Although he has been using his new laptop for six months, Pierre does not start to wipe the old one until the morning when Beatrice has agreed to drive to the dump. After 2 1/2 hours ‘restore to factory settings’ has reached 80%, after three hours, 91%. Pierre starts researching recycling options nearer home.
Over dinner with our Ukrainian friends we learn that the Russian for parsnip is pasternak. Our perception of a literary family acquires a whole new flavour.
There is an interesting sounding piece of dance/music/film coming on at the Oxford Playhouse (and other venues around the country) in November. According to the musical director Robert Hollingworth it is innovative and wonderful (and only an hour long). That’s unusual (the innovative bit) for the Playhouse, and worth encouraging, I think. https://www.shobanajeyasingh.co.uk/works/clorinda-agonistes/
Alice is besieged by anxieties about flying to the states. Will the flight be cancelled, the airport bus break down, the check-in queue so long she misses the flight? Will her baggage be lost on arrival? Will she catch Covid and give it to her hosts? Wouldn’t it be better to stay at home?
At Heathrow her flight is upgraded to business. She gets a great seat, proper food, her luggage out first on arrival. The passenger in front of her in the security queue is Tilda Swinton.
Larry emails me from Toronto: ‘The attempt at a Guinness World Record for the greatest number of people standing on one foot for two minutes failed yesterday. The organizer (who himself holds the world record for standing on one foot for 72 hours) had hoped for 2,500 participants but only about 500 showed up.’
An email pops into my inbox from Linked In. ‘Jane, you’re on a roll with your career!’ it says. ‘Now take these next steps for more success.’ I’m unsubscribed from their marketing. I haven’t worked for 2 1/2 years. My Linked In profile gives my job title as ‘Free person at home’.
I’ve spent most of my life wishing I was different. Nicer face, flatter stomach, more outgoing personality. It’s all my parents’ fault of course — their genes, their insecurities, their values. If they’d believed in me (and themselves) a bit more, sent me to a better school, passed on a different bone structure, I would have turned out so much better. My fear of change, lack of ambition, feet that no shoes will fit — all down to poor old John and Pat.
But now that they are no longer around to blame, or forgive, now that it’s a bit late to worry about my lack of good looks or stunning personality, I’ve started to think there’s quite a bit to be grateful for. Those tedious after-school bus journeys to the orthodontist and painful mouthful of metal were better than a lifetime of crooked teeth. The skin that turns a peachy brown at the least glimpse of sun was not such a bad legacy. And I’m thankful every day that my father, with his scientific training, brought me up to question everything, look at the empirical evidence, understand cause and effect.
After I left university and started work my parents more or less forced me to take evening classes in typing. My lack of both coordination and interest made me the dunce of the class. It was a bleak, lonely time in my life, and turning up to hammer away on a heavy upright manual typewriter twice a week did nothing to enrich my dark days. But now, in a world where everything happens on a screen, the ability to touch type, even at my unimpressive speed, is something I feel more pleased about than I ever expected.
There are other people to be grateful for too. The university boyfriend who never changed his sheets and dropped out in the second year but who had the fewest hangups about sex of anyone I’ve known. The biology teacher who took us on fungal forays and the school’s first ever field trip, enthused us with his own feeling for the subject, but was most loveable for his mistakes — muddling up the circulation system for the kidneys, being unable to spell, using so much concentrated ammonia that clouds of vapour filled the room and people started to choke. And my grandmother, a notoriously difficult and manipulative woman, who giggled with me in church, gave me a love of language, and was the only person who ever believed I was special.
What these people gave me was something my parents would not, could not, were actually afraid of — the chaos of creativity. And there’s the rub. On the surface I am my parents’ child. Order out of chaos has been my raison d’être. I love taking a piece of text, turning it inside out, cutting its length by half, and revealing what the writer was trying to say in the first place. I’m comforted by reducing the crumpled contents of the ironing basket to a neatly folded crease-free pile. I calm myself by making lists, balancing my bank account, deadheading the roses. I don’t go overdrawn, I can’t be late, I’m the schmuck who steps in to take the minutes or buy the leaving present, and I do it to my own exacting standards.
Doing my civic duty, cleaning my shoes and sorting the rubbish correctly are second nature to me. But that goody-goody is not really me. All the time I am sewing on buttons and diligently responding to the latest idiotic plans from the council I’m thinking ‘Soon this will be over and I can go out and play.’ But that point rarely seems to arrive — there are always more chores to do. As Newland Archer muses at the end of The Age of Innocence ‘The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.’
Chaos will out, of course. My garden is a riot of flowers planted without thought of height or colour clash. I’ve never in my life had a tidy desk. Piles of notebooks, letters and novels lie in every room of the house. Still I find it hard to leave a comma in the wrong place, or dirty laundry unwashed.
***
One recent afternoon, when I could no longer force the neatly ironed piles into the wardrobe, I made Simon go through all his shirts and discard those too frayed, formal or faded to ever wear again. We ended up with a rainbow heap of much-loved, once beautiful, striped, checked, flowered shirts, full of memories, dating back decades, impossible to throw away. What could I do with them? A neighbour, a hugely creative woman, came to look at the shirts, bringing some of her own appliquéd embroidery. Multilayered, rich with stitching, fragments of this and that worked into a jewel-like whole. ‘How do you do it?’ I asked. ‘Just start,’ she said, ‘and see what happens.’ She left me with a piece of backing fabric and the instruction to sew some pieces on to it. It feels like leaping into the sea without being able to swim.
But maybe if I jump I’ll find I can do it. A few days ago I met my friend Richard for a shortish walk on Hampstead Heath. He knew the way, I didn’t even look at the map beforehand. Five and a half hours and around 17 km later, after two diversions caused by locked gates, an impromptu tour of Kenwood House, and an hour or so of being totally lost because we hadn’t paid attention to the way we’d come, we arrived back at the pub.
Neither Richard nor I are noted for our lack of precision or attention to detail. We both grew up with parents who would rather cut off their arms than set off on a walk without map, compass, binoculars and emergency rations. But not once on the walk did we argue or even particularly care that we were lost. It didn’t matter. We had the view from Parliament Hill, the summer afternoon, the company of some ancient oaks, sweet chestnuts, and each other. We had the excitement of passing through Mornington Crescent on the Tube train home. And, on our whirlwind whiz round Kenwood House, the unexpected treasure of Rembrandt’s most famous self portrait, late in life, looking at himself, at the world, at his painting — who knows — with what seems to be the understanding of age, that nothing is simple, life is full of pain, it cannot be explained or unravelled. A presence more real, more honestly and achingly human, than anyone else in the room.
I wake up to a sweet burbling sound like laughter, a mysterious creaking. From the bedroom window I can just see, several gardens away, the flying hair and white T-shirts of four little girls, bouncing on a huge trampoline. It is 7 a.m. Cool air, sparrows calling across the gardens, dusty muted light. The first day of the school summer holidays.
Jessica, 13 and wiry as a boy, sleeps through breakfast and refuses lunch. In the afternoon, at the summer carnival, she buys a large stick of candyfloss. ‘It’s sugar-free,’ the stall-holder assures her as she hands it over. It doesn’t taste much like candyfloss, but Jessica is hungry. Not long after, she discovers the full laxative effects of artificial sweeteners.
When the men come to put up the taller fence panels, Robert’s notoriously nasty neighbour screams abuse in their faces. She takes her stereo into the garden and blasts out rock music, as loud as it will go. One of the fence men, who are all from eastern Europe, bluetooths into her hi-fi from his phone, and switches her Black Sabbath to his Polish folk tunes.
janebuekett 