The Deranging Effects of Barbara Pym

Because I quite often work at home (no longer in my own office, but - rather less glamorously - in my bedroom) I find myself quite regularly in the position of having to tidy my bedroom before I can happily settle down to work. And because I attract clutter in the same way a little old lady with a bag of breadcrumbs attracts pigeons, I have to tidy my room before I can settle down to work pretty much, er, every day. But I don't actually really tidy every day. I just rearrange the mess, and put things into ineffectual and ever-collapsing piles. So the chaos invariably expands until I'm pretty much in the centre of a vortex of receipts and empty water bottles and one-pence pieces and clothes that I can't really bring myself to hang up. In short, ladies and gents, it's a shit hole in here. And because the vortex is pretty much on the point of swallowing my whole being, and because I've got bucketloads of work to do before I go back off on holiday (hurrah! my second holiday in two weeks. woo hoo. check out how fancy i am) I am obviously mucking around with my hitherto neglected blog. I'm sure the fantabulous energy rush will enhance my room-tidying/work-doing performance in much the same way as the illegal testosterone levels enhanced the Tour de France blokey's cycling power... and if I'm really lucky I might also get permanently disqualified from both room tidying and working. Hurrah! But that might reduce me to being Stig of the Dump so perhaps that's less good. (Although my friend Hayley might fancy me then ... but less said the better about that. And I don't wish to imply that she's One for the Ladies - not of course that there'd be anything wrong if she were. But ... but ... )

Anyway, I digress, what I was going to write about when I sat down was NOT my fabulous powers of procrastination, but a novel that I've just read, which has quite disturbed me. As the tell-tale picture of the mug featuring a curled-up cat will have warned you, this is not a novel of murder, sexual violence, and witchcraft but one about some people who live in a 'parish' in North London and about the dilemmas faced by an unmarried woman of a certain age.

It's a book about how women need men more than men need women and how going to Rome is like being A Room with a View (perhaps it was in 1963, I'm not sure - or perhaps it always has been if you're the type to hang out with vicars and unmarried sisters) and about how men are sooo much cleverer than women. So it made me feel a bit sick - but it was also oddly irresistable, and briefly seemed to change everything I had assumed was a constant of my personality.

For instance, I went to Westbourne Park on the underground yesterday, and while sitting in the train carriage I noticed that the young man sitting next to me kept angling his book in such a way that made it look, for all the world, like he was staring at me. Now, this isn't the sort of thing I'd usually notice, and if I did my instinctive reaction would be "euwwww stop being such a perv". But because I was absorbed in Barbara Pym World it seemed very affecting and I was half-expecting him to offer to take me to tea at a Lyon's Corner House. (So you see it also transported me back to some several years before my birth, but - as you may have gathered - I was feeling a little deranged.) And even though the novel ends with a very unappealing wedding, I felt - as I turned the last page - that it truly was my destiny to get married. Not, of course, to any one in particular, but just to Be A Bride and wear a frock and everything.

And all morning, I've been feeling quite unhappy about the transformative powers of what seems to be such a middle of the road novel, but then I was reminded of the way that going to see a gangster film at the cinema makes me want to walk down the road like I've got a gun stuffed in the waist of my trousers, and how going on holiday to Paris made me want to be French, and how - yes, I may as well mention it - A Room with a View made me want to fall in love (although I was 13 at the time) and The Great Gatsby made me want to be a dissolute-but-glamorous waster, and I realised that it's probably not really Barbara's fault at all. It's just that I'm a spongey sponge and I take everything a bit too seriously. So I suppose it's just as well I don't play Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft, because then, I expect, there really would be trouble...