SEVEN ADJECTIVES

Like others, and somewhat to my consternation, I have been tagged by Little Brown Dog to name seven adjectives with which to describe myself. Goodness! But where to start?

My first thought was simply to borrow the seven that LBD had chosen for herself. Most seemed to apply to me and had the advantage of being rather less negative than the ones I would otherwise tend to choose for myself and which would undoubtedly have been the same severe condemnations that generations of authority figures have left ringing in my ears: lazy, unfocused, sad, vain, delusional, could do better, and so forth.

Left to its own devices my self-image does have a tendency to drift off into the realms of outer darkness. In this it resembles the family silver which also turns black without a regular polish. One of the advantages of blogging is that it allows you to remind yourself who you really are. I am constantly surprised.

Still, plagiarising LBD’s eclectic crop of adjectival matter wouldn’t have made very interesting reading so, having a flash of inspiration, I telephoned to Elder Daughter, to ask her opinion. “Give me seven adjectives,” I said, “ to describe myself, straight off the top of your head.”

Having worked for The Body Shop, having indeed trained Gok Wan in his younger days, she is used to coping with all eventualities. Without breaking step she reeled off the following seven:

Fun
Intelligent
Happy (most of the time)
Eccentric
Funny (in the sense of having a capacity to amuse)
Young at heart
Sensitive

“There, is that seven?” she asked.

“They’re all very positive,” I said, hesitantly.

“Well, what do you expect?” she replied.

“Isn’t ‘Fun’ the same as ‘Funny’?”

“No! ‘Fun’ means you are playful, you’re not stuffy, you join in, you let your hair down, you participate, you don’t shrink into a corner. Whereas ‘Funny’ means that you amuse - you tell stories, make jokes, invent, make us laugh.

“Oh!”

At this point either she or I had to run away to make supper so I shall have to fill in her take on the other adjectives.

Intelligent - well, yes, I suppose so. I had a ‘good’ education (courtesy of the grants that were available in those days) and I like intellectual things. The house is full of books and papers. I enjoy writing. I enjoy learning about things - history, geography, climate, people, language. I am fascinated by politics and debate. I like to think I have made some original findings in the field of Neolithic Archeology. I am grateful that I have the opportunity (and some minor talent) for acting and occasional opportunities to travel.

Happy - of all seven adjectives on her list ‘Happy’ is the one that I am least comfortable with though she did qualify it by saying ‘most of the time.’ I am uncomfortable because I prefer to think of myself as irrepressibly sad, driven by some distant longing for another world - but that, I tell myself, is really just a Byronic impulse; I am still a lost teenager at heart. While maybe I would like to be sad and wistful, in reality I am, as she says, ‘Happy,’ whether I like it or not.

Eccentric - I can trace a gene in my family from my great aunt, through my father, through me and my eldest half-sister and on to Younger Daughter, which causes our eccentricity. This is a charming madness that makes us just slightly different to others: square pegs in round holes all. This is both a curse and a blessing. A blessing because it makes us original (and therefore not boring) but a curse, too, because there are so many times when all you want to do is to belong, to be unobtrusive, to sink into the anonymous background. And yet whatever we do, wherever we go, we are condemned to being somehow different.

When her natal friendies are having coffee mornings, supporting each other in each others houses, what is Younger Daughter doing? Taking young Theo (born February ‘09) on tour with the circus, spending four months in an elderly caravan and even more elderly transit van traipsing the highways and byways of Europe.

Funny - I suppose I do have some minor capacity to amuse. Maybe that is because I find it so tedious to be seriousness. Mild facetiousness enlivens every conversation. I do tell stories, invent, make things up. I create fantasies. At parties I enjoy telling jokes badly (for jokes are actually much funnier when told badly for the joke is then you struggling to tell the joke rather than the joke itself). I enjoy nonsense verse and children’s stories and retailing these on inappropriate occasions. But I am also a shy person and I suppose being funny is a defence against timidity.

Young at Heart - and head and body and legs and arms and face and hair! Actually I am very proud of my hair which still retains its natural colour, though not, sadly, its original volume. I can still run faster than Elder Daughter (and probably Younger Daughter too). But yes, I have no difficulty in adjusting my mental age downwards from where it seemed to get stuck at the age of about 17 so that I can play easily with small children, or, at the other end of the spectrum, with the very old. I find the techniques are exactly the same. Its adults that I always have difficulty with.

Sensitive. Yes, I have to confess to a weak and febrile nature. I am horribly sensitive - I hate violence and aggression of any sort. I cry in films at anything remotely heroic or romantic. I am constantly ‘saving’ animals even pests. I will spend ten minutes chasing a fly out of the window rather than simply swatting it. I hate upsetting people and am always thinking that I am in the wrong. But I am also sensitive in other ways - to colours and tones, to textures, to shapes and sizes, to touch, to an ambiance, to the wonder of the natural world.

So that’s my seven. I’ve ‘come clean’ How about you? I see Preseli Mags has tagged everyone. So, there’s no escape.