For many years the cartoonist Tony Husband and I travelled up and down the country presenting our ‘hilarious’ (blurb word) show A Cartoon History of Here in village halls all over the B-road place; all we needed was a flip chart for Tony and a stage for me and we were up up and away. Sometimes we’d be what we laughingly called ‘on tour’, which meant that we were away from home for a couple of nights staying in people’s spare bedrooms or small B&Bs or, occasionally (and these were my favourite), anonymous corporate hotels or (my second favourite) cottages by the sea. The late John Peel once said that listening to an album by the singer-songwriter Bridget St. John was like ‘renting a cottage by the sea’ and on the occasions when we woke up and put the kettle on in one of those beautiful kitchens, I thought that in some indefinable way our gig the night before had simply been a prelude to renting a cottage by the sea.
Once we stayed in a cottage in Perranporth, having done a gig at the local public hall; the next gig wasn’t too far away and so it meant we had that rare thing, a day at leisure. Tony, of course, had cartoons to do; at that time he was doing a daily one for a national newspaper, which meant that at some point in the morning he would ring the paper to get an idea of which story they wanted him to do the cartoon for. We’d then find a café somewhere and Tony would sketch four ideas on a sheet of paper. We’d then have to find a fax machine; sometimes the café owner would have a fax that Tony would charm them into letting him use on the promise of a free cartoon. Sometimes we’d have to find a business centre, somewhere that would charge us. Tony would send the cartoons off and we’d then have time for a stroll before he’d get the call from the newspaper that said ‘We like number three but can you make it funnier’ and then we’d usually have to find another café and a scanner.
The stroll in Cornwall was on a windy beach that flung my hair around like somebody chucking a firework. Kites tried to escape to the USA. Gulls gave up the unequal struggle and just swam around in the deep end of the sky. Tony took photographs and waited for the call from the newspaper. We sat on a bench and had takeaway coffee, which the breeze almost took away. We went to a newsagent and Tony browsed the magazine section like he always did, buying a couple he hadn’t come across before so that he could send them sample cartoons. I’m telling you all this like I’m reconstructing a crime scene because, as we walked back across the beach to the cottage, Tony began his familiar pocket-tapping dance that meant he’d lost his phone or his wallet or his keys or his glasses. It was inevitable, like the turning of the tide, that on one of our jaunts Tony would lose something. I glanced at him and he said ‘I can’t find my glasses’. Ah well, on a scale of one to ten the glasses are about a three. He wouldn’t be able to see to draw his cartoons but at least he could ring people up about it and buy magazines in a shop and get into his car and drive it.
I began the ritual, the antiphonal chant. ‘Do you remember when you last saw them? ’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you have them on in that shop where you bought the Yachting Monthly?’ ‘I don’t think so.’ ‘Did you have them on when we were sitting on that bench?’ ‘I can’t remember.’
Visitors to the beach that windy day would have been treated to the sight of what looked like a pair of men in late middle age beachcombing, or two men in late middle age performing a piece of Live Art. We wandered up and down like wading birds, watching for the glint of the glasses. Every now and then we’d think we’d seen them but it would always turn out to be glass not glasses. We somehow hoped that if the sea had taken the glasses the sea might somehow give them back. Tony is a gregarious man who likes to talk to anyone and he would ask total strangers ‘Have you seen my glasses?’ and they would either ignore him completely or just say no. Then, amazingly, somebody said ‘Yes’, and fished a pair of glasses out of their pocket. ‘I was just on my way to the police station with them.’ Tony put them on; he looked like Elton John Live At The Hollywood Bowl. They weren’t his but he kept them on just a couple of seconds too long before handing them back. I could see that he was tempted to say they were his.
So now, in an odd scenario like a black-and-white European film, there were two lost pairs of glasses and there could be two sets of people looking for them. We paced up and down as the tide came in and the time of our gig approached. The wind dropped and a kind of mocking mist strolled towards the fringes of the sea. I knew that we’d have to be going soon. Tony’s phone rang and I half hoped it was his glasses ringing from a call box. It was the newspaper asking for his final version of the cartoon. We’d established earlier that the organiser of the gig that evening had a scanner so the plan was to get to the village hall a little early, draw the cartoon and then get the organiser to scan it at the same time as making us a cup of tea and a lovely sandwich.
We walked towards the car; people passing us would have seen that we were visibly agitated. Tony sneezed, put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a huge white hanky. And a pair of glasses, which fell on to the car park’s tarmac with a guilty sound. Maybe, in some odd and indefinable way, the sea really had taken them and the sea really had given them back. Or sneezed them back.