BORSCHT AND TEARS

We are supposed to be in a recession, but last month we sold more than a million labels. To put this in context we normally sell about 400,000 labels, but last month it was more than a million and this month it may be as many. So really we should be happy bunnies, shouldn’t we? Well, yes. I mean ‘yes,’ no question yes. Except for the fact that all this selling of our little self-adhesive friends is hard work.

The labels long ago escaped from their normal confines of the two rooms that were the old garage and which we converted into a bedroom and sitting room for MIL in the days when she was still with us. Then they took over the dining room, whence they can be expelled on high days and holidays all apart from two large and growing stacks of heavy duty pallet labels in garish colours that lurk behind wicker screens bought for the purpose in IKEA.

But now as I write they have even over-spilled the dining room. There are boxes of labels, piled high, along the hall and in the sitting room neat rows of partly filled white mailing bags stand on their ends, their sheet-like corners waving at odd angles. They remind me of so many baby ghosts, lined up in some ghost orphanage.

We have an exceptionally large order to despatch to several hundred stores. What seemed like a great piece of business has turned into a nightmare of perplexity. Nothing is very difficult in quantities of ones and twos, but multiplied by several hundred the slightest difficulty or hitch requires hours of labour to remedy.

The labels we are selling are quite complicated - they are the labels used to certify films, 18, 15, PG and so on. We don’t print these ourselves, but we have nevertheless to ensure we have the right quantities and the right mix and to bag everything up and address it and stamp it and despatch. It all sounds easy enough until you have to cope with suppliers that are late and customers who are anxious, and, of course, all the continuing normal workload that goes on with the occasional deadline for an article on European Affairs thrown in.

We have been working, heavy eyed and limbed, from early morning until night, bringing in the offspring as required. Elder Daughter has missed her vocation as Superwoman. She works twice as fast as anyone else and has a capacity for organisation that puts us to shame. I wonder if ever this order ever will be complete and we able to reclaim our sanity and most of the house.

So as a diversion we entertained Di and her two aged mothers (one hers, one her husband’s) to lunch in the kitchen (into which the labels have not so far intruded). One aged mother is 87, the other 97. The 97 year old is deaf, but and so gives a standard response of ‘quite all right, thanks’ in a shaky voice to whatever is put to her. I sometimes think one could go though life on just a few of such standard responses. Alistair Cooke used to say that if a discussion had anything to do with politics, you could sound intelligent simply by saying ‘but not in the south, I think.’

As it happens we did not discuss politics, so I fell, between plate-warming and duck-carving operations, to reflecting how easy it was to form relationships these days through the internet and this led me to wonder whether one is ever too old for internet dating.

Could an 87 year old and British Passport holder to boot ‘want to meet’ a ninety year old Russian or Argentinian oligarch? It seems, I suppose, unlikely, but just imagine.....instead of contemplating a quiet winding down and a diet of painful knees and shuffling gait and generally having to be waited on hand and foot, think how one’s life could be transformed by falling in love at such an age.

With the endorphins released by the brain, the old would become instantly younger. Instead of ageing, one would de-age. And by at least ten years. Mobility would be restored and out of the window would go all those sad poisons prescribed by the gerontologists to hold body and soul together.

Anyway between mouthfuls of duck and roast potatoes I put this to her and she seemed much taken with the oligarch idea. I even taught her the Russian for ‘I love you.’ (When you are 87, it’s as well to work fast). ‘Ya vas loublou’ she said, very prettily. It remained only to set up the advertisement in Yahoo personals and perhaps, for good measure, the London Review of Books, a periodical much given to fostering eccentric relationships among those who feign a literary interest.

But sadly as I had then to break off to serve and sample the lemon tart, a snip from last week’s visit to IKEA, but still delicious with a spot of double cream, I found on my return that the conversation had drifted from visions of yachts and private jets and a dacha outside St Petersburg. I could see my chance of rubbing shoulders with Vladimir Putin in the hallowed portals of The Hermitage, awaiting my opportunity to slip ‘but not in the south I think’ into the conversation, slipping away with every mouthful.

I must try again, though. And next time I shall serve Borscht.