Something worrying is happening. I am seriously considered buying one of those preposterous devices for trimming nose and ear hair. You may mock. But since like my brother Esau I am an hairy man (unlike Jacob who is an smooth man) I find the onset of - ahem - maturity sponsoring a depressing proliferation of wiry stuff from these specific cavities (though not from others thank God). What is the biological purpose of all this? I mean I spend less time sleeping in ditches or in fields at pop festivals, as I get older, so there's actually LESS chance of an earwig crawling where it shouldn't than at any other time in my life. So why the surplus defensive bush? Like most things in this life it makes no sense whatsoever.
Most disconcerting of all are the steely strands that flourish not in the ear tunnel or the nostril cavity itself but from the soft fleshy part of the earlobe. What possible bio-function can that have? I'll tell you: none. It's just there to make us feel more ridiculous during the onset of middle age. And what would happen if you let the damned things grow? You could plait them I suppose, and colour them. You could do something with fibre-optics. But it's all so bloody >undignified<. I give up trying to understand the body.
Thank you to those of you who wrote with advice about what to give a three year old high on Blue additives. It reminded me of the advice habitually given to acid casualties in the Aid Tent at old-fashioned Rock festivals: Vitamin C, water, soothing talk and quotations from the appalling Desiderata. I just hope Joe doesn't feel he has to retreat into strict super-conservative conformity or Pentecostal religion, which was what happened to some of the best deep fried brains emerging from that era.
Speaking of acid casualties I've enjoyed a rush of contact from old school pals recently. I like this very much until people start mentioning old albums. This is deeply disconcerting. There is music out there I'm ashamed to have listened to, so bad was it. The guilt lies in having to admit to having promoted this auditory carnage. Let me paint a hideous scene for you. There's this kid with long, long hair, an army greatcoat, flapping flares and desert boots. He carries under his arm a square shaped album sleeve with a psychedelic daub. (In case you blinked and thought I'd come up to the present, I'm really in 1972). Really it's a badge, this album; a statement, a flag. This album is cool. Or so he tells everyone. But in his heart, in a place where he won't even look, he knows this album is shit. In fact it's an acoustic abomination, a tuneless massacre of the innocent. But he's not going to admit that. Not when he's seventeen he isn't.
Lord forgive me the sins and offences of my youth. Get thee to an Aid-Tent.
So I just delivered the first draft of my Tooth Fairy screenplay. If it looks nothing like the original book you can blame me - at least at this stage of the game. The distance of six years since writing the book has helped, thought the slimming down is shocking. Sad to have to ditch some favourite minor characters and to junk treasured scenes. Happy to find completely new scenes and develop other minor characters. Instead of a feeble tale about growing up in Coventry in the sixties it's now set in revolutionary Russia at the time of the storming of the Winter Palace, and my main character is courtesan to the Tsar. Well, it's no good trying to hang on to these things is it?
You may laugh. Even if you only snorted with derision. I may be laughing on the other side of my sporting visage when the response comes back from my Hollywood masters. I may weep to you on these very pages. I may walk in the woods bemoaning the darkness of my heart. Muttering the word Hollywood over and over, recalling what Raymond Chandler said about the poisoned chalice. But then as Jonathan Lethem pointed out to me recently, Chandler was a miserable bastard about >everything<, whereas I, dear reader, am as cheerful as lemonade.
Thus far the production team are being worryingly creative, sensitive and open to persuasion. Something is mightily wrong. It can't last. Not that I've had all my own way, but then if I had, this film would have been at least fifteen hours long. Though they did strong-arm me into making it a sensible length by refusing to entertain a lot of sub-plotting, so I'm on to them. No one can be human and work in Hollywood, for so it is written.
Meanwhile back home I was asked to chair a panel of judges for a Leicester Book Award. All the judges were fourteen or fifteen. Except me. I'm slightly older. I was there, presumably, to waggle my soft-lobe silver hair-plaits at the young people. But anyway we had a great day, and unlike other panels I've been on, everybody was great friends at the end of the process. I actually felt heartened, and the maturity of the young people involved was humbling. No one stormed out. No one played politics. No one dragged up some slight still fermenting after a decade in the paranoid corners of their feverish imaginings. No one wanted the award to depend on which college the author attended. I'm going to propose that the Booker Prize adopts a similar panel. They won't though. They'd rather give the prize to that politically correct Oxbridge pillock who insulted me ten years ago.
I learned something very important, too. Young people are sick - sick d'you hear? - of sugary or overly happy endings. They want mixed resolutions, ironic endings, win-some-lose-some conclusions. Good stuff on the shortlist narrowly missed out on these very grounds.
At the same time as trimming my earlobes and sundry cavities I see I'm going to have to break this news to Hollywood. Wish me luck.
