A Colossal Wreck (14 page)

Captain Iain Swan of the Royal Logistics Corps suffered arm injuries when he opened the door to a shed and had to raise his arm to block the device as it swung at his head.

The judge sentencing Cockburn said Capt Swan could have been blinded. The Recorder Mr Christopher Wilson told Cockburn: “The nature of your former occupation makes you potentially very dangerous. You are an expert in counter-terrorism and have considerable experience in dealing with explosive devices.”

A microwave oven which had its door removed and had been wired at the back to be permanently on was also found in the shed. And the court was told in 2004 Cockburn had also wired up a door to the mains in order to shock intruders.

He claimed he had been burgled 20 times in 14 years and the police had not done anything about it. Cockburn was said to have told police he would kill burglars if he had the chance.

He was sentenced to twelve months for assault causing actual bodily harm, eighteen months for setting a mantrap, and three months for possessing ammunition without a certificate, to run concurrently.

Cockburn, who worked for the MoD for 36 years, had denied the charges but was found guilty.

He was cleared of wounding with intent.

September 3

The short century of the common man begins and ends with a royal passing: in 1914, the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, and now, three years shy of the millennium, the death of Princess Diana. The Diana cult—for what else can we call it?—offers her as the people’s princess, but this is merely the sleight of hand of the old fairy tales, where the prince most admirably displayed his royal essence by moving among his subjects as a commoner.

The British wanted a love story, and it began well, before turning into vulgar soap opera as so many love stories do. Too bad a good fairy wasn’t on hand to warn young Diana about the future that fateful day when Prince Charming came and knocked on her door. In the end she only truly seemed to come into her own when in the company of people in worse shape than herself. She would glow, as though the proximity of imminent death and suffering lent a steadying hand, a comfort to her fraught existence. No wonder she took such an interest in minefields.

As she bent down to embrace a little boy, oblong handbag elegantly raised to shield her cleavage from the photographers, it was obvious that she did not mind the paparazzi, in fact needed their constant attention, but on terms she hoped to be hers. That’s how everyone in show business wants it. Probably Dodi snapped, “Lose them,” to the chauffeur, who obediently ran the car up to the fatal 121 mph. Di surely knew, far better than Dodi, that paparazzi were inescapably part of the terms of her trade and gave her comfort and meaning, as surely as did her encounters with the dying and the maimed.

September 5

This time around President Bill spent his time on Martha’s Vineyard in the house of real-estate developer Richard Friedman. I’m unclear whether this is what was once the proud home of Robert McNamara where Clinton stayed back in the year of the Somali fiasco, and from which redoubt he ordered the attempts to murder Mohammed Aidid, the late capo of Mogadishu.

I remember visiting in the early 1980s. The house had a commanding view of Great Beach, a stretch of sand usually covered with lawyers and wreathed in fog. As he led our party down the cliff path and onto this bleak expanse, McNamara’s face darkened. He had, he said, “tried everything.” He’d sought relief in the courts and from the most resourceful fixers of Edgartown. Every stratagem had failed. We wondered what he was talking about. As we gained the beach itself McNamara stretched out a hand, shielding his eyes in eloquent despair. All around us was a pride of nudists, cocks and tits akimbo. It turned out that McNamara had taken these nudists below his house as a personal affront, with a depth of passion equaling his attempts to wipe Vietnam from the face of the earth. But the nudists had held their ground, had indeed prevailed. Eventually McNamara sold the house and moved away. John Belushi moved in.

September 10

My daughter called last week from London, saying that the entire nation had gone insane. I faxed her a couple of pieces I’d written about Diana and she said that if this sort of cold-eyed commentary were read out on the streets of London, the author would be torn apart by the crowd. She also said she was grateful, and glad to see the old man had a spark of radicalism left in his bones.

As he dandled me on his knee, my father used to tell me the story of how he and some trusty comrades sabotaged King George V’s jubilee back in the 1930s. They ascertained that the route of the procession ran down Fleet Street. Three days before the parade they dressed as workmen and told newspaper offices on both sides of the street that
they were city employees stringing up banners. They slung one across the street with “God Bless Our King” written on it.

On the day of the actual parade, they returned and found the crowd so great they could scarcely get near the string they had run down from the banner and around the corner into an alley. Eventually a partner in crime got on my father’s shoulders and pulled the string. The banner fell open, to reveal the words, “Twenty-five years of hunger, misery, and war.” They heard a gasp and great bay of rage from the crowd on Fleet Street, and took to their heels.

When they saw the newsreels, everything had gone even better than they had dreamed. The news cameras were right behind the King’s coach and caught the banner perfectly as it fell open. I saw it myself about a decade ago, and it was odd to see the jerky horses in the old footage, and the commotion, and remember Claud’s role. Down the years it’s been easy to forget—until the Diana insanity—how reverent the British were about royalty not so long ago.

In the 1950s, my family was very friendly with the late Malcolm Muggeridge, who wrote a piece about the royal family for an American magazine. I think it might have been the old
Saturday Evening Post
, or perhaps
Look
. By today’s standards Mug’s piece was tame to the point of invisibility. He wrote things like, “Even her friends say Queen Elizabeth can be dowdy and a frump.” But the roof fell in. At the time Muggeridge had a big job at the BBC. He was promptly dropped. People traveled great distances to daub horseshit on his country house in Robertsbridge, Sussex. His son John had just been killed in a skiing accident and Malcolm’s wife Kitty got plenty of letters from people saying how glad they were this had happened.

September 11

A photograph is by definition a moment seized from time, and the seizure can remove context in a way that might not exactly be unethical, but does damage the truth. Photographers tend, alas, to think in clichés. Refugees must never laugh. Hungry children must never smile. Someone once told me that Walker Evans’s famous black-and-white photographs of the Okies fleeing the dust bowl, printed in
James Agee’s
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
, didn’t exactly do justice to the humanity of these Okies, shown by Evans as invariably grim. The contact sheets apparently showed laughter as well as tears, exuberance as well as despair.

The patron saints of photojournalism all manipulated grossly. Photography is, almost always, manipulation. Take the famous photo of young love in Paris, the boy and his girl kissing with abandon. Turns out it was set up. Or take Henri Cartier-Bresson’s equally famous picture of the batty old woman wagging a flag somewhere in the American Northeast on July 4. Turns out Henri set her up with the flag. So the picture was a lie. Unethical? Most assuredly. That’s the nature of the beast.

September 17

First one friend of mine and then a second developed arrhythmia last week. One of them told me that what with the irregular heart beat he was worried about having sex on the ground he might croak on the job. It’s a fear that often besets the older man with any sort of pain between Adam’s apple and belly button. I referred my pal to a study by M. Ueno cited in an essay by Hackett and Rosenbaum called “Emotion, Psychiatric Disorders, and the Heart,” published in
Heart Disease
, edited by Eugene Braunwald, published in 1980. The Ueno essay is alluringly titled “The So-called Coition Death,” published in something abbreviated as Jap. J. Leg. Med. 17:330.1962, though why the Japanese should be so interested in this I’m not sure, since their rates of heart disease are remarkably low owing to the huge intake of sashimi and seaweed. On the other hand, Japanese executives are in the habit of dropping dead from overwork.

Coital death is unusual. Ueno’s study showed that coition accounted for 0.6 percent of endogenous sudden deaths. Most of these occurred in the context of extramarital screwing. Males in that situation were on average thirteen years older than their companions and one-third were drunk at the time.

Of course this fear of dying while fucking is connected to the notion that the latter activity involved a great expenditure of physical
effort. Not really. One study by Hellerstein and Piedman reckoned that the equivalent cost in oxygen of maximal activity during intercourse approximates six calories per minute. During “foreplay” and “afterplay” about 4.5 calories are consumed. I’m not sure what “afterplay” involves now. In the good old days it meant lighting a cigarette, puffing on it and blowing lazy smoke rings in the air, sort of, while trying to persuade the love partner to get up and mix a gin and tonic.

Hellerstein and Friedman conclude that the demand placed on the heart by sexual intercourse is equal to that of “a brisk walk around the block or climbing a flight of stairs.” No big deal really. We should all try it more often. At least that’s what I told my arrhythmic friend.

October 8

My favorite forger is still the amiable German who did the Hitler diaries in the early 1980s, though the old ladies who managed to sell their forged Mussolini diaries
twice
run him a close second. When he finished dashing off the Fuehrer’s daily reflections into a series of cheap notebooks, he decided their authenticity would be improved if Hitler’s initial were embossed on the cover. So he hastened off to the stationary store to buy some Letraset, only to discover that the letter A had run out. He decided to use F instead. So each notebook had FH. Not a single one of the experts noticed.

One of Princess Di’s ancestors fell for a forgery by an Italian called Joseph Vella, who claimed in 1794 he’d unearthed the seventeen lost books of the Roman historian Livy. His story was that he’d got them from a Frenchman who’d stolen them off a shelf in Santa Sophia in Constantinople. They were, Vella said, in Arabic, which was not implausible, since the Arabs translated classical works, which is how many were saved.

Vella persuaded Di’s ancestor, Lady Spencer, to put up the money for a translation into Italian, and quickly made a specimen page, which he claimed was the whole of the sixteenth book of Livy’s history. Now Vella got the bit between his teeth and reported another great find, the ancient history of Sicily in the Arabic period, across 200 years, plus all the correspondence between the Arab governors
of Sicily and their superiors in Africa. The king of Naples showered Vella with medals and other gratuities, including a pension. There was a problem. The only Arab text he had was a book about Mohammed. But though his knowledge of Arab orthography was scant, he inserted dots, curlicues and similar flourishes that looked like Arab script. When he published a facsimile, further praise was heaped upon him for translating these illegible scribbles. Vella said he’d almost lost an eye after poring over the manuscript and the view was he should get a higher pension.

Vella’s work was published throughout Europe, until finally an Orientalist examined the manuscript, declared it to be the history of Mohammed and family, and Vella went to prison.

October 15

I’ve been following the gastronomic excursions of
Vogue
’s Jeffrey Steingarten with increasing concern. The man is out of control. October’s
Vogue
features him in an excursion to Rome as the climax of an obsessive three-year quest to make pizza bianco and pane Genazo. The former is a kind of bread, a bit like focaccia, and pane G is a wholemeal bread.

Steingarten’s approach evokes the single-mindedness of a Mars shot as prepared by the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. He notes his arrival time in Rome. He scuttles to his target bakeries to measure and collate, oblivious to the charms of the city, or indeed of his companion soon—one surmises—bored to distraction by her employer.

It’s all a bit reminiscent of someone engaged in sex with eyes fixed not on the beloved but on some Masters and Johnson diagram of neural responses. Steingarten represents the ultimate triumph of positivism. He races to collect samples of Italian flour, malt and water for later analysis in US labs. He reports excitedly that one Italian manufacturer had overestimated the protein content of its flour by
nearly 3 percent
. Enraptured by such triumphs of US lab analysis, Steingarten has nothing to say about the vital gluten levels in the flour that are both a feature of the flour and a consequence of the way in which the dough is kneaded.

Such omission is emblematic of Steingarten’s approach, which sees breadmaking as an activity akin to manufacturing rocket fuel, rather than as the outcome of an interaction among domestic yeasts, wild yeasts and variabilities in wheat strains and water. Fermentation involves not just the introduction of domesticated yeasts, but also the chance invasion of wild ones. Bread is a living thing that involves both. As anyone who regularly bakes bread well knows, bread becomes better not purely as a function of technique or careful measurement and proper ingredients, but rather because the kitchen becomes progressively colonized by wild yeasts. This is why European bakeries, somewhat messier than the sterile kitchens of this country’s commercial US bakers, produce better, tastier bread. The dough-encrusted towel, the unsterile bowl all play their part in providing a haven for wild yeasts.