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.

SEX AND HORROR IN THE DOLL'S HOUSE

For reasons that needn’t detain us here I found myself last Saturday in a doll’s house shop. Inside, arranged on shelves, were numerous houses ranging from the simple and inexpensive to the complex and monumental. All with large windows - to see what goes on inside, obviously.

Some of the houses could apparently be built from boxed kits. Those, easy to construct were described as suitable for children; more challenging boxes carried the sobriquet ‘Adult Collection.’

No doubt this referred to the difficulty of making up the kit, but so much these days is labelled ‘adult’ as a limp euphemism for puerile eroticism that I wondered for a moment whether these ‘adult’ doll’s houses might be representations of Amsterdam’s Rossebuurt, where girls ply their trade from great neon-lit picture-windows, whose enticing lights reflect exotically in the dark waters of the canals below.

If so that possibly could prove a new avenue with which to spice up the rather staid conventions of the doll’s house trade, because the one terrible and frustrating conundrum about doll’s housery is finding plausible explanations for what actually goes on behind those plywood walls and in those rooms so beautifully decorated with plates and dressers and ranges and sofas and miniature fire-irons.

Beatrix Potter had a go in the Tale of Two Bad Mice who, if you remember, invade the doll’s house belonging to Lucinda and Jane and in disappointed rage smash up the plaster fish and ham, laid out on the dining table, and run off with the furniture as well.

But well-ordered houses in the 21st century are not usually infested by mice with ASBO qualities, so the problem of constructing a convincing existence for the doll’s house inhabitants remains, even for those of an imaginative disposition, as Jane Shilling regrets in her memoir, ‘The Fox in the Cupboard.’

“The doll’s-house game was a kind of rolling soap opera, except an awful lot more soap than opera..........There were no incidents in my doll’s house, no domestics, no house fires, no lost children or broken limbs. The most exciting thing they did in that house was the housework.....It was a world as tight and safe as the inside of a nutshell.”

Model the house on the charming 14th century architecture of Old Amsterdam with its canals and winding, narrow, cobbled streets; fill its windows with ladies, or indeed gentlemen, of the night and you begin to create something that could at last become more opera than soap. Certainly rather less safe than a nutshell. Something for children to grow into as they get older perhaps, rather than leaving forlorn and abandoned at the first approach of the mystic passions of teenagery.

Certainly I continue to feel a subdued hankering for doll’s house drama and seeing now in the shop those rows of dark empty windows I turned to my companion and asked, “of course, you remember the classic doll’s house tale?”

She didn’t apparently and nor, surprisingly, did the shopkeeper. They had never heard it. Which left me wondering whether this was actually something that I had made up myself. So I ask readers to let me know if you have heard a story like this somewhere before, perhaps on the radio, perhaps as you were lying in your child’s bed, blankets pulled up to your chin, the lights out, your doll’s house perched on your bedroom table, a winter wind moaning about the eaves........

“Then she heard a noise, a scraping, and a yellow light went on in the bedroom window of the doll’s house and she felt the grip of fear. She couldn’t see anyone, but someone must have been in that house for the light flickered and she could see a shadow against the internal wall. Now she discerned voices, the words at first fumbled and lost. The shadow moved against the back wall; with horror she saw an arm raised and, at its end, something sharp and pointed. A frightening odour of doom and despair filled the air. She heard a muffled scream but she could only watch, mesmerised, as the arm and its dagger rose and fell, rose and fell until the screaming stopped.

For a moment she saw him then, tall and hatted, standing silhouetted in the doll’s-house window. Then the light went out.”

That, or something like it, is the core of the story. There is no doubt a prequel, and possibly a sequel too. There may well be some interaction with reality, with the young heroine recognising the house on which her doll’s house is modelled, up for sale, and seeing in the street a tall man, dressed in black wearing a hat, standing...........

You can see where this sort of thing can easily lead. Answers on a postcard, please.


The photograph, lest anyone should get the wrong idea, is copyright free from the official City of Amsterdam website.