GILES: I enjoyed seeing something of my children over Christmas, but they both went off to separate events on New Year’s Eve – Rosie goes every year to the Edinburgh street party – and now they’ve gone back to what I call their own little lives.
Since Rosie left the nest she has successfully fledged and, long ago, she stopped ringing in to relate blow-by-blow accounts of her daily life. She says this is because at the end of a day as a teaching assistant she is too knackered. Neither am I on Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or Twitter so, to my continued bewilderment, my sister, who is on Facebook, knows what my daughter is up to before I do.
Both girls have inherited the socialising gene from Mary. When Rosie was at university we called it twentyfirsity, since she was constantly celebrating someone’s twenty-first birthday. We hoped it would come to an end when she graduated but instead she is now constantly celebrating someone’s twenty-second or twenty-third birthday.
I feel if I were able to find her number and ring her to tell her my own news – i.e., that there were not one, but two bullfinches on the nyger-seed feeder on a particular day I would inevitably get through just at the point when her Uber had arrived to take her to yet another party, and I get the sense that my news is irrelevant and slightly off-message and that I am holding her up.
But not content with parties she also attends After Parties. When Mary and I were young we were quite satisfied with the one party – we might go to one a month at most. Never mind an afterparty. We’d never even heard of Prosecco or pop-up magicians.
A few cans of Bulmers cider, ‘Brown Sugar’ blaring in a village hall, girls one end, lads the other, and cheese cubes and pineapple on a cocktail stick was good enough because, sadly, the cheese and chive dip got cigarette ash in it. So it was demoted to an ashtray.
MARY: This last entry is a typical example of Giles having Seancespeak – on this occasion he is channelling our pest controller Denis, who has just been round the attics laying poison. Giles never went to a party in a village hall in his life with girls at one end and lads at the other. But it’s true that in our day people didn’t have so many twenty-firsts. Neither Giles nor I had eighteenth or twenty-first parties. People were simply not so egomaniacal and narcissistic as they are today – a trend propelled by social media.
Unlike Giles, who has ‘reservations’ about almost everyone apart from around six friends, Rosie is supersocial and benignly disposed towards the whole human race. And Fleur sees successful party-giving as a genuine achievement as valid an art form as a painting.
Since I’m not on Facebook, Snapchat or Twitter either, I can’t ‘follow’ them. But I’m better at knowing the right time to ring them. And also that Rosie prefers to text rather than speak on the phone. ‘That way you don’t have to take your eyes off the screen,’ she says.
Giles could, of course, feel much more involved in their lives if he had an iPhone because then he could send them photos of bullfinches feeding off his nyger seeds and even be set up to follow them on Facebook, although I believe that like many of their age group they are now concentrating on other forms of media like Snapchat Stories instead. Unfortunately, though, I can’t risk letting Giles have an iPhone as I know he would immediately start using it to document agricultural crimes committed in the neighbourhood, such as inappropriate tree planting – he believes the copper beech, being purple in colour, has no place in England’s green and pleasant land. He would photograph tyre burning or film farm workers spraying pesticides on windy days and inflicting other ecological wounds on the landscape, and he would upload all these things onto trouble-maker websites. Like a rabbit trapped in headlights he would be sucked immediately into the websites of obscure anarchist eco-groups which promote sabotage and conspiracy theorists and that would be it, as regards socialising or painting, for the rest of his life.
This is why I’ve given him a pay-as you-go mobile. It’s an analogue version with no more than £15 worth of credit in it at any one time as he can’t seem to remember to press the disconnect button after he’s made a call and he likes to leave it in plain view on his dashboard with the car parked in the village street and the windows down.
GILES: One person I can always get through to, and who always welcomes my call, is our trusty old friend from Yorkshire, Jo Farrell. She rings in herself twice a day to speak to Mary and I often pick up the extension when I hear through the floorboards that it’s Jo. Today her husband Gerry, one of my best friends, was barracking her in the background so I asked to have a word with him about Rosie.
‘She never rings me!’ I grumbled to Gerry.
‘Don’t complain man, get a grip. You are extremely fortunate,’ he insisted, ‘in having somehow succeeded in producing a self-sufficient, well-adjusted adult. Unlike yourself. What’s more she is the centre of a normal group of loyal and supportive friends of her own age.’
‘A group of friends,’ I reminded him, ‘all of whom also seem to be indefatigable party goers who never tire of pulling silly faces in groups as they pose for photographs and then laughing at the results on their iPhones in scenes repeated up and down the country. Who never stop going to a party long enough to ring their aged parents. Congratulations! Indeed.’
‘Giles,’ he replied. ‘Why have you started talking in those long and breathless sentences as though you’re reading from an autocue?’
I told him it was partly because my voice, as my Jungian analyst told me all those years ago, is never heard. And on the rare occasions when I get the chance to have some contact with a willing listener from the outside world then I am going to jump at it.
‘And also because I’m now very overweight. That could be why I’m sounding breathless.’
MARY: Both of our daughters have Apple Airbooks of superb efficiency while Giles and I struggle along with, respectively, an eleven-year-old Apple Mac desk top and a nine-year-old HP laptop. It’s one of the reasons why I like to work on other people’s machines or in the library. I find it so much easier to stare straight ahead at a big screen rather than staring down, and promoting a double chin, at a small one.
MARY: It turned out that Rosie was going to another twenty-second birthday party only eleven miles from here last night. She had no idea how close she was to home as her generation doesn’t read maps and depends on sat nav to get them to places. (She once went via Swindon when travelling to London from Kent). With her friend Kitty she had intended to sleep in a car at the party site. This she told me before her phone ran out of battery as it so often does but, being a beady mother, I’ve also got the phone number of Kitty, so I suggested Giles come to collect them at 2 am as I (correctly as it turned out) had calculated that the charm of sleeping in the back of a freezing car together would quickly pall. Giles (who never drinks more than one beer an evening because his system ‘can’t process any more toxins than that’) quickly agreed on condition I would go with him so he didn’t have to do any of the thinking himself.
It was bliss to wake up this morning and know that Rosie and Kitty were safely tucked up in bed in the Pointy Room and that we could spend the day looking after them. Kitty had to go back to London after lunch but with any luck we can keep Rosie with us for another night.
GILES: Rosie and I are never happier than when either binge-eating my home-cooked spag boll, or binge-watching a Netflix offering on her Apple Airbook. After lunch and before supper, together we watched Stranger Things in two sittings while the wind howled around the cottage walls, only stopping for hot chocolate for sustenance.
When the weather gets better we will go cycling together through the country lanes that lead to the pub two villages away. First I will have to take the bikes in the back of the Volvo to be mended.
In the olden days, men like me used to know how to mend a puncture. Now, along with other workaday skills, like knowing how to put laundry through a mangle, we have lost these abilities. Or maybe we have lost the will to relearn them since we feel our time is better spent binge-watching.
We need to see the return of village shops and to have them supplemented by a workshop of skilled immigrants, who would happily spend their days just mending things, giving satisfaction, at the same time as training a British apprentice or two. The dream of a craft-based society was envisioned first by William Morris. A vision that subverts the dead-end, quotidian assumption that humans are here merely to consume or produce more and more shoddy goods destined for landfill, as the only legacy of their existence.
MARY: If I came to power I would bring back the village shop. In this village of fifty souls, at least twenty-five of us make a fourteen-mile round trip to Waitrose or Co-Op every day. Often we are stocking up on just one thing, such as tea or cigarettes. We don’t have a village shop but there is one three villages away. When you ask the residents there if they patronise the shop, they air-headedly often say, ‘No. Because it’s too expensive. For example, teabags are £2.49 in Waitrose, but £2.70 in the village shop.’ And so, in order to get that one item, they spend at least £3 on petrol to make a saving of 21 pence.
Under my rule the Big Four – Tesco, Waitrose, Morrisons and Sainsburys – would be responsible for the subsidy of a certain number of mini-Tescos, Waitroses, etcetera, in the centre of villages. They would just sell core products. They might not have enough footfall to match the giant profits they make in their mega-stores but they would be giving something back because each village would not only be spared the emissions created by twenty-five people making fourteen-mile round trips, the village shop is where a lonely pensioner can be sure of having at least one conversation a day. And the general gossiping about potential sightings of burglars or young offenders etcetera would do so much to reinforce community cohesion. Now that we don’t bond at the church (I do, but only a handful of others from the village join in) we need a centre for communal interest.
GILES: We are still feeling stuffed after the excesses of Christmas and this morning I felt a twinge of recognition when I read a shaming human interest story set in an Italian hotel.
‘Greedy guests at hotel breakfast buffets are hard to stomach,’ says playwright Alan Bennett. As an Alan Bennett-lookalike, I always pay attention to what the wry leftie has to say. At a Venetian hotel he observes, ‘Some of the well-to–do guests can’t wait to get the food back from the breakfast bar to their table, one young man downing a tumbler of orange juice en route and a boy stuffing himself with sausages before he even sits down.’
Reading this gave me an uncomfortable twinge of recognition. Back in June, while staying in Hotel Tornabuoni, in Florence, I had guzzled a chocolate croissant at the buffet breakfast bar. Impatience had overcome me while waiting for the toaster – a medieval-type instrument of torture which used a process akin to briefly waving a slice of bread past a three-bar electric fire, then twenty seconds later repeating the interminable process.
And yet Italians are the world’s top designers of white goods, and have no difficulty churning out highly sophisticated working Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Maseratis.
In my defence, the hotels who run these bunfights, aka buffet breakfasts, are asking for trouble by cutting down on early-morning staff. If more waitresses were available, oafish, dog-eat-dog, and other churlish behaviour would cease.
I read in another paper recently that we all have a ‘reptilian’ part of our brain which serves to fulfil the basic functions of survival (not including higher functions like consideration, empathy or guilt). There is nothing like the sight of a large German lumbering towards the last croissant to excite the reptilian section in the brain of a nifty Brit like myself and see me outmanoeuvre him and grab it first.
To my generation free orange juice is still a treat, which is why I drank a litre’s worth at that breakfast. It goes back to the days when the red tops discovered mountains of orange halves set out for the binmen at Gatcombe Park. It emerged that Princess Anne was squeezing, or having staff squeeze for her, dozens of REAL oranges for her morning glass of juice.
Back in the Seventies people had never seen excess like it. The story reignited stirrings of Republicanism in this country. It goes without saying that Princess Anne is the second most hard-working royal.
Yet we are not so different from cavemen, as road rage testifies. Feasting and tossing bones over our shoulders is part of our hunter-gatherer past. One mile away from our cottage is a hill fort where feasting would happen sporadically as a form of community bonding. Today feasting happens every day and the consequences of over-eating present a uniquely first world problem.
The continental breakfast is itself a mystery. A food–combining nightmare. Why cheese? Why salami and cold viands as well as pastries, prunes, yoghurt and choux? But we breakfast brutes are very suggestible. ‘What is it there for’ our reptilian brains ponder, ‘if not to guzzle?’
Mary informed me, ‘You’re not supposed to eat it all. They have to have a variety to cater to different tastes and nationalities.’ But then the camel’s-hump part of my logic kicked in – shouldn’t I stock up now in case there is nothing to eat later? What about all the refugees coming from sub-Saharan African via Lampedusa and now, allegedly, passing through Italy. Won’t their presence trigger shortages?
Humans have not adapted well to a world of plenty. Mary likes reality programmes about Fatties and, while getting the fire going for her tonight, I noted one obese Briton being confronted by a table-load of replicas of exactly what he had eaten the previous week. The quantities alone resembled what had been laid out in Florence for one breakfast for sixty people. This denouement was accompanied by gasps from the Fatty of feigned astonishment and mock disgust. But also a puerile pride in his greed having attracted so much attention it had made him the focus of a television show.
Another thing, Mr Bennett. We humans are ‘territorial’ and even ‘tribal’. A word rarely used in debates about over-population within the context of immigration. The sight of three Bavarian mountain men heading towards a pile of mortadella sets a panic button off in my head and I grab a bit – just in case.
‘You hate mortadella,’ Mary reminded me as I sat down with my loaded plate. ‘You said a moment ago that it’s the lowest form of processed meat. So why have you taken it?’
‘In order to stop the mountain men,’ I hissed, before heading back for some gruyère at the same time, and a plate of chilled strawberries.
It seems to me that too few nutritionists, dieticians and food doctors have sufficiently examined the psychological causes of greed, or the atavistic fear of famine, leading to yo-yoing. Feast or famine is a cliché. It was used in the plot of La Bohème, the opera by Puccini about starving artists in a garret, who at one stage break up the furniture to fuel the flickering embers in the grate.
With camel’s hump syndrome I don’t know when my next oasis may appear, so eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die…in the western world more likely of a heart attack. For this reason most villages in Britain now contain a defibrillator machine. A sure sign of the ‘Descent of Man’.
GILES: I took Mary to the station. She was going up to London to helicopter parent Rosie and sort out a bank statement problem.
An uncomplicated soul, Rosie once startled me by saying if she was run over by a bus tomorrow, she had already clocked up so much joy and happiness in this life that she wouldn’t grumble. Wow, where did she inherit those positive genes from? Certainly not from my side of the family. She seems to live in the moment, not unduly concerned with past events or the future, perhaps that is her secret. Neither is she burdened with philosophical or intellectual questions of an existential nature.
Meanwhile, I must ring her to check that she purchased a protective case for her Mac Book Air, which I promised to pay for. Is the prefix 07783, 07883, or 07833? Either way, one of those people I have been misdialling is a very polite, endlessly patient Italian woman who repeats ‘no problema’ when I have serially apologised over a nine-year period. This was a sound reason not to vote for Brexit.
GILES: Mary has arranged for me to have a memory test at our local surgery. She cites many potential disorders that her research suggests I could be suffering from and which need to be formally diagnosed. The shortlist includes a condition called fronto-temporal dementia, where one is deranged only some of the time. Today she handed me an article from the Daily Mail about conditions such as ‘glass delusion’ where the sufferer believes him or herself to be made of glass and Charles Bonnet Syndrome where the sufferer’s clear as daylight hallucinations are caused by macular deterioration in the eyes, and the brain, compensating for the lack of action in the field of vision, broadcasts old material from the brain’s memory bank. Surely this explains ghosts once and for all?
Mary says, ‘I’m just saying you too might be suffering from some sort of condition which could easily be cured by a small medical intervention.’
But personally I have taken steps to save the NHS thousands of pounds by drinking only the recommended units of alcohol – indeed fewer. Local society hostess Louise Brewer took great exception to my referring to her fine wines (Petrus and Margaux) as units of toxins when she heard me ticking off Mary, who was clearly overstepping the maximum recommended.
Regular liver tests as part of a human MOT make sense on the basis that prevention is better than cure, since no one wants to end up like George Best, even if he did have an airport named after him. (NOTE TO SELF: must make list of airports inappropriately named in honour of drug abusers and drunks…John Lennon, George Best. Only two so far!)
I was enjoying The Family Doctor’s chapter on confusion and forgetfulness when Mary rudely snatched the thick volume from my lap. My sin? Guilty of being slow-witted and taking too long to turn the pages. Her sin is impatience, but as my analyst once said, my voice is never heard!
Mary started firing questions in a staccato manner: ‘Have you noticed two or more of the following symptoms: change in personality, decline in standards of personal hygiene, difficulty in following complex conversations and instructions, and inability to cope,’ she probed, ‘with every day matters?’
‘You haven’t got to the bit where the patient thinks his body is rotting from the inside,’ I protested.
In the months before sending me for a formal diagnosis, doctor’s daughter Mary has dubbed the syndrome ‘Variable Intelligence Disorder’. OR VID. For example, my habit of asking her where she is going every night, in the middle of the night. A question that so infuriates her that sometimes she turns on the light and starts working on an article, despite my humble apologies. ‘Sorry – I forgot’. The memory test was part of a full MOT with a nurse at the surgery. She started by chatting amiably and mentioning the name and address of a man she knows in Kensington.
Then more chatting amiably, then the question, ‘Can you remember the name of the man I mentioned earlier and his address?’
I might have known I was being set up for an ambush.
I remembered his surname and the area, Kensington, but had forgotten his exact address within minutes. I was told I got six out of nine for memory. Not good but not bad…fair.
More worrying is the number of TV programmes I watch which require no input of intelligence whatsoever. They could be a guilty pleasure, and not a medical condition as such. Do the programmes themselves lead to dull-wittedness, or was I dull-witted to watch them in the first place? Neighbours from Hell, Bargain Brits in the Sun, any winter sun programmes – all these programmes rob you of precious time, especially if you sit down in the afternoon. There is a remedy for these daytime time wasters: emigrate to Australia or California. You will get more daylight hours, and waste less time just trying to stay well.
Half an hour after the appointment the name of the man came back to me: John Brown, of 17, Thackeray Street. Kensington.
The doctor gave me a clean bill of health and I am now thinking that Mary’s insistence that I am suffering from a progressive form of mental deterioration may be inspired by the film Gaslight, in which a husband creeps around the attic switching off lights, etcetera, to make the wife think she’s going round the bend, in a bid towards getting rid of her by having her institutionalised. I am institutionalised already – the institution is called marriage.
GILES: Joined Mary in London. We have been invited to stay in the top floor room still currently unlet as our friend Virginia seeks a new tenant. I have an appointment tomorrow with Fleur to collect her from her flat in Notting Hill and take her to the James Ensor exhibition at the Royal Academy.
Mary has been telling me for decades now that a mobile is essential in today’s fast-moving world, not least for the purpose of having personal telephone numbers stored and easily accessed. She has given me such a device but I keep making the mistake of leaving it in my drawer instead of keeping it in the car glove compartment.
How am I going to find my way to Fleur’s rented flat from Westbourne Park tube station except by ‘poring’ over a bulky, easy-to-read larger print version of a London A–Z? As my mother keeps reminding me – what a shame it is that no one in my family has the patience or the time to take me through the step-by-step procedures towards digital literacy.
On the other hand, I sometimes feel interconnectedness is over-rated and leads to homogenised thought forms. Today Mary is ‘ghouling’ over recently posted pictures of our contemporaries, also empty-nesters, spending their children’s inheritance. Be it whale-watching holidays in the Azores, or camel riding in the high Atlas mountains, or just simple, charming close ups of wild flowers in South Africa, people who have the time to ‘curate’ their own lives as if they were writing for Condé Nast Traveller are courting hubris like Icarus. If you have a primitive mindset like me and the peasants of southern Europe, you risk trouble through showing off in this way – e.g., by attracting the attention of the evil eye.
These show-offs never make mention of the dental hygienist’s appointments, or the time spent trying to track down the expiry dates of MOTs or road tax now it’s all gone paperless. They don’t seem to curate images of themselves groping for coins in pay and display car parks.
There’s a funny cartoon in Private Eye of a couple in a Caribbean beach resort taking a ‘selfie’ with the caption, ‘Right, let’s post that up on mylifesbetterthanyours.com’.
GILES: Twenty-five years ago, despite battling with impecunity, I thought BIG for once in my life and purchased a day return flight to Paris, to see a never-to-be-repeated retrospective exhibition of my favourite artist James Ensor (1860–1949) at the Petit Palais. The complete works would be on show.
Just to be on the safe side, I telephoned the French cultural attaché’s office in London to reassure myself that nothing could go wrong. ‘Yes Sir, the exhibition is open every day of the week,’ I was told.
Imagine my dismay to find myself in Paris surrounded by over-excited continentals chanting and letting off fireworks because it was Bastille Day. I approached the museum to find it closed. Even though it was the era of Lateral Thinking as promoted by Edward de Bono, in the absence of Mary with her legendary ‘can do’ attitude to problem solving, I couldn’t think what to do.
I couldn’t even work out the public phones. Where could one buy the little tokens, used in those days in French call boxes? Neither could I speak French because six months of living in Italy had driven my memory of that language out of my brain in favour of pidgin Italian. The prospect of the runaway costs involved in staying another night plus the cost of a fresh airline ticket defeated me. Rather than ask for help I opted to drown my sorrows like The Absinthe Drinker by Degas. I inwardly performed a Gallic shrug and can’t remember how I passed the day.
When I rang the cultural attaché on the Monday to complain the exhibition had been shut when he had told me it would be open every day he retorted, ‘But Sir, obviously it’s not open on Bastille Day. Everybody knows that.’
It was fuel for my pessimistic philosophy that nothing is ever straightforward. Mentally I saw only problems after that incident, like the stereotypical plumber who shakes his head and says, ‘It’s much worse than I thought, and I will have to revise my estimate for the job.’
Was this the moment I invented the Wood family motto, ‘There’s no such word as can’? In this respect the traditional game of Snakes and Ladders, as training for life’s little vicissitudes, involving no skill, only luck, should be on the syllabus for schools of all denominations. It would be a necessary corrective to the platitudes of the ‘yes you can’ positive but unrealistic brigade headed by Michelle Obama.
And so it was that, twenty-five years later, I prepared to make the superhuman effort to go alone by public transport to pick up my daughter and take her to see the small James Ensor show at the Royal Academy. Disappointingly, the forecast weather event of ‘thundersnow’ of January 2017 failed to materialise – we now have to experience winter vicariously by watching it on television in other countries.
I managed to make my way to Fleur’s flat without too much difficulty. Fleur rings less when her life is going well. I know her mobile number off by heart and we have a lot to talk about. She, like me, feels ill at ease in the universe and like me she feels she is a ‘special case’. She is also a highly talented artist with no skill for self-promotion, unlike Hirst and Emin. Correction, no inclination towards self-promotion.
She had told me forcibly not to stop in the street to check my jumbo A–Z, but to borrow Mary’s mobile, as this would risk ridicule, or worse, being filmed as a relic of another epoch. ‘DUH! No one carries an A–Z any more,’ she protested. ‘Just as no one buys DVDs or CDs any more, except you, Daddy.’
She was rather overstating her case, I thought. But then her life is one long psychodrama, an emotional rollercoaster which will feed in well to her chosen path as an artist. One only has to look at Kirk Douglas’s portrayal of Van Gogh to see that all the great artists suffered emotionally, and the suffering nourished their creativity. This is the main problem with the light-weight work of Jeff Koons – he’s clearly never suffered a day’s setback in his life.
Anyway, Mary refused to lend me her iPhone for the trip to Ensor. She says it is too great a risk since I might lose it and all her work contacts are listed in there.
Timing in life is everything. Just as I like to avoid Cornwall in August for the quiet of September, this exhibition was even more depopulated than I could have hoped for (I would wish England’s population to return to Elizabethan levels. Elizabeth I.) Three ticket booths stood empty. The cloakroom also felt like a private gentleman’s club. All my favourite paintings were there. This decision to go in the last few days was spot on, with none of that jostling for position in front of masterpieces and trying to interpose oneself like a pawn on a chess-board.
God works in mysterious ways. Would trying to tick off all the Ensor works in one day in Paris twenty-five years ago might have been a bit like turkey and too many trimmings…indigestible? I pondered. Less is more I say. Now I had the bonus of a talented daughter in tow. There is nothing more agreeable to a parent than to impart their enthusiasms to a receptive offspring, provided they are not checking social media at the same time.
One of my favourite paintings entitled ‘Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring’, satirised the artist’s turbulent relationship with the art establishment of the time. I thought how lucky Ensor was to be born in an era when it was actually possible to épater le bourgeoisie. Now, no one bats an eyelid at pickled herrings or pickled sharks or unmade beds. Indeed, art buyers almost require to be shocked to reassure them that their investment will rise in value.
I noted in the blurb that Ensor did his best work before the age of forty, after which he merely repeated himself. I intend to do my best work after the age of sixty, in order not to repeat his mistake. Ploughing his own furrow as the ‘first expressionist’, what an achievement! Unfashionably, and to his credit, he stayed in the same place, Ostend, all his life. Like myself he believed that the real power lies in the regions, not in the capital. And, like me, he felt no desire to ‘network’.
For some unknown reason Ensor is hopelessly underrepresented in British collections. All the more reason to get on Eurostar to Antwerp or Brussels, to over-eat mussels and chips, all washed down by trappist monk-brewed beer. Belgium produced Magritte, Ensor and the surrealist Paul Delvaux, to name but a few. Jonathan Meades did a wonderful TV programme on the weirdness of Belgium and its artists.
Small to medium-sized exhibitions of lesser-known artists have enriched my life this year in particular. Nikolai Astrup was an eye-opener at the hard to get to Dulwich Picture gallery. Twenty years earlier Mary and I were staying in what was then an obscure fishing hotel, Hotel Mundal, at the top of Sognefjord, and I had put up my easel to capture an interior since the rain was stair rods outside, when another resident came to talk to me and showed me a book from the well-stocked hotel library featuring their national artist Nikolai Astrup, unknown outside the country. Now I was to see all his works in England – another example of the mysterious jigsaw puzzle which makes up life.
By contrast, any exhibition that involves queuing, booking, or waiting in the rain for, nein danke! I dislike the idea of being just another statistic. I would like to make a list of all the blockbuster exhibitions I have missed in my lifetime, most memorably the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum, and the Matisse at the Tate in 2014. I am particularly proud of never having seen the film Grease.
But Mary insists there’s no point to making such a list especially as I would ‘take the day about it’ through Parkinson’s Law. I disagree. To boast of all the things I haven’t done would counter that despicable trend to make a bucket list of things to do before you die.
GILES: It’s well known that appearing on television adds nine pounds to your perceived weight and maybe more. It doesn’t help that the chair that Mary watches television in is a wrongly placed reclining chaise longue designed as a bedroom chair for use in what was presumably a less frantic and more leisured age when she could have lolled back on it by day reading Trollope. It could barely be less flattering since in real life she has an almost normal body mass index.
Or had. Despite TV screens getting slimmer, neither of us is. Like a lot of folk, I enjoyed feasting over Christmas. The birth of Christ was superimposed on pagan meat-based, mid-winter feasting rituals lasting days and stretching back to the Stone Age.
We are fortunate to live in a time of relative food abundance but the future is all on a knife edge. Today we have gluts of ripe, ready-to-eat avocadoes delivered to supermarkets on a ‘just in time basis’ and issues like Trump and Brexit are leading to a surge in comfort eating. Is it no wonder we feast on viands like Henry VIII all year round?
And goodness knows what will happen now the Indians and Chinese have developed a taste for meat, because animal agriculture is the worst thing for the planet. I know because, as I have already mentioned, I’ve watched the documentary Cowspiracy. And it’s not just the flatulence…
Personally, I love that too stuffed to walk feeling from festive over-eating. You have finished the pudding and brandy butter and now it’s time to inspect the new-look Toblerone bars, in which, in a graphic example of shrinkflation, the spaces between the triangles of joy have got wider!
I got a shock at the doctor’s surgery when I went for my MOT last week: the cottage scales had been lying. I was not an overweight 14.5 stone, I was a massive 15 stone. It is cause for concern, the days for laughing are over.
In my defence, most Britons (one third) are now overweight or obese, so it’s up to my mother’s in Wales for a two-week boot camp of vigorous exercise and calorie-controlled diet. The main problem will be mood swings, but then I didn’t ask to be born so it’s logical in a blame-based society to shift the blame for my portliness onto my mother.
The first evening’s supper was a punishment plate of unseasoned mince with carrots. ‘Where’s the mash, Mum?’ I asked. ‘I’m very happy to do the mashing for you.’
But it transpired that there were no spuds, and nor was there even the standard rescue remedy of a Blue Riband snack bar with which to refresh my mouth from the taste of mince when my mother went out of the room. As every woman who has a son or husband on a diet knows, they WILL suffer from mood swings.
I have inherited a sweet tooth from my grandmother who made meringues and force fed me as a nipper. I also witnessed her going back to a chicken carcass and eating crispy skin which made a deep and lasting impression. I often tell Mary that my admiration for my grandmother is partly to blame for my inability to resist whatever tasty morsels are accessible to me. Being Scottish, my grandmother used to pronounce it ‘tuth’. To my prep school, she used to send packages of fudge so delicious that I had to eat it privately in my dormitory for fear of other boys over hearing my Billy Bunter-style groans of pleasure and demanding some.
MARY: Giles often pins the blame for his greed on the fact that he admired his grandmother so much and she herself was very greedy and always, following the Sunday lunches she invited them to each week at 43 Whitmore Road, Stoke on Trent, ‘went back to the carcass’ after everyone’s plates had been cleared away.
I usually respond to this by asking why, if he admired his grandmother so much, does he not try to emulate the more positive aspects of her character and lifestyle, such as the fact that she was a tireless worker for the public good (she was a consultant anaesthetist) instead of singling out for mimicry her one small fault – greed.
MARY: With Giles in Anglesey, I’ve decided to stay in London with Virginia. For better for worse but never for lunch goes the mantra re the desiderata for a happy marriage. I would prefer Giles to be out during the day in order to give me mental privacy and to allow me to get on with my work. It’s jolly hard to concentrate on the aforementioned when a man keeps coming to the door of my pop-up office (e.g., Room Two, the bedroom or even Room One – the multi-purpose room) to ask a seemingly harmless question such as, ‘Where’s the coffee?’
‘In the place where it’s kept,’ I’m likely to reply.
‘It’s not there. You must have moved it.’
I leave my desk and lumber past him towards the place where the coffee is kept. Giles has an odd habit of standing in the doorways he has invited me to pass through so that I am prompted to snap, ‘Well get out of the way then.’
To which he replies, ‘There’s no need to be uncivil.’
Walking into the kitchen to the shelf where the coffee is kept, I find the packet and hand it to him.
‘Why did you think it wasn’t there?’
‘Well it wasn’t there a minute ago. You must have slipped it back.’
‘Why would I do that, Giles?’
‘Just to make me think I’m going mad so you can get the upper hand.’
There is, of course, the other distraction of Giles beginning to speak to me from a room that I’m not in. Now that Gug is no longer in the cottage to act as messenger, it means I have to get up from my desk and walk towards the room from which the disembodied voice is emanating.
‘Giles! If you want to talk to me then come to the room I’m in!’
‘I’m a busy man. And I never have any idea which room you are in. This cottage is unmanageably big.’
Then when dear Phoebe was with us there were the regular bursts of barking to disrupt my train of thought. What had triggered it? Going downstairs, I would invariably find him standing on a windowsill in the television room barking furiously. But how had he got up there? Giles would have lifted him there and be grinning with approval as he himself skulked out of sight while Phoebe barked at the sheepdogs exercising in the opposite field, the shepherd’s girlfriend firing tennis balls for them.
‘Giles!’ I would scream. ‘Why are you making Phoebe bark?’
‘It’s very good for his lungs.’
But though I dream of him being out by day, I don’t want him out at night. The cottage is too grim without him there at all. And particularly without the dog, now our beloved child substitute and all-round love object has gone to heaven.
So I’ve decided to stay at Virginia’s till he comes back.
GILES: I rang Mary in London to dictate my article for the Oldie. She complained that it was full of Seancespeak and that she could tell I was channelling someone called Forbes I was at school with and not my own personality.
MARY: The problem with Gogglebox life is that we now spend at least twenty-five hours a week watching television. This means that not only are we not exercising during this period of enforced recumbency, but that the other ‘work’ I do as a writer and journalist and PR for the Caribbean region all has to stack up like planes waiting to land at Heathrow. In the few moments per day when I’m not working, I’m conscious of trying to fast forward the relaxation process before going to sleep and starting on the work again the next day. Hence the hand stretches forward for the pistachios and wine that might speed on that process.
I can see no solution other than hiring in another Gug-type assistant to follow me around the cottage and make sure I stick to controlled and sensible foods. It was the solution that worked for super-fatty Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who only managed to finally lose the absurd amounts of poundage he had gained by hiring two security guards to block his access to the fridge.
Meanwhile I can see on Instagram that ten of the rich people I know are at either the Viva Mayr clinic in Austria or at Landershof in Germany.
No wonder society is pyramid-shaped. We are all greedy but those at the top are much thinner than those at the bottom because they are the ones who can hire in personal trainers and dieticians to curb their excesses and issue praise or blame of the sort we all got used to as schoolchildren. Even in adult life, praise from authority figures keeps a person on the straight and narrow.
MARY: I communicate with Giles through emails as he can’t work his own mobile to ring mine and to spare his mother the expense of calling my mobile from her landline.
We discuss the security arrangements of the cottage. I’ve placed Sandi at number two in charge. I don’t cancel the newspapers or the milk since otherwise the delivery men get confused. Instead, Sandi at number two has the milk and leaves the post and papers for me on the table of Room Four.
MARY: Went to Cath Kidston’s sale in Portobello Road. I love Cath Kidston’s floral print products although I do have oilcloth fatigue. Her clothes are just up my street but these days the skirts are knee-length rather than the mid-calf length I prefer. I bought a knee-length skirt which I intend to customize with elastic so I can wear it on the hip rather than on the waist under a Cath Kidston knee-length dress. The only one left was size 14 but I’m size 15. I don’t understand why she doesn’t do big sizes because after all her core customers must be bagwomen – she sells mainly bags – and bagwomen, like me, have too much stuff and eat too much stuff and hence we are overweight.
As I walked out of the shop and along Portobello, correction, sidestepped the various obstacles, I spoke to size 8 journalist friend Ruth who was ringing from the health clinic in Germany. She doesn’t need to lose weight but she was having an MOT on her body and being taught to chew every mouthful fifty times before swallowing.
I got a text from our friend Syrah, the former cottage bed blocker. Syrah, an artist, has one of the last Chelsea studios. She rang to tell me she has just bought a double bed so Giles and I can stay there. She loves us because we remind her of her late father who was our great friend, Euan.
This won’t be the first time I have referred to the dictum of Alexandre Dumas fils. ‘The chains of marriage are so heavy that it takes two to carry them and sometimes three.’ Seventy-three-year-old Euan came into our lives twenty years ago. He lived seven miles away. His wife had left him and his two daughters were at university. Having met him through a mutual friend in the dead of winter we quickly accepted his invitation to move out of our freezing cottage and into his overheated hilltop farmhouse. We moved in with the children then aged three and nine – they loved it because Nunu, as they called him, had a telly in those days and we didn’t. Nunu only had two videotapes – The Sound of Music and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – but we were happy to watch them again and again. Euan himself would always watch The Sound of Music, booming along in his excellent Frank Sinatra baritone. At the end, when the hard-hearted Captain von Trapp realised how proud he was of his children the tears would roll down Euan’s cheeks. ‘Ah, the eternal verities…’ he would say.
We quickly both fell in love with this ‘vintage Briton’ whose views were so wholeheartedly unacceptable that even our other friend and neighbour, the writer Robert Harris, was not offended by them but instead fascinated by this embodiment of living history.
‘The working classes are always in,’ Euan would observe. ‘Otherwise the plot of The Bill wouldn’t move forward. When the police come round to interrogate a suspect he’s always in,’ he said, tapping the table with his forefinger to emphasise the point. ‘If they were looking for me I might be at my Club, the Beef Steak, I might be at my hice [sic] in the south of France, I might be lunching with the Mannerses. But the working classes are always in.’
But it wasn’t just the vintage attitudes, there was the old-fashioned civility as well. Giles was keen to imbibe from Euan’s distillation accrued over a lifetime of courtesy. ‘I notice that you always stand up when Mary goes into or out of the room?’ said Giles. ‘Is it absolutely necessary for me to do it, like a jack in the box?’
‘My dear fellow, at the very least you should shuffle in your seat as if intending to rise,’ he commanded. ‘Women, particularly wives, like it.’
GILES: Staying with my mother in Anglesey always offers me a chance to win back some mental clarity. No mobile telephones go off, and the landline, which rings rarely, is never for me. Moreover, my mother, clutter-phobic to a fault – she once sent the contents of her loft to the dump just to facilitate the entry of the men who had come to insulate it – has a manageable amount of photo albums and a manageable number of well-read books on her shelves.
Picking out one of these I found, interleaved within it, a letter written by me in the mid-Nineties. I found I had written that, as parents of two small children, Mary and I were locked, like Inuit, into a daily struggle just to survive. We were both too tired to read Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems and yet our newborn woke every thirty minutes throughout the night. I observed that the time seemed to go by so quickly that the children would be at university soon and I couldn’t see my way clear to having four hours spare to read the book before then.
Mary then wrote a section of the letter telling Mum that it was she who eventually set aside time to read the book. ‘Rosie stopped crying and started sleeping like a log the first time I put the advice into practice. In short it is this: put the child to bed, wait outside the door while she cries first for five minutes; go in and check she’s all right but don’t cuddle her. Wait outside the door while she cries for ten minutes; go in and check she’s all right but don’t cuddle her. Wait outside the door for twenty minutes – ad nauseam.
‘The point is that the child eventually realises that she has not been abandoned but that it will take double the amount of crying to bring you back each time and frankly they can’t be bothered.’
Mum, like Mary’s mother, was amazed at how our generation of parents put our children first. It was not the same in her day. Rosie’s godmother Lucie asked her mother, ‘Did I cry a lot when you put me to bed as a baby?’
Lucie’s mother shrugged and shook her head. ‘I don’t remember,’ she replied unguiltily. ‘Your bedroom was right at the other end of the house so we couldn’t have heard you anyway even if you were bawling your head off.’
How on earth did Mary and I get any time to ourselves in those days? The simple answer was we didn’t. I used to be able to talk to her in the days when I drove her to and from Waitrose but then she got a mobile and after that was talking to colleagues on it. Once her French friend, Variety, who she had known when she first arrived in London from Northern Ireland, came over from Paris to see the cottage for the first time ever. She asked Mary what had drawn her to this part of Wiltshire. Mary, who worked, in those days as in these, as a frantically busy freelance journalist handed her a copy of Country Living magazine and suggested that Variety read an article by Mary on this very subject. She said that she was too busy to tell Variety herself and this would save time by putting the whole story into a nutshell. I remember Variety’s face. She was appalled. ‘But I don’t want to read an article about it. I want you to tell me.’
Another survival tool of Mary’s from those days came back to me as I flicked through Mum’s old photo albums. Hers was the generation before digital and she went to all the trouble and expense of printing out the photos and putting them into albums. In one of the ones of Mary from the mid-Nineties it was clear to me that she was wearing rubber ear plugs as she posed angrily for the photo.
‘Look Mum,’ I showed my mother. ‘Those were the days when Mary wore earplugs so that she couldn’t hear my point of view if she thought it was going to differ from hers.’ Mum, who never wants to take sides, and especially not retrospectively, made an enigmatic response and then changed the subject.
But I remember at the time accusing Mary that in the one crude gesture of wearing earplugs, she was rejecting ‘civilised and reasoned discussion in favour of a new post-feminist Neanderthalism’.
Discussing it with Mary that night by email she replied that it was the only course of action open to her during the sleepless baby months. ‘I was so tired that I was likely to over-react to anything provocative you said. Since you found it devilishly tempting to be provocative I took pre-emptive action by wearing the earplugs so I simply wouldn’t be able to hear what you said and thereby sidestepped being annoyed by it and having my energy drained further.’
