You may have noticed from my previous post that I have memorised every compliment that has ever been paid to me. They are carefully stored in a dusty little box somewhere deep in my brain, wrapped in tissue paper and tied with red ribbon like old love letters, to be taken out, gloated and puzzled over every now and again.
I missed out the one about the special ‘glow’ that I have, told to me twice, years apart, by two different people, both women, both Greek. The second time was the night in Brussels when I was salsa dancing with the Crazy Frog (and a few other people, admittedly, but he was the one who said, next day, ‘I want to go salsa dancing with you again’. We never did). The night of the embarrassing photos, posted somewhere in the bowels of this blog. My second Greek friend, the one who was there that night, the one I’m still in touch with, always addresses me in her emails as ‘beautiful’. Maybe she says that to all the girls, I don’t know. When I speak to her, to any of these people, I have to remind myself that this is how they see me, not as the hopeless and rather pathetic middle aged woman I feel myself to be, but someone special and lovely.

The EMBM used to take the credit for the changes he saw in me during the time I knew him, but it wasn’t really down to him. Melinda has always been in there, just sometimes she finds no outlet and goes away and sulks for months at a time. But for now she seems to be in the ascendant, even through a damp and dreary January, with nothing much going on in the Real World, when I sit in front of my computer she is there, whispering in my head, egging me on to flights of ridiculousness. So far, my wings are holding up, the wax hasn’t quite started to melt and bring me crashing down again. Not quite.
When Chris/Lady Lucy was approaching her 40th birthday (must be about 10 years ago by now), she wrote and asked me how to cope with being 40. I wrote back and told her all the mad things I had done in the previous 3 years (got my PhD, went up in a hot air balloon, spoke at conferences in the US, etc. I missed out having sex with a 28-year old German PhD student, I didn’t feel like confiding THAT much at the time). I asked her if she knew ‘the Ballad of Lucy Jordan’, and the line ‘At the age of 37, she realised she’d never ride/through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair’. ‘Well’, I said, ‘I still haven’t given up hope!’ (and given some of the things which have happened to me in the last 10 years, I STILL haven’t).
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/marianne+faithfull/the+ballad+of+lucy+jordan_20088581.html
Turned out it was one of her favourite songs. In her darkest times, she used to threaten to do a Lucy Jordan, at which point I reminded her of Dorothy Parker’s poem ‘Resume’ – or ‘You might as well live’, as I think of it.
http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/4931/
From somewhere, she found a card with it printed on, and sent it to me when she moved house to California a couple of years ago. We had a few exchanges on the theme of Lucy vs Dorothy, which made me realise how firmly I am in Dotty’s camp.