Postcards from the Edge

I’m the Quentin Crisp of Deal

Mary Kenny would host Ukrainians – if they could stand the dust

Young people like to embrace the mantra ‘Be kind’. We’ve seen a great display of kindness in the many, many offers to host Ukrainian refugees in the middle of the tormenting war they have experienced.

I wished I could invite a refugee into my abode in Deal but, quite honestly, they could do an awful lot better anywhere other than chez moi.

I live in circumstances of barely controlled chaos. I’m a dreadful clutterbug. My bedroom is organised according to Quentin Crisp rules – after five years, the dust hasn’t got any worse.

The converted loft room – the only space for visitors – has plaster falling down on an inside wall, damaged by a storm. It also has uneven, narrow stairs on which anyone could break a leg. As there is no en suite, a Victorian chamberpot has been provided (at the request of one long-ago visitor).

I have a kindly monthly cleaner, who says she derives real job satisfaction from helping me. Every other kitchen she enters is already immaculate, whereas mine is in such a mess that she knows she’s made a difference.

I hate the TV dramas that show utterly perfect, state-of-the-art kitchens. Why is mine a 1970s design where several of the cupboard doors have irreparably fallen off?

But then I call to mind the tragic scenes from Ukraine in which people have lost their homes altogether – as well as, so often, suffering human loss. Am I not fortunate to have a kitchen, a bedroom and a home, however dishevelled?

The Treasury wants a ‘cashless society’ – so we’re being nudged away from the cash habit. It’s said this will disenfranchise 11 million people, who like to use real spondulicks rather than paying for a pint of milk with a bank card.

There’s an interesting divide in European practice.

Northern Europeans have steadily moved towards cashlessness – in Sweden, card payments are expected, and in the Netherlands, it’s often difficult to use real money at all.

Friends in Italy, on the other hand, tell me that there cash remains as popular as ever, and most workmen ask to be paid in readies.

The old Italian habit of keeping two sets of accounts – one for the government’s tax inspectors, and one for private use – may yet keep the cash habit flowing. That’s a win for those of us who still like to use the folding stuff.

Mrs Patrick Campbell, the spirited Edwardian thespian, famously remarked, of the sexual proclivities of others, ‘I don’t mind where people make love, so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses.’

That’s the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations attribution. A variation is ‘I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t it in the street and frighten the horses.’

How amusing that the horses working for London traffic police are being trained not to be alarmed by the LGBT+ rainbow colours painted on the streets as pedestrian crossings. Horses, highlystrung creatures, have been spooked by this innovation. They have reared up nervously at the strip of bright colours, some including the transgender flag.

Mrs Pat’s witty remark was prophetic. The horses have been frightened – not by anyone’s public conduct, but by the contemporary addiction to display.

Born Beatrice Rose Tanner, Mrs Patrick Campbell was making the civilised point that consenting adults could do as they liked in private, so long as they didn’t harm others. But that was before everything became showbusiness!

The practice of changing the denotation of historical time from ‘BC’ (Before Christ) to ‘BCE’ (Before the Common Era) is spreading. And ‘AD’ is being superseded by ‘CE’ – the Common Era.

Some Irish secularists are unhappy that this change isn’t occurring fast enough, on the grounds that ‘BC’ and ‘AD’ are surely discriminatory against non-Christians.

But an Emeritus Science Professor from Cork University, William Reville, writes, in correspondence to the Irish Times, that, whatever we call the passage of time, the universal dating system remains the same. 2022 still means about 2022 years from Christ’s birth. Anyway, some people take ‘BCE’ to mean ‘Before the Christian Era’ and ‘CE’ to mean ‘Christian era’.

Should those of us who don’t worship the Nordic gods of old object to ‘Thursday’, honouring Thor, or reject ‘August’, named after a Roman emperor?

In the Jewish calendar we are now in the year 5782, and in 1443 in the Islamic one. But Jews and Muslims have continuously used ‘BC’ and ‘AD’ without feeling too offended.

I’d like to keep ‘AD’ – Anno Domini – because of the connection with once-universal Latin. When my 90-yearold uncle was asked what caused his aches and pains, he’d reply, ‘Anno Domini.’ An elegant way of referring to the mileage on the biological clock.