My in-laws came to stay recently, prompting a crisis of what some DIY chain has forced me to think of as “housebarassment”. We don’t have many guests, because I get funny when people use my mugs, and offer a welcome along the lines of the peregrine falcon nest boxes I watch on webcams: a few strewn pebbles, dismembered pigeon corpses, me hunched and glaring in a corner, covered in viscera. But some visits are welcome – we hardly ever see my in-laws, since they’re fairly elderly and live in France, but I like them! It’s a miracle. I hardly like anyone.
But it’s shaming to suddenly see your home through other eyes. Before they arrived, we surveyed the squalor we’d got used to, each secretly blaming the other. The shoe and pizza box mountain in the hall, an insanitary trip hazard. A pair of socks left on the radiator since last summer. A mummified – what? Apple? Lemon? Mouse? – in the fruit bowl, an unconscionable amount of hair everywhere, the sofa smelling of old dog and surrounded by crisp packets and coconut water cartons.
We’ve lived here for two years and had barely hung a single picture: my husband haphazardly put some on any hooks already in the walls the day we arrived (it looked as if they were curated by one of the stupider species of primate) and nothing has changed since. He’s always suggesting we tackle it but I’m tired, so tired. I should probably get my thyroid checked, or the 5am-waking dog put down (joke, joke! Who can get a doctor’s appointment these days?). But pre-guest housebarassment won out and we hung pictures, hid the shoes and vacuumed the sofa.
Unfortunately, none of that helped with a much worse problem: countrybarassment. My in-laws missed their first train because the platform was never announced; the second was severely delayed. Then for the whole trip, we hovered protectively, desperate to avoid any risk of injury. It’s not so much the (entirely correct) junior doctors’ strike – being French, they are used to strikes – but nothing could prepare them for the 2023 UK A&E experience after 13 years of underfunding. They claim it’s much harder to see a doctor in France now, but when we explained the fruitless 8am GP phone race, they looked aghast and said OK, no, it wasn’t that hard.
We talked about the current French retirement reform protests, of course. Both teachers, they retired well before hitting 60 and were horrified to hear retirement age might reach 68 here (versus a rise to 64 in France). They bemoaned the cost of living in France and political short-termism, but at least they’ve always had access to salad. They were curious about whether our energy bills had risen, since theirs have – but moderately: Macron forced EDF to take the hit by imposing a price cap, limiting increases dramatically. Here we get a nearly 130% rise in gas prices, with Ofgem feebly suggesting 85-year-olds might be spared pre-payment meters.
It’s all part of a wider spiral of countrybarassment: there’s so much here you can’t stuff in a cupboard and hide from visitors. Rivers running with shit; eight food banks in the supposedly prosperous city where we live; visiting musicians refused entry at the border; school groups no longer able to visit; a country seeking to breach its obligations towards refugees under international law, and to ignore European convention on human rights interim rulings. Like the house, it feels like a personal shame: how have we let it happen? Why aren’t we out on the streets, like the French?
Not everything was mortifying. The return train went like clockwork, and they were spellbound by a lovely group of women sitting next to us in Hawaiian garlands, enjoying a full cheeseboard and prosecco at 8am. “They are travelling to see a Tina Turner musical,” I translated after eavesdropping. “They are celebrating the birthday of the older lady in the paper crown holding the miniature whisky; she is 92.” That impressed them: in multi-generational boozy fun if nothing else, we’re still an inspiration.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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