What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Being a crabby old bat myself, I am rather annoyed by the TV ads with deliriously happy older people (they are actors by the way) who have found romance through some dating agency. I am more of Tina Turner’s opinion! Here are sketches of three different loves.
Daniel
Daniel lives with his parents in a semi-d in Harrow. Every day he travels into London to his job as a cataloguer in the National Gallery. He never spends any time in the gallery itself. Art does not interest him. The important thing for him is the thousands of slides reducing vast canvases to tiny images, the detail almost invisible to the naked eye, carefully filed, referenced and cross referenced and now to be transposed digitally.
At lunchtime he eats his sandwiches outdoors if the weather is good. Carefully packed by his elderly mother, they don’t vary. Every day healthy brown bread, good for his bowels, some salad in a plastic box and a yoghurt that he throws in the bin. Always. He can’t bring himself to tell her he hates yoghurt. Once, he tried to work out how much all those wasted pots had cost, but it proved too much for him. Daniel was no more interested in mathematics than he was in art.
When it rains he stays in the locker room eating his sandwiches on a hard wooden bench. He doesn’t go into the staff dining room. He feels so lonely in a crowd,
He can’t wait to scuttle back to his pool of quiet, his space, his endless task. It seems he often has to work late into the evening even missing the last train home. His mum and dad understand how important his work is and are grateful when he spends a cosy evening at home with them, watching the Television by the fire. Then he can tell them all about his day, and who he has seen, who he has talked to. They like to hear about his life out there in the world with his friends and workmates. They enjoy that.
Of course, he never mentions Paul.
Celine
I’m hiding in the pet food. No, not literally, I’m lurking among the shelves of Chum and Felix and the bags of cat litter because I don’t think he has any pets. I almost bumped right into him in Crisps, Nuts and Biscuits, but I managed to dodge back among the alcohol.
Maybe it isn’t him. Yes it is. I couldn’t mistake the hair cut, the glasses like bottle ends and the baggy corduroys. Perhaps he hasn’t recognised me. I’ve got highlights now and he is very short sighted. That’s one of the things that he told me, one of the many things he told me on that long evening we spent together. I haven’t answered a ‘men seeking women’ advert since. I’ve cut it out of the newspaper and stuck it on the fridge to remind me.
For ‘Intelligent’, read ‘obsessive’; for ‘six foot’ read ‘five foot seven’; for ‘slim athletic build’ read ‘weedy’. Dark hair, well maybe a few years ago. Ah well, it’s a long time since I was ‘blonde, curvaceous and fun loving’, you have to give and take a bit don’t you? I could have forgiven the little embellishments but the tedious voice, and the constant batting on about his favourite obsession, the true author of Shakespeare. Does anybody in this world care who wrote it? Nobody is going to be arguing over the royalties are they?
Oh, God, he’s coming this way, he’s past the mince and the bacon, he’s crossing the aisle. Damn! No, wait, somebody has come up to him. She’s stopped. Now she’s taken his arm and kissed him! A woman in a tight red dress, blonde, curvaceous and obviously fun loving.
Great Uncle Matthew
Matthew had enjoyed the war. Is that a a strange thing for a clergyman to admit? Of course he wasn’t a clergyman then, had not had the call. He was just one of the lads of F Squadron, living with the daily presence of death.There had never been anything to touch the excitement of living in another dimension, of leaving the earth behind, relying totally on your wits, your comrades, your machine.
The peace had fallen on Matthew like living death. Returning to the routine of work in the car factory. Every day the same, and any thoughts about the future like looking down a long grey tunnel. When he met up with some of his old comrades for the occasional boozy night they all felt the same. The daily grind and that long grey tunnel. There was guilt. too, silent in the air when they met together; guilt at what they were settling for, this second rate life, when so many of their friends had never made it.
So it was quite a relief to Matthew when he got the call. He had never thought much about religion in his youth. Even the closeness of death in the air had not moved him to thoughts of eternity, only thoughts of beer, and a girl to snuggle up to.
How it happened was so ridiculously simple. He was walking along in the sunshine, mind on nothing in particular, passing a church, looking at nothing in particular, and he heard a voice in his head, plain and clear saying ‘Come in.’ Just that, ‘Come in’. So he did.
He never made it to Archbishop, and the marriage and children he would have loved never came along. But he had no regrets. He felt the exhilaration of pitting his wits and strength against a much greater enemy than Hitler. For Matthew believed in the Devil. He had seen enough of senseless war to know his enemy.
He didn’t know what it was he felt. He had long since given up trying to put into words what filled his life. ‘Love’, ‘Joy’, seemed a bit over the top for a man like Matthew. He was content to just call it gratitude for having the chance to put his weight, his mind, every scrap of himself into life instead of death.