There are eight, say ten customers sitting out in the sun, waiting for something. There are ten, say twelve talented baristas visible in the kitchen. So how much longer should my cappuccino take? But I’ve yet to realise that the difference between a talented, hip barista and any old barista is that the talented, hip barista has no talent. After fifteen more minutes I raise an arm. A passing barista says he’ll ask. Another arrives – this must be about the sixth not to have served me with anything – and surveys me with laconic contempt. ‘We are working on your coffee, sir,’ he says.
‘Working on it! It’s a cappuccino, not the fucking Empire State Building.’
In fact I don’t say that. It’s not hip. Hip is consenting to getting nothing you really want because there’s nothing you really want. I, who never smile, smile.
Peace
‘Sea or sheep?’ my wife wanted to know. ‘Sheep,’ I said. ‘No, sea. No, sheep.’ This proved her point. I was overworked and tired, I couldn’t make a decision, I needed a weekend away looking at something that wasn’t a manuscript or a computer. But what did I need to look at – sea or sheep? I was too tired to know.
I pretty much stopped driving a few years ago. This was partly because I had moved into the West End and didn’t need to drive, and partly because I was falling prey to road rage. If I didn’t stop driving I would kill a cyclist. Throttle one, I mean.
The only time I miss driving now is when the urge to get away, to look at sea or sheep, is upon me. Getting away without a car is tough. You can’t just set out and see where you end up: you have to choose a destination and then book taxis, trains, hotels, even sheep. The Internet with its we’ll-do-it-for-you dot-coms is said to have made all this easy, but that’s a lie. Booking anything on the Internet is Kafkaesque, full of mysterious interrogations and dead ends. After two hours on the Internet you start to wonder who’s asking the questions – you or them?
Where are you going, when you are going, what station are you leaving from, when are you coming back – if you knew the answers to any of those you wouldn’t be searching the Internet. Find a hotel that doesn’t specialise in mystery weekends or hen nights and before any site will tell you if there’s a way of reaching it by train you have to register or remember a password or re-register with a new password which turns out to be your old password and is therefore no longer available to you since you’re now not the person you were before you re-registered. They want to know your sex, birthday, postcode – which information keeps coming back with the word ERROR flashing in red because you’ve forgotten to tick a tiny box hidden at the bottom left-hand corner of the page. By the time you’ve got the information you need to get away you’re too worn out to go.
In the end we chose sheep over sea, going for a rural hotel with lily ponds, near enough by train not to have to start our return journey the minute we arrived. No table for dinner until nine o’clock but given the wildlife promised on the hotel website we could always shoot our own if we got hungry.
We arrived at four o’clock, in good time for afternoon tea in the drawing room. All the waiters were busy, pouring tea with one hand behind their back. When we finally got the maître d’s attention he noted we hadn’t booked. ‘We’re residents,’ I told him. He looked at his watch and shook his head. I told him we’d been told afternoon tea went on until 5.30. ‘It takes two hours to bake fresh scones,’ he said. I pointed to the scones on everyone else’s plates. ‘They made a reservation,’ he said sadly. I gave him the look I gave cyclists in the days I drove. ‘You telling me you have to make a reservation for scones?’
‘Calm,’ my wife whispered. ‘Think sea or sheep.’
‘I’m thinking scones,’ I said.
The maître d tried to mollify us with biscuits, but brought scones in the end, with rich raspberry jam, Cornish cream and an apology, all of which he served – even the apology – with one hand behind his back.
I calmed down by the Monet lily pond. The gardens were as good as promised. Bunny rabbits played on the lawn, undisturbed by the sound of croquet mallets. At the far end of a magnificent avenue of giant redwood trees an incurious deer chewed grass. ‘This is working,’ I told my wife, allowing my BlackBerry to quack away unanswered in my pocket. The sun came in and out, fish appeared on the surface of the water, ducks gathered in a circle beneath a bush. Peace!
At nine o’clock we went to take our seats in the restaurant. Nothing doing. Would we please go to the drawing room where we’d be given canapés and shown the menu by one-armed waiters. ‘No,’ I said. I enumerated my reasons. Hunger, dislike of not being seated at the time I’ve booked, dislike of eating late, dislike of sitting in low armchairs reading menus and wine lists when I want to be sitting up at a table clinking glasses, dislike of leaving London for relaxation and walking into that hurricane of fuss and obstacle known as ‘Fine Dining’.
‘If you used both your fucking hands,’ I thought of saying, ‘you might run a more efficient restaurant.’ But I hadn’t come to the country to swear.
There was no moving him anyway. So it was back to where we’d earlier had to fight for scones, and the naff ritual of balancing heavy faux-leather menus on our laps and wondering if we were ever going to eat again. Half an hour later we were called for dinner. Soup arrived at the time I normally start getting ready for bed. At 10.45 a waitress offered us desserts. After waiting twenty minutes for them we gave up and left the table. Another waitress pursued us with the offer of coffee in our rooms. ‘When – three in the morning!’ I exclaimed. She wondered what was wrong. ‘Everything. The whole thing’s been horrible,’ I said, and then was unable to sleep, not because of the late eating but because I thought ‘horrible’ had been a horrible word to use and was annoyed with myself for having used it. It hadn’t been horrible, just fussy and inept, pretending to style where there was none. It confirmed my belief that every hotel in England was a Fawlty Towers at heart. ‘We must have been mad trying,’ I woke my wife to say.
‘Hush!’ she said, as we watched the dawn break through the unlined curtains.
We returned to the Monet lily pond in the late morning. The sun came out. Fish showed their backs above the water. Ducks headed for the shade. Far away, a sheep baahed. ‘But then again,’ I said, closing my eyes.
At that moment two young Australians began setting up a laser version of clay shooting. An amenity for guests. When you hit the clay an electronic buzzer went off. Zaphbedoyng!
‘Sorry to spoil your view, guys,’ the Aussies said.
Should have gone for sea. Should have stayed home. Should have punched a cyclist.
The sweet seductiveness of loss
No meal can be sad, said the critic Mikhail Bakhtin. But then he never dined with me. In anticipation of a meal – supposing we are with the ideal companion at the best table in the perfect restaurant – we might indeed postpone sadness. And maybe even halfway through we will remain in tolerably high spirits, with dessert still to come. But as we near the end of eating we begin to feel anticipatory twinges of anticlimax. Soon it will be over and we’ll be wondering why we expected so much. Soon we’ll be experiencing that emptiness of spirits which no satisfaction or memory of satisfaction can dispel. Soon we’ll be asking why we are alive.
In ‘Resolution and Independence’, that great despondent William Wordsworth describes the descent from exuberance to wretchedness as a law of the physical universe.
But, as it sometimes chanceth, from the might
Of joys in minds that can no further go,
As high as we have mounted in delight
In our dejection do we sink as low.
The morning is too beautiful, the sense of natural joy too intense for animation to sustain itself. We sink because we rose. This is how philosophers explain the tristesse of sex, how nutritionists explain the slump after gluttony, and how I explain the hollowness that waits on watching tennis day after day.
I am enthralled until the last ball Djokovic hits, and the moment it is ove
r and he is on his knees eating grass I sink into my chair, cannot believe I have spent another fleeting fortnight of the few summers I have left caring about the outcome of contests I will have forgotten in the blink of an eye, and begin to question my sanity. Only a madman would have murdered time as I just have, and it’s no consolation to know there are tens of millions of people out there as mad as I am. If it’s bathos you want – and I suspect we are all bathos junkies in the end – nothing gives it to you quite like watching sport. Unless it’s playing sport.
Imagine what Djokovic is feeling now. Imagine to what dejection he must have sunk after having mounted in delight so high. I read that he’s a devout Christian, so that might help. Since God never puts in an actual appearance, He can’t ever be a let-down, and so is bathos-free. Otherwise it would have to be heroin.
Winning itself certainly won’t have kept Djokovic high for long. OK, so he’s the best tennis player in the world. So what? I recall waking to the realisation that I was the best table-tennis player under seventeen in north Manchester and parts of Bury. The satisfaction lasted for half an hour before I saw into the nothingness of things. So how profound must be the nothingness confronting Djokovic, whose backhand isn’t as good as mine was and who hasn’t even got Manchester to go home to.
And that’s after winning. What happens when you don’t? How’s Federer feeling just now? Not quite as bad as Andy Murray, and Murray won’t be feeling quite as bad as Nadal. Unless he is.
I worry about Murray. There is a particular thing that’s not quite happening, and I don’t mean winning. I mean apprehending what it is that’s not quite happening. He has enough people helping him, I know, but I suspect I have inside knowledge the others don’t. I understand the allure of not wanting to win.
That this is a qualification that won’t earn me a place on his management team I accept. People who don’t know what’s best for them don’t know what’s best for them. But assuming he is a regular reader of the Independent, I offer him the following thoughts which he is welcome to print out or transcribe into a notebook of the sort that Vasek Pospisil, his opponent in the quarter-final, kept by his chair and from time to time consulted – without success, admittedly, but we don’t know how much more decisively he’d have lost without it.
Court notes for Andy Murray:
To thine own self be true – not. Pop psychology makes much of the need to find ourselves. Ignore it. Find someone else.
Don’t be at peace with yourself either. Peace has no place in sport. Sport is war. But don’t hold your coaching staff responsible for everything that goes wrong. The thing you’re locked into with your mother – blaming her and your various mother-substitutes for every point you lose – is not so much unhealthy (mothers exist to bear our blame) as debilitating. It depletes your energy reserves. Hate your opponents instead.
Face facts. The fastidious Federer scorns you and proves it with every ace he sends down. He doesn’t care for the sort of tennis you play and would rub your face in your limitations, winning 6–0, 6–0, 6–0 if he could. Learn contempt from him.
Djokovic is too busy hating Federer to have time to hate you, but he remembers how much he dislikes you whenever you get to two sets apiece, and that secures him the fifth set.
Courtesy is a fine quality in a tennis player provided it is false. I see through the Hibernian cussedness you affect; in reality you’re a pussycat. That’s the wrong way round: act nice, play nasty is the rule. ‘This Duncan hath borne his faculties too meek’, and so have you. Be Macbeth instead. Think that’s a dagger you see before you.
Don’t expect other players to cooperate in your success. Don’t wait for them to give you points. Win your own. You have thunderous strokes. It breaks the heart to see you not using them. Softly softly catchee monkey, but you don’t want to catchee monkey, you want to breakee monkey’s balls. Go to passivity-management classes. And get a second serve. Then you’ll be a man, my son. Still sad, but at least a man.
Nellie, I am Catherine Earnshaw
Pleased to see the new Children’s Laureate, Malorie Blackman, coming out of the blocks fighting. Let’s get children reading, she says, and let’s ensure that black and other minority ethnic children don’t turn against history because of too great an emphasis on Nelson and the Tudors. Let’s have a few heroes who are culturally easier to identify with. We are in favour, in this column, of getting young people to read, even if we don’t think they have to read books especially written for them. Remember, we say, the example of John Stuart Mill, who knew his way through the classics when he was three. Yes, he went on to have a nervous breakdown, but at least he had the classics to help him out of it. Never mind the Prozac, try Plotinus. And we are in favour of a little more Henryless history (and Tudorless television) as well. Too much Tudor and you end up on temazepam. So we are disposed to listen when the new Children’s Laureate speaks.
Two statements she has just made strike me as important. The first is: ‘I still remember feeling I was totally invisible in the world of literature.’ And the second: ‘I understand you need to learn about Henry VIII, but when I was young I wanted to learn about something that felt more relevant.’
What a person remembers about being young is not open to controversy. What you felt, you felt. But I have to report differently. Not only didn’t I feel invisible in the world of literature, it would not have occurred to me that there was such a feeling to have. I am a few years older than Malorie Blackman, and those years might well have been decisive when it comes to what we think we have a right to feel – I put it like that because feeling is not autonomous: feelings catch on, go in and out of fashion, are determined by external circumstance and ideology – but however it’s to be explained, I didn’t feel excluded from what I read and nor did my friends. True, we weren’t black, but we were Jewish, northern and working class, so if there was an invisibility to feel, we were well placed to feel it.
‘Where are the Jews?’ It’s possible that one of the reasons we refrained from asking that question was that when a Jew did pop up in literature we wished he hadn’t. Thanks, Fagin, but no thanks. Quite simply, though, we were perfectly happy to read about people who weren’t us. We didn’t read to self-identify. We might not have said in so many words that we read for precisely the opposite reason – in order imaginatively to enjoy the company of others, in order to understand what those who were not ourselves were like, in order to feel the world expand around us, in order to go places we didn’t routinely go to in our neighbourhoods or in our heads, in order to meet the challenge of difference – but that was what we were doing. We probably wouldn’t have said, either, that the best books are inclusive in a way that transcends skin colour, religion or ethnic identity, but we knew they were. Reading felt like a journey out of self, not into it. And if occasionally we thought we saw something specific to us in Hamlet, or Heathcliff, that was interesting but not obligatory.
There’s another way of putting this. If I didn’t feel invisible, it was because I wasn’t. Madame Bovary c’est moi, Flaubert declared, invoking the writer’s creed. The reader’s creed is similar. Jane Eyre c’est moi, I felt when I read Charlotte Brontë’s great novel at school, and she was no less moi because she was a girl. If we should resist the principle of ethnic identity when reading, we should resist the gender principle as well. I was not invisible when I read Jane Eyre a) because the best writers make general what’s particular, and b) because I, who had not been taught to go looking for myself missing, honoured the writer/reader compact and found me in characters who weren’t me. Did my being a boy make me more Biggles than Little Dorrit? No, it did not. Would I have been more Biggles had Biggles been Jewish? No, I would not.
Our disagreement with Malorie Blackman about history – Tudors aside – is essentially the same. It’s not history’s job to be relevant to us; it’s our job to be relevant to history. I certainly see the argument for schoolchildren to be introduced early to the great issues that bear on racism – the
Holocaust and slavery, for example – but that’s not because of the special relevance they have for Jews and black people. It’s because knowing about them matters to everyone.
I remember where I was when ‘relevance’ entered the education debate. I remember where I was standing, what window I was looking out of, what bleak landscape I surveyed. That it would come to no good – that it demeaned those it pretended to help by assuming limits to their curiosity; that it denied those it offered to empower, cutting off their access to ‘irrelevant’ intellectual pleasure and enlightenment; that it was in every essential philistine in that it narrowed the definition of learning to the chance precincts of an individual’s class or upbringing – I was certain. The education system I benefited from assumed an equality of eagerness for knowledge, and an equality of right to acquire it. ‘Relevance’, as the Children’s Laureate’s urgency to promote a lost literacy proves, has benefited no one.
The answer to a history course that doesn’t interest children is not more digestible history; it’s better history teaching. A person who has trouble learning to drive isn’t advantaged by being taught only how to crash. I applaud your energy and passion, Malorie Blackman, but take the relevance route and you don’t educate, you disinherit.
The phoenix and the turtle
According to Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland, what the militant group al-Shabaab, was ‘really attacking’ when it went on the rampage in Westgate shopping mall, was ‘the very idea of capitalism’. A four-year-old boy from Britain, whose mother had already been wounded in the attack, had a different moral take on the massacre. ‘You’re a very bad man,’ he told one of the gunmen. Sometimes you get nearer to the truth if you keep it simple.
Whether the story has grown wings, whether the gunman really was shamed by the boy’s words, handed him a bar of chocolate and begged for his forgiveness, saying ‘We are not monsters’, I’m not in any position to know. It would be nice, though, to think that the little boy had time to say: ‘Oh yes you are. And don’t give me any of that “what you’re really attacking is the very idea of capitalism” crap.’
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