Month: July 2017

thing 1: middle-aged woman on a beach (part ii)

I’m usually a slow getter-inner, when lake or river swimming in Britain.

I enjoy the gradual acclimatisation process, and the way I eventually reach a point where postponing the gasp-inducing full plunge becomes worse than enduring it. On this beach, however, you have to let go of any vision of strolling casually or lingeringly across white-gold sand into lapping clear blue water as your footprints dissolve beautifully behind you. (more…)

thing 1: middle-aged woman on a beach (part i)

I doubt Leonardo’s going to hustle for the lead in this one.

And it probably says something sadly unsurprising about the state of the film industry that I can’t even think of which female actor would have their agent on the blower to the producer. However, I’ve got to tell you: middle-aged woman on a beach felt absolutely bloody marvellous. (more…)

we’re going to need a lot of cake…

The Big Day.

It’s in the post. Should I hire trumpeters, skywriters, a marquee? A cloistered cell in which to grieve? Do I want a Greek chorus to keen over the event, or a Glee chorus to celebrate it? Do I don some kind of ritual clothing, à la Victorian mourning garb, or go out and buy whatever constitutes my personal equivalent of a combover, a sports car or a push-up bra?

You may detect some ambivalence here. Over the last years (more…)

the afternoon knows what the morning never suspected

I came across this line by Robert Frost quite recently on the internet (it’s all over the place) and it got me, in the way that poetry often can.

I heard a voice inside my head go Cor, in an almost Phwoar-y kind of a way (swiftly followed by a quiet, greenly-jealous voice saying I wish I’d written that). Though Frost is probably not, in fact, saying something very different from “You can’t put an old head on young shoulders”, there’s something so much more palatable for me in coming across the idea in this form; (more…)

what country, friends, is this?

Fifty. Half a century. Five decades. Blimey. How did that happen?

And what happens now?

I imagine most people feel those things, or something similar; —or, if they don’t, I probably won’t want to have tea and cake with them. I can’t imagine what it might be like serenely to glide up to 50, untroubled and untouched, perma-sure of self and place-in-world. For that matter, I can’t imagine what it might be like serenely to glide through life at all. Yes, there are patches of glide, and stroll, and float—and even sometimes dance—but they’re punctuated with stagger, reel and flounder. And sometimes with sit-down-and-howl, too. (more…)