My remembrance of things past

Objects sometimes bring back many lost memories, don’t they?

In Proust, it was the flavour of the little cake known as a Madeleine that – he fictionally claims – brought back his Remembrance of things past. With me, it has been two much more solid, and far less edible, items.

One of my most painful characteristics, certainly from adolescence into middle age, was fecklessness about money. I don’t entirely regret it – my boys had some memorable holidays as children – but I remember with horror the struggle to cope with a mountain of credit card debt and the harrowing conversations with bank managers about badly-managed overdrafts.

That only ended when I was made redundant for the second of the three occasions in my career. Fortunately, because my boss (and friend) had persuaded me to come back from abroad to take the job from which he later dismissed me, I’d negotiated myself a long notice period, as an insurance policy that served me well when I now had to call it in.

This meant that my redundancy pay was substantial. Indeed, it covered not just the seven weeks for which I was out of work (unlike my third and last redundancy, this one led to a very short gap in employment) but also enabled me to pay off all my debts. Since then, helped by Danielle who was always much more effective at managing our affairs, I’ve learned to live within my means and avoid new debts.

Redundancy, a hurtful experience, turned out to be beneficial in this instance.

Looking back on the period before I learned that lesson, I can see that I had mistakenly modeled myself on a misinterpretation of my father’s behaviour. He was generous and he cultivated an appealing air of carelessness towards money. The reality, I now realise, was different and he managed his affairs far more wisely than I understood. He had a good income but I’m sure, now, that if he avoided debt it was because he combined it with intelligent self-control.

But that’s not the image he liked to present. On the contrary, he affected a devil-may-care, big-spender image. I’m not blaming him for my own poor behaviour, but I admired him and may well have been influenced by his supposed attitude, which he buttressed with tales of his youth.

He told us, for instance, of the occasion during his life in Paris when he decided he fancied a little smoked ham. He popped out to his local charcuterie, but once there he let the silver-tongued shopkeeper talk him into buying not merely a few slices, but an entire ham, at huge cost. He convinced himself that if made it last two months, buying the whole ham instead of the occasional slice, would save him money. But, with ham readily available, he couldn’t prevent himself popping into the kitchen, at any time of day or night, to cut just one more slice. Again and again. In the end, the ham lasted only a few days.

Something similar happened when he caught sight of a Russian Orthodox cross in an antique shop. He simply couldn’t resist the impulse to buy it, though it took a big chunk out of his salary.

My father's Russian cross

Today, it hangs on a wall at home. And very attractive it is too. It moves me to see it and remember that it was something my father valued. Though I’d have to question whether anyone else would value it as highly: Danielle checked it out on eBay, and you’d have to be on a pretty poor salary for the price of such a cross to make a significant dent in it, even in a single month.

Might he have paid a little over the odds for it?

Seeing the cross also inspires other memories. Of the day when, though he’d told me not to touch it, I couldn’t resist and brought it tumbling to the ground. My father was a man of exceptional equanimity but he had an effective way, without raising his voice, of making it clear when he was displeased. I’ve never fully recovered from his careful explanation of just how displeased he was on that occasion.

Honest, guv. A genuine ancient Roman oil lamp

Another powerful reminder comes from a second object we have on our shelves today. It’s a little clay oil lamp. No genie emerges if you rub it – I’ve tried – but it does make me smile. Wryly.

It was sold to us as a Roman antique during a family visit to Pompeii. I was around eight and we were living in Rome. We visited Pompeii on a Saturday before driving home. A guide attached himself to us and gave us a rather good tour – including, inevitably, some obscene graffiti – before, as we were about to leave, offering my parents the exceptional of buying this antique oil for a knock-down price.

Maybe it was genuine. I’ve never checked, and nor did my parent. Neither of my parents believed that it was anything but a fake, but they also felt that it was a way to offer the guide a bit of tip and leave him convinced that he’d pulled off rather a brilliant trick. Which would make it ironic if it ever turned out to be a priceless antique after all.

Unfortunately, cheap though it was, it left my parents with too little cash to pay the motorway fees for the drive home. Credit cards weren’t as ubiquitous as they are today. There were no automated till machines yet. On a Saturday, there was no way to get any money out.

So we drove home on ordinary roads. Which was fine. It was a pleasant trip in good weather. But I was gnawed the whole way with anxiety over my parents having allowed their reserves of money to dip so low they couldn’t even afford motorways.

It strikes me as shameful today that, young as I was, I’d allowed middle-class values to take so firm a hold of me that I suffered anxiety over such a trivial cause.

Perhaps that was another factor that influence me into spending too much as soon as I could – disdaining money to overcome my fears of not having any.

Either way, the modest little oil lamp provides me with an even more chilling warning against my illusions than the Orthodox cross.

So I’ve inherited two objects that produce a powerful and salutary effect on me. Good to have them around. Among many other things, that’s another cause of gratitude towards my father.

When the family shows up

“The family, that cage with living bars,” wrote the French novelist François Mauriac. There must be families like that, just as there are families which are pleasant holiday chalets with open doors to let the air in with the visitors, and the residents in or out as they want. Equally, I suppose many families mix their open rooms and their cages, often right next door to each other.

For my own part, I’m always pleased when my family comes to see us. This weekend, it was the turn of my youngest son Nicky and daughter-out-law Sheena to add considerably to the pleasure of the household. We did lots of things which might not otherwise have done, some highly successful (a walk in Ashridge Forest, for instance), some less so (a Motown concert which we left early, after raising my understanding, if only of the question why I had never attended one before).

Inevitably, we ate too much. Somehow, whenever we do anything for the sheer pleasure it seems to lead to a series of meals, many of them far too big.

In any case, it didn’t much matter what we actually did or how well it went, since what made it most fun was the fact that we were doing it together. I even took pleasure from going bowling, a game I usually delight in because I play it well, though on this occasion – when I notched up some historically abysmal scores – I could only enjoy the simple fact of participation. .

It was ironic playing such a quintessentially American game with my family. Not a week before, my American boss had been in town, and I enjoyed introducing her to that fundamentally English game, snooker. American games with an Englishman, English games with an American: the simple symmetry’s a joy in itself.

Nicky leading the way in the Wardown Park run
but the threat's on his shoulder...

A more successful sporting event took place on Sunday when Nicky decided to take part in a park run in one of Luton’s pleasanter places, Wardown Park. Some 300 people took part; he led for a short time and eventually came in second, behind a worthy winner (“perhaps I should have tried harder to catch him,” he however claimed). With several friends among the runners, it was good to be there, and the dogs enjoyed it too – they’re keen fans of Wardown Park, where there are ducks, squirrels, kids to play with and, if they’re quick and we’re not watching, occasionally the opportunity to gobble up some ghastly piece of food discarded by a careless eater (or possibly an eater more discerning than they are).

Watching those runners got me checking my phone for the records of the days when I used to go running regularly. It shocked me to discover that at the peak of my performance, I was achieving speeds that would have hardly have got me out of the bottom half of the field in the park run. My son achieved over twice that. No wonder I gave up running, switching instead to badminton: at least it’s a game that allows me to take out my frustration at my ineptitude by occasionally viciously punishing the shuttle and smashing it beyond my opponents’ reach (worth it, even though they do the same back to me even more frequently). .

As it happens, not only do I not have the energy these days to do any running (except over the narrow distances of a badminton court), I find it effort enough just to keep walking. I remain under the dominion of my fitbit, obsessively piling up the steps each day. That can be painful, but it does have one advantage.

Like a great many people – even another French writer, Proust – I’m neurotic about remembering to undertake routine tasks. He talks about having to turn off the gas very consciously, so that later on he can remember having done so. With me, it’s locking doors. “I’m locking the front door, now,” I have to think to myself, or “I’m locking the car,” so that when I get a sudden rush of anxiety I can remember clearly having done so.

Of course, that means having to remember to think consciously about those tasks, and I don’t always. Often I have to go back to check. With the car, that isn’t so easy: I can’t test the door handle because, with the clever new technology we now have, if I do that the car unlocks anyway. So instead I just look at the wing mirrors: has the car tucked them away? If it has, then it’s locked.

Still, just being obliged to go back to check is a pain. Except that – now it isn’t. Because it’s steps. I’ve actually found myself deliberately walking all the way around the car to lengthen the process. Because it’s all steps towards the target, all grist to the mill.

No good for my fitbit obsession. But maybe good for my body.

When it comes to my soul, it was the family visit itself that did me good – there was no cage there, no bars. Well, except the kind where one might celebrate over a drink. As is only appropriate when family shows up.

Forgetfulness of things past

The thing about Tweed is that it never goes out of fashion. Of course, you might think that was because it was never in fashion in the first place but, hey, that doesn’t make the statement any less true.

I’m deeply attached to my fine, old Tweed jacket.

I say old because it is old but, to be fair, it was probably old when it was new.

And by “attached” I don’t mean I’m sufficiently fond of it to wear it. Every year or so I go through my wardrobe picking the clothes I never wear and chucking them out. Or rather, this being England where the only thing in constant growth is poverty, not chucking them but recycling them through a charity shop.

Each time I carry out this culling exercise, I come across the tweed jacket and I think, “I shouldn’t get rid of that one. I should wear it a bit more”. It’s a thought that comes with a pang of guilt, since each time I realise that I haven’t worn it, even once, since the last time. It continues to hang in my wardrobe, seemingly immoveable because I’m no more prepared to part with it than I am to put it on.

Today I was preparing an expense claim and realised I’d mislaid a train ticket. Whenever this happens – and, alas, it happens more often than I like – I always check through the breast pockets of all my jackets, since that’s an obvious place to stuff a ticket which you’re going to need at a barrier in a short time.

What prompted me to look in the tweed jacket I can’t imagine. There was no chance the missing ticket would be in a garment I hadn’t put on for years. But what I did find was something even better, a discovery that opened a door to a trip down Memory Lane. Except in my case Forgetfulness Lane is far more apt.

I found two boarding card stubs (remember when airlines used to have those? Before you could use a phone?) They were for a flight from Paris Charles de Gaulle to Barcelona, one 12 November. The outward flight was at 7:30 am.

The last time I lived close enough to the airport at Roissy to catch a plane there at 7:30 was 1998. We’re talking about a trip that happened up to two decades ago (you might spot the fact that my seat was in the ‘no-smoking cabin’ which certainly dates things a bit).

The trigger for a flood of memories.
Or in my case none at all

Sadly, I have no memory of the trip at all. Which seems a pity, since Barcelona is one of my favourite cities.

Was it the 7:30 start? In November? Maybe it was sheer trauma that led to my memory failure. A kind of act of mercy by my psyche. Particularly as I notice from the return stub that I flew back the same day, on the flight that left just before 6:00. I can only have had about six hours in the city itself, making it an experience to bury rather than relive.

What can have possessed me to wear tweed to Barcelona? It’s true that it’s cold in November. Even so, the Spaniards dress so well. Was I trying to make a point of my Englishness, it being a profoundly English tradition to wear that quintessentially Scottish cloth?

Lots of fascinating questions. Speculating on the answers is almost as pleasurable as reliving the lost past. It’s a kind of non-nostalgia.

For Proust, it was the taste of a Madeleine cake. For me, it was the rough feel of tweed. Of course, for Proust the experience triggered an avalanche of remembrance of things past. In mine, it merely reminded me of my forgetfulness.

Where I have the edge over Proust, though, is in my succinctness. He used a million and a quarter words on recreating his memories. I’ve taken fewer than 700 on the failure of mine. 

A small mercy, dear reader, to be thankful for.