Since those heady days I was reminded of it every once in a while by watching Woody Allen’s magnificent pastiche,
Love and Death
, or at university hearing it name-dropped by people who wanted to show they were serious students of the classics. On such occasions I’d think to myself, one day I really must get around to reading that and while novels that I had previously put into that category, like
Slaughter House Five
and
On The Road
, got read, when it came to
War and Peace
I always seemed to find something more pressing to do. This time was going to be different. This time I was going to give Tolstoy my very best shot.
Excerpt from Mike’s To Do List Diary (Part 7); Tolstoy Do List Diary
Monday 16 July
Today is the first full day of our holiday. Yesterday, in the late afternoon Maltese sunshine I opened my copy of
War and Peace
. Handily, the Oxford World Classics edition begins with a breakdown of the contents of each chapter. It is over fifteen pages long and is in really small writing. I get as far as reading about Book Three, Part Two before admitting I have no idea who anyone is or what any of them are doing and have to go back to the beginning. I reach the same point some time later and remain just as clueless. I decide to give up and concentrate on the book itself.
Tuesday 17 July
The novel kicks off with someone called Anna Pavlona Scherer throwing a party although, having read the opening few pages several times now I’m still not sure why. I don’t think it’s her birthday but I could be wrong.
Later, in need of a break, I take Maisie for a stroll around the roof whilst conducting a quick survey of poolside reading material. The results are as follows:
Books by Dan Brown: 11
Books by J.K.Rowling: 20
Books by Leo Tolstoy: 1
Books by maverick economists: 2
While obviously disappointed by the lack of Gayle on the roof top I can’t help but feel pleased that I am the one person ‘doing’ Tolstoy and award myself several house points.
Wednesday 18 July
I have now reached page 146, which pleases me no end. The downside is that I still can’t work out what’s going on. People are walking in and out of rooms. There’s someone called Anna Mikhaylovna who seems to have a problem with someone called Catiche. I’m pretty sure there’s a Prince Andrew and someone called Mary but I wouldn’t stake my life on it. Claire thinks that I should read around the events of the book to put it into some kind of context. I can’t help but wonder if Tolstoy was a great writer who, like artists who aren’t very good at drawing noses, was just rubbish at writing endings because even though I’m only on page 146 I know this book needs to be a lot shorter.
Thursday 19 July
It’s just after midday and my family and I have switched locations to the beach near the hotel. Claire is on child-watch duty and I am supposed to be continuing with
War and Peace
. Instead I am assembling a mental list of all the famous classics that I have read and
understood
without recourse to other books to explain them, because
War and Peace
is making me feel like a bit of a thicko. ‘I’ve read
Finnegan’s Wake
,’ I tell Claire, ‘
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
and the Bible but compared to this, even the third book of
The Lord of the Rings
is starting to look like a walk in the park.’
Friday 20 July
We’re back at the pool for a change of pace and although I feel guilty about it I have left
War and Peace
back in our hotel room and have brought instead my old friend, Time Coach Mark Forster’s book
Get Everything Done and Still Have Time To Play
along with me, as it too is on my To-Do List (Item 1000). I read the back cover and the introduction and then Lydia asks me to go for a swim. When I return I end up reading Claire’s
Heat
magazine from cover to cover and falling asleep.
Saturday 21 July
My family and I are dining at the hotel’s swanky outdoor restaurant. Maisie is asleep in her pram, Lydia is throwing bread into the sea and Claire and I are in deep discussion about
War and Peace
.
‘I think deep down you don’t want to read it.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Because you haven’t read it.’
‘But I do want to read it.’
‘Why?’
I think for a moment. ‘Because it’s the kind of book that you’re supposed to have read.’
‘Says who?’
I shrug. ‘People.’
I don’t know how but I can tell that even from behind her sunglasses Claire is rolling her eyes.
‘I think that it’s probably an okay book if you’re into Russian literature but most people read
War and Peace
because it’s a big fat book that gets name dropped a lot as a shorthand signifier of supposed intellectual greatness. In my position as a former English student at one of the UK’s premier redbrick educational institutions, I can tell you first hand that it’s not all that.’
I can hardly believe my ears. ‘So you’ve read it then?’
‘Years ago at university.’
‘So what happens in the end?’
Claire shrugs as Lydia crawls in to her lap. ‘I have no idea.’
Sunday 22 July
It’s the last day of the holiday. Not only am I back at the beach but I’m back reading
War and Peace
. Despite agreeing with most of Claire’s speech yesterday I think that I probably should carry on reading not because it will make me any wiser (the words fall out of my head the second after they enter), and not because I need the tick (though I do) but for the same reason that George Leigh Mallory wanted to climb Mount Everest: ‘Because it’s there.’
Refreshed from the holiday, I felt ready to throw myself into To-Do Listing again and I attacked the List with everything I’d got. I started getting up half an hour earlier every day and the ticks started coming, if not thick and fast, then at least reasonably regularly and far from slow. The eclectic nature of some of the things I was tackling were startling and heartening at the same time. One day I would be knee deep in ancient bank statements attempting to address Item 356: ‘Shred all old bank, credit card statements and letters from financial institutions so that you don’t end up having your identity stolen’, and the next I would be staring at my younger daughter in wonderment at her new-found smiling skills in a bid to fulfil Item 426: ‘Spend a whole day with your new kid trying to make her laugh.’ Later I’d lurch from a day on Item 843: ‘Find out what the big fuss is about Bob Dylan’, to an afternoon in Cannon Hill Park attempting to undertake Item 1005: ‘Learn to catch a fish so that I will have all the skills I need to live off the land (or water)’. It was like that maxim of Karl Marx that a man should be able to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner without permanently becoming hunter, fisherman, cowherd or critic. This was me. I was getting a million and one different things done every day. It felt great.
But at the same time the List was taking its toll not necessarily on me but on Claire. Any time that I wasn’t working was shared between To-Do Listing or playing with the kids or getting extra sleep. I was in danger of neglecting my wife and undoing all my good work earlier in the year. I needed to do something special for her. Something to demonstrate that I really did think she was the best woman in the world. Three days later I hit the jackpot.
Ever since she turned thirteen Claire has been a fan of the artist Prince. When we first got together she would regale me with tales of how she would buy Prince’s new albums on the day they came out and spend hours locked in her bedroom studiously attempting to learn the lyrics whilst dreaming of the day she would get to see him in the flesh. Unfortunately she was thwarted in the one opportunity that did present itself by her mother who thought that Prince’s stage show contained sufficient ‘adult’ material to render it inappropriate for a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl from Leicester. Unable or unwilling to run away and see him against her mother’s wishes, Claire had missed out on her chance to see Prince. Until now.
Surfing the web I came across an announcement that Prince was going to be playing what I thought was a one-off concert at the 02 Arena in London. ‘Great,’ I thought. ‘I’ll keep Claire in the dark, get tickets, book a hotel, book my mum in to babysit and one evening I’ll spring the whole lot on her and in one fell swoop grab the coveted “Best husband in the world award”.’ It was a no brainer.
The tickets were being released for sale at 10.00 a.m. on the following Tuesday. At 9.55 a.m. I sat glued to my computer refreshing the Ticketmaster website every five seconds with my credit-card details at the ready so that I could be first in the queue. At 10.00 a.m. on the dot nothing happened. At 10.05 a.m. still nothing. And when still nothing was happening at 10.10 a.m. I started to panic, imagining that thousands of Prince fans were getting in ahead of me.
I went to The Prince website and was puzzled to discover a notice advertising advance tickets for a secret Prince gig at Koko in Camden starting at 11.00 p.m. and going on to the early hours. I assumed that the tickets were for an after-show party following on from his 02 Arena concert and so I clicked on the link which took me to the Ticketmaster website. Grateful that it now appeared to be working I bought the after-show tickets and tickets for the best seats I could find for the actual gig.
Thoroughly pleased with myself at having pulled off a Prince double whammy, I booked a hotel and my mother and headed down to the living room where Claire was playing with Maisie.
‘Just so that you know,’ I began casually, ‘it’s official: I am indeed the best husband in the world.’
Claire laughed. ‘As if there was any doubt.’
‘No, I mean it. I’m the best. Who’s the one recording artist in the world that you’d most like to see play live?’
She didn’t miss a beat. ‘Prince!’
‘And guess who’s going to see him in August?’
Claire’s jaw dropped. ‘Are you saying that you’ve got tickets to see Prince? I didn’t even know he was playing! That’s brilliant. I love you so much right now!’
‘And there’s more.’
‘More than Prince tickets? We’re not going to meet him are we?’
‘No, but what would be the next best thing?’
She shrugged.
‘Well, how does an exclusive secret Prince aftershow party sound? Because we’ve got tickets to that too.’
It was minutes before I could stop her jumping up and down and running around screaming, ‘I’m going to a Prince aftershow party!’ And then she only stopped to ask me what she should wear and how long Prince might play for and whether we might meet him? It was as though the fifteen-year-old Claire had had her all-time top dream come true. It was great. I really was the best husband in the world.
When Claire had calmed down I returned to the loft to check my emails and discovered I’d got two messages. The first was from Ticketmaster telling me that they would email me my ticket for tonight’s secret concert later that afternoon. I was confused. The concerts weren’t until August so why were they going on about tonight? I opened the second email. It was from my friend Matt, a huge Prince fan whom I’d emailed earlier to let him know about the tickets.
Hi Mike, great news that you’ve got the tickets. I’ve been lurking on some Prince fan sites and word is that he’s going to do something really special. See you tonight!
I double-checked Matt’s email, no, I hadn’t misread his message. It definitely did say: ‘See you tonight.’ I had an awful sinking feeling in my stomach. The sinking feeling was right. The secret Prince party was for that night in London.
The list of reasons why we couldn’t go was long and tedious. Lydia had a pre-school play that we’d promised to go to, Maisie was teething and wasn’t sleeping very well, I had a newspaper article that needed to be in first thing, Claire was supposed to be seeing a friend who she had already cancelled on three times, Claire didn’t want to go without me, I didn’t want to go without Claire and on and on. How something so great turned into something so awful so quickly I’ll never understand.
In the end I gave the tickets to my brother Phil and over breakfast the following morning Claire and I read about it in the Bizarre column in
The Sun
. Touts were asking hundreds of pounds for tickets. The venue was really small. Prince played loads of his hit songs. There were tonnes of celebrities in the audience. Prince didn’t leave the stage until three in the morning.
In contrast Claire and I had watched a repeat of
CSI: Miami
and gone to bed only to be woken up by Maisie (at 11.05 p.m., 1.05 a.m. and 3.23 a.m.) and Lydia (complaining of foxes in the garden at 4.12 a.m. and 4.32 a.m.).