Intrepid sisters of the Service

Diplomatic memoirs were once a staple of serious publishers; nowadays they are privately printed, if published at all. But the appetite for memoirs of the ‘trailing spouse’, the plucky ‘diplomatic baggage’, seems insatiable. A phalanx of distinguished critics rolled out on the dustjacket has greeted Brigid Keenan’s contribution, the latest to this popular genre, as a masterpiece. It’s not; but it’s fun and I suspect it of being quite a spoof too.

The gifted wife of the current EU ambassador to Kazakhstan, a professional journalist, has whiled away time in Almaty, capital of the land of the Soviet gulags, in lacing a highly coloured account of her 30-year marriage to her steady eurocrat husband with every funny story to come her way in Nepal, Ethiopia, West Africa, India, the West Indies, Syria and Kazakhstan, not to mention London and Brussels. It succeeds and must as surely strike a chord in the hearts of those of her ‘brave sisters in postings overseas’ with any sense of humour as with the general reader who wants to get no nearer the realities of ‘ex-pat’ life than going on a package tour.

Keenan is not, she would have us believe, the stuff of a Victorian lady traveller; there is nothing doughty about her and certainly no stiff upper lip. Nor does she heed Salad Days’ advice and remember not to look back. With a glorious sense of the ridiculous, she depicts herself as a hyperventilating hysteric, who sobs her doom-ridden fantasies into reality and claims to have been ‘utterly miserable in every one of the six countries across the four continents’ to which she followed a long- suffering spouse during the last three decades. Had she really been that silly, he would surely have taken stern measures long before she idiotically got them locked into their bedroom in Port of Spain and he smashed both ankles jumping out of the window in order to free them.