Home life
The grip of the vices
Alice Thomas Ellis
Talking the other day on the telephone to my darling Caroline it suddenly occur- red to me that life is very like being at sea in an open boat. (`Hang on a moment', I said to her, 'while I just dash down this apergu on the back of an envelope.') There you are rocking in the swell, awash to the gunwales as a gale recedes to westward and even the boiler has sprung a leak. You shake the maggots off the ship's biscuits, wring out your oilskins, adjust your sextant and aim at the pole only to discern yet another storm approaching inexorably over the billows. It can get very wearing. Where, you ask yourself, where the _ _ _ _ is land? Trapped in this analogy, landfall must be death, I suppose. An earlier scribe, an ancient Egyptian, wrote on his column that life was very like a cucumber: one minute it's in your hand, and the next — well, never mind. I only have three vices, drinking, smoking and swearing. They do something to alleviate one's time on the ocean wave, although I make occasional stabs at giving them up. Once I thought that next time I tripped on the garden steps I would remark 'Hot choco- late', but it doesn't work. It takes stronger words to relieve one's feelings and if anyone tells me that in speaking so I reveal myself as having an incomplete grasp of the English language and an inadequate voca- bulary I shall spit. I have quite a wide sort of quarter-deck vocabulary and it stands me in good stead when the boat is rocking.
The other day for instance reading the Guardian column of my friend and neigh- bour Jill Tweedie, I learned that our part of the country — I mean the 'country': trees, grass, mountains etc — was still absolutely zizzing with radioactivity. This made me almost speechless with irritation, but I recovered and made some observa- tions about science. We go to the country to get away, and while it is undeniable that we, in turn, come back to town in order to get away I never foresaw this particular hazard. Floods, gales, ice, drought, the occasional mild earthquake are all inconve- nient but, one feels, inevitable. What is absolutely infuriating is that there is no need for the lambs and the lettuce and the milk and God knows what else to have been rendered unwholesome. Man, with his meddling little paws, has brought that on us all by himself. Invisible death now lurks in that beautiful, holy and peaceful countryside and it really is enough to make a saint swear.
On a lesser level, there is the telephone. One of ours developed a high-pitched scream and a propensity to permit the person on the other end to hear us, but not us to hear him. That gave rise to some profanity. Another one had a curiously gynaecological complaint — I think it's called inverted nipples. It refused to allow them to pop up so one could never get the dialling tone — dash it. Then the post office ran out of passport forms. Janet whose assignment it was to pick up one of these rare documents, came back en- veloped in a cerulean miasma. I have learned quite a few expressions from Janet, although she, dreadful little hypocrite, often remarks as I fall over the cat that it's so nice working for a real lady such as myself. One of the cats was out all night — Puss, the female, holding the garden against all comers. I was too tired to go down and grab her so I pulled the eider- down over my head and called her affec- tionate names in silence. She's asleep in a fruit bowl at the moment together with some unanswered post and a withered plum and has scattered bits of black fluff over what remains of a novel I am working on. I discovered the other day that I had somehow mislaid about 20 uncopied pages of this work — which is quite a lot for me as I write very short novels. 'Oh bother,' I said.
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