Talking about my generation

The Who famously sang "hope I die before I get old", I am part of that generation but never signed up to that hell cat sort of sentiment and while I am still far too young to die, I fear I have missed the " hope I die before I get old" boat already. Let's look at the facts. I am collecting my pension although these days you don't have to queue up at the post office but just watch as it glides, almost unnoticed it's so teeny weeny, into your account. I have hardly any clothes that don't have dinner dropped down them, parts of my body that once had skin so smooth it made men go weak at the knees would now only set a rhinoceros or other pachyderm atremble. I am half deaf, I have to have the subtitles on and in conversation find myself guessing words ridiculously wrongly like my Mom who was convinced our friend Chris was called Fritz. Last time I had my eyes tested they had to point me at the chart because I could hardly make out the top line and try as I may I can't get up out of a chair without a sort of strangulated bellow erupting from my lips, if lips you can still call them.

I suppose I should be thankful that I may be saved from sinking further into dotage to the point where I start peeing myself and muttering things about the younger generation or even worse start trying to look the same as I did when the Who were around. We had Roger Daltrey speaking at one of our conferences a couple of years ago, alongside the Prince of Wales would you believe, I didn't notice whether he had gravy stains down his shirt or was beginning to dribble but sure enough he was older and like me, can probably now pop his clogs without those immortal, dying before he gets old, words leaving his lips, if lips you can still call them.

It don't rain but it pours

There is a Brummie saying: just cos yer house burns down, it don't mean yer old lady wont run off with the milkman. Well it's less PC than that but I have my reputation to think of. So I find that having cancer doesn't mean other things stop going wrong. I don't just mean my dodgy knees and the repetitive strain injury in my shoulder caused by too much Monopoly on the laptop but the trials of parenthood are catching up with us again. When young folks moan about their babies not sleeping etc we joke and say " It's the first 37 years that have been the worst". Well that is coming back to bite us as we have a very unhappy Joe staying with us. We had to go and fetch him from Sam's who had fetched him from Lille right up in the North. I find you can't put being a Mom on hold, we are weaving the family magic on him and feeding him up. Luckily he can keep working from here and we have got him fixing a satellite on the side of the house. Not sure of the aesthetics on our lovely mellow limestone, but it is bringing a smile to his face and that is all the aesthetics I need.

It seems we may be marooned here as the French are up in arms about Scarcozy ( ha ha spellcheck offers me Sarcoma or scarcity for that) wanting to raise the pension age to the dizzy heights of 62. While the world lets the bankers get off the hook I am with them all the way. The petrol refiners and deliverers are on strike and there are queues at the petrol stations, maybe the ferries wont be working and they may blockade the roads. No hardship for us of course, I can get a scan done here if I have to and we can enjoy more of the wonderful sunshine and autumnal colours, and no rain or milkmen in sight.

Happy Birthday

Google tells me that today is John Lennon's birthday, they seem to have missed the fact that it is also the birthday of my soul mate and daughter, Jess. She is 29 today, so the last year of her roaring twenties is about to start. And they have certainly roared, but then so did her teens and her pre-teens, in fact she sort of roared at me as we eyed each other up for the first time, when she was about 29 seconds old. Her look said "and who do you think you are". I'm still asking that question myself but she got used to me and her Dad and loved her brothers as long as they kept to their places ie did what they were told. If you were watching Question Time on Thursday she made the second comment from the audience ( I haven't seen it yet, we can't get the telly here in France) something which suggested that maybe David Cameron's multi millionaire family might not feel the loss of child benefit quite as much as the average single Mom who has struggled to get her salary up to £36K or whatever the limit is. So we are bursting with pride for her of course.

This is the first second family occasion since I was told I might only see one more birthday, one more Christmas etc. It's a weird feeling. My Mom lived almost another 29 years after I was 29; OK the last five or so were not worth the candle but if I think what has happened over the last 29 years since Jess was born it feels like almost all of my life. I know I couldn't have expected the next 29 to be quite so momentous career and personal experience wise; life is slowing down and gets a bit repetitive but I can't begin to imagine all that I might miss that I should be seeing happening. Some perhaps that I would rather miss!

I do know that Jess will carry my flag, remember everyone's birthday and cook the Christmas puds and she will keep on roaring.. because ..that's my girl.

Curly tops

My hair definitely has a wave in it. Not waving goodbye anymore but waving hello to a new curly me. It has always been dead straight. I didn't need to iron it when it fell down to my waist in the 60s; my Mom had it razor cut for a couple of years, whatever that is, in the hope that this might make a wave happen. She used to curl it round a few grips and even the odd roller in the hope of getting her dream daughter to materialise. Nothing would make it curl. Even I tried to get the Farrah Forcett look in the 70s and had a perm, but I could only afford the local salon where the old ladies went and ended up looking like a Brillo Pad.

But now the curls have finally arrived, I am really not sure what to do with them, how to live with them. Luckily it's still very short so it's not going wild, I don't have ringlets or kiss curls but wonder if it's just a matter of time. It's like getting a baby or a pet late in life when you have lived without one for ever. I may need to go to curly hair classes or consult a few of my wavy friends.

I am wondering if anything else is growing back kinked, maybe my politics and I'll start thinking Nick Clegg is a good thing or my atheism, I might start lighting candles or muttering the rosary. If you see either of those things happening dear friends, I think it will be clear that in fact I am not waving but drowning and for goodness sake, pull me back and lock me up.

My old man

There are things that irritate me about my husband. Currently:

* He drives at a million miles an hour if someone is behind us on bendy French roads because" they get annoyed if you don't"

* He can't go a day without visiting a do-it-yourself shop and standing for hours fondling various screws and brackets

* He has always just read the greatest book ever and goes on about it to everyone

* He worries about everything, the fosse (septic tank), the boiler, Rupert Murdoch, the attention span of today's kids.

BUT

He makes me laugh, we love the same things and people, we agree about all the important things like politics and religion and since the very worst he could imagine ever happening, happened, he has been fantastic about it. About leio and how he now shares my life and might in fact run off with me sooner rather than later. He has played along religiously with my let's not let it ruin what time we do have philosophy, he has become fonder, he never let's me see him feeling sad even if we both know just how much he is; he makes me tea in bed.

I cannot conceive of what it will be like, no comfortable silence, no quirky shared smiles, no punch on the arm on waking. It's too much for him to lose. Which is why when he read out this poem chosen by our friends, Chris and Denise, at their recent wedding (after 26 years together!) I wept, like them, but for different reasons I hope:

For What Binds Us
by Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

The bearded lady

In yesterday's Guardian there was an article telling us we should learn to love our facial hair. Apparently there is a group called Hairey Awarey that is proposing that we embrace our beards and flaunt our hirsute extremities. I have always quite liked my facial hair because frankly I didn't have much, certainly not enough to get into a clinch with. But of late I am becoming more hairey aware, you see the hair is not just coming back onto my head but also onto my chin in soft, pale, but really quite long, sort of down. I am pleased that this might now be the height of chic but still shudder as I see it glowing and waving as I pass the mirror. So this morning, not wishing to be a slavish follower of fashion, I got Stewart to give it a quick clip with his beard trimmer.

I hope this doesn't mean I will have to start shaving on a regular basis because I couldn't even keep up with my legs before the chemo and fuzz is starting to grow back there too. But luckily I will have no need for a Brazilian or other exotic trims on my rude bits, the radiotherapy did for them in more ways than one.

I was right wasn't I? Cancer treatments do have a great deal of the absurd and bizarre about them; in fact it's all quite hairy as you will observe.

Read any good books lately

I was reading A Fair Balance by Rohinton Mistry on the way here. It's the book I stole or swapped, in fact, from the German hospital where I had my lung zapped. I had abandoned it, gathering dust next to my bed, because the print was very small and I kept nodding off as I screwed up my eyes to try to make out the blurry bits. Armed with my new glasses I picked it up again and got hooked. It's a happy tale of castration, amputation, hanging, starvation and slums but it manages to have its funny moments.

Even so as light relief after polishing it off I turned to Adrian Mole's latest diary The Prostrate(sic) Years. What do you know it's all about cancer, poor old Adrian; and of course it's a hoot. It doesn't quite wring out the full absurdity of radiotherapy and chemo and what it does to you but my smile kept wrying. And that Sue Townsend, they say that blind people have better hearing than the rest of us, it must be so, she must have heard, all the way from Leicester, my husband muttering about the impossibility of finding a proper sandwich and not one slathered in mayonnaise; words put into the mouth of the hapless Adrian. Perhaps my husband is Adrian Mole, he keeps threatening to write to the Prime Minister too, he is 25 years older of course and has a much better prostate and taste in women but ..there is the cardigan.

I'm now reading a book by a woman called Fred about murders that mimic the Black Death, that should be a laugh a minute too.