To some people, Wimbledon is a tennis tournament. To me, it is a sort of binge. Confronted with a mere two weeks of fantastic tennis on the TV, I approach it with the same gimme-gimme intensity as the competition winner allowed three minutes to fill a shopping trolley with free food, or the fat boy attempting a speed record for the consumption of cream buns.
‘More!’ I demand, each evening at 8.15 when BBC2 stops transmitting, and the light begins to fade. The cats exchange glances, as if to say ‘She’s off,’ but I take no notice. I want more, don’t you see, more. More matches, more coverage, more – I don’t know, more male knees. And above all, I want the very beautiful Pat Cash to remain prominent in the men’s singles tournament, despite the unfortunate fact that he was knocked out last Thursday.
Bingeing, of course, is something you do on your own. It is therefore one of the great pitfalls of single life. When there is nobody to say, ‘I think that’s enough Wimbledon for one day,’ you don’t know where to stop. Leaving aside those knees for a moment, let’s imagine you had an addiction to – I don’t know, to fruit jelly, but did not live alone. Well, you would simply be obliged to curb those unnatural wobbly cravings, wouldn’t you? It would be no good leaving a nonchalant bowl of Rowntree’s black cherry on the coffee table, because the pretence (‘We were out of olives, so I thought why not’) would fool nobody.
But being single means that not only can you buy jelly in telltale catering quantities; you can make it by the gallon-load in the bath, and fill your entire living-room with great amber columns of it (if you want to), so that it resembles a confectioner’s Monument Valley. Similarly, you can watch two channels of Wimbledon simultaneously, and then the evening highlights, and then your video of the highlights, without anyone objecting that it’s getting out of hand. Believe me, it can happen. Last autumn I conceived a crush on an American leading actor and, in the absence of any restraining sensibility, had reached the jelly-columns-in-the-living-room stage before you could say ‘Jeff’.
It was alarming. One minute I was quite normal, the next I was popping out to see Jeff’s latest film every time I could contrive a free slot at 1.10pm, 5.05pm or 8.30pm. I considered finding out from Mastermind whether ‘the films of Jeff’ would be an acceptable specialist subject. And sometimes I pretended that I needed to cross Leicester Square on the way from Baker Street to Euston, so that I could accidentally find myself quite near the big Jeff pictures outside the Odeon. I was on a binge.
Virtually overnight, my flat turned into a 24-hour Jeff season-cum-masterclass. Friends popped in and found themselves being pushed roughly into seats while I snatched up the video control.
‘Watch the way he says ‘‘Small world’’ in this scene.’
‘Oh God. More Jeff.’
‘Have I shown you the bit where he glances away to one side, and sort of rubs his nose before the ‘‘Listen, princess’’ speech? It’s brilliant. The man’s a genius.’
In the end, they gave up expecting me to talk about anything else; instead they patiently cut nice Jeff pictures out of magazines for me, bless their hearts. After all, we are each entitled to find our own peculiar way of dealing with celibacy, and it turned out that this was mine. Jeff. I was even happy. ‘This is great,’ I said. ‘The last time I had a crush on someone it was in the pre-video age, but now I can watch Jeff deliver the ‘‘Small world’’ line fifteen times together if I want to.’
‘Mmm,’ they agreed.
And now it is Wimbledon, and I get so excited I expect tennis on all channels, all day. More. I get so involved that I even relish the on-screen computer statistics, tabling the number of times each player has changed his shirt or wiped his face with his wrist-band. In the old days, when Dan Maskell said, ‘Seventh double-fault,’ I would think, ‘Oh crikey, what an old bore.’ But now I exclaim, ‘Seven!’ and get angry with the commentators for making nothing sensible of such a thrilling statistic. ‘Ah, now, seven double-faults,’ said a Dull Donald during a match last week. ‘Lucky for some, but perhaps just a passing statistic in a famous victory.’ I could not believe it. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I yelled. ‘Good grief!’
Thankfully the Wimbledon binge contains built-in limits, and will be over by Monday. I do not watch tennis at any other time of year: say the words ‘French Open’ and ‘Prudential-Bache Securities Tennis Classic’, and the pulse-rate does not lurch. It is the annual two-week tournament of Wimbledon – the stars! the knees! the knock-out! summer in the city! – that is so unputdownable. It makes me think of warm summer fairs and dances in Thomas Hardy; the travelling circus setting up tents for solstice-week on some pagan hillsite, and the whole town queuing up nightly on hot dusty grass to grab it before it goes. I am getting carried away, I suppose. But honestly, for an all-alone binge, Wimbledon is almost as good as sculpting indoor jelly stacks. And a lot less messy.
What does it mean, anyway: ‘Do not remove lid before cooking’? There you are, in the kitchen, cook-chill dinner in your hand, oven nicely heated to 180 degrees, saliva glands triggered to the point of no return, and you receive this gnomic instruction about the lid which stops you dead in your tracks. Does it mean take the lid off, or don’t take the lid off? Why does life have to be so complicated?
‘I’m cooking it now,’ I reason (I have to talk it through, slowly, usually sitting down). ‘And I didn’t take the lid off before. Which was right. Hmm. All right so far, then. So perhaps I should take it off now. But perhaps they mean not to take it off until after it’s cooked. But then of course I will take it off when it’s cooked, won’t I, ha ha, because otherwise I couldn’t eat it. Hmm. So why would they mention it? I mean, if I didn’t take the lid off then I’d have to throw it away uneaten, and all that cooking would have been a waste of time. Hmm. And they show a serving suggestion on the box, so they can’t mean for you not to get the food out, otherwise they’d show a picture of a foil box in a bin. Hmm. And another thing …’
This goes on until the ghost of Bertrand Russell whooshes through the kitchen (screaming what sounds like ‘For Pete’s sake’) and dashes the box to the ground. It’s usually Russell, but sometimes it’s Wittgenstein. I have lost a lot of dinners that way.
As a consumer, one often finds oneself on the receiving end of superfluous advice, and I suppose it is a measure of one’s mental health how one deals with it. Buying a couple of ice-cube trays the other day, for example, a friend of mine discovered an interesting household tip on the packaging: ‘Keep a tray in the ice-box for those occasional drinks, and keep another in a chest freezer in case of unexpected callers or a surprise party!’ Could have worked that out for myself, thought my friend – but then she is a sensible, well-adjusted person who does not experience semantic vertigo over the removal of tin-foil lids. A more neurotic and literal-minded consumer (i.e. me) would have read this ice-tray advice on the bus home, and been obliged to go back to buy a chest freezer.
My hobby, by the way, is replicating serving suggestions. You know: I study the picture on the packet and re-create it with the real food. It is an unusual and creative pastime, I like to think. Sometimes, with a frozen dinner, the serving suggestion seems to be that you just take the food out of the dish and put it on a plate with a sprig of parsley, which is a bit too easy and not much of a challenge, quite honestly. But sometimes you have to add new potatoes or peas or something, and a bottle of wine in the background on a chequered tablecloth, and then you can spend quite a lot of time getting the composition just right. I have never told anybody this before.
Sometimes, just for a change, I defy the consumer recommendations. For example, recently on a bottle of hair conditioner I came across the advice: ‘And then just arrange your hair in its usual style!’ And I thought, well, I shan’t then, and I put my head in a bucket instead. I thought the advice was slightly redundant, in retrospect (from inside the bucket). I mean, if they hadn’t said anything I would have arranged my hair in its ‘usual style’ without even thinking about it. I wonder how they know where to draw the line, these people. Perhaps there are other bottles which advise, ‘Arrange your hair in its usual style, and then have a nice cup of cocoa’. Or, ‘Arrange your hair in its usual style, and then take a holiday in the West Country’.
Some manufacturers of prepared meals tell you that, after cooking, you should empty contents on to a plate. Before long they will also tell you to eat contents, burp (optional), wash up the plate, turn off the lights and lock the back door before going to bed. People are not being credited with much initiative, it seems to me. But then I am clearly susceptible, because I read all small print, listen to all advice. ‘Serve chilled,’ says the gazpacho carton, so I go out and stand in the rain without a hat. The strange thing is that when I come back in, the last thing I want to eat is some cold soup.
Recently I read some advice for people living on their own. I thought it would be about creating a helpful mental attitude, but it said things such as ‘Don’t open the door to strangers’ and ‘Have baths on a regular basis’. I was reminded of a student journalist who once shadowed me for a day and who told me that the lecturers on the journalism course had given her some pretty good advice. ‘What do they tell you to do when you interview somebody?’ I asked, hoping for some useful interrogation tips. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘they say don’t forget to take your bus fare. And always have a sandwich with you in case of emergency.’
So that’s it, then. I don’t open the door to strangers, and I keep taking the baths. I arrange my hair in its usual style, and I empty contents on to a plate. I carry a sandwich at all times. It’s all you can do, really. I remember that I used to pass a doorway on the way to work each day, where I saw a little sign: ‘Speak into the microphone.’ And even if I was late, I would say ‘Oh, all right then,’ and think of another old Max Miller routine to regale it with.
In the early 1980s, when I was a compulsive Blue Peter viewer (recording it while at work, and priding myself on not missing a single show), there was a very upsetting Thursday evening which I shall never forget. There I was, safe in the usual items (potted biography of Louis Braille narrated by Valerie Singleton; how to make a Dinky Toy car-park out of a cornflake packet and a drinking straw), when suddenly Simon Groom announced brightly, ‘And today we reach the letter M in our Dogs’ Alphabet.’ I felt as though my entire world had been tugged from under me. Did he say ‘Dogs’ Alphabet’? What Dogs’ flipping Alphabet was this, then?
I remember standing up abruptly from my working-girl TV dinner, and spilling jelly and custard on the carpet. I choked on some hundreds-and-thousands. I was so outraged that I virtually ignored the ensuing scenes of a large mastiff dragging a Blue Peter presenter skidding across the studio floor, knocking over those triangular stands with teddies on, amid reassuring shouts of ‘Ha ha, everything is under control.’ I was too angry to enjoy it. ‘When did you do the letter L?’ I shouted, in a sneering tone. ‘Nineteen seventy-two?’
So it is with some trepidation that I announce that today we reach the letter H in our Single Life role-model series. Ahem. The choice is wide: Heidi, Miss Havisham, Hinge and Brackett, Harvey the six-foot rabbit. Oh yes. Each tells you so much about the advantages of the unmarried state – in which you can be mad, Swiss, invisible or purely imaginary, and can run around with your hair on fire. But actually I have invented the Single Life role-model series because I want to discuss the little silhouette woman in Hello! magazine who illustrates the films-on-TV page, and she is such a strange phenomenon that I couldn’t see how else to bring the subject up.
She speaks to me, this lonely figure; I don’t know why. Next to the review of each film appears this little illustrated woman, who is evidently watching the TV from a firm 1960s low-armed chair in an empty room. She is wearing outdoor shoes and a knee-length skirt, and she is reacting with bold body language to the quality of the films she is watching. I can imagine her watching that famous Blue Peter episode alongside me, and expressing the whole thing more eloquently, and without words – a hand cupped to her ear (‘What’s this?’); her arms folded in front of her (‘I don’t believe it’); she shakes a fist (‘Someone will pay’). She is a mime, you see, this woman. Her body is her tool.
Her role is this. When the film is very good, she stands up and applauds enthusiastically; when the film is entertaining she leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands, possibly holding her breath. When it is only fair, she sits back, with her hands in her lap. And when it is boring, she sticks her legs out and flings back her head, as though she has been shot.
I have some quibbles with the authenticity of these reactions, of course. Personally, I lean forward with my head in my hands when the TV is terrible, not good. I jump out of my seat only when I want to ring up Blue Peter and give it a piece of my mind. When the telly is exciting, I lie back happily with a cat on my chest; and when it is excellent, I slide down so far in the chair that the only thing vertical is the top half of my head.
But the compelling thing about this woman is not the form but the intensity of her reactions. She concentrates without let-up, whether the stuff is good or not. In the course of a week’s films she leans forwards, leans back, stands up, claps her hands, gets shot, leans forward and leans back – but she never stops watching. Why did Hello! choose this figure? I suspect because she is the antithesis of the couch potato. She is slim and active and self-possessed, and she would never be caught dribbling hot Ribena down her neck by trying to drink it without sitting up – which is what I do, now I come to think of it, while reading Hello!
She gives the lie to all those worthy sociology projects, in which closed-circuit cameras are rigged up next to people’s television sets, to observe how broadcasting is treated in the home. Through the fishy lens, you see the ghostly figures of Mum and Dad wandering in, reading the paper, blinking stupidly at the screen while exciting car-chase noises and gun shots emanate from it, and occasionally pointing at the picture and saying, ‘I know that bloke. He was in, you know, whatsit called. Yeah, he was,’ before wandering out again.
I have never seen one of these experiments applied to a person who lives alone, but I think it would be rather different, and a bit disturbing, because of the aforementioned intensity of response: ‘What Dogs’ flipping Alphabet?’ ‘God, I hate Noel Edmonds!’ ‘Why are the weather forecasts so short, for heavens’ sake!’ ‘They’ll never get a self-respecting Dinky car in a car-park made out of cornflake packets!’ and so on.
I have great hopes for this woman in Hello! I feel she has room for development, and an obvious life of her own. Her little figure could start popping up elsewhere in the magazine, responding to the articles with exaggerated yawns while reading in the bath, or peering terribly closely with a magnifying glass at the telephoto pictures of the King of Spain.
And sometimes, of course, she could fling the magazine aside, turn off the TV, kick off the sensible shoes, and perform the polka with the cat in her arms, the way ordinary single people do. Go for it, my little friend. Live a bit.
A telephone rings. It is tea-time on a day in late June. England. The columnist (a harmless drudge) hastily presses the ‘Mute’ button on her television remote control. The giveaway background noise of ‘Pock, pock, applause, Thirty love’ abruptly ceases. She grabs the receiver.
COLUMNIST (defensively, and without punctuation): Hello who’s that of course I’m working good grief up to my armpits in fact Huh do you think I’ve got nothing to do but watch tennis? (Her voice rises to a squeal.)
There is a pause, while the caller lets the hysteria subside.
FEMALE FRIEND: Psst, it’s me.
COLUMNIST: Linda? Oh, thank phew for that. I was just watching Wimbledon.
FRIEND: I know, so was I. Did you see him? Andre the Adorable, did you see him?
The columnist guiltily surveys the Andre Agassi press cuttings littering the floor of the study, and nods dumbly. She has just finished entering the names of today’s winners in the special men’s knock-out tournament chart. A keen-eyed observer would note that the equivalent chart for the women’s tournament is left curiously blank. Taking a deep breath, she makes a decision.
COLUMNIST (carelessly): You mean the Agassi match? Oh, I believe I did just manage to catch every single minute of that one, yes. Mmm. I was particularly impressed, actually, by the champion’s new short-action serve – 118 miles per hour he’s getting – the power of the ground strokes, top-spin, all that. ‘Ooh, I say,’ as Dan Maskell used to exclaim, ha ha. Oh yes, French Open, lob, tie-break, Gabriela Sabatini.
FRIEND: Lynne. You’re talking funny. Can’t we discuss chest hair, like we usually do? Is there somebody there?
COLUMNIST: Good heavens, no. It’s just that all these technical sports-reporter aspects, none of them passes me by. More like a fly-swat than a serve, I’d say, that new Agassi action, but still 118 miles per hour. Amazing. Sport can be really interesting, can’t it? Can’t think why I’m usually so dismissive of it. Also, there’s these new, um, graphological racquets … and, um, did I mention 118 mph, and the linesmen, gosh, Sue Barker, new balls, fascinating. And on Today at Wimbledon, Humphrey Carpenter can’t even say ‘Ivanisevic’ properly! So what makes me cross –
FRIEND: You mean Harry Carpenter.
COLUMNIST: What?
FRIEND: Not Humphrey Carpenter.
COLUMNIST: Well yes. Yes, obviously. So anyway, what makes me cross is this. Here we are, you and I, having this highly informed and sophisticated conversation about the ins and outs of grand slam tennis, and the papers insist that when women become obsessed with Wimbledon, it’s only because of the so-called hunk factor, because of the gorgeous pouting well-built athletic blokes such as Michael Stich and Goran Ivanisevic and – sorry, can’t go on, throat a bit dry. Anyway, the idea is that we’re watching the legs and the midriffs, not the tennis, I mean, that’s absurd, obviously?
FRIEND: Eh?
COLUMNIST: Absolutely absurd.
Pause.
FRIEND: But they’ve stopped showing Andre’s midriff, in any case. I phoned up yesterday to complain.
COLUMNIST: You did? Good for you. I mean, I hope you also mentioned their excellent coverage of his stunning returns of serve, and inventive cross-court passes?
FRIEND: No, I didn’t. I said, I am a licence payer and if I want to see the dreamboat’s tummy, the dreamboat’s tummy I shall see.
COLUMNIST (struggling, but steadily losing her grip): Gosh. Whereas me, well, scoreboard, let-cord judge, first service, Cyclops –
FRIEND: Give it up, Lynne.
COLUMNIST: Shall I? Drop-shot, foot-fault, er … Are you sure?
FRIEND: Definitely.
Pause.
FRIEND: I see Lendl got knocked out, then.
COLUMNIST (resigned but happy): Never fancied him, myself.
FRIEND: Nor me. Great player, I suppose?
COLUMNIST: No, no. Something to do with those stringy legs and the unattractive way his socks stayed up.
FRIEND: I know exactly what you mean.
I was interested to read in last Monday’s paper that a possible side-effect of low-fat diets is an increase in aggressive behaviour, especially since I have now reached the stage in my own low-fat diet where I would happily mug somebody for a small sliver of cheese. Aggressive, eh? Take off your glasses and say that. It is the sort of story that makes you uncertain; it muddles things up that were previously clear. Was I being aggressive when I forced copies of Rosemary Conley’s Hip and Thigh Diet on unwilling friends, instructing them to read it (or else)? I looked back with a sad little smile to the innocent days when I could say that the only drawback to low-fat diets is that they make you quite thin, thus making it difficult to store pencils in the folds of your torso.
But now, it seemed, there was one of those pesky little hormones to be considered – a hormone moreover that refused to be secreted to the brain unless there was sufficient cholesterol around, the upshot of which might be a propensity for violence. ‘Bastard,’ I said, involuntarily. I scoured the rest of the paper for supporting evidence (linking murders with Ambrosia Low-Fat Rice Pudding) but was disappointed. There was no statistical survey showing that the people who knock off policemen’s helmets invariably prefer St Ivel Gold to butter in a blindfold test. I suppose we shall just have to sit back and wait for the inevitable confirmation of the story from the American law courts. It cannot be long, surely, before the first serial killer is acquitted by an American jury on the grounds of diminished responsibility (by reason of cottage cheese).
In my own case it is hard to establish any straightforward cause and effect, since I started the low-fat diet simultaneously with embracing the single life. Any character change, therefore, might certainly be the result of pizza deprivation; but on the other hand, perhaps I have just been unhinged by the burden of sole custody of the cats. The causal borderline is murky. I have noticed, though, that I get extraordinarily jumpy and irrational in the vicinity of high-fat food. For example, the idea of eating crisps now alarms me so much that in Sainsbury’s I remove them surreptitiously from other people’s shopping trolleys, and scuttle off to hide them in the bin-bag section. The fight against fatty food has become a personal mission. Yesterday my next-door neighbour mentioned that she is partial to a spot of Camembert and I reacted with such horror that she might have said she enjoyed jumping in front of tube trains to test their braking distance.
The only way to set one’s mind at rest, I decided, is to do a bit of independent research. Follow a clamping unit around central London, for example, and offer cubes of lard to people whose cars have just been immobilized. ‘Do not attempt to move it!’ I might chuckle, springing out from behind the clamped car and proffering a platter of Cookeen-on-sticks. ‘I wonder if you would be interested in taking part in a little survey I am doing?’ I can imagine some interesting results. Or I could attend the check-out in Sainsbury’s (surrounded by people saying, ‘Funny, what happened to the crisps?’) armed with a tub of low-fat yoghurt and a packet of pork scratchings, so that I can nibble little bits from each, monitoring my reactions. I could stand there with my hand on my head saying, ‘Which way? Which way?’
The check-out is the right place for the experiment because while other people seem undisturbed by the sight of their shopping hurtling serially towards them down the conveyor belt and slamming into a multiple pile-up at the end, I loathe the avoidable frenzy and entertain visions of clonking the check-out lady on the head with a tin of Felix to slow her down. The only trouble is that, what with all the frantic packing and sweating and muttering, I shall probably forget to eat the pork scratchings. I get too worked up, really; and I don’t suppose diet is the answer. Either supermarkets must adopt the American system of packing the bags for the customer, or the government must relax the gun laws. The question: ‘Could you work more slowly please?’ would pack a lot more punch if backed up by a loaded .45.
Last week’s article was not only concerned with violence; it also suggested that low levels of cholesterol could be linked to unsuccessful suicide attempts. Great. Wonderful. First class. I am reminded of the time an editor said to me: ‘Perhaps you could just be like Dorothy Parker,’ and I misunderstood. What, keep slashing my wrists and drinking shoe polish? Keep waking up in hospital to hear wisecracking friends say: ‘You’ve got to stop doing this, or you’ll make yourself ill’? If this low-fat existence offers the fate of Dorothy Parker, perhaps it is time to reconsider. After all, even the exciting prospect of death by spontaneous combustion (which I’ve always fancied somehow) is less inviting from the low-fat point of view, since one’s body would burn for a considerably shorter time than would make the option properly worthwhile.
In my flat, I have a small flight of steps, and it worries me. Because one day, in a blur of windmilling arms and high-kicking legs, I am convinced it will shape my end. In itself, this staircase looks innocent of hazard: there are no loose stair rods, and if ever I discover ball bearings, bars of soap, or sheets of slippery tin-foil on the top step, I clear them carefully before starting my descent. No, the trouble is, these stairs lead to the kitchen – and anyone who lives with cats will instantly grasp the nature of my fears. For whenever a cat hears someone heading, with a loaded tray, in that direction, he looks up, thinks quickly (but not deeply) – tins! cat-bowl! tea-time! – and makes a blind dash, in the manner of a furry bowling ball hurled with gusto down an alley. There is a heavy expectant pause as he thunders targetwards, and then crash – the pleasant hollow sound of stricken skittles is reluctantly simulated by the windmilling lady with the tray.
My only consolation, as I await this disaster, is to muse (albeit tautologically) that ‘most domestic accidents occur in the home’. And how right I am. A recent DTI report about domestic mishaps evidently included the extraordinary statistic that twenty-nine people last year were injured by dressing-gowns, while six named place-mats as their personal Waterloo. Yes, place-mats. Adjust these numbers upwards to account for people too proud to admit to misadventure by warm fluffy towelling or slim cork rectangles and we can see the extent of the danger in our homes. But how was it that 101 people fell victim to their own trousers? How was it that a lone peculiar person was afflicted by a tea-cosy? Crime novelists must be in ecstasy at the news. Suddenly it is permissible for a suspicious detective to peer quizzically at a lifeless body, suck his teeth, and say, ‘Of course, this may be just a straightforward tea-cosy casualty, but I rarely trust the most obvious explanation.’
Ah yes, trousers, dressing-gowns, bread-bins, place-mats, tea-cosies, slippers – all those innocent Christmas gifts now carry the unfortunate connotation of the loaded gun. Personally, I find myself wondering (with a feverish urgency) what sort of place-mat. I mean, the rough raffia sort could give you a nasty scratch, I suppose; and the smooth laminated hunting-scene sort might possibly raise your blood pressure if you were an animal-rights activist. Neither, on the face of it, could land you in hospital.
No, only one explanation will satisfy all the scrappy data at my disposal: that instead of umpteen implausible domestic accidents taking place last year entailing tea-cosies and slippers, there was just one enormous out-of-hand Christmas party involving 101 drunken people spilling on to a main road wearing their trousers on their heads, and six attempting to skate across a frozen swimming pool with place-mats strapped to their feet. It’s the only solution that makes sense. ‘Let’s break into the dressing-gown warehouse,’ yells someone wearing a knitted tea-cosy as a balaclava, twenty-nine people following behind him, stumbling. But alas, once inside, blinded by the tea-cosy, he falls against a lever, and from a great height a large bundle of dressing-gowns promptly plummets towards their unwitting bonces. Meanwhile, back at the party, the innocuous game ‘Toss the slipper in the bread-bin’ has been proceeding safely until somebody has the bright idea of transferring the action downstairs to the kitchen. At which point a cat wakes, looks up, thinks quickly (but not deeply), and – well, you can guess the rest.
The DTI does not investigate the statistics, just tabulates them, so it’s no use asking for the true story. Presumably most people made their statements in a state of shock and blamed the wrong thing. ‘Why did you fall downstairs, madam?’ ‘The tray!’
A friend was once waiting in an uphill queue at traffic lights when her car was threatened by a van in front, slowly rolling backwards. Having honked her horn in vain, she ran to the driver’s door, and discovered a woman piling plates on the dashboard. Evidently, they had slipped off; hence the neglect of the handbrake. ‘Plates!’ she laughed, by way of inadequate explanation. ‘But they’re all right, luckily.’
A few years ago the American magazine National Enquirer ran a very helpful tip-list entitled ‘Ten Ways to Spot Whether Your Grandparent is an Alien’. Evidently a large number of American teenagers were racked with worry on this issue and required some official guidelines for confirming or allaying their suspicions. So the Enquirer did its civic duty, telling youngsters to peel their eyes for certain telltale signs. ‘ONE,’ it blared, ‘Gets up in the night for a glass of water. TWO: Remembers things from long ago with clarity, yet can’t summon up details of yesterday afternoon. THREE: Takes naps.’
The article did not explain what dastardly mission these alien wrinklies had been sent to Earth to fulfil, so naturally one formed one’s own theory on the available evidence. Clearly they came here in their silver shiny spaceships with the sole intention of putting their feet up and grabbing forty winks. Independent evidence backs up this notion. For as any astronomer will gladly affirm, very few comfy chairs have thus far been sighted on the surface of Alpha Centauri.
I mention all this because, according to a bizarre item in The Times Magazine recently, the American passion for aliens has not declined. True, the National Enquirer no longer carries those entertaining whole-page adverts for genuine extraterrestrial mineral samples (actual size) ostensibly brought back by Wyoming women from adventures in hyperspace. But apparently a new American movie in which a spaceship abducts a humble logger from Arizona (keeping him five days) is billed on its posters as ‘Based on a True Story’. It pulls you up short, this kind of thing. I mean, leaving aside the objection that it can’t possibly be a true story, doesn’t anybody stop to ask why superintelligent aliens would do it? I mean, what’s in it for them?
It ought to be a source of national pride that in Britain we don’t automatically think in terms of aliens. The ‘Lord Lucan Spotted in Sea of Tranquillity’ story, accompanied by fuzzy aerial photo, somehow fails to grab our imagination, which should be cause for whoops of joy. Brits who abscond from work will possibly resort to far-fetched tales of illness or amnesia, but rarely do they claim to have spent a week in a spaceship unable to phone the office because the aliens (ironically) hadn’t heard of Mercury.
‘So where’ve you been?’
‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘Was it good?’
‘Fine, yes. We did some crop circles. They’ve got a special attachment.’
‘What were the aliens like?’
‘Funny. They slept a lot, and kept asking me to remind them who I was, and then occasionally they got up for a glass of water.’
Just why America is more susceptible to ‘true-life’ alien stories is hard to account for (at least without being offensive) but it obviously entails a childish confusion about religion and space – which is a reasonable mistake, I suppose, since both originate in the sky. Visitations from the universe are the new-world equivalent of weeping statues in Catholic Europe, and in traditional American space movies, the identification of the visitor with the Messiah is so complete as to be almost laughable. In John Carpenter’s film Starman, the alien comes in peace, is persecuted, raises the dead and ascends on the third day in a blaze of light. The fact that he also samples apple pie (‘Terrific’) and wins half a million dollars in a casino does not detract from the analogy, it simply confirms that this is messianism American-style.
Of course, the ludicrous feature of the aliens-from-space belief is that it expects these visitors to take a wise, fair and godlike interest in the way we are running our planet, when it is more likely (as Woody Allen once pointed out) that they will just turn up one day and dump their laundry – socks, underpants, shirts, jackets – with instructions to have it ready by Thursday. Meanwhile they will settle down in front of our TVs for a mass alien after-dinner snooze. Another fond illusion bites the dust, but still, it’s only the same lament that has resounded through the ages. We ask for bread, and they give us stones; we ask for gods, and they give us ironing.
After the price of Whiskas and the paucity of NatWest Servicetills in the Marylebone area, my favourite conversational topic is garden sheds. I can wangle them into any kind of interchange – from the anecdotal (‘Roald Dahl? Writes in his shed, you know’); through the philosophical (‘But how can you tell your shed is still there when it’s night-time and you can’t see it?’); to the seductive (‘I’ll just pop down to the shed and slip into something more comfortable’). I am, you see, hoping that people will ask me to tell them more about my shed. But, strangely, no one ever does. The other day I even (Oh God, did I really?) tried to ‘talk sheds’ with Melvyn Bragg.
Perhaps one day someone will put together a glossy book called The South London Shed and ask me to write a little piece: about when my shed was built, what additions I’ve made, and how I sit in it all day wearing a straw hat and watch other people do the gardening. But I doubt it. That sort of request goes to the idle rich, like the people who have contributed to The English Garden Room, edited by Elizabeth Dickson (Weidenfeld £8.95). Never have I been more troubled by a large-format paperback. For it has made me discontented not only with my shed, but with my entire lot in life.
It must be said that the book is full of stunningly beautiful photographs. Conservatories are lovely places: huge and healthy plants set against cane furniture, stone paving, tall jardinières, classical statuary, and the odd piano – you can’t go wrong. Lady Aberconway has a large rectangular pool in hers. ‘The surface of the pond,’ says the caption, ‘unites by its reflection two convex shapes in perfect harmony.’
But it’s all this harmony that’s so upsetting. All this tranquillity and all this leisure to enjoy it. I can’t bear to think of it – that some people actually have the time to swing in hammocks. Or is that just an illusion fabricated for the book? Perhaps Princess Nicholas von Preussen is really just as driven as the rest of us – hanging about in the vet’s waiting room with her dachshund (Lily); getting into the slowest queue in Sainsburys. The most violent envy I have ever felt goes out to Mary Douglas-Scott Montagu, who spends her summer months playing Wendy House in a showman’s caravan in the grounds of Beaulieu. She collects up the family pets and a couple of good books and ‘lazes around’. ‘It is the most luxurious and magic escape from the mundane pressures of everyday life.’ Huh.
Perhaps this is what such publishing is for: to sustain the existing social order by reducing its readers to a kind of wormy mulch of envy, despair and class hatred. But come the revolution, I can tell you this: there’s going to be a lot of flying glass.
About this time last year, a friend accused me of having ‘let myself go’. And I remember being quite taken aback. I put down the bottle of salad cream I was drinking, and changed the receiver to the other hand, while considering how to reply. ‘But my boyfriend says I’m lovely,’ I protested, at last. ‘He likes me the way I am.’ ‘Oh, come on,’ was the rejoinder. ‘Surely you can see he’s just saying that.’ I bit my lip, slid down in the chair and unbuttoned the waistband on my elasticated jumbo-sized trousers.
Luckily the boyfriend returned at that moment from the chip shop, so I was obliged to ring off. But later, while licking tomato ketchup off the hem of my baggy T-shirt, I told him about the conversation, and asked him what he thought. He said my friend was probably just jealous, and that I should take no notice. But for some reason this cure-all answer failed to satisfy. After all, she was right: I had stopped buying nice clothes, had become addicted to chocolate milk-shakes and taramasalata (sometimes in thrilling combinations), and had started to warm to Shelley Winters as a potential role-model. But what alarmed me most was the memory of my own pathetic little defence: ‘My boyfriend says I’m lovely.’ I could not believe I had said it.
Leaving aside the attractive jealousy hypothesis for the time being, I told myself that at least the idea of ‘letting yourself go’ was the wrong phrase, since it belonged to the wrong era. Letting yourself go meant casting aside your boned corset (and having a good scratch), or letting your real eyebrows grow back. You can imagine it in those dour D.H. Lawrenceish Albert Finney movies (‘What about tha’ wife?’ ‘Me wife? Yon bitch uz let hersel’ go’). Those were the days when women were deemed to be the human equivalent of the Morning Glory, flowering for about twenty minutes and lucky if someone noticed.
All of this was comforting. But on the other hand, it is undeniable that I let myself get fat and frowzy when I had a boyfriend; and that the minute I became single again I lost weight in butter-mountain proportions and headed for the gym. To anyone familiar with the life story of Elizabeth Taylor this syndrome is a sad cliché, for which I apologize. Prior to cohabitation, I had looked after my body by feeding it occasional salads; but once safely cocooned in coupledom with a man who did a marvellous impression of a priest granting absolution (‘Hey, go for it, babycakes; life’s too short’) I was singing ‘Bring out the figgy pudding’ from dawn to dusk. This seemed wonderfully liberating until the cold dawn of single life brought me the realization that the only Lonely Hearts advertisements I could answer were the ones that said ‘Send photo of flat’.
All of which was how I came to learn about weight-training, and discover my pecs and lats. You wondered where all this was leading, and this is it. Stung by the remark about letting myself go, I decided it was time to pull myself together, which is precisely what weight-training is. You know the way people tune up strings on guitars (dooing-dooing, dung-dung, dang-dang, ding-ding) – well, weight-training is a bit like that, only you have to supply your own sound effects. It is mostly boys who go to my gym, many of them with moustaches, and some of them have even pulled themselves together too tightly.
It is amazing. We have muscles all over the place, some of them happy to respond to attention after about twenty years of disuse. I am particularly fond of the muscles known to us in the weight-training fraternity as ‘lats’ (the latissimus dorsi) because they pull my shoulders down from where they want to be – viz, around my ears. But I have also discovered some muscles called ‘glutes’ which are pretty impressive, since I had previously assumed that there resided nothing in this area beyond wibble and wobble.
The jargon is great; I love it. What is a bench press, Auntie Lynne? Well, it is not, as you might think, a huddle in a rugby club changing-room, ho ho. And what do you mean by ‘calf extension’? Well, it has nothing to do with veal, ha ha. The nice man with big beach-ball shoulders who taught me to use the machines was impressed that I picked up the terminology with such relish. ‘What’s next?’ he would say, as we finished our warm-ups. ‘Quads!’ I yelled, like a contestant on a gameshow. ‘And what do we use for quads?’ ‘Umm … the leg press!’ I was transported by it all. I remember coming home on the Tube and musing, like Alice in the rabbit-hole, ‘Do cats have lats? Do newts have glutes?’
The big issue now is: would I ‘let myself go’ if a man said to me, ‘Listen, two buckets of potato salad won’t be the end of the world’? I honestly could not say. Rather cunningly, I did ask the man with the beach-ball shoulders if he would like to go out for a drink, but it turned out he was married already, which was a crying shame. I had fancied the idea of going dancing with him, and wiggling our lats at one another across a crowded room. Friends said we would not have had much to talk about, but I didn’t care. What a perfect solution to the man-or-muscle dilemma, I thought. I mean, what an ideal chap for keeping a woman on the straight and narrow.
Somewhere along the line, I got the wrong idea about snails. Influenced by my fondness for Brian in The Magic Roundabout, I thought of snails as rather larky characters wearing comical hats and mufflers who deliver wry put-downs. I know this is silly, but you can’t legislate for the power of The Magic Roundabout over a young person’s imagination; and if I grew up expecting sarcasm from molluscs, at least I know where I got the idea. Brian also had a jaunty manner of locomotion, as I recall: reversing back and forth continually, as though engaged in a compulsive seven-point turn. So I rather got the impression that – what with the put-downs and the skidding about – snails were the Bruce Forsyths of the natural world.
So it was a bit of a shock to discover, when I finally took responsibility for a garden, that snails are in fact rather stupid organisms that mechanically chomp through marigolds and delphiniums, and are so blindly partial to a drop of Theakston’s Old Peculiar that they can actually be lured into drowning in it. Brian’s razor-sharp wit and lightness of foot were clearly unrepresentative of his gastropod friends in general. ‘Where be your gibes now?’ I say, as I gruesomely pile dead snails and empty shells into a sort of garden-path Golgotha (pour encourager les autres). ‘Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were apt to set – er, Dougal and Zebedee in a roar?’
Dealing with pests is one of those problems that women prefer not to face alone. In fact, when discussing separation, I have known women suddenly struck by the thought ‘but who would dispose of the spiders?’ decide on the instant that the calling-off must be called off. It is sad but true that when a man is around, one automatically crouches on top of a wardrobe saying ‘Eek’ while the chap does the business with the coal shovel. It all happens so quickly, you see, that you don’t have time to explore the sexual politics. ‘Cat’s got a frog!’ you shout, and before you know it the man has taken charge, and you are scaling the curtains.
I have never actually asked a man outright if he is any good with worms, but it is only a matter of time. There we will be: him, me, moonlight, the heady scent of honeysuckle, the flesh trembling, pushing towards the overwhelming question, and I shall have to spoil it by mentioning worms. The funny thing is, of course, that when no spouse is present to stride manfully worm-wards with a piece of cardboard (‘Don’t worry your head, little missy, I think Mister Worm and I understand one another’), a lone woman simply does it herself. She looks up, sees a worm, thinks ‘Why do cats catch worms? What do they think it proves?’ and then rolls it on to a copy of Hello! and flings it back on the garden.
Up until this year, you see, I let the man deal with the snails. ‘Ugh,’ I said, as I watched him pick them up, ‘I couldn’t do that. No, no. I couldn’t do that.’ The idea of handling snails gave me the same species of ab-dabs as the thought of being encased in polystyrene, or forced to listen to a thirty-minute concerto for fingernail and blackboard. Watching my brave chap pulling the little suckers off the pots and plants and hurling them over the wall into an overgrown garden next door (with an encouraging shout of ‘Wheee!’) I would huddle in the doorway and gaze admiringly at his prowess, all the while thinking that, left to me, the garden would solely comprise tall, bare, ravaged stalks and enormous, menacing, overstuffed molluscs blocking the path to the shed.
But in fact, of course, I kill them. I don’t shout ‘Wheee’ and lob them over the wall; I patrol the garden with a special killing-bucket and a pair of tongs, making evil ‘snap-snap’ noises and cooing ‘Daddy’s home.’ I used to think all creatures were petals in God’s daisy-chain – but that was before I joined the Marigold Liberation Army, and learned not to feel compassion. After a successful snail-raid, I even add insult to injury by watching my favourite piece of archive footage from Nationwide (shown last year in BBC2’s extravaganza The Lime Grove Story) where a huge snail called Boozy is shown supping the froth off a pint before suddenly falling off stone dead with a thump. It makes me laugh every time.
I could never love a snail. The great crime writer Patricia Highsmith kept snails, I believe, at her home in Switzerland, but I am not sure this is evidence of affection. She once wrote a terrifying short story in which a foolhardy zoology professor encounters gigantic snails on a remote island, and has his shoulder bitten clean off (munch, munch) by a snail in search of fresh protein. It wasn’t funny, but it helped to get the enemy in perspective. I mean, I think she was saying they’d kill us if they had the chance.
Patricia Highsmith was probably intrigued by their homicidal tendencies, and took the more dangerous specimens into town for a pub-crawl, to see how they’d act with a few beers inside them. At which point – of course! – they’d probably put on the hats and mufflers and start saying, ‘Nice to see you, to see you nice’ while zig-zagging across the bar in the snails’ equivalent of the hokey-cokey. I never realized it before. All that skidding about and sarcasm that Brian used to do – perhaps he was simply tiddly.
I once heard a very scary story concerning a man who lived alone. I sometimes remember it late at night, and get so nervous that I chew the edge of the duvet. Invited to a friend’s house for dinner, it seems, this man behaved in a perfectly normal, outgoing manner until the moment attention turned to the serving of Brussels sprouts – when he suddenly got strangely serious.
‘One, two, three,’ he said to himself, as he carefully ladled the steaming veggies onto his plate. ‘Ha ha, oh yes. Four, five, six, seven.’ The hosts swapped glances, and shifted uncomfortably in their seats. ‘More sprouts, John?’ asked the hostess, after a pause. At which their guest made a loud scoffing noise and stood up, violently pushing back his chair so that it rucked up the carpet. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ve got seven sprouts. And forgive me for having two strong sturdy legs to stand on, but seven sprouts is the number of sprouts I have.’
No doubt there are many married people, too, who have strong feelings on the subject of sprouts. One recalls those famous cases of men murdering their wives (and getting off with a light fine and a reprimand) for serving up the incorrect number of roasties, or putting the cruet on the wrong place-mat. But it is sitting alone in the evening, I am sure, that encourages crankiness: start out with a harmless little tendency towards obsessive-compulsive behaviour, and within a few months of single life you are not only talking to the characters in Brookside but also getting dogmatic about vegetable-consumption and forming advanced crackpot theories on the nature of evil. Since nobody contradicts you (and the goldfish doesn’t care) you easily convince yourself that you are ‘on the right lines’.
Take the chap I met recently in a Pasadena cake shop. He seemed normal enough: just a bit over-keen for a chat. But then he mentioned that during his solitary hours he had given a lot of thought to the identity of the Antichrist, and had finally settled conclusively on Richard Branson. Everything pointed to it, he said. There’s none so blind as those who will not see, etcetera. I thought he was joking, but it gradually dawned on me that he wasn’t, and that moreover he was positioned between me and the door.
‘Set in your ways’ – that’s what they call it when single people start getting things out of proportion. ‘Don’t get set in your ways.’ It means: don’t use a protractor when setting the coffee table at an angle to the wall; don’t attach so much importance to changing the date on your kitchen calendar that you scoot home from work mid-morning to check you’ve done it. The image conjured up is of a stupid-looking prehistoric animal sinking in mud and muttering, ‘Actually, I always buy the Radio Times on a Wednesday’ and ‘I asked for kitchen towel, and she bought me yellow.’
One need only spend half an hour in a supermarket to see where ‘getting set in your ways’ can ultimately lead. There is a strange urban myth which says that in supermarkets single people strike up impromptu chats over the rindless streaky in the hope of finding a potential mate. In reality, however, they are more likely to start the conversation because rindless streaky has been occupying their thoughts in the evenings.
The trouble, of course, is to recognize when one’s own reasonable preferences and quaint pet theories (attained through a painstaking process of trial and error) turn into pig-headed fixed ideas, or even dangerous obsessions. At what point does it ‘get out of hand’? I have a nasty suspicion that it is a phenomenon you can never observe in your own behaviour – one of those clever irregular verbs:
I have rules about things;
You are set in your ways;
He thinks Richard Branson is the Antichrist.
I am assuming, I suppose, that a sane live-in partner prevents the escalation of this behaviour – rather as he might helpfully point out that your clothes are thick with cat-hair or that there is toothpaste up your nostrils. But is it worth taking on a live-in partner just for this function? I can’t believe it is. Perhaps, instead, there ought to be some tall, supernatural protector for single people (along the lines of Superman) who could spot a burgeoning obsession with his X-ray vision and wooosh into our homes (with a fanfare) to prevent it from getting a grip.
Thus, just as you were preparing your solitary dinner and thinking ‘I don’t know. Eight sprouts seems too many, yet six sprouts seems too few,’ he would suddenly appear at your side and dash the whole bag to the ground, releasing you from their terrible influence. ‘A close call,’ he twinkles (with arms akimbo and a smile reminiscent of Richard Branson’s). ‘Lumme,’ you say, ‘was I really counting sprouts?’ ‘It’s all over now,’ he chuckles, patting you on the shoulder. ‘Just don’t let it happen again, you hear?’
And as he turns horizontal and flies off through the kitchen door with a cheery salute, you slide down the wall to a sitting position and think – with ample justification – ‘I wonder if I’m spending too much time on my own?’
Years ago, I was privileged to meet one of the men who first applied the word ‘vector’ to a type of bank account. I met him at an historic moment, actually, because he had just emerged from the selfsame shirtsleeve-and-braces design consultancy think-tank meeting at which the full kennel-name of Vector (‘Indigo Vector’) had been finally settled upon. He looked tired but happy – like a miner, perhaps, at the end of a 12-hour shift, or a brain surgeon who had just achieved a complicated transplant.
Of course, the proceedings of this meeting were not disclosed, but from his exhausted but triumphant state I somehow deduced it had resembled the jury room in Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men – you know, sweaty, tense, touch-and-go, life-in-the-balance. Perhaps opposition to ‘Indigo Vector’ had been fierce; the ‘Blue Streak’ lobby was unshiftable. I imagined my chap taking the righteous white-suited Henry Fonda role, quietly fighting his colleagues every inch of the way, and remaining cool while his enemies dabbed their brows with big hankies.
Had I never met him at all, however, I would have imagined something quite different. I would have assumed that the naming of a new bank account must be a work of inspiration, and that, as such, it must come from a humble individual sitting alone in a padded cell – rather in the manner of the contract Hollywood writer under the old studio system. We could call him Mankowitz. ‘Get Mankowitz on to this!’ the board would command. And a secretary would place a sheet of paper in Mankowitz’s in-tray, describing the new bank account and expecting a result by noon.
Mankowitz would come in at ten, take off his hat, shuffle the papers without removing the long cigarette between his fingers, and then start to type short one-liners, stopping occasionally only to pinch the bridge of his nose under his wire-rimmed specs.
Indigo Vector.
The bank that likes to say yes.
I want to be a tomato.
For the little things in life.
They’re tasty, tasty, very very tasty, they’re very tasty.
Once bitten, forever smitten.
We won’t make a drama out of a crisis.
And then at half past ten, he would stop for coffee.
Perhaps I harbour too strong an attachment to romantic notions of solitary genius. Perhaps I have too little respect for the massed talents of the advertising industry. But somehow I prefer the Mankowitz option. The idea of a gaggle of blokes in expensive whistles sitting together and running the paltry word Vector up a flag-pole fills me with a strange and yawning sadness.
I remembered all this because I have recently discovered the surreal world of paint colour names (Comet, Murmur, Quiescence, Evensong, Early December) and I simply cannot bear to believe that these were chosen by a committee in a designer boardroom. There is too much poetry involved, too much imaginative intimacy.
‘Right, then,’ I said, at the paint counter. ‘I’ll have a litre of Hazy Downs please, with Tinker for the skirting,’ and I caught my breath at hearing the words. It was as though the spirit of a mad poet had breezed through. Walls of hazy downs; and ‘Tinker’ for the skirting. Wow.
Just look at a strip of green Dulux shades – ‘Spring dance, April coppice, Verge, Racecourse, Meadow land, Treetop’ – and you can see this poet, can’t you, his eyes closed, straining to hear birdsong in the rustling trees outside his cell window. ‘More greens,’ he smiles to himself, momentarily forgetting the shackles that bind him to the damp stone walls. And he falls into a trance. ‘Curly kale,’ he intones, relishing the shapes it makes in his mouth. ‘Shady fern, Mystic moon, Fresh breeze, Elderwater, Trickle.’
‘What was the last one?’ snaps the man from Dulux who is taking this down. ‘Trickle,’ he repeats.
What I am building up to is a confession. I keep meeting people who think I write this column in a darkened room in a small flat, with just cats for company, and that I write it all myself out of my very own brain. Whereas of course this is a mere illusion, and in fact the writing of this column is a well-organized team affair involving a large number of hacks in consultancy roles, a weekly meeting (with minutes), and an all-day creative thrash-out, in which each person writes a paragraph and then the whole thing is put together by a complicated voting procedure. I mean ‘Single Life’? You must be joking. There are loads of us here. Loads. You should see the washing-up.
I am sorry to ruin the illusion, but we all have to learn some time that there is no Mankowitz in the advertising industry; there is no mad poet dreaming of Dulux colours; it’s all done by meetings. ‘Now, a few more greens and thank goodness we can stop for lunch. Anybody got a word that goes with Kale? Anybody?’ ‘Er … ‘‘yard’’, sir.’ ‘Mmm, so you think we should call it ‘‘Yard kale’’, Robbins? Sounds all right to me.’ ‘No, sir. I meant – er, kaleyard.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘There’s something called curly kale in the dictionary, sir.’ ‘Splendid. All right, hands up for Curly kale. Next!’
I have never lingered in cosmetics halls. In fact, I have never really understood what they are for. Why do they invariably lurk at the entrance of department stores, blocking one’s progress to the real business inside? Is it a subtle fumigation process? Or is the idea to soften you up? The luxuriant chrome and lights, the shrill exciting perfumes, the gallons of moisturizer (in tiny pots) – I figure that this sensual riot is designed to trip up the women, and remind them that shopping is basically self-flattery and treats. By the time you actually buy something, you see, you feel so madly feminine that you shell out wildly for an extra tube of bath sealant.
But I am only guessing, because personally I always draw a deep breath at the threshold to the shop, take a last memorizing look at my list (‘Draino; Cat-flap accessories; Something for getting Ribena stains out of sofa’) and then whiffle quickly and invisibly between the little counters, tacking athwart this alien sea of feminine trinketry with my eyes half-closed against the unaccustomed glamour of it all. If I pause nervously to examine a lipstick, and a lady asks ‘Can I help you?’ I freeze, and then scuttle sharpish to the lifts.
But suddenly, a few weeks ago, I felt an urge to paint my fingernails. It was weird and unaccountable. One minute I was quite normal and stable, attempting to play a well-regulated game of hide and seek with cats who can’t (or won’t) count to twenty. And the next, I was overtaken by an access of femininity, humming ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl’ with brio, and breezing into cosmetics halls demanding a range of nail colours and offering to trade unwanted cat-flap accessories by way of payment. Funny how life can change.
Single life suddenly looked quite different, you see: I caught a glimpse of another world, originating in the sort of TV advertisement where pink gauze curtains billow sensuously in a boudoir full of white light and a woman with fantastic hair pampers herself with a beauty product (or tampons). Most people probably regard nail varnish as either functional or tacky, but to me it acquired the force of revelation. Previously the idea of pampering myself meant watching the EastEnders omnibus when I had already seen both episodes in the week. But now it meant inhabiting an aura of solitary voluptuousness, spending whole yummy evenings watching paint dry.
Now, the interesting thing about nail polish is that it comes without instructions. Did you know this? This was my first setback, really, and it was one from which I never properly recovered. The other interesting thing is that nail polish remover, if you splash it about too liberally, removes polish quite indiscriminately – from your best sandals, for example, and your chest of drawers. Also, it is not a good idea to put used cotton buds, soaked with nail polish remover, directly on a mahogany dining table, because not only does the surface mysteriously acquire pits and scars, but the lacerations have white hair growing out of them, which won’t come off again, ever.
Within minutes of starting my new regime, I had run up damages to an approximate replacement value of twelve hundred pounds. But I was not down-hearted. I had applied a transparent goo of base-coat to all of my fingernails (including the right-hand ones, which were tricky) and was now ready to drink sherbet, eat Turkish delight, and watch an American mini-series until the next stage. ‘I’m strictly a female female,’ I sang, ‘Da da dum di da Dum de dee.’ I picked up the remote control from the carpet and was surprised to discover that a layer of speckled gunk had attached itself to all the nails that had come in contact with the floor. Spit. Peering at the other hand (which looked OK), I cautiously tapped all the nails with a finger to check they were dry. They weren’t.
Three hours later my fifth attempt at a base-coat was almost dry, but I was feeling strangely detached from my surroundings, because I had just spent a whole evening not using my fingers. Every impulse to pick up a tissue, or stroke the cat, or wipe hair from my eyes had been followed once (with disastrous results) and thereafter strenuously denied. At one point, the phone had rung, and after a period of whimpering with indecision I had answered it by picking up the receiver between my elbows and then dropping it on the desk, in a manner reminiscent of thriller heroines tied to kitchen chairs. ‘Hello?’ it said faintly from the desktop. ‘Help!’ I yelled, kneeling beside the receiver, and waggling my fingers like a madwoman. ‘Hello?’ it said again, and went dead.
Eventually I took the whole lot off again, partly because the removal process was the only one I was good at, partly because I realized that novice nail-painting is not something to be attempted alone, after all. It requires the attendance of slaves. I did a swift impression of Lady Macbeth (damned spot, and all that), and went to bed. And there I dreamed of waltzing through bright cosmetics halls, dressed in pink gauze, carrying bags and bags of lovely self-indulgent stuff for getting Ribena stains out of the sofa.
First, there is something I should explain: in May 1968, when the world stage resounded to the lobbing of cobbles in the streets of Paris, I recorded in my personal diary the purchase of a maroon skirt. I make no apology. To me, you see, at twelve years old, this was an événement. Maroon wool, slightly too big, zip at the front, I was proud. Moreover, conscious of the heavy responsibility owed by all diarists to future historians, I thoughtfully taped the price label to the page. ‘Etam,’ it says, ‘£sd: 19/11’. I still have it (the label, not the skirt). It is before me now.
In the intervening years, I have of course laughed at the schoolgirl hubris – fancy preserving an Etam label; did I imagine that the wild-eyed time-capsule people would wrest it from my grasp and bury it along with a copy of the Maastricht treaty for unborn post-nuclear generations to gape and wonder at? Ha ha ha. But now something has happened. The University of Reading has acquired a ‘Centre for Ephemera Studies’, dedicated to the preservation of can labels, leaflets, and all such throwaway stuff. Good grief, my Etam label – someone really wants it. It is like waking up in the cold light of a science fiction novel. Well, do it to Julia, that’s what I say.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to be the University of Reading at the moment. Leaving aside the obvious horror entailed in suddenly finding oneself transmogrified into a red-brick academic institution in the middle of nowhere, tons of old shed-clearings must daily be screeching through the gates by special courier. ‘More bus tickets from well-wishers,’ says the dumper truck driver, as he cheerfully pulls his lever and sends several hundredweight of brown-paper parcels slithering down in a heap. The remit of the centre is to preserve only printed matter, but the chronic hoarders of carpet off-cuts will be much too excited to notice. ‘People throw these bits away, with no sense of heritage, but we have kept these sacks of Cyril Lord for thirty years,’ says the covering letter. ‘Please don’t try returning it to us, we have moved. We hope you find much interest also in the tins of paint.’
But if the university sinks under the weight of empty seed packets and Brillo boxes, it will only serve them right. What a terrible idea, to confer academic respectability on the worst of human failings. Besides, since we feel guilt about having a throwaway culture, for God’s sake let’s have the exhilaration too. Chuck it right away, Kay; sling it in the bin, Vin; take it to the tip, Pip; dump it in the sea, Lee. There must be fifty ways to lose a label. Who cares if the ‘details of our everyday life’ are not remembered for ever? Who do we think we are? This sort of vanity is all right when you are twelve, but let’s snap out of this worship of the design-classic Coke bottle, before it is too late.
It used to be the case that cultural artefacts of all sorts – not just H.P. Sauce labels – were consigned to the dustbin. And it was better, healthier, that way. The old made way for the new. Television programmes were shown, then wiped; films were distributed once; records were released, sold, deleted; nice old buildings were wantonly knocked down; and a collection of old cinema tickets was something that alarmingly dropped out of a shoebox in front of guests, making you flush red, grab your purse, and run away to Sweden. But now the culture has been telescoped, which is why it’s hard to remember what year it is, and why shopping in the Virgin Megastore is such a depressing experience. When a person can still buy Monkees albums in 1993, it reduces her faith in the natural workings of progress.
So here is a rallying call. Let us face forward, dump some big ones, and move on. It needs no ghost of Sigmund Freud to point out that the new discipline of ephemera studies represents anal retention on a vast, global and terrifying scale. Besides, if we carry on like this, there will be no future historians to thank us for the postcard, so it’s all a vainglorious waste of time in any case. By the year 2000, if we are not all dead through millennial terror, economic incompetence, or holy war, I confidently predict we will have disappeared under inundations of books and videos and lovingly preserved Etam labels.
I swore off caviare on Sunday night. The cats took it badly, but I stood firm, and told them they would thank me in the end. Having watched an hour-long Channel 4 documentary about the polluted River Volga and its toxic sturgeon, I sadly added caviare to my mental list of proscribed foods, finding surprisingly little comfort in the thought that I never eat it anyway. According to a current crack-’em-up joke among the Volga fishermen (who admittedly rejoice in a very peculiar sense of humour), even the Kremlin bureaucrats no longer dare to eat the stuff, so I was not over-reacting. Industrial pollutants and agricultural pesticides are poisoning the river to a point where the giant beluga no longer swims gaily in its waters but is reduced to a big stuffed ugly fish in a museum, dusted weekly by a woman in a scarf.
Given that caviare is not a staple food (and that you have to eat quite a lot of it to feel any ill effects), the programme wasn’t exactly alarmist, and I wasn’t exactly alarmed. But my heart sank as I recognized the beginnings of a new idée fixe. The trouble with food scares is that only rarely are they called off; a warning siren wails out the danger, but there is no equivalent to the All Clear. This means that susceptible, obedient people with no minds of their own (like me) still pick up little trays of Welsh lamb in supermarkets and then put them back down again, just wondering in a vague, confused kind of way whether the effect of Chernobyl will wear off in their lifetimes. It is possible to get stuck.
Personally I don’t buy French apples (why, I don’t remember); I don’t buy cat-food marked ‘beef’ (mad cat disease); and I am wary of eggs (Mrs Currie). Making meals is therefore quite difficult, as you can imagine. In fact, if there is ever a scare involving big economy sacks of Maltesers, quite frankly I am done for.
This is mainly a personality failing, obviously. If nobody says stop, I carry on. I reckon I am one of the very few people alive today who understand why a Japanese soldier would still be fighting the Second World War. A couple of years ago I was obliged to forgo my visits to a very pleasant supervised gym just because every time I was given a repetitive exercise (‘Breathe out and pull; breathe in, relax; out and pull, and in, relax’) I found I would obediently repeat it until the tutor checked up on me, regardless of the interval. ‘Done ten of those yet?’ he would enquire, in a kindly tone. ‘Fifty-six,’ I would blurt out, red-faced. I finally gave it up when I realized that he might one day set me going on an exercise and then pop out to post a letter and be run down by a furniture van. In which case I would be left to row an imaginary skiff for the rest of my natural life.
The idea about food scares, presumably, is that you use your own judgement, but without information I don’t understand how it’s done. A fortnight after Chernobyl, do you just decide not to dwell on the nasty idea that contamination lasts thousands of years (or whatever), and choose to make a traditional shepherd’s pie – even if it cooks itself without help and outshines the candlelight on the dining table? ‘Life’s too short,’ you reason (quite aptly, in the circumstances). But isn’t salmonella still rife in the chicken coops, aren’t cattle still waltzing in the pens? They are probably doing a full-scale mazurka by now.
On the caviare front there is less to worry about, obviously. ‘I hope there’s no caviare in this,’ is not something the average attentive cat-owner thinks to herself when doling out the Whiskas. On the other hand, the chances of us hearing that the Volga has been cleaned up (even if it happens) are remarkably slim, so the old Japanese soldier syndrome takes over once again, I’m afraid. ‘Don’t eat the prawns,’ Julie Walters once hissed alarmingly in a Victoria Wood sketch. ‘They tread water at sewage outlets with their mouths open.’ Likewise, from now on I shall raise a skinny warning hand at people in the act of eating caviare canapés, and remind them of the latest unfunny sturgeon jokes from the fisherfolk of the Volga. Either that, of course, or only respond to invitations that promise ‘6pm–9pm, Cocktails and Maltesers’.
According to the first-hand reports, what tends to happen is this. You are lying in a hospital bed, approaching death, and then suddenly you lift out of your body and look down on yourself. This is weird enough to start with, of course; but before your rationality can fully take stock – ‘That’s very odd, me on the ceiling, I expect it was the toasted cheese’ – you are propelled, helpless and at great velocity, along a dark tunnel towards a wonderful welcoming light. No thought of passport, hand-baggage or travellers’ cheques detains you; nor do you slap your hand to your brow with the cry ‘Oh no, I left the iron on.’ Instead, you emerge into a beautiful, timeless, tranquil garden where you feel blissfully happy, and decide to stay for eternity, if not weeks.
Of course you are also dragged away again. Suddenly, with a dreadful finality, you are dropped back in your body, and it’s all over, your vision is fled, you are condemned to life. But you are never the same again. Possibly your experience confirms the notion of life after death, possibly it proves only that imagination is the last thing to go. Whichever way you see it, you have been blessed.
Personally, I have always yearned for an out-of-body-experience. (With a body like mine, so would you.) My only fear was that my idea of paradise is so cheap and materialistic that my tunnel would end, not in the tranquillity of Elysian fields, nor beside still waters, but in a celestial shopping arcade (modelled on Bentalls of Kingston), from which I would return with beany hats and specially printed souvenirs: ‘My sister went to Heaven and all she got me was this lousy T-shirt.’ This sense of personal unworthiness, however, only increases one’s awe at the genuine wonderful thing, and on Sunday I watched BBC1’s Everyman programme about near-death experiences with big round eyes and my mouth open. Even if you don’t believe in Heaven, you can believe in the near-death experience. These people had seen something. They thought it was lovely. It was thirteen years since one woman’s privileged return from the undiscovered country, yet she still had light in her eyes when she spoke about it. In earlier times, these people would have been revered as saints, I thought.
The only puzzle was why nobody mentioned Lewis Carroll. Tunnel, garden, I don’t know, it rings bells. What was mentioned, however, was a miserable wet-blanket scientific theory which suggested in no uncertain terms that the near-death experience is a mere perceptual illusion – something that happens inside the brain when your resistance is low – and that in reality you don’t go anywhere, not even Bentalls, you just think you do. This was a shock, especially since it sounded so plausible. Dr Susan Blackmore, a cheerful academic with a no-nonsense approach and a leaning towards Buddhism, has been researching the phenomenon for years, and what she said, basically, was that your inhibitory cells stop firing, causing masses of excitation. I felt terrible. I sat down. So it was really true, what they told me. There is no shopping after death.
‘What happened to you back there? We thought we’d lost you!’
‘Oh, it was just some uncontrolled firing in the temporal lobe, silly! The accompanying rush of endorphins (peptide neurotransmitters) just persuaded me I was having a frightfully good time when in fact I wasn’t.’
‘Oh. So it wasn’t like Heaven, then?’
‘Well, in a way it was. I mean, I wore a blue frock and had a pony, which was nice, and there was a treacle well and a pile of comics, but it didn’t mean anything. It was just that my brain had lost its grip on the normal model of reality, and had constructed one from memory and imagination, rather than from the evidence of the senses.’
I suppose the near-death experience never did prove the existence of the immortal soul, but I have to admit I sneakingly thought it did. But that’s all in the past now. What saddens me equally is the thought that if the near-death experience is an illusion, there is no near-life experience either, which leaves a big question-mark hanging over the glassy-eyed travellers of the London Underground. Previously I had supposed they were dead people on spiritual awayday tickets, investigating the joys of the other side. But if they aren’t, then who the hell are they?