Questioning the Compliment.

In last night’s post I reported that I’d had a visit from a lady called Leila (universally known as ‘the lovely Leila’ to all who know her.) It’s twelve years since I last saw her and I was prepared for a woman approaching middle age.

Not a bit of it. If anything she looked even younger than I remembered her, but I confined my expression of surprise to the more realistic: ‘You haven’t aged.’

‘Neither have you,’ she replied enthusiastically (Leila applies a notable degree of enthusiasm to nearly everything she does.)

‘You must be joking,’ I said. ‘According to what I see in the mirror, I’d say I’ve aged ten years in the past six months.’

‘But what I’m seeing is the same light in your eyes.’

Light in my eyes? I had no idea I still had light in my eyes, apart from the minimum expected of anybody who hasn’t yet rung down the curtain and become a 150lb piece of something unfit for human consumption.

(I quite liked something a pathologist said in a TV programme once. A dead body isn’t a person. The person has gone.)

But back to the light in my eyes…

At first I took it as a compliment because I like the idea of having light in my eyes. But then it struck me that there are lots of other signs of ageing, none of which got mentioned, so whether it was a compliment or not became questionable. It could be seen as an example of that lovely old expression: ‘damned with faint praise.’

But that’s the half empty side of me. The half full side is still clinging to the compliment.