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

Merry Christmas...I think

 Review of the Year…..

I mean, really…. If I was to do this in the style of one of those round robin, Christmas letters that American people write, referring to themselves in the third person, I might say something like:

Shyama put on quite a lot of weight this year, meaning that every time she saw a photo of herself she was drenched in self loathing

Or

All our energies, as a family, were concentrated in trying to remain sane and not kill each other.

All very negative though, in’t it? It is very hard to remain positive at the moment and 2020 has been an absolute bastard of a year.  But there have still been high points and I do realise how lucky I am. 

You know those memes that go around saying - ‘even though you feel like shit, get up and put lipstick on’ and that sort of thing? 

Very much not me with red lipstick on

I don’t wear lipstick but it was in that kind of spirit that I bleached the hair on my upper lip this morning. My daughter came into the bathroom as I was doing it so she could do a poo (of course she did!) and said to me:

“If that white stuff’s to get rid of the hair on your face, why don’t you put it on your chin?”

“I don’t have hair on my chin, you cheeky mare!” I said, in the style of a 1950s cockney, while thinking - I don’t, do I? Have hair on my chin?

She said;

“You don’t have hair on your upper lip either.” 

So perhaps she was trying to make some kind of profound comment on the nature of the standards we inflict on ourselves in the endeavour of fitting into societally imposed beauty ideals, I’m not sure.

By the way, I really like lipstick and appreciate the vampish red lips of other women but sadly it doesn’t seem to suit me. I watched a couple of episodes of 'Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries' and promptly bought a bright red lipstick and a cheap kimono from a well known, online retailer. The lipstick felt as alien to my face as some people report the wearing of contact lenses to be. I’d love to swish around, flicking my scarf over my shoulder and pouting vampishly but it was not to be. 

The reality

That’s quite enough about me, how about you? You need to give yourself a massive pat on the back for withstanding the pressures that have been thrown at you this year! You really do. And if you’ve binged, cried, shouted, indulged in a lot more ‘me’ time, got welded to your sofa, that’s all perfectly understandable. 

A psychologist on the radio said that when we do video calls the brain doesn’t differentiate between seeing somebody irl and seeing somebody on the screen so it is actually a good thing to do if you’re feeling lonely. In all honesty I can sometimes find big group video calls a little tiring and sometimes stressful. But I’ve realised that on screen, as in real life, I prefer smaller gatherings - there’s more space to talk, less chance of inadvertently interrupting someone just as they are about to tell a killer anecdote and it just feels more friendly and intimate. I am an introvert though so you might prefer your zoom call to look like the opening scene of The Muppet Show, it’s up to you.

Zoom call

I’d been toying with the idea of sponsoring a child for quite a while, had the tab open on my computer for months but it was reading about the work that Marcus Rashford had done this year, to try and make sure that school kids didn’t have to skip meals during the holidays, that finally pushed me to do something and set up the sponsor. I know this might sound sanctimonious and self congratulatory but, at this point, I don’t really care. I think that witnessing compassion has a positive effect and can inspire you to be a bit kinder in your own life. Not that my direct debit and letter to my sponsored child is on the same level of Marcus Rashford’s work, but they do say that any act of kindness, however small, is never wasted. 

I hope you manage to have a good Christmas, whatever you do and that, even though calendar years are a completely arbitrary measurement of time passing, 2021 holds some hope and warmth for us all. 

Music Maps

Music was my first love….

Actually I don’t think that’s true, I think my first love was books, or probably food, but just bear with me here while I take you on an odyssey of sound and sensations…. (you’ll have to provide your own sensations).

 

Ain’t no doubt it’s all so fucking depressing at the moment - incompetent, blundering and dangerous leadership, a terrifying global pandemic and dickheads panic buying toilet roll as soon as there’s a sniff of a second lockdown. Yep, it’s all very grim and added to that you’ve watched everything Netflix, iPlayer and all the others have to offer, twice! So let’s all join metaphorical, non germ carrying hands, sit around an imaginary fire and listen to some soothing tunes.

There used to be a T.V programme called ‘Comedy Connections’ which I loved, it would plot the genesis of a particular funny programme - what the writers and actors/performers had worked on before, what brought them together to produce this and where they progressed from there. If we’re going to pretend that music was my first love, let’s just continue the fantasy that comedy was my second. Music docs and ‘rock-umentaries’ might do the same thing in plotting the genesis of songs, bands and albums but sometimes in a leaden and heavy handed way. We could do with a similar thing, to the Comedy Connections programme, for songs.

Quincy Jones Wikimedia Commons

For instance, I only learned recently that two songs I really liked had sampled Summer in the City by Quincy Jones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q7IJOYxAMo

If you don’t know the song it has a wonderful catchy, gently thrilling sort of refrain at the beginning and throughout. The two songs that I’d been enjoying, without knowing that they were leaning on Quincy Jones, were:

Passin' Me By by The Pharcyde (1992)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-mAK3uB2_0

And

Les Nuits by Nightmares on Wax (1999)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q7IJOYxAMo

By the way, if you want to pass some time in an entertaining manner, look up Quincy Jones’ comments and insights on other musicians, he's brutally honest and hilarious. Here is just one quote from an interview in Vulture, link below.

“It’s Trump and uneducated rednecks. Trump is just telling them what they want to hear. I used to hang out with him. He’s a crazy motherfucker. Limited mentally — a megalomaniac, narcissistic. I can’t stand him. I used to date Ivanka, you know.”

https://www.vulture.com/2018/02/quincy-jones-in-conversation.html

Massive Attack ft Tricky

Another connection. I’d heard Black Steel by Tricky for years without knowing who it was by or what it was called, only that I loved it. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZJTM03UByU

It was only when they had withdrawn some music cassettes from the public library I worked at and we were invited to help ourselves to the stash that I snagged Maxinquaye and loved it, especially Black Steel, that song gave me the feels. A few years later I learned that it was a cover of a song by Public Enemy, originally called Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM5_6js19eM

I still prefer the Tricky version...

Green from Scritti Politi
Stock image

So many bands and artists have covered Beatles songs but some of the, arguably, more obscure ones can pass you by. It wasn’t that long ago that I found out that She’s a Woman had been done by the Fab Four years before Scritti Politi had covered it (or before Scritti Politi with Shabba Ranks had covered it!). I always liked Scritti Politi there was something unsettling sexual about the way the lead singer’s androgonous tones breathed out the lyrics, or perhaps that was just me….

Urgh, this is dreadful, I can’t find a Scritti version without Shabba Ranks - does it exist or did I imagine it?

Now this one isn’t a connection, just someone I’ve come across lately. Arlo Parks and her beautiful, mellifluous voice - perfect for these uncertain times and with a song called Black Dog, in which she says in the first line that she wants to lick the grief away from your lips, or somesuch! (I'm paraphrasing here) I started off alluding to the depressing state of the world but if you are in need of some comfort you could do a lot worse than listen to Arlo Parks. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM5_6js19eM

I get a bit evangelical about music and want other people to listen to stuff I'm enjoying (until too many people do it and ruin it for me…) In all honesty I never click on music videos that people share on social media which is why I rarely post them myself, but in the spirit of our campfire sing along let's all have a collective listen and try and take a break from reality for a bit.

As Arlo Parks sings in Hurt: 

“Just know that it won’t hurt so, won’t hurt so much forever.

Won’t hurt so much forever.”

Breeding Season

I was going to call this post  - ‘When Covid comes to call’ but thought that would be misleading as I'm pretty sure we don't have it. I also worried that calling it that might drive away any potential readers - as if saying the word or reading some words about it would instantly transmit the virus. 

I’m not trying to make light of a life threatening condition but I do feel that if I so much as sniff these days, I’m a modern day leper who should be ringing a bell and calling ‘unclean’!

You see, me and the kids have had a cold this week, the first one of the year. Because I mentioned the word ‘cough’ when I rang the school to report their absence on Monday, I was instantly informed that they would have to be tested for Covid-19 and found to be clear before they were allowed to return to school. As it’s been reported in the news it has proved impossible to obtain a Covid test so we’ve been trapped in the house with two hyperactive kids. They are now almost fine, I feel better - unless *self pity is one of the recognised symptoms of the virus…

*Yes, I realise there are healthcare professionals, teachers and other key workers who are currently unable to go to work because they can’t get tested - I know there are people worse off than me, thanks!

I understand the school's stance - they have to be extra vigilent. But we are still trapped in limbo. Can they go back to school when they couldn't be tested but have passed the quarantine period? Is this situation going to keep recurring throughout the term? What if it's not just a cold?

It made me eat my breakfast very mindfully the other day. I interrogated my taste buds - could I taste my banana, yogurt, honey and granola combo? I could and it was delicious! The roasted almond in Tesco Finest** granola is one of the nicest things in the world, so nice that I added it to the gratitude journal the other day when I was scrabbling around for things to be grateful for.

**Other brands of granola are available.

A friend has recommended vitamin drops for the kids to protect them against the inevitable barrage of coughs and colds that will assail them at school from now until next April. It was no different when I was at school. My Mum used to break a Karvol capsule onto a tissue for me and I’d dab my red, chafed nose against it at various points during the day.  We went into school with coughs and colds just to keep up the merry proliferation of that virus, obviously nowhere near as dangerous, in its many strains, as Covid-19. The Guardian helpfully reproduced this NHS chart: 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/18/coronavirus-symptoms-common-cold-covid-19-flu-nhs-guide

Onto cheerier things, ever since I read of Agatha Christie's writing routine I've been longing to go to the same hotel on Dartmoor and write! And take solitary walks on the moor after lunch and act out my dialogue! This is what I need to do! I mean, I’m not saying that it is my constant fantasy to run away at the moment or that any harsh word that gets thrown at me this week is making me want to weep but….you know. 

We stopped off at Dartmoor on our way to Cornwall in August and tramped across the misty Moors. It was a wonderful feeling to traverse the expanse with only the sheep and cows for company. 

One day I will go to a hotel there and be comfortable in my own company and take solitary lunches and write, one day...

Camping Revisited

View from the bottom of our pitch

Nobody wants to be ‘that’ guy, do they? That fussy, prissy, joyless idiot. Too neurotic to enjoy the simple things in life, squawking theatrically when they see an insect. Shuddering at the slightest inconvenience. The worst character in a film or a sitcom; uptight and unable to let go. 

However, this, unfortunately, seems to be the character I seem to adopt when I go camping. This character is always there - in a less amplified state, worrying about where she is sitting in a pub or a restaurant, but she becomes a bit of a monster when tents are involved.
I’ve written about my feelings about festivals before and my feelings about camping are very much wrapped up in that. https://msmuddles.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-disparity-between-real-and-ideal.html

Glamping seemed to offer a whole different outlook - the tents, yurts or teepees are already put up for you, the campsites aren’t as crowded and you bathe under a wondrous waterfall of mountain spring water, warmed by the tropical, British sun. (I may have made that last bit up). The toilets and waterfall have mute men servants, ready to dispense Egyptian cotton towels, wrapped in sprigs of lavender. After your shower they pummel the city tension from your shoulders on a massage table…

Our bell tent

O.K, so I might have had unrealistic expectations of glamping, a genuine one was that our campsite would be comprised of four other families and we’d all be spaced at least two miles apart so we never saw or heard each other. I was also expecting our tent to be perched atop a hill, overlooking a beautiful valley... Although I saw those valleys on the drive there, Reader, I really did, the reality wasn’t quite like that. 

I had to reckon with glamping within lockdown which meant that they’d closed the regular showers and you were only permitted to use bucket showers. Imagine what a bucket shower is, that’s what it is. It involves filling buckets, which in turn involves good upper body strength. I never used one, preferring instead to resort to the festival wash method of baby wipes in the tent. I took dry shampoo as well, another festival staple, but to be honest I barely looked in a mirror the whole weekend so that didn’t get used. 
My husband* had not one but two bucket showers over the course of the weekend, and was keen to highlight how great they were but it felt like he was trying to prank me into having one. 

*Note - if I’m the joyless, neurotic idiot, he’s the gung ho, Bear Grylls-esque, hero. He threw himself into wood chopping, fire lighting, even dish washing with enthusiastic gusto. His boyish ebullience rubbed off on the kids and they enjoyed burning things just as much as he did. They weren’t so keen on the composting toilets.

Oh, the composting toilets - sawdust, minimal lighting and the smell! The indescribable smell. My husband said that, after this weekend, we’d never get rid of the smell of wood fire from our nose, I’d say that the composting toilets provided a strong contender for this role. Still, to be fair to the campsite, they were always clean, they always had toilet roll and the sink outside, at which you washed your hands, was always stocked with hand soap and hand sanitiser. You were instructed to tip a cup of sawdust into the chamber of horrors if you’d done a poo and this made for an experience which was marginally nicer than a festival portaloo. You had to spray the seat with antibacterial spray after each use and while this made paying a visit more labour intensive than normal, it probably meant that the toilets were generally cleaner than your average public convenience. It’s just the smell, the sweet smell that nearly made me boke on my very last visit. My main problem with camping is not having a toilet nearby. That first night, kept awake by the sound of revelry and the demands of my bladder, I eventually made the journey to the toilets, on my own, in the pitch black, with a head torch lighting my way. It felt like a hero’s journey. 

Camping usually makes me want to cry and this trip was no different, however I have to give credit where it’s due and list the plus points of glamping versus regular camping.

1. Although we weren’t at the top of a hill, overlooking a lush, verdant valley, we did have a lot of space around us. You couldn’t really see anyone else and they couldn’t really see you. Thus we were able to caper around with unselfconscious vim. (You could hear other people - the forest resounded with the sound of strident, confident, middle class voices calling their children or the music coming from the large crowd of yoofs in the corner field but you couldn’t often see them.)
2. The tent is already put up, which cuts down on rows. You could stand up in our one, a bonus for when giving oneself a baby wipe shower.
3. The fires - the fire pit and the little stove we made tea on. I’m not as enthusiastic as Bear G the second about this but it was pleasant to sit around one of these with a glass of wine or cup of tea. No T.V, no P.C, no phone coverage, just the fire. 
   
4. Family Time. OK so this largely consisted of bonding over our shared disgust at the smell of the composting toilet BUT it was also time spent assembling halloumi kebabs and showing them the correct way to cut a pepper. On holiday they revelled in assisting us, fetching things and carrying logs, saying ‘Can I help’ or ‘I'll get it’. At home this ceased abruptly, it was nice while it lasted though….

Lovingly prepared kebabs

Am I now a convert to the whole camping thing? Not quite.

Swimming and the Body

One of the things that I love about swimming, particularly swimming in the sea, is that it is an activity which is not so much ‘how do I look doing this?’ as ‘Oh, I love this!’  If you’re someone who carries around a yoke of (probably mildly irrational) self consciousness with you, this is a very big deal. Not always imagining that constant, critical audience; ready to jeer at your every move. When swimming somewhere that’s not too crowded, looking out at the horizon, I cease worrying about how I look and merely focus on how I feel.

I’ve tried to evangelise about this down the pub; about not worrying how something makes you look - how sweaty you become or what it does to your hair, I’m sure I’ve sounded tiresomely bogus but I’m just trying to spread the good news. Swimming makes me feel marvellous; at one with the world and more at peace with myself, it could do the same for you! 

Marazion Beach

From a young age I waged war against my body; I cruelly seized bits of it between my fingers and wished it away, I pinched it and hurt it. I starved and berated it, ignored it and tried to pretend it wasn’t there and still it served me as all of our bodies do. My body served me well - carrying me around, healing wounds and nurturing the human beings who grew within it. Why are we taught to hate our bodies so much? To try and mould them into some kind of impossible faux Platonic ideal, when the goalposts keep moving anyway? When I was young the ‘fashionable’ body shape for women was a flat chested, half starved ‘waif’, at this moment it seems to be a cartoon, Jessica Rabbit, hourglass figure.
I read somewhere that wanting to lose weight was very rarely about wanting to be thinner, it was about being acceptable to other people. And that is probably true of anything we want to change about our appearance - the wish to be acceptable to others - that invisible audience again.  At the heart of this is wanting to be lovable. 

I recently entered a micro story competition, the challenge was to write a 100 word story based on a picture. The picture was of a lighthouse, with the sun setting on the sea. It was a peaceful image filled with soothing colours. The sea was calm and still. I tried to banish the prosaic reality of the function of a lighthouse being to warn sailors away from the rocky shore and write about swimming instead! The image reminded me of an evening swim I’d had at Marazion Beach in Cornwall, near St. Michael’s Mount. The water had been wonderfully cool and silky - not bracingly cold and I’d managed to get to that happy state of Zen-like contentment. We were all sticky from our visit to a tropical garden that day and a swim was a perfect way to end the day. 

Light on the Water

Nowhere to park in the whole of Southport. Trapped like wasps in our hot car. We get to the rocky beach at five and unpeel ourselves from sticky clothes. I wrestle with the shame of my bulging outline. 

Picking over the painful pebbles we run into the sea. I plough through the oily shallows; gentle waves tugging playfully.  The kids splash behind me and I pretend we're a family of seals. 

Cool water. I send a silent prayer to my body - I’ve been so busy absorbing the disapproval of others that I’ve forgotten to appreciate the pleasure it can bring.

I didn’t win the competition - maybe mine’s not a story at all and more of a poem or a vignette but I enjoyed writing it and I’m grateful to it for reminding me of how much I love swimming!

First attempt at capturing the scene in pencils