CAN you remember a time when you walked down a street and took in the scene – shoppers having a lovely day out, hipster office workers weaving between them on their scooters, dog lovers with their fluffy pooches, jolly music piped into the street from the coffee booth on the corner – without finding something to criticise?
I certainly can’t. Last year? 2010? I couldn’t say. What I do know is that I have reached a point where, in such a situation, no matter how bright a day or how good my mood, I will find myself galled by the discarded drinks cartons around the litter bin. Outraged at canines being carried rather than allowed to walk with dignity. Aghast at scooter-riders forcing pensioners to part suddenly like the Red Sea on joints that need 24 hours’ notice. Offended by tartan muzak that would make the ears bleed if you had to listen for another minute...
All this aggravation, before catching sight of a Robert Adam masterpiece turned from an imposing bank into a pound store, while the bank has relocated to some brutalist sixties office block – or, more likely, been closed down altogether. Not to mention huge bollards blockading pavements and roads for an impending street party at which almost every reveller will be a tourist, while locals will be kept awake by whooshing fireworks and tipsy cheers.
On and on it goes. So little time, so many things to make your blood boil. No hour of the day, it seems, is free from sources of irritation, grist to the ageing grump’s ever-grinding mill. And that’s before we’ve even mentioned B****t.
When I was a sunny child, the world was always rose-tinted. Now, I am at risk of joining the sour band of whingers who dash off letters and emails of complaint to railway companies, newspapers, councils, MSPs, or whoever is not running affairs with due thought and care. “Basically you’re turning into a Church of Scotland minister,” my husband told me, which really didn’t help. For Christmas, I lived in hope of a cache of green pens, but nobody seems to listen properly anymore, and it’s clear I’ll just have to buy my own.
Is this captious persona just a phase that fifty-somethings go through? Will Pollyanna ever return and show Victoria Meldrew the door? I can understand when it happens in retirement, when people have more time to simmer and fume, but I’m still working, and when I’m not at my desk I’m thinking about what I should be doing there as soon as I can get back. Hence my rage when trains are cancelled, or a shop assistant takes the time to ask everybody ahead of me in the queue their New Year’s resolutions.
Of course it’s not only me who finds so much to rail against, but that doesn’t make it any better. Recently I bumped into an old friend I hadn’t seen for a couple of years. Within seconds she had launched into an all-out denunciation of two top political figures, north and south of the Border. After mentioning that her son had got a first class degree, she added “but they’re handing out firsts like sweeties”.
I keep thinking there must be a way of not allowing almost everything to become a source of provocation. Yet perhaps this fault-finding is the very point of advancing years. If not precisely the age of reason, might the accumulated wisdom of five or more decades be a necessary counterweight to the unfounded optimism of youth? Maybe in prehistoric societies, when there was a debate about who had earned the right to sit around the cave fire, they looked at their elders and realised that while they were a complete pain with their constant cavilling, they had their uses. Not so frantically busy as child-rearing youngsters, they could take a more strategic, long-term view.
After all, you usually only begin to complain when you can see how matters could be improved. That takes experience, and knowledge. People get grouchy because they know things don’t have to be this way. Not that the problems folk like me pick up on are global-sized. Far from it. We get taxed not over regime change in the Middle East, but lids for recycling boxes so they don’t create litter; not child vaccination in developing countries or early flood warnings in Bangladesh, but thermostats in hotel rooms that don’t require an Einstein to adjust from a tropical setting to Hebridean.
The fundamental cause of this perpetual aggravation, I suspect, is that there’s so much wrong about the way our country is run, and all of it out of our hands. Powerless, and horribly conscious of it, maybe all we can do is quibble over the small stuff. A victory over minor aggravations feels like striking a blow against adversity. But I’d be fooling myself if I expect to achieve Zen-like calm once B****t is sorted. Grumpiness is probably like high blood pressure: once you’ve succumbed, it’s with you for the rest of your pettifogging, narky, carping life.
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