A life without fun? I find that hard to imagine.
Barbra Streisand
Whether it was a canny sound-bite marketing ploy (cynical? moi?) or a surprisingly candid revelation, the fact that in an interview on the release of her long-awaited memoir, My Name is Barbra, a couple of weeks ago, global megastar Barbra Streisand admitted that she hadn’t had much fun in her life, struck me as a combination of astonishing and terribly sad.
Of course no-one can ever know what the lives of celebrities are like beyond and behind the screen or stage, but that someone whose decades-long career has made her one of the select group of people to become an EGOT - having won Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards - and who has given so many indelibly memorable performances, both acting and singing, could have apparently had so little fun, either doing them or living the rest of her 81 years, makes me want to give her a big hug. And then take her to the beach in front of her Malibu home, build a sandcastle and jump in the waves with her.
Because, truly, I can’t imagine life without fun in it. For me that would be like living in black and white rather than colour. With the volume turned down to a practically inaudible murmur.
Writing about this set me thinking about the many different ways my life has been fortunate enough to be jam-packed with fun. And remembering just some of the fun-lights (that’s a play on highlights, in case you didn’t spot it. Just thought I’d say…) that have filled it over the years:
Like the romps my siblings and I used to have with our dad, who somehow managed to pin down four squirming, squealing children and then tickle us simultaneously.
And the songs we would write and perform for every special occasion which involved taking well known hits and rewriting the lyrics. We kept this practice up well beyond childhood, including performing at two of each other’s weddings. The last one we did was only about 5 years ago, at a party to celebrate my amazing mum receiving her CBE. In all honesty, the writing of them - which always involved copious amounts of hysterics - was often more fun than the delivery.
That can’t be said about the amount of stomach-aching laughter and fun my sisters and I had both learning and performing the routine featured at the end of the first Mama Mia film, which we did as a surprise for the assembled guests at my 50th birthday party screening in a little cinema near my house, dressed in dangerously inflammable ABBA outfits specially hired for the occasion (in case you think these were something we just happened to have hanging in our wardrobes)
Then there were the skiing holidays with my girls and other family friends when we would plunge off piste and through the trees only, inevitably, to meet with all kinds of hilarity-inducing mishaps navigating our way round them.
The summers of my childhood on the beaches around my grandparent’s seaside home in Broadstairs, and the summers of my children’s childhoods on the broad sweep of beach below our little flat in Bournemouth. Crunching on sandy sandwiches and pushing the swirly ice-cream all the way down in the cone so it was still there in the very final bite. Chasing the waves and building intricate sandcastles, then jumping on them just before heading home.
The quiz games we would play around the table at dinner with my parents, which we also did with our girls as they were growing up.
The jokes and pranks my late husband loved to play on everyone, which ranged from jumping into the bath with the girls when they were little, still almost fully dressed from his day at work, to stealing into his best friend’s bedroom just before leaving after a weekend visit and filling all his drawers and pockets with styrofoam pieces. (He was still finding them months later!)
And, of course, the endless fun of time with my delicious grand-girls, playing water games in the garden, swishing through the fallen autumn leaves, jumping in muddy puddles, and on the beaches of their childhood, doing all the things I and their mothers did when we were growing up.
Here’s the thing when it comes to fun. Although it is, of course, entirely possible to have fun by yourself, as anyone witnessing me dancing in my kitchen will confirm, fun is very definitely dialled up when you have it in the company of other people. And better still, as Barbra’s plans for injecting more fun into her life demonstrate - “I just want to get into my husband’s truck and wander, hopefully with the children somewhere near us. Life is fun for me when they come over. They love playing with the dogs and we have fun.” - when those other people are the ones you love.
Because it turns out fun is reassuringly easy to find. And not just - or even mostly - in organised or planned ways, but in a myriad of unexpected, unremarkable and memorably precious ones.
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