At home I work in a cupboard under the stairs just to keep me grounded, so you won’t hear me talking about my ‘studio’ — unlike some cartoonists I could name. My cupboard has in it, apart from old clothes, a cat litter tray and a collection of hundreds of jazz CDs. Do I put them back in their cases when I’ve finished playing them? I do not; anyway, I now have an iPod with all my music downloaded on to it. Fancy that! All those wonderful CDs on a machine the size of a packet of five Woodbines. Now I can have music wherever I go, so don’t even try and speak to me. I can’t hear you. In fact I have caught up with the rest of you with plugs in your ears, but I still haven’t got a mobile phone and so I’m not texting this diary from anywhere exotic. I’m writing it in my cupboard under the stairs. A hangover from the war, I’m afraid. At least then if you had a large black Bakelite telephone you could pick up and dial Whitehall 1212 and the police would be round in a tick and apprehend the yob attacking you. His name was Hitler, by the way.
I read the other day of a woman who said she suffered from hairdresserphobia. Is there anyone out there with a similar complaint? Well, I’m certainly phobic about having my hair cut, and have been ever since my mother had me tied to a hairdresser’s chair when I was five and left me there and went God knows where. I’d rather go out on stage at a Royal Command Performance than have to make conversation with a crimper. ‘Been away have you, sir?’ ‘Well, yes, I have. It’s a little island near Naples. It’s quite unspoilt….’ ‘How do you want it? What about this nasal hair? Shall I cut it back, along with your eyebrows?’ Some awful pirate radio station is pumping out rap drivel at full blast. And remember one can’t get out! Still, as they all say, I’m very lucky to have such a head of hair — ‘at your age!’ Yes, it’s true: I’ll never see 69 again.
I am always amused by the photographs of very important, very interesting people that appear in Vanity Fair showing writers, actors and contributors sucking the ends of their glasses and looking sideways on to Annie Leibovitz’s merciful lens. So as a birthday present to me our editor arranged to have one done of the editorial department of The Spectator. It’s a joke! Or is it?
To nail a cartoon to a particular topical subject, I often have someone holding a newspaper with a headline identifying the subject of the cartoon. Quite often these made-up headlines come true. I once put the first three horses to come home in the Grand National on a bookie’s blackboard the day before the race in some long-lost cartoon in the London Evening Standard. I didn’t bet on them myself. Of course, if I had, they wouldn’t have romped home. Lately I’ve been putting ‘The World Is Coming to an End’. And what were the headlines in the Sunday papers? Yep, you’ve guessed it. So what? Watch the birdy. Bird flu will have got us all by then. ‘Bring out your dead.’
My secret hero is Pot Head Pete Doherty. He has all the fun, it’s just not fair (I mean it). All the girls fall under his spell. He takes all the drugs in the world and nobody seems to care much, although I don’t suppose he could be leader of the Tory party, which is a shame. He and Kate would get all the kids out voting. He goes OTT on aeroplanes, in hotels, all over the world; New York, Ibiza, Dublin. He gets arrested, let off, gets on another plane, goes berserk again, critics mumble about him being a genius and that he’s going to crash and burn out. The good die young — what a way to go! I’ve even bought a CD of him and Babyshambles, the group that holds him up. I haven’t played it yet: I don’t want to have my illusions dashed.
There is a book … about how to pick up girls (women?). I don’t mean the ones who have fallen down drunk; I mean the ones men pick up hoping for a meaningful relationship, or, as it’s called nowadays, a shag. Advice on how to chat them up comes from a midget Yank with a shaved head and an iron will (or maybe willy). Anyway, you look the totty straight in the eye (in his case standing on a bar stool) and say: ‘You’ve got eyes like stars, they come out at night.’ Just kidding, sorry. Very old music-hall joke. Anyway, you get control of their buried emotions; women are really very insecure and need to be patronised, you see. Not as insecure as me but insecure just the same. After a few card tricks and showing them cute things you can do with bar book matches, they start chewing your Y-fronts. This is so exhausting! All you have to do is hang about with miniature dachshunds. Millions of pretty girls crawl all over you asking his name, age, isn’t he sweet — by George, if I hadn’t already been spoken for … I add hastily that the girls aren’t nearly as pretty as the dog’s own mistress.
Tourists doing the grand tour nowadays always take their mobiles with them. Have you noticed that when they stand in front of some officially designated masterpiece — the Duomo in Florence, perhaps — they don’t even bother to look at it. Instead they take out their mobiles and start texting. Hi, Tim. Flrnce OK, but nvr bn so sik b4 food awfl cul8r x
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