Monday
Some berk has invented “longevity scales”. You step on to them and the tech packed into them by said berk scans 60 biomarkers – including your blood oxygen, heart’s rhythm and pumping efficiency, the distribution of fat and muscle, especially the visceral fat around your abdominal muscles, which is apparently the stuff that’s really out to get you, cellular age – and tells you you’re a goddamn mess.
Not exactly the last part. Your info is fed into an app that compares it all with others your own age, and spits out a heart age and a long-term and short-term health score for what is undoubtedly by this time your quaking and terrified self.
I mean – can you imagine? Instead of just having to face knowing your weight once a week, having to confront death on the daily? The Body Scan 2, as it’s known (I don’t know what happened to Body Scan 1 – maybe it went RoboCop and automatically killed anyone with a BMI over 30), would stand in the corner of your bathroom like a haunting. You would feel its creeping, malevolent presence all the time and eventually be driven mad merely by the thought of the knowledge it could bring.
The makers are waiting for regulators to pass it. Regulators – please, do not.
Tuesday
The 12th day of Christmas. My husband and son have stripped the house of decorations, denuded the tree and taken it to the annually appointed recycling spot. I have done nothing because this year I discovered the existence of the Irish tradition Nollaig na mBan. Translated from the Irish, it means “Women’s Christmas” and in essence gives women the day off in recognition of the fact that they are probably nearly dead of exhaustion after sorting actual Christmas for everyone else.
Traditionally, women went to each other’s homes to sit and chat, eat the last of the Christmas cake and generally restore themselves while the men and boys took care of things at home – and cooked a goose for the family evening meal. The practice had been dying out but then the hospitality industry realised what an opportunity they were missing out on, the marketing industry went to work, and now special events for women are plentiful and the bars throng with female guests eager to celebrate their day. I don’t know if geese are still being roasted in their honour, but they should be. Partly because I love women, mostly because I hate geese.
Anyway, in honour of the Mangan ancestry, I intend to follow this practice every year from now on and advise anyone who discovered – possibly in the wake of Brexit when we all scrambled for alternative passports – any touch of Irishness in their family history to do likewise. If we can’t smash the patriarchy, let’s at least take our leave of it where we can.
Wednesday
Speaking of passports – George Clooney has left us. No, not like that, God no, I would be in full Victorian mourning were he to have – oh, whisper it only! – passed. I mean he and Amal have taken French citizenship. We had our chance 10 years ago, when they relocated to Oxfordshire, but alas it was not to be. We couldn’t hold them. As is so often the way, Gallic charms won out over our honest, simple ways.
There is no more to say. Simple heartbreak is what it is. But deserted though we may be, we must wish them well. Drink your wines, George. Enjoy the stricter French privacy laws. Revel in the beauty of your vast estate in rural Provence. Just remember us sometimes, will you? Fondly? We’ll never forget what we had.
Thursday
My friend’s baby is due in three days’ time. She is completely calm. I am beside myself. She’s going to have a baby. I feel she hasn’t grasped the gravity of the situation. “Something that is currently not born is going to be born,” I want to say to her. “What is currently on the inside is soon going to be on the outside. Isn’t that unbelievable? Isn’t that amazing?” I can’t, of course, say anything like that because I would sound like a loon and I want her to let me see this baby afterwards, not ban me from the house for ever. But I’m right. It’s all incredible.
I’m also resisting the temptation of church. I have no religious faith whatsoever but I still want to fling myself on my knees and pray for a safe delivery and for blessings to rain down on mother and child. It looks like an Irish Catholic ancestry has more ways of manifesting than I thought.
Friday
It’s been a long week. On Monday, seized with the optimism that the advent of a new year inescapably brings (humans! Just meat puppets in thrall to just a few basic instincts and primitive responses!) I decided to cook a nice meal for my stupid family. It was to include potatoes dauphinoise. A few minutes into prepping I sliced half the ball of my thumb off with the mandolin.
It is remarkable what a difference missing half an inch of flesh can make to one’s life. I can’t touch-type (I’m pecking this out with two fingers, like a chicken searching for seed). I can’t hand write at all. I can’t unscrew lids, including that of my morning coffee. Do you know what the three things are that are necessary for my and by extension this household’s survival? Yes, those.
Plus there’s all the faff of keeping it clean and dressed, dry while showering and blahblahblah. I couldn’t be more furious with myself or the stupidity of the meat puppet body (though I do thank the minds that invented the nonadhesive dressing, because I had to put cotton wool on at first and the next day’s removal was … memorable). Still, it’s knocked that optimism into touch and restored me to normal levels, which is to say, none. And now I can truly face the year, with the brutal honesty, courage and low expectations it needs.
