I'm forever blowing bubbles

The editorial committee here doesn't spend all day sitting on its arse: it does make some decisions. The decision not to go on about the funny terms people access the site via google searches for sometimes saddens me, as there are some crackers. But today the committee has given me a special dispensation to thank the person in Holland who searched for:

older women blowing bubbles

This morning I woke up to an email from my dearest most beloved friends, who now live in the San Francisco Bay area and are seen in the Baroque vicinity approximately once every blue moon. (You can guess the number of times I have been to San Francisco. That's right.) Now, these friends - the first people I met after landing in London, when I was 19 and they were all of about 30-something - have written that they are now 60! And they say I do not look old at all in the pictures I sent them, and that in any case they consider me still an infant.

They came over here young, like I did, but in flight from the draft in the USA, as products of the sixties, and I think I can say they have lived their lives according to their values and ideals. They've never owned a house, been tempted to put their energy into "things" (I know - it's not my way - not that I own Baroque Mansions, far from it), got sucked into the vortex. They never had to become Jack Lemmon. They do gardening and t'ai chi, and I still sometimes think of the colour therapist* they used to go to to in the eighties - a 90-year-old Quaker woman named Alice. I was very inspired by her example, and now I know why: I too will be working when I'm 90.

Their habit of wandering (I used to love the stories about the Magic Bus) meant they never got indefinite leave to remain in London, so for the past ten years they've been back in the States trying (always trying, travelling light) to make a go of it there. Can you imagine! In these years! So part of the email was about their half-Dutch neice who is doing a graduate degree in Europe, and how that reminds them of what they miss.

The long email has reminded me of what I miss. I read my stats at just the right moment.

Oh, Dutch searcher, whoever you are: Come back! We promise we will! (whether waving or drowning...) (less of that - ed)


*you lie on a table and they beam differently-coloured light at various parts of your body. At the time I was very interested in Bauhaus, and Johannes Itten's theories of colour.