Tag Archives: what the fuck do I tag this as?

20 Aug 2022 · 1:34 pm

The dementia life sentence …

For some time now, I’ve been putting off writing anything here. Mainly because I need to write about Mum but I’m just so burned out with the whole dementia circus that when I sit down to do it, I can’t. I know I’m in trouble, but there’s nothing I can do, no way out, and for the next ten years, I know it’s just going to be more and more of the same grinding awfulness. Wednesday’s visit to Mum was lovely and she was in great form, so it’s not like there aren’t good days. It’s just that I’m in the kind of bad place, mentally, where I’m having trouble seeing them. I think this is because there is too much Mum stuff and it’s time sensitive so I can’t spread it out.

Settling this next stage for Mum is dragging on, and on, and on, and on, and on. And I can see no end. And it’s taking everything, so I’ve nothing left for writing. I’ve hardly written anything in six months and that is not a recipe for happy me. There has to be writing, and right now, until the next year of the Plan is settled for Mum. There’s not.

Which means I’m as miserable as sin.

‘Last night, I dreamt that Mum had died, peacefully, in her sleep. My overwhelming sense was one of gladness and relief. When I woke, and realised it was all a dream, I was absolutely miserable.

How the fuck does that even happen?’

OK, so I’m putting it in quotes but it’s not really a quote, it’s what I said when I woke up on Tuesday.

A lot of looking after someone with dementia is wishing them dead before the grim bit starts and then feeling really guilty about it.

It’s not that I don’t love Mum. I love her utterly. It’s not even that I find her difficult to love the way she is now. Far from it! It’s not that I can’t enjoy her company the way she is now, again, far from it. We have really good fun some visits. It’s just that I miss real Mum so much and I want her back. And I know she’s frightened and I don’t want her to go through the scary last bit.

‘Please God spare her that,’ I beg.

‘Fuck off and do one, Mary,’ says God.

Mum’s been petrified of getting dementia all her life. Scared enough to mention it to me on numerous occasions. And now … I wish her a gentle death while she can still be in denial. I want her to die before I have to mortgage her house from under her, or move her somewhere else because we can’t afford the care anymore and there’s nothing else left to sell. And who knows, she might be find if she goes and lives with my bruv. It might be fantastic and we might end up wondering why on God’s green earth we didn’t do it sooner. But her family are her carers now and leaving them would definitely be a wrench. And I can’t write this stuff without crying, and I just can’t cry right now or I’ll be undone. And I can’t be undone. And I’ve cried so much already. I’m so bored of being sad and crying.

That, right there, people is my baggage.

Let’s unpack it!

Let’s not, I hear you cry. Unlucky. This is my blog and I can do what I fucking well like. Also, I’ve had vertigo for seven days so I’m not in the mood to be tactful, gentle, accommodating or, in fact, to be pleasant in any way. You have been warned.

Right then. MT pauses to put her rant goggles on. I’m going to rail at the system here. It’ll do fuck all good but it makes me feel better. Off we go.

What kind of person does that statement in the big letters up there make me? Probably a git, but mostly, just an exhausted one. If you are diagnosed with any form of dementia and you are unlucky enough to live in the UK you are absolutely fucked. You see, we have a national health service, but it’s chronically underfunded and has been by successive governments. Case in point, Doctors have had static pay or tiny pay rises for so long that, in real terms, looking at what they earn versus cost of living increases, they claim their pay has dropped by 30% in real terms. I can believe it.

The NHS is full of agencies employing other agencies, ‘to save money’. But agencies are a false economy. For example, say you need help after an operation. In the area where I’m familiar with the rates of car fees, the NHS is paying £25 an hour for the people who pop in twice a day to and help you dress and undress. A self employed carer will cost you £15. Agencies do the admin, so basically, the NHS is paying £10 an hour for admin for each patient. That’s because it looks cheaper on paper than employing a bunch of people to do the care and others to administer it all in-house.

Since it’s as cash-strapped as the rest of us, the NHS is always on the look out for ways to save money. One way is to discriminate against people with illnesses which are expensive or lengthy to treat. Come in Dementia, your time is up.

You see, there wasn’t much to do at the end of World War 2 except shag and have babies. There was a huge population explosion. Now all those kids are reaching the age where they are getting dementia. That’s a lot of people at once and that’s expensive.

What is the NHS response to this? Well, since Dementia patients are expensive to care for and successive Governments were refusing to find it properly, the NHS dumped its dementia patients. They now refuse to provide ongoing care to the majority of dementia sufferers. Occasionally people take them to the High Court and they are forced to provide ‘free healthcare at the point of demand’ for a dementia sufferer the way their charter says they’re supposed to. But it takes many years (1998 – 2011 in the case of the lady I know) and more energy than most people who are trying to look after someone demented have to spare. The only people with access to dementia care from the outset are the lucky ones who have no savings, and even then it’s a post code lottery.

Drugs? Yes, they’ll give you drugs (much good may it do because did I mention that THERE’S NO FUCKING CURE!) Stuff you really need, ie support and care? No.

Dementia is the long slow death of a thousand tiny cuts. It takes years to die of dementia. Bit by bit, little tiny piece by little tiny piece, you fade away. Worse, because the NHS made this decision not to deliver ongoing dementia care relatively recently, the current generation of dementia sufferers with more than £14k to their name have not taken out insurance, or planned for treatment. So we have this broken, semi-American system where half of it is free but there’s only nascent insurance to cover the other half. Indeed, if you have dementia, and savings, you will need a craptonne of money and there is NO financial advice about managing this. There are millions of people in the UK facing this every day and you cannot find financial advice for love nor … well … yes … money. All you can do is find folks who will help you with the various aspects, mortgages, care annuities etc.

Unless a person with dementia has less than £14,000 in the bank, the only available care for them is what they can pay for, or family members. Bear in mind, I have admitted that I’m struggling to cope with Mum’s admin, being a mum and trying to write the occasional book. But I am not trying to look after a spouse with a profound cognitive disability at the same time. Mum was.

If you look at guidelines for carers, what their hours should be, their rest breaks etc, you will see that there are laws about this. The tacit implication of that is that Government acknowledges that being a carer is not a job one person can do alone 24/7 year in, year out with no respite. Ever. Except that they clearly think that if you have a family member with dementia you have some magical bionic transformation because that’s what the family of every single dementia sufferer in the UK with more than 14k in the bank is expected to do, until the money runs out.

If ever there is a group of people who need help facing their illness it’s dementia sufferers and their loved ones. Dementia ravages everyone involved. It’s horrific.

If ever there was a group of people with less help available facing their illness, it’s dementia sufferers and their loved ones. Ha fucking ha.

Except that looking after a demented spouse with the risible amount of help available can and does kill some people.

I guess what I’m saying here is that Mum’s dementia was almost certainly brought on by the stress of looking after Dad, with his. Old people are proud and they won’t accept help. In the case of Mum and Dad, at the beginning, I suspect they also knew what ‘helping’ would do to me and my brother, and as loving parents, they tried to protect us from that for as long as they possibly could, which turned out to be until Mum’s health broke down in 2015. We finally managed to get her and Dad live-in care in the Spring of 2016.

Right now, this seems to be the story with anything in the NHS. Once again, it’s a false economy. Like their bizarre insistence that I could not have a knee replacement until I was 60, meaning that I now have arthritis in my other knee and both hips from walking awkwardly due to the pain. Even if they can fob me off about the other limbs when the time comes, they’ll still have to provide me with a wheelchair, painkillers, crutches, someone to help me wash and dress every day … I doubt a couple of years of that are cheaper than a 12 grand knee replacement, yet the whoever is in charge of this stuff at the NHS is clearly convinced they are.

Going back to dementia. You might ask why I think this is unjust. Why I believe people deserve to keep their life savings.

Well, first of all, while I know and understand the fact that by the time I’m elderly, any kind of healthcare will be a luxury for the rich these people don’t. They were led to believe they would pay taxes and that those taxes would buy them free health care and security in their old age. They were led to believe, all their lives, that Britain was a welfare state and would remain one. I think one of the cruellest things about dementia is that, unless you’re lucky enough to die of something else first, it takes years and years to die of it. A dementia diagnosis in the UK is a fast-track to slow-motion destitution and death.

If we really have to punish people for saving and putting money aside for a rainy day, then, for the love of god, can’t they keep their house? It’s the saddest thing that, from the Hippocratic Oath/compassionate medicine side of the equation, it’s well known that a dementia sufferer will do better in familiar surroundings. The nature of the disease is such that usually, they have to go into a home at some point, but in the initial and middle stages, a change of surroundings will confuse them more and accelerate their condition.

As I understand it, this is a known medical fact.

Her knowledge of this is the reason why Mum didn’t downsize when Dad was ill — because it would confuse him — and of course, by the time Dad finally died she was too demented, herself, for us to do it. This being the case, you’d think that there would be a mechanism for a person with dementia to stay in their own home, wouldn’t you? But oh no. If a dementia sufferer is living alone then, once their money is gone, they must sell their house and everything else they possess to fund their care fees. They might have paid taxes and worked all their lives but they must now surrender the money they’ve saved. The money they’ve already paid tax on so that they could have free healthcare.

Obviously having dementia isn’t shitty enough, oh no, the NHS the Government the local authority or whoever the fuck it is sure as hell isn’t going to look after any demented person until they’ve been stripped of everything.

How is that humane? Every step of dementia care in the UK right now seems to be along the lines of, ‘How can we make it worse for them? What will make them suffer more? Hey look! This one lets us shit on their families as well! Good-oh! We’ll do that.’

Worse, it’s not just cruel, it’s dangerous. Because dementia care is a social services ‘problem’ and down to your local authority, it means that whether or not there’s a place in a secure home for you is very much a post code lottery. Here in Suffolk, there are people who have to travel 60 miles to Peterborough to visit loved ones because that’s where the nearest secure dementia home with a place was situated when their loved one needed it. There are other people who regularly pick up demented wandering parents from the police station after they’ve been found wandering at night … because there isn’t even a secure place for them 60 miles away in Peterborough.

Luckily for Mum and Dad, Sussex contains the south coast and towns like Worthing which are still home to large numbers of elderly people who appear to have gone to them to die and then forgotten what they went there for. Despite being a bit more hip and nascent Brighton spill-over, Worthing is still well supplied with elderly people and care homes. Even so, it took three weeks to find a place in a secure dementia home for Dad while he was in hospital, and that was only because we had already started the process with Social Services and they were already looking to place him. We were incredibly lucky.

People with dementia need secure care, or an adult living in with them because otherwise they do weird things; they go walking along the A14 at four in the morning in their pyjamas because they think it’s day time, they drive down streets on the wrong side of the road, they go ‘home’ to someone else’s house in the middle of the night because they used to live there and they’ve forgotten they don’t any more, they get confused at road junctions and end up driving the wrong way down a dual carriageway (these are all things demented people have done and in all but one case, they are the demented loved ones of people I know). And sometimes, when they do these things, especially in cars, other people get hurt or killed. It’s not just the carers who are broken apart.

Cutting out dementia care isn’t only ruining the lives of those who suffer from it and their families, it’s harming a whole host of invisible others.

I wish I could say that government or anyone anywhere gave a flying fuck about any of this, or us, but it isn’t true. I’m just railing into the wind. I know that … but it makes me feel better.

Thank you for listening.

On a completely different note …

If you want something to take the taste away from my insane rantings, there’s always a free book.

Yes, Small Beginnings, K’Barthan Extras, Hamgeean Misfit: No 1 is free to download in ebook format from all the major retailers and you can also get the audiobook for free from my web store.

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

 

 

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25 Jun 2022 · 5:18 pm

And his mummy cried …

This week, I was thinking about discussing world events but looking at them … for fuck’s sake. I can’t bring myself to do it. Let’s look at the fact America has passed its first gun legislation since 1994! Bloody well done America, we’ll ignore your apparent descent into the abyss on the women’s rights front because let’s face it, nothing’s more important than life, including a life worth living.

Seriously though, we need to relearn the art of deep thought—or, indeed, any thought. Fast.

illustration

We have to learn that not everyone who is different from us is a monster.

There is a standard branding technique that is supremely effective it’s this: make people feel they are part of a group, part of a tribe. Make them feel they have found their home with us (the brand). It speaks to our most primal instincts. The trouble starts when politicians get hold of it.

First up, the most motivating thing to a primal critter such as a human is fear, so they aim to use that. At the same time, as politicians, they also want a certain amount of control because what they want is your vote. They want you to feel that by joining their cause you are part of a warm fuzzy loving community that is fighting against a dangerous and unseen enemy. They want you to feel the blitz spirit of WW2, except over things that are not nearly as serious a threat. But to get that motivation, that solid Dunkirk spirit, they have to scare you enough for you to feel as if they, you and the people with whom you stand are, literally, holding back the forces of chaos. They use strong NLP trigger words like ‘war’ to validate the importance of your fight and write robust and forthright articles showing you that you need to press your cause, for the public good and those who oppose you must be ignored or walked over, for their own good.

Example: We are at war with litter louts, the war on noise pollution, etc. It’s all bollocks and actually trivialises issues which, while not on a war footing, are still important.

Stupid twats.

Once they’ve got you scared enough to think you’re fighting a ‘war on …’ whatever it is, rape or incest victims I mean sorry, people who asked for it as we’re probably meant to call them from now on, or possibly dissolute women who can’t say no*, whatever it is this week, they want you to feel self congratulatory and smug. How do they do that? By pointing at other tribes and saying stuff like,

‘Look at these folks. They’re not like you. They’re scary. They’re threatening us. They’re taking our jobs. They’re not on the run from extremist states, they’re just here to sponge off our welfare system. We’re not undermining your human rights so we can take over. We are taking difficult but necessary steps because they are planning a bloodless coup. They have control of the mainstream media. We need to stick together and fight them, No is still the best form of contraceptive if they didn’t listen and screwed you anyway it’s your fault.’ etc.

* Yes that was inflammatory but I’m fucking angry.

This is, as one of the historical masters at the art put it, ‘persuading one group of people that another group of people is less than human.’ These days. There’s a lot of it about. Big business owns most things. The richest individuals own everything, including many politicians and the newspapers. Democracy and a fair society is not in their interest. Nothing must stand in the way of them accruing more wealth because the billions they already have aren’t enough.

On a side note though, have you ever wondered why, in the UK, people on the political fringes attempt to undermine the BBC? It’s because for all it’s flaws and Oxbridge elitism, it’s the nearest thing to an impartial press we have … oh, along with Private Eye.

I have friends from a wide range of social and political backgrounds as our common ground is often a hobby, such as detecting, writing, foraging, wine, music … whatever. I know seemingly benign and friendly folk who will turn round and tell me they believe stuff that is pretty fucking appalling. The thing is though, sometimes, not always, but often, they are people I get on with in the context in which I see them. Because we’re not talking about their offensive views, we’re discussing book marketing, or foraging, or some other topic upon which we completely agree. Sometimes I take the piss out of them for being very right wing, or out of myself for being the token bleeding-heart liberal in their life/club/forum whatever.

The way I see it, if I suddenly discover an author friend holds views that puts them close to being Marxist or something equally moronic, they are usually completely brainwashed into thinking that people of a different political persuasion are bad and that they shouldn’t mix with them. If all I can do is show them, by being the official bleeding-heart liberal of the group, that actually nothing is quite that black and white, then maybe I’ve done something good.

Sometimes, I continue to talk to people for the simple reason that, if they see that we agree on many things, there is a chance that they will understand that not everyone to the political left or right of them (depending where they are on the scale compared to me) is a threat to society, since I’m not.

Take away that ability to mix and people are sitting in an echo chamber and see nothing but their own views. Over time they find it increasingly difficult to mix with people who don’t believe the same things as them. After spending a lot of time on the internet, I, myself am finding this. Although I think our right wing, here in the UK, has moved a long, long way to the right of what ‘conservatism’ actually stood for when I was a kid. Either that or its PR has—presumably it’s gloating far right voters they are looking to steal, rather than centrists, like myself.

It’s important to be able to mix; I like to discuss stuff, you know, without evangelising or trying to win anyone over, but just because I’m really interested in what other people think and how they’ve come to their conclusions. I think, as human beings, it’s part of our nature to want to share our views so it’s important to be able to do so without getting too emotional, even if it’s hard. Take away this ability to share views and before you know where you are, you’ve got groups of feckless idiots smashing up synagogues and … the rest is history.

I’m not shitting you here, ceasing to engage, ghettoising ourselves or others … this is how wars start.

When you start to make people feel part of a tribe by playing on their fears of people or things they don’t know, pointing out the ‘threats’ posed by others, or as normal humans would call it, the ‘differences’ you get polarisation. The fact there are churches which will tell their congregations not to speak to, or mix with. non-christians … hmm, where in Christ’s teachings do we see that. Oh wait! I know. NOWHERE! That’s where.

Why are some people so bloody poisonous? But more to the point, why can’t they see? It’s like people are too scared to think. Too scared to face the grey areas between thou shalt and thou shalt not. It’s like a lot of people mull something over once and then decide what they’ll believe about it for the rest of their lives. Then, no matter how circumstances may change or what new facts may come to light they never revisit their opinion. How can people live like that? I mean sure, it’s nice and simple but it must be so empty.

Seriously, I am constantly revising my opinions on things. Is that weird? I think Brexit was a terrible idea but I’m interested as to why other folks disagree and actually, in many cases I totally get why they voted how they did.

Is it about confidence? Could it be? You see, I fuck up a lot, so I am not in any way afraid to admit to getting things wrong. You can only be carpeted by the headmaster so many times before you start to give a bit less of a shit about how other people see you and a bit more of a shite about how you, personally, see yourself and what you are actually like.

Maybe people perceive changing their minds as a sign of weakness which they’re too afraid to show. Certainly I know there are people who mistake my tendency to be accommodating with being a push over. But surely, if someone perceives changing their mind — or compromising — as a sign of weakness and failure, they’ll never be able to revise their opinions about anything. Whereas, if a person is genuinely strong, they will have the confidence to change their mind over things when new facts emerge or their experience alters. Let’s face it, no-one’s ever going to be afraid of people thinking that they’re weak if they know, in their hearts, that they aren’t.

Often, I wonder if a lot of these people who hold very fixed or hard opinions simply do so because they don’t have the strength of character to cope with a world where nothing is certain. It is difficult, I know but sometimes, there is grey. Sometimes it’s a case of ‘Usually, thou shalt not but in this case, if thou art just, thou shalt …’

On other topics …

Yes! I am still reading through what I have of the current book and yes, it’s going OK, indeed, I’m enjoying reading what I’ve written, which is a bit of a turn up! I am also continuing to make accompanying notes to be sure I smooth out the bits I’ve cocked up.

There’s a terrible lull which I need to fix but essentially, it zips along. I just need to figure out the end; simple or complicated, that’s my choice. Simple may still make it very, very long so I might do complicated as that will be two books. Once I have finished I’ll decide where to split it and then I’ll send it out to beta readers, get it edited and do a kickstarter instead of a preorder.

Also the cosplay … I looked for cloaks online and I found this … it’s velvet but it’s very cool and you can stipulate what colours you want. Oh yes.

And on a lighter note …

My audiobook sale is still on and (woot) the odd person has even bought one here and there.

Not nearly enough to pay for the cost of the advertising but hey, you can’t win ’em all. If you want one, grab them while you can. Or if you want to encourage your friends to have a listen feel free to do so by clicking or sharing this link: https://www.hamgee.co.uk/cmot

Last but not least …

I think this song is pertinent today. Personally, I think procreation isn’t the answer without some promise of a life worth living afterwards. Could I have an abortion, no I couldn’t. But if someone else needs to for their mental or medical health, it’s not my business to stop them. The original name for this song was The Vicious Circle. It’s also worth reading this article.

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2 Apr 2022 · 6:44 pm

Weird things …

It’s been an interesting week this week. I did a lot of writing and discovered that I’ve spent the last three weeks going in the wrong direction. After that I went back to what I thought was square one and off in another direction, only to discover that was wrong, too. So now it’s back to another point where it went wrong. It feels right this time, though so I think it probably is and of the binned scenes, it’s probably the outcome of second one that’s right with a kind of mash up of the two beforehand.

So now I’ve managed about 800 words in what looks like it’s the right direction. I might have to sit down and do a time line or just work out how many plot threads I have before I go on though because it seems to be getting a bit hectic. And I so want the gunfight in the balloon factory where the helium canisters start leaking. I suspect I’m losing my grip on it because of the Mum thing, in which case, I need to make some kind of timeline/table of what happens when so I can lean on that and write it by numbers. Right now though, I’m just really enjoying writing it. Also, I’ve found a tracer I put in The Last Word that I’d forgotten about. I think I can use that to make it into something a bit longer, just another 12k or so to get it novella length.

I have also made a start on cataloguing my massive collection of sci-fi tat! That’s five items done so far. More on that story … next week … probably.

Other news, I’m going to be putting my author hat on (more on that story, in a moment) and going to two events this year to flog books. The first is St Albans comic-con in July, the second; Norcon (Norwich) in September. Several of us in my local authors’ group have booked a table so we can share the work, cover loo breaks and that kind of stuff. Also it’s much easier waxing lyrical about someone else’s books other than one’s own.

While we were discussing it a few weeks back the topic of cosplay came up.

Cosplay anyone? Er … no.

When people go to conventions, quite a lot of them dress up as their favourite sci-fi character. We discussed who we could be and whether going as characters from our books would be fun. The first question to me was, ‘Are you going as full Lord Vernon?’ Mwahahahargh!

Sadly, though I’m sorely tempted, I felt that the green face paint involved was probably a step too far. And suede gloves in July. A Big Merv-style suit with a light blue pinstripe was an option but it might make me look more like The Doctor.

The face is wrong but the hat’s right. Big Merv isn’t big enough either Mwahahahrg!

That left The Pan of Hamgee. He is my favourite character, except when I prefer one of the others, because they’re like kids. It’s hard to pick one. He also wears a hat, which is nice and distinctive; a cross between a Mel and Kim hat and a Zorro hat. Like Zorro he also wears a cloak, but it’s ankle length—unlike 1960s Zorro … although, did the Antonio Banderas version have a long cloak? Maybe he did. I can’t remember, anyway, onwards. The Pan wears a velvet jacket—I’m thinking the kind of gothic brass buttoned number you might have seen on members of Pink Floyd in the 1960s—and obviously the canvas jeans and elastic-sided boots. How much of this shizz do I have? Oh look! Everything except the hat!

Woot.

Hang on though.Does it fit?

… No. Not even the cloak.

Now what?

Go shopping of course.

First the shirt. Since my enormous, post baby, H-Cup boobs are too big to jemmy into any of my old shirts, I started with that. There are three vintage clothing shops in town, I found it at the second. It’s not quite as virulent as I’d hoped and it’s not silk, because silk paisley shirts are about 200 quid, but it’s dark blue cotton and perfectly good for this. If I find another one somewhere, I’ll buy that. In the meantime, job done I’d say. Next, I have the jeans and I also have some suede, elstic-sided boots. The most comfortable pair for a warm day is pink, which is the best that I can do.

Next … the hat.

Until I was about 40 I used to wear a hat every day. Usually a fedora, a wide brimmed trilby or a straw boater in the summer. I especially liked the hats worn by two stars called Mel and Kim in the 1980s but never bought one when they were ‘in’ and kicked myself for ever after.

However, a few years later at the Spanish/French border, I saw something very similar in the gift shop. I was on a coach trip and it was just a bathroom break so there wasn’t time to buy one—and they were too expensive anyway—but I did now know that Mel and Kim wore Spanish Flamenco Hats. Clearly then, since there is more than a hint that the original Zorro was hispanic, the Spanish Flamenco Hat would be the place to start.

A rigorous search on t’interweb revealed that yes there are such things and you can actually have one made for you for 120 Euros! Or you can buy one for 50 Euros. They were pretty much right but I couldn’t find a company that would ship to the UK … because bloody Brexit. Ugh. On the up side, there is a type of riding display where the horsemen and women wear these hats and there are sites selling them to horse people.

So then I thought what about Portugal … I mean, Britain’s oldest ally at 600 years and there’s the port logo right? The police officers mention that in The Wrong Stuff. So I googled, Portuguese traditional hat, and one of the things that came up was this. Oh my lord! Perfect. Even better it was a shade over 30 Euros from a Portuguese riding shop.

Yep. This, my friends, is a Bolero, one of the traditional hats of Portugal. It is also the hat worn by the geezer on the Sandyman port logo and the hat of choice if you want to look like Lee Van Cleef, or even Clint Eastwood, in The Good The Bad and The Ugly. Those are traditional Portuguese cowboy hats … totally different to the Texan thing, y’all but very much what you see them wear in the films.

Yeh. Well … the hat helps a lot. That’s the shirt.

Interestingly, while I was researching all of this, I discovered why the Sandyman port geezer has a cloak as well as a hat. This is not because he’s a cowboy—though a cloak would be practical to keep you and the horse warm and dry, Drizabone style. Nope. The Sandyman geezer is just a student. Mwahahahrgh! That hat and cloak is what Portuguese students wore when the logo was designed. They still do at some universities. I suspect the public image of port has altered somewhat since then, either that or students weren’t perennially brassic the way they are now.

Plastic loo-seat-shaped hat preserver.

It arrived in a huge box and since I was buying the hat I also bought a thing that looks like a clear plastic loo seat which keeps it flat and in shape … see below.

The correct way to wear it if you’re Portuguese is tilted to the left, if you are a British lady you’re supposed to tilt it to the right. I think I’ll wear mine going left the Portuguese way from now on.

I love that by pure happenstance The Pan’s father, the original owner of his cloak and hat—and lecturer at the University of Hamgee—turns out to have dressed as a Portuguese student. It kind of works too becuase in my mind’s eye, The Pan was always olive skinned until his blood went blue.

Other interesting factoid. Blood in its natural state actually IS blue at some stages in its journey round the body. It’s only when it hits the air and oxygenates that it goes red.

So there we are. Funny what you find out isn’t it?

On a different note …

If you’ve stumbled on this page looking for information about hats and are now wondering who on earth all these imaginary people are well … there are some books about that and they don’t even all cost money. Feel free to read one of the free ones if you’d like to give them a try. You can find a list of them, with links to buy them from the major stores, and mine, at the end of this smashing link here:

MTM’s Books

Or you can sign up to my mailing list and grab Night Swimming for free here:

Night Swimming

 

 

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1 May 2021 · 5:23 pm

Unicorn farts and other sundry ephemora

This is going to be a short one because it’s twenty past five, which means I have approximately forty minutes to write my usual fifteen hundred word blog post. Hmm. Isn’t going to happen.

Looking at my notes to write about this week they read as follows:

  • Auto correct and bloody Duke
  • Metal detecting and throwing a six

That is all. Okay… off we go then.

Metal Detecting and throwing a six

Saxon ... thing.
A Saxon … thing.

Quite pertinent as I write this, that one. Yesterday, to my absolute delight, I was invited along to a friend’s permission to do some detecting. It was an old club permission so I’ve been going there for a while. The land owner is thoroughly good egg and it’s a lovely spot.

The last time I was there I found a crushed silver thimble from the 1600s I think, and a hammered coin. I love finding stuff from that era because it was such a stormy time in our past. Anything less civil than our Civil War is hard to imagine. You know I’m fairly obsessed because I’ve told you the story about a house called Woodbines which my family lived in, in Kingston, although I’m not sure it’s on this blog. You can read it on the blog on my official author’s site, which I no longer post to, down the end of this link here. Excuse the lack of pictures. I believe that if you’re using a picture to illustrate something under discussion, on a personal blog, it’s supposed to be fair use. However, I still got hit by copyright trolls. I don’t want to risk a huge bill, but also I don’t want to inadvertently pirate photos. I thought it was clear cut but it seems not. Hence, I’ve removed the three pictures I, personally, haven’t taken from all my blogs and two of them were on that post.

Where was I? Oh yeh, so I love Civil War era artefacts mainly because that era was so uncivil and it makes me feel close to a very turbulent part of our history.

The thimble wasn’t my first bit of treasure, there was a bit of Anglo Saxon strap end previously to that from another permission. Both were interesting and have to go through the process by din’t of being silver, rather than particularly brilliant in any respect. That said, a museum somewhere might want the thimble because it’s a bit rarer, coming as it does from an era in history when they were being melted down to make coins to fund the war effort. The modern day ‘evangelists’ yelling ‘Jesus needs your money’ on telly are clearly nothing new since the Puritans really believed they were doing God’s work. Humourless and uptight, they were eventually kicked out of the UK and a lot of them became the founding fathers of America. I’m wandering off on one though.

So we started detecting. The setting is one of the many studs in this neck of the woods and our main purpose is to get any big or spiky bits of iron out of the ground after a piece injured one of the horses a few years ago. This week there was a gorgeous little foal who was too shy to be photographed. I nearly managed it though. After a while I felt I should try and actually find some iron, it wasn’t going very well, I was digging what I thought were big crap signals and discovering, after digging a very deep hole, that the thing that had caused the bing was not iron. Eventually, I got what, in theory, should be a decent bing and sure enough, down in the hole, I found a random silver bit of something. I checked the hole but a bit was all there was. I thought it was either arts and crafts or Saxon. To be honest there wasn’t going to be any middle ground.

Now, having consulted smarter people I am pretty sure it’s Saxon, so that’ll be off to the treasure process then. On the up side, it’s so good it’s likely to come from a grave so there may be more of it. Even better, we should be back on the site this week so I will be able to have a look. But the thing I find most amazing is that when I pulled it out of the ground, mine were the first hands to touch it since someone living six to eight hundred years after the death of Christ pinned it, grieving, to the tunic of a recently dead loved one.

Where is the throwing a six bit to this? Well, I have this theory. I’ve never found gold or anything like that with my detector and I’ve always assumed that my main problem there is the walking over it bit. Because I think, to walk over something really valuable like a hoard or a piece of valuable gold, you have have a certain kind of luck. I remember as a kid playing Ludo with my family. You had to throw a six to start and then you threw the dice to go round the board and back into your ‘home’. The person who got all four of their counters home first was the winner. I remember sitting there, round after round, trying to throw a six to get out and failing dismally. Often I’d not succeed to get anyone out onto the board until my brother’s first counter was already ‘home’. Then Mum, who had similar dice throwing skills, and I would make our way round the board throwing a one each time.

I was always last.

The luck that follows me is not the kind of luck that wins me many premium bonds … or board games. When the Unicorn farts, I am usually up-wind or indoors or … I dunno … facing the wrong way. Except for people; there’s the McOthers, many of my friends and a lot of the colleagues I’ve stumbled upon through my working and writing life. Work stuff would clearly be things like Gareth popping up and wanting to narrate my books … well it could only have been a cloud of sparkly unicorn gas that wafted that piece of good fortune my way! Bloody hell! And nothing gives a person a bigger lift than when someone with a generous dollop of talent in their own field seems to think your stuff is good, I mean he is an actor but I think that’s genuine! Mwahahargh. Also Katherine Jackson, who taught me so much about editing, while editing my books and really had no business dying like that. I still miss her. Then there’s the lovely folks who do my covers, who I blundered upon because they were the people my employers used. And the lovely folks I’ve met and become cyber buddies with in my authoring efforts. But that’s not the luck I’m talking about. The luck I mean is the throwing a six and winning at board games kind of luck.

Am I content with that? Well yes, I think for the most part I am. If I can only choose one, I’ll take the one I have. But reverting to the silver thing – actually I’m pretty sure it’s a silver gilt thing – it’s clearly a tiny fragment of something special. What, exactly, I do not know but, as I mentioned before, most likely it’s grave goods. A brooch pinned to the clothes of a very loved, cherished and high-status dead person before burial so they would be looking at their best in the next life. The rest of it is probably still there somewhere … if I can find it.

If …

Part of me thinks – possibly a little churlishly – that were I the kind of person who could throw a six on a regular basis, I’d have found the whole thing. Another part of me realises that even this tiny fragment is like throwing a double five, a whole one would be the find of a life-time. It’s not that they’re rare, although they are, I believe, but one that good, whole, would be a hen’s teeth job. On the other hand, it definitely ties in with my ability to find interesting things. The ideal, of course, being something interesting enough to be fabulous (to me) but not so interesting it’s worth stacks and I have to sell it! And then another part of me is thinking that I’ll be back there next Thursday. I was chatting to the ex finds liaison officer for this area on line. He told me that in his time, someone had found a fragments of a similar things, returned to the site and found more … Mmm. I’ll keep you posted.

Autocorrect and bloody Duke

A brief one here. Anyone who knows me, personally, will know that when it comes to communication, using my phone, if I’m not speaking, is the bane of my life as it is one long battle with auto correct/auto complete. Auto whatever it is is like wearing a gag, although if I turn auto correct off it seems to be even worse. Part of the problem is that I use the swift keyboard – the Google one.

What is wrong with that thing? It seems to be possessed by some dyslexic demon with an exotic name fetish. Case in point, here in the UK, on the whole, Duke is a surname, a title or something you call your dog. I do not know anyone called Duke as a first name and I think, in the entire two years, so far, that I’ve owned this phone that I’ve typed the word ‘Duke’ on purpose, twice. Yet, whenever I type the word ‘done’ Duke is what it gives me. Not only does it give me Duke but if I change it to done and continue I will find, when I hit send, that it’s quietly changed ‘done’ back to Duke again. Every. single. fucking. time.

Someone or sometime. Bog-standard words. Often used you’d have thought. Summertime. Not so common. Uh-uh-uh, says Auto correct. Every time I type either of those words it defaults to summertime. This is with actual real auto correct switched off. This is just the stupid slidey keyboard getting it wrong. Then there’s or. What is so fucking difficult about understanding it when my finger is sliding from the o to the r key? I’ve no clue but what I get for ‘or’ is out or put. And once again that’s every. fucking. time.

I read somewhere that these things work by looking at what the normals type, averaging it out and offering suggestions. Lord above I haven’t a fucking hope then have I? I mean, look at the words I use. OK so it’s learned the word, K’Barthan. That said it seems to unlearn it and have to be taught afresh from time to time. I’ve no idea why that is. But if it can learn that when I type in K’ I’m going to be saying K’Barthan because that’s what I type every time I write K’ then why the fuck can’t it learn, by the same logic, that every time I type in Mc I’m going to type McGuire? Why is it able to understand that I spell ‘realise’ without an ess rather than a zed but at the same time, be pathologically unable to grasp that if, every time I type done and it offers me Duke I cancel it and type done again until it accepts it, I must actually mean done. Why, when I type in the letters d-o-n-e and not Duke, does it default to Duke, a word I never type, comprising completely different fucking letters?

Also, new factor here. Random capitalisation. If I am in the middle of a sentence, or sometimes in the middle of a word it will suddenly give me a capital letter so I get stuff like,

Hello, how are You doiNg today?

Mental. It’s not as if I’m typing the name of some obscure chemical that is only written by out in full every six million years. These are bog-standard words that everyone uses. Seriously though, who, in God’s name, are the people it’s taking averages from to work out how english … well … you know … works? What in the name of holy fuck are they saying to produce the shit-show that is my phone’s text suggestions? I can only assume it’s mostly folks in Asia where English is used a lot but isn’t anyone’s first language, or that my vocabulary is simply too wide for the parameters of the algorithm to operate. (Really, though? Sounds doubtful.)

At a complete loss, I tried speaking to it. But it can’t understand my fucking accent! My fucking ENGLISH accent for fuck’s sake! The other day I was speaking a sentence which involved the phrase, ‘power of attorney’. My phone decided I’d said, ‘parrot Ernie.’ Give me fucking strength!

As a result, I find myself typing each word tiny letter by tiny letter and the phone, which should be something I can use to quickly reply to stuff, turns into a time sink.

Bah! Swift key? There’s a fucking oxymoron if ever I heard it.

Bookish things …

Yeh, those. So, this month, was officially the worst in about three years for sales.

Last April, I made £408.74 in book sales. This April, I made, er hem, about £65 if I count the sale on my website. Then again it’s up on April 2019 when I made £56.68. Mmm.

Something appears to have happened to Amazon, maybe it’s because I dicked with my series pages – as in changed the name from ‘K’Barthan Trilogy Series’ to K’Barthan Series. Actually no, thinking about that it wasn’t this month. But needless to say, the K’Barthan Trilogy, while disappearing completely from my dashboard, is still alive and well on Amazon. I now have a two book series called the K’Barthan Trilogy (it contains books three and four) which appears nowhere on my dashboard and is therefore undeletable, but alas, all over Amazon. I will sort it out but at the moment I just don’t have the strength of will to deal with emailing KDP customer service repeatedly until they stop giving me boiler plate answers to some other vaguely related question, finally read my actual query and give me a bastard answer.

On the up side, I discovered something weird about myself. Because I’ve made about forty quid on Amazon this month, instead of a hundred and fifty, my wide sales are a much bigger percentage. For the first time they are over a third; 34%. For some bizarre reason, this makes me feel fantastic. Audiobooks, I still appear to be unable to give the bloody things away off Amazon/Audible – except for the odd library purchase or sale on Google Play. Ebooks though, there’s a weeny hint of movement from non-Amazon vendors. This may be because I’ve been actively advertising to people in countries where Amazon companies are not the number one supplier.

It’s not that I don’t like Amazon as a customer, it’s alright, except it’s getting harder and harder to find out how to pay for anything I buy without joining Prime – talk about black pathways. But while I don’t want to penalise Amazon users, I have no wish to be beholden for my income to a company with such rancid corporate ethics, so ideally, I’d like to see a lot of my income derived elsewhere.

Sales last month with unfeasibly high percentage wide because Amazon was low. This month because there’s only been one day, and Amazon sales continue to flatline, I’ve sold a book on Kobo and am 100% wide for a while! Yay!

Yes, here I am a hundred dollars plus down on my monthly earnings and I’m not nearly as pissed off as I should be – and year-on-year looking at 2018 and 2019 they were about the same – but the distribution of sales over the different platforms is making me happier than money? Well yes. But also it’s because the action on other platforms seems to be increasing a teeny bit. Even better, as my Amazon sales continue to flatline, I have sold my first book of the month, on the first day, from Kobo. Yes, for a while I have a 100% wide sales chart. This also makes me unaccountably happy. There is zero logic in this. I am doing badly and I should be worried but strangely I care more about increasing my sales elsewhere (which is really hard) than on Amazon. I appreciate it sounds a bit touched in the head. But Amazon is difficult to deal with and has the corporate ethics of a morally louche confidence trickster. All its rules are enforced by AI but it’s the cheapest crappest AI possible – NOT like the algorithm at all – which means they are totally inconsistent and their measures ridiculously draconian, often with no appeal or recourse.

Amazon’s customers love the experience but they mostly do prime. The books I’m interested in are usually like my own, outside Kindle Select so I know I wouldn’t maximise the benefits of Prime. Also I don’t understand people who pay £7 a month for netflix, £7 a month for prime, £7 a month for Spotify and so on ad infinitum. All those invisible direct debits chipping away at my income … the thought gives me hives. I need to know the cash is going out. Then again, I am eclectic and have a wide range of interests. Therefore, just as auto correct throws up its hands and has a melt down trying to predict what I will say, so a subscription algorithm probably isn’t going to deliver me with what I require once it is tweaked for commercial gain. Since Amazon’s algorithms are now driven by advertising payments rather than entirely by the desires of the customer, it’s unlikely I’d find what I wanted there. And since Spotify has announced that it, too, will be shifting to that model, I’d suspect theirs will become the same.

I appreciate that the Normals like Prime and Amazon’s customer service is excellent for those who fit their ideal customer criteria (I don’t). But to deal with as a distributor, Amazon is extremely high maintenance. Clearly, they are important and I will always have my books there, but ideally, I want the lion’s share of my income and interaction to be with entities where things are smoother, pleasanter and better run. And where my royalties will not inexplicably go tumbling from over £300 a month to £40. Not to mention that the other sites, and my own, all pay me higher royalties than Amazon for book sales. That’s just business logic innit?

And now, some free stuff and a lot of Things On The End …

Small Beginnings …

Small Beginnings: Ebook version

This month, I have mostly been doing some marketing. I have two things that might be useful. First, Small Beginnings is now free pretty much everywhere except Amazon. I’m hoping it will go free at Amazon eventually.

Normally if I reduce books in price to zero pence elsewhere Amazon makes it free on their own but they don’t seem to have noticed this time. Anyway, if you’d like to bag yourself a free copy of Small Beginnings, or you know someone who might, you can find a page with links to download it. NB, in this particular case, avoid my online shop as I haven’t sorted out a discount code yet and Amazon, because … ditto. Yeh, still steeling myself to contact KDP help (shudders) with the web address of my book on every single Amazon site, followed by the web address of it shown as free on every single country Amazon serves on Kobo, Google Play and iBooks.

Kobo are featuring it in their free section this week, too. For that information link click here.

Unlucky Dip: Audiobook version

OK so you do actually get this as part of my mailing list sign up protocol but if you aren’t, and you have a boring half hour job to do and would like something to listen to to lighten your spirits while you do it, you can’t really go wrong with this. It’s all that is joyous and wonderful about Gareth doing his thing – albeit on a bit of writing that is, if I’m honest, not my best work. Never mind. That is free in two places this month, from iBooks and from Kobo. For links to that, click here.

Merchandise …

Finally, do you remember that K’Barthan merchandise I was talking about? Two developments on that one.

Thing one … If you would like to vote and haven’t yet, the quiz is still open for you to choose your favourite K’Barthan invective. because I have to send it to my mailing list in two week’s time as well! You can still vote for your favourite invective here.

Well I finally have a sort of shop, although it’s Zazzle so no-one will be able to afford anything – I’m working on other suppliers who are less expansive (and pay more royalties) – and also I haven’t finished adding products. But if you’re interested to see how it’s going and you want a gander, you can see that here.

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6 Jul 2019 · 9:12 pm

Angry

Real Life. Don’t you wish it would just fuck off and leave you alone sometimes?

I wondered about posting this but I am so bloody angry. Really. I am tired of the petty shitty meanness of my fellow countrymen and women. Their inability to use any imagination and appreciate another person’s point of view, their willingness to swallow propaganda without thinking. I’m fed up with fucking Brexit, with the EU behaving like an arse and the idiots in charge of us ignoring the potential of the commonwealth and instead pandering to the US who, I’m afraid, royally shafted the UK after WW2 and the current administration is, quite clearly, rubbing its hands with glee in anticipation of doing it aagain. But our government and influencers don’t seem to have noticed, or maybe they don’t care, more likely they’ve the kind of investments that mean there’s some personal cash in it for them somewhere down the line.

You see, if you want people to pay tax, they have to actually get something for it, all of them, not just the rich, or just the poor, everyone. And while we do get some things, a lot of other stuff has disappeared. What the government’s austerity plans teach us is this: Get up to your neck in debt, live for today, save nothing for tomorrow and have anything you want whenever you want it on HP. It’s best not to have any real money because at the end of your life, when you’re ill, they’ll take it anyway. Get into debt and your healthcare will be free at the point of delivery. Sure it will be on the terms of the NHS or your local authority but you won’t have to pay a bean for it.

Today, I was reading about the Brexit party arriving at the European Parliament. They turned their backs to show their disrespect for Europe when Ode to Joy played. It seemed utterly ungracious and it really pissed me off. These people hate Europe and hate the European Parliament but they’re happy to take a very large wage and a lot of expenses to go there and be rude. I remarked on facebook that it was so Kevin and Perry it was embarrassing and I really wondered how much more petty they could get.

A level-headed friend countered the argument with this.

Which makes sense.

However, while the sentiment on the T shirt is put fairly robustly, it says, ‘I don’t like this.’ The turned backs say, ‘I don’t like you.’

That’s my issue.

The turned backs make it personal.

That’s been my issue with the way the Brexit campaign was conducted all along. Them and us. Hence the polarisation. I think both sides of this debate are as bad as each other now but originally that kind of behaviour was only noticeable to me, as a punter watching it, from the Brexit side. Now that may be my perception but it’s how it looked to me.

And that’s not because the people who voted Brexit are nasty, either.

It’s just unfortunate that the leading, noisiest, pro Brexit leadership are conspicuously unpleasant even for politicians and yet also seem entirely typical for the party currently governing us.

We’ve got that bloke who’s trapped in the eighteenth century and looks as if he lives in a coffin, jeez I don’t even remember his fucking name. He probably thinks all these underprivileged families should be putting their kids down coal mines or up chimneys to earn cash. Obviously those of us who don’t earn or inherit astronomical wealth like his are too stupid to succeed so if they’re living in miserable penury it’s their fault. He doesn’t care if there’s no NHS, he’s fucking loaded and he probably pays for all his medical care anyway so he doesn’t have to go to hospital with the proles. He probably thinks that people who can’t earn enough money to pay for their medical care are failing to do so because they’re too stupid. I expect he thinks that’s their problem and if Brexit and Britain all goes tits up, well, he can just move to another country.

Then there’s Boris who doesn’t give a s*** about anything but Boris, and is such a massive cockwomble that he actually managed to go to Iran to negotiate for leniency for that poor woman who’s been accused of spying and instead blurted out that she was spying by mistake so they’ve put her in prison and thrown away the key. Well done. Great going. And has Boris shown any regret, any humility, or compassion or the tiniest, remotest hint of remorse? No, of course not! He doesn’t care because he’s an entitled fucking cunt.

You can just imagine him behind the scenes saying, ‘she’s only a woman, who gives a shit.’

And lastly, we have Nigel Farage who is a thinly disguised Nazi who has said he will leave if the UK goes tits up after Brexit … and like Hitler with his Jewish grandmother, he has German immigrant antecedents – for all his anti immigration stance – and has ensured that his children have German passports allegedly.

As someone who feels, personally, utterly betrayed by the conservative party and everything it stands for, Farage, Boris and the vampire bloke seem to be the epitome of everything I despise about the right wing in politics. Their sense of entitlement, their bombproof self love, their we’ve-got-money-and-we-can-cope so f*** you attitude really pisses me off.

Likewise the rest of the Conservatives, I am not impressed with their shafting people who have lived good lives and worked hard, or about the destruction of the national health service, which is only going to accelerate once Brexit goes through, about the fact that looking after people who are ill comes down to the name of the disease they have and if a disease has the wrong name, the person suffering from it will be left to fend for themselves or give everything that they have, including the house they live in, to pay for care which, again and again, has been proved in the high court should be delivered free.

To me Brexit is less about leaving Europe and more about handing our country to people like Boris, coffin man and Farage. And that worries me far more than any mere implications of leaving the EU. I suppose what I’m trying to say is it’s not Brexit itself that does my head in, it’s what it has unleashed.

They’re career politicians and politics is all they’ve known. If the rest of us were just too stupid to follow their lead and go into politics too it’s our own fault. That’s the attitude that comes over.

Fuckers.

Brexit, or at least, the shit that goes therewith, is one of the biggest arguments in favour of time travel I’ve seen.

How else have we ended up in a situation where a vacuous, self-serving, charmless, philandering yobbo like Boris Johnson is likely to be Prime Minister? And worse, where people are actually convinced he’s a decent bloke! If you made this shit up nobody would believe you. ‘Nobody’d be so dumb they’d follow that guy, he’s a twat!’ My readers would say. Yet here in Real Life nobody thinks it’s strange … is this a hex?

And what’s the alternative?

A man who admires the American model of healthcare, where the hypocratic oath comes second to payment. Where people willingly put payment for treatment in the hands of the insurance industry, an industry which, essentially, is there to scare you into giving them money and then, if something happens, find reasons not to give it back. I have American relations, I actually know someone who watched a man lying on a gurney left to suffer. He’d drunk bleach by mistake. He had no health insurance because he was poor so the hospital refused him treatment. No-one would touch him. He just lay there, writhing and groaning in agony. That’s zero fucking ethics any way you look at it. My relative did have insurance, so luckily he was wheeled in for treatment before he had to watch the man on the gurney actually die.

How fucked up does a nation have to be before it allows that? And how fucked up does another nation have to be to think it’s a good idea, and dismantle one of the best healthcare systems in the world to change to the insurance model.

Do we, in Britain, really want that? Are we that fucking cold?

Well, yes according to the Tory party – because compassion and empathy are for wimps aren’t they? They’ve been educating us for a while now haven’t they? The NHS is failing because evil people are coming to Britain from abroad and draining its resources. No, but a lot of people coming in from abroad fucking work there. It would fall on its arse without them. Then there’s the retirement age being pushed further and further back so it’s harder and harder for young people to get a job is because old people can’t let go of them. They’re fucking skint, no pension yet and they’ve got care fees to pay for their other half …

Here’s another one they’re peddling; everyone on benefits is milking the system, the disabled are freeloading bastards, they should work like everyone else. Yeh. Good idea, because you know my dad who worked all his life, paid taxes, and saved up so he and Mum would be OK in their old age. He became disabled, so he was a freeloading bastard in the end. Scrounging benefits from the state after a life time paying tax. Disgraceful!

Fancy my Dad expecting the state to honour its promise to care for him when he was ill. Sorry chum, your illness has the wrong name. You should have seen this coming and taken out an insurance plan against care fees. If he’d had a benign frontal lobe brain tumour, which would have produced exactly the same symptoms, my Dad’s treatment would have all been free.

Oh dear, John. You didn’t think you’d get to keep a penny did you? You’re not rich enough to be allowed to keep any. You have to be pushed down and kept there, your children too.

And while we’re at it, my Dad paid tax on his work pension, hang on though, it was taken from his wages, which he paid tax on, so it’s taxed twice. What?

And what happens to all the people who have grown up being promised free healthcare and aren’t insured, or people who’ve been disabled from a young age, so aren’t insured? Damaged your knee as a nipper? Won’t get any insurance on that. What happens to them? Oh hard luck, I’m afraid you’ll have to live with crippling pain because we’ve changed the rules. Yes, I realise you’re going to spend half your fifties in a wheelchair but you can only have two new knees each side so you can’t have one until you are sixty.* What will you do if you’re a fit and healthy seventy year old and you can’t walk?

I’ll be in a wheelchair! But I won’t care half so much if I’m fucking seventy as I do now you stupid Tory winnit! I’ll have bastard Alzheimer’s by then anyway.

* (Subtext, each one lasts for ten years, with any luck after a decade of excruciating pain, you’ll have died of some stress induced illness before we have to fork out for the second one). That’s the basic NHS strategy, only treat them at crisis point, don’t do anything preventative because with any luck they’ll die first.

Sometimes, I am just weary with the endless, grinding awfulness of it all.

The latest one … Mum only has a certain amount of cash to pay for carers. When that runs out -and it will, soon – we only have two ways forward.

  1. Persuade Mum to move somewhere smaller with less overheads and upkeep and pay her care fees with the cash from the house sale.
  2. Get planning permission to build all over Mum and Dad’s garden to up the value of the plot and get an endowment mortgage so she can stay where she is and still pay her care fees.

If she runs out of cash before the end, the local authority will not allow her to stay in the house. They only fund care in an institution and she will be forced to sell her house to pay for the fees. As I understand it, forcing her to move from her house and sell it isn’t legal. Forcing her to pay for care isn’t legal. After all, the NHS still says it’s free at the point of delivery and as I write this there isn’t an ‘if your illness has the right name’ caveat tacked on the end Animal Farm some-are-more-equal-then-others style. Once our new Prime Minister is settled in post, doubtless there will be.

We’re welcome to go to the High Court to prove it. But we won’t because it takes years and we don’t have years, do we? The politicians and NHS managers who decided to withdraw free healthcare for dementia sufferers know this of course, and they also know that watching someone you love slowly losing their mind is one of the most strength-sapping, soul-destroying, utterly cruel experiences available in the gamut of human experience. They know you won’t have the mental energy or capacity to fight them, they know you’re weak from carrying everything. They know that it’s all you can do to keep everyone’s heads above the water. They know that if they try to kick you into submission, you’ll go down.

Seriously? In this day and age. After the fall of the Berlin Wall. When we are supposed to be enlightened. When we are supposed to have learned where Nazism takes us and instead what are we doing? We’re going backwards. We’re trying to convince idiots that the world is round, that evolution is a real thing and that the holocaust actually happened. We’re losing our empathy, our sympathy, our compassion. That’s where it starts. With people glorying in their ignorance, with extremists undermining main stream news and others actually believing the hype. With people so nuts they even believe Australia isn’t real! What can you do in the face of moronism like that!

This shit can only be someone fucking with the time-line, right?

I am also still wading through the admin plus all the sundry admin associated with my dad dying. Jeez. Getting there on that one. It’s a case of writing a list of tasks and setting myself one thing a day.

On the up side, I needed a special number from the land registry to take Dad’s name off the house ownership. I was a bit pissed off at having to pay for information but OK with doing it. However, I didn’t know which bit of information I needed to purchase to get the number so I rang them. I was amazed to find there was a report a death option on the menu so I pressed the button and spoke to a lovely lady. I explained my predicament and she gave me the number without my having to pay. So there are times when it pays to find a phone number.

Likewise the lady I spoke to at the Department for Work and Pensions when I had to cancel Dad’s attendance allowance really couldn’t have been kinder or more helpful. She explained that I may have some outstanding to pay and was genuinely apologetic when she explained that it might take as much as a year to receive a request for this money. In the end, it didn’t. But what was so refreshing was that she understood that a sudden bill for several hundred pounds is enough to put people living on the edge into debt and into serious trouble.

In my journey with Dad, the people who work in these departments, and the social workers whose job it is to implement the shitty rules the Government makes have been lovely without exception.

It occurred to me that maybe, if every MP was forced to spend a month living on benefits, or the minimum wage, or working in the call centre that runs the benefits help lines they might learn some humanity. I guess I’m just raw, because I’ve lost my Dad and I’m beginning to remember who he was and realise that he was a giant compared to most of them and had more wisdom and empathy in his little finger than all of these bastards put together. But even if these hideous people were given a dose of reality it wouldn’t help. They’d just dismiss the experience, or say it was easy. And as for adding money worries, stress and angst to the painful business of watching someone they loved going slowly insane … well … for that to cause a blip they’d have to be capable of loving someone first.

Don’t mind me, I’m just fucking, fucking angry. It’s probably a grief thing.

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30 Jul 2016 · 7:11 pm

Just another day in paradise!

Come the winter we are hoping we might be able to go skiing so in order to prepare, it occurred to us that it would be smart if McMini and I actually had a go at skiing first. So today, it was McMini’s turn. There’s a dry slope not far from us so off we went. He took to it well and it looked ace. I am very much going to try it when term starts.

After we were done, we decided to make a day of it and we went on to Aldeburgh for lunch which was lovely. After we’d eaten we took a stroll, bought an ice cream and sat on a bench to eat it, overlooking the sea. Even though I checked it for turds before sitting down I still failed to notice that one of the ‘special Aldeburgh seagulls’ had laid a length of cable that a Doberman would have been proud of, and of course, I sat on it.

Aldeburgh

Aldeburgh: taken while sitting in seagull pooh

As the resulting cack smearage made me look as if I’d extensively soiled myself I tried to clean it off. Half a bottle of water poured over the affected area merely made it look as if I’d lost control of both orifices. And now I also had pooh smeared on my hands! Lovely! Once I’d rinsed my hands with the rest of the water and rubbed liberal amounts of hand sanitiser over them we took stock. There was only one thing for it. I deemed it imperative that I changed into some pooh-free trousers or shorts at the first opportunity. But I had no spares so I was going to have to go into a shop looking as if I’d shat my pants, explain what had happened, and hope they’d let me buy some.

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The seagulls in Worthing are much more genteel

Aldeburgh has many clothes shops and right now they all have sales on but, even with 70% off, a pair of shorts was coming up at £35. Hats off to the folks running them, though, who were perfectly prepared to let me try and buy despite my effluvia-covered togs and accompanying smell.

However, I began to despair of replacing my rancid shorts until I noticed the Sue Ryder charity shop. I popped in there and got a very nice pair of chino beige pedal pushers for £4.50. Phew.

I had planned how I could zip my anorak up round my waist and remove my trousers in the high street but although I’d worked out how it could be done without flashing my arse to the entire neighbourhood, I can’t say I was looking forward to it very much. Many, many things could have gone wrong.

But all’s well that ends well.

So that’s a relief.

A quiet day here, then. Same old, same old. How was your Saturday?

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22 Feb 2016 · 3:44 pm

Underground, Overground, Wombling Free…!

It’s a long time since I wrote anything on my blog. There is a reason. It’s because Real Life has been quite hectic. Worse, it’s been hectic in a way that has meant that I need to write to stay sane. That’s where I’ve been. Writing, and driving 130 miles to Sussex in the middle of the night to accompany one parent to hospital while a carer stays over and looks after the other, then doing the full care package for a day and dealing with all their heating and the cooker being turned off due to a gas leak on one and a half hours’ sleep… that kind of thing.

But now I’ve just finished half term week during which I was compelled to leave my characters to their own devices and interact with Real Life. So here I am, sorting some bits of real life out before I go back to my routine of not very much time, but a bit more than before, and a lot more of it spent writing. Also, my parents are on a more even keel now, so the desperation with which I escaped into my made up world is not quite so marked.

As you probably know, both my parents are in their 80s and they need a bit of help. To that end, I’ve been trying to get some disability aids out of Social Services for them. It’s not that social services won’t give them, just that it takes ages. There’s one particular thing called a ‘perching stool’ which Mum could really use in the kitchen, right now. But there’s a 20 working day waiting time before they can even call you back and start the process. I have been wondering if I should buy one – if Social came up trumps with a second I could always put the bought one in the greenhouse for her. But I was havering, because they cost a sod of a lot of money, these things.

So imagine how insanely chipper I was to discover this bizarrely obscure item in a skip this morning, just outside my gym! It was brand new and it wasn’t alone. It was in there with three other disability aids: a riser loo seat for people with dodgy hips which was still wrapped in its plastic and a really handy trolly-cum-walker with two shelves for trays. All had labels on with a number to call for collection after use, so at the least, I thought, if Mum and Dad have no use for them, I can ring the number and get them back to people who need them. Anyway, I had to take the trolley because it was the only way I was going to get the stuff, plus my bicycle, home. So, with the help of three of the ladies who also attend my gym, who praised me for my Womble* like tendences, I climbed into the skip and relieved it of its disability enhancing contents.

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If anyone had ever told me I would get excited about finding items like these in a skip I’d have told them to piss off. Luckily, no-one did. Unlike the time I said I’d never marry a lawyer and then…

It will be even more of a challenge to get the things – which are square and firm and most non-folding – from Bury St Edmunds to Sussex in a Lotus. I might have to borrow McOther’s car.

Even so it’s a bit of a result. I am, naturally, hugely chuffed to have these difficult-to-get things fall into my lap, instantly, when I never expected them to, and for free.

Mwah hahahahrgh! Sometimes the stars just align.

 

*If you don’t know what a womble is, click here the song explains it. Obviously, they are a lot more interesting when you are 7.

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