Our Lives

I will do the story of the Bittern later, as I am horribly caught up in the prison of my job.

Right now I am anxious to record a moment when I realised how far I have come in this life.

A while ago I had a very old friend. I wanted to write her life when I realised that she had come from Victorian black button boots to Reebock grey suede trainers in one easy stride.

But I too belong to history. There are photos of a stolid little girl in sixties Britain. We had lino on the floor, no telly, and no car. It took my parents a great deal of effort to get into town. We had a large wireless which relayed the news about the prime minister's raincoats. Our chips were fried in beef dripping. We had two seaside holidays my whole childhood. I wore brown sandals and a grey cardigan and my grandmother had made me grey flannel shorts out of old men's trousers.

Yesterday that same little girl, yes, I, Polly, was sitting in a Bristol car park in my new-to-me German car, wearing Prada shoes (£5.00 in a jumble sale), drinking a Costa Cappucino, eating a pecan pastry, listening to Andreas Scholl singing in Handel's Solomon, thinking about my new Ikea waste bin, and staring out at the trees in Tesco's car park, before hitting the M4 for home. Beside me a chap in an American car (a Mondeo) drew up and he starting drinking bottled water and eating sushi from Tesco's with chopsticks. I don't know what he was listening to. But there we both were, and I wondered if life was not, after all, better these days, not worse, as I am always saying it is!