Third Life

The Obsessive Diary

Photo by Kristel Hayes on Unsplash

Home to the farm as Solstice approaches, I left London on Friday after breakfast with J, H and others; in those morning hours as the market crowds with candlesticks and ragged chairs, we meet up the top where they having been meeting for over a decade. Every Friday, that’s where they’ll be, and now me, too. It’s exactly why I moved back to the city, this easy connection, no phone calls or train times involved. Eggs on toast and a coffee, a conversation that dives immediately into heart regulation, memoir and alien life force. H pointed me at the audio book of A New Science of Heaven by Robert Temple and I listened to Plasma all the way from Ladbroke Grove to Guildford where a second root canal awaited me.

This one wasn’t as fun as the first and the first was no fun at all. She, my dentist, is lovely, couldn't be sweeter nor more adept at her craft. We’d already bonded over Mangalore - her birth place and where I landed when I ran away from Uni to search for my boyfriend’s mother ¹ and we were on a roll of trust and careful hands but nothing beats metal in the mouth and screaming drills to bring nightmare to a reclining seat. I dug nails into pain points as instructed by J before I left Golborne. I breathed out as the needles went in. An hour went by. My heart rate went up about a thousand notches. She told me I was doing well and I had no measure for that.

Numb all the sunny way back to the station, another train ride to Milford where my car had been gathering sticky dust for a fortnight in the carpark of the railway. Waitrose, because dinner was needed and I wasn’t planning on driving again till Sunday. An odd feeling of grip in my mouth where tooth recreated filled the jagged gap I’d been living with. Home to a garden exploding in summer. Nesting birds darted from the hedges as I drove in and I rang the farmer to say let’s defy those sightline furies of many years and leave them be till November. He wrote back, You must be psychic. I was just about to text you. Jasmine left me no option but to bury my face in flowers at the gate. Artichokes impersonated triffids. Michaelmas daisy’s moved in tides across the yard. Agapanthus stuck up like sentries to remind me of my mother. Poppies budded with opium. Vine tendrils reached for me as I lay on the day bed talking to M. later on the phone to A she asked me what I do with weeds. I said I didn’t recognise the word because the land is singing. The air is pulsing. There is life in great multidimensional stories spilling into every gap and the farm is happy. There is no such thing as a weed.

An email from a journalist told me an interview I did a while back is live on BBC Sounds and I listened to ten minutes of me telling tales of the stones which on hearing in edited bites came across as so other, as if it had happened to someone else, and I found myself thinking wow, how amazing, the wish I’d been there I often have when hearing of other people’s lives enflamed before remembering I had been there, it was mine. We’re such funny creatures, aren’t we?

B is at the flat about to fly to France. I’ll be there in about a week and I can’t wait. J is in Jakarta posting videos of terrifying bike tricks at traffic lights that make me pray he’s on two feet, or at least on a bike taxi who isn’t an idiot. And I’ve been thinking about this third life which is without blueprint. My parent’s are dead, my children are out of the nest and for centuries this would have been the slowing down, the baking bread, the pottering in the garden with arms ready for grandchildren when they come but in the lull nothing but a looking back - but not for us. We are the first generation for whom a third life is granted. I see a decade before grandchildren, thirty years of an energy for who I am now; hands free and working. Eight months ago in the tumult of endings I stood in my kitchen, the quiet overwhelming, and said aloud, I have to get out of here. I had a vision of waiting at that table for my children to need me, the oppressiveness of a farmhouse that once overflowed with endless meals and Lego turned silent like a ship when the wind drops, a vessel caught in the doldrums, rocking me into ancient age.

My therapist asked, Do you miss the hub? and I said yes - the clamouring cacophony of family life, the mess and exhaustion, the no time for anything else yet somehow I made time, publishing three books, bringing up words as well as children. This is your third life, she said in response to my wobbling. There is no blueprint, and I thought, yes, that’s it. My mother worked throughout our childhood, we were a blip fitted into the slats of an architectural practice rather than the central pivot of her world and so when we left, although I cannot know for sure, I imagine she hardly noticed. Her house remained full of the waifs and strays with which she’d filled it. Her days and weeks and yearly routines remained exactly the same. She did not up and leave and rent a flat, there was no need. I’ve worried my shift in focus, the farmhouse here but without me in it, will have wobbled my children - their anchor in place but the captain jumped to a swifter, more agile vessel that as we speak is cutting through waves like the farmhouse never could; I am revelling in the ability to tack left and right at a moment’s notice, to see the sun hit waves at entirely new angles, to feel the spray so close, the light so piercing. B said I like the idea of you being at the farm but I wouldn’t want you to feel stuck. God love them both. Here we are. Third life. Let’s go.

1. First, limited edition is now sold out but I do have a couple of copies left in my office. If you’d like one of those, please DM. And if you’re a publisher who wants to offer me a deal, also DM. It’s a cracker of a story. You won’t be disappointed.