Why won’t anyone listen to my views on the distillation of seawater?
My last column on this page was about pasta. The column testified to a lack of enthusiasm for boiled flourand-water paste, accused pasta followers of pandering to fashion, and praised the undervalued potato.
A little levity in a rather political magazine is no bad thing; no great question of the hour grabbed our attention at the time; and though a writer’s personal tastes may be of limited interest in themselves, he may voice what others think too. Lots of us may think pasta is boring, and it’s worth a blast on the trumpet if only to find out whether there will be an echo.
Nevertheless, one would have anticipated a raised eyebrow here and there, with the perhaps unspoken reproach that it was trivial of me to occupy an entire page of a respected national publication with my views on spaghetti. Was there nothing more important to write about? Was it not lazy to lapse into an easy facetiousness instead of tackling issues that matter?
This did not prove to be the response. Within minutes of the issue’s publication, the Today programme contacted me with an invitation to debate the pasta question with the respected Italian restaurateur Antonio Carluccio on its Saturday morning show. The debate was fun. Mr Carluccio was a good sport (I dared not admit that I eat in his excellent Canary Wharf restaurant all the time) and we had a spirited discussion on whether spaghetti is the middle bit hollowed out from macaroni. In the listeners’ emails reported at the end of the programme, the pasta issue dominated the mailbag and the messages were lively. Since then, friends and others who encounter me have hardly mentioned anything but pasta; it seems they have all read the column or heard about it. Little else I write seems to evince this kind of response.
So there you have it. My journalism has reached its natural level. Nobody is interested in my views on religious hatred. Nobody cares what I think about ID cards. My views on the Conservative party ‘modernisers’ are not widely sought. The future of electric batteries, road-pricing and the distillation of seawater — all topics which absorb me in print and in private — are of no account nationally. My theories about the sharp slowing of progress in applied science over the last century, and the slid ing scale and mutability of human sexuality are disregarded by my countrymen.
There may be nothing for it but to recognise my fate, stop fighting destiny, and embrace the trivial and the wry. One can certainly make a pretty good living out of it.
So why persist (as I shall) with trying to say something important about things which matter? My own reputation as a columnist was founded on my 13 years of parliamentary sketches for the Times: determinedly, almost doggedly ‘light’, we sketchwriters had a mission to trivialise, and there is no doubt readers welcomed this. Yet just as the clown dreams that within him is an important Hamlet, our hearts would sink as the umpteenth person would approach with the merry quip, ‘Well, Simon/Matthew/Quentin, what comical feast have you prepared for us today?’ A tiny voice within us would squeak, ‘I don’t want to be reliably droll.’ As the crowd roars, ‘More about John Prescott’s ugly face!’ my soul sighs, ‘But have you not heard my hymn to the beauty of wind-turbines?’ The truth is melancholy to relate. Most entertainers begin to bore themselves long before they bore their audiences. This is as true of high art as it is of the workaday stuff produced by people like me. I thought of this while attending a splendid production of Verdi’s Otello at the Royal Opera House last week. You see, the embarrassing thing is, I prefer the Rossini Otello.
I did enjoy the Verdi last week — very much — and cannot fault the production or the singing. More to the point, a friend I was with, who really knows about opera and serious music, loves the Verdi version, and thinks this late example of the composer’s work markedly more interesting and important than some of the earlier, easier and more popular work. ‘You can almost hear Wagner in this!’ he enthused. That, I reflected inwardly, was the problem.
I wanted more songs. Desdemona’s ‘Willow Song’ is so beautiful in the Rossini. Verdi’s is more difficult. I wanted lilting duets — there’s a lovely one in the Rossini — but the mood in the Verdi was unremittingly dark. You could spot a number of key moments in this Otello when Verdi will have known very well that his audience would have been expecting something they could whistle, and thought, ‘Sod them. I can do that sort of thing with my eyes shut and nobody doubts it. Now for something more challenging.’ I think he had begun to bore himself as inescapably as UB40 will have bored themselves as they sang ‘Red, red wine’ one more time for the Live 8 audience last Saturday; as inescapably as Sir Arthur Sullivan, wincing as they reprised his old material and ignored his new. Indeed, you could argue that ‘classical’ music as a whole has bored itself to death, traipsing off into the wilderness in the last century, to die interestingly though almost unobserved.
Something comparable happened (I would maintain) to Enoch Powell in his later years. He knew how to get the easy cheers (and once told me that in politics one should never disdain to stoop) but in truth had wearied himself in that pursuit. Without retreating from his early position on race and immigration, his mind and spirit ached to advance beyond it; but all anybody really wanted to hear him do was play the old favourite — ‘Rivers of Blood’ — again, to be applauded, ‘You were right, Enoch, all along.’ Perhaps wisely, he stayed where he was, but you could tell he was bored there.
I am no Powell or Verdi, or even a UB40: just a hack columnist with a minor talent which gets all the recognition it deserves, and who is occasionally anxious not to start boring himself. So no more about pasta for a few months, and pin your ears back for my seminal assault on the concept of personal insurance against risk ...
... Or then again, perhaps not. ‘The most I’ve had,’ sang Noël Coward with bittersweet candour, ‘is just a talent to amuse.’ Matthew Parris is a political columnist of the Times.
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