Just got back from lunch. Guess that's what you call a long lunch. My friends F&D made a fab vegetarian spread (S is also veggie), and J, an old college friend was there, who I haven't seen in like forever. Someone asked me for my earl. There's a lot of phrases I might runtogetherlikethat but URL isn't one of them.
For a reason I can't remember, we started talking about old people. When I was a kid, my life was regimented by my parents old-people responsibilities (two grandmothers, one (childless) great aunt, and an ageing, ailing, (childless) second cousin of my mother's). We spent every Sunday afternoon visiting these largely ibberbottle (senile, yiddish) women. No one could call after ten o-clock; someone might have died. We couldn't go on long holidays (we might have to, God forbid, come back for a funeral). And if we didn't visit, we had to feel guilty.
I remember about five years ago, getting a call on Saturday from my Mum, saying that Auntie Tess "really wasn't well". I knew this was code for imminently leaving us. It was up to me if I wanted to come and visit her tomorrow, they were all going. "What if I don't come, Mum?". "Well, it's up to your conscience. But if she dies..." There was a subtle perfected guilt in the conversation.
Sunday morning saw me on a 9am train to Manchester, picked up at Piccadilly, straight over to the nursing home en famille, no time to waste. And of course Auntie Tess was more lucid than she'd been for years (the past ten years had generally been having the same conversation about where her books had gone, over and over again). "What are you doing here, Sasha?" she enquired. What was I supposed to answer? Heard you were dying. We had a wonderful day, and she talked about her childhood in lots of detail, and I was glad I went. And she didn't die for... oh, another eighteen months or so.
Feeling sad about not having any old people in my life, I decided to be a volunteer befriender, and visited an old lady across the road from me for about two years. She couldn't remember my name, and just called me "ze gurl", insisted that she read German poetry to me, despite the fact that I don't speak it, and was generally bitter. And 93. The way I expect old people to be. The first time I met her, she said to me (in a thick, mittel european accent): "Tell me, are you one of zose modern gurls? Do you go viz men?" I said I'd tell her when she was older. The next time I visited her, forearmed with the knowledge that she'd not opened a window since 1976, and it was like a cross between the Bahamas and an unwashed sauna in her flat, I wore shorts. As we sipped coffee, she slapped my thighs, and said: "such polkes (literally, thighs, but has an implication of fat thighs, really), you shouldn't vear ze shorts."
I'm wittering. We had a mellow afternoon, and everyone was very taken by my pointy, rose-printed fifties shoes, and seemed to think I was terribly glamorous.
Which is good, becuase I'm going to Katy's party tonight and I'm supposed to look glamorous. Must go wash my hair, daaahling.
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