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When are you in Regent’s Park but not in Regent’s Park? When you’re at the Marriott Regent’s Park. Or to give it its correct name which is also, in its own way, incorrect: the Marriott Regents Park.
That’s the large hotel I’m passing on King Henry’s Road; architecturally it looks quite holidayish. It wouldn’t be out of place on the Majorcan coast. When I lived round here, we’d occasionally go for a drink in the bar, instead of going to the pub – although I think it might have been a Holiday Inn then.
You can’t see the park but, to be fair, it would be a very quick taxi ride or a ten-minute walk. Globally speaking it’s extremely close to Regent’s Park. At the solar system level they’re indistinguishable, part of the same speck. At a pan-galactic level, you’d reflect that the number of things in the universe further away from Regent’s Park than the Marriott Regents Park so utterly dwarfs the number of things closer that to complain would seem churlish. But I still reckon that an inter-dimensional traveller, on being shown to his room with a view of the A41, might have to bite his tongue (or tongues) to prevent himself (or herself or itself or third-alien-gender-self) from muttering that he thought it might have been a bit closer to Regent’s Park than this. And that they might have fucking kept the apostrophe.
When we drank there, I found it engagingly anonymous – a perfectly adequate hotel which could have been anywhere – certainly its name isn’t a particularly good clue. Also, the lager may have been slightly more expensive than in a pub but you got free peanuts. I think I worked out that, if you were on for a big night of peanut-eating, it might even work out cheaper. My friends were less keen to go there than I was, possibly because it was so devoid of atmosphere but possibly also because they didn’t feel they belonged there. We were a bunch of scuzzy, unemployed and impecunious ex-students and this was a place full of businessmen. I don’t think we were sneered at but it felt like a possibility.
I quite liked that possibility. I liked the idea of some self-important sales manager trying to assert that he had more right to buy a lager in a hotel than I did – so that I could angrily respond that my money was as good as his, while secretly thinking that it was better (even if it was far less plentiful). I suppose as a middle-class ex-public schoolboy I got a feeling of social confidence from a middle-ranking hotel (after all, my parents used to manage such places) which even the empty pockets and frayed clothes of the unsuccessful freelancer couldn’t shake. In fact, it was probably those very reduced circumstances that made me seek out the reassurance of an environment of unremarkable prosperity.
And also I fancy myself a bit. I reckon I’m something (or ‘summut’ as they say in Yorkshire, where almost everyone reckons they’re something and yet particularly resents it in others, so expressing it in fewer letters saves millions of man hours). That’s not to say that I don’t sometimes feel very shit about myself – I’m not always nice, organised, hard-working or sensible. But however broke, scruffy and unemployed I became, I could never quite shake my feeling that I was a man of consequence.
I really hope I don’t come across as if that’s what I think about myself. I’d hate to seem immodest. Not here, of course. I’m perfectly resigned to seeming immodest here – and I do so in a spirit of honesty. But I very seldom want people to realise that’s what I feel. Not because I’m ashamed of feeling a bit special (I hope everyone does) but because I’ve been brought up to believe that behaving modestly is one of the keystones of politeness. It’s something that maddens me about the direction our culture seems to be taking – led by reality TV – that this convention of modesty is being lost. In programmes such as The X Factor and The Apprentice, contestants are encouraged to voice the most megalomaniacal aspects of their self-belief and, should they be unfortunate enough actually to be as modest as I wish in non-autobiographical contexts to seem, to exaggerate them. We’re sliding into a society where the first thing you need to do to demonstrate that you’re any good at something is to say that you are. Under the old rules, boasts were assumed empty until proved otherwise. You had to impress with your actions, draw attention to yourself subtly without being seen to do so. It’s a hell of a lot more fun than the pantomime of self-belief we see on reality TV today. A society where you’re not allowed to blow your own trumpet is so much more nuanced, sophisticated and interesting than the grim world of literalism that’s being ushered in.
One of the weird side effects of my continued adherence to this fading convention is that sometimes it makes people think I have low self-esteem. Mostly this is a misapprehension from which I profit, as people are apt to be fonder of those they think of as self-doubting. But it’s annoying when people not only assume I think I’m shitter than I do, but then agree with that estimation. It reminds me of a moment in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when Arthur Dent, the hapless and very British central character, has been unusually helpful in a crisis. Zaphod Beeblebrox, the cool, preening, transatlantic-voiced President of the Galaxy, congratulates him and Dent replies: ‘Oh it was nothing.’ Beeblebrox says: ‘Oh was it? Forget it then.’
Some might think that acting all modest and yet feeling all megalomaniacal is dishonest. I say it’s a cultural thing. And of course it’s not megalomania (well, if it is, I’m the worst person to judge – just don’t put me in charge of soldiers), it’s just general high self-esteem. And it means that when I do have moments of self-loathing, I don’t feel worthless but that I’ve let myself down – which implies that, even when feeling low, I still sense that there’s something to let down.
And to those who say to me: ‘Oh I can see you’re the nervous one,’ or ‘You seem shy,’ I sometimes want to reply: ‘If I’m shy, why am I standing on the shiny platform?’ In showbusiness there are a lot of complete extroverts who uncomplicatedly want to be on stage being looked at. I’m a bit shyer than that; I don’t always like it. But at the end of the day, people who really hate the limelight don’t choose to stand in it.
I don’t know where my feeling of self-confidence comes from. Being the loved child of nice intelligent people in comfortable circumstances is an excellent start – but there are plenty of doted-on kids of the middle classes who doggedly self-loathe and self-harm. If I had to pick a reason why I’ve avoided that, I might very well plump for Form VI, the scholarship set at New College School, for boys who might win scholarships to public school.
I was a swot – I was one of the boys who were good at exams. In fact, I don’t think I’m flattering myself when I say that, in my year, I was the best at exams. I admit that this made me very proud. I loved being the best at something. I could never be best at sport – the activity that most schoolboys would probably choose to excel at – but being best at lessons was a very acceptable second-best sort of best.
I also had a sense that the disproportionate cachet which sporting prowess attracted was not something that would continue in the adult world. It’s caused by evolution failing to keep up with mankind’s fast-changing circumstances. Our enthusiasm for signs of physical strength and agility over the mental equivalents made a lot more sense when the economy was more reliant on catching woolly mammoth by hand than it has been for some millennia. Twenty million years from now, the boys who are good at maths will be cool and popular and get the girls – and by that time there won’t be an equation on earth that isn’t solved by robots.
So the swots weren’t top of the boys’ social tree, but they were valued, accorded grudging respect and not bullied. There were only seven of us in the scholarship set and we were, fairly ridiculously, treated like adults. The teachers enjoyed our lessons and so did we – and we didn’t have to pretend otherwise. This was an environment in which Lisa Simpson would have found acceptance – if she weren’t a girl.
We were constantly told that we were bright and special and that this was a brilliant academic opportunity afforded to few. It was assumed, even at that age, that we would go on to achieve things: get scholarships, go to Oxbridge, become professors (only academic success was really aspired to – no one was pushing us to become entrepreneurs). Our expectations and self-image were managed upwards. I loved it and I genuinely think that I’ve never quite lost the glow that being treated like that at a young age gave me. It has waxed and waned with my fortunes but never disappeared entirely.