Chapter 4
New Challenges – Different Standards
for or against? I think not. You smoke because you want to, or you
smoke because you are addicted, and your addiction beats your
willpower to discontinue. Or you do not smoke, never have, and
think it is disgusting. For me, as from the age of 15, I ventured out
into all weathers, I sought out unused lavatories and I loitered in
dark passages or wherever else I could light up without discovery,
and the smoking habit caught fire. It continued to blaze brightly for
the next twenty five years, and when I came to Oxford I was smoking
thirty five cigarettes a day. Discourses on ‘how I gave up smoking’
are boring to everyone. If you don’t smoke, then you cannot enjoy
the fuss and agony of giving up, and if you do smoke, have tried to
give up and haven’t succeeded, it is incredibly irritating to hear those
who have managed, talking self-righteously about how clever they
are. Listening to Miriam Stoppard on the radio one day, that
glamorous television/doctor personality twittering on about how
well she felt now that she no longer smoked and how ‘we could all
do it’ if we were determined and so on, I felt like killing her, not
emulating her. Sufficient to say, therefore, that with great difficulty I
did stop smoking. However, I believe that once a smoker always a
faintly reluctant non-smoker, and my constant dread is being, for any
length of time, with people who smoke. After a week with them I
would be back smoking myself. So, I try to keep away from smoking
people and smoking places.
The result of not smoking did not seem to be immediately
beneficial. Indeed, the opposite was true. Not only was I irritable and
bad tempered, but I got fatter and fatter. I put on two stone in about
6 months. Fair and forty go together, I know, but it was difficult to
discern whether it was the middle-age spread, or the lack of nicotine
to speed the metabolism, that was causing the embonpoint. Or both.
Living alone had presented new problems of what, with no fuss,
could I cook for myself. Cooking a Sunday joint for one was
ridiculous, expensive, and unnecessary. Making a stew and having to
eat it for four consecutive days on order to finish it was a kind of self-
inflicted culinary punishment. It reminded me of the Christmas
turkey. Delicious on the 25th, good on the 26th, less so on the 27th and
horrible thereafter. Puddings fared no better. Even a small apple
crumble, reheated on day two, is fairly unappetizing, so it joined the
uneaten stew in the dustbin. Good food is not on my list of essential
priorities for happy living. I seldom notice what I am eating – indeed I
am sometimes surprised to see an empty beans tin in the sink when I
have no recollection of eating them whatsoever. It has always been a
puzzle to me just how much discussion takes place about the relative
recipes, restaurants, wines and so on, as if they were a serious and
important part of life. Eating is generally supposed, I believe, to be
the optimum pleasure in middle age when the pleasures of sex
abate. Since my enjoyment of eating exciting or rich food is non-
existent I can only hope that the pleasure of sex will ever continue.
Life, otherwise, promises to be fairly dull.
But, obviously, gaining so much weight, I was eating the wrong
food. Finally, I went to see someone in the menopause department
at the Oxford Hospital. It might, I thought hopefully, be hormone
imbalance, and I could get something for it. The doctor I saw was
young and aggressive. She asked me lots of questions, mostly about
how much I drank. “Do you drink a lot?” she said. Doctors always ask this
question in a voice suggesting that they never touch drink and that they
suspect that you are an alcoholic.
“How much is a lot?” I asked. “Do you mean do I drink two bottles
of gin a day or two glasses of sherry after church on Sunday?” She
did not find me amusing. Finally, she wrote something on a piece of
paper. She had written one word on it: o-b-e-s-e. OBESE! Horrible
thoughts flew round my head. Obesity is serious. It implies several
things – none of them good. Greed, lack of self-control, lack of pride,
lack of intelligence, and obviously, lack of willpower, were just the
first few. But the dietician was very nice. She explained that human
beings were designed for a lifestyle, after evolution, as hoe-ers of
land and drawers or water. We needed then, with the fresh air,
exercise and long hours toiling, the benefit of three large meals a
day. This obviously no longer generally applies. Certainly, I should eat
very little because I do very little. Two or three apples, a little fish or
chicken, All Bran and two slices of wholemeal bread, ‘washed down’
with lashings of tea (with skimmed milk) or water, is about all I can
eat each day if I want to stay slim. (My nanny would have been
horrified. She taught my sister and I that three meals a day were
essential for our wellbeing). Now, years later, I have got the gist of
slimming. It is for every day of the year, every year, ad infinitum. It is
hard work and boring, and whether it is worth it is debatable. I try to
keep to the prescribed diet but sometimes rebel and buy delicious
homemade fudge, in a pretty packet, and eat it all in one go. And I
love it. I know now when I am fatter than I wish to be, and take
steps. I have accepted that my weight problem is a life battle, and
that it will never go away. When I become overweight, by my
standards, I go on the Cambridge diet for a week or two, which is
painless and very effective. I like having a chocolate drink for
breakfast, turkey soup for lunch and mushroom soup for dinner and
know that I am losing two pounds a day with no effort. So that is
what I do. It works, and it is cheap.
At the beginning of the eighties, exercise became fashionable.
Aerobics, jogging, running, squash, dance movement, yoga et al plus
Jane Fonda telling us all to ‘burn’. (I tried ‘burning’ one day, fell over
backwards and could not walk for a fortnight). Strolling about
through water meadows or walking in the wonderful Welsh
mountains at my own unhurried pace is perfect exercise, it seems,
for me. Violent activity gives me a headache, and I avoid it wherever
possible. But, pressurized in my first year in Oxford, I felt reluctantly
that I should emulate my fellows. I joined a class of enthusiastic
ladies at an exercise class run in a health farm, advertised in the local
paper. This was a serious mistake. The health farm, set in a luxurious
private estate, was designed to give a feeling of ease and relaxation.
Thick, plain, carpets in every room, bowls of expensive flower
arrangements everywhere, and new copies of Good Housekeeping
and Vogue lay on the waiting-room table. There was a suffocating
richness in the very air, as if the place itself was preening its
superiority.
The woman taking the class was straight out of Dallas, I imagine,
or some such fantasy grown-up fairy-tale world. She had long silky
blonde hair, long red nails, lots of make-up and a lovely figure clad in
hundreds of pounds worth of leopard skin leotard, plus trimmings.
The morning of my first class I had carefully chosen what to wear. An
old pair of black tights, feet cut off, seemed appropriate: they would
be taken for half a leotard. Plus, one of my daughter’s T-shirts. This
ensemble appeared to be perfectly adequate when I tried it on at
home, but in the changing room (all pine louver doors) I saw it in a
rather different light. The other members of class had bought in neat
little Gucci changing bags, brilliant aquamarine, red, purple and
peacock blue leotards (from Harrods, I gathered), with matching
tops, and some strange garments called leg warmers (not articles of
clothing I could immediately see a use for. We were not ballet
dancers, were we?). Looking round, I felt no empathy here and to say
that I was the odd man out would be a great understatement. We
trouped off to an exercise room with a parquet floor and William
Morris chintz curtains. For the next hour, to the sounds of some
classical music (Chopin would have been appalled at the antics his
Mazurkas inspired) and some popular music, we bent and stretched,
lay on the floor with our legs in the air, pointed our toes, danced on
the spot, and generally asked our bodies to behave in an irregular
manner. Mine rebelled against it all. At the end of the hour I escaped
thankfully, my body indignant at such unwelcome exercise, my mind
stupefied by the waste of time and money. A lovely walk over open
fields with an abundance of fresh air, aesthetic views, and music
from the wind ‘listing where it bloweth’ – my kind of exercise – was
surely better for the body and soul than cavorting about in an
expensive health farm.
Several months later, inspired by a friend who said that exercise in
the form of free dance movement was sheer delight, I made one
further attempt at communal exercise activity. The Church Hall,
where the dance movement took place on a Tuesday evening, was
very different from the Health Hall. It was cold and dirty with a worn-
out air. There were no changing rooms and as far as I could tell, no
lavatories. But here, at least, the other class members did not wear
exotic leotards and where my cut-off tights and T-shirts were de
rigeur. An indeterminate lady thumped out music from an old piano
whilst another tried to get some form of order into the class’s
dancing by shouting out things such as:
“Feet in, feet out, to the right, bend to the left, bend in, bend out,
jump, and again….”
I never got to grips with it at all. It seemed that I, whilst listening for
the next instructions, got behind with the previous one so that I was
bending or jumping when everyone else was doing the opposite. I
persevered for several weeks but there was no improvement in my
timing, and although I quite enjoyed the dancing to describe it as
‘sheer delight’ was certainly overdoing it. I abandoned the struggle
for coordination.
What I continued to struggle with, however, was with the
acceptance of the fact that standards have to change in a single life if
the sought-after peace is to be attained. Different standards and
different values are inevitable, there is less time, less money, and
less willingness to spend either on yourself or your friends. I found
alcohol expensive and dangerous to keep in the house. Dangerous
because drinking alone can lead to drinking too much, too often.
Having discovered this, I asked friends to bring their own vodka, gin,
beer or whatever, which they did willingly, thereby saving me from
expense and temptation. Dinner party invitations issued by me,
translated, mean come to supper, early, for stew and apple crumble,
instead of smoked salmon, rump steak and four vintage wines – the
invitations of yesteryear. Nobody seems to mind; I have no
complaints. Many a lively evening is spent over simple fare, drinking
bottles of Tesco’s equivalent of Sancerre. As for the washing up, it
gets left. I used to be obsessive about washing up, it always had to
be done as soon as the offending dirty crockery touched the draining
board. Having always thought J Wesley’s quote “Cleanliness is next
to Godliness” was indisputable I have since learnt that this is not so.
To be clean, yes; but to be obsessive about washing the body,
washing the dishes or washing anything is absurd. Manufacturers are
constantly inventing new, ever more lethal ‘cleaners’. For instance,
detergents once designed to clean the lavatory pan are now
guaranteed to take care of the inner cleanliness of the pipes as well.
Our forebears did not hanker after pipe-inner-cleanliness, and nor
should we. What the detergent does, probably, is to filter into the
canals and waterways killing off plant life and poisoning the fish.
Anyway, now I rule the washing up, it does not rule me. If I want to
leave it overnight or for any length of time, I do.
The friends who come to visit want primarily to see me. If the
house is full of fresh flowers (it is not usually), has clean towels in the
bathroom, and I arrange for ‘interesting’ people to come to supper,
that is a bonus, not a necessity. Friends want to relax, exchange
news, gossip and grumble a bit, make jokes, and leave feeling better
for their visit. Hostesses should give their guests their time and
attention, otherwise, it’s much nicer for them to go and stay at a
hotel if they merely need a change. I do what I can. What is lacking in
material comforts is forgiven (i.e., the mattresses in the spare room
are lumpy, apparently). What I know I can provide is a place of
refuge, in a peaceful house. I work at making it so. I like to think the
peace my house bestows upon me will be of benefit to others, too.
So far, in this sphere at least if my friends are to be believed, I seem
to be having some success.
If I do have people to dinner and I don’t very often, obviously I do
spend more, but not much more. Homemade vegetable soup and
garlic bread, curried chicken, and rice with baked courgettes and rice
with baked courgettes and carrots, followed by cheese and biscuits
or fruit salad, is a favourite cheap menu for four people. It costs
about £10. Normally guests are very generous and bring wine but I
always buy a bottle or two costing about £2.50 each from Sainsbury's,
who seem to have a large, good choice.
The only important conclusion I have come to about food is that
For me, as in other matters where there is a large choice, I
wish for less choice. The uncomplicated food I buy requires very little
thought, and is a healthy diet. So much for food.
Among the Odd-Job Men: the importance of sifting the sharks from the saints.
I have embraced the feminist movement with certain
reservations. No doubt men are selfish and spoilt but, nevertheless,
I like them. In a radio broadcast, Enoch Powell once said that men
and women were built to complement each other, not to be
identical, and that they should excel at different things. This fact has
much revealed itself in a practical way since I have no ‘houseman’.
I know nothing of electrical matters, Rawlplugs, or of manipulating
Black and Deckers; neither can I dig strenuously or put-up fences. I
cannot paper walls or put in DIY double glazing, neither can I attach
draught stoppers to the doors to any effect, or measure widths any
degree of accuracy. Obviously, I could with time learn some of these
skills. However, I am most inept at practical matters and not, I think,
right temperamentally for precision. So, I needed an odd-job-man to
help me.
There are plenty of them about. Postcards in the post office often
tell of their whereabouts and their skills. Gardening, window
cleaning, guttering, roof work, repairs, and other miscellaneous jobs
are all on offer. Speaking from experience, I think ‘who to trust’ is a
vital question when choosing someone to employ in your house with
probably no references, and no personal recommendations. I am not
naturally suspicious of anyone, especially if they are trying to work
and are unemployed, but it is a wicked world, and it is important to
be careful. If you live alone, consider what this man will know about
you and your movements, your door and window locks – or the lack
of them.
I employed a man, one Mr Talbot, who I found through the yellow
pages, initially as a window cleaner, later as an odd-job-man. He was
friendly and enthusiastic, but clumsy, unreliable, and an amazing liar.
He had been an officer in the SAS he said, and told tales of spying in
East Berlin. On one occasion he had been sent to quell an African
uprising. Apparently, he had sat up trees in the jungle with his troops
and, with great daring and accuracy, felled hundreds of warring
tribesman. Later he had to leave the regiment on account of his
teeth playing up. (Actually, I do not think he had ever left English
shores). I list here just two of his many misdemeanours.
On his advice I bought a front door handle which he put on, taking
off the existing rather pretty Victorian brass one. This new handle
was too heavy for the lock and the pin in the middle broke under the
weight. The inside handle then fell onto the hall floor when I was
trying to get in one afternoon. Stuck outside, I had to pay £23 to an
emergency locksmith to let me into my house. The Victorian handle
was then put back in its original place on the front door. Mr Talbot,
like Mr Toad, would say anything to get what he wanted, totally
regardless of its truth. I had bought some tiles to put round the bath
and asked him whether he was anything of a tiler. He had,
apparently, been close to championship tiling – there was nothing he
didn’t know about it, he said. However, his skills deserted him with
my bathroom tiles. He managed to break several, put two or three in
the wrong place and stick the ones over the basin, upside down.
It seemed strange, thinking back, why I continued to employ him,
knowing him to be almost useless. Perhaps it was his availability. Just
when I was despairing of getting the Hoover going, or somesuch,
there he was on the doorstep, enquiring about work. Stupidly I let
him try again and he broke something else or committed a further
misdemeanour. I am afraid that Mr Talbot is not at all unique in his
inability to turn up on time or not at all, or to start jobs and not finish
them. Or to pop down the local shop where his brother-in-law works,
and buy you something which you do not require and haven’t asked
for. Fortunately, I have now, by chance, found a very good and
reliable man, Mr Wood. But it took four years to find him and much
wasted money, not to mention endless disappointments and risings
of angry temperatures. At some time, it has to be decided whether
odd-job-men are worth the stress they cause. Large firms are much
more expensive and not always first rate, but at least with a
company there are legal ways of retribution. There are none with the
odd-job-man.
The inner peace of burglar prevention.
All burglar prevention devices are money well spent. The house at
night can creak, doors can slam, and undistinguishable noises can
waft up from the kitchen when the kitchen is supposed to be empty.
Alone, this creates high nervous tension, and I did not wish to die of
a heart attack bought on by night nerves. My house was in the centre
of the ‘Oxford Rape Triangle’ when three women, at separate
addresses in my immediate neighbourhood, had their houses broken
into and were then assaulted. In haste I had screw-locks put in all my
windows, dead-locks on the outside doors, and Banham locks on all
inside doors in the house. Unfortunately, it now looks like a bit like
Fort Knox but at least I feel safe. In my view, whatever money is
spent to ensure peace of mind cannot be too much and burglar
devices should be a top priority.
I heard a woman who had started her own business talking on the
radio about her experiences. The one certain thing she now knew,
she said, was that she could trust nobody: that no one was
trustworthy. If this were true, life would be very sad and gloomy, and
I do not feel the same. But it is a sad truth that there are
unprincipled people everywhere, especially in cities, on the lookout
for easy money. And single women, particularly middle-aged women,
unknowledgeable in worldly ways, are simple targets. Burglar
prevention is an expensive investment, but for a tranquil life it has
become a necessity, well worth the price.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment