‘May you live all the days of your life’ – Jonathan Swift (author)
Twenty years ago I was madly raising sponsorship for a week long trek I was about to join along part of The Great Wall of China. This was undertaken in partnership with a charity I’ve supported for years and with a bunch of people I’d never met in my life.
Apart from it being a very worthwhile cause – funding Bibles for Christians desperate to have a copy for themselves and in their own language which, at the time, was closely monitored and clamped down on in various liberty-reducing ways by a less than sympathetic Communist government – it all happened to coincide with what I was only prepared at the time to call a ‘significant’ birthday. In reality that was the big 4-0 which, by a swift calculation, will take you to the large number now looming on my horizon.
Did I have a mid-life crisis? Well, I didn’t go out and buy a red sports car or ditch my long-suffering and loyal husband in for a younger model. Neither did I ‘invest’ in plastic surgery of any sort nor join a gang of bikers to thunder my way through the mountains of Europe with my hair flying in the wind. No; going to China was about it – a place I’d been curious about for years which prompted a pile of preparatory reading which fuelled my fascination further.
October 2004 was pretty chilly in the land where they used to claim in revolutionary song that The East is Red, which salutes Chairman Mao as ‘the great saviour’. This is the man whose policies induced one of the greatest self-induced famines the world has ever known (1959-61) and on whose watch anywhere from 40-80 million people died by purging, persecution, starvation, labour camps and executions.
A week of camping in farmer’s (yes, they really do call them ‘peasants’ which doesn’t sit comfortably at all) fields was basic in every possible way. I’ve only every been lured into it once since then, and that was for one night only, and an uncomfortable and sleepless one at that.
I remember we were accompanied by a number of strong, silent gentlemen – let’s call them ‘government companions’ – and led by a cheerful Tasmanian man of boundless energy who’d start each day assuring us that the route ahead merely involved, ‘a gentle stroll with a token number of steps.’ Very reassuring.
In fact, the whole thing was extremely challenging. I was grateful for my weeks of training at the gym ploughing up one of those everlasting escalators in a bid to acclimatise my legs to the many steps they would be required to navigate. Apart from one small section of the wall which had been repaired for the benefit of tourists, much of the structure has been left to weeds and trees. In several places there are just dizzyingly steep steps with sheer drops either side which demanded cautious ascension on hands and knees and descents backwards. Not for the faint-hearted.
My actual birthday fell on the day we returned to Beijing and included an eye-opening trip to Tiananmen Square and the extraordinary Forbidden City where, against all expectations, we found a Starbucks. Oh the irony; the classic ‘running dog’ of the West nestled alongside an ancient Chinese fortress.
All this to say that the oncoming milestone doesn’t feel quite so wobbly as that one did. Sure, come October I’ll be receiving cards referring to archeology, grey hair, bus passes (although, unless you live in London, you now have to wait until you’re 66 for this one) and zimmer frames, but my old adage holds true: I’ll never be this young again.
At 40 I had a slight panic at the self-evident thought that twenty years previously I had been a relatively carefree 20, but that another twenty years would usher me along to 60, which felt ancient if glaringly obvious. Time really does speed up as you go, as the relative span of your life changes proportionally. Thus, when I was 5 years-old a year seemed like forever, and it was indeed a whopping 20% of my life; now it’s a mere 1.667% of my life. Both negligible and unsettling.
There will of course be year long celebrations. You may recall that I waxed somewhat lyrical about our celebratory trip to Mauritius back in April – it seems so long ago! I know there’s more to come and I’ll tell you about one of those treats next month when I’ve enjoyed it to the full and hope to have some photos to accompany it.
Until then, with apologies to non-sports-lovers, let’s hope the rain holds off as we lurch from Silverstone, Wimbledon and the Euros into the Paris Olympics next Friday.
dancingthroughchaos 