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“As a token of my esteem for your frankness and writing skills, I’ve enclosed a sample of my wonder oil...” That is simultaneously one of the most touching and funniest sentences I’ve ever read. It’s a quote from a letter I recently received. Yes. I have been sent a bottle of homemade Wonder Oil by a fan. You know you’ve made it as a writer when the Wonder Oil arrives. I’ll bet ol’ Phillip Adams never receives Wonder Oil – though he could do with a bucket of the stuff.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
I’m generally wary of unsolicited concoctions that lob in the mail, knowing what a glorious scalp I would make on the belt of some vengeful nobody bent on culling saints. Sarah is less cautious. (Finds me less important – indeed, laughable as a target for assassination.) She had her feet glistening with Wonder Oil within minutes of its arrival. And as she didn’t want to track it throughout the house, not knowing if it would stain the rugs or stone the dog, I had to fetch and carry for her all evening.
I asked myself what J.K Rowling would do if she received Wonder Oil from a stranger. Would she oil up immediately? Or, suspecting anthrax from a trans activist, would she regift it to Dan or Emma? It’s hard to know what to make of tributes out of the blue from back-shed pharmacists.
I heard Barry Humphries once received a potion by post that its sender claimed was a vibrant homemade aphrodisiac, asking that Humphries forward it to Sandy Stone to salvage his tumescence. It sat on the comedian’s London mantel for years blaring temptation, a lurid liquid coiling viscously in the chandelier light.
Here is a partial list of ills this Wonder Oil claims to cure: “Roughness, calluses, sunburn, burns, windburn, rash, fungus, tinea, foot-pong, ulcers, warts, sunspots, pre-cancerous keratoses, moles, infections, styes, lumps, cuts, bruises, wounds, scars, old injuries, blisters, splinters, acne, eczema, shaving rash, dermatitis, vaginitis, thrush, herpes, dryness, wrinkles, ache, pain, twisted, pulled, torn, strained, RSI, tennis elbow, stiff, tense, cramp, injured, under-toned, over-used, pre-sport and after-sport, gentle detoxification, operation sites, old injuries, arthritic, injured, overused, spurs, RSI, cracking... dicky knees and elbows, back and neck improver, hands love it.
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“It will also fix: haemorrhoids, ear wax, grit in the eye, whatever needs a good clean-out or tone-up, pre-birth prevention of tearing, baby’s nappy rash, external infections, bodywork and massage, gradual cleaning of internal organs by daily exterior application for three weeks or so. Many people don’t believe Wonder Oil could rid them of haemorrhoids, but it does the job well. It’s like a hundred products in one!”
Why its maker would assume I was riven with the preceding surfeit of disorder and decide to mail unctions to cure me I don’t know. Have I complained here of grit in the eye? Spurs? Nappy rash? Pregnancy?
Anyway, I thank him for it. Not to would be churlish. This isn’t the Qataris giving Trump a jet in the expectation he’ll dissuade the IDF from vaporising terrorists in their Doha bachelor pads. No. In this, I recognise the natural human impulse to give a gift to an artist who’s done something you admire. Not quid pro quo as much as quid no quo, that is ... just quid, a tribute. A way of offering thanks, or returning a favour – roses at the soprano’s dressing room door. The Wonder Oil may not do all the things it claims, but if its maker believes it does then what a magnificent gift he has bestowed.
I feel honoured to have received it. Had Clive James written well enough to be the recipient of Wonder Oil he might still be with us. If half its claims are valid, I imagine Stephen Hawking playing a passable set of tennis while glistening with the stuff. I intend to slather myself head-to-toe with it and see where it takes me. I will start low and rise up the Cameron corpus, dabbing, daubing, smearing and smothering as I go until I’m Wonder-Oiled in all the right places and slick as an Exon Valdez seal pup.
And if, by Cup Day, I don’t look in the mirror and see Brad Pitt staring back, then I can only say that eating fish never made me as brainy as Mum said it would. Nor did their use of champagne make me as attractive to women as countless publicans promised, and that the world is full of falsity and blather.
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