The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  One by one they came, these people who have made me laugh, or rushed to buy me a drink or cook me a meal, or visit me in hospital, or offer me a sofa bed, or search their heads and hearts to find words to console when life has been tough. If they could get babysitters, and had partners who could come, then, like the animals in the ark, they came two by two. And every time I saw a new face arriving, I felt a flutter of joy. These people make me proud. These people are my gang.

  Three months after I lost my job, I went to a wedding. It was a big, smart wedding full of successful people and I had to control my face every time someone asked me ‘what do you do?’ I saw a man I hadn’t seen for years. He was the finance manager of the Poetry Society when I was its director. Now he was married with a family, a large house and a business that was clearly going well. Yes, I said, I still live in the same flat. No, I said, I haven’t met anyone. No, I’m not at The Independent any more. I am, I said while trying to smile, freelance. And then I changed the subject because I didn’t want to spoil the mood.

  For my friends who were getting married, I did smile. I smiled because they are lovely people who deserved to find love. I smiled because Stuart, my friend Ros’s new husband, had found the love of his life in his fifties and was marrying at fifty-eight, for the first time. I smiled because how could you see all this and not want to crack open the champagne?

  When I was running the Poetry Society, we couldn’t afford champagne. But whenever we got good news about a funding application, I’d nip out for cava and Kettle Chips. I believe in bubbles. I believe in crisps. On one staff away day, when we were doing a SWOT analysis, I asked my colleagues to suggest some weaknesses and one yelled out, ‘Kettle Chips.’ We all laughed, but I wanted to say that she was wrong. Kettle Chips are not a ‘weakness’. They’re a strength. There are, I have learnt, very few situations that can’t be improved with some bubbles and some crisps.

  When I started the job, I introduced a fortnightly poetry reading group. If it was sunny, we’d have it with margaritas on the roof. If it was cold or wet, we’d have it in the Poetry Café, which was also a bar. I was the licence holder for that bar. To become a licence holder, I had to do a course in Bethnal Green with pub landlords from all over the East End. In the morning, we had the teaching. In the afternoon, we had the exam. The adjudicator was a woman with a tiny dog. She wandered round the room and peered over at our answers as the dog trotted by her side. It was, thank goodness, multiple choice. In order to pass, you had to get the first ten questions right. ‘I think,’ she whispered kindly, ‘you should have another little look at number four.’

  On Friday nights at the Poetry Society, we would mark the end of the week by nipping down to the Poetry Café for a drink. We called it the 5.45. Sometimes, we had music. The finance manager was in two bands. Sometimes, we just talked and laughed and drank wine or beer and ate crisps. ‘I’ve never had a boss,’ wrote one of my colleagues on my leaving card, ‘who has come back from a day off sick and confessed she’d had a hangover the day before.’ That, by the way, was after the Faber summer party, which is one of the big literary parties of the year. The next day I really wasn’t well. I phoned my deputy to tell her that I couldn’t go in, and was touched when people kept phoning with suggestions for hangover remedies. I tried to tell them how grateful I was, but it was quite hard to speak with my face pressed against the mat on the bathroom floor.

  I’ve actually only had a handful of hangovers in my life. I have hardly ever been drunk. When I went to the lupus clinic after the pain in my knees came back, the rheumatologist asked me if I smoked. I said no. She asked me if I drank. ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I love it!’ She wrote a letter to my GP which said ‘Ms Patterson is a heavy social drinker’. I felt a bit embarrassed, but I suppose that’s exactly what I am. I don’t drink for consolation, or Dutch courage. I rarely drink on my own. I drink because there’s something about being with someone I like that makes me want to raise a glass.

  I always thought wine was invented by the Romans. It’s one of the many reasons I’m pleased to have been born in Rome. Apparently it wasn’t. Apparently some of the earliest wine was made 7000 years ago in Iran. It makes it all the more unfair that you can’t actually drink it in Iran. In Iran, you can be publicly lashed, or even executed, for drinking wine. In Iran, it’s a ‘crime of God’ to drink wine. I think it’s a ‘crime of God’, or of a government pretending to be a kind of God, that you can’t.

  I fell in love with Iran. I loved the pottery from 9000 years ago, carved with scorpions, snakes and fish. I loved the Sumerian tablet from 6000 years ago, covered with one of the oldest alphabets in the world. I loved the parks and gardens full of cypress trees and roses, where teenagers pretend to study as they swap shy smiles. I loved the ruins of the palace at Persepolis, which was burnt to the ground by Alexander the Great, and the carved stone showing Scythians in pointy hats. I loved Isfahan, and its square that’s three times the size of St Mark’s Square in Venice, smaller only than Tiananmen Square in Beijing. And I loved Shiraz. At the tomb of Hafez, Persia’s greatest poet, I watched men and women weep as they recited his poems and I had to wipe away a few tears, too. But I didn’t like being in Shiraz and not being able to have a glass of Shiraz.

  I love Shiraz. I love Rioja. I love Marlborough Sauvignon and Viognier and Vermentino and Gavi and Chablis and Chilean Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. I love sipping delicious wine with a delicious meal. But most of all, I love sipping wine with crisps. I know it’s not very sophisticated, but I really, really love crisps. I eat so many crisps that one boyfriend used to call me Crispina.

  At a push, I’ll grab a bag of Walkers, ready salted or salt and vinegar. They’re not in the premier league, but they fit the job description of a crisp because they’re salty and they’re crisp. Then I discovered Kettle Chips. Potatoes grown in rough earth by a jolly red-faced farmer and sliced up in his rustic kitchen by his jolly red-faced wife. Then chucked in a copper kettle full of bubbling oil until they are – well, crisp. Of course I know that’s not how they’re really made, but I don’t want to think about big, ugly factories when I’m biting on a deep-fried sliver of potato any more than I want to think about a slaughter house when I’m eating a bacon bap. Kettle Chips. Tyrrell’s crisps. ‘Handcooked English crisps’, according to the packet. Whatever else is happening in the world, I think we can all now agree that we are thoroughly spoilt for crisps.

  How do I love them? Let me count the ways. I love the colour of them, golden like a holiday, of sand and sea and sun. I love the shape of them: the soft curves, the curls, the sudden slopes. Crisps, for me, are like snowflakes. No two are the same. If William Blake saw a world in a grain of sand, why can’t you see it in a crisp? I love the sudden shock of salt when you’ve felt that itch on your tongue. I love the snap and crackle and crunch. Crisps make me think of celebration. They make me think of parties and wine and fun.

  To ‘celebrate’, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is to ‘honour with rites and rejoicings’. I think there’s a lot to be said for ‘rites and rejoicings’. Birthdays in our family, for example, always started with the sound of singing. There would be a knock on your bedroom door, the opening notes of ‘Happy Birthday’ and the whole family would troop in. My mother would carry the tray with the presents. My father would carry the tray with the coffee and candles. You’d open your cards and presents as you drank your coffee and ripped the purple wrapper off a Fry’s Turkish Delight. I always wondered why every birthday of my childhood started with the sweet taste of pink jelly. A few years ago I asked my mother if it had a special meaning. For a moment, she looked baffled. ‘I think,’ she said in the end, ‘that Dad just liked Turkish Delight.’

  Swedes love their rituals. At formal Swedish dinners, you’re not meant to take a sip of your drink unless you catch someone’s eye and make a toast. They also love singing songs. When my mother and I went to Sweden a few years ago, we went to see my uncle and aunt. My aunt invited some elderly neighbours round
for dinner. There were seven of us round that table, including my eldest cousin. On the table were sheets of paper covered with words in Swedish I didn’t understand. I sent a panicked signal to my mother, but she just smiled. As soon as she sat down, Auntie Lisbeth picked up her sheet of paper and indicated that we should pick ours up, too. Between courses, it was clear, we would sing Swedish folk songs. I’m not sure that I’d recommend singing songs you don’t know in a language you don’t speak with your uncle, aunt and their elderly neighbours when you’re forty-five. But I knew that my aunt wanted to celebrate the fact that her sister was there, so I sang along anyway.

  I think you should celebrate birthdays and anniversaries and leaving jobs. I think you should celebrate new books and new babies and new romances and new starts. I think you should celebrate the end of the working day and the start of the weekend. I think you should celebrate – and the scientific evidence backs this up – because thinking about good things makes you feel better.

  A few years ago I was eating pizza in an Italian piazza when I got a call from the deputy editor of the paper. He said that the editor wanted me to come back from holiday and write the lead piece on the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton. I was tempted to say that the wedding had been planned for quite a while and so, by the way, had my holiday. But if the editor of a newspaper asks you to do something, he isn’t really asking a question. So I went to an internet café, and booked a Ryanair flight home.

  I’ve got mixed feelings about the royal family. Of course it’s ridiculous to have an aristocracy, and baronets, and dukes and duchesses and princes and princesses and queens. It’s ridiculous that a country can be ruled, or theoretically ruled, by whatever scrap of flesh and brain pops out of someone’s womb. But the ‘ruling monarch’ of this country doesn’t really rule the country. And I’d rather have lovely, dutiful Elizabeth theoretically in charge than a Mugabe or Putin. I’m not mad about Charles. He seems a bit of a fusspot. But William seems nice enough and Harry seems like fun. And boy, have those boys been through the mill.

  I was nervous as I wandered round the crowds and as I stood in Trafalgar Square and watched the wedding on a giant screen. I was even more nervous when I went back to the office and tried to fill the space on the page as the clock ticked. I’m not a news journalist. I hadn’t done this kind of reporting before, and certainly not for the front-page story on one of the biggest events of the year. But I was pleased to do it, because what I saw that day, behind all the fuss, was that a young man who learnt about death when he was far too young, and who had had to walk behind a coffin in front of the eyes of the world, had swapped his sadness for joy. Who could begrudge a giant party for that?

  On my fiftieth birthday, when I’d finished clearing up from the night before, I opened my presents. One friend had bought me a history of opera. When I was a child, I hated opera. The wails coming out of my father’s ‘wireless’ as he gardened made me think of a cat that was having its organs taken out, one by one. I wasn’t surprised to hear a few years ago that police in Sweden had broken down the door of a woman they thought was being viciously attacked, but who was just practising her scales. Perhaps we all turn into our parents, because as an adult, I have learnt to love opera. I’ve interviewed several opera singers and every time has felt like a massive treat. Bryn Terfel, for example, has a speaking voice like a mixture of whisky and the darkest, most expensive chocolate you can buy. Sitting three feet away from me in a tiny ‘interview room’ at the Royal Opera House, he was so magnetic that he had me fumbling with my tape recorder as I felt my cheeks flush. I wasn’t surprised, when I saw his Flying Dutchman, that his voice on stage was like the voice of God.

  My friend Arifa Akbar gave me a book called The Modern Art Cookbook. It has paintings by Matisse and Picasso and Van Gogh and Duncan Grant. It has a poem about oysters by Seamus Heaney. It has an extract from Joyce’s The Dubliners, about peas. There’s Frida Kahlo’s recipe for red snapper and Cézanne’s for baked tomatoes. I’m not likely to follow the recipes, but oh, what a feast of food and writing and art!

  My friend Paul Brandford gave me a book called The Vanity of Small Differences by Grayson Perry. It’s about taste and art and class and how we live now. There were two inscriptions at the beginning, one by Grayson Perry and one by his alter-ego, Claire. I was so excited to have a book signed by Grayson Perry, and only a little bit disappointed to find out that both inscriptions had been written by Paul.

  It wasn’t clear at first who had given me the two leather-bound volumes of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. Ever since reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, as part of my MA on ‘The Novel’, I’ve been a big fan of Sterne. I’ve stayed in the house he used to live in, in a village in Yorkshire, Shandy Hall. When Michael Winterbottom made a film of Tristram Shandy, I was invited to the world premiere in the village hall. The film was called Cock and Bull. There was a real bull outside the village hall and a competition to guess its weight. There was also one to guess the name of a big ceramic cock. I wrote a feature about the film, and the drinks in the pub afterwards, and the villagers, and the cock and the bull. It was one of my first features for The Independent’s arts pages, and I still think it was probably the one that was the most fun to do.

  A Sentimental Journey was written and published by Sterne in 1768, as he was facing death. It’s often seen as an epilogue to Tristram Shandy and describes his travels through Italy and France. It’s a ‘sentimental’ journey, because it’s a journey with feelings, an early example of travel writing that allows the writer to bring him or herself into whatever it is they see. It’s partly because of Laurence Sterne that journalists like me could bring personal feelings into, for example, travel pieces about trips to Iran.

  The leather-bound volumes were, it turned out, from my friend and former Independent colleague Chris Schuler. When I opened them, I gasped. The books were printed just ten years after Sterne died and were nearly 250 years old.

  ‘I pity the man’, says the narrator of A Sentimental Journey, Yorick, ‘who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ’Tis all barren – and so it is; and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers.’

  Well, I’ll drink to that. How can you not want to ‘cultivate’ all the ‘fruits’ the world offers? How can you not want to drink in the beauty of the world, and its art, and its landscapes, and its wine? I’ll drink to thoughtful, kind, generous friends. And I’ll drink to the fact that the bastards didn’t actually kill you, even if they sometimes seem to have tried.

  Coffee and cake

  My mother took me out for tea at the Savoy. We’ve been there for tea a few times over the years, but if you can’t go to the Savoy for your fiftieth birthday, I don’t know when you can.

  Actually, I don’t just go to the Savoy on special occasions. My friend Tina and I used to call it our ‘local’, even though I live in Stoke Newington and she lives in Tooting Bec. At the time, she had a rich husband and would have a champagne cocktail. I didn’t, and would have a glass of house white. The thing about the Savoy is the surroundings. Where else can you sit in luxury for a fiver? The thing about the Savoy is the free snacks. At first you feel as if the person who serves you is going to phone your bank manager before you’re allowed to sit down. But once you’re safely settled, they’re all charm. Would madam like another drink? Well, yes, now you mention it, madam would. Would madam like some more nibbles? Madam would always, always like some more nibbles. And so you can sit there all evening, gorge on hand-cooked crisps and salted nuts and olives, and gaze at the rich people. It’s always fascinating to watch rich people. They seem to have a sheen, as if they have been dipped in something shiny, but there’s something about the corner of their mouths that make you think that it might be quite an effort for them to smile.

  Most people having a drink or tea at the Savoy aren’t actually all that rich. That’s what I love about posh hotels. They’re democratic. Anyone can have a taste of that lu
xury for the price of a glass of wine or a cup of tea. Sure, it’s usually quite a pricey glass of wine or cup of tea, but have you seen the prices at Starbucks? You clutch a paper bucket if you want to, but I’ll stick with bone china and glass.

  I have only ever stayed in posh hotels for what’s loosely called work. When I was first asked to write for the travel desk at The Independent, I had fantasies of sleeping on planks and getting lost in the Serengeti, as Martha Gellhorn said she did in Travels with Myself and Another. I wasn’t expecting to be sent off to spas. When I was told that the editor liked travel pieces to be about luxury, because it was all about ‘aspiration’, I was shocked. But if that’s what the editor wants, that’s what the editor gets, so I soon learnt to overcome my embarrassment about sleeping (alone) in beds the size of rooms, beds sometimes covered in giant hearts made out of rose petals or towels folded into swans. Partly because I didn’t have a partner or a family, I spent many of my holidays on press trips for the travel pages, and sometimes for other publications, too. There is a small price to be paid. You do have to make a lot of small talk to a lot of hotel managers and you don’t usually get to choose how you spend your time. But oh, the gains! I think on my death bed I will be grateful for the extraordinary, thrilling privilege of trips to Cambodia, and China, and Zambia, and Thailand, and Syria, and Prague and Iran.

  One trip was to South Africa. Like every visitor to that country, I was upset by the contrasts between the townships and the comfort and luxury of so many white South Africans’ lives. On the last day, I went to Robben Island to see the cell where Nelson Mandela had spent so much of his life. Afterwards, our little group had tea at the Mount Nelson. Tea at the Mount Nelson is even more lavish than tea at the Savoy. As I piled my plate with dainty little sandwiches, and delicate sponges dusted with sugar, I remembered what Samuel, our guide, had told us. He’s one of South Africa’s four million ‘coloureds’. He grew up knowing that there were places he would never be allowed to go to. But then Mandela made his long walk to freedom and then many of his fellow citizens did, too. When Samuel got his job as a tour guide, he saved up and took his mother for tea at the Mount Nelson. ‘Son,’ she told him, wiping away tears, ‘I never thought I’d see the day.’