Pushing 60: Happy Sisyphus

I can’t stop now I have accepted the challenge to write 60 chapters on whatever for whoever.
I was invited by Sandra Bartoli whose essays on the Tiergarten were so riveting that I read them in one sitting.
A hard act to follow.
I mulled over what to write until I realised 60 was already on my mind. I turned 56 last week. My theme was / is already there.
I will write, looking backwards and forwards as Janus, about ageing and change.
I am in Spain where I first came as a girl in ’77 inspired by Lorca and revolutionary Spaniards in punk time London.
I wanted to be the girl on the roof of the Colon in Barcelona but I was just a little bourgeois so my Spanish novio told me until I cried which made him laugh.
He is now a teacher in a nearby town and what could be called a family friend. He called to wish me a happy birthday. In calling him back and listening to the plight of Spain, the anger and disappointment he faces as a socialist who resents the changes in values of his party, I lost all the credit on the pay-as-you-go. When the phone peeped a warning and his voice ceased I realised with horror that I had spent 60 euros hearing how his party faithful brothers eat fancy shellfish, buy their daughters’ apartments and call themselves good socialists and how the percentage of school leavers without qualifications is rising, how he and his wife work more hours for less pay and how the morale of the people of Spain is at an all time low. Unemployment is way up and …
I know all this. I watch the news and my friend’s shop is the post office without stamps, the tobacconist without fags.
I came to Spain on a birthday trip last week with a family group including my mother of 87. She is the only person who remembers my birthday and yearly tells of the extremely dangerous death defying arrival and the miracle of my unscathed appearance, my coming out with a full head of dark hair, perfect skin and bright open eyes.
‘Have you seen the Farquhar baby ?’ the doctors and nurses are alleged to have been heard saying. My mother tells the story every year. I wonder how many more times.
Ten years ago I asked her why she never said I was pretty as a child or girl.
‘Women who rely on their looks age badly’ she replied unapologetically.
‘She has a point’ my famously beautiful friend acknowledged when I told her.
I wonder what ageing well actually means as I look at my hands covered in pink scars where once (recently) were age spots. I don’t see my face but my hands wave about in front of me and I took agin the dark ‘freckles’.
I paid 100 pounds to have them laser zapped off by a doctor in London who said the pain was akin to hot oil being splattered on skin. It was the first time I have ever had pain described accurately.
It wasn’t painful but it was vain and I wasn’t raised to be vain.
Vanity was for the unenlightened. I said my prayers and knew that Jesus loved me. I was devout till I saw ‘Clockwork Orange’ at the age of 14 and then I stopped going to church and embraced worldliness.
On my birthday last week my granddaughter suddenly announced ‘I am Mary and you are Jesus’. It came as a bit of a surprise. I had to call her mum and run down the beach to find Bethlehem. As we passed the tiny village church I said ‘better not call me Jesus now or I might get followed’.
She isn’t being brought up in the faith, as Catholicism was once termed, but has been living in a dream of Jesus and his birth since the school ‘activity play’.
She is three years old.
‘Jesus is great for kids’ my friend Paul Scully once remarked. Oh we laughed.
My father died when he was 56.
I can’t help thinking of that. I was taken to see Billy Graham by Americans shortly after his death and ran the length of a stadium to give my heart to Jesus ( or Billy ). I was one of the first up and when I told my mother she looked aghast. She called me a friend of Billy’s after that. I was always teased.
My father had called me Mrs Cassius Clay on account of my love for the boxer. I loved Cassius Clay and Cliff Richard from the age of 3 and was quite shy about my feelings. I watch my beloved granddaughter being shy in similar ways and I am moved by how somethings never change.