On a sleepless night, solace might be someone else's words in your head
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Version 0 of 1. I have been up at 3am a lot lately, the time of the night when, as Alice Munro once put it, everything looks like a “spiteful imitation of itself.” That line is from Munro’s Friend of My Youth, her 1991 collection of short stories that is on the comfort reads sub-list of my security blanket master list – those books and TV shows that I turn to for relief from (mostly) late-night anxiety. Comfort food is great; but there are times when what you need is other people’s words in your head. The reason I am up late is my five-month-old twins, who are also the reason for that amount of ice cream in my freezer and a playlist on Netflix that includes 30-year-old crime dramas and things that, in saner periods, I wouldn’t dream of watching. (I hit a particularly rough patch at the two-month mark, which you can see reflected in a viewing history that includes the 1987 pilot episode of Inspector Morse and, on YouTube, a BBC news anchor announcing the death of Princess Diana, which is the TV equivalent of a woman rocking back and forth murmuring to herself.) The psychology of self-soothing hinges on a combination of straight-forward nostalgia and something more complicated to do with re-rooting oneself in one’s given community. If your identity fundamentally hinges on your proximity to others, then the things to which you turn for relief from disquietreflect a common idea of the world in which we live. For example, if I’m rereading Penelope Fitzgerald’s Human Voices, her novel of the BBC during war time, I know I’m looking for the recognition that, while savagery lurks in unusual places, kindness mostly prevails. If I’m compulsively rewatching Call the Midwife, I am generally in a sloppy and blubbering place. And in the rare instance I find myself reaching for Malory Towers, the Enid Blyton boarding school series that I loved as a child and in which terrible things befall impertinent children (in Blyton’s awful moral universe, the student athlete bound for the Olympics is permanently disabled during training, something the author implies she jolly well deserves), I know I’m in real trouble. The instant accessibility of all books and TV shows has enabled the indulgence of our many moods. Jewel in the Crown is currently showing on Netflix, that early example of “event television” that children of the 1980s in Britain weren’t allowed to stay up for, and that cheers me up nicely – you only have to look at Peggy Ashcroft to feel immediately better. (Although it is odd to binge watch something that predates the notion of binge watching by so many years.) On HuluPlus, meanwhile, the original State of Play is currently showing – and it’s set in a newspaper office much like the Guardian’s was in the late 1990s which, to those who recognize it, is as close to a hug as the TV can give you. But there are also those things that you go to for their ability to voice alienation so perfectly that it instantly vanishes. In self-pitying mood I reach for Isherwood’s novel, Prater Violet – the bit when he’s walking home after a party and the street lights “seem to shine with an unnatural, remote brilliance, like planets on which there is no life.” There are those things that give succor because they denote niche areas of understanding – the equivalent of holding the blanket very tightly over one’s head. A fellow expat friend, when down, compulsively rereads I, Partridge – the Alan Partridge memoir – because jokes about Sue Cook and Bill Oddie are both culturally and generationally specific in a way that is massively and instantly soothing. In the same spirit, when I first arrived in the US, I would watch the UK version of Antiques Roadshow on PBS – something I would rather have eaten a bowl of antique rivets than do while still in England. And now, eight years later and out of my mind with sleep deprivation, I find myself watching Question Time on BBC iPlayer in much the same spirit. (If one could hire anyone to voice one’s interior meltdown, it would, of course, be David Dimbleby: “And now, as her state of mind degenerates from rattled to insane, the band of the Coldstream Guards plays Elgar’s Enigma Variations.”) At the same time, if there’s anything to relieve one of a longing for England, it’s the audience on Question Time. Over time, the books we re-read and the shows and movies we re-watch become talismanic, like obsessively touched prayer shawls, and it is enough, sometimes, just to look at the spine of a book or imagine a scene to be reassured. You know the words are in there – solid, impassive – holding you up. |