Circus

And so, my darlings, the show must go on. 

Every day I get up, I get ready, I go about my business. Smile and jolly everyone along. Put my game-face on and pretend everything is ok.

For what else is there to be done? I go to the concerts at school, and nod a smile at the other parents. I go to meetings and say yes, I'm all ready for Christmas, looking forward to it, lovely, having a quiet one this year. No kidding.

This year isn't like other years. I always ordered all my Christmas food a few weeks in advance, got all the presents ready way ahead of time. Feels like bad luck, tempting fate now. I'm waiting until Christmas Eve.

Can you save someone that might not want to be saved? 

All I can do is try, and hope that in time she will feel better. Perhaps she will grow out of it. Perhaps she will discover something to make her feel like she wants to spring out of bed every morning - calculus, or masturbation, or Greenpeace. 

Or perhaps this is the start of her troubles, the part where we dance along the knife-edge before we tumble into the dark abyss, or move evermore in the grey fog of uncertainty.  Perhaps the rest of my days will be like this now - one breath away from a panic attack, one lip-tremble away from a howl. 

But I'm putting on a damn good show.  Perhaps if we all behave as if things are getting better, that's as likely to work as anything else? Life is one long confidence-trick, after all. 

A Room of One's Own

There is no place as lonely as a marriage.

I sleep in the spare room of my own house: a spare person. The sadness of this month aches like a pain, tugs at me like stitches pulling in a wound. Some of this hurt might feel better with some kind words or a hug, but there is no such thing to be had. 

I move through my life like a sleepwalker, although at night I do not sleep. I am troubled with nightmares, with panic. I creep around in the dark to check my girls are safe, and check again, and check again. 

In the daytime I check, and check, and check my phone. My little one is in the Highest Risk Category. It feels like the part in Lawrence of Arabia where he thinks he can make a difference, but it only postpones an inevitable fate. It is written. 

What is written for her? Can I change the story? Can she change it? Does it have a happy ending? Or a tragic one? 

I feel desperate in every way. I have no idea how to live with this fear. 

Floods

I cried from 4pm Monday all the way through until 4am. Woke up about 6am and cried all day Tuesday. Cried much of the night Tuesday, apart from when I was watching a school show, and when I had recurring nightmares for a couple of hours. Cried all day Wednesday, including half of a very important appointment with my child and various experts.

I wouldn't have thought it was physically possible to cry that much  - especially for me, as I never used to be much good at the whole crying thing.

I look terrible, and not just because of the crying. I went to the hairdresser (my local recessionista hairdresser) and asked for the white strip that developed down my parting (apparently from the shock) to be coloured to match the rest of my hair. I thought this was a clear instruction, but now all my hair is the colour of merlot wine. It's kind of cool, in a plum-ish, purple-ish way, but it's not my colour. Every time I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I see this plum haired, puffy faced old woman and think "who the hell is that?"

So now I look as shit and weird as I feel. 

30 Words for Snow

People talk about "heartache" and it sounds so Jane Austen, so manageable. Nice walk in a meadow, cup of tea with a handsome chap and it's all right as rain again.

There should be a different word for the feeling of someone whacking your chest open with an axe, then ripping a chunk out of your heart with their bare hands. The feeling of your sanity being torn apart by dogs. The feeling of your life being held under a murky pond until your lungs fill with water and weeds, and you gasp your drowning on the bitter choking silt of despair. 

I don't know the words for that kind of pain. 

Under My Skin

Endlessly fascinated by the photos of abandoned Detroit. It's a catalogue of my inner landscape. 

Last night I drove back from Colchester. And when I arrived outside the house I didn't want to go in. I didn't feel like I belonged there, it didn't feel like home. So I drove some more. I drove to Bristol and I walked around in the city in the night. Then I drove back. I have been instructed not to talk to friends. Tonight I will go see a play at the school and then I will drive again.

Loop

If your child doesn't want to be alive, there is no worse failure you can have as a mother, I reckon. Everything here is still the same on the outside, but I feel like I have died inside. 

I should have known. I should have been more available to listen. I should have asked. I should have guessed. I shouldn't have gone out. I should have gone and taken her with me. I should glue her hand to mine. 

I should roll back time until this would not happen. How far back? How long ago? I can't work out when it went wrong. Rewinding and rewinding, I am like a broken cassette tape with all my insides spooled out and chewed up. You can wind me back into the plastic case but my music won't come out right. 

Stony

You cannot count a mother's pain by the number of tears you see her shed. 

It might be that she is busy sorting things out to help her child. It might be that she needs to be brave and strong, so that her child can feel certain there is something firm to cling to. It might be that she needs to have serious conversations, to talk and listen calmly, and to work out what to do for the best. 

It might be that if she started crying she would not be able to stop. Ever.

Ordinary Day

Normality is elastic. One-off situations, they can sit beyond the edge of it. Once they repeat themselves, normality expands to encompass them – however extreme they might be.

The first time my daughter tried to commit suicide, the world turned upside down. When she tried it again last weekend, it was shocking, terrifying, devastating. But this time it still felt like a part of my life – a horrible, dreadful part, but a part of my life just the same. I knew this wasn’t happening to someone else. It was happening to me, to her, to us. Again. 

This time, she took an enormous overdose. She was very fortunate to survive. She could not explain why she did it, or why she later decided to call an ambulance. At the hospital, they said they have a dozen girls a week admitted like this. A dozen a week.

The adolescent psychiatric ward is a very frightening place to spend the night. It scared the hell out of me, and I was already pretty scared when I got there, what with my panicked journey back from London and not knowing whether our daughter would still be alive when arrived. Fortunately it seemed to scare the hell out of her too, so perhaps it will deter her for a while. 

And she won’t be on her own for a while, although in the end we will have to go about our family business, and in the end she will be left alone again, first for ten minutes at a time and eventually for longer. We can’t do anything else but try to go back to normal, and that is the advice we have been given to help her with her recovery. She was already back at school today.

We will try to go back to normal, but normal has changed for us. Living with this level of fear is now becoming the new normal, and I guess in the end it will feel like normal too, and I will stop having to hold myself in at every moment so I don’t scream and howl and claw my own face to shreds wondering where I went wrong as a mother. 

How To Look After Your Husband #4

(I wish)

Feeding

Fresh water must be provided daily from a bottle with a metal spout. Feed good quality husband-mix along with small pieces of fresh fruit and vegetables. Only give small amounts of food at a time, as husbands will hoard excess food in their bed where it can go rotten. Uneaten food should be removed daily and fresh food should be provided.

Gnawing is important to wear down the teeth. Nuts in their shells, such as monkey nuts and unsalted pistachio nuts, are good for gnawing, as are dog biscuits (based on egg and oatmeal without meat derivatives). Husbands also like to gnaw carrots and hard baked bread crusts.

Encourage your husband to forage by hiding food in cardboard tubes and under pots.

Time Lapse

On a weekend, I have so many things that must be done, anything that isn't a household task or mum-taxi journey needs to fit around the edges.  Now I have no weekly cleaners, much of my Saturdays and Sundays to come will be spent cleaning an enormous house we don't need, cluttered with stuff no-one uses but no-one will chuck out. 

Sometimes there is a rhythm and a soothing in the repetition of the routine tasks, the swoosh of the dishwasher, the slide of duster over the lid of the dark wood chest where women's hands have polished two hundred years before mine.

This weekend was different though. This weekend was set aside so I could write a piece for a new literary magazine. This is an exciting opportunity for me. It was important and it needed to be done properly, to an exacting standard. I made it very clear I would be unavailable for the carrying out of menial household tasks and ferrying about.

How fascinating it was to see that when I had an important commitment, it wasn't as important as anyone else's commitments. If I wasn't determined to take this as a life lesson, I'd have walked straight out of here this evening. 

As it is, my article is written and it feels as if it's good enough (just at the moment - I don't rule out the possibility of waking up in the night and fiddling with it or indeed rewriting big chunks).  I am breathing normally, nice and calm. 

Because there is a bigger picture. Soon it will not be like this.  Soon I will be able to make more time for the things that are important. For living, for breathing, for the girls, for my friends, for my family. And for writing. 

How to Look After Your Husband #3

Exercise

It is essential that husbands get plenty of exercise in order to relieve boredom and to keep them fit and healthy. Use your imagination to make their cage more interesting. Husbands like to climb so it is a good idea to provide different levels. They like gnawing, running through and hiding in cardboard tubing. They like to climb on and hide in plastic yoghurt pots or flower pots. Some cages come with plastic tubing for husbands to run through but be careful as some of the bigger Syrian husbands may get stuck.

Husband wheels should be solid and wide. Wheels with spokes can trap limbs and cause injury. The wheel should be big enough that the husband's back doesn't bend. Only allow your husband to run in the wheel for 3 to 4 hours at a time to prevent exhaustion. Husband exercise balls without any means of escape can cause exhaustion, and the husband should never be left unsupervised.

Mrs Mop

If you want something doing, you know what? Don't ask a busy person. Just don't.  This is bollocks advice. Because the busy people are already busy, do you see?

I have a big house (yes I know this is supposed to be a blessing yadda yadda yadda - it just looks like a lot of work from where I'm sitting).  I have a team of three cleaners that come in for two hours a week and blast around.  In my book that's six hours of cleaning.  Just keeping the tide of dirt at bay. The place is not spotless by any means, but it stays in a holding pattern of acceptability.

Today they arrived to clean while Himself was home. He was unimpressed so he's given them the push, and has arranged for the cleaner from the office to come in once a month for half a day. Is there something wrong with my arithmetic here, I wonder?

The rest of it we are going to share amongst the four of us, apparently. I've seen this kind of "sharing" before.  Inequitable doesn't even begin to describe it. The issue is that my threshold is different to everyone else's so they don't feel driven to clean anything unless it's so filthy they can't help but notice (golden syrup spilt all over the table, dog shit trodden into the carpet, no clean mugst to be found - you get the drift).

I thought I was overworked and overwhelmed before. This has jolted me to a whole other level of pain. 

Anyway, hey ho, let's see how it turns out. At the moment I'm tired due to writing an article (a truly excellent article but for Himself's byline) until 3am so even I can tell that now is not a good time for me to discuss this. 

I smiled as a good wife should, and went to do some hoovering.  Life sucks sometimes.

How To Look After Your Husband #2

Housing

Husbands are escape artists, so any housing must be secure. Dwarf husbands are particularly good at squeezing through small spaces and cannot be kept in wire cages. They should be kept in a plastic/glass tank or aquarium with a securely fitted lid to provide ventilation. Syrian husbands can be housed in a wire cage with a plastic base or a plastic/glass tank or aquarium.

When husbands are restricted to cages or tanks, it is important to remember how active husbands are in the wild and how far they travel when they are foraging for food. The more space that you can provide for your husband, the better. 

The cage or tank should be placed in a warm, well ventilated room away from drafts and direct sunlight or heat. If husbands get too cold, they can go into a deep sleep (hibernate). They have sensitive hearing and need to be kept away from constant noise e.g. the hum of a fridge freezer, or loud noise e.g. TVs or music systems. Being nocturnal, husbands are most active at night so it is not a good idea to keep them in a child’s bedroom where they are likely to keep the child awake.

As husbands like to burrow, a deep bed of shavings is ideal, although savings sometimes get caught in the coat of long haired husbands. A separate nesting area should be provided in a cardboard box where the husband can burrow out of sight to sleep and hoard food. The ideal bedding for nesting is shredded clean white paper (e.g. kitchen paper) and soft hay. Avoid fluffy bedding such as cotton wool, as it can wrap around limbs or cause impactions in the stomach if swallowed.

Soiled areas of bedding should be cleaned out daily and the area should be checked for rotten food. The whole area should be completely cleaned out weekly. Husbands can be litter-trained to make daily cleaning easier – use a shallow ceramic bowl or dish and place in it a small quantity of wood shavings which are wet with urine. If this is done daily, the husband will gradually learn to use this area to go to the toilet.

Photo Finish

I spent a large part of today taking photographs in plant rooms. 

The picture above is not one of mine - mine are not remotely like this. There shouldn't be anything growing at all in the plant rooms I visit. Strictly minerals only, nothing animal or vegetable.

I don't mind a day like this one, actually. In my industry, people like to walk-and-talk. They don't really do the sitting-in-meeting-rooms thing very easily - much better to get them to wander around their buildings, telling me their ups and downs as we go along. 

Now after a couple of other meetings I am holed up in a hotel, writing. Much to busy to blog, but I thought it might get me into the zone. It's likely that evenings such as these over the past few years have saved my sanity (such as it is) by giving me some time to belong to myself rather than all the other people who claim me. 

It's really quiet and the lights are low. Over the course of the evening as I crank out my articles, speeches, press releases, reports, write-ups, I will slowly eat a bar of milk chocolate with caramelised sea salt that I bought especially. God knows it's rare enough to discover a new sensual pleasure at our age.

How to Look After Your Husband #1

General

Husbands are rodents with continuously growing incisor teeth.  Well kept husbands can live for several years. They have poor eyesight but good hearing and a keen sense of smell.  In the wild, husbands live in underground burrows. They are nocturnal, sleeping during the day and foraging for food at night. Husbands are used to large open spaces and amazingly, they can travel several kilometres away from their home at night!

There are many different species of husband. Syrian husbands are most commonly kept as pets and are also known as golden husbands, due to their original wild golden colour. They are found in a variety of different colours and are the largest husband. They are solitary, territorial creatures and cannot be kept with other husbands as they will fight and can cause serious harm or even death.

Dwarf husbands such as the Winter White Russian or Campbell’s are more sociable and can be kept in pairs or small groups of the same sex and age. Any introductions need to be made when the husbands are young and very gradually to prevent fighting. Due to their size, dwarf husbands are harder to handle and more likely to nip and do not make the ideal first husband. They should be kept by more experienced husband keepers. 

A number of health problems can be avoided through correct housing and feeding and the following information provides a brief summary about looking after your husband.

Absence Has a Weight of its Own

Ah writing, how I've missed you. My dear friend, my old familiar, my comfort blanket. And why deny myself this comfort when there is so little comfort to be had? 

I need to challenge my thoughts about writing. It's a treat that must be withheld until I've done enough drudge to deserve it. It's a vice. It's an addiction that must be fought, a siren-song that will lure me away from life.

But it builds and it builds. The itch inside the brain, a scribble here and a jot there. It sneaks in through the chinks like sunshine through the knot-holes in grandad's shed. Until I am choked up with the words. I will burst like a confetti-bomb. Shoot out poems like a bunchberry. 

In the end it is an irresistible force.  I am up at 3am in the spare room. I give in: I'm a writer.

[The richly resonant heading of this post is the title of Daniel  Sluman's brilliant collection from Nine Arches Press. Everyone should read this. Everyone.]

Careless Whisper

Why so quiet? You ask.

Well it's not that I don't have lots of things to say.  Thoughts tumbling around like laundry in the machine. Voices in my head, and not very positive ones mostly.  I know those voices are mine, much as I like to pretend they come from other people (which is making me think of this project I read about, if your inner folk are causing you problems - fascinating).

Anyhow. I don't need an avatar project to give faces to my outer folk - I know what they look like, I know who they are. And some of those voices are not very positive ones either.

"Your so-called writing is one big confidence trick. Drivel dressed up as art".

"Words aren't really important to me".

"I would prefer it if you didn't speak to me unless you have something interesting to say".

Once I get to three I feel it's gone beyond a coincidence, don't you?

The thing is, the words build up inside me . Like an unexploded bomb. Like a volcano. Like a pressure cooker. You get the picture. So noisy in here I can hardly hear myself think. Inner voices, outer voices, words bubbling up like geysers  -  what can I do with them all?

I need to write. I do. I need to write lots of things, all sorts of things. Work things, home things, tweets, blogs, funny things, sad things, opinion pieces, magazine articles, poems, press releases, novels, reports, legal pleadings, birthday cards.... I need to write.

Writing is one big confidence trick? Damn right.

Brainbox or Braindead?

Ladies, it appears we fall into two simple categories. No, not Tits Or Tushes, it's a different taxonomy.

The very use of the word taxonomy gives a clue about which group I might fall in to: Women Who Think Too Much. As opposed to the other group: Women Who Don't Think Enough.   Men also fall into two parallel categories, based around the type of woman they would prefer.

I bought my sister a self-help book once, actually, called Women Who Think Too Much. Perhaps some of us do have a tendency to over-analyse sometimes, but the only self-help book I've ever bought for myself was entitled Shut Up And Move On, which gives you a flavour of my general approach to life.

However, if you are a woman who is seldom troubled by thoughts of any kind, there is a new product on the market designed just for you. It's an eTablet for laydees, with a pretty pink background and pre-loaded with all the software you need (love that word, soft-ware, sounds like kittens and snowflakes and clothing all put together, mmmmm). Apps cover yoga, shopping lists, recipes, perfumes and weight charts, plus of course the indispensable technology to help you track the timing of your monthly visitor. How did we manage these things before? I have no idea, I can't remember (duh - women are like goldfish). 

This eTablet is for women who are "confused by technology", and therefore also good for women who have been lobotomised.  Personally speaking, I am continually confused by the bewildering array of rectangular things in my handbag. Are they all bars of chocolate? Is it a tiny teeny TV? I hear ringing and I hold the white rectangular thing up to my ear - oops, it's a pantyliner again. God, I'm always doing that. 

Like many conversations with women, there is a serious point somewhere within all this chatter. The pinkification of products, the dumbing-down of technology for a female audience, is really worrying.  It's an insidious, pernicious new variant of gender-discrimination and it's creeping in under the wire in the disguise of responding to consumers. Not just small gadgets either. If you want a really good laugh, have a look at Honda's new girl-car. Simply perfect. Comes in any colour you want, as long as it's pink.

What Lies Beneath

If you grow up in South Yorkshire, you're aware that under your feet is the ground, and under the ground are the men. The dads of all your friends, hewing away at the coal while you're stock still staring out the classroom window.  It's the same in London I suppose, that earthquake rumble of tube train that you feel in your soles and hear in the clink of glasses on the draining board.

But even when you think you know about the underground world, there are still surprises to be had. The Williamson tunnels under Liverpool that are only just being re-discovered or, even more fascinating, the maze of tunnels under the Balby flats in Doncaster. There was once a whole House cut into the sandstone here, with a ballroom that could hold 200 people and mysterious carved figures at every turn. When they were building the dual carriageway, they tried to bring up some of the carvings, the animals and the people, but in they end they just filled in the space.  So the elephant and mahout stand under the road, their unseeing eyes stopped with grout, still present but not to be seen again.  Just  -  there  -  enormous, permanent, invisible.

People are like this. Smooth-surfaced but with huge, eleborate things inside them that no one else will ever know, unless they tell the story.  It's the sharing of the elephants and ballrooms, the secret passageways of the inner landscape, the tales we tell of ourselves that enable us to see that surface with a different eye.  Listen carefully to learn the map of beneath, the opening of the clamshell, the beautiful unique network of memories and thoughts, of hopes and disappointments, of secrets and confessions as whorled and complex as a fingerprint.

Simple people, plain and straightforward on the inside, smooth as saucepans - they hold no fascination for me.  Yes I can endlessly trace my fingertips across the curl of your lip, the breadth of your shoulders, the line of hair pointing down from your navel.  But it's the richness of you beneath the skin that catches my breath and holds my attention.

Out Of Order

What if you had a slow realisation that perhaps your main charm had been after all not your smile, your wit or even your cleavage - but perhaps nothing more enticing than your convenience?

Then it follows that as you become less convenient, you become less appealing. And that finally, inevitably, your appealing becomes inconvenient.

Surely a man that you have held close to your heart, or indeed other parts of you, could not be so heartless, so shallow?  And if it be so, surely that reflects more on your ability to assess character than on his ability to ensure you can be in the right place at the right time to suit his schedule.

Can you bank on the fact that there is an inverse relationship between interesting girls and their easy availability? Well that may be true. But if availability rather than interesting-ness becomes the determining factor, you're stuffed.

Or rather, not stuffed. Because it's not convenient.

Scales of Justice

I was doing some adding up, and I realised that in the time I have spent with this man, our largest areas of expenditure break down as follows:

1. Lawyers
2. Cars
3. Mortgage
4. School fees
5. Pension

Yep, you read that right.  It's no fecking wonder I am GOING INSANE is it? How much input do you think I get to make into our purchasing decisions, purchasing expert and equal wage-earner that I am? Not much, it would seem.

The more I keep thinking about, the more disturbed I become. It's really, really weird. How could I not have noticed this before? I mean, I know he's an alpha male and likes to get into arguments, but this is a stark illustration of just how wrong his priorities are - and how stupid I must be not to have realised this and put my foot down.

Excuse me a moment, I must go into a darkened room and freak out for a while. I am a loser. Quite literally.

Cover Story

A woman over 40, like a book, does not deserve to be judged by her cover.

Like a good book, she might not give any hint from her dust jackets as to the delights that may be found once you get started.  She might play on your mind all day so you can't wait for the evening to start the next chapter. She will make you laugh out loud, fill your eyes with tears, make you fidget on the train with inappropriate erections.

You might find you can't put her down, and have to stay up for hours past your bed time, hungrily devouring page after page of her.

Use By: See Bottom

I am past my peak and over the hill.

I seem to have reached the stage where glibly trilling "age is just a number" doesn't do the trick. It's not to do with how I feel inside - don't believe that bullshit. It's about how I look.

I look old and I look tired. My eyes do not sparkle, my hair does not shine, my skin does not glow. Never mind how sharp my wit, how glittering my conversation: I look dull, flat. I look like the kind of woman no-one looks at. No one tries to catch my eye.

And it's not that I've given up trying  -  on the contrary. I take longer than I ever did before on skincare routines, hair masques, finding just the right hair colour to match my own and cover up any greys. I spend more time than you'd believe on scrubbing, rubbing, soaking, poking and primping. All sadly to no avail as I still appear a crinkled, faded, Instagram version of my inner and formerly outer self.

Soon perhaps you will not give me a second glance. Soon perhaps you will think of me as an old friend, and kiss me hello on the cheek not the mouth, without the slightest twitch of your cock. Soon perhaps you will forget you ever knew me.

I was Best Before.

Fired Up

A research study has found that men from Stoke on Trent have the largest manhoods in Britain.  I read this in the Daily Male so it must be true.  No doubt it is due to the inhalation of kiln-smoke and a diet consisting mostly of pie. Bristol boys have the greatest circumference, but a short, thick thing is not necessarily what a discerning partner prefers.

Does size matter?

Well, hell yeah. Only men ask this question, insecurely, as they try to persuade us that technique counts more than anything else. This is a particularly foolhardy argument given that the majority of men struggle to remember they are supposed to do foreplay. Big news, boys - everyone's "technique" is necessarily the same, once you're into the main event.  All that thought about the right position only makes a difference if you're big enough to be your own warm up act.

Perhaps I should carry out my own independent study, just to triangulate the results? I am drawing up an equipment list:

• Tape measure
• Map of the British Isles
• Notebook
• Suspenders

Have I missed anything off?

Thunderbirds Are Go!

As a part of new anthology inspired by icons of popular culture, I have been asked to write a poem about Tracy Island.

This is giving me the perfect reason to watch episodes of Thunderbirds in the name of research. The series has the most thrilling introduction of any programme on the telly, and is certainly one of most exciting things ever to emerge from the Slough Trading Estate where it was filmed.

My childhood was steeped in the world of the Thunderbirds. I watched carefully so I could learn how to be like Lady Penelope, with her fancy clothes and her perfect flawless skin, not a freckle to be seen. Even today I could tell you which brother pilots which vehicle, the special features they have, and of course the way they launch. The pull-back of the swimming pool as Scott shoots TB1 out of the underground hangar, up past the diving-board with a boost of his rockets. TB2 is the green transporter, so wide the palm trees have to drop down to let it pass on its runway - which pod will it take today? TB3 the big orange rocket that bursts up through the circular observation deck, TB4 the undersea rover and TB5 is the orbiting space station.

Growing up on Tracy Island has made me experience the world the wrong way round, like looking through from the back of the screen into the room. I knew all about the Thunderbirds before I knew much at all about anything else beyond the end of the garden.

Here was my first Virgil. James Bond's villains, in cheap imitations of the original island lair, have already been thwarted by International Rescue, Sean Connery wishing he were Scott. Emma Peel in The Avengers was copying Lady Penelope's style. Frank Lloyd Wright modelled Fallingwater on the Tracy Island house. Star Trek is a tribute, of course. And imagine my delight to discover only recently that the Mercury astronauts were named after the Tracy brothers!

I was not sure at first whether the Thunderbirds were real people. However I was reassured that they were actors not puppets once I saw that, on close-up, they had human hands.

Now back to my research (zooms off on a personal hovercraft towards her magnifcent pink car).

This blogpost is brought to you in Supermarionation.

Valentine

The road to the bonfires of hell is paved with rose-petals, they say. Who are these "they" people, I wonder? With their authoritative yet obscure pronouncements.

Happy Valentine's Day - and don't slip over on the squished roses bleeding their perfume under your heels as you skip along the merry path, dancing to the devil's best tunes.

What's In a Name?

There is a book in the LRofB by an author called Wolfgang Palaver.

I wonder if this is an extravagant nom de plume for someone who couldn't bear to be called Arthur Cackitt? Or whether he moves in a milieu where this kind of name would never raise a stifled snort of disbelief? I'm always amused by silly names - it's probably a mark of my pleb-ness.

Billy Connolly says his definition of an intellectual is "someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger".  My own definition is probably someone who can hear the name Virgil without thinking first of Thunderbirds.

I am thinking of inventing an alter ego - more than a pen name, as I might live her outside of the page. But she will certainly have an exotic, exciting, interesting name: the female equivalent of Wolfgang Palaver. Crossing cultures and continents, redolent of explorers, concerts and dusty villages all in one flowing curl of signature. 

(Sweeps thinking cap onto head with an extravagant twirl).

Bookworm

I was gifted a subscription to the London Review of Books, and already I don't know how I ever survived without it. I inhabit a house of books: they sit like the photographs as a record of a person I used to be, a person who read a dozen books a month, gobbled them up greedily - the haute cuisine, the junk food, the snacks, the banquets; my bookcases a smorgasbord of food for thought.

Now when the London Review arrives, it reaches out, reaches back to the Ur-me, that girl who used to have such a busy, buzzing brain. I was so smart, once. Switched on and chock full of ideas. Now I am like one of those abandoned mining towns in Alaska, living amongst the ruins of myself. And then this clever, challenging publication appears on the counter and I feel those old circuits flickering as if they might still come back to life.

One of our au pairs once decided to surprise me while I was away on holiday by rearranging all the books in the house by colour as it "looks nice". Not a reader. I have never been able to reliably find anything since. I am thinking of arranging them by linked themes, so that only people who have read them would understand why they were together.

Curl Power

So I did the thing that women always do in a crisis: I changed my hairstyle.

I’ve also changed my hairdresser. Doing these two things in tandem is a high-risk strategy at the best of times. At this time in particular, I’m under a significant amount of stress and therefore entirely unqualified to take even minor decisions like Galaxy or Dairy Milk. Undeterred, I decided to become a new woman. Well, the same woman as before but with better hair.

“Is it a wig?” asked the Tweenager. Concerned as I am about her, I still felt it appropriate to make a sour face and ignore her.

“Woah” said the Teenager. “Whoah what?” “Nothing. Just woah”.

I’m not sure they like it.

So not I’m not sure I like it either, even though I was really pleased when it was just done. I’ll tell you tomorrow whether it’s turning out ok. And if not, since I’m feeling rather unhinged from stress, I can always do a Britney. Not in the serial-marriages-live-in-a-trailer sense. Nor in the look-amazing-in-school-uniform-number-one-hit sense. Or even the sexy-air-hostess-toxic sense. Just the head-shaving part. Britney, Sinead O’Connor and me. Now where was that strait-jacket?

To Write Love On Her Arms

All that pinprick that you thought was pain, all that inconvenience that you thought was misery - it was just a light warm up. You think you know sorrow, you think you know fear. But nothing prepares you for the day you come home early to find your daughter trying to hang herself. And you hold her in your arms as she howls her misery and confusion, you whisper the lie that everything will be ok. And as you hold her you see - something - and later, much later. when you pour her a bath you see the soft skin of her arms is sliced and hacked in a tally of despair.

She needs you to be strong, and you have so many things to sort out now. So you ignore the sink hole which has opened up inside you as you fix appointments and look at new schools and try not to blame the school, the bullies, the advent of the internet. Because you know what is really to blame. You are.

And you have never cut, but you know the feeling of the pain building up, and the thoughts swarming their sinister hum in your head, and the dark things trapped inside that mustmustmust come out, and you know what to do to find that sigh of release. You write.

You write your one sided conversation, carving your lines into the soft blank space.