LINGERING BEHAVIOURS

NOT TO MENTION BELIEFS

I had to smile at myself this morning. I had made and drunk a mug of tea and took the mug back into the kitchen. In the bottom, as always, was a small amount of liquid.

The reason for this? When I was young my mother would make tea in a teapot using leaf tea. Even with a tea-strainer, a few errant leaves slipped into the cup where they would settle to the bottom and lie in wait. An unwary drinker might finish the cup and ‘yuck’ their mouth would be full of tea-leaves, leaves which were surprisingly hard to get rid of. In reality, they might be only two or three fragments of leaves but it felt like your mouth was filled with the annual crop of a plantation.

So we soon learned not to drink the final half-mouthful for fear of the lurking menace. For the last twenty years I have been using tea-bags so the risk has been eradicated. Not so the residual behaviour. On a couple of occasions in these years, the tea-bag burst and it always seems then that I have absent-mindedly ignored my maternal admonishments and swallowed the last drop and the offending fragments of leaves.

On the whole, therefore, not drinking the final cup of tea seems a sensible behaviour. And the same would be true even more for an aficionado of Turkish or Greek coffee.

This got me thinking about some other behaviours which may continue long past their sell-by date.  Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street series has a character which exemplifies this beautifully. Bertie Pollock is a six or seven-year-old genius, wise beyond his years and certainly more so than his dreadful mother, Irene who has a programme to make him an intellectual titan. He may have read more books than most adults, speak Italian, play the saxophone to a high level and have a marked emotional intelligence as well.. Yet he has an abiding behaviour which infuriates Irene. He does not step on the cracks in pavements for fear of being eaten by bears.

It’s also claimed that Samuel Johnson, a real-life intellectual titan, had to touch every lamp-post he walked past and once retraced his steps for half a mile when he realised he’d missed one.

Recognise that, done it, finally grew out of it at the age of, I don’t know, either seven or twenty-seven. It’s quite a common fear and it makes me wonder if there’s a secret cabal of malevolent adults who spread this fear amongst children. Fortunately, Bertie, who the author sensibly doesn’t allow to age, never grows out of this to Irene’s continuing chagrin. If you’ve not read these wonderful, feel-good books, start right away. Or the bears will come for you.

It got me thinking of my own lingering behaviours of which I have many. Thank goodness for the film As Good as it Gets where Jack Nicolson’’s portrayal of an author with obsessive compulsive disorder shocked me into stopping what I worried might be my own journey into this territory. I still have to rinse my hands after dropping anything in the bin, however. Presumably deadly germs are just waiting to leap on my fingers and destroy me.

And I count the number of steps I climb, not all but many. Interestingly, my father used to stare out of the window at mealtimes, in a reverie which I believed was taken up with deep and wonderful thoughts. But when I asked him in his 90s what he had been thinking all those years ago he said, ‘I wasn’t thinking, just counting the bricks on the garden wall.’ So maybe we inherit our residual behaviours.

So here are some of my Lingering Behaviours, some of which I have, thank goodness, grown out of but also others which still linger with me.

Stepping over the cracks in paving stones. No, I no longer do this. But it may be because the town I moved to when I was eight had more tarmac pavements than paved ones.

Running out of the toilet before the flush ended for fear toilet bowl monsters would chase me the moment it did. No, I no longer do this. But maybe because the house I moved to, had an inside toilet and a swift exit would lead to my falling down the stairs.

Counting steps. Occasionally, although I have no idea why I do sometimes and not others. a

Heart-stopping terror at seeing the 1939 film Hunchback of Notre Dame. Oh yes, still suffer this one. The terror was invoked by seeing Charles Laughton’s Hunchback vilified and then whipped. I screamed and screamed and still can’t watch the film. In fact, I almost put a picture of the poster on this Substack but decided against doing so. Didn’t want any visual reminders. Wouldn’t dream of even seeing the Disney version. A definite lingerer.

Terror at seeing Christ on the cross. According to my mother I screamed the house down when I saw a picture of Christ on the television and he lifted his head and said, ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do.’ I had to be taken out of the film Ben Hur because there was a picture of three crosses at the opening, dreaded Easter and would never watch any programmes about the crucifixion and was terrified when I read about Padre Pio’s stigmata, fearing I might develop one. No chance as I’m not at all saintly. I still have this behaviour to an extent. I go in churches but won’t look for long at too realistic a rendition of the crucifixion.

I like classical music but not opera, like pop music with vocals but not instrumentals. Maybe because the Tornados Telstar was in the UK singles charts for 25 weeks and you couldn’t escape it. And this was preceded by Acker Bilk’s Stranger on the Shore which was in the top 50 for a whole year. I can listen to instrumentals now, at least for a while and even some arias from Opera. But really, really can’t cope with jazz.

I’m convinced that my mother made me eat the jelly in cheap pork pies and I still dislike anything too slimy, food in aspic and the parts of films where there’s too much slime. Even Men In Black and Ghostbusters make my toes curl when there’s too much slime.

It’s interesting that so many of these residual behaviours were formed before I was eight years old so the quote ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man’ is probably accurate.  It’s not by Loyola as I was told when a teenager but by Aristotle. So there’s a lingering belief I ditched only this morning.

So please adults, don’t tell children below the age of eight that they will be eaten if they stand on cracks, nor that monsters dwell in toilets, nor anything else that is going to grip them for all their lives. Unless that' a smile is worth a thousand frowns.

I was going to attach a story about such behaviour but my friend says it’s one of the gruesome ones which make her glad she’s not inside my head so I won’t. But you could buy my book Artful about how the Dodger could not shake his need to thieve.

https://mybook.to/TheArtfulDodger

If you want to share any lingering behaviours or beliefs you suffer from or secretly enjoy, why not pop them in the comment box. And please share this post with your friends and ask them to subscribe.