Like most people I was initially taken aback by Justin Bieber's self-aggrandising remark in the visitors book at the Anne Frank Museum. He was inspired to remark, ""Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber." It seemed too ridiculous to be true, but apparently it is. For a second I thought, "Wow, that guy is out of touch with reality and thinks the world revolves around him." How could he do something so crass?
But within a heartbeat I realised I was making my own arrogant assumption. What teenager doesn't think the world revolves around them? Even ones without the huge amount of evidence that it does. Much as I am bamboozled by the appeal of Bieber his heart is about 65% in the right place there, even if he expresses himself clumsily. I seem to recall that Anne Frank was rather taken with film stars of her day and had pictures of our future queen on her wall. She wasn't a saint, she was an ordinary girl in an extraordinary and terrible situation which is what makes her story so poignant.
And any lingering judgement within me was exploded when I remembered my own teenage comments about Anne Frank in my (admittedly private, thank God) diary. I was deluded enough to think that my teenage thoughts might be worthy of publication if only people knew what a nascent genius was lurking in this spunk-stinking bedroom in Cheddar. Of course some of the stuff was worthy of publication, but not for the reasons I believed. Not because I was a great thinker, but because of just the opposite, because of my delusions and youthful arrogance and because my attempts to be serious were much funnier than my many attempts to be funny.
This was what I wrote about Anne Frank when I was about 16 -
"I donÂ’t really bother writing much in this diary still. The sort of things that would get it published would be going into great details about how I am losing all my friends but IÂ’m not very good at that
this is really the main difference between me and say, Anne Frank. Well not the main difference. She was a girl and sheÂ’s dead. Yes, thatÂ’s another thing you need to get a diary published - to be dead. You also need to be lucky enough to have something unusual happen to you like Nazis blowing your tits off."
Lucky, lucky Anne Frank. If I'd been locked in an attic my diary would have got published too.
And I wrote this in the mid-80s only forty years after the events when feelings were even more raw. And I was a clever young man, cleverer (I am guessing) than Justin Bieber, but so much more stupid in this case.
And even now as a 45 year old, if I am asked to write a comment in a theatre or hotel's guest-book or whatever then I still struggle to think of the right thing to put. You inevitably draw on platitudes and banalities because of the lack of space and weirdness of the exercise. And I'd find that a thousand times more difficult if I was aware the world was looking over my shoulder. Maybe I still wouldn't write, "I bet Anne would be a great fan of my sucking your own cock question on RHLSTP" or "This museum is OK, but it would be better if it had a shrek in it." But maybe in the heat of the moment and trying to make light of things after the sombre visit to a heart-rendingly sad place I might have. It's the end of the visit, you've all been serious, maybe there's something appropriate about going back into the real world with something light-hearted and dumb.
It's a shame that the most popular singer in the world at the moment is not able to write an eloquent sentence, but it's not his fault that people buy records because they like the way someone looks (or possibly sings). It'd be nice if all our 19 year old pop stars had the poetic ability of Keats and were grounded enough to know their place, but unless you were that together as a teenager and unless you never wrote stuff as stupid as the things in my diary then you don't really have a right to criticise. In fact just thank God that you got to live your teenage years in privacy and your every utterance wasn't broadcast to the world. I would have loved to be that famous as a 19 year old and I would have said and done some awful and embarrassing things if I had been. And so would you.
Stew and me used to do a routine about signing the Princess Diana condolence book and my compunction to draw a big spunking cock in it. I am sure if you set me down in front of the Margaret Thatcher book with a pen I would find it very hard not to do something wrong. It can be overwhelming trying to express yourself in a medium that demands po-faced respect and solemnity. If Bieber had drawn a cock in the Anne Frank book that might have been worse (though I would have loved him forever and bought all his records and listened to nothing but them for the rest of my life), but he's just an inarticulate multi-millionaire who is mobbed by girls everywhere he goes and is surrounded by people blowing smoke up his arse. And he just made a little poorly judged self-referential (possible) joke. Embarrassing and inappropriate, but if you're criticising him vehemently for it and have ever been a teenager, then you have about as little self-awareness as him, without the excuse of being an international superstar who is treated like a mini-God (even though you probably thought you should be when you were 19).
