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Selfish, sexy, fussy, funny - I want my guests back
The world divides into hosts and guests. I like to think of myself as one of nature's guests, rather like the prime minister and his wife, but things have somehow worked out rather differently for me, at least on holiday.
For many years now, for one reason or another, we have rented holiday houses and invited friends and their children; in this way we have turned into hosts. It is not at all what I planned. But it is how I know that the world divides extremely clearly into good guests and bad guests.
Good guests, like happy marriages, are all the same. Bad guests, by contrast, are memorable, various and all too interesting. There is the guest inconsiderate, the guest aggressively late, the guest clumsy, the guest sexually disruptive and - my favourite of all, in fact the best of the good ones - the guest selfish.
Over the years I have enjoyed contemplating my personal bestiary of guests, but now I am feeling rather penitent and anxious, because all summer I have been a guest, along with my husband and children.
We made no plans this year, but laid ourselves open to invitation (an awkward social position to adopt) and, when they came, we accepted with heartfelt gratitude. No cooking for 18, I thought to myself. No taking the garbage out in the unreliable hire car at first light on my way to the bread shop, 10 miles away, to get fresh croissants for breakfast. No juggling bedrooms when unwanted lovers turn up, or much-wanted friends decide to chuck. No trips to the airport two hours away to pick up unexpected delinquent teenagers. No guests.
I particularly resent vegetarian guests, among whom is one of my closest friends. For one thing, vegetarians usually hate vegetables, and refuse to eat the clever little fusion dishes you dream up. "Don't worry about me," they always cry - a warning signal to the experienced. They won't actually eat many of the plain vegetables that you might offer; what they really like is carbohydrate. And even so, all those delicious pasta and rice and lentil dishes have chicken stock or duck fat in them somewhere. So what vegetarians really demand is something separate and different, steamily simmered at the last minute by the exhausted cook hostess in a sweltering old-fashioned kitchen.
My second least favourite is the guest who insists on helping; competent guests are wonderful, but it is always the incompetent ones who long to do their bit, begging to break the can opener, clog the filter mechanism in the pool, place hot dishes on wooden surfaces, dye everyone's shirts pink in the washing machine and sling rubbish bags out to burst in the sun. They are the ones who confess, too, and then apologise ceaselessly, as they go on to make things worse with clumsy attempts to put them right.
Almost as bad is the model-parent guest. I shall never forget the day an intellectual mummy got out of her car on arrival in the Aveyron, heavily pregnant and with two toddlers, bearing an armful of wind instruments. "I've brought some extra recorders along," she said, "since there are so many of us, and some extra sheet music as well." She was the one who reprimanded me for letting my little children suck their thumbs. "Goodness, they must be insecure - don't you worry terribly?" she asked. I was, under the circumstances, quite glad to see, when clearing her room out, that her two little prodigies had ruined their mattresses and sheets with a week's serious bed wetting.
Remembering bedrooms, the sexual delinquent is always with us, on holiday at least. Much ink has been spent on the subject of sexual wreckage in Tuscany, and with some justification. There is something about the sun and the south, as many novelists have remarked, starting with the great Thomas Mann, that makes northerners very silly. There seems to be a feeling - entirely misguided in my view - that the normal rules don't apply south of Montelimar. On the other hand, sexually delinquent guests and midnight creepers do not cause much trouble to the hostess generally speaking, and may not even be noticed by other guests, unless they are directly involved, or particularly observant.
Sometimes they can be disruptive. I remember a time in Italy when three men - one of them married - sulked for days because they didn't receive a visit from a beautiful midnight creeper who had aroused expectations in all of them. But so long as they don't upset the children, or the help - if any - and try to avoid misbehaving in broad daylight or round the pool, they are not usually much trouble. They may even add a certain youthful frisson to the proceedings.
They are at least less trouble than the husbands and wives who insult each other at meals, or the parents who let their toddlers trail sticky juice and crumbs everywhere and scream through meals, or the teenagers who leave roaches where they will most upset other mummys and daddys, or the men who wear socks with sandals. What a wonderful collection.
My favourites have always been the selfish ones. So intent are they on having their own way and having a good time that the hostess simply doesn't need to worry about them. And they will not bother with all the manipulative fibs that considerate guests insist on telling, to the terrible confusion of the hosts, who then have no idea what anybody really wants to.
"Oh, no, I don't mind at all having the mackerel pate, I don't really like fresh lobster."
"No, no, why don't you take the hire car. We don't particularly want to see the Alhambra, not if there's no room."
Selfish guests leave you in no doubt. Not many guests are quite so unilaterally demanding as the Blairs who, I think, asked poor Prince Strozzi to move right out of his sumptuous Tuscan villa early on in their regime, so that they could enjoy his hospitality without him; however, you know where you are with guests like that - somewhere else.
But this summer the tables have been turned. We have found ourselves guests for the first time in many years. It is rather disorientating; I hate to think where we belong in the bestiaries of those kind friends who have invited us to stay. I like to think we are competent, and more than adequate at cleaning vegetables, carving, unblocking drains and washing up even when the water supply has dried up, as it did this year in sweltering Argyll.
I know that we are grateful, good map readers, weather tolerant, bring plenty of alcohol and talk a lot, for better or for worse: following some gruelling lessons in general conversation at an old-fashioned evangelical girls' school - no religion, no politics and obviously no sex - I am trained to try to talk without hesitation or repetition on almost any uncontroversial subject, though my natural preference is for controversial.
But beyond that, Robert Burns's gift "to see ourselves as others see us" is not one I particularly want to have; I wonder whether Burns ever went on a family villa holiday. I have a feeling I might not like the category of guest to which I belong and I certainly don't want to be told, though no doubt I shall find out from the number of invitations next summer.
Perhaps I had better make up my mind to being one of nature's hosts after all; at least you can keep inviting yourself on your own holidays.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 31, 2003 | Comments (0)
Oh joy, now everyone can be a holiday hooligan
This is the time of year when we traditionally bemoan the behaviour of British youth today. Whither civilisation, we ask ourselves; what they get up to, or down to, on their unspeakable summer holidays becomes worse and worse every year. And they are famous for it.
On any cut-rate beach in the Mediterranean, from Tenerife to Cyprus, young Britons are to be seen in their seething thousands, night and day, pissing, posturing and puking, swearing and shrieking, and ceaselessly senselessly "shagging", to use their own nasty expression.
At least they do it abroad, mostly and so far, which is something to be grateful for, while it lasts, although I believe that senseless shagging is beginning to be a feature of some of the better Cornish beaches as well. With global warming it may well catch on here in time.
It is becoming hard to keep up with the number of young British things arrested for lewd behaviour, naked exhibitionism, rape, drunkenness, brawling, public affray, stabbings, and so on. It may all start as something harmless, like the Eurovision Thong Contest, or the Best Bottom 2003, with a little light mooning and girls presenting their nether parts like chimps in oestrus, but soon enough things get out of hand, as it were.
It is hardly surprising the Greeks are beginning to react. They must be getting desperate. For it is not only the ghastly grockles, it is their revolting tour reps as well. This summer in Corfu three girl reps from Club 18-30 were filmed by a shocked Greek businessman - at least I assume he was shocked - performing oral sex on fellow employees to the delighted yelps of the British spectators.
We know from the sworn testimony of former President Clinton that this doesn't count as actual sex, but it is by most people's standards quite rude all the same.
The Greeks certainly thought so.
Were I a Greek policewoman, I wouldn't personally have slung a silly English slag in the slammer last week just for "accidentally" dropping her bikini top in a moment of excitement, but I do rather understand the temptation. We must be very grateful to foreigners not only for putting up with these appalling young people, but also occasionally for punishing them rather brutally. That may not be the British way, but it may discourage them for a while. Besides, one does rather wonder about the British way. Is the British way somehow to blame uniquely for the unspeakable behaviour of our youth today?
Fortunately, the answer is no. British youth are not alone in their ghastliness.
The police in these unhappy tourist resorts think others are equally bad. A policeman in a particularly Brit-infested part of the Costa Brava says that they have trouble with German, French and Dutch youth too. That is hardly surprising.
Boys will be boys, and so, given half a chance, will be girls - hence our scary British ladettes.
But they have their French and Dutch counterparts, sluts with pierced navels, dressed - or rather undressed - like jailbait, wandering about wantonly inviting assault. The Notting Hill carnival, which unfortunately takes place right outside my front door, is full of young tourists of all kinds of nationalities, shrieking and sucking like babies at bottles and cans, bumping and grinding in the streets like cut-rate pole dancers, and defecating in our front gardens. Unless they come from the most repressive regimes, they're all like that. There's nothing uniquely vicious or depraved about British boys and girls.
And there's nothing new about their misdemeanours either. While staring at the sad face of the English ladette being led away by the law for exposing her beefy bosom, I suddenly thought of the Russian lad Alexander Pushkin. This gently bred and exquisitely educated lad, this sophisticated aristocrat and poet, this national icon of everything that's best about Russia, was every bit as bad as any of our English oafs on the Costa Brava, 200 years ago.
For instance, in the hottest part of the summer of 1820, at a formal dinner given by the civil governor of Ekaterinoslav, Pushkin actually turned up (aged 21) in transparent muslin trousers without any underwear. That might be startling today, at a smart civic dinner; in those days, more or less the era of Jane Austen, the effrontery, so to speak, must have been almost unbelievable.
All the ladies were forced to withdraw, apart from one who was too short sighted to see the problem, and indeed refused to believe what she was told. She insisted that Pushkin was simply wearing flesh-coloured summer trousers, until she looked through her lorgnette, and promptly took her daughters out of the room.
This was not just a moment of madness on the part of the great poet. Pushkin in his youth would have given serious competition to any British hooligan; along with many friends, he was notorious for drinking, whoring, roistering, gambling, brawling, duelling, interrupting performances at the theatre and deliberately assaulting policemen for fun. The truth is that people behave as badly as they are allowed to, particularly young people, upon whom the heavy hands of necessity and maturity have not fallen.
The rich upper classes have behaved horribly badly right across Europe, time out of mind. They had the time and money to indulge themselves, within certain limits, and nobody had the power or the will to stop them. As far as I know, upper class misbehaviour, however unfair to others, was not usually seen as a sign of the end of civilisation as we know it.
What's changed perhaps is that bad behaviour has been democratised. Now the middle classes and the poor can afford, in every sense, to behave badly, without fearing the consequences. Indeed, one could argue that depravity is much easier today.
Until the 1960s sexual licence meant sexually transmitted diseases. Pushkin and his friends suffered from them constantly. Some of them were ruined financially by their escapades. Today's lads and ladettes can go down the STD clinic, down the social, and down the job centre if things go wrong on their return from Faliraki.
And they don't usually behave badly for very long, in any case. Maturity gets most of us, in the end.
The only real question is how much any of this youthful nastiness we are prepared to put up with. It doesn't affect us much if it is concentrated in a few foreign spots here and there. We could build amphitheatres, perhaps. But my bet is that sooner or later it will burst out of these restraints and start to annoy the rest of us.
Then, instead of moral lectures, young people should be given disincentives and punishments. Pushkin, incidentally, was exiled for being a nuisance (if of a rather different sort). Perhaps we too should consider exile for Europe's repellent young victims of affluence, together with forced labour on community projects in poverty-stricken places, where they might earn some respect and some self-respect by doing something useful.
They might even, in certain kinds of Third World location, learn to keep their kit on, for fear of being stoned. The British have a long tradition of getting foreigners to do our dirty work for us; there is no reason to stop now.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 24, 2003 | Comments (1)
Fake public jobs prop up middle-class failures
Ideas have a time frame of their own. They will not take hold of the public mind until, by some mysterious and unpredictable process, they are ready. Trying to introduce an idea before its time has come will result in failure, no matter how powerful the argument. But when the idea is all set to take hold of the public mind it becomes a received idea overnight. Everyone is for it. Everyone thinks everyone always was.
This is what has happened to the idea that new Labour was bound to waste masses of money on public services without improving them. A stalwart few - not least this newspaper - have said so for years. Most people denied it until just the other day. But suddenly, overnight it seems, almost everyone is agreed: Labour cannot improve public services and is wasting billions of pounds doing the wrong things in the wrong way. You no longer have to try to prove this; it's the received idea.
Last week, for instance, The Wall Street Journal reported that Gordon Brown had failed to meet almost every economic goal that he set six years ago. The only things that have gone up are taxes, red tape and public sector jobs. Another report showed how the extra money aimed at schools is being wasted on bureaucracy, non-teaching staff and quangos. Meanwhile, A-level maths is being openly dumbed down and the best schools are dumping GCSEs because they are too easy. I don't need to continue. People are at last beginning to be convinced.
The question now is not whether, but why. Why are there so many busy bees in the public sector, buzzing and bamboozling about, achieving little or nothing and - what's worse - getting in the way of the real worker bees? Who lets it happen?
I have wondered much, for example, about the man who authorised state sector featherbedded packages, plus pensions, for three outreach workers in Nottingham to help, in educational establishments and outdoor locations, men who wanted to have sex with men. Does he understand where the money comes from? Does he really think this is the best use of it? And what does that man see in the mirror each morning?
For this is a personal decision. He could have decided to spend his health education money on something that mattered. There is plenty of misery and real need out there. His boss could have insisted that he did. But instead he chose something desperately silly and wasteful, just like thousands of other misguided managers who advertise jobs in The Guardian, Nursing Times and the rest.
There are grand overreaching arguments which explain the recent explosion of state sector nonsense jobs. Most obviously there's the problem for politicians, particularly for Labour, that one in five adults works in the state sector. To get their votes you have to let them and their powerful unions do what they want.
A more serious political problem, however, is middle-class unemployment. The explosion in state sector jobs, many of them useless, is middle-class makework.
These people would almost certainly be out of work otherwise and may be unemployable. Employment in the commercial sector - real work - is falling fast.
It may be unfair to prop up the weaker members of the white-collar classes in this way, but that is what's happening.
Then there are the perverse incentives of central planning. Whitehall targets and bullying cannot help but skew the judgment of public servants. They might prefer to do differently but they want to hang on to their safe pensions, after all.
This destructive mania for central planning is not only a Labour phenomenon; it was bad under the Conservatives. But I believe the implacable determination to interfere comes not so much from politicians as from civil servants. The Sir Humphreys are the agents of bureaucracy and waste and they get public honours for the damage they do. Then there is the tragic inner logic of bureaucracy, which grows without anyone apparently doing anything at all.
However, this isn't what mystifies me. I would like to know, on a personal level, how men and women can bring themselves to waste public or charitable money as they so persistently do. I mean men or women with choices.
Either they can authorise a new non-job, or a dubious research project or some networking awaydays, or they can direct money to living, breathing people in urgent need. What makes them choose wrongly? I am talking about people low enough down the managerial chain in public services to know, still, directly about people in real need. They are not yet so elevated as to have lost all touch with humanity, with illiterate teenagers and grannies on trolleys and lonely schizophrenics.
Do they ever think about those people whose services have been cut, as they settle down with a cafe latte in a first-class train compartment to a pleasant hotel on a largely pointless awayday?
One could argue, I suppose, that they are so stupid that they cannot understand their own folly. Considering what has happened to education over the past 30 years, and considering therefore how badly most public servants have been educated and how right-on conventional thinking in schools has become, perhaps that is the answer. That would explain why they are so impressed by the management jargon which obscures reality in public services.
Anyone who has spent any time working with the state sector will know this terrible jargon, a downmarket version of 1980s management speak, with its Best Practice, Quality Assurance, Action Plans and its constant dubious training in the pursuit of a dubious professionalism. I have felt for a long time that public service training makes people unfit for public service. It makes them lose sight of what matters, which is people.
This probably only reinforces, I suspect, a regrettable tendency in many of us.
Given a choice between sitting in an office and messing around with a computer and a few underlings, or dealing with the troubles of a real person, most people would choose the desk job. It's warmer, safer, easier. Humankind cannot, it seems, bear very much humanity.
It is desperately hard to find carers, minders, nurses, psychiatric social workers and teachers to do essential (but not necessarily "professional") jobs. But it's easy to find people who want sanitised, inessential, white-collar "professional" jobs, even though these very job applicants must know that the real need is elsewhere. One can only conclude that most people don't really like other people.
It is also true, sadly, that caring for other people lacks status. Being a doctor is all right (although GPs are fleeing in despair), but otherwise caring is usually not seen as "professional", while office work can easily be presented that way. The whole impetus of bureaucracy is to extend the status of "professional" to as many bureaucrats as possible.
Middle-class makework jobs in the state sector should be dumped at once. In exchange, those workers could be offered real jobs, looking after real people, who need real help, real attention and real time. That might be worth a real pension.
Perhaps this is an idea whose time has come, too.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 10, 2003 | Comments (0)
A sex suspect is named and justice is shamed
Wronged though he may have been, I find it hard to feel much sympathy for John Leslie, the minor celebrity who has just emerged from a squalid court case "without a stain on his name".
Of course there is a stain on his name: no man can escape the accusations of sexual assault that have been levelled at him and constantly, gleefully, repeated by the media, without a permanent stain on his name, whatever the courts may say.
He has unquestionably been wronged.
That is a great pity. All the same, I just cannot feel much pity for the man. That may simply be because he reminds me so much of our thespian prime minister. To my mind, Leslie's performance on leaving court last week, with broken voice, rhetorical gestures and studied timing was worthy of Tony Blair at his most histrionic and tear-jerking, and about as convincing. They even somehow look like each other, as if they were pupils of the same drama coach or followers of the same cult.
Justice ought to be blind, so we should turn a blind eye to Leslie's unattractive morals and manners. However, there seem to be various reasons, good and bad, why in cases of sexual assault even justice herself tends to peek between her fingers at the smutty details.
In this case, peeking raises at least two serious concerns. One is that the police and the Crown Prosecution Service have been startlingly incompetent, or worse, perhaps even deliberately leaking information to the media and prone to celebrity-mania themselves. The other is that the rules on anonymity in sex cases are unfair and perhaps unjust. Moreover, one could argue that there is still something wrong with our legal definitions of sexual offences. Despite, or perhaps because of, all the earnest thought that has gone into their framing, they cause endless trouble.
As for the CPS, the public can hardly be blamed for losing confidence in it. We all have vague memories of the disgraceful collapse of the Damilola Taylor prosecution, of the farcical end of the Paul Burrell trial or of the rapist who telephoned his victim from jail because the CPS had blundered into giving him her number - these are just some of the most startling failures in a list of errors and incompetence that have been pointed out again and again.
An Audit Commission report of June 2002 described a "culture of delay and inefficiency" in the CPS. What's more, three out of 10 cases of violent crime put forward by the police for prosecution never get to court, and more than half of the defendants found not guilty in crown courts are acquitted because judges throw out their cases, mostly because of problems with evidence or the failures of the prosecution to bring key witnesses to court.
Who can fail to be amazed by the Leslie case? The general idea is that the CPS brings to court only those cases where there is a reasonable prospect of a conviction. Yet the CPS brought only two allegations of indecent assault, on one night, from one complainant and then, after months of torment for the defendant, withdrew them with a totally mystifying statement. Those of us who like reading detective stories have been spending many harmless hours trying to puzzle out what is meant from the few clues in the plodding text.
The gist of the CPS statement in plain English, I think, is that the complainant, Ms X, has just recently, much to her credit, told the police something about herself that could not have been foreseen (at least not by the CPS and the police, apparently), which cannot be mentioned but which means that there is no longer "a realistic prospect of conviction". It's a brain-teaser.
Could, for instance, Ms X herself have foreseen, or indeed known, this mysterious information about herself that she so creditably handed over at the 11th - or rather the 13th - hour? Why didn't she pass it on before? And why would it be "misleading" or "unfair" to her to reveal it?
We shall never know, unfortunately, since Ms X is entitled to lifelong anonymity under the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act of 1992. Her blushes and - who knows? - the blushes of the CPS over all this may be for ever hidden. That is quite wrong; the whole subject of anonymity needs to be reconsidered. Of course we all understand the point of granting rape complainants anonymity (which inevitably grants it to liars as well as to truth tellers).
I once sat through the trial of the Notting Hill serial rapist, listening to the terrible stories of his many victims, some of them very young; they might not have found the courage to give their shocking evidence if their shame and distress had been made more public than it was already in court. That was bad enough for them, and might have been worse had it been the sort of trial where the defence lawyers violate the victims once again with their aggressive questioning.
All the same, what strikes me just as forcibly is the terrible injustice to men of naming and shaming them, innocent though we must assume they are until proven guilty, and even before they are charged. But that is what usually happens and not only to celebrities. It ruins their lives.
To falsely accuse someone of sexual assault or, worse still, of sexually assaulting children is a terrible crime, especially as people take even minor sexual offences extremely seriously. The false accusation is a kind of murder.
Character assassination does involve a kind of death.
People always remember the accusation; a verdict of not guilty, or a decision to abandon the case, does not seem to restore a man to his former life and the presumption of his innocence. There's no smoke without fire, people say, and they think so too.
Somehow sexual crimes - even minor ones - carry much greater stigma than other crimes. It's possible to live down a rumour about fraud or grievous bodily harm; it's not possible to live down a rumour about sexual assault. So it is not right that anyone should be able publicly to accuse a man of such a crime from behind a screen of anonymity. It is wrong in itself and unjustly tempting to the vicious and vengeful.
This injustice could easily be righted, at a proverbial stroke, by allowing the defendant anonymity as well, for life, unless found guilty. This used to be the practice between 1976 and 1988, and its restoration was recommended in June by the House of Lords. The Commons home affairs committee has also twice supported a proposal to ban naming suspects until they are charged, at least.
The conventional argument the other way is that publicity will help other complainants to come forward, but actually the Leslie case seems to suggest the opposite. There was massive publicity and lots of rather depressing women came forward with lurid stories of trouser droppings and gropings, but this did not, apparently, help the prosecution at all.
There are no easy answers, as the tabloid newspapers say. Hard cases make bad law, as the broadsheets say. But one principle of justice surely is that everyone should be treated equally. Defendants should be as much protected, or as little, as complainants. What's law for the goose should be law for the gander, too.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 03, 2003 | Comments (0)
