Me. You. a Diary

by Dawn French

  More fumbly sex in sweaty tents.

  HOLIDAYS WITH FAMILY AND LITTLE KIDS

  Main memories: taking it in turns to deal with the night shift alongside a bolt-awake jet-lagged tot.

  Trying to explain how different toilets are in other countries.

  Being terrified when my three-year-old’s asthma took a turn for the worse on holiday with a friend in Minorca. She quickly deteriorated and went limp in my arms. I had to speak in Spanish to a doctor on the phone urgently to get directions to an all-night chemist and to explain what was happening. I don’t speak any Spanish, but I somehow did that night.

  Getting henna tattoos from hippies on the pavement in Corfu. Letting my daughter have one of a dolphin on her arm. Watching her allergy to it angrily blister up and get infected. She still has traces of it today. Some people’s skin doesn’t like henna.

  Games around the table with lots of kids. Making up new words, especially swear words, and finding out what everyone’s last meal might be, and which Spice Girl they are going to marry in twenty years’ time. Most wanted to marry Baby, because she was voted ‘the kindest’. Even the girls thought she would be the best option for them, except a few renegades who voted for Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, mainly because of his remarkable arms. Concur.

  No sex. Too knackered. Too sunburnt. Kids in bed.

  HOLIDAYS WITH ADULT KIDS

  Main memories: the absolute need to behave like much littler kids at the airport, mainly in the lounge, mainly due to massive over-excitement.

  ‘Stealing’ the in-flight wash kits and feeling mighty fortunate.

  Late-night fire on the beach in New Zealand.

  Cooking sausages on sticks in the flames.

  Ghost stories.

  Catastrophizing in Mexico, imagining that when they went off into town for an evening, some cartel member would SURELY plant class A drugs on them and we’d spend the next five years fighting to get them out of Mexican jail, having to sell our house to fund the court cases. Yeah. Chilled in Mexico …

  That moment on a beach where you look over and see him next to you, and beyond him, her, and her, and him. Five sausages frying in the same heat, dopey and safe. Family together, with only mojitos in mind. Bliss.

  HOLIDAYS WITH JUST YOUR DARLIN’

  Main memories: him with ‘binokliers’ checking for pirates/whales/birds of exceptional beauty.

  Trusting that food in wayside cafes in far-off distant countries is actually for human consumption. Knowing in your heart, on this one occasion, it isn’t.

  Staying up ‘til 4 a.m. binge-watching House of Cards. ‘Being’ the ruthless Francis and Clare when making late-night sandwiches or toast, just to experiment with what it feels like to prepare snacks when you have no soul.

  Holding hands on tiny planes seemingly made of paper, flown by teenagers not concentrating on keeping them in the air. Wondering if this level of bum-twinking fear is part of being a well-travelled person?

  Reading books in easy silence. Swapping books. Muscular debate about books. Abandoning the swapped book, reclaiming the original one, and more reading, but now in less easy silence …

  Planning a new dog. Thinking of names, including ‘Satan’, ‘Nits’ and ‘Susan’ … Having a scary thought flash through my mind, might this be my last dog …? Blimey. Tick. Tock.

  Sometimes it’s only when you’re on holiday and your mind is rested and open enough that these bigger thoughts can seep in. There’s a danger with deep thinking, in that if you don’t get the chance to do it much, you can mistake it for the truth, as if the truth is only plumbed in the bottomless moments. I think it’s often only the loudest thoughts that are heard in quiet minutes, not necessarily the truest.

  I like to think that I am the more authentic me when I am relaxed; that I am who I most am then. Perhaps though, it’s simply that there’s time to reflect. I’m too busy most of the time, like all of us, to judge myself. Too busy and not bothered enough. I think that’s why I sometimes surprise myself on holiday, with how anxious or grumpy or plain odd I can be. I have been known to take advantage of the precious time available to treat myself to a really satisfying extensive lemon-lipped sulk, typically about a relatively minor thing. It’s partly because there is time to devote to it, and partly because it’s interesting to explore the sulky state at leisure. It’s a childish, indulgent thing to do and it’s relatively ugly in so many ways, but it’s almost as if it flushes your emotional system out.

  Who hasn’t, when on holiday, decided that on reflection, EVERYTHING in their house at home is hideous and that, yes indeed, the entire dark teak, fancy woodwork, colourful throws and pom-pom mirrors of a Balinese interior is the way forward? I know I have. I have shipped home huge quantities of entirely unsuitable furniture at great expense only to find a) it doesn’t fit in or suit my house, and b) identical items are found at Habitat for a quarter of the price. I saw them there last year, thanks, and didn’t like them then … so why have I BOUGHT THEM NOW?!!?

  Who hasn’t, when on holiday, decided quite categorically that you definitely want to move to this country to live, or, at the very least, buy a home here to come to on your holidays? Furthermore, when you return home, you are going to CHANGE YOUR WHOLE LIFE, and take loads more holidays … like, maybe eight a year … or something … so that you can come here at any time. Pretty much two days after your return home, all of these seismic decisions are as air … forgotten, gone.

  Who hasn’t, whilst on holiday, felt like the two weeks just AREN’T ENOUGH, that it's all going to whizz past far too quickly … and then felt the day before returning home that it’s been far too long and that you’re longing to be back home? Back where you understand everything, however irritating, back where you’re more familiar with yourself.

  With your flawed, flummoxed self.

  Yep.

  Home.

  Lovely.

  Recently I was asked to write a reference letter for someone who had worked for me for seven years. It was a fascinating exercise. What to say? What not to say? How to convey in a formal way the nature, the character, the heart and the truth of a person. I wondered if I could do it of myself …?

  Across is a space to write your letter, recommending yourself and giving reasons why.

  To Whomsoever It May Concern:

  Take another photo of yourself as you are right now

  .

  • Politicians/dentists/policemen + women seem ridiculously young

  • You have a favourite cup/plate/crockery

  • You turn the plugs off at the wall at night

  • You go carefully down the stairs

  • You refuse to ‘wear in’ shoes

  • Your date of birth seems a long time away and sounds massively old-fashioned

  • People are interested in talking to you about ‘your era’

  • You have to make lists

  • You love routine

  • You are interested in ancestry and genealogy

  • You have a ‘signature dish’ (see later)

  • You have a ridiculously sweet tooth

  • You are overzealous about the music you love

  • Your torso is thickening

  • You constantly feel, ‘This can’t be happening to me, surely?, about any health issues

  • You love a sneaky nap

  • You begrudge filling out the over-fifty part of any health/insurance form

  Here we are, in the full drama of Nature’s act III, where the colours make lots of noise. Big bold shouty crimsons, russets, oranges, yellows and browns all compete to be heard in their flourish of a fanfare, the final shout before they leave the show, exiting stage left pursued by a naughty wind, hamming it up all the way. Autumn resolutely refuses to be upstaged by Spring when it comes to display. She has fat apples and dark swollen blackberries and rosehips and elderflowers to offer as her treasures during this transforming time, when day and night agree to be the same length again, and when:


  • spiderwebs are bedecked with dew

  • spiders head indoors. Eeek!

  • flies die

  • wasps disappear

  • honey is harvested

  • logs and coal are ordered

  • we stop cutting the grass

  • stags are rutting

  • porridge and stew and pumpkin soup are on the table

  • birds fly away

  • we make chutney

  • hops are picked

  • clocks go back

  • Halloween and Diwali happen

  • new school shoes are bought

  • there’s smoke in the chimneys

  • it rains rude, thick rain

  We put our clocks back and dread the weight of Winter for the first time this year, and then we remember, oh hang on, it ain’t so bad, this means there’ll be candles at dinner time, and we love that …

  We cry at Harvest Festivals in junior schools where tiny tots learn about gathering in all the fruit and vegetables grown throughout the Summer by cramming misbought tins of strange beans into shoeboxes that will be given to the elderly or the needy who will most probably recycle them exactly the same way next year. The tables and altars will heave with ornamental sheaves of bread and a cornucopia of berries and fruit, and we will feel fortunate and fed.

  Oh, and the unmistakeable smell synonymous with Autumn. What is it really? A mixture of overripe fruit, rotting leaves, fireworks, mud, frost, smoke and rain. Everything seems earthy, probably because wherever there are trees there is now mulch underfoot, nourishing the ground beneath, where beetles and millipedes and millions of other crawlies are gorging on delicious leafy debris. Even fungi are feasting on the sweet rot. It’s so … damn … more-ish …

  September is soft, almost sad, and beckons us indoors to start our withdrawal. As the shorter days creep in, so too do we retreat gently, into a familiar seasonal kind of melancholy. The days pull back, we pull in, and we take our comforts in the welcoming warm places inside us. We feel homesick and nostalgic and ready to settle, and let our bums get a bit broad in a comfy armchair. It’s not a surrender, we’re not going to seed, it’s just a rest and a pleasure.

  Presently, I am firmly IN this season of my life. I am sixty. When I was a child, I genuinely thought it might be better if everyone aged sixty or over was just … gently, discreetly, killed. Because what is the point of them? They are nearly dead anyway and why prolong the inevitable decrepitude? Well, I didn’t think in terms of decrepitude exactly, but you know what I mean … I thought sixty was ancient, elderly, infirm.

  And here I am, alive and really well. Aliver and weller, ironically, than I was in my forties, when I was often considering my age, my place in my lifespan and my uncertain future. I gave inordinate power to anxious thinking back then. I don’t any more. Well, I do less. I think I tired of myself as a constant seeker, I wanted to slide into the role of a finder, instead; it’s more assured, it fits me loads better. In order to do that, I have had to allow myself quietude to reflect and properly re-group, to ‘move my chair into sun’. Only in my fifties have I been calm enough to do that. It’s second nature, which in turn means it’s natural, which in turn means it’s normal.

  Perhaps that’s the true purpose of this ‘middle age’? Actually, hang on, when IS middle age?! And how long does it last for? Sixty can’t be middle-aged, I’m surely deluded, otherwise we’d all be living ’til we are a hundred and twenty or something. So, is middle age the actual middle of your life? And if we’re all living much longer, is that say, fifty? Or is it forty? Is it an age or a state of mind? If it’s the latter, I need to do some serious re-thinking because I haven’t felt like I’ve exited middle age yet. And, if I have, what have I entered? OLD age?! Blimey. Heck. And bollox.

  You know that moment when you stand back and notice who else is your age? It’s always a tad surprising. I went to a school reunion quite a few years ago, and for a good five minutes I was convinced that my old chums had sent their mums along instead. Here were some women in A-line skirts, tan tights and court shoes. They looked a bit like the people I once knew, but they had morphed into their darlin’ mothers. Not all of them, of course, just a few, but it was shocking. MORE shocking though, was when I caught sight of myself in the mirror, and realized that I was one of them! Maybe not so much with the clobber, but certainly with my mother’s face. Do I really mind? No, my mum had a lovely face. It’s just that, as I remember it, it was mostly seventy-seven years old.

  I have been delighted to find that, give or take a few silly years, I am the same age as Ellen DeGeneres, Kim Cattrall, Oprah Winfrey and, oh my goodnessing heck … MADONNA.

  That’s THE Madonna, the Mother of Lourdes.

  Not any old Madonna, the Mother of Christ.

  I mean the actual, real, authentic one, the Material Girl, the undisputed Queen of Pop, the true artist. There are only half a million inconsequential minutes between our dates of birth, so I am taking that to mean that we are virtually twins, and, as such my twin heart breaks vicariously a little bit every time she is age-shamed. She can get older any way she ruddy likes, can’t she? When she was bullied again recently by a bloke in a newspaper, she wrote,

  ‘How do I know I’m still acting my Age? Because it’s MY age and it’s MY life and all of you Women Hating Bigots need to sit down and try to understand why you feel the need to limit me with your fear of what you aren’t familiar with.’

  That’s right, sista. Sadly, we are all too unfamiliar with strong, sexually confident empowered older women displaying their assurance as she does, unashamedly.

  Now, talk of Madge brings me on to the prickly puffy phenomenon that is plastic surgery. Not that I know if she has travelled that particular route, I haven’t yet received a memo about it, so I don’t really know for sure if she’s had a tidy, but … I suspect so. It’s ABSOLUTELY NONE OF MY EFFING BUSINESS of course when it concerns her, but it definitely IS my business when it concerns me. The awful truth is that when you’re sixty, and especially if you’re in the business of show, it is utterly expected of you to resort to knives or injections in an effort to stem the inevitable tide of age flooding your face with crinkly bits. Thus far I have resisted but I would fight to the bloody death for Madge, or anyone else, to do what we like to our own mug, if we choose to.

  EXCEPT. Hmmmm …

  DO we choose to? Or are we women all bullied so atrociously much about our appearance that, to fend off the criticism, WE are prepared to voluntarily mutilate ourselves so that we can appear a tiny bit younger? This fleeting and desperate measure means we can stave off feeling ugly or somehow lesser than we are ‘supposed’ to be, for a few paltry months more. As sure as chickens are chickens, and eggs are crow’s feet, age is coming for us all and it’s armed with wrinkles and sag and droop and spread. None of it is pleasant, and when it starts to happen, it’s with alarming speed … BUT … that’s the natural order. That’s what is supposed to happen. Give me that ordinary decay in all its infernal inevitability any day over the monstrous barbarism which presents itself as the eminent plastic surgeons’ apparent ‘skill’. Why have so many breathtakingly beautiful people ended up so woefully injured? And, somehow, we have normalized this. We say, ‘Hello, how are you?’ to folk who we rightly should be screaming in horror for, offering them an ambulance and a good lawyer for the lamentable disfiguring that has been wrought upon them in the name of beauty. For shame. For all our collective shame.

  I fear that we have come to accept these vandalized faces as indicators of wealth and status, of someone who is ‘taking the trouble’ to attend to their appearance; of someone who welcomes the attack, despite the result.

  If that is so, then I am simply too lazy to attempt to remain young-looking. Or too afraid of the obvious mistakes that clearly happen very often. Look at the poor wretches with the gone-wrong faces! Why are the surgeons not in rat-infested prisons for their heinous crimes?! Instead of driving boasty Porsches?

  O
f course, I refer to the obvious horrors. I presume that the clever, subtle work is undetectable and thus I wouldn’t know it. Good. THAT is skill. The rest is butchery and I can’t accept that it’s OK, and I won’t pretend, otherwise by the time my daughters are thirty, they will be being given facial surgery vouchers as birthday gifts.

  NO.

  NO.

  NO.

  And there’s an end on it.

  (Cut to picture of me on a red carpet with a face like a cheap overstuffed button-backed headboard and wearing my fanny as a beard).

  Never mind believing that being sixty is practically the end as I did when I was younger, would the teenage Dawn ever have imagined that I would be starting a whole new chapter of my life in my mid-fifties? No. Neither would the twenty-, thirty- or even forty-year-old Dawn. I have always been quite a dogged person. If I make a promise, my sense of resolution firmly kicks in and I remain steadfast. Marriage is a promise, a huge promise, and I didn’t make it lightly. I was an ex-Brownie after all, used to blind dedication. I was determined to make it work, come hell or high water. Then some hell DID come, followed by some high water, and I still lingered. No-one wants to fail at an important relationship, but I decided that instead of thinking of it as ‘failing’ the marriage, I would instead be surviving, and thus bettering my life. The only way to do that was with honesty, kindness and grace, with the odd touch of vitriolic fury at appropriate moments, in the company of the right people. In other words, the way for me to handle this and many other tricky situations is and always has been to face it head on, the Roma French way:

  ‘The only way out is through.’

  While I was doing that, going through the process of hurt and anger and forgiveness, and finally acceptance, SO MUCH was going on for me that I was utterly unaware of. I was gradually, subconsciously, coming to realize such a lot.