They’d obviously never come across an infested desk because there were further warnings about not putting it near furniture or matt surfaces. And that it would be detrimental to pond life and must be kept far, far from anywhere animals might feed.
And just at that point the two cats came in, knowing that all was not well, and that The Little Book of Calm was badly needed. And the moment I thought of them licking this murderously poisonous stuff and lying dead beside the ants, all eight paws rigid in the air, my decision was made. I carried the ant-killer to the garden shed and all the pages that had to be gone through downstairs to the dining-room table. At the moment, an ant-free zone.
Talking to Various Ships Passing in the Night
18 July 1998
It’s a crime to be lonely. Nobody might ever have discovered, it could have gone on for years, this harmless little scheme of Nora going out to the airport two or three times a week.
She went there because she was lonely, because it’s easy to talk to people at airports, there’s an atmosphere of excitement and energy and people going to places, and coming home.
Much better anyway than sitting looking at the four walls of your house.
And it’s not all just looking at the people going off to their different flights, you can browse in the bookshop there, have a snack, get your hair done even.
Sometimes she would get talking to families with children.
Nora liked that, she’d ask them where they were going and what they thought it was going to be like.
One little boy said he’d send her a postcard, but Nora didn’t mind when he didn’t. There was too much to do in Disneyland.
There’s a kind of system about striking up conversations, she says. Like there’s no point at all trying to talk to anyone who has a mobile phone, they’re only dying to use it to make a call or else waiting for it to ring.
People on their own with briefcases are not likely to want to chat. And anyone rooting in a bag looking for tickets or passport is a bad starter, they’re too fussed to concentrate on a nice conversation with a stranger.
Nora has had some of her best chats with people going on package tours, especially bus tours. Women wearing badges with the name of the coach tour company were particularly approachable.
Some of them had never travelled abroad before and were a little anxious. Nora would reassure them and say that these companies were great, they looked after everyone and nobody would get lost.
She has patted down a lot of those who were nervous about a trip to Lourdes or a Five Capitals in Seven Days tour.
Nora, who has been abroad only rarely herself, is well able to head their anxieties off at the pass. Oh yes, the buses do stop several times and indeed everyone in these hotels speaks English and there’s great shopping where they’ll give you the price in pounds as well as in foreign currency.
She waves them off, feeling that in a way they almost are friends.
No, they don’t ask her too much about where she’s going herself; it’s odd that, but people aren’t all that interested. She doesn’t tell them packs of lies and make up mythical journeys. She doesn’t need to.
If they do press her, she says she’s just on a little hop across the water this time, and they let it go.
Nora is a mine of information for travellers. She’s nearly as good as the personnel in uniform.
She can tell you which gate your flight leaves from, where the letter box is, the nearest ladies’ cloakroom.
She often carries paper clips which are a good way of constructing a makeshift lock on a suitcase. Someone showed her once, and it was too good a hint not to pass on. It would delay a thief anyway and that’s what matters, Nora would explain sagely – and people were always very grateful.
She often talked to Americans who had been here on a holiday and they told her about their trip. One of them had even given Nora an address in case she was ever in Seattle.
Then she might take the escalator down from Departures and go to sit in Arrivals for a while.
It’s very easy to talk to people there, particularly when flights have been delayed. That’s a great opportunity.
She got talking to a woman once who was waiting to meet a cousin from America. A very nice person, they had a lot in common, Nora said. The woman liked the same television programmes, and was about the same age. She didn’t live far away either.
She would have been a fine friend. But Nora didn’t like to push things.
It was so easy for people to reject you, keep you out of their lives. It was hurtful when it happened.
Nora didn’t see any point in going out of her way to attract it. This woman had a life of her own, a cousin from America, plans for the summer.
The woman had asked who Nora was meeting and Nora had been vague.
Oh, the flight wasn’t due until much later, she said, and somehow that covered it. No need to say who was coming or who wasn’t.
The woman had said that she too was a compulsively early person. They really could have become friends.
But then she might have found out that Nora was a person who went out to Dublin Airport not to meet anyone but just for something to do, and once this was revealed she would be seen in a different light.
Odd is what people called it. Odd and sad. The people who knew.
And they were many now because two people had said casually to Nora’s niece that they had seen her aunt at the airport. Her niece was always saying Auntie Nora should develop some hobbies, get out more, meet people.
The niece, a busybody of the highest order, had interrogated Nora.
Nora was never good at lying, she couldn’t think up a story that would sound convincing. So she told the truth.
And now they are all frowning and tutting.
Her sister, who lives in the country, came up to see her and tried to persuade her to go to the doctor so that he could give her a little something for her nerves. She said there was no shame in it these days.
But Nora says there’s nothing wrong with her nerves.
And her nephew, who is in social work, says he can get her accepted for one morning a week in a day centre. Even though, strictly speaking, she’s too young, not quite 70. A lot of the people will be quite frail and in wheelchairs but still it would be company and something to look forward to. Wouldn’t it?
Her brother’s wife, always one for the tart word, apparently said that Nora was lucky to have so much time on her hands. If she had raised a family and had to look after a man, a house, a brood of children, she wouldn’t have these problems.
Nora would love to have had a man, a house and a brood of children, but things didn’t work out that way.
The bossy niece said that surely she must have some friends, neighbours, people she knew?
And it’s very hard to explain to the young and confident that other people have their own lives and they close their front doors on you when they go back to them.
And Nora has only her little flat, which sort of chokes her if she’s in it too long on her own.
She wasn’t complaining about being lonely, she says. Nora never mentioned it to anyone really.
It was a thing people didn’t understand, it seemed that you must be some horrible person if you didn’t get on like a house on fire with your neighbours and have 100 people you used to know at work rushing in and out of your house.
It’s as if everyone is afraid of lonely people, if they reach out to the lonely who knows where it would end?
So she didn’t tell anyone, she just went to a busy, exciting place and talked to a variety of ships that were passing in the night. That’s how she saw it.
Not doing anyone any harm, filling her days nicely.
But now it seems this is odd and sad, normal people don’t do things like that.
From now on Nora must be watched. Carefully.
Sweet Dreams
25 July 1998
There’s this good-tempered man called John, whose boss insulted him de
eply at the end of May. His boss said, quite casually and without malice, that poor old John was way beyond being computer literate and though not exactly a dinosaur in the quill-pen league couldn’t be expected to know a spreadsheet from a search engine.
John has August off and he has plans. He is a 51-year-old married man with two children. Normally they take a house by the seaside but the children were getting bored with it, so this year they are not packing the buckets and spades. His wife is going to take in three foreign students for the month. His sons, mollified by the fact that there are going to be drop-dead gorgeous Mediterranean girls, are going to hang around and help them integrate.
John is going to do an intensive, four-week computer course. It will cost exactly the same as renting the holiday home. John will eat less, drink less, spend far less than if he were in a resort. Ahead of him lies that glorious day in the first week in September when he will be so much on top of things that the man who called him Poor Old John will wilt in his soft Gucci shoes and be henceforth riddled with great self-doubt about his powers of judgment. It’s a vision that will sustain John throughout concentrated hours of taskbars, title bars and toolbars instead of the kind of bars he was normally used to in August.
It will be the most satisfying summer ever.
Maria is 26 and this summer she is going to spend her summer holiday finding a husband. She knows how it’s done. You just turn up looking well where there are loads of fellows. Not in a pub when they’re all drunk. Not in a disco or a club when it would be dead easy to get a fellow for the night but not at all easy to get a husband. It had to be planned scientifically.
You don’t want to waste time on tourists, visitors, handsome fellows passing through looking for one-night stands. You go where there will be a glut of marriageable men. She has studied lists of conferences, golf classics, race meetings, yachting events. She knows where they will be and she will be there. With a cover story.
She is here on a short vacation with her mother and she has come to the hotel. Mother will be distracted elsewhere with friends but will be constantly expected on the scene. This way Maria doesn’t look like she’s there to pick people up. She won’t be taken for a Working Girl cruising the provincial hotels sending out wrong, if exciting, signals to professional men in their late thirties. Her quarry.
Her mother will turn up full of apologies later on in the evening when friendships have been made but before they can be expected to be cemented in bed or anything.
But could this possibly work and why would her mother go along with it? Maria shrugs. How else do you think her mother ever found Maria’s father all those years ago? And it was much harder back in the 1960s than it is nowadays.
Ronnie, who is 12, got third prize in a local photography competition. The prize was a book token for £10. But more important, he got a certificate and he has had this certificate laminated and wears it around his neck on a cord.
He lives near a well-known beauty spot in an area very much visited by tourists. Ronnie noticed that people coming to see the sights always wanted their whole family to be included in the shot. They would offer strangers their camera with detailed and complicated instructions of what to press.
How much better to have a semi-professional like himself involved. He stands nearby, hovering silently, ready for the opportunity.
‘I’m in the business of photography myself,’ he will say to a group as if they had actually asked a 12-year-old boy his line of work. He will indicate the certificate hanging around his neck like a press pass as proof of his great skills.
People usually nod gravely at this, there’s not much else they can do.
‘So if you’d like me to include you all in a snap I know the best place for you to stand and I charge £1 per session.’
He will produce for inspection a pound coin of his own in case any of them might be confused about the currency. They normally enquire about the nature and extent of a session. Ronnie says that it would include up to half a dozen shots with any of the cameras of the group in question. Much more often than not, they agree. They admire his enterprise, his sheer gall.
And it is a help to have someone who doesn’t keep bleating about what should they look through and what should they press.
He has been watched beadily since mid-June by a woman who runs a nearby craft shop. She still can’t make up her mind about Ronnie. He’s certainly putting in the hours and making the most of his summer. It’s just that with no overheads at all, he can take in £50 on a good day. That’s rather a lot for a 12-year-old boy, she thinks. In fact, it’s astronomical.
But she has no proof that he’ll spend it foolishly or that earning this fortune in a wet summer will somehow lead him into organised crime, so she still can’t blow the whistle on him.
And what about myself, off on sort-of holidays until the start of September – what will I do? I know what I think I’ll do, of course, walk my legs off, read the 36 books listed in a spiral-bound notebook, master the internet, deal with all the letters in the in-basket, learn to cook with yeast, visit at least six parts of Ireland I’ve never been to, identify and plant a yellow flower that has been driving me mad in other peoples’ gardens for years, write postcards of praise to people I admire, teach the cats some kind of trick, any trick, so that people will think they are brighter than they are, label the videos, learn to park in something smaller than a football pitch.
But then maybe I won’t do any of those things.
The whole essence of anyone’s summer holiday is that it is always based on some kind of dream.
Staving Off the Senior Moments
17 October 1998
There was a time when I used to give advice, serious advice, on travel pages, about what to take with you on a trip. I never took any notice of the advice myself in those days, since as long as you had the bottle of gin, the 200 ciggies and the portable typewriter everything else was only icing on the cake.
I used to look with scorn at all the people in airports fussing about their matching luggage, their eyes scanning the carousel in case one piece had gone missing. I was always half hoping mine would go missing and I might get the compensation. It did once, in New York, and instead of buying a nightdress and a change of underwear I bought a desperately expensive bubble bath and a bottle of champagne and even now, 35 years later, I remember it all with pure pleasure.
No such freedoms these days. If I should lose the case that has all my work in it, I may as well give up on the future.
If I lost the case with the garments, it would be serious. Being a large person, I can’t easily get things in shops that will fit me. I have to speak at various functions and they might not take too well to my wearing the same outfit for six weeks. So I have joined the ranks of those who look anxiously until the two brightly coloured, glaring suitcases come out of the innards of a plane.
Tomorrow night I will be unpacking them in a hotel that looks out on the Pacific Ocean.
In the old days I used to pack in 10 minutes. The old days are gone. I’m ashamed to say it has taken a week to pack.
I got a clipboard – not just a piece of paper but a serious clipboard – and I listed all the items. I felt somehow powerful and in control as I wrote down things such as: Sellotape; torch; Velcro rollers; corkscrew; good black dress.
There was a time when I used to think only the insane would make lists like this, but alas I have travelled to too many places and found myself disappointed with the contents of the two glaring cases when I arrived. Like the time I took six pairs of shoes, six T-shirts and no skirts whatsoever to South Africa.
So I realised it was time for the clipboard. It’s not that anyone is getting old or forgetful or anything. Lord, no. What people like myself have nowadays is what the Americans call a ‘senior moment’. It’s a wonderful phrase and one I have taken up enthusiastically. It takes the whole harm out of being bewildered.
Tomorrow night, when I am unpacking the glaring suitcases in a faraway place, I
don’t want any surprises. But if it were only a matter of what you took with you for six weeks it would be reasonable enough; sadly, it’s also a matter of what you leave behind you.
There will be other people staying in the house here while we are gone, so it’s not a matter of ramming awful things into a cupboard and saying that it can all be dealt with in December. It means a visit to the dump, which always frightens me because I assume everyone there is getting rid of dismembered bodies and that they think I am doing the same. And a visit in what might, hopefully, be off-peak hour to the bottle bank and the paper bank – rain forests of newspapers and magazines unread going back to be pulped somewhere. And taking out all the things from the press where the table napkins are, in case I might have hidden some cheese there to stop me eating it.
And one of the things I love to do, in what a psychiatrist friend calls my pathetically over-documented life, is stick my snaps in an album. I don’t feel right until I’m up to date with this. So it involves getting out all the pictures since summer, and oohing and aahing over a trip to the Isle of Man, and to Schull, and to the Merriman Summer School, and to get an honorary degree in Queen’s, and to visit Dickson’s Nurseries in Newtownards, and a party in London, and a magical day at the National Ploughing Championships which I think I enjoyed more than anything else this year.
Sorting out all that takes time.
And there are the letters to write which I will not take with me and carry around the world as I have done so often: instead, I will stay up late and write them before I go.
And I won’t worry that the cats will miss us because cats have their own agenda and they will think whoever is here is us really, just as long as the bowl of food is put out and someone tells them they are wonderful.
And it doesn’t really matter that we will be in some places where it is snowing and others where the sun will be splitting the stones.
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