Leaving aside the attractive jealousy hypothesis for the time being, I told myself that at least the idea of ‘letting yourself go’ was the wrong phrase, since it belonged to the wrong era. Letting yourself go meant casting aside your boned corset (and having a good scratch), or letting your real eyebrows grow back. You can imagine it in those dour D.H. Lawrenceish Albert Finney movies (‘What about tha’ wife?’ ‘Me wife? Yon bitch uz let hersel’ go’). Those were the days when women were deemed to be the human equivalent of the Morning Glory, flowering for about twenty minutes and lucky if someone noticed.
All of this was comforting. But on the other hand, it is undeniable that I let myself get fat and frowzy when I had a boyfriend; and that the minute I became single again I lost weight in butter-mountain proportions and headed for the gym. To anyone familiar with the life story of Elizabeth Taylor this syndrome is a sad cliché, for which I apologize. Prior to cohabitation, I had looked after my body by feeding it occasional salads; but once safely cocooned in coupledom with a man who did a marvellous impression of a priest granting absolution (‘Hey, go for it, babycakes; life’s too short’) I was singing ‘Bring out the figgy pudding’ from dawn to dusk. This seemed wonderfully liberating until the cold dawn of single life brought me the realization that the only Lonely Hearts advertisements I could answer were the ones that said ‘Send photo of flat’.
All of which was how I came to learn about weight-training, and discover my pecs and lats. You wondered where all this was leading, and this is it. Stung by the remark about letting myself go, I decided it was time to pull myself together, which is precisely what weight-training is. You know the way people tune up strings on guitars (dooing-dooing, dung-dung, dang-dang, ding-ding) – well, weight-training is a bit like that, only you have to supply your own sound effects. It is mostly boys who go to my gym, many of them with moustaches, and some of them have even pulled themselves together too tightly.
It is amazing. We have muscles all over the place, some of them happy to respond to attention after about twenty years of disuse. I am particularly fond of the muscles known to us in the weight-training fraternity as ‘lats’ (the latissimus dorsi) because they pull my shoulders down from where they want to be – viz, around my ears. But I have also discovered some muscles called ‘glutes’ which are pretty impressive, since I had previously assumed that there resided nothing in this area beyond wibble and wobble.
The jargon is great; I love it. What is a bench press, Auntie Lynne? Well, it is not, as you might think, a huddle in a rugby club changing-room, ho ho. And what do you mean by ‘calf extension’? Well, it has nothing to do with veal, ha ha. The nice man with big beach-ball shoulders who taught me to use the machines was impressed that I picked up the terminology with such relish. ‘What’s next?’ he would say, as we finished our warm-ups. ‘Quads!’ I yelled, like a contestant on a gameshow. ‘And what do we use for quads?’ ‘Umm … the leg press!’ I was transported by it all. I remember coming home on the Tube and musing, like Alice in the rabbit-hole, ‘Do cats have lats? Do newts have glutes?’
The big issue now is: would I ‘let myself go’ if a man said to me, ‘Listen, two buckets of potato salad won’t be the end of the world’? I honestly could not say. Rather cunningly, I did ask the man with the beach-ball shoulders if he would like to go out for a drink, but it turned out he was married already, which was a crying shame. I had fancied the idea of going dancing with him, and wiggling our lats at one another across a crowded room. Friends said we would not have had much to talk about, but I didn’t care. What a perfect solution to the man-or-muscle dilemma, I thought. I mean, what an ideal chap for keeping a woman on the straight and narrow.
Somewhere along the line, I got the wrong idea about snails. Influenced by my fondness for Brian in The Magic Roundabout, I thought of snails as rather larky characters wearing comical hats and mufflers who deliver wry put-downs. I know this is silly, but you can’t legislate for the power of The Magic Roundabout over a young person’s imagination; and if I grew up expecting sarcasm from molluscs, at least I know where I got the idea. Brian also had a jaunty manner of locomotion, as I recall: reversing back and forth continually, as though engaged in a compulsive seven-point turn. So I rather got the impression that – what with the put-downs and the skidding about – snails were the Bruce Forsyths of the natural world.
So it was a bit of a shock to discover, when I finally took responsibility for a garden, that snails are in fact rather stupid organisms that mechanically chomp through marigolds and delphiniums, and are so blindly partial to a drop of Theakston’s Old Peculiar that they can actually be lured into drowning in it. Brian’s razor-sharp wit and lightness of foot were clearly unrepresentative of his gastropod friends in general. ‘Where be your gibes now?’ I say, as I gruesomely pile dead snails and empty shells into a sort of garden-path Golgotha (pour encourager les autres). ‘Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were apt to set – er, Dougal and Zebedee in a roar?’
Dealing with pests is one of those problems that women prefer not to face alone. In fact, when discussing separation, I have known women suddenly struck by the thought ‘but who would dispose of the spiders?’ decide on the instant that the calling-off must be called off. It is sad but true that when a man is around, one automatically crouches on top of a wardrobe saying ‘Eek’ while the chap does the business with the coal shovel. It all happens so quickly, you see, that you don’t have time to explore the sexual politics. ‘Cat’s got a frog!’ you shout, and before you know it the man has taken charge, and you are scaling the curtains.
I have never actually asked a man outright if he is any good with worms, but it is only a matter of time. There we will be: him, me, moonlight, the heady scent of honeysuckle, the flesh trembling, pushing towards the overwhelming question, and I shall have to spoil it by mentioning worms. The funny thing is, of course, that when no spouse is present to stride manfully worm-wards with a piece of cardboard (‘Don’t worry your head, little missy, I think Mister Worm and I understand one another’), a lone woman simply does it herself. She looks up, sees a worm, thinks ‘Why do cats catch worms? What do they think it proves?’ and then rolls it on to a copy of Hello! and flings it back on the garden.
Up until this year, you see, I let the man deal with the snails. ‘Ugh,’ I said, as I watched him pick them up, ‘I couldn’t do that. No, no. I couldn’t do that.’ The idea of handling snails gave me the same species of ab-dabs as the thought of being encased in polystyrene, or forced to listen to a thirty-minute concerto for fingernail and blackboard. Watching my brave chap pulling the little suckers off the pots and plants and hurling them over the wall into an overgrown garden next door (with an encouraging shout of ‘Wheee!’) I would huddle in the doorway and gaze admiringly at his prowess, all the while thinking that, left to me, the garden would solely comprise tall, bare, ravaged stalks and enormous, menacing, overstuffed molluscs blocking the path to the shed.
But in fact, of course, I kill them. I don’t shout ‘Wheee’ and lob them over the wall; I patrol the garden with a special killing-bucket and a pair of tongs, making evil ‘snap-snap’ noises and cooing ‘Daddy’s home.’ I used to think all creatures were petals in God’s daisy-chain – but that was before I joined the Marigold Liberation Army, and learned not to feel compassion. After a successful snail-raid, I even add insult to injury by watching my favourite piece of archive footage from Nationwide (shown last year in BBC2’s extravaganza The Lime Grove Story) where a huge snail called Boozy is shown supping the froth off a pint before suddenly falling off stone dead with a thump. It makes me laugh every time.
I could never love a snail. The great crime writer Patricia Highsmith kept snails, I believe, at her home in Switzerland, but I am not sure this is evidence of affection. She once wrote a terrifying short story in which a foolhardy zoology professor encounters gigantic snails on a remote island, and has his shoulder bitten clean off (munch, munch) by a snail in search of fresh pro
tein. It wasn’t funny, but it helped to get the enemy in perspective. I mean, I think she was saying they’d kill us if they had the chance.
Patricia Highsmith was probably intrigued by their homicidal tendencies, and took the more dangerous specimens into town for a pub-crawl, to see how they’d act with a few beers inside them. At which point – of course! – they’d probably put on the hats and mufflers and start saying, ‘Nice to see you, to see you nice’ while zig-zagging across the bar in the snails’ equivalent of the hokey-cokey. I never realized it before. All that skidding about and sarcasm that Brian used to do – perhaps he was simply tiddly.
I once heard a very scary story concerning a man who lived alone. I sometimes remember it late at night, and get so nervous that I chew the edge of the duvet. Invited to a friend’s house for dinner, it seems, this man behaved in a perfectly normal, outgoing manner until the moment attention turned to the serving of Brussels sprouts – when he suddenly got strangely serious.
‘One, two, three,’ he said to himself, as he carefully ladled the steaming veggies onto his plate. ‘Ha ha, oh yes. Four, five, six, seven.’ The hosts swapped glances, and shifted uncomfortably in their seats. ‘More sprouts, John?’ asked the hostess, after a pause. At which their guest made a loud scoffing noise and stood up, violently pushing back his chair so that it rucked up the carpet. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ve got seven sprouts. And forgive me for having two strong sturdy legs to stand on, but seven sprouts is the number of sprouts I have.’
No doubt there are many married people, too, who have strong feelings on the subject of sprouts. One recalls those famous cases of men murdering their wives (and getting off with a light fine and a reprimand) for serving up the incorrect number of roasties, or putting the cruet on the wrong place-mat. But it is sitting alone in the evening, I am sure, that encourages crankiness: start out with a harmless little tendency towards obsessive-compulsive behaviour, and within a few months of single life you are not only talking to the characters in Brookside but also getting dogmatic about vegetable-consumption and forming advanced crackpot theories on the nature of evil. Since nobody contradicts you (and the goldfish doesn’t care) you easily convince yourself that you are ‘on the right lines’.
Take the chap I met recently in a Pasadena cake shop. He seemed normal enough: just a bit over-keen for a chat. But then he mentioned that during his solitary hours he had given a lot of thought to the identity of the Antichrist, and had finally settled conclusively on Richard Branson. Everything pointed to it, he said. There’s none so blind as those who will not see, etcetera. I thought he was joking, but it gradually dawned on me that he wasn’t, and that moreover he was positioned between me and the door.
‘Set in your ways’ – that’s what they call it when single people start getting things out of proportion. ‘Don’t get set in your ways.’ It means: don’t use a protractor when setting the coffee table at an angle to the wall; don’t attach so much importance to changing the date on your kitchen calendar that you scoot home from work mid-morning to check you’ve done it. The image conjured up is of a stupid-looking prehistoric animal sinking in mud and muttering, ‘Actually, I always buy the Radio Times on a Wednesday’ and ‘I asked for kitchen towel, and she bought me yellow.’
One need only spend half an hour in a supermarket to see where ‘getting set in your ways’ can ultimately lead. There is a strange urban myth which says that in supermarkets single people strike up impromptu chats over the rindless streaky in the hope of finding a potential mate. In reality, however, they are more likely to start the conversation because rindless streaky has been occupying their thoughts in the evenings.
The trouble, of course, is to recognize when one’s own reasonable preferences and quaint pet theories (attained through a painstaking process of trial and error) turn into pig-headed fixed ideas, or even dangerous obsessions. At what point does it ‘get out of hand’? I have a nasty suspicion that it is a phenomenon you can never observe in your own behaviour – one of those clever irregular verbs:
I have rules about things;
You are set in your ways;
He thinks Richard Branson is the Antichrist.
I am assuming, I suppose, that a sane live-in partner prevents the escalation of this behaviour – rather as he might helpfully point out that your clothes are thick with cat-hair or that there is toothpaste up your nostrils. But is it worth taking on a live-in partner just for this function? I can’t believe it is. Perhaps, instead, there ought to be some tall, supernatural protector for single people (along the lines of Superman) who could spot a burgeoning obsession with his X-ray vision and wooosh into our homes (with a fanfare) to prevent it from getting a grip.
Thus, just as you were preparing your solitary dinner and thinking ‘I don’t know. Eight sprouts seems too many, yet six sprouts seems too few,’ he would suddenly appear at your side and dash the whole bag to the ground, releasing you from their terrible influence. ‘A close call,’ he twinkles (with arms akimbo and a smile reminiscent of Richard Branson’s). ‘Lumme,’ you say, ‘was I really counting sprouts?’ ‘It’s all over now,’ he chuckles, patting you on the shoulder. ‘Just don’t let it happen again, you hear?’
And as he turns horizontal and flies off through the kitchen door with a cheery salute, you slide down the wall to a sitting position and think – with ample justification – ‘I wonder if I’m spending too much time on my own?’
Years ago, I was privileged to meet one of the men who first applied the word ‘vector’ to a type of bank account. I met him at an historic moment, actually, because he had just emerged from the selfsame shirtsleeve-and-braces design consultancy think-tank meeting at which the full kennel-name of Vector (‘Indigo Vector’) had been finally settled upon. He looked tired but happy – like a miner, perhaps, at the end of a 12-hour shift, or a brain surgeon who had just achieved a complicated transplant.
Of course, the proceedings of this meeting were not disclosed, but from his exhausted but triumphant state I somehow deduced it had resembled the jury room in Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men – you know, sweaty, tense, touch-and-go, life-in-the-balance. Perhaps opposition to ‘Indigo Vector’ had been fierce; the ‘Blue Streak’ lobby was unshiftable. I imagined my chap taking the righteous white-suited Henry Fonda role, quietly fighting his colleagues every inch of the way, and remaining cool while his enemies dabbed their brows with big hankies.
Had I never met him at all, however, I would have imagined something quite different. I would have assumed that the naming of a new bank account must be a work of inspiration, and that, as such, it must come from a humble individual sitting alone in a padded cell – rather in the manner of the contract Hollywood writer under the old studio system. We could call him Mankowitz. ‘Get Mankowitz on to this!’ the board would command. And a secretary would place a sheet of paper in Mankowitz’s in-tray, describing the new bank account and expecting a result by noon.
Mankowitz would come in at ten, take off his hat, shuffle the papers without removing the long cigarette between his fingers, and then start to type short one-liners, stopping occasionally only to pinch the bridge of his nose under his wire-rimmed specs.
Indigo Vector.
The bank that likes to say yes.
I want to be a tomato.
For the little things in life.
They’re tasty, tasty, very very tasty, they’re very tasty.
Once bitten, forever smitten.
We won’t make a drama out of a crisis.
And then at half past ten, he would stop for coffee.
Perhaps I harbour too strong an attachment to romantic notions of solitary genius. Perhaps I have too little respect for the massed talents of the advertising industry. But somehow I prefer the Mankowitz option. The idea of a gaggle of blokes in expensive whistles sitting together and running the paltry word Vector up a flag-pole fills me with a strange and yawning sadness.
I remembered all this because I have recently discovered
the surreal world of paint colour names (Comet, Murmur, Quiescence, Evensong, Early December) and I simply cannot bear to believe that these were chosen by a committee in a designer boardroom. There is too much poetry involved, too much imaginative intimacy.
‘Right, then,’ I said, at the paint counter. ‘I’ll have a litre of Hazy Downs please, with Tinker for the skirting,’ and I caught my breath at hearing the words. It was as though the spirit of a mad poet had breezed through. Walls of hazy downs; and ‘Tinker’ for the skirting. Wow.
Just look at a strip of green Dulux shades – ‘Spring dance, April coppice, Verge, Racecourse, Meadow land, Treetop’ – and you can see this poet, can’t you, his eyes closed, straining to hear birdsong in the rustling trees outside his cell window. ‘More greens,’ he smiles to himself, momentarily forgetting the shackles that bind him to the damp stone walls. And he falls into a trance. ‘Curly kale,’ he intones, relishing the shapes it makes in his mouth. ‘Shady fern, Mystic moon, Fresh breeze, Elderwater, Trickle.’
‘What was the last one?’ snaps the man from Dulux who is taking this down. ‘Trickle,’ he repeats.
What I am building up to is a confession. I keep meeting people who think I write this column in a darkened room in a small flat, with just cats for company, and that I write it all myself out of my very own brain. Whereas of course this is a mere illusion, and in fact the writing of this column is a well-organized team affair involving a large number of hacks in consultancy roles, a weekly meeting (with minutes), and an all-day creative thrash-out, in which each person writes a paragraph and then the whole thing is put together by a complicated voting procedure. I mean ‘Single Life’? You must be joking. There are loads of us here. Loads. You should see the washing-up.