Everybody, every busy man or woman, must have experienced the urge to drop everything. In moments of fatigue, moments when either the workload or the routine - the sameness of things - get on top of us, who has not offered a silent prayer: "Beam me up. Pluck me out. Whisk me away. Sweep me off my feet. Take me hostage. For three ha'pence I'd chuck all this in."
Each has an impossible dream about how we might abdicate. For some it would be holy orders in a monastery beneath Mount Sinai; for some, the ascent of Everest, the Foreign Legion, or a new life sketching wild flowers on the Isles of Scilly. And for others it might be a glorious slide into as many of the seven deadly sins as it proved possible to embrace before death. There can hardly be a living soul who has not felt this: the same urge in many different forms.
For most it's never more than a whim, wild, impossible, and passing. Yet the persistence with which something so foolish returns, seldom to wrestle us to the ground but instead to tug fleetingly at our sleeve, must mean something. There is a theme common to so many of these whimsies, but I struggle for the right words to describe it. "Conscription" is too military, "vocation" too mystical and "bondage" too sexual.
Maybe force majeure serves best; but each strains after the same thought: that the matter should be taken out of our hands.
We need rescuing from choice, especially moral choice. I am convinced that the deliciousness of helplessness helps explain the handcuffs and harnesses you will find in sex shops, the No which does not mean No, and the deeply incorrect fantasy entertained by some women (and, if the truth be known, men) of being taken by force.
But the secret, insistent appeal of the loss of personal autonomy goes much wider than sex. It is why some men seek to return to prison.
It is why the idea of being kidnapped so appeals. If - by force of arms, by tempest, by fire, by war or by the voice of God . . . by anything we cannot control - the "all this" in our lives should be taken from us, then persistent amid the tears, a small voice within us would rejoice. The baggage has been swept overboard. Hooray. And it was not our fault.
This is why gay men make such a ridiculous palaver about it not being our fault, as though we would be diminished by the act of choice. But not being our fault is important wherever an act of will would be hard to justify. Any character we can wholly admire, including our own, contains at its core some sense of duty.
A good person does not abandon wife, husband, family, children or work; a good person is faithful as far as he can be to all who love or depend upon him. And so, as our life proceeds, we build a network of obligation until we are caught in its web. That we should break the web is unthinkable - but oh that some sudden gale should blow it away! How we would weep. How we would laugh.
Whether the deus ex machina takes all this from us, or takes us from all this, matters less. Look at myth and literature. The idea of being snatched away props a thousand plots. Dorothy would have lost our sympathy if she had abandoned her kindly Aunt Em, but the whirlwind did it for her. Prospero loved his island, but it was the tempest, not choice, which cast him there. A fisherman who abandoned boat and family would not normally attract respect; but, commanded by the Son of
God to drop everything and become a fisher of men, he becomes exemplary.
For many still living, the Second World War was the adventure of their lives, spoilt by no stigma of having turned their backs on home, but crowned with the honour of serving as their country demanded.
Dutifulness and adventure: a new chapter, a clean slate to write it on, and yet a record unblemished by waywardness. Dutiful as far as we could be - but, glory be, placed by fate in a new world.
Perhaps I paint my fellow men from the palette of my own experience, but that is all we can ever do. Passing 50, I was feeling weighed down, in a rut.
Especially in my world which lies along the curious frontier between creativity and observation, many men and women are kept fresh by an invigorating sense of potential still unrealised. Some are sure they have within them the great novel, the great column as yet unwritten, the epoch-making proposal for television or radio, the idea which might change the world.
A suspicion that thus far the world has not quite discovered you, that you possess talents others have yet to recognise, can be frustrating, but, like Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, it gives a man something to live for: a dream unfulfilled. Every second comedian hopes he might one day play Hamlet. Many columnists hope that with practice or luck they might yet become a Bernard Levin, a Hugo Young, a Cyril Connolly or an Orwell.
But I never have. Working right at the limit of my abilities and extracting from my work a fair return, all the credit and attention I deserve, and more, I know I am good at what I do, but also that it is all I can do: write alpha to alpha-minus stuff, fairly consistently and quite fast; one of life's easy 2 (1)s and a voracious thief of other people's ideas, jokes, even phrases; a magpie with good powers of discrimination.
This has been true from the start and one might as well recognise it. As a boy I performed better in exams, on less work, than almost all my classmates. Quick-mindedness and confidence were the key. But in my class there would sometimes be a boy or girl who really was original. It was never me and never will be.
I do believe in luck and don't believe it's only what you make of it. Fate knocks some people down so hard so early that they never get up again. Fortune can raise another up and give him the confidence to fly; and thereafter, perhaps, he makes his own luck. That isn't humility but observation. I look at a rather neglected journalist like Ed Pearce, erratic but touched sometimes by a genius I shall never know, and feel a sense of undeserving. I
have also noticed creeping into my recent work (of which I am a busy critic) a certain careless abusiveness. This is easy for columnists to fall into and makes tolerable reading, but it is lazy and rude. Leafing through one of my books recently I found inserted a scrap of paper on which a friend, presumably after some drunken evening, had scrawled: "Piss off, Parris, you overrated bastard." That's not far from the truth, and seemed like a sign.
So it was time to piss off, at least for a while. But how? Where was the tempest, the war, the dreadful fire in which all my obligations perished, which could take me away on a long journey that did not look like impetuous caprice, or some kind of pitiable midlife breakdown? Then - my good luck again - it arrived.
I can almost deny instrumentality in my banishment to Desolation Island until August. A single shred of contrary evidence had better be confessed. Some months ago I was feeling fed-up and itchy-footed when Jeremy Bugler, who runs the TV production company sending me there, mentioned that the vile weather to which the Kerguelen archipelago is prone might just make it impossible for me to reboard the ship which had dropped me. In that case I'd have to await her return in August. I blurted
out "too bad; it would be a blessed relief" with a passion which perhaps he noted.
But there instrumentality ceases. When, a few weeks ago, we realised how fleeting would be the ship's wait, and I had the chance to cancel altogether, I can honestly say it was out of obligation to Jeremy's enthusiastic team that I opted to stay; or almost honestly say. So you see I did not choose this: it happened to me . . . didn't it?
And here I sit now, awaiting the ship which will take me, on the Isle of La Réunion, sweet birdsong and flowers all around me, the sky blue, the sun high, the Indian Ocean crashing on the reef beyond the white sands at my feet, penning a column of such sloppy self-indulgence as to send a Simon Jenkins shuddering for the "search for an 'I' and erase" function on his laptop - and expecting The Times to print it.
And you think I'm not lucky? In my Protestant soul I know I must pay for this. Maybe the island will be unendurable. Maybe the little group of French scientists there will dislike me. Maybe I'll freeze to death, or sink in the notorious bogs, or be blown away - as, on Desolation Island, a thousand brave dreams have been.
But the experience will be genuine and it will be new and - oh, sweetest of phrases - it's out of my hands now. I am beamed up.
