Persistent Acts of Kindness

‘At least we won’t forget it!’

‘Imagine the stories for our grandchildren!’

You know, I love the human spirit in these situations, searching for the humour and positive. In truth – and please stay with me as I gloss over the fact that 2021 hasn’t exactly begun to a deluge of parties and hugs and burning of masks – 2020 will be the year we remember for all the wrong many of the wrong reasons.

There are heaps of us lucky enough (and this isn’t to forget those who’ve been hit so terribly hard) to have a list of things that have been an ‘improvement’ on pre-Covid life or, if that’s stretching it too far, a decent alternative.

One of the positives I’ve heard talked about far and wide is the receipt of random acts of kindness, those people with enormous hearts, ‘paying it forward’. It's that wonderful gesture from which the giver receives nothing concrete – the fabulous mood lifting power of a sense of wholesome well-being notwithstanding.

This happened to me totally unexpectedly at the end of last year.

My increasingly poor hearing has become more of an issue in recent years which you may have noticed in my increasing blog posts on this theme. I am also incredibly lucky. My type of hearing loss responds to hearing aids and mine are so good, that I can almost forget my hearing is so poor.

Until that is, I take them out.

An occasion where I am reminded that I am very hard of hearing is when I need to absolutely, and categorically, wake up. Combine the poor hearing with being an incredibly deep sleeper, and a broke-the-mould night owl (my life’s mission is addressing this: more about that here) and it presents a problem when I have an early flight, class, appointment, or even simply an over-spilling to-do list.

Luckily, my lark of a husband can be relied upon to shake me awake at any point post 6am. Earlier? Not a problem. If he’s not awake already, this alarm radio thing apparently clicks on to some dreary news channel and does the job. Personally, I can’t imagine a worse way to wake from peaceful slumbers, but that’s ok, because I can’t hear it anyway.  I also can’t hear any clock. No, not the analogue ones with the bells either – I’ve tried them all. I certainly can’t hear my phone. That long list of tones and chimes you can set to bring you back from Slumberdom? I’ve tested each and every one without aids. At the absolute best, providing the volume is on max, there is the odd sound I can register as a sort of faint rattle.

That ain’t gonna work.

The closest I’d come to success was setting my Garmin watch to shake me awake and certainly, in a light sleep, I will notice my wrist being pummelled by my watch. But I’m oblivious in a deep sleep and thus this method is also not reliable for me.  

Hence the problem, which is not an unusual one: if I can’t rely on something to wake me up when my human alarm clock isn’t available, I have Early Flight Syndrome every time. I wake several times in a panic, only to see the hands of the clock having inched forward since the last eruption into Wakedom. Off I return to my slumbers, only to repeat the process every half hour or so.

So, I decided to investigate. I posted on Facebook about this dilemma. Did anybody know of any alarm capable of waking this normally deep sleeping, poor hearer? So many people took the time to reply, often sending me links to various potential solutions, and I’d like to thank them first of all for that. You know we love to diss us humans but most people really are so very kind and helpful and that came through loud and clear – excuse the pun - in response to my slightly off the wall question.

Alas, many of the suggestions I’d already tried to no avail, but something piqued my interest. Following a very amusing comment by one friend who, it would appear, had been bi-passed when the cycadean rhythms were being handed out, and any of the other stuff that wakes a person, I looked into the Wake ’n’ Shake Dynamite (!) 

This alarm clock booms out at a rude 95 decibels. The pneumatic drill is 120 decibels. A 110-decibel sound is the loudest an audiologist will play when testing your hearing (and only then if it's very poor). If you need a sound to be louder than 90 decibels for it to register, your hearing, at least in relation to that particular tone, is classed as profoundly deaf. I have a few sounds that I can hear at 95 decibels. But I wasn’t sure whether I had enough to hear the alarm alone.

There’s more. The clock has a funny little paddle attached which you stick under your pillow - it’s soft, no Princess and the Pea here - and that, well, as my amusing non-sleeping, incredibly helpful friend assured, ‘makes the earth move’. Excellent. And then, just so you can tick all boxes, there’s also a strobe light to join in the party.

This could be life changing. It's not cheap*, around the £40 mark when I was looking. But it was certainly going on my Christmas List.  

Enter a fellow writer who I can’t profess to know very well at all. We are Facebook writing friends but have never met. A message popped up saying that this writer had tested this alarm clock for her blog and that if I could make use of it, it was mine. She wanted no money and wouldn’t even let me pay the postage.

Not only was I ridiculously excited to have potentially found the answer to my Early Flight Syndrome but I was also overcome with the kindness of people: how the ugliness of human nature often makes it to the fore of the news, and is repeated ad infinitum over the day, but there are random acts of kindness happening all day, every day, all over the world.

And this isn’t the first time this has happened to me in lockdown. Eleanor, I’m looking at you!

2020? The horrors are well documented and ongoing. They can’t be ignored, and they will be on the list to tell the grandchildren.

But the positive? Alongside the innate human ability to find a smattering of the good, positive and even humorous in a situation? The kindness of strangers! The love and power of community! This also needs to be sung from the rooftops.

Thank you, everyone. And may 2021 bring us more positives than negatives to tell the next generation.

Oh, The Wake ’n’ Shake! Does is work? 

Let’s just say: the earth moves.

 

*The RNID (recently returned to their original name after ten years as Action on Hearing Loss) provides help in purchasing technology to assist with hearing loss. Find out more, here.

In non-COVID-19 times (temporarily closed), The National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) lend this type of technology out for your children to try before you buy.

The Wake ‘n’ Shake Dynamite Alarm is widely available. This links you to its listing in the RNID online shop

Attached to the Phone

It’s term time again which can only mean one thing: back to ironing on Monday and Friday mornings. I like a deadline so the deal is that I have to get it all done before 9am when I start work. It commences around 7 with brief interludes to push my children through the door and into the arms of the school bus, to load forgotten cereal bowls into the dishwasher, to put the washing on - lest I should have no clothes to iron in a few days’ time.

And to have a flit around Twitter.

I like Twitter because people can be very funny and in 140 characters they can be even funnier. It’s also where I hear about blogs and writing competitions – so I can even pretend it’s work – and where fellow tweeps share writing successes and woes which is the closest I get for hours, sometimes, to having a chat with colleagues at break. I also like to have a paddle around Facebook but we’ll leave that one there before you raise an eye at the suggestion that this may be something akin to work.

We got back from our summer holiday on the eve before school began for the new term. I love being on holiday but I also love coming home, even though it’s with a tinge of panic about getting back-to-it, that I’ve forgotten how I work and what I need to do. It’s a real life recurring dream for me. As is customary, I’d compiled my to-do list in the car as we left the airport. Who am I kidding? I’d been adding to my to-do list all holiday and this time I took out my pen to add some things that had needed doing which I’d already done and could thus be ticked off. (Some of you won’t understand this and I salute you.) The list had done the trick: no need to panic. The house was clean, only the aftermath of a seven week period of ironing on a need-only basis to contend with, the freezer was packed with food and the fresh stuff was arriving by those kind home-delivery people with their lively suggestion of substitutes just to keep life interesting.

Let’s just say, the stench which hit us as we opened the front door was not a dead animal (or family of, I’d decided, with one still limping to a better place, via the bottom of my bed), nor was it the entire contents of the ‘cycling drawer’, although we do appreciate that I have now washed every pair of gloves, neoprene socks and avoid-washing- unless-smelling-like-dead-animals shower-proof- jackets. No, after an hour of false starts, my husband was the unfortunate soul who discovered the source of the foul smell. We’d left the freezer door ajar all holiday; our rammed full freezer, boasting fish fillets after the lovely man from South Shields had paid his annual visit and persuaded me that forty packs of assorted flavours were much better value than twenty. There were a couple of blocks of stilton in there, too. 

I would like to say a public thank you here to my husband for launching into the first and by far the worst of the three all-over freezer cleans, including all the pipe work and the floor below where putrid fish juice had seeped.

And the home shopping delivery didn’t turn up.

Thankfully, if a little ironically, we’d bought fish and chips on the way home so nobody went hungry for this tale. And our milkman had delivered so we could have a cup of tea.  Lots of cups of tea. You see, there are perks to a by-gone age.

On holiday we had no Wi-Fi. Actually, we had a small allocation of Wi-Fi but my children’s Snapchatting needs, and thus desire for the holiday quota, was greater than mine. It meant that I had three weeks without the internet.

Now, I’m afraid that the freezer debacle with its laborious insurance claim and urgent need to buy fish, or the distinct absence of ironing fairies – I know, I know, I really should have done the uniform before midnight of the night before the new term – or even the time spent having a couple of coffees with people I hadn’t seen for years (ok, weeks) is not to blame for the fact that I am still chasing my tail (or should I say, ‘tale’) a week after our return. I’m afraid, dear readers, the cause is Wi-Fi, or to be precise: social media.

I’ve lamented before about the time sap that is this fairly recent phenomenon of our need to share and share again our lives, but being without social media on holiday was a different revelation this time. I had a wonderful holiday. But I actually missed my online communication.

Even though I didn’t realise it until I got home.

Partly due to my woeful hearing making phone conversation both for me and the poor person on the receiving end a little trying, but mainly due to living in a world where most people of my generation and younger are more likely to message than make a phone call, contact using the internet has become my number one way of keeping in touch. It’s a sad admission that I use any time I might have spent speaking on the phone, on-line, but other people are doing the same. Even if I wanted to go back to sitting on the stairs in the hall à la 70s, attached to a phone line via a curly wire connected to the cheese wedge on the wall, and when I was only on the phone, when I was 'on the phone', I’m not sure many other people would have the time or inclination to indulge me. 

When my Wi-Fi returned and I logged into Facebook and Twitter, read the funny little quips and personal messages, it made me smile. There is something undoubtedly reassuring about sharing online that your house stinks of rotten fish, your food delivery hasn’t turned up and you’re going to be here for the foreseeable because you couldn’t be bothered to do the ironing over the school holidays - and learning that you’re not alone. There is a certain comfort in knowing that even when you were away, you weren’t forgotten. And there’s something quite heartening about realising that a three week world without internet was fun, but only that. It wasn’t superior, just different.

I have a love/hate relationship with technology. I spend most of every day on the computer and am the most complaining and exacting of companions: how dare you crash? How dare you not allow me to ‘save’, you’re a computer, that’s what you do! Yes, I should learn how to use the new software but I don’t have time, so make it work anyway, if you wouldn’t mind. I always said I would happily ditch the computer and go back to letter writing and postcards, to queuing in the post office three days before deadlines to make sure my work reached its recipients safely, to sitting in the library with my amassed questions on post-it notes. And I probably would go back to this world, if everyone else would join me.

But the internet is here to stay and thanks to a period of abstinence, our relationship has deepened a little. I’m off to joyfully post this on-line, appreciating the seconds it will take to do it, whilst repeating the mantra that I will not complain about technology, that I will not have unrealistic expectations, that I will happily use social media but ONLY when I’m not working.

I have just removed my mobile phone to the hall.

How about you? Are you a technology lover or a fighter? And how do you manage your time?

A Nod to Technology

A few months ago I was asked if I'd be interested in trialling Journl (free trial), the on-line organiser. The prospect tickled me. As a technology Luddite, I assumed I'd be organising my life with a pen and paper for at least the next three score years and ten so if Journl could turn me, I thought, then their product deserved to go viral. I'm a list maker. I write things down so I can tick them off – the pen on paper makes me remember and the ticks are bundled with a whole little reward system of their own. Could an on-line tool possibly be as clear and reliable as my cumbersome desk planner-plus handbag diary-plus an array of to-do lists (some illustrated), I wondered, and would it be as practical and rewarding? I flew around the Help Pages with great gusto but, I'm sorry to admit, my enthusiasm quickly evaporated when I lost my family set of to-do lists in a fiction folder and some birthdays found their way into teaching. Feeling guilty for not giving my all to the trial, however, I decided to have another go. It coincided with the launch of Journl's extra Christmas Planner which was very timely considering we were well into November and I, unusually for me, had little more organised than a date to go shopping with my mum.  No sooner was my planner installed, and my Journl diary was spotted with cute little Christmas trees reminding me to buy my Christmas cards, book Father Christmas, order the turkey etc. Hmm, I thought, how nice that I don't have to work these things out for myself, nor remember where I've put the particular to-do list with my workings. It took me a few attempts to get all my separate folders set up and to stop putting my children's sports fixtures in with the shopping list but slowly I started to love Journl because it does what I want it to do. Whatever I want to plan, I can. I have a cluster of small jobs and they're all up there, with their own separate to-do list, diary and notebook. And my children have their section, as does our social life. As do the bills. Starting to smell a lot like Christmas But the beauty of Journl over my lists on scraps of paper is that when I look at the front page, all the day's to-dos are merged. It doesn't really matter whether I have to remember to scoop up my children from various places in North Yorkshire, bake a Christmas cake or hit a deadline, these things must be done so having a list with my to-do's all together is both practical and calming. My Journl is also installed on my phone so I can tick off lists wherever I am. But it does have its limitations in that it is reliant on Wi-Fi so you could be left high and dry in an area without a signal. I did pause when I came to buy my 2014 diary last week but for this reason, went ahead. It's a purple Moleskine® so, to be honest, I was quite glad of the excuse. Journl isn't free either, and there are plenty of free organisers on-line but, of course, their scope is limited. Journl will cost me the same as my annual desk planner inserts so that's OK with me. So, it looks like I'm headed into 2014 with a small diary and Journl instead of a small home diary, large work diary and an army of notes stashed in any room of the house, or deep inside any bag, other than the one I need. I'll keep you posted but for now, it looks like this particular technology Luddite is finally enjoying a dip into a non-paper age. Worry not though, I shall still keep stationary shops everywhere in business feeding my fiction writing notebook habit.