"If Women Over Sixty...

... Said what they really thought, there would be an outpouring of wisdom" 

So a nice lady called Marianne, Tweeted today and I laughed! Lord! How I laughed! Marianne says sweet things, and I do too sometimes, because they do no harm. As to whether they do any good, why, that's another matter entirely. We hope so, Marianne and I. 

Ekhart Tolle says that if humanity was a person sent for a psychiatric analysis she would be declared insane, and I thought about this for a bit, and I think it's true. Stupid, brutish, greedy, fearful, deluded, miserable, manipulative ( and manipulated) unconscious and ... . 

What am I thinking, that could make me so disgruntled? ( What a lovely word! Will I ever be "gruntled"? What are these "grunts" I am dissing?) 

I am thinking of the people who use Twitter to threaten and abuse. I am thinking of the 'Go Home' advertisements being trialled in areas of London, and then I have to stop thinking, because so many other and worse thoughts lie just beyond reach where I want them to stay. 

How does the wise-woman in me, now that I've reached the age of  wisdom, deal with the insanity of my kind? (Presumably, as I have been over-sixty for nearly three years now, I already am... Dealing with it, I mean. )

"Ninety seconds" is the answer. I will deal with it for ninety seconds. See, this is how it works. Your brain senses something that is going to upset you, and releases the bio-chemicals that are going to make you feel mad, and they will flood through you AND DISSIPATE in ninety seconds. How do I know this? Because I have just finished reading, 'My Stroke Of Insight' by Jill Bolte Taylor: she knows because she's a neuroscientist who did the work, and I know because I'm a wise-woman-in-training who did the reading. 

So for a minute and a half you just have to let the body do its  thing, and then the cave-person can go and lie down again and you can choose. I have been mad for a minute and a half, because that's how this body of mine works, and now do I want to go on being mad? That's the choice, and that's where being sixty- plus comes in handy. I have been mad many, many times before and I know it serves little purpose other than  to give me migraines. 

Being mad at a fool who tweets obscene things isn't going to stop him. Expecting the current administration to think with its heart isn't going to happen. I know this, you know this. So I'm just going to let the cortisol or whatever it is (I'm guessing) wend it's way out of my bloodstream and I'm going to accept my futility, my culpability, Then I'm going to do what I CAN do. 

I can write to my MP, calmly, quietly, and say that when your government attempts to further increase fear and insecurity in a woman whose home may not be safe, like yours, you do not do it in my name. When you arrest a man on suspicion of illegal activity because of the colour of his skin, you do not do it in my name. ( I guess, cynically and accurately, the idea of 'trialling' this behaviour is to find out whether ordinary people like me, are willing to stomach fascism, or whether we'll speak out against it.) 

I can resolve to be sweet on Twitter, and always wait ninety-one seconds before I decide not to respond to a madman. 

 Wisdom indeed. Will it get better as I get older? Not so much, I hope, I want always  to be open to the possibility of doing foolish things... 

Do As Your Father Tells You

 I knew my father was dying, maybe with days left to live, and I was due to fly to South Africa to introduce my English family to my African one. 'You go' He was insistent, but I couldn't make up my mind what was the right thing to do.

Dad organised his death quite wonderfully.  He had suffered with shingles for two years, and now cancer ravaged his body. We had the morphia in the house and the nurse's number ready to administer it when necessary, but dad had no pain. This is not uncommon apparently.  I was undergoing instruction for reception into the Catholic church and this particular evening I was setting off for the party at the end of the summer session. Bottles
chinked in the bag I was carrying.  'I'll have some of that champagne!' my dad whispered.

To this day, I'll never know how dad knew I had sparking wine in that carrier, but so it was.  Dad had never had champagne, which this wasn't, but still... and I was a bit
worried because of his diabetes.  The doctor laughed.  'Give him whatever he wants, its too late to worry about diabetes!'

For the last two weeks of his life, my dad subsisted on sweet sparkling wine.  Knowing where this was going, he signed a living will that stated that he wished to cease taking insulin and that when he went into a diabetic coma, he was not to be resucitated.  The doctor spoke to him privately about it and took a copy away.

I couldn't quite go through with it, when the nurse told me he was comatose I asked her to administer a dose of insulin to ask him one last time.. 'This is it dad.  Are you sure this is what you want?  He nodded, and I let him go.

I was due to fly out the next day.  I had agonised about this for weeks.  Jeanette said, 'Just for once, why don't you do as your father tells you?'

I sat next to dad working on his computer, I had one last service to perform for him.  I wrote his eulogy. I printed it off, and read it to him.  I told him what a wonderful man and great father he was, I told him how his principles and direction had shaped my life, and how I would miss him. I read it to him, and exhausted I went to bed. I prayed my final prayer for my father, 'Lord, when your work in him is complete, take him home,'

I then fell asleep.

Less than an hour later, Ray came to wake me up.  'Dad's gone' he said gently. He then went on to say that he'd waited twenty minutes before coming to tell me to make sure - 'because of Aunty Ethel'.

(At mum and dad's fiftieth wedding party, aunty Ethel fell over drunk, and I, also a little merry, couldn't find her pulse, and declared her dead... At which shocking news,
Ethel promptly sat up!)

Dad wasn't going to sit up though, or relive the story of Ethel's untimely demise.

Doing what my father told me, meant flying to South Africa. I celebrated his life with a community whom he had supported, and who sang for me, a song of love and hope
for this amazing man.

Mary Contrary (Re-Post)

Keeping Active

“Mary Ellen, You come back here, you little … ! Don’t let me have to chase after you!” I was in trouble; my mother, who loved me to distraction, only called me ‘Mary Ellen’, when I was in trouble. I didn’t care. I let the wind carry her protest away, and left her to do as she pleased.

 I recall this as the first day back at home, back on my feet , after a spell in hospital. I was five years old. I didn’t know that the cerebral hemorrhage I suffered, following a fall, had nearly killed me; I didn’t know the long sleep I had enjoyed had been a coma; I didn’t know the reason I limped, was because my left side had suffered paralysis. I only knew that the sun was on my face, there was grass beneath my feet, and I could RUN!

I have slowed down considerably over the years, due, in part, to a love of flowers. It’s not possible to study plants at speed, so now I potter, meander, ramble , and dart about between clumps of greenery with a field guide and a camera. An activity that barely looks like activity, and drives all my walking companions, but one, to distraction.

 A chocolate box 1950’s childhood, which mine was, was an endless exploration of the capacity of the juvenile human body to walk, run, climb, wade, swim and swing, in and out of trouble. My mother stopped chasing after me when I was about seven. She opened the doors of our council house at the foot at Robinswood Hill, on the outskirts of the City of Gloucester, and let me go: “Look after Adrian mind! And be home for tea!” My brother Adrian, was twenty months younger than me, and like me , a pirate, an astronaut a cowboy and a smuggler.

I recall in particular, a warm day in early May in 1959. I can pinpoint the time, because late primroses and early bluebells were scenting the woods and hedgerows, and, with Queen Anne’s Lace, in a haphazard bouquet I had picked to take home. By now, Adrian and I had explored ‘The Hill’ from base to summit; a gentle ascent of just over 600 feet. We were investigating a disused reservoir that we had recently discovered. It was hidden in plain sight, next to St Katharine’s Church, Matson, and a stone’s throw from Matson Lane.

 The object of our attention had been abandoned many years ago; it was a tangle of hawthorn, bramble and nettle, so overgrown, that it was only our persistence in conquering the rusting defences, that had led to us finding the water at all. The reservoir seemed huge to us, though it was probably less than thirty feet in diameter. The temptation to sail across it was irresistible; we were, after all, pirates.

 This was the day Adrian nearly drowned. Naturally, we told our parents nothing of this. A tale we decided that he had lived NOT to tell, in case our misadventure lead to us both being permanently grounded.

 It seemed that fate was lending a hand in our aquatic enterprise. An old zinc bath lay half-in, half-out , of the water close to the ‘shore’. It wasn’t easy to free it, but, eventually, we pulled it clear. It must have been filthy, but we were too excited to notice, and probably wouldn’t have cared anyway. Adrian, as pirate chief, took to the water first, and paddled confidently to the middle of the reservoir. At the point furthest from safety, the bath began to sink.

I was nine years old, and really didn’t know how to panic. Neither did Adrian. He paddled faster and faster, out-distancing the incoming water by a few feet, sufficient distance to sink the bath in water shallow enough for him to scramble to safety. For many years afterwards, mother recalled with fondness , the afternoon when her two oldest children squelched up the garden path, a rusting zinc bath oozing mud, and smelling of the ditch, roofing their heads. Two pairs of wellington boots protruded from beneath it, propelling it unsteadily forward. The story the mucky pair told to explain the fact that Adrian was soaked from head to foot, came nowhere close to the truth.

 My turn to take to the water came eight years later, when in the Sixth Form at Ribston Hall High School For Girls. I was offered the opportunity to exchange hockey, which I loathed, for rowing, which I was willing to give a go. A short cycle ride to the canal, eight swift strokes forward, and, freedom!

 My sporting achievements at school , up to September 1968, aspired to modest. I specialised in coming third in events that the House Captain couldn't get anyone else to enter, and I was easily persuaded . In 1965, I streaked away in the 100m hurdles shattering a personal best (never having hurdled before in my life). My proudest moment, however, was achieving 3rd in heaving this huge weight down the field; an activity that, to this day, I have to work hard at remembering if it's called 'shotting the put' or 'putting the shot'. Both work for me.

 In 1967, I missed a place in the School Swimming Gala by not paying full attention during the, 'Someone's got to do it', plea and diving in to swim a length in the wrong stroke. I thought at the time, and still do, that my willingness to take part, so vaunted in British sportmanship, should have been rewarded, at the very least, by an, 'Oh, I say, well done!'. But no, I was disqualified.

 I was not always an ‘also-ran’. Indeed, records show, that in July 1969, I was in the shell that beat Stourport in the final heat of 'The Ladies' Coxed Four' at Gloucester Regatta. I was ‘bow’, that is, position number one; rowing backwards at the front of the boat.

Records LIE. Stourport Ladies beat us by a canvas. (If we were horses, that would be ‘by a nose’.) The referee was either biased or blind. One of the Gloucester Men's Eight compounded the deception when he misdirected The Citizen sports reporter. This was almost certainly deliberately, because the Gloucester ladies' captain had chosen to row for Stourport , and there was, in consequence, a general feeling of miff around the boathouse. I have a photograph mother cut from the newspaper. I am leaning on an oar clutching my ill-gotten gain, a Prinknash Potttery tankard. I cherished it for years, until the day I said, “Where’s the pot I won rowing?” and nobody knew.

 I married Ray Francis, a football fan, from choice, and have never regretted it, but I have had to fake 'sportgasms' on numerous occasions since our first date. March, 1970. We were huddled over a tinny transistor radio in Ray's lodgings in Warrington. The blessed Sunderland were playing against the mighty Liverpool. Sunderland scored, probably, as usual, in the last minute , where all this team's games are won or lost. Ray yelled with excitement and leaned over... Our first kiss!

In April 1971, the year Sunderland was demoted to the Second Division, we married. My sympathy for the demoted endures to this day.

 Some time ago, around about the turn of the Millennium, I decided it would be a good idea for Ray and I to share an interest. I quickly realised that flowers would never be his thing, and I was not going to want to spend time checking out the railways. So footie it had to be. I joined a 'Fantasy Football League' and, with some help from experts, and a little studying of form, I managed to pick a squad that sank without trace within minutes of going online.

There is a rider to this story that proves, beyond doubt, that no experience is ever wasted. I was attending a Head Teachers’ Conference in Oxford in 2001, and happened on a table at dinner with four boy heads and one other girl. The topic soon turned from education to football. To my utter amazement I found myself hogging the conversation: “Oh no! Don't talk to me about Babayaro! He's in my Fantasy League team and he's been; on the bench... , sent off … , fouled …, x number of times, in the past month alone!” With a few judicious open-ended questions, and a lot of tut-tutting, I held my own for twenty minutes! I was SO proud. And the boys! Thrilled! One offered to show me a ’ Chelsea’ programme from the previous Saturday, that he happened to have brought with him, and was sitting on his bedside table. An invitation I politely declined.

To spice up my sports-life, I decided, within a year, to ditch Fantasy Football and enter the real world. I became a highly inactive fan of Newcastle United Football Club, then just demoted to the First Division. As a ‘Teaching Head’, I shared responsibility for a Key Stage Two Class at Pauntley Primary School , ten minutes away from where I live, in Newent. My new-found passion for the beautiful game was a big hit with some of my students. Floyd , ten years old and a fellow ‘Magpies’ fan, was keen to know why I supported Newcastle: “ Because,” I smiled, “ Mr Francis supports Sunderland.” Clever boy, he got it at once.

This Is The Life

I am typing this sitting on the swing seat in my garden. It's 70ft by 35ft (garden, not swing)_- which the mathematician in the partnership informs me is a golden rectangle, and I can quite believe it.

If memorial garden were not such a sad concept, I'd call my  garden that, for everyone I care for is present here, as are many of the places I have visited over the years. My mother, who's seven year anniversay falls today, loved sweet peas - they are aiming for the trellis at the sunny side of the shed.  My marriage to Ray is commemorated in the violets and primroses which are abundant here.  Thirty eight ago they were the posy I carried and were wreathed into my hair.

The evening primroses are the descendants of an ancestor grown from a packet of mixed wild flowers I bought at the Post Office in Talkeetna, Alaska. The iaxias, pineapple lilies and osteospernums redolant of South Africa and the beautiful white dogwood and the columbines take me back to the Pacific Northwest... I have one rose - a double-hearted white one that fades to yellow called 'The Swan', planted in November 2001, which takes me immediately to Stratford and fond memories of a dear friend -  far away now, with whom I enjoyed happy
hours in the company of the Bard.

Two Gentlemen of Verona - An Adventure in !Xhosa

It  was a privilege to escort our African friends to 'The Swan' theatre, Stratford for TGoV.  It was going to be a really exciting event for all of us - but especially for Nomvuzo who taught Shakespeare at the Senior Secondary School in Port St John's on the Wild Coast, but had never
seen a performance - anywhere.To say that our party stood out from the crowd is an understatement to say the least. Not only were our guests African, but Nomvuzo and Lindelwa
wore tribal dress. (I could have worn mine too, but it wasn't my night.)

The adventure began in the theatre lobby.  Coats deposited by theatre-goers were hanging on a rack and Landilesa had an idea they might be for sale.  He went and asked an attendant behind the desk, who obviously misheard the question and replied, 'Yes';  Just picture it, a black man
going through the furs and high quality woollens (in search of price tags as it happens).  We English are so polite.  No one said a word, but the horror on the faces of some of those present was really quite funny.  I nudged Nomvuzo who was closest to me and whispered to her,
urgently.  I now know what !Xhosa for, 'If you don't stop doing that you'll get arrested.' sounds like.
Can you imagine what it would be like to be experiencing live theatre -and the RSC at that -for the very first time?  Our friends were utterly spellbound.  They hung over the balcony and watched entranced. Audible cries of 'Yo, yo, yo ...' could be heard as the plot warmed up.

The audience were delighted ( I feared the opposite...) and it was soon evident that the actors were playing to one particular part of the gallery.

And What's This About Talkeetna

I defy anyone to find a weirder festival anywhere in the world than the Talkeetna Moose Dropping Festival.  It's true.  I have the tee-shirt. I believe I may even have a preserved moose-dropping somewhere too.

Alaskans used to make a living in two ways - fur-trapping in the winter and gold-panning in the summer.  I suspect they still do. The town has a wonderful Museum in the Little Red School-house.  You can wander in, buy the Moose-dropping Festival tee-shirt in a range of colours and inspect the fur- trapping and gold-panning paraphenalia of bygone days. Then for a couple of dollars more you can buy a map of the town with the preserved frontier cabins circled for you.

Each one made of logs with a bed, a quilt, a stove a candle and a wash stand. And on the walls, pin-ups of Betty Grable, Lana turner and Marylyn Monroe;  The frontier in Alaska was alive and well in the 1950's.
The gardens were still extant too.  I vividly remember a strawberry patch with a sign that read,'Please eat the strawberries and pull a few weeds' (No, I'm not making it up - go and take a look:



Alaska is still a frontier state to some degree.  The Anchorage Times has lifestyle and cookery sections just like the London variety - but the front page still carries tales of bar-room brawls and close encounters with bears. I will recall the story of my encounter with a bear on Mt
Eklutna when I have ceased to have nightmares about it.Www.talkeetnahistoricalsociety.org