DIARY
BARRY HUMPHRIES Somewhere in London there must be a Speed bumps millionaire. In the dismal purlieu of Hampstead where I temporarily reside, the craze for these costly corruga- tions has reached maniacal proportions. Surely Camden council should just let these narrow and potholed streets degenerate even further, so that they, like the Devil's Causeway pavements, become completely Impassable. But Camden council was ever on the side of perversity. The ubiquitous orange vans of its Gay and Lesbian Coun- selling Service constantly impede the slug- gish flow of traffic in these squalid streets. Not seldom, these may be found parked mid-roadway with engines running and doors ajar — like motorised Marie Celestes — while overalled psycho-medics are else- where, attending to some sexual emergen- cy. I love those photographs that occasion- ally appear in the correspondence columns of Country Life: a reader's snap of an equiv- ocal chunk of worm-eaten carpentry, for instance: 'I found this in our shed. Can a reader tell me if this is a mediaeval Lin- colnshire hod?' I envisage the same column In a Count'', Life of the millennium (if that Periodical has not by then vanished into the oubliette of anachronism). A reader's query will be illustrated with a laser photo of a mouldering speed bump: 'What is this? A seismic and bituminous ripple? A late 20th-century tumulus. . . ?' Readers in per- manently gridlocked England will be invit- ed to surmise. I think we can safely guess that someone on the council has a brother- in-law or, more likely, sister-in-law in the Speed bump industry. But surely these pro- liferating undulations and modified ha-has must present a serious problem to the emergency services. I would hate to have spinal injuries, water on the brain or even a broken anlde and be jolted to hospi- tal in an ambulance which was obliged to negotiate a series of sleeping policemen at high speed. Indeed, Camden council may be hoist with their own petard, for thanks to their own speed bumps their Emergency Counselling Service may arrive too late at the doorstep of some desperate housewife teetering on the brink of heterosexuality.
There is something about writing an occasional column which brings out the curmudgeon in the columnist and often turns him into a querulous old pedant. He excoriates the manners of youth on public transport, and whinges tediously on about People who say 'hopefully'. I suppose there is something about having to deliver a col- umn of any kind which makes one immedi- ately rather tetchy and captious, and of Fourse it is usually a good opportunity to let off steam or syphon off bile. Having said that (one day I hope to publish a book of boring essays with the downbeat Beer- bohmian title, Having Said That), I'm beginning to hear everyone saying, 'Bear with me,' aren't you? What does it mean exactly? When uttered by a shop assistant in response to an enquiry, it usually means, 'I'm going away now, perhaps for a long time, and you'll think I'm checking to see if we have the product you require, so that I can come back quickly with some good, helpful news. Instead, though, it's my tea break, after which I'm going to stand in the street and smoke a cigarette and I will have completely forgotten about you and, this being England, you will half expect this sort of treatment anyway, and you'll wait a long time wondering if I'm coming back and then you'll go away, and with any luck you'll never return.' When a tradesman says, 'Bear with me,' it means that he is pre- sented with a problem which he has no idea how to tackle, and couldn't care less. And the man in the camera shop examining your expensive, duty-free but slightly malfunc- tioning instrument always says, 'Bear with me,' just before he irreparably breaks it. On the telephone, 'Bear with me' usually pre- cedes an interminable silence, and I am sure that in the latest courses in business administration and public relations, there are special 'Bear with me' classes, encour- aging students to employ this phrase as a more customer-friendly alternative to 'I haven't a clue' and 'Get stuffed'.
There is a new kind of profile in Sunday papers, at least I think it's fairly new, in which the subject of the profile doesn't get a look-in. Instead, the journalist rings up people who know him and interviews them, so that the finished article is a bit like This Is Your Life without the main protagonist, whose personality is meant to emerge in ghostly form. Well, some well-intentioned joumo did this to me recently in the Sunday Independent. He must have pestered quite a lot of people, who all said very nice things, though he did manage to canvass at least one total stranger and two card-carrying ratbags. The former, a provincial academic, berated me for not agreeing with him on practically everything. It is all quite flatter- ing and might even sell a few tickets at the Palladium, where I am at present imper- sonating the most politically incorrect char- acter in English literature other than Little Black Sambo. However, might it not be an even more interesting experiment to inter- view people who don't know me at all, or even people who have never heard of me? Perhaps acquaintance carries its own preju- dices, occluding a true picture of the sub- ject. A nice ex-wife importuned by the journo said that getting a composite picture of me reminded her of the famous Japanese film where four witnesses to a murder all give radically different accounts. I am not sure that I care to be compared with a murder victim and perhaps it should have been tactfully pointed out that the girl in the movie wasn't murdered but raped.
There is a nasty thing you can catch in Australian hospitals when you go there for something else. It is called 'golden staff, a hypocorism for staphylococcus, I suppose. It sounds like a decorative plant and probably looks rather pretty under the microscope. English hospitals must have an equivalent, since we all know people who go in for observation and come out for obsequies. A slightly loopy doctor told me that it is not that our hospitals are dirty — though he could have fooled me because I was once invited by a lascivious nurse to the base- ment of a famous Paddington infirmary and observed that the kitchen floor was cobbled with cockroaches — but that they are too clean. Modern sterilising agents have apparently produced hardier and more athletic organisms and the golden staff and its colleagues are learning to scale even loftier hygiene thresholds. It seems that in Israel a successful experiment has been conducted in a really grubby hospital where surgeons don't scrub up, smoke dur- ing procedures, and operate with instru- ments sterilised in old shaving mugs. Result: no cross-infections.
Imissed David Helfgott's concert, I'm afraid. I admire his courage and tenacity, but I would not cross the road to hear someone who had learned to play The Flight of the Bumble Bee from John Gielgud.
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