Tuesday 8 November 2022

Finding Flippancy in the Darkness.

A middle aged woman of my acquaintance once asked me why I wasn’t married. ‘I’m not the marrying type,’ I told her. ‘Nonsense,’ she replied. ‘You just haven’t met the right woman yet.’

By then I knew myself quite well, and I’d come to know her quite well, and I knew that she wasn’t the sort to understand that not everybody has the psychological or emotional means to subscribe to standard perceptions and behaviour. And so I knew she was wrong, and I knew that I was right in taking the pledge to engage in no more romantic entanglements because the ‘right woman’ simply doesn’t exist.

So anyway…

Having recently read the novel Never Let Me Go, tonight I decided to watch the film again, and what should I see but Carey Mulligan wearing a woolly hat. The effect was immediate: Had Carey Mulligan and I met when we were both twenty eight, and had she been wearing a woolly hat, she would have been the woman who doesn’t exist. She would have been the one to disprove the rule. She would have been the one I could have grown old with and of whom I would never have tired.

The last one was Audrey Tautou. I wonder who’ll be next.

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