Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (35 page)

‘Well, I hardly—'

‘Course, if I was a
zebra
, werl!' said the dog, sourly. ‘If I was a zebra, if I was an
antelope
, stuck up Rome airport, they'd all be running round like bloody lunatics trying to sort it out, am I right? Television, papers, questions in Parliament, you name it.' He dropped to his belly, put his head on his forepaws, stared across the lino. ‘They look after their own, Pakis,' he muttered.

Since it was time, I felt, to change the subject, I said:

‘You mentioned post-war credits, I don't
quite
see how you, er, qualify. I understand you're fifteen?'

The dreadful eyes glanced up from the floor.

‘As a
dog
, I am fifteen,' he said. ‘I never said I wasn't fifteen, and here's my point,
as a dog
. But what you are forgetting, what the Council is forgetting, is that in human terms that equals seventy-five, I am actually a poor old sod of seventy-five currently being screwed by the Thatcherite Nazis out of what is rightfully mine. I fought the war against that kind of thing. Or,' he added, ‘I would have done.'

‘You
were
born in 1964,' I pointed out, I thought, gently.

The dog sprang to his feet.

‘Oh, excuse
me
!' he barked. ‘I did not realise I was in the presence of Magnus bleeding Magnusson. I was not aware that an attempt to baffle an unfortunate geriatric in the twilight of his years was under way.' His mouth opened, and I realised, with sudden unease, that the serried incisors were between me and the door. ‘You are not, by any chance, from the Council after all?' enquired the dog, with nasty sarcasm. ‘You would not care to nip upstairs and have a little snoop as to whether I am living in sin or perhaps running a small manufacturing business in the back bedroom?'

‘I apologise,' I replied quickly, ‘it was honest curiosity, merely, I do assure— you watch
Mastermind
, then? How very inter—'

‘Only,' muttered the dog, ‘in black and white. Also, the vertical hold's up the spout. Picture's like a slot in a letter-box. Peter Woods looks like Chu Chin bloody Chow. Know how many times I been up the Council about that?'

‘Well, I—'

‘There's dogs in this town with
three
colour sets at their disposal,' snapped the tenant. ‘We are two nations, as Disraeli so succinctly put it; for a Jew, anyway.'

‘Nevertheless,' I said, taking my courage firmly in both hands, ‘for an obviously deeply concerned social democrat—'

‘Absolutely,' nodded the dog, ‘definitely.'

‘—you seem oddly unconcerned, if I might say so, about the fact that you have been living for three years in a three-bedroomed Council house, modernised for six-and-a-half thousand pounds, when the Council waiting-list contains the names of four thousand families, most of them with small children. Does that not, perhaps, leave you feeling somewhat uneasy?'

The tenant's teeth bared again, whether in a smile or a snarl it was impossible to say.

‘In this world, sunshine,' he said, ‘it's dog eat dog.'

The Cricklewood Years
1990–1999

A.A. GILL

Introduction

T
his isn't going to be funny. The first rule of comedy is: ‘Know when not to be funny.' Actually that's the second rule of comedy. The first rule is: ‘Be funny.' No . . . as you were, that's the first footnote of comedy. The first rule is: ‘Learn how to be funny.'

Whoever said that the first rule of comedy is timing was either an actor or a subeditor, a brace of callings that are Bell's palsy to humour. This isn't going to be funny because I know the rules; I know when not to compete. You don't want to follow Shakespeare in a sonnet karaoke, or Mötley Crüe into an orgy, and you really don't want to drop a stream of fey drollery into the collected works of Alan Coren. I know my limits, and I know my place. I'm here to introduce the next act, say something nice and get off.

The fourth, or perhaps the fifth, rule of comedy is: ‘Always be funny for a reason.' There is nothing so happy-sapping as the unattached purposeless joke, and that was what always made Alan Coren's newspaper columns so readable, so insinuatingly, quietly memorable; they were never just comedy calories, there was always a context. Often – no, usually – the seed, the grit of the homily, was so small, so faint, that you barely noticed it. It would sit in your frontal lobe's in-tray for the rest of the day and grow a green shoot of an idea, or a pearl of wisdom, depending on whether you got the seed or the grit.

There is in this section a column that I reckon is an almost perfect example of the humorist's craft. Not least because it manages to get ‘concatenation' into the first sentence without a ‘by your leave' or ‘excuse me'. It's about crisps and Gatling guns. How it gets from crisps to Gatling guns, by way of an Italian driving school, is a small master class in the long and classy tradition of the English humorous essay. It moves with an effortless nonchalance, a saunter, without apparent destination or point. And only when you get to the end can you look back and see that it is as finely constructed, as pristinely pleasing, as a wren's nest in an Elizabethan knot garden.

The first tradition of the tradition is that we all pretend there is absolutely nothing to humorous writing, that it's a negligible parlour trick, a piece of amateur patter, an effervescent sleight of mind. Well, let me just this once tell you that no tradition had ever been harder-honed, or more diligently practised, polished and delivered with a lethal accuracy, than Coren's. The sticky-palmed pianist cracking his knuckles as he faces the sheer precipice of Rachmaninov's Third needs no less technical skill and dexterity than the comic columnist staring at the glacier of the blank A4 on a Monday morning.

Coren was a craftsman, not an artist. Artists are excitable men with extempore facial hair who beat their mistresses, leave their children destitute and their agents millionaires. An artist makes a unique thing every so often, a craftsman produces things of the same quality over and over by 4.30 on press day. Alan wrote to a standard that rarely varied by the girth of a semi-colon. I could at this point tell you about the perfect pitch of his ear for a rhythm and the mouth-feel of words, his prestigious ability to hug-a-mug colloquialisms with baroque elucidation, the elegance with which he would cast a sentence to make it curl and curve in the air before dropping the feathered hook precisely where he wanted it. I could tell you about the eye for the absurd and the nose for irony – one of the most difficult things to pass off in print. I could dissect all that, but let's just continue with the traditional pretence that it's all an amateur hobby.

The 1990s were a foolish, cruel and boastful decade that was made for Alan Coren's particular view. Remember the idiotic fuss about the Millennium? The sugared dome of New Labour? It was all fields of corn for Coren. We might call these The Cricklewood Years, the low view through the letterbox from the suburbs. Of course it was a front, a conceit. Of course really it was Chaucer, Swift, Cobbett, Pepys, Jerome, McDonnell and Wodehouse, posing as Mr Pooter and Mr Polly. Alan's column in
The Times
was generally to be found in the Thunderer's comments and editorial page, and it would invariably have the startled look of a chap who's turned up in his tennis flannels at a white-tie dinner. Surrounded by the stentorian stuffed shirts, he would make his sideways discursive point with that characteristic tone of a man who finds a naked duchess in his garden, but notices that she's standing on the begonias. And then he'd cut along home for cheese on toast, because craftsmen are generally happily married and pass their trade on to their children.

It is a wry and blissful irony that you're holding Alan's humbly passed-off thoughts here; it is they that have been collected for posterity, while the louder spittle-flecked diatribes of strident opinion have long since been recycled as crisp packets and that chaff they annoyingly stuff into padded envelopes.

It's all here in this concatenation, that rare and very English parochially homespun ability to see the world in a grain of sand, and a universe in Cricklewood.

51
Here We Go Round the Prickly Pear

I
have nothing against poetry. If it were not for poetry, Postman Pat would have a black-and-white dog.

Poets, however, are another matter. While I derive much joy from what they do for a living, primarily because of the manner in which they do it, when they deploy this manner where it has no business, I derive no joy at all. I go up the wall. I kick things about. For, though I relish the ellipsis and elusiveness of poetry, though I am more than happy to tangle with the ambiguity, the obliqueness, even the downright inaccessibility which poets needs must bring to their tricky trade, I abhor their apparent inability to talk straight when straight talking is required. Never ask a poet what a spade is; you will be there all night.

Oo-er, I hear you murmur, something has clearly upset him today, he is normally the most equable of men. His wick must have something major on it. We are entitled to an explanation.

Let us go then, you and I, to the works of T.S. Eliot. Not to the wondrous conundrums of his verse, but to a letter he wrote, on 26 April 1911, to his cousin Eleanor Hinkley in Boston. He was 22, and on his first trip to Europe; he had gone to stay in Paris, but decided to nip over to London for a few days, and it is this visit about which he is writing. Here is the nub, both of his letter and of my complaint:

‘I was out of doors most of the time. I made a pilgrimage to Cricklewood. “Where is Cricklewood?” said an austere Englishman at the hotel. I produced a map and pointed to the silent evidence that Cricklewood exists. He pondered. “But why go to Cricklewood?” he flashed out at length. Here I was triumphant. “There is no reason!” I said. He had no more to say. But he was relieved (I am sure) when he found out that I was American. He felt no longer responsible. But Cricklewood is mine. I discovered it. No one will go there again. It is like the sunken town in the fairy story, that rose just every May-day eve, and only one man saw it.'

Is it any wonder that as I stumbled upon that paragraph in my nice new
Letters of T.S. Eliot
yesterday I trembled with anticipation? Nor any less wonder that as I came to the end of that paragraph and found it was all that Eliot had to say about Cricklewood, I trembled, now, with rage? For God's sake, Tom, what did you
mean
? Why ‘pilgrimage' – what did you know beforehand? More to the point, what did you know afterwards? Why is Cricklewood yours, what did you discover, why is it like the sunken town in the fairy story?

A terrible urge came on me to chuck the book in the bin; here was the century's greatest poet, certainly the greatest ever to fall for Cricklewood, offering me nothing of which I could make head or tail. Why could he not come right out and say what made my backyard so magical, so worth not merely a detour, but a pilgrimage? Why couldn't he have bunged Eleanor a simple postcard,
Here I am in fabulous
Cricklewood, bloody ace, Guinness is tuppence a gallon, you never
saw such big whelks, no bedbugs to speak of and I have to beat the
women off with a stick, hoping this finds you as it leaves me, in
the pink, T.S. Eliot?

I did not, however, bin the book, I went instead to fetch another, for something had occurred to me; only two months after visiting Cricklewood, Eliot finished his first major work,
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
. Since he had fiddled and fussed with it for years, what might have spurred him, suddenly, past the post? I opened
Collected Poems
.

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent . . .

I closed the book again. I had hitherto believed that the squalid, unnamed town in which J. Alfred murmured his glum monologue was part Baudelaire's Paris, part Dante's Hell. Now, I looked at his letter again. It was as I feared: how had I beguiled myself into believing he had said what I thought he had meant? Why had I imagined it contained one single word to suggest Eliot had actually
liked
Cricklewood?

Between the idea and the reality, falls the Shadow.

52
Uneasy Lies the Head

I
f for nothing else, today's
feuilleton
will be remarkable for recording the smallest thing ever to go wrong with a house in its owners' absence. Indeed, so confident am I of this claim that if any reader writes to me with a smaller, he will receive, by return of post, a magnum of the finest Toblerone.

I spent the Bank Holiday weekend in Edinburgh, where it I turned out not to be a Bank Holiday at all; so that I came home feeling oddly deprived. It was not for some time that I discovered the yet odder depths to which deprivation may plummet.

It was four hours, to be precise; which is precisely what I can be. I know that my key turned in the lock at 3 p.m., because I heard the cuckoo clock in the kitchen observe this; just as I know that it was 7 p.m. when I discovered what I discovered, because I was in the kitchen itself at the time, slicing the lemon for the yard-arm gin, and when the clock cuckooed, I looked up.

Owners of clocks of the order
cuculidae
will not need an explanation for this, but the rest of you might be thunderstruck to learn that that is what you do if you are in a room with one at any time after five o'clock. Up until five o'clock, the number of cries registers in the head, but after that time you have no idea how many it is, and you have to look up at the clock to see what hour it is.

I looked up just in time to see the little door shutting. And, in the nanosecond before it did, to note that what it was shutting on was not the cuckoo.