Gradually, little stacks of index cards with these words on them started to grow in John Lloyd’s bottom drawer, and anybody who heard about them would add concepts of their own.
They first saw the light of day when John Lloyd was putting together the Not 1982 calendar, and was stuck for things to put on the bottoms of the pages (and also the tops and quite a few middles). He turned out the drawer, chose a dozen or so of the best new words, and inserted them in the book under the name Oxtail English Dictionary. This quickly turned out to be one of the most popular bits of Not 1982, and the success of the idea in this small scale suggested the possibility of a book devoted to it—and here it is: The Meaning of Liff, the product of a hard lifetime’s work studying and chronicling the behaviour of man.
My Nose
My mother has a long nose and my father had a wide one, and I got both of them combined. It’s large. The only person I ever knew with a nose substantially larger than mine was a master at my prep school who also had tiny little eyes and hardly any chin and was ludicrously thin. He resembled a cross between a flamingo and an old-fashioned farming implement and walked rather unsteadily in crosswinds. He also hid a great deal.
I wanted to hide, too. As a boy, I was teased unmercifully about my nose for years until one day I happened to catch sight of my profile in a pair of angled mirrors and had to admit that it was actually pretty funny. From that moment, people stopped teasing me about my nose and instead started to tease me unmercifully about the fact that I said words like “actually,” which is something that has never let up to this day.
One of the more curious features of my nose is that it doesn’t admit any air. This is hard to understand or even believe. The problem goes back a very long way to when I was a small boy living in my grandmother’s house. My grandmother was the local representative of the RSPCA, which meant the house was always full of badly damaged dogs and cats, and even the occasional badger, stoat, or pigeon.
Some of them were damaged physically, some psychologically, but the effect they had on me was to seriously damage my attention span. Because the air was thick with animal hair and dust, my nose was continually inflamed and runny, and every fifteen seconds I would sneeze. Any thought I could not explore, develop, and bring to some logical conclusion within fifteen seconds would therefore be forcibly expelled from my head, along with a great deal of mucus.
There are those who say that I tend to think and write in one-liners, and if there is any truth to this criticism, then it was almost certainly while I lived with my grandmother that the habit developed.
I escaped from my grandmother’s house by going to boarding school, where, for the first time in my life, I was able to breathe. This new-found blissful freedom continued for a good two weeks, until I had to learn to play rugby. In about the first five minutes of the first match I ever played, I managed to break my nose on my own knee, which, although it was clearly an extraordinary achievement, had the same effect on me that those geological upheavals had on whole civilizations in Rider Haggard novels—it effectively sealed me off from the outside world forever.
Various ENT specialists have, at different times, embarked on major speleological expeditions into my nasal passages, but most of them have come back baffled. The ones who didn’t come back baffled didn’t come back at all, and are therefore now part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
The only thing that ever tempted me to try taking cocaine was the dire warning that the stuff eats away at your septum. If I thought cocaine could actually find a way through my septum, I would happily shove it up there by the bucketful and let it eat away as much as it liked. I have been put off, however, by the observation that friends who do shove it up their noses by the bucketful have even shorter attention spans than mine.
So, by now I am pretty well resigned to the fact that my nose is decorative rather than functional. Like the Hubble Space Telescope, it represents a massive feat of engineering, but is not actually any good for anything, except perhaps a few cheap laughs.
The Book That Changed Me
The Blind Watchmaker.
Richard Dawkins.
Whenever it was published. About 1990, I think.
It’s like throwing open the doors and windows in a dark and stuffy room. You realise what a jumble of half-digested ideas we normally live with, particularly those of us with an arts education. We “sort of” understand evolution, though we secretly think there’s probably a bit more to it than that. Some of us even think that there’s some “sort of” god, which takes care of the bits that sound a little bit improbable. Dawkins brings a flood of light and fresh air, and shows us that there is a dazzling clarity to the structure of evolution that is breathtaking when we suddenly see it. And if we don’t see it, then, quite literally, we don’t know the first thing about who we are and where we come from.
Yes, once or twice. But I also dip into it a lot.
Yes. The workings of evolution run so contrary to our normal intuitive assumptions about the world that there’s always a fresh shock of understanding.
I’d recommend it to anybody and everybody.
Maggie and Trudie
I am not, I should say at once, in any formal relationship with a dog. I don’t feed a dog, give it a bed, groom it, find kennels for it when I’m away, delouse it, or suddenly arrange for any of its internal organs to be removed when they displease me. I do not, in short, own a dog.
On the other hand, I do have a kind of furtive, illicit relationship with a dog, or rather two dogs. And in consequence I think I know a little of what it must be like to be a mistress.
The dogs do not live next door. They don’t even live in the same—well, I was going to say street and tease it out a bit, but let’s cut straight to the truth. They live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is a hell of a place for a dog, or indeed anyone else, to live. If you’ve never visited or spent time in Santa Fe, New Mexico, then let me say this: you’re a complete idiot. I was myself a complete idiot till about a year ago when a combination of circumstances that I can’t be bothered to explain led me to borrow somebody’s house way out in the desert just north of Santa Fe to write a screenplay in. To give you an idea of the sort of place that Santa Fe is, I could bang on about the desert and the altitude and the light and the silver and turquoise jewelry, but the best thing is just to mention a traffic sign on the freeway from Albuquerque. It says, in large letters, GUSTY WINDS, and in smaller letters MAY EXIST.