A Day at a Time E-Book

Mary Kenny

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 284

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

A Day at A Time is an entertaining collection of stories, observations and anecdotes to be treasured and enjoyed. A thoughtful, poignant, funny and inspirational collection that will never fail to uplift, amuse and enlighten. Spanning self-help, humour, biography, history and a little bit of spirituality, here is a wonderful example of Mary Kenny's signature wit, talent and charm.

Leseprobe

A Day at a Time

A Day at a Time

Thoughts and Reflections through the Seasons

Mary Kenny

A DAY AT A TIME

First published in 2016 by

New Island Books

16 Priory Office Park

Stillorgan

County Dublin

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Mary Kenny, 2016

The Author asserts her moral rights in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

PRINT ISBN: 978-1-84840-537-0

ePUB ISBN: 978-1-84840-538-7

MOBI ISBN: 978-1-84840-539-4

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

British Library Cataloguing Data.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of my darling brothers and sister: Carlos, James and Ursula, so kind, witty, sweet-natured – if sometimes argumentative – and interested in everything. Their memory is with me every day of my life.

Contents

Spring

‘Pippa’s Song’ by Robert Browning

St Brigid’s Day

Freedom of Choice

The Ethics of Prostitution?

When Doctors Err

World Cancer Day

The Uses of Superstition

A Carer’s Lot

Lent: When Less was More

The Charm of the Feline

‘Don’t Be Thin-Skinned’

A Blessing We Should Count

The Rules for Social Kissing

Things You May Not Know about St Patrick

Panic Stations

Why (Almost) No Agony Uncles?

The Pursuit of Happiness

Jobs of the Future

Down Syndrome Day

Cultures Vary – Each Has Its Strengths

Mother’s Day

Duty Calls

Sex …

… And Money

Change is Good

A Manner of Speaking

A Chinese Superstition

People-Pleasing

Mother Earth Day

The Truth in Fable

Priority, Please!

Counting Your Blessings – It’s Complicated

The Easter Rising

‘Four Ducks on a Pond’ by William Allingham

Summer

‘Wild Nights’ by Emily Dickinson

Buddha Day

Africa Day

Bag Lady

No Smoking Day

May-Time Beauty

Joan of Arc – All Things to the French

Deaf Sentence

St Anthony – Patron Saint of the Absent-Minded

Father’s Day

Merry Widow or Forlorn Spouse?

St Benedict’s Rule for Business-Folk

The Glamour of Crime

The Best Sermon I Ever Heard

Why Jane Austen Still Matters

By Virtue of Habit

Journalism Day

Peter and Paul

Talking to the Wall

America’s Day

Forgiveness – A Tough Call

Bastille Day

To Thine Own Self Be True?

The Madeleine

The Meaning of Empiricism

All Do Not Get Prizes

The Pitfalls of Advice

Four Literary Masters

A Poetry Memorial

My Dream House

Grammar Lesson

Proud to Be a Shawlie

When a Tragedy Strikes

The Green Letter Box

‘Blossoming Plum and Cherry’ by Adelaide Crapsey

Autumn

‘Poem for an Adopted Child’ by Anonymous

World Suicide Prevention Day

Grandparents’ Day

Autumn and Old Age

Regrets – I’ve Had a Few (Especially about Education)

Jewish Harvest Festival

A Bad Trip with Gender Quotas

The Medicalisation of Melancholy

Biography in Topography

Should a Judge Swear?

The Sadness of the Lonely …

… And the Consolations of Solitude

St Francis – A Universal Figure

The Archaic Elegance of the Necktie

A Week in an Old People’s Home

Don’t Get It Right – Get It Written

What to Put on a Gravestone?

Parking Wars

The Absent Mind

She Died at Auschwitz

Becoming a Better Person

Liberation from Corsets

Rapunzel – The Other Side of the Story

Gratitude Letters

Adoptive Mum Meets Birth Mum

Good Anger, Bad Anger

Cousinage

Winging It

Meeting and Greeting

Cheerfulness Aide

Mary Quant’s Car

What’s for You

‘Maternity’ by Alice Meynell

Winter

‘Vitae Summa Brevis’ by Ernest Dowson

Day of the Dead

The Language of Colours

The Coffee Revolution (But Tea Still Holds Its Ground)

Politics Tests Friendships

Waking the Feminists

Love Is Not All You Need

Some Conjugations

The Condolence Letter

The Greatest Restorative

The Habit of Habit

An Answer to Hypochondria

Another Grammar Lesson

The Future is Bright – For Oldies

The Uses of Mindfulness

The Perils of Tidying

Fairy Tales Are True

The Turkish Carpet

It’s All Maintenance

A Chance Decision

Christmas

The Doll’s House

The Reputation Economy

New Year’s Resolutions

The Mantra

Written on the Body

How Boxing Nearly Died

Wishing Time Away

Journey’s Beginning

How to Achieve the Fountain of Youth

Living in the Past

The Existential Loneliness of Old Age

What Do People Pray For?

The Burden of War

Wise Words

‘The Rainbow’ by William Wordsworth

Acknowledgements

Spring

Pippa’s Song

Robert Browning (1812–1889)

The year’s at the spring,

The day’s at the morn;

Morning’s at seven;

The hill-side’s dew-pearled;

The lark’s on the wing;

The snail’s on the thorn:

God’s in His heaven –

All’s right with the world!

In thirty-seven words Robert Browning conjures up that rapturous feeling that we get from time to time – perhaps quite rarely, but wonderful when it occurs – that everything is in place and things are going to be just fine.

Browning, who of course married the poet Elizabeth Barrett, rescuing her from a tyrannical father and taking her off to Italy, was a dazzling Victorian poet, whose long descriptive verse ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ was a favourite parlour recitation in the days when people gave recitations. His ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’ is the quintessence of the exile’s yearning, and ‘Pied Piper of Hamelin’ has entered into fable and legend. How clever that he could write both at great length and with striking brevity.

St Brigid’s Day

1 February

Visitors to Ireland will observe many examples of the St Brigid’s cross – that rather unusual variation of a conventional cross, fashioned out of straw.

Despite a decline in formal religious practice, the St Brigid’s cross retains its revered place in Irish life. Brigid lived a long time ago – she was born in the year 450 – but her memory has been stamped into Irish history and folklore. The placenames of Ireland honour her: Kilbride, Templebreedy, Toberbride, Kilbreedy, Rathbride, Drumbride. Kildare is still Brigid’s county, though Alice Curtayne, in her 1955 biography of the saint, notes that there has always been special devotion to her in Offaly where Brigid established her first order of nuns at Croghan Hill, a site of the earliest Celtic monasticism.

Brigid was born into what would then have been called a mixed marriage: her father was one Dubthach (the modern equivalent is Duffy), who was a ‘pagan petty king, or chieftain’. Her mother was a bondwoman, that is, a slave, by the name of Brocessa, ‘who belonged to his household’. Dubthach seemed to have availed of his droit de seigneur and duly got Brocessa pregnant.

Ireland in 450 was on the cusp of transitioning from paganism to Christianity, in the wake of Patrick’s conversions. Women had a surprising array of rights under Brehon law, but these rights were class-based. They applied to women of the chieftain class only. Slaves, or bondwomen, were without rights at all and were even forbidden converting to Christianity, since that might prove inconvenient to their masters.

Brigid, therefore, grew up with a mixed heritage, although, according to Alice Curtayne, the saint’s childhood was happy – even if Ireland at this time was perpetually in a war-like state. According to the annals, between 452 and 517, fifteen major battles took place. There was a constant struggle for dominance under the rule of the High King.

When she was a teenager, Brigid’s father sold her into fosterage to another chieftain (a not uncommon practice at the time). But while awaiting in her pa’s chariot, she gave away his sword, complete with embedded gem, to a leper asking for alms. Lepers in Ireland, unlike the biblical kind, were not treated as outcasts. Celtic Ireland, fierce in some ways, was compassionate to the afflicted.

And so began Brigid’s life of independence and defiance. She rejected marriage – Dubthach hoped she might wed a poet, but she wasn’t having it – and began travelling around the country to assemble a community of women. She had seven companions with her when she was received into religious life, and by the time she died she had some fourteen thousand. She rescued women from ‘the fortresses of chieftains and the hovels of bondwomen, offering them a haven’. Among her early achievements was to obtain liberty for her mother.

Eventually, recognising her evangelising ability, the bishops of Ireland extended their friendship to Brigid, and this ‘developed into a kind of fellowship with the episcopacy’ – that is, she was accepted as an honorary bishop herself (which was sometimes a courtesy title for abbots in those days).

Brigid was a powerful abbess and an initiator of women’s communities. The annals describe her as strong, compassionate and gay (in the old sense of the word), ‘imbued with a shining charity’. She was also opposed to war – she went on to confiscate many a sword.

The Danish Vikings destroyed many artefacts associated with Brigid, but the straw cross – which she wove from floor straw while comforting a dying man – lived on and remains ubiquitously with us as a reminder of a great woman.

Freedom of Choice

Every day, almost, I mentally argue with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the French philosopher icons of my youth. (I can hardly believe I was actually in Montparnasse, and in the vicinity of those very existential cafes where they smoked and drank coffee, at the very time they were still flourishing. But what did I know at eighteen? Nothing!)

Sartre and de Beauvoir were, and remain, the great apostles of personal freedom. Indeed, many of the accepted values of our world today were planted by the duo, first among the intelligentsia and, subsequently, taken up by the mainstream. Simone and Jean-Paul started this affirmation that everything is our own choice. Well, they didn’t exactly start it: they drew on philosophical ideas already laid down, including Christian ideas of free will. Orthodox Christian theology taught that Adam and Eve were quite free to choose; they made a bad choice and paid the price. Sartrean existentialism emphasises greatly this freedom that we have – to make our choices and to accept the consequences; except, of course, their values are atheistic rather than biblical.

I argue, constantly, all the same. I aspire, most ardently, to freedom. Between freedom or equality (two values often cited as being in opposition to one another), I would always choose freedom. That’s because I have sometimes experienced freedom, but I have never experienced equality – everyone I’ve ever met is either superior to me in one way or less fortunate than me in another (money, brains, charm, looks, skills, etc., etc.)

Yet freedom, for all that it is desired, has its elusive side too. How free are we truly? Are we subject, in our free will, to our genes, our background, our timing, our luck? Can we be free to make choices when we have duties, responsibilities and an obligation to care for others? Can we be free if we are constantly worried about money, housing, daily necessities, bills? Do we not make choices from reluctant need rather than from free will?

Sartre and de Beauvoir were childless by choice, and that was an element in their freedom. But was it also an element in their lack of insight into the everyday lives of the rest of us? I go on debating with their shadows.

The Ethics of Prostitution?

A man asked my advice about whether he should visit a prostitute. He was a widower in his eighties and he missed his wife – and their sex life. He didn’t want another ‘involvement’ in a relationship: he just wanted some sexual companionship. Well, I said, taking the coward’s way out, it’s up to yourself and your conscience. I have interviewed women who worked as prostitutes – ‘sex-workers’ is now the accepted term – over the course of my journalistic career and what struck me about them was their contempt of men. I’ve interviewed men who have frequented prostitutes and they have joked (men often joke about things that disturb them) that hookers and psychiatrists are the only two professionals who insist on cash as the transaction is done – because the service provider would never get the money once the encounter is in the past.

Yet there are people who speak kindly of women who sell sex. My brother Carlos was touched by the stories he had heard in France during the 1940s about the women who provided sexual services to les gueles cassées. These were war veterans whose faces had been disfigured and were considered to be repellent to women in the normal course of events. But certain prostitutes overcame such repulsion and provided sexual services for these veterans (cheerfully, he alleged). Perhaps this is an example of where money can buy a form of compassion.

The French had a more practical approach to sex-work (although in modern times their attitudes are changing, perhaps under pressure from feminism). Gaston Berleymont was for many years the landlord of The French pub in Soho – his parents had founded it in the 1920s, and during the Second World War the Free French, including de Gaulle, had met and sipped there. In his retirement days, Gaston spoke nostalgically about the French prostitutes who had frequented Soho after the war. ‘They had such beautiful manners. Never plied for trade in the pub. And they never missed Mass on Sunday at St Patrick’s church’ – the very pretty Catholic church in Soho Square. But, I asked him, was there not a contradiction between their lifestyle and religious devotions? ‘Why should there be?’ he asked. ‘Their profession had nothing to do with their faith.’ It was suggested to me subsequently that their faith may have helped them bear their profession. Keeping body and soul together drives most of us to work: sometimes the problem is trying to keep them apart.

When Doctors Err

It’s often said that we learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes. But imagine being a surgeon, making a mistake with an operation and having to sit through a revision while you ‘learn’ from what went wrong – perhaps knowing that someone died because of your error. The brain surgeon Henry Marsh describes this process very poignantly in his book, Do No Harm (the ancient Greek Hippocratic oath, for doctors, begins: ‘First, do no harm.’) He actually delivered a lecture in America with the title ‘All My Worst Mistakes’: I’m not sure that many of us would have the courage to stand up in public and make such an avowal.

‘Everybody accepts that we all make mistakes,’ he writes, ‘and that we learn from them. The problem is that when doctors such as myself make mistakes the consequences can be catastrophic for our patients.’ Most surgeons, he says, with a few exceptions, feel a deep sense of shame when their patients suffer or die as a result of their efforts, ‘a sense of shame which is made all the worse if litigation follows’. Doctors, he confesses, find it difficult to admit to making mistakes, to themselves as well as to others, and there are all kinds of ways that they can disguise these errors or put the blame elsewhere.

It was only when approaching the end of his career that Marsh felt an increasing need to ‘bear witness’ to his past mistakes. This was in the hope that anyone following in his footsteps might learn from the blunders, and also, perhaps, as a kind of reckoning with his life’s work. Then, ‘the more I thought about the past, the more mistakes rose to the surface, like poisonous methane stirred up from a stagnant pond. Many had been submerged for years.’

When he delivered his American lecture, it was met by stunned silence. He still wonders if his audience was astonished by his reckless honesty or by his incompetence.

Yes, a brain surgeon can indeed make a mistake. Cutting through an artery when operating, with fatal results, is an acknowledged hazard of brain surgery. It is a devastating loss to a family, especially when the patient is young and had a good chance of recovery.

Who would be a brain surgeon?

World Cancer Day

4 February

I’ve had this pain – or is it an ache? – between my shoulder blades for about, oh, let’s see, five or six months now. I don’t feel otherwise unwell and, mostly, I just hoped it would go away. Sometimes it does go away. But then it comes back. And there is always this awful calculation in your head: if it is a fatal cancer tumour, wouldn’t it better, really, not to know about it? On the other hand, if it is something treatable, isn’t it sensible and responsible to have it checked out?

I had a distant aunt who had a bad shoulder for a while. Her GP had described it as ‘frozen shoulder’, which is something muscular, as I understand. Eventually, the condition warranted further investigation. Further investigation put her in a hospice for the dying – it was bone cancer – and she departed this world quite speedily.

Maybe she was better thinking it was a frozen shoulder, the previous year, when she still enjoyed life. ‘In greater knowledge is greater sorrow,’ says the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Cancer is the diagnosis we all fear so much, and it is also the diagnosis that many of us will one day face, should we live long enough. An oncologist describes it as essentially a disease of old age, even though it can strike at the young, tragically. We have all seen the ravages that cancer has wrought: my brother James died of a cancer that originally started in the kidney, at the age of fifty-two, and my sister Ursula died of a gynaecological cancer at the age of sixty-nine. I dreaded seeing the cancer look that makes the face, and the body shape, so skeletal.

And yet, I know many friends who have survived cancer: cancer of the breast, cancer of the prostate, cancer of the bowel. I know a woman who has survived cancer three times. So much progress has been made, and so many people are incalculably brave in facing treatment and prognosis.

When I was growing up, the word ‘cancer’ was only mentioned in hushed tones. In some London newspapers, journalists were not permitted to write the word itself, lest it bring ‘bad luck’. On World Cancer Day, let’s thank the medical researchers who have worked so hard to cure this frightening illness and have made so much progress.

The Uses of Superstition

Every time I see a lone magpie, I think of my late brother Carlos. Glimpsing the bird alone, he would wait and wait and wait until a second bird joined the first, bearing in mind the old superstition: ‘One for sorrow, two for joy.’ One lone magpie is deemed to be bad luck.

These are folklore traditions which don’t have any basis in rationality, and I tell that to myself when the lone magpie alights upon my path. The bad luck that the lone magpie may bring can, according to superstitious protocol, be deflected by greeting the magpie with the words: ‘Good morning, Mr Magpie. And how is your lady wife today?’ Most birds mate for life, and thus it is that the lone bird is, perhaps, himself unlucky.

Superstitions have a bad influence on human behaviour where they replace rational thinking; where they cause people to be passive and fatalistic, rather than exercising their free will; and where they act as self-fulfilling prophesies. If you think something will bring bad luck, perhaps your unconscious will court bad luck.

My brother was a very intelligent man and a well-read person; I ponder on his predilection for superstitions and wonder about their origin. He was tended, as a young boy, by a Dublin woman my mother engaged as a housekeeper, Lizzie, and Lizzie had many superstitious ideas, often mixed in with Christianity. Dubliners of that generation also had a morbid streak: when Carlos was a young boy, Lizzie would take him to see drowned sailors stretched out in the mortuary in Ringsend – it was, it seems, quite a spectacle back in the 1930s. Some of these poor fellows made ‘a lovely corpse’, in Lizzie’s words.

But there is also a wise element within superstitions. They may remind us that our lives are contingent. We do have choices, but we don’t always have control over nature or happenstance, and bad luck can strike out of the blue. The magpie may not bring me bad luck, but he may remind me that ‘stuff happens’ to people, out of nowhere. So don’t go about your day feeling cocky that you’ve got everything beautifully under control.

The magpie’s bad reputation, according to Chloe Rhodes in her book One for Sorrow, may stem from its behaviour: it’s known for stealing shiny objects and for killing other birds’ chicks. Or perhaps it is that in good weather magpies tend to be in groups – in foul weather, alone.

The rhyme that begins with ‘one for sorrow’ and ends with ‘six for gold / Seven for a secret never to be told’, somehow connects us to centuries of country lore.

A Carer’s Lot

Whenever I encounter someone who has been thrust into the position of being a carer – be it a son or daughter for an elderly parent or a spouse for a long-term partner now diagnosed with a degenerative condition – my advice is always this: make time for yourself. Give yourself breaks. Get respite care.

When I was the main carer for my late husband, a friend gave me this advice – and a good illustration of why it’s important. You know when you’re in an aircraft and the flight attendants start demonstrating the safety drill? They always add that, in case of an emergency, you must put on your own oxygen mask before you help anyone else, including a child.

That’s because unless you equip yourself with the wherewithal you won’t be in a position to help anyone else. A useful metaphor.

Carers are often dogged by a sense of duty and a sense of guilt (as well as genuine feelings of love and wanting to care for someone). They can feel isolated, imprisoned and depressed by their role of caring – even when they want to do it and would hate to desert their caree.

That’s why they have to look after themselves. They have to get breaks. Respite there must be.

Someone who is stricken with a severe disability or a degenerative illness can easily feel abandoned, yes, and can even return to a child-like sense of dependency. I remember arranging to pick up my husband after a hospital appointment – at a time when he was beginning to decline in health (from a stroke) – and, because of traffic congestion on a motorway, I arrived rather later than arranged. (It was before the era of the mobile phone – not that Richard would ever have acquired, or used, a mobile phone.) He was sitting waiting for me in the hospital waiting room, and as I entered, the look on his face was like that of a rescued child. This from a man who had been the very epitome of independence, famous for vanishing from a pub in a puff of smoke and turning up in Saigon.

The carer has to make respite arrangements with a certain degree of guile, inventing some valid excuse for an absence – an excuse that won’t hurt the caree or make him feel abandoned. But it must be done. As my aunty Nora used to say: ‘When you’re too good, you’re no good.’

Lent: When Less Was More

Old customs change and die away. Ash Wednesday was an important day in my childhood because it was the beginning of Lent, and Lent, to Catholics in the 1950s, was rather what Ramadan is to Muslims today. It is probable that more people in the Western world are now familiar with Ramadan than they are with Lent. For forty days (with a crucial break for St Patrick’s Day on 17 March) we observed fasting and abstinence – no meat on Wednesdays or Fridays, no sweets or treats and no weddings or dances either. Grown-ups would usually forswear alcohol for the fasting period.

The season of Lent marks the forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness, but it also draws upon agrarian practices from when our societies were based on agriculture: the winter stocks were running low and the hens wouldn’t start laying again until April, so the shriving of Lent blended in with food practices and needs.

In continental Europe, Carnival and Mardi Gras preceded Lent with parties and feastings, but Shrove Tuesday never quite had the same cachet and was reduced, finally, to Pancake Day, the last residue of what was once a Europeankermesse.

If there is a secular Lent now, it is likely to be in January, when people shrive their bodies after the indulgences of the Christmas period.

The rhythm of the year has changed: refrigeration and the deep freeze, as well as the jet engine, have dictated the changes. There is now no season when strawberries are not available, and food is air-freighted from all over the globe. If we really cared about the environment we would not fly vegetables in from Kenya and flowers and fruit from South America. We would eat local foods when they are in season and be content with them.

But we’re spoiled by our consumerism, so we want everything at our convenience and for our delectation at all times. And so we will never quite know the joys of feasting after fasting, and the particularly exquisite taste of a rasher of bacon on a Saturday morning when it has been beyond our legitimate reach on the Friday.

The Charm of the Feline

Pussolini walked into our lives by appearing at the garden door and making it plain – as cats will do – that she would appreciate a meal. So I rushed to the corner shop and purchased some cat food, and from then on she decided to adopt us. She’s a classic moggie, and she must have another – a ‘real’ – owner, and perhaps we should have tried to find out who that was. She did have a collar around her neck but, mysteriously, she removed it. She’s a frightfully clever cat: she ‘tells’ you when she wants to go out and come in, when she wants food and when she simply wants to sit on your lap and purr. She also dances. If you bend down to pet her head, she rises on her hind legs and does a beautiful little Nureyev step or two.

My son named her Pussolini because cats share certain characteristics with Italian dictators: everything must be on their terms; they demand devotion to Uno Gatto; and they decide which territory shall be theirs. She’s also given to sly fits of temper – stalking off if she doesn’t like the food that has been put out. She once decided she didn’t like fish, and that was that.

In addition to their powers of command, felines have powers of beauty. The grace of their musculature as they move is something to behold – again, one is reminded of the ballet dancer. And then they sit on your knee, sometimes curling up in guileful imitation of a baby, nestling into your lap and rewarding you with what you think are adoring looks when you caress their back.

Pusso comes and goes as she pleases. She makes it clear that it’s her choice. Sometimes she disappears for a day or so, and at the end of twenty-four hours I begin to worry that something has happened to her. I’d miss her terribly if she went away permanently, and even her temporary absence is a reminder that all attachments, in the end, are severed by death. When she’s absent, I look at her empty food plate a little sadly. And then, as if out of nowhere, she appears at the garden door again, and her return is greeted with the feline equivalent of the fatted calf.

‘Don’t Be Thin-Skinned’

Mother Margaret Mary stood in front of our class of sixteen-year-olds. A practical, dedicated nun whose rote approach to French verb endings was remarkably effective (ais/ais/ait …), she liked to dispense sensible advice. ‘Now, girls,’ she began. ‘Don’t be touchy. Nobody likes a touchy person. A person who takes offence at the slightest provocation. A person who flies into moods, tempers and tantrums. A person who is thin-skinned and over-sensitive to every slight. If someone says something that offends you, just brush it off. Go for a walk. Forget about it. Move on. But don’t be touchy.’

I remember this advice so well: I can see her saying it, while we sat on the orchestra steps of the concert hall. Did I follow it? Sometimes. Sometimes not. Maggie May – her colloquial name – lived before the time of research into genetic predisposition, when we would learn that many of our characteristics are inherited, and if we’re ‘touchy’ or over-sensitive, maybe we can’t help it. Touchiness was certainly in my family – and still is, at times. I had an aunt who was so super-sensitive that she saw slights everywhere and the world as a cruel place which delivered many affronts. And it was her further lifelong torment to be overweight.

She was lodging with a companion in the English midlands and one night was asked to put the milk bottles out – in the days when empty milk bottles were deposited on the doorstep for the early-morning milkman. Aunt Nora felt this was a slight – she thought it demeaned her to servant status – and departed from the shared accommodation, which was otherwise delightful, the next day.

Super-sensitivity was in her character but possibly, too, endorsed by experience. She had once been told of a fashionable Victorian nervous condition, ‘neurasthenia’, from which women were said to suffer. It just means being thin-skinned.

I experience mild tendencies to paranoia myself. If someone ignores me, I think they hate me, when the usual case is that people are just too busy with themselves to remember to attend to someone else. Although, being paranoid doesn’t mean people don’t loathe you.

If Maggie May lived in an era before genetic predisposition assigned us our traits, she also lived in an age before political correctness (which is not all bad) encouraged us to take offence so prodigiously. But, essentially, she was right: we should try not to be touchy.

A Blessing We Should Count

When oldies recollect their childhoods, they often remember a visit to the dentist as being akin to entering a torture chamber, with the frightful treadle drill and a nauseating smell of antiseptic. The dentist’s chair has remained as an emblem of torment because of such memories. Laurence Olivier did the dental profession no favours when he portrayed the cruel and sinister Nazi dentist in Marathon Man applying excruciating oral pain to Dustin Hoffman. It hits a nerve – not because dentists are cruel people, but because, lying back in the dentist’s chair, we feel vulnerable.

But dentists should be declared heroes, really. They have hugely advanced the health and even happiness of humanity. They have consistently relieved pain and are always developing new ways to advance dental surgery.

Dentists themselves can suffer from ‘transmitted stress’ – the stress felt by the patient in the dental chair is communicated to them – and until recently had quite low actuarial ages of death.

They are also said to feel ‘status anxiety’, because dentists traditionally don’t have quite the same social position as doctors. There’s no Jewish joke about the proud mother on a Florida beach shouting – ‘Help, my son the dentist is drowning!’

And yet, in America, good dentistry has been greatly prized for decades. When a Balkan friend of the family – a university professor – asked if my sister could help him get a visa for America, Ursula replied: ‘Yes, but he can’t go to America with those teeth! The taxis would never pick him up! He’ll have to see a dentist!’ True, the Serbian academic had poor teeth, but until then I hadn’t realised that bad teeth could be such a stigma in the US. (Question at Homeland Security: ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party, or do you have bad teeth?’)

When the novelist Martin Amis obtained a million dollars for a book advance in the 1990s, he said he needed the money to fix his teeth. This was considered an outrageous act of vanity in London – ‘All that money for a Liberace smile?’ – but in New York, it was thought entirely rational.

Look at any set of American teeth and you’ll usually see a perfect set of gnashers. They may be capped, polished, assisted by implants and cosmetically whitened, and thus they are faultless.

Advanced dentistry has now crossed the Atlantic, and the costs are reflected proportionately. But I think that dental care always cost money. In the 1920s and 1930s, people would have all their teeth extracted at a young age so as to save the expense – and pain – of visiting the dentist for the rest of their lives.

Some people still fear visiting the dentist – one person in ten has some phobia about getting into that chair. It’s a pity because modern dentistry can do wonders and can change lives. But children today have a much more positive attitude. My granddaughters shout ‘Hooray!’ when they’re due a trip to the dentist, because they get all kinds of stickers and colouring books as rewards. It may help that many dentists attending to young children are women, who may indeed be better at treating the very young.