savourites #62: birthday special

new year's resolutions

The morning before I turned 35 I watched the sun rise from the sea. It was our final morning in a little whitewashed apartment - a large studio with a fridge and a terrace, really - on the eastern edge of an island shaped like a seahorse. We’d spent much of the past week reading while the baby napped and constructing lunches from tomatoes, bread and cheese. Our days had followed a loose pattern of finding different beaches, setting up camp beneath olive trees and taking to their still, clear waters. I told a friend I was pretending to live a very simple life. He replied “you need that”. He was right.

That morning, in the sea, I watched the sun appear - perfect circle, yolky coral - between a dip in the mountains and I realised that this was the last day of another year. My birthday has crept up on me this time; we’ve been away, we’ve had a baby. I would have been fairly content not to celebrate it, only I was raised in a house that always made a fuss of birthdays and you only get one a year. It’s harder to absent than acknowledge.

Thirty-five, I read recently, is a peculiar age because it is neither young nor old. There’s a freedom to that in-between. I know I’m ancient in comparison to the art students I see around my neighbourhood, all wearing clothes I remember from my adolescence. I know I’m just starting out in the eyes of the elderly people I occupy the bottom deck of the bus with in the middle of the day. There’s everywhere and nowhere to hide in this liminal space; I have been there with greasy hair and sleep dust. I have been there on the best days. I am newly invisible behind a buggy and the blue eyes of my child; this is partly the beginning of a fate that besets women and partly a superpower.

In the water, which was pewter-coloured in the first low light of day and silky, I thought about what I was going to leave behind and what I was going to invite in as I embarked upon a new year. The life-changing things don’t happen on the momentous days but besiege you without warning on a week when you’ve all manner of other things on. But we make sense of time with these markers and I’d be lying if I said I’d not been reflecting on where I’m at and where I’m going of late.

So, a list of sorts for a new year ahead. One that comes with the caveat that these are path-markers rather than ambitions to be upheld or ticked off. Several of them will probably not happen and instead are destined to belong to the realm of nice ideas, perhaps to be picked up in another year.