Stardust Memories

A few years ago Alex Michon interviewed me for Arty and asked me about success.I told her if i thought i was going to live another five years i would feel a dreadful failure but if I was going to live to over 100 I would feel quite good.

My plan is to live to 100 and to die on my birthday to the sound of swifts; even if this means suicide. It seems very neat to me and confounds Thomas Hardy’s doom-laden reflection on the source of human misery: knowing your date of birth but not your date of death.

These people managed to die on their birthdays:

* Ingrid Bergman – Aug. 29, 1915-1982

* George Washington Carver – Jan. 5 1864-1903

* Elizabeth of York – Feb. 11, 1466-1503

* Betty Friedan – Feb 4. 1921-2006

* Francesco Petrarch – July 20, 1304-74

* Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. – Aug. 17, 1914-1988

* William Shakespeare – April 23, 1564-1616

These people were willing themselves to death but their bodies weren’t cooperating. They died within a week of their birthdays:

St. Francis of Assisi,Louis XIV, Sam Adams, Julia Child, Perry Como, Gary Cooper, Erich Fromm, Marvin Gaye, Estelle Getty, Andy Gibb, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Frida Kahlo, C.S. Lewis, Ezra Pound, John Ritter, Auguste Rodin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dinah Shore, Gene Siskel, James Whistler, Ludwig Wittgenstein

I got the Owl and the Pussycat card in 1979. I told my mother I was going to keep it for the rest of my life.

August 4th. 1979

To Annabel with all our love on your 4th birthday, from Mummy, Daddy, Harriet, Liz & Caro.

August 4th. 2008

To Annabel with love and best wishes for a very happy Birthday. Father.

It was so lovely to see you: I hope that my surprise and nervousness did not appear as being unwelcoming.

I would so like to meet under more propitious circumstances. Maybe I could take you out to lunch in Cambridge or the Orford Oysterage.

This week has been strange I did a bin-raid with Jamie on Wednesday very early in the morning at a place where I found out my father lived in 2003 in a little village near Cambridge. It was going to be some stupid Sophie Calle wannabe art project but it didn’t go to plan as he was actually in the garden. I hadn’t seen him for 18 years and had been told that he had killed himself the bin raid was to find out. I knocked on the door and he answered in his underpants and showed me in to a tsunami of crap: papers, chairs upside-down, food, like a weird badgers set! my dreams of being adopted had to be abandoned at this point, the genetic fingerprint all too evident as he sat in a pile of crosswords in his underwear with a boiled egg on his lap. I taped it all but I was an idiot really doing it- although the old snake had definitely lost his fangs. I have slept for the rest of the week-think it overwhelmed me didn’t think I would ever see him again. I don’t
know how the hell you handled your father dying-I am in admiration. How do you feel? I hope you are ok-you seemed brilliant last time I saw you.

Anyway…I wondered if you are free any of the weekend of the 21st/22nd/23rd June but you might be looking after Poppy or knackered after Manchester- would 20th July time be better for you? if you really busy could: wave to me across the street/have a drink/go to the archive/car boot whatever you fancy. Ps you and Paul are always welcome in Suffolk. (ha ha that sounds like a threat doesn’t it!)
Bye bye Ells
Annabel xx

Dear Else,
How are you? I loved your email and I knew I couldn’t do it justice with my reply-but I thought I would send you one anyway. I looked up Bratitsimo and you are right-I got a bit carried away and ordered a top that I think maybe makes me look like I work in a building society-but I like it-and what’s your account number please? Well that was for me mighty complimentary to compare me to Poppy from Happy go lucky I wish I was like her -it’s my new goal in life and Maude is fantastic isn’t she I love it when she throws the ring away because then she knows where it is!Audrey Tatou is so sweet isn’t she-have you seen dirty pretty things? I saw that recently and I liked her.

Norway how lovely- have you read the Summer Book by the old moomin herself? I have had a lot of Scandinavian fantasies after reading that-where are you staying? I will look it up on the internet.

That’s great you have lost so much weight so quickly. Have you tried listening to that oily reptile Paul Mckenna? ‘I can make you thin’ I start off laughing in a superior way at his faux American accent and novotel flip chart patter and then wake up 20 minutes later-so I am not sure what he actually says- he could just be brain washing me to tell people I know to buy his cds…it worked the first time for me but then I got back into the old dribbling at trifles-although since I found out that M&S sherry trifle was the number one sick-up of John Prescott I have lost my thing for them a bit.

Ctd. next post

The window space had my mothers desk in it. I could look out and get a glimpse of the pavement often with a chicken on it trying to get grit from the road. My mothers diary laid out and her encrypted writing that I was embarrassed of in school notes and later I faked when I lived on my own. Rebecca. Prepared for a life as a mistress of a house.

It was a three leaf desk with garland handles, it fitted perfectly into the large window near the flowerbed. I had found an earring belonging to a previous owner of the house there, she had been the first woman in the village to have electricity and had a lot of parties. The earring was shaped like a wedding bouquet but I think she never married. I hoped that her bedroom had been my bedroom and that the earring had been on her dressing table by the window and had flown out with the heavy push of an expensive curtain. Or maybe she cast the wedding bouquet out of the window as she danced into bed with a man.

My mother’s desk had a range of artefacts: heather and a snail shell petrified inside a glass paperweight-I tried to chip the heather out but the glass went opaque and I mildly ruined it. A bible with a solid silver front- every time I looked at it I had the same impulse I have with a biscuit to bite the top solid part off the soft papery bit and indeed I had done that when I was five and the bible was delicately held together by the immobility by the desk-if a fly had landed near it-it would have disintegrated.

The tray from Venice rested on this desk on the right hand side. It had three brass bean-bells from Africa on it and that’s all-my sister Harriet has those now. There was a miniature pencil that went with a lost diary and one or two stamps, a book being ludicrously extravagant. I have the tray now and it finally looks how I imagined it would if I owned it.