Are you aware, perchance, of the current internet trend, “Taking my younger self out for coffee”. If you didn’t flinch at the word “perchance”, maybe not.
But it is fairly self explanatory. A person imagines taking the him or herself of a decade or two or three ago out for coffee and imparting wisdom, discussing all the ways in which the adult has changed from the child, teenager or 20-something and generally reflecting on life.
Here’s mine. Dear young Lucy Mangan, by 2025 you will have reached a point in life where a roof repair will plunge you into an apparently endless existential crisis.
To be fair, not just a roof repair – even though I must note that what began as an apparent single slipped tile duly turned (as these things do, I shall point out to young Lucy so that she is early aware of this immutable but for some reason unrecorded in GCSE physics textbooks law and can start saving her Sainsbury’s Saturday girl wages accordingly), into the revelation that £7,500 worth of work was needed.
There was also, 48 hours later, a defunct boiler and an ensuing three days without heating (water on the immersion heater if you can bear to have a shower in a bathroom frozen on the inside long after the sun has made an appearance outside) and a rat in the compost bin.
Three things, it turns out, is all it takes to undo me. Four, if you count the rat twice, which I do because mice are no picnic but a rat is… oh dear God.
Each revelation has been received by my psyche as a mighty axe might be by a small tree. The rat, despite the pest control man’s serene demeanour and kind assurances that anyone with a collection of warmly decomposing garden detritus could expect to find a rodent or two sheltering there for the winter, was the final splintering blow. I am felled.
What is going on? Where’s my resilience? How can I call myself a functioning adult if three things in a row is all it takes to reduce me to an anxiety-ridden wreck, rocking in a blanket on the sofa and muttering to myself as I stare at a blank spot on the wall and try not to hear the sound of men stripping felt and rotten battens above me, others wrenching out the boiler below me, or see in my mind’s eye that whiskered snout poking out of a warm bin as I tip the until-then-very-satisfactory results of half an hour’s weeding?
I feel terrible for feeling so terrible. How spoiled am I that these problems – merely practical, not affecting anyone I love, not involving any illness or threat to life or limb (apart, possibly, from the roof if the tile thing hadn’t alerted us in time), and that we can afford, if not without sharp intakes of breath, to fix without having to miss a mortgage payment or sell a cat – are enough to send me into the foetal position?
It is such a myth that you get tougher as you get older. It might in fact be a myth that you become better in any way as you get older. It’s not just the flesh that loses firmness and bounce but the mind and soul too and I don’t know what the equivalent of collagen supplements is that I can take to repair the damage to those vital organs.
My patience – once a thing of legend – is also shot to hell. I can’t stand even momentary sartorial discomfort, any kind of delay or anything on television that involves any character undergoing any kind of suffering. It’s not sloth or exhaustion, or not just sloth and exhaustion, that keeps me fastened to the sofa watching nothing but Brooklyn Nine Nine repeats every night – it’s self-preservation. The need to protect the last vestiges of my emotional continence from being swept away by even the most minor further assaults by the outside world.
My fundamental affliction of course is one shared by most of us: the consciousness of being an adult in a godless universe. Every slipped tile, every funny initial knocking noise from a boiler (honestly – don’t ignore it. You know it’s nothing good already and it’s only going to get £800-1200 worse) is a reminder of our essential powerlessness. That the cosmos can throw anything it likes at us at any time and we have no defence. We and our loved ones just have to… stay lucky.
How am I supposed to live like this, with the metaphorical roof off and our inner vulnerabilities exposed to the elements at all times? I’m going to have to find a way to rebuild my defences, better, stronger and ideally with a breathable membrane that will stop the battens becoming waterlogged and crumbling unseen beneath it this time.
I’m sorry, I may have crossed streams there. But the principle is sound. I just don’t know who to call for repairs. My best bet is the lovely rat man, I suspect.
And that, young Lucy, is where we are.
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