The Genetics of an Under-stairs Cupboard and age

This week, I’ve felt more like my old self than I have in a long time. Maybe, it is just natural grief lifting, as the NHS website says, “you might feel affected every day for 18 months after a major loss.”  I’d be surprised if you aren’t ‘affected’ every day for the rest of your life because your life is different now, you are missing someone important but maybe a switch gets flicked after 18 months to let you feel happy again. I suspect it also has something to do with a glimmer of light at the end of the death admin tunnel.

Feeling more me, I’ve been thinking about strange things again. This time, it’s been about age.  They say that age is just a number, so I picked 42, in honour of Douglas Adams but it’s not the number that I really feel. In the last few years I’ve been telling the children at school that I’m 112. “Come on if I can stand up to sing when I’m 112 you can too!” 

They ask, “Are you really 112 miss?”

This year I’ve said, “Oh no, I feel much older”

And it has been true. The pressure of the last few years aged me. 

Before, I felt about 9, with a wider vocabulary, particularly of swear words. 

I’ve noticed that a person’s actual age rarely represents the age they feel. 

This week, I accompanied my sister on her search for a new house. She chose to buy the one with the perfect under-stairs cupboard. It was the cupboard of our childhood and as I walked in I suddenly had a flashback to an argument about a monkey that said, “Have a banana, munch munch,” and my sister, secure in her safe space threatening me (deservedly, as it was her monkey) with a machine gun. I’m not proud of my big sister credentials. When she got excited about the cupboard, I was reminded of my son. He too, loves an under-stairs  cupboard and would have happily lived in ours. I could see him buying a house based on the same criteria. I had never seen a genetic link between my son and my sister before. My daughter always looked like my sister (and the LSH) but my son looks like my Dad.     Can under-stairs cupboards really show genetic links? They have another thing in common, that I had also forgotten. While I can talk to 8 year olds, they can both talk to 80 year olds. When we were little and went to holiday camps, my sister would have adopted at least 6 sets of grandparents. 

Yesterday, was a weird (and very long) day for me. It started with school band practise. The first in a long time, where all the wrong notes made me laugh. Then I taught all day. The children were funny and I didn’t find them irritating. (I was getting a bit worried that I’d got too old for this teaching lark.)

I was given a piece of music for a concert we are going to do with the local choral society and I laughed at the name of the lyricist. “Younger, more promiscuous brother of Darth. I’d like to see his light sabre,” my colleagues and I joked.

Then it was time for the Youth Orchestra. They taught me the happy llama, sad llama thing. All day children had been giving me what I thought were deformed rock finger signs. This is sign language for llama, which goes with a rhyme, “Happy llama, sad llama, totally rad llama, super llama, drama llama, big fat mamma llama.” Then there’s something about a camel, a moose  a fish and a turtle. 

“Where’s it from?” I asked, “Why is everyone doing it?”

“Tik Tok,” they told me, “Do you want us to teach you?” 

“No, it’s ok,” I said, “If it’s on Tik Tok, I can look it up.”

There was a incredulous gasp.

“Well, why not?” I said, making llama signs with my hands, “There’s no age limit.”

At that moment my hand decided to do the weird crampy spasm thing they’ve been doing to remind me of my real age and I feared I was going to have to go to the seventieth birthday party I was attending after with my hands stuck in ‘totally rad llama.’

Being invited to seventieth birthday parties can make you feel old especially when it’s a party for someone who is really 18. The Prosecco flowed, the band got louder, dancing followed and I sneaked away early to read my book.