3 hours ago
2
My mum’s best advice was “You’re allowed to enjoy nice things.” Both elements – the nice things and being allowed them – were equally important. She was a fervent believer in the restorative power of a treat, taking herself out for solo breakfasts most weeks (a bacon muffin and a cup of coffee in the cosseted calm of Bettys Tea Rooms), ordering chips at the slightest provocation, staying in chic hotels she had a pre-internet gift for ferreting out and being coaxed by department store salesladies into buying expensive unguents.
She was even keener on treating others, including me. During my teens and early 20s, when I was ill and unhappy in my body, she took me for lavish lunches, booked me massages and accompanied me on spa trips. I recently found a note she had sent me when I was slogging, lonely and sad, through my finals, which had obviously come with some cash. “Buy yourself something frivolous darling,” it read. “A nice nail polish?”
This makes her sound a bit of a princess, but she was anything but; that’s where the second part of her advice comes in. She grew up one of six children in a family with very little money, and took on caring responsibilities when she was very young; it was not a place, or a time, of treats. Feeling she was allowed to have nice things and go to lovely places was not a birthright, but she cultivated the confidence to pursue and enjoy them. Having grown up without much ease or beauty, seeking those things out and asserting her right to them was quietly defiant.
I had the good fortune to grow up with more money than she did, but none of her nerve. Often the places she brought me felt flat-out intimidating, but she made it into a game of sorts, an implicit “I dare you”. Scuttling sheepishly in her wake, I would gradually become emboldened to enjoy myself, gawping at well-heeled punters in a Parisian brasserie, trying on a gossamer cloud of a cashmere coat, or being happily bamboozled into buying a lipstick that would, allegedly, change my life.
Feeling allowed is a habit you have to keep cultivating. Now in my 50s, I still sometimes find myself wandering around a strange town, peering into enticing shop windows like the little match girl, trudging deliriously hungry and tired, because I don’t dare go into nice places. I feel like I’ll be out of place, or that I’ll embarrass myself.
But when that happens, I give myself a stern talking-to and channel my mum. I’m allowed to sit and drink a cup of tea in a palatial hotel where I’m not staying. I can breezily enter a forbiddingly empty antique shop, as if I’m in the market for a £40,000 stuffed giraffe. I can eat alone in a restaurant with starched tablecloths and heavy cutlery, not snarf down a sandwich on my chain-hotel bed. And I can do it because she’s there, whispering “go on”.
It’s frivolous, yes (and awful for my bank balance). But it’s also powerful to give yourself permission to do joyful, indulgent things and that goes double when you’re filled with sadness and fear or when the world is falling apart. We’re here for a good time, not a long time: my mum died at only 63. She was on her way to Rome, and I bet she was planning a lovely lunch.
