Happy New Year! Hope you had a good one. Mine came four hours later than for those of you back in the UK, meaning that it was 2008 for me for 366 days and four hours (plus that extra nano-second that they added on all the clocks to get them back on track). On the downside 2009 will be 364 days and 20 hours long. Unless I go away for the New Year again. I might have to keep doing this, just to ensure that my years don't come in short.
Some bad news came through to paradise a couple of days ago. My Great Aunty Babs died on Boxing Day. She was in her nineties and had had a good knock, but it was still a nasty shock, if not exactly a surprise to get the news. My grandparents' generation will soon no longer be with us and although her sister, my amazing Grandma Doris is still battling on in body, her mind is drifting away over the horizon, bobbing out with the tide.
Our family is not a huge one and I don't have all that many close relatives. Aunty Babs was someone I'd see every now and again when we travelled up to Middlesbrough and who would send me a book token or a pocket diary at Christmas time. I used to love going round to their house as a child as Babs and her husband Joe Bainbridge had a little Scotty dog. I always wanted a dog, but my parents correctly ascertained that that enthusiasm would wear off once I actually had one and all the time and expense of such a purchase would fall to them.
I have a memory of the dog that I have only made sense of in hindsight, but I recall on one occasion I was about four and playing with him (how awful that I can't think of his name - might have been Scottie, but I don't think so) and he was enthusiastically playing back. He was jumping up on my leg and suddenly everyone else in the family seemed rather concerned that he should stop and pulled him away. "He's just being friendly!" I innocently declared. Of course now I realise that something else had been going on and the looks of horror and embarrassment and mild amusement on the faces of my relatives make more sense to me now than they did then. Is it bad that my main memory of a relative is actually about her dog trying to have sex with my five year old leg?
Probably.
Best not get my mum to mention that at the funeral.
But the women on that side of the family seem to be long livers. My gran is 97 and still counting and last year bounced back from several maladies which would have taken out most people ten years her junior.
And the previous generation were just as hardy. I remember my Great Aunty Eva (though she must have been a Great Great) who passed away at 99 when I was about eight. I cried a lot when I heard the news and my grandma and mum were surprised as I didn't know Eva all that well, but I was bereft because I had really wanted to be related to someone who was 100 and Eva had just fallen short and let me down.
The bitch.
But I had met her a few times and (I am pretty sure I've got the right person), on one occasion when I was about 5 or so, I was at some party she was at (possibly her birthday). I have a vague recollection of spending a lot of the time outside searching for a four-leaf clover (this could well have been a different occasion, but it's connected in my unreliable memory stream), and actually found one and kept it in a tin for some months afterwards. But as we were saying goodbye at the end of the party, Eva (if it was her, and I'm actually starting to wonder if I've got her name wrong, so who knows how much of this is true) came to give me a kiss. A nonagenarian was approaching me and quite rightly I was rather petrified of this wrinkly, hairy, but smiling old lady. She kissed me bang on the lips, which would have been quite unsettling for any child, but I remember it distinctly (and if not Eva it was some other ancient relative - but I'm 90% confident I've got the right person). We weren't the kind of family who kissed on the lips - and to be honest I still get a bit freaked out by other people who do that with their children. If you do that you're a weirdo. Or maybe I'm just repressed or overly prudish, but lips seems too sexual for family use (and I grew up in Somerset!). She was thus probably the first person to purposefully kiss me square on the mouth and it's stuck in my mind. So much for four leaf clovers bringing you luck.
Fortunately it's had no lasting implications on my sexuality. I mean I have probably had sex with more ninety year old women than most people of my age, but I don't think my gerontophilia can be attributed to his moment of near necrophilia mixed with paedophilia.
I am being unfair (and also lying about having sex with women in their nineties - I draw the line at 78). Eva was merely expressing her love for the cute little ragamuffin, some ninety years her junior, who would live to see things that she could never dream of.
But it struck me as I was reminiscing about this event that I have been kissed on the lips by someone born in the 1870s. That just seems too freaky to believe. She was kissing lips when Queen Victoria was still on the throne, probably attached to a man in a top hat with an impressive handlebar moustache. What a baton has been passed on through time and saliva. It's incredible to think that it is possible to be alive in the last year of the Noughties (can you believe this decade is almost at an end?) having kissed someone who was alive over 130 years ago.
I now see it as my duty to live til I am over 100 and to kiss some terrified young relation of mine square on the mouth, and so in two kisses we will have straddled two hundred years. The child will have to be old enough to remember the event, so I might have to be closer to 105 or 106 in about 2073. But it's definitely something to aim for. It's not a nice thought for whichever petrified infant who'll end up with the grey and puckered lips of the 106 year old me looming towards them, but I hope in time they will come to understand what they are participating in. They will have been kissed by lips that were kissed by lips from the 1870s. And that will be an amazing historical journey. It's not perverse and strange, like you're making it. It's beautiful and timeless and the one occasion when it should be permitted to platonically kiss a child on the lips (have a go at the people who kiss their kids on the lips on a daily basis without this historical justification, rather than me).
I feel humbled by the realisation anyway, even if, as might be the case, the woman who kissed me was someone else.
But if you're into being kissed by people from the 19th Century and you haven't done it yet, then you'd better pull your finger out. There's only a few of them left. You could pop down to Wells and see
Harry Patch, but your options are limited. And don't get complacent and think you can wait for the moment to present itself. You'll have to get proactive. Yes it's true that there are said to be people in places like Tibet who have lived to 150, but they probably won't have the documentation to confirm this. And if you wait even three or four more years your only option might be to kiss a tortoise or a tree. And you don't want to look like a pervert.
I got my 19th Century person kissing in early and I'm glad to have got it out of the way. You aren't going to have half the choice I had and back in the seventies there were still a few 19th Century people who were at least not hideously ugly and a couple who might even still be called sexy. But you're going to just get the dregs now. There are not any sexy people over the age of 109.
Of course the other option would be just to go down the graveyard and dig up a coffin. But that is sick.
And I'm glad that my heartfelt tribute to my Aunty Babs has somehow gone down this dark alley.
Thanks for the book tokens and the diaries and for stopping your scotty dog from ejaculating on my child leg, Babs.
I don't know why I'm being so scurrilous as I am genuinely upset about her demise. But that's just the kind of idiot I am.
