rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_965012bc-aaee-58bd-8cb6-3de1cd78c214.jpg"/> Compared to money, this one’s a cinch. From where I’m standing a half-hearted Christmas card from an ex-girlfriend scores you at least a 3. Look around and you’ll see that most people beat this score, just don’t look at me. I scored another 2.
THREE: SEX
No, those to watch for high scores here are the ones who barely seem to look at each other at table apart from to exchange black, jaded insults. After dinner they nurse their hostilities at opposite ends of the room, while everybody else inwardly speculates on their imminent break-up. In the sack they’re like a herd of satyrs home on leave to make a porn movie. Look for the flu symptoms: bleary-eyed and all sore and achy in the morning. And then watch them closely. They are already considering their next options: which orifice, which lubricant, which forearm, which piece of machinery. A 9, no question.
You may have noticed that the sex symbol is phallic rather than yonic, if you will. Now, the act of sex for me is a yoni thing rather than a phallus thing, simple as that. That is, in an ideal world it’s a yoni thing. At that time, however, it was very much a phallus thing, and no prizes for guessing whose phallus. I regularly scored a fine upstanding 1, especially in the mornings.
FOUR: WORK
Another example. You may think that Bill Clinton has a pretty good job, and most people would agree with you. I don’t. I mean it’s just one thing after another if you’re the Leader of the Free World, isn’t it? West Bank settlers one minute, a Republican majority in Congress the next, some woman broadcasting to the nation about distinguishing marks on your penis the next. Bill’s welcome to it if you ask me. My (ex) flatmate Henry’s girlfriend is called Lottie and she knits sweaters for a living, except that she doesn’t get paid for it. I don’t really want to do that either, but at least I’d sleep at night.
When I left university I had a question to answer. What becomes of a dissolute, immature ex-Maoist (the girls are prettier in the Communist Society), now patrician-Tory, broadly-not-deeply-read pseudo-intellectual when he has to get a job?
I initially took the conventional Oxbridge approach. I applied for jobs in American, Swiss and Japanese investment banks. I considered law, but in banks the girls are prettier. In fact, they’re the Maoist girls, but now in £80 undies and mock-Chanel body armour. Needless to say I failed. I then applied to go on a journalism course in Harlow and succeeded.
A year later, the girls in the pricey underwear were just graduating into their first 3 Series when I took up an eight-and-a-half-grand glamour job on the Streatham Post. While they dealt in issues of world importance, like the exchange-rate fluctuations between the schilling and the escudo, I was scrabbling around with the trivia: births, marriages, deaths – that sort of thing.
I operated in a different world order from my peers. My world ended at Balham, Wandsworth, Chelsea Bridge. Nothing in which I was interested ramified outside this area: Chamber of Commerce Outrage at Red Route Plan, Lady Mayoress Opens New Texas Homecare, Woman Found By Son ‘Had Been Dead Three Weeks’.
On the other hand, the people I knew were obsessing about the fate of the dollar from their striplit hangars at Salomon or Stanley. They were part of that process whereby some bureaucrat in DC says the word ‘nervous’ at a dinner party and six hours later little children are crying in the streets of Nairobi.
Anyway, I didn’t last long. Journalism’s all about getting your face around, cold calling, beer drinking, loud laughing, cock sucking. I just didn’t have the necessary. Most of all it’s about wanting it badly, and I’ve never wanted anything badly, nothing that wasn’t human and female at any rate. So I sacked it. In fact, if truth be known, they sacked me. I’d captioned a picture of the local MP at a garden fête as follows: ‘ANGELA HOWEY, MP, HOLDS ALOFT A LARGE PARSNIP BEFORE INSERTING IT INTO HER ANUS’.
Everyone at the paper missed it, and they got scores of furious letters, not least from Ms Howey herself, but I was long gone. It was, I can see, a puerile gesture, but momentarily enjoyable, and mentally I was way out of there anyway. I wasn’t happy in my work, you see. At least I got out alive, if somewhat disillusioned with journalism for the time being. And now I wait tables.
So I would ask myself the question: Frank, are you happy in your work in a bad restaurant in Battersea? The answer? No, not really. Score? 3.
FIVE: HOUSE
* of London, obviously.
** Likely to be a barn (unconverted).
In all cases subtract I point if you’re renting.
For owners of second homes, combine scores up to a maximum of 10.
For Islington, read Fulham, for Neasden read Tooting and so on. Zone 1 tends to beat Zone 2 which tends to beat Zone 3.
You may think that I have marked Notting Hill a tad unfairly, especially if you’ve just bought a plasterboard cubbyhole there for two hundred grand. I just say that if you live in Notting Hill you deserve all the unfairness you get.
If anybody else feels hard done by, and thinks this table undervalues their own property, I am afraid to say I don’t yet operate an ombudsman system to mediate disputes.
I rented a room in Henry’s cosy three-bed flat in Clapham, which was above a CTN and overlooked the public khazi. A roof-terraced, stripped-floored, ficus-benjamina-by-the-tellyed 4.
SIX: WHEELS
