Monday
A kabillion-bedroom 17th-century manor house in Yorkshire – with a connection to Charlotte Brontë, no less! – set in 1 hectare of grounds has gone on sale for £1.15m, which means it is time to send my Utopian Living email again. This goes to a select group of friends with whom I share the same dream: to live in a house so big that we need never leave.
I don’t mean in the sense of “never have to move again”, I mean that we literally never have to leave. The real dream is to live in such a house separately but, property prices being what they are, even dreams have to be attenuated. So, we pool our money and buy a super-large house, so that we live together – but happily.
Food will be delivered, there will be room inside for a library, maybe two, a bedroom and sitting room each, a handful of kitchens and dining rooms – cooking and eating being the only two activities in life that are sometimes better in company (yes, the only two; I said what I said). All pets welcome. Gardeners can garden, birdwatchers can birdwatch, and in the unlikely event that any of us gets into exercising they can do that too out on our rolling acres. “Welcome to Introverts’ Manor,” the gates will say, and underneath: “Except, of course, you’re not.”
Tuesday
Shrove Tuesday, the last day before the Lenten fast begins. This year, along with most of us, I am giving up hope – and my annual display of mothering. For it is Pancake Day, and I do pancakes. I make batter and I provide pancakes to the child for breakfast, lunch and – should he still want them, which he usually does, whether out of genuine desire for the foodstuff or for the maternal affection and esteem it represents I do not know – dinner. Savoury (any combination of ham, cheese, egg, beans available), followed by sweet (lemon and sugar, honey, jam, not in combination. Come on now, child, behave) all flipped in proper fashion by my own fair – and, frankly, not untalented – hand.
I hate cooking; I’m a terrible mother. But one day a year – more so than Christmas, where I turn into a rage-filled beast staggering under the weight of expectations and the stress of ever-shifting arrangements – I overcome myself and do right by the boy. I do feel shriven.
Wednesday
The Royal Horticultural Society is urging people to check for rare pink daffodils.
Two points: the first is that these daffodils, as accompanying pictures in the papers show, are not pink. Not as you or I think of it. Not pink like a normal daffodil is yellow. Not a pink that would have had Wordsworth desperately trying to find rhymes for “bubblegum” or “strawberry amoxycillin”. The Mrs R O Backhouse cultivar has delicate pink tint to its trumpet, and that’s your lot.
The second point is: check where? Much as I love the idea that I have a garden so large that it might contain an enclave full of rare flowers that I had completely forgotten about (I mean, I will soon, hopefully, depending on the replies I get back to Monday’s email), or even one big enough to contain something other than a stamp-sized scrap of lawn and a campanula begging to be put out of its misery, I do not. Were I to venture beyond, I would have to hope that Mrs R O Backhouse raised her original blooms to thrive on dog crap, gobs of phlegm and a pervasive sense of the imminent breakdown of society. Which she probably didn’t.
But for those who live differently, may the sight of sweetly tinged trumpets nodding and dancing in the non-shit-scented breeze be added to your overflowing cups of happiness. Send me a photo. And money.
Thursday
I took the train to Oxford today, to go for lunch with a friend and then to enjoy a restorative hour or two (restorative in the general sense, not specifically in relation to having lunch with a friend – that was great) in the Norrington Room in – or, technically, under – Blackwell’s bookshop.
I only discovered it on my last visit there a couple of years ago. I can’t believe I hadn’t known about it before. All bookworms should be handed its address – I envisage gilded lettering on a thick card drawn with bated breath from a shining white envelope – on their 11th birthday, along with enough free rail tickets to get them up there once a month until they start work.
It opened in 1966 and used to be in Guinness World Records as the largest room selling books. I don’t know what has superseded it, but I suspect it cannot match the Norrington Room for beauty, peace, or all-round sensory delight. And that’s before you start perusing the actual books. There are an estimated 150,000 on about two and a half miles of shelving.
Go. Go. It’s like a spa day for nerds. You need this.
Friday
I have not yet seen Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, starring Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Margot Robbie as Catherine – partly because I’m having too much fun reading the reviews, partly because I am still traumatised by having to read the thing for GCSE.
It was nothing but feelings! Mad, made up feelings, being had in spades by everyone – except possibly Edgar Linton, which I suppose was part of the problem – as far as the eye could see, which, over moorlands, is FAR. They all had huge houses and acres of space (I am beginning to spot a theme in this diary – my apologies, I do not plan these things) and could have lived so peacefully, but instead they ruined their lives by filling it with noise and nonsense. Berks.
Years later, I found the antidote – Anne Brontë. Agnes Grey is a child-hater’s manifesto, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a masterpiece, pulsing and seething with repressed fury (repressed, Emily, repressed), and Anne is welcome at Introverts’ Manor anytime.
