How Does That...?

Would my authentic self have done that I wondered? Was I my authentic self now, or was I that self then? Do you always think the self you are is authentic, therefore the one past either must have been too or can't have been?
If I think the latter then who I was then and who I am now? In psychoanalyst babble: how does that make me feel?
I don't know I don't know I don't know. And I don't much care. There is no answer to that pathetic question. To the ones before it there might be but I don't know it.
What makes me the genuine article and what makes me fake? Er, it's er, like this...yes?..Er, well, you see...yes? Said with kind sympathetic (and a little bit curious) eyes and bent head. No, sorry, I can't explain it. Let that be your homework then.
I won't be coming again. Goodbye.
A scenario, imagined. Though I know what it feels like to be in a room sitting across from one person, squirming in my chair and trying to be earnest. I know I said I prefer one-on-one but not this type of one-on-one. I don't want to be the one talking; I want to be the one listening and making notes. Or do I? No. I don't. It's intrusive and unhelpful. Why should I have to explain how my mind thinks to a stranger? It makes me sound cuckoo. And I know I'm not.
No one can't understand your mind like you do, and if you're not good with the spoken word you'll never be able to make yourself heard. The words you say won't be right. The words you say will be construed differently; a different emphasis put on them. You will leave each time frustrated, without any insight, and with your mind nettled rather than settled.
How does that make you feel? In turmoil. I wasn't before.
The cooperative self is not my authentic self. That much I do know. The cooperative self has to, well, you know, cooperate, against its will, but still, it does.
The authentic self wants what it always wants: to be left alone. To be left to its pondering without answers. There just aren't enough classic thinkers.
What do you have to say about that? Nothing. Silence is employed so that you fill in it. Silence will be met with silence then.
How does that...? Oh God!
Perhaps I should have a meltdown....? A breakthrough (they'll think) for them; an embarrassment for me. I try not to do PDE (Public Displays of Emotion). No, I couldn't engineer one. I struggle to control myself as it is. Empty supermarket shelves tipped me over the edge last time; I actually had to be consoled. And I did have an outburst over my temperature once, for it being too low: what was I doing to make it so? How should I know?!
The hackles raised. I will come out and fight if pushed. And when I do it takes everyone by surprise so then I apologise, profusely, as if I'm not entitled to rage.
Yes, so no PDE if it can be helped; it very often can't. I'm so damn sensitive. I take the little things personally, not the big, and will think about something that's been said, or that I've said for days. Years? Well, I might return to it.
But I know this about myself. I don't need to analyse it, talk it over, with a well-meaning stranger, assigned to me, not chosen by me.
I know exactly what I need, just not always how to go about it. I'm not, as you probably by now appreciate, the run-of-the-mill client. Is anyone?
Talking to paper for me is a positive thing. It doesn't reply. It doesn't always make sense, when I read over it. But then it doesn't desire further clarification. It just accepts. Sense will come. If it needs to, maybe it doesn't. That's not really the point of it. Whereas a person you speak to has expectations. Your journey is being plotted, week by week. They say you have time, yet each week there needs to be progress as otherwise they'll ask: why?
So the cooperative self appears, only for the authentic self to leap out at unexpected moments and leave you all a-flutter and them agog at your reaction. And when you've both calmed: how did that make you...? Aargh!!!

Picture credit: Chair near the stove, 1890, Vincent van Gogh (source: WikiArt).

Written June 2020.

Mil and Daisy

Once upon a time in my life there was a Mil, there was a Daisy. Mil and Daisy. Two 1920s babes in arms. Two 1920s sisters. The two youngest of a large family, residing in South West London.
You will say this is too like Angela Carter's Wise Children but it's true. It's also true to say, though, my re-acquaintance with her last novel reacquainted me with them, in memory, because one I know has gone and has been gone for some time, and the other I can only presume followed suit some time after. Of course, if she is still with us (even if in the land of the fairies, somewhat aged) I profusely apologize for casting aspersions that she wasn't.
I'd like to report they danced and sang through their childhood but of that I can't be sure. It seems unlikely; they were orphaned young, sometime before the outbreak of the second world war and were left to the care of their elder brothers and sisters. To hard times and hand-me-downs.
I knew very little of all that and found it out piecemeal, a snippet here, a snippet there; none of which ever fitted together, seamlessly. Those times weren't talked of, nothing like how it is in books, chapter and prose. It should be verse, shouldn't it?
Forgive me, I'm ageing. The mind has never been what it should have been, and the hair that crowns it is fading, as if I've dusted it with talcum powder.
So, their lives up until the 1980s is a haze (the Blitz walked home in and the war survived), and even after that it's only a little clearer because they were both (again) living in the same area, a ten, fifteen minute drive from each other.
Mil's daughter flown (the first grandchild, a girl, born), one son living at home, and husband retired. Daisy, alone, widowed; a daughter, a son and two grandsons, but still chipper.
Alike and unlike, not two peas in a pod. Both small in height, maybe just or just under 5ft, both bundles of inventive fun, both with sharp flashes of humour. But could you have told they were sisters? It's debatable, that's the point.
It won't be debated here however, for I'm too close to it. They were a pair. Though I knew them separate and together. Am I confusing you? Get used to it, this is how I roll (how modern!)
Perhaps it's time for some more confusion...Mil was not Mil and Daisy was not Daisy. Mil was an M, a different M, and Daisy was an F. Though I know not how either nickname came about (I suspect it had something to do with the cousins of whom you'll hear a little of later). Mil didn't care for Mil, and Daisy, I don't know whether she cared for it or not. Both answered to them; Mil grudgingly, and Daisy, it appeared, willingly. Mil was not Mil to me personally, she was Nan. Daisy was Daisy, or her real name, shortened to end in ie.
Daisy's grandsons were possessive of Daisy; I was possessive of their Mil. We were content to occasionally share, but one was more mine, one was more theirs.
The cousins. Tom and Chad. Or was it Chad and Tom? I can't recall now which was the younger and which the older. I think perhaps there might have been an even younger one too, another grandson, a son from the son whom I'll call...another apple of Daisy's eye, but him I didn't know at all. Of the other two, well, naturally I had a crush on...was it Tom or was it Chad? Ah, be-still my beating heart. There is no place for you in this narrative.
The cousins could tease. Mil let them and joked in return too, playing whatever role came to mind, with whatever prop came to hand, on whatever day, all in good fun; though often when I was there as witness, I did wonder...I don't know how Daisy tamed them; perhaps she didn't have to. I never treated Daisy that way. Daisy was super cool! (That phrase was modern then.) She once took me into town – just me and her - in her Mini Cooper (or was it a VW? No, I'm sure it was a Cooper), the windows wound down on a summer's day as the sound system played 'My Boy Lollipop', laughing and singing all the way. Daisy was as daisy was, a little wild.
Mil and Daisy, alike and unlike, not two peas in a pod.

Picture credit: Twins Grace and Kate Hoare, 1876, John Everett Millias (source: WikiArt).

Written June 2020.

There's No Business Like It

Miss Hanff also revived an interest, a very old interest, in show business. Ethel Merman. There's no business like it.
I need to be clear however from the off that there is a theatrical background, of the backstage and front of house sort, in the family. Wardrobe, scenery, carpentry; ticket sales, programmes and ice creams, that sort of thing. Perhaps even further back some performing. It's a little vague (or I'm just hopeless at recalling it)...I'm no keeper of history, family or otherwise, and this occupation (hazard, you might call it) has now skipped a few generations. All that remains is a love of going to rather than working in, behind the scenes or in front of them.
So what did I do after Miss Hanff? I turned to Angela Carter's Wise Children. Dora and Nora Chance, the main set but only one of numerous sets of twins. Theirs is a complicated history alright. Chance by name, chance by nature. Coincidentally, it was quite by chance I came across Angela Carter's last, perhaps her best, and most comic novel; I found Dora and Nora sitting gossiping, well, Dora was doing all the talking, in a railway station waiting room, and since they were lost I took them on the train – with me to work - and then brought them home again with me at the end of the working day. And here, well, here they are; sitting pretty on a shelf next to Expletives Deleted, with every now and again a one week holiday.
Dora's reminiscences of their growing up and glory days (on and off the stage) put me in mind of my own. The Saturday ballet lessons in St Mary's church hall, though I'm not sure now I was built for it, or even if I enjoyed them. I liked the slippers. We didn't wear tutus; I can't remember what we did wear...leotards I think, shiny and stretchy material, that as you grow older and taller (my height marked every few months on a wall) shows up all manner of lumps and bumps, as if you didn't feel awkward enough already. This duck will be a swan. Leaping across the room diagonally, arms flung, rather than floated out. Grace came later, well, some, anyway. I didn't have a Grandma Chance watching on (guardians or parents were forbidden to stay), but Grandma M, in later years, was, like Grandma Chance, partial to a Fox's glacier mint. Maybe that too (I've just cottoned on) was digestion related, just as today my after-dinner extra peppermint gum neutralises acids.
The end of terms shows I will gloss over. A leotard monkey, a tea-towelled wise man. The country dances on the school field, round a maypole. And the recitals, musical recitals: I and a recorder. I and a guitar. Painful playing. The school choir. Oh Lord. I should have known better. I was not a Thespian. So why try? God knows why!
There were plenty of 'unofficial' plays (with plenty of rehearsals beforehand), too, put on in the garden, with costumes and props, from the dress-up box or magicked up from somewhere. Grandma M (the amateur Charlie Chaplin and actor-manager of the family) encouraged it, and would join in too with an impromptu performance of her own. She'd steal all the laughs, and all the rolling eyes, though she too had never been on the theatre stage (that I know of), but mostly behind or in front of it. But if you're of a large family, as Grandma M was (and orphaned young), you entertain.
So, no, again I repeat, though I felt it in my blood (and sometimes my waters too) I was not born to it. Even my toy theatre (not at all like the theatre Dora and Nora were given by their uncle/father on their seventh birthday) couldn't convince me of that, despite hours of play, of moving cardboard actors around on plastic rods. What thrilled me to the core was the theatre – the big theatre - and being in the audience. One of its anonymous members, and yet not entirely faceless because you always felt singled out. You never imagined the performers couldn't see very far; they were speaking to, looking at, you directly. Of course they were! Starstruck. By all of it, the actors, the music, the props and backdrops, the change in costume.
The anticipation, however, was the best bit: the warming up. The band taking their places in the pit and tuning up, the lights dimming, the curtain rising. After that you'd either be swept up and swept along, or would, on extremely rare occasions, beg to leave (forgo the ice-cream, the bar, and the queue for the ladies loos) rather than suffer through the second half.

Picture credit: The Orchestra Pit, Theatre Royal, circa 1935, Dorrit Black (source: WikiArt).

Written June 2020.