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2 Nov 2025 · 6:28 pm

Did I eat that? Yes I did!

Misadventures in food …

This week, I felt the urge to write something light and pithy because it seems to me there’s not quite enough of that in the world at the moment. To that end, I thought I’d describe some of the bold culinary experiments I have undertaken recently. So here we go. One bit of this has been used elsewhere, the rest is virgin territory. First up (do skip to the cake wrecks section if you have read my October newsletter) …

MTM’s adventures in foraging.

One thing I particularly enjoy is getting something for nothing. Enter foraging. Not only does foraging involve getting free food but, in the case of mushrooms, it’s free food that is about one calorie per metric tonne. If you are trying to eat sensibly and healthily and you are doing that with a dash of food group and calorie control, this is a bit of a bonus.

Images of edible fungi (montage) Top row two images top and underside of two beefsteak fungi, these are dark red. Underneath them is a dryad's saddle fungus first top uppermost and then the underside. These are arranged on a slate grey mat on a light wooden surface. Bottom row are two photographs of a parasol mushroom on green grass. Shows a whiteish mushroom with a brown centre and lots of dark brown spots. In colour and marking it's actually very similar to the top of the Dryad's saddle above it. . Underside shows white gills and a beige/brown stalk with white stipe.

In the picture we have: top left beefsteak fungus and dryad’s saddle from above and then showing the underside. On the bottom, parasol top and underside.

For the last three years I’ve been finding parasol mushrooms, dryad’s saddle and beefsteak mushrooms in the same places and putting photos on a foraging group on Facebook to confirm my efforts at I.D. This year, the fourth, I was finally confident that, having had the experts agree with my identification three years running, I could probably pick and eat them without risk of death. So when we had a muggy week last week and a lot popped up, I threw caution to the wind and picked them.

Then I ate them, so you don’t have to.

In a lot of cases there are reasons the edible foods in our hedgerows have fallen out of use. Usually it’s either because they take from here to the arse end of eternity to prepare, there’s something that looks exactly like them which will kill you or they merely taste vile.

These were surprisingly good.

Beefsteak fungus is offputting. It’s red/maroon, glistens like chopped liver and it oozes red goo. It’s always a joy to find one at the furthest point from the car on your walk when you have nothing to carry it in. Bearing it proudly home in your hand, past other walkers who look at you nervously, clearly wondering why you’ve just walked a five mile circuit with a pile of chopped liver in one mitt (yes, that’s what it looks like) can be a challenge if you are easily embarrassed. I found the Dryad’s saddle closer to so I didn’t have to carry it quite so far. Typical as it doesn’t ooze anything. Although it served to hide the beefsteak mushroom so the are-you-a-serial-killer looks from other walkers stopped, which was nice. The parasol mushroom came the next day. I found it walking round the grounds of McMini’s school waiting for the rush hour traffic to die down before driving home.

Montage of four pictures showing cooked and chopped dryad's saddle and beefsteak mushroom. All mushrooms are shown against a wooden background. There are four pictures. Top left is a fred gooey mess in a glass bowl with a fork in it. This is cooked beefsteak fungus. Top right is a brown and white speckled fungus cut into strips showing firm white flesh. This one is raw. Bottom left something that looks like slices of tongue, red and marbled like meat this is raw beefsteak fungus on a cutting board of slightly darker wood to the surface it's standing on. Bottom right is a white bowl contraining cooked Dryad's saddle. It has gone a little darker in cooking so the top is brown and the flesh is beigy brown in tone.

In the picture above we have, top left, Beefsteak Fungus, cooked, Top right, Dryad’s saddle chopped and uncooked. Bottom Right, Beefsteak fungus, chopped and uncooked, and Bottom left, Dryad’s saddle, cooked.

Verdict

Parasol mushrooms are lovely. I will eat more. Dryad’s saddle is supposed to smell like watermelon or cucumber. Actually it’s the smell of a flavour. That flavour is when you pick and eat a raspberry from the garden and there’s one of those tiny brown shield bugs in it. Not 100% pleasurable.

Texture: The texture of parasols is like a shop bought mushroom but slightly more watery.

Dryad’s saddle on the right in the pic, cooked (bottom) and uncooked (top) has a fantastic texture (although you need to use commonsense with which bits are edible and which are too tough).

Beefsteak cooked (top left) uncooked (bottom left). I think we can safely say the texture has to be managed correctly. On it’s own, well, you know that bit in The Blob where it comes through the grating in the cinema? If you don’t I expect you can google it. Yeh well, if you could imagine eating something of a similar texture to that you’re probably in the right area. BUT if you cut it very small, fry it with onions, garlic, tomatos, a glug of wine, herbs de province and throw in a little cream and some pasta and it’s bloody delicious.

Scores on the doors: Parasol 10/10 om nom nom. Very good with onions and cream or paired with scrambled eggs and marmite toast. Dryad’s saddle: 5/10 smells like a shield bug and sadly has a tang of that in the palatte too, only good with other mushrooms I suspect but the texture is mucking farevellous. Beefsteak: 7/10 quite an acidic taste and the texture is gopping so you need to cut it small and cook it with the right things but if you do you stop noticing the texture and it tastes fabulous. I can take or leave dryad’s saddle but will definitely eat parasols and beefsteak fungs again.

And of course, extra bonus points, I’m still alive. Which is nice.

I also had a giant puffball that week but I haven’t mentioned it because I’m confident identifying those so there wasn’t that same will-I-die-frisson.

Cake Wrecks

Shortly after these adventures, still basking in my sense of self-sufficiency, we jetted off to Portugal for a week. While there, I enjoyed a special pudding of the Algarve called, Torta De Armêndoa, or Torta De Armêndoa do Algarve to give it its proper name. This looks like a kind of wholemeal swiss roll with something very reminiscent of custard through it instead of icing. I love this pudding. It is one of my favourite things.

However as our favourite Algarvian haunt becomes a bit more curry-and-chips and a bit less pork-and-clams or fried-squid, Torta De Armêndoa do Algarve has become harder and harder to find … to the point where I was only able to have one portion. Meanwhile, my other favourite pudding, Dao Rodrigues (imagine baklava made with egg instead of pastry—it’s a lot more delicious than it sounds peps) was literally nowhere to be seen. There was only one thing for it. I was going to have to find out how to make these things, and then cook them. Myself.

Knowing that Dao Rodrigues requires special equipment and is insanely complicated to make, I realised this was not something I could learn to do straight away. Torta de Armandoa, though. That was a different matter entirely. I looked up ‘traditional food of the Algarve’ and found a picture of this thing. Then—God bless Google Lense—I searched for it with the legend, ‘recipe for this dish’ and after years of crap results for something similar, with a similar name, which is not the pudding I was looking for, Google finally came up trumps. Woot.

Picture of whole meal looking swiss roll filled with yellow icing.

Torta De Armêndoa do Algarve

Thank you to this lovely blog, where I found this picture and the recipe. I have posted the picture so you can see what the pudding looks like in real life, although I think most of the ones I’ve seen in the Algarve tend not to be iced on top. Anyway, onwards.

The basic gist is that the wholemeal-looking bit is a meringue with ground almonds in it and the zest of an orange.

Anyway, the meringue bit done; egg whites and sugar whipped, almonds and orange zest folded in, I then set about making the custardy-icing-bit which is interestingly counter-intuitive to someone versed in making things like Real Custard, with eggs. Basically, you make a sugar syrup, then you stir in the yolks from the eggs you used to make the meringue. Then, in the antithesis of any sane custard-making technique, you heat it, as if you’re trying to make it go like scrambled eggs, stirring all the time. Instead of going lumpy it thickens up to a similar consistency to butter icing. Weird, but also kind of cool. What I suspect I should have done here, just to keep the whole thing from getting too sickly, is to use two table spoons of the juice of the orange I’d zested, rather than the two table spoons of water suggested in the recipe.

Once that’s done and the ‘cake’ bit is cooked, you let everything cool and then you get the flat tray-baked cake, spread the bright yellow custardy-gloop over the cake. That lovely line from The Beatles’ I Am The Walrus

‘yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye’

was going through my head all the while I did this. Because I’m classy like that. The final results did nothing to dispel that particular earworm which continued relentlessly through my head, on loop as I regarded the results of my labours.

Yes. I give you Torta De Armêndoa, do Algarve.

A swiss roll like cake, but one that’s cracked a lot and is rolled in an exceptionally amateur way, on a plate on a wooden table.

You can see why the earworm persisted can’t you? I mean, it looks more like a surgical truss covered in pus but in my defence here people, it was surprisingly tasty. I present for your perusal a slice on a plate that looks a lot more like the real thing than this somewhat terrifying view from one end.

swiss roll style cake, plain cream/off white plain sponge coloured with yellow icing and a fork beside it on a green plate, with a thin blue rim, placed on a light coloured wooden table.

We had friends round for dinner so I tried it out on our brave diners. Luckily I’d already done them some prawns they’d enjoyed, so they trusted me. Amazingly, they liked it so much that when I offered them a chunk to take home, they rapidly accepted. Although they forgot it—which was a shame—because it meant I had to eat both their slices, with a cuppa, a few minutes ago.

The rest of it is sitting on a different plate with a glass bowl over the top which makes it look like a domed exhibit at some victorian shop of horrors … or possibly an art installation made from surgical waste.

Plate with a blue rim with a circle design at quarters, a red on yellow each side and a yellow on green at the front. On the plate is a swiss roll style cake which has been left overnight with a glass bowl over the top (still in place in the photo). Yellow custard-coloured icing is oozing from between the rolls of the Swiss roll so it doesn’t really look like a cake at all. It’s all sat on a wooden table with other bowls in the background one black with a lid and one translucent plastic with green leaves inside.

I know, terrifying.

Verdict

Well, yes, my Torte de Amêndoa, do Algarve does look like an utter abomination, but it tasted pretty good and more to the point, quite authentic. Despite containing enough sugar to induce a diabetic coma in a large elephant, the presence of almonds and egg seems to have tempered the sweetness considerably. The orange zest also helps on this score.

Looking at mine compared to the original on west coast cooking blog, I think I should probably have given the egg yolks a proper full-on beating, instead of just flapping at them ineffectually with a fork to get the stringy bits out. Think more fizzy-omelette-comme-Mere-Poulard than the somewhat desultory stir that I did.

Additionally, the texture of mine has come out a bit stodgier, I suspect, down to the fact UK ground almonds are ground up much smaller and peeled first. I have bought some straightforward almonds (un salted and unpeeled). Next time I’ll whack a few of these in the blender and see if I get a closer texture to the Algarvian original. I think I’ll also try adding a little of the orange juice to the sugar syrup because it could be a little less sweet, even if it was deliciously eggy.

Eight out of ten, then. I will definitely try this again.

Last but not least …

I have finished my latest book. I’m just doing the final sweep now before I format it and send it off to the beta readers. It’s not my best work, but it’s the middle of three and I have a decent idea where the rest is going to go, so I am extremely happy.

If you want to volunteer to beta read it, you can find more information, and a form to sign up here.

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9 Mar 2025 · 6:52 pm

In which MTM is a cockwomble, just for a change …

Last Monday was an interesting day. The kind of day that makes me wonder what the fuck is going on. Well, no, I mean, I end up thinking that most days—at the moment, I think that every time I watch the news for starters—but I digress, I am talking about on a personal level. I do wonder if other people’s lives are a bit less chaos-tastic.

This is probably no big surprise to you, bearing in mind the constant adventures I manage to have, laminating bacon or getting bitten by one of the soppiest, tamest dogs on earth, for example and then, when asked if I had an up-to-date tetanus shot having to explain that yes, I have, because I got bitten by a mouse in 2020–I got bitten by a rat in 2022 as well but, as usual, I digress again. Come on MTM get with the programme.

PIcture of a double metal hook with eyes stuck above it so it looks like a face with two outstretched arms.

Yeh… go figure.

Let me share the story of my day last Monday and at least demonstrate why I get absolutely fuck all done. Do feel free to tell me if this is the kind of stuff you’d expect to see regularly in your life.

Monday morning, I was booked in at the gym and headed off on my trusty bicycle. I got there pretty much without incident, except for thinking, as I parked my bike, that it would be a bad place to get a flat tyre, two and a half miles from home and all.

It’s strange how you can be prescient about stuff like that. After training quite hard and walking jelly-legged out of my session I was looking forward to cycling feebly for about half a mile and then, basically, sitting on it as it rolled downhill all the way home.

As you can imagine, I was a bit peeved to discover that this was not to be because my front tyre had gone down. I got out the pump and pumped it up but it simply made the type of loud hissing noise that suggested the air was going out almost as fast as it was going in. Sure enough, when I checked, it was.

Wanketty-wank.

A succession of inner tubes has sprung a leak; same tyre, the same place, where the valve joins the tube. Knowing the symptoms, I was pretty sure this was what had happened.

Again.

For fuck’s sake.

I’d already wheeled it home once (from half way to the gym) so unless I could pump it up enough to stay vaguely inflated, wheeling it anywhere now meant the tyre would be toast. I gave it another go. Nope. Nothing doing.

Arse hats!

Never mind, there was a motor spares shop in the next industrial estate over, it was also on one of the many routes home. At least if I got the tube I might be able to fix it …

Except I wouldn’t. The original front tyre of the bike had levers that allowed you to undo it without needing a spanner. However, I bought an electronic assist for it three years ago and that comes with a new front wheel, with an electric motor in the centre, which you have to use instead. This wheel has nuts you have to tighten. This also meant that without the prerequisite spanner I wouldn’t be able to fix it anyway. I decided that if I could walk it there I might be able to get a new tube for the bloody thing so at least when I finally got home I wouldn’t have to go back out to the local cycle shop.

I flirted with the idea of leaving the bike where it was, walking to the motor spares shop and buying the right spanner as well as a new tube, but to do that, I needed to know what sized spanner to buy and naturally, it’s a sodding number, and as we all know, thicky-Mc-Thicko here couldn’t remember the simplest number even if it was tattoed onto my actual fucking hand.

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

The spares store was about half a mile away so wheeling the bike down there would mean the tyre would be toast anyway, so even if I fixed it to ride home, I’d just have to take it off again when I got there. On the upside, I had a new tyre at home which I bought the previous time this happened.

To my joy, the motor spares store did, indeed, have some spares for bicycles. I paid the princely sum pf £6.50 for a new inner tube. They sold tyres too, so I thought about buying one, plus spanner, and fixing it there but was thwarted by the fact that, though they had knobbly mountain bike tyres, they didn’t have one that would fit my wheel.

Arse. Kind of.

Never mind. Can’t win ’em all. I supposed and it did save me the cost of a new tyre—when I already had one at home—plus the cost of the right spanner to change the wheel on top (also something I had at home). Accepting my fate, I popped the inner tube in my bag and paused to take stock.

Having started bright-but-cold it was turning into a lovely warm day and I was sweating, so I stuffed my coat and sweatshirt into my bag with the tube and set off.

The gym is at the top of a hill, the motor-spares place half way down. There are many routes home but none of them is direct so I usually choose the one with the least number of uphill climbs on the way there—it is not the most direct but I will go a long way out of my way on a bike if it avoids unnecessary hills—and a slightly longer route that’s downhill all the way on the return journey.

Since I was walking, and half way down one hill by this time, anyway, I chose a different route, which was also the shortest in miles; the cycle route. This is by far the hilliest with uphill stretches both there and back so I seldom use it on an actual bike because it’s far too fucking tiring, it takes a sodding eternity to get up all the bloody hills and I have better things to do with my time.

Half way down the first long hill I discovered a shortcut across a field that took off a huge corner AND the longest up hill stretch, suddenly turning this into the quickest option, at least on foot and possibly even on a bike, too. Huzzah! The path also goes straight across the field and I do like riding an off road cycle off road from time-to-time so I will definitely be trying it again for other return journeys.

Looking through a gap in the hedge at a field of brand new bright green corn with a blue sky.

This is the field in question …

Despite being the shortest route, it took for fucking ever to walk home. On the upside, at least I had water and a lark followed me across the field path, singing its heart out, which was wonderful. But it took me every bit of 45 minutes and what with another half an hour or so faffing about buying the inner tube on top I didn’t get home until half past eleven. I was knackered and all I wanted to do was relax but oh no, no chance. Now I had to fix my effing bike.

PIcture of a tabby and white cat lying on its back, stomach up, back legs akimbo, clutching it’s tail with it’s front paws.

It’d be nice to relax but … no time.

Once I’d removed the wheel I could see the problem, the tape round the inside of the wheel (that stops the inner tube from rubbing on the fastenings holding the spokes in place) had shifted round, digging into the stalky bit of the valve and rubbing a hole in it. I went and got a modelling knife from the house, dumping all my stuff on the kitchen side as I did so.

Back outside at the bike I greatly increased the hole in the tape where the valve pokes through using the knife. Hopefully it’ll now stop the bloody thing from puncturing every fucking inner tube I put in. Unless it’s the metal of the wheel where the valve goes though, in which case I’ll have to file it down, fingers crossed it’s the tape and nothing else.

Next I checked the tyre which was full of little balls of rubber, proving it was, indeed, comprehensively bollocksed. Bin that then.

The tyre came off easily, the new one went on eventually, but there were several moments where I rather wished I was an octopus. A lot of tyres come folded up which is great but means they need a bit of coercion to assume their proper shape.

It also took ages to pump the stupid thing up because I couldn’t get the pump on far enough to release the valve and let any air in. Finally, after about an hour of sweary effort, I had fixed the puncture. I put everything away, locked my car and went back to the house. At which point I discovered that one of the things I’d dumped in the kitchen was my house keys and I’d locked myself out.

Bollocks.

So then I had to break into my own bastard house, which is something I have to do once every couple of months, on average. By this time, I was ready to eat my own arm off so before taking a shower I had a quick bite of lunch. I finally had my shower at about 2.00 pm … instead of the usual time of about half ten. I’d left in a hurry so I had to do the washing up and tidying up from breakfast, at which point, it was time to collect Mc(not so)Mini from school. Then it was tea, family time and that was that.

This is what I do with my time. This is why I never get anything done.

Ho hum. Onwards and upwards.

Never mind if you have more time than me why not read a book.

Graphic book cover with two old ladies silhouetted against a darkened street

Yes, you can read a selection of my books for free to see what they’re like, including this one. To dip your toe in the world of K’Barth, check out www.hamgee.co.uk/cmot3.

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21 Sep 2024 · 9:04 pm

Hello again, hello …

Crikey but it’s been a long time hasn’t it? I am well aware that this is not good for my readership and that most of you are long gone. However, life has been very busy. I suppose everyone gets back from holiday in September and has to catch up on the month and also do All The Things that those of them with kids were putting off over the summer. I confess to being no different, although, today I have a cold so I have decided that running around like a blue arsed fly will not be my lot and I am going to spend it sitting down doing things I enjoy. Ergo …

Chaos fairies have been in abundance this week, when are they not? Although I have managed to remember my own name, and even some other people’s. I have kept my eye on the ball enough to get my lad to and from school at the right times, with the right kit washed and ready for a whole week while McOther went to Arnhem on a history walking tour. This process confirmed to me, very strongly, that I am not a morning person. But we managed it anyway. Woot.

Picture of a hollyhock flower with a bee inside it collecting pollen.

At one point I had a hilarious meeting with the school bursar who was so stereotypical that it was like interacting with a character from a comedy comic strip.

The speed limit on Mc(not so) mini’s school site has recently dropped from 15 to 10mph. After 7 years of 15 I do tend to do that speed on autopilot now so I have had to be very mindful that it’s dropped. Basically, if the car is bunny hopping along in second gear, I know I’m doing the right speed. If it’s running smoothly, and I’ve forgotten to stop and put it into first, I’m going 15mph.

So there I was, having just turned onto the site, about 100 yards in, drifting along on auto pilot. It was 5.00pm and I noticed there were lots of cars still parked at the pre-prep and was wondering whether it was late pick up, or a parents’ evening or similar.

As I lurched over another bump and gave it a bit of a squirt to stop it bunny hopping, I was brought back to earth, as the revs dropped again, by a movement at the side of the drive. A tall man in the kind of tweed suit you’d expect to see on Colonel Blimp was striding along with his arm out at about 45 degrees from his side waving it round in a circle.

Is he looking at me? I wondered.

Yes, I decided he probably was. The gesture was not one I’ve seen but I assumed he meant slow down. I eased right off the pedal and checked my speed, which by the time my very dodgy vision was able to present my brain with an image of the speedo that was in focus enough to read it (more on that story, later) was definitely bouncing about a bit at the 10mph mark.

OK not speeding now then, probably was before. Never mind, all’s well now. Phew. Job done. Smile and creep on past. But no, he continued to wave at me. What did he want? I checked the speedo and the errant eyes worked better this time. Yes, it was just below ten.

I’m going about 7mph now mate, I was thinking. I can’t slow down any more, so I stuck with 7mph and continued on by. It wasn’t like he had a speed gun, so it wasn’t his fault if he didn’t know I was going under 10 miles an hour, I decided as I approached the next speed hump. He was still waving his hand, presumably because he wanted me to go slower, no stop yet though.

There is normally one of those things that tells you your speed at the bump there, which I’ve slightly come to rely on to check I’m complying with regulations, that would have helped both of us know my speed for certain and has the added benefit that I can see it, but I was disappointed to note it wasn’t there.

I slowed even more for the speed hump. That was the point at which point he ran over and banged on the window.

Well that was a turn up. I stopped, and wound it down. Somewhat flabberghasted but also wondering why, if he wanted me to stop, he didn’t just … you know … put his hand up, palm towards me, in the universally acknowledged signal for stop. He appeared to be absolutely incandescent. And before I could even take a breath to say,

‘Hello there, can I help you with something?’ he started in.

Here we go. I thought. People do that same slow down gesture as I motor carefully through villages at 30 because they are certain that a car like mine will be speeding, so I was already harbouring misgivings that he was one of those. As such, it was probably best to just keep schtumm and see what he wanted. It depended how reasonable he was and what he had to say I guess. But since he was some random male I had no clue what he was about, but I could always burn away if he tried to open the door.

‘I am Arnold Rimmer*, the bursar of this school and when I signal for you to stop I expect you to do so please.’

*Not his real name, obvs.

Well, it would probably have been a good idea to actually signal that he wanted me to stop then. Never mind. I looked up at him in silence, the only thought in my head apart from, doesn’t he know how to signal stop? was, hmm, somebody’s done assertiveness training.

That, and a certain amount of surprise, of course, because I don’t think anyone’s talked quite as comprehensively down to me as that since I left preschool, and I had to hand it to him, the way he tacked that ‘please’ on the end took the sentence to a new level of rudeness and, yes, aggression, whether he meant it to or not.

Well. On the upside, it was nice to know he was the bursar and not some weird fucking rando, on the downside, it was very clear that he was about to go into orbit. Previous experience of this kind of situation has shown me that it’s best not saying anything to these people. You just nod politely until they’ve finished and then carry on with your day.

Even though it was extremely tempting to suggest, politely, that actually signalling ‘stop’ might have been more effective than just waving his arm about in some vague and random gesture, I reflected that it was unwise, and more pertinently, pointless. He had already decided who and what I was and no evidence or polite suggestion to the contrary was going to change his view, that much was clear … he had me pegged as evil. Forever. Not that he gave me time to so much as breathe before continuing.

‘How fast were you going?’ he demanded as I took a breath in to ask if I could help him.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I really don’t think it was much more than about twelve.’

‘It looked much faster than that to me,’ he said.

I didn’t reply. I think he said some other stuff but I’ve blanked it out. When he was done I drove off. At 10 mph. Except I started off in the wrong gear so my car was having none of it so embarrassingly, it bunny hopped the entire way up the drive. Now he’s going to think I’m speeding at any point when he sees the car driving smoothly.

Fucking weird though. Really, fucking weird.

That story there was going to be more of later …

Other things I have been mostly doing this week? Buying eye-wateringly expensive spectacles. My son and I needed eye tests. I have noticed, for some while, that I can’t always see things close up … or far away to be honest, but then I discovered that there were days when the instruments in the car … well I can see them, I just can’t always read them straight away. And that’s very bad so I booked an eye test immediately.

McMini’s eyes needed adjustment and he chose new frames, the most expensive frames in the shop which are made in Japan using the same technique that is used to make samurai swords or something ridiculous. For the love of the almighty. Raises eyes to heaven. They do suit him though.

Not the glasses in question…

Meanwhile I discovered that I now have astigmatism in my right eye as well as my left. I had no idea that could happen. I thought you were born with it but no, it grows. So there’s a new fact I’ve learned this week. Here’s another one. Varifocal lenses are extremely expensive. I’m going to try contacts as they do lenses that act in a similar way but I’ll still need specs whatever. I’ll have to test the lenses out as apparently some folks find they just make everything feel blurry. We shall see. I have chosen new glasses (the cheapest frames in the shop) although they were the ones that best suited me as well so … swings and roundabouts.

Writing news.

The writing has been coming along. I’ve been managing to do a little bit each day, which has been grand. It’s mostly editing so far, and shuffling scenes around so they fit, although I have a cold at the moment, just for a change, so I probably won’t be able to do much until that’s gone.

Bastard Chaos Fairies

Yep. The little bastards are back. This time it’s my fitbit they’ve got into. Yesterday it suddenly went yellow. I plugged it into its charger and rebooted it which seemed to fix it for a few minutes, then it went yellow again and completely died. I’ve no idea what’s up there but it’s not even a year old. Return it and get a new one I hear you say. Well yes, I could do that, I thought if I could find the chuffing receipt. I know I bought it in October but that’s all, which was kind of annoying.

Worse, I know I threw the box away recently, as in put-in-the-recycling-they-collected-two-days-ago recently. So that’s also sodding annoying. I have no receipt, no delivery note … nothing. That’ll teach me to tidy up.

I did everything I could think of and then clicked the help thing and got a call back. Turned out I had, indeed bought it from Fitbit, and while I couldn’t see it on my dashboard after Fitbit became Google, they could. So I have a shipping label and it will be off to Holland by DHL on Monday to be fixed, or at least switched. It’ll take ten days, and it’ll be a bust one that’s been fixed, but I’m really chuffed not to have to stump up for a new one.

Here’s another thing you never knew.

On the usual Saturday morning trip to the market today, there was sad news from the egg sellers. Apparently one of the major re-homing shelters for urban foxes from London is near them and many are released into their woods. This is usually fine, but occasionally, once a year or so, a fox gets into their hen coops and kills everything. Last night a fox got into their bantam coop and killed all 12 of them.

Interestingly, the girl also told me that the reason foxes kill everything is because they will take the bodies away and bury them to eat for later meals. So it’s not bloodlust after all. Nope. It turns out your basic fox is just a panic buyer.

Onwards and upwards.

Afore ye go …

There’s a fabulous free book giveaway on today so if you want to snaffle a copy of Few Are Chosen, now’s your chance.  There are a stack of books in the promo, you can find them all here:

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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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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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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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27 Feb 2022 · 6:05 pm

Oh shit … warning: venting ahead.

Gardening tips from Vladimir Putin

Holy fucking fuck.

Well, this has been an bit of a grim week hasn’t it? If you’d asked me the kind of future I envisaged for my son a few years ago, I’d have said, ‘whatever he wants to make of it.’ I confess that the idea that, in a couple of year’s time, he might be called up to fight in a third world war wasn’t exactly uppermost in my mind. I suppose it depends on a lot of factors but there are uncanny parallels between current events and some of the darker parts of 20th century history.

What worries me, specifically, is that, putting my Lord Vernon hat on for a moment, if I was the average dictator-in-the-street, with one of the largest conventional armies at my disposal, I’d be thinking like this:

Nobody wants to use nuclear weapons. Why? Because a nuclear war would poison the entire planet. We’d all die except for about 0.0001% of the population; the social or political elite who have access to/own a nuclear bunker. Everyone else would either be vaporised in the succession of blasts, or would die of radiation poising in the aftermath.

Obviously as a dictator, I don’t give a shit about killing people but a nuclear conflict does raise problems:

1. If I want to bestride the earth like a colossus with every creature doing my bidding, I need … well … an actual earth to bestride. If I’ve nuked it so that no-one can ever go outside again then, frankly, my chances of doing any seriously satisfying bestriding are a bit shit aren’t they?

2. There’ll be a staff problem. I mean, I’m a dictator. I have an ego. I believe in my own indomitability. There have to be enough people in the underclass to lord it over. There won’t be enough little people to crush under my mighty feet as I do the colossus thing if they’re all dead and there won’t be enough of them to see it. Unfortunately, today’s underclass- no scratch that, pretty much the entire population of the world, today, lacks access to a nuclear shelter. If I nuke my enemies and they nuke back then all the little people will die in the attack. I will be left with a very small group of similarly mighty egos to my own, and the kind of people who’ve never got their hands dirty.

3. If I’m a proper dictator and worth my salt, I like money and a broken and shattered world economy isn’t going to earn me shit. Unless I just want all the stuff. Maybe I just want a palace full of looted art and jewellery all stacked up. The art. All of it from every single museum in the countries I’ve destroyed. I dunno, but I suspect if I’m properly dictator-level greedy I’m going to want an economy to subjugate that’s a bit more than dead on the table.

No sireee! I’m pretty sure that if I was a dictator, a world comprising me and my special few, plus a couple of thousand people from every other country that could afford a shelter system—with a sprinkling of the kind of insanely rich and paranoid bell-ends who have their own nuclear bunkers, Auric Goldfinger, come on down—would not float my boat world-dominance-wise.

Yes, lording it over the survivors of a nuclear war will be child’s play, but as I mentioned, there’ll be only a handful of them. It might be alright, but I’m guessing the average Dictator-in-the-street will consider this to be small-time shite and not the big cock-waving fest they’re after.

Unless Putin’s decided he’ll rise from the ruins with a few thousand privileged survivors and start a master race. I do hope not. I wonder how that would work though. Especially if, for months, no-one can go outside for more than half an hour without getting radiation sickness, and when they do, nothing will work because the EMP in the blast has done for the infrastructure. I’m hoping he’ll decide that poisoning the entire planet is a really bad idea because it will make it much harder to subjugate.

OK so that sounds good so far, but it’s not, because if I’m a properly power crazed nutjob, the inability to nuke isn’t going to stop me wanting a massive fuck off war. If I was the average Dictator-in-the-street and I knew that I had a bigger army than most of my enemies put together, and being a dictator, I didn’t give a rat’s arse about the people I govern because they are there to serve me and add to my wealth, nothing more. I might be tempted to sacrifice a few million of them in a conventional war.

After all, if I start a conflict that wipes out 60 million people like the second world war did, I still have way, way more individuals to screw for cash and lord it over afterwards, if I win, and there’s still the remnants of an infrastructure for me to milk for my own ends. If I’m just another of the rich white men who wants to run the world but am being a bit more obvious about it (by din’t of being a meat-packing dictator) war without nukes will suit me.

Let’s face it, half the western world believes Putin’s the good guy anyway. Yes. Russian sources are painting the Ukraine as the aggressor and because Putin and his ex KGB mates have so successfully undermined our faith in mainstream media there are normal people in the west who actually believe it. There are, educated, sensible people who genuinely think that Biden and Trudeau are part of a communist conspiracy to seize power.

Well, I guess they kind of are, because Putin would probably call himself a ‘communist’ I suppose. If it happens, though, I can’t help thinking that the power seizing is going to go very differently to the way our conspiracy theorist friends expect. The fact is, as I understand it, a lot of the folks who are in charge in Russia are also very rich. I can’t help wondering if a lot of the very rich and very right wing people in the west have looked on and thought, ‘hmm, we want a piece of that.’

Do we think our Dictator-in-the-street has sown enough internal discord in the West’s main players to ensure they stand divided, crumble under pressure or even stay home? Possibly.

All I can hope is that financial necessity and greed will save us. That the parties controlling the propaganda in this will appreciate that any war will destabilise economies and detract from their ability to line their own pockets long-term, and they will put away their guns and lure Mr P back to the negotiating table.

The only thing we can guarantee is that average dictator in the street doesn’t give a shit about, is his people and the death toll. Yep, we know that he won’t be having any thoughts about that.

So rock on greed, I guess. Unless it’s about ideology. In which case, I suspect we’re screwed. Nobody believes their ideology as hard as a your average extremist nutbar.

I sincerely hope we are not standing on the brink of world war three, but looking at our apparent inability to learn from the mistakes of history, I can’t help wondering if we are. I keep seeing the parallels; the undermined press, the persecuted minorities the whole thing, right down to everyone sticking their heads in the sand and going, ‘La, la, la, it’s not happening!’

But what do I know? I’m just a mother with a young son who may end up being the wrong age at the wrong time. One of millions who stands to lose someone they hold very dear over the antics of some vainglorous dickhead with an over-inflated ego.

Just like last time then.

That’s a bit of a pisser.

It’s not often I agree with Sting, but here he is articulating my fervent hope. Yeh. Maybe I should have just ditched the rant and posted this …

On a happier note …

If you want to forget about this shit, you can always download my free ‘winter’ story.

The Last Word, A Christmas K’Barthan Extra

Shows the cover of The Last Word

The Last Word

Yes! It’s dark, it’s mid winter and in K’Barth that means only one thing. It’s Arnold The Prophet’s Birthday! The biggest holiday in the Nimmist year. As usual, the Grongles have banned any celebrations and worse, this year, to add insult to injury, they’re going to have a book burning on the Sacred Day but that’s not going to stop Gladys and Ada. Oh no. Here’s the blurb:

When Mrs Ormaloo brings the terrible news to the Turnadot Street Businesswomen’s Association that the Grongles are going to burn some more banned books on the night of Arnold, The Prophet’s Birthday Gladys and Ada decide to take steps. They even enrol some of the punters from their pub to help out.

The books are in a warehouse being kept under guard. Gladys, Ada, Their Trev and the rest of the group embark on a plan of devilish cunning to rescue as many banned books from the flames as they can.

Corporal Crundy is determined not to mess up his first assignment since his promotion. It should be easy. All he has to do is guard some books. Yeh. It should be a piece of cake but somehow that’s not the way it turns out.

This story is about the same length as Night Swimming and available in PDF, Mobi and Epub from Bookfunnel. Which reminds me, I must pester Gareth about doing the audio version.

Later on I will probably add a second half to it and release it as a short story with a proper cover and t’ing rather than this slightly dodgy one what I done! Phnark. Aaaaanyhoo …

To download your copy, click here

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7 Feb 2022 · 12:08 am

Deserted landmarks and empty milestones …

Recently, I’ve been feeling slightly muted. Tomorrow would have been my father’s birthday and a few days ago, my phone’s calendar flashed up a reminder warning me that I might want to get prepared.

It hurt.

I still miss Dad, which is illogical, because it’s not as if he died a bad death or his departure was even a bad thing. It was a mercy. He had suffered enough and there was nowhere else for him to go. Death was the next stage for him and I am certain that he was more than ready. Although it hurt to receive it, I couldn’t bring myself to remove that notification from my phone. Maybe next year eh?

Strangely, I find that these empty milestones that were once land mark days often come accompanied by a stream of coincidental, memory-triggering events. I don’t mean the phone notification it’s more stuff like the fact that today, in church, we had a couple of hymns that Dad loved. Immortal Invisible is one where the memory of how he sounded, singing it, was so strong that I could almost hear him beside me. Likewise, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, which we have had at most family funerals on both sides of the house, weddings too — to the point where I feel guilty not having it at Dad’s.

There is a bit in Dear Lord and Father of Mankind which can be construed as rude … if you work at it very hard. Today, I found myself smiling as I remembered Dad leaning over to me after the service, in a conspiratorial manner, and telling me which bit it was and why.

This from the man who was endlessly telling me the latin or greek roots for things … which is not as erudite as it sounds because Dad was a natural rebel and liked to be a little subversive from time-to-time. That’s probably why the only instance I can remember of his efforts to educate me is constipeo (constipere, constipatatum, constipatus sum) — which means ‘I bring pressure upon’ and from which we get the modern word, constipation.

How proud he’d be!

Or not.

Dad

Then again … I do remember him gleefully sharing this information with my brother and I, and Mum’s gentle, ‘No! Darling!’ which was more for show than anything because she was trying not to laugh. Indeed, as a nipper growing up, I remember all four of us as being terrible potty humourists, you only had to shout, ‘bum!’ at my family in the right way and we’d fall about laughing.

Mum was probably the best at pretending to be normal, Dad could do it as well, but he did tend to be a bit forgetful which blew it all apart at the seams sometimes. On the up side, as I told him when he started to get dementia, since he could never find his keys anyway, he’d be quite far gone before anyone noticed. Which turned out to be the case.

In my last year at Lancing, Dad retired as housemaster. Since he and Mum had left the accommodation on site I was boarding. Dad was Head of The Common Room which basically meant he was now housemaster to the teachers. One evening, I was on my way back from supper, or possibly a rehearsal or something at the music school and I encountered Mum and Dad, in their best black tie glad rags, with the parents of one of the lads in Dad’s house.

‘Hello, what are you doing here?’ I asked.

‘We’re here for the Common Room Dinner,’ Dad explained.

I glanced over at the door of the Master’s Dining Room. It was looking a bit closed and I couldn’t hear much in the way of chat going on. Should I say anything I wondered? No.

‘It seems to be a bit late starting,’ said Mum.

‘Right,’ I said. I think I wished them well and skipped off without a thought.

The next day I asked one of the other staff if they’d enjoyed the dinner the previous night. ‘That’s not until next week,’ I was told.

Oh dear … poor Dad, I remember thinking. Poor Mum, too as she had to produce dinner back at home and she had precisely zilch with which to do so. I think she rustled up a quick risotto with tinned ham and frozen mixed veg.

Life was never boring at home indeed, it was years before I reached the point where my parents were remotely shockable. They were more open and accepting than most of my friends … perhaps I should just leave that as, ‘most people’. Mum still is.

I miss Dad a lot. I suppose that’s partly because, as time passes and my memories of the shouty bit that plagued his last few months at home have begun to fade, I’ve begun to remember who he was — which is a bonus. The only slight drawback is that when you’re stressed your brain dumps an enormous amount of intel and unfortunately, I’d say as much as half my childhood memories, and my memories of Dad, have melted away post the stress of dealing with his Alzheimer’s. So it’s kind of wiped my memory, as well as his.

That’s a point of order though, because on the whole yes, I remember who he was more. Who he really was, and that’s a Good Thing. I have a video of him talking on my phone, in his proper, non demented voice. He had Alzheimer’s at the time, advanced Alzheimer’s, but it wasn’t manifesting itself so strongly and it’s so much him, that vid, that I treasure it. I realise that I need to make a video of Mum. I might get her to record one for McMini next week, saying she’s looking forward to seeing him. That will be one for both of us to treasure then. Because that’s the first thing I find, when someone dies, you subtly start to forget their voice. Not totally, but when you hear it properly you realise how much is missing from your remembered version.

Then there’s the fact that, on top of the better memory of who Dad was, I’m finding that, as Mum follows her own dementia journey, I am keenly aware that this time round there’s no ‘sane one’. Through most of Dad’s illness, I could ask Mum for guidance if I wasn’t sure I was getting something right. She would know exactly what Dad would have done or said. It’s probable that, because of that, I know what Mum wants. But there’s no Dad to check with. Because he’s dead. And even if he wasn’t dead, he’d have been nuts.

Shortly after he died, I was out with Mum in the garden walking very slowly beside her as she crept along with her walky frame-on-wheels thing. At that time, we always made a beeline for the bottom of the garden because it was beyond the range of her panic button and she wasn’t allowed, or at least was strictly encouraged not to go there unaccompanied. She did, of course, but we all pretended she didn’t. As we walked I suddenly heard Dad’s voice in my head saying,

‘Oh darling! Just look at the state of your mother, I can’t bear it.’

Pyrimid Orchids at Mum’s

It was so vivid I turned to look but he wasn’t there. I remember thinking ‘back’ that I’d do my utmost to look after her and that while I couldn’t make her better, I would try to keep her happy.

Most of the time, I know those things are my imagination, but every now and then, one pops up from such depths that it feels as if it wasn’t me. Weird.

As well as it being the eve of what would be Dad’s 91st Birthday, had he survived, today was also the 70th anniversary of The Queen’s accession to the throne (in English, since the death of her father).

As a result, the last hymn was I Vow To Thee, My Country — a hymn I would like a lot better if the tune didn’t concentrate itself quite so comprehensively in the crackly twilight zone between my upper and lower range. Then we finished with the National Anthem which goes to a tune I rather like — apologies to Billy Connolley, who, I know, believes we’d be much better off using the theme tune to BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Archers’.

Run with me, there is a spot of relevance to this one. I remember reading somewhere, a while back, that The Queen was very upset when her uncle abdicated. To the point where she took herself off somewhere quiet and cried for a long time. Legend has it that the reasons for her grief were twofold; firstly, because her father lacked his brother’s strong constitution and she shared the view of himself and most other members of the Royal Family which was that being King would do for him. Secondly, because she had to face the godawful truth that she would have to be monarch, which is a job that nobody sane with the smallest understanding of what it entails would want.

Few people seem to see beyond the wealth but I’m sure fame, or being monarch, could be pretty grim. I can’t imagine how I’d feel having people like Robert Mugabe round to tea. Sure his name backwards sounds like Yorkshire swearing (eee by gum) but that doesn’t make any of his actions funny. Supping with murderers and meat-packing tyrants might be quite grim but since you’re part of the state machinery, it’s what you do. There’s a point where being monarch might actually be quite dehumanising, I suspect.

Years ago, growing up in the school, everyone knew who I was because they all knew who my dad was. That meant everyone felt they knew me well, even people I’d never met in my life. Every now and again someone would pop up and say hello and I’d have no clue who they were. So I’d ask after their work, and various other things until I could pin down which of the people Mum and Dad had described — but whom I’d never met — I was talking to. I was always aware that my behaviour towards other people reflected on Dad so despite being an absolute menace in many respects I was always as polite as possible to everyone, especially the people at the pointy end, the cleaners and domestic staff.

Sometimes, I felt the pressure. Especially when I hit my teenage years and boys started wolf whistling at me out of windows etc. But I could always go off site where nobody knew who I was. There’s no ‘off site’ if you’re queen. Most people want a piece of you. Anyone else hates you. Everyone thinks you like it. Everyone thinks you can say no, the way they think my brother and I could say no to looking after our parents. But actually I doubt she can say no any more than we can. Being Queen? I think it’d be a bit shit to be honest.

The point is, she’s spent 70 years of her life doing a job that she categorically did NOT want to do. OK, so she might have come to enjoy it by now, who knows. The point is, it was the antithesis of what she wanted at the start. The perfect storm of NO. You can see where this is going now, can’t you?

Yep.

There are times when I do give the Almighty a piece of my mind about putting my Dad, and by proxy the rest of us, through so much. The fact that pretty much everything about the whole care thing requires a portfolio of skills that is the absolute antithesis of any of my fucking skills. Which is, indeed, a perfect storm of all the things in life at which I am spectacularly shite. Yes. Every. Last. Fucking. One. Oh and some extra things that I didn’t even know I was shite at until this kicked off, but now I do. Bonus!

The fact that pretty much all my duties of care are about playing to my failings. OK so I can sort of cope with that, because yes, I am able to understand that many parts of my life — most of them, to be honest — are fucking brilliant. Also I am able to understand that if this is the price of growing up with parents as lovely, open, amusing and out-and-out fun as mine I’m happy to pay up. But … the mental energy required to do stuff you’re absolutely bollocks at day after day is quite substantial.

The endless requirement to enhance my sorry performance from fucking awful to godawful-but-it’ll-scrape-by … probably (that’s a technical term by the way) is not only draining but it cascades down onto the pathetic embers of my creativity like a gushing torrent of rusty bog water, further hampering my efforts to write anything or … I dunno … for my existence to have a point.

Sitting in church today, thinking about how long The Queen has been monarch I actually felt a bit of a lightweight for whinging about 5 years running my parents’ finances. I will try to shut up about it and be less of a whinging twat from now on. Seriously though.

Seventy years.

Seventy fucking years people.

God in heaven! That’s a bastard truckload of CBT. Well done Ma’am. You’re a stronger woman than I.

On the lighter side …

Another quick heads up about freebies and cheapies available from my fabulous portfolio of literature. Er hem.

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

Few Are Chosen (remember it’s My Store only at the moment. It’s back to £7.99)

Small Beginnings (The ebook of this one is free at all participating retailers and on my store. The audio version is also free on my store, but £1.99/$2.99 everywhere else).

The Christmas One This one’s an ebook, obviously. Gareth has finished performing in Worms, presumably he is now bathed and scrubbed up and ready to do … audio things. Soon. There is an audiobook scheduled for late February/Early March.

Shows the cover of The Last Word

The Last Word

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7 Aug 2021 · 5:38 pm

Urgh! Just kill me now …

This week I have been making a very credible attempt to disappear up my own bum. Jeepers, if this is what it takes to visit another country I am never ever smecking going abroad again. And I’m not even the poor bastard trying to organise it. That’s McOther.

Suffice it to say that we had been looking at the prospect of escaping to France at some point, but I suspect the gargantuan mound of admin we have to attend to, were we to do so, would compare unfavourably with the amount of forward planning Scot did for that fatal trip to the Antarctic.

Other news this week, my website – not this blog but the actual http://www.hamgee.co.uk one – fell over. OK it didn’t really fall over exactly, I pushed it … a little bit. But NOT on purpose.

For some time now my web interface over there has been pestering me to upgrade  to WordPress 5.8. However every time I do I get a server error. This was something which had always happened at first release but there was usually the option to upgrade to the US version. I’d do that and then the GB version would work fine. This time there was no US version.

This was not a good idea.

Looking up on t’interweb, I discovered that it might be down to lack of server space, possibly, or I might need to do a manual install. I deleted a lot of posts from my blog, except for the two years when it was there rather than here. Then I attempted the manual install. I followed the instructions carefully and … when I loaded the site, I got a little message telling me something was missing. And a white screen. But nothing more.

Shit.

I backed up the copy I had on my own computer and then cracked open the original copy I’d downloaded in 2014. Then I wiped everything on the server and uploaded that. Maybe that would work?

Nope.

Maybe if I uploaded the backed up recent version on my computer then?

Nope.

Shit.

The galling thing was that this was obviously a really simple fix, I was just having trouble understanding what things it was telling me it needed.

Long and the short of it was I contacted the fellow who designed the site and does my web hosting. After a fraught 24 hours waiting for him to come back to me. He was away bless him, he reassured me that there was a back up on the server and reinstalled one from Friday. It’s still a bit borked so he’s going to have a look at it and see if he can straighten things out. Fingers crossed.

Other news this week, I suddenly got two promo slots for Hello Books, which is rather good and as a result I added a couple of other promo sites and yesterday Escape From B-Movie Hell received a massive 40 downloads. I am very chuffed about this as they came from other sites as well as Amazon, including Barnes & Noble and Kobo. Woot. Happy with that then. Yes it cost more than I’m going to earn but at the moment it’s a case of collecting new readers any way I can and hoping that as they join in with the whole K’Barthan Jolly Japes community, they will stick around and read my other stuff too.

Yesterday, I managed to step on a dead chick which I think may be the most revolting thing I’ve ever done. It was very windy here and I think it must have blown out of a tree or been dropped by one of the squirrels/magpies. It still had a yellow egg sack and it was primrose yellow and fluffy and definitely hadn’t been caught by the cat as there were no bite/puncture marks. Ugh. Just thinking about it gives me the boake.

Over the next four weeks I have many, many things to do. Just the thought of it is giving me hives, also characteristically, many things I wanted to do are, of course, happening at the same time, or when I’m not around; church friend’s funeral, the first metal detecting rally I’ve had access to in two years … all fall on days I can’t get to them. I guess that’s the same old same old.

During the next month, I suspect there will be no blog posts because there will not be time. I’m really sorry about that. There is so much admin that it’s all I’ll have time to do. If you feel denuded of all things K’Barthan, and are on Facebook, do feel free to hop over there and join the K’Barthan Jolly Japery Group. It’s a scream and I should be able to check in there a couple of times a day.

Right then. That’s it, I think. A bientot! Waves.

In the meantime, if you are hankering after some K’Barthan nuttery …

You can get some of my books reduced at the moment. Woot.

There may be a security error on some of these links but last Friday, I installed something that fixed that, but clearly after the time the site was backed up to. I have just installed it again. Oh yes I have. Hopefully it will work and nothing will break.

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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.

Lord Vernon … uber git

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 darkness falls …

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.

More tea vicar?

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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