Is One O'Clock the new Twelve O'Clock?

It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand. ~ John Cleese (as Brian Stimpson in Clockwise.) 

Even the Met Office man said it on the telly last night - The weather is just toying with us - an hour or two of sunshine and then the cloud descends - or the ice. 

My birthday is in early February and every year as it approaches, a grumpy gloom begins to fall over me. This year it was a big birthday and the gloom has been alleviated by the generous and loving people around me - I've had some wonderful parties and treats - but still, there's a shadow. This could just be end of winter blues - most people seem to feel something similar, we're all hoping for spring and trying not to hope too much in case we're disappointed - but I think it's more than that. When I was younger a birthday was a light in the February darkness, but nowadays it's a reminder of age and ageing, a nudge towards another darkness.  



I'm nervous about writing this here. The internet, blogs, websites, twitter, facebook - are full of such energy, and chatty performance, that it's hard to strike the right tone when confronting difficult subjects.The media is bi-polar - swinging wildly between bad news stories about the coming ageing tsunami, care homes in crisis, Alzheimers, generational wars . . . and good news stories about 90 year olds running marathons, 60 being the new forty, Mick Jagger and Tina Turner strutting their stuff. And I feel the same. One day, I'm fit for anything, the next I'm looking into the abyss. I'd like to look away - as most people do, as I've done to my shame, for much of my life - thinking ooh, not yet, not yet. But now here it is. Three score years and ten. My turn.

Most people, me included, don't find it easy to talk about age, ageing and death - I mean why would you? The language and vocabulary of ageing is dominated by discourses of panicky catastrophising or forced and anxious positivity. I'm a writer so I need to find a way of negotiating this period of my life, as far as I'm able, of finding meaning through words. In the early 60s when I grew up it was difficult to speak and think about being a woman without lurching between opposites - sweet-natured/stupid - dependant/burdensome - beautiful/ugly - weak/needy . . . passive/aggressive . . . and it seems to me that 'age' and 'ageing' is discussed today in similar ways. 

 Back to Brassington. The photographs of gravestones are from St James's churchyard and are here to remind me how lucky I am to have reached this age, to have already had all these years of life. And now the daffodils are coming up on Hillside Lane, February is over - the winter is fighting back but it's nearly gone - the gloom has lifted and this will be our second spring here.

There's another gift that Brassington church is giving me at the moment. The clock is in need of repair and the chimes are out of sync. They're an hour behind - one oclock is twelve chimes and so on. If it isn't fixed by the end of March we'll be two hours behind. I like this - time slowing down, going backwards even . . . soon maybe seventy really will be the new sixty

. . . fifty?

. . . forty?

. . . ?

The end of the beginning

I'm planning to bring this mancinbrassington blog to an end and begin a new website/blog (not sure what form yet) exploring the language and experience of ageing. There are others doing the same and I'd like to make connections for myself and anybody else who's interested. I'll send email and facebook links - so let me know if I haven't got your email and I'll forward the link.

Thanks for being here with me

Heather

Where there's Muck . . .

The snow's gone for the moment - although the weather forecast this morning threatens more. Looking at these photographs taken a couple of days ago you could be tempted into thinking about spring. Sun on the fields, blue skies, white clouds floating across the sky. But the wind is bitter and in places that don't get much sun the ground's still frozen. These pictures seem to show a peaceful, quiet world, a flock of sheep, calm winter trees. Which is true up to a point but also an illusion.


In reality, the lanes are full of busyness - tractors carrying bales of hay to the sheep, muck sprayers shooting great fountains of muck over the fields, soggy gobbets of it falling on anyone daft enough to be walking down the road on the other side of a hedge. The roads are smeared and slimy, the air filled with a warm stink as the tractor opposite our house winds up and down the steep hillside turning it from pale winter-green to rich shit-brown. Most cattle are inside at the moment but every now and again there's the sound of a beast making a noise that echoes around the village and sounds like pain. Labour probably.

All this activity makes me aware of how ignorant I am about the proper country - where people have to make a living from the land. I don't want to make too much of the ignorance of townies. I've listened to enough episodes of the Archers to know that the mince in my freezer is minced cow, and having seen Springwatch a few times I could maybe have a stab at pulling out a stuck lamb if called on, which I hope I'm not.

I remember some of the debates a few years back when some of the countryside alliance lot were banging on bad-temperedly about how much cities needed the countryside but knew nothing about it and should therefore butt out and shut up about hunting, shooting and pesticides. I thought then and still think, about how mutual this dependence is, farming and other rural pursuits needing industry and urbanised infrastructure for manufacturing, energy transportation, etc. You can bet that tractor was made in a city somewhere, some of the parts transported here by container, through the global market.

There may be a tendency to romanticise rural life, but the opposite is also true. People can demonise the cities - gun-running on the streets, drug dealers on every corner, crime out of control, etc., whereas the reality is that the huge majority of people in cities, live quiet, productive lives, focused around family, work, pleasure - just as they do here.

Still, we may all be interdependent and equal but there's definitely a lot more muck here than in the city and we've been carrying it in and out of our house attached to shoes and boots for weeks now and need something to avoid it turning our floors into versions of the fields. I'm also planting a hedge around some of the garden which involves even more earth moving.

I finally understand the need for those metal things that you sometimes find outside pubs and stately homes which I used to think were for eighteenth century olde-worlde effect and tripping up the peasants - but I was wrong. There they all are on Amazon - more boot scrapers than anyone could ever need.  The ones shown here are the simplest and cheapest but there's one multiple scraper that costs £350! Obviously plenty of brass in muck.

As well as muck in Brassington.

(Sorry - couldn't resist it.)

Snow Heroes and Slow Heroes

Red skies in the morning then more snow. Six inches laid on top of six inches - much deeper in drifts. I love the transformative beauty of it - but then I don't have to commute to work or school and the worst that's happened so far is that we're running out of vegetables and we won't be going canoeing anytime soon.




Him outdoors has been Him Indoors for the last week as he's had to write a work report but we've managed to get a walk in most days.

I broke my arm on ice a number of years ago which dented my confidence when walking in wintry conditions  - but now with my Leki stick donated by friends and Yaktrax strapped on my boots, I skip up and down the hills and paths like a Tibetan Yak.
Yaktrax are snow heroes. Perhaps everybody who breaks a bone on snow and ice should get a pair issued on the National Health.  Thinking about it, maybe everybody should get some whether they've broken anything or not. Might save us all a lot of money in the long run.


Then there's the Royal Mail. Thick drifts at the bottom of our path that we hadn't had time to clear and the sound of feet pounding through them and up the path then the letter box clanging. It's great to see the little red van parked on the road and the postman trekking doggedly up and down the snow clogged lanes and paths with his bag over his shoulder.

Sadly the post was only two bills and an advert but still heroic I think - Postman Pat vans and men and women stitching us all together despite the weather and the internet. Every day heroes. Use it or lose it.

The third hero is MSR Newsagents in Ashbourne who have managed to deliver the weekend papers. I know a lot of people access papers online these days but for me, the weekend just isn't the weekend without those thick multi-section papers spread over the breakfast table. I like the serendipity of page turning, finding something unexpected, and anyway, they're good for lighting fires with afterwards. There are no paper shops for miles but a van comes out from Ashbourne and goes round the villages - more feet pounding up our steep path, a heavy clunk through the letter box - lifting the heart.  In really thick snow, as now, the papers are left at a drop off point by the Miners Arms pub. I don't know the name of the man or woman who actually drives the van and delivers the papers - but I'm grateful.  Gritter lorries. Farmers taking feed to the animals in fields. Neighbours clearing paths for neighbours.  All heroes.

Snow slows you down. And here's a thing - stopping work - being 'retired' - getting older - all do the same. I'm trying to work out whether this is a good thing or not. When I was commuting to and from work, looking after children, juggling all the things working parents have to juggle, slowing down looked like paradise - something longed for but never quite achieved.  I know plenty of people living that life now who would love a lot more slowness.

But now, here, for me it's a bit like the snow. Beautiful but possibly deadly. I don't want to carry the metaphor too far but there's a tendancy to drift. The romantic idea of ageing and retirement is that you become more tranquil, more accepting, more . . . well, slow. There is some of that. I look around more. I notice small things, take less for granted.

But the same desire to do something, not to be invisible and irrelevant, to have significance and meaning, still rages and burns. The question that bugs me, is whether I should be fighting the drift or learning to lie back and enjoy it.

Acceptance or resistance? Answers on a postcard, please. Keep the Royal Mail in work.    

How to trash a cottage and survive . . . just!

I promised to be back here again in the Autumn but the horror of the building process plus all the moving out and moving in and packing and unpacking again - followed by the unstoppable juggernaut of Christmas - reduced me to a dust-covered wraith, fit for nothing. Not waving but drowning, as Stevie Smith wrote. Or, as in my case, not blogging but coughing. Not writing but whining. 

There's something particularly nightmarish about house-trashing. Builders take it in their stride - just knock this wall down, chuck out this bath, pile up more stuff on the garden, whey-hey, lets make a big heap of rubble! I hope these two photographs convey something of the existential dread I felt when I took them - direct evidence of impermanence - how easily things fall apart.  Of course I chose all this - along with Him Outdoors. We made it happen, so have only each other to blame, and on bad days, we did just that. Whose idea was this? Yours. No, yours. Another perk of married life.  

My more positive-thinking friends remind me that life, even the difficult part, is about learning. Preparation maybe for some final exam? My trouble is that I seem to learn painful truths only after the event - in this case that I don't like DIY and am no good at it, that packing and unpacking is horrible, that mess and clutter make me edgy, that planning processes are labyrinthine and stressful, and that if you move house and start on a building project you get all of the above and more. I kind of knew this before, but now I really know it. A new neural pathway is gouged deeply into my brain. It says NEVER AGAIN. Too late    

Of course, as other cheery-up friends and family say, it'll all be worth it when it's done. I've not reached worth-it yet but it is looking better. The builders have left, we are back in the house and the new extension gives us a lot more space and light. H.O.'s garden workshop is nearly built, the kitchen is modern and easy, most of the rubble heaps have gone.  I've just planted two apple trees and spring will probably come.

Happy New Year!