Tag Archives: Mary Fails at Modern Life

9 Jun 2024 · 6:02 pm

Stuff

A mixed bag this week so on we go.

On health

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

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

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

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

Out and about

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

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

Picture from the woodland path …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afore ye go …

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

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27 May 2024 · 11:51 pm

Let’s try kindness…

This week has been hectic although looking back on it, it’s less that I’ve had a hectic week and more that, after last week’s visitation from Cardinal Chunder and friends I was definitely not firing on all cylinders for most of the time. I finally got back to the gym on Thursday, even though I was still feeling a little ropy.

It did leave me a little time to browse the internet more than I should have done. There was also time to write which was good and finally, after some of the stuff I read on line, time to think. Yeh, I know, if I keep practising it might become an habit etc.

It also gave me more time to spend on social media. The result is … well I did enjoy all those posts about Rishi looking like he’d just got gunked on Tiswas but otherwise it’s all a bit grim. Yes, rant warning ahead. MTM steps onto soap box. Yep. Here we go. You might want to scroll on by but …

Blimey. What a bunch of miserable fucking bastards we are! Seriously. What is going on? I saw a post somewhere about young people and their many genders etc and the poster was commenting on what a load of bollocks it all is.

It wasn’t shrill or tub thumping but it wan’t needed. It was stuff that didn’t need said and yet, it was there and because there seems to be an awful lot of tub thumping shrill stuff about ‘wokeness’ it just felt like another person putting the boot in against kindness, respect and consideration for others, which is what a lot of ‘wokeness’ is supposed to be.

Perhaps I feel it more because my son has so many LGBTQ+ friends. But I get perplexed by this anti woke stuff. I don’t mean the endless pussy footing about in case we cause people offence. That’s just stupid and standing against that is fine. I mean the inability to see the difference between not taking consideration for others to extremes and just not considering others. The anti woke reaction I guess.

The one where the logic goes like this. Bob is LGBTQ+ and has behaved like a twat on telly. That must mean everyone LGBTQ+ is a twat like Bob. Even though there are LGBTQ+ people we’ve known all our lives who are friends and we know aren’t twats! Also, let’s not take the matter up with Bob because even though that would be logical we can’t reach him. Instead, let’s go kick our friend Eric who we’ve known for. years. Eric hasn’t even heard of Bob but he just happens to be LGBTQ+ as well and furnished with our new knowledge of famous Bob, who has been a dick everyone, we now understand that all LGBTQ+ must be dicks and since Eric lives round the corner it makes sense to go smack him. Yes, we’ll smack Eric, even though we have known his family for years and his father is our son’s godfather and we know he’s a lovely man etc etc.

Is this for real?

What fucking prick outside the brainwashed nimby in a police state thinks that one small aspect of a person defines the rest of them?

Also anti woke? Yes of course, because a few morons going over the top about getting offended now means that consideration and thought about other people is a bad thing. As if the fact someone has behaved like an arsehole and got offended over nothing gives the anti-woke brigade cart blanche to go out of their way to deliberately upset different, unrelated people who just happen to have the same gender, sexuality, hair colour (insert your own inane reason here) as famous person who’s behaviour they consider rude, in some warped ‘redressing of the balance’. Or ‘perpetuation of the pointless shit and enmity’ as I prefer to call it.

How old are we all? Three?*

*No. Most three year olds have already grown out of this kind of behaviour.

As the mother of a teenager, I feel beholden to say something.

There is always the disingenuous argument in any conversation about the modern youth’s approach to gender along the lines of x, y or z person has decided that they are a toaster, which stems from a misunderstanding of how they interpret gender, is largely irrelevant to the whole gender/trans debate and merely serves to muddy the waters. A bit like the ‘all lives matter’ mantra, when yes, undeniably all lives do matter, but the whole point of black lives matter was that, to a lot of the ethnic population, it felt like non-white lives didn’t matter. Back to the youth of today.

My son explains that there is a person’s sex, which is what you are born as, male or female and that is irrefutable, but your gender is more like a spectrum which is why some girls are very girly and some are, in many respects, blokes with boobs and a high voice. There is of course, every stage of girlyness or blokishness along the spectrum between.

That makes sense.

Yet still I see so much anti LGBTQ+ or minority of any description crap daily on t’interweb. More than when I was growing up in the 1980s for fuck’s sake. I find my self wondering why? Seriously. Apart from the obvious, are we really going that badly backwards? Question, why does anyone give a shit? Or at least, why do so many people give a shit about trivial rubbish like the way someone else expresses their sexuality? I mean, one; it’s not their business how much man, lady or in between anyone else feels. Two; if choosing to be one gender or another makes a person happier, and therefore more readily able to be kind to others, why would anyone stand in their way? Oh and three; did I mention that someone’s sexuality is none of other people’s fucking business.

I saw a Facebook post just recently; someone in East Anglia getting all hot under the collar because Chichester police dolled up a police car for pride week down in Sussex. That’s where Brighton is, in case anyone needs a nudge. The usual comments asking why they couldn’t spend the money fighting crime followed, from a bunch of people who clearly don’t understand how the allocation of budgets works in government, local authorities and large organisations. Here’s a hint, you can’t take the cost of a £500 vehicle wrap from a marketing budget and add it to a different one. That’s now how it works. I’m not saying it’s good but that’s the way it is in most organisations right now.

These folks who have to complain about everything do my nut.

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

You! Yes you! You miserable fuckers! You’re doing my effing head in.

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19 May 2024 · 6:43 pm

Stones …

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

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

Picture of air freshener canister eyebombed

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

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

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

Come on a tangent with me.

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

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

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

How hard can that be? I thought.

Mmm always a bad start.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A partial success then.

Woot.

So I give you … polished stones.

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

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7 Apr 2024 · 12:25 pm

Respite and random thoughts about faith…

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

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

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

‘Yes, but no butter or milk.’

‘Can I have coffee?’

‘With a meal.’

Woot.

‘With a tiny bit of milk?’

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

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

It did.

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

I slept like a fucking log.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other stuff …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30 Mar 2024 · 6:17 pm

A very unwelcome conundrum …

This week I have been mostly…

…Having a crap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a bit of a case of …

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

Plus points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

picture of the south downs dappled with sunlight and shade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upsides?

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

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

3 Mar 2024 · 10:08 am

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

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

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

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

The Kickstarter funded!

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

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

It funded! So there’s a thing.

General stuff …

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

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

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

Frank Skinner.

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

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

Blimey.

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

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

Other news with a neurodiversity tangent

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

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

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

Redeeming feature my arse!

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

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

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

What my family looks like if you’re normal.

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

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

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

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

Grk …

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

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

Awkward.

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

Awkward …

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

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

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

A serious lapse in judgement.

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

This week I have been, mostly, laminating bacon.

Come again?

No really; bacon.

Not this bacon …

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

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

Do you want to know how I did this?

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

This was not a good idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Um … no.

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

I reversed the direction of the laminator.

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

Bollocks. Now what?

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

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

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

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

A partial success then.

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

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

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

Yeh. That.

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

Oh dear.

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

No.

Never give up! Never surrender!

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

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

Correct. It was extremely smecking hard.

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

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

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

So there we are.

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

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

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

15 Jul 2023 · 12:23 pm

Modern life is rubbish!

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

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

[Rant mode] Modern life is rubbish!

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

Aroogah! Aroogah! Whinge warning!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not quite. Clearly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bastards.

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

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

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

The first session was on Tuesday.

I forgot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[/rant mode]

Here’s something a little lighter …

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

Picture of books about eyebombing displayed artfully

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Mar 2023 · 6:02 pm

The chaos fairies … just for a smecking change

Holy shizz, this has been a hell of a week. But there have been successes among the rampant chaos. As you know, if you read this regularly, the chaos fairies frequently play havoc with my life. They’re dogged little bastards and their latest escapades have been more than a little annoying. Yes, it’s time for the Insurance Story.

OK, so I insure my car because if I don’t then, in this country, it’s illegal. I am under no illusions that it will be easy wresting any cash from the most compliant and efficient insurance company should anything happen. I drive a completely stupid car. I admit it. It’s this car.

The thing about this car is that it has a tiny, teeny little 1.6 toyota yaris engine. It does 40mpg. But it goes from 0-60 in an excitingly short length of time, even if it’s 6 seconds rather than 4. It also goes from 60 to quite a lot more in a similarly short, blink-of-an-eye type of time. That makes it fun to drive but reasonably straightforward to insure. Cos … small engine. You know …

Another one of its advantages is that it’s mostly made of aluminium, carbon fibre and fibreglass. This is great from the point of view of it not rusting and many bits of it degrading more slowly than normal cars. On the downside, if you prang the fibreglass it is an absolute bastard to fix. That means that, ideally, you need a fibreglass specialist rather than the lowest bidding contractor.

A few weeks ago, somebody backed into me at Tesco’s filling station (it’s always bloody Tesco’s filling station). I’m pretty sure this is not news to anyone, I think I mentioned it. The result is a couple of cracks in the wheel arch. The chap wanted to pay for it himself but I explained that it would be expensive and when I showed him the quote he did, indeed, have conniptions so I contacted my insurance company.

The insurers are a bunch called Geoffrey. The main call centre I am dealing with there is the most lovely bunch of folks up in the North East somewhere. So far I’ve spoken mostly to people with Geordie, Middlesbrough, County Durham or Northumberland accents and one Scottish lady. They are uber helpful and respond magnificently to humour, which is fairly essential when someone’s backed into your car. I cannot praise them highly enough. I always try to be decent to call centre staff, even if I’ve been waiting a while, because they’re just people and often, if you’re even remotely decent to them, they will respond warmly and make that extra effort to help you.

OK, so, like most companies these days, Geoffrey, itself, is really a sales and marketing company, they contract out the hire car side to Enterprise Rental Car, the nitty gritty of organising the work to be done is contracted out to a bunch called Incident Management Solutions, and the policy is underwritten by a company called Markerstudy. This is how capitalism works. Indeed, having worked for National Express, which contracts the nitty gritty of running many, many routes to other operators, this sort of thing is pretty standard. I understand that.

Fibreglass is an absolute bastard to repair.

I think I mentioned that.

This being the case, I usually ask if I can use my own repairer. I did have to use the insurance company’s repair service once. They were a decent lot. They did the bodywork on some of the vehicles at the coach company I worked for at the time. However, they didn’t get the paint curing right on the fibreglass and the first time I passed a gritter the newly re sprayed front of my previous car ended up pitted with white holes.

Most insurers are more than happy for me to use a local Lotus specialist. Geoffrey, and then Enterprise, said they were fine with it. They just had to agree terms with the mechanic. The guy who fixes my car is extremely competitively priced. Furthermore, he knew he could fix this without replacing the whole front of the car. He also knows that many companies will automatically say they’re going to replace the entire front, but often end up not doing so. The difference being a quote for the work without changing the front is about £800 and it’s about £1,500 for the parts from anyone else.

Gerald, that’s his name, is the most honest person you could happen to meet, likewise his colleague Neil. These guys are not ones to charge more than the price of gold for the oil used in an oil change. Small bolts and washers do not miraculously become £10 on their bills unless they’ve had to buy them for that from Lotus. They are also really, and I mean really good at fixing weird niggles. It’s a Lotus and it gets lots of weird niggles. And if there are two options and one is cheaper, they will advise you to take the cheaper one if it’ll work just as well.

As a result, GST, that’s the company name, is well in demand so I rang them and provisionally booked a slot for the work while I was on holiday. Then I broke the back of my car, which I am not claiming for because the work would cost about the same as my excess and we agreed they’d fix that at the same time.

Someone rang GST to negotiate but they couldn’t get hold of them. When they called back it rang out or a message said the call handlers were all busy. GST have better things to do with their time so I rang Geoffrey, who put me through to Incident Management Solutions. I waited for … quite a long time … and got hold of someone who was able to give me a direct line for GST to call which I passed on and all was well …

Except it wasn’t. Because GST’s hourly labour rates were too high. I’m not sure how because their labour rates are, quite frankly, lower than pretty much anyone’s. Also, the time they were doing the work meant that there was no need for a hire car, so no cost there, and of course, they hadn’t said it would need a new nose cone so that was a few grand off the ticket right there, too.

Yes, but the labour rates were too high. They needed to reduce another 8% before VAT and pay a £20 admin fee to be in with a shout …

So basically, as I understood it, if GST had committed fraud, by quoting for a new nose cone to up the price, but not fitting one, so they could then reduce their labour rates to £25 an hour, or whatever it was that was stipulated in the rules, they’d have got the job even though it would have cost the insurance company more money.

That’s fucking bats. This might be the world of capitalism but that’s Nationalised Industry levels of mental, pointless, hoops, rules and inefficiency right there.

Yes I was fucked off.

Anyway, I rang Incident Management Solutions and asked what I could do to get GST in with a shout and they explained that basically, nothing. I’d have to go with their approved repairer. I knew from the bumpf I’d received that Markerstudy, who underwrote my policy, were prepared to allow me to use my own repairer. I was advised that I should go back to the insurer, which I did and they, in turn, advised me that now I would have to go direct to the underwriter.

My first call to Markerstudy, I was put through directly from Geoffrey (the insurers) to the new claims department, because they weren’t sure Markerstudy would have all the paperwork yet. I spoke to a lady who had an accent like Gina Ahluwalia when she’s doing an impression of her mum. She explained that they had the paperwork and that she’d put me onto the existing claims department. Markerstudy don’t tell you where you are in the queue so after 45 minutes I reckoned something must have gone wrong and hung up.

I tried again but this time I got a menu and chose existing claims, I then got another menu of items, none of which applied to my situation, so I chose 7 ‘anything else’. I’m not sure if it was a bad line or the guy at the other end didn’t seem to speak much English and certainly couldn’t understand mine. I explained what had happened.

‘So you had an accident that was your fault?’

‘No, it was the other guy’s fault.’

‘So you want to use our approved repairers?’

‘No. I don’t. I want to use my own.’

‘I will put you through to the existing claims department.’

‘Hang on, you are the existing claims department. I chose existing claims from the menu.’

‘No this is not existing claims.’

‘It should be. Honest. I picked existing claims. Then I got a menu of seven options, none of which applied to me so I chose number 7 for “anything else”. Please can you tell me what item on the menu I should choose to get put through to the existing claims department straight away.’

‘What were the menu options?’

‘I can’t remember them all but there definitely wasn’t one for using my own repairer.’

‘Then ma’am may I suggest that next time you listen to the menu carefully, then you can select the right department.’

‘Why thank you for your advice, which wasn’t condescending at all,’ I told him sweetly.

‘No problem ma’am,’ oh. I made a mental note that, clearly he’s immune to sarcasm. ‘I will put you through to the existing claims department now, yes? I am putting you through now?’

‘Yes, you may as well.’

Another heaven knows how long on hold. I started this at 10.00 am and it was getting on for 12.00 now. I was due out to lunch with a friend in 20 minutes. I decided I’d try again because no-one’s answering and knowing my luck it’d go back to the beginning and I’d end up talking to this bloke again. This time I wrote down all the menu options and chose number 3, ‘I wish to use our approved repairer.’

I got through to another man with an equally strong Nigerian accent.

‘I will put you through to the right department,’ he said after I’d explained my predicament.

‘But … I chose “existing claims” and then “I wish to use our approved repairer” how can I be at the wrong department?’

After a long conversation like those ones you have on holiday when they only speak a few words of English and you only speak a few words of their language, except I didn’t speak any of his language at all, he basically told me that he was in a kind of triage area where they answered the phone and then put people into the queue for the relevant department. In short the menu was an irrelevant and pointless waste of time. So that was grand.

I thanked him, and as it was 12.20, and I was due to meet my friend at half past, I told him I’d ring back later.

Later that day at 4.30, I arrived home. I googled Markerstudy reviews. I invite you to do the same. There are some 5 star ones, from people who are chuffed their insurance is so cheap and there are the others, which are all 1 star, from people trying to make a claim. A big red flag for me was how many people in non-fault accidents had ended up paying their excess anyway and how many people had to involve the ombudsmen, or lawyers, to get the faintest sniff of their money. Others; more people than I was comfortable with, ranted at what a shower the approved repairers were and how comprehensively they cocked it up.

Shit. I needed something between these people and me. Also, my excess is just shy of £300. It was definitely worth paying the difference.

I rang Geoffrey Insurance and explained that I really didn’t want to go direct to Markerstudy. They spoke to Enterprise and managed to get them to agree to reopen my case if I promised to go with their own insurers. Then I rang Gerald at GST and told him to agree to whatever they asked and that I’d pay the difference. Then it was supper time.

The next morning, bright and early, I rang Geoffrey and asked for advice. Had anyone ever paid part of the claim? The lovely geordie I spoke to said I could but ask although he’d never heard of it happening and that I’d been very lucky that they’d agreed to take my claim back after closing the file.

Back to Incident Management Solutions. Number 9 in the queue this time and only fifteen minutes or so on hold. I got a lady who sounded really bored and pissed off, but she thawed considerably over our conversation and turned out to have a wonderful droll sense of humour and the bored sounding delivery transpired to be mis diagnosed laconic. She was great. I explained that I was going to pay the difference. She said that was unfair because the accident wasn’t my fault. I explained about the reviews of Markerstudy online and that I thought it was probably cheaper in the long run. She therefore made it all official by ringing GST while I was on the phone, and then confirmed that yes, they would be doing the work. Halle-fucking-luja!

This also means that they can fix some other niggles on my car for that tiny bit less because they already have it for the insurance claim, and since I’ll be on holiday at the time they’ll have it for two weeks so there won’t be the same time constraint.

I can’t help thinking that this experience represents a kind of Livy’s circle of capitalism. These days, the customer is no longer king, it’s the shareholder. Doubtless Markersure is worth billions and doing really well on the stock market because they are buying everything that moves. At ground level, that rapid expansion, which, most likely means buying a company, firing the staff routing the calls to their own call centre and piling the load for their sales advisors, rather than employing any more, results in absolutely shit customer service, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s expanding, so the shareholders still get a bonus, and it’s still a ‘successful’ company even if it’s running at a loss. (Did you know that Spotify has never made a profit?)

The cumbersome nature of behemoths, generally, coupled with all the petty, box-ticking dos and don’ts by which decisions are made within them is so very similar to the aspects of nationalised industries in the 1970s that were crap. It’s all about box ticking, rather than any form of logic or business acumen at ground level. Stuff I read about British Leyland in the 1970s and 80s and other examples of the worst inefficiencies of Britain’s nationalised industries in the that period echoes through all my experiences with modern help desks and call centres. Not to mention our government bodies now.

Take the NHS, everything contracted out, nobody has agency … remember the problem I had getting them to deliver Mum home? The transport people box ticking, no tick, no delivery; Mum is taken home to her house and then back to hospital again. The ward administrator is livid but can do nothing because the drivers don’t answer to her and in the long run, neither does the transport company. They’re the lowest bidder so however shit the service, they’ll always get the job. All those double journeys and mistakes … is it any cheaper than organising it in house? Probably not.

So we have this weird situation where, as far as the customer is concerned, the down-to-earth, nitty-gritty of dealing with capitalism is exactly the same as dealing with a government department or everything that was shit about nationalised companies. Because it turns out that one behemoth—be it the passport office, the NHS, Google, Audible or Markersure—is very like another. Just as governments are often, flabby, inflexible and inefficient because they’re massive and complicated; so companies, when they reach the same size as a small country, seem to become the same. Full of illogical conflicting rules and guidelines that hinder rather than help. A culture of box ticking and back covering rather than actual action or customer service. But what do they care? They own their markets andtheir consumers have no choice, right? Except no. We do. It’s more difficult sometimes but we have to think about it.

There we go then.

Caveat emptor.

Check who underwrites your insurance. If it’s Markersure steer well clear.

Which leads me onto this … A few days ago someone on Facebook shared this quote from Ursula LeGuin.

‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art – the art of words.’

What interested me was people’s reactions. They got all democrat and republican about it. The internet is rather Little America, after all. Lots of people saying yah boo you leftie twat! You think communism (that’s what the Americans call socialism) is better do you? You think shitty inefficient communism crushing our freedoms is better do you? etc.

But it strikes me that shitty inefficient communism was exactly like the events I’ve just described. I have Mondays and Fridays, along with some Thursdays to write. The simple job of getting my insurance claim sorted out took me all my spare time on all three of those days. Obviously, the post of Ursula LeGuin’s words being on Facebook, and having seen it once, I’ll never find it again. Facebook doesn’t want you thinking about stuff before going back to make a measured response. But that’s the whole point isn’t it? Keep the customers busy doing pointless shit and they won’t notice how shit you are. They’ll be too busy concentrating on the pebbles on the path to look up and see just how shit the view has become.

Except some of us do look up. We see their shite. We so, so do.

Everything right now, at every level of life, is about box ticking, arse-covering, bureaucratic pissyness. Nothing is about what might work, what is logical, what is sensible and certainly, never, never, ever about about what is right. That’s why my parents have paid three quarters of a million quid in care fees and we will be pursued to the ends of the earth if Mum is deemed to have tried to give anything away to us—you know, so we have something to inherit the way she and Dad would have wanted, for example—rather than paying it all on care fees the government promised them it would pay, before pulling the rug from under them and a whole generation of people when it was too late for them to act.

I don’t know what the answer is but it might be in here. If you haven’t read this book, read it right now. It makes so much sense of the way modern business and modern life runs.

Is religion such a bad thing done the right way, you know, so it gives people principles? If today’s help-yourself-and-bollocks-to-the-rest-of-them society is anything to go by, some kind of belief system — other than ‘I want it all’ might be worth having.

And finally … once again, here’s a chance to grab 12 hours of fabulous audiophonic joy for 99p (or 99c)

Yes. If you like cheap audio books, Few Are Chosen is on sale for all of March. After that the price goes up again. As always, I’m cutting my own throat here. It’s 99c on Apple, Kobo and my own website. For anyone in the States, it’s also 99c on Barnes & Noble and Chirp (which is USA and Canada). If you want to grab it while it’s mega cheap you can find store links and a bit more info here

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Tagged as I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, markerstudy, Mary Fails at Modern Life, massive rant, MTM gets stroppy, rant, writers

26 Feb 2023 · 7:45 pm

Discombobulation … is the name of the game

Yes, you find me all arse-about-face this week. Well that’s the default state, I grant you, but in this particular instance I’m probably a bit more arse-about-face than usual. Yeh. I know. Impressive. Even for me.

One of the difficulties I’ve experienced recently with my blog is that there’s been so much to write about I haven’t really known where to start, so then I’ve just gone a bit droopy and given up on it.

The past few weeks have been rough.

On the Mum front, nothing much seems to be happening about getting her an official diagnosis for dementia and we are reaching the stage where she does need one. It’s a pain to have to keep chasing her doctor and getting absolutely nothing back. He’s normally excellent so I don’t know what’s happened but I think I’ll have to book a call next week and get to the bottom of what’s going on. If he can’t refer her to the NHS memory people for some reason then presumably I’ll have to try and get a diagnosis done privately. It will cost money but the expensive bit is the brain scan which has already been done in hospital and should be with her NHS record.

On the upside, having done my tax return which showed I owed tax, and having paid said tax, it now turns out I don’t so they’re going to give it back to me. On the downside, some numb nuts reversed into me at bloody Tesco’s filling station … why is that place always trouble? Turned out he wasn’t insured because he was driving his friend’s car and didn’t want his friend to know. I explained about fibreglass and the cost of repairs and he looked at the bill and decided he couldn’t pay so I reported it to my insurance company. Apparently they’ve agreed that the repair can be done by the bunch who always look after my car. Unfortunately they’ve told Enterprise rent a car that, and they’ve rung the fellow who will be fixing the damage and have left a message that he must call but when he does all they get is a message telling them that all their operators are busy and to ~~piss off~~ call back at another time.

Incidentally, since every single call centre has been experiencing ‘an unusually high demand’ since covid, I’d be tempted to say that the level of demand has been like this for three years and therefore it isn’t unusually high; it’s simply a case that they sacked everyone after covid and have decided they’ll make more money if they sacrifice any customer service principles they had and run on a shoe-string staff. But I digress.

As the mechanic apologetically explained to me, after making five attempts, there are only so many times you can call. So now I have to ring my insurers between 10.30 and 4.30 (nice hours if you can get them) and they’ll put me through ‘because they’re more likely to answer’ and get the bloody job number myself. FFS.

The next week, going to Mum’s because I’m so fucking intelligent, I was a bit upset by seeing a rolled horse box and car on the motorway and the green we’ve-just-shot-this-horse screens. Late for Mum’s and in a dither I reversed my car into a flint wall, fucking the other end of it although—thank the lord for small mercies—the wall was unscathed. Since it was the random wall of someone else’s drive that is a Good Thing. Why? Because I can’t claim on my insurance or I’ll lose my no claims bonus and my excess is just shy of £300 so unfortunately the £800 for this one is on me because if I lose the no claims I’ll only be getting about £100 for a claim in real terms and paying the rest in increased premiums and excess. It’s tough being this much of a twat but someone’s got to do it.

Another up and down one, I had planned to see Abba Voyage with a friend this week. She’s one half of a lovely couple who absolutely get me. They also like me as much as I like them and there is a huge amount of mutual respect and ditto with McOther too. McMini also loves them. The chap has had cancer on and off since just before lock down. It’s been a virulent bastard. He’s been playing bash-the-rat with it and we’ve been seeing them in the gaps between bouts of chemo. He’s not had much respite between ending one lot of chemo and it popping up again which is highly unfair.

He faced it with a great deal of courage and liberal dashings of his habitual droll humour. Last time we saw them, at the back end of last year, he was unable to eat all of his dinner round ours and suspected he had another tumour somewhere causing a blockage which would mean more chemo.

Knowing this, we sort of left them to it. McOther and I tend to take a, ‘you know where we are if you need us’ approach to this kind of thing and then give people space. We have a kid and if someone’s immune system is compromised with chemo we’re probably more likely to bring pathogens than most people—although McMini doesn’t get all the colds like some kids, it’s probably me that will bring the bugs in. Typhoid Mary anyone? Oh yes.

Long and the short, friend messaged me on Tuesday to say that he was in the hospice. I was particularly amused that, as a keen Viz reader, he should have ended up in the J Arthur Rank … which is ryhming slang for a wank, snortle. But it is a fab hospice and the original J Arthur left a lot of money for cancer care (I’m not sure if he died of it or someone close to him did, I should probably check). She explained that her other half had talked to her about Saturday and told her she had to go, whatever stage he was at. However, she felt her attendance still might depend slightly on him. I totally got that if he was dying, she would probably want to be holding his hand rather than watching Abba Voyage with me and I assumed, from this, that the odds were, he might be. I said that whatever she needed was fine.

Looking at the map, I realised that the hospice was only about 10 minutes out of my way on the way home from Mum’s so I arranged to pop in and see her the following day, and him if he was up to it. You know how with some people you can be really quite rude and abusive to one another and know it’s a joke. If you don’t you should as it’s an incredibly joyous and liberating thing to be able to insult people ironically because you love them.

These two were like this, with one another but also with us so I also told her that if his sense of humour was still in evidence to tell him that all she and I wanted was to nip down to London for a day to watch Abba and he had to make it all about him!

The next morning she contacted me to say that he had died very peacefully in the early hours of that morning. She must have told him I was coming to see him. I mentioned that to her, but obviously I offered condolences first. Then I cried a great deal, most of the way to Mum’s.

JD, the chap in question, was the absolute best of people. Much like my friend Duncan, he was into cars and was not remotely phased about speaking his mind—well, he was a Yorkshireman—or pricking the bubble of the pompous. He saw the humour in everything, but not to the point of offence, or at the expense of the humanity or pathos. Both he and his Mrs coped with the world using gallows humour, and wit, the way McOther and I do. Presumably that’s why we all got on so well.

He was very intense—but not in a way that was at all wearing—very intelligent and well informed about many things. He had an enquiring mind, so I guess if he was interested in something he needed to know about it. Properly. Among the things were music and cars to name two but history and wine, F1 … he was also a fabulous cook. Oh and he was endurance fit, one of these people who gets up at 6 am and goes for a 50 mile bike ride before breakfast. He was also highly amusing. He had a way of calling everyone by their surnames but in a way that felt rather less formal than using first names would be, although he always called me Sweary, for that is my nickname with that group of friends and they all call me Sweary.

His dry wit made the world a better and kinder place and when the cancer appeared he faced his affliction with so much positivity, pragmatism and courage. It’s clear, from talking to his Mrs, that he never gave up until acceptance was the best path. I will miss him dreadfully but, I’m very aware as I say this, that his wife and his mother (God love her, poor woman) have this way, way worse.

His Mrs is being as brilliant as I’d expect her to be. They were great friends, anyway, and clearly grew together rather than apart as his illness progressed. It can’t be easy though. They’re in their mid 50s. And I mean, as it is, I feel as if someone has turned a light out. There is so little humour in the world right now, so few people with a light touch. So few people who will catch my eye, in a situation where everyone is taking something far too seriously, and I will know they’re laughing inside as well. It feels like the world is being run by clones of Biff from Back To The Future. The Biffs are on the ascendant and those of us who understand the importance of humour to civilised living and discourse are fewer and further between than ever. And lightness and humour are so important. If you can be funny about stuff, you can explore some really scary shit in comparative safety, or at least, in a way you can’t if you are a humourless automaton.

The day after breaking the news, my friend contacted me to say she wanted to go to Abba because he would have wanted that and also that he had left instructions that his life should be celebrated. I said that was OK and did she want me to come and pick her up and drive us down there. She said that yes, if I could, that would be great.

I took a half bottle of champagne and on arrival we drank a toast to him. I think it made us both feel better. Then we had lunch and went to watch Abba Voyage which was very impressive and which I can recommend. It did strike me that some of the words were a bit close to the bone but it was only the second to last song where I thought she looked a bit wobbly and gave her a hug. She hugged me back so I think she may have needed it.

The audience was dancing but I was amused to see that, while they clearly wanted to dance the way they had as teenagers and kids, they were nursing the kind of backs, knees, ankles and collapsed arches that meant the couldn’t quite do it the way the used to. The intent was there though. There was a woman about our age near us who stripped down to her bra like it was some kind of 1990s Ibizan foam party, which we thought was hilarious, if a trifle weird. She came over as insecure and wanting to impress, like a teenager, rather than just being overheated, menopausal and giving no fucks. But what do I know?

When we came to leave we had to walk miles round the houses because West Ham were playing at home and turning out at the same time as us. All the streets had been barricaded so you simply could not leave them. I stopped to take a few photos, including a rainbow. A promise? Maybe.

The shopping centre we’d walked through to get to the Abba Arena was closed off with massive metal shutters like the blast doors out of a nuclear shelter and the streets lined with unhelpful stewards who said we had to go round.

We’re not football folks though, we’re here for Abba and we want to get a coffee. Never mind, that. You have to walk round the outside in the pissing rain with the West Ham peps.

Is the car park open? Are we allowed to go into the car park to get our car?

You have to go round. That way.

Yes. We have twigged. But are we going to be allowed into the car park to get our car?

You must go round.

Yeh, right. Thanks that’s been a great help.

On the upside, they demonstrated, clearly, that Westfield shopping centre could survive the Zombie Apocalypse, which is useful to know.

It was bizarre though.

Luckily, we were able to get into the car park, although not into the shopping centre from street level. But by climbing to the next floor we were able to walk into the shopping centre from there and go with our original plan to grab a cappuccino and an arancini.

When it was time to leave we found that the pay machine in the car park was one of these ones where you put in your number plate and it just tells you how long you’ve been there and presents you with a bill.

Except it didn’t.

It kept presenting us with pictures of wildly inappropriate and unmatching vehicles. The more times I tried to find my car’s numberplate, the more bizarrely wrong the suggestions it offered; enormous munter trucks, saloons, and the odd van. Each time it was kind of going, ‘well, there’s an A in the numberplate on this one, is this your car?’ I’d press ‘no’ because it was a bus/estate car/motorbike etc and it would start again. Finally it suggested a massive van which shared one of the same numbers as my car’s number plate, ‘What about this one?’ it says hopefully.

‘Nah-uh.’ Say I. And so on.

After we’d done about seven of these we were both snorting with laughter because we reckoned it would be just our luck to get trapped in the car park forever, unable to leave. In my head I could just hear JD laughing at our antics. There were many jokes about how us two could get in to the most ridiculous scrapes. McOther calls me The Woman THINGS Happen To and they had a similar gag running themselves. I pressed the help button and was told that we should just drive to the exit and ring them again and they’d charge us then.

Off we went. I managed to tell two lurking motorists that I was leaving, by mistake, but my friend explained to the second one that we’d told the other we were going first and so we avoided precipitating a hand bags at sundown situation over our parking spot. Phew.

When we reached the exit, I discovered that the help button was about 3 feet above the roof of my car. I dunno, maybe there were some exits for buses or something and I’d inadvertently picked one of those, but they’d all seemed to be the same. Then again, there were about 60,000 West Ham fans making their way home and most of them seemed to be parked in that car park so maybe it was just that there were cars over the top of the writing on the ground and I’d not seen the bus label on this one.

On the up side, there was a guy there and I explained what had happened and asked him to help. He pressed the button for me, not quite what I was expecting, I’d assumed he’d be able to work the machine. Never mind, it was a start. The sound of a distant phone ringing drifted down from above me as the help button attempted to make the connection. It went on for a while. Some of the West Ham fans behind us tooted.

‘I’m going to let you go,’ said the man and proceeded to raise the barrier just as a tinny voice 3 feet above my head said, ‘Hello?’

I’m afraid I didn’t reply. Instead, I thanked the man, hoofed it out of the car park and headed for home. As I drove, my friend had to ring some folks to explain when her husband’s funeral was. I listened as she spoke a cross between Italian and dialect to a cousin in Sicily. And tried to shut up Margaret (the sat nav on my phone) who seemed to be shouting orders on full volume. (It’s called Margaret because it sounds like Mrs Thatcher.)

As we got to the bottom of the M11 she (my friend, not Margaret, the sat-nav, obviously) was saying, ‘Caio, Caio, Ciao …’ exactly the same way Brits say, ‘bye’ successive times, really quickly, when ending a call. But then the person on the other end clearly asked her something and they started talking again and went on for another ten minutes.

This got me chuckling because I could imagine her husband laughing at this so vividly it was almost like he was in the car with us and I could hear it. And I immediately remembered a conversation the four of us had had with him and McOther ripping the piss out of myself and her over our inability to say goodbye quickly. McOther complained how, when I was leaving my parents, we’d suddenly start another conversation in the doorway and talk for another twenty minutes in the cold instead of getting into the car, at which point JD had cited examples of similar behaviour from her while visiting the rellies in Italy.

Once her call was done, we put on my Abba Gold CD and did some hard core singing as we drove up the motorway. I managed to get cramp in my shin on the home straight going to her house, which was interesting and made us laugh some more. It did go the minute I got out and went inside to say a quick hello to JD’s mum and have a wee. Then it was home for a well earned spag bol. I’d done 23,000 steps and an hour and a half of dancing so I had no qualms about eating a generous portion!

So yeh … all in all … a bittersweet few weeks. I haven’t written anything, and I can’t, but that’s OK.

On a vaguely book related note …

Graphic book cover with two old ladies silhouetted against a darkened street If you have the remotest interest in any of my books, I have a page on my site where I list all the stuff that’s reduced or free so you can try it out and see if you like it. If you think that sounds interesting (oh yes you DO think it sounds interesting) then click on this link: https://www.hamgee.co.uk/cmot3

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3 Sep 2022 · 12:38 pm

All the things … so many things …

This week, by the wonders of technology, I’m speaking you from somewhere I’m not. Yes. I’ve scheduled this post in advance. A LOT has happened this week. Let’s start with an update on, Mum.

Mum is in hospital still but she is getting better with each passing day. She has something like a potts fracture, having broken both the tibia and fibula bones in her right ankle but I think bruv and I have managed to convince them not to operate because she has a bad heart and dementia. She’s had a brain scan and it shows clear signs of dementia but apparently they’re not allowed to give her a diagnosis so we have to go to her Doctor for that. On the up side, she won’t have to go for a CT scan because she’s just had one. I’m hoping I can sort that out as she does need one.

We are kind of holding off on the mortgage to see what happens and how with-it she is as she recovers. Ultimately, she probably will have to go into a home but ideally, not until she has forgotten about her actual house and is happy anywhere. Strangely, this did happen in hospital, at the beginning, when she was first admitted. She is perking up now though.

Things looked a bit grim there for a while so I’m glad she’s bounced back a bit. McMini is going back to school, so I took him down to see her on Wednesday. On the upside we did also get to see Bruv and the Missus as well two of McMini’s cousins. We had lunch together in Worthing and were ready for visiting hours around 2.00pm so that was grand. We also met a lovely consultant who’d been looking after Mum and had a word with the doctor about her. She’d been moved to a different ward; Durrington ward. With the best will in the world, because the staff there are lovely, it does slightly strike me that the D in ‘Durrington’ also stands for ‘death’ and it does slightly look as if waiting to die is what most of the occupants are doing.

That is unfair, but it’s kind of a waiting room ward. People tend to end up there recovering from strokes, broken hips and other ailments usually associated with the elderly. As a result it is, slightly, the twilight zone between home and a care home, but also where people wait while their families get care in place at home so they can leave, or wait for the results of tests, or wait for treatment to be decided. There are usually some with dementia, of which Mum is one.

Everything felt very final on Wednesday, but as I understand it from the carers, Mum was a great deal perkier yesterday so I’m less worried. We should have a hoist and a hospital bed for her sometime next week and once that’s all arranged we can take her home. The most important thing is that, though bored, she is actually alright in herself and seems quite relaxed. The carers are taking it in turns so someone visits her every day, too and they are actually pretty up beat about getting her home and looking after her there. However, this does feel like the beginning of the next stage but … not in a scary or bad way.

So that’s a weight off.

It was also lovely to see my bruv and wife plus niece and nephew who went and played on the slots on the pier with McMini. An excellent way to spend the time! We had a fabulous lunch in the restaurant at the end, which is really very good. Then I went right to the very end and took a photo looking out to sea.

Meanwhile, I’ve booked to go one a two day metal detecting dig this weekend and there’s another one next weekend too! Lovely McOther has bought me some scotch eggs to have for my lunches. Smokes but I love scotch eggs, and I’ve charged up the detector all ready. Fingers crossed I’ll have a good day and find some interesting stuff. It starts at 9 but apparently there’s often a big queue for registration at these things so I will need to get there earlier. I’m aiming to leave here at half seven, which should get me there for quarter to eight, or thereabouts, and I will be up at half six so I can finish the IBS before I leave. There’s another one next week but they let you register on the Friday for that one so you don’t have to queue on the Saturday morning. I might do that, I think.

We went to the beach yesterday, which was wonderful, and I managed to get an hour’s practise in with the detector. No finds to report, well, except for 20p, but it did bring back how the tones sound, which was useful, so I feel a little more confident that I can still remember how to use it. I haven’t been out in an eternity to be honest.

Things are a bit busy and I do have half an eye on Mum and the other on the fact that I have two two day digs over the next two weekends, McMini is back to school, McGrandpa will be having a cataract operation. McGranny doesn’t drive and McGrandpa won’t be able to drive so McOther will be going to Scotland for a week to keep his Mum company and drive his Dad to and from the hospital. We’re not sure when that’s going to be though but the hospital will tell us when his slot comes up.

Then there’s the last weekend of September, which is NorCon. I have ordered a craptonne more books because it’s over two days. Yikes. I’m hoping that people will buy the small ones on the first day, read them and then come back to buy more! Well … I can dream. Also, THE CLOAK has arrived and it’s really rather splendid. Yep. I think we can say that it is good. I took a quick pic this afternoon but I need the full costume on to do it justice.

Other news, while I have steadfastly not lost any weight since the start of August.

Bollocks!

On the up side, I do now fit into an awful lot of clothes which I haven’t been able to wear for years, or at all in some cases. Yes, I really am that dumb. I actually have clothes that I bought thinking, ‘this is small but it will fit soon because my fat bastardy is temporary,’ about eleven years ago and turned out to be wrong.

Mmm. Bonus points for optimism.

That said, it makes for a nice surprise now. It’s a bit of a gas suddenly discovering that shirts I’ve not been able to wear for years, and was going to throw away unless this last ditch attempt to slim down worked, now fit. I’m liking that. I still have a lot of pot belly to lose but oh so much less than before! I think some of the slow down might be due to the fact we keep having Important Events (like McOther’s birthday) at which we eat things that are the antithesis of compliance with my eating plan and then keep eating them repeatedly for days afterwards, as left overs. I’m looking at you, baked potatoes. I love baked potatoes but one is approximately one million calories. Seriously, I could do my whole allocation for the day with one tuna baked spud. It’s frightening.

picture of two paper bags on stripy fabric backgrouns As well as the craptonne of books for Norcon, I decided I’d try getting bags done with a logo, too. That way, if I go bagging up my stuff when I sell it people carry paper bags round with the HUP logo on.

OK so the logo isn’t necessarily going to encourage them to read the books but it’s cool and people might ask what it is and the web address is on there so I thought it was worth a go. To that end, I have procured a rubber stamp and some green stamp ink as well as 100 recycled paper bags. God help me, I now have to stamp them all with a green logo.

Mmm I’ve done six so far. Watch me go! Mwhahahrgh.

That said, I have to confess to being pleased with the results.

Talking about green … last week something went gross in our kitchen bin. We removed the liner, washed it and dried it and put it back. Needless to say, neither of us noticed that there had been maggots. Boake! Or that the liner had holes through which the maggots had retreated into the bin proper and then each one had become little crysalis. Oh god.

I’ve no idea how long that takes but in my defence, both McOther and I checked both bins and noticed nothing. I’m not sure if it’s myopia or abject skankiness I’m pleading here but anyway, we saw nothing. But there were a lot of them. Which we didn’t see. And then they hatched into blue arsed, or at least green arsed, flies. For some reason they decided that the conservatory was the place to go, so on Wednesday afternoon, McOther went in there and discovered a whole swarm of them. I kid you not. It was like the fucking Amyteville Horror.

After killing 20, McOther closed the door and left the rest in there. We searched anew for the source and finally I discovered the remaining pupae under the bin and then, he discovered the pupae inside. Ugh. The weird thing was that, though there was something very stinky, at no point were there maggots. Well, no, there must have been but clearly they must have been whistle stop maggots because our bin is emptied about every other day and when we emptied the reeking yuk bag the other day, no maggots were in evidence.

Luckily they are mostly dead now. We have chalked it up to experience.

So … have I written anything this week? Er … no. But I have last week’s post to use as a handy guide when I get back to it again.

Fancy something a bit more fun?

NorCon! Yes, the Norfolk film, TV and comicon is coming up on 24th and 25th September at the Norfolk Showground Arena and guess what? Yes. I’m going to be there with some of my other author friends! Woot. If you want to come along and say hello. I will be dressed as The Pan of Hamgee complete with the New Cloak and devaluing my books by signing them for people.

Or treat yourself and stay at home …

Yes, Ambassador! Spoil yourself with your good taste and a wonderful free book. Mmm hmm. If you are looking for a fun novella, to take your mind off that whole thing I said back there about the green arsed flies, for example … or if you’d like to listen to an audio book in the car, or at work or on the commute and you are just fresh out of ideas fabulous newness … well, you can fix all those things by grabbing a free book.

This book.

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

It’s free to download in ebook format from all the major retailers (except when Amazon is dicking with me) and two and a half hours of glorious K’Barthan audiobook deliciousness is a mere £1.99/$2.99 on retailers and free to download from my web store.

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

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Tagged as an author with children, author blog, comedy fantasy fiction, dementia, Events, full time mum writing, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, K'Barthan Series, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, writer parent