Columns

As someone who has recently discovered he is black, I have watched with incredulity the treatment doled out by the white liberal media to the theatre director Anthony Ekundayo Lennon. Like me, Anthony has shoved a name which sounds a bit exotic between his Christian name and his surname in order to convince people he is black. He has also said that while he does not have any African genes whatsoever, he feels black. That’s good enough for me, and it has proved good enough for organisations which bung people large sums of money on account of their skin colour — or what the individuals, on a whim, deem their skin colour to be.

Reader, may I call you John? Now imagine, John, that you are my employer and I know (or claim) that you made an inappropriate sexual advance towards me in the workplace. So I approach you. ‘John,’ I say, ‘you groped me in the lift. Give me £5,000 or I’ll make this public.’ That is blackmail. It’s blackmail whether or not the allegation is true. You can go straight to the police and I will very likely be charged with a serious criminal offence. Now imagine a different scene. You, John, aware that I have been saying this about you, approach me first. ‘Matthew,’ you say, ‘I know what you’re saying about me.

In celebration of its 110th birthday, I downloaded a Mills & Boon — The Greek Tycoon’s Blackmailed Mistress — and plan this coming weekend to settle down for an evening in the company of Dr Ella Smithson and Aristandros Xenakis, ‘an arrestingly handsome man… the epitome of lithe, masculine grace teamed with the high-voltage buzz of raw sexual energy’. I’m fond of Mills & Boon. In the mid-1980s, they provided me with the sex education my otherwise excellent mother must have thought school would sort out. I stole them from my older cousins’ bookshelves, hid them under my jumper and ran home to read them behind the sofa, agog at what grown-ups got up to.

When the Fawn saw the selfies Boy had taken in the aftermath of his college football club’s initiation ceremony, first she burst into tears, then she was spittingly furious, then she finally settled into a state of gnawing anxiety and despair. ‘There’s a lesson there, son,’ I told him. ‘And I hope you’ve marked it well. There are some things you simply do not share with your mother on the family WhatsApp group.’ I hated having to say this because we’re one of those families that likes to be open about stuff. If my kids are ever going to end up doing drugs, say, I’d rather they did so after some expert advice from their dad — not guiltily and in secret at some scuzzy dealer’s dive.

I almost got killed this week. I went for a very early morning walk in a New Hampshire forest, in the icy rain. Black coat, black hood, black trousers. And so the hunter saw this hunched, awkward, shambling black beast, stumbling over sodden logs, and immediately raised his rifle to his eye and cocked the trigger. One thing, and one thing only, saved me. The armed cracker, looking through his telescopic lens, thought to himself: ‘Hey, it’s a bear — but it’s… smoking a cigarette?’ And so, at the last second, refrained from pulling the trigger. I had this brush with death related to me, with great glee, by the people who ran the bed and breakfast where I was staying. I’d been quite oblivious.

Halloween used to be easy. It was a fancy-dress party: you could wear whatever you liked. The idea was to have fun. As teens, my friends and I would dress up as ghouls, spiders or witches, with cones of black paper on our heads. When we became more mature, Halloween turned into a tarty affair. We thought this seemed authentic, somehow all-American. Our costumes became flimsier and more flammable. One girlfriend made a habit of always going dressed as ‘sexy cat’. Inevitably, somebody would dress as a zombie Princess Diana or Amy Winehouse, or another celebrity who had died unpleasantly. The more risqué the better. I was once served a drink by a man with a toy doll tied to his lower half. He had come as Jimmy Savile. But Halloween is changing.