When hopes are dashed

Sonia Kelly

I’VE noticed that on the whole, people seem reluctant to use the phrase ‘so disappointing’ – it is as if admitting to disappointment is somehow demeaning. This is why a former client of the Health Centre, at the time I was running it, stands out in my memory. She was always so disappointed. If she didn’t quite lose half a stone in the week, if she wasn’t completely cured of an arthritic knee, if she couldn’t manage the lotus position in yoga…the catch phrase would be uttered. Because, despite of all the implied failings, she was a regular visitor, she became known as “so disappointed”. Perhaps this proves that, if you want to make an indelible mark on people’s memory, the best method is to criticise them.

To this day, I often find myself muttering ‘that’s so disappointing’ under my breath. Like when waking up and knowing it’s going to be a wet day. On good days, the clock comes into view around 6.30am. When the clock face is still invisible at this hour, the day is dreary prospect.

The familiar mantra crops up also when I have bought a book that seemed good from reviews and turns out to be a real struggle to get through. This happened lately with Dervla Murphy’s ‘Silverland’, which promised to be an interesting account of one of her cycling trips through Siberia. Instead it turned out to be an endless train journey through unbelievably depressing towns, mostly dominated by abandoned factories, where poverty and TB are endemic and babushkas are reduced to grubbing in rubbish bins for scraps of food.

In this case, though, the disappointment was slightly mitigated by the curious (and disappointing) information – apropos of something I can’t remember – that George Bush has a lucrative association with an organisation in the death-care industry that employs 35,000 workers. Named Service Corporation International, it operates undertaker companies in five continents. A corollary to this is that in the US alone, more than 800 gallons of embalming fluid are buried annually, thus polluting with toxic substances the surrounding soil and water courses. Even if cremation is employed, mercury-based dental fillings release poisonous vapour into the atmosphere. Both methods of disposal are extra lethal to the employees, many of whom succumb to cancer.

Another, and rather puzzling, source of disappointment is the way clouds behave when the day is actually fine. If one decides to sit in the sunshine and the sky is uniformly blue except for one line of clouds, why do they all make a beeline for the sun and pass over it in succession? One is thus subjected to periods of dark chill, which can only be described as ‘so disappointing’.

In the same emotional category must be the many failures of my physical system to accept all efforts to improve it. Like, drinking lots of water, which is supposed to be essential for one’s well-being. Any more than half a glass and I have a sneezing fit, as though my cells were drowning. I’ve tried stuff like orange juice and grapefruit-seed pills to try and accumulate the prescribed amount of vitamin C, only to feel as if I was getting MS shortly afterwards, implying that I am allergic to citrus fruit. Pills to stop my hair falling out, although successful, induced some other form of debilitating disease. At that point, I decided to try Lucozade, said to account for the vigourous action of people like Damien Duff. Nothing happened, except that after a while I felt I was sickening for ‘flu and felt less and less like action…

Is all this ‘so disappointing’, or what?

And I suppose the ultimate disappointment will occur at the time I go blind, in spite of all the experimental injections I have so far been subject to.