Mute

As my parents get older I find it gets harder to find things to talk to them about. Since lockdown they’ve kind of stayed in that mode so that they hardly go anywhere now. The car sits on the drive, as if the energy needed to put it in the garage is beyond them these days.

They seem to spend all their energy on bickering, as they try to get one up on each other. Perhaps 60 odd years of marriage will do that to anyone – eventually you run out of things to talk about and so the only topic left is how you feel about each other. And then the day becomes a kind of low-level competition of barbed arrows flung across the living room. Some hit, some fall short, nobody really keeps score. Mainly because they can’t remember whose turn it was.

There are still plenty of topics we’re not allowed to discuss. Politics is the main taboo but even then they might start it, before mum will shut it down with an imperious ‘we’re not getting on to that today’. The weather is a safe subject, of course, or tv programmes they’ve seen but I haven’t (and which don’t interest me, so I have nothing at all to say about them).

As a family we’ve all become even more taciturn than we used to be. In my case, apparently, it’s hard to believe I could say even less than I used to (my father’s words). It’s true that our worlds have all shrunk to such a degree that it’s hard to chat about past trips or future hopes. Talk these days is mainly about ‘getting on with it’. Whatever ‘it’ may be. We’re resigned, I suppose. The great English malaise. Unhappy with our lot, but muddling on.

If we had any kind of mantra these days it would be something like ‘you’re on mute’.

And then we might, if we were feeling energetic, shrug our shoulders.

Or not.