'UNSUBSCRIBE...'

 

You know you’ve spent too much time at home, with inane daytime tv in the background, when the earworm which torments you for half a day is the jingle performed by Bird’s Eye frozen vegetables…

 

What with two periods of working from home in lockdown, and several school holidays with very little opportunity to do anything but stay at home, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much daytime tv.  For me, the procession of automatically volume-raised adverts, every 20 minutes or so, has come to personify what’s been so depressing about these twelve (almost thirteen) pandemic months.

 

It’s not just the singing vegetables: at least they look cheerful about their impending fate (or plate).  It’s the constant imperatives to ‘hurry’, before this or that sale ends (Online only! Get clicking now!).  It’s the filmed inferiority complexes of home hair-dye kits and anti-wrinkle creams… blitz those greys, smooth on that retinol.  Because you’re worth it.   But most of all, it’s the funeral plans.

 

Maybe it’s because, traditionally, the typical customers of daytime tv are retired- at home- infirm, perhaps.  But I’ve never experienced anything quite like the bombardment of funeral plan or over 50s savings plan adverts.  I feel almost guilty for not having a named savings plan specifically for my funeral, even though I know there’s enough money there to cover such an eventuality, were it to occur imminently.  I’ve seen adverts (with chilling frequency) for at least three different funeral plan providers, at different times and on different channels.  When I’m in the kind of mood where dark humour feels appropriate, my favourite of these adverts is when the chap from next door calls round with some misdirected post, and advises his female neighbour to get saving for her funeral.  I cannot imagine advising my neighbours like this… especially in the middle of a pandemic, when we’re all just that little bit more attuned to our own mortality. 

 

And it’s not just on tv.  I don’t get very much that’s interesting, or personal, in the post: I do, however, get frequent advertising leaflets and junk mail.  In rage, last week, I shredded a small catalogue of ‘easi-recliners’, chairs featuring a motorised mechanism which would help me to get up more readily.  I’ve been the lucky recipient of such publications ever since my second-last birthday.  Adverts for the latest deals on fashion, too:  I write this after today’s post was stylishly flung in the recycling bin, as it breathlessly offered me the opportunity to ‘wear the British fashion brand everyone’s talking about’.    I’ve had a ‘plan your own funeral’ booklet through the letterbox as well:  offering the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put everything in place, pay for it all, and then leave directions with a next-of-kin to press go on the whole procedure when the crucial moment arrives.  I know, I know: there’s something sensible about leaving arrangements in place, so that whoever’s left behind will have less hassle and no expense.  But do the advertisers never think that, by some kind of tragic law of averages, some of the recipients of these tasteful booklets could be deeply anxious about their own fragility- recently bereaved and deep in grief- depressed, and really struggling?  These booklets go to everyone once they reach a certain age.

 

And it’s not just in the letterbox either.  These last two days, I’ve spent some therapeutic time unsubscribing from many, many marketing emails which I mostly get because of an online purchase, or brief curiosity which didn’t actually result in buying anything at all.  I realised that actually, no, two daily emails from a well-known site were not among the favourite things I wanted to pin to a happy mood-board.  I didn’t want reminders from several different cosmetic companies, numerous times each day, about how to erase those lines or this sun damage, or fix that terrible lockdown hair.  'I’ll sort it, ok', I found myself muttering, testily, as yet another cheery problem-fixer email pinged its way into my life.  To seem younger, I was urged yesterday, ‘upgrade your jeans to our cool distressed denim!’ All jaunty exclamation marks and artful rips.  To deal with the symptoms of being a woman of a certain age, I was nudged subtly today at lunchtime, here’s a brand-new range of creams and lotions, from a top brand, exclusive to M&S.  This is not just mid-life; this is M&S mid-life.  And don’t even start me on the (currently countless) companies who sent out upbeat emails about enhancing your spring wardrobe or reinventing some aspect of your home as the springtime light streams through your windows… only to whisper, in small print somewhere, that, actually, they don’t ship to Northern Ireland any more.  Un. Sub. Scribe…

 

There’s something very liberating about pressing unsubscribe.  About muting the tv or turning it off completely.  About ripping the address label off an unsolicited leaflet or catalogue, before depositing it in the recycling.  It can even feel like a huge relief to turn devices off for a bit, even if you feel that you need to stay connected most of the time.

 

If only it were as easy as that to unsubscribe from the reality that these bombarding adverts represent.  That you’re getting older- yes, when you strip away the small amount of makeup you still wear, you see lines.  That you need to work on your hair, now and then.  That you’ve started to have moments when, if you’ve stayed sitting in the same position for too long, you might groan softly as you get up.  That you’ve made a will and you can’t say you haven’t thought about your funeral, simply because you’re at the older end of the age-range in your workplace, and so many of the generation above you in your family have now gone. 

 

The ultimate reality tv, for me, these last 12 months, has been the adverts, accompanied in stereo in my letterbox and in the inbox of my various devices.  And I don’t like it.  ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality’; I’m quoting TS Eliot again.   At a time when everything seems bleak, even though the spring flowers are blooming and there are tentative steps to easing lockdown, I don’t feel as if I can bear very much more reality at all.

 

So, forgive me if my blog is a little quiet.  I’ll probably be busy with work; otherwise I might be admiring beautiful coastal views on a walk, trying to improve the arthritic reality of rediscovering my love of playing the piano, or rewatching Dix Pour Cent from the start of Season 1. Most of all, I’ll be losing myself in the eloquent, magical stories of books.

 

That’s the kind of reality from which I’ll never unsubscribe.