Home life
Patronising patterns
Alice Thomas Ellis
Sometimes life seems so short it's barely worth putting one's name in the telephone book and other times it seems to be going on for ever .— drearily. When it's being fun it never looks as though it's going on for ever. The approach of the festive season is an odd mix of both. I can't decide whether I wish it would come quickly so we could get it over with, or slowly so that I can get ready for it. Or whether the simplest move is just to cut one's throat at the beginning of Advent and forget the whole thing. I can't even buy whisky now without it's being in a cardboard box so it looks like a `gift': a golden cardboard box with a semblance of red ribbon painted on it. Gm. The bin-liner is bulging with these wretched boxes when really whisky should come in medicine bottles on the Health Service since one only takes it to retain one's sanity in the face of the turkey and the mistletoe. I started snivelling in church last night and sneaked out before some kind person could ask me what was wrong. Church seems a most inappropriate place to confess that one is sobbing because Christmas is coming.
I was also irritated by the new designer paving-stones to which the council has treated us and which go along Arlington Road past my place of worship. There is nothing really all that wrong with these non-slip stones except that I don't think they're stone at all and they're small and some of them are very small — brick-sized — and every now and then somebody has waxed artistic with them and popped some of the very small ones in amongst the small
ones, making a pattern. I wouldn't mind if the stone-layer had done it by himself in a fit of joie de vivre, or to ease the tedium, but these patterns have the air of being designed by a distant official who learned at architectural school that the brute popu- lace needs a little variety in its surround- ings in order to keep it meek and well- behaved. They are horribly patronising patterns and make me think dismally of shopping precincts. They have the same effect on me that hats have. People in hats look fearfully self-consciously pleased with themselves and one longs to tip their silly hats over their silly faces. (Just think of Peter Wright.)
There is a sinister rumour too that our council are going to be kind to us in the matter of our street market. That is, they might move it altogether into some co- vered area where everything will be much nicer and more hygenic. Certainly a lot of tidying up has been going on and new supermarkets are proliferating all over the place. There is a heated argument in progress about the fate of the local cinema. I think somebody wants to turn that into a supermarket too. I don't understand why, because we have millions already and nobody has any trouble finding things to buy — except for really useful things like metal mop buckets and shirt buttons and shoe laces, and you can bet they won't have those in the new supermarkets. Coun- cils seem to be incapable of leaving well- enough alone. Some of the old York stone paving was broken but that was because lorries had driven over it and I see no reason to suppose that they won't break the pretty new stones too. What I wish all the councils would do is something about the sewers. I believe that all over the country the sewers are crumbling and one day the ground will open and swallow us up. This is a much worse prospect than breaking an ankle on a cracked pavement. The irony is that I banged my shin on a rod sticking out of a stone-cutting machine when I was trying to manoeuvre my way along Arlington Road to the supermarkets in between red and white cones and sand pits and signs and roped-off areas and workmen. I never fell over anything in the street before.
The other worry is what is going to happen to the neurotically compulsive among us. The sons have an acquaintance who once took about five hours getting round Holland Park because he wouldn't walk on the joins between the paving stones. What on earth he would do when faced with the prospect of the small stones and the very small ones I can't imagine. I suppose he would have to walk along the middle of the road where the articulated lorries would get him (if they weren't on the pavement again breaking the little stones). On the other hand if we're all going to fall into the sewers I suppose it doesn't matter. I just wish it could happen before Christmas.
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