Diary
The isle is full of noises. Both the last and the penultimate writers of this Diary have complained about transistor radios played in the street. As I write I can hear two, or maybe three. Then there is a neighbour's child practising the trumpet, lorries in the distance, a motor lawnmower, two jumbo jets overhead. Noise-haters are sometimes made to feel that they are petulant neurotics but really it is the accep- tance of noise that is deranged: we are sur- rounded by millions of small explosions coming from internal combustion engines and we put up with it as if it were sane and natural. In a weary way we all grow less in- clined to protest about noise. Sometimes, occasionally with success, I ask pubs to turn off the canned 'music', a form of torture to anyone in the least musical, but then there is the ping-squeak of fruit machines and space invaders. It is almost enough to stop one drinking. Sometimes also I ask people to quieten their radios in public places but this can take strong nerves. You are on a Piccadilly line tube early on Saturday even- ing. The only others in the carriage are four huge lads with woolly hats pulled over their dreadlocks. Between them is a big Japanese portable cassette player (the kind known in New York as a Puerto Rican briefcase) Playing 'Reggae Express' at several thou- sand decibels. Do you attempt a friendly greeting: 'I say, Rasta, man! but would you mind awfully turning that down?' No, you — which is to say I — get into another car- riage. The latest aural curse is the helicopter. In American cities they positive- ly darken the skies and in London too their ear-splitting clatter-bang becomes more familiar all the time. What are they all do- ing? Carrying top aides to some prestigious rendezvous? Preparing a military coup? Who knows? The other month I wanted to work in peace and so I borrowed a friend's cottage in the country. At least, quiet was what I sought. I had forgotten the bird- scarers. For those who know not the modern English countryside, these are large tripods supporting two long, fat, horizontal cylinders. Beneath is slung a canister of calor gas. The gas fills the barrels and at regular intervals is ignited with a deafening roar. In the prairie land of West Suffolk there is one of these infernal machines for each half acre of cornfield. It might be Beirut, or the first day on the Somme.
In his forthcoming memoir More of My Life, Sir A. J. Ayer (a correct form of ad- dress, by the way) writes, a little surpris- ingly, that his main interest in sport is not aesthetic but simply because, having made sometimes arbitrary identifications with one side or the other, 'I want my team to "I'• He adds less surprisingly that lawn tennis, the one game at which he showed some skill, is one in which he now takes
little interest 'just because the leading players appear so disagreeable'. The leading players are so disagreeable that I now find it almost impossible to watch tennis, let alone watch it with pleasure. All my life I have promised myself that I should boycott some product or other because of a repellent advert; now for the first time I have actually done so and make a point of not buying the razors advertised by that psychopathic McEnroe commercial. Apart from that, few people have pointed out how boring McEnroe is: not his manners, his play. He can hit the ball very hard and very accurate- ly but with no grace or subtlety. Nastase's humorous antics may have been a pain in the neck, but he was a great artist on the court. The truth is that women's tennis is now much better to watch than men's: more delicate and reflective, less dominated by brute force. There is an answer: to do away with the second service in professional tennis. This would end the premium on the big service, followed by a charge to the net, as services would have to be on target rather than as hard as possible. This would not, I fear, mean the immediate end of McEnroe's reign, so tediously accurate is he.
The last time I reflected in these pages on the number of people who seemed to drop dead while jogging I was sued for libel, which did not alarm me (although it cost the Spectator money), and I was told that I had caused pain, which did bother me. So I return to the subject with caution. Cautious as one may be, did anyone read of the death of Jim Fixx without a flicker of a smile? He it will be recalled was an American jogging fanatic who had made a fortune out of a book on running (that's right, a book on running) and then keeled over on one of his solitary canters. Indeed, not one but two well-known Americans died while out a-jogging last Friday. What the running craze most clearly reflects is
something which our antepenultimate Diarist, Mr Alan Watkins, remarked on: American credulity in the matter of health and fitness, and diet also. This credulity stems from a logical error. No doubt it feels better to feel well than to feel ill. But despite the fitness freaks' apparent misconception, we all die. By masochistic- ally tormenting their bodies the joggers may succeed in prolonging their lives, though some clearly do not. What does that profit them if it leads to a senile and incontinent old age? A life spent in the temperate pur- suit of bodily pleasure ending in a somewhat earlier death is at least as rational. One of the chapters in Mr Fixx's book was called 'Across the pain threshold'; I'll stick to snooker.
Ifirst met John Vaizey almost 20 years ago when he was a don at Oxford, inter- rogating scholarship candidates at Worcester. We had an altercation about the character and conduct of Winston Chur- chill, and he struck me as somewhat brash and pretentious, though looking back nothing like as brash and pretentious as I must have struck him. The immediate out- come was that I went to New College. Later I came to enjoy his company — he was a witty man — and to admire his writing even when I didn't agree with it. It is fair to im- pugn, or at least be cynical about, the motives of many of the 'defectors', their youthful enthusiasm for socialism dulled by the marginal rates of income tax. Not so with John, I think. He ended as a Conser- vative peer but it was truly a case of the Labour Party's having left him rather than of his having left it. He was the last Croslandite, and In Breach of Promise, his last book on, among others, Anthony Crosland, was one of his best.
Writing from San Francisco last week I resolved to avoid the more obvious aspects of the Queen of the Pacific, as that lovely city was once called with a straight face. Then on my last day there I was sitting in the foreign press centre idly thumbing through a pile of bumf, when I came across a leaflet addressed to 'Dear Media Per- sons'. It contained 'profiles of some forty organizations that serve the lesbian/gay communities'. These include the Society of Lesbian Composers, the Gay Atheist League, 'a community of gay and non-gay Episcopalians', the Dykecologist Herbarist and the Gay American Indians (I have not made any of this up). So far just within the bounds of imagining or bearing. Then I wandered into this circle of hell: the Castro Club is 'an alcohol-free social club for gay men and lesbians ... additional income comes from a small coffee bar. Besides con- versation and reading, the Club encourages board games and video entertainment.' Well, it was good of them to mention it but I have this thing about board games....
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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