Do you remember that classic 1980s American TV series about a group of elderly American women, The Golden Girls? You could call the sitcom the geriatric equivalent of Friends: equally sharp, and every bit as addictive. One of the central characters (she was called Rose) was forever lapsing into interminable accounts of uninteresting events. Her companions would try different means of cutting her short, doing so with a brutality born of desperation. One such intervention became almost a catch-phrase among her circle: ‘Where is this story going, Rose?’
I’ve always remembered it. And the more time I spend in the company of those now my age or older — men and women in their sixties, seventies or eighties — the more am I struck by that candid remark. What is it about advancing years that impels some (not all) to recount things that happened — today, yesterday, last year or when young — that are no more than that: just chronological reports of things that happened, in the order in which they happened, with no moral, no twist, no real plot, no implication, and no logical beginning, substance or conclusion? It’s just a chunk of day-to-day reality, creeping in its petty pace, and reported in sequence.
A friend once told me of a competition he’d run for the most boring imaginary title for an autobiography. The winning entry was No, I tell a lie, it must have been the Tuesday. It’s a telltale indicator of these ‘Where is this story going, Rose?’ reports that they almost invariably bog down at some point while the narrator struggles to retrieve a fact, a date or a name that has temporarily escaped him, but is of no possible interest or importance to the tale; and, after struggling unsuccessfully to fill in the blank, will move on with an exasperated sigh — ‘Oh never mind; it doesn’t matter anyway’ — to resume the narrative. Indeed it doesn’t matter. But by now his hearers are coming to the conclusion that nothing else in the story matters either. Or else he’ll retrieve in time the missing datum, and brandish it with the triumph of a jigsaw-puzzler who has just located the missing cardboard morsel of pale blue sky — as though the aim and justification of the whole exercise was to fill in the gaps until the whole picture was in place.
A daily diary, re-read in month-long chunks after the elapse of decades, has some of these same qualities of pointless report, of a story going nowhere; but a well-written diary will be illuminated with flashes of description, of evocation, of appraisal. Rose, however, along with her millions of fellow storytellers, is not intending to comment, judge or make an argument; she is not trying to bring another time to life. Asked her views on any of the actors in her tale, or what verdicts she has reached, she’ll look at you as though you were missing the point: she wasn’t by her story meaning to provoke, amuse, move, lift, surprise or advise her hearers; she was just telling them what happened, even though they hadn’t asked and didn’t need to know. Typically, therefore, such accounts will be full of wholly irrelevant detail. The day of the week, or name of the street, or which set of traffic lights it was, or whether the A1 or the A515 was the road in question, will assume a central position in the story.
A good storyteller will supply his readers or hearers with data that will turn out to be needful to their understanding as the story unfolds — so that if he tells you it was the holly tree as opposed to any other landmark where our hero stopped and turned back, you’ll know that’s going to matter. Rose, however, will recall and inform you that it was the holly tree just because she can. She remembers it was the holly tree.
As for her hearers, something happens to them — happens to the audience for any such tale — that we’re all familiar with. One has been listening since the tale began, trying — on the assumption that sooner or later it’s all going to fit together into what could be called a plot — to remember the salient facts. But at a certain point it dawns (often around the same time for all the audience) that there aren’t any salient facts because there isn’t a plot.
My dear Nana did it, endlessly, to Granddad’s despair. Grandma never did. My mother will occasionally tell a story we’ve heard before, but it will always be a story, interesting and worth telling to those who don’t know it. My father showed not the slightest tendency to tell anyone anything that had happened just because it had happened: indeed as he got older he grew more angrily impatient with those who did.
So why? Why do people do it? What are they minded to achieve as they launch into the formless narrative? Is the habit of inconsequentiality, in those among whom it appears, a result to the ageing process? I think not, or not precisely. Observation suggests that those who do it a lot as they get older, always did it a bit when they were younger. Perhaps in old age they just have more time — or are less self-critical, less bothered anyway about whether anyone’s interested.
I’ve even wondered whether this kind of storytelling is an unwitting intellectual gymnasium: a set of exercises we set up to help us keep on top of things, and by repetition keep our memory coherent as powers of recollection fade. I’m encouraged in that hypothesis by the fact that the other group who tell pointless stories are toddlers: little humans just gaining and expanding the powers of speech: maybe they too are exercising?
But then again… oh dear… where was this column going, Rose?
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