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Island Blog – The Jousting Woman

Women used to joust, you know, back in the jousting days. Needless to say, they had to look like men, breasts bound. But, coated in gmail, no, chainmail, sorry, all they needed were huge biceps, strong thighs for clamping a horse, hands free, great eye-arm precision and bloody mindedness; a Boudicca sort of attitude and a kick ass determination to be a fighter, regardless of their sex. Altough jousting was fast and furious, it rarely ended in tragedy, but only in collapsed pride. Women, wiry and flexible are less rigid, less stuck in the ways of men and, more importantly, less encumbered by ego and swagger. In fact, swaggering is not what we bother with at all. Wrong shape for starters.

I will get the call tomorrow, the one from my wonderful surgeon, the one who will tell me the wotwot of my nexting. I will hear that only radiotherapy is next, after Christmas, and for one week. Or, I will hear that more surgery is required and, then, the radiotherapy. I have said I refuse chemo. I’ve seen too many of my community go for it, only to lose a year, at least, in sickness and pale-faceless and loss of self-confidence, and then, for some, to fade away anyway. No bloody thanks. However, if I was 40 (loved that birthday) I might have chosen differently, but I am not, I am 70 and that’s a fricken long life. I have lived like nobody else has lived. I have adventured every single day, dealt with chaos, damage, disaster and celebrations which everyone who came would agree were the best. Me and the old bugger were excellent party hosts. Just saying.

Not that I am going under. Whatever my results are, I am ready and peaceful. I cannot control the most of it, but I can control me and my attitude and. my thankfulness and my humour and that mischievous imp behind my eyes and in my throat. I can do that because life is the most wonderful thing. My life is the most wonderful thing. So, btw, is yours because without it, there is nothing much.

So, although I began with jousting, I still like the thought of Joan of Arc-ing myself up to meet the stranger which is Cancer. I doubt I could hold the chainmail, nor clamp the horse, hands free, but there is something about flying there, about letting go, and not just of the joust pole; like a spirited game-on thingy, the pounding of hooves, the tension, the timing, the invisibility.

Whatever I hear tomorrow will take me forward, and forward is the only way for a jousting woman.

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Island Blog – Window Clown

I am home again after a weird but wonderful weekend. My eldest granddaughter turned 16, all excitement and hormones and friends over. I arrived on Thursday, driving Miss Pixty Forkov (feisty daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Palaver) who is throaty and fast around corners, holding the road like she owned every inch of it and refusing to let go. I am always anxious about journeys, for no good reason. I know the road, so does Pixty, and the drive is lovely as long as I can bumble along, not that my car does ‘bumble’ very happily, preferring, instead, to roar past everyone like an Arab filly. I hold her back.

On Friday I travelled by train to the hospital, grabbed a delicious pesto wrap for lunch and marched out to find a smiley taxi driver. No distance, and I was in and settled when my sister arrived, she who knows about breast cancer and has more than ‘survived’ it. We met June, a ward orderly who remembered my sister and hopes I am in Ward 6 when I go for the chop. I hope so too. We reminded her (and I think she remembered) years back, when I had asked her who cleaned the windows. They were filthy. She said, Not Me, and so I asked for a bucket and water and a cloth, climbing onto the wide sills and bringing in the light for all those brave women in rows, in beds, survivors, I hoped. On a high now, and literally, I moved along all the wards. Hallo, I am the Window Cleaner, I announced, all smiles and bucket, receiving welcome smiles from pale faces that still could lift one. As I consider my own possible time in that ward, I hope there will be a window clown for my stay.

Needles. Loads of them. Anaesthetics then biopsies, then two more markers as another dark patch, a possible cancer lump, and joined to the other one. Then a mammogram to photograph the markers. I am titanium woman now. There’s a song in there, somewhere. I await results next week, and, hopefully, a decision or, at least a suggestion as to surgery. The original lump has grown a tiny bit, and, in truth, the lump itself is barely visible to the naked eye, but because of the proximity to a nipple, and if a lumpectomy might leave me with the Ochil Hills, all ups and downs and a right frickin mess, I may choose, or they may recommend, a mastectomy. Ectomy. What does that mean?? Sometimes the fanciness of word endings makes me laugh. So much pomp and dictionary when most ordinary people just want plain language.

It is glorious to be home. To walk in the Fairy Woods, to watch the leaves fall, to notice foot tracks on the narrow track, human, male heavy, woman dance-foot, deer, dog, all of them leaving their marks on this wonderful Earth. Hazel nuts and acorns scatter the ground but no conkers, no conkers, no shiny balls of smash and clash for children. My husband, canny as you like, would soak conkers in vinegar overnight to make them hard as iron. He always won, or so he said, back in the days when there was no such thing as a ‘device’ to lure a child into a world he, or she, had no real understanding of.

The 16th party was wonderful, even as I was too tired to join in, watching through the window. The fire pit lit the night, as did the lights strung through trees. Snacks and dips were laid out as the 16s arrived, the boys and girls on the cusp of adulthood, beautiful, gangly, brazen and funny. I said hallo, then disappeared upstairs. I heard them singing together, playing rounders with a luminous ball, dashing off to hide and to seek in the big harvested field, returning for pizzas and fire poi, trying their hands at what is way more of a skill than they realised. At 11 they left, bar the girls, who slept over. Slept? No. No slepting at all. I reckon they chatted and laughed till 3 am and it reminded me of my own 16 when life was laid out like an endless and beautiful carpet, riddled with rips and tears but still laid out. I saw the ease with which my daughter and her husband talked and laughed with the 16s, having known them since toddlerhood. I remember that ease with my own kids.

Ah…… the memory of time passed is a beautiful thing. All those parties, all that confidence, all those rips and tears, all that colour, dance and light! A view from the window, now, but I will always be the clown, breasts or no breasts.

Trust me.

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Island Blog – Blue Gin and Sleeping with Ants

Happy 70th birthday to me! It bizarres me that I have arrived here at all. 70, in my experience of parents and grandparents, is an age for sensible knickers, shoes and rigid opinions. I relate to none of those. I still feel mischievous, my sense of fun and the opportunities for seeing the fun in pretty much everything and everyone, is childlike still. The very thought of becoming sensible, according to the world, is enough to send me up the curtains, in my mind, at least. Life is such a glorious adventure, a troublesome pain in the ass at times, yes, but I will not focus on those times, only learn from, and survive, them. People keep saying Life is too short, and then spend endless moments, hours and days, worrying about a future that hasn’t even arrived and probably never will. Such a ridiculous cliche and meaningless when you think about it unless the core truth of it is imbibed and digested.

This past weekend in Africa, I was feted and celebrated until my smile threatened to dislodge my ears. Taken out for lunch, out for breakfast, gold and white helium balloons and golden streamers dangling all around the big open kitchen; champagne toasts, lovely new friends over for a wonderfully daft evening with good food on the braai, good wine to drink, shared anecdotes and jokes, conversations and laughter tossed into the sky, high enough to join the stars, which, I might add, are in all the wrong places and tilting dangerously. Even the moon is on her back, the saucy madam. Something to do with the Equator or an attitude to Latitude or whatever.

Although I knew bits about what might be happening, I didn’t know it all and it felt odd at first not being the one to organise a surprise, the celebration of another. Let go, I tell myself, and shut the dufus up. You think you don’t deserve to be celebrated? Stupid woman. Look at your family, friends and other animals, how they keep coming back. This, my dear, means something. Drink your blue gin and be thankful. And I get it and I am. I loved every single minute of the weekend, gathering up the memories like wildflowers, saved into a file in my head to be enjoyed over and over again when I return to my little island home.

For the past couple of warm African nights I have not been alone in my bed. A large contingent of ants has chosen to join me and we cannot work out where on earth they come from, why they are in my bed and what ion earth they are up to. Ants are intelligent wee critters so this is no random invasion just for the hell of it, just to upset me, not that I’m upset. I studied them the first night, my miners lamp on my head (in case of power outage overnight) and my goodness they looked busy. I pulled the duvet over me, brushed a few stragglers away and wished them well. In the morning they were gone. However last night I believe they lost their moxie a bit as I noticed a lot of dithering and fleeing aboot, all the way up to me. It tickled me awake. Okay, I sigh, clock says 01.15, and I want to sleep. I wished them well and took myself off to the couch, a very comfortable ant-free zone. It is still a mystery, this incoming tide of small black busybodies, and one I hope we can solve without destroying their lives, but none of us speak ‘Ant’ and nor do we have feelers to waggle, so a mutually agreeable result is only a possibility for now.

I could easily freak out over this but that is not my style. However, if we were talking scorpions or poisonous spiders, my moxie would also be challenged, I admit, and my curiosity wouldn’t even lift its head to engage in any study. But these harmless wee people are a fascination because there is such intent and dynamism in their ordinary little lives and they very obviously do not want to be in my bed. Something has disturbed them and they are de-camping. Solid walls are preventing this, or so I guess. I wish them well and I wish them gone, obviously, but I know what it feels like to be unsettled or discombobulated and I also know that in this so-called short life of mine, sleeping with ants is rather an unique situation, a story for the telling sometime when I am home again.

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Island Blog – After Party

For a few days I am staying alone in the house we had built around 1992. Living in 2 mobile homes (that’s 3 too short) with five kids, four of whom were teenagers, 4 collies who spent all day wondering where the sheep had gone and who stole overnight that glorious opportunity to run wide, covering miles in a single burst of energy, to come in like a mothers arms on a curve of 50 plus sheep. Impotent, confined, caged and re-acting. Ditto teenagers. The younger ones never listened to me. Their eyes were on their angsty and hormonal siblings who favoured noisy dirt bikes, fire-making and climbing through caravan windows. You have to be skinny, or fit, for that manoeuvre. I never managed it, although I did manage it when I was a rebellious teen, through a well-fitted and spacey sitting room window, but when I told my kids that, they left the room, like bored. I get it now. My escape was feeble compared to theirs. In a caravan/mobile home you cannot drop a feather without someone yelling at you to keep the noise down.

Anyways, here I am. Minding the hens, the greenhouse and the tortoise (where is he?) for the weekend. Alone. I don’t think I was ever alone in this lovely house. We lived here for just 7 years, but there was always someone, a child/adult or all of us plus more, usually many more. This was a party house. I recall one Hogmanay, the pub closing, a band of street performers laughing with us all and me standing up, all 5.3 feet of me and loudly extending a welcome to the whole pub for an after party. Nobody stopped me, not even the husband. It was a fabulous fun night, still in my remembering circa 1997/8. Music, juggling lessons, magic tricks, all of it.

When I look back on the craziness of my life I love the moving pictures. There are people who were changed forever, in a good way, after meeting us, me and the Admiral. They may have gone home in someone else’s clothes but they would always have got home, or we would have sorted it for them. That’s who we were and who we are, albeit seriously compromised just now. Now that it is all carers and nurses and morphine and confusion. Although there are a zillion times I fold, cold and sad and chewing on a bare hunk of bread, there are so many more when I remind myself of who we once were and more….much more….how may young folk came to us over the decades, as marine students, as runaways, as window escapers, as just kids who wanted more than their own bedrooms with posters of Che Guevara on their ceilings. Kids who wanted to live life, scared and all, probably terrified and certainly broke, who took one step, then another, easing gently away from the safe options and landed here with us.

Now the Admiral is heading for the Elysian Fields. He may take days/weeks or months. Nobody knows the answer to that. We all want him to stay in his own home but this is not a given, not always an option. His body is strong, his mind is still here but there are times of confusion and frustration and anger and who is surprised at this? Rage, Rage, Rage against the dying of the Light. Quite Right. I would be raging too, I think. I say, I think, because I have no fear of death. I believe there is either complete peace or a wonderful floaty magical land of unicorns and light and, best of all, the meet of those long gone. Like my Dad, my Mum, My beloved Granny and even those I sort of knew in my childhood but not really. Who were they, what did they think, what did they love, what music, what art, what food, what moments? All of that. So many glorious conversations.

For now, we go day to day, night to night, and I will not pretend it is pretty. But, beyond the now, and I love to celebrate the now (usually), there is hope, and faith and a promise I can paint any colour a like. One I can make into a party of music and juggling and laughter and home.

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Island Blog 57 – A New Song

Island Blog 57

 

There’s a young man that I know……

Well THAT’S bad grammar for a start!  It should read…….There’s a young man whom I know……..no…that sounds heavy and requires too much lip puckering. It also sounds like the plural of hummus.

I know why the songwriter chose to forfeit the English Prize – some words are really hard to sing in certain combinations, and it sounds different again when you listen back to it through a fancy recording thingummyjig.

We were writing songs, me and two professionals from Wild Biscuit, in a lovely farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.  There was a beautiful dog called Blossom, a bonkers horse with wild eyes that dashed by every now and then in a tartan blanket, ignoring any wheedles to come in for the night, and a loudly colourful pheasant from a hot country who (or is it whom?) appeared outside the kitchen door one morning and who now resides in the yard, fed on porage oats and leftovers. Swallows busied themselves with nest building and chattered me awake in the early mornings.  I watched a dipper on the pond and heard the Bark Chorus from the kennels across the valley.

Everyone knew this place already, but I didn’t.  My bed had soft white cotton coverings, and there were daffs from the garden in a little vase.  I sat down with my writings and John said Pick a line, so I did.  ‘Hey did I get here early?  I see you’re packing up the car.’  and we were off, me with my pencil and he with his guitar and recording thingummyjig.  When Mags came in to see if we wanted coffee, we already had the bones of a song in shape and my sore throat had quite forgotten itself in the excitement.

It was the same the next morning.  Only this line was ‘Sometimes I feel beautiful, easy in my skin,’ because I do sometimes, and I did that day looking out this time on sunshine and promise and that bonkers horse shooting by to interrupt my reverie.   By mid-afternoon we had two songs down, and harmonies and different instruments that rose into place with the push of a button.  I loved losing myself in the music, singing into a microphone for the first time in years, hearing the reverb and the feedback and remembering to free one ear so I could hear my voice in real time as well as the enhanced one, that sang me like a boy in a cathedral, with those high ceilings and big echoes and time standing still. There was even  Photographer Bill to capture the magic of all this creativity.  I gave him a copy of Island Wife and he said he would write his own story one day.  Shame, I said, you can’t photograph sound as I scrambled through another verse sounding like a donkey.  The next day I would be horse.

It’s a beginning, which is why we call it the ‘Imagine Sessions’. I am already writing a third song in my head and listening back to the cd I brought home of the first two, to think more on rhythm, beat, musicality, harmonies and lyrics; to practise, to lift a word clean away, or shift it, or lay down a new one altogether.  And the cough has nearly gone, for on mental tiptoe I can reach the high notes again.

A new door opens and I am stepping through.