Ok, I admit it.

Cheer is a good thing. Optimism. A positive attitude. Looking on the bright side and expecting life to be good to you. I am the Tigger in our marriage… indeed, family.

“You’re so negative!” I said to Eeyore yesterday. Not, I confess, for the first time in our decades of wedded bliss. I can’t remember whether he’d said it would rain, or the toast would burn (probably neither: it didn’t rain until nightfall; and we don’t have toast for breakfast as we are Being Good so it’s just an egg each from the only hen laying) or that we would be bankrupt by Christmas (much more likely).

“No: just realistic,” he corrected me patiently.

Well yes, Lord Copper. Sort of.

Anyway, I was here to concede defeat. (So far; it’s only SO FAR, isn’t it? The fat lady is still blasting out tuneless drunken ditties at the top of her voice, blast her eyes.) Not to defend myself.

I said this blog was going to be about Cheer, and yes, Cheer is a Good Thing.

But perhaps honesty is better…

See, the reason I haven’t written a post since April is because I couldn’t. I couldn’t scrape myself together to be ruddy cheerful.

What with having lost:

1. All our income. (All? Did you say all? What all my pretty chickens and their dam, in one fell swoop?)

2. My father. For whom I haven’t yet shed a single tear, life has been so ghastly in so many other ways.

3. The performance of my very first play, in a very, very good and reputable theatre. Due to delight a packed audience on my son’s and the Queen’s birthday, in late April. Was it only a week before lockdown, that I drove back from my meeting with the theatre administrator, singing louder than the Fat L and hailing my new career as a successful playwright?

4. Our daughter, who walked out months ago, ill as she was, and hasn’t been in touch since.

5. A close relationship… so painful I can’t possibly talk about it here.

So, life hasn’t been particularly cheerful and I made a mistake in setting myself the rule that it has to pretend to be.

(Oh yes and 6. All our hens but two, our real chickens, what with a new young dog fox and his family born far too near our garden and brazen enough to show off by day.)

Anyway, under my new regime, started this morning, I am due a coffee break in ten minutes and have to do another writing exercise before then, so I’d better wind up. 

And funnily enough, now I’ve been honest, I do actually feel cheerful enough to share something happy with you.

Penultimate item on this morning’s Today Programme was with a couple of brides one of whom, poor thing, has had to reschedule her wedding five times already. I think it was the other who had an original cast list of three hundred and fifty for her marriage. And because they are a good Muslim couple they are not cohabiting until they are wed.

Agonising about a wedding with only fifteen, when four of those guests are the officiant and photographers and presumably are two the couple themselves and huge families on both sides, to be somehow squeezed into the remaining nine spaces left.

And I wanted to tell them, go for it. Please, go for it.

My parents were wed at twenty four hours’ notice with only two people (whom they barely knew: family friends) as witnesses, and were happily together for seven decades of deep, true love.

Here they are. My father not looking nearly as handsome as usual, in his bare khaki, unable to be promoted beyond corporal because he was a despised Conscientious Objector. My mother in the beautiful silk veil I wore, as did my daughter.

I know the current situation is heartbreaking but so was the war.

Just go for it.

x

PS Sorry guys: it’s so long since I wrote a post I forgot to enable comments. (I wondered why some of you were commenting on my Facebook page – thank you!)