Through the looking glass
when life feels back to front
Sometimes I feel like an adult Alice, with two cats for company instead of kittens. As in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass. When no one else is visiting or staying, I find myself asking the cats their opinions and chatting to them, discussing the weather or what I’m going to do next. For my own amusement, I talk to them in dialects/accents, usually Geordie as that’s what I was brought up with, and in different languages. With this ongoing hip condition limiting my mobility I have to find ways of amusing myself! Lola is always very chatty; Little Fatty is more a cat who purrs.
Alice is a bored, imaginative and lonely little girl so invents/dreams her adventures, first in Wonderland (the first book) then on the other side of the mirror in the second. You’re probably familiar with the stories but as a reminder when she goes through the mirror into the looking glass world, everything follows its own dream logic and is back to front. She meets and hears about absurd not to say surreal characters, most based on the pieces from a game of chess. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Jabberwocky, The Walrus and the Carpenter and Humpty Dumpty. And the Red and White kings and queens.
Whereas the first book’s characters are based on playing cards. As children, we grew up with Alice, being read the stories by our father. I have the copy he read from and which he owned as a boy in 1940s Newcastle. I love that he’s written his name and address in very boyish, joined up writing in the front of the book.
Our childhoods were defined by books, his and ours. We were very lucky and had a houseful but I don’t imagine he had many - I do know that he spent a lot of time in the local library borrowing books. So I treasure this one, complete with the strange, dreamy Tenniel illustrations.
The world of someone living with a debilitating condition, as I now seem to be, is the direct opposite of the active, going out one I’ve been used to. But as Helen, the narrator in my first novel, One Scheme of Happiness says, if you can’t change things you adapt (sic). And slowing down so much has made me see things differently. Appreciating and enjoying small things with a greater intensity. - sitting down is nearly always preferable to hobbling around. All the mundane but necessary tasks like doing the laundry, or making a meal still need to be done, and have their own challenges, when you’re trying to avoid pain and discomfort. And how grateful I am that I have family, friends and neighbours to call on, or who are happy to come and visit. Adversity is a good way of making you really see what matters.
When I go out everything looks amazing - the richness and variety of life. I feel like Miranda in The Tempest: oh brave new world etc. It reminds me also of living through the Covid pandemic when we could go outside for exercise, and the world looked new and amazing.
I’d forgotten, but when I was looking through Alice again I remembered how I linked the two queens with my grandmothers. The red queen with my dad’s mother - she was a generally busy active person full of songs and laughter. Whereas on the other side of the family my grandma was more gentle and thoughtful, always knitting, which the White Queen isn’t, but there is a lot of wool and she does change into a sheep in the chapter Wool and water’!
Here in my looking glass world where I now have a wheelchair in the (loaned from a friend) instead of my recently refurbished bike, everything feels topsy-turvy. Me and my two old cats hobbling around together and taking our medicine. Lola (18) has kidney disease and also, like Little Fatty (17) thyroid problems. But I love having living creatures in the house with me, in spite of hair everywhere and the job of cleaning out the cat litter.
I’ve been on a waiting list to get an appointment to see an orthopaedic specialist for nearly two months now. And that’s just to have an appointment! No idea how long it will be until I have any treatment. Makes you realise how precarious the NHS has become. I’d naively imagined people on waiting lists to be getting on with their lives while they waited (some obviously do) but living with pain and discomfort brings home the reality. Thankfully the majority of health workers are kind, empathetic, caring and professional. I’d already met one who didn’t seem to know how to smile (a lack of empathy?) but more recently a woman who only wanted to discuss what my appointment was actually for (possible arthritis in my wrists) and became very defensive when I tried to tell her about being in pain etc. She told me she had other people waiting and complained that everyone was angry with her for the waiting lists and it wasn’t her fault! Great bedside manner!
One thing you have no control over is passing on your love of a particular book to your children. I bought a copy of Alice for my older daughter, with illustrations by Helen Oxenbury (in colour and much less weird than the Tenniel drawings) but she hated it. Dad tried to get me to love The Box of Delights (John Masefield) but I just didn’t get it. And Mum’s favourite, The Children of Green Knowe left me cold. But perhaps because Alice was read aloud to me and referred to in conversation, it became part of my inner self. Both as a reader and a writer. She’s such an independent, feisty character in my own quiet way I see her as a role model, going deep into imaginary adventures.
Do you have any favourite children’s books? Let me know in the comments.
Thank you for reading my Substack dear friends. I really value you as readers and hope you enjoy my thoughts and photos!
Ali xx