29.5.25 - A week and a lifetime

St Andrew's Cathedral in Bordeaux

So we made our way to Brive. It was a long one. A pilgrimage, fittingly enough, to a journey of lifetimes. We hadn't seen each other for 35 years, and those years had gone both slowly and swiftly. When we began our journeys we were young women in our twenties. We were carte blanche. We had nothing to trouble us but those miles and miles of possibility which stretched on forever. When you are in your twenties, things like responsibility, success, family are literally lifetimes away. We were often the first women - and possibly men - in our generation, which had been liberated from the footsteps of our ancestors. All of our parents wanted something better for us, the entirety of our societies said, whispered, insisted, that we could be anything we wanted to be. We could travel. We could see the world. We could speak without fear nor favour. We were in the ascendancy of the iconoclasm of postmodernism. Nothing should be taken too seriously, even death. But perhaps everyone in their 20s is a bit postmodernist.

We ate what we wanted, we sat in study carrels. We possibly spent far too much time drinking coffee and attending gigs. We referenced picnics from films, we laughed at men. (We didn't really care for them.) We must have been a terrifying sight - this posse of women - without a stitch of care in this world. We were going to take life by its shoulders and give it a good shaking. Life would not know what hit it.

And in a way, that is what happened. We did travel, we did continue laughing loud, we did fall down and bruise our knees and hearts. We continued to read a lot and say what we thought. But then also life did shake US by our shoulders. Some of us had children. These new being, like us, were unquestionable Earth Shakers and Shapers. Some of us went on to have relationships which smouldered or burned. Some of us rode the waves and winds with our lifetime partners. Some rode those waves alone. Some others threw theirs abroad - some of us, more than a few times.

But after 35 years, all those ships were brought into harbour - the one at Bordeaux, and we came in to port, more or less, in tact. And like all good travelers, the stories we told. The tales we regaled each other with. The memories which we shared. 

Could we have ever been so young once? Could we have ever smiled so hard? Could we have ever imagined the lives we would go on to lead? Could we have ever imagined that we would be here after all this time, still sharing sofas and stories? 

Our pilgrimage in life, in our friendship, in this sacred journey, had reached this waymarker. We placed it the way the pilgrims of the way of St James did, with grace and gratitude. We had survived this journey with so much to tell. We had marveled at each others' wounds and scars. We had each others' back. We bestowed our own benediction. 

This meditation of seven. This call to prayer into which a pledge to honour a friendship which has been transubtantiated into family. Sangrial - Holy Blood. Written in space and time. 

Then after a week, it all melted away, back into the repository of memory. Like the bas reliefs of the many churches and cathedrals we visited. In whose streets we were in awe of - how did they make these houses which look even better with time? 

And so, here is to ties which mellow and which age - chromatic patina of colour, the tremendous heft and girth of oaks, the sanding of stones and sea glass... all the lessons and leaves in the pages of this book of seven, now bound together by the deepest affection and love.