“Do you remember the first time?”

This is the heading over a review of Pulp,

a band reunited after x years, designed to provoke, ensnare and hopefully to get you to read what’s written.  The editor of the broadcasting reviews and correspondence in my tv guide encourages his staff to be similarly snippy and crisp.  Beats the hell out of talking about everything as if it’s wonderful because it isn’t. 

But it made me think.   Response to shock, bad news, horror and just plain old disappointment  adapts down over time.  If it doesn’t, there may be more to it than you wish to examine or you’re just plain old fixated.  Life is peristaltic action, only goes one way.  You may not like that way

but there isn’t another.   Whatever horror and pain you carry in your memory, tomorrow is another day – even if they seem unendingly similar.

Walking home the other day, I looked with appreciation at the quiet street where I live – and realised I have lived there longer alone than I was in my long, immensely important to me, second marriage.   It was the first time I had thought about that.

 When I shared with readers the tenth anniversary of annalog, I had not thought about till I thought about it – if you see what I mean.  It was the first time I marked ten years.   A decade.  Gosh.

Until I went to South Africa, I thought I knew about the animals.   I mean, I knew their names, roughly their size, some idea of their colouration.   I learned more about colour and shade in South Africa (yes, this was before Amandla) than any film or book could tell me.   Forty years later, I remember grinning like an idiot, it was so wonderful.   Riding round the Kruger Game Park sitting (highly incorrectly) in the window frame of the Peugeot, one hand gripping the luggage rack, the other in the book on birds I had just bought.  Nothing prepared me for bird life in SA. 

  First time.

Discretion forbids any detail on the first serious boyfriend (long married, I hope happily and with daughters with whom I hope he is rather more thoughtful than he was with me) but there was only one, the first time that a man I really care for, said very quietly “I should have married you.”  We were at lunch with a lot of other people, I had just got married to somebody else.   He was famous for the beauty, intelligence, standing and wealth of his connections which I remarked, saying I would never have done.  But years later I saw him enter the foyer of a big public building, mark me and head towards me.  I rose to meet him and we stood in a long wordless embrace.  Outside time, inside space, the first and only time.

That kind of embrace is shared by Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch at the end of the original A Town Like Alice, the splendid conclusion to a gut-tearing film, when you love somebody above and beyond, so much that the kiss and the rest of that very enjoyable stuff comes second.

I remember the first time I passed an exam, it was Friday 13^th and my parents were so delighted that I asked them why ?   “Because you can,” said my mother.

The first time in a broadcasting studio, it felt like home – and residually, it always did, even in less than able or pleasant company.    And the first time I had my hair “done” and was so disappointed, I was rude to my father for teasing me about it .

The first time I understood wonder was the night of my son’s birth, the closest most of us get to the miracle of creation, every girl her own stable.  And the first time I understood hate (though I had been on the end of enough of it) was when a response to a programme about backstreet abortion – before the law was changed – found me likened to Myra Hindley. And I was immediately defended.

Years ago, I read or heard it remarked that every child was an only child, a one off.  So, I suppose, every important event is a one off.  It may happen again, it won’t be the same and we remember, even in shadow, the first time.