DIARY KEITH WATERHOUSE
Having had two marriages 'dissolved', as the reference books politely put it — it makes one feel like a cube of sugar — I look with horror upon that impertinent White Paper with its traffic cones charter title 'Looking to the Future: Mediation and the Ground for Divorce'. What's Lord Mackay trying to do — compel those who would be happily divorced to remain unhappily married? God save us from the monstrous potential of an 'Institute of Family Mediation' which would 'combine forces' to convert every failed marriage into casebook-fodder. As well as being objec- tionably intrusive into private life, the White Paper's aims are ridiculous. How can it claim, as one of its objectives, to 'include practical steps to prevent the irretrievable breakdown of marriage'? Irretrievable means gone, lost, done for, finished, irrecoverable, not retrievable, a dead par- rot — in other words, beyond prevention. Are we talking salvage here — spent mar- riages fished out of the sea and semi-resus- citated to give a statistical boost to what the White Paper calls 'the institution' of mar- riage? I don't wish to sound like Jeffrey Bernard but if I still had women lining up (quite rightly) to divorce me, I would soon- er emigrate and commit bigamy in Tahiti than subject myself to the bossy insolence of a compulsory 'information-giving' ses- sion run by 'experts in marriage and divorce who will introduce the couple to the benefits of marriage guidance and counselling'. I just hope they have the chairs bolted to the floor, as they do at the social security bureaus.
If it's advice I wanted I should much pre- fer the invigorating therapy of my former lawyer, the celebrated Oscar Beuselinck, believed by all his friends to have been the model, or anyway the inspiration (we have to be careful in the company of a litigation specialist), for Bill Maitland, the wits'-end Protagonist of Osborne's Inadmissible Evi- dence. When I came to him with the news that I was being sued for divorce for the second time, Oscar's robust response was, So the cat's been pissing in the strawber- ries again?' To John Osborne, his mea- sured advice on one divorce settlement Was, 'No, son, I'm afraid she's got you by the short and curlies.' I recommend stress counselling on these lines to the concerned ladies of Relate and all the other 'media- tion, agencies that will be lapping up the milk of human kindness come any Act of Parliament arising out of this patronising White Paper.
One of the cushiest assignments in journalism must be the questionnaire, which you just fax to your interviewees, leaving them to do the work, and bingo! you have a column written. I have come across an even lazier refinement of the wheeze. Someone commissioned by one of the Sundays to prepare a VE-Day feature writes: 'I would very much appreciate your personal recollections of where you were on that particular day in 1945. Would it be possible for you to write, in a few para- graphs, your outstanding memories?' Half a dozen replies and he has his piece with- out having to lift a word-processor finger. Whatever happened to coming round with a notebook? And then we have Esquire magazine: 'We run a regular column in the Resources section entitled "My Favourite Vegetable", where a celeb/public figure writes a very short paragraph, strangely enough, about their favourite vegetable. We were very much hoping . . .' There is nothing to suggest that Esquire's resource- ful Resources section would pay for my thoughts on broccoli or carrots, if I had any. What an idea, anyway! Eat your heart out, GQ.
Iwrote something in my Daily Mail col- uinn this week about the lamentable igno- rance of a large group of tested schoolchil- dren about the war — didn't know who Eife's a botch, and then you die.' Churchill was, couldn't say what VE-Day stood for, never heard of the Holocaust and so on. It gets worse. A friend, the mother of a 12-year-old, rang me to say, `You don't know the half of it. Susan came home from school and asked me where the demo is next Monday. I said, "What demo?" "The protest demo." "What protest demo?" "The one we're getting the day off for." "No, ducky, you're getting the day off because it's VE-Day." "Yes, I know • — Vigil in Europe Day, and our teacher says we should be celebrating, it by protest- ing against all war."' The wretched child had got hold of the wrong end of the stick, of course — all her teacher had said, it transpired upon enquiry, was that in her own considered view we should use the day to observe a vigil against warfare rather than for a victoryNiollification — but then let's not forget who gave her the stick to hold.
Ending myself, while waiting for a train, in what proved to be a student pub, I idly counted the number of young women smoking. Fifteen out of nineteen. Astound- ing. And come to think of it, those outcasts you see puffing away out in the street because the office has been declared a tobacco-free zone are predominantly women too. Is it because they've been told not to? Forbidden fruits? If so, why from my observation, anyway — are far greater numbers of girls hooked on the habit than youths (five out of eleven in my pub researches)? Do they look upon cigarettes as stylish, sexy even? I've noticed, now that I've taken up counting young women smokers on a hobby basis, that a lot of them handle their smokes in a self-con- sciously mannered fashion, as if admiring themselves in a mental mirror. How does the Health Education Authority propose to combat narcissism?
Talk about frying pans and fires . . . A showbiz friend of mine came across a pro- fessional acquaintance he hadn't seen for some time, and noting his haggard, haunted appearance, asked him if he was well. The reply was, 'No, I'm not well at all, in fact I've just spent a few months in a rest home, but it doesn't seem to have done me any good. It's the work, the pressure, the demands, the rat-race; having to prove yourself, people breathing down your neck all the time, being scared of failure, only as good as your last job, afraid the bandwag- on's going to stop, running to keep up with yourself.' My friend asked solicitously, `So what are you going to do now?"Well, I've thought it all out, and I'm movjng to Los Angeles.'
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