More conversations

A page or two back I was blethering about how hard I find it to speak my truth without it becoming divisive - or something like that. Perhaps it was about how often I find myself arguing with friends and how hard I find keeping my mouth shut even though I’ve had plenty of time to learn the sense in the maxim ‘least said soonest mended.’

I never did write the follow-up to the conversation about virginity and ‘saving oneself.’ I thought of it just now. No idea why. It might have been another conversation I had with a customer today. She was once in a foursome - three women and one man. She’s in a another unconventional set-up just now which isn’t really working for her... but enough of that. The second conversation I had that past week also strayed into the interesting topic of sexual mores. I have a friend who had very unsatisfactory parents, a drunken violent father and a critical self-centred mother. In her young teens she escaped from the poisonous atmosphere in the family home to a nearby artist’s colony and there led a life I can only be jealous of because it sounds so idyllic and interesting and so far removed from my stodgy teenage years at a grammar school when the most exciting highlights were getting the lead in the school play, finding a boyfriend and having almost-the-whole-way sex in a shelter on the promenade on a wet and windy night. (We used my bed for the real thing not too many days later. Much more comfortable.)

Our lunch-time was enlivined by J’s accounts of the stream of shy young artist students arriving to learn at the seat of the master, of musicians dropping by for a night or two, jamming for hours drunk on home-made wine; of long languorous afternoons spent in the garden and the fields, only visiting the house for wine or lemonade and bread. To earn a little pocket money she and the artist’s daughters helped with the humble tidying up work on stained glass pieces finishing the leadings whilst around the adults (many of them now household names) discussed and discoursed (I’m imagining here) probably shaping the way she now leads her life. There was never any money but somehow they always seemed to have enough to make meals look like banquets, and there was that wine to get tipsy on.

In this halcyon existence the fact that the daughters were sleeping with and having sex with their father hardly registered as remarkable. Whilst I was listening to her I thought I could be watching a rather well-directed film - probably by a French director for lightness of touch . Slow and sensuous, with lots of sunlit out-door scenes, yellow meadow flowers and a babbling stream, it would seem as though there was to be no story only a gentle comfortable portrayal of the artist’s life, rather pastel with lots of use of the fisheye lens, then this extra dimension would slide into consciousness unheralded, and the viewer would be left to make up their own minds how they felt about it.

My friend was also matter-of-fact when she got to this part, matter-of-fact in the way that a person is when they are aware that there may be a difference of opinion here. She knows me well enough to know I’m not easily shocked except by ugliness, and the way this had been happening it wasn’t ugly. I believed her when she told me that the girls went on to have quite normal successful (or not, but anyway normal) relationships in later life and were perfectly happy with the situation both at the time and now. Unfortunately everything changed in Arcadia when a biographer blew the whole affair into the media . The regular members of the loosely knit colony either faded away because they disliked the attention or withdrew in on themselves for the same reason.

The lunchtime conversation had been very pleasant thus far. We enjoyed agreeing that it’s wrong to criticise other people’s way of life, especially when we don’t fully understand the circumstances. My friend declared she would never, for instance, criticism any religious person for their practices however bizarre or distasteful they are to our cultural upbringing.
Uh-oh!
Red lights are now appearing all around me as she states firmly that even female circumcision cannot be condemned if it’s a custom of the socio-religious ethos.

I squawked in horror. We laughed to cover the moment. We got the bill.

We’re still friends. I just know I’ll convince her that she’s wrong!