The Bluestocking, vol 197
Emotional Support Wombats.
Happy Friday!
One of the hardest things about getting older, I think, is that your potential narrows to a single path, or maybe two or three if you’re lucky. That’s what ageing is, I suppose, the closing-down of options. (When we bought this house, we got mortgage insurance, designed to cover the balance if one of us died. The premiums go down as we pay more and more of the capital off. The name of the policy is therefore “HSBC Decreasing Life Choices.” Those are some bleak annual statements to receive.)
Babies’ brains make a million connections a second, before being “pruned” back to the most useful. As you reach your 40s and 50s, you become more knowledgeable, but less flexible in your thinking. “If your profession requires mental processing speed or significant analytic capabilities—the kind of profession most college graduates occupy—noticeable decline is probably going to set in earlier than you imagine,” writes Arthur Brooks.
Some of this process should be embraced. I have traded my teenage potential for a solid adult skillset: the ability to look at a story and “see” the headline; or the ability to look at random, chaotic events and “see” the story. I’m a better interviewer than I was at 18: less self-conscious, less burdened by the need to show off. Having recently re-read some old blogs from my 20s, I hope to god I’m a better writer now.
There’s a deep pleasure in doing something you’re good at, something which has taken time and intellectual investment. I regret not being able to play the piano (and being pretty sure I could never learn) because I love that synthesis you see in concert pianists, that fusion between human and instrument. It must feel wonderful to make music as an extension of your body. My job doesn’t offer that kind of physical reward; the closest I get is the “pop” of solving a structural problem in my writing. It’s a satisfying enough feeling to sustain me through the other 99.9% of my writing, which is staring at a blank screen wondering if it’s too early to eat lunch.
But there’s a problem with that deep pleasure: it can become a comfort blanket. Why try something new when I will have to go back to stage one? Why not just do the thing I know I can do? Won’t I be humiliated? Frustrated? Completely shit at it? It’s worse if you have had a bit of success in your chosen field, because that inevitably breeds jealousy, and there will be people dying to watch you crash and burn to validate their existing hatred of you. See, we told you she was no good to start with. In every way, as you get older, the stakes are higher. There is no noodling around, free from the weight of expectation, and there are bills to pay.
And that takes us back to the bad side of ageing. I’m really worried about what the pandemic has done to older people, as it closed down their horizons, shrank their world to the front room and the back garden, turned even the corner shop into an expedition. Some of them will never open themselves to the world again. The legacy of Covid is old people who’ve become Old People earlier than they would otherwise have done.
I’m always forcing myself to try new things, because keeping your horizons wide has to be a conscious decision. I take inspiration, as always, from my friend Laura McInerney, who has been since graduation, variously: a management consultant; an award-winning teacher; a PhD researcher; an FOI litigant who annoyed Dominic Cummings before it was fashionable; a newspaper editor; and now a tech start-up founder. (If you ever mention being too old to try something new to Laura, she will tell you that Ray Kroc didn’t buy a small and unsuccessful food business called McDonalds until he was 59. Normal people’s go-to example of an opsimath is Cezanne, but not Laura’s.) She has the least fear of failure I’ve ever known, possibly related to the fact that she doesn’t fail. At worst, she learns.
This is a long way of saying that last year I pitched a comedy programme to Radio 4, despite my complete inability to tell a joke. (Sometimes, when I’m freestyling, I … lose confidence.) I had a great producer, Richard Morris, who I knew wouldn’t let me put absolute dreck on the BBC.
AND NOW IT’S HERE.
Starting next Wednesday at 11pm, Radio 4, Great Wives tells the story of the Support Humans who helped their partners achieve extraordinary things. It’s the first time I’ve had a script made, the first time I’ve written characters for radio, and the first time I’ve done acting outside of a school play. (OK, just an American accent, but still. I’m 37. This is scary.) There are four 15-minute episodes, and in them you’ll discover the pre-Raphaelite poet who loved wombats, Tolstoy’s mid-life crisis and the modern architect who advertised for a wife.
I hope you like it. And I hope that, however old you are, you keep trying new things—even if they frighten you.
Helen
PS. My American accent is to voice the Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas (left, with Gertrude Stein, who actually wrote the “autobiography” in question, and . . . I’m guessing a poodle? Surely they didn’t have labradoodles then).
The Trumpiverse in Exile, aka Florida (Vanity Fair)
“I love what Maria Bartiromo always says,” says Holt Kramer over iced tea, referring to the now right-wing Fox Business anchor. “Money is mobile and it will go to whoever treats it the best. And I think that people who have a lot of money realize that we are in the middle of a war right now. We are really in the middle of a war.”
Their enemy, of course, is the “total radical leftist” Joe Biden.
In the 1960s, Holt Kramer was a dancer at the Copacabana in New York and later became a celebrity interviewer in Los Angeles (Frank Sinatra, Rock Hudson) before taking up part-time residence in Palm Beach with her seventh husband. She recently published a book called Unstoppable Me: My Life in the Spotlight. When Trump ran for president, she formed the Trumpettes, who count Kimberly Guilfoyle as an honorary member.”
Florida, boy, I don’t know.
Best/worst Wikipedia entries, part II: Aimo Koivunen, “the first soldier to overdose on crystal meth during combat”. (with thanks to Tom P)
Quick Links
“When Google Reader disappeared in 2013, it wasn’t just a tale of dwindling user numbers or of what one engineer later described as a rotted codebase. It was a sign of the crumbling of the very foundation upon which it had been built: the era of the Good Internet.” (The Ringer)
Maybe it still is 2003…? (TikTok)
The Story Behind Original Cast Album: Company… and Elaine Stritch’s famous meltdown (Vulture)
“The last Jew in Kabul has said he intends to stay in Afghanistan despite having been jailed last time the Taliban were in power, according to reports. . . [Zabulon] Simentov was involved in a long-running feud with the only other Jew in the country, Yitzhak Levi, who died in 2005. They regularly reported each other to the authorities, including the Taliban, particularly over their disputed custodianship of the synagogue’s Torah.” The greatest film Mel Brooks never wrote. (The Times, £)
A great multimedia article showing the insanity of Olympic speed climbing (NYT).
“Daniel told none of his friends he was ready to talk, but on April 4, he called me. He said he didn’t want to be called a whistleblower. He preferred the word traitor.” (New York Magazine)
“If a belief becomes an identity, it’s much harder to abandon in the face of new evidence.” (Unherd)
Whatever happened to emotional support peacocks? (Wesley Yang)
‘Meanwhile, the men standing around were making fun of girls and women, laughing at our terror. “Go and put on your chadari [burqa],” one called out. “It is your last days of being out on the streets,” said another. “I will marry four of you in one day,” said a third.’ Of all the coverage of Afghanistan, this was the piece which I found most affecting—and several female friends said the same. The rollback of women’s rights doesn’t only look like stern men declaring you to be dirty, evil, loose. It also looks like … banter, the casual sadism of schadenfreude. (The Guardian)
Bluestocking Recommends: Opsimaths (late bloomers) are often “experimental innovators”—they need to keep working on something until it finds its finished form. The opposite of that is a “conceptual innovator”: someone with a big idea that they execute straight off the bat, often when very young, like Picasso with cubism.
I enjoyed this episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History, “Hallelujah”, about an Elvis Costello song you’ve never heard of, which took the singer two decades to get right, and the mad miracle that is the story of Hallelujah, a song which it took someone other than the songwriter to get right. Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was a squelchy synth-filled mediocrity; Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah is sublime. (As readers of last week’s newsletter will know, however, the ultimate version of Hallelujah is by Jeremy Hardy.)
PS. Great Wives also features my new favourite Salvador Dali painting, about which he wrote: “As soon as we had got settled in Portlligat I painted a portrait of Gala with a pair of raw chops poised on her shoulder. The meaning of this, as I later learned, was that instead of eating her, I had decided to eat a pair of raw chops instead. . . My edible, intestinal and digestive representations at this period assumed an increasingly insistent character. I wanted to eat everything, and I planned the building of a large table made entirely of hard-boiled egg so that it could be eaten.” What a loss to the art world that was.
See you next time, and hit reply to tell me about what new thing you are trying, despite the remorseless march of time . . .
I bought a piano at 69.
I agree I'll never be much good, but I enjoy learning, theory and occasionally the 'sounds' I make give me pleasure.
Try it.
Just listened to your first Great Wives on BBC Sounds - witty, knowledgable and acerbic. I had no idea Einstein has a daughter whom he basically abandoned! Really excellent piece.