Where did all the time go?
You know you’re getting old when you have a milky drink before bed, forget people’s names, tell teenagers that they’ve grown, start wearing beige and count your blessings.
The mercy is that I haven’t yet started wearing beige (promise me you’ll take me out and shoot me if that happens) but the rest has sadly come true. Soon I’ll start asking people to turn the music down, the TV up, and will take out a subscription to The Lady.
It barely feels five minutes since summers were spent going to all my friends’ weddings. This summer I’m going to several 50th birthdays, my friends’ 50th birthdays, not my parents’ friends. The same friends whose weddings I attended oh-so-seemingly-recently. Where did the time go and aren’t policemen looking younger?
The one glimmer in the ageing process is perspective, which leads nicely to counting my blessings. My mother – a much more delightful, positive and holy woman than I – has long urged me to do this.
She usually does so when I’m being particularly gloomy and about to wander off down my field to eat thistles. ‘Count your blessings,’ she says. ‘You’ll soon see that things aren’t so bad.’ But for many years the thought that I might have been undergoing some unique suffering in middle-class Winchester was a badge of comfort.
Not any more. Get out the slippers and the cocoa, I found myself counting my blessings this evening and feeling a radiant glow because of them. And no wonder. The house has been crammed with friends all weekend. It became so full, that we ran out of beds and a very obliging next-door neighbour (for whom I’m also grateful) housed the spill-over contingent.
Not allowing the fact that I have two bedrooms and a small dining room with a table that seats four to limit me. I invited seven people to a four-course dinner. It was a good friend’s second 40th birthday (she misguidedly had the first one during May when I was lying in a darkened room, groaning).
‘I know,’ said Phil, ‘we could do it later at your house Hazel and you could cook that rather nice slab of beef that’s in the freezer.’ You get the idea. So, we dug out the bunting that we’d made for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, ironed it, and hung a street’s worth round a small terraced house. We cracked open the champagne. We pressed every utensil in the house into service. And we ate the beef.
Hoorah, it was marvellous, everyone laughed, ate, drank and generally had a jolly good time. Even Phil, back that morning at 6.40am from South Africa, managed to stay up late and revel in being among friends.
This would have been enough to make me count my blessings. But Phil, a medic, had caught a glimpse of life in South Africa and neighbouring Zimbabwe and the scales had begun to fall from his eyes.
He told stories about HIV infection and unemployment rates. As four of the party were journalists this triggered a string of very sobering stories, which we tell and re-tell down the years: famines, poverty, enforced prostitution, HIV, powerlessness, all embodied in individuals whose stories we’ve heard and reported.
Absolute poverty for us is old news. But for Phil it is new and dreadful. ‘How can people earn $2 a day?’ he asked. ‘And what am I going to do about it?’
Meanwhile, the youngest member of the party (aged 15) had just won a regional speaking competition, addressing the topic of poverty. ‘There is,’ his father said, ‘hope when a 15-year-old boy takes on this subject. Because we know the next generation want to fix it too.’
Humbled, grateful, silenced, I’m off to make a milky drink and take a fresh look at what else I could be doing, who have so much in global terms.
Originally published in Baptist Times
in Blogs & Columns
About Hazel
Hazel Southam is an award-winning journalist who reports on religious affairs, international development and the environment. She has covered four G8 Summits.
She wrote for The Sunday and Daily Telegraph for 10 years. Her work has also appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, The Daily Mail and The Evening Standard.
Reporting assignments have taken her to places including Bosnia, Zimbabwe, Mongolia, Albania, Nagorno-Karabakh, Senegal and the Arctic Circle.
In the UK, she has also delivered media training to the MOD and leading businesses.
Contact Hazel
- hazel@hazelsoutham.co.uk
- 01962 861411
- 07785 538556