Clickety-Click Take Two

Portrait in the Jacobean Manner

This week sees my 66th birthday, so I hope you don't mind this little annual self-indulgence in self-portraiture. For reasons that should be self-evident I'm not especially vain about my appearance, but I have always admired Tudor and Jacobean portraiture – the sheer mastery of Hans Holbein as a portraitist has rarely been surpassed – so I enjoyed mocking this up from a recent, arm's-length "selfie". Taking selfies is not something I'm in the habit of doing – more than a couple of times a year and it starts to seem excessive – and I think I'm probably too old to really grasp the significance of the contemporary selfie obsession; it surely can't just be unbridled narcissism, can it?

Recently, I was hanging around my partner's London office, which has a less than spectacular view across one of those desolate institutional-architectural voids, directly into the adjoining library. As I stood by the window, I was intrigued to watch a Chinese girl, sitting at a study desk by the window opposite, repeatedly posing for her phone, tossing her hair, smiling, simpering, frowning, turning this way and that, all presumably in pursuit of the perfect selfie. This went on for ages: I'd go away, make a coffee, come back, and she'd still be at it. In the end, I felt like throwing open the window and shouting across the void, "Oi, you! Yes, you! Stop that ridiculous preening, and get on with some bloody work!"

It never ceases to surprise me how much more weather-worn – not to say old – my face looks when photographed than when seen in the mirror above the bathroom sink (there are very few other mirrors in our house). Maybe there's some "Haggardiser" filter in the camera I've somehow managed to turn on, together with "Thinning Hair" and "Mad Eyebrows"? Or maybe it's that I simply continue to see the same face I've been seeing for 60+ years – brains are complex mechanisms dedicated to self-delusion – whereas the simple-minded camera records the stark, unmediated reality. I wrote about this five years ago (such wisdom from one so young!) so here it comes again, slightly revised:

I recently read something in an essay by John Berger on Rembrandt's self-portraits that intrigued me. He wrote:

A painter can draw his left hand as if it belonged to somebody else. Using two mirrors he can draw his own profile as if observing a stranger. But when he looks straight into a mirror, he is caught in a trap: his reaction to the face he is seeing changes that face [...]  It is the same for all of us. We play-act when we look in the bathroom mirror, we instantly make an adjustment to our expression and our face. Quite apart from the reversal of the left and right, nobody else ever sees us as we see ourselves above the washbasin. And this dissimilation is spontaneous and uncalculated. It’s as old as the invention of the mirror.

Nobody else ever sees us as we see ourselves above the washbasin.  A troubling thought, that. I've been trying to catch my own "real" face in the mirror ever since. Or, at least, one or two of the many real faces we all wear. I think of the way I must have looked in countless meetings, struggling with boredom or irritation or slipping quietly away into a rapt doodling session. Or when giving presentations beneath the PowerPoint screen, or telling a funny story over coffee, or sharing outrageous get-outta-here gossip. Then there are the faces I make when driving, or playing with my children, or just buying stamps in the Post Office, or any number of public or intimate circumstances. Face it (sorry...), to everyone else you are that person (or those people) and virtually never the one you imagine yourself to be, gurning winningly at the bathroom mirror, toothbrush in hand.

As W.B. Yeats put it, with a conscious level of irony:

From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

Yeah, right. So are all those other truth-seekers, checking themselves out in the shop window, or taking endless samey selfies by a window in the library.

1975... I suppose in our day photo-booth

strips were the nearest thing to a selfie.

Sadly, you couldn't see what you

were going to look like...

By the way, should you feel inclined to join in the world-wide celebrations of this event (my 66th birthday, that is, not Lucy Liu's selfie session) then you could do no better than to encourage your like-minded friends and acquaintances (even your social media "friends") to read this blog. Seriously: I enjoy writing it, but the real pleasure lies in knowing it is being read. Read, that is, by people other than the relatives, ex-colleagues, long-standing friends, enemies, and old school chums who are closely monitoring it for possible legal action. Thanks!