This Way to The Gents

When I was at school, I hung out with the kids who were in band and orchestra, the ones who were in the drama shows and the musicals. It would be a mistake to think that this was a group of swotty wusses - it was a pit town and so there was a strong musical heritage, for brass instruments anyway, and a surprising number of the hard kids were in the band. Moreover the new drama teacher, with remarkable insight, had been able to attract the most talented actors (rather than the soppy nerds) by selecting as her very first production The Price Of Coal.

The two coolest boys were Chris C and John M. They were both talented actors – clever, funny, political. John’s dad was a local councillor and an NUM rep. Everyone looked up to them, we all liked the things that they liked. More than anything, Chris and John liked Sheffield United and The Jam. No-one had scooters or anything like that (no-one could afford them), but Chris and John had parkas and the right haircuts and the right jeans and the button-down shirts, all that.

Worshipping The Jam was like a religion for us. No-one we knew had seen them play live, maybe the band didn't venture that far north, or maybe they did but no-one could afford to go. We did know everything about them though, and make complicated arrangements to be at one another's houses when they were going to appear on TV.

It would be hard to explain to our children now that we would get together with friends just to listen to a record. I remember one Thursday when A Town Called Malice came on to Dial-A-Disc, a huge fight broke out in the school foyer as several hundred people tried to cram into the phone box. The teachers had to call the police in the end. We all still trusted the police then, before Orgreave and Hillsborough.

We never saw The Jam, but it was OK because we had our own local version: The Gents. They were becoming really popular just at the time Paul Weller was making his shock announcement. When he started issuing photos wearing necklaces, and videos sporting dodgy sweaters punting on the Cam with Mick Talbot - with piano music included, for God's sake - it was a tragedy of immense proportions. So we hooked onto The Gents instead, Northern Mod boys with the sound we liked, and endlessly gigging locally. We saw them at WMCs, MWCs, even once at the Hacienda in Fishlake, eight of us crammed into a car one of the lads had "borrowed" from his dad. They played at Mainline and Rotters too, but my dad wouldn't let me go before I was eighteen.

I found a website the other day where a fan has published an obsessive amount of information about the band, including the fact that they are having a reunion gig on 23 April. This makes me think of Jarvis and his idea of all meeting up in the year 2000. The town has changed beyond recognition since that time, and I fear the lads in The Gents have too. In fact I'd be surprised if there were many people left to go, of our mates. There were no jobs to come back for after university.

In my head, the strike is always happening to sound of The Gents, the working lad's Jam. Many of the gigs we saw were Miners Benefits. The Blades had gone from the fourth division up to the second division between O level mocks and A levels, but no one went to see them play when they been promoted, because the miners had been out for months by then and no-one could afford to go. Well some could, but they wouldn't go without their mates.

It's estimated that the town lost £250,000 of spending power from its shops and businesses for each week of the strike: it has never recovered. Our pit employed 3,000 men in 1984. It was closed for a long time, and reopened recently employing 300.

Trains roll by the pit head day and night coming in from Immingham docks. They are filled with coal imported from abroad and costing more now than the coal we mine in the UK. At the start of the strike we had 170 collieries and nearly 200,000 miners. Now we have 12 pits and 8,000 miners. We import 23 million tonnes of coal a year even though we have 220m tonnes of known reserves and it recent geological predictions estimated up to 1bn tonnes more. We rely on coal for one-third of our power to the grid, and the government is proposing more "clean-coal" power stations like the new one at Kingsnorth.

My girls have just been performing in a musical with their Stagecoach group - Billy Elliott. "Who won in the miners strike, mummy?" they asked me. One had played a policeman, the other a miner (and a ballerina). "It's complicated," I replied. "Everyone lost, in the end."

I thought about dancing to The Gents, in Midas Club on the day of my sister's birthday. It still smelled of the onions we'd fried for the lunchtime soup kitchen. The weather was starting to get cold but the three boys had not yet been buried alive while they were out coal-picking.

It feels like centuries ago.

Summer 1984 down our Pit Lane

The Big Decision

It was a good offer, better than I'd expected. However I wrote to them just now and said no.

The reasons I said no are too many and too complicated to explain in my current state of mind (which is too distressed to explain).....however the reasons for making said decision do not include:

• The financial package
• My career prospects
• Potential for the business going forward
• Interest and nature of the work
• Stuff I like to do and am good at
• How I aspire to live my life

This will turn out to have been the right decision. Because I will make it so. I'm not prepared to live my life crying and berating myself for having made bad choices. I need to get busy, very very busy, on post-rationalisation. I'm already off to a flying start by having successfully talked myself in to this decision in the first place. I guess I can build on that......

And.....relax

It's rather wonderful having children that are performers, actors, singers, dancers, musicians....but it does lead to a lot of performances at the end of each term.

In the last two weeks we've had music exams (three), school concerts (three), a Stagecoach performance, a LAMDA exam and two ballet exams. Not to mention the swimming gala, the Tudor assembly and inter-house netball. I'm knackered just from driving everyone around to all these things - and the kids are completely wiped out. Adrenaline keeps it going through the shows, but then there's an almight crash afterwards, and there have been a lot of tears. For the first time this year, we've experienced the crash-down plus girl-hormones. It was really quite horrible.

So tomorrow we bundle everything in the car and disappear to a big house in Somerset which will be replete with a full dozen female hormone-sets (middle aged hysterical mums, teenagers, tweenagers, a chocolate addict and a heartbroken Sicilian). We are taking a terrifying amount of alcohol. PJs and some fleeces. That should do us. I might not get dressed again until Friday.

For the first time in decades, I have packed already and gone to bed early. I almost felt nostalgic for the all-nighters I regularly used to pull. Ah, those were the days, back when we had so much work we couldn't finish it.

I have been running my company for fifteen years exactly today. I wasn't sure what to do to mark the occasion. There was a time when we'd have thrown a party, held a corporate event of some kind, treated our clients to a celebratory gift, travelled to Paris on the Eurostar to enjoy a slap-up lunch with the team. At the ten-year milestone, we took the whole summer off and spent it in France, while the team beavered away back at the ranch.

Now the recession has put paid to all that. We're not doing anything - and I haven't mentioned it to anyone. I'm too tired of the whole thing.

The Last Resort

The government has announced today that it is providing financial support to help regenerate England's "Coastal Towns". Interesting that, of all the things about coastal towns that have gone out of fashion, one of them seems to be the word resort.

On the Today programme, they interviewed a man who runs a B&B in Skegness. He seemed bewildered that, even with the current vogue for stay-cations, the market had fallen for serviced accommodation (B&B clearly being another term out of fashion).

I tried to imagine a situation where a weekend to a B&B in Skeggy would reach the top of my list of mini-breaks. Sure I can imagine breezy, bracing walks (the sand will still be great, regardless) and maybe you can still get good fish and chips. But I think in the final analysis it would be a funky modern aparment (like the ones I saw being built at Westward Ho! last year) or a groovy boutique hotel (like the one Jamie O has opened in Ilfracombe) that would lure me. If I wanted a totally retro experience, I think I'd camp. Bed and breakfast, with candlewick bedspreads, and someone shuffling outside the bathroom, rattling the doorhandle when you're on the loo, that just doesn't feature on my list of holiday possibilities.

I'm not sure how this funding will be spent: they talked about £5 million per town. Marketing is the answer, said the man from Skegness, whilst admitting that self-catering had actually grown in the town last year - I suspected that the resort itself maybe isn't the issue so much as a failure to admit that serviced accommodation has reached the end of its appeal and boutique or minimalist or retro might be concepts worth exploring.

I can imagine, actually, a B&B reinventing itself as a retro-boutique. I'm thinking ice cream vans, Cath Kidston, diners with chrome stools, pastel colours. I'm not thinking brown gloss woodwork and the smell of cabbage permeating the swirly carpets and nylon sheets that snag on your nails and a cold greasy egg on a chipped plate.

The radio piece alluded euphemistically to the fact that some coastal towns have some problems to do with an unbalanced population, healthcare and supported living issues. Seems that old people are out of fashion too.

I spent the first nine years of my life in Margate, another ten to and fro to the bracing resorts of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, and the last fifteen years driving endlessly to Teignmouth to see the in-laws. The crumbling stucco of the villas, the faded grandeur, you could see they would spruce up nicely. I live in a place like that myself - far from the sea but once similarly shabby and faded, now all bright and clean and smart again. The raw ingredients are there: clean sand, fresh air, wide avenues, generously proportioned buildings. But £5 million per town won't even touch the sides.

Relative Values

Conventional wisdom has it that money can't buy you happiness (nor indeed love, for that matter) but scientists have now proven that it's more complicated than that.

We knew this already of course (although this knowledge was in fact supposition until the eggspurts got onto it). I always reckoned, in my hard-up living-alone-in-London days, that being able to afford a washing machine and a car would make a really massive, transformational improvement to my quality of life. Beyond that - owning your own home, affording ready meals, expensive clothes, holidays abroad - everything counted as nice to have, as opposed to necessity. I still think that now.

So I am endlessly appreciative of the nice-to-haves that I enjoy having in my life now. I was chatting on the phone to my sister a while ago, as I was getting ready to go to a dinner at the Dorchester. I laughed and said I was looking forward to seeing how the other half lived.

"You are the other half!" she said.

I cetainly never expected to live in such a nice house, (detached and no lodgers!), mortgage paid off, drive lovely cars, go abroad on holiday several times a year. For a girl who started life in a council house in Margate and going on holiday to Pontins at Camber Sands (all of about 40 miles from home) it's really quite something. And since plenty of branches of the family are still struggling to make ends meet on the big estates of south-east London, I appreciate what I have.

The study into money and happiness found that getting richer only makes you happy if you outstrip the people around you. I'd better confess upfront that I only skim-read this study, based on a snippet I read in the Metro, but there's more information here. I was irritated by the research at first - I thought it was talking about schadenfreude, keeping up with the Jones's. But then I thought ,no, perhaps it means people like me. Knowing how fortunate we are and really understanding, appreciating, the difference that the extra money can make. I love opening the front gate, peeping around it through the shrubs up the path, leading up to the front door, and thinking "Wow, I actually live here!" It never ceases to surprise me.

It works the other way too. We buy an Aston Martin, and that gets us on a mailing list to be invited to the Boat Show as guests of Sunseeker. At the end of that day, one of was grinning from ear to ear, having spent hours fraudulently pretending to assess the merits of various luxury features from on-deck hot-tubs to walk-in humidors. One of us was feeling like a poor country churchmouse because we don't have a yacht.

Sometimes this makes me very angry.

However the study says this is the experience for many people. What happens, I can see, is that often a change in your lifestyle means you make new friends. It doesn't mean you've lost the old ones, but it does mean that your life then feels ordinary. If I drove around my teenage stamping grounds Oop North in my immaculately-restored classic Ferrari, I wouldn't feel that I'd made it. Actually I'd feel like a ridiculous showing-off twat and I simply wouldn't do it. When I drive it through the Cotswolds in the summer, I do feel quite cool and smart. But mostly I drive that car to Ferrari Owners Club events, and it feels pretty run of the mill all of a sudden.

Maybe he's less happy than I am because he's cursed by having grown up in a wealthy, colonial environment with houseboys and swimming pools and country clubs, and always expected a life at least as good as this, if not considerably better, and with sunshine thrown in too.

We've got various friends now who have serious, serious money - and they don't seem to be any happier than the rest of the people we know. One of my pals spent years slogging away in the family engineering business founded by his grandfather. He really hated it. He received a surprise offer and after much soul-searching he sold the company and personally received nearly £30 millon, all cash. Lovely, lovely man, couldn't happen to anyone nicer.

"The great thing about it, " we told him, "is with a sum of money like that, you can afford to anything you want to".

The first item of post he received, the first day the money hit his bank, was a prospectus for a yacht. Price tag: £31 million.

Doctor Doctor

I reckon the only people who take doctors seriously are the people that don't actually know any in real life.

Those of us who've had them as friends, housemates, family members understand that they have no more idea what is going on in their work environment than any of the rest of us. They bullshit, make things up, go to the clinic with such bad hangovers they can barely speak - muddling along just like everyone else.

They also, like the rest of us, delegate the boring stuff to minor serfs and minions.

No-one smart enough to be a doctor (even before they'd destroyed their brain cells with alcohol and snorting the OroMorph capsules) would have written the instruction booklet they gave me when I arrived for the first appointment.

First some fatuous platitudes: "People are afraid when they first receive their diagnosis". "Everyone in our team are here to help you" (sic). Well, no shit.

Then some lies. "We will respect your modesty". "Do not worry you will not need to remove your underwear". The nurse/assistant/whatever-she-was looked bewildered when I mentioned this.

"I challenge you to administer this treatment without me removing my underwear".

"Ooh," she said. "Ooh dear. I think we will, erm, we will need you to remove your, erm, your pants". I feared for her. I did not know how she would be able to do, or even support/administrate/whatever this procedure if she was already faltering with embarrassment over the word pants.

I stopped teasing her, it was cruel. "OK shall I take everything off then?"

"Oh no, not at all. We will respect your modesty". So it said in the booklet. "Just your bottom half".

I sat on a small square of green paper, naked from the waist down. My modesty however was perfectly preserved as I was wearing a neat turquoise jersey twist-front top from Jaeger with matching necklace and earrings, even a touch of co-ordinating eye liner.

After I had waited like this for about ten minutes, and two people had come in by mistake, I settled my elegant black and silver-thread pashmina over my lap to respect my modesty just that little bit more. Which was good, because I sat there for another half an hour with various people wandering in and out.

Eventually the nurse/assistant/whatever came back. "Is it finished?" I asked wickedly. "Can I go now?" I didn't see why I should be the only person to suffer. She won the round though, by smiling a pitying smile that made me want to smash her face in. I don't want anyone ever to look at me like that.

I took a deep, deep breath and tried to radiate calm. "Did you want the CD player before we start?" Ah, yes. One of the other ridiculous instructions: "Bring along your favourite CD". Bring along a CD you really like, so you can ruin it for yourself for life by having it evermore associated with these days and the green walls and green square of paper and the apparatus and its weird electrical hum. I guess they want you to bring the CD so you can't hear the hum.

"I didn't bring a CD", I said. "I forgot". I was lying, for the very good reason mentioned above.

"Don't you fret". She did That Smile again. Grrrrrhhhhh. "We've got a nice one here. I'll leave you listening to the music, the doctor is coming now". She sounded like the sidekick in Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman. She explained about the treatment by reading, haltingly, from the book I'd read before I came. The one with the stupid instructions. Outpatient Radiotherapy For Dummies, I think it was called. Finally, she went away.

The doctor arrived. She looked quite normal, for a doctor - although obviously I'd been hoping for one of the original cast from ER. George Clooney or I'd settle for Dr Carter. "Are we ok to start?"

"I'd rather you finished me off now", I said "if I'm going to have to listen to Enya every time I come. I can't cope with that".

"Oh thank god!" she marched to the CD player and took out the disc with a flourish. "Every time I hear she's put that bloody crap on, I want to stick a fork into my own eyeball". My kinda girl. "The Manics is best for this. Because everything must go". I get that, yes.

"I'm designed for life," I told her. We smiled. Close my eyes and think of Wales.

She explained it may feel slightly uncomfortable. We both knew that was doctor-code for this will hurt like fuck. "I expect I'll need OroMorph afterwards", I said slyly.

"Oh without a doubt." She grinned, put six vials on top of my handbag. Excellent. "Thursday nights and Monday mornings, my clinics".

I've changed my schedule. It's important to find a doctor who understands you.

Velvet Kicks

It was spooky.

"I thought I'd found a way of dealing with it all", she said. We were trying out the much-hyped Flat White at Costa. Not as milky as a latte, not as frothy as a cappucino. Made with three shots of espresso, and a dense, velvety milk layer. The ultimate fusion of milky smoothness and a caffeine kick.

"I met this wonderful man....." she looked nervous, eyes darted from side to side to check for acquaintances with flapping ears before she carried on. Or maybe it was the three shots of espresso. I smiled knowingly, nodded. "We just clicked straight away. We have so much in common. It's been a revelation. I mean, we all know everyone's already hooked up into their arrangements, but it's been great to have this in my life".

"So what's upset you?" I asked. "Has your husband found out?"

"Oh god, no. Nothing like that."

I waited. Something more complicated, obviously. What woman doesn't have a knot somewhere in the knitted-together mess of modern day working-mum life?

"He's written me some wonderful emails. All the things I have been longing for, he's been feeling the same! Walks on the coast path. Going to the theatre. Long relaxed dinners with wine and flirting. Lying in bed with the papers, someone to talk with. All that".

I smiled wryly to myself. Everyone wants that, don't they? I thought about the poem, the one that sits at the top of this blog. Is this where I was going? Is this where any of us were going when we set out?

"Well, good for you", I said. "He sounds lovely. Treat yourself, make the most of it. We've all got our way of keeping the head above water. It does sound rather wonderful. Theatre, dinner, lying in bed with the papers.....Mmmmmm......."

"Course, we don't actually do any of those things," she shrugged, spooned the dense velvety milk layer from the bottom of her cup. "We just meet in hotels and fuck for a couple of hours. We don't even have supper - he prefers to eat with his wife when he gets home. I don't really hear from him in between, other than to make arrangements."

I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat, looked away.

"I thought I'd found a way of dealing with it all", she said. "But actually I fear I've just created another situation where I sell myself short".

We kicked it around for while, the pros and cons, the ins and outs. We decided that, on balance, being desired for an hour or two a week by a clever, attractive, sexy man was still worth it.

We had another coffee. It's the only guaranteed way these days to get your heart to race.

What Seems To Be The Hardest Word?

"You apologise too much to him", she said.

Damn. I really thought I'd stopped doing that.

I know a lot of things I'm apologising for are not my fault, or even my responsibility, in fact sometimes I don't even know what I'm apologising for - I'm just trying to stop him kicking off. This means, I expect, that I apologise more if other people are around, in an attempt to avoid an unpleasant scene.

Except that more than one of my friends has commented now that they find it an unpleasant scene to watch me being craven and grovelling in a usually-pointless attempt to keep things running evenly.

"He's a bully. He likes it when you apologise". She suggested I tried telling him I couldn't give a shit.

This weekend, in fact, no amount of apologising could prevent him from storming out of the restaurant mid-meal, dragging the children after him, and shutting himself in the bedroom for the rest of the night. And you know what? We couldn't give a shit. We had a nice bottle of wine, chatted and went in the hot tub, it was great. "Look what you did last night", he said the next morning. "You ruined the evening. I hope you're ashamed".

Even my dad, who is wiser than to comment on partners, spouses, children was moved after one particularly grim weekend to send me an email (I still have it) in which he told me "It breaks my heart to see you trying to please that man. You know you never will - that's his game. I wish you would stop playing it".

I like to think I am becoming more inclined not to play. I am going to perfect an enormous Gallic shrug, a disdainful upper-class sneer, and a range of choice Northern expressions - none of them containing the word Sorry.

Let's see how we get on!

Weekends

First you have to make it through the week. And then, you have to gird yourself to make it through the weekend. Just another set of jobs to do for a bloody ungrateful, unfriendly bunch of customers.

This weekend, though, my friend is here from France and we've been for coffee with another friend, and looked around the shops, and laughed at one of his toddler-tantrums (in a restaurant - next time I'm making him sit in a high chair) and drunk wine and lazed in the hot tub.

The sun is out, and I'm making a butternut squash and sage risotto, and we're going for a walk round the castle this afternoon. With someone to talk to, the laundry mountain, the tidying, the ferrying around, the cleaning up - none of it seems quite so bad.

It makes me realise how much better things could be. I meet people all week, hundreds of them sometimes. Rarely though does anyone ask me about my day, how I am, what's my news. Probably a good job as I rarely have any news. Everyone is so busy, and my friends have their own troubles.

What I miss more than all the other things is someone to keep me company. To hang out with. Ruffle my hair, put an arm around my shoulders, pour me a glass of wine, choose a CD, chat about nothing in particular. Someone pleased to be there, and not in a rush to go and do something else. Someone happy to listen and happy to talk.

Someone to smile at me when I walk into a room.

Fruhlingserwachen

Yet again I’d forgotten just how I struggle in February, the cold and dark, drear and downcast. Each year I’m shocked and bewildered and appalled by the cloak of despair that drops around my shoulders. Surviving it takes such an enormous amount of energy, there’s hardly anything left for the good stuff.

This year, though, it was different. The sunshine broke through clear and often, dazzling with its brightness. If anticipation is nine-tenths of the pleasure, you’re probably not doing it right - but there’s certainly something to be said for having something nice to look forward to.

When the alarm goes off - always too early whatever the time - and I’m running through the day’s schedule in my head, I love that drowsy realisation that something good is coming up.

There are lots of ways of counting down towards a nice time. Hours and minutes, obviously. Days, weeks and months, years even. I’ve also counted in miles, pay-packets, the distance between cigarettes and even for a while the blissful pauses between the agony of one breast-feed and the next (thank god that’s one thing at least I won’t have to do ever again).

Lately it’s all changed. I’m not lurching from one something-to-look-forward-to to the next one any more. An end now to this one-more-day-until-coffee-with-a-friend, two-weeks-until-my-facial, three-months-to-the-holiday: good days are easy to find now. Barely a week is going by without a day that makes me feel great, barely a day goes by without a reason to smile.

Winter can be a dark, cold, lonely time - or so it’s always been for me. But the sun was always there behind the clouds this year, glinting through so much more easily than I thought it ever could.

There has been a change in the weather for me these last months, and that feeling of crackling with anticipation, sparkling with excitement, is one I’m happy to experience.

Aural Sex

"The cleavage is the sexiest part of a woman", he said.

"I like to look at the shadow, the suggestion of what the breasts are like".

He had a catch in his voice, sounded husky. A faraway look in his eye as his mind wandered.

"I imagine their size, their firmness, their softness, how they would feel in my hands, in my mouth......"

Sometimes the sexiest part of a man is the things he says.

The Wound That Finds New Ways To Hurt

Can't sleep.

Keep thinking.

It's bad enough to suffer the horror of the nightmares, night after night. A sign of - something, I suppose.

But oh jesus for someone to know. That is bad. That is so bad.

Crying in the dark, like a toddler. I am pathetic. I hate that this has happened.

Next time (but of course, there won't be a next time, after a show like that) next time I will stay awake, read, write, stick pins in my hands.....

Shhhh. Everything will be ok. Rest now.

Mother's Day

I hadn't spent that much time alone with my parents for years. Probably since about 1987. I don't know whether to be suprised, or ashamed, or maybe lots of people are like that these days?

We hung out in the morning, then had lunch together, walked around the market, had a Turkish meal at a place called Zest. Finding an upmarket Turkish restaurant, never mind eating there, would have been inconceivable when I was growing up, in the days when we used to talk about going out for a Foreign Meal (this term including all cuisines except Italian – and of course English).

We talked about all sorts of things, and there was no tension, no interruptions. I was wondering whether the behaviours, problems perhaps, that I’m noticing with my girls now were something they experienced with me and my sister, and I steered them towards the subject but there were so many diversions along the way that we never got there.

I was remembering how difficult I used to find it to spend time with them, knowing that they were judging and finding me so badly wanting in so many respects. I didn't imagine that in my insecurity - in fact it's the root of the whole thing, I imagine, as they told me all the time.

"Pull your socks up". "You're not stretching yourself". "You should be setting an example". "We're very disappointed". "You should be ashamed of yourself".

It was very effective: here I am today, never feeling I've tried hard enough or done enough, disappointed in and sometimes ashamed of myself. I still see their judgement is there, but somehow I don't mind so much now.

I know the days like these will be limited in number now. I thought today of the friends who have already lost the chance to sit and chat, go round the market looking at curtains, with their mums. Lost and passed away, or lost their mind and become a different person inside the familiar skin, like seeing a thief driving around in a friend's car.

I sat with my mum and watched The Dirtiest House In America and talked about cleaning products, and whether it would be a good idea to trim the spotty laurel back a bit beside the gate, and how to stop the bananas going brown in a banoffee pie. When I went, she said she'd had a lovely day.

I thought maybe I should do it more often, while I still have the chance.

Huis Clos

This is my box.

Not one of the ones in my head, my life - the one I inhabit in yours.

I have learned the shape and size of it, I think. I'm careful not to break out.

What Difference Does It Make?

Today I did not think of lying down on the railway line. Not even once.

Today, unlike most days, I felt that it made a difference whether I was alive or dead.

Today, making a difference to someone else has made all the difference to me.

Tight Rein

See? Today was fine. Everything was ok.

Stayed upright at all the appropriate times. Did not say the things I'm not supposed to.

Bright and breezy with smiley intervals, that's me.

Thank heaven for the times when the padlock is undone. Without that, I don't know how I'd survive.

Systems Operational

Back on my tight rein. Everything packed neatly into its boxes - you'd never have known the mess that was strewn about. All tidy now.

This is good, I am in control.

I'm having to swallow some bitter pills lately. Figuratively and also literally. I imagine it's no coincidence that my resistance to anything will be minimal (literally, and also figuratively). Since this morning's meeting was cancelled I could after all submit myself to the bewildering array of tests required by the handsome doctor. Dizzy spells: I sound like a weather forecast. I'm sure it will be the usual old stuff. Typical of me to have an Achilles heel right inside where no-one can see it. Things are eating away at me on the inside: figuratively and literally.

I know I sit in other people's boxes too. We all do. Some of the boxes I sit are, it turns out, smaller and narrower than I thought. Ignorance of this fact would have been bliss - although it would have been the triumph of hope over experience. I'm sure I've said before that I'm a slow learner.

A minimal expectation must be the surest route to avoid disappointment. I will gratefully receive whatever I am offered, and consider myself a lucky girl.

Boxing

Oh, by the way. That whole opening up and coming out the submarine, real-me in the real-world? Didn't work.

People didn't want it, didn't like it. Wouldn't accept it, even, in some cases.

One friend, I told her how I was feeling about something. "Aw, poor you, you're having a bad day".

Actually, I said, I feel like this all the time.

"No," she said. "Not you. I know you don't feel like this. You are strong, you sail through difficulties that would floor other people. You don't get tired, you don't get down, you never lose your confidence: it's amazing".

I am less interesting when I am ordinarily flawed and a bit crap. I imagine there were sound reasons why I headed down the Little Miss Capable route in the first place. The feeling of extreme discomfort I have experienced, the snail out of its shell, the un-dressed open wounds, that vulnerability - it has not been outweighed by the creation of more meaningful connections. There was little reassurance to be had that I would not have my eyes pecked out by the birds.

Indeed when I have been at a very low ebb, people step back - rather horrified. I see myself shrivel and diminish there and then in their eyes. And when I'm feeling great, I'm bubbling over, enthusiastic, chatting on and on, rubbish in a different way. Unfocused, talking too much and too quickly, grinning, hands flying around: childish.

It's obvious, I suppose. The people I know, they know the Me that I created, and that's who they like.

So everything is going back into the boxes. Double-boxed and locked down. And henceforward, I will announce to anyone who asks that I am FINE and everything is a breeze.

Some of us know that FINE is actually an acronym for Fucked-up, Insecure, Needy and Emotional, but let's not let the rest of the world into that secret.

Twice in a Lifetime

You may ask yourself, how did I get here?

It's a good question. I found myself this week, trying to explain the inexplicable, to justify the absurd. I'm not sure why I started off down that route, other than it seemed like a reasonable conversational gambit at the time. Later as I felt hot tears welling unfamiliarly behind my eyelids and the heavy concrete weight settling familiarly on my breastbone, I knew I'd taken a wrong turn. Whatever I said was going to make things worse, so I just stopped talking.

And as we know, it's the things I don't say, the stories I don't tell, the fears I don't share, that are the most important.

When I contemplate the full reality of the choices I've made, it's no wonder people strap on their running shoes and scram as fast as they can. Either I must be a cold-hearted monster, or a pathetic self-abasing wet blanket. Neither holds much allure.

But then I never felt I held much allure anyway. It's not rocket science to work out why I might have sold myself short. I made the choices I felt I deserved. Doesn't everyone?

You may ask yourself, am I right or am I wrong?

And you may ask yourself - my god, what have I done?

Inside

Surely it can't carry on like this.

Can it?

I know I'm always bleating on endlessly that I'm afraid I can't cope - but really, I don't think I can.

As the Queen Of Planning, I am thinking I should plan for not-coping now. How might it manifest itself? Will I unravel, like wool? Boil over, like milk? Shatter like glass? Stretch to the point of breaking, like an elastic band? Crack in half like a piece of dead wood? Melt like wax? Crumble into dust when you touch me, like old paper? Fade and disappear like film exposed too early to the light?

If I just let the tide of tiredness break its wave over me, I will be washed away like a bird's footprints on the sand.

These days, I struggle to hold myself upright, at times. I stagger, catch onto furniture as a black shutter comes down behind my eyes. Other times I can't breathe, have to remind myself how to do it: out and then in, and s.l.o.w.l.y s.l.o.w.l.y again. I cannot sustain a thought, my brain feels dulled.

There are only a few things left that are keeping me connected to the world. Powerful voodoo, but strands as fine and delicate as cobwebs. How easily they snap.

When I was young, I used to have dreams that I was falling. Now I have that sensation all too easily in my waking day. I feel one of those silken threads break, and I drop a little. That jolt of stepping unexpectedly off the kerb.

I think that's what not-coping will feel like. A step down that wasn't anticipated, and then falling and falling and falling. Tumbling through space into the darkness, spinning away from the blue-green familiar like an astronaut detached from the mother-ship.

Lost Souls

"I'm Molly," she said.

Ever since I'd turned the corner - a little side street in Lambeth - to go to my meeting, she'd been standing still, facing me, her bag on the ground in front of her feet, waiting for me to reach her.

She was shorter than me, slight in that way elderly people are. In her mid-eighties, I'd guess. Well spoken, a touch of lipstick and rouge. Quite well dressed for an old lady, in woollen jacket that was too thick for the afternoon's unexpected sunshine. As I came closer I could see she had tiny beads of perspiration on her forehead, and she looked a little tearful.

"Hello Molly", I smiled. "Where are you heading?"

"I think I must have got lost. I have been invited to a luncheon club but I can't seem to find it".

She showed me a printed flyer with the address of a church at the top.

"I've got a little A-Z in my handbag, so I expect it'll be in there," I replied reassuringly. "Let's have a look".

I consulted my A-Z but it only covers the centre, and we were right at the bottom of the final page, beyond Lambeth North tube station. The world would have ended further north than there, I bet, if it weren't for the Imperial War Museum.

"Is it somewhere round here, then?" I asked.

"Well......." Molly was hesitant. "I'm not sure. I set off at twelve, what time is it now?" It was after two.

"Do you live around here, Molly?"

"I live just along from London Bridge station".

She was way off course. Two pages further across in the A-Z. I had another look at the lunch club flyer. Hmmm.

"It says that the Lunch Club is open on Mondays. Is there something else on today?"

She looked confused. "It's not Monday then? Oh. I must have got mixed up on my days".

I was late for the meeting with my client at 2pm, and it was a few doors along, so I took her in with me, thought we could decide from there.

I phoned the church: no clubs on today. It was too far, and too complicated, for Molly to walk home again. And she had a big hessian bag with her that appeared to be heavy. We made her a cuppa, and wondered what to do next.

"What's in your bag there, Molly?"

She looked inside and pulled out a large and heavy china pot. She turned it over in her hands in bafflement. Long pause. Then, "I recognise this!" she announced, triumphantly. "I keep my keys and my sunglasses in here. And it's a lovely sunny day so I wanted to bring my sunglasses. And when I take them off at the lunch club, I can put them back in the pot so I don't lose them".

There were a number of things wrong with that plan but the receptionist and I did not point them out.

"I keep my ComCab card in there too. I can ring up for a taxi if I need to go somewhere, and I can put it on my account. Boris Johnson pays for it. He's very kind, I don't even know him". Bingo! She gives me the card, and I make the call to get them to pick her up and take her home.

I speak to the operator, give the code number on the card. What's the name of the passenger? I ask Molly for her surname. She rifles in her bag, and pulls out a piece of paper with various notes on it. At the top is her name. Molly Barker-Smith. She read it out carefully, as if it were a foreign word she had never seen before.

"Barker...." she mused. "I wonder if that's a middle name, or a part of a surname?"

And the destination address? I asked Molly where she lived. She rooted in the bag again, looked upset. I took the piece of paper from the chair beside her. One of the notes was an address. I read it out to her. Is that where you live? "It must be, if it's on my sheet". I checked both sides of the sheet carefully to make sure it was the only address. And I knew she had her keys: they were in the flowerpot.

Once I'd made certain the cab was on its way, I went into my meeting. Before she left, Molly came in to the glass meeting room, and gave me a hug. "Do enjoy the rest of your holiday, dear", she said. "Safe trip back across the waves". Clever, that. Now I was nearly as confused as she was. We said our goodbyes.

I thought about the older people we know, have known. Worrying-about-Molly has its own little corner in my head now. I hope other people are worrying about her too.

Bloodsucker

I am a Dementor, a vampire.

I will suck out your experiences and feed off your anecdotes and extract the essence of every story you ever told me, every secret you shared.

I will pull them and shape them and chop them up mash them in with other tales until they coalesce into something new.

Scarlett O’Hara’s curtains become a dress. A silk purse brightens the ears of a toy sow.

I will add and embellish, I will reduce and redact.

Your kindness will become a woman’s cruelty. Her howl of agony transforms to a child’s shriek of excitement.

I am hooking people in their infinite variety with my butterfly net and weaving a tapestry of sparkling rainbows.

Square One

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch,

you must first create the universe.

Carl Sagan.

How far back, exactly, would I need to go to get to square one?

Back before the recession? Back before I pimped the brainchild and went roaring round in my DB9 and helicoptering out to the Barrier Reef? Back before I won the awards? Back before we turned over the magical £1 million for the first time? Back before we started the company? Back before I worked with him? Back before I was any good?

It's an interesting question. I'm not sure I know the answer.

Certainly there is a rolling back. I can't decide whether I should roll with it.

And of course you could argue (if you have the poor understanding of relativity that I do, for all my education) that since time is moving inexorably on, we can never go back - the only direction of travel is forwards. Even if I'm in situation similar to one I've been in formerly, I'm a different person now, with all that experience under my belt, and therefore it won't be the same.

It won't be the same. I'm older, more tired, more jaded, less optimistic, less energetic. I have amassed some experience, for sure: and we know this only ever comes the hard way. I'm not sure I'd have the thrust, the urge, the sheer bloody-mindedness to do it all again.

Even if I wanted to.