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A sense of resolution
Peter Mandelson is the closest thing there is in the New Labour inner circle to One of Us. I can't understand why he didn't join the Conservative Party in the first place.
It is very wearisome, at this sad and dark time of year, to have to make resolutions for myself that I will almost certainly break. This year, instead, I have decided to make resolutions for other people. No doubt they will be broken, too, or not taken seriously in the first place, as is the way with resolutions, but that will hardly be my fault. Here they are:
For everybody, and especially for the Cabinet: To read more poetry.
People are reading less and less, as the scrapping of the OUP poetry list this year demonstrates only too clearly. Schools no longer introduce children to the habit of reading poetry, but, given the slightest encouragement, people quickly realise they love it, as was shown by the mass sales of Auden after one of his poems was used in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. Poetry is beautiful, funny and sustaining, and soothes the savage breast. It is, therefore, healthy.
Instead of his ghastly, misguided campaign on healthy eating, I resolve that Frank Dobson, the Health Secretary, shall set up - since what is he for if not to set up irrational public health education initiatives? - a healthy reading campaign. He has been set a good example by the Poems on the Tube and by Ted Hughes's recent book By Heart: 101 Poems To Remember.
Poetry also offers a wider perspective and is instructive; I therefore also resolve that the New Labour Cabinet - past and present - shall read a great deal of Alexander Pope on manners, morals and cronyism and also this little quatrain by Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), On A General Election: "The accursed power which stands on Privilege/ (And goes with Women, and Champagne, and Bridge)/ Broke - and Democracy resumed her reign:/ (Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne)."
For Conservatives: To support Peter Mandelson.
Apart from, or quite possibly including, his enthusiasm for the good things of life - if not precisely bridge, women and champagne, then at least designer chic and salon society - Mr Mandelson is the closest thing there is in the New Labour inner circle to One of Us. I can't understand why he didn't join the Conservative Party in the first place. Without him, there might well be the terrible lurch to the Left that we have all been dreading. Help keep the Labour Government Conservative!
For journalists: To stop being so sanctimonious about cronyism and conflicts of interest.
What about the motes in our own eyes? We, too, most of us, keep quiet about all kinds of things and are as corrupted by friendship and hospitality as anyone else. Some journalists actually belong to political parties - I think that's very Hoffman. It is friendship above all that corrupts. I think there should be a register for all those in public life not simply of financial interests but also of friends.
For Europhiles, especially including Peter Mandelson: To explain in clear, plain, well-spun English the advantages of greater harmonisation with Europe (but not at public expense).
Euro-sceptics are always explaining their views with passion and eloquence, and the arguments themselves are easy enough to understand. Euro-enthusiasts, by contrast, seem either unwilling or unable to make their case. I keep meeting clever, honourable and reasonably patriotic men who believe strongly that we have everything to gain from embracing Europe, and that tax harmonisation will be very good for us, but when I try to repeat their arguments later, I find that I cannot remember a single word. Are the arguments so very difficult? Is it really necessary to put them forward in obscure jargon, with a patronising smile? I understand that for innumerates, and for those with little knowledge of economics or business, it may all be a little hard to follow, but I'm not sure that Euro-enthusiasts feel obliged to try to help us. They share an alarming sense of superiority that feels undemocratic and supranational. They are living in a world of fait accompli.
For the Secretaries of Health and Social Services: To stop congratulating yourselves about what you've promised for the mentally ill, and do something about the mentally handicapped.
The problem is pretty much the same for both; the difference is that the mentally handicapped don't murder people, and thereby draw attention to themselves. Their suffering goes unnoticed. You've admitted at last that care in the community doesn't work. Stop throwing the mentally handicapped out into it. Stop shutting the hospitals down, where parents' groups support them and where they can be adapted into friendly communities. Stop letting bigoted local authorities deprive people of the choice of care that is theirs by statutory right. Stop local authorities telling people what is best for them. Stop local authorities silencing the families. Stop listening to the so-called experts - have you learnt nothing from what happened to the mentally ill? I resolve that you shall listen - isn't this supposed to be your thing? - to the people concerned. It might even save money.
For columnists, government ministers, politicians and religious leaders generally: To stop lamenting the demise of the family.
No amount of wise words, or foolish words for that matter, seem to make the slightest difference; people no longer want to live in traditional families. We've all thought long and hard about the reasons for this, chief among them the facts that divorce is now financially possible and that women either wish to work or have to work, or both. Another reason, not often mentioned but all too clear at this time of year, is that family life for most people is awful. It is noisy, intrusive, demanding, boring, unrewarding and sexually frustrating.
For most people it is not much fun, and the alternative is not bad enough. A few tax concessions won't change any of this. Nor will moralising. Only some very major material benefits would make any real change. I mean huge tax breaks and jumps up the housing queue for married couples; generous payment for stay-at-home married mothers; inferior treatment for children of second marriages; mother and baby homes only for never-married mothers. Since no one is resolved to do any of this, I resolve that everyone shall stop talking about it and concentrate instead on what to do about this country's neglected children.
For all NHS supporters: To stop blaming every woe on nurses' pay.
Of course nurses must be paid more, but more money won't solve the real problem - abysmal training and the bogus professionalisation of nursing. It needs revolutionary reform.
For everybody, including me: To Count Your Blessings.
Happy New Year.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, December 31, 1998 | Comments (0)
Eating is bad for you
My mother shocked friends by eating butter from a spoon
Those of us who enjoy foie gras over Christmas and the New Year may well find that we shall not be able to indulge in this luxury for much longer. A group of European scientists has just announced that the method of producing foie gras is "detrimental to the welfare of bird". One could say the same thing about killing and eating the bird. Anyway, the European Commission is now considering whether to ban production on grounds of cruelty. Clearly foie gras is a pleasure we shall soon have to give up, rather like throwing donkeys off steeples or fighting bulls - not that I personally shall miss those very much.
Though I have been expecting this for years, I still find it confusing. On the one hand there are the usual stories, regularly reprinted by newspapers when short of more interesting copy, about ducks and geese nailed down by their feet, so that greedy and rascally peasants could more conveniently abuse their livers, so that greedy and rascally capitalist gourmets could abuse their own livers in turn. And I have always noticed that farmers do tend to be thoughtlessly cruel, especially farmers in some parts of Europe who do things to pigs that the British are far too tender-hearted to contemplate. On the other hand, there are reports from time to time that the foie gras birds don't object to this treatment, and flock willingly to their abusers for their unhealthy diet, rather as we ourselves flock towards fast and fatty food outlets, without a thought for our intestines.
Failing any reliable evidence, and thinking the fate of bird-brained geese less important than most other things, I have thoroughly enjoyed foie gras, without a twinge of guilt. I can't help feeling that the anti-foie gras brigade, like hunt saboteurs, are upset not because the goose is having a bad time, but because the foie gras-eaters are having a good time. I can't stand Puritans. They are only interested in guilt, not in pleasure and the generosity that an appreciation of pleasure engenders. It seems to me particularly ignominious of present-day Puritans to attach guilt to food, and to expect others to feel it. Food is, or ought to be, the most uncontroversial and social pleasure - a communitarian pleasure even. But on all sides there are official or semi-official killjoys . We are in the grip of the food fascists. Under cover of telling us what is healthiest, they try to impose eating disorders on us all.
There was a hilariously funny moment under the regime of Nanny Bottomley, when she tried to tell us how many potatoes, and of what shape and size, we ought to eat a week. The Labour Government, if no worse, is no better. Frank Dobson is planning to issue guidelines next year on healthy eating. Guidelines indeed. Never trust anyone who says guidelines. The truth is that no one has the slightest idea about healthy eating. All the received ideas of one five-year plan become the unscientific nonsense of the next, and so ad infinitum.
There was a time when protein was god. Steak, lamb, cheese and lots of creamy milk were what you had to have. Slimmers added lots of salad, and despised those who ate potatoes, lentils and pasta. No one knew about roughage. Then suddenly it was roughage and only roughage. Full fat milk and cheese were for flabby cholesterol addicts, and sugar and spice and all things nice were for trailer-park trash. If you didn't eat roughage, but gorged on red meat and cream, you would get heart disease and cancer. And serve you right. How else could you have had a legendary advertising slogan for cream running "Naughty but nice"? How about "Terminal but tasty" - such is the spirit of our time.
My mother, who had lived through any number of the food fascists' fads, used to say that no one really knew how diet works, or why people get sick or fat. She was ruggedly wrong, as far as any food orthodoxy went, resolutely ignoring all fashion, and pouring salt and cream on her food simply to upset people. She, like me, loved high-cholesterol food (which some food scientists now say has an anti-depressant function) and ate it with conviction. It began after the war, after years of deprivation, when she shocked Californian friends in her new husband's country by eating butter from a spoon, neat. In later life, with coronary artery disease, she cheerfully ate baked eggs with cream, and plenty of red meat and cheese, and even naughtily enraged my mother-in-law by deliberately pouring lots of salt on superb foie gras one time when we spent Christmas with my husband's family.
It is true that my mother died quite young and suddenly of heart disease. On the other hand, her younger brother, who disciplined himself to eat a low-fat diet, denied himself all kinds of delicious food, and remained carefully slim, fit and active, was still hunting in his late sixties. But he too died young of heart disease, a year before his sister, almost to the day. That is the number on our family bullet. My mother was right, of course. We have little control, and still less understanding, about these things. Food science is mostly bogus. One thing we do know is that a bag of crisps contains as much vitamin C as the average apple. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die regardless. Happy New Year.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, December 27, 1998 | Comments (2)
Class traitors of soap
An inverted snobbery still lurks in television culture
O NE of the most influential men in television, or such is his reputation, said last week that middle-class life does not make interesting television drama. According to Phil Redmond, the producer of Brookside and Hollyoaks, working-class drama is "a lot more interesting" than middle-class drama, and that, in terms of television, the middle classes are "essentially quite boring". I am prepared to believe that Mr Redmond is hugely influential in British television, even though I have never heard of him or of Hollyoaks, and have only once seen Brookside. And I am sorry to believe it, because his kind of unthinking inverted snobbery still lurks in television culture and probably plays an important part in the present dumbing-down of television and radio.
Any subject can be interesting. A couple of tramps waiting for someone who doesn't turn up can be interesting, and so can an heiress whose mail doesn't arrive. What's more, as any story-teller knows, there are only a few great universal stories; most plays and novels and films are variations on these few great themes, and the details - the characters, the place and the social setting - are merely the idiom in which the story is retold. Betrayal is betrayal, whether it is in EastEnders or Neighbours or Pinter's Betrayal or Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The only question is whether the story is well told - possibly, in the case of television soaps, whether the story is commercially told. Nothing is in itself boring, least of all, one might say, in all its energy and muddle and aspirational striving, the bourgeoisie.
The view that bourgeois experience has little to offer sounds oddly out of date. When I was a student, earnest young things - many of them middle class - used to go about saying that only working-class experience had any authenticity. Middle-class life was somehow not "real", and middle-class people were weighed down by the burden of their own false consciousness, if not quite destroyed by the internal contradictions of their inauthentic class alignments. It sounded complicated, but the meaning was clear - working class good, middle class bad.
I thought all that had changed. I thought we were all middle class and upwardly aspirational now. The working class has shrunk out of all recognition and I thought that the idea that working-class life is more real, or more alive, or more significant than other kinds of life, had long since had its day, if only because most people no longer belong to it.
Yet that is the idea, I suspect, that underlies Mr Redmond's approach. He says working-class drama is not only more interesting than the middle-class variety; it is also more "relevant" - there's a censorious Sixties buzzword for you - to "a majority of the population". How can it possibly be more "relevant"? It may indeed be more interesting to most people, whenever it is better done, and in that case it will be more "relevant", as better art always is, though the artistic quality of the soaps is usually debatable at best. But it is not more or less "relevant" of itself. I think what he means is that he prefers working-class drama, and thinks most other people do, because he is not interested in middle-class concerns and assumes that they aren't either.
He is wrong about other people. But that is not really the point. The point is that there is widespread sensibility in radio and television - often, though not in his case, developed out of middle-class guilt and self-loathing - that feels that what people want, and what people ought to want, is deprivation, practical problems, the daily struggle and the lowest common denominator generally. Anything more aspirational or sophisticated or abstract is not relevant, or therefore must be boring. What this amounts to is dumbing-down. It's a dumbing-down that takes the form of excluding what is seen as "middle class". It is the conviction that audiences will not be interested in what is complicated, or unfamiliar, or not of direct personal concern to themselves.
It is true that there is enormous commercial pressure in this direction. Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the audience, as Sam Goldwyn said. But it is not necessarily the duty of the creative classes - the intelligentsia, the directors and the writers - to rush to the assistance of Mammon. Least of all is that the duty of the educated elite in our public service broadcasting. Although these people are very often the flower of middle-class culture themselves (or outstanding products of working-class, would-be middle-class aspiration), they seem oddly antagonistic to middle-class interests. It is a remarkable kind of self-loathing; in the old days they would have been called class traitors. To see it you have only to look at the obstinate way in which they are degrading Radio 4, trying to make it "relevant" to a much less "middle-class" audience, against all informed middle-class protest.
I don't understand middle-class self-loathing. I don't understand middle-class guilt either. None of us is personally responsible for the history of the middle classes, and in any case, there is a great deal in the achievement of the bourgeoisie of which to be proud. It is high time that the middle classes, and all those who recently moved into them, showed some self-respect, and said a firm bourgeois "boo!" to the pseudo-proletarian goose.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, December 20, 1998 | Comments (0)
The teachers' plot to make our children into failures
There is an incentive for schools to register children as having special educational needs. It provides an advance excuse for bad results.
If the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, the price of vigilance is eternal tedium. There can be very little more tedious than fossicking about in local government papers and sitting through dreary town hall meetings. And few people can be much interested in the day-to-day minutiae of education policy and the running of schools. But it is the minutiae that matter.
Take special educational needs, for instance. How the heart sinks; the subject falls unmistakably into the category of important but boring, and best left to experts. Yet I wonder whether it is best left to experts, or whether it is being left to real experts. For once, I think that, on closer inspection, there is something sensational about this unappealing subject. What is going on in this field seems, from a commonsense view, both astonishing and shocking.
What proportion of primary school children would you expect to have special educational needs, as reasonably understood? I mean children who, for some special reason, cannot cope with ordinary classes in the ordinary way, and find it significantly harder to learn than their peers - children who have specifically educational needs, which ought to be met in some special individual way, unlike those of normal children. Common sense suggests that, across the population, such children would be fairly rare.
For instance, across the population, you would expect to find only 0.33 per cent of children between five and 14 with a mental handicap or intellectual disability, according to figures from the Office of Populations, Censuses and Surveys. Only two to four per cent of people suffer from dyslexia, as strictly defined, according to the educational psychologist Martin Turner, of the Dyslexia Institute. Less than 0.01 per cent of people suffer from autism. Attention deficit disorder is notoriously difficult to define, but probably does not affect more than five per cent of children, if as many. Then there are serious psychological problems, visual handicaps and disabling medical problems. All these disabilities add up, but to what? To what proportion?
It is astonishing to discover that there are many primary schools across the country where 40 per cent of the children are registered by their teachers as having special educational needs. In the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, for instance, there are only six schools that have fewer than 20 per cent of children registered with SEN. Twenty-four schools have more than 20 per cent of children with SEN, 18 schools have 30 per cent or more, seven have well over 40 per cent, and one has 55 per cent. Tower Hamlets is not alone is having these astonishing proportions of SEN children. Britain lists far more than other European countries, as the DfEE admits. Clearly, in this country, all too many teachers think that special educational needs are not really special at all, but more or less normal.
One might argue, and people do, that Tower Hamlets has particular problems - poverty, overcrowding and many children who do not speak English as a first language. However the Government's SEN code of practice specifically says that a child must not be regarded as having a learning difficulty solely because the language of his home is different from the language in which he will be taught.
And there is no reason to suppose that Tower Hamlets children have more disabilities than other children, or that SEN are genuinely so common. Ruth Miskin is the head teacher of the Kobi Nazrul school in Tower Hamlets, and she, apparently, doesn't believe it either. Most untypically, she has registered only five pupils (three per cent of her school) as having SEN. Yet her children are not selected in any way. They come from exactly the same catchment area as the Tower Hamlets schools that have registered 30-40 per cent of their children. There is no special selection.
Nearly 80 per cent of the children at Kobi Nazrul are Bangladeshi; English is their second language, and some arrive at school hardly speaking any. In 1997, 63 per cent of the pupils qualified for free school meals, a clear indication of poverty. The average class size is 27.5. Seventy per cent of the children in the local ward live in overcrowded households, according to the latest census.
Yet these children have consistently done extremely well; they scored above the national average in reading, writing and maths, in the recent government tests (SATs). They scored easily the highest in Tower Hamlets in reading tests and got an excellent inspection report from Ofsted. All the seven-year-olds at Kobi Nazrul, without exception, can read.
Something stands out a mile here: a negligible rate of SEN registration seems to go with a very high rate of reading success. That is because Ruth Miskin and her staff are passionately interested in literacy - she believes that every healthy child can learn to read - and particularly in a rigorous system of phonics, about which she has lectured and written a great deal. Properly taught, a comprehensive phonics system enables children to learn very fast, with great confidence. This means they avoid the common sense of failure and frustration of poor readers, and the disruptive behaviour that goes with it, which also leads to SEN registration.
Effectively, phonics keeps children off the SEN register. On closer inspection, it emerges that an enormous proportion of SEN children, perhaps as large as three-quarters, are labelled that way simply because they cannot read, or cannot learn to read. That is not because something is wrong with them; there's something wrong with the way they're taught. "Most of what schools see as SEN has to do with illiteracy, and much of it is created by the schools themselves," says Martin Turner. "Most literacy teaching is ineffective and children are being crippled as a result."
The perversity of this is hard to believe, but perverse it is. Above all, there is a perverse incentive to register lots of children as having special educational needs; it provides an excuse in advance for any failure. It must be tempting to attach the failure to the child, rather than to the teacher or the school or the teaching method. The absurdity is that, being registered as having special needs, does not mean that the child will get any special attention, other than meetings with parents and SEN co-ordinators.
Very often it is not much more than a label of failure and a list of unambitious targets; real personal help is rarely forthcoming. Government advisers are apparently aware of this, and anxious to keep the Literacy Project on course. Perhaps a good start would be to assume that where a child cannot learn to read, it is probably the teacher who has a special educational need - a problem in teaching reading, a difficulty with understanding the value of phonics and a slowness to understand that almost every child can learn to read, even some of the truly disabled.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, December 17, 1998 | Comments (2)
A baby is not for Xmas
After giving birth my mother would cook the family dinner
There are few things in life that are entirely inescapable, apart from death and taxes, but one of them, at least for those who are nine months pregnant, is childbirth. That is one of the things that is so elemental and awe-inspiring about it; labour is an overwhelming and unstoppable force, like a typhoon or a tidal wave. Which is why, I suppose, there was such amazement last week about a young businesswoman who, though already in labour, carried on working through her early labour pains at her office in Glasgow for more than five hours after her waters broke.
Her baby was born four hours later in hospital. "High flier put contract before contractions", according to a headline in The Daily Telegraph, above a picture of the radiant new mother with her infant daughter. Miss Sue Clark, 34, was working on a pounds 4.5 billion takeover deal. She had worked for more than 10 hours a day for the previous 14 days, and will be back at work in January. She will have "some help" with the baby and expects her husband to "take a full role".
I imagine the point of this story - why it is news - is that this is seen as some sort of new extreme of motherhood: women are so driven to succeed that they are prepared to try to ignore the demands of nature. I think that is true, but not in the way that the story suggests. Whatever the myths about childbirth, it is actually easy to override the demands of labour, at least in the first stages. Giving birth for most women is not overwhelmingly difficult. Most women these days are encouraged to stay as active as possible, until well into labour, and most historically have done so. The first stage of labour is not always very painful, and in any case the pains are intermittent and it is only in the short, second stage that all other concerns must give way to the force of nature.
Equally, many women recover quickly, and go back to work in the fields almost at once. In the Seventies and Eighties lots of working women managed to disguise the demands of pregnancy and giving birth, in order to prove that pregnancy and childbirth wouldn't stop them doing their work. My mother, whose first three children were born at home, would always rest for a couple of hours after labour, then get up and cook dinner for everybody. And I wrote a column on the day my second child was due, and then went home and did a television interview when he was only 48 hours old, even after a difficult labour. That's all pretty commonplace, and nature doesn't usually object much.
What nature does object to, I think, is what happens in the following months and years. Gazing at the Telegraph's photograph of the ambitious mother and sleeping child, I was reminded of the slogan the animal welfare people usually put out at this time of year: a puppy isn't just for Christmas. Similarly a baby isn't just for its birth day. A baby is for ever, and for every day. I realise that new mothers don't understand that. I didn't understand it myself, and imagined I could do a two-month working trip to China, only weeks after my baby was born. I assumed that it would be easy to hand my baby over to someone else and easy to find a suitable someone else; it isn't. Nor did it occur to me that while some babies sleep peacefully through the night, others scream with colic and wake up four or five times in the night. It didn't occur to me that I might have a baby with chronic illness or disability, who would need much more of my time than other children: children with special needs almost always force their mothers out of full-time careers. Nor did I realise that babies grow up to need more and more, not less and less, of their mothers' time.
None of this seems to have occurred to Miss Clark either, judging from the way she talks. However, she may turn out to be another Nicola Horlick, and manage to do everything at once, including her demanding job. The question is whether it matters for a mother to work more than 10 hours a day for more than 14 days. What is the point of having children in that case? Isn't that what defies the demands of nature in this story? My feelings and my experience convince me that women and children need each other.
However, there is a quite a lot of evidence the other way. Many women, rich and poor, have entirely neglected their children throughout history, handing them over to others, either because they had to or (more significantly) because they wanted to. Wretched 19th-century factory hands tied their infants to bedsteads when they went off the mills. Jane Austen's mother handed her babies over to peasants in the village. During the Second World War women were expected to dump their children in creches and work in munitions factories. Seven-year-olds are still sent off to boarding school. I don't know of any evidence that those generations of unmothered children were far more dysfunctional than any other. Our bourgeois idyll of the carefully nurtured child is very recent and very short-lived. It could be argued that those of us who feel so strongly that children need their mothers at home, if only part-time, are merely expressing a preference.
However, the answer to this question is very simple and very final: ask the children. They are almost unanimous.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, December 13, 1998 | Comments (0)
My husband dresses me
He chooses everything. I long gave up buying my own clothes
Men hate shopping. It is now official. A survey - commissioned by a shopping centre - has just discovered what most people already knew, that men don't like shopping and tend to get upset when forced into it, as they are more and more these days. Women, on the contrary, positively like shopping.
It seems that a lot of serious researchers have spent a lot of time following selected shoppers round department stores, measuring their blood pressure and their heart rate and their stress factors, and have established that shopping is actually bad for men's blood pressure. Women, by contrast, seem to get through it with very little anguish, even with children in tow.
One must try not to object to these surveys. There is really very little harm in this sort of job creation, which provides purposeful and paid activity for people who are doing nothing more sinister than establishing the obvious. And I suppose this particular survey might serve the useful purpose not just of establishing the obvious, but of reminding people of it, which in this case is that men are usually very different from women, and ought, therefore, not to be expected to fulfil the same functions.
No doubt there are all kinds of evolutionary explanations, about men being hunters and women being gatherers, but common sense alone will tell you that men usually shop badly, and reluctantly, and indeed rather pathetically. I don't think they should be made to do it, least of all if it's bad for their blood pressure.
I hate seeing men shopping glumly in supermarkets, obediently following their wives round the high-fibre cereals or sanctimoniously pushing jumbo trolleys of disposable nappies. That kind of man looks all wrong to me; the male supermarket shopper is like a hunting dog transformed into a poodle, wagging what little remains of his tail and hardly aware of his unnatural and rather comic servitude.
There must be some, or more likely many, who resent this new dispensation; it is only since the feminism of the Seventies that men have had to shop in supermarkets, and - even more important - be seen to shop. In one of my husband's favourite comic scenes, at the beginning of The Wimbledon Poisoner by Nigel Williams, the resentful and murderous husband, sent off to the supermarket for the week's supplies, notes with pleasure at the check-out that not one single thing in his trolley corresponds with the list imposed upon him by his wife.
Women who force men to shop are not just playing fast and loose with their partners' arteries; they are also playing with fire, or possibly with poison.
However, all stereotypes are made to be smashed. I, though a woman, loathe shopping. Apart from buying food and things for small children, which I enjoy, shopping makes me feel quite ill - no doubt it makes my blood pressure soar, just like a man's. Even bookshops make me want to leave at once. In almost all shops I feel overwhelmed by a yammering inner monologue about trivial choice, or major choice, and by the deluge of things I don't want, or that my children ought not to want, or that won't suit anyone I know, or that are cluttering up the world with unnecessary and hideous junk.
Even shopping for Christmas stockings is no longer a pleasure. I once read of another survey about shopping, which was unforgettably sad. It said, all too plausibly, that most people only feel "empowered" when they are shopping in malls. For me it is the opposite. It is only when I am shopping that I feel beside myself with indecision, confusion and a longing to be somewhere else.
Fortunately I am married to someone who also defies the stereotype, a man who genuinely loves shopping and is good at it. I don't mean supermarket shopping; my husband would consider it a defeat to find himself behind a trolley. Nor do I mean department stores, which make him oddly irrational, as per the stereotype. I mean everything else, all those things that are fun or interesting or difficult to buy.
He even buys all my clothes. I long since gave up trying to do it myself. Occasionally I buy a pair of shoes - I am considered reasonably sound on footwear - but otherwise he chooses everything, very often when I am not there, and often in sales, when clothes can't be returned. They always fit perfectly. I realise that this is very odd and not at all empowering, but as someone who loathes shopping, I think I'm very lucky.
There are some odd consequences of it, though. My image is not my own, or not my own idea. My husband's taste is not mine and our view of me is not the same. I have been wearing black or grey for years, against my nature. I lurch from boldly understated in subversive grey to alarming decolletage in glitter; sometimes in the Eighties I used to feel like a female impersonator, in a skin-tight Lycra leopard-skin sausage dress, for instance, wobbling on Vivienne Westwood Minnie Mouse platform shoes: I sometimes think my husband indulges his sense of humour at my expense. But it is quite fun to pretend to be oneself when one isn't.
However unfeminine this may be, absolutely anything beats shopping especially as the alternative shopper in my life is much better at it than I am, defying not only me but both survey and stereotype.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, December 06, 1998 | Comments (1)
