The Salmon of Doubt

Wearing shorts. My mother pleaded with the principal on one occasion to please make an exception in my case and let me wear long trousers. But Jack Higgs, ever fair but firm, said no: I was only, six months away from going up to the main school, whereupon I, along with everybody else, would be able to wear long trousers. I would have to wait. At last I left the Prep School. And two weeks before the beginning of the Michaelmas term, my mother took me along to the school shop to buy—at last—a long-trousered school suit. And guess what? They didn’t make them in a size long enough for me. Let me just repeat that, so that the full horror of the situation can settle on you reading this as it did on me that day in the summer of 1964, standing in the school shop. They didn’t have any school trousers long enough for me.

They would have to make them specially. That would take six weeks. Six weeks. Six minus two was, as we had been so carefully and painstakingly taught, four. Which meant that for four whole weeks of the next term I was going to be the only boy in school wearing shorts. For the next two weeks I took up playing in the traffic, being careless with kitchen knives, and neglecting to stand clear of the doors on station platforms, but, sadly, I led a charmed life, and I had to go through with it: four weeks of the greatest humiliation and embarrassment known to man or, rather, to that most easily humiliated and embarrassed of all creatures, the overgrown twelve-year-old boy. We’ve all experienced those painful dreams in which we suddenly discover we are stark naked in the middle of the high street. Believe me, this was worse, and it wasn’t a dream.

The story rather fizzles out there because a month later, of course, I got my long trousers and was readmitted into polite society. But, believe me, I still carry the scars inside, and though I try my best to bestride the world like a Colossus, writing best-selling books and ... (well, that’s about it, really, I suppose), if I ever come across as a maladjusted, socially isolated, sad, hunched emotional cripple (I’m thinking mainly of Sunday mornings in February, here), then it’s those four weeks of having to wear short trousers in September 1964 that are to blame.

“Why” is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it.

The alphabet does not go “A B C D What? When? How?” but it does go “V W X Why?

“Why?” is always the most difficult question to answer. You know where you are when someone asks you “What’s the time?” or “When was the battle of 1066?” or “How do these seatbelts work that go tight when you slam the brakes on, Daddy?” The answers are easy and are, respectively,

“Seven-thirty-five in the evening,” “Ten-fifteen in the morning,” and “Don’t ask stupid questions.” But when you hear the word “Why?,” you know you’ve got one of the biggest unanswerables on your hands, such as “Why are we born?” or “Why do we die?” and “Why do we spend so much of the intervening time receiving junk mail?”

Or this one:

“Will you go to bed with me?”

“Why?”

There’s only ever been one good answer to that question “Why?” and perhaps we should have that in the alphabet as well. There’s room for it. “Why?” doesn’t have to be the last word, it isn’t even the last letter. How would it be if the alphabet ended not, “V W X Why? Z,” but “V W X Why not?” Don’t ask stupid questions.

From Hockney’s Alphabet

(Faber & Faber)

The Meaning of Liff* started life as an English exercise I had to do at school, which then got turned into a game fifteen

*The Meaning of Liff and its successor, The Deeper Meaning of Liff, are books coauthored by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. years later by John Lloyd and myself. We were sitting with a few friends in a Greek taverna playing charades and drinking retsina all afternoon until we needed to find a game that didn’t require so much standing up. It was simply this (it needed to be simple; the afternoon was too far advanced for complicated rules): someone would say the name of a town and somebody else would say what the word meant. You had to be there.

We rapidly discovered that there were an awful lot of experiences, ideas, and situations that everybody knew and recognized, but that never got properly identified simply because there wasn’t a word for them. They were all of the “Do you ever have the situation where ... ,” or “You know what feeling you get when ... ,” or “You know, I always thought it was just me ...” kind. All it needs is a word, and the thing is identified.