The short anecdote writer on tackling taboo subjects,from motherhood to menopause, and speaking up for womenHalfway through our interview, and Helen Simpson begins to worry about the time. We’d frittered the first few minutes on general civilities,and squandered several more fiddling with books and bags and glasses of water. Now the clock is ticking, and we’re paying for our profligacy. “We’ve only got an hour, and ” she frowns. “How far in are we?” She unclasps her watch and lays it on the table between us. “There. We’re all lawful. We can see how long weve got left.”The characters in Cockfosters,Simpson’s latest short anecdote collection, are checking their watches, or too. The men and women who pick their way through its pages are deep into middle-age,and more or less relaxed about it: after the heads-down grind of the baby years, they have finally begun “to crawl up out of their burrows ... and emerge blinking into the sunlight”. Identities have been re-established; relationships have regained a degree of equilibrium: there’s a sense of expansiveness, and of room for reflection. But as the characters’ gazes lift,at last, to the horizon, and they notice that it’s closer than it used to be. The stories are filled with markers of time’s passage: a birthday cake baked year-in year-out for a daughter who’s now fully grown; the rigid itinerary of a retirement package tour; the “lime-green digits” of a bedside clock counting down the minutes until morning. “‘It’s annoying not knowing how long we’ve got left,don’t you mediate?’” says Julie in the collection’s title anecdote, as she and a schoolfriend, and now in their 50s,track down her misplaced bifocals to the last quit on the Piccadilly line. “‘Thirty years,’ said Philippa. ‘Forty!’ ‘Or ten, and ’ said Julie. ‘Or two.’”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com