SIGMUND FREUD would have had a field day with me. All of us, apparently, give ourselves away with our anxiety dreams. When we are preoccupied, or under pressure, our mind processes our concerns while we sleep by turning them into specific types of nightmare. For some of us the anxiety dream takes the form of turning up for an examination completely unprepared, or arriving at a social event in our pyjamas, or finding ourselves naked while piloting an aircraft.
There are, of course, some people for whom these are not anxiety dreams but episodes from real life. But let’s leave Richard Branson out of this. For most of us the anxiety dream encapsulates a moment of exquisite embarrassment when a situation has arisen which leaves us exposed, vulnerable and ashamed. And my own particular nightmare has all these qualities plus a special horror of its own. The situation in which I find myself is not just temporarily embarrassing, but permanently, irredeemably, shaming. The torture which my subconscious visits on me while I sleep is the prospect of waking to find that my flabby Scottish torso has been gloriously and vividly covered in tattoos.
I suspect that if I ever did have the chance to talk through this deeply buried, but ever-present, nocturnal fear with a trained psychoanalyst the conclusions drawn about my weak character would probably be scarier than the prospect of an inky needle etching the outline of an Iron Maiden album cover across my back. All I do know is that my fear of being tattooed is clearly not shared by the majority of my fellow citizens.
One of the consequences of this weekend’s glorious weather was the confirmation that tattooing has long since stopped being a counter-cultural statement and has become as mainstream as a Make Poverty History wristband. A generation ago the tattoo was the badge of membership of a distinctive set of tribes. Merchant seamen, Hell’s Angels, rock chicks and rebels sported them. The respectable middle classes would no more have strayed into a tattoo parlour than they would have let their garage become a crack house. But now you can’t visit a village fête, down a swift one in a country pub or pop by a bourgeois barbecue without seeing a hint, and sometimes more than that, of delicate tracery peeping through summer clothing. Tax inspectors, lawyers, lecturers, even distinguished Times columnists, are all proudly tattooed.
Of course, there are those who take the whole practice to extremes.
David Beckham has turned his torso into a cross between the births announcement page of The Times and the design for a Black Sabbath stage set. Now Becks is embroiled in a battle with the artist who transformed his upper body into a poster gallery over who owns the copyright to the images. The Beckhams wanted to use the tattoo designs in their own advertising campaigns. The artist concerned insists that the images are his intellectual property. I’m sure he has a point. But I suspect we’re unlikely to see a more daring attempt to claim intellectual status for something this year unless they put the Crazy Frog ringtone on Radio 3’s CD review.
Of course, for most modern tattoo-wearers David Beckham is no more a role model than Michael Jackson for anyone contemplating cosmetic surgery. We should never judge a position by those who take it to extremes. You don’t have to have a Welsh dresser bedecked with royal wedding commemorative china to see the point of the monarchy, or have been every year to Bayreuth to take pleasure in Wagner.
But just as some will never feel at ease with a non-elected head of state or never surrender to the Tristan chord, so I fear I’ll never quite understand the appeal of body art, however tasteful the design or tasty its wearer. And I think that, at bottom, it’s because there’s something imprinted on my soul as indelible as any Celtic band on a trustafarian’s arm: an attachment to respectability which marks me out as the product of a particular class and generation.
I strongly suspect that those of us who were the first in our families to go to university, at a time when that was an option open only to a minority, always retain the suspicion that our good fortune is built on precarious foundations. The fear of offending society’s codes that you find in the work of Alan Bennett, the lurking risk of social catastrophe captured in the novels of Kingsley Amis, the ability to anatomise embarrassment with soul-bearing candour that you see in The Office, all are products of the first-generation graduate mind.
In that sense, perhaps the tattoo inhabits the same part of my subconscious that the memory of the convict Magwitch occupies in the mind of Pip in Great Expectations: it’s the symbol of a life outside respectability which exercises a dark fascination that we dare not safely acknowledge. Either that, or I just shudder to think what I would look like in the old folk’s home in 40 years’ time with “Born to Rock” emblazoned on forearms peeking out of winceyette pyjamas.
Damn this praise
MANY THANKS to the scores of readers who sent in a host of phrases uttered in an apparent spirit of kindness which nevertheless set our teeth on edge. My own bête noire was the apparently well-meant cry of “well done you”, which always leaves me feeling patronised. Top of your list of wince-inducing phrases was the injunction “you’re a star!” after the performance of some utterly trivial task, such as the photocopying, which no one who was actually thought to be a star (or for that matter an absolute gem) would ever find themselves doing.
Also excruciating was the ubiquitous cry of “aww, bless” directed towards any apparently sweet or touching individual. Uttered increasingly often by achingly trendy female TV presenters it suggested to you, as it does to me, that the person doing the “blessing” was someone who thought herself a tremendous sophisticate condescending to approve of some poor soul who lacked her poise and wit. Davina, you have been warned.
Alternative reading
THIS IS THE season of holiday reading lists and while I’m grateful to be kept up to date with the publishing season’s current favourites I yearn for recommendations that aren’t on the “3 for 2” table at my local Waterstone’s.
For me the ideal summer reading is a neglected classic that isn’t too demanding but still offers more than the cheap thrills of an airport thriller. At the easier end of the spectrum that would mean an Ngaio Marsh detective story, and slightly upmarket of the straight whodunnit would be something like Arthur Machen’s enchanting Gothic stories or Rex Warner’s haunting political allegory The Aerodrome.
All of these writers have faded out of fashion but remain cracking beach reads. I would be grateful if readers could nominate their own suggestions for summer reading in a similar vein. No stretching Austro-Hungarian novels of ideas please. Just good English reads that don’t deserve to be left on history’s slush pile.
E-mail all your suggestions to me at govem@parliament.uk and I’ll print the best, or most intriguing, over coming weeks.
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