All about me
James Delingpole
This is going to be the quickest TV column I've written, well I hope so anyway, because I'm off to Lundy any second and you know what it's like before you go on holiday — there's so much to do and you end up getting so flustered and knackered doing it that you spend all your holiday recovering.
So that's where I am right now and, though I might at some stage attempt to introduce a TV element into all this, I can't promise it a) because I couldn't be bothered to order up any preview tapes and h) because there have been complaints from several readers that I have been banging on far too much about TV of late and that's not what they read me for, they say; they read me to learn more about me.
I'm not quite sure why my columns have been so disappointingly unautobiographical of late. It might he the competition from Deborah Ross, it might be that I've been going through a shy spell, but I think the likeliest possibility is that this novel I've been writing Thinly Disguised Autobiography has been exorcising most of my personal demons, so there hasn't been much need.
But just to keep you totally, brutally and shockingly frankly up to date: thanks to essential roof repairs our mortgage has now risen to £325,000 (and, bloody hell, was it irritating reading Paul Johnson last week airily declaring that he never borrowed money: try to buy a family house when you're my age, matey, and see how far your principles get you) and obviously we can't afford it, still less the impending 16,000-a-head school fees for children two and three, what with our living in Lambeth and it being an act of incredible cruelty to send any middle-class child to any of the local states. Then there's evil bastard Red Ken, of course. And Gordon Brown. But if I talk about them too much I think I might have a brain haemorrhage or something, so perhaps we should move on.
Brown's plans to turn us into a Soviet
style command economy are why I decided I'd do this column instead of leaving it free for my dear chum Marcus Berkmann. The pay, as I've grumbled before, is bordering on the Nike wage slave but if you can toss off the words quickly enough it's almost worth it, and at least it'll offset the vast sums I have just spent on quotidian essentials like parmesan, balsamic vinegar, decent claret and fresh coriander having heard that these things are not easily available on puffin-infested islands in the middle of the Bristol Channel. Also, it will alleviate my guilt that I'm not doing enough extra work to make up for next year's massive tax hikes and the loss of income when our lodger goes because he'll be impossible to replace, I'll bet, thanks to the glut of buy-to-letters who I hope all go massively under in the inevitable property crash because they deserve it for making my life more difficult and for generally being such smug tossers.
I think the only answer, really, is for my next book to do massively well. Heaven forfend that I should sound like Jeanette Winterson, but it really is a work of borderline genius, possibly better, and if you like my Spectator stuff you'll think it's great, though the sex scenes are quite terrifyingly nearthe-knuckle, which is worrying when you realise how much of it actually happened to me. But I've no doubt that 99 per cent of you won't read it because you're mostly crap that way. I had an argument about this the other night with someone who professed to be a fan. 'You can't expect people to buy your book just because they like your column,' she said. 'Of course I sodding well can,' I said. 'And I do. The only reason people don't buy books by journalists they like is because they're scared they're going to be had which is true in most cases hut not in mine.'
Another argument I had about the book was with my father. He thinks (not unlike my agent and publisher, actually) that I should have more plot and well-rounded characters and all that other conventional stuff like in my first novel. I tried to explain to him that he was a philistine, that he knew nothing about art, and that the only way you can write stuff that's any good is being true to yourself and not trying to ape whatever it is you think the market wants. This is another reason why I want a bestseller: to prove my family wrong.
Nor have I quite forgiven my father for not watching — note cunning, last-minute insertion of TV programme — The Battle of the Atlantic (BBC 2, Sunday). I rang him up last week for a mutual rave session about how moving it was to hear those stories by merchant seamen who'd been torpedoed (none of them could bring themselves to describe the moment when they were rescued: even now it was too emotional), how extraordinary it was to hear testimonials from so many surviving U-boat crews and commanders (remember, they had a one in five survival rate), and how surpris
ing it was to learn that for a good chunk of the war German intelligence on our ship movements was stronger than ours was on theirs. 'Sorry,' he said, 'your sister wouldn't let me.' God, I hope I never allow myself to be bossed around like that by my daughter, pregnant or no.
One other thing, to pursue briefly this unwonted TV theme: isn't the 19th-century pioneer re-enactment series The Frontier House (Channel 4, Sunday) awfully good? You'd think, being as it involved Americans, they'd be so scared of law suits that no one would be allowed to suffer or take any form of risk. But already, we've had horses bolt and nearly crush one of the pioneers with a wagon, we've had a small boy attacked by a savage dog, and we've seen tearful teenagers trudging half naked through the unseasonal June snow that has just destroyed everyone's crops to milk a cow. Now that's what I call a reality show.
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