No Valentines from the cats again. Sometimes I wonder whether they are working as hard at this relationship as I am.
Reflections on the single life by Lynne Truss
So begins Lynne Truss in her collection of media columns. These appeared originally between 1988 and 1995 and were published in The Times and other journals. The collection was reissued in 2010 and is still available, now described on Amazon as ‘the alternative Bridget Jones’. This moves the book forward from its cultural moment, but not by much. Cats and their paw prints mark the pages of sections named, more or less arbitrarily, ‘The Trials of Celibacy Explored with Surprising Frankness’, or ‘Single Bananas’.
Written in a time before the domination of the internet, let alone social media, some of its references (to Amstrad ribbons; Lonely Hearts columns with replies by post, typewriters) belong to a world that seems very distant, and comforting, if only because of the many terrible world events which have yet to take place. Many of the pieces were TV, cinema or book reviews, or reflections inspired by them, but the themes: cats; navigating relationships; the absurdities of a metropolitan existence – remain current. One piece reflects on a celebrity sportsman telling his wife that their marriage was over by sending a fax. Substitute text, or unfriending, for fax, and you have a persistent urban myth.
There’s been no change, either, in the inability of a cat to use a tin-opener, nor of the lengths to which some owners will go to bond with their pets. In one piece Lynne Truss imagines – well, I suppose in the privacy of her kitchen she might actually have done it – impersonating the once-live contents of their food: ‘a rabbit goes like this’. The cats, waiting to be fed, remain unimpressed. Many of the pieces are like stand-up anecdotes or riffs. One considers the question of cats’ IQ and the psychology of the questionnaire. She concludes that in general you can define the intelligence of cats by identifying things they won’t, as much as can’t do. Pondering the claim made by a book she’s reviewing that no cat skeletons were discovered in Pompeii, she argues that this was probably owing to the fact that cats got themselves out of danger ‘at the first whiff of sulphur’, leaving their surprised owners, holding out handfuls of cat treats, to be discovered petrified in the gesture centuries later.
In reviewing Susan Hill’s sequel to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca Lynne Truss reimagines the final return of Max de Winter and his second wife to Manderley, when they see the house burning in the distance. She uses the scene to riff on the character of the anonymous second wife: ‘well intentioned, not very bright, motivated by gratitude and love, and terrorized by a fear of failure’. This, she says, is an archetype of the heroine. I wasn’t sure that this was true for du Maurier in 1938, let alone in 1995, but then Lynne Truss mentions Princess Diana, and I got it. Speaking as the second Mrs de Winter Truss tells us – or reminds us – that she’s changed a lot since the days of Rebecca, and her future will take a different course, once she’s divorced Maxim, collected half the insurance money on Manderley, and learns to sail. She will even gain a name.
Truss’s feminism is humorous but incisive. I wonder whether the businessmen who encountered her hauling books up the stairs in an office building during a London-wide blackout recognised themselves in the column that followed. One of them commented (jocularly of course) that he supposed she must have blacked out the whole of London by plugging her typewriter into the wrong socket. She proceeds to deconstruct the ‘perfect diamond’ of British male prejudice.
Fittingly, however, the last word in the compilation goes to a cat, and in my view it’s worth getting hold of a copy of the book to read this piece alone. It begins: ‘She was thirty-one when I got her. Mangy and with a bit of a whiff, but also affectionate.’
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