Home life
Crumbling urns
Alice Thomas Ellis
I'm going to talk about the weather. I haven't talked about anything else for days now. There doesn't really seem to be anything else. Our friend Hylan just flew in from New York, rather looking forward to the cool of an English summer, but was disconcerted when, having descended through one layer of cloud into an area of blue, he saw below him another layer of cloud. With this two-ply effect no wonder all our days have turned green. We used to have an urn in the middle of the garden. It contained a bit of lavender and some Ragged Robin, and acted as a receptacle for a number of wind-borne weed seeds of one sort and another. Even small trees had hopefully attempted to take root in it. The other morning, after a night of relentless rain, it abandoned hope, purpose and function and simply fell apart. Hylan sur- veyed it sympathetically and remarked that he could see how it had felt. Gazing at it afresh, from this point of view, I was overwhelmed by a sense of empathy. Ev- erything had got too much for it and it had quietly given up. It hadn't exactly commit- ted suicide but it had, as it were, turned its face to the wall. Now we haye all those orphaned weeds and infant trees to dispose of, as well as its shattered remains. How do you dispose of an urn?
Wringing the rain out of my hair recently I considered travelling abroad in search of the sun. As far as I can gather, it's blazing down too much everywhere except here. Everywhere else people are sick of it and praying for our rain. Hylan says England's future lies in becoming a theme park: a rain theme park — and tourists will come from all over the world to see what it's like. Rain forests will spring up from the urns in our gardens and the seas will lap at our doorsteps. Already the gulls are here, their cries vying with the burglar alarms (Alfie says the local wives turn on the burglar alarms to alert their husbands that it's time for lunch), and the pavements resemble beaches as the sewers overflow in the gutters.
But, travel involves — well, travelling and I'm not sure I wouldn't rather get wet. The daughter set off with her friend Anna last week: destination Italy. On the salient documents, every time it was appropriate to mention the point of departure the word Heathrow was writ large, but when they got there the airport staff said that that flight flew from Gatwick. They rang Gat- wick to enquire if the flight was, by any chance, running late, in which case the little girls could hasten over there. And, of course, it was the only single flight in the country which was running on time. So they had to fly to Bologna via Paris. We had sent them by registered post — Janet signed them in and Anna's sister had to sign them out the other end — so we knew they were safe enough, but I used up a whole day sitting by the phone, gibbering. It takes it out of one. The car had also sustained a puncture on the way to the airport, and all in all the hazards of getting from hither to yon may outweigh the tedium of sitting watching the trees drip- ping.
I did arrange in one week to travel to Nantes, Builth Wells and the Isle of Wight. Unfortunately I wasn't thinking at the time; I did not consult the diary or wall chart, and discovered that I had agreed to be in all those places more or less simul- taneously. It is difficult enough to get to anywhere even with your wits about you, passport in hand and your itinerary laid out, but my plans were clearly ridiculous. In the meantime I had also arranged to do several things (including a bit of work) in London, and had completely forgotten about everything else.
Usually, at this time, London is deserted except for people from other countries who have come here to. refresh themselves in the rain. Now that the airports refuse to relinquish the indigenous population in search of the sun, we're all here, inviting each other to parties, barbecues, weddings and similarly ill-considered ventures. There are obviously too many of us, since even with the airports and prisons insani- tarily overcrowded there are still plenty of as left on the streets or entertaining in our homes. Space travel must be the only answer. It has always annoyed me that the conception of tele-transportation has never borne fruition. If, instead of schlepping about with all that luggage, we could merely be dematerialised and reconstituted in a more salubrious environment, then I would not complain. Transgressors could be whisked off to Mars and those of us who had in the past elected to go to Benidorm could, instead, go to Venus. Our football hooligans could fling their beer cans into Infinity, and our little children could be taken to the theme park of the Milky Way. The only trouble is that, if we are to believe the astronomers, the climate on our neighbouring planets is even worse than it is here. I can hardly believe it. I think our poor urn was aspiring in a microcosmic way to the condition of a Black Hole, a White Dwarf or a Collapsor. Good luck to it.
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