Hello old friend

Picture this. The Albert Hall. Red velvet curtains draped across the back of the stage. Lights go down and the music starts. And the guitar starts to play. Thunderous applause. Clapton singing Hello old friend as he walks on stage. Can my life get any better?!

Hello old friend,

It’s really good to see you once again.

So this could go two ways. Do I do rock and roll and great guitar, or friends and what they mean in life? Music is easy. Who doesn’t like it? Although, having said that I did meet someone once who admitted to never listening to music. She didn’t own a radio or any type of player. Said it distracted her from whatever she was doing. And I mean never. How is that possible?

Friends are more difficult. An elderly man I knew once said that if you can count your true friends on one hand at one time, you are lucky. Does that sound odd to you? I did it and think he has a point. We’re not talking your 349 facebook friends or the people who sit next to at work or join you in the pub on a Friday night. I mean the real friends who know you backwards. People you can tell anything and they don’t judge you. People who you can phone at any time and they really will come if you call.

… ain’t no mountain high enough,

Ain’t no valley low enough, ain’t no river wide enough;

To keep me from you;

Baby if you need me call me no matter where you are,

No matter how far;

Just call my name; I’ll be there in a hurry;

On that you can depend and never worry.

One doesn’t make that many of those in a lifetime. School friends come and go. Besties at play school, everyone at primary, in-crowds at high school, more solid friendships at university. Perhaps. And then you move away or move on and sometimes your friends go but come back again. Years later you bump into someone and they say “Aren’t you so-and-so? I’d recognise that laugh anywhere” and if you’re lucky, you have another friend.

But don’t think this is going to happen at a school reunion! If you’re a woman, you are likely to worry for ages beforehand about how you look and what people you haven’t see for 20 or 30 years are going to think. Have you aged well? Are you successful? How? Where? Most importantly, have you put on weight? Because, let’s be honest, that’s what you’re going to do. This is not going to be about re-connecting with old friends because if they really were real friends, why on earth would you have lost contact in the first place?

Good friends are rare and I don’t think when we are young, that we realise just how important they are. I have tried very hard to instil in my daughter the value of her friends. I have been married twice and one of the worst things after the divorce was losing a circle of friends. As a couple you are part of a group and when you split, the group often decides which of the couple they will continue to mix with. Weird hey? You’d think they would continue to invite both parties separately and let them fight it out between them but it doesn’t happen.

If, as the wife for example, you have allowed yourself to be sucked into your husband’s circle, seeing less and less of your own friends, you will find that you are left with very few come the time you find yourself on the outside of what was once the in-group. So, some advice for free, keep your friends – and your independence. Remember how important they are. Try to always have at least one best friend, even if you can’t make five.

Sing along with Queen. Be happy you’ve got a good friend – who of course may also be your lover …

You’re the best friend

That I ever had

I’ve been with you such a long time

You’re my sunshine

And I want you to know

That my feelings are true

I really love you

You’re my best friend

Ooh, you make me live …

Some enchanted evening

Is it old fashioned to love musicals? Maybe it’s the romance in them that catches me. Romance in the real meaning of the word – “a spirit of or inclination for adventure, excitement, or mystery” together of course with the joy and heartbreak you also associate with love. Who doesn’t like a fairy tale?

My mother loved musicals too. We had an old gramophone when I was growing up – one of those cabinet ones with two doors that opened onto a radio that you tuned with a knob and a pull-out shelf with the record player underneath! Slots in the side to store your LPs – and Mom even had some old Ivor Novello 45 RPM records. Don’t ask. I can’t possibly explain if you’ve never heard of either him or 45s.

And her collection of LPs of musicals was legendary. They were wonderful! We had Oklahoma, Gigi, and West Side Story, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, The King and I, South Pacific … And I knew just about every word to every song. No dvds then and nothing to download. Just songs and imagined pictures of what they meant.

Then Bulawayo got its first theatre. 1969 it was and Rainbow Cinemas opened with a surround sound theatre! The very first movie I ever saw was Paint your Wagon with Lee Marvin ‘singing’ I was born under a wandering star. After that we actually got to see many of the old favourites and they all lived up to my mind-pictures. And the list grew longer, with films like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Hello Dolly!, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Mary Poppins, Fiddler on the Roof, and The Wizard of Oz. Bugsy Malone, Grease, Cabaret and of course the Elvis movies, Cliff Richard and the Beatles.

Disney was a god-send as the musicals grew thin on the ground for a while. New doors were opened with his spectacular versions of The Jungle Book, Aladdin, Cinderella, Snow White, Lady and the Tramp, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. By then I had a daughter but it never mattered whether I went alone or took her. You don’t need a child to enjoy animation! They do help to remind you how fantasy is food for the soul if you’re getting a little jaded, but I, luckily, have never had that problem.

And I was old enough too to take myself places (like Dr Seuss). London West End and the smell of an old theatre! Broadway still to come but it will never matter where I see the show. I’m just a sucker for a musical! Some enchanted evening indeed.

What a wonderful world

My father had an improbably sweet view of life on earth. Which is strange, thinking that he came from hardy farming and mining stock and lived through both World Wars and the then-Rhodesian bush war. He had a never-ending fund of stories about his life and my biggest regret is that I never wrote them down before he died.

Dad was born in 1905 onto a farm in Southern Rhodesia. That was what he did. He farmed. Bush, cattle and buck. His interests. In that order. Water, dip, mielies, whirlwinds, dust, gun dogs, gold mines, grass and acacia trees. The list of what evokes him and his stories is endless. By the time I really knew him, he had settled into a farming life in town and went almost daily out into the sometimes harsh and often beautiful Rhodesian bush to tend to his cattle and do what farmers do all day!

He only stopped farming in the Seventies when it became too dangerous to go alone onto the farm because of the armed struggle raging throughout the country. The farm was sold and he passed away soon after.

But Dad was a sentimentalist, a softy at heart. He cried when he was touched and loved romance. Louis Armstrong’s gravelly deep throated singing suited him just fine. He’d sing along with him

I see trees of green, red roses too

I see them bloom for me and you

And I think to myself what a wonderful world.

And you knew he really did love us, his family, and the countryside around him.

I often wonder how many of our memories from childhood are real and how much is built up like lego blocks from things we hear. Things that then become your memories. Are they things that really happened to you or did they happen to someone else? If you think your parents felt one way, did they really? Are you just projecting your ideas and opinions onto them and believe they must have felt the same way?

I read a moving newspaper commentary recently by a columnist who was honest enough to talk about having strong opinions. As he said, something happens, often something atrocious in another part of the world, and within hours of it happening, comment is already out there. So how does what you hear or read affect you? Does your opinion change depending on what you read? Should it?

If you feel sympathy for the victims of an attack, is it bad that you haven’t felt as strongly about victims somewhere else? And if you don’t express your opinion? Is it worse to not say something or to say something that seems inappropriate to some people?

He ends saying that all you can really do is to talk about your own feelings, your own opinions, however unsure you may be or whether you think you have said everything there is to be said. Not many people do that.

Silence is golden

Often in interviews you hear someone asking “who has influenced you most in your life?” “Who helped you become what you are today?” Presumably this is because there are all sorts of people out there who led vague and undefined lives, wandering aimless and unsatisfied because they weren’t sure what it is they were ‘meant’ to be doing. That is, until that special someone was able to point them in the right direction, after which they would forge ahead resolutely pursuing what it is that they were born to do.

I regret that I have obviously never met that someone. I have on the other hand met a number of people who seemed determined to make me not enjoy what I already knew I enjoyed doing! University was a perfect example. I loved English, love English (why a blog if I don’t like writing?!). So I majored in it. Big mistake. Just like Julia Roberts said in ’Pretty Woman’ – “Big mistake. Big. Huge.”

My lecturer for the whole of first year gloried in making us hate him and his lectures. Tutorials were hell to sit through. He insulted everyone and said he would prefer it if we didn’t talk at all. No-one did a thing. I doubt if anyone believed us. I did my big project on Ted Hughes and at the end, got back a ‘marked’ essay with only one word written down the side – Crap! How is that helpful? It may well have been but some indication of how or why would have been useful.

Years later I married an Economics lecturer and as fate would have it, he returned to teach at my alma mater.  One night at a party I came into the kitchen – where else did groups gather at parties in the seventies? – to hear my old lecturer pouring forth pearls of wisdom about how he ‘maintained control’ in his class. Turns out he always wore a tweed jacket, never went without a tie and carried a pipe to indicate that he meant business and that students should pay him due deference. Apparently inspiring students and helping them to enjoy what they thought they would like to enjoy, doesn’t curry the same favour nor bring the kudos you so deserve!

School wasn’t any better. Maths, Latin, History … All done under duress. Drama on the other hand was great – would I be allowed to say that the person who affected me most while growing up was Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice?

In the end, I think it’s bits and pieces from all sorts of people that affect one the most. Wonderful stories about growing up from my dad. Memories of how my mother copied with a debilitating disease. Friends who laughed and cried with you as you grew up. Family who can tell you straight out that you’re a pain or who can tell others that the best person in the world is you, their sister. Plays I’ve gone to, music I’ve listened to, books I’ve read and places I’ve been. There is definitely not one person who has ‘made’ me – and anyway, who says I’m quite done yet?

Fool if you think it’s over

Funny how your dreams and goals go through highs and lows.  Life in general I suppose.

It all starts when you’re young and you think every disappointment is absolutely the worst you’ll ever have. You can still hear your twelve or fifteen year old self whining “Doesn’t she (mom/sister/friend) know that this is just the end?!” But it isn’t. It never ends. And I don’t necessarily mean that in the “life is a bitch and then you die” kind of way. I’m not actually a pessimist but it is true that there will always be sad times and bad times and times you think you have reached your lowest point possible.

Chris Rea – and then Elkie Brooks – says it best

Fool if you think it’s over

I’ll buy you first good wine

We’ll have a real good time

Save your cryin’ for the day

That may not come

But anyone who had to pay

Would laugh at you and say

Fool, if you think it’s over

Yup, some things just do get worse. But then, they also get better. All a bit trite to say life is a roller coaster but I have noticed just how much this is true in the last seven years or so since I started keeping a diary again. At the end of every year I look back over it and I am stunned to see just how much has happened. If someone offered to pay you to predict events in the year ahead, you’d think it’d be money for jam, wouldn’t you? Not so I’ve discovered.

One year, I bought a new house, sold an old one, got a new car, broke up and made up, had serious illness in my family, had an unforgettable holiday and continued living and working at the same time. All unplanned. How is that possible? So now, every time I get one of my “this is the end” kind of days (or most often, nights) I try and remember that something better will happen, sometime.

It won’t be over but it may just be balanced by something good.

You wouldn’t call me gentleman

Who doesn’t like a bad boy? Is there a girl out there who at some time in her life not been attracted to the “wrong boy”? Whether wrong by your mother’s standards or wrong by what criteria you have set yourself, he is just wrong. And so appealing!

My mother had very fixed ideas on what was appropriate in a boyfriend. I’ve said already that she was the Cliff Richard vs The Rolling Stones type and translated this into her beliefs about what good girls should do and be. The seeds of temptation were planted right there!

At school I met a boy, three years older and everything I had been warned about – tight trousers, long hair, too much money and a great kisser. How did I know this you may wonder? Why ask. He was absolutely everything I had been forbidden and he, just like Lou Bega, was no gentleman

You wouldn’t call me gentleman

If you only knew my plan

You wouldn’t take the chance

To dance with dynamite

But Lou was right, I was so ready to “explode with [him] tonight”. I didn’t but just knowing I shouldn’t made the wanting more.

You go through life with all sorts of social norms swimming in your head – what you should wear, what to eat, who you should and shouldn’t mix with, how you should talk to people in different situations, what looks good or tacky in your house …

Who decided? What do we do out of habit and what is a conscious decision? And even if it’s conscious, is it the right decision? Some behaviours are obviously determined by ethics and values, and so they should be. Others are the result of upbringing and habit. But does that make them right?

Think about your house or your clothes. What is ‘good taste’? Surely taste is fundamentally personal and yet we get judged on it. I think one of the advantages of age should be being able to look a little more objectively at things and other people and value the incredible diversity around us. I think this but I still have to work at it. I have to chastise myself when I think someone looks a bit ‘tacky’ or if I don’t like pink floor tiles and sun filter curtains. There are so many variations on the ‘poor taste’ theme – unseemly, untoward, incorrect, disreputable, unrefined… Notice how many words tend toward the negative. The ‘un’s’, the ‘dis’, the ‘in’s’. One very seldom just says “it’s not my taste”. Behind those simple four words is a range of judgement, and all negative. All slightly disapproving. All thinking yours is better.

So, as I get older, I think I’m going to go back to looking at bad boys. Unfortunately the hair may be a lot thinner and the trousers not as snug, but I definitely want to find one who my mother would not have liked!

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.