Making the Cat Laugh (20 page)

It used to be the case that cultural artefacts of all sorts – not just H.P. Sauce labels – were consigned to the dustbin. And it was better, healthier, that way. The old made way for the new. Television programmes were shown, then wiped; films were distributed once; records were released, sold, deleted; nice old buildings were wantonly knocked down; and a collection of old cinema tickets was something that alarmingly dropped out of a shoebox in front of guests, making you flush red, grab your purse, and run away to Sweden. But now the culture has been telescoped, which is why it’s hard to remember what year it is, and why shopping in the Virgin Megastore is such a depressing experience. When a person can still buy Monkees albums in 1993, it reduces her faith in the natural workings of progress.

So here is a rallying call. Let us face forward, dump some
big ones, and move on. It needs no ghost of Sigmund Freud to point out that the new discipline of ephemera studies represents anal retention on a vast, global and terrifying scale. Besides, if we carry on like this, there will be no future historians to thank us for the postcard, so it’s all a vainglorious waste of time in any case. By the year 2000, if we are not all dead through millennial terror, economic incompetence, or holy war, I confidently predict we will have disappeared under inundations of books and videos and lovingly preserved Etam labels.

I swore off caviare on Sunday night. The cats took it badly, but I stood firm, and told them they would thank me in the end. Having watched an hour-long Channel 4 documentary about the polluted River Volga and its toxic sturgeon, I sadly added caviare to my mental list of proscribed foods, finding surprisingly little comfort in the thought that I never eat it anyway. According to a current crack-’em-up joke among the Volga fishermen (who admittedly rejoice in a very peculiar sense of humour), even the Kremlin bureaucrats no longer dare to eat the stuff, so I was not over-reacting. Industrial pollutants and agricultural pesticides are poisoning the river to a point where the giant beluga no longer swims gaily in its waters but is reduced to a big stuffed ugly fish in a museum, dusted weekly by a woman in a scarf.

Given that caviare is not a staple food (and that you have to eat quite a lot of it to feel any ill effects), the programme wasn’t exactly alarmist, and I wasn’t exactly alarmed. But my heart sank as I recognized the beginnings of a new
idée fixe.
The trouble with food scares is that only rarely are they called off; a warning siren wails out the danger, but there is no equivalent to the All Clear. This means that susceptible, obedient
people with no minds of their own (like me) still pick up little trays of Welsh lamb in supermarkets and then put them back down again, just wondering in a vague, confused kind of way whether the effect of Chernobyl will wear off in their lifetimes. It is possible to get stuck.

Personally I don’t buy French apples (why, I don’t remember); I don’t buy cat-food marked ‘beef’ (mad cat disease); and I am wary of eggs (Mrs Currie). Making meals is therefore quite difficult, as you can imagine. In fact, if there is ever a scare involving big economy sacks of Maltesers, quite frankly I am done for.

This is mainly a personality failing, obviously. If nobody says stop, I carry on. I reckon I am one of the very few people alive today who understand why a Japanese soldier would still be fighting the Second World War. A couple of years ago I was obliged to forgo my visits to a very pleasant supervised gym just because every time I was given a repetitive exercise (‘Breathe out and pull; breathe in, relax; out and pull, and in, relax’) I found I would obediently repeat it until the tutor checked up on me,
regardless of the interval.
‘Done ten of those yet?’ he would enquire, in a kindly tone. ‘Fifty-six,’ I would blurt out, red-faced. I finally gave it up when I realized that he might one day set me going on an exercise and then pop out to post a letter and be run down by a furniture van. In which case I would be left to row an imaginary skiff for the rest of my natural life.

The idea about food scares, presumably, is that you use your own judgement, but without information I don’t understand how it’s done. A fortnight after Chernobyl, do you just decide not to dwell on the nasty idea that contamination lasts thousands of years (or whatever), and choose to make a traditional shepherd’s pie – even if it cooks itself without help and outshines the candlelight on the dining table? ‘Life’s too short,’ you reason (quite aptly, in the circumstances). But isn’t salmonella still rife in the chicken coops, aren’t cattle still waltzing
in the pens? They are probably doing a full-scale mazurka by now.

On the caviare front there is less to worry about, obviously. ‘I hope there’s no caviare in this,’ is not something the average attentive cat-owner thinks to herself when doling out the Whiskas. On the other hand, the chances of us hearing that the Volga has been cleaned up (even if it happens) are remarkably slim, so the old Japanese soldier syndrome takes over once again, I’m afraid. ‘Don’t eat the prawns,’ Julie Walters once hissed alarmingly in a Victoria Wood sketch. ‘They tread water at sewage outlets with their mouths open.’ Likewise, from now on I shall raise a skinny warning hand at people in the act of eating caviare canapés, and remind them of the latest unfunny sturgeon jokes from the fisherfolk of the Volga. Either that, of course, or only respond to invitations that promise ‘6pm–9pm, Cocktails and Maltesers’.

According to the first-hand reports, what tends to happen is this. You are lying in a hospital bed, approaching death, and then suddenly you lift out of your body and look down on yourself. This is weird enough to start with, of course; but before your rationality can fully take stock – ‘That’s very odd, me on the ceiling, I expect it was the toasted cheese’ – you are propelled, helpless and at great velocity, along a dark tunnel towards a wonderful welcoming light. No thought of passport, hand-baggage or travellers’ cheques detains you; nor do you slap your hand to your brow with the cry ‘Oh no, I left the iron on.’ Instead, you emerge into a beautiful, timeless, tranquil garden where you feel blissfully happy, and decide to stay for eternity, if not
weeks.

Of course you are also dragged away again. Suddenly, with a dreadful finality, you are dropped back in your body, and it’s all
over, your vision is fled, you are condemned to life. But you are never the same again. Possibly your experience confirms the notion of life after death, possibly it proves only that imagination is the last thing to go. Whichever way you see it, you have been blessed.

Personally, I have always yearned for an out-of-body-experience. (With a body like mine, so would you.) My only fear was that my idea of paradise is so cheap and materialistic that my tunnel would end, not in the tranquillity of Elysian fields, nor beside still waters, but in a celestial shopping arcade (modelled on Bentalls of Kingston), from which I would return with beany hats and specially printed souvenirs: ‘My sister went to Heaven and all she got me was this lousy T-shirt.’ This sense of personal unworthiness, however, only increases one’s awe at the genuine wonderful thing, and on Sunday I watched BBC1’s
Everyman
programme about near-death experiences with big round eyes and my mouth open. Even if you don’t believe in Heaven, you can believe in the near-death experience. These people had seen something. They thought it was lovely. It was thirteen years since one woman’s privileged return from the undiscovered country, yet she still had light in her eyes when she spoke about it. In earlier times, these people would have been revered as saints, I thought.

The only puzzle was why nobody mentioned Lewis Carroll. Tunnel, garden, I don’t know, it rings bells. What
was
mentioned, however, was a miserable wet-blanket scientific theory which suggested in no uncertain terms that the near-death experience is a mere perceptual illusion – something that happens inside the brain when your resistance is low – and that in reality you don’t go anywhere, not even Bentalls, you just think you do. This was a shock, especially since it sounded so plausible. Dr Susan Blackmore, a cheerful academic with a no-nonsense approach and a leaning towards Buddhism, has been researching the phenomenon for years, and what
she said, basically, was that your inhibitory cells stop firing, causing masses of excitation. I felt terrible. I sat down. So it was really true, what they told me. There is no shopping after death.

‘What happened to you back there? We thought we’d lost you!’

‘Oh, it was just some uncontrolled firing in the temporal lobe, silly! The accompanying rush of endorphins (peptide neurotransmitters) just persuaded me I was having a frightfully good time when in fact I wasn’t.’

‘Oh. So it wasn’t like Heaven, then?’

‘Well, in a way it was. I mean, I wore a blue frock and had a pony, which was nice, and there was a treacle well and a pile of comics, but it didn’t mean anything. It was just that my brain had lost its grip on the normal model of reality, and had constructed one from memory and imagination, rather than from the evidence of the senses.’

I suppose the near-death experience never did prove the existence of the immortal soul, but I have to admit I sneakingly thought it did. But that’s all in the past now. What saddens me equally is the thought that if the near-death experience is an illusion, there is no near-life experience either, which leaves a big question-mark hanging over the glassy-eyed travellers of the London Underground. Previously I had supposed they were dead people on spiritual awayday tickets, investigating the joys of the other side. But if they aren’t, then who the hell
are
they?

I got stuck in the lift last week. I had been working a bit late, and the lift was waiting innocently at the right floor, so – fool that I was – I thought I’d travel down in it and save on the wear and tear to the support hosiery. The doors closed pretty efficiently, but then nothing else would work: the doors wouldn’t open again, and the lift wouldn’t move. I told myself to breathe deeply, and not panic. Funnily enough, that didn’t work either. The whole of Hancock’s
The Lift
flashed before my eyes.

I knew I stood a good chance of being rescued, since several people were still dittling about, pretending to be working. Nevertheless I was quite frightened, especially as they didn’t seem able to hear my knocking and calling … or my
BANGING
and
SHOUTING
… or even my POUNDING and SCREAMING. There was a glass panel in the door, and I could see people wandering soundlessly between rooms, totally oblivious to my plight. Had premature burial come to the Old Marylebone Road?

Even when at last I managed to attract someone’s attention, the relief was short-lived, since it was soon discovered that the door wouldn’t open from the outside either. Besides, it turned out that my so-called rescuer had watched Billy Wilder’s film
Ace in the Hole
on television the night before, and was immediately
struck by the parallel. Shouting through six inches of metal, she assured me that I would be perfectly all right, of course, but that they might need to drill down from the top. ‘We’ll have you out of there in no time,’ she said. ‘Three weeks at the outside.’

Gradually the alarm went out, and people gathered around the lift to see me in my vertical coffin. Having endured many a Roger Corman movie in my youth, I knew the proper Ligeia drill, but I decided against breaking my fingernails tearing at the glass for their benefit. Instead I behaved impeccably, shrugging and smiling, and waving cheery hellos to the succession of familiar faces who took it in turns to peer solemnly in at me. It was like one of those reconstructions of a baby’s-eye view of childbirth: big faces with impersonal expressions looking in and mouthing stuff like, ‘She’s in there, sure enough. But how are we going to get her out?’

In the end, our fast-thinking Chief Sub ran and located some sort of lift-key which, when properly applied to the door, alarmed him by sending me plummeting down (inside the lift) to freedom.

There is only one interesting aspect to this no-doubt commonplace experience. It is that throughout the whole terrifying ordeal, I seemed to hear the voice of the Lord. And he said to me, ‘Here you are then, Lynne. Here’s your
Margins
for next week. Don’t say I never give you anything.’