That’s the big question. So let’s not waste any more time in case we die of old age, and leap right in. Here is a subsidiary question to help us on our way -
Which well-known person of-a-certain-age do you most want to be like?
Is it –
1. Trevor Nunn?*
2. Woody Allen?
3. Your father (for female readers – your mother)?
4. John Prescott?
5. Twiggy? (this book is for women as well as men. No really it is)**
(* For bankers and chemical engineers and others who aren't au fait with the Arts - Sir Trevor is a very heterosexual theatre director, currently married to the gorgeous Imogen Stubbs. He's directed Cats and Starlight Express and Les Miserables. And a lot of plays by Shakespeare. And some other stuff I forget).
(** No it is. Really. So if I sometimes, or in fact always, forget to do the she instead of the he thing and stuff like that could you please just pretend I did it? It'll be easy after the first few goes - women are so much more imaginative than men).
If you look at the footnote about Trev you’ll think there’s no contest here - Imogen Stubbs, loads of money, loads of fun auditioning all those chicks in Cats. Perhaps you’re not so keen on the Shakespeare but that’s OK because he doesn’t do much any more. And if you look at a recent photo of him you’ll think it’s even more of a no-brainer. He’s clearly done a deal with the devil because he’s no spring chicken but even so he manages to wear jeans and trainers to the manner born and he’s not become a fatty (unlike his former boss Peter Hall) and he’s still got saturnine (I think that’s the word) good looks.
A little more about the good looks. The amazing thing is he’s only two years younger than John Prescott but he’s still got really dark hair with a moustache and beard to match. More than a touch of the Grecian Two Thousand probably, but what the hell, it works. The other thing about the hair is, it’s really long, and even so it doesn’t make him look a prat. To put this in perspective just think what John Prescott would be like with long hair - it’d be like Les Dawson as the Ugly Sister.
What about the other candidates? I think we can cross out parents because clearly no man in his right man wants to be like his father and most women seem to want to throttle their mothers.
So what about John Prescott?
Right. That leaves us with Woody Allen and Twiggy.
Of course we all know the worries about Woody. Do you really want to be known for the films you made over twenty years ago and not the crappy ones you’ve slaved over more recently? And, well, did you marry your daughter or didn’t you? (No he didn’t. But even so….) You would think that someone famous both for his sense of humour and for all those years in therapy might have a more highly developed yuk factor. On the other hand, the sense of humour must have something going for it. After all, when you look like a depressed weasel and are obsessed with death it’s pretty impressive to be able to get Diane Keaton into bed both on screen and in reality.
Like his best films, all that was over twenty years ago. The other thing is he’s at least a hundred and eighty so he’s easily the oldest on the list (not that chronological age matters….)
So I think that leaves us with a short-list of two. The clear favourite – Sir Trev. And Twiggy.
You know, the more I think about Twiggy the more I wonder. After all, who wouldn’t want to be like Twiggy? Attractive, down to earth, everyone loves her and she’s the youngest on the list (not that chronological – etc….)* Not to mention all that money from M & S…..
(* I think I've now made the point. To sum up, in case you really are gaga - chronological age is totally irrelevant nowadays except to a few sadistic saddos in the NHS. That's the last time I shall say it. Ever. So when I say old or young in future you'll know I don't mean it, not really. Not like that anyway).
Mind you, it’s not half as much as Trev gets from all those Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals….
Hang on though - times have changed. This is the twenty-first century and we’re all strapped for cash and disgusted by excessive wealth and angrily rejecting superficial materialistic values. Anyway which do you prefer, M & S or Andrew Lloyd Webber? No contest really, is there?
So is it Trev or Twiggy? Who do we most want to be like? A multi-millionaire hugely talented knight of the realm with saturnine good looks that vastly belie his age or a well-preserved former sixties icon….?
I’ve made up my mind. Trevor - you’re fired.
It’s not really because of Andrew Lloyd Webber. You see, Trev, to be painfully honest the bonus with Twiggy that we don’t get with you is that though she looks great she doesn’t look twenty years younger than she’s meant to. So there’s not the risk that she’s going to wake up one morning and find her face has suddenly collapsed and she suddenly looks her proper age and everyone’s pointing at her and laughing and making hurtful jokes about Les Dawson and are you doing panto this year?
It’s the Dorian Gray problem of course. It goes without saying that none of wants to look “old”, but how much are we willing to sacrifice comfort and security in order to stay looking “young”? Do we really want to be on tenterhooks the whole time like poor old - but ever young-looking - Dorian? I guarantee that he lived in constant dread that one day someone from the Antiques Roadshow was going to pop up to his attic and find the ever-wrinklier portrait of him hidden away behind his school reports and that trike he had when he was four and start asking him all about it and then he’d just be so embarrassed.
Let’s leave Dorian to his tragic fate and have another subsidiary question.
Is there anything at all about your parents’ attitude to age that you envy?
Yes yes I know - why would you possibly envy it when so far as you can remember they were always old and always perfectly happy to be? You forget that what I’m attempting is to guide you gently but firmly towards a conclusive answer to the big question - which in case you’ve forgotten was How old do you want to be?
Every option has to be explored. Some people might say our parents were just being mature and realistic, and unlike their children didn’t spend their whole lives obsessively chasing youth and novelty by getting divorced and remarrying and/or deciding they really couldn’t commit after all and one way or another ending up in penury because there wasn’t enough left to live properly after all those years of alimony and child maintenance.
Yes yes I’m sorry, that’s far too bleak a picture of our lives. Bleak and glib.
Besides, the right to live in post-divorce penury is a hard-won freedom - just like votes for women and not being charged for withdrawing money from holes in the wall - and you mock it at your peril.
Let’s put aside our preconceptions and answer the question truthfully:
Are you really sure that deep down you don’t just want to be comfortably old in matching beige cardigans like your parents always were, contentedly watching tapes of All Creatures Great And Small on your ancient VHS recorder?
OK OK it might sound appalling and you’ll undoubtedly end up with that weirdly horrible “old” smell just like your parents….
But on the other hand….?
On the other hand wouldn’t it be quite nice just to be cosy and unstressed and not needing to impress anyone ever again in your whole life?
There are three possible answers to this:
1. Yes it would
2. No it wouldn’t
3. Don’t condescend to me you little prick….
If you’ve ticked “1. Yes it would” -
You have either already died or will very shortly, so you might as well stop reading now and do something comforting in your last hours like switching back to All Creatures Great And Small.*
(* Or if you want to give your mind one final canter before reaching life's last winning post, why don't you try to work out why Dr Who is one of the lead characters in All Creatures Great And Small and why is he pretending to be a 1930s vet, and why Peter Davison is a thousand years younger than his "brother" Robert Hardy. Is it to do with time travelling? And is the fact that Nicholas Lyndhurst in Only Fools And Horses is also clearly a thousand years young than his "brother" David Jason an homage to the celebrated vet series? You have probably already noticed that both series have six-syllable titles. This cannot be a coincidence. There is a pattern there somewhere).
If you’ve ticked “2. No it wouldn’t” -
You’re still vibrant and alive and probably still a bit of a stud on the quiet, though maybe only a Saga-stud (which is better than nothing, believe me). I’d like to welcome you back on board and trust you’ll stay with us to the bitter end. Just like our parents did with their unhappy, interminable marriages.
If you’ve ticked “3. Don’t condescend to me you little prick….” –
I assure you that’s fine, perfectly OK, I’m not offended, in fact you might even be quite amusing in an immature sort of way. So join the club - we need people like you. And I bet you don’t really own a beige cardigan or watch saddo videos, do you? No exactly.
This is fascinating isn’t it? I sense we’re really getting somewhere now, we’re really getting much closer to answering the big question – How old do you want to be?
Let’s have a quick recap of the information we’ve gleaned so far….
In answer to subsidiary question one – the person you most want to be like is -the youngest name on the list.
In answer to subsidiary question two – you have no respect whatsoever for your parents’ attitude to age – and even more significantly, the very thought of being as old as them makes you shudder with horror and whimper with appalled disbelief.
Now hang on a minute while I work out a couple of things….
Right. I’ve now analysed all the evidence and to my surprise we’re pretty close to a result. It’s clear that those who haven’t left us for the final consolation of their ancient VHSs now have a really pretty good idea of how old they’d like to be.
The truly amazing thing is that give or take a few years they’re pretty much in agreement.
Please remember, there’s inevitably a margin of error here because there are various anomalies and imponderables to take into account - the most obvious being that though all our parents are of different ages, it seems there’s unanimous agreement that none of them was ever under sixty.
Which is a little surprising, when you think about it.
There’s also the disturbing fact that even in the time it’s taken me to to work out the figures everyone has got a little bit older - even Trev.
After taking into account all the above and also taking into accounts lots of other complex stuff that’d be far too hard to explain to you, I can now give you the answer to the big question -
How old do you want to be?
Fifty-three.
Thursday, 15 October 2009
Arnold's introduction: What is old?
OK so you’re sixty. Or is it seventy? So what? What’s the difference? Yes all right, there’s ten years difference, but what does that mean? I mean really mean? It’s just a number. They’re all just meaningless numbers. Because the point is you don’t have to be old any more. Age has nothing to do with how long you’ve been on the planet any more.
Nowadays the great thing is, you’re only as old as you feel.
Think about these two men.
One of them is forty-nine and he’s depressed and his wife has left him and he hates himself because he’s never done what he wanted in life and now it’s too late and his world’s about to collapse - and all because he is nearly fifty.
The other is seventy-eight and his wife has just died. So what does he do? He decides you’re only as old as you feel, and he becomes a silver surfer and he sneaks into the over-fifties chatroom where he lies outrageously about his age and meets this amazing woman and now he’s suddenly having the best sex of his life and feels like a teenager all over again. And he’s nearly eighty!
Isn’t that a life-enhancing story?
Not for the forty-nine-year-old unfortunately, because the seventy-eight year old happens to be his Dad, and his sudden success with women only makes his son’s chronic sense of failure even worse, and to add to his woes his Mum’s hardly cold in her grave - and she’s already been replaced with this fat blowsy nurse - this truly awful woman, hideous and vulgar - and the trouble is he just finds her totally and rivetingly sexy.
He feels horribly guilty about this and tries to stop it but he can’t. And his self-loathing reaches unbearable levels because inside his head he’s now being incestuous and disloyal to his Mum - both at the same time.
I’m straying from the point.
The son is not our role model. He’s a self-pitying loser and a weirdo. No wonder his wife left him. The one whose side we’re on here is Dad, isn’t it? Because the point is that eighty is the new sixty and sixty is the new forty, and life nowadays is great for all of them.
Well isn’t it?
Of course it is. Just look around you. Joan Collins is having rampant sex with her toy boy husband and Hugh Hefner is apparently still busy doing whatever he does with his bunny girls and Michael Douglas has married the sexy one from The Darling Buds Of May and become a proper family man in his dotage.
Maybe the rest of us don’t live such remarkable lives but we do our best, we haven’t given in, and to prove it we still defiantly wear jeans – our badge of eternal youth - just like our kids do.
Which means we’re cool and happy. According to Esther Rantzen, the baby-boomer generation are now having the time of their lives - and she should know.*
(*Or should she? According to my dictionary, the baby boomer generation is from 1946 to 1964, while Esther clocked in in 1940. I mean come on, I don't want to be pedantic but sorry Esther, this is a serious attempt to deal with a very complex issue and little fibs like that don't help).
Then there’s the couple who recently got divorced in their eighties.
What does that tell you about changing attitudes to age? An optimistic, death-defying act if ever there was one.
It seems it was the wife who divorced the husband. When asked why she had done it, she said that all her husband wanted to do was watch DVDs of Heartbeat and anything with Stephen Fry in it while she wanted to travel the world and explore her inner potential.
Good for her, eh?
God what a boring stick-at-home slob he sounds, doesn’t he?! I mean come on, you’re eighty-four, get a life….
And what about the most mind-boggling news story of all, the recent announcement that Saga magazine is opening its own sexual addiction clinic?
Isn’t that amazing?
What does that say about getting old today?
Am I alone in having the guilty thought that while we all agree sexual addiction and the awful diseases that go with it really aren’t very nice, on the other hand the idea of all these thoughtlessly promiscuous oldsters busily giving everyone the clap is somehow really cheering?
I probably am alone because I just made it up. But there’s a poetic truth in there somewhere, isn’t there?
A deeper psychological truth.
Which just adds further fuel to my argument - though it really hardly needs it because we all agree it’s true anyway. “Act your age” doesn’t mean anything any more. Straightforward chronological age just no longer exists. Nowadays you really are only as old as you feel.
Or are you?
When you reach sixty the National Health Service sends you a special birthday present. This is like getting a telegram from the Queen when you reach a hundred but not so exciting.
It is, in fact, a bowel cancer testing package.
Once you have got over the shock you will see that it comprises six cardboard sticks and a rather jolly orange and white piece of cardboard with three little pairs of windows on it. The man pictured on the front of the instructions leaflet is beaming happily, probably because he hasn’t read them yet.
This is what you do. When you have a crap you dip one of the sticks into it and spread it over the first window. Then you get hold of a different bit of the same bowel movement - a highly skilled activity because you also have to make sure it hasn’t yet plopped into the toilet bowl – and quickly do the dip-and-spead trick with a second stick.
Repeat the process on the next two occasions you crap.
If you manage to survive all this, carefully place the poo-smeared windows into an envelope and send it off to Noel Edmonds or any other person you seriously detest (second-class, so it will be really rich and whiffy when it arrives).
Or you can be boring and predictable and send it to the testing place in Harrow.
This whole protracted process is clearly aimed at reminding us of our mortality, rather like those skulls in Renaissance paintings. OK, they’re telling us, we’ve given you free prescriptions and bus rides and we respect your contribution to society so much that we’re not even making you pay fines any more on your overdue library books, but don’t forget the real reason - you’ve probably already got some awful life-threatening disease and you’ll be dead very soon and no longer a disgusting burden on the rest of us - thank God.
So my NHS birthday present clearly shows that some un-PC types really don’t think you’re only as old as you feel - they genuinely believe that physical elements are of prime importance!
For these pathetically old-fashioned souls the idea of chronological age is clearly as relevant as it ever was.
One of the main aims of this guide is to help such literal-minded types to see the far more painfully complex reality. The other is to help those of us who are - shall I say - no longer quite so young to cope with the crisis of identity I sense in our midst….
Who are we?
Why are we?
Can we still wear things that say “slimline” on them and will they laugh at us if we shop at Primark?
How ridiculous, I hear the sceptics say, people have managed to get older perfectly well on their own for years without the use of self-help guides, they’re nothing but a cynical way to part the gullible from their money…
And look at it! What on earth can a flimsy smart-arsed little book like this possibly do to help the not-quite-so-young deal with their problems?!
To which the simple answer is that babies and children and their parents somehow managed to muddle along unaided until Dr Benjamin Spock published Baby and Child Care in 1946. Now no self-respecting parent would dare come within a hundred yards of their new-born baby until they’d read at least half a dozen childcare manuals.
Sometimes the world just doesn’t realize what it lacks until a Spock or a Freud or a Trinny and Susannah comes along and provides it.
Nowadays the great thing is, you’re only as old as you feel.
Think about these two men.
One of them is forty-nine and he’s depressed and his wife has left him and he hates himself because he’s never done what he wanted in life and now it’s too late and his world’s about to collapse - and all because he is nearly fifty.
The other is seventy-eight and his wife has just died. So what does he do? He decides you’re only as old as you feel, and he becomes a silver surfer and he sneaks into the over-fifties chatroom where he lies outrageously about his age and meets this amazing woman and now he’s suddenly having the best sex of his life and feels like a teenager all over again. And he’s nearly eighty!
Isn’t that a life-enhancing story?
Not for the forty-nine-year-old unfortunately, because the seventy-eight year old happens to be his Dad, and his sudden success with women only makes his son’s chronic sense of failure even worse, and to add to his woes his Mum’s hardly cold in her grave - and she’s already been replaced with this fat blowsy nurse - this truly awful woman, hideous and vulgar - and the trouble is he just finds her totally and rivetingly sexy.
He feels horribly guilty about this and tries to stop it but he can’t. And his self-loathing reaches unbearable levels because inside his head he’s now being incestuous and disloyal to his Mum - both at the same time.
I’m straying from the point.
The son is not our role model. He’s a self-pitying loser and a weirdo. No wonder his wife left him. The one whose side we’re on here is Dad, isn’t it? Because the point is that eighty is the new sixty and sixty is the new forty, and life nowadays is great for all of them.
Well isn’t it?
Of course it is. Just look around you. Joan Collins is having rampant sex with her toy boy husband and Hugh Hefner is apparently still busy doing whatever he does with his bunny girls and Michael Douglas has married the sexy one from The Darling Buds Of May and become a proper family man in his dotage.
Maybe the rest of us don’t live such remarkable lives but we do our best, we haven’t given in, and to prove it we still defiantly wear jeans – our badge of eternal youth - just like our kids do.
Which means we’re cool and happy. According to Esther Rantzen, the baby-boomer generation are now having the time of their lives - and she should know.*
(*Or should she? According to my dictionary, the baby boomer generation is from 1946 to 1964, while Esther clocked in in 1940. I mean come on, I don't want to be pedantic but sorry Esther, this is a serious attempt to deal with a very complex issue and little fibs like that don't help).
Then there’s the couple who recently got divorced in their eighties.
What does that tell you about changing attitudes to age? An optimistic, death-defying act if ever there was one.
It seems it was the wife who divorced the husband. When asked why she had done it, she said that all her husband wanted to do was watch DVDs of Heartbeat and anything with Stephen Fry in it while she wanted to travel the world and explore her inner potential.
Good for her, eh?
God what a boring stick-at-home slob he sounds, doesn’t he?! I mean come on, you’re eighty-four, get a life….
And what about the most mind-boggling news story of all, the recent announcement that Saga magazine is opening its own sexual addiction clinic?
Isn’t that amazing?
What does that say about getting old today?
Am I alone in having the guilty thought that while we all agree sexual addiction and the awful diseases that go with it really aren’t very nice, on the other hand the idea of all these thoughtlessly promiscuous oldsters busily giving everyone the clap is somehow really cheering?
I probably am alone because I just made it up. But there’s a poetic truth in there somewhere, isn’t there?
A deeper psychological truth.
Which just adds further fuel to my argument - though it really hardly needs it because we all agree it’s true anyway. “Act your age” doesn’t mean anything any more. Straightforward chronological age just no longer exists. Nowadays you really are only as old as you feel.
Or are you?
When you reach sixty the National Health Service sends you a special birthday present. This is like getting a telegram from the Queen when you reach a hundred but not so exciting.
It is, in fact, a bowel cancer testing package.
Once you have got over the shock you will see that it comprises six cardboard sticks and a rather jolly orange and white piece of cardboard with three little pairs of windows on it. The man pictured on the front of the instructions leaflet is beaming happily, probably because he hasn’t read them yet.
This is what you do. When you have a crap you dip one of the sticks into it and spread it over the first window. Then you get hold of a different bit of the same bowel movement - a highly skilled activity because you also have to make sure it hasn’t yet plopped into the toilet bowl – and quickly do the dip-and-spead trick with a second stick.
Repeat the process on the next two occasions you crap.
If you manage to survive all this, carefully place the poo-smeared windows into an envelope and send it off to Noel Edmonds or any other person you seriously detest (second-class, so it will be really rich and whiffy when it arrives).
Or you can be boring and predictable and send it to the testing place in Harrow.
This whole protracted process is clearly aimed at reminding us of our mortality, rather like those skulls in Renaissance paintings. OK, they’re telling us, we’ve given you free prescriptions and bus rides and we respect your contribution to society so much that we’re not even making you pay fines any more on your overdue library books, but don’t forget the real reason - you’ve probably already got some awful life-threatening disease and you’ll be dead very soon and no longer a disgusting burden on the rest of us - thank God.
So my NHS birthday present clearly shows that some un-PC types really don’t think you’re only as old as you feel - they genuinely believe that physical elements are of prime importance!
For these pathetically old-fashioned souls the idea of chronological age is clearly as relevant as it ever was.
One of the main aims of this guide is to help such literal-minded types to see the far more painfully complex reality. The other is to help those of us who are - shall I say - no longer quite so young to cope with the crisis of identity I sense in our midst….
Who are we?
Why are we?
Can we still wear things that say “slimline” on them and will they laugh at us if we shop at Primark?
How ridiculous, I hear the sceptics say, people have managed to get older perfectly well on their own for years without the use of self-help guides, they’re nothing but a cynical way to part the gullible from their money…
And look at it! What on earth can a flimsy smart-arsed little book like this possibly do to help the not-quite-so-young deal with their problems?!
To which the simple answer is that babies and children and their parents somehow managed to muddle along unaided until Dr Benjamin Spock published Baby and Child Care in 1946. Now no self-respecting parent would dare come within a hundred yards of their new-born baby until they’d read at least half a dozen childcare manuals.
Sometimes the world just doesn’t realize what it lacks until a Spock or a Freud or a Trinny and Susannah comes along and provides it.
An introduction from Cap Ferrat
This blog - as I believe it's called - is not really by me. It is by Arnold Appleforth. The late great Arnold Appleforth, of whom, sad to say, hardly any of you will have heard.
I am honoured to act merely as his conduit, and to introduce his golden words to you, blog by blog - or chapter by chapter, as he would have preferred to think of it - through this delightful new medium that he never even began to master.
Because my dear departed friend and colleague was one of the old school. A writer who learned his craft the hard way, not from soft-option media studies courses and MAs in journalism but from years of sweating over Middle English at Peterborough Poly, then more years reviewing amateur productions of Peer Gynt and Private Lives for the Market Harborough Gazette and finally, when London at last came calling, from those endless, incomparably productive hours in El Vino’s and the various bars of the BBC – in the days when the BBC had such things. (Remember that in those far-off halcyon days no writer worth his salt ever wrote anything even halfway decent without a very serious hangover).
As I re-read this brilliantly witty and incisive little guide – tragically his last completed work – I quietly rejoice because it is sparklingly clear in every blog - or chapter, I hear him shout - that those years of struggle really did pay off.
His musings on the suburban childhood he so loathed are particularly fine, as is his rugged - some would say perverse - refusal to give in to the ageing process in any way at all. In every erudite, fun-packed blog - or chapter, sorry! - it is joyfully clear that he still had his sixty-plus finger firmly on the pulse of contemporary culture in all its forms. (Well almost all). Not even his famous travel guides to countries he never visited have quite the breadth, insight, freshness and sheer originality that we see here.
As I raise a metaphorical glass to his talent, I find the tears well up as I recall what is lost. How grand it was to be alive then and to know Arnold Appleforth! What innocent fun we had in those golden far-off days!
Let’s not get sentimental. Arnold hated sentimentality. I still smile as I fondly recall his oft-repeated words, “Sentimental fucking wanker” - invariably hissed at me as the tears welled up as I took in the latest disastrous news about his roller-coaster personal life.
Fortunately there was always the work. The work was his salvation, and in those glorious golden far-off halcyon days when we were bosom buddies he would happily turn his hand to virtually anything – from second-string theatre reviews in The Guardian to drily witty op-ed pieces about the broken society for The Daily Telegraph, to a not entirely successful episode of All Creatures Great And Small in which Christopher Timothy (or was it Peter Davison?) toyed with becoming a Marxist.
Because there was always a touch of the leftie in Arnold.
It is there in his journalism, and in his famously anti-travel travel guides, and you can just about see it in his occasional, invariably heavily censored contributions to popular television drama after the All Creatures Great And Small debacle made him for too many years persona non grata at the BBC. I remember with particularly fondness an episode of Miss Marple he wrote, in the first draft of which Joan Hickson railed against the vicar’s decision to send his son to private school and fingered him as the murderer purely for that reason. When I subsequently agreed to rewrite it for the BBC with the correct murderer and the correct motive back in place, just as Miss Christie had intended, he attacked me furiously for being a craven lickspittle and lacking all integrity.
Which was fair comment, of course. I never quite had his fire.
All the same, I was never entirely sure if it was really politics that motivated him or just a perverse desire to get up people’s noses.
Many were the liquid lunch we shared where we argued fiercely about this very point. I fondly remember how Arnold would get ruder by the glass until by the second bottle he was hurling abuse at me, my loved ones, his loved ones and of course the great and the good who were stopping him reaching the creative heights where he somehow instinctively knew he belonged.
When he had his first heart attack some unkind people put it down to alcohol.
It was more complicated than that.
As I said earlier, for many years he happily turned his hand to virtually anything. How fortunate that he was so happy because in later years he sadly had no choice in the matter. After his first marriage failed he philosophically paid both for the alimony and for the love nest he had already set up with Cynthia in Golders Green. After Cynthia left him for their little boy’s deputy headmistress he seemed quite resigned to paying for their support too.
When ten years later his third wife took their three girls off to live with her tennis coach in Eastbourne and promised that her solicitor would take him for every penny he had ever earned, I did discern the first tiny hint of bitterness.
And why not?
By this time he was well into his fifties but still had seven dependents and could not afford to turn down anything.
What made it even worse for a man as proud as Arnold was that he could no longer afford to argue the toss with editors, sub-editors, producers or “any of the other adolescent fucking arseholes” who - as he wittily put it - made the BBC bigwigs during the All Creatures Great And Small debacle “seem like Father fucking Christmas”.
Fortunately his gift for the telling phrase never deserted him, even in these difficult times. Beneath the unself-pitying Wildean façade I sensed an increasingly broken man. I have no doubt that it was the stress of constantly having to hide his true opinions that brought on the fatal second heart attack.
I remember a particularly poignant occasion only weeks before his death. What, he asked me, is the point? Where is my fucking raison d’etre if I can no longer get up in the morning and meet you for lunch and look at you pityingly over the vino reddo and think to myself, well at least I’m not a total fucking cop-out like him?
Goodness, how I miss him. The dry subversive humour. The starkly unsentimental ability to see right through the phoneyness, even his own. “I’m not just a hack,” he used to say to me, “I’m a pseudo-fucking-intellectual hack, and don’t you forget it!”
He was - and I don’t.
Despite not being allowed to read any book at his beloved Peterborough Poly that was written after 1470, he was still one of the best read men I have ever met. Even when he had not read something he was such a brilliant liar you hardly ever realized.
When he was first asked to write this little guide, he was I am sure aware it was his last chance to make his grand statement to the world. Intimations of mortality were already crowding in on him, and he eagerly grasped the opportunity to put down once and for all his uniquely witty, sprightly, comic yet still somehow tragic vision of life.
Should we take his advice on getting older seriously?
Should we regard it as a last irreverent jeu d’esprit, a last attempt to laugh in the face of the biggest joke of all, death itself?
Maybe a bit of both?
Whatever posterity decides, I personally have no doubt that in one way or another - and probably, knowing Arnold, both - he meant it to be no more but definitely no less than a final distillation of one man’s heroically defiant “up yours” philosophy.
Sad to say even this modest ambition was to be frustrated, as the ever-growing interference in his work by “adolescent fucking arseholes” reached its painful pinnacle here.
After Arnold’s second heart attack I visited him regularly in hospital. On my final visit, he shakily put the manuscript into my hands and asked me to look after his last baby for him - at which point I confess the tears did not so much well up in my eyes as spurt all over what tragically turned out to be his deathbed.
On the bus home I had a quick flick through the manuscript to try to find out why it had been so callously rejected by the uncaring conglomerate who had commissioned it. I was shocked to see it was covered with crass editorial comments in red ink and far too many exclamation marks. I angrily planned to delete them all, but after much agonising - and with the enthusiastic help of a young friend who is, I confess, far more expert at such arcane matters as posting and blogging than myself - I kept them in, precisely as written, not just to show the intolerable pressure he was under but also to celebrate the fact that, somehow, his voice defiantly survives even so.
Because defiance really was Arnold’s middle name. In this his last work I think he finally won his lifelong battle to meld the stylistic purity of his two great heroes, F Scott Fitzgerald and Oscar Wilde - “the hetero version,” I hear him say - with a dash of middle-period Bob Monkhouse.
Insightful, epigramatic, ever ready with the smart one-liner and the acidly accurate put-down. Rest in peace, Arnie, closet Sudoku fan and quiz fiend - literary Jack of all trades – and master of quite a lot of them, too. Let this posthumous online publication serve as your memorial.
William Humble, Cap Ferrat, 2009
I am honoured to act merely as his conduit, and to introduce his golden words to you, blog by blog - or chapter by chapter, as he would have preferred to think of it - through this delightful new medium that he never even began to master.
Because my dear departed friend and colleague was one of the old school. A writer who learned his craft the hard way, not from soft-option media studies courses and MAs in journalism but from years of sweating over Middle English at Peterborough Poly, then more years reviewing amateur productions of Peer Gynt and Private Lives for the Market Harborough Gazette and finally, when London at last came calling, from those endless, incomparably productive hours in El Vino’s and the various bars of the BBC – in the days when the BBC had such things. (Remember that in those far-off halcyon days no writer worth his salt ever wrote anything even halfway decent without a very serious hangover).
As I re-read this brilliantly witty and incisive little guide – tragically his last completed work – I quietly rejoice because it is sparklingly clear in every blog - or chapter, I hear him shout - that those years of struggle really did pay off.
His musings on the suburban childhood he so loathed are particularly fine, as is his rugged - some would say perverse - refusal to give in to the ageing process in any way at all. In every erudite, fun-packed blog - or chapter, sorry! - it is joyfully clear that he still had his sixty-plus finger firmly on the pulse of contemporary culture in all its forms. (Well almost all). Not even his famous travel guides to countries he never visited have quite the breadth, insight, freshness and sheer originality that we see here.
As I raise a metaphorical glass to his talent, I find the tears well up as I recall what is lost. How grand it was to be alive then and to know Arnold Appleforth! What innocent fun we had in those golden far-off days!
Let’s not get sentimental. Arnold hated sentimentality. I still smile as I fondly recall his oft-repeated words, “Sentimental fucking wanker” - invariably hissed at me as the tears welled up as I took in the latest disastrous news about his roller-coaster personal life.
Fortunately there was always the work. The work was his salvation, and in those glorious golden far-off halcyon days when we were bosom buddies he would happily turn his hand to virtually anything – from second-string theatre reviews in The Guardian to drily witty op-ed pieces about the broken society for The Daily Telegraph, to a not entirely successful episode of All Creatures Great And Small in which Christopher Timothy (or was it Peter Davison?) toyed with becoming a Marxist.
Because there was always a touch of the leftie in Arnold.
It is there in his journalism, and in his famously anti-travel travel guides, and you can just about see it in his occasional, invariably heavily censored contributions to popular television drama after the All Creatures Great And Small debacle made him for too many years persona non grata at the BBC. I remember with particularly fondness an episode of Miss Marple he wrote, in the first draft of which Joan Hickson railed against the vicar’s decision to send his son to private school and fingered him as the murderer purely for that reason. When I subsequently agreed to rewrite it for the BBC with the correct murderer and the correct motive back in place, just as Miss Christie had intended, he attacked me furiously for being a craven lickspittle and lacking all integrity.
Which was fair comment, of course. I never quite had his fire.
All the same, I was never entirely sure if it was really politics that motivated him or just a perverse desire to get up people’s noses.
Many were the liquid lunch we shared where we argued fiercely about this very point. I fondly remember how Arnold would get ruder by the glass until by the second bottle he was hurling abuse at me, my loved ones, his loved ones and of course the great and the good who were stopping him reaching the creative heights where he somehow instinctively knew he belonged.
When he had his first heart attack some unkind people put it down to alcohol.
It was more complicated than that.
As I said earlier, for many years he happily turned his hand to virtually anything. How fortunate that he was so happy because in later years he sadly had no choice in the matter. After his first marriage failed he philosophically paid both for the alimony and for the love nest he had already set up with Cynthia in Golders Green. After Cynthia left him for their little boy’s deputy headmistress he seemed quite resigned to paying for their support too.
When ten years later his third wife took their three girls off to live with her tennis coach in Eastbourne and promised that her solicitor would take him for every penny he had ever earned, I did discern the first tiny hint of bitterness.
And why not?
By this time he was well into his fifties but still had seven dependents and could not afford to turn down anything.
What made it even worse for a man as proud as Arnold was that he could no longer afford to argue the toss with editors, sub-editors, producers or “any of the other adolescent fucking arseholes” who - as he wittily put it - made the BBC bigwigs during the All Creatures Great And Small debacle “seem like Father fucking Christmas”.
Fortunately his gift for the telling phrase never deserted him, even in these difficult times. Beneath the unself-pitying Wildean façade I sensed an increasingly broken man. I have no doubt that it was the stress of constantly having to hide his true opinions that brought on the fatal second heart attack.
I remember a particularly poignant occasion only weeks before his death. What, he asked me, is the point? Where is my fucking raison d’etre if I can no longer get up in the morning and meet you for lunch and look at you pityingly over the vino reddo and think to myself, well at least I’m not a total fucking cop-out like him?
Goodness, how I miss him. The dry subversive humour. The starkly unsentimental ability to see right through the phoneyness, even his own. “I’m not just a hack,” he used to say to me, “I’m a pseudo-fucking-intellectual hack, and don’t you forget it!”
He was - and I don’t.
Despite not being allowed to read any book at his beloved Peterborough Poly that was written after 1470, he was still one of the best read men I have ever met. Even when he had not read something he was such a brilliant liar you hardly ever realized.
When he was first asked to write this little guide, he was I am sure aware it was his last chance to make his grand statement to the world. Intimations of mortality were already crowding in on him, and he eagerly grasped the opportunity to put down once and for all his uniquely witty, sprightly, comic yet still somehow tragic vision of life.
Should we take his advice on getting older seriously?
Should we regard it as a last irreverent jeu d’esprit, a last attempt to laugh in the face of the biggest joke of all, death itself?
Maybe a bit of both?
Whatever posterity decides, I personally have no doubt that in one way or another - and probably, knowing Arnold, both - he meant it to be no more but definitely no less than a final distillation of one man’s heroically defiant “up yours” philosophy.
Sad to say even this modest ambition was to be frustrated, as the ever-growing interference in his work by “adolescent fucking arseholes” reached its painful pinnacle here.
After Arnold’s second heart attack I visited him regularly in hospital. On my final visit, he shakily put the manuscript into my hands and asked me to look after his last baby for him - at which point I confess the tears did not so much well up in my eyes as spurt all over what tragically turned out to be his deathbed.
On the bus home I had a quick flick through the manuscript to try to find out why it had been so callously rejected by the uncaring conglomerate who had commissioned it. I was shocked to see it was covered with crass editorial comments in red ink and far too many exclamation marks. I angrily planned to delete them all, but after much agonising - and with the enthusiastic help of a young friend who is, I confess, far more expert at such arcane matters as posting and blogging than myself - I kept them in, precisely as written, not just to show the intolerable pressure he was under but also to celebrate the fact that, somehow, his voice defiantly survives even so.
Because defiance really was Arnold’s middle name. In this his last work I think he finally won his lifelong battle to meld the stylistic purity of his two great heroes, F Scott Fitzgerald and Oscar Wilde - “the hetero version,” I hear him say - with a dash of middle-period Bob Monkhouse.
Insightful, epigramatic, ever ready with the smart one-liner and the acidly accurate put-down. Rest in peace, Arnie, closet Sudoku fan and quiz fiend - literary Jack of all trades – and master of quite a lot of them, too. Let this posthumous online publication serve as your memorial.
William Humble, Cap Ferrat, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)