Read Online Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions by Martin Amis - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Martin Amis
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'well chuffed'. This would give him more pleasure than anything else he intended to bring back from China. Money isn't everything, he pointed out. And China, however reluctantly, would be forced to agree. On the flight home the 747 made its first stop in Hong Kong, arrowing in through the genie-clouds above the bay, past the golden cigarette-lighters of the skyscrapers and sparkling hotels - a Manhattan, a Mammon, a vast duty-free store, perched on the very tip of the East, and destined to be dismantled and flattened out into the Chinese fold. One couldn't escape the impression that most foreign visitors make the trip to China chiefly for the shopping. In hotel lobbies, in airport lounges, one was always hearing elderly and prosperous Americans talking lecherously about the latest Friendship Store they had plundered, or planned to plunder. It was said of one press photographer in our party, on the day before our return, that 'his room looked like a Friendship Store' . . . While the Directors sprawled in First and Business, the players dozed with their manager in Economy, their faces set in scowls of discomfort. But the team roused itself for the transit lounge (where they have cameras and gadgets, as well as silk and jade), and we all trudged out for one more crack at the loot.
Observer, 1983
Postscript: In terms of cultural responsibility the Watford footballers behaved even better than this account admits -especially when you compared them to certain elements in the press corps. I remember encountering Wilf Rostron, the young defender, in the hotel lobby in Shanghai. He was on his way from the ballet to the opera. Accompanied by the Sun's Voice of Sport, John Sadler, I was on my way from the bowling alley to the snooker room . . . The esprit of the players was a tribute to Graham Taylor. Late at night, ensconced in an armchair, with the pressmen gathered piously at his feet, Taylor would talk of the deeper mysteries of the sport, and would air his dream of a management job somewhere in his native North-East - Sunderland? Newcastle? As far as I remember he never mentioned the possibility of managing England. I write these words on the eve of England's World Cup qualifier against Holland at Wembley: Taylor's watershed, or his Waterloo. But it doesn't surprise me that he seems physically undiminished by the job. Bobby Robson, if you recall, was a shot-faced spectre after about six months. Taylor is made of stubborner stuff. As for the 'enigmatic' — i.e. bafflingly ineffective — John Barnes: there probably isn't any upper limit for bodily splendour in a footballer (look at Ruud Gullit), but Barnes struck me as someone close to being overwhelmed by his own attributes. He appeared to spend much of his free time examining various portions of his person (his forearms, his calves), not from any concern about injury but in simple admiration. Often his hand would rest proprietorially on the prow of his skimpy white shorts. When he arrived he made quite a speech about the need to respect Chinese culture. The next day he turned down his only chance to visit the Great Wall (the much more ebullient, Anglicised and squeaky-voiced Luther Blissett went off alone in a taxi). Taylor said: 'How can you pass up the Great Wall, talking like you were talking yesterday?' Barnes didn't answer, but fell to the contemplation of some neglected highpoint of his physique — his collarbone, his elbow.
JOHN UPDIKE
I met up with Updike at Mass. General - that is to say, at the Wang Ambulatory Care Center of Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. The brilliant, fanatically productive and scandalously self-revealing novelist had been scheduled to have a cancerous or cancer-prone wart removed from the side of his hand at 9:30 that morning. It was 10:30 when we eye-contacted each other in the swirling ground-floor cafeteria. 'You know what I look like,' he had said on the telephone. And there was no mistaking him (apart from anything
Observer, 1983
Postscript: In terms of cultural responsibility the Watford footballers behaved even better than this account admits -especially when you compared them to certain elements in the press corps. I remember encountering Wilf Rostron, the young defender, in the hotel lobby in Shanghai. He was on his way from the ballet to the opera. Accompanied by the Sun's Voice of Sport, John Sadler, I was on my way from the bowling alley to the snooker room . . . The esprit of the players was a tribute to Graham Taylor. Late at night, ensconced in an armchair, with the pressmen gathered piously at his feet, Taylor would talk of the deeper mysteries of the sport, and would air his dream of a management job somewhere in his native North-East - Sunderland? Newcastle? As far as I remember he never mentioned the possibility of managing England. I write these words on the eve of England's World Cup qualifier against Holland at Wembley: Taylor's watershed, or his Waterloo. But it doesn't surprise me that he seems physically undiminished by the job. Bobby Robson, if you recall, was a shot-faced spectre after about six months. Taylor is made of stubborner stuff. As for the 'enigmatic' — i.e. bafflingly ineffective — John Barnes: there probably isn't any upper limit for bodily splendour in a footballer (look at Ruud Gullit), but Barnes struck me as someone close to being overwhelmed by his own attributes. He appeared to spend much of his free time examining various portions of his person (his forearms, his calves), not from any concern about injury but in simple admiration. Often his hand would rest proprietorially on the prow of his skimpy white shorts. When he arrived he made quite a speech about the need to respect Chinese culture. The next day he turned down his only chance to visit the Great Wall (the much more ebullient, Anglicised and squeaky-voiced Luther Blissett went off alone in a taxi). Taylor said: 'How can you pass up the Great Wall, talking like you were talking yesterday?' Barnes didn't answer, but fell to the contemplation of some neglected highpoint of his physique — his collarbone, his elbow.
JOHN UPDIKE
I met up with Updike at Mass. General - that is to say, at the Wang Ambulatory Care Center of Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. The brilliant, fanatically productive and scandalously self-revealing novelist had been scheduled to have a cancerous or cancer-prone wart removed from the side of his hand at 9:30 that morning. It was 10:30 when we eye-contacted each other in the swirling ground-floor cafeteria. 'You know what I look like,' he had said on the telephone. And there was no mistaking him (apart from anything
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