WRITE about the birds, he said. Black moorhens found shelter in the rushes by the lake; a pair of snow-white swans floated on the still waters.
We saw a grey heron haul himself up off the lake’s edge, take wing and glide slowly across the skyline.
“The sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing,” I told him. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” I said and he knew because that story comes from an old French fable.
Write about the birds, he said. But I wanted to write about the long-legged human bird in the Jacuzzi. She was a redhead, porcelain of skin, languid of limb. She lay in the Jacuzzi in the hotel spa along the top of her boyfriend.
At one point, when they were kissing deeply, she opened one beady eye and looked straight at me.
This old bird was schlepping along in her spa slippers and towelling gown to complain. I’m good at that. I glared back. She went back to the kissing.
Two hours they took up residence in that Jacuzzi. No-one else felt welcome.
“Get a room,” I wanted to shriek. But they probably had one.
Hmmph, I thought. And hmmph again at dinner when my husband ordered fish and chips.
“That baby fish must have been wrested from his mother at birth and dropped into the batter,” I told him.
It truly was a little fishy in a little dishy – I’d have sent the puny one back in our local chippy where he’d have been a quarter of the price.
“It’s beautifully cooked,” said my husband.
“I’m turning into Olive,” I told him.
Olive Kitteridge is a character from a book I’m reading. She’s a retired maths teacher. She’s sharp and abrupt. Her people skills are limited. Sometimes she shrugs and says “phooey”.
In one of the stories she comes upon a local girl, one of her old students, who was made a US poet laureate. She sits down for a chat, knowing that she’s only doing it because of the laureate tag.
She’s not impressed. This girl is just the same one she taught maths to way back in the day, no matter what life has gifted her. Olive ends the conversation with a throwaway line about using Olive in one of her poems.
Months later, someone shoves a magazine through her door and there is, indeed, a poem. It’s about how the girl met her old teacher who once terrified her and who, in turn, is terrified by age and loneliness.
How the teacher is “white whiskered” – oh, cruel – and how she is so lonely. The knife dug deep, laced as it was with truth.
“I’m sharp like Olive,” I told my tolerant other half.
I have friends who’d like a slice of bolshy me.
“I’d like to be assertive like you,” said one.
“What, so you can stand in the doctor’s reception and yell ‘The NHS stinks?’ That wasn’t my finest hour,” I told him.
“Just over all,” he said.
My husband favours the gentle approach. Take the advice of the other lady you met in that crushed Jacuzzi, he said. She wrote a lovely review and they rang her and gave her an upgrade.
“They must have put a star by our name,” the lovely, not-snogging lady told me.
There’ll be that poo-with-a-face emoji by ours.
It was a lovely night away. Every birthday counts these days, even if you are white-whiskered and intolerant of Jacuzzi babes and teeny battered cod.
The staff were lovely. When I told the young waiter to put the ‘toast’ back in the toaster to make it slightly brown like real toast, he did so with a smile and even nicked me extra butter.
There was a couple with a little boy who reminded me of us 20 years ago. The setting was winter beauty. We wrapped up warm and walked by the lake.
We were once the moorhens clucking in the rushes, once the swans held close in the grey waters of the lake and now, we’re more like the old heron, grey and bearded, launching himself up out of the reed beds.
Weary of limb and weighted with life, hauling ourselves up is a little harder these days.
But the heron wins through. He finds the strength for the ascent and the joy of the flight... up out of the shadows he climbs, higher and higher, ever onward and upwards.
