Afterthought
By ALAN BRIE N
I find that I tend to overrate the trappings of success and prosperity-all those cool, sophisti- cated, metropolitan tastes in food and drink and clothes which once seemed so much part of the cultured higlif to a provincial on the make. The dryness bit, for example. It has taken me to the age of thirty-nine before I dare admit to myself that I really do not prefer a sherry to have a sharp, teeth-gritting edge to it, coffee to be a tiny egg-cup of black bitter medicine, martinis made of paint-stripper, olives which squirt salty bile on the crawling tongue. All these years I
'Use full artistic freedom.-Within the limits of strict Frontality, of course.'
have been suppressing a hunger for the thick, the syrupy, the bland, the creamy, the stodgy. It is, I realise, about time that I recognised that my natural appetite is that of a retarded schoolboy instead of that of a prematurely senile under- graduate. So away with all those overrated pun- gent, peppery, sour flavours, invented to pene- trate the glazed palates of the self-indulgent rich whose taste-buds have been clobbered into in- sensibility by exposure to hard liquor and heavy smoking. In future, give me sherry 'sweet, very sweet,' which creeps from the bottle like molten tar. White coffee in soup bowls which pours down in healthy, milky gulps. Mix the wine with water, fizz up the beer with lemonade, sort out the hard- centres as a, Christmas present to the dentist, let the peach juices dribble down the chin, warm up the whisky and sugar the hors d'ceuvre. They can nudge each other-those trend-setters and ghastly-good-tasters with ansthetised, salt-caked gullets-in future I am eating to gratify my belly, not to impress prospective employers, fathers-in- law, Roscoe and old J.B.
The same feeling is gradually reviving about clothes, furnishings, architecture and the rest of the Design Centre cult. I cannot remember when I was first hoodwinked into believing that any- thing except simplicity, austerity, starkness and clean lines was dead common. Now I see this is the worship of the skeleton rather than the body, the X-ray not the photograph. `Secretly have always enjoyed buttons and bows, frills and flounces, loud colours and restless patterns, as remembered from the party frocks of those shy, warm girls who astonished you in the darkness of the broom cupboard playing 'Murder' or 'Sar- dines.' But I have continued to pretend that I admired the little black dress which makes all women look like assistants in a bankrupt draper's.
Enough of those empty rooms, with their hygienic pastel walls, blank patternless carpets, surgical furniture and abstract paintings, that look as if you had arrived ten minutes after the bailiffs had cleared out everything comfortable and casual. Let us have houses where it is possible to lose six children for an afternoon in a jungle of mountainous sofas, elephantine armchairs, barri- cades of lamp standards, cake stands, potted plants, grand pianos and sideboards. Back to the baroque, the rococo, the barococo, Gothic Art
Nouveau, Late Marzipan MGM. Man is the measure of all things—and few objects have so many knobs, crevasses, pendants, shelves, decora- tions, dimples and pointless adornments as the naked human body. We should stop our designers behaving as if we were all eggs dnd cubes in a geometrical landscape.
Overrated too are all attempts to simplify, codify, poll and percentage human wants, needs, fears and aspirations. I would rather hehr the stumbling, confused, rambling opinions of ten people picked at random from the population than all the statistics of the psephologists. Never in the entire history of superstition—the heyday of witches, fortune-tellers, augurs, prophets, sibyls and oracles—have so many pseudo-scientists been engaged in trying to foretell the future from a bagful of decimals. I should not be surprised in October if only one poor illiterate went out to vote while the rest of us stayed at home to watch the ceremony on television and wait for Robert McKenzie and David Butler to analyse his choice. Self-consciousness carried to such pathological extremes becomes a form of auto-hypnotism.
We become conditioned to do tomorrow what the newspapers tell us we did yesterday. We stare at our own face on the telly, afraid to move in case we get out of synchronisation with our own image. The slightest deviation from the norm makes the freak famous for a day. Then the norm shifts and we settle back into conformity. Most overrated of all is being'with it, being modern, up-to-date, in the swim, in the know. Let's make the sociologists liars and beat the computer by dying our hair, changing our job, voting Liberal, baking bread, walking to work, playing parlour games, reVersing roles.
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