Archives for 2011

Often, when I’m sitting on the bus or on a bench in the local park, a young woman will approach me and reach her hand out tentatively towards my crotch while making cooing noises, or saying such things as “Ooh, aren’t you cuuute!” I hasten to add, it isn’t always young women who do this to me – sometimes, it’s older women or small girls and every so often men of various ages will reach for my groin, too. This has been going on for about four years, and while it isn’t as intense as it was to begin with, it still happens with sufficient frequency that I find it . . . well, fucking annoying.

It isn’t my fur that these love-struck fools wish to stroke but that of my small Jack Russell, Maglorian, who is such a lapdog that I cannot sit down for more than a few seconds without him whining for me to hoick him up on to my denim plateau. This has been going on for his entire life but I’m still dreamy – and possibly vain – enough to be disconcerted every time. After all, I can remember times, albeit long gone, when young women, even the occasional man, did reach for my crotch while making cooing noises. True, they didn’t tend to do it in public but it happened nonetheless.

There’s this discombobulating factor and then there’s the wannabe fondlers’ wanton invasion of my personal space. Why is it that the presence of a small dog licenses such freedom? I understand the feelings that people can have for a dog. I’m quite fond of Maglorian: he’s pretty and well made and has some emotional intelligence, although his ability to reason falls well short of a Casio pocket calculator, circa 1973.

However, Maglorian is my dog and I have invested a lot of time in walking him, feeding him, picking up his excreta and taking him to overpriced veterinary surgeries. I feel very little inclination to go up to strangers in public and pet their small dogs, any more than I would their children.

It is to this connection – between the child and the small dog – that I believe the “Ooh, aren’t you cuuute!” madness owes its genesis. Confused by his tininess, many as-yet-childless young women think that Maglorian is a puppy. So saturated are they with hormones goading them towards infants that his species is immaterial; they must cuddle him. When Maglorian was a puppy, his ability to inflame maternal passion was stupefying. I remember leaving him outside a shop at the Covent Garden piazza and coming back a few minutes later to find a baying crowd of women, five-deep, all looking like attack dogs prepared to rip the first of their number’s throat out should she break ranks and go for that precious cuddle.

So it’s not just unawares that I come upon this pathology; I can spot it from a long way off. The puckering of a downy top lip, the widening of a dewy eye, the heaving of a yearning-for-maternity bosom – these are the initial symptoms, followed by more disturbing sequelae: the spasmodic, tic-like touching, gurning and what neurologists term “palilalia”, the repetition of meaningless words and phrases. “Ooh, aren’t you cuuute! You’re adooorable – aren’t you adooorable? Are you a him?” (Duh, your hand is three inches from his penis.) “Can I say hello to you?” (You can talk to him until the cows come home, but of one thing I can assure you: he will never answer – because he’s a dog.)

Often I feel like giving these broody souls a shock of reality by saying: “I know you think he’s adorable and you’d like to nurture him as you would a baby, but consider what would be involved in having a canine infant. You’d have to be impregnated by a small and snappy dog – not much fun. I concede, a two-month gestation period would be preferable to the usual nine-going-on-ten, but think of those claws scratching away inside you. Are you enough of a Spartan girl to withstand it?

“Then there’s the delivery – should it be at the local hospital or the animal shelter? And explaining to all your friends why it is that your newborn doesn’t need a bath but a shave; if, that is, there’s just the one, because dog babies usually come in multiples – they’re called litters. It may be this collective noun that has resulted in so many of them ending up in the canine equivalent of care.”

Yet there wouldn’t be any point, because, just as their malady renders me invisible to them, so it makes them incapable of understanding a word I say. Perhaps I should try an ultrasonic whistle.

My wife, who has had cause to spend some time in hospital over the past year, observes that if patients were told on admission that they would have to pay for their own food, they would have a fit – with a commensurate drain on the already straitened resources of the NHS. And yet, almost invariably, the first thing that a visitor is instructed to do by their prone one is to go down to the lobby and get a sandwich from Marks & Spencer, because the food divvied up gratis is such muck.

I’m not sure how the powers that be at M&S feel about this association: serious illness/M&S chicken sandwich. My hunch is that they’re pleased. How else to explain the selection of snacks they’re offering on behalf of Macmillan Cancer Support, which enables the buyer to chomp and donate at the same time? I recently took the unusual step of going to a hospital for lunch – I’d like to say that I was meeting Andrew Lansley there to have a frank exchange of views on his NHS reforms, but the truth was more sickening, if quite as prosaic: I had this column to write.

Under the current dispensation mandated by free-market ideology, large hospitals have become one-stop shops for anything from having a heart bypass to purchasing a pair of Pretty Polly sheer tights. Strolling from the cashpoint to AMT Coffee, via a boutique with the teasingly downbeat name Stock Shop, I think I could have been forgiven if I’d forgotten, for example, that I’d come in with acute coronary thrombosis and spunked off all my money on a carb binge.

Standing in the M&S café, I thought about the associations that the St Michael brand has for me. In my childhood, the stores had a genteel cachet, summed up in our family lore by my father’s Uncle Martin, who had taken early retirement from the colonial service to live out his days in a villa in Cheltenham. I remember the celebrated luncheon at which Uncle Martin, the faint nimbus of a psychic sola topi still shimmering about his snowy brows, fixed us all with gimlet eye before saying – apropos what he was masticating – “We buy all our chickens at Marks & Spencer . . .” Ever afterwards, drawling out “Marks & Spencer” in the manner of the ex-district commissioner would reduce my mother to giggles, for, like many immigrants to England, she had an eye for the fatuity and infinite divisibility of its class mores.

So it was a no-brainer: I selected the chicken salad sandwich and went to the counter to ask what the seasonal soup was. “Butter and nut squash,” said the more recent immigrant behind it, whose name badge read Kurshid. It was a charming malapropism and I hoped he’d never lose it.

While Kurshid microwaved the beige gloop, I selected a slice of Bakewell tart: the sight of flaked almonds always makes me think of the smell attributed to prussic acid by detectives in Agatha Christie novels. Kurshid made me a latte and I retreated to a nook. Above me, circular lampshades glowed red between naked neon tubes; on the walls, pseudo-Warhol prints showed sections of fruit juxtaposed with St Michael tomato soup cans; outside the floor-length windows, the hospital façade was pinioned together by steel struts and tensioned cables that resembled a monstrous, orthopaedic brace.

I tried the gloop – it was OK. I bit down on the chicken sandwich – it could be borne. I sipped the latte – ah, well, I thought, so it goes. On the hospital’s concourse, medical and auxiliary staff mingled with patients and visitors. The hospital staff wore loose tunics and baggy trousers of the same colour – either blue, green, white or butter-and-nut-squash – while the civilians were just a little more informal. Kurshid and the other M&S staff wore fetching black ensembles.

At the next table, a middle-aged woman with tired eyes spoke in the low tones of bereavement. I wanted to lean across, pinch her cheek in a Michael Winner-ish way and say, “C’mon, darling, cheer up!” Then I noticed the lanyard around her neck that bore the words: “Aspire – equality and diversity staff networks”, and clocked the dog collar which cinched that neck. “For Christ’s sake!” I screamed internally. “This is what your life has come to: fantasising over an M&S sandwich about goosing a woman priest!”

I reached for the Bakewell tart, sniffed it judiciously and, hoping with the fervent calculation of the parasuicidal that the hospital had a poisons unit, took an enormous bite.