Waiting & Reflecting

 

23^rd October 2014. Despite being 92 my mother is game for her hospital visits. Today she has to visit the oncologist between sessions of chemotherapy. She uses NHS  transport and has to be ready by 8.30am for collection. It is now 11.33 and she is sitting in a corridor, still waiting. Fortunately she cooked herself scrambled eggs before she set out and is not feeling hungry, just bored and anxious.

I am also bored and anxious because I am still waiting to exchange contracts so that I can move. This has been dragging on for three months. No word from the solicitor this morning so to be useful, to do something, turn out all the cupboards in the conservatory, a very scary job for me involving 35 years of theatre programmes, some show photos of a young Judi Dench, a youthful Ian McKellen and John Hurt. Then there is the mound of photos, all mixed up, covering my travels to distant lands, friends some cherished some well lost, and my mother at different ages, as she travelled through her life.

There she is digging in my garden, setting my dinner table, nursing my cats. She doesn’t vary  much in each photo and always looks happy even though I am pretty sure she wasn’t, the atmosphere was at best edgy. I seem to have changed a lot though. I was much prettier in my twenties  than I ever thought I was. If only I’d had the confidence to raise my eyes, look life in the eye and enjoy things. I  looked like the real me, the skin was good, the hair was right. Entering middle age, suddenly the hair  starts appearing in different colours, red, ginger, blonde, and myriad styles all of them bad. Somehow the person I was in my 20s, quite depressed about my looks  but with no great urge to change them, has disappeared beneath the face of a woman entirely dissatisfied with herself, struggling for some look that never happens.

The photos show that after thirty five I looked best at dinner parties and in the Groucho Club in Soho, in evening clothes. Long ago I was as nocturnal as a vampire, travelling by taxi from office to club to  home in the early hours.  It was my Sally Bowles identity  and I  wore it  for twenty five years, but not now as I am never out of jeans now and go to bed at 10pm. But I wonder if I would go back to being Sally if I had the money? Now and then it would be nice.