IF the date had been April 1, I should have thought the
Today programme was engaged in one of the laboriously hilarious teases that it contrives for the amusement of its listeners on that day. But All Fools’ Day is six weeks away, yet this Wednesday morning I emerged from the shower to hear Carolyn Quinn report that President Kibaki of Kenya is in a state of such despair over the failure of his efforts to stamp out corruption among senior government officials that the poor man has retreated to his bed, where he is reading P. G. Wodehouse to take his mind off his troubles. She had a P. G. Wodehouse expert in the studio and everything, so I suppose it must have been true.
This is what you might call the Mr John Dormouse approach to affairs of state. Mr John Dormouse, you recall, is the elderly shopkeeper in Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Ginger and Pickles who, when his customers complain about the quality of the candles he sells, “stayed in bed, and would say nothing but ‘very snug’.” (I make no apology, incidentally, for the fact that I seem to quote almost every week from The Tale of Ginger and Pickles. It is a work of remarkable insight into the human — and animal — condition which, together with Montaigne’s Essays and Tristram Shandy, is one of the great influences of my life.)
The narrator of G&P takes a dim view of Mr Dormouse’s trouble-shooting stratagem, observing that it “is not the way to carry on a retail business”.
Which may well be the case. But I can’t help feeling that if more politicians gave up rushing around trying to get things done and retired to bed with a volume of Wodehouse, the world would be a happier and more peaceful place.
It is a melancholy result of the frantic post-industrial work ethic that the act of going to bed is interpreted as a signifier for weakness or idleness (unless, to be sure, you are going there to engage in frantic post-industrial sex of a strenuously athletic nature).
In the 1960s and 1970s, it was just these associations of insouciant slackerdom that made taking to one’s bed such a subversive gesture. Think of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who gave the vague impression of having spent an entire decade in bed for one pressing political reason or another.
John and Yoko may have reinterpreted the bed as a place of political dialogue, but they certainly didn’t invent it. For centuries, that article of furniture has been the theatre in which great political dramas have been played out. Yet for some reason, while historians are eager to accord a proper respect to the dinner tables and clubmen’s armchairs that have traditionally provided the settings for Tory plots and coups, and the conference tables and cosy sofas that perform a similar function in Labour circles, no one seems willing to accord the bed its moment of historical glory.
While historians tremble at the door of the boudoir, novelists rush boldly in. Nancy Mitford’s Don’t Tell Alfred contains a memorable passage in which a semi-fictional Lady Leone, the wife of the outgoing British Ambassador to Paris (who is based on a real Ambassadress, Lady Diana Cooper), is so stricken at the thought of leaving the Embassy that she contracts a diplomatic illness and retires to bed in the entr’sol, from where she hosts a protracted and hilarious cocktail party, to which all the most amusing visitors to the Embassy are diverted while the real Ambassador’s wife sits lonely and increasingly cross in her great salons, listening to the shrieks of mirth from the sickbed and waiting in vain for someone interesting to call on her.
The other great bed of political fiction is, I suppose, that of Bishop and Mrs Proudie, of Anthony Trollope’s great Barsetshire novels. The bed is Mrs Proudie’s battleground. From skirmish after skirmish between the marital sheets the Bishop retires defeated while Mrs Proudie sallies forth triumphant until at the last, the bed becomes the scene of her final battle: she is found dead, “leaning against the end of the side of the bed, while one of the arms was close clasped around the bedpost”.
From that image of a bed as the seat of intimate influence, I suppose it is not so very great a leap to the remarkable pictures of a real political bed: the one at No 10, on which Cherie Blair was photographed for Marie-Claire magazine, perched on the counterpane while her friend Carole Caplin applied her lip gloss in a pretty scene of cosmetic confidentiality.
Harold Macmillan, of course, was supposed to read Jane Austen in bed, by way of refuge from the political turmoil of his time. I can’t remember from the Marie-Claire pictures what books — if, indeed, there were any — lay heaped on the bedside table of the Blairs. Someone once told me that the Prime Minister was a Kipling fan, but I can’t imagine his image-tweakers would have been terribly happy with copies of Stalky & Co or Kim left lying around next to the Prime Ministerial pyjamas. Nor P. G. Wodehouse either, now I come to think about it.
So I salute President Kibaki, both for his revolutionary reading matter and his subversive choice of a place to read it in. Before long, I feel sure, he will return to the turbulent business of political life, refreshed and invigorated by his sojourn between the sheets with Madeleine Bassett and the Empress of Blandings. Meanwhile, with the election imminent and so little to choose between their policies, perhaps our would-be leaders would care to tell us a little about their own bedside reading.
Penguins and foxes
TODAY is an odd day for me. On the one hand, it is the publication day of the Penguin paperback edition of my first book, The Fox in the Cupboard. For someone whose entire reading life has been spent among Penguin imprints, from the Frederick Warnes and Puffins of my childhood to my first exploration of adult reading among the orange-backed paperbacks on my parents’ bookshelves, it is a triumphant moment to see my own name hovering above the orange oval containing the familiar black-and-white Penguin logo.
On the other, my book is a memoir of my brief foxhunting career. And this is the day on which hunting — that late-blooming passion which I hoped would see me out — is banned. Aside from the conflicting emotions of pride in the book and misery at the ban, I am conscious of a certain sense of curiosity. Do you think anyone else has ever had a book published on the very day on which the subject of that book is made a criminal offence?
A sinking feeling
ONE of the many reasons I love foxhunting is that at moments it has a kind of meditative, transcendent quality, in which the self seems to vanish and become absorbed into a greater whole — the chase itself, the horse, the hounds, the woods and fields over which we are passing, even (inexplicably to people who loathe hunting) the hunted fox.
Forgetting who you are is, besides being a useful spiritual exercise, a great luxury in these insistently self-conscious times. Now hunting has gone, I suppose I’ll have to find something else. But what?
Where better to find the answer but in The Times, which yesterday reported that Italians find spiritual satisfaction in washing-up. A market research company has surveyed quantities of Italians who refuse to give kitchen space to a dishwasher, on the ground that “those moments of peace at the washing up basin are like a sort of meditation”.
Personally, washing-up has always struck me as more of a mortification than a meditation. Still, to look on the bright side, while washing-up may lack the grander excitements of hunting, at least while standing at the sink there is a negligible chance of being bitten, kicked or falling off while negotiating a jump consisting of an iron bedstead topped with a curl of barbed wire.
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