Tag Archives: Mary Fails at Modern Life

17 Nov 2025 · 4:38 pm

Jump, you bugger! Jump!

Into this here blanket what we are holding out and it will be alright …

Well it’s been an interesting week and a busy one, not necessarily in the best way although there have been good bits. On the up side, the editing is creeping forward. I’m a third of the way through now! Woot. Go me. On the downside, Real Life just will not fuck off and leave me alone to finish my sodding book. I give you this week’s examples.

First up, a piece of such gargantuan twattery on my behalf it defies belief. Let me begin at the beginning. McSon has bought a car. Not just any car, because he’s our son so he’s not going to buy a normal vehicle. Nope. He’s bought himself a Renault 5. He’s not passed his test yet, so at the moment McOther or I have to sit with him while he drives it to school. Then I, or his dad, hop into the driving seat and bring it home again.

We picked up this thing just over ago. Seven days, people. It is his absolute pride and joy. There are only two this colour on the road in the UK. It’s a once ubiquitous thing that has become a rareity. It’s boxy and French and a scream to drive.

Last Thursday, five days after picking it up, we did the school run, after which I took it to the gym first and then home. As I backed it onto the drive I managed to completely cock up the angle and as I backed it past next door’s garage wall there was a loud and terrifying bang. I stopped. Then, very slowly, I backed up.

There was no scraping noise! Hoorah.

Ah yes, that was because the bumper was on the ground.

Arse.

I got out and then, becasue I’m fifty something and a bit hormonal at the best of times, I burst into tears. Then I got back into the car. Parked it where it should be, went and picked up the bumper and carried it to just in front of the car.

I looked at it in horrified silence.

I cried.

Then I looked at it again and cried some more.

Probably a little bit like this

Then, accepting the fact I was not going to stop crying any time soon, I went inside and tried to explain to my McOther half what had just happened.

‘I’ve …’ squeak.

‘What’s happened?’

‘I’ve … squeak-ity squeak.’

‘You’ve been robbed?’

‘No… hic,’ deep breath. ‘I’ve broken,’—I stopped to make a string of noises like a sealion, or perhaps, an asthmatic duck before continuing—‘McMini’s car!’ More wailing and gnashing of teeth as husband patiently hugged me and I soaked his shirt in tears and snot. Nice.

We went to have a look. Miraculously, the bodywork was fine, so there was that, although I’d managed to rip off pretty much every single fixy bit on the bumper that we might use to put it back. Also it had a big rip in it although it hadn’t bent out of shape or anything, there’s just a tear. I’d also smashed the indicator bulb but, miraculously, not the indicator glass.

McSon had to be collected at 5.25. We had about 4 hours.

Fuck.

We started with the bulb. McOther brought the bumper in and set about finding washers, bolts screws etc that might allow us to put it back in away that would be strong enough to keep it there. I also suggested that since it looked as if I’d compltely bollocksed it, I might be prudent to get a new bumper. There was one on-line, pick up only, in Liverpool.

‘It’s only 500 miles. I’ll drive up there and get it,’ I said, thinking logically as always.

‘Let’s not be hasty,’ said McOther.

OK so McOther thought he might be able to get it back on, but if we couldn’t, there might be other options. My car is fibreglass, so I reckoned if I rang my mechanics I might at least be able to take the bumper to their fibreglass bloke so I could tell McSon, when I picked him up, that the bumper was already away to be fixed. While McOther checked the part number of the indicator bulb, I rang the mechanic’s to ask.

The one I spoke to didn’t sound convinced, he thought their fibreglass guy was way too expensive.

‘Is the bumper off?’ he asked me, and I explained it was.

‘Do you want to bring it down here and we can see if we can put it back on again?’

These two guys are genius mechanics. Very, very capable and as absolutely honest and straight as they come. Did I? You bet I fucking did.

But first to Halfords to get the bulb. That done, McOther had already loaded the bumper into the car and put the bulb in. It wasn’t working but … sod that. Away I drove down the A14 at a stately 65, which is about its top speed, to see if I could salvage anything from this horrific mess.

Did I mention that these mechanics are genius? Yeh, well they are. They’re called Gerald and Neil! Hello there chaps! I chatted away with them while they calmly and methodically went round the car, reassembling all the bust bits and somehow putting the back on the car. It took them about 40 minutes.

I told them they’d saved my fucking life and asked how much?

Nothing they said.

Blimey but people are lovely sometimes aren’t they?

Now I must remember to secretly ring when the lady who does their billing and accounts is in and ask her what their favourite tipple is. Because if they won’t take money for saving my arse, I have to give them stuff! Mwahahargh. And jam! I have some jam they might enjoy.

Incidentally, I would tell you to take your cars to these guys but as I understand it, they’ve no room for any more punters … unless your car is really interesting, then I suspect they might squeak you in. They only fix Lotuses though … well … except when they’re putting the bumpers back on a Renault 5, obviously.

Head desk. Or at least head dashboard in this case.

What an absolute melt I am. Jeez.

But they did a fantastic job, as they always do, and I drove to pick up McSon with almost imperceptable damage. He drove home and when we got onto the drive, I broke the news to him.

‘It was the nightmare weird steering wasn’t it?’ he said.

It is a bit different to modern cars, about four turns lock-to-lock as opposed to what feels like about one in mine.

‘That and I drove over a brick,’ I said.

He told me it was just stuff, and not to worry and that it looked OK and he was thinking of getting a body kit for it anyway. I could have hugged him but he’s 17 so that kind of stuff is absolutely not allowed from his mother. I wish I could have found out another way but I was extremely proud of my son over this. He had good reason to go into orbit but he didn’t. Although he is being very sarcastic and taking the piss out of me constantly, not that there is ever a time when he’s not sarcastic and taking the piss out of me constantly.

Then there’s McCat. McCat is not well, he has been a bit drooly for a week or two but now his fur feels a bit dry and tufty, and he seems lethargic, sad and generally very sorry for himself. I took him to the vet for a routine check up and blood tests on Monday and mentioned the drooling but they couldn’t find anything out of order and suggested I keep an eye. So I did. The drooling got worse and I decided it was not normal. I booked an appointment yesterday and after a really good look in his mouth, which he didn’t like, the vet spotted a red patch under his tongue.

Picture of a tabby and white cat sitting on a desk in front of an opened computer.

My theory is that he has tried to eat yet another thing he should have avoided and that there’s something stuck there, like a grass seed, or most likely a bit of dried up lemon grass. Cats are not supposed to eat lemon grass. I looked this up because mine does. Try telling him that though.

I’ve Taken Steps and locked the lemongrass away. If I so much as look at the door to the room it’s in, he’s there. It’s a bit dried up this time of year but a couple of weeks ago, sure enough, I had to go in there and the furry scrote was in like flynn. I suspect a horrible dried up spiky bit has got stuck in his tongue. The vet agreed that it was probably something like that.

Having booked him in to have a minor op to explore the problem area next week, I took him home. Sunday morning, he was completely off his wet food as well as the dry. I have no idea if he’s drinking. I hope he is but he’s an utter plank so it’s not beyond the possiblility he isn’t.

Suddenly I was looking at the fact that, if he doesn’t eat or drink until Tuesday, he may be so dehydrated they won’t be able to get a line into him and he’ll die. Because I’m not melodramatic and I don’t catastrophise at all.

Ever.

With that rather horrid thought in mind, I went off to do my weekly bit of God bothering on Sunday morning, convinced I’d be calling the vet’s for emergency surgery when I got home. Instead, I chopped the food a bit smaller, loudly, and with a great deal of cheerful chirrupping and burrping McCat appeared and hoovered it up in short order.

Phew … for now.

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Tagged as an author with children, author blog, 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, McMini, off topic

2 Nov 2025 · 6:28 pm

Did I eat that? Yes I did!

Misadventures in food …

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

MTM’s adventures in foraging.

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

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

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

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

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

These were surprisingly good.

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

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

Verdict

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cake Wrecks

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

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

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

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

Torta De Armêndoa do Algarve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know, terrifying.

Verdict

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

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

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

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

Last but not least …

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

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

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Tagged as author blog, author parent, 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, Mary Fails at Modern Life, off topic, women in sci-fi, women writers, writer

27 Sep 2025 · 9:11 am

What in the name of Pete …?

Well, it’s September, getting towards the end, and I had thought I’d have my book finished by this time FFS! Or at least off to the beta readers.

As if.

In July I reckoned I had about two chapters to go. I still have about two chapters to go. I do not know what the fuck is going on. Seriously where in the name of Pete did that all that time bloody well go? I have run round like a blue-arsed fly this month. I’ve done digs, we’ve been away for weekends, I’ve done events, I’ve been to the theatre, indeed I’m going to two comedy gigs this week because heaven forefend they should come along neatly spaced out. I have Lived with a capital chuffing L. But two years out from Mum’s death I have also achieved a princely zero percent of the tasks I put off while my parents were ill. OK it’s 10 years’ worth of stuff. That is a LOT but you’d have thought I’d have managed some.

Oh no, hang on.

There’s been one success.

Fuck let’s celebrate that then! Yeh! I’ve managed to get my son’s ADHD diagnosed. I had promised him that. It’s only taken me six months of on-and-off effort but I’ve finally got there. I now have to sort some time for him to see the lovely education woman who will help him with techniques to get through the school day, hopefully with slightly less regular amounts of panicked last minute shit!-I-haven’t-done-this! shennanagins than his mother. Woot.

Go me! Winning at life, clearly.

If you’re wondering why I would bother to get a diagnosis for him, it’s obvious you don’t have ADHD. Put simply, a diagnosis explains the madness, the dysfunction and why it takes 900% more capacity for him to fill in a form and deal with government bodies than the normals. And also you can get medication that helps you concentrate. I do not have a diagnosis, but having been through one with my son, let’s just say it’s pretty blindingly obvious where he got it from. I cannot stress how much self-hatred and frustration fell away just being handed an explanation for my complete inability to organise my time, life, diary etc through learning about his.

How much better it made me feel about having a fucking genius intelligence level (well OK one point off) that is of absolutely fuck all use (welcome to the world of C grades with the odd A thrown in for encouragement. No Bs you notice)! If it was that bloody marvellous for me, God knows what a relief it must have been for him, because he’s way, way brighter than I am. How awesome to officially know IT’S NOT HIM, IT’S THEM, I suspect it’s bloody wonderful. I would have killed for that at his age.

Here’s an example of what it’s like. McSon had his driving theory test the other morning. The night before he looked out his driving license, ready (he’d had a lesson that day and has to have it with him for those so it was in his school trousers). He took it upstairs to put back in his wallet along with some bits of his drum kit that he’d used at a gig this weekend. He reassembled his drums, had a quick practise and then after doing some homework and a bit of this and that he had a quick chat with me and went to bed.

This morning I went off to parents’ swim at the school leaving the McOthers to get to the test centre.

‘Do you need your license?’ asked McOther, just as they were leaving.

‘I don’t think so, but I might,’ says McSon.

He goes upstairs, goes to his wallet where it lives and where he knows he put it last night and … it’s not there. He panics, they go anyway, but without his license he’s not allowed to sit the test (even though he had to submit a chuffing picture of it to book a test anyway so it’s not like they haven’t seen it). I come back to discover McSon in the dearth of despair.

‘How could I be so dumb?’ he asks me. Not to my face, obviously, but by text message to me, in the kitchen, from his bedroom upstairs, because … teenager.

How indeed? This is a question I felt keenly, having asked it of myself pretty much on loop growing up, and repeatedly over the years. This is why I always tell my child that charm will get you everywhere because sometimes, when you forget to do something that you should have done, and you have to throw yourself on the mercy of others involved in the task to help you to get it in the bag, they may help you. If you have treated them appropriately, they will go the extra mile and do it because they like you. So not only is being polite and respectful to people the right thing to do, but it gets you further, in the long run, than shouting and jumping up and down … unless you’re doing the shouting and jumping up and down for humorous purposes, and in a funny way.

So I went on to tell him about his rellies, about his grandfather who managed to arrive at the port to go to France, twice, before he hit the age of 30, with a passport that had expired. A man who was universally loved, whose ability to forget stuff was legendary, as a teacher at his school. Indeed, when Dad was head of the common room he had to organise the dinner, there was some doubt which night it was on, Friday 12th December, or Saturday 13th December. Dad soon cleared that up by sending a memo round to confirm the day. Trouble was it said,

‘I gather there is some confusion as to the date of the Commonroom Dinner. It will be on Friday 13th December this year.’

Then there was his great uncle, who managed, with some friends, to organise a trip to drive a jeep to Afghanistan one summer holidays while he was at university, to deliver a letter from the mayor of Brighton to the mayor of Kabhul … except after the ornate letter-handing-over ceremony in Brighton between him and his friends and the mayor, which was conducted in front of the press, they left the letter on the mayor’s desk, realised too late to go back and get it and had to have it sent on to Tehran or somewhere so he and his friends could pick it up along the way. I told him about his Uncle, who left his hired wedding suit on the train on the way down to the venue and then had to get the lovely people at British Rail to take it off the train at Pulborough and hare over there in a borrowed car to pick it up.

Picture of one of those red ropes they drape across bits where you're not meant to go at events but frayed so badly that only a couple of fibres are left holding the rope onto the hook.

Clinging on by a thread, this is how we live, my son and I. Welcome to our world.

I told him about the time I booked tickets to take him to a comedy show about ADHD … and then forgot to go. I confessed how one term, I started my essays at uni a ruthlessley efficient 3 weeks out from the end of term, wondering why it was so easy to borrow all the books I required from the reference library, only to discover I’d got the date wrong and term ended in four days. I explained how I arrived at the start of the next term a week late because … numbers … and I’d got the date wrong and nobody batted an eyelid.

I told him how I managed to fly home from Norway a day early by mistake. Yes, even when the plane came down in Bergen for half an hour while they tried to work out what the fuck was going on, I still didn’t compute that the date on my ticket was wrong (coz … numbers). On the up side, neither did they, so that was lucky. I told him the story of how I went to France on an organised tour for six weeks, managed to miss the hovercraft and spent the first week trying to catch them up. Also had a lovely night in the waiting room at Gare D’Orley during that one (I’ve done that twice now; one star on trip advisor, NOT recommended). I should probably tell him about the time I called Dirk Bogarde by mistake or the time I answered the phone and said, ‘Fuck off Giles! That’s a crap Welsh accent!’ to someone who, I fear, may have been the leader of the opposition at the time.

And so on …

On the upside, ADHD does train certain useful things into a person. For example, I remember as a kid that something usually went wrong on our family holidays. I suspect this was more about the kinds of holidays my family booked than my father’s legendary forgetful nature, although I’m sure his vagueness helped, examples incoming…

There was the time we turned up in Crete for my second ever holiday abroad. There was no water so we had to spend the first two nights in the hotel owner’s flat. I remember wondering what the fuck we were doing there, but then I had a swim in the sea and suddenly everything was alright.

I remember another Greek holiday the following year when we had to spend the first week in a hotel up the road which wasn’t finished because they’d double booked our room by mistake. We got our revenge, my brother broke the bathroom mirror trying to swat a fruit fly with the flat end of a full bog roll. Or the next holiday on Lesbos, there was the fiesta we hired that we had to bump start every day until the embarrassed car hire man gave us his own ride, an elderly peugot 504 with a bench front seat and gearshift on the steering column that only Dad could manage to work.

Then there was the time when the French fishermen were blockading the ports so we sped along the cost, reaching each port as it was closed, until finally we managed to overtake the fishing boats leaving from Calais to block Dunkirk and get away from there. We arrived at 3 am and had to sleep in the car on the port because Mum and Dad had run out of money and had spent their last 10 francs on the petrol we’d used to get there … at one of the last garages that still had some and was open.

The company honoured our Dieppe – Newhaven ticket at Dunkirk and we got the last berth on the 6 am ferry, just in time for me to do the whole sorry thing backwards two days later for a school trip. We were supposed to be going Portsmouth StMalo for that one but had to go from Dover to Calais, which opened briefly, and then get a train to Paris, that was the first night in the waiting room at Gare D’Orley by the way. In those days, you had to buy currency in advance, or use traveller’s cheques. The only reason Mum and Dad had that 10 francs left was becase it was my pocket money for the 2 week school trip. Nobody panicked and after a few years I grew to like the chaos. Looking back on it, it was kind of fun.

Likewise, I’ve noticed my son is very calm and able to think laterally in a crisis, even when he’s panicking inside. As a kid, when there was trouble in the park or he and his friends saw someone being beaten up, it he who quietly called the police or shephered everyone to the nearest parent’s house, and safety. It’s always he who steps in and mediates between angry friends, often successfully. I’m incredibly proud of him for this.

Blowing my own trumpet here but I defy many people to be as calm as I am in a crisis. This, my friends, is because, if you have ADHD, your whole fucking life is a crisis because things drop off the mental grid and do not reappear until you are about to be supposed to be fucking doing them. If your entire existence is spent dropping what you are meant to be doing and sorting out shit that you’ve forgotten to do you soon become very adapatble.

Most of the time, you can learn make it work. Sometimes, yes, you have to apologise and confess that you’ve fucked up. It’s not great. I mean, lurching from one organisational crisis to the next is pretty exhausting but never let it be said that it’s dull. Oh no, people like us, we live an exciting life. And of course, you soon learn that fucking up and having to admit it isn’t so humiliating, because you are way, waaaay more used to it than other people, which means you have no pride and learn to give absolutely no fucks and just do the few things you are capable of organising without waiting for permission. That’s a win.

Frankly, if you have ADHD and you give any fucks about anything (other than not hurting others or being a cockwomble) your personality and general mode of existence means you will die of shame. The fucks are bludgeoned out of you early on in life because it’s the only way to survive. OK so weeing in your pants in the tack room after a riding lesson because you are too embarrassed to ask to use the loo also helps in that respect. Not my finest hour that one but definitely cured me of my fear of asking the dumb question and speaking up because even though nobody said a thing, they must have known and no way was I ever going through the embarrassment of that ever, EVER again.

Woah! LONG tangent there. But now you understand ADHD a little more perhaps? Although that last bit was probably autism. Anyway… onwards.

There’s another thing! Oh yes! And I’ve managed to sort it so that Mc(no longer)Mini is insured to drive a car to practice on outside his lessons … trouble is … it’s this car.

Picture showing a grey, low-slung, fast looking sports car against a flint and brick wall. The numberplate has been blacked out in the picture, so as not to show the real one on t'interweb, and the photographer has put a red line round the outside of the hole where the numberplate should be shown (as if it's a pair of lips) and drawn in teeth.

Obvs in real life it has a numberplate rather than teeth.

Yeh, I know. But the main car is an automatic SUV and the tic-tac with a boot we bought as a run-around, (a fiat 500 Abarth) is considered a hot hatch, so insuring McSon, McOther was given a guide quote of £900 to insure a learner driver on it for 6 months while they investigated whether they could even do it … and when they had researched it further, they came back and said they couldn’t actually insure him. So instead of the 1.4 Fiat 500 Abarth, he’s going to be doing his driving practise on the 1.6 Lotus Elise with the close ratio gearbox … because it’s only going to cost £150 to put him on there as a learner driver for a year. Because it’s not a hot-hatch.

What the fucking fuck, Insurance Land?

Seriously, you couldn’t make this shit up. So there we are. It now has L plates on it. He’s doing commendably well so far and more to the point, driving extremely sensibly. Much more sensibly than I do. So there’s that.

Other news: Events …

Last but not least, I am doing an event this weekend that ever is. Indeed as this goes out, today and tomorrow. If anyone is at Norcon, I am opposite the signing tables. Do feel free to come and say hello. I will be dressed as The Pan of Hamgee, as usual, in a cloak and hat. I have no new books to sell. I’ve written about 400,000 words since the last one, they’re just not on any one project unfortunately. I am just hanging in there for the year when I get all of this shit I’m working on actually finished at the same time. There’s something to be said for jumping from project to project every time you get stuck but it’s not exactly a short cut to a steady and predictable rate of production. Never mind. At some point there will be 12 books, probably coming out within weeks of one another.

Anyway, if you’d like to, do come along and say hi to me at Norcon, because all the other authors will be selling books hand over fist while I will be sitting there making people laugh and conspicuously not selling any books to them before they go on and buy a book from each of the authors next to me. Because this is how I roll. But I have fun so I’m OK with that.

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Filed under General Wittering, Mary Fails at Modern Life

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

10 Aug 2025 · 6:05 pm

I still aitn’t dead.

Well peps, it’s been a mighty long time but today I decided it’s high time I blugged a blog, so here I am.

Where have I been? Well, on holiday, trying to do some of the stuff I promised I’d do after I’d finished looking after Mum and Dad and … stuff.

However, I’ve been trying to use the time I have available to devote to my ‘author career’ to do writing. I think I tend to blog more when there’s nothing coming writing-wise because blogging is fun and keeps my hand in, but if the books are going well I tend to put all my writing energy into producing those. That said, despite the fact the writing is going pretty well this week, I really and truly thought it was high chuffing time I said something.

What’s happening then?

Well I’m preparing to do a stall at the fabulous Forward Festival next Saturday (16th). There is a book fair, I’m not going to that, but I will be at the Young Adult tent in the family friendly market. The whole festival is taking place from yesterday through to Sunday 17th. The thing runs for a whole week although there are no events tomorrow so everyone can recover from the weekend before they start the rest of it! Wise, I feel.

There is have a wide and varied selection of authors doing talks, a record fair and all sorts of events. Sorry this is sounding like a commercial isn’t it? Mwahahargh! Well since I’m doing a stall I guess it is but it’s also because it looks fab. I will definitely aim to go to some of the events as they look interesting. Case in point, the book fair, the vynal fair and probably one of the talks if I can manage it.

Talking of vynal and then obliquely, music. A brilliant thing happened this week. McMini was going to a re-enactment in Market Harborough and so when McOther and I dropped him off we decided to visit the town for the day. We visited the museum, which is free, and in the library, and has some cracking stuff in it including some stupendous finds bequeathed by a local metal detectorist. If he found that lot and got to keep it, heaven knows what wonderful things went through the treasure process and ended up in museums. Anyway, MTM verdict on the museum, small but perfectly formed. MTM verdict on Market Harborough, very pretty, a bit down at heel in places but containing all sorts of interesting shops, including a real cobbler etc.

There was also a decent number of charity shops there too and it was in one of these that McOther spotted an electrical item and, thinking it might be an amplifier, which McMini currently wants to source for his sound system, he went and had a look. I joined him and we discovered that it wasn’t an amp but was actually a CD/DVD player made by a company called Cambridge Audio, bearing the hefty price tag of £10.

Since McMini’s current interest is buying broken walkmans and fixing them, it seemed a good idea to buy it, since, even if it didn’t work, I reckoned we could probably get £20 for it on Ebay if we sold it for spares. And of course, there was every chance that McMini could fix it, or possibly, McMini’s extremely helpful mentor in this endeavour, a bloke up the road called Alan, who fixes extremely high-end stereo for people, and also adds things to make them more compatible with modern tech so their owners can plug them into their computers and similar.

Can we just take a moment, here, to give a big shout out to Alan? He has spent endless time and patience helping McMini fix one of the early Sanyo walkmans—which is admittedly, very cool—and taught him lots about fixing electronics, soldering etc in the process. I owe Alan a LOT of beer for his kindness.

Right on we go. Cambridge Audio are high end. The current CD thing they offer retails at £500. The one in the shop was older, obviously. I discovered, later, that it retailed at £300 in 2004. It was extremely popular as the picure quality was excellent apparently. I’m a big cynical sometimes about CD/DVD players in that they all do the same thing, essentially, so there shouldn’t really be a gap in quality, added to which, my own CD player is not too shabby. I reckoned there shouldn’t be too much difference but when I plugged it in to my stereo system and had a listen I was amazed to discover that there was a definite gap in quality. The Cambridge Audio one had more depth. It was more like listening to headphones than listening out loud. And it works. Woot.

Extra bonus points, I discovered it had a remote and because it was a popular model, there were several available to buy on ebay. I plumped for one that cost £8.99 with £3.99 postage. I have, therefore procured a very good CD player for £23! Hoorah.

Other stuff …

Weirdness continues. I have a polytunnel/greenhouse in the garden. It’s on the path from the gate, so I pass it on my way in every time I’ve been out. Often I pop in there on the way to the back door and just check that everyone has enough water and water the things that need some. Usually I am wearing a small rucksack on my back, which doubles as my handbag, when I do this. Sometimes, if I’m a bit clumsy, I turn the wrong way and knock an unripe fruit off the tomatoes with the bag. This is annoying.

It seems that I dislogdged a tomato this way at some point last week, which fell into the open pocket at the front of my bag. There it stayed until Saturday, when I was in Market Harborough and found it there. By this time, it had ripened, so I was able to have a very small bite of lunch. It was delicious so if this year’s crop all taste like that, we’re onto a winner.

Stuff like this, with the tomato, happens to me regularly.

A yellow tomato that has grown in a strange way with a blob at the front, which makes it look like a nose. It has eyes stuck on it and two of the green stalk fronds stick out behind it but because it’s shown from the front they look like green ears. It sits on a green baize table with a line of veneered wood at the side. Behind it is a big brown chest of drawers.

A tomato, yesterday

Last exciting thing …

… Which, as you’ll have gathered from the previous exciting things, is really not that exciting at all. I decided it might be good to get one of those festival trollies to transport my books around at events. Right now I’m using a sack barrow that has a box integrated into it. It’s excellent but when I start adding the banner, or heaven forefend, a table, it all gets a bit dodgy. If I put the banner on it wrong I also end up getting stuck in every single doorway I go through, as well, which is not helpful.

However, it’s one thing deciding that enough is enough and quite another trying to find a festival trolly which will fit in the boot of a Lotus Elise. Not the early ones which had a nice big boot, this is the diddy one with the souped-up 1.6 toyota yaris engine. There are only about five of them on the road (and I really don’t need ‘howmanyleft dot com’ to tell me this, the availability of spare parts is eloquent enough on its own. I have the ‘last in the uk’ of several bits). It also has the exhaust pipes in the middle and that means there is a giant lump in the boot floor to accommodate the catalytic converter underneath. What that means is it’s not always easy to fit things in. Then you have the added problem that the standard plastic boxes used for storage, which I could, sensibly, use for books, don’t fit in there, or my box sack barrow thing, or on the front seat/in the footwell.

At a book fair a while ago, I was admiring the festival trolley being wielded by my author mate Julia Blake (check out her books by the way, they’re excellent). Julia writes multi-genre so often has a LOT of books to carry. I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a festival trolley but thus far have been put off by the fact that a) I wasn’t sure any of them would fit in my car and b) they seemed to retail for about the same amount as a kidney on the black market. Yes. They were expensive.

However, Julia showed me hers (phnarr phnarr) demonstrating how it folded up, and how the wheels came off so it would fit in a very small space. More importantly, for my running-on-an-elastic-band-and-a-shoestring author business, it retailed at a price I could afford. I was impressed enough that we decided to see if we could jemmy it into the boot of my car once folded. Lo! And behold! It fitted. Yeh. Blimey. So Julia kindly sent me a link to buy one for myself.

I decided I’d buy one at once!

Spool forward a few months—because as we know, I am always incredibly swift to put any of my plans into action (not) and ‘right away’ in Mary world can be anything from ‘within the next five minutes’ to ‘sometime before I die of old age … probably’—I finally got round to it. I discovered that the makers of Julia’s original trolley had superceded it with new version, with wider wheels. It also had a wheel at each corner, whereas the original had the front wheels a little closer togther, in the middle. This had me worried —probably needlessly—about stability.

The only fly in the ointment still was the car. The car is non-negotiable. If I have to drive sodding miles I want to do it in a vehicle that is fun and diverting enough to drive to keep my attention. Otherwise my mind will wander and I will die. Would the new trolley fit? Well I read the measurements and it appeared to fold up slightly smaller than its predecessor. I knew that fitted so I reckoned I’d stick my neck out and buy it.

I bought one that promised to arrive next week. It arrived two day’s later. Which was nice, but a bit of a surprise, especially as I wasn’t in. We found it on the doorstep when we got home. The box was tiny box. See picture.

A brown cardboard box with a loo roll wrapped in jazzy black and white paper sitting on top of it to give a feel of size. It sits in front of a red chesterfield which is set against a beige wall with a white dado rail.

The tiny, tiny, box

Seriously, my cat couldn’t fit into this thing. See picture.

Picture shows a large tabby cat stretched out on a light blue and white striped duvet with a loo roll (wrapped in jazzy black and white paper) for scale

My enormous cat

OK so my cat is huge see picture, note loo roll for scale, but even so, you get the idea. What I’m saying is it’s a small box. When I say small, bearing in mind that the boxes I use for books are all small but I have put them in the passenger seat beside me because only one will fit in the boot, this box would fit in the boot. AND, there’d be room to shoehorn in another box … possibly. That’s how infinitesimally small it was.

Have I said enough about how small the box is? Hmm, yes, I think I probably have. Onward.

It was quite difficult to get the trolly out of the box, but once I had, I discovered that it folded up a ridiculously small size. We are talking small enough to fit in one of those re-usable bags you can get from Savers. Yeh. Miniscule.

I haven’t used it yet. I’ve no idea if it travels over rough terrain and sand the way the sales pitch promises, or whether, like rollerblades, it stops dead when it hits a slightly raised paving slab (or stone) although at least it won’t pitch me forward onto my face the way rollerblades do in this situation. So there’s that.

The trolley will be having its first outing next week as I suspect it will be a long walk from the car to the venue for the Forward Festival.

Where you come in

I need a name for this trolley. OK bear with me, if you reckon you have my train of thought here and feel like jumping ahead, you’re probably right. But please, please, please, read this bit first..

Just for larks, I decided to set up a poll to allow my fans to pick a suitably K’Barthan name for the trolley. So far, almost both my fans have kindly joined in with the name poll—hoorah—and we have a clear leader.

Foolishly I gave voters the option to go off piste and suggest a name of their own, so long as they chose a K’Barthan related name from the books. About 20% of the respondents chose to choose and of those, a massive none of them kept it K’Barthan, mwahahahrgh!

This proves, beyond all doubt, no fucker will ever read the fecking question if they can possibly avoid it.

Likewise, if you give people more than one piece of information at a time and they will take absolutely NO fucking notice of the second piece. Indeed, if you are foolish enough to warn them NOT to do something, they will go out of their way to do that exact thing.

Perhaps this explains why, when you contact a support site for help and ask two questions—because they take 48 hours to respond and you haven’t got all day—they will only answer the first question you ask, forcing you to re-ask the second question and wait another 48 hours because asking more then one thing fries their heads.

Having said all that, the poll is still open, so if you want to help me choose a name for the Trolley it would be wonderful. All you have to do is follow this somewhat unwieldy link. Oh and if you do decide to suggest your own name, please keep it to a character name from my books. Ta.

Name the trolley

A festival trolley parked with the front towards us on a flagged stone floor. To the left part of a bamboo sofa is shown. To the right a pink,red, orange and green directors’s chair. Eyes are stuck on the trolley making it seem a little sad.

The trolley to be named …

Writing.

The latest K’Barthan thing is so nearly finished it hurts, although I may write quite a lot of the next one before I publish it. This being the plan, I do need to get my finger out of my arse pronto as I have an editing slot provisionally booked for September/October. Shit! That’s only a month away. Fuck!

Sorry where was I? Oh yes, the K’Barthan thing. I really don’t have much to write before it’s finished. It will need polishing though. Hmm.

The memoir. I’m reading a lot of other memoirs at the moment to see which ones I enjoy and respond to and which ones not so much. So far, all I’ve really discovered is that I like things that feel genuine. I like the characterisation to be good, even if it’s someone describing their loved ones or people they know. I also enjoy depth, although it’s surprising the memoires where this depth occurrs.

I’ve just finished Father Joe by Stephen Hendra. As a description of one person’s profound effect on another, it’s fabulous. Also I love the way he writes (bitchy but honest). He was clearly an absolute dick for a big part of his life, but his memoir is so honest and up front, and coupled with the irreverent style of his writing you can’t help liking him. I feel that I am closer to getting a handle on the kind of memoir I want to attempt but it’s still hard to look it in the face. I’m definitely getting a feel for how I want to write it though. The up-front honest style is definitely the way to go.

So there we are, I’ll leave you with a quick bit of info about the Forward Festival.

The Foreword Festival (9th August – 17th August, 2025)

The Foreword Festival, which I hope I have spelled correctly in this post—bloody auto-correct will keep changing it—is the first independent book festival in the UK. It is running in Stowmarket and it’s running … NOW.

The festival is taking place in Stowmarket, in Suffolk. There is a LOT going on suffice it to say they’ve thought of absolutely everything. Yes, it even has its own beer! How cool is that?

Foreword Festival beer!

If you are in striking distance of Stowmarket and fancy giving the festival a whirl, I can highly recommend it. Clearly the organisers have taste because they let me join in but seriously, it’s going to be fun. For comprehensive information as to what’s on when, go here:/https://forewordfestival.uk/

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Tagged as author blog, K'Barthan Series, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, trying to be a writer, writers

1 May 2025 · 3:41 pm

Living the dream … as always

Hello there, yes, still alive. Things are busy though and I have books to write. I’m determined to publish a bloody book this year if it’s the last chuffing thing I do (and at this rate, it probably will be).

As a result I am working on two at once, the dementia memoir the first of the two sequels to Too Good To Be True. Yes, there are going to be two and Lord Vernon is in them as well. The first of those is so close to completion it hurts and is quite easy to write at the moment although I suspect that is merely because the dementia one is really hard and my brain’s Centre of Procrastination has turned to the only thing to hand.

As part of this, I’ve been working with a lovely blogging friend on this one, because I think I need to do it as part of the healing process. I’ve been trying to pin down what I want it to be about and I’m beginning to think that the only way I’m going to do that is to write a lot of it. BUT I’m also thinking that I may have hit on a way to write it that would give me scope to plait the three different strands of memoir stuff together coherently; funny stories, family history and Dad and Mum’s respective journey’s so … woot.

Garden Wildlife

No seriously, in a town, but yes, there is. For a couple of years now, we’ve had a hedgehog in the garden, who I have privately christened spiny Norma. Norma is fucking enormous, seriously, I shit you not. When I realised she had hoglets, I started feeding her. We use dry cat food, not hedgehog food because hedgehog food production is unregulated and they put things like mealworms in which are actually extremely bad for hedgehogs and make them ill. Kitten food is the best thing to use apparently, because the kibbles are nice and small.

This year, when I realised she was back again, I decided to buy a wildlife cam. I researched cameras and prices and found that one type seemed to get recommended somewhere on most of the top 10 lists so I decided that would be a good one.

Grainy black and white night-vision photo of a hedgehog crossing a patio towards a food bowl. The hedgehog is in the centre and the ground before her slightly over exposed while behind is the hint of folding table and darkness.

The retail price was £99 which is quite a massive wad to stump up for a trail cam so I shelved the idea until, doing more research to find a cheaper alternative, I discovered one that most of the top ten camera articles had a link to for less than £50 on Amazon. Much as I dislike buying from Amazon, it was a market place person rather than the company, itself, so I bought it.

It looks the business but needed an SD card. I have two 32gb SD cards which I used to use in a bullet cam I transferred between my car and on my bike. It was brilliant but unfortunately, after about 6 months, it started randomly turning itself off so I’ve stopped using it. I found the spare SD card I had for it only last week but this week when my new camera arrived could I find that spare SD? Could I bollocks? Could I even find the bullet cam to take the one out of there? Not on your fucking nelly.

Wank!

Never mind, I thought, I’ll have others. Indeed, I did have another one but I had to sort though the stuff on it and clear it before I could reformat it for the wildlife cam thingy. It took a chuffing eternity. I’m a dunderhead.

Anyway, net result. I’ve discovered that there are more hedgehogs bimbling around in our garden than I thought. I think it may be five, as my naked eye observations over the past week or so have been seeing three arriving early and then noticing another two had turned up later but I haven’t confirmed that.

However, I can confirm that there are four, by dint’ of the fact they have all appeared in camera shot at the same time. Also the vid has captured some courting behaviour which I’d seen with the naked eye from the kitchen window a couple of times, including a memorable moment when I discovered they were at it when I went to put out the food. I felt very bad for disturbing them. Luckily, since the breeding season lasts from April to September there’s plenty of time.

That said, while I know there’s hanky-panky going on, I’m not 100% certain between whom. I can’t quite work out if it’s one particularly randy male snuffing round and round in circles with two separate females or two separate males and one, or two, female(s). When the four turned up they arrived as two pairs so it could be two couples. I did see some light argy-bargy with the threesome who had been eating together happily for a week or so. One of them turned out to be Mr Randy and shoved another hog away from the food. It went limp and half curled up so he looked as if he was disposing of a body. Then she just lay there, inert, in the middle of the patio, while he huffed and puffed at the other one next to the food bowl.

There are two bowls now, which seems to have alleviated this.

Also, despite seeing a hog which was very definitely the original Spiny Norma doing courtship stuff with Mr Randy a couple of nights before I got the cam (they’re the ones I disturbed while I was putting the food out) I can’t now work out which one, in my films of courting, is the original Spiny Norma, or indeed if she’s there at all. This is mainly because with the best will in the world, night vision cameras are a bit shit. To be honest, I also can’t quite work out if there is only one Mr Randy trying to poink two females or if there are, indeed, two Mr Randys.

It’s a mystery. Hopefully it’s a mystery which will be solved with the aid of the camera. Fingers and toes crossed. Obviously, I have no definitive answers yet because I’ve only had it running for a few nights. I’ll keep you posted.

Other news: Helios at Ickworth

You what Mary?

Art, sweetie, art.

There’s this artist I follow called Luke Jerram. I happened upon him because some of his first pieces were these amazing models of bacteria made in glass. These things are stunning, although sadly, I haven’t photographed one myself, so I’m not sure if I’m allowed to post a photo. The fact I’m discussing it means that I can post one of his images under fair use. However, this is not the way copyright trolls see it, and having been caught out before—a process which involved about a year of negotiation over what was clearly a bullshit claim culminating in my paying for a photograph I’d used to illustrate a point (fair use) despite knowing their assertions were actually a load of old cock and bull, in order to to make them just fuck off already—I’d rather not.

Earlier this month Helios, an art installation by Luke Jerram was visiting Ickworth. I missed his Moon and Gaia earth installations, even though they came to a venue a few hundred yards up the road, because I’m a disorganised melt. As a result, I was determined that I would NOT be missing this one. It took a while to see it because it was installed outside and could only be on display when it wasn’t too windy. Naturally it was too windy for a lot of the week but I finally managed to see it on a gorgeous hot Sunday. Photos attached.

Luke Jerram, Artist’s, Helios at Ickworth. Inflatable orange ball set against a classical portico with gravel and viewers underneath on beanbags spread over beige mottled gravel. The top half of this view is seen through the foliage of an orange tree with a pair of oranges hanging either side, framing the orange ball in the middle.

I’m not sure it was as lovely as the other two but at the same time, it was outside, in daylight and because these things are lit, I suspect it would have worked better indoors or after dark. On the other hand, by standing with it between me and the sun, I got some lovely pictures of it looking glowy and orange against an azure sky.

Luke Jerram, Artist’s, Helios at Ickworth. Inflatable orange ball set against a classical portico with an azure sky above. This view is seen looking between a pair of blue flowering bushes (cyanothus) either side, framing the orange ball in the middle.

Luke Jerram, Artist’s, Helios at Ickworth. Inflatable orange ball set against a classical portico with hints of the gantry holding it aloft and behind it an azure sky.

Naturally because I’m smutty, I noticed at once that it had an anus.

Luke Jerram, Artist’s, Helios at Ickworth. Inflatable orange ball which is printed with a photograph of the sun. Close up to a part where we see a sunspot which looks a bit like an anus. Sorry I’m smutty like that. Phnark. This amused me.

Yet more Other news: I went to a marvellous party*.

*Divine Comedy fans might get that reference, no-one else will.

A friend of mine had a birthday party this week which involved a bookshop lock-in. Yeh, I know. Genius. As a result I have bought three books; one of which, the Grimoire Grammar School series (Parent Teacher Association) I’m already half way through. Although I’m reading Monument Men at the same time which is non-fiction and also excellent.

Anyway, off we went in a taxi to Clare where there is a fantastic bookshop. We arrived early so we went to the pub next door. I was offered a drink and asked for half a pint but got a whole one. It seemed churlish not to drink it so…

Then, slightly unsteadily on to the bookshop (I’m a cheap drunk). It was fab and I bought three books which I thought was fairly reserved of me. I am liking some of the ideas in cosy fantasy it’s not the horrifically clean, Ned Flanders style upstanding awfulness I feared. The one I’m reading is a genius idea; about a normal couple whose daughter has been bitten by a werewolf. The daughter is at magic school and they are feeling their way with the other parents (selkies, mages, vampires etc)..

My book purchases were oiled by the interesting gins I had which were all made by the lady who runs the book shop. It was particularly cool the way she opened a special cupboard behind the till and there were all the bottles lined up. Then she would pour a shot and ask us not to put the glass sticky down anywhere near the books. Mwahahahrgh! I had rhubarb and then damson which were fabulous. Next, I was tempted to try the rhubarb and ginger vodka but I was conscious that I might get a bit pissed and ebullient if I did that, and since I didn’t know everyone who was there, I decided it was best to call it a day at those two. Harris Books in Clare. Definitely worth a look.

We were also very generously provided with a £10 voucher by the Birthday Girl for more books from the store, so I was off to a good start. I bought three books. I could have bought more books. I could have bought a lot more books although I’m glad I didn’t because it meant I was able to buy four more at the Maker’s Market in Bury today! Mwahahargh!

Next, on to a fabulous brewery where they served up a very fine beer and baked or roast potatoes with various toppings to go with to absorb it all. This involved sitting outside, which was perfect, as it was a gorgeous evening.

Knowing I was buying books ahead of time, I’d bought a small rucksack to put them in because sometimes I’m surprisingly sensible (don’t get excited, it doesn’t happen often). I had elected to wear clothes that would be warm enough outside at night in a British early summer but at the same time, cool if it was warmer outside at night than … you know … British early summer.

This meant I’d packed a polo shirt in my bag and a scarf/shawl that was large enough to double up as a warm thing if the wind got up or temperatures plummeted. I appear to be permanently cold unless the temperature is over 24 (which is approaching 80 degrees in old/American money). On the bottom I was wearing voluminous pantaloons. I think they’re called ‘Harem Pants’ these days, but voluminous cotton trousers gathered in at the ankles, anyway. Think Ali-Baba and the 40 thieves.

Picture of messy room containing a middle age woman wearing a floaty dark blue vest top with red pantaloons. She is holding the pantaloons out to show how voluminous they are and grinning inanely.

The author clad in a pair of said pantaloons, although, not the original ones. Naturally. I have many.

Yeh. So I’m sitting there dressed as Aladdin and some other kind soul buys me a beer. I have not paid for a drink yet and I am distinctly half cut (being, as I am, a cheap drunk).

Anyhoo the table we were sat at was those bench table things that are ubiquitous to pubs everywhere; a slatted table with a bench stuck on either side. They were a bit shuggly, as they always are, and of course, you have to kind of climb into them to sit down. I put my beer carefully on the middle plank of the surface to avoid spillages and sat down.

However, then someone got up, or possibly sat down, the other side and … abracadabra! The plank shifted upwards suddenly, the glass tipped over and the entire fucking pint went down my front and on my trousers. Obviously it went between the planks as well as over them to ensure maximum coverage.

Do you know how much liquid a pint of beer is?

No? Well I can tell you.

It’s an absolute fuck-tonne of liquid.

There was only one thing uppermost in my mind when this disaster happened, well OK two things. First, naturally, was:

Shit! That’s a terrible waste of some really good beer.

The second thing—more of an instinct—which happened at the same time, was to leap up before any of the beer soaked through to my actual knickers.

Then as I stood, holding my sopping trousers away from my thighs—(my knickers don’t come down that low, I promise, but we are talking really soaking trousers here so … you know … seepage upwards was perfectly possible)—I had to decide what to do. The trousers needed to be wrung out, for certain, and possibly dried. Did the brewery have a ladies loo with a hand drying machine?

Did it fuck?

Arse.

Obviously, continuing the evening looking, and seeping, like someone who’d just had a bucket of water thrown over them wasn’t really an option. Then I remembered that I had a polo top and a scarf in my bag and, to whit, that if I’d been sitting about in a vest top and pasha pants, it was unlikely anyone would think it strange if that suddenly morphed into a polo shirt and a knee length ‘sarong’ because I looked that fucking weird already.

Except, could I get to the lav to change in private without a) getting slubbery beer-soaked trousers too close to my (currently) dry scarf and top to avoid soaking them too or b) getting slubbery beer-soaked trousers too close to my (currently) dry pants and then having to endure the entire evening with an unpleasantly damp mimsey?**

No.

**(That might just be the longest sentence in the world right there never mind, where was I? Ah yes onwards…)

What to do? The only thing I could do. I told everyone to look the other way, took off my top and put the polo shirt on. Then I took off the trousers, grabbed the scarf and wrapped it around me like some kind of shit sarong. On reflection I realised it was too long to tie like a sarong and also it would end up too short. Unsure as I was as to the tidiness of the topiary situation downstairs in the lady garden short seemed unwise. I didn’t want the world to see ‘spider legs’, giant black knickers, or indeed, the hairy thighs which I hadn’t bothered to shave. Hmm, would I have to hold the stupid sarong closed all night?

Yes.

But no!

Wait!

I had an idea!

Removing my ‘Kindness is as punk as fuck’ mum-badge off my bag I was able to use it, like a safety pin, to keep my modesty together. Then, just to be sure, I took the ‘I’m a little teapot’ badge off my jacket and fastened that the other side to keep both the ends I’d wound round me in situ.

This happened in front of everyone.

There was laughing.

But nobody gave a shit.

And someone bought me another beer.

Which was nice.

Even better my knickers stayed dry and having spread them out, my clothes dried enough to wear the pantaloons home so there was no worrying about losing my ‘skirt’ in the taxi.

Hoorah!

That’s me right there people, living the dream and winning at life.

Er hem … Sort of.

Fancy a change?

Fancy something a little bit weird? Why not read one of my books? A surprising number of people think they’re good and some are free. Woot. You can find those if you wend your way down the following linky-link: https://www.hamgee.co.uk/cmot-3 https://www.hamgee.co.uk/cmot-3

Black and white photo on dark blue, fading to yellow background showing a street with two old ladies (cartoon silhouettes against the yellow bottom section). They are holding a cage with the silhouette of a parrot in it.

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Tagged as author blog, author blogs, funny, humor, humour, humour … probably, 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, writers

9 Mar 2025 · 6:52 pm

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

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

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

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

Yeh… go figure.

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

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

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

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

Wanketty-wank.

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

Again.

For fuck’s sake.

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

Arse hats!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arse. Kind of.

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

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

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

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

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

This is the field in question …

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

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

It’d be nice to relax but … no time.

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

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

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

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

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

Bollocks.

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

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

Ho hum. Onwards and upwards.

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

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

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

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24 Feb 2025 · 7:48 pm

Bite me …

It’s been a while since I contacted anyone, I didn’t do any Christmas cards and things have been a bit higgledy-piggledy this Christmas and New Year. There are reasons but I can’t really talk about them. Suffice it to say there was a death in the family, so this Christmas was pretty much a rinse and repeat of last year. When stuff like this happens, I tend to write about it on my blog. There are two reasons for this.

ONE:

As an externaliser, sharing my thoughts helps me get them in order. In theory, as someone who sells stuff and writes books, sharing something this personal might be considered over sharing. Indeed last year, when I mentioned my mother’s death in a mailing, someone unsubscribed and left me a very unpleasant message. Hence, I only share stuff about people who I know wouldn’t or won’t mind. This death was someone who would mind, ergo, no externalising. But my WYSIWYG nature being what it is, I was unable to write a post without mentioning it. That meant no blog.

TWO:

The world political climate is grim and I know I should do something to stand against the bile and hatred that seems to be spewed everywhere at the moment in the name of ‘free speech’ which some folk seem to think means, license to bully people, lie and spread misery.

Sadly, I’ve no clue what to write and nothing will do any good. Apart from writing extensively about why this new strain of (We’re Not Allowed To Call It) Fascism is wank. Clearly many people can no longer imagine what a police state would be like since the USA’s descent into (We’re Not Allowed To Call It) Fascism and the apparent unconcern among a huge chunk of right wing voters there is a tad chilling and yes, I should comment. However, it’s also difficult to write about it until I get my thoughts in order; and they aren’t. At the same time, it’s difficult to ignore it when I attempt to write about anything else.

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

Yes you you miserable fuckers. You’re doing my tits.

Bizarrely, this week, I am finally writing a blog at a point when it’s actually physically painful to do so, because at last, I have a genuinely, ‘interesting’—well yeh, it’s all relative—story that I can share which will stop me straying into ground where my thoughts are not yet cohesive enough. Woot. Probably. Right, on we go.

Ouch

Yep. Muggins here managed to get bitten by a dog; a rottweiler, no less. Copious bleeding and stitches given, or at least, steri-strips and glue because apparently they don’t do stitches much these days. Let me tell you the entire sorry story.

PIcture of a hand wrapped in a bloody bandage against the white and grey background of a casualty department floor and wall.

I was booked to go on a dig on Saturday and McOther was off to Twickenham to watch England V Scotland in the Five Nations. McMini is now competent enough to be left at home although I’d booked him a haircut, left the money and promised to ring him in time to get out of bed and be ready. Luckily the hair cutter comes to us!

Anyway, off I went, parked up, got my kit ready for the briefing and hung around waiting. My detector was on so it and the spade were over my shoulder but my right hand was free. There was this big soppy old Rottweiler trundling about on an extended lead, people were patting him and he was trotting over to people and sniffing them. He came my way so I wandered over to have a chat.

He had lovely light brown eyebrows and his brow was wrinkled, friendly-dog style, his expression and demeanour open and friendly. Now, I’m a country girl. Animals, even the best of them, are unpredictable, especially if they don’t know you and a Rottweiler is a formidable dog and absolutely not one to get on the wrong side of. I usually make a point of asking people if I can touch their dogs before just striding in there for a pat.

However, this dog was greeting lots of people and was clearly a much loved part of the group. Indeed, I think I’ve seen him at a couple of digs myself. He’s well-behaved and properly trained.

So I made eye contact and then held my hand out spoke to him. I have since learned that it is not always a good idea to maintain eye contact with dogs as they can see this as aggression. I knew cats do but I didn’t realise dogs were the same in this. Anyway, he had a sniff and seemed alright with it so I stroked the top of his head. He was OK with that, too, but I didn’t think he was 100% comfortable so I decided to move back. I withdrew my hand and broke off eye contact as I made to step away. When I did so, he suddenly went for my hand. The noise alerted me before I saw him move.

Obviously, I did the natural thing, withdrew the hand pronto. This was kind of sensible, I mean as I understand it, and I may be wrong here but as far as I know, Rotweilers can lock their jaws closed and if they are spooked or panicked they’re more likely to do this. It might be arthritic but I do find my thumb useful, although I guess my instincts decided for me anyway.

Luckily I was wearing two pairs of gloves. I realised I’d been bitten because I felt the pressure and also the glove went with the dog. He shook it twice and dropped it on the ground, thumb completely severed.

’Ah!’ I said.

There’s some previous on this. I once cut my other thumb peeling vegetables because I thought there was a slug in the potato I was working on and threw the knife away, slashing my thumb in the process #NotAMelt. This also bled copiously, well, hands and heads do (feet too I should imagine) and I was ripped for some time because when it happened I just said, ‘ooh’ followed by silence.

On that occasion, my husband was beside me in seconds and I avoided casualty by din’t of the fact we had a doctor staying with us who always carried steri-strips in her car.

I still get the piss ripped out of me about the fact I will yell the place down if I stub my toe but that the McOthers know that if I say something calm and quiet like, ‘oh dear’ I’ve probably severed a limb.

In this case, the ‘Ah’ had a similar reaction.

A lot of people gathered round very quickly. Although the noise the dog made must have alerted them too I’m guessing.

My first thought was, ‘Bollocks! It’s bitten me! This had better not be bad!’ because I haven’t been out detecting in fucking ages and there wasn’t a doctor with steri-strips (and even if there was, it needed washed properly etc).

I checked the damage. The bit that hurt was the base of my thumb on the back of my hand. Yes, there were a couple of punctures just between the two knuckle joints. They were bleeding a fair bit and I could see the bruising coming up round them. Not too bad. The longest was only about a centimetre/half an inch. I reckoned I could get away with that if the organisers had a plaster I could stick on it. But the meaty bit at the base of my hand was also a bit stingy, as if I’d grazed it, so I thought I’d better check that too. Turning my hand over revealed a lovely gash about an inch and a half long. It looked like a slashed cushion with the stuffing spilling out. Strings of yellow fat and strawberry jam. Nice. It was also bleeding.

Copiously.

Everywhere.

Wank.

‘Ah,’ I said again. True to form.

If you want to see that that looked like, click on this link: I’ve given you the option in case you’re squeamish.

With a sinking heart, I explained that I’d had similar cut before and knew it needed stitches. Nobody disagreed. The various stewards cleaned it as best they could, applied dressings and bound it up tight to slow the bleeding.

Various kind others helped me pack my detector up, put it in back in the car and lock it. The guy who owned the dog was mortified but it so obviously wasn’t that kind of dog and I told him not to worry, no harm done.

The dig group is run very professionally by a husband and wife team and, usually three or four other stewards. There is always someone there who’s not digging for just this kind of eventuality, but also so there is someone back at the farmyard if anyone needs them and to view the finds.

The wife, Joanne, drove me to Colchester Hospital in their truck. Luckily she is very good company so we just chatted away as she drove. Google took us via Will’s mother’s, as usual, but we got there in reasonably good time, it was about half nine when we arrived.

Casualty was pretty full lots of people who’d injured themselves, left it overnight to see if they felt better and discovered they hadn’t. We joined the queue and I had to fill in a form which Joanne did for me, bless her. Colchester hospital is being refurbished so there were that many building works going on there it felt more like Heathrow but luckily there didn’t seem to be much work going on (it was Saturday) so it was reasonably quiet.

Joanne was sent off to the cafe because there weren’t enough seats for anyone other than the folks nursing injuries. Luckily she had a book with her. I joined another queue, to hand my form to some ladies behind glass and got told off for going to the nearest free lady before I was called forward so I had to scuttle back to the wait here sign. These ladies were both very stern, and slightly terrifying. I suspect they get a lot of shit.

Picture of a sideboard that looks really miserable

Stern …

Form handed in I sat and waited with my fellow victims. By just after ten it occurred to me that although all my fingers and thumb appeared to still be moving as required, I ought to tell the McOthers in case they had to fix something and I was kept in for surgery. I didn’t imagine it would take long but I’d had breakfast, so it’d be a while before I could be anaesthetised and I might not make it home until very late. McMini was at home alone, McOther having gone to London to watch Scotland play England in the five nations, so I’d need to tip him off or transfer him some cash for a takeaway supper. I put a message on our family group chat explaining what had happened.

Bless him, McOther replied at once asking if I could drive. I said I didn’t know as I hadn’t seen the doc but that I thought I’d be fine and if not I Joanne had already said that someone fully comprehensively insured from the dig crew would drive me. Lovely McOther said he would much rather see me home safe, that he was just about to meet the lads and that he’d explain what had happened, head straight round to Liverpool Street and get the next train to Colchester so he could drive me home.

I asked Joanne if we could pick him up from the station when I was done and she said yes, so it was all fixed.

At about half eleven, I was shown in to see a lovely doctor called Camilla. She was an absolute poppet. Apparently Colchester A&E has at least one dog bite every day, which I thought was a bit of an eye-opener. She had a look, washed it carefully, stuck steri-strips and glue over the long cut on the heel of my hand and the shorter one on my thumb. I asked if yanking my hand away had been unwise and the gist of her reply was, ‘not if you like having two thumbs’.

PIcture of a thumb held over a wooden effect laminate desk with a cut that has a steri-strip across it.

Number 1 cut with steri-strip applied.

That done she dressed it, bandaged me up and gave me a precautionary 3 day course of penicillin. This has to be taken as equally distant apart as possible, with food, so the diet’s going a bit badly as I have to have an extra bite to eat at 4pm and 10pm. The first dose is taken with breakfast so that’s a win and I can drink with it. Also a win.

Picture of a hand with dressings over the thumb and palm

The final article, before bandaging.

The last thing the doctor did was hand me another pair of dressings and bandage to change the dressing on day three, which is probably today. Next Joanne drove me to Colchester Station to wait for McOther who would have got there in perfect time but the first train was cancelled so he had to catch the next one. We passed a very pleasant hour in the truck putting the world to rights. Then McOther’s train arrived so we picked him up, drove back to the farm and he drove me home. I’m not sure he enjoyed driving the Lotus, I’m also not sure the gearbox will ever be the same again, bless him. Shhh don’t tell him I said that.

We got back shortly after my hairdressing friend arrived to do McMini’s hair and while she was there, I got her to tidy up my hair as well … which was nice!

Aftermath

So there we are. It’s now day three and it’s stiffened up a lot, which is excruciating. BUT … I have discovered two things that really help, get your hands moving when it’s too painful to do it alone. Start with a heat pack to loosen it initially, or if you have a vibro massager use that in the general area (but not on the stitches, obviously). Both those are wonderful for reducing the pain and allowing freer movement. Then, once everything is more relaxed, touch typing seems to be brilliant for this kind of stiffness as it’s low impact but enough movement to keep things supple. Also after an injury like this you do need to keep things moving.

On the downside, after about half an hour it all stiffens up again. It maybe that I’ve been typing too much and overdone it perhaps, I dunno, but I’ve left The Pan of Hamgee standing on a roof disguised as half of a drag duo, with the other half at his side and a party of hostile members of the Grongolian Security Forces about to join them very soon, so I reckon I’m excused as I need to know what happens next. Flying car chase, obvs but I need to work out how it goes.

If you’re bored …

Or need to escape, why not check out one of my books. I give some away for free, because I’m kind like that, so you won’t even have to pay to be distracted from the absolute fucking car crash that is the world right now.

Lose yourself in some books here.

PIcture of the cover of Close Enough by M T McGuire depicting a man in a hat and cloak standing on a parapet looking out over the city and a hovvering flying car. The colour palette is mostly blue and purple but the parapet is orange.

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11 Aug 2024 · 12:00 pm

The end … or … is it the beginning?

Where have I been? I’ve been selling a house. That’s where I’ve been.

This house

It’s been a hell of a ride. After needing a document from me which delayed everything, exchange on Mum’s house was delayed from the Wednesday until the Friday. On the Friday the people at the bottom of the chain, the ones who had put the most pressure on everyone else to hurry the fuck up, suddenly decided they needed an indemnity over something over their sale and there was an argument as to who paid. We tried again the following Tuesday, still to no avail at which point, I believe, their estate agent volunteered to pay for the indemnity to get things moving.

So on the Wednesday morning, as we set off for France, a week after we were supposed to have done it, we tried again. This time the same buyers wanted assurances from their seller that an oven had been removed. Assurances were given. Then they asked for a safety certification. A plumber was called, the certification provided and it was sent. Then they asked that the gas line be capped.

Moral: try asking for everything you need at once. The plumber who did the certification could have capped the sodding pipe at the same time or, indeed, done all three when he removed the oven.

Once again no joy. Our vendor rang up to apologise and as I stood admiring the last part of a 15th century abbey standing on a street in Epernay he told me what he’d discovered. He’d been very diligent trying to find out what the fuck was going on and that is how I discovered all that. Apparently another difficulty the two at the bottom of the chain were having was that relations between them had soured so much they were only able to speak via solicitors, which did rather protract their conversations.

This is all as reported to our buyers so take it with a pinch of salt but clearly it was fraught. I was delighted to be able to leave things our vendors wanted for them. The people selling that flat to the first vendor are probably, as we speak, removing all the loo rolls, the light bulbs and curtains and anything else that’s not actually nailed down … or possibly, if I go off at a tangent here, they could go one worse … my son is no longer McMini. He is 16 and every bit the font of horrific knowledge you expect the average 16 year old boy to be. Today, he introduced me to a horrific concept called the Upper Decker.

An Upper Decker is when you poo in the cistern, for example, when you come to vacate a property that you rented from a particularly unpleasant and demanding landlord, etc … (I’m learning so many things about youth culture from my son). Personally I suspect nothing on God’s earth justifies the horror of an Upper Decker but because we are vile the McOthers and I have been making a lot of jokes about how an Upper Decker may well be on the cards for the people moving into that property because they were the ones who pressured us most over the probate thing and then, having pressured us to move fast, they are the ones who held the process up for a week while they bitched and bickered over things they’d have a small eternity to sort out.

I’d just like to cover my arse by saying I’m sure it’s not but it didn’t stop us speculating and giggling irreverently about it.

The other worrying part about trying to exchange was that I have a very ADHD brother who lives a vibrant and full life to the point where he does as much as I would normally do in a week’s holiday in one day (often one morning) and … well … he gets absorbed in what he’s doing so he doesn’t always answer his phone and he is not the most organised of people, indeed, I often wonder if, outside his profession, he could organise a burp in a carbonated drinks factory. He doesn’t answer his phone much … or at all to be honest. And he has no answerphone. The whole thing was dependent on the lawyers getting hold of him each day to confirm that he was as happy to exchange and this, for me, was the toe curling, nerve wracking, the-stress-of-this-is-going-to-cause-my-untimely-death part of it.

This morning, we tried again. It was the last chance as our vendor was worried they would have to renegotiate their mortgage if it failed. I wasn’t holding my breath and wasn’t sure they’d get hold of my brother, I rang my sis in law who got onto my niece who told my brother to turn his phone on. Strangely, a few seconds after that he said he was around waiting for the call and all was well. A few hours later I was gobsmacked to discover we were over the line. We have exchanged on Mum and Dad’s house.

Except it’s more than Mum and Dad’s house. Yes, it’s not my house. It’s not the house I chose, but it’s where I grew up. They bought it in 1972 when I was 4. We moved in in 1974 when I was 6. It’s been in the family 52 years and the family, or part of it, has been living there for 50 of them.

I’m 56 and it’s been in my life for 52 of those years. In short, it’s been part of my life.

For all my life.

How does if feel?

I’m not sure.

I’m on the road right now. When I heard the news I sat down on a carpark wall in Mersault and cried. Half of me was desperate to sell, desperate for exchange, desperate for closure, to move on. The other half of me, the half that grew up in that house, in Sussex, loves that house and doesn’t want to let it go and was desperate to hang on. Perhaps if we’d inherited any money at all I might have. But we have £700 left and that’s of £100,000 my brother and I put in to pay Mum’s care fees about this time last year.

It’s like I’ve slipped the moorings of the first half of my life and I am drifting gently away from the quay, into the current to take me away from safety, from all I know, to who knows where …

It’s … weird.

But people are with me. People I love. It’s going to be OK.

I couldn’t find a picture of a ship and a quay so this picture of a hot air balloon I took tonight will have to do

The thing that’s strange is that the further away from my parents’ deaths I get, the more I want them back. Except I don’t because at the end they were suffering or, in Mum’s case, about to. But as I drift away from the quay that was the first part of my life and the figures standing there get smaller and smaller, I begin to remember them as they were before they became ill. In the wine shops in Epernay, I was looking at some widget and suddenly thought it would be a great present for my Mum. It’s a different feeling when you move from the realisation that she wouldn’t know what it’s for anymore, to thinking that she’d love it but that she wouldn’t want it because she’s dead.

My lovely cyber friend Jim Webster once said to me that when they die and all the pain and the sadness is gone you do get them back. And I suppose this is what’s happening. I have been missing the people my parents were for years. The difference is that for most of that time they were still alive. Now they are both dead, it’s easier to remember them when they were still the glorious, larger-than-life personalities they were.

I love Sussex. I love the downs. I don’t want to leave. But in some ways I have been privileged to be there, drink in the views, the sea the Sussexness of it all once a week, every week, for 10 years when I wouldn’t normally have done so. Were my parents healthy, those weekly lunches wouldn’t have been de rigeur.

Yes, I’d have loved to spend a week at the house I grew up in with the McOthers visiting all the roman sites in Sussex, or Arundel Castle … or Goodwood Festival of Speed. Or taking the McOthers to see the Victory at Portsmouth, which is brilliant. But the beds there are horrific, so we never did. Maybe we will do that one day, from a base in a decent hotel. There’s stuff there I’d love to share with the McOthers because I know they’d love it.

Later, maybe.

So how does it feel? Bittersweet. I guess am standing on the brink of the rest of my life. I dunno where it’s going to go. But there are people with me, so with any luck it’ll be fun.

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Tagged as an author with children, author blog, death, dementia aftermath, dementia emotional cost, dementia fiscal cost, I fucked this up so you don't have to, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, off topic, sad

7 Jul 2024 · 8:54 pm

Life laundry and other adventures

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

Bum.

Never mind, onwards and upwards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luckily one of the removers was a carpenter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s an odd feeling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tagged as death, dementia aftermath, grief, grieving, 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

16 Jun 2024 · 12:50 pm

More wittering…

It’s that time of the week and here I am, back like a bad smell.

At the moment, I feel as if my blog is officially Not Funny anymore. And at the same time, not poignant either. I hope I’ll get back in the swing of making it interesting soon. In the meantime, talking of bad smells …

At the market today I couldn’t help picking up a cheesy bargain. A massive Epoisse cheese was going for a song from the catering left overs man and I bought one. I spent an hour cutting it into 25g portions and freezing it. It’s probably not something I should be eating large amounts of after two months of D&V … or at least D. Hence freezing the lions share for sunnier times. I was very pleased with it though.

A picture of an extremely large, runny, rinse-washed cheese in a wooden box.

Football sized Epoisse. Om nom nom.

It also smells. A lot. It’s not as bad as Tomme De Bethune—I believe that smells so rank that shoppers in France are banned from using public transport if they have a portion about their person—but it’s not far off.

Picture of M T McGuire with the round bit that went round the cheese on my head

The Queen of Cheese wearing her cheese crown to demonstrate just how big the cheese was. There was no cheese on that bit BTW or my hair would be worryingly smelly about now.

Cheese frozen I played with my new delivery. Furniture polish. Yeh try not to get excited people. But some of Mum’s furniture hasn’t been touched much for the last few years and some of ours is a bit beaten up after years of being looked after by me … So I bought some antique wax, her recommended formula, to buff it up. I glued the leg back onto a cake stand thingy I liberated from Mum’s and fixed the barometer.

Sort of …

OK so it’s hopelessly inaccurate but that might be the result of my brother’s and my efforts to move it about. Despite the instructions on the back about transporting it, he didn’t notice them, and I, too failed to notice them until about 3 weeks after I’d received it.

Having laid it carefully flat to take it the three hours from Mum’s place to the home near my brother that she was going into, and then having done the same thing to bring it back down to my house, it transpires on reading said instructions that this is not the right thing to do. Some of the mercury has gone awol. At least I assume it has. When we came to unload it he was a bit concerned when I explained what the silver droplets were on the back seat. I did manage to shepherd most of them into a little plastic pot so I’m rather hoping it won’t cause the untimely death of either of us. It’s sitting on the mantlepiece waiting for me to work out how I tip it back into the barometer’s tube safely.

That said, I may just need to wrap the string from one of the weights round the pulley a couple of times to even them up a bit. And what with today going from bright sun to thunder and hail it’s difficult to work out what the reading should actually be. Very Stormy, where it’s sitting, might be about right.

Also this week, I’ve been trying macro photography. Here are two shots of flowers I took on the way back from the vet’s in a rare moment of sunshine. Picture of a poppy looking down from above with tarmac behind.

They really looked that vivid although the purple of the thistle was a bluer one than that.

Close up of a purple thistle flower with green foliage behind.

Writing stuff

This week, I have mostly been … productive.

Ooo get me.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a seat in a teaching session about how to get the best for your books out of Google Play. It cost me the princely sum of £75 or thereabouts and has been well worth the money. I couldn’t attend all of it so I did the first hour and have been working my way through the video replay. I’m three hours in and there is still more, plus a couple of supplemental videos so it’s excellent value. There were definitely some scales-from-the-eyes moments. I’m excited about some of these hints and tips and I’m half way through implementing them all and hoping they’ll give sales a little lift.

Talking of sales lifts … The first novel in the K’Barthan series is in a free anthology of first in series books. I’ve included it in my mailing list and I give it a plug every now and again but clearly one of my fellow authors in that enterprise—someone with a lot more mailing list clonk than I have—has plugged it too. This has resulted in couple of sales of the second, third and fourth books in that series and in one case, all my books from my online store. Which is grand. I enjoyed watching someone on Kobo hoover them up in about three days as well.

You see, there are advantages to having shit sales, you can watch someone methodically work their way through your stuff and feel good about it. Because the thing about my books is that when I can actually persuade someone to read one, they nearly always read everything I’ve written afterwards. It’s just that they have to be forced into starting one at gunpoint.

Have I done any writing?

I did a big chunk on Tuesday, but haven’t been able to do much since. Can’t win ’em all.

Other splendid things.

This week … well last week actually but I forgot to say … I had a rather smashing windfall. There is a convention for self published authors that runs every year called the Self Publishing Show. I went the first year (2020, two weeks before lockdown) and really enjoyed it. There was a talk by Joanna Penn about selling on all vendors rather than just Amazon, which made me feel I might have a chance to get somewhere with my stuff.

Since then, I haven’t been. This is mainly because the head honcho put his books exclusive with Amazon and so it all began to feel a bit Amazon-centric. This year, however, the line up looks really interesting and is much more varied, so when there was a reply-here-and-you-may-win tickets post in one of the groups I’m part of in Circle, I left a comment … and won a ticket!

So that’s grand.

On the downside, it involves a 6 am start and runs for two days and of course, the only day the removal company could collect the stuff from Mum’s was the day before, which also involves a 6 am start.

Three 6 am starts in a row is … well let’s just say, I’ll need to go to bed very early and eat extremely carefully because I will be extremely worried about waking the Bum Kraken or riding the Vomit Comet again. Fingers crossed.

Ho hum. Never mind.

Other things this week. I was 56 years old on Wednesday. That was scary but also fun because I managed to make a reasonably decent cake and McMini, who shares a birthday with me, wanted chocolate for the first time ever! At last! After 16 years I was able to indulge myself with my favourite flavour. I tried to make fondant icing. It went very wrong, well, no, that’s not true. In cookery, he who dares wins. It’s only gone wrong if it tastes like Satan’s bile and this didn’t.

A picture of a cake covered in chocolate icing with an orange and red ‘happy birthday’ candle on top

Unfortunately, though, I made it too early and then realised that the cake was still warm, so the cake had to go in the freezer, and while I was sorting that out, the icing began to cool and set in the bowl. Finally, it curdled into an unpleasantly oily mess. I remembered being told that if something curdles to add more fat except I had used all the butter in the house so I had to add a spoonful of cooking oil, along with some water, which the recipe specified anyway. What I ended up with was a luxuriantly gloopy variant of butter icing so all was not lost. It was just … different.

Close up of icing that makes it look like a wave with a ball (really a hundred and thousand) floating on top

Surfing the brown wave …

It’s very moorish and I have put on 4lbs by looking at it. Two days of indulgent eating and boom it’s lip up fattie. Never mind. I can lose it again next week.

McMini and I each got presents, which were fun. It felt weird not ringing Mum, not paying the Mum cheque into our accounts and … yeh. It felt weird. Although, I think the best present for me was that probate has been granted on Mum’s. Woot.

I’m waiting for the actual letter from HMRC to arrive before I let the estate agent know but hopefully this means we can now go ahead with the sale, probably in July. That will make it all hands to the pump but at the same time, it’ll be over sooner, so there’s that.

Right that’s it from me. I will see you next week.