Message in a Bottle

Dear reader

I hope this finds you well.

Do you find yourself writing those words on every single email, text and WhatsApp message you send to someone you don’t know very well? Anyway, if you are reading this I hope that you are well and you feel at peace. I hope that you don’t judge yourself too harshly and set impossible standards for yourself. I hope that you don’t measure yourself up against a legion of others and find yourself constantly lacking. I hope that your life isn’t blighted by anger* or resentment. *Although anger can be useful if channeled in the right direction.

Sometimes I see very well meaning tweets telling someone that they are loved and valued. If I was in a bad place I’d think - ‘what do you know?’ I hope you do feel loved and valued, for your own sake and also because, if you feel that, you are less likely to cause harm to anyone else. Perhaps you don’t realise how loved and appreciated you are?

Enough of that, it’s all starting to sound a bit wanky.

I haven’t written in a while and don’t plan to regularly update this blog for the time being. This is partly due to the fact that I don’t think anyone other than Russian spybots reads it regularly. It’s also because I’ve just done a writing course and am working on a novel, which always sounds more impressive than it is but there! I am working on a novel for adults. Now I’ve committed to it and I can’t back out.

At it’s best this blog was a wonderful tool for connection, at its worst it wasn’t even that bad, a benign way to let off steam and perhaps overshare...So it’s been lovely but now it’s time to move on and try and channel all my creative energy into the *novel*. 

I’m just gonna leave you with some hard hitting musings:

Crush of the month:

Bertie Carvel as Dalgliesh in the Channel 5, yes Chanel flipping 5, series of the same name. Based on the crime series by P.D.James. He’s quiet, he’s dignified, he tells his dickhead sidekick off. I heart him.

Best TV

Dalgliesh - obviously, watch it on Channel 5 - Five star I think it’s called - I wonder if the ‘eighties band have thought of suing them.

The Outlaws - Comedy drama by Stephen Merchant and Elgin James. Genuinely funny and proper bloody tense at times! I’ve come to love the characters. Catch it on BBC iPlayer.

Impeachment: American Crime Story - Real events are played out, real people are humanised and Clive Owen plays Bill Clinton! Yes, he dons a prosthetic nose and a very convincing Arkansas accent and presents a very credible performance.

Advent

Chocolate advent calendars used to make me feel sad. It’s not that I don’t like chocolate but I miss the old fashioned calendars (which I used to make when I was a kid) - the excitement of seeing which picture would appear. But this year my Mum has bought us all a posh Lindt calendar. There’s something truly thrilling about being a middle aged woman and having someone still buying you an advent calendar. I appreciate the form of it forcing you to be moderate and only have one a day. 

The title of this piece is misleading, the blog used to be a message in a bottle, form of connection, means of expression but now it's more like an expunged ‘Dear Diary’ or a motto in a fortune cookie. I once wrote in outrage about feminine deodorant https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/978691151524409415/1529823579158032984 then saw an advert for 'ball trimmer and ball deodorant' the other day. Two wrongs don't make a right! I feel like my granny calling The Beatles long haired louts, appalled at these developments. I feel that Naked Attraction is everything that is wrong with society. I have no wish to see a pasty, flaccid penis or shaved vulva. I'm as prurient as the next person but there's something deeply soulless and unsexy about that programme. You probably disagree and that’s OK, there are worse things to disagree on.

Politics

I can't write about the political situation, I'm outraged and I'm tired and I'm stunned that people keep voting for this shower. If the P.M defecated on a puppy on live T.V people would still vote for him and his bunch of sociopaths. I have nothing more to say on this, not here anyway.

I don't want to depart on that note so I'll just put a picture of a cute animal.

So this is where I leave you. Thanks for reading, you’ve been amazing! (Unless you’re a Russian spybot) Stay sane, stay healthy, keep the creative spark going. All the very best.

Hard Work

They tell me that blogs are becoming obsolete so what’s the point in continuing to write one?  It's not as if this one ever set the world on fire anyway.  I write because the compulsion to communicate overrides my inherent self consciousness. Plus I spend a lot of time on my own and find that the urge to shout into the void becomes too great to ignore at times.

There are certain things in life which should feel like a minor episode but actually take up far too much head space. Routine tasks which are actually far too emotionally loaded. The last two weeks have contained two such things - shopping for a swimsuit and sending something back to a shop.

I took something back to the shop and it felt like a monumental task. (I don’t know about you but everything feels like a Herculean feat at the moment) 

My constant quest for the perfect swimsuit prevails - something practical yet aesthetically pleasing. Something which offers enough industrial strength support so I feel comfortable and contained but not so much of that ‘support’ that it’s difficult to breathe and I feel like I’m going to vomit an internal organ. I can't have meaningful congress with bandeau styles, halter necks or 'handkerchief' tops. 

I thought I’d found the perfect costume - a tankini which resembled a dress. It looked lovely on the model and it promised to make my figure ‘even more perfect’ OK, folks, if you think that’s even possible….

When the swimming costume came it was truly awful, I might just as well have tried to make myself a garment from a canvas tote bag. Things were spilling out everywhere and do you know what? It didn't make my figure look 'even more spectacular'! I had to bite the bullet and send it back!

This task involved going to the local shop to dispatch the offending item back to the evil, multinational conglomerate. The conglomerate promised me it would be easy. ‘Simply take this QR code to the nearest drop off point and they will scan the code and print the label for you’. They promised. No they won’t, evil conglomerate, they will resentfully wave you vaguely in the direction of the self service scanning/printing machine, leaving you to stew in your own incompetence! Whereupon you will uselessly waggle your phone at the machine, while the people behind the counter offer no support at all and you begin to wonder whether this procedure is emblematic of your whole life.  I don't know what I've done to offend the man in the shop - perhaps I look like the person who rear ended him in 1998, or the doctor who scraped his cornea while conducting a routine examination, but his distaste for me seems to know no bounds. 

Whenever people are unhelpful and/or unfriendly in shops it puts me in mind of the swimming pool receptionist from The Day Today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk2uTv_jacg

I’ve ordered a couple of swimsuits from a website that I use a lot - specifically from their ‘Curve’ section. What I like about this site is that reviewers post plenty of photos of themselves wearing the gear so you get to see what it looks like on someone with a similar shape to yourself, not just modelled by a six foot tall alien. Sometimes the reviewer’s refreshing frankness makes me laugh ‘perfect if you’ve got big tits’, or ‘usually seeing myself in swimwear makes me want to kill myself but this is actually super cute’. I think that 'super cute' might be a bit of a stretch for me, I'd settle for acceptable. 

So yeah, fingers crossed and all that......

 

It's Been Emotional

I don’t know about you but I am all over the place at the moment;

Anxious and depressed one minute - weeping at memes and assailed by sudden whiplashes of loneliness and grief,  then on a more even keel the next.  blithely shaking cinnamon into a saucepan, laughing at things the kids say, getting excited about *Tom Hiddleston being cast in the adaptation The Essex Serpent.

*Ever since The Night Manager I’ve had a bit of a mild ‘thing’ for Tom Hiddleston. My husband berated me about it - how could I - a ‘born again Trotsky-ist’ (his words) have a thing for this product of the public school system? What can I say? Isn’t it as bad not to like somebody because they are not working class than to like somebody because they are?? Anyway, I loved the book The Essex Serpent and am fairly comfortable with the casting of Claire Danes in the lead role and positively delighted at the aforementioned Tom Hiddleston playing another part.

Claire and Tom

What is the cause of this turmoil? The after effect of a year of restrictions and uncertainty, fear about the future, boredom and loneliness - a feeling of stagnation. Recovering from the horror of homeschooling - I legit thought I was going to lose my mind! (Why would people voluntarily do this?) Anxiety about a return to normality?

It’s been a year

It’s been a year since the start of the first lockdown.

If we were two people in a film who were escaping from something unexpected and terrifying - a monster, a sudden storm or a psychopathic maniac. We would slam the door against the howling wind, look at each other and say something like:

“Wow, that was intense!”

Or

“What was that?”

A man on the telly was saying that just because we are all going through it, doesn’t mean we should diminish or underestimate the impact it’s having on all of us. He’s written a self help book but rather unhelpfully, I can’t remember what it’s called. I’ll tell you what has helped me slightly in recent weeks:

• Grayson Perry’s Art Club - a joy!
• Headspace meditations - on Netflix but they have an App.
• Erm…. Just Dance - always - feels good to move.
• Getting creative/doing artsy things.

Art

Let me give you a laugh, I did a 'Creative Wellbeing' course in January and have found painting to be enormously therapeutic, with one exception, when I try to capture myself. Below is my latest self portrait. 

Last seen fleeing the crime scene

I enjoyed painting it, initially, felt that I was really getting somewhere but then it went awry - it looks a bit like me but (I hope) not too much! A friend of mine asked me to send it to her and said - ‘don’t put it down, I like it’. At which I thought - shit! Does this mean that this is what I really look like!

This is the photo I tried to copy.

Roots

Mojo

Right so in the last few months I lost my writing mojo and it was horrible. I don’t think it was the pandemic, although maybe that played its part, but I felt totally flattened and without hope. Every time I saw a competition being advertised I’d snort and think - what’s the point? More depressingly, I didn’t want to write and writing is what I do, it’s how I make sense of the world and how I express myself and sometimes how I escape, but I just didn’t have the will to do it. What happened was that last year there were two competitions where I’d got through to the final stages - and one of them had made very encouraging noises all the way along, only to be told in a bald, impersonal way that they weren’t taking it any further, at the end. I realise that rejection is very much part of the process but I suppose I had built up this fantasy where everything else was shit but at least I had this. I was already planning the post lockdown celebration party. Hubris.

But anyway, I’m writing! I’m supposed to be working on a script but got distracted into writing this - shame on you! I’m 15% hopeful, which is better than 0% and it’s all good practice and also, one thing that the 'Creative Wellbeing' course did for me was made me realise that I don’t just write with a vain hope of publication, I write because that’s what I do!

Anyway, friends, Spring is in the air, people are being vaccinated and Chocolate Orange Easter Eggs are a thing (hint, hint). 

Other brands are available

Stay well, stay safe and stay sane.

xxxxxx