So how much sheer profit do they make from those of us who buy Irish Cancer Society Christmas cards? They make £75,000-£80,000 profit. It’s very important to them, and, like many charities, they rely on it more and more heavily each year. They put this money into three areas, into research, into an education programme and into buying some badly needed hospital equipment for the diagnosis or treatment of cancer.
Their other big fund-raising effort is Daffodil Day and the money from that goes towards home-care services, night nurses and a freephone service. So it’s all earmarked – what they do with it and what they need it for, this money raised by people buying a Christmas card with their name on it. They sounded greatly alarmed that anyone might cease to support any worthwhile charity out of fear of being conned or of being dubbed a public do-gooder.
I was fair to the woman in the red jacket in that I thought about it a lot. She had asked me if there were any kind of Christmas cards I didn’t like, and there are. Open-minded tolerance doesn’t have to be so bland and wishy-washy that you beam at every bit of cardboard you open. I resent the male chauvinist pigs who send feminist cards as a tee-hee joke. I don’t like blasphemous cards or very big tasteful ones of buildings that nobody knows, or too many skating ladies on frozen lakes. But that’s it.
I don’t think any the less of anyone who is saving a whale or restoring the wing of some falling-down place. If my eye falls on the fact that someone’s card will give 30 pence to the Samaritans, or to fight famine, or to house the homeless, then I am pleased rather than annoyed. I certainly wouldn’t think that the sender wanted to be admired or praised for doing it.
Nor would I assume that they believed they had conquered the problem single-handed by placing the organisation on a sound financial footing. Thanks to television exposés and newspaper articles, we have been made aware of scams and false-hearted entrepreneurs who tug at our heart strings. The danger would be that we become so watchful and politically correct in not falling for the conmen that we may forget those who are relying on us at this time of year.
I advise people to buy a card in aid of charity. It’s more important really than finding a tasteful print, and some of those cards which aid good causes have many a tasteful print in their repertoire anyway.
The £80,000 at Christmas that the Irish Cancer Society will get from those of us who buy their cards will be spent on things that matter. And, at this time of year, when I think of family and friends who have died of cancer and, much, much more positively, of family and friends who have lived with cancer and have been cured on account of the research, education programmes and equipment . . . then, to me, there’s no better way of buying a greeting card.
Starkers
“I would say group sex was as far from their minds
as clog dancing”
She has a part-time job and they put all the money she earns in a kind of leisure fund. They buy the holiday from it and the music centre and the swinging seat for the garden. So this year they were looking through the brochures to decide where to go and her husband said he would really fancy two weeks on a naturist holiday. At first she thought this was looking at plants or wild life, then she realised that he didn’t know B from a bull’s foot about botany and what he was talking about was a nudist colony. That’s what he wanted, to go to some awful place with sand dunes and little huts where everyone was naked 24 hours a day.
She was much disturbed by the brochure he had sent for. There was a lot of reference to “individual” cabins, and “family” cabins. What did that mean? On a normal holiday they didn’t stress that you were going to have your own room in the hotel and not share it with any other couple who happened to be on the same package tour. Did this mean that you had the option of being an ordinary couple?
She wrote to me because her husband has gone mad and her friend has gone tight-lipped and maybe it’s the kind of thing I might have a view on. She says she’s 40 and quite ordinary, whatever that means. She has what she thought was a happy marriage; they have two children in their teens, children who have now outgrown the family holiday and want to be with their own friends, which is fine.
But was the norm group sex with people writhing away, all naked, all day and all night?
I was so flattered to be invited to get involved, rather than having to strain to hear what people were saying behind menus and in dark corners, that I wrote back immediately and asked her what her worst fear about the whole thing was and why her friend had become tight-lipped.
She wrote back. She didn’t really want advice as such, just a view. In other words, I wasn’t to make a federal case out of it. But her answers were as follows.
She was afraid he didn’t love her anymore. If he did, why would he want to go and gawp at naked women? She was afraid they would look idiotic and no one would talk to them. Or that somehow, for some unfathomable reason, they would be so desirable that hundreds of Swedish and German and Belgian naturists would fancy them to bits and want to go to bed with them all day and all night. Or that they might meet someone from home.
Her friend just said that the man was having a mid-life crisis and he only brought the matter up in order to be reassured that he was the greatest. The friend said that these things occurred in a marriage and were best slapped down and not encouraged. And that it had all to do with too much explicit sex and violence on television anyway.
She ended her letter saying: “I know you were never in a nudist colony yourself but still you might have a view”.
Wrong. Wrong. I was in a nudist colony myself, years ago in what they now call Former Yugoslavia. I was there for 14 hours and I advise her not to worry about a thing, to take no notice of the tight-lipped friend and to go with him.
It’s only a bit of wobbly flesh. Once she gets over the shock of thinking “those people have come down to breakfast without their clothes,” she’ll settle down and enjoy it fine. Let’s take her worries.
If he wants to gawp at naked women, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her any more and he can gawp at them anyway in magazines, on videos and at most resorts.
They won’t look any more idiotic than anyone else. I was so mortified at my nudist colony that I used to sit on seats with my handbag on my lap, my arms crossed across my chest and my chin in my hand, pretending I was deep in thought and sending out lizard glances through my sun glasses to see what was passing by.
And what was passing by was immensely reassuring. Men with gigantic stomachs hanging over not little satin briefs, but sort of lost, inoffensive-looking appendages. No problem for anyone there. And women with tanned skin and pendulous breasts. And of course the usual quota of Miss Worlds and Mr Universes that you see anywhere, but they are no more jealous-making naked than they are semi-clothed.
Now I was there in the line of duty so I went round with a notebook, interviewing people. And I would say group sex was as far from their minds as clog dancing. Lots of them had little naked children by the hand, they all talked a lot about being free and they referred to people who wore clothes as “textiles”. The people were textiles now, not the clothes.
It was very awkward eating meals; you would forget and let bits of hot food fall on you and somehow it seemed sort of awkward getting it off. And I used to stick to the chair. But that was all. If they met someone from home, well, then someone from home was there too, so no sweat.
On any holiday, people make compromises. For years I have seen women agree to go and watch a match on television; men agree to tour shops they find boring; friends go to the museums to please one and to the disco to please the other. We are kind to those we love and they to us; it’s not the end of the world to go on one holiday that you don’t fancy, to please someone you do. Next year she can choose.
The tight-lipped friend is another matter. The friend was no help to her at all. I advise this woman to tell her friend no more, to smile enigmatically and say “let’s talk no more about holidays”. And then she should go off and wobble and laugh with her
husband in the naturist place and talk about silly old textiles, and being free, and remember to take lots of heavy duty sun cream for the bits that haven’t been exposed for a while, and not to sit down on hot benches for fear of roasting her bum.
Light Up and Live
“Today is Saturday and every time I hear a church bell ringing
I will think that it could have been his funeral Mass”
It’s great that he’s still alive. Still sailing out of side roads and lanes into the traffic. Still assuming that people who get out of their cars, shake him, shout at him and then burst into tears are just mad grown-ups. Seriously disturbed adults thinking they own the world because they drive cars. It’s much better that he’s alive and 13 and unrepentant than dead in a mortuary, awaiting burial this morning.
His parents will go about whatever they do on a Saturday morning; they will not be sitting stunned in a house, waiting for the car to come and take them to the church. His friends will be out with him whirling, swooping and trick-acting on their cycles as usual, looking for adventure and delighted to have wheels that might take them further afield to find it.
You might pass him today, he’ll be easier to see in the daylight, just as slippery and eager to get where he is going, with the same casual disregard for any rules of the road that he had on Tuesday night. But when it gets dark you won’t see him. He’ll be there all right, he’s a grown-up of 13, he doesn’t have to be in at Lighting Up Time. He can stay out way after nine, if his parents know where he is.
He will be heading home after dark in his fine dark jacket, his near-black jeans, on a bicycle without a lamp, without a rear light reflector, with no trace of luminous paint, with no glowing belt, no white scarf, no helmet and no worries. He will tell nobody about the near miss that he had on Tuesday night.
Who would he tell? Not his parents. They might darken their brows and sympathise with an unknown adult who had leaped from her car, shaken him, and then, with tears pouring down her face, assured him that he was only alive because she was driving at 25 miles an hour because it was raining. They might suggest buying some of these safety things like lamps and rear lights and they might cut short his wild and free cycling hours.
No, he wouldn’t tell them. He wouldn’t have thought it worth telling his mates. They’re all sick of us finger-wagging adults, shaking our heads, peering with our weak eyes at perfectly visible things and then blaming them because we are too feeble to see them.
They wouldn’t be interested in his brush with death, they’ve had it many a time. They tell the adult to chill out or get a life or, in the interests of speed, they say sure, yes, no problem, they’ll get a light tomorrow and thanks, just to get rid of us so that we can shuffle off to whatever geriatric unit mistakenly allowed us out to drive.
He is 13 and has no imagination. He is lucky enough not to have my imagination. Today is Saturday and every time I hear a church bell ringing I will think that it could have been his funeral Mass; whatever his parents normally do on a Saturday morning they are doing only because I am a timid driver and terrified of the rain making things more difficult to see than they already are.
I can almost hear myself talking to them, telling them how sorry I was, how hard I tried to avoid him. I wouldn’t even want to add to their grief by telling them that he was an irresponsible little devil, a danger to himself and others and that I was so much in the right it would make your head swim. Because their child would be dead and that is not the language to be used.
And there would be a picture of him on the mantelpiece and, for the rest of their lives, his brothers and sisters would wonder what he would have been like if he had grown up. And maybe his mother and father would have wondered, as the years went by, whether they could have done something more – like examined his bike every time he went out on it, or insisted that he wore reflective clothing if the little red light had come off the back.
Maybe they would. Or maybe they would have spent today, and the time that follows it, thinking about selfish motorists in big warm cars driving on a wet night and mowing down defenceless children. And there are many cases where parents are right to mourn and rage over children killed by drunks or speeders or even the preoccupied. But this would not have been one of them.
My fevered imagination can create scenes of family and friends trying to reassure me, trying to make me feel that there was nothing I could have done. I would think that I had taken up driving too late in life. Possibly, I would never get over the guilt.
So what is going to happen? I drive slowly already, I’m going to be a danger to other traffic after this. The boy? Is he kitted out in reflective gear, now astride a perfectly lit machine? Is he what? He thinks that because he sees the light of a car, the person in the car can see him.
I saved his life on Tuesday and I advise his parents to tell him that he is wrong. He is only 13 and he won’t listen to anyone else. He won’t listen to me – unstable, tearful and loud. He won’t listen to the National Safety Council – gang of grown-ups, like school and the guards and everyone else, conspiring to prevent you having any kind of a life. But he has to listen to his parents just in order to have a bit of peace.
If they say: “You don’t get on that bike again until you have proper lights and proper luminous strips” and if they mean it, then it’s going to be such a hassle every time . . . he’ll do it.
If his parents themselves wore a bit of fluorescent something on them, even if they were crossing the road to post a letter, he would see it as the norm, not as some kind of weakling nonsense, the hallmark of a nervous child instead of a daredevil grown-up which is what you are at 13.
At 13 you don’t read statistics and, even if someone else reads them forcibly to you, you don’t believe they apply to you. The latest figures the National Road Safety Council has for cyclists killed on our roads refer to 1992. That year 35 cyclists were killed; 136 were very seriously injured; 609 were just injured.
At 13 you wouldn’t think about this, it would be just one more sad thing, like war and famine and things that happen in other places. But if I had a 13-year-old child who was intending to cycle anywhere tonight, I wouldn’t care how much family aggro it caused, I’d dress him up like the Kish lighthouse. I’d have him looking like a Christmas tree if necessary – just so that he could be seen by the well-meaning folk as well as the drunks and the speeders who will undoubtedly be out this weekend as well.
In Loco Parentis
“Were they mad to let her have this fellow in her room? Were they mad if they made a scene about it?”
This woman is 47 and her best friend is also 47 and, long ago, went to live in America. The friend in America kept in touch – pictures of family, long Christmas letters, visits every three years when they came to Europe.
Then she wrote with a suggestion. Her daughter, who would be 17, would love to come to London for six months to do one of those posh secretarial courses that also involved grooming courses and learning how to arrange flowers. It would look awfully good when she came back to the States. It would give her confidence and smooth some of the rougher edges.
The friend in America said that the girl was very young and silly, and it would be a huge relief to her if she could stay in the London friend’s house – as a paying guest.
The friend in America had read between the lines; she had realised that times were hard and cash was short, and that a paying guest would be just the thing. Especially an extrovert 17-year-old girl who would love everything and be a bit of a help around the house as well.
The London friend and her husband had no children, so they inquired well in advance what time the girl should come home in the evenings, whether she could travel on the Underground after dark and if they should offer her wine at meals. They didn’t think about the one question which they needed to know how to answer.
The 17-year-old girl arrived. She was glowing with health and vitality and looked like an advertisement for orange juice and fibre. She had perfec
t manners and declared herself very pleased with London, her new home and her training course.
Eleven nights after she came to stay, she brought a boy home with her and took him to her room. The London friend and her husband were up all night, trying to think what to do. They could hardly knock on the girl’s door and ask her to order the young man out of the house. Would they tell her in the morning that this occurrence must never happen again? Would they call the States and ask for guidance from her parents?
Were they being ridiculously old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy? Was this perhaps the way all young people carried on nowadays? Should they just check that she had been to the family planning clinic and practised safe sex? Would their obligation, and interest, end there?
If only they had been at home the previous evening, they could have indicated that it was not the expected thing for a guest to invite another guest to her room, but they had already told her that she was welcome to bring friends to the house. They had not meant male friends, to sleep.
So the dawn came, eventually, and they said nothing to the girl because they didn’t know what to say; their ideas hadn’t crystallised.
They were torn between wanting to be the good sports, the tolerant people, the liberals who took all that kind of thing casually, and, on the other side, the middle-aged couple to whom this girl’s parents had given a daughter in the understanding that they would look after her. The words in loco parentis had been used in a letter. It literally meant in place of a parent.
So didn’t they have a duty to know what the parents would have done under such circumstances, and then done something similar? They tried to read what the parents would have done. They voted Republican in the States which didn’t give them any real indication. The father was a lawyer, the mother an interior decorator. It gave no hint of moral values and standpoint.