Archives for September 2010

Is Nick Clegg the verruca of British politics? I only ask – in fact, it’s something I asked Sadie, a nice woman who held my gnarled and calloused foot between her parted thighs for half an hour in a south London consulting room early this week, then charged me £28 for the privilege. I hasten to add that Sadie’s thighs were sheathed in denim and far from being a fetishists’ assistant, she was a chiropodist.

I’d spoken to one of her colleagues on the phone and asked if they – the chiropodists – would be able to remove this growth from beneath the little toe on my left foot: “I’ve tried the proprietary stuff from the chemist’s,” I explained, “but the thing is difficult to reach, and no matter how much I coat it, pick it and then rub it with an emery board, it just goes on getting bigger. And besides, I think I can hear it at night, speaking from the bottom of the bed, mouthing platitudes about the national debt and the lack of any alternatives and core Liberal beliefs. Moreover, I’m worried about infecting my kids.”

Sadie’s colleague assured me that Sadie would do the business and booked me an appointment – but when it came to the crunchy dermis, it turned out that she was far from willing to make the cut. “There’s no point,” she averred. “There’s about a 50% chance of success, and as 50% of them fall off within a year of their own accord, it hardly seems worthwhile.”

“But what about contagion?” I asked.

“They aren’t actually contagious,” she said, “that’s a bit of myth. The virus is like the herpes one that causes cold sores – it’s everywhere all the time, it’s just a matter of it finding a chink in your immune system. Verrucas thrive between upper and lower layers of the skin where the body’s immune system can’t detect them, so the thing to do is actually to irritate the skin beneath the verruca so that it mobilises antibodies to repel the foreign body.”

“Hm,” I hm-ed, “so the verruca virus is like Liberalism, it’s everywhere all the time but you can’t see it and it has no real impact on Government policy until it manages to get in between the layers of popular and parliamentary sovereignty, whereupon it will grow into an opportunistic Cleggy-shaped thing?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Sadie concurred.

“The size of it is fucking huge!” I screeched, “and it looks like an overgrown public schoolboy!”

“Well, as I say, you’ve a 50% probability of its coalition falling apart within the year – and even if I did remove it surgically there’s a chance you could develop something worse.”

“Do you mean – ?”

“Yes, Simon Hughes. Now, that’ll be £28 please – we accept credit or debit cards, and, of course, cash.”

“If you show me your breasts I’ll give you £35,” was perhaps an inopportune remark to make to the middle-aged commuter sitting opposite me in the first-class carriage of the 14.30 Taunton service out of London Paddington on Tuesday afternoon. I was only going as far as Bath Spa, but from the expression that darkened his features I immediately realised I was already in very hot – and possibly even sulphurous – water.

The worst thing about the situation was that I didn’t even particularly want to see his breasts – I just spoke on impulse and out of boredom. Not, you appreciate, proximate boredom – that’s for kids – but a deep, gnawing, existential kind of boredom. Besides, he was reading The Times in a way that convinced me he was just as afflicted with tedium vitae as I. I thought: I’ll hand over the 35 quid, he’ll take off his tie – striped blue and lighter blue – and unbutton his shirt – white, not especially fresh – then simply part the sides so that I can ogle for a few seconds or minutes his slack, sparsely-haired moobs. That’ll be it: no fuss, no drama – I doubted that anyone else in the carriage would even notice.

Of course, if I’d paused for a second to think about my proposition I would’ve realised that it was just another attempt on my part to indulge in the pornography that swells in every moist and hidden crevice of contemporary society. Yes, that’s the thing: ever since a revelatory encounter with the late Andrea Dworkin, in Manhattan, in the late 1990s, I’ve accepted that pornography, far from being a harmless little vice, is in fact a crime – and a crime with victims like any other. Granted, it seemed unlikely that this man was in danger of experiencing himself as a sexual object (indeed, he might even have welcomed this if I’d put it to him nicely), but there it was: I was objectifying him.

The strange thing was that as he became more and more irate, and threatened to call the conductor – I found myself getting aroused. I suppose you can guess how it all ended… But then, I thought to myself as I zipped up my flies, smarmed my hair, shut the toilet door, and descended to the platform at Bath Spa, in my end is my beginning – surely a sentiment Pope Benedict would concur with?

My daily go-round has a menacing stereotypy: I walk the dog with such regularity it’s hard to know which of us is on the lead. I’d like to be able to say that the business of publicising a new book – with readings, interviews and so on – is something of a departure, but it ain’t so. I’ve been trundling to Bristol, Bath, Brighton and Birmingham year in year out for almost two decades now, so that these journeys have the quality of an annual progress by some cut-rate monarch viewing his papery pop-up dominions.

Not that I wish to be dismissive of the audiences who turn out for my readings, or the journalists who trouble to interview me – I value them all. I cleave to Cocteau’s view of the artist, that we are all hermaphrodites engaged in feats of parthenogenesis: we inseminate ourselves, gestate our mind-children then deliver them on to A4 beds. We raise them, and eventually – when they’re hulking and hirsute – we load up their belongings, drive them to another town, buy them an electric kettle, open a bank account for them and cut them loose. It’s not our fault if they subsequently end up as crack whores – or, worse, provincial solicitors.

So, the audiences and the journalists in Bristol, Bath, Brighton and Birmingham are effectively foster parents, or beadles, or possibly “moral tutors” (which is what the member of the academic staff charged with student welfare was called in my day); because it is unto them that the fully-grown mind-child is delivered. And just as it’s no longer the writer’s responsibility as to what becomes of his books, so these transitional figures may fold, spindle and mutilate them as they will.