Monday
What’s that? I have a particular glow about me, you say? A profound serenity emanating from every pore? An unprecedentedly content expression replacing my customarily surly mien? Why, thank you, and yes I do indeed. For I have just come back from fulfilling my greatest lifetime ambition: spending a week at Gladstone’s Library. This is, really, just as it sounds. Prime Minister William Gladstone’s book collection is housed in a beautiful Victorian building in Flintshire, north Wales, that looks just as you would want it to look, inside and out. It has a residential wing full of gorgeously spartan yet gorgeously comfortable bedrooms, which means you can stay there, knuckle down each day in one of the oak-panelled nooks and crannies and – say – redraft in a week the goddamn book that has been giving you stick for the past six months. For example. Or, you could just go and read and walk round north Wales and enjoy yourself.
I spoke to three people – just briefly – all week. It was introverts’ heaven. The only problem is, now that I have fulfilled said greatest lifetime ambition what do I fill the remaining years with? And why is everything so noisy? Why are all these people talking to me?
Tuesday
No sooner do I step beyond the hallowed portals of Gladstone’s Library, however, than the modern world in all its perfect awfulness breaks over me again. A message arrives from a friend: “Do you know John Lewis has started selling vibrators now?” Only a very expensive pre-booked train ticket stopped me from turning on my heel and marching straight back and throwing myself on the mercy of the warden. I could work for food and board, I reasoned. I could at least put off the evil day for another week or so.
But no. I set my face towards the station and Gomorrah and tried to come to terms with this even more depraved new world. Because, I mean, really? Is nowhere safe? Are we to have no tiny sanctuary left where we can think about things other than our vaginas and all the associated fuss that goes with them? By the time you get to John Lewis age, are you not allowed just to enjoy admiring a cushion or choosing a frame without being ambushed by what I decisively call All That.
The fact that All That is now only being sold online (John Lewis with-and-without-partners apparently wished the introduction to be “discreet”) is neither here nor there. They are already here and there, and now that this last bastion has fallen, they will soon be everywhere.
Wednesday
Today is Valentine’s Day. I hope you’ve been to Peter Jones for chocolates and a vibrator! Or maybe you went in the other direction and decided to ignore all the emetic nonsense entirely. Or maybe you went one worse (or possibly better – discuss, animatedly while a repeat of Brooklyn Nine-Nine plays in the background this evening) like my husband and I did and didn’t realise it was happening at all. We have successfully blinded ourselves to the weeks and months of gathering merchandise in the shops, online ads served up to us, special offers emailed from hotels we once stayed in, restaurants we once ate in and all the plethoric rest of it.
We had a perfectly pleasant day, of course. In relationships, it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you are on the same page.
Thursday
Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean have announced that they will perform their Boléro dance for the last time next year, before retiring after 50 years of skating together. Children, if you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, hie ye to YouTube or wherever ye usually hie yeselves these days and type in “1984 Sarajevo Ravel Torvill Dean” and watch the pair win that year’s Winter Olympics.
They were perfect, you see. It was a perfect dance. It was a beautiful thing. All the more beautiful, we thought then, for being ephemeral – though now of course you are watching it 40 years on and it is one of the most famous pieces of footage in ice-skating and possibly television history. Perhaps we have lost something by that, perhaps we have gained something – the jury’s still out. But watch them next year, won’t you, for their last time. Once 2025 rolls around it might just be the last good thing we ever see.
Friday
The Notre Dame scaffolding is coming down. A mere five years after the fire that devastated the world’s most famous and arguably most magnificent cathedral, the top of the spire is emerging restored. What a triumph! What a moment of national unity, pride and celebration, that the combination of modern political will and ancient practical skill and expertise, that the synchronisation of such innumerable efforts large and small necessary to bring about such a smooth and rapid achievement, our Gallic cousins must be enjoying right now.
But will they ever know the true satisfaction of finding their way home through a welter of train cancellations and re-routings amid a dearth of information, or getting a GP appointment within seven weeks of falling acutely ill, or reaching a human voice at the other end of a phone line belonging to a gouging utility company and then, mere days later, one attached to a human who knows what they’re talking about? I suspect they will not. Rule, Britannia!
Digested pictures of the week …
