AND ANOTHER THING…
Our premier talkshow host Michael Parkinson is a rather gentle, cricket-loving Yorkshireman. Not for him the abrasive personality dissection: he’s an affable & persuasive interviewer rather than a ball-grabbing interrogator. He cajoles & seduces through what appears to be authentic charm & he has the top off & the contents flowing within seconds of his guests seating themselves. Not that all his interviewees need the inducement. I’ve just been watching Parkinson inserting occasional questions into momentary breaks in Michael Caine’s canny East London cataract of anecdote & epigram.
I’ve always found Caine a consistently interesting man, apparently free of any of the self-deluding narcissism that infects most of those whom we deem to be ‘stars’. It’s difficult to account for this curious immunity to the ultimately corrupting blandishments of Hollywood fame & fortune. It just seems that somehow certain individuals are able to make their way through Babylon without touching the sides. One thinks of such stars of the past as Victor Mature, Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart. I suspect that it’s nothing more complicated than the individual genuinely not giving a toss about anything at all other than the job, a bottle of good wine & somebody to love. I’m sure that that’s the case with Michael Caine. He radiates common sense & the kind of wisdom that reflects a lifetime of listening only to a handful of respected friends & oneself.
In the Parkinson interview he made a couple of points that resonated strongly with me. Both were about ageing & personal change. Conscious of Caine’s long-held status as an unlikely but potent sex symbol, Parkinson asked him how he felt about being 70. Without any hesitation or dissembling Caine declared that the very good thing about ageing is that it places you in a territory where you are no longer presented with alternatives. In youth & middle age (& here I’m paraphrasing) there is a sense of an indeterminate future within which you might at some juncture make those final, life enhancing changes. In old age that option is no longer available & you have only the opportunity to be cheerful or to give up. Before the onset of old age people treat life as a sort of rehearsal for something yet to come, Caine said. “I say to them, this is it!”
The other point that he made was in reference to some research that he did for a part at one time. He was reading some material on abnormal psychology & he came across the assertion that when we falter then we are in most danger of becoming that which we fear most. This simple truism – elusive maybe because of the somewhat specialised context within which it would normally be found – struck him forcibly & he made the decision to effect change within himself accordingly.
There’s nothing particularly profound in either utterance, nor did I experience any particularly Damascene revelations on hearing them. But both were neatly expressed & arose so clearly from empirical sources rather than abstruse philosophical pondering that they went home & I was glad that I’d made time for the programme.
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A few rather more idle moments in front of the TV tonight had me watching David Blaine emerging from the glass box in which he’d incarcerated himself for the past 44 days. Just before the stunt an interviewer put it to him that many would consider the project insane. Blaine languidly shrugged his unconcern: he wasn’t doing it for other people; he was doing it for himself. Which begs the question, of course, why he had chosen a glass box suspended above the River Thames by Tower Bridge where an excellent view is afforded from the Embankment rather than shutting himself into the privacy of his own airing cupboard at home. A woman interviewed at random in the huge crowd that awaited his emergence prattled excitedly about what an inspiration Blaine was to one & all & then raised a cheer on his behalf. The box was duly lowered, Blaine stepped out & burst into tears & I pressed the little red button on the remote.
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When I started this weblog back in February I had for a while a regular(ish) feature that included patron saints attached to various occupations. Sparked off by The Pope’s decision to canonise immaculate world heroine Mother Theresa (& following my suggestion to His Holiness Doctor Omed that he supplement his Nun of the Month offering with a list of the wackiest & least appropriate of saints), I present the following:
· ST DOROTHEA – patron saint of florists.
· ST JOHN BOSCO, patron saint of editors. (Who looks after the writers?)
· ST SEBASTIAN, patron saint of pin makers. (Kind of figures, I guess).
· ST AMBOSE, patron saint of beekeepers.
· ST FIACRE, patron saint of taxi drivers. (Now you know who to pray to when you can’t get a cab after 1.00 AM).
· ST STEPHEN, patron saint of bricklayers.
· ST GEORGE, patron saint of syphilitics.
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Although France may well be up there with North Korea, Iran & Syria as ripe for some Texan ass-whuppin’, Salon democrats may well feel some sympathy for post-World War One French President Georges Clemencau’s analysis of the United States as “… the only nation in history which miraculously has gone from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilisation”.
12:45:50 AM 
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