones. There’s a small plate on the bottom jaw; it’s on a swivel. You turn this plate with your thumb (or finger) and when you use the stapler each staple will be splayed outwards rather than closed in on itself. I’ve never really understood what one would use this feature for, but it’s nice to have the option.
I met Marina, oddly enough, in a small café just outside the very stationer’s where the stapler was bought. We married two years later and have three children, Jacinth, Barabbas and Hengis. When we bought our first flat in West Hampstead, just off West End Lane, when Marina was very pregnant with Jacinth, the stapler came with us. Marina told me that there wouldn’t be room for it, but somehow I found a space in my desk, and there it has sat ever since, though we left West Hampstead years ago.
I rise every morning at 5.00 (two hours earlier than Jilly Cooper) and wake up Marina and the kids. Breakfast is usually Cretan honey with a little unpasteurised kumis and a nectarine (twice as nutritious as Freddy Raphael’s breakfast and three times as exotic as Shirley Conran’s). Then I run round the park/common/heath. I’ve taken to Danish Navy exercises. Not many people have heard of these, which is why I do them. They consist of stretching and breathing exercises indistinguishable from the same stretching and breathing exercises that everyone has been doing for a hundred years but you have to wear a towelling thmarjk or ‘tracksuit’ to do them in, so I get four more people every morning laughing at me than Laurie Taylor does.
Then it’s down to work. I like to dictate first drafts to myself (Marina gave me shorthand lessons for Christmas in 1968) and I take down my dictation on a Phillips and Drew narrow feint school exercise book, using a B2 pencil. I like the soft darker lines of a B2. I write on the left-hand side only. I then like to do revisions on the right-hand side in an old Waterman’s ‘Invicta’, writing only on alternate lines. This is four times more complicated and pointless a way of writing than Simon Raven’s method. I take that text and transfer it onto a 70 megabyte IBM mainframe computer which Barabbas gave me for Father’s Day last year. This is sixty-five million more bytes than Len Deighton has available on his word processor. I always write standing up, at an old credence table I bought from a sale of the fittings of St Michael and All Angels Church, Islington.
I work in ten-minute bursts, in between I go for long swims. I built our swimming pool myself, to my own design. It is shaped like the Burmese symbol for eternal serenity, which is a rectangle. The Nepalese symbol for eternal serenity is an endless knot, so perhaps it’s as well I gave up my interest in Nepalese religion when John Fowles started getting interested too: if my swimming pool was shaped like an endless knot I wouldn’t be able to count lengths so ea
sily. The pool is filled with Evian water – chlorinated tap water is bad for the lymph glands – heated to 70°F.
Then it’s dinner round the stapler. I skip lunch (unlike Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess). If the kids are home from school we’ll play some word game or talk about what they’ve been up to during the day, I think these moments can be important. I don’t watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself. Then a Taiwanese fruit bath and bed. I sleep on the right, the stapler on the left. Marina has a separate bedroom. I’m not quite sure why.
Next week: Traveller and poet Millinie Bowett in the feature ‘My Press-on Towel and I’.
Give Us Back Our Obfuscation
There was a time when you could hardly open a newspaper, especially a Times or Telegraph, without coming upon an article, written by some guardian of common sense and plain thinking, which railed at the jargons and periphrastic prolixities of trades unions, sociologists and the bureaucracies. Sesquipedalian circumlocution was frowned upon. What used to be called roundaboutation was mocked and fleered at. The argument, which always flowed over a current of individual libertarianism, was that the uneducated, posing mandarins of the corporate state dressed up their wicked intent in an attire that hid the dwarfish and deformed shapes beneath. A ruthless pogrom against ‘meaningful situations’ and ‘on-going scenarios’ was established. Private Eye ran a column exposing the more pungent examples of such language that occurred in the public prints: Philip Howard, Michael Leapman and Bernard Levin, with varying degrees of wit and purpose, highlighted in The Times moments of the obfuscatory logorrhoea and gobbledy-gook weasel verbiage that was threatening to unseat their reason. In keeping with the Jovian rumbling that writers for that newspaper still like to imagine informs the tone of the Thunderer, the shining intent of language is for them to inform with clarity and precision.
