Tag Archives: grief

17 Nov 2024 · 5:50 pm

The gap between intention and delivery …

It would be my Mum’s 91st Birthday tomorrow and it feels surprisingly weird. For starters, I had a horrific dream that the ongoing stomach thing went comprehensively wrong while I was out with friends. I dreamt I had stomach cramps and thought nothing much about them, little realising that I was actually bleeding to death at a wine tasting. The final death scene, where I keeled over and hit the deck in front of all the horrified wine tasters, threw me a bit, especially as it was what I called a deja-vu dream, which is difficult to explain but is just my slang for dreams that mean something.

Thinking about it, I suppose I tend to dream about death when I’m processing a change in life. I suspect it’s pretty standard for most people, fear of the unknown, fear of new because what is death, after all, if it isn’t a step into the unknown?

Elderly lady sitting in a coral coloured chair holding a paper. Her glasses are perched on the end of her nose and she’s smiling

Mum.

In a few weeks, it will also be the first anniversary of her death. I miss her terribly. Even demented Mum although it’s undemented Mum I yearn for; the lovely mercurial, funny, lively lady who gave ZERO fucks about making a tit of herself if that’s what doing the right thing entailed. The fabulous cook. Her boundless hospitality and her kindness and good humour and her unerring instinct as to what The Right Thing To Do was at all times.

And weirdly, I miss my Dad. It really felt as if he was there over those last months, when the money ran out and I accepted that we were going to have to move Mum. I know The Pan of Hamgee has virtual parents (cause, write what you know, hey? And I definitely did there). I kept hearing little snippets of ‘Dadspeak’ in my head. It felt as if he was with us most of the time as Mum got ill and also after she died.

PIcture of an older man in a cardigan and shirt sitting in front of a window. He’s wearing a panama style hat and smiling.

Dad

I think, because of that, I miss undemented Dad too in the same way. The joyous fun-filled bon-viveur. The patrician rebel. The very dapper man who looked so establishment yet had a wicked sene of humour and loved to prick the bubble of the pompous, and of course, ditto with the right kind of no fucks attitude to making a prick of himself. It’s not so hard apologising, it really isn’t. I find it really hard to understand people who are unable to admit they are wrong or back down. Dad and Mum would just say, ‘oh dear, have I made a boo-boo?’ or something similar, apologise and move on.

I miss the seemingly boundless capacity for love and kindness towards their fellow humans in both of them, their sense of duty. They were giants of people. It’s a lot to live up to.

All that about love and doing the right thing makes them sound terribly serious. They weren’t, they were just unbelievably open and accepting. There were two kinds of people in their world, people who were twats and everyone else. I think my parents were in their 80s before I met anyone as unshockable and accepting as they were, although I’ve since been lucky enough to find more of them.

There were gargantuan meals, a lot of my family life was about eating—they took the agape thing seriously—there were huge Sunday lunches, or small ones, depending on how many people they found who ‘weren’t doing anything’ on Sunday. Their dedication, at Lancing, to giving a slap-up Sunday lunch to any stray younger members of staff or boys left in the house on exeat weekends, and failing that, my or my brother’s friends. There was laughter, the silly stories and Dad’s impressions. The stories they told against themselves because they were funny. The humour, warmth and laughter. Their home was a sanctuary; not just to me but to many others.

An elderly man and lady standing in front of a fling and sandstone archway. They are smartly dressed, her in a fuscia pink jacket and top, him in a suit with a striped dark blue and light blue tie. Their arms are linked and they are holding each other’s hands and smiling

Love is in short supply at the moment so I miss the pair of them more keenly. I miss the way they lived their faith, their principles, their strength of character and their courage. My parents; my guiding light in how to behave, my moral compass in many respects. The light has gone out. Now I have to be the light and I’m a long way behind them.

For some time, I have been thinking, that I should write a memoir about Mum and Dad. The rationale behind it was to paint a picture of what it’s like walking the dementia journey. Taking the hand of someone you love and walking beside them, into the dark. The things to look out for and be prepared for. The things which will hurt and maybe, ways to deal with that pain that helped me and might help other folks.

But I’m having trouble starting. Maybe I should just write. Barf it all up onto my computer and sort it when I’m done. I dunno. I find myself writing two memoirs. The dementia one and one about them and the ridiculous stories they used to tell. And their ridiculous peccadillos. Dad was pretty much a walking compendium of the Guide Michelin, if you mentioned a place he’d be able to tell you about a ‘red underlining’ or a ‘knife and fork’ etc. His holiday reminiscences comprised lists of the glorious meals he’d had and where followed by a mention of a visit to his very long-suffering French cousin, Marianne, to be ill. He underpinned a lot of his experiences with food, setting life against the background of meals. Mum, I think, was more interested in the random people she met and their stories. She would spend hours talking to everyone and remember who we met and what their story was. I appear to have inherited this.

The second memoir, the one about them, probably isn’t going to work as anything other than a family document.

The dementia one is harder because it flies in the face of a lot of what was true and good about who they were. Especially Dad, because he was one of the most empathetic of people, and it took that from him.

However, putting myself in the shoes of us at the beginning of it all again, all we knew was that people who were diagnosed with dementia tended to become a bit forgetful, then they would disappear and three years later you’d hear they’d died.

None of us knew what happened in those three years. Well, OK, maybe Mum and Dad did, I don’t know. I’m guessing they would have talked about the future when they realised something was happening to Dad’s brain in 2004. They did their power of attorney then had a big 40 year wedding anniversary party because they didn’t think they would make 50. They did make 50 in the end, but it was a struggle and in many respects the photos were better than actually being there.

Even so, I guess what I want is to write something uplifting and at the same time, true, honest and informative so people knew what to expect. I wanted to hold their hands and guide them through it. Because it’s less about managing the demented person to be honest and more about managing yourself.

There was no guidance for us; nothing and in Mum and Dad’s area, one of the excellent charities that might have helped and guided us didn’t operate in Sussex. There is still no other guidance than charities in most places and for us that was simply a string of being told ‘we don’t but x might’.

So yes, I guess I’d like to help other people taking their first steps on the road. Shine a little light onto the path ahead, or the shapes that might be coming out of the dark. At the same time, I also want to send a message to the powers that be. Look at this you utter bastards. This is what you’re doing. To tell them the whole truth and not hold back.

However, there are points where it feels a bit disloyal, to Dad especially, because his dementia affected his personality more. When Dad started to show signs of dementia we didn’t know what to expect. I owe it to others to tell them, but I owe it to Dad to do it the right way.

The explosions of unexpected, hurtful anger would have mortified pre-Alzheimer’s Dad. Maybe I should just stick at no-one will tell you, no-one will commit to anything, there are organisations who will help but no-one will tell you who they are or how to contact them. Because they really won’t. Even in 2015, a mere four years before the Alzheimer’s ran its course, we were like lambs to the slaughter. We hadn’t a fucking clue what was coming.

‘What will happen to Dad, how will the disease progress?’ I used to ask the professionals.

‘We can’t tell you because no two people are the same. Each person’s journey is different.’ They always replied.

This is true in some respects, I mean, clearly no two people’s journeys are the same. But in others it’s complete bullshit. Indeed, what it really means is, ‘We can’t tell you what you’re in for. It’s too horrific. If we’re too honest with you, you’ll never stay the course. You’ll run or worse, we might have to offer you some meaningful help.’

At the time I was angry in the face of what felt, to us, like a conspiracy of silence. But now that I’ve reached the other side and I come to talk about what it was like I too feel reticent.

I want people to know but in some ways, it’s easier to talk about Mum, because the dementia was kinder to her and it never took away who she was. While at the same time, it’s more difficult in other ways because her loss of cognition hit me harder. I’d been trying to get her through Dad’s journey alive and well so she would have time to mourn, regroup and relax in her last years. I wanted her to have just a few years without a care in the world, where we could just be friends.

Well, actually, I suppose that even with the dementia, that is pretty much what we did for her but not entirely. She was going to downsize and possibly move into the retirement flats just up my street, if I could find her one, or near my brother, or if she couldn’t decide, somewhere smaller in her village. Instead she insisted she stay in the house which, though lovely, was bleeding her dry almost as fast as her care costs.

The same milestones came and went on the descent; the day she forgot where ‘home’ was, the day she asked if her parents had died, the day she said she thought I was her sister … but she was always kind and never lost her sense of the ridiculous or her sense of humour. She could laugh at herself until the very end. It was easy to align myself in the moment with her. (With the exception of when I looked after her one Christmas and she was knackered, way more demented than usual and I got 4 hours sleep in 3 days. That was the one where I burst into tears and begged her to go back to sleep at 2. am. She was very irritated with me but did, at least, do as I asked.)

Even though her brain was ravaged with dementia, she still had the same startling amounts of intelligence.

With Dad, I feel disloyal describing some of the things he said and did under the influence of Alzheimer’s because it wasn’t who he was and I don’t want him remembered that way. But also because I realise now, as I encounter more and more people who are treading the carer’s path, that despite Dad saying and doing some truly horrible things, he actually fought it with everything he had and I don’t want to do anything that might underplay that, like describing times he was awful in too much detail, for example.

It’s left me unsure how to explain what happened to us, how to paint the distress and the horror Alzheimer’s causes enough for any readers in authority to take notice, without demeaning the people at the centre of it or terrifying readers who are carers at the start of it. Because yes, it is bleak, and fucking relentless, but there are moments of lightness. Dementia care is a model lesson in the maxim that you only get out what you put in. But the ever-present grinding reality of it makes it hard to find the mental bandwidth to make that commitment sometimes.

You have to learn to look for the moments of joy among the disconnected brain fuzz. You have to learn to pivot to stay alongside your person with dementia. You have to make it all about them because they are incapable of thinking about you and that, in itself, is a horrible thing to come to terms with. It can be done. At a very high cost to the carer, for sure, but in the long run, it comes at a cost that’s slightly less high than not doing it.

Then there’s the political side. The righteous anger I still feel at the injustice of a system that asset strips the most vulnerable people because it knows they are too exhausted to fight back. The fact that care provision is a postcode lottery and there’s no information, no help, no guidance. If you’re in Sussex, they offset the value of care costs against the value of your house up to 100%. In other counties, they very magnanimously allow you to keep £250,000 worth of the house if it’s worth more than that.

Sheep grazing in a green grassy meadow with the sun behind them in such a way that it looks as if they’re surrounded by an all body halo.

Nuclear powered sheep

There’s a lot of ‘signposting’ and most of it takes you a very long time to be signposted to another body, round in circles, via many hours on the phone on hold. Everything is stacked against you, benefits, the care system, social services, all of it.

Carer’s allowance, for example. You have to be spending 35 hours a week on care for your relative. But if you have small children, you don’t have 35 hours a week, you probably have about 15 or 25, tops. You might be looking at a part time job, except if you’re a carer, even at a distance, you’ll be spending all that time running someone else’s house, paying wages, bills etc. Oh and sorting out an endless stream of small domestic disasters.

’Darling a man rang, and I’ve given him my bank card details.’

’Don’t worry Mum, I’ll stop the card.’

So that’s 4o minutes wrangling the India based call centre. Then sorting out who needs paying what and paying them and not forgetting to take £200 cash down with you next time you visit to tide them over until the new one arrives. Heaven forefend that there’d be a branch of a bank you could go into or that your non-standard problem will be comprehensible to the help bot AI.

In my own experience, as my lad got to school age, I wondered about part-time jobs but the day a week I did visiting, the emergencies, wages, banking, wrangling with government bodies, utilities, their ISP and all the other bits and bobs, plus the fact that I could only work during the school day, put paid to it.

I spent all my free time sorting out Mum and Dad but the non-mum time I was doing it in didn’t amount to 35 hours a week so despite my activities meeting the criteria for carers allowance I was ineligible. I am guessing a lot of people with kids who are carers at a distance are in that situation, which is probably why carers allowance is set at 35 hours a week and not a lower amount.

Or maybe everyone else just lies on the form. I dunno.

Lastly, the relentless sadness. Being sad makes you unproductive, unable to concentrate, listless and lacking in energy. It makes aches and pains worse, it does pretty horrendous things combined with the menopause. When it all began, in 2012, I had a course of cognitive behavioural therapy on the NHS which was a godsend but I was still sad and being really sad for 10 years does take it out of you a bit. It’s only now I am beginning to realise how much it took.

As I understand it, this side of it is a bit more hands on and ongoing now. At the time, all they could offer me, after I’d done the CBT, was depression meds. But a regular side effect of depression meds is brain fog and as that’s a very marked side effect of dementia care, too, it was the last thing I needed. And that’s the thing. A lot of dementia carers aren’t depressed, they’re sad. Depression is ill. Sad is a response to outside stimulus. It’s not the same thing.

Picture of a very still lake and the sky with reflections

So … in a nutshell writing a dementia carers memoir is hard (no shit, Sherlock):

  • It’s hard to outline the difficulties without sounding graceless about time I actually gave willingly or sounding like I’m bitter and twisted, and railing angrily against everything.
  • I still can’t talk about what people should expect from the NHS and other bodies—asset stripping the vulnerable anyone?—without actually being bitter and twisted, and railing angrily against it.
  • I probably need to let some stuff go. For example, I hold the care system responsible for my mother’s vascular dementia as I’m pretty bloody certain it was brought on by the stress of navigating the care system while looking after Dad, with his dementia. It was her choice, and I can only marvel at her courage because I’ll bet she knew what it meant. She did what she believed was right for Dad, and in the absence of any help from social or NHS care, she did what she believed she had to do if she wanted to be able to look at herself in the mirror every morning. It killed her brain.
  • It’s hard to outline what happens over the years as dementia progresses without devaluing the worth of your loved ones who suffered it.
  • It’s hard to be truthful about some forms of dementia and to shed light on what to expect from the journey without terrifying others.

That’s my conundrum.

With two outstanding exceptions, most of the memoirs I’ve read about this have felt falsely upbeat. Oh there is an up, there are fabulous moments, but the darkness is greater. It wasn’t an upbeat experience, even if there were times of joy or happiness, times of beautiful and heart moving poignancy, and times that were funny. Dementia is a lot of things but it isn’t fun, and while there are dapples of sunlight on the shady path, the secret is managing your levels of acceptance and surrendering all semblance of controlling your life. The dementia controls a lot of your loved one and by association, it controls you. It feels never-ending, it’s exhausting, there is fuck all help, and it lasts years. The only way to survive it is to accept that truth and adapt accordingly.

It’s hard, it’s sad and it’s relentless.

Picture of a rainbow in the sky with trees and a patch of blue.

How do I try to help someone prepare for that? I can’t even research it and give them answers, or organisations to turn to, because they are not the same in any area. Sod it! They vary from town-to-town. No! It’s worse than that, they vary from doctors’ surgery-to-doctors’ surgery, let alone county to county, or health authority to health authority.

I set out with all these grand ideas but there seems to be a bit of a gap between intention and delivery. Maybe I just lack the skill to write this yet. Or maybe if I just keep writing about it, my scattered thoughts will crystallise and clarify. Who knows.

Onwards and upwards I guess.

And now for something completely different …

That was a bit grim. Sorry. Let’s lighten the mood. If you need cheering up there’s always a bit of K’Barthan invective. Yes, I have made a K’Barthan Swearing and insults Generator. It has taken me a long time because I take to coding about as well as the average cat would take to obedience classes but finally it is done.

If you’d like to see it you can find it here

K’Barthan Swearing and Insults Generator … Click Here.

Until next time then, toodle pip.

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7 Jul 2024 · 8:54 pm

Life laundry and other adventures

It’s been a busy few weeks, as you’ve probably guessed from the spectacular lack of blog posts, which is irritating because I had loads of stuff to say last week and thought I would carry it over. Needless to say, when I sat down this evening I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember what I was going to write about.

Bum.

Never mind, onwards and upwards.

Two weeks ago, I won ticket sot the Self Publishing Show live. I wasn’t sure how it would go but it was excellent. I really enjoyed it and met a group of authors who seem to be great fun. I also met a fellow blogger which was also grand! Even better had a few really significant ‘learning moments’ that I feel may smooth my self publishing efforts.

picture of a book cover featuring a few of the Thames with the same view of the thames in the background

My hand looks much nicer than it really is in this picture. Mwahahargh!

Highlights this week! I took Mc(Not So)Mini to a WWII reenactment yesterday. That was fun. He met three friends and I had a pootle round, a wee chat to one of the friend’s Mum’s and another wee chat to other friend’s dad. They had gone as 1970s British Army and had some lovely chats with veterans who recognised their old kit. I also took a close look at a Willys Jeep and decided that I would not enjoy driving one from Brighton to Kabul which my Uncle and two friends did one summer holidays when they were students. Not just the dust in the hot bits, but driving that through rainy France. Mmm… no fun.

A row of Willy’s jeeps in a rainy UK fieldBTW my Uncle’s mate wrote a book and my uncle has published it. I can’t for the life of me find the link but I know it’s on Amazon, at least. I’ll have to see if I can find it.

McOther was given a voucher for a local restaurant when he retired and so we went there last night with friends. It was an absolute gas and a very jolly evening. I had lobster. Mmm-Mmm.

A plate on a table with lobster and samphire with a glass of wine.

This week has been Life Laundry. In order to accommodate the stuff from Mum’s we have to move, remove and generally tessellate the stuff we already have. But our social lives have been busy so we’ve had to fit it all round that.

As a result our dining room looks like a furniture warehouse with various bits waiting to be polished, have the drawers hoovered etc.

Compromises were made too, because when we got to Sussex with the removers and thought about it, we realised that the rather lovely oak bookcase we were going to have wouldn’t actually go out of the room unless it was taken apart.

Looking back, I dimly remember Mum and Dad realising that it couldn’t move from the housemasters quarters at the school where Dad worked straight away because it was too big to fit anywhere in the house. So they hired this dear old boy, who was in his 90s I believe (he went on to collect cider apples from the tree in Mum and Dad’s garden for a few years and he would bring us a bottle of really good Normandy style cider).

Sorry where was I? Right, yes, this lovely old man went over there in a van, took the shelves to bits, cut two feet off it and rebuilt it. What I’d forgotten but think I now recall, was that he brought it back to Mum and Dad’s in pieces in his van and rebuilt it there. Which means we can’t remove it without taking it apart.

Luckily one of the removers was a carpenter.

Unluckily, he took one look at it and realised that it was nailed together with tiny nails and he felt it very unlikely he could take it to bits without breaking it.

Luckily, I was allowed to make a substitution so now, as well as the collection of little bits and bobs Mum had (which she, or her Grandmother who started it, I’m not sure which) called ‘funnies’, I have the cabinet they have always lived in, which was going to be sold. It’s too big to fit into my office, but it comes in two parts. The bottom cupboards can go in one place and the top half with the shelves will work fine as a display cabinet.  I discovered, to my amusement that the cabinet has legs, which obviously nobody has ever liked, so they have travelled with it from house-to-house and owner-to-owner stuffed in the back corner of its under cupboard, so to speak.

Brown furniture stacked up in a room

Not as bad as it was, we’ve cleared a way through

Meanwhile I’m also having Mum’s desk, which means I have to empty the one I have. There is a startling amount more stuff in there than I anticipated. I have filled three boxes so far and will easily fill two more, which is a bit horrific, but I suspect most of it will go back in the drawers of the new desk. The old one doesn’t have drawers but it did have shelves. I genuinely think Mum’s will accommodate more stuff than the old one, even though it’s half the size, but it might be different things because some things—the books for example—will need shelves.

Then it’s a case of shuggling everything around so the two armchairs I’m having fit in… and a footstool. It should be OK. It’s just a case of having a massive clear out. Gulp.

Once that’s done, I need to start putting my toy collection in the auction. It’s glorious and I love it but most of it is in 35 boxes in the loft above the garage and has remained there for the last 16 years. It comprises Dr Who toys, Thunderbirds, Stingray and Captain Scarlet toys, the odd left-field thing like Austen Powers action figures and a lot of StarWars stuff. The only things that are worth anything are the 1970s StarWars 3” action figures, which, naturally, are the thing I like best of the StarWars stuff, and are about the only things that are small enough for me to actually keep.

Once that’s gone, or at least, the big bits, I can put all my stock of books on the shelves so I know how many copies of each I have and organise some other things—which are currently dotted about the room—onto the shelves out of the way. Having sold some of Mum’s stuff, I can also put my more interesting detector finds in the glass fronted display cabinet too, so that’s grand.

Obviously, I should embrace the opportunity to have a sort out, and I kind of do, but I also really, really want to finish the WIP and actually, if Real Life would just SOD OFF for one fucking moment I could probably knock that book on the head in a few weeks. But Real Life is showing no signs of pissing off and leaving me alone any time soon. The minute I get one thing sorted another person asks me what the status is with X, Y or Z and I have to ring people and find out. And I need to pay the bequests which will leave me with perilously close to nothing to pay the bills and run the house until it’s sold.

Seriously, don’t bother growing up. Being an adult is absolutely fucking bollocks. I hate it.

It got me thinking, though. I think one of the hardest things about getting rid of all the stuff is that everything has a story. It’s something Mum and Dad bought together shortly after getting married, or it’s a poignant reminder of some member of the family I utterly loved. Or I remember thinking it was lovely. Or ‘dear old x’ gave it to Mum and Dad.

Some of it’s been in the family for years, seriously, there are every lady member of the family’s wristwatch from about 1910 onwards. All lovely. All worth about £100 for the scrap gold or silver value. I feel like the curator of a museum which is closing whose last duty, before signing their own P45, is to put the collection up for sale.

It’s an odd feeling.

As I write this, I know there will be people reading who will be thinking that these are very first world problems and that I should grow a pair and belt up. And yes, they’re probably right.

But this blog isn’t about me being strong and overcoming against all odds, this is me writing about how I feel, however wretched that may be… or a bit sad, in this case because lord knows, I’ve done wretched and this really isn’t it. But I digress. My point is, I didn’t write this to open the batting for a game of ‘I’ve had it much harder than you with anyone’. I am actually aware that I’ve had it a lot easier than many people with regards to ‘stuff’. Emotional toll? Not so sure but maybe sometimes cash and stuff can make the emotional toll easier to bear.

Talking about the last 10 years to a friend whose wife had lost both parents relatively fast but had needed to deal with a similar situation, albeit for a shorter time, he asked who I had been ‘talking to’ about this. Had I had therapy or counselling? I was intrigued because it had never occurred to me to do that long term. I did a six week course of counselling with the NHS when it all kicked off back in 2012. Six weeks was all you got then, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t get that now. But it was very good and from then on, I just applied what I’d learned.

So if you’re reading, fingers poised over the keyboard to comment about how you only had one pot to piss in which your parents shared with the neighbours on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the rest of the time had to go without, can I humbly invite you not to, because if anyone does I will, I’m afraid, politely tell them to fuck all the way off.

Picture of a sideboard that looks really miserable

If anyone starts playing ‘I’ve had it harder than. you’ with me, they can fuck off.

None of my regular commenters will … but just in case anyone else happens upon this, here’s a truth. My parents didn’t have an huge amount of money in the grand scheme of things, but they had enough to show me that it’s not the universal panacea those who have none believe it is. Having enough wealth to live comfortably can really, really help. And for Mum and Dad, it did. But it didn’t lessen their suffering, or mine and my brothers over the last ten years. Sometimes people have to face things in life are just really, really harsh and their wealth, or lack of it, makes no difference.

Obviously comments deliberately taking the piss about licking t’road clean wi’tongue or that meme with the mountain about ‘our parents route to school’ are allowed.

In some ways, it would have been easier if my parents had nothing. There would have been no big questions and nothing to lose although there’d have been a LOT more work and a lot more hectoring homes to see that they were cared for properly.

Amazingly, I don’t begrudge spending £1m (more than their life savings, and some of ours) for them on their care. It wasn’t my money (mostly) and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I really don’t mind. What does get to me, a bit, is that they did. They saw their life savings as their nest egg to have fun with and the rest as an inheritance for my brother and I, and their grandchildren. It was taken from them to pay for something they had paid tax all their lives to be given for free as part of the NHS. What they got for being good citizens and saving for a rainy day was a fair distance along the path to institutionalised destitution.

Brown furniture stacked up in a room

Yes, I am lucky I am to inherit anything and I know that for dementia sufferers it’s very rare to have anything to leave your children, rare to live in your own familiar surroundings until the end and rare to come out of it with any assets at all. I am lucky to have something as piffling to deal with as trying to tessellate furniture. Or feeling sad about letting go. I know that. I don’t need to be told. This is just an honest account of how I feel, because if I’m feeling this, there are probably other people somewhere feeling it too and if just one of this finds this, reads it and feels a bit less daunted and alone knowing they’re not the only one, then my work here is done.

On the upside, the house sale is projected to complete in September, which isn’t too far away, I’m crossing fingers and praying that, maybe, what I might get for Christmas from the ether is my life back. I’m not holding my breath, but I can hope.

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2 Jun 2024 · 6:04 pm

Meh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the upside …

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

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

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

Other news this week …

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

Picture of authors at a table selling their books

Thanks Simone for asking someone to take our picture!

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

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

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

Other comicon news, eyebombed the loos.

Picture of a peg to hang things on with eyes stuck above it to make it look like a grumpy face.

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

Picture of a loo roll dispenser that looks like a fat faced duck

Writing…

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

Probably …

So that’s grand.

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

 

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1 Feb 2020 · 2:19 pm

Chip off the old block …

This week has been busy. Much going on anyway and then The Wrong Stuff arrived for audio proofing. Woot. More on that and the audio project generally in a week or two.

What I should be writing about, this week, is my new release, Nothing To See Here, which is out a week today on 8th Feb. But 8th Feb is also Dad’s birthday, I’m sort of releasing it then, in his honour, so I’ve kind of been thinking about that this week, too.

This last Sunday, I went to church and because McOther had Stuff To Do, elsewhere, I took McMini. McMini is pretty good on his own for a few minutes while I whizz up to the post box or nip to Tesco’s but I don’t like to leave him on his own for long periods of time – one and a half hours while I do church and then stuff my face with biscuits and bend everyone’s ear at coffee afterwards – for example.

As you know, McMini is a bit of a live wire and also has the same sense of the ridiculous as I do. When they do all the high church stuff with the cope and the incense round the altar on high days and holidays, and the acolytes follow and hold the arm of the cope out of the way as the celebrant does their thing, I immediately think of James Brown. James Brown used to do many encores and he’d pretend to be overcome with exhaustion and his acolytes would help him onto the stage, where he’d perform again … all part of the theatre. And he wore a cloak sometimes, which sort of helps make it feel similar. This is probably Blasphemy but then again, since Christ was not above sarcasm, in spades, and clearly had a sense of humour, I am hoping that, when I head pearly gates-wards he’ll intervene on my behalf about this one if things are looking a bit dicey for me. Not that it’ll do me much good, there’s an awful lot of other stuff – But I’m wandering off topic again.

Taking McMini to church I am aware that it’s a long service, and he doesn’t always enjoy the hymns (I like a good shouty hymn but I’m a half trained classical musician). McMini is beginning to enjoy classical music, and he will, because as a musician, he will end up listening to everything because if you are musical, that’s what you do. But I feel it’s important not to force it. The trick is for him to know it’s there and he’ll learn to enjoy it in time. He’s beginning to rather like opera … just as I reach the point in my life where it’s pretty certain I’ll never go to Glyndebourne again. Sigh.

Anyway, there we are in church. And for the first bit he was a little bored, then, in the prayers, he took it quite seriously doing all the responses etc.

The jumper tribble … octopus? starfish?

Then as we got to the sermon his attention began to wander again. It was actually rather a good one but I’d seen this coming and my theory is that, it’s better to behave a bit badly in church, for us to have a laugh together and for him to enjoy the experience, than to make him be ‘good’ and put him off going for the rest of his life. Because even if he’s a bit bored, if he spends most of the time giggling, it’s going to be a memory of happy bored when he looks back on it later. So it was that I picked the larger fluff tribbles off my jumper and made them into a little creature. This was the jumping off point for a lot of mirth.

McMini kept on waiting until I wasn’t looking and then knocking it onto the floor. Then the longer I took to notice the more giggly he got, especially if I trod on it a couple of times. This is definitely one of those events where you had to be there so you’re just going to have to believe me when I tell you it was funny. McMini is a naturally gifted clown, keenly vigilant for any opportunity to get a laugh and not one to let a single one slip by. Hence the wee joke at Dad’s funeral. Eventually the blue furry critter lost both its eyes and looked very sorry for itself. Obviously, there was also banter. I can’t remember much of it but … it was there, and there was a lot of giggling about that, too. Or at least a lot of shaking, going red and crying while we tried not to make any noise. It wasn’t stealth giggling, but we gave laughing in silence our best shot. It was only after the service that I appreciated that it wasn’t just us who’d been giggling. There’s a lovely lady who usually sits behind me with her Mum and they had also been enjoying the … er hem … show.

The mum flashed us a beaming, twinkly smile said, ‘It is rather a long service for a young boy isn’t it?’

And I smiled back and said, ‘Um… yes,’ and left it at that.

Then the daughter said she wished she could have heard what we were saying so she could be in on the joke but we were too far away. Well … at least we weren’t making too much noise, then.

What was rather lovely about it all, apart from the fact that the other parishoners, were clearly far more happy to see that I’d brought McMini than they were worried about any behavioural deficiencies, was that it reminded me so much of Church with my parents. Dad giggling about the awful Victorian poetry again, or pointing out the dirty bits. I had no idea what detumescence was until my father pointed out a line that reminded him of it in a hymn. Although once again, St John’s excelled itself with rather good poetry, and a couple of tunes taken from the Scottish Psalter and an Orlando Gibbons thrown in … all the kind of elegant, symmetrical, mathematical music that I love.

This morning, McMini had arranged to meet some friends in town. I wasn’t sure when but I felt that, possibly, meet up time was pending when there was a sudden sense of urgent activity and then I could hear McMini saying on the phone, ‘I’m running a bit late … I’ll be with you soon … It won’t take that long to walk up there will it? Where would I meet you then? OK.’

It occurred to me that if he was going to the other end of town, he might appreciate a lift. So I popped my head round the door and asked if all was well. He admitted that he’d agreed to meet his friends at ten fifteen but that he’d suddenly realised at about ten thirteen that he was still in his pyjamas.

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘So … did you make this arrangement at about half past nine think you’d just do a couple of things first and lose track of time?’ I asked him.

He no longer throws me an ‘are you telepathic?’ look when I do this sort of thing because he is old enough to understand about inherited traits and that he’s just a chip off the old block. Instead he gave me a sort of small, knowing smile and said, ‘Yes.’

Immediately I remembered the number of times my father had forgotten he was supposed to be somewhere, or that he’d invited someone to lunch. Mum became a consummate expert at Not Looking Surprised, when people turned up to lunch unannounced and stretching meals for larger numbers of people than anticipated.  I suspect there was also a reason we seldom ate before one or quarter past. Plenty of time to make extra arrangements if surprise guests suddenly turned up.

One particular time, I remember my uncle ringing and asking where Dad was. I asked where he was supposed to be. At the Rotary Club lunch, my uncle explained. Ah. Dad was, at this point, in Worthing, and when they set off, he and Mum had said they might stay and have lunch there. Obviously I didn’t tell my uncle this, instead I said,

‘Oh yes, he did say he was going to lunch, where was it again?’

My uncle named a hotel in Haywards Heath. I explained that Mum and Dad had popped into worthing.

‘He’s probably lost track of time, but I’m sure he’ll be with you shortly,’ I said, praying that this was true.

I managed to pump my uncle reasonably subtly for information as to where Dad had to go, whether Mum was invited too (no) and if he needed change for parking. I say I was subtle. I probably wasn’t but my uncle was good enough to play along with the pretence.

Luckily, Dad and Mum returned a few seconds after I’d finished talking to my uncle. I tipped Dad off but I’d forgotten the dress code. None of us were very up on the Rotary so we hummed and haad about what he should wear and decided that jacket and tie would probably be OK. So he quickly put a tie on, grabbed a decent jacket, leapt into the car and sped off to join his long suffering brother. I think he arrived half an hour late, in the end, which wasn’t too bad. Unfortunately, everyone else was wearing suits.

On the up side apparently the feedback was very good and one fellow Rotarian told my uncle,

‘Your brother is a very cool customer. Not only did he give a wonderful speech, but I was sitting near him, and I saw him write it during the pudding course.’

So there was McMini, late already because, like his mother and grandfather before him he had, ‘lost track of time’. Naturally, I offered him a lift.

We grabbed his phone and keys and I gave him a fiver. Then I went to open the garage and left him putting on his shoes and getting his bag.

‘Don’t forget to shut the door,’ I said. Obviously, it’s one of those ones that, if you shut it, locks itself.

We got into the car and I managed to get him to his meeting point by twenty past, so he was only five minutes late. When I arrived home, I discovered he’d left the back door wide open. Blimey he’s a chip off the old block.

As I watch my son following in his grandfather’s footsteps, and mine, I think a small penny dropped somewhere. I am brain fogged, for sure, but it’s a lot better since I started the HRT and while I may feel like I’m demented, perhaps it’s more of a case of being like my dad. Maybe it’s not that the numbers of instances when I’ve ‘lost track of time’ or just forgotten something that are increasing. Maybe I just feel like they are because, as an adult, doing this kind of stuff correctly is more important.

Maybe.

Which reminds me. I’ve a new book out next week and it’s available for pre-order. If you’re interested here’s the info click on the title or the picture to visit the links page:

_______________________________

Nothing To See Here, K’Barthan Shorts, Hamgeean Misfit: No 2

It’s midwinter and preparations for the biggest religious festival in the K’Barthan year are in full swing. Yes, even though, officially, religious activity has been banned, no-one’s going to ignore Arnold, The Prophet’s Birthday, especially not Big Merv. He orders The Pan of Hamgee to deliver the traditional Prophet’s Birthday gift to his accountants and lawyers. As usual, The Pan has managed to elicit the unwanted attention of the security forces. Can he make the delivery and get back to the Parrot and Screwdriver pub in time for an unofficial Prophet’s Birthday celebration with his friends?

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22 Dec 2019 · 11:21 am

Birth of The Prophet Greetings to one and All … and a mini whinge.

Yes, of course K’Barth has it’s own equivalent of Christmas. They celebrate the Birth of The Prophet, or The Prophet’s Birthday as the feast is also known. The Prophet was born on the darkest, dimmest night of the year – aren’t they all? In memory of His birth, K’Barthans prepare an enormous meal, with numerous courses and specific – mostly alcoholic – beverages, none of which particularly goes with the other. Does this sound familiar?

However, they don’t exchange presents, oh no, instead they present each other with pastry effigies of Arnold The Prophet, stuffed full of confectioner’s custard. Anyone who stumped up for a copy of Christmas Lites last year will have read about this in the short story I had in there. It was a truncated short though, I had to hack mercilessly at it to make the 10k word count and you know me, I believe in never throwing anything away, so I decided I would polish up the longer original version and add it to my current series and publish it at Christmas time.

Unfortunately, what with Dad dying and all that malarkey, I didn’t get it finished as quickly as I expected so it’s coming out in February, 8th February, 2020, put that date in your diary peps. If you’re interested, it will be up for preorder soon but, unfortunately, not yet as … Christmas … which is so much more complicated and a significantly greater pain in the arse than exchanging pastries, mwahahahargh! But fret not! If you do want me to tip you off when Nothing To See Here, is released/available for preorder you can sign up for a special email bulletin. If you haven’t joined my mailing list, you will receive no other emails. Yep. Unless I cock it up mightily, I will only tell you those two things. Nothing else. To sign up for that, just follow the link, below or click on the picture of the cover:

Tell me when Nothing to See Here is released.

And here’s the blurb, in case you wanted it!

It’s midwinter and preparations for the biggest religious festival in the K’Barthan year are in full swing. Yes, even though, officially, religious activity has been banned, no-one’s going to ignore Arnold, The Prophet’s Birthday, especially not Big Merv. He orders The Pan of Hamgee to deliver the traditional Birth of The Prophet gift to his accountants and lawyers.

As usual, The Pan has managed to elicit the unwanted attention of the security forces. Can he make the delivery and get back to the The Parrot and Screwdriver pub in time for an unofficial Prophet’s Birthday celebration with his friends?

Other news …

There are lots of things I wanted to say this week. I wanted to talk about racism and how stupid it is, I wanted to fact check all the U-turns the Conservatives have been accused of making so far and see if it really is that dire, I wanted to do a lot of things. But … Christmas.

OK, so this is where the upbeat stuff stops, so if you want to feel upbeat, this is probably where you should stop too. The next bit is honest, and a bit of a downer.

The thing is, I’m missing Dad quite badly, it’s not quite as grim as it was, I haven’t felt weepy for over a week now, which is grand, and splendid progress. I just feel down. The grief counselling has come through for the New Year, so I know that will help and I’m looking forward to it.

In the meantime, life. It’s like we are sliding into anarchy and extremism and I’m the only person in the world who can see. I’m so weary of it all. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t go on politely pulling people up every time they say something shitty about immigrants, asylum seekers, LGBT etc folks, disabled people, brown people or anyone different from them. I know what goes around comes around. If kindness and tolerance was trendy for a while then, clearly, we’re going to go through another phase where it’s cool to be a bigoted fucktard. Cool for twaaaats (sing it to Squeeze).

At the moment it feels as if the world is being run by the stupid jocks out of seventies movies. You know, the popular bully in the class in seventies films. The one who make our geeky hero or heroine’s life a misery until said geek saves the world using knowledge and science while the jocks who think they rock stand by with their mouths open. That’s right, the people in charge right now, the people being heard and calling the shots are the equivalent of Biff from Back to the Future.

Joy.

Once someone you love has become, ‘other’ be it disabled, mentally ill, whatever, it changes you for life. I met a couple yesterday, a man and his disabled wife. He was pushing her in a wheelchair and she was incredibly apologetic about getting in the way in a very small and pokey shop. They were both sweet, but he, especially, had the kindest, wisest face I have seen on another human in a long time. Here was someone who had clearly been the recipient of unending twattery from morons and doggedly continued to treat other people with kindness and dignity. Someone truly, truly good in a way that was impossible to hide.

Apparently people frequently have a go at this couple for taking up too much space and getting in the way. I had a bit of an oh Lordy moment, myself, trapped in a very narrow aisle between them and a pram and trying to get out of the way! Only last week, at the supermarket, the lady told me, they saw that one aisle where they had to get some stuff was really full. He parked her next to some things she wanted to look at and went to get the bits they needed from the packed aisle alone. While he was gone someone came along and wanted to get to something from the shelves by the lady. She was in the way, so instead of speaking to her, or even asking her if she could pass it to them, they just moved her. Without a word. As if she was a piece of furniture. Moved her out into the middle of the aisle and left her there.

How fucking rude is that?

This is Brexit Britain. It’s not Brexit, itself that’s the problem, it’s the fact that it’s given the handful of people who voted leave because they’re racist and bigoted the courage to think their Neanderthal, shitty viewpoint is OK. The courage to commit hate crimes against disabled people, to air views that are, frankly, pretty evil, and it’s made them feel entitled to do so. I’m not even talking people who think we need to look at immigration, here. We do need to manage immigration properly, you know, with thought, compassion and empathy. Not only for those who are wishing to move here (what on earth are they doing coming to our crappy little island) but for those among whom they will be placed. No, I mean people who are out-and-out vile and seem to rejoice in it. The kind of people who would call me a snowflake, simply because I have an imagination and, occasionally, use it to try and appreciate what it might be like for other people who are different from me.

Incidentally, lots of people call me a snowflake in jest and that’s fine. Let’s be clear, I don’t mean my right wing friends taking the piss out of me here, I mean the really scary people.

The fact we are standing at the top of the same hill, with Mum, as we were with Dad four years ago is probably not helping me to feel jolly either. I did have a brief respite, but I know what’s coming and it’s coming much faster with Mum. A few months ago, when Gareth the Voice first contacted me I played Mum the demo he sent. She read and loved the K’Barthan Series years ago, and we discussed how exciting the whole audiobooks thing was. By the time Gareth and I were speccing the voices, a month later I had one voice I wasn’t sure about and I thought I’d play it to Mum. Gareth had definitely delivered what I specced but … had I specced it right?

Mum has a very good marketing brain – she was director of a PR firm in the 1960s and that is some going in an era when it was considered perfectly OK for a client to refuse to work with a copywriter on the grounds of them being female. As a result, Mum and I have chatted about my writing in depth from time to time. I did branding, which was pretty similar to PR and she’s one of the few people in Real Life I can talk to about both my writing, and my efforts to market it.

When I mentioned the voice conundrum to Mum she said,

‘Oh yes, darling, I meant to remind you about that. I haven’t read any of your books and I haven’t a clue what they’re about, it’s awful. I’m your mother. I really ought to read them. Could you lend them to me?’

I was a bit thrown.

‘Uh … I can’t remember now, but I think you read them,’ I lied. ‘But it was a very long time ago, so you’re well within your rights to have forgotten them. I pretty much have. I needed to re-read them thoroughly to get up to speed for doing the audio,’ I told her, continuing to lie comprehensively, through my teeth. ‘Does anything come back if I remind you? D’you remember Ruth, or The Pan of Hamgee? Big Merv? Lord Vernon?’

She remembered the ones in my latest story, which is short enough for her to be able to follow it. But otherwise, that’s it. She’s completely forgotten about all of it. She’s completely forgotten so much stuff.

Already.

All of it’s gone forever.

Which is grim.

I was hoping, so hoping, that it was just the strain of looking after Dad but it isn’t.

One of the toughest bits about Dad is that even though he is out of pain, and, even though, as a Christian, I believe he’s gone on to somewhere happier, I still find it hard to look his suffering in the eye. I need to if I’m going to move on, but it hurts, it hurts a lot and I suspect it always will. And now I have to walk the same journey with Mum. A costly, painful journey. One that’s going to make my heart ache for the rest of my life.

Pain on pain, hurt on hurt.

Another three years of this. Minimum. Where, in God’s name, will I find the strength to do it all over again?

Um … yeh. Merry Christmas.

Never mind, I’m going to church now. With any luck, when I come back, I’ll feel better.

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16 Nov 2019 · 12:00 pm

Alarums, excursions and jolly japes

This week, I am speaking to you from the past by the wonders of scheduling, as I do from time to time. When this post goes live, I will be at Dad’s memorial service, which, incidentally, takes place in a building that, with a few tweaks, became the High Temple in the K’Barthan Series. Here it is. It looks a bit frillier in this picture than it really is. I think I wrote in prettier chandeliers though.

This is where I went to church every other Sunday in term time, from eight weeks old to when I was a teenager. We sat in a stall; one of those raised seats at the sides, the second one on the left in this picture. As a small child, I remember playing in the Chapel (that’s its name) while Mum did the flowers. Running up and down the aisle under the kind auspices of Mr Kendall, the verger who would warn me not to run past the altar rail for fear of setting off the burglar alarm.

Once he gave me one of the hosts to eat. It was delicious! Just like a flying saucer only without the sherbet. I also remember playing with the hassocks, but they were blue leather, like cushions rather than the traditional home-embroidered, sorbet-rubber brick, so they couldn’t be stacked into walls or towers, and weren’t nearly as much fun as they should have been. It was a school, so they were probably designed like that deliberately. Therefore, I usually eschewed hassock-related japes in favour of running around. Sometimes I went down the stairs into the crypt, although, not so often after I fell down them and cracked my head open (3 stitches).

Later it wasn’t as much fun. If you will, imagine sitting raised up on high like that as a shy gawky teenager, looking out over around 500 or so boys who were sitting in the seats below. I was a shade of puce throughout the whole hour and it felt as if every single one of them was staring at me. I liked the music, I sang in the choir of the other church we went to and I enjoyed listening to most types of music (still do). The hymns helped, in that they were usually tub-thumpers and it was fun to listen to the boys and try and work out what their alternative words were; Glory, glory Brighton Hove Albion, with a small contingent trying to shout Glory, glory Man United more loudly, etc. But apart from that, mostly it was a pretty cringeworthy experience.

If you do that every other term Sunday, and get as many regular bollockings at your own school as I did (a different institution to the one attached to the chapel in the picture) you come out the other end almost unembarrassable … if that’s a word. I was so glad when I finally went to the school I actually lived in (girls were only allowed in the sixth form in those days) and I was able to leave the stall and disappear into the anonymous mass of pupils below. Actually I sat in about the position this picture was taken from.

Anway I’m wandering off topic terribly here, what I was really going to say was that I’m actually writing this from a few days in the past. It’s been a busy week but all in all, things seem to be going reasonably well.

First up, Mum. After discussing it with her financial advisor, we have decided it’s time to get Mum’s enduring power of attorney for her finances activated. I looked out all the paperwork we’d done on Dad’s and dropped the solicitor a line, by email, explaining what we were going to do and asking if she could send me the original document of Mum’s enduring power of attorney. I did it first thing but got one of those weird, ‘your message couldn’t be delivered so we’ll try again’ type things. Not an out-and-out bounce but a kind of, might have, maybe bounced.

After a bit of thought, I decided that the best thing to do would be to ring the solicitor, explaining what had happened and apologise for pestering her by phone as well if it had got through. The lady who answers the telephone there is great, we had a chat, I explained what had happened and I gave her as much info as I could. She asked the date Mum and Dad signed their powers of attorney and I reckoned it was 2004 but I had all the paperwork in front of me.

‘Give me a sec, I have Dad’s here, I’ll look it up,’ I said. I grabbed the document in front of me. ‘Oh … hang on,’ I said as I read the name on the front, ‘Um … this is Mum’s. Oh … I must have got you folks to send it through when I did Dad’s. That was … surprisingly organised of me.’

‘I bet it’s a nice surprise,’ she said.

‘It is but I still managed to forget, phone you lot and make a monumental twat of myself,’ I said.

She laughed, which was lucky. I doubt she gets many people telling her they’re twats. She told me she’d tell the lawyer I’d emailed that I didn’t need her to do anything and I thanked her and hung up. Then I made some toast by holding a piece of bread against my red face. No. I didn’t make toast actually even though I was quite embarrassed and my cheeks were burning. NO! The ones on my face you dirty bastards!

And there we have it. Three years ago, while sorting Dad’s enduring power of attorney I had been prescient, not to mention organised, enough to get them to send me Mum’s as well. It was heartening to know that I am capable of such giddy heights of organisational prowess, but it would have been more heartening if I’d remembered, or at least discovered my uncharacteristic attack of forward planning before I’d made a tit of myself.

Ruthless efficiency, and yet also, gargantuan twattery. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.

Meanwhile McMini is enjoying his new school and is as nuts as ever. Lately, he has introduced me to the joy of ttsreader.com This is a site which allows you to type text into a box and it will then read it in an electronic voice. For some strange reason best known to ourselves, McMini and I find this unaccountably funny. Obviously, we don’t use it as it is intended. Although we do happily conduct whole conversations using it in about six times the time it should take were we speaking; laboriously typing what we want to say into the reader, highlighting it all and clicking play. Clearly we try to do more than talk with this thing, I think McMini has come closer than I to getting it to produce a realistic raspberry but that’s not for want of extensive effort on both our parts. All the while, as we pursue this ridiculous game, tears of laughter stream down our faces – because we’re really mature. Well, OK to give him his due, McMini is only eleven, after all, and probably is quite mature for an eleven year old. He already displays a great deal more maturity than I but then, I guess that’s not difficult.

Even McOther started giggling the other day, though, when McMini finally scored a realistic sounding raspberry.

On the books front. They’ve managed to squeeze me in at the Christmas Fayre so I am busy ordering books etc, which reminds me … Even better, the date of the new release creeps ever closer. Anyone who has pre-ordered it should get the ebook on Monday 29th. Woot. The paperback is coming later. I have also been doing lots of research into audio books. It’s kind of doing my head in because there have been a lot of changes to the audiobook scene just recently, with evidence that Findaway Voices might be edging ahead of ACX as a provider. I might post more about that as I discover it, or at least, some pros and cons if I can. But my own experience is going to be atypical because Gareth The Voice and I have done pretty much the opposite of what you’re supposed to! Mwahahahargh!

Anyway, that’s enough of that, here is a quick reminder about my two new releases … on about to come out and one out already. Pipple toot!

Small Beginnings, K’Barthan Shorts, Hamgeean Misfit: No 1

Available for preorder. If you are interested there is a page which gives you link to the main book vendors. Just click on the picture or follow this link here …

http://www.hamgee.co.uk/infosb.html

There will be print links, to follow. The print version is out on 23rd November.

Here’s the blurb:

Terry Pratchett meets Dr Who … sort of. 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.

Future Adventures Box Set … Gorge yourself on free sci-fi!

This features full length novels from eight science fiction authors. I can vouch for the quality of the books in here, even more so now that I’ve read some of them!

But, if any of you haven’t read my first full length novel, Few Are Chosen, and would like to, it’s in this book, which is free, but more importantly it comes with all these other brilliant stories by seriously accomplished wordsmiths who really know what they are doing. So, you can grab a copy of Few Are Chosen with seven other books by authors who are seriously gifted and of whom I am, frankly, a bit in awe. And all for zero pence. If you want to pick up a copy, just click on the picture to visit a page of links to find it on all the major stores … or click on the link below:

http://www.hamgee.co.uk/infofa.html

 

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5 Oct 2019 · 12:26 pm

My lord! I bring news!

This week has been quite a contrast to last week.

First of all a brief word about superstition and its place in society. Now there are some folks who say that butterflies are a sign that angels/dead loved ones are watching you, and ditto about white feathers. I have no idea if any of this is true, but if I can see a white feather bobbing down from the sky and use it to make myself feel less sad, I will.

Obviously, it would be lovely if it was a message of support from Dad. There have definitely been a few white feathers over the past few years, something I’ve noticed because John Lennon always told his son that he’d send a white feather drifting across the room as a message after he died. Julian Lennon said once, ‘I’ve always been looking for that white feather.’  So when I saw my first one, during a pretty grim time in Dad’s illness, it left an impression.

No, I didn’t think it was John Lennon, but I’d never noticed a white feather drifting down from the sky before and I thought that pushing fifty was quite late to notice my first one, so it did make me wonder, slightly, if some dead relly somewhere was sending me a message of support – look I’m a writer, OK? I imagine all sorts of weird shit, it’s my job after all.

The instances have increased dramatically recently, and they have definitely coincided with good days, not just because I can use them to pep myself up but because genuinely good things have happened on the days when I’ve seen them. Coincidence? Probably. They are white, so they’re coming from the gulls rather than our local pigeons, who are all grey. Perhaps there is a particularly scrofulous gull flying over our house every day, one with a dash of the gift,

‘Ah yes, I must drop a feather on MTM today, good things will happen to her.’

Mwahahahrgh! Or perhaps he’s just the gull equivalent of Humbert. Hmm… could be. I don’t really mind, I’ll even put up with them shitting on the conservatory roof if I can use this phase of vigorous moulting on their part to help me be positive.

It’s like the bit in Terry Pratchett where he talks about telling people stories, or at least, Granny Weatherwax does. Tiffany Aching is trying to use facts and truth and Granny Weatherwax contests that people don’t respond to facts and truth and that you must tell them stories.  Tiffany is at her wits end because a family in the village have dug their outdoor lavvy too close to the well and they keep getting ill. Despite her most earnest entreaties to move it, and despite her repeatedly explaining to them that the crap is seeping into the drinking water and making them ill Tiffany can’t galvanise them into moving their out door kharzi. They can’t be arsed. She seeks Granny Weatherwax’s advice. A few days later, Granny Weatherwax tells Tiffany she persuaded them and the two witches visit. Sure enough, the bog has been moved.

‘How did you do that?’ asks Tiffany.

‘I told them there’s goblins down it,’ says Granny Weatherwax matter of factly.

So another brief lesson about grief then, don’t be afraid to use headology on yourself! If seeing a white feather floating in the air makes me feel something good will happen, my attitude is going to be such that it probably will, even if it’s just something that mightn’t have registered on another day or in different circumstances.

But, that said, quite a lot of smashing things are happening! Here are some.

Big news this week.

Small Beginnings is now available for pre-order in some but not all places, I’ll post a proper link next week when it’s live everywhere. In the meantime, click on the picture for more information, or if you want to to, you can sign up to receive three email reminders around launch time. To do that, click the link below.

Receive a reminder when Small Beginnings comes out.

Ultimate launch date is 19th November. Feel free to tell your friends.

Eyebombing news

I have to fess up to being piss poor at posting my eyebombing recently, but I’m also hoping to organise the eyebombThereforeIAm calendar a bit more formally this year. It depends if I can get a stall at the Christmas Fayre though, and I won’t hear about THAT until Monday or Tuesday. More on that story next week.

And some even bigger news this week. Um … yeh.

So a while back a chap contacted me explaining that he was an actor and that while it was a grand and jolly life, he would quite like to do a project of his own.

[MTM waves] hello Gareth!

This being the case, he’d decided he would learn to read and produce audio books. He wanted to use something as a guinea pig while he got to grips with production skills, sound booth construction, etc, and for this purpose, he chose the K’Barthan Series.

However, he hadn’t just said he’d like to do it, he’d already recorded a rough outline of Unlucky Dip. Since then he’s recorded another one. So yesterday we had a chat on the phone about well … basically about the recordings he’d sent me, and the characters. It’s a pretty great project to be involved in when two people can spend over an hour on the phone doing silly voices at one another, and giggling, and then tell people, solemnly, that it was work. Mwahahahaahrgh! Yes he’s as nuts as I am but then, what would you expect? He likes my books!

If anyone wants a listen, you can do that by clicking the link below. It is a draft, so it isn’t nearly finished, and he’s reading it off his kindle, rather than a marked up script so he sometimes puts the emPHAsis on the wrong syllAble, but as an outline sketch I reckon it’s chuffing marvellous! He’s got Big Merv and The Pan of Hamgee, absolutely how I imagine them and he also knows how to put in the right kind of energy to bring it all to life … through the magic of acting he tells me with tongue firmly in cheek. Feel free to have a listen and let me know what you think.

Unlucky Dip Sketch Number Two

So yeh. All in all, a good week.

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28 Sep 2019 · 12:40 pm

A snapshot of blue …

It isn’t always like this, but I’m feeling a bit blue today. Then again, it’s probably only to be expected because I have, as we might euphemistically say, the painters in. But I’m going to take a few moments out to bang on about grief again because I suspect the way I’m feeling is pretty universal, so it might help someone to read it and see they aren’t alone.

As a human, I’ve always approached my life, and my future, with an attitude of mild interest, a kind of, ‘I wonder how this is going to turn out.’ That doesn’t mean I don’t try and mould my destiny at all, but I am aware how many other riders there are affecting the outcome of anything I plan. I hope my actions make a difference. Fervently. But I also think I’d be a fool to think I can realign the stars and guarantee anything about my destiny through my own efforts … well … you know … beyond how I react to what happens.

So my dad died. It happens to lots of people. And I’m OK with that and, more to the point, he was. It was his time, he led a full and wonderful life, he was loved … it was, dare I say it, beautiful.

The thing I am having trouble with is what happened first.

Losing someone to Alzheimer’s is really hard. There’s a strange mixture of emotion at the end where you’re glad their suffering is over but really want them back. There’s always hope, until they draw their last breath, that a miracle will happen and they’ll come back to you, that the gradual extinguishing of the light can somehow be reversed, the damage undone, your loved one returned. That you’ll find them again.

It can’t, although you might find enough of them. Dad definitely came back to us a bit at the end, I am in no doubt whatsoever about that.

They say that you don’t get over some things but that you do get used to living with them. That makes perfect sense to me. I try to give myself gaps to grieve, and in between, I tell myself it’s hormones, and yes, I am looking forward to reaching the stage when I no longer have a cycle, when Psycho Week, Misery Week (which is probably where I am now) Extra Special IBS Week and of course, not forgetting Brain Fog and Constipation Week all come to an end and every week becomes Mary Week. I do have a Mary Week once in every five and it is literally like being someone else, someone I really like.

Anyway, I try to convince myself that I’m busy or tired or hormonal but the truth of it is, I’m just sad. And I guess I’m learning that I have the strength to carry that sadness, which is nice, but at the same time, unfortunately, I’m not quite as strong as I hoped I was. Which is a bit of a shitter.

One of the things you can notice about people, if you look hard enough, is that those who are suffering or damaged are marked. They have an intensity, a brittleness about the edges, a burning brightness to their eyes that acts like a huge neon beacon over their heads saying, ‘Damaged Goods.’

Sometimes, I have to tell people that my dad died recently. It’s cringingly embarrassing because usually it’s part of an explanation as to why I’ve forgotten to pay a bill that arrived around that time, or pay in a cheque etc. I find it difficult to keep my voice flat. The emotion always creeps in and evinces an outpouring of kindness from strangers that is only reserved for folks they are very, very sorry for. Which is lovely but quite mortifying. I also find it really, and I mean really hard, to keep it together in the face of sympathy. No matter how hard I try to be dispassionate, they hear the emotion. I am always hugely grateful for their concern. But at the same time, it’s also difficult and embarrassing because there’s only a finite amount of time about which I can talk about it before I cry. I wouldn’t want people to stop showing sympathy though, or stop being kind. Because for all the awkwardness I feel, it’s also a wonderful and uplifting thing.

There’s very little time for sadness in modern life and even less in mine. Mum has dementia, someone has to run her financial affairs, pay the care team, make sure she’s OK. In some respects my weekly visits are a lifeline for both of us. It is wonderful to be able to talk to her about Dad. We discuss how we feel, how there was nowhere else for him to go, how illogical our sadness is when it was such a good death and when it was clearly a death he embraced. I think it helps both of us. Mum is definitely better than she was but she’s had a bit of a blip recently, which, I suppose, is  another reason why I feel the responsibility a bit more keenly than I usually do, and feel sadder.

Typically, now he’s gone, it seems that my life is full of events and problems that I would have discussed with Dad. Things he would have been able to advise me about so I could have made sense of it all and it would have been OK. Interpersonal stuff. It’s a loss I would have felt badly any time in the last one and a half, possibly two, years but it seems a great deal worse now. I think it would be melodramatic and downright wrong to say I’m sinking but it’s definitely a struggle. And I’m so raw. Oh blimey I’m ridiculously raw and so easily hurt about other things. Everything makes me cry, I reckon if I was walking round with a thistle stuck up my arse I’d cry less.

Politics hasn’t helped. It’s like the loss of Dad’s goodness and humanity, the compassion and empathy in him has taken it out of the entire fucking world. This week Britain has stepped up it’s efforts to make a monumental tit of itself on the international stage. The jury who found Boris Johnson’s proroguing of Parliament illegal have been warned to wear stab vests for fear of nutters who are also pro Brexit.

And the two sides bang on at one another, the left getting all drama llama about Jo Cox so they can tell the right that they are heartless twats who don’t give a shit in a way that makes the whole thing reek of faux. The right are totally unmoved, of course, since the majority of them are heartless twats who don’t give a shit and I really don’t understand why the left felt that point had to be made, since we are all already aware.

In the middle of all this, I’m still waiting to hear someone mention the good of the people. Not ‘the will of the people,’ as decided by a ridiculous sham of a vote to decide which side’s lies were less plausible (but sadly, a vote, nonetheless) not who should be in power, not how much better we would be if x or y was in power. Likewise, I don’t want to hear politicians spouting off in the media for the benefit of sending a message to other politicians via the press, rather than because they have anything meaningful to say to us.

Wouldn’t it be great to see someone in Parliament who genuinely seems to be there to try and make life better for the British people rather than to feather their own nest? Someone who isn’t a plutocrat foisting left wing sentiments they can afford to hold onto people who can’t, or conversely, someone who isn’t a hedge fund manager, wholeheartedly buying into the vileness of the party opposing them; a party which continues to demonise the vulnerable, the disabled, the chronically sick as scroungers and weaklings, quietly passing laws to punish people for their disabilities, or chronic illness, or having dementia like my parents, as if these people are to blame for their own suffering. A party pedalling the view that anyone who is vulnerable is weak and that those who are sick somehow deserve to suffer and are not worthy of our compassion. A party that puts the view that, contrary to the tenets of the Welfare State, those less fortunate, or who have fallen on hard times are somehow stealing for us when they are given help. A party which is punishing the elderly for having savings and being careful, stamping on the fingers of everyone working or lower middle class who has dared to put a foot on the ladder. A party which is quietly dismantling the welfare state and the NHS while everyone is too distracted to notice by the circus of shite that is Brexit and all that goes therewith.

We need normal people in politics. Now. Because at the moment, for the most part, it’s just a bunch of rich, entitled pricks doing what they like. On all sides. Their wages alone put them into the top 6%, the expenses some of them charge probably put them into Fortune 500*. Only 8% of Labour MPs are working class. We need a proper mix and we need to hold them accountable, the trouble is, voting doesn’t seem to work so I really don’t know how we do that.

* That was a joke even if it does ring true.

All I know is that watching the different parties competing to out do each other over the lowest depths to which they can sink I feel like something inside me is dying. It’s like grief has taken my reality filter out and I can see every crack and fissure and smell the foetid pus below.

But then something will happen that snaps me back.

For example, today I had to explain to the lady in the building society that I’d failed in some duty of admin because the summons arrived while my dad was sick and dying, or possibly while I was on holiday just before, or maybe in the six weeks previously while I was sick as a dog with a massive temperature and road testing different varieties of antibiotics to get rid of a persistent chest infection. The minute I fess up to her, I know she’s seen the rawness. My orange neon ‘damaged goods’ sign is flashing. She nips out back and comes back with a leaflet.

What to do in a bereavement, it’s called.

‘There are numbers in the back,’ she says. ‘And your doctor can help you too.’

My doctor? Shit.

Is it that bad?

Is it that obvious?

Am I more damaged than I think?

OK so watching my father go mad was pretty horrible, but I genuinely believed that once it was over I’d bounce back. It’s happening but it’s not a bounce and I’m aware enough now that in many ways I will never be the same. I thought it would be a lot faster than this and I thought I would get over it all. I’m not and it’s going to be slow. I guess the hard thing is having to keep going, having to carry on paying the carers and doing the pathetic amount I do to keep things running – the care and gardening team do literally ALL of it but I still find my few duties tough. I probably need to look what happened to Dad squarely in the eye but if I do that right now I’m undone and I can’t be undone, because … Mum.

Or maybe I’m just humiliated that another person has seen the extent of the damage, noticed my brittle cheerfulness and angular edges. I am worried and grateful in equal measure. As I try not to well up at her compassion and kindness I remember what Dad always said,

‘And this too shall pass.’

Maybe that’s the thing that’s so hard. Grief is amorphous. It oozes about inside you like a liquid and leeches out where and when you least expect. There’s no stopping it and no answer. You just have to ride the storm and wait until you are used to it, or it goes. It’s not as if I’m the first person who’s lost a parent, or the last … It’s just … hard.

On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

‘Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
‘Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.

Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.

The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
Today the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.

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7 Sep 2019 · 6:04 pm

This week, I am mostly, cheating!

Greetings, late as ever. I appreciate that this is a late post. I knew things were going to get a bit hectic and sure enough they have. I had to set up McMini’s computer for school and it took approximately one thousand years. OK not quite one thousand but it felt like that, especially when I had bloody microsoft asking me to sign in and then saying ‘oops there seems to be a problem.’

After searching for what felt like fucking aeons, I realised that the problem was simply that McMini is under age and therefore I had to sign in as me to move windows from some crappy version, where you can’t download anything off the Microsoft app store, to normal windows that everyone else uses. As a result I have nothing to witty to blog this week and had to resort to Things I Have In Reserve, in this case, my Dad’s Eulogy.

It might seem like a strange thing to share, but it was written for laughs and it even got some! Next week, I have some absolutely chuffing amazing news for you! In the meantime … enjoy …

________________________________

Dad post retirement but pre dementia.

The difficulty talking about Dad is that I have so much material, so it’s tricky to know where to begin and when to stop. The fact his nick name, at the school, was ‘Johnny the Legend’ probably says it all.

I’ve made some notes.

Obviously, as his daughter, I’m biased and see him as a shining example of what it means to be human, and a Christian, and to do Christianity and humaning really well. There are certain words that crop up again and again in the letters and cards we received; Gentleman, kind, warm, radiant, humour/joie de vivre, fun, funny, witty, generous, non-judgemental, wise, humanity and a word he used about others but which also very much applied to Dad, himself, effervescent! Dad lived his whole life with an aura of intelligent enquiry and seemed, to me, to have a genuine interest in everything and everyone around him. He also had a sense of fun and mischief but coupled with a sense of social justice and a kindly disposition which meant the mischief was never cruel. He was genial and good humoured and would often tell stories against himself if he believed his antics were funny enough. Probably one of the most indicative things about Dad, and Mum, is the friends they made and the people they have around them. They seem to be pied pipers of lovely people.

Dad delighted in sharing the Latin and Greek roots of words, especially if they were slightly dodgy or a little bit lavatorial. I can still decline the latin verb from which we get the word, ‘constipation’. Despite being a committed Christian, Dad would sometimes take me aside after church and we would both giggle as he pointed out the double entendres which Victorian poets, in a more innocent age, had unwittingly put into that Sunday’s hymns. ‘Oh Lamb of God, I come,’ was a particular favourite, and the fact it was written by an ancestor on my Mum’s side just made it even funnier.

He loved to prick the bubble of the self-important and was proud of any signs of rebellion in my brother and I. He once hauled a colleague to the window of the master’s common room and, glowing with proprietorial, that’s-my-boy pride pointed out a scene in the quad below, where a member of staff who ran like the original Minister for Silly Walks was sprinting across the grass followed by my brother doing a near perfect impression of the man’s ridiculous run a few yards behind. Another time, I remember Dad carrying a copy of the unofficial school newspaper round one speech day and, when he met the right parent or colleague, he would whip it out of his inside jacket pocket, like some war time black-marketeer selling stockings, to show them a slightly scurrilous cartoon I’d drawn of the Bursar.

Life with Dad was never dull. He was always cheerful and sociable. He enjoyed entertaining friends and relations during the holidays and would wear his bedroom slippers ‘to make it more relaxing’ often prank phone calls would be made to other, absent, members of staff, or those who’d moved on to better things at other schools. Sometimes he would invite people round and forget so Mum would be surprised and delighted to see them arrive but have to pretend that she knew they were coming. She, and we, usually pulled this off, except for the time my uncle and aunt turned up and found the four of us sitting down to a grilled trout each.

Dad was, as he would have put it, ‘a good trencherman’. On holiday France Dad demonstrated that, were he ever to go on Mastermind, his special subject would be not classics but instead, Guide Michelin, Normandy edition. As we drove through some village he’d suddenly stop the car and announce that it was lunch time because the auberge had a red underlining. No-one I’ve ever met before or since could sniff out a good restaurant as surely as Dad.

He also enjoyed wine, although, in that respect he was quite a long suffering father, luckily he had a very forgiving nature. I remember I inadvertently drank one of his best bottles while he was away on holiday. ‘What? You drank my Gevrey?’ he cried, his expression a mix of horror and disbelief at my iniquity in drinking his wine and pride that I’d made such a quality choice. Luckily pride won out although I did replace the bottle as soon as I could. I also remember spilling mayonnaise all over him at a restaurant in Durham when we were having a meal to celebrate Giles’ graduation. There was complete silence and, again, Dad’s face was a mixture – of anger and humour, this time. For a few seconds we watched the two emotions battle for control. God bless Lil, who guffawed before she could stop herself, Dad’s habitual good humour reasserted itself immediately and all was well.

I’ve already alluded to Dad’s selective memory. Any timely attendance at social events was due to Mum’s insistence that he put them on the kitchen calendar … also, most friends were wise enough to ensure she knew about them. The odd one or two slipped through the net though. I remember in my last year at school, Dad had just left the house and was commuting in daily from home. One evening, I found him, Mum and two friends wandering disconsolately through the cloisters in their dinner suits having arrived at the common room guest night a week early. This was a particularly spectacular achievement since Dad was chairman of the common room at the time and, therefore, the person responsible for organising it.

A familiar refrain in our house when I was growing up was the phrase, ‘have you seen my biro?’ Dad had two Papermate biros: there was a red one, which with Dad’s characteristic fuzzy logic, contained black ink, and a turquoise one which contained red ink. The hunt was on for one or other of them (and his keys) most of the time. Finally, he lost the red one, apparently forever, so I bought him a new one for his birthday, a top of the range black and gold Papermate. Yes, from now on the ‘black’ biro was going to BE black. I was incredibly proud when he hung onto it for years, although it turned out it was several biros. He couldn’t bear to upset me by admitting he’d lost my gift, so he kept buying replacements. It was only after he tried to buy replacement number five and he discovered Papermate had discontinued that model that he was forced to come clean. It was typical of Dad’s kindness. He was a soft old thing. He used to hug the cat goodbye before work in the mornings. She always smelled of aftershave at the start of the day.

For all Dad’s legendary forgetfulness, though, the headmaster’s secretary once told Mum that he was the one housemaster she could always rely on for an instant answer to any question asked about any of his charges. There was no filing system, no having to look things up. He always remembered the things that mattered.

One more instance of fuzzy logic. One summer night we left our pet rabbit in his outside run which had shade but very little shelter. Mum was the first to realise when she was awoken by a rumble of thunder.

‘Darling! There’s a storm coming and the rabbit’s still out!’ she cried and Dad went out to rescue him.

Mum heard the door go just as it began to chuck it down with rain. She ran to the window to see Dad rush into the orchard, completely starkers, barring a pair of wellies, grab the rabbit and take him, through the pouring rain to his more permanent home in the garage.

‘I didn’t want to get my pyjamas wet,’ he explained when Mum asked what on earth he was doing.

Dad was a committed Christian with a deep and enduring faith. Interestingly, his efforts to be Christ-like in every aspect of his behaviour could make him come up as a bit of a maverick – which suggests he may have been doing it properly.

Dad had a very firm idea of right and wrong and, as it was governed by his faith, it didn’t necessarily involve proceeding as convention, or the rules, dictated. Luckily most of the people he encountered appreciated this, even if his tendency to take the same approach at work, coupled with a propensity to forget housemaster’s meetings frustrated some of his bosses. Neither tendency let up after he retired.

One evening he and Mum got talking to a homeless man in the churchyard and brought him home to spend the night. Mum, rang me and explained that if I hadn’t heard from them by half nine the following morning I must call the police as they would probably have been murdered. She put the phone down with the parting shot, ‘Don’t tell your brother darling, he’ll go into orbit.’ Mum and Dad were a team and as you can tell from this story, it was definitely a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other.

One of Dad’s maxims was,

‘Never let anyone see you’re shocked by anything, most of the time, it’s what they want.’

Dad was pretty good at not being shocked especially by some of my more punk friends not to mention us, his own kids. I remember his reaction after I attended my first party. Unfortunately I mistook the fruit punch for a non alcoholic beverage. By the time I realised my mistake I’d downed gallons of the stuff and I was terribly ill. The next day, I felt truly awful and spent the time very quietly in my bedroom. When supper time arrived, I came downstairs and Dad said,

‘I thought we could have a treat tonight, I’ve made some wine cup.’

I have no idea how he did it but Dad had managed to replicate the exact same punch that I’d drunk to such horrific excess the night before. I sunk two glasses with a heaving stomach and a thin pretence of enjoyment. It was a much more salutary lesson than any lecture on the evils of drink. Fizzy logic, perhaps, in that case, but no less effective.

Dad was also great at understanding the way other people thought. A naughty friend of mine told how, when about to be cautioned by the police for some argy-bargy at the Goldstone, Dad stopped him just before he went in and said,

‘Now listen, Duncan, there’s one thing you have to remember and it’s very important.’

‘Yes Mr Bell?’

‘Yes, whatever you do, DON’T laugh! It’s yes sir, no sir, thank you sir and out again. No backchat, and NO arguing the toss. Right?’

My friend confessed that, the moment he was confronted with the police officer cautioning him, he was indeed, seized with an urge to guffaw or make sarcastic comment, but he managed to contain himself because of what Dad had said.

Dad wasn’t afraid to be human if, by venting occasionally over something small, he could be better at something bigger and more important. I remember him mowing the orchard at home. The lowest branches of the trees were all about four feet off the ground. As Dad mowed he was watching the grass in front of him so he bashed his head on pretty much every single tree. Each bump was greeted with an ever lengthier flow of invective, mostly comprising the word, ‘bugger!’ It lead to a new family measurement scale of vexation, ‘how manyb’uggers was that, Dad?’ we’d ask after a particularly vexatious escapade doing something or other.

Dad told me that he’d wanted to be a teacher for as long as he could remember. To be honest, if you grew up around him while he was going about his job it was fairly obvious. He was extremely dedicated, but even when he had retired, even when he had Alzheimer’s, children still flocked to him to chat.

His pet advice on housemastering was, ‘It’s not about catching the boys it’s about knowing when NOT to catch them.’ I only found that out recently, which is probably why it was many years before I realised that, when he came home to regale us with something funny he’d caught the boys doing, they didn’t actually KNOW. The famous Johnny Bell warning cough made sure of this, unless they were seriously up to no good, in which case Dad would omit the cough and attempt to catch them. He allowed some slack but had a zero tolerance policy for bullying. I remember him agonising when he had to send boys to the headmaster for drinking, smoking, going awol or the like, but if they’d been bullying people he never had a qualm about having them expelled, which was entirely in keeping with his sense of right and wrong and social justice.

One of the greatest gifts Dad taught me was that, if you want to be happy in life, it’s essential to be able to laugh at yourself. He had a way of being self depreciating and using humour to keep things light without losing the message. His humour also helped him keep things in proportion, in a way that not everyone can. Perhaps that accounted for some of his courage when facing the grimness of Alzheimer’s. Wherever he is now there will be light and laughter.

In the classroom, too, Dad liked to allow space among the learning to enjoy a bit of levity. His pupils soon realised that you could have a far more interesting Greek lesson if you got Dad onto some off the wall topic after about five minutes. He got decent enough results, so it seems to have worked. Even after he’d retired, Dad’s one-to-one students knew to ask about his most recent holiday if they wanted a break. At school, the lateral and inventive nature of Dad’s red herrings was so famed that they were featured in an article in the school magazine, which amused Dad greatly. I have a photocopy of that article which I’ve included, below.

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