69 for 1 (6 page)

The kid is across the aisle from me, in an ordinary seat. I am in a very special seat. Not only is it very special, it is also very important. It is what we flying aces call the bulkhead exit
seat. It has more leg room than ordinary economy seats, it has more leg room than club class seats, that is why we flying aces always check in by telephone before we fly, but that is not what makes
it important. What makes it important is that in the event of an emergency, we aces have to do the thing with the big handle that opens the emergency door, and we have to help with the chute; we
have to make sure passengers have removed their high heels, spectacles, and teeth, and, if they have a thing about sharks and do not want to go down the chute, we have to throw them out. If sharks
do turn up, we have to dive in and knock them about. That is why we have to be fit: when we check in, the deskman on the telephone asks us how fit we are. We tell him terrifically fit: like
well-oiled machines – which we intend to be as soon as the booze trolley comes round, that is one of the reasons we need the extra leg room, we want to stretch out and zizz after we have
drunk the trolley – we rattle off our pulse-rate, blood pressure, cholesterol level, body mass index, glucose tolerance, hearing/vision factors, press-ups per day, all that. Fit or what?

So then, Sunday night, Nice airport, soft damson sunset over the adjacent Med, the Boeing has taxied to its take-off point, the stewardess is about to do the emergency drill, and the kid is
smiling happily beside his, I guess, daddy. He is two years old, and he is an angel: he looks like Millais’ Bubbles. Pears soap wouldn’t melt in his mouth. At this point the stewardess
snaps open the yellow life jacket, slips it on, and sticks the oxygen mask over her face. And the kid goes crazy. No kid ever screamed like it. No adult ever screamed like it. He is only a small
kid, but his body must be made up entirely of tonsil. Never mind not hearing the engines, if the kid doesn’t stop screaming soon the windows will shatter. The tyres will burst. The
electronics will fuse. Alerted fire-tenders and anti-terrorist APCs will come clanging and howling towards us – though we shall, of course, not be able to hear them. The stewardess is staring
at the kid, the kid is shrieking at the stewardess, and economy passengers fore and aft are straining in their seat belts to try to clock what’s happening: could be an ullulating
fundamentalist about to claim his six dozen virgins, could be a turbine blade shearing through an engine, could be a shark attack – maybe they’re getting bolder, like foxes, hurtling
out of the Baie des Anges, who knows? – could be anything, this is 2007 and this is a plane. I glance past the stewardess at the club class curtain; it is trembling. Rich people up front,
free caviare, free foie gras, have no inkling what might be happening back here: are the poor people, no free caviare, no free foie gras, eating a kid?

The kid’s daddy is distraught. He picks up the kid, but it is like picking up a dervish octopus, the kid is flailing, a left hook, a right jab, teeth, flying snot, the yellow-jacketed
stewardess steps towards them, the tonsils go up to warp-factor decibels, the fuselage might crack . . . and it is at this point that the ace intervenes. This is his moment: it is for this that not
only all his fitness has prepared him, but also his incomparable savvy. He tells the stewardess that it is the yellow jacket which has detonated the kid. She takes it off, but the kid does not stop
screaming, he is not fooled, there is a monster aboard, this is a fee-fi-fo-fum moment, but the ace is not fazed, he has a trump left to play before push comes to shove and he has to open the door
and fire the kid down the shute. He tells the stewardess to blow her whistle. The stewardess frowns. You know how to whistle, don’t you, says the ace, you put your lips together and you blow
into that thing dangling from the life jacket. The stewardess replies that this is only for emergencies, but the ace – fit, cool, authorative – says: what do you think this is?

So she picks up the whistle, and blows. It is a hell of whistle: the kid stops. He has met his match. It is all over. The plane takes off. The ace settles back into the special seat he was born
to fill. Eat his shorts, Biggles.

T
OMORROW
is a major day. It is the last day of an era. The midnight chimes which gong on May 1 will herald a watershed
between romance and lust. I know this, because Nestlé tells me so. They have clearly chosen their day with much forethought: May 1 has been a watershed between romance and lust since time
immoral, for it is the day when maidens wake up to deck themselves with flowers and dance around a tall signifier designed to ensure that as soon as they have finished dancing they will be chased
giggling into the long grass and comprehensively undecked.

Now, Nestlé make a signifier, too, albeit not so tall. Just six inches. It is built by stacking 11 circular chocolate-covered caramels on top of one another. Here is a press release about
it: ‘Rolo’s famous chocolate slogan of ‘Do you love anyone enough to give them your last Rolo?’ is being axed after 23 years because makers Nestlé think it too
romantic to reflect modern relationships. It will be replaced on May 1 by advertisements in which an office girl flashes her underwear to get one of the sweets, because Nestlé research shows
that romance is not the most important thing in a modern relationship. It’s time to move on.’

Time to move on whom is not of course specified, but we can be sure it will not stop at office girls. If Nestlé has its marketing strategy in line, you may be confident that, after May 1,
the sassy female spectrum from Ulrika Johnsson to Margaret Beckett will be leaning fetchingly against the water-cooler, murmuring: ‘Is that a tube of Rolo in your pocket or are you just
pleased to see me?’ You may be sure, too, that there will be equally naff observations from the lads along the lines of: ‘The trouble with a tube of Rolo is that after you give her one,
it gets smaller.’ You know how people are, these days.

But you also know me, and you will therefore know that I am a little uneasy about all this, not least (pretend I care) on Nestlé’s behalf. The exchange of chocolates for women may
have an ancient provenance, but I surely cannot be alone in finding it somewhat iffy. It can so easily backfire. In the romantic lang syne, when it was a truth universally acknowledged that a
single man in possession of a box of Black Magic must be in want of a wife, I fell in love with great regularity. In consequence, even in my teens, I was frequently to be found sliding five bob
across the Woollies’ confectionery counter in the hope of securing, later that same day, the first Mrs Coren. I was not after anything else: picture me as that sad jerk in a black jumpsuit
who used to parachute onto the north face of the Eiger, abseil down through a thunderstorm, swim across the icy lake at the bottom, break and enter a lakeside house via the bedroom window, leave a
little carton on a bedside table, and then, in major italics, clear off again, without even looking in the bed to see if he could learn something to his advantage. All because the lady loved Milk
Tray. And, subtextually, all because she was a lady. Leaving us to assume that, after he had delivered the requisite number of chocolates and had a word with her father, she married him.

I did a lot of that, in my search for romance, not so much in the Alps as in the Southgate Odeon – a spot no less hazardous if, for example, all you could afford that week was Maltesers,
which, lovingly placed in the lap beside you, could easily, if its new owner was startled, say, by a hand suddenly clamping her far shoulder, fly off and send its contents rolling down to the
front. You got blamed for that. You often walked home alone. Worse yet, I fell deeply in love with a number of future Mrs Corens in tooth-braces, several of whom got bits of hazelnut cluster lodged
in their canines, to the terminal detriment of advanced kissing. More than once, too, I would reach out romantically for a hand that already had half an unwanted coffee-creme in it. From which you
will understand when I say that bartering chocolates for wives, even in those pre-feminist days, wasn’t all that the advertisers cracked it up to be. (Just as, a little later, I was to
discover what a scam candle-lit dinners were: fine at the start, when the candles were tall, but as they burned down to below chin height, the person opposite you turned into an uplit ghost train
ghoul. Also, your nostrils had to be spotless.)

So then, what happens after May 1, when Nestlé will be offering not romance for chocs, but sex? If men are led to believe that there are dames out there eager to flash their underwear for
just one Rolo, what will they expect from those prepared to take on the whole first eleven? Will it, as it so often did under the old regime, all end it tears? Maybe not: these are, after all,
different times. Love is only a Rolo in the hay.

I
THINK
I have contracted compulsive–obsessive disorder, if it is called that. It may be called obsessive–
compulsive disorder, or, indeed, something else entirely, but in order to pin down what it is, I should have to get up from the computer on which I am tapping this and go across to the bookshelves
and try to look up whatever it is that it is, and that would mean putting the light on, because it is midnight as I write, and I can’t put the light on because of what I have contracted. I am
tapping only by the light of the screen.

I know how I contracted it, mind. I caught it off my carbon footprint. Or, rather, my carbon shadow, because it is not just under my shoe, it is stuck to me at all points. Like you, I never
thought about it until very recently, but now I cannot think about anything else, which also means that I cannot do anything without thinking about it.

This morning, I couldn’t think how to shave, because I have both a safety and an electric razor. Which is worse for the planet? The electric sucks from a fossily power station, the safety
is made of steel and non-biodegradable plastic which will end up on a landfill site, possibly cutting a gull’s throat to boot, with God knows what ecological consequences.

And when I recall cleaning my teeth, the tremors start all over again. I have an electric water pick for flushing old dinner out at dawn, but I daren’t use it any more. I would have to
plant a tree. I do not know where you get these trees you have to plant every time you burn carbon, but I bet you have to drive there, and you would have to buy another tree to offset the petrol. I
can’t do that every morning, especially as I have a very small garden. In less than a week, it would be a very small forest. Its roots would gobble up the water table and the house would fall
over.

Which leads me to my non-electric toothbrushing: it wasted ten times more water than the water pick would have done, because we had pork belly last night, and most of it was still wedged between
my molars. The brushing also used a lot of energy (mine) and that doesn’t grow on trees: or, rather, does, given that I got the energy from the protein which Mrs Coren cooked last night with
gas made from what might well have borne conkers, once.

Mind you, I had already used most of that energy before bedtime. I had to take the rubbish out to umpteen different eco-categories of bin, but I wouldn’t put the garden lights on to do it,
obviously, and the bottom fell out of one of the wet paper sacks we now use instead of planetocidal plastic, so I had to crawl around in the dark burning up precious pig, and when I finally got
back indoors, Mrs Coren had turned off the telly standby light, and my disorder wouldn’t let me turn it on again to watch the cricket highlights.

However, if England ever get another whiff of the Ashes – and how non-sustainable is that? – I think I could manage, just the once, to force one compulsive obsession to override
another. Even if it cost a tree or two.

M
RS
Coren and I have reached that happy point in life where we get asked out a lot. Fat glossy invitations plop daily to
our mat. Some kind hosts want us to join them for an invigorating game of shuffleboard in the Bosporus, to be followed by a jolly sing-song in their candle-scented sauna; others insist we come with
them to camcord penguins, and, when darkness foils the straining lens, foxtrot the night away to the internationally renowned melodies of Morrie Plunk and his Mandoliers. More yet beg us to
island-hop with them from one Maldive to the next, tantalisingly dangling the promise of a dinghy whose transparent bottom will allow us, while sipping sundown cocktails shielded from gnats by
titchy parasols, to gawp at turtles.

Of course, there will be a price to pay. That is how cruises work. And they work better at it with every passing day as more and more OAPs pluck equity from the stratosphere into which their
properties have soared and grope creakily for their cruisewear. It is why, last Sunday, the
Liberty of the Seas
, the hugest liner ever built, hove to off Southampton on its first
promotional trip. Know what it was promoting? Not merely its malls, cinemas, casinos, pubs, ballrooms, swimming-pools, and all the other gewgaws of common or garden cruiseboats, but also its common
or garden, which boasts a running-track, an ice-rink, a nine-hole golf course, a waterfall, and a cliff-face to enable rock-climbers to keep their hand, or at least their fingertips, in.

Not, I’m afraid, my idea of a ship; my idea of Basingstoke. I write this because, yes, Mrs Coren and I did receive an invitation, and this piece will save us the bother of a formal reply.
Thanks, but we shall not be sailing off to shop, filmgo, bet, booze, boogie, swim, sprint, skate, negotiate the tricky dog-leg fourth, go over the falls in a barrel, or up the north face of
anything, because if we did want to do that we would not elect to do it on a prison-hulk, however swish; for that is not what ships are about.

And they are about to be about even less. Soon, you may be sure, there will be a
Diabolical Liberty of the Seas
, ten times the size of this one, its lucky passengers living in thatched
cottages, fishing the trout-lake, playing cricket, riding to hounds, and taking luxury trains to the afterdeck to watch Saracens v. Wasps; but Mrs Coren and I will not be sailing with them.