by Maeve Binchy
Fumigation with brimstone or the fresh leaves of pennyroyal sewed in a bag and laid on the bed will have the desired effect.
(The School of Arts, or Fountain of Knowledge,
Mrs de Salis, 1890)
HEAD TO TOE EXAMINATION:
A FEW MORE THINGS TO WORRY
ABOUT
You have far too much hair and look like a monkey
You have too little hair and will shortly go totally bald
Your eyes are too wide open, making you look mad and staring
You have drooping eyelids and look like a criminal and a vulture
Your tongue is white and unhealthy looking
Your tongue is red and dangerous looking
Your bosom is too small and flat and dull
Your bosom is too big and floppy and disappointing
Your skin is oily and greasy and full of harmful impurities
Your skin is dry and flaky and about to fall off in chunks
Your private parts are small, pathetic and insignificant
Your private parts are huge, obviously deformed and revolting
Your knees are weak and give way all the time
Your knees are stiff and unyielding
Your feet are hard and scaly and disgusting
Your feet are soft and mushy and disgusting
SENIOR DECISIONS
Years ago I had this great notion, which was that together with all our friends we should go into an old people’s home long before we were really old, but while we were young enough to enjoy it. It seemed the perfect solution to everything.
We would all sell our houses and take a wing together. We would hire a part-time waiter to bring us gins and tonics on a tray with a folded white table napkin over his arm. We would be looked after, we would have company, we could move from room to room playing bad bridge. We could take over a lounge for ourselves and have parties. We wouldn’t have to worry about our friends coming to see us because they would all be there.
If we had children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces, they would be delighted not to have to worry about us as we got feebler. They could have all our furniture and our treasures now rather than later. They would visit us because we would all be such fun, growing older without a care in the world.
We wouldn’t be tormented with fear of losing our keys, or burglars or conmen or burst pipes or setting the house on fire or getting malnourished, because the home would look after all that side of things.
We would have no sense of being beached, no lingering resentment that we should possibly be living with relations, because after all we chose this ourselves.
It seemed such a flawless idea that we were almost ready to go in straight away. Even though we were decades below the age that one might expect people to consider such a step, we started sussing out places of residential care.
Somebody said that if this was such a great idea why had nobody thought of it before?
And then they all got restless. There had to be a snag in it somewhere.
I was just forty at the time and very keen to go in that year. I couldn’t see where the problems were suddenly coming from, so to rid everyone of anxieties I decided to test out the theory by writing an article about the whole idea in the Irish Times.
It met with the kind of mild patronising approval which annoyed me intensely. It was as if I were being patted on the head for a silly, off-the-wall, humorous look at the future, while I thought I had sorted out a whole area of angst, potential loneliness and confusion for an entire generation.
We were the people who would provide the smooth transition from the extended family concept, where everyone took in their grandparents automatically, to a world where housing, the economy and society meant that adults made their own arrangements for old age. But nobody was taking me seriously.
And then the two most boring people in the whole country wrote to the newspaper and said they would like to join us in all this, and where would they pay their deposit.
Now, I am very sure that people may well cross roads to avoid talking to me, but these are people who would empty a stadium if they were seen to approach. They could bore at Olympic competitions, bore not just for the nation but for the planet.
In vain did I tell my friends that we didn’t have to have them with us. We could tell them politely that the subscription had now closed, that they would have to start their own. This was the whole essence of the idea, I begged them to believe. The idea was that groups of like-minded people should form an ageing commune of their own with people of shared interests.
But the very mention of the two awful and frightening people had destroyed the fragile edifice. My friends kept thinking of how awful it would be if you thought you might meet them at breakfast every single day of your life, or hear them booming around the place with their entirely unacceptable views.
We all decided reluctantly that we would live in our own places until the time came, with no plans, and take whatever happened. So it was over, the dream that might have changed society.
But perhaps some day someone else might reinstate it. A word of warning, however. Just do it quietly. Don’t write anything about it in a newspaper.
CHEERING THINGS ABOUT
CHEST PAINS
I once went to a women journalists’ conference in Central America where so much went wrong and the stress was so high that if there had been an Intensive Care Unit within miles I think all 600 participants would have been in it.
The hotel booking system was so bad we slept three to a room, and one of my room-mates woke in the night with terrible chest pains. One of the waitresses was a third-year medical student, and since she was all we had, she stood there in her nightie while frightened women in all languages tried to interpret for each other by candle-light, since the generator had gone again.
I hope by now she is an acclaimed heart specialist in her own land, that young girl who reassured everyone in sight. She stood there in the candle-light telling us that it need not be what we all feared.
‘You see, the chest she ees a beeg complex structure. The chest, she has many major organs. As well as the heart, the pain could be in these. She has the ribs, and they could be cracked like firewood. The chest, she has the muscles, and these could be strained by too much sex or climbing around the ruins. The chest is also the area where unwisely chosen food could cause the indigestion.’
A little colour was coming back to the face of our room-mate. The banquet – when we’d eventually found it – had offered a rather leathery sausage. Please may this be what it was.
But the waitress was not finished. ‘The chest, she ees so interesting she could hold the pleurisy, the bronchitis …’ She beamed at all the things the chest could hold which might not be a fatal heart attack.
And now, decades later, women from forty countries have remembered her calm round face, her lack of fear, her insistence that we didn’t all choose the worst-case scenario. Not only was she right then but I imagine she has been right for all of us who had a chest pain sometime and were able to call up her wonderful, calming words:
‘The chest, she ees a beeg complex structure …’
HIGH WIND
A sneeze can travel as fast as 100 miles per hour.
CHAIN LETTER FOR WEARY
WOMEN
Dear Friend
This letter was started by a woman like yourself in hopes of bringing relief to other tired and discontented women. Unlike most chain letters this one does not cost you anything.
You bundle up your husband, partner or boyfriend and send him to the woman whose name appears at the top of this list. Then add your own name to the bottom of the list and send a copy of this letter to five of your friends who are equally tired and discontented.
When you come to the top of the list you will receive 3,125 men and some of them are bound to be better than the one you gave up.
DO NOT BREAK THIS CHAIN. One woman did and she received her own man back.
WH
Y I TOOK UP DRINK:
A PERSONAL HORROR STORY
As in everything else, I was a late starter. For one thing, I didn’t like the taste. We always had whiskey on a piece of cotton wool to cure a toothache, and it had bad associations. For another, everyone I met who did drink alcohol seemed to be racked with guilt, penniless and feeling very sick indeed. They didn’t go on with all this ‘never again’ thing about cream buns or chocolate or even ten Woodbine. But fellows after too many pints and girls after too many sherries seemed to be in the last stages of remorse. Drink didn’t seem to have all that much to recommend it.
Then one day, when I was about twenty-two, I went to a wedding. The bride and groom were an extremely handsome couple. They could have been sent over by Central Casting so much did they look the part.
And as we all followed them glumly out of the church I caught sight of my reflection in a glass door.
Now I hadn’t any great illusions about the way I looked. I was wearing a suit belonging to my mother which hadn’t looked great on her either, and it had been bundled up in the bicycle shed of the school where I taught.
Why was this, you ask? So I could change into it after I had complained of not feeling well so I could get off my Saturday morning teaching to go to the wedding. I’d also gone to the wedding on the bus without the benefit of a mirror to indicate the unusual shape and angle of a very old hat.
‘I look desperate,’ I said to a woman beside me.
‘I know you do,’ she said reassuringly. ‘So do I. I can’t wait to get into the drink to make me forget it.’
‘Will drink make me forget what I look like?’ I asked innocently, and began life as a drinker.
I loved drink. Loved it. And I may be wrong but I don’t think it turned me into a Jekyll and Hyde. I was just rather louder and even more insanely talkative and cheerful than the norm. I forgot things, of course, and had hangovers and stayed on much too late in places. But what the hell.
And amazingly my liver held out and I didn’t lose my job or house or my friends over it. But one day when I couldn’t walk or stand or lie down, and most important of all couldn’t sleep with arthritis, it was put to me rather plainly that if I were even to think about a new hip then a great deal of weight would have to be lost. And drink, however jolly, and to my mind it is very jolly, is a great enemy of weight loss. It looked, sadly, as if we were into extremes again.
HOW I GAVE UP DRINK:
AN INSPIRING STORY
I had a great plan. I would drink one day a month. Every single month there would be an Evening with Wine. I would plan this carefully for about thirty days.
And I did. The actual outings themselves were fairly spectacular because they were so eagerly anticipated.
In January I went to an Italian restaurant on my wedding anniversary and after two glasses of wine became helpless and incapable with drink and tears. I sobbed to the whole clientele, and eventually to the kitchen staff who came out to know what was happening, how very, very happy I was. I apparently listed all the shortcomings of the people I hadn’t married. It took three days to get over that.
In February I had one glass of a very full-bodied red wine in South Africa and more or less passed out until I was assisted to the taxi.
In March I unwisely drank some champagne on a flight to Chicago and fought bitterly with the air stewardess who was going to marry a man she didn’t love. I was so depressed by her attitude to things, I brooded too much about it and fell out of bed, breaking my nose and my toe.
In April I was so ashamed of what had happened in March I had no evening at all with wine.
In May it was my birthday so I had an Evening with Wine surrounded by cushions and rugs in case I fell again.
And then in June I had lost the weight and I got the new hip.
Now I know all this sounds very extreme and possibly not at all helpful to normal people. But there just might be a few extreme folk looking at this book who will be helped, which is why I decided to share my inspiring if somewhat overly-dramatic tale.
I have an Evening with Wine once a week now, which isn’t nearly as nice as an Evening with Wine every night. But it’s four times better than once a month.
TEN WONDERFUL THINGS ABOUT
GIVING UP DRINK
1) You feel heroic.
2) Your liver turns nice and pink again.
3) You won’t have to explain. Only the worst kind of bore begs you to ‘have just one’ these days. Mostly, people actually don’t notice if you’re drinking or not. Trust me on this, it surprised me too.
4) You don’t have hangovers.
5) You save money.
6) You remember what happened.
7) You get more work done.
8) You won’t find it nearly as bad as you think. Anticipating a dry evening is much worse than actually having one, and no wine is easier than a little wine. Trust me on this too.
9) You don’t get that that sudden urge to eat everything that’s on the table.
10) You have a load of great help out there if this advice isn’t quite enough for you.
UTTERANCES FROM A HOSPITAL
BED THAT WILL ENSURE YOU GET
NO MORE VISITS
‘I thought you were never going to get here.’
‘Oh, it’s you again, is it?’
‘Well, how do you think I am, stuck in here?’
‘Not more fruit, I’ll turn into an orange at this rate.’
‘I hope you’re keeping the place properly at home.’
‘I’ve read that, you can take it home with you.’
‘They say I’m getting better, but what do they know?’
‘It’s easy for you, you can walk away on your own two good legs.’
‘You’ll never guess what my last visitor brought me …’
‘You can go now if you want to.’
‘You mean you’re going already?’
WHERE THINGS ARE
I used to think the kidneys were somewhere in the knickers area. But they’re not. They are up behind your bra strap, if you are the sex and shape that wears a bra. If not you still know where I mean.
Get a map of arteries. They look like an amazing underground rail system. We might clog them and fur them a bit less if we knew what they look like.
Be courageous and look at a picture of the large intestine and the small one. Why should we come over all silly and squeamish about how bits of us look if we expect medical people to take them in their stride?
Examine a picture of a skeleton and see whether the knee bone is actually connected to the thigh bone, etc. or if it’s only a song.
If a real medical text on all this is too much for you, get a child’s book on the body. The basics are there but presented much more cheerfully.
And why not take a mirror and look into your own orifices? You look into totally unimportant things like other people’s windows, open handbags, shopping trolleys in a supermarket. You won’t tremble so much about an ear, nose, throat or indeed any other aperture, if you have examined it in good health.
THE DEMON SMOKES:
ONE ADDICT’S STORY
If there was an easy way to give up smoking, I feel pretty sure we would have heard of it by now. In the meantime, there is some research to show that reading other people’s stories of renunciation actually paves the way. Here’s mine.
I got the whole way through school and college without smoking. And this was despite growing up in a home where most around me were wheezing and inhaling and gasping and either complaining about the cost of cigarettes if they were old enough to buy them or unravelling butts in ashtrays if they weren’t.
My friends all smoked and they never once congratulated me on my strength. They just said Maeve was useless because she never had five zipped away in the back of a bag like other nicer people did. I had nothing to offer in a crisis and no way of being calmed down myself by others if the crisis was in my court.
And then one fateful day a particularly h
orrible acquaintance inhaled through her slim body right down to her tiny feet and told me I was very brave not to smoke.
Brave?
Yes, apparently. Because if I had been smoking, I wouldn’t have been eating a warm almond bun covered with butter.
I looked around the group. They were frighteningly elegant. They even made smoke rings, some of them. None of them had fingers covered in butter, none of their eyes were looking at the last almond bun on the plate.
We had all been to a film where Humphrey Bogart and Lauren or Ingrid or some other non-almond-bun-eating person had looked just terrific.
A grown-up sensible woman of twenty-two, earning my own living, not a pre-teen racked with insecurity, I can still hear myself saying to the horrible acquaintance that I’d give it a try.
That was in 1962. For the next sixteen years nobody saw me much, because I was behind a thick wall of smoke. I suppose I didn’t eat as many almond buns as I had, but it didn’t really matter since I was hardly visible.
I discovered interesting things, like you could ask a total stranger for a cigarette, which you didn’t normally do for a chocolate biscuit, and you couldn’t really sleep well if there wasn’t a packet beside you.
