Cosmo Landesman | The Spectator columnists & writers

Why your more successful friends will drop you

You might have noticed the numerous glowing pieces by friends of Salman Rushdie about their ‘brave’ and ‘brilliant’ friend. I too would like to write a glowing piece about my brave and brilliant friend Salman Rushdie, but there’s one little problem: I’m not a friend of his. In fact I don’t have any famous novelist friends. I used to. There was the occasional lunch with Nick Hornby and the odd debauched evening with Will Self. I’ve drunk whisky with Norman Mailer and smoked pot with Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (And I have a lovely thank-you letter from Edward St Aubyn – does that count?) The fact is, I could never be friends with Rushdie or Amis, Zade or Rooney, because successful writers can only be good friends with other very successful writers.

I’m tired of being a good friend

I would do anything to help a friend. Need money? A shoulder to cry on? A place to stay? A confidant to confess to? I’m your man. Want me to read your new novel? Forget it. I would do anything for a friend, but as the late Meat Loaf would say: I won’t do that. Sorry. I’ve been there. Read that. And I’ve had enough. Many years ago a really good friend showed me his first novel. It was so bad it left me speechless — but I had to say something. So I did the only thing a good and trusted friend could do: I lied. 'It’s really funny and smart!' I said. Since then he’s written four novels, all self-published and each one worse than the last one. And every time he asks me for my opinion I say, 'smart and funny' or 'funny and smart.

In defence of staring

Like many people, I enjoy watching people. There’s a great pleasure in sitting in a café or on a park bench on a sunny afternoon and just watching people pass by. But increasingly, people-watching is becoming suspect, and even criminalised. The latest and most worrying example is Transport for London’s campaign against what it calls ‘intrusive staring’. Posters all over the Tube now warn us: ‘Intrusive staring is a form of sexual harassment and will not be tolerated.’ Last month a man was sentenced to 22 weeks in prison after a woman reported him for ‘continuously staring’ at her on a train in Berkshire. Sarah White, leader of British Transport Police’s sexual offences team, has urged anyone who feels intrusively stared at to report it.

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Why men of a certain age love to get naked

Something very strange happens to men as they get older: they like to go nude. I don’t mean they become practising nudists who seek out and enjoy the company of others of their kind. But unlike most younger men, they feel no embarrassment or regret at being seen naked. Consider the recent battle between one nude man and his neighbour. Simon Herbert (54) was in his Oxfordshire garden mending a fence when he spotted his next-door neighbour — Air Marshal Andrew Turner (54), the RAF’s second-in-command — strolling naked in the paddock of the cottage Turner shares with his wife. Herbert says that his partner and stepdaughter caught an eyeful of the nude air marshal too. The ‘shocked’ Herbert family are demanding a ‘proper apology’ for the distress they’ve suffered.

When did sexual deviancy become so dull?

Recently, at a London dinner party, I found myself sitting next to a beautiful young woman with a PhD in physics and a passion for bondage. At first I thought: I’ve hit the jackpot! Brains-Beauty-Bondage — here she is: wife number three! And then she treated me to a long monologue on the joys of bondage; the intricacies of knot-tying, bondage etiquette, arcane bondage practices from roughly the Middle Ages to the present (or so it seemed), plus her own bondage biography. Believe me, there’s no bore like a bondage bore. Granted, we boring old heterosexuals have our faults and our limitations. We lack glamour. We rarely bonk outside the box. But at least we can laugh at ourselves; we’re happy to recognize the comedy — and the tragedy — of erotic life.

It’s no longer just clean eaters who are the health bores

David Hockney has just endorsed a series of specially designed beer mats, created by an artist called Mr Bingo, that display a cigarette in an ashtray with the slogan: ‘Bored with wellness.’ He went on to declare he found the very idea of wellness ‘ridiculous’ and ‘too bossy’. Hockney is a verification of that urban legend often cited but rarely seen: the granny who ‘smoked like a chimney’ and ‘drank like a fish’ and lived to be 100. He is now the nation’s good-time gran. At 84 he’s still standing — and smoking — and boasts that he’s never been to a gym in his life. I know people just like Hockney, usually obese middle-aged men, who boast that they never do any exercise, never go to the gym and who smoke, eat and drink whatever and whenever they like.

Would you go to a naked dining club?

Why would anyone want to dine in the nude with other nude diners? Yes, I get being nude on a sunny beach. Swimming nude. Walking nude. But eating nude in public? What’s the appeal? Why leave your comfort zone for the Twilight Zone? Yet nude dining is making a comeback — or at least it’s trying to. The food-in-the-nude movement was just taking off in Bristol — and various secret places in London — when Covid first struck. Now that things are going back to normal, the normal are going nude. Ever curious, I went to an event billed as the ‘first in a new series of nude supper clubs’ to find out. It offered canapés, cocktails and a three-course dinner in a ‘safe’ sex-free zone that would leave me with a ‘positive, life-affirming experience’.

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Help! I don’t know what a cervix is

With all this talk of private parts, the political has now gotten very personal. Recently, I was having an argument with a male transgender rights activist over Labour MP Rosie Duffield’s claim that 'only women have a cervix'. I huffed and puffed and pontificated about the 'undeniable facts of biology and female anatomy' when it suddenly occurred to me: I haven’t the faintest idea what a cervix is. Yes, I know that only women have them. But what are they? Where are they? What do they do? Can you implant a cervix? Create an artificial cervix? Have cosmetic surgery on your cervix? Search me. Clueless men like me are all gung-ho when it comes to joining these gender war debates and igniting controversies. After all, it was a tweet by Piers Morgan pointing out that women are the ones with a cervix — and which Rosie Duffield liked — that got her into trouble.

My failed attempts to be a good Samaritan

I’ve been trying to be a good Samaritan for some time now and failing. But this week I discovered that even well-trained, experienced good Samaritans — who work for the Samaritans — can fail too. Reports have surfaced revealing the ‘abuse’ of vulnerable callers by a small number of the charity’s phone volunteers. It’s a sad state of affairs when even the Samaritans are subject to scandal. They do excellent work and have always been the Eton of Britain’s volunteer sector. Two years ago, I tried to get in and failed, which was a bit of a shock. I’d assumed that my listening skills would make me the ideal volunteer. I was, however, politely informed that their waiting list was so long I’d have to wait before I could get on their waiting list.

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We’ve become a nation of armchair psychiatrists

Are we becoming a nation of amateur psychoanalysts and armchair psychiatrists? We all speak the language of therapy and are quick to diagnose and label friends, strangers and even loved ones. Prince Harry does it to his wife Meghan Markle in a forthcoming five-part series on mental health for Apple TV that he’s co-produced with Oprah Winfrey. Discussing his wife’s suicidal state of mind during her pregnancy Prince Harry offers this diagnosis: ‘The thing that stopped her from seeing it through was how unfair it would be on me after everything that had happened to my mum, and now to be put in the position of losing another woman in my life with a baby inside of her, our baby.’ That’s a rather simplistic diagnosis.

The agony of watching friends succeed

I’ve just had the first sign that things are going back to normal — and that I’m going back to normal, too. I was suddenly struck by a feeling I’ve not had since the first lockdown last March; a feeling writers and journalists know all too well. Literary envy. Whatever your profession, envy is something we all know. A colleague’s promotion or a friend’s pay increase prompts that inner voice of brattish resentment. Envy is the herpes of competitive capitalism — it disappears from view and just when you think it’s gone for good, up it pops. But envy hasn’t had much of a chance to surface during lockdown. Everyone’s career in the so-called creative industries has been put on hold. And we’ve been too worried about the state of the world to talk about that most beloved topic of creative people: our careers.

The joy of drinking alone

Thanks to a combination of night-time curfews, social-distancing rules, pubs closing, restaurants failing, the ‘rule of six’ and compulsory mask-wearing, that basic and necessary human need for people to meet for a drink has never been so difficult. Now, with the government’s new three-tier Covid strategy in place, anyone at any moment could find their local pub shut, their parties cancelled, and all forms of indoor mixing prohibited. Millions in the UK are already living under these restrictions. It’s a fair bet that millions more will soon join them. And if the government gives in to demands for a ‘circuit breaker’ — a short-term lockdown — it would in effect totally suspend social drinking as we know it. In the wake of these restrictions, a disgruntled friend of mine spoke for many when he said to me: ‘What the hell are we supposed to do, drink on our own?’ ‘Yes! You should try it,’ I said.

In defence of the Covid snitch

Nobody loves a bossy, busy-body. A curtain-twitching nosey-parker or that most despised creature of the popular imagination and the playground: the snitch. Once such people were the comic baddies found in Ealing Comedies and sitcoms like Dad’s Army. But the spread of Covid-19 and the accompanying lockdown rules that began in March gave them a new visibility and voice. In April this year, police claimed that they received 194,000 calls from 'lockdown snitches'. We’re living, one paper declared back then, in 'The Golden Age Of The Snitch'. And now to help the government enforce its controversial 'Rule of Six', a new army of nationwide snitches will be coming to a street near you: the Covid marshals. At least that’s what all liberty loving paranoids from the left and right would have you believe.

I spent Christmas Day helping the homeless – and I was bored out of my mind

When I told friends that I would be spending Christmas Day helping the homeless at a Crisis at Christmas centre in north London, they all congratulated me for doing something good for someone else. And then they congratulated themselves for having already done Crisis at Christmas years ago. Volunteering at a Crisis at Christmas centre is, I discovered, the Glastonbury of good causes. Crisis veterans all told me about what a ‘rewarding experience’ it had been for them; some claimed it had been their ‘best Christmas ever’. Some take their teenage children along and they, I’m assured, love it too. And now when they ask me, ‘How was it?’ and I say, ‘It was OK’, they’re disappointed in me. When it comes to Christmas charity work, OK is not OK.

OK zoomer, is that really the best you’ve got?

Every generation and teen subculture likes to put the boot into baby boomers like me. I’ve been physically attacked by skinheads, verbally assaulted by right-wing intellectuals and mocked by millennials. But I never thought I would be subjected to the derision and verbal lashings of Generation Z. The ‘zoomers’ — that is, people born after about 1995 — have come up with a cutting and dismissive retort for older people: ‘OK boomer.’ It all began when an elderly man posted a video on the social media app Tik-Tok denouncing the younger generation. They were, he claimed, suffering from ‘Peter Pan syndrome’ and ‘needed to grow up’. Not exactly an original critique of the young — but something snapped inside thousands of American teenagers who responded with tweets, memes, artworks, doodles, posters and placards bearing the words: ‘OK boomer.

In praise of cultural elitism

At present we have a series of ‘culture wars’ over a wide range of issues — race, gender, sexuality, power and privilege. But the one culture war we don’t have any more is over culture. Yes, we fight about the ideological messages of literary texts, but not about matters of personal taste. We scrutinise and interrogate works of art for their latent — or blatant — sexism and racism. Often what matters is what the work in question says about marginalised groups — not what it says about us as cultured individuals. It hasn’t always been so. There was a time when we judged people, labelled them, loved them or hated them because of their taste in literature, art and even pop music. Louis Menand, professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard, argues that the great American critic Lionel Trilling was writing for an audience who believed that your taste in literature, music and painting told people something about you and your values.

Daddy issues | 13 June 2019

When I was growing up in the late 1960s, boys like me craved the admiration and approval of our dads; we wanted nothing more than to impress them. And now that we are dads, we crave the admiration and approval of our children; we want nothing more than to impress them. But the curious thing is, they don’t care about impressing us. In fact, our teenage children are just like our dads were — distant figures who are busy getting on with their own lives. Today we demonise dads of the recent past for being cold and uncaring. For failing to change nappies, read stories at bedtime, provide the unconditional love and praise children need to grow into happy, well-adjusted adults. Despite the fact that historians have shown that fathers of the past — both in Victorian times and the 1950s —were much more involved with their children than the popular stereotypes allow, they provide modern dads with the perfect example of how not to be a dad.

Hands free

Eight years ago, I had an erotic epiphany. It was around midnight: I had sex on the brain and porn on my laptop. Suddenly, everything felt wrong and a wave of sadness washed over me. I felt like some sleazy man from a Michel Houellebecq novel. I no longer wanted to be that kind of man. So I made a solemn vow to abstain for at least 60 days. Back then, I thought I was the only man in the world who had taken such a vow. (And in case you’re wondering, I lasted 45 days that first time and now remain free of porn.) Little did I know then that that year — 2011 — was when a forum called NoFap was set up on social media platform Reddit by Alexander Rhodes to support men like me. The name NoFap is meant to be an onomatopoeic representation of the sound of masturbation.

With friends like these

There was a time when you couldn’t walk down your local high street and not be set upon by a succession of ‘charity muggers’ — those relentlessly cheery and chatty young men and women who want your money for worthy causes like Cancer Research UK, Greenpeace, Oxfam or Age UK. These days the high streets are relatively free from their presence and their sales pitch is more restrained. But there’s a new breed of brazen ‘charity muggers’ who want your money — and they’re called your friends. I used to get emails from friends asking me to dinner or for drinks; now, on a daily basis I get emails from friends asking me for money — money for their favourite charity. They tell me they’re running/walking/singing/swimming/growing a moustache/shaving their heads/ going sober for a month to raise money for some worthy cause, and would I like to sponsor them? And then there’s another type of worthy cause that friends would like me to make a donation to: themselves.

A class act | 10 January 2019

The English love a story of posh people behaving badly, especially one that involves sex, drugs or drink — preferably all three at once — in some stately home or Mayfair pad. In 1963, following the Profumo scandal (yes, the one involving Christine Keeler) the nation was gripped by tales of sex parties involving prostitutes, pimps, peers and cabinet ministers. And then there was the infamous photograph of the Duchess of Argyll with something in her mouth that definitely wasn’t a silver spoon. The Denning Report — Lord Denning’s 1963 inquiry into what he referred to as ‘perverted sex parties’ — was a smash hit, selling more than 4,000 copies in the first hour of its publication. ‘VIP sex parties’ have been back in the news more recently, following the murder of Tudor Simionov.

Virtuous vice

It hasn’t always been easy being a progressive-minded man who prides himself on his sensitivity to issues of race, gender, feminism and sexual exploitation — and still gets to walk on the wild side. Political principles tend to get in the way of politically incorrect passions. You like to watch porn, but as a good feminist man you know that porn exploits women. You like to take cocaine, but it exploits poor Latin American farmers and enriches corrupt drug cartels. And maybe you have a secret passion for prostitutes, but you hate the idea that you’re paying for sex with some underage Albanian who’s been trafficked for your gratification. No porn. No drugs. No sex. What’s a poor would-be decadent to do? Take up golf? Knitting? Stamp collecting? Nowadays, though, you can indulge your more dissolute pleasures and still occupy the moral high ground.

Identity theft

I got some bad news this week. I discovered that I’m a ‘privileged, white male’. It was my agent who broke it to me. We were talking about the trouble he’s having in finding a publisher for my book — a work of non-fiction — when the following exchange took place. Me: What’s wrong with my book? Agent: There’s nothing wrong with your book. It’s brilliant. It’s moving. It’s funny. Me: OK. So what’s the problem? Agent: You’re the problem. Me: Excuse me? Agent: You’re a middle-aged, privileged white man. You’re out of fashion — and so is your book. Publishers think you’re too male. Too white. Things are difficult for writers like you at the moment. When I told my ex-girlfriend that my agent said I was suffering from privileged white maleness (PWM), she gasped, then seized my hands and said: ‘Darling, we’re going to beat this thing together!’ I knew she was just putting on a brave face.

Desperate housewives

Freud famously asked: what do women want? And I think that after two marriages, a dozen long-term relationships and a thousand-and-one dates, I’ve discovered the answer to that great mystery: they want a man with a beautiful house. In my twenties I thought that what women wanted was a man who was funny, intelligent, sensitive and kind. A man who would be faithful to them and a good and caring father to their children. Yes, for the modern woman those are all desirable qualities in a man; but they won’t seal the deal. No, what women really want — well, many women — is a man with a big beautiful house. Preferably, a man with a big beautiful house in the beautiful British countryside or the south of France. They say size isn’t everything, but it’s amazing how the possession of a big house will alter a woman’s perception of a man.

Problem children

There was a time when middle-class liberals used to complain that the English were a nation of child haters. They packed them off to boarding school as soon as possible and banned them from the dinner table as soon as they got back. Why-oh-why, they asked, can’t the English just relax and enjoy the presence of children like the French did? Well, they’ve got their wish. That old, much-mocked Victorian proverb — children should be seen and not heard — has been replaced by a new dictum in child-centric Britain: children must be seen, heard, celebrated, praised and obeyed all of the time. Once children were expected to fit themselves around the needs of grown-ups; now it’s the other way around. In progressive minded households, children are regarded as mini-adults with rights who must be consulted on all family matters.

Bringing sexy back

Sexual intercourse, Philip Larkin famously wrote, began in 1963. And listening to contemporary commentators, you’d think that it came to an end in 2017 with the birth of the #MeToo movement. For these voices of doom, the end of the erotic is nigh; Britain is on the brink of sexual apocalypse. The recent news that Netflix has banned flirtation from film sets — along with lingering hugs, requests for phone numbers and extensive touching — is for these commentators just the latest example of #MeToo sexual correctness gone mad. They fear we are witnessing the making of a bland new world where the rules and regulations governing social relations between the sexes will become so oppressive that the very sexiness of sex itself will be snuffed out.

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