Cold Fish

I've never been a warm fuzzy kind of human: not someone you'd go to for a hug.  I'm the sort of person who gets called 'strong' or 'good in a crisis' but definitely not someone who 'wears their heart on their sleeve'. This probably makes me an odd kind of friend. 

Yesterday, I met a friend in London.  We haven't seen each other for a while and I kept thinking that people not like me might have hugged and I wondered if she was disappointed that we didn't or get drunk and take selfies, pouting over the top of our over sized Margarita glasses. I hope she wasn't and enjoyed what we did as much as I did.

Standing in the cold drizzle queueing at the TKTS office she asked me what I wanted to see.  I was only prepared to say what I hadn't seen and what I knew about the shows that were available.
"Big Fish.  That sounds interesting. What's that?" she asked.
"It's new.  It should be good, funny and sad.  It's a great film."
She hadn't seen the film but we settled on that one and went to Barrafina for lunch.

Barrafina is a Spanish Tapas bar in Covent Garden.  It has smart red bar stools, a shiny counter, waiters with proper Spanish accents that mean that they spit a little as they talk. You watch your meal being prepared and the vegetables and fish are on display.

It was delicious and your glass keeping filling with free fizzy water, which is my idea of a good time out, although I wasn't sure about being watched by the fish.  Then a big red prawn thing jumped. It was like a scene from the little mermaid.  We could almost hear the chef singing about poissons while Sebastian hid under a cabbage leaf. 

As we ate we talked and I ended up telling my friend all about the elephant. I didn't mean to. Just as I refuse to give him space on the blog I wasn't going to take him to meet my friend. However, just a few questions and I described him in full technicolour detail but as though he was sitting on someone else's blog and I was just watching him. I refused to give any of his histrionic emotions houseroom.  My friend apologised. "It's fine. I can talk about him now," I said going on to explain how he was effecting everyone else.  I also talked about my Dad's last few days and grief. I can't think it was the best fun she's ever had.

We had to run across Green Park so we didn't miss the start of the show. It was at The Other Palace Theatre in Victoria, which is quite like the Mercury in Colchester and we had front row seats, which give you a bit of a crick in the neck and make you fear that a giant might land in your lap. It was different from the film but not too much. It was still about the death of a parent.

At the interval my friend looked worried.  

"This probably wasn't the best thing for you to come and see, under the circumstances," she said.

I laughed. 

You've got to laugh.

I think you know you are doing okay if you can laugh.

Big Fish would make anyone laugh. It had some wonderful comic performances and a brilliant joke or two.

"They've crossed a Hippopotomus, Elephant and Rhino."

"What do they call it?"

"Hell if I know. (Helephino)"

Maybe the elephant is actually a Helephino.

A musical can't convey the weirdness as well as a film does but it does a pretty good job.  The songs, however, bring so much more emotion into it. Most of the theatre was sobbing or at least dabbing an eye. My friend thought that it could have sent me over the edge but being a cold fish it just made my cold a little worse.

When I got home the Long Suffering Husband asked me all about it. 

"It was really good," I told him, "It had some famous actors in it. I think the man who played the Dad was someone and the the circus man was Gene Wilder."

"Gene Wilder?" the LSH asked, "He died."

"No. He didn't die.  It was the other one who died."

The LSH explained that he meant Gene Wilder had died in real life. He said that he'd been one of the victims of the great 2016 celebrity cull. I didn't believe him, so he looked up who was in the musical.

Kelsey Grammer was the Dad and the person I thought was Gene Wilder was someone called Forbes Masson, who someone should discover as a comedy genius (if they haven't already)

Not Gene Wilder

If it had been Gene Wilder then they could have called it Big Cold Fish.

Extreme Adulting

The last couple of months have been rough.

My dad and a couple of friends have died.

It makes you think.

You think about your own place in the world and you contemplate your relationship with the people who are still living.

As part of the contemplation process I'm trying to be spontaneous, go with the flow and get in touch with old friends.  This isn't easy, as I'm exhausted.  I go to the High Street for coffee, planning to pop to the bank before I come home but when reality kicks in I'm too tired after talking to people for a while and going to the bank doesn't seem very important.

The Long Suffering Husband was nagging about booking a holiday (he's always thinking about holidays). It became a bit of an issue. I snapped, cried and we booked a short break in Dorset a few days before we left.  The day before, he mentioned that we were driving past my friends' house.  When you haven't seen someone for two years is it acceptable to invite yourself to stay the day before you arrive?

Luckily, I have friends that are exceptionally good hosts at a moment's notice.  They even had tea and coffee making facilities in the spare room and a dog bowl, despite not owning a dog.

People say that the sign of true friendship is that you can not see someone for years and still have things to talk about.  Within a few minutes we were talking as we used to at college.  We were looking words up in the dictionary (Calceiform - I remembered it!), discussing the state of the world and laughing about life. We had discussed Brexit, motorbikes, the depressing play for today, socks, cars, exhaust systems and our children with the kind of eye-rolling resignation parents in their fifties have about the life choices of their new adults that they still feel responsible for. Our children are 'adulting'. They are trying out adult activities for the first time: travelling on their own, renting a flat, paying bills, doing their own laundry.  They are doing the things we take for granted; the things we have been doing for so long that we've forgotten how difficult they were the first time.

My friends are also recently bereaved (a favourite Aunt) and have been dealing with her estate.  They suggested that the jobs around a death should be described as 'extreme adulting.' It's the BMX racing to popping to the shops on your sit-up-and-beg bike with the basket on the front.  The list of extreme adulting tasks include filling out a probate form, talking to a bereavement officer at a bank who can't say the word 'dead',  reading the inheritance tax literature, paying a solicitor's bill, choosing music for a funeral, writing a eulogy, taking out a mortgage to pay for funeral flowers and organising a party where the guest of honour is missing.

It has started me wondering, though, if there is another level to look forward to when we reach our seventies.  If adulting is sport and extreme adulting is extreme sport, do we have the deadly adulting to look forward to.  I remember reading about the rise in popularity of extreme sports that are killing people.  The man who paracuted into the London Olympics dressed as James Bond died in a wingsuit accident and Russians are taking parkour to extremes that are killing grandmaster chess champions by the dozen.  These 'deadly adulting' tasks could be things like learning to drive a mobility scooter or negotiating the correct dosage of pain relief.

That's something to look forward to.