The Salmon of Doubt Read online

  Y

  “Why” is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it.

  The alphabet does not go “A B C D What? When? How?” but it does go “V W X Why? Z.”

  “Why?” is always the most difficult question to answer. You know where you are when someone asks you “What’s the time?” or “When was the battle of 1066?” or “How do these seatbelts work that go tight when you slam the brakes on, Daddy?” The answers are easy and are, respectively, “Seven-thirty-five in the evening,” “Ten-fifteen in the morning,” and “Don’t ask stupid questions.”

  But when you hear the word “Why?,” you know you’ve got one of the biggest unanswerables on your hands, such as “Why are we born?” or “Why do we die?” and “Why do we spend so much of the intervening time receiving junk mail?”

  Or this one:

  “Will you go to bed with me?”

  “Why?”

  There’s only ever been one good answer to that question “Why?” and perhaps we should have that in the alphabet as well. There’s room for it. “Why?” doesn’t have to be the last word, it isn’t even the last letter. How would it be if the alphabet ended, “V W X Why? Z,” but “V W X Why not?”

  Don’t ask stupid questions.

  —From Hockney’s Alphabet

  (Faber & Faber)

  The Meaning of Liff*1 started life as an English exercise I had to do at school, which then got turned into a game fifteen years later by John Lloyd and myself. We were sitting with a few friends in a Greek taverna playing charades and drinking retsina all afternoon until we needed to find a game that didn’t require so much standing up.

  It was simply this (it needed to be simple; the afternoon was too far advanced for complicated rules): someone would say the name of a town and somebody else would say what the word meant. You had to be there.

  We rapidly discovered that there were an awful lot of experiences, ideas, and situations that everybody knew and recognized, but that never got properly identified simply because there wasn’t a word for them. They were all of the “Do you ever have the situation where . . . ,” or “You know what feeling you get when . . . ,” or “You know, I always thought it was just me . . .” kind. All it needs is a word, and the thing is identified.

  So, the vaguely uncomfortable feeling you got from sitting on a seat which is warm from somebody else’s bottom is just as real a feeling as the one you get when a rogue giant elephant charges out of the bush at you, but hitherto only the latter has actually had a word for it. Now they both have words. The first one is “shoeburyness,” and the second, of course, is “fear.”

  We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts, and began to realize what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English Dictionary is. It simply doesn’t recognize huge wodges of human experience. Like, for instance, standing in the kitchen wondering what you went in there for. Everybody does it, but because there isn’t—or wasn’t—a word for it, everyone thinks it’s something that only they do and that they are therefore more stupid than other people. It is reassuring to realize that everybody is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for is “woking.”

  Gradually, little stacks of index cards with these words on them started to grow in John Lloyd’s bottom drawer, and anybody who heard about them would add concepts of their own.

  They first saw the light of day when John Lloyd was putting together the Not 1982 calendar, and was stuck for things to put on the bottoms of the pages (and also the tops and quite a few middles). He turned out the drawer, chose a dozen or so of the best new words, and inserted them in the book under the name Oxtail English Dictionary. This quickly turned out to be one of the most popular bits of Not 1982, and the success of the idea in this small scale suggested the possibility of a book devoted to it—and here it is: The Meaning of Liff, the product of a hard lifetime’s work studying and chronicling the behaviour of man.

  From Pan Promotion News 54,

  OCTOBER 1983

  My Nose

  My mother has a long nose and my father had a wide one, and I got both of them combined. It’s large. The only person I ever knew with a nose substantially larger than mine was a master at my prep school who also had tiny little eyes and hardly any chin and was ludicrously thin. He resembled a cross between a flamingo and an old-fashioned farming implement and walked rather unsteadily in crosswinds. He also hid a great deal.

  I wanted to hide, too. As a boy, I was teased unmercifully about my nose for years until one day I happened to catch sight of my profile in a pair of angled mirrors and had to admit that it was actually pretty funny. From that moment, people stopped teasing me about my nose and instead started to tease me unmercifully about the fact that I said words like “actually,” which is something that has never let up to this day.

  One of the more curious features of my nose is that it doesn’t admit any air. This is hard to understand or even believe. The problem goes back a very long way to when I was a small boy living in my grandmother’s house. My grandmother was the local representative of the RSPCA, which meant the house was always full of badly damaged dogs and cats, and even the occasional badger, stoat, or pigeon.

  Some of them were damaged physically, some psychologically, but the effect they had on me was to seriously damage my attention span. Because the air was thick with animal hair and dust, my nose was continually inflamed and runny, and every fifteen seconds I would sneeze. Any thought I could not explore, develop, and bring to some logical conclusion within fifteen seconds would therefore be forcibly expelled from my head, along with a great deal of mucus.

  There are those who say that I tend to think and write in one-liners, and if there is any truth to this criticism, then it was almost certainly while I lived with my grandmother that the habit developed.

  I escaped from my grandmother’s house by going to boarding school, where, for the first time in my life, I was able to breathe. This new-found blissful freedom continued for a good two weeks, until I had to learn to play rugby. In about the first five minutes of the first match I ever played, I managed to break my nose on my own knee, which, although it was clearly an extraordinary achievement, had the same effect on me that those geological upheavals had on whole civilizations in Rider Haggard novels—it effectively sealed me off from the outside world forever.

  Various ENT specialists have, at different times, embarked on major speleological expeditions into my nasal passages, but most of them have come back baffled. The ones who didn’t come back baffled didn’t come back at all, and are therefore now part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

  The only thing that ever tempted me to try taking cocaine was the dire warning that the stuff eats away at your septum. If I thought cocaine could actually find a way through my septum, I would happily shove it up there by the bucketful and let it eat away as much as it liked. I have been put off, however, by the observation that friends who do shove it up their noses by the bucketful have even shorter attention spans than mine.

  So, by now I am pretty well resigned to the fact that my nose is decorative rather than functional. Like the Hubble Space Telescope, it represents a massive feat of engineering, but is not actually any good for anything, except perhaps a few cheap laughs.

  Esquire, SUMMER 1991

  The Book That Changed Me

  1. Title:

  The Blind Watchmaker.

  2. Author:

  Richard Dawkins.

  3. When did you first read it?

  Whenever it was published. About 1990, I think.

  4. Why did it strike you so much?

  It’s like throwing open the doors and windows in a dark and stuffy room. You realise what a jumble of half-digested ideas we normally live with, particularly those of us with an arts education. We “sort of” understand evolution, though we secretly think there’s probably a bit more
to it than that. Some of us even think that there’s some “sort of” god, which takes care of the bits that sound a little bit improbable. Dawkins brings a flood of light and fresh air, and shows us that there is a dazzling clarity to the structure of evolution that is breathtaking when we suddenly see it. And if we don’t see it, then, quite literally, we don’t know the first thing about who we are and where we come from.

  5. Have you reread it? If so, how many times?

  Yes, once or twice. But I also dip into it a lot.

  6. Does it feel the same as when you first read it?

  Yes. The workings of evolution run so contrary to our normal intuitive assumptions about the world that there’s always a fresh shock of understanding.

  7. Do you recommend it, or is it a private passion?

  I’d recommend it to anybody and everybody.

  Maggie and Trudie

  I am not, I should say at once, in any formal relationship with a dog. I don’t feed a dog, give it a bed, groom it, find kennels for it when I’m away, delouse it, or suddenly arrange for any of its internal organs to be removed when they displease me. I do not, in short, own a dog.

  On the other hand, I do have a kind of furtive, illicit relationship with a dog, or rather two dogs. And in consequence I think I know a little of what it must be like to be a mistress.

  The dogs do not live next door. They don’t even live in the same—well, I was going to say street and tease it out a bit, but let’s cut straight to the truth. They live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is a hell of a place for a dog, or indeed anyone else, to live. If you’ve never visited or spent time in Santa Fe, New Mexico, then let me say this: you’re a complete idiot. I was myself a complete idiot till about a year ago when a combination of circumstances that I can’t be bothered to explain led me to borrow somebody’s house way out in the desert just north of Santa Fe to write a screenplay in. To give you an idea of the sort of place that Santa Fe is, I could bang on about the desert and the altitude and the light and the silver and turquoise jewelry, but the best thing is just to mention a traffic sign on the freeway from Albuquerque. It says, in large letters, GUSTY WINDS, and in smaller letters MAY EXIST.

  I never met my neighbours. They lived half a mile away on top of the next sand ridge, but as soon as I started going out for my morning run, jog, gentle stroll, I met their dogs, who were so instantly and deliriously pleased to see me that I wondered if they thought we’d met in a previous life (Shirley MacLaine lived nearby and they might have picked up all kinds of weird ideas from just being near her).

  Their names were Maggie and Trudie. Trudie was an exceptionally silly-looking dog, a large, black French poodle who moved exactly as if she had been animated by Walt Disney: a kind of lollop that was emphasised by her large floppy ears at the front end and a short stubby tail with a bit of topiary-work on the end. Her coat consisted of a matting of tight black curls, which added to the general Disney effect by making it seem that she was completely devoid of naughty bits. The way in which she signified, every morning, that she was deliriously pleased to see me was to do a thing that I always thought was called “prinking” but is in fact called “stotting.” (I’ve only just discovered my error, and I’m going to have to replay whole sections of my life through my mind to see what confusions I may have caused or fallen afoul of.) “Stotting” is jumping upward with all four legs simultaneously. My advice: do not die until you’ve seen a large black poodle stotting in the snow.

  The way in which Maggie would signify, every morning, that she was deliriously pleased to see me was to bite Trudie on the neck. This was also her way of signifying that she was deliriously excited at the prospect of going for a walk, it was her way of signifying that she was having a walk and really enjoying it, it was her way of signifying she wanted to be let into the house, it was her way of signifying she wanted to be let out of the house. Continuously and playfully biting Trudie on the neck was, in short, her way of life.

  Maggie was a handsome dog. She was not a poodle, and in fact the sort of breed of dog she was was continuously on the tip of my tongue. I’m not very good with dog breeds, but Maggie was one of the real classic, obvious ones: a sleek, black and tan, vaguely retrieverish sort of big beagle sort of thing. What are they called. Labradors? Spaniels? Elkhounds? Samoyeds? I asked my friend Michael, the film producer, once I felt I knew him well enough to admit that I couldn’t quite put my finger on the sort of breed of dog Maggie was, despite the fact that it was so obvious.

  “Maggie,” he said, in his slow, serious Texan drawl, “is a mutt.”

  So every morning the three of us would set out: me, the large English writer, Trudie the poodle, and Maggie the mutt. I would run-jog-stroll along the wide dirt track that ran through the dry red dunes, Trudie would gambol friskily along, this way and that, ears flapping, and Maggie would bowl along cheerily biting her neck. Trudie was extraordinarily good-natured and long-suffering about this, but every now and then she would suddenly get monumentally fed up. At that moment she would execute a sudden midair about-turn, land squarely on her feet facing Maggie, and give her an extremely pointed look, whereupon Maggie would suddenly sit and start gently gnawing her own rear right foot as if she were bored with Trudie anyway.

  Then they’d start up again and go running and rolling and tumbling, chasing and biting, out through the dunes, through the scrubby grass and undergrowth, and then every now and then would suddenly and inexplicably come to a halt as if they had both, simultaneously, run out of moves. They would then stare into the middle distance in embarrassment for a bit before starting up again.

  So what part did I play in all this? Well, none really. They completely ignored me for the whole twenty or thirty minutes. Which was perfectly fine, of course, I didn’t mind. But it did puzzle me, because early every morning they would come yelping and scratching around the doors and windows of my house until I got up and took them for their walk. If anything disturbed the daily ritual, like I had to drive into town, or have a meeting, or fly to England or something, they would get thoroughly miserable and simply not know what to do. Despite the fact that they would always completely ignore me whenever we went on our walks together, they couldn’t just go and have a walk without me. This revealed a profoundly philosophical bent in these dogs that were not mine, because they had worked out that I had to be there in order for them to be able to ignore me properly. You can’t ignore someone who isn’t there, because that’s not what “ignore” means.

  Further depths to their thinking were revealed when Michael’s girlfriend Victoria told me that once, when coming to visit me, she had tried to throw a ball for Maggie and Trudie to chase. The dogs had sat and watched stony-faced as the ball climbed up into the sky, dropped, and at last dribbled along the ground to a halt. She said that the message she was picking up from them was “We don’t do that. We hang out with writers.”

  Which was true. They hung out with me all day, every day. But, exactly like writers, dogs who hang out with writers don’t like the actual writing bit. So they would moon around at my feet all day and keep nudging my elbow out of the way while I was typing so that they could rest their chins on my lap and gaze mournfully up at me in the hope that I would see reason and go for a walk so that they could ignore me properly.

  And then in the evening they would trot off to their real home to be fed, watered, and put to bed for the night. Which seemed to me like a fine arrangement, because I got all the pleasure of their company, which was considerable, without having any responsibility for them. And it continued to be a fine arrangement till the day when Maggie turned up bright and early in the morning ready and eager to ignore me on her own. No Trudie. Trudie was not with her. I was stunned. I didn’t know what had happened to Trudie and had no way of finding out, because she wasn’t mine. Had she been run over by a truck? Was she lying somewhere, bleeding by the roadside? Maggie seemed restless and worried. She would know where Trudie was, I thought, and what had happened to her. I’d better follo
w her, like Lassie. I put on my walking shoes and hurried out. We walked for miles, roaming around the desert looking for Trudie, following the most circuitous route. Eventually I realised that Maggie wasn’t looking for Trudie at all, she was just ignoring me, a strategy I was complicating by trying to follow her the whole time rather than just pursuing my normal morning walk route. So eventually I returned to the house, and Maggie sat at my feet and moped. There was nothing I could do, no one I could phone about it, because Trudie didn’t belong to me. All I could do, like a mistress, was sit and worry in silence. I was off my food. After Maggie sloped off home that night, I slept badly.

  And in the morning they were back. Both of them. Only something terrible had happened. Trudie had been to the groomers. Most of her coat had been cropped down to about two millimeters, with a few topiary tufts on her head, ears, and tail. I was outraged. She looked preposterous. We went out for a walk, and I was embarrassed, frankly. She wouldn’t have looked like that if she was my dog.

  A few days later I had to go back to England. I tried to explain this to the dogs, to prepare them for it, but they were in denial. On the morning I left, they saw me putting my cases in back of the 4WD, and kept their distance, became tremendously interested in another dog instead. Really ignored me. I flew home, feeling odd about it.

  Six weeks later I came back to work on a second draft. I couldn’t just call round and get the dogs. I had to walk around in the backyard, looking terribly obvious and making all sorts of high-pitched noises such as dogs are wont to notice. Suddenly they got the message and raced across the snow-covered desert to see me (this was mid-January now). Once they had arrived, they continually hurled themselves at the walls in excitement, but then there wasn’t much else we could do but go out for a brisk, healthy Ignore in the snow. Trudie stotted, Maggie bit her on the neck, and so we went on. And three weeks later I left again. I’ll be back again to see them sometime this year, but I realise that I’m the Other Human. Sooner or later I’m going to have to commit to a dog of my own.