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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

21 Oct 2023 · 12:00 pm

Balls … all of it.

Well, it’s been a long time and I suspect most of you have wandered off, assuming I have disappeared off into the ether.

Nope, like a bad smell, I never go away, I linger. I have just … yeh well, to be honest I’ve completely lost the plot. I wouldn’t say I’m actually burning out yet but let’s say … we’re on the red line and there’s definitely an alarming aroma of burning oil and hot metal. Hence my stepping back. So having not blogged for a long time it’s time to catch up. Yes. You know what you’re going to get now, don’t you? That’s right. An entire sodding book. Mwahahahrgh. Jolly dee then. On we go.

You want to know how my life’s going right now? Here’s how it’s going.

A few days ago, as I was walking up the garden path, minding my own bleedin’ business when a sleepy wasp fell out of a tree and landed on my head, at which point it got stuck in my hair and the little bastard stung my face. Worse, the breeze kept blowing my hair, plus—now incandescent—jabby stingy wasp, back at my cheek. As I flapped at my hair to try and keep the wasp off me, and at the same time, shake it free, I inadvertently batted my glasses into the shrubbery. Then of course, I couldn’t find them because I wasn’t wearing my bloody glasses. Luckily McOther heard me effing and blinding, took pity on me and found them for me, although he had to put on his reading glasses first or he wouldn’t have been able to sodding see.

Finally, after repeated bouts of ‘the Wasp Dance’ the pesky insect in question fell out of my hair and landed drunkenly on the patio. I’m afraid I was very angry with it and trod on it.

Welcome to my world. Shit like this happening the whole. Fucking. Time. Shit so fucking bizarre you couldn’t make it up; day, after day, after day. I really should write more of it down.

So that’s set the tone. Now you know what you’re in for with the rest of this. Mwahahahrgh! I can’t say my life is lacking in comedy it’s just that it’s the kind of stuff that, if I put it in a book, would have reviewers saying it was too slapstick and unrealistic to be true.

Mmm.

The evidence would suggest that, here at McGuire towers, we are some kind of fucking masochists, we have had the fullest room in the house re floored. Why the fuck did we do that? This has involved us moving shelves, about 300 books and about 8,000 LPs a table, a sofa, a doll’s house, a printer, a LOT of curtains and Lord knows how much other shite into different parts of the house.

When the LPs are leaning against the wall along the length of 3 metre room double thickness, you know there are rather a lot of them. Said room is also full of boxes of books, tables, there’s a doll’s house and all sorts of shit. Not to mention a sofa blocking the door so you can’t actually get into it and a giant set of shelves all but blocking the hall.

The room being re floored is also a main thoroughfare. Think, central hall. So to get from most of the house to the kitchen we have to go up the stairs, along a corridor, and down the back stairs into the kitchen instead of along a hall and through a room, because we can’t walk on a newly tiled floors because … glue.

To get to the utility room and the freezer we have to go outside into the pissing rain, round the side of the house and in through the back door. To put the cat to bed … well … he’s having to sleep in another room. He’s doing really well—because cats don’t like this kind of stuff but he hasn’t run away—although I suspect he’s not enjoying it. There were many set backs. It was meant to happen two weeks ago but other jobs over ran and the chap couldn’t get to us until this week.

On the up side, we can access all rooms without having to actually climb in through a window. Frankly, the state things are, I call that a win.

Unfortunately, having the entire house becoming more and more discombobulated over a period of several weeks (because that room has taken a long time to clear because it was packed well above it’s plimsoll line with shit, anyway) has left me astoundingly arse about face. I have no fucking clue which way is up. Or at least, even less fucking clue than I usually have. On the up side. They’re done. And though we can’t walk on it tonight. Again. It will be dry tomorrow and—pending a quick once over with a mop—finished.

Then it will take us another three weeks to move all the shit back again.

No. We’re not going to.

We’re going to sort though the shit and sell/bin it. That’s kind of OK except I have so much fucking shit to sort though and get rid of and now it looks like I might be adding Mum’s to the mix because we all know how brilliant I am at cataloguing and tidying things up or selling them/giving them away. There’s a reason my rather fabulous collection of plastic tat has been languishing in 39 boxes above the garage since we moved here 15 years ago, instead of on display and it’s not all about lacking the room.

(Yes, just in case you need this spelled out. I’m shit at those things. Really, astoundingly, gobsmackingly, special-super-hero-attribute levels of shit, so my life is going to be an unbounded joy for the next six months/year but hopefully things will fuck off and leave me alone after that.)

On the Mum front. Mum is running out of money. The people who are supposed to be getting continuing care for us appear to have stopped doing whatever it is they do and I’ve chalked 4 grand of her cash up to experience. My interactions with them are very different to that of Mum’s carer, who recommended them to us. She said they couldn’t do enough to help, my experience is they have taken 4 grand of Mum’s cash and can’t do enough not to. I’ve paid 4k and it seems their job is to tell me what to do and wait until I do it for them. I did think, for that kind of eye watering fee, that the carers and I were going to provide the information and they were going to collate it.

No. Maybe the precedents they will use to prove their case will make the cash worth it. Maybe but it’s worrying, when the key reason I went to them was because I knew I was too burned out to collect the information required and navigate the process on my own in the time we have available.

The way things are, I am, indeed, too burned out to chase this stuff up myself and they aren’t doing it either. They do not volunteer any communication. I have to contact them, they take two or three days to reply to emails, and it’s not possible to speak to anyone on the phone, you have to leave a message and then they call you back, usually during a doctor’s appointment, or while you’re driving, or on the loo or in an area of stupendously sketchy mobile phone coverage.

I asked how it was going and they said they were waiting for medical records and asked me to send a document I’d already sent. I did so and chased up Mum’s doctor. They then contacted me to say they were still waiting for the records. I said I’d chased and asked them to let me know when the records arrived. Next port of call, chase them again and then, presumably, chase it up with Mum’s doctor.

Having employed them because I needed someone to do this shit for me, to take the admin out of my hands because I’m too slow to do it they’re just sitting there making me do it all. Indeed, it seems I’ve lumbered myself with a double layer, and a stopper between myself and the care board that is slowing things down rather than speeding them up.

Ho hum. So yeh. It’s probably actually taken longer than it would have done if I’d done it on my own. Head. Desk.

A learning moment then. Chalking that one up to experience. I’ve sent them heaven knows how many documents, in certain instances, several times. You wait. I’ll get a lovely email from them tomorrow now and feel really guilty for writing this.

No. I won’t. Although they say it takes 8 weeks to process after they’ve received all the information and I think Mum’s doctor is dragging his feet signing off the medical records, because he’s absolutely swamped with admin.

Meanwhile things are progressing slowly with identifying a possible learning issue for McMini. I am hoping to get an assessment for visual processing which is something that is relatively straightforward to sort once it’s identified. He’s burned out and I don’t think he would be burning out from school if there wasn’t something making life extra difficult for him. His intellect is razor sharp, which makes it all the more difficult. As I understand it, burn out is one of the tell-tale signs of a learning thing.

Other Mum news. OK, so … the continuing health care company may yet come through, but Mum’s financial reserves are unlikely to outlast the time it is going to take. That means we have to sell the house. Talking to one of her carers the other Wednesday, she confirmed that Mum doesn’t really know where she is anymore, which means we can now move her. So she’s going to my lovely brother. Not to live with him but to a home near him which is opening up, quietly, bit by bit, and which specialises in dementia care. We were looking at next year but Bruv has to do the do during the school holidays and I should be there to help too. If I am going to have Christmas at Mum’s with her that means, the way our holidays and trips abroad fall, that it would be June 2024 before we could move her. Too late. We’ll have run out of cash. Or just after Christmas. Except, if I do that, it will have to be the first week in January or Bruv is back to work and as a teacher, with school holidays, he can’t really ask for time off during term time for this.

But … we are going to McOther’s folks in Scotland for New Year and we can’t cancel that because they are 5 hours away, they can’t travel and with Saturday school, holidays and half terms are the only times we can go.

So … the only other time is the beginning of the this school holidays … which means I needed to drop everything last weekend and belt up to Shrewsbury to look at the home, which was lovely, luckily. It was lovely to see Bruv, wife and kids too and heartening to meet the staff and see the home. I genuinely think Mum will be happy there.

Having given the home the green light, we’re moving her mid December. Then we have to clear the house and sell it. I have to do stuff like cancel the phone and broadband contracts and get the garage cleared (it’s full of stuff that belongs to someone else). Bruv and I have to decide a) who gets what and b) what we might sell to pay care fees.

It’s been interesting, as at one point I was looking to meld Mum’s broadband and phone into one. This would be £20 a month for both rather than £30 for each one. However, where the utilities (except the broadband) were all with one company; SSE, that company is now defunct so it all went to Ovum or OVO or whatever they are. They then divested themselves of the phone account to a company called Origin broadband. I rang Origin but in the long chain of passing accounts from one operator to another something has changed the account name. It’s no longer in Mum’s name it seems, or at least, when I gave the account number and they asked for my account name for ‘security’ and I gave mum’s name, as printed on their welcome letter, they said I had got it wrong. They asked for a title. There isn’t one so I said Mrs. That was not the correct salutation apparently. I then suggested ‘hello’ which is what it said on the welcome letter. That was also wrong. We tried two different spellings of Elisabeth; the way she spells it and the usual one but that wasn’t right either. So nobody at Origin can actually access my mother’s telephone account … because it’s not in her name. So that’s a joy to come when I try and cancel the phone.

Dealing with Origin I spoke to a lovely lady in South Africa (she used ‘just now’ and had the accent) and we did have quite a giggle about it as she tried 101 different permutations of Mum’s name to get in but we failed in our mission and she wasn’t able to help. We had to give up which is a little ominous.

I guess I just write to them and cancel the Direct Debit with the bank, but they are now dealt with by a call centre in India (even though Mum chose a special account specifically to have her telephone banking handled by a UK based call centre). The folks in Bombay or wherever it is are actually lovely but it’s a terrible line, a lot of them are really soft spoken so even I have trouble hearing them and they are far more interested a perfect administrative record than any meaningful customer service — jeez nobody does admin and minutia-driven bureaucracy like a this lot I wonder if they’re handling BT’s help line as well — so I’m not sure how far I’ll get with that.

Meanwhile, I’ve been getting vaguer and vaguer. I know dementia is my destiny but I was hoping not quite yet. Two weeks ago I bought an air plant in the market. I know I had it with me at the check out shortly afterwards in Marks & Spencer’s because I remember picking it up and taking it outside but somewhere between M&S and home I put down the bag it was in and failed to pick it up again. I literally don’t know where I lost it. I only remembered I’d bought it two weeks afterwards. Arnold’s pants. What a bell end.

In health news, because I am one eighth French, which means that if you ask me how I am I WILL tell you … I have finally been to the doctor properly about my aching hands and while I suspect they are a bit arthritic, the main problem is carpal tunnel. The sore arm I have been experiencing when metal detecting for the last year and a bit which has suddenly become permanently painful … that’s tennis elbow. So I’ve had that for over a year and the carpal tunnel since 2015.

Ah.

Nice to know I’ve been looking after myself. Mwahahahrgh!

On the upside, both those things can be fixed with physiotherapy. Excellent. So long as I haven’t fucked the hands up too badly in the intervening 7 years since they started. I had been to the doctor before about the hands but they said it was arthritis. My bad, though, I should have been more articulate about the type of pain. I didn’t really think about it until it got really bad. Then I realised it wasn’t responding to the same things as my arthritic bits do.

So that’s a joy. But hopefully a fixable one.

There are Christmas events too! Please do feel free to come and visit me at the St Edmundsbury Cathedral Christmas Fair on 23rd – 25th November, 2023. Woot. I will be the one dying on my arse while those around me sell stuff feverishly hand-over-fist. I’m busy prepping for this, I have to order some eyebombing calendars, a couple of books and some cards. I also have to decide whether I’m going to visit a local cafe, clean the mirror in their loos and take another photo of the eyebomb I did there so it looks better as a Christmas card than the picture I have already.

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

Oh ho ho

Right now it’s the spit of Father Christmas but you can really see the dust. I thought writing Oh-ho-ho! in red or drawing a silly hat on it might help. I dunno.

Events! Norcon! I never blogged about Norcon! It was fabulous this year. Sorry not to post. Although no Nigel Planer selfie this time because he wasn’t there. Pity as I loved his book and was hoping I could buttonhole him and tell him. It has a similar feel to mine, which was heartening. So yeh, would have loved to have talked to him about that. Never mind. Can’t win ‘em all. Maybe next year. I sold a lot of books though, at pre covid levels. Which was lovely.

Ditto McMini’s most recent gig. Jeepers but he has gigs springing up like mushrooms all over East Anglia, including a Friday here and another on the next night in Norwich which will be a bit hard core for his perennially knackered 55 year old mother even if it will be fun. I should add that I sell the merch so it’s like doing a small event. I’ll get used to it though and the last gig I went home to entertain dinner guests and other people sold the merch for me!

Where was I? Oh yes. Events. A few weeks after Norcon it was time to take part in the first ever Fringe Literary Festival, here in our very own Bury St Edmunds. They had a short story completion: Fast Forward, for flash fiction up to 500 words. I put the start of an incomplete series in (one of the many things I’ve managed to get half way through but is now too complicated to complete until the emotional load is lighter than it is now). OK I condensed it a lot but if you want to listen, it’s here. Although there’s a lot of background noise. Sorry about that but the stories were read out in venues around Bury which was brilliant but less easy to record cleanly. Not that it mattered! As always, I was stoked to hear it read out. Here it is anyway.

So there you have it. Things are very, very hectic. I have a talk about burnout on 7th December. I’ve been working on it all year and I am cautiously optimistic that I will get it done in time but it’s tough because I’m … well … burned out. Mwahahrgh! Even more burned out than usual! As for writing, have I written anything new? Have I bollocks? Sigh. Maybe LIFE will fuck off for a bit next year and I’ll get a chance.

Ho hum, onwards and upwards? How have you been this last three months?

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Tagged as author blog, author blogs, author parent, comedy fantasy fiction, dementia, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, K'Barthan Series, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, off topic, writers, writing

15 Jul 2023 · 12:23 pm

Modern life is rubbish!

This is a blog post I wrote a couple of days ago. I’ve wrestled with my conscience as to whether I should actually post it. Mainly because it’s only going to worry people. I promise we’re all OK, but I do need to vent sometimes. This, being my blog, seems as good a place as any to do that. So it comes with a <rant mode> warning. Naturally, it’s written with a mental voice I use specifically for ranting which sounds like John Cleese doing Basil Fawlty going off on one. If any of it makes you laugh, that is the correct reaction. It is meant, foremost to amuse, but also to inform a bit in that it does genuinely feel like that sometimes.

Since the entire tirade genuinely reflects the way I felt at the time I wrote it, I think that, in the interests of full transparency, I should publish it. And also because I haven’t written anything else, so here it is.

[Rant mode] Modern life is rubbish!

A famous Blur album from the 1990s but also, sadly, very true for me. Or perhaps if I’m honest I should say, I am rubbish at modern life.

Aroogah! Aroogah! Whinge warning!

OK so I’m going to go on a teeny bit of a rant here, because in many respects, I’ve had a pretty rough time of it lately, and since this is my blog, I can sodding well do what I like. But I have a burning question right now and it’s this.

Why am I so unsuited to modern life? Because despite having been invited to sit the mensa test, it counts for zilch since I’m as thick as pigshit when it comes to certain, more mathematical strains of logic. I write numbers back to front and upside down (and add them up that way too) I often mange to look up completely the wrong hymn in church—because I read the number back to front—and my organisational skills are negligible. I couldn’t organise a fart in bed but the most galling thing is that despite knowing this, I still haven’t hit on a way to learn how to be organised. It just … doesn’t.

Then there’s the Mum stuff. The perfect storm of every single thing at which I am shit. I have skills. Are they any use to me for this? Of course they’re fucking not, I need the jot tittle and iota of formfilling and box ticking down pat and frankly, I suspect I’ve more chance of getting to the moon by putting car springs on my feet and trying to jump than I do of bossing that sort of stuff.

Mum’s mortgage money is dwindling astonishingly fast so I am trying to get some help from the NHS with her care costs. Yes, I know, I’m in the UK and the NHS is supposed to provide healthcare free to all at the point of need and yes, it does … except that some aspects of healthcare are more free than others. When you have dementia, it’s classed as a ‘social’ illness and dealt with by social services and presumably mental health services. It is a mental illness but at the same time, it isn’t because the causes of dementia are physical; strokes, bleeds to the brain, or neural diseases like Alzheimer’s, Lewy bodies, Motor Neurone etc which are all caused by physical factors, even if medical science doesn’t always understand why they happen, it’s a physical factor, not a mental one, which causes these outcomes.

Unfortunately, the NHS changed its classification of dementia back in the late 90s and for a whole swathe of people it was too late to plan for any healthcare costs, they just had to hope they wouldn’t need them. Worse, if those people did try to offload some cash after diagnosis, they stood the chance of being had up for avoiding care fees which is called deprivation of assets and is considered to be a criminal offence.

Some folks were lucky and they didn’t get dementia or they died fairly soon into the journey. My parents weren’t. One of the diffiiculties is that, for example, Mum has a house and the logical thing to do, from the point of view of death duties, would be for her to make over the house to us but continue to live there but even if she does this in a way that is compliant with UK tax law, then, since her dementia diagnosis, it would be a criminal offence because that would be trying to leave something to her children rather than spend the last of her and Dad’s assets on the healthcare she was promised for free until it was too late for her to do anything about it. Oh, and because the fact she and Dad have spent around £900k on care fees, to date—that’s right, close to ONE MILLION QUID—one million quid I didn’t even know they had, it still isn’t enough because the bastards want to make sure they strip those assets thoroughly, family antiques, pictures, the house, it’s all got to be sold to pay for care costs, or you have to make over the house to the authorities if they are going to pay (there may or may not be a cap on how much they can take for this. I think it depends where you are).

Yep, if you want to be tax efficient with your will, or try to avoid paying every last penny you have in care costs and give something to your kids … well … if you’re dying of cancer that’s OK. If you have a benign front temporal lobe brain tumour that presents very similar symptoms to the ones Dad endured, that’s OK, but if your affliction is associated with dementia then no. I’m sorry. If you try to do it, then, it’s a crime. Remember people, the D in dementia stands for destitute, and as far as the state is concerned, if you’re not destitute by the end of it, they’ve done something wrong. You’re supposed to surrender everything to pay for your care fees, suddenly, it becomes an actual crime to leave anything for your children or grandchildren.

Because we’re lovely compassionate people here in the UK and when our government screws over our citizens it likes to do it properly. Dementia isn’t a long grinding and hard enough road on its own, oh no, the government and the NHS like to ensure they make it as shitty for everyone concerned as possible. Why help one dementia patient when with a few deft tweaks to the care system, you can ensure there are more and double the assets you strip from the afflicted. Twice the money. Chancellor rubs hands together. Excellent.

As you can see, I’m not bitter or angry about this. Not at all.

Seriously, though. I genuinely don’t give a shit about my inheritance, that’s gone, although I do care about my brother’s half and that he gets nothing as well. What does make me angry is that it’s cost me pretty much everything; the never ending, grinding awfulness of it all has sapped me of any meaningful ability to write books and with that my purpose. It’s cost me being a decent mother, it’s cost me being an attentive wife, it’s cost me keeping in touch with my friends and wider family because it’s such a massive drag on my mental energy that I can only just keep in touch with a few folks. I guess we could just stop with, it’s cost me my happiness in many respects, or perhaps my contentment because in terms of stress, time, sadness, love, pain and god knows what else, it’s blown away any semblance of concentration and mental capacity I had (yes! Stress gives you brain fog, who’d have thunk it). It’s cost my husband and son because they feel it too, and they’ve seen me cry, many times and in my son’s case, at far too young an age. It’s cost my brother and his wife and my nephews and niece just as much.

I fucking resent the price we, and thousands like us, have paid because the illness our parents have endured has the wrong name. It does, indeed boil my piss. Mwahahahargh! I try not to think about it too much.

And fair due, when I say they take ‘every last penny’ they do generously leave you the last 23k. Except they don’t—and it’s not—because there’s a sliding scale of help beyond that and the full package doesn’t kick in until you are at £14k … which, to put this in perspective, is about 9 weeks of care fees.

Anyway, the amount of form filling! As you know, I am always a tower of strength when it comes to form filling, says she, with deep sarcasm. Did I mention that looking after Mum’s finances, healthcare and general wellbeing is a perfect storm of every single thing at which I am shit? And so was Dad’s. And it’s been going on for years and years, and years. And I am so, so fucking tired of my entire life being about trying to boss an enormous collection of all the things I am emotionally, physically and mentally least equipped to do. And Oh Lordy I took McMini to a consultation with a counsellor today and we fleetingly touched on the whole dementia dementor that is sucking away my life and I actually nearly wept. It caught me completely broadside because I thought I was through all that.

Not quite. Clearly.

The other day, I was listening to a programme on BBC sounds about dementia and they were so fucking upbeat.

‘Do you know carers everywhere save the government over £11bn a year?’ they said (or something along those lines). ‘Aren’t you all marvellous?’

Yeh the same way clapping people is so much better than giving them a pay rise and we don’t save them the money, they take it from us.

And I was sat there in the car, bundling along the M25 (it was flowing well that day) shouting,

‘No! We’re not fucking marvellous you absolute pus wangle! We’re fucking desperate, and lost and we have NOTHING left to give and NOTHING left to fight with! And no-one fucking gives a shit! And while I’m shouting at the windscreen like this, worrying the person in the car next to me,’ MTM turns, gives the nervous looking woman in the nissan micra a thumbs up and waves. ‘Can I just mention what it costs US? Everything. Fucking everything. Let me repeat that! It costs us every. fucking. thing. Our social lives, our hobbies, our capacity for coherent thought, our health and in some cases our sanity or our actual fucking lives.’

OK so I appreciate that sounds melodramatic but sadly, it’s true. One demented relative, and you are surrendering to years of sleepless nights and brain fog. Think new baby for years, and years, and YEARS until the lack of sleep kills you.

In a horrible irony, do you know what the result of that level of stress, for 15 years, was for Mum? That’s right. Dementia for her too. What a kindly joy! Thanks God you absolute get. The woman who said, ‘I don’t really care what happens to me when I get old, so long as I don’t lose my marbles.’ is losing her marbles.

Thank you, you to whichever clusterfuck of cucking funts made that decision back in the 1990s because thanks to your intervention she has, indeed, lost her fucking marbles.

Bastards.

Yes! I’m sure I’m entitled to all sorts of benefits and help and Mum gets it, what there is, but I’m too exhausted to look into it. And when I do, it’s for people spending 36 hours a week on care. If you have a part-time job that you can no longer do because of the strain of looking after your demented relative, that means you’re not eligible. If you worked during the school day, you’re not eligible because that’s not 36 hours. It’s a fucking shower! And I’m just running a house, a care team and a life from afar. I’m not even one of the poor bastards at home doing it 24/7 with no let up, no relief and no fucking hope. Waking up every hour all through the night and trying to persuade their demented relative to sleep because they are so … fucking … tired. People with dementia can live a full and happy life but it costs their loved ones everything. And nobody gives a fucking toss.

Then there’s … ugh … other stuff. Other stuff is a bit patchy to be honest. Everyone has a Draco Malfoy (look it up if you don’t know) and McMini is no exception. There’s a kid picking on him at school and for a while a lad who was a friend at one point was joining in, which made it extra specially hurtful. The ex friend has stopped now, thank goodness, but the other lad has continued. Luckily McMini, who was bullet proof on that score, and then very suddenly, not bullet proof, seems to have rediscovered his armour and ceased to care about the Draco Malloy in his life. Long may that continue.

Though the school is being brilliant it’s been tough for him. Hence the counsellor (psychotherapist who does counselling) and I arranged for us to meet to see if a few sessions would help. Things are a great deal better but I still want rule in or our whether or not Mc(not so)Mini might need a few handy coping strategies. Mainly because I doubt I’d be here now, in quite the same form, had I not had a lot of CBT at the beginning of this fucking dementia nightmare. And while he’s coping fine now, the kid who picks on him is still picking on him. So I set up an initial session to meet and see if the counsellor could help.

The first session was on Tuesday.

I forgot.

Jesus, Mary, Joseph and their fluffy donkey. Fuck me but I’m a fucking dickwad.

You know what. A few years ago I did an intelligence test, the result was a bit like a spider with 8 zones of intelligence and scores for each. Basically, I scored a solid top 80%-90% in seven of the eight areas. However, in one area—numeracy and certain mathematical logic—I scored below 20%. In an IQ test I scored one point off genius level (on paper, I’m well thick on screen) yet for everything that matters in wrangling my and my mother’s day-to-day existence my fucking enormous teflon-head brain is of absolutely fuck all use. The only thing my intelligence achieves is a keen awareness of how lacking I am in the one single form of fucking intellect I actually need. There are people out there with such severe cognitive disabilities that they are unable to live independently who are smarter than I am in the only area that anyone counts.

All my life I’ve railed against the stupid fucking bigots who say that the only intelligence that counts is mathematical intelligence and discount everyone else whose abilities aren’t a carbon copy of their own as ‘stupid’ because they’re too unimaginative to see the worth in any other kind of intelligence. I heartily loathe those people who aver that only one kind of intelligence is the arbiter of all intelligence and that without it you are thick, much as I heartily loathe the way the morning people have managed to fit the entire world to the way they function and have convinced us all that being a night owl (a logical evolutionary step to ensure some of the tribe was always awake to keep watch) makes you some kind of morally bankrupt deviant.

Sadly, modern life and educational standards are set up for mathematical logic, and nothing else, and it’s amazing the number of people who, when I suggest that it’s possible to be intelligent without being mathematically intelligent, will agree but then basically say, no. Engineering and construction and most stuff runs on maths or is designed using maths they argue. Therefore our world is built on maths and it is the apogee of all intelligence. I completely get that. I get that it’s important.

But we don’t all need ALL the maths to just … you know … live. I mean, for starters, if everyone in the village has one kind of intelligence and is brilliant at building the bridges, who’s going to do the fucking cooking? Rishi’s barking plan about maths until people are 18 … well … it depends what they teach. But trying to get people like me to understand advanced trigonometry isn’t going to happen, no matter how many times you try and drum it into me. It’s just a waste of everyone’s time.

Nobody insists we all play an instrument to grade 8 level and shames anyone who can’t as an inferior or a second grade person. Some people aren’t musical. Nobody gives them any grief. Some people aren’t mathematical. Newsflash. That isn’t a fucking crime. Why this ridiculous insistence that mathematical intelligence is the only thing that matters? It’s bullshit! Surely, unless they want to be a theoretical physicist then, so long as a person can manage their finances, or parse a spreadsheet/find an expert they trust to do it for them that’s all they need.

Yes, we need to understand certain mathematical basics to get by but the way they go on. It’s like saying that only one colour matters or that only one musical note is important. And what will making people who are useless at something keep trying—and failing at it—do for their confidence.

‘You have so much to give, and so much talent but that counts as nothing because this one tiny facet of intelligence (that you’re shit at) is the only thing that matters.’

Is that a healthy message to send to our kids? From one who received it loud and clear at school throughout their entire fucking childhood let me assure you that it’s very much not.

The other day, when I forgot that session with the counsellor for McMini, I hated myself: truly fucking hated myself in a way I’ve managed to avoid since the CBT I did to deal with just this kind of negativity when I was first trying to look after my parents and navigate the absolute craptonne of admin they seemed to generate. Fact is though, I’m just a massive fucking white elephant. I know I am. Normally, I can look away and carry on living the lie that there is some actual fucking point to my existence but yesterday. No.

It’s so hard to be bright, really bright, in a whole arena of disciplines which, while perfectly valid, are discounted by modern culture as worthless, it’s even more frustrating to be smart, but, at the same time utterly, crushingly, mind-numbingly thick at the only subject by which the world gauges intellectual worth … and filling in forms … and admin. Oh I know it’s a them problem (and the fact that I care is a me problem) but it’s fucking galling. It’s not that maths isn’t important, it’s that not everyone is going to use it to an advanced level, not everyone will need to and more to the point, not everyone can. Making them try for years is just going to make them feel shit about themselves and as we all know, miserable people beget misery.

Actually if you want to appreciate what trying to force people to study something beyond their ceiling does just read this. Read this to see just how shaming people who are bad at maths makes them feel. Read this to see how giving people the impression they are stupid or somehow morally lacking, because they are less able at something you can do easily makes people feel.

It’s this idea that because some people are engineers or scientists and are using maths to define space and time, or build bridges, we should all be doing it. It’s like saying that every single person in existence should be made to write a book. It’s like saying, ‘oh we’re having a bit of trouble with the new covid vaccine, MTM why don’t you have a go?’ and being surprised and upset when I can’t crack it. It’s saying that we should all be carbon-copy geniuses (geniai?). It is, quite frankly, a bit fucking mental.

Most of us need to do a tax return, manage a budget and possibly manage a business. Yes, it’s important to know that. We all need to. But just as important is showing people who are less gifted at maths useful stuff like the kind of logic required to parse a spreadsheet that’ll do that maths for them.

It seems a trifle unfair that the zone of intelligence, out of those eight, around which my entire chuffing life revolves is the one in which I sit in the bottom 20% of the population; remembering things, administrating financial matters, filling in government forms correctly, dotting every I and crossing every T as stipulated, and in a timely manner, not being able to see how my situation fits a standard box, sitting waiting on hold because I’m over thinking it.

On top of that, my startling lack of smarts—in the one area which dominates my existence—makes life such an uphill struggle that I have nothing left for anything else after I’ve finished with it all. That’s really where this whole sticking eyes on things cropped up. Because I wanted to write. NEEDED to write, but after dealing with all the shite, getting it wrong, doing it again, missing bits off and cocking it up, all while watching my father and then my mother slowly disappearing in front of my eyes; all while taking their hands and walking beside them as we made our way together into the dark … after that I had nothing left in the tank. But an eyebomb takes a few minutes, little or no energy. I still get to be creative and it cheers me up.

Hence the marked absence of any new writing so far this year. Or last year to be honest. Of course, that’s also the reason I’ve been concentrating on the eyebombing book. Because it’s a different kind of creativity and an easy win … except I did an event on Saturday and there was very little interest in it live … so to speak which was rather worrying after it looking like people were interested online.

This is the first book I’ve talked about on social media where people have demonstrably shown an interest but … The price was definitely too high. Nobody was countenancing paying £18 for the hardback and £10 was clearly too steep for the paperback too. I might try a smaller size and see if I can produce it more cheaply and charge £7 for the paperback and £10 for the hardback. I guess the trouble is that it’s still too expensive to produce a colour photobook for a price that anyone’ll pay. It may be that I need to aim it at a more deluxe audience … gulp … but then the photos should probably have been better. Yeek!

Bummer. It looks like I might have produced yet another turkey.

Never mind. I guess you can’t win ’em all… or any of them, it seems. I should give up already, but that would be easy, and I NEED to create things … and I’m pig-headed. Onwards and upwards.

[/rant mode]

Here’s something a little lighter …

Something for that person who has everything: Eyebomb, Therefore I Am

Picture of books about eyebombing displayed artfully

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; that art of sticking googly eyes on unsuspecting inanimate objects to unleash the joy within.

As you turn each page, you’ll find yourself smiling at the quirky personalities that emerge from everyday objects 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 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 our own pockets and having a go at eyebombing yourself.

To find out more and be informed when it goes on sale, join my eyebombing mailing list by clicking on this link:

https://www.hamgee.co.uk/ebl

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Tagged as author blog, author blogs, author parent, book marketing, dementia, dementia emotional cost, dementia fiscal cost, full time mum writing, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, massive rant, rant, trying to be a writer

12 Mar 2023 · 12:44 pm

Come with me on a journey through my exciting life!

Obviously, I use the word, ‘exciting’ advisedly, the ironic implication being somewhat the reverse.

This week, I have mostly been … running around like a blue-arsed fly! As previously implied, it’s not exciting and sadly it’s not even that funny either. But this is my blog, so I can do what I sodding well like, which means I’m going to tell you about it anyway.

On the Mum front … more admin popped up, just for a change. There is so. much. admin. Ugh. Never mind, it is what it is. I can’t fix that. It’s dealing with it in the most effective way possible that counts.

A few years ago, Mum very wisely decided that she would put all the bills with one provider. At the time this wasn’t the cheapest way but from the point of view of suddenly having to take care of Dad’s side of the admin for the first time in about 50 years while, at the same time looking after someone with dementia (Dad at that point) it was worth paying a little extra for the reduction in hassle. From the point of view of someone who takes to this sort of stuff like a duck to quantum physics and is now looking after a mother with dementia, I regularly give quiet thanks for this decision.

However … the company that looks after her electricity, gas and phone had been taken over by something called Ovo, yes that’s OvO people not OvUM. Needless to say, I can’t remember their bloody name because all I can think of is ovum. Yes well … moving on. We’ve been waiting to have our account ‘switched to Ovo’ for some time, inhabiting an uneasy limbo between the two which made it tricky to do anything. However, I reckoned we’d finally achieved splash down because something had happened to the direct debit so Mum suddenly owed them money. When I checked Mum’s post on Wednesday I discovered a welcome to Ovo letter with a phone number to ring to sort it out.

On, on… probably …

On the up side, despite the fact that all the operators were busy helping other customers, I only had to listen to a hilariously 1920s version of the Blue Danube before someone answered. I got someone nice, as well, which always helps. Her english had a slight midwestern twang and she kept calling me ‘ma’am’ so I suspect she was in India, or possibly Singapore or Thailand? It was all very straightforward though. Mum needs a smart meter but one of the carer’s partners, who fits them, had recommended waiting as long as possible … except that then the whole takeover thing began and we got stuck in the twilight zone between belonging to the old company and being absorbed into ~~Ovum~~ Ovum. Shit! I’ve just typed Ovum twice. Bloody Hell! OVO chuffing buggering OVO. Er … yeh. Sorry about that, where was I?

Right yes, ringing Ovo. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to speak to them about Mum. I had special dispensation from the old lot but as we had a bill and I suspected this was because the Direct Debit hadn’t transferred over from the old supplier to the new one, I wasn’t certain the special dispensation would have transferred either. As a result, I saw no point in making things complicated so I did the usual trick of fraudulently pretending to be Mum so I could circumvent the security protocol without having to wait however many days it was for them to process a copy of Mum’s power of attorney or speak to her so she could give them permission to talk to me (which would have been difficult with her in Sussex and me in Suffolk). While I was on the line, I managed to book the installation of a smart meter on Tuesday, even better they have sensible slots so instead of 8-12 and 12-6 which involve a large gap when staff levels are thinner and I have to get an extra person in to make doubly sure that there’s someone available to deal with the engineer, they had a slot from 10.00 until 1.00 and from 12.00 until 2.00, which fitted into the right time frame for us and was surprisingly sensible and accommodating of them.

A quick message to the carers’ chat while I was on the phone and the engineer is now coming to fit a new electricity smart meter between 12.00 and 2.00 which is the time when there is absolutely guaranteed to be enough folks about for someone to take care of the meter ~~man~~ person. Even better, if Ovo turn up before 12.00 or after 2.00, Mum gets £30. Jolly dee … probably. So much could go wrong but … I’ve done my best.

I have also managed to end up running the bank account for McMini’s band, because I’m a special kind of stupid. That shouldn’t involve much, but this week I was busy sorting out T shirts to sell at their next gig. I managed to get more money, and therefore more shirts, by having the band member friends and family put our orders in up front. So that’s grand. I’ve also managed to set up a paypal account for the band with a Gmail address. Next step, when the money pours in after the gig, if it does, get an iZettle so we can take card payments.

Other news, this week, I went to a gin tasting with a group of ladies from Parents’ Swim, at McMini’s school, along with a wider group of folks, who I tend to run into when they’re walking their dogs on the school site and I’m going for a walk if the swim is cancelled, or I’m looking for mushrooms, or if I’m simply passing the time before the traffic dies down a bit and I can get home quickly (I see zero point sitting in traffic for 40 minutes when I can go for a 40 minute walk, get all my exercise in for the day and then drive home in ten minutes).

The tasting was in the bar part of the concert venue in my home town and was billed as being gin and ‘nibbles’. Naturally, all of us being either menopausal or a little older, we knew what our priorities were and a lengthy discussion ensued as to what ‘nibbles’ comprised. Would it be enough to absorb a substantial amount of gin? In the end, we decided it was probably canapes and as a result we all ‘lined our stomachs’ before we went with the kind of hearty fare designed to absorb large quantities of alcohol. The event started at 6.30 so the McOthers and I had supper early; spag bol.

It was absolutely lashing it down with rain, the kind of rain that would look far too unconvincingly heavy if you saw it in a film. I had to do that thing where you need to hold your coat out in front of you or the water runs off and soaks your trousers, leaving you with cold damp thighs all evening. I still got a bit damp but on the whole, it worked. I took photo of the town in the rain which I was quite pleased with, and also a picture of water running down the street because I thought it looked abstract. It does.

Rain soaked town … I think this would be a new Grongolian development if it were situated in Ning Dang Po.

Squigly lines and dots or running water?

Imagine our surprise, and possibly a little consternation, when we arrived to discover that it was a seated event and there were tables set for a three course meal. We started off with a cocktail that contained a lof of gin and an even greater quantity of Campari and probably some more stuff as well. On repairing to the furthest table from the others, so my laugh wouldn’t deafen people (I have had people on adjacent tables ask to be moved in restaurants before now) we then proceeded to get the giggles repeatedly about the fact we were going to have to do a Vicar of Dibbley and ~~three Christmas dinners~~ two suppers each.

We were immeidately identified as the Naughty Table so when two members of another party couldn’t make it, we were given their cocktails which we shared amongst ourselves.

The gin was fab by the way, the company is called the Heart of Suffolk Distillery and they have three gins out at the moment, the first was called Betty’s Gin, the second Rosie’s Gin and the third Ivy’s Gin. All were a bit of an eye opener as they were so much tastier and more aromatic than just … gin, but I liked Rosie’s Gin best, with Betty’s a very close run second and Ivy’s third. All of them were head and shoulders above what you’d normally expect in way of flavour, aromatics and general deliciousness. I bought a bittle of the Rosie’s becuase it had really lovely coriander kind of undertones and was delicious served with tonic and a strawberry floating in it.

The dinner was, indeed, three courses and was very good and luckily not too huge, although it would have been plenty on it’s own, without the large helping of spag bol I’d imbibed first. There were three little eats for starters; avocado mouse with a delicious home-made taco, a sort of salsa thing and a parsnip puree washed down with a lovely herby aromatic gin called ‘Betty’s gin’. It was followed by a kofta with some really good home made slaw and some ham croquette things, couscous with pomigranite seeds and a bit of curried parsnip soup on the side. This was served with Rosie’s Gin which was equally herbal and aromatic but where Betty’s was rosemary, this was definitely coriander, it would have been fab with a light thai curry. Pudding was a lemon tart with rasperry coulis served up with Ivy’s gin, which was more gluveinish in aroma, I could definitely smell cloves, and taste them too. McOther wouldn’t have liked it.

It seemed a waste not to finish everything so we drank all of the gin and I cleaned all three of my plates and the others did pretty well on theirs, too. Nom. But also sort of bleargh. Even now, two days later, I’m slightly feeling it … says the woman who bought a massive cake in the market this morning and snarfed it with lunch but … you know.

Next up we thought we might try doing pottery.

The following morning, in a somewhat debilitated state, hangover-wise (it took me until this morning—Sunday—to recover fully) I had to go for a blood test at the hospital. I didn’t get up in time to drive, it takes about 40 minutes that time in the morning, especially when some of the roads were flooded. I also left it too late to walk which meant the electric bike. It was still throwing it down so I put on my waterproofs and set off, aware that I’d only really left fifteen minutes for a twenty minute journey.

Unfortunately, I discovered that my usual route was blocked with an enormous puddle, however, there was no time to go round so I just had to plough on through and hope it wasn’t too deep. Needless to say it came up to the bike’s axles but somehow even though, when the pedal was at it’s lowest point, the tops of my boots were well below the surface of the water, none got through my waterproofs. I did pedal as fast as I could of course which may have created some kind of vacuum induced waterproofness … (is that a word?) I dunno. I arrived in time for the blood test. The check-in thing didn’t work but I managed to sort that anyway and apart from misreading someone else’s name and blundering into one of the bays while some poor chap was having a blood test it was more or less OK. Then I came out.

It was snowing.

A lot.

Never mind, I thought, it’ll stop in a minute. So I started off home. Pumped by my success on the way, I took the quick route which entailed going back through the enormous puddle. Once again, the feet stayed dry but the waterproof trousers caught on my pump, ripping it out of its holster. It disappeared into the murky depths with a plop. Since the water level would have been just below my knees if I’d put my foot down, I had to leave it and chalk the loss up to experience. If I go back in drier weather I might possibly find it … who knows … mind you, it’ll probably have tadpoles in by that time. As I exited the enormous puddle it began to dawn on me that snow is fucking painful when it hits your eyeballs at high speed. It was blowing a hoolie and I was riding into it as fast as I could, which was about 15mph with maximum electronic assist. The journey sounded like this.

‘Ouch!’ pedal pedal, ‘Fuck off!’ pedal pedal, ‘Ow that fucking smarts you fucking fuck!’ pedal pedal, ‘Fucking snow! Fuck! Owwww! Fuck!’

It only took me 10 (very unpleasant) minutes to ride home, but because snow on the eyeballs is so painful I was riding squinting out of one eye for most of it. By the time I arrived, I looked like this.

Lovely.

With all this extra eating, how is the eating thing going? Well … my weight this morning is 11 stone 8lbs and on Tuesday it was 11 stones 4lbs. Then again, it’s fairly arbitrary at the moment because two days before that 11.4 weigh in, I was clocking in at 11 stones and 7lbs. I have concluded that water retention affects this and some of it’s also about how much food there is in the system. For the most part, if I eat 1600 calories a day or more, the weight loss stops. If I hit my protein targets, it slows down. If I aim to hit my calorie target I get nowhere near my protein target.

At this point, I’m more concerned with which clothes I fit into and since there hasn’t been much change on that score I’ll not worry. I probably ate about 1750 calories yesterday and I was absolutely stuffed.

Other news this week. I am moving to a new ISP which means I’ve kind of broken my hamgee.co.uk website, on a temporary basis, though, I assure you. I need to do a couple of final steps in set up this morning and then, when the name servers are pointing to the right place, I need to reinstall the SSL certificate. After that, hopefully, everything should work again. Next steps after that will be to slowly rebuild it. I’m afraid it will probably be glitchy for a while.

And finally … once again, the chance to grab 12 hours of fabulous audiophonic joy for 99p (or 99c) continues … if the link works.

Yes. If you like cheap audio books, Few Are Chosen is on sale for all of March 2023. After that the price goes up again. As always, I’m cutting my own throat here. It’s 99c on Apple, Kobo and my own website. For anyone in the States, it’s also 99c on Barnes & Noble and Chirp (which is USA and Canada). I’m trying to walk the line here between offering a bargain from time to time and turning into a kind of audio DFS where there are only five days or so in a year when there isn’t a sale.

If you want to grab it while it’s mega cheap, though. You can find store links and a bit more info below …

Grab it direct from the author for 99c:

MTM’s Store

Or get it from one of these retailers:

Apple
Kobo
Chirp
Barnes & Noble
Spotify

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Tagged as author blog, author blogs, author parent, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, K'Barthan Series, K’barthan audio, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire

4 Feb 2023 · 5:09 pm

2022 in Focus, career version

picture of a factory with sunlight shining on it

The Bury Beet Factory in sunset hue … Less Silver Spoon and more Golden Spoon in this one …

This blog post is written over a couple of weeks but I’ve not harmonised the timeline. Instead I’ve left it in as-I-wrote it mode because it seems to read better like that …

This week I have suddenly developed sciatica, or at least a trapped nerve but same end result. It just gradually appeared over the course of Wednesday evening as McMini and I watched TV. Yesterday it wasn’t great but I exercised a lot to try and keep it all moving. This was the right thing to do on paper, but unfortunately, I woke up this morning with the most evil pain in my lower back. It got better as the day wore on with a heat pad pressed against it pretty much all the time, and concentrated itself in and just above my left bottom cheek. Lovely. Lowlights of the week, trying to get dressed yesterday, today and the day before. Friday, especially, my socks were causing too much friction for me to be able to get them into my trousers without extremem pain. When you are standing on one leg shouting, ‘fuck off you fucking bastard trousers!’ at the top of your voice to an inaminate item of clothing you know you are in trouble but when it acctually makes you feel better, rather than an idiot, you know it might be piss-poor day, painwise. Still the only way is up. Except it wasn’t. Although let’s face it, things may improve from here. A friend came round to lunch on Friday which was lovely though, and it did take my mind off the pain.

Having googled myself extensively, if you see what I mean, I’m pretty sure I have what I had last time which is a tight piriformis muscle but I may have a disc pressing on the nerve too somewhere, too. The piriformis is a pathetic little muscle in your arse which, if it gets tight, traps the sciatic nerve, which hurts, which makes your arse clench, which makes it tighter, which hurts more … you get the picture. When I do a specific stretch aimed at helping this it … well … you know … helps. However, when I do stretches to releive a blurpy disk pressing on the nerve that helps too. Knowing my luck I’ve scored a full house. So now I just have to keep doing the stretch and moving around regularly, even if that does involve walking like Clive Dunn. No sitting at my computer for more than ten minutes. Productivity levels may vary. I have some absolute horse pills that they gave me last time which do seem to help but it means no alcohol if I take more than one a day. I did virtual church this morning, which was nice, except they had a collection of some of my absolutely favourite hymns … on the other hand, communion just happened to arrive at the same time of breakfast so I communicated with a glass of water and a slice of Lorne sausage. Probably quite unholy in the grand scheme of things but it helped …

Interestingly, I have been a bit more productive like this. Sitting on the sofa in my office with the omnipresent heat pad and getting up for a little walk round for ten minutes on the hour I seeem to be getting more done. So far I’ve read quite a lot of a book on antique bottles and have been able to look up some of the ones I have and come up with an approximate date. I’ve also written the thank you/Christmas letters I do to keep elderly friends of my parents and relatives to keep them in touch with what’s happening to Mum. Once the first is done, obviously, it’s easier to do the others because I’ve already written a lot of what I want to say and kind of … you know … got it down pat.

Never mind, onwards and upwards. I was going to talk about the year in book sales, although looking at the volume of sales, I am sorely tempted to say, ‘let’s not!’ On we go then …

MTM’s Year out of in Focus 2022

Aims

Ooo! Get me, all organised with my headings and subheadings but yes, despite my efforts, and my business looking like a completely random and chaotic shit-show from the outside (and the inside if I’m honest) I did start off with some actual aims last year. Rather loose ones, to be honest, and I probably hadn’t given enough thought as to how I would achieve them but they were:

Write and publish another book … er hem. Yes. Oops.
Increase my audio sales and see if I could get some sales of soemthing other than my two first in series
See if I could do some face-to-face events and sell more paperbacks.
Attempt to grow sales at outlets other than Amazon and Audible.
Try something new in marketing, possibly a kickstarter, and be more organised with other marketing efforts (social, mailings and ads).

Let’s have a look and see how I did then shall we?

1. Publish a book

Yes, that one fell victim to pressures at home but I’m hoping I might finish one in 2023. I won’t be able to publish it because if I do finish, that’ll happen in April after which I probably won’t have time to do much else but if I fail to finish I’ll throw caution to the wind and write another novella in the interim, or extend The Last Word or … I dunno. Something.

To be honest, if I want to get anywhere I have to write some straight medieval fantasy and something about a dorky american bloke in space. I haven’t done anything straight medievel fanatasy wise but I do have a dork in space (not american because america doesn’t exist in that version of reality but a guy who lost one leg just below the knee in an accident). In the meantime, I just have to go with what’s flowing, sigh, which is more K’Barthan shizz. Oh dear.

2. Audio sales

My figures for audio are not as complete as sometimes, mainly because I haven’t got round to finishing the spreadsheet where I log them all. However, this one actually went better than I thought it was going to at the start of 22. Gareth and I share a steady £60 or so from Audible each month but obviously, I wanted to grow my sales on other retailers. I did several promos on Kobo and tied in Apple and Chirp, adding Barnes & Noble as Findaway added those retailers to the promotions section. For future promos I can now add Spotify as well. On the whole, each sale was around two weeks long.

On average, my effots (bookbub ads and the odd post on social media) garnered between 30 and 40 sales of the first book in the K’Barthan Series at 99c during each promo. These were mostly on Chirp but occasionally on my site or on Kobo too. In the first instance, there was little or no readthrough but when I ran the second sale, I noticed there were some downloads of the second K’Barthan book or the box set, although these were mainly from Libraries. Third sale, more read through and even some purchases of later books so things are looking up there. In 2020 I earned about 2/3 audible and 1/3 Findaway.

Overall, audiobook sales are climbing and to my joy the non Audible portion is growing. It is rather wearing to read my royalty statements from Audible and see sums like $395 earned with $90 going to Gareth and I to share 50:50. Worse, ACX are now reducing the prices of books so we sell more. Great on paper, I mean Audible’s book prices are fictional anyway, they are twice as much as everywhere else to make the price of a credit look good but at the same time, the books they are selling a la carte on Audible for £24.99 are piped through to Apple at £10.00 so they know how much audiobooks actually cost. However, they say that the publisher compensation is governed by the published price so if they reduce my books by 20% then presmumably my royalty goes down by 20% too. Other authors whose books have already been reduced have seen this borne out on their statements. I have had the odd very low payment but I haven’t managed to track down if it was a sale or an offer or what … So far on Audible UK they haven’t reduced my books. I am unable to see prices on any of the other audible sites, or, indeed look at them … even in ‘private’ browsing it funnels me back to the UK store. So yes, the Gorilla is still providing 2/3 of the income but only from one book and I am beginning to think seriously about pulling all the others. I just see no point exposing myself to anymore of Audible’s shit than is absolutely necessary. I’d keep one book on there and keep my account so I can claim any new books as I publish to stop other people putting them on Audible. Otherwise, I’m close to just telling them to do one with their contract that reads like an unenforcable software contract and their punishment royalty rates for putting my books in libraries.

On the upside, although the Findaway portion dropped dramatically in 2021 this last year it appears to have gone up again. It’s still only 1/3 which is annoying but at the same time, if I’m earning 1/3 of my income from 10% or less of the readers it goes to show a) how shit Audible’s royalties are and b) that I should keep promoting my wide audio. Oh and I forgot to add sales of my own books which are tiny but were definitely a thing last year (along with Kobo) both of which had very little action the year before … zero on Kobo and a few quid on my store in 21 but some earnings in 22. Gareth and my earnings in 2022 are up by about 20% overall on the year before and that’s with December’s figures missing.

Conclusion: I might be doing the right thing for audio so I’ll carry on and hope it keeps improving and that the wide/my store share keeps growing.

3. Face to face events

This one was a bit of a mixed bag. I didn’t do as well as I have at previous events before lockdown. However, at the same time, I was able to attend a lot of events in a group that wouldn’t have been commercially viable for one person alone. And I earned £349 quid that I wouldn’t have earned otherwise and yes, the others earned way more than that, indeed one earned that figure in one appearance, alone, at the Christmas Fair during which I earned £35 but I’m still pleased with the overall figure. There’s an enormous £8.00 from Ingram Spark, the people who distribute my paperbacks online, on top. I think when I add Bookvault, who are similar to Ingram but much cheaper, I may well find things easier.

Will I do more face to face stuff? Yes because it was fun. However, I may try to be a bit more smart about which events I attend. For example, Ely Cathedral Christmas Market is one I should look at and I will definitely try Bury Cathedral if they do an event for Bury’s ‘Not’ the Christmas Market next year. I must also approach some schools offering to do a library talk, although I have to find out if I need CRB checked first. That’s expensive but might still be worth doing. Overall the most important thing was that barring one bit of one event, where I was a little bit embarrassed, I had fun and that is the main point, after all.

4. Grow sales on sites that are not Amazon

I can only really go on a hunch with this but as far as I can see, the non-Amazon portion of my earnings is growing. Now, admittedly, this could be because Amazon is pay-to-play and runs the most bizarre, opaque and arcane advertising platform so my choice is to get to grips with that one thing, or do everything else. I’ve chosen everything else. I’ve been doing the standard operating procedure with the others, I have a first in series in a free box set, I have a short and a novella permanently free and I have an exclusive story that people get for signing up to my mailing list. It’s OK but not hugely successful. Having looked at other people’s success I have decided to try running a kickstarter. After Brandon Sanderson ran the highest grossing kickstarter of all time, there are a fair few fantasy and sci fi fans on there and as yet it hasn’t been swamped by romance like everywhere else. Doubtless that will come but I need to try and sort one of those out before the Romance authors pile in and fantasy becomes a sub genre of romance on there like it is on all the other sites.

Unfortunately the only thing standing in my way is that I haven’t finished a book. I need the finished article ready to go and then I use it as a pre-order system essentially.

Looking year on year, at the nice easy fix that is Scribecount sales tracking, things appear to be going in the right direction.

In 2019 28% of my sales were off Amazon.
In 2020 it was 25% and I earned three times as much. I also had orders for books from non Amazon outlets where there had been no traction beforehand. I think a lot of that was the Pandemic but also that Amazon seemed to relax some of it’s algorithmic twiddling so people could find stuff they wanted rather than the nearest fit to what they wanted from the stuff in KU or that was advertised. This has since been tightened up again as far as I can tell and my Amazon earnings have dropped accordingly.
In 2021 the percentage of non Amazon sales was up to 33.3% (woot) including 6% from my own store but that may have been skewed by the launch of Too Good To Be True which a lot of lovely people bought from my store rather than any of the retailers. If that was you, thank you another 20% of those royalties went to me instead of ‘The Man’.
In 2022 39.5% of my income was from elsewhere than Amazon. (So close to 40%!) Kobo and Google Play were 12% a pop and my own store was 4.4% although I suspect that was mostly audiobooks (I can’t separate them out at the moment).

2022

2021

2020

I hadn’t really looked at the figures until now but that’s heartening because it is going in the right direction; the non Amazon share is definitely going up. Or to put it another way, the share I rely on from the most morally shonky, high maintenance of the stores is going down. I’m not sure what’s happened to my print sales though, I used to do about £40 a year from Ingram and this year it’s £7. I’m guessing this is Amazon no longer ordering my books in batches of six, which it then bins off for less than it costs me to buy them from Ingram at cost so I always purchase those and put them into stock! Mwahahargh, not that I’m devious or anything.

On the whole that’s a pleasing result though. I’ll keep doing what I do with that one then and hope that I can keep my dependence on Amazon and Audible dropping throughout 2023 and my earnings from other less abusive stores and/or sources of income rising. Also I haven’t posted my print sales on here because I can’t add sum up to the spread sheet as yet.

5. Try something new …

I didn’t do too well on this front. I guess I could call the in person appearances as trying something new because I hadn’t attempted that sort of thing regularly. They netted me the same as I’d usually have earned from my previous single appearence at the Christmas Fair but I do think it’s worth doing more. I bought a stand-up course to help me think about how I would talk to readers in public. I also bought an epic Kickstarter course and have so far got to about step two, but I’m slowly working my way through it with a view to reaching more readers of fantasy and sci fi books. With that in mind this year, I’m definitely hoping to ditch preorders and start using Kickstarter to get sales in advance. The upside of that being that I can give people more than just the book for buying in advance in a way that I can’t with the stores.

Other stuff to try. I’d like to expand my efforts on live appearences with two biggies:

Ely Cathedral Christmas Fair
School visits – time to contact local schools and offer a library talk
Move from pre-orders to doing a kickstarter for my next book, and possibly starting with Googly Joy or Eyebomb: therefore I am, depending on what I decide to call it.
I should sign up as a speaker to the Women’s Institute. I’m not sure how many sales I’d get but I should imagine it would be similar to the library talk I did at my local library, which was great fun.

Conclusions …?

Not many really. I think I’m doing the right thing. I think it’s been good to get out more among the people so to speak. Apparently, as authors get more successful, the profitability of in person appearances drops but at the moment compared to the vaguaries of internet marketing, personal appearances are like shooting fish in a barrel. They are not easy and on a couple of occasions I have been roundly humiliated. However, they are still an absolute piece of cake compared to trying to get some jaded online reader with ten million books they will never look at already parked on their e-reader to open mine and start reading. I won’t do the routine with about the wi-fi free island, the telephone directory and the lavatory because I suspect you’ll remember that but you get where I’m going …

Plans for 2023?

Yeh, there are some …

Last year I definitely made a little bit of progress so, at the risk of sounding as if I’m repeating myself, this year’s aims are pretty much the same:

Write and publish another book.
Continue to increase my audio sales, especially away from Amazon/Audible and try to build on my print sales too.
Pick the right events to sell more paperbacks face to face.
Attempt to grow wide sales (i.e. at outlets other than Amazon and Audible).
Try something new in marketing, possibly a kickstarter, and be more organised with other marketing efforts (social, mailings and ads).
Try to visualise how I could do these things and break down what I need to do to actually get them done.

Any progress so far?

Yes. I’ve started as I mean to go on. Work out what I want and then break down what I need to do to get there so I have small, easily implemented steps to take listed out and can consult the list and just do them on brain fog days. For something big like a kickstarter this is going to be especially important. I’m listing the stuff I’ve set in motion here so I have a reference document that I can return to, in order to keep myself accountable. Whether it’ll work I don’t know but I can try right?

1. Writing another book

This is where the Eyebomb: Therefore I am, easy win comes in. There will be another book this year and it’ll be that one. Another easy win is a short book; in this case, I’m doing a talk in December about coming to terms with failure. Achieving less by doing more is what it’s called but being a failure is what it’s actually about. Being a failure and being totally OK with that. The talk is schedulued for December 2023 and will run for 30 – 40 minutes online with powerpoint slides. Clearly, by the time I’ve written that, I’ll have pretty much written the entire book anyway, so it’s a case of setting out my thoughts and doing the slides early enough for there to be time to make it into a book. I think I’m going to call it, ‘I fucked this up so you don’t have to’. No obviously not fucked, the Americans will go mad. I’l

2. Increase Audio and Print Sales

The eyebombing book would be a great fit for Christmas markets if I can do it at a stocking filler price, I’m thinking 10″x 10″ hardback for £9.99 but I can take that down to 7″x7″ if that means I can make it longer for that price. I have found a cheaper printer and set up an account with them. Their books are good and so I reckon I’m going to try printing it through them. They also distribute across the UK and in The Great British Bookshop. So I’ll be using them for UK distribution and possibly for drop shipping if I do a kickstarter, in conjunction with drop shipping from Ingram Spark for the Americas, Africa, the Far East and Oceana. Ingram are between £1 and £2 more expenisve per book, wholesale and make me add a 50% margin to distribute whereas I can do 35% with the other bunch so I will definitely be using BookVault where I can.

Another important thing to do is to link my payhip shop to bookvault. I hope to move to an integrated woocommerce store on my website eventually but until I can fix that up, it’s possible to use Payhip and connect it to bookvault for direct sales via something called Zapier, which, I think is free until I make 100 transfers a month.

Likewise, if I can finish the next misfit book I will. I think it’s possible that I could but it will be important to keep up all the other stuff alongside so I won’t feel the pressure as keenly. Yes, in a strange twist of reverse phychology, doing other stuff that brings results at the same time may take the pressure off and help me finish this one. I need to do the carer’s memoir, too, as that’s very now and again, there’s a lot of stuff on my blog and in other places that I’ve already written and can use for that. However, that particular book is probably something I should attempt through trad. Hybrid is the way to go really as a trad deal shows the bigots you are good enough to get a deal and opens doors that will be closed to me forever otherwise.

3. Pick the right events to sell more paperbacks face-to-face.

picture of two people smiling in front of a table at a sci fi convention

Yes, I’m going to flex this photograph on you yet again.

I’ve already sent in my application for the Ely Cathedral Christmas Fair. Ooo get me! Will I get in? Who knows. They wanted a web address and my HUP website had just gone down so it’s actually quite likely I will fail this year. It’s also a bit of a conundrum trying to add product photos to a pitch, when a lot of the products haven’t been made yet. However, if I get a spot I will start printing up cards and merch over the course of the year; a few things each month to defray the cost pre Christmas. If I don’t get in, I’ll probably still do that ahead of any other Christmas Markets I might do, I just won’t print as many. I’m not going to inherit any money. It’s going to go on care so I need to earn some capital of my own, fast.

4. Attempt to grow wide sales (i.e. at outlets other than Amazon and Audible)

Here’s hoping I can keep the momentum going and hit 40% of my sales being from non Bezos companies. To that end, all I can do is keep trying to find readers on other platforms and continue to advertise to them.

Other stuff, finish uploading all my books to Barnes & Noble direct. I have seven on there and five to do. Then I need to sort all the Barnes & Noble links on my site so they go to the books I’ve uploaded direct. Then I need to contact Barnes & Noble and ask them to move any reviews on other versions to the ones I’ve uploaded and then I need to cancel distribution where I’ve used an aggregator. I also need to sort out the rest of my links pages at Books2Read.com this is a brilliant thing that lets you add all the links to a book for audio, paperback and ebook format. The only trouble is, it’s immensely buggy so you can only do about two at a time, then you have to clear the cache turn the computer off and on again and do another two and so on. So I tend to do a couple here and there when I remember because otherwise it’s so frustrating that I may be forced to smash my laptop to pieces. That would be bad. But really, I have to bite the bullet and do it.

5. Try something new in marketing

Gulp. This year, I may see if I can resurrect my Facebook ads again, perhaps doing one or two aimed at readers on Apple, where I get crickets, or Kobo, which is rather good. Ideally, I’d get them going to my own store and buying stuff there. This is another thing I could use Zapier for, I think … as I can also have books for sale on my Facebook page. Nobody buys them and the store is hard to set up and edit but I’m a great believer in having things available in as many places as I can. Then … I’m going to try a kickstarter. I’m going to do it for the eyebombing book, to start with, because it’s easy to explain what it is and there’s no mashing of genres involved, it’s a humorous non fiction art book. I’ll design it and build it first, then, when it’s proofed and finished and ready to go I’ll do a kickstarter campaign to try and recoup as much of the money as possible. If that works, I’ll try a kickstarter for the next Misfit book again, waiting until all three versions are ready to go before I start … and possibly adding an under-the-table hardback.

6. Try to visualise how I’ll do this and plan it in bite sized pieces so I am able to.

That’s kind of what this post is for … The minute I start writing or explaining it I come up with a very straight forward list of stuff I need to do. But when I sit looking a blank screen or sheet of paper trying to type, or write, it up I find myself completely unable to think. Doubtless something terrible will go wrong because it usually does. Not least, if I get into the Ely Cathedral Christmas Fair you can guarantee something will happen to Mum about ten minutes into it and I’ll have to do a mercy dash to Sussex and chalk £275 for the stall (and probably a life time ban from exhibiting ever again) up to experience. If that’s the case, I’ll just have to pack up and leave the stall because I have no back up. Here’s hoping …

In theory I could update myself, and you, on where things have got to over the course of the year but you may well lose the will to live and people will be leaving in droves! So. Instead, why not lose yourself in a book?

Astonishingly cheap ebook and audiobook alert …

Yes. Spoil yourself with your good taste (Ambassador) and a wonderful free book. Mmm hmm. If you are looking for a fun novella–to relieve the considerable tedium you may be experiencing after reading this blog post, for example … or if you’d like to listen to an audio book in the car, or at work or on the commute and you are just fresh out of ideas for fabulous newness … well, you can fix all those things by grabbing a free book.

This book.

Small Beginnings, K’Barthan Extras, Hamgeean Misfit: No 1.

It’s free to download in ebook format from most of the major retailers (except when Amazon is dicking with me) while two and a half hours of glorious K’Barthan audiobook deliciousness is a mere 99p or c from Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Spotify, Apple and Chirp (if you’re in the States). It’s also free to download from my web store.

If you think that sounds interesting and would like to take a look, just go here.

Oh and PS … my back has recovered and my knee is getting there. Onwards and upwards eh? A bientot!

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Tagged as author blog, author blogs, book marketing, comedy fantasy fiction, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, K'Barth, M T McGuire, trying to be a writer, writer parent, writers, writing

22 Jan 2022 · 3:17 pm

This week I am mostly … wittering

So a quiet one this week. I’ve been trying to finish off some of the admin. I’m getting there but rather slowly. Big pluses this week, I have done my tax return! Woot. It’s always a weight off when I finish that. It was made easier this year by the fact I started getting the information together a while back and so I’d collated the various bits of paper I need.

The hardest thing is that originally, when I did my tax, I would have a four page short form which I’d fill out and send in. I just declared how much I’d earned, how much I’d spent and then any income from bank accounts and shares. Now that I do an online return, I have to fill in the long tax form, which appears to be written in a cross between legalese and accountant speak. Jeepers. Even the simple stuff is complicated. Where it was profits, turnover and loss it’s now turnover and ‘allowed expenses’.

Expenses used to be extra things you could claim, for example if you bought a computer you could spread the cost as a loss over three years and that was a business expense.

Now, I don’t actually know if the ‘expenses’ it’s talking about are business expenses, or the day-to-day costs of running the business. I’m allowed legal fees and accountancy fees but is paying my cover designer an ‘allowed expense’? I dunno. Everything is so much more complicated. Thank you, Gordon Brown, for mushrooming the amount of tax law from one weighty tome to an entire fucking truckload of weighty tomes.

Bastard.

Onwards and upwards.

As a person with discalculia, numbers are extremely difficult for me. We are talking wading miles up to your neck in treacle. Weirdly, I actually have some scientific and mathematical pragmatism and logic but numbers themselves are grey and amorphous. There is nothing to cling onto. I get zero intellectual traction.

Words are like bright sparks, glittering and zipping down my neural pathways at the speed of light. I can feel the tiny nuances in meaning between them. Words are sparkling, and razor sharp and glittery and accurate. Numbers are grey and insubstantial with nothing to hold onto, or they are cloying and impenetrable, like slime; thick grey slime. Words … if I hear a word for the first time in my own language, I know instinctively what it means. Numbers are drab and faceless, the dementors of my intelligence, their meanings unknown to me, their messages scrambled or parsed in a code to which I have no key. They’re like a foreign language but there is no dictionary and I lack the intellectual capacity to discern them without one.

It’s important that I take numbers very slowly, to the point where it might be close to retardation. My mind and thought processes are usually quite quick, so my incapacity it makes me feel very stupid. It would be good to be bright and not … stupid. No wonder so many of us dyslexics are chippy about our intelligence.

Put that next to the knowledge that, if I get this wrong, I’ll go to prison and obviously it’s a recipe for a neurotic hissy fit and stress fest!

Seriously though, I go through these pages and pages of questions just thinking, I have no idea what this means, I’ll leave it blank. Although I reckon if they are questions I can’t begin to comprehend, they’re probably not asking something that applies to me. Gulp.

One particular joy is that we have to declare all our foreign earnings. We have some foreign unit trusts or something and I have to declare the few quid a year I earn which are ploughed back into them. I suspect individuals such as myself are not the type of people for which this section was added. I have also told myself that I will definitely, definitely file the current year’s return as soon after 6th April as I can. Except that was what I vowed last year and here I am, filing it in during January when the do by date is 31st … then again, they’ve extended it to Feb so in theory I’m a month early. Ooo now there’s a result.

Obviously, once I have got used to it, I can fill it in much faster and I’m much more confident. However, they rephrase all the questions and change the entire form EVERY. FUCKING. YEAR. Ugh.

Next up on the admin list is to try and confirm when Mum last did a tax return. I have a vague clue but not a massive one although I think I’m homing in on that gradually. We have to dispose of Mum’s stocks and shares now because there aren’t enough of them for it to be a sound investment strategy. The balance will go into a high interest account and fund her care while we arrange to borrow a yearly sum for care fees against the house. In the UK healthcare is free unless you have dementia, in which case, you have to bankrupt yourself. When you get down to your last £23k, except it’s not really £23k it’s actually £14k, the local authority will step in to help rather than the NHS. If you’re lucky, you may end up in a decent care home. If you live in an area where there are more demented people than care home places then it’s either up to your relatives to look after you, or if they are busy doing things like jobs to pay their rent and feed their families, you get four twenty minute visits a day to serve you meals and help you dress and undress.

Mum’s local authority are very good. They were great with Dad, but even so … I hope the house is worth enough to last her out.

I was thinking about dementia, obviously, with the life I live (Thanks God, you utter, utter git.) I think about dementia quite a lot. Mum’s is different from Dad’s. Well obviously because Mum is different from Dad. That’s the thing of course, every individual is different so each person’s dementia attacks them in a different way. I guess there are general pointers which allow folks who know what they are doing to work out exactly what stage the person with dementia is at. It’s handy to have a handle on that when it comes to planning care and anticipating whether to ease off or step it up.

My grandmother ended up lying in bed for a year. She was totally unresponsive and Mum said that she used to go visit once a week. She’d just sit there holding her mother’s hand and cry. Apparently the sister in the home was lovely and used to tell Mum that it was alright and reassure her that my grandmother was different – in a good way – after her visits.

I could see Mum going that way, herself. If she did, I’m not so sure I’d mind so much. Surely it’d be better than the torment Dad endured on his darker days, wouldn’t it? I’d read to her I think. Whodunnits, or books that I knew she’d enjoyed like the Children of the New Forest, and Ballet Shoes. Or the Romany books.

On a happier note. My cousin came over this week and we took Mum out to lunch at the pub round the corner. She wasn’t in the best of form but the visit went well and my cousin had some prints of the school I grew up in which she offered to my brother and I, but I don’t think he was interested, which was handy as I’m very pleased with them.

Said cousin also kindly gave me a print of a portrait of my … I dunno how many times great grandfather who started a newspaper called Bell’s Weekly messenger. See picture. He looks worryingly like Fraser from Dad’s Army. I believe he’s responsible for initiating the use of the double s—before that they used an f. But that might have been his father. I get muddled because there were two John Bells in a row.

Even though he is wearing the most magnificent Dickensian coat—of which I am extremely jealous—I am fully expecting him to step out of the print and tell me I’m doomed.

Extra bonus content was a book of poetry by my great grandmother which I think might be termed as ‘sentimental’. It’s sort of good and also sort of hilarious, bless her. She clearly travelled to India and Kashmir and found it hauntingly beautiful. I can’t wait to show it to my Aunt, who grew up in India. I think she might appreciate the descriptions and find the sentimentality as amusing as I do, but at the same time, I think I could get away with us having a giggle about it without being disloyal.

I was going out to the theatre yesterday evening so McOther and I decided to have our big meal midday and we went out to lunch to a noodle bar in town.

What is it with people, though? We arrived early and there were only a couple of diners in there, one sitting at a table one side, by the window, the others sitting about ten feet away, at a table that was also by the window but on the other side. We sat further in, near the wall.

While we were there, four more groups came in to eat. One sat on the table right behind me, although that was still a good three feet away from ours. Another sat at the table right behind McOther which was also three or four feet away. Neither was too close but, at the same time, they could have sat a bit further away.

Finally, as we were just finishing our plates of noodles, and enormous Dodge Ram wanker-tanker pulled up outside. It backed up, parking across the drive of the house next door and a family got out. It looked like husband and wife with granny and young daughter. They were all quite big, which, presumably is why the four of them had to arrive a vehicle about the same size as some of the smaller-sized buses operating in the UK — although it probably does fewer miles to the gallon.

The presence of the daughter, who could have been anywhere between about four and seven, was notable, in that she should have been in school unless she’d had special dispensation, or was unwell. She proceeded to demonstrate that she was, indeed, unwell by producing a wracking cough, you know, the sort of thing you usually hear from people who have spent the last 40 years smoking sixty a day.

Clearly the little girl was off school, recovering from a chest infection, or possibly, judging by the sound of her cough, pneumonia.

There’s no way the kid had the Rona, nobody would be that thoughtless, but in these dodgy times, someone who is clearly off school sick, coughing as if they are suffering from TB is always going to be a bit disconcerting. Bearing that in mind, when it’s me, I will always be a bit embarrassed about it and sit a long way from anyone else, I was kind of expecting them to choose one of the empty tables away from other diners.

Maybe they’d had it up to their eyeballs with people looking askance at their coughing kid, I dunno. But they came over as very concerned that they should be allowed to exercise their own freedoms and rights but at the same time, not remotely bothered if exercising their rights and freedoms came at the expense of other people’s — parking across someone’s drive because it wasn’t illegal and nothing said they couldn’t, for example.

The restaurant contained about ten or fifteen empty tables. Including the other half of ours. Our table was the end of a table for six, comprising a four seater and a two seater, and it had been turned into a two seater by being pulled about six inches away from the other one.

Did the new arrivals go for the social distancing option and choose one of the empty tables that were a decent distance away?

No.

Of course they fucking didn’t.

They came and sat next to us. On the four person bit of our six person table. Right hugga-mugga pretty much on top of us. The daughter barking like a sea lion all the while as they took their places. I was fully expecting to see the poor kid’s lungs land in her noodles.

Not that we stayed that long. We made a very, very swift exit. But instead of enjoying the rest of our noodles and then sitting for a bit with our cups of jasmin tea, we shovelled them in as fast as we could, knocked the tea back and legged it for the door.

To be honest, these folks were clearly completely oblivious. The kid probably just had asthma. The hospital’s not far away, maybe she’d just been seeing the specialist, who know. I’m not blaming them. Folks pull this shit all the time.

However, it did get me wondering why we are such herd animals. It’s a bit like that thing when you park in an empty car park and return to your car to find that there are now two cars parked in the car park, and the other is next to yours, and parked so close that you can’t open the fucking door to get in. What is it about we humans that means we have to all huddle together in a crowd? To the point where it’s bloody irritating.

Why, in a restaurant with about seventy covers, did three quarters of the diners decide to huddle in a close knit group round our table? I have no clue. I am always one to find an empty space, if only so we can relax and converse unheard. The rest of them? It’s like they wanted us to listen.

Finally to round off the week, the theatre performance I went to was Jenny Eclair’s new show, Sixty FFS which was hilarious. I bought the last two tickets in the house for a friend and myself, in separate boxes one each side of the theatre. Then the booking office rang us and asked if they could change the tickets so we were in the same box, which was ace.

Jenny was absolutely as funny and as outrageous as I expected. She was particularly funny about post operation constipation – which is a factor of the painkillers (for more on that story, go here). She was also very funny about Nordic walking poles – we all end up using them because we’re arthritic – and she showed off her gilet ‘I bought it in yellow to go with my teeth.’

If it’s on near you and there are any tickets left. Go! It’s hilarious.

Oh and I’ve even done a bit of work on Misfit 5. Woot.

All in all, then, a moderately successful week.

And now for something completely different.

As per last week, another quick reminder about freebies and cheapies available from my fabulous portfolio of literature.

The Christmas story is still up for grabs, also, the audiobook versions of Few Are Chosen and Small Beginnings are down to 99c on Apple, Chirp, Kobo and my own Store. To find an information page, with links to buy, or to download The Christmas One, just click on one of these links:

Few Are Chosen (remember it’s Kobo, My Store, Chirp and Apple the other stores still have it at£7.99)

Small Beginnings (this one is free on my store but 99c/99p on Kobo, Chirp and Apple.

The Christmas One This one’s an ebook, obviously. Gareth is currently performing in Worms (snortle) but there is an audiobook scheduled for late February.

The Last Word

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Tagged as author blogs, comedy fantasy fiction, dementia, early dementia, full time mum writing, humour, indie authors, K'Barthan Series, M T McGuire, M T McGuire audiobooks, M T McGuire new releases, women in sci-fi, women writers, writer mum, writer parent, writers, writing

31 Jul 2021 · 1:45 pm

Dreams, weirdness and …

WTF? I can see I’m going to be using this picture a lot.

Yes, this week I am going to talk about dreams and then I’m going to have a massive rant. Run with me, there is a kind of connection between the two.

A few days ago, I had a dream about Lord Vernon. In case you are unaware, Lord Vernon is the bad guy in my first series of books. He is a gargantuan shit. I went for love-to-hate with this guy. Kate, who edited the books, loved his vileness. For some people, he’s a bit much.

The dream went like this. I was outside at Mum’s and someone gave me a laser pistol and said, ‘see that bloke there, that’s Lord Vernon. We’ve captured him and we’re just off to get the Black Maria,’ (prison van) ‘Don’t let him out of your sight.’ Then they bugger off, leaving me alone to guard an invincible green bastard who makes Hitler at his worst look like your cuddly uncle.

Lord Vernon is sitting on the ground, leaning against the wall of the house, apparently unperturbed.

I look at him.

He looks at me, his expression one of sneering condescension, with a dash of mocking amusement thrown in. Jeez. A few seconds in and already I want to punch the smecking bastard. Nothing is said. I throw a clod of earth at him. I have no idea why. I mean I have a laser pistol as far as I recall. The logical move is to stun him so the idiot who left me guarding him can just chuck his limp, unconscious form in the van upon their return. But this is a dream so logic is not an abundant factor here.

The clod of earth I’ve thrown falls short because throwing in a dream is like running in a dream, natch. He laughs and asks if I really think I can keep him there. I say, ‘yes,’ obviously and try to sound as if I’m convinced. I fail. He just shoots me his best ‘as if’ smile, folds his arms, leans back against the wall and relaxes. Except he’s also staring at me.

‘I will kill you,’ that stare says. Smug smecker.

So we’re sitting there, and every now and again I lob a clod of earth at him, which does fuck all except prove even more conclusively how weak an opponent I am each time I do it. Arnold knows why but it still hasn’t occurred to me to use the chuffing gun. I’m really pissed off now because a) he’s quite clearly not taking me seriously and because b) he’s going to kill me any minute … hang on. While my mind has been wandering, Lord Vernon has quietly stood up and made off without my noticing.

Shit! Civilisation as we know it is relying on me to keep that bastard where he is. I leap up and run round the corner of the house only to realise that Lord Vernon has got inside, into the drawing room and has leaned out through the window and grabbed one of Mum’s carers by the neck. I know seems a bit convoluted doesn’t it?

But wait.

It’s OK because I’m armed, right?

Wrong. By this point, the laser pistol seems to have completely slipped my mind because when my mind turns to a weapon it turns, not to the pistol, but the penknife in my pocket. It has a two inch blade … like this one.

The pathetic knife in question, the pen is to give a reference for size.

I take it out and start stabbing him in the arm so he will let go of the carer, who is not appreciating being strangled and is now saying, ‘grk’ a lot and pointing to the arm round her neck in the universal sign language for, ‘can you get this off me?’ the world over.

My efforts are a partial success. Clearly I’m doing some damage in that my hands are now covered in blood which appears to be Lord Vernon’s rather than mine or, heaven forbid, the carer’s. I suppose that’s progress. There are also a lot of rips in his uniform through which I can see that I’ve made some holes in his actual arm. On the downside he appears completely unaffected by the experience. Not much progress then. Indeed, now he’s just laughing at me. Laughing and bleeding at me. A lot. I renew my efforts to get stabby on him. I have to. I must maim him enough, not only to let go of the carer but also, so that he can’t hurt Mum either.

At this point, I woke up, greatly relieved that I didn’t have to dream the bit where Lord Vernon killed us all and the incompetent buffoon who left him in my charge came back and discovered our lifeless bodies.

Obviously, I awoke, sat up and thought, ‘what the fuck was that about?’ But actually, in this case, I think I know.

At the moment, I feel as if I’m living in the version of the world in Back to The Future where Biff has nicked the sports almanack, made loads of money at the bookies and taken charge. It’s like everything that is fuckwitted, moronic, and morally bankrupt is in control. Where reason and science are ignored. Where the Far Right; Steve Bannon and his friends have successfully eroded people’s confidence in researched news and are winning the war of hearts and minds hands down.

A video popped up on my Facebook feed the other day. I can’t remember where from but I think the gist of it was supposed to be that sometimes when we let people settle in Britain, they turn out to be rum’uns. Well no shit Sherlock. That will happen because humans are not perfect and the administrative process of the state should be as blind as justice. If someone has the right criteria and ticks the right boxes they are chosen. Sometimes that doesn’t work out or they aren’t as they are painted.

However, the tone of the vid was a bit, these foreign bastards are all the same, we are letting everyone in (which isn’t true, it’s chuffing difficult to get into Britain these days and ever more so as we abandon our British sense of fair play and move to a more American, winner-takes-all, losers-lose-because-they-were-weak-and-deserve-to attitude). It was a similar argument to the one Farage posited over Brexit; vote leave to get rid of the brown people, a sentiment to which, as a direct descendent of one of the brown people, I take great exception.

In this video though, it was very clear that the narrator despised immigrants, asylum seekers, victims of torture, migrants and any others who seek refuge in Britain. There was a lot of effing and blinding about this, while film footage played of a Spitfire flying over Beachy Head. I dunno how that has more credibility than thoughtful researched journalism but apparently it does. And how dare they appropriate another icon like the Spitfire. They’ve already taken our flag. That’ll be fair few downed RAF pilots spinning in their graves then. Bravo.

When the aliens come, or Lord Vernon and his Grongolian hoards invade from a parallel reality, our donkey leaders will be too stupid to defend us. At the moment, if you’re looking at the news the way I do, and I must really try harder not to, it’s as if natural selection has decided the human race has had it’s day and it will seal our fate by ensuring that only the most gargantuan tossers end up in charge of anything. Who thought it was a good idea to put the dumbest fucks who shout the loudest in control?

Then there’s all this ‘real news’. Real my arse. Some struck off doctor in Alabama or somewhere says it’s dangerous to wear masks. It probably is for some people, and they have exemptions but for the rest of us, well… if wearing a mask stops me spreading Covid to others, that’s grand. When I see some information about the criminally high numbers of surgeons, doctors and nurses who died in their droves, before the pandemic, from the PPE they wore? That’s when I’ll worry. Or when I see articles about the huge death rate among the thousands of people in South East Asia who have been wearing masks in cities for years, yeh, when I see that those are higher than, or equal to, pollution related deaths, I’ll be concerned.

At least smokers got that when they exercise their freedom to smoke indoors, the rest of us in there with them have to smoke, too. If you don’t want to wear a mask, stay home, you know, like the vulnerable people are doing, the ones who have to stay home because you won’t wear a mask.

Meanwhile the idiots in charge set an example by wearing masks when they feel like it and then expect us to do as we’re told ie wear them all the time. I do see that side of the conspiracy theorists’ beef.

All this batshit crazy shit, flat earth and the rest of it, science is WRONG because it’s the establishment. Jeez who thinks humans are that malleable. I mean we are but to pick one at random, how could they have faked the moon landings. Seriously did they kill every single person involved? Because they would have to. Because that’s the only way they could get everyone to shut up. It just looks, to me, like the far right – as in the Putin influenced ones – flexing at the democratic world.

‘Hey world leaders! Look how fucking stupid we can make your people be. We own you, weaklings and we will destroy you.’ And I look at the apparently rational-minded and sensible people falling for this shit and I think, ‘yes, Mr P, it looks as if you will.’

Meanwhile they think I’m the sheep because science is part of the establishment and therefore part of the conspiracy. Oh yeh and don’t forget, if you take a knee you’re following in the footsteps of that famous Marxist, Martin Luther King and that’s bad. Oh and if you do anything kind or wear a t-shirt supporting a cause that’s not endorsed by the far right, I dunno something principled and an obviously good like comic relief, you’re virtue signalling. If you say, ‘hey, let’s be kind to one another,’ that’s also virtue signalling. Let’s stop people from doing anything pleasant. Let’s make it shameful to own up to a sympathetic or kindly action. We don’t want it catching on. Way to fucking go you absolute spunk buckets. I’m sure that’ll really help make the world a nicer place and hasten on your utopia! Arnold’s socks! Stop already, Mary.

This isn’t true. I know that, but I’m feeling it. And I guess part of the reason I’m feeling it is because good people will keep dying.

This week, a lovely lady who goes to my church died of many and varied cancers. She hadn’t been to the doctor, she wasn’t well but had celiac’s disease so the symptoms were very similar.

I was talking to her just four weeks ago. She always sat in the same place and throughout the Pandemic I’ve walked past her after communion most times and we would exchange conspiratorial winks, grins, waves etc. If something funny happened, she was one of the people whose eye I’d catch.

She was one of those people of quiet, unassuming, steadfast integrity who just got on with things. If it looked like there was tea to be made and I cottoned on, I’d go to the kitchen area to sort it and she’d already be there, putting out the cups, urn plugged in and well on the way to boiling. She was just one of those rock steady people who is utterly solid in a crisis. I went round to tea at hers just before lockdown and was looking forward to inviting her back but then … Covid. We never will have that cup of tea now and it’s a pisser. But I think one of the biggest pissers is that every decent, balanced, kindly disposed person who checks out means there are less of us and more of them.

And I guess my dream was about this; how a couple of good people have left this world and I feel more than ever that it’s down to me to throw my increasingly ineffective clods of ~~logic, facts, kindness, decent behaviour~~ earth in a desperate attempt to hold back the ~~tsunami of stupid and/or evil~~ completely invincible Lord Vernon as it he laughs in my face. I think I’m probably having a bit of a bleak one at the moment, or perhaps that’s how I’m processing my grief at my friends’ deaths. I dunno.

Goebbels, I think it was Gobbels, said once that, ‘the art of propaganda is to convince one group of people, that another group of people is less than human.’

Maybe it’s time we looked or behaved more like the Chuckle brothers, not the comedy duo, the other ones (look it up) because where the far right do have a point, even if they are being disingenuous in making it, is that prejudice does go two ways. It’s hard not to be prejudiced against them the way they are against … well … pretty much everyone who isn’t a white, straight man. It’s hard not to despise pointless bigotry and hatred (it takes a lot of effort though, Arnold’s socks where do they get the energy for all bile and vitriol) but actually that’s just being like them and doing what they do. The rest of us have to be better than that. Because if a person believes they stand for what is good and right, they have to be as good and right as they can. The thing that makes us good and them bad is that we don’t torture prisoners and- oh hang on. Less of the Vernon then and more of the Vimes, perhaps.

Crikey but it’s hard work sometimes, though, isn’t it?

</rantmode>

Well … I definitely went off on one there and now I feel a lot better. If you need to go off on one too, please help yourself and have a rant in the comments about anything you like! Get it off your chest the way I’ve just done.

Now then, shall we all relax with a lovely free audiobook? Yes. I think that would be a good idea.

Small Beginnings, K’Barthan Extras, Hamgeean Misfit: Part 1

Destiny called and everyone else was out.

When your very existence is treason, employment opportunities are thin on the ground. But when one of the biggest crime lords in the city makes The Pan of Hamgee a job offer he can’t refuse, it’s hard to tell what the dumbest move is; accepting the offer or saying, no to Big Merv. Neither will do much for The Pan’s life expectancy.

This is free to download from most of the major ebook retailers for August and also in audio from my store, the exception is Amazon, I changed some keywords last night and now they’re dicking me about. Also, I can’t make it free from the book vendors in audio so if you’re after that one, it has to be just from my store, you can get it from my store if you normally buy from Amazon too.

If you’re interested in the ebook, click here.
If you’d like to give the audiobook a go, click here.

If you aren’t interested but you want to help, feel free to copy and paste either of these links into the social media thingy of your choice and share away:

Audiobook: https://payhip.com/b/ubYs
Ebook – free from all the main vendors: https://www.hamgee.co.uk/infosb.html

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Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as author blog, author blogs, author parent, cockwomblery, comedy fantasy fiction, M T McGuire, massive rant, rant, writers, writing

3 Jul 2021 · 12:25 pm

Interesting times

This week, I single-handedly caused a gargantuan traffic jam and discovered that I am strong enough to brake a centimetre thick bar of steel. Move over Hulk, here I come. There’s a story in that and we’ll get to it in a minute. Meanwhile, writing news.

Yes, the writing is creeping along, McMini is off for his last day of school as I begin this, although it’ll probably be Saturday by the time I’m finishing it! It will also have to be today’s word count total as I’m off out with a friend. While working on the space dustmen book I’ve done a little bit of research as well as writing and discovered some information about micro bacterial fuel cells. Really interesting stuff. If you’re interested you can read more here.

As a result, I now have a space station which gains much of its power from the ‘waste products’ produced. Yes. It runs on wee. The stuff that isn’t useable is ‘processed’ by cockroaches who were already planned in as the rubbish processing facility in the plant. They had developed sentience and become minor characters. They still are but now, they run the recycling centre, ~~eating~~ cleaning the kack off the things that have had food or other stuff in them, sorting the rubbish and processing it.

Yesterday, I visited Mum. She wasn’t as switched on as sometimes. Mind you, by the time I got to her, I wasn’t either. The M11 was borked – there was a 2 hour delay – so I had to cut across country a little way and go down the A1 to the M25 instead.

Naturally, by the time I got to the M25, a lorry had caught fire between the A1 junction and the M11 junction. It wasn’t on my side but I made a mental note that it would be, when I returned, and despite being the other carriageway, the road was closed my way too. Joy. I ended up and taking the other, 80 miles longer, route round the M25 via Heathrow. I arrived about an hour and a quarter after I would usually have done but still a good 40 minutes before I’d have got there via the borked M11 route. Despite not being very with it, Mum was in reasonable form.

It was annoying being late as I’d suspected that the raspberries in Mum’s garden might be ready and I’d wanted to get there in time to pick them. I went down to the fruit cage anyway. The kitchen garden there is lying fallow this year. The weeds are up to my waist. I got soaked and it wasn’t helped by the fact there’s a power line over the fruit cage and the birds sit on it and shit onto the waist high weeds in the fruit cage below. Not just water smearing all over my trousers as I moved among the weeds then, but also shit. Copious clods of the kinds of massive turds pigeons do.

Bastards.

The raspberries were way more ready than I thought and some of them had rotted in the seemingly endless rain, which has never fucking stopped. All in all it was a bit of a disaster really. I was pissed off with myself for not checking them last week as I’d have been able to pick them as they ripened rather than letting a load rot on the canes by mistake. Then again, I got some and we had them for lunch. A partial success then. However, by the time I was done I was covered in fruit juice from the mouldy squishy ones along with bird shit.

Nature, one: MTM’s salmon pink combat trousers, nil.

In addition to the lovely fruit juice and turd smears on my trousers, I also had burrs all over my shoes. After lunch, as Mum and I chatted and watched the tennis, I picked them all off. Here they are with a pen in the photo for reference. See? That’s a lot of burrs.

As usual, I left at half two but bearing in mind the lorry fire, I had a quick look at google maps before departure because I reckoned they’d be resurfacing the road after that one. Sure enough the M25 was closed for resurfacing and everyone was using the M11 as the route round it so that was at a standstill. Alternative routes are available for this so I nipped up the A12 and decided that I’d cut across from Chelmsford, via Ongar and Toots Hill (mwahahahahrgh!) on the A 414, cleverly joining the M11 at the junction where everyone else who was trying to avoid the lorry fire was turning off. Away I went with a podcast I particularly enjoy playing on my phone and the plastic lady from Google shouting directions imperiously at intermediate intervals.

All was well until I ended up at the back of a slow moving convoy of vehicles stuck behind a breakdown truck with a lorry on the back. Poor bugger. I felt for him but it wasn’t exactly well met. Top speed? Oh I dunno … 40mph? But it was mostly 30mph. As we crept up a hill the speed dropped and I changed down a gear. At which point, something happened and the gearstick suddenly went limp, between the gears, with my foot on the clutch. I took my foot off the clutch but discovered the car was stuck in neutral. No drive. Just momentum.

As you can imagine, at 20mph, on a hill there’s not much momentum or coasting potential. I managed to creep slowly to the side of the road, but to be frank, not as ‘at the side of the road’ as I’d have liked and there wasn’t enough umph to get it up the curb onto the verge which is where I’d have preferred to have ended up. Once I had stopped, I realised that there wasn’t going to be enough of a let up in the traffic whizzing past for me to get out and push it onto the verge either. Indeed, the cars and lorries overtaking me were probably taking the same detour as I. The road was narrow and they were not leaving any room or taking any prisoners as they passed. Open the door and something would smack it – or me – at high speed. Nope. Nothing doing there. I had to exit, with very little dignity, through the passenger side.

It was looking ominous but not actually raining at this point so I spread my anorak on the grass verge and took stock. There was a lot of traffic because it was a busy trunk road; that is one lane going in one direction and one in the other. And I’d blocked the one going my way. As a result, everyone had to wait behind my car until there was a gap in the almost never ending stream of oncoming traffic or until someone in the huge queue of oncoming cars was kind enough to stop and flash a handful through. On the up side, at least it was a straight bit and there was reasonable visibility both ways so folks could see where the gaps were to try and overtake.

Traffic … as far as the eye can see. Zoom in for the full horror!

Er hem. Yeh.

From my vantage point, the statutory ‘as far as possible’ away from the car, I looked along the road in the direction from which I had come, and which I was now blocking. The queue of cars stuck behind mine filled the whole straight and snaked away into the distance out of sight. About three quarters of a mile of it by the looks of things.

Shizz.

But also, in a very selfish and unpleasant, wow!-I-did-this! kind of way a bit rewarding. It made me understand how satisfying it must be to drive a caravan and cause this kind of mayhem wherever you go. Look at all those gits stuck behind me, they’ll have to learn some patience etc, etc. Except I did have the good grace to be mortified in majority, rather than smug.

Yes, well … that’s enough of that.

OK, better get the breakdown truck. I had never rung my breakdown company, had no clue what they’d be like, and wasn’t confident at all. My spirits sank further as I got the usual recorded announcement about COVID19 decimating their routine, although luckily it was just to apologise that some folks would be answering calls from home and that there might be some background noise. Not half as much as there was my end, I thought. The phone was answered quickly by a gentleman who asked where I was, at which point, I looked at google maps and discovered that I was half way between Chelmsford and Ongar, quite near to the highly amusingly named, Toots Hill. Then I realised that there was an enormous red bit on this road which started right about … ah yes … where I was standing.

When I mentioned this the gentleman on the other end asked if I was in danger. Judging by the number of people hooting and shaking their fists at me, I suspected there might be a small chance that someone who had been stuck in the queue behind me might stop to smack me in the mouth but otherwise, no, not especially. It’s all relative. I said that I was OK and that the car was in the middle of a straight, which was good, but that it wasn’t parked quite as I’d have liked. He suggested that I might be wise to ring off, call the police to warn them that I had single-handedly brought the traffic to a standstill. The call was logged, he explained so there’d be a truck on the way to the Ongar area I could just ring them back in ten minutes or so and fill in the details of my destination. There was much giggling from both of us because I told him that it appeared I’d done some kind of Hulk move and ripped the gearstick off, that it needed a viagra, etc. So I hung up and dialled 101.

It took a while but I finally got through to a dispatch officer with Essex police. She was lovely. The road was a bit loud and her what three words weren’t working so it was difficult for me to give her my exact location. We were on the phone for longer than we might have been, I suspect. I explained roughly where I was and she patched it all through. We then had a conversation that went something like this:

‘The traffic sounds like it’s going quite fast,’ she said.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘That’s the stuff coming the other way. The traffic my side is mostly stationary.’
Just at that moment a bunch of them got past and someone vented their anger by beeping their hooter long and hard.
‘Are they hooting at you?’ she asked incredulously.
‘Yes, they’re not happy.’ I replied. ‘They’re probably all avoiding the M25 like I am.’
‘Seriously, what do they think you’re doing?’ she said.
‘It looks like they think I’ve decided that this would be a really good place to stop and make a phone call,’ I said with my best sarcastic, idiot-spotting tone in place.
She laughed at that. ’Some people!’ she said.
‘Yeh. They’re not all bad, though. Some are looking sympathetic,’ I said, at which point a girl in a Fiat 500 stopped and asked if I needed any help and I said that I was fine and that the police were on their way.
‘That was a nice woman in a fiat asking if I needed any help,’ I duly reported to the officer who was still trying to get her version of what three words to link up with their mapping stuff.
‘Of course, the only person who offers to help would be a woman,’ she said drily and I liked her even more.
‘Right, there’s a car on its way, they’ll be with you in nine minutes.’
‘Brilliant,’ I replied at which point we said our goodbyes.

Before I rang the breakdown people again, I rang the mechanic who fixes my car to ask if I could have it delivered to his workshop. He was fine with that so I then rang the breakdown people and told them where I was. Luckily their what three words was working so that was pretty quick.

Just as I was thinking of writing ‘sorry’ in big letters on a piece of paper and holding it up, I heard sirens in the distance. Yep there was a police car doing the full blues and twos piling towards me down the wrong side of the road past the huge queue of traffic. Shizz, was this for me?

Yes it was. Ooo. That was a bit of a thrill.

And also completely mortifying.

Yes.

They did, at least hold up the traffic and agree to help me push the car off the road but they had a ‘danger to life’ to go to next so instead of being able to enlist their help to push the car to the gateway of a field further up, they pushed it into a sort of half lay-by on the other side of the road. It wasn’t ideal, but it was better than nothing and at least now I was safe enough from the traffic.

Now that I was safely parked, I got into the car and rang the breakdown people explaining that I wanted to be taken to the address of my garage. They warned me there might not be room for me in the truck and I might have to be dropped ‘in a safe place’ where McOther could pick me up. Was that alright?

Shit.

‘Yes,’ I said, because, what else could I say?

Then I rang McOther and he was happy to pick me up from the mechanic’s garage. Lastly I rang Mum and pretended that I was in the driveway and that the traffic was the cars on Northgate Street. That done I realised I only had 20% charge on my phone so I got my charger out, fixed it, because it had come apart, and plugged the phone in to charge. By the time I’d finished that lot and discovered the text from my break down people saying the truck would be there at 5.57 I just had a few minutes to nip behind the hedge for a wee and my rescuer would probably have arrived.

The lay-by was part of the original road, which had been moved over. The metalled remains was left, hidden from the new road by a row of scrubby elms and blocked off at the beginning and end with piles of paving stones. There was a path but there were also a lot of brambles. I put on the sheepskin gloves I wear to fill up with petrol, picked my way gingerly over the pile of bricks and slabs and had a very, very much needed wee. Great. Now I was comfortable I could face anything.

Probably.

Even on a tow truck I still think my car looks cool.

The guy arrived exactly when he had said and when I told him my destination, thought he might well have been there before, with other stricken Lotuses, or would that be Loti? He had to pretty much stand in the hedge to get to the winch controls but he clearly knew what he was doing and it was on the back very quickly with the minimum of fuss or bother. Had he been doing this all his life? I asked. It turned out that yes he had. His father had been a mechanic before him and had also done recovery work. He remembered ‘cabbing’ with his dad to help at breakdown jobs from as young as three. He told he was a grumpy old git which made me warm to him immediately.

We didn’t go through the amusingly named, ‘Toots Hill’, much to my disappointment instead the road took us through Ongar and as we approached the junction with the M11 we hit a queue. It wasn’t long before we got chatting. His mother had died of Alzheimer’s. We talked about the first warning signs. In his case, his father had taken his mum away on holiday. She had a light smoking habit, about ten a day, which she started fairly late on in life. While they were away on this particular trip, his father popped out from the hotel to get some bits and bobs from the shops and bought her a packet of cigarettes. When he handed them over, she seemed nonplussed and explained that she didn’t smoke. She’d forgotten that she did, completely. Such a weird thing.

Everything went smoothly. We chatted happily over the course of the journey and arrived back at the mechanic’s workshop a bit after seven pm. Not bad really. He deposited my car exactly where the mechanic had asked me to park it, once more, with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of quiet competence, then off he went with a cheery wave. McOther was already there to collect me and we got home just before 8 o’clock.

What was wrong with it? I hear you ask. Well, to be honest, I was expecting it to be the little pin that holds the gearstick onto the … thing. It wasn’t. It turns out that it had broken off. Yes I’d actually managed to rip a piece of steel half an inch thick in half. For fuck’s sake. OK so I get a bit panicky sometimes and miss gears and kind of flap at it in a kind of go-in-go-in headless-chicken panic but I have come away with a rather sobering reassessment of my own strength.

The mechanic, who is called Gerald, but I promise the one in my book was called Gerald/Gerry before this one appeared in my actual Real Life, told me that the gear stick used to be available separately but that even though Lotus only stopped making the 1.6 Elise three years ago, in 2018, they have ceased manufacture of all its bespoke parts. So there was one set of gear stuff that comprised the whole linkage, which I don’t need, but which included the stick, for £650 plus 20% VAT. Otherwise, I could wait until a gear stick appeared on the second hand market. That would render a perfectly serviceable car un-drivable for weeks … months … years? … Until somebody broke one up somewhere.

Yikes.

The supplier had given him three minutes to say yes or no because they knew this was the last one in Britain. Jeez, I know the noisy cricket is inanimate and not sentient and that but seriously? It’s like it knows I spent all that money on art last week.

In case you’d forgotten what the noisy cricket (after which my car is named) actually is, here’s a refresher. 🙂

Yeh. Bollocks.

What to do?

Say yes to the last replacement part in existence, obviously.

Even if I end up paying about £500 over the odds for a whole lot of extra stuff on it that I don’t need, I’d prefer that to having a perfectly useable car standing idle for want of of an 18 inch piece of metal. The part will arrive next Wednesday and be fitted soon after with any luck. But now I have to think about what I do from here on in. Because if finding parts for my ten year old car is going to be like trying to source bits for a 1920s Lagonda or something, it’s going to be impractical and expensive. If I’m having to have a new gear stick bespoke machined from the plans from here on in, I’m in trouble.

If I sell it right now, there aren’t any new models of Lotus to buy and the Elises are all being retired. I doubt I’d get one and certainly not in my go to favourite shade of gunmetal grey. Anyway, two years down the line, my three year old car would be in the same situation as the current ten year old one.

Furthermore, I don’t think I can quite afford another Lotus, not new. Although, with the part exchange, if I start saving up I might be able to in a few years’ time. I also have to think in terms of my knee, which doesn’t straighten quite enough for the effortless exits and entries I used to be able to make. I do now look like an ancient old bag heaving herself in and out of it, and whatever the repercussions of walking wrong for so long have been on my hip are causing problems now that I’m walking properly again. The easy twist of the leg to slide under the steering wheel now hurts me. A lot. That said, I was going to wait a year or two and see if I could get physio and sort the hip out because it’s probably something some physiotherapy exercises could fix – shortened flexor muscles or similar.

Perhaps it would be smart to start thinking about what I drive next. Gulp. When the time comes, do I buy another Lotus? Where can they go after the current range of heart-wrenchingly pretty cars? Surely the only way is down. Or is it time to bite the bullet and buy … shudders … a normal car? I’ve driven a Lotus for 21 years and I had a spitfire for 11 years before that. 32 years of two-seaters that are like getting in and out of a sleeping bag. I like it like that. I feel safe looking up at the hub caps of taxis. And whatever car I buy, it needs to be absorbing enough to hold my attention for a 300 mile round trip every week or my mind will wander at the wheel and I’ll die. And when I say absorbing, I mean absorbing in a good way, in a way that makes schlepping up and down to Sussex as enjoyable as possible. And … pointy steering. I need pointy steering. Most normal cars are like driving a water bed on castors.

Also while Lotus might stand for Lots Of Trouble, Usually Serious, this one has 81,000 miles on the clock and this is only the third major expense I’ve had … and one of those was the headlight which was a major expense but not quite as life threatening as say, the suspension, which went just after lock down but only cost £600. Most of the things I have done cost about £600 to be honest.

Modern cars are also a bit toss. They’re over engineered where it doesn’t matter, and under engineered where it does. I don’t want a million crappy gizmos. I don’t want caps on my tyres that cost £120 because there’s a pressure sensor in each one, it’s pointless shit. I’m not a complete moron. I can check my tyre pressure. I don’t need an electronic voice to tell me my washer fluid is low, I don’t need a stupid ‘console’ with a smart speaker and all manner of other shizz programmed in that’s connected to the internet and that I have to pay a monthly subscription for (yes another chuffing £7 a month). I have a phone for that. And if there is going to be a nut job at the wheel, I’d prefer it to be me and not some radicalised teenage whack job hacker in a bedroom somewhere who has got into my car’s smart software and is now controlling it.

All I want from a car is headlights, a heater, indicators, windscreen wipers and a radio/cd player that I can plug a flash memory stick into. Hell, even electric windows are a bit of an extravagance in my book. I mean, I have arms don’t I? Likewise, air-con would have been nice last summer but this year I wouldn’t have needed to use it at all so it’s not 100% necessary.

Nope. What I want is the kind of engineering that gets 0-60 in 6 seconds out of a 1.6 Toyota Yaris engine. The kind of engineering that gets me 0-60 in 6 seconds but delivers 40mpg on the motorway. That kind of elegant, logical, common sense, smart engineering that is spectacularly fucking absent from pretty much any other marque of car. The only alternative, really, is a Tesla, but the range is 250 miles and I need 300 to get to Sussex and back.

Or possibly a fiat 500 Abarth because … 0-60 in 6 seconds is enough to give me a thrill but 4 seconds would be even more fun.

Hmm … decisions, decisions …

Talking about vehicles with a mind of their own …

If you want to read about the fictional version of the Noisy Cricket, it features in Too Good To Be True, my latest release in both ebook and audio format. Here’s a bit more about it.

Too Good To Be True

When trouble comes knocking, meet the one man dumb enough to answer the door …

When The Pan of Hamgee encounters some mudlarkers trying to land a box on the banks of the River Dang he is happy to help. Having accepted a share of the contents as a reward he cannot believe his luck. It contains one of the most expensive delicacies available in K’Barth, Goojan spiced sausage. If he can sell it, the sausage might spell the end of his troubles. On the other hand, knowing his luck, it could bring a whole load more.

Written in British English with a dash of light swearing. Suitable for any reader of any age from 10 up – younger readers who have read all the Harry Potter books without any worries will be fine with the Hamgeean Misfit stories.

Suggested cinema rating, PG. Ebook: 247 pages, Paperback: 295 pages, Audiobook running time, 9hrs 57 mins.

You and find out more (or listen to the audio sample) using these links:

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Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as author blogs, careful with that axe Eugine, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, lotus, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, writers

13 Jun 2021 · 2:51 pm

Birthdays and some inane wittering

Do you ever wonder what you’re going to be when you grow up? I was 53 yesterday so I suspect I should hvae grown out of the habit by now. However, I still look to the future and wonder what I will ‘be’. Well no, I don’t wonder that, being an author is definitely what I’m here to do but I do wonder if I will ever ‘make it’. Making it, here, is earning £20k a year. Even minimum wage would be nice. I was going to do a long post today, trying to put my jumbled thoughts about selling audio books in order. It’s a bit rambly though, so I’m going to leave it to rest in the faint hope that if I come back to it fresh next week I’ll be able to make it more articulate. Also,it’s my birthday weekend and I decided that, instead, I’d just describe some MTM-ness … so long as I can make it funny enough.

It was a hot day yesterday but I did some gardening so I am still bathing in that warm sense of fitness smugglers I get when I’ve taken enough exercise to get my fitbit in a dither. I was expecting to wake up with vertigo or at the least hayfever. It was hayfever only, which was grand, although not so grand when I had to sing a solo in church. My voice went all crackly on the low notes which was a bit of a bummer so I had to sing very quietly to stop the low notes coming out as more of a yodel. Plus points, well, it was mostly in tune.

Other domestic news and general goings on. It was McMini’s birthday on Saturday as well as mine. This being the case, yesterday, I set about making a cake. McMini being not the biggest fan of chocolate and me loving it, I have resigned myself to the fact I will never have a chocolate birthday cake again. On the other hand … there’s always stealth chocolate. The white stuff. Among my family and friends, I am renowned for my horrible looking, but quite tasty cakes. Thinking about it, there are probably photos deep in the archives of this blog of my cakewrecks from previous occasions. If there are, I will try and find them and dot them about this post when I’ve finished.

There wasn’t much time, when is there ever? But I reckoned I could bash out a fatless sponge (swiss roll cake to the uninitiated) and I had some white chocolate which I could melt across the top of it (Bury St Edmunds market, £1 per catering sized bag). Excellent. I made the fatless sponge and it being a hot day the eggs and sugar took about five seconds to get to the right consistency. Believe it or not, it can take as long as 15 minutes on a cold day, I suppose that’s why they used to recommend you did this in a bowl perched over the top of a saucepan of hot water. That was in the olden days of beating it by hand, of course. Obviously, neither I, nor Mum, who handed this recipe down to me, can be arsed with that sort of malarkey. Also, two words. Kenwood and Chef. Yep. I have two of these babies but McOther has put one away in the pantry under the stairs where I can’t remove it without kneeling down so that one is temporarily out of action. Instead I had to use the, supposedly mothballed, back up machine, purchased some years ago for £5 from a car boot sale. Note to self, remember to mention to McOther that he has mothballed the wrong one.

When I’d finished the mixture I discovered I’d made a bit too much so there were seven bonus buns as well. Jolly dee. I rustled up some icing for the middle; butter, sieved icing sugar, a couple of drops of vanilla essence to taste and then just mix it about and add sugar or butter as desired until it tastes like butter icing. It was one of those days when it all comes together straight away and tastes as if a real chef made it. I was very pleased with the results and even more pleased that I remembered to let the cake get cold before I slathered it all across the middle. Cake pretty much constructed, next it was time to do the white chocolate icing for the top. The trouble with purchasing catering sized bags of stuff is that they are big and this can led you to believe you have an inexhaustible supply.

Over the past few weeks, since I purchased the bag, I have been grazing lightly, on the white chocolate. Just the odd couple of buttons here and there, but when I came to examine it, I realised I might have been grazing a bit more heavily than I’d anticipated. There wasn’t quite enough of the stuff to just melt it and pour it over the top of the cake, indeed, there wasn’t nearly enough.

Bollocks.

Never mind I would add icing sugar and butter, warm them all up in a saucepan and it would set hard with any luck. The result of my efforts was a ball of great-tasting stuff which, unfortunately, was not unlike pastry in consistency.

Right.

After a brief internal debate as to whether or not to ‘loosen’ it with milk, I decided not to because I didn’t have any ingredients left to start again if I fucked it up. Nope. I just spread it on anyway. It looked a bit flakey. In fact it looked like giant lumps of dandruff. And because fatless sponge has a sort of crumbly crunchy outside it didn’t stick.

Ah well, never mind. Nobody would notice if I decorated it with enough crap. I sprayed it with edible gold paint to give it a nice sheen, looked out the Happy Birthday candle that we light every year, and threw some white chocolate stars on it.

Cake: After, with the RIGHT date says the original caption. Yes I put the wrong date on my parents’ Golden Wedding cake.

Then I discovered some Halloween icing decorations; pumpkin faces, Frankenstein’s monster faces, an eyeball and two severed fingers. Perfect for McMini then. On they want and hoorah, we were done. After a bit of trouble, I managed to remove the airtight box I keep cakes in from the under the stairs bit of the pantry by using a strange grippy handle thing which has been in the family for years. My mother remembers her grandfather using it to reach for high up blackberries when she was a kid. From an early age I spotted it at my grandparents’ house and have been fascinated with it all my life. When my grandmother died, I inherited this strange thing and I am still fascinated by it.

Sorry, digression there. ‘Cake’ made I put it in the airtight box to have on ‘the day’. Birthdaygeddon dawned and McMini went off to town with a friend and disappeared. On the downside, he did not return at teatime and I was agog to try the cake. On the upside, he has grown out of wanting a party. Eventually texted said friend’s mother at five, and asked her to tell him to come home because I wanted to eat the chuffing cake. He arrived at half past five. On the upside, the cake was delicious and the dandruffy icing turned out to be lumps of crumbly fudge (tablet, basically). The most important thing was that it tasted wonderful. Yeh. Job done I’d say.

Having stuffed ourselves with cake at a point in the day which was, if we were honest with ourselves, a bit close to dinner, McOther got the bar-b-queue on and handed me a bottle of beer and some nuts to enjoy while I was upstairs having a shower and getting into my pyjamas. Yes, I put my pyjamas on at about seven pm because I have come to rather dislike going out in the evening. Well, I am fifty three after all. And I already have arthritis and one replaced knee so I may be even older on paper, so to speak. Not that I was going to have time to enjoy the beer and nuts either, since he told me, cheerfully, that I had five minutes. As I mounted the stairs I took a swig of beer from the bottle.

Big mistake.

You know how the first sip of beer from a bottle causes this foam eruption that just goes on and on and looks as if it’s never going to stop. Yeh, well the bastard thing did that. By the time it had finished bubbling it’s guts onto the stair carpet there was only about half the bottle left. Well fuck. Since I’d been gardening all afternoon I needed that shower. I was stinky and dirty and appeared to have a bad case of greenfly … almost as bad as some of my plants. Three and a half minutes of mopping them with a hanky later the beer stains had disappeared. I belted upstairs and hurled myself into the shower. Sod it, I was going to be late for supper which the cook does not appreciate. Never mind better late than stinky, washed the earth off my legs, feet and hands but didn’t have time to rinse the greenfly infestation out of my hair. Oh well.

McMini’s Donald Trump bun … obviously having a plate like that to put it on helps.

Luckily supper was a bit late so I wasn’t and the McOther was not upset that we’d failed to enjoy his smashing cooking. McMini peeled all the coating off his burger bun and it ended up looking a bit like Donald Trump which amused me. An evening vegetating in front of Montalbano and McMini went off to bed. McOther disappeared upstairs to put his light out and after about twenty minutes I realised he’d done that weird thing blokes do when they just disappear up to bed without telling you and you sit there watching telly for half an hour and then suddenly realise that the rest of the house is dark and you can hear snoring coming from the bedroom.

Realising that it was bed time I set about going to bed when McMini arrived for our evening chat. McMini likes a chat before bed. He arrived with a balloon pump and set about trying to puff me to death, at which point I want and got my balloon pump and before long we were puffing things at one another, or he was trying to puff the birthday cards off the mantelpiece while I puffed at them from the other direction, trying to keep them upright. Standard procedure for us then. McMini doesn’t have a sibling but as McOther pointed out, because I am merely another child, he sort of does. Having finally persuaded McMini that bed and sleep would be a good idea, I got to bed at about midnight.

First thing this morning, McOther headed off to car boots. I woke up and discovered that I could hear strange thumping sounds. I couldn’t work out if it was the cat in his ‘bedroom’ which is the room below our en suite, or McMini who is a demi-floor up from us. Our house is the same height all round but there are two rooms on top of each other at the front and three rooms on top of each other at the back, which is weird but just the way it is. Seeing as McOther was not there I indulged my Chaucerian side and ‘lette flye a fart’. Unfortunately, even when I am alone the sound of farts makes me giggle and McMini heard and appeared with a build-your-own hydraulic hand model that he’d been given for his birthday, the previous day. Yes, it seems he had built it over night.

‘Have you slept?’ I asked him blearily.

‘Oh yes, but I woke up at 4 am and was bored so and built this.’

Gads. Four am. Urrgh. Clearly McMini is like his father in that he has never really got the hang of going to sleep, or at least, both seem to be pathologically unable to go back to sleep if they wake up in the middle of the night. Me, I grew up in a boy’s school so I have no trouble with this. Mind you, not being able to sleep again after being woken up would have resulted in something like the Russian Sleep Experiment for anyone living there. As it was, I learned to sleep through the sound of fireworks – but not bombs, it seems I can differentiate between the two – drunken shouting, loud music and the fire alarm – I will be burned in my sleep if ever a building I’m in catches fire and there’s no one else with me to hear the alarm and drag me out of bed.

McMini was very much awake and ‘tested’ the robot hand by throwing a ball at me with it, stroking my face with it and generally being an evil troll. And now we are just on the brink of going out for a walk, except by the time I’ve found the pictures and phaffed with the stupid keywords, it will probably be evening and we’ll probably have been for the walk before you see this.

In other news …

The results of the K’Barthan invective quiz are in. Mwahahahrgh! Boy oh boy this was close. There were two run-away winners but the rest of the vote was comprehensively split between about six of them. Here are the results:

Smeck: Out-and-out winner this one with a huge 40% of the votes. Smeck is a word I made up that would sound a bit like fuck but not be as rude. I suspect I now need to think of something along the lines of Red Dwarf’s, ‘Better dead than smeg!’ Only in K’Barthan, using smeck.
Arnold’s Y-fronts! Not a huge surprise this one because lots of characters use it. It received 35% of the votes.
There are two in third position: Arnold’s conkers! and Arnold’s underpants! Hmm … do I detect a theme here? These two picked up 30% of the votes.
Fourth equal – because my list making thing can’t cope with jumping to five the way I’m meant to after a tie – with 25% of the votes, we have: Arnold’s bum! Smecking Arnold! Arnold’s smecking sweaty … and a suddenly clean, Arnold’s eyeballs! and Arnold’s Armpits!
Close behind these we have: Arnold’s earwax, Arnold’s toe jam! and Arnold’s plums.

There seems to be a theme here, which is that anything to do with bottoms and undergarments or the word ‘Smeck’ is a goer, along with dodgy effluvia such as toe jam and ear wax. I did write my books for people like me. Maybe there are more of them than I thought.

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