GILES: Mary has been to Lacock Garden Centre to look at garden sheds. She employed a jobless graduate neighbour of 22 to drive her there since she can’t drive herself. I have refused to look at sheds unless she will agree that what we need in the one acre field is a starter home for our older daughter and not a shed in which to store Mary’s clutter from Northern Ireland – Victorian sideboards, burst horsehair chaises longues, Victorian bed pans, and grotesque Hyacinth Bucket-style Sheffield plate hors d’oeuvres platters and the like.
MARY: It’s all very well Giles saying we need to build a starter home for our daughter but the contract we signed when we bought the cottage specifically disallowed us from building any residential dwellings in the one acre field. Giles thinks we can get around this because his late father, who is his role model, succeeded in doing precisely this in his own back yard. He built, from scratch, ‘stables’ in an area of outstanding natural beauty in Cheshire. Then had the planning officer round for drinks – it was the 1970s. Was it Hirondelle or Lutomer Riesling that he offered?
GILES: This was the first time in history that wine was democratised and freely available to the common man, and not just the ones who could order crates from Tanners, the wine merchants in Shrewsbury. Either way, Godfrey managed to get the official ‘squiffy’ enough to sign off a ‘change of use’ from equine to residential.
MARY: Giles’s main focus in life has always been to tread exactly the same path trodden by his father. Which is worrying since his father died at 65.
GILES: We have an issue with power in this marriage. Mary may earn more money than I do but, according to my Jungian analyst, Mr Newman, this does not give her the divine right to rule. He who pays the piper calls the tune, says Mary. Yet even now I have power over Mary because I won’t write to a friend who had us to stay for the weekend because her eighteen-year-old son spilt milk in the back of the Volvo which probably means we’ll have to sell the car as you can never get rid of the smell of spilt milk.
MARY: I only wish I did have some power over Giles. I have none at all. He won’t go to parties in London to which I often suspect I’ve only been invited because people really want him to come, and not particularly me. And he bitterly resists my suggesting we have people to dinner, always saying ‘let’s leave it till the weather is better’. I can’t stop him having eco-wars with the two billionaire neighbours with whom we ‘march’. He’s constantly rushing out to complain about the sprays and the over-zealous strimming that takes place around us.
One good thing, though, is that this May there was no spraying of the cow parsley in the verges. This is thanks to Giles. Giles believes in leaving things untidy to provide habitat for overwintering invertebrates, while he accuses our neighbours of favouring the ‘squaddie haircut’ school of neatness (i.e., beautifully mown lawns and tidy verges) which means, says Giles, ‘death to biodiversity’. And ‘tidy mindedness is the enemy of conservation’.
Having been brought up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the last thing I want is to make enemies of our neighbours, but I have no power over him at all vis-à-vis conciliation and suggesting we have the spraying neighbours round for dinner.
I bear in mind that his childhood was characterised by ‘neighbour wars’ between his role model father and all three of the neighbours around them in their converted stables in Cheshire. One of the problems arose because a neighbour stabled his horses on Godfrey’s land at a peppercorn rent and then claimed an agricultural tenancy.
Giles has therefore ‘inherited’ an irrational suspicion that his neighbours, like Godfrey’s neighbours, are trying to somehow get one over on the gullible ‘yuppie incomer’.
The word yuppie of course, has not been used by anyone other than Giles since the 1980s but he was struck, on our arrival in the village in 1988, by overhearing our then next-door neighbour Polly, the wife of Bert, talking about how the village (of thirteen houses – nearly all of which, apart from the Manor Farm and the Old Rectory, had traditionally been occupied by members of her own family, the Vardens) had changed. ‘It’s all yuppies now,’ she grumbled. And as Giles likes to cling to negative things I often hear him describing himself, thirty years on, as a ‘yuppie’, with its implied disapproval. This despite him not fitting into any of the identifiers of the original moniker which was used to describe upwardly mobile young professionals.
The only time I can get him to stop doing something I really mind about is when I head for the village post-box with a twenty-pound note in one hand and a stamped addressed envelope to our neighbour Ben Goodall in the other. As I insert the note into the envelope to despatch the anonymous present, Giles will normally back down. He can’t bear to think of Goodall getting free money through the post.
Ben Goodall is a rival painter in the Vale of Pewsey, tackling very much the same sort of subjects pictorially as does Giles, for the same clients. In the past Ben tackled portraits; now, like Giles, he tackles interiors. The Easel Wars have been raging for twenty years or more.
GILES: The problem is that because Ben Goodall does so much work – apparently he posts a new painting or drawing on the internet almost every day – he is becoming better and better and is now almost as good as me.
MARY: He might as well be since Giles seems no longer to be a working artist.
MARY: We are driving up to Norfolk to stay with Desmond, who exemplifies our shared taste for bossy and eccentric friends. On the way, we slowed to pass a peculiar shrine where someone had committed suicide off a bridge. Tragic of course – but why do mourners leave the cellophane on? It reminded us of the time we went to Kensington Palace after the death of Princess Diana. Giles and I were swept up in the mood of national mourning and mass hysteria at the time but even so we couldn’t help wondering why people didn’t take the flowers out of the cellophane and what they thought was going to happen to the sodden soft toys after a week in the rain.
One of the last legacies of the Peace Agreement, i.e., when we went to counselling in the local surgery it was agreed that if I stopped rushing out of the house to yell at Giles to stop mowing, he would stop driving at 50 mph on the dangerously curvy A345.
To reward him for driving reasonably safely to Norwich, I’ve downloaded some podcasts on subjects of interest to Giles and though not to me; perhaps we can bond if I try to be interested by listening to it together with him.
One example was a radio item about ‘whooping’, in which Howard Jacobson decried the new trend for audiences to whoop in public scenarios, thus effectively gagging the performer on the stage. Another was an interview with Piers Corbyn, brother of Jeremy, on LBC. Who would have believed that Corbyn 2, a meteorologist who makes his living by using sunspots to successfully predict long-term weather patterns, would be on the side of Donald Trump re: climate change, but there he was saying that Trump had seen through the ‘myth’ of the greenhouse effect. ‘There is no evidence at all that climate change is manmade,’ said Corbyn, who does not deny climate change, he just says there is no evidence to support the claim that manmade CO2 is the cause of it.
GILES: Shared disapproval is still a bonding factor for Mary and me. We also share horror in the same words. Neither of us likes the word Hainault, plaudit, or leccy. Often when we are driving on a long journey together we see, from the relative security of the Volvo window, plenty to disapprove of – particularly the bunches of flowers in cellophane at accident blackspots.
We hate the emotional incontinence of the new Cry Baby Britain where the camera seems to linger in expectation that anybody who is vulnerable (dread word) who doesn’t well up and blub in front of the camera, is almost in breach of contract.
We dislike hugging, fridge-magnet clichés and the absurd over-reaction of contestants in television elimination contests who never act like the good losers of old who embraced, as in our day, ‘It’s not the winning but it’s the taking part’ philosophy but act as though their lives, following elimination, are effectively over, since being on this show was their last chance of fame and therefore happiness. The rot started with John Major who introduced the something-for-nothing culture of the lottery.
MARY: Giles dislikes the new ‘liberated’ television adverts for sanitary towels and pile cream and incontinence pads. Taboos are broken daily. He dislikes the new unpleasant trend of showing people, in television plays, sitting on the loo, even ‘shaking’ the drips’. ‘It’s only a matter of time until the cameras are positioned actually in the lavatory bowl itself to make the programme more gritty.’
Neither of us like to see septua- and octogenarians being encouraged by the likes of Esther Rantzen to behave in undignified manner, being crude or pandering to dumb Britain. We are mystified by cuddly toys at funerals or by people singing ‘I did it my way’.
GILES: So much of reality television is a thinly disguised freak show. Freak shows were popular in this country from around the mid-sixteenth century to 1884 when Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, was at the peak of his fame, but since they are now effectively banned we have to watch dishonest documentaries posturing as cutting edge celebrations of diversity instead. ‘Thirty Stone Child’, ‘The Woman Who Ate Her Own House’, ‘Half Man Half Tree’. This unwholesome trend in broadcasting makes us all too often feel like strangers in a strange land.
MARY: If I could be spared one recurring event in my life it would be the quarterly requirement for me to prepare the papers for the accountant. It’s a lonely and thankless and fiddly task, handling thermo-printed receipts which have mainly faded and seeking bank and credit card statements some of which, although I have fastidiously stored them in a pile as they came in, have mysteriously gone missing.
Today I begged Giles to help me with this two-day chore.
‘What does it involve?’ he asked restlessly.
‘It involves one person reading things out, the other one ticking boxes and sliding slimy fading receipts on thermal paper into plastic envelopes.’
‘I’d like to help you,’ replied Giles (I know this because I recorded it on voice memos), ‘but I won’t be able to because I’ve been away for seven days.’
‘Why is that logical?’ I asked.
‘Well, a lot has gone on in the garden since I’ve been away.’
‘Yet you agree that the accountancy chore has to be done so who do you think should do it – given that it’s to your own benefit?’
‘Mine takes much less time to do than yours because I don’t spend anything.’
This is the sort of impasse I don’t enjoy arriving at during one of the most tortuous points of the quarter. But my guru Betty Parsons taught me to turn setbacks to my advantage and, considering the possible benefits of Giles not helping with the paperwork I realised it WOULD be to my advantage if he didn’t get a chance to study the receipts for my spendings. So I suggested that, if he wasn’t prepared to help with the accountancy work, ‘maybe you would help me instead by writing thank you letters to Cyril, Desmond and Melissa?’
Giles replied, ‘Not to Melissa, not for yet another inedible lunch. But I will write to Cyril and Desmond. Very short letters but not to Melissa.’
This sort of illogicality makes me wonder whether, not jokingly, Giles doesn’t have just Variable Intelligence Disorder but perhaps early onset dementia.
I calmly reminded him that the rules of society are that the person who has made the effort to create a lovely scenario in which Giles could bond again with an old friend he hadn’t seen for a bit, have lunch, and bring his daughter to lunch, needs to be thanked.
‘And for you not to thank her, on the grounds that the meal was inedible, suggests you have sustained some kind of brain damage – perhaps from inhaling agricultural sprays?’
Giles has been thrilled that this morning’s paper carried a report that pesticides do damage brains.
‘Well all right. I’ll use the last three postcards of the Nikolai Astrup. But you must tell Christof [our neighbour on the hill above us] that we’ll only go to the Outside Chance with him on the strict understanding that we will be back here by 10 pm.’
‘To watch telly?’
‘No. Not just telly! Desmond on telly! At ten o’clock!’
‘Giles, may I ask you something? Do you think you would enjoy living with you, if you were me?’
‘No, I wouldn’t. But I’ve just realised what’s wrong with me. I’m starving. No wonder I’m bad tempered. Where are the Medjool dates, Mary?’
‘And don’t tell me you had more than one cup of coffee this morning?’
‘I’m afraid I had three. I needed three to wake me up. Didn’t you hear that hornet in the night making intermittent rasping noises?’
