Pushing 60 (X)

I like Roman numbers especially ten.
X looks like a letter for voting, kissing and seeing through (ray vision) .
‘On my 4th birthday I’m going to be ten’ says O for Olive and I laugh because she is serious and because choosing an age to be makes me wonder. I think and can’t think of being any other age.
This is the age for me, this is my day. Ahem …
This isn’t a diary but present time, whereabouts and company do impact.
Well, I am in Snape in Suffolk. I am keeping quiet about ‘Pushing  60’. There are great writers here. I drank a lot last night and blurted out a lot of unnecessary information but never mentioned the iPhone novella.
For the term, iPhone novella, I am indebted to my husband, the invited artist here, who marvels at how much can come out of one thumb.
I have decided that all 60 episodes will be thumbed. I have a flexible double jointed thumb.
The precision of its darting sideways action is regularly impressive but the compelling obscenities and absurdities that sometimes burst out are even better, instant joys (Joyce).
Thumbs up for vocal vulgarly (vocabulary) in my third episode, the one called ‘tree’.
Looking forward is not always fun. I’ve spent a dark dawn looking forward in fear at the things I have to do like pass on the ‘not very good news’ to my mother.
She left me a message last night ‘you’re a great little cricket’ she said.
I pressed to save (for a week).
What a wonderful night last night was. Patrick Keiller showed me his concessionary travel card, he corrected me when I called it a freedom pass.
I wonder if I’ll ever get a freedom pass or its equivalent.
All my generation are getting these tickets to ride or looking forward to them but now there is talk of putting a stop to it. Imagine wanting to put a stop to us lot getting something for nothing and travelling about causing trouble.
‘No future’ sang another John long long ago and here we are.
The silver jubilee was over 35 years ago.
The other day I was having my hair cut and tossed. It looked like flaxen candy floss for 15 minutes but lost its airy bounce on the way to the Hayward. Is it true that Thatcher’s research at Oxford revolved around how much air could be pumped into ice cream before it collapsed ?
As my hair was filling with hot air I saw a familiar face at the window. It was none other than my friend Shanne Bradley who I haven’t seen for years.
Her old band The Nipple Erectors is still a favourite on my play list.
She came in and we talked of dead and dying punk time people and the living of course. I asked her what had happened to Helen who was known as Helen of Troy back in the day when she accompanied Malcolm Mclaren.
Helen was very fond of him, said he listened to sentimental songs with tears in his eyes, information which somehow made me loathe him all the more.
She, Helen, was initially my brother’s friend from South Africa in the far out sixties. She told me she had been put on a worldwide registry of eligible Jewish dwarves as her father had wanted her to find a suitable boy. She escaped the paternal plan by following my brother back to London and going to Goldsmiths.
I first saw Helen when I was 10, yes, how apt for this one.
My mother and I were in the canteen at Goldsmiths, waiting to see my brother play Oberon, when I first saw Helen.
‘Is Duncan’s friend a … ?’
‘Would you like a kit kat Marcia ?’
My mother, who never offered much in the way of chocolate, intercepted so quickly that I realised she was uncomfortable with where my question was going.
My brother was painted silver and I think he was totally naked, but whether he had an ivy cod piece or not he was nude enough for my mother and I to feel awkward. We were not avant garde then or even bohemian.
Helen remembers my mother’s beauty and strength which she puts down to being a Taurus woman like herself. I don’t know why I have given present tense verbs to Helen’s memories. I haven’t seen her since the GOLDEN jubilee when some of us, including Shanne, watched fireworks from Parliament Hill. And then Helen vanished.
‘She wasn’t at her friend Malcolm’s funeral so I heard from Sophie’ I rattle on with a mouthful of hairspray.
Shanne said she’d heard that Helen had gone to Canada.
‘Oh yes, that’s where she has a sister who’s a surgeon, my brother lives there too …’
When he went missing (for years from ’71 on) Helen would talk about him…
My brother, before he disappeared, wore safety pins and razor blades on military ribbons and asked the barber to give him a Napoleon. This was not a known cut. He was no hippy my brother.
I think my brother’s sartorial aberrations had an impact on the look of punk. I muse on unknown muses.
I once asked my mother if she thought she had been Imre’s muse.
‘Oh yes’ she answered ‘he found me amusing’.