I was nervous.  I am always nervous before I present to an audience, be it to 10 people or to 100.  Last night in Crieff, we counted 52 good folk who turned out to hear what I had to say.  I think that’s very humbling.  Although many had already read my book, some had not, but they came, intrigued and curious to see in the flesh a woman whose life is either different enough from their own to warrant a peek, or just like their own. To some my life reads like a story, to others an account they relate to, at least in part.

Having been invited to appear on International Women’s Day, I knew how to pitch my talk and worked on it for some time before leaving the island.  As the time grew nearer, the doubts began to rise like chickens in a fright.  Was I focusing too much on women issues within a conventional marriage?  Was what I had to say, with a voice of authority and experience going to shake someone’s foundations?  Was I sounding like a rebel and would someone sniff loudly at my bare-faced honesty and leave, taking others with her?

I am learning (oh boy am I always…..) to notice thoughts that arise in me, the ones planted long ago, in childhood, in early marriage, perhaps, those of the ‘storyteller’, the ‘monkey-mind’, the voice of self-doubt and judgement;  the one that says (smugly) Who wants to listen to your claptrap?  You are just self-indulgent, seeking hero worship, seeking recognition.  I say to them, the chickens, You are just a thought and not the truth.  It works, it really does for they are as insubstantial as a collection of dust motes in a new breeze.  Even more so now that I realise it is I who have fed these flaming chickens and kept them alive when what I should have done is make a lot of chicken stew.

In a world of over-thinking everything from why a child has a tantrum in John Lewis in Manchester to how we can deny ourselves all of life’s pleasures in order to live a long life of denial, I try not to overthink very much at all.  However, the invitation to speak brings in its wake, a wash of responsibility –  to what? I ask myself and to whom?  Well, yes to the audience (obviously) and yet I have no forward knowledge of who will be coming and nor does my inviter.  Yes to the Scottish Book Trust who promote me for public speaking and yes to Kirsty who set the whole thing up and invited me a while back to come, but Yes also to me.  What I decided, this time around, was not to seek approval primarily from my imagined listeners, but, instead, from myself. How arrogant!

No, not arrogance.  Go away Chicken.  My book is my truth and I must be true to it.  The dynamics of a conventional marriage are not mine alone to live.  We are many, we conventionally married women; we are legion and I am in the position of privelege.  I have the stage and I can, by speaking out my truth, tell others they can change whatever they want within their lives.  I can’t, nor would I begin to, tell them how because I don’t live that life, but I can tell them it is possible if they grab the chickens and strangle them.

As I read my talk and peppered it with readings from Island Wife, I could feel the audience were with me.  I was talking to women (mostly) about things they knew well, moments highlighted, days of children and feeling overwhelmed and just a bit lost, of lack of communication, loss of confidence, feelings of rebellion and regret and no understanding of how to process them. Of patterns copied and then fixed in place, too complex to break down and to change; of either and of or; of what is and was expected of us by peers, by neighbours, by family and by our own selves.

The questions after were interesting and stimulated good conversations in the little theatre. Even the men, brave souls, engaged with questions.   From behind a jug of tulips, fresh and bright and opening their blooms as the evening moved on, I listened to those questions and answered them honestly.  One in particular stayed with me. ‘Did you know yourself back then when you were young, or do you only now know yourself?’  What a great question!  I had to think.  No, I didn’t know myself at all beyond the reflection I was shown by my elders and betters, that of a rebellious and difficult child/young woman, one that didn’t fit in; one who never settled, never landed, had to keep moving and changing; one who got lost inside her own head, was unfathomable, complex, moody.  This is who I thought I was.  Now I do know myself, and I am still all of those things, bar the moody bit, for that is always a complete waste of energy, and clearly announces to the one who put me in a mood in the first place, that I am expecting them to make it better, to make me better, instead of doing it for myself. And that makes all the difference because now, instead of feeling ashamed of all those labels, I know them to be my labels.  To work with them, to contain or develop them, is entirely and completely in my hands. ‘Difficult’ means I don’t agree with what you want me to do, or to be. ‘Rebellious’ means I am going this way, not that way.  ‘Not fitting in’ makes me unusual and interesting and possibly not invited to sing in the choir. ‘Not settling’ makes me energetic and gone before the dishes need drying. ‘Unfathomable’ works for me because even I can’t fathom me. ‘Complex’ sounds like a Mahler Symphony so that works and ‘Moody’, as aforementioned, has been dismissed without a reference. How wonderful to have learned such a vital lesson about 30 years ago.

As we disbanded, many came to speak, to have a book signed, to talk awhile. I looked into other eyes, bright sparkly eyes dancing with life. I know my story touched their hearts and my hope is that they all left with a seed for change, a seed that will need daily care and attention.

We are all pilgrims.

Today I cleaned the house, Made up my face, cleaned my boots, sorted the washing, planned the evening meal (and thawed it).  I walked the Poppy dog around Tapselteerie, noticing the change in birdsong and feeling the spring of urgency in the air, air that was soft and plump with sunshine, cut by a memoric winter wind.  I was glad of my stout boots, my leg warmers, my soft wool hat with diddles of gold fleck just to keep style about me.  I heard my boots pound the ground and squelch through the mud, mud raised and created by men with trucks and trailers laden with blocks of chainsawed tree – a victim of Harry or Imogen or the one before beginning with G.  I considered the times that a tree falls outside of any gale, named or anonymous.  The tree is never anonymous, standing tall and strong for many years with its own name, growing according to that name, behaving such and blooming when the time for it is right.  If oak comes before ash or ash comes before oak, there is a ‘knowing’ among humans.  Certain birds nest in oak branches, others in the ash.  Rowans are female, as are silver birches, oaks, male.  Who decided all this?  Not I said the sparrow, not those of us who couldn’t give a monkeys about names or species or gender.  We just do what we do when we do it.

After walking I cleared some old raggedy stalks in the garden, noticed the chipped paint around the window, noticed the windows (there are no window cleaners any more) and the clouds full shout beyond the glass, moving as they do, changing, catching light, making shapes to enchant me, full of rain or hail, every colour of the palette, and then, gone.  I added to a painting, one of jaunty boats and not much talent, but bright and attractive.  I made lunch, which means lighting toast and adding toppings.  I worked on editing two pieces of script for others who value my grammatical critique and I opened mail, jumped on the paper bin which is always overfull and managed to shut the lid.  I washed a jumper, folded sheets, wrote a thankyou card, paid two bills, charge my phone and lit a scented candle. I texted some of my kids, dealt with some admin, cleaned my car and oiled the door hinges.  I worked out a fence adaption to stop the Poppy dog jumping over it, lit the fire, brought in wood and ordered more for next week. I cleaned out the hoover, ordered some Spike Lavender, sorted out the cutlery drawer and shredded courgettes.  I emptied the compost, picked up litter, went to the shop for some groceries.

Okay, I am not a broker, nor a vet, nor a TV presenter..  I am no neuro-surgeon, no map maker, no dentist or mountaineer.  I am not a book binder, a celebrity, an actress or counsellor.  I could list a million professions and come up with a ‘No, not me’.  And yet, all this day I have achieved  a great deal that matters.

In my life I have met folk who ask me what I do.  Now I can say I am a writer and yet that irks me, the fact that I need to put myself within any such confines, allowing the askee to nod and say Ah, as if being anything they can Ah about makes me great (or great for the moment).  I practised once as a young, irked, woman saying ‘ I am a mother and wife’, because to me that meant I was more brilliant that any of those aforementioned professions, in that I had to be as dextrous as an acrobat, 24/7 for the rest of my life.  I could not come home tired and sit down because everyone needs an evening meal.  I could not say I was bored with feeding babies, or welcoming guests with cake and a loving ear. I could not abandon the housework when 24 dogs or fifteen children or one husband had turned the carpet into a mud bath. I could not lie in, play hookie, turn my face to the wall, not once, not ever.

The person who received my Wife and Mother response, drifted away like a wave on its way down the coast.  To be ‘just’ a wife and mother is so not enough for this patriarchal world.  The little woman back home is just that.  Little.  And yet she is far from that.  She will hold together a life, a family, a community.  She will learn and become adept at a thousand tasks most professional folk would marvel at and run from.  She may sit quiet  but her quiet is her knowing, like the tree, like the bird.  She does what she does when she does it.

If nobody else honours her, I do, right here and right now.

Nobody knows what a life and the living of it feels like but the person living it.  Experience is everything.  Although we are all writing a memoir as we work out the how-tos of each day, we often get ourselves fankled up in the tapestry of what A. N Other prepares beneath our feet.  Finding our voice and then using it to speak out is not always easy.  children have no such qualms, but somehow that confidence dissipates in the winds of time. We learn to conform for the sake of peace, the wrong sort of peace.

When a person decides to share this life, a whole load of stuff has to go.  Singular decisions, for one.  I becomes ‘We’ overnight.  We like to do this, we like red furnishings, woodburners, pasta and pesto, dogs, hamsters, walking in the rain, burgundy,bouncing on a trampoline, and so on.  I recall well that moment when ‘We’ anounced we didn’t like going to parties.  I remember my eyeballs wide, my surprise complete.  This ‘We’ thing tiptoed into life and the way it landed, the certainty with which it became a family member, rendered me wordless.

I suspect I am not alone.  Morphing two into one is what all the love songs and poems and romantic stories are all about, after all.  We can’t live without the other, we need to be ‘always by your side’, never alone, never singular again, for singledom means loveless, lonely, sad.  Well isn’t that what they want us to believe?

Over time I have fought off ‘We’ but it is a persistent little so-and-so, especially as it moves in so quietly, weaving its tentacles around a shared life, hardly noticeable as it’s roots burrow in silence to a very great depth.   It also offers security and the chance not to think at all about what I want in any given situation.  So easy to be lazy, to be unsure enough not to challenge a ‘we’ moment when it just doesn’t fit.  If a person has gone along with everything decided by one half of the ‘we’ for years and years, and never once considered rising up to make an ‘I’ choice, or too scared to even consider it, then why bother now?  After all, hasn’t ‘we’ sort of worked till now?

The trouble is we are bigger than half of a whole.  We are whole all by ourselves, or ourself. The trouble is that if it does limit our personal freedom of choice, of speech, of direction, we are never going to know who we really are, what our purpose is in this one life.  What dreams we have can stay in dreamland if we refuse to bring them into the daylight, but they will not let us go; they will keep coming, nudging, whispering to us and it will sound like rebellion, red and fiery, dangerous, destructive.

Of course, it is none of those things in reality.  It is simply a matter of challenging a ‘we’ when it feels wrong.  It might have felt right, once, but not now, not now, because we all change all of the time, growing and learning, turning to face a new direction.  Challenging a ‘we’ that was acceptable once, is enough to panic anyone.  The other half might be upset.  Will be upset.  Expect it and keep going, gently, firmly, lovingly.  None of us really welcome change and yet change is necessary or we just go backwards.

We are taught so much about how not to upset another human being.  We bend over backwards to avoid it, paint ourselves into the background, accommodate and serve and there is everything wonderful about that, at times.  But, must it deny a singular freedom whilst remaining one half of a whole?  I say No, and No is a complete sentence.  Finding a good way to untangle from an uncomfortable ‘we’ might not be achieved overnight, but if we are consistent and gentle and determined, it will, eventually, be accepted as the new norm.

I am often teased about being ornary and cussed as I challenge a ‘we’ but it is just teasing and not the end of the world.  I found that facing down a fear, always imagined, led me to a singular freedom and yet I am not single.  I am part of a ‘we’, but more, I am I.

I leave you with a wisdom.

‘If I am me because of who I am, then I am me.  If you are you because of who you are, then you are you.  But if I am me because of who you are, or you are you because of who I am, then I am not me, and you are not you.’

When you turn 37 and suddenly discover you need glasses, it can come as a shock.  You thought you would never get to this time in your life, never have to use glass to see the world clearly.  You probably fended off those who suggested you might need a little help, because, in truth, you don’t want a little help in any area of your life.  You are fine on your own two feet thank you very much and this niggling soul, often someone close, is turning the mirror around so that you can see who you have become…….or not quite see who you have become, for this slightly blurry person is so not you. You are on the outside of the looking glass.  I remember being there and all sorts of thoughts and feelings rose to the surface of me, bubbling me into new rooms where I found my old mother and other ancient animals.  I blamed my busy life, my husband for wearing me out, my work load and so on.  The consideration that I, of all people, was victim to the aging process, was one I was not prepared to face.

Children run without a care.  They burst through gates and leap over rocks and not for one minute do they consider falling.  They may well fall but they don’t worry about it ahead of time, so caught up are they in following each other, of being the leader, of getting from here to there as quickly as possible, of laughing into the sky, of being one with the moment.

I remember being like that even as a young woman, an older young woman.  When did I get caught up in the idea of falling?  I have to tell myself, firmly and often, whilst facing the rocks in between me and the curled lip of a wave, to forget myself, forget my feet, just go!  After all, I have done this a hundred times and never once planted my face in the kelp.  But no matter how much talkback I give the monkey, the monkey confounds me, arrests my itchy feet, cautions me to slow, to consider, to walk the run.  Am I alone in this?

When I sit down to paint on my face for the day, I am cautious about the application of each product.  I have seen orange old ladies many times, or those with the scooped line of the wrong colour foundation dancing around their chins as they talk.  I have seen lipstick bleed and spiders legs sticking out like fencing around receding eyeballs and I have thought to myself, Well, when that is me I shall make certain I look hilarious.  What I don’t want is to lay too much store by the falsehood of ‘better not tell her and upset her’, and that process begins with me.  I will laugh at myself, I will, I will, and that will then free others to feel okay about pointing out that my lip liner is green when it is green, and the red around my eyes makes me look like a hamster.  It is easily done, and although I haven’t done it myself on those early dark mornings when specs and mascara will not mix and I have had to take especial care in my colour selection, a friend has.  She pulled into a layby to touch up her face before arriving at a party, and in the gloom of an interior car light, surrounded her mouth with green eye liner.  Actually, it looked rather swish and she may well have influenced others to try it out next time they went dancing.  She looked stylish and different and I like stylish and different.  Her sense of humour is always Head Girl in her life, and once she realised what she had done, she did not rush to the bathroom for a scrub, nor ask the floor to open wide, oh no indeed.  She remained for the evening, engaged in animated conversation, all the while just knowing that the person opposite was doing everything possible to avoid staring at her mouth.

Although some of the quick moving things in life can still be quickly moved, many cannot.  But boundaries must always be pushed out a bit, for they do tend to move in, ever so quietly, and probably at dead of night.  If we must do something that makes us uncomfortable every day, then I am onto a winning streak, for the questions and the emotions that float up to the surface as life takes what she needs from each one of us challenge me to remember who I am, not who I was.  This who I am thingy means I must be still and in the moment, like children are, although children are rarely still.  And, what is more, it isn’t just one decision.  It requires consistent focus and attention.  It is all too easy to join the sick queue, not even realising we are in it.  In order not to buy in to what all the young people fear, ie old age, we must work like never before.  Where life was effortless, no moisturiser required, it now requires effort and moisturiser.  I see so many folk by the side of the wrinkly road and they make me sad.  Talking about ‘how it was in my day’ is lovely if the children or grandchildren want a jolly good laugh, but that is where it stops.  If we allow ourselves to recede, the path is an easy one, but if we rage against the dying of the light, we can have specs in every room, we can sit on them, lose them, laugh at them and make others laugh too.  We can reach the sea however long it may take.  The mistake is not to bother going at all simply because it takes longer to pull on boots, because we have a sore back, because we might get cold.  What we will miss is this:-

The seabirds dipping and soaring above the salt; the colour of the sand, the squelch of kelp; granite, orange with lichen, white with fungus,sharp-edged or rolled into soft by endless tidal flow; the sound of children laughing into the breeze, the puddles along the track, the spring birdsong, a sudden wren singing aria atop a fallen branch; new shoots on winter trees, a chance meeting with others who also chose to seize the day; rain, sudden and heavy, and the merry dash for shelter; the feel of boots, their crunch and squish and squeak as they carry us along; a small cold hand in yours, the gift of a shell, a hazelnut, a pebble; the crazy barking dance of a happy dog.

Perhaps we can change the fear of aging if we do bother, if we do teach ourselves how to inhabit the moment, forgetting the past, forgetting the future.  We can do nothing about either, but, right here, right now, well………there be dragons and magic and anything is possible.

Put your specs on and take a look.  It’s a fairyland out there.

The days are now lengthening which sounds very positive, but with this lengthening thingy comes the cold.  The winter sets in, into our lives, our very bones.  We have months yet before we can go back to lightweight cardies and no socks and I can feel my gears changing.  Up to Christmas nothing matters much beyond Christmas, but, after that it seems we are faced with self-control and diets and bare trees and winds with teeth, floodings and the very real chance of arriving at playgroup, work, the supermarket or school soaked to the skin.

I remember standing at a bus stop out in the open (bus shelters were yet to be invented) with my toes turning to wood, and painfully.   My mother fixed me into clod-hopping, steel hard lace-ups with round toes and room for growth, as there was in my regulation coat, closely resembling a small and chilly gnome, standing there, waiting for the school bus.  I remember my toes remained frozen for most of the day so that if I ran along with the others whose mothers chose softer and warmer footwear I invariably made a great impression on the gritty scree of the courtyard, and little on my classmates.

I recognise a gear shift when it comes.  It’s the same when the weather warms up in late Spring, which for us is May at the earliest, more likely well into June.  I am way too hot and yet unwilling, it seems to bring out the thinner tops.  I resist the change initially until the very real threat of internally combusting forces me to adapt, and I must needs peel back multi-layers and expose my ashen and unwilling skin to the shock of sunlight  It thinks me about change.  I say that I welcome it, but I now think that I welcome change that suits me, and am as resistant as the next woman when it does not.  Change seems to sneak up and bite my bum and I will do anything to fend off what niggles and bothers me for as long as possible.

What I seem to want is no change at all once I’m in step with life.  I like routine, even though I say I don’t.  What I know is what I want, not that other uncomfortable thing about which I know nothing, or can remember little, and which looms like a spectre with dark shadows and siren threats and a change of clothing.  And yet, Life herself changes daily, so why the resistance when I know it to be true?

I don’t need routine to keep me upright and smiling, I need change.  I don’t need routine to give me a sense of self or of place, for I am complete all by myself. Nor do I need to control any change when it requires something of me, although it might be nice to get a warning email a month or so before it arrives.  What I need is an open mind, an ability to move quickquick if I need to or slowslow if that is a better option.  I need to loosen up my grip on what I know, ready to let go, ready to grab on to the next set of circumstances, for it is the truth that most change comes unbidden and unsought.

My own little world is very small.  And yet the world itself is huge, littered with people and homes and lives.  Looking out of my window, stepping out of my world and learning more about others, talking, sharing, helping…..these are the ways I learn to accept change in my own life. This is the way I stop thinking about myself, and, as I step out more, my own world expands.  Conversations lift me, I learn new truths, and I find things I can alter or accept inside my own little world.  None of that happens if I stay home, boiling or freezing in my stubborn resistance to change.

This is the season for visits and laughs about runny noses and frozen toes.  This is the time to work together, to pick each other up, to slog through the mud and cold of it all, for we need each other in order to understand who we are.  This is how we define ourselves with stories and songs and cheer-ups and cough drops, and, in defining ourselves we can work more flexibly with change when it comes, sans warning email.

In short, we remember how to laugh and mostly, at ourselves.

Thanks from my heart to all who read and commented on my blog during 2015.  I always hope, in my honest look at life, to give encouragement, as other wise writers do for me.  We are a team, after all.  Below are the stats for last year, ones I wanted to share with you.  Bring on 2016 with all its suprises and delights and please stick with me for I need you all.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Today is an ordinary day with an ordinary name, Sunday, and just saying it chucks me into no mans land where I land with a bump, looking round me for a mark on my year map.   I feel momentarily aberrated because I am uncertain of the date and there are as many possible options as there are leftover cheeses on the Mouse Man board.  I search the caverns of my mind for epiphanies – that AHA! (loud whoosh of relief) thing that happens nowadays when, without recourse to laptop, diary, Iphone, wall calendar or radio, me and my brain find the answer.  It is never a big deal sort of question like ‘Should I cut here or there to put a stent in the patient’s neck artery?’ because I could Google the answer to most of my piddling queries in seconds.  What is important to me is that I tap my own resource supply before seeking help, and, in doing so, I take hold of my power.

I catch myself, sometimes, calling across the room, mid sentence to ask for the spelling of a word, when right beside me sits a dictionnary.  I still have to look up the word, to be sure I write it down correctly, but in rifling through the pages to find what I’m looking for, I am probably employing about 35 muscles, all of which would have remained in a sleepy stupor, had the answer I sought flown across the beig carpet with the worn patches and into my shell-like.

I tend away from ‘lazy’ although it tempts me at times, I do confess and it receives a rap on its knuckles.  I know the importance of personal independence in this life, and once a life gets a bit long in the tooth, it is even more valuable.   It’s so easy to stop bothering, and yet not bothering always brings gloom because we are not built for sitting about all day, and, if we do it, our bodies complain; stiff limbs, skin irritations and loss of muscle strength to name but a few.  All of these lead to indulgent gloomery.

There was not much sleeping going on last night.  As I dressed, long before cock crow, in the weirdest combination of warm clothing, by torchlight, I considered how I would present this very disturbed night when asked How Did You Sleep?  Possible responses are

a) Long face, strained voice, a theatrical sigh and much eye rubbing ‘Hardly slept a wink.’

b)  Brave face.  A tiny outpuff of downward sloping breath.  A slightly faltering, but determined voice through a strained smile  ‘Not very good really, but it’s okay, I can doze later….maybe, if I get through my chores.’ Theatrical stare into space.

c) Upbeat, bright-eyed, elevated voice….’Weird night, very wakeful – so many words inside my head, all jostling to get out and nowhere to lay them down.  I wrote a story, a blog, and began a book all inside my head and could not find sleep anywhere! Must be the cheese!’ Genuine sounding belly laugh, midriff bouncing from too much cheese.

First two, whiney, needy, attention-seeking, heavy with gloom and the expectation that sympathy will arise and enfold me in strong arms for the rest of the day.  In a word, pathetic.  The third response is the truth.  Speaking it out tells me that this day, whatever date it may have attached to it, holds promise, fun, opportunity,excitement.  There is only poor little me in the first two, so why would I ever employ either of them?  I have done, of course I have, even knowing that sympathy has a short attention span.  I think it is that I hold out hope for a sympathy that decides to go along with my drama, and I believe I am not alone in this.  It’s a perfectly normal human need to be intelligently loved but if it is dressed up in the wrong clothes and employed as a form of manipulation it always presents as melodrama and all it ever achieves is a long and tiring day. By pulling someone else down just because I am down, I am poisoning their day too, and what can any of us do with such a day beyond waiting for it to run out?

So this thing I do, this mindful consideration of how I present myself even when almost no-one is looking, is critical, to my health and the health of the home. It dictates the mood and the mood directly affects the flow of good energy.  This positive energy is like a drug, despite sleep deprivation, although that deprivation word bothers me for it suggests that sleep is given or withheld at the whim of some capricious god.  This positive energy will affect others, confounding their attempts (most of the time) to explain in detail their current state of collapse, which is what most people get around to once the weather  and the family visit have been exhausted.  This positive energy will laugh me all the way to evening and all those I meet will be infected by it, as will I all over again, and that is the strangest thing of all.  If I speak out either of the first two responses, I am doomed, I tell you, doomed and so are you if you get in my way, but by choosing option c I lift all of us into fresh air.

It may have been the cheese of course, sampled from the Mouse Man board and taken just before bedtime that kept me alert till 5.30 am but I think it was the words in my head, jabbering away, bumping into each other, shouting and yelling at me to let them out, to lay them down, to write and write and write some more.  Now what could be more positive than that?

That’s what I’ll say, if anyone asks.

Oh flip we get older.  I know it’s pants but we do it anyway.  We can’t seem to avoid it, for all the techniques we employ.  We keep fit, laugh often, love much, that sort of stuff but still the memory lapses and the body dithers.  Mostly we laugh about it, in front of other people anyway, and mostly we can hold that sense of fun as we fight our way to the outside of a king-sized duvet cover, grab both corners to shake the feathered mountain flat only to collapse onto the bed wheezing like granny’s old bellows.  Till now, we never thought about granny’s old bellows much, nor the sound they made as we, young then, pumped gusto into her wet coal, lifting flames into life with our supple arms, sure of an even larger slice of pound cake as reward.  Now, the body remembers that sound and is upset that we are making it, sans bellows.

We remember granny. As we flitted through her high-topped halls, in full play with skates for feet and ghosties round every corner, we remember her for we are granny now.  We watch her smile as we now smile at skidding children full of laughter and sunbeams.

I notice that even mentioning the process of aging brings on a flapping of hands and a mouthful of compliments.  Oh but you look so young, for one, and, another, You’re as young as you feel, and yet I leave feeling exactly the same age as I did before the Let’s Not Talk About Nasty Things thing.  Oh, for a minute or two I could imagine the skates on my feet and yes my heart did twinkle a bit, but what I wanted to do was to have a conversation of some depth and with some contextual relevance to where I am/they are in life.  Aging is not a nasty thing, per se, but merely something we all have coming and it seems to me that the way most folk deal with it is by not looking at it.  Not looking at the inevitable is to turn away from the truth in all its beauty.  Not looking forward sounds a lot to me like I am looking back, at what has gone, at what is lost to me.  I am in No Man’s Land, neither here nor there, stranded on a sandbank without my dancing shoes, without my head on straight.  I am blind and deaf to who I am, to the truth of me in all my beauty.

As we mutter about how dreadful it is to watch an old (that’s OLD) person decline into the apparent powerlessness of a failing body and mind, we lose sight of that person, however dear, however important they have been to us, for they have changed.  This dynamic person to whom we bowed, either in terror or in a loving adoration, is losing the plot and we have no map for the new one.  Is this, I wonder, why we flap and giggle at any mention of getting old?  is it that we see our own self becoming this poor sad creature?  My third question is this.  If we face with pride and humour our own aging process, might we find the last bit somewhat happier to contemplate…..or, even better, might we, by walking with it rather than away from it, actually change the future of getting old?

I am not saying Never Wear Your Tutu again.  I am not saying Stop Dancing, Enjoying Wine or Bouncing on the Family Trampoline.  What I AM saying is that when you forget a name or a number, or your wallet or what you had for lunch, find laughter in it.  I am saying engage with aging for it is a lovely and exciting time.  It is also a time to allow for a slowing of pace, for the inevitable decline of our physical selves, for twinges in the back, sore feet, aching knees just before it rains.  We might feel less inclined to go out at night, more unsure of creating a meal for guests, less able to see the cobwebs in the corners.  We might need to ask for help from the young, as once we were asked for help.

We have stories to tell and our children want to hear them; not that old nonsense about how good it was in the olden days, not that, but stories of our lives, what we loved, how we danced in virgin snow, how we could outrun a deer, how we sailed across oceans, won first prize, fell into a smelly pond and had to walk 3 miles home, how we didn’t get picked for the rugby team and how we sulked for weeks, how jealous we were of an older sister, and that crush we had on the maths teacher that all went horribly wrong when his wife read your note.  All of this, is who we are, who we still are. But let it not be the only country we inhabit.

The sickness queue is a long one and many of the ailments begin in our minds. Depression meds are dished out like sweeties.  Yes, we would rather not be getting rickety-sticks or fluffy-headed, but we are and that’s that.  I don’t think that’s the problem at all.  I believe that, in not engaging with the aging process, of flapping it away, of living in fear of the future, of ending up like that OLD person who has become a sad soul, we manifest the whole thing in ourselves.  Mourning what can never be again takes the joy from life.  Have you watched a young woman run for a bus and just watched her with a smile?  Or have you immediately related her speed to your lack of it, feeling even more sorebones-and-downmouth?  How much youth can you observe without feeling even older?

And yet the watching IS the joy.

Turning to look ahead when you don’t want to see what you fear takes courage, but, trust me, the monsters are quite gone, once you do – oh, and I’ll be there to welcome you in my tutu and a big jumper on to keep out the cold with spares for you in case you forgot your own.

You know when you arrive on a dance floor and just wish you had donned something with sequins, because that woman over there looks like a chandelier, or a firework, and there you are in something that reflects absolutely nothing beyond the fact that it is obvious you can never sit down because that body-hugging fat controller would sever blood flow to your brain in about 4 minutes.

As I lean against a door frame with something fizzy in my hand I ponder my lack of ‘reflectivability’ and I always come to the same conclusion.

I doubted.  I doubted myself inside the dress I actually wanted to wear, hearing, as I always do, those matronly voices tutting at me.  You’re too chunky, too old, too much of a farmer’s wife, too much of a mother of five to actually, seriously (!) consider wearing that!?

And so, the sequins stay wrapped in plastic doubt for another year, two years, and then some.  It thinks me.  To be absolutely honest, the call for sequins nowadays is rare, if it comes at all.  Living on a rain-soaked island is more welly and’mackintosh’ (does anyone use that delicious word these days?) than it ever is sequins and heels.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t love them, even now, and I really believe in holding that love close.  It is easy to forget sparkle and yet sparkle is everything. Okay, not necessarily sequins and champagne, but that wonderful human sparkle that can be held inside wellies and mackintoshes. It’s all in the eyes.  When life feels a bit solid and lumpish, there is someone, always one someone who sparkles.  They don’t always manage it, but that’s also okay, because when they don’t, you can.  It’s a see-saw thing.  One of us is up, one of us is down, one of us light, one heavy…… then it changes.

Today I went to church and heard a lovely positive message, sang good Christmas songs (in a slightly higher key than any of us could ever reach) and then I filled the manger with hay and swaddled Jesus ( they said….. she can do it , she’s had five…..) ready for the school nativity play tomorrow, all the while, laughing and talking and watching the light in eyes all around me. Without doubt I could see the sequins, hear the music, feel the dance.

This is ordinary mackintosh life reflecting a sequinned light.

Light at this time of year is precious.  It comes in suddenly, enough to startle and is all too easily lost if we are texting, or inside a shop, or caught up with sticky children where roads divide and rule.  Headlights are on a lot of the day, and the orange streetlights don’t know what to do with themselves as the sky closes over yet again with dark foreboding clouds.

Indoors, lighting is warm and mood-creating unless the lights are those cold blue fizzing strips.  We had them at school, I remember and they never ceased in making their presences felt by whining and complaining and eventually going out altogether, which was a relief, not least because Chemistry was cancelled for the afternoon.  As we walk past cafes and bars, the light is inviting.  Outside it’s wet and windy and we are in serious danger of being decapitated by flying umbrellas.  We see their abandoned skeletons on the pavements, their skin ripped from their bones.  Dogs ears fly out like wings, their tails firmly tucked in, their legs pushing for home.

This is the winter, not of our life, but of our year.  The fact that we have an extraordinary volume of rain is just how it is these days.  In the past, according to everyone over 55, it never rained.  Snow fell and it was always pretty snow and sparkly and nobody got stuck in drifts or skidded off the road.  Seasons were well defined and the world was a simpler place and there was no violence, no weirdo behaviour, no anorexia or obesity, no drugs and no divorce.  Of course, this is twaddle.  What they mean is that there was no social media, only a handful of newpapers and only 3 TV channels, so that the ordinary folk never got to hear of the nasty things.  Now we all know all the nasty things and we don’t much like it, because it creates in us a fear of life in the big Out There.

I wonder at how much we actually need to know, because all this information can make us blind.  It seems to me that we can be thoroughly appraised of the dreadful situation in Syria whilst at home our own children come home to an empty house and unsupervised TV.  We can wring our hands in grief at the acts of violence and persecution around the world whilst we ignore the agressive rudeness towards an immigrant taxi driver saying it’s none of our business.  We can talk about what should be done in care homes and never bother to visit Granny in hers.

The light is on and we are at home, protected and warm, most of us, and yet it seems to me that we forget our responsibilty to our own values.  We can talk as if we had them all in place, pointing blame everywhere but at ourselves.  Talking is easy, blaming, even easier, because it makes us feel good about ourselves, our values but when we point one finger in blame, the other four are pointing right back at us.

There is enough food in the world to feed every single human.  There is enough money to supply everyone’s basic needs.  There are enough parents to give every child a home.  There is enough light.  We should work on shining it in the right places.