M.T. McGuire's Blog, page 2

I bore you about the aurora borealis and also bang on about other things …

Woah there, another massively busy week. We hit the ground running (from both ends) with a lovely bout of the Noro on Sunday night. I was fine by the end of Monday but it was still a right pain in the jacksy. Tuesday I kept things very low key because I was still feeling a bit delicate so I did a bit of admin in that I wrote three reviews, which I’ve been meaning to write for ages. There isn’t really room for them this week but I’ll set them up to post, by the wonders of modern technology, while I’m running around like a blue-arsed fly over half term in a couple of weeks.

By Wednesday I was able to go back to the gym for a session, which was great fun. I haven’t done Wednesdays before and I should probably mix up my days a bit more as each day has a different set of exercises. They pretty much all do the same thing, but it’s fun to vary it. Instead of going Thursday, I went again on Friday and was exceptionally stiff afterwards!

Wednesday night we went to a wine tasting. It was advertised as coming with ‘tapas’ so we ate first. Mwahahahargh! Won’t do that again. They produced a fabulous 4 course meal although I hadn’t bothered to tip them off about allergies so one course was chicken in a sauce that was hooching with the only kind of mushroom out of the vast and varied world of edible varieties, to which I am allergic. Yes, of course it’s the ubiquitous one that appears in everything. It was a shame but it just meant I had more room for the other courses and it was a very entertaining evening.

I boreaborealis  … yes, I saw the aurora (at fucking last).

Highlight of the week; the Northern Lights. Finally I managed to see them. Seeing the Northern Lights has been on my bucket list from pretty much the moment I knew about them … although on the downside I got a bit engrossed and have been catching up on my sleep debt all week.

Having had a text from a mate telling me to have a look, I popped out into the garden at 11.30. Didn’t get much … see picture … wasn’t sure if it was the northern lights or just light pollution from the railway yards and the site where a new housing estate is being built, both of which sit between us and North.

I was in my pyjamas by this time but one photo had a bit of a blue/purple bit in the sky above our garden looked hopeful so I tried from one of the windows at the top of the house.

The results were better, but still inconclusive so I decided I’d pop over the road and see if I could get a more definitive sighting in a dark street next to the allotments. It took me a minute or two to dig out a tripod and then I removed my bathrobe, because I didn’t want anyone I met asking me where my towel was, flung on an anorak and headed out into the night.

It was about 11.45 by this time and after having a go I felt was definitely getting a few shades of green but still wasn’t 100% sure if it was the Aurora or just … you know … light.

I realised there was a small park near a housing estate which was just another couple of minutes’ walk so I decided I’d go there. I took some more pictures and then, reviewing my photos, I realised there were funny lines in the green bit in some of the first ones and that the top of the frame was beginning to look a bit pink. Maybe I was getting there then.

I walked back to a different bit of the park and took one with more pink and green and then I just happened to look east. The whole sky was tinged with pink, you know the way orange streetlights used to make it look orange in the days when sodium lighting was a thing. Like that.

Hang on, I thought.

Pointing the camera at the pink bit I took a photo. At this point I could hear the hallelujah chorus full volume in my head as finally, I had cracked it, well … almost but I needed to aim it right. After taking a few more pictures—woot! See below—I thought I’d take some piccies of landmarks round town.

 

 

 

 

The beet factory, for good measure, on my way back.

I decided I’d start with the church I go to since it was near my house and then if it worked, I’d walk to the Norman Gate and take a picture of that.

I took a picture of the houses on our street, but not ours (doh!) and then headed up the hill.

Our house is just on the right beyond the sign. Did I photograph it. Did I bollocks! Doh!

Got some lovely shots of StJohn’s (the only inclusive church in Bury) and having photographed two big parts of the Bury skyline; St John’s and the beet factory, I decided I might head for the Norman Gate which was about 10 minutes’ walk away.

St John’s Bury St Edmunds looking North.

St John’s Bury St Edmunds looking South.

Luckily, before heading for the Norman Gate I looked at my watch.

Quarter past one!!! Quarter past fucking one! Had I really spent an hour and a half wandering round town with a mobile phone and a tripod, in my pyjamas, Arthur Dent style, like a nutter?

Yes I had. I decided it was time to go home. Still forgot to take a picture of my house (bell end) but I did get one of God’s. Oh well. You can’t win ’em all.

Other News …

It was all rather busy last week culminating in Mc(not so)Mini doing a gig at a really lovely small venue in Ipswich. It was great fun, I passed a very enjoyable evening talking to the other band members’ parents in the bar, where they served Adnams ales (always a bonus). We were discussing ‘modern youth’ and the whole trans they/them thing and how as dinosaurs we had trouble sometimes. Two members of the band are trans and so it was interesting talking to the parents, especially of one.

To my shame, she said that she had experienced a lot of prejudice from ‘Christians’ towards her son. I really struggle to understand the way some of my brothers and sisters in faith behave towards the LGBTQ+ community. The way I see it, Christianity is pretty fucking simple. It’s all about this bloke called Christ (the clue is in the name there, people, Christians because they’re followers of Christ).

What Christ, the original Christian, said was ‘love they neighbour as thyself,’ and then proceeded to tell the story of the good Samaritan as an example of who a ‘neighbour’ is. Yes, he tells a story in which someone his audience would have despised did a good deed and helped an injured man in distress while the pillars of their community, people they’d see as the epitome of goodness, pretended not to see and left him to die.

The basic gist of Christianity, then, is to treat other people the way you’d like them to treat you. That you treat everyone as deserving your respect until they have proved otherwise. This does not mean that because one gay person pissed you off, you decide all others are the same. That’s bigotry.

The clue is in the name there people. Be like this bloke, Christ, who was pilloried by the authorities in his time for talking to all the wrong kinds of people, the kinds of people the authorities despised like Samaritans, tax collectors and women some of whom were even—shock! Horror!—hookers.

Seriously though, it’s not difficult is it? Not if it’s that bleedin’ obvious to someone as thick as pig shit like myself. There are two types of people in this world. People who are wankers and people who are not wankers. Sometimes two different people can tell you the same thing and it will be offensive from one and fine from the other simply because of the spirit in which you know it is meant.

Ergo when it comes to being a Christian, I thought the point was to be as Christ like as possible, which means seeing the humanity of others before everything else and Doing The Right Thing. You know, love your neighbour as yourself and all that. I’m probably being a trifle simplistic but ‘doing the right thing’ means doing what is just, which isn’t always following the rules (no vigilante justice bringers, that’s NOT what I’m talking about). I’m talking about being kind to people others spurn. Kind to people who are doing things that are perceived as ‘bad’ by the rule makers. I’m talking about stopping and offering to help when you see someone in trouble.

Recently, I’ve read extraordinary things stemming from friends who appeared to be perfectly normal (until they started sharing this stuff on t’interweb and moved themselves to the bat-shit crazy area on my venn diagram of living).

There is a conspiracy theory that the pedophiles are after our children and that they are hoping to achieve this by pushing back our tolerances to other forms of ‘deviancy’—their words, not mine—so that eventually pedophilia will be allowed. I really struggle to see how pedophilia—in which an adult forces a child who does not consent or too young to do so into sex, or sexual activities—can be remotely compared to consenting adults choosing who they love or who they’d like to be, or indeed consenting young adults being allowed to fall in love with whoever they fall in love with.

Yes, as mother of a teenager it is a complete minefield but, as I understand it, two people falling in love with one another, and being allowed to admit it and even express it, within the bounds of the law, wasn’t a crime last time I checked.

If someone female happens to fancy females rather than males then, again, the way I see it, it’s fine, because it’s none of my fucking business. They’re not forcing their choices on me, which, incidentally, is what the establishment has been doing to the LGBTQ+ community, and up to a point, women, for the last thousand years or so.

Likewise, when I was at school in the 1980s, my gay friends were not forcing their choices on me then either. Instead, one of them only came out to me when we were both 25  because she knew I was a Christian and thought I’d be like those other cunts.

At least we’re not all gits. Here’s a story about what even just avoiding a topic can lead to (let alone being openly anti and judgemental)  …https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/8-june/news/uk/it-took-this-death-to-end-silence-on-inclusion-says-priest-of-teenager-who-took-her-own-life

Here’s another thing that completely bamboozles me. How is the ‘Christian’ right are pushing to erode women’s rights and return us to ‘our place’ in the kitchen and to the days when the male half the population was sexually repressed to the point of obsession, while the female half was vilified and hidden away as if their very existence was shameful.

It hasn’t been like this in our society for years but we know how crap it is. We’ve seen ISIS, and these ‘Christians’ were all anti that. Therefore, I fail to understand how they can despise members of other faiths, Muslims, for example, and then paint an ‘ideal’ world that mirrors the ISIS Caliphate. The point of a moral stand point is that you live up to those morals. This kind of crap isn’t being better than the Daesh. It’s just doing what they fucking do. How does the world not see this? How do their brainwashed followers not see this?

Also, why do these ‘Christians’ care so much who other people choose to love or how other people see themselves. Do they realise how far from Christ’s teachings this actually is. Well no, of course they do, because everything they espouse is from the Old Testament and they completely ignore the New Testament most of the time. Which makes them … I dunno … some kind of extremist Old Testament sect. Not Christians anyway. I really don’t care if someone decides they’re a fucking toaster, so long as they’re not a cnut … unlike those judgemental bastards who weigh in with a ten out of ten score on the cuntomter every day of the week. Judge not, lest ye be judged. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Twats. Never mind. Here are three of the band.

Sorry where was I? Oh yes, other stuff.

Detecting

Or Wombling With Pretentions as I sometimes call it. I am a member of a number of Facebook groups now which organise digs. Mostly these are on Sundays and as that’s the only day I get a lie in, I am always on the look out for digs mid week or on Saturdays. One group has run two on the last two Saturdays in the same place (but different fields).

Having attended last week’s and found not much, but at the same time, found many bits of good things which indicated there was old stuff there to be discovered, I decided I’d go this week as well. My first signal was an Edward II half penny so that was something good, job done, can happily go home. There were lots of signals, mostly fragments of old things and then, at the top of the hill in a really junky area—where the machine was making farty iron noises as if we were at a rave—I dug up this tiny milled coin.

Milled coins are made with a machine and is how coins are made today. Before that, coins were hammered which is when you get a die with a design, stick a blob of silver/copper/gold on it and then put another moulded die over the top, smack it with a hammer and bob’s your uncle you get a hammered coin. See pic.

Tiny, tiny hammered coin. I think it’s a ha’penny

The first milled coins were introduced in the reign of Elizabeth I but it didn’t work out. They were not reintroduced until the reign of Charles II. As a result, Elizabethan milled coins are quite rare. The tiny milled coin didn’t look like anything I’d seen, ever. It was really, really thin for starters and small. It had a shield on one side, which I’d seen on hammered coins of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. This sent me to early stuff, Chas II or maybe James 1st? I wasn’t sure,  But at the same time, when I flipped it over and cleaned the other side, the monarch was clearly a woman … wearing a crown … and although at the time, I assumed Victoria. But then, when I cleaned it up, I could clearly make out that she had a crown on her head, and a distinctive aquiline nose. there is only one queen that this could be; Elizabeth I.

As. you can see, this coin is in a really shit state.

It’s pretty unmistakeable. Neither of the Charleses looks similar and since it’s base metal, copper? I’m assuming it’s a threefarthing. Yes there was a denomination for three quarter of a penny at that time, lord alone knows why but there you go. So this is a rare thing, and possibly a significant thing. I dunno.

Also, fun fact, the monarch’s heads alternate, so Henry VIII has his nose pointing right. It does help with identifying them sometimes.

On the one hand, yes, this could be a seriously rare and significant find. On the other, it’s bollocksed so even if a decent one is worth anything, this one won’t be worth more than about £40. So once again, subject to checks—because I will make sure I check this out carefully, in case it is worth something, in which case I must either buy out the farmer or sell it and ensure they get half—but subject to checks it looks like the usual. I get to find something really interesting and significant, and by din’t of it being a really shit example, I get to keep it. I’ll take that.

Next stop the finds liaison officer for more advice and to see if I need to add it to the portable antiquities database or think about getting it valued. I’ll keep you posted. At least, I’ll try.

And finally …

At last we reach the end … I’m thinking that if it’s going to be like this I should write a blog twice a week. But finally, I’ve been working on some jolly japes for my website and I’ve come up with a K’Barthan Insults and Swearing Generator. You click and it will produce the cream of K’Barthan swearing for your enjoyment, enlightenment and edification (probably). If you think you’d like to have a go at that, click here.here.

Until next time ..

Hello again, hello …

Crikey but it’s been a long time hasn’t it? I am well aware that this is not good for my readership and that most of you are long gone. However, life has been very busy. I suppose everyone gets back from holiday in September and has to catch up on the month and also do All The Things that those of them with kids were putting off over the summer. I confess to being no different, although, today I have a cold so I have decided that running around like a blue arsed fly will not be my lot and I am going to spend it sitting down doing things I enjoy. Ergo …

Chaos fairies have been in abundance this week, when are they not? Although I have managed to remember my own name, and even some other people’s. I have kept my eye on the ball enough to get my lad to and from school at the right times, with the right kit washed and ready for a whole week while McOther went to Arnhem on a history walking tour. This process confirmed to me, very strongly, that I am not a morning person. But we managed it anyway. Woot.

At one point I had a hilarious meeting with the school bursar who was so stereotypical that it was like interacting with a character from a comedy comic strip.

The speed limit on Mc(not so) mini’s school site has recently dropped from 15 to 10mph. After 7 years of 15 I do tend to do that speed on autopilot now so I have had to be very mindful that it’s dropped. Basically, if the car is bunny hopping along in second gear, I know I’m doing the right speed. If it’s running smoothly, and I’ve forgotten to stop and put it into first, I’m going 15mph.

So there I was, having just turned onto the site, about 100 yards in, drifting along on auto pilot. It was 5.00pm and I noticed there were lots of cars still parked at the pre-prep and was wondering whether it was late pick up, or a parents’ evening or similar.

As I lurched over another bump and gave it a bit of a squirt to stop it bunny hopping, I was brought back to earth, as the revs dropped again, by a movement at the side of the drive. A tall man in the kind of tweed suit you’d expect to see on Colonel Blimp was striding along with his arm out at about 45 degrees from his side waving it round in a circle.

Is he looking at me? I wondered.

Yes, I decided he probably was. The gesture was not one I’ve seen but I assumed he meant slow down. I eased right off the pedal and checked my speed, which by the time my very dodgy vision was able to present my brain with an image of the speedo that was in focus enough to read it (more on that story, later) was definitely bouncing about a bit at the 10mph mark.

OK not speeding now then, probably was before. Never mind, all’s well now. Phew. Job done. Smile and creep on past. But no, he continued to wave at me. What did he want? I checked the speedo and the errant eyes worked better this time. Yes, it was just below ten.

I’m going about 7mph now mate, I was thinking. I can’t slow down any more, so I stuck with 7mph and continued on by. It wasn’t like he had a speed gun, so it wasn’t his fault if he didn’t know I was going under 10 miles an hour, I decided as I approached the next speed hump. He was still waving his hand, presumably because he wanted me to go slower, no stop yet though.

There is normally one of those things that tells you your speed at the bump there, which I’ve slightly come to rely on to check I’m complying with regulations, that would have helped both of us know my speed for certain and has the added benefit that I can see it, but I was disappointed to note it wasn’t there.

I slowed even more for the speed hump. That was the point at which point he ran over and banged on the window.

Well that was a turn up. I stopped, and wound it down. Somewhat flabberghasted but also wondering why, if he wanted me to stop, he didn’t just … you know … put his hand up, palm towards me, in the universally acknowledged signal for stop. He appeared to be absolutely incandescent. And before I could even take a breath to say,

‘Hello there, can I help you with something?’ he started in.

Here we go. I thought. People do that same slow down gesture as I motor carefully through villages at 30 because they are certain that a car like mine will be speeding, so I was already harbouring misgivings that he was one of those. As such, it was probably best to just keep schtumm and see what he wanted. It depended how reasonable he was and what he had to say I guess. But since he was some random male I had no clue what he was about, but I could always burn away if he tried to open the door.

‘I am Arnold Rimmer*, the bursar of this school and when I signal for you to stop I expect you to do so please.’

*Not his real name, obvs.

Well, it would probably have been a good idea to actually signal that he wanted me to stop then. Never mind. I looked up at him in silence, the only thought in my head apart from, doesn’t he know how to signal stop? was, hmm, somebody’s done assertiveness training.

That, and a certain amount of surprise, of course, because I don’t think anyone’s talked quite as comprehensively down to me as that since I left preschool, and I had to hand it to him, the way he tacked that ‘please’ on the end took the sentence to a new level of rudeness and, yes, aggression, whether he meant it to or not.

Well. On the upside, it was nice to know he was the bursar and not some weird fucking rando, on the downside, it was very clear that he was about to go into orbit. Previous experience of this kind of situation has shown me that it’s best not saying anything to these people. You just nod politely until they’ve finished and then carry on with your day.

Even though it was extremely tempting to suggest, politely, that actually signalling ‘stop’ might have been more effective than just waving his arm about in some vague and random gesture, I reflected that it was unwise, and more pertinently, pointless. He had already decided who and what I was and no evidence or polite suggestion to the contrary was going to change his view, that much was clear … he had me pegged as evil. Forever. Not that he gave me time to so much as breathe before continuing.

‘How fast were you going?’ he demanded as I took a breath in to ask if I could help him.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I really don’t think it was much more than about twelve.’

‘It looked much faster than that to me,’ he said.

I didn’t reply. I think he said some other stuff but I’ve blanked it out. When he was done I drove off. At 10 mph. Except I started off in the wrong gear so my car was having none of it so embarrassingly, it bunny hopped the entire way up the drive. Now he’s going to think I’m speeding at any point when he sees the car driving smoothly.

Fucking weird though. Really, fucking weird.

That story there was going to be more of later …

Other things I have been mostly doing this week? Buying eye-wateringly expensive spectacles. My son and I needed eye tests. I have noticed, for some while, that I can’t always see things close up … or far away to be honest, but then I discovered that there were days when the instruments in the car … well I can see them, I just can’t always read them straight away. And that’s very bad so I booked an eye test immediately.

McMini’s eyes needed adjustment and he chose new frames, the most expensive frames in the shop which are made in Japan using the same technique that is used to make samurai swords or something ridiculous. For the love of the almighty. Raises eyes to heaven. They do suit him though.

Not the glasses in question…

Meanwhile I discovered that I now have astigmatism in my right eye as well as my left. I had no idea that could happen. I thought you were born with it but no, it grows. So there’s a new fact I’ve learned this week. Here’s another one. Varifocal lenses are extremely expensive. I’m going to try contacts as they do lenses that act in a similar way but I’ll still need specs whatever. I’ll have to test the lenses out as apparently some folks find they just make everything feel blurry. We shall see. I have chosen new glasses (the cheapest frames in the shop) although they were the ones that best suited me as well so … swings and roundabouts.

Writing news.

The writing has been coming along. I’ve been managing to do a little bit each day, which has been grand. It’s mostly editing so far, and shuffling scenes around so they fit, although I have a cold at the moment, just for a change, so I probably won’t be able to do much until that’s gone.

Bastard Chaos Fairies

Yep. The little bastards are back. This time it’s my fitbit they’ve got into. Yesterday it suddenly went yellow. I plugged it into its charger and rebooted it which seemed to fix it for a few minutes, then it went yellow again and completely died. I’ve no idea what’s up there but it’s not even a year old. Return it and get a new one I hear you say. Well yes, I could do that, I thought if I could find the chuffing receipt. I know I bought it in October but that’s all, which was kind of annoying.

Worse, I know I threw the box away recently, as in put-in-the-recycling-they-collected-two-days-ago recently. So that’s also sodding annoying. I have no receipt, no delivery note … nothing. That’ll teach me to tidy up.

I did everything I could think of and then clicked the help thing and got a call back. Turned out I had, indeed bought it from Fitbit, and while I couldn’t see it on my dashboard after Fitbit became Google, they could. So I have a shipping label and it will be off to Holland by DHL on Monday to be fixed, or at least switched. It’ll take ten days, and it’ll be a bust one that’s been fixed, but I’m really chuffed not to have to stump up for a new one.

Here’s another thing you never knew.

On the usual Saturday morning trip to the market today, there was sad news from the egg sellers. Apparently one of the major re-homing shelters for urban foxes from London is near them and many are released into their woods. This is usually fine, but occasionally, once a year or so, a fox gets into their hen coops and kills everything. Last night a fox got into their bantam coop and killed all 12 of them.

Interestingly, the girl also told me that the reason foxes kill everything is because they will take the bodies away and bury them to eat for later meals. So it’s not bloodlust after all. Nope. It turns out your basic fox is just a panic buyer.

Onwards and upwards.

Afore ye go …

There’s a fabulous free book giveaway on today so if you want to snaffle a copy of Few Are Chosen, now’s your chance.  There are a stack of books in the promo, you can find them all here:

The end … or … is it the beginning?

Where have I been? I’ve been selling a house. That’s where I’ve been.

This house

It’s been a hell of a ride. After needing a document from me which delayed everything, exchange on Mum’s house was delayed from the Wednesday until the Friday. On the Friday the people at the bottom of the chain, the ones who had put the most pressure on everyone else to hurry the fuck up, suddenly decided they needed an indemnity over something over their sale and there was an argument as to who paid. We tried again the following Tuesday, still to no avail at which point, I believe, their estate agent volunteered to pay for the indemnity to get things moving.

So on the Wednesday morning, as we set off for France, a week after we were supposed to have done it, we tried again. This time the same buyers wanted assurances from their seller that an oven had been removed. Assurances were given. Then they asked for a safety certification. A plumber was called, the certification provided and it was sent. Then they asked that the gas line be capped.

Moral: try asking for everything you need at once. The plumber who did the certification could have capped the sodding pipe at the same time or, indeed, done all three when he removed the oven.

Once again no joy. Our vendor rang up to apologise and as I stood admiring the last part of a 15th century abbey standing on a street in Epernay he told me what he’d discovered. He’d been very diligent trying to find out what the fuck was going on and that is how I discovered all that. Apparently another difficulty the two at the bottom of the chain were having was that relations between them had soured so much they were only able to speak via solicitors, which did rather protract their conversations.

This is all as reported to our buyers so take it with a pinch of salt but clearly it was fraught. I was delighted to be able to leave things our vendors wanted for them. The people selling that flat to the first vendor are probably, as we speak, removing all the loo rolls, the light bulbs and curtains and anything else that’s not actually nailed down … or possibly, if I go off at a tangent here, they could go one worse … my son is no longer McMini. He is 16 and every bit the font of horrific knowledge you expect the average 16 year old boy to be. Today, he introduced me to a horrific concept called the Upper Decker.

An Upper Decker is when you poo in the cistern, for example, when you come to vacate a property that you rented from a particularly unpleasant and demanding landlord, etc … (I’m learning so many things about youth culture from my son). Personally I suspect nothing on God’s earth justifies the horror of an Upper Decker but because we are vile the McOthers and I have been making a lot of jokes about how an Upper Decker may well be on the cards for the people moving into that property because they were the ones who pressured us most over the probate thing and then, having pressured us to move fast, they are the ones who held the process up for a week while they bitched and bickered over things they’d have a small eternity to sort out.

I’d just like to cover my arse by saying I’m sure it’s not but it didn’t stop us speculating and giggling irreverently about it.

The other worrying part about trying to exchange was that I have a very ADHD brother who lives a vibrant and full life to the point where he does as much as I would normally do in a week’s holiday in one day (often one morning) and … well … he gets absorbed in what he’s doing so he doesn’t always answer his phone and he is not the most organised of people, indeed, I often wonder if, outside his profession, he could organise a burp in a carbonated drinks factory. He doesn’t answer his phone much … or at all to be honest. And he has no answerphone. The whole thing was dependent on the lawyers getting hold of him each day to confirm that he was as happy to exchange and this, for me, was the toe curling, nerve wracking, the-stress-of-this-is-going-to-cause-my-untimely-death part of it.

This morning, we tried again. It was the last chance as our vendor was worried they would have to renegotiate their mortgage if it failed. I wasn’t holding my breath and wasn’t sure they’d get hold of my brother, I rang my sis in law who got onto my niece who told my brother to turn his phone on. Strangely, a few seconds after that he said he was around waiting for the call and all was well. A few hours later I was gobsmacked to discover we were over the line. We have exchanged on Mum and Dad’s house.

Except it’s more than Mum and Dad’s house. Yes, it’s not my house. It’s not the house I chose, but it’s where I grew up. They bought it in 1972 when I was 4. We moved in in 1974 when I was 6. It’s been in the family 52 years and the family, or part of it, has been living there for 50 of them.

I’m 56 and it’s been in my life for 52 of those years. In short, it’s been part of my life.

For all my life.

How does if feel?

I’m not sure.

I’m on the road right now. When I heard the news I sat down on a carpark wall in Mersault and cried. Half of me was desperate to sell, desperate for exchange, desperate for closure, to move on. The other half of me, the half that grew up in that house, in Sussex, loves that house and doesn’t want to let it go and was desperate to hang on. Perhaps if we’d inherited any money at all I might have. But we have £700 left and that’s of £100,000 my brother and I put in to pay Mum’s care fees about this time last year.

It’s like I’ve slipped the moorings of the first half of my life and I am drifting gently away from the quay, into the current to take me away from safety, from all I know, to who knows where …

It’s … weird.

But people are with me. People I love. It’s going to be OK.

I couldn’t find a picture of a ship and a quay so this picture of a hot air balloon I took tonight will have to do

The thing that’s strange is that the further away from my parents’ deaths I get, the more I want them back. Except I don’t because at the end they were suffering or, in Mum’s case, about to. But as I drift away from the quay that was the first part of my life and the figures standing there get smaller and smaller, I begin to remember them as they were before they became ill. In the wine shops in Epernay, I was looking at some widget and suddenly thought it would be a great present for my Mum. It’s a different feeling when you move from the realisation that she wouldn’t know what it’s for anymore, to thinking that she’d love it but that she wouldn’t want it because she’s dead.

My lovely cyber friend Jim Webster once said to me that when they die and all the pain and the sadness is gone you do get them back. And I suppose this is what’s happening. I have been missing the people my parents were for years. The difference is that for most of that time they were still alive. Now they are both dead, it’s easier to remember them when they were still the glorious, larger-than-life personalities they were.

I love Sussex. I love the downs. I don’t want to leave. But in some ways I have been privileged to be there, drink in the views, the sea the Sussexness of it all once a week, every week, for 10 years when I wouldn’t normally have done so. Were my parents healthy, those weekly lunches wouldn’t have been de rigeur.

Yes, I’d have loved to spend a week at the house I grew up in with the McOthers visiting all the roman sites in Sussex, or Arundel Castle … or Goodwood Festival of Speed. Or taking the McOthers to see the Victory at Portsmouth, which is brilliant. But the beds there are horrific, so we never did. Maybe we will do that one day, from a base in a decent hotel. There’s stuff there I’d love to share with the McOthers because I know they’d love it.

Later, maybe.

So how does it feel? Bittersweet. I guess am standing on the brink of the rest of my life. I dunno where it’s going to go. But there are people with me, so with any luck it’ll be fun.

 

General wittering … and cars

Woa, well that’s been a bit of a week. Things are hotting up in the sale of Mum’s house. We are hoping to complete by the end of August, fingers crossed. If anything it’s the lawyers that come with the auction house we used who are going to slow things up. It’s a shame. Whenever anything happens the companies we deal with always ring my brother because he’s the bloke but I’m the clued up one… although to be honest, it’s a very low bar. Mwahahargh.

Anyhooo, it’s all hands to the pump so this next week I’ll be down to Mum’s once, at least, I fear I may have to go on Friday too, although I’m not sure. One thing that is lovely is that we’ve been able to leave a lot of stuff for the new owners because they want it, which is great. I just have to make sure I can sort that out with the house clearers so nothing they shouldn’t have gets taken away. It’s all go. I’ll need to make a couple of trips to get down there and back.

Other news … we went to a car show this weekend at a school near us (Culford). There were some cracking cars there, old MGs, a lot of Lotuses… Loti? including some elites which were wonderful. One of the joys of an event like this is often as much the cars parked in the car park as the ones on display. Here are some belters.

This was parked a few feet from us. Likewise this one (see below).

This is the same model as McOther’s Car That He Didn’t Get Rid Of When He Bought A New Car because … why would he. Then there was this one …

A Lancia Fulvia, I think. This was one of its first outings since the guy restored it. It wasn’t entered into the display it was just there in the car park. Along with this Jag which looks like an automotive tribute to neck rolls. Phnark.

In the display section, there was my (almost) favourite Ferrari, this is a 328 GTS and my fave is the 308 GTS, although I also like the B512 but it’s a bit splitting hairs. Ferraris have got too big for me now, but the smaller 1980s ones are all gorgeous.

When it comes to small sports cars though, few things are lovelier than this … no wings on this model of course.

No wings…

That’s 4 inches narrower than a 1960s mini, which, probably makes it about 4ft wide. It might not even have a problem keeping to one side on a cycle path. Then there were some Lotus elites, which, interestingly, had more switches and dials on the dash than my 2012 Lotus.

And last but not least … the Dad’s Army museum is not far from us and they had brought Jones’ van which was one of the coolest things ever.

That little curtain over the window in the back of the cab and the holes to stick the guns out. Open, two three, guns out, two three, aim, two three, fire!  Or something along those lines in The Armoured Might of Lance Corporal Jones. Worth looking up as it’s hilarious.

Bizarrely that was one of the most evocative things I saw the entire day. I did enjoy Dad’s Army though and when my Dad had Alzheimer’s it was the thing that used to bring him back. We’d watch Dad’s Army together and guffaw. It is incredibly good. I still find it really funny. I’d kill to write comedy like that. It’s funny but it’s also so well observed.

Other than that, over the next couple of weeks I will mostly be completing on Mum’s house. If we can get it sold and finished before August, and holiday time, starts in earnest it will be fantastic.

On another note, I think England are possibly about to loose the football, but they have acquitted themselves extremely well. And Spain are a bit good but England, who looked really pedestrian and boring in other matches suddenly came good and played really well … it’s just that Spain are playing like … I dunno … Brazil? Three great goals and England did well to hold them to two one I think. So there we are.

Until next time!

Life laundry and other adventures

It’s been a busy few weeks, as you’ve probably guessed from the spectacular lack of blog posts, which is irritating because I had loads of stuff to say last week and thought I would carry it over. Needless to say, when I sat down this evening I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember what I was going to write about.

Bum.

Never mind, onwards and upwards.

Two weeks ago, I won ticket sot the Self Publishing Show live. I wasn’t sure how it would go but it was excellent. I really enjoyed it and met a group of authors who seem to be great fun. I also met a fellow blogger which was also grand! Even better had a few really significant ‘learning moments’ that I feel may smooth my self publishing efforts.

My hand looks much nicer than it really is in this picture. Mwahahargh!

Highlights this week! I took Mc(Not So)Mini to a WWII reenactment yesterday. That was fun. He met three friends and I had a pootle round, a wee chat to one of the friend’s Mum’s and another wee chat to other friend’s dad. They had gone as 1970s British Army and had some lovely chats with veterans who recognised their old kit. I also took a close look at a Willys Jeep and decided that I would not enjoy driving one from Brighton to Kabul which my Uncle and two friends did one summer holidays when they were students. Not just the dust in the hot bits, but driving that through rainy France. Mmm… no fun.

BTW my Uncle’s mate wrote a book and my uncle has published it. I can’t for the life of me find the link but I know it’s on Amazon, at least. I’ll have to see if I can find it.

McOther was given a voucher for a local restaurant when he retired and so we went there last night with friends. It was an absolute gas and a very jolly evening. I had lobster. Mmm-Mmm.

This week has been Life Laundry. In order to accommodate the stuff from Mum’s we have to move, remove and generally tessellate the stuff we already have. But our social lives have been busy so we’ve had to fit it all round that.

As a result our dining room looks like a furniture warehouse with various bits waiting to be polished, have the drawers hoovered etc.

Compromises were made too, because when we got to Sussex with the removers and thought about it, we realised that the rather lovely oak bookcase we were going to have wouldn’t actually go out of the room unless it was taken apart.

Looking back, I dimly remember Mum and Dad realising that it couldn’t move from the housemasters quarters at the school where Dad worked straight away because it was too big to fit anywhere in the house. So they hired this dear old boy, who was in his 90s I believe (he went on to collect cider apples from the tree in Mum and Dad’s garden for a few years and he would bring us a bottle of really good Normandy style cider).

Sorry where was I? Right, yes, this lovely old man went over there in a van, took the shelves to bits, cut two feet off it and rebuilt it. What I’d forgotten but think I now recall, was that he brought it back to Mum and Dad’s in pieces in his van and rebuilt it there. Which means we can’t remove it without taking it apart.

Luckily one of the removers was a carpenter.

Unluckily, he took one look at it and realised that it was nailed together with tiny nails and he felt it very unlikely he could take it to bits without breaking it.

Luckily, I was allowed to make a substitution so now, as well as the collection of little bits and bobs Mum had (which she, or her Grandmother who started it, I’m not sure which) called ‘funnies’, I have the cabinet they have always lived in, which was going to be sold. It’s too big to fit into my office, but it comes in two parts. The bottom cupboards can go in one place and the top half with the shelves will work fine as a display cabinet.  I discovered, to my amusement that the cabinet has legs, which obviously nobody has ever liked, so they have travelled with it from house-to-house and owner-to-owner stuffed in the back corner of its under cupboard, so to speak.

Not as bad as it was, we’ve cleared a way through

Meanwhile I’m also having Mum’s desk, which means I have to empty the one I have. There is a startling amount more stuff in there than I anticipated. I have filled three boxes so far and will easily fill two more, which is a bit horrific, but I suspect most of it will go back in the drawers of the new desk. The old one doesn’t have drawers but it did have shelves. I genuinely think Mum’s will accommodate more stuff than the old one, even though it’s half the size, but it might be different things because some things—the books for example—will need shelves.

Then it’s a case of shuggling everything around so the two armchairs I’m having fit in… and a footstool. It should be OK. It’s just a case of having a massive clear out. Gulp.

Once that’s done, I need to start putting my toy collection in the auction. It’s glorious and I love it but most of it is in 35 boxes in the loft above the garage and has remained there for the last 16 years. It comprises Dr Who toys, Thunderbirds, Stingray and Captain Scarlet toys, the odd left-field thing like Austen Powers action figures and a lot of StarWars stuff. The only things that are worth anything are the 1970s StarWars 3” action figures, which, naturally, are the thing I like best of the StarWars stuff, and are about the only things that are small enough for me to actually keep.

Once that’s gone, or at least, the big bits, I can put all my stock of books on the shelves so I know how many copies of each I have and organise some other things—which are currently dotted about the room—onto the shelves out of the way. Having sold some of Mum’s stuff, I can also put my more interesting detector finds in the glass fronted display cabinet too, so that’s grand.

Obviously, I should embrace the opportunity to have a sort out, and I kind of do, but I also really, really want to finish the WIP and actually, if Real Life would just SOD OFF for one fucking moment I could probably knock that book on the head in a few weeks. But Real Life is showing no signs of pissing off and leaving me alone any time soon. The minute I get one thing sorted another person asks me what the status is with X, Y or Z and I have to ring people and find out. And I need to pay the bequests which will leave me with perilously close to nothing to pay the bills and run the house until it’s sold.

Seriously, don’t bother growing up. Being an adult is absolutely fucking bollocks. I hate it.

It got me thinking, though. I think one of the hardest things about getting rid of all the stuff is that everything has a story. It’s something Mum and Dad bought together shortly after getting married, or it’s a poignant reminder of some member of the family I utterly loved. Or I remember thinking it was lovely. Or ‘dear old x’ gave it to Mum and Dad.

Some of it’s been in the family for years, seriously, there are every lady member of the family’s wristwatch from about 1910 onwards. All lovely. All worth about £100 for the scrap gold or silver value. I feel like the curator of a museum which is closing whose last duty, before signing their own P45, is to put the collection up for sale.

It’s an odd feeling.

As I write this, I know there will be people reading who will be thinking that these are very first world problems and that I should grow a pair and belt up. And yes, they’re probably right.

But this blog isn’t about me being strong and overcoming against all odds, this is me writing about how I feel, however wretched that may be… or a bit sad, in this case because lord knows, I’ve done wretched and this really isn’t it. But I digress. My point is, I didn’t write this to open the batting for a game of ‘I’ve had it much harder than you with anyone’. I am actually aware that I’ve had it a lot easier than many people with regards to ‘stuff’. Emotional toll? Not so sure but maybe sometimes cash and stuff can make the emotional toll easier to bear.

Talking about the last 10 years to a friend whose wife had lost both parents relatively fast but had needed to deal with a similar situation, albeit for a shorter time, he asked who I had been ‘talking to’ about this. Had I had therapy or counselling? I was intrigued because it had never occurred to me to do that long term. I did a six week course of counselling with the NHS when it all kicked off back in 2012. Six weeks was all you got then, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t get that now. But it was very good and from then on, I just applied what I’d learned.

So if you’re reading, fingers poised over the keyboard to comment about how you only had one pot to piss in which your parents shared with the neighbours on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the rest of the time had to go without, can I humbly invite you not to, because if anyone does I will, I’m afraid, politely tell them to fuck all the way off.

If anyone starts playing ‘I’ve had it harder than. you’ with me, they can fuck off.

None of my regular commenters will … but just in case anyone else happens upon this, here’s a truth. My parents didn’t have an huge amount of money in the grand scheme of things, but they had enough to show me that it’s not the universal panacea those who have none believe it is. Having enough wealth to live comfortably can really, really help. And for Mum and Dad, it did. But it didn’t lessen their suffering, or mine and my brothers over the last ten years. Sometimes people have to face things in life are just really, really harsh and their wealth, or lack of it, makes no difference.

Obviously comments deliberately taking the piss about licking t’road clean wi’tongue or that meme with the mountain about ‘our parents route to school’ are allowed.

In some ways, it would have been easier if my parents had nothing. There would have been no big questions and nothing to lose although there’d have been a LOT more work and a lot more hectoring homes to see that they were cared for properly.

Amazingly, I don’t begrudge spending £1m (more than their life savings, and some of ours) for them on their care. It wasn’t my money (mostly) and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I really don’t mind. What does get to me, a bit, is that they did. They saw their life savings as their nest egg to have fun with and the rest as an inheritance for my brother and I, and their grandchildren. It was taken from them to pay for something they had paid tax all their lives to be given for free as part of the NHS. What they got for being good citizens and saving for a rainy day was a fair distance along the path to institutionalised destitution.

Yes, I am lucky I am to inherit anything and I know that for dementia sufferers it’s very rare to have anything to leave your children, rare to live in your own familiar surroundings until the end and rare to come out of it with any assets at all. I am lucky to have something as piffling to deal with as trying to tessellate furniture. Or feeling sad about letting go. I know that. I don’t need to be told. This is just an honest account of how I feel, because if I’m feeling this, there are probably other people somewhere feeling it too and if just one of this finds this, reads it and feels a bit less daunted and alone knowing they’re not the only one, then my work here is done.

On the upside, the house sale is projected to complete in September, which isn’t too far away, I’m crossing fingers and praying that, maybe, what I might get for Christmas from the ether is my life back. I’m not holding my breath, but I can hope.

More wittering…

It’s that time of the week and here I am, back like a bad smell.

At the moment, I feel as if my blog is officially Not Funny anymore. And at the same time, not poignant either. I hope I’ll get back in the swing of making it interesting soon. In the meantime, talking of bad smells …

At the market today I couldn’t help picking up a cheesy bargain. A massive Epoisse cheese was going for a song from the catering left overs man and I bought one. I spent an hour cutting it into 25g portions and freezing it. It’s probably not something I should be eating large amounts of after two months of D&V … or at least D. Hence freezing the lions share for sunnier times. I was very pleased with it though.

Football sized Epoisse. Om nom nom.

It also smells. A lot. It’s not as bad as Tomme De Bethune—I believe that smells so rank that shoppers in France are banned from using public transport if they have a portion about their person—but it’s not far off.

The Queen of Cheese wearing her cheese crown to demonstrate just how big the cheese was. There was no cheese on that bit BTW or my hair would be worryingly smelly about now.

Cheese frozen I played with my new delivery. Furniture polish. Yeh try not to get excited people. But some of Mum’s furniture hasn’t been touched much for the last few years and some of ours is a bit beaten up after years of being looked after by me … So I bought some antique wax, her recommended formula, to buff it up. I glued the leg back onto a cake stand thingy I liberated from Mum’s and fixed the barometer.

Sort of …

OK so it’s hopelessly inaccurate but that might be the result of my brother’s and my efforts to move it about. Despite the instructions on the back about transporting it, he didn’t notice them, and I, too failed to notice them until about 3 weeks after I’d received it.

Having laid it carefully flat to take it the three hours from Mum’s place to the home near my brother that she was going into, and then having done the same thing to bring it back down to my house, it transpires on reading said instructions that this is not the right thing to do. Some of the mercury has gone awol. At least I assume it has. When we came to unload it he was a bit concerned when I explained what the silver droplets were on the back seat. I did manage to shepherd most of them into a little plastic pot so I’m rather hoping it won’t cause the untimely death of either of us. It’s sitting on the mantlepiece waiting for me to work out how I tip it back into the barometer’s tube safely.

That said, I may just need to wrap the string from one of the weights round the pulley a couple of times to even them up a bit. And what with today going from bright sun to thunder and hail it’s difficult to work out what the reading should actually be. Very Stormy, where it’s sitting, might be about right.

Also this week, I’ve been trying macro photography. Here are two shots of flowers I took on the way back from the vet’s in a rare moment of sunshine.

They really looked that vivid although the purple of the thistle was a bluer one than that.

Writing stuff

This week, I have mostly been … productive.

Ooo get me.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a seat in a teaching session about how to get the best for your books out of Google Play. It cost me the princely sum of £75 or thereabouts and has been well worth the money. I couldn’t attend all of it so I did the first hour and have been working my way through the video replay. I’m three hours in and there is still more, plus a couple of supplemental videos so it’s excellent value. There were definitely some scales-from-the-eyes moments. I’m excited about some of these hints and tips and I’m half way through implementing them all and hoping they’ll give sales a little lift.

Talking of sales lifts … The first novel in the K’Barthan series is in a free anthology of first in series books. I’ve included it in my mailing list and I give it a plug every now and again but clearly one of my fellow authors in that enterprise—someone with a lot more mailing list clonk than I have—has plugged it too. This has resulted in couple of sales of the second, third and fourth books in that series and in one case, all my books from my online store. Which is grand. I enjoyed watching someone on Kobo hoover them up in about three days as well.

You see, there are advantages to having shit sales, you can watch someone methodically work their way through your stuff and feel good about it. Because the thing about my books is that when I can actually persuade someone to read one, they nearly always read everything I’ve written afterwards. It’s just that they have to be forced into starting one at gunpoint.

Have I done any writing?

I did a big chunk on Tuesday, but haven’t been able to do much since. Can’t win ’em all.

Other splendid things.

This week … well last week actually but I forgot to say … I had a rather smashing windfall. There is a convention for self published authors that runs every year called the Self Publishing Show. I went the first year (2020, two weeks before lockdown) and really enjoyed it. There was a talk by Joanna Penn about selling on all vendors rather than just Amazon, which made me feel I might have a chance to get somewhere with my stuff.

Since then, I haven’t been. This is mainly because the head honcho put his books exclusive with Amazon and so it all began to feel a bit Amazon-centric. This year, however, the line up looks really interesting and is much more varied, so when there was a reply-here-and-you-may-win tickets post in one of the groups I’m part of in Circle, I left a comment … and won a ticket!

So that’s grand.

On the downside, it involves a 6 am start and runs for two days and of course, the only day the removal company could collect the stuff from Mum’s was the day before, which also involves a 6 am start.

Three 6 am starts in a row is … well let’s just say, I’ll need to go to bed very early and eat extremely carefully because I will be extremely worried about waking the Bum Kraken or riding the Vomit Comet again. Fingers crossed.

Ho hum. Never mind.

Other things this week. I was 56 years old on Wednesday. That was scary but also fun because I managed to make a reasonably decent cake and McMini, who shares a birthday with me, wanted chocolate for the first time ever! At last! After 16 years I was able to indulge myself with my favourite flavour. I tried to make fondant icing. It went very wrong, well, no, that’s not true. In cookery, he who dares wins. It’s only gone wrong if it tastes like Satan’s bile and this didn’t.

Unfortunately, though, I made it too early and then realised that the cake was still warm, so the cake had to go in the freezer, and while I was sorting that out, the icing began to cool and set in the bowl. Finally, it curdled into an unpleasantly oily mess. I remembered being told that if something curdles to add more fat except I had used all the butter in the house so I had to add a spoonful of cooking oil, along with some water, which the recipe specified anyway. What I ended up with was a luxuriantly gloopy variant of butter icing so all was not lost. It was just … different.

Surfing the brown wave …

It’s very moorish and I have put on 4lbs by looking at it. Two days of indulgent eating and boom it’s lip up fattie. Never mind. I can lose it again next week.

McMini and I each got presents, which were fun. It felt weird not ringing Mum, not paying the Mum cheque into our accounts and … yeh. It felt weird. Although, I think the best present for me was that probate has been granted on Mum’s. Woot.

I’m waiting for the actual letter from HMRC to arrive before I let the estate agent know but hopefully this means we can now go ahead with the sale, probably in July. That will make it all hands to the pump but at the same time, it’ll be over sooner, so there’s that.

Right that’s it from me. I will see you next week.

Future Adventures

If you’re interested in that free anthology of first in series books you can find out more by clicking this link here.

Stuff

A mixed bag this week so on we go.

On health

Because I have French blood—so if you ask how I am I’m going to smecking well tell you—I’m going to tell you how I am. Before you hesitatingly raise a hand, first finger extended in an ‘excuse me’ gesture and start to explain that you didn’t actually ask how I was at all, rest assured I’m going to tell you, anyway.

Once again, I have been riding the vomit comet this week, although I did manage not to actually hurl, merely emptying at extreme speed at 3.00 am in a manner reminiscent of someone upending a bucket. But since I did not find myself vomiting into the small plastic pot I have learned to keep ready and disinfected by the loo for just this purpose, I’ll chalk up this latest round of Mary versus The Virus as a draw.

Another visit to the Doctor and I have new HRT to try—patches—which seems to work better as I am already sleeping more soundly. I have to change the patches twice a week, which is irritating because as we all know there are seven days in a week. Seven is a prime number, which means it’s divisible by one, itself and fuck all else so dividing it into two is tricky. I have elected to go for 3.5 days which so far means 8am on Saturday, followed by 8pm on Tuesday, back to 8 am on Saturday and so on. It would have been much easier if the instructions were something sensible like, change the patch every three days. Never mind. Onwards.

Out and about

Between Saturday’s hurlathon and Thursday’s attack of fire-hose bottom (or FHB as I like to call it) I finally managed to get a gym session in, which is always good, had a swim, did ‘Walk and Whinge’ with my friend Jill or a ‘Grumble in the Jungle’ in this case, since we took the woodland path.

Picture from the woodland path …

We also went to see Miles Jupp’s one man show, On I Bang at The Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds on Thursday night, pre my FHB attack. I cannot recommend the Theatre Royal enough, OK, like every theatre, it could do with a couple more loos—even the gents queue out of the door during the interval—but otherwise it’s a lovely venue, the staff are delightful and it’s small which makes is so much more intimate, and therefore, more fun. They also get some amazingly big names in comedy. I saw Frank Skinner there a couple of months ago, I was in the third row back, which was brilliant although I missed Michael McIntyre and Dara O’Brien.

Anyway, if you can go and see On I Bang, I highly recommend it. Miles Jupp’s relationship with his wife appears to be a facsimile of mine with McOther in that he clearly shares the same manic need for tidiness while I got the impression his wife, like myself, might be a bit more louche about that aspect of keeping house.

It was also clear that the dynamic with which the Jupps handle this difference was very similar to ours.  Jupp comes out of it as a genuinely lovely chap, which he proved beyond doubt on this particular evening when someone in the audience was taken ill. OK, so the whole show was about a similar thing happening to him, plus the aftermath, but it wasn’t necessarily a given that he’d be empathetic. In the event he was the first person to notice, simply stopping, looking out into the audience and saying, ‘are you alright?’

When it was clear that, no, the chap was not alright, he calmly asked if there were any medically trained people who could help, asked if they could bring the lights up and then enquired whether they needed him to stop the performance at this point or just pause. The end result was a pause while the gentleman was helped out of the theatre.

However, the thoughtful and kindly manner in which Jupp handled the crisis was extremely impressive. Concluding, after the chap had been helped out of the auditorium, that he was thinking about offering him tickets to On I Bang in Ipswich the following Saturday but that, if the show affected the man the same way a second time, he might not want them. After the actual interval, the first thing he mentioned when he came on again was that the taken-ill-man was OK.

So that was grand. I passed up a chance to do a comicon in Ipswich today because we were due to go to my Uncle’s 90th Birthday celebration yesterday and I wasn’t sure I could manage two days running after last Saturday’s outbreak, let alone after Thursdays’s extra helping. That was grand. It being Saturday and there being GCSEs we went down and back in the day.

The M25 is mostly down from 4 lanes to 3 all the way round at the moment which means it’s bollocksed at the best of times. This wasn’t too bad, but it was the M11 which screwed us. A lorry side swiped a car and ruptured its diesel tank in the process. We sat for 45 minutes and then they’d sorted out the bollards and we were allowed through along one lane.

Having taken 3 hours, and the rest, to get down there, we decided it was best to leave by about 4, but after a worrying trip to the loo during pudding, I decided it might be prudent for us to leave at once, just in case. In the event, my fears proved unfounded, but had we stayed, and I’d got more tired, they could well have been borne out by my ever troublesome guts. It’s very difficult to predict it for certain, as I’ve no clue what sets it off.

Going past the morning’s crash site on the M11 on our way back, it was still a lane down although they were just finishing up resurfacing it. We noticed there was hardly any traffic and discovered that was because exactly the same thing had happened about five miles further up. There was a tailback for about 10 miles and it looked like they’d closed the road. We were extremely glad it wasn’t an evening do and we weren’t sitting in it on our way down.

This morning, I had a suspicion I was going to be the only member of the choir at church and because of riding the Vomit Comet last Saturday and Thursday night, I hadn’t passed a cursory glance over the hymns, mass setting etc the way I usually do. There are only three of us, anyway, but the other two are consummate musicians and while I can read music, it is a bit hit and miss. I’m there to make up the numbers really. Today the other two were away and it was a choir of one; me.

The mass was one I hadn’t sung for rather a long time and I was a bit nervous as I hadn’t prepared myself in advance. I managed to sing one of the responses a third higher than everyone else, which was a bit embarrassing and of course, a lot of the congregation followed me and wondered why it was such a strain on their vocal chords.

Luckily one of the altar party doubles up as choir from time to time so he helped out with some of the descanty bits in the mass setting, albeit an octave lower. I forgot the first of four in the gloria but managed to remember the others even if I forgot to go up a note instead of down at the end. It didn’t really matter as it still went with the rest of the chord. In the Agnes Dei, the organist was kind enough to pick the alternative bits out for me, which was very helpful of him.

To my horror, I managed to forget the first three notes of the second (gradual in Anglican nerd-speak) hymn. Naturally it was the one where we weren’t singing the tune printed next to it in the book. It’s one I know backwards, upside down and inside out … until I think about it. Luckily I managed to calm down, stop thinking about it and switch to autopilot by the end of verse three so at least I got it right twice. After that, apart from the aforementioned Angus Dei, I blundered through to the end of the service largely unscathed. There was another slightly sticky moment when we had a hymn which went to the tune of another, slightly more famous hymn, and I had to concentrate extremely hard to ensure I didn’t switch to autopilot and end up singing the wrong words.

Afterwards there were homemade biscuits and having spent a fair part of the week emitting my entire contents, suddenly, and at speed, I had no qualms about replenishing my lost calories by eating four of them. I also had coffee. Mmm. After the first bout of FHB finished, I kicked caffeinated coffee into touch because I’d not been able to drink it for most of March and April while I had my endless crapathon. Previous to that, I had reached the stage where I had a raging headache if denied access to coffee in the morning, not to mention trouble getting out of bed.

Having got rid of that annoying dependency, it seemed a bit mad to re-establish it so I’ve been drinking decaf, except occasionally. However, I have discovered that drinking the caffeinated stuff now gives me a little bit of a buzz! Mwahahahargh! Which is nice.

On writing

My writing is really pissing me off at the moment. I have a story, with a timeline but I am slightly flummoxed as to how I deal with it.

There are two sub characters, a gang member and a kidnapped sausage maker, whose relationship is a big part of the whole thing. The sausage maker is being forced to make sausage against her will and refuses. Her gaoler is trying to persuade her because his boss wants her to make 8 more sausages after which they promise to release her. The trouble is, they promised to release her after she’d made four, eight and then twelve sausages so the sausage maker has refused to make any more.

Finally, the gang leader has the sausage maker’s husband kidnapped, intending to threaten his murder unless the sausage maker makes more sausages. Enter our hero, The Pan of Hamgee, who blunders upon the kidnapping as it happens, and after finding out some more about it, reports it to Big Merv who decides to send a message to the gang leader who has done the kidnapping.

Originally, delivering that message was where the story starts. Then I rolled it back to at the point the husband was kidnapped. I can start it with the delivery, but … there has to be some time before that for the relationship between the kidnapped sausage maker and her gaoler to develop. That either means a prologue or flashbacks. I suppose it’s possible flashbacks might work… I think prologues are like cliffhangers, some people avoid them on principle, and lord knows I have few enough readers without pissing some of them off before I start. But others hate flashbacks.

It’s all extremely irritating and although I think I’ve almost solved it, it’s stalled progress for a chuffing eternity, which is irritating in the extreme but I think I’m nearly there now… probably.

Right with that, it’s time to go and help cook stuff. I also have to interrogate my son about cake.

Afore ye go …

If you’d like to read something, there’s always a free book. I have some free at retailers, and more free from me. You can find links and information as to where and how to download them here

Meh.

OK here’s a TMI alert for everyone. This is far too much information, very much TMI. If that’s not your thing, please feel free to pass on this one. The rest of you… enjoy.

Last night I was unfortunate enough to have yet another visit from Cardinal Chunder and Mr S’hitattak. Jeez what is going on? Actually no, let’s stop me there, because I think I may know.

After the Stomach Bug That Would Not Die, coupled with the stress of possibly putting Mum in a home which I knew would devastate her, and all the money worries over the last two years, and then her dieing and all the gubbins and aftermath of that, I have been left a bit run down. When I am tired, the first thing affected is my digestive system which makes it much harder to kick a long-term, double-ard bug bastard with this level of persistence into touch. At the moment, I’m on HRT. After having two coils I now have pills for the progesterone bit and the same oestrogen infused alcohol gel to rub on my legs. The pills have to be taken on an empty stomach. I’m not sure what happens if they aren’t but I’ve assumed it means they don’t work as well.

The instructions suggest I take them an hour before food or two hours after eating. Before the Undead Stomach Bug I would take them when I went to bed which was usually anywhere between half ten and midnight which meant my 7 o’clock supper had between two and four hours to vacate my stomach beforehand.

However, when I am knackered, my digestive system slows down. I discovered this by din’t of throwing up A LOT while I was doing my A’levels. Usually that was caused by eating something too rich, or too late. The meal would then stay exactly where it was, until a few hours later when, if it was something really rich like a pork chop, my stomach would decide it couldn’t digest whatever it was, throw up it’s hands and admit defeat, at which point, I’d throw up.

So essentially, stomach bug aside, I think what has caused the last two attacks has been partly that I’m still recovering, and therefore tired, but also I’ve taken the HRT pill two or three hours after dinner on a stomach that is tired and lackadaisical—not to mention still very full of food. Ever since I’ve been taking the pills I’ve been much more menopausal and have had much more trouble getting a good night’s sleep. You need a good 3 hours to get proper REM in and I’ve been getting two hours unbroken rest if I’m lucky, waking up 5 – 7 times a night like I have a newborn or something. It’s been particularly bad all week.

I tried taking the pill later, in my regular 1 am wake up slot. I’m guaranteed to wake up at 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 at the moment, which is a pain when I usually have to get up at 7. This hasn’t made much difference so far. I could start taking the pill in the morning, which might work because it has to be an hour before food, but not if it’s holidays etc and I’m having a lie in and wake up at 9.30 or if we’re going somewhere and have to leave early and I can’t have anything to eat before I go, and spend the day ravening hungry.

Naturally sleeping really badly makes me tired, ergo the digestive system goes slow, and with each successive night of disturbed sleep the digestion is slower and presumably the stomach fuller each time I take the pill on a supposedly empty stomach at midnight. So, presumably the effectiveness of the progesterone pill gets less and less as there is more and more food on board later at night … so I get more and more menopausal symptoms, until I get so knackered that my stomach does a go slow, and, if I eat something rich like curry it throws up it’s hands and … yeh.

Last night, after feeling a bit more nauseous each time I woke up, I was finally sick at 5 am, while poor McOther was getting ready to go to a car boot. So I literally had to wander into the bathroom while he was cleaning his teeth, carrying a small pot, bid him a cheery, ‘good morning’ apologise, and then proceed to do the level up from farting and coughing at the same time; sitting down on the loo and cleverly emitting copiously from both ends of my alimentary canal. Mmm. Poor man. I bet he enjoyed that. Isn’t life a peach? Let me tell you, this is not an ideal way to start the day for me either. And despite being 5 am, it was clear that my stomach had not even given a nod to digesting my supper. I was also pissed off that I didn’t get to church or do anything fun today because I wasn’t ‘empty’ in time.

So I have to decide if I’m going to have another coil or if I’m going to try the patches first. I slept like the dead with the coil and gel combo and have always struggled with the pills so I suspect they may not be for me. I guess I should give the patches a go as they may work better, seeing as the coil did. So another trip to the Doctor’s on Monday, I think.

There are still another few weeks before my results come back but I think everything barring microscopic colitis has been ruled out.

Still feeling a bit nauseous as I write so it’s rice tonight. But I’ll put a tiny bit of ragu in it to make it more interesting.

On the upside …

I’ve been far too ropy to do anything today so I have sat in the garden, in the sun, in a deck chair in my pyjamas and read a book. I also repaired to McOther’s lounger where I had a very pleasant little sleep so all is good. I just need to be really careful what I eat from now on I think, until I get on a more even keel financially and the Mum admin is done.

I have money worries for myself now. Mum used to pay my brother and I expenses to go see her—‘Darling, you must pay yourselves because it’ll probably be the only bit of our money you’ll ever see.’—and I no longer get those regularly. I am feeling their loss, on top of a succession of enormous and thoroughly unexpected bills and in a very long month the housekeeping is supposed to arrive on 1st of the month but it’ll be the 7th or later this time because of the way the days fall. But somehow knowing the end is in sight helps a bit.

Other upsides, or at least reassuring things. I am having grief counselling about Mum which has started and is really helpful. The counsellor said that it is very common for illness to accompany grief so I feel a bit better about that side of it.

Other news this week …

Yesterday I had a very enjoyable day at Watford Comicon. It was a lovely venue and there were lots of lovely folks there, including, among the guests,  an actual Dr Who (Colin Baker).

Thanks Simone for asking someone to take our picture!

There was also a fantastic bunch of traders with some amazing things to buy and look at. Unfortunately there weren’t that many folks in. Maybe everyone decided the last weekend of half term was too much hassle and they just wanted to stay home. Despite it being quiet the punters who did come along were great and I had some very interesting conversations with some lovely people.

The event was staged at Watford Leisure centre and extra bonus, we saw some wild parrots flying around in the grounds afterwards.

The noisy cricket now has two slow punctures so I’m thinking I should probably get my alloys recoated at some point as this is what usually happens, as they get older and more rusty, they start to leak.

Other comicon news, eyebombed the loos.

Although some things in the loos didn’t need eyebombing.

Writing…

Yes, I have done some writing this week. My main task now is to do the timeline. I couldn’t get it to gel and it was only as I tried to work it out in my head that I began to realise that what I really have is two books. Jolly dee. Both follow quite happily on from each other without cliff hangers so it should be alright once I’ve sat down and planned the timeline.

Probably …

So that’s grand.

Right that’s it from me. Hopefully I’ll have more interesting things to post next week. In the meantime, remember you can always grab any books I have free from this page, here: https://www.hamgee.co.uk/cmot3

 

Let’s try kindness…

This week has been hectic although looking back on it, it’s less that I’ve had a hectic week and more that, after last week’s visitation from Cardinal Chunder and friends I was definitely not firing on all cylinders for most of the time. I finally got back to the gym on Thursday, even though I was still feeling a little ropy.

It did leave me a little time to browse the internet more than I should have done. There was also time to write which was good and finally, after some of the stuff I read on line, time to think. Yeh, I know, if I keep practising it might become an habit etc.

It also gave me more time to spend on social media. The result is …  well I did enjoy all those posts about Rishi looking like he’d just got gunked on Tiswas but otherwise it’s all a bit grim. Yes, rant warning ahead. MTM steps onto soap box. Yep. Here we go. You might want to scroll on by but …

Blimey. What a bunch of miserable fucking bastards we are! Seriously. What is going on? I saw a post somewhere about young people and their many genders etc and the poster was commenting on what a load of bollocks it all is.

It wasn’t shrill or tub thumping but it wan’t needed. It was stuff that didn’t need said and yet, it was there and because there seems to be an awful lot of tub thumping shrill stuff about ‘wokeness’ it just felt like another person putting the boot in against kindness, respect and consideration for others, which is what a lot of ‘wokeness’ is supposed to be.

Perhaps I feel it more because my son has so many LGBTQ+ friends. But I get perplexed by this anti woke stuff. I don’t mean the endless pussy footing about in case we cause people offence. That’s just stupid and standing against that is fine. I mean the inability to see the difference between not taking consideration for others to extremes and just not considering others. The anti woke reaction I guess.

The one where the logic goes like this. Bob is LGBTQ+ and has behaved like a twat on telly. That must mean everyone LGBTQ+ is a twat like Bob. Even though there are LGBTQ+ people we’ve known all our lives who are friends and we know aren’t twats! Also, let’s not take the matter up with Bob because even though that would be logical we can’t reach him. Instead, let’s go kick our friend Eric who we’ve known for. years. Eric hasn’t even heard of Bob but he just happens to be LGBTQ+ as well and furnished with our new knowledge of famous Bob, who has been a dick everyone, we now understand that all LGBTQ+ must be dicks and since Eric lives round the corner it makes sense to go smack him. Yes, we’ll smack Eric, even though we have known his family for years and his father is our son’s godfather and we know he’s a lovely man etc etc.

Is this for real?

What fucking prick outside the brainwashed nimby in a police state thinks that one small aspect of a person defines the rest of them?

Also anti woke? Yes of course, because a few morons going over the top about getting offended now means that consideration and thought about other people is a bad thing. As if the fact someone has behaved like an arsehole and got offended over nothing gives the anti-woke brigade cart blanche to go out of their way to deliberately upset different, unrelated people who just happen to have the same gender, sexuality, hair colour (insert your own inane reason here) as famous person who’s behaviour they consider rude, in some warped ‘redressing of the balance’. Or ‘perpetuation of the pointless shit and enmity’ as I prefer to call it.

How old are we all? Three?*

*No. Most three year olds have already grown out of this kind of behaviour.

As the mother of a teenager, I feel beholden to say something.

There is always the disingenuous argument in any conversation about the modern youth’s approach to gender along the lines of x, y or z person has decided that they are a toaster, which stems from a misunderstanding of how they interpret gender, is largely irrelevant to the whole gender/trans debate and merely serves to muddy the waters. A bit like the ‘all lives matter’ mantra, when yes, undeniably all lives do matter, but the whole point of black lives matter was that, to a lot of the ethnic population, it felt like non-white lives didn’t matter. Back to the youth of today.

My son explains that there is a person’s sex, which is what you are born as, male or female and that is irrefutable, but your gender is more like a spectrum which is why some girls are very girly and some are, in many respects, blokes with boobs and a high voice. There is of course, every stage of girlyness or blokishness along the spectrum between.

That makes sense.

Yet still I see so much anti LGBTQ+ or minority of any description crap daily on t’interweb. More than when I was growing up in the 1980s for fuck’s sake. I find my self wondering why? Seriously. Apart from the obvious, are we really going that badly backwards? Question, why does anyone give a shit? Or at least, why do so many people give a shit about trivial rubbish like the way someone else expresses their sexuality? I mean, one; it’s not their business how much man, lady or in between anyone else feels. Two; if choosing to be one gender or another makes a person happier, and therefore more readily able to be kind to others, why would anyone stand in their way? Oh and three; did I mention that someone’s sexuality is none of other people’s fucking business.

I saw a Facebook post just recently; someone in East Anglia getting all hot under the collar because Chichester police dolled up a police car for pride week down in Sussex. That’s where Brighton is, in case anyone needs a nudge. The usual comments asking why they couldn’t spend the money fighting crime followed, from a bunch of people who clearly don’t understand how the allocation of budgets works in government, local authorities and large organisations. Here’s a hint, you can’t take the cost of a £500 vehicle wrap from a marketing budget and add it to a different one. That’s now how it works. I’m not saying it’s good but that’s the way it is in most organisations right now.

These folks who have to complain about everything do my nut.

You! Yes you! You miserable fuckers! You’re doing my effing head in.

Seriously, people are so pissed off by the minor inconvenience of having to call someone ‘they’ that they are happy to put hours of time and energy into saying horrible things about them on the internet. Please tell me, who has the time and energy for all this anger and hatred. Jeez guys, just step away from the poison and calm down for one fucking minute. Is it really so fucking hard to be kind?

I dunno. Maybe it is.

It seems that I’ve hit this weird stage in life where I’ve reached the middle and noticed that some of the people around me have suddenly got old. I don’t mean that they’ve physically aged, well they have and I have too, but I’m not talking about that. I mean their outlook is old, in absolutely the wrong way. They are acting like stereotypical grumpy old people; saying and doing stuff that is, frankly, a bit grim. I’m just waiting for someone I hang out at the pub with to say it’s time they, ‘brought back the birch’ or some other rampantly mentalist shit.

So another question … is anyone gay making people be gay? Is anyone trans forcing the straight objectors to LGBTQ+ to be trans. No. Which puts them in a much better position than the lion’s share of LGBTQ+ people then. Because for years people who aren’t straight, in whatever way, have been forced to pretend they are. Not a few years either. Hundreds. Thousands in some cultures. Notable exception some older, wiser cultures than ours.

You know what. If all the self appointed sexuality police in the heterosexual world consider that, as humans, they are big and ugly enough to decide their sexuality for themselves, then surely it follows that people in the LGBTQ+ community are equally well equipped to decide their sexuality for themselves. So long as nobody is deciding anyone else’s sexuality for them and forcing them to be someone they’re not surely that’s OK.

Nobody LGBTQ+ is doing any harm or ‘corrupting people’ by being open about who they are. They’re just doing things their way and by doing things differently they are allowing other LGBTQ+ people like them the chance to be true to themselves without fear, or if they’re not sure, to explore possibilities. I’m thinking people who might otherwise have lived their lives pretending to be someone they aren’t here. You know, folks who are too afraid not to fit in, or who are forced to.

The thing that’s difficult about homophobia is that I can easily see that it’s a big part of our caveman programming and therefore, to some people, it feels natural, like an instinct. Think about it. Back in our caveman days, we were usually at war with the tribe next door. Infant mortality was high and making babies was as much an arms race as the natural progression of a loving relationship, rather more so, in fact. Making sure everyone who possibly could had kids was an important part of survival. Of course they didn’t like anyone challenging that norm.

If you don’t like the LGBTQ+ community, relax because it’s not them, it’s you. That’s your inner cave man messing with your arse. It just means you’re not quite as well evolved as the rest of us. Never mind. Keep working at it.

So while there are no gender police waiting to stop me in the street and put me on a charge for not caring about my nails and makeup enough, I will always support LGBTQ+ people’s right to just be who they are, because in many places they are not allowed to. Since I am allowed to be who I am (and as a woman, in many places, I’m not allowed to do that either) I’d like to think I can afford to extend such a simple courtesy to others.

So, if my son ever wakes up one morning and decides he feels more female than male, it won’t make him a different person. He’ll still be the lovely chap I know and love. He just might be a ‘they’ from that point on rather than a ‘he’—he might even be a ‘she’—but I really don’t care if that is what will make him feel fulfilled and happy.

I’m just a bit shocked, as I get older, how many people my age are going … a bit Oswold Mosley and becoming intolerant, mean, pissy and only interested in negging everything and everyone. What happened to us? I think back to the Olympics of 2012 and I swear we’ve jumped the fucking timeline. Or a whole load of people have swapped places with nutters from the middle ages who don’t understand modern life, think electricity is magic and believe forks are evil. What happened there? I’m sure I haven’t changed yet suddenly I feel like an alien. What’s happened to everyone else. Sheesh.

Me, I play down my gender, ergo M T McGuire rather than Mary, because the minute people know I am female all kinds of judgemental shit comes into play. Less than there was but it’s still there. Maybe that’s why I find it a bit easier to live and let live when it comes to the LGBTQ+ community. But the whole storm in a teacup about ‘they’ reminds me of the outcry when women first started using Ms instead of Miss or Mrs; on the grounds that whether they were married or not was nobody’s business but their own.

Before anyone comes back with the answer that being LGBTQ+ is abominable ‘because it’s wrong’ I would just raise a question.

If something is wrong, it means it hurts others. Now, most people who are trans, like most people who are anything, are not deliberately setting out to hurt other people. Indeed, a lot of the time, fessing up to feeling that they are more of a lady inside than they are a man or vice versa, or that they would prefer a same sex partner, is fraught with fear and difficulty. In order to open up about who they are to their family and friends, I suspect they will have to uncover reserves of courage that, with any luck, us vanilla people will never need to find.

Like any of these things, it comes down to the fact there are two types of people. Those who are pricks and those who aren’t. I have zero beef with calling someone ‘they’ if it makes them feel more comfortable and at ease. That’s just human decency isn’t it? If they ask politely and I refuse, I’m the prick in that situation. On the other hand, if they’re aggressive or unpleasant about the way they make the request, then yes, I’d feel less like accommodating them. Not because of what they’d asked but because it might be a situation where they’re being the prick.

As an aside here, I have less beef with calling someone ‘they’ than I do with the kind of American cultural imperialism that requires me to spell humour ‘humor’ and cosy ‘cozy’ in all my book listings, or call poo ‘poop’ like we’re all three years old, or the fact that sometime in the last five years or so, a waiting list became a wait list but I digress.

Perhaps it goes wrong when the state tries to legislate for things that people should just have the nouse, not to mention decency and good grace, to work out for themselves. That’s a bit of ‘woke’ I totally get people disliking.

For example, it’s not the state’s job to legislate about who uses which lavatory. That’s up to whoever owns the loo in question. If some guy dresses up in a skirt and goes into the ladies at a club to perv at them, then whatever he says in court, pretending to be ‘trans’ is not relevant since what he’s actually being is a perv. It’s completely illogical to decide that all trans people are pervs because one pervert pretended to be trans. That’s like saying that because burglaries happen to people all people are burglars; clearly bollocks.

Also, going back to the perv in the lavvy scenario. Let’s say, for ease of reference, that the loo is in a night club. In a logical human world, the ladies using the loo would report the fake among their number to the management. Then the management would warn or remove the person. They either call the police, or ban him, or warn him. It’s their loo and it is under their jurisdiction. That’s how life works. So no, the state should not be intervening where it has no reason nor right and where sensible legislation is not possible. Likewise, the ladies using the loo should not be suing the nightclub owner over the perv in the bogs. Not if the club acted.

If you’re countering with, well, there was that story about the sex offender who said he was trans and was sent to a women’s prison and started reoffending in there. As a result everything should operate on the sex you are assigned at birth. Then, yes, I get that but I refer you to the burglar argument earlier. Also, it’s the same logic as saying that if one bloke in America goes into a school with a semi-automatic rifle and kills a load of people, all guns should be banned. I can’t see many of the types who are ‘anti woke’ on the internet buying into that one, can you? A lot of the shrillest decriers of ‘Woke’ and trans culture I’ve encountered are remarkably selective about how and where they apply that particular brand of logic.

Which brings me to my main question. Why do people care? Seriously, what’s the problem? What people do with their bodies is entirely up to them, surely, unless it breaks the law, which, as far as I am aware, being LGBTQ+ doesn’t.

When my son stuck up for a trans person who was being pilloried for posting on line, someone actually posted, ‘Jesus hates you, faggot!’ in response. Oops, missed the entire point of Christianity somewhere along the way there, bud.

Where am I going with this? I dunno where I’m going, I guess I’m trying to say that we’re all human beings. All these people folks hate are someone’s loved one, someones’s son or daughter, someone’s sister or brother.

Many of my friends are gay, several of them knew at a very young age. A couple from school didn’t come out to me for ages. And I know they were worried as to what I might think. But why should I care? They’re still lovely. Being gay is just ephemera like having brown hair. Back in the 1980s, even my parents never gave a shit about this stuff so I sure as hell never will. As Mum would have said, it’s all cosmetic and Dad would have added, all that really counts is whether or not someone is a shit.

So I guess if I want to say anything here it’s, for fuck’s sake. Life is a tough enough at the moment and hate takes so much sodding energy. Just stop. Stop it already. Be Kind. Really. Miserable people beget misery. Happy people spread love. For the most part, that’s how life works. Be kind because it’ll make you happy, I promise and it’s really not that hard.

Stones …

I had a deep post planned for today all about, you know, being nice to one another and stuff but unfortunately, life had other plans.

Today has been a very quiet day because last night Cardinal Chunder visited me again. Not only did he visit me but possessed me to wreak horrible havoc on my surroundings. I pebble-dashed the bathroom rug, myself, my feet and the other bathroom rug, the lavatory… oh god it was awful. But I managed to clear it all up before I went to bed and the rugs have both been through the wash today. So that’s nice. Gulp.

Yeh, sorry that’s enough of that. But like I said, it meant today was a bit of a wipe out. I wanted to write that post, indeed I typed up some, but then by about 3 o’clock I was nodding off so I decided to repair to the sun lounger round the corner and have a little zizz.

It was quite a big sleep as it turned out but I do feel a lot better. You know how it is, sometimes it’s best to just give in to nature. However, it means I am faced with the challenge of writing a diverting and interesting blog post in half an hour.

Preferably without mentioning The Cardinal. Or at least, not again.

Come on a tangent with me.

I have a fascination with stones. I have a fascination with many natural things because I like to know how the world works. As a result, I have been in the habit of picking up stones where ever I go. Interesting stones obviously, or pretty ones, and I can tell you where and when I picked most of them up and they remind me of days out, holidays etc.

Recently I have been trying to learn how to polish them. I know that it is perfectly possible to use a tumbler but that would be easy. Also running an tumbler involves having a jar of stones spinning round for two or three weeks at a stretch. That’s a lot of noise in the house and involves having something electrical, always on and unsupervised in the garage for days on end. McOther has conniptions at the thought of any piece of Unsupervised Equipment and I have to confess, that despite being the louche laid back one in the marriage, in this case I do rather agree with him. As the Woman Things Happen To it is rather red rag to a bull. The chaos fairies really don’t need any provocation.

Yeh, the tumbler was right out, so I decided to polish them by hand. I looked it up and basically you select the right kind of stone and then you scrub it smooth with increasingly fine grits of sandpaper until it ends up  looking shiny.

How hard can that be? I thought.

Mmm always a bad start.

It’s probably less hard if you have a blind clue what stones will actually polish and which ones will best. So far my efforts to are proving to be … interesting. Yes that is in terms of a euphemism for being a bit shit. Part of this is because I have arthritic fingers and part of it is because I’m still learning and as a pupil of this particular art I appear to be extra specially dense. It could be that my wish to polish pretty overrides my good sense in selecting something actually polishable. Even so, I persist in my efforts.

Another factor hampering my efforts is the fact that the stones need to be polished wet, which is difficult at the beginning of the process because the really scrubby sand paper I need to start them off with is only designed to be used dry so tends to dissolve. I’ve no idea why you can’t get wet/dry below 300 grit but it seems that here in the UK it’s not possible. Other smoother papers higher up the polishing ladder are wet/dry and that makes things a lot easier.

Also a drawback with polishing wet is that everything already looks smooth and shiny and it’s difficult to tell how much scritching I need to do sometimes. They’re all beach pebbles so they all look smooth anyway.

I have learned that the best stones to polish are the softer non-porous ones. There is a lot of slag glass on the Suffolk coast which comes from the furnaces that ran at the steel works up north. We have been finding this for years, and it is called ‘pure green’ or sometimes ‘pure blue’ depending (surprise, surprise) on its colour in our house.

The aim with this exercise has been, mostly, to get the stones to look, dry, as vibrant and colourful as they are when wet.

Over the last couple of months I have successfully managed to get a banded flint, a conglomerate of fossilised … things … a piece ofdifferent green I found on the ground in Alsace and some flints to the point where they look about as shiny as a polished stone age axe head. But the best one so far is a great chunk of pure blue which has polished up a lovely dark colour and is even shiny. The slag glass is definitely the best because it starts a pale dusty colour and once polished is much more vivid. But all of them have gone from dusty and dry to the colour they were when they were wet, which is what I was aiming for. They’re not shiny … indeed they’re not even a nod to shiny but it’s the best that I can do.

A partial success then.

Woot.

So I give you … polished stones.

The three along the left hand side are some pure blue in various stages; as found, after 300 grit and after polishing.