Adele Archer's Blog, page 14

For Dear Life

 

By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way to have a diagnostic procedure at my local treatment centre. I know, on a freakin’ Saturday morning! What a way to write off a day. Don’t worry, dear reader, I’m as healthy as an ox. But as you may know from earlier posts, cancer has featured far too commonly amongst my siblings (robbing me of one of them), so I have to have regular checks because now I’m under the radar. And I’m thankful – no, utterly grateful, to be under the radar. If anything should crop up in the future, hopefully it can be nipped in the bud. I was never one to worry about death before, and perhaps surprisingly, I don’t particularly worry about it a great deal now. But I do think about the possibility of not being around a little bit more than I used to. None of us like to think about our own mortality, but sure as eggs are eggs, we’ve only got our allotted time on this earth.

January in Britain has been blighted by some extremely upsetting celebrity deaths – all iconic, household names, all taken by the cruel and heartlessly random cancer; gravel-voiced Lemmy from Motorhead, inspirational David Bowie, the finest of actors Alan Rickman and just last weekend, charmingly witty TV and radio broadcaster Terry Wogan. All gone too soon – through no fault of their own. I didn’t know these people personally, of course, they were not family or friends – but they had become a part of our lives. And I’m so very sad that they are no longer with us. I cannot bear when people don’t get their full quota of life. Sometimes you hear about the passing of certain celebrities through thrill-seeking; the misuse of drugs and alcohol for kicks or, well, I don’t know for what reasons. I hate to think of young talent, amazing potential snuffed out; a person taken in their prime. But the feeling that overrides this is a sense of…anger. Yes, I do – I admit it. I feel angry with with them. Angry that they took flagrant chances, played Russian roulette with that fragile thing called life. When so many others are ripped from this world kicking and screaming. Most of us would do anything to survive. I don’t mean to judge; who knows what demons some people are plagued with? So nightmarish they feel forced to turn to substances to numb the pain. But life is so short, life is so precious, we need to hang on to it for as long as we can – if we can.

I don’t mean to cast aspersions on those who feel the need to end their life prematurely because of mental illness – an illness is exactly what depression or anxiety or any other disorder of the mind is. Some people are so low they cannot see the wood from the trees. Some take their lives just through the sheer misery other people inflict on them day after day. Some people lead nightmarish lives that you and I couldn’t possibly even imagine. So nightmarish that leaving the world seems like a blessed release. I get that. And it’s heartbreaking that some have their very survival instinct crushed out of them.

Anyway, this is getting too heavy so I won’t digress any further down that path. Hopefully this little procedure I’m having might be over by now. I might even be enjoying a slab of cake and a full fat latte as a reward right at this very moment. And apart from that occasional slab of cake and full fat latte (with possibly a biscotti on the side), I do the best I can to stay healthy. I’ve been reckless in my teens and twenties – even my thirties. Too much to drink, too much fatty/sugary food, too much sun (I haven’t given up everything, I mean, we’ve all got to have a few vices to make life more enjoyable). But I had a wake up call. Now I eat better, don’t smoke, drink very little alcohol, regularly exercise, I rub in the factor 30. I go for tests whenever they tell me to. But my sister did all those things (she never smoked or drank and could swim for miles and miles) but it didn’t save her. There are no guarantees, I’m afraid. But you can only give yourself the best of chances.

There’s a reason I don’t play with my health these days. And it’s not because I’m afraid not to exist any more; I’ve never been afraid of death as such (I shouldn’t say that. The thing that gets to me most is how scared my sister must have been at the end when she knew she wasn’t going to make it. I never stopped to ask her. I was too afraid to hear the answer). I take no chances because of my loved ones. I do it for the people who would be left behind. And sadly, I know first hand what it’s like to be left behind. Because you see, our fundamental desire to survive which all of us were born with and the majority of us still have, well that desire shouldn’t be ignored. So my friends, take good care of yourselves, and maybe we can make a toast to our respective good health over a well deserved pint when we’re in our eighties. We’ll have crisps too. Well, it will be a special occasion.

NB: Apologies, YET ANOTHER maudlin post this weekend. I promise to make you laugh next time. Or that least I’ll try. I’m not a joke machine, y’know…

 

 

Push the Button

 

 

This may not have come across during the discourse of my blog posts, but I am naturally shy by nature. Well, sort of. When I write, I can throw off the burdensome mantle of meekness and divulge the true contents of my personality, but that isn’t always the case in day-to-day life. I come from a family of notoriously shy people; who speak when spoken to, tend to avoid eye-contact, are ever-polite, say ‘excuse me’ and ‘sorry’ an awful lot and generally avoid large crowds or gatherings if humanly possible. However, of all my siblings, I guess I would say I am the least diffident. There is a hidden inner voice within me that frowns upon ‘keeping my head down’. I remember thinking even as a kid, yes I’m an introvert but shyness gets you nowhere in life, so you must overcome this. And so, on occasion, I do. But perhaps not in the right way. These days I think of myself more as an introvert with an extrovert screaming to get out. With the use (or on many occasions, the ill-use) of humour, I get by. Some may say I overcompensate. They may just be right.

If I had to describe myself, I’d say I’m still waters, but beneath the surface there is an undercurrent of mischief. It’s a bit like that picture of the red button above; you know you shouldn’t push the button, but what would happen if you did? And sometimes you just can’t stop yourself. And that’s me. Meek and mild, meek and mild, day after day, meek and mild. Until an opportunity to do something really stupid presents itself. And then that usually silent inner voice will scream at me, do it, do it, do it! So I do. There are too many instances to mention but here are a few examples.

The real me (or rather the stupidly-zany projection of me) really came to the fore at school. As you can imagine, I was my naturally shy and reclusive self. But one day, during a particularly dull religious studies lesson, I realised that the sun glinting on my oversized watch-face created a rather magnificent ray of light. And when projecting this dazzlingly magnificent ray of light into Mrs Pearce (the religious studies teacher’s) eyes, she would unfailingly be forced to stop, stammer and shield her face from it. Much to the delight and surprise if my schoolmates who had never seen Adele being naughty. And so this fun continued until Margaret (my classmate sitting beside me) caught on to this magnificent activity and proceeded to try the same trick, but this time using the shiny inside lid of her metal pencil case. At this point I took a back seat until suddenly Mrs Pearce exploded in fury, ‘Margaret!! Get out!!!’. Margaret was shamefully dismissed from the room, leaving me to face the accusing stares of my class. ‘…Miss,’ I instinctively put up my hand, ‘my watch is very big and shiny and I’ve got a feeling that I might accidentally have been shining light in your eyes, not Margaret…’. Mrs Pearce’s face broke into a beam. ‘Oh Adele, that’s very sweet of you to try to take the fall for your friend, but I saw Margaret with my own eyes’. So I shrugged and lowered my hand. Well I’d tried. A boy named Alfred seated across from me turned to whisper, ‘you jammy bastard.’

Forward wind to a few years later. At the age of eighteen I got my first job at the head office of a music retail company as an administrative assistant in the ‘Services Department’. That meant we dealt with things like the shop tills in our nationwide stores. The first week was difficult as first weeks usually are. I was the new girl; nobody knew me and I didn’t know them. And after a few days, the polite smiles and suppression of my inner self began to become tiresome. One day, a couple of members of the neighbouring department to mine (Rachel and Mark) came by with a giant home made card for one of their team members. Oddly enough, she had the same name as me and was only a few weeks further into her job than I was but found the job wasn’t to her taste. Since a few of their department were away on annual leave, I was asked by Rachel and Mark if I would be happy to forge a signature for ‘Richard’, just to say goodbye. They confidently went away and left me to it. Now to this day, I still don’t know why I did this. Like I say, I think I was bored of being thought of as shy. So with my trusty black marker I wrote, ‘I loved you x Richard’. When Rachel and Mark returned, I handed back the oversized card with an expectant smile. Both Rachel and Mark looked at the card, then at each other, then back at the card. And in horrified, hushed voices they anxiously discussed amongst themselves if there was time to make a new card. It turned out that the girl who was leaving didn’t possess a sense of humour. At all. She may merely have been shy, but if she was, she was shy to the point of rudeness. Baffled at my amazing joke having gone bad, I insisted Rachel and Mark give the card back to me and I wrote underneath my hilarious comment in brackets, (Only joking, I wrote this as Richard was away. Good luck in your new job x Adele). And strangely enough, this huge gaff broke the ice and that ended up being one of my favourite jobs ever; I still know staff from that office to this day. It was something we all came to laugh about – eventually.

Twenty five years later and I’m afraid to say I haven’t changed much. My office encompasses hundreds of different healthcare workers all under one roof. Some I only know to look at. As you can imagine, this can make for interesting staff Christmas parties when we all come together in one place – one place containing alcohol. A wee while ago I was innocently eating my lunch in the staff coffee room. I tend to keep to myself and eat at my desk but I thought I’d get out of my office for a bit of a change of scenery. In strolled two of the dental team who happened to be husband and wife (and who hopefully don’t read this blog) and proceeded to join me. They began animatedly chatting about last years’ Christmas party. They were insisting how glad they were that the old system of having a sit-down meal at a hotel around tables of ten, with set name-places was being abandoned this year in favour of a buffet style party at the office, where you could mill around at your leisure. They went on to say how they weren’t especially keen on the old system because you were ‘forced to sit at a table with a bunch of boring people and you got stuck with them for the duration of the night’. I quietly sat there eating my sandwich and contemplating this, thinking, I could be a tad offended since my husband and I had actually been seated at their very table the Christmas before. I remembered this quite clearly because they had dominated the entire meal with their noisy banter and bickering, but evidently they had forgotten me. Over lunch the married pair, still banging on about that fateful Christmas, still being loud and a teeny bit obnoxious, eventually turned to me to ask my opinion on office Christmas parties and if I had attended the sit-down meal the year before. Awkwardly swallowing a lump of bread and ham, I scratched my head and said, ‘well yes, I was sitting at the same table as you two boring bastards’. I broke into a big mock-innocent smile which luckily turned their slightly crestfallen faces into big guffaws of laughter. A dental nurse standing at the nearby sink stirring her cuppa-soup had to physically turn away and hide her face, her shoulders shaking, so she could silently snicker to herself. I don’t know why I do it. But again, it broke the ice. I go to lunch more often these days to see who else I can offend.

Anyway, I could go on but some of these outbursts aren’t fit for publication and some I’ve forgotten. Maybe you know me of old and could dredge up some gaff I’ve long since erased from memory (my children are hugely embarrassed of some of my ‘episodes’ in shops that I didn’t even realise were mortifying for them). It’s not just me, is it? Do you ever do stuff like this? Just blurting out the first words that come into your head or acting out the dumbest impulse? My normally safely concealed risqué sense of humour comes at a price. Sometimes the jokes land and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you’re met with a roomful of laughter, sometimes complete silence falls with a tumble weed rolling by. Yet to this day, I still have this urge to take that risk. To push the red button. Usually because I’m bored of being misconstrued as a shy person, or to break an awkward silence, or through nerves; a silly idea will come into my head and I just HAVE to go through with it or forever regret it. Do it, do it, do it! That extrovert screaming to break free from the shell of an introvert just keeps insisting at me. Anyway, of late I’ve managed to channel that mischief into writing instead, which is a far safer outlet, I think we can all agree. Or at least the benefits outweigh the risks, which they don’t always in real life. Heigh-ho.

NB: I wasn’t going to post this weekend but dragged this post out of the ‘I’m not sure if I should publish this’ folder and tweaked it a bit at the behest of my writer friend, Lizzie. She does night shifts on Friday nights and likes to sit in bed with her porridge on Saturday mornings whilst reading my blog. Then she can drift off to sleep, safe in the knowledge that her life isn’t quite as stupid as mine. So if this post isn’t up to par, blame Lizzie. Because I intend to. 

 

One-Trick Pony

The 25th January 2016 is the first anniversary of the date I self-published my début novel, International Relations (I should be writing this post on Monday, but nobody reads blogs on Mondays, something to do with having a job? I know, selfish. So…here we are…on a Saturday). Anyhoo, I thought to myself, do I really want to write an anniversary post about that? And the answer was a resounding ‘no’. I don’t especially care that a year has gone by. And if I don’t, there’s no reason that you should. But what I do want to talk about is where one supposed to go from here. And by ‘one’, I mean me. In the very near future, this trilogy will be done and dusted. It will be time to write something entirely new. The problem is, as the saying goes, I got nothin‘.

The real issue I’m struggling with is that it was such an incredibly long time ago that I came up with the idea for my current series, that I’ve forgotten the process. I can’t remember how those initial sparks of inspiration even come about. I can’t imagine I ever sat down and drew a lovely pie-chart or a graph or a spider diagram mapping out what I wanted to achieve. I’ve always flown by the seat of my pants. The only thing I do recall was that I’d just had my first child, I was on maternity leave and I wanted to constructively fill my baby’s two hour daily nap time with something creative. And I know I called on childhood ideas from when I used to write in my teens. I sat down in our home-office (we stopped having an office once my second child was born) and I pulled up a Microsoft word document and that was the starting point. But that was some time ago – and what does a 44 year old woman actually write about, I wonder? I’m vastly more experienced and worldly-wise than I was. Well, y’know, kinda’…

I have become irritated with the phrase, ‘writers block’. It’s overused, a bit hackneyed and doesn’t really sum up a feeling I’ve ever experienced. If I had a story plan, I’d be good to go. Once I know roughly what I’m supposed to be writing about, I’m a bit of a machine. I only suffer with ‘lack of time’. But you see, for my future venture, I don’t have a plan and I’m wondering whether I really ought to? I’m actually putting off sitting down and brainstorming a strategy about what to write next. I keep telling myself, ‘well, I’m a starter-completer (it’s a thing) and I simply must finish this project before I can contemplate a new one’. I’m just slightly concerned that when I do get around to researching the next project, nothing will be forthcoming. Nada. Perhaps that is writers block, but I really feel I just need the initial idea and then I’ll be off like a rabbit out of the traps. I mean, it isn’t like I don’t know how to write any more; I’m editing all the time – rewriting and adding in huge chunks of story. But putting together something completely new with a completely different backdrop and completely different characters? Eeek.

The only thing I’m certain about is that I don’t want to write a romantic novel next time. I don’t particularly want to be pigeon-holed or typecast or boxed into a corner. I can be diverse. I think. I’ve discovered in the last year that I can write really banal and inane blogs that have virtually nothing to do with love or relationships. I know, I was surprised too. So that’s an indication to me that I’m capable of other things. Not that there’s anything wrong with romantic fiction; it’s the biggest seller of all genres and it’s vastly underrated at times. I for one was bored of reading bad romantic fiction so thought I’d have a stab at it myself. And there’s an art to getting the chemistry between two people right. It’s astounding to me that some fiction in that genre lacks that chemistry at all; the relationships frustratingly rushed or highly unlikely or just a bit disappointing. I’m not saying I’ve perfected that art, but when you do (and I reiterate, I’m not saying I did [but I think I did]), it’s like alchemy. A certain kind of magic happens if you get it right. But like it or not, the powers that be don’t rate romantic fiction. There ain’t no Booker or Pulitzer Prize for the likes of us (maybe because we’re a bit too free and easy with the word ain’t [its okay, I’m a cockney – and it’s my birthright]). But that’s not the only reason I want to cross the genre-border. I don’t read a great deal of romantic fiction, although I’m always happy when an author crowbars a romantic dalliance in. I mainly read fantasy, if I’m honest, and wonder if I would have any aptitude for writing that. Although I’ve a interest in writing murder mystery too. Which to choose, which to choose…

Anyway, maybe it doesn’t matter right now. This current project isn’t done yet so perhaps my ordered, black-and-white brain won’t allow me to move on until it is. Or maybe I am that archetypal one-trick pony; my writing career over before it really started. You just can’t live off one idea for the rest of your life. Maybe I’ll just end up being a blogger – I still, more or less, manage to pull these posts out of the bag at the nth hour (just about). But I love and always have been in love with escapism, and there’s nothing like the feeling of creating your own imaginary place with your own imaginary people who live in it. It even surpasses reading fiction (which I also love, just to be clear). I hope that need to create another world, that desire to invent another reality when my own is a bit too much to cope with, will win out in the end. I guess only time will tell. Right, I’m off to write a highly detailed food shopping list, because that’s about as much creativity as I can muster. That’s right, I still got nothin‘.

 

Lost in Translation

My family and I are seriously considering visiting Germany for our summer holiday this year. I have never been but have long wanted to go since taking German for GCSE at school. The family with whom our daughter lived with last year for her German exchange trip have very kindly invited us to stay. So we plan to pop in on them whilst visiting other interesting parts of the country; Berlin, The romantic Rhine, Cologne, the castles of Bavaria etc. But my German is rusty. Very rusty. So I thought, it’s time to brush up on my language skills.

The beauty of living in this era is that I don’t need to join a boring evening language class. You can just download an app on your phone or tablet and learn for free in the comfort of your own home. And that is exactly what I have done. I thought, what with the training I’d had in my teens, I’d have a bit of a head start (I failed my GCSE – I got a D, but we won’t talk about that); I couldn’t have been more wrong about the head start. However, I must have realised this because I chose to start at the beginner’s level – and that is precisely where I belong.

I always imagine learning a language will be easier than it turns out to be. What I expect is that every English word has it’s equivalent in the chosen language. And I, in turn, learn each of those words and become fluent in chosen language. Hoorah! But the problem lies in that most other languages like to have more than one word for the one English word you are trying to find it’s German equal. For example:-

The = Der, Die or Das (and sometimes even Den)

A = Ein, Eine or Einen

You = Du, Ihr or Sie

Are = Sind, Seid or Bist

Have = Habe, Haben or Hast

or adversely:-

Sie = She or They or You

Well that’s just wonderful. As you probably know (being the smart readers you are), these variations are either gender-specific, plural/singular or dependant on the person you are talking to (somebody in authority or a friend etc). Or something. But you see, I can’t remember which one is which! I know what you’re thinking, the English language is probably difficult to learn for a foreigner too. We have odd words that sound absolutely nothing like the way in which they are spelt. For instance, choir ought to be pronounced quire but looks like…well, choir. Or Subtle should be pronounced suttle but there’s that stupid ‘b’ in it. Not to mention some of our place names. Many a foreigner (even English speaking ones) struggle with places like Leicestershire or Worcestershire or Edinburgh. But you could quite easily travel around England and never feel yourself in need of saying. ‘I would like to go see that subtle choir in Worcestershire’. Whereas I need to be able to say ‘the’ and ‘you’ a fair bit and there’s a high probability that I’m going to look like a right bloody idiot in Germany!

The app I am using is called Duolingo and I have to say it’s fairly good, but on occasion you have to speak into the phone and repeat the German phrase you see and hear on the screen. I consider myself a pretty good mimic so I impersonate the teacher using the phrase for, ‘I am sorry’. This in German is, ‘Es tut mir leid’. I must have cited those words aloud ten times but I am repeatedly told I’ve said it incorrectly. Well I’m sorry you hard-of-hearing old hag from Duolingo, but I said it exactly the way you did! And what’s more, why does ‘Es tut mir leid’ even mean ‘I’m sorry’anyway, when the German for ‘I’ is ‘Ich’, ‘am’ is ‘bin’ and ‘sorry’ is ‘entschuldigung’??!! Arrrrgghhhh!!!! 

On the plus side, Duolingo assures me that I am now 4% fluent in German. Woohoo! Only another 96% to go! The app even suggested I share this joyous news with LinkedIn. Yes, that’s right – the business-oriented social network. Because I’m sure there is a huge calling for healthcare professionals who occasionally write books or sarcastic blogs but are also 4% fluent in German. I hasten to add I am not going to be sharing this information with LinkedIn. All I want is to understand and to be understood. But the app, like all language-teaching tools, also tends to want to teach me things I am very unlikely to need to be able to say in conversation. Things like (I kid you not), ‘the child eats insects’. Handy. I can see that coming up on a daily basis…

There is also this small voice in the back of my mind that keeps reminding me that German isn’t the only language I’d like to learn. I’ve been telling myself for years that I ought to learn Spanish as so many of the world’s population speak it. But I fear there is only so much room left in my minuscule brain. Yes, there are people in the world who are fluent in multiple languages but they’re just irritating show-offs and are not worthy of mention in this blog. And I think we can all agree on that. I may only have the brain capacity for Deutsch (you see? Fluent. [4%]). If I ever make it big, I will have to only go on book-signing tours in English speaking countries, or German speaking ones (that’s Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, right?). So I’m all set, really.

Seriously though, to my German readers, I am not casting aspersions on your beautiful language, I’m just mad at my teeny-tiny brain for not allowing me to grasp your language as easily as I’d like. But I won’t give up. You might see me in your fair country this summer conversing like a pro. Or at least inadequately scraping by with my God-awful pigeon-German. But I am determined to give it a try. And if I’ve said anything above that you don’t feel is relevant for me to learn as it isn’t widely used in day-to-day German conversation, please let me know. I will gladly erase it from my memory. It won’t be hard. Bis bald!

(Look it up).

NB: I’m certain there are people out there who will be cringing at my use of the German language above, muttering, ‘she’s used the masculine accusative when she ought to have gone for the neutral or pleural bler-bler-bler-bler-bler-bler-bler-bler…’ (I’ve already gone).

How Was It For You (2015)?

 

A year in your life is a pretty long time. It would be difficult to dismiss 365 days as an entirely crappy year, or adversely, a completely brilliant period of time. I don’t really know why we do this; await the eve of a new year to try to assess how we have progressed as a person. Are we any more self-actualised than the person we were 365 days ago? Do we really need to deliberate over these changes (or lack of changes)? Why don’t we take stock of our lives on our birthdays instead? I’ve just turned 44 so why didn’t I take a long hard look at my life earlier this month? However, if I’m going to do this look back over my year (and I am – I’ve got to write about something), I suppose this year I have made a start at attempting to really define myself as the person I want to be. But in spite of that and perhaps because of it, I have ignored a lot of my internal struggles. Either way, as years go, 2015 has been fairly significant for me.

This was the year I finally got my foot on the first rung of the ladder – the writing ladder (if you will). If you follow this blog or know me in any way, shape or form – you’ll be horribly bored of hearing that I finally got around to self-publishing my first novel in January. The book (and it’s 2nd and 3rd volume) was something I had been secretly working on for years but was never confident about sharing with the world. And I’m not really sure why, but last January enough was enough and I decided to put the damn thing out there and to hell with the consequences. Nearly a year has gone by since I took the plunge and even though I’m not on the best-seller list yet, the sales steadily improve. The second book is nearly ready and the third is ready for editing. Oh, and the first book is now in paperback so it’s nice to see something that I have written finally in the confines of a glossy-covered book. And even if nothing ever comes of it, at least it’s one job ticked off the bucket list.

As an unforeseen offshoot of the book, in February 2015 I started this blog. Like most authors, the blog only came about because I’d read that I was supposed to have one – y’know, give readers a taste of my writing style etc. And considering I didn’t even know what to write about at first, comparatively (if we’re talking views and visitors and interest), the blog has been more successful than the book. I think this may be because the blog developed into being the one place (apart from the innermost recesses of my mind) where I felt comfortable enough to be honest; to really give of myself. Sometimes I wonder if I give too much away but I have come to believe that if you can’t really give of yourself, then you can’t call yourself a writer. And people seem to like honesty – who knew. I had never really set out to be a blogger, but I have grown to love the blog. It’s my diary. But other projects and commitments have dictated that I can’t give as much time to the blog as I’d like – so maybe in 2016 I might be a little bit more elusive. Still, I’d like to think I’ll still be here in January 2017 and not become one of the many that simply fade away (I see that happen a lot). I still have a lot to say – I just need to find more time to say it. Either that or I’ll completely run out of material, burn out and retire from writing altogether. I mean, there’s only so much you need to know about me.

But perhaps that’s enough patting myself on the back. Every year of our lives will have its share of negatives. I’m still the emotionally scarred me that I was last December. I’ve done little to nothing to make inroads into fixing my bereaved self. However, I have become incredibly skilled at forgetting and ignoring. I’m super awesome at that. And then there’s that procrastinating part of my psyche that is still unwilling to take any risks and change my circumstances. I know life is short; I should know that better than most people but I am still unwilling to make the major life changes that would make my day-to-day life a happier place. Don’t get me wrong, I have a happy home life – within my nuclear family, life is hunky-dory. I’m not griping about that. But I’m still not doing what I want to do, being who I need to be. All too often I play it safe because the fear of failure looms heavy over me. Heavier than it should. And if anything has to change, it’s got to be that. Still, I’m aware of it and the awareness has to be a starting point.

So what about you? Has the dawning of 2016 seen you becoming the person you desire to be? Or are you one of those lucky, driven people who has that focused kind of mind which achieves its goals? Or do you have such a easygoing disposition anyway that you’re generally happy with your lot? And if you are one of those people, tell me how you do it. Tell me how to be happy with my lot. I have a roof over my head, food to eat, a great family and friends – so why is there always this missing, nameless thing just out of reach? I know one really ought to live in the moment and appreciate what we have, count our blessings. But I have always been of the mindset that the grass is always greener over there. If only I could just get over there. Anyway, I’m rambling here. I’ve got to learn that every step in the right direction is at least a step – a positive. And I’m sure I’ve been stepping in the right direction in 2015. I’ve got to be happy with the little achievements even if they are little. Lots of little’s make a big, right?

So readers, some of you I know personally and some of you I’ve met purely through your words and encouragement on a computer screen. 2015 has been great for that; lots of new and interesting  people, people from the past reappearing, people from the present steadfastly standing by me. Either way, you all mean a lot to me and thank you. Thank you for sitting-in and offering your comments on my journey and telling me a little bit about yours. It would be a lonelier place without you. Y’know, a bit like Twitter (i.e., walking around your empty house and shouting to yourself about the unfairness of life). Anyway, whatever shenanigans you got up to last night, now sitting there reading this on your sofa on New Year’s Day, gingerly sipping a coffee swiftly chased by a big glass of Berocca and nursing your aching head (like I am), I wish you a Happy New Year, people. Really, I hope it’s 365 days of pure ‘happy’. You never know.

 

Joyful and Triumphant…

 

 

Bah humbug! I’m only kidding. I kind of like the Christmas season on the whole when it rolls around (as it has again). Or at least I enjoy it from the perspective of my children who are so über excited that they have been counting down the ‘sleeps’ since the beginning of December. Anyway, I don’t expect any of you will be reading this today as you’re too busy ferreting through a family-sized tin of Quality Street, but if you do happen to be bored today or on Boxing Day; it’s nice of you to drop in! How did you find the lead-up to Chrimbo this year? I quite like Christmas itself but it’s the run-in that causes me the most anxiety. Like most things, there’s a lot about the Yuletide season that vexes me somewhat…

Presents

I do find the annual ‘gift list’ a growing chore. My kids are a breeze; I know exactly what they want (they won’t bloody well let me forget it), but it’s the other relatives that can be hard work. As December steadily marches by and my time runs out, towards the end of the month I find I am buying presents just for the sake of it. I barely care if the receiver is going to actually like it or not; at least they will have something to open and that’s the main thing. But that has to be wrong, doesn’t it? That has to be flouting some ‘Christmas Spirit’ ruling? And how much of this stuff just ends up in a landfill, I ask myself? We get ourselves into mountains of debt that will take us half a year to pay off just for the sake of a couple of days of celebrating. I do sometimes wonder why we make so much of it.

Cards

I detest writing Christmas cards. I think cards should only be sent to the elderly or infirm at Christmas. That doesn’t mean to say I don’t carry out the practice because I do. I worry about all the cards I will receive and the stress of finding I’ve missed the last posting date so I do as many cards as I can stomach. I guess there is some merit in the tradition of cards being sent because if we didn’t, there would be a mass of people in our lives we wouldn’t make contact with year-in-year-out (if it wasn’t for Christmas). So if you have received a card from me this year and you are not elderly or infirm, I do hope the dreadful mood I was in at the time hasn’t come across in the seasons greeting inside (I imagine a green puff of venom/bile being emitted as the envelope was opened). The words I wrote were heartfelt; I just don’t enjoy sitting down and writing them. One year, I once wrote all my cards in pretend pigeon-German, taking on the character of famous 1980’s British javelin thrower, Fatima Whitbread. For some reason. That was the only year I ever enjoyed writing cards. I just need to find a way to amuse myself or it isn’t fun for anybody. For those of you who didn’t receive a card from me this year, I do apologise – I honestly haven’t stopped caring about your existence. But I had probably lost the will to live at that point and couldn’t bring myself to write another one. And if you are from my husband’s side of the family or were his friend before you were my friend, I assigned your card-writing task to him (we do have to make some divisions of labour in our house). And he’s a lazy arse so you have probably been left wanting on the card front.

Wrapping

Wrapping presents is even worse than writing cards. Fact. Especially when you have a tonne to do. This probably arises from the fact that I’m terribly bad at it. I once watched a ‘how to’ video saying that the biggest mistake most people make is using too much paper. This makes for an untidy, ‘baggy’ present. Apparently. So I have tried to cut down on the paper to tidy things up a bit but I don’t get caught up in the complexities of ribbon-tying or ‘making a pressy look fancy’ business. They’re torn open so quickly in my house that there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of point. We’ve had the added hindrance this year of acquiring two cats over the summer. Cats love present wrapping. Or more correctly, they enjoy sitting on the paper whilst you are attempting to wrap a present. Which makes the whole process even less fun. Why do cats feel the incessant need to park their posteriors on paper? Answers on a postcard please.

Food

I won’t labour the point on this one, but I’m still on a diet healthy eating plan and I have only just hit my target weight. The thought of all that hard work going down the toilet is heart-breaking. Because it will, at least a bit. I’ve been reading a lot of blogs about how to survive the festive season if you’re on a diet but they’re mostly full of crap and don’t give you any meaningful advice. So the fact of it is, I am likely to binge a bit but hopefully I will have some tiny vestige of willpower left in me by the New Year to pick up where I left off. Oh, and all that running around we do to ensure we have EVERY item of EVERY food-group in the house just for the sake of ONE DAY (there are a lot of shops open on Boxing Day these days), is absolutely crazy. As long as you have bread, milk and toilet paper, you’ll live.

Relationships

This is a bit of a maudlin one, but Christmas does force you to look at the relationships in your life, or how you’ve let them dwindle to next to nothing. I’m not talking about your other-half or the people you see day-to-day; it’s those distant friends and family I worry about. I used to be in touch with my late-sister an awful lot at this time of year. We used to converse regularly about our Christmas preparations and what our respective children would like. Now she has gone, so has that connection. I have no idea what her son (my sixteen year old nephew) would like for Christmas. Every year I take a fairly uneducated guess. Since the death of my sister, we virtually have no relationship with my brother-in-law and nephew. Understandably, my brother-in-law has withdrawn somewhat from family life (my side of the family, anyway). It’s all very sad if I stop and let myself think about it; I regret that things are the way they are. I blame myself because I’m a grown woman and I don’t know how to fix it. I sometimes hope that my last connection to my sister, her son, will try to make contact when he is older. But perhaps I am just deluding myself. Maybe I am the one who needs to try to bridge the gap. Also I worry about the friends I have let disappear from my life (I’ve discussed this before in a previous blog). I’m astonishingly bad at maintaining long-distance friendships. Perhaps Christmas (and the card-writing thing) is good for that. At least it’s a time of year to try to keep those channels open.

Yikes! Sorry, got a bit depressing there. I didn’t mean to. It was supposed a fairly light and airy Christmas blog! But I guess Christmas can stir up a lot of good and a lot of bad emotions for people. Still, I for one will probably enjoy the day – I’ll be with my lovely husband (who isn’t really a lazy arse, most of the time) and my awesome daughters and my in-laws who have very much become a second family to me. Also (even though I moan about it), I certainly enjoy eating, so the whole day is a win-win for me. And so to all of you who have taken the time out to read this blog today or on Boxing Day, and those who have been reading my posts throughout the year, I wish you a very Happy Christmas (think of this as a venom/bile-free Christmas card from me). I hope you are spending it with the people you love most on earth. And to those of you who are alone on Christmas Day or have lost someone you love and don’t feel very much like celebrating, try to take solace in the knowledge that there will always be someone somewhere who is thinking of you – but maybe they just don’t know how to make the first move and get in touch. And what’s more, even though we do make a huge song and dance about it and get ourselves into masses of debt and make absolute pigs of ourselves – really, Christmas is just a another day.

Merry Christmas

Love Adele x

How to Turn Your EBook into a Paperback and Other Misadventures

 

I’m not the kind of person to write a ‘How To’ blog. Mainly because I don’t officially know how to do anything and the things I do achieve tend to originate from brute force and ignorance, blood, sweat and tears – oh, and blind luck. So you’ll be pleased to learn this isn’t a ‘How To’ blog. It’s more of a nightmarish account of the trials and tribulations I had in turning my Ebook into a paperback last weekend.

I’ve put off doing this for nearly a year because I really wanted to see how the Ebook faired before I ventured any further into the foray of self-publishing. And I’m glad I didn’t attempt it before now because, as I’ve said in an earlier blog, the gaffs and errors that existed in the original Ebook were so embarrassing, to have them in print would make me want to top myself. But during a telephone conversation with my mother the other day, she expressed a wish to have a paper copy of my book. She’s 80 years old and understandably doesn’t have access to a Kindle or a Kindle app or even a computer. And so I thought to myself, hmm – well it’s nearly Christmas and I have no idea what to buy her… And that is how the idea first germinated in my mind.

So I rubbed my hands together, rolled up my sleeves and opened my laptop up for business. First I logged onto CreateSpace (which is a sister company of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing who publish EBooks) went through all the inputting of data, bank details, tax malarkey, creating an ISBN number – all that jazz. Next I set about trying to upload the book exterior (the cover). But CreateSpace wasn’t happy with the original tuppenny-h’ppeny cover we used for the Ebook. The resolution just wasn’t good enough and it wouldn’t accept a jpeg either. So I thought, screw it, I’m sick of that day-glow pink cover anyway – with its ridiculously oversized heart on the front (I blame my husband for that heart – I never liked it. I’d told him I wanted a barbed-wire heart, if anything, but he insisted that was beyond his technical capabilities and he needed to fill some space). So instead, I plumped for using CreateSpace’s own cover-creator function. That was a bit of a debacle in itself; trying to find and match a suitable photograph up with one of their title templates, then sticking in a decent blurb, cover colours, font style and colours – all that jazz.

Then began the REAL fun and games. Uploading the interior (the actual book itself). Being that I had uploaded my book to Kindle as an Ebook thirty-g’million times, I thought this would prove no problem at all. But, oh dear God, how wrong I was. The upload was simple enough but when trying to fit the book into the standard 6-by-9 inch book template, well it didn’t quite fit. First off, CreateSpace gave me the option of allowing them to refit the book into a standard template. And this looked God-awful. The print was virtually up against the edges of the page and the writing seemed to be horribly crammed in. So I took CreateSpace up on their second template option which made the book look far more presentable; bigger margins, less cramped – a much nicer reading experience. However, this doubled the thickness of the book – oh, and doubled the price of making the book too…

So then CreateSpace asks you to approve what you have created and I had a flick through the virtual pages. It was then that I noticed that on at least five occassions the book had a blank page before the start of a chapter (which there wasn’t in the original manuscript – I physically went back to check all the page-breaks). And on one or two occasions a new chapter started on exactly the same page as the last chapter had ended. Agghhhh!! If I uploaded that book once, I must have uploaded it fifty times. I kid you not. And finally I thought the issues were resolved and I hit ‘approve’.

After this procedure you must wait approximately 12 hours whilst CreateSpace assesses your virtual book. When this waiting period is up, they email you so that you can go in and do your final approval of the project before allowing it to be available to purchase online. At this point I noticed MORE errors. For one, the word, ‘International’ had decided to separate on the front page, i.e.:-

Internation

al

Relations

Which, of course, was exactly the effect I wanted. No it bloody wasn’t! So then I had to decrease the cover page font size. Subsequently I noticed the book didn’t look quite as I expected. I had to physically go to the bookshelf in my lounge and open a real book to prove this to myself.  The first chapter of a real book always starts on the ‘opening page’ (the one on the right). And mine didn’t. So, ignoring my husband’s helpful advice to, ‘just leave it as it is and suck it up’, I had to add a blank page and re-upload and re-approve. I think I went through the approval process THREE times (all of which requiring a 12 hour wait before I could access the final draft). Eventually, after hours and hours of staring at a computer screen and ignoring my family for an entire weekend, I painstakingly leafed through a virtual copy of the book that was acceptable (but for a few asterisks’ which had bafflingly un-centred themselves in the uploading process but at this point I was about to string myself up from the rafters so the crappy un-centred asterisks’ had to stay). I made my final approval and clicked ‘submit’. Eeek!

So, after a few more days of waiting, the book is finally available to order on Amazon. Yay! And no, I can’t get any discounted ‘author’s copies’, as to order the book from America (from CreateSpace itself) works out more expensive than ordering a copy from Amazon UK just like every other buggar. So that’s my mum’s Christmas present sorted (if you know my mum, please don’t tell her – it’s a surprise. Don’t worry, I know for sure she doesn’t read this blog because she doesn’t have a computer). Maybe it’s a birthday gift option for other unlucky family members this year. They’ll probably never read it, but they can just stick it on their bookshelf and think, my daughter/sister/irritating friend wrote that book. Or they can use it to prop open an annoying door that keeps closing (it’s certainly heavy enough). And would I recommend CreateSpace? I guess. It certainly wasn’t a doddle but nothing important comes easy, and had I not needed an impromptu Christmas present, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. Most self-published books are read in the Ebook format these days.

So, perhaps it’s a crappy gift – not much better than buying your loved-one a bowling ball with your name on it. But my mother expressly asked so it’s not precisely vanity publishing. And for anybody out there who feels a burning desire to buy it, it’s not exactly cheap. CreateSpace can’t make them for any less – and not look like a piece of dog turd (and that’s before I, as the author, even consider making any profit!). To create a print-on-demand book comes at a cost. It turns out, in the (self-publishing) Ebook age, paperbacks have become expensive – maybe because of lack of demand. Or perhaps they are not expensive, perhaps we have just devalued books too much over the years; everybody wants to read for nothing. Anyhoo, now I’m off to order my very own copy (which will never be read in case I come across more errors); you see, I’ve got this annoyingly heavy lounge door I need to prop open…

Project Summary

International Relations

Authored by Adele Archer

6″ x 9″ (15.24 x 22.86 cm)
ISBN-13: 978-1507636916 (CreateSpace-Assigned)

ISBN-10: 1507636911

BISAC: Fiction / Romance / Romantic Comedy






STOP PRESS: Since the writing of this blog, I’ve received my copy. It’s massive! I’ve seen smaller bibles! I’ve had to go back into CS and re-upload another version in a smaller font with decreased line spacing. Oh, and I’ve had to arrange for customer services to make the pages cream as white turns out to be ‘retina-burning-white’. You see, I make these mistakes so you don’t have to. *sigh*

Have Your Cake (Just Don’t Eat It).

 

Alas, this isn’t the first time I’ve talked about diets, or food for that matter (I’m sorry to say). I do hate to be a diet bore, but, well…I’m on a diet healthy eating plan. Again. I’m not one of those lucky souls who can eat whatever they want and remain svelte. I’m small in stature with the tendency to be pear-shaped and have the propensity to run to fat. I have to watch what I eat – watch it like a sodding hawk. I lost quite a bit of weight about four years ago (I was getting married and had incentive) and I was pretty damned smug about it too. The weight loss, not the impending marriage. After losing a stone and a half or so and reaching my goal weight, I thought to myself, ‘I’ve really got this diet-lark sussed. I don’t know what all the fuss is about. You just eat a bit less and do more exercise. I might write a self-help book about it. I’m such an inspiration…’. I recklessly threw out all my larger clothes and took great delight in purchasing new ones. For a few years I lived on my maintenance allowance of calories, religiously exercised three times a week and all was well.

But then I got cocky. I’d been doing this for years so why did I need to laboriously log my calorific intake day after day on ‘My Fitness Pal’? I knew what to eat, I didn’t need to continually add it up on a phone app for the rest of my life! Then the maintenance allowance of calories crept up a little bit, if the family were eating cake, I would eat a bit of cake. The three-a-week workouts dwindled down to two. And oddly enough, those lovely abdominal muscles I’d lovingly cultivated over those glory years mysteriously seemed to disappear under a layer of fat. All of a sudden I was just nudging past the top of my body mass index. What in the bloody hell was going on? There must be some mistake!

Well no, actually there was no mistake. I had simply grown complacent. I had blamed the weight-gain on ever-growing muscle density one too many times (that old China) and just let things slip, if I’m honest. So at around Halloween time this year, after looking particularly unpleasant in my overly-tight costume, I decided enough was enough. Some friends were on a diet, but able to eat a decent amount and were still losing weight. Hello..? The diet promotes consumption of real foods, whether it be unprocessed carbohydrates or fats, but not at the same meal. Because carbs essentially turn into sugar and excess sugar = insulin spike = fat storage = bad. Or something. And this diet also suggests that eating less calories just slows down your metabolism causing your body to require less calories over time. Oh. So having living, skinny proof standing there before me, I thought this might be the diet for me!

The first phase of the diet is a five-day nightmare. Your meals can consist of unprocessed meat, fish, eggs, veg, live natural yoghurt and one portion of ‘safe’ grains (brown rice or oats). No sugar or anything with added sugar. No processed food. No milk. No alcohol. No coffee (!!). No fruit, because fruit is classed as a carb – who knew? I could be found wandering around the house muttering, ‘what kind of ****ing diet doesn’t allow fruit?’ But I made it through those five days (apart from cheating on the coffee-front, screw that) and lost a pound or two. Then I moved onto what was supposed to be the more relaxed phase two. In this phase, good carbs are allowed but never in the same meal as fats (meat, fish, diary, eggs etc). Or to put it another way, never with anything which once had or derived from something with a face. Or something. The trouble was, being the cheapskate I am, I refused to buy the official book and just got my information from snippets found on the internet. So I blithely went along, at times, eating chicken curry with lentils (lentils = carb, chicken = fat. WRONG!!!) and chilli con carne with brown rice (rice = carb, mince = fat. WRONG!!!). Don’t mistake me, for the majority of the time I think I did what I was supposed to do, but a few times I made mistakes. And those mistakes seemed to make all the difference.

I hasten to add, I didn’t lose any weight overall – I actually gained. I never made it to phase three which is the lifelong bit. Of course it was my own fault. If I’d followed the diet religiously, I suppose my body chemistry would have done its magic and started shedding the pounds like my friends. And possibly some of the rules I have given above aren’t quite accurate, like I say – I didn’t buy the book. But it was just a diet I couldn’t relate to. The final nail in the coffin came when my family and I went out for a meal and we had to go to three different restaurants before I could find somewhere that gave me the options of not mixing fats and carbs (not without giving away the bulk of my meal to the greedy scavengers better know as my husband and children). For me, this just wasn’t sustainable – not forever.

I’m a person who thinks in very black and white terms, so a week ago I reluctantly decided to go back to the tried and trusted old-faithful. 1,200 calories a day. Exercise three times a week. And at last the weight is coming off – pretty quickly. And my abs are coming back! Okay, sometimes I’m a bit hungry but I’m doing something that my simple little brain can understand. Eating less calories than my body can expend. Some research says you can’t accurately count calories but I can’t argue with the results. I actually think I’ll be back at my ideal weight by Christmas. I’m lucky I didn’t let things slide so badly that I had tonnes to lose.

Yes, I guess some may say this too will be hard to sustain but this is the only diet that ever worked for me. Different strokes for different folks. I’ve just got to retrain my brain about portion size. I’ve adopted a couple of the elements from the former diet though, I now eat better carbs; brown rice, brown pasta, porridge oats, pulses and sweet potatoes instead of potato. But I certainly eat them with meat! Damn straight! I haven’t had bread in a month but when I next do, it will be whole wheat. I try to cut the processed products down to a minimum. I don’t eat sugar that can be avoided. Which means no cake or biscuits *sob*. So the diet healthy eating debacle will probably go on and on, around and around, causing me endless anxiety for the rest of my life. But right now, I’m on the right track – or I would be if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s my birthday in a couple of weeks, and I’m having a ****ing piece of chocolate cake no matter what. You just try stopping me. And I don’t even want to discuss Christmas…

 

The Error of my Ways

I’m feeling pretty darn chuffed with myself as I type this, I can tell you. I’ve just finished the corrections and editing of my new book (the second in a trilogy). But whooah-there, save your almost certain applause and launch-party planning! That does not mean it is ready for publication. Oh no, no, no. I’ve merely finished with my corrections. That’s all. And now I need the fresh eyes of somebody else; somebody objective who hasn’t read those same words so often they could recite them in their sleep, somebody who isn’t as close to this project as little old me.

 

A super-smashing friend recently offered to proof-read the second book for me. That is no mean feat. And it’s also a big ask of a friend (which is why I didn’t ask; she offered, thank God. And I nearly bit her hand off in my enthusiasm). Proof-reading a book really spoils your enjoyment of actually reading it (I would imagine. It spoils it for me and I wrote it); it must messes up the flow. But she offered. It was her idea. I swear it on my life. And I’ve sent it to her now so she can’t get out of it! Ha ha ha ha ha *laughs maniacally* (I’m joking, lovely friend, you back-out whenever you want. Just like my husband did with the first book)! I will always owe her one; I’ll probably need to give her a kidney or something. If she ever fancies a slightly addled one.

 

But what I really want to talk about today is the amount of errors one can accumulate in a manuscript. Bear in mind this book, when it hits Amazon Kindle, will be between 300-400 pages long. But still, it’s bloody insane the amount that crop up. I promise you, I have been through that novel with a fine-tooth comb, I’ve run spell-checks, grammar-checks and yet I know for a fact many more errors will be found. And I can’t help wondering why that should be? I’m not an illiterate person (at least I don’t think so, I may be so clueless that I just haven’t realised). My vocabulary and grammar are possibly better than the average man on the street – writing books has forced me to improve. Actually, my spelling is still pretty crap – but they say Shakespeare couldn’t spell either – so there. And I’ve got spell-check, so boo-ya! And yet, my most recent edit showed my manuscript still to be littered with errors. LITTERED! How have they escaped my notice before now? How?? No really, how???

 

I know the biggest culprit for the never-ending mistakes; it’s the process of editing itself. You read the book through, you chop out this and crowbar in that – the error is made, and you just don’t notice it. It could just be the simple fact that you make the following rookie mistakes (like I did and probably always will). Firstly you decide that your lead character, Flossy (for the want of a better name), should no longer have, say, a cat because you can’t be arsed to keep mentioning it (and then of course you forget and the cat makes a ghostly appearance even though it no longer exists). Secondly, your brain is working so much faster than your poor little fingers and invariably you inadvertently drop in a spelling or grammar mistake (even though, I promise you, I’m fairly adept at navigating my way around the English language. I know the difference between Pacific and specific and everything). But I bet even in this tiny amount of writing in this one blog post there is an error or two. Shall we look for them? No, actually – let’s not do that. I personally blame the elves. Like the ones in The Elves and the Shoemaker who come out and mess with things at night, except these little bastards are far less helpful.

 

I’m ashamed to say that when the first book was initially published on Amazon Kindle, even though I could have sworn it was completely clean, it wasn’t. There were still a few errors which I have since corrected and resubmitted the manuscript. So I apologise to all the earlier-readers who got a shonky copy. I probably owe you a refund. Or a pint. In actual fact, there are probably a few errors even now. And before you start, NO! Don’t tell me about them; I don’t even want to know any more! But that’s how hard it is to ensure a book is completely devoid of mistakes and typos. And that’s why some will hire a professional editor I suppose (which I am not about to do. I’m a realist, I have no intention of shelling out vast sums of money I will probably never recoup in book sales. I’m sorry but there it is. I’m a tight-arse. Deal with it). What’s more, I’m a self-published author. ‘Self’ being the operative word (well, me and my friends, anyway. They must do it for the love. And the kidneys).

 

Anyway, I’m quite certain there is still much work to do. But the plan is to release the second novel on the anniversary of my first one; at the end of January 2016 (no pressure super-dooper friend. The world can wait. In fact, it would probably prefer a delay. Nobody is beating down my door for a sequel the last time I checked). And then there’s book number three to edit next. But sod that for a game of marbles; I’m giving myself a month off. And then maybe at last I can finally put this book-writing episode of my life to bed. I’ll go off and do something more useful with my life; like whittle a kayak from an old wardrobe with a blunt butter knife. Which has always been my life’s ambition (it hasn’t).

NB: First batch of corrections are back! Um…feeling less chuffed now, let’s just say I’m going to be very busy for the next few weeks. Anybody want to run a used and slightly random blog for a while..?

 

 

This is a Low

You may not even have noticed, but I haven’t written a blog for two weeks. What? What kind of tardy operation is this?! Yep. And I didn’t rope in a guest-blogger to fill in for my apathy either. I know. It’s terrible. But I didn’t have anything to say. Or at least, I didn’t have anything I felt able to share. There is a song by 90’s Brit-pop band, ‘Blur’ called, ‘This is a Low’ that I’m rather partial to – hence the title of this blog (I name a lot of blogs after song titles – you may or may not have picked up on that). Anyway, the lyrics to the chorus of this song go, ‘This is a low, but it won’t hurt you’. Well, I guess I’ve been having a bit of a low. And I think it did hurt me. A bit, anyway.

I’ve never considered myself as somebody who suffered with any kind of depression or anxiety. I had the odd off day but on the whole I wear a bright and sunny disposition at all times. But when I suffered from bereavement four and a half years ago (here she goes again), I think, looking back, something inside me changed a little. My glass was previously half full, but now it is half empty. I and the people I loved were once impervious, bullet-proof – but four and a half years ago I realised that wasn’t true. I remember thinking at the time, well – at least nothing worse than this can ever happen and nothing trivial will ever bother me again. But it turned out that the opposite was the case. Everything has to run perfectly. If it doesn’t, if there is a single setback, I can be thrown off into one of these black moods.

And this is what I want to talk about; the black moods. Because that’s where I’ve been the last couple of weeks – stuck in one of those. People around me probably wouldn’t have noticed because I can paint on a clown face better than anyone – I am world class at gallows humour and laughing when I don’t really feel like it. And I still maintain I don’t suffer from anxiety or depression in the true sense of the words because these periods are thankfully brief; I just fall into these dark places sometimes. They can be triggered by the smallest of things but once I am in one, everything is wrong. I am wrong. I am too fat. I am unlikeable. I am letting my family down. I am going nowhere. My writing career will never come to anything. I’m not talented, or special or different or significant or anything worth mention at all. But after only a few days or at the most a couple of weeks, the fog will lift and I am back on form. The arrogant, self-assured girl you all know and love. Boom!

I guess I’m lucky – these little potholes are not too deep and I can always get out. Some people can’t. Some people live like this. I think about the possibility of counselling sometimes but the thought of having any form of therapy makes me want to throw up. The thing that is wrong cannot be changed. The person who died will never come back. And so I think to myself, that road isn’t open to me. That’s terrible, I’m a medical professional and I ought to be extolling the virtues of counselling. But I personally don’t think I could do it. I’m a bit of a closed shop when it comes to emotions and I couldn’t think of opening up to a stranger when I can’t even open up to friends and family. Some people say that the very fact that the therapist is a stranger makes it easier, you’re free to show weakness when normally you feel forced to wear a strong front. I did put feelers out looking into a local bereavement group. I thought I might possibly be able to stomach sitting in a group of people (rather than one-to-one) where I didn’t feel I had to speak unless I wanted to. But it turned out the group was more of a coffee-morning bang in the middle of the day when I’m at work. Perhaps it was just a group for elderly bereaved people who have lost a spouse and have more free time in the day than I do. But young people lose loved-ones too. I even looked into seeing a medium once. Stupid, I know – they’re probably all charlatans but I was at a bit of a low ebb at the time. And every local medium was booked up until infinity. Seriously. I guess there are a lot of people like me out there needing to make contact with others that have passed away. Because if I’m honest, I feel that would be the only thing that would help. To know my loved-one is still there. Please, I beg of you, don’t spout Christianity at me at this point. I have lost my faith and it will either come back or it won’t.

Maybe it’s no coincidence that this mood coincided with me being on a very low carb diet. I know for a fact carbs make me incredibly happy; me and bread, we’re like, ‘besties‘. So imagine having that bestie taken away for an indeterminate period of time! And maybe I can’t promise to be here every week – but don’t assume the worst. I may just have something super exciting to do or simply can’t be arsed. Those are FAR more likely reasons for my absence. And two weeks off is no biggie, is it? But back to the song, ‘This is a Low’ (you ought to listen to it, it’s lovely). Blur might just have been talking about weather fronts, I don’t really know, but it seemed apt for the way I’ve been feeling for the last couple of weeks. There will be lows and highs and I just have to deal with them (don’t worry, I found a ladder and I’m out of this most recent hole now. Whoopee!). And physically, no it didn’t hurt me. But the emotional scars are still there – I’m still dealing with those and I’m doing it in the best way I know how right now. Cheery little buggar, aren’t I?