Hermione Laake's Blog: Thoughts, page 5

The Motherboard serial: Part Two

https://hermionelaake.wordpress.com/2020/04/19/the-motherboard-day-1/

Lost

Haiku

The Motherboard serial; days 1-77; update – 77

https://hermionelaake.wordpress.com/2020/04/19/the-motherboard-day-1/

Stitches, a flash fiction novel, 2.

Stitches – A novel (2020)

I feel nothing but sorrow. I feel a sense of loss, of sadness as I walk down the well trodden streets of Bath today. Some people are wearing masks in the street. Others are not. Some people are wearing masks in the restaurants and cafés, others have removed them and forgotten to replace them when they go to queue for the loo. There are gaps everywhere. Gaps of confusion.

We live in a small town in the south west of England where the people are probably demographically elderly, by and large.

It is only people like me, over fifties that think of writing phrases like “by and large”; young people wouldn’t understand it. They have their own language. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an underground language they used to talk about old people. There’s a film they’re delaying launching. It’s called ‘Live and let Die’. It’s a Bond Film. He’s a fictional character, a sort of dare devil; a charasmatic spy who loves beautiful women. He has, or had, this friend Leiter; Felix Leiter. (Just now, even though I never added it, an algorithm has altered ‘Leiter’ to ‘Letter’ (even though I used a capital), three times, and I have had to manually change it back, which is what comes of using a mobile to type a novel). I know this because I read several of the author, Ian Flemming’s books as a teenager, not the algorithm thing, the name. I was always attracted to rogues. Raffles was a Frenchman I used to enjoy. He had been serialised on television when I was a child. A gentleman thief. We were attracted to cool, suave, sophisticated, we called them, men, as children. I digress. The film has been put back because it has a distasteful title; in the circumstances. We’ve lost over 40, 000 people to Covid-19. Most people call it Coronovirus. I call it Covid-19. Mostly I listen to the scientists, and that is what they call it.

In September the schools will all go back, and I suppose people will start to die again.

I feel nothing but sorrow.

I know I’ve said that already but I’ve always enjoyed litany. I began writing this for the oldies anyway. I dislike stereotypes, but I thought well I am old, I suppose. And if I am writing for myself then I must be writing for someone over fifty. It isn’t fair though, to stereotype me, because when I was around ten I was in love with older people and I should have read more of them. I wasn’t directed to good, strong writers until I was thirteen and I never found the right book. That would be an idea for a blog though, If you’re looking for one; books for thirteen year olds. Still, I’ve a habit of digressing. I’m missing my mother. I suppose she has done me a favour placing so much trust in me not to contact her. She knows what a good girl I am. I will comply. I just read an article in The Times (god knows why I continue to rifle through that paper looking for inspiration, it turned over to the other side during the other crisis, Brexit; I almost forgot the name of it; but Brexit seems so far away now). Where was I? Oh yes. Here. In Coffee 1. Listening to the buzz of voices. They’ve invented an app for office workers (they all use them), because they miss the hum of their colleagues. I discovered the soothing qualities of “the hum” in 2017. I’d recently moved to a town. In ancient books of the last century they’d leave a gap there, usually with a name, as though they were incinuating something, thus–.

I’m not going to reveal where I live. And I know you’ll keep up because you are as old as me and you haven’t lost the ability to read minds.

It was just this sort of conversation I used to have with my mother. We’d text and discuss maybe three things at once. Picking up loops of lost words like stitches. Perhaps I’ll call this stitches. Perhaps we’ll be in “stitches” later on. You never know. I may begin cackling with laughter at any moment. I know it is an old cliché but laughter really is the best medicine, and if you are reading this mummy, mother, don’t contact me now not now that I have found the page again. It is always the page that saves me from my own dark and desperate thoughts. The tree that sustains life becomes the paper or the symbol of it. God knows why “apple” it’s obviously “Word” and “WordPress” isn’t it? I never know whether that final question mark is supposed to be there. I mean wasn’t that a rhetorical question which doesn’t require a question mark? And so on and on it would go, like stitching. No not stitching, stitches. Stitching is so final, whereas Stitches can be unpicked and you can start all over again.

Voice #family #loss #reader-in-performance

On Beauty and Botox

I didn’t grow up in a world of Botox, although my thirty-something children did. My daughter once told me that getting work on your face was perfectly normal for her generation. At the time she was in the sixth form. I was quite shocked at the time. But I’ve rarely attempted to overtly influence my children, except with regard to taking pills. I made sure they knew that I was very anti pills, as they grew up because of the side effects and risks. When they were unwell I always asked them what they felt like eating and we were lucky enough to be able to afford to buy it for them, whatever it was.

I suppose Botox is a kind of quick fix solution if you’ve been squinting at a screen all day in poor light. Except it isn’t a cheap one, like chocolates for someone who has forgotten to eat.

I often wonder whether people realise how good you look when you walk for a couple of hours. Your skin glows, your eyes sparkle and you can lose a great deal of weight through walking 12k a day. The only difficulty would be finding the time, especially with computers and phones calling to you to take more photographs and compare yourself to everyone else. When I was a child it seemed to me like there were about three rival women in the world, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, and Debbie Harry.

The icons were film stars from Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Bringing up Baby. They seemed a million miles away. in an old film you could rarely get access to.

Men rarely seen to be involved in this debate. Although Simon Cowell used to get the injections, and it was never a secret.

I suppose there wasn’t that constant pressure to look good. The main mirror was a reflection in the glass of the shop window as you walked past. And imagine a man doing that.

Still, there is always gardening to lift the spirits and take us out of this constant need to compare ourselves with others on a superficial level.

I’ve been practicing yoga too, which is calming and doesn’t involve the use of a device.

Building in regular health enhancing habits, is a good way of taking your mind off your flaws.

When I was a child there were very few mirrors in the house and if we ever looked in one our grandmother would tell us not to be vain. Now that is a word you rarely hear anymore.

I remember I used to enjoy dressing up in the sort of clothes they wore in the twenties.

Red lipstick gives the face an instant lift too. It always puts a smile on my face.

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Black and mixed raced people.

Lately, there has been a great deal of debate on black and white binary perceptions, in all media.

As the manager of a grade 4 concession for British Shoe Corporation, I interviewed for a supervisor in 1984/5 and recruited my first “black” member of staff. I was just nineteen years old. However, I believe that one’s blackness or whiteness, rather like one’s sex, is something invisible.

I don’t like binary terms. I never have. I recruited this member of staff as a person. She was right for the job. She never let me down. As a supervisor, she ran the concession on my day off. Her name was Juliette Foulger.

Here we are dancing together when we sadly had to close the concession down as the store, Army & Navy Kingston upon Thames closed down during the 1980s recession. I advised her to apply for a similar role, as I couldn’t take her with me to the grade 10 High Street store, Lilley and Skinner, around the corner where I was offered my next role. I hope she is doing well. Although the matter of what colour we both felt on the inside is something personal to us.

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Voice – Hermione Wilds