Category: LIFE

Ramblings, daft and humourous, dark and sad, but hopefully mostly happy

What’s in a name – the stork’s been! 🥂

April 23, 2018

Congratulations must go today to Prince William and Kate as they have produced a third baby. A boy.

Born around 11am today. How cute is that and how modern and lovely that William was there to watch, help or stand back and pretend to know how to handle that moment when his wife is making the final push and praying that it’s all still under control.

What a great leveller. Doesn’t matter if you’re the future King of England, or in some homeless hovel… the birth of a baby is true genius. Wow.

I wander what name they have chosen. Shall we guess?

I’m leaning towards Arthur or Charles maybe? My daughter thinks James (we’ve already swapped texts), my son’s nursing a bruised shin from being a plonker and falling over so we won’t ask him 🙄😂

This new little Royal has a lot of ready-made play mates and I hope his childhood years are full of giggles and kindness.

With parents like those two, I have few worries. They are down to earth, hands-on, realists. When they travel for duty, they take their children with them rather than leave them for weeks on end with nannies.

Yes, of course they are privileged .. but with that life comes an enormous responsibility which many of us mere mortals could not cope with.

I mean, will that little boy be able to lie on their bed for an hour mid afternoon and continue reading their latest book?!! (I did get up at 0530; promise I’m not being lazy!).

🌸

PS … I’m typing chapter 7 now 👌🏼

Don’t Be A Parachute Pal

April 19, 2018

I’m sure many of my followers already follow this pair of amazing bloggers who regularly share their wisdom. Today is no exception. Friendships are very important when they are true and special.
🌸

Fractured Faith Blog

I am writing staff performance reviews at present where I assess whether or not the members of the team I manage have met their objectives for the previous year. Thankfully as I am such a fantastic manager and they are such a fantastic team I can hand on heart write that they all have. No need for bribes, inducements or back handers. It’s the truth!

One of the key performance areas are strong communication skills; with other members of the team, the wider organisation and external stakeholders. This relates to both verbal and written communications. Active listening skills are always essential as effective communication is a two way street. Ha! You would almost think I was copying this out of a leadership manual. Which of course I’m not.

Solid communication skills also form the base of any successful relationship. Let me give you an example. Fionnuala shouts at me when…

View original post 444 more words

I survived – the counsellor was right!

April 19, 2018

I had everything crossed; fingers, toes, the works. But not my wires.

Lessons learned from experts in psychology and the verbal tools I’d been shown across months of study and placed in my toolbag of armoury came together in my first major test since they signed me off and wished me well (translate into hugged me, told me they were always at the end of a phone and would I be popping back to the coffee mornings to help new members at the start of their own journey? Too bloody right – it would be an honour).

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

Had I listened?

Had any of it truly sunk in?

Would I be able to respond differently to the age old vulgarities which escape through my mother’s lips, alongside wild statements about subjects she knows nothing about and her mood so often close to explosion that she walks around with the blue touch paper permanently lit.

I packed simply for our overnight London stay, my toolbag of armoury needing no physical space so is readily transportable.

The first major breakthrough was that she respected our non-smoking preference whilst inside the car. She actually said “Of course dear – that goes without saying!” as if I was being silly to even bring it up yet I had done so on the back of the previous trip, during which she had lowered the passenger window in an almost panic-state during what had become a slighter deeper than normal deep conversation, brought on by her peculiar need to talk deeply about everything.  Mind you, it had been 18 minutes since her previous cigarette. “I’ll just hold this outside.” and while doing 50mph up the A1 past Huntingdon, I was speechless and watched in my perifery the swirl of cigarette smoke leaving the tip to reclaim solace through that inch of access back in to the car’s cockpit. And hey – guess what? In order to take a drag, where is Mother’s mouth? On her face… where is her face? Inside the bloody car 😤 … so it didn’t ‘go without saying’ did it!

(Before we go any further, may I take this opportunity to point out I do not negatively judge anyone for smoking if they choose to do so and enjoy it. That’s their prerogative and I respect others’ choices. What I do have a problem with is her antagonistic approach to smoking outside when visiting our home (with our asthmatic son) because she is disgusted  that anyone who is a non-smoker should tell her “how to live her life” .   So she will stand in open doorways, or outside an open window, pretending to smoke ‘outside’ when clearly the smoke billows straight back inside on a breeze. She relayed a huge argument she’d had with a couple a few years ago and whom they no longer see, who’d been life long ex-service friends, who had decided to give up smoking. My parents had gone to stay with them and had not been made aware of this couples’ new way of life (presumably because they didn’t see the difference as a problem). I guess the issue was mentioned, starting a deep discussion about smoking and how the guests had been ‘banished’ to “outside, no less. I can’t understand it – they were always such fun” .

🤐🤐🤐🤐🤐🤐🤐🤐🤐🤐

So I drove and promised I would stop every so often for comfort breaks; in my case that meant what you just pictured followed possibly by a chai tea latte or cappuccino. In her case that meant teetering off to find an area of grass in which to smoke two cigarettes (because she can’t abide sharing normal smoking allocated areas with ‘common’ people) and continue her verbal assault on my father, who was not there to defend himself and probably wouldn’t have tried had he been. He’d have turned his hearing aid off and furtively studied the depth of tyre tread on the DB5 on the flatbed trailer behind a truck, perhaps returning from some classic car rally or event.

That evening I heated up another lasagne from that COOK shop and my daughter joined us at the Airbnb apartment for dinner. Her Oscar-winning performance of delighted granddaughter in the presence of her (mostly for 19 years disinterested) granny was something to behold. I listened to her animated explanation of Section 20s needing to be added to contracts where tenants share a block, from the kitchen area where I was bent double, head in the oven attempting to work out whether I’d had the fan oven on for the previous half hour or was it just the grill as the knob illustrations had long since been rubbed away.

The Airbnb was seriously cute; a ground floor garden flat with access to a private patio (I’d searched for one specially 😇) which showed clear evidence of previous smokers, stubs on the concrete 👌🏼, meant she could, having negotiated the exit, puff away to her heart’s content and I should hopefully maintain my usual 5/5 ‘guest star rating’.

Daughter departed to prepare for an early meeting the next day and I drove mother and I down to Little Venice, an area I’d not visited before but been meaning to .. and it was stunning! (Derrick, you were right!)

We sat outside the cutest Italian restaurant, so she could relax while the small glass of Merlot turned her dried lips black, the blue touch paper fizzing away in the background, and admired the Edwardian architecture of a large London pub opposite.

When the friendly waitress came outside to ask if we would like top-ups, mother enquired if she could buy the ashtray. The wicker chair refused to absorb my embarrassed being and instead I adopted small apologetic smile as the waitress faultered and asked her to repeat the question before concluding she would “ask my boss”.

So beautiful was this area that I suggested with calm and kindness across my face yesterday morning that “I would like to go back and see the barges in the daylight, if that is agreeable?” … (this was me practising my self esteem as she had hinted the evening before we should go reminiscing half hour the other way to an area we lived when I was 13-15). Mother does spend a lot of her day living in the past, recalling “the good times” …

… yet I recall a small private girls school and silently enduring some atrocious bullying from a particularly unsavoury character who ultimately got expelled – but not before she’d repeatedly bruised the top of my skull on a school trip with her elasticated purse belt with it’s 3 metal connectors at either end. She was sat in the seats behind me ‘entertaining her entourage’ … I did nothing 😡 (show me that cow now.)

Little Venice is like the cutest oasis amongst the red buses and black cab-filled roads of W2. The Pièce de Résistance simply has to be an amazing cafe built across this tiny section of the Grand Union canal, Cafe Laville.

.. in which we could have sat overlooking the water, watching as bargemen expertly handled their moving homes. Alas, I made do with this photo while our takeaway coffees were being made.   We instead sat outside near the entrance, at one of a handful of tables on the pavement next to the A5.

I am definitely going back there, whether it’s with my daughter, Man of the Woods or Daniel Craig if I remember to send an email. It’s truly stunning.

It was such a delight to arrive back home. MoW welcomed me home and listened to some funny tales .. and laughed at the fact the Airbnb had displayed a Japanese hat (which I found to be a very happy coincidence)

By the way .. that first day I was absent from you? The one I called my DayBreak? It was brilliant. I avoided all 4 apps, as planned and felt free to type away and managed over 1,400 words 👌🏼 … not quite the 2,000 I wanted but I was very pleased. I didhalf hour ironing too! 😂

Reading between the lines… and sorry it’s too late to say I love you too.

April 13, 2018

Glimmer

Just spent an hour de-cluttering some boxes in the barn. I like to do this methodically and check each piece of clutter to ensure I can truly discard it hence it takes more time than a requested BT engineer to actively get around to even starting these goals.  But I had an hour …

I came across a dusty envelope, a letter from my paternal grandfather (who died in 1993). The address on the front is to a small one-bedroom cottage I rented at the time – for £150 per month.  He was 91 when he wrote it.

I sat on my haunches and opened the envelope. My 23 year old self will have pocketed the £30 and made a mental note to thank him when I next returned ‘home’ but I doubt I paused long enough to read between the lines produced by his shaky hand at some point during the ten months he lived as a widower.

What do I see now?

I hear loneliness, but empathy that his granddaughter, his only grandchild, lives two hours away in a town in the Midlands and is probably too busy to think about visiting the ‘old people’.

I hear honesty. He spent time sitting around ‘thinking’??? I do that too grandad! He hopes I am well and wants to ‘make up’ for the intervening years in which we’d stopped ‘pocket money’. Those days started when I was just tall enough to stand level with his knee and he would hand me a coin much to my complete delight. OMG, he even writes the words I love you.  He never said that to my face.

Then again, he was a distant persona in my young eyes, born at a time where men never went out without wearing their trilby and overcoat or mac in winter or sports jacket in summer. He worked as a lecturer and took two weeks off in August, every August. He would take his wife, my grandmother, to the south coast to stay ‘in digs’ (that’s where I got the expression!) in houses along the sea front where rooms were rented by the week – much like my Airbnb experiences of today.

Some years, he would treat her to a day return P&O ferry crossing. His routine on holiday was much the same as at home after he retired – a gentle stroll down to the town to buy the day’s supplies and a pint of ale or two in the pub on the way home.

I recall an austere man, serious mostly until we played pontoon, as granny called it, whereupon he would make me giggle as he debated what to do for his hand muttering “Shall we risk it for a biscuit? Twist” and I would wait with baited breath while dad turned over the next card.

I had no siblings but entertainment was not an issue. I had my imaginary horses I had to feed, pat and let out to their paddocks (wherever I happened to be at the time) with every motion carried out like some elaborate mime, hanging the headcollar (or bridle if I’d been ‘riding’ around the garden) up on a hook so it didn’t get muddy or stood on.

Cards, or boardgames such as ‘Monopoly’ or ‘Mastermind’ with the coloured pegs.  Dad and I would play this at my grandparents (but never at home, I now realise) and his default contemplation tactic of flattening down his moustache usually preceded some amazing move I could never quite keep up with.  Sometimes I would wriggle with impatience because he took soooo long.

Christmas Day afternoons meant games, after a lunch with more food prepared than was consumed and before a completely unnecessary tea. The five of us played around the table, pausing only to watch the Queen at 3pm.

Grandad was the big man, who liked ‘his special drink’ and I would watch as granny poured the amber liquid in the small glass whenever he requested it; always this glass, never a different one. He loved all “cowboys-and-indians‘ films, and the small black and white telly perched on the sideboard when I was small was always on way too loud but the gunshots, saloons and dresses worn by the women grabbed my attention. After a while, I would even recognise the more famous actors and loved the drawl John Wayne brought to each part he played. The original ‘True Grit’ remains a favourite of mine and I know I first saw it sat next to grandad, his long fingers nursing the small glass of whiskey through which the light glimmered.  I remember howling with tears when Little Blackie was galloped and galloped until it dropped down dead, but it was ok grandad assured me – horses on filmsets were trained to do that.  Phew.

1542249034-John-Wayne

Granny would make his meals, his bed, and I think now she made his world. She was dutiful (she’d been in service apparently and as a child I knew not what that meant. Then I grew up and watched Downton Abbey).

G&G didn’t outwardly show affection. They were from a generation who didn’t. Yet when granny passed away one morning (about which, dear friend, I shall create a flash fiction piece soon) his life ended.

Those ten months he ate less and less. My mother went in to help as much as she could, dad was still commuting at the time so went in at weekends but grandad’s mind wasn’t in it. He knew enough to realise his body would one day let him see her again, if he starved it of life enhancing nutrients. So he ate very little and lost lots of weight. He drank his amber nectar, maybe to dull the pain, maybe to help his liver out a bit, so he could reunite with his loved one.

I wish I had noticed him a little more in those final months but I was probably worrying more about whether Alan in accounts had noticed my new shoes.

This letter is not clutter. It shall be placed in my bedside cupboard 🌸

Have a great weekend 🤗

What title shall I choose … how about the ‘Red Barn Murder’

April 12, 2018

Disrupt

RedBarn.jpg

I came home last night from watching a ‘run-through’ of a brand new script to a never before performed play.   I found it profoundly moving and quite traumatic because it brought back much of the subject content of the self-esteem counselling I endured and from which I benefitted throughout 2017.  Let me explain …

There is a local Womens Aid Centre in our local town, as there are in many towns.  The staff and volunteers’ faces there soon became recognised beacons of warmth at the regular meetings.  Stepping in from cold, wet autumn evenings to their brightly lit rooms with walls covered in artwork, produced by women who still like to go back and partake in coffee mornings they hold regularly, made you feel safe and at home somehow.

These walls have seen and heard it all.  There is no story which would shock the fabric of this place.  The volunteers have helped hundreds of women rediscover themselves or assist in them ‘seeing’ perhaps for the first time that they have choices ahead of them, and that if they make choices to change aspects of their lives, the world will keep spinning.  It won’t necessarily come crashing down around their ears because now the wealth of knowledge out there in the support systems; the police force, the courts, the lawyers means these women can feel safer if they wish to report domestic abuse.

However for many, they don’t report it.   One of the most important sentences issued by my counsellor during my first week, which she warned would be hard to hear and it was, was that I would need to start to take responsibility for my own wellbeing and hence future happiness.  She explained I’d made one of the biggest decisions by visiting her – she recognised that finally I was no longer happy to sit back and let life happen to me, leaving me unhappy, unfulfilled, victimised and silent.  I did not argue or defend myself; I was low enough to simply nod and let the knowledge run through my veins that from this point onwards, if I didn’t want to be a victim, I would have to stop behaving and reacting the way I had been.  All my life.  To many different characters along the way.    (You’ll appreciate this post Jennifer) I refer to the amazing Jennifer Gilmour who wrote her debut novel based around domestic abuse and how Rose, her MC, finally escapes.

I digress; back to the play.  There was a murder in Suffolk a very long time ago, about which many plays were written over the next hundred years or so.  Although I’m not keen on wiki, I will use it today so that you can read about it here.

Practically all the plays based around this true story were written by men and are about the murderer or the police teams and how the search for Corder was carried out.  Most are about bringing Corder to justice – thats all good stuff.

About five months ago, a playwright (we’ll call her Lizzie) visited the womens aid centre by arrangement to meet with some of the women who had completed the Freedom Program and Self Esteem courses during the previous few months.   We were treated to four afternoons of literary exercises and chat while she got to know us and our stories and we were given the opportunity to write prose and poetry.   The aim, she explained, was for her to write a new play from the point of view of Maria, the victim.   Lizzie had been fascinated by the Red Barn Murder story and felt there was an untold story here – that of Maria and the life she may have led up to the point of her death at the hands of Corder.

Three months has passed since we last saw Lizzie.   Yesterday, we met the meet the six women who would perform the parts in Lizzie’s play, and to sit and watch them go through various scenes which they had been working on for only three days.   They carried their scripts with them, yet still managed to portray emotions and friendships, difficult relationships between the girls as the years passed and Corder worked his magic on Maria’s grasp of life through gas lighting.

Lizzie’s play starts when Maria and her village friends are all young and it reminded me so much of that amazing ‘Always’ advert which did the rounds a few years back.  Even now, I can’t watch this without shedding a tear, so valid is the content.

When the scenes were finished for our benefit, and I had swept away more tears, the Director stood and asked if any of use would like to say anything.  Well guess who spoke?!   Yup, you know me so well; I did not let the emotions disrupt what I had to say 😀

I found my voice and complemented her on writing a script that covered so many of the aspects of living like a victim and how that manifests itself; withdrawal from family and friends because you’ve been persuaded that your friends are not making comments in your best interest is just one of many examples I saw performed brilliantly.   I complemented the six women who now were sat on the stage awaiting feedback.   The girl playing Maria had adopted the perfect nervousness exhibited when confronted by strangers, the perfect defiance and defence of Corder when friends questioned his ‘love’ because of the gas lighting he had been inflicting upon her.

We all clapped and wished them well in their further rehearsals.  The performance is not due to take place until June and anyone going to watch it will need to take a tissue.

Disrupt

When your cupboards are bare ..

April 11, 2018

So hungry.

Nothing much grab-able round here because I’ve eaten it all, bar one measly frozen battered cod fillet in the back of the Birds Eye box. I know!! Let’s make a homemade fish finger sandwich 👌🏼

Yup I’ve got nice bread so things are looking up.

Today I’ve been putting the finishing touches to a piece for a competition. I printed it off convinced it was as polished as I could make it. Then I spotted a flaw. Then another. They crept off the page like small slugs, laughing at me at how well they’d been able to hide for so long from my scouting eyes.

Seven times I think I printed it in the end.. what a waste of five pieces of paper each time. Don’t panic – I’ve made small notepads of those sheets, cutting them into four and stapling the corners 😇

I love bread with nuts and seeds in it… ok this sarnie works well. Try it!

So the finished piece is now in an envelope and I shall send it today. You may recall I entered three or four competitions around Christmas time for flash fiction or potential openings of a novel. Needless to say I’ve heard nothing back, but I have not let it put me off. On the contrary, I feel I’m improving weekly and I’ve got some exciting days here and there booked at conferences and courses to meet like-minded peeps and learn more writing skills. Very excited about that.

Man of the Woods continues to be supportive.

“I see Matsu’s made the bed this morning!” he grinned as he walked past the bedroom earlier to find me in my writing room. I was not offended by his need to register a not too common event.

“Yes!” I smiled back and took the comment with positivity 🌸