When your partner is that bit older than you, you witness ageing in preview. I remember the moment — this time last year, on Brownsea Island in Dorset — that my boyfriend succumbed: he’d got chatting to a volunteer in some cords and shocked me by ending up with a year’s National Trust membership. He looked already greyer, but more contented. “We just can’t pretend any more,” he said. “It’s time.”
But with most of the year stuck inside the M25, a National Trust desert, this summer we had to let rip before our pass expired. As we criss-crossed the country, I cross-referenced maps to make sure we swapped a service station burger for a nip into any random National Trust property: golden arches for the green acorn. As we swung from Charlecote to Calke, there was always a collective sigh when we rumbled over the car park cattle grid. We were safe now, no surprises, no lapses.
That is the McDonald’s formula for well-branded chains: guarantee a uniform experience, every Big Mac the same. The National Trust is the McDonald’s of the middle-class middle-aged. In every café a slice of lemon drizzle; in every gift shop a trowel with a floral handle and a pot of damson jam in a cloth bonnet. Behind a velvet rope an ornate table is laid for a long-dead colonial plunderer who will never come for dinner. And outside, a ha-ha. There’s always a ha-ha.
McDonald’s are urban havens, specialising in the young. For the price of one McFlurry they can hang out for an afternoon. McDonald’s employs sulky teens too, converting them so they radiate the happiness of deep brand devotion. The National Trust does the same for the other end of life: their volunteers are old, but no curmudgeons: no one burns with more mad evangelical smileyness than a septuagenarian in a National Trust fleece.
It’s easy to mock, but I’m resisting. I took my late father to a National Trust property when he was frail. I knew they — as one — would be tender to us, and I was right. They ministered.
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Although unthinkable to both parties, it’s possible a united McTrust could stand for something good.
Bare facts
On walking through a National Trust nudist area, Knoll Beach in Dorset, our children flung off their clothes, skewing the demographic of male pensioners displaying gravity’s effects. Then we ran into an even weirder life form collapsed in the sand: a giant blob of jelly the size of a space hopper. My daughter screamed and ran, plunging her foot into another blob, and another. Barrel jellyfish, we were told, infesting our shores this summer. That they targeted this nudist beach must be nature’s way of telling us to wear more shorts.
An eccentric group gathered around to exclaim. One wrinkling nudist told us that jellyfish are the only animals — specifically a tiny species called Turritopsis dohrnii— that are immortal. After they reproduce, they can return themselves to baby-state and start again. It’s true.
We spent the rest of the summer asking people the Jellyfish Question: if after having kids you got to begin again as a baby, would you? And miss the rest? The National Trust and all?
Secrets of the sole
After my boyfriend bought some beach shoes, the salesman pointed out to him a secret compartment in the sole for his “stash”. So flattering! So handy for the key to the allotment!
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I had this in mind at the violent end-of-summer ritual in our local shoe shop: under toppling stacks of Start-rites, fortysomething mothers, me included, were battling their pre-teen daughters. No to the school shoes with a secret box in the heel for a hidden doll. They’ve got the look of something that inmates at a women’s prison would fashion to smuggle heroin past the guards.
Then I realised, that is truth of it. The girls are just trying to smuggle a bit of Disney-crack past us, their femi-Nazi guards. What you would hide in your shoe is the key to your soul.