I’ve had enough of the puritanical brigade: the “dry January” lot; the clean eaters; the obsession with personal trainers.
By all means, cut out life’s pleasures – but please don’t show off about it. I’ve developed a different version of the line originally attributed to Voltaire: “I approve of what you do, but I will defend to the death my right not to listen to you bang on about it.”
In my revenge on the self-deniers, I’ve developed my own regime: drunken sport. There aren’t many forms of physical exercise – particularly the boring forms – that aren’t improved by a few drinks.
On New Year’s Day, I had two pints of scrumpy before biking along the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. Suddenly, I gazed afresh on sights familiar to me for 35 years. The low dusk light singed the evening clouds a burning red. The fields looked as if they’d been furrowed with a celestial rake. The long, steep hill leading to the village of St Petrox – normally agony on the thighs – was magically flattened and shortened.
Then, last week, I addressed the Richmond Literary Lunch at Royal Mid-Surrey Golf Club. I calmed my nerves with a few glasses of white wine – and then took to the golf course; the first time I’d played in over a year.
I can’t say I played particularly well. But I felt minimal nerves before a shot; and very little of my usual self-loathing anger after the shots I messed up.
Sportsmen pay sports psychologists a fortune to remove their nervousness. They could achieve the same effect for the price of a few drinks.
……..
I was struck by the obituary of Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea, who died last week, aged 91. The young Kamprad grew up on a Swedish farm, where he had been surprisingly lazy: he refused to get out of bed in the morning to help his father milk the cows.
He grew up to be a workaholic billionaire. It made me think of people with grown-up characteristics that are directly opposite to their childhood ones. These “reactive characteristics”, as I call them, crop up a lot.
Jeremy Lewis, the deputy editor of the Oldie, who sadly died last year, was an extremely sociable, chatty, gregarious man, but he had been cripplingly shy in his youth – “shy to the point of unemployability and prone to panic in social situations”, as his Telegraph obituary said.
There’s a strange logic to adult characteristics reacting against their childhood opposites. I, too, was a very shy child, who can now chat away at most occasions. That sort of transformation takes rather an intense series of self-taught lessons – so intense that you become quite adept at the newly learnt sociable characteristic. You also know how to deal with shy people – because you were one once.The growing awareness of the chaos and sadness that come of bad characteristics propels you in the opposite direction.
I remember as a teenager reading an article by Nigel Nicolson, the writer, publisher and son of Vita Sackville-West. Then in his 80s, he remembered how disorganised he’d been as a teenager, waiting weeks to pay a bill or answer a letter. He realised what extra agony these delays caused – he ended up looking at every bill a dozen times before paying it. Overnight, he changed his habits, answered every present and every bill by return of post and became immensely efficient – a classic reactive characteristic.
“The child is father of the man,” wrote Wordsworth. Yes – but quite often the man is the complete opposite of the child.
……..
Finishing off dinner – smoked salmon and rocket salad – at my flat the other night, I went to pick up a stray piece of lettuce from the kitchen table.
Except that I couldn’t pick it up because I was actually scraping at my tablecloth – which has a rose and rose-leaf pattern on it. What I thought was lettuce was in fact a bit of painted oilcloth.
Inadvertently, I’d recreated Pliny the Elder’s story of an ancient painting competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Zeuxis’s painting of grapes was so lifelike that birds flew down to eat them. Parrhasius’s painting was hidden behind a curtain, which he asked Zeuxis to open. He couldn’t open the curtain because it was itself a painted illusion. Zeuxis declared, “I have deceived the birds, but Parrhasius has deceived Zeuxis.”
The anonymous painter of my tablecloth had pulled off a similar trick. When I looked at the painted leaves, they were quite different from my rocket salad; they had been done in an impressionistic, illusionist way, but they still fooled me. They had emulated the Platonic ideal of rocket salad without being a slavish, ultra-realistic copy of rocket salad. A brilliant piece of art, in other words.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.