Day 638: Family

Thank you, sweet Pauline. More than sweet. Rich, flamboyant, funny, loving Pauline, who came to the pond dressed as a fairy on Christmas day and has raised a thousand pounds or more for charity by doing what we all love to do, and stepping into the cold water day by day. We swam together this morning, then hung out. She is another inspiring pond lady with a big life full of love and I adored hearing her stories. She's also an incredible communicator and determined like a tree root. I have a beautiful photo, but I can't seem to find a way to get it off my phone. 

The Saturday family pull-out has always been my very favourite part of The Guardian. I'm drawn to it like a voyeur or a fantasist, a filial peeping Tom. I want to hear about love that's tinged with ties and resentments, or families who love, respect and cherish each other, and always have. I like to read of secret letters from long dead fathers or of the diverse paintings on cave walls that are our histories, our families and our constructed truths. I love to hear of children loved, lost, gained; of tragedies and happy endings; of the tiniest tinges of family life. Perhaps I glamorise it because it's not my world. 

Perhaps I'm missing something, in the bigger sense of things, because it is my world. I have a family too - not one I've given birth to/with, granted, but the one I chose in coming here - and that, itself, with all its oddnesses and intricacies, with all its withheld heartness and its cross-related stories (never a perfect fit, always a little blurred in its overlaying) is good enough.  Nobody's article can cover the wholeness of a family's existence. Nobody's family is perfect, nor is their history. Even families who find no-one ever quite lives up to what they got from mother, father, sister have moments of bickerly spatting (don't they?) and times when irritation sits like sand in love's eye. It scratches, but doesn't blind. Maybe that's enough. Maybe it starts not with my ancestors or with other people's families, but with my own, the bits that work and the bits that don't (bits being moments, exchanges, whole people).

Avocado iced lollies:
A Step Too Fucking Far
or...

So thank you, Harriet. This section has always been my favourite, and recently, having said this to my friend (your husband) John-Paul, I discovered that it is you who are responsible. Keep it coming, please. I have never once failed to feel the warmth of it, or to enjoy its complexity. Families can be complex, love is simple. Remembering that's like walking after letting down a piggy-back rider - there's a lightness that could never have been felt without the pig. And remembering that the rider, however likely to climb up again unnoticed, can be set down with any chosen breath (or two). In love. 

The avocado I bought three days ago, part of a pair, is not ripe. I feel a deep compulsion to go and buy another - how could I have a salad without a helping of creamy, slimy avocado, cut with onions to mix in crispness and sharpness of flavour to offset the blanket of bland that avocado brings. What the fuck is happening to me? It's clear that I don't yet love them, exactly, but I feel the pull like an addiction, almost. 

I remember the first time I ached for marmite. It's location-based, that memory. I was at Brighton's Seven Dials, at the top of Montpelier. On my way to see J, who lived at the cute square that's now a hairdresser's. I was terrified. I thought I surely must be pregnant. Why would I wake and suddenly crave a substance I'd detested for so long? Just short of B12, perhaps, or harbouring a secret candida creature that was calling to be fed. The taste has stuck. nearly twenty years later (Lordy!), I still adore crisp white toast with butter and a little too much marmite. Avocados, you and me, we're joined now, like twins.