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 …

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!

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”!

Perfect 10

The body beautiful. Just the words evoke such a range of responses. What is, what isn’t, who is, who isn’t, the best, the worst … All really so subjective. That’s why I love this song ..

She could be sweet 16, bustin’ out at the seams

It’s still love in the first degree ….

The anorexic chicks, the model 6

They don’t hold no weight with me

Well 8 or 9, well that’s just fine

But I like to hold something I can see

Of course, it helps that I am definitely no size 6 and struggle to get back to a 14 most days, but am also fairly middle of the road, average, in weight and looks. But I am still really aware of size, despite trying my utmost to not pass on my feelings and paranoias  to anyone else, especially my daughter. I’ve talked about body image with almost everyone I know at some stage, whether about a new diet, a comment on someone passing, a revelation, an admission or an apology. Man or woman, old or young, there are very few people I know who don’t have a preference for appearance. Some are open about what they like, others will say they are not concerned about the outside “it’s what’s inside that counts”, but when push comes to shove and you’re on a dance floor or in a pub with someone standing in front of you asking you to dance or go out, you can’t tell me that there isn’t a little part of you that assesses appearance? Surely?

Maybe you do but put that aside to get to know the real person first. Well, good for you. I can’t. I have no doubt this has made me miss out on some experiences but I’ve accepted over time that I am hot-wired to like a certain type. One has to know one’s limitations (despite yearning for just one more close-up look at a washboard stomach!) but I’ll always go for what I deem to be a general ok-ish type.

I am fascinated by the differences that the human body is capable of generating. Just think of it – two eyes, one nose, one mouth – and it can be put together in literally millions of ways, Identical just isn’t a word in the language of looks. One of my musings involves the possibility of a ‘twin’ somewhere in the world. I simply can’t believe that there are just so many variations. And the fantasy goes further. If there is someone just like me, how different would their life be? Would just the face be the same? Would she (he??) too have aches and pains and cheeks that slip in the night?

Would she have someone who loves her unconditionally?

‘Cause we love our love,

in different sizes

I love her body, especially the lies

Time takes it’s toll, but not on the eyes

Promise me this, take me tonight

When I’m 64

This seemed so far away once upon a time and is now just around the corner. So difficult to believe that so much of my life has already passed. A friend recently made the disturbing analogy of one’s life as a metre stick and if I were to ‘place’ myself on it, I’d be well past two thirds of a way along! How depressing is that?!

But with advancing age comes memories and there are a lot of them. Starting with the actual memories of an incredible era of music – who can forget The Beatles with their weird hairstyles and indefatigable pop-py sound? And who would have thought they’d be so popular? I know the words to almost every song they did and still own one of the original LPs: The Big Beat of the Beatles.

I remember going to church socials in halls and church basements where nothing at all churchy went on. Short skirts, black eye make up, teased hair laden with sticky hair spray. Boys on one side and girls on the other until a song came on you all liked and then you’d move into the middle and dance until someone appeared before you and suddenly became your partner. Slow dancing at the end with lights dimmed and everyone shuffling around and around, swaying to the last songs before your parents came to fetch you. 64 seemed impossibly far away. Even your grandparents weren’t that old!

Ageing is a strange thing though. You don’t feel much older for a long time and then suddenly it seems as if a whole host of things start happening. Your body aches more – where did the new pain in your finger come from? Why can’t you turn the lid to open a new bottle of marmalade? How come kneeling down to garden is so much more difficult? Why do you have to make a three-point turn to get up off the bed in the morning? Why, when do you look in the mirror in the morning, does it look as if your face is made of wax and bits have slipped in the night?

And also, it seems as if it is suddenly time to start making sensible plans. Will you keep on working after 63? (And if so, who will have you??) Will you stay in your same lovely but now a bit empty house? Do you want to keep on living in a vibrant but big, busy, sometimes violent, city? Who will you spend your time with when you move? And what on earth are my hobbies supposed to be? Who ever had time for hobbies when you’ve worked for over 40 years?!

So, what’s next? They’re still there – the hopes and wishes. I still want but maybe it should be when I’m 84!

When I get older losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?