Category Archives: Blimey!

3 Mar 2024 · 10:08 am

This week I have mostly been … a bit of a twat.

Yes, I have not covered myself in glory this week, indeed, while I concede I may have come up covered in something, glory is definitely not it. Cf my attempts to laminate bacon (yes, you read that right). But on the upside at least it was funny. More on that story … later.

#00A650 … SORRY oops, I mean Sorry. The cat has just sat on keyboard. Where was I? Ah yes.

Before we get to the funny bit, just a quick update.

The Kickstarter funded!

Woot! Not only did it fund but it finally came to rest at £985 from 41 backers. This now means I can do the book officially. I’ve tweaked the colours over the week and sent off for a proof copy of the paperback to see if it looks better. I’m slightly erring on the side of it being a bit too vivid rather than washed out, which can result from the transition from photos (RGB colour) to print (CMYK colour).

Anyway, considering that I doubted I’d get £100 I am absolutely stoked! If I’d left it going another 15 minutes I’d have got another £15 and hit £1000 as another potential backer went to try and put it over the line just after it had finished. Next time I know to leave it running a bit later.

It funded! So there’s a thing.

General stuff …

These last few weeks I’ve been doing fair bit on probate. It’s is a bit of a ball ache but we are getting there, I think our application should go in next week.

On a lighter note, I have an event coming up and am also going with a friend to see Reginald D Hunter at the Theatre Royal which should be a gas.

Bury is surprisingly brilliant for comedy. I booked to go to a satirical show about politics a while back but the chap is ill and having treatment so it was postponed. With an empty theatre that night, clearly The Theatre Royal had a look round for something or someone else. Who?

Frank Skinner.

Seriously? Comedy legend at the drop of a hat anyone? Why yes please?

So me and my mate Jill went along to that and it was an absolute hoot. It’s like sitting with some really witty guy in the pub who just tells you funny stories. He was lightning quick. Seriously good.  The more I watch people do stand up, the more I realise; a) how comprehensively not smart enough to do it I am and b) how truly appalling my act must have been. Mwahahahrgh!

Blimey.

But yes, what a gas it was to see Frank Skinner … especially as I was in the middle of a bout of flu. Although, at the time I thought it was just a shit cold and that I was getting over it. I’d been feeling a bit odd so I spent the day in bed asleep and woke up feeling a great deal better. I dunno. Perhaps I was, but as well as seeing Frank Skinner’s show, I went on a metal detecting rally the next day which might, possibly, have put the kybosh on me. Either way, I soon discovered that no, I was not better, and I proceeded to spend the best part of a week in bed. Definitely a bonus gig that one, after the other performance was cancelled, not to mention squeaking in during an intermission in the flu.

So yay. Frank Skinner. And bonus, Jill did not get flu so I’m hoping no-one else did either, because I did feel incredibly bad about going to both the show and the dig and potentially giving it to others, when I finally had succumbed. Obviously, this being Britain, if we all stayed at home when we had a cold the streets would be deserted and the country would grind to a halt in winter. But flu? Yes, we do try not to give that to one another.

Other news with a neurodiversity tangent

This last three Saturdays, I’ve been donning my God bothering hat on Saturday mornings (as well as Sundays) to do some lent courses. They have been great fun and also rather lovely, especially the first one where we discussed how we came to become Christians and I enjoyed learning how interesting and varied other people’s paths to faith were.

Last week I talked too much, this week I think I managed, if not to talk less, then not to talk more than anyone else on my table. I do have a tendency to say too much though and I really have to watch it. I’m actually quite shy and socially anxious and I have an unfortunate propensity to over compensate by rattling on, and on, and never shutting up.

That said, I think different people take different levels of offence, and when they do, it’s probably more about their own brand of neurodiversity and how badly I’ve read the room. The great thing about places like church is that no-one appears to mind or, if they do, they hide it really well (a big thank you to any of them reading this and possibly an unofficial BAFTA nomination to anyone who did mind because I had no clue). I do try to rein it in though, especially if the people on my table seem to be quieter and more introverted. Also, I try to always help with the washing up afterwards, or putting the chairs away, so that if my unfortunate propensity to witter on has proved too much of a cross to bear for anyone, there is, at least, an upside to my being there and I have done something thoughtful and displayed a Redeeming Feature.

Redeeming feature my arse!

This week, the conversation on our table aligned rather well. We were like a bunch of autistic nerds hyper-focussing about God stuff. If you have a faith, it’s not often you get to talk about it among the normals. Not without people Looking At You In A Funny Way anyway. So I suppose it’s always going to be reasonably relaxing and we’re always going to be quite enthusiastic. It got me thinking about the whole reading the room thing. I mean, it’s interesting how different the interpretations of a phrase like  ‘polite conversation’ can be isn’t it? But I guess the nub of it is having the social nouse to work out what’s going on and tailor your style to fit accordingly. Bizarrely, I seem to be better at that in a stand up setting than a social one … which just shows how comprehensively I must suck at it. Gulp.

In defence of my deficiencies, I grew up in a house where everyone talked at once so ‘polite’ was quite a loose term and short of not insulting anyone (or at least only in jest) and refraining from resorting to actual physical blows, the niceties of how the words flowed back and forth wasn’t considered part of the issue. There was always a lot of information to be exchanged and everyone was enthusiastic and often perched on the edge of their seats. In many instances, so much Important Information had to be exchanged in such a (relatively) short amount of time, that in order to make full use of their time together, people ended up having more than one conversation at once.

Picture of broken off 12” action figure leg with eyes stuck on it so it looks like a creature.

What my family looks like if you’re normal.

Thinking about all this, I have a kind of generic memory from when I was probably about 14. I was sitting on a small stool one Boxing Day, because all the chairs were taken by adults, and more to the point, I was young, and still bendy and flexible enough to fold up onto a small stool, and they weren’t. My great aunt and grandmother sat either end of the sofa with Mum in between. My Grandfather was the other side of the room, chatting to Dad, while my brother was floating around somewhere, it may have been his turn to hand round the snacks, and my great aunt’s sons … which I think makes them removed cousins … might have been there, although they don’t feature in the memory so I can’t be sure. But I do remember that my grandfather was conducting a conversation with my father and me at the same time from one side of the room, while both my grandmother and great aunt were also each conducting a separate conversation with me at the same time, along with an animated chat with my mother, from the other.

Three conversations at once for me then, and a minimum of two at once for everyone else, including the blokes.

The room rang with laughter and cheery voices, it was sunny and the fire was lit, the bright light spilling through the windows shining onto the flames and rendering them almost invisible. The smell of cooking lunch wafted through the house and we were all drinking pre-lunch brandy alexanders which my father had made (taught by my grandfather, these were a bit of a feature at family parties and were something I particularly enjoyed).  We were eating salmon—smoked just up the road—on small, buttered squares of my mother’s homemade bread… with lashings of black pepper and lemon juice squeezed over it, of course. And as well as eating we were talking. A lot. I grew up thinking that was quite normal; a sea of enthusiastic conversations going on, and dialogue coming thick and fast from all sides. So much information to exchange, so little time, the more you give out the more you get back; maximum KBPS for everyone involved and then home for a lie down.

Picture of the light cluster from a ww2 military car that looks as if it has two eyes and a face.

Grk …

Even now, it’s easy to slip into conversing like that if I’m not concentrating, whereas both my menfolk find it extremely challenging, and toe-curlingly awful if I so much as interject details in a story as one of them tells it (standard procedure in my family growing up think Lee Mack on Would I Lie To You? Only probably not quite as funny). I have had to watch McOther on the phone before now, arranging to meet people on a day we can’t do and then wait until he hangs up to explain to him, and call them back, because he simply can’t handle being on the phone to one person and having another person talk to him. Not even if it’s to say something like, ‘We won’t be here that day!’

Likewise, I suspect I feel equally uncomfortable and exposed in situations where there’s a room full of people and only one person is allowed to speak at a time. I don’t know the rules of engagement, I can’t work out when the person speaking has finished, how anyone knows if it’s their turn to speak next or, more to the point, remember what I was going to say by the time it is my go, anyway. Then there’s that whatever I had to say usually pertains to something several sentences earlier in the speaker’s train of thought that is no longer relevant now. Tangents not allowed I guess, whereas I can’t imagine a conversation without the kinds of tangents Eddie Izzard would be proud of.

Awkward.

Cat lying on it’s back on someon’s lap with all four legs in the air

Awkward …

Almost as awkward as the way my cat is lying in this picture. Or when I was a kid and people used to think I wasn’t listening because I turned my ear towards them so I could concentrate on what they were saying. I still find it properly difficult to remember a thing anyone says to me if I have to look them in the eye during our conversation, but I do know to cup my hand round my ear now, if I turn it towards them for concentration purposes.

You’ve read all that on autopilot while wondering how I’m going to get from there to laminating bacon haven’t you?

Yeh. Well … looking at the sorry tale I’m about to relate, it’s probably all relative. Perhaps my reading the room skills aren’t as bad as my judgement in some other areas, considering some of the other things I do. But I suspect that merely means that the bar is set embarrassingly low. On we go then.

A serious lapse in judgement.

In my defence, I reckon the only difference between genius and madness is failure with this particular one… er hem … probably.  To put it another way, this is what happens when you combine an enquiring mind with less than stellar attention to detail, not quite enough information and very little forethought. I still reckon that if I’d thought this through properly I’d have pulled it off. But there we go.

This week I have been, mostly, laminating bacon.

Come again?

No really; bacon.

Bacon Man

Not this bacon …

Thinking about it, perhaps I should have said, attempting to laminate bacon. McMini attended a gig ten days ago at which he won a signed piece of bacon by a local band he follows. It was framed. It was also raw. It’s been in the fridge for a week and on Friday I thought it might be a good idea to either a) bin it or b) preserve it in some way. Obviously the smart money is on binning it isn’t it? So what did I do?

That’s right. I decided to preserve it. (Here’s my moron’s anonymous card for your perusal.) Head desk.

Do you want to know how I did this?

Braniac-McBraniac here decided that if I did so carefully I could laminate the bacon; preserve it forever in the air-tight security of an A3 laminating pouch. OK on the face of it, the idea is sound isn’t it? … ish. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Apart from … well … you know … everything?

This was not a good idea.

If I put the bacon in the middle of a really big laminating pouch and stuck it through, I reasoned (except that there was probably not much reason involved here but for the sake of finding a convenient adjective let’s call … whatever it was I did … ‘reasoning’) I reasoned that I could reverse the polarity direction of the pouch and would have something to haul the un-encapsulated end (is that even a word?) back out with should anything … untoward … happen.

So far, so good. I unframed the bacon, which had two rather worrying black dots on it and smelled not quite right but at the same time, was not as gagworthily high as I had feared it might. Mmm bonus.

OK a quick aside here people. If you’re going to laminate bacon … yeh, I know who the fuck would laminate bacon apart from me? But I digress; should you wish, for some God forsaken reason of your own, to laminate some bacon, you need to remember that it’s quite thick. Or at least, it’s quite a bit thicker than the gap-between-the-rollers that the usual sheet of paper and plastic pouch go through in your laminator.

You also have to remember that as the bacon goes through the laminator it will get hot and cook. Raw bacon is squishy and can be squished by the rollers so it will spread out and go through like a steak through a mangle. Cooked bacon is a lot more rigid. It will not spread out.

Some fragments of laminated bacon with the packaging it originally came in, in this case, a small photo frame.

Now, I had realised the bacon-is-thicker-than-the-laminator thing going into this but clearly I hadn’t realised it quite hard enough.

If you are ever going to laminate bacon, can I suggest you add a critical step here? A step I missed. Once you have the bacon in the pouch, before you put it through the laminator, you need to flatten it. A LOT.

Thinking about it, you can do this with the kind of 2lb rubber twatting hammer (that’s a technical term) which I used to use, as a young woman, to hit the starter motor on my Triumph Spitfire when it jammed. I still have the twatting hammer and to be honest I was a bit of a twat not to use it to twat the bacon into flatness but there’s now’t as clear as hindsight is there? Anyway, on with the story.

Captain Encapsulator plugged in and running, I placed the bacon carefully slap bang in the centre of the pouch so there was room for it to flatten and spread, and started it through. As the lamination pouch began to exit, bacon in situ, everything appeared to be tickety boo. The tip of the bacon was where I had placed it and where it should be. It suggested that the rest would come through fine then, didn’t it?

Um … no.

But I thought so, so I took my eye off the ball, lulled by the crackly sounds of the plastic bending and flexing as it went through the hot elements. And then, just as the back end of the pouch disappeared into the darkness of the encapsuluator’s innards I realised that … no no no! That’s not how it should look. Where’s the rest of the fucking— Aaaargh! Aaargh. Reverse! Reverse!

I reversed the direction of the laminator.

Predictably the pouch, which had disappeared, didn’t come out again. It merely crumpled up, concertinaing itself into a zig-zag of melty bits.

Bollocks. Now what?

Nothing for it. Press on and hope the rest of the bacon comes through. So I started it forward again and listened to the whirr of the motor and the gentle crackling sound as the plastic continued on its merry way through whatever gubbins it goes through inside the laminator. The bacon was coming through or at least some of it, the major question was, how much? No way of knowing until the rest of the pouch came out.

As the last of the plastic exited the laminator (hoorah!) I realised, with dismay, that the greater portion of the bacon had not.

There was a hissing noise, much like the sound a slice of bacon makes when it hits the surface of a very hot pan. Next there was a smell. Despite the apparent age of the bacon and the dubious black spots in the middle, it was still the right side of utterly putrid to smell pleasing when fried. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Checking the laminated sheet I could see there was some bacon. The problem was the other bacon which appeared to be frying merrily somewhere inside the laminator.

A partial success then.

Now, I had a laminator full of bacon. Putting aside the legion health and safety issues surrounding this simple fact, there was a mechanical one too. Ergo, that if I tried to laminate anything else it would get stuck on the three quarters of a rasher of cooked (but still festering) bacon within and crumple up inside. I had to get the bacon out.

In a rasher moment (did you see what I did there?) I decided to try putting the laminated bacon through again in the hope that the sheet would push the rest of the bacon out. But the rest of the bacon had cooked. So all that happened was the plastic hit the part of the encapsulator that was blocked with bacon and stopped. Meanwhile, the rest was being gradually drawn in ..

Remember what I said about cooked bacon being harder and less squishy?

Yeh. That.

But I was on it this time, I reversed the polarity direction and the plastic pouch with its scattered porcine contents reappeared, crumpled but unbowed and more to the point un-melted. The last three inches of the laminated sheet with the bacon in, the ones that had been crushed up against the blockage within, was now matt with a layer of fat.

Oh dear.

For a moment I toyed with the idea of just lobbing the whole sorry mess into the bin.

No.

Never give up! Never surrender!

This was Captain Encapsulator. I had bought it for £5 at a car boot and it had seen many years’ faithful service. How hard would it be to take it apart and remove the bacon?

You can guess the answer to that can’t you?

Correct. It was extremely smecking hard.

It was I-spent-four-fucking-hours-on-Thursday-afternoon-and-I-have-still-not-reassembled-it-three-days-later hard. And having taken the encapsulator apart or at least, having taken enough of it apart to realise I could not take the roller assembly off and that the bacon was trapped in its innards forever between the two sets of rollers under the hot bit that melts the plastic. I knew it was going to be tough to free the bacon and the laminator from their unfortunate entanglement.

Except maybe it wasn’t. By running the laminator for a long time and essentially, cooking the bacon until it desiccated, I boiled off most of the fat and burned most of the bacon off the laminator’s principal parts. Small dried bits of meat came through the rollers and dropped through the small gap between the cold rollers that bring the pouch in and the hot ones that push the pouch out, landing on the inside of the casing, below. I cleaned those up with a hand held hoover and dried the rollers with kitchen towel until the grease stopped coming. I think the laminator is now clear of the vast majority of the actual bacon.

However, you know how, when you cook bacon, you get crunchy bits on the pan? Well, there are some of those on the metal part between the two sets of rollers, and surprisingly, my encapsulator lacks a teflon coating. The edges of any pouches I put through will get stuck on that I fear. Although, I suspect I may be able to remove it with ethanol and then run it with the casing off, putting a paper pouch protector through again and again. If I can find one, it’s not a laminator that needs the outer paper protective pouches normally so I have none and I’m not sure if they are used anymore these days.

So there we are.

The wages of stupidity are many hours wasted … and possibly a broken laminator … but the jury’s out on that one. I’ll let you know if I manage to fix it.

Ho hum. In the meantime … at least I wrote something even if it was just this. Onwards and upwards eh?

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4 May 2019 · 2:33 pm

Red alert at Ice Station Zebra … And the Pile Howitzer

This one comes with a profanity warning. It’s not that profane but I do mention piles quite a lot. There. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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The thing about giving birth is that your dignity tends to be birthed along with your child. Not that I even had to give birth to my lad, having a c-section and all. Except while, after it’s all over, they give the child a rub down and hand it over for a cuddle, it seems that my dignity is still in Addenbrooks hospital somewhere. I’d like to think it’s wandering the corridors looking for me but I suspect it’s more likely to be in a drunken stupor. Then comes the menopause/perimenopause/postmenopause. Ladies, if you haven’t yet you do. Not. Know. What. You are in for. If you have … you’ll be laughing along with this.

Basically, when a lady hits mid-life then, if she has any dignity remaining, trust me, the whole change of life shenanigans will knock it unconscious, drag it away, murder it and bury it in a shallow grave.

Motherhood, menopause and adulting. They’ll be the fucking death of me.

Yeh. I don’t really know where to begin this week. It’s manic. The painters are in. For once this is not a euphemism there really are genuine painters painting the woodwork outside of our house. Yes, I’m sorry folks, it’s all our fault the weather had turned to shite. They’re in for three weeks I’m afraid, an’ all so crack out your waterproofs and thermals. The painters start at half seven, which means I have to set my alarm for half six so that I have some thought collection time between waking up and getting out of bed.

When you have to get up that early, who needs thought collection time, right? Wrong. Why do I need it so badly though? You ask? Well, you may not but for the sake of the point I’m attempting to make here, let’s pretend you did. Er … yeh, why do I need that? Because otherwise a terrible thing beyond our imagination may occur. A rush. Also … brain fog. A rush plus brain fog equals a day comprising one gargantuan balls-up after another, followed by an evening of wailing, gnashing-of-teeth and too much alcohol.

Also it has not helped that since it was constipation and brain fog week last week, it is, naturally, piles, headache and brain fog week this. I confess, the piles bit is, usually, only a mild annoyance but every now and again the little bastards decide it’s time for war.

Naturally, what with it being absolutely the worst week ever for it, this week they decided to declare war. So bad I’ve had to open, ‘that box in the fridge’ and crack out the heavy armour. These things are the mother of all cures, the big hitters and I confess, this is only the second time I’ve had to resort to using them. Privately, in my own warped head, I call them ‘The Pile Howitzers’. Normally their presence, in the box, in the fridge, in the paper bag, is enough to keep the little bastards under control.

Obviously with the painters in, it was inevitable that as well as a hectic week for McMini things would go a bit wrong with Dad, which they’ve done – to the extent that I can’t really look it in the eye enough to talk about it now.

But presumably that’s why this week, of all the bastard weeks I would be forced to do so, I’ve had to deploy the Pile Howitzers. It’s a mis-nomer, too, because it’s more like pile shells. Each one looks like a bullet, made of some candle wax like stuff – I assume there’s more than candle wax in it though. Anyway, these things bear a very passing resemblance to the missiles off one of McMini’s StarWars toys – it’s a Clone trooper transport ship, if you must know – and each one has to be shoved where the sun don’t shine – the medication I mean, not the missiles of scion’s Clone trooper transport ship clearly – after … er … daily motion.

As you can imagine this is not hugely dignified experience at the best of times. But when there’s a strong chance you’ll have to give a painter outside the window, sanding down the woodwork, a cheery wave first, it’s a whole new dimension of ‘interesting’! So as well as needing ‘thought collection’ time, in the morning, I have to have been up long enough for motility to occur before the painters arrive as well, in order that the Pile Howitzers can be deployed safely.

Nice.

As a result of this, we have managed, just about, to make it to the end of the week even if, yesterday, both McMini and I forgot his PE kit. I had to rush back to the school with it. Then, he came home wearing said PE kit having left his clothes at school in the bag. As he’s low on trousers, or at least, as he only has the one pair with knees in, I had to rush back to school with him and get his clothes. When he brought the bag out, I was smart enough to check the contents for once and sent him straight back in to get his shoes. This week has been like that.

Then there’s this morning. Although I’d call this a partially successful session.

Today is Saturday and, like many other small boys up and down the country, McMini has football practise. It starts at half nine so I need to wake up at 8 am or so in order to nag McMini to get ready, constantly, from about then on. If I do that, there’s an outside chance he’ll get himself sorted and ready by about 9.15. Today I was woken at about twenty past eight by a cheery cat who lay on my chest making burrping noises and generally demonstrating how pleased he was to see me. After a brief cuddle he headed off to do Important Cat Things and I went and cleaned my teeth, washed my face, brushed my hair and got back into bed for a moment to warm up. But I was fucking knackered after a week of six hours sleep a night instead of seven. Can you guess what happened next?

Yes. At about ten to nine I woke up. This was not good. Leaping out of bed in my pyjamas I ran down and put the coffee on, whacked a crumpet into the toaster for breakfast – first of two x four minutes – made McMini a cup of tea and grabbed his football kit from the airer, where it has been ‘drying’ since its last wash over a week ago – because I’m not a skanky ho or anything. Mwahahahaahrgh!

Ran up to McMini’s room as fast as the action of arthritically running up stairs while carrying a cup of tea and a football kit would allow and discovered that he was awake. It was he who had released the Kraken cat. Unfortunately, he was on the loo looking at videos on his phone. Fortunately, he was most accommodating about wiping his bum and getting his finger out with the dressing when I told him what the time was (I can only assume he’s all up to date with Dan TDM or that the battery in his phone had died).

In something that must be closely approaching a miracle, McMini got his football kit on in about fifteen minutes; evil, impossible-to-pull-on socks and all. I should imagine the tea helped because I’ve tried the ‘Oh shit we’re late’ approach to getting him up in the morning on many occasions and it’s never worked before. At the same time, I hurled on some clothes, put my face on, dragged a brush through my hair again and ran downstairs. I even remembered to push the toaster down to give the crumpet its second four minutes. McMini requested a tortilla wrap, just the wrap on its own, which I had right to hand. Despite the fact that the morning, so far, was like red-alert at Ice Station Zebra we were rocking this! What was going on?

McOther arrived home just as I was shoving McCat into the box to take him to the vet for his yearly shots. Cat in box, now it was time to find the immunisation card. Could I find it? Of course I fucking couldn’t. Never mind, it was now nine twenty and McCat had an urgent appointment on the vet’s table at half past. McOther was taking McMini to football so I hurriedly kissed the boys good bye and rushed off to the vet’s. Amazingly, I even remembered to take the cat with me.

In the short five minute journey I managed to see sun, rain and hail. Plus there seems to be a permanently gale force wind direct from Siberia or somewhere mind-(not to mention, extremity)-numbingly cold.

Despite a nervous few minutes sitting at the traffic lights which went red just as I got to them, naturally, we made it to the vet’s at nine twenty nine, went straight in, wormed, new card, shots done for another year and that was just the cat (badoom tish). Quick chat, paid … a LOT of money … and went home. I broke the cable for the solar charger I have for my car battery which was a bit of a pisser, but on the upside, I think I can fix it.

Even when McOther rang me at 10.45 to say they were holding the traffic on the main road after an accident, that he thought he might not be able to get from Sainsbury’s to football to collect McMini, and that I might have to, the traffic started to move while he was on the phone. Despite waking up, almost too late, everything had gone according to plan, and rush or not, we had achieved our aim. We were blessed! Yeh.

Mmm … just call me Van Halen.

So here I am now, sitting typing this, breathing a sigh of relief that everything is all done. Then I catch sight of my reflection in the kitchen cupboards.

Now, I may have whinged about my hair before but basically, it’s very affected by what the weather is doing. So when the weather doesn’t know what it’s doing, neither does my hair. So the downside of this? Let me show you.

Yes I’ve been going about all morning looking like the mad bag lady of Ning Dang Po. There’s just no way on God’s green earth that any normal person would look at that and think it wasn’t a wig. Blimey-oh-Reilly. Or perhaps it’s more of a 1980s stadium rockstar. Or is it a cross between Milton whatsisface and Ken Dodd? Ah, if only I was as funny as them! Or am I trying to ameliorate the effects of alopecia with a Brillo pad and some wool? I dunno, I’ll let you decide.

Ho hum, I suppose it could be worse.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and put a thing that looks like a StarWars missile up my arse.

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3 Apr 2019 · 11:06 pm

This will end in tears … the chaos continues

It was Mothering Sunday lunch at McMini’s school yesterday. I know, bit late but who cares. Incidentally, before I go on, folks in the rest of the world, Mothering Sunday is a UK thing and part of the church calendar. It was when people in service were allowed to go home for the day and see their families during Lent before the Easter rush – yes they got one day off each year. Looking forward to labour laws like that post Brexit, still at least Farage, Reese Mogg and Johnson will have left the country so it’s not all bad. Mother’s Day is something different and more to do with legislature than tradition as I understand it, but I’m probably wrong and I digress, as usual.

When I booked a ticket McMini was completely horrified, telling me that I might be the only mother in his group of friends who was coming. Then I discovered that, no, another friend’s mum was also going. Phew! When I revealed this fact to McMini his horror at my impending visit was lessened considerably, indeed, he hid it well but, at the same time, he clearly quite liked the idea of my turning up as long as he wasn’t the only person lunching with Mum. I texted the other mum to make sure she was still on for it and she’d forgotten so that was lucky!

Needless to say, I left a bit late because I managed to drop a whole load of receipts out of my back pocket as I pulled my trousers up after a last minute wee. Obviously there was absolutely nowhere in the entire world that they could land other than in the lavatory and obviously this was just before I flushed so there was a few minute’s hiatus while I fished them out of the wee water and washed my hands. What a joy that was.

Clearly, this is the only picture I could post here!

As I left the house I discovered that someone had left an absolutely hugantic turd in our drive. A couple of the dog owners in our area are terrible, letting their animals crap all over the pavements and seeming to work on the theory that the more chance some poor bugger has of standing in it, the better. But no dog could have laid a cable this large.

It’s human.

I have absolutely no idea why people feel compelled to shit in our drive but every now and again they do. They do drugs there, park there to take ‘legal high’ capsules, leave stolen goods and their used syringes … I even turned up at midday once and discovered two young people having sex against the wall, although I’d pressed the open sesame button for the garage door while still out on the main road so they were, at least, rearranging their clothing by the time I got there – he zipping up, she pulling up her jeans. I always blip the button in the road now, in the same way my Dad used to cough a lot in certain parts of the school when he was a housemaster, to alert anyone in the vicinity breaking the rules of his impending arrival.

Reverting to the enormous Richard in question, it was about as wide as my wrists so as McOther remarked when he came home, it was definitely a copper bolt. Frankly, I hope the trauma of doing that one tore the stupid bastard’s arse in half. I mean fine, sometimes things happen and you are caught short and it’s better to whip your trousers down and poo in the street than in your pants but seriously? How much of a fucktard do you have to be to take a shit in someone’s garden? I like to think that even I, at the height of my self-destructive punk, fuck-you-world phase would have had more style, panache and general humanity than to do that.

We human beings can be truly monumental wankers can’t we? I mean look at the rise of Marxism and Nazism oh I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to call that second one by it’s actual name, am I, even if they are following Hitler’s playbook and their ideology appears to be identical, I have to call them the alt right. The ones who bang on about how we fought a war … yes against a bunch of people like them. Waves at Nigel Farage. Oh the irony.

Sorry where was I? Ah yes, well, on the upside, at least I didn’t do my usual trick of managing to get my rucksack, with its many straps, hooked up on our stupid garage door handle. That handle kind of sums up life really. It moves a full ninety degrees but only the last one and a half degrees of that full, ninety degree swing actually moves the latch. The result is that you tend to find is that you attempt to open the door, only to find you haven’t pressed hard enough for that last millimetre of travel and therefore haven’t opened the stupid fucking thing after all. I hate that door, I hate it with a venom and passion that surpasses even the ill feeling I currently harbour towards the cockwomble who shat in our drive. But the door handle does make quite a good metaphor for adult life; an awful lot of effort seems to be required to do the tiniest thing and most of the time, it seems you are doomed to get absolutely bugger all done.

Here’s an example. Remember how McMini came home with the wrong trousers? Well, we effected a swap and McMini’s trousers arrived back washed from his friend’s mum last week. When I unfolded them, I discovered that at some point during the day, before his PE session, he’d gone through them at the knee. Never mind, there were only four days of term left. He’d get through those with the last pair of trousers wouldn’t he?

Er … no.

He arrived home on Wednesday with a massive hole in one knee. Such things tend to go under McOther’s radar and I arrived home from Sussex after the shops were shut. There was nothing for it but to compare trousers and send him in to school the next day wearing the pair with the smaller hole. Then I had to go and buy another pair for him to wear for the last day of term and his Boy’s Brigade awards evening. I bought the last two pairs in the shop and now I’m thinking that may have been unwise as they’ll probably be just below the knee by next term.

At about the same time this was going on, I also noticed a strange rough patch on my left hand. It took me a while to work out that it was not some rampant skin disease taking hold, or some horrible alien affliction gradually turning me into a scrofulous space zombie but was, in fact, the remains of an act of such incredible rank stupidity that I am feeling rather guilty for my castigation of the phantom turd burgler now. Read and weep …

Oh no M T you total wanker …

Last week we did dinner for some friends and we decided to make creme brûlées (woah! My iPad put all the right accents in there! Magic.) with a blow torch. So far so good, we have a chef’s blow torch and have had it for years. I filled it up with gas the night before but, when I came to use it, I discovered that contrary to expectation there was no gas. Further efforts to fill it revealed that smething in it had broken so as the gas went in one end, it leaked out of the other. By filling it up and then using it for about twenty seconds at a time, I managed to do two of the four creme brûlées but progress was slow. Yes, I checked my watch, I’d been at this for ten minutes already and I still had two more to do.

Hmm. I sure as hell wasn’t going to make seconds.

I turned the grill on, toyed with the idea of using it to make the last two. But putting aside the fact that the average electric grill takes about twenty minutes to reach optimum temperature, even when it does it isn’t hot enough to caramelise sugar. A friend of mine once researched ovens back in the noughties and discovered that, unless you spend three or four thousand on a La Conche oven, every single element in every single electric grill and oven is made in the same factory in china. The upshot of this is that if you have an electric grill and you want to make creme brûlées you will get this weird scrambled egg thing and all the fruit will cook and the juice will rise to the surface and combine with the sugar to make this kind of sticky slurry on top with a kind of curds and whey style thing that used to be soured cream underneath.

Trust me, the real thing is even less attractive than I make it sound.

There was no other option, I had to use the effing blow torch but surely there had to be a quicker way. I had a think and hit on a cunning plan, I would stick the butane refill bottle on the bottom and turn the thing on so that gas was always coming in. Yeh the plan was Baldrick cunning.

Oh yes, cracking idea, I thought, that’ll get it done in no time.

You can see where this is going, can’t you? My cunning combo did, indeed work long enough to complete the other two creme brûlées but it wasn’t real cunning, it was Baldrick cunning. Flushed with my success I went back to the first one, which was looking a bit gritty still, to give it another blast.

Unfortunately, what I hadn’t quite grasped was that the seal around the butane refill nozzle and the intake valve on the blow torch wasn’t as … um … airtight? as I’d anticipated. A large cloud of gas had been building up around the blow torch and my hands and eventually, the inevitable happened and it ignited. There was a noise.

‘Whump!’ it went.

A large pale orange-white fireball engulfed the butane bottle, the blow torch and my hands. In my head there was no time for words, merely a picture of the refill aerosol exploding. Luckily the picture came fast enough for me to cease all pressure on the release valve of the butane refill bottle at the W of whump, actually it was probably at the first V of the W or maybe even the first \. Quickly enough for the fire not to be sucked into the aerosol canister anyway, so no actual explosion occurred. Which was nice.

In the aftermath of this substantial ignition, there was a very strong smell of burning wool and I noticed that the fluff on the jumper I was wearing was considerably shorter in the area closest to the fireball. I was mightily glad I had worn a non-combustible wool jumper that night, rather than a fleece or something made from highly combustible man-made fibres. As I thanked my lucky stars for that, I noticed that the first and second fingers of my left hand were smarting mightily and rather red. I ran them under the cold tap and to my relief the burns stopped at second degree and by the end of the evening I’d forgotten about them, until a few days later when, like all sunburn, they peeled.

So yes, my cockwomblery is confirmed, but it could be worse, it could have ended in tears. My tears. Still, at least I’m not turning into a scrofulous space zombie.

Is there a moral to this story? Possibly. I mean, thinking about it, a lot of us are struggling. A lot of us have lives like the stupid bollocking garage door. Lives where it seems to take the most gargantuan effort so shift the needle while other folks stroll on by making it look simple. We want those things, the adverts tell us we can have them now, and society tells us that if we haven’t earned enough or got X, Y or Z we have failed. But that isn’t real, that’s just advertising and fashion. It’s no more real than my books. But still we persist in applying these unrealistic standards to ourselves. Then when we ‘fail’ we look for someone or something to blame for that failure, brown people, gay people, people of a different religion.

And what’s so stupidly ironic is that it’s all stuff and it isn’t stuff that makes us happy, it’s people and relationships and experiences. Money helps, and it makes things easier, but if there are no true friends to share it with it seems pretty pointless to me. As for the ‘failure’ in question, sometimes it’s down to having a hopelessly unrealistic dream, sometimes it’s us but most of the time, I think it’s random luck.

Whatever the reason, it isn’t easy to give up on a dream when so many folks on line appear to be living it. But I do think being happy takes work. You have to focus on what you have. And taking myself as an example then yes, it’s true, I don’t have the several million I’ll need to pay my care fees when I’m elderly and leave something for McMini, but I do have McMini and McOther. I have a loving family and a cracking bunch of friends and for the most part, I have a good time.

Is that what’s wrong with us all in Britain, too many broken promises, too many broken dreams? We can’t all be rich and famous, and it’s becoming ever more apparent that fame isn’t much fun. Maybe what we need to fix is our attitude. We have a parliament full of MPs who seem to have forgotten what they’re there for. Meanwhile Brexit rumbles on and the government sneaks cuts to essential services through under the radar.

We’ve had another big row on about Brexit this week, lots of outcry and resignations, lots of talk about loyalty to the party and betrayal of party values from all sides of the house. Oh I know there are MPs who care and work hard for their constituents, but what shocked me most about this week’s row was how it was all party politics, throughout all the reportage I heard. The idea of anyone doing anything for the good of the nation didn’t make so much as a blip on the radar.

The cruellest blow is that it’s our fault. We elected these idiots. Heaven knows how we go about engaging normal people in politics again, people with life experience outside the political spectrum, people who will put their nation first and their party second, people who have had careers rather than career politicians, but we have to do it, fast. Making it to cabinet is not the same thing as getting promoted at the investment bank or making partner at the law firm. One is a job promotion, the other is a service to a nation. There’s a subtle difference and it’s one our current career politicians seem to be missing.

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30 Mar 2019 · 1:39 pm

How does this even happen?

This is McMini’s work.

Obviously there are points among the mayhem when I try to write a sensible post about something, but this week the madness continued so I felt I may as well just give in and tell you about it. To be honest, I was worried, a few weeks ago, that I was losing my sense of humour. The good lord has clearly decided to rectify this by making my life as surreal and bizarre as possible. The appreciation of oddity centre of my brain is definitely fully satisfied at the moment, anyway.

First, Dad.

Huge relief this week. After a meeting with Dad’s home, his social worker and the community dementia nurse on Wednesday, they said they were happy with his progress and thought he was settling well. The manager of the home confirmed that they will be able to look after him permanently. Since we were happy with the home, too, this is a huge relief. They addressed most of the doubts or misgivings we had before we got to the asking questions stage which was also a good sign. The home are taking it slowly and letting Dad settle, he flips from charming to very much not charming and has to be placed carefully since he is able to raise his voice to the kinds of levels required to be heard by rowdy teenagers. As the manager pointed out, that kind of volume, like hearing someone play the bagpipes in a small room, can be a bit much for the other residents in a confined space.

At the moment they are working out who Dad gets on with and who he doesn’t. Residents with dementia do irritate each other from time to time, apparently. Like life then. But they’re more like kids so there’s a lot more of the kind of nursery school exchanges. Go away I don’t like you, you’re smelly etc.

A highlight was when the lovely lady who runs the home was trying to get into the computer system to show us Dad’s record. The meeting room was just off the main hall/lounge where everyone sits. She forgot her password. So she opened the door and called for one of the other staff.

‘She’s gone,’ said an elderly voice from a chair nearby. ‘She got into the taxi.’

‘Did she?’

‘Yes, I don’t know where she’s going.’

The staff member appeared from the office next door and came in to join us. In the background I could hear a cheery commentary from the same resident.

‘Look! They’ve both got into the taxi.’

‘Oh,’ said someone else.

‘Yes, I don’t know where they think they’re going,’ said the first voice.

Very Alan Bennett.

At another point I heard a resident shouting and then the familiar voice of Dad bellowing, ‘shut up!’

There was a slight pause in the meeting room.

‘That was Dad,’ said Mum.

‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘still, at least he didn’t say, “fuck off!”’

It sounds a bit grim of me but I’m afraid I actually found it hilarious. Luckily everyone else laughed too.

If you want to survive stuff like this, I sincerely believe there is no other option than to see the funny side. Were he still wholly himself, I’m certain it’s what Dad would have done. There is something gloriously, surreally random about listening to a background of conversation between demented people. Furthermore, Dad is much more settled and much more aware so we are happier because he is and therefore, so is Mum. She is a bit of a worry. We are standing at the top of the hill we were on with Dad three years ago, except with her. I’m hoping the cajoling, the getting extra care and all the other baggage that comes with getting people the care they need, rather than the care they want, will be easier to handle the second time.

Business in casa McGuire is mayhem as usual.

McCat is behaving abominably. As if his complete obsession with my evening primrose oil capsules wasn’t enough, I turned my back on the kitchen work top this morning only to discover he’d leapt up there and was drinking the dregs of McOther’s tea. For the love of the almighty was there ever such a skanky cat? I swear he’s suffering from species dysmorphia because he is clearly a labrador. I have discovered that screaming at him makes him stop and run away, and it also clearly communicates to him that I am displeased and he’s been bad. It doesn’t stop him, though, because not only is he mischievous but he also has a sense of humour and I suspect he thinks it’s funny.

Midweek, a friend from way back rang up out of the blue. She was up here on business and asked if she could stay over. Yes she could, I said. So after a grim journey home from the care home on Wednesday – a lovely 39 minute delay at the Dartford Tunnel and other shenanigans – I got home a few minutes before she arrived.

We had supper and there was lots to talk about, we’re in very similar situations with elderly parents although it’s just mum in her case and we managed to talk the hind legs off every donkey in the vicinity until we realised it was one am.

Nooo I forgot the soldiers in the bog!

I didn’t really think it through, since I had metal detecting club the next night and McOther is hoping to start a wine tasting group we had the first meeting round ours the night after. Long and short, I really can’t do late nights any more I have been recovering from Wednesday’s excesses all week.

When we had the wine group round, I spent the day trying to change my mindset to that of a person who does not live with a ten year old and to notice, and remove, some of the bizarre items that have come to rest around the house. A lot of nerf guns, bits of biro, headless action figures and other detritus later, I thought I had them all, only to discover, while having a nice relaxing wee during the wine evening, that I’d completely forgotten about the row of toy soldiers in the lavatory. Still, I suppose it could have been worse. The scale on our water here is brown and I did, at least, remember to give the lav a good treatment with descaler so it was mostly white.

Meanwhile, McOther had blithely imagined that he’d be home from work in time for us to eat a meal before the wine evening on Friday started. In fact, the first of our guests arrived about two minutes after McOther did. I chatted to him while McOther had a wee and unpacked his work bag before leaving McOther playing host and haring off up the hill in the car with McMini to Boy’s Brigade. Needless to say, because I have a tiny car and McMini is, himself, a microdot, he has elected to play the bass drum in the Boy’s Brigade band. To give him his due, he’s pretty good at it but it means I have to schlepp up the hill with it, or borrow McOther’s car. It’s only a matter of time before he takes up the double bass and the tuba I suspect … or possibly the euphonium or some other hugantic instrument I’ll need a luton van to ferry him about with.

On the recovery from my persistent socialising score, the fact it is the part of my monthly cycle which I privately refer to as Constipation and Brain Fog Week hasn’t helped either, but this time the brain fog and seems to have extended its sponge like caress, not just to my brain, but also to McMini’s.

On Fridays he has PE. Thank heavens he no longer has to go into school dressed in his kit, with his school clothes in a bag, but he tends to come home in his PE kit with his school uniform and school shoes stuffed into his bag. However, he also has Boy’s Brigade on Fridays so he has to put the school trousers and shirt back on again. Bless his heart, I took his uniform out of his PE bag, popped it on the sofa beside him without really looking at it and asked him to put it on. A few minutes later, I heard a shout of dismay.

‘Muuuuuum!’

‘Yes.’

‘These aren’t my trousers! They’re huge.’

He was standing in the middle of the room, sporting what looked like clown trousers. He held the waistband out from his stomach and there was, indeed, about three inches of extra room where, presumably, they usually sit snugly round a very much larger child. Luckily, I’d already washed the other pair of his own trousers and it was hanging over the airier in the utility room so I didn’t have to creep up the stairs on my shonky knees. Even more luckily, it was dry!

The week before last, he managed to get changed back into his school uniform but he came home with another child’s hoody. I didn’t find it for five days. The wee lad’s poor mum was probably wondering where the hell it was. At least I managed to wash it and get it back to her in time for the next PE lesson.

So now we have a pair of mystery trousers and some other child has McMini’s. As far as I recall, McMini’s are named, I’m not sure though, because he went through about six pairs in the first three weeks of term playing something which he called ‘human chess’ and so in the whirl of rapid acquisition and destruction of trousers I may not have named them. Still, I should thank the world for small mercies, I mean, it makes life interesting and at least he still has a pair to go to school in on Monday.

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23 Mar 2019 · 12:54 pm

Adventures and alarums!

What the fuck is going on?

This last week has been rather fun but it has been a bit like some badly written situation comedy. Then again, most of my life is like a badly written situation comedy. McOther often tells me that if my life were written up as a screen play, it’s so barkingly strange that no-one would believe any of the true life events depicted were … well … true.

In a strange coincidence, two old friends who I haven’t seen in ages have rung up to say they’ll be in the area and could we meet up. To my delight they were around when I am, as well so I met one friend yesterday and another is coming to see me on Wednesday! Woot all round.

On top of that, it’s been an adventurous couple of days. The night before last McOther was due to come home late. He rung and told me he’d be even later than he thought as he was swamped with emails. I could hear the tension in his voice. That was fine though, I would make sure everything was spic and span and try to ameliorate the mess so it was not as bad as sometimes, or at least, so enough of it had disappeared for him to register that we’d made an effort to be tidy and feel loved accordingly. I began by starting McMini’s supper early and also putting McOther and my supper together ready for when he came home.

Meanwhile, McMini was convinced that he had to have a drink and it had to be ‘a potion’. I haven’t a blind clue why but we looked out a jam jar and he made himself a rock shandy (two thirds ginger ale to one third soda with a dash of bitters, ice and a slice of lemon).

Rock shandy made, although he never does the ice and slice, he explained that it needed to be a lurid colour.

‘What sort of lurid colour?’ I asked him.

‘Do you have blue?’

The food colouring is on the top shelf of the larder ever since I discovered McMini, as a three year old, taking a good pull out of the bottle of yellow. Accordingly, I went into the larder and climbed onto the fold away stool thing I use to reach the top shelves. Frankly, I’m too fat and heavy for this thing, so having already broken one, I have learned to stand on it very carefully. It can take my weight but only if I place my feet in a certain way – you know like always stepping on the joists rather than the bit between when you’re up in a roofspace.

The stool creaked and groaned ominously but held up as I had a shufty on the top shelf of the larder. Eventually I discovered the blue food colouring and passed it down to McMini. I was still stepping off the stool with a slowness that only glaciers, or the arthritic, can achieve, when McMini had whipped off the lid and upended the bottle.

Oops.

Luckily only about half of it came out before he realised what he was doing and stopped.

‘Sorry Mum, I thought it would have a dropper like the bitters.’

‘Nae bother sunshine.’

The result was a tall thin jam jar full of the most bizarre blue liquid. We both knew it was rock shandy but it did look like something fresh from hell, or an antifreeze tank, in rat-poison blue. Mmm-Mmm!

‘Please, please, please keep the lid on that at all times and don’t drop it,’ I told him. I handed him the lid which he placed carefully on the jam jar and tightened under my supervision before he went off happily, potion in hand. It really was very blue – I’m thinking Regalian Brandy, StarTrek fans, or certain brands of lavatory bleach, everyone else.

McMini disappeared with his strange concoction, to have a poo, he informed me.

Lovely.

I carried on with whatever it was I was doing, faffing about in the kitchen doing something or other and then I heard a noise.

‘Flabado-do-do-doom!’ It went.

I listened.

Nothing. Then …

‘Mum.’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you come upstairs a minute?’

‘Why?’

‘Something’s happened. Please don’t be angry.’

He’s fucking spilled it, I thought. There’s blue bastardy jizz all over my fucking stairs.

‘What’s up?’ I said.

‘I’ve fallen down the stairs and banged my head.’

Oh, or maybe not on the blue jizz front, I thought hopefully.

‘Oh dear. That sounds a bit grim. Are you alright?’ I was pretty sure he was, it sounded like a small boy version of a terrible injury rather than an actual … you know … terrible injury.

‘Yes I am but … listen Mum, please, please don’t be angry.’

Oh fucking bollocks! He knobbing has spilled it! We have a blue chuffing carpet, I thought

‘Have you’ve spilled rat poison blue liquid all over the stair carpet?’ I asked, just to check.

Long silence.

‘I’m really, really sorry Mum. How did you know?’

Because the klutz gene is dominant and Sod and his bloody law made it fairly inevitable, I thought.

‘Skill,’ I said. ‘I’ll just get some kit together and then I’ll come up to join you and we can clean it up. Where is it?’

‘Outside Dad’s office.’

Oh fuckity fuck.

Dad also known as McOther. The same McOther who rang twenty minutes earlier, his voice full of tension. OK, no matter how disastrous this was, it had to be gone before he got home or he was going to lose his fucking biscuits. McOther is a neat bot and although he tries not to let living with the two messiest and most disorganised people on earth get to him, things like a sudden stain on his beige carpets can drive the poor man buggy. Especially if he’s stressed and he’s had a tough day. Code blue had to be neutralised before McOther got home or the three of us would all have a horrible evening.

As you may have gathered from accounts of my activities on this blog, I’m a total and utter klutz. Or the spill-o-tronic, 3,000 series as I am known. This means I have a library of stain removal products that is second to none. I am also pretty good at removing stains because otherwise, I would have nothing to wear and a house that looked like an ongoing Jackson Pollock project.

I grabbed a bucket and put every bottle of propiatory cleaning product I could find into it, and trust me there were a lot of bottles in there; vanish soap, OzKleen carpet cleaner, white vinegar, washing up liquid, you name it, I equipped myself with it. And sponges. Then I took some old ‘real’ nappies that we now use for just this type of emergency and clanked my way upstairs with it all.

McMini was standing beside a football-sized carpet stain of a lurid torquise colour. To give him his due, the lid was on the potion, so only about a quarter had spilled. As he fell, he’d dropped it and it had tumbled from his hand and landed on its side, the impact loosening the lid and allowing leakage. He’d then tried to wipe it up with his hands, bless him, merely smearing a small concentrated spillage into a much wider area. A bit like the time he used his goal keeping gloves to pick up a poo he’d done in the hall by mistake after he’d waited too long to go to the loo because he had to stand his Lego General Grevious up first and it kept falling over. He’d seen me put on rubber gloves to clear up sick so grabbed the nearest gloves to hand. In other words, he’d got it so right and yet … so wrong.

There was a nerf gun on the floor beside the stain so it was clear he’d been taking too much stuff down the stairs at once and probably missed a step because he couldn’t see or he may not have fallen and have just lost his hold on one bit and ende up dropping the chuffing lot.

We started by putting nappies on the stain and standing on them to wick it away.

‘So were you taking all this gubbins down stairs at once?’ I asked him as I marked time on a nappy that was rapidly turning blue.

‘No,’ he told me. ‘I took the gun down and then I went back for the liquid and got that and then when I was walking down with it I fell.’

I looked at the gun, half way down rather than at the bottom.

‘I see,’ I said.

So that’s a, ‘yes I was trying to carry everything and dropped the lot,’ I thought, but I’m not going to say anything. How could I when he was supremely contrite and nearly in tears.

We put half a bottle of OzKleen carpet cleaner on the stain and scrubbed it, then, when that had almost run out, I chucked half a bottle of white vinegar in with the rest of the OzKleen in an approximation of a recipe McMini had just found on the internet using his phone. We put that on. Then I filled the bucket with water and ‘rinsed’ it out at which point McMini, feeling that he wasn’t helping, left me to it.

After standing on more nappies to ‘dry’ it out a bit, it was better, but still blue. Blue like the touch paper on the firework McOther would turn into when he saw it and went into orbit.

Arse.

Then I remembered the condescendingly helpful lady in the advert for the Vanish in-wash stain removal stuff. She got it in a small pot and added some water. Then you were supposed to be able to make a paste and spread it onto stubborn stains, scrubbing it with the stippled bottom of the pink scoop that came with it. Leave over night and rinse the next morning. That’s what it said. Yeh. So I did that. Making a vile pot of claggy slime with bits in that wouldn’t dissolve. But fuck it, what did I have to lose? I went ahead and scrubbed it into the carpet. Along with those little white bits like polystyrene balls that they put in to take up space, stay loader as Mr Bol* wash used to call them, which resolutely refused to blend into the rest of the mixture at any cost. Then I left it to work and emptied the water out in the bathroom and left the bucket up there, along with the sponges and the two nappies I hadn’t used which I set aside for ‘wicking’ the slimy gloop back up again (complete with blue hopefully).

McOther rang to say he was leaving the office. He sounded a lot less stressed but I realised that in order to ameliorate the impact on his wellbeing of the blue carpet outside his study door, I now had to break it to him gently so he was prepared for the sight of the blue stain and ready for the shock.

Hmm, how to do this?

Then like lightning, inspiration struck! Of course, I’d just say what McMini did. So I said that McMini had fallen down the stairs and bumped his head but was OK. McOther was all concern, at which point I broke the news that it was only a little bump and that McMini had also spilled blue juice everywhere in the fall. Bless him, McOther was just happy that the head bump was minor as I had been.

Even better, by the time I’d finished cooking dinner and went back upstairs to see how the claggy gloop was doing, the stain had … yes … vanished. OK we have a weird clean bit of carpet that looks like a pale stain but I expect I can fix by rubbing some dirt into it or something.

Meanwhile, McCat has been such a thieving bastard these last few weeks that I feared he may be ill. Like The Blob, he has been eating everything in his path. But he hasn’t been putting on weight, adding to my fears about his health. Some very expensive tests later it turns out that no, he is not ill, he is just a scrounging shite. This morning he capped it all by opening a plastic bag of this week’s vitimin pills. I take several different ones each day and I can’t be arsed to faff around with all the child proof lids that nobody in the house apart from my ten year old son can open. So I decant them all into a plastic bag each week. Only one thing to open. Except this week, McCat opened it. Twice.

McCat likes cod liver oil and evening primrose oil. It appears he’s also quite partial to vitimin A and cranberry cystitis pills.

I cleared up the mess and counted up a second bag. He ate a lot of the actual bag this time, as well as the cod liver oil and evening primrose capsules. He left the rest though. So now I will be putting the pills in a small pot with a very tight lid. Presumably McCat will have a blindingly luxuriant coat for a day or two. I just hope it doesn’t make him ill. Rock on summer when he will have insects to chase and will, almost certainly, become a well behaved cat. In the meantime, as well as vitimin pills he eats sugar snap peas, peas, broccoli, cheese, bread, olive oil, yogurt, pasta and anything else that is not nailed down.

Another eventful week then.

* Spelled the way the bloke in the ad used to say it, rather than the proper way.

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29 Dec 2018 · 2:15 pm

New stuff, has landed! Woot!

So, I have a new release.

Yep. That caught you by surprise didn’t it? It’s a 10k short and it’s in an anthology of other excellent stories for yes, now, once again, ’tis the time of year for Christmas Lites. In this case, Christmas Lites VIII.

You may or may not remember the story behind this because I shared it last year. Splitter, an author friend from way back, found himself in a women’s refuge, dressed as Father Christmas with a bunch of candy canes in a sack. He was supposed to be arriving at the office party but instead, ended up doing the whole Santa malarky where he was and giving the candy canes to the people staying there.

You may also remember how his boss asked him where he’d been and how she then called him into work the next day where he found she had loaded her car with presents and how the two of them went back to the refuge with them the next day.

It’s a brilliant story, it’s human nature at its absolute best, and now every year, a group of authors join together and release a new Christmas Lites anthology to raise money for a charity which helps domestic violence victims, and which, I believe, was the the charity behind that shelter, the NCADV. It’s all the more poignant to the authors involved, now, since Splitter died of cancer a few years back so as well as the charity element there’s a dimension of doing a kindness in memory of a lovely guy. I am incredibly proud to be involved.

I’ve made a page of links to places where you can buy it. Unfortunately, because of the logistics of getting the money made to the charity, the book is only available on Amazon at the moment.  Hopefully that won’t be too much of a pain in the arse for users of other platforms – I can recommend the Kindle app if you have an Amazon account.

Grab your copy of Christmas Lites VIII here.

On other news, I also have stumbled upon a rather excellent give away.

It’s a Strange World Science Fiction

This giveaway is running from 22nd December through to 22nd January. These are authors who’ve written sci-fi books that are planet-based, you know, either future Earth, parallel Earth or different planets in other universes. If you enjoyed my stuff about K’Barth I think you may find some things you like among these too. At the least it has to be a release from Christmas telly and turkey farts!

You can find the books and have a look at what’s on offer by clicking on the picture or clicking on this lovely link here.

That’s about it from me, I hope you had a wonderful Christmas or, if you don’t do Christmas, I hope you had a wonderful whatever it is you do. Incidentally, did you know that the whole thing in America where they can’t say ‘Christmas’ is actually just something that occurred because Happy Holidays catches it all and shops didn’t have to have loads of labels, cards etc printed to mention all the other celebrations around at the same time. Then, in order to disguise their laziness, they pretended it was altruism and said they were doing it not to offend anyone. So now everyone’s up in arms at the liberals when the origin may well be down to Hallmark trying to save printing costs! Mwahahahrgh a little Christmas-tastic trivia for you. Sadly, I have not been able to fact check it, but I am very much enjoying the idea.

Anyway, happy it, whatever it is you do and all the best for a fabulous 2019. Whatever the New Year brings, here’s hoping it’s good.

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13 Oct 2018 · 12:19 pm

The downside of making progress

Just a quick one today. I’m sitting in a cafe, drinking an enormous bucket of hot chocolate while I while away an hour before McMini’s harvest service. Very important I go to this one as Scion has a speaking part! Woot. There will also be a Hymn I Know, apparently, so I must make sure I am in a position to sing loudly without causing undue distress to people around me, ie I must stand at the back, alone at least twenty yards from anyone who can hear.

On the up side … I have my keys, although I didn’t yesterday. I was late meeting McMini after school – he walks half way home on his own and I meet him in town – because I managed to lock myself out of the house. On the upside, I did, at least, realise I had no keys before I locked myself out of the garden as well. The garden is a nightmare because my disability makes it impossible to just climb over the wall and unlock the gate. I have to borrow a ladder or a chair and lean over.

On the other hand, the house is easy, I’m usually back inside in about twenty seconds. It did make me late though, because I had to find the ruddy keys before I could come out again and I had wet knees from kneeling on the doormat. There are times when I wish my life wasn’t quite so remeniscent of a badly written situation comedy. Obviously any character as ditsy as I would be totally unrealistic when written into fiction. I can’t believe I’ve reached the stage where I’m so bad that, as a fictional character, I’d be untenable. Nobody is actually that crap in reality … er hem … well … no-one except me.

Obviously, even for me, locking yourself out of the garden or house three times in about five days is pretty impressive going. Now it could be menopausal brain fog – yes ladies I can tell you, for nothing, that really is a Thing – but I think it may be the knock on effects of my efforts to do a little bit of something. It sounds mad but thanks to the lovely Joseph Michael’s course on Writer’s Block, I have been following his advice to merely aim for ten minutes’ writing a day. The results have been so splendid that I’ve been doing it for other things. The results are a very much calmer, less tense MT because doing secret me stuff that I enjoy makes me happy and fulfilled.

However, by making this time for me stuff, I fear I may have inadvertently overstretched the mental capacity available. The way my memory for administriatitive shite works is that it has a finite amount of space and when that fills up, as I put stuff in one end other things start leaking out of the back. My old headmistress used to use the analogy of a sponge. As in; it can fill up with a certain amount of water but after that, when you put more water in, stuff that’s in there starts running out. This appears to be what is happening.

By doing things I enjoy alongside all the stuff I have to, I have discovered that the things I like are starting to take up a portion of that memory and as a result, shite, like remembering to pick up my keys as I leave the house is falling out. I am lurching from one, ‘shit McMini! We’re supposed to be at …’ insert name of specially organised Year Six event here. And just getting to things on time; school open days, upper school head master’s talks, providing packed lunches on the days McMini requires them, going to school in his PE kit with a bag full of his normal school uniform, or, like today, remembering that it’s harvest festival at ten am and that I have to be there.

To be honest, I’m not sure what to do about it. I am so much happier and more fulfilled if I do a few things I want to do alongside things I have to do that I’m loathe to go back to tense frustrated MTM. But at the same time, I don’t want to reach the stage where I fail to function as a human being in normal society! A stage upon the brink of which I am teetering, right now.

It’s a fine balance to strike and Mum is particularly muddled at the moment so I have to remember a bit more than usual for her and way, way more than usual for McMini. The quiet oceans of peace when McOther takes him to football on a Monday evening are gone because McOther is no longer home in time. I think the thought collection time is definitely lacking and perhaps this is part of the problem. I’m not sure.

Whatever it is, Real Life is rather too busy for my taste, McOther is buried under work and so I’m doing the cooking. By doing every dish from scratch and eschewing everything ready made I am hoping to lose some weight. It isn’t actually that much more work than using cook in sauces and I am cautiously optimistic that it may be working. Might need to hold back on the spuds a bit though. The cooking isn’t a problem but I do have to be a bit more organised, there are lots of lists although I seldom remember to take them with me when I go shopping etc.

Back to the drawing board then. I don’t want to drop the things that make me happy but I definitely have to find a way to remember more crap.

I leave you with a McMini-ism. Last night at about 3 am he called out. I went and found him on the stairs having had a bad dream. I sat down a few steps below him and told him he had far worse things to worry about, like that his mum might wee on the stairs because I really needed to go to the loo. He laughed and then told me he’d dreamed we were fixing my car, that his dad had given him a coke to drink and that he’d inadvertently drunk from a bottle of rat poison we were using instead and died. I said that sounded like a bummer but that if he was dreaming of dying it was a sure sign that he was enjoying life! I asked him he’d like a hug. Yes, he would, he told me. So I hugged him tight. Too tight. He farted loudly and then guffawing with laughter told me,

“I’ll be alright now Mummy!” and we both went, giggling, to bed.

Incidentally, as I prepare this for posting, it’s later in the day. I’ve managed to leave the house to collect my son with my keys, I locked the garden gate without shutting the keys the wrong side … trouble was, when I got home again, I realised I’d forgotten to lock the door. Hmm. Let’s call this a work in progress.

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27 Jan 2018 · 1:41 pm

Calm in a crisis; elementary burglary for dunderheads …

One of the strange things people tell me often is that I am calm in a crisis. Positively the ice woman, apparently, in my capacity for quick thinking action.

Want to know a secret about that?

It’s bollocks.

Well not wholly bollocks but mostly. Amazingly, I am actually extremely cool-headed in a crisis, I can make calm decisions in the heat of the action and the blink of an eye. They are not always the best decisions, but they are decisions that are, usually, a great step on from the nothing at all that others are doing. Sometimes, my decisions even precipitate a solution of sorts. Let’s make it clear, we are not talking about the kind of person who is likely to confront an armed robber, but if someone else is in trouble, I’m usually reasonably handy for doing the thinking, or taking action, if they can’t. But that isn’t because I’m the kind of clear-thinking, lion-hearted, V.C. winning material that the phrase, ‘cool headed in a crisis’ conjures up.

No.

It’s because I’m a complete and utter twat.

Allow me to demonstrate.

Yesterday is an excellent example of why monumental twattery makes for good crisis management.

It’s three o’clock; time to walk up to the school to collect McMini. I grab the keys as I leave the house but when I shut the door and the yale lock clicks I can’t find the keys to do the chubb. I know what’s happened, I’ve grabbed them, and as I put them and the bag of post school snacks for McMini in my pocket, I’ve missed and dropped them. I look inside but can see no keys lying on the floor.

Aaaaaargh! No keys! What shall I do? Dan-dan-daaaaaargh! Thinks Mary … NOT.

It’s three o’clock and while I can break in and search for my keys it will take time. McMini is to be collected at three fifteen and if I’m late, he thinks I’m dead and gets worried. I will have to go. I mean, the door is locked.

‘Yeh laters,’ I think, since, in theory, I don’t need to try and get into the house for another forty minutes. The locked-in keys are not an immediate problem.

Except they are.

Having put the absence of keys aside to deal with later, the next, more immediate, thorny issue pops up; how to make the gate look locked, yet leave it secretly unlocked, so McMini and I can get in, but no-one else will try to.

Casting around I see the large chunk of a fallen tree trunk which we are using to edge a flowerbed. Thanking the good Lord for the gym, I heave it down the path and lean it against the back gate. Carefully, mind, I don’t want it to get jammed against the wooden reinforcing planks across the middle and jam it closed. That done to my satisfaction, I slip carefully through the gate so it continues to lean on the right place and head for the school.

When we return, the gate is still closed, yet we are able to open it because the wedge has worked correctly. Excellent. I shut the gate, flip the latch down so it locks and put the tree trunk back where it was. Now to open the yale lock.

Taking off my anorak I spread it on the doorstep because it’s damp and I don’t want to be soaked as well as irritated. Then I rummage about in the potting shed and select a long bamboo cane. I tie some wire round one end in a D-shaped loop, lie on the anorak and feed the pole, and my arm, through the cat flap. McMini holds the door handle down while I loop the D round the catch for the yale lock on the inside of the door. That done, I check he is still holding the handle as I require and pull the stick downwards, so it pushes against the straight side of the lock handle and turns it. You need the wire because the weight of the bamboo pole and the force of me are not strong enough on their own. The door opens and we are in. My keys are still on the peg, so basically, it seems I just bashed them with my hand in the way past. Yes, I created a crisis because I reached for my keys and actually, genuinely forgot to grip.

Give me strength.

Never mind. All is well. Total time to break in about thirty seconds; or roughly five minutes from the start of our search for a suitable stick.

How come I can break into my own house so fast?

Practise.

Practise? How do I get to practise?

Weeeeelllll. Being such a total fucktard, I manage to lock myself out of my house several times a month. See how it is that an event which would be a disaster for anyone normal is rendered routine and mundane by my awesome twattery. Yeh! Go me. Lock-out is a blip, a minor inconvenience to Mrs Shit-for-brains and son. Notice, too, how this crisis is of my own making.

So there you have it. I suspect, there are two vital components to managing a sudden crisis; the first is to be able to act at once, without being British about it and pausing to wonder if you ought to interfere. If you’re a prize pillock then clearly, you will have got over any feelings of self consciousness – or at least buried them – by din’t of the fact that you cannot afford to countenance what others think of you or you would never leave the house.

The second component of successful crisis management, I suspect, is to be able to suspend your disbelief. What I mean is that you just need to find a way of not noticing how gargantuan the pile of shit you are in actually is, but just approach it as a problem to be solved. In short, it’s down to conditioning. And if you’re the kind of spanner who regularly locks yourself out of the house, strands yourself in the middle of nowhere with a flat battery and jump leads that don’t work, misses planes, boats, hovercrafts and trains, loses your passport, takes a plane a day early etc, then you probably tackle a crisis of some sorts most days to the point where, for you, even a major crisis feels like a normal part of your day.

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs, and blaming it on you,
You are, most like, a porridge-brained idiot
Who can’t remember their own name or find their own arse,
In the dark, with both hands. But when shit goes down, you stand up.

I’m really sorry Mr K.

If you want a calm head in a crisis you need practise, and being an utter tool in your day-to-day life will give you that practise. Yes, in every disorganised bollock-head lives the ice woman or man. Probably.

If you are despair of ever bing a big enough twat to crisis manage successfully never fear, why not pep yourself up with an uplifting, noblebright, humorous, science fiction fantasy box set for 40% off.

Yes, there are still a couple of days to get the K’Barthan Series Box Set at a drastically reduced price on Kobo.

To find out more – just click here.

On the other hand, if you are already becoming adept at creating small crises for yourself, failing to procure a calendar for 2018 for example, you can always grab an eyebombing calendar from my recently re-vamped and re-tidied Zazzle shop here.

Postcards of my best eyebombs are available there, too, along with K’Barthan bling and some other stuff.

Last of all a glimpse at my new marketing technique: I’ve decided to try threatening people*. So here we are. Buy my stuff or Lord Vernon will visit you.

Buy my stuff! Or I’ll send him round.

* That’s a joke, obviously. It’s a bit crap though, really, isn’t it? oh well, never mind.

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17 Jun 2017 · 12:00 pm

And now for something completely different … #eyebombing #eyebombthereforeiam

Eyebombing: the art of spreading googly joy

Saddled as we are with a thoroughly grim world landscape right now I thought everyone could do with a bit of cheering up. So it occurred to me that it would be fun to start a group about one of my favourite hobbies, eyebombing, possibly with a view to doing a book later on … if it goes well.

Eyebombing is the art, if that’s the right word, of adding googly eyes to inanimate objects to give them a personality. When I write, I love putting obscure jokes in my books; things that only a handful of people will get. Eyebombing has that exact same appeal. If I stick googly eyes on something, odds are only about one in ten people will see it. It’s a secret joke between a tiny and exclusive club of eagle-eyed, uber-noticing folks.

And it’s a little bit naughty …

and I’m not meant to …

and yet, it’s mostly harmless.

And it’s a lot more interesting than running through wheat fields! (Sorry, bit of British political humour there, although, to give her her due, running through wheat is a lot more outrageous than it sounds, she’d have got a proper bollocking from the farmer if he’d caught her.)

Eyebombing is something I’ve been doing since before McMini was born. Over the years I have built up a sizeable library of photographs. Looking at them with a couple of friends, the other day, they said, ‘why on earth don’t you do a book about this?’

So the long term project will, indeed, be to produce a book on eyebombing. But it will be a long ride because this is something that only, really, works in print, and as a result, it means that not only will it be a more expensive sell but I’ll also have to try and flog it to book shops and funny only sells there at Christmas which means I’ll have to work on the book all this year, get it ready to promote next spring – because book stores choose their Christmas funny in about March. Then I will launch it, officially, in October 2018.

To fund stock, editing and design I am toying with the idea of a crowdfunding campaign. If I do that, I can give backers their copy this year, a whole year before release, and sell any left over pre release copies at the Bury Christmas Fayre – if I get a stall this year – or keep them until next year.

Royal Mail being what it is, the postage outside the UK will probably cost slightly more than the book and the crowdfunding thing may not work. So I may have to get a ‘proper’ publisher. However, for now I’m setting up a group to share pictures, both mine and I’m hoping other folks will post their eyebombs too. It’s just something I thought I’d do and if it adds ‘social proof’ to applications to publishers, or my efforts to sell the book to bookshops, jolly dee. Going forward, if I do have to mount a crowdfunding campaign, am hoping folks in the group will share the link as much as possible.

If you want to follow the fun …

If any of these kinds of japes appeal to you, and you think eyebombing would amuse you, I’d be delighted if you joined me.

To follow the development of the book, not to mention any eyebombing activities undertaken, there are three ways you can keep up with it all online.

If you want to join in …

If you already have a packet of googly eyes burning a hole in your pocket are welcome to join in; posting your own photos, chatting about eyebombing and generally shooting the breeze on the very nascent – I formed it just a couple of weeks ago – EyebombThereforeIam facebook group. You can find that here:

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/369964093397829

Here are those links again:

Follow on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eyebombtheschoolrun/
Follow on facebook: https://fb.me/eyebombthereforeiam
Join the Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/369964093397829
Join the Eyebombthereforeiam e-mail Newsgroup here http://www.subscribepage.com/eyebomb

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5 Mar 2017 · 7:56 pm

Can I have fried brains with that? Time management/productivity hacks for writers #amwriting #writingtips #timemanagement

The longest blog post in the world … probably.

This week I will be mostly talking about making something out of nothing, or as that pertains to my world: time management.

As many of you will remember, my lack of minutes in the day to do … well … anything much was a continuing trope in many of my posts last year. The frustration of not producing any meaningful work while any ‘free’ time melted away faster than the polar ice caps was strong, and the whinging on my blog extensive, as a result. Sorry about that.

However, good news, I think. It looks as if I’ve fixed it, possibly, or at least, bodged the problem enough for my writerly mojo to return. And as I bitched and complained my way through last year, I did realise that I’m not the only one who struggles with balancing their duties to others and their requirement to write. So I thought I’d share the stuff that has worked for me in the hope that, perhaps, it will help anyone reading this who has similar struggles. So off we go …

A long time ago in a galaxy far away …

Last November, actually, Mum was in hospital again, and as I tried to sort everything out, and write, and be a mum to my own son, a good daughter, and be happy, burnout loomed.

Once we got her sorted out, and back home with Dad, I knew that if I was going to carry on writing I would have to make changes, even if it was just changes to my attitude. And I was going to have to make them fast. I’m an old hand at this now. The trick is not so much as to solve the problem but to alter my thinking so I see it differently. This time the ‘solution’ I arrived at was twofold:

  1. I couldn’t write the kinds of books I had been writing and deal with the things I needed to do in Real Life. I would therefore write shorter, less complicated books.
  2. It was clear that many folks who read my books enjoyed the K’Barthan stuff best. And I knew K’Barth well. There wasn’t so much time for experimentation right then – so that was easy. I’d write shorter, less complicated stories about K’Barth.

Enter the new series of 99p K’Barthan Shorts. In a bid to discover more details about the ‘market’s’ demands I asked what people would like to see more of. Gladys, Ada and Their Trev was the answer from everyone.

Roughseas asked me to write on about how Betsy, on Turnadot Street, started her Bordello. The answer popped up almost immediately. Meanwhile there was another one about The Pan of Hamgee’s early years on the Blacklist. That popped up reasonably fast too. So I had two ideas for short stories ready to go. All that was left was to write them.

Keenly aware that I can’t actually guarantee myself more than about 40 minutes to write in each day, it occurred to me that one of the problems with my rate of production was that its slowness sapped my morale, resulting in even less speed. So making some steady progress was essential to keep up my spirits and keep going. Obviously, as an authorholic, I am, literally addicted – stopping would have been much more sensible but it wasn’t an option. I decided to try and find a way to write more efficiently. I had a bit of a think and I came up with five ways that I could, possibly, give myself a hand:

  1. There might be some book production tools I could use to speed up and ease the process – such as writing software or text-to-speech software.
  2. Planning and plotting a bit before I start would help if I could tie it into the way I write.
  3. Writing shorter and less complicated stories would reduce the cerebral load (as previously mentioned).
  4. If I could improve my time management I might achieve more in the moments I had,
  5. My brain was fairly porridgey and I needed to find a way to re-enthuse it and sharpen it up while avoiding burnout.

1. Production tools

Yes, I am aware this sounds nuts but it occurred to me that one of the problems I face, writing, is that I usually keep the whole plot in my head. This is fine until I’m sad, or  stressed about other stuff, or my writing routine is constantly interrupted. Then, I can’t do it. I lose track of who is doing what, and with what, and to whom. When I make notes to help myself I still fail to remember, or at least, I fail to visualise what’s happening where, so written notes are unhelpful. So back in November 2016 I was spending three quarters of each writing session working out where I’d got to and catching up, and then about five minutes moving it forward before I had to stop.

As I pondered how to solve this knotty conundrum I saw a free seminar by a bloke called Joseph Michael about using a writing programme called Scriviner. Now, I confess, I’d never thought about using Scriviner, it seemed completely pointless, but I couldn’t help noticing, as I watched this free seminar, that the way you lay out a project in Scrivener appeared to cover a couple of my big writing problems.

  • Finding a way to list major scenes in a memorable way so I can work out a cohesive plot
  • Finding something that can remember what’s happened so far, and where I’ve got to, when my head can’t in a way that’s instinctive and at-a-glance.
  • Being able to put bits I like but can’t use yet somewhere close to hand so I can just nip over and cut and paste them in and out and remember they are there.
  • Being able to flip from my writing to my research easily  if I want to.
  • Being able to fit more writing into a short time.
  • In short, having all the information and prompts I need to write effectively in one place without burying one room of my house in post it notes.

The way Joseph Michael had his demo Scrivener set up, everything was laid out on screen where I could see it. My mental filing system is visual and it works horizontally. My ideal filing system would be a huge long table, with all the work in progress laid out on it. I’d walk up and down the table and see what needs to be done. If I try to file things vertically, in stacked trays or in drawers I forget they are there and cannot visualise what I am supposed to be doing or the shape of my task. I lose things in a pile.

My computer is a drawer – even using WordPerfect to write doesn’t fully ameliorate the impact of that, despite the fact it has its documents in tabs and I can switch from one to another with a single click. Things get lost and forgotten in my computer. Important things. Scrivener looked as if it might be the computer equivalent of a table rather than drawers, and when I found it on sale for  75% off, I decided to try it.

Bonus! Except While it was, indeed, the closest thing a computer can produce, in organising and filing terms, to a table, it was incredibly frustrating to use because it’s very much NOT intuitive in some respects. So I bought the training course for a truckload of money. BUT ONLY because it has a 365 day money back guarantee. No 30 day nonsense. A whole damn year. If I get stuck, I look up the problem on the course site, watch the video, which lasts about 3 minutes and I’m set. I am quite quick to pick up computer stuff but even so this worked very well for me. The way it’s set out is like an encyclopedia you can look things up in, rather than a course of long lessons which you annotate. Thus you sidestep the thing where your mind wanders as you take notes and you leave out a crucial click or step, one that renders your notes worthless and necessitates spending 30 minutes of your 40 minutes’ writing time watching a video, from beginning to end, to sort out where you went wrong. It’s way more useful than I expected, almost indispensable. Indeed, it’s probably paid for itself already to be honest. Bugger. Won’t be getting that refund then.

Around this time, I also saw McOther dictating email replies into his iPad and a light dawned. I could speak my books. However, after discovering that there is no way to teach my iPad how to write ‘eyebombing’ when I say ‘eyebombing’ and having the same experience with many other words like that, I reckoned it would be more trouble than it was worth. Even doing some dictation for my non-fiction book where I used the word, ‘spectacles’ instead of eyebombing – with a view to using search and replace, later – it was, frankly, too much of a ball ache. It occurred to me that the whole process of teaching speech-to-text software to understand my vocabulary, the correct spelling for the word arse and all the rest might take a lot more time than it would save. Doubtless I will give it a go at some point, but for the moment, I think I’ll put it in the someday-my-prince-will-come section of my list.

2. Planning and Plotting

Obviously what I envisioned achieving for myself here is far removed from compiling a comprehensive plot and then sketching the story by numbers.  I am, at heart, a pantser. However, it did occur to me that I could save myself a lot of time if I could kick the habit of developing so much backstory that my first scene ends up being one of the last ones. This is how I write: I get to know my characters, get interested in their pasts and before I know it, a new story has emerged. It’s usually a better one but having it turn up a bit earlier in proceedings would save me … well 60k of wasted words last year so, in short, the entirety of last year’s output (some of those words will be rescued or recycled but not all 60k).

I heard about a free seminar promoting a course called Story Engines. Story Engines sounds brilliant, but I can’t afford it. It didn’t help that there was only a short window, during the zenith – or is that the nadir – of the Christmas and post Christmas bankruptcy period. Why does everyone who runs a $500 closed course think a good time to open it up is December when everyone is skint? Sorry, I digress. The seminar was pretty good and opened my eyes to the kinds of questions I should ask myself. Questions which I thought I was asking already but clearly haven’t been. However, I could only afford one course and I thought that, possibly, I would work out more of the plotting stuff on my own than I would the workings of Scrivener. And the Scrivener course cost less. A lot less.

And I still have about 335 days in which to decide whether or not I like it! So I bought it.

3. Writing shorter

An absolute epic fail. For example, I’ve binned 20k of the ‘short’ about how Betsy’s bordello opened and I’m now just bubbling under 29,000 words into the new one. I think I may squish it into about 40,000 but it could run to 60,000. On the upside, I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN. Yeh. Thank you, Story Engines free training and lovely easy-to-see-what’s-going-on Scrivener layout. The magic is still happening, the picture is slowly de-pixilating and sliding into focus and the process is fun again. I also have a very much clearer idea of how Space Dustmen, the new series I’m working on, is going to go, and I’m really enjoying making notes and thinking about ideas. The characters are more focussed and yeh, things are happening there, too. Oh and there’s a non-fiction book.

On the writing shorter books front, then, null points. But on the writing, generally, a massive booyacka!

4. Time Management

We talked about the minuscule size of my writing window. How to make those minutes count then?

Scrivener was surprisingly useful and the plotting was helping but it was only a partial success. My efforts to write were still resulting in redundant words. Cf that 20,000 odd I mentioned just now and the other 40,000 from last year. Even though I will probably use three quarters of them, tweaked, a bit later in their prerequisite stories it was fairly essential that I did something to increase my rate of production and increase the suitability for immediate use of the stuff I produced.

So far, I’d some ideas plotted that I was really chuffed with, I’d laid out the basic chapters I thought I was going to write in Scrivener, added some notes, done the cards etc. But I needed more.

Somewhere, I read that comparing notes with other writers and posting your progress daily can really motivate you so I started a thread on a forum I visit. I’d also read that doing sprints works well for many people. You set a timer for twenty minutes and write until it goes off, have a 5 minute break and then rinse and repeat. I thought I’d see what I could do with that. I reckoned if I spent the first twenty minutes planning the scene and maybe writing a bit, and then the next twenty, going for it, I might get somewhere. No distractions, nothing, just writing the rest. So that day, I started my thread and explained what I was going to do. Then I turned off the internet, opened scrivener, sat down with the pinger set to twenty minutes and off I went.

Well.

That was a fucking eye opener I can tell you.

First sprint: 400 words, second 1000. Smecking Norah! Four weeks later, I have 28,800 words down. Even a hard, pulling-teeth-style sprint nets me 400 words. Just three of those sprints, ie an hour and a quarter given over to writing, and we are looking at 1,200 words, minimum. My record in one 20 minutes is 1,700. Typing. Every morning I can wake up knowing that, even if I only have half an hour to work that day, I can get a few hundred words done. Few things boost a writer’s spirits better than being productive.

I love the sprints and I love the camaraderie of chatting on the thread where we encourage each other and compare results. Definitely a really effective strategy, that one.

5. Avoiding staleness: saying, ‘bollocks’ to social media and making it quality time

With the sprints, Scriviner and even the plotting going well. I wondered if I could work on my freshness of approach. What I mean is, trying to persuade my times of  maximum brainpower to coincide with the times I had available to write.

After a lot of head-scratching it occurred to me that this writing game is a bit like a relationship in many respects. Sometimes, with dating, less is more. Three hours of quality time are worth many more hours of half cock time spent not really connecting that just make the whole thing go stale. I realised that, when quality writing time was thin on the ground, I was spending hours on social media while I did other things looking at emails, or generally staring at my iPad and phone to try and keep myself connected to the electronic ether and with that, somehow, to my writing. Even sitting at home in the evening watching tv, or while I was cooking, or some other situation in which I could never hope to produce any meaningful content for my books I would be gazing soulfully at the screen convincing myself it would help.

It didn’t.

While, on one hand, all this screen time made me feel as if I was maintaining the connection, on the other it fogged it, made me feel as if it was sapping my creativity somehow. And the more in touch with it all I tried to be, the more time was sucked into this faux ‘keeping in touch’, and the less time I spent actually writing. Across my wider life, writing was all I was doing … Oh and panicking about having no time. I did a lot of that. So as well allowing my brain to be gloopified by the wrong kind of screen time, I was starving it of stimulation. No fuel. Poor brain. How could I expect inspiration?

More head-scratching, and then I decided to try and make all the time I had count, across the board, not just in writing but in everything. So I limited social media and marketing time and added other things to my day, experiences, like coffee with a friend, a walk, reading, listening to music, shopping, eyebombing, etc. I also tried switching off the computer at six pm and not turning it on again until the next morning. I still checked my emails and social media first thing as I sat in bed with a cup of coffee. However, I started writing a to do list for the day at the same time. Then when I sat down at the computer after the school run it was easy to reorientate myself. I started experimenting with using sprints to write emails and social media posts. I listed things I needed to look at, set up a sprint to do it in and then stopped when the bell rang. I found I could achieve exactly the same amount of interaction in a fraction of the time. In the evenings, in front of the telly, I stopped checking Facebook on my phone and started knitting socks. Um … Yeh.

The results of this have been amazing. I have way more creativity. When I started this, a month or so ago, there was only really room in my head for one project. After a week, I started having ideas about a project I’d shelved because it was too complicated. After two weeks the short had turned into a novel. After three, a non fiction project popped up. It looks as if I may finish a novel this year. One that I only started writing in earnest four weeks ago. It is as if this simple act of giving my brain time to rest has jump-started my creative mojo. Yes I still get tired, I still get sad about my parents, I still have the odd week of PMT when I can’t meaningfully achieve anything but I also feel fulfilled and fantastic because I am creating stuff – and when I feel like that I create more stuff – and even when it’s not books, it’s very comfortable socks!

Conclusion

So what gave I learned here that might help anyone who has waded through to the end of this? D’you know, I think probably this:

  • Being open to new ideas and open-minded about trying new things can result in solutions you never believed possible. I am really surprised at how helpful Scrivener is, for example, and would never have tried it had it not been flagged as a godsend by a couple of the book selling gurus I follow.
  • Looking at problems from different angles can really help to solve them.
  • A writer’s brain is just like a computer, you need to put stuff in to get stuff out – although unlike computers, I find that putting rubbish into a brain doesn’t necessarily diminish output quality. But the biggie is input. Input has to happen for output.
  • Avoid getting stale.
  • Keep trying! I’m beginning to think that the people who achieve stuff are the folks who never give up. And I’ve discovered this by achieving stuff (in my own very small way but it feels big to me) because I can’t give up. So I’m beginning to think that, within reason, if you try to achieve something for long enough, and work hard enough at it, something WILL happen, even if it’s not what you were expecting. Or to put it another way, when life throws you lemons then yes, take time, lick your wounds, nurse your bruises, regroup … and make lemon meringue pie.
20160412_mandslemon

Pie-ify me big boy!

 

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