Motherlode

It's Mother's Day. And my mother, who is in good physical health at 76, is slipping away from us with dementia.  I went home last weekend to work on a memory-book with her, to try and capture some of the history before it's too late - and it will soon be too late. I've been horrified at the speed of her deterioration, and we will have to start working on some concrete plans for the next stage (whatever the next stage is). 

My dad, who is not a patient man at the best of times, drinks heavily every evening now, which must affect his mornings too. I imagine a person more confused than my mum might need a lot of help going to bed and getting up.  Neither of them really ought to be driving anywhere, but both of them still are. There's a high chance they will hurt or kill themselves - or god forbid, someone else, in an accident so that needs to be addressed too. 

I don't know quite how this help and sorting is going to work out - other than that it will fall to me.  My brother is busy with his terminally-ill child and my sister lives in Australia.  And I'm the oldest, so I am kind of in charge I suppose. 

I've had a difficult relationship with my mum from my early teens through to my thirties, but it's much better now. Becoming a mum and finally growing up myself has helped me to forgive and even understand some of the things she said and did so they don't matter so much now.  She has been a lovely granny to the girls and I know that she loves us all, in her own strange only-child way.  She will be gone while she's still here, like her father before her, so I kind of know what to expect.  It won't be fun, but we will still find the fun in the days that we have, just as we have learned to do with my nephew.  Where there is love there are always smiles. 

I don't usually post poetry on here, but as it's Mother's Day, here's one from a couple of years ago that I'm editing at the moment.  It's not quite ready for submission, in my view, but it's getting there.  I was thinking about it when we were doing the memory book, and she was talking about all women in her family who were named after flowers. Her parents were not in favour of showing emotion, and it must have been a funny old life, just the three of them. As my granny often used to point out, my mum stuck out like a sore thumb - an exotic looking child with her striking red hair in a family of mouse-brown. 

Marion: I

Born in the summer of the gathering storm,

Soothed each night by the rhythmic thud

Of bombs falling on the Glaxo plant
She Listened With Mother
All dozy and cosy in the Andersen shelter
Watched over by the eyes in the potatoes
Studding their soil sky like stars;
Spiders were her night time friends.

Endlessly re-knitting jumper into scarf
They also served who sat and waited
Picking balsa-wood pips from their teeth
In the pretend-jam sandwiches of birthday teas
Barrage balloons hung cheerily along the Thames
Just for her – bomb-site fire-flower

In the family bouquet of Rose, Daisy, Violet & May.

  

Marion: II

Ernest as his name, father was away
Beating the Nazis with the neatness of his inventories
Seasick, then homesick, then sick of it all
Counting the cost of the ruins of Germany
Lodged with a family just like his
Where another girl with plaits and a too-small dress
Knits the same scarf, thumps the same piano scales
Laughs at spiders and the same stained moon.

Then victory was ours, and he came back
A stranger to his daughter
"When's that man going home?" she hissed.
He was not a one to pull her to his knee
Throw her in the sky and catch her in his arms
With a joyous shout; she held the basket
As he pruned and told the names of all his roses,
Secateurs held gently as a child’s hand.

Headspace

I could never really manage the meditation-thing. Couldn't empty my head. It's like King's Cross station in there, thoughts milling around, criss-crossing with each other, jostling about. Even if a space opened up, it would be filled again immediately.

But swimming is different. Not everywhere, just a few places. Here I can swim early or late, when I have the pool to myself. After a few lengths I can find a rhythm, and enjoy the sensation of water rippling across skin, of limbs stretching, joints easing open after the crush of desk and train. 

My mind begins to clear, and all I do is swim and look, swim and look. Arms and shoulders, hips and legs, the slow cool glide.  At one end is oak and slate, at the other end horse and sky.  Up and down, up and down, oak and horse, slate and sky.

This is where I find my calm, this countryside that feels like a home - although I have never lived here.  I can write here, I can always write here.

Missed Connections

So here it is. Writing. Itching inside my head, waking me up in the morning, stopping me sleeping at night. Words coming to life like butterflies breaking out of their cocoons. It's as if a switch was thrown. 

What's interesting is that I've realised I was holding myself too tight to write. Curled into a ball, a porcupine.  And for all my talk of unfurling, the attempts to open up - it wasn't quite happening.

Until now. 

Perhaps I was looking in the wrong place for the Unlock button. 

Comeback

Then suddenly, after a long, cold absence, it's here again.  

It's hard to explain how you know when it's back.  First of all it's just a feeling, a kind of inner shift like a loosening of the bowels, an itch, a hum at the back of the mind.

It starts to build and will not be resisted. Words are sprouting everywhere and cannot be held back.  They take up all the headspace and start spilling out onto scraps of paper, the notepad on the phone, demanding to get onto the page. Insistent, relentless.

I am beginning to think that I understand why this happens. I hold myself tightly closed so much of the time. Safe. Nothing can get in that way. Romping around inside my submarine, closed away in the dark depths.  You can't see in, you can't get to me.

But nothing inside can get out, either. 

So now I am uncoiling again, opening up. What was a fist, fingernails cutting tight into palms, is uncurling. It's been taking a while, but it's here now. Sunshine helped, and some other things.  I'm welling up in a surge of turquoise waves, a breaking of buds, a crescendo. 

Unresolved

Do  you know what? I'm not even going to start with the whole Resolutions thing this year. Just another set of things to fail at. And all my Januaries are all the same - you know the drill. Write a novel. Publish a poetry collection. Fit into size 12 jeans. Learn to play Lullaby of Birdland. Blah blah blah.

This year I'm not going there. I'm just going to take it as it comes, see how it goes. All these plans and goals are just ways to beat myself up - and I clearly don't give a crap about them really, deep down, otherwise I'd have done them all by now. 

I am going to think smaller. Not a poverty of aspiration but more like a miniaturist. Do little things properly. Drink good coffee slowly out of a good cup. Brush my daughter's hair. Look out the window of the train. 

I am going to get stronger. I need to support my daughters, and to do that I need to stand firm myself. That means be healthy, eat right, get fresh air, try to sleep. 

I am going to write. I'm not even going to say what. Anything. Everything. I do know that writing makes me feel better. 

I am going to reconnect with myself. This is homework from my counsellor. Who the heck am I? Actually I think I already know the answer to that. I am my Collected Works. I am here. in these blog posts over the last 5 years. In my poems. In all the words I have churned and cranked out for work.  I am write here.

Book Hopscotch

This is my view every Saturday. As an aficionado of 'shelfies', it's not a bad outlook. 

I try to sit somewhere different each week, so that I don't become one of those people who have their own spot. Deadens the thinking, having the same perspective all the time. Did you know this is why we instinctively tilt our heads when we're curious? Animals do this too. It's to get a slightly different view. 

This weekend I can take a journey through time, just by scanning the shelves opposite.  I can start with the fabulously titled Feeble Mindedness and Mental Deficiency. On through Outwitting Our Nerves to the Psychotherapy section. Scan past Freud, Kinsey, Shere Hite and Why Is Sex Fun? then before you know it, I'm straight into Psychosexual Problems, Perversion and The Pathology And Treatment of Sexual Deviation. After that we segue into depression and suicide. 

Pretty miserable stuff - and fortunately not my own topics of research. Sure I'd much be rather be having sex on a rainy Saturday afternoon than working in the library, but you can't always get what you want, right?

Hero's Welcome

You know I like a sexy building. And they don't come much sexier than the Wellcome Library. It's been one of my favourite places since I ran a project there a few years ago, but lately it's become my second home.

I'll be spending Saturdays there, writing. There is hardly anyone here at the weekend, so it's lovely and quiet. There are no more excuses not to get on with it. Here are the things I'll be working on (in no particular order).

• developing a poetry collection
• submitting poetry to journals
• writing my novels (yep, 2 started)
• writing reviews
• blogging

These are a few of my favourite things. More about the raindrops on roses, brown paper packages tied up with string, crisp apple strudels and all that shit later.

Reboot

So I am all out of excuses now, about not having time to write.  I have every Saturday, and long evenings stretching into night in the spare room.  It is time to do this properly.

I have started by sorting out all my files, the bits and pieces of poems and prose, the seeds and germs of stories. The two novels that are nothing more than ideas and a few thousand words. 

Why now, you wonder? Well it's all part of a wider plan.  More on that in the weeks to come.  Suffice to say for now that an end is in sight. Still quite far away right now, but close enough to start making an actual, concrete plan. With a couple of key milestones to break the journey. 

One of the parts of the plan is writing. This is the only thing I've every really, really wanted to do. For all the success I've had in the day-job, it's not the same as fulfilment. Writing is something I need to do, I have to do. 

It'll be a shame if I'm crap at it, won't it?  But at least it gives me an excuse to do absolutely anything I damn well please, all in the name of research.  A poetry friend of mine once said when I was going through a desperately dark time - "think of all this as raw material".  That immediately made it better, if only because it started to place a distance between me and the stuff, as I thought about how to write it, and started to get a sense of proportion and a more clinical viewpoint. 

I'm aiming to write my postcards two or three times a week (at least) so if you're interested in updates from my tour around the inner landscapes, do drop by. 

Write Now

Anyway, my counsellor pointed out that if not-writing makes me feel as if I don't exist, it might be a good idea to consider writing.

It's quite a bold assumption - do I want to acknowledge that I do indeed still exist? I suppose I can't float around in limbo forever, physically vital, heart beating, head aching whilst my mind is a dead, flat fog. 

So here I am. 

I'm trying. The rest of my life still ahead of me, dammit. There it is in the picture: a blank page. 

I had better write myself better, write myself a better story.  Keep your fingers crossed for me. 

Lure

This is it - the path. This is how it looks in winter. This year I will walk it. 

I know I have said this before. I've said so on this very blog, in fact.  And if I am going to be kind to myself, I had better start by keeping my own commitments to myself, particularly when they are basic, free-of-charge, uncomplicated activities that will be enjoyable and healthy like this. What I really mean by all that waffle is, why couldn't I have given myself a couple of hours off, some time over the last nearly 4 years (4 years!!) to go for this walk? I don't think I am kind to myself at all. 

This week I have Tried Harder. I spent time with friends (hardly a trial, of course, but I had to allow myself to "deserve" that time).  I tried hard with my husband (and believe me this is very trying indeed). I went on a Mummy-Daughter date, supper and a night in a hotel in London. And this afternoon while I wait for her to finish dancing, I have been for a wonderful facial in a Thai spa I found on the internet, and am now writing. 

It will be very hard to get used to having time for myself that does not involve running around doing things for other people. 

But I Asked For Help, and help was forthcoming. Of course it was, my friends are wonderful (well, most of them, with notable exceptions but let's not go there for now). The writing is creaking into gear, I am on my fourth poem of the year, and it's only Week 2 of my 52 Challenge.  One of my poems was about the path. 

I am going to get off the clickety-clack of this railway existence and walk up that hillside. Yes I am. 

Fresh

I have to find a way to live my life as it is. The meaningful changes I would like to make cannot be made at this point - I am a mother before anything, and I need to do what is best for my children.

Thus I have made some New Year Resolutions and I have been trying to stick to them. 

Be kind to myself: life and other people are throwing rocks at me, I don't need to help them out by beating myself up.  I am going to try and talk myself up instead. I have a continual inner voice constantly talking me down, so this will be a real challenge.

Write: I have signed up to an initiative to write a poem a week (I'm ahead of the game as I've already written two).  I will organise my material and submit more of it for publication, see if I can raise my game a bit. This will give me something purposeful to do now that I have to spend so much time at home. I am also going to write other things. This blog for a start (expect to see all sorts of writing on here going forward, sorry it's been such a wrist-slitter lately).  Crack on with the novel. Maybe also a work-blog - I have set this up on the company website, all I need to do now is blurt some opinions on topical issues. I'll need to give a shit first, I guess.

Get fitter: notice this is a relative objective.  I need fresh air and walks and to keep myself moving. It's always hard for me, as I fight my body's natural urge to chub, and I would rather sit on the sofa with a glass of red and a good book than go for a run, any day.  However I am going to try. Harder than I have so far this year, otherwise this aim will be over before it's even begun. 

Yesterday for instance, I started well. Had Fruit & Fibre and a coffee for breakfast. Planned to go for a run later in the day.  Then had a very distressing therapy appointment with Ultra High Risk Daughter. The day was derailed after that. For lunch I had a samosa, a bag of Cheddars and a Star Bar. Then I had a bag of crisps later on.  For supper I made a leek and mushroom risotto (quite healthy) but ate some pate with crackers while I was making it.  Then I had four Thorntons Continentals in bed. Today I will do better (see? I am still able to be optimistic, that must be a good thing). 

I realised I needed to do something very important that I have rarely if ever done before. I understood that I can't struggle on being this lonely, feeling so alone. So I took a lifesaving step: Ask for help. Wow! Yes, I know! So proud of myself. I contacted the people who are important to me, reached out to them. This might sound easy but believe me, it's a huge step. I don't feel like talking to anyone, any time, as I don't feel I have anything to offer them. I'm the life and soul, right? I'm the party organiser, the drinker, the fixer, the sorter, the fun-times girl.  No one wants to see me white-faced, silent with panic, beaten by my spectacular failure to build a happy family. Do they? 

Actually maybe they do. I think I might have been underestimating my friends. Times like this sort the wheat from the chaff, for sure. And the people who are left are the golden ones, and just sitting with their glow will help me feel better.  I hope. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Compulsion

There are a couple of things I simply have to do.

One of them is get fit, the other one is get writing. These things are particularly important given that the thing I've been working towards for the last 20 years has led me, via a very roundabout route and a large amount of graft, back to the place I started.

So I'd better strive at something else, otherwise the overall outcome of my endeavours will have been pointless.

I can't be trusted to get on with things without some sort of external encouragement, targets, goals. Maybe at least I have learned how to understand myself, if nothing else.  Therefore I have set myself two challenges.

The first is a six week poetry course. I've just finished a two week poetry course as a sort of limbering up, and come up with 3 pieces I quite like. This longer stretch should get me back in the writing saddle, so to speak.

The great thing about poetry is that it doesn't require the same amount of sitting down that, say, a novel would dictate.  Most of it happens inside the head while doing other things, and as long as there is the possibility to jot or record a voice memo, it doesn't always interfere fundamentally with the daily timetable. Writing a poem is a bit like waiting for a plant to grow. You can get it started, sow the seed of an idea but then it has to do its own mysterious thing in the dark before it's ready to begin emerging.

Even so, I thought that I should offset the temptation to stay on the sofa drinking comforting red wine while my poems mature in the aged oak barrels of my brain, by also signing up for a fitness challenge. 5 x 50 will commit me to covering 5k a day for 50 days, running, walking, cycling, swimming or a combination of these.

Truth be told, it's not that much of a challenge on the days I'm exercising anyway - 5k is my standard running route. It's a kick start for the sedentary days though, as I will have to go for a walk for an hour or get on the exercise bike in the evening.  It can only do me good.

My brave little hero nephew has just had an operation which will leave him in plaster from hip to ankle on both legs for 7-8 weeks. And even after that, he can't walk anyway. So I thought the least I could do is be grateful for the ability to get about independently, and do a bit of extra walking in his honour.

In between, I need to fit in my work. Less said about that the better.

The Lost Picture Show

I stayed in an apartment opposite here last week. Britain is full of buildings like this: none of them cinemas any more but still thronged with the glamorous ghosts of the glory days of film.  Redolent of the cigarettes from the time when everyone smoked, and wore hats, and went to the pictures.

These buildings are too big to demolish, so they sit in the midst of the old high streets  -  streets themselves that have been overtaken by retail parks and out of town stores and precincts.  Mosques, bingo halls, gyms, or possibly nightclubs, they still serve as places where people go to have fun.

I've travelled widely in this country with my work, and most towns, even small, can muster a masterpiece like this - a Gaumont, a Roxy, a Ritzy.  One day I would like to find the time to photograph these buildings. I'd like to capture them in a book, or perhaps a blog, with a photo and a piece of creative writing for each one.

I do not want to run out of time to do the things I promised myself I'd always do.  And I need to reconcile myself to the fact that if I want to do these things, I must do them on my own otherwise I won't be doing them at all.