Every now and then I am heartily irritated by something I read in the paper. This is one of those times.
Daisy Waugh has written a piece in the Sunday Time New Review section about how she moved to the country, found it 'sterile' and came back with relief to London. She ends her article with this hilarious assertion:
"Go anywhere beyond the M25, where the houses are pretty and large enough to have their own utility rooms – and I get the feeling that lady-talk is pretty much all you’ll ever get.”
Well that’s settled then. Daisy Waugh, She Who Has Been There And Knows, has informed us that if you remain within the bounds of the M25, then you can hope to remain half-way cultured and potentially interesting enough to engage her in lively discussions of, I don’t know, the European Community, the war in Iraq, the merits of the Turner Prize show this year and all manner of other stimulating topics. Turn your car in the wrong direction off the Yellow Brick Road and your brain atrophies.
Daisy, Daisy, Daisy! Get out your atlas and have a teeny-weeny look at a map of the British Isles. There is London and then there other cities as well as the country. In fact there are even other capitals. I watched Kirsty and Phil trumpet the benefits of Edinburgh as the best place to live in Britain in 2007. Cardiff was up there too. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were women in both places who not only knew where to source good slate, but could also discuss the state of the British film industry and the best methods of teaching your child to spell. (Not that I’m thinking of last night’s conversation or anything.) I don’t think they’re all obsessing about fairy cakes.
When we were first married we used to live in London, where I couldn’t bear the smug, boring, middle-class dinner conversation, mainly centred around what people either owned now, or were planning to own at some point in the future. Or how brilliant their children were and how much effort they’d made to get them into the frankly fabulous schools to which they had, against the odds, gained entry. It’s a particularly London phenomenon, that one, as you Londoners might recognise if you’ve noticed the look of puzzlement on non-Londoners’ faces as you warm to that particular theme (and trust me, an awful lot of you do.) But then it’s fair to say that I didn’t see my real friends often because I lived in Putney and they lived all over London. I now live in Bristol, where I socialise much more, with a much wider range of people. I drink too much, but that’s rather a function of having more fun than is probably appropriate for a woman of my age.
I went back to teaching a little while back after spending nine years working as a full-time mother and trying to write screenplays. My best friends, also full-time mothers, were a TV producer and a graphic artist on career breaks (and both, now that I think of it, refugees from London life.) The TV producer wrote a book in her time out, the graphic artist had a third child. Our wider circle included doctors, lawyers, teachers, a dentist, a speech therapist, a publisher as well as hairdressers, writers, nurses and all kinds of other people. We were, it is true, short on angsty, neurotic upper middles, but I don’t think any of us felt deprived. The reason we spent so much time together is that we were colleagues in the sense that we were doing the same job, and we would therefore share information.
We now don’t spend so much time together because in most cases we’ve drifted back to work and don’t have the same need to talk to one another about mothering related issues. And we’re all a bit more chilled about the business of parenting. Although I’d guess that many of them, like me, do fret about proper food, and make sure that homework is properly punctuated.
The reason I am constantly with my two best friends is that they are life-enhancing, challenging, knowledgeable, fascinating people. And feminists. And do you now what? We do sometimes discuss Farrow and Ball and slate. And I quite enjoy it, but it won’t take up a whole evening, or even a whole hour.
At this point I don’t want to sound like the large-breasted well-upholstered elderly correspondent to the Telegraph seated at her escritoire, but I’m going to. I’m sure that Daisy is a talented writer, but I’d suggest that authorship of what you yourself describe as ‘chick-lit’ doesn’t entitle you to a flag-waving place in the vanguard of the feminist battalion. I don’t even get much of an idea of what she thinks constitutes feminism. Many women (and some very right-on men) bandy the word around, pinning it to their chest like some badge which makes you, in some indefinable way, a Good Person. I know what I think it means, and I’m sure she knows what she thinks it means, but I doubt we’d agree.
Daisy, in summary, I’d suggest that you rethink the people you mix with. It sounds as if you headed out into the wild green yonder… and spent all your time with desperate refugees from London. What a pointless waste of effort. That’s as bad as my Polish cleaner who can’t speak much more English than she did when she arrived here eight years ago because she spends all her time with Polish people. Going somewhere and not bothering with the natives is a daft thing to do.
To other people tempted to take the chance and leave the M25, take a lesson from Daisy Waugh, and don’t do as she and her friends did. Take the blinkers off and acknowledge that there is more to provincial life than lounging in the spacious homes of other people who are patting themselves on the back for their bravery in leaving civilisation. Get stuck in and recognise that we’re not all prissy pinafored throwbacks. You might even enjoy yourself.
