Collected Essays

The Commitment to Pleasure

Last week I took my twin thirteen-year-old sons to see the Black Keys at the Empire Shepherd’s Bush. The Keys are two American guys, one on drums, the other on guitar, and they make a mean, dramatic and impressive noise.

That evening my sons were tired from a day at school; they were worried about not doing their French homework, and whether they’d get in trouble the next day.

‘Missing your homework for a rock ’n’ roll band,’ I grumbled. ‘You’ll have to do it in the morning on the bus.’

Then, as casually as I could, I asked one of them what he was best at, at school. ‘Don’t worry about it, Dad,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I’m the best looking.’

The boys, who are uninterested in most adult things, were mesmerised by the show. They considered the evening to be ‘sick’, watching the guitarist and drummer carefully, talking to one another about what the musicians were doing.

It might have been the usual rock ’n’ roll experience: sticky carpets, the toilet cistern leaking on your head, people taking your seat, the boredom and excitement of waiting for the band to appear, and a headache at the end.

But during the gig I recalled a quote from Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone magazine, who said something like, ‘I recognised that the most talented of my generation were going into music, so I did too.’

Wenner was acknowledging the truth, something I’ve known since my teens. Music has been the most interesting, significant, liberating and sexually compelling cultural force of my time — and the most lively, gifted and attractive people went into it. Alas for the talentless and shy.

Now, nearly thirty years after Sgt Pepper, it is not only Tony Blair strumming his Stratocaster in the evenings and at weekends. A good proportion of the over-forty male population is learning how to master Samba TaPi. Well-off and winding-down, these lost men can now spend a lot of time in the music shops of Denmark Street, and with friends, practising their licks.

A successful writer pal of mine has been rehearsing with his band every Monday for ten years. He jammed with my sons, recently, teaching them Clash songs while they explained to him who The Feeling are.

For this man there is much to wonder over, and even regret. ‘Don’t you think’, he says seriously, and almost plaintively, ‘I could have been in a professional band — maybe as a bassist? I’m not Hendrix, but I’m as good a player as many of those who made it.’

Like most of my generation, I’ve spent more time listening to music than I have spent reading. Pop is the cultural form I have in common with most of my friends, and certainly, as I’m discovering, with the kids.

Luckily, after listening to hip-hop for a couple of years, my sons turned to American rock, and then to British pop and rock. I became interested in music again through them. Otherwise I’d feel a little embarrassed liking the Kooks and the Streets, as if I should have grown out of it.

When music hall died after the war, re-appearing on television as variety, pop took its place on the stages of those old theatres. During the fifty years I’ve been alive, this country has continued to produce masses of high-class music, as well as absorbing and reinterpreting American music, and saturating its youth in the leery attitudes which accompany it.

Pop is the ‘outsider’s’ cry — free speaking to a large audience — which has done more to remake British identity than any other form, and the spirit of punk still inspires it.

British music has always been mixed up in all senses. It is a democratic form, and it is multi-cultural; it has been black and Asian, working-class, middle-class, gay and lesbian. If I find myself talking to the kids about this, it is because this is their history too, and something they might like to know about, indeed probably should know about, as an alternative education.

The present commitment and fervency of religious believers is disconcerting, impressive and daunting, making us wonder what it is we believe. Our own lack of such belief might make us slightly ashamed. However, if such commitments are more or less unavailable to us, there are others which are, though they are less tangible and authoritarian, less of a programme, and more about feeling and self-expression.

But that which makes an identity — perhaps the most important part of it — might be something which, as the Who put it, you ‘can’t explain’, that is put beyond the refinement of language.

Pop still represents the voices of those who are not normally listened to, and there remains something subversive and obscene about it. The odour of cheap sexuality, drugs and drinking, as well as desperation and people going mad, remind us that pop is, ultimately, about the deepest and most important things: anarchic enjoyment and bodily pleasure.

Unlike most art, which becomes over-sophisticated as it develops, pop remains simple and direct. As with music hall, its most important qualities are vulgarity, naivety and exhibitionism.

Fortunately, this is almost impossible to articulate or teach. Think of our recent passion to characterise ‘Britishness’, in order that we might impress it into the psyches of the potentially British, to stop them becoming terrorists. We could have newly arrived immigrants being forced to sit in booths wearing headphones, writing an explication of ‘I Am the Walrus’.

The Britain of pop is the country I understand and like, partly because its music has never quite been domesticated. Neither parochial or patriotic, pop is an unusual identification, not one based on hatred, but on creativity.

Unlike identifications built on religion or on love of the state or the leader, it is forever shifting, still anarchic, cussed, rebellious, non-conformist. It is intelligent and witty, a running ironic description of contemporary British life.

A Great Leap

‘Dad, Dad!’ is the familiar cry, the word I know I will hear most frequently this week. ‘Watch me!’

To one side of the small shingle beach in Deia is a high rock with a flat top on which the more intrepid children gather, daring each other, and themselves, to jump. One older boy hesitates for two hours, but when at last he goes over, screaming, the entire packed beach, seemingly inert under the boiling sun, bursts into applause like the audience at a TV ‘confession’ show.

Much to my surprise, my first son, a twin of eleven, who traverses the numerous perils of Shepherd’s Bush with caution, but otherwise has little contact with dangerous sports, leaps from the edge straight away. ‘The only way to go,’ as he puts it coolly, giving me five. But the other twin is up there for more than an hour, pacing worriedly, locked in his own existential panic, knowing he can’t climb down without considerable loss of pride.

After he goes over, my wife decides she cannot be excluded from this carnival of courage, brushing aside the men and boys rather regally, and dropping into the water with her toes pointing down and arms up. This shows a level of bravery which eludes her entirely later in the week, when she sits on a horse as we drift past vines and red earth, weeping and shaking, as her harmless horse munches on a bush and the rest of us cowboys stare at her in bewilderment.

I notice Bob Geldof is standing on the beach, too, watching the boys on the rock. He doesn’t mind a bit when questioned by a crowd of kids as to his mode of address to Snoop Doggy Dogg. (‘Is it plain Mr Dogg, Mr Doggy Dog, or just Snoop?’ ‘Snoop is fine.’ ‘What’s his real name then? Isn’t it Curtis?’ ‘I don’t think so, no.’)

Deia is a quiet and cute little town, with good bars and live music, many restaurants and a fine bookshop selling rare first editions, and without a shred of advertising anywhere; all the colour is natural. It is where Robert Graves finally settled after the war, and is now said to be full of ‘artists and writers’, as though that might increase its allure. I think it’s unlikely we’ll find a Sky dish in Deia; we’ll have to go elsewhere for football.

My children are unfamiliar with what we call ‘the country’. When, one night, the hotel sprinkler system begins to hiss, they assume their room is being attacked by snakes. Their favourite place is anywhere with a mirror, and their idea of a good time is lying in a darkened room watching Sumo wrestling on Euro-Sport. They are capitalism’s finest — perfect disciples and consumers: wishing, buying, envying: it is all aimed at them. I wouldn’t want them to be excluded from the general orgy, nor for them to think it is all there is. But I know they will not want to miss the Manchester United — Newcastle match.

We drive along perilous coastal roads to the other, flatter side of the island, where, we have heard, the British gather; many of them have opened bars there. Many of them, I can see by looking along the beach, have read the Da Vinci Code.

In the car the twins are edgy and anxious, unimpressed by the precipitous views; next week they will begin at a new secondary school, an altogether bigger leap. If you have the misfortune to live with all your children, you won’t know the pain of having them enter and leave your life abruptly and often. These long drives are a good opportunity for us to talk, and for them to hear me and what I want of them. They’re even interested in what I might be writing next. They are surprised and not reassured to hear my theory that the worst bit of life is probably the beginning rather than the end.

We stop to eat at Es Guix, an old Majorcan property in the Sierra Tramuntana mountains, converted into a spacious restaurant. The lowest of its terraces has its own freshwater pool; after lunch the boys shoot down the slide into the freezing water, bobbing up under a waterfall, their bright faces howling in the natural shower.

The game has just started when we hurry into a British bar which has a large TV. The place is full of tattooed beasts in Newcastle shirts accompanied by robust pierced mingers in tiny bikinis talking on mobile phones. The staff are wearing England shirts with their black eyes; for some reason most of them have bits of sticking plaster on their faces.

‘We’re Manchester United,’ one of my sons fatally announces, stripping off his hoodie to reveal his Man Utd away shirt. ‘Only a little bit,’ I say, in an extremely high voice. Unfortunately we win the match two nil, but are moving rapidly and soundlessly towards the door when I pick up a sun hat from a table, stuffing it into the front of my trousers, believing it to be my little boys.’

Outside, my progress is blocked by a large man standing in front of me. ‘You got my ’at,’ he says. ‘Oh no, sir, surely not. I am hatless as well as quite ill.’ ‘What’s that then, right down the front of yer pants?’ ‘Oh yes, this little thing,’ I say, thrusting the hat at him, patting him on the back and legging it towards the car, the kids rushing ahead of me. ‘It probably wasn’t a good idea to tap on him like that,’ one of them says, wisely.

‘Never look back,’ I advise.

‘A paradise of tranquillity and relaxation,’ as our present hotel — La Reserva Rotana, in Manacor — characterises itself. It probably was, until the Kureishis arrived. It has cavernous rooms, huge beds, old paintings, its own vineyard and golf course, and there’s acres of space to chase chickens in; it has an outdoor chess set. Nearby there are monasteries, cathedrals, galleries, castles, gardens and lap dancers. We will be there for four days. This is some contrast to our first hotel, Ca’n Verdera, in the village of Fornalutx, which was compact, seemingly cut into the rock, weirdly and suddenly designed: post-modern in an old place. The Mediterranean, they say, is where all styles meet.

After this holiday I think the boys would want to go on a horse again, and they have even talked of taking up golf, after thrashing away with clubs one morning and shooting wildly across the course on a golf-cart. But kayaking wasn’t something we’d have thought of doing ourselves. We couldn’t even pronounce it. For me, usually, the point of a holiday is to be so indolent and bored that I can’t wait to get home and hide behind the curtains. It had never occurred to me to go on holiday and do new things. But our outings were organised by Jane Stanbury — soon known as ‘Indiana Jane’ — of Balearic Tours — who knew the place well and is aware that a bored boy is a bad boy.

In Majorca the water is clear and warm: the kids lie in the surf for ages, or put on masks and snorkel. They’ve never been so close to a live fish before, or swallowed so much sea. We are taken out in a small boat, passing huge yachts and looking back at expensive houses on the mountainside, with kids sitting out watching one another, and impatient fathers in Speedos talking on phones.

We were put on even smaller boats — kayaks. This is like being strapped to a lolly-stick and thrown into a flushing toilet. The moment the three boys were put into the sea, they took off, digging madly into the water with an oar which resembled a double-ended shovel, looking at the caves and the rocks which ran down the coast line. For them it was like riding a bicycle without stabilisers for the first time.

To be a tourist is to be behind glass, of course, protected from the real politics and pressures of the place you are visiting. But unlike with some Third World destinations, in Majorca you are not locked into some sort of compound surrounded by wire, while the rest of the population roams around outside, looking as though they can’t wait to get their fingers on your wind-pipe. The staff in the hotels are neither servile nor resentful. Majorca’s narrow roads are often congested with huge coaches, and soon the island will have to make many decisions about how far to go with tourism — whether that is the only purpose of the place. But until then the place is sublime, with far more to do than on most sand-and-sun destinations.

I follow the yelling boys up the steep path of a challenging hill. They want to get to the top; I want to sit down. They want to wait for me, but I tell them to go on, ahead of me. Next year I’ll be jumping off that rock, just watch me.

Venice in Winter

This winter we thought we’d go to Venice by train, for the adventure. Having become averse to travelling, the Kureishi family had taken its previous holiday in Watford and we were home in twenty minutes; indeed we could have commuted. Not only that, on checking into the Watford hotel we discovered Ashley Cole, Frank Lampard and John Terry playing Scrabble in a side-room. The England captain charmed our ten-year-old son, asking him his name before giving him his autograph. The kid was smart enough not to let on that we were Manchester United supporters.

This time, after taking the Eurostar to Paris and the Metro to the Gare Bercy, we joined the night train. I took two sleeping pills and, wearing all my clothes, slipped under the thin blanket on the bunk bed, thinking how lovely it was to lie there watching the landscape and the lights speeding by. An hour later I woke up to find the train had stopped in a station and a crowd of French clubbers were staring into our cabin.

Every time I peered down at my partner in her bunk, her eyes were open and she was staring at the ceiling. The restaurant car had been splendid, but we did wonder at the level of hygiene in the tiny cabin; it was not unlike sleeping in a public toilet with a great view of the Alps. Indeed, if you did happen to peer into the train toilet, you could see the ground below.

But we did wake up in Venice, the train almost tipping us into the Grand Canal. I’d never been here in the winter, and it was a different beauty, stark and fresh. The sun was bright and near the Rialto, not far from one of my favourite shops, the Beatles’ Memorabilia emporium, people were eating outside wearing sunglasses.

Luckily there was no sign of the worst flooding Venice had endured since 1966. Having watched the TV news in early December and seen a man canoeing across St Mark’s Square and the rest of the population wading up to their gussets in sewage during a transport strike, I’d had to say to the Missus: that’s where we will be spending the New Year.

The hotel we were put in, the Palazzo Barbarigo, was dark in the modern style — the modern style of the 1980s, resembling a smart Philippe Starck New York hotel, where everything straight was curved and you needed a torch to find your way around, even when the lights were on. But the floors were great for a ten-year-old Duracell-battery boy to skid across in his socks, and he could duck down behind the huge sofas when the need for discretion arose.

As I have a theory that you can eat almost anywhere in France or Italy and the food will be fine, that first lunch-time we picked a place at random. (Never try this in London.)

Opening a door into an almost deserted small place near the Rialto, we came across two old, frail women taking their morning cappuccino. Immediately they began to talk to us, telling us through gestures that our son Kier was both a genius and beautiful. Later, we learned what an impressive and relaxed café society there was in Venice: that local people, particularly older ones, gathered with their shopping in cafés in the morning, to gossip.

We had been anxious about whether our son would be sufficiently distracted during these few days in a drowning museum of a city. Fortunately he soon began to hop about happily in his Crocs. Since Venice combines shopping with water and boats, and in St Mark’s Square the pigeons will still sit on a child’s head, he adored it; and everyone in Venice seemed to adore him. Strangers on the water-buses — the vaporettos — and in the streets and cafés touched him and stroked his head as soon as they saw him. They wanted to give him stuff: roses, sweets, paper planes, pens, kisses.

What better company in the world is there than that of a ten-year-old boy who is curious and lively, retaining the charm and affection of a child without the sullen aggression of a teenager? He and I went to Harry’s Bar for more conversation, where they took Kier’s coat and brought him chips and ice-cream immediately. The bar was still chic and busy, with classic food, and it remains famous for the writers who like it. But these days a writer had better be accompanied by his publisher if he wants to afford it.

Years ago, a friend with incomplete English appeared to believe that there existed a useful book called Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venice. But the women from Venice mostly appeared to be old women, widows probably, in fur coats, often with little dogs. There were babies too, but otherwise the city seemed bereft of young people or teenagers. While it can be a mercy to be free of the young and their exultation and hope, it was strange too. But without them what future could there be for a city which made a good living out of eternal decline? However, graffiti provided evidence that there were kids around. It wasn’t until later that night that I saw them.

My friend, the painter Serena Nono, lives on the mainly residential Venetian island of Giudecca in the apartment her father, the composer, Luigi Nono wrote in. If St Mark’s is crowded and claustrophobic, as it is for most of the year, it is easy to take a boat Giudecca, just ten minutes away. Serena intended to show us a different side of Venice. She had said, pointing at the ground and then at the buildings, ‘Never forget that everything is crooked in Venice; nothing is straight.’ As Muriel Spark wrote, ‘Venice is a city not to inspire thought but sensations.’

That night, at her urging, Kier and I took two vaporettos from the hotel to the Giudecca canal. It hadn’t taken us long to get into the vaporetto thing. You can buy a limitless use twenty-four-hour ticket, and the boats are regular, run all night and are fun to ride on — you are on a bus on the water and the view is of ancient floating palaces.

But tonight it was dark, cold and desolate; the city tunnels were rancid and dripping, and Kier and I began to wonder if there really could be anything going on here particularly when the only person around was a desperate Pakistani who jumped out of a doorway and sold us a laser pen and glasses which lit up. Still, at least I could see my son. And anyway, although Venice gives off a sense of menace and death — and one of the best things to do there is get lost — it is not violent.

At last, near the Zattere vaporetto stop, we came to a freezing toiletless squatted warehouse on the edge of the water. Venetians in overcoats were drinking mulled wine, smoking, feeding their dogs and playing table football. When a tight band began to do Elvis covers people slowly began to get up to do the twist, elegantly, while 1950s black and white movies were projected on a screen behind. My son in his woolly hat and gloves, wandered to the front and stood and stared. I guess it was probably the first time he’d heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and ‘Hound Dog’, and what better circumstances could there be?

Later, Serena’s work was projected on to the screen, and a Venetian ska band started up. It had been so long since I’d heard a Venetian ska band complete with a Rasta saxophonist and trombonist as good as this, that I started to dance on the concrete floor, though without moving my feet. Kier was still at the front of the crowd, which was jumping now, and a teenage girl took his hand and twirled him around. Just before midnight I had to drag him out of there; as I watched him watching those devil musicians I feared he’d been seduced for life.

Giudecca, once home to Michelangelo and Alfred de Musset, and now to Elton John, was beautiful in the day too. Serena took us to see her studio in a converted brewery, where a month before she had found her paintings floating. Now they were dry and stacked neatly against the walls.

Venice is expensive as everyone knows, particularly as all goods have to be transported by boat. But you can get by on a hot chocolate with whipped cream if you walk past the bleak woman’s prison to the almost deserted Hilton Hotel, where you can sit on the roof while contemplating the best view in Venice. From here you can confirm Jan Morris’s remarks in her magisterial Venice, published in 1960, ‘This is not a large city. You can see it all easily, from one end to the other. It is about two miles long by one mile deep, and you can walk from end to end of it, from the slaughter-house in the north-west to the Public Gardens in the south-east, in an hour and a half — less, if you don’t mind shoving.’

It was important for us to get to know where the best pizza was. Fortunately ten minutes walk from our hotel was the Campo Santa Margherita, in Dorsoduro, one of Venice’s six sestieri, or districts. This square or piazza is lined by trattorias and shaded by trees; in the morning there’s a fish market.

In a bar we ran into an actor, a man with the dignity of the great Fernando Rey. Though he didn’t speak English nor I Italian, he invited Serena, and us, to his family house the next night, New Year’s Eve.

We pondered this for some time. It seemed a little weird going to a generous stranger’s house on the last night of the year. But what else would we do at midnight in a strange city? There was a dinner in the hotel, but it seemed a little impersonal. So we bought Prosecco and turned up at ‘Rey’s’.

It was a lovely, welcoming fish dinner; there were other children there, and we all sat around a small table. For entertainment we felt the bumps on the top of each other’s heads. The actor and I couldn’t speak to one another so he pulled out his albums from the 60s, put on a scratchy record by the Rolling Stones and we two strangers danced together. Later we found Kier outside, standing on the edge of the canal with sparklers in his fist, enraptured by a long-haired Italian girl.

As I got drunker, Serena Nono’s Berkeley-born mother Nuria, whose father was the composer Schoenberg, told me stories of her childhood: of Thomas Mann making the children stay outside in the garden when her father went for supper, and the long wait for Brecht to visit — she was at school with his daughter Barbara.

Then, as though this had been staged for us, around 11.30 it started to snow. At midnight the fireworks in St Mark’s Square began, and we had a perfect view from the other side of the city, the rockets firing into the snow, which was heavy now. Couples in the house began to dance and embrace — I don’t mind hugging strangers if they’re Italian. It was like a scene from Fanny and Alexander.

By now drenched and with white heads, we shoved into the loaded vaporetto, all the bells of the city ringing out at once. At the hotel bar I saw a waiter I knew hurrying towards me carrying a tray on which was a two-decker chocolate cake and a huge glass of vodka. After turning fifty, pleasures are harder to come by than at an earlier age; but they are more appreciated. I like to believe I woke up in the morning, still holding that glass of vodka.