I seem to have lost the last two days but I'm back on track now. The cleaning lady is coming this morning. She does have a name but I'm never sure who it will be. Because it's already 10.08, Marilyn is confident that it will be Sandra, (the others tend to come earlier), but we are ready to be surprised if it happens to be someone else. We've filled in the time by doing a Coles order and that saves a trip into town.
We tried to sit outside this morning to have our coffee but a cold wind drove us back indoors. Perhaps I was a bit premature thinking that Summer has come to Longford; we'll still have a few days of cold weather before we can enjoy being outside.
Nothing else is planned for today. I might try to write something but it's more likely I'll get back into my book or even see another episode of Madam Secretary. We're watching this series again and it's interesting to see the many ways in which the US manages to save the world from disaster in the space of a 43-minute episode. The worry is that there might be people around the world who think that it is all true and wonder why all the rest of the world is not falling over itself in gratitude, especially now that D. Trump is back on the throne.
Where would the world be without the US Republican Party?
DON’T ASK JUNE 12, 2020
Do you find,
like me, that some people seem to have been born with the ability to irritate
everyone around them without really trying, or meaning to? I had an uncle like that. Whenever he was around I could feel the hairs
on the back of my neck start to bristle, obviously some sort of primitive
warning that it was time for me to run away.
To be fair, he never did me any physical harm but he had a terrible
effect on my state of mind. I’ve often wondered what it was about my uncle that
attracted my aunt but she often spoke dreamily about Richard Gere and Harrison
Ford so clearly she wasn’t looking for subtlety or depth in her ideal man.
I also tried
to analyse what it was about my uncle that irritated me so much and there were
several things which sprang to mind. He
had a perpetual smirk: an expression which seemed to signify that he had an
innate sense of superiority. I know you
can’t choose the face you are born with but surely you can control to some
extent the expression you put on it.
To go with
his smirk, he was what we used to call a smart-aleck. No matter what the topic of conversation, he
always claimed to have special insider knowledge not available to the rest of
us. And he used cutting expressions
like: “Didn’t you know that?” and “What did they teach you at that University
you spent so many years at?”
His name was
Lancelot. Yes, I know it’s bizarre but perhaps his mother had a romantic
yearning for the days of King Arthur, and her husband was happy just to let her
have her way, but it was an unusual name for someone living in a middle-class
Australian suburb. I would have thought
it would make sense for him to use his middle name (William) or shorten his
first name to Lance but, no, he clung to the incongruity of the name as if
using it as a weapon to beat all the rest of us plebs.
Another of the
things which irritated me most about Uncle Lancelot was his speech. He had a
whiny voice, like a querulous bank manager complaining to a junior clerk about
taking an extra five minutes for his lunch hour. When he began one of his lengthy monologues
about what the government should be doing about the current fiscal downturn or
the pitfalls of our immigration policy, I had to use all of my willpower to
stop myself from screaming.
And on the
top of my list of things I hated about my uncle was his habit of turning any
polite inquiry about his state of health or a throwaway remark about how he was
going into a tirade about the extraordinary trials he was dealing with and the
unfairness of life. I confess, I didn’t
have a comprehensive vocabulary of conversation starters but my tentative “How
are you?” or How are things?” would invariably be met with a “Don’t ask!” and
my heart would sink as I knew what was coming.
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