Western Morning News (Saturday)
Secrets to a long life? Too many to list...
WELL, she deserves it. A rousing “Happy Birthday” that is. My mother-in-law is 99 this week. And I reckon that she’ll live to get her telegram from the Queen. Hubs and I reckon she’ll outlive us.
She sent an email to Hubs today at 6am, asking, as he had a Prime account, if he could order her a lightweight flatbed sander – she wanted it tomorrow.
MIL does all her own DIY. In lockdown she relaid her patio. There is not an inch of her house, in or out, that she hasn’t painted. When it eventually changes hands, her house will immediately double in size once the paint has been stripped off. It’s all green and white, with pillarbox red accoutrements, holly berries, the like, so there’s a perpetual feel of Christmas in her cottage.
I once called in to find a hulking Sky technician on the verge of tears. He couldn’t find the TV cables anywhere and needed to check them. Not surprising really as MIL channels out the walls and buries them, plastering them over and wallpapering on top.
“My shoulder aches,” she said to Hubs. “Anno Domini Mum” he said, oozing sympathy. “What have you been doing?” “Well I’ve been painting the kitchen ceiling,” she says. I think she’s probably blacklisted from local decorators. The last one went in, much against her better judgment, to wallpaper her kitchen. By the time he left, she’d ripped it off to start again. She made a cracking job of it too.
I drove past her house the other day. Not content with decorating her own house, she was bent over, the suppleness of someone half her age, weeding the pavement.
This week she’s busily making curtains. She’s the only person I’ve ever met to make matching covers for their freezer and washing machine and would definitely have fitted into the Victorian age when piano legs were covered to avoid embarrassment.
MIL is, I’m convinced, powered by long life batteries. Except hers never need changing. She strides along, no stick and stubbornly refuses an arm to cross the road. Last week she went to see “an old lady” in Tavistock. It meant catching three buses. The last one terminated early so MIL did no more than hop off and flag a car down to take her for the rest of the journey. Coming home she stopped to buy two bags of groceries and a couple of bunches of flowers before taking another bus home.
If you think I’m going to be able to share the elixir of life, the secret of longevity that she has imparted, I’m afraid you’re wrong. Well, I can, but I’m not sure you’d make a lot of sense of it.
For the last 10 years she has, to our eternal embarrassment, been a huge Donald Trump fan. He can do no wrong. Maybe her passion for politics is the secret. If I rang her now, she’d tell me what the Dow Jones was doing. Maybe her long life is due to taking a daily vitamin she buys in Boots. The packet says “take for four weeks”. Well that’s clearly not to be obeyed. She’s taken them without a break for 40 years.
Many years ago she smoked 40 cigarettes a day. That hasn’t stopped her. She’s never touched alcohol, but does have a really sweet tooth. A large box of chocolates will disappear overnight as she sits in bed watching American crime documentaries, electric blanket on, which she says is “so much nicer than a man dear”. One evening we had to let ourselves in as she wasn’t answering her phone. She was fast asleep in bed with a mountain of golden Werthers originals on the bed, a bit like Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory.
Despite this, MIL is slim. She has a strict food routine, weighing out her porridge every morning, following a diet that she read online which might require boiled grapefruit for three weeks. I’ll invite her for supper and the reply is always the same. “I’m on my diet dear”. Then two days later I’ll find her scuttling back from the shops with a box of four cream cakes and a bag of chocolates. Nothing if not inconsistent. Yet she has the patience of a saint, and will unpick a coat to re-make it, and recently altered 20 pairs of trousers.
Later this month MIL travels to Tenerife for two months. It’s her annual trip and the hotel know her well. She insists on travelling alone, refuses to let us put her up in an hotel at the airport, instead insisting on taking a coach leaving at 2am.
Generosity is MIL’s middle name. She insists on spending far too much on presents – it’s impossible to stop her. I’m always being given bunches of flowers and her grandchildren are spoiled too. My son never forgot the pencil case he was given when he was 11 – with “I love Leonardo di Caprio” written on it…
Thank God for eccentricity in our troubled times. I hope MIL lives for another 20 years because without her life would seem very dull.