I’m ill. Not thoughtful, Virginia Woolf, using it as an opportunity to be still and quiet and think deeply about things ill, but just common-or-garden ill. I have a cold, which I feel it shouldn’t be called when it’s thirty degrees outside. You can get a cold at any time of year, but when you get one in the middle of a heatwave it makes you feel stupid and out of step with the rest of the world.
I have an upper respiratory infection, and feel like my brain is operating on ten percent of its usual capacity (maximum), which means that all I want to do is lie in bed and not do very much. Which is exactly what I’m doing, and now I’m doing fifteen minutes’ writing to justify my indolence.
Since I’ve been ill (the last couple of days) my main activity has been rereading the What Katy Did books. I’ve realised that although I’d like TV to be my primary form of relaxation, because it’s so passive and easy and gives such a great shortcut to connections with people, I really don’t like TV as a default. Good telly has started up again (Handmaid’s Tale, Killing Eve, Big Little Lies - when did all the good TV get so feminist, and what did I do to deserve it?) but I don’t want to binge on that until I get sick of it. That’s the kind of TV I want to enjoy and think about.
Kids books. I need to go back to my parents’ house and spend an afternoon sorting through all my childhood favourites. When I think back to my childhood the main scene I remember was hiding in the little space between the wall of my bedroom and a mattress propped upright against it, with a cup of tea and possibly an apple, reading. I don’t think that the mattress could have been there for very long so that memory is probably only drawing on one afternoon, but that scene seems to hang in time and expand itself over a period of years. I was probably perfectly happy in that moment, and that’s why I remember it.
I used to read the same books over and over. I think that’s what a lot of kids do, and I really miss it. You can never have that really intimate connection with a book if you only read it once. It’s the difference between treating a book as a stepping stone between present you (ignorant) and future you (well read), rather than living in harmony with the book itself.
There’s a real temptation to look back on those Victorian/Edwardian era children’s books aimed at girls and dismiss them out of hand as worthy, mealy-mouthed and probably racist. And while they don’t make any particular claims to transcend their time, I think that’s a rather unfair impulse. Mother-murder, I guess. Trying to write off the books that raised you.
Katy Carr is a delightful character, and I love her and all her siblings. I’d completely forgotten the proclivity that the Carr children have for hiding in little nooks and crannies in their wonderfully strange and exotic Midwestern world. They sit on henhouses and build bowers. They climb spiked poles to huddle up in the hay loft. They eat huge amounts of cakes and cookies. There needs to be more said about food in books, particularly food in children’s books. It can create such a glorious sense of abundance and pleasure, and the right book can make you crave a certain food more than almost anything else.
Anyway, I’ve really enjoyed going back to Katy, and haven’t found her remotely irritating and tedious. If she was published now she’d be praised for being a representation of a very real, human little girl, strong and headstrong and navigating the line between fantasy and reality, like we all did. But she was published in 1872, nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, so the fashionable thing is to dismiss her.
You know what it’s not fashionable to dismiss though? Killing Eve, and the work of Phoebe Waller-Bridge more generally. And although I like PWB’s work, and think she’s very clever and funny and turns out some great lines, and although I think the lead performances in Killing Eve are superb and the costumes, settings etc are glorious, I just can’t fall for it hook, line and sinker, the way I feel I’m supposed to. Maybe it’s the general feeling of sensing that I am supposed to feel a certain way that’s putting me off. I felt that in the first series too - the perfection of Villanelle’s wardrobe, the desirability of her Parisian pad, the drollness of her rolled eyes when she delivers some exsiqurivte piece of cruelty - something about them just feels so calculated to pull me in, to say ‘yes, we share this feeling, don’t we?’. Consequently, I find myself keeping it at arm’s length.
The same cannot be said for Big Little Lies, or Handmaid’s Tale, or Derry Girls, none of which seem to be intended for me to ‘relate’ to them, because of course I don’t. But just like I fell in love with a nineteenth century Midwestern girl and her five siblings when I was a kid, I find that strange settings and distant lives aren’t a barrier to me for falling in love with a character. If anything, they’re conducive. It’s something about being invited to look at someone’s life with the wide-eyed curiosity of a child. Something about being taken by the arm or grabbed by the throat and someone leaning in to whisper into your ear, whether intended to inspire comfort or terror, let me tell you a story.’