Category Archives: General Wittering

9 Jun 2024 · 6:02 pm

Stuff

A mixed bag this week so on we go.

On health

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

Picture of an iced bun with eyes stuck on it so it looks as if it's a miserable face bearing the legend, 'this too shall pass but some other bullshit will come and take its place becausae it never fucking ends.

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

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

Out and about

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

A picture of british countryside, rolling hills and trees, with sunshine and blue sky

Picture from the woodland path …

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screengrab from Google Maps showing the amusingly named town of Titsey and the clogged M25

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

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

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

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

Picture of the insides of a church reflected in the brass dome at the bottom of the lectern.

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

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

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

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

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

On writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afore ye go …

picture of four book covers in M T McGuire’s humorous science fiction fantasy trilogy The K’Barthan Series If you’d like to read something, there’s always a free book. I have some free at retailers, and more free from me. You can find links and information as to where and how to download them here

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2 Jun 2024 · 6:04 pm

Meh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the upside …

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

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

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

Other news this week …

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

Picture of authors at a table selling their books

Thanks Simone for asking someone to take our picture!

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

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

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

Other comicon news, eyebombed the loos.

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

Writing…

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

Probably …

So that’s grand.

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

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27 May 2024 · 11:51 pm

Let’s try kindness…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this for real?

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

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

How old are we all? Three?*

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

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

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

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

That makes sense.

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

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

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

eyes stuck on a whitewashed window to make it look like two miserable faces

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

Continue reading →

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19 May 2024 · 6:43 pm

Stones …

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

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

Picture of air freshener canister eyebombed

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

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

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

Come on a tangent with me.

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

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

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

How hard can that be? I thought.

Mmm always a bad start.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A partial success then.

Woot.

So I give you … polished stones.

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

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12 May 2024 · 11:11 am

Indie Writers Book Fair (Huntingdon) and a catch up

picture of spring woodland with cow parsley and young trees

A nice spring picture …

I’ve been meaning to write a post for some time but unfortunately while, like The Leaning Tower of Pisa, I had the inclination, unlike Big Ben, I did not have the time. Also the weather has been fantastic and so much stuff has to be done with a wi-fi connection these days that I can’t just sit outside and type stuff up like I used to. Everything has to be a work station rather than of any practicable use. Despite the lack of internet access, I keep finding the lure of sitting outside in the sun reading a book to be too great. And I’ve been ill, so it’s good for me to relax and just read a book or chill. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Last night I continued with the time honoured British tradition of missing the Northern Lights when they appear. In this case, in Suffolk and as far south as Brighton. Lots of fabulous pictures on t’interweb taken some time after I went to bed. It’s going to happen again tonight apparently, although I suspect that is the point we will adhere to the other tried and tested British tradition, of it being cloudy, and I will sit in a deck chair in the garden until all’s blue seeing nothing while a light show of unfathomable beauty plays out above the clouds.

Ho hum.

Other news…

Mc(not so)Mini has done his first GCSE this week. Best of luck to everyone doing exams over the next few months. Here’s hoping everything goes OK for him.

Health wise I am hoping I’ve turned the corner. Lots of things ache but otherwise, I’m feeling a lot better and my innards appear to have settled down … which is quite a relief.

Book news …

I have been wondering whether to start sharing chapters of my works in progress as they … you know … progress. To be honest because of the way I write, it would be less chapters and more random scattered bits. Apparently The New Way Forward for authors is a subscription. I get that subscriptions are good for companies in that they can predict the money coming in but I’m struggling to see the benefit for readers, unless they are happy to pay a couple of quid a month to read the tangled mess that is my stuff before I smack it into shape.

On, on… probably …

Personally, I have two subscriptions; Disney and Spotify. I don’t use either as much as I should to justify paying for them. Oh yes and I have a subscription to dishwasher tablets and washing powder which I basically keep paused until I need them and then go to the website and click on the ‘help, I need it now button’ and just buy them. I’ve never, yet managed to work out how much washing stuff I’m going to use so as a punter, a lot of the things people are selling subscription only these days look like a bit of a crap bet.

From the author subs point of view, I’m thinking that if people did subscribe, I’d want it to be a community too. So bits of random writing for folks to read and then maybe something like the K’Barthan Jolly Japery facebook group, but where, perhaps, there was a bit more me or video things or live chats or… um … something.

You can see I’m really awash with ideas here. Mmm.

But on paper the subscription makes sense for vendors but not so much for customers.

OK, so people who love my stuff subscribe and get to see my work in progress and get access to a fantastic online community which is a bit more in my control. I am aware that Facebook could ban me for something bizarre, like the time I said ‘boys are gross’ when discussing my son’s socks in a school parents’ group and got banned from Facebook for a month. Getting locked out of my own fan group is a very real possibility. I have emergency moderators for this but it’s still a bit of a worry.

Sorry, tangent there (quelle surprise). So as I was saying, on paper it makes sense, but if other people are like me then all these subscriptions to authors soon add up to something big and unmanageable. I could only subscribe to two or three, just as this blog will never take off because I can only cope with following and commenting on a handful of other blogs that I really enjoy and I would need to interact with hundreds to get any traction, so I feel I would not do well with something like Substack because it’s based on you spending all your time there reading and commenting on other posts and I lack the spoons for that.

OK, so I know a lot of authors don’t care if they have 10 subscribers and only two read or interact but … I do.

Then again, the thing that sells books for me is … me. I have far more success going to events, standing behind a table dressed as my main character and being ~~a twat~~ relentlessly funny* at people until they buy a book, than I do trying to work out what the normals would put into a search engine to get my books seen, and then purchased, online.

* Yeh. I say ‘funny’ but I suspect other people’s mileage may vary.

Standing behind a table being relentlessly funny* at people until they buy a book … *probably.

There is also little or no money for ads. Seriously. Absolutely fuck all. Gone are the days when I could budget £2 a day for a mailing list sign up ad and have 30 or so people quietly signing up to my mailing list each month. These days it’s £10 a day on facebook to get out of ‘learning’ and anyway, if I spend £10 a day on ads to my store, I need to sell 5 or more books per click to pay for that £10. I only have a few books and I would bet there are not enough. I reckon I’d need more like 30 books to make my money back, indeed the red-hot organised lady on the panel with me reckoned there was no point in advertising with less than 20 books. I have 11 … 8 if I count the ones I charge people actual money for.

Another thing that is leaning me towards the community thing is that doing a Kickstarter was a bit of an eye-opener. My aim with that was to test the water; avoid incurring any design costs by doing it myself, do it print on demand and try to make a third of the overall total in profit, because it’s actually quite hard work and there’s a fair bit of admin.

The books cost £10 each to print for the hardback and £5 each for the paperback. Most buyers were abroad but I can keep the postage costs between £10 and £15 if I have the books delivered to me and then send everything by boat. I expected to sell about five but 31 people bought copies. I even made some UK sales, which is a little cheaper £5-£7 so that makes up for some of the peeps further afield where I took a hit on the postage.

However, the most fun bit of the Kickstarter was all the chat, when backers asked me questions and I got to interact with them. That’s a big part of it for me. Now there is time in my life to think, I reckon I should look harder to find ways where I get to do more of what I love and less of the things that are hard going. While I’m on the brink of starting to write again, but still, mainly, sorting Mum’s affairs, it seems a good time to work that sort of stuff out. So far what I’m thinking is that it’s me people follow (although that may be because most of the signed up to my mailing list to get a free book and seven years on they haven’t read it yet). But yeh, it seems to be a big part me side as well as books and characters, so maybe I should capitalise on that … I dunno …

Talking of the fun stuff …

Last weekend, 4th May, I went to the Indy Book Fair at Centenary Hall in Huntingdon. It was a gas.

First up, one of the K’Barthan Jolly Japery group came to see me and hung out with me all day, which was lovely. I’ve known her sister for years but never met her so that was awesome. And she brought me coffee and millionaire shortbread! Which was awesome! Thank you, you know who you are. 🙂

Second, I dunno … I wasn’t really trying to sell the books that hard. I was just telling people about them, but it was busy and there were lots of people to talk to and I did sell stuff. There was a maker’s market on outside, which might have helped as it probably brought in people who were prepared to spend some cash, but austerity aside, people seem to be spending more. And whereas last year, my books were doing well online but in Real Life people wanted dark gritty realism, they seem to have swung back. Either that or I have a better pitch going now.

In addition, cash purchases were up so I’m guessing people had been saving up, and I had a wonderful time talking to people. As with the previous event (Sci Fi Weekender at Yarmouth) people were buying whole series, which was a bit of a thing and not a sales trend I’ve seen since 2017.

Having failed dismally to sell Too Good To Be True at any of these things, I suddenly got rid of a whole bunch of copies of that, which was nice! 🙂

I loved seeing this lady carrying her shopping home on her head as I drank a Peroni Zero

After a hurried supper with another author, snatched from a couple of fast food outlets, and a zero alcohol beer outside the venue (very nice) we went back inside for the evening events which were two panels; on producing audiobooks and selling ‘wide’, ie not just on Amazon. I was on the wide panel, which was great fun.

I’m the one with the hat on.

There were four of us, myself, a proper, grown-up successful author and two of the big hitters in paperback printing and distribution. A lot of the questions were about print so I got a pretty easy ride and managed not to fart, fidget (too much) or interrupt too often. Although I think my contribution was the least useful of all the members but it was great fun. I really hope I’ll be asked back next year.

The whole thing felt up beat and full of vibrant spiffy joy. I was just chatting to people and then they bought stuff. I suppose it was a book fair so they were going to turn up ready to buy things, but maybe there were more of them, or perhaps I was more relaxed. But… it sort of feels like something’s turned the corner. I wouldn’t say I’m going places, but I do think I’m going to be able to start writing again soon and that I’ll have a lot more capacity than I have had this last 15 years. I’m looking forward to it.

Right then. It’s time I did something else. I have chapters to read, some editing to do and maybe a bit of writing. Also I have to plan my week.

And finally …

I leave you with this smashing stone which I bought in the Maker’s Market (Bury St Edmunds) on Sunday. It’s a piece of quartz of some kind, but to me it looks more like a ‘Sheba, flakes of salmon in jelly stone’. I guess if I was naming it properly I’d call this gem, ‘salmon in aspic stone’. Yeh, you saw it here first.

picture of a heart shaped polished piece of quartz, with inclusions that makes it look like salmon flakes in jelley.

Salmon flakes in jelly/salmon in aspic stone … both sides. 🙂

Looking at it, one side of it, the one shown on the right, it looks like a face with an eye, an eyebrow and a nose to me … you know … as well as the salmon flakes. What do you reckon?

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Tagged as author blog, book marketing, creative book marketing, Events, Events and signings, Indie Author Book Fair, M T McGuire, M T McGuire new releases, marketing a book, selling stuff, writer mum, writers

7 Apr 2024 · 12:25 pm

Respite and random thoughts about faith…

Blimey, this week’s been a bit of a roller coaster. As you know, last week I was having extreme difficulties with what felt like bowel-based armageddon. I’m going to relate the happy ending of that story (spoiler: I didn’t die in the end even though I was genuinely beginning to wonder which would go first, the virus or me). I should also run this with the caveat that it is mostly supposed to be funny, and/or reassuring to those in a similar position. But I have no idea which bits of what I write/say make people laugh. I know they usually do, somewhere along the way, the trick is just to make it look deliberate. So if I’ve misjudged this and none of it is funny at all my humblest apologies. I’ll try and find something laminating-bacon-level stupid to do over the course of the week to make things more interesting. Right. Disclaimer made, on we go …

Having cancelled our holiday I then hot-footed it to the Doc’s on Tuesday again, desperately seeking help but also the referral she suggested to see what in god’s name is going on with my insides. She agreed that the referral was a good idea and suggested I have another go at solids. ‘Rice and chicken … and maybe a hard boiled egg, but not much else,’ she warned me.

‘Can I have the egg scrambled?’ I asked her.

‘Yes, but no butter or milk.’

‘Can I have coffee?’

‘With a meal.’

Woot.

‘With a tiny bit of milk?’

‘Yes.’

God love her. So I went home, made myself a small cup of coffee and had a scrambled egg. It might possibly have been the loveliest thing I’ve eaten in my entire fucking life. Trooper that he is, McOther went off and bought some chicken which he divided, making some into a delicious pasta dish for himself and McMini. I decided I would do my portion with basmati rice, chopped onions and herbs, I also added a stock cube. It was surprisingly tasty.

The next day, I felt human. I went and had the first appointment, an ultrasound scan (clear) and then we collected the cat. I had energy. It was wonderful.

That night I felt so much better I decided to branch out with some different foods. The following lunch I had the chicken and bacon in an amatricana sauce that the boys hadn’t finished the night before on lovely big shells of pasta. I did forebear to have cheese. There were no ill effects or indeed any. Having not ‘BEEN’ for 24 hours, I was cautiously optimistic I might, possibly, have turned the corner. For supper I put lentils rather than rice with my chicken and veg and cooked it in the oven with a tiny bit of cider. It was lovely. As I went to bed, I took my HRT pill and the hayfever one, although with real work to do my immune system had stopped yanking my chain and I wasn’t having any hayfever. My hands had stopped aching too.

I normally take supplements. Not many but taking Magnesium L-Threonate has definitely helped my menopausal brain fog and also made me sleep better. I’d read a few days previously that Magnesium supplements can set off this kind of reaction so I’d stopped them. Feeling a bit awake but at the same time really tired, I took one and went to bed. I knew what to do now, I reasoned. If my bottom unleashed armageddon during the night I could fix it.

It did.

Here’s another useful nugget of information people. If you are having the shits in the night, it’s more likely to be an infection, having them in the day is more likely to be IBS or some other thing caused by your immune system pissing you about. Always useful to know that. I spent Thursday drinking diorolite and thinking I was going to die but manfully started in again with the scrambled egg breakfast on Friday. Supper was chicken and rice. I had no coffee, indeed, I am no longer addicted to coffee. I can now not drink any for a whole day and there will be no headache, which is a bit of a bonus. Let’s face it, something good had to come out of all this tsunami of crap. Come the evening I did not take a magnesium pill.

I slept like a fucking log.

Today I am very tired but I am basically fine. I know I have had something grim, I feel very post viral; weak and feeble the way you do after a really bad go of flu, but my weight has stabilised at 10st 13lbs (about 67kg I think) but I had a tom tit today and it was normal for the first time in about 6 weeks … Holy shit (literally I guess)! What a joy that was! I nearly took a fucking photo of it. But I didn’t because even I am not quite that bad, so instead here’s one of the absolutely enormous shit that pigeon did on my car (and long-suffering sister in-law) a while back.

Pigeon shit down the window of a Lotus Mwhahahargh! What have I sunk to?

And I took a walk up to the market today which feels so much better. At some point I will be having an endoscopy and a colonoscopy (either together in a couple of weeks or separately, starting with the endoscopy next week and the colonoscopy in a month or so).

Any takeaways from this? I probably should have stopped and rested at the beginning but I just. did. not. have. time. And I should have known it was a virus, because it had given my overactive immune system enough to do that the allergies and arthritic pain had all stopped. Well no, actually, I did know it was a virus, I just wasn’t sure if I was going to get better! I genuinely believed it might kill me at one point, because I’m not a drama queen at all. (Yes, that’s terribly melodramatic but, in my defence, I remember my Mum saying the exact same thing after she had pleurisy; as in, ‘It was awful! If I hadn’t had to look after your father I think I’d have happily gone then’.)

Also, I tidied up something I’d got lying about and turned it into a short story which I submitted to an anthology, so that’s grand. And I applied for a stall at the Ely Cathedral Christmas Fair, so that was grand too.

Thank you, everyone who gave me advice. It was actually really useful. I listened to/read all the links and stuff you all sent and it gave me things to try.

Now, if I can make this stick I have a target of getting fit and well by 21st when I have booked to go on a metal detecting rally half an hour up the road. Really looking forward to it as I haven’t been out for ages. And I’m going to go back to the gym. Possibly Thursday or maybe a week on Monday.

Other stuff …

A propos of nothing much, on the way home from the market today, I popped into the cafe next to the church to give them a bit of pay it forward cash. They know some of their customers, are really hungry but can’t afford to pay for a meal so you can drop a few quid in so they can give meals to these people for a reduced rate (or nothing). I then nipped into church to light a candle and say thanks for the end of the tsunami of crap. I tend to pay £1 each for them, I’m not sure if there is an actual price anywhere, but I didn’t have any cash so I did the minimum £5 card thing on the doo-hicky at the back which which is a safe 3 up front, anyway, I reckon. There was another lady in there, who was obviously having a bit of quiet time and as I walked back past her I stopped to ask if she was OK, but she said hello first.

I asked her if she was OK, anyway. I always ask this, because … I dunno … because I think it gives people an option if they need or want to say something, but they can also not say anything too, and it’s an important part of the ministry of that particular church, to me, because it’s a place of welcoming and inclusive kindness. Then as I got to the door thought about my remaining candles-in-hand and went back.

‘I didn’t have any cash so I’ve paid for a few candles up front, if you’d like to light one on me you are more than welcome,’ I said.

We got talking and she is new in her faith. She’d been brought up a Christian but it just hadn’t really clicked until recently. We ended up having a chat, which was lovely until we got onto the topic of how stuff sometimes aligns uncannily and … ugh, I ended up telling her the fucking ridiculously long Mother Death story which, even in the abridged version, took far too long. I only wanted to talk enough for her to feel relaxed and comfortable and then ask her about her faith journey, because I love hearing how other people came to have their faiths, possibly because my faith journey is so boring, or because I’m nosey, or quite possibly simply because I’m unable to do anything, even being a Christian, without hyperfocussing autistically about it. But also, because I suspect the lady would have liked to have talked about it, too, and that is far more likely to be the reason our paths crossed. But oh no, no. Nothing like that from shit-for-brains here.

If the good lord sent me to listen to her story, all I did was bloody well tell her mine. Perhaps that’s what he sent her for, to listen … poor woman if he did. I was desperate to ask her when I got to the end of her story but I could see she also wanted to be on her own for a bit too and recharge during her lunch hour. So I felt I should leave her to have a chat to God rather than me.

On the upside, I did make her laugh by telling her that one of the windows looked like Jesus jumping on a trampoline, a little nugget that was pointed out to me by one of the lay readers and she did pop in to church this morning for the first ten minutes or so.

On the downside … I comprehensively stuffed judging when it was time for me to shut up and I didn’t even ask her name. I think it was OK. She gave me a hug anyway. But urgh. It’s really frustrating to have a brain that’s really pointy in some respects and then be thicker than mince in others.

The thing is … I think I do have a kind of calling. Not to be holy particularly or anything, mostly it’s to write, but also to be kind … because my parents are both gone it is left to my brother and I to Be The Light. And I have a very strong sense that I must be the light now … it’s just that my parents made it look so fucking effortless but it’s actually really difficult. I’m not the kind of legend they both were were so … I can’t … yet. I might if I work very hard at it and all the stars align.

The thing is, maybe sometimes the fact I am a cheerful soul who is, to be honest, a bit of a bell-end is something I can use in a good way. It’s just that it’s a weapon I don’t quite know how to wield yet. I think it’s at the stage where it’s still a bit heavy for me, and metaphorically, I’m waving it round inadvertently cutting off the limbs of people round me and gouging walls the way a 6 year old would if given a real working lightsaber. It’s like a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of a rather overenthusiastic labrador … or my cat.

I think if I was to complete a what disciple are you? quiz, I’d be Peter; lovely guy, really sweet and well meaning, totally solid and practical too, but just … a bit of a wazzock sometimes. If he can say the wrong thing at the wrong time he will (God love you I’m sorry Peter but you know it’s true) and he’s just, so sensible and practical and well meaning and even though he blunders on from gaffe to gaffe he learns (unlike me). Maybe it’s because he’s so obviously human and flawed that I think he’s great … maybe we’re all Peter.

But at the same time, when I think about all the things I saw my parents do, the really amazing, treat-your-neighbour-as-yourself stuff, the overriding thing is that they were not embarrassed. They gave absolutely no fucks for social convention. On all levels there was simply the question, what is the right thing to do here? Oh yeh. That is. Check. Off we go.

The first time I saw a stranger in trouble on the street I stopped but I hung back, waiting for others to act. I was too shy to stop and help, myself. But then I shared a flat with someone who had epilepsy and she told me that actually, it really meant something when people stopped to help if she’d had a fit in a public place and was just lying on the ground. So now, if I see someone who looks like they might be in trouble I make a point of stopping.

If someone’s sitting down on the ground looking tired or weary, or yes, drunk, I ask them if they’re OK. Even if there’s a crowd round them I stop and ask (and the one time that has happened, when there was a crowd I mean, the woman on the ground was having a heart attack and nobody gathered round her had thought to phone for an ambulance, they were all just standing there, gawping. No-one was even holding her hand. So although six people had found her before me, I was the one who phoned). If someone’s begging I don’t always give them cash but I try to ensure I acknowledge their humanity and say hi.

Thinking about it. That’s the thing about my Mum and Dad. If there was some guy lying on the pavement with people stepping over him, my parents were not afraid to go over and check that he was merely in a drunken stupor, rather than seriously ill, and pop him in the recovery position if need be. They were never scared to ask people if they were OK, even if it might have made them look a bit stupid. In some cases they were not afraid to do something a bit dangerous, like give a homeless man a bed for the night.

While I looked on, not getting what was happening, my mum ran across the shingle of Shoreham beach and into the breaking waves to save the life of a child. She didn’t stop to think, ‘the parents might get the wrong idea if I manhandle their toddler’ or not even realise what was happening, like me. Maybe that’s the trick, at every level; getting to that point where the part of your brain that knows, ‘I should act/offer help, be kind,’ subsumes the ‘will I embarrass myself?’ awkwardness as the go-to neural pathway.

My parents were never afraid to step up. So I guess I’m getting there. I’ve got to the bit where I give no fucks about asking or offering or helping. But they were also really good at the aftermath and I’m not (unless it’s a crisis. I’m properly level-headed in a crisis but I’m a bit lumpy at the rest). I just need to get to the listening bit faster when it’s not a crisis I guess! Or I dunno … maybe I just have to hope that this afternoon was a time when the good lord had decided that what that lady actually needed, right there, was a well-meaning wanker. Although I’m not beyond thinking that it might have been that the well-meaning wanker needed a kind lady to talk to.

And yes. I think about everything I do in this much detail, which is why I write books I guess. Indeed it’s probably what makes the books alright. And no it doesn’t drive me that nuts. Although this mix of extreme self-awareness—and at the same time none—kind of dumb at times like Peter (sorry Peter) is sometimes annoying and I know I embarrass my very introvert husband constantly. But I can also let it go quite happily; chalk it up to experience, try to learn and move on. If I didn’t, I’d have probably topped myself, or been admitted to a long term mental institution, years ago. Never mind. I’ve got the no fucks bit down, so that’s a start. And tomorrow is a clean slate, after all. I can start again.

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Tagged as advice from writers, author blog, author blogs, faith, faith journey, god stuff, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, off topic, trying to be a writer, women in sci-fi, women writers

30 Mar 2024 · 6:17 pm

A very unwelcome conundrum …

This week I have been mostly…

…Having a crap.

Yeh, I know. You didn’t even ask me how I am and I’m going to tell you the intimate secrets of my Benjamin Owls. But actually, I could do with the hive mind’s advice on this one. I’m going to do personal detail here. Not much but I’m going to say the word poo a lot because that appears to be my new hobby. If you are offended by that or find it difficult, please don’t read on. I just wanted to share this, because if I’ve got this, I’ll bet there are others out there who are equally perplexed and at sea with their body’s behaviour. So this is a you are not alone, if you’re a fellow sufferer post, and a here are the things I’ve done, to squirrel away in case, post for if you’re not.

Poo. If I get away with under 12 a day right now, I’m doing OK.

Let me explain … It started two weeks ago, on 15th March, a Thursday. I went to the gym and was a bit surprised to find I needed to go to the loo when I got there. The following days I was selling books at Sci-fi weekender in Great Yarmouth and it was much easier to get to because I didn’t have to do my usual morning IBS ritual. The Thing happened as soon as I got up. Several times. Thinking IBS attack, I’ve been a bit stressed recently, I took the usual meds which worked and headed off without a thought.

Strangely, the same thing happened on the Saturday. On the Sunday, I started needing the loo after eating anything, which was a bit grim and by Monday I realised I had a bug. I never got the V part of this particular batch of D & V, it was only the D and I mostly felt OK. After a week I’d lost a couple of lbs but it showed no sign of abating and long and the short two and a half weeks later there is absolutely no change and I still can’t shake it off. After the first three days, neither imodium nor buscopan touched it, so I’ve given up taking them..

As I hit the marker for the first week, I began to lose weight, to the tune of 1lb a day and I’ve lost 12lbs over the course of the second week and two days… which has gone from great-I-don’t-have-to-diet-off-my-Christmas-weight to rather alarming.

On one level, though I’m not as comfortably upholstered as I was three years ago, I do have some slack in the system vis a vis losing weight. On another, it is quite alarming I’m 11stones 3lbs today, and tomorrow I will be 11stones 2lbs. As someone who weighs in quite heavy anyway, I’m 5ft 6” and I am a size 10 at 9 stones, there’s not quite as much slack as it looks. So that means that unless I can make this stop, I’m going to reach 6 stones, and the point where my levels of malnutrition start to damage my internal organs in approximately 8-10 weeks. Which is a grim thought.

On the up side, I’ve been tested. Extensively. The Doctors were brilliant. I’ve done stool samples, I was sent to the hospital with pages and pages of blood tests. The only thing they can find out of kilter is my lymphocytes, which, apparently, are fewer in number than usual and this points to my having a virus. So it’s probably a stomach virus…

It’s a bit of a case of …

“Physicians of the utmost fame were called at once, but when they came they answered, as they took their fees, ‘There is no cure for this disease…’”

Plus points:

It’s almost certainly not cancer. If it’s going on next week they have offered to refer me for a colonoscopy but there are no obvious markers or usual symptoms there.
It’s not heliobactor, the usual parasites, celiac disease etc
It’s not bacterial.
My eyeballs and stuff haven’t gone yellow. Always a bonus.
I’m not throwing up. I feel a bit sick sometimes but I can go out and do things, just slowly and carefully, because, obvs, losing weight at this ridiculous rate, I feel a bit weak and also, if it’s a virus that’ll make me weak too.

So there we are, there’s an upside to everything.

However, I’ve been trying to find out more. Clearly there’s the dietary information:

BRAT: Banans, Rice, Applesauce and Toast. I’m not 100% brilliant on bread usually so I’m going easy on the toast in favour of more rice.

The trick, I’m told, is to cancel out sugar and fats. I definitely know about the sugar one as I felt markedly worse after a piece of chocolate the other day. Bit of a pisser at Easter but there we go. I have kept in the occasional spoonful of Bury St Edmunds honey, hopefully my poor beleaguered gut biome will thank me.

I’ve also been drinking cuppa soup (what flavour cuppa soup is this Noddy?) chicken stock (home made) and trying to feed myself up with very small meals comprising things like chicken and um … sprouts (mwahahaharrgh!) which I find I can most easily face eating. I can tell where things are not going down well as I get stomach cramps but I also get those if I haven’t drunk enough water.

Apparently eating as normally as you can, but tiny portions is the way to go.

Another thing I have tried is that Huel stuff that Facebook keeps showing me ads for. Complete meals in a shake. You can buy it ready mixed as a health drink in Holland&Barrett. It is alright but as you might expect, it tastes like chemicals in a jar and it’s really sweet, in an atficicial-sweetner-tacstic kind of way which is a bit bleagh.

Marmite. Oh god, marmite is my friend in need. I am getting terrible cramps in my feet and marmite does help with that.

In order to feed my gut biome, if I still have one—it’s taken a drubbing, I’ve been having the odd, very small portion of home made kefir from my trusty plant, Bob The Blob. Sadly Bob is a milk kefir but fuck it! Needs must and 100ml of that whizzed up with a banana is really, really good. And HUGELY calorific, so that might help. And I can add powdered almonds to help bulk it up a bit. I might see if I can find some Kimche. I’m sure I bought some the other day. But that’s fermented which is supposed to be good. I also have a terrible craving for kedgiree, but the way I make it, with a dry rice base rather than a gloopy, risotto style one. Though verboten, I’m sure a knob of butter in there would be fine.

picture of the south downs dappled with sunlight and shade

Here’s a nice picture I took while I was up a down the other day …

I am supposed to give up coffee. I haven’t managed that but I have succeeded in cutting it down from 4 cups a day, to one or two. On the upside, I’ve had no compunction ditching alcohol—also verboten—so I am clearly not the old soak I thought I was.

The applesauce part of the BRAT is a godsend. I had some frozen made with apples from our garden and it’s proper lovely and actually feels very pleasant. I should have frozen it in ice cube trays as it was truly wonderful eating it as it defrosted yesterday, while it still had a crunchy, granular sorbet kind of quality. I also know that you can get liquid meals from the NHS, because I met a dear man in the chemists who is terminally ill, who explained this to me and recommended them. Apparently they’re very small and very expensive to buy over the counter but if all else fails …

So to sum up … I feel ill but I’m not throwing up, so there’s that. I have not found an over the counter medicine that helps, or even makes the remotest dent. I am losing weight and need to try and stop that, or slow it down. Ideas on a post card please …

For once, turning to t’interweb on health matters has not resulted in dire warnings that my time is up. Indeed, it has told me from the get-go that I’m not going to die (no blood in it) although to be honest, if this goes on for another couple of months have grave concerns I may come close (badoom tish did you see what I did there? Yes, that joke was so shit I had to point it out). I suppose if it gets really bad they’ll admit me to hospital and stick me on a drip. I dunno.

What I have learned is that this is Real Thing. Yes, people do get long term stomach infections. It is very rare but it is a Thing. In the case of bacterial ones, they can take anything from weeks to months, to a year to clear. Friends working in pharma sent me the name of the new wonder drug antibiotic for this but sadly I suspect it won’t help as I haven’t the raised white blood cell count that would suggest a bacterial infection, just the low lymphocyte count that points to viral.

Viral infections usually last less time, about 6 months for the longer ones. There is very little information about treatment, management and living with long-term stomach infections on line but a couple of things about having a longer form of gastroenteritis for 2-3 weeks that were helpful.

We are supposed to be going to France on Tuesday. I duly delivered the cat to kennels today, but I suspect that I will not be going. I can’t imagine anything more horrible than travelling like this, or coping, if I get sicker while I’m there. It’s a monumental pisser as I love our spring holiday. It’s always warm in Europe and the flowers are further ahead. It’s alright today but for the most part it’s been fucking freezing here … and it’s forecast to rain for the entire time we’d have been gone. But I’m aware that I’m getting quite weak and having to keep going for a lie down so I’m not certain it’s the best idea to go on a long trip.

I have until Monday to recover … stranger things have happened.

Upsides?

There is one. I had a story competition I wanted to enter but I have to send it in by 7th April. There is now an outside chance that, since I lack the energy to do much more than sit in bed/on a sofa and write I am going to finish a story for this. There’s a chance. I just have to decide which of three things to send …

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Tagged as author blogs, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, off topic

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.

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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Tagged as fubar central, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life

17 Feb 2024 · 12:14 pm

Eyebomb, Therefore I Am: new book release

Yep! You read that correctly, I, M T (writes at a speed which compares unfavourably with continental drift) McGuire have a new book out. This book.

Illustration of eyebombing to show what it is

Eyebomb, Therefore I Am

Currently it is available, with perks, on Kickstarter, until 22nd February and will roll out to other retailers and my own store in a few months. Although, to be honest, by the time I’ve given Ingram/Amazon a cut, the cataloguing people at Betram’s or Gardeners a cut, and the book store a cut, it will cost about £50 a copy from anywhere else, whereas I can sell it at £30 on Kickstarter or my shop and still ‘lose’ some of the postage costs in there along the way so that even the Antipodeans only have to pay about half £10-£15 (£5-£8 if they go for the hardback or purchase the softback with other things).

Yeh, I nearly did …

Here’s some more about it:

Eyebomb, Therefore I Am

Everything’s a bit grim right now isn’t it? So if you’re looking for something to lighten life up a bit, if you want to grace your home, or your coffee table, with something classy-but-funny, light-yet-cutting-edge; something joyously humorous but at the same time, sort of deep. Here’s a book that might be your thing. It’s about street art. Eyebombing, to be exact.

Picture of an eyebombed scaffolding guard at an art exhibion

Yeh that is a Banksey behind there …

Eyebombing is the art, if that’s the right word, of sticking googly eyes onto inanimate objects to give them a personality and raise a smile. See above, and below. I think you may all know this. I’ve forgotten how much I’ve talked about eyebombing on my blog, or not. I know I’ve banged on about it pretty much endlessly on Facebook and Instagram but …

Anyway, if who know my imprint, HUP, or me, you will, at least, know that I illustrate a lot of my social media and blog posts with eyebombing pictures like this:

For years people have been asking me to do a photo book.

Doing a book involved learning a lot of new stuff (like Desktop Publishing) which was a bit daunting. It would also be really expensive (see earlier paragraph) so there wasn’t really much point that I could see. As a result, for almost as many years, about ten to be precise, I ignored peoples’ frequent requests to do a photobook. But people kept on asking, so now I’ve given in, if only to shut them up. Eyebomb, Therefore I Am is the result. Here it is …

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hamgee/eyebomb-therefore-i-am-a-photo-book-of-funny-street-art?ref=1sxan3

And here it is again. This time, with cat for scale, because I didn’t have a banana to hand.

Sniff test passed

Eyebomb, Therefore I Am is my first photo-book. It’s a deluxe 21cm x 21cm (8.5” x 8.5”) hardback containing over 120 images taken my own personal collection of more than 4,000 photos. It’s a bit mad but then … for those of you who read this blog regularly and know me, that should come as absolutely no surprise whatsoever. You will also be unsurprised to learn that the Kickstarter actually started on 7th February and runs until 22nd Feb and I’ve only got round to mentioning it now.

In my defence, I hadn’t got round to writing a blog post in advance, and I was interring both parents in a part of Sussex that is startlingly free of any internet or mobile phone coverage last Saturday so it kind of slipped my mind. More on that story … next week.

Interring the old dears …

As you know, the last couple of years have been quite worrying and my writing muse was having a go slow. When it threw a loop, eyebombing is how I solved my need for creativity; tiny, cheeky, sanity-saving acts of micro creation. No matter how burned out and miserable I was, it was straightforward enough to stick a couple of googly eyes to something and snap a quick photo. Also, there was the added thing that it might make someone laugh and even though I wouldn’t see, that gave me a little buzz.

Picture of an ornate frame with eyes stuck on it so it looks like father Christmas

Oh ho ho

So, yeh. With things really stacking up over the last year, it seemed a good time to have a go at this book because it’s a different kind of creativity. One I actually still had.

Oooh and here’s the blurb!

Eyebomb, Therefore I Am

Step into a realm where inanimate objects come to life and a simple pair of googly eyes holds the power to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. This book invites you to immerse yourself in the whimsical and hilarious world of eyebombing; the art of sticking googly eyes on unsuspecting inanimate items to unleash the joy within.

As you turn each page, you’ll find yourself smiling at the quirky personalities that emerge from everyday articles ranging from lampposts and traffic signs to automatic hand dryers and even dinner. The juxtaposition of the ordinary and the unusual challenges societal norms, reminding us to embrace new or different things, and look for humour in the unlikeliest of places.

Whether you’re a fan of street art, a lover of comedy, or are simply seeking a joyous escape from the mundane, this photo book is sure to leave you grinning from ear to ear. You might even end up stashing a pack of googly eyes in your own pockets and having a go at eyebombing yourself.

So there we go. If you think you’d like to have a look feel free to go here to investigate further: Eyebomb, Therefore I Am on Kickstarter

And yes! OMG! It’s embedded it, Mwahaharhgh! You can watch the vid! What a scream!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hamgee/eyebomb-therefore-i-am-a-photo-book-of-funny-street-art?ref=1sxan3

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Tagged as author blog, Eyebombing, eyebombthereforeiam, eyebombtheschoolrun, good reads, humour, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, M T McGuire new releases, new book releases, new books

21 Jan 2024 · 7:25 pm

Aftermath …

Well, since we’ve talked about my lovely mum dieing, we may as well go on to talk about her funeral and the general aftermath. I wrote, possibly the longest eulogy on earth, except there was so much more I could put in and my brother wrote an equally lengthy one, my nephews and nieces said things, and my son read the lesson. The rain fell out of the sky like someone emptying a bucket over us but strangely, nobody really cared. Not even my poor uncle, who can’t walk without assistance but made it all the way up the church path because I forgot to get the wheelchair out of the church room! What a plank!

One of the important things about a funeral, I think, is that it should be a celebration. It’s like a send off where you laugh and tell stories about the person you loved. It’s how I was taught to do them and I find them enormously cathartic, done that way. So Mum was carried in to Lord of the Dance, because she’d always said she wanted that at her funeral but the priest pointed out that the words are a bit hard core. They are actually. So she got her wish without the hard core words. We tried to keep it short. And failed. We had a requiem mass because that’s what Mum wanted, she was always very disparaging about anyone having ‘a hymn sandwich’ as she and Dad called it. Mwahaharhgh, except she wasn’t because she wouldn’t have criticised anyone who’d decided to have one, she just didn’t want to do that for any of her rellies or have us do it for her. We found a whole bunch of lovely photos of her which I’ve uploaded to her memory wall because loads of people couldn’t come. We also got the service recorded. Originally we were going to try for a live stream but the signal round the church is even worse than it is round my parents’ house so it was loaded onto the web afterwards.

Slight hiccup when I went to the cupboard to borrow Mum’s dark blue coat only to discover that my brother had already taken all but a single puffa (which was even mankier than the one I’d brought with me) for the Ukranians. Luckily we found some kind of embroidered affair upstairs in Mum’s wardrobe. I put it back when I was done and now I’m slightly regretting it. I’ll definitely nick it next time I’m down. It absolutely threw it down with rain. My poor friend who came from Worcester took five hours to get home, and another friend who was about an hour up the road took two and a half hours to get home. Joy.

How does it feel now?

Kind of weird, if I’m honest. There’s still an absolute metric craptonne of admin, forms to fill in stuff to scan, copy and submit, and an absolute gargantuan raft of other shite. And I’m skint. As ever. And will be for some time because … probate. Obviously we’ve had to take anything worth nicking out of the house as well, and put it in storage and then we’ll have to bring it all back when we get a date for the probate valuation. Head desk. Oh well.

Apart from that though …? It’s hard to explain but, this last ten years as I’ve shared my frustrations at my complete inability to write books at a reasonable speed and my all general ineptitude with you lot, it’s been quite a struggle. A lot of the time, this blog was all I could write. The eyebombing helped of course. That was a bit of a win. But the thing about dementia is it’s sad. Even when the person is quite happy the way Mum was. I’ve been sad a lot of the time for the past eight or ten years and the five before that I was just exhausted.

We have a memory page for Mum with a link to give to the Dementia Society (Admiral Nurses) because they were incredibly kind to me when I rang their helpline which I did, in pieces, several times.

Picture of a lady in a chair reading a newspaper

I love this picture of Mum.

My godmother and I were chatting today and she said she’d looked at the page, and the pictures of Mum and found it very distressing to see the last one, at Mum’s 90th birthday celebration because she felt, looking at the picture, that a lot of Mum had already gone. It’s probably true. At the end, Mum was like a tiny flame, a pilot light compared to the brightly burning, vibrant personality she had been. It was hard to watch her like that, although, since she wasn’t in distress, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

Mum was so energetic though. Back in 2015/6 when this all started, I would go and stay with my parents and I would help Mum around the house, being a spare; running to fetch things because I could move faster, cutting stuff up for her because her hands were too arthritic. I had a small child but I would still come home exhausted after a few days trying to keep up with my nearly 80 year old mother. I remember Mum’s annoyance when, aged 77, her doctor suggested that perhaps it was time to stop digging potatoes herself and that maybe she should ask someone else to do it. I also remember when she was embargoed from going to that part of the garden because her panic button wouldn’t reach there. I arrived one Wednesday and found her arranging flowers, including some flowers from a tree that was well into the verboten zone.

‘Have you been down to the fruit cage?’ I asked her.

‘No, no. Not at all,’ she said.

She laughed like a drain when I pointed out the blossom and told her I’d got her bang to rights.

Sorry, none of this is really how it feels is it?

In truth, I feel as if I have lived the last 15 years of my life in twilight. First with a small child although that was uplifting, even if it was exhausting, and then with my parents. One of the hardest aspects with Mum was that there was no ‘sane’ one. Whereas with Dad, I knew exactly what to do because Mum was his soul mate and his best friend. She knew him so well that she understood exactly what he would have wanted us to do, had he been mentally equipped to decide. Except that it does get more complicated than that because the person with dementia changes so instead of putting the others round them at the centre of the world, they centre on their own needs. And those needs change. Case in point Mum, who went from ‘the minute your father goes, I’ll downsize to a nice little bungalow and then we won’t have to worry about money because it’ll see me out.’ To, ‘the house MUST stay in the family at all costs.’

Go figure.

Also, I’m not quite sure what was worse, watching Dad’s suffering or watching the effect it had on Mum, so having a sane one to consult did have a downside. The good thing was that Mum had given me a perfect demonstration of how caring for someone was done, so it was straightforward enough to just do what she did for Dad, for her.

I miss her though, and I will for a while, but when I think of her, I see light in my mind’s eye. Kindly, gentle light. And peace. So that’s grand.

Rain soaked town … Long passage of doom. I dunno. Go figure.

I have her engagement ring. It means a huge amout to me because it meant so much to her, but also because she meant so much to Dad, so it’s kind of the love of both parents rolled into one. At the same time, it’s also a lovely thing, and I am delighted with it on an asthetic shiny-thing-appreciation level which actually makes me feel a bit guilty. (Now I can hear the voice of Dad in my head telling me there’s nothing wrong with thinking it’s a beautiful ring because he thought it was and so did Mum and that being able to appreciate the ring in both respects is nothing to be ashamed of. Nonetheless …) My ring size is N and a half. Mum always joked about having hands like shovels and massive knuckles. I never thought she did until I tried to wear her ring. It was U and a half! I could have worn it with gloves Lord Vernon style … on the outside. Mwahaharhgh. When I picked it up from the undertakers, I put one of those plastic things you can get on it to make it smaller. It was two weeks before I could bring myself to remove it so it could be altered. But I knew that if I didn’t get it altered soon, I’d gesticulate and it would ping off somewhere and I’d never see it again. So I went to one of the lovely jewellers in town. I got it back on Friday. I’m not sure I’ll be taking it off again for a while.

Sometimes, on sunny days, I imagine my parents’ drawing room. I see the way the sun shines through the windows casting bright slanted oblongs of light across the wooden floor. I hear the birds outside. I see the ashes of the most recent fire in the grate. It’s a lovely room. Sitting in there is like being hugged. No wonder that house has only had three owners since 1911. It’s a bit special. It feels kind. Perfect match for my parents really.

What next?

Nothing much for a while. We have the interment of both Mum and Dad’s ashes on 10th. Which reminds me, I must pop down there and rescue Dad from Mum’s desk. We’re going to drop him off at the undertaker’s for a quick holiday so they can pop him into his casket and Mum into hers. They’ll be interred at the school where Dad worked, next to several of their much loved friends.

On the writing front, there’s not much. That’s fine. I didn’t write a thing for three months after Dad died. And then it only built up very slowly. I’m not expecting anything much there, although I will welcome it when it does start up again. Which reminds me. The eyebombing book’s on its way. I’m launching it on 7th February and the campaign will be live for 15 days. Hopefully I’ll hit my target of five purchasers but if I don’t I’ll just have to chalk it up to experience. It’s good to try these things.

Other than that. It’s drifting in limbo until probate’s done. And as for my newfound freedom … that feels as if it’s not going to come true. We’ve inherited a house miles away from either of us and not enough money to keep it going, unoccupied, for more than a few months. Something’s bound to go wrong, it’ll burn down … or thinking about it WWIII will start. Yeh. That’s more likely. Just as my kickstarter goes live they’ll have some massive, hideous war and it’ll fail because we’ll have all fried (hey, guess what? I never catastrophise, not at all). But it does all feel a bit weird. Like I’ve crept under the radar of the fates. It can’t last. I’m going to get rumbled.

After some years where I’ve found it difficult not to feel that, if life is a gift, there were parts of mine that were definitely a dog turd in a paper bag, I’m standing on the brink of a new kind of existance where I might, possibly, have some time and mental energy. Part of me feels it’s one I don’t deserve, or at the least, that I’m not going to get away with it. A simple, straightforward life feels like one that isn’t possible, moreover like one that I’m not entitled to. A big part of me is waiting for something to come piling out of left field to make certain sure doesn’t happen. As if things aren’t allowed to go right for me. I suspect this is part of the process after anything that’s been a bit of a long schlepp. Or maybe it’s survivors’ guilt messing with my head.

Mwahahaargh! As you can see, I’m still the same gargantuan melmet I ever was. Melmet: someone who is such a plonker they are a melt and a helmet, ergo, a Melmet. This is one of my son’s words and I think it’s brilliant. I can also put it into my books as I’m sure Big Merv will be calling The Pan a ‘melmet’ and can even explain that it’s toolbit and melt, which means I can get away with it because even if helmet is a bit rude, toolbit isn’t. Mwahaharhgh!

So there we are. And now McOther has arrived with a glass of sherry and I must take a sip or two and then head off to collect McMini from his boyfriend’s house. So that’s me for this week.

In the meantime, if you are a friend of the family visiting and you want to visit Mum’s memory page, you can do that here:

Memory Page: https://elisabethbell.muchloved.com/

Playback of the service: https://visual-memorials.co.uk/elisabeth-bell

If you are not a friend of the family, you’ll not be interested in those but you might be interested in my forthcoming release: Eyebomb, Therefore I Am which is launching on Kickstarter and then will probably be available from my website (because I might have some copies left). If you’re interested in that, you can follow the campaign and it will let you know when it launches. I now have the princely sum of 36 followers on it, although I suspect they are mostly people who have absolutely no intention of buying the book but want to make the algorithm think it is popular! Mwayaharhgh! My mates being kind basically.

Eyebomb! Thereofre I am.

Anyway, if you’re interested in having a look you can also see a preview of the campaign which I have now finally finished! Yes! Even also including the video.

You can find inks to those below:

Follow and get warned when it goes live here.

Have a sneak preview here

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Tagged as an author with children, author blog, death, dementia aftermath, Eyebombing, M T McGuire, M T McGuire new releases, off topic