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My dad had lung cancer for a year and – being the hardest bastard in the universe – told nobody about it. His lungs were being eaten away and we never knew. Then one day he collapsed, was rushed to hospital and three weeks later we buried him.
A decade and a bit later, my mum had the same kind of cancer for the same length of time, but I was by her side and holding her hand when some busy NHS doctor told her there was no more they could do. And then she talked about it, and she weighed her chances of survival, and she confronted terminal illness with the combination of humour and grit that was peculiar to her generation of war brides. It was a very different experience to watching my dad go. But then she died too.
And I thought that the world should stop. Let me catch my breath. Acknowledge the passing of this woman – five feet nothing of bravery and jokes, even when the doctors were solemnly shaking their heads, and slyly looking at their fucking watches. It is only now I see the obvious.
Losing your parents is the most natural thing in the world.
And of course there are far worse things in this life than watching a parent die. Some people have to bury a child. Many people bury a spouse. Losing a parent is surely just another season, one more turn in the cycle of life.
Yet the world seems to change. First one goes, then the other.
‘You’re an orphan now,’ more than one person told me when my parents were both gone, and I thought that was a tad dramatic. I don’t see how a grown man can be an orphan.
It is completely natural to lose your parents. We all have our time. And then it’s up.
Then why does something so natural feel so completely and brutally unnatural?
You never know when they are going to go. Forget all that three-score-years-and-ten bullshit. I have a friend who lost his father before he was born. I have other friends who lost parents in childhood. I even have a friend who, when she was a girl, lost both of her parents in the same car crash – an incredibly common experience, as it turns out, because husbands and wives – fathers and mothers – regularly share a car.
Yet I have other friends well into middle age who still have both their parents living. And I have noted that the longer your parents live, the tougher it becomes to let go of them. You would think it would be the other way round – that spending almost half a century with your parents would make you more prepared to let go. But it doesn’t work that way.
And whenever they die – if your father goes when you are still in your mother’s womb, or if your mother goes when you see a middle-aged man you don’t recognise staring back at you from the shaving mirror – the world changes. There is nothing like the death of a parent to help you see the big picture, to truly get it, for the very first time. How could you have missed something so obvious?
Golden lads and girls all must.As chimney sweepers, come to dust.
When you bury your parents, you pull down the barrier between yourself and mortality.
When the first parent goes, the Earth shifts. When the second one goes, the Earth falls apart. When my father died in 1987, my mother left his suits untouched. She slept on her side of the bed. She stayed in the same house – for twelve years and one day – until her own death.
But when the surviving parent goes, the last link to your youth goes with her. Those strange hours spent wandering an empty house, opening drawers, peering into a vanished life, working out what to keep – what is priceless – and what to leave out for the bin men. It is the photo albums that do you in. Not because of all those familiar faces but because of all the faces that you do not know, as the memories of a lifetime dissolve like teardrops in the rain.
You don’t really know your parents until you watch them die. My father was the toughest man I ever knew, and then I saw him in that cancer ward, shot full of morphine, and he was afraid. I was shocked. I had never seen him afraid before, that scarred old soldier. I didn’t think he was capable of fear. That’s how little I knew him.
And my mum was a typical post-war housewife, as placidly faithful as a woman in a Tammy Wynette song.
Everyone thought she would just wither away with her husband gone, this man she had been with since she was sixteen and he was seventeen. And she didn’t.
She discovered some inner steel. She realised she had an army of friends. She even learned that loneliness had its compensations. She could play her country and western records very loudly, without my dad shaking his Daily Express with irritation.
When your parents are around – giving or denying approval to boy and man, diminishing you with just one look or a few sharp words when you break a window, or drop out of school, or get divorced – there are powerful forces preventing you from reaching true maturity. You are still some kind of child until both of your parents are dead. You don’t know them until they are dying and you don’t know yourself.
For most of us, losing a parent is our first real contact with death. Until then, death is an impossibly distant prospect, and we kid ourselves that it can be kept at bay forever if we eat up our greens.
We live in a death-free culture. If you make it out of the womb you are likely to survive childhood. There are no world wars. Your fussy modern car scolds you if you fail to wear your seat belt.
You think you have time to burn until your parents are dying. Then for the first time in your life, your own death is undeniable.
When your parents are alive, you believe you will live forever. From the moment they die, you start counting the years that you have left.
The classic text on bereavement, On Death and Dying, by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, cites the five stages all men must stop at on their path to death.
First stage – denial and isolation.
Second stage – anger.
Third stage – bargaining.
Fourth stage – depression.
Fifth stage – acceptance.
What is true of the dying is true of the ones left behind. You get over it. You do. With time, scar tissue covers the deepest wounds. You become grateful that this man was your father, that this woman was your mother. You learn to feel blessed for what you had, rather than rail at what has been lost.
Yet you never really get used to it. In an unguarded moment – always some happy moment, when I have some small good news to relate – I am capable of reaching for the phone to call a woman who died in the last century.
Maybe she is watching down. Or maybe not. When I kissed the cheek of my dead mother – already cold, already departed, already truly not her – I did not know if she had gone to heaven, or simply gone. There were no clues.
Only when your parents die do you realise that the clock is running like the meter of a bent mini-cab driver – and it’s running for you. And whatever comes after this short sweet life, be it heavenly hosts or a dreamless void or some great eternal kip, it will not be long until you find out for yourself.
Four Angry Old Man (#ulink_fb3f39cf-b7b9-5c6c-88dc-b1c2121f54b7)
You never argue at airport security. And then one day you do.
You never argue at airport security because those lethargic, blank-eyed men and women are the front line in the war on terror. You never argue at airport security because it is pointless, and they are just doing a job, and the stupid questions-Is this your toothpaste, sir? – and the dumb rituals – they find one shoe bomber and so all of mankind has to take off its footwear until the end of days – are the price we pay for pretending we are safe.
And then one day you snap.
For me it was Frankfurt, when they confiscated the entire contents of my toilet bag – yes, I bet that had old Osama trembling in his cave – and then gave me some insolent lip when I mildly commented that I had lugged all that stuff through Heathrow without anyone raising an eyebrow.
‘Ja,’ said the sausage-munching jobsworth. ‘But here ve haf rules.’
I gawped. I laughed. And then I pointed out that back in the sleepy little place that I come from – London town, Fritz, perhaps you’ve heard of it – ve also haf rules.
‘And the reason we have rules,’ I continued, ‘is because for about seventy years we have had somebody trying to blow us to pieces. Right now it is Islamic nutjobs, but before that we had thirty years of the IRA and before that – I hate to bring it up – it was the Luftwaffe.’ I cackled with derisive laughter. ‘But if confiscating my Gillette Sensitive Skin Shaving Foam makes the fatherland a safer place, then bitte schoen, be my guest.’
Oh, it was an ugly scene. I was too loud. I was too mouthy. But all the pointless bossiness that I have experienced at airports all over the world finally reached critical mass. And I blew. And as I walked away with what remained of my personal belongings – dirty socks and a pair of rusty tweezers – I realised that I had become something I never thought I would be.
I had turned into an angry old man.
We think of rage as being the province of the young. We think of youth as being the age of righteous, red-blooded protest. But the young are not angry any more. The young of the twenty-first century are a placid, bovine, docile bunch, sucking up the Arctic Monkeys on their iPods, dreaming of catching Simon Cowell’s eye.
They might fret about the environment, but they are not angry about it – not really. They might be a bit miffed about what we get up to in our distant wars, but I don’t see them marching to Downing Street or rioting in Grosvenor Square. They might get a bit trembly-chinned over Third World poverty, but they think that watching Coldplay in Hyde Park and flashing their student union Visa card will wipe away Africa’s tears.
The young are no longer capable of anger. If you want to see genuine fury at the way of the world, then look at a man on the far side of thirty. And as he gets older – thirty-one, thirty-two, forty, fifty – the anger builds. By the time I am sixty I confidently expect to be on the roof of a public building somewhere with a high-powered rifle while the neighbours reflect, ‘Well, he was always a bit of a loner.’
Nothing makes a young man angry.
Everything makes an old man angry.
I can no longer go to the cinema. I just get too angry-angry at the sound of some barnyard pal chewing cud in the seat behind me, angry at the dozy bastards staring into the wintry glow of their mobile phones, as though they would vanish in a puff of smoke if they turned off the Nokia for two hours. And talking during the movie – well, that puts me in a state that is somewhere beyond mere anger. If you ever saw someone in a cinema suddenly shove his face into someone else’s face and scream at the very top of his voice, ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP!’ then that might have been me. I know you are meant to clear your throat in a disapproving fashion, or mutter a sharp, ‘Sssh!’ But I can’t seem to do any of that. I wish I could. But there’s too much blood pumping through my veins for a quick, ‘Ssssh!’
I scream. I rave. And if the barnyard pal is sitting directly in front of me, then I kick his seat with the heel of my boot as hard as I possibly can, and when he turns around I scream, ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP!’
Then of course you have to be prepared to roll around in the aisle of a cinema, sticky with popcorn and spilled soda pop. There are twenty movies that I have paid to see that I have no idea how they ended. Because I was waiting to be joined in mortal combat.
But what can I do? I am an angry old man.
So no cinema for me – and countless nights out ruined for my loved ones, because something – cud chewing, mobile gazing, mindless chatter in the darkness – set me off.
But I am not a single-issue angry person. Almost everything makes me angry these days. I am angry at people who litter. Yet I am also angry at people who want to force me to recycle. I am angry at people who have no manners, and I am angry at people who swear around children, and I am angry at people in Smart cars, who inevitably drive in an incredibly stupid fashion. People, really – I am angry at people. Any kind of rudeness, finger wagging or ignorance is liable to light my blue touch paper.
Sometimes I think of Terry in The Likely Lads, who did not like foreigners, or southerners or – now he thought about it-the bloke next door. But the anger that comes to us all with time is not mere misanthropy – this is not anger for anger’s sake.
It is hard-earned, clear-eyed and horribly justified.
You have seen too much. You have lived too long. You know the way things should work, and you are maddened by the yawning chasm between your expectations and the grim reality of the workaday world.
I don’t want to be this way. I want to be happy. I want to be nice. I want to be like the kid I was as a young journalist, who was so happy to be flying to America to go on the road with Thin Lizzy that he truly didn’t care that the plane sat on the runway at Heathrow for six hours, and didn’t care that he was in economy. I didn’t even know that I was in economy. I wasn’t aware that planes had a class system. To me there were only seats on planes, and they were all good ones.
As my legs throbbed merrily with Deep Vein Thrombosis, I didn’t care about anything at all apart from the fact that within twenty-four hours I would be immersed in the fleshpots of Philadelphia. Will I ever be that carefree and giddy with happiness again? Probably not. There is too much anger in me now. If an airline had me sitting on the runway for six hours today, my head would explode. They wouldn’t be able to placate me with some savoury nuts.
My family stayed at the hotel that featured so glamorously in the James Bond film, Casino Royale: the One and Only Ocean Club in the Bahamas. And I say – be thankful there’s only one of them. What a dump. It took us hours to check in and, you’ll never guess, but that really made me angry.
Because I know that if you stay at the Sandy Lane in Barbados, or the Ritz-Carlton in Hong Kong, or the Jalousie Plantation in St Lucia, or the Conrad in Tokyo – or any other world-class five-star hotel that is worthy of the name and those five stars – they will check you in up in your room. Not the One and Only in the Bahamas. With our jet-lagged nipper in tow, we waited for literally hours to check in.
‘You’re always angry,’ my wife told me. ‘Why are you always so angry?’
‘Because I know how things should work,’ I replied, through gritted teeth.
And that’s the problem. When you are young, you have no idea how the world should work. For most of my twenties, I thought that a mini-bar was the height of sophistication and luxury. Of course I was never angry – I was too grateful to be on the loose in the world, and I was too stupid. Anger comes with experience, anger comes with wisdom. What’s true is that – righteous and justified though it may be – anger spoils everything.
‘Why can’t we just sit here and enjoy the sunset?’ asked my saintly wife, as she cradled our exhausted daughter, and the staff of the One and Only Hellhole Bahamas gave us some more feeble excuses about why our room wasn’t ready. ‘It’s such a beautiful sunset,’ Yuriko said. ‘Why can’t we just enjoy it?’
Why not indeed? Why not contemplate the lovely sunset and count our blessings? Why bother to burst a blood vessel because of the failings of the international tourist trade?
It is a male thing. This dissatisfaction, this anger, this railing at the sloppy and the stupid and the sub-standard – it comes with your biological hard drive. It is wired into us, this rage to make right the world – or at least get dummies to stop looking at their mobile phones in the cinema.
It is the impulse that helped our species to crawl out of the primordial swamp. It is the reason the human race survived. It is the life-affirming core of everything.
No point in giving yourself a heart attack because some airport security dimwit who couldn’t make it as a traffic warden confiscates your eye drops. No point in having an aneurysm because some gum-chewing simpleton is texting on his mobile during the third act of The Departed. No point in having a brain haemorrhage because you arrive at your hotel and your room doesn’t have a chocolate on the pillow.
But only young men fresh from having their laundry done by Mum have any excuse to tolerate the world in all its venality and stupidity. The grown men know better – they have been around, and seen it all before, and we know that if you save up and splash out for two weeks in the One and Only Ocean Club, Bahamas, and your room is not ready when you arrive, then you have every right to blow a gasket. In fact, you are showing exemplary restraint worthy of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King by not smashing up their lobby. I will never again be that twenty-two-year-old, stunned by the sight of an economy seat and a mini bar, excited by the thought of seeing Thin Lizzy in Philadelphia, and I can’t pretend otherwise.
The trouble is, there’s no end to the anger. You get in your car – and you want to kill someone. You go through airport security – and someone who has never actually made anyone more secure starts bossing you around. You go to the cinema – and then one day you can’t go to the cinema any more.
When does it end? It doesn’t. The rage comes as youth goes and we shall never be free of it. It feels like an ancient emotion, a hereditary anger – something that has been handed down through generations of men, a bug-eyed fury passed down from angry grandfather to angry father to angry son.
I can’t help feeling that the anger is somewhat wasted on the generations born in the second half of the twentieth century. I can’t help believing that this rage was used for more constructive purposes in the past – to fight for survival, to free the world, to build better lives for people with nothing.
Perhaps male rage will die out with time. Perhaps decades of peace and prosperity will make the anger fall away, like a coat of fur on Neanderthal man, or a set of fins that are no longer needed on dry land. Perhaps angry men will disappear into history – like men in hats, and men in uniform. But not yet. And not for you and not for me. For us there can be only one honest response to cruelty and wickedness and stupidity, and people who don’t say please or thank you.
Grumble, old man, grumble.
Five Fear of Fake Breasts (#ulink_010bdaf9-ab91-5fe3-8732-9712a0d3e5fb)
Until a man has actually made love to a woman with fake breasts, he can never really know what they are like.
Round, juicy and tempting they may be.
But then so is a bowl of plastic fruit.
For no matter how good they look, the spell is broken the moment they are touched by human hands. The real things somehow manage to be both firm and soft, they feel undeniably human, they move, they are alive.
In comparison, counterfeit breasts feel as though they have been stolen from the morgue. Replicant breasts are so hard. Bogus breasts are so numb, so lifeless, so dead. Once they are outside the two dimensions of celebrity magazines, a pair of phonies are suddenly a million light years away from the objects they seek to imitate.
And real breasts are warm. The fake breasts I have encountered have always seemed cold to me, but that may have been my appalled imagination. Certainly you will get the best out of them if you look but don’t touch.
But then that’s almost the point of fake breasts. They are not there to be fondled, kissed or felt, they are there to be admired, discussed, lusted after and photographed.
The moment they are touched – and I mean in the heat of passion, rather than out of curiosity or in the interests of scientific research – then the spell is broken. And this is true of all fake breasts, no matter how much money has been spent on this act of female self-mutilation.
Some women have reconstruction forced upon them. I watched my wife’s mother die of breast cancer. The battles that women like my wife’s mother have fought are insulted by the pumped-up twiglets on the cover of Heat.
The women who survive breast cancer – and even today, only lung and colon cancer kill more – are faced with hard choices. A lumpectomy – breast-conserving surgery – has to be followed with radiation treatment. A mastectomy – total removal of a breast – can be followed by reconstruction. But that means yet more surgery. These are all devastating choices for any woman.
But the overwhelming majority of women who have breast enhancement do not do it because they have fought cancer. They do it because of vanity. They do it because it has become a fashion option. They do it because they have an IQ somewhat smaller than their bra size.
And the brutal irony is that breast enhancement – boob jobs, in the baby talk that portrays it as akin to a getting a spray-on tan – makes everything from a benign lump to a malignant tumour infinitely harder to detect.
You would think that would be enough to put anyone off. And yet somehow it isn’t.
In a bar at the end of the world, there was a story they told of a man who loved a dancer although the dancer could not love herself.
She was a great dancer, and most nights of the week, if you were in that club at the rough end of a rough street in that rough city, you might see her. And if you saw her dance once, then you would never forget her.
Physically, there was not much of her. She had the natural-born dancer’s lack of waste. This man loved to look at her, and he thought that she was an undeniably beautiful woman. But-like many women who are told they are beautiful by men who have only just met them – she disagreed. The dancer had what a head doctor would call ‘body issues’.
She was small-breasted. That was the heart of her complaint about herself. The man had always liked her exactly as she was, and thought she was perfect – but these small breasts were a big thing for her, an insurmountable barrier between her and true happiness.
She had great legs, a great little bum, a lovely face-but in her mind it all added up to nothing because of her small breasts. She started talking about her breasts more and more – how she would have more confidence if they were bigger, how she would dance better, how she would finally reach a point in her life when she felt good about herself.
She wanted surgery.
Naturally, he told her that he thought she looked great already. And he meant it. But it became clear that what he thought really didn’t come into it.
She wouldn’t be doing it for him.
She would be doing it for herself.
