EIGHT-OH

Eighty years is a long, long time or, from a certain point of view, just the blink of an eye. If you’re sitting in an armchair looking back upon eighty years of life it probably seems all to brief and seems to have passed far too quickly, but that seems to be true for all of us once we plunge into those strange and murky swamplands we call adulthood. Becoming sixteen seems such a vivid memory that it could have been yesterday, and yet the last two decades seem to have come and gone in an instant when I try to think about it, even though they probably passed at an almost geological pace to some of you, and sometimes I find it hard to believe that they ever happened at all.

My mother was just over thirty-two years old when I was born and my father died when I was twenty-one, and I’m sure that both of those events seem like five minutes ago sometimes when looked at from the strange present we now unexpectedly all find ourselves lurking in. Yet thirty-two is far, far younger than I now am, and the relatively youthful age my father attained seems mere moments away, which is all rather troubling from the point of view of genetic inheritance.

I have a sister who’s rather surprisingly (not least to herself, I’m certain...) approaching whatever it once was that we used to call retirement age and her daughters are now in their mid-twenties despite it being merely a blink since either of them popped into the world. Time, whilst managing to be a great healer, is still the fire in which we burn, and the most sentimental of us can still be brought up short when we realise how much time has actually passed since this or that or the other and how little actual useful use we feel like we have put it to. Memories fade until we are sharply reminded of them and suddenly nothing has really faded at all and it’s all horrendously vivid and real and very much of the now...

And yet...

Sometimes everything seems so long ago that it happened to another person, and sometimes you find yourself wishing that it had.

So why does eighty years seem to be a particular concern this merry morning?

Well...

Today is my mother’s eightieth birthday, a not, I am reliably informed, insignificant number, and certainly one I suspect that I’m unlikely to reach myself if those genetics and a certain amount of destiny have their way. To me, numbers are just numbers, and, whilst certain numbers can seem more significant than others, birthdays are, to me at least, matters best avoided. Nevertheless, I am told that this is a cause for some celebration even if the circumstances of our lives make it less of an extravaganza than some would no doubt prefer. How the day unfolds is, of course, still to be determined. Some of the significant players are unable to appear due to matters fiscal or of a more permanent and unchangeable state of unbeing, so the celebration of this particular life on this particular day is likely to be a quite muted affair, although I’m rather sure that this is likely to create an air of long-lasting disappointment in the celebratee, who has already made many pointed remarks about wondering whether any of her friends will decide to inflict a surprise luncheon upon her and other utterances with an air of expectation within them. However, real-life remains a brutish foe, and in matters of a more fundamental health-related nature is also very difficult to predict, which means that any pre-planning of events or venues was an impossible thing to organise, and, on top of all this real and imagined angst, there is also the tricksy little matter that you all know how difficult it is to get me to commit to anything of a social nature.

“But, it’s not about you, is it?” I hear my detractors cry (in my fetid imagination, because no-one really actually gives a damn...), but in many ways it is. Would that I had the kind of so-called “normal” situation to be dealing with here, but, as ever, things are always far more simple and yet far, far more complicated that they at first might appear. Happily for you, I’m not currently in a state of mind (or grace) to plunge once more into those murky waters, even if they are currently threatening to drown me, not least in the anticipation of the months of retribution ahead of me and the unknowable price yet to be paid.

So, I’m dreadful. Deal with it.

Ah, I know that this lack of effort on my part and my resentment of this sense of responsibility makes me a wicked, wicked person.

Those eighty years take us back to times that seem like a million years ago to us now. Times when horses were still a common sight on the streets of our towns, a time before what we now think of as the “Second World War”. This was an era when, if my Grandfather wanted to go out and take pictures of machines, the ones which he saw looked like these pictured on the right that are from an old lined exercise book of his that I still have, taken in a time when the image of a motorbike or a car or an aeroplane conjured up in the mind something very different to what it might do nowadays. All less than a lifetime ago, and it is probably no wonder the modern world can seem a scary and unusual place if it is so very different to the one you spent your own childhood in.

But then the past has a nasty habit of vanishing far too easily, despite the fact that I have a lot of his photographs in boxes around the place, rotting away, all full of anonymous faces and unknown places that were once his memories but which fail to be mine. The labels on the boxes of slides are minimal. Sometimes merely the name of the ship they cruised upon and the year they did it is the only clue to the wonders within. Information which told him everything but tells the rest of us nothing much at all. And so they slowly fade away, as I’m sure that a lot of my own images will be one day fade too, as mine suffer from the same (genetically inherited?) lack of labelling comprehensiveness that means future generations would (if at all interested - which I suspect that they won’t be, hence this ridiculous urge to blog things into clarity, I guess...) find themselves looking at obscure little lumps of coastline and wondering just where they might actually be too...

Time passes. Life’s little triumphs and tragedies trouble us along the way, and the echoes we leave behind are for others to interpret as they will, and how they are interpreted has precious little to do with us. My holiday snaps are memories to me, but to others they will just be photos of stuff to dispose of as they will. Maybe as I bore you with them (almost as much as I bored myself last weekend) you’ll come to realise that this is all about context and history and explanation so that those little memories that might mean something to me might just manage to cling on and mean something to someone else after all. Incidentally, and apropos of nothing much at all, eighty is about four percent of the rather pointless number of pictures I took on my recent holiday (do not say that you weren’t warned...), and is probably about the number that were half way respectable from my old-fashioned “scatter-gun” approach to snapping the snaps. Tales about them, of course, remain to be shared. Well, what else am I going to write about? Which brings us back, I suppose, to the small matter of significant birthdays and how to deal with them, because the memory of today is something that I’m going to have to find some way of living with, and I’m not quite sure yet precisely what that means.