Happy Birthday Granny Annie

My mother is eighty today. Eighty. Wow. She should be listed. That's a degree of venerability that would flummox Bede. There are older trees and tortoises but not many. Continents, perhaps. Eighty. That's incredible. 

We were going to have a party, of course, and Lord knows she could use a party. The last year or so has been no fun. She's suffered two broken hips, one of each, hospitalisation and surgery. Her awful cat died after nearly two decades of being disagreeable. She can't walk and her legs and feet are painful from various other ailments. She's seen a lot of isolation, loneliness and boredom this year and she doesn't really do anything but read and sleep these days, so a party would have been wonderful - finally an opportunity to misbehave. She is a rotten old show off and she would have loved it. But no, the pandemic has crushed even that dream. I can't go to Basingstoke. I'm stuck in Belfast. Luckily the other members of my family constitute her "bubble", though the tier system has done its best to try and thwart those schemes too. 

Its a balls and its a shame because if anyone deserves Grand Dame status its Annie Higgins. Always the youngest in her family, always the baby, she has finally arrived, through sheer obstinacy, at Lady Bracknell status, but there is no one to disapprove of now, no handbag to describe with icy hauteur. Its the part she was born to play but now she has no audience. 

I hope she isn't eaten up with ennui - it's accidie, really, the malady of the monks - she's become an unwilling anchorite: not so much a Poor Clare as a poor, poor Annie. I'd love to see her twinkle again, fire up the old mischief. At the height of her powers she was a confirmed mixer, an upsetter of tables and a law unto herself. The Covid virus has been particularly cruel for the elderly and Annie is desperate to see her grandchildren, and aching to have her family all about her. The denial is awful and gnaws at her. 

She has been fairly stoical about the whole thing, though some of the Higgins pessimism has finally filtered in. But it's my dad's side who are the pessimists: a black cloud hovers permanently over that side of the family tree. My mother is a magical thinker, she's a Panglossian: if she doesn't quite believe this is the best of all possible worlds then she at least thinks things will work out for the best, God willing. Her God is very much an interventionist God, and when he's busy St Anthony picks up the slack. Her deck shuffling of holy cards wouldn't disgrace a riverboat gambler. 

Eighty years. She would have been a war baby if the war had reached Sligo. She lived in New York in the early sixties ("What was that like?" I asked. "It was okay" Where did you go?" "Dancing." "Where? " "Dunno" "Was it like Madmen?" "I have no idea.") and was living in London by the end of that decade, nursing in the hospital where I would be born. She met my dad in Muswell Hill: two Irish Higgins in Muswell Hill - no problem with an ice breaker there, especially once they worked out they weren't related. She once took me on a guided tour of where she used to live - predictably half of it wasn't there any more and she couldn't find the rest. But it was nice just to wander around, lost. She had four children and now has five grandchildren. She has been a force of nature all her life and all my life: strong, silly, funny, sentimental and full of fire. I think I'm the most like her of all of the children - my madnesses are her's as well, but I'm possibly also the least prone to doominess. I too am a magical thinker:  I also pretend and wish things away. 

I wish I was watching daft old films at blaring volume in her living room, her questioning me about every face appearing on screen, the house heated like a tropical garden. Every so often she would hold aloft an empty wine glass and make a noise like a baby bird urgently requesting feeding and I would replenish her wine, tutting loudly. I would make her a pointlessly elaborate dinner of which she would eat nothing, noting that "she's not that bothered about food". That was the old regime and I never realised how happy I was doing it. You never do at the time. Now I just want her to be happy and have fun. I want her to be afforded the possibility of enjoying things again. I want to kindle that vital spark. I want her to be rude about the gifts I bought her. Then I'd know she was on the mend, I'd know she was happy. She deserves to be happy. I hope that's not magical thinking. 

Happy birthday, Grannie Annie. I love you. x