Nostalgia isn't what it used to be

Reunions are in the air. In a few weeks time we are going to Hubby's 25th school reunion. And last weekend, two hundred people danced the night away in Belfast for the first (but I suspect not the last) Delta / Plaza reunion.

The Delta was a sort of underground club, colonised by Goths and Physcobillies and every other teenage tribe that lurked in the shadows in Belfast in the 1980s. It was filthy and probably a fire hazard. It opened after the pubs closed. I can't remember what time it closed at - I was never sober enough to be able to read my watch. It was brilliant, and it was awful. I was fifteen when I first went there and I felt like I had found my spiritual home.

Not so long ago, someone started posting photos on Facebook from the Delta days. Every now and then a picture would pop up with my name attached to it. I ignored them.  Interest grew, someone set up a fan page. People sent me the link. I ignored it. Inevitably, a reunion was organised. I ignored that too.

Part of the problem for me is, while I had some of the best nights of my life at the Delta, there were some very dark times too. I look back at my teenage years and wonder how I got out of there alive. But I have a problem with nostalgia in general. It makes me uncomfortable. When someone starts to wax lyrical about the 'good old days', it makes me wonder what is wrong with their 'here and now'. And I have no interest in re-formed bands from the 1980s and 90s. I don't want to listen to music from another lifetime. I like the person I am now much better than the person I was then.

Don't get me wrong - I don't want to get old before my time. And judging from the pictures on Facebook this weekend, everyone else enjoyed the reunion perfectly well, without analysing themselves into a tizzy. But I don't want to recapture a youth that, quite frankly, didn't have that much going for it first time around. Except for the fact that had it not been for the Delta, I might not have got to know that young man in the photo up there. Twenty five years on, he's still an handsome devil, and he's still my man. And we've both still got all our hair, despite the predictions of our parents.

A reasonable question.

It's one of the joys of parenthood that we seem to lose most of our capacity to feel embarrassed by ourselves just at the stage when our children feel embarrassment most acutely. I've started doing many of the things that my mum used to do that I found cringingly uncool. Like complaining. I'm not talking about general moaning, but proper 'I feel a letter coming on' complaining about bad service and that sort of thing. And then there's the dancing. I consider myself quite a nifty mover. On Wednesday mornings you'll find me in the front row at dance class, giving it my all, with jazz hands. But in my own kitchen, for some reason I'll start channelling my own inner middle-aged woman. There is lots of ill-advised frugging and boogying. The kids either ignore me or physically restrain me, lest I injure myself.

The Boy is gradually bowing to peer pressure and has started to find various body parts (mostly female) utterly unmentionable. But it's not his natural mindset. He asked me the other day over breakfast whether my boobs every got in the way. Reasonable question.

Last week he fell and hurt his shoulder and I had to take him to the hospital for x-rays. We were sitting in the x-ray room, waiting for the radiographer. It was a huge room, full of massive equipment and banks of buttons and switches. As we waited, he looked around the room. 'Mum, what are those?' he asked. There, hanging on the wall, was a row of black rubber plates, shaped like, well, underpants. They ranged in size from teen-tiny (newborn size, the sign said), to alarmingly huge (for large adults, apparently). I read the sign about this display: Gonad Shields.

Of all the exciting, unusual things in the room, this is the one my son homes in on. And I wasn't sure where to start my explanation. I'm pretty sure that, having just turned nine, he knows the basics of reproduction, but not the mechanics. So I started at the beginning: 'Do you know what your balls are for?'

I'm very glad the radiographer didn't walk into the room at that point. Now that would have been embarrassing.

Sauce for the goose?

Hubby is disappointed. We have just booked our trip to Barcelona, just for the two of us, to celebrate the fact that we have been together for twenty five years. The flights are booked, the hotel organised and then he discovers that FC Barcelona are playing at home on the day we leave. He has always wanted to go to a European match, and it doesn't get better than at the Nou Camp. I feel bad, but it's too late to change the bookings.

On our second day in the city, we are strolling back to our hotel. We take a slightly different route, just for the fun of it. We stumble across the FC Barcelona store. We decide a Barca shirt would be the perfect present for the Boy. We go in. At the door is a big notice: Sunday's match has been rescheduled to Saturday night. There is a scrum of men at one of the tills. We enquire - yes, indeed, tickets can be purchased. Some thirty minutes later we leave clutching a printout that confirms that we have bought one of the few remaining pairs of tickets.

Hubby is delighted and so am I. But the reaction of other people is perplexing. 'Oh', they say to Hubby, 'What will you have to pay the Wife for that? She's going to do some serious shopping now.' Huh? Since when was this not his holiday too? Since when did couples go on holiday and do nothing but shop and eat cake? Since when did women become such selfish harridans?

I'll tell you since when - since we've been told for the past God knows how many years that We Are Worth It. Since we've all been getting out our credit cards to buy into the designer lifestyle, because We Are Worth It. Since we decided that we all needed Me Time, which is definitely not Him Time.  Since handbags and cocktails and shoes and girlie nights out have been elevated to the status of rights, not luxuries. And it's all complete bollocks. Or whatever the female equivalent metaphor would be.

We spent our Saturday night at the football, and I loved it. I loved that Hubby was so excited, I loved that he was getting to do something he really, really wanted to do. I loved the whole experience, seeing the similarities with, and differences to, English football, watching the people, soaking in the atmosphere. It was great fun, and we still had dinner together afterwards (albeit at nearly midnight).

Hubby and the Boy have decided that when the Boy is old enough, they are going to do their own version of the Grand Tour, visiting the great football stadiums of Europe. I think it is a marvellous idea, but I'm a little jealous too.

Wish You Were Here?

The Boy is looking pensive, holding back the tears he knows I don’t want to see. Hubby and I are heading off to Barcelona, leaving the Girl and the Boy in the care of their grandparents. I’m tucking the Boy into bed. I can see he wants to talk. We chat a little about families where the parents are divorced or separated. He says he just can’t even begin to imagine what that feels like, because our family will never be like that. And then we get to the crux of the matter:

'I’ve been thinking, Mummy, that you don’t really ever get a chance to get away from us, so you should just go, enjoy yourself, because you deserve it.’

What he doesn’t say is what he is really thinking: Why do you need to get away from me? I know this, because I know my boy, but also because I remember feeling just that way when my parents went on holidays without me and my brother and sister. I remember confused feelings – missing them, of course, but also not quite understanding why they had to go. To make it worse, my parents would go off for a week somewhere Abroad. Somewhere glamorous and warm, staying in actual hotels, with pools! My parents never, ever took us kids Abroad. Usually, if we got a holiday at all, it was staying in a farmhouse B&B in Donegal, or somewhere near Newcastle or Castewellan in Northern Ireland. Donegal at least had the attraction of being Down South (despite the fact that it is actually due North of where we lived in Belfast). The money was different, the accents were different, the ice-cream brands had the same logos but different names. Newcastle, however, is no more that an hour’s drive from Belfast. It might be a seaside town, but spending a week there hardly felt like a holiday at all.

So the first time I ever went Abroad was with Hubby, when he was still just Swain. Even now, as the plane touches down in a foreign land, I get a little clenching of panic – will I be able to cope with Abroad? For so long it was a place that other people went to, and, moreover, a place that I was apparently unworthy of, or unfit to cope with, or was just, mysteriously, not for me.

But I think, finally, Abroad is for me. Barcelona was wonderful, Hubby was Swain again for a few days, and while I missed the kids, I really didn’t wish they were there. 

Head Space

Like Virginia Woolf, my mother thought it was important for a woman to have a room of her own. Ironically, it took a move to a smaller house to get her what she wanted. The house I grew up in had three proper reception rooms, plus a huge utility room (that was originally the kitchen),  a vast kitchen / diner and sun room. Upstairs there were six bedrooms (if you count the box room, which was always full of boxes, and one year, full of apples, individually wrapped in newspaper and perfuming the room with the smell of comfort and autumn as they slowly rotted). Outside there was the garage, the old outdoor loo (converted into a fuel store) and a shed big enough for my brother to hide quite happily all day when he was bunking off school.

Despite this abundance of space, my mother never had a room just for herself. We three kids each had our own bedrooms. My father had his study, and also appropriated the sun room, utility room and shed for the paraphernalia he used in his war of attrition against the house (it kept trying to fall down, he kept patching it back up again, but never properly). It was only when the family house was sold and my parents moved to a newly built, much smaller, house, that my mother got her own room. I suppose my mother thought that she had finally earned a right to her own room - she had retrained and launched herself into a very successful career as a financial advisor when I was in my early teens. In her room she had a sofa, a desk and a full wall of mirrored built-in wardrobes. My mother loved her job, she was hugely sociable, and she loved fashion - her room catered to all these needs.

She bought a traditional writing desk, with little drawers and a pretty bowed front. To sit at it, she used 'Aunty Jo's Chair', a delicate antique chair handed down from my mother's maiden aunt. I'm sitting on that seat right now - it has a wicker seat and is held together with ivory pegs. We weren't allowed to sit on when we were kids,  it was deemed so fragile, but it has survived my using it almost every day for some fifteen years. My laptop lives on my mother's little writing desk, or rather it rests there, when it is charging, or when it needs to be connected to the printer. When I'm writing, I usually sit at the kitchen table. This is partly because the writing desk isn't really the right size and shape for what I need, and partly because the kitchen is the nearest thing I have in this huge, Victorian house to a room of my own.

Don't get me wrong - I had a room of my own. We have a study, I used to work in there. But sitting at the desk, with my back to the door, I felt isolated and cut off from the rest of the house. I didn't like it. Here in the kitchen I can hear the kids in the other room, the washing machine running in the utility room, the rain dripping from the jungle-like tendrils of last-year's wisteria outside the window. The cats come in for a bite to eat and a quick leg-rub. There is evidence everywhere of the food we have just eaten, or the food I am going to cook later in the day. This is my room.

Vintage Butterflies

Just a reminder that the old blog - or Vintage Butterflies, as I like to think of it, is archived here:
Vintage Butterflies. There is also a permanent link to the old blog over there on the right. For new readers, a visit to the old blog is highly recommended (by me, which isn't really much of a recommendation, but there you go). There is a better display of my photography there, plus a year and half's worth of, well, more of the same, really.

Ka-boom

It was perfectly possible to live in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s and never really see 'The Troubles' first hand. Riots, bus-burnings, punishment beatings, shootings with homemade guns, all these things happened no more than a mile away from where I grew up, but, like most people, I only saw it on the news. There were times, though, when the Troubles came to our part of town, and, once, to my own doorstep.

I was maybe nine or ten years old. Coming home from school, I noticed a white BMW parked across the road from our house. We lived on a very busy main road, and the car was parked near a small row of shops, so it shouldn't really have stood out. But Northern Ireland was still sufficiently economically blighted that a nice car was something that turned heads.

I went to sleep in my parents' bed that night - I can't remember why. What I do remember is being plucked out of my bed by a soldier. He carried me out of the house and down the street to where my mother was waiting for me with a pair of shoes and my coat. The next thing I remember is being put back to bed at a friends' house - their son was off at boarding school, so I got his bed. Somewhere between these two events, I overheard enough to understand what was going on: a car bomb had been planted outside our house.

We lived in a large (but decrepit) semi-detached Victorian house. The other side of the house (which was in much better order) was occupied by a very nice, quiet, older couple. They kept themselves to themselves, but were very kind. I once spent an afternoon in their kitchen when my mother went out and forgot to leave the back door open for me. The lady of the house gave me chocolate biscuits and orange squash, and told me to feel free to use the connecting gate as a short cut (there was a little gate linking our two gardens. Rumour had it the houses were built by brothers who shared the gardens). It was the only time I was ever in their house. What no one told me, because it wasn't the sort of thing you wanted to go spreading around, was that the tall, quiet grey-haired man who lived next door was a judge.

Hence the car bomb which was, you've guessed it, in the white BMW. The white BMW that I can still see in my mind's eye. The white BMW that sat opposite our house all afternoon, as I did my homework, watched TV, ate my tea, had a bath. Sat there, full of explosives. In the end, the army performed a controlled explosion and the only damage to our house was to the windows. I returned home the next morning to find the windows already boarded and my mother grimly sweeping the broken glass into green-tinted shimmering piles. She promptly sent me off to school, which seemed very unfair to me at the time.

We had a lucky escape. How lucky? A few years later, a Catholic judge was shot and killed at point blank range in front of his family and hundreds of churchgoers as he left Mass at our local church. We rarely saw our neighbours after the car bomb incident. The little gate was closed, the short cut decreed out of bounds. Their new security lights were so sensitive they flared up at every passing pigeon. But we didn't dwell on it, because close as we came to disaster, we were still very lucky compared to the people who lived in fear, day-in and day-out. As the politicians fight over the final details of devolved government in Northern Ireland, they would do well to remember the bad old days, to remember what it was really like to live with fear, oppression and economic deprivation, and get themselves back around that table.