The Week That Was

#TheWeekThatWas: Growing into yourself

I can’t remember what I wanted to be as a small child. But after I hit about fourteen, I had a plan that involved never marrying, living in a small, remote house with a garden and a duck pond; and keeping a flock of ducks and a string of lovers.

Some of this has happened. Some of it has been sadly lacking.

I grew up on a smallholding. My background is one where ones income comes from growing or making stuff and selling it. After I hit fifteen, my pocket money came from keeping a few dozen ex-battery hens and selling their eggs in the local market every weekend. Ma and Pa took a load of vegetables and flowers in to sell every Friday for the Saturday market and they’d take my eggs as well. Ma paid my sister’s school fees with the sales of apple pies and jam each weekend. She says she knew she had to make a certain amount every week to cover the bill, else that was that.

When I left home, I went to college for a bit and got a couple of degrees. I have never used the first one – Archaeology and History are fascinating but their real world applications are pretty minimal unless you want to actually work in the field – and in between that, I learned to copy- or audio-type at seventy words a minute whilst simultaneously holding a conversation about a completely different subject. That’s the most useful skill I have ever learned. And thinking about it, fantastic preparation for parenthood.

architecture building castle city — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

After a bit of time copy-typing and regretting my college choice, I fell in to a graduate degree in Geographical Information Systems, which was in its infancy then. Now, you can do an undergraduate course and specialise really early on, but then – the mid nineties – you could only go the postgraduate route. It seemed like a really good way to combine my interest in both the past and computers. Afterwards, I toyed with the idea of a doctorate, but in the end, I’d had enough of the ivory tower of academia and wanted to be back in the real world. Retrospectively, this may have been a mistake, but I was in my mid twenties and had a certain amount of judgemental arrogance. Instead, I went to work for a well known UK telecoms company and used the time to discover I really, really hated the corporate world and that the money for nice shoes, whilst lovely, wasn’t more important than my sanity.

I ended up quitting and teaching various levels of IT and office skills in an adult education setting. I loved it. My favourite class, ever, was made up of Hilda, Ada, Muriel and Betty. They had come to my ‘Computers For The Terrified’ class on a Friday afternoon as a change from their usual crochet sessions. Their average age was eighty and they were hilarious.

“Remind me how to save the file again, dear. I’m so sorry. I used to be able to remember things, but it’s all gone now.”

“I can’t get used to this mouse, Ally. My granddaughter has given me her old lapthing and it hasn’t got a mouse, it’s got a trackpad.”

“I’m so sorry dear. I have no idea how this came up on my internet search. I really wasn’t looking for naked men. It won’t get you in trouble with the centre, will it, that he’s got that big erection?”.

man standing on cliff watching punch bowl waterfalls — Photo by S Migaj on Pexels.com

At the same time, I was extracting myself from a relationship where my partner thought it was acceptable behaviour to throw me over the sofa. I eventually moved out and found myself a little house deeper in the Welsh valley I lived in – South Wales is a bit like Narnia, in that further up and further in is the way to go to uncover all the glories. The house was ten feet and one inch wide, with a garden a hundred feet long. I borrowed the money to renovate it from my father and did it up myself. I swore off relationships completely.

And then of course, OH turned up. I considered dating him simply because the house I had bought had no duck pond and I knew that my adolescent dream couldn’t come true whilst I was still there.

Twenty years later … I have had the duck pond. I have had the remote house. I have even had the string of lovers, a long time ago. But never all at once. And I’ve come to the conclusion that whatever you start off wanting – astronaut, scientist, writer, duck-keeper, Madame Bovary – you are pretty lucky if you hit that happy streak straight away. I think you’re more likely to find your groove by the process of elimination.

The Day of the Triffids and nightmares

I don’t watch scary films and I don’t read horror…and this is probably why!

When I was about fourteen – in my second or third year at Senior School – we had an English teacher who seemed set on giving us all nightmares. He was thought of as a nice bloke. He played saxophone for Screaming Lord Sutch and his band when Such toured the West Country and he took various groups of kids camping on Dartmoor and Exmoor.

However, he must have had a really sadistic side. He showed us various TV Series as ‘treats’ in one particular lesson slot every week and they were invariably really traumatic. He showed us the 1982 Q. E. D. Documentary A Guide to Armageddon about the consequences of the detonation of a small nuclear warhead over St Paul’s Cathedral; and the TV adaptation of Z for Zachariah, which is a fantastic book, but watching it in the context of the tail end of the Cold War and preceded by watching the St Paul’s Nuke thing was terrifying.

The story that really, really freaked me out, though, was Day Of The Triffids by John Wyndham. I don’t think that we even read the book in class. He just showed us the TV Series. There was a BBC serialisation done in 1981 that had large fibre-glass and latex ‘Triffids’ that were operated by a chap crouched down inside, with a radio-operated clacker-thing to make the rattling noise.

I know this NOW, because Wikipedia. However, then, it was terrifying.

The thing that made it double, triple, a million times more scary was that I lived on a horticultural nursery. Where we grew flowers. Big flowers, small flowers, short flowers, tall flowers. I’d get home from school as it was getting dark and my parents would be somewhere out on the seven acre plot. And I’d run, run, run around the house and down the path along the back of the greenhouses to find them in the flower-packing shed, all the time waiting to hear that rattle. We used to grow huge swathes of Chrysanthemum blooms – globe-shaped single blooms about four or six inches across – and the white ones would look ghostly in the dusk. As you walked, or ran, down the Back Path to the flower packing shed, they spread out in great luminous swathes in the half-light and I was convinced they were watching me.

I’d arrange my music lesson every week in the same slot so that I had an excuse to miss watching the serialisation. When he realised what I was doing, the teacher reported me to my Housemistress and they stopped me and forced me to sit through each episode. I would sit there with my eyes shut for the whole forty minutes, trying not to hear what was going on; and if he noticed, he would try and get the rest of the class to tease me.

Cover of the 1981 Penguin edition of Day of the Triffids

To try to help me not be so scared, my Pa, who was a bit of a old-school Wyndham fan I think, bought me a copy of the book. I can remember him watching the series on the BBC every week as it was time for us to go to bed and he wouldn’t let me sit with him, so he must have known it would affect me. I was a voracious bookworm even then, but I couldn’t even bring myself to even touch the covers of the paperback he bought. That episode of Friends where Rachel puts Little Women in the freezer for Joey? That was me. I couldn’t even have it in the living room. In the end, Pa put it on the table by his side of the bed. When he died, twenty five years later, it was still there. Nothing has ever, ever scared me like that, since.

Strangely, I grew in to be a huge science-fiction fan. Some Wyndham I love. The Chrysalids is one of my all time favourite books. Give me some nice post-apocalyptic drama and I’m happy – especially if there is romantic tension thrown in there. No walking plants or clacking noises, even now though, please.

the week that was: The Year of Hell

I haven’t done one of these for a while so it seemed time for some personal stuff. It’s not really a #WeekThatWas, more a #YearThatWas. It was one of the formative years of my life, if not the formative year.

Mr AL and I have a year that we describe as The Year Of Hell. Partly because we are Star Trek Voyager fans. And partly because, well, it was.

We had Talking Child in autumn 2007. It was all rather unexpected. We’d just completed the rigorous two year adoption procedure and were about to be matched with potential children. When we discovered I was knocked up, we were delighted on the one hand and on the other a bit confused, because we had put all that work in to getting ready for a family in one way and now it was happening in another.

So, TC arrived and that was great. And because I was knocking on a bit, we thought it would be a good idea to try to ride that alleged post-pregnancy fertility and go for Littlest. To our surprise, this worked when Talking Child was three months old. Go me. Yay. At age thirty-seven, at the beginning of 2008, when I’d resigned myself to never having a tiny baby, there I was, not only with a tiny baby, but with another one on the way. I was exhausted, pitifully sick and with awful, awful post-natal depression. Retrospectively I have NO IDEA why any of it seemed like a good plan. But eh, hormones.

At the time, Mr AL and I were working together in the audio-visual industry, mostly doing work for conferences. It came as a genuine surprise to me that no-one would let me climb ladders whilst pregnant or with a baby strapped to me in a sling. Mr AL still trotted off to work for days at a time and left me in rural Wales with the baby, climbing the walls. He couldn’t understand why I was virtually bonkers each time he came home from a tour.

And then, because the post-natal depression was so debilitating, I didn’t keep track of who had paid us and who hadn’t. A big customer that we trusted screwed us over. They got us to do a second large job for them before they had paid us for a large job a few weeks earlier and then they went bankrupt. They knew it was coming and they hung us out to dry, owing us about thirty grand. They opened up under another name a few weeks later and we had no recourse. That left us with a small baby, me unable to work because of small baby/pregnancy/depression, and an enormous mortgage on our idyllic rural house.

And then there were the deaths. My Pa died. He was elderly and it was expected. I was still devastated. I nearly went in to labour in the Chapel of Rest when I went to say goodbye. Then the mother of a dear friend died. That was unexpected and terrible. And two friends in their forties died out of the blue, one from a brain aneurysm and one from a heart problem.

We lost the idyllic house in our own bankruptcy, three weeks before the second baby was due. We found somewhere to live, but it was a very near thing. Mr AL crashed the new-to-us car Ma had given us money to buy and wrote it off. In the autumn, Littlest was born with pneumonia and at eight weeks old was on a ventilator. We spent the winter going back and forth to hospital in ambulances, with her on oxygen. We fell out with Mr AL’s parents in a comprehensive and horribly damaging way.

Littlest, back from hunting, with her walking frame, rifle and camo face paint. — Littlest, May 2013, back from hunting, with her walking frame, rifle and camo face paint.

If I had to have a do-over for a year, it would probably be that one. But having said that, I don’t know exactly what I’d do differently. I feel very strongly that what happens to you forms you as a person. I love my life and my beautiful family as they are, despite the difficulties we face.

Plus, that was the year that did a great deal of the excavating of the inner me. I don’t take bullshit from people as easily these days and I am more cautious who I trust. If someone lies to me, I cut them out completely. I am more vocal and I stand up for my family more quickly and perhaps too aggressively. When you’re under that amount of stress, friends you thought were close turn out to not be so close. People you weren’t close to become closer.

I don’t think any of those things would have happened as they did or in the same way if The Year Of Hell hadn’t happened. So, 2008, you sucked. But good things came of you, so you can stay.

I was going to write a post telling you all about my hydroponic lettuce growing set-up, because why not? But instead it’s been such a bloody stressful week that I’m going to moan about that because I need to get it off my chest.

These are the things we’ve had to deal with this week:

Decide whether to go ahead with Littlest’s elective surgery that is supposed to help with her curling-in feet. The hope is that she’ll be able to stand again. However, it’s been delayed for twelve months because #Covid and in all that time she has been without splints (more #Covid) and has not been standing. It is therefore likely that she doesn’t have enough strength left to regain where she was, even with lots of physio. But she might. Also, the anaesthetic is a bit dodgy, because of her breathing issues.
Still pushing for a vaccine for her. The local health service is only calling clinically extremely vulnerable 12-15 year olds who are in residential care at the moment. Other services nearby are calling all children in special schools. It was a bit of a blow, but it will be a matter of weeks apparently.
We needed to sign off her ‘Advanced Care Plan’, which used to be call her ‘End of Life Care Plan’, but they changed the name a couple of years ago to make it more fluffy and less brutal. It’s still brutal. We have decided we do not want resuscitation.
My mother has updated her own DNR paperwork. She’s done, pretty much, and is perfectly happy with her low intervention decision; as am I because it’s what she wants, but it’s my mum.
As the filling in the shit sandwich, one of our carer’s other clients has suspected Covid and she is therefore isolating until this person gets their test results back. It should have taken three days, but the test has been lost in the post. So we are managing without help.
Mr AL has put his back out. (Lifting a bloody piano. Don’t laugh). I can move her, but it’s a bit much for me and tends to mean I have a seizure afterwards, so as he’s recovered we’re double-handling her…she has a hoist for actually getting in and out of bed/her chair/the sofa etc, but still needs moving once she’s landed.
Talking Child has had another round of bullying at school. School sounds like half the student body have gone feral after three months of no real structure and a lot of staff are still off, shielding or whatever, and I wouldn’t be a teacher for all the money in the world at the moment. TC was disappointed that she missed a huge fight in the playground yesterday and when the head of year rang me, she sounded exhausted. If you are an educator, I applaud you, hang in there.

Anyway, all these things are why I’ve been quiet. I’m drained, I’m sad about my mum and the issues our kids are dealing with and I have been struggling to adult. I so want to get back on the writing horse in the mornings; and the last few days I have actually rolled out of bed and sat at my desk. But my brain hasn’t kicked in yet.

Eight Acts came out last weekend and As the Crows Fly is dropping on the 13^th April. Inheritance of Shadows is in the process of going wide in audio with a new cover. My slate is clear, but I feel completely uninspired about getting on with Sylvia Marks, although I know where I want the story to go.

I was talking to Littlest’s community nurse yesterday and she says that pretty much all her families have crashed in a similar fashion. It’s the light at the end of the tunnel finally being visible, I think.

So for #TheWeekThatWas, that is all.

The Week that Was

This week has been wild.

person holding yellow and white flowers — Photo by Lisa Fotios on Pexels.com

First, Littlest’s school was closed because they had a child with a positive test. Then it was open because the child hadn’t been in touch with anyone outside their bubble. Then it was closed because despite that they had a very high viral load.

You may mentally insert your favourite gif of an octopus flailing wildly here.

Next week though…she’ll be back at school from Monday. Talking Child will be going back on Thursday. Apparently they aren’t going to do very much the first week—children are going to have home covid tests twice a week, so they’ll show them how to do that. And presumably implement some sort of catch-and-tame program for the people who’ve gone feral during school closure and need to settle into a routine again.

Let us take a moment to pause and silently applaud all UK educators and send them our silent support. Or vocal support if you know any personally.

Here at Lester Towers this week though…spring is happening. We’ve got snowdrops and daffodils coming up well now; and the ridiculous pigeons are actually making a nest in the bush outside our bedroom window. If they carry on with it I’ll have a prime view of the whole process. They are ridiculously stupid creatures and their nest is more like a pancake of sticks they’ve just shoved in there than anything meant to nurture the next generation of pigeon-kind.

I’ve cracked on with quite a bit of admin type work…I’ve got the two audio books I’ve reclaimed from Audible up with Findaway, listed them on my Author Direct page and they are in the process of rolling out wide, as per my previous post. I’ve done a new cover for Inheritance of Shadows and started the update process for that and sorted out a new version of the paperback. I’ve done some pretty marketing images for both Inheritance and Eight Acts. I did the final proof of Eight Acts and sent out the ARCs.

So that’s quite a bit, really, despite feeling like I’ve spent waaaaay too much time in my pyjamas.