Paperweight

by Stephen Fry

  The latest euphemism for disabled, hot from the United States, and I am aware that I am on dangerous ground here, but I’ll charge on anyway, the latest euphemism for disabled is ‘physically challenged’. The word ‘blind’, as you may already know, should now be replaced where possible by the phrase ‘visually impaired’.

  I have never shared the distaste for the word ‘gay’ which, as the correspondence pages of this newspaper have more than adequately shown, is felt by many. I know it was a nice word and that nothing else will quite do, I know it has been ruthlessly hijacked and shamelessly taken away from us. But we have, let’s face it, been given back the equally good and irreplaceable words ‘bent’, ‘pansy’, ‘fairy’, ‘faggot’ and ‘queer’. One good word for the price of five is a pretty good exchange. The word homosexual was fine as a quasi-medical definition, but always to use that would be like having to say ‘parturition’ every time we meant ‘child-birth’. It’s good to have a non-judgmental, lay word for a common enough fact. The trouble with the phrases like ‘visually impaired’ is that they are turning their back on the kind of word gay people (there I’ve used it!) craved for years, the word ‘blind’. It is not a euphemism, nor derogatory, nor complicatedly technical.

  I know the blind and disabled lobby is attempting to be ‘positive’ in its attempts to usher in these new words but I’m horribly afraid that there is a law of diminishing returns here. ‘Handicapped’ was originally a new ‘positive’ word, as was ‘disabled’; but each one had a shorter currency than its predecessor.

  I fear that ‘challenged’ and ‘visually impaired’ will be obsolete too very soon. Round about the same time as my new CDV player, I should guess.

  I suspect the Japanese will find it easier, however, to design a fun replacement for the CDV than the Americans will to invent a new word for blind.

  God Bless Worcestershire

  If you are not reading these words, but find yourself gazing instead at a white empty space with room enough for 800 words bearing the legend ‘Stephen Fry is on holiday’ then you will know that the editorial staff at the Daily Telegraph has drawn up its maidenly skirts and decided to exercise its right to suppress and censor, for the article that you are not reading is a fearless exposé of the uses, practices and thinking behind said editorial staff and it is highly probable that they would rather operate behind a veil of secrecy than have their methods ruthlessly broadcast in their own newspaper.

  I begin with a question. Do you come from Worcestershire? Some of you reading this (or gazing in wonderment at the white empty space where this should be) surely dwell within the marches of that inestimable shire. I wonder if there is something unusual about you? Are you more than usually prudish? Is there something in the waters of Droitwich, the carpets of Kidderminster or the broad smiling acres of Evesham that lends itself to a missish, puritanical air? It had never crossed my mind, living as I do beneath the wide Norfolk skies, that this might be the case, but it may please you to know that the breadth or narrowness of your minds is a source of constant concern to those whose business it is to supervise the matter that fills your daily newspaper.

  Let me explain. I telephoned the features desk this afternoon. You will understand by this metonym or synecdoche that I wasn’t so far sunk in sin as actually to attempt to engage a piece of furniture in conversation, but that I was dutifully ringing an editorial assistant to advise her of the contents of my hebdomadal tribute. I employ what my English master at school called such ‘sixth form words’ as ‘synecdoche’ and ‘hebdomadal’ not out of a perverse desire to be sesquipedalian but so as to ready you, especially those of you who come from Worcestershire, for the stunning shock of the obscenities with which I am about to foul the air.

  I told the editorial assistant that I was considering a piece on Saddam Hussein and the current agonies in the Gulf. It had occurred to me that there was no word to cover the crime of illegally violating another sovereign state and that perhaps the word ‘saddamy’ should be coined. The United Nations might enshrine this in an Article expressly forbidding one country wantonly to saddamise another and enforcing strict sanctions against saddamites.

  The editorial assistant listened carefully. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m just a litde worried about how the readers in Worcestershire might react to that.’

  I jerked like a gaffed salmon and dropped the telephone. Why had no one ever told me about the readers in Worcestershire and their special requirements? I knew how disgusted the townspeople of Tunbridge Wells could be and I was aware that Colonel and Mrs Chichester had no truck with modern playwrights. That Enraged of Minchinhampton is sick and tired of the use of ‘target’ as a verb is widely understood, as is Simply Livid of Carshalton’s impatience with the emergence of the Pacific Oyster at the expense of the good old Colchester Native, but I have to confess that Worcestershire’s problems had entirely escaped my notice.

  If the features desk’s fears are justified, but out of a commendable sense of liberality they have decided to publish this article, it is possible that Worcester General Hospital has already received a number of calls from mauve-faced citizens bellowing for digitalium, that the County Constabulary has formed a highly mobile task-force to deal with crazed villagers from Broadway picketing the newsagents and that the Fire Brigade is overrun with calls to deal with out of control Telegraph bonfires started up by outraged ad hoc ‘Burn The Filth’ Action Committees in Dumbleton.

  If this is the case I am heartily sorry; sorry enough to eat my hat.

  I think it is time the people of Worcestershire let the Telegraph know that they can take a great deal more than has been supposed. Time, too, for people of other counties to make their views heard. All these years you have been reading material in this newspaper that has been vetted, yes vetted! Adulterated, bowdlerised, censored, blue-pencilled, emasculated, muffled, repressed, curbed, gagged and stifled and all for the sake of the sensibilities of Worcestershire. You probably did not know that the copy of William Deedes is often so saucy that it has to be written on asbestos, that Worsthorne and Heffer are known as the Gilbert and George of modern letters and that Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd’s original submissions can only be read by those who have been passed medically fit by the Telegraph’s in-house doctor. Of course you did not know, because their writings have always been sanitised and sieved and filtered, entirely for the benefit of Worcestershire.

  Well, bottoms to you, Worcestershire. Some of us refuse to be muzzled.

  Back on the Road

  The Tuesday that has just passed, unmourned and unshriven like all Tuesdays except the Shrove which, I suppose by definition, is always shriven, was by way of being rather a red-letter day in the Fry diary. Actually my diary these days, like the diary of any self-respecting flâneur, runs on batteries and makes no allowances for rubric. In today’s theme park world, however, what you lose on the Laser Mountain you gain on the Giant Corkscrew and while my electronic organiser may be ignorant of red-letter days it can tell me the time in Tirana and schedule my day into To Do Lists. Tuesday 21 August was accordingly flagged as the day it became legal for me to contribute once more to London’s growing traffic problem.

  Three hundred and sixty-five days earlier the bench of Number Two magistrates’ court Bow Street, London, to the accompaniment of minatory remarks and austere sniffs, had taken from me five hundred pounds, my driving licence and a good deal of my self-esteem.

  A year is a long time in motoring. The thought that haunted me over the last few weeks as the end of the ban hove in view was that I had perhaps forgotten how to drive.

  A favourite car, that I have kept garaged throughout the last year, is a handsome Wolseley 15/50 saloon, deep maroon in colour and smelling of Bakelite and a vanished England of glistening pavements, raincoated Inspectors of the Yard and, for some improbable reason, Valerie Hobson and Tide detergent. It is almost precisely my age, having been registered on 23 August 1957. I was born at six o’clock the following day, so today, you may l
ike to note for future reference, is my birthday.

  The proximity of our ages has caused a rather voodooistic relationship to develop between me and the Wolseley. If I put on a couple of inches around the waist, its wings and sills seem to bulge slightly too. If I keep slipping and falling over for no apparent reason the explanation will be that the rear tyres are getting worn and need changing. On the rare occasions when I have a bath, I look out from my bedroom window while towelling myself and see that down in the street the old bus is as gleaming and clean as I am.

  I was in a play in the West End a couple of years ago and lost my voice. Fellow actors thought I had been over-straining my vocal chords in the now legendary Potato Scene and rallied round with fatuous bottles of vitamins and homeopathic nonsenses but a quick check-up showed me that a connection just behind the solenoid had come loose and was fouling the contacts on the wire that fed out from the steering wheel. This stopped the horn from working. Two minutes with the screw-driver and both of us were in perfect voice once more.

  I, as the cruelly honest photograph above this article can testify, sport a broken nose. When researching my car’s history I discovered with a thrill that the bent Wolseley mascot on the bonnet had got that way after an incident involving a Home and Colonial Stores delivery van and a librarian from Daventry on 17 January 1962, precisely the day my own proboscis met its fate! These things are meant.

  Might this special symbiosis, this marvellous interdependence and mutual reliance, might it be weakened by a year’s neglect? That was my fear on Tuesday as I found myself once more behind the wheel.

  The Wolseley’s transmission system requires a manoeuvre perhaps familiar to my older readers, that of the double declutch. Today’s louche world of synchromesh and, heaven help us, automatic gears, has rendered such a procedure antique and I feared that after a year’s absence, ear, hand and foot might have lost their magic connection with the car’s cogs and clutch-plates. I need not have worried. The old bond still exerts itself and we are once more as one.

  One thing, however, still concerns me. Should I have the engine converted to take unleaded petrol? If I do what might be the personal consequences? Will it mean I have to drink decaffeinated coffee, or will even more calamitous changes be wrought in my own engine? Is it possible that I will be able to ingest nothing but alcohol-free wine? If the Wolseley isn’t going to be allowed to get high on lead it’ll be damned if it will let me gorge myself on intoxicating liquors.

  Well so be it. At least that way I’ll find it easier to cold-start myself in the mornings.

  In November I get my poetic licence back. I was banned for taking a caesura too fast and stopping at an enjambment while under the influence of Auden. Never again.

  Zoo Time

  In my salad days, when I was green in judgment and tossed in a light vinaigrette of faith, I liked nothing better than to put my trusting little hand in that of my mother and toddle to the zoo. The possibility of pandas and the likelihood of woolly monkeys exerted the strongest of pulls. But then, in my pudding days, when I was starchier in judgment and steeped in a heavy syrup of doubt, I found myself wondering dreadfully. Was it not possible that future generations would look back with amazement and distaste at our casual willingness to countenance the imprisonment of animals?

  This whole question of the refinement of moral values is an interesting one. Perfectly virtuous, kind and considerate people two hundred years ago kept slaves, owned shares in sugar plantations that used nothing but slaves and wore cotton that they knew perfectly well had been picked by slaves. If you were to tell them that they were participating in, encouraging and prolonging one of the most noxious and inhuman practices conceivable they would have thought you mad.

  More recently our grandfathers or great-grandfathers would have snorted with astonishment and distaste if told that the withholding of the vote from one half of the population gave the lie to claims that Britain was a democracy. Those who campaigned for feminine suffrage were hysterical, women didn’t understand politics, they should never, never be allowed to vote, the majority of men argued. If you were then to tell them that in sixty years’ time Britain’s longest serving Prime Minister would be a woman they would probably have gone into spasm.

  But our grandfathers were not wicked, nor too stupid to grasp the moral arguments that we now take for granted. Morality after all is custom and we are accustomed to the idea that it is wrong for one human to own another, that it is inimical for women to be denied a vote and, for instance, that bear-baiting and freak shows are disgusting.

  What then will our grandchildren wonder at in our world? What practices that we indulge in will turn their stomachs and make them amazed that we could ever have called ourselves civilised? I have a strong feeling that zoos will figure high on the list.

  Is it possible, they will ask, that we actually stole polar bears away from the arctic and set them in concrete-floored cages in southern climes to be gawped at? No! My grandfather would never have countenanced that, he would have demonstrated, or lobbied Parliament or written to the newspapers; he, kindly old grandpa, would have been ashamed to live in a country which imprisoned animals for show. Wouldn’t he?

  Human beings, who have imaginations and the ability to distract themselves by remembering poems or writing new ones, or betting on which bluebottle will fly off the window-pane first, find it hard enough to cope with incarceration. Animals, as far as we know, do not gamble or hum tunes to themselves or have an interior life that can make captivity less irksome, they simply turn slowly from rage to despair to neurosis and finally to a kind of numb torpor.

  Some zoo keepers claim that seeing animals live and close up teaches children respect and awe for the glory and variety of nature, makes them understand their responsibility to these creatures. That might be so, but I have yet to hear plans to put South American Indians in pens in Regent’s Park or Whipsnade, or herd together Kurdistani tribesmen in wild-life parks, thus to better our understanding of their lot. I have no doubt that the sight of a trembling Winnebago Indian in a cage, together with a little plaque describing his habitat, diet and ancestry, will encourage millions of British school children to respect the diversity and nobility of humanity and make them better, finer school children, but oddly no one has suggested such a procedure, even though it might save a tribe from extinction.

  I don’t subscribe to the idea that animals have ‘rights’. It is more a question that there are some rights that we do not have. We surely do not have the right to put other creatures in prison, especially for so obscene a reason as for the furtherance of our appreciation of them. We do not have the right to tease them or bully them or send them mad. It may be that future generations will believe that we don’t have the right to herd them, slice them into tender juliennes and steaks and then eat them. We raise our eyebrows at such a preposterous notion, but then so did our ancestors when it was suggested that small boys might be kept out of chimneys.

  When my young nephews next come to London I shall deny them the zoo and take them to Parliament instead, to see Prime Minister’s Questions. It’s the same as watching gibbons fight over territory and rhinoceroses urinate, but without the guilt.

  Trefusis Returns!

  Never go back. Those words are written upon my heart in letters of flame. I have gone doubly back recently. Two years ago I was in a play in the West End by Simon Gray called Common Pursuit. The BBC are filming it and this week we are in Cambridge, evoking those gilded years of flared trousers, side-burns, collar length hair and stupid waistcoats.

  I was up at Cambridge myself a few years after the era we are recreating, but it is nonetheless alarming to realise that, as far as the wardrobe and make-up departments of the BBC are concerned, the mid-seventies constitute Period. Sitting for an hour having strange wefts of human hair woven into one’s scalp and ludicrous whiskers stuck to one’s jowls to represent what my mother insists on calling ‘bugger’s grips’ is one thing, but to have one’s face painted with
a strange translucent ‘skin tightener’ is quite another. I was an undergraduate only nine years ago, surely I haven’t wrinkled and sagged so terribly since then?

  In an attempt to cheer myself up I spent a morning showing the American member of our cast, Andrew McCarthy, around the colleges. He was as good as gold and never once expressed astonishment at the lack of air-conditioning in King’s College Chapel or disgust at the absence of ice machines in the Wren Library. He started to yawn after an hour or so though, so I showed him the way back to Peterhouse, where we are filming, before turning my own steps towards the rooms of my old friend and mentor, Donald Trefusis, Professor of Comparative Philology and Extraordinary Fellow of St Matthew’s College.

  It was Trefusis who had initiated me into the Disciples, a close, intense sodality of intellectuals, sexual heretics and liberal humanists who toasted marshmallows and copies of the Spectator by the fire and read each other papers on intense topics such as the ontology of the flesh and the signature tunes of Jonathan Cohen. Donald had also recruited me for the KGB … or was it MI5? He never actually told me and it would have been un-Cambridge of me to have asked. In Cambridge you were on your friend’s side, right or wrong. Human relations were the only loyalty.

  Trefusis would be able to tell me why a heavy feeling of depression and alienation had begun to haunt me as I had ambled through the courts and cloisters.