THE COOLING-OFF PERIOD
Nothing is sadder than to feel a man going off, it’s like trying to hold water in cupped hands.
The coward usually does it with a kiss, and then stops ringing up. If he starts saying things like: “I’m awfully fond of you, Jennifer,” or “I love you but I’m not in love with you,” or “We don’t have much in common except the obvious thing, do we?” Or if he’s married: “I think Honor suspects something, so perhaps we’d better cool it for a month or two”—you know the end is very near.
Personal Habits
HYGIENE—ME AND MY FIVE O’CLOCK SHADOW
“Well, it’s quicker than a bath any day.”
TELEVISION ADVERTISING HAS made us positively paranoiac about hygiene. A man hardly looks at a girl without fretting whether he’s forgotten to use his roll-on deodorant, his anti-perspirant, his Lifebuoy Soap, or his Gold Spot. A lot of his time will be spent shaving twice a day so he can dunk himself in aftershave, cleaning his teeth, worrying about the Y-fronts and Wherefores of Under Stains, and lobbying to have a bidet installed in the office Gents.
The sweet smell of success has been replaced by the success of sweet smell. If a man smells remotely rancid you can assume he hasn’t got a television, or only watches B.B.C.
I like men to wear scent. I hate mouths like mossy caverns and I prefer fur coats to furlined nostrils. But it is very turning off if a man stops his car and starts crunching Polos, before he crushes you in his arms and fills your mouth with peppermint-flavoured splinters.
The nicest men taste faintly of garlic—but not of onions.
Sexual Norm, who wants to get his teeth into Dental Floss, is wondering whether he ought to get circumcised because he’s heard it’s more hygienic.
CLOTHES
Once upon a time there were hard and fast rules about what a gentleman wore. But recently the young have raised two fingers at fashion, and now anything goes as long as you wear it without selfconsciousness, and with style.
One was always being told that no gentleman would wear rings on anything but his little finger, or coats with belts, or suits without a tie or braces—but somehow with shoulder-length hair they all look perfectly all right.
I’m still not wild about jerkins, or knickerbockers, or any kind of hats, baggy flannel trousers, lovat-green cardigans or white polo-necked sweaters on older men trying to look younger (“a touch of white is so flattering near the face when you get beyond a certain age”).
I’m also allergic to shorts except on athletes, belted camel-hair coats, vests, and gloves except on ski instructors or gynaecologists. And I can do without the anorak brigade, and old school ties—that awful idea of looking at someone’s neck first to see if he’s acceptable.
It also amazes me how few men have a sense of colour. They don’t seem to realise that grey looks hell with a sallow skin, and red with an English red-brick complexion.
“Your HAT, Charles.”
Or, as a chum of mine said who went to see a friend in prison: “Brown simply isn’t Gordon’s colour.”
Well dressed men always seem to get someone else to wear their suits in for them. Sexual Norm wears a blazer with a Rotary Club badge, a club tie with shields on it, and a battery of fountain pens in his breast pocket which leak onto his white nylon shirt when he presses himself against girls.
HAIR
Very few Englishmen seem to realise the importance of having their hair cut properly.
They also seem to have no control over their barbers. Having just grown their hair to a reasonable length over their collars, they suddenly start muttering about having too many wisps round their ears or the older men in the office looking disapproving, and disappear to their barbers. They emerge with their sideboards shaven, absolutely nonexistent back, front and sides, and looking just about as gruesomely sexless as soldiers used to on their first leave from National Service.
“But, Celia, I’m working until 3 every morning. How do you expect me to get it cut?”
It takes at least two months for them to be bearable to look at again.
I can’t think why they’re so reluctant to grow their hair. Not only is long hair pretty, it also covers a multitude of sins, such as an ugly hair line, a dirty neck, protuberant or dirty ears, and carbuncles.
Dreadfully square men who fancy themselves often have it cut short at the back but slightly longer at the front, so that it curls on their foreheads and makes them look boyish.
BEARDS
I’m not wild about beards on men or women, particularly if the men have very full red lips, or their beards are always getting clogged with soup, cream or melted butter. I suppose if you shut your eyes you can fancy you’re being kissed by some furry animal who might be Jupiter in disguise.
The Common Market
THE COMMON MARKET
IN THE NEXT few years, the country will be flooded with foreigners, Frenchmen who would a-wooing go, Italians who take every remark you make with a pinch of flesh.
Wives will greet their husbands with the question: “Had a good Dago at the office, darling?”
When I was eighteen I spent a fortnight in Majorca with a girl friend. The beauty of the Majorcan men affected us like a fever and they soon returned the compliment. The first day we sat on the beach we suddenly became aware of hundreds of small, dark, handsome men edging inch by inch towards us on their stomachs like an army on manoeuvres, and soon we were surrounded. Every night we seemed to go out with at least six men.
After a few days my friend settled for a flamenco dancer, but I couldn’t make up my mind between a taxi driver and a telephone mechanic called Angel, until one evening the taxi driver took me for a long walk along the beach. A huge white moon had turned the sea to gunmetal.
The taxi driver removed his coat and hung it on a breakwater, then took my scarf and spread it out on the sand. How like Sir Walter Raleigh, I thought, very moved, and was preparing to sit on it when I was firmly pushed out of the way and he sat on it himself. He was damned if he was going to have his new suit covered in sand. After that I settled for Angel.
What other single men is a girl likely to get off with on holiday? Sexual athletes from the Gorbals in their prehistoric shorts and their sandals and socks. Pallid Belgians in snorkel masks, airtubes and flippers looking like something out of Doctor Who. Germans who spring 100 yards across a crowded beach to light your cigarette. Danes so impossibly blue-eyed and beautiful that they couldn’t be interested in women at all.
Beware too the French gigolo with his curls and flat stomach, his flashy crawl and his superb English. If you spill Ambre Solaire on his shirt, he’ll drop his accent in a trice and turn out to be some hairdresser from Palmers Green.
Even the stolid English wolf will find his sheep’s clothing too hot on holidays and emerge in his full colours as Playboy of the Western World.
When he gazes deep into your eyes and murmurs: “Let’s spend the rest of our lives together like that ah, um, you know, that classical couple who spent their lives together” he doesn’t mean it. Holidays produce beautiful ephemeral relationships but rarely husbands.