The BBC bills them as
“Austerity protests”.
What on Earth are they when they are at home?
I am
sitting in a bar where the TV is turned down and I am watching thousands of
people with banners talking to anyone with a microphone who will stand still
long enough to listen. All of them are grossly overweight, so whatever cuts
they are protesting against, rest assured it’s not one to their food budget.
I confess to never having taken part in any kind of
demonstration in my life. I once stood outside News International during the
printers’ strike at Wapping, but that was only in the hope of bumping into a journalist
with whom I was in love at the time. When I was at university, I also bought a
Save the Miners badge, but that was only because I was in love with a
philosophy lecturer, whom I knew to be a Marxist and thought my showing willing
might prove an aphrodisiac (it didn’t – well, not until 15 years later, but
that’s another story).
I’m not against marching per se; I admire people who
will take to the streets on a wet weekend morning to shout about something they
stand barely any chance of being able to influence. I like their passion and
enthusiasm and marvel at their bad taste in clothes and footwear – it’s like
Fraggle Rock taking to the streets.
It’s just not for me. I don’t like getting my hair wet
(most demos take place in the rain), I don’t like being flat-footed because it
draws attention to my five foot height (when Jimmy Choo brings out a Built for
Demo sandal, I might change my mind), and I don’t like people shouting. I
suffer very badly from misophonia – literally, a hatred of sound – and being engulfed
by marauding complainers really is my idea of hell.
It’s not that I don’t have beliefs – but my excuse for
not taking to the streets in my Wellingtons is that I’m a writer, and anything
I have to say I put on paper and, hopefully, get into the marketplace through
the printed word. But then many writers have been and still are far more
pro-active than I could ever be.
Take Salman Rushdie. It was speaking out in print that
got him into trouble in the first place, and it didn’t stop him. Me? I’d have
keeled over without so much as a “Yes, yes, I renounce the evil ways of the
West and where can I buy a burkha?”
I met Salman quite a few times when I first came to
London in the early Eighties. At one point, we had the same agent, and I met
him at a party, where he accused me of “rambling”. “Hah! That’s rich,” I
responded. “Coming from a man whose books you can’t even read further than page
3.” I could smell his contempt.
When he was under cover following the “fatwa” declared
upon him, you couldn’t go to any literary event without bumping into him. I
knew his bodyguards better than I did my own family, and their appearance ahead
of the “star” always alerted everyone to Salman’s arrival in ample time to
muster up a battalion and prepare for attack.
One such occasion was a Jonathan Cape Christmas party.
I am an ex-ballroom dancing champion and, seeing Salman standing morosely at
the side of the dance floor, whisked him away for a jive. He must be dying for
a dance, I reasoned. How he would love having a slice of normal life. Reader,
he walked off the floor. Walked off the floor! From me! A champion dancer! He
said I was not doing the jive to his liking.
He was bloody lucky he had any sodding legs to do the
jive, let alone any sodding jive according to his liking, I tried to argue, but
it was to no avail.
So maybe it was
my early Salmanella poisoning that bred in me an abhorrence of anything
smacking of dissidence.
Or maybe it has more to do with my having been brought
up with a terror of authority. Doctors, vicars, teachers, the police – I was
brought up to believe that these people, my elders and people in a position of
authority, were right about everything, and to cross them would cast me into
the outer reaches of hell, never to return.
We now live in an age in which we know that many
people in authority power abuse that power and that blind trust is . . . well,
not to be trusted. I like to think I had good instincts when, on a youth course
when I was just 13, I was not one of the youngsters who crowded around a creepy
Jimmy Savile as he tried to ingratiate himself amongst us on our church youth
club annual holiday.
So maybe I’ve just never liked being part of the
crowd. Although, growing up, it was something I thought I craved, it is always
something I have avoided, consciously or unconsciously. I am suspicious of mob
mentality, banners and flat shoes marching in unison.
Just give me my pen, my desk and the telly showing me
fat, wet people, whose Wellington boots I am not fit to lick.
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