Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

The trouble with doing a thing for cosmetic reasons is that one always ends up with a cosmetic result, and cosmetic results, as we know from inspecting rich American women, are ludicrous, embarrassing and horrific.

Today, with the foul miasma of evangelism rising up to engulf us from every corner of God’s poor earth it is hard to remember that good Christian lives were once lived without words like “outreach” and “salvation” being dragged into general conversation.

Unhappiness and happiness I have always been able to carry about with me, irrespective of place and people, because I have never joined in.

… I can’t think of a better encomium. What characterized him and made him so precious in twentieth-century England was that, although he was a modern, he believed in reason … [He] rejected authority, mistrusted intuition. That is why his loss is so irreparable … If you said to him “This must be right, all the experts say so … Hitler says so, Marx says so, Christ says so, The Times says so,” he would reply in effect, “Well. I wonder. Let’s see.” He would see and he would make you see. You would come away realizing that an influential opinion may be influentially backed and yet be tripe … Intuition he did not reject. He knew that it is part of our equipment, and the sensitiveness he valued in himself and in others is connected with it. But he also knew that it can make dancing dervishes of us all, and that the man who believes a thing is true because he feels it in his bones, is not really very far removed from the man who believes it on the authority of a policeman’s truncheon.

Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in every country, but in England they are national characteristics also, because only in England have the middle classes been in power for one hundred and fifty years. Napoleon, in his rude way, called us “a nation of shopkeepers.” We prefer to call ourselves “a great commercial nation”—it sounds more dignified—but the two phrases amount to the same.

My mother has an absolute passion for sour fruit and can strip a gooseberry bush quicker than a priest can strip a choirboy.

When I first heard other children’s parents shouting at each other I wanted to die with embarrassment. I just did not believe such things could be, or that if they were, that they could be tolerated. I still find any sort of confrontation, shouting or facing off unbearable.

It is possible that the closeness, interdependence and unconditional love each bears for the other may have contributed to whatever fear it was that kept me from partnering anyone for so many years. It always seemed impossible to me that I would ever find anyone with whom I could have a relationship that would live up to that of my parents. They