Some decades are better than others...

Some days are better than others.  Some months are better than others.  Some years…some decades…  Yeah, you get the picture. 

It’s easy to get lost in the past, isn’t it?  You start by looking at old pictures and, hey, weren’t you so young and pretty?  And, oh, didn’t you have a life back then – a job, a vision, a purpose; friends, family, home.  Weren’t you so in love – with someone, with life, with yourself?  And wasn’t the future so bright? 

And what happened, in those years that followed?  What turned the rainbow monochrome?  What killed the magic stone-dead?  Was it the first grey hair or the first deal that went west?  The dimming of eyes or the dilution of love?  Was there a definite point where it turned sour?  Can you look back and see exactly that fork in the road where you made the big mistake, where you chose this way over that, or did it just float over you imperceptibly, like mist, until one day you woke up and the fog was so thick that you couldn’t even bite the hand in front of your face?

Isn’t it so damned unfair the way it never quite worked out the way you planned? 

Ah, it’s so easy to get snaggled up in regret, in self-blame, in else-one blame, in disappointment and despair, isn’t it?  You had your chance, you blew it and life will never be so rosy again.  You’re washed up, old, tired, so bloody tired, and doesn’t the mirror delight in showing you how just plain nasty time can be? 

Where did those days, weeks, months, years, decades go?  It only seems a blink ago that you were standing, fresh–faced and hopeful at the prow of adulthood, peering into a future in which you could be anyone, do anything, go anywhere.  And now?  Now the walls crowd in around you. Time chews your face, biting it into furrows, spitting out lines.

Many of us have a golden time, a period, however fleeting, in which life felt good, the fates seemed kind.  Or do we?  Isn’t it all just hindsight?  When I look through my photo albums at the pictures taken in my twenties, it looks like heaven.  And, yes, it was a magical time.  Looking back, I was one lucky bitch – I had the looks, the job, the flat, the friends, the fun.  I knew what I wanted (work-wise), I went after it and I got it.  I ticked off my goals one by one – first published feature, first feature in a broadsheet; first feature in a glossy woman’s mag; first feature in a tabloid; first column; first book; first TV appearance; first …oh, you get the idea.  My love life was a shambles but hey, I had great work and fabulous friends and, as the song says, two out of three ain’t bad. 

But you can’t turn back time, no matter how hard you wish you might.  The past is sliding by, slippery like water – and, really, there is no past, it’s just memory.  There is only now and what we choose to do with that now.  And one can easily sit and drown oneself in the past, in that lovely lilac wine of Lethe that, if you drink enough, pulls you into a soft soporific befuddlement.  

Or, alternatively, you can look back with love and a shrug, and then tug yourself into the here and now, gird your loins and all that malarkey and make of it something new. 

Because if you don’t…if you can’t let go of the past, it will strangle you and squeeze out every last fragment of possible happiness.  Cos time’s just a right bastard like that.  J

Lost weekends and the Hedgerows Heaped with May

Weird old weekend, spent mainly in the past.  As anyone who knows me on Facebook will have realized, I finally got a scanner and indulged in a totally over-the-top nostalgia fest.  Pictures spanning a century (no, I’m not quite that old – I found some of my mother’s old photo albums too). 

Living in a box, living in a cardboard box.

It was bittersweet, the way looking at the past often is.  I compounded it by reading through old diaries.  And then, just to cap it all, I decided to tackle my box files and weeded through a decade of accounts and cuttings and clippings and other detritus.   Dear god, I was another person entirely – earning a packet (THAT much?  SHIT!) and spending a packet (mainly, has to be said, on doing up the derelict money pit otherwise known as the Rectory).  I didn’t have time to think – one year I think I wrote six books (quite apart from doing a shedload of journalism and TV and radio).  Funny old world, huh? 

Shoulda spent more on hairdressing, huh?  

Anyhow, the passed is past and I had a big bonfire (of my vanities) and there you go. 

Burn! 

And then lovely Zoe and her lovely husband came over to visit and I was going to be all Nigella-ish and make them pukka tea with scones and wotnot but they came early so the poor sods ended up taking me out to lunch (at lovely Woods, of course) and then I spent a bit of time dragging Zoe round the estate agents in town and pointing out the delights of Dulverton in the hope she would decide it really was time to ship out and come on down to Exmoor. 

And then, the post came.  A thick parcel from Aurum Press.  Huh?  I opened it up and there were two fat hardbacks sitting inside.  The Hedgerows Heaped with May.  Huh?  The Telegraph Book of the Countryside, edited by Stephen Moss. Huh?

And then I remembered.  That piece I’d written for the Telegraph, years back, about Liz Jones being such an arsey cow when she moved to Exmoor.  22 August 2009, to be precise.  Time flies, huh?  Based on that blog post. 

Anyhow, it was being included in a compilation of ‘the best writing’ on the countryside from the Telegraph.  Well, well.  Even better they were asking me to invoice – for fifty quid.  Not quite a fifteen grand royalty cheque but hey…every little helps right? 

The book is quite nice actually.  It’s got contributions from people like Clive James, James May (hey, how come he gets his name in the title??), Max Hastings (The Hedgerows Heaped with Hastings?), Joanna Trollope (umm, better not) and Boris Johnson. And, er...me.  

The past in a box...

So I’ve been sitting here, in my study, on the sofa, by the window, with the SP, with tears dribbling down my face.  And not just from the virus thingy.  I dunno why…(well, I do, but it’s not really important) but I opened up the wooden box that my brother had given me way back in the late sixties or very early seventies or thereabouts.  He’d been working in London with this guy who dealt in antiques (and who, incidentally, hung out with all kinds of major rock legends) and he gave it to me (my brother, not the guy, or the rock legends).  The box, that is. And it’s a bit of a memory chest…with stuff in it going way back. 

I haven’t looked in it for years but this morning I did.  And, oh my.  Such strange things; things I’d forgotten all about; letters from people that I haven’t read in…what?...forty years in some cases. Things like...

A photo of me and my sister with Father Christmas.  

A pic of me and my mum and the ridiculous dachshund, Bella, with the bald stomach (the dog). 

Invitations to 18^th birthday parties, including one I designed for me and my (foster) sister’s joint party (the one which started off so well but ended in hilarious – in hindsight - disaster).  

Good luck cards, Congratulations on passing your driving test cards. Medals from the war. A rosette. Clippings from the local newspaper.  

My great-uncle’s indenture papers, his merchant seaman reports and his astronomical notebook.  

A Blow Monkeys’ single, with a large bite taken out of it. Why? Not a clue.

'Chin up' type postcards from friends...including one of Harrison Ford, which did make me smile.

And I read the letters – in this box mainly from my family.  My mother’s – practical, newsy, talking about animals and the weather, worrying about my manners and various coughs and colds and whether she should send me stamps and if I’d get a train back from somewhere or other because the petrol would cost £5 (obviously in the days when it was cheaper to travel by rail than car!).  My sister’s – well, just the one, laughing at how rubbish she was at writing letters and telling me about the Sunday joint (the meat one). And so weird, hearing her talk about her baby (my eldest nephew) and her bump, my second eldest nephew who hadn’t been born then, not to mention their three younger siblings who were…where? 

And the funniest, loveliest letters of all, strangely enough, from my brother.  From when he first went to America to live.  A few years after our father died.  He’s one of those rare people who writes pretty much exactly the way he talks (unlike his emails which are terse and to the point, to put it mildly).  And one bit really struck me…

‘Janie. Bean. I’d like to hear how you’re feeling – not so much how you’re doing at school – I’m sure you’re doing as well there as you want to.  So tell me – it occurred to me that you kept most of those feelings to yourself.  So let me know if you feel you want to – otherwise it’s OK if you don’t want to?! (if you see what I mean).’

I wonder what I replied?  I wonder if I did reply?  Cos he was right.  I did keep feelings to myself.  Always did. Always do pretty much.  Which is probably wise in many ways, but equally probably not very healthy.  Cos when you suppress feelings, they sort of stagnate and have a  nasty tendency to go bad.  And that, I wonder, is why I've been so ill?  Maybe it's time to get out my paints again.  Cos, though I never say or write what I really feel - I can't ever lie in paint. 

And then, at the very bottom, I found this - one of several 'Biff Kards' (anyone remember them?) and it made me laugh and laugh... 

So, tell me...have you got a box like this?  :-)

A message from Pisser summons me to the Past

‘Mum, are you ever going to answer that phone?’
‘No. If whoever it is wants to talk to us, whoever can damn well leave a message.’
‘But they’ve been ringing for four days now and, if you answer it, you can tell them to leave a message next time. It’s not some kind of peeing contest, Mum.’
‘Oh, for pity’s sake.’

I snatched up the phone. ‘YES???’
A tinny voice emerged. Obviously a text message. ‘Blah, blah…Pisser…blah blah…three in a bed…ha ha…blah blah…Daddy wants to see you…’
What the…??? I threw myself over the machine so James wouldn’t hear what was clearly some pervy nutter. Fat chance.
‘Who is it? And why are you tackling the phone? And who’s John Warren and why isn’t he coming?’
‘I really don’t have the foggiest.’

But, hang about… John Warren. I knew that name. Way back in the mists of time. And, slowly, I deciphered it. It was my friend Fi, at Pisa (not Pisser) airport asking if I wanted to stay at her house as there would be room (because JW wasn’t coming). And Daddy? Another friend, usually called by her surname Dady (Daydee).  Stupid phone, as Milla would say.

Turned out that tomorrow, now today, was the City Limits reunion party, in London. City Limits was a London listings magazine, a worker’s co-operative, which started when Time Out stopped paying parity. I left my nice well-paid job doing the accounts for the Royal Tournament (where I was fed champagne and had my own pet Commander) to become the magazine’s office manager (on a pittance).

On my first day, I walked in and said hello to the first person I met. ‘Oh good. Glad you’re here,’ he replied. ‘The cellar’s flooded. It's full of shit - literally.’ Kinda set the tone.
I met some wonderful people there and, truth be told, some totally repulsive ones. I started reviewing (theatre, books, food and, weirdly, museums). Ended up as Shopping and Travel editor before being poached by the London Evening Standard. And, to be honest, by that point, it was all over. The spirit and soul of the place had been sucked out. It had lost its way.

But, in its heyday, it was wonderfully, blissfully bonkers and packed with some serious talent. John Fordham and Nigel Fountain were the editors. Duncan Campbell, Bea Campbell and Melissa Benn were in the news room. Ros Asquith and Lyn Gardner were the theatre editors. Sheryl Garratt was music editor. Kim Newman used to wander in swishing his black cape. And on and on..  Ah, the memories come flooding back… some good, some bad.

‘You are going?’ said Lyn (Gardner) on Twitter.
‘Yeah, I guess. Though I think I may be wearing dark glasses.’
‘I’ll have a wig,’ she responded firmly. I could her her voice in my head, clear as a bell.
‘Will we recognise one another?’

I wonder. I also wonder this, as I pack my overnight bag and try to erase the bags under my eyes. Should one revisit the past? All those people who shone so bright…will they still shine? Many won’t be there. Some, like my lovely mate Nicky Pellegrino, cos they live so very far away. Others because they are, not to put too fine a point on it, dead. Daddy sent me an email (she was always of a depressive bent) giving a list of our deceased former workmates. 14 of ‘em. Fecking sad.

Should one go back? I dunno. But I do know I’m looking forward mightily to going back to Dalston to stay at Fi and Andrew’s house (and seeing Daddy of course). Cos, in my twenties, I spent so much time there – at their kitchen table drinking wine; in their back garden chatting over the fence with the Jehovah’s Witnesses (and drinking wine). Arguing animatedly about art and politics, waving our arms around, laughing our heads off, occasionally shouting our heads off.

Should one go back?  Time will tell.