The Queenager: Eleanor’s Letter (April 1st 2024)

Dear Queenagers,

Happy Easter and Happy April – and no this isn’t an April fool, this missive is a day late. Sorry not to send you your normal Sunday newsletter but it was Easter and I was in Oxford scoffing chocolate and walking in blossom under grey skies with my own family, sister, brother in law and nieces. We played a long and entirely idiolectic word game involving so many family in jokes it would have been incomprehensible to any observer and the now late teen and early twenties cousin sorority was as tight as ever. There is no such thing as perfection when it comes to parenting but I do feel glad that my girls love and know their cousins. The support of that kind of wider family tribe is the gift that goes on giving. It gives my sister and I huge pleasure to see them getting on so well (and yes dear Queenagers, that is the sister, Annie, who comes to the Noon Circle and Wasing). Bless her.

Bless, now that is a word I don’t use much, not being of the religious persuasion. But it is hard to avoid religion at Easter – my local paper and neighbourhood is full of churches proclaiming Sunday mass (a full three hours!). I drove past one with a huge golden cross of daffodils and another with a full choir and congregation dolled up in white and processing. The news has been full of the Pope proclaiming about the ‘absurdity’ of war. That remark didn’t strike me as that helpful or comforting: war may well be ‘absurd’ but definitely not in any kind of humorous way for the poor people caught up in it. Whether it’s horrors in Ukraine or the aftermath of the Isis attack in Russia, or the ongoing catastrophe in the middle east – 32,000 Gazans dead, two thirds women and children (this article from the New Yorker particularly got me); and the Israeli hostages still not released – or the agony of women in Afghanistan banned from participating in society by the Taliban, the sufferings of our planet are not currently being alleviated by any higher power…

Yet Easter is definitely my favourite festival of the year – I made Nigella Lawson’s chocolate nest cake, soothingly whizzing egg whites and melting chocolate, whipping cream and piling on mini eggs – a labour of love for a family lunch. In fact, I’m all in favour of many of the Easter rituals and given they are a totally random mixed bag and Christianity itself co-opted an earlier pagan festival around eggs and spring and new hatchings for its own tale of rebirth and immortality, I don’t feel at all conflicted about loving it all but junking the Christian bit. Forget Turkey and Christmas Pudding, I much prefer a hot-cross bun and a chocolate egg. In fact I was amused to discover that the first chocolate easter egg was invented by Mr Cadbury in 1875. He made a chocolate one as a novelty amongst all the hand-painted Pace-Eggs beloved of the Victorians. Easter has long been associated with painting eggs, partly because the chickens started laying them again after winter and the privations of Lent made everyone keen to get stuck in. Pace-Eggs, were Easter Eggs (Pace comes from Pasch, the Old and Middle English word for Easter). I bet Mr Cadbury had no idea when he cast that first choccy egg that he was creating the mightiest new Easter tradition… But now kids believe in the Easter bunny like a chocaholic-version of Father Christmas. My three year old niece today wanted to know all about how the Easter Bunny had left her reams of chocolate eggs but she hadn’t seen him. Chocolate is now such a part of Easter we’ve had to invent a new higher power – the Easter Bunny – to explain it. And why not? For me Easter isn’t just about chocolate but the warmth in the air, the neon green of new leaves on the trees. The new leaves started low, with bushes and hawthorn, now the willows are out and the chestnut and although the bare branches look bare, a closer inspection reveals buds just about to burst. There was heat in the sun this morning as I dried off after the pond. That feeling of spring sprungen, fecundity and growth returning to the world, it being light after 7pm. All that makes me feel heady with possibility and new beginnings. Ahhh Easter.

It feels synonymous with the year coming to life, of new starts.  Astrologically there is a total solar eclipse on April 8^th a million Americans are expected to converge on Niagra Falls which is in the ‘total darkness zone’. It’s an eary thing when it gets pitch dark in the middle of the day – I remember when it happened here. No wonder such events are loaded with portents – particularly around a collective new beginning, of a new era, indeed. I’m not that much of a fan of that kind of thinking, but I have had a sense in the last few weeks of going around old patterns, of thinking, gosh, am I really back here again? But then realising it’s not the same place; it’s a spiral not a circle. The difference is crucial. In a circle we are back literally in the same place. In a spiral we come back round but the evidence that we have changed is that the same triggers don’t get us in quite the way that they used to. Maybe there is just a beat in which we see a pattern, take a deep breath and don’t react. (I spectacularly failed to do that while discussing the admission of women to the Garrick Club with my dad at another Easter lunch on Saturday.) But that is also part of the Queenager journey. Realising what will never change and learning to accept it not fight it.

That is also the work of midlife; shedding what is weighing us down, sloughing off the unrequired baggage – realising that in order to change we have to shift our own mindset, do something different. That doing the same old thing and expecting different outcomes is indeed mad – and fruitless. That’s why we need a new tribe, a new path, a new beginning. We see so much of that in the Noon Circle (thanks for everyone who came last week).

I was very tired before Easter so I’ve tried to really do nothing. I’ve walked and swum. Had a massage (the therapist took one look at me and said I needed Lymphatic Drainage, no me neither, but apparently menopause plays havoc with hormones that don’t get emptied out, as does stress so she’s been clearing it all out. I’ve certainly felt better for a couple of treatments… more of this to come I think). I’ve enjoyed hanging out watching Gilmore Girls and Sex and the City with my Gen Zs – and lying on the floor having cuddles with my baby niece. Not to mention those charades with my big nieces and not doing any work – or writing. Which is why this is late.

Wherever you’ve been I hope you’ve had a relaxing time, have scoffed some mini eggs and are feeling a hint of spring. Of course April is the Cruellest month, with its whiff of warmth followed by lowering skies and chilly squalls, but summer is on the way. It feels like the time so shed the trappings of winter, whether that’s thick black tights, or the duvet coat. That’s not particularly because it’s warmer but because it is the start of a new phase.

Let’s have a collective new beginning. We talk about that a lot at Noon because midlife really is the time when one phase ends and a new one starts. And that for me is what Easter is all about; the return of the sun, a new cheerier phase of the year. A rebirth, a renaissance –  whatever belief system you attach to it.

So enjoy the rest of your bank holiday Monday and much love!

Ps if you fancy something good to read – I highly recommend Karensa Jenning’s piece about what Queenagers need to know about AIup now on the Noon website, with some practical tasks to get you going. We’re also going to be doing a Noon debate with Karensa and Lalita Taylor, (both on Noon’s Advisory Board and experts in this space) – it’s free to Paid Subscribers, £10 to everyone else. It’s on April 15^th at 6.30pm on Zoom chaired by me. Here’s the link if you want to sign up. Our aim is to be practical and useful and explore the bigger impact of AI on the world.

By Eleanor Mills