Doggie Tales

Greetings! If you are still coming back after being presented with a series of my poorly drawn cartoons, I salute you! Below are more of the same.

I think the less I 'say' the better, I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. I've added captions to the ones where the writing is particularly scrawly.

A Harry Potter moment

Meanwhile, life goes on

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Family Life

If you have children and they have reached or passed school age, you will be familiar with the following discourse:

Parent:
- Can you get dressed please.
- We’re leaving in 20 minutes, can you get dressed.
- Have you brushed your teeth?
- Why are you not dressed?
- Oh for god’s sake - GET DRESSED NOW!!!!

And you think - when did I become this dull, shouty, awful person?

I have a confession to make, I’ve got you here under false pretences because all I’m giving you is some more cartoons. I said I can’t write at the moment and it’s easier to draw. The next set of drawings are based around family life and it’s a lot easier to represent how I felt when my daughter told me that she wished I wasn’t her mother, than to put it down in words. Thus you have a dog howling in the park rather than a woman, er, sobbing in the park, behind her sunglasses (I think the dog says it better).

Even if you don’t have kids I hope you can relate.

The trials and tribulations of a 'dorg'

Hello there reader, I hope this finds you well.

I haven’t written in a while because I haven’t really had the heart for it. Things have all been a bit meh, a bit shit and a bit arghhh! I was lying awake at 3 o’clock in the morning one day and thinking about lots of things and my inability to express them and I had the idea to put it *all down in a cartoon. A kind of visual diary.  *I say all but of course it won’t really be ‘all’, it will be part censored and part fictionalised. I’m not under any illusions about my drawing skills, it’s not really about that, but I do find writing and drawing the cartoon enormously therapeutic. The idea is that if I carry on drawing, within a year, my technique will have improved, either that or I’ll get bored with it and give it up.

I’ve called the cartoon ‘Space Dorg’ because I think it has a nice ring to it but, as yet, it has nothing whatsoever to do with space. It’s ‘dorg’ because that’s how one of my kids pronounces the word ‘dog’ and I just like it.

Did you really need another collar?

The production values are very low.

Mirror, mirror

Dear reader,

It's been a while. I haven't felt compelled to write anything lately as I’ve spent much of January and February just trying to stay sane, melodramatic as that sounds. For the last couple of months, though, all my energy has gone into simply staying afloat. But that’s a matter for another post, one that will never see the light of day, probably. For this one I’m going to revisit some old ground, so look away now if you’re bored with me going on about Body positivity.

Why does Body Positivity matter when there are things like Brexit and the rise of the Far Right on the horizon? Is focusing on it as frivolous as focusing on its counterpoint  - the relentless pursuit of beauty, thinness and eternal youth?

I suppose it could be construed as frivolous if you didn’t see the pressure placed on women to look a certain way to have deeper, more political implications.
In her book Body Positive Power, Megan Crabbe argues that societal constraints on women’s bodies - particularly diet culture, are part of a patriarchal plot to keep women down. To keep them weak, hungry and preoccupied. Indeed, I feel that there is such an onus on women to be decorative that men get really angry when someone who doesn’t meet their exacting standards of beauty appears on television or social media. I’ve said it many times before, in many ways, but can you imagine if male newsreaders, historians, politicians or 'Come Dine with Me' contestants, came under the same scrutiny as women?
The historian, Mary Beard, who received vile abuse online after she appeared in a documentary gave a brilliant talk about women's voices and how men have always tried to silence them:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n06/mary-beard/the-public-voice-of-women

Just think about this simple, body positive phrase - about how earth shattering it is:

“It’s not your job to be pretty.”

And really, it’s really not, so why do so many girls grow up thinking that it is? And why do women agonise over their looks and make toxic comparisons to the images they see on Instagram? Are boys put under the same pressure?
Perhaps they are, sometimes, although not as much. My husband said to me once, ‘I don’t like it when people go on about Wayne Rooney being ugly.’ He’s right, of course, what have Rooney’s looks got to do with his playing or his behaviour off the pitch?

On a personal level I feel like this is something I need to focus on because it’s something that’s dogged me my whole life.  Lately I’ve found myself googling ‘How to get rid of freckles’ and wondering whether it would really be so bad to get Botox. I was troubled by the fat streak of grey hair, snaking its way through my otherwise black and (dyed) caramel locks and then I saw Russell Brand on T.V with his bushy grey and black beard and I thought - why am I worrying about a bit of grey - I can be grey*! Why are men allowed to grow old gracefully and not women?
*As a segue, my husband is always trying to out-feminist me. I got him to help me colour my roots as he could get to the parts I missed and one of the kids asked me - “Are you dying your hair to get rid of the grey?” I affirmed this.
“But women don’t have to do this, girls.” My husband told our daughters. “Women don’t have to dye their hair when it goes grey.”

Anyway, I’m reading a new book about Intuitive Eating, called Just Eat It by Laura Thomas PhD. This book marries the threads of Intuitive Eating and Body Positivity. She encourages you to keep a journal and work through several exercises, some of them devoted to having a more positive view of yourself. One of the exercises is to list 100 you like about yourself! Can you imagine that? Not necessarily physical things but you are encouraged to include these. The trouble is I do think, certainly with my generation and the generations that came before, that modesty, self-deprecation even, were seen as positive traits. You weren’t really encouraged to big yourself up and I’m a bit stuck on this exercise and need to go back to it, but I will go back to it. In the meantime I’m going to stop describing myself as a fat, middle aged woman, even if it is part of my comedy shtick and just try and be body neutral, which is a lot easier to achieve than all out body positivity.

Homework
Do you reckon you could list 100 things you like about yourself? 50? 25? 10?

It doesn’t just benefit you to feel better about yourself, it benefits all those around you, it makes you want to spread the love, laud others, build them up and cheer them on. Nobody really profits if you are a tightly wound-up ball of angst. Maybe those far right activists might do well to try a bit of self care.

Then, once we are all fully body positive/neutral/couldn’t give a shit - we can rise up and throw off the patriarchy!

It's your Jam

It’s your Jam, Babe

Around this time last year I was not in a good place. I met up with a friend and told her that I’d been re-reading the books of one of my favourite authors - Marian Keyes, because I got a lot of comfort from those books. I don’t think I imagined that she baulked with disdain. We all do it sometimes, flinch when someone talks about getting pleasure from something which we ourselves can’t stand, sometimes without having properly watched, listened to, read or tasted the thing itself, we just have this perception that the thing is beneath us. The thing is, why should anybody feel the need to be defensive about the things that bring them pleasure? Who made any individual the arbiter of good taste?

Tribes
When I was a teenager I felt that I had finally found my tribe in the Indie music scene - here were a bunch of thoughtful, sensitive, shy types, they hadn’t been the popular kids at school, but the more interesting ones (ha ha). The music was the thing, the string that pulled us all together and it was our selective, special thing. It didn’t matter that others didn’t get the music - in fact it made it more attractive - the music was a deep pool, only to be understood and dived into by a choice few. We had found our place in the world. Then, suddenly, your favourite band would appear on the front of Smash Hits, be played on Radio 1 and everything was ruined! That was your band, you didn’t want everyone’s grubby mits on them! They were yours to listen to in your tiny bedroom, learning the lyrics by rote and occasionally venturing into the outside world to see them play live.

There is this protective snobbery around the music scene - popular is bad, teenage girls liking it is bad, it is a largely male domain, with the occasional backstage pass issued to the occasional woman. The musos are sneering and dismissive of anything that doesn’t pass their own impossible standards of excellence and artistic integrity. Anything remotely poppy is dismissed as being totally without merit. But the thing is, to slightly misquote Laura Mvula, who made you the master of the freaking universe, love? Who made you the ultimate arbiter of good taste?
I get it, that protective thing, that not wanting the masses, those same masses who mocked you at school, to take this special thing of yours and ruin it. But I felt like that when I was a teenager, I’ve got over it now I’m an adult. I can happily listen to The Smiths (not happily, but kinda guiltily, if I’m honest), Radiohead, Alice Coltrane, Bonobo, Katy Perry, The Beatles, Crowded House, Kendrick Lamar, Ian Brown, Depeche Mode, Harry Styles….etc, etc, with no restrictions on myself and it makes life more varied and fun!

So called low brow

Back to Marian Keyes, one of my favourite authors, lumped into the category of ‘Chick Lit’, yet the first person I came across who depicted depression, in her books, in a way that resonated with me (more than sodding Jean Paul Sartre, babe!). Why would I not love her? Her books make me laugh, entertain me, contain universal truths and make me feel less isolated. There is nothing wrong with this, I shouldn’t even have to spell it out or defend it. I don’t really feel like I have anything to prove with my reading matter, I have my English degree but even if I didn’t, could still happily dive into a range of material without having to defend my choice. I love Jane Austen and Barbara Pym and Agatha Christie and Maria Semple and Jonathan Coe and so many others. The best, albeit bittersweet, feeling is when you feel sad to finish a book.  The characters stay with you, they cling to your clothes and speak to you from the pages. You go back over passages you love, rolling the words over your tongue. Or, sometimes, you might just read something silly, fun and forgettable, to get you through the day. You don’t always want a fancy, open sandwich, made with focaccia bread, topped with olives, roasted artichokes and drizzled with oil, sometimes you just want a cheese sandwich.

The ‘Idiot Box’
Same goes for T.V. I have to be in the right mood for a subtitled film I’m usually rewarded when I make the effort but often I just want to watch First Dates! Again, why should we feel that we have to defend our choices. There should be no such thing as a guilty pleasure, we need to knock that sanctimonious Jiminy Cricket figure off our shoulder and just get on with it.

I know that for self-preservation, I often have to impose a news embargo on myself, it makes me less well informed but more robust, mentally and I’ve gotten over feeling remotely guilty about it. I feel similarly about my choice of books, TV, film and music - a Dolly mixture array of things and nobody else’s business.

So, on that note, I’m going to go off and watch some episodes of Sabrina the Teenage Witch - the original, kinda silly one, I have found that, whilst I really love the darker, modern reboot (The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) I also enjoy the original.
Have a marvellous weekend!

Self-help books - optimism or delusion?

I've always been really drawn to the transformation story; rags to riches, shy, retiring mouse to self-assured dynamo, plain Jane to goddess. The first ones to catch my attention were those ugly duckling, 'fat to thin' photospreads you get in magazines. The ones where, on one side of the page, a huge, marshmallow person stares apologetically at the camera. ‘I’m sorry I exist’ their sad, puffy faces seem to say - ruining your paper with my looks which don’t fit into society’s rigidly defined ideas of what is aesthetically acceptable!

Then, on the opposite page, there’s the transformation pic, the former fatty has shed 6 stone (or however many kilos that translates as) and is holding out their fat person’s, clown trousers out in front of them.
‘Look at what a fat joke I was.’ Their happy grins say, now I can walk down the street happily, without children pelting me with rotten fruit.

The most predictable New Year’s resolution

The thing is, my shameful little secret, is that there is a part of me that is still strongly drawn towards this fat to thin story, so that every now and again I’ll take a sneak peak at My 600 pound life or similar programme, on T.V. I just can't seem to stop being seduced by the lure of the idea that however bad it gets, change is still possible.

By the side of my bed, there is always a pile of books. Usually comprised of self-help books, the novel I’m currently reading and fiction books I started then put aside in favour of something a bit more interesting.
At this moment in time, at the top of the self-help pile is Freedom from Emotional Eating by Paul McKenna. And why do I have this book there, if I’ve claimed to support the body positivity movement and intuitive eating and the rest of it?
The answer to this is that I can never fully climb aboard the whole body positivity/fat acceptance thing because:
a) I don’t want to be fat and don’t feel comfortable at the weight I’m currently at
b) I do still see excess weight as having an emotional aspect to it.
c) I want to be as healthy as possible.

Now, please don’t come down on me like a tonne of bricks about this, I’m saying that I can’t embrace the whole whole ‘fat acceptance’ thing for me, I’m not talking about anyone else. I really do believe that I’ve always been an emotional eater, using food for comfort and not always just eating when I’m hungry and I want to address that. Although Mckenna’s book tends to oversimplify things, it does seem to contain basic truths. The only problem is that, I must have bought it a while ago, and it contains a hypnosis C.D and we have nowhere in our house that plays CDs and the whole point of it is to listen to it privately, on an MP3 player or suchlike but I don’t have the means to burn it onto my device but when I do we’re really going to see some changes! Clown trouser pictures to follow.

The impact of the past

The other transformations I like to hear about are the ones where people were addicted to drugs or alcohol, then had an epiphany, turned  their lives around and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro or something. I don’t think that I’m an alcoholic, I just like the narrative of having a problem to solve - one so huge and which overshadows everything, that needs to be overcome before you can realise your full potential.
Talking of problems to overcome, someone recommended to me a book about trauma, [The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. Kolk, Bessel van der, Penguin 2015 ] The author propounds that trauma and its effects are a lot more widespread than most people think and the repercussions are manifold. Going back to the whole weight thing, one of the things he puts forward is that feelings of panic might be experienced as hunger, causing people to overeat. Also, that people who are disconnected with their bodies, not in tune with signals, may continue to eat past the point of fullness. I’ve encountered versions of this theory since reading Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach (Although she talks of women subconsciously wanting to be fat, as a protection from the outside world).
The book about trauma is a difficult read, detailing case studies of traumatic experiences which can be harrowing, I’d only recommend reading it if you are looking to go into that field of work yourself or if you are feeling emotionally robust and read it in small bursts.

It’s all getting a bit heavy now, let’s move on 

Triumph over adversity: I’m also a great fan of those tales of women who were married to
feckless men (not that this applies to me!) and they had four children and their husbands left them but they picked themselves up by their bootstraps to become bestselling authors/successful business women/human rights lawyers. I bloody love those stories!

Like I said, I don’t have the feckless husband but am often held back by my own lack of confidence and have a tendency to self-sabotage, so to that end, when my brother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I requested the book The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance---What Women Should Know by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman. He kindly got it for me, last December, I just need to read it now, to be brimming with confidence….(In my defence, December was really manic).
Tip 1: to get the most from a self-help book, make sure you actually read it!

Finish what you started

So, perhaps my main New Year’s resolution should be to actually read my self-help books, right through to the end and, in the case of the ‘Emotional Eating’ one, actually watch the DVD, find some way of downloading the CD and follow the techniques. I’ll check in, this time next month to let you know if it’s started to work.

Time Out

Around this time last year, I wrote this post:
https://msmuddles.blogspot.com/2017/12/because-youre-worth-it.html
About going easy on yourself, not expecting perfection and taking a step back. Boy do I need to follow my own advice right now.

Right, I’ve always had a tendency to tut and sigh, heavily at times, without realising it, others have helpfully pointed it out, but now I’ve realised that I’ve actually started groaning aloud! Friends, I’m stressed up to the eyeballs at the moment, I’m irritable, emotional and the other day I fell asleep in the pub and I wasn’t even drunk - maybe I’ve developed late onset narcolepsy! So, I’ve been thinking about ways to decompress and take time out because this time of year seems to bring on full on meltdown (or is it just me?). I swear, if one more person asks me if I’ve done all my Christmas shopping….Note: I’ve done NONE of my Christmas shopping! This is not because I’m a last minute, fly by the seat of your pants, buy everything on Christmas Eve, it’s because my daughter’s birthday is next week and all my resources are going into prepping for her party. (Plus I’ve been really skint and have only just got paid). Anyhoo, that’s enough about me, bless you if you’ve preserved past this drivel, let’s talk about YOU, how can YOU relax? Because it’s very important to take care of yourself.

1) Listen to some music, preferably on noise cancelling headphones.

Shut out the whole world and their selfish, unreasonable demands for an hour.
May I recommend
Stars by Dubstar for an uplifting song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddlIPv-DAeM
Strange, kinda ghostly and kinda flat verses, interspersed by an almost operatic chorus. Enormously uplifting, especially of you lift your arms up in time to the chorus and sing along as best you can.
b.  Toxic Girl by Kings of Convenience for a relaxing song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9UauaXTXUI
I’ve never heard of them either, but this song came up on a Greatest Indie Anthems album and it’s really soothing, especially if you pay no heed to the lyrics. (Actually all their songs are rather soothing, am listening to them as I type this)
c.      Young folks by Peter Bjorn and John if you’re feeling emotionally constipated and need a good cry - it’s so melancholy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iArXv64tCJA

Of course, this is a personal list, you’re bound to have your own go to songs, for every occasion, so go forth and listen to them.

2) Have a massage
Ask around to see if your friends can recommend anyone - then when you find someone good, tell me about it.

3) Buy yourself a gift
Next time you go Christmas shopping, buy yourself a present too! Ha ha, I tend to do this sometimes anyway, especially in book shops.

4) Take time to read
Find a really quiet cafe, buy yourself the beverage of your choice, turn off your phone and read for an hour. If books aren’t your jam, read a magazine or a paper.

5) Wrap up warm and go to the zoo
 Go to the zoo/urban farm/park and look at some animals for a while. The farm is a good option because you can often feed and pet the animals and this is good for bringing down your heart rate.

6) Get Arty
Buy some cheap art materials and paint something - maybe a picture of that goat you took a particular shine to at the Urban farm

7) Socialise
Spend time with people who make you feel good or who make you laugh. Sounds a bit wanky, I know, but enormously therapeutic.

8) Ceremonial stress relief
Write your worries down on scraps of paper and have a ceremonial burning ceremony, or just rip them up and throw them away.

9) Bake something. 
Method, routine, the satisfaction of having created something. If you’re feeling virtuous, gift it someone, if you feel in need of a treat, eat the thing you baked on a really nice plate, accompanied by your favourite beverage (again) in your favourite cup. (If you don’t have a favourite cup, buy yourself a nice cup, as part of point 3!)

10. Give yourself a break
 Don’t worry about being fat (this one's for me) because one of your favourite animals is a seal and seals are fat and gorgeous and everybody loves them!

Now, go forth, you magical unicorn and sparkle! Or, alternatively, put your feet up and relax.