#maslin

Măslinul: Simbol și semnificație

[...]

It's been seven and a half years since I last wantonly scattered pixels on these hallowed pages, and yet somehow my child is still only fifteen months old.

I prefer to think of it not as gaining a son, but as losing vital parts of myself forever. There is much to mourn the loss of.

My aggressive metabolism, once my stalwart companion and saviour, has now abandoned me. I have, in one year, grown a paunch that a decade of wild dietary excess could not inflict. 

My luxuriant hair. Gone. We will not see its like again. The central quiff has been caught in the ruthless pincer movement of a senseless and unjust war of aggression. Eventually it will find itself surrounded, cut off from rescue, before being erased completely; a victim of the insatiable territorial ambitions of my own shiny forehead. 

Exhaustion has even eroded the contours of my very personality, its edges blending with those of the bottle steriliser. We both have similar, thankless roles, spend much of our day sitting sadly in the kitchen, and occasionally emit a low grumbling noise to confirm we are still alive.

Truly, parenthood has been everything I feared and I was wise to avoid it for so long.

Yet, against my best judgement, I have resolved never to pay others to raise my child for me; a resolution that now seems foolhardy. Instead of entrusting my son to the arms of a loving professional, he has been consigned to the care of a rank amateur. The boy has spent his formative months sat in the corner of my office, functioning as an effective - if occasionally pungent - paperweight. Yet he shows no taste for port and cigars, no inclination to write and, most shamefully, little or no sartorial flare. Give him a pocket square and he simply chews the corner of it. I fear he may never become the elegant but troubled genius that I need him to be.

But change - like the complex odour of nappy cream and excrement - is in the air. 

Now, whether in a quest for food or in urgent protest at my lively but one-sided conversation, he has begun to walk and therefore has finally become very much someone else’s problem. As he totters down the Office hallway like an inebriate giraffe, I find myself temporarily freed up to once again lavish the minimum of time and energy on you, my readership; my neglected first child. 

After all, I poured so many hours into cultivating you, moulding you in my gnarled image, inspiring in you a combination of lust and awe. Since you’ll bear the scars forever anyway, it would be a shame to waste it altogether, eh? 

And, as that achingly healthy breed of absentee father, the Cycling Dad - clad in his lycra and treating strangers and squirrels to bellowed insights about marketing strategies in the nation’s quietest and most idyllic parks - will attest: it is important, nay essential, to keep up your own interests in the face of new responsibilities.

That is why I have dipped my toes back into the viscous mire of political machination; the swamp into which I wade with such practiced, amphibian grace. On the 17th of May, I managed to wangle my way into giving a speech at the much-chortled-over proceedings of the National Conservatism conference earlier this month.

[...]

Well, it’s finally happened.

They said it couldn’t be done.

More often, they said it shouldn’t be done.

But once again, I have proven the doubters wrong and demonstrated myself capable of generational replication.

Or fatherhood, as the sentimentalists insist on calling it.

Between the grave diagnoses bandied about by so-called ‘urological experts’, and even graver ones touted by my exhausted corps of therapists, who claimed my recurrent condition [1] was either an act of profound psychological self-sabotage [2] or the necessary consequence of my cheese, port and cigar exclusive diet, I had assumed that I would never be blessed/blighted by progeny of my own.

Rumours abound, of course, of illegitimate offspring – they cling to me like cigar smoke and cheese rinds, dogging my every step. But I’ve never heeded scurrilous gossip, nor opened the letters sent to me by the courts. So as far as I know, or am legally willing to acknowledge, this is the first time this has happened.

Regardless, we cannot get hung up on our past mistakes. We must instead focus on our future ones.

There is no shortage of guidance out there advising how best to raise your children, not least the dry and functional manual produced by my own nearly lamented father [3]. While there is little doubt that Pater's unconventional methods made me the well-adjusted and only mildly substance-dependent man I am today, I’m afraid I haven’t the energy required to trap my own son in a constant web of aggressive silence for the next 18 years. I haven’t got the old man’s stamina.

Instead, perhaps the greatest gift I can bestow upon my child, is to select for them a respectable and well-meaning au pair. Someone into whose arms he can run while his mother and I loudly express our undying admiration for one another through the medium of hurled crockery [4].

Nevertheless, I still hope to be able to impart some wisdom of my own to the boy. This is going to take the form of one of those private messages people write to their children, to be opened on their 10th birthday, or in the event of the parent’s grizzly and unforeseen demise. Except, in order to get some content mileage out of it, I am publishing it here, so that the depth of my affection for this unborn creature can be known to all the world. I leave it to my secretary to make the necessary amendments as the circumstances dictate.

Hello lad

I’m sorry that I’ve not been there to see you grow because [of my untimely death at the hands of my many creditors/our diaries didn’t align for the few days a year you weren’t at boarding school/you quickly identified me as a bounder not worthy of your love and time].

I’m sorry for the condition of the land you inherit; its fetid rivers, its choked skies, its scarred and savaged earth. I’m sorry that my addiction to single-use plastics has irreparably poisoned the wellspring of life on this planet. Washing things and reusing them is so much harder than simply discarding them. But I was wrong. I see that now.

I’m sorry that you have been delivered into a society that sees you as little more than an indentured servant, upon whose aching, blistered back the comfortable retirement of your coddled forebears will be borne, as you toil in the burning gaze of a dying sun.

Finally, I’m sorry that you have been born into the seemingly endless night created by the titanic shadow that I cast over this fragile world.

But on this, [your 10th birthday/your 20th birthday/your 60th birthday/Wednesday], I want you to know: you can eclipse me. 

Yours can be the name the peoples of this sphere cry aloud, in pain, in devotion, in the expectation of mercy or salvation. You can be the darkness that swells the perpetual black I leave in my wake. Or you can be the light that banishes it altogether. 

The world is but clay ready to receive your imprint, waiting for your fire to mark it indelibly.

The choice, all choices, are yours.

I love you. And I will use the flayed skin of my foes to line your golden bassinet.

The bins go out on Fridays.

Yours, in fierce adoration,

Your father (the Editor)

______________

[1] Egotistic flaccification, according to disreputable medical textbooks.

[2] Whether my unconscious did so out of spite or through the noble motive of a better tomorrow remains unclear.

[3] The Cold Hand of Indifference: A Victorian Father’s Guide to Childrearing in this Cursed Century intermittently climbs to #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list under the ‘Callous Self-help’ category.

[...]

This Office has always supported and endorsed its nation's efforts in all forms of competitive kicking [1].

The fact that we have only now decided to vocalise our unwavering commitment should in no way be interpreted as a late Damascene conversion; the sharp creases in our replica shirts are no indicator of a shallow and snivelling opportunism.

Even if they were, hitching oneself to hurtling bandwagons is surely the most effective way of slipstreaming through existence. Winners invariably make for the best bedfellows. Even now, my pen hovers in readiness over the deed to a Tuscan villa. Next week, should oil be discovered there, my counterfeit Algerian passport is ready to go. One must be chameleonic, prepared for every eventuality.

But for now, and, I’m prepared to swear, every minute up until now, my heart and spine is forever England. My chilblains are forever England. My rash is possibly French but it has recently come around to an English way of thinking. My liver will be England long after the rest of me is gone.

For that reason, the time is ripe for a few words on the English association football team [2].

I have been told that one of their most valuable traits as a team is their diversity. Fundamentally, I believe that all football players are of a very specific type – practically the same person at their core, probably all called Jason – so I highly doubt that can truly be the case.

But unlike, for example, the suddenly amnesiac sections of the froth-for-pay press, or that one lone Tory MP who has managed to paint himself into a stimulating Sunday evening unboxing, admiring and re-boxing his collectable Margaret Thatcher toby jugs, I take no issue with their public political gestures.

Being not so much woke as incredibly drowsy after a few sherries, I treat their kneeling with the same quiet indulgence I do anyone trying to take a stand for a better world, whether that be the charity workers I cross the city to avoid or the repeated attempts of Office staff to unionise [3]. I chuckle patronisingly, safe in the knowledge that we’re trapped together in this sclerotic body politic, torpid and wheezing at the most minor exertions, and nothing will ever meaningfully change. God bless it.

Like most others, I find myself curiously, even erotically, drawn to their manager, Graham Billingsgate – kindly, well-tailored, his face the picture of ill-shaven hawkishness, looking like everyone’s favourite woodwork teacher. Recent polls place his public approval rating higher than that of Churchill himself. Winston admittedly cuts less of a dash in a waistcoat but his victory over a full-strength Germany was more decisive, if equally reliant on late substitutions.

Perhaps the thing I like most about this England team is that they had the generosity and good grace to win their semi-final in a way that has brought pleasure and satisfaction to our troubled and splintering Union. The English are happy for reaching their first final of a major men’s tournament since before my father even made the pivotal decision about which side of the Cold War he would come down on. The rest of the UK are happy because they got there through a controversial decision that provides yet more evidence of perfidious Albion being handed an undeserved victory. That betrays a level of thoughtfulness and dedication to keeping the Kingdom united that you’d never see from those rancorous Scots.

So here we are – this nation of shopkeepers, of cropsharers, of sharp coppers, of sheep croppers, and probably much else besides (footballers being the obvious one to mention) – on the cusp of achieving something astonishing. Astonishing in the sense that, by the basic metrics of population and wealth, a nation of our size probably shouldn’t have gone 25 governments, 11 Prime Ministers, and the fractious entry and withdrawal from an international political union between visits to a final.

Nevertheless. Nevertheless…

Football, that faithless gadabout, carousing abroad with his many and varied floozies – some from the Americas, some Continentals, far too many of them German – might just, after these 55 long years, be coming home.

If he does, I shall give him a piece of my bloody mind.

Or perhaps the warm allure of his exotic, if emotionally demonstrative, Italian mistress will be too much to resist...

As I said, winners make for the best bedfellows.

-------------------------

[1] The Falklands War was famously resolved with a shinning tournament – Dutchman’s rules (trousers rolled up to the knee, no clogs, first to expose the bone wins) and a comprehensive victory for Coldstream Guards Sergeant Elmer ‘Razorshins’ Ruddle – which to my mind remains England’s finest post-war achievement.

[2] This being how they are always referred to by the true fans.

[...]

I myself have, on occasion, been a member of several of the great European Royal Families [1]. I weave myself into them quietly, like hereditary susceptibility to gout, and then disappear without warning, like embezzled charitable donations.

And yet, there is more – a great deal more – that qualifies me to opine, with the zest of a gossipy courtier, on the travails of our much-maligned monarchy.

Indeed, at first glance, there is much that unites me with the Duchess of Sussex: I have had a moderately successful acting career stymied by a torrid love affair with a troubled redhead [2], have a publicly venomous relationship with my father that has played out on the front pages of the gutter press [3], and (I assume) we have both secretly urinated in the vestry at St George’s Chapel in Windsor before a major event was due to take place.

Yet despite these almost eerie similarities, I’m afraid I am at a loss to understand the Duchess’s mindset and the Sussexes’ candid and inexcusably American interview.

Like her, I have had my share of unpleasant skirmishes with the media. I too know the sting of being outrageously accused by spiteful commentators of ‘not being black enough to have experienced racism’. However, unlike Meghan, I managed to rise above it and, with dignity, continued to deliver my impromptu speech at the MOBO Awards.

In fact, I have relished the ongoing war of words (and, briefly, before I saw sense, letter bombs) between myself and that shrill costermonger of pungent, overripe opinions, Piers Morgan. Having spent much of the early 2000s leaving messages on my own voicemail calling him an elaborate mutton-sculpture in the hope that they would eventually find their way back to his hot, puce little ears, I simply cannot understand the Duchess’s reticence to exchange insults with a man with such a hefty trade deficit.

The enmity of Piers Morgan is a gift to be treasured. If they did it in vouchers, I’d give them to my dearest relations [4] for every birthday and Christmas.

The point I am getting at here is that, with time and the patient support of the ermine-swaddled nucleus of the Royal Family, the Duchess could have learned the ancient rules of combat on which their relationship with the media is founded. When they offer ritual humiliation, you smile sheepishly and endure it. When they offer you incriminating allegations, you chunter unconvincingly with anecdotes about pizza outlets. When they hound a relative to their death, you cheerfully accept it in exchange for some bar polish for your gilded cage.

This is the quid pro quo of the empty cipher of your life, the price paid for the honour of drifting around needlessly large and difficult to heat houses; for the privilege of attending garden fetes and asking people, incessantly, what it is they do; for soaking in the quiet scorn of your social circle, who are just as wealthy as you but don’t have to spend every other day trapped in the pallid light of the hospital ward they are opening.

But no, clearly those privileges – of being an absurd and costly anachronism, like an antique foot-pedal sewing machine or leech beauty treatments – aren’t good enough for the Sussexes.

That’s why, in my fleeting outrage, I have created a petition calling for Harry and his children to be removed from the line of succession, finally injecting a bit of democracy into the principle of hereditary succession.

At least, until I lose interest and, with the true privilege of the super-rich – unencumbered by the stifling confines of duty to an institution whose right to exist is predicated on its own powerlessness – I return to the warm azure waters of my tropical island, far beyond the gaze of a voracious press, free to shoot idly at porpoises.

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[1] I still rule over a small protectorate in Schleswig-Holstein, whether they recognise it or not, which entitles me to a proportion of the yield of the annual pig harvest. One day soon, I will make my way there in my best overalls and my hog-plucking gloves and take what is rightfully mine.

[2] Antony Worrall Thompson can deny it all he likes. We both know what happened and there’s only one way to interpret those photographs.

[3] And, never one to miss out on a scoop, even one to my own extreme national humiliation, the pages of the Panic Office itself.