DIARY
ALAN RUSBRIDGER
If, like me, you are married to someone who positively relishes a dust-up in a restaurant, the one thing you dread encountering over a meal is a maggot. The other night we met one while out to dinner celebrating the launch of a friend's book. We had just finished our meal and paid the bill when a little white figure wriggled into the middle of the table and waved hello. The dramatis personae are important here: three effete Englishmen and one not at all effete Scottish woman, who comes from a long line of restaurant terrorisers. Her father, for instance, is a large and voluble Scottish farmer who considers a meal something of a disappointment if it all appears on time, properly cooked and minus any form of insect life. The three Englishmen looked aghast as my wife fixed the maggot in the eye and said firmly, 'That maggot's worth money.' The Englishmen mumbled apologetically as my wife entered into negotiations with the waiter. One of us indicated in tones strangled with embar- rassment that we would be quite happy with a drink. 'A large brandy,' insisted my wife. 'A small glass of white wine would be fine,' we murmured. The curious thing about the episode is that everyone to whom I have described the scene — other effete Englishmen included — sides with my wife. `Bloody lucky to get away with a glass of wine,' these armchair complainers bark. `You could have had the place closed down.' I have since met one of my fellow diners, who also speaks warmly of my wife's performance. Even I am now convinced that she was right. I am equally convinced that if the three men were ever again to dine alone, and were a little white maggot once more to make its cheery entrance across the table, one of us would discretly squash it and, without a word from any of us, quietly slip it into his pocket.
Classie FM goes from strength to strength, but its presenters still have the greatest difficulty identifying the music they are playing. This is understandable when dealing with the lesser composers of the Darmstaadt school, but you'd have thought they'd be at home with Gilbert and Sulli- van. Last weekend — with no fewer than two presenters on duty — we were told to expect the overture to the Mikado. Neither presenter spotted that the music they in fact played had nothing to do with the Mikado. This did not stop them confidently dissecting the performance they'd just heard: five marks for interpreta- tion, six marks for sound etc, etc. I think it was one of these same presenters who recently introduced a violin concerto by 'Max Bruckner'. Five out of ten for accu- racy. The Sunday Times' editor has been at his patronising best over the Guardian's recent Observer deal. In one now famous metaphor he likened the Independent on Sunday and the Observer to Raith Rovers and Brechin City fighting each other for the right to play Rangers. These sporting alle- gories are always dangerous. The Sindie's editor, Ian Jack, has already pointed out that Raith Rovers have just been promoted to the Scottish League Premier Division. As it happens Brechin City are now doing terribly well and are within one match of promotion. And Rangers? The manage- ment at Ibrox Park is currently splashing out nearly £3 million on a complete facelift. Bulldozers have just moved in to dig up the pitch, with the turf being flogged off to fans at £5 a square metre. At the end of the reconstruction the level of the new playing surface will be a foot lower than before. Athe Saatchi Gallery for last week's party to celebrate Granta's issue dedicated to the Best of Young British Novelists, I picked up a catalogue for the show current- ly on: the Best of Young British Artists. It is a dismal document which confirms my feeling that contemporary artists should avoid the temptation to explain their work. Words are seldom their strong suit, and sympathetic critics generally serve only to make matters worse. Mark Wallinger's extraordinarily precise paintings of stallions are extremely striking, but the heart sinks to learn that they are, in fact, a metaphor for the interconnection of class, money, privilege; power and national identity. Sim- ilarly, in a small New York gallery recently, I was rather struck to come across an extraordinary installation of wire sculpture consisting of about 20 rolled up mattresses suspended in mid-air and smeared with cake. I had little idea what it meant, but the image did linger in my mind. I have since discovered that the artist, Nancy Rubins, intended this as a metaphor of eating disorders and sexual abuse. 'Neither man nor woman can inhabit her rotting beds,' wrote a friendly New York critic, `suggesting the impossibility of sleep or sex — as we know it — before the night- mare of domestic violence blows over.' The current Whitney Biennial is full of artists' slightly flatulent explanations of their own work. Never explain, never apologise.
Actually, such things are much less likely to be metaphors nowadays than paradigms. Paradigms are definitely the growth industry of the Nineties. You may have noticed how more and more journal- ists are cottoning on to what useful little things they are. Last week we learned in the Times how both Michael Jackson and Madonna 'epitomise one pop paradigm'. Elsewhere we have been told that Philip Larkin's lovelife was a paradigm of indeci- sion and deceit and that David Brown was a paradigm of British engineering. The Grand National fiasco was, naturally, a paradigm of English institutional life, just as television's Noeline is a paradigm of how working-class habits lead to ill-health. A quick computer check has established no fewer than 236 such paradigms in the last year in the broadsheet papers. This com- pares very favourably with 1991-92, when there were only 149. That paradigms are a paradigm of the Nineties cannot be serious- ly in doubt. Records show that between 1985 and 1989 there were never more than 76 paradigms in a good year and as few as 41 in a lean year. This must surely be a paradigm of something. Of what, I am not as yet quite sure.
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