Travels with my aunt

Img_5941As promised (we aim to please here at mirror mirror), here’s a bit more about our trip to Southern California.  It’s not really about business or babies, but hey!

As we were going to be on the West Coast in Seattle, it seemed sensible to travel down to visit my aunt down in Orange County (just south of LA).  Actually it wasn’t very sensible at all, it was only after we booked the flights that we realised that she actually lives 1,000 miles from Seattle – America sure is BIG.

But in the end it was definitely worth it.  I had last seen my aunt about eighteen years ago at my father’s funeral – we’ve never known her very well as she moved to Canada and then the US when she was about 20.  Nevertheless there was the immediate shock of the very familiar – she looks a bit like my father, but even more like my father’s (and her) aunt, an old lady whom I knew when I was a child.  Her wry, slightly deadpan, sense of humour is also very much like my father’s – and completely un-Californian.  And therein lies the rub.  For my aunt, though living in paradise, is a rather sad and lonely woman.

She lives with her cat in her slightly-Austin-Powersish-but-nevertheless-beautiful house with views over the ocean, listening to Tom Jones and surrounded by photographs of herself in her 1960s heyday. She is slim, immaculately well-groomed and elegant, and looks to be in her early sixties rather than 75.  Money is clearly no object.

But her life has been tough. She and my father were orphaned during the war, she then lost her only brother (my father) when he was still quite young, her husband died only a few years later and her only child, her daughter, died last year of cancer at the age of 48.  So now she has no-one and seems to find it impossible to make real friends in California, with Californians.

She talks of coming back to England, which she fondly imagines is an oasis of old-fashioned good manners and intelligent conversation (I didn’t disabuse her), but knows no-one here either and doesn’t think she could cope with the weather.

We had a lovely time together and I learnt lots I didn’t know about our family history which was fab (may blog a bit about this as well).  But it’s left me feeling sad and thoughtful.  Not sure what to conclude except that money clearly doesn’t buy happiness.  It also gives an new interesting perspective to the ‘should I have another baby’ debate (which I will DEFINITELY blog about later).

The above photo was taken from the lounge of the Ritz-Carlton hotel. How can I in all honesty tell my aunt to come back to England?

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