When I was 12 one of my favourite things was to go to my local library and check out music. I'd record (copyright infringement!) what I borrowed on my double cassette player and through this I ended up with a rather interesting and eclectic taste in music. The most important thing I ever borrowed was the David Bowie greatest hits double album ChangesOneBowie. I fell in love with Bowie. By the time I was off to uni I had pretty much his entire back catalogue on cassette, plus a couple of choice vinyls. Most of this I picked up at the Manchester Corn Exhange but I also benefitted from the reissuing and remastering of a lot of his stuff in the 90s.
12 was a really important age for me, as well as Bowie I discovered other loves that would last a lifetime such as Fry and Laurie and Sean Bean (Sharpie!). I saw A Room With A View and When Harry Met Sally, still two of my favourite films, one of which began my love of Forster, both showed me cinema and film could be something other than the blockbuster or action movies I was used to. In short when I was 12 I began to really be the person I would become.
Yesterday two extraordinary yet ordinary things happened. A man died. David Bowie died. It chokes me to even write that- it's still so raw. He died on Sunday night and the news broke early yesterday. A world without Bowie has been unthinkable - not least because he's five days younger than my dad, who is still so vibrant and full of life. We'd just celebrated his 69th birthday. That's younger than a lot of the patients I'm looking after. Younger than half of the people I attend church with. Nothing. The international outpouring of emotion and the wonder that he even existed is unprecedented, yet inside I'm screaming "he was MY Bowie", as I try to stay rational and pray for his family- wife Iman, Children Duncan and Lexie (still only 15) and daughter in law Rodene (herself recently recovered from breast cancer).
The other thing that happened was my beautiful, quirky, creative daughter turned 12. My daughter who's just got into Manga, Studio Ghibli, loves to draw and create, adores animals and rock music (especially The Cure and Foo Fighters). My daughter is becoming the person she will be. She woke up to an upset mum and we watched Labyrinth again last night whilst munching on pizza and a pug shaped birthday cake.
Another thing that happened when I was 12 was an evangelical christian group came to our school one evening and I went along to see what it was all about. They used tactics I'm sure we'd all recognise and at one point asked us to stand if we wanted to give our lives to Christ. I felt overwhelmingly that I wanted to, but that this was not the time, or the place, or the way for me to do it.
I fell away from the church as I became a teenager, coming back in my early 20s, not long after having been married, but the feeling from that night never left me. I felt sure that eventually, even though I very very agnostic at that point, I would find my way to God.
So I've looked forward to my daughter turning 12, half excited and half dreading it. Who will she be? What will she become? Who will she love? Who will the heroes be who it will break her heart to lose? Will she turn from faith or find faith? Her name's Faith, the reason being my journey to faith had been the hardest yet most wonderful thing I'd experienced- until she was born!
