ANOTHER VOICE

Park Lane would be all fake furs and fake purrs

MATTHEW PARRIS

'Here, come sit beside me on the sofa,' she purred. But of course women do not purr. Humans can't. If the lady had fol- lowed her invitation with a real attempt to make that strange glottal rumble at which cats excel, her intended sofa companion would have run from the room. No woman has ever approached me making this noise.

I was thinking about purring and humans as I rubbed the furry stomach of my latest kitten, Achilles. Unfortunately Achilles has only three legs, having appeared in a friend's back garden with the fourth all but detached, and in a terrible state. Such crea- tures should be put down, but soft hearts prevailed and a vet saved Achilles. My friend asked his sister, who looks after my house in Derbyshire, if a home there could be found, and she asked me.

This goes against all my Thatcherite instincts, but to march out of the house chanting 'Only the strong survive, bearing a little brown kitten by its scraggy neck, would have been to take ideology too far. I increasingly .suspect that the secret of not going mad is to fight the temptation to take anything to its logical conclusion. Achilles was spared, has learned to manage with three legs and cannonballs around the house with agility.

And he purrs like a tractor. You have only to look at him and he begins to purr. Is it a sort of thank you? I find this continuous background chorus of general appreciation for human company, milk, stomach rubs, warmth, life itself, rather cheering in an animal companion. As Robbie Millen seemed to hint in The Spectator ('Barking dogma', 18 September), Achilles has at least as good a claim on Paradise as the late Alan Clark. He thinks he's there already.

And purring is better than saying thanks, because, in words, gratitude can be feigned. Like the postprandial burp by which some cultures mark appreciation of a meal, purring seems to come straight from the stomach, without passing through the high- er levels of consciousness on the way. For this reason, purring does more than express satisfaction, it is satisfaction: an audible concomitant to an internal feeling, part of the feeling itself.

'If only men and women could purr,' I thought, stroking Achilles. How marvel- lous, after a good dinner, to sit down with brandy and a few good friends and, instead of talking, simply purr together. Instead of the post-coital cigarette of which reports speak, how delightful to lie in someone's arms and just purr.

Pleased by these speculations, I began to develop my fanciful case for human purring. And then stopped. A horrid thought occurred. Social purring. Oh, nol For that is where it would take us, would it not? Smart people would teach themselves to purr politely as occasion demanded. This has happened, I understand, with burping: among those peoples for whom the noise is a way of thanking your host, it does not, as it sounds, come involuntarily; children are taught how to burp artificially and on demand. Reproachful glares are directed by stern aunts at little boys who fail to burp.

And so it would be with purring. Like the social kiss — mwall, mwah — the perfunc- tory purr would soon be de rigueur among smart people. 'How very nice to see you, prr-prr."What a delightful little garden! — prr-prr — oh, you are so clever,' and 'Where, prr, did you get that stunning little dress?' Park Lane would be all fake furs and fake purrs.

At parties where serious networking was taking place the purrs would be deafening, as bores charged about purring like taxis. Children would be reprimanded for failing to purr when appropriate. Would-be experts at lovemaking would read women's magazine articles about whether, when and how to purr. Spectator readers would write to Mary to ask how to deal with a weekend guest so eager to please that he overdid it, purring non-stop. And soon — oh, the awful inevitability — the sharp-eyed and sharp-eared would begin to distinguish between natural purring and social purring, and the sharp-tongued would begin to com- ment on it.

At party conferences (I am in the middle of one now) New Labour would break into an orchestrated purr whenever Tony Blair walked into a hall. Commentators would remark on how the purring for Charles Kennedy was 'polite rather than ecstatic' and contrast this with the warm, sponta- neous purrs that had greeted Paddy Ash- down's valedictory speech. 'Seldom', Peter Riddell would write in the Times, 'have I attended a Tory conference where the purring was so thin and — where obligatory — so forced.'

And we would be right back to square one. A physical gesture, which had at first been concomitant with a feeling, would have slid inexorably into being the expres- sion of the feeling — and have moved final- ly into its terminal phase: no more than a polite nod in the direction of the feeling. The gesture becomes a husk, content gone. We did it to the handshake, we did it to the hug, the kiss, the handclap, the laugh — even the smile. Like pygmies moving through the African forest, civilised society makes its slash-and-burn progress through the myriad expressions of human spontane- ity, seizing something still precious for its inviolate link with the inner man, forcing the outer man to simulate it, robbing it thereby of meaning, and moving on.

We never quite make a success of the simulation. We are in perpetual battle not just for advantage over each other, but with ourselves. Whoever seeks to bend his physi- cal self — his body, posture, vocal tone, his facial muscles — to his will rather than his desire, meets an implacable foe. There stands another, within him, who will not smile naturally, will not relax his shoulders, just cannot say 'Oh, I'm fine' in a convinc- ing voice when it's not true, finds it impossi- ble at the supermarket checkout to laugh, 'My goodness, didn't I pay for that?' except culpably.

I wonder why? What Darwinian explana- tion might there be for this stubborn human difficulty with lying? Better liars are better survivors, surely? It is more than a failure of accomplishment like failing to play the violin well, for everyone can say 'Oh I'm fine' in a natural voice sometimes, and everyone has; it is a block, some inter- nal countermand, which makes us fail to play well our own bodies, our own throats, our smiles. It is a divine failure. I hope Achilles never tries the social purr.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwtiter and a columnist of the Times.