Carol - and other stuff

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Carol never opened her bedroom curtains. They remained closed day and night. She said it was to stop the sun fading the duvet. I wanted to say to her: Carol, this is Wolverhampton not the south of bleedin' France.  Of course I didn't.  That girl was good to me in those dark days when I was evicted from my own home by you-know-who.

Yes, that modest council flat provided a refuge, a safe harbour from the cruel storms of life.

As Carol used to say:

I'm a port, in a storm -

Your harbour, where it's warm -

In my arms you will hide

From the great big world outside.

No she didn't - that was Marlene Dietrich - but it could easily have been Carol.

Of course you knew Carol, didn't you? From an upper class background, the product of a posh girls' school, she chose to live on a council estate in order to gather data at first hand for her doctoral thesis - The council estate syndrome: a phenomological investigation into the relationship between domestic violence and low cost, high-rise development in an inner-city environment.

There she met Gary.  She now identifies with the proletariat, affecting a lower-class accent and adopting the idioms and slovenly syntax of the lower orders.

Of course she didn't complete her thesis and has, instead, taken on the role of prison visitor. Well, Gary is inside more than he's out so it's one way of keeping the relationship going.

Anyway, I thought of Carol this morning when I decided to leave my bedroom curtains closed. You know that I'm a stickler for routine: Every morning I get up, fold the duvet so the bed can get an airing, smooth down the sheet and then open the curtains. I always make sure they are exactly the same width on each side of the window. Well I suppose that's what a military training does for one. (I don't do the  'Hospital Corners' to the sheets any more, though).

Anyway this morning I thought: blow it - I'm going to have a break with routine. So I left the bed just as I got out of it and I did not open the curtains. I went downstairs, made myself a cup of tea and spread honey on a Sesame seed Ryvita.

Of course I opened the curtains later, and tidied the bed. But the point I am making is that sometimes it is good to have a break from routine - just to demonstrate to yourself that you can do it. Like occasionally going to bed without brushing your teeth; just once in a while it won't do you any harm.

Actually, that reminds me - I have a dental appointment on the 26th.

But I am rambling on about myself, which is not like me.

I am proud of you already, and when you get your degree - which I am sure you will - I expect to be invited to the graduation ceremony.

And I do take note of what you say regarding the 'bigger picture', it's just that I have (or so I was once told) the philosopher's temperement.

You may be right in that I 'think too much' but in order not to think too much one has to think about thinking itself, and then decide how much thinking is about right. This, of course, involves more thinking.
It's very tricky.

By the way, if anyone thinks I am denigrating the working-class - I am not! I myself am 'working-class'. You, Anna, are aware of my humble beginnings: We lived in a ‘two up, two down’ with a lavatory at the end of the yard. But it was kept spotlessly clean (as I type this I 'smell' the fresh whitewash) and we had squares of newspaper on a nail behind the door: usually the Times or the Telegraph (my father only read the broadsheets). But I have to say (based upon my experience in friends' lavatories) that the coarser paper on which the tabloids were printed was in fact more absorbent.

Sorry to end on such a prosaic note, but after all... when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Don't burn too much of the midnight oil.

George