Making the Cat Laugh (17 page)

No, only one explanation will satisfy all the scrappy data at my disposal: that instead of umpteen implausible domestic accidents taking place last year entailing tea-cosies and slippers, there was just one enormous out-of-hand Christmas party involving 101 drunken people spilling on to a main road wearing their trousers on their heads, and six attempting to
skate across a frozen swimming pool with place-mats strapped to their feet. It’s the only solution that makes sense. ‘Let’s break into the dressing-gown warehouse,’ yells someone wearing a knitted tea-cosy as a balaclava, twenty-nine people following behind him, stumbling. But alas, once inside, blinded by the tea-cosy, he falls against a lever, and from a great height a large bundle of dressing-gowns promptly plummets towards their unwitting bonces. Meanwhile, back at the party, the innocuous game ‘Toss the slipper in the bread-bin’ has been proceeding safely until somebody has the bright idea of transferring the action downstairs to the kitchen. At which point a cat wakes, looks up, thinks quickly (but not deeply), and – well, you can guess the rest.

The DTI does not investigate the statistics, just tabulates them, so it’s no use asking for the true story. Presumably most people made their statements in a state of shock and blamed the wrong thing. ‘Why did you fall downstairs, madam?’ ‘The
tray!’

A friend was once waiting in an uphill queue at traffic lights when her car was threatened by a van in front, slowly rolling backwards. Having honked her horn in vain, she ran to the driver’s door, and discovered a woman piling plates on the dashboard. Evidently, they had slipped off; hence the neglect of the handbrake. ‘Plates!’ she laughed, by way of inadequate explanation. ‘But they’re all right, luckily.’

A few years ago the American magazine
National Enquirer
ran a very helpful tip-list entitled ‘Ten Ways to Spot Whether Your Grandparent is an Alien’. Evidently a large number of American teenagers were racked with worry on this issue and required some official guidelines for confirming or allaying their suspicions. So the
Enquirer
did its civic duty, telling youngsters to
peel their eyes for certain telltale signs. ‘ONE,’ it blared, ‘Gets up in the night for a glass of water. TWO: Remembers things from long ago with clarity, yet can’t summon up details of yesterday afternoon. THREE: Takes naps.’

The article did not explain what dastardly mission these alien wrinklies had been sent to Earth to fulfil, so naturally one formed one’s own theory on the available evidence. Clearly they came here in their silver shiny spaceships with the sole intention of putting their feet up and grabbing forty winks. Independent evidence backs up this notion. For as any astronomer will gladly affirm, very few comfy chairs have thus far been sighted on the surface of Alpha Centauri.

I mention all this because, according to a bizarre item in
The Times Magazine
recently, the American passion for aliens has not declined. True, the
National Enquirer
no longer carries those entertaining whole-page adverts for genuine extraterrestrial mineral samples (actual size) ostensibly brought back by Wyoming women from adventures in hyperspace. But apparently a new American movie in which a spaceship abducts a humble logger from Arizona (keeping him five days) is billed on its posters as ‘Based on a True Story’. It pulls you up short, this kind of thing. I mean, leaving aside the objection that
it can’t possibly be a true story
, doesn’t anybody stop to ask why superintelligent aliens would do it? I mean, what’s in it for them?

It ought to be a source of national pride that in Britain we don’t automatically think in terms of aliens. The ‘Lord Lucan Spotted in Sea of Tranquillity’ story, accompanied by fuzzy aerial photo, somehow fails to grab our imagination, which should be cause for whoops of joy. Brits who abscond from work will possibly resort to far-fetched tales of illness or amnesia, but rarely do they claim to have spent a week in a spaceship unable to phone the office because the aliens (ironically) hadn’t heard of Mercury.

‘So where’ve you been?’

‘Well, with aliens.’

‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘Was it good?’

‘Fine, yes. We did some crop circles. They’ve got a special attachment.’

‘What were the aliens like?’

‘Funny. They slept a lot, and kept asking me to remind them who I was, and then occasionally they got up for a glass of water.’

Just why America is more susceptible to ‘true-life’ alien stories is hard to account for (at least without being offensive) but it obviously entails a childish confusion about religion and space – which is a reasonable mistake, I suppose, since both originate in the sky. Visitations from the universe are the new-world equivalent of weeping statues in Catholic Europe, and in traditional American space movies, the identification of the visitor with the Messiah is so complete as to be almost laughable. In John Carpenter’s film
Starman,
the alien comes in peace, is persecuted, raises the dead and ascends on the third day in a blaze of light. The fact that he also samples apple pie (‘Terrific’) and wins half a million dollars in a casino does not detract from the analogy, it simply confirms that this is messianism American-style.

Of course, the ludicrous feature of the aliens-from-space belief is that it expects these visitors to take a wise, fair and godlike interest in the way we are running our planet, when it is more likely (as Woody Allen once pointed out) that they will just turn up one day and dump their laundry – socks, underpants, shirts, jackets – with instructions to have it ready by Thursday. Meanwhile they will settle down in front of our TVs for a mass alien after-dinner snooze. Another fond illusion bites the dust, but still, it’s only the same lament that has resounded through the ages. We ask for bread, and they give us stones; we ask for gods, and they give us ironing.

After the price of Whiskas and the paucity of NatWest Servicetills in the Marylebone area, my favourite conversational topic is garden sheds. I can wangle them into any kind of interchange – from the anecdotal (‘Roald Dahl? Writes in his shed, you know’); through the philosophical (‘But how can you tell your shed is still
there
when it’s night-time and
you can’t see it
?’); to the seductive (‘I’ll just pop down to the shed and slip into something more comfortable’). I am, you see, hoping that people will ask me to tell them more about my shed. But, strangely, no one ever does. The other day I even (Oh God, did I really?) tried to ‘talk sheds’ with Melvyn Bragg.

Perhaps one day someone will put together a glossy book called
The South London Shed
and ask me to write a little piece: about when my shed was built, what additions I’ve made, and how I sit in it all day wearing a straw hat and watch other people do the gardening. But I doubt it. That sort of request goes to the idle rich, like the people who have contributed to
The English Garden Room
, edited by Elizabeth Dickson (Weidenfeld £8.95). Never have I been more troubled by a large-format paperback. For it has made me discontented not only with my shed, but with my entire lot in life.

It must be said that the book is full of stunningly beautiful photographs. Conservatories are lovely places: huge and healthy plants set against cane furniture, stone paving, tall jardinières, classical statuary, and the odd piano – you can’t go wrong. Lady Aberconway has a large rectangular pool in hers. ‘The surface of the pond,’ says the caption, ‘unites by its reflection two convex shapes in perfect harmony.’

But it’s all this harmony that’s so upsetting. All this tranquillity and all this leisure to enjoy it. I can’t bear to think of it – that some people actually have the time to swing in hammocks. Or is that just an illusion fabricated for the book? Perhaps Princess Nicholas von Preussen is really just as driven as the rest of us – hanging about in the vet’s waiting room with
her dachshund (Lily); getting into the slowest queue in Sainsburys. The most violent envy I have ever felt goes out to Mary Douglas-Scott Montagu, who spends her summer months playing Wendy House in a showman’s caravan in the grounds of Beaulieu. She collects up the family pets and a couple of good books and ‘lazes around’. ‘It is the most luxurious and magic escape from the mundane pressures of everyday life.’ Huh.

Perhaps this is what such publishing is for: to sustain the existing social order by reducing its readers to a kind of wormy mulch of envy, despair and class hatred. But come the revolution, I can tell you this: there’s going to be a lot of flying glass.

About this time last year, a friend accused me of having ‘let myself go’. And I remember being quite taken aback. I put down the bottle of salad cream I was drinking, and changed the receiver to the other hand, while considering how to reply. ‘But my boyfriend says I’m lovely,’ I protested, at last. ‘He likes me the way I am.’ ‘Oh, come on,’ was the rejoinder. ‘Surely you can see he’s just saying that.’ I bit my lip, slid down in the chair and unbuttoned the waistband on my elasticated jumbo-sized trousers.

Luckily the boyfriend returned at that moment from the chip shop, so I was obliged to ring off. But later, while licking tomato ketchup off the hem of my baggy T-shirt, I told him about the conversation, and asked him what he thought. He said my friend was probably just jealous, and that I should take no notice. But for some reason this cure-all answer failed to satisfy. After all, she was right: I had stopped buying nice clothes, had become addicted to chocolate milk-shakes and taramasalata (sometimes in thrilling combinations), and
had started to warm to Shelley Winters as a potential role-model. But what alarmed me most was the memory of my own pathetic little defence: ‘My boyfriend says I’m lovely.’ I could not believe I had said it.

Leaving aside the attractive jealousy hypothesis for the time being, I told myself that at least the idea of ‘letting yourself go’ was the wrong phrase, since it belonged to the wrong era. Letting yourself go meant casting aside your boned corset (and having a good scratch), or letting your real eyebrows grow back. You can imagine it in those dour D.H. Lawrenceish Albert Finney movies (‘What about tha’ wife?’ ‘Me wife? Yon bitch uz let hersel’ go’). Those were the days when women were deemed to be the human equivalent of the Morning Glory, flowering for about twenty minutes and lucky if someone noticed.

All of this was comforting. But on the other hand, it is undeniable that I let myself get fat and frowzy when I had a boyfriend; and that the minute I became single again I lost weight in butter-mountain proportions and headed for the gym. To anyone familiar with the life story of Elizabeth Taylor this syndrome is a sad cliché, for which I apologize. Prior to cohabitation, I had looked after my body by feeding it occasional salads; but once safely cocooned in coupledom with a man who did a marvellous impression of a priest granting absolution (‘Hey, go for it, babycakes; life’s too short’) I was singing ‘Bring out the figgy pudding’ from dawn to dusk. This seemed wonderfully liberating until the cold dawn of single life brought me the realization that the only Lonely Hearts advertisements I could answer were the ones that said ‘Send photo of flat’.

All of which was how I came to learn about weight-training, and discover my pecs and lats. You wondered where all this was leading, and this is it. Stung by the remark about letting myself go, I decided it was time to pull myself together, which
is precisely what weight-training is. You know the way people tune up strings on guitars (dooing-dooing, dung-dung, dang-dang, ding-ding) – well, weight-training is a bit like that, only you have to supply your own sound effects. It is mostly boys who go to my gym, many of them with moustaches, and some of them have even pulled themselves together too tightly.