“If a man cannot work with his hands,” no less an authority than Dr Johnson proclaimed, “then he is stupid.” By which criterion, I am indeed a dunce. I could try to blame my parents – epigones, both, who couldn’t get used to the idea that there weren’t hiding – in some curious interdimensional Downton Abbey, mysteriously concealed in our three-bedroom suburban semi – a lot of servants and other handy staff.
They used to berate each other for their failings in this regard – which extended from their own inability to put up a picture or slap a bit of paint on a wall, to their incompetence when it even came to getting anyone less stupid than they to do it. As a child, I felt acute shame when I heard them arguing about tradesmen, who they invariably referred to, de wannabe haut en bas, that they still remained, as “little men”.
Still, I’ve had decades to rectify my own woeful upbringing in this practical regard – and haven’t. It once took me about a week to fit a toilet roll holder in the bathroom. I’m not saying I overthought it, but price comparison on the drill took a full day – shopping for it and other necessaries, another. The blueprints were extensive – if there had been a CAD programme, I would’ve used it. When the wife got back from her holiday, she tartly observed that it was the wrong way up: good to dispense bum-wipe to angels in zero gravity, not so effective for sublunary folk who actually defecate.
So, enter Rashad – who, the friend of a friend who recommended him said, is Iranian, but who I suspect is really Azeri; not that I’m letting on to Mrs S, who’s of Armenian origin: we don’t want a postcolonial Central Asian war being fought in the front room. Which is where I want Rashad to hang a large panorama of London that was given away free with the Illustrated London News in, um, 1848.
Can’t I do this myself? No. I can’t: I might be able to get it up there wonkily, but I want the panorama to be so precisely aligned, that when you move from this room to the next, it seems to elide seamlessly with the series of six of Hokusai’s famous series of views of Mount Fuji, which are hung on the other side of the wall. The effect desired is that the viewer feels themselves to be moving effortlessly from 19th-century London, to, um, 19th-century Japan.
And for this to happen – given Rashad speaks not one word of English, while my Azerbaijani is pretty rusty – we have to find a means of communicating. The Holy Spirit is the obvious means – in the Acts of the Apostles, the eponymous religious heroes are filled with it, and begin “to speak with other tongues.” Not just babble, mind, for: “there were dwelling at Jerusalem devout men… out of every nation under heaven.” Such that “When the multitude came together [they] were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.”
Yes, but there’s nothing spiritual about Google Translate and its voice-recognition technology: on a smartphone, this becomes to all intents and purposes the Babel fish imagined by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For some reason when Rashad speaks Russian into his phone – a stilted English voice then tells me I need to go and buy picture hooks. It’s almost as if there’s one of my parents’ little men trapped in there.
Together with a little breakaway enclave – because if Rashad is comfortable in Russian, it may be because he’s in fact from Nagorno-Karabakh, the debatable land between Azerbaijan and Armenia. If this is the case, and Mrs S gets wind of it, things may get… complicated.
I’m not sure how I feel about all of this: there seems to be an inverse correlation between the ease with which the most diverse people can communicate nowadays, and the extent to which such discourse fosters irenic relations. It may well be, contra the Acts of Apostles, that the world’s migrants deeply resent voices magically telling them to do things in their own language, rather than marvelling and being amazed.
Brexit was, of course, all about taking back control – clearly, middle-class homeowners such as myself, with a compelling need to hang pictures, should’ve taken back control of it in 2016. Instead of Eastern Europeans doing it now, it’s yet wiser men, coming still further from the east.
