Paul Johnson

‘We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.’ Macaulay’s famous castigation of humbug, apropos of Moore’s Life of Lord Byron, applies perfectly to the sententious huffing and phoney indignation heaped upon the silly head of Prince Harry for wearing Nazi uniform at a fancy-dress party. Ye gods! Are we never going to be allowed to consign Hitler and the Nazis to history, where they belong? In April it will be 60 years since Hitler’s final defeat and death. How long do we have to wait before those dreadful times can be seen in a cool perspective unclouded by emotions, especially false ones whipped up by newspapers like the Sun, a media pachyderm with the brains of a shrivelled pea?

Things are stirring on the God front. A leading atheist recants his disbelief, provoking cries of anguish from the Darwinian fundamentalists crowded on to their isolated bandwagon, now stuck in the mud of events. On the other hand, the giant waves in the Indian Ocean shocked the Archbishop of Canterbury — not one whom Jane Austen would have called ‘a sensible man’ even at the best of times — into doubting the existence of a deity, or at least a benevolent one. The question of whether the notion of God is compatible with the existence of evil or calamitous events in the world is a very ancient one, and was pondered by Plato and the Stoics, and most of the early Christian philosophers — such as Origen — and later by Thomas Aquinas.

My old friend Peregrine Worsthorne was deploring the other day the decline in the quality of courtesans. And it is true that those who get themselves into the headlines today, either by the voracity of their sexual appetite or their status as mistresses of prominent men, do not strike one as notably interesting or desirable. But were they ever? And what is a courtesan anyway? A lady of easy virtue with court connections? A royal whore? Nell Gwyn did not hesitate to use the word, calling herself ‘the Protestant whore’ to an angry mob hunting for well-connected papists. There is in the Correr Museum in Venice a suggestive panel painting, done by Carpaccio in 1495, and known to Ruskin and Proust, who loved it, as ‘The Courtesans’.

Christmas is a time of goodwill and I must, as usual, suspend my dislikes for the season. What are they? The list lengthens every year. It now includes Scotch announcers on the BBC and radio reporters who use what I call Elementary School Sing-song when reading their (often ungrammatical) dispatches. All footballers and their managers (and mistresses) and football fans.

I have had my portrait painted. It was not my idea. One fault I do not possess is vanity. Indeed I am extremely vain about not being vain. The artist is a young lady called Katrina Bovill. She has been properly trained in Florence where they still have the highest possible standards of fine-art teaching, and she knows exactly what she wants to do and how to do it. She is the best young painter I have come across for many years, and it does my old heart good to relish such a rare combination of talent, skill, professionalism and disciplined enthusiasm. I met her at that magical caravanserai of writers, artists and bibliophiles, ‘Sheila’s Shop’ (Notting Hill Books is its official title), and it was Katrina’s idea to paint me.

Whatever else the re-election of Bush signifies, it was a smack in the face for the intelligentsia. Like a crazed Kappelmeister sitting at a nightmare organ, they pulled out all the stops, from the bourdon in lead to the fiffaro, not excluding the trompeta magna, and what emerged, far from being a thanksgiving gloria in excelsis, was a lugubrious marche funèbre. In America they were all at it, from old Chomsky to that movie-maker who looks like a mushy jumbo cheeseburger. In Germany the Heidegger Left were goose-stepping in force. In France the followers of ‘Jumping Jack’ Derrida were at the barricades. Here in England all the usual suspects were on parade, from the Oxford stinks-don to the public-sector playwrights, with the Eumenides-novelists spitting fury.

So autumn has come again, with her blushing and animating hand, searing and spotting, tinting and flaming, making hectic and encrimsoning, concealing decay, death and coming annihilation behind a mesmerising anarchy of colour. I have been out painting, down in Somerset, trying to get down on my oblongs of Whatman the blazing furnaces of reds, yellows and golds in my garden, beyond it and beyond the place where the indigenous fowl — geese, ducks and chickens mostly — fend off the rooks which raid their food from the darkening sky, a line of gilded birches glitter fantastical against the dark green fields.

If there is one material I particularly relish, it is alabaster. It is slightly soluble in water and therefore defenceless against a rainy climate. So it can’t be used for outdoor work on cathedrals and churches. For internal decoration, however, it is superb, being soft and easy to cut; it takes a high polish and can be painted with almost any kind of pigment including watercolour. In the Middle Ages, workable deposits were discovered in Staffordshire and near Nottingham, and by the mid-14th century English alabaster was famous, and religious figures and altarpieces carved from it were exported all over Europe.