Ep.34: Half life
Pennie Latin does BBC Out of Doors.
I’m standing at a cliff edge leaning out, rocking gently backwards and forwards onto my toes, finding my balance. A salty, sharp breeze lifts my hair suddenly and a metallic taste rises up from my stomach, dry and unfamiliar, a small hard knot of fear, like a marble, pushes at the underside of my tongue. If I close my eyes I can just about imagine tipping silently into the void, the sudden rush of wind that would push and pull me, adrenaline roaring through my veins as I fall, my hair and clothes rising above me.
If there’s one recurrent dream I’ve had in my life, it’s this. That I’m falling, dropping at a great speed, sometimes from the sky, sometimes when a freak wave suddenly sweeps me up then falls away leaving a void below. Always I brace for the impact of the fall, always I wake first, heart pounding feeling punched, winded.
In two weeks’ time I’ll delete files, write a perky, positive out of office message on my email then switch off my computer and hand it, along with my mobile phone, any recording kit I still have and my staff pass, back to the BBC then I shall gently, quietly, close the door on half my life, ¼ of a century of programme making. I’ll lean gently forward and step off that cliff.
And as I contemplate that leap it’s hard not to meander back over the past 25 years. Pausing to remember some of the programmes I’ve made I start to pluck them out of the archives and my mind at random. I spend the afternoon listening to a jazz series I made with saxophonist Tommy Smith, delighting in how pedantic and perfectionist we were; I find a bizarre but beautifully quirky Radio 4 series I made about human parasites where Honor Blackman was cast as Malaria and Tony Robinson a tapeworm; I re-visit an amazing and amazingly sleep deprived trip to Rockall which left me giddy and off balance for days.
I can’t decide what to pack and take with me, how to choose, there’s hundreds of them. I’m surprised at the sheer volume of sound they represent, but also the sheer volume of life they’ve woven around – the script I wrote on the science of love while my own love life was falling apart; a personal story about chronic pain; a search for meaning in a mortuary. So often I’ve chipped away at personal experience, mined my own life to season the programmes I’ve made, so in a sense there’s great slices of me buried in that archive along with the audio.
And while I listen and laugh and indulge in the memories they prompt, I also cry but I’m not sure why. I feel a rush of affection for all these old programmes and adventures, a huge pride in all I’ve achieved and created. I’m so glad of the career I’ve had so I guess it’s not surprising I feel grief at saying goodbye to it all.
Although I’m sad to be leaving there’s a completeness here, a fullness. I am done.
But even though I know this story is finished, there’s that curious thing that happens with a great book or adventure. Part of you wants to hurtle to the end and throw yourself at the empty space beyond, the other part of you wants to drag your feet, take time to savour all the best bits, delight in the pleasures the book has afforded you, put off that inevitable moment when you turn the page and there’s nothing there, a blank sheet then maybe an acknowledgement or two.
I’ve been experiencing both of these things. Both of these things laced over with fear, pure, undiluted, gulp down the bile, fear.
I can’t decide whether electing to take redundancy after the turmoil of the past 7 months is born of some kind of madness or merely the product of inevitable momentum, forces beyond my control. Reading back over the blog entries I realise that a recurrent theme is that I write as if time were running out, as if the orchestra were already tuning up for my exit music, but surely that’s the point. I need to live as if the fiddle is being tuned, the challenge is how to live without that causing panic. The danger on realising that you’re mortal is that you spend so much of your time worrying away at the threads of the end game that you forget to enjoy the time you have. The danger is you waste your days, clutching them to you in desperation, but there again trying to busily make every day the best brings its own pressures too.
It’s not easy to admit how much of my time is spent contemplating how little time I may have. Especially when I’ve been told I don’t have cancer any more. But it’s difficult to let go of that idea of living closer to an ending than I did previously. A couple of weeks’ back I was delighted by attending and surviving a pilates class at the local gym. I felt like myself again, a bit of normality returning. At the end of the class a woman – Theresa – asked me how I found it and I explained I was recovering from surgery. She said she too had a mastectomy, last year, and is now waiting to have reconstruction. Then she shares that her sister also has breast cancer and that she was clear but now after 5 years it’s returned and she’s dying. Theresa says ‘they wouldn’t check you every year if it wasn’t necessary, they say it’s unlikely to come back but it does’.
So, like it or not, that’s how I’m going through life, to the sound of a clock ticking. I don’t blame Theresa for landing the knowledge of her sister on me, I think she was trying to articulate the seize the day mentality that I suspect descends on all of us who go through this or similar.
And so in trying to find that balance between fear that time is running out and the need to savour every day I inevitably came to asking myself ‘if this were to be the last 5 years of my life would I want to spend those years doing the same things as the past 25 years?’. And the answer to that is ‘no’. That was the easy part, the more difficult part is the follow up question of ‘assuming you live more than 5 years – which statistically is pretty bloody likely – what are you going to do to earn a living?’. And the answer is ‘I’ve no idea’ but unless I lean out and step off into the void I’ll never find out…