In praise of the stiff(ish) upper lip
Also, the best telly of the week (year?), a slight Dennis drama, and the silliest Halloween costume of all time
I interviewed Sophie Kinsella in Liverpool last week. I mentioned the event in last Tuesday’s instalment, and a very good evening it was too. At least I hope it was. A sea of hundreds of fans sitting in front of us made me quite nervous to begin with, so I stammered through my introduction before asking my first question, and then we were off because Sophie’s a pro.
As I also mentioned last week, Sophie was diagnosed with a brain tumour at the end of 2022, and has since gone through a major operation and rehab. Her recovery and bravery has been extraordinary, and now she’s managed to write a moving and funny novel about a woman with a brain tumour, too.
I asked her about this, her ability to have laughed, even in the bleakest moments, because it’s a quality I so admire. It’s very British, Sophie said, and I agreed. Although this is possibly a bit unfair because I don’t know if, say, the Peruvians or the Vietnamese have the same ability. Maybe they do.
‘The stiff upper lip,’ I went on, ‘is very unfashionable these days, but do you think there’s still something to it?’
Absolutely, Sophie replied, before explaining to the audience that in her family they have a saying - ‘but luckily…’ What this means, she elaborated, is that someone might grumble that it’s raining whereupon someone else will say ‘but luckily, you have an umbrella.’ In the book it’s ‘I have incurable cancer. But luckily, my last scan was good.’ Look on the bright side, essentially.
Another chapter of Sophie’s book is titled ‘It Could Be Worse’, and involves a conversation with a doctor, that includes the following:
‘Do you have any sickness,’ the doctor asks.
‘I feel a bit sick sometimes,’ says Eve. ‘But it could be worse.’
‘What about fatigue?’
‘I feel a bit tired sometimes, but it could be worse.’
Because with most things, it could be worse, couldn’t it? I don’t want to be the kind of wanker who drops Shakespeare into conversation because I’m not Boris Johnson, but there’s a line in King Lear which I’ve always remembered: ‘The worst is not so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’’ If you can still acknowledge the tragedy of a situation, in other words, it’s not the worst it could be. Right? The stiff upper lip is often maligned, nowadays. It’s old-fashioned, insensitive and damaging, say its detractors. Showing maximum emotion has become the currency, and those who are unable to do so are criticised for being out of touch. But is it entirely fair?
Look, I’m all in favour of emotion. Recently, I’ve practically been using this newsletter as therapy. I have cried and cried and cried - by myself, with family and friends, on the phone to family and friends, into poor Dennis. But I also think there’s strength in being able to say, after a while, ‘OK, up we get.’ I don’t believe the stiff upper lip necessarily makes one an uncaring, unfeeling monster. You can care and feel all you like if you’re a stiff-upper-lip sort. You can crumble. But it also means that you then, somehow, dust yourself off and carry on. Is that so very bad?
On the train to Liverpool last week, my ex unexpectedly texted me about coming to collect various bits and bobs still at my house. I felt a peculiar mixture of elation and pain at seeing his name flash up on my phone screen, and we exchanged a few sad messages before arranging the collection. I didn’t want to be there when he came over, so I bought him a card at the Liverpool Waterstones to say goodbye and leave with his stuff. I stood in front of the card rack for ages, trying to think of what would be funny, and eventually decided on a card that read ‘Sorry you’re leaving’, which people would more normally buy for departing colleagues. Funny, no? Or at least a bit funny? It made me laugh, anyway. I had to find a way of laughing at that moment because, really, what else is there?
The combination of humour and grit is a powerful one. This time last year, my mum was about to undergo surgery for her brain tumour, and when my sister and I took her into hospital that morning we set about trying to distract us all by laughing over how handsome the anaesthetist was. Later, when we came upstairs to find her in recovery, I asked the nurse on the ward how she was doing and he replied, ‘Great, better than me!’ We laughed at that, too.
Maybe it should be rebranded as the stiff(ish) upper lip, these days? You can cry and gnash your teeth and weep and wail but, after that, a few jokes and a resolve to get on with things. Just as Mum and Sophie have done.
It’s that Winston Churchill thing, of ‘keep buggering on.’ Or KBO, which my wise and wonderful friend Clare said recently that she wants to get as a tattoo. I said I might go with her and get it too. Although you’d have to be quite careful of where exactly on the body you got it, wouldn’t you?
Picture Video of the week
Right, I don’t want to shatter your view of Dennis, but we had a bit of a drama in Dorset on Saturday morning. I was down there for two friends’ 40th birthday weekend and it was glorious - 30 of us in one big house, proper time with proper friends as opposed to a snatched drink or dinner when you only really scratch the surface of what’s going on in each other’s lives. What was less glorious was Dennis rifling through one of the bathroom bins on Friday evening and, somehow, managing to eat a tampon. I know, I know, I’m so sorry. I didn’t actually realise this until Saturday morning when we snuck out for a bracing walk on the beach, and he had trouble, erm, shifting it. So I had to help. If you happened to see a woman on Hive beach early on Saturday morning, running around with a poo bag on one hand, and a lead and her coffee going everywhere in another, while her dog ran away with something flapping from his bottom, I’m enormously sorry. The GOOD NEWS is that he was absolutely fine afterwards and bounded along the beach very perkily. See video above. I was much less perky and needed another coffee. Lovely beach though, if you’re in the area.
Recommendation of the week
Roll on, Friday. It’s a big day, the day that Rivals lands on Disney+ - all 10 eps of it. This is the adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1988 bonkbuster, and I can’t go into too much detail here because I’ve interviewed Alex Hassell, the actor who’s playing Rupert Campbell-Black, for a piece coming out in YOU mag this Sunday. Ahead of that interview, having signed roughly 53 NDAs (non-disclosure agreement), I was given access to the first three episodes of the series.
I was nervous about watching it. A few months ago, reports circulated that the Disney execs were horrified by the amount of sex in the adaptation and had ordered various reshoots. I was so alarmed by this that I wrote a column on the subject. You can read that HERE*.
Long story short, nobody needs to panic. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s a glorious, funny, knowing adaptation, magnificently done, which made me laugh from the very opening scene, set on Concorde. The cast is fab, the shooting is fab, the soundtrack is EXCELLENT. Lots of Robert Palmer and Roxy Music. It’s just what we all need atm. I’m off to a viewing party on Friday evening, very possibly in stilettos and shoulder pads.
If you’re anything like me, you periodically cancel your subscription to various TV platforms on the basis that you haven’t watched anything on Disney/Apple/Netflix for ages, and then pick the subscription up again when something comes along that you actually want to watch. I would say it’s well worth having Disney+ for this. ENJOY.
*(PS. I know some of the links I put in here are paywalled, but that’s because journalists have to be paid for their work! And also most news organisations offer you a free piece a week or similar if you can bear to register with them.)
Nonsense of the week
Is a ‘sexy Ozempic shot’ perhaps the very worst Halloween costume of all time? I’m quite a grinch about Halloween, but it just so happens that I’m off to America the week after next to stay with some friends and my godson, and I’ll be there for the ‘holiday’ (and also the election, which is exciting). This makes me even more nervous because Americans go in for Halloween in an even bigger way, don’t you guys?
Some years ago, my siblings and I were in New York for Halloween, and we spent an entire Saturday afternoon in a fancy dress shop near Union Square, sorting out our costumes. My bro had booked dinner in a trendy downtown restaurant that night, and we knew we needed to dress up to avoid looking like uptight Brits. We took this challenge extremely seriously. See below.
Unfortunately, when we arrived at the trendy restaurant, nobody else was dressed up. Everybody else, and I really mean everybody else, was wearing normal Saturday-evening-going-out-for-a-nice-dinner clothes.
‘Excuse me,’ my brother said quietly, having summoned a waiter over, ‘why are we the only one in costumes?’
‘Because it’s Halloween on Tuesday, sir,’ the waiter replied with real and very heartfelt disdain, which is how we discovered that Americans don’t celebrate on the Saturday evening closest to the date as I think lots of people do here (?), but on actual Halloween itself. By this point, my cheap face-paint had started melting so we ghouls ate fairly quickly and left.
I shan’t be making the same mistake this year. Oh no. You won’t catch me as a sexy Ozempic shot *any* earlier than 31st October.
Superb card choice Sophia. The stiff upper lip thing is much underrated. I was diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer some 14 years ago now. Yes I had many moments of utter despair, but at some point you have to pick yourself up and fight. The best way to do that is to laugh, proper pig snort laughing. I remember being in the waiting room for therapy. You could tell which people had given up the fight and which had found a renewed sense of hope through making fun of the situation. Xx
But luckily, hoiking a tampon out of Dennis's bottom might be the worst thing you'll hoik out of it. Not the last, mind you. Not the last.
Card choice quite brilliant.
When my mother was dying in hospital - I mean, a few hours away, not just in general - she kept saying (rather heartbreakingly) 'Oh, I'm not ready yet, I'm not ready' and I replied, sort of automatically, 'Well, why don't you have a cup of tea and think about it?' which completely floored my father. In a good way.