Memories of music: Until it's time for you to go

"Until it's time for you to go" was a song I learned and sang in summer 1975, after my first serious love affair had ended. I learned it from DW's records. He too had just had a serious love affair end, engaged to an Irish girl at the same college as me. But he was a Northern Irish Protestant. Why did he have to meet another Catholic girl? Me. But we spent that summer as friends, travelling together platonically (we experimented with that word,"platonic") round French camp sites, hitching down to Bordeaux, and walking up the highest (and hottest) sand dunes of Europe in the middle of the day. We laughed, argued and sang together that August.
Back in his room at Brunel University he had this Buffy St Marie record and I taught myself to play the tune on  my guitar, and I learned its words. They seemed so apt to us, in a relationship we could not sustain:
"Don't ask why"...
"and here you'll stay until it's time for you to go".
"Yes, we're different. Worlds apart. We're not the same..."
but we were the same, and only a sea apart, a slightly different faith apart.

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Having written that, now I remember more about that holiday:

• visiting P & M, old family friends that I'd spent a previous summer with and who were holidaying in the Bordeaux region, knocking on the door and hearing an invitation, we stepped in to the family's surprised faces. P had said, not "Entrez" but "Qui est là? It must have been shock to have us visit in late evening and dark. Their son, F, quizzed me on our sleeping arrangements in our tent - cheeky nearly teenage boy!
• the torrential typical Mediterranean downpour, so DW had to wake me because i was sleeping in a newly created stream! We spent the rest of that night in the men's showers, and packed and left in the morning. But the sun came out and by midday, all our clothes were dry, including our sleeping bags sitting on the top of our ruck sacks, as we hitched in the heat. one night our hitch dropped us int middle of who-knows-where, but not near a campsite, so we pitched our tent surreptitiously and hopefully in a small wood by the side of the road, slept and got up early to be off before someone came saw us and complained we were trespassing.
• one lift took hours to get and DW was getting grumpier and grumpier, so I was attempting to balance him with cheerfulness. he complimented me after, but I felt I was forcing it, yet he never knew and my cheer took us through to the next lift.

After that summer, we started our first jobs, in London, hardly a city apart, only a few suburbs between East London and the west. We kept in touch for a few months, then, since our paths didn't cross again, we lost touch. It was time to go.

May month

May was a busy month for

• work, which I enjoyed because it included a writing week with research colleagues in a Cotswold village. See some photos on Twitter or Facebook
• meeting old friends from decades ago when honorary degrees were awarded at the Royal Festival Hall 
• visiting aged auntie and getting her old carpet changed for new. No flying carpets, or magic lamps or genies sadly. 
• washing a hen. And losing an old one.
• Just a nice month - sunset near us

Only connect

Have you read 'Five ways to wellbeing'? The first suggested action for wellbeing is to connect.  Connect with family, friends, colleagues and neighbours. I am lucky with my friends.  I still connect and am in touch with friends from

• school (See friends)
• tae kwon do (See http://ejh2.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/competitions-and-competing.html ) 
• gliding years ago (See gliding weekends, gliding club,  and gliding again),  
• friends abroad (See Norwegian gliding friend)
• studying for my OU qualifications and from work
• teacher training college
• comparatively new friends in this town where I've lived since remarrying
• neighbours
• lost friends that I refound through social media



AB

• friends of my late husband (FoLH), loyal and supportive to me in raising our children. 

FoLH

An old friend, my ex-doctor friend (ExDrF) connected last week, staying here overnight on her way to somewhere else, between places. Like me, my ExDrF has retired from her first career and is enthusiastically making her way in a new one and its work brought her near enough to visit. I hadn't see ExDrF for 15-16 years because I'd moved and she'd moved, yet we'd stayed in touch.  What a pleasure it was to talk with her! We remembered each other's children - she remembers mine so well it's a compliment; exchanged news on what they're doing - one of hers is doing a doctorate as is one of mine; one of hers is about to get married and one of mine has married.  We remembered the nursery school they went to, which friend had influenced which of us to choose that nursery and subsequent schooling decisions. We have mutual friends (like AB) who have similarly changed tack as children departed. I missed these friends when my children reached sixth form and university age because I wanted to share with them the end of that era, the completion of a job: bringing our children up ready to  make their own way in the world.
My friends support and enrich my life. I hope I do theirs. We'll have mutual wellbeing.

Birthday greetings, bottle of wine

Birthday greetings, bottle of wine - last night a housemate from many years ago, visited with a bottle of wine. He calculated my age and today remembered my birthday, sending me an email with birthday greetings. How nice is that!

Gone to roost

And a vine lot of trouble

It's interesting how many poultry derived idioms we have in the language, isn't it?  And now so few of us have hens, we've forgotten or don't realise where they came from:

• gone to roost,
• pecking order
• flown the coop
• hens' teeth (they don't have any)

We went out yesterday to old gliding and Oxford friends' 40th wedding anniversary.

 "You need tolerance, perseverance and wisdom"

 to keep a marriage that long said a friend who raised a toast. May my son and his fiancée, marrying on Oct 25th at Newark, have those gifts too.

When we came home, it was past dusk and the hens had flown the coop and gone to roost. I had had to hunt the garden in the dark, till I found two of the three in the vine. "Vine lot of trouble" remarked my husband! The third hen, Lady Grey, didn't turn up till this morning, and now all three are happily eating left over rice curry from a few days ago. Cluck, cluck, clllcckk! Happy hens.

Gliding weekends (sunny Sunday with friends)

Gliding incidents used to be the staple of my social conversation.  Sunday evenings would be spent in the pub reviewing the weekend's gliding activities: who'd gone solo, who'd earned a medal, who'd landed out.

My gliding club friend, having finished her Open University studies, is returning to normal sociability.  She invited husband and me, along with several others from gliding days for lunch on what must have been the first warm Sunday of the year.

Her dog, Hendrix, hid in the shade beneath our table, while we compared notes on our now grown children, our waning careers, and pension prospects. the mortgages we've paid off, and the 16% interest rates we started with.  Gliding we hardly mentioned, apart from remembering the scandal when an early solo pilot misjudged his height so badly that he failed to return to the air-field, attempted to land on a local parade ground, yet was so low he missed that too, and as he glided into a street, wrapped the K7 glider round a lamp post so that his cockpit nose ended up in the first floor  bathroom of a local house, whence the owner dragged him to safety.

It was a memorably embarrassing incident at a politically difficult time because the MOD was trying to sell the airfield, and despite a question about our airfield's safety consequently being asked in Parliament, the incident was effectively hushed up, forgotten and the airfield sold.  But, though we didn't know the culprit, we were all ab-initios or early solo pilots too at the time, and we remember it.  I expect culprit and house-owner remember it too - a talking point for their Sunday reminiscences.

Photo (by Terry Morgan) from the local paper 1982.

Two men and a car

Yesterday was an interesting day, not only because I spent most of it with two rather nice young men. What is a middle aged woman doing hanging out with two men in their twenties?

My son was searching for his first car and I was taken along as support and potential adviser - he flatters me because I've only once bought a car. Son's friend thought he knew something about cars, and indeed I was impressed that he turned up equipped for the adventure. His kit included:

• magna light
• plastic gloves
• i-phone

He used the light to peer at the car's dark places, under the bonnet, behind the boot, beneath the wheels. And his gloves kept his hands clean when he poked the wheels to find the brakes. This poking the brakes was helpful on the first car we looked at, a Ford Focus in Milton Keynes because he found a lip and suggested that the brakes might soon need to be replaced, and that comment initiated a conversation with the salesman who assured us that the cars his organisation sold did MOTs before they put them up for sale, so the brakes should be safe enough to pass the MOT - you assume. But the Ford Focus was a tad expensive, so we drove home to have some lunch and further perusal of car selling web sites before venturing out again to Luton, via Dunstable.

The Dunstable car site looked a bit dicey being a temporary office on an unmade up lot and the end of a very quiet road on a quiet industrial estate - we only found it because of the hand painted words on the gate-post "Car sales". We turned round and headed off for Luton.

Son's friend now used his smart phone to access Google map to get us to the Luton. Unfortunately, it wasn't a GPS that might have told us about the closed road and the detour and the detour took us down and up a local road with yellow lines each side and cars parked each side and on coming buses so driving life became a bit fraught. My car is on the small side, and if I see a space to pull in, I'll fit, but if on-coming bus decides to carry on on-coming then my car can't reach the space to pull in. I had to reverse down the main road until I reached a junction full of traffic and still no room for on-coming bully-bus. At this point, another driver suggested I reversed into a side-road on the right, which would have meant only two other cars would have to reverse. Fortunately, I realised that if I pulled onto the kerb on the right, then bus could squeeze between me and other parked cars - not sure why bus couldn't pull over more. Doing this meant that I couldn't get back out into the traffic stream until son's friend turned up sterling. He jumped out of the car, stopped the traffic to let me back into the flow and jumped back in. We decided that we weren't going to come home that route.

The delay meant it was nearly dusk by the time we arrived at the next car sales, a muddy lot tended by a bearded Muslim, with some others collecting and tipping barrels of sand into the muddy ruts. The car was a Nissan Almera and S'sF immediately noticed some damage to the rear bumper and a check revealed the car had been rear shunted. He peered at its engine - his torch now being essential as the light went, but every thing else seemed acceptable. Son, S'sF and Muslim salesman started negotiations over MOT, documents, price, means of payment, when to pay.

Suffice it to say, son has bought his first car and I expect to see more of him now he can drive over here without the hassle of a long slow bus journey at inconvenient hours. So maybe I won't have to drive him places again, but neither will I get the chance to drive his friends around too. End of another era, start of a new.

Bowling together

Bowling together [1], not alone, demonstrates friendship, networks, and links.

My girlfriends, together with their partners or child in some cases, along with some very close members of my family went ten-pin bowling for my birthday. Some friends came from very close, being neighbours, and others from miles away, people I knew when our children were small, friends from the Open University, and friends from tae kwon do.

Unfortunately friends from belly dancing and toastmasters couldn't make it or we could have had some performances and speeches.

Husband made a wonderful cake - the best tasting he's made yet, and he bakes good cakes. He iced it with numbers

00111100

People gave me wine, flowers, smellies, chocolates and books, so I'm having a week of luxuriating in the bathroom. There's sparkling Saumur left to share if you have the time to come and visit me.

I don't know who gave me a dozen pink scented roses - they're beautiful. Thank you, friend.

---

[1] Putnam, R. D. (2000) Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, New York ; London.

BIG birthday

I have a big birthday coming up and I would like to celebrate it. I'd like to celebrate:

1. with sixty girlfriends,
   
2. take them to a spa for a day,
   
3. with a nice lunch and
   
4. lots of bubbly.
   

Realising that around a dozen girlfriends had commented supportively on my Facebook page when I talked about my radiotherapy, I wondered if I had sixty girlfriends, so I counted them up and reached over seventy. Seventy girlfriends collected over the years from school, college, work, hobbies, and neighbours, and my lovely female relatives.

But, first I couldn't find a suitable spa for us all, although daughter and I did go and test run a couple. ;) And secondly, some of my friends live too far away, maybe only in another county, but some live in the States, or Australia or Spain or New Zealand or somewhere in Asia.

So I'm planning a smaller get together of my local girlfriends with a few important men friends as well for luck.

I've asked Husband to bake me a big fruit cake, and last night the kitchen smelled of spices and fruit, so that's promising. I've found a venue, and started to invite a few people.

Now, I need to organise the nibbles and fizz. How shall I decorate the room? Any suggestions?

A good friend

What's a good friend? What can you talk to a friend about? It used to be that you couldn't at polite dinner parties discuss

• sex
• religion
• politics

But I think I've discussed all these with my best friends. I had some fantastic friends in the town where I lived for twenty years, and they helped me crystallise ideas on many aspects of life. One friend - a mother of four children - had her youngest son at the same time as I had my first born. She was so helpful and sensible on bringing up children, just being there doing it in front of me, advising if I asked.

Another friend wanted to talk about religion and gave me the opportunity to attend an Alpha course at our local Anglican church, something I'd have liked to have done through the Catholic church, but there wasn't the opportunity. I see Alpha courses are discussed on Mumsnet here.

And only good friends can talk to you when you've got cancer. Servan-Schreiber writes that the evidence is that women with good friends (girl friends, not husband) survive breast cancer better. And I know from the reaction of my women friends that they're supporting me. Aren't I lucky with my friends?

Ruby wedding anniversary

Husband's university friends have been married much longer than us. Today a couple celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary by inviting loads of their long term friends for a trip on the River Isis from Oxford. The boat was covered with ruby red balloons and streamers, with around 80 friends. We ate, we drank, we talked. The weather was great, neither too hot nor too cold.

One of husband's friends from college (see reunion here) is partner to a fellow post-graduate student at the Open University, so we spent some time happily comparing notes on our progress, our supervisors, theory (Bourdieu if you're interested), and we admonished anyone who dared ask, "When are you finishing?" That sort of question is one you just do not ask a post grad student - it's as rude as asking a woman how old she is - as this grad comic illustrates.

And just to add to that insult, someone asked me if I'd used my bus pass to get there today. I'm not only too young to get a bus pass yet, but they've raised the age at which I'll be eligible for it. So insults, unintentional insults flew round the boat.

These insults were not as bad though as those in today's Times Style magazine, in which AA Gill slated The Oxford Ashmolean restaurant and Oxford people - calling its female students "lesbians in blue stocking", and the restaurant "full of very old people. A sea of thin white hair." As the director of the Ashmolean met fellow PG and FPG's partner this morning, he was railing about the review. FPG's partner has something to do with the Ashmolean museum so the encounter meant they nearly missed the boat, and then they wouldn't have been able to tell me how rude the Times was.

It was a lovely day with lots of lovely intelligent and cheerful people to talk to. Perhaps AA Gill of the Times doesn't know what intelligent conversation can be about.

I wonder which college rejected him.

Old friends in Bath

We picked up daughter and went to Bath to meet friends we haven't seen for more than ten years, lovely people that I've known for more than thirty years, who gave us our visitors' book.

We had a lovely time, including a meal by the river.

Old friends, new places

I met an old friend today, at work, a friend I haven't seen for perhaps ten years, someone whose son is around the same age as mine. We used to live near each other, but lost face to face contact when I moved here. But she's now a full-time post grad student at the OU studying for a doctorate too. So we met over lunch and chatted for an hour, and could have talked longer, but I had to get on and do stuff. (See Frustrating Day).

A colleague commented that it was weird that we'd both ended up here, but it's not really weird. We've got similar children, we have a similar approach to learning, a similar view of life and what's important - that's why we got on ten years ago. And that's why we're doing similar things now.

Son's surprise birthday party

I like my son's friends. His friends from school turned up this week with a birthday cake for his 21st birthday, to celebrate as a surprise now in the holiday because they couldn't do it in April when they were all at university.

Irish scandal

Years ago, at school in north west England I had a left-handed friend. LHF was very shy and under confident. When she blushed, and she blushed often, she blushed well. The pink would visibly rise up her face. Years later, she told me how when she was in reception class at her Catholic convent, the headmistress nun used to smack her across the back of her left hand with the wooden ruler. Try it on yourself. It stings with a plastic ruler. The headmistress was so cross that my friend was left handed that she kept her down a year before letting her into the next infant class.

That nun accused me of 'dragon-tears', and answering back, but didn't smack me. I can't remember if she was Irish, but there were a lot of Irish Catholics in the north-west. Nuns and clergy were held in great respect, and had much power. So I'm not surprised, though I'm sad to see here how much worse it was in Ireland.

---

Dragon-tears were false tears - putting it on - crying to impress a hard-hearted nun - and I didn't know what she meant

India trip booked

We've booked to visit Ahmedabad in time for Zenobya's grandchild's navjote on 30th December this year. That's a parsi thread ceremony that happens when the child is around 7 to 12 years old. Her son, Kaizad, emailed about a year ago:

"see if u can make it to india in december next year, would be grt to have u with us on such an occasion."

It's 31 years since I was there with Vera McNamara - I wonder where she is now - I lost touch when Australia had its postal strike.

Husband and I will fly out to Ahmedabad 27th December, leaving the 'children' in charge of the house and each other. Son and daughter will have to get themselves back to uni in January as we shall still be away. After the ceremony, we are going to Kerala for a tour round Kochin, Munnar, Periyar and other places, staying in hotels, a cottage on a tea estate and a houseboat. I think it looks wonderful on this web page.

And I get ayuvedic massages, any massage pleases me, and husband will have the chance for massages too, and we get to see the wild life. (I could give the tigers a miss though - I'm quite happy to see them from a distance).

Our trip isn't quite the same because we are arranging our own transport (and a right hassle that has been - the JetAirways web site doesn't show you everything so we got down the wrong names on the tickets twice and had to cancel and rebook. And we couldn't book the internal flights on line, but only over the phone, but they don't take credit cards over the phone. It is cheaper to arrange your own flights but easier if you get an agent to take on the hassle.

Home comings

Both Youngest Step Daughter and Son are due home soon from university. YSD was hoping to be able to stay in her present house but it transpires that the landlord isn't letting them stay and she has the hassle of finding somewhere else. But she's doing well and looks like she'll come out with a respectable degree.

S is still taking exams - I think they're called collections.

And the lodger is still with us, with a bit of an overlap, so we have to have negotiations over bedrooms.

For a few days it will be nicely busy as Son is bring home a couple of friends too - Oliver and Qu, so we'll have people in all the rooms.