I was reading the telephone directory the other day. Well we all have our flat days – days when our minds feel like old grey sag-bags and our indoor plants stare reproachfully at us from dry, neglected pots. On such days the sun is wasting its time up there above the dark grey cloud barrier.
Actually, on days like this, if the sun does happen to be shining it just shows up how smudgy our windows are getting. Well, anyway, on just such a morning, there I was staring bleakly at the phone book and half-noticing that I could, if I wanted to, easily ring up and find out the correct time, the latest cricket score, recipe, bedtime story etc, when a brilliant thought struck me.
What we housewives need is a new service called: ‘Dial-A-Compliment’.
Then on days when our shoulders feel like old bent wire coathangers and our legs hang heavy from our hips we could pick up the phone and a Robert Redfordish sort of voice would instantly, keenly, awarely cry:
‘Hey – I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to ring because I think you’re absolutely smashing!’
Or perhaps to make the whole thing seem a bit more personal, he would first ask: ‘What number are you ringing from?’ and then when we told him he’d cry: ‘Oh yes – you’re that lady/girl/little darling with the gorgeously wicked gleam in her eye. And the truly delectable earlobes!’
No matter that we happen to be huddled over the telephone with eyes like dried gravy and earlobes like spent balloons. I guarantee we’d perk up and start looking and feeling better right away.
But until the telephone company catches on to my scheme we’ll just have to turn our thoughts to other ways for curing the blues … It’s not a bit of good anybody telling us to Beat The Blues By Going On A Diet. If we felt up to doing that we wouldn’t be blue. Starting a diet, like giving up smoking, requires a confident, buoyant sort of mood to get Day One under way.
On drear days we must set our sights much lower. We might re-pot the house plants perhaps. Or clean the silver. But even these require a certain amount of get-up-and-go. As one glum chum recently put it: ‘When I’m having one of these sorts of days I can sit for hours staring at a cobweb without being able to do a thing about it.’ As a matter of fact, just writing that last sentence reminded me that I’ve been staring out at a rather dank-looking stringy thing hanging down outside the window for several weeks now. So hold on a minute while I dart away for my new, very fancy, peacock blue feather flick …
… There, that’s better. Oh dear, except that it looks as if I shall spend the next few weeks staring out at a gaudy, left-behind feather, now wedged and fluttering in the eaves. But that does bring me to one aspect of blues-curing we might consider on our slightly more radiant days. A psychiatrist once told a very sad woman I knew that, yes, he’d be glad to have a go at cheering her up but that, first of all, she must go home and get her house in order.
Gloomily she trailed home and dragged out the vacuum cleaner, wax polish, ironing board and mending basket, and for three days grimly followed his instructions, non-stop. Whereupon, as the clever chap obviously suspected in her case, she found herself surrounded by gleaming furniture, pressed clothes and darned socks – and feeling so cheerful she decided she didn’t really need psychiatric treatment after all.
I shouldn’t think many psychiatrists are quite so altruistic in their approach but I pass it on here for all those women who may happen to be reading this while slumped despondently in tatty tights, droopy trews or dusty armchairs.
I especially pass it on to all those worn out young mothers like the one I visited recently who had let things go so far that, following a rolling pencil, I plunged my hand down the back of her sofa and came up with a very old, cold and flabby fried egg.
The whole key to successful cheering-up operations seems to be in managing to reach a turning point; that critical moment when we stop glaring at the piece of dried bacon rind under the kitchen table and actually drag ourselves up and over to dustpan and brush. So let’s all make our broom cupboard, shelf, box or wherever we stow our cleaning materials, a really happy place to drag ourselves over to.
Hence my peacock blue feather flick. Hence too, my new orange dusters, my new pink rubber gloves and my new purple-flowered ironing board cover. Well yes, I agree my cleaning cupboard is a shade on the jazzy side but at least it is cheerful. Although, just in case pride in all this sparkling new gear should begin to flag, it would be nice, wouldn’t it, to be able to summon a few words of inspiration and encouragement from the outside world?
So I still think there’s a very good argument in favour of the telephone company taking up my ‘Dial-A-Compliment’ idea. Then, as our orange dusters begin to fade and we feel another of those hard up, cast down, worn out, thoroughly misunderstood days coming on, we could at least bask in the cheery illusion that somewhere out there somebody fancied us, if only for our earlobes.