Home life
C'est la vie
Alice Thomas Ellis
Iwoke up on the wrong side of the bed today in a filthy mood before I had even swung the legs over the side. It is the weekend — with not just a bloody Sunday but a bloody Saturday to get through before the peaceful shores of Monday morning heave into view through the mist. I voiced a few thoughts as I lay looking out at the rain falling on Camden Town and Someone asked tenderly what he could to do make my life more interesting, where- upon I reminded him of the old Chinese curse: smiling inscrutably, they say to anyone they've really got it in for, 'May you have an interesting life.' What I want is a few years of uninterrupted boredom. The possibility that the smell in the linen cupboard is redolent of dry rot is extremely fascinating; the chance that the sapling, which seeded itself in the garden and grew virtually unnoticed, has now got a death grip on the drains is most diverting, and I bet not many people have Colorado beetle in their bedrooms. The fifth son com- plained, `Mum, these little bugs keep jumping on me.' Cat fleas?' I suggested. `Snake ticks?' No,' he said thoughtfully, `they're about so big, and they're yellow with black stripes.' Do I alert the council pest-exterminator or the Ministry of Agri- culture? Do I care? When life is as interest- ing as this, one tends to get blasé.
Perhaps fearing that time might be lying heavily on my hands, this same son left a heap of camping equipment on the dining- room floor, when he returned from a weekend of Battle Re-enactment. I ignored it for some time until one day, sitting discussing life with a neighbour, we noticed a powerful smell of gas. Hastily we rang the gas board and a silent man duly appeared with a great deal of gas- discerning equipment. Neither this nor his own olfactory sense proved anything to be amiss and he left, still silent and by now also rather scornful. Women was the mes- sage evident from his body language. The fact that the whole house still stank of gas seemed not to have registered on him or anything. It was, of course, upon Janet that the truth finally dawned. Whisking aside a sleeping-bag she uncovered a bottle of camping gas whch had flipped its lid. 'I wondered what the smell was,' observed the son when I mentioned this to him. Talk about Battle Re-enactment.
My recent reading has done nothing to improve my conceit of myself. I have been learning about the African martyrs of 1885 and have been forced to the realisation that if anyone offered to cut out the sinews of my arms and roast them in front of my eyes I should retract, apostasise, apologise, grovel without a moment's hesitation. My neighbour Gwynne suggested that this would be only sensible, and then, as one disappeared over the horizon, one could re-retract with a cry of yah-boo-sucks to one's would-be tormentors, but I don't think that's quite the point.
One way of avoiding boredom is to exchange it for the depression engendered by the contemplation of the ingenuity which human beings can bring to bear on discomfiting their fellows. I was once told about an empress of China who took a dislike to one of the court ladies: she cut her arms and legs off and packed her into a jar and kept her as a sort of pet, daily rolling her out to amuse the other cour- tiers. When I recounted this anecdote to my friend Jenny she was very quiet for a moment and then remarked that the awful thing was that the incident had a terrible kind of style.
Looking on the bright side I can only suppose that the empress must have been very, very bored. If she had had dry rot and beetles and gas leaks to contend with she wouldn't have had the time to think that one up, so I console myself with the reflection that all the irritating vicissitudes of la vie serve to keep us on the straight and narrow.
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