Gstaad
Here we go again! ‘I hear music and there’s no one there, I smell blossoms and the trees are bare, all at once I seem to walk on air…’ Some of you, or perhaps all of you, must be getting rather tired of this, but I simply can’t help it. I’m not doing it on purpose, that I swear on the Bible. In fact, I dropped in on the terribly nice village doctor although I knew it was a total waste of his time and mine. His diagnosis, as always with such symptoms: ‘There is nothing you can take to relieve that pleasant ache; you’re not sick, you’re just in love.’
Yes, folks, this time she’s Jessica Raine, that graceful and shy nurse Jenny in the Sunday-night soap Call the Midwife. This is the kind of coup de foudre I haven’t experienced in years. Cupid’s arrow pierced my breast three Sundays ago, and I haven’t had a peaceful night’s sleep since. I even had my daughter Google Jessica — she grew up on a Welsh farm near Powys. And the mother of my children agrees. ‘She’s very pretty and nice,’ she admitted, however reluctantly.
What attracts me is the role she plays. Her grace, shyness and understatement, her intense and repressed character, straight out of some Terence Rattigan play. And I love her rather plain beauty. Now that’s what I call an English rose, not those grotesque tarts who fall out of their bras while drunk and stumble on their ghastly Louboutins, the ugliest shoes ever invented by men who hate women. Incidentally, Hugo Rifkind asked recently if there is a Madame Louboutin, and there is, but he’s a brute with a beard. (But Hugo knew that and was pulling our leg.)
Nurse Jenny is my ideal woman. Her total lack of flamboyance and inability to be vulgar even if she tried has me loathing myself for having fallen for others in the past. Well, that’s all over with for good. Goodbye, deputy editor of The Spectator, so long, Keira, au revoir pour toujours, Rebecca; you’re all through, washed up, history, curtains, finished. From now on and until the day I die it’s only Jessica Raine and Nurse Jenny, to whom my heart and soul belong. And I’ll go a bit further. She can have anything of mine, boat included, if she agrees to have a dinner — one single dinner in Paris — with no après dinner tricks, unless of course… but I don’t dare dream that far ahead. And there is a very nice present waiting for anyone who will show this article to her, and an even nicer one to anyone who will arrange the dinner.
I know, I know, I’ve said all this before, but this time it’s for real. Jenny is the incarnation of goodness, and her enchanting looks have turned me into an erotomaniacal fool. Sanctity is a woman’s ideal and it is based on passion, which by means of love lifts us above law. Jessica-Jenny plays this kind of character, and I like to think that she’s not that great an actress to be a slut in real life and as angelic as she appears on screen. It may be a beatific vision I have of her but, what the hell, I’ve always preferred the fine to the base, the noble to the ignoble, and the beautiful to the hideous. Which brings me to Theodore Dalrymple’s Diamond Jubilee Speccie debate of two weeks ago.
I agree with every word he wrote and I’ve put my money where my mouth is and moved out of England for exactly the reasons he gave. I felt England’s decline perhaps more than others because I am not English, never wished to be English, but loved certain aspects of English life that were non-existent in other places. (The sense of humour, the understatement, the tolerance, and so on.) Then the culture changed into one in which the bizarre was seen as beautiful. Women, especially upper-class girls, began using one word and one word only to describe everything: amazing became the most overused word in English except for the F-one.
A brief example. That posturing designer Karl Lagerfeld called the singer Adele fat, suddenly turning her into a victim. But she is fat, and, playing to the vulgar audience, she admitted that the most frustrating thing during a recent illness when she couldn’t speak owing to a throat operation was her inability to swear. She was proud of her swearing, which says it all. Of course Britain has become a more dishonest and cynical country, and of course the odious entertainment industry has most to do with this coarseness and brutality. How can a man like Gordon Ramsay be on TV swearing his head off and making millions? How can cops be taken seriously when they’re not on the beat, and how can anyone civilised watch a movie when every second word is the F-one. How can any newspaper be taken at face value when it refuses to state a criminal’s colour but describes the clothes he happened to be wearing at the time of the crime. How stupid do these PC commissars think we are? (Much more stupid than they think because we accept everything.) Force the entertainment industry to cut out the violence and swearing and the glorification of the abominable and vulgar (Jonathan Ross), force it to produce more Call the Midwife dramas, and in a generation or two the brutalisation of Britain might begin to reverse itself.
In the meantime I will be found in my chalet watching endless reruns of Jessica-Jenny and pining for her even as an avalanche is about to send me to kingdom come.
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