Twenty-seven renewals. Not one of them required a decision. That is how it works and it is why it goes on so long.
She said one thing about that which I have not been able to put down.
She said: every year it got harder.
Because every year I’d have had to explain why I hadn’t done it the year before.
And then: by about the tenth one, the explaining was the whole of it.
And now my part.
I have looked at those silver wings my entire life.
Thirty-one years.
That bag has been on a kitchen table every Sunday of my childhood, within four feet of my own hands, in a room I know better than any room on earth.
It went to my christening. It was at my mother’s second wedding. It has been in the back of about four hundred photographs and it is in one on my own wall.
And I never once said: Grandma, what’s that?
Four words. Available to me on roughly a thousand separate afternoons, at no cost, with nothing at stake.
I did not fail to notice them. That is the thing I have had to be honest about.
I noticed them.
I have a specific memory of noticing them at about nine years old, on a wet Sunday afternoon, lying on a sofa with my feet on the arm, looking at that bag on the table.
And deciding they were probably from an airline somewhere. And going back to whatever I was doing.
That is a complete thought. It took about four seconds and it closed the subject for twenty-two years.
I filed them under Grandma’s things.
And that is how you turn a person into furniture in her own house.
Not by ignoring her. Ignoring is visible and somebody eventually tells you off for it.
By cataloguing her. By having a complete and settled account of who she is, assembled by about the age of nine, and never once updating it.
She was in that room every Sunday with the whole of it clipped to a handbag.
In plain sight. On the table. For three decades, while four generations of us ate roast dinner around it and talked about parking.
And it goes further, and this is the one I did not want to write and left until last.
I bought her a first-class ticket.
Four months of planning. A spreadsheet, which I am ashamed of. Two conversations with an airline about assistance she did not need.
