Paperweight

by Stephen Fry

  Your honest English faces are already purpling with disgust. ‘I thought men like that shot themselves,’ you are thinking. Don’t worry. I am not about to write a revenge piece casting myself as the embittered and embattled Aesthete and the games players as crude, bone-headed Philistines. Far from it. What is exercising my mind at the moment is the fact that I now love all forms of sport so very much.

  What would my young self say if he could see me now, six-pack at my side, ingesting every form of sport that television can offer? He would draw himself to his full gangling height and sneer. Fry, the Spazzo of the Fourth, watching every stroke of the Open Golf? Fry, the Weed who once wore furry gloves and a scarf while playing rugger, roaring ‘that was never off-side!’ Fry, who would give himself an asthma attack by burying his head in laburnum bushes just to get off cricket, wangling an introduction to Denis Compton so as to talk about the relative merits of Miller, Hadlee and Botham? It’s inconceivable.

  But I do love sport. Cricket first, by miles, but soccer too, and rugbies league and union. I love darts, bowls, snooker, baseball, motor-racing and badminton. I even work out. It’s true. Twice a week I grunt and sweat under the eye of a physical trainer. I used to faint at the sight of a jock-strap and now I babble of deltoids and anaerobic toning. What is going on?

  I certainly don’t want to present myself as the all-round Heming-way-style hero, both manly and sensitive. You know the sort of thing; up at six, brisk ten rounds of wrestling with one’s drinking companion of the night before; light breakfast of mescal and roast stag with a volume of Swinburne sonnets propped up against the pepper-pot; an hour of real tennis while dictating an article on Danish enamelware followed by a lunch of absinthe and raw fillets of narwhal to the accompaniment of a string quartet playing late Couperin. That’s not quite me. Nonetheless I have betrayed the adolescent self who swore that one day he would get even with the swaggering hearties.

  Unlike most sports lovers I do derive a perverse kind of pleasure from the behaviour of the Hooligani Inglesi, repellent as it is. It is the pleasure of anticipation. Every time I see footage of the Italian police coping with our disgusting compatriots I try and imagine what will happen in 1994 when the World Cup is held in the USA.

  The American police and National Guard weren’t notably sympathetic in their treatment of Vietnam War protesters. Given the opportunity to express themselves properly with some Category One English football fans, the like of which they will never have experienced, I feel sure they will surpass themselves.

  The spectacle of some scarlet-faced oaf draped in a Union Jack looking up at the grim, unforgiving features of Inspector ‘Dirty’ Harry Callaghan of the San Francisco Police Department is one to which I look forward eagerly.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, punk. You’re thinking, did he fire six shots or only five? Now, to tell you the truth, I’ve forgotten myself in all this excitement, but being this is a 44 magnum, the most powerful hand-gun in the world, and will blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself a question. “Do I feel lucky?” Well do you, punk?’

  ‘’Ere we go, ’ere we go, ’ere we go. Eng-er-land!’

  Kerboom!

  Even my young, sensitive self could have learned to love a sport like that.

  A Question of Attribution

  The story is told of how F.E. Smith used to stroll to work each day from his lodgings in St James’s. The walk would take him along Pall Mall, past the row of gentlemen’s clubs that have made that thoroughfare such a hissing and a byword, into Trafalgar Square, through the Strand and thence to the Law Courts which were his natural domain and fiefdom. Being a regular sort of fellow, diligent about his matutinal ingestion of prunes and unswerving in his dedication to oats, he found it necessary every morning to stop off at the Athenaeum, for all that he was not actually a member, and make use of the excellent lavatories that are such a feature of that remarkable institution.

  One lynx-eyed porter, after several years of painstaking observation and deduction, came to the conclusion that he only ever saw this august gentleman on those occasions when he came in for what Lord Byron would have called his morning supplication at the shrine of Cloaca, goddess of the bowel. The brave porter plucked up courage one day and actually stopped F.E. as he attempted ingress. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, ‘but are you actually a member of this club?’ ‘Good lord!’ said Smith, ‘don’t tell me it’s a club as well.’

  I was reminded of this remark when I visited Wimbledon last week as the guest of the BBC, whose frankly and openly Marxist coverage of the tournament has no doubt incensed so many right-thinking people over the last fortnight, but which I, sunk in sin as I am, find so commendable and efficient. There were many there thronging the corporate marquees and measuring out the afternoon in champagne flutes, who would have been as staggered as Smith to learn that somewhere in that vast tented village there were actually games of tennis afoot; genuine matches of what my cricket master at school used contemptuously to describe as ‘woolly balls’.

  I don’t mean here to rehearse the common moan of those who find corporate entertaining vulgar and demeaning, enough ink has been spilt on that subject already. The point is that I repeated the F.E. Smith anecdote to a companion that afternoon and they replied: ‘Yes, but it was Churchill, actually, wasn’t it? At least, that’s what I heard.’

  I have already steeled myself to the possibility that I will soon be bobbing helplessly in a swollen torrent of letters informing me that in fact the gentleman in question was neither Churchill nor Smith but actually Sir Thomas Beecham, or ‘my uncle, the late Dean of St Paul’s’, or the fourth Duke of Bassingbourne, or Joad, or Porson, or Marcus Aurelius, or Jael, wife of Heber. This is the difficulty of approaching what Disraeli called one’s ‘anecdotage’ – it was Disraeli, wasn’t it? Or was it Dr Johnson or Sidney Smith? – stories seem to accrete to a chosen cast of people. In medieval times when the milk soured or the chimney caught fire it was convenient to blame Robin Goodfellow, later to achieve world fame as Puck. We know that mud sticks, but it seems that cream sticks also. Sam Goldwyn, Dorothy Parker and Groucho Marx on the other side of the Atlantic and Churchill, Wilde, Shaw and Coward on this; they have all been credited with other people’s bons mots, simply because it is more convenient to attribute to the known than to the unknown.

  But who are the epigrammatists of today? If one wants to repeat a story which involves a word-processor and a Post-It Note one can hardly lay it at the door of Mark Twain, can one? I believe a modern wit should be nominated, whose duty it would be to take the credit for all the anonymous sallies and unattributed one-liners that are thrown up in modern life. Such a person can hardly be a politician, I think. When you consider that the most thigh-slappingly brilliant gag heard in the chamber in the last twenty years is Denis Healey’s remark about being savaged by a dead sheep, it is clear that Parliament is no longer a repository for wit of any kind. I feel we should elect our new Quipmaster-In-Ordinary in aleatory fashion. Someone chosen entirely at random, someone like, say, Ian McCaskill the popular and charming weatherman. ‘Wasn’t it Ian McCaskill …’ conversational gambits would begin. ‘Well it’s fine, as McCaskill once said about Cajun food, but it’s nothing to fax home about.’

  I think the name has the right ring. Which reminds me of McCaskill’s splendid aperçu on the subject of Wagner’s great Nibelung tetralogy. ‘It’s splendid,’ he once remarked over a brandy sour, ‘but I don’t think the Ring has the right name.’ What a man.

  Carefree Panty-Shields and Intimate Wipes

  We live in dangerous, uncertain times. Dame War, her mean, pinched features cracking into a ghastly smile, threatens to enGulf us in a molten river of desolation and ruin. The Harlot Inflation is pulling up her petticoats and allowing us a peep of her huge, swollen thighs. That surly footpad, Recession, rubs his brutal blue beard-line threateningly between finger and thumb and leers down with grim delight at the prospect of poverty, squalor and homelessness. At such a time
it’s good to know that people are coming up with television advertisements for Carefree Panty-Shields and Intimate Wipes.

  Now I am not quite sure what a Panty-Shield is; something, one might wildly hazard, that shields a panty. The identity and purpose of an Intimate Wipe is something I know even less about and I am content to go to my grave that way. They are a closed book, or at the very least a closed wipe, to me. There are some mysteries, I feel, best not enquired into; some depths that are better left unplumbed. Besides, I have a powerful intimation that I am not the target audience for Carefree Panty-Shields and Intimate Wipes; my ignorance as to their function, appearance, packaging, availability and price is not, I reckon, going to cost the manufacturers, marketers or advertisers a moment’s sleep. Somewhere in the back of my mind I have a dim feeling that Intimate Wipes are in some loose way connected with Personal Freshness, a subject I am appallingly hazy about. I seem to remember that I had German Measles when we covered it at school and I’ve never quite caught up.

  But that is not the point at issue, or at tissue, here. What puzzles me is that there are men and women who are paid real cash money to sit round tables and come up with this kind of calamitous drivel. I bored you all a few months ago with my puzzlement at the phrase ‘Serving Suggestion’ or the title ‘Moist Lemon-Scented Cleansing Square’ but Intimate Wipes? Surely there has been some ghastly mistake somewhere. I mean, lawks.

  I am told that when a new product is to be launched, marketing people have what they are pleased to call Brainstorming Sessions which decide brand names and product descriptions. How I wish I could have been present at the Carefree Panty-Shield and Intimate Wipe brainstorm.

  ‘Well,’ says Tom, ‘let’s face it, these little beauties shield your panties and leave you totally free from care, don’t they? Well, why in hell don’t we call them Carefree Panty-Shields?’

  Large measures of Jack Daniel’s all round (marketing people like to be thought of as American) at this inspired piece of left-field thinking.

  ‘Tom’s cracked it! Tom’s cracked the son of a bitch,’ everyone agrees.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ says Jacqueline. ‘What about … what about Carefree Panty-Shields and …’

  ‘Yes? Yes?’ Everyone is breathless with excitement, Jackie has a proven track record. She, after all, was the marvel who came up with the catch-line for Moists, the revolutionary new moist lavatory paper, ‘Moists, they’re a bidet in a box.’

  ‘What about,’ says Jacqueline, ‘Carefree Panty-Shields and Intimate Wipes?’

  Now if you or I had been there, reader, we would have called for a nurse at this point. A once talented marketing mind in ruins. With the best possible care in an up-to-date rest home and a great deal of quite violent electric shock therapy perhaps one day Jacqueline would again be ready for the outside world. But that is not what happened. Instead of someone being deputed to keep her talking while Tom called for an ambulance, Jacqueline was cheered to the echo, the printers and packagers were informed, the advertising agency briefed and the whole package presented to the British public.

  The English language, in all its glory, can be pressed and pummelled and scrunched and squeezed into many shapes and configurations. It is capable of wonders like ‘Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,’ ‘Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep,’ and ‘How strange the change from major to minor, every time you say goodbye.’ It is also, of course, capable of horrors like ‘heritage care’ and ‘family values’ but I never thought the day would dawn when someone would be allowed to ransack the dictionary and force a shotgun wedding between the innocent, blushing adjective ‘intimate’ and the strange young noun ‘wipe’.

  There are hundreds of thousands of words left in our language that will in time be conjoined in beautiful, ugly, coy, obscene and bizarre ways that we cannot guess at. Let us all fervently pray that with the invention of the Panty-Shield and Intimate Wipe we are over the worst.

  The Stuff of Dreams

  I am a foreign correspondent today. Fate has found me coming to America, to the badlands of Los Angeles, California. The grand hotel from whose bright balcony I write these few faltering words is in the Avenue of the Stars, just off Santa Monica Boulevard and Constellation. It’s hard not to drop such splendid sounding street names, harder still not to drop the names of the big motion pictures that have been made in this remarkable country. My task today therefore will be to include as many film titles as I can think of in the course of writing this communication; your task will be to find them buried in the (of necessity) rather torrid prose that follows. Not a shatteringly fascinating programme for the day, perhaps, but no more harmful a way of killing 10 minutes during the incredible journey you take to work than doing the Agatha Christie book titles game or counting satellite dishes. You will need a pencil or similarly low-tech implement of scripture with which to circle the titles. Full titles only will count, with proper conjunctions and definite or indefinite articles. In this opening paragraph, for instance, you might have spotted Foreign Correspondent, Coming to America, Badlands, The Incredible Journey, Agatha and Grand Hotel, but you may have missed Country, 10 and Big. It doesn’t matter, none of them counts; the competition starts from the next paragraph. A Californian present for the first person to send me more than 112 different titles. Be warned, American films only.

  Welcome to L.A. This above all is a place stranger than paradise. Being there, with Sunset Boulevard around the corner, one cannot help but run the gauntlet of emotions from intolerance to suspicion and fury. It’s a wonderful life, to live and die in L.A., but I confess to feeling that I am an alien amongst aliens in an alien nation. It is angel city and I’m no angel.

  From sunrise to sunset the blue skies shelter people carefree, rich and famous, or at least rich and strange; they shelter scenes of notorious wealth and power, interiors and estates where even the gardeners wear livery. But the awful truth is that there is a different story, for the sun also rises on ordinary people, the misfits scarred by poverty; on loveless, violent streets and on the men and the women who find themselves cornered like the rats they are treated as. They are the outsiders, missing out on the real glory.

  Call me indiscreet, but I wake up screaming and breathless when I think of how this deranged bedlam teeters on the edge of sanity: pet perfumeries, bra museums, outdoor air-conditioning, a wedding for dogs, all done without a trace of irony, by the beautiful people of this over the top heaven.

  When the adventurers of the past, the gold diggers, first decided to go west to the promised land, the general idea was to find the motherlode. Things change: the descendants of these explorers still share this frantic greed, but it has turned into an indecent obsession with the mirage of fame. They are given over to it hearts and minds, body and soul, flesh and blood. Los Angeles is not of this earth; it’s a boom town for dreams that money can buy. Everyone believes with the burning frenzy of the moonstruck that they too can make a splash and become a giant legend, if only fortune deigns to smile. The conversation you pick up from the starstruck lounge lizard and the beguiled barfly always revolves around hitting the big time or the struggle of keeping up the desperate mask of pretence that they have already jumped on the bandwagon of easy money and easy living. Family life, security, every normal impulse is sacrificed one by one in this ruthless quest for miracles.

  It’s not a safe place; the crazies and ruthless people who run it show no mercy, they hire and fire with caprice and in cold blood. They hold nothing sacred but the sweet smell of success. The verdict of future generations will probably be harsh. I could go on singing the dispraises of Los Angeles for ever, but I’m on dangerous ground because, bananas as it may sound, I love this magic town.

  I forget who first exposed the natural truth that if you look hard enough beneath the surface tinsel of Hollywood you find … more tinsel, but he overlooked the city’s saving grace. In the end, the real genius of Hollywood is that the tinsel
is perfect tinsel. The producers at work in the glitter dome may only turn out trash, but it’s model trash. They have turned alchemy inside out and discovered the formula for the most important of secrets: taking real gold, dull and useless as it is, and transforming it into the shining dross that millions like us need: the stuff of dreams.

  Answers to The Stuff of Dreams

  Bold type indicates a film title. There are probably more than I have shown.

  Welcome to L.A. This above all is a place stranger than paradise. Being there, with Sunset Boulevard around the corner, one cannot help but run the gauntlet of emotions from intolerance to suspicion and fury. It’s a wonderful life, to live and die in L.A., but I confess to feeling that I am an alien amongst aliens in an alien nation. It is angel city and I’m no angel.

  From sunrise to sunset the blue skies shelter people carefree/rich and famous, or at least rich and strange; they shelter scenes of notorious wealth and power/interiors and estates where even the gardeners wear livery. But the awful truth is that there is a different story, for the sun also rises on ordinary people, on the misfits/loveless and scarred by poverty, on violent streets and on the men and the women who find themselves cornered like the rats they are treated as. They are the outsiders/missing/out on the real glory.

  Call me indiscreet, but I wake up screaming and breathless when I think of how this deranged/bedlam teeters on the edge of sanity: pet perfumeries, bra museums, outdoor air-conditioning, a wedding for dogs, all done without a trace of irony, by the beautiful people of this over the top/heaven.