M.T. McGuire's Blog, page 24

When dyslexic people try to fill in forms … #dementia

This week, a cry for sympathy rather than help, hopefully, in a way that is amusing or useful to you.

[image error]Last night, McOther and I were invited to a Christmas party. We went. He from London, me from here. I met him there. I was late because our babysitter couldn’t get here before 7.00pm – although I had only just hopped out of the shower when she arrived. This year, the babysitter had not had a car accident, McOther was not in the middle of some stupid deal and it all went off without a hitch. Until we drove home at which point we found a sign announcing that the road would be closed at the next junction. So we ended up having an interesting adventure driving around the Suffolk countryside on muddy single track roads, in the middle of the night, at temperatures of about four below so the mud was mostly ice.

This is the story of my life right now.

Nothing is quite going to plan.

It’s not that things are going badly, or over complicated even, just that they are consistently arse-about-face. The simple things complicated and the complicated things … nope they’re still complicated. It’s not all hand of God like that one though. A lot of the cock ups are my fault.

Obviously with Christmas looming I’d expect things to be going slightly wrong, but this year, even November, which is usually a nice quiet month, got complicated. It all started about ten days in, as I was cresting a very creditable 25k in the first ten days of NanoWriMo. My brother phoned in a panic because the accountant who does Mum’s tax return had been onto him telling him that he must do this that and the other, and suggesting we remove all Mum and Dad’s remaining estate from stocks and shares and into a high interest account. It sounded barking to me but what do I know? Luckily after a few phone calls to check the situation, and a consultation with McOther who understands banking and shizz in a way I don’t, it was all sorted out but it took several days.

At the same time, my brother raised a second thing; that we need to have a properly legal power of attorney over Mum and Dad’s health – yes my lovely peps a Do Not Resuscitate form is not enough, why, I do not know but it seems they have to express this intention formally, using a living will or a special government form. The form is massive and it has to be witnessed, counter witnessed, another independent person has to sign to say Mum and Dad are not being coerced and they all have to do this in front of one another. The form has to be signed in a certain order, or it’s void and when it’s done it costs £110 to file each form, which you don’t get back if you fuck it up and you have to pay again to resubmit, although they will let you resubmit it a second time for half the fee.

To complicate things Mum and Dad’s DNR was signed three or four years ago and the legal stuff must be organised while Mum and Dad are still capable of stating their intentions about this or we would have to make them wards of court or something horrifically complicated. Mum is fine but I wasn’t sure about Dad. I knew I’d have to get the forms filled in and ready to discuss by Wednesday so I could go through them with him when I visited.

Having taken this all in, it occurred to me that I had pissed several days of Nano to the four winds but I had written the middle week of Nano off anyway, because Mum’s birthday is on 18th November and she isn’t really able to organise things like a cake, day out etc for herself so some of that, notably the cake for 15 people, would fall to me. We were all going to have lunch with her at the pub on the Saturday. Likelihood of both attorneys, both deputy attorneys, Mum and Dad in a compos state and enough hangers on about to witness the thing being in the same room in the same place again within another year, low. And, as I said, the middle week of November was already shot writing-wise so I decided I may as well lob the form filling into the mix. Along with the cake.

Finding the forms online was reasonably straightforward and I printed them out and set about filling in the obvious bits. After cock ups galore, I ran out and when I came to print some more I discovered that the latest Windows update had some issue with older printers so I couldn’t print them. So I rang and got them to send me two copies. Thanks Microsoft, I have a computer that won’t save anything to the remote hard drive I bought for it after the last upgrade and which can’t print anything in less than half an hour after this one. Way to go. Yes if I had world enough and time, I am sure I could browse our help fora, as you very reasonably point out, because I’ve nothing better to do with my available time than spend a couple of weeks of it fixing my computer so the drive is useable and its 64bit operating system is, once again, able to talk to a 34 bit printer. I could. But unfortunately, you total and utter bastards, I have a life.

After the helpful intervention from Microsoft I sent the forms to my parents’ email address and on the next Wednesday, I visited Mum and Dad, printed out several copies and set about filling them in. I must state, at this point, that while the forms, themselves, are a nightmare, the government helpline to assist you is staffed by wonderful people who answered my numerous questions about the bleedin’ obvious with politeness and endless patience.

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Filled in forms 1 and 2 on the left, instructions and stuffed up pages on the right. Pen, for size reference.

Naturally, since it’s a government form, and you have to have about ten people in the room at once to sign it, two of whom have dementia, plus three children ranging in age from seven to nine who are a bit bored. Distractions are everywhere and opportunities to fuck it up are legion. Add in that the person ‘organising’ it all, the ‘sensible one’ in my family is pathologically unable to fill in any form without fucking it up at least three times and you have a recipe for disaster. I had seven copies of each page. I used every. single. one.

Indeed I had to print an extra one to redo when I discovered that if I so much as scratched out a letter Mum and Dad, the two attorneys and the two deputy attorneys all had to initial them.

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Mwahhahahahargh! Another MTM cake wreck.

Meanwhile, a family tragedy overtook two of the carers on the morning, which meant the cake for fifteen which I had made and McMini had helped me ice was somewhat redundant. It also meant that I was going to have to arrange lifts to the legion of appointments with the nurse, hospital, dentist etc that Mum had over the following two weeks while they were on compassionate leave. Obviously, dear Mum did just enough to make it really complicated, organising lifts, then forgetting, or asking me to and forgetting and then organising them so we found two doughty folks had stepped up to help. But we got it sorted. Just! And it could have been so much worse, because the other two carers stepped into the breech and were wonderful while the other ladies were on compassionate leave. We still had a good day on the birthday, Mum called it her ‘best birthday ever’ even if a cake for fifteen was a little more than was required … and I got the forms signed …

… Except I didn’t.

Oh no.

Dick brain here managed to miss the page where the attorneys have to sign and so I had buy two hard backed envelopes so I could send those to my brother to sign – with the second envelope stamped and self addressed inside (he lives further from a post office than I do). I left them to ‘rest’ for a week while he was doing that, on the pretence this would make me more efficient when I checked them but really, just to see if I could jemmy in the last few days of Nano.

This week, there was a panic about Christmas, who would make the cake? Not me!  Yippeee! Who would order the turkey, Mum hadn’t, I did, just in time. Phew.

And then yesterday, back to the forms. One round of final checks as I was getting them ready to post and I realised one of the other pages my brother signed had managed to slip through without a witness signature.

Head desk.

Another joy of having a form of dyslexia, you only seem to see these things one at a time, so you check and find a mistake, rectify it, check, find another and so on. I just hope I cease to find mistakes eventually, except, when I cease to find them, it won’t necessarily mean that there are none.

Anyhooo … The lady who had signed as a witness isn’t one I routinely see on a Wednesday. Would I have to arrange a special meet? I rang the government helpline and was told no it could be someone different. So now, on Wednesday, the lovely carer on duty is going to sign as witness.

At the same time, I was working on the other form my brother mentioned, the thing where Dad gets a community charge reduction. Turns out I’d filled that in and sent it to the Doctor to certify at some stage AND COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN! Help me God! How? I found out when he popped round to see us on Wednesday with it and while it was a lovely surprise to discover I’d been so efficient it was a bit of a shock to have completely erased such a land mark event from my memory.

Form for Dad was signed, I’d done one for Mum on the off chance but Mum has no diagnosis for her memory gaps and isn’t really mentally prepared for the news, if we are to get her one, so I can’t get a reduction for her but I can get one for Dad. So yesterday, having discovered I’d bollocksed the Lasting Power of Attorney for Health forms I turned to the Community Charge Disregard for Dad, called a ‘disregard’ because they disregard that person when totting up the bill, except they only disregard 25% of him but I’m not complaining because it’s a sod of a lot better than refusing to disregard him at all, sorry where was I? Oh yeh.

There are two parts to the form, a bit the doctor filled in and another bit which I fill in. Needless to say, I ballsed it up. Manfully I print one. After twenty minutes of printing enough of it has come out for me to discover it’s auto set for landscape.

The form is portrait.

Swearing colourfully, I cancel the print job and after waiting ten minutes for the printer and computer to sort that out with one another, I check the ‘portrait’ box and set it to print again. I leave it and sort the washing into darks and lights, change the sheets on the beds and come back to find it’s printed a quarter of a page. I go and make a spag bol for half an hour and discover it’s now half done. Then it occurs to me I have no address to send it to so I ring the council to ask, they ask me for my account reference, I say I don’t know it and ask for the address which the lady thinks is on the form but she’s kind enough to give it to me anyway. As I write it down, I hear the sound of the printer spitting out the completed sheet. I look at the form. It is set out as a table with shaded headers for each bit. At the top, above the table is a tiny bit of type which I only notice now that the woman has asked me for it. ‘Account Ref’ it says.

Fucking shit.

Do I have the account reference number? Do I bollocks?

But wait! I can look at the bank statement, it will be on there won’t it? I spend five minutes getting into the account with the special secret code that you get by putting a different password into to your phone and have to type in before it expires and it’s numbers and you have discalculia so you have to do it twice and it forgets all the other answers you’ve typed on the page because you got the one wrong so you have to type them all back in and then the new passcode has expired so you have to go back to your phone and do the other password again and so on.

I get in. Is the ref number there?

No.

Arse.

Second job for Wednesday, find the knobwanking reference number.

Here’s hoping that when I check these bastard forms next time, they will all be in order.

At the end of it all, Mum, my brother and my sister in-law sat me down and told me I must pay myself for the stuff I do for Mum and Dad. So now I’m earning one day’s ‘consultancy’ a week from them, which is what I’d be doing if I was efficient.

On top of that upside, what of Nano? Well, I did 35,000 words in less than half of November. OK so that isn’t a ‘win’ but in the number of days in which I was actually doing writing, that is a gargantuan result. And, it shows that:

The Joe Nassis method of planning a bit, even if you don’t normally plan, on line seminar I went to and took copious notes about does actually work for me.
That if I can make time to write, any time at all, and structure it properly, I’m fucking productive!
There will be a novel out next year.

Woot.

Finally, a note on powers of attorney or planning generally. My parents sorted out enduring power of attorney forms in 2004 so that if anything happened we could take care of their finances smoothly. At that time health was usually implied, certainly in the way the homes and hospitals my grandparents ended up in consulted my parents over their wishes in regard to treatment. As I said last week, I remember talking to my Mum after the home where my Grandmother was had asked her whether they should aim to cure my grandmother of pneumonia or make her comfortable. These days she would need to be officially and legally entitled to make that decision for my Grandmother and likewise, I need to be, to make decisions like that for her and Dad. Best laid plans of mice and Mum and Dad etc. You can plan but even when you do, you have to accept that laws change, the landscape alters and things move on.

Also, if you’re doing these forms for finances it is worth consulting the bank. Despite having power of attorney over my Dad’s affairs, I am not allowed a bank card for him, so it’s worse than useless when it comes to the day to day matter of trying to buy things or get cash out for my parents, etc, etc. Luckily, they have a joint account and it is a key reason why we haven’t activated Mum’s; because she needs cash, and she’s two to three hours away by car, so the ability for her, or her carers, to get to a cashpoint themselves, or pay for things by card in a shop is very important. I am certified by the bank to do telephone and internet banking now, which helps a lot. So I keep an eye on her bank account, pay the wages and liaise with their stock broker when they need more cash. It works very well, and I consult Mum each week about what she’s paying and to whom, but it’s definitely a compromise and I’m not 100% sure if our method is exactly by the book.

After all this, the other day, McMini with his somewhat gappy smile, grinned at me and then, pointing to the large empty space where his new front tooth will grow said, ‘Look Mummy! My gums are bald.’

And so it continues …

Beeper and Bingy, and free books … #randomwittering #metaldetecting #mcmini

Scroogeability factors.

Better late than never today. The build up to Christmas is well and truly under way and I am gradually disappearing up my own bottom. As usual I am slightly dreading the holiday period but mainly because of all the travel, the being away from home and the general pain-in-the-arseness of that, the people I visit are lovely I just wish I didn’t have to do it all at once. Short school holidays are a bit of a bind in that respect because we have to use the time to visit when we can because in term time we’d have to take McMini out of school and neither set of parents can travel. I couldn’t do it any other way and like myself as a person so it’s head down, get it done and then I can feel enormously smug that I’ve been a decent human being when it’s over.

The bit I do like is the looking for presents for everyone, that’s where I can forget the bits I don’t like; travel, admin, remembering to pack everything, and focus on the bits I do; the people involved. Now that is a gas although this month, I have been rather remiss. I got my Christmas money from Mum and Dad early and I have spent it on a present for myself.

Meet Beeper … or is it Bingy?

Yep, a couple of weeks ago, I bit the bullet and upgraded my metal detector. I managed to spend about £40 more than McOther spent when he bought my original entry-level detector new but for that I got second hand detector that would be about £700 when new. An XP Goldmaxx V4. I also bought some of the XP wireless headphones for it because I was fed up with getting the headphone cable tied around my ankles, burying it in the hole by mistake etc etc.

So this new detector, is it good? You bet your arse!

Although, of course, it means I have to go back to the beginning and start the learning curve again because each detector’s beeps and whistles and peeps are different and the only way you can truly know which beeps represent something you should be digging up, and which don’t, are by digging every single signal until you’ve learned them by heart. I think I’ve just about worked out what hot rocks (coke) sound like and I suspect I’m nearly there with aluminium and deep iron but I’ve only taken it out twice, so I’m still digging every signal I hear.

Last week, I took McMini along to a club dig; me with the new detector, he with my old detector which is now ‘his’. It didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, the detector was too heavy for him and it was the day after a very late night so he whinged constantly. Ideally he needed to stop to eat, and I mean properly eat, at half hourly intervals which was a pity as I only brought along lunch and I needed an almost bottomless supply of snacks. We wasted the first two hours footering around, other than deciding that our detectors were called Beeper and Bingy. I think his is Beeper but sometimes mine’s Beeper and his is Bingy, depending on which name he thinks is the funniest at the time.

However, after lunch, he stayed at the car, and while that did doom me to only detect on one field (because I don’t like it if I can’t see him) I did get a couple of hours of proper detecting in. The new machine was good. Sure, I dug a couple of chunks of iron but I have gone past the ‘I wonder what it is,’ zone and reached the stage of thinking, ‘that’s iron, but I’d better dig it to check.’ So that is progress. Getting past that will be tricky as I am an eternal optimist and will probably be digging everything, ‘just in case’ in several years’ time but that isn’t so bad.

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Hand made wingnut and old metal … thing.

Despite having no display screen, everything about the new detector is easier, and as the information on the screen the old one had was wonderfully and wildly inaccurate, losing the visuals doesn’t really make that much difference. But my faster pinpoint and dig rates mean I can find more targets, meaning that if something is a lump of old shite, it doesn’t take up nearly as much of my time as it did before. The last two outings, it’s been a case of right metals, but that medieval lead seal matrix I think I’ve found turns out to be a tiny blob of shapeless lead, and that Roman broach-style coppery bing brings up a hand made wingnut. OK so it’s hand made and probably over two hundred years old but sadly, though almost everything has someone somewhere who is interested, a wingnut of any age is regarded as crap in all quarters.

Ho hum. You can’t win ’em all.

That said, one of the fragments of green metal I dug up turned out to have the hint of a embossing on one edge when I got home. So I had a good old scrub at it with a wooden cocktail stick and brought up a lovely pattern. Then I dropped it and trod on it, breaking the bent corner, which was really smart of me, and when I put it out on the finds table at the club one of my hawk-eyed colleagues said.

‘Look, there’s a bit of guilding on that.’

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A clog fastener, Regency era? Going on the pattern.

I examined it under the lights and sure enough, he was right. My mind wandered to the industrious scrubbing with a wooden cocktail stick that I had done to bring up the pattern. ‘Hmm. Yes,’ I had to admit as I clocked the hints of gold in the cracks. ‘Sadly, I think there’s probably a lot less than there was.’

Then to compound my embarrassment, the FLO said he thought it might be Saxon. I think the metal’s too thin for Saxon but it’s definitely 12th or 13th Century. He’s taken it away to check it out so I’ll let you know which it actually is when I collect it in January. It’s a bit like the thing that looked like the end of a metal bag tie that I dug up on one of my first digs. It was green so I reckoned it was old, and I thought I’d kept it but now I suspect, I threw away – at least I can’t find it. I found another one a month ago but kept it this time because I noticed it had a pattern on it. It’s a clog fastener.

What I like most about it is the way it’s designed so that the precious metal bit can be removed and reused when the clogs/leather bits on the clogs wear out. It’s like another thing I found a few months ago that resembled part of a suspender belt, that was a stud chape fastener which was used to do up a 1660-1720 shoe. I love the way that even basic, mundane things were treasured in past times and how the resources were valued and reclaimed. Things that we would throw away without a moment’s thought are regarded as reusable and precious. Can you imagine removing and reusing the metal cleats on a pair of dead hiking boots? That said, they still managed to discard a truckload of stuff for people like me to dig up and puzzle over. That’s another thing I absolutely love about this detecting lark; the whole, what the fuck is this? Aspect to three quarters of the stuff I find. I love that I discover things I didn’t know.

Sometimes, in life, it seems that the most boring and innocuous-looking things turn out to be a lot more interesting than we thought. Especially if, like me, you’re a bit of a spud.

Back to the dig and those bits of iron. When I made to throw the iron in the hedge, McMini stopped me.

‘No Mum, I need that to make my iron man suit,’ he told me, in all seriousness.

Who was I to argue? We now have a finds bag full of iron in the garage. I’ll give him a week or two to forget about it and then creep in there and stick it in the recycling.

Meanwhile, during my couple of hours’ hard core graft, McMini explored the area round the car. This involved standing in about the only sticky mud to be found until his boots stuck and he had to get out of them and stand in the mud in his socks to retrieve said stuck boots. Then he got back into my car and as he did so, found some stones he’d picked up on a beach a few months ago in his pocket. So he made a rock sculpture with the mud, which he then put on the dashboard to dry. By the time he’d finished, the inside of my car looked like this:

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Our kitchen sink approximately 3 minutes after the cleaners had left. Thanks Harrison.

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Mud sculpture.

More wonderful McMini-isms this week include Hide and Worry; a game he and a friend have invented. ‘It’s like hide and seek but when they find you they stab you,’ he explained. Yes, well, I could see why that might be alarming. He and the same friend have also developed a habit of putting their back packs on the wrong way round and then they pretend to sumo wrestle. They call this new form of Sumo ‘Flab Fight’ which I find unaccountably hilarious.

And now to books for a moment …

Well, this is supposed to be an author blog so on a completely different but probably more on-message note, I’m doing a giveaway at the moment with a bunch of other lovely authors and I thought I’d share it with you because it has a manageable number of entrants and the books – all sff – look interesting. So if you’re looking for some new reads for no pence, or if you are like me and want to give yourself a sneaky present without the guilt of spending cash you’re supposed to be spending on others, on yourself, check this one out. I’m pretty sure you don’t have to join Bookfunnel to take part. Here’s the link (or click on the picture): https://dl.bookfunnel.com/b8dr8lj6w1

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Coming to terms with #dementia

For some time now, I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a blog, or a website, specifically dedicated to my experience of dementia; with my dad, mainly, but also, these days, with my mum since she, too, is getting very forgetful.

However, it seems far more sensible to do it all on here. The subject matter on here is so random anyway that I doubt many of you will take exception to the more detailed post about my dementia-related experiences every now and again. If you look at the menu, there’s now a dementia section and all the posts which mention Dad’s Alzheimer’s are tagged Dementia and should appear there. Obviously, in true M T McGuire form, it would be pointless talking about my situation if I didn’t occasionally share a list of things that have either worked to keep me sane or that I’ve fucked up royally so that you don’t have to. This isn’t exactly that list but below are some of my less than ordered thoughts on the subject.

Here are the golden highlights of coping with dementia, in yourself or in others.

Be not proud! And be absolutely up front with people.

Yes, you read that correctly. All will become clear.

The first sign that something was amiss with my dad was when my parents refused to come and stay. Our spare room was on the top floor and the loo was in the middle. Dad always needed a wee in the night and he began to wake up in a very disorientated state.  Mum didn’t always wake up too and she was afraid he’d fall down our stairs. So for three years, from about 2004, they refused point blank to come and see us. Mum never told me what was wrong, she just made up excuses. She’s bollocks at making up excuses so I assumed I’d upset her but she said I hadn’t. I got very down. I didn’t know what to do.

Luckily, I have a brother so I rang him and asked him what the fuck my parents were up to. He didn’t know either but said he’d ask them. When he broached the topic with Mum she told him at once. So it was he who explained about the stairs, about Dad going weird in the night and Mum’s concerns. The last eighteen months we were in that house Mum and Dad started coming to see us again. We were in a small market town with a perfectly decent hotel and a lot of equally decent guest houses. We put them up in one, within walking distance of our house. The moral of this story then, be honest, because when trouble crops up, there’s usually a work around.

Mum could have saved herself and us heartache if she’d just admitted that Dad had a tendency to get dizzy when he got up in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t have even had to mention the dooh-lally part. Likewise, I could have saved myself a lot of heartache if I’d read the signs and worked out that something was wrong earlier or just asked my brother sooner. But hey ho, it all worked out in the end.

Act early.

These things are like the flight path of a landing aeroplane. You sink, level out, sink, level out and so on to the bottom of the chasm. If you can manage to think ahead a bit, to what the next level of deterioration might be, you can save yourself a lot of grief. It’s hard to look at the next stage of the illness when you,are losing your mind or when a loved one is losing theirs. Naturally you don’t want to think about it, but trust me, for the sake of everyone concerned it helps. For a long time, Mum and Dad seemed to be in denial. Mum kept a very close eye on Dad and I watched her sinking. Imagine if you are eighty and you are looking after someone who is, essentially, a giant two year old. As a mum with a two year old of my own, I knew how hard I found it to keep my eye on him all the time. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to cope when you are elderly.

Talk about it.

Mum and Dad are actually very good at this, they have talked to me, extensively, about being mortal, I know what kinds of funerals they want, what kinds of hymns, what kind of goodbye. I suspect they’ve willed money for a piss up wake. They also talked to me about what might happen if they went nuts well in advance of any dementia appearing. In Mum’s case we have talked about how she felt when she was in a similar position to that which I’m in now, looking after my granny. My grandmother had lots of small strokes, micro bleeds at the back of her head and as Mum puts it, ‘she just faded away’. For her last year my granny was lying on a bed in a home. In those days there were no living wills or powers of attorney for healthcare. Even so, when my granny got pneumonia, they asked my Mum what kind of treatment she would want, Mum said to make her comfortable. They did, she got better without the life prolonging drugs and died peacefully a few months later.

In her last year, as well as being bed-bound, my granny couldn’t speak and made no signs of recognising Mum’s presence. Mum used to go and see her and sit there crying quietly for forty minutes. The staff in that home were wonderful, and were wonderful to Mum, too. They assured her that my granny was different, more peaceful, even calmer, after a visit. They took the time to see that Mum was OK too. Mum and I still talk about this, and I really wish I’d been able to have the same kinds of conversations with Dad about his dad, who also ended up in a home. It’s hard to talk about these things, but if you can open up to someone you trust it will help and it will also give your carers a feel for what your wishes will be, and how you will want to be treated, when you are no longer able to tell them.

If you are the carer, it’s worth making sure you have someone to talk to and if the main carer is not you it’s worth finding someone for them. There is a lovely lady who comes to see Mum who is the deacon at her church. I saw the lady talking to Mum one time when she was in hospital and couldn’t speak. I asked Mum, afterwards, if it would help to see this lady often. She said it would. She never rang the deacon herself, so I did and now she comes to visit Mum regularly. I know it helps.

People want to help you. Let them and if you can’t let them down kindly.

There are a lot of people around my mum and dad who love them almost as much as I do. They are sad to see people they love and respect struggling. Sometimes it’s hard to accept that the people who love you may be even more upset about your illness than you are. So if you or a loved one are in similar poop, and people offer to help you, let them. Mum and Dad have a big group of folks who give them lifts, pop in to visit, pick up shopping sometimes or generally help out. I think they had a hard time accepting help from these folks at the start but now they revel in it. They get continuity in that these are people they’ve known for some years, yet they also have variety in that it’s not the same old faces. Likewise for the helpers, there are enough of them to avoid fatigue setting in. Despite his dementia, my father is a very social animal, and this has helped him stay with us for far longer. Likewise, Mum and Dad have a four carer team but they also employ a cleaning lady for a couple of hours a week and a family who work in the garden. These folks all give support that goes well beyond their job descriptions. They do this because when Mum and Dad were fitter and younger they were good to these folks. I’m a great believer in karma now that I’ve seen it in action on my folks. So if people offer help, and it’s useful help, let them. Pride has no place in this.

But at the same time, set parameters for your helpers.

If anyone helping you, or your loved one, gets too clingy or too overbearing, tell them. When you are ill and losing your capacity to process everything but your emotions, you don’t have time to put up with anything that will make it worse. So if someone who wants to help is … well … not helping, you have to tell them. Or if you can’t, you have to find someone who can and ask them to do it for you.

My mum loves her garden. She sees it as a living thing, an entity which must be treated with kindness and sympathy. However, she is very arthritic and once Dad had started to get really forgetful, it was too much for her to do on her own. There was a point where the chap who was coming to do the garden kept cutting down the wrong things, pruning stuff wrong, planting vegetables in the wrong places, forgetting to water them etc and you could see that something inside Mum was curling up and dying along with her plants, but she couldn’t let him go. She couldn’t face the hassle of finding a new gardener while she was trying to look after Dad, or, indeed, the hard task of telling the current one she no longer needed his services. Her heart was so full from the pain of seeing her soul mate, my father, her husband, in such distress.

In the end, after a family holiday, my Mum became very ill with pleurisy. At this point, Dad had reached the point where he was so forgetful that he couldn’t cook or look after her the way he would have done. My brother and sister in-law went to stay and they gave the gardener notice and employed the people who do it now. My mum almost cried with relief and the ‘new’ gardeners are wonderful and love Mum and Dad dearly.

Moral, don’t wait for the crash. Take action first.

Avoid being too proud.

Mum is of the old school where she believes that if Dad is ill she should look after him herself and that nobody should know about his disability for as long as possible. But actually, when you’re in your eighties, you can’t look after someone who weighs about eighteen stones, can’t wash himself and has to be talked through the process of going to the bathroom every two hours hours, every night. You need help.

When Mum finally agreed to let someone come and sit with Dad for an hour, three afternoons a week, so she could get out into the garden, she blossomed. And the lady who came round did the ironing and all sorts of other stuff that Mum was struggling with fitting in around caring for Dad. So it helped in all sorts of other ways she hadn’t anticipated. It also meant there was no longer the danger of Dad coming out into the garden looking for Mum and falling down. The carer would bring him out, with his walker, and sit with him.

Even if your loved one seems gone, keep searching.

Dad is very different to how he was. He’s the same person, but he’s a different incarnation of that person, the raw genetic make up. He has lost his filters, his ability to moderate what he says and he has become very much more self centred. Just as a child learns to think about others, so as he regresses to a more simplified state of self, Dad has lost that skill. It’s not his fault. It’s just the way it is.

He can no longer read, his ability to read a novel was one of the first things to go but he is unable to read even short stuff now. It’s interesting that Mum writes herself notes, but even at the start, if she wrote a note for Dad and put it by the clock saying, ‘went out to garden at ten to three back in for tea at four’ he would not think to read it or look at the clock. This was so early on, when he was just my dad with no short term memory. These days he can be a little boorish, which is incredibly sad because Old Dad would be horrified if he could see himself like that. But a lot of the times, the boorishness is asking for help. ‘I can’t get a word in edgeways,’ means, ‘your sentences are too long for me to follow, can you slow down.’ The answer is to speak in short sentences, starting with a shared memory and then as the conversation gets going, you can bring it forward to the now. Lo and behold! Before you know it, back comes Dad. Reaching Dad is all about trying new things. When the landscape of his mind changes, you just experiment until you get him back again.

It’s OK to grieve for someone before they go.

Although I’d recommend keeping it to short bursts. But sometimes you need to cry. Or just drive up to the top of a hill and shout your anger into the wind – my parents live near the South Downs so that’s quite easy for me. But yes, while my dad is still himself in some ways, I still pine for the refined non-raw version. But I also hear him, I hear him in the way I talk to my son, in the anarchic conversations we share, I hear him as I tell my son to get into bed! And that if he could manage to clean his teeth sometime before I die of old age it would be wonderful. I hear my dad speaking through me as I comfort my son after a bad dream. I remember who Dad can be, over and above the raw genetic version I have now, and it’s extremely important to me that I do, that I keep sight of the man who is in there still, but who the present Dad can’t be. And I cry. But that’s OK. Sometimes you need to cry. Ration yourself, though. Indulge your grief too much and it’ll take you under but bottling it up is also unhelpful.

Sometimes your loved one’s disease will speak more loudly than they do.

My dad says some seriously inappropriate things but it’s just his illness talking. It’s hard to accept that sometimes, especially when the person says something that upsets you, but you have to let it go. If you can, it will allow the relationship between you on good days to be much more similar to the old one before the dementia came.

Make the most of the good days.

Need I say more? Enjoy them. Do stuff. Go out on a whim. My parents are the most social dementia sufferers I’ve ever met. They still go out, visit friends, have lunch with people … It says a lot for their friends, too, that they are so accepting.

Pace yourself.

Being a carer is hard. It can fill up your life, suck up your emotional energy, sap your physical energy, your strength of spirit and your creative mojo. Alzheimer’s is a long, slow death of a thousand tiny cuts. To put it in perspective, Terry Pratchett was diagnosed four years after Dad began to deteriorate. Dad’s still around. It’s been about fourteen years, the last nine or ten that we’ve really known something was wrong, but … fourteen for Mum, definitely. Not a barrel of laughs.

The truth is, no matter how much you may love the person in your life who is ill, you cannot give your all for that amount of time. You have to ration how much you give. You have to look after yourself, leave time for yourself, or you will go under and then you’ll be no use to anyone. And if you aren’t the main carer and they are neglecting their own sanity and health, you have to make them understand this as well. As it’s often said, this is a marathon, not a sprint. You can’t run twenty four miles at the same speed as Usain Bolt.

Do what’s right for them: it usually works out.

There was a point when I would worry that Mum and Dad were so far away. It was difficult to get them into a home because Mum was far too well to go into a home and she refused to send Dad into one alone. My brother and I discussed moving them nearer one of us but if we did that, which one of us would it be? We live on different sides of the country. So they stayed put in their own home and I worried that if something happened, and I couldn’t drop everything and be with them, I would have to let them fall. Indeed, eventually, I did.

Mum had a stroke and went into hospital in March 2016. At least by this time we had the afternoon carer and an agency helping Mum and Dad get up in the mornings. I had to ring the lovely lady who would look after my dad in the afternoons and ask her to sleep with my dad so I could drive down to Sussex and be with my Mum. I remember sitting with Mum in hospital at three am. They asked her where she was, she said she was at home, they said she was confused, I told them no, she was having trouble speaking and that what she meant was, she was with me. They finally got her onto a ward at five and at six they told me I should go because the car park was free until six am. I slept two hours that night. Mum came home at three in the afternoon. I had to try and look after both of them. It was horrific. I slept two nights with Dad while Mum slept in another room. Then my boy needed to go to school and my husband to work. I had to go home. I hired a care agency for the following week and my brother came down for the next three nights.

There was a week of special hell while we got a care team sorted. Mum refused to accept she needed live in care, but she kept falling asleep with things on the stove and burning saucepans, and she was getting very forgetful. My brother and I wanted to move them near one of us but they both refused. Now that we have their lovely care team in place I realise they are so much better off where they are, where they have friends and where they have lived for over 40 years.  Once they had twenty four hour care, keeping them in their own home was a no-brainer. Thanks to their fantastic care team, they now enjoy a social life far and above anything I could deliver if they came to live here. They are in the right place for them even if there were points when my brother and I felt like it was the wrong place for us.

Make time for yourself.

When you have children, people say you must keep something that you do just for you; continue your career, a part-time job, a hobby, whatever; something that validates your humanity as something other than your little one’s mum. Something that is not about motherhood. Something that is about YOU. It is very hard to squeeze that in when you are trying to care for elderly parents and a small person at the same time.

That is why, even though I have to fight for the time to write and struggle to find ways of putting my head anywhere close to a place where it’s possible, I can’t give up on it. Because I have to hang onto something that makes me who I am; something that defines me as someone other than Mum and Dad’s daughter, or McMini’s Mum, but ME; Mary.

You cannot self actualise though the job you do, but likewise, you are more than the visits, the form filling, the planning, the admin. Give yourself you time. Allow yourself to be human. You are a person in your own right, you are important as well. Allow time to be you.

Conclusion

Well … that was a bit of a monster, wasn’t it? But in a short snappy sentence, I guess the nub of it is this: when a loved one is long-term ill then, if you want to look after them, you have to look after you.

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Chilling is important.

 

How not to do things number 53: Parenting #badparent

It’s my mum’s birthday and today, so I’m not really here. To that end, here is a pre-prepared blog post; another gem from the school of things I’ve fucked up so you don’t have. Enjoy.

McMini has a two day gap in his school meals schedule where he dislikes the lunches offered and I have to send him in with a packed lunch. This is a bit of a pain but at the same time, he is a creature of few needs and so we have a boilerplate packed lunch which he his happy to eat repeatedly. This includes sandwiches made with a particular type of reconstituted chicken slice that he loves. A kind of chicken spam. Oh well. Each to their own.

So there we I am preparing his lunch for these two days in advance – oooh get me all organised. I lay out the bread and then I get the chicken slices from the fridge. At the sound of the fridge door opening, Harrison, the cat, miraculously appears and brrps a couple of times hoping I am going to be opening the cheese drawer. I tell him no. The chicken spam also elicits some interest from him and I tell him it is not for him. He is remarkably acquiescent – indeed, if I’d thought about it I’d have clocked that he was suspiciously acquiescent – disappearing off in the direction of the utility room.

As I lay out the chicken slices on the bread, McMini appears wanting batteries for the TV remote or some such and I foolishly turn away from the breadboard, with the sandwiches and chicken slices, to open the drawer where the batteries live. At which point McMini gasps and points.

I turn to see what he is pointing at and there is Harrison, on the counter top, fur fluffed with excitement, just starting to lick the nearest slice of chicken-luncheon-meat-spam-stuff. The shops are closed, this is all McMini will eat and there’s only one more slice in the fridge so it’s imperative I stop Harrison before he slubbers on the other slice.

‘Fuck off Harrison! You fucking bastard!’ I shout as I head aggressively towards the counter top to push him off.

He leaps off and piles out through the cat flap at speed. Good. Except. Shit. I’ve just sworn in front of my impressionable child. Jeez how will he be grow up to be anything less than a total potty mouth when he has me as a Mum.

McMini gasps, wide-eyed with shock and yet, wearing a huge smile – because there’s no better thing, for a kid, than seeing the adults fuck up. He says,

‘Mummy! You just sweared.’

Bloody bollocks! Didn’t I just? I think, as he stands there laughing at me. Hmm … what to say now? Oh I know.

‘Yes. I’m afraid I did. But, OK, listen, here’s the thing kiddo. Mummy is a fishwife but it doesn’t mean you should be. You never, EVER, heard that,’ I tell him as he begins to really guffaw. ‘Strike it all from your mental record. Those were terrible words and you should never use them.’ I add as I throw away the dodgy cat-spittle-laden chicken slice and replace it with a new one.

But McMini does not forget things like this. Especially as we both find it hilariously funny that I am such a ‘Bad Mother’ as James Brown put it, although I have an inkling he might not have been using that phrase in quite the same sense as McMini and I. These are the secrets we can’t tell McOther because he would be shocked, but McMini has has been taking the piss out of me about it all week. I suspect the main reason for this is that he gets to shout, ‘Fuck off Harrison! You fucking bastard!’ at the top of his lungs, and few things are more likely to get a laugh from McMini than doing stuff that is a bit cheeky, cheeky, especially if it’s likely to prick the bubble of the pompous and it’s stuff he’s not really meant to do. Pretty much the reason I swear.

A chip off the old block then.

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Thanks son.

When it feels right but is … wrong. #writing #indiebooks

This week: you have another opportunity to benefit from the vast store of wisdom I have earned by royally fucking things up so that you don’t have to.   [image error]

It started like this.

Wednesday; visit the parents day, and this week I arrived in extremely dire need of a wee. It is fairly usual that the pint of water and two cups of coffee I need to kick start my day turn into about five pints by the time I’ve driven fifty miles or thereabouts and I drive the next ninety in some agitation. This Wednesday was no exception.

At Mum and Dad’s the downstairs loo is just off the lobby before you go into the house proper and I usually use it before I announce my presence, otherwise the ten minutes of hellos can be a bit excruciating for my poor bladder. Into the loo I rushed, and breathed a huge sigh of relief as what felt like about a gallon of wee went into the pan. Except that each of the lavs at Mum and Dad’s has a riser for people with dodgy hips, and if you sit on the riser in the downstairs loo wrong, the wee runs down the inside of it and despite being positioned over the bowl, the gravitational wonders of surface tension bend the wee round and under the edge of the riser and it then falls over the side of the pan onto the floor. Well, it came from a skip, still in its wrapping, you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth. But yes, you guessed it. A significant portion of my wee deluge had missed the pan entirely and puddled on the floor.

Joy.

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The original dribbly-wee loo riser of doom (centre) among other skip scored offerings.

There I was. I’d done the right thing, sat on loo, weed into hole but somehow, despite following the instructions it had all gone somewhat awry. I spent the next five minutes wiping it up with loo roll and anti bacterial floor spray. It’s not just me, the foibles of this particular loo riser are a known problem and I soon had it all ship shape again with no harm done. The point was, sometimes, even when you do things the right way it all goes horribly wrong.

So how does this tale of substandard urinary aim have any connection with writing?

Well, it’s like this.

There’s a quote that appears on something I use – my Kobo Writing Life dashboard, I think – that goes like this:

‘If you want to read a book that has not been written yet, you must write it.’

Way back in 2008 when I finally finished my first decent novel that is, exactly what I had done. But to be honest, while this is great advice, it only works if you are in touch with the popular Zeitgeist on some level. I sell my books on the internet which, to all intents and purposes, is American. It is devilishly hard to reach non Americans but back then it was even harder (except on Amazon at that point).

Therefore, I shot myself in the foot instantly by writing a very British book set, mostly, in a fantasy world but when it came here, it came to London. Yes Dr Who is like that but it was put on by the BBC and when they first did it, they had a captive audience comprising all of Britain. I wrote British because I was bored of books and films where the main protagonists are American and the setting America. I wanted to see some shizz go down in my own country. What I failed to grasp was that there is a reason the vast majority of books are about Americans in America. It’s to connect with Americans; the biggest and most easily reachable group of readers in the market place.

Yes, I’d done kind of the right thing but … wrong.

The problem wasn’t even that I was writing a book that could well hold more appeal to British or Australasian readers. It was that I hadn’t researched my market – I thought I had but, no. That’s why I didn’t understand how hard to find they would be. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I would be unable to reach British readers without taking special measures. OK so that was 2008 but even now, in 2017, you have to work at finding international readers and even harder at finding readers who buy from sites other than Amazon.

Likewise, I’d read a lot of Victorian and Edwardian fantasy: the Narnia Books, The Five Children and It, The Incredible Mr Blenkinsop (I think that was its name) the Borrowers, the Wind in the Willows, The Lord of The Rings. I’d seen films like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Mary Poppins and Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, I’d read Harry Potter and Terry Pratchett. In most of those books, the writer has invented a completely new world, or a new creature, or a new something. The point is, while they may have broad themes that are similar, good versus evil baddie, etc, each one takes place in its own fantasy world or hidden world within this one, often there are specific and new creatures created for purpose of the story. The notable exception is Terry Pratchett, who took the tropes other people used and poked gentle fun at them.

In the same way that I thought, at my parents, that rushing into the bog, sitting down on the ice cold, thigh freezing riser and letting it all out was enough, and discovered that oh it so wasn’t, I genuinely thought putting my book on sale and supporting my efforts with advertising on the big promo sites was all it would take to find readers. It wasn’t. I wrote weird books, that are funny and I had covers made expressly to say, ‘this book is like nothing you have ever read’ because when people saw my books, I wanted them to think, ‘Pratchett’. When I got reviews that said that, I quoted them. I wrote my book the old way. The E Nesbitt way. And I sold that as an asset … the wrong way.

When people talk about wanting ‘different’ I suspect that what they really mean is that they want the same old ware wolves and sparkly vampires but with … say … slightly different lighting.

That is where Sir Terry cleaned up. He kept to the standard tropes, and spun them differently. If you want to succeed financially, I think, possibly, the trick is to write something bang on genre that has a different angle; a standard, boilerplate, trope made interesting enough to you for you to be able to stand writing in it.

When it comes to making choices, I guess it’s wise to think through the ramifications, but with writing it’s hard to anticipate what they might be sometimes. If you like writing wacky but want to produce a well edited book with a professional cover, it’s worth looking at how much cash you have to throw at it and how long for. When I started this game, the estimate was that once you’d produced six books you’d reach tipping point; momentum would be easier to maintain and sales would rise.

‘Great!’  I thought, ‘I have budget for six novels.’

Now that I’m writing my sixth book, that magic tipping point number is more like twelve! Things change and move. How long can you sustain your business without making a profit? OK now double it. Hell, quadruple it to be safe.

Likewise, when you plan what you’re going to do to reach readers, I’d thoroughly recommend keeping as much of it under your control as you can. This is why so many writers ask readers to sign up to their mailing lists. I had an amazing three months back in 2014 when I optimised my book listings for UK readers and started getting a ton of downloads on Amazon and, even better, a really good read through rate – seriously it was massive, about 20% of the folks downloading the first book bought the others But then Amazon changed the algo – which they do around April or May each year, it seems. Overnight the downloads of the free book ceased. And that was that.

These days, however many author lists readers are signing up to, I still believe that if you can make your emails personal, fun and interesting enough they will stay with you. Just don’t make them too fun or your readers will sign up for the emails rather than your books or if they do, be prepared to monetise your blog posts, newsletter etc – either as non fiction books or paid content. The great thing about mailing lists is that if someone doesn’t get on with your books they can unsubscribe so you should end up with a list of folks who might, eventually, read your books! If you’re really lucky, some will part with cash for them.

Once you have some readers, it’s also worth listening to them. I always sold my books as fantasy and when asked to cite comparable writers I’d suggest Holt, Prachett, Rankin … When people started reviewing them, the bulk of them cited Douglas Adams. I now publish them in sci-fi. They don’t sell as well there as they did in the days when I could put them in fantasy and they’d be actually visible. But now that fantasy is kind of, ware wolves and shifters with a small corner for epic, my books definitely do better in sci-fi! Sci-fi seems a bit less rigid in the genre factors required, too, hence the next series, Space Dustmen, is going to be sci-fi with the odd planetary visit.

To sum up, what I am trying to say, I guess, is that now, more than ever, you need to think long and hard before you even start to write that book and you need to keep pretty nimble afterwards. So, if you’re thinking having a pop at writing or are working on your first book, maybe you should ask yourself these questions:

Who are you are writing for?
Where you you find them?
Can you find them easily and inexpensively?
How often do the authors they read release new books?
Can you keep up with book production rates for your genre? or to put it another way …
How much time do you have? Even if you give up your job.
What kind of writing career will fit with your life?
How and where will you sell your books – it’s no good being wide if everyone in your genre whose books you like and who might like yours too and do mailing swaps or promos with you is in KU.
How long before you need your books to start funding themselves to keep going?
Are there other ways you can monetise your writing to support book production until such stage as your book business is self financing.
How big is your social media following? Are you up to a kickstarter to fund book production?

The way I see it there are two broad choices about what you decide to write.

The first choice is to conform. You, write to market, so if it’s fantasy, you write about ware wolves or witches and yes you light them differently or whatever it takes and you write about six books (minimum) a year. And you thank your lucky stars you’re not in Romance where you have to write one a month!

Alternatively if you really can’t face the prospect of writing about creatures someone else has already invented or making your hero American, or 101 other must haves for the best selling book, accept that you are unlikely to earn diddly squat for a long, long time and just go for it writing the kind of stuff you love, that fulfils you as a reader and writer, stuff you want to read that hasn’t been written yet. But if you choose this route, you have to be extremely pragmatic about your chances of earning anything for many years and extremely lateral and original about what you do to earn from your books in other ways.

It’s quite good if you can avoid combining motherhood to a small child and trying to look after sick, elderly parents, at the same time as trying to have any sort of career, too.

This is where I am right now. But hey, my sixth book will be out next year and who knows, 2027 I may even have written twelve and if I market the hell out of them, well who knows, they might pay for the thirteenth book.

Mwahahahargh! I can dream.

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Guest post: Touching the void #horror #books

This week to celebrate the release of his new horror novel, I’m delighted to have a sit down, put my feet up and hand over the blog to my esteemed author colleague and guest poster, Will Macmillan Jones. Take it away Will.

I’m primarily, at least in my own mind, a comedian. Certainly my ex, not noted for giving praise, was quite happy to describe me in that way. Mind you, she might not have meant it in the way I thought, so perhaps we had better move on.

Now one thing about comedians – we are all drawn to the Darkness that lies within. Anxiety, depression, alcoholism – these are all challenges that seem to line up with depressing (that again!) regularity for those of us who love making people laugh. The list of famous comedians who have succumbed to these ills is endless. So endless that the hidden tears behind the mask of a clown has become a cliché. That is in itself depressing, isn’t it?

But the Darkness need not always be a curse. Many of us find answers to it in unrelated activity, although I do think that taking up golf is a step too far. There should be a special hell designed for whoever invented that game. Simon Cowell; and anyone else who bears any responsibility for X Factor and/or the relentless stream of talentless wannabe boy bands and girl bands can join him or her there for eternity, in my view. Sorry, I digress.

I have seen and touched my darkness within, I’ll freely admit. So how is it that I am still here to bore you all rigid with my ramblings? Well, I embraced my Dark Soul. And turned to writing horror, or in my particular case novels that I class as Paranormal Mysteries. Yes, there are some purely dark short stories and poetic pieces around too:

Darkness drifts down the river of the night.

Not crashing like a Tsunami:

But sleek and silent as a Predator

Sorry about that, another digression.

Black humour is an old tradition, a quintessential British tradition in fact. Take an awful event or catastrophe, or especially a terrorist incident, and within minutes we are cracking gags about. In the best possible taste, of course, as the late Kenny Everett would say. Now, I like black humour and employ it in my horror as a counterpoint to the fear and dread to (hopefully) exacerbate those features, but it isn’t the point of the books. The point is to scare, to frighten, to provide that frisson of terror that will return every time to haunt a reader every time a storm rattles the windows with rain, or an unexpected shadow falls across a familiar wall, or the wind howls in the eaves and there are strange scratching sounds coming from a loft or a cellar…

Writing horror is just like writing humour, I have found. The intent is to draw from the reader an immediate reaction. When out performing, I have had as much satisfaction from seeing the audience nearly throw up at the end of a horror piece as I have from seeing them laugh at the punch line of a joke. It is no wonder to me that the word ‘gag’ has more than one meaning, and I like using both of them. In fact I am mildly surprised that more comedians do not end up writing horror: not least because it is so much fun!

I’ve discovered the joy now of having twin ambitions: one is to write a gag that makes someone fall off their chair. The other is to write a scene that makes someone actually gag in fear and horror.

Just as comedy has its dark side, so do writers of comedy – and I am having the time of my life letting it out to run free.

*See what I did there?

Will’s latest book, Demon’s Reach, has just been released. Here’s a little more about it:

Grab your copy here

Demon’s Reach, by Will Macmillan Jones

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All families have secrets or skeletons in the cupboard, hidden away from view. Most of those secrets are better left undisturbed, for very good reasons. When Mister Jones agrees to deal with the Estate of a recently deceased cousin, he finds that the secrets hidden by his family are very dark indeed, and that the skeletons in this cupboard are very real – and not yet entirely dead.

Drawn once more by Fate into a world where magic and myth are all too real and danger lurks at every turn, Mister Jones confronts a past that seeks again to become the present, and to plunge his future into a rising Darkness.

Can he escape the Demon’s Reach?

When Mister Jones discovers that he has been asked to be executor of the Estate of a cousin he wasn’t aware he had, he thinks that the request is innocent, a family matter. But when he travels to his late cousin’s home, he finds that the local village is a dark place, full of mistrust of his family and with unsettling whispers of a dark past.

Indeed, his arrival is enough to spark of an attempt by the villagers to destroy part of his late cousin’s home – and the first death. The mystery deepens as another lost relative finds Mister Jones – but is she all that she seems?

His first visit to his late cousin’s house is almost his last, for Mister Jones finds first evidence of Black Magical Rituals among the effects in the house, and then discovers that a Demon still walks the grounds. The Demon makes herself known to more than just Mister Jones, and the body count rises. Joined by another relative stranger who reveals that she is his half sister, Mister Jones struggles to unravel the web of deceit and mystery and uncover the truth – only to discover that his half sister is more involved than he believed and that the plot centers around his presence, there in the house. He is to be a sacrificial victim, in a Ritual that will restore his long-lost father to life – at the expense of Mister Jones’.

Can Mister Jones’ half sister bring herself to sacrifice the brother she doesn’t know, for the father she fears?

About the author.

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Will Macmillan Jones lives in Wales, a lovely green and verdant land with a rich cultural heritage.  He does his best to support this heritage by drinking the local beer and shouting loud encouragement whenever International Rugby is on the TV.  A lover of blues, rock, and jazz he has just fulfilled a lifetime ambition by filling an entire wall of his study with (already overfull) bookcases.  When not writing he is usually lost with the help of a satnav on top of a large hill in the middle of nowhere, looking for dragons. He hasn’t found one yet, but swears that it is only a matter of time. His writing credits include an occasional award, and a lot of more frequent near misses covering his chosen genres of Horror, Fantasy, Children’s, and Flash Fiction.

His major comic fantasy series, released by Red Kite Publishing, can be found at:

www.thebannedunderground.com

and information on his other work: horror and children’s books and poetry and stuff in general at:

www.willmacmillanjones.com

And Facebook https://www.facebook.com/william.macmillanjones

And Twitter  @macmillanjones

His next comedy, set in The Banned Underground collection of comic fantasy novels, and called A Teacher’s Lot will be out in the summer of 2018.

Win a laughter library and Kobo’s 40% off sale. #kobo #giveaways

Greetings everyone, just a quick one today about some smashing offers for Kobo users first and then a giveaway that should suit everyone … well everyone who likes humorous books because if you don’t like the funny then, frankly, I’m not sure what you’re doing here. On we go.

Kobo 40% off sale

Yep the lovely peps at Kobo are doing that thing again, only this time, it’s 40% off!

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So, if  you do Kobo and you’re holding out for a cheaper copy of Escape From B-Movie Hell, now’s your chance to bag one. This promo runs from 26th – 30th October, here’s what you do. Go to the Escape From B-Movie Hell book page, click to buy the book, enter the code 40SAVE at checkout and they’ll knock 40% off the price.

You can also download as many participating books in the promo as you like with the same code … which is nice.

For more info and a link to the promo page on your local Kobo, go here: http://www.hamgee.co.uk/ebmhkobo.html

If you have already bought a copy of Escape From B-Movie Hell the link to the sale home page is on there too.

Win a Laughter Library runs until 15th November

This is a cracking giveaway running over the next couple of weeks and the prize is a bunch of funny books. [image error]

The lovely Dean Wilson at SFF book bonanza has set this one up. If you like funny books, follow the link, enter the competition and a whole bunch of humorous paperbacks could be yours. You can get extra chances to win by sharing the details as well.

To enter just click on the link.

http://sffbookbonanza.com/win-a-laughter-library/

Next week, in a radical departure from my usual fare, I will be bringing you HORROR with my good author friend Will Macmillan Jones! It being Halloween and all, I thought you might like that. Mwah hahahaahahahahahargh! (For full effect, do that laugh in the style of the one at the end of Michael Jackson’s Thriller).

Just the basic facts? I wish.

When is news … Well … not news but … say … propaganda.

Yes, it’s a little bit of politics this week. Yikes.

News is, and always has been, complicated. However, recently, it seems two things have happened.

We’ve realised this.
We are too busy to read and understand all the reasons underneath everything. We are looking for short cuts. An outlet for news which we know and trust which will tell us everything we need to know.

In short, we seem to be looking less for newspapers these days and more for a reliable friend who will research the facts so we don’t have to and give us a potted summary. I used to enjoy the news on the BBC text service because it would just report what happened. No comment or slant or suggestions as to why. Just the facts.

That’s gone now though.

Maybe there is a parallel with buying products. Take cars. Gone are the days when you could fix something that went wrong easily. These days, most cars, most things to be honest, are so complicated that a normal intelligent person cannot fix them without serious training or expertise – usually in electronics. So these days we have to trust the manufacturer to deliver something that will do what we want it to do without breaking down, blowing up or generally endangering us. As a result, brand has become a lot more important and with so much trust invested in our purchase, maybe that’s why we feel a lot more let down if the product doesn’t live up to our expectations.

News, we have something similar. I’m noticing a trend for people to pick a news service of choice and stick with that. Nothing new there. In earlier days, we all knew and accepted that these outlets had an editorial bias and you took that into account when you read or watched. There seems to have been a shift. News outlets have a much stronger bias and instead of reading them with that bias in mind, people seem to be reading them as truth and then feeling hurt and aggrieved and lied to if the ‘truths’ of their organ of choice are proved wrong.

Perhaps life, political life at any rate, has become too complicated. Perhaps our problem is that while products can be summed up in a nutshell and pitched to us in a catchy soundbite, serious and more complicated issues like news can’t.

The fact is, ‘it feels like the right thing to do’ is fine for deciding what brand or colour of washing machine you have but maybe it’s not going to cut the mustard when you are choosing a political candidate. Surely, when it comes to political or ethical issues our decisions need to be based on more facts. Except that when our news is packaged up in easily digestible soundbites and slickly marketed to us like products the facts are so difficult to ascertain.

We need the facts – without the spin and the NLP trigger words designed to titillate or shock us. The BBC used to be excellent for this and judging by the way the far right and left BOTH decry it for its ‘petty rules’ and bias it is clearly still doing reasonably well at maintaining the middle ground.

But now we have a whole new take on this. First, smaller interests in politics had to be represented – for balance. So it was that the BBC was slammed for only inviting the main contenders to political debates. So individuals like Gordon Fosdyke from the Wombling Alliance who had three followers, one of whom was a dog called Benjy suddenly got prime TV time. So did the far right. And for people with far right leanings, that was an endorsement. They began to feel it was OK to believe the things they secretly believed about people who were a different colour, sexual orientation, gender or heaven forefend, disabled. They began to forget that the reason people have frowned upon views like theirs for so long is because that kind of thinking caused one world leader to start a war a few years back in which sixty million people died. I do hope you are reading, Mr Trump, Leaders of The Caliphate etc.

People who were not aligned with the far left, the far right or those areas of religion more concerned with controlling and judging others than the love your neighbour aspect of their founders began to notice this, and at the same time, people also spotted that there were folks here in the UK preaching hatred on religious grounds. Remember the Muslim cleric preaching hate in North London? Abu Hamza. And so the new crime of inciting hatred was born.

“Expressions of hatred toward someone on account of that person’s colour, race, disability, nationality (including citizenship), ethnic or national origin, religion, or sexual orientation is forbidden.” To quote Wikipedia.

Now, I have a varied group of friends and a couple are very right wing, one tells me his news organ of choice is Breitbart, a platform for the smiling face of the alt right, as I believe National Socialism is called these days. These are all guys – and it’s normally guys because it’s a hard job hating women enough to be alt right if you’re a woman – who would be first to extend a helping hand to anyone in need. The Breitbart reading lad is about as morally and spiritually unaligned with the far right as I can imagine. I confess, I have tried to read Breitbart a couple of times, more to try and understand my friend than anything. There are a lot of sweeping judgements being made, a lot of mocking others who are more accepting of the things they decry and a little bit of sick-up into my mouth at the sentiments expressed a lot of the time. Interestingly, there’s a fair bit of anti feeling against people like Mr Abu Hamza in the far right on the grounds they are preaching hate in our country – which they are. But at the same time, many of those folks speaking out against Muslims (they think all Muslims are like him) have attitudes that carbon copy his. Yet they can’t see that. Like Abu Hamza and his ilk, they target groups who are different; disabled people, LGBT people and women of course,  oh yeh, I know the score, no matter what brand of extremism you’re peddling, you all hate me because I’m a lady and I do ladies’ things.

So, obviously, as a female with a love your neighbour, rather than judgemental, religious faith, reading Brietbart is going to be a very uncomfortable experience for me. The comments are the worst bit. So much hatred. So much bile. Jeez.

However, it got me wondering how and why intelligent thinking people abandon mainstream news which is, at least, delivered by journalists who are paid and trained to do research and attempt to be factual, in favour of a site run by people who are not always journalists, nor trained in journalism and who are unapologetically pushing their own political agenda. In this case hatred of everyone who isn’t a fully able white man, as far as I can see. Maybe I’m naive.

Interestingly, a big bug bear for the far right, the religious exrtremes and the far left –  and I’m sorry anyone from either reading this BUT YOU ARE ALL THE FUCKING SAME how are you unable to see that, with the exception of a few key words swapped YOU ARE ALL PEDDLING THE SAME MESSAGE – are protestations that the BBC and other organisations like it are biased and muzzling free speech.

Thinking about it, I’m guessing the BBC has to act within the law. Since preaching hate and hate speak are a crime in the UK where it is based, then technically, I suspect that giving someone a platform Encourage people to hate one another on grounds of sexuality, religion, skin colour, ability or gender group of people is … an ethically grey area. Or to put it another way, vile AND illegal to boot. Especially if those sentiments cross the line from a political argument into the realms of hate speak which they have to, if expressed, because there is no reasoned or scientific reason to think someone’s colour, sexuality or gender makes them inferior. Our forefathers spent seven years discovering where that kind of crap gets us in the 1930s and 40s so that we don’t have to.

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Guess which group of people in these pictures killed someone.

Those who had previously been given a platform, albeit briefly, to spread their poison on the BBC are now no longer able to, because preaching hate does not comply with the law of the land – even though Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and The Sun newspaper seem to get away with it on a regular basis. Generally, though, it’s frowned upon. I doubt having someone banging on about people being inferior because they’re female, or coloured or gay ties in with the BBC’s diversity guidelines either.

So, our extremist friends, unwilling to retreat back to obscurity, now pitch themselves as radical new thinkers being silenced. They cry that their ‘right’ to free speech has been curtailed. But frankly, if you preach hate, you forfeit your right to free speech. Furthermore, I can’t help wondering if going after the BBC is these peoples’ way of trying to knock out a main source of reasonably accurate news and one of the few larger ones with a more left wing bias. Clearly it’s a big threat to the extreemists on all sides if they are so keen to take it down.

It’s also important to remember that most of the human race decided, after the holocaust, and the death of sixty million people during world war two, that it was a bad thing to base political rhetoric, let alone government policy around a view that is, basically, the grown up equivalent of a toddler saying, ‘I’m not going to play with you coz you smell.’

It may well be that we need to look at immigration and how people settle here. In my view, if you walk through the streets of Luton chanting ‘death to Britain’ you really do need to have a think about what the fuck you’re doing here. And if you can’t, the government should, perhaps, help you to focus by revoking your citizenship and expelling you to whatever country your grandparents, parents or you originated from … or just expelling you; escorting you to the border and saying, ‘bye-bye mate.’

But of course, treating people who behave in an inhuman manner as anything less than human merely reduces us to being like them. That is what they do to us after all. And if we behave like them our arguments that we are better or more advanced than them become moot. That is what extremes are about, uniting us in our distrust  and suspicion of others. Tribalism, basically, a once useful instinct, but one that counts for little when used in excess or without logic, even if it is very powerful.

It seems to me that extremism, in any form, never got anyone anywhere long term, it brought us the Pogroms and Stalin, the concentration camps, North Korea and Cambodia under Pol Pot, The Daesh and medieval Bedouin law in a twenty first century state. It never turns out well. It is proven flawed. There are bigots in every religion and every flavour of politics but fighting their bigotry with a different type of our own bigotry doesn’t help. It just makes two groups of bigots where there was one.

So reading the news? Well, I tend to try and do what people used to do. I watch mainstream news aware that agendas are being pushed. I try to look at the facts behind what is happening. If I read the Telegraph, I accept it has a tory agenda, likewise, I accept that the Guardian is more left wing. But I do at least know that the people working there are, mostly, journalists, and that they believe it’s their job to produce well researched, well balanced arguments. If they fail to include hate speak, or refute the rhetoric of hate speak, that’s a bonus to me. It’s definitely not a problem and not a denial of anyone’s ‘rights’. We should have grown beyond the use of hate speak as a political tool.

I leave you with this lovely flyer that a beer company in the States produced in response to a visit from a white supremacist speaker to their town.

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NB: Gordon Fosdyke from the Wombling Alliance is not real.

Excerpt from one of the W.I.P.s #amwriting #comedybooks

This week, another joyous example of the logic of children. The children in question being me and my brother. This is also another story that will be making it into my family stories book: Setting Tripwires for Granny (and other tall family tales). And yes, as per, neither my brother nor I is reflected in the best of lights. Anyway, enjoy.

No parking … [image error]

When he hit the age of eight, my parents made the difficult decision to send my brother to a nearby boarding school. According to Mum, he was beginning to strongly resent the amount of time Dad spent in the house and wasn’t enjoying living in a school. So off he went.  It sounds draconian but by the time the events in this story happened he’d been there some time and was thoroughly enjoying it.

Every Sunday, we picked him up and he came home for the day to have lunch with us. Four weekends each term he was allowed home for the night and these weekends were red letter occasions. At the end of each Sunday, my brother had to be back in school at around six pm. Meanwhile, the boys at Lancing who’d been out for the weekend, or the day, had to come back, too. Lancing operated with Saturday night out every other weekend and the boys (and the girls, there were girls in the sixth form at that point) had to return for evensong at six pm. This meant there was always a difficulty with us leaving when the tide of traffic up the drive was coming the other way.

The building we lived in fronted onto the car park for the next door house, Fields. We had a small fenced off terrace, but otherwise it was Fields House parking and then Fields House Lawn. Obviously, there were usually cars parked everywhere. There was one particularly tidy spot at the end of our terrace but if anyone parked there, the angle was such that you couldn’t get our car out of our garage. Usually Mum remembered to get the car out before the boys came back and then park it in a lay by a little further down the school drive so the family cars of the Fields House boys wouldn’t box it in.

However, on this occasion, our car was still in the garage. When Mum found out it was boxed in, we knew she would be all in a dither. She’d have to venture into the twilight zone that was Fields and find the owner. It was a job of sleuthing that always took ages and on one ghastly occasion the person was in chapel. Mum was not good company when she was all in a dither so as far as we kids were concerned, anyone who was inconsiderate enough to put her there was bad news.

One day, when my brother came home for the weekend it snowed. We were only a couple of miles from the sea so this was something of a rarity although it did tend to hang around slightly longer, on top of our hill, than it did in the valley. After a weekend of high jinx, snowman building and tobogganing it was nearly time for my brother to go back to school. With twenty minutes left, some parents turned up and buttonholed my Mum and Dad in the kitchen. My brother and I were upstairs, looking out of his bedroom window when we noticed that there was a car parked in The Spot; the one that blocked our garage. We knew two things about this car.

First, we knew that Mum had already asked the owners not to park there on other occasions, two, it was occupied. There was a woman sitting in it reading a book. We knew a third thing, too; Mum hadn’t moved our car yet, it was still in the garage.

My brother immediately had horrors about Mum failing to get the car out in good time and him being late back to school. I should point out here that, for him, being late to school involved missing a meal rather than missing evensong which was an altogether more disastrous outcome for a ten year old boy. And also there were plenty of other parking spaces, the car didn’t need to be parked there. As kids, it never occurred to us that Mum had probably seen it too, and seen the woman in there, so known she could just pop out and ask when the time came. No, all we saw was bad person parked in bad car.

We opened the window to get a better view and we looked at the car. It was something big, executive and expensive; a Merc or a Jag.

‘Let’s give it a couple of minutes,’ my brother said. ‘If it doesn’t move, I’ll tell Mum.’

It didn’t move and Mum was still busy with Dad and the parents in the kitchen.

Perhaps we could help Mum by making the car move ourselves?

We would ask but the lady was unlikely to pay any attention to our request because we were children. And anyway where’s the fun in that?

I think it was my idea to go downstairs, out of the door at the other side of the house, onto the upper quad, make a couple of snowballs and bring them back. One of the wonders of living in a school is the weirdness of the accommodation; a handful of rooms, miles of corridor and an astounding variety of exits, should the incumbent housemaster wish to escape from rampaging parents, or the kinds of talkative ones he couldn’t afford to let himself run into when he was late for lessons—housemasters pack a lot into their days so they are usually late for something.

Off we went, sneaking out quietly because we weren’t one hundred percent sure that our parents would approve of our actions, and into the upper quad where we made a couple of snowballs each. Back indoors we trundled, trying not to spill any tell-tale drips of melt water or giggle too loudly as we made our way back up the stairs to my brother’s room where we had opened the window, a fair bit but not too much. Standing well back so that we were indistinguishable to anyone looking up at the windows we lobbed the snowballs out. Our attempts to avoid being seen hampered our aim a bit as it took a fair bit of skill to get the snowball through the window on the right trajectory from a safely anonymous distance back. They landed near the car with a satisfactory splatting noise but not near enough to make an impression on the woman inside. We waited, just to see, but she didn’t react or move the car.

Back down we went through the house, out of the door, down another flight of concrete stairs into the cloisters and through the archway into the quad. We made another couple of snowballs each using the snow on the grass and retraced our steps to my brother’s room. This time one of our efforts skimmed past the wing mirror, sputtering the window with water droplets and the other landed on the roof with a hugely satisfying bonging noise. The woman inside was royally startled from her book and looked about her. We watched from well back as she tried to work out what had happened. Clearly deciding that a lump of snow must have fallen off the roof of our house and hit her vehicle in some freak episode, she settled back into her seat and carried on reading.

She didn’t move the car.

Foiled!

The snowballs weren’t doing enough. Or maybe the rate of fire wasn’t fast enough? Yes, that was it, we decided. We needed more ammo for a sustained attack.

We got the old nappy bucket the lived under the sink in the bathroom and headed down to the quad, filled it with freshly made, if somewhat claggy, snowballs and returned to my brother’s room. Standing well back from the half open window we subjected the car to what I guess you might call a fusillade of snowball fire, culminating in a particularly slushy one, thrown by my brother, which landed with a massive splat right across the windscreen. The woman looked up at the anonymous windows of our house and scratched her head. She seemed thoughtful for a moment but then she did, finally, move the car.

She never parked there again.

PS, if you like the picture you can buy it as a greetings card from here: https://www.zazzle.co.uk/frosty_the_abominable_snowman_card-137112259617806813

Real treasure isn’t always shiny #writing #metaldetecting

Opening a little window on the world of metal detecting today, and chatting about gold, not comedy gold, like last week but kind of tenuously linked gold … Oh, I’ll just get on with it shall I?

A few months back, the finds liaison bod who attends both the clubs I go to and asked us to bring in all the interesting things we’d found detecting. The local museum was mounting an exhibition of lost items and he wanted some of those lost items to be things which had later been found by local detectorists.

To my delight he chose two things from the pile of worthless shite I took along; a King Charles pipe tamper and a Limoges Mount.

It could be that I’ve banged on about them before but basically, they’re that glorious type of find which is not worth that much, so I get to keep it, but is incredibly rare, so it’s cool. The Limoges Mount was made in Limoges (I know there’s a shocker) between the 12th and 14th centuries. At the time a pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostella ran past the town and it was very popular. The good burgers Limoges, with their eye on the prize, started to make religious souvenirs to sell to the passing pilgrims. It’s probably an early one because it’s quite good. Close up there are hints of guilding, green and blue and I think there was some ochre coloured glaze as well, I can’t look right now because it’s in the museum, obviously. It’s bent which is a pity but it doesn’t really matter. It’s worth about £70 and when I tried to look it up on the Portable Antiquities Scheme database there had been about six found in ten years, so it’s quite rare.

The King Charles pipe tamper is worth about £45 and took a fair bit of perseverance. I dug out three nails before I managed to find it and had practically reached Australia by the time it came up. It was about eighteen inches down. I love both these items, the mount because it’s so rare and so interesting, the pipe tamper because it is rare, too, but I also love that because it comes from a tumultuous time in my nation’s history.

England at this time was a police state, people were bullied, picked-on and even ruined over their political allegiances, or those of their forebears. Worse, these were decided on the word of someone in favour with the regime. You could, literally, be executed on the word of someone who claimed to have heard you saying something seditious in the pub if they were prepared to swear it in court. Despite the fear of lying after swearing on the bible, it must have been easy enough to denounce someone who stood in your way, especially as both sides were fighting on religious grounds so would, no doubt, be able to convince you that you were doing God’s work perjuring yourself, anyway. It sounds like a grim time. All the theatres were closed, there may even have been a curfew. The arts were dismissed as frivolity, some of the most beautiful religious artworks were wrecked cf every single statue in Ely Cathedral, where the New Model Army also stabled its horses.

Cromwell really was a fucking vandal.

And he was born just outside Ely so in the case of his town of origin he should really have known better.

Despite being three hundred years ago, the language of that era intrigues me, it sounds so modern, Lord Protector, New Model Army. It’s very now. And much of what we consider to be British traits today, the idea of even-handedness and fair play for example, actually come from Cromwell’s ideas. But for all the new dawn he wanted to achieve, it didn’t quite work. There was to be no music, not even in church and no dancing, very Myanmar under its previous dictatorial regime (as opposed to the current dictatorial regime). I believe there are some places where Christians still believe dancing is the devil’s work, mostly in areas Cromwell’s followers fled to when the monarchy was restored; sorry US and Canada, I’m looking at you again; would the Pilgrim Fathers please stand up.

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My finds in a glass case, in a museum! Not something I ever thought I’d see.

But for all its horror, or possibly because of it, that time holds a kind of morbid fascination to me. Probably because as an ex stand-up comedienne, who writes comedy, I would be considered the devil incarnate by Cromwell’s regime. However, I also am fascinated at how bravely people stood, and fell, by what they believed. Would I? Could I?

Things I like, they got to wear really cool clothes; you know, big hats, frilly shirts and … swords … and thigh boots. Mmm Three Musketeers anyone? What’s not to like? Oh yes, the dying young, and being a public enemy for making jokes. Alright then, so it’s cool but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Back to the stuff. How did these things end up buried? Who knows? The mount came from just outside Lavenham and it probably fell off something holy as it was being paraded around the fields, to bless the harvest? To pray for newly planted crops? But it could just as easily have been torn off and thrown there by an over enthusiastic Parliamentarian. The pipe tamper would have been a highly political object. If it’s restoration, it’s a celebration of the return to ‘normality’ such as it was – in effect, it was little more than swapping despots. If it’s during the Protectorate, it’s a red hot political potato. The kind of object that would get you beheaded or hung – subject to your social status – if the wrong people saw you with it. Perhaps it was buried, perhaps a concerned wife lobbed it to keep her husband safe? Who knows. But basically, because of that, anything from the Commonwealth era and the years just before and just after it, are bucket list for me.

Which brings me to this:

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Cromwell shilling with the sun on it so you can see what it actually is. It’s about an inch and a quarter across.

Woot.

This is a Commonwealth Shilling, from the time of Cromwell, and it belonged to someone who either a) hated the Commonwealth – perhaps it was the same guy whose pipe tamper I found a few hundred yards away in a field across the road or b) someone who was trying to use it afterwards, had missed the date to return it and be issued with new, Chaz II head-on-it legal tender and tried to scrub the picture off so possession of his cash – and it was a lot of cash in those days – wasn’t treasonable and therefore punishable by death.

This is the best picture I could get, angling it on sideways to the evening sun. If you look at it in normal daylight it’s little more than a silver disc. But the point it, it’s good enough for me to see what it is, but too knackered for it to be worth anything. Indeed, the dealer I showed it to reckoned it was worth about £35, which is brilliant because it means that since it’s worth Jack Shit to anyone other than me I get to keep it.

Sod finding a hoard.

That, my friends, is a result.

In case you’re worried that I’m getting ahead of myself, here’s a picture of the kind of thing I usually find.

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A piece of aluminium – probably once an aircraft – which McMini and I found. Obviously, the eyes were applied later. It may look like a pug but we are going to call it Glorb.

So how does this link in with my books? Well, some days, when I’m really in the zone, I get impatient with Real Life. It feels as if it is little more than an annoying obstacle between me and the far more interesting places I make up in my head. Other days, usually when making up the interesting places in my head is going well and I know I won’t forget what I’m doing if I walk away from it, I enjoy the Real World as mightily as any made-up place I could concoct brain-side.

But over and above all, I guess it says that I cannot lock myself away, sit in a garret and write – well, I can but only for short bursts. Because if you want to get things out of your head you have to put stuff in. There has to be living between trips to the garret. According to my conscious mind, much of the stuff in K’Barth is informed by my skewed understanding of European history in the 1930s and 40s. But I never realised how thoroughly I rationalised it through my own national view and, unconsciously, though that period of history when England – but Britain also – underwent a similarly monumental upheaval.

Amazingly, it was only a few months after publishing the last K’Barthan book that I realised where I’d got Lord Vernon’s title, ‘Lord Protector’ from. I would have changed that if I’d cottoned on but at the same time, I guess that’s part of the joy of it all. That this shit goes in, my brain mangles it about for a while, warps it through the prism of weirdness and then something else comes out: Cromwellian Britain with multiple alien creatures and flying cars.

Mmm.

One of my current projects, Space Dustmen, features a truly disgusting – but very nutritious – food called Dagon Porridge. I’d got the Dagons down as being a very practical and sensible but utterly unimaginative bunch of aliens who are now extinct and have left the universe with little more than the benefits, if that’s the right word, of their perfectly balanced nutritional meal. The Dagons lacked the imagination to appreciate the joy of making nutrition interesting, of course, so they are roundly and regularly cursed by our protagonists. I now realise I got Dagon from church, it’s the god of the Philistines; Goliath’s god.

Hmm … to change it or not to change it? I might just have to call them Aygons instead, except then they’ll sound like a baby Toyota (Aygo). But it does go to show that there is so much hidden treasure in Real Life. All you have to do is listen, let your brain suck up the information, blend it and spit out the literary smoothie of your unique warped-eye view. At some point, every experience becomes useful.

Example: About twenty years ago, I remember sitting down on a bench just outside Riquwier, in the Alsace, waiting for my husband and our friends so we could go and see a vineyard somewhere. I was joined by a little old lady – rather glam, dressed in a silk shirt, smart skirt, nylons, heels, immaculate make up, jewellery but not too much, dyed brown hair and silk scarf tied into a type of turban (well smart though, not 1960s sit-com cleaner style). I wasn’t in much of a mood for conversation but she proceeded to chat to me, as old dears do. She turned out to be absolutely lovely and told me, from what I could understand with my rather rudimentary grasp of French, that she’d been one of Picasso’s models and a mistress in the 1950s and that she had a book of his sketches which she hoped her family would sell after she died – or possibly which they had sold already, I couldn’t be sure – to pay for her flat, where she lived, in the walls of the town. Obviously, as an art historian originally, I was really chuffed to meet her. So it just goes to show that however unassuming someone, or something looks, it’s worth paying attention, because it might turn out to be treasure.