This week, it dawned on me I was overdue a rather large treat for various magnanimous acts, feats of good behaviour and sustained bouts of courage. I know it’s not for me to say, but I think even an independent judiciary would present findings that suggest I’ve been really quite spectacular – you get the idea. I wondered at length what might most feel like a reward. I kept thinking of things that would be almost impossible to procure.

I revisited my favourite childhood daydream, the one where I am all alone in some sort of candlelit cavern with two industrial-sized vats, one brimming with warm molten chocolate, the other full of softly whipped cream. You half expect The Joker or The Riddler to jump out, but in fact, for me, it’s the exact opposite of torture.

I thought about the intense excitement I experienced last December, when I landed a small part in Les Misérables on the West End stage for one night. Dressed as a smutty bar-wench with a ratty wig and pinafore, I like to think I shone in the “Drink to me” scene, where I sang, walked across the stage, carried a jug and poured out drinks, all at the same time. I particularly loved the moment where I took my curtain call and thrust my right arm out into the audience with 40 others in return for rapturous applause. It was such a good bargain. I’ve always been shockingly vain about my wrists, and that night they didn’t let me down. Aren’t charity auctions wonderful?

After these memories of pleasures that clutched right at the heart of who I am, a conventional pick-me-up like new shoes or a massage seemed pedestrian, banal, slightly insulting. Even the Roger Vivier gold-hooped, black ruched patent peep-toe courts with the drunken-looking heels.

Some time ago a friend went to a trophy shop in Kilburn and bought a small silver cup – the sort that looks as though its hands are permanently on its hips – and had it engraved in an indulgent italic font with her name. The whole thing cost about £19, and she keeps it on a shelf inside her wardrobe to remind her that she is genuinely a little bit special, an excellent mother and wife, not to mention a heavyweight bigwig in her career. This to me, though original, seemed a bit too literal a solution.

I have wanted for some time one of those long-armed vicious light-up mirrors, the ones that show all your imperfections to the power of eight. They are amazingly expensive, but I couldn’t quite justify it, not as a treat.

Then, listening to a radio show that mentioned the 200th birthday of Tennyson, I decided that on Saturday morning while the rest of the family turns cartwheels in leisure centres I would get into bed and read “In Memoriam”, my favourite Tennyson poem. I would wallow in a morning of intelligent grief and religious doubt of the highest calibre, counting not my blessings but my losses. Now that’s what I call self-indulgence!

. . .

“It is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine,” the poet wrote in a letter to a friend. “In the poem altogether private grief swells out into thought of, and hope for, the whole world.” You can keep your hot stone treatments. I’ve never understood that kind of carry-on. To me it’s like looking to a console table to cheer you up.

The august August day arrived and I made tea and found my red linen-bound variorum edition of Tennyson’s poems, bought at enormous expense with fruit machine winnings from The Folly Bridge Inn during my student days. I felt Noël-Cowardish in my grey dressing gown with the paler grey piping. To make matters even more perfect it was raining rather heavily. You don’t have to spend money on rewards, I told myself smugly. All was well.

The poem was even better than I remembered. I had forgotten quite how much I admire the rhyme scheme that turns on itself continually, so that any suggestion of progress is countered in every stanza by an anxious retreat. Long-term mourning contains such a pattern, and Tennyson’s poem reminds me how excruciating grieving is, but also how ambivalent we may feel about the end of grief because the less acutely we mourn, the farther away from us the lost object becomes. It’s a fact that if we cling to our losses in life, encase ourselves in them like a uniform, they seem less like losses. This is the best part of mourning, and also the most dangerous.

As I read I grew angry that society seems to have decided the best response to grief is courage. This is such an exacting requirement of the bereaved and, also, a rotten lie. It puts so much pressure on the heart and the mind that it makes people ill and mad. It was an odd sort of treat I had organised for myself, I know. A little austere perhaps, but no less valuable for that.

susie.boyt@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/boyt