Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (14 page)

But it's warm in the mud. And the idea of rising has grown inimical to us.

Bad Time of the Year

This is always a difficult time of the year for me – school broken up, summer climaxing in the arms of autumn, the trees heavy with whatever trees are heavy with. Maybe if I knew what trees were heavy with I'd be having it easier. Name a thing and you take away its mystery. Horticulturists don't look as though their knees knock in nature. They pause, sniff, label and walk on. But because I don't know what anything's called or why anything is the way it is, I'm destined to wander summer parks and gardens like some sorrowing Werther or Melmoth, forever outcast from the consolations of green.

Who can ever trace beginnings? What made me a boy whose thoughts invariably turned to desire the moment school broke up and the trees grew heavy with whatever? Clearly there are biblical precedents for finding gardens erotic, but other boys at my school were able to read the Old Testament without it making them soft in the head about lawns and shrubberies. The Ritz, that was where they headed to find romance the minute term was over. Or the Plaza. Everly Brothers on the turntable, spinning balls of splintered light above your head, Gladys from Accrington's head on the shoulder of your school blazer, and love followed as sure as day follows whatever day follows.

But not for me. School broke up and I was out haunting municipal parks. What did I hope to find? Truth, if you really want to know. But if truth eluded me, company. Someone sweet. Someone who smelt like grass. Someone I could thread dandelions with, which meant someone who could show me what dandelions looked like.

I was always between girlfriends in the summer holidays – that's to say I was always between not having one and wanting one. And if nothing showed up locally, by the bowling greens and duck ponds of Cheetham Hill, then I travelled further afield. One of my friends, Malcolm Meggitt, carried lists on his person of towns that had the most girls in them: Leicester because of the hosiery industry; Aldershot for the reason that all the men were in the army; Dagenham on account of the all-girl pipe bands. I have no idea where he obtained this information or whether any of it was genuine, and we never got around to testing it – not in each other's company anyway – I suppose because we didn't want to suffer the indignity of failing where sociology showed it was impossible to fail. Besides, Dagenham and Aldershot sounded altogether too inorganic for my taste. And the people of Leicester were notorious floricides.

I had my own preferred list. Chester, where the Dee tinkled like fairy bells and the riverbanks were grassed like carpets. Harrogate, which threw year-long flower festivals and where even the main roads were laid to lawn. Buxton, where the fainting daughters of the northern aristocracy went to take the waters, and where the earth was so rich in health-giving minerals you had only to suck on a stick of hay – or however hay came – to be cured of every ailment. But Malcolm no more fancied Buxton than I fancied Leicester. So he went where his list took him, and I followed mine.

In order to compensate for the inherent ponciness of looking for love in orangeries and allotments, I wore dark glasses, a maroon hand-me-down smoking jacket, a yellow paisley cravat from Austin Reed and lovat-green suede shoes. Since I was wearing a smoking jacket I thought it behoved me to smoke. Stuyvesants in the squashable packet. Two a month in term time, but one every five minutes in parks. That my face blazed hotter than a blacksmith's furnace goes without saying. It's embarrassing to be an outcast in nature. Even the flowers know you've come to the wrong place. I must have been a fearful sight. It's a long time since I made a public apology in this column, but I make one today to all those women – they will be grandmothers now, if they've survived at all, inpatients of sanatoria all over the north of England – who were unlucky enough to be surprised in a parterre of geraniums by a creeping red-faced boy with a voice as husky as the Boston Strangler's and smoke coming out of his ears.

‘Excuse me, I don't suppose you've seen a short fat man with ginger hair go by recently, have you?' That was my line. Don't ask me where it came from. It's possible I was making an unconscious connection with Cain, the other wanderer, whose hair was reputed to be red. But I have no idea what advantage I thought would accrue to me, however they answered. ‘Yes, I have just seen a short fat person with red hair.' Then what? Would you care to lie down with me among the sphagnum and swallow my smoke rings?

Mainly, the unfortunates I approached didn't answer me at all. I suspect they were too shocked by my demented appearance to know what to say. That some suffered seizures I don't doubt. That others would have miscarried on the spot, succumbed to hysterical blindness or gone instantaneously mad, I am also prepared to believe.

Perhaps I exaggerate the dreadful spectacle I presented. I was only fourteen. How dreadful can
anyone
look at fourteen? But it was the unwontedness of my presence that was so shocking – black desire suddenly showing up, like the carrier of plague, in the quiet of a late-July rose garden. The invisible worm that flies in the night, except that I was visible. The devil, stripped of all disguise, breathing Stuyvesants in Eden.

And maybe that's all evil is: alienation from nature. Had I only known what trees were heavy with, I might never have turned bad.

Every Day Is Father's Day

I wonder if you can have too much jubilation. You go to bed to the sound of crowds hosanna'ing the monarch and you wake to English football fans partying outside your bedroom window. Hurrah to Her Majesty and another hurrah to the boy with the Mohican. Next day you're hurrahing again because the most fearsome boxer in the world has been flattened by a gentle giant with a British passport. Ropy accent and inane mannerism, acquired in some foreign place, of referring to himself in the third person, but a British passport's a British passport. Still got a hurrah left in you? Then let's hear it for the Irish, putting three past those footballing giants, Saudi Arabia. Huzza, huzza, huzza!

It's like spending too much time at sea and finding, when you hit dry land, that everything's still moving. Even when there's no one cheering, cheering is all I can hear. A couple of days ago I thought I was being cheered in my shower. Just the pipes, but for all the world it was as though I had a hundred fans in there with me, roaring every time I soaped. The idea is not entirely preposterous. Though no longer athletic in the Leni Riefenstahl sense, I suspect I am still a sight of some ruined magnificence – like the tomb of Ozymandias – when I lather. Worth a shout or two, all things considered. But I am not a fool: I know when my ears are playing tricks on me.

It will be good when we revert to losing and can enjoy some peace and quiet again.

In the meantime the festivities are making me melancholy. My father, methinks I see my father. Maybe jubilation enjoins memories of fathers on men whose fathers are no longer alive, causing us to remember them with peculiarly fervent longing. Memories of being hoisted aloft on strong shoulders to see a cup presented or a royal personage drive by. Lift me, Daddy. We hug our male friends every time a goal goes in, and maybe that's a substitute for our earliest same-sex embraces. Enfold me, Daddy. Mothers make the world safe for us, blinding us on the breast. A father's grip might be just as sure, but he holds us out towards the naked flame.

I have a friend my age who heaves his six-month-old son on to his chest and takes him into the shower with him. It would seem the baby loves it. How could he not? I love it for the baby. ‘My mother groaned, my father wept / Into the dangerous world I leapt' – no weeping in this instance. Into the dangerous watery world they leap together. Infinitely touching, not to say biblical, I find this – the patriarch Abraham, full of years, making a great feast of the unexpected gift of fatherhood. Age apart – and my friend's not that old – it's stirring. An elemental bond, sealed elementally.

But then as I've explained, when it comes to fathers I am myself all water at the moment. On top of everything else it is the tenth anniversary of my father's death. Ten years, fled like a dream. Ten years in which much has happened for me, and nothing has happened for him. As always, my mother rings to make sure I know it's yahrzeit, the day to remember him by, as calculated by the Jewish calendar. The Jews commemorate the dead with candles. Man is a flame, the flame is extinguished. You can't fault the imagery. So we keep it simple, the yahrzeit candle a mere deposit of wax in a miserable Methodistical little glass, guaranteed to burn for twenty-four hours and then go out with a dead sizzle, like hot oil escaping down a sink. This at least you do not confuse with the sound of crowds cheering a penalty.

And would he have been a fatherly sort of father, my father, this last week or so? Hard to say. I doubt he'd have lifted me up to see the Queen, or bought me a flag to wave or had much to say about Rio Ferdinand. Lennox Lewis knocking out Mike Tyson, though, might have got him going. He'd have admired that final punch. ‘Sheesh – you wouldn't have wanted to be on the end of that, eh, Howard?' he'd have said, by implication returning the question – not what sort of companionably male father he, but what sort of companionably male son I. And we'd both have known the answer to that.

His one true sporting passion was wrestling. ‘For God's sake, Dad,' I used to jeer, catching him biting his knuckles in front of the box, ‘they aren't touching each other.' ‘That's how it looks to you,' he'd say, ‘because you don't understand the science.'

The science wasn't all he was in it for. What he really loved was needle. In every wrestling bout, he reckoned, there was a moment when needle entered and the play-acting gave way to genuine anger. ‘Now it really is needle,' he'd say, rubbing his hands, and had the house gone up in flames around him, he would not have noticed.

He had a weak heart, else he might have become a wrestler. He had the build for it. As it was, he settled for judo, buying himself what looked like hessian pyjamas and a square of coconut matting upon which, because he had no other opponent, he'd pin my mother. ‘That's a waza-ari,' he'd say. ‘Three points to me.' It was her idea that he join a club. But then came his heart operation. ‘No more judo for you,' the doctor warned. Just to be on the safe side my mother confiscated his outfit. But after he died we found a new one under the mattress, together with a fourth degree black belt – a
yodan
– three higher than the
shodan
he had when he told us he'd quit.

Briefer than a candle, man's life. So you might as well burn yourself out as wait for the wind to do it. His philosopy. To which I'll raise a cheer on Father's Day.

In Defence of Melancholia

Been brooding, in these toxic times, over the story of Manfred Gnädinger, the German-born hermit whose sculpture garden in Camelle, on the Galician coast, was damaged by the oil spill from the tanker
Prestige
, and who subsequently died, according to those who knew him, of melancholy.

Not enough of us die of melancholy. And when we do, the doctors call it something else. Depression, usually. But depression and melancholy are not synonymous. Depression is a condition you are meant to deal with. Take pills, get pissed, play with your genitals, leave your genitals alone, join a gym, find a partner, leave a partner, try liposuction, put your buttocks where your mouth is, go on
Big Brother
, get kicked off
Big Brother
, change your sexual orientation, get thee to a nunnery, expose yourself to light – fly to Galicia even.

Melancholy, on the other hand, though it was long thought by the ancients to be a morbid condition caused by excessive secretion of black bile, was also called by them ‘the sacred disease'. Which might have meant that the gods had a hand in it, or that those it claimed enjoyed other privileges as a consequence. There is argument as to whether it was Aristotle or his pupil Theophrastus who made the famous connection in the
Problematica
– ‘Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics, or poetry or the arts, are clearly melancholics?' – but it's a true observation, whosever it was.

True if you leave out politics that is, politics no longer being a calling with which eminence has anything to do.

Depression happens to you, melancholy is an option. ‘I imagine that for one to enure himselfe to melancholy,' that distinguished melancholic Montaigne wrote in an essay on the variegations of our natures, ‘there is some kinde of purpose of consent and mutuall delight.'

How much delight there was in Manfred Gnädinger's decision to die of melancholy I would not dare to guess. But we must assume, since he had been a hermit in Galicia for more than forty years, that he had consented to the sadness of that calling. The Galicians called him Man, short for Manfred, but suggestive of something pared down and elemental in him too. ‘I was looking for a place to be alone,' he told a journalist just before his death. ‘This is my world. I don't think I like other people.'

Misanthropy, we are inclined to call that. A judgemental term. We are not meant not to like other people. I prefer melancholy. It restores dignity and refuses the tyranny of normative behaviour, there being no reason on earth why we should like other people much, and every justification, even in the blue and green of Galicia I would imagine, for not liking them at all.