Badmind

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A lot of Roald Dahl’s lessons have stayed with me, but none so ingrained as that famous passage from The Twits.

“If a person has ugly thoughts,” writes Dahl. “It begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it”.

On the flip side, a person who has good thoughts “cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”

A passage from The Twits by Roald Dahl.

I’m sure there’s lots to say about packaging up such wisdom alongside a fear of becoming unattractive to others but regardless the warning stuck. It reared its head again this week, when I was listening to a dilemmas episode of The Receipts Podcast. A listener had written in with a problem concerning her mother. The older woman was always holding forth on her weight, the dilemma’s author complained, and she would make sly digs about her, particularly in front of male friends.