Time is doing weird things right now. Maybe prompted by returning to Newcastle 30 years after graduation. It was awesome to see the city again and to be with people who I shared some ridiculously seminal years with. 1996 doesn’t feel 30 years ago, and at the same time when I see a photo of myself from those years, short hair, clothes which I can’t remember wearing, a happy anxious probably hungover moment caught on film, I feel a long way from that girl.
I wonder, if I was in 1996 now, could I even have vaguely imagined that I’d be back in my childhood village, living in a crumbling 400-year-old-house, with a dog that eats shit like I eat chocolate, a husband who’s the village cricket team captain and children which I noisily pushed out of my own body in the Hackney hospital famous for treating knife-wounds. I didn’t know, in 1996, that 6 years later we’d be showing my father-in-law the first scan of my pregnancy before anyone else because we were worried about his health.
In 1996 I didn’t give much thought to the future.
And in 2026 I try not to think about it too much either.
And after graduating, I also wouldn’t have been able to predict that 3 years later I’d be walking down the aisle to marry a boy that I’d met only 3 years earlier.
That 6 years after graduating I’d have my first baby and own a house in Harringay. In 1996 I didn’t even know Harringay existed and then it became my home for 10 amazing years.
And as I sit here in my 400-year-old cobwebby kitchen thinking about time-warps I recognise that I am about the same age that my parents were when they watched me get married, and that in 23 years time, the age that Mol is now, I will be the same age (roughly) that my parents are now, in their dotage. I say parents. But I suppose I mean parent.
23 years.
And thinking about how long it took those 23 years to unroll is unnerving, veering on uncomfortable because it’s been packed full of great things but has gone at the speed of a juggernaut with no breaks. Mols first birthday party – drunken with pizza and no actual baby present as it took place after bed-time. Liz turning 5 with a lady-bird cake. And then suddenly birthdays are in nightclubs for 50% of the household, and the other 50% celebrate with a long walk and maybe a steak for supper.
In 23 years time I will be 74.
When mum was 74 we entered a 2 year pandemic and were locked into our houses, wondering if any of our friends might die from Covid.
How fast will the next 23 years go?
When Granny (my dad’s mum) was 74 she had been a widow for 20 years. Granny, who never failed to turn up to my parents house without a gift – home-made biscuits, a quiche, some green-tomato chutney (I still have her handwritten recipe); a pair of my dads socks she’d darned. I’d hear her chorkle (for that is how she laughed) and maybe we’d tickle each others arms while we talked about school or a fishing trip she was about to go on ("I need to tie some new flies..."). I only ever saw Granny in a tweed skirt. A widow at 54 and never married again. She died in her mid-90s when I was 29 and had a 1-year-old baby.
Kiki is going to be 10 (human years) 70 (dog years) in April. I was 42 and Mol was 13 and Liz was 9 when she joined our household as a large-pawed puppy. And now, possibly a little like me, she is past the middle-age and moving into another life-chapter. She still eats shit and I still eat chocolate.
What am I trying to say? It’s complicated, but essentially this: if you go to a reunion be prepared for some extremely wonderful heartfelt rebonding with people you love and then a massive dollop of time-warpy-head-whackery and warn your dog when you get home that she needs to look you in the eye and tell you to calm the fuck down.
No comments:
Post a Comment