It was my uncle’s 85th birthday, so we did a Zoom across three continents. He kicked off with the claim that he was actually 84. On the one hand, you have to believe a man about his own date of birth, and it would be a wild time for him to start lying about his age. On the other hand, if a family can’t lose 20 minutes on whether a man is sure he means 1937, not 1936, those aren’t relatives at all; those are more like friends.
Then we had to do it all again, because my brothers joined late. They have a chimpy dominance thing where whoever is the latest is the mighty silverback. It meant, as ever, that we had to go through key details again for each new arrival, so by the end my uncle had been vaccinated six times.
He is the only double-vaccinated person on his street, the only one any of us has met. I am relieved about that; when I last spoke to him, only the Pfizer jab had been cleared and he wanted to hold out for the cheaper one. He knew it was free at the point of delivery – he is not a baby. He is just a man with an eye for a bargain.
Sick of the sight of my own fringe, I left abruptly and called him later to put the finishing touches on my salutations. “I hate those Zooms,” he said, after a bit of preamble about how nice it was to see everyone. “I can’t stand the sight of my own face.”
This made no sense to me, even though I feel exactly the same way. He is the least vain person I have met: he used to keep his extracted molars in his pocket so he could wow the crowd with a joke about still having all his own teeth.
“I look in the mirror once a day, when I wake up. I’ve never looked in the mirror for 40 minutes in my life.”
Yup. Same.
“And the gesticulation! Why do I do all these stupid things with my hands?”
“It feels like you’re being a little hard on yourself,” I told him.
I have realised, finally, nearly a year in, that vanity and never having signed up to look in a mirror for 40 minutes are two different concepts, each of which need a word of their own.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
