Pushing 60 (Number 2)

‘Upsey daisy ducksy doe that’s the way we want to go’ chants my mother as she climbs back to our apartment.
We have just come back from dinner at La Palma, a restaurant by the sea where no one goes at this time of year.
We were the only diners and I saw the ghosts of dinners past, remembered our friend Joe buying a round of beers for flamenco singers there and how I’d been cross that he’d brought rock’n roll attention to our party.
I think I was being naive, he already had the attention. He just wanted to do something generous with it and did.
He was one of the seventies Londoners caught up with those revolutionary Spaniards of which I wrote yesterday.
I rang my ‘old one’ earlier to help with a translation from today’s sugar packet.
A quick message ‘can you ring back ?’ cost a euro.
He rang back but the ringer was off. No one heard the call.
My mother is on her way to bed saying to herself ‘they are brave to open with no custom’ and I feel the existential depth of this throwaway comment.
There were free drinks in sachets and I swallowed quite a few so this may be a drunken episode. Number 2 as shit is sometimes known.
I am again tapping with one thumb and wonder if my chronicles on looking both ways, ageing and change will change once I can type with two hands or if this is just a (vain) hope.
I have so many messages waiting in the wings. They sit in drafts because I don’t think they are good enough. They say too much or too little and are written too fast in excitable type. I am an excitable type and I want to be otherwise. I admire elegance and restraint but …
Today I was reading the wisdom on my sugar. Like fortune cookies these messages can seem quite intentional.
This morning’s message was about the meaning of ‘goodbye’ by Manuel Scorza.
It was as follows:
No se sí sabes lo que quiere decir adiós
Adiós quiere decir ya no mirase nunca
Vivir entre otras gentes, reírse de otras cosas,
Morirse de otras penas
I think it translates:
I don’t know if you know what goodbye means
Goodbye means never seeing again,
Living with other people, laughing at other things
Dying of other pains
I don’t know if it does mean that as my Spanish gets worse. It was once good but now it just sounds like it could be, but really really isn’t.
Last year I was asked to open a square in Granada. I’m still not sure why, but I did it. I spent a long time writing virtually nothing about our dead friend whose love of Lorca, and his Spanish novia, caused him a passion for Spain that I entirely understand. He was the one who bought the round at ‘La Palma’ and he wasn’t so good at Spanish either. Maybe in another chapter I will include the speech I made to open ‘plaza Joe’ in Granada but for now I just want to say that I got help with the translation from my friend who has the post office with no stamps.
I was moved that ‘lost boys’ translated into niños eternos, I loved that (still do) and that misfits, I was told,translates into ‘varios pintos’.
I think of the word ‘chronic’. We public schoolgirls of the seventies used it as a synonym for ‘bad’ when bad never meant good and before we realised that all words could be decoded.
To say something was ‘chronic’ was to reveal a certain class privilege. My protests and tears in 1977 against the accusation of being ‘a little bourgeois’ here in Spain are on my mind. As I look back at my young self,in the blue dungarees of railway workers, pasting up communist party posters I see that my then novio had a point.
The fact that I was so outraged was because my mother had no money and used my father’s life insurance to send me to a ‘good school’.
She never owned the house in Chelsea where I grew up. She is rather proud to have lived on the ‘sniff of an oil rag’ (an expression I have never understood) yet unabashedly reads The Daily Telegraph. She is not a Tory but says the obituaries in The Telegraph are ‘very good, like stories’.
When I was at school the editor of the Daily Mail visited to speak to ‘us girls’. ‘
The Times’ he said is read by those who run the country, ‘ The Guardian by those who would like to run the country’, ‘ The Telegraph by the aunts of those who run the country’ and ‘The Mail ( a pause ) by the wives of those who run the country. After this he paused again smiling out at us all, ‘so’ he continued  ‘I presume I am addressing my future readership’.
He was a compelling little jerk with the sort of all purpose bonhomie that has always appalled me.
He sat down. I stood up.
‘Thank you’ I said ‘that was funny’ and I sat down. After that I was sent to the headmistress for a dressing down. My insolence had been noted. It had been an honour for me to have been chosen to give the vote of thanks and I had not only let myself down but apparently the school as well.
I was unrepentant ‘he got off lightly’ I told the intelligent headmistress who had dedicated her life to educating girls. She smiled a rather beautiful smile for an old woman. I think she must have been 50.
It was around this time the French teacher caught me smoking.
‘Only unintelligent people smoke’ she said.
‘Au contraire’ said I flirtatiously tapping the back of my copy of ‘la peste’ where Albert Camus made smoking look mighty fine. I think of Camus everyday as his ability to support an idea of happiness in the midst of the bleak is inspirational. I often remember to choose the cheese sandwich. I might have it wrong but I think he once said something about there being a choice  between committing suicide and having a cheese sandwich.
Coincidentally I have seen that the girl on the roof of the Colon in Barcelona in 1936 died on Epiphany  this year. She was 94, her name was Marina Ginesta. Her obituary was in “The Telegraph” along with the photo that inspired many a little bourgeois of the 1970s.