It's what's inside that counts!

We are all in denial about something.

Best exemplified by the memorable detail of a half remembered story (or was it fact?) when some wag wrote a note saying, “Your secret is discovered, flee!” to a whole group of people and watched as they all duly panicked.

It sounds like a story by Saki about his elegantly sinister, yet likable anti-hero Clovis. This is the sort of occasion when John Lord would have been able to supply title, author, year and publisher! I do miss his vade macum of a brain – and the series of little books in which he recorded his reading.

Or to take another instance, the time a policeman come to our house when I was about 12 or 13 and to my horror as I opened the door asked for me! I was immediately convulsed with guilt and staggered back to my parents croaking that the police had come for me. The fact that the policeman had singled me out by name because my name and address were printed clearly (by my father) in my glasses case, which he was returning, did not calm my shattered nerves. I was ready to confess. To paraphrase King Lear, I assumed I’d done such things –What they were yet I knew not – but they were obviously the terrors of the earth, and had policemen calling!

From that moment I never questioned the basic reality of stories about false confessions made under duress because I was certainly prepared to admit to having started the Suez conflict if the policeman had suggested it!

Mary Mallon was born in Ireland in 1869 and then later moved, like so many others, to the United States. She made her living as a cook which, as it turned out, was a very bad career choice. Not, you understand, because she was a bad cook, but rather because of something contained inside herself; something fatal. She was no mass murderer: she was not the American version of Sweeny Todd; the thing inside her was typhoid.

Mary was a carrier and became known as Typhoid Mary. She refused to admit that she had anything to do with the trail of case which followed her trade. She was a healthy carrier and she saw not reason to stop working as a cook. It puts one in mind of the old duffer in the television comedy show who refused to believe that the war was over and constantly rejected the more and more pointed explanations of its ending to humorous effect. When you’re dealing with real life and, at that time, a killer disease, it’s not so funny. People died because of her inability to accept reality and she herself eventually died in enforced quarantine.

It’s at this point that I should make a light hearted comment and reveal that the motivation for this writing is some gossamer thread of thought which caught my attention for a nano second before its diaphanous lightness was lost on the chilly breeze of a signing-on day. But Typhoid Mary’s death tally has rather pushed the more serious aspects of my thoughts and the fugitive sparkle of the inconsequential now seems strangely out of place.

Never let it be said that the thought will be wasted, most of us live out our own versions of ‘Groundhog Day’ – even if the ‘day,’ is spread over a rather longer time span. We constantly retread thoughts, so the one that I’ve lost (or suppressed) for this piece of writing will pop up in another alluring guise some time soon, dressing itself in the vulgarity of originality.

And I will, I assure you, be taken in by the display!