An almost unbroken silence...

...is about to be interrupted.

It is more almost six weeks since my last confession.  I am in a state of disgrace when it comes to this blogging malarkey, and I can't even raise a smidgen of guilt, a scintilla of shame about that.  I guess if the mood isn't upon one and the muse is absent then we are marked out as the amateur writers and feeble self-publicists we genuinely are, we non-posting bloggers.  "See her?" they say "She can't even keep a blog.  Couldn't write her way out of a paper bag with a sharp pencil.  She's useless, she is..."

Can't even claim domestic rectitude has taken over and I have been too busy looking after other things and other people to put finger to key.  Nor have I been ill, beyond a day or three of sinusitis, ooh, ages ago.  Nor have we been away.

But I have had a birthday, and that day was also our wedding anniversary.  That took care of 31 May, and the two weekends either side of it.  When I told her in an e-mail, after she'd asked, that I was now 54 an old friend as near as dammit accused me of making it up and that she was sure I'd been 54 before, but I have never lied about my age in that direction.  In my teens (to get served in pubs and buy a ticket for an 18 at the flicks) I recalculated upwards, but I've never skimmed a day off my age.  I seem to remember the friend in question back in the 1980s admitting to taking four whole years off her date of birth when she met a nice chap who was two years younger than her.  To the extent of, when she found herself actually married to him, changing her passport (in those days it was filled in by fountain pen, by the issuing clerks, you don't believe me, you young ones, do you?) to cover her taradiddled tracks.  My How I Laughed!  But I didn't remind her.  She's been divorced and remarried since and the second husband is a little older than she is, so fibbing wasn't called for that time, and maybe she has forgotten that it was done in the past.  So when I received her teasing accusation I was doctoring the facts, I put that down to a spot of psychological projection and let it go.


I let a lot of things "go" these days.  I just can't be arsed to make an issue out of this fatiguing business of living life any more, so the sixth-form student firebrand I was in the mid-1970s simply wouldn't know me now.  However, I still get a bit cross about flagrant unfairness, potty extremism and wilful blind ignorance, if I bump hard up against an example and bark my shin on it.  But only instances in my direct personal experience, at the time, when I am there, and I will sometimes admonish the perpetrator and take them on in an argument if they want one.  I can't remember when I last harrumphed at a newspaper, though, or shouted at Radio Four.  Actually, I gave up Radio Four for Radio Two about twenty years ago, so that last example of crotchety intolerance is a bit out of date, but you know to what I refer - the blustering what? what? bloody what? stuff that happens in kitchens the country over on the hour every hour, on our being acquainted by the BBC about some gross ineptitude or heartless cruelty or other. 


That doesn't mean I have stopped valuing in the things I once cared about, I just don't get so strung out about them anymore.  Since letting "go" of such stuff I have found a sweet serenity in my life, that sits well with a loving husband, a daft and affectionate dog, and the just generally pottering about trying to keep out of mischief which has replaced what I once laughingly used to refer to as "my career".  You know, paid work.  Going off every day to fight monsters and bring back the bacon.  The Husband still earns our daily crust, and he describes his job as a lot of "colouring in without going over the lines and not being cheeky to teacher" as though there is a natural extension between how one learns to behave at primary school and one's working life.  Which of course there is.  Only the spending money is a bit more impressive later on.


I have often said a thing I heard many years ago, that grown-ups are just children with money.  We have some money, and time to spend it, now Our Ma is ensconced in the Bide-a-wee Home For the Baffled, and The Husband has been taking me, with a delicious frequency and insouciant regularity, out for drinks and meals at a charming local hostelry, and we have met new people, and they have asked us out for drinks, and to celebrations, and then there is the little matter of the once-a-month quiz night, and half-price champagne on Thursdays, so there you have it, gradually, eventually - my full confession.


I haven't blogged because I have been too busy enjoying myself.  In the PUB, and if you've missed me, TOUGH, because we are most probably going there tonight, for me to drink half-price champagne - again.  Live with it!