My mother-in-law

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More when rationality and a sense of proportion have been restored.

A death in the family

Just at the moment, it feels like the fall of the House of Atreus.  We all seem to be set against each other.  Mark's father Edward died on Thursday - and although this was in a sense good news, we both went into shock.  I did some hugging, arm around the shoulder stuff, but M didn't seem very responsive.  He says he feels awful how un-upset he is.

For various reasons I have sort of got a large part of the funeral arranging gig... this feels very stressful, I have that same slightly spaced out feeling I had when my mother died, dashing around the place, trying to organise things, and do the things I have committed myself to as well (Festival Club, the shop gig, and an editorial meeting tomorrow).  Plus I have foreign students to feed - and no flexibility about times - have to adhere to their timetable!   Fortunately, perhaps, my afternoon drink with Tara today was postponed... in its place I had an appalling row with Ned.  I gave him the back of my hand, so he leapt up punched and kicked me.   I am too shocked, and want to bury the whole thing, but frankly, I feel that things have gone too far.  I told him I wanted him out of the house - this was after he'd started throwing glass jars at us.  He said a lot of really unpleasant things: "nasty old woman!" was the least of them, basically his beef was that he had nothing to be grateful to us for (I wasn't trying to make him grateful).  It's infuriating, he argues so illogically, it is horribly reminiscent of my brother Tom.

The major problem is that most people in this household have no sense of urgency or priorities, this drives me mad, and I am becoming more and more annoyed by it, because it never gets any better, and everything falls apart.  Mark has been trained to some of these a  bit, and is a lot better since we first met, Ned is, unsurprisingly, all about himself... he has no sense that the rest of us may be under pressure of any kind.  Yes, M's lost his father, but I've also lost someone I loved, I was tremendously fond of Ed, and got on very well with him, I remember him quizzing me when I first met about how I'd felt when I first met Mark.  I discovered last night that meeting Stella he had had one of those "I'm going to marry her" type coups de foudre, although knowing what I now now about Ed, I don't suppose marriage was the first thing on his mind.  His quizzing of me was perhaps to ascertain whether I'd have that same recognition.... no, I hadn't.sadly.   Mark said "it took us a while to ...." to what?  to know? to understand? to recognise... Yes, but I never noticed all the other things that I should have noticed.  Then again, Ed's marriage to Stella was not perhaps as promising as that first fine careless rapture... so who knows which is better?

I understand now that my being laidback (or lazy if you prefer) is hopeless in our relationship, because M just does likewise.... so I have to get unnaturally over organised and bossy to make anything happen.  And I hate myself when I behave like that.  I was trying to organise Ned into doing the paid work he is contracted to do for Clive this week, because he is just procrastinating at present.  I am, like many parents, hoping my children will make good my deficiencies - but they aren't.  Surprise, surprise!  This really is a hopeless marriage in many ways, since I am always being forced into being who I am not - and the "real" me is not given much scope.  Oh, perhaps that's not true.

The weird thing is that I am being given responsibilities by M's family, while he's blithely coasting along like the family idiot - having to be reminded that it might be an idea to speak to his mother (hello! your father's died, she might want to hear from you, rather than me!).  He has a bad cold, and he is struggling to finish some work, so it seems as if he has no room to cope with anything else.   I suppose that is how one gets - just full up of coping - I didn't have room to cope with Ned's dilatoriness today or his self-centredness.   The thing that upsets him most is saying how I long for him to leave home.  I don't say it to upset him - but I find having an under-employed, under-productive, critical presence loafing around the house in his dressing gown for large parts of the day, with or without girlf in tow, rather difficult.  They hang out in the kitchen a lot - it interferes with my operations in there.

Whether Edward's death and the frosk im pisk for Ned are connected, I leave it to the analysts to decide.  Slightly more worryingly, I have to meet Finn's "counsellor" on Tuesday, together with Mark to discuss "family dynamics" i.e. what it is we are doing that is fucking up Finn.  I wonder if I have made any steps beyond the sort of parent child relationships that existed in my family with my parents.  I am, despite having sacrificed myself financially (no, I never saw it like that) to stay at home with them, apparently a totally useless mother, perceived as loving by Finn (but quite unable to influence him) and as basically horrible by Ned, and as "lazy" by both of them.  I cannot imagine what can put this right - short of a large lottery win, domestic staff and some intensive therapy, a new house, a separate establishment and a few other fairy sandcastles in the air....

There is a big part of me that doesn't want to put in the work with Ned and Mark - just to run away and say "A plague on both your houses!" and give up the struggle because we are so temperamentally different it hardly seems worthwhile trying to sort things out any more.  Yes, for years I have accepted their behaviour etc, but now I wonder if I should, for my own sake and sanity.   Finn is a different kettle of fish - but he's been the great white hope of the House of Samuel for years, and our hope is looking a bit wobbly at present.

Edward's death is a strange echo of Paul C's death last month - he died on a Thursday too.  That made me (briefly) appreciate life and freedom. Edward's death somehow amplifies this, because he died the old person's death - which one expects (I do not say "hopes" for) oneself.  I do not yet feel like an "old woman" pace Ned, but I am aware that I will be sooner or later. I wish to have a new lease of life before I get to that stage.  Losing weight is beginning to do that, making me much much healthier, faster, etc.  I have definitely "speeded up" in the last few months, but I still have long days of apathy.   I hoped writing would eventually purchase me greater freedom of movement, but it is not doing so yet.  In my worse moments, and they are increasingly common, and this is one of them, I fear it will never happen.  I "know" something will happen.  Perhaps today was it?

I chose the title before I started to write: when I look at the contents it looks as if I am describing the death of the family - but perhaps that is a little melodramatic and we still going to jog along somehow.

Anger

I was angry with my friend, I told my wrath, my wrath did end
I was angry with foe, I told it not, my wrath did grow....

Or words to that effect.  But nothing from Blake about anger with oneself, I realise more and more how much of my anger is with myself - and I am furious because I didn't say what I meant to say, didn't explain myself clearly, didn't hold back the winged word behind the hurdles of my teeth (to use two Homeric epithets which suddenly come to mind).   I am angry about a great many stupid things.

I have rather spoiled the last two weeks feeling angsty about the advertising for Thanet Watch - it's just not the sort of thing I really enjoy doing.  I spend a lot of time delaying the evil hour - and find that when I have made the calls everyone is out. No one phones back (not that I expect them to, why would they?) and the whole thing is thoroughly dispiriting.  I thought I'd probably make £200 - but it looks more like £50 - if that!.  But that's not the problem: the problem is that I knew when I agreed to do it that I wouldn't enjoy it - and that it would do this to me, that I would wake at 4.30 am and worry about it.  I should have just said No.  Unfortunately, I felt I wasn't in a position where I could say no to money.  I don't know what the right thing to do is.  It seems arrogant to try and say "I'm only going to do this!" i.e. to carry on with my fairly unsuccessful writing, rather than take every opportunity to earn money.  There's amour propre to be considered too.  People will talk, they will say I'm useless, that I drop out of things.  But does this matter?  Should I be using this to teach myself a lesson, to be more organised, committed, to procrastinate less?  But in fact I am not such a champion procrastinator - I often do things at once, it is only things I don't want to do or don't like doing that make me proscrastinate.  I don't really procrastinate about writing.  So, what to do?

But to return to anger with oneself - who can one tell it to?  How can one heal it?  So much anger at one's own stupidity, indolence, lassitude etc is inevitable.  The pop-psychs say "be nice to yourself", the Christians say "forgive yourself" - and yes, I should clearly.  But there's always that feeling that one's letting oneself off the hook too easily.  I wonder why I've spent my whole life feeling I ought to be nicer and better than I am to be acceptable? I know why, technically, but it goes back to the old problem of therapy, just because you know doesn't mean you can change the feeling very easily.  So why can't I say "it's OK, you don't have to do it!" - in the end I usually do, I usually give up, but only after I've struggled and made myself miserable for months/years etc.  So is that it I have to make myself miserable and hateful before I stop doing the things that make me so?   This is a bit like that strategy where a person ends a relationship by making themselves so hateful to the other person that the partner breaks up the relationship.  Am I doing that too?

Going around in circles, I just find it really hard to allow myself to spend the time doing the thing I enjoy doing.  When I did write a little today I felt perfectly happy and satisfied.  I was thinking about it technically as well as emotionally, expanding the character - and it was working.  But I did this for about 30 minutes today - a great deal of time was taken up by worrying, email correspondence, Weightwatchers, shopping, unpacking shopping, washing, playing spider solitaire while listening to R4 and worrying about not doing the advertising work, then unsuccessfully doing the advertising work.

What I love is those days when I wake up with no responsibilities.  That sounds really self-indulgent, and in fact, I never actually have days with NO responsibilities - there's always light domestic work and social interaction to be done.  But I think I love these days because that is when I am able to be myself.  Since I was a small child I have had a sense of responsibility as the oldest child - and as the unsatisfactory child who had to prove herself lovable all the time.  So if I don't feel responsible for anything it is almost as if I had returned to a pre-conceptual stage - where it's just my spirit/soul - free of any earthly requirements or demands, undamaged by any parental or other expectations, just my essential self.  Not real of course, but I am beginning to have a sense of what I could be - this freer person, whose creativity becomes untramelled by expectations.   Is it real?  Or just a fantasy?.  I think it relates to this idea I've had recently about being somehow able to write more radical, free-form ideas, not fantasy exactly, but to write with more freedom!  Somehow writing novels based on the adventures of family members feels like another form of "responsibility", to be their story teller.  Nobody asked me to do it though.

So - is getting rid of my responsibilities (i.e. voluntary work, advertising sales) the answer?  I remember how pleased I was when I settled down to write in 2012 - knowing that I could earn as much through intermittent hospitality as through struggling to get a business going.  I need to think about this a little longer and decide what to do.  But it is clearly not having a good effect on my temper - unless that's caused by some other factor!

Explorers, Builders, Negotiators, Directors: Helen Fisher + the 4 Humours

Have just been reading a book by an American anthropologist Helen Fisher called "Why Him, Why Her?".  It is more interesting than that title sounds, but I am rather wondering how "scientific" this book truly is.
She has identified 4 personality types and says their relationships with each other will tend to pan out in certain ways.  She claims that the types are related to a predominance of different hormones in the brain - Dopamine (Explorers), Serotonin (Builders), testosterone (Directors) and oestrogen (Negotiators).  Although she devises some questionaires so that you can find out what type you are (it's all very Cosmopolitan), she doesn't actually say whether people who fall into these categories on the basis of the quiz  have ever been measured for these hormones - or whether it's just a hunch.  This is my major problem with the book.

I rather liked the fact that she pointed out that this quarto-typology has existed since Hippocrates idea of the 4 bodily fluids that dominated people - which Galen boiled down to the idea of the 4 temperaments.  Galen thought balances of the humours were what was needed, Fisher agrees people are a mix but says we all have a dominant type.  I appear to be predominantly a Negotiator - so is Mark, ergo we should not be married to each other - he is however a more balanced/desirable type according to Galen (he has more health problems than me however).  Of course we cannot argue from anecdote and Helen Fisher tries hard not to, but at the same time the book is full of vox pops from different people.

She aligns her four categories with Hippocrates, thus:

Sanguine:  Explorer
Melancholic: Builder
Phlegmatic: Director
Choleric:  Negotiator  (she uses the word Passionate to bridge the vast gulf between these 2 types).

These groups of 4 are interesting - the trad ones are aligned with the planets: Mercury,  Saturn, Jupiter and Mars (I think), or they became aligned with the elements: Fire, Earth, Air and Water - but none of this really works or lines up together - intuition, pragma, intellect, feeling - it doesn't quite work because Negotiators are meant to be intuitive, which is fire - and the explorers have got that - if you gave the Explorers air instead then the Directors would lose the intellectual connexion and become water which wouldn't do at all.  The traditional humors fit with the astrological signs and the Jungian types: thinking, feeling etc.  but hers don't.  Of course she could be right.  But she's not really in the great tradition here.  .

A quick visit to Wikipedia and I discover that Ms Fisher is not alone - lots of modern psychologists have identified and used these 4 types in other ways - so perhaps it is possible to boil us down to that.  Then again plenty of others have not - don't know if Freud ever bothered with them. Myers Briggs went up to 16 personality types - which sounds a bit more like it.

The question becomes one of chicken-and-egg: did Prof Fisher remember the 4 types (she is an anthropologist who specialises in sex) and update them - or did she start from some unquoted research about hormones and brains...and retro-fit to the 4 types idea?  4 is obviously the number to start with - any more and it gets confusing.  I am not dissing her basic premise, but just questioning the cultural "norms" that gave rise to it.

I am not entirely sure I agree with Prof Fisher - but I have now started seeing my friends in these categories -  most of my women friends are Negotiators - some are builders, and I can recognise Explorers quite easily.  James, my first husband was a classic Director - his nickname at school was Baz - short for Basil(eos) (King) - which tells you what you need to know.  Since Negs like to be with Directors, should I have stayed with him?  No, don't think so.

Having seen one of Fisher's lectures on TED I rather hoped for something a bit more chewy - but it has the air and style of an easy-to-read self-help book, so not quite what I expected (although the title was a bit of a giveaway...).  Will it catch on?  I don't think so, the book came out a few years ago 2009 in fact and doesn't seem to have had much impact beyond it's original hype.  I suspect though that by adopting an existing cultural form Helen Fisher has condemned me to retain this knowledge.  It fits, it works, it seems reasonable - but I would still like them to have done hormone tests on the participants in the dating matches.

Aristotle on tv

Quite wonderful - and unbelievable - a tv programme about Aristotle's science.  It had everything one could possibly want - lovely settings, food markets, agreeable discussions about wildlife, amazing shots of chameleons and macaques... and information about something new.  A tv programme which one actually learned something from.

The basic thesis of the programme was what a great scientist Aristotle had been, and how had he spent two years by a lagoon in Lesbos researching animal life.  He had begun to understand a great deal, including things that were not improved upon until the 19thC,.  He had begun to realise some things about inheritance, but he wasn't great on experimenting as a result of this he believed that maggots were spontaneously generated from dead meat - and indeed, that many other creatures were spontaneously generated too.  I suppose this is where the idea that barnacle geese were spontaneously generated from barnacles (I've never understood how anyone could believe this - even in times of greatest credulity - it flies in the face of other animal behaviour...but I suppose if you think maggots can be spontaneously generated, then anything else that you never see breeding might be too).  It filled me with a (probably short-lived) desire to go and read A's Natural History work - I think we have some edited highlights somewhere in Penguin classics.

Now I wish there was going to be a whole series about A's scientific discoveries and how he made them, and whether he really did dissect an elephant.   Followed by a series on natural history through history.

One of my longstanding backburner book ideas has involved Aristotle and other early scientists' observations and anecdotes about animals, all laviishly illustrated with pictures from manuscripts and Renaissance printed works... up to, but no further than, Hooke I guess. Would such an object sell?  I suppose it depends on how far the public yearn to understand how people thought in the past.... well that would be quite a lot of people I think. 

Home & Away - some impressions

Thursday afternoon, Ramsgate, overcast, everything neatly stowed into old hand bag for an overnight stay.  The fast train: water marshes, les boucles du Stour, grey sky and yellow rape fields, clouds lowering into mist beyond Canterbury.  St. Pancras, oyster card top up, fast tube to Piccadilly Circus - too early, go to Hatchards and browse, disgusted to find Hatchards is a camouflaged Waterstones... remember a birthday book token - two WW1 paperbacks.  Found a bestseller "Cats in France" - designer interiors and charming exteriors - with cats - in France!  Made me laugh.  Try to go to St. James's Piccadilly for a prayer - but the church (unlike the burgeoning market place in the churchyard outside) is CLOSED - because it's after six... "moneylenders in the temple" thoughts.  Walk to St James's Square in hope of sitting in a green space - also CLOSED.  Staring into space see beloved cousin... meet, kiss, he's had a drink already, how are you? "fucked"...... enter the imposing edifice together - does this look bad?  Stow my stuff and "prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet" (there will be time to murder and create!!!) seize a glass of cremant de bourgogne and sally into the fray - more beloved cousins - chat - more people -  priest "Vatican II was an experiment that didn't work" - 3 x 2nd cozs once removed - briefly, plus spurned wife of beloved cousin's son...more shock revelations about health statuses/outrageous behaviour of various mutualities.  Then the speeches: warm praise, S reads a moving extract from book - remember discussions with him about that sense of something "beyond" when we were teenagers - decide actually want to read book, not just because he's my cousin!  We are invited to mingle - we mingle and separate.  I wander off meet a couple of people I've encountered on Facebook - isn't the real world wonderful? and find interesting American student and have interesting discussion about Plato - Kierkegaard and poetic vs.philosophical language - another cousin enquires about my book "don't mention the book!"... More talk with putative collaborators about "The Menopause Dialogues"...mingle, blur, cremant de bourgogne, salmon scotch eggs, etc.  Suddenly it's time to go - a detour to Paddington cramped under the curve of the tube door.  We don't have forever to talk to the people we care about - if not now, when?  The tube, the escalators and disjointed talk, "I had dhrink taken, your Honour" - The terrible melancholy of empty tube stations.

I send a text and soon - after dashing through Bayswater on the Circle Line, the tube station of my childhood - I am received into the bosom of South Kensington with a Thai takeaway and gallons of water.   A long discussion about the economy.  Are we totally fucked?  Is there any hope for the West?  Dear sister scathing about my views on Americans, which are probably unfair to 5% of them!  Move onto safer ground - literature... Bed, magnificent downstairs spare room, bathroom, underfloor heating, shower, brass bed, v. comfortable - but can't sleep.  Start reading S's. book ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Power-Ring-Spiritual-Vision/dp/082454983X/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1) but aware not really doing it justice in current state.  Swap to book about Woodbine Willie, drift off to sleep....

 "no, that is not what I meant - not what I meant at all."