The Queenager | Eleanor's Letter
Maybe the Queen is the ultimate Queenager? The power of now, ducks, flag irises - and the Jubilee
I hope you didn’t find my female power rant too hard going – it wasn’t the easiest to digest, I know. So hopefully this one is a bit of an antidote.
Over the last few months, I’ve become increasingly irritated by stock phrases which keep getting repeated in the media and advertising which have become so hackneyed they don’t mean anything – and any meaning they once had has long been removed. I’d love to know if you find them similarly annoying (or whether I’m just becoming a curmudgeon) and what your pet hates are too.
Ok first up is ‘making memories’, the dreaded phrase that appears in almost every holiday advert out there. Since when did going travelling or in fact doing anything, become about ‘making memories’, as if everything anyone ever does is for their Instagram feed, or photos they can boast about to friends, or something to remember in retrospect? It’s the opposite of what life is about. I don’t know about you but I go away - or do things - because I want to have a good time, to be in the moment, to feel present, to go somewhere interesting, or moving, or culturally significant so I learn something and have a laugh, feel the sun on my face, giggle with my daughter, relax with my husband, inhale the scent of the spring blossom, or the colours of the Aegean sea against the snow-capped mountains. It’s all about being there, in that spot of the present – not making a memory for the future.
The most egregious use of this phrase I’ve ever heard was a man who refused to carry his father’s coffin because he didn’t want to ‘make the memory’. His father was dead. The shift had happened – it was his last duty to his dad to carry him to his final resting place. You can’t avoid the pain of death by not carrying the coffin. But he simply didn’t want to ‘make the memory’.
By contrast, my favourite phrase currently is ‘there is only this moment’ (It doesn’t come from anywhere profound, someone said it on a Star Trek episode, yes I am afraid I am a closet Trekkie) but I like the immediacy of it. That sense that we might die today or tomorrow and the injunction to live every day as if it were precious, as if it might be our last.
My co-founder at Noon the amazing Claire Gillis has been very involved with the Deborah James campaign. You may know Deborah as @bowelbabe on Instagram, she’s the courageous former deputy headteacher who was diagnosed with bowel cancer and has devoted the last five years to raising awareness of the disease and fundraising for treatment. Prince William just made her a Dame, she’s raised millions (here’s the link if you’d like to donate).
I was lucky enough to meet Deborah at a dinner Claire held at the Roundhouse last year and we’ve chatted several times since; she was going to come on to Noon and do an interview just as she got really sick. Seeing her at the Chelsea Flower Show this week - beautiful despite the ravages of cancer and chemo, refusing to let the illness get her, enjoying every last second, her devoted husband by her side and holding her glass of champagne - sums up for me that Carpe Diem mentality. It’s so easy to get bogged down in anxieties about the future or regrets or spiralling negative loops about the past.
But really we only have now. And we have our best times when we are exactly where we are supposed to be, in the present, happy to be right here, right now. In fact, I find the more time I spend enjoying the moment - whether it is watching the flag irises wave yellow on the edge of the pond as I swim, or noticing a duck is perched on one leg like a flamingo on a buoyancy ring (it was like a Mallard doing yoga) the happier I am. Maybe it is getting older but life feels more precious – I am less worried about where I am going to end up and more determined to enjoy the journey.
Our phones can be such a suck away from the present. Having spent so much of my last decades addicted to the news cycle and responding to a million emails a minute, I am also trying to exert some discipline over the wink of the screen (really difficult when running an online platform largely from my phone as I run around). But I do try to read in the evenings – my book of the year is Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle. I finished it last week and I was truly gutted to have to leave the world of female aviators that she had conjured – it’s an amazing huge canvas of a novel. The main character is a difficult, determined, damaged woman who loves flying aeroplanes and flies from pole to pole. But it’s also a story of triumph over the odds and what makes for a meaningful life. It’s also a siren call for women to live on their own terms, to pursue whatever it is that we really want.
That chimed with me, I meet many women who seem a bit lost in their own lives, so following everyone else’s sense of what they should be doing, or attending to other people’s needs that they have lost track of their own. I was coaching a woman last week and we realised that she has been so busy and consumed by work and her family’s needs that she had lost her own internal compass about what she wants. We’re trying to tune it back in, day by day – I’ve told her every day to do something she feels like doing, just one thing – small if that is all she can fit in – which is only for her because she wants it. We need to keep that muscle of our own purpose, power and passion tuned in. Great Circle is all about that. I really loved it, I hope you do too.
I’m proud to say that Maggie is coming to the Noon Book Club in the autumn. I can’t wait. But in the meantime, do come and join us on Monday night for May’s Noon Book Club (click here to join us for free, and if you become a paid subscriber to this newsletter you can get a free book every month as well, and lots of other goodies and you will be supporting Noon). Anyway, this week we’ll be chatting to the lovely Clare Pooley about the Authenticity Project, a really charming novel about what happens when we dare to be real, to tell the truth about ourselves with all our vulnerabilities. That also really chimed with me.
It is only when we are honest and real with the people around us that we become properly connected. One of the great joys of getting older is having the confidence to just be who you are, not to trim, not to mind, and to have friends where we can totally reveal our true feelings and most dangerous thoughts because we know they love us enough not to mind. And we are also confident enough to take the risk, not to please or to trim.
These days I live for those conversations where all guards are down, the free flow of truth between intelligent beings: no one-upmanship, just flow from one mind to another.
If you fancy a bit of that kind of communion – come and join us for our very first Noon Walk. We came up with the idea during one of the book clubs – the one with Dog Days author Ericka Waller. It’s happening at Saltdean, just outside Brighton on Sunday June 26th at noon, of course. It’s free to join. There will be me, and Ericka, and dogs (if you want to bring one that’s fine, but you need a lead) and cake – and maybe a plunge in the sea as we are walking along the beach. If you want to join us please sign up here, there’s no charge but we want to know who is coming so we get the right amount of cake etc. We are going to be joined by a fantastic midlife entrepreneur who has set up a new community app called trundl, which raises money for charities with steps walked. So do good and have a lovely day. A win-win!
Enjoy the Jubilee – I reckon the Queen really is the ultimate Queenager – rocking it into her 90s, doing her thing (interesting she was well enough to go to Windsor Horse Show and to open the Elizabeth line but gave the state opening of Parliament a miss… way to go). So here’s to the Queen of Queenagers, powerful, showing women can do greater things later in life, full of energy – and not stopping I hope anytime soon.
Love,
Eleanor