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BARRY HUMPHRIES
Only the most venerable and knowledgeable London cab driver has heard of Belsize Circus, a roundabout near the slums of Kilburn Heights where I have my lodgings. During the second world war many bombs fell nearby but, as was the case with most of London, the worst damage by far was wrought after the war by local councils and town-planners. This morning I saw a massive new building arising on the site of an innocuous petrol station. It is already so transcendentally hideous it could only have been enthusiastically approved by Camden Council. It claims to have been put up by something called the Notting Hill Housing Association and is emblazoned in huge rainbow letters with ejaculations like ‘Hello! Affordable! Smile! Unusual and curious!’ Unusual probably just means uncomfortable and badly designed. John Betjeman used to say that modern British architects should have large photographs of themselves, in their beards and duffel coats, posted outside their buildings, as though they were criminals, which they are. This morning I heard an admiring interview on the wireless with a blind British artist, who paints by smell and touch. He was treated as if he were a unique phenomenon; yet for decades, blind British architects have plied their trade with rarely a word of praise.
Iam still getting over my ‘tap on the shoulder’. This was peritonitis at Christmas time. Luckily it happened in Sydney and not on stage in America, where I was planning soon to be. In 1958 I invented a character called Sandy Stone. Originally intended to put the boredom threshold of an audience to the supreme test, Sandy was a feeble old man in a dressing-gown, clutching a hot-water bottle. In January this year, I came to in hospital finding that I had turned into Sandy, at least temporarily. When he had his little op, he had a nice nurse called Sister Younghusband, who used to put her head around the screens every morning and coyly inquire ‘yes or no?’ Amazingly, one of my nurses bore the same euphonious name, Younghusband, intensifying a spooky link with the invalid of my invention. When you have a ruptured appendix and have been walking around with it for a few days, there is, apparently, a nasty mess for the doctors to clean up, if they succeed in saving your life. Fortunately I was fast asleep when they unzipped me and washed the grey quilted swags and garlands of my intestines in Domestos, stuffing them back into my belly about as neatly as a customs official repacks a suspect suitcase.
New parking laws have been introduced as part of a master plan to make living in London as unpleasant as possible. Instead of giving you a parking ticket, they now take a furtive snapshot of your car and book you without you knowing it, sending you a ticket a few weeks later in the post. This way, they hope you will have lost or thrown away your ticket from the meter, and won’t be able to prove whether you were legally parked or not. This racket has, of course, been going on in Camden for some time. You are cynically given the option of legally challenging the authorities, but by the time of the hearing, the parking enforcement agent will have probably gone back to Somalia. At least they wear nice green uniforms, unlike almost everyone else working the streets of London, who wears a luminous sulphuryellow jerkin. It is a sartorial aberration which has infected people who don’t even work out of doors. I have even noticed supermarket staff stocking the freezer in their fluorescent lime body-warmers, as a protection, no doubt, against out-of-control shopping trolleys.
Bond Street, once such a charming and varied thoroughfare, is on the brink of ruin. After 130 years of trading, Agnew’s picture gallery has been sold to some Italian haberdasher and one fears for the few remaining premises that don’t sell jewels or dresses. Apart from Sotheby’s, Mallets, Partridge, the Fine Arts Society, and Green’s, née Wildenstein, it’s now wall-to-wall rag trade; a boring Frockerama and mostly owned by the Dutch! Paradoxically, with all those clothes behind glass, the pedestrians are among the drabbest and most ill-dressed people west of Albania. Where are the hats of yesteryear? Where are the gloves?
Most Belgian women I have known wear gloves when driving, just as the Californian girls of my acquaintance prefer to drive barefoot, like the hoydens in a tale by Kerouac. Many people think that I do not drive and that I am an only child but, in fact, I am a keen motorist and an Australian Grand Prix driver with, I believe, several siblings. I always wear motoring gloves, custom-made for me by my gantier in Lisbon, but they have recently gone missing. Lately, I seem to have mislaid many things, including wrist-watches, glasses of course, and last Tuesday, a small drawing by Picabia. In such cases, I always telephone Minna, my psychic adviser in Brisbane, who tells me where to find them, and she is never wrong. Thanks to Minna’s long-distance clairvoyance, I discovered my driving gloves in the most unlikely place of all. The glove compartment of the car. Where would I be without my sub-tropical sibyl?
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