MARTIN VANDER WEYER
It is exactly a decade since I pupated from a caterpillar of the banking world to a butterfly of journalism, having made my debut in these pages on general election day 1992. I think that I can describe myself as having been unnaturally happy ever since. Indeed, so glad was I to have found a gate into the garden of literary idlers, so grateful for each commission that followed — the second was a stockbroker's obituary — that I never noticed the recession which must then have been afflicting the freelance fraternity. But I have certainly noticed the present one, which set in before Christmas and continues despite growing evidence of recovery in the real economy. It has left me time to try my hand at playwriting — a comedy about conflict resolution, set in a Yorkshire pub — and to ponder my ambitions for the next decade. The half-formed answer is that I think I just want to make people laugh: the more middle-aged-pillar-of-the-community I become, the more I get a kick out of amdram, poetry and brief bouts of stand-up. So, if the freelance comment slump persists, it's the green shoots of comedy writing for me. Ridiculous? Maybe, but remember Bob Monkhouse: People laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now.'
Iam writing at a pavement table outside the Hotel de France in Monpazier, a lovely bastide in the Dordogne, having come to chivvy the builders who are renovating an old watermill for me nearby. 'I'll be there Friday and expect to see progress,' once had its effect, but this time it had none at all; ten weeks on-site, and they have achieved three weeks' work. They began by demolishing a bathroom and tipping the debris into the mill stream. Next, someone — we politely agreed that it could not possibly be one of the workmen — nicked the stereo out of the house. 'Deep into Peter Mayle territory, then?' friends say, irritatingly, when I recount these frustrations. 'Why don't you write a hilarious book about it and make a million?' Because he's already written it long ago, twice over, and made the million, that's why. But still, the sun's shining, there's fresh asparagus for lunch, and there isn't a damn thing I can do. And, even if there's no music from the stolen stereo, I can calm myself by listening to the mill stream cascading gently over half a ton of gleaming, broken porcelain.
When I'm at home in Helmsley, North Yorkshire, I run the arts centre and
chair the summer music festival. The best thing about both is that so many interesting visitors come to drink or to stay in my house: last year's star guest was Willard White, the great Jamaican-born bass. He was excellent company, once we had recovered from an incident outside York Station in which a passing tourist — rebuked by Willard for lifting a boisterous child into the air, painfully, by one arm — shaped up to punch him. Fortunately, Willard is even more imposing in person than he is on stage in his Paul Robeson show. He took a step forward and repeated, in an impossibly low growl. 'Be very careful with that arm.' The miscreant stepped back, fear in his eyes, while his wife tugged his sleeve and said, 'Leave it' — saving York from what would doubtless have been reported as a shameful racial incident.
This year's star guest to date is another good man to have on your side in a fight: Attila the Stockbroker, the celebrated hardleft poet and punk vocalist. His real name is John, but he really was a stockbroker once — for 11 months in 1981 — and never recovered. He hankers after Honecker's East Germany, while regarding New Labour, US foreign policy, commercial broadcasting and mass-produced lager as facets of a vast, evil conspiracy. He especially hates former fellow-radicals turned smug celebrities — 'saboteurs now riding with the hunt' — among them Roger McGough, who unforgivably accepted the OBE and can look forward to 'an epitaph, in Dailies Mail and Telegraph'. But Attila has his endearing side: he loves Brighton & Hove Albion FC, pond frogs, Hilaire Belloc, and his sensible wife Robina. And he likes my cooking. I've never had a house guest with whom I disagreed so completely, but, in my search for new directions, I think he could be a role model.
And so to lap-dancing. Over the decade, I have had a go at most forms of journalism except war reporting, but I have avoided this winter's most overworked assignment: the visit to a lap-dancing club plus interview with a dancer who's really a drama student and doesn't feel exploited. There seem to have been dozens of them, and the Guardian set a new record for gratuitous space-filling last week with a double-page feature devoted to a new branch of the American chain Spearmint Rhino in, of all places. Harrogate. That's just down the road from Helmsley, but I'm glad that no editor thought fit to send me for a follow-up. I confess that I have already experienced this phenomenon — on a stag night for a British bridegroom at a place called The Gold Club in Atlanta, Georgia, a couple of years ago. Far from being the chic post-modern art form described by devotees, lap-dancing turned out to be jaw-clenchingly dull and creepy, requiring a kind of tantric detachment on the part of both dancer and customer. Conversation seemed superfluous, and laughing out loud — the only correct British reaction to a tacky American invention taken so seriously — would have got us thrown out quicker than grabbing the nearest G-string. It reminded me of a line by Martin Amis about watching pornography — 'Hard to tell who was the biggest loser in this complex transaction: her, him, them, me' — to which we can add, this season, readers, editors, and journalists desperate for work.
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