Ten Years in the Tub (37 page)

Authors: Nick Hornby

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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In
Early Bird
, Rothman discovers that he's hopeless at both shuffleboard and bingo, and that it's perfectly possible to find septuagenarians sexually attractive. He gets his ass kicked at softball by a bunch of tough old geezers, and he tries to resuscitate the career of a smutty ninety-three-year-old stand-up comic with the catchphrase “But what the hell, my legs still spread.” There are very few
jokes about Alzheimer's and prune juice, and lots of stereotype-defying diversions. And Rothman allows the sadness that must, of course, attach itself to the end of our lives to seep through slowly, surely and entirely without sentiment.

So this last month was, as I believe you people sayâ¦ oh. Right. Sorry. What I'm trying to say here is that, once again, I didn't read as much as I'd hoped over the festive season, and one of the chief reasons for that was a book. This book is called
The Man on the Moon
, and I bought it for my two-year-old son for Christmas, and I swear that I've read it to him fifty or sixty times over the last couple of weeks. Let's say that it's, what, two thousand words long? So that's one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-odd wordsâlonger than the Alan Hollinghurst novel I still haven't read. And given I haven't got many other books to tell you about, I am reduced to discussing the salient points of this one, which has, after all, defined my reading month.

I bought
The Man on the Moon
after reading a review of it in a newspaper. I don't normally read reviews of children's books, mostly because I can't be bothered, and because kidsâmy kids, anywayâare not interested in what the
Guardian
thinks they might enjoy. One of my two-year-old's favorite pieces of nighttime reading, for example, is the promotional flyer advertising the
Incredibles
that I was sent (I don't wish to show off, but I know one of the stars of the film personally), a flyer outlining some of the marketing plans for the film. If you end up having to read that out loud every night, you soon give up on the idea of seeking out improving literature sanctioned by the liberal broadsheets. I had a hunch, however, that what with the Buzz Lightyear obsession and the insistence on what he calls Buzz Rocket pajamas, he might enjoy a picture book about an astronaut who commutes to the moon every day to tidy it up. I dutifully sought the book outâand it wasn't easy to find, you know, just before Christmasâonly to be repaid with a soul-crushing enthusiasm, when I would have infinitely preferred a polite, mild, and temporary interest. Needless to say, I won't be taking that sort of trouble again.

After his busy day on the moon, Bob the astronaut, we're told, has a nice hot bath, because working on the moon can make you pretty “grubby.” And as my son doesn't know the word “grubby,” I substitute the word “dirty,” when I remember. Except I don't always remember, at which point he interruptsâsomewhat
tetchilyâwith the exhortation “Do âdirty!'” And I'll tell you, that's a pretty disconcerting phrase coming from the mouth of a two-year-old, especially when it's aimed at his father. He says it to his mum, too, but I find that more acceptable. She's a very attractive woman.

Amos Oz's
Help Us to Divorce
isn't really a bookâit's two little essays published between tiny soft covers. But as you can see, I'm desperate, so I have to include it here. Luckily, it's also completely brilliant: the first essay, “Between Right and Right,” is a clear-eyed, calm, bleakly optimistic view of the Palestinian crisis, so sensible and yet so smart. “The Palestinians want the land they call Palestine. They have very strong reasons to want it. The Israeli Jews want exactly the same land for exactly the same reasons, which provides for a perfect understanding between the parties, and for a terrible tragedy,” says Oz, in response to repeated invitations from well-meaning bodies convinced that the whole conflict could be solved if only the relevant parties got to know each other better. I wanted Oz's pamphlet to provide me with quick and easy mental nutrition at a distressingly mindless time of year; it worked a treat. He kicked Bob the astronaut's ass right into orbit.