Tag Archives: I fucked this up so you don’t have to

9 Jun 2024 · 6:02 pm

Stuff

A mixed bag this week so on we go.

On health

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

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

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

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

Out and about

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

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

Picture from the woodland path …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afore ye go …

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

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

2 Jun 2024 · 6:04 pm

Meh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the upside …

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

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

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

Other news this week …

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

Picture of authors at a table selling their books

Thanks Simone for asking someone to take our picture!

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

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

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

Other comicon news, eyebombed the loos.

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

Writing…

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

Probably …

So that’s grand.

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

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Tagged as grief, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, off topic, women in sci-fi, women writers, writer parent

19 May 2024 · 6:43 pm

Stones …

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

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

Picture of air freshener canister eyebombed

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

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

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

Come on a tangent with me.

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

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

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

How hard can that be? I thought.

Mmm always a bad start.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A partial success then.

Woot.

So I give you … polished stones.

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

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Tagged as author blog, hobbies, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, mtmcguire, off topic

7 Apr 2024 · 12:25 pm

Respite and random thoughts about faith…

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

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

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

‘Yes, but no butter or milk.’

‘Can I have coffee?’

‘With a meal.’

Woot.

‘With a tiny bit of milk?’

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

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

It did.

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

I slept like a fucking log.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other stuff …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed under General Wittering

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

30 Mar 2024 · 6:17 pm

A very unwelcome conundrum …

This week I have been mostly…

…Having a crap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a bit of a case of …

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

Plus points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

picture of the south downs dappled with sunlight and shade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upsides?

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

Filed under General Wittering

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

3 Mar 2024 · 10:08 am

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

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

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

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

The Kickstarter funded!

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

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

It funded! So there’s a thing.

General stuff …

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

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

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

Frank Skinner.

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

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

Blimey.

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

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

Other news with a neurodiversity tangent

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

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

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

Redeeming feature my arse!

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

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

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

What my family looks like if you’re normal.

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

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

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

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

Grk …

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

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

Awkward.

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

Awkward …

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

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

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

A serious lapse in judgement.

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

This week I have been, mostly, laminating bacon.

Come again?

No really; bacon.

Bacon Man

Not this bacon …

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

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

Do you want to know how I did this?

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

This was not a good idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Um … no.

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

I reversed the direction of the laminator.

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

Bollocks. Now what?

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

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

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

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

A partial success then.

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

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

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

Yeh. That.

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

Oh dear.

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

No.

Never give up! Never surrender!

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

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

Correct. It was extremely smecking hard.

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

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

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

So there we are.

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

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

Filed under Blimey!, General Wittering

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

21 Oct 2023 · 12:00 pm

Balls … all of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No. We’re not going to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah.

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

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

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

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

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

Oh ho ho

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed under General Wittering

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

15 Jul 2023 · 12:23 pm

Modern life is rubbish!

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

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

[Rant mode] Modern life is rubbish!

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

Aroogah! Aroogah! Whinge warning!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not quite. Clearly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bastards.

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

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

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

The first session was on Tuesday.

I forgot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[/rant mode]

Here’s something a little lighter …

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

Picture of books about eyebombing displayed artfully

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

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

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

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

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

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

18 Jun 2023 · 4:15 pm

Let’s talk about pigeons …

This week, my school friend texted me to say she’d had a successful cancer op. There’s none left and she will do radio therapy.

‘Woot! Fantastic news!’ I started to type.

‘Woot! Bacteria!’ wrote my phone.

Fuckinell what is it on? I stopped and tried again. Nope. I have to laboriously type it in, one letter at a time, very slowly in order for it to understand because nothing will persuade it that someone writing in english is more likely to write Woot! Fantastic news! then Woot! Bacteria. Seriously, what the fuck has Google’s machine learning been smoking?

Welcome to my world. It’s been a bit like that this last couple of weeks. OK then. Onwards and upwards.

Where to?

I know! Let’s start by talking about pigeons.

Recent events got me wondering how much of the average pidgeon is bowel? Seriously, if there are any nature experts out there reading this I’d really like to know. It might be that birds, generally, have a very high large intestine too … um … rest of them ratio. After all Canada geese poo every 90 seconds (my poor bottom is wilting at the thought of going through life doing that. Sudocreme anyone? Five tonnes over here please, that might stretch to three days … etc).

Also, I remember how, once, I inadvertently sat in a seagull shit on a day out in Southwold. Bloody hell! Never again. It was the size of a labrador turd. Likewise … this last week, although not this LAST week as I come to finish this post, but the one before, it was half term. McOther went to check up on his folks and Mc(NotSo)Mini and I went to see my bother in Shrewsbury. As well as being a target-rich environment for eyebombing, Shrewsbury is a lovely market town. Much like Bury St Edmunds only rather inconveniently far away.

Cousin of Mc(not so)Mini/nephew-of-me had a minor op, poor lad, so we didn’t do much, which, as you know, I always regard as an absolute bonus. What I love to do, when I see friends or family, is talk. OK so I tend to talk the hind legs of any donkeys within several hundred miles but I enjoy myself. I’m not quite so certain they do but they’re all very tactful about it anyway.

We had a fantastic time, or at least I did, just sitting about drinking rather too much alcohol or sitting in the sun while the youngsters binge watched the Harry Potter films. We threw in a couple of forays out to meet up with family friends whom I haven’t seen in ages.

But I digress. Extensively. (Quelle suprise.) I was on about pigeon shit, wasn’t I?

So my bother and his Mrs live in her mother’s house, now. They also have a large and really rather lovely static caravan in the garden which Bro’s mum in-law and husband are using as a granny annex. Having sold their original house, Bro and wife have put the proceeds into a buy-to-let property for the time being. They’d owned it for about two days by the time I got there so Sis-in-law needed to measure up the kitchen with a view to giving it a bit of a refresh. I suggested I tagged along as it’s so much quicker and easier with someone else there to hold the other end of the tape measure. It’s a really nice house, no garden but that’s perfect for a rental and it has a terrace so the people can still sit out.

You’re wondering how the pigeon bowels come in by now, aren’t you? I know, but stay with me, I’m getting there, which, by the way, is kind of how it happened.

Sis-in-law works for a homeless centre. If you see anything about Shrewsbury Arc in the media you can pretty much guarantee she’ll be the spokesperson. They have a rented storage property which they’re giving up and some of the furniture there has been deemed too knackered to move or too complicated for many folks to fit so they are leaving it. This includes a couple of counter tops so Sis-in-law reckoned it might be worth going to have a look to see if any of it would could be recycled into the kitchen of the new house to give it a bit of a refresh. Otherwise it was going to be skipped.

Kitchen measured, off we went to the storage property. On the way, we had to drive under a railway bridge. There were traffic lights before hand, red, naturally, but as they went green Sis-in-law blanched and explained that there were more traffic lights under the bridge, that they would probably be red and that there were pigeons. We got the giggles about the odds of being shat on; about 100:1 for normal people but, since we had the lid off, I reckoned the odds of us actually escaping a shite dousing were the remote ones and the chances of being comprehensively crapped on from a great height pretty much odds on.

Sure enough the light went red and as we stopped, third in the queue and right under some convenient girders, I could hear the pigeons above. One, in particular, sounded as if it was heaving and straining, as if to lay an egg, or give birth … or possibly even scream for an epidural. Having commuted regularly on a line that involved changing trains at Earl’s Court I know what that means. It was about to lay a gargantuan cable.

‘Yikes!’ I said. ‘One of them’s got us in its sights. I can hear it gearing up.’ At which point there was a sound like a loud hand clap.

‘Bollocks! Was that the sound of shit landing on us?’ I asked her.

‘Yes. Although mostly on me,’ was Sis-in-law’s approximate reply as the lights went green. I looked over and her window was covered in what looked like the contents of a newborn’s nappy; yellow, quite runny and a bit granular, like mustard.

Except that to call it the contents of A newborn’s nappy was doing the pigeon an injustice. The roto-virus-yellow excrement on the windows was there in the kind of abundance that was more befitting a sizeable ruminant like … I dunno … a cow, a water buffalo, or possibly a large elephant. Definitely something bigger than a pigeon. Seriously, I’ve done smaller poos than that and I’m chuffing enormous next to a pigeon.

Luckily the homeless centre at which Sis-in-law works was about 100 yards away, so we pulled over and parked there to clean the car. When she stood up and climbed out I could see that she hadn’t been so much shat on as hosed down. Seriously there was a LOT of poo. She ran in and got a bucket of water and a sponge for me to clean the shite off the seat, floorpan, sill, seatbelt and window. I think I may have mentioned that there was a lot of shit but trust me, because I really cannot stress this enough, there was.

Sis-in-law went back inside to change into some clean clothes from the stash they keep there for folks who only have one set, so they can use the shower and the washing machine without doing their own impression of that 1980s Levi jeans advert.

Pigeon shit down the window of a Lotus

So. Much. Shit. There was double that inside the car and on Sis-in-law

While Sis-in-law was absent I surveyed the damage. I found myself marvelling at how one pigeon could do that much excrement. Seriously, there were gallons of it. OK so I know that when they’re spread out liquids look more voluminous but even so. There was an absolute fucking crap tonne of … well … you know … crap. We must be talking a 33cl coffee cup, minimum, of shite down the window, inside and on the floor and seat of my car … not to mention the extensive splatterage down Sis-in-law. I found myself marvelling at the wonders of nature present in the amount of liquid that came out of a living vessel that really shouldn’t have been large enough to contain it.

And what did the pigeon look like afterwards? You know … minus what appeared to be most of it’s bodymass? What happened to it? Did the sudden release of that much fluid kill it? Was it lying on the ground, little more than a flaccid skin with nothing inside it, you know like one of those plastic chickens? Would it shrivel to nothing, when touched, like an ancient balloon that’s lost its air? How could a living creature contain so much … liquid … without being double the size it actually is. I mean seriously just … how? It seems that the humble pigeon is nature’s TARDIS; soooo much bigger on the inside.

If anyone can tell me what the maximum capacity of a pigeon is, I’d be most interested to know. Both of us were giggling about what had happened despite the horrific stench but at the same time, I am genuinely agog to find the answer to this question.

As I washed the copious amounts of stinking guano off the car I noticed that the back tyre was looking a bit low profile. Less low profile, to be frank, and more flat.

Bollocks.

Sis-in-law returned, having had a quick wash and brush up, resplendent in a strangely baggy pair of grey tracksuit bottoms and carrying her reeking shorts in a sealed plastic bag. I briefly outlined the a new chapter that had arisen in our Series of Unfortunate Events and showed her the tyre.

OK first things first, or do I mean second things second by this time? God knows. Anyway. Step one in this phase. We needed to fill the tyre with air becasue otherwise I’d break it by driving on it. Needless to say, it’s a Lotus tyre and it is therefore a tyre that tends to have to be ordered in and take a day or two to arrive. Mc(not so)Mini had a gig coming up so that was two days we didn’t have, so if I buggered it up it was tow truck time when we came to go home. Step two, we then needed to see if the air leaked out very quickly or if it just went down slowly. If it didn’t leak fast we could drive to a garage to get it fixed the following morning and all would be fine. But it was now 7.00pm and the KwikFits of this world were closed for the day. On the upside, it was a Thursday night so they’d be awake the following morning.

But air was the first stop anyway.

Off we went to the nearest source—Morrison’s petrol station—to pump up the tyre. Then, since we were there and I was going home the following day, I decided to use the five minutes we were going to wait to see if it started to go down to fill up with petrol. I had a debit card in my phone case with over £100 on it but no other money with me, so we headed on over to pay at the pump. I swiped it and it was refused.

Ah yes, of course. I realised it was refused because the pump tried to take £100 off it and there was only £90 there because 48 hours previously I filled up with petrol at Tesco and paid at the pump with that card. No worries, if I stuck £10 on it the funds would go over the magic £100 level with a bit to spare, and all would be well.

Except no, it wasn’t. Even though I had £100 in there, and I’d only spent £20 on petrol at Tesco’s. No worries. I used my banking app to transfer another twenty quid to the account. It still didn’t work. I tried another tenner. Still no. Then I looked at the banking app for the account that was linked to this particular card. Well that explained it. The bank in question believed that I’d spent £100 on petrol at Tesco’s and that my coffers were empty. Thinking about it, I realised that Tesco’s hadn’t worked out how much I’d actually spent on petrol yet, so they’d just taken £100 off me for now, and were sitting on it while their accounting computers worked out how much I’d actually spent at which point they put the rest back. This had taken it 24 hours so far.

Fucking what? I knew you had to have £100 in there to buy petrol but I hadn’t realised the bastards actually hang onto it. Presumably, in a couple of day’s time … when Tesco’s accounting software had got its finger out of it’s arse, they were going to give me the other £80 back.

It was the end of the month, but luckily I did have another £90 I could put in, just, to convince the Morrisons pump that I had enough money to buy £45 worth of petrol.

Luckily, by the end of the day, Tesco’s had ‘realised’ that I only did a £20 splash and dash the previous day and Morrisons had already changed the £100 to the correct amount. Suddenly I now had £150 in my slush account and absolutely jack shit in the account all the direct debits were about to come out from. Cue some hurried transferring back.

I wonder how much interest Tesco’s makes from sitting on £100 of people’s cash for a day or two each time they buy petrol at the pump. Lots, I should imagine. Every little helps themselves eh? Bastards. No wonder every man jack of those gits buying petrol alonside me at Tesco’s clogs up the pumps for ten minutes a pop while they queue for fucking ever to pay in the guichet. Note to self, only use the Lloyds mothership account for this, not the Chase spending account, because with Lloyds mothership Tesco do not hang onto £100 of my money for 48 fucking hours!

Tyre pumped up, we decided the warehouse was probably a bridge too far and went home. Upon examination I found a nail in the tyre. It’s weird how these things come in patches as I haven’t had a puncture for ages but had a nail through my front tyre a couple of weeks ago.

Then of course, the next morning, I had to find someone to mend the tyre. That was alright, although it took a bit of doing and it wasn’t ready until 12.45. That was fine but not what I was expecting. We got away by 1.00 and even though the traffic was a bit shit we got home by 5.00. Poor McOther coming home from Scotland had it far worse, his five hour jouney was seven, whereas our two and a half hour journey was three, which doesn’t feel so bad. And we had each other to talk to. McMini is still as amusing as ever, except now he’s just incredibly sarcastic. We have in jokes about neck rolls, people with square jaws and apparently any bald person with very short or no hair is referred to as a ‘thumb’ these days which I find unaccountably hilarious. It probably makes me a four star bitch.

Other news, briefly: on the Mum front, the application for continuing healthcare continues on. I have been required to gather together an absolute fucktonne of documents, have them certified by a solicitor (but not my husband) and then send them off to the people who are going to attempt to apply. Continuing care is a bit like farming subsidies, applying is so complicated and fraught with difficulties that a whole industry has sprung up around applying for it. I am quite nervous because it’ll cost us £5k to do the application, another £2.5 if we want an advocate to speak for us and then, if we have to appeal, it’s the same again. I’m definitely nervous, but doing this could be the difference between her being able to stay where she is and having to move her early next year.

As you can see it’s all go, hence my doing fewer blog posts.

Writing news.

On writing, big news this week, I have now finished the insides of the eyebombing book … I think. I may have to redo all the images to CMYK but that isn’t so bad, it was choosing them that took the time. There’s just the cover to do … and it appears it has to have a dust jacket so it looks like I’ll have to do one of those as well but that’s just, kind of, the cover twice, with a little bit of blurb on the flaps on the inside. Although I might make it a poster or something. So that’s grand.

Picture of lap top with last page of photo book in D T P software loaded.

If you are interested and would like to know when the eyebombing book drops you are welcome to sign up for my all things eyebombing newsletter. To do that click the link just here:

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

I am appearing at the Bury Cathedral Summer Fair with some other author friends on 8th July. Which reminds me, they don’t know about that, and I should probably tell them. I am hoping I can have the Eyebombing, Therefore I Am book finished, ordered in and ready to sell for then. It’ll be touch and go I’m going to try and pull out the stops to get it done. I am so, so close. It might be possible, if I pay extra for a quick turnaround. Hope springs eternal!

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as Eyebombing, eyebombthereforeiam, eyebombtheschoolrun, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, living dangerously, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, M T McGuire new releases, new book releases, whyarepigeonssofullofshit

21 May 2023 · 6:47 pm

We’re not at home to Mr Cockup. Oh no, no, no, no.

Except we so smecking are. Mwahahargh!

Picture of an amber warning light for an automatic gate with plastic googly eyes on it to make it look like an irritated face.

Yes he’s a bit fucked off.

I was going to do a post about writing this week—and accompanying things—but the accompanying things got a bit out of hand and so I’ve gone off on a completely non-writing related tangent.

Do you remember a refrain from the Blackadder II episode where he’s made Lord High Executioner?

‘We’re not at home to Mr Cockup!’ he tells his team. And they fuck it up, of course, and Baldrick says, ‘Shall I prepare the guest room for Mr Cockup, my lord?’

Yeh, well … Mr Cock-up seems to have taken up permanent residence in the spare room and his omnipresence has affected most events this week. Sadly this time, my inefficiency has impacted on my ‘work’. I put ‘work’ in quotes because we all know that I don’t have time for a real job, since what I do is look after Mum and be a mum. My writing ‘career’ is the thing I pursue in the few minutes a week that I laughingly call, ‘my spare time’.

Here’s the thing.  For the last, I dunno how long, the cunningist of my most cunning marketing strategies has revolved around the crack dealer’s school of marketing. Give them books, get them hooked and then make them pay. To whit, I have been handing out cards … these cards … (see pic).

picture of two business card-sized flyers advertising free books.

The QR codes send people to a page where they can download The Last Word (top card shown) or join my mailing list (other card shown) and grab a copy of Nothing to See Here… In case, like me, readers can’t get the QR code reader on their electronic thingy of choice to work, there’s a link written out longhand as well.

When I changed ISPs a few months ago, I lost my website. I’d run out of space and there wasn’t enough room on the server to back it up properly … except that I didn’t realise that and so when I got the new site up and running and tried to upload the backed up file it told me to piss off.

On the face of it, this wasn’t so bad. I have an earlier back up which contains most of the material I’d want to keep. Also, I used a lot of orphan pages; that is blanks with information about my books etc but without the menu and distractions that might make people browse away before they’ve properly assimilated how fantastically brilliant my books are and ponied up for one. Phnark.

Those were stored on my computer. I composed and edited them in a very ancient copy of Dreamweaver … 2004 ancient, to be precise … and put them backwards and forwards using the ancient Dreamweaver’s integrated ftp. As a result I was able to upload those to the new site and so most of the stuff in my automations should be working as usual. But things with Dreamwever are getting a bit shonky—it being nearly 20 years old and that—so I’ve been attempting to use an alternative.

Anyway, because I’m so organised and efficient (oh ho ho) I made a list and started downloading the code for all the pages I wanted to use … except that then, I suspect, I saw a shiny thing, or something happened with Mum, or McMini needed a lift somewhere and I got called away, and when I returned, I thought I’d finished. What distracted me is immaterial, the point is I hadn’t finished the job that I thought I’d done.

Yes, it turns out I’ve been handing out these cards like confetti and sending people to my site to download a free book to read and all they get is a 404 error.

Mmm, well done MTM. Bellend of the week award anyone? Ah yes, that would be me.

Balls up discovered, I have now put it right and the page for people to go to when they click the QR code is back in position. However, my gargantuan cockwomblery does not end there. Oh, no, no, no …

It now transpires that the QR code on my mailing list sign up cards points people to a sign up page with my list provider rather than on my site. I did these cards when I had artwork but in advance of publishing the book so I had to guess what I’d call the landing page with a view to making it later—when there was a book there for people to download and I’d written an onboarding sequence. I duly made up a name for the landing page, which involved the working title of the novella rather than the one it actually has…

Can you guess what happened next?

That’s right. I forgot to make that page. I forgot I’d made the link. I forgot that was where the QR code pointed but I had the cards printed anyway. Once again, the helpful QR code was taking them to a page that said oops but this time, rather than an oops page hosted by me, it was hosted by Mailerlite.

Mmm. My professionalism knows no bounds.

Bollocks.

In order to have a neat link, I used a link shortener.  Needless to say, in the interim, the link shortener in question, Bit.ly, has drastically reduced the facilities of its free account so I can’t just make a new one for bit.ly/hupbook or whatever because I’m only allowed to use the ones bit.ly gives me, you know; bit.ly/1f*5hio;avew or something equally catchy and easy to print correctly and remember. So what did I do? Well, I just duplicated the signup page I have, and renamed it with the name I used when I made the original link. Simple! But also. Ugh. Head desk.

As you can see, my marketing’s been just peachy this week, say I with such leaden irony that if I decide to move this sentence I’ll need a special, heavy-duty winch. Then again, perhaps my … er hem … marketing prowess has been kind of OK because I can tell myself that I’ve fixed a long-term problem that’s been extant since mid January.  Which makes this a win. Obviously. Snortle.

How did I not spot this problem earlier? I hear you ask, except I probably don’t because I expect you’ve nodded off by this time, but as usual I’m going to pretend, for comic effect, that I did. Er … hang on … oh yes. How did I fail to spot this? Well the QR code isn’t the only thing on there, I have also written out the link … except … it’s a different link which goes to a real page which does exist and will allow them to sign up and download the book. Not a total disaster then but kind of weird, all the same. I’ve left it like that for now because an alternative means changing the artwork.

Going forward (not a phrase I like but probably the best one to use here) people can at least sign up to my mailing list or download a free book with those cards, now. They probably won’t but that’s not the point is it? The point is that they can.

It’s been one of those weeks this week.

Similarly, I ordered a new case for my phone. I needed a wallet case because I like to have a single card in there and be able to go out with just my phone without being caught short of cash. Also, if my wallet’s nicked and I have to stop everything else I can still pay for things in a shop and get cash while I’m waiting for them all to arrive AND I can still buy stuff if I go out and forget my wallet.

However, I couldn’t find any companies that made them for my phone initially and had to buy a normal case—this is me, it has to have a protective case of some sort because otherwise, I’ll smash it. Although even with the protective case I smashed the phone-before-last on day two.

The case it has is great but I have to take it off to plug in a USB stick to download my photos, and as I’m doing the eyebombing book at the moment, I need to keep moving eyebomb pictures from my phone to my computer so, as you can imagine, this has become a sizeable point of pain. I have google drive but anyone who’s ever tried to download anything more than one photo at a time from Google Drive will know a) what a palaver it is and b) that when it compresses the photos into a zip file it leaves three quarters of them out. Massive, MASSIVE ball ache. The USB storage stick is way easier, even if you have to keep taking the phone out of its ruddy bastard case each time. That’s how eager Google is to ensure you don’t bother and pay for extra storage. Money grubbing bastards.

Sorry, where was I? Ah yes.

Having ordered the case, it arrived two weeks later from China and I discovered I’d inadvertently ordered one to fit a Pixel PRO rather than a plain pixel. When I put ‘custom wallet case for google pixel 6’ into a search engine, I have to be very careful that I check the results are not for a Pixel 6 Pro, which is bigger, because no matter what I do, it lumps them all together. I also get annoyingly irrelevant ‘sponsored’ results from companies who don’t make a custom wallet case for a pixel at all. I know I had the right one initially but the internet dropped, I had to reload the page and I didn’t realise it had defaulted back to pixel 6 PRO again. Bastards. That said, it was so rubbish that when it arrived I was almost glad it didn’t fit.

Needless to say, only one other site offering a Pixel 6 (not pro) wallet case popped up on my search results, but apparently they’d changed some vital parameter to ‘custom’ that made BT parental controls ban them. Or perhaps it was because they’re called hairy worm, phnark. Uh yeh … I guess it could be that. Sometime, long ago, in the dim, dark, distant past, we put parental controls on our BT internet access because … you know … McMini.

However, that was eight years ago. We are out of contract and neither of us knows our BT password so we can’t change it. I tried to get this back off BT but was unable to because it was confidential information. So confidential that once it’s been lost, they can’t even tell the actual account holder what their own password is. Likewise, if they spell your name wrong, they can’t change it. I might be able to tone down parental controls via the wi-fi router and I will probably try at some point in the far future, when I’ve nothing better to do.

Alternatively, it might be that only McOther can do it because he’s the account holder and being his mere wife means I’m not secure enough. I did have a secondary account and password which I could do this stuff with but those no longer work, probably because I haven’t used my BT email address, ever.

As far as the account goes, I think there has to be one default email address but we can’t get in because … password … and they can’t send it to us because we can’t get in to read the email. Anyway, they’ve spelled our surname Maguire, the ignorant tossers, so they can fuck off.

Hmm. Sorry. Not ranty or anything today am I? I’m just in a grump because my son has very generously shared his cold with me. Back to my long and rambling story. I just know you’re on the edge of your seat. Mwahahargh!

Luckily, I have data on my phone so I just used that to bypass BT’s draconian system by using my data and my phone, instead. I did try to report it as an error but obviously I needed to know my account name and password for that. Considering I uploaded the artwork, positioned it and chose the text colour using my phone I am actually quite chuffed. See picture attached.

picture of a wallet case for a phone

Mmm … K’Barthan swag.

Nothing much else has happened this week other than my opening what, I suspect, is going to be the most gargantuan can of worms. I asked about getting Mum a care assessment for a continuing care grant; mainly because one of her carers’ grandfather had been given it and she told me that, in her professional opinion, he was no more in need of help than Mum. Her mother, who is also on the care team, agreed. I asked what they did, and apparently another family member had contacted an agency who’d done it for them.

Armed with this information, I rang the agency in question but they told me that if Mum is able to speak she isn’t bad enough. The chap there seemed to think that non-verbal was a key factor and told me to come back when she reaches the pureed food stage. I’m a bit confused by that because if she needs help to stand, go to the loo, wash, dress, cook, clean and can’t even use the phone or turn the telly on by herself then surely that’s 24 hour care.  To be doubly sure, I rang the Admiral nurses helpline. Sadly they don’t cover where Mum lives so they won’t be able to help with the process but they were able to advise me and said that yes, Mum definitely had needs that made her eligible for Continuing Care.  Next, I got through to social care at the council who thought I should contact her Doctor. I guess what I really need to find is the local social services number for her and get a social worker on her case. I’m not 100% sure how that’s done, as with Dad I seem to remember it happening automatically. I’ll have to look up his notes and see if I have a number for them from then.

Essentially, Mum needs a care assessment first from the right team. Apparently you can call and ask for one of those any time. Then the results of that are scrutinised closely and financial help awarded … or not. The trouble is, nothing says who you call to get this initial care assessment sorted.  There are parameters and a procedure, but to the outsider looking in the vaguaries of the system are very difficult to understand, at best and at worst, it comes over as deliberately opaque, whimsical and arcane … Mum ticks most things on the list but, as yet, I’ve found no concrete information as to where the starting point of the system is. As a result, I’m not sure who to contact to have the care assessment done. It’s a NHS team, who does the assessment for the actual application, but I have no clue if we need a ‘normal’ assessment first from social services. I’m guessing we do, although I’ve found a thing that says a district nurse can arrange this, too so I might see if I can get the carers to liaise with them.

There are two agencies who will apply for NHS continuing care on behalf of people, and a law firm with the most ridiculous name on earth—they’re probably really good but the name screams cold-calling ambulance chasers. The only one of these august bodies that quoted a price for their work charged £2,500 and some suggest as much as £6,500 depending on what they have to do. I will have to think about whether it’s worth that. No, it’s definitely worth it, for my sanity, to pay someone else to do it for me because this will be a grim project to try and undertake on my own and, like all the Mum stuff, is a perfect storm of everything at which I am shit.

In the meantime, I’ve started filling out the form on the website of the other agency. I’ve already stalled at how much Mum has spent on her care … well … you know … apart from, ‘everything’ but some of that was the day-to-day costs of running the house. She has a state pension so there’s that on top, as well, though so theory, it’s actually a bit more than everything.  Everything with brass knobs on? I dunno.

What I don’t understand is this; while I appreciate that they aim to make it hard for people gaming the system, it would be quite nice to set it up so the people who needed this particular part of the system would have some blind clue as to what, exactly makes them eligible and how it works. There are lots of really clear accounts that explain what will happen when you are already in the system and what the steps of the evaluation are. But how to start the process? Absolutely fuck all.

Carers looking after a sick relative who are seeking continuing care for them, or people who are sick themselves and need continuing care … they’re not exactly endowed with an abundance of energy for administriviatitive shit because they have a craptonne on their plate and are already nearly broken. I should imagine many of them will never get money to help with care, money to which they are entitled, because they are too fucking ill and their relatives too fucking frazzled and burned out to even begin to work out how to fucking apply.

Fuckity fucking fuck! Preparing the guest room for Mr Cockup then, even, also as we speak.

Ho hum. Onwards and upwards.

Astonishingly cheap ebook and audiobook alert …

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

This book.

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

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

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

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as an author with children, author blog, dementia, full time mum writing, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, off topic, trying to be a writer, women in sci-fi, women writers, writers