Imprecise Prescriptions
Isabel Campbell - my Nana - was not a showy woman. Tall, slim and predominantly silent, she expressed her frequent disapproval of time or morals with a slight sniff and a dismissive turn of the head. Born in 1899, Victorian in attitude as well as age, her greying hair was coiffed tightly, with the suspicion of a wave tamped down tight to eschew exuberance, her ubiquitous beige mac seldom married to anything as showy as (gasp!) a matching handbag. A lifelong teetotaller who shivered in terror at the ‘horrible’ taste of the alcohol she had never actually tried, she was congenitally lacking in enthusiasm; not negative, really, more like shy, taciturn, leaving the talking and opining to her slightly shorter and only marginally more loquacious husband. Always backward in coming forward, she showed passion only for two things, her daily paddle in the ice-cold North Sea - ‘gannin’ for a plodge’ in the local vernacular - and going to ‘the meeting’ on a Sunday night, where her fellow Spiritualists would seek intel ‘from the other side’, extraterrestrial exclusives which were then passed on to an often baffled family with the triumphant air of an oracle.
So it was that, as I awaited the result of end of school exams which would determine my entire future, she revealed some apparently unimpeachable good news. She’d been to the meeting, and received a message. About me. ‘You have a Grandson’, the Spirit had opined, with admirable accuracy, adding, more gnomically, ‘he’s going to go a long way’.
She paused, clearly expecting me to fall over in convinced gratitude. I thanked her for passing on this piece of future intelligence, wondering what the right protocol was; should I ask her to thank the spirit too? Much obliged, your ghostliness. But how to deliver the message of gratitude? Could you just dial them up to say ta? What if he/she/it (or potentially even they) had moved rapidly on, sharing anticipatory news with different locations, even centuries? Temporarily, or indeed temporally, uncontactable? Doubts expanding, I began to wonder if the spirit world has good news specialists, others who delight in taking people down a psychological peg or two. What if a future communicator got out of their heavenly bed on the wrong side that morning and was feeling malevolent? Do they indulge in fake news? And were they allowed to tease?
Awash with such thoughts, I was prevented from taking much comfort from my personalised piece of advance notice, coming as it did a full two weeks before the exam board would spill the beans for real. Instead, I was consumed with worry about the terminological exactitude of the message. To whit: what exactly did my ghostly informant mean by ‘a long way?’ It’s all a question of distance perception. If I got my grades, I would be off to Oxford, several hundred miles away in the deep south. That literally distant prospect was unarguably ‘a long way’ away. Or it was, if you were a real live human, in the north of England. But is a five hour train journey ‘a long way’ to a spirit? Surely they deal in millennia, or light years, or something like that. Why would they bother themselves with mere miles? Was my psychic source simply being metaphorical?
More confusingly still, slipping from an A to a B in just one A Level would instead consign me to Durham University, twenty miles down the road. Local people regard South Shields, just over the river, as practically in the Midlands, so Durham might as well be in Australia. A long way indeed. It came down to this: how far is ‘far’, to a being lacking corporeal credentials? Was my informant a Geordie Ghoul, or did it take a more internationalist outlook? Could they perhaps provide some kind of clarificatory scale, a mercator projection for my personalised projection, my future foretold?
Thus distracted, I failed to prostrate myself in gratitude, causing Nana to lift an arch eyebrow and tut slightly at my willingness to look an invisible gift horse in its virtual mouth. And then, with that fearsome sniff, she turned her attention back to The Sunday Post.
This was her weekly dirty little secret, Scotland’s favourite newspaper, mysteriously adored in her northern English household, a rag revelling in its lack of actual news. I would pick it up and turn to the cartoons, Our Wullie and The Broons, both propagating a schmaltzy vision of heroic Scots good humour in the face of penury. And alongside them, my favourite section: ‘names that make you chuckle’.
These were Dad jokes in tabloid form. A chef called I Cook. A solicitor named Sue Law. A policeman who lived at Letsby Avenue. They had been profoundly hilarious to my eight year old self, somewhat losing their appeal ten years later. Especially with A Level results coming soon, and doubts abounding about the veracity of my secret, unidentified, inhuman communicant.
I thought about those chuckling names this week, flat hunting in London, meeting thrusting young estate agents wearing suits taken straight from the 80s, shoulder pads and everything, with names like Jago and Lilly. Jago turned out to be nice but dim, clearly unaware that he’s really just a misspelled Iago, hence not to be trusted. Lilly was hard as nails, artfully dodging my question ‘does this place normally smell so damp?’ with the mendacious skill of a politician. And then – joy of joys – I saw an absurdly over-priced flat, presented with enthusiasm by a nice, rather short woman called Rumi.
Now there’s a name to make you chuckle.
Because the apartment she was showing wasn’t. It was the smallest flat you ever did see. Not roomy at all. Ha ha. The Sunday Post would have been thrilled. This set me off on a giggling rampage, recalling how Estate Agents like to say a place is ‘deceptively spacious’ which means the exact opposite of what they intend - something deceptively spacious looks big, but isn’t. (What they mean, but are too scared to say, is ‘deceptively small’). This in turn had me riffing inevitably on the absurdity of ‘unisex hairdressers’, which always make me want to pop my head round the door and ask ‘which is it? Men or women?’
Not that Nana would have got the joke. When my actual exam results arrived, triumphantly proving the spirit’s omniscience and resolving once and for all my doubts about its geographic terms of reference, I went round to tell her the good news. ‘Nana, I got my grades and I’m going to Oxford’. She sighed, put the Sunday Post down, and said ‘you shouldn’t do that, Paul. You should get an apprenticeship at the shipyard as an electrician. Then, you’d have A Trade’.
The shipyard closed a few years later. She didn’t see that coming.
