I’ve decided to sell the house in France. These last couple of years we hardly used it. And when we did, we’d just follow the same deadly routine – a drink here, a walk there, etc. We knew a few people in the nearest village. But neither of us really liked them. And taking friends down with us was too much responsibility. That sounds dreadfully mean, I know, but the mind-numbing effort of being Mine Host for a full week just made me miserable. And late at night, after a glass or two too many we’d just end up having the same petty disagreements we’d had a dozen times before, guests or no guests.
Five or six years ago, when there was still work to be done on the place, that fact would give us a little motivation. Some shared purpose. And we’d talk about how, once it was all finally completed, we’d be able to sit back and appreciate it, but it was quite the opposite. We just realised how bloody boring it was down there. And when I lifted the toilet seat last year and found a rat skittering about in the bowl, that just about did it. I screamed and slammed the seat back down. Let’s be honest, if you can’t scream when you find a rat in your lav, when exactly are you meant to scream? John came huffing and puffing up the stairs, assessed the situation, then disappeared. And came back up the stairs a couple of minutes later, carrying his tool box.
What exactly, I asked, was he planning to do to the rat? Dismantle it? I don’t think he knew himself. Anyway, not surprisingly, after that little incident I could never fully relax whilst visiting the bathroom. And the house’s days were probably numbered.
To be honest, I’m half tempted to sell the house in London. It was too big when it was just the two of us. Although God knows where I’d go. A part of me thinks I should buy some little pad in Clerkenwell. Or on the river. Then at least I could walk to the cinema or the theatre or a restaurant. If you’re living in a city, the argument goes, then actually live right in the heart of it. But then I’m sure I’d have young people pissing on my doorstep, or puking, or fornicating. Or whatever it is young people do these days.
The fact is I freaked out and had to leap into my car in NW3, so how the hell would I cope living even deeper in the city? Perhaps I could have a speedboat tied up on the river, with its engine gently ticking over. If I felt a bit queasy I could just jump into it and head for Kent.
I have no aching desire to raise chickens and grow my own potatoes, wherever one goes to do that sort of thing. And, apparently, I have my doubts about living in London. Looks like I’ll just have to stay here in my bijou cottage until I decide where on earth I might feel comfortable.
*
Actually, I don’t know why I’m talking about the theatre as if it’s some major foundation of my cultural existence. And that without it I’d, you know, simply go to bits. Twenty years ago I used to trot into town pretty regularly, to the West End and the South Bank. But I think half the time I was just fooling myself.
You do indeed have to kiss a lot of frogs. These days I find I just don’t have the stamina. I had a little epiphany maybe four or five years ago, when I was penned in in the middle of an auditorium as some endless bloody Russian play creaked and groaned along. The maid was meant to be completely ditsy, which for some reason I found rather offensive – or just plain lazy – and each time she jiggled her boobs about or one of the other characters made some dreadful pun, everyone around me launched into this ridiculous guffawing, as if they’d just heard the funniest joke ever. I was thinking, This isn’t remotely funny, you idiots. Why the hell are you laughing? And the only answer I’ve ever really come up with is that they’d paid good money for their tickets and they just wanted to show the rest of the audience that they were at least intelligent enough to get the joke. Or perhaps they just thought that over-the-top guffawing at dreadful puns is what you do in such a place.
Anyway, I found myself sitting there thinking of all the other, more rewarding ways I could be spending my time, like lying in bed or watching telly or doing the washing-up. And when the interval finally hove around I got to my feet and left the theatre and never really looked back.
Life’s too short to pretend to enjoy something when it’s clearly pigswill. At least at the pictures if the film’s complete twaddle you can walk out without feeling like you’ve wasted more than a couple of quid.
These days it’s so rare for something to genuinely surprise me at the theatre. Without it being deliberately, self-consciously shocking. And frankly when you’ve seen one troupe of naked, shaven-headed eastern Europeans rolling round the stage in some controversial new production of Hamlet you’ve kind of seen them all.
I’m getting old. I’ve seen too much. I’m unshockable. Well, perhaps the first of those three statements is true. I used to be quite pally with this woman who was a few years older than me. I remember going to her sixtieth birthday party, when I was probably still in my early forties. I arrived, gave her a little hug and asked how she was doing.
As she embraced me she whispered, ‘If anyone ever tries to convince you of the joys of getting old, they’re lying. Being sixty is bloody awful.’
I guess she’d started drinking a little while before I got there. If I remember rightly she had her head down the toilet by eleven o’clock. But unshockable as I might now claim to be, I found that little aside decidedly unsettling. It didn’t so much shock me as make me plain depressed. And now that I’m in my sixties myself I find I’m inclined to agree with her. Why spare the younger people? Why not just tell them the truth?
*
Actually, I once witnessed something which really did shock me – if not at the theatre, then at a graduation ceremony, which is just theatre by another name.
The son of some friends of ours was graduating at Oxford, so his parents and John and I drove up and went along to the ceremony before spending a few days in a cottage out in the Cotswolds somewhere.
Well, talk about tedious. Those must’ve been the most boring couple of hours of my life, which is saying something. It was in the Sheldonian – the building with what appears to be a selection of severed heads on the tops of columns all around the outside – and the whole ceremony, I kid you not, was in Latin, and consisted of nothing but an endless stream of students, in their gowns and mortarboards, shuffling through the place.
All we could do to try and stay awake was look out for our friends’ son in that great black tide below us and to listen out for his name in the never-ending Latinate drone. Then, right at the end of the ceremony, when everyone got to their feet and started heading towards the exits there was a bit of a kerfuffle and I looked round and saw this woman on the gallery opposite us, who must have tripped and fallen. And somehow managed to go clattering down a couple of steps and bounce right under the railings. So that suddenly everyone in the building was watching this poor woman as she clung onto some post, with her skirt up round her backside and her little legs threshing about.
It was a good forty-foot drop below her. If she’d fallen, without doubt, she’d’ve broken her neck, and possibly taken out half a dozen graduates.
It was like the final scene of North by Northwest, where they hang off Mount Rushmore. Anyway, the people around her managed to grab a hold of her and slowly dragged her back up onto the gallery. It was only later that it occurred to me that somewhere below, in that great throng, was her son (it’s funny, I never think of it being her daughter) watching, horrified. Which meant that from that day forward, whenever his degree came up in conversation the entire family would be quietly mortified, as they remembered poor Mum hanging off the railings and showing her knickers and flailing her legs about.
Anyway, that’s quite enough writing (and drinking) for one day. I’m off to my (widow’s) bed.