T he world is, suddenly and inexplicably, obsessed with the moral
implications of penguins. The Christian Right in America, inspired by the documentary film March of the Penguins, argues that the life-cycle of the emperor penguin demonstrates the truth of ‘intelligent design’ and the importance of ‘monogamy, sacrifice and child-rearing’. Their enemies, in turn, make hay with the gay penguins of Central Park Zoo in New York, and suggest that penguins are prone to have affairs, and do not show much sign of minding if they lose the odd family member to hungry petrels. The debate’s only common predicate is that, whether liberal or conservative, you are expected to regard penguins as moral paragons rather than, say, nasty smelly fisheating birds with weird little legs. There are precedents for this. One of the most amusing entries in the index to Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality is along the lines of ‘Elephants: as paragons of conjugal virtue.’ Foucault, if I remember rightly, maintained that elephants mated once, quickly and without much enthusiasm, and then rushed off in opposite directions for a jolly good wash, afterwards making a point of having as little to do with each other as possible. Whether Mr Foucault was projecting a certain distaste for the general idea of heterosexual congress on to the poor old elephant is a moot point. It’s no sillier than penguins — for whom I have a high regard, incidentally, and no sexual feelings.
Monday night brought Pen’s annual fundraising quiz at the Café Royal. The idea is that you get a lot of journalists and publishers together to drink and shout and squabble, in order to highlight the plight of those brother writers who are the victims of censorship and torture overseas. (Will Self added the suggestion that we think, too, of writers suffering in this very country, among them ‘a man we shall call H.P., imprisoned in his house on Holland Park Avenue by an enormous pile of cash’.) I was drafted on to the Daily Telegraph’s team after a colleague fell ill, and I was, of course, useless, muffing all the Books questions. ‘Isn’t that a picture of Robert Browning?’ I’d ask. ‘No,’ a colleague would reply gently. ‘It’s Virginia Woolf.’ I never tired of being told, ‘Call yourself a literary editor?’ Knowing that Paris Hilton’s pet monkey Baby Luv had tweaked her nose during a shopping spree in a Las Vegas knicker shop earned me back some kudos, but not as much as I thought it should have. The post is hostile. I feel this more and more as Christmas approaches. Snowdrifts of passive-aggressive secondclass post silt up the hallway of my flat, sulking. Boring, guilt-inducing Christmas cards. Invitations to grim parties. Newsletters and begging letters from the various places that educated me, glossily produced and full of news from half-remembered acquaintances, now paunchy, defeated and prone to exclamation marks (‘John Ledbetter and Jane Dupree send greetings from sunny Guildford! We got married — finally! — in the summer and are expecting our first child’). Expensively produced pamphlets from my bank encouraging me to buy more of their debt. Endless notifications of minor fluctuations in interest rates; utility bills; county court summonses. Catalogues from shops I have never been to; leaflets for plays I don't want to see. Magazines from the NUJ; invitations from the Electoral Reform Society to vote in a ballot on which of three strangers should run my pension fund. Bulletins from the London Cycling Campaign; subscription offers for The Spectator. It started with my not being able to face opening the post, and it piling up on the kitchen table. Now I have moved on to the stage of not being able to face picking it up from the hallway, and the mass of slippery envelopes has started to present a physical as well as a mental hazard.
Why have postmen, once the bringers of pleasant things, become the harbingers of dull horror? My theory is that the things that used to be in the post and provided an incentive to open it — cheques; postal orders; tenners from elderly relatives; letters from friends — are no longer in the post: money arrives electronically; friends email; the elderly relatives have gone to their graves. Things that used not to be in the post — junk mail, mostly — is now all that is in it. The more you get, the less you want to open anything. The Post Office is, in a complex way, bringing about its own demise. And, twisted ankles aside, does anything bad really ever happen to people who choose not to open their post? Ignorance is bliss. Once every couple of months I pick some of it up and open one or two letters, experimentally, as a form of therapy. Not long ago there was one from my accountant, for example, giving a long list of documents that I needed to post to him so that he could do my tax return. The tax return, and the documents I needed to complete it, he implied, were all to be found somewhere else in the pile of unopened letters. Happily, his letter was weeks old and the deadline of the end of the month had long since passed, so doing anything about it was out of the question.
It occurs to me now, though, that ranting about the post is an instance of Meldrewism; which is something else I was gearing up to complain about. Grumpy Old Men fill the telly schedules, and bookshops are swamped with Trussalikes complaining that we no longer speak proper, write right, or behave in a manner that would distinguish us from the least fastidious member of a troop of baboons. The one thing we can still do, apparently, is buy books complaining about us. A book called Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? is number one in the Amazon bestsellers chart. We can only hope the authors’ disgruntlement with modern life and their fellow man will be eased by the huge royalty cheques consequent on their fellow man having bought their book in such obscene quantities. Perhaps, too, all those surly, drunken yobbos of whom the Meldrews complain are simply expressing frustration at not having written their own bestseller about the crapness of modern life; or at the fact that their own book has never got higher than 1,974 on Amazon. Drat it.
Ifelt sympathetic, then, when I ran this week into Alexander Masters, the enviably talented young author of the book Stuart: A Life Backwards, who was recovering from authorial mortification. He walked into the Cambridge branch of Borders the other day pretending to be a customer, sidled up to the counter and asked: ‘Do you by any chance happen to have a copy of Stuart: A Life Backwards?’ The assistant gave him a straight look. ‘Do you by any chance happen to be the author?’ Sam Leith is literary editor of the Daily Telegraph. His book Dead Pets: Eat Them, Stuff Them, Love Them is published by Canongate.
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