The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  Vanessa returned to her Mayfair flat six weeks after giving birth. She visited a ‘brilliant, cut-price’ dermatologist Linda had tipped her off about. The tall, chalk-white Estonian peered at her face and agreed there were faint lines around her eyes and the corners of the mouth. He warned her that some people had ‘issues’ with his treatment, which involved injections with ‘animal-based fillers’. It transpired, with gentle probing, that the animals in question were foetuses, purchased from Russian abortion clinics. Vanessa looked at him and smiled: ‘Bring it on.’

  She didn’t see her child again until the christening. ‘Oh, you hold him,’ she said to her dull husband’s dull best friend, the banker, who was to be his godfather. That night she opened her child’s presents. She took the claret back to London and swapped the Tiffany cufflinks for a pendant.

  Vanessa’s visits home grew more sporadic over the years. When her son was five her husband felt forced to divorce her. ‘Thank God he’s finally shown some backbone,’ said Vanessa to her lawyer as they dined in the Garrick Club. A year later her former husband married the pretty Serb nanny. ‘Some men cannot be cured of their foolishness,’ said Vanessa at the news.

  Vanessa’s son was later to write: ‘People joke about a mother who is rarely there. You know the sort of thing: “All I remember of mama is the swish of her silken gown and the faint scent of lavender as she left for the ball.” But my mother was truly absent. I only met her three times after the divorce, and on one of those occasions she left me for the day with a musician who was later jailed for keeping child porn on his laptop. The second time she appeared unexpectedly at a school founder’s day; she was visibly drunk and kept saying in a loud voice, “Who’s that little creep over there?” On my final visit, to her London flat, she couldn’t disguise her boredom and asked if I’d mind if she watched TV.’

  He showed this passage of his memoir to his mother on the fourth and final occasion of their meeting. She read it swiftly and nodded dismissively, as if it were a shopping receipt presented for her approval. ‘Poor, poor diddums,’ she mocked, ‘do you think you’d have anything to write about if your childhood had been happy?’ You’re hardly the most imaginative of people.”

  He stared at her silently.

  ‘No,’ Vanessa said, pouring a large whisky and exhaling a smoke circle into his face, ‘I don’t think so either.’

  Her son returned home and ended his book with these words: ‘Some women should probably be sterilised at birth.’

  Vanessa laughed when a friend told her what he’d written.

  ‘Frankly, it’s hard to disagree,’ she said.

  The Fashionable Side

  Living in Shoredietrich

  Xavior Roide

  One’s address is always a matter of concern to those who are concerned with the fashionable. The fashionable is the spell cast over the fictitious ‘now’, a literary invention which Taoist fellows fondle and with which nostalgic narcissists tackle. Being ahead of the game however, fashion turns the ‘now’ into the ‘next’ with cunning sleight of hand-in-marble. With fashion we are never meant to feel that we are truly in the moment, that we have arrived, but rather that we are somehow nostalgic for this moment, an absurd situation indeed! As a result, we are never really there nor ever nearly here, though we assume otherwise. Fashion deludes us, it deliberately causes discontent. To fashion something out of marble is to see more than the marble, we always have to fiddle with what is given; we never relax; our marbled hands tremble with sensitivity. Given this shaky state of affairs it is no surprise to realize that secondary qualities are the concern of Art. Art is always a secondary concern. To make it a primary one is an act of decadence.

  Currently, I have the most fashionable address in London. Sitting near the top end of Columbia Rd, I am a grateful glance towards the scruffy street walkers on Hackney Road, a simple stone’s throw from the George And Dragon, a brief walk to Curtain Rd’s ‘Ball Music Hall’, a mere five minutes cycle to Bistrotheque (for to walk down Hackney Rd would be to pose as a local, and I’m an internationalist), and a frenetic sprint from Brick Lane (the locals still enjoy a good chase).

  My address sits at centre of where the four humourless boroughs meet: sanguine Hoxton, choleric Shoreditch, melancholic Hackney, and phlegmatic Bethnal Green. Nevertheless, as a transcultural I see no traditional borders and I take no traditional sides. Where I live used to be called Hockney (Hackney meets Hoxton), when canvas art was the fashion, but now I have fashioned this place Shoredietrich because being a cabaret star is oh so au courant.

  It used to be said of Hockney, ‘Where there is dereliction today there will be an art gallery tomorrow.’ Now, in Shoredietrich, due to the sheer amount of nonsense produced by postmodernists posing as artists, or rather decorators-but-never-painters™, it is truer to say: ‘Where there is an art gallery today there will be dereliction tomorrow’. On the ruins we will build makeshift theatres and dance The Adoration of the Earth.

  Hoxton Square is increasingly gathering a terrible reputation for becoming plebeian. The White Cube is surrounded by tepid bars and doomed music venues that seem to be designed to look like an Australian’s living room. These are the places that draw the cocky mockney boys in crummy monkey suits; why, one can scarcely parade around Hoxton Square in full regalia without having some raggedy comment being flung onto one by these creatures. Shoreditch is equally full of ugly bars and pubs that play urban music. I want urbane music. As soon as middle-class boys and girls who work in offices come to an area to drink beer it is all over. You can spot these creatures by their haircuts, always five years out of date. As a result, Hackney and Bethnal Green are becoming the preferred places for the Artistocracy to parade in, but how long will it last? The streetwalkers on my corner have begun to charge more and smile less.

  I’m terribly lucky to live in none of these places. I live in Shoredietrich. On Sunday the famous Columbia Rd Flower Market is still the perfect place to buy lilies for one’s buttonhole before cycling off west to meet one’s fellow Teaists at The Wolseley in St James. Cream tea is all the rage you know.

  Hearts of Darkness

  Vanora Bennett

  Don’t bother with caviar if all it suggests to you is a few tremulous black eggs, wobbling pitifully on a cracker, at the kind of indifferent polite soirée where you also get one glass of champagne-on-the-cheap, bow ties and insipidly grown-up conversation. There’s no point in eating it if you don’t do it right; and right, when it comes to caviar, means revelling in its fascinatingly expensive wrongness.

  Caviar comes from the wanton slaughter of a rare fish, the sturgeon, in the remote Caspian Sea – an illicit trade that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has kept a generation of poachers and dodgy businessmen in money. It has also brought the biggest and rarest of the three kinds of sturgeon in the sea, the beluga, to the brink of extinction. Hardly an eco-sustainable party snack, then – but the caviar baddies are showing no signs of regret that their hunger for instant big bucks is destroying the environment their children and grandchildren will inherit. Any caviar you eat today, even if it comes from a tin virtuously labelled ‘produce of Iran’ (where post-Soviet smugglers do not operate), is likely to be the evil stuff, stolen from the sea, produced at minimal costs, canned and fraudulently labelled by murderous crooks and smuggled on to Western markets at a mark-up of many million per cent.

  That background of danger and distress puts the consumer under a decadent obligation. By eating caviar – by being willing to part with a king’s ransom for a taste of something so rare, ambiguous and endangered – you are signalling that you’re the kind of person who is also willing to countenance thrillingly improper relationships between all pleasure and all payment. Behave accordingly.

  First, don’t bother listening to gourmet-talk about the quality of beluga, or sevruga, or osietra: the taste you’re after is the taste of misused power and cruelty, and every bowl of sturgeon eggs will be full of that.

  Second, thi
nk quantity. Remember that one tiny, mean-spirited mouthful is never going to be enough. You’re after excess, glut, extremes – the head-rush feeling that comes from shovelling glistening dollops of the stuff into your mouth; the live-for-the-moment euphoria of not giving a damn how much it costs.

  If you can’t get that at the polite soirée, even by helping yourself to entire trayfuls of respectable caviar canapés, there’s only one thing to do: leave and source a better supply elsewhere. Either pay the full whack for the full plate at a legit sales outlet, or, more entertainingly, go hunting for the other sort.

  It’s not hard to find. Britain is full of whispering, cheating, alluring caviar salesmen. Some are the genuine Caspian kind, with long southern eyelashes and gold teeth, operating out of organic butchers’ shops and open-all-evening emporia in high streets near you. Others are apparently virtuous part-timers: Russian sailors in town for a few days with a bagful of swag to offload; chess players moonlighting between tournaments. Dozens are reputed to make their way every month to every big food hall in London, trying to flog their dirty wares to shocked sales managers; you could do worse than to catch them on their crestfallen way out, and strike a private bargain.

  If you want the real deal, though, you’ll have to travel further. Reclining on a despoiled sofa from the Hermitage, quaffing vodka with Mafiosi as the snow falls outside, singing depraved songs as you lick up fish-eggs with your fingers will give you a first inkling of the sinister pleasures to be got from this underworld delicacy. But it’s only when you reach the oily southern shores of the crime-infested Caspian itself, and are invited by a gun-toting poacher hanging out his nets on the driftwood to share his ‘power food’ breakfast – a gutful of stolen eggs on a great slab of white bread – that you will truly appreciate the heart of the darkness that is caviar.

  Pissing in Space

  Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray

  Medlar and Durian, astronauts

  Ever since, as schoolboys, Durian and I huddled together at Lucan Lodge on that distant July night in 1969, watching Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong bounce like sedated trampolinists across the moon, I have nursed a deep longing to go into space: to don that puffy white regalia, to climb, waving like Liberace, into the tiny cockpit at the top of a Titan rocket – then to be flung in a torrent of fire towards the stars!

  Alas, neither of us have the physique, never mind the mentality, for the job. NASA require their astronauts to be A1 specimens. As representatives of the F class (‘totally unsuitable material, lacking in endurance, know-how and moral character’) we were never likely to make the grade – although our names are held on file in Brussels as volunteers, should the Kingdom of Belgium ever wish to start a space programme. We remain at full readiness, awaiting the call.

  In the meantime we content ourselves with imaginary journeys into space. We have tried various forms of ‘virtual reality’ (a concept, like ‘virtual orgasm’, which fails to deliver on several fronts). Films are a help, of course, as are flight simulators, and a certain amount of ‘flying ointment’ (i.e. henbane).

  By far the most effective method we have found is to sit in a darkened room with a small reading-lamp, a glass of plum brandy, and a copy of that classic of space literature, Carrying the Fire.

  Its author is Michael Collins, a test pilot and astronaut with an unusual view of existence (due partly, no doubt, to a working life carried out at an average speed of 22,000 miles per hour). He was the man, in Apollo XI, who stayed in the command ship orbiting the moon while Aldrin and Armstrong flew down for a stroll among the boulders. Call him an observer, a voyeur, what you will – his lonely position gave him the leisure to contemplate the mysteries of their task. This was beyond his companions – they were too busy with the practicalities of fuel consumption, angle of descent, and not smashing into rocks. Collins was something of a poet – he put into words the sensations, thoughts and emotions of an earthling who is suddenly shot into space. His account is splendid. It earns him an honoured place in the Temple of Decadence.

  His gifts first caught our attention when he described the cramped Gemini 10 spacecraft as ‘an orbiting men’s room’; and again when he spoke of the medical examinations at the School of Aerospace Medicine in Texas: ‘no orifice is inviolate, no privacy respected.’ (Suddenly, space travel took on exciting new possibilities in our minds.)

  One of the finest moments in the book is an account of urinating in a space-suit. It is, apparently, something that everyone wants to ask an astronaut. He quotes the technical manual in full.

  Operating Procedure

  Chemical Urine Volume Measuring System (CUVMS) Condom Receiver

  1. Uncoil collection/mixing bag from around selector valve.

  2. Place penis against receiver inlet check valve and roll latex receiver onto penis.

  3. Rotate selector valve knob (clockwise) to the ‘Urinate’ position.

  4. Urinate.

  5. When urination is complete, turn selector valve knob to ‘Sample.’

  6. Roll off latex receiver and remove penis.

  7. Obtain urine sample bag from stowage location.

  8. Mark sample bag tag with required identification.

  9. Place sample bag collar over selector valve sampler flange and turn collar 1/6 turn to stop position.

  10. Knead collection/mixing bag to thoroughly mix urine and tracer chemical.

  11. Rotate sample injector lever 90 degrees so that sample needle pierces sample bag rubber stopper.

  12. Squeeze collection/mixing bag to transfer approximately 75 cc. of tracered urine into the sample bag.

  13. Rotate the sample injector lever 90 degrees so as to retract the sample needle.

  14. Remove filled urine sample bag from selector valve.

  15. Stow filled urine sample bag.

  16. Attach the CUVMS to the spacecraft overboard dump line by means of the quick disconnect.

  17. Rotate selector valve knob to ‘Blow-Down’ position.

  18. Operate spacecraft overboard dump system.

  19. Disconnect CUVMS from spacecraft overboard dump line at the quick disconnect.

  20. Wrap collection/mixing bag around selector valve and stow CUVMS.

  This is less a set of instructions than a prose poem! Step 4 (‘Urinate.’) has the simplicity of a sketch by Ingres. One can almost feel the sense of relief as this brusque command cuts through the tangle of formalities that precede it … And instruction 19, I feel, has a similar cadence to some of the finer verses of Allen Ginsberg

  Mad Monday 8.55 am, Liverpool

  Helen Walsh

  While the bulk of the country forlornly builds itself up for the five-day drudge, Liverpool is putting on its glad rags ready to crank the party mood up another gear. In my city, the start of the orthodox working week signals the mother of all closing parties – Mad Monday. Liverpool has always gone its own skewy way when it comes to hedonism. When London went skiffle mad, we had Merseybeat. When punk took over the U.K, Liverpool veered towards an unhinged amalgam of Warholesque art-rock and gay disco. And when unemployment battered the nation into a state of inertia in the early 80s, Liverpool reacted by slotting another twenty-four hours on the weekend. Keen to keep the punters in the pubs rather than allowing them to waste precious pennies on such fripperies as rent, food and so forth, minehosts came up with the brilliant notion of a) cashing giros through their pub tills and b) slashing all drink prices to 50p on a Monday. The city has wrested itself cockily back from the wretched 80s, but the tradition remains – even if the bevs are a whopping 99p a throw these days.

  How gloriously liberating it feels to leave one’s house to carouse while the rest of the country is at work. Michelin star cuisine? Hip Hotels? Deviant sex? None of these esoteric delectations even come close to a Mad Monday in town. Forget the Docks and its avant-garde bars. Forget the trendy Hope Street restaurants and the cheap and cheerful lap-dancing clubs, where the girls work Sundays just so they can Mad
Monday it. If you want a real slice of Europe’s newest Capital of Culture then follow the shrill clamour of malingerers, OAPs, students and lapdancers as they boulevard the boozers’ circuit each Monday.

  Mad Mondays are as much about communal revelry as they are about solitary drinking and that’s what makes these sessions so special to me. I love to indulge in solitary drinking – I absolutely fucking love it. It’s a great way of discovering yourself, of breaking the ice with yourself, falling in love with yourself all over again – and occasionally falling out with yourself. You can learn more about the inner you over the course of one unflinching binge than a six-week stint with a shrink will ever reveal – and it’s a hell of a lot more fun.

  When I finished Uni I spent an awful lot of time walking up mountains trying to figure out what job I wanted, where I was going and suchlike – but my long, cold peregrinations yielded nothing more than wind-slapped ears and blistered soles. My Scouse boyfriend, Kevin gave me some priceless advice – spend a day on the ale. On Monday. In Liverpool. That’ll sort your noggin out for sure.

  So in a dark remote corner of The Roscoe Head under a thick plume of smoke, I took my first sip of bitter and my first step towards enlightenment. By my second pint, my tongue loosened, my thoughts emboldened, I began to open up to myself. By my third, these introspective probings had segued into full-blown debates about the meaning of life with fellow tipplers (all of whom, I might add, were over 70 and wiser – if younger – than judges). By my sixth and final pint the road to wellness was complete. True happiness stood within an ace. All it would take was a job that allowed me to solitary drink, here, every Monday. I called my newfound guru from the pub’s ancient phone to ask his advice. Easy, he said, lapdancer or writer – you’ll excel at both.