This isn't a Dolly tribute

Tumble out of bed and I stumble to the kitchen, Pour myself a cup of ambition.
Oh Dolly. Should I write a long flowery tribute about how Dolly changed my life? It seems a bit late now and there have been massive outpourings which really do the job splendidly, and my life wasn’t really changed by Dolly except only for a few short days when I was maybe 10 years old. I found myself on stage (not somewhere I have frequented often) doing a ‘skit’ for a school show where me and a couple of friends danced to 9-to-5 with our hair tucked into headscarfs and old fashioned mops in our hands. Aged 10 we wouldn’t have known much about working 9-to-5 but it seemed like a jolly song to have a dance to. We thought cleaning was funny. (I don’t now, obviously, as I look regretfully at my un-mopped floor and cobwebbed windows.)

Remembering this Dolly moment did get me thinking a little bit, especially after having very recently re-watched Sliding Doors. (Gwenny with an incredibly strained English accent, John Hannah incredibly irritating with every line.) Back in the 80s I did a lot of dancing at school – in a relatively un-self-conscious and definitely not ambitious way. I just loved it. Stretching out (short! I was very small) limbs, our dance teacher clicking a rhythm through his teeth and fingers, our collective bodies clad in 1980s leotards and legwarmers, we’d choreograph routines and occasionally perform for an assembly or maybe even a parents-day. It was a very comfortable space. Somewhere I felt confident and possibly even something I could consider myself good at. In the classroom I wasn’t any of those things. So I danced. And at some point the dancing ended because when we all went up to senior school dancing wasn’t available (unless you did it out of school but that was difficult being at a boarding school, and it was ballet that was offered, not contemporary - which was what I loved, and who would take us anyway?). And whilst I was at a school which celebrated ‘the arts’ it seemed that back then, late 80s, dance wasn’t really included in this category. Not for children in a rural boarding school, anyway. So it fizzled out and my red-and-white leotard was pushed to the back of my drawers. And I lost touch with that little dancer and got into learning how to drink Bacardi and smoke cigs without being busted (which actually I did a good job of as I never was busted, I could confidently call myself extremely good at lurking in the shadows not being noticed by suspicious teachers).

My Sliding Doors thinking rewinds me to being that 11/12-year-old and being offered a life of dance… what would that have looked like? To have been encouraged and supported and allowed to be ambitious? It’s very likely I would’ve given up anyway in my mid-teens (according to research, girls are most likely to give up sports in their teens), but if dance had been there – taken seriously, pushed for, given value, would I have carried on? Could I have ‘made it’ – become a professional and stag-leaped my way around regional theatres with a small company, multiple pairs of legwarmers, poorly paid but loving life on the road?

In Sliding Doors Gwenny’s character discovers her shithead boyfriend in bed with another woman and so she dumps him, cuts her hair, starts a new company and aces at life, until she’s hit by a car and dies. The other Gwenny character doesn’t discover the boyfriends infidelity because she missed the tube and gets mugged and then wears plaits in her hair so we know which character is which. And when she is hit by the same van she doesn’t die but she’s learned about life in a different way and dumps her shithead boyfriend and pulls through stronger than ever. There’s a message there for us. (Don't cut your hair?)

My Sliding Doors scenario wouldn't be quite so dramatic and end in death. But I do wonder, especially when I get twitchy-body at the sound of certain tunes, what I could’ve been. I suppose we are all prone to thinking about what could’ve been and the aim is to not live with regret over past decisions or lack of choice, especially if we didn't even know they even existed, but to be the conductor of our own opportunities looking ahead.

Meanwhile my creaking and cracking 52 year old body actually is quietly pleased to not be flinging itself around a dance floor as I nurse a repetitive strain injury on one side (from watering the garden with bath-water during the drought, up and down stairs with a heavy watering can for weeks) and a bruised rotator cuff on the other side (I had a fall in December!). Each morning I wake up – I quite literally do tumble out of bed (Dolly didn’t even write this song during the menopause!) because overnight my joints have seized up like some rusty old bike left out overnight in the rain.

Talking of which (rain that is, not my rusty joints) how nice it is to see a cloud in the sky and a shoot of green grass poking through what had increasingly looked like a sheet of brown concrete but was actually the garden.  

 

Oh for a ceiling fan

 All this heat… lying on bed (no longer in bed) gently sweating into the sheets, staring at the ceiling wishing there was a fan twirling the air around the room… god it’s hot. How does it feel hotter when the sun goes down? My house, ancient, wasn’t built in an era when it hit 35-degrees for weeks on end. As an old butchers, the meat hooks and bars for hanging giant carcasses off (nice) do nothing to keep the rooms cool. So I lie on bed gently sweating into the sheets. 

The lack of a ceiling fan reminds me of a time in my life when I lived in a house that did have ceiling fans… over in Seikong - Hong Kong mainland - when Dad was posted there with the army in the 80s. I was 7-8 years old and we lived in a jungly army bungalow enclave on the side of a hill, mosquito screens on all the windows and large clunking ceiling fans swirling muggy air around quite a dark house. I remember my bedroom was a sort of lean-to-add-on to the side of my brothers room, and in it I had a tiny little cassette player where I played, continuously, a tape of Beatles music. Can’t buy me love. I also had a collection of Sindy dolls. (Note, not Barbies, which was always the aspiration.) They had shiny dresses, plastic shoes, handbags that didn’t open, hair that could melt if left too long in the sun, disproportionately long skinny limbs… and a male version - who’s name I don’t even know - of which I had 1 doll - a bit puny and underwhelming in equally shiny clothing but with helmet-hair rather than ‘real’ locks. My brothers had some kind of male doll thing too which had a more army-like appearance and when they returned to HK from the UK on the B-Cal flights exporting all the children who boarded to and from school 3 times a year, they would be reunited with these slightly dubious alpha male specimens. 

One time, we became particularly fevered - the word feral works too - and hysterical and created a game, which would be a one-time-only game, given the nature of this invention. The idea was to put the ceiling fan on full-blast - it would make this thwump-thwump noise that got faster and faster as the blades went round and round - dizzying… - At which point we decided the best thing to do would be to throw the dolls into the whizzing blades and see what happened. Total-carnage-mayhem! Bits of Sindy and her boyfriend brutally shredded as they hit the rotators - then peeeeeewwwweeeewwww - they ricochet in parts all over our bedroom - whack splat thwack! Shoes - zoom! Overly-long-leg - weeeeeehhheeee! Our eyes manic with destructive pleasure we would re-chuck the (poor) dolls back in as they became increasingly dismembered and mangled. The grand finale would have been Sindy’s head coming off like a champagne cork and flying across the beds and landing with a thud in a dark cockroachy corner of the room. It was all over very quickly. I kept the clothes but the dolls didn’t make it and had to be dispatched of all together. I think it was worth the moment of stomach-clutching-out-of-control-laughter this gave us at a time when we didn’t see each other all that much (them at boarding school in Sussex, me at the local army school in Hong Kong). It didn’t resolve the issue of the extreme humidity either but was an excellent distraction. 


Thinking about this time in Hong Kong I know now we were living in a different world era, Hong Kong was relatively un-developed, and we would head off, when my brothers were home for the holidays, on adventures on the Ghurka Junk - an incredible wooden boat (seemed enormous to me when I was only 7) that the regiment owned - picture a Chinese boat in your mind and this is what the junk was, full of curves. We’d go off on the junk, the boat being driven (sailed, I guess) by Ghurka soldiers who were so handsome and so kind and patient with us (were we nightmare bratty children who they had to put up with? God I hope not) and smiled with such warmth it could make me cry now just thinking about their kindness and how Dad would talk so fluently and unselfconsciously in this beautiful Nepali language, chuckling at some joke or other. And Mum would put this insane suncream on our noses which was like a strip of thick white paint that would last for hours and later make me think about Adam Ant. We would have a massive picnic - I think cooked by someone in the regiment - maybe some curries - delicious, so normal to have curry for lunch on a massive beautiful boat in unspoiled waters - and splash about in warm clear sea around Plover Cove (I wonder if that even exists any more) - watch out for the lethal jelly-fish (man-o-war!) and home as the sun set, feeling warm and crunchy from the salt water. And then the long drive home back up ‘twist’ the terrifying road that zig-zagged up behind Kowloon where Dad would try his best not to kill us while overtaking on blind corners in a bid to get past some sputtering diesel fumes of an ancient 3-wheel motor. 

It’s funny where the mind wonders when you’re staring at the ceiling sweating gently into your sheets wishing you had a fan. Thwump thwump.

You’ve been snookered!

There’s a funny feeling rumbling around which resembles like when a snooker ball whacks into the triangle of balls in the opening shot. The balls scatter across the green felt and all you see is chaos (unless you’re a snooker player in which case I guess you see the beginnings of a game). I think this applies to life right now, a little bit. I suspect it started in December 2023 when the first shot was played and Dad was, er, potted. Emotional and physical disarray followed.

Beginning the process of clearing the green felt could be described as part of the grief process and one by one the balls kind of started to move in directions which maybe made a little bit more sense. (I’m really bad at snooker mind you and can barely hold the cue, the fun bit is rubbing the nib in chalk - that’s not a dirty metaphor; ball games, for me generally, bring on a frown).

Less jarring flash backs to the hospital and more dipping into photos or memories with accepting wistfulness. And as all the therapists in the whole world say, the start of managing (grief) in a way that is like the careful carrying of a clunky painful heavy bag that you know how to handle the more you handle it, and less clunky and less painful and whilst heavy possibly easier to carry than at first. You find a place for the bag and grow muscles that help you hold it.

But wait! 2023 is YEARS ago now! Yes I know! But these things take a long time. It’s not like going on Amazon and clicking 'purchase' and 12-hours later you get the delivery: the quick Be Gone Grief Kit! You have to go to the emotional gym and work on those muscles so you can say jokes about your Dad being a potted snooker ball without falling apart. He didn’t like ball games either.

So getting to a point where there’s a bit more emosh-balance and fewer trembly chins is like a major milestone! Bravo, you pat yourself on the back and feel a bit stronger and a bit more capable.

But what we don’t know is that this particular snooker table is always resetting and it’s BOOM the triangle is hit and it’s ball chaos over the green felt once again, a mere 18 months later. The Good Ship Family finds itself in high-seas and the balls are flipping all over the place.

And this time because we’re dealing with adult orphanising (possibly just made that word up) it’s not even ‘straight forward grief’ – everything is multiplied – the bag is heavier, more painful, needs bigger muscles to carry it - because there’s an estate which needs to be sorted as well as the bereavy-bit. And I’m afraid no amount of “well it’s a nice distraction from the loss” placates.

When you find yourself and your family in your mother in laws’ house rummaging through time via multiple dusty and crumbly cardboard boxes containing incredible documents possibly last touched in 1852, wondering what to do with barely legible diaries because the handwriting is so Victorian and loopy, finding 3000 photos of building works from 45 years ago, acknowledging that none of us have houses big enough to absorb even a fraction of the beautiful and memory-laden furniture, one feels slightly out of ones depth to say the least.

The dump. The charity shop. The boot of the car. The garage. Visited. Revisited. And will be visited again. Possibly with a white van. There is a lot to sieve through.

Politely we ask each other questions:

Do you want this (pointing to a rabbit-fur-lined-travelling cloak from 1900s)?

Will you use these when you continue to not have smart dinner parties (pointing to an impeccable set of mother-of-pearl-handled-cutlery seemingly made for children)? 

Are you likely to have a sherry party and use those tiny engraved crystal glasses? 

When was the last time you read Shakespeare? Are you planning on reading a Shakespeare play every year until your death?  The house has maybe 3 separate entire collections. I suspect I would die before I even got past the first sonnet. Even the copies with pictures can’t be of help. Please don't compare me to a summers day.

Would you like 25 framed photos of varying sizes of patriarchal figures dating back to 1700- to whom you are probably related? Look at that mans' insane pork-chop-side-burns.

Whose job is it to decide if these are things worth keeping?

We somehow feel it ought not to have been left entirely up to us. We are still children who can't make adult decisions. 

Down to the nitty gritty, we set-to on the freezer, taking out erroneous bits of chicken, tupperware labelled with soup – parsnip, courgette, turkey - from 2025, diligently put aside for a spontaneous visit from a child or grandchild, 8 bottles of (homemade) elderflower cordial, some sad looking sea-bass-fillets, they would never have been promoted to a frying pan. For some reason I couldn’t part with the meatballs. They’re back in Hamsphire making friends with our frozen croissants.

Meanwhile, talking of snooker… An entire snooker table which was in my m-in-laws basement and provided hours of fun (for game-players) in the nineties has been rehomed – for someone else to whack that triangle of reds with hopefully less shattering impact.

We all need a break.

(Like what I did there?)