I had a photograph of the style that I wanted, which was quite a lot shorter than the one I was currently sporting, which was a shoulder length bob of sorts. Once she had put her belongings down I showed her the picture, and then watched as the colour in her face drained right out.
Sunday, 15 December 2013
The Build Up
I had a photograph of the style that I wanted, which was quite a lot shorter than the one I was currently sporting, which was a shoulder length bob of sorts. Once she had put her belongings down I showed her the picture, and then watched as the colour in her face drained right out.
Saturday, 14 December 2013
What Happened Next?
What happened next was a combination of a terrible haircut, a much better haircut, a couple of tattoos, one of which is twinned with a pub in Bristol, and a meeting with a group of people, half of whom I had never met but knew very well and the other half I had already met but hadn't seen for ages. On a barge. With burgers. Also starring some legwarmers, the most surreal overnight queue outside a shop ever, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, and and a shot of what can only be described as a total headfuck in a glass that makes time go slower.
I shall elaborate, but it will take several posts to do so. Mostly because it's such a long and good quality story that stuffing it all into one post would be a travesty and disrespectful to the events that occurred.
And I am too tired to do it now. So it must wait. But not for long.
Thursday, 17 October 2013
Brain Ache
I hate passive aggressive facebook statuses. They fill my timeline with as much regularity as the posters of the "its have a guilt trip about someone elses disabilities week, post and share if you aren't a complete piece of shitbag who doesn't give a crap about anyone but yourself" and the "I know you pay no attention to my posts so leave a one word answer to show that we have a real life connection and we mean something to each other" posts.
I don't post them. I dont share them. I think they are dumb, and if I am honest, I worry about the people who do post them.
But today has been so heinously shitty that I can kind of understand why people post passive aggressive ones that invite attention and questions to "drag" what's wrong out of the original poster.
Im not going into details (ha, passive aggressive postahoy) - but suffice to say a number of my plans for the next twelve months have had to be shelved due to a massive financial disaster. Some of those plans directly affect my upcoming birthday. I'm about to be 40 and my inner being is crying like a baby and wanting all the people I know to care about me and fix my life and make it all better. My actual eyes have done their own share of crying today. But I had to get some sort of grip because I don't want to worry the kids by looking like a dribbling mess.
So I'm dumping it here. I haven't eaten today, I'm not hungry. I should be starving by now, but I'm not. I was hoping to turn 40 with a positive frame of mind, how this part of my life might work out better than the first half, how maybe I might be able to put the past to rest. Now it's so tarnished it will have to be stuffed in the cupboard with the other epic fails of my birthdays gone by. (13 - mother was "stranded" in a foreign country and couldnt get back for it, 14/15 she buggered off on holiday for the week and I didnt go, 16, mired in dying grandparents, dont remember 17, 18 - ended up spending all my birthday cash keeping my friends in drinks because they were all skint. 19 I was pregnant, 20 passed in a blur, and 21 was Mother's coupe de grace of birthday sabotage. Offered to throw a party for me, threw a shitfit on my actual birthday which ended with me in bed in tears by 9pm, then decided she couldn't afford to hold the party so I had to go round telling everyone to bring their own drinks. Fell down some stairs in the pub and chipped my ankle, but didn't realise how much pain I was in and for some godforsaken unknown reason ended up in the clutches of a college friend who had brought along his party trick of firebreathing which involved him drinking meths or something and spitting it out and then burping petrol smells all night.
And let's not talk about the custard chilli.
I pretty much gave up on birthdays after that and they didn't get much better in the following years.
Last year was pretty ok. I was away on holiday with my mum and she made a real effort. Because of today, this year, my 40th, is destined to be a true return to form. My mum and my brother were going to chip in together and get me one of the new ipads when they come out. But I have had to ask for cash instead, because a couple of weeks after my birthday my daughter will be 10, and then its Xmas. We have next to no spare income as it is. Their needs come first and 40th or not, I couldn't justify to myself having such an expensive item while not knowing how I am going to pull Christmas out of the bag.
I feel like I'm drowning. I don't know how the hell we are going to manage. But I need to sleep so I needed to write this down to at least try and get it out of my head for a while.
Now I have, so I shall try to sleep, safe in the knowledge that I have averted a passive aggressive facebook status frenzy. Coz in the bigger picture, no-one really gives a fuck anyway.
Saturday, 28 September 2013
28 Days...
Friday, 6 September 2013
Absence Makes The Heart Go Fondant
It's been a while since I began the post I just finished up, it's been sat in draft form for a couple of weeks while I went away with my family for a week's caravan and seaside fun.
It was an excellent week, the first time we have taken the girls away for a holiday properly, we have had the occasional three day minibreak, usually to see my dad's side of the family in Scotland - but a proper holiday has been beyond our means. My mum decided that it was important for the children to have a proper seaside holiday and so paid for the caravan and we all went. All except my son, who she asked to stay at her house and look after her dogs, and keep an eye on her lodger, who has somewhat of a drink problem and a propensity to a spot of drunken cookery.
I have known her lodger for a very long time. For the purposes of his anonymity I shall call him Jim.
Jim and I met when I worked at the local and recently opened fast food establishment that I have previously referred to. He was employed about 6 months after I was, but he was full time and I just did weekends and the occasional after school. In every way, we were polar opposites, except for our joint ability to get mindnumbingly drunk and do things we probably shouldn't and wouldn't have with the benefit of hindsight. It was this which our friendship arose from.
Jim had recently come out as gay, having tried and failed to pass as a heterosexual man for a while. I would learn over the years that his father had been somewhat of a bully, whereas his mother compensated for that by being somewhat of a soft touch, especially where Jim was concerned. He had other siblings that he got on with in varying degrees from "really well" to "not at all" - but very much felt that he was the outsider of the family. His anger at his father was repressed a great deal for his mothers sake, but it was clear that his father's inability to accept him for himself had hurt him deeply.
He dealt with these repressed feelings by drinking a lot. Because of the nature of the place where we worked, social drinking was a common occurence and we would often be found in the local hostelries causing mischief. Many of my underage drunken antics feature him in some capacity. We would often meet up on payday and have a wander round the shops, have a coffee, and just laugh.
People would stare at us, me super tall and already "chunky" - him about 8 inches shorter than me and as thin as a rake. We would link arms and gaze adoringly at each other, just to give them something to talk about. We once had what I refuse to call a drunken snog, it was something more akin to be leapt on by a giant leech and stirred precisely nothing in either of us other than a sense of disgust and a mutual agreement never for that to ever happen again.
Over the years, our friendship has gone through highs and lulls. I lost some of my charm when I found myself a single parent at 19, as my social capabilities were limited, but he loved my son and during one spell where he was unemployed helped me out by babysitting for me when I was working. We shared a flat for a few months, until such time as his OCD cleanliness and desire to have his space to himself got the better of him. My son and I had most of our possessions crammed into one bedroom and that did not make for a tidy and spotless environment even if I had a remote chance of being crowned Housewife of The Year - which, I am happy to admit, is more unlikely than me having a big lottery win.
To be honest I think it was more likely that he wanted to be able to do bad things with the scally upstairs and a tub of Stork SB and a young mum with a toddler living there is somewhat of a style cramper.
But over the years we have had other periods of sharing a roof for various lengths of time, and paths that have invariably crossed. If he had a problem, I was there for him, if I had a problem, he was nowhere to be seen, unless it was a "Ladies Problem" in which he could be seen quite clearly rushing to the bathroom while trying to stop his lunch from doing an encore.
Heterophobia is alive and well in the gay community. Well, that particular branch of it, anyway.
At least it's an informed opinion based on experience though.
He was less thrilled when I met my husband, a little jealous, a little put out, and a lot distant. He was hard work for the first few years of my marriage, and has got progressively harder to handle in the subsequent years. The drink, it seems, is catching up with him. Nowadays 95% of our conversations happen when he is drunk, 100% always contain a slagging off of a family member to whom I am related (he saves the rants about me for other ears) and 85% I have no clue what caused the rant and am left oblivious still months and years after the event.
It's a shame, but people change and move on in life. He was one of the few that I thought would be a lifelong friend, although it was taken for granted that lifelong in his case was dependant on how long his liver could hold up under the strain.
Now it seems that is not to be. He pulled a very nasty little stunt while we were away to try and get my son into trouble. Who would think that a man in his fifties could act like a preschool infant? All because he was annoyed at being "babysat" - so to ensure it never happened again, he went round the house after my son left and deliberately made it look as though my son had been throwing raging parties there.
I know my son, and I know when he is lying. He can't keep a straight face and lie. It's beyond him. He has Aspergers which does assist in this sort of circumstances - being socially short on guidelines for polite society means that brutal truth is often first to depart without really understanding the impact the words will have on your peers.
My son is so angry with him now he's refusing to have anything more to do wuth him. It's a shame, he has been there all his life and had a great bond with him. I don't feel like having much to do with him either. I have had my fill of alcoholics over the course of my life and can't deal with another one. Polite in passing is about all I can manage nowadays. I'm tired of dramaz. I guess I'm getting older. No energy left to waste on wastes of time.
Wednesday, 21 August 2013
But It Stopped Short...
At primary school, in a year too long ago to be able to accurately identify but almost certainly falling somewhere between 1980 and 1985, as part of our music lessons, we learnt a song called My Grandfather's Clock.
If you haven't heard this song, these are the lyrics.
My grandfather's clock was too large for the shelf
So it stood ninety years on the floor
It was taller by half than the old man himself
Though it weighed not a pennyweight more
It was bought on the morn of the day that he was born
And was always his treasure and pride
But it stopped, short never to go again
When the old man died
Ninety years without slumbering (tick, tock, tick, tock)
His life seconds numbering (tick, tock, tick, tock)
But it stopped, short, never to go again
When the old man died
My grandfather said that of those he could hire
Not a servant so faithful he found
For it wasted no time and had but one desire
At the close of each week to be wound.
And it kept in its place, not a frown upon it's face
And its hands never hung by its side
But it stopped short, never to go again
When the old man died.
It rang and alarmed in the dead of the night
An alarm that for years had been dumb
And we knew that his spirit was pluming for flight
That his hour for departure had come.
Still the clock kept the time with a soft and muffled chime,
As we silently stood by his side.
But it stopped short, never to go again
When the old man died
Ninety years without slumbering.
His life seconds numbering.
It stopped short, never to go again
When the old man died.
I reckon I was probably 8 or 9 when I learned this particular song and was immediately struck by the intensity of the lyrics. I suppose it carried extra weight on a personal level for me because my own grandfather was so utterly important to me. It would also quite often pop into my head when I visited them, as they had such a clock, although it was the smaller more three bedroom semi suitable sized version.
My grandad was born in 1921, and was a terrible family secret. The people he believed to be his parents as he grew up were actually his grandparents, his "sister" was his unmarried and shamed mother.
As I understand it this was not revealed to him until he was an adult - and was never spoken of again - I don't recall any conversations with him about his childhood or family life, and I only became aware of the facts when his biological mother died and left a sum of money in her will to her "granddaughter".
I had actually met her on several occasions, totally unaware that she was in fact my great-grandmother, and we even went to stay with her at her home in Melton Mowbray, where she lived next door to her daughter, my grandad's half sister, my real great-aunt, who I spent lots of happy hours with playing badly on her piano, all the while completely unaware of her significance in my life.
It was a shame. They were both lovely women and I would have liked to have been allowed to know them in their proper designated roles in my life but clearly as it was not an open secret, the opportunity was lost to me. I assume this was to protect the respectability of my grandad as the social stigma of being a "bastard" was significant enough for them to have need to do so.
He had been a member of the RAF during the second world war. I'm not sure what his actual role was but I know it involved him being in the tail end of the plane, in itself a ridiculously dangerous spot - the tail being disabled was an excellent way to down a plane as it would lose control and become unsteerable.
By all accounts he was a bit of a jack-the-lad and spent a lot of time going off the rails. How much of this can be attributed to the shock he had recieved from the revalation that his entire life thus far was a sham and a lie is impossible to say, but I do that at some stage he pushed his marriage to my grandmother to breaking point and she took control of the relationship in order to get him back in line. He was a heavy drinker and whilst the details of how awful his behaviour was have been kept from me, the words alcoholic and violent have been mentioned. I never saw that side of him, he never touched a drop of alcohol as long as I knew him, but he did manage to keep the spark of mischief and a sprinkling of still being a man-child tucked carefully in his pocket at all times, along with his exceptionally pristine and yet soft cotton handkerchief.
Photos from his younger years show a tall sandy haired upright sort of chap, with a distance in his eyes. He had very kind eyes in my opinion, but then I was his sidekick, and we would spend many a happy hour walking the dog, or out in his garage messing around with his vice, sawing up bits of wood or doing things that involved spanners, all the while chatting and whispering under our breath about how Nana would tell us off for hiding out there rather than doing the chores we were supposed to be doing. I always felt sorry for him and felt she picked on him a bit much and constrained him, it was not until much later that I understood why that dynamic existed.
He and I had an unshakeable bond. I was his co-conspirator for mischief and he was my protector, a realisation I didn't come to until some years after he died when I went out to meet my biological father in Sweden just after my 21st birthday.
My father told me that having left my mother and returned to his home in the Highlands, he had returned to my home town to attempt to see me, when I was around 3 years old. His mother had given him a teddy bear to bring as a gift for me. When he got here, he was sent packing immediately by my grandad having had it made quite categorically clear that under no circumstances whatsoeverwould he be allowed to see me, so he shouldn't bother to stick around one second longer.
Cowed and defeated after really not making much of an effort at all, my dad put the bear in the bin, returned to Scotland again, told his mother I had loved the bear, and I was perfectly fine and promptly gave up on me.
I can understand why this happened and what propelled my mum and grandad to prevent me from seeing him. He hadn't exactly done himself any favours by dumping his young wife and baby daughter in the first place, and the mess he had left behind him was pretty substantial.
Having invested considerable effort and time into supporting my mum to recover from that, it is no wonder that my grandad feared the repercussions of allowing him back into our lives.
Perhaps he recognised the alcoholic in himself as being present in my dad, and wanted better for me than he had given his own daughter, and indeed better for her than a replica of his own bad behaviour - I don't know - what I do know is that he was my best friend, my strongest ally, and the person I relied upon whenever family life at home got bad, which it did with remarkable frequency. A hug from him made everything ok again, even when it really wasn't. It was him I clung to when my mum and stepdad (no1) split up, and he who would, I knew, have defended me unconditionally no matter what. I was always happy in his company and actively sought it out.
I knew that everyone eventually died. We are born, we live a life, then we die. It was pretty matter of fact for me, most of the time, that's just how things are - except when I contemplated that in the context of his life. He wasn't going to be allowed to die. I wouldn't let that happen. He and I were a team, and a life without him in was unthinkable.
He was ridiculously proud of me. He came to anything I did at school, including the infamous netball match in the fourth year juniors where, short of a goal shooter, they had asked me to stand in for the first team in the last match of the school year against another local primary school. They had never bothered to play me in an attacking role before, preferring to use my height as a defensive tactic when I was picked to play - but on this occasion I volunteered and the PE teacher went along with it.
We won. 15-0. I scored 10 of them. Every single ball that left my hands and slid deftly through the netted hoop of glory above my head was loudly cheered, by the increasingly dumbfounded gathering of parents who hadn't borne witness to such a dazzling display of goalery in any previous inter-school encounter, but most loudly by my grandad, wildly waving the oversized stuffed dolphin I had insisted on bringing along as a mascot for good luck. (His name was Flipper and he was a Christmas present from my Nana and Grandad when I was 6.)
Meanwhile, the PE teacher was kicking herself repeatedly at having failed to spot my goal shooting expertise sooner. I was Girl of the Match that week.
Any time I had the opportunity to spend some time with him, I grabbed it with both hands. Most Saturday mornings we would go to a garage/petrol station/second hand car dealership owned by one of his friends of unknown origin, who was not that far removed from the stereotypical second hand car dealer sort of chap. Twisty moustache, Brylcreemed hair, wore a brown smartish raincoat, with a salesman's way with words, and perfectly happy to have a 9 year old girl serving petrol to his customers because it freed him up to talk with my Grandad for a couple of hours. He was called Del, which just added to the whole stereotype.
At about 11am we would cook bacon on a hot plate in his little office above the showroom, butter some floury rolls, assemble the sandwiches with the assistance of a liberal splurge of ketchup and make massive mugs of tea, stuffing our faces before going home for lunch. Good times.
(Between my formative years living above their newsagents with the ready access to sweets and chocolates that it provides, those Saturday mornings and early lessons in "how to binge eat your feelings away" that I received from various sources, it is no small wonder that much of my adult life has been plagued with the side effects of an obesity problem. But I digress.)
In his eyes, I could do no wrong. And in my eyes, nor could he. He was my hero. Until he went and committed the ultimate betrayal and did that whole getting ill and dying thing.
When I was about 11 he had decided that he needed to take better care of his health, so had stopped smoking and tried to lose a bit of weight. He wasn't hugely obese or anything, just enough to be cuddly, but he decided to take up road cycling and promptly got himself an old bike and stripped it down and rebuilt it for himself with better parts and a comfier seat. He later built one for me too, from parts he had assembled from various bits and pieces of other bikes, and painted in bright red shiny paint. It was way cooler than my previous and now outgrown bike which was a brown Raleigh girls bike that I had been thrilled with at the time but paled into tepid insignificance when the local boys started turning up to play on bikes with their new BMX bikes that they would do stunts on and giant leaps off the kerbs. When I got my red bike, it was more of a racing style but a ladies version and I was thrilled with it.
He joined a local cycling club made up of a mixture of ages of men who all liked to have a bit of a bike ride regularly and would go off for lengthy bike rides that usually ended with a cup of tea and a cake at a cafe where many such cycling enthusiasts congregated.
He was also a keen amateur photographer and either through this hobby or the cycling, not sure which, made a new friend called Gordon, who as it turned out lived just down the road from him. Gordon was also a cyclist, and owned a tiny camera shop in the nearest city centre. (It was the shop that was tiny, the cameras came in a range of sizes.)
For the first few years of secondary school, I lived about 5 minutes walk from where my grandparents lived, and on days where my mother was at work beyond school hours, I would walk from school to my grandparents house, they having already collected my brother from his school.
The minute I walked in I would be given a sandwich (peanut butter and jam on wholemeal bread) and a glass of Kia-Ora orange squash and be allowed to eat that while watching the kids tv shows that were on after school.
If we were staying for tea, it was usually something like a salad with potatoes and boiled eggs about 5.15pm and if we were staying any longer than that, inevitably we would be graced by the presence of Gordon, who would have cycled home from his shop in rush hour, stopping only at the local shop closest to home, where he would purchase a brick of cardboard coated vanilla or Neopolitain ice cream, and a packet of wafers. The ice cream would be wrapped up in newspaper to preserve it, and he would duly arrive around 6pm, hand it over to my grandmother, accept her offer of a cup of tea and settle in for a chat lasting an hour or so with my grandad.
If the Tour De France coverage was being shown on Channel 4, the pair of them would sit there enraptured listening to the report of the days events, discussing various important details like bicycle clips and whether seventy gears were strictly necessary.
Goes without saying, I liked Gordon. He was grimy and greasy and used words that made little sense to me about apertures and wide-angles and chain guards, but he always brought ice-cream which won my silence for the duration of his visit, and my eternal gratitude.
Nana never ever said anything to him, but you could tell just from the way she would say his name using only a despondent sigh that she wasn't exactly thrilled with his imminent arrival.
For one thing, she had a small fridge with an icebox at the top. She didn't own a separate freezer or anything like the sort we see nowadays. Her entire capacity for storing frozen goods was barely bigger than a shoebox. Having survived the rationing of WW II, she was not prone to waste either, and if Gordon ended up bringing the larger size of the two types of ice cream brick you could buy (which was double the small one) she would grumpily have to find somewhere in the icebox to fit it, which caused serious duress to her frozen pea collection.
My grandads cycling continued for quite a few years, and he was in good shape. When I was about 14, he started to feel more out of breath than he should and went to see his doctor. The doctor said he didn't think that there was anything wrong and sent him on his way.
It was apparent that this was clearly not the case, and so rather than make a fuss, Grandad quietly transferred himself to a different GP practice that had recently opened closer to his house.
This GP immediately spotted that Grandad had an irregularity in his heart sounds, and correctly predicted that the cause was a leaking valve, which was confirmed after his immediate referral to the specialist hospital that dealt with such matters.
The plan of action was to be a valve replacement - major surgery and well before the days where quadruple bypass procedures were considered to be routine surgery.
Of course we were all concerned about this - but it needed doing and so after lots of appointments he was admitted to have it done, expecting to be in hospital for about a fortnight.
The operation went well and we went to see him every day while he recovered from it. He seemed perfectly fine, but then one day it was decided that the incision to his sternum was not healing appropriately and would require a stronger and thicker type of suture to keep his rib cage together.
He ended up being in hospital for over two months because this still didn't help, and had to go back in for more surgery on at least two more occasions, each time returning with a bigger thicker rope wound in and out of his sternum. The doctors said he had very "chalky" bones, I guess that's a layman's way of saying osteoporosis, but that given enough time, it would heal.
Finally he came home, in early April. I could relax. He was still very weak but on the Sunday afternoon after he came home we ventured out in the car to a local beauty spot with an excellent ice cream shop for a couple of hours. Almost immediately after this he began to decline rapidly, and was admitted to hospital again, this time the most local one, and remained there until, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, my Nana recieved a knock on the door, to find the police standing there.
They had come to inform her that he would not make it through the night and take her to him quickly.
The phone in our house rang at about 3.30am. It woke us all up, except my brother who managed to sleep through it.
I don't know if she made it to him on time or who was on the phone, her or the police - but I do know that I spent the next few hours sitting up in bed alone, staring into space, tears dripping onto my pink and grey striped quilt cover, waiting for the confirmation that my worst fear had come to pass.
I don't remember how it was confirmed or who confirmed it, I guess my mum's partner did the honours but I don't know for sure, and I don't really recall much about that day at all.
A post-mortem would be held, as the death was unexpected, and a later inquest would find that during one of the procedures to re-secure the incision, the knife used to reopen the wound would have not been sterile, and an infection had been introduced that went unnoticed and festered until such point as it caused an embolism that killed him.
This was of course back in the day when such things would never have resulted in a court case and the family recieving many thousands in compensation, it just went on record as an accidental death and that was the end of the matter. It made the local newspaper though and I'm sure put the fear up anyone who read it and was due to go to the same hospital for a procedure of their own.
Everyone was in shock, but Nana, the dignified woman that she was, got on with it as best she could. Within a few hours of his passing she had decided that she couldn't look after their dog and he had been duly dispatched to the Happy Hunting Ground via the local vet's surgery. I was HUGELY angry about this. She might have not wanted or been able to take care of Zac but I would have gladly done so and was not given the option, only informed after the event.
It wasn't fair to him at all.
Zac was an awesome dog, they had got him before they retired when they still owned a newsagents together, after a break in made them decide they needed to get a guard dog, and ended up with Zac, who was a big fluffy white lump of animal that could no more have defended their livelihood than fight his way out of a wet paper bag. He was however, designated as Grandads dog - although Nana did all the feeding, he did the walking. I dare say she just couldnt feel like she could cope with seeing him around and coupled with the fact that she wasn't physically strong enough herself to walk him due to her arthritis was most likely sufficient cause to make the decision for her. I always felt it was hugely unfair though. Zac had no choice in the matter.
I didn't go to the funeral. I volunteered to stay behind and get the funeral tea put out for when they returned but the truth was, I just wasn't ready to say goodbye.
The hearse containing my beloved Grandad's remains arrived at their home, and all the people dressed in black got in their cars and prepared to follow him to the crematorium. I watched them all pull away in that slow and dignified manner that they do, and as they did, my heart smashed to the floor in a million tiny pieces. I didn't bother to sweep them up, there was no point.
It could never be fixed.
Once all the cars were gone, I walked back into the house, closed the door behind me, and leaned against it to gather my thoughts and wipe the wet that I was trying to prevent leaking out of my eyes from escaping. I would not cry. I had to be strong for everyone that needed me to be, my Nana, my Mum, and my little brother. I don't recall who was looking after him that day. Probably his dad's sister or mum. He wasn't there though.
I spent the next hour arranging tablecloths, boiling kettles, unwrapping sandwiches and plates of little cakes ready for the return of the funeral party. I turned myself into a human robot, thanked the guests for the nice things they were saying about him, fed them buttered scones and poured endless cups of tea and glasses of sherry, forced a smile and just kept going. This was my tribute to him. I would make sure it went well so no-one had to worry about it and could just get on with the business of grieving. I locked up everything bubbling inside me and pushed it away. Their need was greater.
Writing this now, I can see that I pretty much replicated his own demise in my behaviour over the following months. The differences only that the incisions went on my arms using a blade and the festering infection in my chest was the result of me leaving all those shattered pieces of heart outside their house on the floor.
My mum was in pieces too, but for the sake of her mum she kept going - making plans for a granny annexe flat to be built on the side of our house, so that Nana did not have to be on her own if she didn't want to.
The rest of the world cared little for our loss. The Hillsborough disaster had occured on the Saturday before my grandad passed away, and that was dominating every newspaper, every news programme. It was truly shocking and what would later revealed to be the truth behind the events of that day, even more so, but it passed me by in a blur.
The blur and fog got worse when just ten days after losing the most important and influential man in my life, another significant one did the same thing. This time it was my step-grandfather, otherwise known as Poppa.
I hadn't really seen much of him in the last year or so before he died. Stepdad No1 had accepted joint custody of both my brother and myself (my brother being his natural child) when he split with my mother and for the first few years after the dust had settled we would be collected on a Friday night and would return to my mothers custody after school on a Monday.
After I turned 13/14 these interminably dull weekends stuck out in the middle of nowhere with a man who could have cared less if I were there or not lost out to the lure of meeting friends and being more sociable.
I stopped going. And because a fundamental part of each of those weekends would invariably be a trip to see his parents, they too blurred out of my self-obsessed teenage focus. I still loved them, admittedly not so much as I was always aware of my lack of blood relationship, but I stopped spending any time with them.
When Poppa died (not leaving me his library of Readers Digest magazines, shockingly) I was already on my knees from the loss of my Grandad 10 days earlier. I was round at Nana's the day I was told, my mum turned up looking all grim and I knew whatever it was, it wasnt going to be a pools win or an impromptu trip to Disney.
So there's me, all keeping my grief under control because I didn't want to upset my Nan, and just to add to the fun times, throw in some more grief, but this time with free additional guilt thrown in! I was mortified that I hadn't been to see him for so long. And now my chance was gone. I didn't go to his funeral. I couldn't face my step-nan or the rest of the family. That guilt stopped me going to see her too. I never saw her again before she died some four years later, in a nursing home after a stroke.
Not one of my finest moments but certainly reflective of my usual methods of dealing with really hard things. Lock it up, dont let it out, never let on that you need something because chances are your luck is out anyway and why be more disappointed with your existence than you are already.
I miss my Grandad still. Not in a hurty cry when you think about him sort of way, but I miss all the things about him that helped me feel safe and secure and to be able to trust in someone. Everyone else in my life had let me down somehow. He never ever did. Once he was gone, so went my anchor and I was set adrift, all full of the potentially explosive mixture of angst, self loathing, teenage hormones, buried grief and with no sign of a safe landing anywhere on the horizon.
I'm not a believer in heaven or God or religion of any kind. But I do think we leave a trail of our energy behind, through our children, our travels and our emotions. Echoes from the past. I used to "see" people when I was a child. I wish I still could.
He would be the top of my wishlist.
As for the clock that triggered the song memories, well, in due course, that is going to pass to me. But it's never been wound since it left my grandparents house when they cleared it. Recently my mum was deciding what should happen to the things that remain from their life, who would be getting what and my husband said he would love us to have the clock as he's keen on that sort of thing, mechanical items and especially old and solid items.
We don't have anywhere sensible to put it, we live in a shoebox, but having written this now, I know when the time comes for it to be with us, how important a piece it will be personally for me and how much I will treasure it.
Monday, 19 August 2013
I'm (Not Really) Loving It...
Rather than try and get her back upstairs to the bathroom, we decided I should take her through to the outdoor "kharzi" as it was delicately referred to by my recently felled grandad, which was basically a cupboard with a loo built into the exterior of the house. I helped her in there, closed the door and moved away to give her some privacy. She finished up, came out and I helped her back out to the car where my soon-to-be stepfather was waiting to drive us.
Sunday, 18 August 2013
The Benefit Of Hindsight
That said, I hate it when people describe themselves as a "nice" person - I prefer to make my own decisions in that regard. I will know if you are a nice person or not, based on how you treat me, and how I feel I want to treat you. I can think for myself, maybe too much, but allow me the time and space to do so and if I am still in your life after a while, you can safely assume that I think you are a nice person.
Despite not being remotely religious, I do unto others as I would like done to me. And frankly, if people want to talk about me behind my back, who am I to stop them? I'm not sure I am actually THAT interesting. Not any more.
When I was 15, I hung around with the same girls that I had always hung around with in secondary school, but we were joined by some of the lower sixth form boys who were also an established group of friends. We did our first major drink-till-you-puke sessions, partied most weekends, either in someone's house, or in better weather, out in local parks, coastal areas etc.
We were far from what would now be considered "Chavvy" - middle class Grammar School pupils embarking on teenage explorations into adult behaviour - but politely and without disruption to anyone around us. We just had a lot of fun.
I needed that fun, more than anything. As previously documented, my grandparents were tumbling in a style I had only previously seen the Christmas Santa brought me a box of "Domino Rally, Action Alley" - my mum was wading through the treacle that losing both parents in less time than it takes to gestate a baby causes, and I was keeping all my grief well and truly bottled up in an attempt to just. keep. going.
I had a younger brother, still do in fact, who was barely old enough to even understand what dead meant - and I was trying to be strong for him, and for my mum, and did not dare to crack, be seen as vulnerable, or do anything other than keep a stiff upper lip.
I channelled this into various outlets, getting drunk at the weekends on diabolical products that I wouldn't even clean my loo with nowadays, self-harming, pristine and not too deep slices across my forearms that I would carefully wrap in toilet roll and cover with long sleeves, a paracetamol overdose at school, (I took 10, and all they did was walk me up and down the cloakroom to ensure I didn't fall asleep... Never even told my mother. Seriously!), binge eating chocolate like it was going out of style, all the while, forcing down my own grief, keeping it buried, for the sake of those around me, who had enough to deal with and didn't need me falling apart all over them.
I survived only because of that group of friends. Knowing I would see them at lunchtimes, and the weekends, and that we would be able to drink and laugh and be able to just forget about the whole grim reality of my existence, was vital to me. Just to be a 16 year old girl and not have to think about what I had lost, what I was holding in, and another bleak week coming up where I would pay no attention in class, care less about the upcoming exams, concentrating on just getting through the day until I could go home and lock myself away in my room, alone, pretending to do homework when really I was just staring at the wall, wishing Jason Donovan would climb out of the poster and make everything all right. He witnessed every tear I shed. It's no wonder he turned to cocaine.
Admittedly, during those drunk times, I did do some of my falling apart. Alcohol is a dangerous partner for the grieving - but in my case, did at least allow me to get to the point where the shutoff button overloaded and the grief made a dash for the escape hatch. My group of friends were kind and supportive, and would mop my tears, try and make me laugh, bring me back round to enjoy the evening.
Fast forward 20 years. The Internet is alive and kicking and Facebook is stealing all of our spare time. One side effect of Facebook is of course, the ability to connect with people, and over the last few years I have reconnected with a fair few of that group of people. One or two I have not, for various reasons, but I suspect the majority of those I haven't were those that fell on the side of a division that occurred in the group during the uni years, which I was only an indirect part of, and I won't detail here because it isn't my story to report - but in the fallout of it, I was firmly inclined towards the side of one of the two members - those that were inclined to the other side of the situation, are all those mysteriously not sending me friend requests, nor do I feel that inclined to do it to them. I know when I am not welcome. That's fine. I am sure most of their memory of me is somewhat tarnished, as I was such a hideous mess for most of the time we all hung out together.
I'm not that person any more, not that it matters.
So, Facebook. A number of the people I had hung around with in that time and I have reconnected. We began to share old photos, reminisce about the "good" old days - and I remarked to one of the girls in a private message about how that group had pretty much kept me alive during that time, everything was such a hideous explosion of teenage angst, adult grief, spontaneous father appearances and just drama everywhere I looked, went, whenever I woke up...
I assumed that the response would be "Oh, well glad it helped" - but what she actually replied was the last thing I would ever have expected.
"Oh, was that all real? We thought you made it all up."
I took a "Like Button" to the face at 90 miles an hour. But the thumb was tucked in.
I didn't reply for several days. I couldn't for the life of me understand why ANYONE would have thought that! I know that teenagers make up stories for attention and to seem like they are more grown up and experienced, but really? 3 dead grandparents and the return of an absentee father? Being visibly absent at school due to funeral attendances? Bit of an elaborate and expensive way to fool your mates!
"Oh how we laughed when she finally revealed she had hidden her grandparents in a coal bunker for a year just to make sure they didn't get spotted at the shops and spoil the amazing story! She's such a gas!"
All this time, I never had one inkling that they felt that way. Not one. It was like she had taken my memories, pulled the rug from under them, and laughed as they crashed to the floor, irrevocably smashed into a million tiny pieces. To be fair, other than those evenings, most of my memories of that time are not good, and I don't mind THOSE ones being smashed up, but these were not THOSE memories. These were my sustenance during the blackest period of my life. The happier moments in amongst the gloom and doom. All broken. All of them.
I began to question all of those times, was I really their friend at all? Did they only pity me and let me tag along as the person most likely to get steaming drunk and make an absolute asshat of herself for their entertainment? I was really angry, briefly. Then sad, and disappointed, and hurt.
But the more I thought and unravelled those times, and remembered them, and the value they held for me, the less the anger and hurt of the revelation smarted. If they actually really did not believe me, they never ever ever let on. They continued to support me regardless.
It doesn't bear thinking about how it would have affected me if they had actually called me out on it at the time. That was my lifeline. The fact that they had been discussing me behind my back - well, in that situation, I dare say no-one would want to handle it alone, without the mutual support of the others in the group, so it would be natural for it to be discussed when I wasn't involved, and yes, it was kind of bitchy, but if it was happening to someone other than me, would I believe that someone could be so unfortunate? I don't know. I have never been in those shoes where I am supporting someone through that situation - so I cannot say.
They did me a huge favour. They stuck it out even if they didn't believe me, they put up with me when I was at my most distressed, my most over-dramatic, my most angst ridden and at the time, my lowest depths.
Eventually, I did write back. I thanked her. And that was all.
My Father, And Other Animals.
My dad wasn't around while I was growing up. I was the product of a bit of a scandal of a relationship, my mum was 5 years older than him and let's not dwell too long on her being a youth worker and him being a youth club member. They got pregnant with me to force approval of their relationship, had somewhat of a shotgun wedding and he disappeared 10 months after I was born, after spending a significant amount of time after my birth in the pub.
All I knew about him was his name, and that I wasn't important enough to stick around for. I knew where he was from, the basic details of their relationship but not the really crappy bits, and I knew I was somewhat of an isolated case.
Back in the seventies and eighties, married parents were the norm rather than the exception. My granddad did his best to fill the consistent father figure role until his death when I was 15, but when things got rough in my life, there was always an idle fantasy kicking around about how one day he would come back and scoop me up and all would be right with the world.
I would watch programmes like Surprise! Surprise! - and they would reunite people who hadn't seen each other for a long time, and it would all be emotional and tears and happy ever afters. That's what I expected to happen one day.
And then, shortly after my sixteenth birthday, that day came. I had just come downstairs from a trip to the loo as the phone started to ring. I picked it up. A gentleman with a Scottish accent asked if he could speak to me. I confirmed that I was me, and he asked if I knew who he was.
My powers of deduction were strong that day. I knew who he was. We excitedly stumbled through an introductory conversation, while in the background my mum anxiously chewed her way through half a pack of nicotine chewing gum. I learned I had two half-sisters, and a stepmother, and a whole other family in Scotland that I knew next to nothing about. I learnt I had missed the opportunity to meet my grandfather as he had passed away a couple of years earlier, but that I had a living grandmother and aunts and uncles and cousins.
Mind. Blown. Earlier that year my quota of grandparents had been somewhat decimated by the death of my mums father and 10 days later my step-grandfather - who had accepted me as a grandchild better than his son did as a stepdaughter, and so this whole new family was amazing to hear about.
He explained that he had called up my grandmother on the only number he had for her, once he felt I was old enough to make my own mind up, and asked if he could be given a phone number for me.
I don't know what thought processes went through her head but for whatever reason she decided that was a reasonable request at this point in the proceedings and handed it over.
Had he left it another four weeks or so, that ship would have sailed, as she too passed away, having never really recovered from the loss of her husband earlier in the year. I remember my mum telling me that the doctors had said that she was physically well enough to have withstood numerous attacks of the bronchitis that sits on her death certificate as the cause of her demise- but it seemed her heart and mind could not and she had given up any thought of fighting it.
After that phone call had ended, I was so excited and full of hope for the future. I DID have a dad and he had arrived just in time to make a positive difference in my life. No longer would I have to sit and enviously listen to all the stories from my friends about their own dads silly behaviour, I could join in! The next day I had school, and I couldn't wait to get there and share the news with my friends, and more importantly, be just like them.
What was to follow was not what I envisaged. A letter followed the phone call, with a handful of photographs of my new family in another country, and containing shakily written paragraphs, all full of the excitement of having found me once more.
It was a huge amount to take in for a girl preparing for her GCSEs, and who was shortly thereafter also grieving the third grandparent to depart via the local crematorium in eight months.
It gave me something positive to cling on to during that time, which in hindsight I should probably be grateful for, because at the time I did not know what was ahead.
If I had, I might have wished for that phone call to have arrived that little bit too late.
Saturday, 17 August 2013
Insert Clever Title Here
Hello to you!
It's not good to start a new blog with Writer's Block, I don't suppose.
Fortunately for me, I'm writing this on my phone which kindly suggests words for me, which is handy for just such an eventuality. The next paragraph will be buttons I press from the selection of words it offers me.
The first one is the most important thing in common with you and your sanity. When I was just a little bit of a new car and the kids to the top right hand corner of the best raid on your website is not the intended addressee. If you are looking for a bit of a sweetener aftertaste to be able to facilitate the best of all ages and abilities on the calendar.
Not entirely sure that will work for longer term treatment. But it fills a gap.
I should probably introduce myself. I'm Mrs Minxington but you can call me Minx. I have been some form of Minx ever since I was allowed to play on the internet, which is quite a while now. I have three kids, a husband, a handful of cats and a puppy that's a handful. I have been gainfully unemployed for a long time due to various reasons for some time now. More about that later.
This blog is for me to dump the innermost workings of my mind into. I envisage this to be something useful for me and not that interesting for the passing reader. Names will be changed to protect me from getting a punch in the face but all anecdotes will, to the best of my recollection, be true.
Some Facts about me:-
1) I am half Scottish and half English. This causes me to have more angst at the moment as Scotland are heading towards a referendum to determine whether they wish to become independent from the rest of the UK. While I can see their point, I at times feel exactly the same, but I kind of like the fact that my blended nationality is all still part of the same body. It gives me a geographical proximity to the part I don't live in.
And yes, I am well aware that if Scotland should vote for independence they aren't actually planning to saw through Cumbria and Newcastle and shove themselves 100m further north, using those poles that gondoliers use to lever the United Islands of Scotland into position.
But it feels like they are. It's the same thing but just on paper. And with a need to apply for a dual nationality passport.
2) I am unusually tall for a lady. Or at least, I was when I was growing up. I think the generation upcoming behind me have been hitting the bovine growth hormone a bit hard.
3) I am a self-taught expert at being estranged from various family members. Current estrangement totals are 1 biological father and 1 stepfather. One of those was an absentee until virtual adulthood and has plagued my life ever since due to his ongoing problems with alcohol and being a self-obsessed gobshite.
The second one is a more complicated story but the short version is "got bored of being his go-to for lengthy tirades against people who didnt deserve them and gave up."
It's a shame for them because they are missing out on some amazing grandchildren and it's a shame for me because I could have used an actual father figure at various points in my life but lucked out there a little bit. Never mind.
4) In the not too distant future I will be turning 40 and this is really what fuels my desire to start doing a bit of writing stuff down. The first of my friends that I made at secondary school turned 40 the day before yesterday - she was in the year above me but was one of the youngest, and lived 3 houses along from where my mother, younger brother and I moved to when she separated from my brothers father. (Aforementioned Stepdad 1. I had 2. Not concurrently although I have always secretly had suspicions about quite how narrow the gap between the two actually were but that's old news and not really relevant.)
Anyway, so she turned 40. She's one of my oldest and dearest friends and other than one minor blip where some exaggerated teenage shenanigans blew up and relegated us to snipy little notes through one another's front doors for a while - have been constant friends since we met nearly 28 years ago.
Unfortunately for me, she lives abroad now so we rarely meet in person, but it is one of those friendships that endures and picks up from where it left off. Of course social media helps - the world has never been so small - but its not the same when the coffees are a thousand miles apart. (That's a guess, don't get out there with your wheel on a stick and start measuring the route and come back and tell me I'm wrong and its only 970 miles. It's. Just. A. Guess.)
I always give her a little bit of grief during the two months where she's officially older than me. Obviously she's always older than me, but for about 10 months of the year we have the same numerical age, the other two are my chance to really capitalise on being smug about being younger.
I've known that I am going to be 40 this year, pretty much since I was old enough to count in tens and worked out when those milestones would occur - curiously they seem to happen every ten years since 1973. However the significance of that has only really become more prevalent in my mind since I turned 39. I don't know why it even matters - I can understand 16 being important, and 18, and 21, as 18 used to be the new 21 a long time back. 40, it appears, is celebrated because you are half way through your four score years of life expectancy. Woo! Half way through! Yay!
For someone looking forward to the grave with as much anguish as I do, it's less of a reason to party, and more an attempt to keep shaking your head to rid yourself of the tinnitus that insists on forcing you to listen to the occasionally "clanging chime of impending doom" that is your life ticking by, second by second, minute by minute, day after day. Cliché by Cliché.
When I was little (in age, I was a lanky strider from birth pretty much) and I was grumpily wishing to do things that older kids or grown ups did, my grandmother would look at me and say "Don't wish your life away, it's shorter than you imagine it to be." I would always think that was a bit odd because she was practically as old as the world itself (she was actually 54 when I was born so probably barely into her sixties when she was advising this). A child's perspective is amazing.
She was right though. Those ridiculously long drawn out days when you are a child quickly turn into compact and bijou (Mostyn) fragments of life that pass by in a blur as you crash in and out of bed over and over and over.
So she (my friend, not my grandmother, unless she's a time traveller and not dead after all) might be 40 now, but the summit is coming for me, as surely as the dog will smack me in the face to wake me up tomorrow morning, and it scares me. So im going to document it - and me, and not really bother giving her a hard time about it, because shit just got serious.