^#smrgSAHAF Kiss and Tell - 1996

“PREFACE
Whatever one's experience of this globe and its inhabi- tants, however impartial one's judgement and varied one's acquaintance, it would be no surprise if the most enchant- ing person one had yet encountered, someone whose tastes in love and literature, religion and recreation, dirty jokes and household hygiene all lay beyond reproach, whose setbacks were capable of eliciting inexhaustible concern and pity, whose dawn halitosis was the grounds for no quiet shudder and whose view of humanity seemed neither cruel nor naïve one might without presumption suggest this person to be none other than oneself.

However gloomy the thought may strike those of ethical disposition, there is a difference between letting it bubble discreetly in one's mind while squeezing an orange or skimming through the channels of late-night television and hearing it confirmed in the fury of another's accusation, along with a couple of vases sent crashing to the ground to emphasize the point.

The charm of self-inflicted insults comes in knowing how far to dig the knife and, with a surgeon's precision, how to avoid the rawest nerves. It is as harmless a sport as trying to tickle oneself. When Elton John sang a beauti- ful love song in which he lamented to his beloved, in the well-worn tradition of singers and moist-eyed poets, that he only wished his art could do justice to his ardour...”