On strange tastes

To admit to being a ‘collector of strange tastes’ sounds as if one is a Victorian trying to confess to a fixation with pornography or a middle aged Englishman in some century past, explaining what precisely it is he is up to in Marrakesh. I must confess I mean neither such thing- after all, Marrakesh has now joined Lisbon, Barcelona, Bath, and Berlin as one of those cities plagues with couples on long weekends, and so I fear it would take a particularly concerted effort by wild horses to get me there. But let us not dwell on the negative or the euphemistic vocabularies of the past: the strange tastes that I delight in observing and then collecting (if committing to memory might be counted as such) are those of others, the discovery of unlikely or unexpected passions held by those whom we think we know.

There are many reasons to delight in the seemingly counter-intuitive tastes of others. On one level it is, I suppose, somewhat voyeuristic, the equivalent of a glimpse into an upper window from the top deck of a bus as it cruises through polite suburbia. Such a glance affords only the briefest of insights to a home- and in almost all cases, what we see is both disappointingly and reassuringly benign, yet, because we have subverted the pebble-dashed respectability projected below, it seems all the more thrilling. So it is with private passions- that the Queen takes a deep joy in the music of George Formby is not so shocking a revelation as it would be if she took similar pleasure in dog fighting or cocaine, yet because it still affords us a peek at the inner loves of one whose life is the byword for public respectability, the thought of her singing along to songs about, appropriately, a voyeuristic window cleaner, is profoundly pleasing.

Of course, as the above demonstrates, there is a joy in collecting strange tastes for anecdotal reasons too. To be able to reveal that such a byword for old English contrarian reaction as Peter Hitchens is also a delighter in the 2004 teen comedy masterpiece Mean Girls is certain to cause a ripple of disbelief and then- as the pre-eminent sceptic scuttles to disprove the line, only to find it corroborated by Hitchens’ own writing- amusement when in company. I do not think this is amusement at the expense of such figures- if anything we laugh, I would hope, at the folly of our own crude categorisations that have been subverted in a pleasing way, as opposed to the much more common, and much darker, subversions of expectation with which our news is so often awash.

These darker passions though are almost always rooted in dehumanisation. These strange joys, however, are quite the opposite, invariably being a private delight in music or humour or art, just not in the manner we expected. I also, therefore, delight in collecting them because knowledge of such passions in others gives permission for our own strange tastes, those odd indulgences which each and everyone of us has lurking somewhere- for I cannot conceive of a person who would prove, after any detailed examination, to be just as I expected. I could, here, throw open the net curtains on my friends- detailing the passion of a hulking rugby playing friend for late Gothic architecture, or the committed High Churchman with an encyclopaedic knowledge of designer trainers, but it would be both cowardly and remiss not to reveal strange delights of my own.

They are manifold, but the one that prompted this reflection was listening to the Thomas the Tank Engine remix of Notorious B.I.G.’s Come On. A strange thing, perhaps for a Church of England cleric to take abiding joy in, but it reminded me of a particular point in late childhood. Preposterous as it might seem, but, under the tutelage of elder brothers and the world of almost uncensored music channels, Biggie Smalls and myriad other artists as divorced from our context as it was possible to be were figures who loomed large in the early adolescence for prep school boys in rural England- a knowledge of them and their music being the mark of an acquaintance with the adult world. By contrast, there was not a son, first born or otherwise, who had not spent the previous 12 years in close proximity to Thomas; for having been written by a Rector and narrated by Ringo, there can be few more appropriate symbols of late twentieth century childhood. The combination of the two, therefore, brings me a great joy- perhaps, if Dr Freud is to be allowed to elbow his fallacies into this conversation, because it transports me back to that strange standing on the doorstep of adulthood but perhaps, and I think it more likely, because it is such a joyfully incongruous marriage of things in and of itself.

This example perhaps best shows the reason, I think, why I love these strange tastes so very much. They remind as that the incongruous is as common as the easy to observe pattern and reveal those complexities and paradoxes that occupy the space between the personality and the person, thus reminding us that the two are very separate things. If the glory of God really is, as Irenaeus tells us, man fully alive, then attention to and cultivation of these strange tastes, that demonstrate so clearly that to be a full person is to be a weird and wonderful paradox, ought to be our delight and our care.