The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Let’s say ‘Go to hell’ to the whole caboodle
Her partner has dementia, the country’s a mess and the milk has gone sour – yet Jan Morris finds reasons to be cheerful
Alovely day today, on a bank holiday weekend, so instead of taking my exercise up our leafy lane, I popped down to the waterfront for a brisk thousand paces along the promenade. It was exhilaratingly full of life – not crowded life exactly, but speckled life. Ours is a pebble beach, so there were no jam-packed sunseekers and sandcastlers, but clumps of people were scattered all across the foreshore, celebrating the sunshine in different ways. There were bathers, of course, and solitary scavengers I took to be fossil-hunters, and children at rock pools who were almost certainly looking for crabs, and lovers, of course, in the secluded lee of the promenade. Far away, almost out of sight, I could see bravos wading in twos and threes, and many dogs running towards the blue-green tide, and brilliantly across the whole waterscape a solitary windsurfer was storming and swishing and showing off his skills among the waves of the bay.
I thought it was all just wonderful, and to engage myself with that happy concourse I used a few brazen techniques that have served me well during a writer’s lifetime. For instance, “I could do that once,” I might like to remark of a child precariously wobbling along a parapet, and instantly I am en rapport with its parents – “Couldn’t we all! Those were the days!” Or if, passing a woman with an ice cream, I appeal that she give me a lick, we often end with her and her friends in hilarious comity. And so on.
The thing is that nearly all of us, old and young, on such a day, on such a beach, in such shared exhilaration, only want to be at one with the world, and welcome even the tiresome conversational devices of elderly literati.
Never get old! Never have I felt its disadvantages more than I do this morning, when my computer system has not only gone wrong, but has brought home to me, over my breakfast, the absolute gulf that exists between me and the generations that have come after. For half the time we do not even speak the same language. Who is the Server, who declines to serve me on my screen this morning? What is the Fibre I must apparently upgrade to?
My own grandchildren are fluent in the vocabulary, and for that matter an all-embracing culture, which I have never mastered, and I am left floundering in search of a tutor who will come up to Trefan Morys this morning to guide me into elementary clarity (e.g. remind me what my password is, and what it’s a password to, and who is Broadband). He is very busy this morning, his answering machine tells me, and there is a waiting time of up to 10 minutes to make an appointment.
The wait will be extended, I’m sure, to at least half an hour of vapid recorded music, so I’ll tell you what we’ll do, you and I, if you care to join me. We’ll say “Go to hell” to the whole lot of them, the whole caboodle, the whole bloody world of this morning, and go for a merry walk in the rain.
The milk had gone sour when I prepared breakfast this morning, the overnight weather having been thundery, so I jumped into the car and drove down to Criccieth to buy some more. It would only take a few exhilarating minutes, I told myself, as the old Honda and I raced down the empty morning roads, singing as we went, picked up the milk and whizzed home. I was wrong. Hardly had we reached our own
front door again than I heard on the car radio the opening notes of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto, and I was trapped in my seat.
Few works of the classical repertoire grip me more easily than this much-beloved old workhorse of a piece, so variedly grand and wistful, disturbing and reassuring, patrician and populist. Rachmaninov’s music was banned in Russia in the Thirties for representing the “decadent attitude of the lower middle classes”, and it’s just right for me.
And glued in my seat there, the concerto also took me, in my traveller’s romantic way, to a particular foreign place: the little Swiss town of Weggis, on Lake Lucerne, which we frequented for some years and which has left in my memory a marvellously jumbled mosaic of impressions: snowy mountains, placid Swiss waters, merry children and, above all, the comings and goings of lake steamers – graceful old white paddle boats with lordly captains and thumping antique engines…
Why do the emotions of the second piano concerto overlap in my mind with the pulse of the steamboats? Because, as it happens, Rachmaninov retired to a white house on the Lucerne shore, just up the coast from Weggis, and I like to think that perhaps he too may have responded to the beat of those very same venerable pistons.
Anyway, I sat in my car until the last chords of the concerto, and only then took the milk in.
Idon’t know about you, but as a matter of principle I won’t expose myself to the awful phenomenon called reality TV, and except for the news there generally isn’t much on the public channels to justify the TV licence. So when the other day, in the course of an interview, I was asked what were my favourite TV programmes, I had to admit that the only two I regularly looked forward to of an evening were both frankly vulgar.
The Irish Mrs Brown’s Boys is a domestic comedy which indulges itself, non-stop, in bad language, sexual innuendo in several shades of subtlety and the crudest kind of humour, the whole presided over by an overwhelmingly comical male interpreter of Mrs Brown herself, knickers and all. It is so frank as to be innocent, and the whole is played with such gusto and self-amusement that it never fails to cheer me up.
My other favourite is a very different kind of entertainment. It is the American comedy Two and a Half Men, and it is really dedicated entirely to matters of sex, as experienced, exploited and confronted by a couple of young men. This protracted, farcical anecdote is too much, and too crude for me, and the only reason I watch the thing is the quality of its acting, which seems to me comedy performance of near perfection.
I don’t know if its two stars find the script itself very funny, which I generally don’t, but I admire their professional techniques as I enjoy really polished Shakespearean acting. So just those two programmes make my television licence worth paying for, whatever you may think of my taste (and actually, being so immensely old, I don’t have to pay for it anyway).
Half the world seems to be snarled up in the labyrinth that is Brexit, and from far and wide friends, acquaintances and just casual readers of mine send me their messages of sympathy for the appalling mess we British have got ourselves into – even the Scots and Welsh among us, who have always thought of ourselves as separate communities anyway. Nobody can escape the quagmire.
Except perhaps people like my dear old Elizabeth, who now half lives in the separate, cursed dominion of dementia. I remarked to her this morning, as I contemplated the day’s televised complexities, that people of our age will never outlive the tangles of Brexit; but, bless her soul, she cheerfully told me she has never heard of it.
Brexit vs dementia. There is no denying that in my life now the temporal miseries of the one are as inescapable as the weird evils of the other. Between two harmless old souls like us who have lived together and loved one another for half a long lifetime, suddenly a strange curtain falls and a long, sweet relationship is ruptured, if only by petty irritations. And in our case at least, the worst of it is that I, the mere partner of the affliction, is the one more insidiously affected.
You have perhaps heard how trying it is to live with a dementia sufferer, however long and affectionate the acquaintance. I suppose most people generally manage well enough. They understand their partner’s situation, do not blame them for it, and adjust their own behaviour accordingly. Some of us, though, fail in this response, and try as I may, I am all too often one of them, and so encounter the most truly insidious power of dementia: namely, that its effects can be transferable.
In moments of exasperation, when Elizabeth’s behaviour can be most unconsciously irritating, I can be unforgivably cruel. I use words and phrases I despise, adopt rude attitudes that are not my own and think things I am ashamed to remember. It is a sort of momentary Satanic takeover, and as a lifelong agnostic, at such moments I do begin to suspect that while there may be no God, there surely must be, somewhere out
Never more have I felt the gulf between me and the generations that come after
there, a confoundedly cunning Devil…
Fortunately, my ugly spasm does not last, and Elizabeth does not seem to notice. So now, having knocked off this splurge of a confession for you, I’m remorsefully going to take her out to lunch. But when I ask her where she’d like to go, and she replies, as she invariably does, for the millionth time, that just this once I must make up her mind for her, why do I always have to ask? – when she says that yet again, then, I admit it, a small gleam of Satanism does flicker in my mind… But with luck we shall enjoy the meal anyway.
I’m big on goats, who will one day, I suspect, inherit the earth from us, and when I found in a tourist brochure yesterday that a sort of entertainment ranch near us went in for pygmy goats, my heart leapt. Pygmy goats! I had never heard of such creatures, and could hardly imagine anything more desirable. A cuddly, sweet version of horny old Capricorn, ready to snuggle up with me at bedtime in lieu of my dear friend, the late Norwegian cat Ibsen! But “Huh!” in my mind I heard old Ibsen snarl. “And just when did I ever snuggle up with you? Dear God, snuggling is hardly my style, and I think you’ll find that Capricorn feels likewise.”
This morning I drove over to that farm anyway. There were baby rabbits to be handled there, and lambs, and baby guinea pigs, nice little ponies and adorable kittens somewhere, I don’t doubt. But the pygmy goats seemed to me not sweetly pygmean at all. Tough, determined animals they turned out to be as they jostled around the bag of victuals I had brought for them, handsomely horned and bearded and full of grasping, greedy vigour.
“What did I tell you?” Ibsen murmured in my mind’s ear. “Try cuddling one of those little bruisers.” I threw the rest of the victuals over the fence for them to fight over, and went home with my old respect for Capricorn confirmed. So the cat was right.
Gigantic lorries stop to let me cross the street. Men with nasty faces help me up steps
Ialmost decided yesterday, as I concluded Day 126 of this performance, to bring the curtain down, write “Finis” or call “Time, Gentlemen, Please!” I rather liked the idea that the poet Marvell suggested for his racier divinities – of concluding life’s career motionless in a tree, e.g. in yesterday’s sycamore! But no, as he also reminds me, it’s a wondrous life is this I lead, so here we go again. It’s a lovely morning once more, and my theme today is one of gratitude.
I walk with a stick nowadays, my balance being wobbly, and it is heart-warming how this declaration of infirmity is greeted by one and all – not just by my dear Welsh fellow citizens, but by unlikely strangers wherever I go. Gigantic lorries stop to let me cross the street! Wild, uncouth youths keep doors open for me!
Men with nasty faces help me up steps, and evident harridans offer me gaps in queues. I can offer these benefactors nothing in return. We shall never see each other again. Just the stick does it, and they are simply honouring the instincts of their own hearts and confirming my own conviction that the human race everywhere essentially prefers to be decent.
Well, Christmas 2018 has come and gone, with its usual challenges and delights, and today is 1 January 2019, in all possibility my final New Year’s Day, and Elizabeth’s too. She ignores the fact and just soldiers on. I make the most of it. Of course I exploit the experience of old age.
It is grist for a writer’s mill, and watching my own decline, making fun of it, exploring its ironies and its moments of beauty – all this helps to soften the undeniable tragedy of death, and partly compensates for its sadnesses.
I am often comical in old age, and if other people kindly look the other way when I make some ridiculous error or perform some preposterous gaffe, I prefer to find it funny. I have been disgracefully selfcentred all my life, and it’s only proper nowadays that the joke’s generally on me!
But it’s not a joke at all. Laughable though it may sometimes seem, the truth is, of course, that I am approaching one of the tremendous mysteries of existence, when I must say goodbye at last to my dear old partner – herself ahead of me in our explorations – to my children and all my friends, every one of whom I can now see, with my ancient mystic eyes, clambering somewhere behind me on the steep rocky track to Nowhere. Some of them are laughing, some are crying, but they are all coming my way too.
Keep smiling, anyway. It may not be to Nowhere at all! It may be to Angels and mercy and kindness and white wine, with toasted crumpets for tea. I do hope so, don’t you? Keep in touch, anyway, and watch out for holes in the road!
Thinking Again by Jan Morris is published by Faber at £16.99