I sat next to Peter Palumbo a year or so ago, at one of those nominally informal bunfights where ‘Just a Few Close Friends’ is hand-scribbled on the embossed paste board, and when you get there two liveried footmen shuck you from your Pakamac and the third shouts your name into a room containing most of the Almanack de Gotha, half the cabinet, and a shoal of tycoons not yet on remand, and you immediately begin asking yourself what your host thinks it is you’ve got that one of his other guests wants, because you were not born yesterday.
Anyway, Palumbo was an agreeable enough cove, he didn’t spill anything on me or try that trick with the cutlery where you bang the spoon and the fork does a somersault, and I was therefore not surprised to learn, a few months later, that he had been made chairman of the Arts Council; if you keep going to informal dinners with Just a Few Friends night after night, and don’t knock over the potted palms, you have only yourself to blame when the scrap of paper that unexpectedly falls out of your hat in the homegoing Roller turns out to have a black spot on it.
Especially if you cannot forbear from banging on publicly about the Cultural Fabric of the Nation: it is the one phrase of his I recall from that night’s exchanges, and each time he loosed it, I rose snapping to the fly, ticking off the threat to that fabric, i.e., to theatre, film, music, books, painting – and, by Stilton time, to glove-puppetry and synchronized origami – from the Philistine hordes yomping behind a Delilah whose manic shears were cutting everything in sight. Palumbo’s eyes would glaze excitedly at each new convoluted metaphor, oddly like those of a man attempting to remember a previous engagement, but whether my shafts were scoring it was not only impossible to say, it did not really matter, since I had no idea, then, that he would ever be in a position to do anything about them.
Indeed, the meeting lay forgotten until I opened last Friday’s Times, where, lurking at the foot of page 5, was the phrase ‘the Arts Council’s plan to restore the cultural fabric of the nation by the year 2000’. Hallo, I thought, its new Akela cleaves unswerving to his mission, there will be a bob or two in this for hack and mummer, might I not be of even further assistance than last time? I phoned the Arts Council.
‘This cultural fabric,’ I said, ‘what, precisely, does it . . .’
‘To quote the chairman,’ said the Arts Council, ‘cathedrals are the greatest cultural glory of this country. He plans to refurbish their fabric by means of a full partnership between the public and private sectors. Other major public buildings, too, of course . . .’
I put the phone down. Bloody buildings. The man had not listened to a word I’d shrieked. He was a literalist: to him, fabric was no metaphor. New conks for gargoyles was what he was after, and a bit of Brasso on the weathercock. Naturally, the private sector would cough up for that: there is nothing iffy about a cathedral, shareholders will not leap up at AGMs and complain about chucking a million at York Minister. On the contrary, it is no bad thing for a board to be seen as God’s benefactors, it is a corking plea in mitigation should their hands get trapped in the till, it has a thick edge over backing unframed paintings or unrhymed verse or unknighted actors.
And what irks me almost as much is that, even for the literalist, cathedrals should top the list when our cultural fabric is under charitable review. Someone will always look after cathedrals. Had I identified, that night, the true bee in Palumbo’s bonnet, I should have turned myself into the Spirit of Cultural Fabric Yet to Come, dragged him down to Cricklewood, made him cringe at butchered conversion and greenfield encroachment, at junkfood facia and bunkered parking, at jerrycobbled estate and polystyrene precinct; I should have cocked his ear to the curfew tolling the knell of parting suburbia.
Bit late now. The window of opportunity has slammed, and one of the very few shortcomings of mock-mullioned double-glazing in snugfit cedarette surround is you can’t hear anyone shouting through it.