The Past Must End So Tomorrow Can Start

Lately, I've been carrying myself heavily...

A recent selfie.

No, stop it, I don’t mean any extra weight I’m shipping around with me, thank you! Rude.

(And anyway, to be fair, the light in here’s rubbish, and I’m pretty sure the shadows add a few pounds. Like TV. Only different.)

Those extra pounds, that I neither confirm or deny, are probably the ones that made the nurse checking my weight last week, look me directly in the eye and really, really think about raising an eyebrow. Eyebrow-raising nurses are the worst, aren’t they? Mine stayed professional throughout, but still I felt the deluge of silent comment coming off her, like dandruff snow-storming around the shoulders of an associate you don’t know well enough to have a quiet word in their ear. An ear you’d need a snow shovel to clear a path to.

Homo-erotic dandruff. Who knew that was a thing?

My nurse didn’t have dandruff, so that’s not the best analogy for her unspoken commentary. And it wasn’t really a deluge, it was more like ripples - like in a pond after you’ve thrown in a stone. A rock stone, not the 14lbs sort. Although, as we’ve arrived here, yes, actually her ripples were because of a stone. Just over in fact. According to my medical record, this addition had occurred in ‘less than a year’. But before your own eyebrows get all frisky, let me caveat – about a year ago a different nurse took me at my word when I reported my weight on the home scales straight out of the shower. Eyebrow nurse weighed me in my shoes, jeans, belt, t-shirt and hoodie! And I needed a haircut! Without my quick thinking, my BMI would also have included my phone and wallet too!

My nurse. Seemingly with a pillowcase staple-gunned to the back of her head.

I tried to tell her that the two weights were not taken in comparable laboratory conditions, but she was too busy repeatedly not raising her eyebrow to discuss it.

Anyway, that’s not the (ill-recorded, NHS) heaviness I’m referring to. I’m talking about a feeling, an atmosphere, a song playing in another room…

I’ll explain.

I’ve had blah, blah, blah going on, which although expected, doesn’t help. Neither does the blah, blah, blah I wasn’t expecting, that flopped out of left field without a by-your-leave. And when the blah-blah went blah-blah-blah, well I nearly blahed an enormous blah, I can tell you!

We’re all on the same page now, yes?

Look, I, like everyone else on earth, has blah going on. You have it, she does, he does, they do (and does). It’s part of being mostly human most of the time, isn’t it? And, just like when faced with an anatomically correct teddy bear, and asked to point to where its soul might reside, there’s a similar hesitation when asked to nod your head in the general direction of where inside you the blah builds up. Because build up it does – no matter whether yours feels like it gathers in your head, heart, or in that place somewhere in your nethers that develops a magnetic pull when standing on a bridge high above a motorway.

The blah can accumulate gradually, or it can avalanche unannounced. It’s not necessarily on the depressive spectrum, although it is more than likely to be wearing a splash or two of Eau de Bleak.  

For a while the feeling is non-descript and you can continue to waddle through existence as normal. But at some point you'll feel normality has changed – and you have to admit - you’re carrying yourself heavily.

My recent ‘Road to Damascus’ moment was actually an ‘Avanti Train to Stockport’ moment…

I was reading, when a lady in a facemask (the ‘I’m not sharing my germs’ sort, not the ‘hand over all your money’ sort) stopped right next to my seat and said in what I can only describe as a ‘thrilled’ voice:

‘Oh my God, you are so cute!’

Well, I didn’t know whether to respond directly, or turn to Sarah first and make sure she was aware that I most definitely still ‘have it’. The decision was made for me when the young couple in the seats behind mine grinned audible thanks. Ah, right.

The masked avenger was so close to my ear it was an understandable mistake to make. I turned around to peer between the seats…

(Can anyone tell me when ‘turning round’ became more like a many-point manoeuvre, in a driving test you’re about to fail? It’s like I was made of unconnected bits, and they’d all got to be turned independently of each other.)

Anyway, and sure enough, there behind me was a bouncing toddler on a proud parent’s knee.

Not sure what they were proud about – kid wasn’t that cute, if you ask me. They didn’t, but I’m just saying. I think I’m cuter. On a good day. With a following wind. But that’s not the point. However, it’s probably the proof. And the tipping point. 

If memory serves, the baby looked exactly like this...

As Miss Mask exuded her pleasure at the chubby, dribbling mess behind me, I recognised what she was doing as something I knew existed, but that I hadn’t brought to mind for quite some time...

Her lightness of tone and energy struck me as familiar yet distant. A voice that suggested it required nothing in return. Quite the opposite – she’d already been ‘paid’ by that simple view of that simple toddler’s ridiculous face. Then she almost skipped away, with whatever germs she was carrying, experiencing pleasure at both giving and receiving joy.

I had no doubt that she would find a seat that pleased her, a space for her luggage that was not a tyranny and would then find delight in her book, her music or whatever she was travelling with - or even the window view. Remember them? I felt sure she would augment herself during the journey, rather than adding layers to her frustration at the world, her time keeping or her health. 

It got me thinking.

Specifically, it got me thinking two things. Firstly, that I should have been Miss Marple. And secondly, that I understand why people go on coach trips to the Cotswolds.

I shared these two realisations with Sarah. Sarah paused, put down her Kindle and said, ‘What, now?’ (Voiced in a kindly, inquisitive tone, not as a demand. She's like that. She would use the same tone to ask you to remove a milk float, if you’d just driven one onto her foot, you mark my words.)

On the Miss Marple stuff - I'm sure I've said before, but I have long been a nostalgia junkie. That’s what Sarah calls me. And she doesn’t lie. And she’s right. It doesn’t mean I care about history especially or get excited by the past per se. But I do often get to thinking that times were simpler once. In Miss Marple’s time, for instance. The dozens and dozens of bodies that followed in her wake aside, it seems to me to have been a time of tea and cakes and peering around things.

A good 'peer' is terribly underrated.

People lived in hotels and everyone wore a hat. Elon Musk wasn’t even a glint in Satan’s eye. And, apart from for the murdered many, everything always ended up OK.

I know this is not a reality. Not least because Miss Marple is a fictional busybody who literally should have become a suspect in, like, a gazillion serious crimes, but was spared this because she lived in a time when the Police were confused and in need of outside help at every turn.

And I know there were wars and poverty and the 40s, 50s, 60s and early 70s were not anyway near as easy for most people as they were for a fictional woman created in Agatha Christie’s mind.

But sometimes my perception is: life was easier. Better.

And it wasn’t. I know this.

And yet I’m drawn to this place I cannot ever go.

As someone who makes stuff up for an impecunious living, I always have one toe in fictional worlds that make perfect sense to me. Sometimes, the rest of me is in a world that doesn’t really make any sense at all. 

I think this is a McDonald's now.

This is a photo of me and my Mum. She died just before COVID (that woman on the train was probably patient zero, hence her incessant sparkle.) Anyway, here we are, 25 years ago. Me signing a book for her. We’re in a pub that no longer exists. Outside the longest running musical in the West End, which moved down the road a few years later to a theatre that’s since changed its name. Then I stopped working there and the staging of the show was all changed and, well, I really don’t know what the fuss is about it anymore, and blah, blah, blah. But this photo takes me right back there, to that world before kids, before backache, before carrying heavily.

Sigh.

A few days ago I was in a park. I know, I'm so cutting edge. I met a dog. She looked at me furtively at first and then stayed directly in my path as her owner tried to guide her away. I was certain this dog was that masked woman on the train, but in canine form. So I acknowledged her, and she jumped up in the air and she nibbled my fingers and the happiness coming off her was tangible. (I get that a lot, to be honest.)

Best. Day. Ever. Said. The. Dog.

As I’ve already stated, I’m not a tweed-wearing imaginary person, any more than I am a dog on a lead (those days are behind me). But where does that go? That feeling? Where literally everything is going to be OK, and in fact, if you just take proper stock, it so often already is.

Of course, it doesn’t go anywhere forever, but there are periods when it is hard to find one's Upward Dog. Is it frame of mind? Yes. But how much control do we have over a frame of mind? Because if it’s the same part of us that has control over, let’s say, the insistence that three biscuits left in the tin is just wasteful, or that the glass and a half left in the bottle really won’t be as nice if drunk tomorrow, then it’s not an easy ask.

I’ve been undertaking a fascinating research project. A lot of that research is set the ‘60s. I was still potty training when the ‘60s came to an end – and knew nothing of any of the people I’ve recently become virtually an expert on. And those people, those who haven’t died, they are now in their late 70s or 80s. And during all those years in-between they did stuff. Some of it memorable, some of it, just making sure there was toilet roll and wondering if that crack in the ceiling was bigger now than a year ago. Usual stuff. No one’s life is perpetually spectacular.

But in the years I’ve been researching, oh, they were magnificent! And awful and selfish and misunderstood and human. But I really, really, really miss not having been there.

If I’d been an adult in the 1960s, then I'd be much, much older, and yet the echo of what happened then, what the world was like (not the whole world, obviously, just the sanitised, sexy, researched version) would be too exciting to miss.

Good times?

And as I write that, I know it isn’t true. Maybe it’s just got a more exciting hue because I did miss it? In any case, the past must end so tomorrow can start.

Blimey, if I wasn’t utterly certain Instagram is the laziest, narcissistic playground available to people who need to look out windows more, I’d create a meme of that.

(Note to self, change the title of this post and create something for Instagram, advertising this blog.)

You know what, sometimes you simply have to carry yourself heavily until a dog sucks your hand, or, wearing your tweed twinset, you discover who murdered the corpse in the hotel room next to you. Both are fab reminders that no matter how much blah you have in your life, it’s just blah, blah, blah.

And coach trips to the Cotswolds?

Well, imagine how little blah you have going on if you have the time for that!

Oh, how I long to have the time for that. It’ll be a sunny day. Slobbery dogs will be everywhere, and when the coach driver, sitting there in her tweed hat, sipping from a teacup, asks if I have anything heavy to put into the luggage hold below, I’ll tell her I’m fine, thank you – what I'm carrying weighs next to nothing.