But in between those there’s been nothing
Posted in General on 15. Aug, 2010
But in between those there’s been nothing.
Not so very long ago we tried a holiday in Cornwall with another family We’re a bit bookish and slouchy on holiday They’re a bit steam trainish and clotted cream. So we had a splendid variety of activities until we wanted a day to ourselves to stare at the sea Their pre-pubescent 11- year-old decided to stay too We warned her: “We’re doing nothing today. Nothing at all.” “Oh, I’d love that,” she said, “Mummy doesn’t allow us to be bored.” What does a child’s boredom evoke in an adult – apart from disapproval, that is? “What shall we do now, mum?” is, after all, one of the great existential questions which the child is never allowed to answer. Other people’s descriptions of how to survive seven weeks of hell and boredom without feeling a failure. When my boys broke up at the end of term they were cross and exhausted They were dying for the summer hols They go back to school this week ( we live in Scotland) I’m a touch irritable and knackered. Things must be organised with military precision We must have stratagem and spreadsheets Above all we must stick to the plan and be punctual God forbid we should find a gap.
We might all fall through and what would become of us then? This, believe it or not, is the standard blueprint for getting through the school summer holidays Every newspaper has been full of it since the end of term. Which is exactly how many men feel about Diana herself.In other words, it is only by changing herself that Diana can change the men she picksn. Carling might have seemed like a more normal bloke, but as ever there was a fly in the ointment – Julia, his wife, in the background. Similarly Oliver Hoare was another typical man that Diana fell for – utterly charming, good looking and suave – but with a wife in the background.Who knows what Dodi’s dark side is, but he must have one We all do. But I guess all Diana experiences now is his overwhelming charm, a man who makes her feel good about herself without, almost certainly, ever getting to know the real person underneath.By now most of us have got the picture and could easily pick a couple of men in our lives who are Diana’s “type” They are “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. She must have felt comfortable with them because they were her emotional relatives.
Nothing is ever that easy.The snakes that followed, the two Jameses, sound as if they were as emotionally damaged and damaging as Diana herself; and in them she found other untrusting, fearful mirrors of herself, who relied on pure surface charm to get them by. It was a Cinderella story, but the trouble was that she felt like Cinderella on the inside as well as the outside – a badly paid nursery school helper – and when the prince found her glass slipper fitted her after the ball, she imagined she would live happily ever after. The other women never see the dark side – and this is exactly what Diana never wants to see. If her men were to show their darker side, she would feel it was her fault, and get upset and despairing as a result, just as she did when her mother left her.Charles clearly was not in love with Diana, and she fell for a fantasy figure rather than the real man. The problem with falling for men involved with other people, as Diana tends to do, is that there is one facet of the other person you never see. Thus a man may show his fussy, pernickety side at home, his coolness and his bullying, but he can, with a mistress, repress all that (since it is expressed elsewhere) and just show the side that he wants to be seen.Many is the wife who has felt furious that an unromantic, undemonstrative husband, who even forgets their wedding anniversary, may be found wining and dining his girlfriend and buying her bunches of flowers.
Or you could say that she simply misreads the signs – she’s one of those women who go to the shoe shop to find bread. If she did have someone who loved her as a person and not just as a fantasy princess, she’d have to face in herself exactly what she can’t bear to face – her deep feelings of rejection, anger and low self-esteem.”Most of the men in Diana’s life have had other women lurking about somewhere, either in the present or the immediate past. Her mother ran off with a wallpaper millionaire when she was only six, and left Diana feeling bereft. She used to cry bitterly in the bedroom with her brother, longing for her return.
This was perhaps her first betrayal and the first moment Diana started to draw up any trusting drawbridge she might have had before. All she had left was her father, an emotionally unavailable man who became even less available after his stroke. He was a man who, after his illness, was “all here but not all there” He remarried a stepmother who Diana loathed at the time. Would that experience not be enough to make a woman behave providently in her own emotional life?Precisely the opposite. She is trapped by her past: in many ways you could view Diana’s present as being an endless re-enactment of it. She finds a man who’s emotionally unavailable, and at least she feels at home.