I felt so implicated in Britishness that I misguidedly phoned ‘our’ consul. His answering machine barked, ‘Don’t bother me with trivial problems like mislaid passports!’ I left an ’umble message to the effect that we were having problems entering the country, but don’t bother doing anything if it’s a hassle — and to our surprise he called back three minutes later. ‘What the bloody hell do you mean bothering me with this!’ he screamed down the phone. ‘I’ve been up all night scraping four of your fellow countrymen off the central reservation of a Belgian motorway!’ I couldn’t help but thrill to his flagrant lack of diplomacy.
In truth, this nether-Netherlands visit was a bit of a cliché. I was writing a parody of a James Bond story and decided to set it among the dope-growing fraternity. The premise was simple: Bond falls for a lovely Dutch spy but when he arrives in Holland to investigate the skunk business with her they share a joint and it triggers all of his issues. He sees that his activities as a Lothario are simply the flipside of his misogynism. Packed off to boarding school at an early age, he has never really understood women, and, threatened by them, his priapic progress is nothing but his inability to deal with intimacy. Standing in the opulent Rotterdam hotel room, the gorgeous Dutch spy thrown naked across the silk counterpane in front of him, Bond experiences his first flop-on as his head whirls with disturbing images. I called the story ‘Rotten Smoke’, from the lines in Shakespeare’s sonnet 34: ‘To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way / Hiding my bravery in their rotten smoke. .’
In the interests of verisimilitude I’d arranged through a Dutch friend to meet up with some skunky operatives and learn about the intricacies of the business. The wacky tobacconists lived in a vertiginous old terraced house in the district of Amsterdam known — rather suitably — as De Pijp (The Pipe). Naturally they turned out to be about as glamorous as a couple of c.1976 polytechnic students reciting Monty Python’s parrot sketch. Yes, they’d got on the wrong end of their product. The house had as welclass="underline" every nook and cranny stank of skunk and there were about fifty kilos stacked up in Geest banana boxes. In order not to arouse the suspicions of any Dutch narcs who happened to be passing downwind, a ventilation system had been rigged up which continually passed the air through a bucket of bleach.
The grower turned out to be a rather straitlaced young woman from Basingstoke, while the ‘taster’ was an Austrian short-story writer manqué. He wanted to talk Hemingway — most tedious. Before I left he handed me a bud the size of a baby’s fist. ‘Make sure you’ve got your head a few centimetres from the pillow before you toke on this,’ he warned me. ‘It’s that strong.’ I did as I was told but all that happened was that my girlfriend’s face was transmogrified into a hideous vegetative tangle. Rotten smoke indeed.
Ralph doesn’t need to indulge in any artificial stimulants at all, as you can see. I wonder sometimes if, like Obelix, Ralph was dropped in a vat of some hallucinogenic potion when he was a child. It would certainly explain the tortured elasticity of his vision. ‘Zwaar’, as the Dutch would say.
The Stones of Rome
At Heathrow it transpired that Ivan’s passport was five days out of date. The nice man on the British Airways checkout consulted his big book and even made a call, but there was no way round it. The Italians — schizoid participants in the War on Terror — wouldn’t let him in. Looked at one way I could appreciate that Ivan constituted a security risk: he’s obsessed by guns, knives and all forms of explosion; he has hardly any impulse control yet can also display preternatural cunning; and he has a naïve faith in an omnipotent deity. Still, he is only seven. So Ivan stayed behind in London with his mother, which left four of us to carry on: the big children, little Luther, aged three, and me.
City breaks are quite the thing in our culture, crazed as it is with its own mad sense of alacrity. In this era of Europe’s integration its principal cities are being mashed together in the minds of its bourgeois citizens. The Rambla leads to Hradčany Castle; the Herengracht runs through the Tiergarten; and the Spanish Steps ascend the Eiffel Tower. The city break has never appealed to me that much — living in London is quite fracturing enough — but when the opportunity came up to defray travel costs to Rome against a literary reading, we decided to go. After all, what could be more surreal than a speedy sojourn in the cockpit of those ancient modernists the Romans?
Reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, it always occurred to me that the reason Rome took so long in the falling — given that whole provinces regularly went AWOL — was the comparatively slow communications system. Introduce a single phone exchange, with party lines in Scythia, Dacia, Gaul and Egypt, and the Empire would’ve folded in weeks. You can only fool some of the mob for some of the time. I’d visited the city once before — for six hours to interview the pornstar-turned-politician Cicciolina — yet even this had been long enough to grasp that its sobriquet ‘Eternal’ was justified. (I mean to say, La Cicciolina herself, although Czech by birth, would be quite at home in the pages of Petronius.) A whole weekend confirmed my suspicion that Rome remains impervious to the march of time.
There was the metro to begin with. We were staying in Testaccio, the proudly nativist quartier, named after the great midden of shattered amphorae, which was the eighth hill of the ancient city (it means, literally, ‘mound of sherds’). Our local metro stop was Piramide — and is a dirty great pyramid incorporated into the Antonine wall of the city. It was difficult to believe we were entering a state-of-the-art transport hub under the austere façade of this obelisk, the tomb of an obscure second-century magistrate gripped by the Egyptology craze of his day (thus it’s basically an ancient chunk of Tudorbethan). The trains themselves were reassuringly spray-painted with graffiti, but our first stop was Circo Massimo and our second Colosseo. By the time we changed at Termini, all I could think about was that the two arms of the system — Linea A and B — insistently reminded me of the names for the ancient Minoan scripts deciphered by Michael Ventris.
We did the obligatory round: the Colosseum, the Pantheon, St Peter’s, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, Prada, Bulgari. That night, with the children asleep, I was lying on my bed in the failed post-modern Abitart Hotel (after all, with no modernism, the post- becomes the most proleptic of prefixes), musing on the way the view from the Capitoline Hill drenches the eye with two millennia of civilisation. In London we always think of ourselves as a two-thousand-year-old city, but the truth is that the vast bulk of the burgh is nineteenth-century red brick, bits of the Midlands reshaped and lain in orderly courses. If you want the real McCoy — all flight paths lead to Rome.
The following evening I gave my reading in a teensy theatre in Testaccio. On before me were a collective of hip young writers who called themselves ‘Babette’s Factory’. Like all Italian intellectuals they wore tweed jackets and brogues, but as a sign of their crazy modernism they also sported odd sprigs of facial hair. They took it in turns to declaim in front of a screen upon which was back-projected pulsating blobs of light. A muted jazz soundtrack accompanied them. I felt as if I were in San Francisco, in the City Lights bookstore, c. 1955. I wanted to beat my wine jug on the floor and yell, ‘Go man! Go!’