Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (16 page)

18
Good God, That's Never The Time, Is It?

T
he weather would pick tonight to break. Just when I thought the whole dread moment might pass unnoticed, one day sliding into another without even a perceptible click. And now the sky is full of thunder, lightning, raindrops the size of golfballs, and hot golfballs, at that, dogs are going mad in the explosions, the cat's under the stairs, nightbirds are shrieking themselves hoarse at the thought of all those worms belting up through the topspit to greet the end of the drought . . . the entire galaxy is rotten with augury. If this were Fiji instead of Hampstead, you wouldn't be able to see for flying beads, there'd be blokes jumping up and down on hot coals, and senior civil servants tuning in to their local volcanoes to see what had set the gods off this time, and remittance men from the Home Counties sweating the stitches out of their seersucker suits and praying that the demented house-boy's kris might find an alternative place in which to sink itself.

It can't all be because I shall be thirty-five at midnight. I don't know Anyone with that kind of pull.

I had intended the whole thing, as I say, to pass unnoticed. Thought I'd go to bed at around eleven, aged thirty-four, and wake up in the morning with it all over. Like having your appendix out. Never expected to sit through midnight, June 26, watching everything turn into mice and pumpkins. And here I am, an hour off the end of Act One, and can't sleep for the thunder rattling the rooftiles, threatening the gutters.

I'll be fifty-eight when the mortgage is paid off. Pass like a flash, those twenty-four, all right, twenty-three years, if I'm any judge. Last twenty-three went by like
that
.

Sorry for the paragraph break. I snapped my fingers at
that
, and pain shot all the way up to the elbow; no doubt, arthritis sets in at thirty-five. A few years ago, I could snap my fingers, oh, a dozen times on the trot. Where was I (senility setting in, too, half a million brain cells been conking out annually since twenty-one, that's seven million brain cells, wonder how many I started with, maybe the entire skull is empty, like those joke ashtrays where you put the fags in the eye-sockets, just a couple of doz assorted brain cells left, huddling together like stranded amoeba, watching one another die)? Oh, yes, about the shooting-by of twenty-three years – I was twelve. I can still feel being twelve. Looking forward to the Festival of Britain. I went down to watch the Skylon going up, in short trousers. Me, that is; the Skylon went around in a sort of tin slip. I can exactly recall the feeling of chapped legs, wind coming over Waterloo Bridge. I went up the Shot Tower and spat off it. Tonight, I feel as if the spit hasn't hit the ground yet –
twenty-three years?

Of course, thirty-five may not be significant at all. I might go on to ninety-six, in which case I ought to be writing this article at forty-eight, i.e. in about ten minutes' time. The thing is, one thinks in terms of three score years and ten. It's about all I have left of formal religious belief. That and a lingering guilt about non-payment of fares. One of the few things I don't have instant recall over: what it was like to believe in God. Stopped believing circa 1953, don't know why.

Other things I find it impossible to remember, (1) Virginity (2) What it was like not smoking (3) Being unable to drive (4) Not shaving.

The point is, am I about to become half-dead, or should I consider myself as being half-alive? I am extremely aware of deterioration tonight; I can see it spilling over the belt, feel it when I run my fingers through my hair. It's a short run, these days, barely get off the blocks and you're through the tape. Also, I appear to have more moles on my forearms than heretofore. I may be growing gnarled: finger-joints seem to be taking on angles, quite arbitrarily, which probably explains why my typing has been falling off. It's as accurate as ever, but the fingertips whang down on the neighbouring keys as often as not. Line up on a “g” and an “f” appears on the paper.

Eleven-thirty.

Deterioration is the last thing I worry about, normally. What I feel most is psychic age. It manifests itself most clearly in the sudden awareness that one is actually part of history, and therefore disappearing fast. I look at old newsreels, Stalin and Roosevelt and Churchill chuckling away at Yalta, it could be an eon ago, it might as well be the Treaty of Utrecht they're wrapping up, they could be ceding Mercia to Wessex, it's all dead time; but I was
alive when they did it
, six, going on seven, fully formed, you can see it in the school photographs, same head. I'd already seen Hatfield House, had teeth filled, eaten Radio Malt, fallen in love, caught fish. At bloody Yalta!

We all got a plate from George VI and a framed message congratulating us on our war effort. George the Sixth – it looks like William Rufus, when you write it down. Twenty years since the Coronation, we bought our first telly for it, 12? Murphy with doors, somewhat larger than a wardrobe, used to stand oakenly in the corner like a coffin at an Irish wake, blowing valves faster than you could say Joan Gilbert; twenty years, and I can recall the exact clatter of Muffin's hooves on the piano-lid as if it was . . . in twenty years' time, I'll be fifty-five, Without A Pension I Really Do Not Know What I Shall Do.

It isn't that thirty-five is old in itself; merely that it is, as it were, the hinge, Halfway House, with Death sitting in the snug, biding his time over a brown ale, under the clock. An index of what's left, how long it will take, life's little Rorschach, you just fold it across the middle, and each mirrored blot is thirty-five years long. Or short. I got here so quickly; I was at Oxford yesterday, took O-levels Monday morning, learned to ride a two-wheeler over the weekend, and was it Friday I was dry all night, for the first time? I can't be sure, but I remember my father was in uniform; an old man, nearly thirty.

I wish more had changed, it would endow my degeneration with more significance; jet travel, sliced bread, colour TV, automatic transmission, professional tennis, and golf on the Moon – it isn't much, really. I would like, I don't know, England's coastline to have altered beyond all recognition, dolphins to have taken over the world, something of that order. I'd like to have had an Ice Age or two, been through the Jurassic Period, watched man climb down from the tree, grow less prognathous, discover the wheel – ‘
Hey, Al, you'll
never believe this, ha-ha-ha, I just made something that rolls downhill!
' I don't seem to have been here very long, that's all, and shan't be for much longer.

It could be my fault, of course; maybe I ought to have done more. Not that I haven't done a considerable amount, I've eaten almost everything there is to be eaten, play most card games passing well, visited all forty-nine of the continental United States, written four million words, many of them different. But nothing solid. Mozart, Keats, Jesus Christ, Bix Beiderbecke, they were all dead by this point. ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, here to introduce his new opera,
The
Eve Of St. Agnes
, is Alan Coren, son of God and first cornet.'

Can't be sure it'd be any better, of course. Achievement need not be a hedge against decay. Look at Ozymandias; or, to be more precise, his feet. I grow melancholic (it is five to midnight) at a thought no more complex than that I like it here; it's a good dance, a good movie, a good match, and I glance at my watch and discover that it's half-way gone already: life's little irony number eight, there's no pleasure, however intense, that cannot be flawed by a brief reflection upon its inevitable transience.

Midnight. There we are, then. I'll be all right in a minute. Feel better already, as a matter of fact. Well, it's easier downhill, if nothing else.

19
Going Cheep

T
his week, I need hardly say, nine birds have been added to the schedule drawn up under the Protection of Birds Act 1954, that list of feathered items which persons of curious taste may not legally kill, steal, or, for all I know, train to whistle the
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
.

These birds, as I know you have read, are the short-toed tree-creeper, the little gull, the Mediterranean gull, the gyr falcon, the purple heron, the scarlet rosefinch, the shore-lark, the green sandpiper and Cetti's warbler, and millions of you have written to me in considerable excitement, asking for enough information about them to be able to drop their names with confidence at this weekend's cocktail parties and dole queues.

I have, in consequence and knowing where my professional duties lie, made some investigations, not to say speculations, and am now well able to give you a few salient facts with which to start your conversation off and, I trust, stimulate further ornithological enquiry. To take them in order, then:

SHORT-TOED TREE-CREEPER

This is a small shifty bird, mottled brown in colour, that hangs around tree roots and sneers at anything that passes. It does not work at all, believing song to be a mug's game, and makes a point of getting up for the dawn chorus only to lean against its roots, examine it claws with studied nonchalance, and occasionally spit out of the corner of its beak. It does not, of course, tear about building its own nests, but squats in those of other birds foolhardy enough to have migrated south without putting their premises in the hands of a reputable agent. It does not go out of its way, in spring, to preen, woo, or otherwise seek a perfect partner, but instead attempts to mate, for form's sake only and out of an instinct it personally finds an irritating drag, with anything it happens to bump into while creeping about. Many have been killed, as a result, by affronted mice, large bees, and the occasional sprightly toad. It is interesting mainly for its supporting role in interminable shaggy-dog stories about Long-Toed Tree-Creepers.

LITTLE GULL

The little gull is to be found mainly in supermarkets, where it is a sucker for special offers on unlabelled tinned goods. Unlike the Big Gull, which will believe anything it hears about Concorde, North Sea oil, reflation, détente, and so forth, the little gull is conned only by small operations: it will, for example, listen to encyclopaedia salesmen for hours, and often comes home with little things it has picked out of open suitcases in Oxford Street. It is despised by other birds, who are always off-loading unwanted junk on it and, in spiteful mood, telling it tall stories. The little gull, in consequence, believes that the world is flat, and lays its eggs under gooseberry bushes.

MEDITERRANEAN GULL

The Mediterranean gull is bigger than the little gull (
q.v.
) but no brighter. As its name suggests, it flies to the Mediterranean for the winter, but frequently fails to arrive, since it asks directions from any bird it passes. Mediterranean gulls can, as a result, be found anywhere, at any time of the year; in 1974, three hundred of them spent Christmas in Preston, and a permanent colony now inhabits Tierra del Fuego in the belief that it is Majorca.

Occasionally, however, they do arrive in the Mediterranean, only to discover that they have once more been fooled and that their winter colony is only half-built, miles from the sea, and that they have to sleep twelve to a nest. When they examine the small print in their insurance, they invariably find that they are indemnified only against cycling accidents.

GYR FALCON

According to p. 788 of the
Shorter Oxford Dictionary
(which I borrowed from a little gull who owned forty-seven copies), the gyr falcon, or gerfalcon, is a native of Iceland, and the
gyr
describes (from the Latin
gyrus
) its habit of flying in circles. From this solid information, we can only induce that it has come here to negotiate, although watch your newspapers for reports that its negotiating circles have widened to two hundred miles in diameter and that it has taken to ramming any English birds found within that limit.

PURPLE HERON

The purple heron is the latest miracle offering from Heron Birds Ltd. Feathered in tasty purple skivertex, with an elegant machine-tooled simulated goldette spine, it spends its life flying into people's homes on ten days' approval, telling them about the sexual passages in Tolstoy. If attacked, its method of defence is to fall apart. Attractive on its own, the purple heron in fact looks best when standing on a shelf with ten others like it.

SCARLET ROSEFINCH

The most intriguing features of this bird are that it is neither scarlet nor a rosefinch. It is more like a large green starling than anything, but not much. Its nomenclature, however, is quite without precedent, and won't happen again, either, if I'm any judge of these matters. Its name was given to it by an ornithologist in debt to a tailor called Sam Rosefinch to the tune of £86. Sam Rosefinch's wife, on the other hand, had always been driven by dreams of show business, and in 1940, following the overwhelming success of
Gone With The Wind
, cut her hair like Vivien Leigh's, changed her name from Lily to Scarlet, and took up drawl lessons. Since there were now three million women in a similar position, Scarlet Rosefinch's career came to nothing, and she went back, in deep depression, to cutting out waistcoat linings. Hearing of this, and instantly seeing it as a way out of his financial difficulties, the ornithologist called on Sam Rosefinch and offered to name his latest discovery after Sam's wife, in return for the £86, plus a spare pair of trousers for his blue worsted. Everyone ended up happy, except for the thing like a green starling, which spends its life answering embarrassing questions from other rosefinches.