Firstly, thank you to Female First for having me on here – I’m a longtime admirer of your blog and it’s always so inspirational and uplifting. So please keep up the great work!
The Women of Primrose Square
And so to the most inspirational women I’m lucky enough to have in my life. There’s my Mum, of course, who continues to be a powerhouse. Bear in mind, this is a woman who is 80 going on 60 and who, in the face of a global pandemic, only wants to know if this means she can still download the latest episode of Better Call Saul.
Then there’s my best friend Clelia, who’s just finished wowing the crowds on a UK tour of The Sound of Music, where she was knee deep in the Von Traps belting out Do-Ray-Mi. Clel played the wicked baroness and was so deliciously bold in the part, she didn’t just steal scenes, she committed grand larceny with them.
There’s my author gal-pals, among them the mighty Sinead Moriarty and Monica MacInerney, who are always there for coffees and chats and who just ‘get it’ whenever you need to bend their ear about plots and characters and stories that aren’t behaving as they should. Is there anything that’s better fun than taking a little mini-break with the women in your life? To this day, the memory of three magical days Sinead, Monica and I spent at the Hay Festival last year makes me beam. (And as an aside, for any booklovers reading this – Hay is a MUST. Like Disneyland, except for book worms. Bliss.)
But the good folk at Female First asked me to write first and foremost about the most significant ladies in my life. So this, I’m giving over to my oldest pals in the world. Anyone out there lucky enough to still have the same group of friends 30, 40 years on will know what I’m taking about.
The thing is, as we age, our old pals take on a significance you can’t imagine. It’s not till you pass 40 that you really begin to appreciate the value of an old friend, who still remembers you in primary school and who can slag you authoritatively about the time you had spikey hair and went around in acid yellow dungarees with a Take That T-shirt underneath.
There’s a glorious shorthand that old friends can use with each other, mainly because we’re all effectively the family that we’ve chosen for ourselves. Your old mates are the ones who’ll tell you to stop overreacting to minor worries, like no one else in the world can.
‘Stop stressing about this – you were always the same – remember the time when we were fifteen and Joe Cunningham didn’t call you for a week and you stopped eating?’ They’ll remember a time when all your had was dreams of a career and hopes of making a living as an actor/writer and were the first ones to support you when that miracle actually came to pass. We’re there for each other, through good times and bad. Them for me, and me for them.
Sad to say, but as you get older, life does start taking things away from you, much loved family members for one thing and it seems like there’s not a year goes by when I’m not at the funeral of yet another parents of a close pal. All the more reason why I’m so grateful to those friends who’ve been in my life for, in once case, well over forty years now, since we were in Primary school together. Is there anything more vital than that link with the past? With easier, more carefree times, when all you had to worry about was swapping your comics and going to each other’s kiddie birthday parties?
So thank you, my old friends. I love every one of you and I’m here for you all the way. (And Karen, if you’re reading this? Can I have my old Jackie annual back please?)