Tony Parsons on Life, Death and Breakfast. Tony Parsons
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me it was Frankfurt, when they confiscated the entire contents of my toilet bag – yes, I bet that had old Osama trembling in his cave – and then gave me some insolent lip when I mildly commented that I had lugged all that stuff through Heathrow without anyone raising an eyebrow.
‘Ja,’ said the sausage-munching jobsworth. ‘But here ve haf rules.’
I gawped. I laughed. And then I pointed out that back in the sleepy little place that I come from – London town, Fritz, perhaps you’ve heard of it – ve also haf rules.
‘And the reason we have rules,’ I continued, ‘is because for about seventy years we have had somebody trying to blow us to pieces. Right now it is Islamic nutjobs, but before that we had thirty years of the IRA and before that – I hate to bring it up – it was the Luftwaffe.’ I cackled with derisive laughter. ‘But if confiscating my Gillette Sensitive Skin Shaving Foam makes the fatherland a safer place, then bitte schoen, be my guest.’
Oh, it was an ugly scene. I was too loud. I was too mouthy. But all the pointless bossiness that I have experienced at airports all over the world finally reached critical mass. And I blew. And as I walked away with what remained of my personal belongings – dirty socks and a pair of rusty tweezers – I realised that I had become something I never thought I would be.
I had turned into an angry old man.
We think of rage as being the province of the young. We think of youth as being the age of righteous, red-blooded protest. But the young are not angry any more. The young of the twenty-first century are a placid, bovine, docile bunch, sucking up the Arctic Monkeys on their iPods, dreaming of catching Simon Cowell’s eye.
They might fret about the environment, but they are not angry about it – not really. They might be a bit miffed about what we get up to in our distant wars, but I don’t see them marching to Downing Street or rioting in Grosvenor Square. They might get a bit trembly-chinned over Third World poverty, but they think that watching Coldplay in Hyde Park and flashing their student union Visa card will wipe away Africa’s tears.
The young are no longer capable of anger. If you want to see genuine fury at the way of the world, then look at a man on the far side of thirty. And as he gets older – thirty-one, thirty-two, forty, fifty – the anger builds. By the time I am sixty I confidently expect to be on the roof of a public building somewhere with a high-powered rifle while the neighbours reflect, ‘Well, he was always a bit of a loner.’
Nothing makes a young man angry.
Everything makes an old man angry.
I can no longer go to the cinema. I just get too angry-angry at the sound of some barnyard pal chewing cud in the seat behind me, angry at the dozy bastards staring into the wintry glow of their mobile phones, as though they would vanish in a puff of smoke if they turned off the Nokia for two hours. And talking during the movie – well, that puts me in a state that is somewhere beyond mere anger. If you ever saw someone in a cinema suddenly shove his face into someone else’s face and scream at the very top of his voice, ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP!’ then that might have been me. I know you are meant to clear your throat in a disapproving fashion, or mutter a sharp, ‘Sssh!’ But I can’t seem to do any of that. I wish I could. But there’s too much blood pumping through my veins for a quick, ‘Ssssh!’
I scream. I rave. And if the barnyard pal is sitting directly in front of me, then I kick his seat with the heel of my boot as hard as I possibly can, and when he turns around I scream, ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP!’
Then of course you have to be prepared to roll around in the aisle of a cinema, sticky with popcorn and spilled soda pop. There are twenty movies that I have paid to see that I have no idea how they ended. Because I was waiting to be joined in mortal combat.
But what can I do? I am an angry old man.
So no cinema for me – and countless nights out ruined for my loved ones, because something – cud chewing, mobile gazing, mindless chatter in the darkness – set me off.
But I am not a single-issue angry person. Almost everything makes me angry these days. I am angry at people who litter. Yet I am also angry at people who want to force me to recycle. I am angry at people who have no manners, and I am angry at people who swear around children, and I am angry at people in Smart cars, who inevitably drive in an incredibly stupid fashion. People, really – I am angry at people. Any kind of rudeness, finger wagging or ignorance is liable to light my blue touch paper.
Sometimes I think of Terry in The Likely Lads, who did not like foreigners, or southerners or – now he thought about it-the bloke next door. But the anger that comes to us all with time is not mere misanthropy – this is not anger for anger’s sake.
It is hard-earned, clear-eyed and horribly justified.
You have seen too much. You have lived too long. You know the way things should work, and you are maddened by the yawning chasm between your expectations and the grim reality of the workaday world.
I don’t want to be this way. I want to be happy. I want to be nice. I want to be like the kid I was as a young journalist, who was so happy to be flying to America to go on the road with Thin Lizzy that he truly didn’t care that the plane sat on the runway at Heathrow for six hours, and didn’t care that he was in economy. I didn’t even know that I was in economy. I wasn’t aware that planes had a class system. To me there were only seats on planes, and they were all good ones.
As my legs throbbed merrily with Deep Vein Thrombosis, I didn’t care about anything at all apart from the fact that within twenty-four hours I would be immersed in the fleshpots of Philadelphia. Will I ever be that carefree and giddy with happiness again? Probably not. There is too much anger in me now. If an airline had me sitting on the runway for six hours today, my head would explode. They wouldn’t be able to placate me with some savoury nuts.
My family stayed at the hotel that featured so glamorously in the James Bond film, Casino Royale: the One and Only Ocean Club in the Bahamas. And I say – be thankful there’s only one of them. What a dump. It took us hours to check in and, you’ll never guess, but that really made me angry.
Because I know that if you stay at the Sandy Lane in Barbados, or the Ritz-Carlton in Hong Kong, or the Jalousie Plantation in St Lucia, or the Conrad in Tokyo – or any other world-class five-star hotel that is worthy of the name and those five stars – they will check you in up in your room. Not the One and Only in the Bahamas. With our jet-lagged nipper in tow, we waited for literally hours to check in.
‘You’re always angry,’ my wife told me. ‘Why are you always so angry?’
‘Because I know how things should work,’ I replied, through gritted teeth.
And that’s the problem. When you are young, you have no idea how the world should work. For most of my twenties, I thought that a mini-bar was the height of sophistication and luxury. Of course I was never angry – I was too grateful to be on the loose in the world, and I was too stupid. Anger comes with experience, anger comes with wisdom. What’s true is that – righteous and justified though it may be – anger spoils everything.
‘Why can’t we just sit here and enjoy the sunset?’ asked my saintly wife, as she cradled our exhausted daughter, and the staff of the One and Only Hellhole Bahamas gave us some more feeble excuses about why our room wasn’t ready. ‘It’s such a beautiful sunset,’ Yuriko said. ‘Why can’t we just enjoy it?’
Why not indeed? Why not contemplate the lovely sunset and count our blessings? Why bother to burst a blood vessel because of the failings of the international tourist trade?
It is a male thing. This dissatisfaction, this anger, this railing at the sloppy and the stupid and the sub-standard – it comes with your biological hard drive. It is wired into us, this rage to make right the world – or at least get dummies to stop looking at their mobile phones in the cinema.
It is the impulse that helped our species to crawl out of the primordial swamp. It is the reason the human race survived. It is the life-affirming core of everything.