Thank goodness the law courts – and
cricketing authorities – did not punish
Stokes’s unoriginal sins with a lifelong
banishment from Eden
— Bruce Anderson, p54
High life
Taki
Gstaad
I was reading in these here pages Julie
Burchill’s review of Candace Bushnell’s
Is There Still Sex in the City? when one of
Julie’s pearls struck me like a stiff left jab
in the noggin: ‘Those who have persisted in
carrying on creakily have become increas-
ingly embarrassing.’ Ouch! Could she have
had the poor little Greek boy in mind? Of
course not, I told myself, but then again...
Never mind. A little paranoia at my age
is normal.
I felt better the next day when a Dutch
TV crew of five arrived in the Alps to film
a programme called How to be a Man. It
stars one man, me, and it will be shown on
Dutch national television, airing in Novem-
ber. Yippee! Margriet van der Linden, a stat-
uesque Viking-like blonde, a real pro, put me
through the ringer. Rarely have I been asked
so many intelligent questions, challenging at
times but never intrusive or embarrassing.
We spent three days talking about manhood
in the age of #MeToo, and filming as I mixed
it up in karate training with my sensei Rich-
ard Amos.
More about karate later, but knowing
how to be a man nowadays is quite tricky.
If you read the lachrymose prose of, say,
Roger Cohen in the New York Times, what
passes as a man of good sense and taste
translates into someone without courage
or originality. (Actually, it’s worse: read-
ing Cohen reminds me of a queasy teen-
ager squeezing his pimples.) My definition
of manhood? Having a sense of duty that
means you never leave a wife, but also a
sense of entitlement that means you never
give up a mistress. The Dutch lady was very
skilled at taking me through my life story —
it was obvious she had read The Spectator
columns with evangelical zeal because she
knew all about me. She wished to know what
has happened to men, and my answer was:
#MeToo. Some of these brainless American
female hustlers are even challenging men’s
literary achievements. A female clown critic
Low life
Jeremy Clarke
Three weeks ago Catriona was going to the
village shop when a building site security fence
fell on her. Wire spikes ranged along the top
gouged three chunks out of her right forearm,
two of which were too capacious to sew up.
She was taken to hospital by the village fire-
men in their fastest van, siren wailing, lights
flashing. The fence had toppled over once
before that day, but the mayor, with whom the
legal responsibility ultimately lay (the build-
ing site was a public work) put the blame on
Catriona for walking too close to the fence, or
perhaps existing.
Within this small Provençal village soci-
ety the incident and the already unpopular
mayor’s hot denial of responsibility became a
cause célèbre. I can only assume this is why
the patron at the permanently packed local
restaurant reserved us a table for three at
such short notice for Sunday lunch. The best
table, too; situated in an unfrequented corner
well away from the long shouty party tables
and backing on to a side street with a cooling
breeze.
Our favourite restaurant is also the locals’
choice. It’s a family-run affair with a menu of
unpretentious country fare unchanged for 20
years. My grandson was down for his annual
ten days and we’d come straight from the pool
with damp hair and silly shorts and the deafrecently wrote that Zelda Fitzgerald’s mad-
ness was because her husband Scott cribbed
from her. Imagine: the great Scott, author of
The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night
and numerous other heart-rending nov-
els, cribbed from the poor, tragic, mad-as-
a-hatter Zelda. She may have been a good
writer on occasion, but she wasn’t anywhere
near him. Such are the joys of the American-
made #MeToo bullshit.
We spoke a lot about sport. Part of the
experience of sport resides in dealing with
the finality of it. It’s often a kind of death.
This is not true of seminars, lectures, or even
reading. (You can always read it again.) The
pursuit of excellence, combined with the
need for courage and personal discipline,
make sport unique, although most sports are
now simply entertainment, the ethos of sport
long gone. The money will do it every time.
The TV crew came to the dojo, where my
sensei and I gave them a bit of a show kick-
ing and punching each other. Richard Amos
is as brainy as any karate teacher around
and is as tough on the floor as they come.
His timing and focus are such that it’s almost
impossible to land a solid hit. Margriet was
impressed, I could tell, and she asked him
some intelligent questions. After that brief
exhibition it was back to hard work and it
made my week. Up early each morning,
drive to the dojo, warm up and have a go.
With 55 years of training experience, I can-
not accept that this stage of my karate life
will no longer be filled with new possibilities.
Getting stronger and faster, kicking higher,
were the old goals. Now I seek to move more
effortlessly and look better aesthetically.
The irony of this is that the more one loses
one’s self in the inner, unseen workings, the
better the technique becomes on the surface.
So, how to be a man? Well, Maxine Bly-
thin — the transgender woman whose bat-
ting average in women’s cricket this season
is 124 — could tell us a thing or two. As could
brainless TV pundits who inform us that
gender is fluid and not determined at birth.
I think that a man needn’t be dominant, nor
does he need to burst into cringe-inducing
tears while looking at reruns of the Harry-
Meghan wedding. The discussion with the
Dutch lady over tournament money in ten-
nis was spirited. If you want equal pay, you
compete equally, said yours truly: best of
five sets, men and women in the same draw.
That’s equality, as in equestrian events. Ditto
for athletics. The Dutch did not take sides on
that one. Nor on anything else. They just put
out their nets and I swam into them.The mother of my children thinks that
the nice Dutch crew will do a hatchet job to
top all hatchet jobs on me. I actually don’t
give a damn. I said what I believe and in this
age of prime-time hate-mongers posing as
Utopians, the worse I come off the better I’ll
feel. These hate-mongers are out to do away
with our past, calling it a mythology while
spreading misinformation and lies about it.
We’ve had a glorious past and men have
played the greater part in it because that
is how God meant it to be. Today’s clowns
are against nature and they will not, cannot,
win. Real women will not allow it. #MeToo
should join the circus.