Dedicated days by Rosie Boycott
I detest those calendar events, or dedicated days: “Anti-Smoking Day”, “Grandparents’ Day”, “Walk to Work Day”, that sort of thing. Half of these are just free publicity for pressure groups; the rest have been invented by Hallmark to sell more cards. And even though they didn’t exist five years ago, you are somehow made to feel guilty if you don’t join in with them.
If you want to give up smoking, give up. If you want to walk to work or tell your grandparents you love them, then do so. Any day you like. But don’t do it because of some bogus, commercial and entirely contrived “tradition”.
I must admit, though, I don’t mind Mother’s Day. I’m a mother myself, and it’s always nice to receive presents.
Salman Rushdie by Tariq Ali
When literature masquerades as imperialism, all one can feel is . . . SHAME
New Year’s Eve by Nick Clarke
My disgruntlement has much to do, no doubt, with the scars from an adolescent misunderstanding – that exclusive invitation to a sumptuous country-house party, only to find she’d invited five other hopefuls, too, leaving me to watch the last waltz from a dark, lonely corner. Misery in three-four time.
Subsequent eves never got much better. Millennium Eve, which we spent in Seattle, the town that cancelled New Year, was a particular humdinger.
So for that, and so many other reasons . . .
– “Auld Lang Syne”, with its artificial camaraderie and sweaty pseudo-Scottishness – “We’ll tak’ a right gude-willie waught, for Auld Lang Syne . . .” OK, Robbie, but include me out . . .
– the dazzlingly self-deluding promises of those drearily repeated resolutions . . .
– everything on television (apart from the bongs) . . .
. . . let us commit the whole thing to posterity, so that we can say with the cliche-mongers: “They will soon be a thing of the past.”
The golf club by Eve Pollard
The British golf club is the last bastion of hunting prints, swirly royal-blue carpets, spotted dick, a spot of lunch, “make mine a large one, squire”, small towels with jokes on them and rules, glorious rules.
British clubhouses, always built to a traditional country-mansion design, however new, are filled with ruddy-faced chaps who moan about their children wearing designer labels, but who are themselves plastered with brand names, frequently accompanied by newly minted, absolutely meaningless armorial shields.
As a barrier to entry, they imbue their game with a language most of us don’t understand. Unless you know what stableford, albatross, bogie, birdie or mulligan mean, how can you feel comfortable joining? In fact, there is little of multi-ethnic modern Britain in the golf-club world. Despite Tiger Woods, few black faces are seen on their exclusive fairways. And women are kept firmly in their place – if they are allowed in at all.
Should female members ever remonstrate that they have only one hairdryer to 50 lockers, they are smugly assured that their changing rooms have exactly the same facilities as the men’s.
Golf clubs are not only full of regulations, but they have the unerring ability to find petty dictators to enforce them.
The clubs’ codes often verge on the ridiculous. For example, in high summer, men at posh clubs must wear knee-length socks with shorts of Second World War army length. Don’t they know that the sexiest bit of a man’s leg is his thigh?
And could this innate ignorance about male sex appeal mean that they would rather play with each other than try a hard-walking hobby – rambling or shopping, for example?
The House of Lords by Simon Fanshawe
Years ago, a man showed me round the House of Lords. I shan’t call him a civil servant. He was anything but. His nose was stuck so far in the air that it wrinkled with distaste as if he’d sniffed the moon’s armpit. And I had an absolutely childish desire to dash down the corridors, shouting “fuck”. The Tories, the bishops, and the Labour titled who cave in and go native, justify this crusty pile with the patronising sweep of an unsustained assumption that it is the repository of common sense. It is neither common nor has sense. It is posh and pointless. Yet its inhabitants endlessly claim that it is a historic protector of our fundamental rights. They may be twiddling with David Blunkett’s anti-terrorism legislation, but I lost patience with the peers during the “age of consent” debates and have never regained it. The chamber echoed to the sound of people old enough to have forgotten their last orgasm trying to deny people a fraction of their age the thrill of their first. It was senility in pursuit of virginity. Most of the old fools who contributed meandered around the arguments until they looked as if they were lost inside their own sweaters. Either they were fools, such as Baroness Young who led the charge dressed as a Laura Ashley sofa, or they were malignantly betraying their own history as the object of genocide and hate, like the then chief rabbi. It’s simple to say, but so obvious. Those who wield power should be elected rather than being born to it.
Germaine Greer by Melanie McDonagh
It would, admittedly, go badly with most pundits if their public asked to see evidence that their own lives had worked out so well that they were qualified to administer advice to others. But in the case of Germaine Greer, one passage from The Female Eunuch reads bitterly in terms of what we know of her present life. “Perhaps I am not old enough yet,” she wrote in 1970, “to promise that the self-reliant woman is always loved, but she cannot be lonely as long as there are people in the world who need her joy and her strength . . . ” This passage was in the context of encouraging women to break free of the illusory security of matrimony. And, having long ago taken her own advice, left her husband after three days, and repudiated the normal restrictions of family life, the most poignant complaint in her most recent opus is that of loneliness. She urged women in The Female Eunuch not to scruple to leave their children if it was necessary to find freedom, yet in a recent interview she expressed her anguish at not having a child. It is difficult now to read without a rising gorge, Greer’s prescription for personal happiness for academic women: find lorry drivers as mates because you have read the texts on class emancipation, and delegate the task of child-raising to some obliging extended family in Italy, willing to undertake the boredom that would threaten your own individualism. During the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Greer denounced the Nato involvement in the conflict as phallic aggression. She asked whether anyone had asked the women who were in the refugee convoys of the ethnically cleansed whether they actually wanted this intervention. I did ask. I went to Kosovo and asked the Albanian female refugees how they felt about Nato intervention. Every one of them let Germaine Greer down. No matter; she has never had much time for those women who do not rise to her own notion of womanhood. For all her eloquence and intelligence, the function of this icon of the women’s movement is not so much role model as object lesson.
Clare Short by Zac Goldsmith
Icon would be stretching the point, but on one or two issues at least, Clare Short used to be seen as something of an ally to the environmental movement. Just a short while before she entered government, she told the special issues editor of the Ecologist in a taped interview that she was determined to fight to change the “malfunctioning” institutions of the global economy, namely the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation, goals that she repeated emphatically in other statements.
Following her appointment as Secretary of State for International Development, and governor of the World Bank, our same reporter revisited Short, tape-recorder in hand, to discuss similar issues. Expecting a realistic compromise to reflect her new position, he was nevertheless astonished to be confronted with a veritable barrage of compliments about the vital work of the World Bank. On being presented with a World Bank report that admitted more than half its projects had failed to achieve their targets, she responded: “I wonder what the failure rate of articles the Ecologist magazine carries are?” On being asked to comment on World Bank involvement in the relocation of 50,000 Chinese immigrants to Tibet, she first denied the designated area was part of Tibet, despite the reality that the Chinese regard it as a Tibetan area, then accused our reporter of prejudice. When he reminded her of her previous comments on the issue, her response was again denial.
Careful diplomacy is one thing. U-turns are another, particularly when they coincide with nifty career moves. What is it they say about power?
Cherie Blair by Ned Sherrin
Mrs Blair seems to be an admirable mother and a more than competent barrister in her specialist field; but I do wish she could cull the cult of First Lady which is burgeoning about her. The term “First Lady” is an American invention – bestowed by a doting president on his love and clung to by others who shared their presidential partners’ beds. The label is superfluous in this country, as we already have an anointed First Lady, just with the more traditional title “The Queen”; and we can supply at least three others in precedence – the Queen Mother, the Princess Royal and Princess Margaret. This makes Mrs Blair the Fifth Lady – unless you bring in Cilla Black, Barbara Windsor and Joan Collins in contention.
Test matches by Kate Adie
I like cricket – the village variety, that is, with lots of bravura batting into greenhouses, fuelled with jugs of ale and rivalry. It’s the monstrous international five-day ritual in front of empty benches accompanied by schoolboy commentary and logarithmic statistics that defeats me. We appear to take on sides of bronzed giants dressed in disgusting Day-Glo colours or weasly cheats in league with the umpire. When there is a crowd, they have to be caged in lest they invade the pitch. And there’s the added irritation of being asked, under fire, in some foreign field by some desperate expatriate, whether or not we’ve followed on. I know they’re a great tradition, originating in some impossibly strange business involving burnt wickets, but is that really an excuse for an entire afternoon being spent “knocking up a quiet 50”?
Television hasn’t helped the cause: close-ups of men smeared with dollops of shiny paste – why is it that they have to look like Christmas cakes waiting to be iced? Armour-plating at the crease – just how did American football get into this game? What happened to Lux-washed pullovers faded into light oatmeal and carrying the grass stains of last season’s glorious catch? Then there are replays, sometimes in slow motion, and averages and analyses. When will television learn the only way a Test is watched is with lengthy intervals for a snooze, a perusal of the Telegraph and then another snooze, especially when you are sitting on a hard bench in the bracing summer at Headingley? National honour is at stake, I hear it said. And instead of ruthless governments and cunning diplomats, the national interest is pursued by cabbalistic groups of crusty men who used to wield a bat several decades ago (British) or who are out for vengeance on the old colonial monster (everyone else). Bags of money now jingle in the pavilions, and accusations of match-fixing carry the weight of international incidents. And all the back-biting, taunts of racism and innuendo take place against a background where, unlike other cash-loaded competitive sports, everyone is meant to be a gentleman, but no one can remember to behave like one.
The celebrity chef by Stephen Bayley
Time, I think, to bury the celebrity chef in all his annoying forms. There’s the cute chef, the gruff chef, the cockney sparrer chef, the fat Italian. Hard to say, really, which is the most irritating. I’d like to spatchcock the lot of them. Chefs are artisans who should be confined to their workplace: what they should have in their hands is a spatula and a skillet, not a media schedule. They should be sweating brutally over hot stoves, not perspiring elegantly under the television lights. Today, in a restaurant of repute, you are as likely to find the cook in the dining room as the kitchen. There he goes, preening and strutting, discommoding the credulous gluttons who pay his salary. There is no doubt today who is feeding off whom. And another expression of this noisome vanity is on the plate: a surreal inversion of “less is more”, where expense is translated not into delicious substance, but into meretricious complication of minimalist content. Last week, hungry in France, I endured serial ditsy compilations of microscopic ingredients in swanky restaurants. Only once did I enjoy eating something: robustly old-fashioned cuisine de grand-mere (like an illustration from a 1955 Larousse gastronomique), served below stairs in a chateau. Gary, Gordon, Jamie, eat your hearts out.
Morecambe and Wise Christmas Shows by Philip Kerr
Old comedy shows never die, they just get repeated on BBC2, endlessly. It doesn’t matter how old these shows are. Witness, on recent Saturday evenings, The Likely Lads: a show so old, and black and white, that you need an appreciative voice-over from an old comedy connoisseur, Bob Monkhouse, to alert you to the imminent arrival of a joke. Not that repeats worry the BBC, which has found the perfect catch-all description to excuse filling the schedule with comedies so old that they make Private Godfrey and Corporal Jones look like Ant and Dec. The BBC calls these television zombies “comedy classics”, in the hope that we will buy the pup that they were programmes of the highest rank and importance. But the reality is that these light-entertainment bromides belong to an age of pre-Reithian antiquity.
Christmas leaves television audiences especially vulnerable to penny-pinching schedulers and their comedy classics. And the most common insult offered at this time of year is the almost mandatory repeat of any one of a dozen Morecambe and Wise Christmas shows. For me, a whole decade was blighted by this so-called comedy duo and their irritating catchphrases, in-jokes and holiday-camp routines. With these two around, you didn’t need to go to see some crappy pantomime in Scarborough, as they would bring it straight to your living room.
Television and, more importantly, a live, non-paying audience in the BBC TV theatre at Shepherd’s Bush made them look much better than they really were. In the cinemas, however, stripped of their ad libs and their cliched routines, obliged to work within the discipline of a script, and faced with an audience who had to pay for their tickets, Morecambe and Wise were a hopeless failure. The Intelligence Men, That Riviera Touch and The Magnificent Two were all cinema dismals in a way that only Steve Coogan can really understand.
But the thing I hated most about Eric and Ernie on TV were the set-piece musical parodies that became their Yuletide stock-in-trade. There was nothing funny, or even entertaining, about watching sports presenters and newsreaders help Morecambe and Wise to act out some corny South Pacific number, like a group of saddos in the Ambridge Christmas play. It was merely an exercise in celebrity-spotting, at a time when the likes of Peter Woods, Eddie Waring, Frank Bough, Richard Baker, Angela Rippon and Robin Day somehow passed for celebrities. I’m sure they all loved it. Just as the BBC loved how the show probably cost about £500 to produce. In those days, there was nothing else on the telly, so the Morecambe and Wise Christmas specials got huge audience figures that won’t ever be repeated – unlike the shows themselves.
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