Instagram

 

I recently took two of my older children on holiday for a post-exam city break to Palma de Majorca.  It was hot, there was a pool overlooking the harbour.  We spent quality time together without their younger siblings.  We explored the city, ate tapas, swam in the sea.  How lucky we are.  Equally, the hotel we stayed in was crap and under-staffed, water poured through our bathroom ceiling at one point and we had to change rooms.  It was two miles out of the city with very little in the way of entertainment close by.  Everything was twice the price that we would have expected.  Evening meals did not come in at under a hundred euros. We all shared a room and I discovered that both my children snore.  In some kind of fiendish plan, if I got one of them to turn over and thus cease, the other would then start up.  I was permanently exhausted.  Then there were the arguments about how we would spend the day, with my son always up for some kind of expedition and my daughter wanting to drink (expensive) cocktails by the pool all day.  And then our flight was delayed by 24 hours necessitating and extra night's accommodation and a lot of plans rearranging.

My instagram feed was, perhaps inevitably, full of pictures of the bluest skies and seas, myself from a strategic angle in a bikini, delicious food and beach vistas.  This is how my Instagram feed looks.  I saw this quote above today and I thought, 'well, of course!' Does anybody not realise this? But it seems that some people consider only posting the best bits to be inauthentic.  I take issue with this.  There are plenty of accounts that you can follow if you want to zoom in on misery and I think that's fine.  Make this space what you want it to be.  For me, Instagram is scrap-booking.  It has an almost entirely aesthetic value for me and these are the sorts of accounts that I follow.  I will hold my hand up and say that I quite wittingly cherry-pick the best bits and post those.  Sometimes, the weeks are full of nothing but shit and then there is some beautiful light filtering through the trees and I capture it and share it and cling onto it.  I do this because it makes me feel better, in the moment and when I look back.  It seems like the moments of quiet loneliness, where things go wrong and we wonder why we bother, and getting up and functioning is hard; these moments look after themselves just fine. But if we're not careful, in a landscape of constantly negative and frightening newsfeed, the precious moments might just get lost in the noise.  That isn't to say that I am advocating suppressing sadness or gaslighting our own travails.  Rather, take it to counselling.

If this sounds like an environment of fakery, I would argue that the connections I make on Instagram, although physically distant, are incredibly energising and, yes, real, to me.  You really can bond over a mutual appreciation of beauty, with people outside of your four walls, your town or your country.  What moves somebody speaks volumes about their inner life and values.  I will never trivialise the significance of a new dress or cushion because these are the things that distract us with their colour, they allow us an outlet of creativity in a largely uncreative world.  And it is the colour that I am seeking on Instagram.  I follow relatively few blue tick accounts because they are often not curated by the account-holders themselves, and I follow even fewer accounts set up to promulgate a single cause.  I have long since done away with Twitter and Facebook because of their bear pit environments but the little squares of people's precious moments helps me to feel connected to a bigger world than my immediate environment.

When I look back at my holiday pictures, courtesy of Instagram, where maybe I've cropped out an unsightly building or lightened the exposure so that our expressions are more visible, I am reminded of the ornate architecture that I may never see again, the heat on my skin, the aftermath of a joke, how nice my new dress felt to wear.  If Instagram didn't come along when it did, I would've continued to make scrap books and albums, the only difference now is that more people get to see my pictures (lucky souls).  Someone from my hometown, I discover, has just visited the tiny town on the north coast of Majorca that my son and I travelled to by train.  These tentacles of appreciation and connection are new but shouldn't be viewed suspiciously.  Let us at least allow that the digital age has some good in it.

BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU

 

        'Aren't we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us.  Or maybe it was just the end of one civilisation, ours, and at some time in the future another will take its place.  In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.'

Sally Rooney is a young and brilliant writer, accurately capturing the hesitancy of the zeitgeist.  I say this before I write a somewhat critical review of her latest offering.  Beautiful World, Where are You (without question mark, so passé) has divided my social media feed ever since it came to publication, so I had to delve in and see for myself.  Like her previous novels, Beautiful World explores the relationships between four characters who, in this case, are a bit older, all hovering around the significant age of thirty and in the grips of existential inertia. The passage above seemed to me, when I read it, to sum up the heart of the book and also encapsulates, nebulously, my own view of the younger generation.  Because, although Rooney's characters are a little older in this novel, she is still really writing about a younger generation.  These characters live in house-shares, are unmarried and childless, essentially only responsible for themselves but nevertheless, carry with them a great weight. What is the weight? 

It is what I notice in the young: A caution and a cynicism that stops them in their tracks.  A lot of the novel focuses on the female characters' inability to prostrate themselves for the men that they profess to love; to hold something of themselves back at all times.  As a feminist, I feel that I should enjoy this as a manifestation of female power, except these characters are definitively without power.  And as a reader, I would love at least one of the characters to prostrate themselves for something, to run towards the fear, to care, to indulge.  Because then, something might actually happen.  It is tempting, whilst reading, to feel that the main thing weighing on these young people is their astoundingly boring personalities.  They may indeed be very real.  Rooney is concerned with what is real now, which is why the long emails between the female characters that form a big part of the narrative are, I assume, her own stream of consciousness.  At times, I wasn't sure if I was reading Alice's or Eileen's words.  They were largely interchangeable.  The content of these emails was genuinely interesting and I would welcome a book of essays from Rooney but it was a little lazy.  The two male characters were much more identifiable because they were so different.  Perhaps Rooney only really knows women who are like herself, or Alice, or Eileen.

So it's a novel where not much happens and this is my natural terrain as a reader.  Only, Rooney is not much bothered with giving us any aesthetic pleasure from her prose.  It is frustratingly and presumably, deliberately, flat. At the end of the non-epistolary chapters, the narrative switches to the present tense where the narrator gives an overview of the scene that has just played out; a sort of zooming out of perspective which is deliberately visual.  In this way, the nod to cinematic effects and the flat prose suggest that Rooney is now so secure in the knowledge that her novels will be televised that she is jumping ahead and writing for the screen.  Or, that her natural medium is actually drama.  In a recent interview, Rooney claims that her prose is 'secondary to the characters'.  Perhaps she might consider, in her next novel some attempt at using language to elevate or provide humour, or, goodness me, perhaps to entertain.  No spoilers here but don't pick up a Sally Rooney novel if you're looking for humour. I think the best way of describing this book is in culinary terms.  It will do you good and as such, it is uncompromising in its wholesome credentials but in order to really enjoy it, which I believe Rooney would consider basic, you need to refine your palette.

A Year of Sobriety

"I bet you feel amazing when you wake up in the morning?"

This is the question that I am asked most often.  And the answer?  Of course not....I'm a 43 year old, peri-menopausal woman.  I wake up (if indeed I slept) with stiff, achy joints, a head full of cotton wool and puffy, blind eyes.  This though is why I am so relieved that I no longer drink.  Imagine, I think, inside my foggy brain.... imagine if I had also downed a bottle of wine last night.  How absolutely disgusting would I feel then?  So, it is not that I jump out of bed with renewed vigour every morning since I gave up the booze but rather the opposite that sells abstinence to me.  I am no longer regenerating and I need to be kinder to myself.  That's the physical element of not drinking and whilst we're there, I should add; no, I have not lost weight.  I have, in fact, gained weight.  Because, what I used to do sometimes (well clearly enough times to count for about half a stone of flesh on my hips) was drink instead of eat.  Also, when you're taking in so much sugar from alcohol you have zero appetite for it in other forms.  "I don't have a sweet tooth" was a thing I had actually been known to say.  Well, take all that alcohol away and your body doesn't accept it without a fight.  Suddenly, I crave chocolate.  Chocolate!  Like some kind of Bridget Jones stereotype I resort to eating cooking chocolate because my body needs its hit of the sweet stuff.  

It's all fine though because, fatter and older I may be but I have so much more time to play with, and head space to enjoy the things that I actually enjoy, rather than things that I pretended to enjoy.  Like, er, parties, or socialising after 9pm.  The other day, I walked past a bar that I used to enjoy frequenting.  The sun was shining and people sat by the river drinking Aperol Spritzes and I had a moment of longing but for what?  I went home and sat in my sunny garden with a cold glass of lemonade and my book and it was bliss.  What was I missing, really?  There was some sense of FOMO, I suppose; because the people at the bar looked so overtly happy.  But had I once looked happy when I was on my fourth Aperol and talking shit to deaf people I cared about not at all, whilst feeling a bit queazy and increasingly dizzy and pushing from my mind the knowledge that I was probably making a tit of myself and storing up a stinking hangover for the next day?  

For a long time I had tried to control my drinking with various ingenious but ultimately ineffective strategies.  There was the classic 'only drinking at weekends', which was fine if you didn't go on a bender at the weekend.  Or fine if you didn't go out on a Tuesday night and break your own rule and then have to write off the whole week. Then there was the '3 nights on, 4 nights off' strategy.  This was my most recent self-imposed rule that I would find justified ways of bending.  Ultimately, if you are drinking on fewer nights than you are not drinking, you clearly don't have a problem. Yes?  You are not drinking more than you are drinking, so how can you have a problem?  Even if your 'on' days start with brunch + Champagne and carry on in a similar vein.  Even if you look for reasons to drink excessively on your 'on' days.  Still, how can you have a problem if you are 'off' more than you are 'on'.  Then there was the 'two drinks' strategy.  I will drink whenever I feel like it but I will never consume more than two drinks.  Clearly, that one was never going to be terribly successful if you lack the moderation gene, and this is important.... over this year of sobriety, the people who do not, or cannot, understand, are those for whom excess never features in any form.  Those who understand are often the very best drunks, the people who seem to be, as Churchill said, getting more from alcohol than alcohol is getting from them.  Those people understand that for those of us for whom the pendulum swings from one extreme to another, moderation is not a choice that we have.  In this way, giving up alcohol has almost been too easy for me.  Can I control defensive patterns of behaviour, unhealthy eating habits or my problematic relationship with my body in the same abstemious way?  No.  But alcohol serves no purpose.  It does not serve and can be cut completely.  Once it's gone and you realise that life goes on, much the same as before but so so so much better, you forget that it ever took up so much of your time and thinking.  

I want to make clear that the only person who can tell you that you have a problem is you.  I am not pretending that I had a physical dependency on alcohol.  In this country, we are conditioned to see problem-drinking as the park-bench men who swig from vodka bottles wrapped in brown paper.  People with a drink problem are outside of society.  They are not the mum who sinks a bottle of Prosecco every night or the business man whose enjoyment of long, wet lunches marks them out as people who 'like a drink' or are 'the life and soul of the party' etc.  In other countries, particularly the US, the bar is set much lower.  By the standards of the US, most Brits are problem-drinkers.  The sober movement over there has, rather unhelpfully, been hijacked by American Christianity.  As you can imagine, this creates a divisive system of judgement that seeks to label and polarise.  There should be no judgement here.  Alcohol is a highly addictive drug and we are encouraged to partake at all social events.  People even allow their children to take the drug.  Some encourage it for that indefensibly idiotic reason that they want their children to grow up to be responsible drinkers.  Sure, not just any old drug-users but responsible drug-users.  We need to address our cultural relationship with alcohol in this country.  I wanted a punchy, humorous ending to this piece but I find that what was initially an incredibly personal life change feels political, now that I look around with this clear-eyed, much prized sobriety.

I N S O M N I A a brief enquiry

 For the past two weeks I have endured one of the worst bouts of insomnia that I have known in recent years.  I average four hours a night.  Having reached the stage of desperation and crying down the phone to the GP I have exhausted the medical options. Although, I'm hugely grateful to my GP for his kindness and his instruction to me to "go for a little run, buy this book I'm texting you the details of and take whatever drugs you need to get through"*. I have been prescribed Sertraline, Diazepam and Beta Blockers.  Nothing gives me more than Margaret Thatcher's four hours.  Nothing really addresses the racing heart and thoughts and, oh God, the sweat. All my so-called natural processes feel blocked; the breathing, the eating, the fucking and of course, the sleeping.  Perhaps you are reading this and apart from reeling from the over-sharing you are saying the word 'mindfulness' to yourself.  Well, mindfulness is a wonderful theory.  I'm a therapist and I get it but I am still not sleeping.

But here's the funny part.  I am OK.  I am on high alert.  The anxiety infiltrates every cell in my body.  It's not nice. But, having reached the sharp end of tearful exasperation I am now at a point where I realise that all efforts to push the insomnia and anxiety aside are counter-productive.  It takes up too much of my precious energy but to no end.  The only path now seems to be to invite these insistent bed-fellows to the table, to accommodate them as best I can and to hear what they have to say.

I don't know what they are trying to tell me, except perhaps, that for so long I was living for others rather than myself and now I am being forced to pay attention before it is too late.  But I know that all growth, for me, is painful.  I have gained the greatest insights about my own identity from suffering.  Carl Rogers called it the actualising tendency, the urge in all of us to grow towards the light.  But some people never actualise much.  Their self-structure is rigid and they are reasonably content with their predictable lives, lived within a small, safe comfort zone.  Still, theory has it that the tendency is there in all of us.  My own therapist has a slightly different take, she likens it to shaking up a bottle of fizzy liquid and unscrewing the cap quickly.  I am aware that my preference is to unscrew the cap very slowly.  To have complete control over how the pressure is released but this may not be possible.  For now, one of the obvious consequences of being tired is being tearful; a heightened emotional response to everything.  Rather than seeing this as an inconvenience I am trying to see it as a new power, an elevated empathic ability.  The words of Rogers seem potent to me right now when he states:

"This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted.  It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be.  It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life.  Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming."

*words to that effect

Mothering Sunday (Film)

 Mothering Sunday is a film based on the novel of the same name by Graham Swift.  I have not read the novel and for this I am glad but in its themes it is reminiscent of 'The Go-Between' and 'Atonement', two novels that I particularly like.  However, Mothering Sunday finds another way into the subject matter of the loss and aftermath of the Great War; that territory where the cultural tectonic plates had shifted so cataclysmically that the inhabitants were walking on sand; ungrounded and shell-shocked beyond hope.  The story deals with the idea of who tells these stories and the answer is as old as time.  The outsider tells these stories because the imaginative outsider sees all the players with some degree of detachment.

In this case, the outsider is Jane Fairchild, an orphan who works in service for a Mr and Mrs Niven.  Said couple have lost both their sons in the war.  On a fine Mothering Sunday in 1924, Jane is given the day off whilst Mr and Mrs Niven join their friends for a picnic.  Jane, played by Odessa Young, takes herself by bicycle to a nearby estate where she resumes her illicit affair with the remaining son of the Sheringham family.  Paul Sheringham is played by Josh O'Connor.  I worry a little for O'Connor who seems destined to be Prince Charles forever.  But his performance as Sheringham required a certain amount of the young Charles so he was well-cast in this instance.  Young is a fine actor whose pre-Raphaelite hair was a character of its own.  I wanted to reach into the screen and stroke it.  And I shouldn't think I was the only one who wanted to reach in and stroke; the nudity was at once tasteful and real, and if I were to sum up the film as a whole, that wouldn't be a bad description - tasteful BUT real.  The realness was exquisite, more real than reality, it possessed a certain technicolour authenticity which felt at times like a special effect.  We could see the spots on the actors' faces (and their arses), the hair on their bodies, the colour in their cheeks, the slightest lines on their faces; every nuance of expression was communicated with subtlety but illumination. There was something about the quality of the light which gave the impression of looking back on a dream but also, making that dream touchable and alive.

The story panned in and out from the personal to the broader cultural context.  After their vividly rendered (but tasteful) lovemaking, Sheringham leaves and Jane has some time to occupy herself in the big house by herself.  This was one of the memorable moments.  Young can easily carry a scene by herself and her character's curiosity for the house and for her lover were related with such an enchanted innocence.  Big houses aside, there was something of the universal post-coital experience, the return to oneself after unity which was compelling.  Whilst within the house, the music by Morgan Kibby, an eerie piano refrain, built a sense of suspense, which we only understand afterwards when the dreadful event that constitutes the plot climax comes to be known.  Afterwards, all that is left from this passionate encounter is a stolen orchid flower head stuffed into Jane's corset.  Her time in the house with Sheringham becomes Jane's 'secret', the one truth that she chooses not to share in her future career as writer.

The whole cast was solid but Olivia Coleman deserves a special mention.  Her character, Mrs Niven, carried the despair for the other lost and bereaved characters.  In a film that dripped with sadness, the scene where Coleman's character breaks down felt like the emotional climax of the film.  It is moving even now to think of her trembling hands covering her face after her shriek of, "They're all gone!" as the tears streamed down her cheeks.

As I left the cinema I felt completely and calmly satisfied, the subtlety and lusciousness of the story-telling should win director, Eva Husson, some awards in the future.

The Comedy of Errors, Garden Theatre, 11th September 2021

 

Live Shakespeare is back, the same but different.  In Stratford, the current run of The Comedy of Errors is being performed in the imposing, outdoor Lydia & Manfred Gorvy Garden Theatre.  The RSC states that it is 'a ready-made, sustainable theatre which can be reassembled for other uses in the future'.  Presumably they mean, when pestilence strikes again.  But so it has always been with theatres, the original Globe having been moved from the north bank of the Thames, over the water to Southwark, its current resting place.  Theatres, more than most establishments, have to be able to adapt to the demands of the zeitgeist.  And so it was that the outdoor theatre added something organic and alive to the performance that I went to see.  The daddy long legs that darted into your hair as they were caught in a frenzied dance in the theatre spot lights seemed evidence of the charged air that the performance, and its audacity, created.  When we were seated at 6.30pm we had to wait a further thirty minutes for the show to start due to microphone issues.  How exciting, to be part of something so precarious.

The RSC has pulled out all the stops with this interpretation of The Comedy of Errors, looking to give one thing only to its post-pandemic, much-needed audience: Laughter.  It delivers with bells on.  From the very opening, the sophistication was obvious, as Ephesus was a creation that might be loosely seen as 1980's Dubai meets Dynasty, which, given the themes of money and trade that form the backdrop to the main plot, was inspired and apt.  In his telling of his own story of shipwreck and heartbreak, Egeon's words are set to life by the other cast members who sway in unison to indicate that they are aboard ship.  Straight away, these clever tricks of storytelling help to make the plotting of the play very clear.  Because, the great danger of the mistaken identity plays is that the audience becomes too confused in the ensuing plot confusion.  And the confusion was displayed with energy, innovation but above all, joy.  The cast seemed to be having the time of their lives and it was infectious, the audience gave it right back to them with whoops and applause throughout.

There were many notable scenes of humour, in fact, if the text allowed it, there was a play on words in every scene.  If not there was slap stick farce and ridiculous costumes to keep up the comedy.  Alfred Clay's Doctor Pinch as yoga instructor/charlatan is hard to forget, his tiny hot pants a source of humour in their own right.  Equally, the restaurant scene, in which Dyfrig Morris, as waiter, nearly loses his toupee in Antipholus' supper was pulled off with such Monty Pythonesque straight acting that the audience was rendered hysterical.

    "There's no time for a man to recover his hair that grows bald by nature."

Too.  Much.

Play within a play was used to brilliant effect when Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse discuss the kitchen wench.  Both characters acquired microphones and performed the lines as if they were delivering a stand-up comedy routine.  At one point, Antipholus asked the audience to bear with them as the jokes were over 400 years old.  It worked.  It was new and it worked.  The RSC has to innovate but sometimes they miss the mark.  Not this time.

Director Phillip Breen, on learning that his Aemilia (Hedydd Dylan), was pregnant and due in December, decided to incorporate her physical state into the performance.  This worked so well that I heard a couple, on leaving the theatre discussing this and deciding that it must be a fake bump and part of the play's text.  You can see why they would think this.  Aemilia being pregnant becomes like a ticking bomb to the great confusion of the play.  Given her condition, her increasingly erratic and wild diatribes to Antipholus seem entirely understandable.  It seemed to give her a licence to ramp up the crazy another notch.  Dylan was the shining light of the cast and, knowing that her bump was real, I genuinely feared that the exertion (at one point she adopts a side plank and if you know, you know!) she put into the performance might result in her going into labour on stage.  I'm sure Breen had a strategy for that as well.

The Comedy of Errors is a play that has a lot to say about madness and identity.  The madness gives a lot of laughs but it is the resolution and reunion at the end that render our characters whole.  It is a profoundly hopeful play and the perfect choice to open the season and resume our new normal.

The mid-life bikini selfie

 

I read with interest a recent article by Polly Vernon for the Sunday Times in which she tells of how she loses approximately fifty followers whenever she shares a picture of herself in a bikini.  More specifically, she loses female followers.

Discussions around women and body image are not new.  But Vernon is 50 years old.  She has told in articles before of discovering exercise at the age of 40 and marvelling at the ways in which it changed her body.  It is understandable then that she might want to share a picture of herself smouldering in a tiny bikini in a spirit of marvel, a sort of look-what-I-did.  Or you could call it showing off, something that previous generations of parents were all too keen to warn their children against regularly.  Less so nowadays because we are more careful with the concept of self-esteem; we are aware that this is something that our children might just need.  The young girl who does not like her body may be susceptible to eating disorders, the woman who is not comfortable in her skin may not push herself forward in the work place like she should.  Except, when it actually comes down to it, we do not appear to like the reality of women revelling in their bodies.

As a teenager, I did not like my body.  Or rather, I was not comfortable inside it.  It felt like the wrong type of body.  I wanted a supermodel's body.  I did not want my hips or my bottom and ironically, I did not want quite such buoyant breasts.  Of course there is a sad irony that it is at the time when our skin is peachy and our curves pert that we often are least comfortable in our bodies.  Still, I was saved from indulging this particular form of inhibition by having children when I was very young.  Oh the relief, to find that your body only needed to be useful.  And it was.  For over fifteen years it gave birth to and then nourished five children.  My body had purpose.  I could withdraw from any silly notions of liking it.  It did not have to bring me pleasure, only to serve others.  I had risen above vanity!

I remember one summer's day, when the youngest was tiny enough to be in a sling, and we had visited a National Trust property for the afternoon, noticing a group of elderly friends seated at the cafe table next to ours.  I watched their careful and considered movements, the slowness of their actions and the effort that it took to get out of a chair.  And all of a sudden, I wanted to climb a mountain for no other reason than that I could.  It seemed like a vision sent to remind me of the brevity of what we take for granted.  Our wonderful, fit, healthy bodies can do so much but not forever.  And to be blunt, we are dying all the time.  From then on, knowing that I would not have more children, my relationship with my body began to change.  Unlike Vernon, I was no stranger to exercise but from then on it took on a greater intensity; I enjoyed pushing myself beyond self-imposed limits and gradually I began to see that so much of what our bodies can give us comes from our own positive regard.  Because, if not now, when?

If not now, when?  I think this is the mantra that starts to reverberate in women's minds around the age of 40.  If not now, when?  If you have spent your whole life caring for others or doing the things that you were told were right, without much consideration for your own needs, you will wake up at 40 with change on the horizon and you will ask yourself, if not now, when?

I will never have a supermodel's body.  I will only ever have this body.  And this body is not going to look better in two, four, eight years time.  So I have a simple choice: To like it or not.  It is a choice.  If I choose to like it then I can enjoy it.  If I choose to dislike it then I will live only half a life.  So I can, it seems, look at the excess skin on my belly, my softly sagging, dimpled arse and even the pocket of fat on the inside of my thighs that will never disappear even if I become emaciated, and I can look on it all and like it.  Because life is better that way.  So if you look on my bikini selfies with, what? Disgust, embarrassment, whatever, you can fuck right off.  My children would say you're lucky I'm wearing a bikini.  I would say, if not now, when?