Once again, I wanted fresh inspiration and new ideas. My mind was a catalogue of dilemmas. It was all forked paths and crossroads with no labelling or signposts. Even the snakes and the ladders looked the same. I was in the market for a mentor. I have friends who take on this role for the young and lost, escorting them to pizza and the pictures, hearing their hopes and dreams and helping them with their fears, but they don’t quite do this for me. (Not that I’ve asked.)
I was feeling very suggestible, gathering tips from everywhere I roamed. I went to a 40th party and when I thanked the host’s mum, she said, “No, no, no, thank you because it’s you all who came who made the party so lovely, I did almost nothing.”
I thought that very elegant. I will say that to my son’s friends when my son turns 40. If he’s still speaking to me. Not that I have a son.
I went to a lunch which was like a parable from the Bible crossed with The Wizard of Oz. I sat between a professor of solitude and a professor of politeness. Opposite me was an academic whose sphere of interest was English pubs, particularly the pub singalong in the 18th century. The professor of politeness said he thought at the heart of good manners was that famous golden nugget, do as you would be done by. As courteously as possible, I said I thought that “do as you would be done by” was too blunt an instrument, for what you like in the behaviour of others might be quite different from what I like, so in order to behave well to you I have to have your wants, needs and desires in mind, and not my own.
He thought this comment rather rude. Oh no! Secretly I wondered if his thinking me rude wasn’t a little rude in itself. I told the 18th-century lady my favourite fictional pub singalongs were those conducted by Nancy in Oliver! “I grew up destined to be Nancy,” I told her, “but it has recently occurred to me I am getting more like Fagin with each day.” She was thrilled. “Although Nancy’s quite outside my period,” she said apologetically.
“I bet those pub singalongs in the 18th century were really something, huh?” She nodded happily. “Oh yes!”
The next day I drank strong coffees with the group of mothers I think of as the big girls, for they are super-successful and wry and indulge in gunfire wisecracks and force-10 repartee that would make Katharine Hepburn feel a little sluggish round the edges. I enjoyed their company very much, but it was nerve-racking.
I met an old friend with a sunny disposition and a distinguished writing career and asked her about her new book. “It’s an effing nightmare,” she said. “Writing is horrible. It makes me miserable. I can’t stand it.”
“I know,” I said.
In the Crazy Coqs cabaret bar the next day I sat next to a famous and captivating astrologer who was kind and sympathetic in spades. What an opportunity. Surely she would have an idea about which way was the right way for me, but I didn’t quite dare ask what was in my future. What if I didn’t like what I heard? The singer that night, Amanda McBroom, sang an old favourite of mine that she wrote herself, called Errol Flynn, a love song to her father who was a B-movie star; “a B-plus-plus-plus-movie star,” she said. “Actors,” she added, “speak louder than words.” The last verse was particularly moving:
“So, you daddies and daughters, you sons and you mothers
Remember life’s over before it begins
So love one another and stand close together
As close as my Dad did to old Errol Flynn.”
As a sentiment it couldn’t be argued with, but still I felt unsettled.
So I went to the seaside, to Brighton to see an exhibition about birdsong. I had fish and chips and sauntered down the pier and put a lot of coins into fruit machines which, after my touch, reeked of vinegar. I went to Marcus Coates’s wonderfully imaginative Dawn Chorus at an art space called Fabrica. The artist had discovered that if you record and slow down birdsong, it sounds like human moans and groans and ghost noises, the sounds we make in mild pain or light outrage, a kind of human-bird jazz lament.
He then got humans to make these sounds, filming them in their preferred natural habitat (a yellow-and-green hotel room, the bath, an underground car park, what looked like a staff room) and speeded up the sounds to show the relatedness of human and bird communication, making portraits of British people in this strange yet familiar way. And, what do you know, the low human noises when speeded up sounded exactly like birdsong, crammed with vitality and notes of celebration. A lesson for me, perhaps.
— Financial Times
