Cake or Death (11 page)

Other people have crushes on people. Me, I have crushes on countries. It’s quite convenient in the sense that you can visit them and then you can leave without hurting their feelings. This is notoriously difficult to do with people you are sleeping with, as someone always blows hot as the other blows cold, emotions grow like blossoms and then like roots, and suddenly a visit isn’t just a visit, it’s a map of the future.

I haven’t been back to Britain since the late nineties. A Brit on a talk-thread called “I’m watching
Friends
on ecstasy while checking my soaring dot-com share values … yeah it’s sooo 1990s” writes that he remembers watching “Ken and Barbara Follett attempt to open a giant bottle of champagne at Labour HQ on the night of the 1997 election, but fail. A little voice inside me wondered whether this was an omen.”

It was. I’m not going back until Tony Blair’s gone, and I may not go back until I forgive Britons for not having turfed him out once they discovered that he was a liar, a sociopath, a snaggle-toothed, meretricious, Uriah Heepish wide-boy, a disgrace to the European Community and an embarrassment to the nation that bred him.

But you can love a country while hating it. And I have to admit I still love Britain by deed, if not by my physical presence.

I was raised to love the place. Look at the ur-British books I read as a child: all the Swallows and Amazons sailing books by Arthur Ransome, Enid Blyton,
The Little Princess
by Frances Hodgson Burnett, historical children’s fiction by Henry Treece, Rosemary Sutcliffe and Cynthia Harnett, books about otters, whales and foxes, about picnics and cups of cocoa and hard-boiled eggs under a sunny sky with jolly people.

The essence of British children’s books is that Brits take their pleasures small. I cannot say how modern British children cope with the idea of a jam sandwich being the highlight of a day at the beach, particularly when they encounter an actual British beach that doesn’t have sand but pebbles. And you need windbreaks, little fabric fences you put up in front of your family plot of pebbles
to shelter you from the biting wind. And then there’s the outflow of untreated sewage that made the EU declare most of Britain’s beaches out of bounds. Britain retaliated by declassifying the beaches as actual beaches. They came out with another name, something like “wet edges” presumably, and got around the regulations that way.

It’s all very well for a child like me to have enjoyed reading about small pleasures, as I had no pleasures whatsoever when I was growing up. But your modern North American child, his home choked with brightly coloured plastic items and expensive electronic gear that ups the ante each Christmas? I don’t see the appeal for him in reading about the joys of jam sandwiches.

But I was hooked. As a teenager, I read mostly American crap as that was what was available, but my university years studying English Lit clinched the deal. I was in love with English writing, which is playful, elaborate, varied, elegant, all those good things. (American writing, which crested in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, had turned pretentious and dull.) I imagined words as an ocean. You could just plunge into it and do what you will.

British newspapers were still good then. Now, when even broadsheets resemble tabloids in their effort to reach the lower orders—I do mean this and it has nothing to do with wealth or education, only intelligence—the British papers far outdo the rest of the world in brave reporting and wonderful presentation. For that’s the thing. Brits are interesting.

And I was mainlining Virginia Woolf. I came in at the beginning of the Bloomsbury craze when I studied her at
university and realized that the book I had greatly enjoyed
, The Waves
, was not the book Woolf had actually written. The woman needed some explaining. And I was off.

Once you are enamoured of writers you explore their milieu, which I began to do on my honeymoon. My husband was British-born, although he had left the place with some disgust decades before. It’s a peasant country, he warned me. And it is. But I didn’t see that then. It wasn’t so apparent as it is now.

I repeatedly travelled to London, always with an elation I have rarely equalled since then. To me, London is a network of blue plaques where writers lived and it is a festival of good shopping. Thanks to the immigration that whitish Brits decry, it is possible to eat wonderful food there. I stayed in good hotels, not great ones. There are no great hotels in the British Isles. It isn’t the nature of the place.

I visited Virginia’s house, Monks House in Rodmell, Sussex, her homes in Bloomsbury, and all the good places, like Kew and the National Portrait Gallery, the Tates and all the places fashionable Brits decry, mainly because they talk and write so much and there aren’t enough opinions to go around.

But the best of London isn’t Britain. It isn’t even London. Britain is a shit-hole. Venture outside London and you will find a poisonous self-destructive place filled with pig-ignorant people that elect governments that do maximum damage. Thatcher began privatization but Blair continued it. Imagine privatizing water. Britain did this. With global warming, there is an annual hosepipe ban
now in a country that regularly suffers from massive flooding. Water bills are fantastically high, but the water itself leaks away through crumbling pipes that haven’t been upgraded for centuries. It is not in the interest of a private company to spend its profits on replacing ancient pipes. Why should they? They find water shortages helpful. It’s not as though we’re trying to find a replacement for water the way we are for fossil fuels. Water’s rarity is a precious thing to a corporation without any concept of the public good.

What kind of country spends £1 billion planning the privatization of the postal service, renames the Royal Mail “Consignia” and then gives up, realizing that the mail will go the way of water and railways? It will be a mess.

I did try to look on the bright side of a country that increasingly frightened me. No one does squalor better than the Brits. You can go into a Little Chef off one of Britain’s endless pointless motorways, look at a menu so lurid it looks like you’re being handed stills from an operation on your filtration organs—spleen, liver, et cetera—and then you can eat something that is clearly not food. It is matter, greasy matter.

And then you can drive to St. Ives, where the young Virginia took family holidays for about fourteen years until the death of her mother. She lived at Talland House, a beautiful home now surrounded by cheap, crappy, badly designed modern buildings and torn apart to make flats for people who’ve never heard of Woolf. Any other country would turn Talland House into a shrine. All I remember is a morbidly obese man wearing a stained
wife-beater with skin burned the colour of a hothouse tomato standing in a giant parking lot outside the house. He had just bought the place. Everyone in St. Ives looked like him. For this is your British tourist. People complain about fat, loud Americans but the Brit peasant has them beat on sight alone.

I was in a bad mood, having cut myself badly on the harsh toilet paper at the St. Ives public toilets—I know this sounds impossible but believe me, it is not—and I was limping and hoping no actual blood was flowing. We went down to the seashore where the sand was the colour of cream and the sea was the freshest, most beautiful warmed turquoise I had ever seen. Godrevy Lighthouse stood in the distance as it had in Virginia’s time. Stand on the shore and look out. England is very fine indeed. But behind me was a municipal festival of dog droppings and shops selling horrible candy and frying mystery meat at grotesque prices.

I have never been so disappointed, so angry. Cornwall had a beautiful town with a distinguished history built on a hillside facing out to a seascape that would make Turner faint and they turned it into a dirty, raucous, crowded place with broken pavements and shambling hovels that smelled of deep-fat fryers and hairy armpits.

There were poor people in Virginia’s time. Her mother, already nearing an early death, used to exhaust herself caring for the poor of St. Ives. But photographs don’t show this kind of public self-destruction. I think there were small pleasures then, even for the poor. There are no pleasures, large or small, in St. Ives now, beyond the ones Nature gave to the seashore.

St. Ives is emblematic. For Britain was always a peasant country with a gap between rich and poor that rivalled what the Americans are creating today. The Second World War finished Britain off. The architects of the sixties did murder most foul with their great heaps of concrete, a material that stains in the rain in that rainy country, and then the postmodernists came along. Instead of repairing the remains of the beautiful architecture that once graced the place, they build glass gherkins. It’s not a country suited to glass or to fibreglass Georgian columns—the Turkey Twizzlers of architecture, says Alain de Botton. It’s suited to the vernacular stone, to brickwork, to symmetry.

There are wonderful dreamers like Thomas Heather-wick building a plaza like a just-unrolled carpet of blue glass in the middle of Newcastle. It is made out of old bottles; Newcastle is an alcoholic’s paradise. But there are so few of these designers.

The great thing about Britain has always been its eccentrics, which is not the right word. They are people who fizz with personality, who are interesting in themselves and don’t give a toss what other people think of them. Eddie Izzard, one of the greatest stand-up comics, started out by busking with comedy routines in Covent Garden. He was told he was crap, he said. Most people would slink away. His crapness was what sustained him, he said. And he wanted to be a heterosexual transvestite, so he did that.

Britain even has great politicians. I don’t mean the Manny Shinwells, Tony Benns, Barbara Castles and the Gerald Kaufmans who honour our species, I mean
the MPs with actual personalities, like the fuckable mess Boris Johnson and the constantly fucked Alan Clark, who wrote his great confessional (actually brayingly boastful) diaries, and George Galloway and the magnificent backbenchers who say fuck you to Blair and suffer for it with honour. But they’re so few in number.

Five percent of the population is intelligent (in Britain that means fucking brilliant as in Great Fucking Brilliant Britain) and most of the population is funny. Brits are outrageous; they make me howl. The place is full of Izzards; it’s the only thing that makes the country worthwhile.

The government is composed of lying bastards. It’s hard to pick the lowest point in British politics. But I took it to be the suicide of Dr. David Kelly, a distinguished decent man who told a BBC reporter that the government was lying about the “evidence” that would justify its invasion of Iraq. Kelly was publicly hanged, drawn and quartered by his employers. Within days, he quietly went for an evening walk and slit his wrists under a tree. He lay there through the night, eventually bleeding to death.

The Hutton Report was engineered to exonerate the government of any wrongdoing in the matter. The prime minister’s wife, the peculiar Cherie Blair, and her husband’s brutal hatchetman Alastair Campbell, signed a copy of the report and auctioned it off several years later. They could not have been more cruel had they signed it in David Kelly’s blood.

But the Blair years were full of moral monstrosities like that. One prominent Briton said he had gone off Blair
(remember, Blair was elected as an honest Labour prime minister who would undo the economic brutality of the Thatcher years) when he read from the Bible at Princess Diana’s funeral. The reading was full of unnatural pauses, all wrongly placed and hideously staged. It’s painful to listen to, so phony it is. And this man realized that Blair was acting. It was only the badness of his acting that made it apparent. But everything was done for show, for spin. Truthfulness had vanished. It was laughable, no longer a virtue.

And I began to hate Britain.

It’s ironic that my hatred of Britain coincided with a noticeable slide in the quality of British literature. But I may be wrong. Perhaps it has always been this way. Only a fraction of what was published was any good. It used to be you’d find some nugget in almost anything. But generally publishers were putting profit over quality, just as politicians were putting spin over actual good results.