BY JOE NUTT
Life has recently dealt me a surprising, but truly delightful blow. I’m getting used to being recognised as someone other than myself. My eldest daughter has made something of a name for herself as a professional gravel cyclist. She travels all over the world racing, sometimes for days at a time, battling across remote, astonishingly beautiful, and often mountainous landscapes. The videos she makes of her experiences in the Sahara and Atacama Deserts, or the Masai Mara in Kenya, have brought her an impressive online following. You may even have seen her appear on the ITN news skateboarding duck slot recently, talking about how she often organises her many hours of training to include a niche bakery or café stop, as a silly, but fun, treat.
So when I’m lucky enough to accompany her to an event, it’s quite normal for someone to stroll up to me and say, “You’re Maddy Nutt’s dad, aren’t you?”
A few weeks ago, standing in a queue for coffee at one, an anonymous guy in front of me turned around the moment my daughter came over to join me, stuck out his hand for a fist pump and told her how she was the reason he had taken up gravel racing and had travelled from the US to race in Britain, together with his son. It happens all the time. In Treviso a couple of years ago, before the World Championships, sitting in an innocuous, local café, a chap about my age scuttled across the room to tell her, in exuberant Anglo-Italian, how much he loved watching her videos. It’s a lovely paternal delight to witness these total strangers’ reactions when they spot her.
It has made me reflect a little on these quirky encounters with fame, because I imagine the online nature of celebrity is such that most of us will come into contact with a famous, recognisable face at some time or other in our lives. If not actually enjoying the fifteen minutes Warhol predicted. I’ve often seen a face in the street that I instantly know I recognise. One so familiar I’ve even been known to spontaneously blurt out, “Hello,” only to walk on baffled whilst thinking, “Who the hell was that?” because I just couldn’t put a name to the face.
Nine times out of ten, a day or so later it suddenly dawns on me that it was actually just an employee who I know from a shop or a café I regularly frequent. But occasionally that curiously spontaneous experience really does involve a Hollywood level face. I once stepped onto a Tube train, in a quiet station, just as Richard E. Grant was getting off, and instantly said, “Hi,” as though he was just a colleague from work. I was minutes into the journey before I realised what I’d really done. On another occasion I just managed to stop myself doing exactly the same when John Cleese walked around a corner, almost bumping into me.
My own pretensions to fame, such as they ever were, were put firmly in their place when I was speaking at a conference and a fellow speaker on the panel introduced herself, but then told me she hadn’t recognised me, “Because you look much older than your photos.” The next day I changed my profile pic.
My most exclusive encounter with fame happened at another conference when I was unexpectedly introduced to a real princess. I was young and bold enough to crack a joke, which seemed to surprise her because it actually made her laugh. I suspect most such encounters for her are probably clinically drab. At the time I was puzzled by the silent, young woman who stood close behind her all the time, conspicuously clutching a handbag, and slow as usual, I only realised days later she must have been her police protection officer and that precious bag almost certainly contained a loaded gun.
Work related encounters with fame have included dozens of frosty politicians, whereas cordiality had emanated from my princess like the glow from an Aga. On one occasion I was introduced at a garden party to Peter Mandelson, and the only thing I remember is how his terse questions were so ineloquently designed to enable him to decide whether or not I was worth talking to. I clearly wasn’t, because by question number two he was already looking over my shoulder to find someone else more important to leech. After that, it was like watching a bee.
Another author I know once arranged to meet a high profile figure who had tentatively agreed to endorse their book. They told me how he had left them sitting in silence for a full ten minutes, while he was busy conversing in a decidedly self-important manner, on his mobile. When that conversation was over, he didn’t apologise but launched straight into a new conversation entirely focused on what networking connections they might be able to provide him with, in return for his endorsement. I had always suspected this individual was a charlatan and when I told my associate that, they recounted a wonderfully revealing anecdote about him on the strict condition that I never shared it. I cannot tell you how perfectly their anecdote confirmed my suspicions. Literally, because a promise is a promise after all.
Only one encounter in over half a century, has ever troubled me. Some years ago, whilst sitting on a Jubilee Line Tube, the then leader of his majesty’s opposition stepped into the carriage and sat immediately opposite me. No one else in the carriage showed any sign at all of recognition but I could tell immediately that he had realised I recognised him. He was carrying a folder and taking some papers from it, he set about looking over them, occasionally looking up, very obviously checking to see whether anyone else had recognised him. The House of Commons Portcullis logo on his papers was conspicuous.
I became quite engrossed in observing him because I had an extremely clear memory of the first time I had ever heard his name. It was in an interview with John Humphrys on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme, in the long gone days when I was a regular listener in the car on my daily commute. He had just been appointed to a very senior role in the Civil Service and Humphrys had challenged him about his political ambitions.
He repeatedly denied having any and as I sat there driving and listening to the unadulterated sound of his voice, to the disembodied words, I thought, “That man – is a dangerous liar.” So profoundly negative was my response, the memory stuck indelibly.
Sitting in the train opposite him, remembering that interview, was distinctly discomfiting. I cannot recall ever having been repelled so overwhelmingly by the simple human proximity of anyone, and for the remaining few minutes of that journey I was anything but comfortable. I found his mere presence intensely irksome and even seriously considered changing carriages at the next station, but as it turned out, I didn’t need to, as he alighted there himself.
I will leave you to speculate who I’m talking about but if I say tomorrow he might well become a religious convert or change his sex; and expect you to believe him, I suspect you won’t have any difficulty guessing. That’s the tricky thing about interviews, sometimes, some people really are listening.
Joe Nutt is the author of several books about the poetry of Donne, Milton and Shakespeare and a collection of essays, The Point of Poetry. His latest book, Teaching English for the Real World was published by John Catt in May 2020.