Spreading the pleasure of life
Apr 19th, 2008 | By admin | Category: EntertainmentTake a quart of fresh cream. Resist the urge to drink it straight from the bottle or to tip it on to chocolate cake to make a sludge of glory. I know thats a lot to ask but today were aiming high.
Shake the cream. Shake it till your arm aches. When the miracle happens, youll sense it. Open your bottle of cream. Floating there youll find a nugget of pale and squidgy gold. People call it butter. I call it a miracle.
Professor Rod Jackson, who is an epidemiologist from Auckland, calls it poison.
Few words sound as good as the word butter. It sounds fat. It sounds lazy. It sounds indulgent. And because it sounds good we have attached it to good things.
Buttercups are the richest of spring flowers.
Hold a buttercup under your chin and your face is bathed in reflected gold.
To butter someone up is to ply him with flattery and gifts until his defences crumble. Butter, you see, is a seducer. Would anyone have watched The Last Tango in Paris if Marlon Brando had reached for the low-fat spread? Butter is sensuous.
And consider butterflies. We hate most insects because we know theyll inherit the earth.
We know that ants and cockroaches watched the dinosaurs come and go.
We know that flies have fed on the dung of pterodactyls and the rotting flesh of mammoths. And we know that insects will be thriving when the human race is long gone.
So we resent them. We give them harsh names and we point ferocious aerosols at them, with the sole exception of butterflies.
Butterflies seem threatless, vulnerable, pretty and good. We love them. Though I expect Professor Jackson swats them.
When I was a child my mother made biscuits. They were earnest oaten things, just lumps of roughage.
But I knew how to make them good. I made butter sandwiches with them. When my young teeth closed on the biscuits, the butter curled out from between them. I have only to close my eyes now and I can taste it.
Imagine sweet corn without butter, crumpets without butter, asparagus without butter, France without butter. I have been rude about the French but even I acknowledge they can cook.
Their sauces are pleasure on a spoon. And all French sauces are based on butter. In the ever-rolling now of life, butter is joy.
And Professor Jackson is a killjoy.
Theres no reason, he says, to use butter in anything. Wrong, prof, wrong. There is a single irrefutable reason. I like the stuff.
Professor Jackson hates it with a messianic passion. All the good things have been taken out, he says, Theyve just left the poison. Poison is a strong word, prof, and here its a false one. Poisons only purpose is to kill. Butters first purpose is to please. And as sage old Kingsley Amis said, and as I never tire of repeating, no pleasure is worth giving up for two more years in a resthome.
Your work, prof, has blinded you to a distinction. Peering down your microscope youve lost sight of the difference between longevity and living. You know from your research that butter clogs arteries and that clogged arteries kill. You know your physiology. And your concern is only with keeping the physiology going as long as possible, as though to breathe were life. How long is it since you read Tennyson, prof? My mother is 85. Apart from during the war, she has eaten butter every day of her life. And wouldnt you know it, she has heart problems.
But butter did not cause the heart problems. Being 85 caused them. The body runs down, prof, and then it stops. When it stops matters far less than what it gets up to before it stops. Living does not need to be an Everest-climbing, parapenting, swashbuckling rodeo ride. It can be a quiet domestic bobbing on a gentle swell of ups and down. But those ups and downs are the pleasures and pains of being alive. And one of the little pleasures is butter.
I have just learned that in New Zealand margarine was once forbidden by law. Oh wise times. But that golden age ended in 1972. And now Professor Jackson and his fellow busybodies want us to live as long as, say, the Japanese do. They tut over our mortality rates with a frisson of virtuous horror and they point the finger at butter and its sister pleasures. They are wrong. It doesnt matter if the Japanese live longer than we do. Its not a competition.
And one slice of toast with butter thick enough to leave tooth marks is worth a wrinkled decade of rice and fish. Be off with you, prof.
Leave me alone.
