If I die I hope it won’t be in Melbourne. The chief obituarist of a Melbourne morning paper takes a dim view of me, and since the London Daily Telegraph pioneered the custom of pissing on the recently deceased, the Melbourne obituarist is pretty likely to do the same to me. A couple of years ago he wrote an autobiography in which he impugned my patriotism in a rather nasty way. It’s quite a fat autobiography, as are usually the memoirs of uninteresting people — the women who talk longest on the telephone are invariably women who have nothing to talk about. Anyway, I suppose this little prick’s obituary is already on file awaiting the distant date of my demise, and all those people in my home town who thought I was nice will learn what an ingrate I was, turning my back on the Australian cultural renaissance and seeking cheap fame and fortune in distant and unimportant countries.
‘How’s ya day been so far?’ On a recent visit to Sydney I found a lot of people apostrophising me thus. When at first I began to tell them in considerable detail, they glazed over, and by the time I was describing my first bowel movement of the day they admitted that the question was entirely rhetorical and they weren’t in the slightest bit interested in how my day had been. Annoyingly, however, the words lodged in my mind like an irritating tunelet, and now I say it all the time to people in London and New York, including strangers on the street. ‘How’syadaybeensofar?’ has almost replaced ‘notaproblem’ and ‘noproblematall’ as one of the most popular phrases in the Austral language, rivalling the English ‘bear with me’. I am surprised that this all-purpose British exculpation does not appear on those yellow road signs which block traffic all over London, although there is never to be seen a hard-hatted workman with whom we have to bear toiling behind the barricades. I see many of these untended excavations on taxi journeys as I move at the pace of a cripple, and at the cost of hundreds of pounds, through the thrombotic streets of London. Last night my taxi driver told me how much he hated Ken Livingstone. ‘Fancy London havin’ a mayor who keeps fuckin’ lizards!’ exclaimed Mr Fitzgerald as we crashed up and down those Himalayan ambulance-jolting speed bumps. I had plenty of time to learn his name since you can get quite pally with a taxi driver during the long journey from Berkeley Square to Great Marlborough Street. ‘’E wants to abolish the Knowledge now.’ Since London is probably the only city in the world where taxi drivers know their way around, having the Knowledge does seem a somewhat snobbish and elitist accomplishment discriminating against idiot and foreign drivers, and it would really get up the nose of a miserable little ratbag like Ken.
I am packing for Las Vegas, where I am doing some sort of a Christmas show in a hotel casino called the Luxor. The Luxor is a glass pyramid, probably constructed to discourage suicides. Apparently a lot of people who lose their money gambling in Las Vegas jump out of hotel windows, but at the Luxor they would just slide gracefully to the ground. Dame Edna was interviewed about this gig by a girl whose CV revealed that she had a Masters degree in English literature at a South Carolina university. Edna told her that the Luxor Hotel and Casino Complex had in fact been excavated in Egypt and been brought to the desert state of Nevada, where it was reconstituted stone by stone. ‘There’s a few modern touches, dear, but it’s really a very ancient ruin.’ The rookie journalist was gobsmacked, ‘My God, Dame,’ she exclaimed, ‘to think I walk past that hotel every day on my way to Bikram Yoga and never knew there was so much history there!’
Dentist again today. All because I literally bit the dust a few weeks ago in Switzerland. I was ambling along the main street of Gstaad, reading a catalogue of erotic books hot off the press, when I tripped on a cobble and fell flat on my face, or rather my smile. In slow motion I saw a couple of expensive incisors fly into the gutter and I just lay there sobbing and thinking what people would soon be saying: ‘Remember when Barry started to have those falls?’ I completely forget about the bloodstained catalogue and missed a unique copy of Gynaecocracy, three volumes printed for distribution among private subscribers only: MDCCXCIII.
I have been reading the autobiography of the second most loved of all Australian divas, Dame Nellie Melba, who writes vividly and well. She describes her mixed feelings on first meeting Oscar Wilde: ‘I had never seen anything in the least like Wilde before,’ she writes. ‘We did not seem to breed that type in Australia.’ Dame Nellie would be obliged to revise this view were she to visit modern Sydney, where no pillow goes unbitten.
The other day, while Britain was canonising George Best, I was in Toronto having a scrumptious dinner with Conrad and Barbara, who are at present sadly oppressed by global sanctimony. I returned to my hotel to find the management had left an appreciative cheese platter in my palatial accommodation. Still peckish, I ruptured its cellophane carapace, releasing a cheesy aroma that would even dismay Sir Les Patterson (who once wrote a song in the manner of Johnny Cash called ‘The Smell of Cheese’, about a recent widower cutting his children’s sandwiches and recollecting the aroma of his wife’s fingers, which had formerly performed that loving task). How does one know if cheese is off? Surely something must be off to make cheese, so that cheese is, by nature, off; yet this Toronto cheese platter was corrupt; unhallowed! I shoved it outside the door and rang housekeeping, or rather an Executive In-house Guest Ambassador, to get rid of it. But the smell never went. The next morning the effluvium still lingered in my suite, but never in the same place — it moved around like a will-o’-the-wisp. I discovered that it was worst when I returned unexpectedly for a wallet or mobile phone and surprised it. It was about five feet off the floor and I found that I could even crawl underneath it. Perhaps it was the unquiet spirit of cheese; some lost and troubled soul of Camembert or Vieux Boulogne. There are few ghost stories where a smell does the haunting: Wilkie Collins’s The Haunted Hotel, an episode in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘Fragment in the Life of Three Friends’, and, if I recall, a couple of tales by Mary Butts, about whom Virginia Woolf complained in her journals that her repugnant odour lingered long after the woman herself had departed. My miasma is probably still there, pottering around the Maple Leaf Suite ruining someone’s Christmas and tainting the fragrance of the room-service turkey and mince pies and obliging them to examine the soles of their shoes. The ghost of cheeses past, perhaps, cheeses present or cheeses yet to come?