Oppostion is true friendship

Posted on April 17, 2011 by blogmywiki

I’ve never been a very blokey bloke. I’m not interested in football – or any other organised sport. Cars, to me, are things that get you from A to B, occasionally breaking down at point C, necessitating a call to the man from the AA. I do, however, like women. I like looking at them. I like being with them. On the whole, I find them more interesting than men – possibly because they tend to spend less time talking about sport or cars.

Perhaps it’s not so amazing that something on Radio 4 should make me quite so angry, but this veritably took the custard cream: a Woman’s Hour discussion on the oldest chestnut of all: Can Men And Women Ever Be Friends? (Female friendships with gay men were, and are, outwith the bounds of this discussion). Two writers were on the panel: Tanya Gold contended that they can be friends, Mark Mason contended that they can’t; he said that your best friend must ALWAYS be of the same gender, that sex ALWAYS gets in the way, and that if, as a man, you think your best friend is a woman you are not only deluding yourself, you probably need therapy.

Further raising my blood pressure, and spreading the radius of spluttered biscuit crumbs in my kitchen, his main example was a case from his own life: a friendship with a woman that had ultimately failed. As an aside he mentioned that this friendship had actually started with two weeks of intense shagging. Now I may be naïve and old-fashioned, but that’s not exactly my idea of a friendship pure and simple; rather that sounds like staying friendly with an ex. (Something, incidentally, I’ve never, ever managed to do – maybe I do need therapy after all).

Mark Mason cited a friend of his who had believed that a woman was his best friend – he even went away on her hen weekend. He had subsequently mentioned this to a therapist, who declared that this was a huge problem, requiring much more, doubtless costly, psychoanalysis.

Even I had to admit going on a hen weekend was a little extreme, until my own friend Jane said that she’d been on a male friend’s stag do, even donning a fake beard in homage to the stoning women in The Life of Brian. Everyone was cool about it.

The female panellist, Tanya Gold, risked straying into dangerous waters off the Stephen Fry archipelago, by saying that 90% of men find most women slightly attractive, and 90% of women find most men slightly repulsive. At least she made me laugh, though.

Having polled opinion from quite a few friends on this subject, I’m pretty sure the safest, longest-lasting male-female friendships involve no sexual attraction at all. I’ve known Liz since schooldays. We moved to London at the same time and shared a flat when I had no girlfriend, and she had no boyfriend. Neither of us was happy about this state of no affairs – and yet nothing happened between us. We got back in touch again after a few years apart, during which time she had been married, had kids, got divorced – and she spent quite some time in the pub telling me exactly how much she had never fancied me and very firmly that she never, ever would. I absorbed the blow. I mean, nobody wants to be not-fancied, but at least I knew where I stood. Our friendship endures, and I can be utterly candid with her. I’m not trying to impress her, she gets me warts and all, and that’s what you need in a friend: the ability to be honest and be yourself.

If attraction-free friendships are the safest, are they the most exciting? Back on Woman’s Hour, Tanya took a pleasingly mature attitude to the issue: we are not all hormonal teenagers; just because we’re attracted to someone, doesn’t mean we have to act on it. There’s nothing wrong with a little harmless flirting, and it can add a certain frisson to a friendship.

I have to wonder if The X-Files would have been anywhere near as watchable without the unresolved, but clearly present, sexual tension between Mulder and Scully? (X-Files pedants note: yes I do know they get eventually together in the last movie. The sheer awfulness of said movie should be enough to put anyone off spoiling a great friendship by ever making a move on their best buddy of the opposite sex).

Mark Mason did make one point that made sense though: if you want a friend of the opposite sex, the odds are stacked against you. If you both have spouses or partners, then FOUR people have to be cool about the idea, and that’s just not very likely. My friend Jane says that she’s lost male friends this way: “I can understand why a man might choose the love of his life over a mate.” But opposite-gender friends can help keep relationships together too – helping you to see things from your partner’s point of view. Why is she so angry? What can I do to make her happy? Your female friend may have some insights and perspectives that you, dear bloke, lack.

William Blake said in Proverbs of Hell, ‘Opposition is true friendship’. Now, what could be more opposite than gender?

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Bittersweet Lucy Ellman

Posted on April 10, 2011 by blogmywiki

Poorly, elderly parents abound. I was convinced the other week that there was a great quote from the writer Lucy Ellman about the death of one’s parents. It was sad, it was witty, it was pithy. It was up there with ‘they tuck you up, your mum and dad’ (that was what Philip Larkin said, wasn’t it?).

So I searched the internet. Nothing, though I did find that quote about men menstruating through shedding each other’s blood in warfare. I think it’s a pretty meaningless statement, but it’s clever and it’s clearly struck a chord with a few people.

I started flicking through the three Lucy Ellman novels I have on my bookshelves. Nothing. So I started reading Sweet Desserts in full.

I still couldn’t find the quote. (The fearsome Dr Bowler*, the imaginary English teacher on my shoulder, is now piercing me with her steely brown eyes – can brown eyes be steely, Giles? Can they? Mmm? – until I spit out the subsequent and missing syllables QUO-TAY-SHUN!).

Sweet Desserts a cracking book. Two sisters, raised in American academia find themselves transported to Oxford after their mum dies. Art and and the art of found objects run through the book, and the text is cut up with gobbets from instruction manuals, adverts (okay, okay AD-VERT-ISE-MENTS, sheesh, Dr Bowler, calm down), recipes and lonely hearts columns. It’s funny and bittersweet and there’s more casual sex than I recalled.

Immediately afterwards, he got off me, turned on the light, opened a carton of yoghurt he’d brought with him, and a thriller. I went back to sleep slowly, feeling envious of the yoghurt.

It’s weird reading a book again for the first time since 1988. It was another age, a pre-lapsarian, pre-internet age. There were books and there were fixed telephones and answering machines and typewriters and Tippex. There were letters. People wrote letters.

The book is also so old, it has an approving quote (AY-SHUN) from Clive James on the front cover. And one from Fay Weldon on the back. I’m slightly surprised it has a barcode on it.

I finished the book, still longing for the quotation about the death of a parent, and I read the blurb on the back:

Suzy Schwarz has learnt one or two things about life: other people know how you should live your life better than you do; sisters can destroy your sanity and self-esteem; lust calls for careful timing because it rarely coincides with that of your partner; and, most heartbreaking of all, parents die on you, leaving you grieving. The only thing that provides constant solace when times are bad (and they usually are) is food.

So – it was not pithy, not witty, and it was probably not even written by Lucy Ellman. But a handful of words on the back of a book lodged in my mind for 23 years.

*Dr Bowler deserves a place in history for one of the most memorable moments in my Sixth Form. We were doing Donne, I think. Or maybe Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, perhaps.

I complained the poem was illogical.

“Giles,” said Dr Bowler, “I want you to do something for me.”

Nervous titters round the classroom. It was the mid-80s. Think The Cure. Think The Smiths. Think The History Boys, with a smattering of elegant, mysterious girls peppering our environment because being 17 at a boys’ school isn’t torture enough as it is.

“Yes?” I asked anxiously.

She replied, “The next time you try seducing someone, try using logic – and see how far you get.”

Lucy Ellman could have written that.

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Grace in Small Things (1)

Posted on March 25, 2011 by blogmywiki

Inspired by Sarah, here’s my first ever Grace in Small Things list. These are the little things that make life worth living.

  • Walking to work in the sunshine.
  • A tweet that makes you LOL but which is too rude to retweet.
  • Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers.
  • Blossom.
  • An unexpected glass of champagne in the afternoon.
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The Curious Case of Mr Faulks and Mr Fry

Posted on March 20, 2011 by blogmywiki

Mrs Wiki has been on at me for ages to read some Sebastian Faulks. Somehow, I never got round to it. I’m not as fascinated by the First World War as she is, and frankly, that Sebastian Faulks (Seb!) was just too successful and, frankly, too damn popular with the ladies for my liking. I was jealous. And envious. I envied his fame, fortune and fans, and I maybe I was jealous that my wife was reading his words not mine.

I was ‘between books’ recently and she said Engleby might be more up my street than a war book. And I was a bit surprised by what I found between the covers.

First of all: the slowness. I was on the verge of giving up on page 85, but I stuck with it – which was lucky as something did actually happen on page 86. Enough to keep me going, but it’s not exactly a suspense thriller. I think I tweeted early on ‘this bloke’s a psycho, isn’t he?’ and events as they unfold, come as no surprise.

But here’s the real problem: I could not believe how similar the early part of the book is to the first volume of Stephen Fry’s autobigraphy Moab Is My Washpot, published ten years before Engleby. I didn’t much care for that book either – it confirmed my suspicions that Stephen Fry is neither quite as clever nor as likable as one might think. But I digress.

Faulks’ descriptions of a minor public school are so similar to Stephen Fry’s autobiography it’s hard to imagine he wasn’t influenced. There are even descriptions of petty theft which match Fry’s confessions, right down to pilfering coins rather than notes from other boys’ jackets, coins being less likely to be missed.

When Fry leaves school he winds up at the London educational employment agency with the delightful name Gabbitas Thring. Imagine my surprise when Engleby attends… exactly the same agency.

The blank periods in Engleby’s memory are also very reminiscent of another book, one I love: Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton, which describes a man who experiences blackouts and who is propelled by a suppressed side of his personality to kill a woman who spurns his advances. Like Engleby, he has no memory of what the he has been doing when his mind flips into its altered state. Sound familiar?

Ok, that’s not much of a review. In a nutshell: unlikeable, unreliable narrator whose behaviour seems to veer between Asperger’s Syndrome and schizophrenia. Occasionally amusing. Odd cameos of real celebrities. Not much happens. Ending is not a surprise.

I don’t think I’ll be reading any more Sebastian Faulks. Soz.

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The Sacred Art of Stealing

Posted on March 2, 2011 by blogmywiki

Thanks to Annie, I am almost at the end of my first Christopher Brookmyre – The Sacred Art of Stealing. A Situationist / Dadaist bank heist, some excellent misdirection, a girl and quite a few guns (though I always thought Godard was wrong – all you need is a girl). I found the opening hard to get into, as the American vernacular didn’t quite ring true. The Scottish vernacular, however, is excellent. And this is genius:

…there are certain mistakes that you know you just have to make, know you’re going to make, no matter what conscience, logic or fear are telling you.
It’s a simple truth of human existence. Across thousands of years of civilisation, throughout the rise and fall of empires and our stumbling ascent from the forests to the stars, greater men than Zal had contemplated the wisdom of their intentions before coming to exactly the same conclusion.
And there was usually a girl involved, yeah.

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