A Startling Life

Yo Granny cool erotic blog Laverne twittered a couple of days ago. I didn’t set out to write about my erotic life. I set out to write an interesting blog of ideas aimed at women my age. We are after all ill served in bookshops and in the media-ask Anna Ford. But as Emily Dickinson said, ‘To live is so startling, it leaves little time for anything else.’

For me the erotic has been a guiding light from there to here and I can’t see it dimming with age. I know it does for some women and good luck to them. I’d even go so far as to say they are lucky. I’ve always run on overactive adrenals myself and although as time goes by I get longer rest periods, I still every so often get the urge to pull out the dressing up box and don the basque, boots and bowler combo, put George(Michael) on the stereo and dance until I pant.

I’ve always been adventurous and some of that I have to admit has been sexual. After qualifying as a GP in the sixties, I couldn’t bear the thought of settling down and for years wandered the shores of South America and West Africa volunteering my skills and checking out the meaning of exotic. It’s all in the mind I can tell you and Voltaire was right. The answer lies in your own back garden. But did I listen? Did I buggery.

So off I went doing daft things like carrying contraband stuff in hairpieces across dangerous borders. Once I had my car pulled to pieces while I stood insouciantly scratching my head-checking that the stuff was covered by hair. When pre-menstrual I refused to wind down my window at check points, even though a machine gun was pointed at my nose. Once I stepped over a snake so large it had its tail in the bush on one side of the road and its head in the other. As I said I’ve always been adventurous. You may one day be able to read about my flirtation with fetish in my book ‘Starting at the End’ which is at present on that slow, depressing trawl around publishing fairs.

Today’s adventure was braving the snow and ice that have unexpectedly gripped the U.K, in order to get to Yoga, only to discover that my teacher Robert had shut up shop and gone toboganning. Every time I turn the radio on I am told to keep warm and not venture out. This makes me all the more determined. So I don my snowboots, bought one hot day last summer in a Tenby sale, and carrying my Leki stick off I go.

My mistake was to take a short cut I had found a few weeks ago, not taking into account that its steep incline had attracted quite a lot on sliding on trays the result of which was a surface of polished ice. Half way up the loose snow that I was relying on gave out and I was marooned on an island of ice. I felt at that moment that I am perhaps too old for such adventures, as my aim in life these days is to avoid at all costs being taken to hospital, which I believe is the most dangerous place on earth. I certainly don’t fall as softly as I used to, as my spine, in spite of the yoga, becoming set in its ways. So there I was back against the wall , Leki anchoring me to the spot and not daring to move. I had that Crib Goch feeling. Once I had climbed the Snowdon ridge that makes strong men blanche and did it by not looking down and moving slowly hand over fist. I did the same this morning. Placing my back against the wall, I held myself up with the stick and moved slowly step by step like a crab. I didn’t panic. But looking back it was perhaps a silly risk to be taking. I wont tell Lala.