Kate Greenhalgh's Point of View

Storm in a Coffee Cup	February 2012
Join the Club	November 2011
Catty Comments	Summer 2011
The taming of the shrews	April/May 2011
Rebelling? Whaddya got?	Feb/March 2011

 

 

Storm in a Coffee Cup

Is there any greater pleasure in life than the conviviality of having guests to stay? In the case of friends, ties are strengthened which bind them even closer to the family, and in the case of relatives, a domestic intimacy is revived and renewed. A household is warmed and heartened when visitors come to stay; a valued mutual affection is celebrated and enjoyed.

Except, that is, when they use my coffee machine.

Let me tell you about her. She is called Nancy. She is Italian. She once went out with a famous football manager. She is extremely temperamental. You must not mess with Nancy. I love Nancy with an intense passion. Life is not worth living without her, and yet she is cruel, vain and capricious. Her little LED screen spits insults when you try to coax a cappuccino from her, (“mio latte non e coronata, puttana!”); she sulks; she spends half her life in the equivalent of The Priory for coffee machines.

So imagine how it felt, coming down one morning to worship at her espresso nozzle, to find a queue of students jostling around her, guests of my daughter? Did they not know the house rule? When I enter the kitchen in my curlers and dressing gown, scowling, there must be silence and a path must clear immediately between me and Nancy. Instead, they were jabbing her touch control screen with their fingers, demanding latte after latte, chatting and laughing impudently. I do not queue for my own coffee machine. Nancy does not do bulk orders. She is a bean-to-cup artist. It was one of those moments when you can feel your blood curdle, and a maelstrom of emotions overwhelms you - hatred, horror, revulsion, outrage. I looked at Nancy and she looked at me. We both knew what was coming.

“Basta! Macchiato tua madre, che cazzo!” her little screen blazed. “Step away from the coffee machine!” I screamed simultaneously. There was an appalling silence. Nancy shut down with a strangulated gurgle, months of rehab and therapy in prospect. My daughter’s friends melted away, mortified. I slumped to the floor.

It’s all ok now. Nancy was home in time for Christmas, although she had a little relapse on Boxing Day. All my delightful guests, whom I absolutely love having to stay, know which cupboard I keep the Nescafe in. After all, if there’s one thing that you must do to ensure a good visit, and something that all guests should know, it’s avoid upsetting the house Prima Donna.

Join the Club

Golf. Does the word thrill you and send you running to put on a lurid, lozenge-patterned jumper, or does it fill you with disdain? Are you picturing that little heaven, the 18th hole at Royal Thames Ditton, or do you envisage ghastly old snobs called Dennis and Basil, charging around in buggies, trying to ban women and ethnic minorities from their club?

Years ago I was told, in a well-meaning way, that there was no point me trying golf, as I did not have the temperament for it, and it made me take against it rather wholeheartedly. My occasional forays onto golf courses confirmed a sense of Satanic alienation, as I was yelled at for walking across a green, yelled at for bringing my child into the club-house in denim, yelled at for walking into a room not for women. Golf clubs seem to exist to give people (men) an opportunity to fulminate disproportionately, in the manner of religious zealots affronted by a blasphemy: “His socks are too short! Unclean! Unclean!”, (assembled golfers begin beating their chests frenziedly, bury the offender up to his neck in a bunker and hurl Titleist No.1’s at him, until he is dead.) This is very off-putting, (no pun intended) for the uninitiated.

You realise this is, of course, a narrative of epiphany and conversion, (at which point I will abandon the religious imagery as it is making me uneasy.) It may be the defining point of a woman’s mid-life crisis, to start liking golf. Now I only have to see a golf ball lying in the grass and I mentally select a club for it, my soul flooded with desire to send the ball into its lyrical trajectory through the unfettered air onto the green. From there, a velvety putt - ah, the softest of touches - to see the ball breast the sward and dive into the hole, as a lapwing nimbly to her nest. My favourite lozenge-pattern jumper is neon green and mauve, and I recently joined in heartily with the lynching of a woman who walked past the tee with a crying baby in a pushchair. I am actually still at the stage where I quadruple-bogey most holes, but this is good. This is playing to my handicap of 124, so I am happy. It turns out I DO have the temperament for golf after all! If simply not the talent.

 

Summer 2011 - Catty Comments

If and when children reach the age when they are reliably house-trained, and no longer ruin carpets and furniture in a variety of revolting ways, have you noticed how many mothers rush out and get a dog or a cat, to fill the gap in their lives?

So my big decision was dog or cat. We used to have two West Highland terriers, Mackintosh and Wellington, (now frolicking with the immortals.) I thought how I had missed them! Not much, actually: Mackintosh’s toe-curling halitosis; Wellington’s creepy habit of always trying to follow me into the toilet; Wellington’s other creepy habit of vigorously sodomising Mackintosh when the mood took him; their refusal to come when called; the long walks over a rain swept Common with people whom you know secretly think that their dog is better than your dog; and perhaps worst of all, the feeling of a warm, fresh faeces in the palm of one’s hand, even when wrapped in polythene…..Never again!

Bertie the marmalade kitten therefore came into our lives, bringing with him his mother and girlfriend, all of whom I agreed to in a weak moment, (this always happens to me - family planning is not my strong point.) What a success young Bertie was! A Boris Becker of the cat world - playful, rakish, tawny and gorgeous! But then, alas, the time came when we had to take the Becker out of his Boris. Our vet has two stone lions by the entrance, friskily flicking up their tails to flaunt their impressively globular reproductive credentials, which probably struck Bertie as very insensitive, as he emerged crestfallen and castrated from surgery. Gone was the lad of life, the imp of fame. Bertie is now a feline amoeba, a disappointing puddle of cat, prone on the floor without any apparent skeletal support, moving by slow osmosis between his food and his bed, his eyes half-closed, a contented purr occasionally reverberating through his plump, girlish form. It is a truly shocking demonstration of what is left when one removes the testosterone from a male. Nothing at all!

Poor Bertie - like his literary namesake, a Drone. A glorious shot at what a cat ought to be, long fallen wide; but a lesson, maybe, that we put too many expectations on our pets, as well as on our children, and indeed, on everybody! Will somebody please remind the children of this when I am no longer reliably house-trained, and start to make a revolting mess on the carpets and furniture? After all, the vet will know what to do.

April/May 2011 - The taming of the shrews

Danny Boyle’s thrilling production of ‘Frankenstein’ at the National Theatre has a scene worthy of Hitchcock, showing the gory destruction of the monster’s bride. True to Mary Shelley’s original, this ‘monstrous Eve’ is torn to pieces by her creator on her wedding night, while her intended looks on impotently. “Shall each man,” he cries, “find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone?”

You can understand his chagrin, but does anyone ask Mrs Frankenstein if she’d have settled for a life with bad plastic surgery, married off to a bloke with stitches all over his whatsits, and forced to live miles from the nearest L K Bennett? Mary herself, a formidably well-educated teenage girl, didn’t do as she was told, after all, and chose an extremely unarranged marriage.

“Girls,” I said sternly to my students as we read the text, “this is powerfully analogous of the female struggle for self-determination. Here we have woman literally as construct for a male. In the same way, I hope that I am not preparing you for university, just for you to be swept up by a suitable future bread-winner there, and cop out.”

Which obviously brings me to Kate Middleton, (I had to contrive an angle on it - you must be sick of Royal Wedding articles by now) as she is turned into ‘a Kate conformable as other household Kates’, propelled into an imperialist, patriarchal institution which won’t have any use for her good 2:1 in Art History, and will probably set her on a path of doing as she is told, producing yet more heirs to the throne, even though we seem to have quite a backlog of them already.

“Girls!” I trilled, warming to my theme, and starting to feel a bit like Miss Jean Brodie, if not Miss Havisham, “it is vital that you do not trade your talents, education and independence for a house in Oxshott, an Aga and an account at Harvey Nicholls.” ( I could see I was really getting through to them now - what a horrible fate.)

“Are you saying that Kate Middleton is a kind of monster, then, Mrs Greenhalgh, who should rather have been torn to pieces at birth than left to meet a nice man at university, find the fulfillment of motherhood and become Queen of England?” asked one girl, “or have you illogically chased a false analogy into a rhetorical dead-end, which is a hallmark of the weaker female intellect?”

Maybe there really is no point in educating girls.

Feb/March 2011 - Rebelling? Whaddya got?

A recent visit to Prague put our own dear Wimbledon into humbling perspective, I fear. I don’t just mean that it highlighted Wimbledon’s dearth of Baroque monasteries, Renaissance clock-towers and 14th century Gothic bridges, (although I’m sure that we have our equivalents, if we look hard enough. The magnificent revamp of Ely’s, with its notable pseudo-façade, is surely on a par with the 600-year construction of St Vitus’s cathedral.) It was the contrasting experiences of the good citizens which I felt showed us in an unflattering, disappointing light, and probably makes us a sadly unsuitable twin-town candidate, despite our shared glory of having Tesco Expresses.

Ushered around by a charming and stoical survivor of Stalinism, it was clear that every corner of Prague’s beautiful, medieval streets commemorates some act of great courage, nobility and the highest disdain for oppression. In this square, a young student self-immolated in protest against Russian invasion, on this bridge a haplessly ethical priest was slung to his death, and from this coffee shop members of the Czech resistance to Hitler were dragged to torture and execution. Heroism and romance blazed from each bloodstained stone.

As a life-member of the Bourgeoisie, I had rather mixed feelings recently about my student daughters going on protests against tuition fee rises. (What placards did they wave? ‘Wimbledon Students Say No To The Cuts! Mummy Already Has Our Annual Ski Trip to Pay For!’?) I have even had blandly moderate debates with them about it, (although of course in my day it was easier for me to justify state subsidy of my degree, as Medieval Latin has so many obvious benefits for modern society, unlike today’s wishy-washy tertiary education.) But no denying, there’s so little to be iconoclastic about these days. The girls weren’t even kettled!

Prague’s defenestrations perhaps best sum up our different civic experiences. When have we ever been chucked out of windows by tyrants? There hasn’t been a single decent defenestration in SW19, to my knowledge. My own protest group - the People’s Militant Front Against Unrestricted Parking On West Side Common has taken subversion to the extreme of sneaking out and placing unauthorised plastic cones on the grass verges in the early hours of the morning, but not one of us has been defenestrated or sent to a Gulag so far, despite this bold provocation of the fascist apparatchiks currently wallowing in ill-gotten power in the Kafkaesque bowels of Merton Civic Centre.

One can only conclude that in our decadently mature, democratic, stable and welfare-supported suburb, with a thriving middle class, it is time to rise up and rebel about something. Only then will Wimbledon be truly picturesque.