Author: Ariadne

Houses are like people. They have facades. What you find on the inside is not necessarily what you see on the outside. I went to the cinema, once, and got lost on my way out. Instead of ending up where I came in, by the brilliantly lit ticket hall and popcorn counter, I found myself in a large, deserted courtyard. It was odd. I’d gone from a packed auditorium, down a long flight of stairs and out into an empty space. Or at least I thought it was empty. Then I noticed a solitary figure, a man, smoking, diagonally across from me on the other side of the yard. Despite being in the centre of town, I felt a long way from the madding crowd. All of a sudden I was in my own movie, a psychological thriller, in which the ground had shifted and I no longer knew where I was or who I was with. One wrong flight of stairs can get you into a whole lot of trouble, or so the strapline of my film ran. I said hello to the man to break the silence. He said hello back, in a mild, sociable manner. The tension broke. I no longer felt I was about to be murdered in an unfortunate twist of fate. I asked the man where we were. He said we were at the back of the Bingo Club. Moments later I was on the high street again, after a strange snaking route via the glittering, hangar like space that is Mecca, adjacent to the cinema, empty but for a cleaner. Luckily, my number wasn’t up.

We don’t often take ourselves seriously, us Britons. It is not in our constitutional make up to expound, ruminatively, on our philosophy of life. If anything, we excel at debunking such efforts, as if to think and take stock with no accompanying note of irony was in itself tantamount to a criminal degree of self-importance. The Meaning of Liff – an anthology of place names in the United Kingdom endowed with humorously fictitious etymologies by its authors Douglas Adams and John Lloyd – sums us up. We’re better at liff than life. Better at stand up than grandstanding. Lovers of wisecracks rather than wisdom.

All of which goes by way of a preamble to my main anecdote, triggered by a conversation with an artist at my printmaking class.

It has been on my mind, lately, artistic endeavour. The question of what makes an artist an artist. And so, at an opportune moment, I asked my printmaking friend, whose work I find both visually appealing and interesting, to explain to me how he’d arrived at his artistic practice. In essence, I asked him for his look on life. He could have told me to bog off. Or he could have assumed a faux gravitas, a mock mantle of pretentiousness, to undercut the otherwise seriousness of his response. After all, it was a serious question. A serious question that demanded a serious answer. In retrospect I might not have raised it quite so lightly. But, to his credit, he more than rose to the challenge. His response was considered, self-aware and thought-provoking. Neither po-faced nor self-debunking. It sounded like something he’d thought about, authentic and original. I more than got my answer, even if he did undercut himself, ever so lightly, at the last minute, by saying: “that’s my spiel, anyway”. Forgivable self-deprecation. He’s a Brit, after all.

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There is an episode in Curb Your Enthusiasm – episode 3, season 8 – in which Larry David cringes as a dinner party guest, a smartly dressed woman with big hair, acknowledges a joke by saying ‘LOL’ out loud. He calls it verbal texting, and it’s a no no in his book.

My 8 and 4 year old sons regularly say LOL, pronounced ‘loll’, and they haven’t even watched the aforementioned episode. They do watch a lot of YouTube, however, and consequently end up sounding much like Beavis and Butt-Head, as in “this playground totally sucks”, or “your butt stinks”.

As a mother, I often find myself both cringing at my sons’ speak and simultaneously berating myself for having become a parody of my own parents. Why can’t they say bottom? What is wrong with un-American English? There are so many perfectly good ways of referring to one’s rear end, after all. Must they say butt?

I can stomach the butts, if the truth be told. It’s OK, just, for ‘sick’ to mean ‘good’. But the transgression that irks Larry David, verbal texting, is a whole new breed of linguistic upset. To say LOL out loud is like impersonating an emoticon at the end of a sentence. It is like saying something funny and then flashing a cheeky semi-colonish wink. It is not cool. Except that it apparently is, in my son’s school playground.

I’m with Larry David , but I suspect that in this particular generational culture clash, my kids will get the last LOL.

The artificial flower industry has been rehabilitated, of late. Plastic stems of all denomination have been uprooted from their vat of kitsch and placed in a meta-vase of chic irony. But I have yet to discover a line of wilting or decaying faux flora. There are no limp cacti, or shrivelling lilies in the boutiques that ply such trade. This, I feel, is an oversight. Cut flowers may be considered uplifting by some, but it is their tendency to die that I find more affecting. Manufacturers might consider introducing a note of decay into their collection, all the more ironic for being rendered permanent…

In the words of Will:

Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud.

Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,

And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.

All men make faults, and even I in this.

Shakespeare, Sonnet 35

A girl with red hair in gold trainers

A green and white 2CV

2 magpies

A man twirling his shopping like a cheerleader with pom poms

A conker falling, and missing the family underneath.

Fennel fronds in a bag, jiggling to their owner’s footfall.

These are the things that stand out from the otherwise impressionistic blur of weekend recreational activities happening around me on the heath.

I surmise from this brief list that I miss a lot. And that the things that I do attend to are either slightly out of the ordinary or have some personal significance.

My eldest boy has red hair

I own a pair of silver shoes

My parents used to drive a 2CV. A prune and custard one.

The cheerleading shopper was slightly out of the ordinary.

Magpies always create confusion in my mind.

I am glad the conker missed me.

Fennel fronds are my friend.

The sight of an old radiator leaning against a brick wall, or a crimson sofa plonked in an alley, sodden with rain, calls for a category of emotion all of its own. A pathos of unwanted possessions. It is hard not to anthropomorphise these inanimate goods, left on the street. I am more likely to feel sorry for them than frustrated by their unlovely existence, blocking my way as I scurry along to the shops. The fact that they have been dumped, removed from their homely context, stirs a strange pity. Poor fan heater. Sad bedstead. Pathetic fridge. They offer intrigue, too, to the landscape of the street, so that it comes as both a relief and a disappointment when something is claimed. No longer there, just a gap where it used to be, like a child’s missing tooth.

My second son, all four years of him, was inconsolable this morning. He’d stumbled downstairs into the kitchen, bleary eyed, to find his magic stick turned, by some kind of sadistic wizardry, into a pencil.

But it’s a pencil! My oldest son said, incriminating sharpener in hand. A pile of efficiently sharpened shavings lay on the bench, mingling with my youngest’s tears. It’s a pencil, love, I said too, less reproachfully than my oldest. That’s what it is. A pencil.

IT’S NOT A PENCIL. IT’S A MAGIC STICK. He replied.

When is a pencil not a pencil?

When it’s a magic stick.

Of course it’s a magic stick.

It can be confusing, navigating the fine distinctions between make believe and real. In our household, for example, Santa Claus is real but the tooth fairy isn’t. That’s just the way it is.

And what about night terrors?

The roll call of ghosts, ghasts, ghouls and zombies that enthral children and adults alike are obviously made up. Of course they are. Not to be believed. But the creatures that populate my children’s nightmares are real enough to inspire terror.

Imaginations need to soar, as surely as gravity brings earthlings down. A wardrobe could house a monster or transport you to Narnia.

A rabbit hole could lead to all kinds of trouble and unexpected delight.

It is no wonder that childrens’ literature is full of such thresholds, leading away from the boringly empirical.

If a pencil was just a pencil, I’d have to eat my words.

One day my son looked at the sky and asked for affirmation. Were they sun clouds?

As a mother, attuned to the ambiguities of motherhood, the sunshine and the rain, the notion of a sun cloud made me smile. It lit and obscured a way forwards in the kind of paradoxical fashion that I like. Yes they are sun clouds. Neither one thing nor another. Ungrammatical. More hopeful than not. Revelatory and confusing, like tears of happiness.

I am a mother and more besides. Mostly, though, a mother.  Generally I wear glasses, but occasionally, when noone’s looking, I take them off and pose for the mirror. Then I’m a siren.

Here I am without glasses in seaweedy green.

On my rock, far out to sea, luring unsuspecting mythical warriors and devouring tuna. Ordinarily, I’m still at sea, but cooking or picking up Lego. And writing about my grandmother. She was a one.