Making the Cat Laugh (10 page)

At the same time as spreading dietary awareness Mr Green also engendered considerable semantic unease, because for twenty-five years one could frown at his splendidly unpunctuated message, ‘Less fish meat bird cheese egg peas beans nuts and sitting’, and somehow miss its drift. ‘What exactly is your
beef?’
one might have asked him, hilariously, if one had only thought of it.

When Stanley Owen-Green started this anti-protein campaign in 1968, of course, food was not generally accepted as the enemy within, the way it is now. Devil-may-care people did not quip: ‘I never met a carbohydrate I didn’t like,’ mainly because nobody would tumble the joke. In those crazy far-off days of prelapsarian ingestion, we bunged all sorts of things in our cake-holes and simply hoped for the best.

The idea of ‘Protein Wisdom’ in the late Sixties was revolutionary, therefore. Mr Green sincerely believed that too much ‘married love’ could kill, and that the way to banish its excesses was to reduce one’s intake of fish meat bird. One only hopes he never popped into a picture palace to see Marco Ferreri’s film
Blow-Out,
in the mistaken belief that it concerned the perils of Formula One.

But the trouble was, his placard was double-edged, both literally and metaphorically, and open to misuse. Ironically, those who positively embraced the notion of swooning unto easeful death sated with lust (not to mention nuts peas beans) knew from Mr Green’s placard precisely which passion-packed items to add to their shopping lists.

What impressed everyone so much about Mr Green’s
campaign, however, was not its faultless logic but its sheer constancy. After twenty years or so, a chap with a popular message might be expected to paint a new sign, take a new angle, jazz up the slogan; but Mr Green seems never to have done so. ‘Less passion from less protein’ was good enough to begin with, and good enough to end with, too.

Early reports suggest that the Museum of London will display Mr Green’s placard, which is absolutely right and proper. By rights, I feel, he ought also to be inserted retrospectively into the works of Dickens. Thus, the last tremendous bustling-street sentence of
Little Dorrit
would read:

Fish have rights, you know. I learned this important piece of information last week as I was innocently travelling up an escalator at Tottenham Court Road, where aquatic matters are arguably furthest from a person’s mind. But there it was, one of those little hand-written labels that fanatics attach to the posters; stating it quite plainly, ‘Fish Have Rights’. Of course I laughed out loud – rights to what? fair trial? freedom of expression? abortion on demand? – but then stopped, confused. I mean, perhaps ‘Fish Have Rights’ was a joke. Or maybe it was the name of a really famous pop group. Worse, perhaps it signified nothing at all, but had been written by an unreconstructed surrealist, to see whether the word ‘fish’ in peculiar contexts still made people feel vertiginous and paranoid. In
which case, I reflected (as I grasped the moving handrail for support), the experiment appeared to be working.

But it’s all true. ‘Fish Have Rights’ is the latest thing in the anti-bloodsports campaign, and the British angler is the object not only of moral opprobrium but of sabotage attack. Really. There was a piece in the
Sunday Times
. Robert Redford has attached a disclaimer to his fly-fishing movie,
A River Runs Through It
, promising that no little fishies were killed, harmed, or even mildly disgruntled in the making of it, yet the 300-strong Campaign for the Abolition of Angling is still thinking to picket the cinemas (‘This film degrades fish,’ I suppose).

I had no idea of all this strength of feeling. Sitting quietly on a river bank under a big umbrella, thoughtfully masticating a cheese roll, our angler looks up in surprise to see a fully rubberized frogman advancing from the water, yelling that he is barbaric. Talk about surreal. What a way to find out that the first right of fish is the right to representation.

Personally, I could never love a fish. It is something to do with their short memories. Call me anthropocentric, but I refuse to lavish affection on a creature that, every few seconds, can’t remember where it’s seen you before. All aquarium-owners will gladly tell you that the extremely short memory-span of the fish is its great salvation in captivity, because while it endlessly circles its tank it supposedly thinks, ‘Well, this is interesting; mm, this is interesting; gosh, this is interesting; corks, this is interesting.’ But to me, that retention problem is a stumbling block to sympathy, and I doubt I shall ever march on Parliament with our amnesiac aquatic friends. ‘What do we want?’ we humans would shout. And the fish would give us that blank panicky look, as if to say, ‘How do you mean?’

On the other hand, I do agree that it is odd to call angling a sport, when there is obviously never the slightest possibility that the trout will win. The great outdoors. Man against fish. Well, you have to admit that the contest is unequal. Moreover,
the idea that a fish can outwit its predator (‘Mister Carp was too clever for me today’) is not much of a face-saver, in my opinion, and I am always surprised when people resort to it. But what really astounds me in this ‘Fish Have Rights’ business is that any sane person, looking around at the world’s current brutalities, would put angling at the top of their activist agenda. Presumably they watch the news from Bosnia with their mouths open and their eyes all glassy, making little occasional ‘Pup!’ noises with their lips.

What it really boils down to, however, is that I just can’t imagine the emotional dynamic involved in wanting to sabotage an angler. How do they get their dander up (especially once they’re encased in a wet-suit)? Whereas the fox-hunt seems to have been designed in every detail to invite aggressive response (the horn! the horn!), I don’t see how anyone could work himself into a lather about a bloke with a flask of tea in a fine drizzle being willingly outsmarted by a fish. It doesn’t add up. It’s like attacking a person for quietly reading a magazine. ‘Look at him doing that! Ooh, that really makes me mad!’ The drizzle scenario is like a red rag to a bull, apparently. Which is strange, of course, because in terms of unacceptable bloodsports, a red rag to a bull is really nothing like this at all.

Attempting to cross a tricky road junction in south London recently, I was very nearly struck down by a speeding van. This is the sort of thing that makes me rather angry; in fact, had I not been carrying two heavily occupied cat-baskets at the time (one in each hand), I would have taken great pleasure in thumping the side of the van as it passed (sometimes the BANG resounds wonderfully). I still had the option, of course, of hurling a retaliatory cat-basket down the road after it, but luckily the thought did not occur to me until later. So, as I
stood helpless on the tarmac, with the smouldering tyre-tracks running just inches from my feet, all I could do was squint at the receding vehicle in search of an identifying clue. And I got one. On the back of the van were two words I shall never forget: ‘Bengal’ was one, and ‘Prawns’ was the other.

As I sat in the vet’s waiting-room and attempted unsuccessfully to comfort my shuddering cats by poking at them through the wire mesh of their baskets, it seemed to me that I had had a lucky escape. Nobody wants to be killed by a van; but it would be a great deal more irritating to be killed by a van with ‘Bengal Prawns’ written on it.

‘How did she die?’ people would ask.

‘I think it was something to do with prawns.’

‘But she never liked prawns.’

‘I know.’

I couldn’t help remembering that when Chekhov’s body was returned to Moscow for burial, it was in a cart marked ‘Fresh Oysters’, but this inconsequential fact did nothing to lift my spirits, so I jiggled the cats for a bit and then hummed them a comic song until somebody asked me to stop.

I think about death sometimes. Analytically, of course. Recently, for example, I got together with a depressed friend, and we discussed – over a bottle of
crème de menthe
and a family bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken – our views on suicide. It was jolly interesting. It turned out that our ideas were completely different, and that philosophers ought to have been brought in by the coach-load just to listen to us because what we said was so bloody profound.
Her
view, you see, was that whereas she often felt like killing herself, she didn’t actually want to die. And I said, well that was so, so, amazingly funny, because whereas I often felt that I wanted to die, I didn’t actually want to kill myself. We felt so proud of this extraordinary paradox that we treated ourselves to a large bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream.

Perhaps the ‘Bengal Prawns’ thing was a message; a presentiment. But what could it mean? Don’t mess with prawns? One day you will die by prawns? You have taken the name of prawns in vain? I have no idea. But it turned out to be something of an epiphany, in any case; because, strangely enough, it has given me the will to carry on. No bloody prawn, I decided, is going to get the better of
me.

Last autumn an Oxford man was prosecuted for strangling next door’s parrot. You may remember the item in the news. The offending bird lived in a cage in the garden, the man had recorded piercing noises from it (up to 90 decibels), and finally it drove him berserk. It was a dramatic story, really, like something from a crack-up movie starring Michael Douglas. Man in specs yells, ‘That’s it! That’s done it,’ breaks down fence, wrestles with door of cage; parrot backs away uncertainly, squawking. Music soars; feathers flurry; shadows struggle; and a bird ladder is kicked over in the fight. The music drops to a low pulse, signifying that the grisly deed is done. The man falls back, stunned, stares at palms of hands. Then silence. The camera pans: empty perch, rocking swing, silver bell, mirror, scattered Trill, cuttlefish, end.

That’s how I saw it, anyway. Here was a man pushed beyond endurance by the constant shrieks of a noisy bird (trained by its owners to squawk ‘Mark’, the strangler’s name). And although I can’t remember if he paid a terrible penalty for his crime, what I do remember is empathizing strongly with his frustrations, and thinking that the urge to strangle next door’s parrot is probably one of the most passionate feelings shared by the silent outraged majority in this inwardly seething, overcrowded and latently violent country. Naked and raw, it is, the common urge to break the windscreen of a car whose alarm
has been wah-wahing all night; to firebomb a house where a party never stops. Thank God they don’t let us have guns.

And now we have the case of Diane Welfare, fined £12,500 last week for broadcasting Radio 1 to her neighbours, amid general cheers that something is finally being done. Hurrah, hurrah. If the court had also burst through the door shouting, ‘That’s it! That’s done it!’ and strangled the stereo or drowned it in the bath, I think I would be literally singing with joy. I don’t care that Miss Welfare can’t pay the fine. I don’t even care that she is a teenage mother with a rotten life. When someone blasts noise at their neighbours, it is selfish and aggressive, and it drives you wild. It gets in your face. Nowadays when new neighbours move in downstairs from me, I cut the usual cheery preliminaries and just demand straight off to see the size of their speakers. Anything larger than a cornflake packet and my life is ruined. I will have to write in restaurants and sleep in the car.