Boocat.

Today the cat we inherited died. Next door left her behind on moving ten years ago and she's been ours ever since. She lived with us - I say lived, but it was more like tolerated us, she wouldn't come inside and instead resided in the clearly far more comfortable propagator all through the snowy Winters and the hot summers. 

She had no teeth at all, she only had two when we inherited her. I reckon she was about 16 or 17.  She was old and tired and skinny and cross but I liked her very much. 

Grumpy old cat.  She wouldn't really come and have a cuddle, although you could stroke her on her terms. But yesterday we managed to catch her, a feat in itself and so we knew something was wrong. She was dragging her leg so badly her paw was sore. The vet said massive ligament damage, no idea why, likely it's just snapped in her old age. Surgery was the only option but she was unlikely to benefit and anyway, trying to look after her outside whilst she recuperated would have been a nightmare. So no more Boocat. 

Goodbye lovely green-eyed yowly crosspants. I will miss you. 

The Perseids.

Last time the Persieds came the same thing happened; I ended up sitting in the park watching them on my own because you were angry, again, for who knows why, again. 

It was probably my fault. Again.

This time I sat there with a 15 year old boy who is rapidly growing up, learning to discern much earlier than he should the sudden signs of raging anger that come in you, the propensity to blame others for the feeling you can't deal with in yourself. He is starting to want to protect me, fighting you, swearing at you. 

A year ago today, give or take, the same feelings in you, give or take. A lack of ability to control them, and no desire to either. Another man; one that I don't know, don't much like and very much fear comes here instead of you, the same times each year in crashing cyclic waves.

I don't think there is a pattern you say. 

The Perseids would disagree, I say.  

I'm frustrated and tired of worrying about money, fretting all the time about how we will manage. Everything I spend even a tiny bit of money outside of the business I feel so guilty it makes me feel sick. On Saturday we spent £60 on paint and masking tape and now it's like a little worry worn with teeth, eating me from the inside out.  My back hurts because my chairs so old and I need a new one but to get that I need more customers but I'm a crappy businesswoman, so I can't/don't do the things I need to do, like PR.  And to top it all I'm hungry but I'm on day 5 of the 7 day juice detox so I'm not spoiling it now.  

Things I know to be true - List number five

1. A little bit of regular physical exercise goes a long way towards long -term emotional well being.

2. The need for a fire is a primal instinct in all of us and is why men like barbecues and garden centres sell so many Chimneas. 

3. If people were once worth knowing, they are always worth knowing, and time really does make a difference to how everyone feels.

4. Even in the Summer insomnia is crappy.

5. People that play Roller derby are both physically brave, and often using it as a way to fight emotional demons. 

6. Adrenaline sports and trying to conceive do not sit well together - it's like trying to get pregnant whilst running away from a Sabre Tooth Tiger.

7. Finding a past time that completely overwhelms you is a vital part of being alive and if you don't have it you need to find it. 

8. Emotional drama is insidious, and is never, ever part of a successful relationship.

9. You only get what you want through sheer hard work so if you haven't got what you want yet you need to work harder for it. 

10. Scented plants in your garden are a simple but indescribable pleasure and investing in Jasmine is a surprisingly easy step towards being inwardly peaceful. 

The three 'wise' choices.

I suppose this should carry a warning: 

Some aspects of this post may be upsetting to read, both emotionally and in the graphical description.. 

When you lose a baby (lose, like you accidentally mislaid it somewhere, wrapped in the knitting or the fish & chip paper or something...)

When you have a baby die before it is born and it's far enough along to be distinct they give you three options. 

Option one: 

Stay in hospital and take drugs. (Bonus!) but no - they're the drugs that make all the 'products of conception' come out quickly. (They can't say 'baby'. They say it once during the scan when you know something is wrong but you are still looking for the baby, but then after that they say 'products of conception' when referring to the baby and miscarriage when they are referring to what has happened to you.)

So with option one you stay in over a few days, you have lots of very heavy, lumpy, clots expelling from your insides and then they send you home, tickety boo.

(Too much information with the lumps and the clots? That's sadly what it's like. Identifiable parts. Placenta, amniotic sac, actual child. My baby was nearly ten weeks old and they do a lot of growing by then.)

Option Two:

Have a D&C. For the uninitiated a  Dilation and Curettage) means scraping out all the bits of baby and baby survival parts (sorry, products of conception) out of the uterus during an operation, those parts then get taken away for testing and eventually thrown in the bin. You can choose to be awake or not awake for this. And straight after it you can go home and its all over, hygienically dealt with, no blood to see, a quick hand sanitizer on the way out and we will see you soon hopefully Mrs Stokoe, good luck with the next one!

Option Three:

Go home, wait it out and grieve. Going home is not for everyone. You have to think about how you will deal with it all. Will you look at what comes out? Will you flush it down the loo? It hurts, it's painful. It's exhausting. When will it come? It's a lot of cramping and bleeding. WHEN will it come?

If you physically look at what comes then you will have your baby's blood on your fingers and a lot of people can't deal with that. How will you deal with that? 

You have to take a lot of painkillers and spend a small fortune on menstruation pads. You do a LOT of sleeping.

And. Whether or not it it true, you will still feel like you smell like death whilst the baby is still inside you.

You'll think why didn't I do this the clean and hygienic way? When you're running to the loo, and in between your legs is stuffed with tissue but there's blood everywhere anyway you'll be screaming for the D&C and the neat and tidy, and the 'permanent floor runner on the cream carpet' 21st Century version of how to have a miscarriage. 

But not us. Of course not us. We chose the hard way, the natural way, the messy, sobbing, bloody, ancient, timeless, traditional, historical, ritual way. 

It was the only way we knew.

We were sitting at the kitchen table and I said to husband, there's a lady in the Birch tree, can you see? "Come up and see me sometime". She's got her arms wrapped around the tree and sometimes the leaves are her hair blowing'.  'Birch, Berkana, Holda.' he said. He saw her.

And then my body knew what to do. I felt a pull and a big heaviness and cramping, horrible pain. I ran upstairs half undressed to the toilet and when the baby (the products of conception) came we scooped her up and wrapped her in tissue, carried her downstairs with the dogs in tow like a little funeral procession, dug a hole under the Birch tree which was all ready to welcome her with open arms and I laid a Camellia flower with her and Mag laid a block of slate onto her. 

Camellia for perfection and love and because that was the nearest beautiful thing we had to hand. 

The Birch Tree already has the placenta from Solly. It likes it. 

We did the right thing. 

 

 

Starting from the beginning

I'm in the crappiest place. I've lost the baby, my knee is still fucked and I've put on about two stone because of not skating and the pregnancy. 

I don't know what to do. I'm so sad. 

It's sunny outside but I just feel paralysed with deciding how to move forward. I haven't gone to work for two days. I need to pull myself together and sort myself out but I don't know how. 

Things to be happy about:

1/ I've got two lovely children already

2/ It's sunny. 

3/ We are having a multi-fuel Eco stove fitted. 

4/ I am going on holiday in August.

5/ We can try again for another baby.

6/ I finally have a Physio appointment booked on Monday. 

PISS. 

Yellow rooms always bring bad things.

This particular room was yellow with a hint of pale grey, more of a weary, washed-out lemon than all-out holiday citrus. 

The last one was vibrant and joyous yellow as far as I recall. I'm not sure why anyone would choose to paint a 'quiet' room such a vivid and hopeful colour; perhaps I have misremembered it and actually it was the same weak and ineffectual shade as this one. If it was me I would paint it a wistful sea blue or a gentle olive lichen or even just reflective, contemplative white.. 

Regardless. 

Last time I was in a room of this colour it brought the news that my father had terminal cancer and was dying. 

This time I hear that my unborn baby had died, that all the bleeding had been a miscarriage and that what I had left was the 'articles of conception' which was causing all the pain. 

But the colour, in the end, doesn't matter it seems other than to act as a visual reference. It doesn't matter how yellow or green or pink the room that you hear the bad news in really. 

Or maybe it does matter. For in my house where all our laughing and living is done I shall never, ever paint a room the same colour as the hospital 'quiet' room where they take you to tell you all about death. 

Catching the train after twenty years of trying.

Last night I dreamt I caught the train. 

I dream of trains all the time and I never, ever catch them. In fact I don't think I can remember catching one in all the dreams I've had. What normally happens is the train comes but I am on the other side of the platform and run but miss it, or it comes but I have too much luggage to load on and things keep falling out on the platform, or it comes but my legs aren't working and I can't quite manage to get on it in time. Something frustrating and horrid like that anyway. 

Then, last night the train was coming and we were driving alongside it racing to get to the station and I was thinking, "Ahhh this old 'not catching the train' chestnut", but as it actually pulled into the station so did we, and unloaded our things and all piled on. Messily, it is true; some luggage was basically thrown into the cabin, but still. We caught it. 

I woke up this morning thinking, Holy shit! I can't believe I caught the train! 

I've been trying to catch that train for all my adult life and quite a lot of my childhood too. Thank fuck I finally have. 

City evening

It's the blue-grey gentle light of the evening. Not dark yet, not even twilight but the lights are on in the houses and the birds are singing about bedtime. She sits in the garden on a wooden chair drinking cider and listening to the sounds around her. In the distance someone is playing a piano. Above her a pigeon flaps in the Birch tree, trying to find a roost.

Gently all the little birds are warbling about nighttime.

There is a police siren.

She listens. 

She can hear the boy racers on the dual carriageway having their Saturday night show-off. Next door are cooking curry and she can hear the sizzle of the frying pan, she can smell the garlic and onion. A bird chip-chip-chip-chips in the big Evergreen tree a few doors down. Is it a blackbird? She doesn't know.  The cat that lives outdoors comes to see her, with it's rubbish miaow and bony body. She picks it up and strokes it, teases out the tangles, tries to straighten the tail that somehow once got broken, strokes it's little Bat-like leather ears. 

It's supposed to be Summer but it's not very warm.  None of the flowers are blooming that should be. 

She can hear the city and the ring road and in the distance the motorway. A car drives up the road, a rap music crescendo. 

Somebody shouts, somebody shrieks. 

It's too noisy and it's too crowded and there is nowhere to go to find peace. 

Another siren passes.

A poem by Alice Walker.

When I no longer have your heart I will not request your body Your presence Or even your polite conversation. I will go away to a far country Separated from you by the sea -on which I cannot walk- and refrain even from sending Letters Describing my pain. Alice Walker

Confession number 2.

They say it's not normal to feel as if killing yourself is a viable option, and that you should tell someone.  It's a 'red flag' in the mental illness stakes, a big ol' tick in the ALERT! ALERT! FUCKING DO SOMETHING box for any kind of mental health professional who may or may not be interested at any particular moment.

But I feel like this all the time, all the fucking time, so it's pretty normal for me, actually. It's normal.  And I'm not doing anything specifically worrying am I? I'm not stockpiling drugs or engineering motorway fates or casually sleeping with clearly unhealthy partners...I'm not measuring rope in Homebase or wobbling on the edge of the Selfridges bridge looking for a hole in the wire fence.

All I'm doing is just vaguely plotting. 

That's all I'm doing.

Constantly vaguely plotting. 

The downward spiral of Therefore.

Since I have not been able to skate (around mid-March) I have put on about a stone in weight, because cake + no derby = maximum storage.

As a direct result of this extra weight, I feel horribly unattractive and want to hide and I don't want to get my body out at the gym or anywhere that people who don't know me might see me. I don't even want my husband to see me and he's already said he loves me in all my seasons, fool that he is.

With nothing to do (or rather nothing I can cope with doing which involves exercise) I stay at home and find other more gentle, nurturing things to do.  I am very good at cooking.

I cook, therefore I eat.

Standing at the cooker, cooking when you know you shouldn't be is a demoralising, horrible, loathing feeling of failure; a lack of willpower and spinelessness.  Often there is cheese.  If there is cheese then I will eat it.  

Therefore I get fatter.

Therefore I feel horribly unattractive and want to hide and...hang on....

I seriously do not know how to extricate myself from this.

I think you'll find it's called roller DERBY, not roller blading, and let me tell you the two things couldn't be more different.

It's very difficult if people don't know about derby or understand what it is, to make someone realise how awful having it taken from you can be.

My consultant said, "I know you're worried abut your roller-blading" in a somewhat patronising voice.  Number one: It's not roller-blading, I don't swan up and down by the duck lake on the occasional saturday in the sunshine, I play a full contact aggressive sport that involves a lot of twists and turns and pivoting movements, which is the exact thing my knee is fucked from doing.

Number two: The longer I am not skating the fatter I get, the more unfit I get, the less relevant I get, the older I get.  I'm 40 playing a contact sport in a world where everyday the skaters are getting younger.  There is not long for me and I do not have much time.  Sitting about wasting three months isn't my idea of recuperation. 

But you see, that's the plan. I've got an official diagnosis:  I have a partial Anterior Cruciate Ligament tear in my right knee.  I was informed about this on Monday when the consultant was imagining Starlight Express or something equally as ridiculous.

Because it's only partial and my knee is strong they want me to do physio for three months and see how it goes before they think about operating.  Operating is bad and recovery takes a long time, I get that.  But you cannot repair an ACL naturally, the body doesn't supply blood to the area so it remains permanently torn.  What you can do is either strengthen all the muscles around the knee, or operate and sew up the tear and graft a piece of new ligament from somewhere else on.  Hurray then right?  Because option one will work, my knee will get strong and everything will be ok, yes?  Well...no.

No, because that usually only works on people who are fairly sedentary in their life and I am not.  I play a full contact sport, a full contact sport I practice 4 times a week which involves a lot of being...er not very sedentary at all.  I also do cross training for it. So either the consultant (who specialises in sports medicine) is confident that by some miraculous means it will be alright just by physio, or he has underestimated my activity level drastically.

I am reckoning on the drastic underestimation.

Another thing is that I need a knee brace but clearly the NHS being what it is these days and David Cameron basically deciding to personally sign the chit for every cup of doctor's tea, I'm not going to persuade the hospital to give me one, so I shall have to fund it myself.  The correct sports knee brace for an ACL tear is a CTi Off-the-shelf and comes in at the tiny little price of £399.  Which is just ridiculous, even if it does come in a range of exciting colours.

So now I'm stuck.  

Things I can do: I can cycle, and I can swim.  I HATE swimming. It makes me want to stab people.  Really, actually.  I can do weights and kettlebells.  Did I mention I hate the gym?  And I'm going to have to do all these hideous exercise type things that I hate not even to get better at skating, but just so that I don't get fat and unhealthy, whilst all the time trying to strengthen my knee, and what if non of it works in the end anyway?  

What if that?

All the everything is too overwhelming. 

Misery

Today I got the results about my knee from the consultant.

I am completely, totally and utterly gutted. I don't want to talk to anyone or see anyone. I just want to stay in bed and cry, I wish it would all go away. 

Things I know to be true list number four.

1. The rain in Spain doesn't fall mainly on the plain, it mainly falls over the Northern mountains, actually.

2. An afternoon nap is invaluable if you work at a job which needs dexterity and concentration and the twenty minutes you invest in sleep manifests in several more hours productive work. 

3. If my knee doesn't get fixed soon I am actually going to kill myself and then I won't have to be miserable anymore.

4. Working with my husband is delightful and inspiring. Lots of couples couldn't manage to be together all the time like we are, but it works for us. 

5. Spring came really late this year, the world is going crazy and not many people are even interested, let alone doing anything about it. 

6. There is no such place as 'away'. Where is away? When you throw something 'away' you are just making it a problem for someone else to deal with. 

7. Buying fresh flowers is worth it just for the smell your house is filled with when you come home from work. 

8. When people say they're really busy it just means you're not important enough to be part of their life. If you were, they would find time for you. 

9. On the subject of busy, most people use busy as a way to deflect from having to have time to think. Because thinking causes problems and is worrisome. 

10. Doubloon, indicative and ossify are all beautiful words. Glistening however, is not. 

Confession number 1.

Standing outside in the pouring grey dawn rain trying to feel less alive. Even in the Summer five A.M is an unearthly hour.

Every one of us has done something in their lives that they are ashamed of and that they cannot undo. I have done several. When I was 14 I pushed my Mum down the stairs in a fit of teenage temper. I forget what I was angry about, I expect she'd told me I had to be in by 10pm or something equally as reasonable.

I pushed her down the stairs and she hurt her knee quite badly and the next day she was due to go on a skiing holiday, the first proper holiday she had had in years.

She didn't get to ski much.

Things I Know to be True, List Number Three

1. You should never open the cheese before you need to because you will just eat it in tiny little slices.

2. It doesn't matter how careful you are with your children's attitude to gender, as soon as they reach school age someone else's kids will tell them boys don't cry at sad things and only girls wear pink.

3. It is always worth spending money on an excellent haircut.

4. Dogs leave massive holes in the material plane when they are dead, or even just not where you expect them to be.

5. It is impossible to feel gloomy on the first day it is warm enough outside not to need your coat.

6. If your child saves up all the toilet rolls to make a forest for dinosaurs you should definitely find the time to do it. My child did this once and I put it off and put it off and never made the forest. Seven years later I still feel bad about it.

7. Running away for a while sometimes works.

8. The investment Birmingham is making in its infrastructure will pay off.

9. Waiting is hard.

10. The Buzzfeed '50 people you wish you knew in real life' is always funny, however many times you've looked at it. I've looked so many times and I still like it just as much as I did the first time.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/people-you-wish-you-knew-in-real-life

What's the time, Mr Zombie?

One of the most interesting things about having children is how they start to want to look after you as they grow older, and they start to feel that you are their responsibility. This morning son number one showed me a Zombie Apocalypse bracelet he had made for himself out of four rubber bands. 'You should get one' he said, 'What if you need it and you haven't made one and you don't take my advice? Then you'll be dead.'

Obviously I don't need a rubber band bracelet, however necessary it might be during an actual Zombie Apocalypse but now because of son number one's insistence I'm starting to feel as if I might be unprepared and regretful if I don't fashion one, forthwith.

But it's alright though because apparently Even though I am hideously unprepared and not taking it seriously enough he's going to look after us all anyway and would never leave us to defend our weak selves. He with the four-rubber-band defence system of possibly being able to snap the arses of Zombies. Or something.

The subject of Zombie Apocalypse is so prevalent in my house that husband and he have an exact and specific objective for what to do in the event of one and I feel like I'm letting the side down if I haven't at least considered a basic survival plan. (I have, but I'm not telling you because it's a really good idea and I don't want anyone to steal it.)

So yes. Prepared for Zombies we indeed are.

Relief abounds.

In other Zombie news the smallest child revealed this evening that his favourite playground game is, 'What's the time Mr Zombie?' My mind boggles slightly at this; whatever happened to, 'What's the time Mr Wolf?'?

I asked if he knew what a Zombie was. 'Yes' he said, 'It walks along with its hands out front like this (holds hands up) and goes Wooo Woooo. And if it touches you, you're dead.'

So there you go.

The ghostliness of nothingness.

I don't have a list of three things, or two things or even one thing that is good about today. I don't have something clever to say.  I don't have a spiel about Feminism or a fancy little argument about the toys we foist on girls.  I don't have a deep rooted anger about supermarkets, or child-rearing or the lack of creative invention in a mono-culture, mega-factory based world.  I don't even have an inherent sadness and a willingness to detach myself anymore, which is slightly depressing; at least the overwhelming despair and secret plotting of self-destruction is an actual feeling.  This lack of anything is like being the pale grey mist on a drizzly Monday morning.

People keep emailing me.  Some of them are telling me they like what I write and it resonates.  That makes me sad, don't feel like me.  it's a crappy place to be.   Some of them are asking for advice (I don't have any).  Some of them are asking me to give opinions on things I genuinely wish weren't happening, some of them are cross with me for caring.  Some of them want me to pay them money I don't have and they're not even from Nigeria, they're real legitimate people with genuine monetary requests.

I'd like to go to bed and wake up somewhere else, as someone else, but ideally with none of my own memories too.  Someone else can be me. Like Orlando. I can be Orlando and Orlando can be me.


I'm failing at the list of good things about today so instead here is a list of some things I would like:

• Some really good smoked almonds from somewhere, like the kind I had in the Albert Hall.  I found the company who make them and I emailed them and they said I could buy 3kg for £40.  That feels like it might be a lot of smoked almonds.  Excessive, maybe.

• Some more commissions.

• For the car to stop breaking down ALL THE ***** TIME.

• Marmite crisps to be readily available in all supermarkets.

• My knee appointment not to have been put back another week.

• Not to always feel stuck in the middle and not really much wanted. I'd really like to have an actual value.

• A good night's sleep.

That old 'Feminism gives women a bad name' chestnut really can do one.

Women who show a willingness to accept nasty or sexist comments about other women, and sometimes even actively support them via social media likes, or laughing at sexist jokes in the pub drive me absolutely up the wall and I have no time for them whatsoever.

Just because they never confront the behaviour they think it isn't relevant to them, that it somehow doesn't apply. But it does. It does! Every time they toss their hair and laugh when a man says his girlfriend is nagging, or 'like' a post on Facebook where a man is condescendingly telling a woman she's said enough what they are doing is tacitly accepting that women should accept and willingly embrace the control and domination of men, and that men have the final say in how much a woman can communicate.

These are the same women who say they hate Feminism because it gives women a bad name. It's sad that they exist but what's even sadder is that they exist in the derby community - a sport so fundamentally female that even the recent influx of boy derby has brought a delightful fashion for men in sparkly shorts.

There is no place for female on female hatred in derby. There's no place for anyone on anyone hatred, it's fucking derby for fuck's sake, where's the derby love? But if you are female and feel the best way to self-identify is by how much the boys think you are one of them - all to the detriment of the women around you I genuinely have no idea why you have chosen to be part of such an inclusive and welcoming sport.

Somebody I really respect said to me once that the thing she really admires about me is a willingness to stick up for what I believe in even when it gets me into trouble myself. But I am weary of always being embroiled in dissent because I insist on sticking up for the underdog.

Husband thinks I am brave.

I think I am stupid.

More not making of the roster. I don't care anymore. I don't care so much that I'm writing about it on my blog.

Collectors

I collect rainbows. I've been doing it for a while. I haven't got very many, perhaps five, but the ones I've got are beautiful, including one over the Stones of Stonehenge and one at the Sunrise festival over all the tents. I'd like some more but the opportunity seldom arises.

I also collect vintage boxes, and champagne boxes and boxes of variousness in general. It's something about being able to put things neatly away inside them and keep the lid shut on the mess.

My friend collects friends. She has many and she knows them all well and spends quality time with them all. This impresses me greatly because number one, it involves phoning people and I am particularly rubbish at doing that. Number two it means socialising regularly and I don't do that very well either. I know a lot of people but I don't have many real, actual friends, those are particularly rare and I try to hang onto them carefully. So it makes me tremendously sad to lose one, especially one I had invested so much time into.

I don't know why people say 'Misery loves company', my feeling is it's best left on its own to sulk, actually.

Today I have made gold wedding rings that look like tree bark, designed a beautiful ring based on Sumi E Sakura or Japanese black ink paintings of cherry blossom and I have started making another tiny Russian doll.

I have generally spent most of my time making beautiful things for people and yet when I stop I realise I have a black heart and I'm harbouring a sort of quiet roiling fury. It's a good job that the art of Goldsmithing allows me to switch off from the world, especially if you believe as I do that you transfer your energy into any object you are making. Today I have really concentrated on closing my mind off to everything apart from how much I like the couple I am making these rings for, and how pleased I am that they chose us.

I can't skate. I feel sad and miserable but I am so sick of feeling like that I've channeled it into anger instead. Anger is just as worrisome but less painful inside, and I'm sick of crying.

On Saturday I've got my MRI to see if the consultant's diagnosis of a tear in my Lateral Meniscus is correct, and if it is I will be fast-tracked for an operation. I am terrified that it will be and I'll be off-skates for months but what's almost worse is, what if it's inconclusive?

I'm most scared of being left like this, hurting inside and out, can't even skate.

Heart breaking.

Sometimes I say really stupid things to people, principally because I am socially inept and nervous. Usually it's to someone I really like and they give me a really strange look and then I feel like I've failed.  People make assumptions about me being all outgoing and confident but the reality is, lots of people who come across as really outgoing are actually the most shy of all, they just disguise it with chronic over-exuberance.  

Mince pies and seasides.

On Christmas Day once when I was a teenager, instead of doing traditional Christmas things my Dad took my Step-Mum and me to the Norfolk coast for the day. We went, all bundled up in hats and scarves, with tomato soup and mince pies for our Christmas lunch, and we sat on the totally empty beach and watched all the sea birds. It was wonderful, even though at the time I'm sure I had a little teenage strop about doing something 'weird' and 'embarrassing'.

We walked and played and found an unexploded Second World War bomb, so we phoned the local police and they came out to the beach and we all shared our mince pies . It was quite the occasion.

My dad was like that, we quite often did unusual things and vaguely annoying ones too; at the dinner table we were never allowed to sit in the same chair because he didn't want us to become 'creatures of habit'. I think he liked to think of himself as impulsive and reckless even though the reality was different; he also did things like have careful financial planning, which isn't very reckless at all, if you ask me.

Anyway.

As I have previously written, today is the tenth anniversary of his death. If I didn't have to work I would drive to the Norfolk coast and toast him with tomato soup and mince pies. Perhaps I still will, at some point. I might sit on the sand and and say, 'Ten years but not forgotten Dad' and ask him what he thinks, what I should do.

I'll say, 'What shall I do Dad? Because I'm lost. Sometimes when I'm driving alone at night on an empty road and the road turns I deliberately don't turn the wheel and then at the last minute a kind of innate sense of self preservation takes over, and I do after all. Why does my brain ignore me?

It's not supposed to be like this. I don't know where to turn or who to ask, or even what to ask for, I don't know what I'm doing or where I'm going and I don't know how to make anything right, or even if I want to.'

Yeah. I'll say, 'I'm lost Dad, and I need help.'

I don't know what he'd tell me. He'd probably tell me to do the exact opposite of what I think he'd say, but since I don't even know what I think he'd say I can't work out the rest and I'm no further forward.

Much easier to have him here to ask, and then I wouldn't have to do all this guessing.

Stupid dying.
Stupid living and stupid dying.

In a kind of weird meta strangeness NSOing at skating is keeping me from crying.

Indebtedness

He bought her a Kindle Fire but she put it away in the cupboard. She doesn't want to like it, because if she likes it she's going to feel indebted to him; she'll have to move one step closer to liking him and she's decided to definitely, definitely not do that. So now it sits inside the cupboard, dusty, whilst she sits outside, bored.

She might do some cleaning.

Things I know to be True List Number 2.

Another late night list. The rules for the lists, by the way, are that they must contain things I know to be true (they can't be suppositions) and each list must contain ten points.

1. Smoking is bad for you.
2. I feel more comfortable about my body now that I ever did in my twenties.
3. The last month of pregnancy feels as long as all the previous months put together.
4. The art of Goldsmithing is a dying skill.
5. Cheap shoes are a false economy.
6. Roller derby has brought me the most amazing friendship group.
7. Spending all our savings on a really good mattress was an excellent idea.
8. There is always an interesting story in someone if you look hard enough.
9. Some people's eyes really are windows to their souls and those are the people I instinctively seek out.
10. Climbing any sort of hill is always worth it.

True love.

I think that true love is like tides and the sea.  Sometimes it is all around you, you are immersed in it.  Other times you have to walk a mile in the sand just to reach the shallows.

But you know it is, and will always be still there.

Painting dark lilies.

On Monday it will be ten years since my Dad died and I still can't really look at a seldom seen photograph of him without crying.   I wish he was still here.

Ten years though is a long time, the normal grieving process is apparently three, and I am past weeping into my coffee and running away to Thailand.

I am past divorcing my husband in a depressed and desperate search for something, I am past staring silently at the wall in the mental hospital and painting pictures of dark lilies.   I don't even think about him all that much anymore and yet not a day goes by without him being in my mind. I don't try and call him like I did when he first died, and I can look at the photograph of him in my living room because I see it everyday and it has become almost unnoticeable.  But love is a strange and wonderful thing and sometimes even when you have forgotten about it for a while it can suddenly overwhelm you again.

I'm still angry with him for leaving us all, too early, too selfishly.  Addiction is a terrible thing and it stole my father from me just when he was about to begin a delightful part of his life.

So if you still smoke, you should stop making excuses and just stop.  My Dad made excuses. ' I love it, it feels like losing a member of the family when I stop.  I'll quit next year.  Next month, next week.'

Next day.

Not now.

And then he fell off a ladder and broke his collar bone and that was the beginning of the end, because  he found out he had a brain tumour.  A great, big, fat brain tumour, that was messing his brain up and making him fall over.  When he found that out, he quit smoking, right there, right then.  But it was too late because that brain cancer was secondary cancer;  the primary cancer was in his lungs and had already started to kill him.   So he started smoking again.

Might as well when you've only got a year to live.

Place your bets.

I'm not a gambling kind of person; I've not got a very good poker face and I don't know the rules. I don't see the point in guessing what might happen when someone throws a dice, or a tiny ball. I can't make a sensible judgement on that and if I had any money I'd probably keep what I had rather than try and make it somehow magically double. Or treble.

I'm not great really at playing any sort of games, because I'm not speculative and I'm not wily enough, I don't have the ability to personally manipulate people and I'm far, far too naive. I never believe that people are lying to me, even if they are. You can tell me anything and I will happily go around telling everyone else about the new 'fact' I've learnt. (N.B. - Several friends actually occasionally do this to me for the comedy value.) It doesn't seem naive to me, I genuinely don't see why anybody would want to lie.

Yeah, I can't gamble, not with cards, not in a casino and certainly not with any kind of emotions either; poker or life related.

So why then do I feel like I'm watching the wheel going around and around and around inside my mind, and why is it that all I can hear is a little voice going,

Black or red?
Black or red?
Black or red?

Verbally morose. Morbidly verbose.

Haiku number 41782

At first, she waited.
Finally, she translated.
Now she's retreated.

On being rubbish at really hearing.

Since I was a little girl I have never been able to hear the nice things. There could be a million nice things in a sentence someone said to me or wrote to me but if there was also a horrid thing, a criticism of something I did, of what I said - of who I am, then all I would hear is that and I would just go to bed and cry about how much people dislike me, and how crap I am.

As I have grown older I have learned not to instantly respond, not to lash out in defence of myself, and have learnt instead to listen to what people have to say. I know now to put myself in their position, and think about how they might feel about me and my behaviour towards them. So now I do that. I can just about do that.

The end result though is that instead of wanting to go to bed and cry because everyone hates me, I just hate myself as well, because they're basically right; I am utterly rubbish at being a nice, normal person and instead am a complete emotional disaster.



So that's good. Self awareness.

Hurray for that.

The 1-10 scale of true, deep connection.

Here is a relatively easy but incredibly complicated task, born out of a conversation I was having (with myself) today. 

On a scale of 1-10 rate how deep your connection is with other people in your life.  With 1 being most  important and 10 being...still really important.  What you end up with is a list of the people who are most vital to you. The 'top 10', if you like.

Seriously.  Do it.  I think you might surprise yourself.  

The criteria for selection is this:  If they called you in the middle of the night and asked for help, what would you do?  

My definition of true friendship is that someone could ring me and say, "Hey Bella,/Izzy/Lula/Whatever,  I am in Glasgow.  Can you please come and get me?" And all I would do is find out the postcode and get in my car.

I wouldn't ask why, how, what happened? I would just drive and get them, and then probably shout, "What the very FUCK are you doing, calling me in the middle of the night from Glasgow??? DICK. "  once they were safely in the car.

So do this.  

(Note:  Children don't count.)

1.  L
2.  L
3. O
4. A
5. B
6. B
7. M
8. D
9. B
10. C

N.B.   I have randomly coded mine, just because it's easier to be truthful and for the purposes of this exercise because you'll all be checking for your own initial or whatever.  (It's not initials).  You can code yours if you want, or write them down on a piece of paper and screw it up and throw it away.  Burn it.  Do whatever the fuck you want with it, I don't give a flying toss-monkey.  

The point is to be honest and true to yourself.  Who would you drive to Glasgow to get, without having a shitfit, if they really, really needed you to?  

I think a stream of consciousness would be a beautiful place to sit beside, a little cosmic brook where the water is perfectly clear and if you look into it you cansee through to the stars.

The internet isn't mine anymore.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/leigh-clark/facebook-statuses_b_3043482.html

I have quite a lot of issues with this.  

In the early 2000's people that posted on message boards were cool.  There weren't that many of us, really, compared to the millions of people that use Facebook now, contemporary, rubbish, messageboard replacement that it is.  We used to use words like 'nom' all the time, but hardly anyone else did so it wasn't an overused word.  Or rather it was, but only amongst a tiny, worldwide, online community, who thought it was funny and cute.   But then gradually as the internet became more mainstream and Facebook grew it became a little bit like having a tiny LSD gathering which is crashed by hundreds of drunk people who have accidentally come across your address and want to pee in your pot plants.  You know it's not quite the right vibe, (they should be pouring Ribena into the carpet to watch it sink in) but you just stand there with really big, round eyes surveying the damage and being completely incapable of fixing it.

So when people say that Facebook has gone down-hill I don't think they mean that.  What they mean is, everyone is on the internet these days and snobbery about the internet dictates only certain people should have access to it.  If you're not counter-culture then what are you doing here?  Being mainstream and normal is now the mainstream internet norm if we use Facebook as a yardstick for message boards as they used to be, and old school people like me are a bit sniffy about it.  They don't like places where they don't have to write their own A=HREF links, it's 'constricting'.  And all those funny pictures of kittens and TEH cutest baby animals?  Everyone's doing that now, it's not so sweet anymore, not so quirky.   

And when you know your next door neighbour Jan is there updating her status about The X-Factor, and her bunion and chatting with her long lost sister from Australia who she found via a genealogy site, what is there left for you to feel cool about?  The internet isn't yours anymore, 'Hunni'.  It's everyone's.  

Horrible spelling and grammar and all.

Lists

I wake up in the middle of the night so lately I've taken to making lists of things I know to be true. It's therapeutic and takes concentration because there is less truth around than you think.

1. Money makes you happy when you haven't got any.
2. Dogs don't judge you.
3. People all feel better when there are more daylight hours.
4. I am a size 38 shoe.
5. There is something about the city which makes me lose touch with the natural world and its rhythms and cycles.
6. Keeping a car on the road is expensive.
7. My Mum should be living nearer to me, or me to her.
8. Everybody snores sometimes.
9. Bread from the supermarket is full of sugar.
10. Drinking water is good for your body.
11. Eventually there will always be daffodils, however dark the Winter.

Dreams

I want to make complicated, intricate jewellery for people who are willing to pay for it because it's beautiful and they appreciate an artisan's time.  I want to make things,  any things.  I want to make beautiful lacquered boxes with silver hinges and line them with incredibly time-consuming, hand printed silk. I want to be a writer.  I want to be a sculptor. I want to be one of those people that absails in trees to lop off branches, or failing that, the ones who absail down buildings to wash the windows.  I want to fly hawks around skyscrapers to frighten the pigeons.

I want to read all the books.

I want to live by the sea in the mountains and I don't even know if that's possible.  I want to live in a city in the country where I can walk the dogs in the quiet and still be part of a vibrant community.  I want to garden. I want to grow my own vegetables and have time to give to them.  I want to sing to my flowers.  I want to teach my children how to identify different seedlings. I want to drink coffee in bed on Sundays and talk about the newspapers without worrying whether what the newspapers say will affect the rest of the day.  I want not to have to cry about money.  I want not to have to care about money because it isn't important and doesn't make me happy.  I want a car that works.  I want access to an amazing library.  I want to live near a second-hand bookshop that is open at odd hours and has interesting smells.  I want to make cakes and eat them whenever I feel like it, without worrying if it will make me fatter.  I want to be able to say, "What shall we have for tea?" and it already have been decided.  I want not to worry anymore.   I want never to be suddenly terrified again, when the second before I had no idea anything was about to be frightening.  

I want to talk about complicated, confusing ideas right into the early hours.

I want to be able to hear the sea from my window.  

I want to feel real again.  I want to feel again.

I keep collapsing into the gentle easy arms of depression, thinking that somehow, someone will look after me. I am finally realising that no-one will and that the person who has to look after me...is me.

It's all very well lounging around in the soft pillow of nebulous, undefinable, not-very-serious mental health problems, it's an easy excuse, depression. 'I feel so bad, therefore I can be excused from X and I cannot do Y.' But then X doesn't happen and Y is never done.

Someone has to step up and it appears to have to be me.

Spoken word.

I'm writing poetry and it's shit.  Or rather what I'm actually writing is spoken word poetry, which is a different thing, and I'm trying to practice it, but I don't want to learn it because I feel like it's not very good. So I've got to read it which is rubbish because spoken word is best when you know it, and it's coming from inside you and it's your heart and everyone is basically just listening to the beat of you living, breathing, being alive.

Reading is like - some duffer poem on Radio 4.

What's the point in learning it if it's rubbish?  But you need to practice.  So you're reading it and you know it's shit and....you should have memorised it but you can't because you don't think it's very good, etc, ad infinitum.....

Cheating.

The human brain is a very adaptable thing. I have somehow managed to circumvent my own no-FACEBOOK-on-my-phone embargo by logging in via Safari instead of the app, which I threw away.

It's a horrible addiction. I am going to have to block myself or something.

"A boat is safe in the harbour, but that is not what a boat is for."

The terror of happiness.

You are so frightened of being loved.

Maybe it's because when you were little once your mother didn't give you a biscuit when she did your brother.  Or maybe it's because at school you had a friend that stopped being your friend when you started liking Batman, and liked someone else who liked Spiderman instead.  Or maybe it's because somebody once loved you, and then stopped loving you and that fucking hurt and you couldn't cope with the pain and you didn't know how to move on and you don't really want that to happen again.

Maybe it's because sometimes people fall in love with you and you don't like their politics, or their dog, or the spot they had yesterday on their nose.  Maybe it's because sometimes people love you and you don't know why, because God's Sake you're annoying and boring and your feet smell and you've nothing to say after work so you've no idea how they could possibly love you, and maybe it's not right; they're not the right one, because what's the right one? Who? How do you know who the right one is and what if you end up with the wrong one and there's someone else more right around the corner and what if you had children and then you realise it was all wrong and then...

SHIT.  

You're 90.

Lies.

Daniella sells the Big Issue outside the Co-op in the area I live.  She's Algerian Muslim I think. She wears a headscarf, she has several gold teeth and chronic Arthritis.  Sometimes when we used to do the market she would borrow painkillers from my husband and they would discuss the horrors of Arthritic pain in the cold.   I like her a lot, despite the fact that she's very religious (I don't tend to generally get on with religious people, I usually want to hit them for being stupid, in my tolerant Atheist way) and she has many children, one of them the same age as Solly.

Solly adores her.  When he sees her he shrieks, "DANIELLLLLLA!" and runs towards her and hugs her, burying his head in her folds of skirts.  She also adores him and we talk a lot about how quickly all of our children grow.

I can't afford to buy the Big Issue every week.  I can afford to buy it some weeks but if I did that then she would think I was going to buy it every week and then if I couldn't afford it I would feel bad and she would think I had let her down. I don't want her to rely on me, for me to become one of her regulars because what if I don't have the money sometimes?

Instead what I do is, I give her money in a Christmas card each year, because at Christmas I usually do have money, owing to basically being a Christmas elf and making all the things for people to give each other.  So I give her 20 or 30 quid and anyway, I also give to several charities directly once a month and when I see people on the streets I try to give them what I have in my pocket so not buying the Big Issue off Daniella isn't that mean a thing to do.

****

Actually, this is all a lie.  I could afford to buy the Big Issue each week.  It's £3 out of my budget which isn't that much in the greatest scheme of things.  I could afford to buy it and don't, telling myself that I give elsewhere already and I don't want her to rely on me and all of the things I've just said.

But actually it probably wouldn't make that much difference to me, whereas it would to her.

I suppose that just proves I am basically shit.

Standing on the edges of Winter, contemplating the jump.

Creatures

I feel like a mole in the sunlight , I've got no idea how to function,

Or possibly a goat in the lions enclosure, knowingly about to be pounced on.

I can't work out how to fix things or even if I really want to,

My thoughts are messy, buzzing flies and right inside it all is you.

My dogs keep smelling my clothes and me, the fear is seeping from my pores,

I've no idea how to do this anymore. All I want to be is yours.

I wake up every morning feeling sick, I'm not pregnant or likely to be, I think it's all the anger inside of me, dripping corrosively.

Doors to automatic

Sometimes someone says something to you and it hurts so badly it rings in your ears. It makes your eyes smart, your nails make marks in your hands from the tension. It makes you so angry you can't speak and you just want to scream but somehow your voice has been taken away and who's going to hear it anyway?

Probably you're shaking.

Look out for that feeling if it happens to you. You'll know it when it comes. You'll feel hurt and angry and righteous and affronted. Look out for that feeling, and welcome it because its called the Truth.

And you don't like it, you don't believe it, because how the fuck do they know what you're thinking anyway? For a while too you're in denial, you just want to stay in your bubble, because its much easier there with your calm lies and gentle reasoning. (If someone screams in the bubble and no-one is there to hear it was there really a scream? )

Without the bubble the world is a horrible scary place full of...thought. Rawness. Picking at the sores of love? Elation. Devastation. Or even just emotion, which is bad enough because you've tried long and hard to shut it down, to close it off, doors to automatic and cross check.

You see, without the bubble you might actually have to do something. Be something, change something. Paralysed with indecision isn't the place to be when the soft walls are no longer there to support you, when you don't have your blinkers on anymore. And you know that if you step outside you might discover an inner melancholia you didn't even realise you had.

You might.

So you stay there, Lalala with your fingers in your ears pretending not to hear, desperately pretending not to hear and not to believe it because if you do you might actually have to start living, breathing, really being.

And stop just existing instead.

First draft of The Crazy Gravy Train

Sometimes I have panic attacks in the supermarket because I can't find real, true food to feed my family with, 

It's all just sell, sell, sell and E numbers and additives.

And extra salt and extra sugar and pass the doughnuts please, darling, 

flick, flick, flick through the food adverts to the next TV reality Prince Charming.

And then I think how shallow it is when I am surrounded by choice, to be panicking,  

This sweat and fear and needing to leave is not damaging,

It's just option paralysis, a rich Western neurosis; we are paying the price,

Instead of having nothing to eat we deliberate over a hundred different brands of rice.

Part of the problem is our constant reliance on big pharma prescription chemicals,

Being told that it's good to numb your feelings makes me polemical,

This laughable contemporary plague is a self-perpetuating myth of us,

Chasing our own tail like a crazy dog, like Oroborus.

But we're so numb now there aren't even 'best bits', our 'TV highlights',

We've got no creativity, no elation, we're lacking insight.

We're creaking wearily toward a mono-future of calm self-destruction,

Controlled by the companies that feed us our feeling interruption.

(This isn't finished yet.  Or even a little bit sorted but I'm posting it anyhow. I've got a lot else to write in it about anti-depressants and society).

Communal creation

I've just been reading about a beautiful project which maps the centre of Toronto using hand drawn maps done by people who were asked for directions.

I think there's something hauntingly beautiful about the idea of all the individual drawn directions coming together to create the whole picture, as if somehow the citizens of Toronto created their own space just by drawing it.

http://www.futurefarmers.com/survey/collaborativemap.php

I can't even begin to tell you. The people who know couldn't tell you. No-one can tell you because it's not our story, and it's not fair.

Ssssh.

Jesus God how do you switch your writing brain off when it's on again?

I remember now why I liked Facebook, all the numb zombie-like scrolling down and refreshing, thinking about other people's lunches was what was replacing this constant, annoying chatter which is filling my brain and trying to get out of my hand.

STAND FIRM, STRIKE HARD.

At the hospital this morning I see a young couple in the main entrance. He is clearly a soldier, he's got that young, hunky squaddie look, really cropped hair and is in a wheelchair. She's wearing a jacket that has print on the back which reads:

STAND FIRM
STRIKE HARD

I am intrigued and a little bit nosey and casually manoeuvre myself into place to see what it says on the front. Worcester Foresters...something something...regiment.

I look it up on the Internet and its an army regiment. I suppose if you are a forester then standing firm and striking hard is the ideal thing to do, and I can see how that has also been adopted as the motto for this army regiment. It's a strong image.

So the soldier is just wheeling his chair along casually and talking to his partner when all of a sudden we get out the revolving door and he launches into a brilliant series of tricks and wheel spins in his chair, all the while carrying on talking. He's like a kid with a BMX, doing tidy mini-wheelies as he goes along, tipping the chair right back, stopping, starting. Spinning. It's brilliant.

Then they get to the car park and they get in the lift and because they don't have to pay and we do they are quicker than us and they are gone.

And I think:

STAND FIRM
STRIKE HARD

And if none of that works, learn how to do nifty, little wheelies in your wheelchair.

On not being spam.

Apparently, I am spam. I'm not sure I believe this, in particular as I'm far to vain to be such a boring thing. However, more than one person has said this so whilst I deplore the idea of being assigned the 'so dull as not worth bothering' tag by a random computer programme I must accept that it is somehow true and that sadly I have not been identified as in any way special. In some email clients you can mark people as 'NOT JUNK' which I like because almost all the people I actually want to correspond with are not junk at all, else I wouldn't be corresponding.

I feel offended. In my inbox everyday there are emails from people with far more unlikely email addresses than mine, most of them spam. My email client doesn't seem to distinguish between good, bad, rubbish or just plain ludicrous; 'You are due a tax rebate of £3,562. Click here to enter your details for payment.' This is ludicrous because I haven't earned enough to even pay that much tax in a very long time, let alone be due it as a rebate. They really should check the income status of the people they send those emails to, otherwise it's a big waste of everyone's time, theirs and mine. In fact if I was an Internet crook I'd definitely try and target my spam more carefully, perhaps even do a little market research.

But then you see sending things out into the Internet isn't my style at all, I'm far more picky than that. So if you ever get an email from me you should count yourself very lucky indeed. And also somehow let your email client know that I'm a little more important than spam.

On (un)recklessness

She thinks she might give up being reckless. It's very under-appreciated and it takes a lot of work, a lot of time and commitment for, lately, what seems to be very little reward.

It's not something that she is by nature anyway; she really has to try to be it. And is being un-reckless really that dreadful? Would she definitely end up in a job she hates, sitting on the sofa in the evenings, in front of the TV, with limited interaction?

She's seriously considering changing it all. A return to her uninteresting, sensible self, innocuous and dull, instead of living this ludicrously painful, excruciatingly worrying attempt at life on the edge.

Time doesn't heal any fucking wounds. It just makes me a little less likely to want to stab someone.

A lack of divinity

I don't believe in God and I have no particular allegiance to the idea of Divinity. I went to church when I was a little girl but that was really just for the social life - the Sunday school teacher made really good flapjacks and was motherly, at a time when my Mother had become bedridden for a few years with depression.

I've done a lot of drugs and have had mystical experiences with the best of them, just like the rest of them. I've been there with the one consciousness and I've spent my time in a sweat lodge. Been there with the spirit animal. Done that.


But since my Father died and nothing happened I decided that there clearly wasn't anything interesting in the 'other side' because if there was he would have done his utter damnedest to make sure I knew.

NOTHING HAPPENED.

He died, this man, this man who was obviously crucially important to me. He was an atheist who knew he was going to the earth and that was it when he died. So if he was wrong....and then he went somewhere else he would have DEFINITELY made a big deal about it. And yet still nothing happened.

No ghosts. No weirdness. No falling objects, no lights going on and off. No crazy messages written in blood on the wall. No letters from the grave. No coldness. No spooky feelings. Nothing. Not a damn thing.

NO. THING.

So I am a non-believer. It's not really rational, not in a SCIENCE FACT kind of way, although I am far more inclined to believe in a wormy old carcass than some kind of guiding light. It would just take a lot to convince me that there was any kind of after-life; I would have to have my own near death experience, because yours just wouldn't be enough. Not now. Not then. Not ever.

I'm telling you this because today I watched two brilliant TED talks that got me thinking about the idea of oneness. These TED talks both ended with standing ovations, and were both real life stories, told by women. In places they are uncomfortable for me, as I say, 'Divinity' is not something I recognise. But in the first instance the story of the poet being 'chased' by a poem is moving and special, and in the second story I align myself with this lady of science, a brain scientist who experienced something so remarkable it reduced her to tears on a stage in front of her audience.

I want people to watch them both. Don't just watch one and not the other - find the time to watch them together.

And then?

I don't know.

Lets talk about it.



http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html



http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

Derby rosters

So I didn't make the roster for the Manchester game and I know it's because I'm injured and everything, I know that. But I can't help feeling gutted anyway. And the worst part is, of course I know how important it is for us to field a strong team and a weak injured link does not a strong team make, and I wouldn't want to be rostered anyway when we have so many brilliant skaters now.

My rational brain knows this. But still.

Sob.

The derby love.

There is a sort of desire I have for skating which is unstoppable.

Even though each time I do it I know my knee will end up all swollen and hurting I still can't not skate.

My rational brain knows that I shouldn't be doing it but emotionally I am completely compelled. It's like an illicit lover, obsessive and all consuming and really fucking dangerous, but you just can't stop doing it anyway even though you know it's hopelessly bad for you and will end in many, many tears.

Writing not to you.

I just want to make it clear here that I'm not writing about you. For instance, if I write about the fact that a random man bit me for no reason at all in a nightclub once and you did that; that was you and you recall it, well then yes, that bit clearly is about you.

But most of this isn't about you, it's not about anyone, not even me. It's just writing.

Except when it isn't, and I'm writing to you, but you'll know that won't you?

Because you did it.

...

....

.....

I've got the blackest pile of slimy gloom hanging over my head, dripping down into my eyes and burying me.

48 ways

I keep writing beginnings. I keep starting things, making notes and jotting down the ideas of things, spawning little tiny projects that remain unfulfilled. I can't stop it. I'm not sure why it's happening, maybe it's the beginning of writing again after a long break, I don't know.

But I want them to grow. I want to send them off out into the Universe and have them return full and complete and ready for the world.

Instead I've got a notebook full of strange little two word notes that say things like:

48 ways.

New beginnings.

Everyone has written everything. There is nothing left to write. All the words are used and I am casting about for topics left write about. Every time I think of something it immediately sounds trite and cliched. Yeah I can't sleep - so can't half the world and they've all already written about how each dark second becomes a lonely hour. They've written about longing, and wishing and hoping, waiting and worrying into the dawn. They've told all the tales of sitting, working, drunk with exhaustion from the night before.

They've used up all the words and there are none left for me that haven't already been chewed over millions of times before.