Three Things About Elsie

by Joanna Cannon

it’s only when you get old that you realise whichever direction you choose to face, you find yourself confronted with a landscape filled up with loss.

It’s strange, because you can put up with all manner of nonsense in your life, all sorts of sadness, and you manage to keep everything on board and march through it, then someone is kind to you and it’s the kindness that makes you cry. It’s the tiny act of goodness that opens a door somewhere and lets all the misery escape.

I’ve always been a big fan of escalators. I wish they had them in more places, because they don’t just get you somewhere, they give you something to look at whilst you’re doing it.

It didn’t take them long to undo my life. I had spent eighty years building it, but within weeks, they made it small enough to fit into a manila envelope and take along to meetings.

Because sometimes, you need to sing and dance. Even if you are eighty-four. Even if your bones push into your flesh, and the slightest breeze could steal you away.

‘You’ve got to find forgiveness,’ Elsie said; I just didn’t realise she meant I had to find it for myself. Perhaps that’s the most important moment. Not the moment of the mistake itself, but the moment in which you finally forgive yourself for making it.

Three Things About Elsie, explores something I’ve often thought about: how the smallest decisions can make the biggest difference to our lives – and the lives of those around us.