Red Sayle in the Funny Set

I'm not often disappointed by books. I enjoy some more than others, of course, and for different reasons, but I usually pick wisely. As with horses, I'm not very adventurous, no great risk taker, and so the hit rate remains quite high. I was prompted to acquire the two volumes of Alexei Sayle memoirs, Stalin Ate My Homework (2010) and Thatcher Stole my Trousers (2016) and have enjoyed them as much as anything. His onstage persona is not a persona, it's him, and it's all true, seen through his lapsed Communist hyperbolic perspective.

The first volume is his childhood as the only child of activist left-wing parents, the luxury holidays in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and the second leads him through college and some unlikely jobs to his career in entertainment. While certainly they are funny enough and provide laugh out loud moments, it is the truth of them that impresses most. I'm not averse to autobiography of such mainstream stalwarts and have Vic Reeves, John Cleese, Alan Bennet accounts of their lives with the three Danny Baker volumes generally regarded as masterpieces of the genre but Alexei's as good if not better.

Although he's those few years significantly older than me and his involvement in left-wing politics more thoroughgoing, it's a recognizable world he describes of  1960's and 70's avant gardism, protest and studenty zeitgeist. There is no higher accolade for writing than that one wishes one had written it oneself. Alexei makes points about the avant garde and Marxists that I've tried, and largely failed, to make myself.  Now that I've seen him do it in books that will have reached a far bigger audience that any I can, I can stop trying and admire him from a polite distance.

My several attempts to delineate what it was about Campus Marxists are outclassed by some distance by Alexei's first hand reportage from the front line of the shambolic, narcissistic, righteous, doctrine-infested and fractured 'far left' which would be more hilarious if it weren't so sad. How true it is that the most radical revolutionary ideas were put forward by police stooges that such organisations as the Communist Party were 'riddled with' is hard to say and he makes it sound fair enough that he amongst others were in it for the inevitable violence by suggesting that the police they fought wanted a fight just as much. The only thing I can add to that is a meeting I went to once where the guest speaker was a defector from the National Front to the Socialist Workers Party. I suspect he just wanted to be on the winning side, as the Anti-Nazi League then were.

But Alexei also saves me the trouble in his vignette on football which, of course, in Liverpool was nearly as big a deal as pop music and going on strike. After the impassioned outcry from football supporters following the (so far) abortive European Super League and the Cup Final yesterday allowing the Leicester and Chelsea variants of the species (there is no difference between any of them) to go through all their devotional rituals, it was a huge relief to read Alexei,

My main problem was that I had great difficulty sinking my personality into that of the crowd, of submerging myself into a mass of people who all felt exactly the same thing, the same joy, the same anguish, the same rage, the same uncritical belief in the rightness of their cause. I, by contrast, couldn't remain partisan for more than a few minutes. If the opposition team were losing I would begin to feel sorry for them and start wanting Liverpool or Everton to concede a goal,

 

and it is precisely that. I've not often had that problem supporting Fulham but it must have been some innate sympathy for the underdog and a horror of the triumphalism of winning trophies that made me side with Fulham from the age of 6 or 7, having been brought up to be a Notts County supporter and a brief but unsuccessful effort to convert to Forest.

It only now occurs to me that my latest picture at the top of the website has me looking more like the mature Alexei than the Salman Rushdie I so vulnerably was told by a few different sets of people I resembled in early middle age. It is probably a symptom of narcissism to admire people that one fondly imagines oneself to be a bit like (again, Danny Baker; Sean O'Brien; Stuart Maconie) and one surely flatters oneself. It might be the Jewishness that I've also come to regard as belatedly essential to who I am and uphold in the face of the terrifyingly bleak tenets of Catholicism but I hope I mainly like Alexei because he's any good. 

To like books on the grounds that one imagines oneself reflected in them is vanity, not literary criticism, and one shouldn't do it.