CRAIG BROWN: Please Yoko Ono, stop ruining my breakfast

By Craig Brown for the Daily Mail

Published: 01:11 GMT, 6 January 2015 | Updated: 07:56 GMT, 6 January 2015

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In a magazine interview, Yoko Ono claimed the person she most admires is herself

The Christmas and New Year period always results in a great build-up of newspapers and magazines on our kitchen table.

By this late stage, in order to clear a space for breakfast, we are having to brush them aside, rather in the manner of a snow plough. While I chomp on my Frosties, I sometimes imagine a little tightrope walker tottering back and forth between the two great piles of newsprint.

For the past week or so, the magazine uppermost on the right-hand pile has been left open on a question-and-answer interview with Yoko Ono, or ‘Yoko Ono, artist’, as she prefers to style herself.

It comes with a photograph of Yoko in her habitual pose, peering knowingly over the dark glasses perched on the end of her nose. 

At this time of year, sloth is at its most powerful; though my New Year’s resolution was to stop reading the Yoko questionnaire over breakfast, I have found myself powerless to resist it. Despite myself, I have been reading, re-reading and re-re-reading it over successive breakfasts, so I know it virtually off by heart.

Its headline is taken from one of the choicest quotes in the article. ‘Which person do I most admire? Me, because I know me best.’

Thus is set the tone of self-approval, fast mounting to self-adoration. Were a politician to let slip the same testimony, he would be obliged to issue an immediate retraction.

But Yoko Ono is an artist and, more importantly, a widow, so we take her at her own estimation, wilfully mistaking vanity for wisdom.

‘What is your greatest fear?’ is the second question. ‘That what I fear will come true,’ comes the reply.

But that is the whole point about fear, I shout back at the piece each morning: if you don’t think a fear will come true, then there’s nothing to be frightened of, so it can’t be called a fear!

‘What is your earliest memory?’ ‘When I was in my mum’s womb.’

Oh, yes? Yoko offers no proof for this dubious boast. How did she know she was in her mother’s womb? It would have been very dark in there, even if she hadn’t yet got hold of a pair of her trademark sunglasses. Since, at that early stage of her life, she would have had nothing with which to compare it, might she not have been confusing a womb with a cot?

‘What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?’ To this sort of question, the self-satisfied usually tend to reply ‘my honesty’ or ‘my boundless love of humanity’, so, the first time I read it, it came as a pleasant surprise to find Yoko replying: ‘Accidentally looking at myself in the mirror.’

But I now think that ‘accidentally’ is the key word here: if each time she looks in the mirror it is accidental, then why would it be deplorable?

Yoko Ono dubiously claimed her first memory is of being inside her mother's womb, providing no proof of this being true

I now suspect that she added ‘accidentally’ at a later stage, so as to soften the suggestion of narcissism.

And then the same question is asked again, only in a slightly different way. To the question, ‘What is your most unappealing habit?’ she replies: ‘Telling the truth.’ Why should telling the truth be unappealing? Many would argue that peering out over dark glasses perched on the end of your nose is an infinitely less appealing habit, and she does it all the time.

What if she is not telling the truth about telling the truth? To my mind, her obsession with enlarging her property portfolio is an unappealing habit that far outstrips her love of truth. Indeed, John Lennon and Yoko owned several apartments in New York’s Dakota building alone, with one room specially refrigerated for her fur coats.

Yoko adds that her book Grapefruit, originally published in 1964, is the book that most changed her life

‘Imagine six apartments / It isn’t hard to do,’ Elton John once joked. ‘One is full of fur coats / The other’s full of shoes.’

As the questionnaire goes on, her self-satisfaction blossoms exponentially. ‘Which book changed your life?’ 

‘One I wrote in 2000, Grapefruit, a book of instructions for art and for life. It became very well-read.’

This might be a good moment to quote in full two of these ‘instructions’, each allotted its own page in the book. One, titled Laugh Piece, reads: ‘Keep laughing a week.’

Another, titled Cough Piece, reads: ‘Keep coughing a year.’

If this advice has changed anyone else’s life, it could only be for the worse, especially for those who live within coughing distance.

And so it goes on, this festival of self-adoration: ‘What do you owe your parents?’ ‘A lot of wisdom.’ ‘Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?’ ‘All activists who are trying to better the world.’

And then, perhaps most off-putting of all, to the question ‘How often do you have sex?’ comes the reply: ‘Depends on what you call sex.’

It is now January 6. How many more breakfasts will go by before I manage to throw it away and read something else? Or will I be consuming Yoko’s wisdom every breakfast for the rest of my life?

And what if I then turn into Yoko Ono? What is my greatest fear? That what I fear will come true.

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