Thinking about Madeleine (1)

"Every parent's worst nightmare". Not just the tabloids and the women in the local sandwich shop have repeatedly trotted out this phrase: Radio four started an early segment about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann with the same tired cliche. We're all supposed to accept this, it seems, our agreement signalled by a dutiful nod implying sympathy and compassion. I’d go along with it too, except that it's nonsense, and a distraction from the real tragedy of this case.
There are a number of reasons aside from pedantry for my refusal to let this pass as mere sloppiness, but let's start right there. As stated, it's simply not true: for this parent at least, nearly seven years have gone by without my sleep being disturbed once by any sort of nightmare about my children. Perhaps this is because I spend so much of my waking existence worrying about actual or likely situations affecting them that there's little room for them in my dream-life. Sleep is about the only time I have for myself, and my subconscious knows this. If we're honest, I think, most of our dreams and nightmares are about us, not our children or anyone else we love. The whole familiar Freudian menagerie—horrors of missed exams, apprehension of pain, torture, disease, public nakedness or other humiliation, decay of tooth and claw, the discovery of suppressed urges—all of these things are reasonable candidates for the title "parent's worst nightmare": child abduction is not. It's not that suddenly losing our children is hypothetically better or worse than any of these; it's merely that it doesn't feature in our dreamscapes. (Unless I'm so much more selfish than everyone else, this is generally true.)
A natural response to the foregoing is: "But that's not what they mean. They just mean 'our worst fear'. Don't be so literal!" This is no better. I am chock-full of fears and concerns about my children: such apprehensions pervade all aspects of my personal and professional thoughts, crowding out useful and coherent ideas; they infiltrate each waking moment, impinge on every other concern, from the intimate to the mundane. It’s a tremendous nuisance, really. Among my daily fears: that Sean will have an accident at school, or, more likely, when we drive somewhere in our aging Fiat; that Julian will fall on the concrete step again, or touch the hot oven, or catch one of the few communicable diseases from which his already over-immunised body has not been officially protected. Longer term, I worry that they will fail where they could have succeeded if only I had done something right, or will not learn to deal with the jolts that are a normal part of growing-up. And these are only chronic low-grade fears. I have many worse fears, of course: that somehow the children will be orphaned, or become chronically—even terminally—ill, or be taken from me by drugs as teenagers. The list goes on...
Added to these are a plethora of selfish fears concerning them: that I may be denied custody or access in the event of divorce; that I will lose contact with them if they’re taken abroad; that they’ll hate me or hold me in contempt.
But abduction or abuse, particularly by complete strangers in a holiday resort, just doesn’t come into it. I don’t fear they’ll be taken by extra-terrestrial life either, or worry about the psychological trauma they may suffer if suddenly we were to become lottery winners, or hapless members of a witness protection programme, or political refugees.
The point is not that one shouldn’t fear these things, but that one doesn’t. And the reason has to be probability: our legitimate fears are based on proximate probable universes: what could well happen with only a slip here, some carelessness there, the unexpected—though not improbable—meeting of contiguous synchronicities. Sliding Doors.
However comfortable our domestic lives might seem, we live only a few streets away, figuratively speaking, from bankruptcy, unemployment, homelessness. We’re right next door to traumatic car crashes, heart disease, separation, the mild dystopias of other people's everyday existence…But we’re not even in the same metaphorical country as gangs of child snatchers that have targetted our beloved children. That is Vulgaria (remember Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?), not Portugal. For what it's worth, my money is currently on the little green men: the odds are about the same as for human abduction, but it’s a lot more interesting.
I’ll take up the probability theme again in the next post about Madeleine. But for now, the point to observe is that it is Gerry and Kate McCann’s current situation, not the loss of Madeleine, that represents “every parent’s worst nightmare.” To be formally suspected of your child’s murder and threatened with a trial in a country whose language and legal procedures are alien, to be pilloried by a completely ignorant public, and to face the real prospect of losing your other children to state-sanctioned abduction: these are indeed nightmares worthy of Kafka. This is true whether the McCanns are completely innocent of their daughter’s fate or, as some now believe, complicit in the removal of her body following an accidental homicide: unless they are masochistic, publicity-seeking psychopaths or victims of a bizarre form of Munchausen by proxy—which not even The Sun has alleged...yet—these people are now in Hell. There is no more appropriate word. The most remarkable thing about this case is that neither of them has broken down completely: in their position, I would have been committed weeks ago. God knows where they get their strength: it may indeed be from God. If only they could wake up.



[to be continued]

Scents and Sensibility

Dreadful pun though it may be, the title captures the theme of this post (I was going to say essence, but that would compound the sin).

I'm losing my sense of smell. This is not some private affliction, though its loss to me is certainly personal; it's less a symptom of aging than of the age itself. With regard to other cognitive faculties we are told to "use it or lose it", but my nose hasn't got a chance, really. It's not for want of trying, but for lack of stimulus, that the sense of smell is gradually giving up its ghost. The same homogenisation of popular culture that has turned every high street into a paltry clone of the next, has done the same for the smells, pongs, stinks, odours, aromas and perfumes that used to infest them. Actually, it's done for most kinds of smells altogether: "reeks" have gone the way of smallpox, leaving only feeble "scents", and pathetic "hints" of this and that...It's not only that everywhere smells the same, everywhere smells of nothing much at all.
As a child, for instance, I remember being taken shopping by my great-aunt along the Upper Newtownards Road in Belfast. First, we'd go to a newsagent just opposite Evelyn Avenue: you walked in to the smell of old broadsheets, packets of Players, Sherbet Lemons, and furniture polish mixed with shoe cream. In the butcher's shop further down, other mixtures breezed around on the draft under the door: sawdust, blood, fresh sausages, cured bacon, mingled with smoked haddock from the fish counter, and wicker shopping baskets. Further down still was the bakery, and Irvine's shoe shop: a new pair of shoes used to colour my bedroom for a fortnight at least. And nearer home, a weekly dose of woody mustiness in Ballyhackamore Post Office filled out my sense of place.
I also remember the stench from the Lagan and the nearby gas-holders on summer days in Victoria Park: since the barrier was built, and gas is 'natural', that's gone too, as has the fantastic smell from Gallaher's cigarette factory, the coal lorries on their delivery runs, fumes of leaded petrol and old diesel.
All these have vanished, and with them an olfactory topography of East Belfast, replaced by the same vapid nondescription found in Bracknell, Boston, and—for all I know—Bogota.
The term "air quality" refers only to levels of noxious carcinogens, eye-watering sulphurs, particulates and their gritty ilk: the contemporary ideal is sterility, absence. This is telling, I think.
Nowadays, even milk goes off without emitting any cloying warning of its transition to unpalatability. This may of course be good for those of us with a toddler who regularly dribbles said liquid across the back seat of the car; time was, this meant a new car in extreme cases! But it should raise concerns, even among the sanguine, about food science and genetic modification.
It's not just the undesirable smells that have been driven from these islands: I can't recall the last time I noticed aftershave or perfume in a public place—or come to that a private one. We've become a Simple^TMr generation: washed yet unperfumed, cleansed but literally unremarkable, and the poorer for it. (This is not universal: many Italian and French women still inhabit scented microcosms, other European men retain their nasal sensibilities, but the Anglo-American world is aggressively fragrance-free.)
Most likely, this is just another 'Golden Age' rant: no doubt something has been gained by the expulsion of scents and sinners, but I suspect much more has been surrendered. When bemoaning the loss of biodiversity, we should spare a thought for our noses too.
If I were a dog, I would weep at such sterility (or whatever dogs do instead).

Parenthood

People say that I am a good father. It may be true, but it does not reflect any strength of character or personal virtue. Quite the opposite: it is a symptom of loss, of involuntary abandonment, transformation of the person I used to be. Every time I change a dirty nappy, or put Germolene on a grazed knee, or quarrel about who should pick up the kids this time, or serve tepid pasta at 6pm, a piece of me is lost. There is no less of me, but I am less myself. Every tiny sacrifice for the sake of domestic continuity is just that: a sacrifice. The laws of physics demand that such loss is replaced: entropy requires that what replaces it is more smoothed out, dissipated and disordered than what came before; and so it is, molecule by molecule, cell by cell... The result is parenthood incarnate, not the realization of some ideal social virtue, but a slow, largely painless, smothering of vitality and egotism. It is not that we change our priorities for our children, which might indeed be a virtuous impulse; rather, the priorities change us.
This insidious transformation is not without consolations, of course: there is probably nothing to equal the experience of seeing a child's first smile, first steps, their continual pleasure (for now at least!) in having you around, the feeling of watching them sleeping soundly. The principal consolation is that it provides an easy reason to live, to go on, a banal raison d'etre. Just because it's banal doesn't mean it's not true; just because it's true doesn't make it interesting. Parenthood is a pastime, like almost everything else in our existence, a distraction from our purpose, whatever that may be...
My friend Eric Kellerman told me before Sean was born that he was too selfish to have children. From anyone else, this should have been interpreted as mild self-deprecation; from him, it is only the truth, and he is right to believe it. What he can't know of course, is that everyone with a reasonably healthy mind is too selfish to have children; soon enough, though, like Winston Smith coming to love Big Brother, that selfishness slips away, leaving only a remembered trace in photographs, occasional rages, and passing flirtations. This may not be a bad thing—surely it is better to have the consolations of parenthood than to grow old without any achieving any other purpose—but it is sheer self-delusion to believe that it is an inherent good, or that it deserves any special reverence. To coin a phrase, "parenthood happens".