Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (6 page)

It is, in general, a wonderful thing to run into any of the large birds as long as they don't mean ill by you. You wouldn't want to find yourself alone on a bridge with a cassowary, for example, on account of his penchant for ripping out your stomach with his big toe. And even the most flirtatiously feather-boa'd emu always looks as though she will turn on you if you read her signals wrong. But there is something benign about a pelican. On his own territory, fishing on a lonely beach or sitting folded and uncomfortable, as though buggered, on a pole, he will cast an idle but protective eye your way. They say a dolphin will save a swimmer who gets into trouble in the water, but a pelican offers more existential assistance. He teaches the virtue of imperturbability and absurdism. On our territory, however, that something benign about him is increased a hundredfold. Have a pelican amble towards you in St James's Park and you believe a kindly hand is ordering the universe after all.

There wasn't anyone on that bridge, no matter what language they spoke, no matter what kind of Christmas Day they'd had, who didn't laugh to see him. Though he is a show-off and even a bit of a bully when it comes to right of way, he inspires, in humans at least, an unconditional joy.

So why is that? Because he is out of place, partly. Because we don't expect to see a pelican strolling through the park on Boxing Day as though he too needs to walk off a heavy dinner from the day before. And because, though he chooses our company, he comes from a world we can't begin to understand. But most of all, I think, because he isn't beautiful. He is grand but it is the grandeur, as it were, of adversity overcome. Fancy managing to look good when you have all that extraneous bulk and a floppy throat pouch to carry around. A flamingo approaching us on the bridge would also have had us reaching for our cameras. But she would not have inspired the affection the pelican did. Too graceful. Too naturally the thing she is.

It's for the same reason that the fast bowler Darren Gough won this year's Christmas Day
Strictly Come Dancing
champion of champions dance-off, easily beating the beauteous Alesha Dixon who had triumphed in the competition proper only the week before. When Darren Gough dances he defies probability. Dancing is not a skill we feel can be, or should be, locked away inside a man of such lumbering machismo. And when he releases lightness from his giant frame it is as though he is refusing the limits placed on flesh itself. For a moment, anything is possible for anyone. This, after all, is why we surrender to the programme despite all that nice to see you to see you nice drivel – not to applaud someone born airy like Alesha merely being herself, but to watch great albatrosses of men and women find elegance in their earthbound ungainliness.

There was a way in which this was true of Alesha also. She did not, of course, have physical bulk or an inappropriately comic personality to transcend, but she did have a clumsy assumption about herself to overcome: the assumption that as a thoroughly modern girl – a pop singer with a round red mouth and a lean hot body – she would do best when her dresses were brief and she was free to jive or salsa. In fact, she most moved the judges and the voting public when she waltzed. Bounce we knew she had; the surprise was to discover she could do old-fashioned grace.

There is a fancy abroad that we are all in pursuit of ourselves. It is a commonplace of the self-improvement business that once we learn to act in accord with who we really are we will be happy. In
X Factor
dross-speak, we have a dream we must make true. Bad advice, all of it. It's who we are that keeps us miserable. Rather than find ourselves we need to find someone who isn't us at all. Release the person you didn't know was there, I say. Learn from the pelican. Be who you're not. Don't fly when flying is expected of you – walk. Don't be beautiful, be strange.

Best Gig in Edinburgh

Just back from trundling my wares in Edinburgh, where, among other trials, I had consented to be thrown, as sacrificial pompous pundit, to a bunch of carnivorous comedians. A radio thing, which was why I couldn't say no. Now that television is wall-to-wall children's programming with the word sex (or the promise of the word sex) thrown in –
Dating in the Kindergarten
,
Sex and the Hobbit
,
A History of Sex and Homework
– you can't ever say no to radio. But I was more than usually tense on the morning of the event, to take my mind off which I spent many hours in a cemetery close to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. As a rule I prefer graveyards to gigs at festivals: at least there they know they're dead.

Next to God and my country I revere comedians and in the main get on with them. But ever since I wrote
Seriously Funny: An Argument for Comedy
they have been inclined to treat me as a sort of composite Rosencrantz and Guildenstern figure, a false friend who has dared to pluck the heart out of comedy's mystery. So I knew in my bones what was going to happen. The comedians would make gags about academic jargon and other
Start the Week
ery and I would accuse them of philistinism. Stirred by the unevenness of the contest – for laughter always has the beating of learning in a crowded place – I would liken their reluctance to discuss what they do, or have others discuss what they do, to a doctor's refusing to examine hearts on the grounds that he would thereby interfere with the mystery of vitality. I would argue that to think about joking was not to usurp the joke itself and install pedantry in its place, but simply to take a hand in our pleasures – to try to understand, in tranquillity, why we are like we are. In a scientific and humanistic age we throw open everything to the light; why should comedy, alone with religious fundamentalism, be exempt? Persuaded by my simple honesty, the studio audience would roar on every word I spoke, leaving the comedians to slink away like so many Goliaths felled by the sweet-tongued David. All this I anticipated, and all this, between ourselves, gentle reader, was exactly what transpired; but I still needed my prepatory morning among the memorials to the dead.

It is a very fine cemetery, this one. Not one of your exquisitely retiring country graveyards where you yearn to be laid, when your time comes, under a sad cypress, rolled round in earth's diurnal course, a thing of faded lettering and quiet nature yourself now, all your striving to be anything else put finally to rest. No, although it is solemnly shaded, a step or two back from the clamour of the living, Dean Cemetery is an urban, even a civic burial place, bristling with verbose Victorian tombstones, elaborate sarcophagi, neoclassical tablets set into the walls, busts, sculptures, obelisks, even pyramids. Where a country churchyard is a grateful relinquishment of the clamour of life, Dean Cemetery is a celebration of it. Here are soldiers, sailors, statesmen, surgeons, painters, zoologists, critics (I encountered no comedian) – all still active in this wordy commemoration of their worldly genius.

But it was one stone in particular which caught my attention. It read:

 

SACRED TO THE MEMORY

OF

ARCHIBALD McGLASHAN

TEACHER OF ENGLISH

DIED 14 MARCH 1881

AGED 36 YEARS

‘A MAN GREATLY BELOVED'.

 

Had I not had comedians to put right later in the day, I believe I could have loitered by this stone until the sun went down. And what was it in particular that struck me? Everything. Every single word.

Died aged thirty-six years, of course; died aged anything other than forty years older than whatever age you happen to be, is always enough to make you stop and think. Longevity is what you like to read about in graveyards, doughty souls who gave up the ghost at ninety-eight and then only because they couldn't think what else to do, not people cut off before their prime. And thirty-six is particularly cruel: just when you're getting going, just when you've outgrown stand-up and television, just when you are getting your first glimpse of what it all might be about.

Except that Archibald McGlashan seemed already to know. Teacher of English. As bald as that. Not linguistician or philologist. Not lecturer in liberal and media studies, nor professor of ideological piety, nor doctor whose speciality is whichever humanities happen to be thought relevant at whatever political moment. Not even Teacher of English with no offence meant to non-English-speaking minorities. Just Teacher of English, enough said. Simple words etched into plain stone.

Tempting, in these fractiously ambitious times, to view such a measured memorial sadly. Here lies some mute inglorious Milton, died soon and died obscure. If only Archibald McGlashan had shared in our twentieth-century advantages he might have got somewhere, become famous like Sting, had his own series on telly –
Sex in the Grave
– at the least made it on to
Big Brother
. Never mind that he's dead; even alive, Teacher of English is too modest an achievement for us to contemplate without melancholy. The poor bastard, we think, forgetting that it wasn't all teenage junkies with abusive parents in the 1870s. The poor bastard, forgetting that you were allowed to enthuse your pupils once, that there was an exhilaration in passing on the baton of learning and enquiry, enfranchising young minds with the best of thought and feeling, because ‘best' wasn't then an unacceptable and outmoded elitist concept.

For which favour, conscientiously bestowed – and I take this to be the logic of the epitaph – you became ‘A Man Greatly Beloved'. Not honoured, lettered, knighted, prize-laden, best-selling and all the rest of it, just greatly beloved. We don't even need to be told by whom. By humanity, naturally.

Best gig in Edinburgh – Archibald McGlashan, Dean Cemetery, any time you're free, dead in the earth.

All at Sea

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today I buried my father-in-law at sea. Buried is probably not the word for it. There was no body. What we did was cast his ashes to the four winds.

I've never seen a person's ashes before. I suppose I'd unthinkingly assumed that ‘ashes' was only a way of speaking, that what we burn down to is some sort of odoriferous powder, finer and sweeter perfumed than talcum, and somehow still animated by soul. But we don't. We make the same sort of ash as a bonfire makes. Grey and grainy and unspiritual. Plenty of it, too. A whole plastic flaskful, which can take a fair bit of shaking out. Especially if your hands aren't steady.

I don't fancy being burned myself. I'm too worried about the possibility of a mistake. Imagine lying inside that highly flammable wooden lozenge and listening to it crackle while you're still alive, still able to hear the congregation singing ‘Jerusalem'. Imagine the condition of your mind. Illogical, I know, given that you can be buried alive just as easily. But then I've never fancied the soil option either. Earth, water, air, fire – let those who are happy to live in the elements, die in the elements. I'm not. I keep hoping I can hold out long enough for someone to discover some new and more suitable medium for my expiry. Something less natural. Evaporation through abstruse sentence, say. Interment in metaphor.

Scatter me in words, O my beloved.

My father-in-law was lucky in that the elements spoke directly to him. He was a gardener, a garlic grower, a pisser on to the roots of lemon trees, a maker of barbecues and fires, and a waterman – that's to say he swam, fished, sailed, and therefore understood and loved the capriciousness of the wind. What a bore he could be on each and all of those subjects! When he expatiated on boats to me, I thought I was dead already. He showed me nautical charts. He talked knots to me. Tides. Reefs. Rips. Sandbars. Fathoms. Channels. Fish. Masts. Sails. The lives of Dutch navigators, for Christ's sake! He clogged my brain with seaweed. He picked my bones clean with maritime minutiae.

But at least he knew how he wanted to be disposed of. Burned to soulless ash and scattered on to the waters of the Indian Ocean off Rottnest, the paradisal people's isle a half nautical hour from the port of Fremantle. And let the winds and tides and fish and fathoms do as they wished with him.

So that was where we repaired to do his bidding – his widow, his daughter, his old fishing and camping friend Eric the ferryman, Eric's wife Dot, and me. There is always farce associated with the disposal of ashes: so of course we left him on the boat and had to run back for him, and of course we weren't able to open the plastic canister that contained him until his daughter found a way of breaking into it with a car key, and of course the wind blew half of him back into our faces. Life is three-quarters farce; it is only fitting that death should be the same.

‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook . . .' Nothing to do with Rottnest but it's a great line when you're thinking about watery graves. There is, though, a wooden jetty which gives out into Thomson Bay and we sat on the end of that like urchins looking for jellyfish and watched the water discolour with our husband and friend and father. We threw flowers after him – camellias from Dot's garden, and wild flowers, white and green and yellow everlastings, which his daughter had picked illegally from the roadside a thousand miles north of here. And so we made a floating memorial park for him.

Then we sang. Then they sang. No words, just a tune. ‘The Swan', by Saint-Saëns. They'd been a quartet when they were young. Dot the singer, Joy on the piano, Eric on the violin, and the man who was now a faint discoloration of the Indian Ocean on the cello. ‘The Swan' had been his favourite. Forever harping on things watery, you see.