Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (37 page)

I suppose it sprang from our peculiar conviction that Orientals have cracked the secret of relaxation. They do go on about it rather a lot. Five minutes in the lotus position, a couple of mantras, a quick tot of ginseng, a pull or two on the old Zen bow, and then into the futon for a good night's kip and next morning you're fresh as a daisy.

That may be
onto
the futon, of course, or under it, or even between them, if they come in twos; I wouldn't know, and I very much doubt, now, that I ever shall.

56
Card Index

I
have received a Christmas card from a dog.

When I first drew it from the envelope, I did not think it had been sent by a dog, I thought it had been sent by a human being who had bought a Christmas card with a dog on it. I did not think it was much of a card, mind, because the photograph of the dog was not much of a photograph. The head of the dog was all right, but the far end of the dog was a bit out of focus, and the house beyond the far end of the dog was not only even more out of focus, it was wonky as well. This was not a photograph at all, it was a snapshot.

None of which is to say that it mightn't have been a professional Christmas card. It is quite hard to tell, these days, with so many charities on the go; I have already received a fair few cards with ill-drawn blobs on the outside and, on the inside, information about dolphin shelters and acid rain and the like, and this canine item might very well have been one such. The dog looked relatively hale, but you never know, it could have had some psychiatric ailment, and as to the quality of the snapshot, perhaps it was the best that the Miserable Dog Trust or whatever could afford. It would be irresponsible to chuck good money away on Lord Snowdon if the Hon Sec had an Instamatic.

But when I opened the card, it just said:
Merry Christmas
and a Happy New Year from Bruno
in type, with ‘. . . and his humans, too!' added in green ink. No signature, no address. I closed it and looked at the dog again. It was a total stranger. Nor could I identify the fuzzy house. It has a fuzzy car outside it, possibly a Volvo, but it's only a guess.

This kind of thing has been getting worse, over the years. When I was young, people sent one another cards with robins on. They were not in aid of Robin Relief, nor was the bird a family pet whose turn it was to do the cards that year. You opened them, and they said ‘Merry Christmas to you and yours from Jim and Millie Nugent, “Erzanmine”, Walnut Crescent, Uxbridge'. You knew where you were with cards like that.

But then, instead of the robin, the personalised card came bob-bob-bobbing along. This had the senders on the front, generally two adults you recognised, surrounded by several infants and a cat. As a shorthand method of keeping abreast of events in households you never visited, it served, I suppose, its purpose. As Yules passed, you watched hair fall out, waists thicken, spectacles arrive, children lengthen, cats degenerate. Sometimes the family moved to the country, and a horse joined them. Sometimes they emigrated, and the Eiffel Tower or the Great Barrier Reef materialised behind them.

But, as Yeats used to scribble gloomily on his own cards, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. A Christmas would come along when you noticed a new baby sitting by the car, and you thought, ‘Hallo, they're a bit old for another kid,' and then you looked at the picture again, and it wasn't the same wife as last year. An extreme and deeply unsettling example of all this was the card we had a couple of years back from a man I didn't know at Oxford 30 years ago. He had married the ex-wife of a man I did know at Oxford, and, when she remarried, she was the one who carried on sending cards. These cards had her and her new husband on, plus a couple of new children standing next to her old ones. Then her second marriage broke up and her ex-husband married again, but hung on, apparently, to the old Christmas card list. We now get an annual card from two people we don't know standing next to a lot of big unfathomable children who could belong to almost anybody.

And now we have an unfathomable dog. Why the hell Bruno couldn't have had his surname or address printed, who can say? Might it be some kind of test? People with dogs, I find, expect you to recognise their pets, so it may well be that Bruno's humans have got him to sort out the wheat from the chaff. If they do not receive a card from me in return, my name will be mud.

I can think of only one solution to all this. I shall put a notice in the personal column of
The Times
to the effect that Mr Alan Coren wishes Bruno to know that he will not be sending any cards this year.

57
Brightly Shone The Rain That Night

B
oxing Noon, and Hampstead Heath resembles nothing so much as the gale-scattered covers of all those comic annuals ripped yestermorn from their urgent stockings. So many bright new Mickey Mouse gloves! So many bright new Rupert Bear scarves! So many bright new Garfield earmuffs and Kermit boots and Peanuts pullovers! The world, new-laminated, is crying ‘Hallo, Chums!' Cavorting gaily in the drizzled gloom, all this iridescent giftery – on adult and child alike – seems to bespeak not so much Christmas as some medieval Haberdasherie Fayre upon which the city's cordwainers and hosiers and mercers and drapers and hatters have descended to propitiate their diverse tutelary gods and flog their latest lines.

It is all so cartoon-jolly that I do not immediately notice that something is missing. What makes me finally notice it is the singularly poignant sight of a small boy sledding down the sodden East Heath slope, towards the Vale of Health. He has new yellow moonboots on, and a new Snoopy flying helmet. He has a new sled. He could be on the cover of the
Beano Annual
, were it not for the one thing he does not have. He does not have snow.

Poor little begger. He is making a valiant fist of it, shoving himself off from just beneath me, lurching down the wet grass, slaloming the bushes with expert toe and mitten, bumping to a halt after a dozen yards, then struggling up again, his mudcaked sled trailing erratically behind him on its sodden string. Had he snow, he would not stop at all, he would hurtle on, shrieking joyously, scattering the pirouetting skaters on Hampstead Pond and finally fetch up, breathless, in Gospel Oak. Because, if he had snow, there would be skaters on Hampstead Pond today, rather than the goose-bumped madmen flaunting their traditional braggadocio in the unfrozen ooze.

Maybe, in his head, he has it. The imagination, at seven, is rich. Maybe he goes down the hill with six huskies in front and a pack of wolves behind. Maybe the unflagging effort is all about getting to Gospel Oak before Amundsen. My point (I have just decided) is that he shouldn't have to. He is forced to imagine only because he is forced to compensate for unnecessary disappointment. He should not have been led to expect snow. He should not have torn open his bedroom curtains, immediately after tearing open his sled-wrappings, to have his heart sunk by only drizzle specking the panes.

For two months now, cotton-wool has been his promissory note. He has stared through it at frosted toys, while Muzak jingled sleigh-bells at him. Tempted inside, he has sat on Santa's snow-booted knee, and heard how reindeer struggle through blizzards on behalf of good little boys. All his weekly reading has featured snow-capped mastheads, all the stuff within has occupied itself with snowball fights, thin ice, risible snowmen, and mad dogs happily frozen suddenly solid in the act of going for a newsboy's shin. Everything he has watched on television has ostensibly taken place in arctic conditions, and all anyone has talked about has been the prospect of the white Christmas of which he has been encouraged to dream.

No chance. We have not had a white yule in 20 years, and the odds on our warming globe ever offering one must be incalculably long. This isn't Lapland. Christmas snow is but one more EC standard to which we have let ourselves be hijacked. Is it not time to chuck this damaging delusion in?

What it does here at Christmas is rain. We should make this a meteorological virtue. Let us have a British Santa in cheery yellow oilskins and sou'wester, ho-ho-ho-ing through the drizzle in a dory tugged by six big cod. Let fake raindrops twinkle down our shop windows from autumn on, let our cards show robins on floating logs and coaches in flying spray, and each display, advertisement and grotto anticipate the joys of snug dry firesides bonding happily families together against the cats and dogs beyond.

Sing
I'm Dreaming of a Wet Christmas
, Cliff, and let's be done with it.

58
Tuning Up

T
hey came to take the piano on Friday. They brought it down the stairs from the landing where it had stood for 25 years, and it went bong as it hit every step, but not a bong any musician could have put his finger on, because it had been out of tune for 20 of those years, and if you put your finger on it, the notes that came out belonged to it alone.

After they had got it down the stairs, they heaved it on to a little cart to wheel it up the garden path to their van, and I walked behind, though lacking an old cock linnet, to see it off. It was a bit like a cortège. One or two neighbours watched – neighbours always watch a removal van – but they didn't say anything, because there is something about a piano leaving a house that begs discretion. Has the owner gone broke, has he gone deaf, are we watching divorce proceeds being distributed to the musical one?

It was none of these, it was simply that the piano was clapped-out. It had in truth never been very clapped-in; we had bought it for fifty quid in 1972 for the children to learn, but they learnt very little, except that you don't get much of a piano for fifty quid. It then stayed in the upstairs hall so that I could use it to tune my banjo, though as the piano was out of tune, the banjo was warped, and my ear is tin, I was never able to play anything that anybody could recognise, except parts of the slow movement of
Polly Wolly Doodle
. Musicologists among you may be surprised to learn that
Polly Wolly Doodle
has a slow movement, but that is only because you have not seen my fingering technique. I have to stop after each chord to have a cigarette and work out where to put my fingers for the next one. So, a few days back, I asked a man round to tune the piano, and he said it wasn't worth tuning, let it go.

I came indoors again after they had driven away with my quarter of a century, feeling a bit glum because it seemed as though the piano had been delivered only about five minutes earlier, and I went up to look at the spot where the piano had stood, and there was this amazingly thick oblong of untrodden carpet with a lot of stuff on it which had, over the years, fallen off and behind the piano, snapshots, bits of Lego, marbles, Christmas cards, wizened toffees, an Action Man's head, three light-bulbs, an arrow, what might once have been the newt that climbed out of Victoria's aquarium in, I think, 1980 – and a book.

The book was the fitness manual of the Royal Canadian Air Force. I had never seen it before. I do not know anyone in the RCAF, I hardly even know anyone who is fit, and I could come to no other conclusion than that Giles, at about 10, had decided either to escape piano lessons by running away to Toronto and becoming a fighter pilot, or to get himself fit enough to knock his piano teacher about. And then I opened the book. It was a revelation. It was the fitness book I had been looking for all my life. It said you did not have to go to gyms, jog for miles, buy exercise bikes or rowing machines or weights, you could get fit by answering the telephone or putting your hat on.

Thanks to isometrics. Isometrics was a muscle-stress technique whereby every physical action you took was done with total effort: you lifted a phone as if it weighed a ton, you put your hat on as if Arnold Schwarzenegger were trying to lift it off, with the result that you not only drove blood oxygenated to Bollinger effervescence throughout your body, you also transformed that body into a rippling powerhouse able to see off Canada's enemies without even getting into your plane.

Drawbacks? Social only. I was on the phone when my wife got home, and she was haggard with concern by the time I rang off (what's happened, your knuckles were white, your veins were standing out, you're covered in sweat) and when friends came for bridge on Sunday and I went out between rubbers to get drinks, I could hear their fraught mutters (is he all right, he closed that door as if 2 Para were trying to push it open, he's gripping his cards like a madman, his face went purple during that last contract), but you ignore such things if you're turning yourself into a titan. Any day now, I shall buy another piano, just so the neighbours can watch me carry it indoors.

59
The Queen, My Lord, is Quite Herself,
I Fear

T
he only time I lunched with the Queen, the first words she said to me were, ‘Have you any idea what a trial it is to own a golf course?'

I do not remember what I mumbled, but I do remember reflecting that when it came to pre-emptive strikes, my sovereign left Admiral Yamamoto at the post. I had turned up at her palace with my conversational fleet dressed overall, there was not a potential topic I had not buffed to shimmering nick, there was not a drollery unprimed, but she had dived on me out of the sun, and her first wave had devastated me; my battleships were going down by the stern, my carriers were ablaze, and where my submarines had once lurked there were now but pitiable patches of flotsam-dotted oil.

She then launched, while the prawn hung trembling on my fork, into a hilarious account of the shenanigans at her Windsor links, where a demarcation dispute between groundsmen and gardeners had left the fairways unmown. When she had finished, she asked my advice as to her best course of action. I put the prawn down and mumbled something else, drawn this time from my vast experience of owning golf courses, whereupon she said. ‘Was there an exact date when workmen stopped wearing boots? You never see boots on workmen any more.'