I shall long remember the rage my son felt, as an eight-year-old, watching a tv commercial for a job at the Ford motorworks. ‘Fifty pounds a week,’ said their chap, ‘a car purchasing scheme, four weeks paid holiday a year … etc, etc.’
‘It’s not fair,’ burst out Dan, rushing upstairs in a paddy. ‘I bet that job’ll be gone by the time I get married!’
I suppose we all have a picture in the back of our minds of how life ought to be. A rather stylised picture, perhaps, based on how it was – or seemed – when we were young. Or how it should have been. Or how it is on our favourite telly programme. ‘If only …’ we sigh.
And instead, here we are, thrust by circumstances into situations totally unsuited to our (exquisitely sensitive, highly sophisticated, really rather rare) personalities.
I particularly find myself thinking this when I attend Daniel’s sporting fixtures. As regular readers may recall, I have never really seen myself as your typical sports buff. So how is it that I’ve somehow become a keen supporter? Not perhaps a really typical hockey-mum. I can’t quite bring myself to leap to my feet in the clinches, waving a sizeable hand bell and screaming ‘Kill ‘im: kill ‘im!’
But I do astonish myself (not to mention nearby spectators) by clasping my hands to my bosom from time to time and warbling ‘Oh well played, chaps!’
How many others of us, I wonder, when gritting our teeth and peeling our forty-ninth potato of the week, indulge in Walter Mitty dreams of how it might have been. ‘… I say! What fun to rustle up a meal for ourselves after all that wining and dining in Bangkok!’ we trill, as with long white pampered fingers we reach caressingly for the Moulinex …
‘Heavens! I’m hardly in the same category as Chekhov!’ we murmur modestly, as we autograph yet another best seller …
‘My goodness, Your Royal Highness,’ we blush fetchingly, ‘to think that you’ve been saving yourself for little me! …’
But then it’s back down to earth with a thump and a splash as Number One Son clumps in from school with the latest gasp-making news: ‘Hey, guess what? There are vampire bats and they give you rabies!’
I am not alone in this growing awareness that my lifestyle is somehow turning out to be a far, far cry from what I feel deep down it should have been.
I dropped in on an acquaintance the other day just as she was plunging her arm right round the U-bend in her loo, to retrieve the Incredible Hulk from yet another adventure.
‘How elegantly you manage even the most prosaic chores!’ I exclaimed.
‘Well, actually,’ she replied moodily, ‘l’m a trained ballet dancer. Or was until all this lot caught up with me. Indeed I often feel, the way things are these days, as though I’m spending my entire life wading through treacle!’
And it isn’t just the ones whose careers have fizzled out who get brooding attacks of what might have been …
‘What would you be doing now, if you had your time again?’ I asked a successful and respected author. Without hesitation he replied, with a faraway gleam in his eye, ‘Oh I’d be the captain of a small but sturdy vessel, chugging around some native islands somewhere, trading in copra.’
Personally I often yearn – especially when I’m once again patching the knees on every single pair of Daniel’s jeans – even the new ones I bought last week – for the ‘if only’ world of ivy-covered academic cloisters. There I’d be, taking tea with my own private Einstein, tossing theories back and forth in ever expanding circles. What bliss!
Others, caught in the commuter crush or trundling wearily round crowded supermarkets may well wonder whatever happened to that dream of buying a farm and growing roses in their cheeks. Not to mention socking away their egg money and creating tomato chutney recipes of county renown.
Of course if you happen to be already down on the farm, up to your ‘ips in mud, then you may well be wishing you were squeezed on to the 8.30 to Waterloo.
When I am not mentally arguing the toss with Einstein, I do sometimes set my sights a little lower down the academic scale. Just one simple diploma would do, I tell myself, in – say – horticulture. (Well you have to start somewhere.) I even picked up a leaflet the other day on a two-year horticultural course being provided by a local college.
‘Hey, look at this,’ I told my family. ‘I’d simply love to further my education and I’ve always fancied – er – outdoor things.’
Then David read the leaflet and pointed out that this particular course would provide me with a diploma in – among other less specifically useful attributes – ‘graveyard work’.
One of the phrases we all know we must avoid like the plague is ‘When I was a girl …’ To heck with that. When I was a girl, digging six-foot holes in the ground was fairly instinctive, common-sense work for old chaps with, not unnaturally, somewhat dour expressions.
Undaunted, when my next attack of the ‘if onlys’ struck, I confided to a very clever professor I know that I’d really rather like to pick up my education where I left off and perhaps take a degree in English.
‘Good heavens, what on earth for?’ he asked. ‘You’d lose all your writing style in the process!’
Ah well, maybe some of us are wading through the right pools of treacle.