writer's moll

One of the speakers we saw at Hay was AC Grayling, who talked about how strange it was that people were prepared to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about their choice of TV, mobile phone and other gadgets but almost none on why we do and feel what we do and gave a nice little quote from Bertrand Russell: “people would rather die before they think and most do”. Well I tried it recently and I didn’t much like what I came up with. It started with a conversation with my nephew, whose third marriage also looks set to end in divorce, and I thought about how and why couples get together - the reasons seem a lot more complicated than why they split up, which are often simply that having married someone for what they are, we divorce them for what they’re not. When I asked my nephew if there was a common factor in his marriages, he thought not in the wives themselves, who are all completely different, but yes in that they all chose him because he was too shy to approach girls and was flattered by their interest in him. Blimey, does that mean that we’re not as in charge of our destiny as we like to think? I hoped it was mutual attraction and instant recognition of a soul mate that brings us together with both partners being equally enamoured with the other. Of course it must work like that for plenty of people who subsequently get divorced, so I’m not suggesting that being the chosen one spells doom, but when I looked within my own circle of friends and family, the chosen ones didn’t score too highly. Damn, wish I’d spotted that first time round when I was 16, knew nothing, unconfident and malleable - perfect for the control freak who picked me.