Snobbery, Bees & Things that Annoy Me
There's a suggestion on CNN by way of that noble institution, The Daily Mirror, that Prince William and Kate Middleton broke up because Kate's mother said to the Queen "Pleased to meet you" and asked to use the "toilet." It then goes on to quote Nancy Mitford ad nauseum, pulls up the old U & Non-U argument and generally suggests that English society is riven with snobbery. How boring. And how blindingly superficial. You'd think the English would've gotten over themselves by now as the Empire was over almost a century ago. Of course the Americans like to exacerbate these ideas, along with the idea that England still has crap food, no matter how many Jamies and Gordons and Delias and Nigellas you parade out in front of them. Everyone needs some framework in which to live and this is created by either religious or social or socio-political or capitalistic or spiritual ideologies, but resorting to judging other men and women by whether they choose to say "couch" or "sofa" strikes one as a little bit parochial and a big bit superficial, don' t you think? I am not unaware that I am hypocritical, but that's part of the fun. It's almost as if snobbery is a game played by bored aristos and pseudo aristos with too much time on their hands, a Da Vinci Code for the louche & debauched gin & tonic swillers. But when any reasonably attentive person can read and take in Noblesse Oblige or subscribe to the Tatler or the Field, or bone up on Jilly Cooper, how interesting is it? How many fat girls in frilly ruffled shirts and faux pearl necklaces did you have to see to realize that not one of them was Lady Diana Spencer. How many young men in mismatched loud socks braying loudly "Air Hair Lair." Boring boring boring. Rats in cages, all of it. We are an idle, vain lot.
Meanwhile, the bees are disappearing even faster than last year or the year before, not just here in California, but all over the US and in Europe too. An alarming story in the Independent confirms that fingers are pointing at mobile phones:
The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.
The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.
Einstein doom-filled prediction that once the bees disappeared "man would have only four years of life left" is being quoted liberally, and I for one am alarmed. The mobile phone theory is only one of the theories being bandied about, the other being that Bayer's crop pesticide "Gaucho" is killing off the little creatures. Either way, this seems to be a more interesting and decidedly more pressing issue to focus on than the very sad but ultimately insignificant demise of the future King of England's love affair with a woman whose mother may or may not say "chimney-piece."
If I sound tired, cynical and bitter, I am sorry. I am getting sick. Both children have had it, one still does, coughs and colds rule our house, and I feel as if I'm running a mini hospital in my bed. No sooner does one patient leave after a steady diet of scrambled eggs, chicken soup, sliced mango, honey-laden tea and Oprah, than another one arrives. This current patient is much longer (bigger) and deeper voiced and has enormously large feet. He's very sweet and grateful. It's actually rather nice to have the chance to bring him snacks and have chats, and an excuse to cuddle up next to him. The dogs like this part too. For them it's an open invitation to slumber party their days away. I just hope today I don't have to deal with a dead squirrel joining the fun.
My mother won the Grand National! Silver Birch (chosen because that is the Norwegian national tree and my mother always chooses horses either because they look like a horse she used to have or because they have good names) came in at 33-1 and she made out like a bandit.
It's quite ridiculous. I've locked myself in the bathroom. N's in my bed, sleeping and coughing, and I can't bring myself to face Monica and her litany of stupid Monday morning questions or her laundry list of cleaning supplies. If I didn't know better I'd swear she'd started an eBay site dedicated to Clorox, she gets through the stuff so fast. She is sweet and dear and she's getting married soon, but I just can't take my eyes off her enormous bottom and God forbid anyone should meet her in a hallway, because one of us would actually have to back up to get through. She loves to be near me and wherever I choose to work, that's where she wants to clean. It's a bit like the dalmatian who cannot and will not even let me be in the loo on my own because she wants to lay sighing and fluttering her eyes at my feet. Monica, bless her - she really is a nice person, a caring person - is the most annoying person I've ever known and will find a way if I lock myself in my office to knock on the door at least six times a morning to ask me questions like "would you like me to clean the ice-cream door of the freezer" or "can i bring you some tea" or "the dog made number two on the carpet and i step in it but i clear it up ok?" I know I should be nice and sweet all the time, I know I should, but after the initial greeting, the smile, the how are you, the did you have a good weekend, the whole wedding conversation, I just want to run away and not be bothered or put headphones on the way you do on an airplane when you're sitting next to a particularly chatty individual.
I wish sometimes I were more direct, like Lucy, who decided to decided to put a moratorium on those leaf blowers in her neighborhood, because all the gardeners come, identically at about two o'clock in the afternoon, just when she's trying to write. So she got together with her neighbors and all the gardeners and got everyone to agree that from now on in that particularly block of Hancock Park, sweeping would become the preferred method of leaf removal. Certainly, sitting on the hard slate bathroom floor and making faces through the milky glass door is not going to get me very far.
Last week, as Minks was ill, I found myself watching the local news, something I never do. A man in Sherman Oaks had approached a couple of nannies in a park and offered to buy their babies for cash. It was a pretty awful story and of course the local news reporters made a dog's dinner of it, interviewing outraged young mothers, all artfully arranged on gayly-colored picnic blankets with their offspring dotted about them. The fire hadn't yet become the big story and so I'm sure the news people were bored. It was like a scene out of Little Children. Young liberal-sounding mothers trying to sound clever for the camera. "It's so scary," one offered, "I mean no-one would ever sell a child, it's ridiculous...but what if you had a new nanny working for you and you didn't know them very well and it was their first day on the job..." The story stopped ominously on this thinly veiled racist remark and faded to black, or back to the newsroom. The next day, with the high winds, fires broke out in the "exclusive Beverly Hills neighborhood above Sunset" and a reporter who looked as if she were reporting from Rwanda, windswept and blonde, in a baseball cap, spoke excitedly into her mike, about the imminent danger, the road closures and the "brave men and women of the LAFD." Again, I rolled my eyes and wondered what would happen if a cat got stuck in a tree at that precise moment. Karma bit me in the arse though, because I discoverd that a friend's house had indeed caught on fire and had it not been for the quick-thinking woman's move to turn on the roof sprinkler, their whole home would have gone back to the dust.
J is bigtime nervous at the moment, and of course, in his inner-dialogue way, lets it all out. This inandofitself is a good thing because as they say a problem shared is a problem halved, but I feel desperate and pathetic that I cannot help him more. I'd sort of like the role where I sweep in like a prince on my white charger and miraculously change everything around for him. I can't. All I can do is listen, bring him cups of tea and try not to open my mouth, at least if there are words that want to come out.
Posted by misswhistle
at 10:10 PDT