TEN WOMEN WITH A PAST
Precedented people Vol. 1
BY WILL COE
Ten women of today assessed by those who preceded them.
A selection of articles published during 2011 in Egopendium.
TEN WOMEN WITH A PAST
Precedented people Vol. 1
by WILL COE
A Wilcooperative publication
Published in Great Britain 2011
by Wilcooperative Publishing
59 Crow Lane
Husborne Crawley
Bedford
MK43 0XA
UK
Smashwords edition
ISBN 978-0-9570025-2-4
Copyright Will Coe 2011
The right of Will Coe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
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TEN WOMEN WITH A PAST
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Belle de Jour by Samuel Pepys
Chapter 2: Carla Bruni-Sarkozy by Joséphine de Beauharnais
Chapter 3: Cheryl Cole by Helen of Troy
Chapter 4: Josephine Bernadette Devlin McAliskey by Grace O'Malley (Grainne Ni Mhaille)
Chapter 5: Kate Middleton by Wallis Simpson
Chapter 6: Gillian McKeith by Hippocrates
Chapter 7: Sarah Palin by Lizzie Borden
Chapter 8: Katie Price by Nell Gwynn
Chapter 9: Delia Smith by King Alfred the Great
Chapter 10: JK Rowling by the Brothers Grimm
Chapter 1: Belle de Jour by Samuel Pepys
MRS PEPYS WOULD NOT UNDERSTAND
Samuel Pepys assesses fellow diarist, Dr Brooke Magnanti, aka Belle de Jour
My wife would not understand why I am so moved by the diaries of Belle de Jour. She would draw conclusions that are misplaced.
For ten years I spied on my own thoughts, deeds and aspirations, committing them to paper unflinchingly every day in tachygraphic code while keeping their readership to one my entire life. Over the next four hundred years, I and countless other people have wondered why.
A diary can be more searing than a mountebank’s dental extraction. If there is not pure pain within it somewhere, the diarist is either a mere record keeper or blindly travelling the pot-holed avenue of self-delusion. An aide memoire is not a diary. A diary scours the nerve endings and applies poultices in equal measure. A diarist must have the steady hand of the barber-surgeon or they may sever an artery. No one but they may know of their deathly bleeding because a diary should only ever have one reader in mind.
Yet how delicious it is to read another’s closely private thoughts, to be intimate with their soul. The diarist knows this, so why would they ever write in the expectation that no other being would share their documentation of joys, tediums, passions and humiliations?
Dr Brooke Magnanti brought me to an understanding of the dilemma of the diarist which I did not have in my lifetime and which other famous diarists had not properly conveyed to me. The implied need for anonymity against the fevered desire for recognition, that is the diarist’s dilemma. She wrote to be read, to be recognised with praise and gold, though not to be identified. The clarity of her dilemma arose from her being a lapsed whore, one who had abandoned her trade for a more respectable yet less rewarding profession. This is not a woman who is ashamed of what she has done, she simply believed that it would not be in her self-interest to be associated with her recent deeds at this stage in her life. She invited the world to look at her diary but not at herself. She assumed a nom de plume, the ruse of many a great teller of fictions. As a calculation of continued anonymity this was clearly flawed. A writer of fiction is not laid bare by their narrative invention. A writer of facts about themselves may not be immediately stripped naked but they cannot avoid being left in considerable deshabille. The calculation of Dr Magnanti may have been as specious as my own. She protected her identity with great skill for several years. This was only possible because she was not in the public eye - though she was presumed to be - and she named no names. When fame and other rewards came calling she surrendered the respectability of Dr Brooke Magnanti with charming aplomb.
How did my mind run when I committed the first entry to my diary? My recollections are dim but it is clear that I was afraid of discovery or why else would I use Thomas Shelton’s system of writing? Dr Magnanti and I recorded our life in London with similar honesty, though her embellishments may have been greater than mine. The difference is that I was in public office and I scurrilously described figures in even higher office without disguising them. The personal cost-reward balance should Samuel Pepys’ diaries ever have hit the streets of Restoration London weighed considerably heavier on the cost side. Cold reason surely determines that I never meant my diaries to be published? If that reason pertained to my scribbling, why did I make fair copy of my rough notes, have the loose pages bound into six volumes, and catalogue them in my library with all the other books?
Intimate diaries
Compared to other diarists, Magnanti has helped more in unravelling my motivations. The great diarists were predominantly literary artists who kept journals so that their musings could be read. They address each page of their journal as though it were an audience. They are testing theories, story lines and dialogue to be refined later as fiction, poetry or play. A diary created an existential experience which helped them balance their lives and their creative works. My diaries were not literary efforts and were not designed to build or add lustre to my reputation. Like Magnanti’s work, they had a purpose that hid behind a cloud. In her case, the cloud was anonymity , in mine it was invisibility. I’m sure we both hoped our cloud would clear. We weren’t like Beatrix Potter who probably meant it when she said “No one will ever read this,” about her cryptic jottings. Or Franz Kafka, who must be genuinely appalled that his friend and literary executor Max Brod ignored his instruction to burn his diaries. Unlike Potter and Kafka, Brooke Magnanti and Samuel Pepys would never have been read if we had not kept a diary.
Who would have thought that the seminal diarist Samuel Pepys could have a kind word for the efforts of Belle de Jour? Has it surprised you that I am content to be measured alongside her instead of Woolf and Thoreau? Our diaries stand apart from ourselves. Ours is not the Book of Self which all other diarists aspire to write. For different reasons we hid the Self while knowing in time the Self must out.
Thank you , Brooke, I now accept that.
I enjoyed your subject matter too, which will surprise no one, least of all my wife.
Samuel Pepys’ opinion was interpreted in Feb 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: Book cover, find-book.co.uk
Photo: Diary, thedaoshea.blobspot.com
****
Chapter 2: Carla Bruni-Sarkozy by Joséphine de Beauharnais
Joséphine assesses the First Lady of France, Carla Bruni
The First Lady of the Republic of France should be incredible. Incredibly alluring. Incredibly passionate. Incredibly charming. Incredibly talked about. Incredibly herself.
Incredibly, I don’t think there has been a true First Lady of France since I lived in the Tuileries Palace two centuries ago. Until Carla. A woman with a reputation as deliciously improper as mine.
France feels better about herself when there is an unashamed Joséphine or Carla on the arm of their leader. Of all the great nations in the world, France is the most proudly and impossibly feminine. The famous nouns of France, République, Liberté and Raison are all feminine. The statue of Marianne symbolises the state in town halls and law courts across the country. She represents breaking with the Ancien Régime, which was always led by men. Yet, as poor Ségolène Royal is finding out, France does not want to be ruled by women; she is most happy when her leader is a man under the spell of a woman with the sparkle of devilry in her eyes. Neither a Margaret Thatcher nor an Angela Merkel is electable in France.
Intuitively, Sarkozy has tuned to this not only because he has a petit caporal complex but because he recognises that a beautiful First Lady could help keep him in power. It is the lesson but not the truth of history that you cannot have a Joséphine without a Bonaparte or a Bonaparte without a Joséphine. He wants France to see me in Carla because it helps everybody to see the Bonaparte in him. In his mind, she is the reality that justifies his pretensions. Not to me. He is a toy bear who thinks he’s a Grizzly. He happens, for the time being, to be in charge of the Republic of France but to my mind there would be no other similarities to my husband without Carla. I applaud his choice of partner, if not the man himself. Because I do see the resemblances, both physical and allegorical, between myself and Carla.
Carla and myself, as the world sees us
Look at her face. She could be my blood, there would be no shock in that. Thanks to my children, Eugene and Hortense, my Beauharnais bloodline weaves through Europe like the Rhine. Could a tributary have meandered into the bed of Marisa Borini, the mother of Carla Gilberta Bruni Tedeschi? I feel so. History is made in the bed of beautiful women, if only because we have more famous lovers. Though never as many as are rumoured.
We are not entirely French, Carla and I. I am Creole, she is a native Italian. That allows us a wildness which France might not forgive in her own daughters. Although the uptight English, the hypocritical Americans and the brutal Germans are accused of it, it is the French who have the most difficult relationship with sexuality. Open, and at the same time intensely private. In France, a woman with an extravagant sexual history and attached to a man in power is in danger of seeming a whore if she is French. If she not French through and through, the same woman can be forgiven and envied as a romantic ideal.
I am amused by scandal in spite of the harm it can do. Scandal is something breathed on you by those who wished they were afflicted by it themselves. I don’t care who you, or anyone then and since, think I slept with. Carla is no better described by her supposed lovemaking than I am. If we eat and drink with men, we must surely sleep with them. It is the law for all women with pretty bosoms, isn’t it? My beloved Bonaparte was intoxicated by my lovemaking, that is well recorded in his letters. This is a greater reflection of his lack of experience than my amatory skills. There is no suggestion that ‘Sarkoleon’ had not been on many bedroom manoeuvres before engaging with Carla but that doesn’t mean Carla hasn’t eclipsed them all.
Lovers, General Hoche and Mick Jagger
Of course, what husbands and wives get up to together is not the stuff of scandal. What entrances France is what we get up to outside the marital bed - with Director Barras, with General Hoche, with Mick Jagger and with Eric Clapton, among many others if the scandal mongers are to be believed. When we are brazen about it, the country’s heart flutters even more.
“I want a man with nuclear power, “ announces Carla, who is easily “ bored by monogamy”.
Yet Sarkozy, it seems, has kept her and impregnated her with perfect electoral timing. What a giant the little man must feel.
But Carla can never make him as tall as my husband.
Joséphine’s opinion was interpreted in May 2011
Image attribution
Photo: Carla Bruni, Wikipedia Commons
Photo: Joséphine, Wikipedia Commons
Photo: Carla Bruni, connect.pn.cpm
Photo: Joséphine, fotopedia.com
Photo: Jagger, nndb.com
Photo: Hoche, virtualarc.com
Chapter 3: Cheryl Cole by Helen of Troy
Helen of Troy assesses Cheryl Cole, another mythical beauty
When I saw Cheryl on the front cover of Vogue, I knew my randy father had been at it again.
You can’t look that beautiful without a splash of divinity in your lineage. It’s a long way from Mount Olympus to Newcastle but not if you’re Zeus and can transform into a bird.
I don’t know which goddess my father was chasing this time but if she tried to hide in the fog of the Tyne she must have been desperate to get away from him. It was probably her decision to hatch Cheryl in the Walker council estate because I doubt if it was my dad’s. Neither would he have given her to Joan Callaghan and Gary Tweedy to bring up. Though I never met him, I’m certain Zeus had a lot more style than that. He would usually find some gullible king or prince to foster his latest offspring, like my supposed father, Tyndareus. Perhaps Zeus wasn’t told about Cheryl. Perhaps the goddess he seduced wanted her shame hidden forever.
Let’s face it, if you want to ensure that your daughter doesn’t fulfil her destiny of being acknowledged as the most beautiful person on the planet, bringing her up in Newcastle is a good option.
Good option, but not good enough. It seems you can’t keep a great myth down.
Certainly not the Proto-Indo-European abduction myth, of which both Cheryl and I are examples. That’s the one where the ravishing beauty beloved of an entire nation is kidnapped by a powerful enemy for the purposes of ravishment and hellish retribution is unleashed.
Not that Cheryl will realise that she’s part of a myth. You don’t tend to when you’re right in the middle of it. When I had that fling with Paris, I honestly had no idea that we were kicking off the Trojan War.
I feel the need to tell Cheryl what’s really going on because I have a kind of sisterly affection for her - an affection I never felt for my other sis, that murderous bitch, Clytemnestra.
Good option, but not good enough. It seems you can’t keep a great myth down.
Certainly not the Proto-Indo-European abduction myth, of which both Cheryl and I are examples. That’s the one where the ravishing beauty beloved of an entire nation is kidnapped by a powerful enemy for the purposes of ravishment and hellish retribution is unleashed.
Not that Cheryl will realise that she’s part of a myth. You don’t tend to when you’re right in the middle of it. When I had that fling with Paris, I honestly had no idea that we were kicking off the Trojan War.
I feel the need to tell Cheryl what’s really going on because I have a kind of sisterly affection for her - an affection I never felt for my other sis, that murderous bitch, Clytemnestra.
First of all, I think she should accept that it’s not talent and personality that has got her where she is today. Undeniably, her face would have launched as many ships as mine if ship building hadn’t become a folk memory on the Tyne. But, because she has goddess-like looks, what has happened to her is pre-ordained. The world needs Cheryls and Helens as part of the psychic soup that sustains it. Understanding that is the only way to make sense of her life. The question she begs is not ‘What is Cheryl Cole?’ - that’s easy: the gaudy wrapping around a box with nothing in it. No, it’s ‘Why is Cheryl Cole?’.
Me, pursued by Theseus, Cheryl captured by Fox
Simple. Without her, the X-Factor War, the war to end all intelligent programming on world television, could not have started.
I don’t want to push the parallels too far but it helps me see how the abduction myth is playing out slightly differently this time.
On the face of it, the English were the Spartans in the X-Factor War, led by King Cowell as a latter-day Agamemnon. The Americans, with pint-sized Fox’s President of Alternative Entertainment, Mike Darnell, as an unlikely Paris, were the Trojans. They abducted Cheryl. However, instead of keeping her for ten years, they gave her back after a few weeks. Darnell discovered that her Geordie accent, over colourful outfits and reluctance to cosy up to resident princess, Paula Abdul, shattered her ‘iconic’ appeal.
Strangely, the English, or Cowell at least, appeared reluctant to take her back. Stranger still, Cheryl was replaced in Darnell’s affection by the girlfriend of British motor racing icon, Lewis Hamilton. Was Lewis a kind of Odysseus playing go-between?
More plausibly this was not a real war, it was another example of Simon Cowell tweaking the psychic underbelly of Anglo-US culture to make himself indescribably rich.
The only alternative possibility is that Cowell is my father, Zeus, in his latest earthly disguise. That he planned the X-Factor War by spiriting her away from that much misunderstood husband of hers, Ashley. That he is, in fact, the Z-Factor, manipulating the entire world through television.
Helen’s opinion was interpreted in June 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: Cheryl Cole, handbag.com
Photo: Helen by Sands, Wikipedia Commons
Photo: Greek vase in Louvre, Wikipedia Commons
Photo: Cheryl at Fox, bruce-juice.com
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Chapter 4: Josephine Bernadette Devlin McAliskey by Grace O'Malley (Grainne Ni Mhaille)
Pirate queen, Grace O’Malley assesses Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
I am angry about Bernadette. Not for who she is or what she's done but for what she says about the whole of Ireland. Britain's youngest elected MP, the woman who strode across the floor of the House of Commons to slap the Home Secretary in the face for defending the murderous behaviour of British soldiers, is being quietly erased from our island's history. As if Ireland had too many female heroes to need Bernadette Devlin McAliskey.
I understand the nuances. You think I'm making the unpardonable mistake of treating Bernadette as an Irishwoman when she's only a County Tyrone girl. You think I don't understand how divided Ireland has become. You think a bloodthirsty sea-captain in skirts cannot comprehend complex modern political situations. You forget I was the only enemy of England who negotiated peace face-to-face with Queen Elizabeth. I spoke Gaelic but I had command of English and Latin too. I was a sophisticated pirate.
Forget the English for the moment. To understand what 'divided' really means you should have lived when I did: under Brehon law, the Butlers and Fitzgeralds and the clan system. At least we knew what being Irish meant. The English were a help there.
Get a grip on yourselves. Bernadette's Irish: she just answers to a different parliament than those of you who live in the Republic. Or often doesn't answer in her case.
Take it from a woman who does make all the famous Irishwomen lists, there are two weaknesses in Bernadette's make up.
Firstly, she's not happy with the romantic heroine role. It could have been hers: imprisoned by the British, nearly assassinated, unwed mother who bred a terrorist daughter, founder of the Irish Republican Socialist Party and proposed for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. Those qualities are as heroic as those which glorified me as a pirate queen. Instead, all that time has tarred her with is the 'radical feminist' brush. It's because Bernadette has never wanted idolatry. She fights for other people. She meant it when she said, "I will take my seat and fight for your rights".
Her second weakness comes from the same root. The basic principle of politics, as it is in piracy, is plunder. You can plunder power or you can plunder wealth, often the two come together. Bernadette has never plundered her fame, which is why it has slipped away.
Bernadette with megaphone, me with pistols
Nevertheless, of all the Irish women around at the moment, I'd be happiest to have Bernadette in the O'Malley family. Of course I would be proud to be mother of either of the two Marys, Robinson and McAleese, but if I had ever been blessed with a sister for Margaret, I would have wanted her to be a Bernadette. She would have taught her brothers Owen and Theobald a thing or two about leading men. And Murrough about loyalty.
I've watched Bernadette Devlin McAliskey and wondered whether there really could be more than four centuries between us. What has changed for our island?
Elizabeth is still on the throne interfering from across the water, though she's added a digit. We still talk best with our fists. You might say that there are two Irelands now and there was only one when I was 'the most notorious woman in all the coasts of Ireland'. Not really. There was the Pale and outside the Pale. They may have moved the Pale from around Dublin to the north east corner of our land but I don't see a massive difference. Whereas the English were always at our throats, they seem to be stuck in them now. Neither is a pleasant feeling.
Ireland is still as tribal as it was when I fought the MacMahons, Joyces, MacSweeneys and Desmonds. I don't think Bernadette has found her tribe. Over the years, she has joined up with some strange in a quest to find political soul mates but rarely finding them.
Grace O’Malley’s opinion was interpreted in November 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, world-citizenship.org
Photo: Grace O’Malley, trutv.com
Photo: Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, with megaphone, socilalistworker.co.uk
Photo: Grace O’Malley as pirate, blog.whiskeydisks.com
****
Chapter 5: Kate Middleton by Wallis Simpson
Wallis Simpson assesses Kate Middleton, now Windsor
Kate Middleton is a commoner who has hitched onto a soon-to-be-king. Hell, I thought I’d done that too. And long before Grace Kelly. In other ways, gotta admit, Kate’s not like me at all. For a start, she’s Hershey Bar popular. No crap flung let alone stuck. Her linen’s clean while mine was kinda grubby from two hubbies and a stint in China where apparently the main skill I learnt wasn’t flower arranging. First lesson for Kate there - it’s not what you do, darlin’, it’s what they say you do that counts. She’ll know that already, she’s not all lippie and legs. She’s cute both ways. What could she possibly learn from a Baltimore gold digger with a talent for getting up noses? Okay, times have changed and the players are different, and maybe taking my advice on royal weddings is like going to your dentist with your gyno problems. Don’t take it as advice, then, but as warning from a woman with enough chutzpah to be made Times Magazine’s Man of the Year (a gender breakthrough for which I get no damn credit).
I don’t know what game Kate’s up to. Whatever it is, I only hope she knows she’s playing by the Woebegone Rules. Like the British Constitution, which I so nearly managed to trash back in the days, you can’t look up the Woebegone Rules. Not only are they not written down but they are made up on the hoof by the Woebegones themselves. Who are they? The only amusing thing my second husband ever did was to make up that name. It was what we called anyone in, or with a connection to, the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas. Think of it as the Masonic Lodge for the Brit Royals. There’s a creepy lot of aprons in it. I know nothing about the Freemasons but, as I see it now that the over-upholstered Scottish frump has finally passed, Shirley’s the GrandMaster and Zorba’s next in importance. I can’t imagine what indignities Kate’ll have to suffer if she’s ever allowed to join. You haven’t seen a sorrier bunch than the Woebegones since Mormon males heard polygamy was off the menu.
Scottish frump, Shirley and Zorba
I have to give it to Kate, the Woebegone Rules seem to be changing in her favour. She’s not there yet - I remember counting my unhatched chickens before the Woebegones crept in my coop and sat on them all. Although there are many women without titles who have been in a Woebegone prince’s bed, I was the only one to get within a pillow’s length of a throne. For most, I’d say it has been a rewarding but shortlived experience. As for mine, it was longlived enough, though not as rewarding as I’d set my trashy American heart on. Play by the rules, and Kate’s got a four poster booked in Buck House for ages to come. Good on her as long as she’s willing to pay the price for staying in the game. Emotionally, it’s a big ticket.
The Palace is no fairy grotto even though the Woebegones aren’t strangers to fairy tales. The point is, they don’t read them to their kids, they make them up themselves. Albert and Victoria, David and I, Charles and Diana and now Wills and Kate. The sad part is the common thread, which has not been ‘happy ever after’, has it? They aren’t the Woebegones for nothing.
On the plus side, love has been a thread, I think. Windsor males fall very hard (though not always for their wives as Diana found out - I’d have gotten on well with her) and Wills seems to be following suit. It adds considerably to their charm of being the most glamorous and gift giving bachelors in the world. Sadly, love can’t conquer all. Poor little David gave up his very large throne for me. Which is as big an ask as a woman can make of any man. Except, I didn’t ask. When the Woebegones dug up so much dirt on me that even the morganatic marriage went out of the window, I would have taken King’s mistress rather than exile’s wife. Of course, if they’d slipped in an HRH along with Duchess, I might not have gotten as bitchy about that afterwards. Another example of Woebegone Rules - titles and honours are confetti to be showered on the chinless and worthless unless refusing them can really hurt someone. I think Kate has that one sorted, thank God.
Back to love - or sex - not being enough. However endless the round of yachts, KTs, trips and dances, there’s always gaps in it. That’s when you’re too bored or tired to do anything but talk. I speak from the experience of countless dinner table conversations before I was deported to Paris, Woebegones have the intellectual span of the sparrow in the lecture hall. They can just about bring to mind where they crapped last and where they fancy going next. Suggestion to avoid another boring constitutional crisis: they taught his great grandpappy to speak, so perhaps the Woebegones should teach Wills to converse. How long his marriage lasts could depend on it.
There’s one tank-size chink in Woebegone Rules. Self criticism has never been my bag so it’s hard to admit I was wrong not to worry about being popular. The little people matter when you’re pitching against the royals. Diana proved that. I’ve watched her from the other side and gasped. No less a tramp than I was, she came with love handles that everyone felt they could get a grab on. We could have shared some stories. I know I’d have gotten on well with her. Unfortunately, I was already gaga by the time she came on the scene. The Woebegones won’t have a good word for either of us but Kate should take lessons from us both.
The people are always trumps however the Woebegones change their Rules.
Wallis Simpson’s opinion was interpreted in Jan 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: Duchess of Windsor, Wikipedia Commons
Image: Kate, womenes.blogspot.com
Photo: Elizabeth Bowes Lyon. copyright expired
Photo: Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visiting NASA, NASA / Paul E. Alers
****
Chapter 6: Gillian McKeith by Hippocrates
Hippocrates assesses jungle celebrity, Gillian McKeith
For a start, I don’t want to sound like a long-gone, bearded Greek guy mouthing off about some new age health guru who doesn’t know her hemlock from her fetlock. I was a modern thinker in 400 BC and I reckon I still am.
Let’s get this out of the way - Gillian McKeith hasn’t taken the Hippocratic Oath even though she’s advised a lot of people on their personal health. Everybody from Jennifer Aniston and Demi Moore downwards (or should it be upwards?). She’s a PhD, Doctor of Philosophy (not that long by Distance Learning), rather than an MD, Doctor of Medicine (five years of Hell whichever way you cook it). Well, here’s some news for you.
I didn’t swear any oaths either, at least not medical ones. I didn’t even write the Hippocratic Oath. Think of the royalties if I had! My followers jumped on the bandwagon of my twenty years wearing out my quill - no metaphor intended - in a Greek jail and cobbled it together years after I’d gone.
Hippocrates of Kos and McKeith of Perth aren’t as far apart as you’d imagine. A couple of weeks with the world watching you in the make-believe Australian jungle series, ‘I’m a Celebrity...Get me out of here!’, isn’t quite on a par with a third of a lifetime in a Greek cell but there are other comparisons.
Take why I was in jail and she was in the jungle.
We both got ourselves noticed by challenging what everybody was told to think.
In my opinion, nobody ever got ill because they upset the gods. It was a wildly radical idea at the time but I suggested that feeling unwell might be down to environmental factors such as diet and living habits. From there, I came to the conclusion that common sense and detailed observation, not superstition, were key to helping someone recover from an illness. Apparently that was tantamount to setting fire to the agora when all the citizens were dutifully assembled to hear what they should be thinking. Fear and religion were the best tools for keeping the hoi poloi in check. Medicine that wasn’t divinely prescribed was rabble-rousing. Hence the get-thee-to-a-prison response from the top tunics on my island.
Whizz on about twenty four centuries and you find our Gillian spouting on in her books, tv programmes and website about her mission to empower people to “improve their lives through information, food and lifestyle”. ‘Empower’, what a great word that is, never used by any of those famous Greek democrats who threw me in the slammer, was it? Along the way she advocates examination of the tongue, the mapping of pimples, and detailed scrutiny of faecal matter and urine as indicators of health.
One of Gillian's books and her fate in 'Celebrity'. Physician heal thyself?
To a barefooted, raggedy-arsed Greek like me, that doesn’t sound all that wacky. It doesn’t put her in a very different camp from me. Yet they threw her in the jungle for her beliefs and subjected her to ritualised humiliation with the entire world watching. Unlike me, who used the cell time to complete my rattling good yarn, ‘The Complicated Body’, she didn’t even get a book out of her incarceration.
She’s right to make a fuss about modern health practices.
As the ‘father of medicine’, I’m not all that happy with what’s being done in the family name either. I stood by general diagnoses and passive treatments. My focus was on patient care and prognosis, not diagnosis. Now, your physicians focus on specific diagnosis and specialised treatment, often involving poisonous drugs and frequent use of the scalpel. I prefer Gillian’s approach.
She emphasises the tongue as the window on the organs, with the extreme tip correlating to the heart; the bit slightly behind to the lungs; the right side to the gallbladder; the left side to the liver; the middle to the stomach and spleen, and the back to the kidneys, intestines and womb.
That seems to me a perfectly logical extension of my theory that the four humours (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, if you’ve forgotten) were the best indicators of whether a body was in balance.
Clearly, Gillian has studied a lot more widely than I was able. All I did was spend a few years in the asklepieion of Kos, taking lessons from the well-meaning but conventional-thinking Thracian physician, Herodicus of Selymbria. I think Gillian McKeith’s credentials are a lot more impressive.
Gillian has a BA in linguistics from Edinburgh; an MA in international relations from Pennsylvania; an MA and PhD in holistic nutrition from the American Holistic College of Nutrition; membership of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants; post-graduate membership of The Centre for Nutrition Education; certificates from the London School of Acupuncture and the Kailash Centre of Oriental Medicine; and a Master Herbalist Diploma (Honours) from The American College of Healthcare Sciences.
Who could argue with that?
Hippocrates opinion was interpreted in Sept 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: Gillian McKeith, femalefirst.co.uk
Photo: Hippocrates by Rubens, Wiki Commons
Photo: McKeith book, gillianmckeith.info
Photo: McKeith fainting, heatworld.com
****
Chapter 7: Sarah Palin by Lizzie Borden
Lizbeth Borden assesses Presidential pretender, Sarah Palin
There are no angels on earth but if there were one, it would be Sarah Palin. How could you raise five children, clean up the state of Alaska, run for Vice President and be touted by conservative America as its next and first female President, without heavenly wings?
That any woman can do that is hard for me to understand. I come from a time before Jack London had introduced Americans to Alaska as a romantic idea let alone as the 49th state. A time when a woman belonged to her father or her husband but not herself. Everything about her life is beyond my imagination except in one part. I know how she feels. In a small way, I even think I can offer myself as an example for her to follow. Yes, I have little doubt that Lizbeth Borden can tell Sarah Palin a thing or two about how to take the whacks.
Since me, has there been a woman in America so vilified for what she did not do? The most brutal and disgusting remarks have been made about Sarah’s family, her baby’s paternity, her marriage, her motherhood and her behaviour in office. The only thing that I can conceive as more repulsive is to be accused of taking an axe to your stepmother and then coldly waiting for an hour or so until you could do the same to your own father. In my case, and I firmly believe in Sarah’s case too, they were all despicable lies. America should be ashamed of what is done in the name of liberalism and freedom of speech. What Katie Couric and the Columbia Broadcasting System did to Sarah in her Vice-Presidential campaign was as obscenely distorted as my treatment after the New Bedford trial by Mr Hearst’s and Mr Pulitzer’s yellow press.
The jury in my trial, the jury in Sarah's CBS trial
The lesson I have to pass on to Sarah is that she will emerge stronger. If you share your truth with God, lies can only hurt, they cannot harm. Hold your head high, look others in the eye and conduct your life as you see fit not as men might see fitting. Be uplifted by the sly looks, the nudges and snide remarks because you are being noticed. I’m sure Sarah already knows this; there is something about her that says she will always be noticed.
What Sarah says should be listened to because it comes from a Christian heart. I tried to be devout and kind throughout my life. Yes, I spoke coldly to my stepmother, harassed my father to move to a bigger house and was harsh to my sister and my friend, Nance, but I was never unmaidenly or deliberately cruel. I have watched Sarah’s life and I know the same is true of her in spite of her swimsuit and gun photographs. And in spite of her remark that “there’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals, right next to the mashed potatoes”. I do not share her love of guns and hunting because I am a Yankee not an Alaskan. She may not be kind to animals but all else that she does is for the good of others, isn’t it?
I know very little about politics because my father did not think it seemly. Were it not for Sarah I would not think it a Christian calling. I love the story of when Sarah was being schooled in how to answer questions on the campaign trail. She was given three answers for each of a range of questions that could be anticipated. Not one of those answers had anything to do with the question. That offended her. She is the only politician I have ever heard who replies to a question with an answer. The truth is very dear to Sarah.
America must listen to Sarah Palin because she has the wisdom to know man is God’s creation. And the good sense to admit, “I made a conscious decision to put life in my Creator’s hands and trust him as I sought my life’s path.”
That path has taken her to the Tea Party. A homely name for a movement that wishes to preserve the original good in the United States Constitution. I cannot say whether that will be achieved by reduced government spending, opposition to oppressive taxation, and reduction of both the national debt and the federal budget deficit, but if Sarah Palin says it is so, Americans should believe her.
She is such an attractive woman that I almost blush to see her. Red high heels in the Oval Office, worn by a President not by a President’s plaything, would make me proud to be a woman.
I remember Belva Lockwood running for President when I was young and thinking, ‘What is she doing? That can never happen, we haven’t even got the vote’.
The Nineteenth Amendment gave us the vote a long time ago now and I think it’s time that it happened. So, c’mon ladies, get on board Sarah’s ‘One Nation’ bus.
Lizbeth Borden’s opinion was interpreted in May 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: Sarah Palin, diamondthoughts.com
Photo: Lizzie Borden, prairieghosts.com
Photo: Borden trial, Wikipedia Commons
Photo: Couric & Palin, mediabistro.com
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Chapter 8: Katie Price by Nell Gwynn
Royal mistress, Nell Gwynn, assesses the appeal of Katie Price
As a woman commonly described as a strumpet, trollop, whore, doxy and jade, I feel qualified to comment on how Katie Price runs her life. I have no problem with any woman making the most of her assets. Or any man, for that matter. I want to admire Katie, to cheer her, to toast her with the finest champagne as I so often was. I want to believe I would have done as she has done. I want to see echoes of Nell in the bold way she has taken her country by the balls. Like any strumpet. I’ll grasp at anything to make me feel better about myself.
Hard as I try, that’s not the way I incline.
I don’t think it’s in the nature of a strumpet to despise her kind without good reason. I know better than most why you become one. Am I making excuses? Do I only know how to become one? It’s possible. But I said it then, and I would not swallow my words now: a woman in love cannot be a whore. I never acted in his play – on stage, I was more Barbara Windsor than Flora Robson and tragedy didn’t suit my attributes – but John Ford sensed woman’s dilemma when he penned ‘Tis pity she’s a whore’. He was a man in thrall to sex and violence but he recognised overwhelming love nevertheless. I have to find the love in Katie to like her and I’m struggling.
I either don’t understand her or I don’t understand her world. It is not only time that separates us. I was the most famous woman of my age because I bedded a king as no other of my contemporaries did (and I had a legion of competitors, as I’m sure you know). Katie has made her fortune by besotting her country with her liberal charms. I admit mistress of a country is a harder role than king’s strumpet but, to judge her, I have to ask: does she love her country as much as I loved my master?
I wouldn’t have known the word – I was barely able to read back then – but I was an icon, as Katie surely is today. What does that say about our respective days? If I assert a right to look down on her, does that mean that I think nothing has really changed in three hundred years. Men are men and power is power; it’s only the cloaks that are different, is that it?
I’m being too clever, I hear you think. ‘You weren’t famous and powerful because you could totter prettily along beside fellows like Wren, Hooke and Boyle.’ Perhaps not. ’Clever, clever Nell,’ they used to say and you think I took it as earned praise not venal flattery, don’t you? Again, perhaps. ‘You’re no fool, Katie,’ is being said just as often and Katie will smile that smile that only really works when it is fixed in time. Like me, she knows exactly how stupid she is. So we have one connection that is not distasteful. A smidgeon of self-awareness. What are the others and do they support my right, or determination, to like myself but not her?
My Coal Yard Alley beginnings were humbler than Katie’s Newport and Brighton start, though only by a mite. We were introduced to sex with the same absence of a ‘by your leave’. Therefore there are excuses for our behaviour that are shared. After those have been considered, I hope the divergences between us stand out more.
‘Do strumpets enjoy sex and is that why they are whores?’ I know that question is still unanswered in men’s heads and never will be. Sex to a whore is as getting wet is to a sailor. Rape turned me off sex no more than it has Katie. Nor no more than it turned us on. Maybe it educated us very quickly, not about sex but about men. Whatever the trigger, we both used sex to better ourselves. I know there’s a criticism both implied and inferred there and I’m not entirely willing to accept it.
I had little at the beginning. My mother sold her body to buy gin. A lot of gin, requiring volume transactions. My father never knew me – you didn’t get weekend passes from debtor’s prisons in my day. I had a sister, who I loved and who loved me. Apart from that, I had bumps on my body and a hole between my legs. If those are the only advantages life doled out, how can you be blamed for maximising them? You may not accept it as an excuse but I didn’t go down the volume route like my ma. I never had to, even later in my life. Luck rather than an individual morality is the cause of that. I know I was a low frequency whore mainly because an orange seller died a few days before I would have been consigned to Meg Ryan’s brothel.
Patrons of the King’s Theatre lapped up my oranges as though citrus deprivation was as great a threat as the plague. I see the symbolism of those shiny, round suckable fruits now, and I’m sure I sensed it then, as young and unschooled as I was. Slavering minds may seek melons as a better analogy but I was a petite girl. Oranges suited me. Both juicy and tart, which is how most men have found me. As a wile to make men look at your breasts, there is no better excuse than a basket of oranges platformed below them. No, that’s not the way to put it, is it? You don’t need wiles to make men ogle your chest, every woman knows that. What a woman wants is an excuse to display her tits without feeling tawdry about it, isn’t that it? The greater my décolletage, the more oranges I sold. Marketing you’d call it now, not indecency. Fresh oranges, mild cleavage, a genuine smile and a lively retort for every customer made me a sales package irresistible to commoner and king alike.
So can I scorn Katie for focusing attention on her most obvious attributes too? Can I take the higher ground because she hasn’t used natural devices, she’s used a surgeon’s scalpel and bags of jelly to get noticed? C’mon, Nell, the world’s the stage nowadays, so more drastic ruses may be perfectly acceptable for making your way in an equally cruel society. Costermongering wouldn’t get a girl anywhere now, I can grasp that. I unlaced my bodice at most opportunities, even when I was meeting Charlie’s Queen. How can I feel superior to Katie about that? Exclusivity, I tell myself. Katie has endowed the whole globe with her chesty melons while I only used mine to entertain court and theatre goers. I know that’s specious, that it’s the same damn thing.
I have to look elsewhere to put Katie out of my shadow. Wit was my greatest abundance, if you set aside luck. Lowly aimed and sexually charged it may have been, but it won me favour from some of the ladies of Westminster as well as many of its lords. I was earthy without being crass. I hope I have something over Katie here. No one has called her a wit unless from typographical error. Her critics, and I realise I am not alone in being one, suggest that she doesn’t just play dumb, she really is. Nonsense, of course. There are tribes of women with the same amount of silicon and only the gutter to live in. Katie may splash around but she’ll never drown there. She is remorseless in using sexual availability to garnish her fortune.
Painting of a young lady by Lely, thought to be Lady Castlemaine
Exactly as Lady Castlemaine did, and I knew her too well to think that foolishness of any kind ever tinged that woman.
Nell Gwynn’s opinion was interpreted in Dec 2010.
Image attribution
Photo: Katie Price, startrip.tv
Image: Nell Gwynn, gwynn.name
Photo: Young girl from theartwolf.com
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Chapter 9: Delia Smith by King Alfred the Great
Cake-burning king, Alfred of Wessex, assesses Delia Smith's cooking
I doubt that Delia thinks of me when she slips another rackful into her oven. Is it the hubris of a king to think her debt to me is greater than she realises? This disturbs me because I have an ego to protect, a small slur to wipe from your collective memory. ‘I was not a great man in the kitchen’. I say it softly, because humility is not the cloth of kingship. My mishap with the cakes threw the focus of my subjects onto the English kitchen. And in that Delia carries my apron. So I will defend my reputation before I laud hers. A king takes precedence over a subject. That much has not changed.
You will appreciate that I have little to be humble about. No other Briton has been appended Great (Rhodri and Llywelyn were Welsh and would not wish to be characterised as British). Almost everything I did enhanced the fame and fortune of what has become Great Britain.
Should I then admit to an ignominious flaw? Let me make it clear that the security of Britain, the laws of Britain, the navy of Britain are testament to my contribution to my country before I face the question of whether the nation’s less than glorious culinary reputation also owes something to me?
I could deny that it ever happened. That the burnt cakes tale was spun by monks who needed to humanise me. Monks who conspired to put my divinity below God by illustrating that, however much a king achieves, he will always have his human failures. It must have amused them to compare what the Lord’s Son conjured from a few loaves and fishes with what I made of an ovenload of cakes.
The fact of the matter is that the monks had no need to be so clever. They didn’t make it up: it happened the way it is in the primary school textbooks. Of course, they weren’t cakes as you know them. Aunt Bessie didn’t descend on swineherds’ cottages in Somerset with trays laden with uncooked foreign fancies. They were small loaves, dumplings possibly, that would sustain a man returning home exhausted by herding swine. I can be no more certain about categorising them than that because, as I have acknowledged, I was no king in the kitchen. Once I’d supervised their baking, no one would have been able to judge whether they had begun their rise and blackened fall as rye and acorn dumplings or incontinent weasel droppings. I watched the embers, not the cakes above them. I beg no pardon for that. The mesmerising embers focused my mind and fired my determination to slink no longer. They were my food for thought. To hell with the cakes. My sole regret is that my inattention to them has achieved enduring mythical status.
Cooking eggs the right way, cooking cakes the wrong way
Why, you or I might ask, should a king be scorned for burning a peasant’s food when he had destiny to grapple with? I know see that it’s all about metaphor. Delia has taught me that. It is as much the duty of a king to sustain his people as it is to protect them. His relationship with food is as important to his subjects as his sword. The psyche of a nation stems from its stomach. Delia Smith epitomises a wholesome, well-grounded nation – and I promise I will get round to discussing her – while I seem to bring to mind a jittery and unfinished one. That’s not only disrespectful, it’s unfair.
When I ruled Wessex, I understood the role of food in the exercise of sovereignty, though not as clearly as I should have. With the retributive power of authority, I taxed all my vassals for the crops - the rye, the barley, the millet, the oats - they produced. But as a symbol of my own duty towards them, I felt bounden in return to bake their bread in my ovens. A grander gesture than I fully realised. Like many lords who were to follow me, I misunderstood the moral power of that. I cared little that that my subjects shied away from the public ovens, preferring to cook their flour at home in the embers of their own hearths. I let a link that binds a king to his people rust away. Which only compounded my image as the cake burner. If I have anything to apologise for, it is no more than that. I left the English to their own devices in the kitchen and it has taken centuries for that oversight to be rectified.
No two hands are entirely responsible for that recent recovery but I would single out one pair that has undone much of the harm I did to the nation’s gastronomic ego. Delia Smith’s.
Would anything have changed if it had been an early Delia who graciously welcomed a dishevelled rebel into her cottage deep in the fens? For a king so sure of himself, I am troubled that I cannot answer with certainty.
What Delia says is so simple, so sensible and so infallible. I would have listened to her, understood what she said and carried out her instructions calmly and without confusion. With my mealtime responsibilities made clear, the cakes would not have burnt but perhaps matters of state would not have concentrated my mind. The consequences might have been significant. A man of full belly in front of a warm fire is less inclined to wander further into fenlands to prepare for renewed battle with ferocious and well fortified invaders. Had I followed Delia’s cooking instructions, the Danes might still be in Chippenham.
Enough conjecturing, I pay homage to Delia because she has done as much to unite her countrymen as any monarch after me. I see that Britain can cook now. You tolerate curry houses, chinese eateries, pizza parlours and tapas bars, but you are proud to go home and rustle up a beef and stilton souffle that will out flavour them all. Delia has helped you understand and follow the laws of cookery, breaking them when necessary to enrich the common good.
I know of no one who can communicate better the role and rule of law.
King Alfred’s opinion was interpreted in Nov 2010.
Image attribution
Photo: Delia, thedailywiggle.com
Photo: King Alfred statue, thisishampshire.net
Image: Burning the cakes, heritage-images.com
Photo: How to cook book, bramleyapples.co.uk
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Chapter 10: JK Rowling by the Brothers Grimm
The Brothers Grimm assess JK Rowling's fairy tale
Wilhelm: She's amazing. She could have been in one of our Kinder-und Hausmärchen. Her life is as much a fairy tale as Potter's, don't you think, brother? She must think she's still dreaming.
Jakob: You've lowered your standards. Where's the violence in her life, Wilhelm? We wouldn't have called anything a fairy tale unless it was riddled through with evil and violence. You've bought into this Disney thing, haven't you? Where kissing frogs is about as unpleasant as it gets. Don't you remember that, in our original, the frog was hurled at the wall to wake him up? That kind of Disney schmaltz is what's making children ungovernable these days. Fear provides the structure a child needs. How can Rowling's life be a lesson in structure to anyone?
Wilhelm: She had to struggle, Jakob, but came through magnificently. Give her that.
Jakob: Rowling lived in Scotland, which, I concede, may well be a struggle for anyone. She attended Exeter University, which is only slightly humiliating. She spent a year in Paris without getting raped, addicted or consumptive. She had to spend hours in a coffee house so that she could think in peace, which might have strained her bladder but usually is not physically or psychologically damaging. The State was giving Rowling money, which I don't believe is inevitably ruinous to self-esteem. Her exposure to monsters has been limited to all those award ceremonies she goes to. No, Wilhelm, there has never been anything frightening in her plight, anything moral in her life story. She had one idea and bludgeoned it all the way to the bank. Which is what every mediocre story teller in the world wants to do.
Wilhelm: You're jealous, brother. Which saddens me. We were never after fame and fortune. Most of it came after we were gone, anyway.
Jakob: Not jealous. Angered, perhaps, at the way the world judges worth. We weren't about Hansel and Gretel, The Girl with No Hands, Snow White or The Old Woman in the Wood, we were about a sense of national identity. By plying visitors to our house in Kassel with cordials and beers, by listening to their favourite stories, we helped Germans understand what it is to be German. I'm not saying we did more than Bismarck to unify our country but our collections of folk legends, along with our Deutsches Wörterbuch, made people proud of German culture. Bismarck built on that. Is any part of the world stronger for what Rowling is or does?
Wilhelm: Florida?
Jakob: Are you deliberately upsetting me, Wilhelm? Is the fact that I'm still living with you and your wife so annoying?
Wilhelm: I don't literally want you to move on, brother, but I would like to see some of your attitudes soften. Become more accepting of a world that has changed. Theme Park envy is not attractive. Besides, we have a theme park too.
The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Orlando, Florida
Jakob: We have a space in the German Culture Village on Miyakojima Island, visited only by bored Japanese. She has The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at the Universal Orlando Resort, visited by hordes from around the world. Almost a thousand culture-forming tales and legends outshone by one strung-out story of a lovable boy wizard. It's humiliating.
Wilhelm: You're forgetting the Spreepark in Berlin where every German who wanted to terrify their children sent them on spooky rides into a giant wolf's mouth inspired by our tales.
Jakob: It's derelict. Only used as a film set.
Wilhelm: Yes, brother, perhaps because Rowling understands what children want a lot better than we did. You never had children, Jakob. The stories you collected were never for children, they were allegories of the dark and dangerous world adults lived in. As soon as I had my first son, I understood why, if we were to call them childrens' Fairytales, we had to change them. Rowling is only building on my style.
Jakob: Your style? Listen to yourself, Wilhelm. As though I had little to do with the books! You polished what I collected, that's all. I wasn't going to say this, brother, but I think Rowling's style is better for children. More sympathetic.
Wilhelm: If that's your attitude, I'm not sure we can stay under the same roof.
Jakob: You want me to move out?
Wilhelm: It wouldn't be before time. You are two hundred and twenty five years old.
The Brothers’ opinion was interpreted in July 2011.
Image attribution
Photo: Brothers Grimm statue, Wikipedia Commons
Photo: JK Rowling, bbc.co.uk
Photo: Theme Park, hollywoodnews.com
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About the author
Will Coe is the Editor and Publisher of Egopendium (http://www.egopendium.co.uk), the online magazine that looks at current personalities from the perspective of historical figures with whom they have something in common.
TWENTY MEN WITH A PAST, volume 2 of Precedented people, is also available as a free e-book.
Will Coe is also the author of 'THE ARCHER PRISM', which explores the fascinating life of Elizabethan courtier, writer and inventor of the flush toilet, Sir John Harington, as he now sees himself, using Jeffrey Archer as his lens.
This e-novel is in the Egopendium spirit. Instead of looking at a modern life through an historical lens, it uses the prism of a modern life to help an historical figure understand his own.
It's a fictional autobiography with a difference.
Connect with me online
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ #!/editorego
Facebook: http://facebook.com/Egopendium
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/willcoe
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