Tiger Baiting

Sunday papers are full of crap: I don't get the whole Tiger Woods or John Terry issue. If the CEO of, say, Marks and Spencer slept with the wife or girlfriend of one of his fellow directors, he wouldn't lose his job or damage the brand. Terry should sue, and Woods should just continue being the best golfer in the world and fuck the mimsy sponsors who won't back him.

I'm sure there's a 'squeaky-clean' or 'don't get caught' clause in their complex contracts, but what I don't understand is why Gillette should drop Woods from its ads, assuming that men who like sports and buy disposable razors are somehow horrified because some chest-enhanced 'model' has given Tiger a blowjob in his Mercedes. Surely they'd identify with him even more?


Photo: Paddy Briggs (Wikimedia Commons)

I suspect two things: Gillette's marketing tells them that their razors are bought FOR men but BY women, and it's tabloid-fed women who are 'outraged' by Tiger Woods' infidelities. As, probably, are the wives of directors of Gillette.

The tabloids' hand-wringing over the events is in a class beyond hypocritical. Nothing new, of course, but the way in which they salivate over the details is flesh-eating: after they effectively created the social climate in which 'football hunks' and 'page three stunnas' are so made for each other that every gymslip slapper in Essex invests her pocket money in fake tan, hair extensions and Juicy Couture in an ultimate aspiration to shag a third division reserve player.

A bright friend of mine says 'sports personality' is one of his favourite oxymorons. You could add 'professional footballer' to that.

If I've understood the story correctly, Terry has been stood down from his job as England Captain because one Wayne Bridge, the man whose former fiancee Terry is alleged to have bedded, might be unable to work effectively alongside him in the team, and their football playing might suffer as a result.

If so, they're not professionals because the definition of a professional is to do for a living something to a consistent standard that might waver and vary if you were an amateur. So if that does happen, sack Bridge for not doing his job, don't victimise Terry.

It is impossible to imagine any other profession, except perhaps the General Synod, in which the mating of Man A with the ex-fiancee of Man B should result in action for dismissal from his job. And why doesn't Man B accept that an ex-fiancee is just that, a girl you've finished with who is herself now a free agent. The only person with any rights of disappointment in this whole issue is Mrs. Terry. And she'll be the first to suffer now he's lost his job.

I'd never heard of Vanessa Perroncel, the 'French swimwear model' at the centre of the affair. But she's now represented by Max Clifford which guarantees blasting across the cover of all the cheap gossip mags available for 90p at your local supermarket and bought by women who really should be spending their child benefit on something more nutritious.

Soapstar to Rock Star, almost

You could be forgiven for thinking that a sitcom actress who pockets thirteen million dollars a season for Will and Grace might indulge herself with any kind of vanity project including hiring a band and the Vaudeville Theatre for a debut week in the West End.

But this isn’t a vanity, Mullally has worked with her backing group ‘Supreme Music Program‘ for twelve years and her range of vocal styles is extraordinary: from blues to country and Sondheim to Stones she nailed song after song with a deft and personal attack, attack being the operative word when her rock voice reaches a controlled screech in a trailer-trash banger like ‘Fancy’ by Reba McEntyre or Ryan Adams’ ‘Shakedown on 9th Street’, but tender and connected in perhaps her best piece, Randy Newman’s luminous ‘Real Emotional Girl’.

Many of the songs are about death and some of the self-pitying country music teeters on the edge of ironic although the audience remained unsure whether her delivery was straight, or tongue-in-cheek.

Whilst Mullally has successfully laid the ghost of ‘Karen Walker’ in the States, partly through a series of disastrous television projects, it’s harder to escape in the UK where Channel 4 daily repeats keep it fresher - and much of Tuesday’s audience was sibilantly disappointed that this wasn’t ‘Karen with a K’ aping Liza with a Z and giving her camp and bitchy all to an in-crowd.

Sexual overtones spike the whole set, in the post-show Q&A Mullally defended her choice of many songs written specifically for men and for which she resolutely wouldn’t change the gender, partly to attest to the authenticity of the piece, but also ‘If people see me performing as a man - so what’, an attitude loudly appreciated by the substantial sapphic claque in the stalls.

Downside is that this is a lazy concert, Mullally told only one averagely funny anecdote about her boring tour guide in Prague and seemed reluctant to engage with the audience, perhaps for fear of resurrecting Karen. She has pitching problems and it’s hard to tell whether it’s refreshingly honest that she re-started a couple of numbers to find the right key, or under-rehearsed.

She could do with a script, and a director to tighten the presentation, but the music’s mostly a knockout.

Continues at the Vaudeville Theatre 8pm each evening until Sunday 21 February, with two shows Saturday and Sunday at 4pm and 8pm. Box Office 0844 412 4663, top price £47.50.

DEAD ERNEST

What are you supposed to feel when someone you don’t particularly like has died?

What are you supposed to feel when someone you perhaps actively disliked dies in a suicide pact with his wife?

In a bored moment I was Googling the names of ex-colleagues when I discovered this article about my first boss, Ernest Lewis, with whom I worked for four and a half years in the Works & Buildings Department of Southampton University.

Unable to contemplate a life apart from his wife who had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, he wrapped the pair of them in a blanket and they drank liquid morphine after typing a carefully worded note and leaving a message for their daughter to call the next day.

I’d like to say he was my mentor, guide and friend but actually he was a rather peevish piece of work – mysoginistic, homophobic, pedantic, Scots and completely humourless and every afternoon at exactly ten minutes to five he lit up a foul-smelling pipe: if he was an example of anything, it was what I didn’t want to grow up to be.

What surprises me is that someone I’d thought of as so mediocre should do something so dramatic to end his life, although the typewritten note and the time-delay message to the daughter have a ring of pedestrian detail that is accurate. And I have a sneaking admiration for how he was able to score two fatal doses of morphine.

If you had to draw a picture of the suburban middle-class man, it would have been Ernest – never Ernie - in his tweed jackets, bicycle clips and whipcord trousers in shades of dun, lovat and fawn rotated by the seasons and I’m fairly sure purchased by mail order from an advert in a ‘respectable’ newspaper.

His middle-middle tastes extended to his Austin Metro Vanden Plas, lifelong membership of the Conservative Party (both he and the wife were tub-thumping Tories, he on the county council, she on the city one) and his protective description of his home as a detached bungalow ‘in one-sixth of an acre’. In Hampshire, where acreages are measured in thousands, this struck me as particularly hopeless.

Somewhat laughably for a small-time Thatcherite politician, he kept in the filing cabinet in our office a bottle of sherry once given to my female predecessor at Christmas by a furniture salesman and exhibited as an ‘awful warning’ against corruption in public service as though by accepting such a cheap gift, one could be influenced in the placing of University purchase orders.

Back in the carbon-paper seventies the hierarchies of our office life were beyond Dickensian, Ernest believed in the perfect order of ‘one man, one girrrrl’ rolling the R’s in his lowland Scots accent as if to emphasise the repetitious misogyny of his attitude to secretaries.

When I opted to do my own typing rather than wait for work to be returned, it was seen as some kind of failure on my part, rather than an increase in efficiency. We had a bit of a run-in once with a rather bluestocking Warden of one of the Halls of Residence, whom he described as ‘perpetual spinster, too ugly even to make a lesbian’ … in a way, reacting against these outrageous attitudes helped to frame my burgeoning liberal opinions and rebellious sexuality. When I came out, and decamped to London for a boyfriend and a job paying three times what I’d earned at the University, he was too bitter to come to my leaving party.

Sad man. Sad life. But sad death, too.

A ROUGH PATCH

I’ve had enough now.

Not because the weather is beginning to turn, I love long days at sea and am even enjoying the breeze which is now whipping the waves into whitecaps and forcing the geriatrics indoors, despite the fact it’s still 75 degrees out there. I’ll even like it tomorrow when the waves get up to 25 feet and the temperature drops to zero.

But there’s a different atmosphere since we left St. Thomas for our 1500 mile dash to New York. Even the water tastes different.

Always keen to run what looks like Paddy’s Market on the lower decks with table after table displaying tawdry jewellery or stuffed toys, the ships retail team are having a fire sale with piles of very cheaply-made clothing like ‘Atlantic Crossing 2009’ t-shirts, key rings, glasses, mugs and anything the suppliers can brand with the ‘Cunard’ logo back in their factories in Bangalore and Shenzen.

I haven’t understood the shopping ethic throughout the cruise. If the point of a long gentle sea voyage is sybaritic relaxation, why would you want to be endlessly comparison shopping for jewellery? Must be part of that marital guilt thing. But every port is the same – at the dockside there’s always a shopping mall catering to the keen buyer or the totally infirm who can’t totter more than a hundred yards from the boat. But it always contains the same shops, specifically Diamonds International and Colombian Emeralds. I didn’t even know Colombia mined emeralds, let alone retailed them at every waterside location from Port Canaveral to Curacao. Oh, and a chain called ‘Mr. Tablecloth’, God alone knows why it should be a maritime tradition to come home with a table cover and matching napkins (I’d have nicked mine from the ship’s restaurant) but apparently, at least in Peoria, it is.

Equally beyond me is the gambling. I would have imagined a five-star cruise ship might have blackjack or roulette and my mental picture featured James Bond types in white tuxedo jackets and women like Russian spies. But the overweight slobs slumped at the many many slot machines (some of which accept $100 bills so we’re not talking about shovelling quarters here) confirm my impression that cruising’s not the exclusive preserve of the jet-set. Or the tasteful. Or clean.

Perhaps it’s time to list some of my gripes about this experience – overall, it’s been enjoyable and I have met some delightful people and we kept each other highly amused for two weeks ... but there’s a long list of niggles.

I hate the way nothing is complimentary. Apart from your accommodation and basic three meals a day, everything requires an extra payment whether it’s a coffee in one of the lounges or a bottle of drinking water in your cabin. Eating in the a la carte restaurant (which has the same menu every night) cost $30 per head supplement. It’s good, but I would have expected the main restaurant to be of this standard.

On top of the ‘room and beverage service charge’ of $11 per person per day billed to your shipboard account, everything you sign for carries an automatic ‘gratuity’ of 15% which is not optional, and the extra ‘tips’ box is also left blank on every chit. A couple drinking two cocktails each and a bottle of wine a day will easily rack up $500 in compulsory gratuities. This exhibits a lack of apparent generosity which, if they are not careful, will make Cunard the Ryanair of cruise lines (as its parent Carnival already is) whereby a low lead-in price is effectively doubled by the passenger’s necessary expenses during his trip. I’d rather pay a bit more and have all-inclusive MEAN all-inclusive.

The housekeeping is good, but many trays, service carts, buckets and vacuum cleaners are left in the corridors, often all day. Bed linen is changed only every third or fourth day, and I was shocked one evening to pull out my tucked-in duvet and find a large smear of dried blood which definitely wasn’t mine.

Smoking is allowed on all balconies and some open decks, so there’s blowback into cabins and corridors, as well as in the casino and the ghastly ‘Golden Lion’ pub, by comparison with which the Queen Vic in East Enders looks smart, both these areas being open to the main lobbies.

Lots of things are simply unavailable. There’s no thick toast at breakfast, it’s all thin cold and brittle: apparently it’s impossible for the ship to supply either thick-sliced bread, or even cut an unsliced loaf to order. There’s brown-coloured bread but nothing I can recognise as wholegrain. And no salted butter. Nor is there any semi-skimmed milk, which is only achievable by having a jug of full-fat and a jug of skim and mixing them mid-air over your cup. Although they use it in their cooking, greek yoghurt is unavailable and despite the fact we’re passing through fruit-growing islands, melons aren’t ripe and peaches and apricots are canned. Equally, there’s no fresh squeezed juice, the orange being an especially vile reconstitute.

There’s no choice of vegetables at dinner, nor is the combination to be supplied shown on the menu. And however they describe their potatoes (variously roast, chateau and fondant) it’s always the same barrel-shaped bastard with no flavour and a soggy oven-coloured exterior.

Entertainment didn’t meet my expectations. I thought at least for the Christmas/New Year cruise they’d have sourced one headline singer or comedian but the Entertainment Director explained that the ship doesn’t control its own selections of performers, they’re all sent from a central talent office and all they can do on the ship is package the shows to the best of their ability.

Excursions are overpriced. A simple two-hour coach tour may be $70. In ports as well-serviced for tourism as those in the Caribbean, this seems greedy. It soon became apparent that walking out of the immediate dockside area, licensed and legitimate alternatives were available for a third of what the ship charged. I enjoyed the river tubing and the cave swimming expeditions, but for trips around the bay or to a beach, ad hoc was definitely cheaper.

ST ELSEWHERE

St Thomas, 1 January 2010

Post-Barbados, the islands dissolve into a collection of English Parish Churches as in rapid succession we attend service at St Kitts, St Lucia, St Thomas and continuing the Sunday theme, Dominica.

Dominica stands out as one of the poorest islands in the Caribbean, memorable for its long-serving and now late Prime Minister Mrs. Eugenia Charles who regularly came to Britain to intercede with the Queen (to whom she bore a striking, if negative-coloured, resemblance) and petition the European Union to allow the import of Windward Island bananas which were technically too curved for Brussels’ standards.

In brightly-painted ex-army trucks we climbed the crumbling roadways to one of the tall peaks that dot the island, to hike up through the rainforest to a cave used in the filming of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ where high rocks surround a narrow river and you then swim in warm rain through the cave to a thundering waterfall. So in a sense, I’ve been through Johnny Depp’s cleft.

On St Lucia we just said to the taxi driver ‘beach’ and were lucky to arrive at Reduit where many of the cruise passengers wouldn’t venture because the tide was so high it had flooded the carpark, but we found a welcome at the Bay Gardens Resort with comfortable loungers, crashing surf, cheap beers, an excellent lunch and a great massage in a muslin-curtained cabana on the beach from a girl who did more for my aching shoulder in 20 minutes than I could expect from a month of physiotherapy.

Of all the islands we’ve visited, St Lucia’s the first one I’d think of for a future holiday, so it’s been a useful exercise and possibly saved thousands in airfares, to know I wouldn’t again want to visit so many others.

St Kitts is pretty rundown, all the formerly British-administered islands seem to be, and the weather was overcast and rainy, so the promised carnival in the afternoon got cancelled and I was glaid I had ducked out of the 7-hour sailaway to Nevis. I did have an amble round scruffy Basseterre, the capital, where a presidential election seemed to be in progress, the bright red or yellow banners of the rival parties fluttering from telegraph poles and paint-peeling buildings.

In the ship, the preparations for New Year’s Eve are fervid, with half the crew apparently up ladders rigging equipment for a massive ‘balloon drop’.

For me, this falls deeply into the ‘why bother’ category since I never quite understand the fuss made over the change in date from Dec 31 to Jan 1. I’m feeling edgy at cocktails which is made worse by the provision on the tables of rattles and squeakers which the entire dining room begins to trumpet from 9.45pm onwards. I also find myself becoming irritated with people whose company I’ve enjoyed on every other evening, so it’s clearly the shadow of the night affecting my mood, although Louis did have too much to drink too early and became a bit incoherent as his attention span dwindled to nanoseconds.

Just before midnight we paraded down to the Queen’s room and for once it wasn’t mis-named as we raised more than a few eyebrows by dancing in same-sex pairs although no-one dared to say anything out loud. Since this was also captured on video by the official photographers, I look forward to seeing whether it will feature in future Cunard advertising.

After the midnight countdown, the gang plan to take over the G32 night-club, a space reminiscent of commercial discos from the mid-80’s before the advent of laser light or digital sound, it’s pretty awful. I go back to the cabin about 12.30 to get some cooler air and sit on the bed for ten minutes ... then the next thing I know it’s 3.45am so perhaps I missed some fun, or possibly escaped the meltdown.

Either way, in the morning I’m brighter and more clear-eyed than most of the ship and enjoy a comparatively early breakfast and the fact the decks are all but deserted. The view is of deep turquoise water dotted with yachts and I set out to explore the last island.

St Thomas is arguably the best-kept outpost in the Caribbean with neat beaches and decent-looking houses, since it’s run as a US state and everything’s in reasonable repair and seems to work. I suspect the cost of living is therefore comparatively high although this is mainly on the evidence of being charged $7.50 for a banana daiquiri at one of the stops on the tour. It majors in duty free sales and the whole of the city centre is so completely given over to diamond, emerald, gold, perfume and liquor stores that you wonder how on earth the locals shop for food and essentials.

Still, a cocktail on the sunny terrace of a Plantation Great House is not a bad way to start the year, even at $7.50, and I reflect on my good fortune at being able to do it.

THE EMPTY CHAIR

There’s usually no shortage of company for breakfast or lunch, and there’s always the optional madness of the random seating assignment at a shared table, but once or twice I’ve asked for a window seat and a table to myself.

I might catch up with some reading, but mostly I find my thoughts drifting and occasionally focus on the chair opposite and wonder who, in my ideal world, might fill it. This is infinitely harder than knowing who you’d like on the other side of the bed, because it’s assumed that the person opposite is your long-term partner and, at my age, one might say ‘for life’ which is a challenge both to the potential holder of the position, and to oneself.

I can’t do it.

I’ve combed through the various lists of people I keep filed in the dusty card index of my cerebellum and no obvious candidate from either current friends, past lovers, facebook, the dead, or even fantasy fucks makes it to the short list.

Hugh Jackman, at a pinch, but I’m sure we’d get bored of each other eventually. Deefa, my late cocker spaniel, runs him a close second.

I guess Deefa with his characteristics of constantly looking adoringly at you, and being willing to lick you almost anywhere is a better qualification for the other side of the bed than for the table where you’d like at least a bit of unstrained conversation beyond the one-sided ‘sit’ and ‘get down’.

So I look around the restaurant and see how other tables are faring. The couples (male and female mostly of course) divide into two types: those who maintain a low-voltage constant bickering, he trying to make conversation by discussing the itinerary for the day, she using it as a chance to deal the low blow of reprimand that ‘we’ve been through this already in the cabin’ and building up a store of resentment to use as a sexual fire-blanket for later, and those for whom silence is the safer option, each focusing fifteen degrees to port or starboard to avoid the other’s direct gaze over eggs and cold toast.

That’s no way to live. Most of them stay cemented for the practicalities of house, children and suburban respectability, but none seem to be actively enjoying each other’s company. Women form instant bonds at shared tables through their mutual eye-rolling at the perceived behaviour of their respective husbands. Why is it considered so normal to complain about your partner on first meeting another’s? If you don’t like him, divorce him, or chuck the sad bastard over the side – but I think there’s an element of reverse psychology in operation here, that (some) married women maintain a steady trickle of criticism of their husbands as a barrage to resist any questioning of their own role.

Even when ballroom dancing, surely one of the best ways for a couple to express their mutual affection and synchronicity, the men stare over the women’s heads and pilot them round the floor like they were steering a particularly recalcitrant shopping trolley round Asda.

Where are the intelligent, angular, lively alpha-couples you’d find on stage or screen? A sharp-witted Harvard professor and his publisher partner, such as you’d get in a Neil Simon comedy? A successful Cotswolds businessman and his Aga-fiddling wife from a Joanna Trollope novel? Not on this ship, over-run as it is with peevish lower-middle-class English readers of the Daily Mail, rounding the final bend in a lifetime’s marital toleration.

I wonder what happens when they retire to their cabins, he reaching for his Dick Francis and she for her P D James as they seek escape from reality into the pages of a thick novel from the ship’s Library. These people are mostly no older than me, so how did their sexuality die so much earlier?

So on balance, I wouldn’t thank you for many of the men on board, attached or single. And I’m becoming less and less convinced that there’s ‘someone’ for each of us.

I have a lot of friends, and I could fill the Albert Hall with acquaintances, but whilst I think I’m blessed to be so readily surrounded with amiable people, sometimes the emotional loneliness is painful.

And on warm nights when the full moon climbs ever higher in the inky sky over the Caribbean and the breeze and the scent of the sea sweeps over me, it’s all but unbearable that there’s no-one to share this.

Oh Island in the Sun, Willed to me by my father’s hand ...

Good old Harry Belafonte. I think that was one of the first records I ever owned.

I was quite looking forward to our visit to Barbados, having heard so much about it from my father who used to visit frequently both for the Test Matches, and for Sharon the Bajan cocktail waitress he was knocking off in the hotel where he regularly stayed. When he was terminally ill, I had to phone her to see how serious was the relationship from her side, in case she wanted to see him, or come to the funeral. She sounded like Bob Marley on the phone.

It wasn’t serious and even though just before we had him sectioned under the Mental Health Act my father was changing his Will in her favour, I’ll never know for sure whether Sharon’s then seven-year old daughter Chantelle is actually my half-caste half-sister. She must be 21 now, funny if I’ve seen her walking about and not known it.

We took a touted tour from the dockside, but it was a desultory experience and at least a couple of the people on the bus were deeply strange, including a very very elderly, very infirm German Jewish gent with the dirtiest crocheted yarmulke I’ve ever seen pinned to his greasy pate with rusting clips. He clamped David into a window seat and was stubbornly reluctant to move when we got to photo stops so after the first we squeezed ourself three to a seat to avoid moving him. He exhibited almost no signs of life until the allotted two hours of the tour was over when he began to punch and kick at the side of the bus to attract the driver’s attention that he wanted to get back to his ship, cleverly titled ‘Mein Schiff’. It’s a low-budget German cut-and-shut made from a converted car ferry with bolted-on balconies and which seems to be following us around from port to port sniffing our sternpipe like a lost Schnauzer.

Also in the back seats were a couple from Massachusetts who seemed educationally sub normal despite being about to celebrate their 41st wedding anniversary. He read aloud every sign we passed, however banal, including ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken’ which seemed to crop up half a dozen times. Perhaps she was illiterate. He also had completely evenly brown teeth which is something you don’t see often, certainly not in States where they put fluoride in the water.

What we saw of Barbados, at least as guided by our driver, was a series of houses built for low-income workers, a glimpse of the deserted Sandy Lane Hotel and Country Club where a pugnacious waitress tried to throw us out, a couple of distant views of coastline, and a ride through the scary downtown centre of Bridgetown where I would certainly not want to stroll after nightfall. Although we’d been offered the option of visiting the beach, we all came back to the ship for lunch and a bit of less traumatic sunbathing.

St. Lucia tomorrow. Must get up and just go to beach, bugger the tours of the island.