Boys' Toys

Kathy Lette's tasteless but really very funny penis and religion joke has been endlessly reposted elsewhere, but I was reminded of it when paying a second brief twilight visit to the Concours d'Elegance at the Marina this evening. The fact that I felt the need to go twice has no significance whatsoever. The testosterone dripped as wanabee machos, chocolate gangsters to a boy, mingled saliva and possibly semen on to their overtightened trousers.  The hordes having largely left to do more shopping, I almost had the exhibition to myself - from the Cord to the Veyron. Bentleys, Aston Martins, Rolls Royces - a multitude of expensive antique and modern machinery was on display, louring stormclouds notwithstanding. It was difficult not to reflect on the conjugation (sorry, ladies) between long, oversized, horsepower-rich vehicles and sexual congress. Anyone I know who races cars online might like to take notes.
Having now turned sixty, such amusements are less frequent than formerly, but one's long-term memory improves with age. Or so I am told.
Kathy Lette is now fifty. In case any lady readers haven't come across her, get your own back and look here.

Humbug and Twitter

I have been hideously and irremediably idle in recent times. Seduced by twitterings and sound bite Facebook posts, I have found my thoughts leaping like a frog on a random succession of lily pads from one vapid thought to another. Nothing new there, then. The short sharp interjection is beguilingly direct but one is in default mode most of the time hence any logical train of connected thought becomes difficult. How smug we all feel when tweeting a crackling one-liner worthy of a Presidential candidate. Apologies in advance then for the random unconnectedness of what follows in the form of a few small passing clouds which have stayed together long enough to engage my attention.

Neglecting for a moment trivia like the European Debt Crisis, today, I read an article – surprising how hard it becomes to read when surrounded by pictures – which explored the principle of proximity in the context of loving my neighbour. How far, morally as well as geographically, does my neighbourhood extend and what exactly are my responsibilities towards it? To those with whom I have meaningful interaction on a regular basis?  Mitt Romney? My Facebook friends and are they really my friends at all? The pizza delivery boy?  Those suffering from disease, famine and disaster in Somalia? Or, the people who don’t like me very much. This list is the longest and most extensive.

On a different note. For impenetrable reasons, my TV is not giving me what I want. I quite like the action channel – sex and mindless violence being vastly entertaining usually, but these days a fat man in a dishdasha who commentates jovially on local football matches, folding his arms at regular intervals is almost more than flesh and blood can stand. It’s a toss-up really whether this or the WWF gets turned over first. The Turkish channel has the advantage in that it shows images of large breasted women, usually suffering some form of domestic violence in Istanbul, but the highlight of the week was finding the 'local' equivalent of the God Channel where jolly people big it up with specially hip bearded guests discussing the relative merits of tattoos and piercings.

In truth, I have had little time to channel hop, since, with fatuous shortsightedness and in a moment of weakness I agreed to ‘read a few lines of Dickens’ for a celebration of his 200^th birthday this month. Expecting to be given the odd line or two of Pickwick or Nickleby, which I could intone from some kind of lectern like Simon Callow, the whole monstrous hydra has burgeoned and grown like a smallpox rash, and has now metamorphosed into a rather jolly song and dance routine, fully scripted and choreographed. My bleats of protest were steamrollered, a script was thrust into my hand by a remarkably persuasive director and there were actual lines to learn and stage directions to follow. The principle is clear. That which begins simply, when placed into enthusiastic hands, takes on a life of its own and participants, willing or not,  are helplessly carried like rafts on the rapids in ever increasing circles. It remains to be seen whether we survive the jeering and catcalling as we all slowly hang ourselves on Friday night. I hope there’s a vomitorium.

Rulers and Cake

What an interesting week it's been. The world and its sadnesses - capsizing cruise ships with pusillanimous captains have not exactly passed me by, but I find myself floating ephemerally on the surface of events these days. Being sixty must have something to do with it. I still want to drive a Ferrari, but slowly.
We have yet another priest - the poor man delegated to serve us over Christmas slipped into a coma and passed away. Another 'father' - how I hate that term - has arrived, who seems to have intelligence, resilience and the kind of churchmanship that will appeal to the more liturgically switched on. This does not, alas, include myself, being a brontosaurus in this respect, slow of thought and response. Nonetheless, there was an efficiency of delivery which I both admired and feared a little. We continue to wallow in a backwater of indecision about what we like to sing - as if God cares - why doesn't somebody simply pull a few people together and just get it right. I play, drifting off to a little private island where I get to ring a doorbell at the the gates of the throne room, for which I am grateful.

The older I get, the more that friends seem important. people who don't just tolerate my noxious and unsettling presence, but those who are warm and unconditionally accepting. It's been an interesting week since I have experienced this in a variety of different contexts. When I was a child, I separated out 'church' friends and everybody else. Everybody else were the martini drinkers and smokers of cigarettes whose lives were racier and more exotic and careless than my own.  Church people were less forgiving but more reliable. In reality, their responses are remarkably similar. After lunch on Friday, a tiny child solemnly presented me with a 'musical ruler' plus instruction booklet - I can already play 'She'll be Coming Round the Mountain' quite well, I think - whose resonant properties will probably find their way into my A level teaching. I had several birthday cakes, the first with some awfully good mulligatawny soup - its very familiarity redolent of a taste of childhood which almost brought a tear to my eye, of which the hostess (who knows me alarmingly well) was unaware - the last at a charity event last night.

Friends brought a vast white confection topped with fireworks which almost fused the lights. Its very extravagance was a metaphor for how valued I felt at that moment. I don't much care for heavily sweetened confection, but to decline would have been a bit like the Prodigal Son saying he didn't much care for veal.

All Change

All change, please.

A palliative nurse gets to witness a lot of earthly departures.  Someone sent me a link which made me pause for a moment’s reflection. Its author was  a nurse writing about people’s final, often sadly regretful wish-lists as they faced the greatest adventure of all, death,  the biggest change of all.

I am currently facing the possibility of change, a paradigm shift, a genuinely small wrinkle or shrug of eternity, insignificant to all but me and those whom I know and love. Life is full of small comings and goings. How we deal with them is determined by how we deal with ourselves when change, inevitable as it is, knocks on our door. Am I going to cower behind the sofa, expecting Freddy Krueger to be on the other side? Or, do I invite the stranger in.

I’ve been wondering why I still need so badly to feel validated, measured by the quality and, above all, the quantity of effort I expend. One ‘deathbed wish’ the nurse heard so tragically often was

“I wish I hadn’t felt the need to work so hard”.

I sometimes look back and recall that for so many who have gone before, life was ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Which particular roll of the dice caused me, this one soul among so many, to have arrived in the world at this time, where comfort, food and shelter are so freely available?  And, why do I feel so driven to validate myself by working so abominably hard? For years, the whispering demon of ambition squeaked and gibbered as it sat on my shoulder, enslaving me. As I grew older, I came to see that a prerequisite of naked ambition is an ego so inflated that one can barely see over the top of it. Slowly, inexorably and hitherto incompletely, the whispers have faded and lessened and the promised glitter fades like shabby tinsel. The world will not cease to turn because people don’t understand Kepler’s Laws. The Universe will not cease to expand because I failed to explain the concept of space-time accurately. As I know myself better, the mists roll away and I know as I am known, which is ultimately a simple matter of perspective.

Also heard often was “I wish that I had let myself be happier”

Happiness is, ultimately, a choice. I think. Sticking fast to old habits and patterns, the ‘comfort of familiarity’ – can overflow into the emotional life thus I convince myself that I’m happy because I’m afraid of change when in reality I’m only barely contented. H’m.

Food At Year's End

New Year’s Eve can be quite a major deal here. People go out to friends, getting invited, dependent on who is doing the cooking. Ah. It would seem we are eight, sorry, nine for dinner tonight, rising to thirteen or more for dessert. Provisional menu herewith, written out by hand by chef for the purpose of instructing various minions, but, things change on a whim. The saucisson brioche has been made from  The Porcine Beast of Which We Do Not Speak (no, best not ask...) and tastes rich  and muscular. Those who pray might like to offer something powerful to the gods who control whether or not dishwashers malfunction at crucial moments. As the year closes, I find myself asking if the (pseudo)scientific Mayan folklore detailing the end of b'akt'un 13, or, if you like, the final wrap about a year from now will be heralded by voice recognition software (the next big thing - SIRI is light years ahead so far for those with an iPhone 4s) or if we'll all still be eating potatoes in duck fat, just like tonight.

Books At Year's End

It is almost impossible to be blasé about Paris, even when skies are patchwork grey and rain threatens. The city has a life and breath of its own, tourists notwithstanding. A half hour from home is rue de Rivoli where WH Smiths, une bouffée d’Anglais, nestles almost cheek by jowl with one of the most luxurious hotels in the world, the Crillon whose website gives no indication of the cost involved to walk through its hallowed portals. Dressed in Ralph Lauren, I felt like a pauper when taking this photograph. A little adroit navigation around the tourist traps reveals English books– blessedly uncensored – it seems that people do actually read these days, abundant and hot off the press. Bespectacled bibliophiles are thumbing languidly, myself among them. A word or two exchanged speaks volumes. A prize unavailable under burning suns is seized.  Rue St Honoré  runs parallel and one can find pairs of socks for only 50 euros. Amongst other things.

Hedgehogs with Buggies

The Greek poet Archilochus was one of the first to focus on human emotions and personal experience. He wrote “the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Those who write and think view their world in one of two ways – hedgehogs who look at things in terms of one great defining idea, like Plato, Pascal and Nietzsche, or foxes who draw threads of experience together and for whom the world can’t be reduced to one single idea,  people like Aristotle, Shakespeare and James Joyce. The Amish are hedgehogs. A British reality show ‘Living with the Amish’ follows six British teenagers from a variety of backgrounds as they stay at five different Amish settlements from Pennsylvania to Ohio, cataloguing the responses of both their hosts and themselves when subjected to a regime of Benedictine severity. Clothed separately by each denomination – on their arrival they looked about as out of place as a stripper at the Eucharist, bereft of iPads, phones and the trappings of modern Western civilization, they were made to get up for milking at five, help with a barn raising – yes, the entire structure is assembled by hand - and learn the simple Biblical structures which underpinned each household they visited. I don’t often find myself caught up by reality shows, but this was a quite engaging experience. 

One had no choice but to attempt to measure the purity of one’s own Biblical interpretations against the clarity and straightforwardness of the kindly but firm Amish hosts. One thing plumblined their lives. The Word of God.  As written in the King James Bible. Full stop. No clever exegesis, no wriggling out of the awkward bits. There was a clear-eyed innocence about each of the families and their many children which was really quite touching. Amish children are homeschooled until fourteen, then work in family businesses; the contrasts were stark. Deliberately. The quiet Etonian, a rich, spoiled brat, a loud, black Cambridge undergraduate, an ex- foster kid in need of a father figure – all were received thoughtfully and the Amish gave more that they knew. One sensed clever editing – the British responses were careful never to offend, perhaps in deference to the Amish habit of weighing words carefully. Would that we could all learn to do the same, how much simpler diplomacy might become.