MARY: I was desperate to go to Marlborough for all sorts of things so my heart sank when, looking out at the glorious view of the Downs from Room Two (see floor plan) I noted that the Volvo was neither in the field nor parked in the road in front of the cottage. Giles had driven somewhere without telling me. And of course, because he doesn’t carry a mobile, I couldn’t ring to give him a list of what we needed.
GILES: Mary can’t drive a car. After 80 lessons over twenty years with three separate instructors she had only mastered the skill of going forward with an instructor beside her in a dual control car. When it came to changing gear she found it challenging, claiming that the ‘thinking load’ became impossible.
She can ride a bicycle but is wobbly on it and has a lot of minor accidents, for example, with insects flying into her mouth as she is screaming at me to wait for her. I am thinking she might get a moped but we would need to take her to a disused aerodrome to practise riding it. On second thoughts, she might then be mown down by learner drivers who also use these places.
There is a history of moped incompetence in her family. When her aunt Sheila bought a moped for use in her work as a nurse in Belfast in the 1960s, the vehicle was delivered and the garageman demonstrated the starting procedure. But before he had shown her the braking…Sheila, allegedly, got onto it and went round and round the block interminably. Each time she passed the house her family shouted at her to stop but she shouted back that she didn’t know how to and had to continue the circuit until she had run out of petrol.
The reason I don’t always tell Mary when I’m going into town is that she’s a hoarder, and we don’t need her to buy any more so-called goods. I don’t want to be held up outside an endless series of shops while she goes into a trance, picking things up and then putting them down again like a zombie.
Also, Mary can never find me when she comes out of Waitrose. She says I should carry a mobile so she can contact me and find out where I’m parked, yet I believe that in a small market town she should be able to use her five senses to try to spot the outline of the Volvo parked somewhere on a high street only a quarter of a mile long. I am a great believer in setting initiative tests. As a follower of the Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies, and a particular admirer of his dystopian novel After London, in which an unknown cataclysm causes society to relapse into barbarism, I believe that the innate skills of recognition of basic shapes and patterns should not be allowed to sink into desuetude. Indeed, our survival could depend on them.
MARY: I have been accused of shopping for things I don’t need or ‘hoarding’, but this is untrue. It’s not that I’ve got too much stuff but that the cottage is too small.
There are three shopping ‘opportunities’ around here.
Pewsey, although pleasantly one-horse as a town, suffers from a condition we’ve dubbed Pewsey-itis. None of the shops seem to have the same half-day, for example. Dry-cleaning has to be dropped at the Post Office and the baker charges one pound one pence for a loaf of bread which means the girls behind the counter are constantly having to give out 99 pence in change with all the queue-lengthening time that involves. However, it is intimate with, for example, an electrician who remembers what white goods you own and will mend or change them without a receipt.
Devizes is the least near of our shopping opportunities but it yields the most satisfaction for me. Although the town’s been over-developed, it has a quaint centre and much more of a feeling of real Wiltshire than has Marlborough. As our old friend Anne has pointed out, anywhere under a hundred miles from London has a whiff of London about it, and Devizes is a good fifteen miles further away than is Marlborough. Devizes has every kind of shop you could hope for, including a stationery shop, a health food shop, a tiny electrical goods shop selling things like two-bar electric fires, an independent chemist, a camera shop selling Kodak film, The Black Swan – a pub on the market square with crackling log fires – antiques and dogs inside it and proper food, to say nothing of a market every Thursday. But for me, the real joy lies in the eleven or more charity shops.
Giles will do anything to prevent me going into the charity shops – for obvious reasons, and who can blame him. But I’ve always associated shopping with achievement, especially if I’ve bought what I call a bargain, and he calls ‘more stuff for landfill’. He would prefer it if I never was let loose in Devizes, but fortunately for us we are on the panel of an NHS dentist there. The ungreedy saint of a dentist welcomes one of us in there at least once a month so Giles has no option but to drive me.
Giles buys very little on ecological grounds. The one thing he does buy, however, is office furniture. Naturally I don’t want horrid grey metal desks or swivel chairs but since we diagnosed his motive for the purchase he has stopped doing it. Basically, he has missed out on office life but has an innate longing for it.
Giles usually hates going to Marlborough because of the spending opportunities in Waitrose, the White Horse Bookshop and the Foxtrot Vintage clothes shop. He feels beleaguered if he sees too many people he knows – for example, former fellow parents at our children’s schools – because he finds it hard to be ‘pleasant on demand’ when he is champing to get back to the garden.
GILES: I’m a busy man. I wanted to quickly slip in to Marlborough’s admirable record shop – Sound Knowledge – one of the last remaining off-line means to purchase music, and buy a CD of Tales from Topographic Oceans by Yes. I used to own the original copy with artwork by Roger Dean but a former landlady sold my entire record collection in the 1980s at a garage sale. Sound Knowledge is one of the few stores where you can find the album you are looking for just by describing its cover to the owner. A tiny CD, however, is no substitute for being able to pore over the artwork of a 1970s double concept album.
Yes, featuring the eunuchy voice of Jon Lord, produced some of the most self-indulgent music ever to be committed to vinyl, but I have a secret admiration for classically trained, absurdly pompous progressive rock bands, and a particular weakness for Emerson, Lake and Palmer (formerly the Nice), King Crimson – especially the album Lizard – and early Genesis – Foxtrot and Selling England by the Pound – but mostly when no one else is around. It’s funny how music can become a time capsule and send you hurtling back to the less complicated days of its origin. (I mean pre-children basically.)
