Life, the universe and everything

Today I turn 42.

No, don’t worry: I don’t need your sympathy or commiserations. I don’t really understand this (pretty universal) idea that getting older is the subject for ribald mockery.

The teenagers are particularly prone to this kind of thing. Do you remember 9/11 children? No, because (adopting teenage sneery tone) we aren’t all REALLY REALLY OLD! (pause for general laughter). No we don’t remember Diana dying because we were only (snort) three years old! (falls off chair in hilarity).

What’s all this about? Am I supposed to be apologetic about the passage of time? Is time passing somehow terrifically hilarious?

The worst of it is, I have a horrible feeling that I used to do the same at their age, Lord forgive me.

Anyway, hilarious or not, time passes. Listen, time passes. And I am fairly neutral about it. I mean I am not massively thrilled about the deterioration of body and mind that age will inevitably bring. But, as a lovely old lady called Ethel I used to know when I was a kid used to say, the thing about getting old is that it’s better than the alternative.

But it’s not just that being old is better than being dead (though it is, of course). Getting older has plenty of compensations. I’ll never see seventeen again and thank goodness for that. It’s a cliché that I see the truth of every day – youth is wasted on the young. I see them fretting with their hair and sucking in their non-existent flab and worrying about the size of their thighs and I want to yell – STOP IT! You look the BEST you will ever look, try to enjoy it. But they won’t, because they can’t. I look at pictures of myself as a teenager and the sight of it makes me feel a bit giddy. God, I had NO IDEA. I was just the same, thinking everyone was looking at my pimples.

But then, at some point, the self-consciousness ran out. It didn’t happen overnight but it happened. Motherhood helped, I suppose. It’s hard to be vain when you are smeared with Marmite and smell permanently of Petit Filou. Your standards slip. You stop wanting to look perfect; I was just happy to look clean. Sometimes.

And at some magical point in time – long past – I stopped worrying about what I looked like. Well, not nearly so much as before. Because instead of looking alright, just about passable as I did through my twenties and thirties, I now can manage not bad for my age. Something that can only get better as I get older.

I know what clothes suit me. I look confident, because I am confident. And I am confident because, at this magical point in the past, I started to realise what the teenagers don’t, and can’t, not yet – that the vast majority of people weren’t looking at me AT ALL. (What an incredibly vain thought that was. Only the young could be so self-centred as to imagine such a thing.) And even if they were – who gives a stuff about what they think?

And it’s not just the superficial appearance – what’s inside has changed, too. Although misery and pain and heartache are not the preserve of the young folk – middle-aged hearts get broken too – well, at least we know that the pain will end. That life goes on.

And as the years go by, you collect really really cool stuff, stuff that really matters. Stuff that’s worth having: like friends, and memories. They are two of my very favourite things, and I will be enjoying a good portion of both tonight. And drinking beer, because these days I drink what I like, and I wear what I like, rather than dressing seriously so people will take me seriously. In fact I hope to God that no one DOES take me seriously. I am not really a serious sort of person; it’s taken me all these years to come to that conclusion, with some relief.

The great thing about the 21st century is that being middle aged doesn’t mean we can’t play any more. And I make the most of this freedom. I sing in public. And I dance like a fool, because I don’t care what I look like. I behave in ridiculous ways because I don’t care who’s looking. And I have been around the block enough to know what matters – friends, family, love, fun. And what doesn’t – pretty much all the rest.

So, maybe I’m half way there. Maybe not quite, maybe a little bit more than half way. Either way, the view is pretty good in either direction.

I may not know the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything, but at least I know not to waste any more time worrying about it.

So. Another candle, another cake, another year.

Bring it on.

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See no evil

Shortly after posting about how tiresome it is to be a woman when you get blamed for everything from the fall from the Garden of Eden to wasting water when shaving your legs, I came across this rather relevant story from the Irish Catholic:

‘A Wexford priest has said that Irish society does not want to hear the politically incorrect truth about child sexual abuse in Ireland which is that “there is another category of people that will match the failure of the bishops, and probably surpass it (my emphasis); the wives and mothers of Ireland, not exclusively wives and mothers but far too many who failed miserably to deal with the abuse of their children by other family members.”

Writing in this week’s Irish Catholic newspaper, Fr Paddy Banville of Ferns Diocese says a significant percentage of the population are implicated in the cover-up of abuse.’

 

I would like to sum up what I think of Fr Banville’s opinions on this subject but, as we say in the law, Res Ipse Loquitur: let the thing speak for itself. I have nothing more to add.

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Life, don’t talk to me about life

This week I have been talking to a lot of seventeen year olds about what to do with their lives.

This is part of my actual job, in case you were wondering. It isn’t a hobby or anything, stopping sixth formers in the street and asking what they want to be when they grow up. Although as hobbies go, that would be rewarding and certainly very cheap, with the added frisson of a possibility of a restraining order at some point.

And what do I advise these young people, fresh faced and panting on the threshold of adulthood. Which way is the world going, and how can they make the most of it? SHOULD they train as an economist, a quantity surveyor, an artist, a lawyer? (Those are different people, by the way, not one very confused youngster.)

Is it worth going to university at all? Should they just get a job (from where? good question) and not saddle themselves with a massive debt, or is a degree the only way to make your way in the world these days, the very bare minimum for anyone who wants to have a chance of material success and intellectual fulfilment in their work?

Christ I don’t know.

The truth is this: the more I see of the world, the less I understand it. If it’s one thing I have learned in the last twenty years, the rollercoaster ride of my adult life, is that nothing repeat NOTHING is predictable. Nothing at all.

This applies to personal lives as much as the Real Big Scary World. Relationships that seemed solid and everlasting end suddenly in a flurry of pain and recrimination. Death and injury and disease throw rocks in the paths of us all, and we trip, and we fall. And we get up again. And love – love is an unpredictable little bugger. It makes us all stupid, at some time or another. Ever fallen in love with someone, you shouldn’t have fallen in love with? I bet you have, even if you never admitted it to yourself.

And if you think teenagers behave ridiculously when they’re in love, well that’s nothing in comparison with the middle-aged gimmer who thought they were past it, feeling the fluttering of the wings of love again, and trying to grab hold of that flighty little butterfly, just in case it’s the last time.

I know so many real life stories of love sending people bonkers that – if I were to include them in a work of fiction – would be immediately rejected as stupidly unlikely and unbelievable. Yet they’re true. And I don’t even know the half of it, of course.

But the workings of the human heart can seem ploddingly predictable compared with the business world, the corporate merry go round. The examples are too numerous to mention them all, but every one of you can think of an example that is close to your heart. Ten years ago, I used to do some work for Natwest, an organisation so large, so powerful, so solidly permanent that we used to refer to it as The Bank. The humiliation and break up of The Bank that as a result of the banking crisis is so improbable to me that it can – even now – make me shake my head in wordless disbelief.

More painful is the sight of the brewery where I grew up. As a child, its imposing Victorian façade seemed like an impermeable castle. My mum worked there, my dad worked there, we lived in a tied house: my life revolved around it. Inside, we were safe. The family owned the town, more or less. Its logo was everywhere, its pubs were everywhere, even when we went on holiday, two hour’s drive away. Now it’s a crumbling ruin, abandoned and – yeah, you know this part – about to be redeveloped into flats. Curse you Greene King. As I drive around the area I grew up in, I try to screw up my eyes and imagine the pitheads that used to tower over and dominate the landscape – all gone, in their places scrubby nature reserves and stubby trees. It’s almost surreal.

And don’t get me started on Woolworths.

And in the wider world, the maps and boundaries I knew as a child are all shifted and jiggled and changed. The world turns, and the next thing Saddam Hussein is hiding in a hole and – incredibly, wonderfully – Gaddafi is on the run. Everything changes, and then nothing changes. Apartheid is abolished, but grinding poverty keeps the old barriers in place. The IRA gives up its arms, but peace in Northern Ireland stays brittle and fragile.

So what can I say to the young folk, who seem to think that my advanced age may have resulted in a little wisdom? (Fat chance.) What can I tell them? That the world is a surprising place. That time heals, but people don’t change, not really. That you had better learn to like yourself, because you are stuck with yourself and you are all you have to keep yourself company on the long and bumpy road. That the world is a complicated place and you can’t protect yourself from change and knocks and setbacks, but get yourself the best education you possibly can because no-one can take that away from you. Don’t let fear hold you back. In particular, don’t let the idea that everyone else knows what they’re doing hold you back – they don’t.

No one does. Not even me. Especially not me.

Chuck that five-year plan away and don’t even admit to the ten-year one. Actually don’t thrown it away, put it in a drawer and get it out in ten years time. God knows you will need a laugh by then. Life’s not a journey. On a journey you know the way. It’s set out for you. There’s a map. Maybe even one of those big ones that you can’t fold up without dislocating your arms. There no life-sat-nav that you can buy. No stilted voice will tell you to make a U Turn where possible.

Life’s a story and you tell it yourself. Make yourself the hero – why not? And make sure you write yourself some decent lines.

But for God’s sake don’t train as an economist. Give yourself a break, dear. When the revolution comes, those guys will be first against the wall.

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You’ll have bad times, he’ll have good times

Yesterday, I put forward the opinion that the VERY worst thing about being a woman was having to give the Unspeakable Melanie Phillips the benefit of the doubt because of the Sisterhood.

Well, I may have been a little rash. There may, on reflection, be a few other things about being a woman that are equally tiresome. Maybe even more so.

Here’s my longer shortlist.

1. Being blamed for everything. Eve copping for the whole original sin, fall from Eden, responsibility for pain and hunger and grinding misery scenario – well, that’s still a little bit irritating, several millennia down the road. But woman-blaming is still alive and well. For example, Thames Water recently tried to pin the blame for water shortages on women WASTING billions of GALLONS of water when shaving their legs. I am not quite sure why shaving your legs is considered to be any more of a WASTE than, I don’t know, shaving your face for example or even watering your lawn, but anyway, when there’s a hosepipe ban you know who to blame. Come on ladies, start getting your Bics out in the rain butt. Or let your shins be unashamedly fluffy. Unless you’re a celebrity because then the Daily Mail or Heat magazine will publish a big close-up of your fuzzy ankles with a big circle around the offending hair with a caption reading ‘cutting a rug! Stubbly and disgusting! Bleugh!’ Which leads me onto…

2. The endless tedium of hair removal. Never mind fat, epilation is a feminist issue. And although I try not to get hung up on my own shocking goat-like pelt, I do have a pact with a friend that, if I fall into a coma, she will come and pluck my wiry chin hairs. (And vice versa.)

3. Intermittently getting sucked into the whole grooming thing, which is so terribly time-consuming and frighteningly expensive. And I am very bad at it. I try hard not to get too worked up about my appearance but every now and again I make the significant error of looking at my face in the mirror in the broad daylight. The Mirror of Truth! Then, soon after, I end up skulking into Boots and start looking at little pots of cream called things like ‘Miracle Worker’ and ‘Vaseline on the Lens’ and ‘Who do you think you’re kidding, grandma?’ Last time I succumbed to this urge, I got kidnapped for about half an hour by the campest man in Oxford* on the Chanel counter, who wouldn’t let me go out until he had given me a FULL makeover on the basis that, ‘We can’t have you going out into the streets of Oxford looking like THAT!’ Obviously the new make up regime lasts about three days, and then I’m back to wearing as much make up as I can put on at the traffic light stops on the way to work.

4. Being called upon to defend the stupid or vile behaviour of some complete numpty on the basis that ‘she’s not a very good ROLE MODEL is she’ or ‘well she’s putting the cause of FEMINISM back twenty years?’ Men can just be MEN, but women have to be role models and set a good example. No-one said after Nixon, well that about wraps it up for middle aged white men in politics! They’re all liars and cheats. (Oh, hold on….)

I admit I am not immune to this myself. I had a big rant the other day about Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, about how their collective nut-jobness means it less likely than ever that I will see a female US president in my lifetime. I know that’s not their fault. They can’t help being total nut-jobs. But I blame them, all the same. I’m sorry, women in power, I know it’s not fair but really – try not to help those who think women can’t be trusted with positions of authority by being fulfilling all their expectations about women being flaky and ridiculous. The patriarchy is persistent enough without giving chauvinists this kind of ammunition, Michelle: ‘Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But carbon dioxide is natural; it is not harmful…. We’re being told we have to reduce this natural substance to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring in the earth.’**

5. Not being able to wee in the open air without an awful lot of palaver and getting more or less undressed and/or running the risk of getting wee on your shoes.

6. Contractions.

Any more, ladies?

*a very competitive field.

** for more of the ‘wit’ and ‘wisdom’ of Michelle Bachmann, see here:

Women! stop shaving your legs in the shower and just rub your legs with sandpaper, you wasteful wretches!

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Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman

The worst thing about being a woman is….

Haha! Where am I going with this? I mean that’s quite a provocative opening isn’t it? And potentially quite a rich seam to mine.

Well, there’s childbirth of course. But that is really only bad at the time. Memories fade and get all fuzzy and rosy tinted with the passage of time. Just today I had to rate my birth experiense in a questionnaire between 1 and 10, with  ‘1 being horrific and 10 being blissful’. I gave both of mine a 9. The LongSufferingHusband’s eyebrows shot up into his hair at this. He wisely didn’t contradict, although I think I heard him mutter something about perhaps asking the midwife to be third umpire on this one, ‘because I swear I remember you screaming at her at one point that it was just like going to war.’

Thank God for the power of postnatal hormones to blank out the memories, otherwise the GothicDaughter would be an only child, SparklyDaughter would not be in existence and I would have precious little to blog about.

But no, it’s not childbirth. Nor is it any of those little irritations of womanhood like waxing, or PMT, or the dogged persistence of the patriarchy, although they are all very annoying in their own way.

No, the worst thing, the VERY worst thing about being a woman is listening to another woman talking absolute total anti-woman baloney and trying hard to give her the benefit of the doubt.

I was brought up on the idea of the sisterhood. The worst crime for a feminist, I was taught, was to put down another woman. That was colluding with the patriarchy, sleeping with the enemy, letting the side down. And I try, I really try.*

But some days are harder than others. Any day in which I make the mistake of reading anything written by the unspeakable Melanie Phillips, for example, can be a very bad day indeed for supporting the sisterhood. Last month, in the aftermath of that crazy summer shopping-with-menaces-fad that swept the nation, The Unspeakable Ms P decided she knew which gender was to blame. Not, surprisingly, the male one, despite the fact that more than 90% of the rioters were male. No, silly reader. It was, of course, the fault of the women. All women, all the way back to poor old Eve, with her hand hovering over that shiny Granny Smith thinking, well, God can’t have been THAT bothered about me eating this or he’d have put it on a higher branch. But, more specifically, The Evil Single Mother.

Now I know quite a few single mums, and I guess you do too. And you know, like I do, that the stories leading up to becoming a single mum are hugely varied. Widowhood, abandonment, adultery, domestic abuse, accidental pregnancy, just the banally horrible everyday business of falling out of love.

And I guess that you, like me, often look on in admiration at the wonderful, amazing women and men bringing up children on their own, to a greater or lesser extent. We know, from our own lives and if we think about it, that Vicky Pollard is a media stereotype representing a tiny minority. You know, really, that she isn’t typical. The charity Gingerbread’s research tells us that 3% of single mothers are teenagers. The average age of single mothers is 37, and 55% of all single mothers had their baby in marriage.

Ms Phillips, like many social commentators, doesn’t stand for any of that kind of nuanced nonsense. Single mothers, you see, are Bad. She doesn’t let the complexity of actual real life get in the way of this powerful narrative. Never mind the widows! Never mind the long-suffering hard-working abandoned wives! The shared trying-hard-to-be-amicable-for-the-children parenting! What kind of narrative is that? It makes no sense at all. What kind of scapegoats do that lot make?

No, in Mel-land, all single mothers are Vicky Pollard: fat, lazy, stupid and feckless, leaping up the council house queue (haha) due to a delibarate impregnation.

(Actually I’m pretty damn sure Ms Phillips doesn’t believe her own poisonous vitriol. She’s just doing it for effect, and to sell newspapers. And that is why there is a special suite in hell reserved for her and all those other intelligent commentators whipping up hatred. Let’s hope the spikes there are particularly long and pointy.)

And this is what I know too, from my own life and from my teaching – there is nothing particularly magical or special about the nuclear two-parent family. Love and care and discipline and some more love – that’s what counts in a family and these things are – by no means  – the monopoly of the two-parent family.

Those ‘stable’ families of the 1950s might look all cosy and fuzzy from here, but the truth was quite different. We all know that, back then, women had fewer choices. Many stayed married, even in violent or deeply unhappy situations, because they HAD to. Because they often couldn’t support themselves otherwise. The only people who might want to turn back the clock to that time are those who have never been in a situation where they felt trapped and utterly miserable, or who can’t imagine what that was like. The rest of us know it’s too high a price to pay for some notional idea of cultural stability.

I know you aren’t taken in by Ms Phillips. I know you aren’t sucked into believing that life in the 1950s was like one long episode of the Waltons. If you are a single parent, doing the best you possibly can to be the best possible parent that you can be, good luck to you and I hope you get a night out soon and maybe even a nice long lie in. Or, preferably, the first one swiftly followed by the second one.

And, sod the sisterhood. Next time I see Melanie Phillips I am going to poke with something sharp and pointy. Or bring her back to my house to do a bit of babysitting on her own for a bit.

That’ll teach her.

*Thatcher was an exception to this, in case you were wondering.

How the right scapegoat single mothers

here’s Melanie Phillips on why single mothers are responsible for the breakdown of the fabric of our society, global warming and the abolition of the second post

 

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