pandemian

30 June 2007

The first idol I ever had was Tufty, of the Tufty Club. His cheery yellow trousers and bright-eyed, alert expression are, I am sure, the sole reason I have reached the age of twenty eight without ever having suffered the dreadful fate of Willy Weasel, hit by a car because I never asked my mummy to go to the ice cream van with me. That, or the persistently irritating fact that the ice cream van doesn't stop close enough to my house these days. Oh, I can hear its cruel, taunting siren song all right but even if I leave my house upon the very first note of O Sole Mio (ice cream vans having got considerably classier since I was a child - the one that used to come round my way when I was seven played the theme tune to Match Of The Day) and leg it down the street in bare feet I can never quite reach it before it turns away into the main road heading for the lucrative council estate and I am left on the corner, panting extravagantly and whinnying for a Funny Feet.

Tufty is still alive today and to my great pleasure, his modernisation has been minimal and has certainly not included the wearing of a baseball cap at a jaunty angle and therefore he both effortlessly eclipses those excessively perky road safety hedgehogs and remains one of the very few idols I've ever had who hasn't eventually abandoned me in one way or another.

The people we admire fall into three categories; the domestic, the heroic or the mirror. This means your idol will either be your mum, Ranulph Fiennes or... well, let me put it this way for you in a series of broad and breathtakingly simplistic generalisations. Those in the first category see great achievements in everyday actions, which might well be the place in which true courage lies if this also didn't mean they consider their wives to be heroes for doing the washing up without complaint, like to spend their Saturday evenings watching programmes with Esther Ranzten called Winsome and Terribly Photogenic Despite the Wheelchair Children of Courage and are brought to the point of tears by that dreary D:Ream song. Those in the second never quite got over not collecting as many whittling badges in the Scouts as they feel they deserved, probably enjoy war films a little more than is seemly and secretly rub themselves up against pictures of New York fire fighters when no-one is looking. And those in the third group choose anti-heros, not aspirationally but as as representations of themselves; fuck-ups, freaks and aberrations fighting their bloody battles out there for them in an increasingly vicious war of attrition. I belong in that third category.

But the casualty rate for us is high. Cool Hand Luke and Jack Kevorkian were captured by the enemy, Richey James deserted and Dorothy Parker, a loyal foot soldier of the old days, finally succumbed to the horror and ended up in a hospital somewhere back home with a pair of y-fronts on her head and two pencils stuck up her nose. Morrissey has grown a huge set of whiskers and an addiction to port and now on the rare occasions he is heard it is only to mumble about the Hun and direct some half-hearted action from a cosy living room somewhere seven miles behind the front line. More recently, Jarvis Cocker fell by an increasingly popular method when he got married and started cooking fish fingers for his kids instead of watching roaches climb the walls. His music may or may not be as good as ever but as soon as he had other priorities than telling me that my bedsit-living, cheap vodka-vomiting and even cheaper romancing ways were okay he failed to notice that the pram in the hall concealed an devastatingly accurate sniper. Very few still stand with me and only this morning I heard the distressing news that Stephen Fry might have fallen on his sword and got a Facebook profile; god knows how Chris Morris is going to hold the fort on his own.

And it's not easy to find new recruits, either. Richard Dawkins had only been in the regiment for six weeks when I was forced to kick him out for spending more time looking at his own reflection in his shiny boots than kicking people up the arse with them. The message appears to be clear; adapt, die or take up arms myself.

So it's me, Tufty and some particularly sharp badges against the world, then. Refusing to grow up, ignoring the comments about our trousers and never, ever forgetting to look both ways.