Why is it that certain words refuse to stay in the memory? Ever since I can remember, there are certain words I just cannot retain. Like
bougainvillea – I had one in the previous house (a Tesco reject) that grew like the giant's beanstalk. When I was trying to tell a friend about it, I could only think of the word
Balenciaga which is a fashion house not a plant. Same with
pergola. I don't particularly want one, but I can never remember what it's called. Some language expert – of course I've forgotten who – said the most attractive combination of words in English was
cellar door. But I think that was being a bit affected.
There are also words I don't like, like
split; 'Gaul was split into three parts' – which sounds like taking an axe to it. Or
stink – which suggests a horrible smell, so I can't bear it. But this is not as bad as a fictional character, an elderly spinster lady in a book the title of which – you've guessed it – I've forgotten, who hated the word
smell for the same reason. Apparently she used to say to her small nephew: 'Those are beautiful roses, and you can
scent them if you like'. Now I can get that, she's a lady after my own heart, but I wish I could remember the book.
There's another book quote I remember: a short story that ends with the sentence: 'Noel, Noel, sang the voices of the waits outside' (
waits being a term to describe a sort of musical night watchman, not Tom Waits as Google would have it when I tried to locate the story it came from). I seem to remember it was about a woman who thought her lover had been unfaithful and then realised he hadn't, but if any reader is familiar with the tale I would love to be reminded.
Feeding frenzy?
The late Mr B would joke that when he died (he being a good few years older than me) I would never put the car in the garage and I haven't – life is too short to reverse a car into a very small garage. It always took him several minutes to line it up with the door and climb out, and I would surely bump it. My motto for car parking has always been: go for the easy option. And now I have the best excuse, as I haven't got a garage.
But he would have been much more annoyed by my lack of culinary skill. I stop short (usually) at ready meals, largely because I didn't have a microwave, and now I've been gifted one, it's still in the box. I mainly eat stir fries, which is sort of cooking, but not in my late husband's opinion. At 6pm, he would consult one of his multitude of cookery books, pour a glass of wine, and produce (in his view) a culinary masterpiece. He loved cooking and shopping for food every day, like an Italian granny.
I would love to have passed on many of his cookery books, some of which I don't care for (I suspect he only liked Nigella for her figure, and Mary Berry is a bit too right-wing for me) but nowadays young people just go online and don't consult books. For me, there is the emotional pressure, as Mr B had a major card index for every ingredient, and the appropriate book for the recipe using it. So if you had a glut of courgette, for example, you would look up the index card and find the book reference for the recipes to cook with them.
He had the idea way back in the 1980s, when computers were still clunky, as what he had foreseen was essentially a database, except his was based on a card index system. He tried to introduce Marks and Spencer to the idea of a cookery book based on what ingredients you had available to work with, but they said it would never catch on…
Mythical monarchs
Since I started thinking about the dangers of mixing up Jungian archetypes with life in this dimension, I began to wonder which of the classical gods and goddesses the dysfunctional Windsor family are channelling. Personally, I've never shared the general admiration for Princess Anne: 'She works hard'. Yet to me the 'work' she does in showing up at official functions is a way of filling time in an otherwise empty life.
Given her love of horses, which she clearly prefers to people, she could be Artemis, the 'mistress of the animals' and the huntress. But Artemis was beautiful and mysterious, whereas Anne's aggression and lack of empathy rather suggests Athene, that warlike goddess who had no mother but sprang fully armed from the head of her father Zeus – all head and no heart, like Anne inheriting her father's 'no nonsense' approach. He is said to have thought her a better bet for monarch than her rather whimsical brother.
Diana would be channelling the goddess of love, Aphrodite, as the search for affection seems to have dominated her life. The others don't fit so easily, although the rather dozy Katherine (I forget her current title) could be Hera, the goddess of marriage, as it seems to have been her only career…
Interesting that the Greeks recognised the role that women played as archetypal goddess figures – they were mostly a pretty feisty lot – yet in everyday life their existence was not that much better than life under the Taliban. There is a sort of oriental distrust of the feminine in Ancient Greek culture. Even the comic playwright Aristophanes, who gives women an important role in the play
Lysistrata, where they go on a sex strike to end the Peloponnesian War, creates pantomime dame characters rather than real women.
I may be biased: as a classics student I always found Greek language irritatingly complex, and they were always inserting little argumentative words into sentences like 'not only… but also'. An Ancient Greek philosopher could get you to accept black was white by spurious arguments. Possibly that was because they lacked women's ability to see both sides of a problem. The Romans were by no stretch of the imagination nice people, but their culture allowed women a degree of freedom their Greek counterparts would have envied. Essentially they were Europeans, who tended to distrust orientalism, whereas the early Greeks looked more towards the East for inspiration, even though their great enemy was Persia.
Sadly, few people now study classics. It's been its own worst enemy for treating the language like a cryptic crossword puzzle, when just a brief knowledge of Greek or Latin would suffice to read some of their texts in the original, where we might see many situations that reflect our own traumas today.
Dr Mary Brown is a freelance education consultant
