Monday, April 03, 2006

 

At to Z in Sixty (Part 2)

Indifference – I hate it, but though I take an interest in what’s going on in the world and send my contribution to the current disaster fund, I don’t get off my bum to drive a lorry load of aid through a war zone, knock doors, rattle tins to raise money, or spend a little time with the lonely pensioner in the street, so it’s not a whole lot of comfort to any of those homeless, helpless, friendless souls to know that I’m not indifferent to their plight.

Jazz – When I first met my husband and told him I liked it, I meant the melodic, mellow stuff of Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughan, and Ella Fitzgerald, but he meant the crazy cacophony of improvised jazz, where a soloist can bend the rules and your ear for 15 minutes at a stretch, although you are free to applaud at will (not to be confused with the Proms where it’s bad form before the end). But anyway, he was so excited at the prospect of a fellow enthusiast to share his passion that he took me along to hear one of his favourites, McCoy Tyner, who was playing in a small town in northern France. Neither of us has ever recovered from that evening. Me, because I thought I’d been transported back to war-time occupied France where, suspected of spying activities, I was being forced to sit in a hall for six hours (oh I know the programme said two but you know how those time-distortion tricks are a favourite with torturers) while Mr Tyner, using his piano as his chosen instrument of torture, sent a million screeching, grating sound waves to disrupt my brainwave patterns in order to extract my confession. My husband, because he simply could not believe that I’d found the performance anything other than sublime and the look of hurt and bewilderment on his face is something I’ll never forget. Incidentally, I'm sure that all the other ‘suspects’ in the hall had confessed early on in the proceedings and weren’t receiving the sounds on the same frequency as me, because they all sat through the performance looking completely untroubled.

Know-alls – I would love to have thought up a gem like this: I wish I were as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything.

Loyalty – I do try to be loyal to my Everton supporting husband, but the problem is that I was introduced to football in the 90’s by a Liverpool supporter and the team was winning everything at the time, so football and Liverpool became synonymous for me. Now I’ve done the Alpha course, and I’m ready to commit wholeheartedly to Everton, but I just can’t help myself – the ugly face of disloyalty shows itself whenever Liverpool play and I find myself instinctively rooting for them.

Myths – When my country-living mother-in-law told me that the best way to stop babies crying was to rub their lips with rabbit’s brains, I thought she was wacko – thank goodness my generation didn’t believe in such nonsense, but it’s surprising how many of those myths are still flying around. I still hear the one about sucking a dummy or thumb over a long period being responsible for extra large lips (for pouty lips, I’d suck a dummy permanently) or cutting a child’s hair makes it grow back thicker – hasn’t anyone noticed the dummy-sucking thin-lipped among us or the frequently cut, wispy-thin haired kids.

My Mum – When I was a kid, I mistook my Mum’s chronic shyness for indifference and it frustrated the hell out of me that she didn’t do the things that other mums did: kiss and cuddle, chat with other mums at the school gates or go to school functions. What a selfish cow I was not to have realised that it wasn’t a lot of fun for her either being locked out of the world, no matter that she’d turned the key herself.

Nostalgia – I’m not affected much by nostalgia – shops and restaurants closed on Sundays, The Archers for entertainment on a weekday, The Black and White Minstrel Show on Sunday evening, waiting patiently in the little local shop while Mrs Caddy gossiped with the shopkeeper, boiling nappies on the gas stove (yes, I know a lot of my contemporaries did use disposables, but I thought that meant you were a bad mother at the time) – no thanks. But some things I do miss are: hedgerows, once teeming with birds and flowers, now almost all cut down to make ploughing easier; kids playing in the street; the freedom to roam, often without another soul in sight, on ‘unheritaged’ sites such as Stonehenge or Lands End, without being forced into orderly queues, through officially designated entrances and exits; and the thrill of festivals and holidays where you got to eat and do things out of bounds for the rest of the year, and now available at any time.

Opinions – Don’t you just hate it when your favourite columnist, whose opinions you respect, dismisses someone contemptuously with things like: “they’re the sort of people who have an avocado bathroom suite” or some other similarly naff thing that you have or do and then you have to spend the next ten minutes either justifying it, convincing yourself that in your case it’s more complex than it appears, or vowing to change your newspaper.

Comments:
So what happens when Everton play Liverpool - or is that dealt with in Post No. 3, under Treachery?
 
My Mum: I'm sorry for being a selfish cow too, but I get it now...
 
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