Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life

Mrs. Tittlemouse
–––
Why we clean, an essay to grease the ­elbows

I am so bloody depressed. And the awful thing about it is that gloom used to be something to be ashamed of. I was very good at being ashamed of it and had a variety of slogans to use as cricket bats on my head. “Just get on with it” was one. “Mustn’t grumble” was another. Until I realized that I was earning a fine income doing just that, that is, writing newspaper columns that were essentially me grumbling for 850 words every week. “Just do it” was very good, the only thing for which Nike deserves ­credit.

But the slogans don’t work any more. Stephen Fry once wrote that just as they have laugh tracks on television comedies, so should they have weeping tracks on the news. And he wrote that during the first Gulf War and he hadn’t even had his nervous breakdown, which culminated in him sitting in a car in Bruges contemplating the other use for an exhaust ­pipe.

There isn’t anything on the news to cheer anyone. One response would be to stop watching it, but look what happened to the United States when the citizens of that huge ­once-­rich-­now-­debtful-­I-­just-­don’t-­know-­what-­to-­do-­with-­myself country stopped paying attention. The place exploded, then imploded, and bits started falling off, like New Orleans soon followed by the rest of Louisiana. In 2004, the nadir was reached after George W. Bush’s second alleged election. An American student was reduced to setting up a website called sorryeverybody.com and stacks of smart Americans rigid with shock and coated with pessimism sent in pictures of themselves holding up signs apologizing to the ­world.

I cried as I watched it online, but by 2004 I was crying pretty ­easily.

The trough of melancholy in which we live now is a shallow grave. My husband, whom we shall call S., is British and doesn’t understand the concept of depression. Every day spent outside his homeland is a holiday, according to him. When I tell him how sad I am, he asks why. Foolishly, I tell him. There’s an awful phrase about how you have to “take things on board,” meaning hear them and live with them. Clearly, I cannot take things on board. Because I tell S. that these men called the Janjaweed are kidnapping children in the Sudan ­and . . .

S. is humane. He understands the wrongness of the Janjaweed but does not grasp why I am devastated by the wrongdoing of mad people in a faraway country not only of which I know nothing but that I can’t even pick out of an atlas. We know this because he has brought an atlas into the bedroom where I am ­curled.

“You know that song ‘Every Little Thing You Do Is Magic’?” he says. I nod, but don’t rise to this as I know he hates Sting. Presumably because Sting is a Brit who still finds a reason to live in Britain and is a prat and poseur. “If you were writing that song,” he says, “it would go, ‘Every little thing you do is rubbish.’”

He laughs. I don’t.

I think I know why we are still conjoined. We couldn’t be more different. I like this. I wish I were him. We were watching the Springsteen tribute to Pete Seeger the other day and he, who loathes hip hop, said, “The progress of American ­music–­from Hoedown to Down, ho.” And he sat there grinning at his own cleverness. I wish I could come up with lines like that. But I am gloomy, and somehow I admire the fact that my deep gloom is a source of amusement to him. (On the other hand, he doesn’t understand North American ethical laxity. The other day in a seafood restaurant, he actually said to me, “Why did you order that if you weren’t going to finish it?” Seriously. “I guess it just worked out that way,” I said.)

Anything can set me off. In 2004, I felt so desperately sorry for Blue State Americans, those nice people, a credit to a nation that was about to go all excremental. And there’s no going back, they realized that, and on that website, they sent out telegrams of shame and sorrow, a student dorm arranging their apology in the form of track shoes, people’s babies holding up signs (I normally disapprove of ­this–­your baby has no opinions on stem cells, ­lady–­but those babies were going to grow up with the consequences). You poor kid. Some ­blue-­eyed Democrat guy in Texas looked grim, saying he had voted behind enemy lines, and he might as well have been a Resistance fighter in France in the Second World War, sending a coded message on his little radio hidden in a ­baguette.

An American tourist in Canada visiting what looked like Lake Louise wrote “I’m sorry you have to live next door to us” and my face got all crumply and wet, like a sodden piece of paper towel. Then Canadians accidentally voted a bit too ­right-­wingly and I felt sorry for that young woman in retrospect. She no longer had us as her hideout. We were Narnia full of goofballs, and suddenly we were mean goofballs with bellies crawling with ­complaints.