The television set and the architect

Last month, you might remember that I wrote a series of posts about things I liked. It feels so long ago, now. At the end, I passed it on to seven other bloggers and I’ve been incredibly touched that so many of them took up the challenge and have been doing the same. Two of them have just finished their own sequences. The Eternal Worrier has completed a series about seven people or things that left an impression on his life which is genuinely superb. Equally impressive is The Domesticated Bohemian, who has written a fantastic set of posts about seven things that never fail to make him smile.

I have so enjoyed watching these guys pick up a theme and run with it and produce phenomenal writing in the process, and now they have both passed it on to seven bloggers themselves. It’s like the opposite of a chain letter; between us we might all eventually reclaim the meme and give it a good name after all. I’m as pleased as punch that I might have started all that.

But I also feel more than a little like a fraud, because the shameful truth is that I have considerably more experience of, and am far better at, disliking things.

There is so much out there to dislike, after all. The majority of newspaper pundits, for instance, or nearly anybody under the age of forty who happens to be presenting a television broadcast. Pointless space filling puff pieces in colour supplements. Hype about pop music. The collective delusion that Lady Gaga is important, seminal or anything other than the latest in a long line of Madonnas. The celebrity bandwagon and publications like Heat magazine speculating about how people can be too fat one day and too thin the next, complaining about body fascism and flogging cosmetics on adjacent pages. Endless column inches complaining about people in the public eye who desperately seek attention, constantly feeding the mouth that bites.

I know people get sniffy about the snideness and sniping in modern life today. They’re almost certainly much nicer people than I am and they‘re probably right, but I can‘t let go of it. I could say that it’s important to know what you don’t like or you become one of those people who doesn’t have a bad word to say about anybody or anything. And we all know how tedious they can be; they might get their reward in the next life but you wouldn’t want to be sitting next to them at a dinner party in this one.

I could say that, but it would be a feebly specious way to justify myself when the truth is a lot more straightforward: I really, really enjoy it. I know it can’t be good for me in any way. Psychologically, it probably says awful things about me. I can’t imagine it does wonders for my digestion or blood pressure. It’s probably set back my progress as a writer, a friend, a networker, and even a human being. The thing is, I simply cannot seem to help myself.

You don’t have to tell me that it’s unattractive, I already know. I’ve had years of being told, even as a teenager.

“You’re always so negative.” my mother would say, immediately after I’d shouted some obscenity at the television.

”No I’m not.” I would respond, proving her point twice over.

Kelly has got used to it now. If I’m watching a TV programme which irritates me, or reading a newspaper article I don’t like, and I happen to offer some commentary – which happens with predictable regularity – she’ll step in. At first, she did this ever so nicely but six years into married life she is much more firm and unsparing. Nowadays she’ll say “Shut up, I don’t want to hear it”, but in the early days it was something fonder and more indulgent like “You’re railing again.” I used to do a lot of that; I was responsible for enough railing to put a makeshift perimeter fence around the whole of Britain.

I don’t mind Kelly’s violent reaction so much, because I’m slowly managing to bring her round to my way of thinking. If a Tesco advert comes on - with its fatuous jingle and a self-satisfied voiceover by somebody safe and famous telling me how reassuringly cheap their food is - she scrambles for the mute button in record time with all the zealous enthusiasm of Robinson Crusoe discovering a pornographic magazine which has fallen through a wormhole in the time-space continuum.

Some days, immersed in the Internet, I might vaguely overhear Kelly out of nowhere saying “Oh, fuck off Davina” and without looking up I can be absolutely certain that Davina McCall is cawing about haircare products on the TV. For those unfamiliar with Davina McCall (and if you are, oh how I envy you), the best way I can describe her is that physically, she’s half-woman, half-crow. Emotionally she resembles a woman in her mid-forties who has gone to see a hypnotist who made her believe that she is nineteen years old and is now unable to snap out of it. I think that description is as good a job as I can do of conveying just how embarrassing she is to watch.

The potential to find new things to dislike increases exponentially when you look at the extra dimension offered by the internet. I’m irresistibly drawn to things I plain can’t stand, like hipster blogs full of half-baked poems, derivative unfinished prose and out of focus photographs. Or ponderous paragraph after ponderous paragraph packed full of semi-colons punctuating the contents of somebody’s intellectual colon. People who have swallowed a dictionary. People who have gargled a thesaurus.

I am a traitor for saying this. Blogging is a genre which - quite rightly - is built on positive, encouraging feedback. It’s a wonderful thing, and having that support is amazing. But my ability to sabotage my best efforts means that sometimes biting my tongue is very difficult indeed. It doesn’t stop me coming up with devastatingly cruel comments in my head, none of which I would ever commit to writing. This is why, on the odd occasion when somebody leaves something spiteful on my blog I am only 80% shaken and upset. The other 20% is probably cheering them on. If I wasn’t me, I’m not convinced I’d like me either.

“Why do you read all those things that make you so cross?” says Kelly. It’s a very good question, and I really ought to try and cultivate the necessary substance to be able to answer it.

“Because they’re so bad. So, so very bad. Jesus, look at this one.”

“No way! Don’t try and get me involved in all this negativity. Oh, fuck off Davina.”

Her variant of Tourette’s syndrome can be a remarkably useful secret weapon in my ongoing battle for the moral high ground, though I’m still left with one hell of a mountain to climb.

Fortunately, it’s not all bad and the dark side hasn’t completely claimed what little remains of my soul. In fact, what’s reassuring about the internet isn’t the preponderance of people, things and ideas I dislike but how easy it makes it for tiny parts of your life to intersect with lovely people for a fleeting moment that you would otherwise never have had. It’s very important for me to try and remember that, so whenever I’m boiling with irritation about the latest piece of fake gushing from some Antipodean lesbian berk in cyberspace I try very hard to remember two things: the television set and the architect.

The television set was Kelly’s pride and joy when we moved in together. It was the swankiest TV I’d ever seen at the time - grey, curved and far prettier than my boxy black portable telly, the one I’d bought after leaving university (at the time, it was the only New Year’s resolution I had ever kept). Mine was banished to the bedroom, allowing me to watch daytime TV in the morning while I waited for Kelly to come out of the shower. I’d never had a television in my bedroom before, and it soon became apparent that that too did very little for my blood pressure, or that railing at the screen which Kelly found so endearing back then. I ended up giving it to a friend.

The television in the living room, on the other hand, started to die several years later, so we replaced it. But it was by no means unusable and far too good to take to the tip, so we stuck it on Freecycle, sat back, and waited for somebody to take our problem away. Freecycle is a wonderful idea. I love the way people will turn up to your house and pick up practically anything you‘re getting rid of. I’ve not found anything yet that is so unappealing that you can’t find somebody on the internet who wants to come round and remove it from your life.

I sometimes worry that Kelly will put me on Freecycle. I also sometimes worry that if she did, she wouldn’t get any emails.

At first, I didn’t understand what sort of people would snap up any unwanted bric-a-brac just because it was on offer. I didn’t get an insight into that for a while, but then Kelly went to visit my mother-in-law and help her to declutter. My mother-in-law is a proper hoarder who can’t throw anything out, and her house is a tribute to that ethos, full of all sorts of random things. Things she thinks she can fix, things she thinks might come in handy one day, things she can’t bear to part with.

“But we aren’t seeing your mother for at least a month! I am not having that carpet sitting around in the spare room for a month just so it can then spend an eternity in your mother’s spare room.”

That always gets the look from Kelly that says We can talk about this for as long as you like, but when we’ve finished you’re still going to do what I say. She learned it from her mother.

The spare room in my mother-in-law’s house is legendary. An archaeologist could document dozens of separate strata of tat in that room alone. I wouldn’t be surprised to find Lord Lucan in there, or the Ark of the Covenant. It got so bad that Kelly took time off work and spent the day blitzing it with my mother-in-law, an experience probably best likened to Vietnam. At the end, there were three piles in that room: a large pile of things she was keeping, a small pile of things to put on eBay and a colossal pile of items for Freecycle. And somehow, for reasons which still escape me, there were people who were even bigger hoarders than my mother-in-law who came to take it all away.

A few weeks later we were visiting again and I spotted a huge glass Galileo thermometer on her mantelpiece, next to some wedding photos and flanked by a disturbingly cute cuddly toy.

“That’s nice Rose, where did you get that?”

“Freecycle.” she said proudly, as my face hit my palm in disbelief at the futility of it all.

We got loads of emails about our television set. You can usually sift most of these out - a lot of them turn up quickly and are clearly landlords trying to furnish slummy shared houses. I’ve lived in those kind of houses and paid those kinds of landlords every month, and I had no desire to give them a free television, especially because I knew they weren’t getting a free television so they could afford to buy their tenants a decent carpet. They were getting a free television for the same reason that their tenants had a repulsive carpet.

The man we eventually picked to receive our once lovely television was, however, a little odd and so were his emails.

“Would you mind dropping the television round at my house?” he said.

He had completely missed the whole point, which was that it was not a delivery service. We very politely told him he had to come and get it himself.

“Fine, I’ll get a taxi. When will you be in?”

When the evening came, we expected some kind of oddball. Perhaps a bespectacled geek who lived on his own and couldn’t drive. A man, in fact, like the man I would have become if I hadn’t met Kelly. Instead, when the doorbell rang we couldn’t believe our eyes because there, standing on our doorstep, was a scrawny child. He couldn’t have been more that fourteen years old. On the road outside was a black cab, meter still running.

He held his hands out as I loaded the television on to them. It was quite possibly bigger than he was. He tottered down the stairs as Kelly and I watched nervously with gritted teeth and then, like an alien heading into the mother ship he disappeared into the depths of the taxi and was gone. I admired his pluck, his imagination and his surprising reserves of physical strength, and as he vanished I congratulated myself for not having given our television to a slum landlord.

Kelly emailed him later that night offering technical support if he wanted any assistance setting the television up, programming the channels and what have you. She’s good at all of that technical wizardry, whereas some days I can’t even work out how to switch our television on. The reply came back the following day.

“No, I’m all right. I’ve got it all sorted. Thanks so much! I use it to play Guitar Hero in my bedroom, it’s brilliant.”

It’s funny how you can get a warm feeling out of interacting with somebody you’ve only met once and knowing that a tiny fragment of your life intersects with a tiny bit of theirs. Despite my negativity I still know when my heartstrings are in motion, and the boy who could play Guitar Hero in his bedroom because of me, to my delight and most likely his mother’s utter frustration, was the ideal antidote to taking an arbitrary dislike to a virtual stranger. And the experience with the architect was much the same, except of course that I never met him at all.

The architect played a minute part in my life several years ago in what, to all intents and purposes, should have been a completely commercial transaction. He was selling a pair of vintage Danish silver cufflinks on eBay in a design I had never seen before, a stunning, stylised wave. Their age was a big part of what made them so covetable; I think I like silver so much because, like people, it’s nowhere near as interesting until it’s slightly tarnished.

Most eBay transactions involve a simple exchange of information - the mundane mechanics of addresses, payment details, postage costs – but for some reason this one was slightly different. Negotiating the safe arrival of the cufflinks involved emails back and forward which filled in the broad strokes about the man who was parting with such a classic, sophisticated piece of jewellery. He was an architect, living in Chicago, and he was selling a number of sets of cufflinks on eBay because he was about to retire. He didn’t say whether there were no family to pass them on to, or whether his family wouldn’t appreciate them, and I never asked. I’ll never know whether he was childless, or had fallen out with his children, or if they had taken up a profession which had no need of such things. But it was clear that these were the absolute masterpiece of his collection, the ones of which he was most proud.

I built up a picture of him across the space of the two weeks that we were in touch, most of which was simply me filling in the gaps based on what little I knew and what I wanted to believe. In my mind he was a fastidious, delicate man, with perfect crisp striped shirts, white hair and thin-framed glasses. Piercing blue eyes. In my imagination he worked in a beautiful skyscraper designing beautiful places, wearing his beautiful cufflinks. I’m not sure anyone drawn to an object so gorgeous could make anything ugly, though if anything could challenge that idea it would be me. Every email was a masterpiece of clearly-worded courtesy. He wrote like I imagined he drew - clean lines, pleasing shapes. I think he liked the idea that his cufflinks would be travelling across the ocean before he would get to do so - he had visited England before, and hoped to do so again in retirement.

I imagined that he had a secretary. I imagined that his secretary adored him, and wished he was her father.

By the time they arrived, I was sorry to break off our correspondence. I told him that the cufflinks were every bit as beautiful as I had hoped, and that I had had to pay duty on them (even in such a pleasant conversation the mundane mechanics intruded, as they have a habit of doing), and thanked him for doing such a fantastic job. And he said something that stayed with me in his final mail. He said “I hope they bring you luck in your future career, now that I’m at the end of mine.”

Not for the first time in my life, I felt like a fraud. Because he did something big, and important, and distinguished. They were the perfect cufflinks for him, they suited him. They made sense, when he wore them. And he had passed the baton on to a man who just wanted to look good while cracking bad jokes on conference calls, or delighting in hilarious typos like “I can get you data from the fist of June” (Poor June, I replied in a mail to one of my suppliers today). I didn’t have the heart to tell him what a disappointment he’d find me if he knew me better - strange, that, since now I am telling all of you.

But when I have a difficult meeting with customers, or when my department is being visited by an auditor, or when I have my annual performance review, I always find myself putting on the architect’s cufflinks. Oddly - for no reason at all - it seems like the right thing to do, and those days are never as bad as I think they’ll be. It’s funny that I still refer to those lucky charms as ‘the architect’s cufflinks‘; maybe one day they will feel like mine, but if they don’t on balance I think that will be okay. It somehow seems appropriate that I, too, will have nobody in particular to pass them on to.