Some random thoughts to share, in the hope that writing them down will cease their noisy rattling in my head. Last night on television, a duck breeder who supplies supermarkets with a less-expensive version of the traditionally goose-produced foie gras said something so quintessentially French that I have to put it here. I hate to translate it because it just won’t have the same je ne sais quoi, but here goes:
“One must be democratic about foie gras in order to make it accessible to all French people – but not to the point where it lapses into mere paté.”
And speaking of democracy, who would not marvel at the medical egalitarianism of treating my 57-year-old malfunctioning knee with the same careful attention as, say, a 14-year-old’s anorexia nervosa? Every now and then, somebody raises the spectre of merit- or age-based medical treatment as a way of addressing the huge financial burden that threatens to sink public health care. Sorting out the smokers and the overeaters from the careful and consciously fit, and assigning priority to those who are in ill health through no fault of their own is more than a slippery slope – it’s a sheer drop into an abyss of calculated indifference. Replacing an octogenarian’s hip might not seem to have the same value for money as doing it for someone with, presumably, more time in front of them, but to my knowledge, age alone is not a determining factor for receiving treatment in any countries where public health care is a bedrock principle. One wonders how private medical insurers sleep at night.
If it’s not too late, slip ‘Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” into your mate’s stocking this Christmas. Kathryn Schulz, ‘the sickeningly young, forbiddingly clever and vexingly wise’(1) journalist who writes brilliantly about the need to make mistakes has turned my smug view of other people’s wrongness into humble pie. It’s no exaggeration to say that this book is a relationship-saver, and maybe even a life-changer. Plus she’s got a damn good explanation for why some people can tell outrageous lies while the minor equivocations of others are writ large upon their face.
And still on the subject of books, I finally did something with the recommendation of my literate friend at Spit and Baling Wire to get ‘Reading Like a Writer’, by the deliciously-named Francine Prose, and have been glued to it for the past four nights. She starts with the importance of the single word, moving on to sentence structure, paragraphing, narration and who knows what else – I’ll let you know when I get there. The risk of taking a book like this to bed is that the excitement generated by the possibilities Ms. Prose’s analysis raises might evaporate by morning, although it could presumably be funnelled elsewhere in the interval. An absolute must if you’re serious about being a good writer – a ‘here’s how’ instead of a ‘what not to’ guide.
Cats are masters of the slippery slope, I have noticed this week - again. Our bedroom door has been kept shut since the day we were adopted by a large, unattractive tabby (a refugee from next door, something we only discovered after she’d been living with us for a year) in order to keep her hairiness off the bedcovers. Neither is she allowed on the new couch, the dining room table or my favourite Belgian’s computer keyboard, none of which she takes to heart. Last week, having left the bedroom door ajar, I found her on the bed, tucked up prettily with a paw over her nose and smack in the middle of a sunbeam and my favourite scarf. The hardest heart would soften at the sight. Since, the scarf placement has been adjusted to accommodate for the earth’s rotation around the sun, and the cat happily snoozes the mornings away.
I intend to submit an addendum to the Human Genome Project, having proof that diagnostic skills – or a lack thereof – is an inherited inability. When the middle child was an adolescent, I swore on a stack of hot water bottles that her abdominal pains were just Mother Nature’s way of reminding her that it’s tough to be female. When the surgeon said that it was good thing she hadn’t come to emergency any later than she did, I had to admit that acute appendicitis hadn’t even been on my radar. This same child has misdiagnosed herself any number of times, the latest being a fever she was sure was due to a common virus, but was in actual fact a subtle signal beamed to her brain by an infected blister on her foot, which she hadn’t really noticed was several sizes larger than the other one. (See merit-based medical treatment, above). And in the ‘Men and Women Inhabit Different Planets’ mould, her mother was ready to jump on the next plane to keep vigil at her bedside, while her father laughed uproariously at the prospect of the family’s first-ever amputee.
McDonald’s moved in down the road a while back. Like many here, I was disgusted by this display of globalization – Americanization, some think –in my own back yard and swore never to frequent the place, but my principles, rarely rock-solid, have crumbled like so many chocolate chip cookies. With a friend, I spent the whole of Tuesday afternoon there, taking advantage of free Wi-Fi and large tables to spread out notebooks and laptops and mutually support our literary efforts. There’s nothing like getting out of the house to focus the mind and besides MacDo, as it is referred to here, serves a more generous coffee than the French are generally willing to.
Ploughing up and down the abbreviated pool at the spa yesterday, I was thinking about territorial instincts, moderation, and that damn book that tells me how frequently wrong I am. The basin is only 15 metres (50ft) long, and just wide enough for three swimmers to do lengths, four if you abstain from the breast stroke. I arrived at 2:15, much later than my preferred slot of 12-1, when all French are sitting down for lunch, and found that I had competition for the space. Three middle-aged women were already in the dressing room – which is unisex, by the way, something I hadn’t realized the first time I stripped down in front of my locker – headed, quite properly, for the pre-pool shower. Their hairdos gave away the fact that they were not serious swimmers and would only swan around the pool, all arched necks and chit-chat. (Did you know that hair is cited most often as the reason women don’t exercise?). In less than a minute I was in my suit, cap and goggles in hand, hurrying across the wet floor, geisha-like, to be the first in the water. Never mind washing off all those pH-disturbing creams and perfumes that I never use anyway, I wasn’t going to let anybody encroach on MY lane.
One hundred tedious lengths, intolerable were it not for a rich inner life. Reviewing a long discussion I’d just had with a young woman whose capacity for straight talk has been a revelation to me, I realized that I’d been wrong on a number of counts. About what exactly doesn’t need to be revealed here, the point being that the beliefs that had informed my point of view were based on plain wrongness. It’s both freeing and humbling to find yourself so exposed, as long as you’re in safe company when it happens, which, as it happens, I think I was.
As for moderation, ‘in all things’ was the caboose on that particular train of thought. In consumption, acquisition, prevarication, procrastination, scepticism, yes - but not affection, appreciation or toleration (sic). However, moderation is not my default mode when it comes to eating banana bread or drinking coffee, and most unfortunately not when it comes to my expectations, particularly of others. This may be due to a family legend about the uncommon self-discipline of the Norwegian patriarch, a man who only needed to hear once that smoking had been proven to be bad for the lungs to give up, immediately and without apparent difficulty, a long-standing habit, and whose fondness for alcohol was despatched with equal ease when it threatened to become a problem. The story made a big impression on a little me, but in the way a blinkered horse has a limited perspective, his example became my excuse to be critical of others for their presumed weaknesses while remaining blind to the best of my own. Thank goodness for people who write books about the self-deception we practice on ourselves.
And now I’d like to wish everyone in this delightful world of writers and poets, artists and thinkers, comedians and cooks, a Christmas that reminds you of how well you are loved and appreciated. That there is much to be grateful for even though Canada has backed out of the Kyoto accord, a decision that may alter the landscape in more ways than one. After Durban, it might Chinese and Indian flags that bloom like algae on the backpacks of traveling Americans, since it’s certainly not cool to be Canadian anymore. I apologize to the world for my government’s shameful act and intend to make my own compensatory effort by starting a compost heap, at last.
Merry Christmas and Joyeux Noel!
(1) from a review in The Guardian