After a lifetime of rudeness, maybe it’s time for some manners
This unattractive yet irresistible urge to reminisce is a function of advancing years, when you have an awful lot of past and like to wrap it around you like an old cardigan.
Tim, however, is a young man, and has been rewarded for a decade of chasing and polishing copy from recalcitrant writers with a dazzling future as The Australian’s chief culture correspondent (he doesn’t appear to be sitting at his desk at the moment, so I presume he’s popped out to buy a velvet cape, a monocle and a silver-topped cane).
Anyway, it was January of 1994 and I had taken an impertinent commoner’s exception to the Princess of Wales’s hypocritical bleating about her desire for privacy while prancing about London’s Royal Opera House with ballet dancer Wayne Sleep, posing for fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier to grace the cover of Vogue, and batting demure eyelids at the paparazzi outside the latest hip nightclub.
My argument was that the nuisance of a few intrusive journos was a tiny price to pay for a life of extraordinary privilege – I said I’d be happy to see a pic of me spread-eagled in the snow under the newspaper headline FAT BASTARD FALLS ON ARSE, in exchange for a couple of weeks on the slopes of Val d’Isere – but Diana never seemed comfortable with that deal, dying a few years later in a Paris road tunnel, her drunk chauffeur trying to outrun yet another mob of snap-happy jackals.
Easy for me to hand out worthless, unsolicited advice, of course, never having suffered the afflictions of fame or photogenicity; I am usually waved out of the shot when people are taking pictures, even at my own birthday celebrations, which is hurtful.
I once worked on a TV documentary for Britain’s Channel 4, but didn’t appear on screen because, as the young woman presenter explained, I have “a face for radio”. I smiled at her tired joke, mostly because she was beautiful and I was shallow, even as she added, “what a pity you don’t have the voice for it”. She ended up in Hollywood, so ha-ha, serves her right.
But I digress, another tendency that blossoms, like ears and nose, with age. When I realised my Diana story was written more than 30 years ago, I wondered if perhaps it’s time to abandon my addiction to insulting politicians and celebrities, with their delusions of competence and relevance, and to adopt the correct position on geopolitical conundrums and social trends, to care more deeply about the Earth and everybody on it.
Or, equally tempting, should I rededicate myself and redouble my efforts to reach the elusive apotheosis of rudeness?
Either way, as the Review liftout that has served us long and faithfully bows and steps behind the curtain, in a whirl of mixed metaphors our new Culture offering will rise sparkling from the ashes, fusing print and digital, audio and video, to brighten our modern lives.
Will the beautiful Phoenix and its new custodians be pleased to take me under their wing? Not if they have any sense, I hear you say, but we’ll find out soon enough.
Until then, I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And I trust the chief culture correspondent can tell me where that line comes from.
Savings slip highlights unanswered questions in Silver review response
When Review editor Tim Douglas told me this would be my final incursion into this space (the Very Last Word), I paused only briefly to dry my eyes before making his glaze over with an account of my first column for this section, long before he ran it, indeed long before my children (and an alarming number of my colleagues) were born.