Ruth is a natural evangelist. She is determined that her friends should succeed where she has succeeded and enjoy what she enjoys. Jomier finds this tiresome. Ruth tells him that he must read this novel or go to that play or see such-and-such an exhibition. Jomier dislikes reading novels. It is an invasion of his privacy to have an author enter his mind and manipulate his imagination. He also blames the novel for flattering women. Nineteenth-century novelists knew which side their bread was buttered: their books were bought by women and they portray lovely, clever, witty, charming heroines and spin elaborate narratives around what au fond is their quest for insemination.

Jomier also dislikes the theatre. As actors prance around on a stage, it strikes him that they are having more fun than he is: why, then, is he paying them? The dramas are banal. Playwrights titillate the bourgeois audience with obscenity and left-wing views. Rich solicitors and brokers from Hampstead get a frisson from the leftist agitprop; their wives from the ‘fucks’ and ‘shits’ and simulated sex onstage.

Why does such mediocrity thrive? Raison d’état. The state has spent many millions on building theatres and theatres must have plays. Actors must have something to act, directors something to direct, critics something to criticise, the inhabitants of Hampstead and Islington something to discuss with their friends. It is the same with the visual arts. Great galleries have been built. Something must be placed on the podia or hung on the walls. Millions file through former power stations or warehouses to gawp at the totems of modernity that they have been told are high art. Who will dare say that the Emperor is naked when the art-world apparatchiks insist that he is fully clothed? So thinks Jomier who once loved to look at a painting by Manet or Vermeer. But now even the old masters do not draw him from his home. Why travel up west on the crowded Underground to be jostled by the crowd of culture pilgrims, and peer over their shoulders to catch a glimpse of some sculpture or painting? Will Jomier lie on his deathbed racked with regret that he has never seen the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo? No. When Jomier hears the word ‘culture’, he reaches for his TV remote.