Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN As a collectivist, I am theoretically in favour of the widest possible sharing of the world's goods. If asked to give up my grey and bitty garden to make a green and pleasant park, to deny myself a small and battered car to improve the efficiency of public transport, to spend less on books to extend the local
library, I should find it hard to justify my refusal. 1 just hope that my altruism is never put to the test for, as middle age creeps nearer, my posses- sions begin to own me.
Even the most mass-produced objects seem to soak up my personality once I legally adopt them. This is largely an illusion, as I soon dis- cover whenever I gather up every packet of cigarettes within sight on leaving a room. That bearded sailor embossed on the Player's packet, turning his back on both sail and steam and pre- sumably sloping off for a dockside pint, even begins to look like me. Out of the millions of packets around in Britain at any moment I ex- pect that mine will somehow carry a sign which proclaims its master. When, after some rather pointed banter with the other cigarette claimants I find that I already have my box of twenty in my pocket I always feel a sense of shock as though I had been the victim of sleight-of-hand.
Other possessions do genuinely grow to re- semble their owners the way dogs do. Shoes, for instance, are more like people than people are. They have distinct faces with individual expres- sions and are far more different than fingerprints. There are those ghastly pock-marked shoes which look as if they must belong to a bad darts player and seem to be recovering from some nasty disease. There are the sly shiny ones, with tiny cunning eyes, which never crease and are worn by sybarites who are carried everywhere without walking. The laces, too, make a variety of mous- taches—grey and frayed like Albert Schweitzer's, furry as black caterpillars like Don Ameohe's, neat and sharp like Enoch Powell's. The toe-cap can be a noble forehead, gravely wrinkled with care for humanity, or a Neanderthal brow, engraved with low cunning. It is not necessarily the outer man which shows in his shoes, often it reveals his secret soul (Shakespeare's joke). Cer- tainly, to put on somebody else's shoes is a kind of adultery and can result in attacks of guilty anxiety.
Rooms also rearrange themselves to fit the occupant. When you first enter a strange office, or sitting-room, or bar parlour, you cannot sort out the people from the furniture. A mystic light from heaven falls on one chair or one person and the rest is a peripheral blur. Everything seems haphazardly arranged to trip you up or fence you off, the tables have their backs to you and the settees are trying to climb up the wails. Wherever you stand or sit, you are in the way.
But within half an hour you have dug into a fortified position. The room has a logical pattern radiating out from you and you can recognise distinct paths and routes as clearly as if they were highways observed from a helicopter. You can then take a mildly malicious pleasure from watching outsiders staggering in, their eyes un- focused and their masks askew, begging to be registered as temporary residents.
Other people's houses are always built on some bizarre and antiquated plan derived apparently from the maze of the Minotaur. Some of them even seem to come with a resident• Minotaur be- queathed by the first landlord judging by the number of times I have lost myself on the way to the lavatory and, stumbled upon frozen mon- sters, immured in cramped cupboards, staring at a gas fire, There is only one sensible place for a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom or a coal hole and that is where I have mine. Other people's houses usually smell as well—thick palpable clouds of cabbage water, paraffin, Californian Poppy, iodine and damp nappy stand like senti- nels on the stairs and landings. There is a theory, purely an academic hypothesis, • of course, that my house also smells but, like the saliva in my mouth, it has become tasteless through famili- arity. Sometimes, after a holiday, I think I catch a Whiff of it—a rather pleasant blend of old wine, wood smoke, polished leather, Ma Grifle and home-made apple pie, I always think.
It is a mistake, however, to spend too long admiring your own possessions. There is a honeymoon period when each one glows with a golden polish as though it had been delivered in a sealed van direct from the Garden of Eden. When you can just sit for hours just admiring the nib of an unused pen, or the spine of a un- read book. When you keep going out of the room and coming back again for the pleasure
of seeing a new suit sleeping in its tissue paper, Or a aew lampshade domittating a corner. This is the time when you keep manoeuvring your friends into the right position for the best view and waiting for their gurgles and coos of admira- tion.
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But, after a while, matrimony sets in. Sooner than later, everything tarnishes, scratches, cracks, clogs and stains. Every time you turn your back, the lares an penates get up to their nasty, irre- sponsible tricks. Doors that purred softly open begin to stick and protest. Finger marks, from hands dipped in a mixture of acid and soot, fol- low you along the corridors. The paint which once was glossy enough to skate upon starts to curdle like boiling custard. Gadgets you never remember buying turn up rusted and broken in drawers you didn't know existed. The suits in your closet hang there like aged parodies of you on the gallows. Instead of being the feudal lord of a stately home you become the caretaker of an LCC home for derelicts. For some reason, you continue to receive the bills, all written in an illegible hand and claiming vast sums for mysterious equipment which sounds as if it would be more useful in a Polaris submarine than in an unpretentious Victorian ruin.
This is the dangerous time for an owner- occupier of anything. You now tend to start thinking not of the possessions you have, but of those you used to have. Whatever became of ... that automatic toaster, that first edition of E. M. Forster, those corduroy trousers I bought at Oxford, that war game I was given on my twelfth birthday . . . of the British Navy, of the Eust6n Arch, of the stopping train to Lesser Finching, of Harold Macmillan, of the Empire, damn it, we can't have mislaid the Empire, it was an enor- mous great thing. If unchecked, such regrets, can lead to voting Tory and writing letters to the Daily Telegt'aph. The only therapy is to accept the age of obsolescence as part of existence and be cheerful that you have at least outlived some of your possessions. It is helpful to reverse your thought processes and enjoy counting the num- ber of sports jackets, gramophone records, foun- tain pens and carpets you have worn through. Once you can visualise yourself taking your grandchildren by the hand to the supermarket and saying proudly, 'I used to live in a house there,' you will have beaten the addiction to ownership.
My comparison of psychiatry to acupuncture two weeks ago has brought indignant letters from followers of both disciplines. I have been condemned for calling a mentally sick person a madman, challenged to substantiate my references by quotations from reputable practi- tioners and authoritative textbooks, accused of being too sick or too stupid to understand the subject at all, denounced as a savage and a bigot, warned that some day I might myself need treat- ment for impotence by analysis and for migraine by acupuncture. The letters, unfortunately, ate too many and too long for publication in full, but I hope soon to return to the subject and meet at least some of the objections.
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