Country Mouse Giles Wood

My lifetime highlight: buying rinse aid

giles wood

There are so many things about the modern age that puzzle me.

Why, when Vox Poxes (sic) are being conducted for TV news footage, does every high street feature such a large percentage of obese pedestrians, waddling along in Lycra gym kits with trainers when they have clearly never been near a gym?

Why is redcurrant jelly now hard to come by? In our local supermarket, a shelf-stacker had never even heard of it. ‘But we’ve got all the normal-flavoured jelly cubes from Chivers!’

Why do all bedroom scenes in TV dramas show sheets coloured grey, green or black? I can only breathe a sigh of relief that black loo paper, as favoured by Simon Cowell, is not yet mainstream – only, no doubt, because the price would not be right.

The music mogul, as revealed by biographer Tom Bower, has to pay £10 a roll for his bespoke black and insists on having them ‘in all his homes’.

Most puzzling of all – why has the catchphrase ‘making memories’ gained so much traction? Adverts for holidays (Centre Parcs) and butter (Kerrygold), to name only two, show smiling families being urged to enjoy the products not because – as in traditional advertising – they will lead to consumer satisfaction, but so as to ‘make memories’.

I don’t live my life with my family expressly to make memories. Most of my days are characterised by my trying to remember to tackle chores such as unblocking the drains, buying rinse aid or putting the car in for an MOT. Nothing much worth remembering there.

In COVID times, with travel and big-event socialising off the menu, and group walks stymied by seasonal mud, the only memory a family can make is bonding by watching television together.

All too often, we have let ourselves

‘After the festive period, I only eat people who have been on a diet’

become emotionally invested in a typical six-hour-long mini-series, only to be faced with an ending ranging from implausible to inconclusive or downright depressing. These have left a sour taste in our mouths – not unlike the cheese footballs of the festive period (another product I found unavailable at the supermarket).

We binge-watched BBC’s The Tourist. We marvelled at the originality of this twisty Outback thriller, shot in sepia tints. We warmed to the unlikely romance blooming between hunk lead Jamie Dornan playing Elliot, an amnesiac on the run from people trying to kill him – he knows not why – and a chunky but charming rookie female cop, the scene-stealing Danielle Macdonald.

We expended six hours of precious quality time on settling down together with the dog in front of the screen with log fire blazing. It was tense and exhausting viewing, but we bonded in our affection for the protagonists and our desire for a positive outcome for them. Spoiler alert. In the final scene Dornan takes an overdose.

Puzzled again. Does he die or not? The selfish scriptwriters may want to leave open the door to a potential Series 2 but meanwhile their viewers, consigned to a limbo land, have been cheated of closure.

Surely, at this particularly grim time of year, a suicide, successful or not, was deeply irresponsible of the BBC. Do they feel no duty of care to their viewers?

Couldn’t the fashionable scriptwriters, the stubble-chinned brothers Harry and Jack Williams, have lightened our darkness with an old-style happy ending, not least so as to fuel hopes for buxom women everywhere that larger-size females can aspire to romances with Hollywood A-listers? They chose instead to make memories for us that, like the amnesiac Elliot, we would rather forget.

Meanwhile, Mary was also making a private memory, reading Clare Chambers’s novel Small Pleasures. After 39 uncomplaining years of drudgery and duty, during which she has always made the most of what small pleasures – eg puffs on a cigarette – she can get, a spinster meets a lovable but unavailable man.

The deft and quietly witty plot is, says Mary, gripping. Plausibly, towards its end, the lovable man becomes available and declares his own love. It is hinted that a pleasant care home could even be found for the grumpy mother. Spoiler alert 2. Guess what happens on the last page? The man is killed in a train crash.

Why do these writers do it? Mary spoke to one of the best-read bookshopowners in the country, Mary James of the Aldeburgh Bookshop. She surmised that writers seeking awards and prizes may be worried about happy endings in case the books are deemed schmaltzy rather than edgy.

Has none of these writers heard of the law of diminishing returns? If the memories we have made during COVID binge-watching have been negative, then, as COVID recedes, we will find less time for ‘feelbad’ productions that make us feel worse rather than better.

We can only console ourselves that we never watched an episode of the allegedly addictive blockbuster Game of Thrones. Apparently, it would have taken three days and 16 minutes out of our lives, and the ending left most of its fans infuriated.

Mary wants a new classification, ‘Spoil alert’ – ‘meaning the depressing ending of this film/book will slightly spoil your life’.