MARY: Giles can watch an episode of University Challenge and get seventeen questions right. But he can also be inexplicably dim-witted from time to time. We call it Variable Intelligence Disorder. And I’m not the only one to have noticed this.
Today, Giles and his mother were pruning roses together in the garden, below the window. I am ironing in the room above them, Room Two.
‘Mary won’t be able to come,’ I heard him say. ‘She’s taken on too much.’
You’ve taken on too little, I thought to myself.
‘No. I’ll come up on my own to Wales, Mum,’ Giles continued. ‘Mary works nine-eleven. She won’t be able to get the time off…’
‘It’s twenty-four-seven Giles. Not nine-eleven. People work twenty-four-seven!’ said Ann Wood.
‘Well how did I get the idea it was nine-eleven? I’m sure it’s nine-eleven, Mum. Do you want to check – on the internet? You could Google it.’
The other day I handed him a hand-written thank you letter I had written to Veronica and John to thank them for having asked us to Mull. We were in the television room and I saw him read the first page with enthusiasm. Then he cried, ‘Don’t be silly, Mary. You can’t end a letter like this in the middle of a sentence without even signing off.’
‘I haven’t done,’ I seethed. ‘Turn the page over.’
‘Ah, there it is,’ said Giles. ‘Well, why didn’t you tell me it was a two pager?’
Without Gug’s sympathetic presence in the house I find the VID hard to take at times. It’s as if I’m going mad. And I’m particularly upset about the fact that Giles has started having his tongue out.
I laughed the first time he did it – it was like the way slower witted children used to read when we were at school. But now he’s doing it all the time and I don’t know if he’s just trying to annoy me or whether he’s got something actually wrong with him, but when I scream ‘Put your tongue in!’ he now replies, ‘Please let me have it out, Nutty. Now that I’ve started doing it, I find it’s so much more comfortable to have it poking out. Why don’t you try it?’
GILES: One of the stupidest things I’ve done was joining Amazon Prime (for ‘free’ next day delivery) because I wanted a parcel to be delivered the next day. Mary wasn’t there when I was punching in the instructions with my sausage fingers. I had no idea that if I failed to cancel it, it would cost me £79 a year until the day I die.
I have never used it since and I’ve no idea if they are still taking the money out of my account because Mary always hides my bank statements before I’ve had a chance to look at them. And then she sends them to the accountant so that’s the last I ever see of them. It’s her way of keeping me in the dark and infantilising me.
One of the earliest examples of my having Variable Intelligence Disorder was at prep school when we were made to do an intelligence test. One of the questions was ‘which weighs more – a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers?’ Easy, I thought. Naturally the bricks got my vote and secured my entry into that exclusive club DENSA, the polar opposite of MENSA. No one in an official capacity had ever tried to deceive me before, and this experience gave me a lifelong fear of entrapment.
When I was entrapped in a motoring offence by a policeman lurking in a depopulated leafy area in Hungerford where the 30 mph limit suddenly turns into forty, it happened because I was just starting to put my foot down to enjoy the freedom of the roads. I was doing thirty-eight as I approached the forty sign. As anyone would, I opted to attend a speed awareness course rather than receive points on my licence (clean as a whistle despite Mary’s protestations that I drive dangerously).
I hated the course and I’ve no time for those folk who claim to have really enjoyed it and who talk about it for months afterwards with all the zealotry of converts. I found out that the fellow who ran my course also moonlights as the proprietor of two dodgy nursing homes. That says it all.
GILES: We are leaving our money troubles behind and heading to North Wales to stay with my mother, but Mary has packed a sheath of mortgage papers to sort through as she seems to be addicted to busyness.
When Mary was organising the mortgage for this cottage, she was looking for something in her basket and systematically unloaded one item after another onto the mahogany veneer antique bureau separating her and the mortgage broker. I remember she told me how his face gradually morphed into a mask of impatience and irritation, and he snapped, ‘If you take one more item out of your bag I’ll give you a smack’ (those were the days before ‘abuse’ was recognised as a source of income). His professional cool was severely tested and to this day I still suspect that the mortgage deal Mary negotiated was the wrong sort.
MARY: I’ve got too much to do as usual but sometimes if you bring paperwork with you and sort it out in other people’s homes, it’s easier to deal with – partly because other houses tend to have empty surfaces whereas the cottage tends to have none.
It’s always worth going to Anglesey if you get the chance. People come in packages and Giles’s package includes his mother. She is enthusiastic about all manner of wholesome things: windy coastal walks, dogs, flowers, building dens and making fairy cakes – which she used to help her grandchildren to make, all three of them wearing linen aprons and then tidying up nicely afterwards, before licking the bowl. She has a wood-burning stove which makes her house overlooking the Menai Straits and Snowdonia toasty all the way through and a third of it is light-filled because, as a former Victorian peach house, it’s made largely of iron and glass. She has a lovely musical voice, knows all about plant and wildlife, and has a sharp and well-stocked brain.
GILES: Mum was once a Brown Owl in the days when the middle classes would volunteer and do good. She’s the sort of woman who knows where things like thermometers and nail scissors are without having to overturn the house. She believes that a woman’s place is in the home.
MARY: The trouble is that she also seems to believe a man’s place is in the home as well. Or in Giles’s case, the garden. The two of them spend hours congratulating each other on the progress the other one has made.
‘Well at least Mum appreciates me,’ Giles has just said accusingly. ‘She says I’ve done really well to have made my own runner-bean wigwam from my own coppiced hazel.’
‘Yes – but at the expense of not having completed your painting commission.’
‘But a mature garden adds thousands to a property, Mary so it’s money earned in kind.’
‘But we’re not selling.’
‘We may have to at the rate you’re spending,’ he says from a doorway. He always likes to stand in a doorway during an argument because it is almost out of earshot and he likes to ratchet up the tension when we are having a disagreement. It’s called passive aggression.
GILES: This is an exit strategy. A sharp exit strategy as in the Carlsberg ads. It allows me to duck into another room and lock the door behind me. Or even jump out of a window. As a woman from Northern Ireland, Mary is fully capable of adopting the ways of violence that characterised the Troubles.
MARY: Of course, I’m never properly violent but I like to reach for some kind of spray product like Windolene when we have these rows. I come towards him spraying a fine mist in the hope of triggering an asthma attack to get my revenge. Naturally, he runs away. Once I locked him into Room One when he had done something really awful about which I felt so strongly that I continued to spray Pledge through the keyhole until the plastic bottle ran dry.
GILES: Our daughter even suggested that I ring the help group Mankind for battered husbands yet I read in the Mail today an article telling me that the word ‘mankind’ is now politically incorrect and no longer allowed.
When the children were small, Mary and I once went on a skiing holiday. We joined a large party who had hired a chalet in Wengen. It was to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of one of my father’s oldest friends, Gill Waterstoner. Mary can’t even walk in ski boots but she was just recovering from Legionnaires’ disease and Gill thought that the rest would be good for her. She could go back to bed after breakfast every morning and then come up the mountain to join us for lunch.
Meanwhile, my mother came to stay in the cottage to look after the girls then aged five and eleven. We found remarkable accelerated learning on our return. One child was singing French songs in a French accent, the other putting her bowl into the machine after she had eaten out of it. What was Granny’s secret? She attended to the task in hand.
She did not read an article and talk on a mobile while simultaneously putting a child to bed. In exchange, she had the child’s full attention. It was then that I realised we needed Mum’s help nine-eleven. Imagine if there were four hands picking caterpillars off brassicas rather than two. And there were jobs like step sweeping which only got done when she came to stay. Then it dawned on me: perhaps that’s why she lives in Anglesey.
MARY: It’s a heat wave on Anglesey and we are sunbathing on Red Wharf Bay, winner of a Clean Eurobeach award.
Many New Age visualisation techniques for inducing mental calm involve imagining yourself lying on a beach. This never works for me because I can’t think of a beach experience which didn’t involve anxiety. Especially during the children’s childhood.
Heroic as men can be at responding to danger (toddlers or small dogs being washed out to sea) or to theft, they seem to lack the imaginative faculty to anticipate such likely results of inalertness. So a woman can’t risk closing her eyes on a beach unless another woman on the next lounger can be inveigled into keeping watch.
GILES: It’s not surprising Mary can’t relax on a beach as she brings so much stuff with her and then spends ages sorting through her bag looking for the various items. Moreover, I never know why she doesn’t carry everything in a sensible, waterproof, zip-up bag instead of a sisal African shopping basket with all its potential for the contents to spill out.
MARY: It’s funny how all men seem to consider a loaded woman’s bag or basket to be a symbol of neurosis rather than a repository of useful items which they themselves will be plundering in the fullness of time – e.g., water, towels, suncream, bite cream, reading matter, tissues, guide books, cash, house keys, car keys…to say nothing of mobiles and chargers. I think Giles’s mother is rather dependent on us going out for part of the day so she can relax herself, rather than having us there twenty-four-seven – or nine-eleven, as Giles insists on describing it.
GILES: All quiet back in Wiltshire but the courgettes have turned into marrows. I put them on a chair outside the field gate with a sign saying ‘FREE ESSEX MARROWS’. This year they were snapped up almost immediately. A sign of the times and food shortages.
MARY: Why not free Wiltshire marrows? This is an example of Giles having Hatrolallia. His explanation, ‘But I used to live in Essex and a man in the next village would always have a sign outside his house saying “FREE ESSEX MARROWS”.’
GILES: I went to fill up at the local garage and found it surprisingly empty. It seems all our neighbours were indoors watching the Olympics. Why should I be made to feel guilty about not joining in? Even David Attenborough has said, ‘There are a few people in the country who don’t want necessarily to see people with very few clothes on jumping off something.’
MARY: I’m not sporty. I’m badly co-ordinated and the best I can hope for is a vigorous uphill walk. I never even thought of running on concrete since it does your knees in in later life, and I’ve been told by a personal trainer that a woman should never run, either on concrete or on a gym running machine. She should only walk uphill fast or use the uphill walking machine at the gym. Otherwise she risks developing the dread condition of ‘banana bosom’. Why don’t people make the connection between the pounding and the loss of elasticity?
I recently wrote an article about neck lifts during which I met the famous Harley Street surgeon Rajid Grover. He told me something reassuring, which is that, ‘All women’s necks go at the age of about forty-three and, unless the woman has done something silly like pavement pounding, it is just something physiological and nothing the woman herself can be blamed for.’
As for watching sport – I followed Wimbledon one year while helping to nurse my sick father and found very quickly that it was absolutely compelling once you got a taste for it. I can’t remember who I was interested in – perhaps it was that black-haired tennis player Ilie Nastase. Anyway, I took each shot he won as a personal triumph and ditto when he was knocked out I was devastated. I had invested so much emotional energy in him winning.
I haven’t watched sport since because, apart from not having time because of being so busy cleaning, I can’t help but, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, treat those two impostors, triumph and disaster, just the same.
MARY: A breakthrough. As a result of our Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus style diary experiment, we have resolved a long-standing argument over the kitchen.
Our galley-style kitchen is revolting and everyone who has been here would agree. Above all we need a new sink. The one we have is stained. The tap heads have come off leaving traps for gunk that we have to look at every day. Yet Giles has been adamant that we cannot replace them.
GILES: It is a perfectly good sink. The mixer tap works very well and it has an ideological value for me because I remember the day when the plumber came to the cottage to replace the taps. I remember that it was the same day as either Bert or Polly’s funeral and I remember leaving him to it as we went up to the church in our Sunday best and thinking – one good thing about Wiltshire is that you can trust a workman to be left alone in your cottage.
When we came back about an hour later, he gleefully announced that he had succeeded in stripping down the tap, descaling it and making it work again. He had spared us the cost of buying a new tap. Therefore, to me, when I look at this tap, even though the heads are still off it, it represents a triumph for the philosophy enshrined in the cult book of the Seventies Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – in other words the opposite of built-in obsolescence. Instead of instant replacement and landfill clogging, he had restored the flow by the traditional virtues of patience and time.
The fact that the taps are still going years later, rather than having submitted to the excessively hard water which comes from the private reservoir our village draws from, gives me a sense of satisfaction each time I see them gush. We each make our own reality.
Yes, the open heads act as repositories for gunk and yes there is a spidery area where the wooden work surface has rotted away at the back of the sink (caveat emptor – don’t buy wooden sink surrounds, they are a nightmare) but I’m not looking at them. I am looking out of the window at the fine trees I have planted outside and the sunbeams playing on the tall, waving Cosmos, whose daisy-like mauve and purple heads refuse to accept that winter is around the corner.
Re: the kitchen: it’s a galley kitchen and it still works – just. I believe in keeping things that still work. The whole myth of the kitchen being the heart of the house and the biggest room where children do projects on a massive table has not materialised in the cottage. We are the only ones amongst our friends who lack an AGA. In this way we are imposters. Neither, incidentally, do we possess that other badge of Yuppie honour – a sit on mower.
Our kitchen is ten foot by six and a half and would not look amiss in a boat. Our friend Jo says that we eat far too many roasts. But then she adds she doesn’t blame us because, ‘your kitchen is so small you haven’t got any chopping surfaces for salad or marinating fish.’ Well-designed, it does suffer from the fact that we employed some school leavers to put on cheap B&Q plastic floor tiles and they were trying to do the project against the clock in order to get to a party in London on the same day as they laid them. One by one the tiles have been popping out ever since.
My parents also embraced the make-do-and-mend philosophy. My father believed that any money he ‘got in’ or ‘fresh’ money (they always got money in through selling houses and moving to smaller ones, rather than earning it) should not be used unnecessarily. They were always keen to save money and so they regretted having splashed out on a fashionable ceramic hob cooker using their tiny unearned income to buy it. They found they resented the enormous amount of energy required to get up to a workable degree of red hot heat only to their dismay, to then have to observe the residual energy being dissipated into the ether as a waste product, half an hour after they had turned off the hob. ‘Bugger the ceramic hob,’ said my father who resurrected a camping gas pair of rings from the garage, attached to a Primus Stove which they placed over the ceramic hob, only using the hob for major religious festivals like Easter and Christmas. Besides my parents had signed up for an electricity programme called Economy 7 which allowed them to pay less per unit if they were to use the bulk of their electricity in, for example, the middle of the night. This meant that having to use the oven to cook dinner any time other than between two and four in the morning, they would pay a punitive rate. And so they naturally used the camping gas stove.
MARY: Reading the above means that, after years of bitterness about the kitchen – pop-up bitterness that is, not permanent – I suddenly see why Giles wants to leave the taps as they are. I now see that his aspirations are just different from those of the average Briton who wants a display kitchen. It’s not sadism after all, but an admirable aspiration to make do and mend. This is the sort of thing that comes under the heading ‘men are from Mars and women are from Venus’. Regarding the kitchen, in any case Giles does almost all the cooking – not because he’s a new man or because I can’t cook but I just haven’t time for any leisurely activities where I can’t multi-task. While I slave away at the ironing board (I can multi task by listening to instructive radio) or single-mindedly at the computer, Giles is happily whiling away the hours as he perfectionises sauces, decides he needs some wild garlic for a lamb joint and makes a forty-minute round trip to the wood above the house to get some…Also, he is very good at it.
GILES: The reason I like to cook is that way I can get the food the way I like it. I feel I may suffer from a condition called Culinary Hypersensitivity Disorder (CHD). In short, my taste buds may be over-sensitive. Although Mary once made a successful brown bread ice cream, all too often I find fault with her efforts, especially if she has cooked meat. She seems to aspire to the ‘Land of Leather’ cooking method where all meat must be incinerated.
However, the real reason I rule the kitchen is more to do with division of labour and attention to detail. Mary doesn’t have the time to ensure everything can be simultaneously au point…I do and I can go into the lane verges and pick chives and Jack-by-the-hedge which lends a piquant mustard flavour to salads or up to the wood to forage for wild garlic leaves for omelettes aux fines herbes for example. Even though I think the foraging craze has now become worthy of satire.
I always have time to prepare things. Mary doesn’t because she is in a rush. Hence sub-optimal fayre is served. Since I bought a Lidl non-stick ceramic pan and my mother explained that you do not have to get it as hot as previously, omelettes and crêpes, Rosie’s favourite, have been the way forward.
MARY: I have enjoyed cooking on the few occasions I’ve had time to but Giles tends to keep coming into the tiny kitchen to criticise me which is, of course, undermining. I read an article by Sarah Vine the other day in which she revealed that she becomes a monster when Michael Gove enters their kitchen. She immediately begins carping and telling him, for example, not to put tomatoes into the fridge when he had no intention of so doing. She ends by admitting that if he ever finds out he is perfectly capable of doing all the cooking himself, Sarah Vine will feel less secure about his need for her. There’s a whiff of the same thing with Giles and his competitiveness over the kitchen but in a way this suits me because I really do work twenty-four-seven and have no time for the leisurely pursuit of real cooking.
Giles also boasts that he is in charge of washing up. Yes, but I have begun to notice Parkinson’s Law kicking in. In Parkinson’s Law, an activity expands to fit the amount of time available for it. Giles has begun to take rather too long about loading the dishwasher every morning (he’s ‘too tired’ to do it before bed). And so, as I am boiling an egg or the kettle (both for five minutes) I enjoy the challenge of seeing if I can unload and reload the dishwasher before the five minutes are up. Usually I can. Whereas Giles seems to take up to twenty minutes to do it each morning.
GILES: The dishwasher is my territory and I don’t appreciate Mary’s cheating me of that satisfying work each morning which helps me to ‘come round’ as I’m waiting for the caffeine to kick in, and gain a foothold onto the day, to use an analogy with mountain climbing. I also need to control the loading of the dishwasher. Mary is inclined to put in food-caked plates and, following an incident yesterday I’ve banned her from loading the dishwasher at all as I noticed an electronic warning signal asking for both water and rinse aid. On inspection, I found the drainage basket loaded to the hilt with guinea fowl bones and roast potatoes which Mary had flung carelessly in in her bid to compete against me with the loading time.
MARY: Giles called me down from my desk in Room Two for a ticking-off like I was some kind of schoolgirl during the Idi Amin regime in Uganda. At first I was genuinely ashamed of having thrown in so many bones but, looking more closely at Idi’s ‘evidence’ of my incompetence, I smelt a rat. There were simply a few too many bones – I mean a leg and a wing. There’s no way I wouldn’t have scraped them off the plates for boiling up as stock. In short Giles had clearly stooped so low as to ‘plant’ the evidence against me.
GILES: We’ve been too busy all these years to call in psychic house cleaners or Feng Shui experts but there is no doubt about it – there are bad vibes in the kitchen and Mary and I have most of our arguments in there.
Having been brought up with sub-optimal kitchen equipment, I think this kitchen of ours in Wiltshire is normal. I prefer hand-mincers for example over Magimixes and I create breadcrumbs by placing the oven dried slices of Mother’s Pride in a paper envelope inside a plastic bag and then standing on it till the desired consistency is achieved. Our few guests have commented that these home made and home seasoned breadcrumbs trump all shop-bought varieties. I use them on my trademark fishcakes.
I like secondary or intermediate technology and don’t want to join the technological race or introduce unnecessary innovations such as have been installed by friends who have given up kettles and instead have taps which gush scalding water on demand. We don’t even have a microwave. This is partly in the perhaps half-baked belief that this will help us to dodge cancer, but also because there is no room for one in the tiny kitchen.
My other objection is that all the carpenters in this area are in such high demand we could never get one to commit to us.
MARY: But why can’t Giles tackle the job himself? Cyril says it’s because ‘Giles hates progress’.
GILES: Cyril’s quite right. I don’t like things moving forward. I would describe myself as a ‘yes but’ man.
My strength is in complaining. If the status quo gets better, I have less to complain about. It’s like a mental block…I become attached to the mental block. If the farmers around here suddenly turned organic, I would lose my raison d’être. Correction: my reason for hand-wringing.
I found I could identify with those members of the so-called deaf who formed a pressure group to unite against a simple operation which could have cured their condition. They objected because they would thereby lose their special status which was a badge of identity that they clung to.
It was the philosopher Gurdjieff who noted that many men are attached to their suffering. If you take it away from them they will have an identity crisis. I believe this is the basis for the popularity of Corbyn – he allows the sullen and defeated hordes to unite in resentment. Being a victim is so much easier than embracing the philosophy of self-reliance.
MARY: I’ll be uniting with them in resentment too.
