Whatever it is, I Don't Like it Read online

  Libraries

  Several years ago, when the the British Library was housed in the British Museum – which meant that you could always while away the odd hour looking at ancient Greek or Indian erotica if you didn’t feel like work – I had cause to ask to be delivered to my desk The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. Today it’s freely available in print, for all I know at a reduced price in Tesco’s; but twenty years ago you had to sign for it, your signature being an assurance that you required the book for purposes of serious scholarship only, that you would not deface or remove it from the library, that you would not divulge to anyone what it contained, and that you would think clean thoughts.

  I’ve invented some of those stipulations, but not all. Before the British Library would entrust a volume of such gross indecency to your safe keeping, it did indeed insist you complete a form promising not to reveal a word of what you’d read. Since I was researching de Sade for a novel about someone who was researching de Sade I didn’t see how I could honour this undertaking, and for months after my novel was published I would start whenever the doorbell rang, fearing that the British Library Police had come for me. What they did to people who reneged on their assurances and put the contents of restricted literature into the public domain I had no idea, but given that this was not any old restricted literature, but The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, I didn’t see how the punishment could fail to measure up to the chastisements adumbrated in that work. Embuggery, amputation, dismembering, slitting, slicing, cleaving, the rack, the cross, the guillotine, flogging with a bull’s pizzle while being forced to kiss a nun’s . . . But there I go, blabbing again.

  What has brought these hours of innocent study in the British Museum back to me after all this time is the suspension last week, pending investigation, of Ceri Randall, librarian at Pyle Library, near Bridgend in South Wales. Under investigation is whether Ceri Randall was within her rights to evict a person demonstratively doing porn on one of the library computers. What constitutes fit material for a public library – that is the question.

  Just about nothing that’s in it these days, is my first response. Call me a pedant, but I think of a library as a place that houses books. Books which educated opinion deems us to be the better, intellectually and spiritually, for having read. If you wonder who should be given the responsibility of deciding which those books are, wonder no more. I will do it. So call me paternalistic as well.

  It amazes me that we have to insist on this. The idea of a free library presupposes the value, to the individual and to society, of reading, and the value of reading presupposes the value of books. If we fill a library with potboilers and that genre of contemporary literature described as crossover because it crosses us over from maturity to infancy, we abandon the grand educative function which libraries were philanthropically invented to serve. First the serious books give way to footling books, then the books give way altogether to something else. Records, tapes, CDs, DVDs, and now computers.

  Don’t mistake me for a puritan. I like the lunacy of libraries. I like the tramps pretending to be immersed in newspapers, and the people who have been swindled of their inheritances trying to put together lawsuits from the only law book on the shelves, and the would-be aristocrats searching family trees, and the general-knowledge freaks memorising every entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the mutterers and the snorers and the wild laughers and the rheumy old men who are here every day, from nine in the morning to six at night, shouting ‘Shush!’ at anyone who coughs. Libraries attract nutters – it’s the flipside of their grand educative function – and it’s proper that whoever haunts books should be kept in mind of the fragility of reason. Books sometimes make you wise, and sometimes send you mad. But the detritus of popular entertainment, which leads neither to wisdom nor to madness, only to terminal triviality, and from which any good library should be a refuge, is something else again. Don’t give libraries a penny, I say, until they present themselves once more as palaces of bookish learning, for the behoof of the studious and the deranged alike.

  So Ceri Randall is a bit of a hero to me, by simple virtue of the fact that she has been prepared to make a value judgement in a library. What you are doing here is low and inappropriate. It was not for swapping indecencies in an Internet chat room that libraries were built. Get out!

  All I hope now is that she keeps her job and starts evicting any adult she catches reading Harry Potter.

  But then I remember my library experiences with the Marquis de Sade, and the look of utter distaste which crossed the librarian’s face when I asked whether the ban on telling anyone what I was reading extended to my wife. My wife? I would speak of embuggery to my wife? For a moment she made me feel I had befouled a sanctum – no, two sanctums, the sanctum of marriage and the sanctum of scholarship.

  There is a difference, of course, between de Sade and a chat room. One is literature – oh yes it is, forcing us to re-examine ‘the true relation betweeen man and man’, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir – and the other is the mere vacant rubbing at an itch. I would like Ceri Randall, as she prepares her defence, to be very clear about this. Filth isn’t the issue. Filth can be art and art belongs in libraries. The issue is the trivialising of the human soul.

  And libraries aren’t for that.

  The Part of Me that Is Forever Cosa Nostra

  There’s a shop I seem to keep passing at the moment. No matter where I’m going or what manner of transport I am using, there it always is, somewhere between X and Y, a constant irritation to my senses, not because I don’t like the shop and what it sells, but because I do. I am not going to describe its location exactly, partly for the reason that I am not certain myself, and partly for the reason that I don’t want other people to know of its existence. Once everybody knows, it will have lost its allure. Enough that it’s in London, in the vicinity of New Bond Street.

  Generically, it’s a shop you will recognise at once. A gentlemen’s outfitters, as such were once called – though, of course, no man now thinks of himself as a gentleman nor goes along with the concept of being fitted out – expensively Mediterranean, of the sort always named after a famous Italian composer, Puccini, Verdi, Mascagni, Monteverdi, Donizetti, Morricone, though you suspect the owner, like the majority of his clients, is actually from the Levant.

  The clothes, meanwhile, whoever buys and sells them, are definitely Italian. Southern Italian is how I think of them. From Naples or Bari or Taranto. Or maybe even more southern still – Sicily, say. Mafia clothes, that’s what I’m saying. Clothes to meet other members of the Mob in. Which is presumably why I am drawn to the place, why I keep seeing it from the top of a bus, or from the window of a speeding taxi, or out of the corner of my eye when I am running to get to the chemist before it closes. There is a part of me that is forever Cosa Nostra. Nothing to do with violence or extortion. I wouldn’t hurt or take money from a fly. It’s an aesthetic thing, that’s all. It’s about dressing. I hanker to dress like a Sicilian-born Mobster.

  I sat next to someone from the Mafia once, in a swing club in New York. He was tall for an Italian, with a long pale face and beautifully tapered fingers. He wore a treble-breasted grey silk suit, shot through with filaments of platinum, and the softest of soft white shirts, with long pointed collars and cuffs lined with swansdown. I admired the way he sat at the head of the table dispensing favours, buying the most expensive Armagnacs, choosing cigars for everyone, including the women, and permitting, with a slow inclination of the head, those who wanted to get up and dance to do so. He was, of course, above dancing himself. Personal dancing is not what you do if you’re Mafia.

  The other thing I liked about him was the way he kept smiling at me. It’s possible that he was coveting my clothes as much as I was coveting his. A blue linty blazer worn over a button-down Viyella Tory shirt, yellowish corduroys and Chelsea boots. There weren’t, after all, many other people accoutred as I was that night. But what I think he really s
aw in me was Mob material. Someone who might, in other circumstances, have been useful to him, maybe his bag carrier, maybe his sidekick, who knows – maybe even his Godfather. When my father drove taxis in Manchester they called him the Godfather. So it’s in my genes.

  A couple of days ago, anyway, I finally found myself, with half an hour to spare, outside the very window I’d been speeding past for weeks. Pavarotti, I think the place was called. Or Lanza. I can’t remember. What I do remember, though, and with great vividness, was a powder-blue ensemble – powder-blue blouson with navy leather elbow patches, powder-blue trousers with navy leather piping round the pockets, and powder-blue canvas yacht shoes, laced with dyed rope of the deepest indigo. All very well, but what shirt do you wear with that?

  Then I saw it, high in the collar as is the vogue all over Italy at the moment, two buttons at the throat, the collars edged tastefully in steel, the cuffs sawn away at a diagonal, so that you can show off your diamond watch at the same time as your diamond links, and the colour – this being the best part – a peacock blue which seemed to change its hue according to the angle from which you viewed it, now azure, now violet, now as crimson as spilt blood. So there would be economy in buying such a shirt, as it goes with everything in your wardrobe.

  Did I mention that the shop was also one of those where you have to ring the bell and say ‘Luigi sent me’ before they let you in? They looked me over a couple of times, through the grille, then must have seen what the mafioso saw in New York, and unlocked. I wasn’t in there long. Just long enough to ascertain that the incarnadined pigmy buffalo belt for the trousers alone was £850. ‘Nice,’ I said, not showing alarm. ‘But I was looking for something a little more ostentatious.’

  I don’t like being unable to afford things. Foolish, I know, but I feel that not being able to afford things is a sign of personal failure. Had I organised my life better, become the surgeon my grandma wanted me to be, or better still a footballer, I could have bought ten powder-blue blousons edged in navy leather with my earnings from a single missed penalty.

  No doubt that’s who Pavarotti’s fits out – footballers with the aesthetic of the Mob. But who am I to disapprove? I studied English literature with F. R. Leavis and can barely quiet the Mafia in my soul. What right do I have to expect better of men with CSEs in the three Rs of rapping, raping and roasting? Give any of us too much money and regard and we’ll act like fools.

  My single consolation as I leave Respighi’s empty-handed: thank God I belong to a profession that keeps me too poor at least to look a prat.

  Juicing

  Just occasionally a column should be a two-way thing. The small distraction I provide from rage and sorrow every week I provide without expectation of reciprocity. A job’s a job. But today I’m the one in need. Help me, somebody. How do you juice? But don’t rush to answer until you have fully grasped the question.

  I have the necessary equipment. I have more gadgets for juicing than anyone I know who doesn’t own a juice factory. Mixers, masticators, macerators, extractors, blenders, squeezers, juicerators, pressers, citrus reamers – you name them, I have them. Loose me into a kitchen shop and I buy a machine for juicing. Perhaps it’s the word. Juice. I think I must hear the secret of life itself in it.

  Every year at about this time I begin to emerge from a personal winter of extreme catarrhal discontent, and experience a deep longing for juice. It could be atavistic. Long ago in the primeval swamp my ancestors either survived on citrus fruits or were citrus fruits. It can be no accident, anyway, that I live in an area where the only shops that don’t sell sex sell health foods. Hot ginger zingers to the left of me, siriguela spicer to the right, and those are not the names of lingerie or aphrodisiacs. Sensing sunshine and the promise of a new beginning last week, I made it to the nearest of these health delis and by pointing – for I am voiceless after a long winter – got them to juice me up some orange, apple, ginger and lime.

  Normally you must stipulate precisely what you want – ‘So is that a wild acai berry sparkadula or an all-night boogie-woogie banana nirvana and watermelon nog?’ – or they won’t serve you. But in this instance they wanted me out of the shop fast; I am not, after all, a good advertisement for their produce. I drank it in a single swallow and ordered two more, the bill coming to a watermelon pip short of twenty smackers. At that rate, I calculated, I’d be out of my life savings – however worthless – by nightfall. So I did what I always do on exactly the same date every year and that was buy everything I needed to make my own juice and in the process surprise my wife by my initiative.

  I don’t know how other people retrieve their blenders from the cupboards in which they’ve been stored all winter, but I do it sideways on and blind, relying on feel rather than visual recognition. I found what I was after eventually but cut my finger on the rotary blade which I am always at pains to remove from the machine itself when I put it away, mindful that the majority of fatalities take place in the kitchen. Now I am not one to complain of injury – broken nail, grazed knuckle, paper cut: I bear them all with equanimity – but the juice of lime stings a cut finger beyond endurance. The juice of orange ditto. And I am messy with an orange, never having mastered that rococo single-movement peel of which our grandmothers were capable. My way is to squeeze the orange with one hand and then to make lunges at it with the other, not unlike Jack Nicholson hacking at the bathroom door in The Shining. Why I don’t simply call that juicing, suck my fingers and have done I cannot explain. I must like the mechanical process more.

  By this time, anyway, it was necessary for me to wash the citrus out of my stinging cut and apply plasters to it – one to go round the finger left to right, the second to go over the top and secure the first, and the third to go round the finger right to left to secure the second. How the first plaster got into the blender I am again unable to explain. But in seeking to extract it I accidentally pushed a button named PULSE – a button which until now I’d never seen the purpose of unless you are meant to feel it to check whether you are still alive. In the confusion caused by this sudden throbbing, I failed to secure the lid on the blender, as a consequence of which enough juice for a small kindergarten erupted volcanically, some of it landing on the kitchen ceiling, some of it landing on my wife’s cookery books, but most of it landing on me.

  Except that you couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination call this juice. Juice runs. Juice flows. This moved, since we are talking horror films, like the Blob. These are mere interim questions, but why was this more like soup or purée than juice? Why, though it had two whole witch-twists of ginger in it, didn’t it taste remotely of ginger? And whatever it tasted of and looked like, would you, reader, consider it permissible – hygienically, and from a culinary point of view – to soak up the spillage with a sponge, squeeze it back into the blender and serve it to your wife pretending nothing had happened?

  All hope of getting anything that could be called a drink out of this having fled, I set about cleaning up. Not only were the jackets of the cookery books covered with a tacky pith, the pages were already glued together. I didn’t dare put them in the sink. I couldn’t dry them on myself because I was tackier than they were. In the end the only thing I could think of doing was to lick them clean. Which raises another question: do you tell your wife you’ve licked her cookery books? And if she asks why, do you explain?

  Unable to lay hands on a tea towel (they spoil the look of a kitchen, my wife believes), I took off my shirt – a silky two-tone Brioni slim-fit with blue piping on the inside of the collar; not a shirt to juice in, I accept, but I like to work in the kitchen in unsuitable clothes in the same way some men like to bungee-jump in three-piece suits – and mopped the mess up with that. It wasn’t inevitable that I should slip on the shirt, but I did. In the act of keeping my balance I pulled over the blender, cracking a tile and damaging three more fingers. The blender itself, of course, is finished – finished in the mechanical and the reputation sense. But that’s not the worst o
f it. After four washes I am still unable to get the bitter-smelling confetti of sticky orange and lime pulp off my Brioni shirt.

  So here’s my question. How do you juice?

  Books are Bad for You

  Callooh! Callay! It’s World Book Day. Or at least it was on Thursday. You must have noticed – pages falling out of the sky, libraries festooned with publishers’ catalogues, writers on every corner, words flowering on wintry trees.

  As a writer of books myself, I am almost hysterically in favour of anything that ministers to their consumption. ‘Read, read, you little bastards!’ was one of my suggestions for a World Book Day slogan, the exhortation to be delivered by a masked flagellator sent to every school in the land. A proposal the organisers rejected, presumably on the grounds that ‘little bastards’ contains too many syllables for the little bastards to read.

  My other suggestion, also rejected, was for a poster campaign likening a book to a packet of cigarettes, with the words ‘Reading is Bad for Your Health!’ or ‘Literacy Kills!’ splashed in blood-red letters across the jacket. This would have had the advantage of enticing into reading those children who need to feel they’re doing something dangerous with their time. It would also have had the advantage of being true.

  Books are bad for us. Books are murder.

  If you don’t believe me, read what books say. Of whom was it written, that ‘Coming later to Sir Walter Scott, she conceived a passion for the historical, and dreamed about oak chests, guardrooms, minstrels . . . She studied descriptions of furniture in Eugène Sue, and sought in Balzac and George Sand a vicarious gratification of her own desires’? Scott and Sand and Balzac, note – literature! So by modern standards, at least, we’re talking about a rather classy reader here, a woman with more grown-up books under her belt by the age of sixteen than most kids leaving school today will have read before they’re sixty.