DIARY
BARRY HUMPHRIES Regular readers of my Who's Who entry will know that I am president of the Jan Frans de Boever Society (Belgium). It is a small society — its total membership is unlikely to exceed four persons — but all of us are united in our enthusiasm for the work of this neglected Ghentois artist. De Boever (1872-1949), who has at least one painting in the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent (though sadly never on exhibition), spe- cialised in erotic memento mori: pictures of chorus girls invariably accompanied by skeletons. The nudes are always provoca- tively posed with attentive cadavers who ignite their cigarettes with bony fingers, grin from the shadows of their rancid boudoirs or attempt forms of congress more satisfactori- ly accomplished by the corporeally endowed. My own De Boever collection consists of a mere seven or eight canvases, but our secre- tary acquires every picture that comes on the market, and his small home in Ghent is lined from floor to ceiling with capering skeletons and concupiscent trollops. At the society's last extraordinary general meeting the other day there were few, if any, chairs on which to sit, since our secretary spends every spare franc in augmenting this unique collection. His charming children, raised in this grotto of white-thighed and black- stockinged filler de joie and their osseous consorts, will carry into later life rich memo- ries of bordello and charnel house.
Iwas unexpectedly reminded of Belgium on a recent holiday visit to the ruins at Myceriae. Beside the ticket kiosk, past which visitors shuffle to marvel at the excavated palace, the Lion Gate and the tomb of Agamemnon, is a visitors' book. A few weeks ago a family from Antwerp by the name of Blockx had ingenuously written, `We wish you good luck with your site.' It was a touching sentiment which I am sure the Blockx family would reiterate were they to visit, say, the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Cambodian temples at Angkor Wat. 'We wish you good luck with your temples,' they would probably say. It is sad that the mighty Dome of Greenwich does not invite its spo- radic patrons to inscribe their comments in a visitors' book. No structure on Earth is more in need of the Blockx blessing.
This summer I spent a week in Turkey with my son Rupert, and for many hours we rambled through the colourful bazaars try- ing to find the exit, only to discover the por- tal of yet another labyrinth of jewellery stores, leather shops, saffron salesmen, Turkish-delight pedlars and carpet vendors. I was rather pompously announcing my total indifference to the rug as a work of art and as a useful household embellishment when a Turk ran out of his heavily draped alcove and in a strong Australian accent greeted me by name. It emerged that he lived in the city of Geelong near Melbourne and was briefly revisiting the family carpet business. It was an odd place to meet a fan, and ever susceptible to the compliment of fawning recognition, I was cajoled into the shop. My new friend demanded that photographs be taken commemorating this auspicious meet- ing and anon he persuaded us to partake of a meal: an extended Turkish mezze which was brought to us in the shop by a neigh- bouring restaurateur. Since I had absolutely no intention of buying so much as a doily of woven wool, I was rather enjoying myself when our host thought we might like to see the difference between an antique Turkish rug and a modern fake. An hour later, hav- ing forked out for the unsolicited kebabs and paid for the souvenir snapshots, I found myself elsewhere in the bazaar trying to buy a cheap suitcase in which to cram three incredibly heavy antique carpets which I would soon have to schlep back to England, via Germany and Austria. When, weeks later, I staggered through Heathrow, I encountered a customs official who seemed to know a lot more about carpets than the Turks themselves do. 'They're very old,' I explained. He looked sympathetic, even rue- ful. Merely glancing at my three gaudy pur- chases, he charged me VAT, a penalty only applied to the brand-new. Who needs Christie's and Sotheby's? For a real evalua- tion, you can't beat the Red Channel. The morbid fascination of the English for sexual eccentricity has remained undi- minished since the Wilde trials. I picked up an old copy of the Independent in. Greece recently and noticed it had a big pictorial spread about homosexuals. The headline was 'Take away these 50 faces and Britain would be the poorer place'. There were photographs of 50 perfectly ordinary-look- ing men and women, and descriptions of their 'contribution' to the arts, politics, medicine, food, fashion, lifestyle, you name it. Was there, I wondered, some suggestion that we might not have these wonderful people for much longer? Were they soon to be interned or vaporised or sent to Tasma- nia, that the Independent was rushing so passionately to their defence? Did the poor members of the pillow-biting and chemise- lifting communities illustrated know they were to be singled out by this liberal and generous broadsheet? Wasn't there some- thing just a little sexist and embarrassing about the whole thing? And shouldn't the Independent run a series? Why just gays and lesbians we can't do possibly without? What about people who part their hair on the right? Or albinos? Or compulsive nose- pickers? Or paedophiles? What about the Belgians, for Heaven's sake?
In an idyllic valley near Salzburg, I lunched last week with Ribbentrop's former aide, my friend Reinhard Spitzy. The genial octogenarian author of that riveting memoir How We Squandered the Reich has finished another volume, to be called Anecdotes of the Third Reich, which, he tells me, dwells on the more humorous aspects of life in Hitler's inner circle. Spitzy writes that at one of Hitler's regular military conferences the Fiihrer was bothered by the attentions of a fly, which made persistent attempts to settle on the tip of his nose. Irritated, he turned to a nearby adjutant, SS Sturmbannfiihrer Darges, and angrily ordered him to dispatch the insect. The adjutant, who fell fly-chasing was beneath the dignity of a German officer, tried to politely laugh off the matter and made shooing motions with his hand in the fly's general direction. This infuriated Hitler, who roared, `I've been talking today with officers who tell me that a brave sailor in a one-man U-boat has managed to sink a huge Allied ship and yet you are incapable of dealing with a tiny fly!' Needless to say, that officer never appeared at headquarters again. There was a clandestine joke popular at the time in which one German asks anoth- er German what his plans are when the war finally comes to an end. The second German replies that he intends to embark upon a delightful bicycle tour of the Greater Ger- man Reich. 'Oh really?' inquired his friend. `And what will you do in the afternoon?'
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