Where There's a Will

by John Mortimer

  On the whole politicians don't think so. They have achieved greater fame by offering us blood, tears and sweat, saying grimly, ‘Today the struggle,’ and recommending death on the barricades or the battlefield as a more exciting option. Religions have also, by and large, taken a pretty grim view of existence.

  The Greek gods, it's true, seemed capable of enjoying a good time. They may have been wilful, jealous, temperamental and frequently uncaring, but they were at least interested in sex and would take the trouble to transform themselves into various animals in the pursuit of love. For mere mortals, moments of sun-soaked delight, and the excitement of the Dionysian revels, were forever overshadowed by darker fears and terrors. On account of some, perhaps unconscious, crime or inherited shortcoming, the Furies would pursue you relentlessly and to the ends of the earth.

  Christianity offered happiness beyond the grave, but it has been less encouraging during what Noël Coward said he believed in, ‘life before death’. The way to heaven is often portrayed as hard and stony, demanding self-sacrifice, confession of sins, begging forgiveness, even martyrdom before receiving the final reward. Religions have prescribed penitence, pilgrimages or holy wars. There has been, among the faithful, very little talk of enjoying a thoroughly good time.

  I suppose that the idea of humanity's right to happiness started at the time of the American Declaration of Independence, which as far as I can discover was the first document which held the truth to be self-evident that all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which were ‘life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. In spite of worries about wealth, diet, terrorism, eating too much salt, taking exercise and failing to conform to the company's image, most Americans do feel, I'm sure, that happiness is worth pursuing. The English are resigned to its being as incalculable, and perhaps as disappointing, as the weather.

  Is the idea of happiness an entirely human invention? Animals are contented when they are feeding or asleep, a condition dogs enjoy most of the time. When they're awake and going about their business, they seem usually nervous, peering about them for signs of danger and taking sudden fright. Horses shy at a blown newspaper, a footstep in the woods sends rooks clattering up to the sky, rabbits panicking and deer cantering into the darkness of closer trees, deeper undergrowth. As Shelley knew, human beings also find moments of contentment suddenly filled with anxiety, which sends us scurrying away into the shadows:

  We look before and after;

  We pine for what is not;

  Our sincerest laughter

  With some pain is fraught.

  At high moments of love, how many men are looking furtively at their watches behind some tousled head and thinking, It's time I was back in the office? How many women are wondering how on earth they got involved with a person who keeps his socks on? At the liveliest restaurant dinner, someone is worrying about the bill. On the most idyllic beaches there is a general concern about flies, mosquitoes, where the children have got to now or how to make conversation for a whole week with a partner who's usually at work all day and sleeps in front of the television at night. Like nervous animals, our natural state is one of anxiety.

  We worry about most things, and then worry about worrying, or worry if we suddenly find there's nothing much to worry about. And if you've got nothing to worry about, the government will oblige by starting a war, for instance, or telling you that the streets are about to be taken over by violent and abusive beggars. Politicians are in desperate need of fear and anxiety in order that they may appear to be the only persons who can steer us safely through these dangers.

  I can only suggest you do your best to banish anxiety, possibly with a glass of champagne, and lay yourself open to the moment when happiness becomes irresistible. I'm writing this at a good time of the year. The beech trees are covered with fresh, green leaves – we are going to have a birthday lunch in the garden. My grandchildren will play in the mysterious sunken copses, disused flint pits now filled with tall and ancient trees, where I also played as a child. The daffodils will be in flower and the dogs will be jumping over them. There is every possible reason for happiness; but it's also a moment of sadness too. How many more such birthdays will there be? It's sad my mother never saw Rosie and Emily, my daughters, grow up. Although Shelley was right about our sincerest laughter being fraught with sadness, it's the sadness, in a way, which makes happiness complete.

  There is a story about a devoted fisherman, in love with the sport, who went to sleep and found himself, on a perfect day, fishing in a clear stream. Every time he cast he hooked a fine salmon. After this had happened a dozen times in succession he asked the gillie where he was. Was it, perhaps, heaven? No, he was told, it's hell. Happiness too often or too regularly repeated becomes misery. And here perhaps we're getting near to what happiness is for me. Happiness is a by-product. If it's sought for deliberately, desperately, it's elusive and often deceptive, like the distant sight of an oasis. If you aim to live a life that is eventful, interesting, exciting, even though it's bound to be also disappointing, frustrating and with inevitable moments of despair, happiness may, from time to time, unexpectedly turn up.

  When I was a child I was stage-struck. Now I only have to go into an empty auditorium to see a rehearsal, or even those draughty, dusty, church halls where the seats are indicated with marker tape on the floor and the actors are drinking instant coffee out of paper cups, to find excitement, a flow of adrenalin, a happiness and an expectation that I suppose some people get from robbing banks. That's the moment of happiness which usually gets to its high point in the final rehearsal. From then on it's downhill, the piece is done and then shown, and alas the public are let in. Anxiety mounts, worries take over – will they, won't they, like it? The gloom lifts gradually, normal life returns and you prepare for another moment of happiness and another exposure to disaster.

  And for writers, certainly for barristers after they have won cases, and, I imagine, for surgeons after a successful operation and architects after the building has gone up, there is greater happiness in finishing things. This happiness is also of course combined with some feeling of loss. I think it has been best described by Edward Gibbon, who speaks of the moment of triumph when he laid down his pen, having completed The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: ‘But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion.’

  And happiness can take you over completely and without regret at the most unexpected and apparently inappropriate moments. Basingstoke was once a pleasant country town, but soulless new buildings and gigantic office blocks have made it drearily unattractive. I was performing in the theatre there and, because the dressing room was down a long flight of stairs, they fixed me up with somewhere to change in a small paint shop at the side of the stage. The sink was full of paintbrushes, paint-stained newspapers littered the floor, the walls were decorated with old saws and various tools, and there was, of course, no loo. One of the actresses I was performing with found me a bucket.

  So there was I on a wet Sunday evening, peeing into a bucket in a small paint shop beside a stage in Basingstoke. It suddenly occurred to me, much to my surprise, that I was completely happy.

  27. Looking after Your Health

  I have to confess that when a doctor asked me if I found myself out of breath when taking exercise, I had to say, ‘How would I know? I've never taken exercise.’

  Exercise has become, in my lifetime, the modern form of prayer. When religious belief faltered, and faith in immortality and an afterlife free of any kind of physical disability faded, it became essential to prolong a healthy life on earth by all available means. Gyms, saunas and swimming pools took the place of churches and chapels. A little sports bag slung over the shoulder took the place of hymn books and missals as the faithful passed to their devotions. The father confessor was replaced by the personal trainer; voices once raised in hymns are now united in the muted dr
one of the yoga class and the muttered counting of swimming-pool lengths.

  It's hard to say if these new religious rituals bring as much joy to the congregations as older forms of religion and it's difficult to know exactly how effective they are. You seldom see a happy, even a cheerful-looking, jogger and it's often said that the only people who lose weight from massage are the masseurs, who sweat away, kneading bulging stomachs or inflated bottoms. However that may be, and as with the older religious observances, it's not the immediately obvious results that matter but the assertion of faith in a better life to come.

  I don't particularly want to hand my atheistical prejudices on to those who will come after me. It's true that the word ‘gym’ has always been associated in my mind with smelly plimsolls, cold showers, daunting vaulting horses, ropes I couldn't climb and unnecessary dashes to the top of the wall bars. ‘Taking exercise’ at school always meant for me changing into shorts and then hiding in the loo behind the squash court with a good book. I don't mean to recommend a total disbelief in the worship of health, but to inspire, perhaps, a little agnosticism.

  No one could ever wish you a painful illness, a shortened life or a serious disability. The complaints I inherited, asthma and glaucoma, are enough of an inconvenience. And yet you may find some minor ailment, a disability you can learn to live with, could have its advantages. If one of your legs gives up the struggle against old age, you can experience the pleasure and privilege of a wheelchair at airports and be drawn, like an emperor on his chariot, through the struggling crowds to be taken first on to the plane. At JFK you will be driven in a further triumph past the half-a-mile-long queue of travellers waiting to have their passports stamped, to be whisked through with the minimum amount of fuss.

  Failing eyesight has also proved useful and there are moments when it's a help to reduce the world around you to a comforting blur. When I was briefed in obscenity cases, it was part of our duty to watch the blue movies we were defending put on by the sergeant in charge of the projector at Scotland Yard. To actually see these entertainments was likely to put you off sex, at least until next Thursday. To protect myself against this affliction I used to take off my glasses and the picture was then reduced to a formless pink blur. I was spared the pain of one defendant who, at his trial, begged the judge to send him down to the cells so that he might not have to watch the stuff he sold. ‘No,’ said the merciless and hard-hearted judge, ‘you'll sit in the dock and watch every second of it!’

  Moderate deafness can also have its advantages. If you are known to be hard of hearing you obviously haven't heard inconvenient remarks or instructions. Evelyn Waugh derived great pleasure and assistance from his ear trumpet. When a conversation at dinner bored him he would merely lower it and retreat into merciful silence and contemplation.

  Another advantage of the minor disability is that it provides fresh conversational openings as an alternative to the weather or the war. People can say, ‘How's the leg?’ and feel they have done you a kindness, which you needn't repay by telling them. Long ago I knew an elderly barrister, healthy and quite free from pain, who had an imaginary complaint which he called ‘my old trouble’. ‘How are you, Hugh?’ people used to say to him, and he'd answer, ‘Perfectly all right, apart from my “old trouble”, of course.’ ‘Well, how is the old trouble?’ ‘Much as always, I'm afraid.’ This ‘old trouble’ saved him from dinner parties (‘I'd love to of course, but the old trouble's been playing me up in the evenings lately’), holidays he didn't want to go on, or cases he felt sure he'd lose. I merely mention it in passing, but an ‘old trouble’ is something you may find extremely useful as the years go by.

  28. Inventions and the Decline of Language

  During my lifetime inventions have fallen upon us as thick and fast as cluster bombs in some war against terrorism, with the intention of destabilizing the civilian population. Life, let us say between the publication of David Copperfield and Mrs Dalloway, didn't change enormously. But since then it has altered greatly due to a proliferation of inventions. It's as hard to think of Virginia Woolf surfing the Internet, or walking with a mobile phone clamped to her ear, riding an exercise bicycle, watching a DVD or sending a text message as it is to think of the Duke of Wellington in a Jeep or Shakespeare with a word processor.

  It's tempting to wonder how many of the inventions of the past century we might have been better off without. Take the aeroplane, for instance. It has transformed warfare from an event in which trained soldiers kill each other on distant battlefields to occasions when death is rained down indiscriminately on innocent civilians, while the professional fighters fly at a great height in comparative safety.

  I can remember the train journeys to the South of France in my childhood, asleep in a dark mahogany compartment, dinner under the pink-shaded lights of the restaurant car, waking up at three in the morning to the clatter of newspaper trolleys on Lyons station and going back to sleep, until you woke up again to bright sunlight on the olive groves. Perhaps it's only the memories of childhood which make it seem a better experience than sitting, vaguely terrified, as a tubular machine bumps and rattles its way through the clouds offering you plastic food and no view of the countryside.

  All right, it's no doubt far too late to do without the aeroplane, but did we ever need the mobile phone? Watch the crowds go by, one hand pressed to the side of their heads as though they are all suffering from a powerful earache, muttering incessantly to other marchers in other crowds clasping their hands to the side of their faces. The climax to the widespread use of the new technology came when a man was seen relieving himself in the Gents of a London hotel. One hand held his member and directed his stream, with the other he was expertly sending a text message on his mobile phone. Once people sat still to make phone calls. Now the summons of some particularly maddening little tune is the cue for a walk round the garden or a heaven-sent opportunity to start making a cheese soufflé with the free hand. It's doubtful if this invention has added much to the sum total of human happiness.

  Then there is computer technology, an invention that throws off such a strong atmosphere of sexual allure that it makes our leaders feel young, up to date, thrusting and in touch, and in schools learning to manipulate these devices seems to have crowded out lessons in history, literature and music. My first thought about computers was that they slowed down communication considerably. Take getting into a hotel room, for instance. In my youth you arrived and the receptionist looked in a book, ticked something with a pen, unhooked a key and you were in. Now you're met with a puzzled girl whose name is on a little plaque pinned to her lapel. She starts to play the computer like a bewildered and uncertain composer in search of a tune – a considerable time passes and various chords are struck and discord often follows. Once I was allocated a room in a part of the hotel that hadn't yet been built.

  No doubt you can get reams of information from computers, and find out all about Einstein, Gérard de Nerval and cheap air tickets, and you can work from home. There lies the greatest danger. Soon office life will be a thing of the past, everyone will stay at home all day, peering at screens and communicating by e-mail, often irritating their husbands and wives or partners, who long for the days when they were out of the way by seven thirty in the morning. There will be an end to office romances, kisses snatched in the postroom and the fascinating plots and counter-plots of office politics. Lonely workers at home will remember with nostalgia the happy days of catching the eight fifteen to Waterloo.

  We might ask the scientists of our time to give it a rest, take a long holiday and stop inventing things for at least another half a century. It's important to remember that all these ingenious ways of sending messages have no importance in themselves. The ‘medium is the message’ is one of the world's silliest remarks. The message is the message, and it doesn't matter whether you send it by e-mail, a note in a bottle or on a picture postcard. The book, or the poem, or the play is what counts and it doesn't matter if it's written with a pen on a
long sheet of ruled paper, as I am writing now, or on the most highly developed word processor. No machine can help with the rhythms of your prose, even if it can spell better than you can.

  Whether or not it's the fault of information technology, there has been an extraordinary deterioration in our language, at least as it's spoken by the governing classes. Words have been reduced to letters so they can fit on to a text message, and such invitations as CU4T are moderately entertaining; but in general the technological age has resulted in our language becoming divorced from grammar, growing curiously inflated and getting lost in the sort of meaningless haze that affects the directions for assembling furniture bought in parts.

  Nouns like ‘access’, ‘source’ and ‘task’ now reappear as verbs. You can ‘access’ almost anything, from the refrigerator to directory inquiries. The jargon has even spread to the theatre, where new dramas get regularly ‘workshopped’ before audiences ‘access’ them. So I might ‘source’ a play and ‘task’ someone to ‘workshop’ it. Among the more ludicrous titles invented for government officials we are now to have an ‘access regulator’ who will see who gets into university. The phrase could be equally applied to a lift attendant.

  This is Beverley Hughes, a government minister, as quoted by Matthew Parris in The Times. She is talking, although you might not notice the fact, about identity cards:

  ‘I think an entitlement card could offer some important contributions both to the challenges we face and also to some important new concepts that we're trying to introduce to this issue around entitlement and also around citizenship, but the most important thing is that we actually stimulate debate, a widespread debate, among ordinary people, and I think, I hope that because we have actually, genuinely tried to bring a really fresh look and some creative thinking to the debate, that I hope people will be, I hope, pleasantly surprised by the document; it's very comprehensive, it looks at all the issues for and against, and the important thing, as I say, is that we want to hear the voices of ordinary people.’