Lynne Truss - Making the Cat Laugh

Evidently authors may choose three (not more) of these qualities and put them together in subtle combinations. Thus, taking a random selection from the bookshelves, one finds that the Ian McEwan of Black Dogs , say, has opted for brainy, anxious and mad; that Martin Amis, formerly brainy, supercilious and dangerous ( London Fields ), has now daringly regrouped as brainy, sincere and anxious ( Time’s Arrow ). And Nigel Williams ( They Came from sw19 ) has achieved an amazing triple – of brainily sensitive, sincerely sensitive and sensitively grumpy.

For women the range is smaller and doesn’t include Brainy. That’s just the way it is. Traditionally women could choose from Clever, Nice, Shiny, Well Made-up and Pet-owning, but usually said to hell with it and took the lot. To this list a few new elements have been added recently. For example, Jeanette Winterson (famously self-effacing author of Written on the Body ) has added Challenging, Bloody-Minded and Eyes that Follow You Around the Room. Pictures of women authors sometimes have a verge-of-tears quality, reminiscent of Julia Margaret Cameron’s famous picture Despair, which was achieved by locking the juvenile sitter in a cupboard for a couple of hours beforehand. Jeanette Winterson does not look like someone recently emerged from a cupboard. She does, however, resemble a person who has just locked someone else in a cupboard, and put the key down the lav.

Meanwhile, what do I do about the Andre Agassi man? If I don’t send a picture, he will smell a rat. Perhaps I should get a heap of coins and take residence in a Photo-Me booth for the afternoon, trying out statements. Think moody. Think mad. Think grumpy. But what I don’t understand is this. Given that the mad, brainy, sincere look is only a pretence, why not go for something a bit more dramatic? Such as Livid, Amnesiac, Paranoid, or Escaping from Wolves? Unfortunately I shall have to settle for Concussed by Bathroom Appliance. Which probably means that my photo won’t be appreciated very much, after all.

A man friend who lives in California recently phoned me at great expense from a Santa Barbara call-box and asked me what clothes I had on. Not having read any fashionable American novels about sex-by-phone, I found this rather unsettling. It came out of the blue. I mean, we observed the usual preliminary greetings, such as ‘What time is it where you are?’ and ‘Have you seen The Player yet, isn’t it great?’ But we had barely touched on the elections and the earthquake forecasts before he posed this extraordinary question about my attire, leaving me all perplexed and wrong-footed.

Was this a dirty phone-call, I thought, or was he simply concerned to conjure up an innocent mental picture of his faraway pal? Should I give him the benefit of the doubt? Playing for time (and angling for clues) I asked what he was wearing, but his answer didn’t help. Evidently his outfit consisted of a T-shirt and trousers, some trainers and a beany hat. ‘Sounds very nice,’ I said non-committally, wondering whether the beany hat was a code for something. Either way, I was still completely in the dark about whether to confess to the old grey army socks and the jumbo dungarees.

Fran Lebowitz once said that the telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink. Personally, I see it as a good way of talking to people without having to dress up in a high-cut Kim Basinger costume, or apologize for your paltry wardrobe of seductive gear. In the end, I decided to ignore the overtones, and acted dumb. I said that actually my clothes were so thickly matted with cat-hair and household fluff that I could no longer identify them with any confidence. A smart evasion, which seemed to do the trick, because the subject turned to the Richter scale forthwith.

I was more disturbed by this conversation than it really merited, perhaps. But I hold the telephone in reverence as an instrument of pure verbal communication, and I don’t like to see it messed about. Surely this is the only form of talk in which you can convince yourself that the other person is really engaged in a flow of words entirely undistracted by the extraneous. Which is precisely why it always comes as a shock to discover that for the past ten minutes the other person has been keeping an eye on Northern Exposure , or marking exams, fitting a new flea-collar on a resistant pet, or reading a funny bit from Tristram Shandy .

Saying ‘Have I caught you at a bad time?’ does not eliminate this problem, I find.

YOU: Have I caught you at a bad time?

THEM: No, not at all. How are things? (Tap, tap, tap.)

YOU: Are you sure you’re not busy?

THEM: (Tap, tap, tap.) What?

YOU: Listen, I’ll phone another time.

THEM: No, really. This is lovely. (Tap, tap, tap.)

YOU: Look, are you typing, or something?

THEM: Just the radio play. (Tap, tap, tap.) The one about existential despair. (Tap, tap, tap.) I’m doing this big speech about the black void of silence and the sensation (tap, tap, tap) that nobody is listening, anywhere in the universe (tap, tap, tap) to anyone else. I don’t mind if you want to talk, though. (Tap, tap, tap.) It doesn’t bother me.

YOU: I’m surprised you can write and talk at the same time.

THEM: Perhaps you’re right. I’ll stop for a while. (Clank, clatter, tinkle.)

YOU: What’s that?

THEM: Nothing much. I thought I’d start dinner.

The worst thing is when they don’t mention they have guests. You chatter away for twenty minutes or so, and then hear them whisper, ‘Go ahead without me. I think she just needed someone to talk to. Sorry.’ That’s the other illusion of the telephone, of course: that the other person is on their own, just as you are. There is a woman I know who answers the phone in your presence and signals at you to wait; and then she talks animatedly for thirty minutes without giving a single indication to the person on the other end that there is any reason not to. Meanwhile she pulls faces at you, mimes ‘nearly finished’ repeatedly, and makes exaggerated comic pleading gestures when you make embarrassed efforts to leave. Imagine how awkward one feels phoning her up, after witnessing all that.

Perhaps I worried too much about my American friend’s innocent question. He only asked what I was wearing, after all. He didn’t ask if I was entertaining a coach party from the Midlands, or examining A-levels, or making a casserole; whereas in fact I was doing all three, as well as finishing my script for the epic Night of the Living Teddywomen and practising bird-calls.

Funny he didn’t remark on the array of sound effects, really – Shsh, tick, chop, tap, cuckoo – (something like a jaunty clock repair shop in a Disney cartoon). But then perhaps he was simply transported by the unbearably erotic notion of a woman, six thousand miles away, dressed up to resemble the inside of a Hoover bag.

When you are a single person, the world is full of happy couples. That’s the idea, anyway; the tragic little myth we have all picked up from somewhere. In this version of events, life is a couples-only ceilidh in which the single person is the perpetual wallflower; she leans over the bridge in St James’s Park in her lonely anorak, crooning the plaintive country song from Starlight Express (‘I’ve been U-n-c-o-u-p-l-e-d’), while happy newlyweds chuck beach-balls about, and giggle together at the ducks.

This is all rubbish, of course. It rubs no salt in my wound to see people happily paired off; they could waltz around the concourse at Waterloo in their dozens, and I wouldn’t care. No, what single life means to me (strangely enough) is that I can’t stand to hear couples bickering about where to park the car; or stalking off in a huff at the supermarket. It seems terrible. The other day I saw a man in the street trying repeatedly to take his wife’s hand, and she kept snatching it away again. It made my blood run cold, like watching somebody kick a dog.