gear. Plastic lunch boxes going missing. And a sudden and uncharacteristic aversion to pork pies. If that description fits your husband, hand him over. You owe that to the farmers and the pigs. Look on the bright side â since he wears thick red socks and carries his lunch in rucksacks, youâll have been wanting to get rid of him for a long time anyway.
But Iâm more interested in the fate of sow number 847Y â the Typhoid Mary of the swine world â than that of just one more human clown. Itâs strange to me, and I cannot pretend I understand all it means, but I am noticing a growing fellow feeling with animals (if thatâs not a contradiction in terms), the more I age. I used to think it pathological of Gulliver to prefer the company of horses to humans on his return from the Houyhnhnms. Now, hunting for meaning and desperate to escape vanity, Iâm not so sure. I havenât yet reached the stage of forbidding my wife and children to touch my bread or share my cup, but my pigs understand me tolerably well, I converse with them four hours every day, and they live in great amity with me and friendship to each other.
Death of Dudley
Alas, poor Dudley. If his death pricks our tears more keenly than did Peter Cookâs that is only because he was the cuddly one, and his dying was the more cruelly protracted. Now it is as though Peter Cook has died again. A double sorrow. Or maybe it amounts to more sorrows than that even. For I think we watched Peter Cook die several times in the course of his separation from Dudley Moore. And we certainly watched Dudley as good as give up the ghost when he succumbed to Hollywood, playing the jackass for Americans who can only take their Englishmen that way.
We donât as a rule do obsequies for the famous in this column. We are uncomfortable showing too much feeling for those we never knew personally. Maybe thatâs wrong of us. Maybe it is a sign of our humanity that we can accept celebrities â those walking shadows â into our hearts and miss them as our own. I remember watching a lady schoolteacher break down in front of the class when the news came through that George VI had died. I couldnât understand it. Whatâs she to Hecuba? I wondered. Or words to that effect. When I went home I asked my mother if she thought Miss Venvell could have been related to the royal family. My mother explained that King George VI had been an important symbol to us throughout the war. And besides, she added, he was a lovely man.
How did my mother know that? I asked myself. For I was a sceptic early. I also doubted whether anyone with a public image could be lovely. I still have a streak of that puritanism in me. Succeed and you must have sold your soul to the devil, I think, fame being a harlot, money being the root of all evil, and a moving image being a contradiction of Godâs wishes and intentions.
Dudley, though, was an exception to all this. He was intelligent, for a start, in the Oxbridge way, and I make allowances for Oxbridge intelligence. One of the reasons I failed to get on with the alternative comedians of the eighties was that they came from red-brick universities. I donât doubt you can be funny if you have a degree from Manchester or Leeds, but you canât be philosophically funny, you canât make the heart itself laugh. You can do knockabout and you can do polemic but you canât do heart. Donât ask me why that is. Something in the water. Something sad about these university towns. Some excruciating anticlimax from which you never recover. Whatever the cause, Dudley Moore touched the heart effortlessly before he went to America â which is sad in another way â both as a musician and a comedian. Though no sooner do I say comedian than I feel I must retract the word. What he was best at was not raising mirth but being the cause that mirth was in others.
I know what it is that has long upset me about the
But Iâm more interested in the fate of sow number 847Y â the Typhoid Mary of the swine world â than that of just one more human clown. Itâs strange to me, and I cannot pretend I understand all it means, but I am noticing a growing fellow feeling with animals (if thatâs not a contradiction in terms), the more I age. I used to think it pathological of Gulliver to prefer the company of horses to humans on his return from the Houyhnhnms. Now, hunting for meaning and desperate to escape vanity, Iâm not so sure. I havenât yet reached the stage of forbidding my wife and children to touch my bread or share my cup, but my pigs understand me tolerably well, I converse with them four hours every day, and they live in great amity with me and friendship to each other.
Death of Dudley
Alas, poor Dudley. If his death pricks our tears more keenly than did Peter Cookâs that is only because he was the cuddly one, and his dying was the more cruelly protracted. Now it is as though Peter Cook has died again. A double sorrow. Or maybe it amounts to more sorrows than that even. For I think we watched Peter Cook die several times in the course of his separation from Dudley Moore. And we certainly watched Dudley as good as give up the ghost when he succumbed to Hollywood, playing the jackass for Americans who can only take their Englishmen that way.
We donât as a rule do obsequies for the famous in this column. We are uncomfortable showing too much feeling for those we never knew personally. Maybe thatâs wrong of us. Maybe it is a sign of our humanity that we can accept celebrities â those walking shadows â into our hearts and miss them as our own. I remember watching a lady schoolteacher break down in front of the class when the news came through that George VI had died. I couldnât understand it. Whatâs she to Hecuba? I wondered. Or words to that effect. When I went home I asked my mother if she thought Miss Venvell could have been related to the royal family. My mother explained that King George VI had been an important symbol to us throughout the war. And besides, she added, he was a lovely man.
How did my mother know that? I asked myself. For I was a sceptic early. I also doubted whether anyone with a public image could be lovely. I still have a streak of that puritanism in me. Succeed and you must have sold your soul to the devil, I think, fame being a harlot, money being the root of all evil, and a moving image being a contradiction of Godâs wishes and intentions.
Dudley, though, was an exception to all this. He was intelligent, for a start, in the Oxbridge way, and I make allowances for Oxbridge intelligence. One of the reasons I failed to get on with the alternative comedians of the eighties was that they came from red-brick universities. I donât doubt you can be funny if you have a degree from Manchester or Leeds, but you canât be philosophically funny, you canât make the heart itself laugh. You can do knockabout and you can do polemic but you canât do heart. Donât ask me why that is. Something in the water. Something sad about these university towns. Some excruciating anticlimax from which you never recover. Whatever the cause, Dudley Moore touched the heart effortlessly before he went to America â which is sad in another way â both as a musician and a comedian. Though no sooner do I say comedian than I feel I must retract the word. What he was best at was not raising mirth but being the cause that mirth was in others.
I know what it is that has long upset me about the
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