Were you one of the popular kids when you were at school? Uh-huh. One of the girls who hung around in cliques, making nasty comments about everyone else and generally trying to make them feel inferior so you could feel better aboout your own flaws? Yeah, this post isn’t for you. Go back to whatever else you were doing. This is for all the other kids who had to deal with you.
The other day, someone posted a tweet that asked ‘if you could go back and give your younger self any advice, what would it be?’
Well, I was that kid. The one with the slightly dorky hair, sticky out teeth and braces. I was the kid who didn’t fit into the cool kids, or the brainiacs or the geeks. I was the kid that didn’t really fit in anywhere. And you know what, if you’re that kid it’s okay. Sure, at the time, it feels like you wish your schoolbag would open up and swallow you but here’s my advice. Being an adult doesn’t mean you magically make friends, become popular and the mean girls go away. They don’t, they’re still out there and you’ll meet them again but the difference is, when you do you’ll know just how much better than them YOU really are, and you’ll smile knowing that you’re worth it, and they’re barely worth a backward glance.
Growing up, in short, sucks. The dumber adults in your life will try and palm you off with platitudes like being a kid is the best time of your life or say I’d go back to being 13 in a heartbeat. They either have the memory span of a goldfish or they’re just out-and-out lying to you. Thing is, you’ve got to learn to get through it, you’ve got to toughen up and find out who the hell you are and answer the questions about yourself that no teen mag will ever have the answer to. You know why? Because the big wide world you’ll enter into when you’re twenty or so, is exactly the same as the one you inhabit now except it’s bigger, badder and will think nothing of crushing you into dust. So adolescence … is a trial run. Inspirational? Not so much. Scary? Hell yeah. Worth it? More than you could ever believe.
You see, every time someone’s mean to you, or you come up against some arrogant power figure with the brains of a wet dishrag, you get a choice in your life. You choose to take it, or you choose to stand against it and to say ‘to hell with you’. Each and every one of those choices will define the person you become. They’re not easy choices, and they’re not supposed to be. At the time in your life when you just want to be accepted and have friends and have fun you are expected to make choices that are too big for you to truly understand. The understanding comes later, the choice is for now. Sometimes it’s the difficult path versus the easy path, sometimes it’s popularity versus unpopularity and being ostracised. Sometimes you have to decide what to stand up for and what to let go. And that’s on top of all the physical and emotional shit as you watch your body morph into someone you don’t even recognise.
So my advice to you is as follows: Hold your head high, nobody is better than you. Nobody is worse than you either. They all have their own problems. Be true to yourself, even if people don’t understand you or think you’re weird. One day, they could look back and think you’re a genius. You just don’t know. If people are unkind, vicious or mean, watch and wait and decide whether to fight or walk away. Both take strength but the wisdom comes with knowing which way is the best for you. Don’t bury your problems, it’s just lying to yourself and it catches you out and teaches you a harder lesson than being caught out lying to someone else. Try everything you can at least once, and keep your mind and horizons open. Don’t close your heart. It hurts more keeping it open but brings you more joy than you can concieve. NEVER, EVER give up on your dreams. They are what will keep you smiling when you’re too old and frail to get out and make them come true.Treat yourself with respect: body, heart and soul. If you don’t, how can expect someone else to? Love yourself. Same goes. Express yourself. If you want to wear sunshine yellow biker boots and a tutu then GO FOR IT. Accept when you’re wrong and forgive yourself for not being perfect. That is harder than it sounds. Enjoy the small things, even if it’s jumping in puddles, kicking leaves or watching the sunrise. If in doubt, DO. Hard work is the best way to clear your mind and work off your sadness. Don’t sleep or laze your life away, you’ll regret it when you’re old. Don’t worry if your life veers off course, or you never know exactly what you want to do with yourself. You’ll end up in the right places anyway as long as you’re true to yourself. Love will come, and probably go. It’s a learning experience and a gift. Once your heart has healed you’ll learn to appreciate the moments and let go of the rest. It won’t stop it hurting like the devil in the meantime. You’ll meet people wiser, you’ll meet people who are less so. Listen to the former and show patience to the latter. That too is harder than it sounds. Read voraciously. It will open up questions, and options inside you that will help you to define the person you want to become. Listen. Sometimes the best wisdom comes from the most surprising places at the most unexpected times and you’ll miss it if you forget to listen. Pray – whether it’s in a church, by the sea or in bed. It doesn’t matter if your God has a name or a face or a religion. Believe in it, and watch the world unfold around you. Have the courage to be the best person you can be. I will always love you.
If you could give your younger self any advice, what would it be?
I’m pretty used to applying myself to a bit of well-articulated navel gazing but for today’s blog post I want to talk about something a little different. A couple of months ago, I found myself following a link from a re-tweet on Twitter about an organisation called FOURYEARS.GO and watched a video on their mission statement: WATCH:
The first time I clicked the play button on that video, it gave me chills. The second time I cried. Ive just watched it again and seen something I believe in with my whole heart. If you skipped over the video to read what I’m writing: WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU? CLICK PLAY!
The internet is full of links we follow and forget about. Issues that seem important while we read an article and then don’t bother to follow up. I can only say, please don’t let this be one of those links. Let this be a moment that changes your life. A link that changes your outlook. A video that makes you do one small thing that can contribute to changing the world and the way we live forever.
It’s so easy for us to say that just one of us can’t change the world. Perhaps not but perhaps we have forgotten the power of the collective, when we band ourselves together and decide to make a change. It doesn’t take so much to convince your workplace to take part or to begin a project with your friends that CAN make a difference. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. Stepping beyond recycling to check that the packaging of our products is recycleable, buying fairtrade, cycling to work instead of driving.
They all seem to be small insignificant things on their own, until you think of the fact that so far nearly 3,000 people and 878 organisations have verbally comitted to making a small change to their lives that can make a huge difference to the world we live in. That’s a large chunk of a town making a commitment to our ecology, to sustainability, to living an ethical life – but in the grand scheme of things, that’s not a lot of people.
So, I know that the people who come by and read my blog are good, intelligent, ethical people. SO I urge you … go and have a look at the FOURYEARS.GO website, and pledge your commitment, however big or small, talk to your friends about it, encourage your workplace to get involved. This is a world that we’re part of, a world that we live in. We are the greatest force for positive change it has. We’re relying on you.
I’ve wanted a tattoo for years, since a friend mentioned it in passing. Of course, that simple throwaway comment led to a very long coffee break in which we discussed ideas of what design, where, I wonder how much it hurts and I wonder what it costs. Since those days, I’ve still considered it. The designs have changed slightly. The placement has altered considerably as my body shape has changed but the desire … is still there.
Of course, so are all the hangups that have prevented me from ever getting one before. Will I look stupid when I’m older and more wrinkly? Will I change my mind in a few months and be stuck with it? Oh God, employers don’t approve of tattoos. And so it goes on. But as time passes, and I care less what other people think, my mind keeps coming back to it. My mind has once more been considering ideas of design and placement.
So here’s my shortlist so far (if anyone has anything they think I might like/want to consider, please leave a comment)
I seem to have a tendency to avoid blogging when life takes one of its more turbulent turns, and so it has been of late. Whilst life continues in its unremarkable day to day way, somehow everything has turned on it’s head, until I feel like I’m walking on my hands, upside down through a sea of molasses.
Not entirely a lifetime ago, I was struck by yet another vicious bout of of wanderlust. When these moments strike, I feel like Vianne in Chocolat. I can hear the wind whispering its message, teasing and tantalising with stories of new places and new adventures and they all look brighter and shinier than where I am right now. I seem to have an affinity with places for a short amount of time, before I feel it passes and I’m on my way to newer, greener pastures. It’s as if my life, mine particularly, is more of a book of short stories or a series of vignettes than a story or a film. It feels less continuous and more like a series of moments that stand out, like connect the dots. I feel drawn to certain places, and certain people, and seem to spend my life following one instinct after another on a journey that’s a little wild and unpredictable, and by its nature seems to throw up beautiful unexpected moments when I least expect them, and when I fear they may have passed me by.
Which brings me to today. I had an uncomfortable start to the day, with a meeting I was dreading. Thankfully it turned out better than expected, and left me in a sardonically amused but quite upbeat frame of mind as I headed in to the second part of my day, which truth be told I was looking forward to almost as much as the first part of the day. Amidst the chaos of our shop in full swing, I slipped out into the back to take a breath, and regain the tattered remnants of my sanity, and as I came out of the corridor, my day suddenly brightened as I saw an acquaintance popping into the shop.
There are some people that you meet randomly, through the course of your life that you just connect with. Inexplicably. People that just upon seeing them make you smile. It’s like a moment of recognition: I GET you. Meeting them again, even momentarily is an event that fills you with joy, and this one was one I had been afraid would pass me by. I thought my wanderlusting might find me gone, without another of those moments of connection, but today the universe threw me a bone.
It really brought home to me something that I had forgotten, about myself and my life, in the turbulence of the last couple of years, and that’s the joy that’s derived from the unexpected moments, the spontaneous acts and the things you wouldn’t and couldn’t have dreamed in a million years. In the turbulence of life that I had tried to control, I’d forgotten the exhilaration of just rolling with it and somehow ending up EXACTLY where you needed to be at EXACTLY the right time. Somehow, without a modicum of control you still meet people who take your day from bog-standard to AMAZING in the blink of an eye, you get a kick in the arse just when you really need it, and at certain privileged points in your life you find yourself in a place where you can make a difference to someone just through being the right person in the right place at exactly the right moment.
Got to say, sometimes life really is just awesome.
I followed a link from Twitter the other day to an evocative blog by a young woman who had recently lost her Mother to Alzheimers.You can tell from the way she writes that it has been an immensely painful process for her, and the admiration I feel for her, being able to blog about something so IMMENSELY horrible that it feels as though your soul has been nigh-on ripped in two, is almost unquantifiable.
As I suppose is natural, I began thinking back to my own actions when my Father was dying and after he died. It’s not something that I’ve tended to dwell on. In some respects, knowing the end was coming allowed me to do a bit of grieving before the moment came, and the rest has passed in a whirlwind of chaos, time and stoicism. Looking back to then hurts. I want my memories of my Father to be good – to be memories of the vivid, strong, effervescent man he was, not the husk of a man in the hospice bed, waiting for his daughter to say goodbye before he took his last breath. It’s hard to remember the man who turned to you the week before he died and said, ‘I’m tired of fighting now, darling. It’s time for me to give up’ and looking at me almost as if he’s asking my permission, and begging for me to understand. It’s hard remembering that, and harder still to remember myself running from pillar to post, trying to create some last happy moments and failing. It’s easier to say it gets better with time, than to know how important it is to look back at a devastating moment and forgive myself for being less than perfect, to forgive myself for being human and to forgive myself for being me.
Because the truth is, that no matter what happens, how it happens or who it’s with: it’s not pretty. It’s painful, it’s ugly and time seems to pass both too fast and too slow all at the same time. I made mistakes that seemed to take on epic proportions and everything seemed to have added weight or significance because time was short. I remember all too much how imperfect I’ve been as a daughter, all the times I said ‘I hate you’ in anger instead of ‘I love you’. It doesn’t matter how many times I said I love you since those teenage days, they hang back and haunt me and added to some kind of pressure in my head that wanted to make the last weeks and months perfect. I feel guilty because I wanted the whole thing to be over, because it’s so long and drawn out and the suffering is immense. I feel selfish because I wonder how much of that wanting it to be over is wanting him to be free of the pain, and how much is me wanting the horror of the hours, days and weeks to be over. I feel guilty because I desperately didn’t want him to die, because I was afraid that the pain of losing him would be too much to bear. I felt guilty because despite having so long to say goodbye, I never told him all the reasons I loved him, and never even realised them all until he was gone.
And then it happened. And I felt numb. It just didn’t process that one minute he could be in there (just, but just was enough) and the next minute, not. And people wanted to go and be with him after he’d gone and it freaked me out and I couldn’t bear it.
And they expected me to get up and do things and be practical and worry about fucking death certificates while there was a yearning hole inside me that threatened to engulf my entire being. I still don’t know if I can forgive myself for smiling and being practical and doing what needed to be done, when I wanted to be standing on the side of a wild hillside, screaming at the top of my lungs just how bloody unfair this was, and HOW WAS I GOING TO COPE WITHOUT HIM?I still don’t know if I can forgive myself for soothing others when they rang up the house and burst into tears whilst offering their condolences instead of shouting ‘how the hell do you think I feel?’
I wanted to punch every last living soul who quoted me platitutes and told me it would get better, and brain the woman who told me at his funeral that she couldn’t bear to look at me because it reminded me too much of him. I was angry at everyone who didn’t know how to respond and ignored me instead, I was furious with the people who thought that because I was okay on the surface, I wasn’t bleeding underneath. Perhaps I need to forgive them for not knowing how to be, when they haven’t experienced devastation and loss like that, and perhaps I don’t really want to because it reminds me of just how raw it still is three years on, and how vulnerable and lonely everything still is without him.
Time doesn’t really make it okay, no matter what anyone says. All time does is teach me how to function without him. It doesn’t make the sharp stab of loss any less when I hear the busker singing A Modern Major General in Oxford Street, or I hear the London Irish fans raising a chrous of Fields of Athen Rye in support of the team. It doesn’t stop the lump in my throat when I hear someone say ‘stupid boy’ in the tones of Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army or a cheerful ‘my dear boy’. It doesn’t make it any less devastating to see the Father of a friend lead her up the aisle on her wedding day. Everything is slightly bittersweet, because it’s always slightly coloured with the memory of a man who is no longer here.
I can forgive myself for feeling that, because to forget too quickly would be worse, and if time someday eases how it feels to be without him, then perhaps I can learn to forgive myself for that too.
I’m feeling intolerably lazy about blogging and I really do absolutely love memes, so here are 25 so-called interesting facts about me:
I experience wordjoy. Particular favourites include: frond, effervescent, collywobbles, ignite, anthropomorphic, meringue and renege. On the other hand, I also have a list of words that I don’t like. Particularly unjoyful are: lithe, stringy, moist, invaginate and remonstrate
I have a love affair with brightly coloured hair, and often yearn to dye my dark brown hair pink (again) … even just a little bit of it.
I would love to be one of those superior intellectual readers but the truth is that I enjoy the Famous Five and Harry Potter just as much as proper grown up literature, and if you called me on it, maybe even a little bit more.
I’m addicted to decorating and home improvements. The potential and possibilities appeals to the creative in me. Show me a new house I could move straight into and I’ll turn my nose up at it. Show me an ancient, tumbledown old shack that’s going to involve me being on my hands and knees in mucky clothes for months on end and my joy will be uncontained.
I am mortally afraid of dried fruit. Phobic. There is simply NOTHING on the face of the planet more hideous. I actually have to leave the room if someone starts eating it in front of me. *shudder*
I rule my spending with a rod of iron, because if my naughty ‘I enjoy shopping side’ goes out armed with a credit card, I’d be in a LOT of trouble.
I am ever so slightly *cough* addicted to chocolate. I’m pretty sure I get withdrawal symptoms and everything.
I LOVE colour and texture. It’s like a new form of language to me: the way that you set and combine different pieces to create different effects. The subtlety, the statement, all the unsaid things, the subconcious effect of colour and texture on your mood, the way you can clash and combine and all of it works. Delicious.
I love old films and tv series and am particularly fond of a good whodunnit. Poirot, Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes …. a surefire good night in
I get very bored very quickly, and constantly need new things on the go to excite and fulfil me. This shockingly bad habit of mine has led me to do many insane things that include giving up perfectly good jobs to set up businesses, move across country for no good reason, date ridiculously inappropriate fellas (well, it was interesting at the time) ….
I have a really hideous recurring dream that involves being eviscerated by rats in the middle of a kitchen. The odd thing is that the kitchen always changes to reflect wherever I’m living but that seems to have absolutely no effect on the rest of the dream.
I love to bake but I don’t do it nearly as much as I’d like to. I somehow imagine that baking makes me a more capable grownup.
I can never remember what I’ve done with my keys. Even if they’re in exactly the same place they normally are, I still look straight past them, panic momentarily, run around going ‘omigod, where the hell are my keys’ before finding them exactly where they ought to be. I have now started tying them to my clothes in an attempt to stop losing them. Because, clearly that will work.
I have a decidedly contrary character. While I tend to be a big picture person, who can’t be arsed with the finer details of things, if there’s no-one I trust to sort out the details, I become insanely nitpicky to the point that I want to rip my own head off and use it to hit people with.
I’m an insufferable romantic. I believe wholeheartedly in love at first sight, and will one day be swept off my feet by a man worthy of me.
I think the most beautiful poem ever written is Before the world was made by William Butler Yeats.
I like to defy expectations
I want a tattoo. Two actually. A star on my wrist and a floral design on my foot. I haven’t worked up the courage for it yet. But I will.
I like the feeling sand makes under my feet when I walk barefoot on the beach.
I am incapable of walking along a beach without collecting stones, shells and driftwood
My first dog was called Rio. He was a vast golden lab that belonged to My Godfather’s son originally. I used to ride him around the garden. Giddyup.
I have weirdly double jointed fingers. They scare people.
My favourite flowers are roses and daisies. When I have a garden of my own, these flowers will feature strongly
I don’t drink. I gave up entirely by accident, and don’t miss it even remotely. Nobody really seems to mind, since it means I’ll happily play designated driver.
Those of you who know me in my real life, will probably know that I’m not entirely English, despite looking and sounding the part to the point that nobody would know unless I told them otherwise. However. I’m only half English, my other half is South African, both by birth and by heritage.
Most of us nowadays aren’t entirely 100% English. Look back far enough and there’ll be some mixing and matching somewhere but quite often it’s so far back that it doesn’t matter much to you. That’s not so much the case when you’re a half and half, especially when you’re born in one part of the world and move to another.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that a move from one English-speaking country to another wouldn’t be a big deal. There might be some small hiccups and differences but it’d be an easy process for all that. Despite some of the linguistic quirks I’ve been talking about over on the Macmillan Dictionary blog (yeah, see that shameless plug? Follow the linky…) there is a something that gets left over, an essence of your former life and culture that lives inside you and sets you apart. It’s the thing that means whichever place you find yourself in, you’re always too much of the other half of yourself to truly fit in.
When summer comes, and it’s Braai time (barbecue for you English), you’ll find me fiercely protective of the Braai. It’s a uniquely South African Process that simply isn’t replicated in Britain. Personally, I think the weather’s responsible but nonethless …. nobody gets their paws on my braai! (It’s normally a male thing but in ex-pats, well we’ve got to do what we can) The notion of a braai, and it’s literal translation, is the cooking of meat over an open fire. Because of this and due to some of the techniques used, the idea of using a gas barbecue … well, perspectives aren’t favourable. We always use either wood or lumpwood charcoal (briquettes and firelighters get anywhere near my food and there’ll be trouble) and quite often chuck some beer on the flames for extra flavour in the smoke. Castle lager being a favourite. Braais are also more relaxed than the English barbecue. They tend to start at about 11am and often go on late into the night. Rather than a formalised lunch with everyone eating at the same time, certain foods are cooked depending on the heat of the fire and it’s a case of helping yourself whenever you’re hungry and doing it all at your own pace.
There is a definite slowness of pace, and less of a sense of rushing around for no discernable reason. There’s a kick back and relax, anything goes feeling that extends beyond the braai.
Beyond braai-ing and biltong, there’s far more that sits below the surface. In blatant opposition to the English reserve (something I have never quite managed to master) most South Africans are outspoken. In fact, I know many English people who find South Africans slightly less outspoken, and often more offensive.
Regardless, my instinctive habit is, and always has been, to call a spade a spade. Though I can get poetic and romantic about things, I just don’t do subtlety and reserve. You piss me off and you know about it and I have always preferred a bloody good argument to bottling things up and pretending it’s all alright. Can’t say it always does me a world of good but you’ve got to be who you are.
And when I daydream, it’s of big wide-open spaces that are more immense than anything you can dream of, of places and sights so huge that they make your heart sing. It’s of merciless sunshine and an elemental ferocity that is as apparent in the landscape as the people.
And yet, there’s something in me that yearns for the grassy, rolling hills of England. There’s a part of me that loves my English side because the sense of history here that gives you roots. It’s not the scenery or the old buildings that choke me up, nor is it the traditions or our modern day culture. There’s a part of me that when I’m upset will want to find myself standing at the White Horse in Uffington because nowhere else gets to the root of the English that sits below the reserve. There’s a part of the Englishness I feel that isn’t ladylike or gentle. It’s a feeling of the warrior England, an England that knows who it is and FIGHTS for it. There’s something slightly wild about that England: it’s proud, genuinely patriotic and bloody fierce. It’s an old England. It’s a HOMELAND and it’s mine.
It’s both places, both people that live inside me, in an uneasy marriage of two cultures. In their own ways, for all their surface differences, they have similarites. They’re both wild, passionate and fierce, whilst holding the key to the most profound and elemental peace.
Want to know a secret? I like the dirty side of town. It makes me feel like I’m in a black and white arthouse film. I feel anonymous. I feel real. I can be anyone I want to be. I like the soured faces that glare out from behind grubby lace curtains, and the kids in tracksuits just a little bit too small playing football in the street. The cheeky comments from young lads passing by and the crude inuendo often makes me smile, if not laugh out loud, because it’s so directly opposite to my own life. I like walking down the identical backstreets of the down-at-heel victorian terraces, tracing my fingers over the blackened bricks, admiring the graffiti that passes for art around there.
It’s a little like living in sandpaper, the coarseness of it takes a while to get used to, while it rubs away your corners and gets to the core of you. It exposes the truth of you. Snap, snap, snap. Celluloid snapshots of an ever-present alternative reality. I like the grit of it. There’s no pretence and no sheen. People are who they are down here. They’ve no time for strangers but hang about for long enough, blending into the brick walls and you’ll see some of the greatest acts of kindness and heroism here too. I don’t mean heroism in the way you’re thinking, I dare say. Not the sort of heroism that runs into burning buildings but the kind of heroism that thinks nothing of sacrificing its own needs and desires to give someone a happy moment or a smile. Everyday heroism, is what it is.
It’s been a while since I was there: things have moved on, passed by, grown up. I’m not the same either. But sometimes I like to go back, in my memories to how it was. Back to days of scalding teas in dirty cafes on the Coatsworth road, and a pint in a seedy pub a little way along, where the locals at the bar looked like they’d mug you given half a chance but behaved better than many of the ‘gents’ I know nowadays.
Living in the dirty side of town taught me lessons I wouldn’t have learnt anywhere else. Lessons about judging people and places. Lessons about the secrets that places like this hold. The beauty you find that most people are blind to the flourishes untended in the cracks. I suppose it tells you a little about me too, my flirtation with the seedier side of town. It becons to me, and seduces me with its whispers of secret dramas. I find myself enticed by the flashing neon promises and flirting with danger.
People walk by the dirty end of town, carefully avoiding coming in. Others scowl from the bus and wish this little blot on the landscape would shrivel up and disappear but I love it, and occasionally in my dreams, I still find myself scurrying along the road, flanked by little dirty shops, in a place that would never be trendy, but to me, was always friendly and real, especially in the middle of the night, when I went walking with my camera.
You know when you sign up to some social networking site or other, your facebook, or twitter or whatever and it has the inevitable box telling you to describe yourself. It’s so completely impossible to condense yourself down to a couple of sentences, or a short paragraph; to find a phrase that adequately sums you up, that’s witty or clever or quirky, that really goes some way to encapsulating who you really are. You go through a mini existential crisis and personality assessment, which is how, I ended up with:
“Nomadic, hippy, hobgoblin with a penchant for sweets”
It all starts with the question “who am I?”. What an essentially simple question. Who the hell knows but it’s a more of a question of what’s inside you, rather than a question about what you do. What drives you to be who you are and act as you do. Because nine times out of ten, who you are drives you to do what you do (Well, maybe save the nature vs nurture debate for another time, hey?)
I’d love to be the woman who stays in one place, and makes a home and a life and STAYS there, and I’m not. When I was younger, I thought my habit of moving around, leaping from one job to another, one home to another, one town to another were just a symptom of being dissatisfied with what I was doing. Maybe it was, and maybe it still is but moving around seems to be part of me. I rarely stay anywhere for more than a year before I get itchy feet and want something new and different. I like to be in different places, meeting different people, seeing different towns, different atmospheres. I’ve lived in all sorts of places: Born in South Africa and moved to the UK as a child. I’ve lived in London, Oxfordshire, West Yorks, Tyne & Wear and now Somerset and visited yet more. I enjoy travelling, the journey, the sensation of leaving, transition and arriving. It’s never stagnant, just a series of moments, like photographic snapshots hung on a washing line.
At a guess, anyone that knows me would happily describe me as quirky (often for want of a better word) or a bit of a hippy at heart. You physically have to pour me into a suit and ‘corporate wear’ is my idea of effective modern day torture. I don’t fit in with business culture, and I’d rather be outside in the fields, or woods or wandering by the sea. If I can get away with wandering around barefoot, I’ll happily toss my shoes to the wind. I have a habit of collecting driftwood and pebbles from the beach and regard them as a greater art than any you could make or buy.
A friend of mine, a number of years ago described me, on separate occasions, as both ‘stumpy’ and a ‘hobbit’. He’s quite a charming that way. It was kind of on account of my being short and curvy, with an intense love of mealtimes and a slightly ethereal sense of the day-to-day. When I was a student and just venturing into the world of Shakespeare, I stumbled across A Midsummer Night’s Dream and simply fell in love with Puck. Far more than any of the other characters, I totally identified with him. He’s mischevious and amuses himself for the sake of fun and nothing more. He sits squarely between the crassness of the mortals and the saccharine sweetness of the other fairies. He’s odd looking, unglamorous and doesn’t quite fit in. He’s capricious, clever and a walking contradiction.
… And penchant for sweets is fairly self evident, and a sweet tooth would desperately understate the matter. Much like a hobbit, I do love my food. I’d be happy with a life that involved a first and second breakfast, elevenses, lunch, high tea, dinner AND supper. God. Heavenly. Just enough meals to fit in all the wonderful flavours and textures I LOVE to eat. Just think of the variety…
So, if YOU had to sum yourself up in a sentence, what would it be?
I’ve been in two minds whether to blog about this. Truth be told, I’m still not sure so I’m typing word by word with no idea if I’ll hit publish at the end of this or not.
Unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand recently, you couldn’t have missed the fact that it’s Mothering Sunday this coming Sunday.
The history of Mothering Sunday is believed to have religious roots. Most Sundays in the year churchgoers would worship at their nearest parish or “daughter church”. In Victorian times it was considered important for people to return to their home or “mother” church at least once a year, which was commonly thought to be the nearest Cathedral. So each year on the fourth Sunday of Lent, everyone would visit their “mother” church. The return to the “mother” church became an occasion for family reunions when children who were in service away from home returned. The majority of historians think that it was this return to the “Mother” church which led to the tradition of children, particularly those working as domestic servants, or as apprentices, being given the day off to visit their mother and family.
Of course, nowadays, much like Valentine’s day, it’s largely a commercial holiday with retailers telling us to buy everything from hand sanitising lotion (thanks for the heads up on that one Amber) to fossils and every last thing in between as a token of our appreciation for our parents. Turn into the local stationers and you’re bombarded with saccharine sweet cards declaring our love for our Mothers. And most people I know will be buying one with a gift for their mothers and doing something special this Sunday.
I won’t be.
You see, while most of the people I know are pretend moaning about buying cards and presents for their Mums but secretly thinking it’s kind of sweet, I can’t do that. And every time I hear someone talking about what they’ll be doing with their Mums, my heart lurches a little bit, because I know it’s unlikely that I will be able to do that, and that Mothers day, for me, is likely to be the same non-event that it has been for a decade or so.
You see, my Mum suffers from a mental disability. An addiction that led her to make a choice between me and another big love in her life and in my youthful, hot-headed way a number of years ago I decided that I couldn’t spend my life playing second fiddle to her addictions. It’s not a choice I regret but it makes me feel a little sad and a little wistful knowing that while other sons and daughters are celebrating what their parents have done and have sacrificed to give them a decent start in life, my Mum wouldn’t do that. That I wasn’t reason enough to battle for and to know I will never be able to celebrate her in that way. While it was my choice to walk away from it and chose to live my own life, it’s a twist of the knife to know that I had to make that choice, to know that I couldn’t have my own life and a loving mother, and to know that I will never be able to join in the celebrations.
I won’t rant about how wrong it is to celebrate Mother’s day just because a minority of us can’t do so. It’s a day to celebrate your Mother (and historically your family) and that’s a joyful thing. So I say go wild. Remember every damned thing your Mother has ever done to make you happy and then mutiply it by 10, because that’s probably closer to the truth. Forget the arguments, the niggles and the tiny things that annoy you about your Mum … because they don’t matter. Imagine what it would be like to spend every single day for the rest of your life without her … and the emotional devatation you can imagine is the the mirror to how much you really love her. Hold onto those thoughts and when you see your Mum on Sunday, don’t just give her a bunch of flowers and a hug … TELL HER how much you lover her, how much you appreciate her and how much she’s one of the best things in your life. Don’t let her go without knowing all the things you love about her from the way she smells to the way she dances when she thinks no-one’s watching .
But being in the situation I am, makes me consider other people, who through no choice of their own don’t have a Mother with whom they can celebrate either. People who’ve lost their family through any kind of tragedy. Being subjected to the endless barage of advertising is going to hurt as much as the knowledge that the day is one that we are now and will forever be excluded from that special relationship and celebration. So as you consider your maternal relationships on Sunday and spend a little time with the ones you love, just spare a little thought for those of us who won’t be.
Well, now it’s up! I think the bed needs a whole load of sumptuous pillows underneath (sumptuous is so my favourite word right now) to really carry it, since it’s sitting quite high up but nonetheless … isn’t it fabulous?
UPDATED to include pics with more pillows and closeups of the bedhead:
Yesterday afternoon, I found myself in a pub in Wolverhampton, celebrating a friend’s birthday with a couple of old friends, and was absolutely STRUCK by how EXCEPTIONAL they are.
Looking at our table of laughing, joking, gesticulating you wouldn’t have seen anything out of the ordinary, just a group of fun, happy, well balanced people. And so they were but also SO very much more. They are people whose spirit not only has triumphed against adversity but people who work hard daily to ensure that EVERY DAY they continue to triumph.
They are inspirational by virtue of no more than who they are. Their triumphs daily inspire my own and they themselves are such lovely people that they inspire help and support from the rest of us whenever they are in need of it.
They are the sorts of people who walk into a room full of strangers and SHINE. They can’t help it. They believe in life taking it by the horns and giving it a smacking kiss on the forehead. They make the world a brighter and more interesting place just by being in it.
While many of us get stuck in our ways: they are an education. They make a lifestyle out of constantly growing, changing, learning and consciously evolving. As their perspectives change, they challenge my beliefs and perspectives and I grow with them.
I know plenty of people who try too hard to be exceptional or extraordinary and by trying so hard, they miss the focus they were aiming for. Extraordinary comes when you know the ordinary intimately. Exceptional comes once you’ve embraced and appreciated the mundane. It comes when you stop trying to be who and what you’re not and be who you ARE to the best of your ability. It comes from having experienced both pain and hardship so that you can truly offer compassion.
They find joy in the smallest things and find wonder in everyday spaces. They know who they are and they know where they come from. They might not know where they’re headed but they make the journey a hell of a lot more interesting.
If ever there was a sentence that I couldn’t imagine myself thinking, this was one of them and yet it’s the one I could hear running through my head at approximately 8.45 this morning. I had to travel across the county for work on a bus that should have long ago been condemned to the scrap yard and some little spark in my head raised the little thought in my head … I’ve got an hour and a half to kill, I could do a little meditation on the bus. Genius.
Each slow breath I took was immaculately timed with the lurch of the bus and my intense focus, entirely detracted from the horrors of the journey, even to the extent that I didn’t notice the youth who looked like a young Richard E Grant who got on the bus shortly after me, smelling quite strongly of marijuana (Dude, seriously, it wasn’t even 9am – what gives?) at least until I’d finished.
Sure, it’s a hazard of doing something that is best performed in peace and quiet in crowded, public spaces but that’s the thing. This is life and life’s not perfect. Sometimes you need to take those moments wherever you can find them and if you can find them for ten minutes on a bus, amongest the noise and chatter and smell, then you can find them anywhere.
Sometimes it’s easier to settle yourself away from the world and blissfully trip away to a calmer, more transquil headspace and we all need that from time to time, however we find it. But sometimes we don’t get that time and space. Sometimes life gets a rush on and we’re ‘too busy’ to be thinking about taking those ten minutes for ourselves.
But you can always carve out a little time, whether it’s meditating in front of a slot machine in Vegas or on a bus in the middle of Somerset, sometimes you’ve just got to take a moment and find your centre while the craziness whirls and eddies around you. It’s still going to be there in 10, 20 or 30 minutes time.
As for maybe looking a little crazy … hell, I live near Glastonbury. No-one’s going to bat an eyelid!
Ya, you read it right. It’s like a miracle that came out of nowhere. Or more specifically came out of a conspiracy between my sister and a photographic studio in Cheltenham. After finishing at the 9-5 (or thereabouts) I grabbed the dogs, leapt into the car and whizzed through torrential rain and snow (snow!?) to Cheltenham for the viewing of my birthday photo shoot from last week.
I was nervous. Being in front of the camera is not my favourite location. I feel naked and vulnerable, and having consoled myself with chocolate brownies after my Dad passed away, was more than aware that I’m not currently looking my best. I was expecting to look acceptable but I’d figured beautiful was an option that had leapt out of the window to save itself a long time back.
The first few photos that came on screen were family shots of us and the hounds, and were lovely momentoes of the day. They were bright and bubbly and fun. Pictures of a family that were happy and loved each other. It couldn’t fail to make you smile.
… and then the photos seagued into the individual shots. I was dreading it. My hands had already crept up to my face, ready to cover my eyes and my heart was beating ten to the dozen. And then THEY appeared and my breath stopped for a moment. I blinked. I shook my head and I heard myself say ‘Oh My God, I never knew I could look like that’ and there it was. There were three. One was cute, and cuddly and wintry and warm and one was all wild eyes and sexy (Me! Imagine that!) and then there was THE ONE. It didn’t have the definable fun factor or sexy elements that the other two did but it had a something that caught me perfectly. It was slightly sultry, mysterious with a hint of my mind’s on other things. It looked on the outside the way I felt on the inside. It’s a work of art.
THEN we got to sis’s shots. Christ she’s photogenic, although she’d never believe me. She had a couple of stunning shots but she too had a ONE and it’s fabulous. Despite her preoccupation with being perfectly coiffed all the time (Joan Collins, eat your heart out) her amazing picture had a really grungy, moody element to it. Almost slightly dark and dangerous. Like you could imagine a classy Courtney Love in a ballgown, leaning against a brick wall in an alley on her way to the Oscars, ready for a dangerous rendezvous. It’s the sort of image that seems to talk to you; it challenges you to try and take her on, provokes you to try with the knowledge she could squash you like a bug. It suits her. It suits the conversation we had over dinner after the shoot.
As well as a beautiful reminder of a fabulous day, the pictures are more than that. Amongst them, there is not only a tale of our relationship but a reminder to us, of who and what we are. Lest we ever forget.
Today I went to a photo shoot with Venture Studios, which was a 30th Birthday present from my sister (she’s such an inspired wee genius!) and had the MOST fun and the doggies were SOOOO well behaved. Getting dressed this morning was a thought provoking experience and I’ll tell you why.
The studio had suggested wearing and bringing along props that were reflective of your personality and interests. So as I was dragging on my clothes this morning, I automatically reached for a pair of odd socks (can you say that?) for good luck and that got me thinking of the small, almost unconscious, things that we do that make unique in ways we don’t even notice.
My odd sock habit has its depths in my University days, when I would catch the bus in to lectures when the weather was grim and I didn’t fancy a four mile hike in the rain. The bus stop was a five minute walk away across a field, and the buses were often double deckers or bendy buses that jammed us together like sardines. At any rate, I had a spate of bad luck on the buses in my first year, when I consistently fell down, got pushed over or some other calamity (see reasons why I hate buses, many of these ocurred during that fortnight) would befall me whenever I was on a bus. It lasted about 2 weeks, and at the end of the fortnight, I had bruises on bruises and could cheerfully have done without seeing a bus ever again. I was, in fact, on the verge of turning in my bus pass completely.
One fine day, I overslept and when I woke up and realised the time, I grabbed whatever clothes were to hand (I must have made a fine sight!) and threw them on including a pair of odd socks and headed for the bus stop and found, to my undisguised delight, that I had not only an uneventful journey but that I made my lecture with minutes to spare. I could only put this unlikely ocurrance down to the odd socks (or blind luck) and ever since, if I’ve felt the need for a little extra luck, I’ve worn mismatched socks. (Clearly I should have remembered to do that on evil, everything sucks Tuesday, shouldn’t I?)
I woke up today and decided my attitude needed a shift.
I had a rough few weeks a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been feeling a little sorry for myself on and off ever since. Self-pity just isn’t my bag. Like flourescent yellow, it just doesn’t suit me. Some things I wanted didn’t turn out how I hoped and because I really DID want them, I grumped about it. ‘I want’ piled on top of ‘I want’ and the wants got drowned in the ‘you can’t always have what you wants’. Life became an emotional laundry hamper, and I was all set for a turn through the wringer… until I woke up.
The wake up call was a couple of friends who were going through respective tough times, and it made me realise that whatever was going on in my life, I only had to look back a couple of years to see how far things had come for me. Financially, emotionally, spiritually. It had all changed, and for the better. Myself of three years ago was a shadow of who I am now, and an even fainter imprint of the me I will be in a couple more years.
I’ve regained much of the strength I had and lost. The strength that is perhaps still missing has been patched with courage, and perhaps holds stronger as a result. I once again have faith, and hope. I have belief, in MYSELF where once I had none and my patience and tolerance grow incrementally every day. Slowly I am finding my voice. Sometimes it’s more raucous and louder than I mean it to be, and sometimes when inside my head is screaming for a witty riposte, my voice is less than the quietest whisper, but somewhere in the Universe I’m finding my place.
There was a time in my life, where I was the eccentric one. I wandered about with flowers in my hair and cameras in my hands and little else seemed to matter. I turned up to parties in bare feet. I wandered streets at night because they were different then and I needed to SEE. But my inner and outer selves didn’t mesh. I was a walking example of Cartier Bresson when he called artists liars by omission. My life was a lie of omission because what I was on the inside wasn’t what sat on the outside. My exterior was creative, interesting and eccentric but it didn’t begin to express the complexities that sat under the surface, waiting for a voice.
For a period, at my lowest ebb, I denied those complexities not only their voice but their existence. I was told that I couldn’t be that person and for a while I tried to forget that person I’d been and those things I’d felt and known so deeply that they were a part of me. But I couldn’t always deny them and sooner or later they would surface again and needle at me until one day early on last year, I made a conscious choice to express the elements of me that had lain so far under the surface, and to have faith in myself and my direction in life. I’m now a qualified Reiki Practitioner and I practice all the time. I’ve never had so much fun and being able to express myself in a new way is a constant surprise and delight to me. I speak about experiences and emotions I would never have touched on before. I’m not afraid to try things that are a little unusual.
My current profession, with all it’s irritations and frustrations has also been an eye opening experience for me. It has opened me to people who believe all sorts of things with varying degrees of vehemence and cynicism. It has given me time and space to realise that my own perceptions are not so far removed from reality as I feared and I have learnt to speak of them in a way that is approachable and balanced. Slowly as a child building a vocabulary for the first time, I am building my own vocabulary and learning to speak without fear of mockery but with confidence, assurance and faith in myself.
Last week, I was looking at my life and wondering why things never seemed to go my way, but when I look back and see how far I’ve come, I have to admit that my life is pretty damned amazing right now. No, it’s not perfect. I don’t have much money and I’d rather be working for myself doing something jaw-dropping but all in all it’s good. It’s somewhere I can be happy and something I can build from to make my dreams, gigantic as they are, a reality. There is magic in the air and beginnings sit like a fizzing taste on my tongue. I wonder what this year will really bring?
Sometimes, right out of the blue, something happens that forces you to open your eyes to yourself, and when that happens, sometimes what you see isn’t what you’d like it to be … and sometimes that hits you like a fist in the solar plexus. It’s not a good feeling.
Yesterday I got sucker-punched by the Universe (and by Christ, it packs a punch, I can tell you!) which reminded me that sometimes, I really suck as a friend. Oh sure, I remember birthdays, I turn up when we hook up as much as I can. I offer a listening ear and occasionally, when asked, a bit of advice. But there are times when a friend has to be more than that. Sometimes a real friend looks behind the calls and texts that go unanswered and instead of assuming that you’re busy, follows hunches and connects the dots, knows that you’re not as ok as you claim and stands up and calls you on it. And that’s what I forgot to do.
I got blindsided by my own worries and troubles and forgot to look out at my friends and see how they were doing. I became blinkered inside my own head and left my friends to fight their own battles, without picking up the phone and BEING there. It doesn’t take much, it’s a small thing to pick up a phone and let a friend know that you’re there and you care, and sometimes it’s the smallest of things that make the biggest difference.
We all have our highs and we all have our rough patches, it’s life and we deal with it but sometimes the highs are exceptionally high and sometimes the lows are so low that they almost require a new word and those are the times we most need a friend … to hold out a hand, to give us a hug, to just BE there.
It doesn’t matter how we make them but those connections are what make our lives, rich, fulfilled and wholesome, regardless of whether those connections are friends, family or lovers. They brighten our days, inspire us, support us, define us and occasionally frustrate the bloody hell out of us but for all their intangibility, they are the most REAL things we possess and we owe it to ourselves and each other to remember that and to put our friendships ahead of all those other distractions we indulge ourselves in, because one day long after our jobs are a distant memory, our friendships will remain and our memories of them will be more precious than any amount of money could buy.
I was working out of town today. Waaay out of town and it required catching the BUS (Oh yes, capitals are very necessary … read on)
Now, I HATE buses. Loathe them and not just for the fact that they make you feel like you ate 15 donuts and then invited a small child to play trampoline of your stomach while simultaneously hitting you over the head with a brick. On top of the fact that once you’re ten minutes into the journey and feeling like a barely contained nausea whirlpool, there seems to be a tacit agreement that rather than open the windows and circulate a little fresh air, it would be infinitely preferable to sit squashed up together with condensation streaming down the windows and share the fetid and stale odours of BO, urine, sweat, leftover food and drink and numerous other smells to unpleasant to contemplate. It’s an unrivalled olfactory experience.
I could sense that I was being given an opportunity for sensory exploration today so, it shouldn’t have surprised me in the slightest that my driver was a non English-speaking version of Lurch from the Addams Family, with a propensity for taking sharp corners and narrow one-track country roads at a minimum of 60mph and braking violently and swerving into hedges and shallow ditches to avoid colliding into oncoming vehicles. I’d be preared to swear that I saw a woman and her dog leap into the hedge for safety as the bus roared around the corner of an otherwise quiet single track road. A parked vehicle has never made me feel more scared.
As people piled on at the first stop, there was the inevitable bagging of double seats as you pray quietly to yourself that the bus isn’t going to fill up and someone doesn’t want to take the spare seat next to you. But naturally, you find that as the other double seats are taken, options become more limited and new travellers are examining the spare seats and evaluating which of you is going to be the least unpleasant to sit next to and you know …. you just KNOW that you’re coming up on the relatively harmless list and in a very short space of time, you’ll end up with someone plonked next to you. Sometimes you get lucky, and it’s a nice old lady or gent that you can pass the time of day with but you know that more often than not, it’s going to be someone else. I have an uncanny knack of attracting those ‘other’ sorts.
Historically, they’ve included:
The one who sat across the aisle from me and kept twitching who took umbridge with my looking out the window and appeared to think I was staring AT her. So she started hitting me with her umbrella and then spat on my head. Which was lovely. She got dragged off the bus by her carer and then JUMPED BACK ON to hit me again!
The drunken man who spent an hour and a half roaring football songs at the top of his lungs, belching out lager fumes and calling me an uptight bitch for not joining in
The woman with the endlessly screaming baby that puked all over the bus floor. (Imagine the noise and the smell for an hour and a half, while you yourself are fighting the rising tides of nausea)
The woman who, offended by my large bag on a crowded bus punched me in the stomach and kicked me in the knee.
The ‘larger’ gentleman who took up a seat and a half so that I was wedged on one hip into a small gap to avoid his excess bulk resting on my lap, while he stuck his elbows in my face because he had to hold the newspaper up to read it.
The ubiquitous chav or chavette, who always makes for a pleasant companion, especially those with the loud and tinny speakers for their music and my personal favourite:
The achoholic, who at 8.30 in the morning is swigging gin from a hip flask and isn’t overly cautious about spillages, as you’re praying that you don’t arrive at work soaked head to toe in gin and smelling as if you came in straight from the pub you were in the night before.
Maybe next time, I’ll cycle, or hitch a lift. Or perhaps I’ll just dose myself to the eyeballs with a sedative and sleep all the way there and hope they chuck me off at the right stop. Perhaps if I offer to tie myself to the roof ….?
I can’t really deny bring a grown-up for much longer, despite my enduring fantasy that I am four years old and have been for the last 26 years. The evidence is beginning to mount up. The stripes of grey hair winging their way out from my temples, the lines fanning out from my eyes when I smile, the fact that I don’t bounce as much when I fall over (although it doesn’t seem to stop me falling!) and irrefutable fact that I haven’t climbed a tree in five years. Not to mention my last birthday (no really, don’t mention it!)
When I was a kid, I could not wait to grow up: All that freedom, all that space to grow into, to travel through, to make a mark on. The world would be mine for the taking.
The little village where I spent my youth with its small minded inhabitants and endless gossip wouldn’t hold me. The villagers weren’t big enough. They didn’t see big, think big, feel big. They weren’t like me. We were different sides of a line that none of us knew how to cross.
When I grew up, I was going to be free. I wouldn’t be the sort of woman to be held back by a partner’s ambition or to be used for another’s gain. I wouldn’t be stereotyped, pigeonholed or belittled by people who were smaller, petty and jealous. None of that shit would touch me. There would be nothing that would hold my dreams in check. I was bursting to be unleashed on the world and shine like no-one ever had before. I was going to shine, I was going to love and living was going to be my art form.
We passed from year to year, being faced with choices that defined and limited our paths: Which GCSE? Which A-level? Which University? I fought against the restriction. I wanted something bigger, something broader: A single focus was too narrow and I fought against it like a caged animal.
I didn’t fit a model of success. I didn’t have a particular aim, a particular ambition, a single direction. I dipped a toe in every puddle, retraced my steps, fell down and got back up again only to discover that what I had was endless possibilities and a depth of feeling I didn’t know what to do with.
I wrote. I photographed. I read voraciously. I walked outside the lines. Until I realised that what I was searching for couldn’t be satisfied with separate, compartmentalised things: a job, a career, a hobby, religion. No. It was too bold, too wild, too yearning.
My direction had to tie together the thoughts and emotions that lay deep within me. I had to find a way of making what was inside me a physical reality, with all the challenges that demands. My direction is spiritual, emotional and physical. It’s multi-faceted, sparkling, impossible to define and MINE.
I don’t know how I’m going to find it, how I’m going to make it or where the hell it’s going to take me. It’s going to be a wild journey, with some money, some poverty, some love and some loneliness but I know that wherever I end up, I’ll be looking at the stars and thinking that my wild adventure begins and ends with me. My happiness and my destination doesn’t rely on promotions or shiny shoes, whether I travel first class or stuffed in a cargo plane with a herd of llamas but it relies wholeheartedly on my perceptions and my willingness to take whatever life throws at me and make something bloody awesome out of it.
In my world, now that I’m grown up, I know that nobody has it better than I do. There is not one single person I’m jealous of … because those other people, they’re off doing their thing and I’m doing mine … and no matter how small my steps, every single one I take is taking me that much closer to that incredible destination I dreamed of when I was a kid and the journey’s a patchwork kaleidescope of wonderful things and desperate disappointments that make up a wonderful life.
I was working out of town today. Waaay out of town and it required catching the BUS (Oh yes, capitals are very necessary … read on)
