No life
Domestic servitude
Toby Young
Evelyn Waugh said the great thing about being a foreign correspondent is that, irrespective of how dull your life is, all your friends imagine you're having a much more exciting time than them. I hadn't realised just how true this was until last week when I returned to London after a five-year tour of duty in New York to live with my girlfriend. Judging from my friends' disappointment, they evidently imagined that I was squiring a different supermodel around town every night. I dare say they were getting a certain amount of vicarious satisfaction from this since they're nearly all either married or in long- term relationships. Now that I've aban- doned the fleshpots of Manhattan for a life of domestic servitude in Shepherd's Bush — at least in their eyes — they can barely bring themselves to talk to me.
Take my friend Sean Langan. Sean's been going out with the same girl for the past seven years and he used to refer to me, somewhat enviously, as 'Lord Lust'. I have to confess I played up to this image, torturing him with tales of my adventures as a swinging bachelor in Manhattan — all made up, naturally. Now that I'm back in London, living with Caroline, he's taken to calling me 'the mouse' and makes high- pitched, squeaking noises whenever our paths cross. I've known Sean since I was a teenager — he's my best friend, really — and the other day he pointed out that if my 16-year-old self met my 36-year-old self in a dark alley he'd beat the crap out of me. He's absolutely right, of course.
Fortunately, there aren't as many marauding gangs of 16-year-olds in Shep- herd's Bush as there used to be. Since I've been away, the area appears to have come up in the world. I remember an occasion, back in 1993, when I returned home from a night on the town to discover my entire street had been cordoned off with police tape, like a crime scene out of The Bill. It turned out that a man had been shot dead outside the Tube station on the corner and, according to the police, the murderer had fled down my street. Those days are over, I'm glad to say, and nowadays Shepherd's Bush is indistinguishable from Fulham. The only people running past my house are investment bankers jogging to the local Oddly enough, there seems to be a large number of ex-foreign correspondents in the area, possibly because they can't afford to live in Notting Hill Gate. However, judging from the buoyancy of the local property market, that may be about to change. Julian Ozanne, who used to be the Finan- cial Times's bureau chief in Jerusalem, has just bought his second house in the neigh- bourhood, having sold his last one for an enormous profit. After he left the FT he set up a successful film and television produc- tion company but he confided to me-that if it hadn't worked out he might have gone into property. 'Frankly,' he said, 'I'd prefer to be an estate agent than go back to being a hack.' He was only half-joking. So much for the glamorous life of a foreign corre- spondent.
I could do with some of Julian's expertise in Arab-Israeli relations in my dealings with Caroline. So far, nearly every evening we've spent together has degenerated into a territorial skirmish. At the moment we're both quite enjoying this constant jockeying for power, but we'll probably tire of it sooner or later. I suggested that we should start thinking about negotiating the domes- tic equivalent of the Camp David Agree- ment, in which Israel gave up the Sinai Desert in order to secure peace with Egypt.
`Look at it this way,' I told Caroline, rather pleased with my analogy. `I'm pre- pared to cede control of a vital strategic area in return for security.' She wasn't impressed. 'So you've cast yourself as Israel in this scenario, have You?' she noted sceptically. 'I don't think so.'
In her eyes I was less like Menachem Begin, the tough, uncompromising ex-ter- rorist who represented Israel in the Camp David negotiations, than Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who was assassinated in 1981. I felt like Steve Buscemi in that scene in Reservoir Dogs in which the bank robbers are being given their aliases. He was hop- ing to be called 'Mr Black' but ended up as `Mr Pink'. In my relationship with Caro- line, I'll always be Mr Pink.
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