God's great plan

A shit birthday

I had one of the worst birthdays I can remember yesterday. Sandy went to Australia the day before (claiming he had no choice but as I told him, we always have a choice, even if we work for the Evil Empire and a nutcase client in Sydney) and the children decided they would help me by taking the day of school – something the local kids all do on any family member birthday, including distant great uncles. It was a big mistake, and I knew it would be for some time in advance: I ended up saying we would go to Murcia, which has the only normal department store in miles, but is about two hours drive. Sandy said it was one, but that is Sandy time: 160 k/hour all the way and not counting the bit between the house and the autovia or the shop and the autovia. Since I get hugely stressed in large shops, I have no idea why I did it, except that I felt this kind of nagging guilt about the children’s party I have to organise for December 1st, also Alexander’s birthday next week. I have no idea where to get the usual trimmings: the Spanish don’t seem to sell balloons, poppers, etc – only piñatas, which are a nice idea, but when you bash them they are just full of things like packs of crisps and those peculiar sweets like foam rubber. Sandy had done his ritual “I don’t know how to buy you anything you like” chant, and ended up leaving me a pair of slippers which were two sizes too small – just as well, since I didn’t like them anyway – and some face cream, which was fine, but I could get it myself and then I would have bought a different one. Well, it’s not his fault, since some people are not good at those things, said Sylvia. I don’t agree: it is his fault. He has lived with me for long enough to know my shoe size and to have picked up any woman’s magazine and learned that slippers are not an acceptable gift. Meanwhile, my mother, when she visited, proclaimed loudly that she was leaving me “a token” present. Why? No explanation why it should be “token” – rather than normal. I told her I would give her a token present on her birthday, then. Only Jasmine and Sylvia managed to get me a card on time. If birthdays are about delivering the message: “You are special!” then this one didn’t hit the spot. Last year, when I had a lot of my girlfriends round and drank a lot of champagne, plus the nanny bought me a chocolate cake, I felt pretty special, and pissed, of course, but now that I live here I do not have any girlfriends handy, nor a husband most of the time. Actually, it is the nanny I miss the most: she might not have been that excellent at housework, but it is nice not to be the one who has to look after you.

Shutting the stable door

The day in Murcia was exhausting and the only good thing that can be said about it is that there is almost no Xmas visibility: presumably by now in the UK they are playing “I wish it could be Christmas every da-aa-ay” on the hour every hour on the radio, but here there was just a small display of baubles on the third floor of the Cort’ Ingles, and of course, some very Catholic looking cribs and a lot of bumper boxes of the rather dry, almond and nougat Spanish biscuits they eat at this time of the year stacked up in the big supermarkets. Apart from this, there are few signs of Christmas, which is a relief, but I expect by mid December I will be missing the great UK bonanza, tacky tinsel and lights everywhere and crap office parties with compilation tapes of Wizard, Slade and Band-Aid going round and round.

Here, Juan Mañas told me that the cultural secretary for the Ayuntiamento (aka Vanessa) wanted to talk to me about my donkeys, which might be needed for the Dia de los Reyes – that is, Epiphany, which is a much bigger deal than Christmas. We went a couple of years back: the donkeys process round town with baskets of sweets for the children, though in fact all the greedy old ladies snatch and pocket them first. When we got back from Murcia, I fed the donkeys, but this morning, when I got up, the stable door was open on the road side, and nothing was in the stable. I spent a frantic half hour tearing around waving carrots, until Cristóbal, the old guy working on the land, rounded them up from behind Pablo’s and brought them back. A great relief: I asked Cristóbal to mend the lock on the door which clearly doesn’t work properly. He has now put a chain on the outside, so that while this was very much a case of shutting the stable door after the donkey had bolted, at least the donkey was found and put back inside. Sometimes you do get a second chance.

Perspective on wrong turns

Moving to another country gives you a new perspective on your old life; when you are close up you can’t see it properly and it is only when you walk far enough away that you get the full picture. Quite often, I wake up at night and think: aha, that’s where I made my mistake! For instance, that I never should have left journalism and gone into PR, to which, after all, I was completely unsuited. If you wrote down the qualities of the ideal PR person on one piece of paper, and mine on another, I expect the only match would be “can write.” Other qualities, like diplomacy, for instance, must be quite near the top of the PR list, but might not appear on mine at all. I wonder now why I didn’t see it at the time: I expect colleagues were saying things like: why on earth did she go into PR, the way I often did about ex journos I knew when they took the PR shilling. Shilling being the key word here: for money, of course. Money can persuade you are well suited to quite a lot of things, jobs, ugly old husbands and so on. At least in my case I turned down two rich men; probably it would have been a step too far to think I could live with an investment banker and organise charity balls, though my day job was not far off that as it turned out.

Another big mistake was going to work for the world’s most old-fashioned engineering company, in the mistaken belief that I would be the leaven in the lump. Actually, I was the grit in the oyster, and quickly got coated in something that would stop me itching. I didn’t need to live through having men with double chins put their hand on my knee in taxis, or say “Just a moment, dear,” in meetings; nobody made me do it and my only excuse is that I thought it was a stepping stone. If so, it was the kind that wobbles when you tread on it and tips you into the river.

The trouble is I have realised my career mistakes too late – at least for that life. In CS Lewis’ The Silver Chair, Aslan, i.e. God - pulls Jill and Eustace into a dangerous other world and gives them a series of signs to follow in order to escape. At one point, they are supposed to be looking for the sign Under Me. They spend a long time despairingly wandering about in stone trenches of a ruined city, until they realise that the trenches are the letters of the words Under Me. This still seems to me a good description of life, except that there is no guarantee you will find the sign at all and not be caught by giants preparing for their traditional Autumn Feast of human flesh.

As Kirsty Alley, the evil Oklahoma beauty pageant organiser in Drop Dead Gorgeous – just after she has topped her daughter’s rival by igniting the combine harvester she is riding – “Sometimes it’s hard for us to understand God’s great plan.” I just have to hope that this time I get a second chance and don’t have to be like Kirsty Alley and resort to murder to make sure my daughter wins the second-time-round pageant on my behalf.

Platonic friendship

I had bad news from the UK. The one nice guy in my old job, Martin, has prostrate cancer that may also be in his bones. I have thought about him a lot and failed to say the right things, though I am still trying. It is hard to be warm without being sloppy, or concerned without being funereal ahead of time. I am a natural optimist about these things, so of course I am saying: “You’ll be fine,” but that’s rather like those people telling you that you’ve passed your exam: how would they know?

Martin and I worked together, which is one of the best ways to be friends with someone, and probably the only way to be friends with a man after you are married. I always spat on girls that said “I get on better with men” – H, for instance, who used to say this regularly when we were younger was actually saying “I’m extremely sexy, so I don’t bother with women.” But the fact is that the best friendships I have had were with men, particularly at work. The film When Harry met Sally claims that platonic friendships don’t exist and I used to think that was true: on the basis that friends have to be people you find attractive and if you find the man attractive, you want to be more than friends. However, this changes when you are old and married, I think: you can acknowledge attraction but contain it, like having a scary big dog on a lead. You maybe want to have a cat, too, and cream sofas, so you don’t let the dog rampage about the house. I would say those friendships are better than most with women, which lack that sense of something pulling on the lead and are too often like the worst marriages: someone banging on about trivia over the garden fence but not actually seeing you as a person, just a listening ear.
So, I thought of Martin, who is nearing fifty with great poise but some little vanity and anxiety about ageing, a subject we talked about quite a bit over a glass of wine at lunch, now being struck with something so much more serious. I am glad I have told him, several times, what a good friend he was, and also, when he was worrying about his wrinkles, that he was still very good looking, knowing perfectly well that he would never put his hand on my knee, and also that, if I asked, he would tell me I still had nice knees, for a woman in her forties. I just hope he gets better, that’s all. There are a lot of shits in that company, and Fate had to wave her scissors at this one. Indeed, sometimes it’s hard to understand God’s great plan.