day to the point I am at now where – to risk sounding like one of the new Armani mystics, the ‘designer Buddhists’ you currently read so much about in the papers – I have adopted a tranquil, uneventful life of passive acceptance. I live in pleasant, unembittered obscurity and feel at ease for the first time in my own skin. Cleansed of fame and its unquenchable cravings.
There is a word for what I have come to regard now as my first life. Nabokov used it once: ‘ A stranger caught in a snapshot of myself .’ ‘Alma Cogan’, a fantasy of beehive hair and bouffant skirts, ostrich plumes, Leichner colours and tarmacadam lashes,is something I no longer feel able to associate with me. It feels as far away as the doodlebug and the Victrola.
So how is it that the letters and calls from the the-way-it-was, way-we-were, return-with-us-now, kiss-and-tell franchisers and packagers are able to get under my skin and breech my defences so effectively? Why do they hit my system like the first drink of the day (a big gin-and-tonic at 6.30 on the nose, in the present regimen)?
If this was a different medium I could use computer graphics to show you: there’d be cartoon crowds, cinemas, taxi-cabs, power stations, chefs’ hats, VDUs and supermarket trolleys all spilling out of envelopes and pouring from the earpieces of telephones to indicate city energy; city chaos; the invigorating unfakeable urban clang and clamour to which I confess to being helplessly addicted. Caught off-guard, it can sometimes tear me up with longing.
The usual form, I’ve been discovering, is a letter carrying a vogueish logo – Art Deco, constructivist, cleverly mismatched hieroglyphs – followed by a call from a person whose position usually advertises itself through one of the ‘fast-track’ Telecom technologies.
There’s the long hold accompanied by muzak, as demonstrated; the cordless model – good for mobility and giving an acoustic impression (not necessarily accurate) of the executive dimensions of the room the call is coming from. Lastly, there is the increasingly popular car-phone.
Calls from car-phones always sound as if they’re being made at eighty miles an hour on the motorway or from halfway up a cliff-face, which I suppose is part of their appeal. Every time I pick up the receiver and hear the now-familiar wh-o-o-oosh, I have to know where the caller is as we speak .
The replies – heading up Park Lane towards Marble Arch; crossing the Hammersmith flyover going to Chiswick – are always evocative enough to haul me out of my immediate surroundings for the duration of the call: I’m not in the world of tide-tables and seagull droppings, but in a place where the ‘in-carenvironment’ of thrashing newspapers and swirling ash perfectly replicates the outdoor environment of sweet diesel and graffiti and blinding grit. Ο city lust!
I have not met Cat from the Nostalgia Book Club, or Shale or Linzi from Not Forgotten magazine; Brick from Charm records, Gully from Star books, Devora from Penguin, or Roxy, Tawatha, Gun, Dyck, Kaff, Swoosie, Chicken or Jalet from Bonham’s, Christie’s (there is apparently unprecedented demand these days for pop-related knick-knacks and memorabilia), the BBC and Channel 4. But the names themselves, neither entirely natural nor entirely invented, not quite kosher and at the same time not really smile-when-they’re-low showbiz, seem to sound a warning.
Read them and you find yourself looking for the tell-tale white wart of Tipp-ex. Roll them round your tongue and you get an idea of what having a split-palate must be like. Say them aloud and the result is queerly cracked; disconcertingly off-centre. They are names that suggest the kind of ambiguities and complexities I have become unused to, hunkered in my bunker, buried in my ‘healthy grave’ (the Rev. Sydney Smith) down here in the country.
The man on The Terri-Marie by this time is doing something which, in boating language, is probably
There is a word for what I have come to regard now as my first life. Nabokov used it once: ‘ A stranger caught in a snapshot of myself .’ ‘Alma Cogan’, a fantasy of beehive hair and bouffant skirts, ostrich plumes, Leichner colours and tarmacadam lashes,is something I no longer feel able to associate with me. It feels as far away as the doodlebug and the Victrola.
So how is it that the letters and calls from the the-way-it-was, way-we-were, return-with-us-now, kiss-and-tell franchisers and packagers are able to get under my skin and breech my defences so effectively? Why do they hit my system like the first drink of the day (a big gin-and-tonic at 6.30 on the nose, in the present regimen)?
If this was a different medium I could use computer graphics to show you: there’d be cartoon crowds, cinemas, taxi-cabs, power stations, chefs’ hats, VDUs and supermarket trolleys all spilling out of envelopes and pouring from the earpieces of telephones to indicate city energy; city chaos; the invigorating unfakeable urban clang and clamour to which I confess to being helplessly addicted. Caught off-guard, it can sometimes tear me up with longing.
The usual form, I’ve been discovering, is a letter carrying a vogueish logo – Art Deco, constructivist, cleverly mismatched hieroglyphs – followed by a call from a person whose position usually advertises itself through one of the ‘fast-track’ Telecom technologies.
There’s the long hold accompanied by muzak, as demonstrated; the cordless model – good for mobility and giving an acoustic impression (not necessarily accurate) of the executive dimensions of the room the call is coming from. Lastly, there is the increasingly popular car-phone.
Calls from car-phones always sound as if they’re being made at eighty miles an hour on the motorway or from halfway up a cliff-face, which I suppose is part of their appeal. Every time I pick up the receiver and hear the now-familiar wh-o-o-oosh, I have to know where the caller is as we speak .
The replies – heading up Park Lane towards Marble Arch; crossing the Hammersmith flyover going to Chiswick – are always evocative enough to haul me out of my immediate surroundings for the duration of the call: I’m not in the world of tide-tables and seagull droppings, but in a place where the ‘in-carenvironment’ of thrashing newspapers and swirling ash perfectly replicates the outdoor environment of sweet diesel and graffiti and blinding grit. Ο city lust!
I have not met Cat from the Nostalgia Book Club, or Shale or Linzi from Not Forgotten magazine; Brick from Charm records, Gully from Star books, Devora from Penguin, or Roxy, Tawatha, Gun, Dyck, Kaff, Swoosie, Chicken or Jalet from Bonham’s, Christie’s (there is apparently unprecedented demand these days for pop-related knick-knacks and memorabilia), the BBC and Channel 4. But the names themselves, neither entirely natural nor entirely invented, not quite kosher and at the same time not really smile-when-they’re-low showbiz, seem to sound a warning.
Read them and you find yourself looking for the tell-tale white wart of Tipp-ex. Roll them round your tongue and you get an idea of what having a split-palate must be like. Say them aloud and the result is queerly cracked; disconcertingly off-centre. They are names that suggest the kind of ambiguities and complexities I have become unused to, hunkered in my bunker, buried in my ‘healthy grave’ (the Rev. Sydney Smith) down here in the country.
The man on The Terri-Marie by this time is doing something which, in boating language, is probably
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