The Coming of Age. May Part 2.

10th May. Val rings up to see how the holiday went. I acquaint her with its highs and lows.
With the coming of the warmer weather, she tells me my ex-husband has been seen wearing a yellow caftan. I think he must have gone off his head, probably because Tracey Emin is getting a lot of publicity at the moment for her latest art-work.

11th May.Following the announcement about the forthcoming Pageant there is a letter in the local paper from Piers Hackett saying there is no documentary evidence for the pageant story at all. The Editor has gone to the trouble of writing a trenchant editorial attacking ‘so-called’ academics who undermine the efforts of the townspeople.

12th May. Te endless drilling next door before I went away reminded me that I too needed more shelves. Today I am having some new bookshelves made by a lovely young man with rather splendid thighs – I know about the thighs because he always wears shorts. Fran is coming out of her house, carrying a shopping bag. She sees the LYM and comes towards me. Perhaps she too appreciates a nice bronzed thigh and wishes to share this thought with me?

‘I would never employ him,’ she said. ‘He’s violent.’

‘Violent,’ I repeat foolishly.

This is very worrying. He and I are going to be in the house together for at least two days while he erects my shelves. Should I call in reinforcements, Val for example? I can’t cancel him. I am quite wedded to the idea of my new bookshelves.

‘I saw him shouting aggressively at some boys who had been kicking the milk bottles over on his doorstep.’ I am relieved.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I would have felt like beating them up myself;’

Fran looks disapproving. ‘Oh, but you wouldn’t really…’
I remember the episode with the gold sandals. I still wish I’d bought them even though they didn’t really fit. I could have twinkled along in them. I am sure they would have changed my life for the better.
‘Oh yes I would’, I say firmly. ‘I believe in hanging, flogging, the cat o nine tails and pulling out fingernails and lifetime incarceration, especially for teenagers.’

She backs away from me, and opens her mouth. Is she about to suggest Counselling?

‘I must go.’ she says and hurries back into her house, shopping forgotten, doubtless to ring a friend and discuss the moral dinosaur she has as a neighbour.

Humorous irony is completely lost on Fran. I wonder how far I would have had to go before she realised I was not altogether serious. The episode was quite enjoyable. I must go into the attack more often. As Goethe said, you are either the anvil or the hammer. I am fed up with being the anvil. Or was it Nietzsche? I wish I could remember things these days. Anyway I have decided I am going to be the hammer from now on.

14th May. The shelves are completed without my having to witness any overt violence. Indeed, when the LYM dropped a box of nails on the floor, he didn’t even swear as I would have done. I spend the next day painting my bookshelves and listening to Radio 4. Become disheartened.

I have listened to the Home Service since I was a child, beginning with Mrs Dale’s Diary at my mother’s knee, then Children’s Hour, later graduating first to Dick Barton and then to The Archers. Now some news programme informs me that ‘They’ do not want me because I am white, middle class, educated, female and over 60. Where shall I go? How can I be a hammer at the BBC? I am just part of the anvil.

In the midst of my despondency Harriet rings up. Would I like to be present at her 20-week scan?

‘What is a scan?’ I ask. They didn’t have them in my day.

I try quite hard not to say ‘in my day’ too often because I sound just like my mother, but it is not easy. Like my resolution not to talk about ailments. I open my mouth and my mother addresses the world through it.

Russell’s mother and Russell himself are going to be present at this event. It will be like a levee or one of those other intimate occasions that took place in public at the Court of Louis XIV.

I am not quite sure I want to be there. What if anything was wrong? She is quite old. Both my daughters are WOOMS, I read this in a magazine in the dentists, it means Well Off Older Mothers. Harriet is upset when I dither, so I agree to go.

15th May. On the way to buy a further tin of paint for my shelves, I meet Mavis. Mavis feels unwell and has a pain in her kidneys.

‘Gosh,’ I say, momentarily at a loss for words. I am impressed. Where are one’s kidneys? I ask Mavis and she gestures to her back.

‘Isn’t that your bursitis?’ I ask. I wish I knew what bursitis was. It is probably an inflammation of the tibia or something, perhaps akin to gout. I shall go and look it up in one of my books later. Mavis obviously needs my help.

In the evening I try and find a cure for bursitis, but get side tracked by ‘Prostate, Enlargement of.’, Gingivitis, Burning Feet, Pruritis Vulvae, Hair, loss of, Knees, pain in, Delirium Tremens and Depression. I can’t find Bursitis. I think Mavis has invented it. The only one of these things I am absolutely sure I haven’t got is ‘Prostate, Enlargement of.’

16th May. The weather is so beautiful that I abandon shelf painting and I decide I shall go out and mow the lawn in spite of Burning Feet and Knees, Pain in.

There is a rumbling noise from the garden next door. I sidle up to the window and twitch the curtains a little so I can see what is going on.

Grant Mitchell lookalike, my nextdoor neighbour (or is it Phil?) is pushing a large cement mixer down the garden path. Unfortunately he looks up and sees me. I pull out a handkerchief and pretend to be cleaning the window.

Can there be room for any more concrete next door? Or shelves come to that. Perhaps he plans to construct a nuclear bunker at the bottom of the garden so that he can escape from the triplets. Now their lungs are developing so robustly I can see that the garage is not nearly far enough away.

At this point I give up entirely the idea of doing anything useful and, ergo, virtuous. I need some escapist literature. Although I am still reading Moby Dick, I have got to the part where Melville is describing every book that has ever been written about whales, where I have been for sometime. It seems a little removed from my life. I must go to the library to look for something less demanding. Turgenev looks at me reproachfully from the shelves but I think one improving book at a time is quite sufficient and I head for the Crime Paperback Section. As usual, I have read most of them, which is shaming. Thank goodness I am not still married to Martin; he would be very disapproving. His face would positively coagulate with disapproval.

I wander off to the newly returned books shelf and see an interesting book on Do It Yourself Feng Shui. My affirmations didn’t work, I wonder if Feng Shui is the answer. Poppy was convinced it was working for her.

Unfortunately apart from turning my whole house round and rebuilding it so that it faces another direction, the only thing I can think of doing to Feng Shui it is to put some wind chimes in the garden. I haven’t got any wind chimes, which can be quite expensive, but I think I can make some. I’ve got the very things. In the back of one of my kitchen cupboards there is an old colander and lots of forks and spoons. I attach the forks and spoons to the holes in the colander with fuse wire and hang it up in the side passage – which is far too narrow and unwelcoming, the book indicates, to allow space for good things to come into my life. I give it a knock and it makes quite a pleasant sound.

20th May. The weather did one of its about turns and it was very windy and wet last night. My ‘wind chimes’ clanked and rattled and I couldn’t get to sleep. In the end I had to get out of bed and go outside in the dark and wet and take them down.

In the morning Fran came round and asked me if I knew what had been making all the noise in the night. I said I had no idea, I had slept like a log the whole time.