Slowing Down Read Online Free PDF Page B

counsel.
    Joan Rivers was perhaps, on this showing, the antithesis of the ex-pipe-smoking, ex-titled aristocrat. She spoke up in favour of extreme ‘vanity surgery’ without qualification, and in her case with considerable justification.
    ‘She’s had so many face-lifts, she has to cross her legs to smile.’ Old joke
    But her view, insofar as I could judge, was that maintaining youth under the knife attracted money. It would seem to have worked in her case, and she and her rich plain husband fell in love and were happy until he died. As someone pointed out, it’s unfair that men tend to become more attractive in middle age; lines and wrinkles seem to have an aphrodisiace effect. With women it’s the reverse.
    There was another American some time back for whom, whatever she might think, it had been a disaster. I have forgotten why she was for a short period so often on television or in the papers, perhaps an acrimonious divorce, but she looked like the Bride of Frankenstein in a wind tunnel. The trouble is we love disasters as long as they don’t happen to us. In Terry Gilliam’s brilliant nightmare Brazil , there are two women, devotees of plastic surgery. For one it succeeds: she becomes younger and younger throughout the movie. The other, on the contrary, increasingly turns into a wheel-chaired freak. There is a German word, Schadenfreude , meaning enjoyment of other people’s mishaps and tragedies but Auden, as so often, found the perfect metaphor:
    That we are always glad
    When the Ugly Princess, parting the bushes, to find out why
    the woodcutter’s children are happy
    Disturbs a hornet’s nest…
    Joan Bakewell in the ‘What would you have done differently?’ programme was a paragon of tolerance: have a face-lift if it makes you feel better (Bakewell hadn’t, and looked much the most beautiful on the screen); sow your wild oats when young; have fun etc. She is a true libertarianand stresses that it’s we who must decide what we do. Like Terry Gilliam she is against all forms of thought-control, nanny-like rules, fascism in a word, from the imposition of ‘no smoking’ in restaurants, trains and soon bars (and I don’t think she even smokes) to the emergence of a leader with a little moustache and a cow’s-lick of hair. Good old Joan! You are still this ageing, impotent man’s crumpet!
    The difficulty of writing about the present is that everything is in flux: one’s feelings, physical degeneration, memory, names, what, being deaf, one has taken in, or even, if one has, remembered. Writing about the past, as I have in the past, is a doddle in comparison because it’s done, it’s set, it’s in three dimensions, the dead walk and talk there. So much was possible, each day might bring a revelation.
    Now I sometimes feel like tiny Alice and the animals swimming in her own gargantuan tears. If I also feel like a motherless child, it’s because I am!
    Well now, I know you’ve all been straining at the leash to hear the conclusion of my confrontation with the policeman in the Uxbridge Road, W12 – or perhaps not. But still, here it is.
    ‘If yer wants ter know the time ask a pliceman.’ Old music-hall song suggesting the law nicked the watches from unconscious drunks
    I explained to the law that every night I have to take a round white pill in order to expel the excess water from my system and this resulted in six to eight visits to the loo or the use of a hospital bottle if, in a hotel or guest-house, there was no bathroom en suite.

    ‘I sometimes feel like tiny Alice and the animals swimming in her own gargantuan tears’
    ‘You take this pill at night, sir?’ the policeman checked, glancing at the same time at his watch. It was about twenty past ten. I admitted I hadn’t taken it yet, but – I suggested he could check with his station’s saw-bones – it could act retrospectively at any time, as I believed sometimes happens with an LSD backflash.
    He wasn’t prepared to give up yet,