Simply Sue: My Hero!
Ever thought of going to a parent-teacher meeting with Mr Darcy? Those fictional heroes would be an absolute pain to have around the house, says Sue Papworth.
With the constant enthusiasm for kneebritches, heaving bosoms, and damsels swooning over Mr Darcy, it is possibly not wise to criticise the heroes of fiction.
But wouldn’t they be an absolute pain to have around the house?
They tend to brood and glower a lot - or, as we call it in lesser chaps, sulk - and they smoulder darkly in corners when you need them to be useful, or stride about the moors in top-boots muttering on mucky nights, and probably leaving you to get the coal in. They don’t seem much good at the practical side of life. Not great joiners in, either.
Imagine having to take Mr Darcy to a PTA meeting, or Mr Rochester to tea with a nervous aunt, or Heathcliffe - well, anywhere really. And as for trekking around Sainsburys on a damp Tuesday with Sherlock Holmes…
The noisiest ones, of course, come from up north. You get that Mr Rochester (the one with the nice wife, keeps to herself, practices her singing in the attic) hammering about all over the countryside: black horse, big dog, ringing laugh, never lets anyone know what he’s up to. Drops dark hints. Shouts a lot. There’s a lot of shouting, especially around Haworth way.
Just down the road, that lot up at Wuthering Heights have the social workers around every five minutes: the kids are left to run wild, the boozy brother-in-law with the shotgun isn’t fit to be let out, and all Heathcliffe can do about it is go barking all over the moors kidnapping relations, yelling at ghosts, threatening folk left, right and centre, and being downright curmudgeonly with the neighbours.
Mr Darcy would probably make less mess and mayhem than them, being a southerner, but he wouldn’t be the sort of chap to pop next door to borrow the mower. Spend all his time in corners, if you don’t prod him…
“Come on, dear, you can’t spend the whole evening skulking behind the blackboard with your nose in the air. Come and talk to the nice woodwork teacher about little Fitzwilliam’s GCSE’s, and just STOP being rude about everybody…’’
Which I suppose is better than living in the flat below Sherlock Holmes - all those desperate crowned heads of Europe thundering up the stairs at all hours, and the crazed violin music at midnight, and if the banging at the door isn’t curious Bulgarians smoking unusual cigars, it’s the drug squad enquiring into possession of cocaine…
On the whole, you’re a lot better off with a budgie.
