But there’s a serpent in every paradise. Because there I am in the taxi, all happy, getting closer and closer to the hotel and wondering if I’ll get a free weather forecast left on my pillow in the evening, when I suddenly think, ‘Christ! Tips!’
And then it’s too late, because the taxi has drawn up outside the hotel and they’re all over me. Swarming like hungry ants, attached like leeches. A bloke has opened the car door with one hand and his other hand is opening and closing like that plant that eats things – but frankly he can get lost, I’m not tipping someone for opening my car door, even my guilt doesn’t extend that far. Some other bloke is hoisting my suitcase out of the boot – and he has to be tipped at the same time as the taxi driver has to be paid, and in the confusion I sometimes mistakenly give the taxi driver’s tenner to the suitcase boy, who can’t believe his luck and then goes all suspicious, like he’s afraid I want to sleep with him. Then there’s the bloke who brings my suitcase up in the lift to my room – a different bloke from the one who took the case out of the car, so he has to be tipped too. Sometimes there’s even another layer: a bloke, entirely separate and distinct from the suitcase bloke, will escort me to my room to show me how the taps work and will linger and linger and linger, pointing out more and more features of the room – the windowsill, the carpet (‘look at the beauty of the weave, please, come down here and have a look’) – until I’ve found a crumpled thousand-zloty note in the bottom of my bag.
It’s awful! It’s not that I begrudge them the money – mind you, it all adds up – it’s the anxiety. How do other people do it? How do they know how much to give each person? Where do they get the right denomination cash? How do they manage to always have enough change to tip everyone? And where do they keep it? In their hands? In their pockets? In a special sack? Ideally I’d like a jacket covered entirely with plastic, see-through pockets, like those shower curtains which have compartments for your sponge, shampoo, razor, etc.
Rich posh people don’t tip. It doesn’t even occur to them. In their natural arrogance, they assume everyone is there to do their bidding. But it’s different for people like me. I have no natural arrogance, nothing but a strong, strong fear that if I don’t tip, everyone in sight will spit in my food, misdirect my phone calls and blacken my name (‘Stingy bitch’).
But why should we tip people at all? If I write a column you particularly like, you don’t tip me. (Or if you do, I haven’t been receiving them.) If your doctor successfully diagnoses strep throat, you don’t slip him a couple of quid during your farewell.
And it’s not like you tip people for doing a good job (at least I don’t). I tip them because I have to. I tip them even when they’ve done a very bad job. I have tipped hairdressers while tears have been streaming down my face from the disaster they’ve wrought on my head.
It’s the lowest paid who get and need tips: tipping is an arbitrary way of supplementing their minimum-wage income. In fact, in many cases, tips don’t supplement but actually make up the minimum wage. In other words, customers are assumed to have tipped a certain amount (even if they haven’t), so management simply pay the ‘balance’ – just enough to bring the meagre pay packets up to the legal limit. Is this not terrible?
Recently I stayed in a hotel in Los Angeles where, with all room-service deliveries, there was 15 per cent service charge, a ten-dollar ‘tray charge’ and – a new one, this – ‘for your convenience’ a five-dollar ‘gratuity charge’. I was delighted that I didn’t have to start rooting around in my bag for a tip, but when I questioned the waiter (a knackered-looking middle-aged Hispanic man) about whether he actually received the five dollars, he said ‘yes’ so unconvincingly and fearfully that I reached for my purse and the fumbling began.
The swizzers! It’s all so wrong. This is a mad notion, I know, but could we not just do away with tips entirely and simply pay people properly? Pinko Commie nonsense, some might say, but there are times when I’ve thought that I’d find it less wearying to organize a Marxist revolution and bring down the entire capitalist system than find three quid for the young man who’s brought me my breakfast. ‘Sorry, son, no tip. But as soon as I’ve had my coffee I’m going to overthrow the capitalist system in order to secure decent pay for you. In fact, I could do with a couple of comrades, will you join me?’
First published in Marie Claire, January 2005.
Negative Thinking
When life throws me lemons, I’m told I should hop to it and make lemonade.
But when life throws me lemons, making lemonade is the last thing I want to do – I just want to curl up on the couch, nursing my bloodshot eye and sore knee from where a couple of the lemons hit me, and thinking dark thoughts about all citrus fruits.
However, that’s regarded as very poor form these days. The tyranny of positive thinking insists that I must instantly reconfigure every negative into a good thing, and be able to name at least one life lesson learnt.
In fact there’s a school of thought that says I should be actively grateful for every disaster that befalls me because they’re opportunities for emotional and spiritual growth. And while I can see the truth of this in theory, in real life it’s very different. In real life I want everything to be LATT (lovely all the time). I want to never feel scared, jealous, angry, abandoned, overlooked, invisible, unfulfilled, worthless … I could keep going ad infinitum.
But in modern life, there’s no room for self-pity. To the point that I sometimes fear it’s only a matter of time before it actually becomes illegal. Which would be a great shame, because self-pity can be a lovely activity. For one thing, it’s free, and for another thing, it’s very enjoyable to fling yourself on your bed and wail, ‘I’m the unluckiest person on earth!’ And ‘Sometimes I think there’s a curse on me!’ And ‘What’s the point in bothering with anything because nothing ever goes right!’
A few short years ago, the following exchange would have been regarded as normal:
‘I hear you had your car stolen.’
‘That’s right, it was. Bastards.’
‘Yeah, bastards.’
Nowadays, though, the conversation tends to run along very different lines:
‘I hear you had your car stolen.’
‘That’s right, it was. But you know what, it was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. Now I cycle to work and apart from the ever-present terror of being knocked down and killed – no, forget I said that, please wipe it from your memory – I’ve never been fitter. And the exercise endorphins are great: they just about cancel out my fear of falling under the wheels of a bus – again, if you could delete that from your records I’d appreciate it. But yes, everyone should have their car stolen!’
May I offer an alternative view: sometimes a horrible experience isn’t an opportunity for growth, sometimes a horrible experience is simply that – a horrible experience. Some things will never not be sad. No amount of talking it up can change it, and people shouldn’t be made to feel guilty about it. It’s hard enough to be coping with loss or shame or humiliation without being labelled a whiner into the bargain.
A close friend was diagnosed with breast cancer and – as is only to be expected – was plunged into profound shock. Then her treatment started and she found it rough-going: the chemo made her as sick as a dog; everything tasted horrible; all her hair fell out and she had no end of unexpected extras, like the fact that her nose streamed endlessly. But when she was asked how she was doing and she answered honestly that she was doing quite badly, people seemed startled. Anxiously they said, ‘But it’s given you a new-found appreciation for lif
e, right?’ And when she explained that, on the contrary, there was no pleasure in anything – chocolate and coffee tasted funny, she wasn’t allowed to drink, she hated having no eyelashes – they seemed displeased. Even more so if she tried to voice her fears of death or of terrible pain. Instead everyone expected her to be fired up and brimming with zeal for ‘fighting this thing’.
‘It’s exhausting enough to have cancer,’ she told me, ‘without having to go round waving pom-poms, shouting, “Rah, rah, rah, I’m going to kick cancer’s ass!”’
And the unspoken judgement of all of this is that if a person doesn’t get well, they simply didn’t ‘battle’ hard enough.
Do you know the saying ‘You can’t heal what you can’t feel’? In general I distrust aphorisms that rhyme – just because they rhyme doesn’t make them true. (For example: ‘Analysis means paralysis’ – actually, no. ‘Analysis’ simply rhymes with ‘paralysis’. And analysis can be very useful.) But I do believe that unpleasant emotions need to be felt before they can be ‘worked through’ (awful phrase – sorry). Healing is a process – we can’t jump straight from discovering our car has been stolen to being delighted that we’re now a cyclist.
However, holding on to rage or bitterness benefits no one. The Buddhists say, ‘You won’t be punished for your anger, you’ll be punished by your anger.’ So how I do it is, I let myself be bitter for a while, I savour it, I positively wallow in it and wish ill on whoever has hurt me. I wake in the middle of the night to have conversations with myself in which I best my adversary and mock them as they grovel before me. But at some stage, just before I go officially insane, I make the decision to move on. And it doesn’t always happen immediately – I’m a gifted grudge-holder – and often I have to make the decision several times before the obsession finally lifts.
A couple of weeks ago my house was burgled and things precious to me were stolen, but the worst part was the sense of violation – that strangers had been in my home and had been through my most private things. First I was scared, then I was sad, then I was ENRAGED. I entertained fantasies of getting a private detective to track down the perpetrators, then I’d hire some ‘muscle’ to kidnap them and bring them to a deserted basement, where I’d have them tied to chairs and in a scary, silky voice I’d ‘chat’ to them, while meaningfully fondling a pair of pliers.
It was GREAT fun for a while, then I had to stop. I made myself focus on how horrible it must be to earn your living by breaking into other people’s homes. I thought long and hard about it and kept thinking about it – and now I actually feel sorry for them. Sometimes …
First published in the Sunday Times Style, May 2015.
No Regrets
Regrets are going the way of carbs – soon, mark my words, they’ll be outlawed. Because any time some icon is asked what they regret, they always answer, ‘Nothing. Any mistakes I made (and actually there are none) have made me the fabulous person I am today.’
But I have millions of regrets. Millions and millions. Big ones, small ones, mortifying ones and those really horrible peculiar little ones, the paper cuts of shame, where the pain is disproportionately huge compared to the event itself. Example of one: 8,000 years ago, in another life, a colleague had just come back from a holiday in Turkey and she was radiantly aglow with the wonderful time she’d had, and next thing I piped up, all po-faced and self-righteous and a recently signed-up member of Amnesty International, ‘I wouldn’t go to Turkey because of their position on human rights.’
For the love of God! Was that necessary? Was that kind? Was it even effective? No, no, and no again. I mean, she’d gone, she was back, what was I hoping to achieve? But my punishment is the memory of her poor shocked face, which still triggers a full-body SOS (sweat of shame).
‘They’ say you only regret the things you don’t do, which is total codswallop because there are no words to describe how much I regret that time I dyed my hair blonde. (It went green. And not in a good way. And I didn’t have any money to get it fixed, so it stayed bad-green for a very long time.) In fact it’s safe to say I regret every single thing I did from the morning I turned twenty to the morning I turned thirty.
However, one of the biggest regrets is something I didn’t do: a newspaper editor asked me to fly to Bono’s house in the south of France, to interview Alison Hewson (aka Mrs Bono) about her eco fashion label, Edun – and I declined.
I know, I KNOW! But can I explain my thinking? First of all, the words ‘fly to the south of France’ send most people into a frenzy; it sounds WILDLY glamorous, conjuring up images of private jets and champagne and pointy cypress trees and driving around hairpin bends in a convertible Maserati with an extremely tanned man in aviators.
But the reality is different. Oh yes. As a journalist, you’re given a very modest sum to cover the flight, and because I was due to go the following day, I knew I was probably looking at a 27-hour trip via Murmansk, on Aeroflot’s budget line, where, doubtless, seats cost extra. I’d be in the land of sun and cypress trees for approximately three hours before leaving for my gruelling flight home.
But the awful journey was the least of my problems. Because the next words the editor said were: ‘She says she’ll only talk about the worthy fashion label, but push it. Keep pushing it. Keep asking questions. And have a good look around the house.’
‘No,’ I said, very, very anxiously, ‘no. I’d be all wrong for this.’
At the best of times I’m hopeless at asking impertinent questions, I just haven’t got the self-esteem to barrel in and demand answers. And Mrs Bono struck me (and still does) as a very able woman. Considering how famous her husband is, she engages with the press very much on her own terms, popping up only now and then, looking serenely beautiful and coolly enigmatic. Her face looks entirely un-interfered with, and even though she’s slim and has fabulous clothes, she’s not X-ray skinny. I bet she really is one of those women who eats what she wants and I bet she never exercises.
When I asked the editor why he’d picked me instead of one of his usual brazen, brass-necked, shameless, door-stepping Rottweilers, he said, ‘Because you’re Irish, you’re chatty. Tell her all about your disastrous – I mean, your … ah … interesting life, win her trust, and you’ll be gabbing away together in no time.’
But I knew we wouldn’t. Mrs Bono is no eejit and it’s no accident that she’s kept her private life very, very, very private. A lot of work goes into staying that far below the radar and to never popping up in the Sidebar of Shame, pictured en famille, wearing Mickey Mouse hats in Euro Disney.
I knew that when I arrived I’d be ushered into a featureless cell that gave no clues whatsoever about life chez Bono – no family photos, no smelly socks abandoned behind the telly, no evidence of a recent Pringles binge. If I asked to use the bathroom, Mrs Bono would calmly and firmly tell me that that wouldn’t be possible but that I could use the Ladies in the hotel down the road when I left, thus depriving me of any opportunity to root through their bathroom cabinets and hopefully uncover all kinds of enlightening products such as – in my wilder imaginings – Anusol (but you knew I was going to say that). Or a little jar containing Viagra (and you knew I was going to say that too). I’d even have been delighted with a bottle of Gaviscon. (‘Bono’s pain: top rocker self-medicates his torment by drinking. Behind closed doors, U2 frontman regularly sits at his kitchen table and swigs from large bottles. Of Gaviscon (aniseed flavour). Full story on pages 4, 5, 6 and 7.’)
I knew I’d spend an hour sitting ramrod straight, listening to reams of statistics about cotton yield in Burkina Faso, desperately failing to find
my opportunity to cut in and somehow convince Alison to trust me and tell me EVERYTHING about being Bono’s wife.
I knew that when I left, clutching the press release and – if I was really lucky – a dun-coloured super-worthy T-shirt, I’d be so afraid of telling the newspaper editor that he’d paid for a wild goose chase that when my return flight stopped off at Murmansk, I’d disembark, buy a warm hat and just never go home.
But these days I think I should have gone. So what if I’d left with no story? Surely, the shame and sense of failure would have died down eventually? I’d have been in Bono’s house! I’d have met Alison Hewson, who, like I say, strikes me as a very fabulous person.
It’d be a story for the grandkids. Assuming I had grandkids, and that looks extremely unlikely seeing as I don’t have children. But funnily enough, despite all the heartache my husband and I went through as we discovered gradually that we wouldn’t be having nippers, that’s one wound that’s healed. So I don’t regret everything. Which is just as well because, as I suspect, soon regrets will be no more.
First published in the Sunday Times Style, October 2015.
Turning Fifty
… this was written shortly before I turned fifty …
My lower back has been giving me gyp lately – now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d hear myself say – but it has. If I stand for too long, it starts hurting and I have to look for some place for a quick sit-down. I’ve never known what lumbago is, but all of a sudden I’m interested. Because later this year I’ll have a birthday and it’ll be my fiftieth one.
When I mentioned it recently, my brother-in-law Jimmy went pale and said, ‘Fifty! My God, that’s … ancient!’ And yes, it is ancient!