Month: January 2013

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Island Blog 13 – Secrets

Secrets are funny old things.  We love to have them for ourselves and we can hug them for days, months, even years and, in some cases, forever.  When we know another’s secret, we have to watch ourselves carefully in case it rises in our throats and spills out in a tumble of words.  Sometimes we are more than happy not to know another’s secrets, however desperate they may be to tell us.  They can be a gift, or a liability, a delightful revealing of something we have always wondered about, or a heavy weight we are stuck with, now that we know the hidden truth.

Sometimes, in the early flush of a love affair, we can think we want to know absolutely everything about each other, but I don’t think that’s healthy at all.  Someone once said that once we tell all our secrets, we are left only with their memory.  We can no longer call them our own, nor feel that sense of mystery, like a butterfly in our hearts.  I have many secrets and I am rather fond of them all.  Nobody can tell me they are a lot of cobblers, because nobody knows them.  Have you ever shared a secret and wished you hadn’t?  The response was too casual, or too earnest and you didn’t quite believe your secret was that interesting.  Or you might have been persuaded you were wrong, or not looking at it right and then you felt deflated like an old party balloon.

Keep your secrets, that’s what I say, and keep the mystery, for isn’t that what makes us interesting, intriguing, a someone who might suddenly disappear without stopping to tell you first?  It keeps people on their toes being around someone who doesn’t lay themselves out like a map for all to study.  I like to say I’m going out, without saying where to. It feels wild and exciting, even if it’s just  to buy milk.

You never know where a snowdrop will appear in the wild, because you didn’t plant it.  Nobody planted it.

Now there’s a secret and a half.

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Island Blog 12 – As you sow, so shall you reap

I love that saying, although it is written in a rather old fashioned way.  To me, it means I put everything into everything, from cooking supper on an ordinary Monday, to dressing up for a book launch.  Haven’t got to that bit yet, but when it comes, I know I will give it wellie.  Its not always easy to do, especially around the dull to-do list, month after month, nor is the ‘sowing’ part always obvious to the naked eye.  For example, as I spend my days with my son and his wife and very new baby, quietly in the background, just helping as best I can at this time of immense change in their lives, I notice things.  I notice that he orders baby clothes with great care and enthusiasm.  I notice that he changes nappies and takes the baby out to give his wife time to sleep, for her nights are no longer her own.  I notice he bothers to shop for groceries after a long day at work, and these are just 3 things I notice.

What he is doing, is ‘sowing’.  He is investing, not only in his child, but more importantly, in his wife, in the woman she really is and this investment will pay off for the rest of his marriage.  Not that he has planned it this way, of course not, but he is doing it because he is unafraid of looking soft in the head.  All the young fathers I have met nowadays are similarly unafraid.

So Hallelujah say I for this ‘informed’ generation! They must have read all the right books, for they have certainly U-turned on their own fathers technique, or lack of it.  Or, is it simply that Love will ‘out’, no matter what, given enough time?

Either way, my heart is smiling for the little ones of today.  The big ones too.

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Island Blog 11 – Speed it up

Blog 11 (V2)

Today despite the fabulous blue cold outside, I felt like a big fat lump.  I’m none of those things, but I can still feel each one of them.  It’s like gravity is pointing her finger at me and lowering everything a tone or two.  I couldn’t find the right key to sing out my day, although I did, of course, make the effort.  This lunchtime, after coffee and a small, very small, slice of lemon torte, ho hum, my gorgeous daughter-in-law and I popped into the hairdresser next door.  I am ‘going’ grey which is pants in my opinion.  Not the grey bit, but the ‘going’ bit.  Why does everything take so long??

So, let’s pump up the pace and get this dinky little hair stylist to make it happen, to speed up the ageing process, at least, on my head.  I sat there, trying to read the magazine text, but having left my specs at home, I was only able to see the models and you can imagine what that did for the ‘big fat lump’ syndrome. Every time I glanced up at ‘Ageing Mirror Face’ my head was just a little blu-er, but, you know, I didn’t care.  You know that place where you are too sorry for yourself to care what happens next, as long as it isn’t more of what came before?  Well, I was there.

An hour later, after an ash tone over completely bleached hair, I am looking like a silver star. As I walk back home, through the blue cold, turning gently and quietly to darkness, there is a bounce in my step and I smile to myself.

How extraordinary is this ordinary day!

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Island Blog 10 – On Thinking Too Much

Actually it can be bad for your health.  Well, don’t people say, as you wander through some complicated quandary over a cup of tea, or six……..’You think too much Whatever-your-name-is!’  as if that sorted it out for you.  And that is how you respond.  You nod, chuckle, or try to, at your own sillybilly-ness, and wave farewell, still puzzled and slopping with tea, and now with a label on your forehead that says I Think Too Much.

 

This knowledge adds to your problem.  What you need now, you tell yourself, is a bell to ding as you plod miserably towards the frozen goods, to find something for supper.  After all, aren’t you a leper of a woman among all these bright bustling ‘others’ with purposeful step and cheery lipstick?  How could you have got it all so wrong for so long?  And, didn’t your old mother, now frozen boned and 6 foot under, always tell you that thinking too much is really self pity?  She never felt it.  No time for that.  She had to win two wars all by herself and that’s no task for a moaning Minnie whose self esteem forgot to leave the birthing ward with her and whose brain goes into cramp every time anybody asks a really difficult question such as ‘Would you like tea or coffee?’

 

I should have learned by now, you tell yourself, remembering all those wise words of advice you thrust on your daughters whilst they faced their own dilemmas, sounding just like your own mother and just as ridiculous.  After all, what did you know about ‘popping’ or ‘tweeting’ or ‘shots’?  I would have said, in order, balloons, birds, guns.  But I would be wrong on all three counts.  And that makes me the fool.  Not because I don’t know what these new descriptions mean, but because I pretend its the same as in my day and it isn’t and never can be.  What we old folks need to do is look to ourselves.

 

On that note, back to you over there mooning over the McCain chips.  I have some ideas, based on my own search for self-esteem, which has been 60 years in the lower end of poor.

Yes, yes, I know I LOOK confident, but so do you when you put on your slap and pull on your sensible kit even though you just know you look fat in that pair of crimplene slacks, and will look as exciting as a poinsettia in June by the time you have lugged all those heavy groceries back up the hill.

I’m just a mother, a granny, a housekeeper, we tell ourselves.

Poppycock I say.  Burn your crimplene slacks, as I did my dresses, although don’t do it, as I did, in a cane waste-paper basket.  Way too dangerous.

And who invented crimplene anyway?  I have never worn such an uncomfortable aberration of fibres; fibres that can set off an 80 kilowatt spark whenever anyone gets too close, which is probably its whole purpose.

 

Whilst thinking too much, I consider that once we women become mothers, we are thus defined in the eyes of the world.  It gets worse at that glorious time when one of our own children gives birth to their own.

Now, we are Granny.

What happened to my name?

I know I should consider myself fortunate to be called anything as long as it’s not ‘Old Bag’  But what, I wonder became of me? Who am I, who was I once?

 

During the scary crimplene-burning process, I realised that I alone must dig deep inside to re-locate my self-esteem (yes, it was there all along only nobody said) and get to know it, to tend it with care, regardless of the smirks from those who much preferred me with none. I am not defined by my husband, my children or my grandchildren, nor my friends, nor my neighbours, nor my peers., and I can have my own opinions.  I must begin to look at who I am, at what I believe in, at how I respond to something, to anything, and to bravely find my own voice and speak it out into the world.

I have no idea how to do it, but didn’t someone once say that stepping out into a fog is better than watching it through the window?

That way, at least we can cause some havoc.

 

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Island Blog 9 – On thinking

As I watch a young couple learn the ropes of parenting, with all the associated doubts and joys, I feel honoured to be invited in, to be a part, a useful part.  So many things change when a baby arrives.  There are tugs on many strings.  They say that children can tear you apart, not that they would ever want to do that, and I can see how, remember how.  When my little ones came along, I turned the full 180 towards them.  Some fathers don’t cope well with that, being relegated to the chorus line, when once they were the star.  We women do our best, but we are not perfect, nor are we superhuman.  We know, in that first flash second of seeing our newborn for the first time, that here is someone we would give our lives for.  We also register, to our, perhaps surprise, that where we once thought we would do the same for our man, we now know we might not – especially if the choice, a Sophie’s sort of choice, was between our child and their father.

It must show, for it causes problems, not that many of us will ever have to make that choice.  It shows itself, this new allegiance in little ways, in where we spend our precious moments, which way we look first, who we listen to when voices rise in competition.

I remember it well.

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Island Blog 8 – Kites over London

I’m watching father and son (now new father himself, as of Boxing Day) take down the outside Christmas lights and bonding whilst 3 red kites soar overhead.  I can hardly believe I am in London beneath such majestic birds.  The neighbours put the remains of their sunday roast on the lawn and wait for the kites to collect.  They don’t land, just swoop and collect. Haven’t seen it for myself, but I hope to this weekend! Must be an incredible sight.

 

Blog article 8 - 'Fathers'

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Island Blog 7

Found the oldest pub in Britain for a wonderful late lunch – ie home at five.  Haven’t done such an exciting things for years.  There was a black cat on my bench, curled up and fluffy and almost invisible until it smelled the wild duck on my plate.  It stretched, then a little more, then one paw onto the old oak table, then a second, and so on with the grace of a ballerina dancing a well-known role.  Eventually, and without causing the least offence, (in fact, we were all in love at this point), it delicately extended one large soft black paw and touched my arm.

Ok I shared my duck with Shakespeare………!

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Island Blog 6

Yesterday we flew down to Heathrow to meet our latest grand daughter for the first time – two weeks old yesterday and the sweetest little munchkin ever!  She feeds, sleeps and gurgles – never known such a happy baby.  Her parents look like they know exactly what they’re doing too, which is more than I remember feeling!  It’s fun being grandparents.  We went for a walk in the Chiltern countryside this morning in the fog.  We don’t get fog on the island, although I remember it from my own younger days.  Its like the air is on hold, no movement but the people walking through it, collecting it in on our skin where it supposedly does wonders for the complexion!

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Island Blog 5

Did I tell you I cook and clean for Old Harry?

Well, I am now, and I do.

The job sort of came to me.  I wasn’t looking for work, but Old Harry has looked after me and my family for over 35 years, doing odd jobs and bringing those little bits and pieces to us when we were without them.  A short length of roofing felt, perhaps, or a special size of bicycle screw, or a bit of wire fencing to block up a hole in the fence.

Well, since his old wife died, he has had to fend for himself in a kitchen he never knew existed.  He did outdoors and she did indoors and that was that for a whole lifetime.  So, Old Harry found someone to cook meals for him, freeze them and deliver once a week.  There was a bit of washing, a bit of cleaning too.  When one cook left him, he came to tell me and I said, quite without thinking, I’ll do it Harry.  For you.

And I do.

This morning I was supposed to go over with supplies, clean washing and my rubber gloves for the cleanup which is never much as Old Harry was a Regimental Sergeant Major in the war and still lives that way.  But, it was raining again, cats and dogs so I knew Harry, whose work is all outside, remember, would be stuck at home and not wanting a merry little cleaner like me moving him around whilst I cleaned.  So, I stayed home and cooked extra meals for him instead, which is timely as we are off to see our new grand-daughter in London on Wednesday and I will be away for ten days helping out.  I will still keep up my blog, though, so no worries there.

I’m bushed now, though.  Time for a walk in the Fairy Woods.  I’ll tell you what I find tomorrow.

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Island Blog 4

Yesterday, my husband the old sea dog, turned 70.  Nobody really believes he is THAT old and he certainly doesn’t look it. When we were young, people that old were bordering on fossilisation, but we seem to be ageing differently these days, and keeping ourselves young and fit.

We had a great day, just pottering about and took a lovely walk up into the Fairy Woods with the little dog, managing to lose her during games of hide and seek! The wallow, used by the deer, was more like Lake Titicaca with all the rain we’ve had recently. We lit the fire and played scrabble and laughed a lot over tea and crumpets (or that’s what they called themselves on the packet)

 

Later, we went through to one of our boys, James (the tv star!)and his family, for a fondue and indoor fireworks.  The fondue was delicious and lasted for hours – the best sort of meal.  The Birthday Boy was truly spoiled and celebrated with the generous birthday present of five gold tickets.  I’d never heard of such a thing, but think it quite brilliant.  As the kids are dotted across the world, busy with their own lives and families, their gift to him, a whole day one to one, is a fabulous idea.  When they were little, they were a collective – inevitable when you have five and an extremely demanding work life, and, as they grew, he had to find out anew, who they are, as they did him.  They had to learn a new friendship.

 

We stayed over, and woke to play with the grandchildren on another rainy morning. Then, after a cooked breakfast (as if we needed more food) we went for the wettest walk in years, getting completely soaked, even through big ass waterproofs and we didn’t mind at all.  Once you’re wet, you’re wet!  The massive waterfall was spectacularly swollen with the rains, and the sound of it drowned out all conversation.  We just looked up and marvelled.

 

Back home, we booked our flights to London next week.  Another adventure and this one takes us to meet our littlest grand-daughter, born on Boxing Day.

Can’t wait!