Diary

Hallowe'en is a far bigger deal for kids than Guy Fawkes night these days. Mine have been in a lather of excitement all week, so on All Hallows Eve I found myself trying to stop a posse of witches, ghosts, ghouls, vampires, psychopaths, Freddie Krugers and Buzz Lightyears from running across the road. It's unpleasantly like a Tory party bonding seminar. A mother has discovered a pocket of Belgravia entirely populated by expatriate American bankers; it provides rich pickings. Men come to the door dressed in loafers, chinos and green fright-wigs, holding baskets of miniature Mars Bars. They say `Hi, guys' to the sugarmaddened miniature undead opposition. Why do Americans always greet strangers as if they are auditioning for a part in an episode of Friends? My four-year-old boy terrified some Filipino maid so much, by screaming through the letter-box, that she uncomprehendingly gave him a fiver danegeld. I lurked in the shadows in agonising embarrassment. Taking your children begging from door to door is ghastly; trick or treat is not part of my culture. It's muscling in on someone else's festival. It's like knocking on doors with muzuzahs during Passover, demanding matzo - `Or we'll murder your first-born.' A small psychopath asks why I haven't got dressed up. My daughter loyally says I have come as the sort of man children are not supposed to take sweets from.

Denis Healey, interviewed by our own Petronella Wyatt, says that men and women are different and anyone who doesn't know that hasn't seen them with their clothes off. Suddenly, horrifyingly, swimming out of the murky id I am confronted by the image of Denis Healey naked. For 30 years, I've lived with the presence of Denis Healey and have never had to think of him unclothed, but obviously he's been lurking nudely in my brain. Like an insistent pop song, I can't get rid of the vision of the silly-willy naturist. I mean, when you consider those eyebrows, what on earth can his pubic hair be like?

There must be a mezzanine circle of Hell reserved for literary lunches. I'm new to these torturous publishers' Tupperware parties. I had to go to Watford to fend off unspeakable melon fans and chicken tits rolled round asparagus, with a nice man who used to manage England's footballers, a chap who had read every detective novel in the world and sounded like it, and Kenneth Baker, the ex-minister, whom I kept wanting to call Richard instead of Lord, who has regurgitated an exhausting collection of war poetry. The audience, most of whom looked as if they'd fought the Germans at least twice, listened politely as I mumbled and stammered, until I discovered that the way to entertain sunset folk is just to preface everything with `do you remember?' and they start chortling. It's an involuntary reaction. Remember Brown Windsor soup? Oh, hee, hee. Remember tram tickets? Ha, ha. Remember Neville Chamberlain abusing sheep? Remember Wat Tyler and the Peasants' Revolt? Remember Denis Healey in the nude? Ho, ho, ho. At the all-important signing session a lot of them balk at the 25 price of my hardback, but because I'm such a nice boy who remembers halfpenny chews and Alvar Liddell, they buy the paperback. Sap rising, I feel guilty. It is so gratuitously filthy it'll give half of them seizures. Kenneth and I swap tomes. `Happy reading, Kenneth Baker!' On the way back I flick through the book. The chapters are headed with little paragraphs of deathless politician-speak. If anyone is compiling an anthology of truisms and opaque statements of the obvious, start here. Here are some random samples: `Women have not, in the main, engaged in the actual business of fighting,' `These poems were all written by fighting men who were obliged to face the possibility of death every hour of the day,' `All successful armies need a strong and visible leader,' `War is too important to be left to politicians, or even to generals.' And my favourite: `It is always helpful to have God on your side.'

Last week I wrote that I'd had more than enough of my friends. Well, I should have know better; the phone hasn't stopped: `You old git, I suppose you meant me.' The stony silence from my end is an unnoticed clue. That's the other thing about friends, they become impervious to nuance and subtlety and grow pachydermal skins: `Don't mind me, you go to bed, I'll stay and finish the bottle.' They think it's their matey duty to put you in your place: `God, The Spectator will print any old rubbish these days, won't it? You just churn it out, money for old rope. You don't know how lucky you are not having to do a proper job.' This is friends being friendly, protecting me from galloping self-importance and hubris. On the other hand, acquaintances come up and say, `I'm sorry to bother you, but I just had to tell you how incredibly funny, well-written and insightful your Diary was.' You see, a friend would be failing in his duty if he said anything like that. No, I've finally realised what I really want from life and people is sycophancy. Sycophancy gets a bad press but it is the most underrated skill. We look at powerful, successful people and shake our heads and say, `Well, you see, he's surrounded by yes-men,' as if it's some terminal failing or flaw. But what could possibly be nicer than having people thinking up new and ingenious ways of ladling out the compliments? The number and quality of your arse-lickers is the only true measure of worldly success. Your friends, though, imagine that they should each be the man who stands behind Caesar whispering, `You're not a god, you're a wanker.' They forget that Caesar had a thousand other blokes screaming, `Caesar, baby! You're too good to be a god, there are 100 gods but there is only one Julius Caesar! One Julius Caesar!'

Guy Fawkes night has slipped from the Tebbit lexicon of British cultural events because the nannyish health and safety bores have stopped fireworks being fun and turned them into event experiences. So it was with sniggering schadenfreude that I read about a man who celebrated trick or treat by dressing up as the mummy in a dozen bog rolls before going to the pub, where naturally he was set on fire, thereby becoming a neat synthesis of old and new. I do hope this is what they mean by multiculturism. How long do you reckon before toilet paper comes with a safety warning: `Insert in moist soil and stand well back'?

The Ivy, A Restaurant and Its Recipes by A.A. Gill has just been published by Hodder and Stoughton (L25).

Copyright Spectator Nov 8, 1997
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