The Age of Irrelephants

I’ve suddenly got to the age where I’m irrelevant. Shh. Don’t talk about it. Pretend it’s not happening. Getting old is a problem because it means you are closer to the elephant than ever. Gosh. That’s it. You’ve done it now. You’ve talked about death again. Don’t you know anything? You are not allowed to mention, or even think about dying. And people who are getting close to it shouldn’t be seen. Quick! Botox those wrinkles, stick some arse fat into your lips, dye your hair, and pretend that you are still young and relevant.

There is no reason for this picture, other than I like it.

I’ve also got to the age where I’m history. This is a shock. I remember my parents being equally shocked when my son told them that his primary school history topic was ‘The Sixties’. I laughed at them and said, it will be ‘The Eighties’ soon and everyone will be saying how interesting Chernobyl and leg warmers were. What happened? Did we miss out on ‘The Seventies’? Maybe, nothing happened, except one long hot summer and prog rock might be too difficult to study.

Last night I saw Blinded By The Light, a film about a boy’s love of Bruce Springsteen. I enjoyed it but when you lived through the era, you can’t help being surprised by some of the inaccuracies. I couldn’t believe that in 1980 his mate got a Chopper, which, even though it went out of production that year was supposed to be cool and he got a Rubik’s Cube, which, hardly anyone had yet and despite winning toy of the year was depicted as the not cool present. The Long Suffering Husband couldn’t believe that in 1988 he went off to University in a G-reg van.

The worrying thing is that I’m not history. If I live to the average age then I have another thirty years.  That’s a lot of life. It’s worse for women too. We can see old men. Old men don’t seem to remind us of our imminent death in the same way.

Kathy Burke has a wonderful, thought provoking documentary on Channel 4 at the moment called All Women. This week’s episode gave me a lightbulb moment. She said that the menopause is the most ***** up thing for women. She wasn’t really talking about what medics call menopause. She wasn’t saying that being a woman without periods and the ability to carry a baby was bad but she was saying that the transition to get to that stage was ridiculous. And it is but being a woman without periods and the ability to carry a baby is fantastic. The other side is brilliant. I’ve never had more energy, I can have loads of sex without worrying about getting pregnant and I can wear white trousers. None of these things are compulsory for us no longer fertile women but they are possible and it’s like being a man. The other side isn’t talked about very much. I guess that not so many women are actually getting there. Most of the treatments for menopause are actually about artificially fooling the body into thinking it is still fertile. The programme followed a woman who was having her eggs frozen and talked to the fertility doctor. She said that the root of all inequality is that men can have children forever and women can’t. She might be right but women being fertile forever isn’t really the solution I want. I feel some dystopian/utopian fiction coming on where men have to have vasectomies at 50.

The reason I started thinking about all of this is because Bake Off is coming back. The contestants have been announced and when I looked at them I suddenly felt old. Baking experts were traditionally your Nanna. Women who were no longer fertile, who had a bit of time and energy on their hands. Obviously, they couldn’t go to work, or run the country or anything sensible like that because the skills of child rearing are universally unrecognised and definitely not transferable (this should be sarcasm). So, they became experts at the things they were allowed to do. They baked and sewed and knitted and (for this generation) looked after the grandchildren. Suddenly, though, people (and especially TV) has realised that these grandma pastimes are fun and young people want in. When Bake Off first started, the post retirement 70+ bakers were missing, understandably, because no one wants to see anyone on TV that might remind you that death is approaching - and let’s be honest, that’s why Mary Berry had to go too. However, there were still a good number of Nanny-bakers. This year the oldest person is a 56 year old man and the oldest woman is 40. This makes me think that people only want to see fertility on TV, which does explain why all the slurping on Love Island is so popular.

So, despite the fact that I will probably live another thirty years I have reached the age of irrelephants. The age, where we don’t mention my lack of fertility and pretend that I have no use in life. Well, as Kathy Burke would say, fuck that!

The Lynchpin

I love a party.

I know. You’ve just read that line twice and scratched your head. It doesn’t sound possible, does it? You know me as a socially awkward person, who likes quiet, reading books and doesn’t drink. I might stalk a party like an interested social anthropologist, looking totally out of my comfort zone but I love them. There’s nothing I like more in life than seeing people enjoying themselves. Whenever I saw my Dad he would always say, “Tell me something nice,” and I think it’s my version of that. It’s possible that the world divides into two (probably 48/52) between people who thrive knowing that others are more happy/unhappy than them. Hearing about or seeing other people’s joy makes me happy.

If you are part of a large family you probably only see each other at weddings and funerals or hatches, matches and dispatches, if you include cooing over new babies. This makes sense in our busy lives as you don’t always have much in common with Great-Uncle-Paul-Twice-Removed but it’s probably a mistake.

On Saturday, I was invited to a party by my cousin. It was wonderful. She has a lovely house at the end of a country lane, a bunch of really great friends and a very generous husband, who loves to host. At any party, people tend to stay within their social groups (oh, gosh, I’m never getting invited to a party again, am I?) and this party was no exception. There were the florists (who would have guessed that florists were so loud?), the police (This is X, we were friends on the riot squad), the Irish contingent (I can’t tell you what they said because of the very thick accents that got thicker as they consumed ever more impressive amounts of alcohol, while still standing), the husband’s friends  (“I’ve known  him for thirty years”) and the family.  In the family group with me were the Long  Suffering Husband,  my sister, another cousin, her husband, daughter and daughter’s fiancé. This isn’t a very impressive number considering that there twenty two cousins on my Dad’s side of the family and so I feel even more privileged to have been invited.
“Do you ever look at all of us and wonder how we are related?” my cousin asked.
“The opposite,” I said. “Weirdly, I see a lot of similarities. Just look at how we can talk to anyone.”

My other cousin’s daughter reminded me of my own daughter, except with a larger vocabulary of swear words and it made me wonder how much of personality is actually genetic. I had always thought it was nurture but such similarities with no shared experiences growing up makes me question that. The last time I saw this woman, she was a teenager with pink dip-dyed hair and my daughter pointed at her from across the room and wanted to be as cool as that. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten that this, the only time our two daughters had met, was actually at my Uncle’s funeral and so what I’d hoped would be a funny/happy reminiscence brought on tears.

If you are part of a big family there will always be this discussion at the end.
“It’s been really nice to see you again.”
“Yes, it’s funny how we get on so well, even though we hardly ever see each other.”
“We should get together more often.”
“Yes, it used to be weddings and funerals. Now it only seems to be funerals.”
“And there’s been too many of them, lately.”
“We should get together more often.”
You all agree and then you don’t see anyone until the next funeral.

Sometimes, you are really lucky and there is someone who keeps everyone together. My Dad used to try. As the baby of the family, he kept in touch with everyone. Even the Russian spy would answer the phone to him. He arranged occasional meals and parties that lots of people managed to come to and when he was dying he was concerned enough about his role of keeping everyone in touch to ask me to start a messenger group to let everyone know he was stepping down from the role. Kindly, he didn’t ask either me or my sister to step up.

At the end of Mum’s funeral, we were having the usual cousins conversation when one said, “I know! I can do it. I have a house in the country. I can have BBQs and invite you. I can keep everyone together. I can be the lynchpin”

Thank you, Lynchpin, I had a wonderful time at your party.

But she didn’t...and then she did

When you are a story teller and your parents die part of your grieving process is to tell stories.
You may have guessed that writing helps me sort my brain out. After Mum died my brain actually broke and writing wasn’t going to fix it. EMDR did that but even though I now want my blog to be about things other than my parents and death that still seems to be where my brain is, so I guess I still have the normal fixing to do.

  When my Dad was still alive I had started to write down a complicated family story. Because it’s complex, it’s long and it takes time to get right. I have written and rewritten it a million times, never quite happy with what it’s saying. Each time I wrote something, I would doubt the truth of it and go and check with my parents. Now that they aren’t here, the story has been freed. I don’t have to tell the truth. I can take the grain and twist it into something more and I’ll be honest, it’s doing my head in. I have a new character and she is relentless; constantly nagging at me to write down what she thinks.

A friend sent me a message, asking if I had written Joanna Cannon’s The Trouble with Goats and Sheep. I didn’t. I wish I had because it’s such a lovely book but I know what she means. The prose feels very me. I was telling the Long Suffering Husband about her text and I said, “It’s funny really because when I was reading it I kept thinking, ‘I could have written this.’l
Then a little voice in the back of my head said, “But you didn’t.”
And it’s true. I didn’t. I think I’m too lazy to get any of my writing published, so I probably never will and that’s fine.

It made me think of a story about my Mum I want to tell you. (I think it’s true but I can’t check so there is at least a grain in there).

My mum was quiet. You could easily miss her brilliance and steely determination, blinded by the flashy lights of my Dad. She was quite happy not to go out very much but Dad was gregarious. He loved a party. He liked to host, which meant lots of work for Mum too but sometimes  I think she preferred that as she was in control of what happened in the evening. He wasn’t one of those men that just dropped things on her, though; they worked as a team.

 However, they did go out. Mum had a large circle of glamorous arty friends and belonged to a babysitting circle. Every woman in the circle was given a certain amount of those little white  cardboard tags with different coloured dots on. The dots represented different amounts of time. They paid each other with these tags for baby sitting services.

One of my mum’s arty friends was a woman called Patsy. My sister and I loved Patsy. We wanted to be her when we grew up. To us, she seemed both glamorous, rich and romantically tragic. Patsy ironed towels, jeans and her, oh so sexy, silk French knickers (“Oh, darling, they’re just so comfortable under trousers.”) She and Mum did their weekly shop together, the first rule of this shop being that first you stop for coffee and the second rule being that it takes all day and includes lunch. Her husband was a businessman and had a lot of wealthy contacts and so one evening Mum and Dad were invited to a ‘Tarts and Vicars’ party.

This type of party was, apparently common amongst posh people in the early Eighties but it was an entirely new phenomenon for my Mum and Dad who talked about it a lot afterwards. Dad had glittered his way through it, drinking, telling stories and being surprised at just how flirty all the women were. Mum found it slightly more overwhelming. I remember her describing the kitchen to me the next day.  It had marble worktops...MARBLE!....an island with a fridge for champagne.....Mum decided that she quite liked champagne..... and a long breakfast bar with stools that Mum had spent most of the evening sitting on talking to a woman named Su.....WITHOUT AN E!
Su had been discussing television. Mum had strong opinions on television: she liked it. When I was growing up Mary Whitehouse was in her heyday, warning that TV was going to ruin us all and that it would numb our brains and stop us reading. Mum held the opposite view. Su was a feminist and she and Mum agreed on a lot.
“You see, there are no good female role models on television,” Su drunkenly waved her champagne glass around.
Mum agreed that she would like to see more women being normal on the television.
"I mean, that sitcom that's on at the moment. It's rubbish.  I could have written that."
Mum looked at her and quietly said, "But you didn't."

About a year later, Patsy was in our kitchen when I got home from school, bubbling with excitement.
"And it's all your fault," she told my mum.  "I hope you are going to watch it."

We all sat down together to watch the new sitcom on Chanel Four.  Dream Stuffing, about two women, sharing a council flat in London.

"Sometimes you shouldn't," was all that Mum would say.

But You Didn't

The Long Suffering Husband is feeling better and has been able to play golf again, which means that we are back to ticking things off our FOMO list and we had a day in London, eating in nice restaurants, seeing Waitress the musical and visiting the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

I haven't been to the Summer Exhibition as an adult and the LSH has never been.  It's quite a middle class artsy thing to do.  My mum was an artist and I grew up thinking that I couldn't do art; that I took after my dad, who couldn't draw a stick cat.  I always enjoyed an exhibition, though and I was quite good at what Mum always called, 'Art Bollocks'.  This is where you say things about the art that is totally made up that makes it seem as though the art is more than it actually is. I'm good at making up stories and even better at taking a grain of truth and twisting it into something more.  It's what transforms three square blocks of colour on a canvas into something that represents the artist's inner angst; a juxtaposition between the primary emotions of anger and sadness with the more complex guilt.

The Summer Exhibition is quite special because there are works by great artists alongside beginners and amateurs. The work is then available to be purchased.  When you visit the exhibition you get a little book that lists all the works with their prices.

Going to this exhibition made me think of my mum.  She had something shortlisted many years ago.  It wasn't in the final selection and she was very disappointed.  I thought it was quite an achievement to be shortlisted.  She took me to see the exhibition and I was an awful, grumpy teenager.  I didn't really look at anything properly and I kept saying things like, "I could do better!"  "£9000! I could do it for you for £9!"  When I think about it now, these comments must have been heartbreaking for her.  These pieces were chosen over hers and I was dissing every one of them.  She wasn't impressed with all of them, either.  She would quietly tut and mutter something about perspective or light.

In this year's exhibition, these two small pieces reminded me of my childhood visits to galleries with Mum.

One of my favourite things about looking at modern art is other people's reactions.  I love listening to people have the conversations about how much something costs, or how they don't understand it, or their interpretations of the piece.  For example when someone touches a sculpture and says, "I just love how it feels so....elemental..." and then looks surprised at their own reaction, or a child lies on the floor to start a tantrum and then catches sight of a print of a dog high on the wall and suddenly smiles and shouts, "doggy!", or when the LSH gets upset that I made him throw away the windows that have been in our garage since they were replaced last year (and yes, the company would have taken them but he thought they might 'come in useful').

To really appreciate such a full exhibition you really need to sit and contemplate the art for a while.  Most of my favourite pieces were not actually for sale, which is lucky because I'm a cheapskate and rarely buy anything.  I'm glad people do, though.  The red dots are proof that they do.  The price reflects the time the artist has spent deciding exactly how it should be, the years they tried to have something selected and failed, the money spent on art equipment, the hours sat in a cold shed trying to muster up some form of creativity.  It's easy to look at those prices and think, "I'm in the wrong game," but that would be like looking at the CEO of Marks and Spencer and thinking, "I really should work in a shop."

Let me take you back to 1979.  There's a woman standing in the middle of the exhibition with a skinny teenage girl.  The woman is wearing a summer dress and a pair of sandals one size too small.  Her big toe is bleeding, where she tripped on the steps into the building.  The girl is wearing purple chord flares and a yellow shirt with an extra long collar, with embroidered purple flowers. Unfortunately, the two purples don't quite match.  The girl has a smirk on her face, her arms are crossed and she says, loudly, "I could have done that."
The woman looks at her and says, quietly, "Yes, but you didn't!"
The girl is stopped in her tracks.  She didn't. It's true.  She still hasn't.

Some of my favourites

England is a very strange place

Two weeks into ticking things off my Summer FOMO list and I’ve broken the Long Suffering Husband. He is currently missing his Wednesday OAP golf session, gingerly getting up from the sofa occasionally to get a hot water bottle. Back pain is a bitch. We had completed our first week of travelling around the north east coast and had settled nicely into a pattern of walking and sorting out cupboards, interspersed with some reading and writing for me and golf for him, when cleaning the garage felled him.

It’s a shame because he was riding high on his knowledge of all things weird.

I’ve decided that despite my college friends bemusement when the whole ‘Essex Girl’ thing started in the Eighties,  (You’re the only Essex Girl we know and you don’t even own a handbag or pair of white stilettos.) I am one.

We started our trip by visiting my daughter in the midlands. It was lovely. We saw nice houses next to the canal and had a great pub meal and we talked about living there but I knew I’d miss the edge of the world. How could I live in a place where you can’t get to the edge quickly?

Next stop: York. I’ve been to York before. My Dad organised a beano for the brass band when I was about twelve. I remember, we went from Billericay station on a special diesel train that puffed smoke direct to York. Yes, I know that shouldn’t have been possible but somehow it veered off at Stratford. I remember looking at all the criss-crossing tracks and thinking, “You could go anywhere from here. You could probably get to France.” When we got there we had a few hours walking around the wall, looking at the Minster and the castle from the outside and drinking in the pubs. It was one of the more
 successful trips that he organised, with no language barriers he was able to ask for a dishcloth when he spilled his beer without getting an omelette. Both my sister and I have a fond memory of him standing on the wall, twinkle-eyed and happy.

Our trip to York was similar, without the confusing train journey. I still haven’t seen York Minster properly from the inside because who knew you could get claustrophobic inside a huge church? When we were there it was the Yorkshire Fringe. I assume Edinburgh is a long way up for most London comedians and their agents think that if they are going to have to book them an overnight stop they may as well work for their money. We saw Henning Wehn, who bills himself as ‘The German Comedian’, crashing into our stereotypes of Germans as humourless. He was trying out his new Brexit set. It was interesting to hear comedy about Brexit from someone who is as ambivalent about the whole thing as I am.

Then we went to Durham, where the cathedral has the most amazing Lego model of itself. The cloud got closer to the ground the higher up the country we got and the people got louder. 

Durham on a Saturday in early August is a party town.  Boats arrive from Newcastle and Sunderland full of loud, drunk people wearing small clothes.  It's a town that parties hard and parties early.  By 8pm the club bars were heaving and by 10pm people were being sick in the street and having punch ups.
The weather didn't stop us trying to tick things off our list.  We saw several National Trust properties in the rain.

My FOMO list included having chips at Whitby and by the time we got there the cloud had reached the ground.  Boats on the sea looked like pirate ships and the people were dressed very strangely.
"I think I want to go home," I whispered at the LSH, "It feels like we've gone back in time to a very strange place."

"It's Steampunk," he said.
"Steampunk?"  I was confused.
He wasn't sure but we looked it up and he was right.
He is a genius on all things weird.