Home life
Passing thoughts
Alice Thomas Ellis
Iwas standing outside the fishmonger's the other day glaring at a crab and think- ing. There's no point in buying a small crab — it isn't worth the aggravation. So I was measuring it for size and also remembering the last time I bought one. There I was busily slugging it with the sharpening steel when I clouted myself on the thumb. It is amazing how badly one can hurt oneself. It couldn't have been more painful if I'd been my own worst enemy. Then I fell to speculating on the relative merits of sal- mon and salmon trout and wondering why I had bought salmon on the previous Friday when actually I prefer salmon trout and it's a bit cheaper. After a while my gaze wandered to a row of hanging octo- puses and I pondered whether I could bring myself to clean one and chop it up and, when I had done so, whether anyone would bother to eat it. The thought of fishfingers had just entered my mind when I was approached by a young man in an orange frock, an anorak, a woolly hat and a gold-painted nose. He was bearing a load of brightly coloured paperbacks and, dis- tracted as I was in Piscean reverie, I had bought one before I recalled my usual mode of address to Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Moonies and the like. Perhaps I thought he was a gypsy. I am never rude to gypsies in case, and I still sometimes worry about the time I went to the fair on Hampstead Heath with the rain beating down and mud up to the knees and the kiddies whirling round in the air on various machines eating candyfloss and hot dogs the while, when a gypsy fortune teller leaned out of her caravan beckoning to me and speaking as follows: '0i, you lady, c'm 'ere.' I shook my head and attempted to indicate that I was in charge of all the flying children and daren't take my eyes off them for fear they disappeared down the Tunnel of Love or something. I was the only adult for miles around since the weather was so vile, so I suppose she was desperate for custom. She retired, muttering and looking pretty cheesed off, and I often wonder what she wanted to tell me.
Reading the young man's book I found some of the passages fairly impenetrable: `In his early pastimes he appears as a householder with a golden complexion . . . . He is the highest abode of peace and devotion, for the "He" silences the imper- sonalist non-devotees.' Eh? Nevertheless the Hare Krishna movement, of which the young man was a devotee, strikes me as not being as barking mad as some of the cults. The book rather charmingly ends with an invitation to 'participate in the famous transcendental festival of chanting, mantra meditation, philosophical discus- sion and sumptuous vegetarian feast'. This reminded me of the time Patrice took me to see a guru in West Hampstead. He did the cooking while two of his lady friends sat down and talked to us. The sitting down had to be done on cushions on the floor, which made me bad-tempered. Then he joined us wearing a dress which buttoned (more or less) up the front and no knickers and he talked a lot of the most frightful old cobblers which made me worse tempered; but what made me hop- ping mad was that we got water to drink while he downed a couple of buckets of curacao. In the end I demanded that he give me some too, and after a glass or three I told him he was a charlatan and Patrice took me home, vowing never to take me anywhere ever again. Despite being fearsomely ugly he kept on swanking about how wonderful he was in bed while his lady friends fluttered round pretending not to mind each other. He wasn't just horrible and a lousy cook and a hopeless host — he was a crashing bore. I do not understand how these nutty gurus acquire fleets or Rolls Royces and hordes of fat-headed followers longing to sign away their fortunes. I know dozens of perfectly delightful RC priests who can not only offer guidance and insight into centur- ies of spiritual awareness and make sense, but can converse amusingly over the dinner table and then go home on their bike or get on the tube. Perhaps they are too dull. Perhaps if they, and the C of E chaps too, were to paint their noses gold the churches would all fill up again. They might even be able to afford to mend the roofs.
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