End piece
Run of the mill
Jeffrey Bernard
One of the few things I find to be absolutely compulsive reading apart from the Racing Calendar's list of defaulters, Irma Kurtz's agony column in Cosmopolitan, the obituaries in The Times and random extracts from the works of Jill Tweedie in Pseuds Corner is the series at the back of the Sunday Times Colour Magazine entitled 'A Life in the Day of'. Perhaps it's just as well since I hope to do a couple of them but I hope to God I don't get stuck with anything as bizarre as the one in the issue dated 7 May. That was a corker of its kind and the standfirst described it as being about 'Diane Harpwood, an ordinary housewife, who lives at Hengoed, Mid Glamorgan.' I must .draw your attention to the use of the word ordinary. Now I think I know what an ordinary housewife is like having lived with a couple of them, so ordinary they were positively pedestrian, but if Mrs Harpwood is ordinary, average and a run of the mill council house housewife then I'm an ordinary city businessman. That or the Flying
Dutchman.
Just take the start of her day. 'I start my day the Valium way at 7.20 a.m. when my departing husband brings me a mug of tea and a Diazepan tablet. A Valium a day keeps psychiatrists at bay'. Now, I ask you, is that an ordinary housewife talking? Are they all at it, on tranquillisers from Skegness to Wimbledon? Do ordinary housewives even know the difference between Aspirin and Diazepan? I doubt it. Furthermore, since when did the husband of a housewife 'depart' as opposed to go to work? No, this particular housewife bears close inspection. Even her children don't simply get up in the morning and romp about, they're actually full of joie de vivre from 6 a.m. on and I think Mrs Harpwood must be very simpatico to put up with it. I mean, sacre bleu, the last time I lodged with an ordinary housewife, which was in Hanley in 1953 when I was down the mines or at least one particular mine called Hanley Deep — the kids didn't get up in the morning and scream for their petit dejeuner, neither did they throw their croissants at each other across the breakfast table while dad was ramming his daily dose of Dexedrine down his throat to stay awake long enough to take mum to the psychiatric clinic after he'0 finished his shift. I never heard a load of quotes either in those days, but Mrs Harpwood says she heaps curses on the head of her kids 'like a hag from Macbeth'. Well, Mrs Arbuthnot in Hanley wouldn't have known Macbeth from Mackintosh, the chocolate manufacturer, she was so ordinary, and her curses were much more Royal Court than Old Vic. On top of that, unlike Mrs Harpwood, her children weren't called Jodi and Benjamin but Tracy and Scott and her house was a shambles. Mrs Harpwood has got the odd idea that only the middle classes have mucky houses and I suppose that's a hangover from Katharine Whitehorn's famous and excellent piece on being a slut. She says, 'Only trendy, middle class lady journalists like Jilly Cooper can get away with having mucky houses'. Wrong. I once went to Jilly Cooper and Leo Cooper's house and you could have eaten off the floor and I think we did. Mrs Harpwood further says that such people have cats that are sick into the boeuf bourgignon. If she's so ordinary and living in Glamorgan, she's not even supposed to know what boeuf bourgignon is even if she can't pronounce it. But Mrs Harpwood does have one very horribly ordinary streak. When her husband comes home for lunch — I wonder what the hell he does for a living? — he gets given a simple meal of—chips or packet soup and cups of tea. ,Poor sod. If Mr Arbuthnot had been able to come home for lunch from Burslem and then got confronted by a bowl of packet soup Mrs Arbuthnot would have been punched up in the air.
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