WEEKEND COLUMNISTS I was chatting to the redoubtable head of governors following a school meeting. Some modest alterations to the structure of the classes had been proposed, nothing at all serious, only I do hate, loathe and abominate change. She was very kind about it, allaying our fears, making it clear that anything that was going to happen was for the best. The parents chatted and some stray fathers ate biscuits and swapped solar heating panel catastrophe anecdotes. I left wholly satisfied, but the head of governors caught me at the door.
“Is that all right?” she enquired. I nodded many times. “What you should bear in mind is this:” – she regarded me decisively – “if something is making you anxious, whatever it is, it’s not trivial.”
I’m ashamed to say I collapsed into a little heap of giggles that just wasn’t pretty. There’s something about parents’ meetings that nudge me towards hysteria. Apparently it’s not at all unusual. “I’m so sorry to laugh,” I tried to explain, “and you’re very very kind. It’s just that the thing is, almost everything that makes me anxious is extremely trivial.”
It crosses my mind to unpack for her that day’s portfolio of gnawing concerns:
1 When I was in Selfridges food halls earlier in the week one of the women behind the tills said to her colleague: “So then he said to me, ‘It’s 11 Hail Marys and one Our Father.’ ” What had she done? Why such an imbalance of HMs to OFs? I’ll never know.
2 At university, the Roman Catholic chaplain asked my advice over whether he should cave in to the requests from visiting young trainee priests who were all demanding that their little ancient trundle beds be replaced with modish new futons. Was I right, I wonder to this day, to encourage him to resist?
3 When I told a woman in a clothes shop recently that I preferred a dress with a sleeve, she said I was being silly because I was young enough to be her daughter. In actual fact, I was young enough to be her granddaughter. Ought I to have pointed this out?
4 If a woman you know in her capacity as an ace hair-remover refers to her victims as “stubborn little buggers”, is it mad to take offence?
5 When my daughter, aghast, tells me her friend has used the “e-word” twice in the playground, should I admit I don’t know what she means?
6 And finally, I think I want something at the moment that I’m not entirely sure that I do want – that I know I ought not to want – that (in one of my favourite archaic English expressions) I really dursn’t want, because of what the wanting means.
It’s not the age-old emotion-versus-reason conundrum that Sandy sings so poignantly about in the musical Grease (“My head is saying, ‘Fool forget him,’/My heart is saying, ‘Don’t let go’ ”). It’s just that I have fallen half in love with a handbag at Chanel which is gaudy and flashy and oddly cheap-looking, considering it costs about the same as 10,000 packets of supermarket own-brand crisps.
It’s huge, big enough to hold a bottle of gin and some high heels and a book and maybe a meat pie, and it’s fashioned from startlingly bright red and cream tweed and has lashings of dazzling gold chains. It’s not demure or subtle, or humorous. It could never grace the arm of a librarian, or a jolly district nurse, or even an academic whose research was limited to revenge tragedies, the sorts of women with whom I identify this evening.
No, it’s as brash as a bag could be. It’s bold. It’s a sort of midlife-crisis Ferrari of a handbag, but wouldn’t it look splendid in the crook of my arm, like an arrogant baby princess? I feel tenderly towards its showiness. Its overblown appearance stirs my compassion. Like a child having a tantrum or a teenager who’s gone out in too much lipstick, spots and sparkle, it demands attention and attention should be given. It’s pretty much Christmas in bag form. Is it right to choose accessories that boast more personality than I do?
And yet I know that with a bag like that at your side – on your side – some of life’s difficult moments would become more bearable. If you were forced to watch your enemies triumph, if you were expected to applaud them, and you owned this bag, it really might not register at all. Plus, its dimensions are such that you could go out for an entire evening without having to pull your stomach in once. Its firm structure might even protect you in a minor restaurant skirmish. It would say things about you that aren’t necessarily true, but this isn’t always wholly bad.
“I’m looking after it for a friend,” I imagined explaining. “I won it in a raffle. It’s my auntie’s. It’s a fake, apparently!”
The head of governors is still regarding me curiously. “If it worries you at all,” she says, emphatically, “then it’s not trivial.”
I walked away from her feeling somehow both forgiven and enthroned.
More columns at www.ft.com/boyt
