Grumpy Oldie Man
Marks & Spencer – the OAP cult Why do oldies remain loyal to ancient brands? matthew norman
The horror engulfing the southern United States focuses the remnants of my mind on the intriguing matter of misdirected loyalties. In Florida, Louisiana and elsewhere, legions of the wilfully unvaccinated are vacating the planet, out of fealty to Donald Trump. As a draft-dodger who left the missus at home suckling their newborn to court a porn star, the once and perhaps future President isn’t an ostentatiously loyal soul himself. Overlooking this, phalanges of worshippers all over the South, not all necessarily light on chromosomes as a result of familial affections, are refusing a brace of painless injections in befuddled tribute to the mores of a double-jabbed old goat who came so close to succumbing himself. If you imagine that such a deranged mass act of self-sacrifice represents the gold standard of eccentrically misplaced loyalty, fair enough – you have, through no fault of your own, not met my mother. A woman of wide-ranging and fervent loyalties, she is as rigorously true to family and friends as she is to the sovereign, whom she invariably describes as ‘faultless’. Were Her Majesty to ask my mother to serve on the battlefield, in no circumstances – including the monstrously broken right ankle that has illuminated recent months – would she cite ‘bone spurs’ as an excuse to stay at home. My mother is also loyal to the man she knows, with a pride I struggle to replicate, as ‘my Prime Minister’. Any unflattering remark about him is crushed by a curt ‘Don’t be impertinent about Boris. He is my Prime Minister.’ Yet of all my mother’s loyalties, none is quite so perplexing as the one to Marks & Spencer. For instance, while freely acknowledging that it makes no financial sense, she has resolutely declined to sell her shares because that would be disloyal. 10 The Oldie September 2021
Still more curious has been her rigid refusal to contemplate buying home insurance – buildings and contents – from any purveyor other than M&S. For each of the last seven years, when the renewal documents arrive in the post, I have tried to persuade her that she and my father are being charged way over the odds. The briefest odyssey through the internet, I have repeatedly posited, would find countless equivalent policies at dramatically less cost. My father has always concurred with this theorem, but gracefully yielded to the inevitable objection that switching insurers would be an act of treachery, if not technically high treason, against Marks & Spencer. I assume that this is a generational thing; that those forged in wartime, when faith in a great cause was an incontestably crucial factor in national survival, developed an acute sense of loyalty which has dissipated down the generations. A 95-year-old-friend from my local Turkish baths, Lionel, served in the fight against Hitler. When he (Lionel, that is; not, for fairly obvious reasons, the Führer) mentioned the prohibitive premium his car-insurance firm was charging, I suggested a jaunt online to check out alternatives. Were a string of pearls a mandatory accoutrement in the steam room, a scandalised Lionel would have clutched his. He had been with the firm for 20 years, he said tartly, and wouldn’t dream of betraying it. Cast as Lord Haw-Haw in this exchange, I nodded surrender with weary familiarity, and stilled my tongue.
My mother concedes that Australia ‘will be nice when they finish it’
With my mother, that tongue was last week unstilled on my perusal of the latest M&S renewal notice. This quoted the sum of £1,485 to insure the house and the valuables therein. I write the following as a gentle hint to anyone to whom the online comparison site is an alien and possibly unnerving concept. Without any suggestion that a reputable insurer would gorge on the technophobia of a clientele that tends towards the venerable, the disparities in this market are staggering. How staggering? So staggering that my mother was grudgingly prepared to take the home-insurance business elsewhere. ‘Who on earth are Sheila’s Wheels? Are they from Australia?’ was the faintly Lady Bracknellish response, when I passed on the quote. For reasons of unknown genesis, she has something against Australia, although she concedes that it ‘will be nice when they finish it’. Whatever their land of birth, I replied, the only salient point about Sheila’s Wheels in this context is that they – if that’s the correct pronoun; who the hell knows these days? – are offering an insurance policy every bit as comprehensive as M&S’s for the unprincely sum of £210. ‘Don’t talk arrant nonsense, Matthew,’ she said, deploying her best-loved catchphrase. At this, I passed her the laptop, and she inspected the screen. The ensuing internal battle between the dictates of conscience and the saving of almost £1,300 was waged ferociously, if briefly. ‘What are you going to do with the windfall?’ I asked when the last click of the keys had closed the deal. ‘I think I’ll buy some more Marks & Sparks shares,’ said my mother. ‘I suppose the price will halve in a month, but I really must, to make it up to them somehow.’
