By Anne Southern
A woman’s anger: ‘…every rock bun at the WI bears testimony to a woman’s rage’. This line, delivered by Lesley Manville’s repellent yet superb character in the BBC’s World on Fire struck me as rather wonderful. Not that I have much to do with rock buns, or the WI, and I have been untouched by the ravages of war, yet I recognised this sense of suppressed anger felt by women who are still not free to express their feelings openly. It made me think of the sources of my anger, some of which should only be mild irritants, but they do pile up, so the little things and the big ones all roll into one. How else can I explain the murderous rage that I feel when the cutlery drawer is left open again, and there are four pairs of shoes on the sitting room floor.
Why do my hackles rise when someone uses ‘disinterested’ when they mean ‘uninterested’ or say ‘less people’ instead of ‘fewer people’ or ‘from John and I’, ignoring the rule that prepositions take the accusative. As a linguistics graduate, I know these rules, but I also know that they don’t really matter, as usage changes and there is no bar to understanding. Should I really be troubled when people ignore the instruction to shower before getting into the pool or walk on the cycle track? Is it the teacher in me that wants rules to be obeyed?
Of more significance is the Kafkaesque nightmare we can get into when dealing with the authorities. Last year my husband and I were issued a fine for not handing in our tax form on time (we had). This got sorted, but Facebook was full of complaints from people who could not convince the tax department that they had submitted their forms. Recently when applying for a grant to have a home energy assessment, we were told in a no-reply email that we couldn’t have it, because the house we had owned for more than 20 years belonged to Andium. It took a fair bit of detective work to find a human being we could complain to. And why, prior to building work, did we have to pay £2,000 to establish that our loft was not housing bats, when we could have built a des res for any flitting by for a fraction of the cost. Why do we have to take expensive measures to ensure we have enough headroom to access a new third storey when our existing 100-year-old staircase does not have, or need to have, the statutory headroom? Ok, these are the irritations of the privileged, I admit. Yes, we’re lucky to have a house at all.
If you don’t, I get angry on your behalf. I get angry when people say that the very wealthy deserve their millions because they worked hard, ignoring the fact that many inherited their wealth. And they don’t have a monopoly on hard work. I bet the builder’s assistant who worked in the heat for 10 hours a day replacing our doors, or the woman working three jobs to pay the rent and feed her family are not in the market for a multi-million pound house.
I get angry when people say that they shouldn’t pay taxes to fund education if they don’t have children – as if they didn’t benefit from the education of doctors, nurses or the entire working population. Or to fund healthcare if they are not ill or can afford to ‘go private’. Do they not realise that everyone benefits from a healthy workforce? I hate the dishonesty of politicians who claim that giving public sector workers a pay rise to maintain pay levels during rampant inflation would cause this inflation when the causes are clearly price and interest rate rises. And I hate it when those who are trying to make the world a little fairer are dismissed as Marxists. I seethe when Brexiteers, anti-vaxxers and climate-change deniers are impervious to rational argument. Why can’t everyone see the world as I do?
But I also get angry with myself, like the unfortunate Greffier whose self-directed ‘stupid woman’ caused consternation in the States Assembly recently, when I drop things, forget things or hurt people, however inadvertently.
This has to stop. The antidote is not to take my feelings out on rock buns, but to notice the good things – the patience of the call centre guy who helped me to fix my Sky box; the treatment I received when, turning up very unwell to the Emergency Department, I was seen within half an hour, left with a cancer diagnosis four short hours later, was treated within two months and recovered in another two, all for free; and the tolerance of my untidy husband who drove to the other side of the Island to mend my jammed bike chain. But if you say, ‘Calm down, dear,’ that will set me off all over again.
