Switching Off September

So here’s the plan I mentioned here. I can’t guarantee it will add years to our lives, but then, I can’t say it won’t, either.

What if we all decided to switch off our technology at the same time? What if we all had a pact: a realistic deadline where we stopped sending emails etc.at say, 8pm? And to make it easier, we stopped looking at them at 8pm, too. The whole correspondence shebang could start again next morning, of course. We could continue using travel time to answer and send emails perhaps, but with the frisson of excitement that after say, 12 hours of frenzied activity on the networks, it would all then stop. Freeze.

Ok, I realise in this global economy that one woman’s 8pm is another man’s breakfast but we have to start somewhere, huh?

I know it’s only a dream. Some people wouldn’t like it, and it wouldn’t work if everybody didn’t sign up, I suppose. But perhaps if there was a significant groundswell, those who didn’t like the idea might, nonetheless, be open to the concept and accepting of the fact that fewer emails would be landing at night. Hey, they might even start to enjoy it, too.

Enter: Scroll Free September!

#ScrollFreeSeptember, the brainchild of the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) is about to enter its second year of encouraging people to take a month off social media, or rather, to do less of it. 

The key is to sign up to the option that is most relevant to you, and then sit back and enjoy a time rich September, musing how much calmer life would be if we could keep up this healthier relationship with our phones going forward. I’ve signed up to Night Owl, no surprise there, but have added in my own, ‘Correspondence Curfew’. In short, my Scroll Free September commitment is: Scroll and Email Free Evenings, and I can't wait.   

Day light hours? I’m going to reply to all correspondence as quickly as possible whilst employing a monumental effort not to begin my missive with being sorry for the delay. I shall respond with friendliness and professionalism but I will not, I repeat, not apologise. You see, by apologising, we’re implying we’ve done something wrong. But looking after our health, and not putting (albeit unintentional) burden on other people’s health, is a good thing and should be rejoiced. What I’m hoping is that people will lower their expectations of me.  And in turn, I will lower my expectations of them.

We’ll still love each other.

In fact, maybe we’ll love each other just a tiny bit more now we’re liberated of brain fog and showered in sleep. Will you join me? Will you endeavour to be less responsive, to keep people waiting and smile while you do it? Will you vow not to apologise for a tardy response to communication?  

Oh, this is the most rebellious I've been for a long time.

Perhaps you’re streets ahead of me on this one, already living long and uninterrupted evenings, the phone switched off way more often than it's on? If so, I'd love to hear from you. Tell me how you do it! And how it’s received?

Or maybe late night to-do list ticking is not your particular tipple, but scrolling - and in bed (please, no. Just no!) - is something you know you do but with that slightly nauseous feeling of discomfort I spoke of in my first post. There’s a place for you in Scroll Free September, too😊 More info here.

I think Scroll Free September is a wonderful concept. It focuses much of its attention on the potential benefits to young people – and I know my children are on Instagram until late at night and try as I might, they show no signs of stopping – but I think all ages are guilty of an unhealthy dependence on our phones. 

I’m not preaching. I’m guilty. I just want to live a long and healthy life and I want other people to be alive to do that with me.

Will you join me?

Trying to Sleep

I was writing a review of the fantastically fascinating, engaging and entertaining (I liked this book) Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker and realised that as I typed, I had that sludgy, slightly nauseous feeling of discomfort, commonly known as: someone is trying to tell me something.

I’m pushing it on that old sleep thing again. 

Again.

Maybe a sequel to Tea & Chemo should be the trials and tribulations of getting enough sleep? Although I fear the book would be very short and very repetitive, here's the blurb: she wants to sleep, she knows she should sleep but she finds it so very difficult to go to bed. And repeat.

The bottom line is, I want it all, but I just can’t squeeze it all in. And the truth is that when I skimp on the sleep, I can.

When I examine my work, it’s the wealth of correspondence which weighs me down. I am always in debt and never, ever get to the bottom of my RSVPs before the next deluge soaks my day.

I remember the headline a year ago about paying employees for correspondence outside of office hours because researchers had discovered that people were spending their travel time to and from work, and more time once they’d got through their own front door, catching up on emails.

No sh** Sherlock.

How many of us have a love/hate relationship with our phone? True, it makes me smile when a message comes in. It's useful always having my camera with me and iPlayer and books on Audible streamed into my hearing aids have accompanied me on many a hot-foot to an appointment. But what started out for all of us as a great use of time as the train transported us to our destination - flying through emails, reports, links and 'pre-reading' for tomorrow's meeting just a few short hours away -  has only lengthened our working day. And I don’t like that part one single bit.

Worse, when in the news yesterday we hear that a group of MPs are urging the government to look into the effect of hands-free phoning on our driving, there’s an instant backlash of people saying they can’t manage their job without using the phone in the car. The fact is, we can’t work from the next life, either, and more’s the sobering point, work would seem much less of a priority if we were coping with having killed or injured somebody because we lost concentration at the wheel. 

Nonetheless, the truth is that in the world we live in, some jobs wouldn’t be viable without people being able to communicate from behind the wheel. End of. We have built a society which relies on people working at work, before work, after work and travelling to and from work. And unless this is forced to unilaterally shift, I can’t see that this state of affairs is going to change for the better any time soon, as we continue careering forward in this ever increasingly techno future.

The problem is the speed of it all, isn’t it. I remember the good old days of freelance copywriting, when I had to tootle off to the post office three days before my deadline, with a floppy disk and a hard copy of the writing in question, all packed up ready to trundle off to the destination of my assignment. For the following week, while I awaited its delivery and the typed letter in return, I could Do Something Else.

These days, ticking off the to-do list doesn’t shorten it, does it? Because once we respond, the reply comes back, and quickly, generally, because we’re all caught in the same trap: get it done before it builds up! And so the circle continues. If we are to break the circle, it is going to have to be a conscious decision to snap it.

And what if we did snap it?

I have a plan. A real plan. And it starts in September. It’s not just a plan for me but one for everybody. We have to sign up emotionally and physically, but it’s free.

Join me?

More information in my next post 😊

Meanwhile, here’s that review. If you routinely go to bed after midnight and wake only a few small hours later, you need to read this book. 

The Day Job

I haven’t written about cancer for a while. There are many reasons for this, none more so than the fact that I don’t have a lot to say, because I am *Stable Mable. I am a, ‘Strange Phenomenon’. I am an ‘Unusual Body,’ which, in this instance, is a good thing. I am, in short, insanely lucky.

And yet no one needs me to tell them that cancer is a heinous, unpredictable disease and there are many people who aren’t so lucky. Never have I been more acutely aware of this than this week, with the news that Radio Five Live journalist, Rachael Bland, has died of her cancer. Co-creator of the chart topping, hilarious, thoughtful, poignant, fantastically direct and gutsy podcast, You, Me and the Big C, Rachael, and her equally fabulous colleagues, Lauren Mahon and Deborah James, encouraged everybody to be upbeat and positive about her death.

But although I recognise that she has left behind the most powerful of legacies, I admit, the news has rocked me.

It's a reminder that we are so fallible, that cancer, in fact many diseases, are random and indiscriminate and that a treatment that's worked for one person, can be totally ineffectual for another. Cancer is not a 'battle' that can be won simply if we have the right ammunition. However, I do believe that there is nothing wrong with keeping that ammunition in a clean and nurtured environment, shined and polished so that if cancer comes calling or a rogue cell gets cocky, it's ready for it, ready to give its best shot at kicking it into touch.

We might miss, but I'd like to feel we tried. The ammunition I am most likely to pack in a corner, not pay it its due attention, is my immune system. Or rather, I'm forever tempted to deprive my immune system of sleep.

I’d been beavering away, life returning so very definitely back to a cracking paced normality after the knee buckling curve ball of April 2017, which I wrote about here. 

So cracking has been the pace that I admit to having taken my eye off the sleep monitor just a little.

Don’t misunderstand me, I am still a whole stratosphere away from my pre-December 2013 delinquency. Back then I prided myself - oh yes - on my ability to stay awake when all around were slumbering. It meant I could crack on in my study: just me the pc screen and a flood of ticks on the to-do list.  I’d finish with an indulgent hour of writing stories, followed by a languorous soak in the bath and the current book in favour, before dragging myself into a fulfilled and light-headed, 3am bedtime.

I felt lucky then, as well. My life was the next best thing to having magical 27 hour days and it meant I could have a lot of every bit of what I fancied because I had that extra tail end of the day that was denied to so many.

Post my primary cancer diagnosis on that fateful day at the end of 2013, my 27 hours had been concertinaed back into 24 and the extra hours of inertia the body's essential rehabilitation, came at a price.

I struggle to fit my own writing around the little cracks of time in the day that are left. Indeed, I struggle to fit the day job (oh, the irony)  into the cracks, and I do wonder if the added stress of never quite managing to achieve as much as I need to do to keep on top of everything, negates the benefit of the extra sleep.

Ridiculous, scoffs the hubbie. But he is a lark, a well-meaning, nothing is more important than keeping me alive, lark. Of course he doesn’t understand. Physically, he couldn’t do it. He is genetically programmed to stop work at 8pm at the latest and to fall into a deep and impenetrable sleep not long afterwards. To-do list or otherwise, larks sleep at night. That’s just how it is. If you want the lark in your family to catch a wild boar, you'll have to ask them to do it in the morning.

Ridiculous of course, but it’s not that easy is it? And it really isn't easy if you know you physically could stay up and answer the emails glowering from the inbox. None of us operate in a vacuum. One man’s, Sod It I’m Tired I’m Going To Bed, is someone else drumming their fingers, waiting for their reply, cursing the lack of response whilst muttering, 'Did they get it?' and 'Don’t they care?'. Or at least, that’s what I suppose.  

But Rachael Bland has given me a wake-up call, a kick up the bum, a reminder of my resolve. And so I have vowed that I will cover my ears and ignore the chimes to 'catch up'. I will shake away the image of steam puffing from people's ears as they spit and curse at my lack of response, and I will switch off, snuggle up, and get my sleep. After all, I owe it to those who aren't so lucky, to at least try my best.

Rest in peace, Rachael Bland, another brilliant person taken too soon.

*I stole that term from another fabulous Rachel, Rachel Ferry, currently NED, and she won't mind me saying, against all odds. 

Why Not Me?

I quite expected to get cancer. Even though I prefer my glass most definitely half full, I've always been a, 'Why not me?', rather than a, 'Why me?' kind of girl. I think accepting the unsavoury situations which jump out at us unbidden, is the first step to giving them a great big slap in the chops.

And 1 in 3 people will contract cancer at some point in their life so why wouldn't one of those people be me? I guess I just hoped that I'd be 109 when it knocked and so short on faculties that I wouldn't really notice. But no matter, I'm here, having treatment for cancer and this is how I intend to move forward.

I thank my lucky stars that I developed cancer in 2014 rather than 1974 because the treatment available these days means that chances of survival for most - alas not all - cancers are so much better than when I was growing up, and rising all the time. But treatment is brutal, expensive and not fool-proof and thus prevention would be infinitely preferable.

Whilst the experts know how cancers are formed, they don't always know why one person contracts cancer and another doesn't. Once the well-publicised triggers such as smoking, excessive alcohol, obesity, sun exposure and genetics have been discounted, medicine puts it down to bad luck. In this case we're grateful for the brilliance of modern treatment and hope that we're not unlucky again.

However, this is the one area of science which doesn't work for me. I get twitchy putting my life in the care of luck. The body is clever but cancer cells are evil little blighters. We're back to my, 'Why not me?' scenario. Something about the mix of my body, my diet, my environment, my genetics, even my character meant that I developed cancer. And I cannot see any logic that says that if I change nothing, this won't happen again. I needed an action plan.

But to be able to hatch my plan, I had to understand how cancer was formed.

I shall endeavour to explain it how I understand it, in my – spent longer revising to scrape through, I reckon it's the easiest science so I'll choose that one, Biology o-level than all my other subjects put together – kind of way. I apologise in advance to those who know their stamen from their stigma or what the periodic table was actually for.

It's all about cells. I imagine our body like a small town inhabited by cells; a little like an ant colony. There are hospitals equipping white blood cells with the tools to fight infection. There's the train collecting and depositing oxygen around the body so that it functions efficiently and productively. Constant building work is going on to make new bones or repair over-stressed muscles and joints. Then of course there are the big organs made up of lots of cells and commanding great respect. If the body gets over-taxed, the lesser organs are ordered to go into standby to ensure the brain and the heart stay in control and manage the body out of the crisis.

It's a very harmonious town. Yes, things go wrong. The control centre for each cell - its DNA - can become damaged and feed it the wrong instructions so that it becomes a faulty cell and be no use to the body. This happens fairly regularly, it would seem, but these Bad Cells are generally expelled; a very necessary and common process in the body's continual pursuit of good health.

However, the body's defences don't always work as effectively as they should do and sometimes a Bad Cell isn't ejected but instead reproduces uncontrollably. Left unchecked (and the body has many checking systems; we are talking a perfect storm here) Bad Cells will eventually grow too powerful for the body's defences. Eventually, our town faces more than a cluster of Bad Cells but instead, a cancerous lump. Now, the most effective tool open to the body is to call in the heavies, the medical profession, who come with a big spade to uproot the lump and cast it from the body forever.

That can be the end of it but if the cancer has been around a while or is a particularly fast growing cancer – like mine, many thanks for that, body – it might have got cocky and started throwing out baby cancer cells which could be hiding somewhere in the body. Or the lump could have taken root in a very built up, hard to reach area and the spade couldn’t get near it. Any chance at all of this and the super powers come in, launching chemo, a bomb which reverberates right around the body. It  kills off all fast growing cells (we hope) such as our hair and disease fighting cells and within this group of fast growing cells are, you betcha, the most fast growing of them all: cancer cells. See you bad boys. In the super power's army are other fighters such as radiotherapy which attack locally and the peace keeping forces such as Herceptin and Tamoxifen (protein and hormone inhibitors without which some types of breast cancer struggle to divide and conquer) which are there to maintain the status quo.

So, back to my action plan. What was it that I did that created an environment in which the Bad Cell thrived? Why didn't my defence system work quite as well as it should have done? And the, 'Why not me?' question: why wouldn't this happen again?

I'm quite a healthy soul. I've always loved sport and spend hours every week doing it. Much to the constant consternation of my sisters and friends (I'll whisper it) I don't much care for cake, am happier munching my way through a bowl of salad. So, she says, glossing over the daughter's warm banana cake devoured last night, my diet is naturally fairly healthy. Breast cancer doesn't run in my family. I've never smoked and when it comes to alcohol, I'm generally considered a, 'bit of a lightweight'. But more about that later.

I'm very wary of scare stories and don’t tend to trust information unless it's endorsed by recognised cancer charities and bodies. My favourites are Cancer Research UK  and Macmillan Cancer Support not least because I know that on their sites, I would have to actively search for statistics, none of which I have any interest in knowing, the very idea of them terrifies me. I've read up on diet, environment and the validity and otherwise of well-documented cancer triggers we hear of in the news and this is what I've come up with. I'm not saying it's a check list of what every person needs to do to prevent cancer or to stop it coming back, nor indeed is it a catch-all list. After all, if it was, I'd be very rich and decorated with various honours, not least the Nobel Prize for Science - and did I mention my lack of aptitude for science? But, in addition to some small diet tweaks, broccoli and walnuts to name but two, here are two changes I've chosen to make based on my own research and lifestyle.

Sleep
There has been much in the press about shift workers living less long than day time workers and there is some evidence that not allowing the body enough time to regenerate can increase the risk of some serious ailments including stroke, obesity, diabetes and, interestingly, the recurrence of aggressive breast cancers.Click for more info. This is early research but to see any link at all when I am someone who's rarely slept more than five hours a night since my teens, was enough for me to make a definite change to my sleeping habits. Before midnight is when I now got to bed, seven hours later is when I wake. Much as I lament that with the new regime has come a loss of ten hours of my old writing time every week, I can't write a book from the next life can I? 

Well, I don't think I can, anyway.

And, an unexpected bi-product was that after only a few nights of better sleep, people noticed. I recognise that people may have expected me to have grown three noses after my diagnosis but nonetheless, I had many comments on how well I looked including one friend who'd said she'd spotted I'd been looking tired (oh the shame) but she'd put it down to us all getting older. Pah! Forget anti-wrinkle cream, my advice for serious, and not so serious reasons, is that if you're skimping on the zzz, get thee to bed!

Alcohol
Remember when I said that I was a bit of a lightweight when it came to alcohol? Unfortunately, women drinking any more than 2-3 units of alcohol a day put themselves at a slightly higher risk of developing breast and other cancers. For men the safe limit is 3-4 units. Click for more info. That's fine, I thought, no need to make any changes there. But then I looked into what a unit really is and realised that 2-3 units per day is actually more like one standard drink a day. I didn't drink every night of the week, nor did I binge drink before, but I did regularly drink more than one glass of alcohol in one sitting. Now I don't drink more than seven units a week and it's been surprisingly easy to make the shift.

No longer do my husband and I crack open a bottle of wine during the week - it would last us a couple of nights, like I say, we're not talking your classic high risk here - unless we have someone round to supper. If we go out at the weekend, I'll have a glass of wine. It's all I need. I just like that first taste, like the first chocolate; always the best and downhill from there. I like the fact that I can join in a toast for someone's birthday, have a splash of wine in the sun, a glass of red with a Sunday roast, but I also like the fact that I don't wake up next morning with the horrendous sinking feeling that I might have increased my risk of breast cancer.

That said, all the advice I've read and been given in hospital is that these are lifetime choices. Break the rules now and again and the result will not be automatic cancer. Nor will all heavy and even light drinkers get breast cancer. Remember, cancerous cells are the result of a perfect storm; a multitude of ongoing factors, only some of which we can influence.

Please don’t have nightmares! And, as always, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I Pressed Send

I almost cried last night. I have a broken foot and an infected ear - of which I shall spare you the details - but it wasn't that. The washing is piling up, the bedding's unchanged and the bathrooms could do with a 'bit of attention'. But it wasn't even that.

It was because yesterday, at 8.40pm I finally pressed 'send' on Glass Houses.

Its re-write has been nine months in the making. Following one agent's disappointing rejection but generous and astute feedback on the full manuscript at the end of last year, I embarked on a re-write in January. Then came dissection during the wonderful Writers' Workshop Self-edit Course at Easter, which inevitably led to a second re-write. Incidentally, I call it a 're-write' if it loses and gains more than 10,000 words - a bit like a crash diet but infinitely more healthy. 

Some of the fab self-editing crowd (and Gayle!)

A heap of hasty amendments followed on the back of workshops and talks, not to mention the general writer-ly buzz, at the York Festival of Writing, as well as from my new term of teaching. Is there a better way to say that, we wonder, it's bordering on cliché, I suggest, and off I trot home to *practise what I preach*. A final burst of tweaks after meeting with my new reader (she's so clever) and there I was, Sunday night, just in time for tea before Homeland, and it had gone, my baby, flown the nest again.

And like every baby resistant to change, after months of cajoling, tweaking, listening - albeit distractedly - and the odd torrent of abuse and self-loathing, I have sent off a better book than the one I submitted last year.

That isn't to say I will emerge with a contract. All I can do now is hope. And wait.

Well actually, now I clean and file and hoover and 'sort out' the wardrobes. I think about Christmas and cleaning the skirting boards, sort out the leak through the downstairs window, call the electrician to fix the kitchen lights, book tickets for the local village play, rearrange the short break I booked somehow forgetting I was working, earn some money and do my physio for my foot. And I sleep. I'm going to sleep at both ends of the day and for a period of time in the middle. 

And then I shall get back to work on book two… 

So, lovely readers, how are you?

Larkism

I’ve never been big on sleep. Generally it’s an inconvenience to be fitted as unobtrusively as possible around work and play. Don’t misunderstand me, I relish that moment when my head hits the pillow as much as the next person, I just don’t yearn to get to that point.

Mind you, I least I sleep every day. I did know a man who claimed to need so little sleep that he only closed his eyes every other night. Worse, this was pre-24 hour TV, shopping or the internet and he only liked to read biographies, which were distinctly fewer in number in those days. I do remember he had a very extensive record collection, however, and a long-suffering girlfriend who finally swapped him for a man who fell asleep the minute his bottom touched a sofa.

I put my good fortune of being an economical sleeper down to Deep Sleep. No messing about in the REM stage for me, I’m plunged into blackness within seconds and not retrieved from it until that alarm clock chimes five and a half hours later.

I’ve been a night-owl forever. My first memory of the benefits was when I read the entire copy of James and the Giant Peach in one night. I was about nine years old and my understanding parents had given me permission to read on – no torch needed. I got to turn my light off at midnight, I was so grown up. 

I remember starting my homework at 10pm and still putting in three hours before bouncing into school next day. And of course, being an owl is fantastic for parties, unless, of course, you’re the host who's ready for you to leave. 

The downside of needing little sleep is that I always push it too far. 1am is when I should go to bed. 6.30 is when I should rise but no, I can always find another blog to read as I wind down at midnight ready to log off for the day. I can tweet uninterrupted with fellow night-owls or distracted writers on the other side of the world for another half hour, prepare myself a little snack, unload a wash, scrub a pan and make some notes for tomorrow before deciding that really, I’m absolutely wide awake and at last, I have uninterrupted time to read whatever novel I have on the go. And then it’s 3am and I know that come lunch time tomorrow, my writing will be reduced to sludge.

Being a night-owl is also quite anti-social.

I remember staying at my Auntie and Uncle’s as a child and thinking it sad that my Uncle stayed up long after his wife had gone to bed, only to fall asleep, alone, in front of the test card. I remember my Dad tapping away at the typewriter keys in the early hours long after my mother was asleep and telling myself that I would never do that when I was an adult.

Hmmm.

So, in order to attempt to better align my sleep patterns with the rest of my family’s, I’ve been conducting an experiment; I’ve been trying to turn an owl into a lark. I call it Larkism. My friend, who retires at 9pm and wakes at 4, ready to run at 4.30 (which is not what I’m proposing) didn’t think it possible. We are genetically disposed to being morning or night time creatures and there’s nothing we can do to change it. I’ve tried, she said. 

Larkism requires two things: I have to go to bed before the date changes and set my alarm for five and a half hours later. My Larkism started a month ago. The first day my alarm went off at 5 and I woke with that queasy, early flight kind of feeling. My husband slept on, I could so easily have done so too. Thank goodness for tea.

Quickly I got into a routine and realised that half way through my first cup, I was feeling surprisingly sparkly. I also noticed how alert I felt when my children got up at 7am and that I knew exactly what they needed for school without having to constantly refer to notes scrawled at 2am. Having already banked a couple of hours of writing, I found I could accept a coffee invitation guilt-free without the gremlin at the back of my mind reminding me every ten minutes that it was OK, as long as I worked late tonight.

The most unlikely result has been in my productivity. Larkism has only given me a maximum of ten extra hours every week. Being an owl, often afforded me double that, or so I thought. Not so. Because in my life, to be an owl, is to be a midnight faffer. Don’t get me wrong, those first two hours preceding the bell tolling were often massively productive. Often I’d write hundreds, if not thousands of words in this time. But then I should have gone to bed.

Larkism has made me focus.

The biggest surprise, however, has been to realise that I actually like feeling tired. I like clocking off at at the end of the school day and realising that my writing day is also done. Full stop. No need to think about how much work I might possibly be able to fit in later because I’ve done enough; I’ve made progress. And I love the fact that having been up since 5am, at 11pm I am tired, like a normal person, and it’s time to go to bed. I suppose, like babies, I’m enjoying the routine.

Nobody is more surprised than me to admit that Larkism is working. I’m told the biggest test will be when those mornings get dark and cold. I’m determined to continue. I’ll keep you posted.

So, are you a lark or an owl? Could you change and would you want  to?