Before he died of cancer in 2001, Nigella Lawson’s first husband, the journalist John Diamond, had chronicled his demise in his newspaper column and then in a best-selling book.
Since I was suffering from the same disease at around that time, a different version but a similarly late stage, my publisher had a bright idea. Why don’t I do a John Diamond and write a book about my ordeal? Anything he could do, I could do better.
My reply “Absolutely not!” came before he finished that sentence, which proves that no prior thought was involved. It was a visceral reaction whose origin wasn’t intellectual but aesthetic. It was for considerations of taste that I turned down my shot at publishing stardom.
Now, I’m not a tight-lipped introvert who wouldn’t talk about his troubles even to friends and family. I admire such people, the salt of the English earth, but I’m not like them.
That’s why my family and friends knew exactly how my cancer progressed, if that’s the right word, and whether my “prognersis” remained as “puer” as my Scottish haematologist had declared in an upbeat tone and with a scary gleam in his eye.
(I hope my Scottish friends will forgive this attempt to reproduce their accent. That’s a notoriously hard task in writing.)
However, the thought of vouchsafing any such information, however sketchy, to all and sundry, complete strangers, was abhorrent to me – whatever the potential rewards.
But then regular visitors to this space know that I am a fossil, a troglodyte, perhaps a fossilised troglodyte. Time hasn’t just outpaced me but lapped me several times over.
Those who keep pace with modernity tend to be free of such old-fashioned inhibitions. Among many diseases afflicting today’s world, the pandemic of exhibitionism is perhaps the most pervasive.
Not just ‘celebrities’ but ordinary folk take to the social media to share urbi et orbi variously pornographic details and images of their lives. Some pornography is just old-fashioned exhibitionism: women and, incomprehensibly, men take full-frontal selfies of their bodies and put them on the net for universal delectation.
This is portrayed as pride in the human body, a feeling that animated antique art. Now, the Greeks had two words for pride, one of which was hubris. And it’s this kind, known as a deadly sin in some shrinking quarters, that our YouTube nudists suffer from.
Most of them fall short of the aesthetic standards established by Venus de Milo and Apollo Belvedere, but even those who don’t are still tasteless, narcissistic exhibitionists. Still, far be it from me to deny people the pleasure of ogling bared female flesh (the less said about bared male flesh, the better). Not all of us are lookers, but most of us are voyeurs.
Medical exhibitionism is much worse. If public nudism caters to instincts wired into our DNA, the medical kind appeals to morbid curiosity, or else to the spirit of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ (with ‘God’ used strictly figuratively, as I hope you understand).
Even that isn’t so bad as the universal acceptance of such medical pornography as an honest, brave attempt to help others in the same boat. Chaps, you aren’t helping anybody. Medical help is provided by medical personnel, not by a bunch of self-centred exhibitionists raised in the belief that any private problem has a public appeal.
The underlying dishonesty is emetic, but by the looks of it not many people suffer from that reflex. Nor do they suffer from that rapidly disappearing condition: good taste. Just look at this excerpt from an article in today’s Mail:
“Yet in recent years, a selection of celebrities have bravely been sharing their deeply personal and often heartbreaking stories in order to help others.
“Just this week, model Kelly Brook reflected on the heartbreak she faced when she suffered a miscarriage while six months pregnant.
“And she isn’t alone in sharing her experience, with Lena Dunham revealing her pain at undergoing a double hysterectomy at just 31 years old, while Jennifer Aniston has detailed her 20-year battle to conceive.”
I don’t know Miss Dunham from Adam or for that matter Eve, but I admit to having had impure thoughts about Jennifer and Kelly in the distant past. Hence, I’d suggest that, if those ladies have an unquenchable thirst for denuding themselves, they should stick to baring their bodies, not their souls. But only if they must.
Otherwise, I can’t imagine who in his right mind would care whether famous models and actresses are impenetrable, impregnable and inconceivable.
One would expect that mindless ‘celebrities’ (and most actors I’ve ever met were mindless – comes with the territory, I suppose) can’t realise how cosmically tasteless such medical striptease is. But that even our conservative papers should encourage that vulgarity is worrying.
P.S. Speaking of modernity’s madness, tastelessness and vulgarity, here’s a headline in today’s Times: “UK troops to be trained on ‘consent, misogyny and incel’ culture.”
Apparently, “unacceptable sexual behaviour” is rife in the military. Male soldiers routinely bang on the doors of their female comrades and demand sex. Fancy that: young men pursue young women with whom they share cloistered lives, who has ever heard of such indecency.
One has to assume that training in more traditional military subjects has been so successful that our defenders can spare the time for woke indoctrination, whose only conceivable outcome will be another tick on the DEI agenda.
The only reliable way to save female soldiers from harassment is not to have female soldiers, but I did tell you I am a fossil. Conscription could then plug the holes in numerical strength, with young ladies looking for other conduits to channel their patriotism.
Still, I’m grateful to that article for enlarging my vocabulary. Thanks to the author, I’ve learned a new word: ‘incel’. It stands for ‘involuntary celibacy’, in case you’re wondering.
I suppose for some, especially a writer, the process may be cathartic. For others, there’s the modern trope, “If it helps even one person…”. Your particular story could have been written in the form of an expose, shining a light on the deficiencies of the NHS. Not experiencing such urges myself, I may be naive. The ultimate motivation may be attention seeking. In the end, I would prefer they stick to medical tales of woe and refrain from bombarding us with their political views (though I am not likely to read anything these people write).
As for the military, it is disheartening to see that other countries have also lost focus. I doubt enemies we may have to battle (Russia, China, Iran) have such concerns.
I’d agree if those medical exhibitionists stuck to that and refrained from waxing political. But they don’t: I think you’ll find that those same people are seldom bashful about sharing their innermost thoughts with us.
Apt title, for it puns on perhaps one of the most exhibitionistic novels ever written, by a writer who was known for being the opposite of a tight-lipped introvert.
One of the first things I ever wrote in English was a parody of that truly disgusting novel. Although in my early 20s and living in Moscow, I already refused to accept that ugly is the new beautiful. As I recall, my title was The Tropic of Chancre (puns are my Tourette’s).
It could be argued that the patriarchy was the longest running DEI program in history. Allowing, as it did, less desirable genes to perpetuate themselves by massively limiting women’s choice. This is a position shared by incels and feminists, well, when both are being honest.
As far as one of your fellow fossils can tell, the modern world seems to be populated almost completely by characters from the tragedies of Seneca. The men are all effeminate, the women are all monstrous, and neither the men nor the women can ever be persuaded to desist from talking endlessly about their emotions, apart from occasional interludes when they talk about how their emotions make them feel.
(I don’t mean to put your readers off reading Seneca. Seneca’s plays are beautifully constructed, his versification is faultless, his choruses contain some powerful poetry, and his characters differ from their modern analogues by being eloquent and literate. Best of all, he’s never boring. He was to Rome what Raymond Chandler was to Los Angeles.)
Both my grandfathers fought in the Great War. Both of them lived long enough for me to know them reasonably well, but neither of them showed any signs of wanting to write a book about how severely they were emotionally, psychologically and spiritually damaged by it, and how everybody else’s emotional, psychological and spiritual state could be improved by paying £19.99 for their books. Neither of them even demanded compensation from the Government for having done their duty! What mugs they were, eh?