The New Reality

Sadly, I know a few people who have lost someone very close to them, unexpectedly, unfairly, suddenly.In most conversations with these friends they talk about a new reality. The death of their Mother, their sister, their child, created an earthquake in their daily life that, in the aftermath, did not return to life as it had been, but rather forced them into a new world. For sure I have experienced this with the death of my sister, in ways too common to write about - in the way my relationship with her family, with my parents and with my other sister, have shifted - but also in ways completely unexpected, and seemingly out of the blue. A few months after my sister died, I took a month off sick. I was exhausted from the trauma of the previous months. My GP thought I needed to rest. I did too, but on my first day away from work I put on my walking boots, grabbed my Oyster card and instinctively sought out a part of the city I had never visited before. I spent the day exploring back streets and staring at unusual buildings and exploring whole boroughs. I did it again the next day. And the next. By the end of that month I had rediscovered London through some of its most beautiful sights - Highgate cemetery, the back streets of Bloomsbury, Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill - and through some of its grittiest districts - Dalston, Peckham, the East End.  And something else had happened. I had, somehow, unaccountably, suddenly developed an interest in art exhibitions. Here's the thing. I have never been interested in art. Pretty much all my life I have found art galleries pretty yawn inducing. Music was where I got my creative inspiration - playing it, singing it, listening to it. After my sister died, music became unbearable. Listening to it, and in particular singing it, would break up my insides even if I was having a good day otherwise. At my local community I would routinely find my cheeks wet after singing along to a melody wholly unconnected with my bereavement - indeed, it still happens six months on, regularly. So I have stopped playing my piano or guitar, I rarely listen to my favourite tracks, and will often spend my Friday evenings at my community sitting dumbly by, deriving comfort from the community but wholly unable to participate without unravelling. Looking at beautiful things, on the other hand, seems to have grown out of my month of walks. Julian Barnes, who lost his wife five years ago, has published a book recently in which he describes his seemingly unaccountable interest in opera after the death of his wife. Before then opera had seemed incomprehensible to him. After his bereavement it was as if the emotional outpouring of opera seemed totally normal for someone whose emotions had been subjected to pain and loss so unbearable that opera seemed like a natural expression of it. I read this with dawning understanding. This could explain my reaction to art. Grief and loss had not just temporarily made me more emotional - they had broken me up with pain, and as a result different things now moved me. I derive enormous comfort from taking in beauty through art. My next London walk, which I now do monthly, is to the Tate Modern, a place I would normally avoid like the plague, and my plan is no more than to wander till I find a piece that arrests my eyes, and sit in front of it for as long as I feel the need. Can it be possible that something so terrible as the loss of someone you love from an illness you can do nothing to prevent or cure, can produce positive responses such as these? Is this what healing is about?

Passover and loss

I am preparing to make a chocolate mousse for Passover. We have this every year for dessert at our family seder. It is heavy on the eggs, dark chocolate and sugar; ask practicallty any practising Jewish family what their traditional Seder dessert is and you will find that chocolate mousse is a staple (alongside the almond plava, but this is such a terrifying concoction, designed to gum up your insides for a week, that we are not going there in this blog).  Every year we allocate responsibility for different parts of the Seder dinner menu and this year I have the desserts. I didn't used to. I used to contribute salads and I would be frying my portion of fish as busily as the next North London Jewish Mum. But this year it is desserts for me. And this is because my elder sister has died, and she was our dessert Queen, and in her absence someone needs to step in. Earlier in this blog I recounted a moving and painful afternoon in hospital with her when my niece was asking her for recipes of her most iconic desserts, and as she talked through them, her face flushed with the infection she had caught, her lids heavy, one hand clasping mine, my younger sister wrote down the recipes while I surreptitiously wiped the tears away. Thank goodness for my niece's prescience. She was preparing for exactly this day. And now it is here. And now I am making chocolate mousse according to the recipe that my sister shared with us just a few weeks before her death. So this is not an ordinary baking experience. Cracking eggs and melting chocolate my head is filled with memories of years and years of Seder dinners at which my sister would present her amazing chocolate mousse, and our kids would dig in with bionic speed, polishing it off in seconds. Memories of all her other fantastic food - her Passover pavlova, fruit towers, biscuit free cheesecakes and many other Passover-defyingly original and amazing recipes. Countless times while whisking the egg white to soft peaks, or creating a glistening chocolate mass out of the egg and melted, ridiculously overpriced Passover dark chocolate ostensibly from Switzerland (why Switzerland?? I have never understood why Switzerland has cornered the market on Passover chocolate, though it may just be that no other country has the gall to charge quite as much as they do for a block of cooking chocolate), I find myself pausing to process a related memory: my sister bringing out extra chairs for the Seder service, my sister handing out bags of marshmallows for the kids, my sister giggling at the hopeless efforts of her husband and Father to find the hidden slab of matza that the kids had hidden earlier in the evening. Making this chocolate mousse is very emotional. But the thing about Seder dinners is that they are unlike practically any other family gathering because they are so infused with the personal contribution of each participant. Our seders have for years now been at my elder sister's house. This year it will be at my parents. Laugh if you want, but my chocolate mousse is its own tribute to her years of amazing Passover desserts. That's if it turns out all right. If it collapses into a puddle I imagine I will hear her guffaws all the way through the story of the Exodus.

Cosmetics, commuting and cardio workouts

I work out first thing, 5 days a week. So do many women. I know this because when I arrive at my gym in central London it's chock full of them. It makes the changing room a really scarey place. A flailing mass of perfectly honed limbs - all, that is, except mine - bums clad in lacy thongs, hair tossed from left to right, a million hairdryers going at once, mascara wands all over the place. Women's workout kit is frankly endless, and most days if I'm having a confidence crisis, and if I ever do have one it's usually first thing in the morning, then it tends to make me want to run screaming from this hotbed of the girlie quest for perfection. It does however open up the question about what you do about make up, in the critical space between waking up and working out. Between me and the gym, lies my commute. That means taking the train, going to my office, collecting my kit, and heading for the gym. That means interaction with other people and by interaction I'm not talking about conversation. I'm not even talking eye contact. I'm talking, people who glance up at you across the train, or who look over at you en route up the road from station to office. If I'm going to do an early morning work out, in theory there is no point whatsoever in applying any make up. Right? But I'm just too vain not to do it. I cannot stand the prospect of meeting the eye of a commuter and seeing them blench at my scarey no-make-up-tousled-hair look. I'm at that age where no make up means looking ten years older. What woman wants other people to think of her as ten years older than she is - even people she doesn't know, even people who may catch a fleeting glimpse of her and no more? So, make up has to be applied, even before a workout. Challenge number two. How much make up to apply? Just enough to restore artificial youth and elasticity? A full on slap just in case today's the day you meet that handsome stranger you have always imagined will encounter you in a sweaty District Line train, midway through the rush hour, and yes ladies, we've all imagined it, even as we talk about how much we hate our commutes. It figures, right, that a place where there absolutely no privacy, nowhere to hide, and so little dignity, somewhere a bit scuzzy, a bit edgy, has got to be the perfect place for a liaison. I wonder how often it happens. Point is, the mystery is enough to want you to ensure you do your very best not to take yourself out of the game for the sake of some red lippy. But if you do, then you arrive at the gym with a five minute extra task of taking it all off before you start your work out. Or, you opt for Disgusting Option Number Three, which is to apply full slap and simply not take it off. This, let's be clear, is Not A Nice Look. Sweat makes make up run, obviously, and it all runs southward to your neck - mascara, eyeshadow, blusher, bronzer, the lot. If you don't want commuters staring at your knackered, unmade up face in horror, no more do you want fellow worker outers recoiling from the puddles of diluted bronzer on your cross trainer, or from the black rivulet tramlines running steadily from your eyes to your boobs. No. The answer here is to believe all those ads that tell you their make up is INVISIBLE. If you put it on it makes you look fab but no one will know you're wearing it. That's what you need. Stands to reason if it's invisible, then nobody will notice when it runs off, right? The debate continues.

Girl music and boy music

My partner and I share an ITunes account. This is a huge mistake. We first set it up this way because he had a laptop and I didn't - this was way before IPads and tablets etc etc so it was just the easiest way to do it when we both purchased IPods. I thought it would be brilliant for me because my partner has a passion for music and I figured this way I would be able to download loads of cool new tracks by bands I had never heard of who I would absolutely love. Well, part of this is certainly true. I regularly find on my IPod loads of cool new tracks by bands I have never heard of. I try really, really hard to love them. It's not easy. Most of the time it's just not possible. My partner goes in for bloke bands, heavy on the bass guitar, lots of mournful, meaningful lyrics, lots of moody pauses, lots of clashing and banging and jarring. And I go in for disco and girl power. I spend loads of time searching out my favourite 80s tracks, twitching with excitement when I locate Echo Beach or tracks from Thriller. I hoard Annie Lennox and Joan Armatrading. The space where our preferences coincide is laughably narrow. We meet where his mournful, meaningful lyrics are belted out by girls. So we reunite around Adele, Laura Mvula, Florence & The Machine. That's kind of about it. I walk up the road to the station every morning at silly o'clock, stick my headphones on, switch on the IPod and reel from an unexpected bout of clashery from, hmm, who is this, Alt J? And my partner comes in for routine abuse at training courses where participants get hold of his IPod Classic and locate all the cheesy tracks, which are of course mine. Abba. Michael Jackson. Ministry of Sound circa 1992. Nowhere do our genders define my partner and me in our relationship quite so comically as in our musical choices. When I bake, my ideal background is anthemic dance stuff. I quite literally jiggle around the room with a wooden spoon in one hand and a bowl in the other. In fact I revel in it, as it shows the sucess of my months and months of rehabilitative physiotherapy on my brand new foot. My partner's taste in music when he does the washing up and cleaning up after the hurricane I have let loose on the kitchen surfaces, is so clashy and bangy that he listens to it wearing headphones, rendering him incapable of course of any other task - answering the phone, hearing the plaintive cries of one of the kids (I'm straying into my Why Men Won't Multitask thesis. Must stop.) Early in our marriage I made a heroic effort to adopt my partner's musical taste. In fact since we are both passionate about music I thought it was a fundamental requirement for the longevity of the relationship that I do so. My recent decision to define my taste as I wish, whether others think of it as cheesy or not, has been liberating. Frankly it's exhausting trying to develop a taste for genres that fight your personality. Mine finds its solace in soaring female high notes and foot-tapping froth. So where does that leave my partner's ITunes account? Well if I download a track I automatically untick the box next to its title so it does not find its way on to his IPod and his reputation as a cutting edge follower of fashion forward bloke music remains unsullied. His and hers music. Some things are just best kept apart.