Diary - 25 August 2006

Sydney

I am here to announce a new stage show. When last here I was having breakfast in a harbourside café with a composer friend and I was just telling him about a particularly vile freelance paparazzo who haunted the area. Suddenly I saw the glint of a telephoto lens across the street. It was him! Emerging from the restaurant at a brisk pace I saw the wretch jogging towards me, grey ponytail threshing and camera rampant. He got so close I could smell the morning drink on his breath. The spirits of Russell Crowe, Sean Penn and Kate Moss suddenly inhabited me, and in trying to brush aside the intrusive Nikon, my knuckles accidentally collided with the photographer’s pulpy jowl, causing his trendy wire-rimmed spectacles to skitter on to the road. A not unattractive woman friend was idling in her car to whisk me off for a swim and I leapt into the passenger seat before the creep could regain his feet and get the Mystery Woman shot. Polly gunned the car with astounding skill and we took off through the posh suburbs of Sydney like Sophie Nivea and Robert Langdon (you’ve read The Da Vinci Code?) or like a luckier Dodi and Diana. The ponytail was in hot pursuit, but we lost him at last and I managed an unmolested dip in the Pacific. The bastard didn’t make the beach, either because he didn’t want to get his hair wet or he knew the sharks were on my side.

Because I’d been offered the role of a hunchbacked albino monk in a Da Vinci-inspired episode of the Australian sitcom Kath and Kim, I had to listen to the talking book as we were driving through northern Italy last week, the sat nav as our guide, but my wife kept disputing its directions rather violently, especially when it recommended that we drive directly over an Umbrian precipice. The combination of some poor American actor wrestling with five French accents, three Italian and assorted British, as well as Dan Brown’s execrable prose, and the voice of that know-all harpy up there on her satellite with her binoculars, made it a nightmare journey.

The other day in Waitrose I overheard a housewife apostrophise her friend, ‘I have to say the cauliflowers in Tesco’s are much nicer.’ So, the parliamentary locution ‘I have to say’ has now filtered down to the humble homemaker. It was originally intended to lend a spurious importance to the politician’s utterance as though he were compelled to say whatever it was he was saying out of duty or honesty. It also gave him a moment to think what the hell he was going to say anyway. Now it’s just a bit of verbal fungus, like the teenager’s habitual use of the word ‘like’. I have to say that the next person who uses this expression in my presence will get a punch, like, on the nose.

In the wrong end of Hampstead, where I sometimes live, there are a lot of kindergartens and twice a day there is much activity with adorable kiddies milling about. I noticed, however, that within a few yards of every playschool, crouching by parked cars, lurking behind lampposts and not seldom staring brazenly at the departing mothers and children, are what I first assumed to be expatriate paedophiles. Are registered Nigerian and Somalian paedophiles now obliged to wear a uniform as European Jews, in the Dark Ages, were forced to wear the yellow star? Of course, I am wrong. These men, and sometimes grotesquely fat women, are predators of another sort. Camden Council, and the angry lezzos and envious pinkos who run it, have now given these privately managed parking inspectors full licence to book those spoilt, posh, possibly even Jewish mothers if they so much as slow down to drop off or collect their ankle biters. In the same street the other morning I saw some poor fellow trying to sweep broken glass off the front seat of his battered green Golf. Someone had smashed the window to steal the price of a tab of ecstasy or a point of crystal meth. This is a daily occurrence. A pity those platoons of uniformed asylum seekers don’t seem to care about that. Luckily, however, someone has just pinched my satellite navigation system, so life isn’t so bad after all.

Since I am already on a postage stamp and a coin, the grateful people of Melbourne are erecting a hideous sculpture of me in my honour, but it is churlish to whinge. ‘Whingeing’ by the way is 19th-century Australian slang. Originally intended to describe perpetually complaining English visitors to the Colony — ‘Whingeing Poms’ — it has now, ironically, been appropriated by the race it was intended to define; particularly by the British press. So have those popular Australian diminutives for Christian names where Garry becomes Gazza, Jerry Jezza, Warren Wazza and even Prescott Prezza. It all started, as etymologists know, with the seminal Private Eye comic strip ‘Barry McKenzie’ in the Sixties, when the name of the eponymous hero was contracted, (though barely) to Bazza. The double ‘z’ lent this most prosaic of names a jazzy laconic energy. Larrikin Australian journalists in Fleet Street ran with it and British journalism, which owes so much to Australia, and to one Australian in particular, is the richer for it; though Prince Chazza might not agree, I have to say.