Ettie Neil-Gallacher

Like many families, we used to have a TV in our kitchen. But the default response when there was nothing immediately to be done became to reach for the remote. This suggested we were all developing a woeful lack of gumption so, when we moved house several years ago, I became a television dictator: it’s verboten Monday to Friday, and our 15-year-old monitor, with its cracked screen and unreliable controls, has long been relegated to the sitting room.  Every so often, however, I find my own resolve weakening. This happens every April when SVT, the Swedish national broadcaster, streams The Great Moose Migration, all day, every day, for three weeks.

Why do we still struggle to say what we really mean? In an age when we’re all encouraged to overshare online, we can be remarkably evasive in real life. We’ve moved on a little from ‘he never married’ – but not much. Only last year, I went to a memorial service for a wonderful man who was so camp he made Liberace look like an SAS officer. He had had a lifetime subscription to Royalty Magazine, and a ferociously proud collection of china figurines. At the reception afterwards, a relation of his lamented how sad it was that ‘he just never found the right girl’. It wasn’t quite the time, but I wanted to reply that she’d have needed the ‘full meat and two veg’. See? Euphemism upon euphemism.

In recent months, much has been made of ‘Fafo parenting’. Touted as the backlash to ‘gentle parenting’, the philosophy of ‘Fuck Around & Find Out’ seems to be that children should learn the natural consequences of poor decision-making. While gentle parenting advocates empathy and respect, reasoning and explanation, Fafo parenting dictates that rather than going nine rounds with your small person to persuade him or her to go to the loo before going out / to put a raincoat on when it’s coming down in stair rods / not to pull the cat’s tail, you should let them see what happens when they have the temerity to exercise their own free will.

Perhaps it’s a sort of Original Guilt – Original Sin’s bastard offspring – that Catholics are born indoctrinated with a sense of the awesome sanctity of church, presumably predicated on the Real Presence. So for us there’s something viscerally shocking when it’s not observed. And yet... I remember being about seven, going to Mass one Sunday, and my father struggling not to laugh as a frightfully well-spoken old Jesuit tried to remove the tramp slumped in the porch with the words: ‘Will you please just fuck off?’ I knew that was really naughty language because a girl had recently been asked to leave my convent prep for deploying the word one break time.

My mother hated Motherland, storming out after five minutes, saying Julia’s frantic school drop-off was too much like real life. She’d have loathed Amanda, the self-styled ‘alpha mum’. But I loved it – and was happy with the spin-off Amandaland, where Dame Joanna Lumley plays Amanda’s mother with gleeful froideur. When interviewed alongside her screen daughter, Lucy Punch, Lumley commented that one of the reasons for their characters’ taut relationship is how ageing women are resentful of their pretty daughters. Maternal envy, being rather destructive for all concerned, has provoked much debate in the papers (and no doubt consternation at dinner parties across Middle England).

I read recently that this month marks 40 years since Britain’s first mobile phone call was made. It was in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1985 in Parliament Square, when one Michael Harrison rang his Vodafone chairman father, Sir Ernest Harrison. It would, of course, take many years – and much hankering and hysteria – before I got my own mobile A few years later, one sunny Saturday morning, my father took delivery of his first company car. I must have been about ten years old and can recall the sheer thrill of seeing something outside our house that wasn’t one of my mother’s seemingly endless succession of Volvos.

I try to head for cooler climes year-round but particularly during the summer, as anything over 20 degrees has me sweating like a pervert and swearing like a docker. But this year I was persuaded to join friends in Corfu, and so with my younger daughter in tow, I braced myself for the inevitable perimenopausal response to savage heat. 10-year-old Ottilie, of course, loved it instantly. Reflecting, as she basked in the balmy waters of Corfu Old Town, that while she’d loved our holiday in Iceland a few weeks previously, and while she agreed that Norway is a peerless destination, she could now understand why some of her friends like a Mediterranean jaunt. Indeed, a war of attrition for a return visit next summer commenced pretty much immediately.

I recently went to a conference on the impact of artificial intelligence on the wine industry. It was not immediately obvious why this would have any relevance to my life. I know nothing about AI, having decided not to bother experimenting with it after being reassured by my delightful first cousin once removed that as it still can’t generate convincing Petrarchan sonnets, mankind has nothing to fear. (Yes, he is at Oxford.) And it’s perhaps more shameful that – despite being married to a master of wine – I know so little about booze; I can’t even claim to know what I like, but mercifully he does.

Back in February, a friend forwarded me a profound and joyous article written by Simon Boas about his terminal cancer diagnosis. (I knew Simon a little at university, where he was both much cleverer and much cooler than me). Originally published in the Jersey Evening Post, it’s since been reproduced here, and seems to have, as they say, gone viral. In the age of mindless clickbait, where cute animal memes and chest-feeding men dominate the internet, it’s reassuring that something so beautiful, which mines the fundamentals of human existence, still resonates. And does it with such humour and grace and intelligence and warmth that while Simon is devoid of bitterness, it’s hard for the rest of us not to feel aggrieved.

Earlier this week I read that, from the moment of pulling into the car park to exiting it, the average supermarket shopper reads just seven words. Seven words. My initial reaction was: who are these Neanderthals? So, for want of something to talk about over supper after nearly 20 years of shackles, I ran this random fact past my husband. He was amazed anyone read as many as seven. My reaction this time was more fulsome: who is this Neanderthal, and why am I having dinner with him? When I was home from boarding school, I was positively relieved when she reached for an M&S carbonara rather than Delia These seven words are all the more stark when you know the average length of time spent in a supermarket: 37 mins.

Managing other people’s expectations takes the joy out of pretty much any excursion. Most things are better enjoyed alone. This hit me many years ago when I decided to risk a bullfight in Las Ventas in Madrid. My grandfather wasn’t long dead, and had been a fan of la corrida; I felt that this was something I wanted to do alone, lest whoever I was with think I’m a total sicko. As a naturally highly neurotic mother, it’s liberating not having to worry if one’s uniquely precious offspring I’ve since become less cautious about admitting how much I like going solo. Without the pressure of having to think about whether everyone else is having fun, you can immerse yourself fully in whatever new experience it is, and not be subjected to conversational post mortems either.

Several years ago, I went for a swim after I’d been for a job interview. I’d just finished my lengths, had my shower, and as I wrestled my knickers back on, a voice from behind me said ‘It’s Ettie, isn’t it?’ Quite how she recognised my bare bottom I don’t know, but the woman who’d interviewed me earlier in the day was certainly keen to continue our conversation, up close, personal and starkers. And for those of you who’ve never tried, I can assure you that trying to juggle one’s bosom into a bra in a flustered hurry when one is still slightly damp to protect what shreds of self-respect remain is inelegant at best.

At the age when most children are being read The Tailor of Gloucester or ’Twas the Night before Christmas, my father took a very different approach to bedtime stories during Advent, and read me my first M.R. James story. I can’t have been much more than five years old, and he was probably a few sherries to the wind, but I can recall with the utmost clarity the sheer, tingling chill of being exposed to Number 13 at such a formative stage.

It is a truth universally acknowledged – at least by anyone with a developed frontal lobe – that seasonal enjoyment and growing up are inversely proportional. As the stranglehold of middle age tightens, I am incapable of conjuring the Christmas excitement I felt as a child. And it seems to have been replaced with intense festive angst.  The mood is less holy and more fisticuffs, as it presents an excellent opportunity to ratchet up the festive stress Samuel Johnson was talking about second marriages when hatching his aphorism about hope over experience, rather than what Americans refer to as ‘readying the home’, yet every year I still try to summon those seasonal spirits of childhood.

I can’t decide if I’m a brilliant or bad driver. I admit I didn’t pass first time (it only took seven attempts). But in the intervening decades, I’ve amassed so many miles behind the wheel I like to think that, if he knew me, I’d be Sadiq Khan’s Public Enemy No.1. High mileage, no major accidents and zero fatalities must mean I’m alright. I’ve got a clean licence too. I put it down to the rosary I chant along to on Spotify with all the superstitious spirituality of a Sicilian nun as I speed across town for my dawn swim. It has been divinely ordained that I should dovetail the numerous speed awareness and driver awareness courses I accumulate every three years.