AND ANOTHER THING
Listen to the whisper of the trees in a year of not worrying
PAUL JOHNSON
This is a special new year and I ought to have an iron-hard resolution to improve myself during it. But what? I gave up smok- ing and drinking long ago. I eat little meat and would dispense with it entirely, but to do so would cause trouble — to others, not myself. I don't eat butter any more. Most of my extravagances have fallen by the way- side of the years. I no longer buy paintings but, rather, give them away. There is no room to hang them. Books I still acquire in large numbers, but only in the quest for knowledge and for solace — two innocent ends. And books to me are people: they speak, hide themselves, pout and quarrel on the shelves, collect dust deliberately to blow in your face in revenge for neglect, then suddenly smile and curl up cosily in your lap. They supply a gregariousness I do not always feel towards humans. A great wall of books is a fortification for the spirit, a rampart against barbarism, a redoubt into which you can dig ever deeper in harsh times. Clothes I never buy (they are some- times bought for me). My difficulty about reforming is that my chief pleasures, which would have been inexplicable to me 20 years ago, are now entirely harmless attending church, not going to parties and slipping off to bed early to read in bolstered comfort.
So I think I shall give up worrying. And raging. Worrying serves no purpose at all. It does not make the problem go away; quite the contrary. Nor, as a rule, does it clarify a course of action to deal with it, let alone impart resolution to carry it through. Worry is a neurotic substitute for deeds. The top- ics in the worry process are constantly changing for no reason at all, as time goes by and fretting fashions pass. It's hard for me to believe that I once worried about the balance of payments, the menace of the Beatles, topless dresses, the danger to Que- moy and Matsu, the harmful effects on youth of the James Bond stories, the Mau Mau, R.H.S. Crossman's indiscretions, Sir Alec Douglas-Home's propensity to count with matchsticks, the appalling behaviour of George Brown and the content of Billy Graham's sermons. Yet the record of arti- cles and diaries shows I did. Private worries of those days have proved, if anything, even more pointless. Cast your mind back five years: what was your chief worry then? Does it make any sense today? Of course not. What is your chief worry now? Devil- ish, I know, but will it mean anything at all in 2005? Then why worry?
Here are some of the things I shall not worry about in the coming year. What hap- pens to the Dome when they are done with it. The election for Mayor of London; the future of Jeffrey Archer, or Michael Ashcroft, or John Prescott, or Camilla Parker Bowles, or Mo Mowlam, or Cherie Blair's baby. It is said that men and women have ceased to evolve and that Darwin's theory of the fittest surviving no longer applies. Pass on that one. The icecap is melting and most of Britain will soon be covered in water. I shall fuss about that when and if it happens. They are going to force clubs to admit women. That will not keep me awake either. The future of the Northern Ireland negotiations, Mr Yeltsin's health, the Chilean elections, the new EU withholding tax, the degree of criminality of Signor Prodi (and of ex-Chancellor Kohl), Senator McCain's precise mental state, whether Jerry Hall is fit to be a Whitbread Prize judge, who will be the next Archbish- op of Westminster or of Canterbury, the outcome of efforts to grab M & S, NatWest, Sainsbury's and various bankrupt German conglomerates— all these matters, though I have a certain mild interest in some of them, will cause me no concern.
This is going to be a year in which I shall not get upset at the news. No breakfast rages. No crumpling up of the papers. No scattering sugar on the cornflakes with a trembling hand. Is Oxford University to confer a new degree in Sexual Orientation? So be it. Will the Proms perform pop music and feature Sir Cliff Richard singing the `Te Deum' to the tune of 'Lloyd George Knew my Father'? I need not listen. So Sir Nicholas Serota is to turn the atrium of the Tate Gallery into a Do-Your-Own-Master- piece workshop, complete with formalde- hyde, dead animals, beds, old motor tyres and bricks. Yawn, yawn. The BBC high command is to share premises with New Labour. Well, it does make sense when you think of it. Is Tony Blair to auction seats in the House of Lords at Christie's? Stands to reason. The Queen is to create a new order of chivalry for outstanding homosexual per- formances—the Knights of the Bathhouse. May they all snap their garters. The govern- ment plans to ban passive hunting (i.e. reading Surtees and Trollope). Give them a tiny, tinny toot. Nothing that happens this year will be permitted to get a rise out of me. I am event-dead, outrage-impervious, shock-horror-numbed, fury-extinct. The headlines will scream in vain. The small print will whimper unheard. I shall be a wall of damp sandbags into which the fiercest bullets of the modern age will plunge harmlessly. I am not just laid-back but supine, decumbent, torpid, vegetative, quite inert. My responses to all things will be whispered, dulcet, at the very worst sto- ical. This will be the year of the shrugged shoulder.
Instead, I shall observe, notice, record and study things in a mood of tranquillity. Small animals like squirrels, now increas- ingly common in the street where I live, indeed in my own back garden — how do they get on with the local cats? A good question. The neighbourhood fox, or foxes, whose epiphanies are becoming regular not an omen for good or ill, just a phe- nomenon, Of interest. Local dogs: the slim Alsatian who lopes after a sort of female Cossack; the Airedale with the Wittgen- stein pu77le-face; the big, buccaneering, ginger dog, with the brash, heedless expres- sion, who might have belonged to Byron and been called Bosun or Pompey; the sly poodle who figures in `Bonzo' Wyatt's diaries. And the people associated with these and other mutts: the retired grenadier with the lance-corporal's strut; Old Contemptible, the only man in West- bourne Park Villas who still keeps a fag behind his ear; Zsa-Zsa Gaberdine, click- ety-clicking her heels and sheltering behind her war paint; Bag Lady herself, as stout and grimy as her Guinness pint-glass; young Bonaparte, not just a chip off the old block but a lethal splinter. These and their mates I shall scrutinise.
But I shall also be looking at trees. I have been drawing them systematically in recent months and this year I shall have enough for an exhibition. Sensible things, trees. They don't get angry, though the wind shakes and tosses them; they are beautiful but never vain. They may grow old but they do not surrender to weariness, cynicism or despair. They are upright but not proud, hard but not cruel, shady and sometimes crooked, but never dishonest. They whisper in a secret tongue, drop their leaves like hints, and sway to the music of time. Good companions in a new year of tolerance and not worrying.
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