Second-guessing the medics – updated

1990 - I’m having an ultrasound on my right eye at Moorfields. I am anxious, but not overly so because the symptoms I’ve been experiencing are the same as those I had seven years ago and I’m expecting ultimately to be told the problem will go away and to get used to the weird green patch in my field of vision because they can’t do anything for me. The ultrasound operator is very talkative and we chat happily for a few minutes while she strokes my eyelid this way and that with the probe. And then she goes silent. I subliminally register the change, but shrug it off. I know she’s seen something because, in the course of the angiogram I had a couple of weeks earlier, the doctor called out to a colleague to ‘come and see this lesion!’ It turns out I have a retinal melanoma.

1999 - I’m having a mammogram arranged by the consultant I saw the previous evening. I’ve never had a mammogram before and it’s agony because I have small breasts and they don’t fit between the plates. The technician struggles with my body, gets her hand squashed, one of my breasts even pops out of the machine halfway through a picture being taken. It is a thoroughly humiliating – and excruciating – experience. Then it’s over and I’m asked to sit on a chair and wait. I sit there, breathless, holding my injured chest, angry that I have to be put through this torture when the consultant more or less said it was some benign problem. The technician comes out of the other room and says she should be having her lunch break now and has to go and fetch her colleague. She comes back with someone else who, when she’s seen the pictures, says that some of them are not clear because the other technician is fairly new and didn’t operate the machine correctly. I get a bit distressed, and even angrier, but do not think there is anything sinister. The experts at the Marsden deliver their verdict the next day: cancer in both breasts – except they were wrong.

2009 – A few weeks ago, I’m lying perfectly still in an MRI room (there is something incongruous in having such a sophisticated test in the basement of an 18th-century house in Harley Street, but I can’t see the humour of it at this point); my head is squashed between two chunks of foam and the machine is making a deafening sound. Still, I’m OK: I’m not in a tube and not feeling claustrophobic – much. The technician told me before the scan started that it would take approximately 15 minutes, but I’ve already heard her say, ‘the next one is eight minutes’, then, ‘the next one is four minutes’ several times and I know it’s taking a lot longer than it should. And then it dawns on me that they are not looking for damage to my cervical vertebrae, but for a tumour on my spinal cord. When it’s over – 45 minutes later – and I query the time it took, she says, ‘We took some extra shots because you’ve had a melanoma,’ and I know I guessed right. Results: no tumour or nerve compression.

The moral of the story? You can’t rely on your instinct when it comes to such tests – just as well sometimes.

Where we at, then? (You can tell I’ve been watching The Wire, can’t you?) Well, no one knows why I’m having the symptoms that have been bothering me, but they’ve discovered I have osteoporosis in my spine (the MRI didn’t show that, by the way), which may or may not be responsible. Some big frightening words have been mentioned, but they don’t bear thinking – or talking – about right now so it’s a question of waiting and seeing if some calcium will do the trick.

Update (18/10/09): So, after waiting over two hours at the hospital and being weighed in public (ugh!), I was told (thanks to a clever computer program that any GP could probably master and thus save everyone a lot of time) that I wasn’t suffering from osteoporosis after all. That is, I do have osteoporosis, but no more than any other woman of my age and I don't require any specific treatment. Just need to be careful not to fall over too often.

That was the good news; the bad news is that osteoporosis is obviously not the cause of my symptoms… I wish it were.

Another Great British Summer…

…another blight on my life.

For over 20 years, I could never enjoy the sunshine* because summer was my busiest period (all the other French translators being away for ‘les grandes vacances’), then, when that work dried out and I was free again, the gods decided I should be preoccupied with health scares instead.

So here I find myself once again ‘under the doctor’, in front of X-ray machines and soon inside an MRI thingamabob, for symptoms that are making my life a misery. I used to be a hypochondriac, but not any longer. That’s what chronic ill health does for you.

Slapping the gods!

* of course, since I live in London and recently bought a new pair of sunglasses, the sunshine is most often replaced by torrential downpours, which, at least, are in tune with my mood. Trust me on this: going for tests and receiving bad news is worse when the sky is blue and the sun is shining.

It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky. (Muriel Spark)

Shameless

I’ve already mentioned my erstwhile friend Diana, who sublet her Notting Hill Gate flat to me when I moved to London in 1979 (Small pleasures from small favours). For the first six months, the flat was still in her name and so were all the utility bills: I gave her the money and she paid them – or so I thought until, one day, I found I couldn’t use the phone because the line had been cut off. Art-loving Diana had bought some pieces in a Stratford gallery. I was livid: that money didn’t belong to her; it didn’t even belong to me; it belonged to British Telecom.

I was reminded of her behaviour earlier today when I read a comment on a blog in which the commenter boasted she was thousands of dollars in debt, but still managed to save for luxuries – to make herself feel better, she said. You cannot save money that doesn’t belong to you. You have no business buying luxuries when you owe money to others. You’re not ‘worth it’! You don’t ‘deserve it’! You are being irresponsible and it’s partly because of people like you that people like me, who always strive to live within their means, are in trouble. I am losing money daily because interest rates are now practically nil in this country, lower than inflation anyway. Forget luxuries, I need that money to live on. For the sake of my health, I’m trying not to get het up about things I can’t do anything about, but that made my blood boil.

Slapping selfish, irresponsible people! There are so many of them.

My Brilliant Career

I’ve been digitizing old cassette tapes and feel I cannot deprive my readers of this treat one moment longer.

I was big in Mali and Niger in the early 90s. Easy to see why, innit?

Time and the Conways at the National

Why, oh why?

Slap!

That famous British humour

Just back from my yearly ‘book bath’ at Earl’s Court. Exhausted, but happy: the future of books is not in danger and the quality seems higher than usual – certainly higher than last year. Fewer rubbishy ‘comic’ stocking fillers; fewer patronising ‘lifestyle’ books; more serious fiction.

Anyway, this was next to my seat on the bus back:

Pity it wasn’t rush hour yet.

The column to end all columns

I used to read quite a few blogs; I don’t any longer. Over the past year or so, I have gradually stopped reading blogs about topics I don’t really care about; blogs that don’t make sense however hard you try to fathom what they’re striving to say; blogs whose authors use the pronoun ‘we’ to refer to themselves; blogs written in painfully bad English; blogs written by admirers of Marie-Antoinette and/or the Romanovs; blogs written by hypocrites; blogs written by sycophants, and blogs whose authors are hypocritical sycophants.

Instead of blogs I’ve been reading newspaper columns online. What is the difference between a blogger and a columnist? The former does it for free; the latter gets paid? Nope: the newspaper columnist has an editor (no one would let me ramble on the way I do in print and that’s as it should be). I am getting fonder of edited stuff by the minute.

The majority of the columns I read are interesting and occasionally perceptive, but none has been more strikingly so as this one, by the delightfully grumpy Giles Coren. It was published in the Times, on 22 November 2008. It refers to events that happened a few months ago, but the main message is even more relevant now, as the recession deepens. I haven’t agreed so much with anything anyone has written for a long time, but then, to me, ‘middlebrow’ is a dirty word.

We need high culture when the index is low

Forget Siberian flosspots. When we’re living on boiled squirrel we should turn to Tolstoy, not trash.

I don't want to give you the wrong impression - and make you think that I give a gibbon's blue goolies whether or not John Sergeant and some horse-thighed Croatian belly-dancer were robbed of a chance to win that game show – but there was one vein of comment in the quagmire of cack spouted about it over the past week that did, briefly, engage me.

And that came when the pro-Sergeant “lobby” appeared to marshal itself around the rallying cry that “the judges should lighten up, it's just a bit of fun, we need distracting from the grimness of the recession”. And I just absolutely do not agree. I cannot see the link. I do not grasp why global economic meltdown should necessarily create an appetite for dumb vanity and shallowness.

Dancing is a moronic activity at the best of times, and when turned into yet another opportunity for celebrity exhibitionism and flawed voting schemes that give democracy a bad name (among a viewing public too lazy to turn out in any significant numbers for elections that really might make a difference to their lives) it appears more imbecilic still. Fiddling while Rome burns.

If a man has lost his job, if his children have holes in their shoes and he is living off soup made from the ninth boiling of a squirrel, then how dare we imagine that his lot will be eased by the sight of a retired journalist waddling round a dance floor with some thunder-bummed Siberian flosspot? (or Slovenian or Russian or whatever she is – I've not seen the show but I've seen the photos in the paper, and nobody colours their hair and body like that except to compensate for a childhood lived under communism).

The media, perhaps understandably, have turned very monochromatic of late. It has only two notes: mad, screaming pessimism about money on the one hand, and brutish, wailing enthusiasm for the lowest of low culture on the other. As if a lack of perspective at both ends in some way created balance.

This week, for example, the papers, when briefly turning their attention away from Strictly Come Dancing, have been thoroughly boob-struck, wrapping stories about the “moral failure” of banks around photographs of Nigella with her shmams out, and running front-page headlines about families losing their homes alongside I'm a Celebrity... video-grabs of big, wet, plastic norks in the jungle.

I do not want to appear hypocritical here, for I am as easily distracted by a big artificial rack on a dim-witted WAG as the next man, but it's not a “new Jordan” that this country should be looking for just at this precise moment, it's a new outlook on life. A far more serious and grown-up one.

And don't look up from your copy of the No1 bestseller Look Who It Is! - My Story by Alan Carr and give me “escapism”. Escapism is an illusion. Escapism is what has got us into this mess. Buying on credit, from the tiddliest MasterCard lunch you couldn't really afford to billion-dollar leveraged buyouts, is, when you boil it down, just escapism - avoiding any sort of engagement with objective reality and doing something just because it feels good at the time. Like a child might do. Or a monkey.

This is not the time to waste a week of your life with Alan Carr's autobiography (or Dawn French's or Paul O'Grady's or Richard Madeley's) and think it counts as reading a book. Because it doesn't. You have borrowed unwisely. You have taken a week off your life that you will not get back at the end, and when you shut whichever compendium of venal drivel you chose, you will still owe thousands on your worthless home and be in no less danger of losing your job.

If you had at least read a bit of Tolstoy, you might have expanded your mind a little. If, instead of watching all those reality shows, you had learnt Japanese, you would be in a better position to remain in work. And if, rather than calling radio phone-ins to say that Len Goodman is a spoilsport, you had learnt the French horn, you would, if nothing else, be able to play your children a bit of Mozart while they sit shivering round the last candle in the house.

I cannot tell you how furious I am with these people who seem to think they should be given back the money they spent on voting for John Sergeant. Anyone to whom a single pound represents a significant, useful quantity of money, and who spent it on a celebrity game show vote, should have his or her assets frozen immediately – under the counter-terrorism laws if need be. Their children should be taken into care. And they should have their credit cards melted and moulded into a stick with which they should be flogged until they bleed.

How in the world can people be angry about a game show? How can a country in 2008 (with the National Intelligence Council in America predicting 20 impending years of environmental tragedy and nuclear war) truly divide into two camps on the question of whether or not the dancing, per se, is the lifeblood of Strictly Come Dancing? It's not funny. It's not even wholesome. It is rancid. If the people who have got so angry about the “injustice” of John's departure had any balls, they would be out lynching bankers.

The point is that all these distractions and escape channels were created not by recession but, quite the opposite, by economic boom.

It was the fat years that made us lazy, dumbed us down, replaced great television with a series of reality shows and killed literature to make room for celebrity whingeing and kiddy books repackaged for adults. It is no coincidence that the publication cycle of Harry Potter, from the first book to the seventh, marked almost exactly the years of economic growth. It is a fat, lazy race that turns its brain off as a prelude to cultural engagement.

Fat, like the seven fat kine in Pharaoh's dream, and the seven lean kine who came after and ate them up. We laid nothing by in the fat years except shlock and dross, and now we turn to it and find that it offers us nothing. Shopping as leisure activity, for heaven's sake. Bluewater, Lakeside, Westfield. The descent into Gomorrah is all-encompassing and headlong. We have not just lost our money, we have lost everything.

Sensible investment designed to repay over the long term would not have screwed everything up the way wild speculation for short-term profit has done.

And the same is true in the culture. Things are going to be pretty crappy now for quite some time, and the short-term fixes of reality television and celebrity biography are not going to help. It would be a great thing if bad times meant we found room for proper books again, and slightly less poisonous popular culture. In the long run, we will end up feeling better if we moderate the gloom of a life with less money by focusing on higher things, not lower ones.

Off to read a ‘proper’ book!

Jamais deux sans trois

You wouldn’t expect the Swedes to trick people, would you? They are so straightforward, so no-nonsense, so blond, so healthy, so attractive… but I digress… I usually visit IKEA once a year: it’s tiring and these days there isn’t much I need to buy for my little flat so going there more often would be tedious and unnecessary.

My last ‘expotition’ to the nearest store yielded a very nice shopping trolley at a reduced price of £11, and a white mug-like container with a handle that looked so strange I could not not buy it. I will ask one of my two Swedish friends to tell me what it’s used for. I fully expect her to laugh and say, ‘We don’t use that kind of contraption for anything; it must be Finnish.’ Anyway, on my return home, I checked the receipt and realized to my dismay that I had been charged the full price for the trolley instead of the discounted one. So, two days later, back I went to that huge warehouse, but before going to the customer service desk and complaining about the mistake I thought I should take a photograph of the label showing the price of the trolley in case they didn’t believe me. All the trolleys had been sold, but the label referring to them was still there. That’s when I noticed that I had been charged the correct price: £11 was the Family price. What Family price? Never heard of a Family price.

Easy to miss on the label, non?

I dislike being tricked in this way. I really do. In an attempt to relieve the frustration and resentment I felt, I bought a small table specially designed for laptop users. I occasionally have mine on my lap, but it gets very hot very quickly. Just like the trolley, the table had to be put together, but unlike the trolley, which had been very easy, it couldn’t be built because a main part was missing. So, the next day, I traipsed to IKEA for the third time and returned the stupid, incomplete table. The guy at the desk didn’t even want to hear the reason why I was returning it. As I was leaving, I noticed a large counter in the waiting area, where buyers are encouraged to ‘check’ that the boxes containing the items they have bought are not missing an essential ‘bit’. The very existence of that table means that masses of ‘bits’ are absent from masses of boxes; that it’s a common occurrence.

What about making sure everything is there in the first place, eh? Slap!


PS. At least I won’t have to go back to IKEA for another two years now.

A failed cure

Last year I wrote about the reader’s block that had afflicted me for a long time and how I had managed to conquer it (see The book freeze). It worked very well for a while and then I had a relapse: all I could read was stuff on the Net instead of all those wonderful books that were piling up on my bedside table. I got quite distressed about it again.

And then, one afternoon, in Poundland – one of my favourite shops in the whole wide world, where you can satisfy an urge to spend money so easily and so cheaply, I found several interesting audio books (24 hours of entertainment for £4 – an incredible bargain):

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, read by Kerry Shale
Brick Lane by Monica Ali, read by Ayesha Dharker
Toast by Nigel Slater, read by the author
Orson Welles by Simon Callow, read by the author

My treatment started well: the Jonathan Safran Foer was pure bliss. The novel is marvellous and I cannot tell you how wonderfully Kerry Shale reads it. Brick Lane was also a delight. At last I could understand what all the fuss was about: it’s a sensitive, beautifully written novel, read with feeling.

I was elated: in a very short space of time I had managed to ‘read’ two great novels. I stuck the first tape of Toast in my player and prepared to be enthralled. But as soon as I heard the first sentence read out in a weedy, reedy, thin, wet voice by Nigel Slater I knew I wouldn’t enjoy that particular ride. It was torture, but I suffer from ‘Completion Syndrome’ when it comes to audio books too so I had to listen to all six hours of it. I love Nigel Slater’s recipes, but the food he talks about in Toast (the story of his childhood and youth through the foodstuffs he ate) is stodgy and unpalatable and so is the book. Still, OK, I thought, the reason must be partly because it wasn’t read by an actor. Surely the Orson Welles biography would be fascinating: Simon Callow is a talented writer and he was bound to read his own book with all the passion he put into his acting. Alas! I am halfway through it and not enjoying it much. This time I am bothered by Callow’s American accent. It is the most atrocious I have ever heard. Think Anthony LaPaglia’s English accent in Frasier. It makes me want to scream, which is not good since I mostly listen to the tapes at night. I don’t know how I’m going to bear it for another four hours.

After that, it will be back to printed books, I think, because at least I won’t have to put up with silly voices.

Slapping the self-indulgent authors who think they can read their own works and the editors/publishers who can’t say no to them!

A neat trick

The media don’t report the rocket attacks the Israelis are subjected to on a daily basis so everyone can express outrage when, at the end of their tether, the real victims decide to respond in kind.

For the past few days, I’ve listened to the news with trepidation and heard the now- familiar biased wringing of hands, as it were, but I was pleasantly surprised by a journalist’s blog. The post itself was the usual hypocritical waffle about ‘disproportionate response’, but a lot of the comments were taking the author to task about it, and that was unexpected and rather heartening.

Update (1/01/09): Watch this.

Happy Hanukkah!

No, but, really!

I just think that a PC from a reputable maker, in the hands of someone who’s been using a computer for nearly 20 years and who knows what she’s doing, should last longer than 16 months and not poof off without warning.

I’ve been a nasty shade of livid for the past few days.

Slap!

Update (1/12/08): if you want to retain your sanity, do not buy a Hewlett-Packard computer, and do not buy it from John Lewis.

The stress of it all!

Some Health Hero!

I was reading the Boots magazine the other day and came upon this – about their pharmacists:

High Street Health Heroes
[They can] advise on vitamins and supplements:
we can assess your age and lifestyle and advise on what nutrients you might be missing from your diet.

Ha! They can advise me on what vitamins to take, can they? So why is it that when I asked a Boots pharmacist about a good, easily digestible brand of vitamin C (because I have IBS and can’t have things like citric acid, an ingredient of effervescent tablets, which are supposed to be the easiest to assimilate), he looked like he hadn’t understood the question, hesitated and then mumbled, ‘But citric acid is vitamin C!’ I answered, ‘With respect, vitamin C is ascorbic acid, not citric acid.’

Actually, I didn’t say ‘with respect’ because I had instantly lost all respect for him. I told him to look it up, and walked away. His two assistants had witnessed the encounter and I expect they didn’t have much respect for him either after that.

Slap!

Mixed messages

A couple of weeks ago, the largest shopping centre in Europe opened within spitting distance of where I live. If my flat was higher up I could probably even see it from my desk.

It's called Westfield. Gorgeous, innit?

Except... I’m not fond of shopping malls: I find them claustrophobic, even when they’re very spacious. I need to breathe a bit of fresh air from time to time. If I can’t, I lose the will to live after a while. They’re not kidding when they say Westfield is the largest shopping centre in Europe. It’s absolutely ginormous: I’ve been there three times since Day 1 (when I took the pics above) and still can’t quite find my way around.

It should be ‘a good thing’, though. We’re all hoping it will signal the start of the long-promised regeneration of Shepherds Bush. Not before time, we thought, when we first heard about it. The ‘gentrification’ was going to happen, years ago, when it was announced that Kate Moss would be buying a flat in the area; she never did. Then, Nigella, who’d been living around here for years, dissed the place after John Diamond died and soon moved to a much posher address with her millionaire husband. So let’s hope it won’t be a case of jamais deux sans trois. But it might, and Shepherds Bush may never become a new Notting Hill Gate since hardly any residents will have the money to avail themselves of what Westfield has to offer. The only customers will be those foreign multi-billionaires to whom we owe the fact that London is the most expensive city in Europe, if not the world. At the moment, business in Westfield is booming, apparently, but what about after the holidays, when all the fairy lights have been switched off and everyone has received their credit card bills? What then? Some of the stores will survive, but others are bound to close down (I think I can already tell which ones). Will this bright and shiny temple of consumption turn into another desolate warehouse, full of mobile-phone stores and charity shops?

Curiously, Westfield has revived my fondness towards Hammersmith, which has been my playground until now. It has a wealth of fun, cheap stores, like Primark and Tiger and the newly opened Poundland and, of course, TK Maxx, where I can get items of clothing I couldn’t afford otherwise. I can have fun in Hammersmith: I can spend the odd pound without feeling guilty. Westfield is for ‘serious’ shopping. Although it will be very nice not to have to traipse to the West End if I want to visit Debenhams or House of Fraser or a large branch of M&S, I predict I will mostly come back empty-handed and rather frustrated from my trips to Westfield.

I will just have to resist going there and instead stay at home and make preserves and mend my tights using my hair, as India K probably advocates in her latest book on thrift. I am so sick and tired... of clichés... no, of wealthy people giving me advice on how to live frugally. I could hardly be more frugal than I am already. I gather there are adults out there who’ve only lived in a time of boom and who would welcome some tips, but someone who wrote a bestseller entirely devoted to shopping – and who will be raking in the royalties for this book too – is in no position to tell them anything about not spending money. Or doesn’t credibility matter any longer?

Oh, and one more thing: what is missing in Westfield – and that will sadden some of my readers – is a posh perfume shop. There isn’t a single ‘niche’ fragrance to be had – nothing but so-called department-store stuff. There is a branch of Beauty Base (the Queensway perfumery), but it doesn’t even sell the Serge Lutens scents it used to stock a few years ago. Actually, talking of Beauty Base, the boss should have a word with some of his employees and tell them not to antagonise customers by using words like ‘You’re not allowed to...’, etc. Considering Beauty Base sells miniatures clearly marked NOT FOR SALE, I don’t think it has a leg to stand on when it comes to things not being allowed, do you?

Slap!

I’ve been tagged again!

And this is a fun and easy assignment from Trina at My Life My Words My Mind : ‘Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 56. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal/blog along with these instructions. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST. Tag five other people to do the same.’

Now, let’s see: the book that is always closest to me is my trusty Collins Robert Comprehensive English > French Dictionary. It’s very big and a great source of comfort: I know that should my memory fail (as it does more and more often these days) I can always rely on it to get me out of a tight spot.

Page 56 bang / bar
* to bang one’s fist on the table taper du poing sur la table
* to bang one’s head against or on something se cogner la tête contre ou à qch
* (fig) you’re banging your head against a brick wall when you argue with him autant cracher en l’air que d’essayer de discuter avec lui
* to bang the door (faire) claquer la porte
* he banged the window shut il a claqué la fenêtre

Fascinating, isn’t it? If you want to know what comes next, you’ll have to buy your own copy of the book: there’s another 1284 pages like that.

I’d like to tag:
GSE at Really Quite Useful
Brian at Brian Sibley: the blog
Bowleserised at Bowleserised

The Monday tip

You already know how much I hate hanging participles, but there is something I abhor even more: the absence of a comma before or after a vocative. The ‘before’ comma is essential. If you don’t put a comma in, you get something like this:

Fanny: ‘Hey, I heard Madonna was in the area today.’
Marius: ‘Oh, did you see her Fanny?’

Oedipus interruptus

So, the house lights go down, Ralph Fiennes, as Oedipus, enters, comes downstage and says, ‘Citizens of Thebes, I...’ and the mobile of the woman sitting two seats down from me goes off. She reaches into her bag and shuts it up, then tries to turn it off completely, thereby making it ring again!

To his credit, Mr Fiennes did not walk off in disgust. I might have.

The companion of the woman in question arrived fifteen minutes after the start of the play and plonked herself in the empty seat next to me: she obviously was the person who had been calling at such an inopportune moment. I saw them both later at the Press Night party: they were with one of the actors in the Chorus. People who are somehow involved in the theatre can be the worst audience.

Slap!

Across the Pond

The more I get to know Americans, the less they fit the image I used to have of them. Surprising as it may seem, they are not all like characters in Woody Allen films. Some attitudes I have encountered recently on the (mostly) American message board I visit have puzzled me quite a lot.

Question: if you see two strangers arguing in the street, do you go up to them and interfere in their argument? If one of them insults the other and then, realizing they overreacted, apologizes, do you – before the insultee has time to respond – tell the insulter there is no need to apologize? Or do you tell them they are forgiven for what they said? I don’t think so. Yet that kind of thing happens all the time in the virtual world.

What on earth makes a person think they can exonerate or forgive someone on behalf of someone else? As Primo Levi said, in a much more serious context of course, only the victim can forgive the person who did them harm. And, in the case of murder, the culprit cannot be absolved by anyone, not ever.

Anyway, if I’m having an argument with someone (yes, it does happen), I do not want anyone to come to my rescue – I am old enough and articulate enough to defend myself – and, if I’ve been abused, I do not want some meddler turning up and telling my ‘adversary’ that all is well. It’s up to me to say so, not them.

And then there’s the idea that you can be proud of someone even though you aren’t their spouse or a member of their family or directly involved in their achievement – like their teacher or trainer, for instance. (On that forum, the ‘achievement’ in question is very often spending an enormous amount of money on a luxury product, not discovering a cure for cancer, and I will never understand how that warrants congratulations, anyway, especially these days.) I thought it might just be me, so I asked around and no one can understand why one should say ‘I’m proud of you’ to a stranger either, so it must be a US thang, like dressing up one’s pet or newborn baby for Halloween, using buttermilk and canned soup in everything, allowing a creationist anywhere near the White House, and owning a gun.

I have a new blog

It’s called Les Planches d’Outre-Manche and it’s here. It’s about the theatre (which is my abiding passion – apart from collecting McDonald’s ‘The Dog’ – er – dogs).

I will be posting fairly erratically (as opposed to like clockwork on this one, LOL!), but I hope you will find it interesting.

Laughing matter?

Do you like double acts? I do. French and Saunders, Fry and Laurie, Les Frères Ennemis (in France), Laurel and Hardy, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, Morecambe and Wise – they all make me laugh like a drain. Being French and therefore exposed to them from a young age, I even used to like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (yes, I know!).

I am less fond of those married actors who perform with each other all the time or are never seen without each other. Could any couple have been more annoying than Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson (that was before Brangelina, of course)? In the end, they became figures of fun and had to split up. I even despised Judi Dench, whom I normally adore, when she acted with her late husband Michael Williams in inferior shows. Then there are the directors who always employ their wives. Claude Chabrol, for instance, who somehow couldn’t make a film without the detestable Stéphane Audran. She couldn’t act to save her life and, as far as I am concerned, spoiled every single film she was in. The less talented partner usually brings the other one down.

There are no problems when people achieve recognition simultaneously, but what happens when someone who is already well known in his or her field teams up with a novice? The former loses some of their credibility if they let the person who shares their life share the limelight as well – their own reputation is dented, and the latter faces accusations of riding on their partner’s coat tails. If the more experienced of the two is not competitive or insecure there are no sparks, but what happens if he or she is an egomaniac in need of constant admiration? Suppose they end up becoming a foil to their more flamboyant, newbie spouse, what then?

But as much as I dislike couples who work together in the world of entertainment, what I detest most of all are real-life double acts (sometimes they belong to the previous category as well): they are not just ridiculous, they are slightly repellent too. There is something so smug about them. Excluded from the cosy relationship, one feels like a voyeur. Is there anything more unfunny than two people who constantly laugh at each other’s jokes in the presence of a third person, or finish each other’s sentences? They both deserve to be slapped.

Slap!