STRANGER IN THE MIRROR

Have you ever wondered how ‘they’ know that so many millions watched a television programme? I’d never thought about it much myself; I suppose if I thought anything I imagined some earnest student with a clipboard, knocking on a few doors here and there and asking the direct question. But it’s all a lot more sophisticated than that.

I can’t remember now how the invitation came - maybe someone with a clipboard came knocking on our door - anyway a couple of years ago we joined BARB’s Viewing Panel. BARB (the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board) have constructed an elaborate checkerboard of homes where you will find represented every social and demographic condition, all carefully weighted so that from the actions of the few one can deduce the viewing patterns of the many. Apparently we were just the people they were looking for, they said, despite neither of us being television addicts.

A friendly soul called Jason came to install equipment which records what we have viewed and then telephones, via some hidden wireless apparatus, what we have watched. When we turn on the television a little box flashes telling us to record - by pressing buttons on an extra handset - who is there and, should there be guests, their age and gender.

In return for this intrusion on our viewing habits we receive points, which can be cashed in for vouchers. This week, not having claimed anything for at least eighteen months, they sent me £50 in book tokens.

Eschewing the desire to buy an Amazon Kindle - the novelty of which, I have a feeling, might soon wear off - I ordered three books from our local bookshop: Stranger in the Mirror by Jane Shilling, Any Human Heart by William Boyd and Reach for the Ground by Jeffrey Bernard, and am still comfortably in credit for a new season of reading later in the year. Any Human Heart is a recommended Book Club read. The others are both idiosyncratic and slightly depressing choices.

Jane Shilling’s book is described as a narrative of middle age (oh dear!), while Jeffrey Bernard’s columns have been described as the longest suicide note in history. Around both authors' lives hangs Eeyore’s universal lament, “We can’t all and some of us don’t.” Yet out of the damp fireworks come verbal pyrotechnics.

Jane Shilling is horribly introspective, but then so am I. Yet she does describe her introspections beautifully. “I have no confidence in my ability to seize an opportunity. I imagine them as hard, glittering objects; golden apples that hurtle unexpectedly towards you, like the ball in school rounders games that looms out of the air and inflicts a sharp, insulting blow when you are standing in the outfield thinking about something else.”

I thought this morning how accurately this description applied to me, particularly the insulting blow of reality when you are thinking of something else. Having purchased newspaper and milk I was half way home before realising I'd left the milk on the shop counter.

Had I been a contemporary of Jane’s and at school with her I suspect we might have become friends, isolated in the outfield and comforting each other’s absent-mindedness. Though now I come to think of it I was always contemptuous of people who were timid and shy like myself and so I lived in a delusional world in which I imagined myself very differently.

Had I been at school with him I would undoubtedly have sought out Jeffrey Bernard who in his early years was also sensitive and shy, but who compensated by a racy addiction to drinking, gambling and sex. I would have been rebuffed of course, as usually happens when one follows one's delusions.

Interestingly enough the question ‘who am I?’ came into sharp relief this week when renewing my car insurance. I used to be a ‘consultant’ - indeed still do occasional bits of unpaid consultancy. I write, too, but in a desultory and equally unpaid fashion. And then I run a labels business which I thought I should mention to the broker, thereby unleashing a Pandora’s box of trouble.

“Did I carry labels in the car? Well, occasionally, like shopping,” I said. But this was commercial ‘Carriage of Goods’ and I was therefore, said my insurer, a ‘sales executive.’ The premium shot up by £160. It took three days to convince them that I was not a sales executive calling on businesses with my car loaded with samples. But thanks to dear Rachel, the broker, I have now been reassigned. Today I am a company director of an office supplies company and the premium has gone down by £25.

It is not only the opportunities, Jane, that hurtle unexpectedly towards you when you are thinking of something else.

DENTAL REFLECTIONS

“Mm, you’ve got a bit of decay starting under that inlay. Perhaps I can fix that now. Save you coming back. It’s only just started, only take ten minutes. What do you think?”

Now the last time young Mike said this to me half my wisdom tooth disappeared ground to fragments underneath his drill. Rotted from the inside, he had told me. I looked at the ceiling and pondered my habit of eating digestive biscuits at three in the morning as a cure for night starvation and then falling asleep again before I could clean my teeth.

“Do it without anaesthetic shall we? Very small! If it hurts stick your hand up.

Still, I told him to go ahead and to be fair I was genuinely surprised at how little he found to drill. All the same I stuck up my hand.

“It’s not the drill,” I said. “It’s the mirror.” Which, stuck at an awkward angle was doing its best to separate my cheek from my jaw. Mike recommenced.

Dentists - and hygienists too - do like to talk in my experience. Perhaps it’s because they know that with your mouth full of their paraphernalia you can’t talk back. You can only look at the ceiling and listen to the various sounds and wonder whether the ultra-violet light gun will burn a hole in your cheek.

When all is done and the chair lowered and you rinse and clamber out, you are so pleased to be free that you don’t have time to say what you had thought of earlier.

So I thought I’d put it in a blog. What I might have said to Mike or to Jennie had I had the opportunity.

Why (I would have begun) do those engaged in medical practice today now wear an ugly design of uniform that first appeared on the space travellers and people of the future in childrens comics of the fifties and sixties? When they were not wearing space helmets the inhabitants of the Dan Dare - Pilot of the Future - column wore exactly the same outfits as today’s caring professionals. Maybe, I wondered, you travel space when you leave the surgery?

Maybe it is why there are no mirrors in hospitals, have you noticed? Or very few anyway. No matter whether you are a nurse or a dentist or a technician today you wear some species of baggy nylon tunic top and trousers whose putrid pastel shades must be designed designed to frighten the patients into wellness. And on your feet you wear trainers, which may be comfortable, but at which the matrons of yesteryear must turn in their graves.

No wonder the NHS is in a mess, though to be fair even private establishments seem to have thrown over the white, fitted collar-buttoning jacket and dark trousers (for the men) and the recognisably smart and confidence boosting rig for nurses (who used to looked like nurses and could never in a million years be mistaken for anything else), with their capes and sashes and upside down watches pinned to their pinafores.

There is a small problem of what to do with male nurses. But still men can wear capes and look dashing with it. No, I suspect, as in so much else, we have been influenced by developments across the Pond. Dress has become more casual and we have casualised the so-called caring professions. Even the consultants have exchanged the top hat and morning dress in favour of the casual suit - some of the time at least.

The white collar-buttoning jacket I suppose was too restrictive. And always there was the danger of being confused with a chef, a waiter or an admiral in Mediterranean dress. There’s a restaurant in Brussels where all the waiters are dressed as admirals, complete with gold braid and epaulettes on their white coats. Very good waiters they are, too, who know what eating and serving food should be about.

But there was no-one to say all this to as I made my way down to the reception desk, clutching my card and fearful of the depredations about to be made to my bank account. One of the receptionists there has been there as long as I have been going to that practice and that’s more than thirty years. Amazingly, she hasn’t changed a bit in that time. Her classic almond face and beautiful hair have not aged by a day and she still wore the same neat dark navy suit.

I thought of saying that she must have discovered the secret of eternal youth. But as time has not been quite so forgiving to her colleague I thought better of it and simply smiled as I handed over my money and walked out into the morning sunshine.

A PREGNANCY OF POSSIBILITIES

Ever since meeting Rose Tremain by accident in the hospitality tent at the Hay Literary Festival and finding myself persistently engaged in a conversation that I had not sought to initiate, I have become an avid fan of her novels. I had at the time read 'Sacred Country' but because the publishers had not graced the cover with her picture I had no idea what she looked like and the person therefore who talked to me beneath the billowing folds of white taffeta that June day in the Welsh Marches did not let on that she was an author, or even that she came from Norfolk.

She certainly didn't look like an author - whatever authors look like - but then I suppose I don't look like whatever it is that I am either, come to that, and it isn't everyday that one sits sipping Cava waiting for a Minister who doesn't arrive. In fact the whole experience became so surreal that it might almost have come from one of her novels, which, I suspect, is maybe what occurred to her as well. Life imitating art.

I've just finished both 'Restoration'- which I think her finest book - and a radio play by her called 'Temporary Shelter,' an acted version of which we may well stage at our thespian AGM in a couple of weeks. I won't try to describe what 'Restoration' is about; for one thing I can't say I'm really sure. The novel is so inventive that when the main character - originally a fop by the name of Merivel - slips away at the end of the book you aren't quite sure whether he is dreaming (and if so whether he is awake or asleep); or in a delirium or whether in fact he is quite well and about to step forward into the pages of another book - each ending being a new beginning.

We leave him anyway with a place to visit and a sense of purpose and a young daughter called Margaret after the main character's mother. My mother too come to think of it, though neither of my daughters have inherited the name. And a horse called Danseuse, who pines.

In 'Temporary Shelter' the action takes place more than three hundred years later and on a campsite but the people haven't changed much. The main characters in both novel and play are ones who have been humbled by circumstance. In the first case the cause the humbling is by the King; in the play it occurs thanks to EC Farming regulations. But both are finding redemption in a new life, trying to make themselves useful and to recover their dignities.

In 'Temporary Shelter'- the play - the main character is called Larry and his wife is Marje. But a different, or reworked, or reformed Larry appears in another of Rose's novels written about the same time and called 'The Swimming Pool Season' which I would regard as perhaps her second finest book after 'Restoration' - but then it's a hard choice for all are most excellent and way better than most. All fizz with the same pyrotechnics of the imagination.

The Larry in the 'The Swimming Pool Season' is more philosophical, cultured, softer; he has fewer hard edges, he has less to learn. He, too, has been humbled, by business failure this time in the eponymous swimming pool trade. His wife is called Miriam and she paints, which is something, one feels that the other Larry's Marje would never do - or at least not while Larry was around to demand coffee or wine or soup. Marje would look at the stars, perhaps and like Merivel in 'Restoration' feel a subdued hankering to paint colour. Unlike Merivel, however, any resulting efforts would be simple and elusive.

The one Larry drives a Granada; the Larry in the play, salesman and ex-pig farmer Larry, drives a Cortina. There's a nice ranking of the characters for you. In neither case, one suspects were their wives consulted. Had Merivel had a car I suspect it would have been an Aston Martin. At least he would have saved money on oats. But then Merivel had no wife: or not one that would have been entirely comfortable with Miriam and Marje. She wasn't even comfortable with Merivel come to that.

And now Younger Daughter has delivered to me 'Trespass' - her (that is Rose's) latest novel with barbed wire across the cover. I heard some discussion about the book the other day. Rose herself may have been speaking. I am inclined to think she was. I believe the story is to do with some land dispute or heritage in a family; the ferocious laws of French inheritance. I will let you know. Between the hard covers lies a pregnancy of possibilities

WEIGHT-WISE I WISH I WERE IN MAMARONECK

There's someone I know who lives in the village of Mamaroneck in the suburbs of New York City, from where the train rushes you, in a steely clatter and in next to no time, to the great cathedral of Grand Central Station. Unlike the names of so many public buildings, this one is absolutely accurate. Grand Central Station, for anyone who has never been there, is grand, central and a station: it does what it says on the tin, as the advertisement has it. And it is a lovely place with a high domed ceiling covered in stars as though it were some eastern or renaissance monument.

Nevertheless there is a problem. Grand Central Station is not designed for tourists; it is strictly a utility. You are not supposed to have time to stand and stare, whether at the ceiling or the walls, or the offices or the throng of people going about their business. If you stop moving for a second people bump into you. As most of them are moving very fast, they bump into you quite hard and swear. Not nice. All the same, you don't 'make-it' in New York by standing still, you see.

Anyway, back to my friend and Mamaroneck: she has in her bathroom something very special. They are a pair of bathroom scales - ordinary looking old fashioned scales that don't need a battery and don't have a digital display. They don't look expensive and I think they are pink; some friendly but unmemorable colour anyway. The needle points to zero as you contemplate whether you dare step on to them, bloated and jet-lagged from too much to eat and too little sleep and your digestive system having anyway gone into lockdown mode, which in my case it always does whenever I venture further than the end of the road.

I'm not sure that others suffer this same design fault. My genes obviously reflect the time before carriages and railways were provided with 'conveniences' or 'rest rooms.' Provided I am travelling, my alimentary system decrees that nothing shall pass bar the days. Voyaging once as a student from London to Athens it took me a week to get as far as modern Serbia when something inside me rebelled and I had to seek urgent comfort in a field of cabbages.

But I digress, let's go back forty five years and, courtesy of Virgin Atlantic, reach Mamaroneck again, although, just quickly in passing, I have to say that I used to dream about New York long before I actually ever got there in person. The airline of choice then was PanAm with its blue and white logo.

And most comfortable it was too, though I remember waking from one of these dreams when I realised the plane had come to a halt and the engines had been switched off and there I was in New York City. My heart leapt in anticipation. But only for a moment. For then I realised that I was still in my pyjamas. Worse, I had no money or passport or luggage, or even any shoes. I stood on the ladder like some celebrity with the whole world looking at me in my Viyella pyjamas and there was me trying to smile a relaxed comfortable smile for the cameras while meanwhile calculating how I could persuade the stewardess to let me remain aboard and ferry me back again to London in time to catch the train to school.

But with Virgin Atlantic I did arrive and with shoes, luggage, passport and money. I took a bus towards the Connecticut sticks and eventually my friend picked me up from some hotel or country club and eventually again, I ate and slept and in the morning made my way to the bathroom, bloated and water-retained as I have said, where the pink scales awaited me.

On to them I wearily climbed, expecting the needle to shoot far past the comfort zone. But it didn't! Lo and behold I was four pounds lighter than I had been when I had set out. My heart leapt.

My hostess later spoiled the effect slightly by telling me that all her guests marveled at how they lost weight on those scales. But how comforting, how warming, how welcoming! How what you need after Christmas! My own digital scales are cruel and unforgiving. Weight-wise I wish I were in Mamaroneck.