I.& I: ON BEING A FIRST-TIME GRAN – a journal, a memoir, and assorted rants
Returning home after my last day with I., I felt a knife-like pain in my shins. Looking it up online, I discovered it was something called shin splints, and that the only cure is to stop doing whatever caused it – in this case, pounding the hard London pavements, something I can hardly avoid if life is to continue. All I can do is try and mitigate it and hope that works. So I bought a pair of gel-soled, tremendously supportive trainers, that I hope will cushion my progress. They’re unbelievably ugly and unbelievably comfortable. When I remarked on their comfort to Bruce, he said, yes, he’d noticed them, and wondered if this was the first stage on the slippery slide towards leisure garments. What next? Trackie bottoms? A slanket?
I wore them for today’s outing. It was a beautiful September day – the kind of beautiful day that used to be standard for September. It was also the day when the International Panel on Climate Change confirmed that the world is rapidly becoming a less hospitable place, and that unless we change our habits more or less instantly, which seems improbable, the notion of standard weather will soon be a thing of the past, and humans are going to have the father and mother of a hard time.
I think about this a lot, especially in relation to I.. When my little grandson grows up, what kind of world will this be? The wicked men who for their own selfish reasons – because they’re in the fossil-fuel business, or ‘consult’ to it, or because action might dent their comfortable lifestyle, or perhaps because they’re simply deluded – try to persuade us that climate science is suspect and lobby politicians to make sure nothing is done, are mostly well over sixty, so won’t be around to feel the worst of the consequences. But don’t they have offspring? I’ve been trying to think of words adequate to express what I feel about these people, but it’s beyond me. Why badmouth harmless body parts or innocent animals?
Esther, more optimistic than me, thinks people will find some way through. She points out that the elderly have always prophesied the imminent end of the world – a world, she said with sweet certainty, that is going to need people like I.. And it’s true, there’s always been some terminal disaster looming, whether real or perceived. When my grandparents were in Russia, it was the Cossacks. When my father was a child, a person called the Get-Ready Man walked the streets shouting, ‘Get ready, get ready, the end of the world is nigh!’ When I was a baby, there was Hitler. And when Esther was a baby, there was the bomb. Or rather, there was still the bomb – I’d first marched against it when I was seventeen, over twenty years earlier. And here, after all that, we still are, the only remaining legacy of those half-forgotten days the ludicrous waste of money that is Trident.
As I piloted I. in his buggy through the carbon-spewing London traffic, my shins began to hurt again.
Moral: just because it’s ugly, doesn’t mean it’s therapeutic.
Originally written Monday, 30 September 2013