FRANCES WHITING
“There is something liberating about momentarily doing something frivolous or ludicrous”
In 1851, the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, the literary genius behind War and Peace and Anna Karenina, went out for a big night (on the vodkas I should imagine), came home and wrote the following entry in his diary.
“I’ve fallen in love, or imagine I have. Went to a party and lost my head. Bought a horse which I don’t need at all.”
And before we all start tsk-tsking at Tolstoy’s folly – or filly – let me ask this. Who among us has not bought an unnecessary horse after a few too many? And on that note, who among us has not imagined ourselves in love only to wake up several hours/days later, and no, not in love, Aperol Spritz?
I know I have, and while I did not buy a horse, in the early ’90s I did buy an unnecessarily large Christmas tree, ordered online after returning from an office Christmas party and clearly misreading the dimensions.
I had an inkling I might have done so when the company’s delivery truck pulled up outside of our house a week or so later and two burly men got out.
“Mmm,” I thought, “I wonder why my tree needs two of them to carry it?”
I had my answer when they began to pull out what appeared to be the Queen Victoria Building Christmas tree from the back, and I realised I was in deep, deep trouble, not least because there was no way that tree would fit inside our tiny workers’ cottage without removing the roof first.
“What’s that?” my husband said, as they began dragging the enormous conifer down our driveway.
“It’s our Christmas tree,” I answered, “I might have bought it.”
In the end, we had to cut half of it from the bottom to fit it under the ceiling, but on the plus side, our house did have a lovely piney, Christmassy scent for weeks afterwards.
Similarly, a mate’s husband, Carl, came home from a night out with a guinea pig in a shoebox he had no memory of purchasing, except for a vague recollection he might have bought it off a busker because it was wearing a teeny tiny pink cowboy hat on its head and he “wanted to rescue it from its life on the streets”.
I was thinking about Carl and Leo this week when I was sent a new report that shows one of the many unforeseen results of the pandemic has been a global rise in buying goods while under the influence, with the 2020 lockdown in the US resulting in Americans spending $44bn online while tipsy.
I am not condoning this behaviour at all, by the way, I learnt my lesson all those years ago in Sherwood Forest, but I think it’s interesting that we are all sometimes (sober or otherwise) driven by impulses that make no sense at all, but make us momentarily feel good.
Whether it’s a horse, a giant
Christmas tree or a guinea pig, there is something liberating about momentarily doing something frivolous or ludicrous, in a life where most of us are none of those things.
So in the spirit of celebrating momentary madness, what’s your most impulsive purchase? Although, granted, it’s going to be difficult to beat Tolstoy’s unnecessary horse.