"I don’t know why Dudley keeps trying to find himself,” the great Peter Cook once said of his partner Dudley Moore and his flirtations with eastern mysticism. “I mean, I found him years ago.”
This thought popped to mind while perusing Looking in the Distance, the latest volume from Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh, whose best-known book Godless Morality in 1999 cemented his standing as the trendy vicar’s trendy vicar by arguing that God probably doesn’t exist, that Christ’s miracles probably didn’t occur and that the parting of the Red Sea actually resulted from an environmentally aware dam-building project in first-century Judea.
Looking in the Distance seems to take a less contrarian approach. According to the blurb it “celebrates the possibilities that life affords whilst examining how doubts and fears often paralyse people, especially as they get older”. As living proof of his own philosophy, the good bishop demonstrates how the doubt and fear attached to being giggled at need not prevent the older gentleman writing books containing sentences like this: “There are Christians who believe that the Bible is a contemporary or living text, a sort of running web page from God.” Hey, bitching contemporary reference, daddio!
In essence, Holloway says, we should make the most of being alive because “our brief finitude is but a beautiful spark in the vast darkness of space”. To support this mind-blowing assertion, he marshals a range of heavyweight literary quotations from Bill Bryson, Donna Tartt, Edgar Allan Poe, somebody named Richard Holloway (what a strange coincidence) and, erm, the Kind of Blue album by Miles Davis. Let’s enjoy some selected highlights — and, remember, it takes more muscles to frown than to smile:
Vanity: “The human desire to obsess over physical appearance is the deepest impulse there is, aside from some others that are even deeper. There is, I believe, a reference to this in the Bible, though I seem to have misplaced my copy for the moment and can’t be certain. The question is: have the scientists yet developed Botox for the soul? Does Clinique produce a range of moisturisers and luxury exfoliant preparations for the spirit? Perhaps not, though I’d really need to check.”
Truth: “What is truth? And if we ever found the answer, could we believe it? These are deep questions. I believe the Clash addressed this in their No 1 single Should I Stay or Should I Go? ‘If I stay there will be trouble,’ they sang, ‘and if I go there will be double.’ It is so simple, yet says so much.”
- It was a sad day for lovers of pomp, hubris and Hush Puppies when Mike Russell, formerly the SNP’s chief executive, suffered the sharp end of the list system and retired from parliament. Every democracy should have its huffing, beardy, sales-rep figure to remind the electorate what craven hucksters these people are. Mike Russell was ours, a role matched at Westminster by Ken Clarke and in Wales by somebody probably named Dai.
What was particularly attractive about Russell was being a Scottish-nationalist-Gaelic fanatic, despite being English. What a wonderfully comic figure he was — and is, for he’s back running for the leadership of the SNP.
A small hindrance is Russell’s non-membership of the parliament. “Some people said I didn’t need a nomination form, I needed a psychiatrist,” he said, “but I have decided I need a nomination form.”
Were Russell to succeed he’d be obliged to conduct his leadership from the public gallery, perhaps via a megaphone. He could, one supposes, rendezvous with Frank McAveety in the canteen and have messages carried through on his behalf (“Keep talking about the North Sea oil. And English football commentators”) but this might breach party confidentiality.
Like Wimbledon or sunny days, we should just enjoy Mike while he’s around, however briefly, and hope for more in the future. “I will not lead a party riven by a rabble of narrow sects determined to impose their views on the majority,” he said. Stop it, Mike, you’re killing me.
- We discovered this week that Gordon Ramsay is finally to write his autobiography just as Bruce Forsyth lamented the volatile chef’s profuse deployment of Anglo-Saxon compound nouns on the television. “Disgusting,” said the veteran entertainer. “That’s the generation we’re in (he’s always going on about generations, isn’t he?). Everyone’s going to be swearing like that on every show. And does that make it right to say those things? I don’t like people saying something in my living room, even if I am flicking around the channels,” added Forsyth.
While happily admitting an urge to visit Forsyth’s living room and say “something”, it’s difficult to believe in his doomsday scenario of newsreaders, weathermen and Blue Peter presenters cursing away violently. Bruce clearly hasn’t watched television in a number of years or he’d know that all this already happens, but after the watershed; maybe he is in bed.
“I like a dirty joke,” he adds irrelevantly, revealing that he may have something on his mind, “same as anyone likes a dirty joke, but I don’t want it in my home. Why can’t a show be funny and clean?”
I don’t know, Bruce, you tell me: you’ve had 50 years to achieve this and you haven’t done it, or at least you hadn’t the last time I watched you patronise some Ovaltine addict on Play Your Cards Right. At the end of the day, Bruce, Ramsay merely utters rude words, the same rude words we all use on a daily basis. He isn’t nice but, then, he isn’t meant to be. You, on the other hand, introduced “Nice to see you, to see you nice” and “Good game, good game!” into the language. I think I know which is the greater crime against public decency.
