Yesteryear

Just as I was leaving the shop with a bargain container of  my favourite shampoo - 33.8 clts, since you ask - it occured to me that I would be very unlikely to live long enough, at a pea-sized dose a time. to use it all. I shall have to leave a note, or codicil, for the young telling them to look for and use up the shampoo they'll find in the bathroom. That started me thinking about what else, as well as bulk buying, is no longer relevant in my  life. I have a rather pretty watch which was left to me. I can no longer see the figures on its face so wearing it for best is not an option unless someone else is responsible for telling me when it's time to go, or even, time to get wherever. The make of trousers I have been used to buy are now three times their original price. Not worth it when one is rather more than three score and ten. Obviously, there are people who can afford to buy a pair for each house, so, cynically, the trousers are priced with that in mind. Were I to expect twenty years out of them, I may have been tempted. The demarkation of degrees of relationships has disappeared. 'Mrs Mountford' meant a stranger. A stranger may well have stayed at 'Mrs' for ten years. Elizabeth is for the outer circle of acquaintance and Liz, well, you know about that. I don't think I have the time left to get used to a letter or email from someone, or even a company, whom I haven't met and sometimes haven't even heard of addressing me as '.Liz' How do they know?. (Green ink).

Some things have required active change rather than negative adaptation. In the past, I looked much the same with or without make-up. Now, make-up is essential in order  not to frighten the horses. It seems to be to do with skin tone - yellowish - and droopy eyelids. That's enough shock treatment. Rest assured I do not open the front door without a measure of what the young seem to call 'slap'. Mind you, I still have to remember to say 'blusher' instead of 'rouge' when the item needs replacing. The mascara I use is not imported in to the UK so a kind friend brings it from elsewhere in the EU. I was about to ask her to bring two on an approaching visit when it came to me that one would probably do. Someone I know recently brought back some wine from a trip to France. Since that person is a contemporary of mine, I am left to assume that he/she is not plagued by the is-it-worth-its of bulk buying. I sometimes wonder where is the lass who walked twelve miles along the river Ure, regularly. As I write it takes me fifteen minutes to walk to the 'bus stop five minutes away. Management is the key. Do not plan to do as many things as you used to in one day. Remember, once you have reached the store, you still have to walk distances within it. Have your hair cut to accommodate its current texture. The curls of the past have gone, like the snows of yesteryear. Oh, but it is so pleasant to be able to talk to people one doesn't or scarcely knows. It is lovely to let insults or hurts  roll off you and it is perfection to avoid all situations where you don't feel absolutely  like yourself. It is also rewarding to have a mosaic of experience to throw light on to what is happening in the here and now. What does it matter if curry ihas become  too spicy when Mars bars taste the same as they always did. Nos da

Concern

A week or so ago, Mumsnet published a guest blog which set off my little grey cells. The thrust of it was the decision of the Mother of a small boy to bring him up without reference to gender.  He would wear a dress, if he felt like it, play with dolls and/or knock things about with a toy hammer and similar boysie - or girlie - pastimes.  Sadly, I am not sufficiently IT savvy to have another look at it for the sake of verification, but, considering the effect it had on me, I don't think that would be particularly necessary.  I did write a comment on the post wondering how the child would fare when he got in to the wider world. This was not enough to quiet my disturbance.  The prime question I asked myself was "why ?" What was the perceived advantage of non-gender upbring? All these days later I have not been able to think myself in to a rationale. Is it a strike for feminism? Is it a perceived desire to give the little one the widest possible life-experience? What I have been left with is a feeling of fear at what I perceive as a most extraordinary use of the Mother's power over her child.

For me, one of the things that I most enjoy about writing "75 going on 40" is the involuntary way humour creeps in. Humour seems to be the lubricant which makes manageable the incongruity of a lively, mischievous forty year old inner life in a very old body. Faithful followers will have noticed I have some ingenious ways of getting over the I-can't-any-longers. Humour in the situation which exercises me at present, would have to be a sort of gallows humour and, strangely, disrespectful. None has come to me, voluntarily or involuntarily. The power the parents - dare I say it - the Mother, has over her child for the first few months, seems to me to be absolute. This little boy, and boy he is, is completely open to what his Mother is offering him. Doesn't he have the right to be honoured and valued for what he is: a male human being? Goodness knows it's hard enough establishing one's identity. The matter can take decades. Whatever is the gain in interfering with that process? What will happen when he goes to school? Is he going to find that other little boys have a sturdy approach to their masculinity? Will he be ridiculed? How will he adapt if his Mother suddenly lines him up with those in his class at school who are firm in their maleness? Will he still wear a skirt if he chooses to? For Heaven's sake, life is complex enough. Why risk precipitating him in to a vortex of confusion just as he joins the world beyond his family? Had I but been aware of my power when my young were little I suspect their adult lives may have been rather different. (I hereby apologise to them). For the first time, I'd like to ask any of you who has a view to add a comment to the post, itself. But thank you to those of you who always email me personally.

In spite of myself, the humour has crept in. Presumptously imagining myself in to the ambience of that little fellow's home life, what came to me was what they say in Yorkshire: that youngster is going to find himself  'nowt nor some'at'. 'Nothing  nor something' if you are in Mountview California. Nos da

What's more

A dreaded lurgie has affected the last few days. From time to time flu-like symptoms turn up and spoil my life while they go on. Sometimes the symptoms turn in to a cold. Mostly they just keep me aching and shutting me down. At my age, I'm not sure how many days I can afford to take off in this, or any, situation. Every day has to be precious and I am not sufficiently disciplined to do something constructive so as not to 'waste' them. But I have had some fun thinking about more of the compromises that smooth the path of the no-longer-young. Pragmatically, there are gadgets. I was given a sort of grab handle thing. You place it over the top of a bottle or whatever needs to  be twisted open, turn until it grips tightly then manouevre the handle to open up. It's too big for my handbag so passing youngsters still have to be asked to help when I am not at home. Washing delicates by hand has stopped. I find that there is a programme on the machine which is gentle enough, although I apologise to my departed Mother every time I consign the finest of my things to the machine. (Since you ask, I have a spin dryer so there is no need for wring and twist).Lately, I have noticed that I need to drop my cat's dishes from a bit of a height rather than stoop to place them on her tray. Yes, she has a tray and a mat over it to stop the dishes - yes, dishes, plural - from slipping. This is not something she is sanguine about since it is scarecly enlightening to see one's food take a little leap before more or less settling back in situ.

Cooking was one of my best things to do. Since the Guru moved on in to his grown-up life I have hardly cooked. I look at my range of cookery books and remember an entirely different woman who gave dinner parties and ate well, herself. This is unadulterated laziness and I am aware it can't be good for my health. More, I am one of those people who scorns the pre-cooked super-market food but ends up eating it. There is also 'take-away' or, better still, delivery. I am crafty and order as soon as delivery slots open so that I don't have to wait too long and the food is more or less hot enough from the first vans out of the restaurants.(Trucks, I suppose, if you are in Mountview California). I struggle with the technical, as you will have had rubbed in ad nauseam. Recently, being unable to source, locally, a certain kind of indexed note book I have been using for decades, I ordered one on- line. (Please say you are proud of me). The irony was staring me in the face. I ordered the book to re-do my address and telephone book which is hardly readable under the popular letters and, sadly, full of the no-longer-with-us. While I can order the book and this and that on-line, I will not countenance consigning my contacts to it! This is not a considered choice: it simply doesn't count as an option. The struggle to live in the 21st Century when I am so clearly footbound - handbound, hidebound? - in the 20th is rendering me schizophrenic. I need a new vacuum cleaner. There are offers. Trade in your old one for money off the new. The logistics defy me. Do I take the old one under my arm and swap there and then? (Don't be silly. I can't even carry it up the stairs) Would someone come to the house and effect the changeover? Shall I drag in to John Lewis and deal with it woman to salesperson or how does it work if I try to do it on-line? Bring out the brush and pan. Bore da

Contingencies/Make-dos

To resume: forefend you should think I had given up blogging. The gap lies in the lap of a book I am writing in collaboration with a friend. She is a youngster and, therefore, still working, so the Easter period was an ideal space for her. It's nice to be back, though. I have been thinking about the expedients one invents to overcome or accommodate the vicissitudes of three score and a great deal more than ten. Not only that: there are plenty of examples of adapting and adjusting in the younger world, too. Mind you, I think people of my era must have the edge. Brought up in the war there were untold, probably uncounted ways of making-do and insteading. The one that springs instantly to mind is the little bottle of orange juice all we children were issued with. Real oranges were folklore as were bananas and many other things we now take for granted, (though I can't think why onions were part of the war effort and, therefore like hens' teeth). The resemblance the bottles had to oranges lay entirely in the colour. The liquid was certainly orange-coloured. I wonder if any of us has encountered a seriously ill orange, with a high temperature and a foul taste in its mouth. That would cover it from a point of view of description and flavour . It seems to me I remember my Mother and her friends using potatoes instead of flour in the baking. She, and they, would draw black lines up the back of their bare legs to simulate the seam in a stocking, the which those of them without contacts in the United States army didn't see from start to finish of hostilities. There was a US post office next door to where my Father worked so we did know one or two. Dinner in a real home equalled one pair of nylon stockings. A date with the 17 year old elder daughter equalled one for her, too.

Thus, after my middle years of comparitive going with the flow, I entered my current age with no little experience of the business of adaptation. My bath with its lovely fierce jets had to go. Why? Picture it. There am I, warm and cosy, aches and pains nicely pummelled when the time comes to climb out. I can't. I am as entrenched in the bath as if leg-cuffed, hand-cuffed and bottomed down. Clearly, I did emerge or I wouldn't be here to tell the tale. But I was scared and frustrated and thoroughly chilled,  Dear Reader, out went the lovely bath and in came a chic shower. For one who hates water pouring down on her head the shower doesn't do it; nor does it sooth the aches and pains. I suppose I can keep clean, though, and that has to matter.  It seems a long way from the 5 inches of water we were allowed in a bath during the war. It strikes me how honest we must all have been. No official ever appeared at the bathroom door to measure the level of the water but 5 inches were stuck to and no cheating. Still, some adapting has to be more user friendly than others. A friend has a friend who makes his living as a film extra. He is a very striking, handsome man with a goatee beard. On his last shoot he was asked if he would like a small, wordless part as a Rabbi. He agreed with alacrity. There was a proviso: he had to have hair extensions to his small beard to make it more Rabbi-like. We agreed it was a very good thing that was the only adjustment he was asked to make. Nos da.

Dignity

A day or so ago I was standing at a kerbside in the centre of busy London waiting for the taxi I had decided to treat myself to. (Never mind the syntax, even I can find myself too pedantic at times: 'to which I had decided to treat myself?' I don't think so.) The decision was taken on the grounds that I was carrying a stick and three heavy shopping bags and would have needed two buses to reach home from where I was, with a good walk at the end of it. Anyway, there I was, waiting for the kind of taxi for which I have a Pensioners special rate when a young man came up and asked me if  I needed help to cross the road. He said he had been watching me and thought my hesitation was because I was afraid. When I could speak I explained I was quite alright, just waiting for a ComCab. Since many other free taxis were passing all the while, it was not surprising that his manner then changed to one of fear for his own safety at the hands of this obvious madwoman. Dear Reader, I assure you I was politeness itself and thanked his retreating back profusely for his thoughtful kindness. However, I'm not sure I am safe to publish what my inner voice was saying. (I am sure: I can't).  I'd be glad for some input as to how long it takes to adjust to this business  old age. The other day, I stood up on a crowded 'bus to offer my seat when an elderly man with a crutch got on. Naturally, the person next to me, who had arisen to let me out, believed I wanted to get off and was decidedly nonplussed when I sat down again having realised the pot had been calling the kettle black.

The nub of the problem seems to be the need to see oneself as others see one. Here, there seems to be a dichotomy between how  others perceive  ones inner world, ones way of being in the world, and ones actual, physical appearance, in the external world. I think I have reached a Nirvana of harmony and balance. What you pick up from my inside is what  and who I am. What I look like standing by the kerb of a thundering London street must be very different. Sometimes, the pain in my back and legs is such that I crawl up the street taking twenty minutes to do the erstwhile five minute walk  home from the nearest 'bus stop. During this journey I am clearly invisible - is this physically possible, can one be clear and invisible? - as people jostle passed me on the inside. Just now, a leadless, (leash, if you are in Mountview, California), collarless chocolate labrador nearly nearly tripped me up. I asked him if he were with anyone. A voice replied "It's she and she's with me." That was it. No apology, no smile, just umbrage because I had got the gender of her beloved wrong. I read of a lady so disillusioned by the lack of humanity in the current technology which governs our world that she decided to end her life. She did so under the auspices of the Swiss clinic, Dignitas. I was overwhelmed, not only by her courage but by the serendipity of the name of the organisation. Perhaps this deserves a post of its own. Until soon....Bore da

In Memorium

On Remembrance Day a couple of years ago, I wrote a post about the unstructured, unexpected, surprising even, vignettes by which we remember those who have died before us. Since then,   many more examples have come to mind, all of which seem to leave an imprint rather more meaningful than a headstone or an obitury. Many years ago, our GP friend told how, coming back from the seaside with a car full of tired and sandy little ones, he came upon an accident. In spite of the need to get the children home, he stopped to attend to the injured. In moments, he felt a hand on his shoulder and heard a voice say "Stand aside. I'm a ,  Doctor". Quietly, he stood up and drove his family home. The other day, someone came up to me at a 'bus stop and, addressing me directly, asked whether all the 'buses from that stop turned left at the top of the road. From further down the queue, a voice piped up "Oh no. One of them turns right". The voice went on to explain   at great length, all the routes from that stop. There was our friend, firmly in mind again, though I doubt I shall ever see where he is buried or where there may be a formal memorial. A friend from childhood  once pointed out that I must be rather impatient. This is not at all how I see myself and, indeed, had patience enough, when I was working, to do the kind of work that was, necessarily, slow and painstaking. But every time I wish that something would happen more quickly than it seemed to be, I hear his observation again and he, anew, lives for me for a moment.

Naturally, there are some people who provide lots of little  film - memories  When I was very small, I had the habit of  trying to kiss and hug my Father when he was at table. "Never interfere with a man when he is eating" was his contribution to our little ritual. I swear that my cat says exactly the same thing when I bend down to stroke her while her   nose is in her feeding bowl, and I am five years old once more. I have the feeling that I may have told you before about a person very dear to me who kept rather a messy household. When, in her absence, I gave her home a thorough turn- out, her comment when she came back was that it would take her ages to get it back the way it was. Over the decades, that episode has stopped me interfering with someone else's effort a thousand times with her voice in my ear. A casket with her ashes or a rose bush on her grave would have much less impact in memorium. Every time I come across a case of sibling rivalry, I hear the voice of my lovely Mother-in-law dismissing my analysis of children squabbling with the succint words "People have been having brothers and sisters for centuries". I wonder what small movie might recall me in death to those who have been close to me in life. There was an occasion when I described the new wife of a family friend whom I had just met as rather eccentric. All the young, in unison, shouted "You, calling her eccentric." The thing speaks for itself. Nos da.

Education

How lovely to watch the little ones as they try to make sense of the world. It is something which I have always done but, retired, I am giving it even more time. When you think of what has to be learned in order simply to function in an every-day life, the mind has to boggle. How much has to be learned and how much can be known through instinct? How long does it take to be sure that someone will come if you scream? How do you acquire that skill? How fortunate are those whose carer will take the trouble to interpret the screams. (I resisted the impulse to write 'Mother'. I am aware of the obligation to watch out for political correctness though I am not brilliant at it.) I remember taking the risk of approaching a young mother who dragged her three-year-old son from the restaurant where we all lunching because he threw a tantrum when she obliged him to sit, not next to her where she had installed her baby, but next to his Grandmother whose perfume had already caused me to break out in a fit of sneezing. When I came up to her she was standing by her car with the child inside. I expressed the hope she wouldn't hit me or call the Police and pointed out how limited were her son's resources. He couldn't say "You've gone and got another baby instead of me and I can't stand the way Grandma smells." He could only produce the kind of tantrum that makes the fondest parent wonder what on earth they had done in the interest of procreation. Her eyes filled with tears and she said that she had never thought of that. This interfering old lady went on her way with  intervention neither from the law nor the fist.

I see the little ones eyeing my stick as they are pushed passed me. Do they think some big people have three legs? I believe I have told you before about the little one on his Father's knee outside a cafe who was staring at a neighbouring dog. I waited for as long as I dared for Father to say "That's a dog. Say 'hello' to the nice dog". It didn't happen. I am in awe of the expedience babies use in cracking this-business-of-living code. Someone I knew as a child has a French father and a British mother. He solved the two-language problem by speaking French to men and English to women. One baby I knew would say "Carry you. Carry you" because that's what was said to him each time he was about to be picked up. What process did he go through to learn he needed the second not the third person? For a long time, a little boy of my acquaintance called any food he could hold in his hand 'apple', because a segment of that fruit was the first thing he was aware of feeding to himself. I watch my cat intently because she has even more complex communication skills than a baby. If I am at home when she deposits solid matter in the litter tray she scarcely covers it up. If I am out it is very thoroughly hidden. This can be only because she has learned that, if I am on hand, I will clear it up forthwith. For those of you in Mountview California, I should explain that London taxi drivers have to undergo what is called 'The Knowledge'. Every street, every building of interest, every station has to be committed to memory. Can you imagine, in a city that size? It beggars belief. Still, if a baby can do the equivalent, so can they. Bore da.