I have never felt more at odds with the world than these last few days. It began with finding that the acronym d.v. (‘god willing’) which litters my father’s wartime letters to my mother is now more commonly used as an acronym for Domestic Violence, and then hearing that it can now be OK to use the word ‘queer’.
I feel like the characters in Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint who are described as feeling that the world is unravelling around them. Of course, Shakespeare got there first. It was Hamlet’s words that have been haunting me as the world becomes more alien than ever. Gender issues, bitcoins, naked dresses . . . Of course, the photograph of a young woman walking down a busy street looking as if she isn’t wearing anything – her skin-tight dress picturing breasts and highlighting the crease of her buttocks – isn’t going to disrupt anyone’s life or bankrupt them, but it is all part of this unreal world in which I feel I have no place.
It doesn’t help that I can’t, or prefer not to, recognise myself in this person who can no longer get up off the floor or bend down to plant a bulb and forgets to put water into the poacher so that the egg melts into the plastic and the plastic melts into the tin and the kitchen almost goes up in flames. Like all people my age who live on their own, I am a bit of a threat to myself and to everyone else, but not as much of a threat as climate change and the war in the Ukraine are to us all.
And I am, at least, taking measures. I am for ever muttering: More haste, less speed and advising myself not to try and do – or carry – two things at once. But it is hard to change a lifetime’s habit in which for so many years it was necessary, as it used to be for most women, to do at least three things at once. R could never understand the rush.
But things have changed and it seems that in my son’s generation, husbands are as likely as their wives to ‘multi-task’. But what won’t change is what ageing does to us all and among my favourite reading now is The Oldie which is full of information about gadgets which make life easier and I am reassured at finding I am not the only person who doesn’t know how to zoom or use a smartphone, nor the only person who remembers Laurence Harvey and Patricia Roc, and gets a thrill from getting upstairs and finding they have remembered to make the bed.