Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

I hate that I haven’t posted on here for 2 months but I love that having written about Sam’s birthday last time, now it’s MY birthday week! I love that birthdays are such a marker for looking backwards and forwards. I love that it gives such a great excuse to remember what’s important and who loves you and even for them to say it out loud…or at least in a card! I had a great celebratory party with special friends at the weekend and tomorrow morning I’ll open all the thoughtful presents they brought to celebrate my new number. I don’t like the number, but other people seem to live with the downward slope to the big 6-0 – and at least I don’t look my age yet, even if body parts are failing piecemeal year by year.

Ageing – another thing there is no escape from! Lately I have stopped thinking about it so much, I suppose, this ‘longing to escape’: the acute pain of it, the desperation and yearning, has receded with the belated onset of summer – and the amazing fact that Sam our son with the so-called ‘terminal diagnosis’ – remains very well. In fact on 7.7 – did you see? – he won Wimbledon! Oh… maybe that was Andy Murray, my mistake 😉 But apart from the fact that our son can’t hit a tennis ball and has no money at all in the bank, let alone millions, you could be forgiven for getting them confused: Sam is only 3 days older than the new British champion too.

Andy/Sam

It’s strange to think when Andrew was hiding under a table from the gunman wreaking havoc in Dunblane’s school gym in March 1996, Sam was at elementary school in Palo Alto California, putting on an American accent so he wouldn’t stand out too much. Both 26 year old men have lived a life less ordinary since then in utterly different ways…

Anyway, the long winter has finally passed – although I am still trapped in many ways by the circumstances of life and still often enjoy escaping into memories, dreams, books and movies, I don’t feel it quite so acutely. This is the 7th month, my favourite month, my birthday month, and along with the lovely weather we have been enjoying all the 7’s… especially underlined on 7.7 by Murray ending a 77 year wait for a British man to win Wimbledon with only Ginny Wade’s women’s finals victory in 1977 to boost the national morale in between. Gosh, I remember that so well! I was working that Saturday in a Salvation Army maternity hospital in Hackney as part of my nursing training, watching the match on the ward television: it really was another era! We all suggested that the woman who gave birth to a daughter during the match should call her Virginia… but I think she preferred Tracey or Sharon or maybe Elizabeth. That child will just have celebrated her 36th birthday: that’s ageing at work again and no wonder that I can’t recall the girl’s name!

Moving on to May 1987 and the births of 3 boys: on 12th our Sam-son in Cambridge, on 15th Andy Murray in Glasgow and a week later – the lucky number 7 again – Novak Djokovik arrived in Belgrade. Who could have known what the next 26 years would hold for any of them? What will the next 26 years hold for me, I wonder…We just have to live a day, a week, at a time – and see what comes next.

Perhaps I have become better at this recently. I haven’t given up the desire for a country cottage retreat but perhaps I feel more settled, more accepting of life, better at living in the present. That could be one excuse for getting out of the habit of this therapeutic blogging about escaping (like I need an excuse, like anyone cares except me!) Perhaps I am not in quite so much need of the release valve?

But it turns out I really DO care: at the moment, although I’m putting up with a distracted housewife’s life, I will often describe myself as “a writer who is not writing”! What do they call that in the acting profession – “resting”? But I don’t want to be resting from writing anymore than actors would choose waiting on tables over treading the boards! The frustration is all with myself and my inability to make time for creativity: instead the thoughts run round my mind in a crazy meleé. I’d much rather be processing like I was a year ago! But, as with the 3 men above, there are seasons of struggle and release, winter and summer, in life. And yes, I have been resting over these months – and it has been important. Perhaps now I will be able to write less out of pressure and more out of pleasure!

Apart from all this seventh month’s 7’s bringing such a fulfilment of promise – which is strangely enough the meaning of the number 7 ‘perfection, completion’ – there was another anniversary on 7.7 that seems to have gone unmarked. It was 8 years since the London bombings in 2005. It seems the world is full of death and life: let’s hope 8 lives up to its meaning as well and delivers the nation – and this writer – a ‘new beginning’

That would be a good birthday present!