For a long time now, I have hoarded toothpaste.
By this, I don’t mean that in these straitened times I have panic-bought huge stocks hoping to make a killing on the dental hygiene black market.
Rather, I have kept my own tube of toothpaste hidden away in the bathroom cupboard, so I don’t have to share with the rest of the family.
This is not a question of some weird gum-health fixation.
It’s just that they all squeeze from the middle and leave the lid off so there is always a crust of dried-up unpleasantness to negotiate at teeth time, and I do not like it.
It is a simple thing really.
What I’m trying to say is that my family annoys me.
Now, at the present time and in the present circumstances, I imagine that at some point in every day I speak for the entire nation in expressing that pettiest of complaints. All our families annoy us because we are not the Brady Bunch.
I would at least argue, though, that toothpaste hoarding is one of the more innocent manifestations of family annoyance.
After all, in the Bible (and the celebrated stage musical), Joseph annoyed his brothers so much that they took the admittedly extreme step of handing him over to some passing slave traders.
It’s fair to say that that option is no longer open to those of us who find our families annoying, since it would inevitably mean a gathering of more than two people and meeting people from outside our immediate household; so we have to look for strategies that don’t involve actually selling our siblings, spouses, parents or children.
What’s compelling about the story of Joseph, though, is that after leaving each other alone for a while, the brothers found that not only could they co-exist, but that they actually needed each other.
And we do too, and I reckon it’s not just in our house. I can bake and fix things that have been waiting to be fixed; Susie can feed us, sumptuously, and keep our spirits up with games; and the boys? Well, the boys can play FIFA. And whenever any of us gets too annoying or too annoyed, we can retreat to the corner and leave each other alone until we need each other again.
Which would be dinnertime.
Reading this back as I got ready to post it, I was struck by how much it drips with the privileges of space into which I can retreat, a family who are no more annoying than toothpaste and a job which continued to pay me throughout these strangest of months. If anything has written itself onto me since March, watching a world where none of these things can be assumed, still less all the wealth of entitlement and advantage that goes with being a white, middle-aged, middle-class englishman, it has been that these, and all my other inestimable privileges are not to be regarded lightly. Certainly not as lightly as I seem to regard them here.
The image above is Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Toothpaste Tube (1964), at the Cleveland Museum of Art.