Any minute now, it’s the last of the unique dates. You’re entitled to point out that there’s no such thing, that all dates are just a load of numbers, jumbled up. You’re right, they are. However, living as we do at the start of a millennium we’ve had some dates that won’t happen again for a thousand years and even then they won’t be the same.
It started off well with the first of the first of the first. New Year’s day, twelve years ago. What were you doing? Did you have the first of all hangovers? Did you make (we all did) the resolution list to end all resolution lists? And have you slimmed your thighs/ dumped him forever/ really, no I mean really got on top of your bank account/ finally got the job of your dreams/ packed in the rat race/ put on what you’re calling five pounds in the same damn place.
Can you believe how different your personal world was, a mere twelve years ago? In the history of time (hello again Stephen) it is the thought of the start of the blink of an eye but in your own universe it could be the difference between being alone and being married, with children. It could be the difference between being busy with a career or being alone, retired. It could be the freedom of health or the traps of illness. It could be scratting for scraps or winning the lottery, because someone does. Whatever happened to you, I think your life will be extraordinary if nothing has happened at all since the first of the first of the first.
My 0 of the 0 of the 0 was peculiar in the extreme. Because my husband was the county emergency planning officer of a county fifty miles away he was going to be manning the barricades all alone. There was a suspicion at the time that because of computers’ clocks vital equipment might suddenly stop working at midnight. We were all poised for dams to burst, electricity to shut down and patients on life support to die all at once. Civil protection was needed as never before, possibly, right at the time that everyone had an urgent need to be at the biggest, drunkest part ever.
So I gave up my millennium to man the barricades with him and, when nothing happened at all, was stood down and drove up the empty motorway at four in the morning. From orange pool of lamplight to orange pool of lamplight we drove up an utterly deserted motorway, two tired people in search of a party. For a while there it was just him and me and one poor soul in the police station between you and the apocalypse.
After that the first of the first of the first had to be better and was very optimistic. Against all reason it felt as if we had a new start, that all wars would cease, that people would all be kind to each other and that a wonderful new world had dawned. All because of one.
The thing about being one, which no one seemed to remark on at the time, is that you are young and really, really ignorant. The only thing that can be guaranteed in the next twelve years are opportunities for learning.
The first of the first was followed, predictably, by the second of the second. 020202 had a certain lightness about it. Twos are good as February is good. For a kick off there’s that inexpressibly welcome pay cheque after the horribly unhealthy diet that is the back end of January. Fat, spotty and miserable after subsisting on baked beans, cake crumbs and the nasty chocolates lurking at the bottom of the box, the ones that no one wants, the only people happy to see the end of the month before are those unlucky enough to have a birthday then. Pity them for they have never had a present without a sale sticker on it. Leftover love and things with the corner only a bit bent is their lot in life. So two two two is a triumph of redemption and the promise of better things in the pipeline. All the twos were all waggy tailed optimism.
Threes. I had great plans for threes. I had finished my novel that I began as a millennium project and started sending it places, devoid of knowledge that what I was posting was a boomerang. There’s an innocence about three. At the time I was still making a little porcelain Christmas present for friends and family but got above myself, being determined to make the three wise men sitting on a camel for Christmas. I even began in May. I still have a box of camels and some unfired Chinese wise men. As you do.
By the time we got to four four four, we’d all stopped calling it the new millennium, though no one was yet sure how to pronounce the date. It seemed a steady-as-she-goes sort of year. I still believed my graduate son would come home, regroup and get a job like a normal person. I did not know the direction in life of my early retired husband would be mainly towards the pub. I was still grateful for the silence from my estranged adopted parents and didn’t know they’d come back needing care. Viewed from this vantage point, it seems like a blessedly quiet year in some ways.
Fives have never been good for me. How was your five? And the five? And the other five? Five gold rings? Me neither but I was enjoying Miniatura and was making good headway with articulated dolls because the greater the difficulty of life the more energy you have to pour into art. I was focussing on the thing I could do. Seven years on this still seems like a good strategy but since then I have learned to poke, gently, the things that are wrong and watch them swirl and resettle, possibly in a better pattern. Like rubbing away at a piece of greenware, the skill of life lies in knowing when to stop. As my first how-to-do porcelain book informed me ‘you do have to rub it some.’ I was mainly trying to sand down relationships and still couldn’t see underlying causes and still thought it was all my fault.
2006. My birthday is on the sixth, oh good, of the fifth, oh bad. That neatly sums up not only my life but yours too, I’d be willing to hazard a guess. In terms of the planet 6,6,6 didn’t seem like the mark of the beast at all, it seemed wonderfully optimistic in the same way that, in the northern hemisphere, June seems like a jolly good idea, full of tea parties on the lawn and the promise of more to come. We know the reality, like the June of this royal summer, will actually involve watching the paper plates blow away in a hurricane whilst standing indoors wondering whether to put the central heating on, or not. As for the mark of the beast, it was really an early Christian reference to the awful emperor Nero, who was so dreadful after he died there were reports of him being seen along the Appian Way or bumped into down the forum, like some terrible reverse Elvis. In the main however, Junes and sixes are optimistic, in a downhill from now on sort of way.
777 has to be lucky. It’s a very popular lucky number, seven. So much so that when number seven comes up in a lottery or any game where the profits are split by the winners, they are sure to receive a really pathetic pay out. Where were you on the seventh of the seventh of the seventh? I was right in the middle of teeth at this stage.
You’d be a very lucky person if the last twelve years have been entirely healthy for you and a very unlucky one if the reverse in your health has put you in a wheelchair or bed. I was somewhere in the middle with my teeth. Just before the twelve I started with a close call, an abscess, a hospital visit and an extraction, though I had to sign and say I was perfectly happy if they took all the teeth away on on side and left me with a tube sticking out of my face. I signed but it was a lie and I escaped with just one gap. Right in the middle of the twelve the mirror image lower tooth did exactly the same palaver.
During the twelve we had moved dentist courtesy of my son’s blackened teeth. Who knew, of all the things that would trip him up at university, the enamel on his teeth would be it? As they rotted several hundred miles away and he only came home for a couple of days a year, I was in despair. When he finally did come back and our then dentist suggested pulling them all out we took advice and finally changed dentist. Our new and wonderful dentist Mr Gibb, is an angel without wings and that very rare item, a person doing exactly the job the universe meant him to do. He saved my son’s teeth, found an implantologist and saved me. As I had discovered the wonders of serrapeptase, a brilliant natural anti-inflammatory, perfect for people like me with a lot of allergies, and being, as always, skint, I volunteered to be a (cut price) guinea pig. With only the aid of this and no other painkillers I kept the abscessed tooth going while the implantologist took several months to arrange for me to be a case study at a university. I then had an extraction and two implants with, apart from sedation during the process, only serrapeptase to help me. So, if you’re on a lot of medication and they suggest serrapeptase to you for dental work, you may have me to thank for that. It certainly worked for me.
Who do you really have to thank? Who saved your bacon over the last twelve years? Have you met an angel without wings? Has someone been quietly kind and just kept you going through a bad patch?
The start of the eights saw me on the other side of the planet for the wedding of my cousin Roy, just a week short of his 60th birthday.
My father in law, who had been to Australia with the navy in the war, persuaded us to empty the coffers, scrape the barrel and go. He said we would see wonderful things. He was right. Here are the twelve apostles.
We had adventures.
I saved Skippy the bush kangaroo.
Really he was a wallaby we met in the crater of an old volcano. When he hopped up to me, I didn’t know he was tame.
He was the same height as me. I turned and ran, discretion being the better part of valour, but in two steps he had overtaken me. If I’d run on I’d have run into him. So, with my heart in my mouth, this being a wild animal on a strange continent, I held out my hand to him.
He immediately lay down to be stroked and was still on the ground when a tourist bus hurtled round the corner. So I stood between the bus and the wallaby and am still, probably, in numerous tourist photographs………….. ‘so we were hanging out of the window taking pictures of the wallaby when this stupid woman stood right in the way………..’
So the eights were great, even though I flew half way round the world with a temporary crown on the implant but by 8,8,8 I was better, (and well travelled).
999 was an emergency. My father-in-law, an ex-fireman, died right at the beginning of the year. We’re still missing him. He was one of the most endlessly upbeat people I’ve ever known and woke up cheerful every day, despite the fact that he’d seen some awful sights in his life and saved lives at the risk of his own. It was probably dashing into smoke in the days before breathing apparatus, that got him in the end. I’m so glad to have known him.
9 of 9 is always an emergency because it’s right in the middle of getting ready for Miniatura. In all the changing scenes of life Miniatura has to be the one constant in my calendar. I’m very grateful for an event that is always positive, always happy, always creative. It’s a reliable uplift twice a year. Your feet might drag going in, especially if you’ve been ill, or you have ongoing family problems but your heart never fails to sing on the way out. There are few things in life that are so reliably lovely.
Also, of course, in 9,9,9 I started a website. I wonder what happened to that?
10, 10, 10, sounds like the music they play in a film when the baddie is round the corner, in the shadows with a gun.
In my world by 10, 10,10 the baddie was a diagnosis of heart failure for my father. I knew his days were numbered, though I had no idea of the terrible effect his death would have on my life. Every time I visited I took pamphlets about local services for the elderly and every time he thanked me politely and, as I discovered, in time, filed them all in a drawer.
Have you become a carer in the last twelve years? Do you, even worse, now need care? If neither of these options is on your personal horizon, you should give thanks. Statistically in the developed world we are only starting to get to grips with the problems caused by fewer people in work supporting an aging population. As there is always population growth following a war, you would imagine this has been a perennial problem but this natural compensation for people lost, so effective when we didn’t have the life span we have now, has become a liability we will have to get to grips with, soon. This is my second time round. I cared for my mother-in-law who had Alzheimer’s thirty years ago. It definitely doesn’t get easier as the carer ages. Then I ended up with cancer and £16,000 in debt. I’m hoping to make a better fist of it this time round.
The 11 of the 11 of the 11 is so close I can recall the emotion.
Have you lost someone in a conflict? To terrorism? Just before the 11,11,11, my son was attacked in the street, quite randomly, and had his skull broken. I am immensely grateful for his survival. He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I am so aware that despite the modern world and, sometimes, because of it, we should never take the long, happy lives of our loved ones for granted. We should all give thanks for messy bedroom floors, long may our offspring be around to let gravity take care of their socks and never in pairs.
And here, at last, we are. 12 12 12
What have you done with yours? Where have you been? What have you seen? Who did you lose? Who did you find? Why are you grateful? What did you save? Who saved you? Who did you help?
The world turns.
If we are still here, we turn with it, rote learning. If an experience doesn’t teach us first time, it keeps coming round again, until we do. Life is nothing if not educational, right up to the twelve times table and beyond
and it’s never boring, is it?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
JaneLaverick.com – always learning.
One Response to All the twelves, 12.