Be trivial – don’t mention the war!
‘How’s your
world?’ asked someone I bumped into a few weeks ago whom I hadn’t seen for a
long time. She meant my personal world, not the world, but I realised that the world was uppermost in my thoughts at that
time. Uppermost in the minds of almost everyone
else too, I guess.
Like many others, I was addicted to the news on radio,
television, in newspapers. Terrible images were being etched in my memory – and
yours. A boy burned and with no arms, women in
black robes weeping uncontrollably, battle-weary soldiers whose eyes had seen horrors, a
tyrant’s statue toppled, looting of hospitals and museums.
The world had invaded all of our personal worlds,
making us uneasy and unhappy..
I had always been slightly
disapproving of the idea of escapism, burying one’s head in the sand, but now I came
to see the value of it. I needed some respite from
the grimness of the news.
So I lingered over fashion features showing models in
impossibly unwearable clothes. I pored over
the wonderfully practical Lakeland catalogue
for useful gadgets and labour-saving dusters. I
went to the Art Deco exhibition at the V & A in London, and smiled at the extravagance
and sense of style (and we bought the jazz-age CD set in the museum shop and played it
with much delight when we got home).
Not terribly life-enhancing stuff, maybe, and rather
consumer-oriented. But there were also other,
more precious moments, when our oldest three grandchildren, aged 5, 7 and 9 stayed
overnight a few weeks ago.
I wanted to video Madam Butterfly which was being televised early in
the evening. So I switched on and somehow got
drawn in, and didn’t really absorb the
fact that all three came up and were sitting with me, deeply involved too, even the
youngest, till my husband came into the room and said ‘Amazing’.
We sat through the entire
first act, a good hour, totally swept up by that passionate, lyrical music.
 And next day, we flew a kite on Hampstead Heath. The breeze was mild but our kite went soaring into the
blue sky, becoming a tiny speck, so that the youngest wanted to know whether it would get
tangled with the aeroplane that happened to be passing.
Such small pleasures, such magic. This is the stuff of normal life, which is
what we want, especially in deeply troubled times.
How do you
escape from troubled situations? You can email helen@laterlife.com
or put your ideas in the Forum - reply to
Helen's entry there.
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Talkback is a regular
feature in laterlife.com run by journalist and author Helen Franks. 
