by Dawn French
He sat down where they had been, so once again, in shadow against the light of the window behind him. I asked polite questions about his life, filling time really. I knew from his long-standing friendship with my mum that he was divorced and that he had two kids, so I asked after them. At which point he lit up, animated and clearly delighted to talk about them, the two most important people in his life. As he spoke, happily, proudly burbling on, a curious thing happened. The sun burst out from behind a cloud, and the lovely light poured in through the window, bounced off the white wall behind me and reflected, bam!, straight back onto his face, lighting him up as if Caravaggio and Fellini had collaborated. His gorgeous face was suddenly awash with beautiful bright light and for the first time ever, I SAW him. Really saw him. Beheld him. I stopped breathing for a moment while I took in his sea-blue eyes and the happy laughter lines around his mouth and the strong angle of his jaw. Then I noticed the width and strength of his shoulders and the muscle in his neck and how expressive his hands are… I knew in that instant that we would marry, yet a minute before, he was just that bloke who was a workmate of Mum’s, nothing else. How on earth did I miss the beauty of him before, when I now think it’s patently obvious? Remarkable, in fact.
Of course my mum later told me that this was the glorious work of my dead dad, ensuring from his place in heaven that I properly noticed what was right under my nose. Yeah, I know … ridiculous …
It’s all about the beholder, isn’t it? Perhaps we should consciously do much more beholding. ‘Behold the sunrise’, ‘behold the egg and chips I just cooked you’, ‘behold your lovely legs which you appear to hate …’ Maybe if we did more beholding, it would remind us to find the Beauty, to look for it, rather than be told where to find it by magazines or the tellybox.
I saw a wonderful story recently, where some little kids in America used their mum’s phone to surreptitiously take a picture of her fast asleep in her swimsuit on a beach. When she first saw it, she was horrified at the ‘hideous big fat blob’. She was about to delete it when her son and daughter walked in, and she asked them if they knew anything about the dreadful picture. They admitted that they took it because they thought she ‘looked so beautiful laying there’, and ‘it could be a postcard’. The kids loved the picture, and only saw their mum through adoring eyes, of course. The love was what made her beautiful to them. They beheld her. The Beauty really was in their eyes.
I know for sure that if someone I love is taking a picture of me, I look better. Beholding someone you love changes your face, your whole demeanour, so of course it would show. Photos are the perfect moment, captured in time, where you are responding to the photographer, when you are caught loving them. You can’t tell me that isn’t ALWAYS beautiful, because it is.
It’s quite another thing to discuss Beauty directly with someone. I once sat next to an older woman in a theatre. A stranger. I was compelled to tell her in the interval that I thought she was the most beautiful person there. I knew I was crossing a boundary to do it, I knew I risked offending her, but I couldn’t help it, it was true and I wanted her to know. Her beauty wasn’t typical. There was something extraordinary about the way she held herself, her grace, her presence. Once I had summoned the courage to quietly tell her, I also noticed when she stood up that she had a magnificent bust to boot, and I’ve always been a huge fan of an unapologetic bosom. We spent the second act of the play next to each other in the darkness, and I was aware that I had most probably made her feel awkward, and I regretted that. At the end of the play, she leaned over and thanked me for giving her ‘just the tonic’ she needed at ‘a difficult time’, called me ‘cheeky’ and off she went, rendered even more beautiful than before in my eyes by sheer dint of her self-effacing honesty. A brief and strange moment for both of us. Unforgettable.
It’s a difficult thing to accept a compliment about your physical self. We are British and vanity is a sin. If acceptance comes too quickly, it’s arrogance. Too much deflection is insincere. It’s a minefield of possible social faux pas. We also doubt whether we are being told anything for real. Is it a trick? It can’t be true, so why is this person saying it? What do they want from me? We are innately suspicious.
I have huge misgivings about any compliments made about my physical self. I can’t accept a compliment for something I didn’t create or achieve, surely? Maybe it would be more palatable if we complimented each other with ‘nice DNA’ …?
As for the rest of my body, my relationship with it, my fluctuating weight, my determination to remain friends with my shape whatever size it is, all of this and the relentless scrutiny of it through the press, have taught me to keep tight-lipped, because almost anything I do say on this subject is misconstrued or misquoted. I do not set out to be anyone’s role model or anyone’s soundbite or anyone’s example. However, if by simply doing my job without any body shame, I am an example of someone just pegging on, then so be it. If a plump girl writing funny stories in a notebook in her bedroom thinks, well it didn’t stop Dawn French … then, great. All of that is by the by. The more challenging times are moments of clarity I have when well-meaning interviewers say something like ‘you’re looking so well’, when I instinctively feel that what they’re really saying is ‘you’re not as fat any more’. And that is true. I’m not. But I’m not any better than when I was fatter. Perhaps I’m healthier, and that’s what they really mean, in which case, say that. I don’t want to be tricked into believing that the old, heavier me was somehow less valuable or attractive, because that’s simply not my truth, and neither is it the truth of so many bigger women.
On the other hand, it’s tempting to argue that it’s churlish to be irritated by a compliment, that I should be so lucky, and that I should show grace in accepting. It’s true of course that if we present to the world in an agreeable way, our passage through life is inestimably easier. That agreeable, acceptable way though, is narrowly defined and hugely manipulated, and I suppose that’s the bit I am irritated by, on behalf of myself and plenty of other fabulously flawed women. If we were looking to behold the beauty in each other in lots of different ways, we surely wouldn’t feel we had to conform?
I was once utterly overwhelmed by Beauty to the point of sobbing. I was on holiday with my then husband and my best friend and her chap, in Barcelona. Like all visitors to that fantastic city, we visited various Gaudí buildings and parks. The last one we went to was the Güell Palace, a huge, splendid, privately commissioned townhouse built in 1886. All Gaudí buildings take your breath away, they just do, there is simply no other architect like him. From the outside, the building is austere, huge and grey, with lots of twiddly ironwork. Inside though, is even more astonishing. We went up various staircases and saw beautiful marble balustrades and vast religious portraits and fabulous wooden parquet floors, until finally we entered the central hall, which is the height of at least two floors and has wonderful long windows with stained glass and a high cupola. I couldn’t speak, it was so supremely beautiful. We moved on up through to a first-floor salon where the tall art nouveau windows have stone arches in front of them. Parabolic arches, which as I understand it, is the shape a ball makes if you throw it in the air, a high arch, lofty, organic and elegant. The shape is very pleasing. By this time, I was tingling inside, a curious excitement I couldn’t entirely understand. The next part of the building was a corridor with the same exquisite arches. Half-way along, I started to cry inexplicably. I immediately wanted to get into some fresh air to take stock of what was happening inside me, it was strange and powerful. I split off from the group and headed up some stairs to the roof and stepped out into the nippy air, only to find myself in a surreal roof garden of eccentric, oddly shaped chimney stacks covered with colourful mosaics of broken Arabic tiles. A weird whimsy, an inner-city forest of ceramic trees, so different to the gravely handsome building beneath. I had come up to recover from the heady effect the building was having on me, only to find even more delights. They tipped me into a sensory over
load. I started to sob, and I couldn’t stop. I had to sit down and surrender to it. Something about the dynamic, elemental architecture of the building had chimed with me in a kind of perfect rhythm. A heartbeat rhythm. We had the same pulse, somehow. I felt that I already knew that building, that I completely understood it. Perhaps the simple fact is that the potent Beauty of it all, made me LONG to be in sync with it. I wanted to belong there. I have not experienced the brute force of that Beauty punch in the gut in any other building before or since. It took me a few days and several Riojas to come down from that sublime high. I haven’t been back. I don’t think I want to, in case it doesn’t happen again.
I want to get my Beauty fixes in everyday, manageable bite-size chunks so they don’t capsize me. For instance, I will ALWAYS find Beauty in the sight of:
• the perfect flick at the edge of my daughter’s eyeline
• Bodmin Moor from the A30
• my new dog’s spotty belly
• mackerel flicking about in the sea
• my husband’s collection of sea glass
• correctly stacked cream tea. (Jam then cream, please. Always.)
• the big, big Cornish sky
• my father-in-law’s wink
All of these I can have buckets of, anytime I like, and that will do.
1. Little kids fall over (I know it’s wrong, but …).
2. Eddie Izzard tells stories.
3. I hear that voicemail which starts, ‘So sorry, but we aren’t going to be able to make it to yours …’
4. Husband tells me he wants to open a sweet shop.
5. The waitress says, ‘I’m sorry, but we only have white bread …’
6. Mother-in-law invites us over for pasty night.
7. I see dog every morning.
8. Cat hides in my clothes.
9. ANY baby is nearby … It’s embarrassing.
Your list starts here.
1. _______________________________________
2. _______________________________________
3. _______________________________________
4. _______________________________________
5. _______________________________________
6. _______________________________________
7. _______________________________________
8. _______________________________________
9. _______________________________________
10. ______________________________________
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MAY
I have a little treasure to offer you.
It’s the most simple, easy, obvious thing, but it’s somehow kept as a mystery.
It can change your life for the better.
It CAN’T change it for the worse.
It’s a little box. Open it. Inside are two words written on a piece of paper.
STILL and SILENT.
In those two words, there is real magic.
Believe me.
I know.
Now then, I have to confess that I am that person who, if you say the word ‘mindfulness’, might make a sucky-lemon face, so cynical am I. My friend Ruby Wax, who writes so well about all that, has changed my thinking. A bit. But on the whole, I can’t be doing with prescriptive quasi-Buddhist new-age lessons-in-life stuff. I know proper mindfulness isn’t that, but still. I love a bit of wisdom or advice or the odd metaphor, oh yes I do, but moving ‘towards the light’ is dangerous ground for me. If I find it absurd, I find it funny and thus utterly dispensable, that’s the problem. It’s a curse sometimes, because my desire to enjoy the laugh is greater than my desire to find the deeper meaning, however much the latter might be tons better for me. I do want to learn new profound things but I don’t want to learn them from an ocean-going wanker. Sorry to be strict about this, but life is too interesting to have my focus pulled away from it by some airy fairy long-winded esoteric twot. Say something original and I am yours, I will respect you forever. I will wash your car, I will wash your feet, I will wash your mother. Waste my precious time with twaddle and I will put you closer to your God, I swear it.
Mindful? My mind is already full, thank you. Full of vet appointments, work deadlines and fantasy pasty fillings. Why would I want it to be even fuller?
I know, I know, but … you know what I mean? I haven’t got the TIME to be mindful, I’m bleddy busy, like all of us.
And anyway, I like my mind being busy – being busy is living. All of the appointments that fill up this VERY diary mean so many things to me:
I am loved.
I am loving someone.
I am loving lots of someones.
I am working.
I am looking after my teeth.
I am remembering.
I am needed.
I don’t want to stop being busy. Busy is rather beautiful and being told to be otherwise is yet another of those unachievable goals that leave me feeling hopeless, like being a Kardashian or spiralizing, or vajazzling. We are all busy. Let’s NOT stop. It’s great!
YES, YES, YES, to all that.
BUT …
Here’s the thing. I am not advocating that we remove the busy clutter of our lives. That’s my energy, my purpose, I just don’t want to be OVERWHELMED by it, that’s all. I want to notice it, I don’t want to miss anything simply because my diary’s too full, and my head’s too frenetic.
I know something very key about myself which is this: the small stuff is my favourite stuff, but it’s the first stuff to drop off the edge of a busy life unless you pay attention. I want to sit up and be alert so’s I register and enjoy all that lovely small stuff.
Recently, an older woman I admire a lot told a story in my earshot. It went like this: she was a young girl when her father taught her how to row a boat. They rowed together in the river and he showed her how to use the oars. The time came for her to row the boat on her own. He stayed on the shore and she tentatively rowed out into the middle of the river. She was doing OK until quite suddenly the weather changed. The wind picked up, dark storm clouds came in and pelted the little boat with rods of rain. She was very scared on the choppy river, and shouted to her father to tell him so. From the shore, and over the din of the storm, she hears his voice booming out, instructing her to ‘Sit still, hold tight, look up!’ She followed this advice, calmed down and eventually rowed back to the safety of the shore and her father’s arms. She explained that these three simple instructions became a sort of mantra she has carried with her ever since, and she has found them hugely useful to remember, especially if you’re in a pickle.
Sit still.
Hold tight.
Look up.
It’s exactly what I need to remember to do. It helps me to be steady.
I heard that story around the time that I decided to start a new habit, and on reflection, they are connected. I love that kind of congruence, when a couple of seemingly random things float together in a perfect timely fusion.
A habit sounds like a bad thing. This isn’t. It’s a wonderful thing, and it started one May morning when I was out walking my old (now, sadly, dead) dog, Dolly. We walked up the familiar hill near our home, through a narrow lane with overhanging trees bordered by stone walls with primroses poking through. On one side of the track there is a steep bank with a row of houses above. On the opposite side is a deep, wooded valley. There are various breaks in the wall where you can escape the well-trodden path and dart into the woods. I have often done this and I have enjoyed the fact that I am near enough to the track to hear the passers-by. Sometimes, if their frequency is right, I can hear EVERY WORD they say! I know you shouldn’t eavesdrop … yeah … but I do, and I like it.
Anyway, on this one occasion, I was in the valley, clambering over a huge fallen tree trunk, and there was a fabulous shagpile of bluebells all around. The sunlight was flickering through the tall beech trees and dancing
mischievously on the cobalt flowers and it was breathtaking. I was overcome with a sudden desire to lie down, so I did. Dolly was a bit confused; this was highly unusual, but she was ancient and tired so didn’t resist. There was a nip in the May morning air, but it was dry so I lowered myself on to the crunchy forest floor, trying not to crush any precious plants, and I lay still, right next to the big thick tree, my dog breathing steadily by my side and I looked up.
Up.
Up through the leafy canopy to where I could see chunks of blue sky beyond. I rarely see this sight and it was gorgeous, surreal. Why had I not done this every single day, such a simple achievable instant hit of natural beauty, right on my doorstep? Never mind the phenomenal eye Beauty, the ear Beauty, nose Beauty, fingertips Beauty and ultimately the heart Beauty were ALL tickled awake. As my quickened-from-fast-walking heartbeat slowly slowed down, along with my breath, so my spirits rose, and a sublime calm flooded into me. My body, mind and heart were all ticking at exactly the same rhythm. Then my breathing deepened, and I felt like I was sinking backwards, downwards into the bracken underneath me. Sinking yet supported, I just surrendered to the vast perfect peace of it all. The stillness was the loveliest part. ‘True silence is to the spirit what sleep is to the body – nourishment and refreshment’ – W.Penn. To be still, silent and awake rather than asleep was a revelation.
I loved
loved
loved it.
And now it’s my ‘habit’ and I try to do it as often as possible, sneak into private places, lie down, look up, and find some minutes to travel inwards a bit, give my head time to hear my own quiet inner voice, normally so muted by loud living. That’s when I remember things I’ve forgotten, and when I allow distant nagging suspicions to be heard. My best creative and instinctive thinking happens then, when it’s just me and nature, and silence. Not a single second of the silences I’ve known has been a waste of my time. It’s been the BEST use, because in those stillnesses I have allowed myself to plumb and dredge some hope and optimism up from the sediment of deep fundamental places I don’t ordinarily visit. I am truthful in these moments. As truthful as I can bear.
