Love your enmities

Grudges make the world go around, according to Sophie Hannah. They are ‘an important and fascinating part of human experience’, which ought to be ‘protective, life-enhancing and fun’. I think this overstates the case somewhat, as I can’t see any pleasurableness, though I am aware that my own ability to harbour resentments is possibly pathological and blood-soaked.

The first thing I do each day is scan the obituary pages to see if any enemy has met with a fatal accident — and I fully understand Auden’s line about hearing with satisfaction, much later in life, of ‘the death by cancer of a once hated school master’. Not that being dead lets anyone off the hook. I still seethe about the little character actor who, though a paedophile known to the authorities, hired lawyers to persuade a judge that this was an inadmissible irrelevance, and that he could still sue me for libel to protect his reputation. (Oh well, since you ask — it was Graham Stark, the judge was the late Michael Davies, and what was defamatory was that I’d said Stark was ‘the only man in London with a flat up Peter Sellers’s arse’.)

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Sellers, by the way, kept what he called a Shit List, revised daily — names of the producers, directors and film reviewers who he’d deemed disobliging. My own catalogue would include a quite well-known if mediocre novelist, a total sponger, who over-meticulously divides up restaurant bills; a woman journalist who is as vile in person as she is in print (quite a feat); a minor television personality who was all over me like a cheap suit when he thought I’d be famous, and then dropped me when I wasn’t; the Welsh language mob who have turned my beloved South Wales into a phoney foreign country; and any number of off-hand shop assistants, nurses, waitresses, barmen and everyone involved with no-frills budget airlines.