Birthday Ends

There were different phases to my birthday.
The build up with people phoning and arranging.
The arrival of guests and gifts.
The cock-up with people who’s heads were up their alimentary canals.
There was the dinner.
The breakfasts
The teas.
Coffee with scones and nibbling on left over crumbs.
There was the trip to the pub with two old friends. The catchup and the realisation that friends really do ‘do the trick.’
There was too much fizz and not enough time.
There was the absence of geographically challenged friends and family.
Thank heavens for Skype to Bali & New York, La La Land and Germany.
Too many late nights and not enough sleep.
The holding onto the last vestiges of people who had to leave.
And then it was all over.
Today I am 65+1 day.
Have just been interviewed for a local website. Wondered whether I should mention my age and decided that by not mentioning it I was bu ying into the received wisdom that we are dead after 50 – women especially.
The next twenty years are going to be interesting. 85 and still demanding to be heard…
Th wet, icy weather made my head hurt this morning. I went for a brisk constitutional.
15 lambs skreiked for they mums. Each had a number on the side of their little wooly bodies. Made me sad. I’ve decided that meat eating has to be done with consciousness. No ramming it down the throat. An occasional piece of meat from an animal that has been compassionately killed. Rows and rows of shelves in the supermarket with bloody packets of slaughtered animals does not do it for me. But a trip to the butchers where their first call is responsible farming makes it easier.
My Balinese son-in-law told me he couldn’t eat raw food anymore, made him ill. That he had to take in animal protein more often than not. So I listened in the knowledge that my body has been complaining just like his. When my brother told me to stop being so anal I wondered if I could change the habit of a lifetime and decided that at 65 if things need changing then now is the time to change them.
Jim is packing for the last leg of his tour The dawter is off back to London so I will be left with two cats, an empty house and skiploads of quiet. The telly machine is on the blink and our heating bill is too high for its own good.
So I will be curled up in my big bed, alone, with birthday books and whichever cat gets there first.
I start at Radio Sussex on Monday, when everything habitual will change.
For now though today its yoga, tomorrow its a meeting in London then candlelit yoga, Thursday its lunch with a brilliant thinker, then my writing course, Friday its more yoga and Saturday morning poses, then a long wait for the old git to return by 3.00 a.m.
Makes me sleepy just thinking bout it.