While his mother is dressing after their swim the little boy sits himself in front of the mirror. ‘Now for a new hairstyle’ he says, smiling at his reflection. He aims a hair dryer at his face, blowing his neat bob until it stands out in a mane like an electrified Farrah Fawcett.
At the parents’ evening Miss H, the hated geography teacher, describes how hard she works to support the students. Lauren’s mother writes ‘bollocks’ on the notepad of Georgia’s mother. Miss H tells them they must stay in their seats until the bell goes.
Much of my daily life seems to have become a battle with inanimate objects. Not just my phone, which craftily inserts profanities and names of people I have never heard of into WhatsApp messages, at the same time removing definite articles so that my texts read like something from an illiterate scumbag, but my household appliances, my car radio, the prima donna that is our printer. The washing machine can drag out the final ‘2 minutes’ of a cycle for an eternity when I am waiting to hang up the laundry before going out, and I have a daily war of tactics with the central heating, which goes into overdrive of its own accord, usually around bedtime when we don’t need it anymore, but stubbornly fails to even slightly warm the house when we are expecting guests. On Christmas Day, with perfect timing, it refused to come on at all, until I had outwitted it with the help of a piece of sand paper.
I have some sympathy with my 99-year old father-in-law, who spent his life taking apart and fixing mechanical objects, but is unable to cope with the binary nature of the digital world. It is either yes or no and in his case it’s usually no – his phone, his laptop, his debit card letting him down, just because he hit the wrong digit or accidentally pressed something. You can’t approximate a PIN number, a password, the answer to a dialogue box, the way you can plane a 2 x 4 to fit, or use a piece of wire to work around a missing part.
My mother was the same. She could solder the wiring in the broken toaster, invisibly mend any garment, know the right person to call in all kinds of emergency, but faced with an electronic device you couldn’t argue with, she was nonplussed.
For me it’s not just the digital world that is against me. Grandma’s hand-me-down sewing machine, decidedly analogue, but even so used by me only when hand sewing really won’t cut it, has developed the unnerving habit of suddenly stitching like mad even when my foot is not on the pedal.
And it is not confined to home. My relationship with the office photocopier was even worse than that with my boss, I recently managed to demagnetise our train tickets for a trip across London, so we had to ask 13 times to be let through the platform and Tube barriers. I don’t like to be defeated by anything, but I much prefer a wooden spoon, a pencil, a measuring jug to any whizzy gadget.
A friend whose adult children came to stay with her at Christmas tells me how they complained about the inadequacy of her kitchen. No meat thermometer, no immersion circulator, no state-of-the-art blender. They have given her a coffee machine that produces coffee almost as good as the stove-top pot she’s always used, but with an awful lot of non-recyclable waste.
I read on the Met Office website that part of your kit for travelling in extreme weather (if I took everything they suggest I’d need a bigger car) should include paper maps, for when you lose signal or power on your satnav/phone. What a novel idea. If we are going back to the world of the dependable low-tech object I’d like to put in a word for some of the other items I love. The hot water bottle (is there anything more comforting?), the washing line (what happier sight than sheets blowing in the breeze?), my reusable cloth teabag for loose herbal tea. And I think that now is the perfect time for the good old thermos flask to make a huge comeback. Forget those bitter, voluminous American-style coffees in one-use polluting cups. Have the real thing, at a fraction of the cost, whenever you want it, a taste of home in your back pack.
This morning the milk on the doorstep is frozen in the bottle.
We drive home from our pre-Christmas holiday in endless rain, and can barely get the front door open for the cards piled up on the mat. The following day there are more. Cards from people I care about, home-made cards that are works of art, keeping-in-touch cards from old friends. Also cards from people who miss my father and write to me as a poor substitute, ritual cards from Simon’s relatives addressed to ‘Mr and Mrs’ as if I have no name, cards that make me feel a bit sick.
It takes us days to open them, read, digest. One or two contain actual letters, others round-robin circulars. A Trump-supporting relative in the US, who has toured southeast Asia and Europe this year, tells me what an idyllic childhood I had, and writes that she misses my father’s annual newsletter, a document which, in my memory, included health reports, random incorrect facts about me and my sisters, and a large dollop of bleak commentary on UK and US politics.
Were I to send one of these circulars, which is unlikely, what on earth would I write? I have no grandchildren, I don’t do exotic travel, I don’t even work. ‘Stayed at home, grew a lot of veg, cycled to the gym’ does not take up much space, let alone interest.
But one round robin I receive does just this, and it is the most profound, engaging, thought-provoking newsletter I have read. A friend from my photography days, now in his late 80s, writes about his beloved German shepherd dog (‘my wolf’), his ongoing grief at the death of his wife 16 years ago and his life now which is, despite his loss ‘in many ways…idyllic’. He is grateful for Radio 3, a warm dry house, the landscape in which he grew up and still lives. He describes the gentle ritual of his days, each of them the same, his horror at reading the news, and how he regards any activity other than wandering the fields and woods with his dog as ‘a complete waste of my time.’ With his letter he includes a card on which is printed his ‘Creed’, a summary of what he has learnt in his 87 years. This amounts to a belief in the sanctity of all living beings, in friendship, in music, in giving, in respect. ‘I believe the only good is kindness.’ I think about it for days.
On Christmas Day I receive my annual email from my friend in Belarus. Each year we both resolve to write more often, and each year we both fail. He describes, with great precision, how he dries apples from his smallholding, a question I asked him last year. He tells me about his garlic crop, and the best way to germinate beans. He has, over the last year, been reading Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. ‘The idea of each novel is strong and overwhelming, although some turns of the plot and some actions of characters feel somewhat artificial.’ Well, yes. He sends me a photo of a grass snake swimming across his pond. When he swims there after a hard day’s work ‘snakes often accompany me.’
I can visualise the lives of these two men who, now I come to think of it, even have the same name, in different languages. One of them striding the chalk downlands of southern Britain with his ‘wolf’, the other working the flat sandy land of northwestern Belarus, surrounded by lakes and forests. They may be generations and continents apart, with a huge disparity in income, but their lives, and certainly their values, are not so dissimilar. Both are visual artists, both are sustained by music, literature, living creatures, the land. Both have suffered harsh bereavements. One is walking through the landscape of Hardy’s Wessex. The other is reading about it. Both of them are my friends.
When I meet up with a neighbour – a young woman from Chennai – we struggle, despite our best efforts, to discover interests in common. She clearly sees my stay-at-home life, growing things, making things, exercising, as unutterably dull, while I struggle to identify with her desire to travel the world. I find myself apologising for my appalling performance in this pursuit. I have travelled I say, I’ve been to North America, the Caribbean, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Tanzania…. Since all of this was decades ago she is even more nonplussed. Eventually, to our mutual relief, we discover a shared love of English literature.
My young neighbour is not the first person to be floored by my desire to stay at home. ‘Understand where your work sits within your life’ advises a woman on the radio. ‘If you’re spending too much time, if you’re not seeing your family, if you’re not travelling…’ Jetting around the world (for those who can afford it) is seen as normal, desirable, a sign of mental health. But why?
This week I’m on my third holiday of the year. It’s in the same place as the other two. I love coming here, to stay in the same comfortable house, cook food bought from the same local shops, take the same glorious walks in the same lanes and heaths, watch the same sea, which is in reality different every day, every hour, every minute.
Why don’t I want to go somewhere new? I’ve been puzzling about this for a long time. Some of my friends barely spend any time at home. My next-door neighbours take cruises and own a house in Greece, the women in my sewing group are always zipping off for a tour of India or a month in the Antipodes, I can’t tell you how many people I know who have been to Namibia this year.
When they ask me why I don’t follow suit, I’m floored. I feel guilty, inadequate, unable to articulate my reasons. There is the glaring fact that long-haul flights, cruises, high-end hotels are an environmental disaster. But would that stop me if I really wanted to go? I’m not a deep Green. I do own a car, I still eat chocolate and bananas, buy new clothes I don’t really need. My guilt about flying is not, if I’m honest, what puts me off. It’s the thought of actually doing it. I hate airports, railway stations, the airless nauseous claustrophobia of aircraft cabins, all the discomfort of travel. I don’t enjoy jet lag, losing my luggage, queueing. I find leaving my home painful, and the decisions of packing an exercise in self control. I want to take everything – all my clothes, most of my notebooks, a choice of shoes, a range of electronic devices and a few kitchen implements I might need. The idea of being a tourist, consuming new places, revolts me. And I don’t need it. I’m already overwhelmed by how much there is to see and hear and think about in the place I’m standing, without going somewhere new.
When I have been overseas it has usually been to visit friends who live in the country, to do the normal things they do. Living in Harry Potter Oxford, a city horribly degraded by mass tourism, does not make me want to inflict the same on other parts of the world. I recoil when people tell me they have ‘done’ southeast Asia, or Brazil, or Amsterdam. I know so little even about the place I live – how can a few days’ visit tell you anything? I am probably punishing myself by never having been to Venice, Rome, Prague because of all the other tourists I will find there. And yet we can’t all be visiting the ‘unspoilt’, ‘real’, ‘off the beaten track’ destinations, because then they won’t be.
But more than that, leaving home seems like too much of a loss. I do not want to give up my yoga class, my futon, my home-made kefir. When I’m away from home I miss my big desk, my sunny kitchen, my bee-loud garden. I long for my own home-grown veg, my simple meals, a decent cup of tea.
This week, I heard from a friend whose greatest delight lies in planning her trips for the next few years. Something she wrote made me realise that, for her, travel is a necessity, a way of feeling happy which is not available at home. This brought me up short. I have experienced travel as challenging. I’ve done things that terrified me, and survived them. It has brought fresh, more relaxed perspectives on worries at home. But I have never felt that travel was an escape. I’ve always found that the hours of waiting, the isolation of travel, being cut off from everything that’s familiar, bring me face to face with myself. I have to come right up against my fears, and if I have a companion, test our ability to get along under pressure in close quarters. Does that not happen to everyone?
Maybe I need to turn the question around. Instead of feeling defensive and apologetic, put on the spot for not wanting to jet off to exotic places, I should be more curious. What is it that you get from it? Why do you need, want, aspire to go? Can you not be happy at home?
And there’s another question. One to to ask myself. Why do I feel there is something wrong with not wanting to do it? Why do I have to excuse, explain, feel like a bad person. I know the answer to that, and it has nothing to do with holidays.
In The Archers Paul the vet nurse confesses to his housemates that he’s failed his driving test seven times, not because he can’t drive, but because he was so nervous. ‘It’s not lessons I need, it’s therapy.’
Me too, I think. I failed three times before leaving home, so scared by the test I was unable to function. It was too much like driving with my father, the incompetence that overwhelmed me when he was in the passenger seat, radiating despair and disapproval. My mother said: ‘It will do you good to fail something.’
At the gym, a graceful boy, all clean lines. Collar-length hair, skin-tight long-sleeved top, harem pants. Slender, Tadzio-like, Russian? He walks as if lost, stands in self-conscious solitude, makes eye contact only with his own perfection.
We do not go to the neighbour’s Christmas party. I walk up the river to Jericho, buy a dish glazed with dancing blue shapes, have tea with a friend. Later I hang the bowl on the wall, sew 23 tiny beads onto a piece of silk, do some yoga. I have forgotten about the party.
At bedtime, in the street below, a small group, so drunk they can barely form words, shriek about going home, about the last train, and eventually ‘Good-bye.’
One of the two people I know who were arrested this autumn for silently protesting against genocide, writes thoughtfully about her experience (‘Sometimes squalid, often frustrating and occasionally terrible’). During her night in a garishly lit police cell she is allowed to keep one book: ‘and the duty sergeant reluctantly allows reading glasses. Try and read a bit – Helen Garner. She is exactly the company I need. Her voice, her acerbic wit, her honesty. Thank you, Helen.’
Why is it that Helen Garner seems like a friend? I am just over halfway through her 800-page Collected Diaries: How to End a Story and despite its 2-inch wodge of pages, I wish there was more of it. What will I do when I reach the end? Because, as my brave 70-something protestor friend points out, Garner is such good company.
I had, to my shame, not even heard of Garner until another friend, Audrey, recommended The Spare Room a few months ago. I summed this up after devouring it as a ‘True spare account of caring for a dying but impossible friend.’ I loved the clean, honest way she writes, her exasperation, her observations: ‘It was a matter of urgency that I should get to sleep before two, the hour at which the drought, the refugee camps, the dying planet, and all the faults and meannesses of my character would arrive to haunt me.’
I lost patience with a novel written earlier in her life, Monkey Grip, feeling too old to read page after page about messy youthful living. But the diaries are something else. I keep trying to put my finger on what is so restorative, nourishing, engaging – in some way this is my perfect book – the one I imagine myself reading in my eternal fantasy of sitting in the sunshine at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee, a pile of notebooks, and no ‘oughts’.
***
Part of why I love this book so much is that Garner more than fulfils my bottom-line requirements of readability. She is never false, lazy or effortful (unlike most writers of contemporary fiction). She describes how she goes through her work editing out adjectives and adverbs (YES!) She admires the spareness of Carver. And at the same time she is living through the world events, the cultural experiences that I too had in the 1980s and 90s, albeit from the other side of the world. She is reading the same books, seeing the same movies, going to the same operas, fuming at the couple next to her in the cinema who make banal comments all through John Huston’s exquisite film of The Dead. ‘Look at that wallpaper. It’s peeling.’
One of the joys of something as fragmented as a diary is that the entries are short, there is no sustained narrative – but of course in a way there is, because this is her life. A story, many stories, do emerge. One of these is about her relationships with men. Garner was married three times, and the diaries cover the demise of her second marriage and the whole, I believe, of her third. She writes with honesty about the difficulty of living with a man even though you can’t bear to be without him, that choice we all make between solitude and companionship. Garner’s real pure love, at least at the point I have reached in the diaries, seems to be for her daughter, and for her female friends. She is ‘nourished by the company of women’. And it is noticeable when she gets together with the (married) man who will become her third husband that she seems to have far more sympathy for his abandoned wife than he does.
She writes well about the differences between men and women more generally: ‘Among men, as usual, I become aware that I have no subject on which I can deliver quantities of information’ or ‘Everything that can be called A SUBJECT he knows about. And I know about the rest.’
But perhaps what I like best is that Garner is writing about being alive. Her observations about the small joys, the dreadful mistakes, the pain of existence all resonate. ‘Why do I write down this stuff? Partly for the pleasure of seeing the golden nib roll over the paper as it did when I was ten.’ I know that feeling. And this one too: ‘Strange power and freedom I experience, when I start to invent. It has its own logic. I feel my way along some kind of dark thread.’ And, when her second marriage is breaking up, how she feels like ‘a very bad and wrong person, a sack of different sadnesses being hauled around by a skeleton.’
***
When Garner is entering a tumultuous period of her life she decides to read Proust because ‘I need a large structured element in which to rest and which I can step in and out of without fear of having lost the thread.’ This is how I feel about reading her diaries. It is a comfort, as books have been to me all my life, a place to retreat, huge and absorbing.
It is a little like reading my own diaries – compelling, surprisingly sharp and funny – but without the embarrassment of revisiting myself making the same mistakes again and again. Garner edited her diaries for publication, taking out ‘the boring stuff, the day’s residue’ but she did not rewrite. The writing itself, at the time, was a kind of daily practice, and it is not sloppy. I can’t compare myself to her of course, but her humanity is such that I feel as if I am on her side, even when she is behaving badly. When, three weeks into my reading of the Collected Diaries, it won the Baillie Gifford prize, I felt a warm glow all day.
Terry Eagleton says of reading: ‘The whole point…is that it brings us into deeper self-consciousness, catalyses a more critical view of our own identities. It is as though what we have been “reading”, in working our way through a text, is ourselves.’
From time to time I have come across women who, in how they are in the world, seem to offer a way of being – the sense that you can just be yourself and do it now, with confidence. It is something that, as a very bad and wrong person myself, I have looked for all my life. And this is something else I get from Garner’s diaries – a permission to be creative, be doubtful, do stupid things, be honest, introspective, different, and write about it beautifully.
janebuekett 