Kingfishers, my Dad's 80th at the Garrick and the gig of the year!
The Queenager: Eleanor's Letter (June 9th 2024)
It has been a week of acceptance, contrasts and seizing the day!
Dear Queenagers
Hope you are enjoying a peaceful Sunday. I was feeling rather serendipitous this morning. As soon as I arrived at the pond I was greeted by an azure blue flash of Kingfisher. Always a lucky day when you see one – but with extra resonance for me as one is on the cover of my book Much More to Come…and I’d just been to the publisher to see the finished proofs. And while swimming, another Kingfisher swooped over me and then, as I hugged the edge of the pond by the trees, watching the baby Moorhen ducklings and looking at the lily pads, (a bit where I don’t usually venture) Kingfisher number three zipped over my head leaving me feeling full of joyous rapture. That sense of being in flow when maybe the universe is tapping us on the shoulder (or I imagine it is). Those streaks of blue made me incredibly happy…
It’s not always Kingfishers and sunshine at the pond. It’s been cold and grey much of this week. I’ve been back in my thermals… On Monday whilst I was swimming I was contemplating the speech I was going to give at the Garrick Club (yup the one that has only just allowed in women as members in 2024!!!!) that night for my father’s 80th birthday. Now I love my dad but I think it would be fair to say that when it comes to establishment gentlemen’s clubs just being for chaps, he and I are NOT on a mindmeld (confession: I got so heated during a family lunch at Easter when we were discussing women and the Garrick that I had to go and walk round the block to calm down). And although my dad did the right thing and, in the end, voted for women to be allowed to be members, he had, until that point, been leading the Taliban at the Garrick against that motion. So I was cogitating carefully what I could say that evening which wouldn’t be disrespectful to his entering into his ninth decade and would also be kind and true… and just as all of this was swilling around my brain the heron dived down in front of me and seized a baby coot, all sinewy legs and grey fluff, and carried it off in its jaws.
Now I love the heron. I talk to it. It’s been a real spirit animal to me during the last few years of my midlife pivot and my daily swim in the pond. It represents balance and a certain steadfast obstinacy about going one’s own way, choosing my own path. On Monday it taught me a lesson about acceptance: if I love the heron I have to love it even when it eats my beloved baby ducklings. I have to take the good and the bad. The light and the darkness. The yin and the yang. It was a reminder that everything is always here – all the good and all the bad. We can’t just choose the good bits, we have to embrace it all.
So with my dad. I have to accept all of him – even when we disagree. So I thought about all his wonderful qualities, the incredible education he gave me, my darling siblings, his sense of humour and particularly his huge capacity for joy and fun. So I wrote the speech about all the wisdom he has shown me and how his life maxims ring through my brain; how are families are our greatest teachers. One of his favourite sayings is: “It’s very important in life to know when you are having a good time because you certainly know when you are having a nasty time!” That sense of carpe diem of piling on the fun when things are good -and revelling in it – is so important. Dad’s always been a great one for cream on his ice cream, another bottle of good wine – one of his other favourite maxims is: “Nothing exceeds like excess” – meaning that if you are going for it, really go for it. I was thinking of that this morning when I read the news of poor old Michael Mosley’s death. There Mosley was, king of Radio 4, bestselling author of the 5:2 diet, four kids, lovely wife, chilling out on a beautiful Greek island, deciding to walk back to his villa and…. That was it. Dead. At the time of writing no-one really knows why. But it just shows why we all need to gather our rosebuds while we may, enjoy the time we have here with those that we love and never take any of it for granted.
We live in a world where we can feel insulated from sudden death, by science and medicine and general longevity, but it is never a given. We never know how long we’ve got. I’m a great believer in saying YES TO JOY… I know I get that from my dad and I am so glad that he is still in fine form at 80, eating delicious food at his favourite club with fifty of his best mates and his five kids, his lovely new partner Pandora and his brother and sister. He talked in his speech about how lucky his generation had been: not to have to fight in a war, beneficiaries of the Sixties, rising house prices, medicine. He didn’t think his kids – me and my sibilings – or his grandgirls (yup all of his children have two daughters not a boy amongst us – that’ll learn the Garrick!) would have such an easy run of it. I fear he is right. Watching the D-Day footage, the bravery, the horror of all those young men fighting their way up the beaches for freedom gave me a sickening feeling that the wheel of time is turning. That with climate change (50 degrees in Symi where Michael Mosely likely died of heatstroke) the scary rise of the right at the European Elections, Trump and Farage on the march – the ascendancy of everyone from Marine Le Pen to Geert Wilders; the liberal post WW2 consensus is on the way out. There is war n the middle east and even talk of conscription again in Europe…. of us being back in 1938 with Putin on the march. If that is the case we definitely need to be making the most of the good times that we have…
On a happier note… I had a lovely time last week recording the first three of our new Queenager podcast. It will be released in July, just before my book comes out, and last week I interviewed the wonderful Dr Nighat Arif about all women’s right to sexual pleasure and general good health in midlife and beyond. As well as Baroness Martha Lane Fox on AI, Quantum computing and becoming a mother via a Surrogate at nearly 50. I also had a great chat about everything Queenager, Midlife Collision and work with the fab Dr Lucy Ryan (author of Revolting Women: Why Women Leave) and I must have said the phrase “Welcome to the Queenager podcast with me, Eleanor Mills” about a million times. Best of all I am doing the recording in the basement of Catherine Mayer’s house – she who is on our NOON advisory board and who founded the Women’s Equality Party and who wrote a brilliant biography of King Charles. She came down into the studio a few times last week saying she’d never heard such high jinx and laughter emanating from the sound-proofed room! She has had her own midlife cluster-fuck; she lost her husband Andy Gill to Covid, he was a musician in Gang of Four and built the state of the art studio where we recorded. It felt apt to be doing the podcast there as Catherine helped me so much, on long wet walks during lockdown, when she was bereaved and I was bereft after redundancy. It is so great to see how things can really get better. I was particularly enjoying the Leather Lane food market nearby – all my family are vegetarians so I was definitely seizing the day when it came to SaltBeef Sandwiches, steak and chips and Bao Buns. Dr Nighat and I stuffed ourselves and had an impromptu picnic (in a rare bit of sunshine) on Catherine’s front steps. Truly Happy days!
three mighty drummers, a bass guitar, percussionists and three vocalists from Soweto…Gilles Peterson called them his ‘gig of the year’ he is not wrong. The ‘songs’ last 20 minutes each; the club was jumping, it was so high energy that the crowd were spontaneously hugging each other at the end. BCUC took us from silence to frenzy – via saluting our ancestors in silence. If you get a chance to see them: GO! The blissed out smiles of delirious glee reminded me of my 38 lovely Queenagers at Broughton during our drumming workshop on the last night! There is nothing like the high-octane joy of live music, whether that’s BCUC or my dad’s favourite: weeping to Wagner in the dark. I took him to Bayreuth once and sat with him there surrounded by hundreds of weeping old German industrialists. As I kid I used to play Brunhilda being rescued by Siegfried (my little brother) from the flames as my dad played the requisite bit of the Ring Cycle; but the piece that always makes me think of my dad is Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, the slow movement is possibly the most beautiful piece of music ever written – he used to play it as a I fell asleep as a child. How evocative music is – like smells it whisks us straight back to the past.
So as with the heron in the pond – I feel I have been through a week in which everything is there, all at once.
If you’d like to come and join us at NOON for an event soon – then we have another round of London and Regional circles for Queenagers on July 1st (thanks to all our lovely hosts go to this link to find one near you). And we are doing a special NOON Queenager Walk and a bit of a pre-publication book reading on July 28th in Warwickshire (click here to book).
