Cake or Death (12 page)

Everything was turning to crap. It left a great gulf in my life, as I dropped one newspaper after another and essentially abandoned the reading of current fiction. There are always enough classics to occupy me, but when Michael Frayn, Doris Lessing and Margaret Drabble die … That generation is dying out, and there are few wonderful young writers to replace them. I no longer see the point of fiction at all if it is going to be done this badly, but it was only when the rot began in Britain that I realized this.

Britain is so grotty. They don’t even do those quiet ingenious little murders now where the neighbours only
find out when there’s a funny smell from the drains. It’s drive-by shootings and thugs torturing the other thugs on the housing estates because Blair won’t spend money on the poor and there’s no other way to pass the time. Unemployment is massive on the north side of the divide. Schools are whirlpools of failure. People get fatter and sadder and angrier every hour. There’s something so grotesque about it, like a glass menagerie or an animal farm, except they’re humans and no human deserves this.

The only thing Brits can do is laugh and this is the only thing I still turn to them for. Laughter comes in print and television and discs of various sorts. They still live in a sea of words with Eddie Izzard putting them together better than most. Izzard’s black-rimmed eyeballs swing while his lipsticked mouth widens into an impossibly huge grin and he says the word
“Az-er-bai-jan”
and I could eat the syllables. He says his standup is just him standing up talking nonsense. People pay for British nonsense. They envy it and yearn for it.

Yet it’s a sad thing to roll about as I watch a once-great nation’s biggest export—its humour. Besides guns, tanks and fighter jets, I mean.

What a loathsome country. What an awful place it is. I shan’t see it again in my lifetime.

Trust me to enshallow my love. But I fell in love with France because of the sunlight hitting the Seine in a certain way as I sat at a café drinking table wine. As usual, I qualified my love and this is why I am not what they call a “fun” person. Perhaps the sun is glinting off the corpses of the two hundred Algerians tied up and dumped in the Seine to drown in the riots of 1961, I thought. But I still fell in love.

I had a very good therapist, who is still sort of on-call for me, and she believed in God. I can’t be doing with
God, so she asked me to name what I would look to for guidance. And I said the feeling I have when I sit in a café in Paris. I am not myself, I say. I am seated. I do not stir. I ponder. My heart beats slowly. I don’t leap to my feet for some suddenly necessary task. I am simply there.

We couldn’t ask “How Heather feels in a Paris café” for guidance, so she translated this feeling as “the goodness of life,” and that’s what we looked to for wisdom. It’s a good thing to pray to pleasure, correct?

You shouldn’t have to fly across an ocean to have a moment of being. Ideally you’d have it in the bath, and it would also be cheaper and kinder to the earth’s atmosphere. Nevertheless in Paris I am the person I wish to be and the hell with faking it the other fifty weeks of the year.

Adam Gopnik says that France does the great and the small, the grandiose and the minuscule. Think of the boulevards and the ancient buildings. Then think of the care with which the lady behind the counter in a shop wraps your inexpensive purchase. Small things matter too. No other country seems to manage this combination well.

The Americans can embark on nothing huge without a consequent disaster that spells death for many. They can’t even build a levee properly any more, yet they once built the Hoover Dam. As for small things, all encounters with officialdom are tiny stupidity fests and their low culture is just a big load of ham, a salted crusty pink eraser from which you get scrapings.

Big and small. It works. French history has its moments of great shame, although they seem to have
fewer moments of great glory, or
“gloire,”
as the French say with great seriousness. There aren’t as many “fuck you” moments in French history as there should be. They were desperately awful colonists, although not as cruel as the Belgians, and they blew up the
Rainbow Warrior
, plus there’s a dreadful history of nuclear testing. They always call it “testing.” Nuclear power failed the test. No one mentions that, particularly the French.

And their novels are laughable. But so are everyone’s. Where’s Zola when you need him?

But when it comes to beauty, to food and sex and the pleasures of being alive, the French have written the history. Furthermore, when the history became shabby at the edges, brave people in the
terroir
movement declared they would maintain their farmland, their countryside, their food and their genius for blending rural life with wild life. I don’t know if they will win, but what a people.

And when the government tells French workers to kiss ass, they learn to regret that decision they made to finally return cobblestones to the roads that had been paved since 1968. The French will lob their stones, the poor will torch cars; they will all make their feelings known with great certainty.

The citizens of Canada and the United States, not so much.

I understand that France is a strictly ordered and closed society. I understand that difficulty. But I could read any book there in public without being mocked for intellectual pretensions. I tell you, read your Walter Benjamin behind closed doors if you are in North
America. As a matter of fact, the U.S. government will track your purchases on Amazon. Book purchasing would be dubious in the first place, and then I made the gaffe of sending books to Canadian Muslims jailed without trial or even charge after they may have done something or not. Amazon sent the books to the jail. Now our spy agency has banned all gifts of books. These jailed men may not read.

Imagine being on a hunger strike without a book.

That is why France is so intense for me. Good food, good bookstores, wonderful fashion with a strictness about it that means that expenditure doesn’t count for everything, wonderful smells and a precision about everything from the materials of storefronts to the colour of the cobblestones. You are surrounded by aesthetic statements. Yes, you leave central Paris and you see dubious aesthetic statements as well as poverty.

But there is a central theme to which the French try to hew.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
, even if they fail at it. In Canada, it is peace, order and good government, and we try although we fail.

“Est-ce que je suis plus agée pour cette …?”
I asked a salesgirl in Galeries Lafayette about a Versace knockoff with a corset tied with eight metres of flesh-pink ribbon.
“Non, pas du tout,”
she said, looking bewildered at the question. It’s not age, it’s the look.

France is a personal country, an insertion, a core. I understand their language, and find little humour in their daily lives, certainly not the kind that enlivens Britain. But there’s something deep and powerful in the French that
I admire. I wish I could live there. But then the illusion of glamour would be gone. There is no such thing as glamour. Let me repeat that. There is no such thing as glamour. Up close, it vanishes.

I would not want my love of France to vanish. It’s an evanescent thing, even now. So two weeks a year will do me. Calvinism suits for the rest of the time, a contrast to that fullness and beauty, to that goodness of life.

There are so many things we either fear or are expected to fear now. And this is such a commonplace, a staple for stand-up acts, that I would even hesitate to write about it were it not that no one has yet published the full list.

Be vigilant, be very very vigilant. Watch out for grapefruit juice, which is exquisite on its own but boosts the intensity of some medications so much that it is like a lit match tossed in the gas tank of your stomach. Same for Tylenol No. 3. Same for SUVs, if you are a pedestrian,
since you will be crushed under the wheels rather than thrown onto the windshield of a sedan and into the sky, dead either way, but still. Phthalates (the
p
is silent as in
pthysis
and
ptarmigan
, but you knew that) in plastic and nail polish are dangerous, as are pesticides and fertilizers (the latter causing cancer in small children). Microparticles in skin cream that in the course of smoothing and beautifying invade the skin’s natural defences and do untold damage inside the body. Flu vaccines in a tiny percentage of cases can leave you paralyzed for months. Flu vaccines that are still made with thimerosal, a mercury preservative included to make more money for the vaccine-maker—think big-box bulk vaccine injected into little Jimmy—may change your child’s brain, planting autism. Every bit of the perfect purple flower monkshood is poisonous as hell, but you may not be able to identify it in your garden. Don’t inhale carcinogenic fumes from your new flooring.
E. coli
is a danger, as are viruses like avian flu, West Nile, and human papilloma.

There are illnesses that have no symptoms. Take chlamydia.

JFK had chlamydia, which causes premature birth, stillbirth or fatal chlamydial pneumonia in infants. I doubt that Jackie would have had him tested before every sexual encounter, even if he had agreed to stop fucking “strange ass,” as he called it, every second day. Thus, we must wonder whether the stillbirth of Arabella and the premature birth and subsequent death of Patrick were caused by JFK. Good thing I warned you. Also, don’t injure
your back in a sexual encounter and wear a neck brace if there is a chance that you will be assassinated. Make sure you can slide down with ease in your open-top limo.

Watch that mole. Also watch for moles of the rodent kind for they will destroy your lawn and may carry diseases such as hantavirus. Wild mice do this too. Don’t let small children eat while travelling in the car, as each crumby, jam-laden, french-fry-baited seat will be a comfortable mouse bedroom.