But then you can ignore those. Case closed.
Urban versus Rural: Urban Wins
No one knows me here
One of my childhood memories is of a windy day somewhere in northern Canada. I can’t say how old I was or where this took place, as we lived in so many places in the north country. My mother, who loved rural walks, used to drag me out to God knows where and we’d stroll for hours. I didn’t hate it; I disliked it, but walking is easy to endure. You just plod. Eventually you end up back at the car and you go home. Another glorious afternoon in the scrub pine in the mid-twentieth-century in the hard-rock Canadian Shield.
It was, as I said, very windy that day. It was howling. The sky was grey, not a depressed grey as in a Toronto sky, or a Tupperware grey as in Vancouver, nor a hard-pavement grey as in London. It was a huge grey. Around us were pine trees, unbeautiful uncharming scrub pines in their millions. Christmas tree shapes? No, scrub pines can’t be doing with that nonsense. They just grew up wherever they could get a taste of light and air, scrapey things that would take your skin off if you ran from bears, but so thick that you wouldn’t run far.
White pines, with their long soft needles, don’t pack themselves in. They drop their needles to make a soft fragrant bed that always makes me think of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons camping out under the stars. Susan would serve hard-boiled eggs, cocoa and grog. Titty would stare at the stars and imagine things. Good times, those.
This was different. You had scrub pine up to the Arctic Circle and you had gravel roads. That was your choice of landscape. Above you was the harsh sky. Now don’t give me that Yorkshire stuff. I bet in Yorkshire they have clouds. The Canadian North can’t be bothered with dramatic clouds. It’s a flat sky, it is.
And it was windy.
My mother and I both remarked on it. I hate the sound of the wind. Hate it. I only tell you about this one memory because it must offer a clue to the birth of this hatred. Yes, Newfoundland was windy, but so beautiful (it did physically break away from Scotland eons ago) that the wind was very Brontë sisters.
The wind of northern mainland Canada troubled me. It scared me in a huge subterranean way. Made flesh, that wind was like the hulls of huge ships moving through the water, another sight that scares me so badly that I won’t travel by ocean. I can’t swim, for one thing. The fate of the American sailors on the U.S.S. Indianapolis in 1945 as the crew of the stricken ship was picked off by sharks, one by one, sums up my thoughts on the outer ocean experience.
The best we can hope for is to die in our beds. Being plunked into the ocean with the hull of an ocean liner bearing down on me, that would be the worst.
This is how much the sound of a gale worries me. I love thunder and rain. I hate the lonely moan of the wind. I will lie in my feather bed, books heaped up around me, as I listen to the Sex Pistols or indeed Marvin Gaye, people who sing about pavement anger and sex. And still I can hear this roaring in the background and I am troubled. This is why I love cities.
I chose urban over rural at age seventeen when I was finally able to leave home and go to university. All the school trips I had taken to that point were to cities like Edinburgh or Moscow/Leningrad and Guadalajara. I have never been back into the bush. For you see, in Canada, rural is not the word, really. You have rural hicks, but they live in small towns in southern Ontario. They’re just far from things, which is very different from a harsh grey and dusty dark-green landscape that waits to kill you if you venture into it.
I was embarrassed for Werner Herzog when he made a documentary about Tim Treadwell, a silly young man who was devoted to grizzlies and lived on grizzly land in Alaska because urban life hadn’t worked out for him. Treadwell was filmed putting his hand on a 10-kilogram load of bear shit, feeling its warmth and saying in his piping Peter Pan voice how wonderful it was to feel the heat of something that had been inside the bear only a moment ago. Inside.
Treadwell ended up inside the bear himself in emphatic fashion shortly after that, but due to the arrival of forest rangers he was not digested. His girlfriend, who clearly was increasingly coming to see that Treadwell was a fool of fantastically irritating proportions, was also eaten although not digested. I don’t understand roughing it in the bush. Agoraphobics in my neighbourhood are just as isolated from humans as anyone doing the hermit gig in the dry unvisited hills of Spain. Cities can offer you everything—anonymity, solitude, wild sociability, even that big fish in a small pond thing that makes me laugh with wonder when I see “socialites” pictured in ill-fitting, badly chosen ball gowns in the local [pick your city] money magazines. You can be anybody in a city.
Even after all these years, Jonathan Raban’s Soft City, about urban life, has been my schoolbook. It opens with his description of coming out of a kebab-house onto a sidewalk, “head prickly with retsina” and being disoriented. What city is this? But you are you. Whatever city you are in, you are at that moment a stranger to yourself living in a community of strangers. And that is what a city can induce and that is the wonder of it. It’s not alienation, Raban says, but something much better. The city is soft. It is waiting for your imprint. You decide what the city will be.
(And there is a side issue here: I stayed too long in the city I moved to when I left the bush. It has become a small town to me. I walk within carefully defined tracks, as though I were a dog peeing on the corners of my habitat. Worse, in those two decades, corporations have flattened urban life so that all cities look the same. They have the same chain stores, the same, admittedly huge, range of food, and evoke the same feelings. This is monstrous. But that is irrelevant. When I was young, I knew every inch of every sidewalk of my small town and they all buzzed with possibility. I have aged in tandem with the power of globalization, and it’s my fault too.)
The first time I went to London was with the man I have been in love with for almost all my adult life. We had no money when we started out, which didn’t matter, as billionaires would have paid their all for the kind of ecstasy we had then. Everything was new, you see! So we could only travel when he had some work purpose. That first morning he went off to some newspaper office and I ventured out on my own in London. I stood on Oxford Street, just at St. Christopher’s Place, taking in the morning sun, the sound of the traffic and the vibrations of the city that came from footsteps and motor cars and breezes in the great parks (breezes, not hard wind, take note), and a feeling of elation and wild freedom came over me such as I had never known before.
It may have been the happiest moment of my life. All this was despite the fact of London’s history, that this was the street where De Quincey lost his Ann, that it was near here that Virginia Woolf walked down Bond Street and Regent Street remembering that dinosaurs once trod where these streets led. William Blake’s rooms were not far from where I stood. Everything was radiant not just with official history but with personal history, yet I was free to walk here just as Woolf had, taking it all in.
Sarah Don, the jewellery designer and gardener, lives in the country with her husband Monty Don, who was so shattered by the crash of a rather blithe and blind life in the eighties that he is permanently scored with a seasonal depression that will never leave him. He describes what may or may not have been the worst moment. He was sitting in a country hotel for a TV piece he was doing for money, when a heifer walked through the restaurant. It was brown and white, he said, and skittish. Its eyes were scared. The problem was, only he could see a cow in the room. It did not exist. Madness loomed.
Monty Don’s books, which describe his horror, have fed me. The only thing that soothes him in the terrible times is working with the soil. He is grounded, he is earthed. But Sarah Don describes in their book The Jewel Garden what it meant, during times of intense rat-ridden financial struggle with a rotting husband and three sprightly children, to be able to go to London. The city meant a concentration of energy for her. She needed that injection. She loved the smell of Paddington Station even. She was happiest alone. It refreshed her a
nd gave her a clear head.
I know what she felt. I suspect neither of them likes people much, after a business failure that lost them their home and any faith in anyone they thought was a friend. Yet Monty gets his comfort from working in the dirt and Sarah gets pumped up by being in a city where she is just as alone.
I feel this elation in most cities I visit, but they have to be foreign and I have to be on my own. I like the knowledge that I will not run into anyone I know. On one of my first trips to Paris, I made great efforts to conceal the fact that I was shattered when a Canadian woman came over to us at a sidewalk café and introduced herself and her husband. They were people we knew or we knew friends of theirs. They were nice. But we avoided those blocks after that and walked around with a hunted feeling. Why do people think I’ll recognize them? And even if I did, I am perfectly entitled to snub someone in a foreign city; they’re equally eager to snub me.
I told an acquaintance once that I was going to London. So this woman, who I took care never to meet at home, wanted to have lunch with me in in that city. Why? Why, why, why. When she suggested this, I was as tense as if I’d put my jeans on backwards, and I eased myself away, slowly screaming. For she was a rural person passing herself off as an urbanite. Her first instinct in a foreign city was to meet someone from home and be local. She even had the rural look, much like the cow Monty Don saw in the hotel dining room, skittering, its eyes alarmed. What was it doing in a place so foreign to its nature?
Some local writer, very much a Chamber of Commerce type despite his pretensions of being an urbane urbanist, wrote an essay in my local paper about this city, Toronto, being better than Paris because Paris was so deliberately established, so set in its own history, that inhabitants were unable to make a mark on it. Toronto was still a soft city. He could be a star in Toronto, therefore Toronto was better than Paris, which is just about the greatest misreading of Raban anyone could have achieved. The key to the soft city is the anonymity you can achieve. Toronto is new and an inch thick; no one cares about the city and no one cares about you. Paris is what it is; it still doesn’t care about you but it is deeply loved by its inhabitants, who are strangers.
I get very angry at people who don’t understand the point of urban life. In rural life, all eyes are upon you. This young man was looking for a city where all eyes would be upon him. That is not what most people seek of urbanity. Perhaps he was an American seeking fame. This fame thing, I don’t understand it. I cannot imagine anything worse than being famous. What a horror.
As the years pass, it turns out to be just as awful in a different way. In a detached house with the mortgage paid off, I don’t have to listen to the artful howls of pleasure from the woman in the apartment next door as she sexes someone. But neighbours are neighbours. Sometimes the distance of a block is not good enough. In my drab yet prissy neighbourhood, I know several young people who were sexually attacked as children—by coaches, babysitters et cetera—and I knew one man who I truly think makes it his life’s work. But it was all extremely quiet. Why did I think such crime would be noisy? Douglas Coupland refers to sex as “fighting crime,” and I thought it was witty until I grew old enough to realize that the sex was the crime and there was no fighting it. If I had known what was going on around me, I would have fought. Children needed defending but I didn’t know it because I thought all houses were safe houses, especially in a city, and that is why sex criminals rampaging through their own families favour cities.
Maybe cities shouldn’t have houses at all. We should all live in terraced houses at best, or in condominiums and apartments, and keep a wandering eye on one another, a drift of attention. The Irish novelist Edna O’Brien says that the problem with rural life is there is no one to hear you scream. But in the polite sections of the city, little girls aren’t raised to be screamers. Peel that eye. Watch out. You live in a soft city. Impose yourself upon the place by screaming about the Fred and Rose Wests among us. Take notice of the child turned suddenly silent. Ask questions. It’s a city. There’s no need to be polite. You can up sticks any time you wish.
It’s a myth I’ve built in my own mind that I have to stay in this city I know too well now. I could pack my tent and steal away in the night to find another soft city in which to hide.
Born Ugly
In which we humans dodge a painful truth
I was struck by a blinding insight this week, a blindingly unpleasant insight, and when I say struck, I do mean with a dead snake.
My girlfriend M—— once killed a rattler at her cottage, and since the rule is that you’re supposed to take the corpses to the nearest Forest Ranger Bob for statistical purposes, she bagged the snake and put it in the trunk of her junky cottage car. And forgot about it for two whole months. That was the state of the snake chunks that hit me in the face. The bearer of foul tidings was The Observer, a British Sunday paper owned by the same people who put out The Guardian. In an attempt to win new readers in a flashy tabloid world, they shrank the paper, went full-colour and decided to put out a weekly thing called Observer Woman. Excellent, I thought. A fine thoughtful magazine from which I shall crib all my column ideas! Pay levels, the struggles and pleasures of Third World Women, ethical shopping, and the electroshock that hits a young university-educated woman when she enters her first workplace. So far, Observer Woman has told me about body hair (naked woman in stilettos with one hirsute, insulation-quality leg), about fashion (headline: “Mmm, nice bit of skirt. But are you a tulip or a pencil?”), health (naked woman squashed as though she were about to be put into a suitcase to illustrate an article on irregular periods), a new feminist who poses naked with a fig leaf to make feminism attractive to women (or is it men?) celebrity housewives like Jerry Hall and Trudy Styler posed like statuary, long frozen stalks in toile de Jouy ballgowns in front of their gloss-painted London homes. You know the drill.
We women can cope with magazines like this, mainly because we have to. That’s all there is. The fact that you’d expect much much more of The Observer, is, well, it’s just bloody typical.
But this week, the cover was a wrinkle-free eighteen-year-old with perfect infant skin encased in headband and dark glasses and bound by Band-Aids. Yes, it was “How Do I Look? Confessions of a Botox Convert.” But it was written by an intelligent feature writer whose articles I can generally count on to be good. She’s someone to be taken seriously. I trust her. She entertains me. She does everything a good journalist is supposed to do.
Change all that to past tense.
For she, disgracing everything she has ever believed, had herself injected with Botox, had unseemly skin patches lasered away and the rest of her skin treated with Retin-A. She was also given cleanser, sunscreen and eye cream (and it must be said that these last three were new to her, so fair enough).
We are shown three honest shadowless white-light photos, before Botox, five days after, and ten days after. And she looks worse in each picture. Which isn’t even the point, but we’ll get to that.
She looks dreadful. She has been dragged through a hedge backwards three times, she is coated in Botox snake venom, her hair is filthy, she has pores you could dip a soup ladle into, and she has a lard-pie face. That means a big piece of splodge that spills over at the edges because she is a big comfy fatty woman. She’s an overstuffed sofa of a human, and yet this doesn’t save her face, as they tell you. (Skinny bodies mean clawlike faces; well-upholstered bodies mean fat, unwrinkled faces. Once you hit fifty, choose one or the other.)
I show the pictures to my husband and ask him how old he thinks she is. After the customary bickering, he hunkers down, studies the three photos and says “Oh, fifty.” Which is what I thought as well.
She is thirty-six.
And he’s right. She looks fifty in every photograph.
Evangelical Christians preface their conversations with “Have you heard the good news?” (It’s not the news you expect, which is why they irritate people.) Have you heard the bad news? It isn’t dieting o
r buying expensive unguents or even a professional makeup application (though the bored cosmeticians always consult the 6-foot, 7-inch bony green-haired black man, mid–skin bleach, who’s running the show, and then gives you purple lips, in my experience) that makes a woman look good. It’s being born good-looking that does it.
Look at this poor woman, noodged into this by a pushy editor who loves it when female journalists can be suckered into poisoning themselves. She is homely. Fact. She must have been born that way or she wouldn’t be looking so haunted and awful by magazine standards, and so utterly average by human standards.
In the first photograph, she looks like someone trying to stay brave after the death of her father, which in fact she was.
In the second, she has just been told that her life sentence in a Bangkok jail for being caught with a coke balloon up her arse at Passport Control has been commuted to 39.5 years.
In the third, she looks wary, pale as bleached canvas, as you do in a mug shot while you’re trying to tell the police officer it was all a horrid misunderstanding. You thought you ran over a cat. Turns out it was a human grandma.
And when she is loaded with makeup, shoved into zebra-striped sandals, fishnet stockings, a gauzy grey dress that conceals her bulky contours, and is finally made to wash her hair and grin manically, she looks tragic. The be-suited dermatologist who’s behind all this lolls on a modernist white plastic chair (not his fault; those chairs are positively dental in their recline) staring at her bemusedly, frowning. It is the male gaze and it is troubling.
I love you, journalist woman, I say. I love everyone who’s unknowingly being humped by a real pack of grossly overpaid pretentionists. You’re a good writer and a good person. I will continue to enjoy your writing and your clever mind. It doesn’t matter that you were intimidated into letting a payer of fees urge you into this public stripping. Oh, and is it a coincidence that now you write a column saying you no longer think the statue in Trafalgar Square of the armless, legless artist Alison Lapper is a great work of art? You’re more interested in conventional beauty now.
Cake or Death Page 13