Comfort Reads

I read this delightful little article from BookTrust the other day:
https://www.booktrust.org.uk/news-and-features/features/2019/april/the-soothing-power-of-uncomplicated-pleasures-why-we-should-treasure-comfort-reading
All about how we should encourage children to read whatever they like, without passing judgement and it's a good thing for them to take comfort from books, in an uncertain world.  It talks about how books can be an anchor of reassurance when we are children and that kids are far more likely to re-read their favourite books than adults are. I have to take issue with this point, about it being only in childhood that we return to our favourite reads, as I often re-read books, particularly in times of stress. Sometimes, when I'm reading a particularly good book for the first time and it sends thrills of appreciation through me, I know I'm going to read it again. The last book I read that had this effect on me was Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans.

Evans used to be a comedy TV producer and I think it shows in her writing. Crooked Heart is funny, seemingly, effortlessly so, but also devastatingly moving. It is set during the Second World War and tells the story of ten year old NOEL, a precocious child who has just lost his only family - in the figure of his godmother, MATTIE, and is evacuated to the countryside. He lands up with a woman called VERA, who never has enough money and is constantly scheming to try and scratch a living. When I say that this book is moving I mean that there are moments in it that hook you right in the guts, but it never tips over into sentimentality. The characters seem so real, right from the beginning, that you feel that you are walking right alongside them, smelling the dust as it's stirred up from the roads. Someone once took issue with the fact that my copy of  I Capture the Castle (one of my very favourite books) had a quote from J.K. Rowling on the cover that said that the protagonist of the book was one of the 'most charismatic narrators she'd ever met'. This person sneered at Rowling's use of the word 'met' but surely that is what a really great book should do - bring the characters totally to life for you and make you feel as if you know them. Rowling is right, by the way, Cassandra from I Capture the Castle is immensely charismatic (IMO).

Going back to the childhood reads. I loved reading, as a child, as much as I hated P.E. My obliging mother used to write notes for me, excusing me from P.E or Games, as her own mother had done for her when she was a child (I come from a long line of duffers). Once a sceptical P.E teacher had looked at my note, saying that I couldn't do P.E as I was currently suffering from scurvy, and said;
"Well, you needn't think you can sit there doing nothing [during the P.E lesson] - you'll have to read a book!" She had no idea how happy this made me! Not only had I got out of performing some kind of humiliating assortment of physical contortions, I didn't have to watch anyone else doing it either! And I got to read Prince Caspian. At the time I was making my way through the Chronicles of Narnia, probably for about the fourth time.

So yes - I definitely turned to books in times of crisis, stress, boredom and panic. Books blocked out the rest of the world on public transport, they provided comfort in unfamiliar places, they accompanied me on hospital visits. When I got so stressed about taking my A levels that I thought the chest pains I was having meant I was having a heart attack, I turned to the Paddington books by Michael Bond and they worked - they helped me to relax. The worst thing about being depressed, as a teenager, was that I lost my love of books, they stopped 'working' for me. I never lost my appetite for food, as other people did, I lost my appetite for reading, which was a far greater loss as far as I was concerned.  Thankfully it came back to me.

What books did you love as a child?

Which ones, if any, do you re-read now?

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

I

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!