No life
Facing facts
Jeremy Clarke
I've joined a new age dating agency. Before they fix me up with a bird, though, I've got to undergo a series of esoteric per- sonality tests, the results of which are fed into a powerful computer. That's what the brochure says anyway. So far I've had my handwriting analysed, an astrological chart drawn up, and my life numbers worked out by a professional numerologist. My astrological reading was most compli- mentary. Basically, it said I was the most wonderful person that had ever walked on 'For heaven's sake, Henry, just take an asprin like everybody else.' the face of the planet. The only negative comment was that I had a tendency to be over-generous.
I never really got to the bottom of what numerology is. The numerologist bloke, Neil, did explain it to me when I visited him at his bedsit in Clapham, but I couldn't quite grasp what he was talking about. And halfway through his explanation a door-to-door salesman tried to sell him a massage table and I lost the thread com- pletely. When Neil finally got rid of him, he worked out my life numbers for me on his pocket calculator. They are the numbers six and seven if anyone is interested. This means that I am always at sixes and sevens, explained Neil. Which is quite true, actual- ly! I am! It certainly grows on you, this new age 'what am I like?' stuff. 'Self,' said Bacon, 'the arch flatterer with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence.'
Last week the agency sent me to have my face read. Face-reading is called personolo- gy, and Naomi R. Tickle, the lady who reads the faces for the agency, is the world's leading personologist. Ms Tickle, 52, lives in San Francisco, and pops over here now and again to spread the gospel. She read my face in a three-star hotel bed- room overlooking Westminster Bridge.
Before Naomi got going on it, however, I showed her three postcard-sized portraits of famous people, purchased that after- noon from the National Portrait Gallery shop, and asked her to guess their occupa- tions. Very sportingly, she reached for her glasses and took a careful look at each one. I'd chosen Capability Brown, the gardener, Stan Laurel, the comic, and Sir Richard Burton, the Victorian linguist, explorer, diplomat and pornographer. (Sir Richard was the man who, when asked by a village curate whether it was true he had once killed a man, replied, 'Sir, I have commit- ted every sin in the Decalogue.') Of the three it was only Burton she got right. She couldn't guess what Capability Brown or Stan Laurel did, but as soon as she saw Burton's satanic, pock-marked face, she confidently stated that he was an explorer or a pioneer of some kind. It was the ears that gave it away, she said. The outside edges of Burton's virile ears were straight rather than curved, which to a trained personologist is a sure sign of a pio- neering, even a visionary spirit. Naomi said the outer edges of Bill Gates's ears were straight too. And Margaret Thatcher's. While we were on the subject of ears, I decided to ask Ms Tickle whether it was true that you can roughly gauge the size of a chap's wedding tackle by looking at his earlobes. She hadn't heard that one, she said, but thought it unlikely.
We got down to business. Naomi got out a stick of charcoal and drew an intricate web of intersecting lines across my face until I looked like a road map of the Isle of Wight. Then she measured the distances between these lines, very carefully, with a series of metal instruments, noting down the distances in a book. Sometimes she had to check these distances through a large magnifying glass. I hadn't expected all this. I'd assumed she'd take one glance at my boat race then tell me spookily accurate things about myself. I must have been sit- ting there for over an hour while she mea- sured and recorded the dimensions of every protuberance and concavity from my neck upwards. She even made a note of the bumps on my head and measured the thickness of my hair.
I didn't get the full report there and then. Naomi said she was going to post it back to the agency from San Francisco. But she did tell me one or two nice things about myself to take home with me. Naomi said that her initial reading suggest- ed I was affable, impatient, discriminating, competitive, prudent, credulous and tended to take things personally. I confess I was a little crestfallen not to hear the word 'genius' mentioned. Still, all of the above are good points in me, I think, though probably ruinous in others.
I don't know if it was Naomi's little joke or not, but when I left she failed to remind me about the web of charcoal lines drawn all over my face. I went 15 stops on the Central line before I realised.
Previous page
