Home life
Bad form
Alice Thomas Ellis
Ihate forms. I hate them with a simple pure and dedicated passion, religious in its intensity. I don't understand them for a start, which is frequently an element in this type of mindless brattling. I am surrounded by tax forms, insurance forms and PLR forms. I wish they'd never thought of PLR. If they weren't going to give us money we wouldn't have to fill in forms. I wish they'd never thought of anything. I wish I was a Visigoth. I had vowed not to watch the news or read the papers because all we ever get is the bad news and who needs it, but faced with the forms I turned to the papers and was momentarily diverted by an item about two women who ran a brothel at their health studio while receiv- ing £40 a week each from the Manpower Services Commission (I wonder how many forms they had to fill in?). Mrs Payne makes me smile too. Naturally I don't approve of all that sort of thing but she isn't half funny. I don't quite see what distress she causes with her parties. It is as nothing to the alarm and despondency occasioned by the devious and evil mon- sters who afflict us with forms. I'd like to see them all in the dock, or even better, on the rack. They are guilty of the mental equivalent of GBH and have reduced me to a wreck. A racked wreck in dry dock. I always used to listen to The Archers when in need of reassurance and comfort but most of the characters seem to have undergone frontal lobotomies and changed personality and I find it hard to recognise them. I am especially worried by Jennifer who used to be a writer — novels and columns. She is now a whining shadow of her former self — in fact on due reflection she bears absolutely no relation to her former self and perhaps should be sanc- tioned. I think the rot started when she insisted on buying new garden furniture (a bad sign) and she has continued to deterio- rate to the point where she wants Betty, the hired help, to wait at table because it disconcerts the guests if the hostess has to leap up and down. She is useless on the farm and expects everyone to run round after her. Her voice has gone up a register, she thinks of nothing but holidays and keeping up appearances, and hasn't done a stroke of work of any sort for months. I have my own theory about what happened to her. I think Brian secretly suggested that she should look after the paper work — her being a novelist and a journalist and all, and supposedly at home with that sort of thing — and it sent her demented. The final straw came, not from the farmyard, but from the PLR. She probably thought it was a terrorist organisation. Whatever the cause she is now a vegetable and a horrible warning to those of us who used to write.
Perhaps I should listen to Capital Radio. A friend of the eldest son heard a story the other day about somebody who went into a jeweller's shop to buy a crucifix on a chain and the assistant asked if he wanted a plain cross or one with the little man on it. I find this extraordinary in view of something else I read in the newspapers. A US-based fundamentalist missionary sect has gone all the way to Paraguay to harass the Indian nomads in order to save their souls, and has whisked off 24 of them to civilisation, where they promptly contracted influenza to which they have no resistance. Now, I have resistance to influenza, or I would have died yesterday. I also know who it Is on the cross, and furthermore that he would not permit the souls of the Indians to suffer perpetual torment just because they wouldn't listen to the Mennonites (who sound to me like a sort of fossil shellfish) and in view of all this I ask myself why this sect doesn't leave the Indians in peace and come here with their influenza to educate the assistants in jewellers shops? They could also have a word with Jennifer and remonstrate with the compil- ers of forms and the ladies from the health studio. Just as long as they leave Mrs Payne and me alone.
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