22/365: Common people

Accidentally meet a friend for coffee. A fortunate accident. Somehow we start to talk about our mothers and the things we weren’t allowed to do as children. A mother rarely enjoys taking the responsibility for saying no to a child, instead they manage to find all sorts of reasons; blaming it on rules or the teacher says or the police will get you or it’s for your own good or (in my case) god says, or, as my friend and I quickly discover happened to both of us, because it’s common.

As well as having a fractured relationship with nationality, religion, and race, I have an awkward relationship with class. All the big four, right there. So much fun. When it comes to class, I have no idea what one I am. My grandmother was untitled aristocracy - I’m not sure exactly what that means, other than there’s a large old red book with her family’s details in, a sort of Yellow Pages of eligible young men and women I suspect, in the age when eugenics was bigger than it is now. I predict it’ll make a come back. My mother was university educated but didn’t work full time until I was 14, we lived in a council house and I had free school dinners, a fact I was deeply ashamed of and still struggle to type so many years later. But at 15 I won a scholarship to private school and although I didn’t stay there long until I had my first breakdown - god I sound great on paper - I still benefited from that. And my mother, firmly upper middle class until this poverty safari, loved a bit of second-hand parenting, whether it was god forbidding things or that we couldn’t do them because they were common.

ITV was common, the BBC was not; being a Royalist was common although the Royals were not; garden gnomes were common although garden centres weren’t; eating dinner on your knee was common, although when it was fish and chips, it was not; being Nouveau Riche was common, being rich was not; talking about your salary was common, having a good one was not; applying lipstick in public was common, wearing lipstick was not. In short, what was and was not common was a secret affair, decreed only by people safely out the reach of being common. Oddly, possessing a horror of being common was also common. This type of list would itself be common.

Every year since 2018, Nicky Haslam has produced a tea-towel listing the things he finds common. Over the years it’s included grief, Mr Grayson Perry, Mrs Grayson Perry, fire pits, WhatsApp, bamboo, St Paul’s School, barn conversions, and on he goes, reducing the idea of common to the nth degree.

Inspired by this, and also possibly procrastinating, and because I’m ill, that kind of low key might be getting sick might just be tired way that means you’re a bit slow with work but can’t properly excuse yourself and go to bed, we spent the afternoon messaging each other on Instagram, lists of things we found common. In case of any doubt, Instagram is not common, calling it Insta is, The Gram, unforgivable.

Publishable common things from our list included:

bottomless brunch, escape rooms, Maria von Trapp, book launches at Daunts (everyone has one but still), margarine, Sauvignon Blanc, pilgrimages to Sylvia Plath’s grave, coffee as an interest, demonising sugar, vilifying Chardonnay, second chances, circling back, all ball games except tennis, macaroons unless you’re in Paris, balloon arches, massages, spas, girls’ weekends, boys’ weekends, grown adults calling themselves boys or girls, competitive SAS style fishing, fish tanks with those little castles in for the fish to swim around, emotional support animals unless lions or elephants, announcing leaving twitter, conspicuous name dropping along the lines of ‘my dear friend xx complete with surname loudly announced’, feeling held, circling back, email, cats without ruffs, safaris, people who hate Giraffes, anyone who isn’t Andrew Scott, any clergy lower than a Bishop, virtue signalling, judging parents, hating on filthy money, bowl cuts, self-diagnosed neurological disorders, oligarchs, morals, practising gratitude, protein bowls, prolonged time in the great outdoors, second divorces and stopping at that, swimming outdoors and calling it wild, spending more than £150 on a cat or dog, those little fluffy dogs that bite people all the time and the their owners laughing it’s fine because they’re only little, holybobs for holidays, Coldplay, Strictly, owning part of a racehorse, vapes, any book described as life affirming sweeping luminous essential necessary, Charlie XCX, Nicky Haslam.

As is now obvious any list like this runs the risk of becoming a kind of ouroboros and disappearing into a blackhole of your own aversions. I promise this friend is real, even if it sounds all like me. That’s the thing with common, it makes no sense at all. That’s the thing often with mothers and their rules, they make no sense at all .That’s the problem with all rules in general, they say more about the person making them than anything else. Now we are off to make our own tea towels.