Caution will not help – only chance will save you from the cruel scythe

ATERRIBLE thing came to pass last Monday. (It wasn’t that Donald Trump reached a new low on the stage at Hofstra University — and showed himself to be the champion w***er of the 21st Century.) I turned 49. It wasn’t a significant birthday like 50. Maybe it felt worse almost for that reason, its ordinariness. Suddenly, I felt really old. Or really not young. Not morbidly so, but you do start to feel that you have reached an age where things don’t occur, they re-occur.

I was in London for the millionth time for work and, millionth time or not, I was lost in the Tube station. And lost in my head. Mind the gap. Mind the gaping human void, more like.

Later that night, when I got to Heathrow to catch my flight home, the absurdities of existence in Terminal 2 made my spirit falter further: you need to show your boarding card to the fuss-bucket in the shop to buy a packet of crisps. Whatever about healthy snack options, patience was never my strong suit.

You hope to work out the angst with age. But, like a lot of things in life, it doesn’t quite work out like that. You hope you won’t get cancer. Crisps apart, you try to eat stuff that will lessen the chances of you getting cancer and dying. It all seems down to very cruel chance. Only chance can save you.

This I say because I found my dad’s copy of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s autobiography the other night in our attic, aka my man-cave in Portobello. In Hope Abandoned, she wrote about Stalin’s Gulags: “We all belonged to the same category live, I mightn’t be the one to provide it. I won’t have the magic stuff. What do I know that she needs to know? What if I tell her the wrong stuff ? But there is no wrong advice in life because everything we are experiencing is a learning curve.

Even at her gentle age, Emilia brings her own brand of individuality to the world — which is saying something in a society where the knuckle-draggers seem to be doing their best to remove all individuality.

It is my adorable niece Skye’s sixth birthday today. I remember my own mother holding Skye in her arms in Mount Carmel on the day she was born — and three days later, my mother dying. It was like she waited for Skye to be born, so she could die in some sort of peace. Though ending up on a trolley in a corridor in St Vincent’s Hospital at 80 years of age isn’t quite the definition of peaceful she envisioned, pondering the twist of fate that led her there, chaos all around in a hospital.

So I try to remember her in her prime instead.

In my eye’s eye, she was a personification of radiance, glittering under summer suns; doling out cream buns and ham sandwiches on picnic blankets in fields, or on cold, stony beaches handing out 99s with chocolate Flakes stuffed in them like the torch in the Statue of Liberty. Or rubbing lotion on my nine-year-old sunburnt back on the seafront in Bray, or picking me up from school in her yellow Mini with the leather roof and my school pals slagging me that my mother looked like Elvis Costello in her sunglasses.

I can’t stand up for falling down.