Although it is not immediately obvious (there are no signs for it and the exhibition is stuck up the back of the building in a room that is really a wide corridor that leads to the cafeteria - 'turn left past the Ladies', as the person at the information desk instructed me) a small number of the pictures of London buildings taken between 1875 and 1886 for the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London (SPROL) are on display at the Royal Academy.
The society first came into being when it was realised that a coaching inn called the Oxford Arms was about to be demolished. The pictures of the Oxford Arms in the RA's exhibition include a wonderful shot taken from the inn's courtyard, showing the upper floors and roof of the building, with the dome of St Paul's rising behind it. SPROL's Honorary Secretary, Alfred Marks, who seems to be considered something of a joke by the exhibition organisers, (they argue that he had a tendency to claim fairly tenuous links between buildings and well-known writers et cetera), described the Oxford Arms courtyard thus: 'Despite the confusion, the dirt, and the decay, he who stands in the yard of this ancient Inn may get an excellent idea of what it was like in the days of its prosperity.' This passage expresses pretty well SPROL's main motivation - if they could not halt progress and the demolition of old buildings, they could at least record what was there and try to capture something of the way the world felt in earlier times.
And, judging by this collection, they did their job well. The pictures chosen by the academy show a city whose scale is entirely different to the London we know today. Apart from St Paul's, the buildings are generally no more than three or four stories at the most and many have a ramshackle feel - this is a world before the time of machine precision. The streets and buildings seem often to have grown up higgledy piggledy and the impression the images create is of a city that was an endlessly intriguing maze, its fabric wood and wattle and daub, not glass and steel.
As often though it is in the details that the past really reveals itself. The quaint buildings are charming but we cannot see what went on inside them or discover how the people who lived there were different from us. It is here that the shopkeepers' signs and displays, captured by chance rather than deliberately, come into their own. The buildings - the focus of SPROL's interest - are often beautiful and intriguing, but they remain remote from our experience. The incidental advertising affixed to their exteriors allow insights into the lives led within their walls, helping provide Marks' 'excellent idea of what it was like.'
Very different, one would have to conclude. The advertisement for an Orphan Working School for Infants on the first floor of one building tells us that - as does (less distressingly) the sign for John Javens, manufacturer of grocers' canisters (grocers' what?). The lovely crammed shop window of an establishment called Mead and Deverell displays items related to Archery, Cricket, Rocking Horses and Perambulators (such an unlikely range of goods would never survive a modern day business plan). Next door, to the left, EC Wood appears to be thriving as a sales outlet for telescopes and opera glasses while, to the right, S Mordan and Sons provides Iron Doors (by appointment to the royal household no less). Now not only would the buildings that housed these enterprises be gone, there would be Boots and Top Shop and a fried chicken outlet in the shop spaces that had replaced them. No-one would be manufacturing anything much; it would all be coming in from China. But then again, no-one would be setting orphans to work in the upstairs office space either. They'd probably be doing it in China though, if they could find enough orphans.
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
Saturday, 5 June 2010
Not Quite True
Watching the news while I was on the plane yesterday, I saw several reports about the recent shootings in Cumbria - the 'cabbie rampage' as some news outlets have begun to call it. Among them was the following statement from a reporter on the ground: 'I am standing in the idyllic little holiday village of Boot, a long-time favourite of families and walkers. Sadly, its carefree atmosphere has been shattered, possibly forever, by the tragic events of the last few days.'
No, sorry. The murders in Cumbria were shocking, appalling and horrible - that is undeniable and a heavy enough reality to absorb. There is no need whatsoever to add to the burden of dreadfulness by making things up. The loss of many lives is clearly tragic. Boot's reported loss of carefree innocence is not. In the circumstances, such a thing would be too trivial to worry about, even if it were true. The important point though is that it is not. As far as Boot is concerned, there has been no loss of anything. Boot never was a carefree place. Boot was, is and always will be a depressing, dismal dump.
Believe me, I know. I spent the worst summer of my life in Boot. It was not long after my parents had finally divorced and the first holiday my father had attempted with us on our own. He had rented a cottage on the recommendation of a colleague, who had told him that not only was the fishing good but the food was superb. We drove from London in a Hillman Imp, which, as everyone knows was a lousy car for anyone (apologies to any Hillman Imp enthusiasts [do they exist?]) - but particularly for a man as tall as my father (his knee hit the indicator every two or three minutes, causing traffic behind us to become maddened by the incessant and increasingly insane signalling).
It was a long journey, and we were tired when we arrived. Our first impression of the tiny main street (actually it is the only street - and it leads nowhere) was that we'd arrived at the most dismal place on earth. Exhaustion, we told ourselves, was the cause of our dismay, but as the days went by things did not improve. There was, we soon realised, a cheerlessness about Boot that was something you could very nearly see and touch - a permanent mist of grim dreariness that pervaded everything.
The 'cottage' where we were to stay didn't help, of course. It was a tiny, very dark, two-up, two-down in the middle of a terrace of similar dwellings. The furniture it contained (and 'contained' is the right word, for the place felt more like a storehouse than somewhere anyone had arranged things in to make a nice living space) was all ugly, heavy and far too large for the tiny rooms. Electricity and heating (and we did need heating - it was August in the Lake District after all) was supplied by meter and as we were always running out of two shilling bits and the village shop had a strict (some might say cussed) policy of not giving out change, we spent a lot of time peering at each other in the dim flicker of candles or my father's Dupont lighter , an object whose elegant (if somewhat flashy) aspirations served only to highlight the dispiriting dinginess of our new surroundings.
To top it all, I, for some reason, had brought absolutely nothing to read. In the end, I turned to the cupboards and drawers of the little place, which were all lined with old pages from the Women's Realm. These provided stories of suburban romance that would not in ordinary circumstances have been of tremendous interest to a 9-year-old. However, I had nothing else and so quickly became glued. As with everything else that holiday though, my strategy led quickly to disappointment, for none of the pages were in any kind of sequence and, by a cruel trick of fate, not one drawer contained an ending to any of the tales. That is why to this day I still wonder about trainee nurse Kate and her dog and whether they ever hooked up with the mysterious but attractive man whom Kate met fleetingly on the common - and about lonely librarian Helen and whether she ended up marrying (or indeed even conversing with) the boy she saw each day at the bus stop.
Was the fishing any good? I can't say. I know that we went to a river every morning and that hours were spent by father and son, casting and waiting, while I sat on a tree-stump reading my sheaf of cast-off bits of Women's Realm. I don't ever remember a fish being caught. My father did once manage to catch my brother when hurling out his line. Instead of hitting the water, his hook plunged right through the flesh between thumb and forefinger on my brother's right hand. My father reacted with an uncharacteristic display of Edwardian outrage when my brother quite naturally let out a loud yell of pain. 'No son of mine should ever admit to pain', he shouted, an outburst that must surely have been the product of frustration after so many wasted, fish-free hours. In this scene I like to think I played a plucky role, leaping from my stump and tackling my father's shocking behaviour, but memory often has a way of gilding one's own actions.
If our mornings were a bit dull, our afternoons were drearier. In those days, I should point out, walking and trekking and rambling were not things people did in the way they do now - some unusual souls tackled big hikes, but mostly that kind of activity was regarded as rather hearty and eccentric. So, although Boot is, apparently, the gateway to Skafell Pike, I wasn't aware of that fact during our stay. And, even if we had been outdoors types, my father was in the grip of one of his periodic bouts of hypochondria - centring, on this occasion, on his digestive system - so instead of going anywhere we stayed at 'home' and listened to him groan.
Perhaps it was the food that did it - it turned out to be unspeakable (far worse even than school). It was provided in the upstairs dining-room of the pub across the road from our cottage, but after a day or two of being faced with dishes that played variations on the colour khaki and always arrived cold and covered by a slick of something that looked very like the stuff filling the Gulf of Mexico at the the moment, we gave up going. There was an alternative - the one and only edible item offered for sale by the village shop. It was a locally-made substance called Kendall's Mint Cake and, according to its wrapper it was exceptionally nutritious. How lucky it was, since we ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day until we were released - I mean, until it was time to go home. At least my brother and I did. My father ate nothing. Progressively more convinced that his days were numbered, he would sit on the front step in the weak afternoon sunshine, holding his head, sighing, very close to tears. My brother and I, clutching our slabs of Kendall's, would sit on each side of him, munching steadily, trying, always unsuccessfully, to think of something that might cheer him up.
I should point out that I am not being heartless about my father's sufferings - he really was all right. When the 'holiday' was over and we returned down south, he consulted a number of Harley Street specialists and not one of them could find anything wrong at all. Eventually, dispirited and still deep in the clutches of his symptoms, he stepped out of yet another great man's consulting rooms and into a nearby pub. 'You look rough, guv' the landlord informed him, by way of greeting. Once again my father unfurled his tale of woe. The landlord listened and then reached behind him for a packet of tablets. 'These should fix you up' he said, 'they're made in Switzerland and they worked wonders for me.' And they did - my father took one that day and never had to take another. He had to have them in the house though. That was all that mattered. If he didn't have them in the bathroom cupboard, the wracking pains returned.
In the decades since that trip with my father, I've often wondered if Boot's lack of charms had become exaggerated in my mind. That is why, when we were doing the Coast-to-Coast walk a couple of years ago, I took a detour just to take a look. They'd whitewashed some of the buildings and hung a few baskets of geraniums from the municipal gallows - sorry, sorry, I mean lamp posts - but these feeble gestures only seemed to emphasise the little town's miserable air. Standing there, remembering that awful summer, it finally dawned on me though - that colleague, that recommendation, it can't really have been an error of judgment. It was suddenly so clear - my brother and I were the innocent victims of some complex act of workplace revenge.
No, sorry. The murders in Cumbria were shocking, appalling and horrible - that is undeniable and a heavy enough reality to absorb. There is no need whatsoever to add to the burden of dreadfulness by making things up. The loss of many lives is clearly tragic. Boot's reported loss of carefree innocence is not. In the circumstances, such a thing would be too trivial to worry about, even if it were true. The important point though is that it is not. As far as Boot is concerned, there has been no loss of anything. Boot never was a carefree place. Boot was, is and always will be a depressing, dismal dump.
Believe me, I know. I spent the worst summer of my life in Boot. It was not long after my parents had finally divorced and the first holiday my father had attempted with us on our own. He had rented a cottage on the recommendation of a colleague, who had told him that not only was the fishing good but the food was superb. We drove from London in a Hillman Imp, which, as everyone knows was a lousy car for anyone (apologies to any Hillman Imp enthusiasts [do they exist?]) - but particularly for a man as tall as my father (his knee hit the indicator every two or three minutes, causing traffic behind us to become maddened by the incessant and increasingly insane signalling).
It was a long journey, and we were tired when we arrived. Our first impression of the tiny main street (actually it is the only street - and it leads nowhere) was that we'd arrived at the most dismal place on earth. Exhaustion, we told ourselves, was the cause of our dismay, but as the days went by things did not improve. There was, we soon realised, a cheerlessness about Boot that was something you could very nearly see and touch - a permanent mist of grim dreariness that pervaded everything.
The 'cottage' where we were to stay didn't help, of course. It was a tiny, very dark, two-up, two-down in the middle of a terrace of similar dwellings. The furniture it contained (and 'contained' is the right word, for the place felt more like a storehouse than somewhere anyone had arranged things in to make a nice living space) was all ugly, heavy and far too large for the tiny rooms. Electricity and heating (and we did need heating - it was August in the Lake District after all) was supplied by meter and as we were always running out of two shilling bits and the village shop had a strict (some might say cussed) policy of not giving out change, we spent a lot of time peering at each other in the dim flicker of candles or my father's Dupont lighter , an object whose elegant (if somewhat flashy) aspirations served only to highlight the dispiriting dinginess of our new surroundings.
To top it all, I, for some reason, had brought absolutely nothing to read. In the end, I turned to the cupboards and drawers of the little place, which were all lined with old pages from the Women's Realm. These provided stories of suburban romance that would not in ordinary circumstances have been of tremendous interest to a 9-year-old. However, I had nothing else and so quickly became glued. As with everything else that holiday though, my strategy led quickly to disappointment, for none of the pages were in any kind of sequence and, by a cruel trick of fate, not one drawer contained an ending to any of the tales. That is why to this day I still wonder about trainee nurse Kate and her dog and whether they ever hooked up with the mysterious but attractive man whom Kate met fleetingly on the common - and about lonely librarian Helen and whether she ended up marrying (or indeed even conversing with) the boy she saw each day at the bus stop.
Was the fishing any good? I can't say. I know that we went to a river every morning and that hours were spent by father and son, casting and waiting, while I sat on a tree-stump reading my sheaf of cast-off bits of Women's Realm. I don't ever remember a fish being caught. My father did once manage to catch my brother when hurling out his line. Instead of hitting the water, his hook plunged right through the flesh between thumb and forefinger on my brother's right hand. My father reacted with an uncharacteristic display of Edwardian outrage when my brother quite naturally let out a loud yell of pain. 'No son of mine should ever admit to pain', he shouted, an outburst that must surely have been the product of frustration after so many wasted, fish-free hours. In this scene I like to think I played a plucky role, leaping from my stump and tackling my father's shocking behaviour, but memory often has a way of gilding one's own actions.
If our mornings were a bit dull, our afternoons were drearier. In those days, I should point out, walking and trekking and rambling were not things people did in the way they do now - some unusual souls tackled big hikes, but mostly that kind of activity was regarded as rather hearty and eccentric. So, although Boot is, apparently, the gateway to Skafell Pike, I wasn't aware of that fact during our stay. And, even if we had been outdoors types, my father was in the grip of one of his periodic bouts of hypochondria - centring, on this occasion, on his digestive system - so instead of going anywhere we stayed at 'home' and listened to him groan.
Perhaps it was the food that did it - it turned out to be unspeakable (far worse even than school). It was provided in the upstairs dining-room of the pub across the road from our cottage, but after a day or two of being faced with dishes that played variations on the colour khaki and always arrived cold and covered by a slick of something that looked very like the stuff filling the Gulf of Mexico at the the moment, we gave up going. There was an alternative - the one and only edible item offered for sale by the village shop. It was a locally-made substance called Kendall's Mint Cake and, according to its wrapper it was exceptionally nutritious. How lucky it was, since we ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day until we were released - I mean, until it was time to go home. At least my brother and I did. My father ate nothing. Progressively more convinced that his days were numbered, he would sit on the front step in the weak afternoon sunshine, holding his head, sighing, very close to tears. My brother and I, clutching our slabs of Kendall's, would sit on each side of him, munching steadily, trying, always unsuccessfully, to think of something that might cheer him up.
I should point out that I am not being heartless about my father's sufferings - he really was all right. When the 'holiday' was over and we returned down south, he consulted a number of Harley Street specialists and not one of them could find anything wrong at all. Eventually, dispirited and still deep in the clutches of his symptoms, he stepped out of yet another great man's consulting rooms and into a nearby pub. 'You look rough, guv' the landlord informed him, by way of greeting. Once again my father unfurled his tale of woe. The landlord listened and then reached behind him for a packet of tablets. 'These should fix you up' he said, 'they're made in Switzerland and they worked wonders for me.' And they did - my father took one that day and never had to take another. He had to have them in the house though. That was all that mattered. If he didn't have them in the bathroom cupboard, the wracking pains returned.
In the decades since that trip with my father, I've often wondered if Boot's lack of charms had become exaggerated in my mind. That is why, when we were doing the Coast-to-Coast walk a couple of years ago, I took a detour just to take a look. They'd whitewashed some of the buildings and hung a few baskets of geraniums from the municipal gallows - sorry, sorry, I mean lamp posts - but these feeble gestures only seemed to emphasise the little town's miserable air. Standing there, remembering that awful summer, it finally dawned on me though - that colleague, that recommendation, it can't really have been an error of judgment. It was suddenly so clear - my brother and I were the innocent victims of some complex act of workplace revenge.
Friday, 4 June 2010
Jamie Grant
I don't know anything much about Jamie Grant, except that he is Australian and I like his poems. Most of them are pretty long, but here are a couple of amusing little ones. As someone who told an oral examiner that I washed up only the forks at home (when asked what I did to help my mother round the house, [all other kitchen implements escaped me for a moment and I didn't know the word 'vaisselle', although it is now etched on my memory]), I identify with the second one in particular:
The Surrealist Poem
My daughter composed her first surrealist poem
when I was unknotting her hair with a comb
and had paused, exasperated by a tangle,
to observe: 'Your hair is like a jungle.'
'Your hair is like an icecream parlour, Dad.'
was her instant reply; she proceeded to add:
'Jock's hair is like a pirate ship, and Emily's
hair is like a hospital.' 'And Mummy's?'
I prompted. 'Would it be a telephone or a fairy?'
'No!' the young poet concluded 'Hers is like a library.'
Mon Pere est Mort
For an oral exam, when aged thirteen
my father was asked questions in French
by a visiting professor in trench-
coat and gold-rimmed spectacles, who was lean
with the thin, pursed lips of an enemy
interrogator. He pressed my father
to say what his father's metier
was - an awkward question, for how many
schoolboys know the French for 'Real Estate
Agent'? Adopting a tragic expression
my father just replied, 'Mon pere est mort.'
The professor blushed to commiserate.
When the results of the examination
were known, my father had the highest score.
The Surrealist Poem
My daughter composed her first surrealist poem
when I was unknotting her hair with a comb
and had paused, exasperated by a tangle,
to observe: 'Your hair is like a jungle.'
'Your hair is like an icecream parlour, Dad.'
was her instant reply; she proceeded to add:
'Jock's hair is like a pirate ship, and Emily's
hair is like a hospital.' 'And Mummy's?'
I prompted. 'Would it be a telephone or a fairy?'
'No!' the young poet concluded 'Hers is like a library.'
Mon Pere est Mort
For an oral exam, when aged thirteen
my father was asked questions in French
by a visiting professor in trench-
coat and gold-rimmed spectacles, who was lean
with the thin, pursed lips of an enemy
interrogator. He pressed my father
to say what his father's metier
was - an awkward question, for how many
schoolboys know the French for 'Real Estate
Agent'? Adopting a tragic expression
my father just replied, 'Mon pere est mort.'
The professor blushed to commiserate.
When the results of the examination
were known, my father had the highest score.
Thursday, 3 June 2010
Wrinkle Treatment
Shall I tell you what I did last night? I did not get drunk, I did not spend the evening trawling the flesh pots of my local suburb (partly because there are none), I did not enrol in Beginners' Lithuanian classes: I ironed. And I have to admit it's something I don't mind doing (I'd even go so far as to say I like it, if I didn't think that everyone I know would immediately come over with basketsful of the stuff for me to do - 'Well, you did say you liked it; in fact, you put it in writing.')
So I won't go that far. But I will admit that, of all the endless round of futile tasks that come under the heading 'housework', ironing is my favourite (followed by shoe-polishing - and can you believe it, someone I know does ALL the other household chores in her house in exchange for her husband doing the shoe-cleaning? She says she hates shoe-cleaning. She says she actually prefers cleaning the bathroom to shoe-cleaning - that is madness in anyone's book, surely [the bathroom! I mean to say {I think that actually merits one of my allowance of four exclamation marks for the year}])
But what is it about ironing that I find so (relatively - mustn't get carried away here) satisfactory? Early exposure to Mrs Tiggywinkle may be partly to blame. That 'nice hot singey smell', described so well by Beatrix Potter, seeped into my soul before I knew what was happening. And the efficient competence Mrs Tiggywinkle displayed as she took Lucy's pinny and 'ironed it, and goffered it, and shook out the frills' was always going to dazzle me, because I am the sort of person who never was and never will be described as efficient or competent by anyone in connection with any physical task of any kind [I think you always particularly admire the things you can't achieve yourself.])
But it's not just B. Potter that made me find ironing appealing. There's also the fact that, of all the domestic chores, ironing is the only one that doesn't involve:
1) moving from place to place or picking things up (as dusting does);
2) stretching or craning (as cleaning cobwebs from the ceiling and hanging out washing does);
3) crawling about on your hands and knees (as cleaning under the bed or doing the skirting boards does);
4) getting wet and making bleach spots all over your clothing (as cleaning the bathrooms does).
Ironing doesn't involve making any noise either (unlike vacuuming) and this means that you can woolgather or listen to the radio while you do it, (and listening to the radio is just about my all time favourite pastime). Ironing, in short, is what Helen Garner, who is great on the domestic and actually has a scene in her novel The Children's Bach in which one character gives another an iron as a present, ('They came in carrying things: a bunch of flowers, a tin of anzacs, a parcel in brown paper which Mrs Fox handed to Athena. She began to unwrap it. The stickytape popped.
'It's an iron,' said Athena.
She pulled the cardboard and the packing off it and took hold of the pale plastic handle. The cord was brown, flecked with blue, and was tightly wound in a rubber band...
Athena held the iron at arm's length, raised it and lowered it as if to test its weight. 'It's a very good iron,' she said.
'I love to see the creases in their little pyjama pants,' said Mrs Fox.
Dexter took the iron. 'It's so light!' he said. 'How could you make things flat with that? Irons should be heavy.'
The women looked at each other. Athena folded the brown paper and put it away in a drawer.') describes as one of those 'straightforward tasks of love and order that I could perform with ease'(although I have to admit that she is actually describing sheet changing when she uses that phrase [in The Spare Room]).
And there is one other important thing about ironing that makes me find it attractive: it is the kind of work I understand. It has a visible outcome, a tangible effect, it produces solid - if fleeting - results that you can stand back and look at. In my professional life (what a laughable phrase in connection with the muddle of things I've done to earn a living), the jobs where I've had to help produce something you can actually see - a magazine you can hold in your hand at the end of the month, for example, rather than just a set of recommendations or a policy guideline - have always been the ones I've found the most satisfying. I know this is the sign of a feeble non-abstract mind, the kind of thing Descartes ranked as second-rate, but there it is. I am literal minded. And because I am literal-minded, I felt, reaching the end of the long night and looking at the stack of smooth sheets and pillowcases and the line of uncreased shirts I had created from the towering pile of crumpled cloth I'd faced at the outset, an absurd sense of achievement. I knew what I'd done was entirely ephemeral, but it didn't matter - I could see the evidence of my work. It was a visible result of what I'd been up to. I liked that.
(And, if you want more on the subject, [surely not - I don't suppose anyone wanted anything on it at all in the first place] a friend has just told me there's a nice poem about ironing’s special joys
here.)
So I won't go that far. But I will admit that, of all the endless round of futile tasks that come under the heading 'housework', ironing is my favourite (followed by shoe-polishing - and can you believe it, someone I know does ALL the other household chores in her house in exchange for her husband doing the shoe-cleaning? She says she hates shoe-cleaning. She says she actually prefers cleaning the bathroom to shoe-cleaning - that is madness in anyone's book, surely [the bathroom! I mean to say {I think that actually merits one of my allowance of four exclamation marks for the year}])
But what is it about ironing that I find so (relatively - mustn't get carried away here) satisfactory? Early exposure to Mrs Tiggywinkle may be partly to blame. That 'nice hot singey smell', described so well by Beatrix Potter, seeped into my soul before I knew what was happening. And the efficient competence Mrs Tiggywinkle displayed as she took Lucy's pinny and 'ironed it, and goffered it, and shook out the frills' was always going to dazzle me, because I am the sort of person who never was and never will be described as efficient or competent by anyone in connection with any physical task of any kind [I think you always particularly admire the things you can't achieve yourself.])
But it's not just B. Potter that made me find ironing appealing. There's also the fact that, of all the domestic chores, ironing is the only one that doesn't involve:
1) moving from place to place or picking things up (as dusting does);
2) stretching or craning (as cleaning cobwebs from the ceiling and hanging out washing does);
3) crawling about on your hands and knees (as cleaning under the bed or doing the skirting boards does);
4) getting wet and making bleach spots all over your clothing (as cleaning the bathrooms does).
Ironing doesn't involve making any noise either (unlike vacuuming) and this means that you can woolgather or listen to the radio while you do it, (and listening to the radio is just about my all time favourite pastime). Ironing, in short, is what Helen Garner, who is great on the domestic and actually has a scene in her novel The Children's Bach in which one character gives another an iron as a present, ('They came in carrying things: a bunch of flowers, a tin of anzacs, a parcel in brown paper which Mrs Fox handed to Athena. She began to unwrap it. The stickytape popped.
'It's an iron,' said Athena.
She pulled the cardboard and the packing off it and took hold of the pale plastic handle. The cord was brown, flecked with blue, and was tightly wound in a rubber band...
Athena held the iron at arm's length, raised it and lowered it as if to test its weight. 'It's a very good iron,' she said.
'I love to see the creases in their little pyjama pants,' said Mrs Fox.
Dexter took the iron. 'It's so light!' he said. 'How could you make things flat with that? Irons should be heavy.'
The women looked at each other. Athena folded the brown paper and put it away in a drawer.') describes as one of those 'straightforward tasks of love and order that I could perform with ease'(although I have to admit that she is actually describing sheet changing when she uses that phrase [in The Spare Room]).
And there is one other important thing about ironing that makes me find it attractive: it is the kind of work I understand. It has a visible outcome, a tangible effect, it produces solid - if fleeting - results that you can stand back and look at. In my professional life (what a laughable phrase in connection with the muddle of things I've done to earn a living), the jobs where I've had to help produce something you can actually see - a magazine you can hold in your hand at the end of the month, for example, rather than just a set of recommendations or a policy guideline - have always been the ones I've found the most satisfying. I know this is the sign of a feeble non-abstract mind, the kind of thing Descartes ranked as second-rate, but there it is. I am literal minded. And because I am literal-minded, I felt, reaching the end of the long night and looking at the stack of smooth sheets and pillowcases and the line of uncreased shirts I had created from the towering pile of crumpled cloth I'd faced at the outset, an absurd sense of achievement. I knew what I'd done was entirely ephemeral, but it didn't matter - I could see the evidence of my work. It was a visible result of what I'd been up to. I liked that.
(And, if you want more on the subject, [surely not - I don't suppose anyone wanted anything on it at all in the first place] a friend has just told me there's a nice poem about ironing’s special joys
here.)
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
Tuesday, 1 June 2010
The Vision Thing
It was a friend's birthday on Saturday and there was a big dinner to celebrate. Conversation turned - as more and more often it does these days - to the irritations of middle-aged decay. I was agreeing with several others that deteriorating eyesight is a complete pain and really annoying and totally vexing and how now, on top of all the hours in our lives that we've already wasted looking for keys, there's the added problem of the equally many and dull hours spent looking for glasses - or the risk of instant dementia if you take the plunge and get a string to hang them round your neck. Gloom was about to overwhelm the table, when someone said, 'It doesn't annoy me; it just makes me think how lucky I was to have such amazing eyesight for so many years.'
I was astonished. It had never occurred to me to think like that. It was a perspective I'd never seen things from before. It was an entirely new way of looking at things. It was a revelation.
Writing it down now, of course, I realise my friend's comment doesn't look all that original and perceptive. In fact, set down on the virtual page, it just seems trite. Yet the man who said it isn't a Pollyanna-goody-two-shoes type of person and he wasn't speaking smugly or with a kind of eye-glinting missionary zeal. He just genuinely thought that.
It's no good though - I can already hear the cynical sucking of teeth, the sniggering, the embarrassed throat-clearing up the back of the room. Well, in the face of such mulish opposition, all I can do is repeat the parting words of my headmistress at boarding school, after she'd hauled me into her office to tell me that if I didn't change my appalling - but unspecified - ways, I would be expelled. 'Do you know what I'm talking about?' she asked at the end of a long and - I won't deny it - not entirely uncritical lecture. 'No,' I said, with absolute truthfulness. 'That just shows how self-centred and egotistical you are. You can go now.'
And I did - I never was one to do anything at all but quake in the face of authority, obeying instructions with a meekness that has rarely been surpassed. That is why I, personally, think the whole incident was really a case of mistaken identity - she probably just got muddled and forgot she was in fact intending to make me head girl. Actually, maybe not. Whatever the case, I still maintain there was no justice in the incident. I mean surely, if there is someone in your charge who does allow absurdist despair to get in the way of team spirit occasionally (just occasionally) it should not be chastisement you offer but sympathy - or, at the very least, medication (and incidentally when did we stop taking medicine and start taking medication?)
Oh no, I can't start down that road, I haven't time to spend the entire day bemoaning the loss of English as we know it; I've got an overseas trip to organise (and, on that note, if anyone knows of good places to stay in Barcelona, all suggestions will be gratefully accepted - cool, [as in temperature] ideally; quiet a real plus).
I was astonished. It had never occurred to me to think like that. It was a perspective I'd never seen things from before. It was an entirely new way of looking at things. It was a revelation.
Writing it down now, of course, I realise my friend's comment doesn't look all that original and perceptive. In fact, set down on the virtual page, it just seems trite. Yet the man who said it isn't a Pollyanna-goody-two-shoes type of person and he wasn't speaking smugly or with a kind of eye-glinting missionary zeal. He just genuinely thought that.
It's no good though - I can already hear the cynical sucking of teeth, the sniggering, the embarrassed throat-clearing up the back of the room. Well, in the face of such mulish opposition, all I can do is repeat the parting words of my headmistress at boarding school, after she'd hauled me into her office to tell me that if I didn't change my appalling - but unspecified - ways, I would be expelled. 'Do you know what I'm talking about?' she asked at the end of a long and - I won't deny it - not entirely uncritical lecture. 'No,' I said, with absolute truthfulness. 'That just shows how self-centred and egotistical you are. You can go now.'
And I did - I never was one to do anything at all but quake in the face of authority, obeying instructions with a meekness that has rarely been surpassed. That is why I, personally, think the whole incident was really a case of mistaken identity - she probably just got muddled and forgot she was in fact intending to make me head girl. Actually, maybe not. Whatever the case, I still maintain there was no justice in the incident. I mean surely, if there is someone in your charge who does allow absurdist despair to get in the way of team spirit occasionally (just occasionally) it should not be chastisement you offer but sympathy - or, at the very least, medication (and incidentally when did we stop taking medicine and start taking medication?)
Oh no, I can't start down that road, I haven't time to spend the entire day bemoaning the loss of English as we know it; I've got an overseas trip to organise (and, on that note, if anyone knows of good places to stay in Barcelona, all suggestions will be gratefully accepted - cool, [as in temperature] ideally; quiet a real plus).
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