DIARY
The crescendo of adjectives trumpeted by politicians after atrocities — murder- ous, evil, mad — has, in recent times, tended to climax with an adjective which, for some reason, is judged to be the most pejorative of all. 'This act', goes the set speech, 'was murderous, evil, mad and . cowardly.' After the IRA mortar attack on Downing Street, MPs condemned it as 'cowardly'. Over the weekend, Mr Neil Kinnock said that 'the word' for Saddam Hussein was '. . . a coward'. It seems to me absurd that to be a coward is now judged more damnable than to be murderous, evil or mad. Cowardice has a great many unsung qualities. Unlike heroes or villains, cowards tend to keep themselves to them- selves and like to avoid any hint of trouble. If only Hussein were a coward, he might have stayed at home with Mum Hussein in the village of Takrit and tried his hand at petit point, rather than opting for the hero's way out, first in terrorism and then in acting the mad dog in a bunker full of armed generals. Similarly, there are more cowardly ways of spending a Thursday morning than in parking a transit van in Whitehall, detonating extremely unreliable mortar bombs, and making an escape through the snow on a motor-bike. If there were only a bit more cowardice about, the world would be a quieter place.
'spent two hours over lunch with Charles Moore a fortnight ago and failed to notice that he was going bald, then last week I read his moving lament to his lost hair. Oddly enough, I have been going bald since the age of 20 (how much longer before going becomes gone?) yet for most of the day I am able to wander around under the happy illusion that I have an almost unmanageably extravagant head of hair, along the lines of an English Jimi Hendrix or even Carmen Miranda. Only when I catch sight of myself in shop windows am I brought face-to-face with the realisation that I more closely resemble Mr Robert Robinson. Though I am grateful to Mr Moore for pushing a new line in baldy propaganda to the effect that bald men are excitingly power-crazed, I'm afraid that it won't wash with the world at large. One of the many upsetting aspects of hair loss is having to read flagrantly baldist fiction in which walk-on characters are described as `dull and balding' as if the two adjectives went together as naturally as 'happy and glorious'. Those who do not suffer from it suspect that baldness is as much a character defect as a physical defect. This is why Gerald Kaufman, who is really not so bad as politicians go, seems to inspire convul- sions of irritation. Perhaps if he were to invest in a Lionel Blair-style bouffant hairpiece, his pronouncements would gain
CRAIG BROWN
a new authority. Other politicians have gone in for hair replacement therapy, some of it bizarre. The late Mark Boxer had as sharp an eye for hair as he had a nose for gossip. As a cartoonist, he found that when he got the hair of a caricature right, the rest followed. A year or so before he died, he told me with great glee that he had been chatting to a dermatologist at a party. This dermatologist had told him of a new method of hair replacement which in- volved planting the patient's pubic hair on the bald patch. He assured Mark that a senior Tory politician was undergoing this treatment, but discretion forbade him to reveal which one. Coincidentally, the very next day, Mark visited the opera, and found that the head behind which he sat belonged to Mr (as he then was) Norman St John-Stevas. But even diarists must exercise discretion from time to time, so I think I will close Mark's story there . . .
Last week, Frank Keating wondered why so few British columnists are in- terested in writing about sport. He then paid me and my mentor, Sir Wallace Arnold, the compliment of including us among those he would like to see turn their pens to sporting heroes. Wallace is under- standably peeved that Mr Keating has overlooked both his jocular tome, Owzat for a Laugh!: The Punch Book of Bat and Ball and his highly-acclaimed humorous
after-dinner speeches to the Lord's Taver- ners, many of them conducted in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh and Sir Harry Secombe. Though I hate most sport, and certainly all team sport, I too once wrote a book about it. Sensing — wrongly as it turned out — a gap in the market, I wrote The Book of Sports Lists with my brother back in 1983. I so hated the subject that I soon found myself homing in on those stories involving sportsmen in death, disfigurement or multiple injury. What the publishers had envisaged as a frothy book full of sporting anecdotes thus became a series of harsh morality tales against all types of exercise. The only sportsmen I had any time for were the darts players, who were then enjoying tremendous popular- ity. Professional darts players differ from all other sportsmen in that they are at their best when unhealthy, drunk and fat. My favourite was Jocky Wilson, whose auto- biography, Jocky, proved a mine of in- formation. Like Queen Victoria, Sherlock Holmes, Henry James and, in a funny sort of way, John Major, Jocky Wilson is someone about whom even the slightest detail of personal information holds a peculiar power. Thus, while dull worthies such as the Charlton brothers or Sebastian Coe merited only a couple of entries each, our book was jam-packed with Jocky. His memory still haunts me. An ex-fin-chopper at a Kirkcaldy fish-factory, he lost his teeth by the age of 28 through eating too many sweets. Having made it big, he splashed out £1,200 on a set of dentures, but they broke on the floor after they popped out of his mouth as he let out a celebratory shout when he won a tournament. He would drink seven or eight vodkas per match `to keep my nerves in the proper state so that I can play at my best' — and some- times more. Once, when moving to shake the hand of his opponent, he completely missed. He was never one to compromise before the television cameras. 'If my nose needs picking, I'll pick it,' he said. Until sport can produce more heroes of the calibre of Jocky Wilson, I plan to steer well clear.
.H. Auden once described his face as 'looking like a wedding cake that has been left out in the rain'. In his new book, Peter Levi describes Auden as resembling `some unlikely cart-horse that might still frisk in a field or might nuzzle one's hand expecting sugar'. Both these images arc pleasant enough, I suppose, but I still much prefer the less romantic view of David Hockney. After painting the elderly Auden, Hockney's only comment was, 'I kept thinking to myself, "If his face looks like that what the hell can his balls look like?" '
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