Speaking as a white man, don’t we have ghastly complexions? Par-baked like those bread rolls you can buy in supermarkets, we look like not quite the finished product. Glancing at the person opposite on the Tube the other day, I thought “if only I could be that colour”. He was in his late thirties, maybe, south Asian, maybe Sri-Lankan; and his skin was that beautiful golden brown that whispers that this is how humans were supposed to look.
White is just wrong for skin — a kind of mutation, as though some key pigment was missing from birth. It looks inbred. I met a girl when I was younger called Weetabix (she said her rural Nigerian parents had wanted her to have an English name, and chose one at the general store) who described sleeping with a white man as being like “sleeping with a skinned animal”: semi-transparent with the blood vessels visible. The awful mental image has never left me.
And as you get older (if you’re white) you realise that a white skin is like a white carpet: it shows all the stains and blemishes. White youths enjoy a sort of mayfly summer, looking an enviable milky alabaster for about half an hour — before they blotch and smudge and scuff and smear and pimple and flush and rash and scratch and mottle themselves into shop-soiled old age. My number one colour would be caramel, closely followed by the almost inky black of the Turkana tribe I once travelled among in northern Kenya.
Come on, admit it, whiteys: if you were God designing the human animal, your brush poised above the divine palette, would you really go for just-crawled-out-from-under-a-stone off-white? Sallow sucks.
Small is beautiful
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I went to see a new musical by Ross Clark, White Feather, in London last week. I know Ross (we see him often on these pages) and he’s been asking me for weeks to go along.
I didn’t really want to. His musical is about forgiving those shot for desertion in the First World War, and in my harrumphing old stony Tory way I rather disapprove of general pardons, and do think that commanders in the field need powers to stamp on morale-threatening behaviour with great severity; and that later generations can’t second-guess the decisions they take . . .
But there I go, you see, moralising, pontificating, framing arguments-in-principle, forgetting that people bleed. People like me need to stop sometimes and see real human beings behind our dry ratiocination. And that is what theatre can do, and what music can do, and what living, breathing actors can do.
I went alone to White Feather. It is a small and beautiful piece of theatre. A small troupe of actors, of whom all are first-rate and at least two are potential stars, bring to life a story so moving that I had to hold back the tears. The music does not soar but it voices mood. Feelings implicit in a storytelling can be stirred to life when people sing. The result was a small triumph.
I keep using the word “small”. The Union Theatre in Southwark, tucked beside a railway arch, is small, seating only about 50. The stage is small — more like a hearth we were sitting around. And here’s a conundrum. Magnify the intimate little theatre into a West End barn; amplify the single piano, violin and cello into a big, swooshing orchestra; add a massed chorus and the grand sweep of emotion — and what do you have? You have Les Misérables, and you have something that’s a whole lot more, and a whole lot less.
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Tipping point
How unself-aware we can be. On Saturday The Financial Times — the bosses’ paper — carried a leading article raging against the “obnoxious” practice of tipping, and praising a swish New York restaurant that plans to ban it. The FT believes tipping “introduces ineradicable uncertainty” into working lives. Why, it rages, should one category of employees get tips but not another? The link between performance and tip is only notional, it complains. Workers should be remunerated by a regular wage. “Time that this relic ended.”
Re-read, dear FT, substituting “bonus” for “tip” throughout. Maybe the two can be distinguished, but what’s hilarious is the mindset in which the need to do this never occurred.