I will survive

Is there any woman who hasn’t air pumped at least once when this has started playing? How many times have groups of women swayed to the music, waving their arms in the air, or looked across at another woman while singing and grinned? Conspirators. All understanding just what it is like to wish you’d kicked the bastard out for good at the beginning.

Or maybe not the bastard. Maybe just the person who has brought you more heartbreak than joy. Or perhaps lots of joy but heartbreak too. Who knows and really, does it matter? There will always be that one person that you heave a sigh of relief to see the back of.

And of course, wish that you’d managed to deal with sooner. I have had the feeling often, to different degrees and in different situations. In the work place where I have walked the three sides of a square to avoid seeing someone just down the passage in the office just before the one I need to get to. At a party when I’ve been cornered by the very person I didn’t want to see, and who has positioned himself right by the fridge. Walking down a street, crossing the road to avoid someone, or in a supermarket where you cringe when you hear your name trilled across the aisles.

And even at home. Much as you love your nearest and dearest, don’t tell me you want to see them every day. Or at least, all day. And worse, what if your nearest and dearest are no longer quite so near and dear? Relationships start so well. We have such high hopes and then something starts to niggle. That old story about where do you squeeze a tube of toothpaste and does it matter? Well, yes it does.

Not necessarily the toothpaste, but small things become big things. The trick is of course to notice and to do something about their growth. But we’re not very good at that. Instead, lots of small things begin to add up and all of a sudden, the size of what’s wrong is overwhelming. It doesn’t seem possible to fix and often, you no longer have the will to fix it anyway.

Sometimes the heartbreak is much more sudden and you don’t see it coming. Your perfect becomes imperfect with the sweep of someone else’s stroke and you can’t believe it’s over.

At first I was afraid I was petrified

Thinking I couldn’t live without you by my side

But just like the song, we do get through it and often, get stronger on the other side

… I grew strong, and I learned how to get along

And now you’re back, from outer space

And I find you here with that sad look upon your face.

I should have changed that stupid lock

And made you leave your key …

And that’s the air pump place! You’ve done it.

The trick I suppose is to find someone who really likes you. Not just loves. It could be a friend, a colleague, a lover, a child, a partner. Don’t look for the perfect at all. Look for what is going to be good for you too. As a good friend once said to me “Be the star in your own movie!”

Simply the Best

I have been fascinated since I started writing this blog by how much music is intrinsic in my life – the background to all I do. I recently read an article in which the author described songs as “a constant soundtrack to one’s interior world”. I so agree. They are a source of inspiration and consolation and pure enjoyment. The mystery of a song is how it interacts with memories and experiences and becomes intensely personal. “More than any other form of artistic expression, people claim songs as their own.”[1]

They are tied to actions and feelings and once linked, the ties cannot be undone. Good songs become bad, bad are good just because of what you felt while listening to them. You usually don’t know all the words to your personal anthems, or even perhaps their original meaning. What they evoke for you becomes their meaning.

Remember Tina Turner belting out Simply the Best? That gravelly voice and those legs. I saw her here in Johannesburg and embarrassed my daughter by dancing wildly in public – she was only nine at the time and hadn’t got to the stage of her own revelry.

I call you when I need you

When my heart’s on fire

You come to me, come to me

Wild and wired

What is “wild and wired” anyway? Crazy for love? High? A bit of a reprobate? But that’s not the point. It is for me all about a time when I was working with one of my best friends and the incredible fun we had for nearly 20 years. It’s also about my learning what I was good at and what I wanted to do with my life. I travelled the length and breadth of South Africa working in rural schools. Give me a pin and a map and I doubt if there is a place you’ll find where I can’t tell you the name of a local B&B.

Over those years I really did have simply the best time. Most public schools in South Africa are not for the faint-hearted, especially in deep rural areas. There is much wrong with education here but there is also good to be found everywhere. And definitely humour, even amongst the heartbreak. I have sat in classes in mud huts on top of a hill in the old Transkei with dung-smeared floors and watched as goats wandered in an out, rhythmically chewing the teacher’s notes as she put them down to write on a blackboard propped on a chair. I have walked up the same hills to schools through knee deep mud after rain made the dirt tracks impassable – and loved the looks on the faces of the children when they looked askance at my wiggling bare toes.

I sat through good lessons and bad, heard stories about how schools have been turned around and also terrible excuses about how something couldn’t be done. I have caught dysentery, viral mumps and measles in schools, but have also listened to songs, seen plays, been to prize givings and sports days. I even actually had one class sing to me

You’re the best

Better than all the rest

Better than anyone

Anyone [we’ve] ever met

How could it not be a good time?

[1] Neil McCormick, The Telegraph

My Baby Takes the Morning Train

From a British 1940’s Communist Party poster that hangs in my kitchen

I bet when this was written it wasn’t intended to turn into someone’s feminist anthem! Probably the opposite but really, have you heard the words?

My baby takes the morning train

He works from nine ’til five and then

He takes another home again

To find me waiting for him

I love it. I belt the words out and a smile comes to my face. Is she really just waiting at home for him every day? Is that her lot in life? That’s it? And yet, look how happy it makes her.

I grew up in a world where just this happened. My mother and her friends did not work, in the traditional sense of the word. They managed their houses and in my mother’s case, the farm, and all that that involved. I do too but I also work and have done so for 40 years. I am sure however that my house looks nothing like my mother’s. I’ve always said that the most positive thing I can say about wearing spectacles is that when you don’t wear them, it’s amazing how much faster housework goes!

But I don’t think that made my mother any the less busy or valuable, especially to my father. What it did do however, was reinforce the ‘women’s place is in the home’ viewpoint. It was a conversation we never had: it hadn’t been discussed in my youth and when she died, I was too young to have gone anywhere beyond the home to learn other points of view. I feel however that she would be the first to tell women today that they should be with their children and they should support their husband, but also that the role women play in the home and the relationship is important. She would have deplored bad treatment of women in any form and expected men to be courteous and responsible in their roles. But perhaps this emphasis on ‘roles’ is the crux of the matter.

Feminism is one of those hot potato subjects. My prospective sister-in-law once told me as I was about to meet my staunchly right-wing Afrikaans father-in-law “Just remember three things: don’t talk politics, don’t talk religion and whatever you do, don’t talk English”! She could well have added “don’t talk about women” because certainly, it was a subject just as fraught with divisive politics. But I do wonder why people still today look askance if you say you are a feminist.

To me, feminism is about power – and choice. Or the other way around? Having choice gives me the power to control my life. I want to have the power to choose my job, to earn as much as the next man for the work I do, to be educated how and where I want to be, and to be treated well as I do it all. This is what equality is all about – the same treatment, the same opportunities and rights, be it in politics or economics, or the social or personal sphere. Why is that considered subversive or divisive? Why does one even need to debate it?

Although perhaps my view of feminism is too moderate. Perhaps I have missed nuances or even basic premises that are all important. I will probably get told so if that’s the case – but then, that in itself is a power and choice worth having. The freedom to debate and to be considered worthy of the debate.

You had me from Hello

I love love. The idea of it is magical and there is a big part of me that believes in the fairy tale. I want it all and I want it now – but I’m not particularly good at it. I have fallen in and out of love, been married and divorced twice, been on good and disastrous dates, and sung along to nearly every love song that has ever been written. I could write this entire blog in cliché love song words but still be found wanting at the end.

And love at first sight? That is real too. No question. Maybe not quite I saw you across a crowded room but attraction yes, and then getting to know you and butterfly feelings in my tummy. Dirty dancing for real and afterwards you can honestly say that for a while you did … have the time of your life

I’ve been waiting for so long

Now I’ve finally found someone to stand by me

We saw the writing on the wall

And we felt this magical fantasy

Does it last? Another million dollar question of course. Not always and not always all parts of that first attraction but yes, I believe it can. It helps to fall in love with someone who becomes your friend too. All the ‘L’ words – like, love, lust, longing … I’ve had them all and in the end the best was when I could say

I’m lucky I’m in love with my best friend

Lucky to have been where I have been

The one good thing about getting older (yes, I’m afraid one does start counting them up) is that you do get perspective on things. I look back over 40 plus years on the relationship highway and see it more as a roller coaster than a road. But funnily enough, I love that too. I like the fact that things haven’t been plain sailing. I like knowing I have had good and bad relationships and I know I have learnt from them all. I’ve also learnt about real friendship and I’ve learnt what you can and can’t do about people. Most importantly, you can’t change them! Why is it that we think we can take someone we like and somehow make them better? What on earth is better and why do we think our better is actually better?

So much to learn and of course, I don’t always get it right.

I might not have the best track record but that absolutely won’t stop me trying.

I can’t get no satisfaction

Have you ever sung along to a song and only realised much later that you had it all wrong? You were absolutely sure that Bruce was belting out “I got my first real sex dream…” and you were delighted because you were pretty much having yours right there and then, and then he followed it up with

Bought it at the five-and-dime

Played it ’til my fingers bled

It was the summer of ’69

Hmm.  Well, good to know where you could get one but a bit of a tough act to follow.

Madonna and her “touched for the thirty-first time” was another classic and not at all difficult to imagine either! Although honestly, if one really is still a virgin, what had been wrong with the first thirty times?

A long time before those realities even entered my mind, I was at a school and going through the just-learning-about-sex stage and loved the impropriety of inappropriate lyrics. Only inappropriate of course if anyone any ever heard them but this was all in my own head and I think I would have been hard put to explain what they really meant if asked.

I can’t get no sexual action

‘Cause I try and I try and I try and I try

[But] I can’t get no, I can’t get noooo [satisfaction]

Who better than the Stones to talk about sex of any sort?!

And then there was “Walking back to hap-penis I shared with you, woo-pah” which was just plain silly but I didn’t often get the chance to say the word out loud (no brothers!).

In my youth there were certain pop stars who were deemed “acceptable” and others definitely not. My mother loved Cliff Richard but found Elvis Presley too raunchy. All that hip rolling was unnecessary! The Beatles were odd and very loud but fairly clean cut – in comparison with the Rolling Stones who were just plain dirty. She really just liked “a nice show tune” and I grew up knowing every word to the songs in movies like Paint your Wagon, Oklahoma, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. All jolly good clean fun. West Side Story was also a favourite but was much darker – much more what we might have analysed at university, if we had bothered to look below the surface. ‘Somewhere’ is still hauntingly beautiful to me and remains my dream song

There’s a time for us

Someday a time for us

Time together with time to spare

Time to learn, Time to care

Going back to the different words story, at university, one of the songs of the day was PP Arnold singing ‘Angel of the morning’ on her album, Kafunta. A powerful voice and one which we did spend many late nights listening to, high on our perceptions of our own invincibility and visions of the many ways our world would be a better place. Many years later, singing along in a pub we all changed the words to

Just call me angel of the morning angel

Just brush my teeth before you leave me, baby

which definitely lowered the tone. Probably akin to our by then lower aspirations and better understandings of how much more difficult it was going to be to achieve what we first thought possible.

We should have listened to Elvis when he crooned “Wise men say, Only fools rush in” but then again, even the King didn’t escape our wit

Take my heart, take my hand, take my whole leg too

For I can’t help falling in love with you

Under the boardwalk

My mother was a blue rinse and perm girl. She went once a week to the hairdresser and had her silver grey hair finely tuned to a purple-blue.  She sat under a great hooded drier in small pink curlers until her cap of tight blue curls was ready to be teased and sprayed into a permanent fixture meant to last a week at least. Holidays were hell for her as she had to either find a new hairdresser or wash her own hair.

My father on the other hand had his own anguish to deal with. Leaving the farm meant leaving his cows for more than a week. Would they cope? Who would dip them? What if they became sick or calved in his absence. He couldn’t bear it.

My sister and I were privy to none of this at the time but later came to understand that these were two of the reasons that we only holidayed out of the country once every three years. Three to four weeks of misery for both parents. In between we would take annual week-long breaks within Zimbabwe. All done by car and none without the usual in-car fights and complaints all trips with children are prone to.

But the joy of getting there outshone everything. Every trip had a theme song. It started on the drive to wherever we were going and we sang incessantly along with the radio. Sandie Shaw sang me all the way to the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe. I did so hope that this might, just might, be the time where I would meet the boy of my dreams.

I wonder if one day that, you’ll say that, you care

If you say you love me madly, I’ll gladly, be there

Like a puppet on a string

The saga of The Monkees kept me amused up to the Wankie Game Reserve. First time I’d ever heard of lip-syncing.

Love was out to get me

Now that’s the way it seemed

Disappointment haunted all my dreams

Oh then I saw her face, now I’m a believer

Not a trace of doubt in my mind

I’m in love, I’m a believer

I couldn’t leave her if I tried

Disappointment definitely haunted me although I later discovered they hadn’t lip-synced their singing but ‘play-synced’ their instruments!  Who can tell these days who is actually singing most of the time?!

And then, Under the boardwalk. This has to be the song of seaside holidays

Oh when the sun beats down and burns the tar up on the roof

And your shoes get so hot you wish your tired feet were fire proof

Under the boardwalk, down by the sea, yeah

On a blanket with my baby is where I’ll be

The coconut smell of Tropitone, melting ice creams, red skin and sore shoulders, carrying far too much to the beach, hating carrying it home later, and sand in everything! Isn’t that what holidays are about?

But, Dad never got carried away by the music. He and Otis Redding might have been Sittin’ in the morning sun but [he’d still] be sittin’ when the evening comes, Watching the ships roll in and then, despondently, [he’d] watch them roll away again, filled with thoughts of his cows back home.

Just a jump to the left

I love travel but not the journey. Maybe if I could afford first class travel I would think differently but I can’t. I’m an economy class girl.

But being there is a different story altogether. London is my favourite. My love affair started in 1975 with tickets to The Rocky Horror Picture Show on my second night there. You have to understand. I was Janet. I remember sitting in the theatre in the West End with no idea what to expect. The play opened and 20 minutes in, Tim Curry strode down the main aisle, singing Sweet Transvestite. I was sunk.

Don’t get strung out

By the way I look

Don’t judge a book by its cover

I’m not much of a man

By the light of day

But by night I’m one hell of a lover

His energy was infectious and I think imbued London with everything I imagined it would be. Excitement, sex, sparkle, glamour – all with a patina of tackiness and quirkiness. The feeling has never left me.

And I felt a change

Time meant nothing

Never would again.

Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to travel more widely – Canada, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Thailand, Australia. But I always come back to London. Britain really, as I’ve lived and visited elsewhere in the UK – Leeds, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Birmingham – but London at heart. It was there I also met people who weren’t even allowed to enter South Africa at the time. Political activists who made my ‘jump to the left’ a reality.

My ideals and attitudes have developed over the years but their beginnings were in the smoky pubs of London in the Seventies. Too theoretical to stay the same for long but they formed the basis for my work for the rest of my life.

Misty blue

Recently, a number of my friends have been having issues with aged parents – either illness, senility or death. This has never been a part of my life because both my parents unfortunately died when I was young. My mother had terrible cancer and died the year I turned seventeen. She was younger than I am now. My father lived longer, re-married and died aged seventy-two, now more than twenty years ago. So I have experienced illness and death at close range but nothing is so devastating as sudden death.

My daughter’s boyfriend was killed in a car crash. That was it. Just gone. She was overseas and came back the next day. This song played in the car as I drove to the airport to fetch her. Not a dirge at all but a song about lost love

Ohhhhhhh, no I can’t no I can’t

I can’t forget you

My whole world turns misty blue

I felt that as I drove – a kind of haze in front of me. But in it I could imagine him quite clearly, see his face and hear his voice, see them together and remember the very last time I saw him.  It really is almost impossible to believe you’ll never see someone again. A life turned misty blue.

I think now far more often about my own parents. I can’t imagine them older yet I visualise them with my daughter, the grand-daughter they never knew, and perhaps even her children, my still-to-come grandchildren and their great-grandchildren. What I am most sorry about is not taking more notice of them when they were alive.

My parents were of pioneer stock in what was then Southern Rhodesia. My dad owned a gold mine and then a cattle ranch and through our early years he would tell stories about prospecting for gold, hunting, living in the bush, and running the farm. We heard about the buck he shot, the dogs he owned, we knew the names of all the cows he milked and the men who had worked for him over the years. They were superb stories but we took it for granted that would just always be there. No blogs then.

My mom was always in the background but at the same time, really important. She ran the house and grew the most amazing dahlias. She hand-made all our clothes and taught us to sew and bake. She was there for us when we went to school and came home and she and Dad sat talking together for hours in the evenings. I would like to think she was an equal partner in all he did. I’ll never know because I never asked.

I remember them both in the same haze. It’s just fainter.

Hey baby!

I’m sure we’ve all had a pure midlife-crisis-reaction experience at some time. Some perhaps less or more than others but don’t tell me that if you’re over a certain age you haven’t felt this just once?

Mine happened the year I turned 50. I went to a party and met a 34 year-old man who for whatever reason really liked me. And we happened to dance to this song.

When I saw you walkin down the street

I said that’s a kind of gal I’d like to meet

She’s so pretty, Lord she’s fine

I’m gonna make her mine all mine

Did it make me feel good? Did it make me feel young? Of course. Was there any possibility of a long-term relationship coming out of it? Was there any reason I didn’t feel this good with myself anyway? Nope. None at all.

So, a completely unfounded gut reaction but to this day, the moment I hear

Heyyyyy, hey baby!

I want to know if you’ll be my girl

I smile.

Why is it that we are hard-wired to seek approval? We seem to need others to accept our decisions and choices. We want people to like us and to seek us out, praise us, even ask our opinions. Why is their approval of us so much more important than our own? And their disapproval so devastating?

I’ve only come to see all this as I’ve got older and am very conscious of the times I look for approval or validation. I’ve learnt that looking or thinking differently is okay. Accepting others as they are is all a part of it too. But learning to take criticism isn’t easy, nor is realising that actually there are people who don’t like me at all!

There is a quotation that goes “In your 20’s and 30’s, you worry about what other people think. In your 40’s and 50’s you stop worrying about what other people think. Finally in your 60’s and 70’s, you realize they were never thinking about you in the first place!” So true – although I hadn’t quite got the stopping worrying part down pat in my 40’s, I assure you!

I continue to read self-help books or articles and try to appreciate myself, win friends and influence people, de-stress my life and think positively. I try to understand what planet a person comes from and am constantly looking for my cheese.

But in the end, I still have to admit, I do get a kick out of being noticed and however much I try, I will look around if someone shouted “Hey baby”!