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Tour de Force

Chapter One: Middle-aged men can dream, too.

LOOKING back - and I’ve had plenty of time to think about it - the most enjoyable moment for me was when Harry dropped his trousers. It hadn’t been a restrained gathering before that, but the revelation of Harry’s (perfectly respectable) polkadot boxers signalled a change from general jollity into one of those dizzy passages of deliciously liberating mayhem and misrule and escape from tedious old strait-laced civilisation that seems to be required from time to time, especially if you’re male, and English. You will appreciate it even more when I tell you that Harry was then a middle-aged solicitor. And that there had been absolutely no hint of what was to follow when he rose to respond on our behalf to the generous and graceful remarks of the chief of our hosts.

Harry was wearing a blazer and tie as well as the trousers. His French was confident and beyond reproach for sounding anything else but English. His sentiments were grave, unimpeachable: ‘Merci, mes amis ...cette repas magnifique ... votre hospitalité vraiment extraordinaire ....’ It is true that he had climbed on to the long trestle table in front of him, better, we thought, to be seen and heard. And, although it was pretty noisy, he had commanded attention. But then, suddenly, he equally gravely and deliberately unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his trousers, and did it. Why, he couldn’t explain afterwards, falling back on that well-known and all-encompassing justification beloved of politicians: ‘It seemed the right thing to do’.

Anyway, thereafter my memory is of increased noise, laughter, shouting, singing, several Harry imitators and a Conga of mighty proportions working its way round the room. The French seemed pretty good at the mayhem thing, too. I didn’t know they were familiar with the Conga, let alone ‘Do You Know The Muffin Man?’, where competitors singing the old Victorian song attempt to negotiate obstacles, chairs, tables, and kneeling comrades while balancing glasses of beer on their heads after the style of the old street sellers. It was very popular with British officers in the Second World War, another, rather larger, incidence of male chaos. And we were, of course, an all-male gathering, apart, obviously, from Jan, but, if I remember rightly, which is not guaranteed, she was the only Muffin person to get through the course without spilling a drop.

Well, yes, I know, this sort of thing isn’t everyone’s, how should I say, tasse de the. I recall, even longer ago, a sassy sort of (American) West Coast woman commenting on an evening of loud conviviality involving drink and men hugely amused by themselves and each other: ‘Male bonding. Heavy.’ It also involved rugby, a pursuit rarely discussed where aesthetes gather. A suspicion of a fatal lack of sensitivity when compared to, say, cricket, which is conceived to be delivering an important cultural message by virtue of its stately impenetrability. Poets have paeaned and played cricket. Becket, for Godot’s sake, actually played first class cricket. And sport surely has no lovelier line than in Francis Thompson’s At Lords, ‘As the run-stealers flicker to and fro’. Even football has contrived to become ‘the beautiful game’ and to attract intellectual analysis and philosophical approval (although I believe this owes rather too much to the proximity of Arsenal to the leafier reaches of North London, and to their legendary coach, a Frenchman with an accent that bestows gravity upon the most banal of utterances, despite its similarity to that of the Sûreté’s non-pareil, Inspector Jacques Clouseau). But rugby? The last recorded sensitive soul was a Harlequins scrum-half called Jeremy in the Sixties who abandoned his England career and the game to go off basket-weaving in Provence. (I should point out that I’m talking about Rugby Union, not the other code, Rugby League, one of the North’s greatest gifts to the world, a game of fiercely concentrated force and flair not to be trifled with by the likes of us.)

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June 8

Harthacnut died on this day in 1042. Who? Exactly. It is a rarely acknowledged fact that a certain sort of English king doesn’t feature in the island story the English tell themselves: the ones that were, whisper it, Vikings.

Cnut, for example, is the only English and British king apart from Alfred to be called Great. But he was a Viking; for centuries this was disguised by anglicising his name to Canute (the possibility of misprinting Cnut played a part as well). The thing with the waves also lent him a certain English eccentricity.

His father, Swein Forkbeard, couldn’t be anything other than a fierce Viking (it has even been claimed that Forkbeard implies economy with the truth), so it might come as a surprise to learn that this king of Denmark was also king of England for five weeks in the winter of 1013-14 until he fell off his horse. Mention should also be made of his wife, the marvellously named Sigrid the Haughty, who had previously been married to Eric the Victorious, who nevertheless died losing.

But, Harthacnut: he was Cnut’s son, a vigorous soldier who reigned from 1040-42, and is memorable mostly for dying young without issue, thus paving the way for Edward the Confessor, Harold, Hastings, and another vicarious Viking, William of Normandy. We ought also to note that he succeeded his brother, the fleet Harold Harefoot, 1035-40, and conformed to the finest traditions of sibling rivalry by having Harold’s body dug up from Westminster Abbey and thrown into a marsh next to the Thames for having the effrontery to hold up his accession.

Not that the properly English (ie German) rulers around the time were without stain, or interest.

I am indebted to the late JL Carr, author of that fine novel, ‘A Month in the Country’, for most of these snippets:

Aethelstan, 927-39, was the first king of all England, achieving overlordship of northern Britain, which, you will be amazed to learn, really resented it. He was also the first king to wear a crown, copying the French, of course.

Edmund, 939-46, was killed trying to eject a gatecrasher from a feast in Pucklechurch.

Edred, 946-55, suffered from a stomach complaint: ‘dinner guests watched in fascinated horror as he first masticated food, then noisily sucked in its juices and, finally, spat out the residue’.

Eadwig, 955-959: Paid subscribers should go to January 26’s entry to be shocked by this monarch’s disgraceful behaviour at his coronation.

Edgar the Peaceful, 959-975, a handsome dwarf. The peacefulness might have had something to do with his criminal reforms which introduced punishments of nostril-slitting, eye-gouging and ear-ripping.

Ethelred the Unready, 978-1016. You know about him. But did you know the infant Ethelred urinated in the font when he was being baptised, leading St Dunstan to accurately prophesy the worst? And he was afraid of lighted candles, which must have been tricky.

Edward the Confessor,1042-66. The English saint of choice before the Normans replaced him with George, a Greek Turk who also is or was the patron saint of Portugal, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Ukraine, Malta, Ethiopia, Catalonia and Aragon, and therefore a curious symbol of insularity. Edward was a pious and meek man by accounts. By others, he had a terrible temper, sent his wife to a nunnery for failing to produce children (he remains the Catholic patron saint of difficult marriages), made his mother destitute, and ordered the assassination of an uppity Welsh prince. I didn’t know that he might have been an albino.

By accounts: one of the delights of this period for the whimsical and despair for the serious is that none of the above is definitively true: medieval chroniclers owed more of a duty to their patrons, persuasions and imaginations than to the truth. How unlike today!

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Welcome! Paid subscribers can now read the first chapter of my exciting new story of middle-aged men, ‘Tour de Force’!

Free subscribers desperate not to miss the entertainment of a lifetime are invited to shell out just over a quid a week to subscribe and thereby gain access not only to my Fairly Fantastic Fiction but also my FUNNY OLD THINGS, featuring a marvellous piece of past wit, wisdom and whimsical curiosity every day of the year.

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Tour de Force

Chapter One: Middle-aged men can dream, too.

LOOKING back - and I’ve had plenty of time to think about it - the most enjoyable moment for me was when Harry dropped his trousers. It hadn’t been a restrained gathering before that, but the revelation of Harry’s (perfectly respectable) polkadot boxers signalled a change from general jollity into one of those dizzy passages of deliciously liberating mayhem and misrule and escape from tedious old strait-laced civilisation that seems to be required from time to time, especially if you’re male, and English. You will appreciate it even more when I tell you that Harry was then a middle-aged solicitor. And that there had been absolutely no hint of what was to follow when he rose to respond on our behalf to the generous and graceful remarks of the chief of our hosts.

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May 31

Today, yes, further adventures in remarkably coincidental births and of famous people!

Born on the same day:

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin: February 12, 1809

Margaret Thatcher and Lenny Bruce: October 13, 1925

Fats Domino and Ariel Sharon: February 26, 1928

Tom Wolfe and Mikhail Gorbachev: March 2, 1931

Van Morrison…

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Welcome! Paid subscribers can now read the thrilling conclusion to ‘Looks Like Carelessness’, an everyday story of murder!

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LOOKS LIKE CARELESSNESS

Chapter One: Philip Jackson, Country Lawyer

Jackson wasn’t listening to the Today programme. It was the so-called ‘light item’ that they tended to spin out mercilessly until nine o’clock, something about beards. Moving slowly in the traffic towards his office, he had grown tired of just gloomily staring and was now aimlessly pondering. Bloody traffic. The 2-0 loss to Arsenal hadn’t done them any favours, just when they seemed to running into a bit of form. How will Mum be on Saturday? Why do people insist on using ‘less’ when they mean ‘fewer’? Sarah’s been a bit odd, a bit distant lately. Why is everybody ‘special’, ‘passionate’ and ‘on a journey’? Why is Simon Jones such a crashingly supremely irritating pompous fart? He changed the radio to the CD, which, as usual, was playing Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant on full scream.

Arriving at last, he drew into the car park and parked in the space marked with the number plate of his last car, the dull old Saab he’d finally and reluctantly parted with after the argument with the electric gates as he was leaving the cocktail party Simon Jones insisted on throwing annually. Jones was the only person Jackson knew still throwing cocktail parties, just as he seemed to be the only senior partner anywhere who hadn’t noticed that even footballers were wearing cutaway collars now. Prat. He got out, just resisting the impulse to slam the door of his sensible sensible something or other into Jones’s irritatingly white Mercedes in the next bay. God, he thought, I’ll be running my key down its side soon, just a pity about the CCTV.

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May 20

It’s clearly odd to expect th…

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May 10

Of the many unrega…

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May 3

On this date in 752, the great Mayan king Yaxun Bʼahlam IV (Bird Jaguar IV), son of Lady Ik’Skull (Evening Star) came to the throne in Yaxchilan, now Chiapas, Mexico.

It was towards the end of a civilisation that had its beginnings around 2000BC and made matchless progress in the study of mathematics, time and the stars. The Mayans built mighty step pyramids throughout present-day Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize and Honduras. They developed the concept of zero, which they held in such reverence that they refused to sully its purity by using it as a wheel. They studied the universe and wrote books. Only a handful survive, including the Popol Vuh, their wonderfully complex creation story. No one knows how many more were burnt by the Spanish conquistadores, or what knowledge they contained. No one knows exactly why their civilisation declined so sharply towards the end of our first millennium. Their cities are still being discovered deep in the rain forests of Central America.

In short, much of the Maya remains mysterious: how, for just one example, could a civilisation that believed butterflies were the messengers of the gods, available for whispered wishes, also enthusiastically indulge in human sacrifice to achieve the same end?

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April 30

Born either today or tomorrow in either…

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