Cosmo Landesman

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.

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 hard to celebrate New Year’s Eve when, if like me, you don’t drink, you don’t do drugs, you don’t have sex with skanky strangers in sleazy toilets anymore — and you like to be in bed by 9 p.m. My ex-wife used to complain that she was married to a man who wanted to go to bed at nine on New Year’s Eve. The bit she left out from this tale of woe was that I wanted to go to bed with her and celebrate with cold martinis (I still drank back then), hot sex and yummy food. Isn’t that a better way to see out the year than a party full of drunk strangers desperately trying to make whoopee? The answer for most of my friends and most of London too is: no. They have this compulsion to celebrate and get very anxious about not having a party to go to on the big night.

Recently, I got dumped by a woman I was crazy about. To cut a long sob story short, here I am 67 years old and facing the future alone. Gulp. Dumped. I can’t believe it! ‘Dumped’ has to be the most brutal word in the lexicon of love. To me it evokes a black garbage bag full of steaming excrement, wherein your bleeding heart lies, still beating. Anyway, I’m taking my date to the West End to an old-fashioned, dimly lit cocktail bar, the kind where wise-cracking metropolitan sophisticates once sipped martinis and smoked cigarettes to the sound of cool jazz. What’s my dream date? It goes something like this. I’m sitting in an elegant and quiet hotel bar opposite the most beautiful, intelligent, sexy and funny woman in the world. I’m not my normal self, thank God.

‘Nobody wants to admit it, but London was boring even before the pandemic — and it’s still boring now!’ I said. We were at a London drinks party. The guy retaliated with a smirk and that old Dr Johnson line, ‘He who is tired of London, is tired of life.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not tired of life — I’m tired of people who always quote Dr Johnson when you make some slightly disparaging remark about London!’ I dislike that Dr Johnson quote because it assumes that you can’t be genuinely tired of London; your discontent must be due to your own boring, miserable life and not because London has become an overpriced, culturally exhausted and soulless city — which it has.