Oxygen Tank

Through the wonderful world of Twitter, I met Thea Atkinson recently who writes psychological and historical thrillers with a deep and dark exploration into the human spirit. She has no less than five novels published on Kindle available at Amazon, BN, Kobo, Diesel and Smashwords. 

We decided to ‘guest post’ on each other’s blogs and Thea’s going first. Please take a look at her thought provoking musings on ageing – you’ll be digging out your photo albums!  You can read Thea’s own blog and find out more about her books at http://theaatkinson.wordpress.com/ 

Me, I’m guest blogging over there on 13^th June but I’ll remind you before then, don’t worry…

The ever-present hum of an oxygen machine fills in conversational gaps as Stan, a retired light keeper, and I sit in the bedroom he calls home. I sit on his bed holding his photo album while he and a small black poodle occupy the Lazy Boy chair. The summer sun hasn't yet set past the one window that filters light in on both of us. Even in the limited daylight, he looks weary, aged more than his cropped, white hair should allow.

We've both lived in the same community our entire lives: one historically dependent on fishing for survival. While he experienced our hometown through whatever light his small beacon managed, I've grown up in an age where every house has at least one car, one television set, and a phone that can easily call for pizza delivery.

I know my town has a history. That's why I've come; I fancy I can capture Stan's stories before they're lost. He catches me off guard by telling me about a circus ship that caught fire here in the harbour.

As he describes the event, the noise of the animals, the licking of the flames against the wooden hull, he struggles to pull in air from the oxygen tank and I imagine the elephants, the lions, the tigers onboard doing the same. 

I wonder how something so extraordinary could pass through a few decades and become an unknown entity to a new generation. A bit of history disappearing like condensed breath. I wonder what else I don't know....what I've forgotten.

As he drags in a breath and the oxygen machine gives a metallic exhale, he strokes the poodle curled on his lap. We look at his pictures of the town’s past. Besides being faded and brown, they're unfamiliar. Almost all of them are of boats. I point to one in particular, and he fumbles to take it from between its plastic sleeves. It's of his father's vessel, from when he ran passengers from Killam's wharf down to the MarkLand Hotel.

I know Killam's wharf; I've walked it. I replace his photo with an image of my own. I walk in my mind, over its wooden slats and smell the salty air. I remember standing beside the recent gazebo addition during SeaFest celebrations. Strains of popular music filter into the image from the memory of the live band that played. It's a good memory, a recent one. But it was with the knowledge that the historic property wasn't always historic. Once it was practical.

And what of the hotel he mentions--one that had to be reached by boat. I think of the main hotel now -- Rodd's Grand. An image creeps into my head of the red brick shell, the exterior, electronic marquee, the dining room bustling with waitresses hurrying to serve coffee. I think of the bar just around the corner from the dining area and the popular music it plays. Those images flip through my thoughts like Stan's photos, faded yet present.

He shows me the CNR station from July 28, 1916, tells me how the circus sometimes came by train and that he would jump in the dorey and row up underneath the station to watch them unload the animals.

Ah, yes. The train station. I study the photo and the odd look of it because the people are dressed differently. My mind takes me to the station of my youth and it overlays the photo of a station past. I traveled to University many times by train. The station of my day offered travel by bus too, and I'd expected a terminal like in the movies--with rows of seats, luggage everywhere. It turned out to be a cubbyhole. But it still had that sense of impending change--at least, for a young girl who got homesick just standing there waiting to leave town and family.

A few years back, they tore that station down, put up a Wendy's and Tim Horton's. Of course, to honor the era before, they styled the restaurant after an old-time train terminal.

Although I try to keep up with Stan and the shots he shows me, I can't help mentally wandering through my town, through my childhood, my present, and comparing it to his.

My Yarmouth has cars in every driveway. I realize his boyhood home had no driveway. He'd lived in a tiny lighthouse on a bit of land on the edge of an island: the Bug Light, it was called, remote enough to require dorey travel because it was dependent on the tides.

I think of how I hate to get into my car in the dead of winter and wait until the engine heats up enough to blow warm air onto my frigid fingers. I don't want to think of living in a beacon so small its only well for water in the winter is the dorey that caught snow as it fell.

The photos spark something within me. As my memory travels the main street, ducking into the drugstore, the magazine shop, Stan continues to flip his pictures. He's meandering down the path of memory, pulling me along with him through sepia images.

Stan mentions ships powered by sail. There are photos of schooners from the '30s loaded with salt and coal. I'd never before imagined that town supplies would come by boat. There are delivery trucks for that. He talks of lighting the darkness with kerosene, banging on bells to warn the boats.

If I close my eyes and pretend I'm not sitting in an ever-darkening room with the noise of an oxygen machine, I can actually begin to imagine a stormy coast lit by a red light. If I let my memory slip back to my childhood, I can actually hear the foghorn. At least we have that in common: remembering the long-abandoned horn.

I suppose technology has improved things, saved lives, but I miss the horn. It occurs to me that I never realized it had stopped calling to the fog until just now.

I try to jigsaw together his pieces of history, his photos, into my present and sometimes into my recent past. Sometimes it's easy. Other times, I shake my head in disbelief

My hometown bustles with impatience; it can't wait to grow into a city's shoes. His Yarmouth is younger than mine, it's a town made possible by a pinprick of light through foggy darkness. And yet, our community is the same community. Mine exists because of his.  

The sun sets further. The brief orange light against the wall has changed to a dull gray. It matches my mood. I feel I've lost something and only just rediscovered it. Stan is oblivious. He flips page after page. Photos move like a mini movie, but disjointed and silent.

The poodle stirs. I realize I've been sitting hunched over myself far too long, trying to make out faded photographs and the cadence of his words through the rhythmic inhale and exhale of his machine. I stretch. So does the dog. It peers through pebble eyes at the man whose white hair contrasts so nicely with the darkness of the room. Stan adjusts the tubes that supply his lungs with oxygen.

Through the guise of photos, I have been given a lesson. I've learned that this, my present, will one day be my past. I want to savor it. I want to breathe in Yarmouth, as he does, and capture it.

Flowers

Still in my pyjamas, ironing school uniform and admiring the precise angle on which last night’s left over washing-up had been stacked tight in the sink, I heard the doorbell. It was 7.30am.  I suspected it would be one of my eldest’s daughter’s friends at the door, asking with a text-book politeness whether we had any porridge oats for the domestic sciences’ flapjack baking later or nail varnish remover for fear of those pink, chipped nails attracting a negative.

But it was better than that, sweethearts that my daughter’s friends are, it was a tiny woman carrying an enormous bouquet of flowers. They were mainly gerberas, happy flowers, I call them; my favourites.  I really didn’t deserve any but gosh, I’d welcome them with open arms.

‘Thank you,’ I said. “You shouldn’t have!’ Granted, it wasn’t my wittiest line but I hadn’t yet had my three cups of tea.  The lady didn’t even flinch, merely continued to search for something in the delivery note.  “Can’t believe they’re for me,” I tried again.  It was a rhetorical question really, my husband not being prone to receiving mysterious bunches of flowers and my children also yet to discover the delights.

The small lady didn’t speak, simply shook her head. ‘They’re for number ten, will you take them for her?’ she asked eventually, more than a little gruffly.

“Oh, right,” I said, “Didn’t think I’d done anything to …”

“Is that alright then?” she asked again.  “I’ve got loads of deliveries this morning,” and thrust a pen and flimsy note into my hand to be signed.

I did take the flowers.  Miranda at number ten was very happy to receive them.  She gave me a single gerbera for my troubles which now has pride of place in an especially rinsed milk bottle on my kitchen window sill.

As I walked back over the road, I thought about the delivery person who was clearly having A Bad Day.  Part of the flower giving is surely to complete the process of making the recipient feel special, rather than wondering why they bothered to get up that morning.  And I decided that, whilst I’d hate to criticise when untold disasters could have befallen the lady before she left her house, there are certain jobs where Bad Days are not allowed and delivering flowers is probably one of them.  Grumpy holiday rep? Not what you signed up to.  Presenters? There’s only one way Chris Evans is getting out of bed at 4 every morning. I’d think I’d feel short changed if the midwife had delivered my babies into my arms and spoken about how fed up she was with the awful place the world was, these days.  And then there are motivational speakers. You never see them in a bad mood, chance would be a fine thing.

Thankfully, I have a job where I can get away with being incredibly grumpy.  I can be absolutely foul to myself and nobody but the study walls and the pc needs to know.  In fact, I’m quite regularly terribly rude to my computer but that’s another story.

How about you? Can you get away with your smile slipping?  Or do you have to wait until you get home for it to droop a little?

Hustle

I’m not very good at watching TV.  Don’t get me wrong, I wish I was, my general knowledge might not be quite so woeful and I might be able to join in conversations about Peter Andre and, errrm, Oojimeflop without being three partners behind.  My problem is that my mind wanders unless a programme is totally enthralling: I am sitting down, the voices in my head point out, and yet I haven’t put the washing on; the ironing basket is exploding and that chapter won’t write itself.  Your choice, the voices shout, but every night you don’t write, is a night further away from publication. 

Before I leave you in total awe of my unfailing dedication to duty and domesticity, I should point out that there are many distractions I manage very well without a single thought for the dishes in the sink.  Just not TV. 

Unless it’s Hustle. 

Hustle is the one programme which entertains me like a book.  It requires single-minded concentration - drift away from that world for a moment and you’ve lost the plot.  The characters are so quirkily intelligent and far-fetched yet strangely down to earth and likeable, their scams are so obvious when revealed, yet so baffling before.

What I never imagined, was that I would have the starring role in an episode of Hustle.

Alas, I haven’t had any contact with the rather gorgeous, Adrian Lester but I have been scammed.  I haven’t lost any money, as I’ve had my £300 returned, but I am a little red-faced.  And my children have delighted in reminding me what I have tried to teach them about who to trust on the net.

I’ve started renting out a property in Slovakia.  I’m a rookie to the business but the hope is that it will eventually increase my current paltry addition to the household income. In short, a company persuaded me to advertise with them.  I paid my £149 for the year and four weeks later, they took another £149 from my credit card. I noticed, the bank investigated and retrieved it. I was lucky. 

Had I heard of the company? No I hadn’t. Was I taken in by the fancy headed paper of the contract, the spurious webpage they made for me, their spiel? Oh yes, yes, yes.  What was I thinking? This particular company are a private holiday letting company, run as a perk for service men, including the police, their particularly slick agent informed me. So, pleasant, reliable people, they know I’ll be thinking. Just the kind of people I’d like to stay in the house – not that I deal in stereotypes, of course. 

Did I google the company? Yes I did.  Did I research under their correct name or the name they’d invented a few days earlier? Ah!  Oh.

I didn’t even follow my gut instincts. I just wasn’t sure initially, I didn’t like being called out of the blue.  But the lack of push from the salesman, and the guarantee that I’d have a second year’s free membership if I didn’t manage a rental in the whole twelve months, persuaded me that it didn’t matter, I had nothing to lose.

I can feel my twelve year old tutting over my shoulder as I write.  Haven’t I learnt anything in my 42 years?  Little of use, would be my answer. I can’t even think who Peter Andre’s going out with. I’ve just tried to google it, but will admit to being none the wiser. 

Have you been hustled? Tell me! I won't laugh...

That Mobile Phone

It was my baby’s 11th birthday this week. No, don’t leave! I’m not going to talk about her, my pregnancy or, God forbid, her birth – not even the £247 taxi ride (paid for by my husband’s then employer) to get back to Leeds from London to be there when his second child arrived, a little unexpectedly, three weeks early.

When we were buying her birthday present together, her first phone, I couldn’t help smiling at the difference between phones now and in the year 2000. Remember the Nokia 5110? Everyone had one! The chic, slightly sparkly, sturdy silver case, the discrete aerial merely peeking over the top, those eye shaped buttons, angled for easy access and yet no camera, no downloads and certainly no wi-fi. They stayed charged for a week, probably because you never used them and they never rang because nobody wanted to call you on your mobile, goodness only knows how much it would cost.


We had a Nokia 5110, back then, and for years after. It was The Mobile. ‘Are you taking the mobile?’ we’d call to each other, hoping that the other partner’s need for it wasn’t as great. The evening before my daughter’s birth my husband had taken the mobile, making me promise that I would call him if there was an emergency. I was poorly, I had terrible gastroenteritis. The next day it was worse, I couldn’t even lift the spoon to feed my daughter. Well, I could, but I had to place it back on the tray to gather strength before lifting it again.


My friend arrived, ordered me to bed, fed, bathed and read to my eldest and came to say good bye. We had a little chat, she pointed out that the particularly bad pains seemed to be coming regularly, seemingly about every two minutes. She said that we should ring my husband. Back to the Nokia 5110. ‘I can only ring him if it’s an emergency,’ I said. My friend looked at me. ‘And of course it will be turned off during the speeches.’ £247, four hours later, he was home. We went to hospital, our baby was born.


It’s this, ‘of course’ which tickles me; a graphic picture of how our lives have changed. Of the 200 delegates, my husband’s was the only phone which rang during the speeches that evening. Only when word had filtered around the room for the reason for the call, did the looks of disdain soften.


I couldn’t imagine being at a business function today and turning off my phone. What if somebody wanted to arrange the next social occasion, my child’s temperature was raised or, let’s face it, a publisher was desperate to speak to me about my novel?


And yet we did manage didn’t we? With the mobile firmly ignored in his pocket, my husband probably had more quality conversations in that single evening than he’d have in three now, because he had people’s full attention and they had his. People still managed to communicate. The message that his wife was in labour certainly got round. All sorts of unlikely people were pooling their suggestions as to which of the trains, planes and automobiles would get him home quickest.


I’m not sure, however, that today’s phone culture is a totally retrograde step. Yes, it annoys me when people answer their phone when they are being served in a shop, picking up a prescription, being served in a bank. It’s just rude isn’t it: disrespectful? However, I pack friends, family, sport and work into most days because organisation of it is so quick and easy. I like the fact that my daughter chose to text me from school to tell me she’d had her first ‘neg’ (that's a bad thing) and that holidays with my sisters in America, Switzerland and South Wales are all being organised in snatches via email from my phone waiting for the kettle to boil.


It is, like so many things, all about moderation I say to my youngest when we discuss mobile etiquette in the Buxton household. She smiles when I say that it is not acceptable to look at your phone when other people are talking to you. ‘I know that,’ she says. My other daughter’s ears prick up when I suggest that there are times of day when the phone needs to be off, such as homework time or during meals. ‘You don’t need to tell us this, Mum,’ she points out. She looks me straight in the eye, her phone I notice, hasn’t left her bag since she got home from school. ‘Remember the questionnaire?’ she asks.


Ah yes. It was about concentration. Would your child be able to manage without her phone for the whole day, was one of the questions. I answered that she would, most definitely. Same question to me. No, I wouldn’t, I was forced to respond.

Newspaper Round

Today , I went running.  There, I’ve said it. I don’t like to admit to it too often as it perpetuates the myth that I do have some extra time when I could be cleaning.  But now I have, I’ll tell you that that there was a frost on the ground and a clear blue sky.  There wasn’t a car on the road and the birds were singing to me. It’s what I class as perfect running conditions. 

I exaggerated about the cars on the road, there was a tiny yellow van which kept passing me, pulling up ahead, then overtaking me again later.  Generally I run in another place, populated with a  great deal of fairies and abstract thinking but I did take a glance back into reality to see what significance this yellow van held to my sunny day in March.  It was a newspaper delivery van.

I thought about this van and decided that delivering newspapers in a motor vehicle was not very environmentally friendly. I suspect this may have been an electric vehicle which is highly commendable and as soon as they introduce gas pumps on street corners within 50 miles in all directions of my home and take a nought off the sale price, I’ll be first in the queue for one.  But nonetheless, nobody could claim an electric car to be as environmentally friendly as going on foot or even by bike.

I ran over the hump-backed bridge, onwards to the half-way point.  There it was again: the yellow van.  Where have all the newspaper boys and girls gone, I asked myself.  Some would say that teenagers won’t do menial jobs anymore and that all they’d do anyway is sling a bag of fliers over the hedge.  I would be inclined to think that teenagers, in this case, like every other teenage generation before them, were being given a raw deal.  

I suspect there would be the odd delivery person who would cast their sack of fliers and free newspapers over the wall and have the job ‘done’ in a fraction of the time.  I suspect this because there were people who did that when I was a teenager in the eighties.  Given half the chance, the next generation of teenagers would be doing that too. 

But not all of them.  And, if my experience of today’s teenagers is anything to go by, not many of them.  They’re desperate for work.  Some of the traditional routes to a bit of cash have been barred to them.  Babysitting jobs are being snapped up by those in their mid-twenties, back from their degree courses, earning the minimum wage if they’re lucky and living back with their parents while they look for something better.  Traffic has increased, as has an unhealthy response to health and safety and where once our offspring would have cycled to their place of pocket money, they are no longer allowed to so.  Thus, unless their parents can drive them or public transport operates in the hours they wish to work, they can’t.

I realise the newsagent has to make money and I can’t expect him/ her to single-handedly attempt to rescue our youth from pocket money poverty but is he (forgive me, it’s just simpler to stick to ‘he’) really better off?  Let’s forget the environment for a moment.  The van will have cost a few thousand pounds, as will the fuel, insurance and maintenance. Then there’s the driver to pay.  Would two or three newspaper boys and girls really cost more than that every week? And would it be really so difficult to find the ones disposing of great sacks of media and release them of their employment? Surely it needs little more than a spot check now and again.

And the paid for newspapers would look after themselves: Mrs D Mail would only miss her paper a couple of times before calling to check its whereabouts.

In my experience, people too lazy to do a proper job are generally too lazy to work out a covert defensive strategy.  When I was growing up, we knew exactly where the delivery people used to abandon their wares, it was in the same place every week, over the back wall and into the compost pile (her family were very forward thinking) of Christabel’s garden.  By the way, I lived in Northumberland, Christabel was nowhere near as proper as she sounds.

As I reached the half-way point and turned back towards home, I waved at the driver of the yellow van, we’d smiled at each other so often on route, somebody had to move the relationship on.  He was of around retirement age and I felt guilty for a moment for depriving of him of his job, albeit only in my imagination, so I switched back to being practical.  Why couldn’t the job be open to all – a set fee for delivery of all items?  The job would then be open to all individuals of all ages to carry out in the manner they saw fit.

The final time I passed the parked van, the delivery person was inside and wound down his window.  “You’re making me feel tired,” he said.

 “It’s much more fun than it looks,” I replied and laughed to myself.  While I’d been running, he’d delivered only to those houses on my route.  He’d have been just as quick to put on a pair of trainers and a ruck sack and his health and the environment would have been better for it.  He’d be even quicker on a bike. If he’d wanted to walk, he could, surely, he’d just take longer which would be his prerogative: these kind of things are always paid by the job rather than the hour. 

Staggeringly, the way fuel prices have risen lately, for the price of a single tank of fuel, his employer could furnish him with a decent pair of trainers.  I rest my case.  Go newspaper boys and girls! Stand up and be counted!

Hush Down Cobwebs

My friend has just had her fourth baby.  I wouldn’t say I was broody but my twelve year old and I did have a great time in Mamas and Papas cooing at the new-borns lying in their prams, with their serene faces and arms up in the air, as we searched for the perfect gift.  No, I’m not broody.  Did I mention their white bonnets and their tiny fingernails? No, really, I’m fine.   

Needless to say, we went in with the intention of buying some practical babygro’s and came out with an impractical, fabric pram toy sporting numerous educational hangy things including our absolute favourite, the vibrating bee. 

Writing the card I remembered the final verse of a poem I’ve been inflicting on new parents ever since I received it with great relief after the birth of my first, the aforementioned twelve year old.   I think it’s called Babies Don’t Keep but can’t find an author on the internet.  Please excuse me if I should know the poet’s name.

On sight of second babies and beyond, however, I do admit to doctoring this poem to suggest that it’s actually acceptable not to coo, rock, play and chat with your baby sometimes, such as when you have to put on your shoes to protect your feet from the un-hoovered carpet or open the fridge door in private for fear of the forgotten cheese broadcasting your slovenliness.

I’ve decided that the poem can teach writers something too as novels are not vastly dissimilar to babies.  As everyone’s who’s ever attempted to write a novel knows (or has been in the unfortunate position of supporting somebody in their attempt) it all starts as your cherished secret, bursts into your life, swamps it, grows and gains its unique personality, giving you immense pleasure whilst driving you to complete distraction.  But most of all, there’s nothing you wouldn’t do to see that baby flourish. 

So, here it is, a little changed again.  Many thanks, Anon:

I hope that my book looking back on today

Remembers a writer who had time to write.
Books get published while we are not looking

There’ll be time enough for cleaning and cooking.

So hush down cobwebs, dust to go sleep

I’m writing my baby and stories don’t keep.

Sloth Week

One week every month, my friend has Slops Week.  This is when she and her family eat up whatever’s in the cupboards. They don’t go shopping at all.  It’s like Ready Steady Cook every night.  I don’t think I’m disciplined enough to install that in our house but it did start me thinking about having a Sloth Week or rather, a more upmarket version:  a homemade Writer’s Retreat.

I should tell you what has driven me to this.

Almost a year ago I started blogging because the ever lovely and multi-talented Jane Alexander told me I should.  Well, Jane and a myriad of other people told me to.  I’d heard, too often to ignore, that a book can be brilliant but if the writer does not appear to have a platform for that book, nor be open to help in its promotion, agents and publishers will be loathe to take him/ her on.  Scary.  So I started blogging and actually, I love posting (you get to write about things that have tickled or interested you and you lovely people read it – it’s great!)  So thank you, Jane.  Then I was told about Facebook for the same reason.  And then came Twitter and suddenly the minutes I spent on social networking were turning into hours. 

It doesn’t seem like that, you understand.  I tweet by the kettle, when I’m waiting to pick up my children, while I’m running the bath.  But the trouble is, I used to do other things in that time.   

I’ve never been good at single tasking.   A boiling kettle is just enough time to get a pile of black washing into the machine.  Three minutes, that’s how long you should leave the tea bag in the mug without stirring before retrieving and adding milk, I once read, and it works for me – I can hang an entire wash on the drier in that time.  Dishwasher needs loading? Give me one baked potato in the microwave and it’s sorted.  Crumbs threatening to take over the kitchen?  I can get that swept in the time it takes me to call for a balance from the bank.  Come to think of it, the time you have to wait sometimes, I could sweep the whole house.

These things still have to be done, alas.

I’ve met some wonderful people through social networking and hardly a day goes by when I don’t see some link to a great writing site or titbit of information from my Facebook and Twitter sources.  However, it has to move down the priority list.  I have to do it outside of work hours.

This is the same for cleaning and cooking and putting away clothes and washing clothes and paying bills and changing beds and hoovering, and organising holidays and filling out forms and, OK, you get the picture.  I will do these things but outside of writing hours.

Sloth week, my homemade Writers’ Retreat, starts on Monday.  This is the plan, it’s very simple: 9.30 – 3.30 is writing time. 

No Twitter, no Facebook, no popping over to the blog to see if anyone’s dropped in, no checking website stats and no scouring my in-box for publishers desperate to sign me - which will be particularly tricky.  I don’t think I have  an addictive personality, I couldn’t  really fit it into my life, but the checking of my inbox, as I have mentioned before, is erring on the obsessive.  Even though I know that in all reality, rejections come in e-mails, signings come by phone.

Please wish me luck with Sloth Week.  Join me if you fancy, we can chat about it after 3.30!

Jackie
@jaxbees

Stylish Blogger Award

My blog post is a little different today, on account of being able to announce that I am now the proud owner of a Stylish Blogger Award.  Yes! Really! I know!  I’m very grateful to BookAngel, it was a truly lovely surprise.  I’m just happy anybody reads my blog at all - if it makes them chortle, sympathise or empathise, well, that puts a good dollop of icing on the cake.  Well done to Faye (BookAngel) for winning her own Stylish Blogger Award as she had to win one herself before she could pass it on to me.  Faye reads and reads and reads so if you want to know what’s out there, visit her blog:  http://faybaysbooks.blogspot.com. 

Here are the rules:
1. Thank the person who gave you the award and link back to them in your post.
2. Tell us 7 things about yourself.
3. Award 15 recently discovered great bloggers.
4. Contact these bloggers and let them know they have won!

So now I have to tell you seven things about myself.  I know, I know, but those are the rules.  And I’m a Virgo and we have to follow rules or we spontaneously combust.  Trust me, I annoy myself with it, let alone anyone else.

I suppose I could tell you about putting my arm in a spin drier which hadn’t switched off. That caused quite a stir, not to mention great inconvenience to me and my family with my children then only three and two years old.  My three year old was cross with me for being so stupid – hmmm, out of the mouths of babes...Let’s just say the arm in question flew out and I dread to think what would have happened if, after dislocating at the elbow, I hadn’t caught the spinning forearm with my other hand.

I woke up during an anaesthetic.  Or rather, I like to say I did.  My anaesthetist friend has since told me that I would simply have come out of recovery a little earlier than they might have expected – which doesn’t sound quite as impressive. It was pretty horrific though, I have to say.  I’ve used some of the images from it in my book, Glass Houses, when my main character, Tori Williams, is having dreams and hallucinating whilst in a coma. 

The anaesthetist at the operation (with whom I had fallen madly in love, it always happens to me after a general anaesthetic and is very embarrassing), eventually managed to convince me that I was no longer being pushed in an enormous wheel chair by Michelin Men type staff with huge monocles the size of ships’ port holes around the spiral stair cases of the hospital and hadn’t, actually, moved from the operating theatre for the duration.  I will never forget him saying, ‘Nicht weinen, Maedel, nicht weinen...’ in the softest Swiss-German accent (I was on holiday at the time).  Who says German can’t be romantic?

I am five foot one and three-quarters (you think that’s small, my mum’s four foot eleven and has size three feet!) and have found out just today, that I weigh the same as a new born hippopotamus – or half a baby elephant – which, I would like to add, is not as much as you might think.  I wouldn’t want to birth either of them, however.

I also found out today that I am 38% right and 62% left brained which in layman’s terms means that I’m just under two thirds dull and over a third scatty nightmare.

And my most embarrassing experience?  There are a few to choose from but a clear winner has to be... well, if you’ve been following my blog for a while, you will know about the fire exit for extremely strong visiting pets.

That isn’t quite seven.  But I shall stop there before I start talking about running...

I also get to award 15 of my favourite bloggers with their own Stylish Blogger Award.  I know I will have missed someone so ask your forgiveness in advance.  Please blame it on ever decreasing brain cells as opposed to any malice.  Please also overlook the fact that the list currently stands at 14.  I’ve left myself a space to sneak in the most excruciating miss. It’s a Virgo thing, we like to cover our selves...

theelephantinthewritingroom.blogspot.com/ 

mundaniapress.blogspot.com

spiesliesandpies.blogspot.com

exmoorjane.blogspot.com/

scribblingseaserpent.blogspot.com/

www.janerusbridge.co.uk/blog/

banana.blog.co.uk/

www.talkaboutwasted.blogspot.com/  (Nicola has a few blogs so I didn’t really know which one to pick but the way she writes just makes me chortle, whatever she’s talking about.)

sandiedent.blogspot.com

www.tltyson.com/the-blogs--links.html

judithkinghorn.blogspot.com

www.markrtrost.com/

jakebarton.wordpress.com

blog.juliealindsey.com/

Confessions of a Christmas writer

Not everybody likes Christmas starting in November.  I respect such frustration, understand the logic but don’t count myself among these protestors.  The anticipation, the decoration, the spendification just can’t start early enough for me.  I’m the dreadful mother who allows her children to play the Christmas CD in the car in September, actively encourages letter writing to Father Christmas and Mother Wrapalot in October and remembers she should have made the Christmas cake in November.  (I write Christmas cards two days before Christmas but that’s another story.)

It’s best when the children break up from school a week early so we can wrap presents together in front of Wife Swap USA, make another batch of mince pies as soon as the next pack of pre-rolled pastry has defrosted and play Winter Wonderland on the piano pretending not to notice the unintentional rhythmical alterations. 

I tend to have a tear at the school’s Nativity, even when I can only hear every second word and my own children have long since graduated.  There’s something just so appealing about a three foot Mary.  And I even like the slightly over zealous Vicar pleading with us to stop and think.

I like snowy walks with my family, meeting friends in the pub en route.  I like my presents, scant in number certainly, perhaps not of the highest quality but chosen so very much with me in mind.  I’m wearing those pink USB heated slippers now, for example, reluctant as I am to put on the heating when it’s only me in the house.

I even ‘get’ turkey; fifth day turkey, curried turkey. I read that 86% of people eat turkey only because they feel they ought. I read a tweet about eating duck instead.  I eat duck but I’m not so keen on it curried.  I like, no I love, people coming to stay, leaving late morning after two jugs of coffee and more chat after the chat and wine and food and chocolates of the night before, the children all playing dutifully on the Wii, still in their pyjamas.

Then it’s back to normality.  They all go back – back to work, back to school and I go back to my desk, to writing again from 11pm, to going to bed late and waking four hours later with a sense of foggy satisfaction about the volume of words written when the house was quiet.

I miss them all on their first day back: hubbie with his cold, eldest with her hormones, youngest with her scruffy old pinafore when I can’t coax her into one of the skirts which hangs pristine in her wardrobe. 

But I have to admit to a small smile as I wave goodbye to the last to leave at 8.45. 

And so I run.  I stuff the remaining breakfast items in the dishwasher, yank some sopping clothes from the washer and toss them over the drier, flick on the kettle, write a cheque for the milk, trip over the forgotten PE kit and make my way upstairs to my desk.  I switch on the computer - an unusual phenomenon caught as it is in a perpetual energy loop over the holidays.  I remove plastic heart shaped key rings, miniature playing cards, screwdrivers and whoopee cushions from my desk and replace them with 344 pages of A4 manuscript. 

Then I start.  Without interruption.  And slowly but surely, I input all the amendments I’d made on the hard copy of my novel.   I’m changing it around you see.  An agent made some fantastic suggestions after reading the full manuscript and I get the chance to see what I can do with it and send it back to her.  It’s a terrific opportunity and one I mustn’t squander. 

After an hour or two I make tea.  I take a few pages of the manuscript with me to read through as the kettle boils and luxuriate in the lack of a call to find the recycled batteries, the guinea pigs’ spare water bottle, the Christmas cake.  After forgetting to eat lunch I set the alarm on my desk to 3.20 to remind me to return to this world before my children get home.

When they’re all back, I smother them with ridiculously large bear hugs.  I’ve missed them, you see, I really have – almost as much as I’d missed my writing over the past couple of weeks. 

Happy 2011 everyone!  May it be packed with happy times and chunks of everything you like!

It's Just that I'm Meant to be Working

The postman delivered a parcel today. It wasn’t for me or anyone in my house.  It wasn’t for my neighbour or perhaps somebody further up the street. It was for somebody in the next village. ‘Thanks, love,’ he said.  ‘I knew you’d be in.’

My postman is great.  Always smiling, always pleasant.  But he’s just another one.  Another one who knows I work from home.  There’s my retired neighbour, he likes to pop by for a chat now and again, see if we’d be interested in the Race Night down at the village hall, seeing as we did so well last time. Did we? Then there’s the man who sells Twinings Tea from the back of his matt black, two-door van and clearly has a lot of customers in my village.  He knows I’ll hold on to Mr and Mrs Chinacup’s next six month’s stock until they get home but, No, thanks for asking, I really don’t think I’ll sign up to having my tea leaves delivered.  I have a penchant for Yorkshire Tea, you see, and besides, I haven’t got a tea strainer.  The milk man asks if Jim at number 22 is OK because he hasn’t put in his usual order and Denis, well he had a heart attack ten years ago and has been walking an impressive eight miles per day ever since.  He likes to share his memories of the walk with me.  And why not? It’s truly very touching that he likes to share this and he’s a lovely old man who tells a great story. 

It’s just that I’m meant to be working.

Would these people call me in the office to have such conversations?  Would they drag me from my desk to sign for an order for someone else’s book club books?   Would they phone me, expecting me to call an abrupt halt to my meeting so that we could discuss their travel arrangements?

Ignore them, my friends say.  But it isn’t that easy.  They ring the door bell twice, three times perhaps, concerned I haven’t heard them.  And on the occasions when I have remained strong, I haven’t been able to resist a furtive glance from behind the curtains of my study window either to be spotted or to be racked with such enormous guilt at the sight of their disappearing shoulders, that ten minutes later, I don my coat and apologise for missing them. 

With limited success I have kept on my reading glasses, no mean feat when negotiating stairs at a sprint,  picked up a pen en route and feigned a stressed expression on opening the door.  Oh look at you in a hurry, they say, what are you doing? Writing (trying)!  Oh that’s interesting they say...

I was talking about this phenomenon with some fellow home-workers recently and was relieved to hear that I wasn’t the only one who found the stream of interruptions a little challenging.  One such person put a note on the door explaining that he was working and would only be available out of office hours.  The next caller did indeed notice that this person was working from home and so knew he’d catch him in.  Another, driven to more drastic measures, got into the habit of driving his car off the drive and further up the road to give the impression he was out at work.  He stopped this when an acquaintance had a word in his ear, wondering if everything was alright at home, because he was spending a lot of time at Mrs Homealot’s place.  We did think this smacked of desperation, however.  Driving the few hundred metres to a secret rendez-vous would rather suggest that somebody wanted to be caught.

So, it would appear that I am powerless to quell the constant interruptions and so I will continue sitting at the pc in my study and cursing every time the door bell goes. 

The thing is, my study is also quite a solitary place and I am aware that the one thing worse than being interrupted would be if nobody called at all.

Thank you Joanne Harris

Sometimes, my day job drives me mad.  I make appointments to speak with people about their business - they’re not there.  I email them to fix another date - they don’t reply.  I make notes, constantly make notes on who I’ve called, plan to call, have almost given up on calling,  always trying to get through the admin to the point of being able to speak with the client in person.   This part is something of which I never tire and, frankly, spending so many hours alone in my study, is something I need to stave off the lunacy like a writer needs tea and biscuits. 

I admit to having a less than perfect attitude to this work. I graft, I do the job properly but I also moan about the unreliability of the human condition.  A lot.

Last week I heard Chocolat’s Joanne Harris speak.  She told of how she’d stayed in teaching for ten years after publication of her first novel, recognising that all the research she ever needed for her writing was there, inside those walls of Leeds Grammar School with all its communities - teachers as well as pupils.    I went to hear Joanne Harris speak, rather than think about my own writing.  However I couldn’t help a broad grin spread across my face.  There it was – my positive attitude, right there in front of me, in the form of this little, slightly off-the-wall writer with a tremendous underlying wit and ability to tell an amusing story about something which when you really analyse it, could be quite banal.  When she spoke of the pupils at school, the writing fodder she had at her fingertips, she was also talking about me and the massive community I have on my excel spreadsheet, 91 personalities so far, when I can catch them. 

There’s the shy builder, the punctilious car valeter, the estate agent who talks about being interested in people.  And there’s the dog lover who cleans poodles in her front room and explains what makes them sit best for the shampoo, in a desperately calm, horse-whisperer kind of way.  Then there are the suspicious ones – just what am I trying to sell, they wonder, not entirely cognisant of the fact that they have already paid for their page and that what I’m trying to sell is actually them so it would be easier all round if they weren’t quite so reticent. 

So I left Joanne’s talk with a signed copy of Blue Eyed Boy (I’ve sped through the first half, it’s a page-turner alright, in a chillingly disturbing kind of way) and a positive attitude.  Tomorrow wasn’t a day of phone calls to people who wouldn’t turn up for my call but the start of a new character.  Who, what or where this character would be I wouldn’t know until later, maybe ten years later.  Or perhaps never.  But it was the potential for future scribbling that changed my mind about the work I do for my bread and butter.

And what of people who don’t keep their appointments? I’m sure, with a little tweaking, there’s a role out there for them.  Maybe that’s where Joanne Harris got her Blue Eyed Boy?

The Phone Rang

A strange thing happened today.  The phone, my second line connected via the computer and allowing free, if hard to hear and hard to be heard phone calls, kept ringing.  

That’s only strange if you know that I just use this line for dialling out.  No one knows the number, not even me.  So when it rang  for the fourth time in the same amount of hours, I suspected the line was malfunctioning somewhat.  No big deal but I did feel the need to share this with my fourth caller of the day once he’d asked for a fourth different name for somebody who certainly wasn’t me.

“What do you do then?” the comfy, slightly effeminate voice asked from the other end of the line.

“Copywriting,” I answered.

“Oh wow,” he broke in quickly before I could attempt to return the question.  “You must be very clever.”

“Exceedingly!  You wouldn’t believe how clever I have to be to do this job,” I said, feeling the need to cover the 300 words I was struggling to cut by a hundred on a local roofing company.  “How about you?”

“Entertainment.” 

So I have to ask, don’t I?  Why, when I’m not remotely impressed by fame, fortune or indeed anything to do with celebrity, am I reduced to a giggling wreck when I ask,  “Oh gosh [tee hee], do I know you?”

“Yes,” he answers.

Yes!  But he’s not allowed to tell me who he is.  Awwww.  So I draw upon all my feminine guise, explain how hard it is to be alone here every day at my desk, tapping out highly charged, fiendishly intelligent copy, and how I really won’t tell anyone, honest.  And he capitulates. 

“Andrew Bernard,” he says.  He was hoping to speak to his agent.  “Are you on the internet?”  I found it quite endearing when he proceeded to give me the full link to his website without realising that I could simply google him and his would be the top result. 

So, Mr Andrew Bernard, it seems you’ve been in everything.  You will recognise him.  Check out his website www.andrewbernard.tv.  You can even listen to him speak, the voice which spoke to me, in my home, on the line that sits clothed in dusty cobwebs, not un-reminiscent of the phone to the Carlsberg Complaints Line.  That’s the voice which made me laugh out loud before I got back to my roofer and the one hundred words I began shifting with renewed vigour. 

Thank you, Andrew for making me giggle, and all the very best for whatever project you were hoping to discuss when you accidentally called little old me.

Perfect Day

There are still places under the parasol.  I take my large cappuccino and place myself facing the street.  As I start to write the short story I’ve been desperate to write all week, I hear David Grey’s, Sail Away with Me sung by the mesmerising voice of a twenty-something year old, with his hint of a beard, jeans slung low from his hips (but no sign of any pants, thank you) and guitar strap relaxed around his neck as though it’s part of him.  The case is open on the ground.  People are filling the base with coins and notes.  He’s good.  He smiles at every passer-by as they drop in their gratitude and respect but he doesn’t miss a beat.

He sings another busking favourite of mine, Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen style.  I smile at the scene in which I find myself. It doesn’t get much better than this.

There’s a different voice now.  I stop writing and look up.  It’s deeper with an African tinge – Bob Marley with slightly more attitude.  The hair suits the voice: slightly dishevelled Rastafarian, chin length curls, greying in a ten pence piece size spot on the crown of his head. 

I notice that my young busking friend has taken a step back, is leaning against the wall with one knee pulled high. He’s strumming an accompaniment quietly; the other man is singing.  Because the other man can sing.  It’s the slightly predicatable, No Woman, No Cry but it’s got passion and a rawness which mean I keep listening.

It’s a warm September day and this man is wearing a brown Paddington bear type coat.  I gasp: it’s Rudi.  Everyone knows Rudi.  He’s to be found every Saturday, and other days as well, wandering through Harrogate.  Generally he carries a megaphone to convey abstract messages of learning and joy.  ‘We all have the power to be nice,’ he shouts.  He was perched on the top of traffic lights when I heard that one.  ‘Your daughters are beautiful,’ he proclaimed another time, much to one of said children’s delight, after her dad had simply passed the time with Rudi.

But I didn’t know he could sing.

No Woman, No Cry finished.  Rudi’s whole face smiled in response to the applause.  He turned and shook the guitarist’s hand who motioned Rudi to the coins in the case.  He should take some, after all people had specifically left money while the duet took place.  It was only right that Rudi should earn something for his trouble. 

But Rudi didn’t touch the money.  There was more gesturing.  But he simply dipped his head, shook the guitarist’s hand again, beamed as he turned and went on his way.  The guitarist watched him leave, nodded sagely, then turned back to his music. 

Judging by the fact that Rudi has been wearing the same black cotton trousers and that brown duffle coat, whatever the weather, for the entire eleven years I’ve lived here – and sometime prior to that too, no doubt, I do not think Rudi has much spare cash.  Couldn’t he have just taken enough for a sandwich?

Rudi just wanted to sing.  And that was enough.  And so he did.  He’s a singer, an entertainer, certainly but entrepreneur, he is not.  In that moment, however, hearing him chuckling into the distance,  I thought that Rudi probably understood the world better than the rest of us and was certainly happier than many. 

Most days I don’t feel confident calling myself a writer.  I say that ‘I write’, when people ask, but the official title of ‘writer’ seems too much like ‘author’ and I’d feel a sham without my name to accompany it, on the front of that book.  But today, watching this exchange, two strangers simply enjoying their mutual love of music and song, enjoying the simple pleasures of life without having to communicate a single word about it, I felt so happy to be someone who loves to write.   

I have the picture of the guitarist and Rudi firmly in my mind now.  And I have a scene, perhaps, or at least two characters who will appear in a book somewhere.  They will jam. They will understand each other, they will know what’s important and then they will go on their way.  I don’t know where I’m going to put them yet but whether it’s next week or when my children have left home, there’s a story about them sharing something, I know it.

Ellie Williamson

A few months ago I discovered elitewriters.co.uk and got into email correspondence with the site owner, Ellie Williamson. She seemed great, we'd chat about how ridiculous it was, us both being up at 2am in the morning working on our various bits of fiction, seemingly not realising that we weren't actually writing at all but chatting. 


I was going to be the site's profiled writer in July.  I submitted the required pieces of writing - an About You, a Blog Entry and a Short Piece of Fiction but then everything went quiet.  A few days of no response and I had a terrible sense of foreboding.  I knew I'd only 'met' Ellie on-line but she just didn't seem the type of person to suddenly, and without explanation, close all communication.  I kept checking back to the site which was like the Marie Celeste.  I even had the fleeting notion that the site was a scam to fleece my £10 annual membership from me but I had to have a stern word with myself for doubting my instincts; I knew that  Ellie Williamson and her site were completely kosher.

When I got back from holiday, I clicked on the link to elitewriters.co.uk and everything had changed.  A new homepage had been uploaded which explained that Ellie had died after a three year battle with breast cancer.  Her friend and colleague, Lorraine Cornish, who runs Words Undone and also helps out with Active Writers, had decided to take over the site in her memory.

I wouldn't claim to know Ellie or insult those close to her by pretending to feel a grief like theirs but I enjoyed my few months of correspondence with her and do feel real sadness that another person in their mid-forties should lose their life too soon.

So, I'd like to help Lorraine promote elitewriters.co.uk in Ellie's memory.  If you're a writer, please have a look at the site. It's primarily a showcase for writing with constant opportunities to enter competitions and air your missives.  If you're a reader, please pop over there and let us budding wannabes know your thoughts.


My July profile has been resurrected for September so you'll see me over there.  I had to steady my hand when I submitted the featured short story as it's something I wrote ten years ago, annoyed by the rise in cosmetic surgery, even back then.  I rediscovered the story (it isn't as heavy as it sounds) and decided to give it a whirl.  However it's the first time I've ever submitted anything which hasn't been read and critiqued by an army of helpful others.  I'd be keen to know your thoughts - honest!

Thanks for listening and here's to making the best of every moment while we're still lucky enough to be here.