Grumpy Oldie Man
Matthew Norman
Can mass murder ever be acceptable, or even applauded? I begin on that jarringly stark note in honour of the most enchanting killing machine known to a planet burdened perhaps with too many.
As mentioned in the Old Un’s Notes, the 70th anniversary of the Ealing Comedies’ high point is imminent.
One thing people never ask this movie critic for the Evening Standard is the identity of his favourite film. But I often tell them, Tourette’s-style, all the same.
Understandably, this can be unnerving. In the middle of a heated debate about Brexit, pretty much the last response anyone expects to a question about whether David Davis has the residual mental capacity to bake a potato appears to be: ‘My favourite film of all time is Kind Hearts and Coronets.’
I did once pose that question, and even more alarmingly out of context, to a woman whose consent to return to my flat would have been inexplicable had it not been offered at the end of a long evening in the pub.
Her answer to it shaped the future. ‘ Kind Hearts and Coronets,’ she said without a nanosecond’s thought. I dug out the video, we watched it, she moved in the next day and within five months we were shackled together by the unflinching bonds of holy wedlock.
Without that shared adoration for the film, it feels fairly safe to assume that she’d have franked the form of all such previous guests. She would have done the hunt in the dark for the strewn underwear, and been off like the Road Runner before the breaking of dawn.
When some years later the union was blessed with male issue, the futility of all those torturous hours with the baby-name books – the hideous, circuitous nightmare of indecision that invariably leads to ‘I’m not dignifying Vespasian with a response. But for a girl, how about Chlamydia?’ – was underlined.
Within moments of emerging, the boy became possibly the first newborn in that maternity hospital, or in any, to be named for a sociopathic killer. He was instantly Louis after Louis Mazzini, later Mazzini D’ascoyne, who in Kind Hearts rose from suburban penury to become the 10th Duke of Chalfont thanks to the inventive range of homicidal methods that removed the incumbent and almost everyone else (diphtheria chipped in with a couple of scalps; Admiral the Lord Horatio went down with his ship) from the line of succession.
‘I shot an arrow in the air,’ as Mazzini describes his ending of balloonist suffragette Lady Agatha (pictured on page 6) with poetic succinctness. ‘She fell to earth in Berkeley Square.’
Over the last four years, I have regularly discussed the existence or otherwise of absolute morality with a young man who has just finished studying philosophy in Edinburgh.
He broadly concurs with his progenitor, albeit so far more in theory than in practice, insisting that it’s possible to posit circumstances, however outlandish, to justify anything.
In the enveloping ignorance that fuels my theorising about philosophy, as about all things, I have disputed this, cleaving to the liberal tenet – I know, it’s PC gone doolally – that slaughtering the relatively innocent is always a poor show.
But an amble through a west London park has undermined that conviction, as it does this time each year.
The annual horror show has begun. The planet’s worst tennis players are back on the public courts, and returning with them are fantasies possibly best reserved for the psych0analytic couch.
If only for the cut-price catharsis, and on the understanding that it is unlikely to be acted upon, I mention the feeling that something drastic must be done.
Mazzini would have agreed. His aesthetic sensibilities were too refined to have permitted him to stand idle while a game raised to a pinnacle of grace by Roger Federer is soiled by those who think it amusing to clear a tragically transparent 20-foot wire-grid fence with an attempted stop volley.
Regardless of recent supernatural events involving our best-beloved Tottenham Hotspur, nothing in this world has irritated me as deeply and consistently as sport. And nothing in sport, with the self-evident exception of Peter Alliss, has been as enduringly vexing as the defilement of tennis by portly, puffing, malcoordinated, middleaged schlubs – people, in other words, like me – with no imaginable right to sully something beautiful for their pleasure.
One always prefers to resolve matters of the sort through a justice system that supposedly exists in part to negate the imperative for vigilantism. But you try persuading an officer of the parks police to arrest these monsters for a public order offence. Personal experience suggests it will be you who becomes the object of their enquiries.
Mazzini, the Roger Federer of serial killers, would have found a solution with his trademark elegant ruthlessness. For the comfort of knowing that, I salute him in verse today.
‘I held a crossbow in my glove. He ceased to breathe at 40-love.’