The Spinster

This started as something for a character in my soon-to-be-published-online novel Tbe Bright Side O' Life but I think it became something broader. I don't think it really reflects my own personal opinion of spinsterdom, although perhaps some of its fears. It is perhaps a worst-case scenario with a slice of light.

What say you?

*

Spinning, not moving

It comes on gradually until it hits you like a train. Sitting quietly at a family event, watching your loved ones grow and develop, watching them change. Yet you are the same as you always were. You are the same; you are treated as you were five years ago, or ten, or twenty.

To your parents you remain a child; to your contemporaries you are an anomaly - at least until you finally settle down.

Your single income household cannot afford mortgages or flashy foreign holidays, so you listen to the minutiae of property deals and tropical islands with a smile frozen between interest and frustration. You fall behind in ways big and small, obvious and subtle.

You are excluded from topics because you wouldn't understand. Much experience is kept from you, and you have to remind yourself that it's not the 19th Century anymore. Even if it was, you know that Mr Darcy isn't coming for you. The Mr Darcys look through you to prettier girls, to sweeter girls, to girls that know how the game is played.

You are not the romantic lead in the film, after all. An extra, perhaps. Odd, given that this was supposed to be your life. Perhaps the genre is wrong...

People who love you will soon give up asking about finally settling down. Maybe they already have. Curiosity will sour into pity.

'But are you happy?' you are asked repeatedly, but the only acceptable answer is "of course not". Any variety of 'yes' is met with disbelief or suspicion. Nobody believes you can be happy alone.

You are mostly happy. Sometimes you wonder what is 'wrong' with you to have had this life thrust upon you. Can you pinpoint a single moment that sent you into the lonely direction?  Was there a missed opportunity or was fate just that capricious?

Your friends say they envy you the single life, but they are never quite sincere. They mean that their own lives are not quite 100% satisfactory, but nobody's life ever is. They would like a break from their responsibilities from time to time; often it is you who provides the opportunity for that break, and you love how those adored younglings light up at sight of their fun auntie/godmother.

People move away. It is the way of the world now: seemingly casual migration. Life gets in the way. Bonds break, as they sometimes do, and nobody is to blame. Those babies you welcomed into the world have lives of their own and Auntie is low down on the list of priorities. It is as it should be, but the world spins with you still in the middle unchanging.

All is as it should be within the order of life as commonly accepted. Milestones only touch you to make you older. One day, you are essentially invisible.

Strangers address you as 'Mrs', not considering that a woman your age would be anything else. Corrections invite pity.

Despite the effort, you are ever more alone. Everyone has their lives. You take joy from their successes and you are there with comfort in their sorrows, but you are still alone at the end of it.

You are depended on: the universal donor. You have the time, don't you?

You wake up one day and you are eighty-two years old. Your limbs don't work like they ought; your brain is slow and quick to tire. When did you become the old crone you once pitied, when you were a pretty girl with the whole wide world for the taking?

When did life unfold without you? When did you replace one set of dreams with another?

Perhaps those were never really your dreams?

Priceless Moments in Music - From the Vault - 2006

Another piece from the DefunctoBlog... this from 2006. If nothing else, it's a pretty good display of my fixation on two particular musical groups at that time...

WARNING: THIS POST INCLUDES A RIDICULOUS NUMBER OF SPOTIFY LINKS!

From the Vault - 2006: Last Night A Video Changed My Life

This was originally posted at the Old Blog That Is Old, Feb 2006. A few edits for clarity only...

As I have a habit of doing, last night I was flicking through the music channels on the telly. I rarely find anything I really really like and even rarer find something I've never seen before.

Last night, one of them, Magic, played "Barcelona" by Freddie Mercury & Montserrat Caballe. I have seen chunks of this, clips of this, but never the whole thing, not until today.

On Phantoms, Morrison & The Would've Been Question - From the Vault 2005

Another archive bit, this time from Jan 2005. I went to see The Phantom of the Opera in a rare family trip to the cinema. It was an excruciating outing in some respects: I don't love seeing movies with other people in general, and the rest of the party seemed determined to irritate the frak out of me throughout...

Of course, The Phantom of the Opera is not a great movie. It's not as bad as some folks would make out, and I don't think it's aged well but it's not awful.

This is another post that feels like it's from 'before'. Before the real darkness set in; before I pulled myself out of the hole; before, before... I've edited somewhat, partly to make my meaning absolutely clear, but the content remains essentially the same... and in places I've noted where my younger self was basically starry-eyed, naive and wrong. We live, we learn. What a naïf I was...

This stayed with me for a long time after I posted it, opening with a single, simple question:


Would I love Jim Morrison if he were ugly?

The London That Nobody Knows - From the Vault 2014

A couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to take part in a one-off choir project called Snapshot Songs, composed by the magnificent Stuart Hancock, in collaboration with various London groups, writers and artists.

London is much on my mind today, as it so often is. Like Dracula, I take strength from the soil (concrete) of my homeland. Being Irish, Not In Ireland, I will never truly belong in the Motherland no matter how I love it, no matter how much I yearn for it... but my people have been in this pocket of London since before the Industrial Revolution, it seems... and I love my Finsbury St Lukes and Barbican, and whatever you want to label it...

Philip Lynott at Ni-ni-nineteen - From the Vaults 2005

I wrote this in 2005, on the nineteenth anniversary of Philip Lynott's death. At the time, I was hugely, almost entirely consumed by the music of his band, Thin Lizzy, and of the work he had given us. This is what I felt and thought then.

Re-reading now, I miss the apparent simplicity of my feelings then. I've edited a little for clarity and length, but otherwise, this is as it appeared on my LJ (aw, bless) in January 2005.

We have now been thirty years without our Philo, but that's a post for another day.

~wavy timey-wimey lines~

No more. More.

I used to blog nearly every day. Nothing particularly good or interesting... that was the old days of Livejournal, after all. Lots of Harry Potter or whining, as I recall.

I haven't said much new for a while, except trying to fold the truth of Bowie's death into my reality. I keep thinking of things to blog about, but they don't seem to stick.

I think I stopped believing my thoughts have any particular use to the world. Not when our civilisation seems hell bent on destroying itself. My thoughts are as nothing to the world, not compared to some of the truly tremendous bloggers out there, the brave and smart women and men who are shining bright lights into the manifold ways in which society works to keep so many people oppressed in one way or another, and often more than one.

I, I, I... maybe I got sick of the absolute self-absorption that characterises the way I blog.

Nah, that can't be it.

Maybe I ran out of things to say. I can only declare and express my love for various dead musicians in so many ways, after all. I can only wallow in the stagnant puddle of self-pity a little while without people abandoning me entirely.

*

Fear keeps my voice still, too. Fear what our government is doing and what it means for me and the people I love. Fear that I really won't amount to much or get my dreams to come true. Fear that I will become the worst of myself after all. Fear that I will try and try and nothing will come of it.

Fear that everything that matters to me will be taken away. Fear that every nice, good, fun, happy moment must be followed by six more of unhappiness, pain, miz-uh-ree and whatever else it is that keeps me in the dark cage of my own devising.

I tried, after all. I did everything I was supposed to do. I finished my novel - and it's good - and I sent it out into the world. I got healthy at last, I rewired my brain, I did my very best.

I tried and... nothing. I did all the things I thought I was supposed to do and... nothing. More of the same. More waiting for my life to start, more moments of hollow, howling despair.

That's the petulant brat in my head who thinks she's entitled to everything just because she asked nicely and isn't a horrible human being.

That's the brain weasels talking, of course. That's the writer's block talking.

No more of that. Maybe there's still more to say about those dead musicians, maybe there's more for me to observe about the world as it crumbles... nobody else sees the world as I do, after all.