Some decades are better than others...

Some days are better than others.  Some months are better than others.  Some years…some decades…  Yeah, you get the picture. 

It’s easy to get lost in the past, isn’t it?  You start by looking at old pictures and, hey, weren’t you so young and pretty?  And, oh, didn’t you have a life back then – a job, a vision, a purpose; friends, family, home.  Weren’t you so in love – with someone, with life, with yourself?  And wasn’t the future so bright? 

And what happened, in those years that followed?  What turned the rainbow monochrome?  What killed the magic stone-dead?  Was it the first grey hair or the first deal that went west?  The dimming of eyes or the dilution of love?  Was there a definite point where it turned sour?  Can you look back and see exactly that fork in the road where you made the big mistake, where you chose this way over that, or did it just float over you imperceptibly, like mist, until one day you woke up and the fog was so thick that you couldn’t even bite the hand in front of your face?

Isn’t it so damned unfair the way it never quite worked out the way you planned? 

Ah, it’s so easy to get snaggled up in regret, in self-blame, in else-one blame, in disappointment and despair, isn’t it?  You had your chance, you blew it and life will never be so rosy again.  You’re washed up, old, tired, so bloody tired, and doesn’t the mirror delight in showing you how just plain nasty time can be? 

Where did those days, weeks, months, years, decades go?  It only seems a blink ago that you were standing, fresh–faced and hopeful at the prow of adulthood, peering into a future in which you could be anyone, do anything, go anywhere.  And now?  Now the walls crowd in around you. Time chews your face, biting it into furrows, spitting out lines.

Many of us have a golden time, a period, however fleeting, in which life felt good, the fates seemed kind.  Or do we?  Isn’t it all just hindsight?  When I look through my photo albums at the pictures taken in my twenties, it looks like heaven.  And, yes, it was a magical time.  Looking back, I was one lucky bitch – I had the looks, the job, the flat, the friends, the fun.  I knew what I wanted (work-wise), I went after it and I got it.  I ticked off my goals one by one – first published feature, first feature in a broadsheet; first feature in a glossy woman’s mag; first feature in a tabloid; first column; first book; first TV appearance; first …oh, you get the idea.  My love life was a shambles but hey, I had great work and fabulous friends and, as the song says, two out of three ain’t bad. 

But you can’t turn back time, no matter how hard you wish you might.  The past is sliding by, slippery like water – and, really, there is no past, it’s just memory.  There is only now and what we choose to do with that now.  And one can easily sit and drown oneself in the past, in that lovely lilac wine of Lethe that, if you drink enough, pulls you into a soft soporific befuddlement.  

Or, alternatively, you can look back with love and a shrug, and then tug yourself into the here and now, gird your loins and all that malarkey and make of it something new. 

Because if you don’t…if you can’t let go of the past, it will strangle you and squeeze out every last fragment of possible happiness.  Cos time’s just a right bastard like that.  J

How do you mend a broken heart?

I met a woman recently. She was beautiful, in all ways – with the voice of an angel. But she was also sad, so terribly terribly sad.   Her husband had died just over a year before and she couldn’t stop talking about him. When she remembered him her eyes became soft and her voice lowered. Her hands touched the silver necklace she wore like a talisman.  Yes, he’d given it to her.

‘He was the love of my life,’ she said simply. ‘He was everything I ever wanted.  Everything I ever needed. We were just so…right, in every way, on every level.’ 

She told me that her friends were losing patience with her and telling her she should start dating, find somebody new.  ‘But how can I?’ she said. ‘How can I find someone to take his place?’

‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘You won’t. How could you?’ 

But then?  What do you say to someone in that position? How do you comfort them?  That time heals?  Does it?  Maybe it numbs. A little.

‘It’s just so cruel,’ she said. ‘So unfair. We didn’t have that long; we didn’t have long enough.’  

For some loves, there is never enough time. For some, there is no time at all.

When I told her that my last remaining work as a journalist is to write an agony aunt column for Natural Health magazine each month, she smiled. ‘Answer my question,’ she said. ‘Please.’ 

And so, today, on this bright beautiful sunny day, I am sitting here with a heavy heart.  Thinking about loss, about time, about separation, about broken hearts, about lost love.

What would you say to her?  What advice would you give?  How do you live with a broken heart?  How do you cope with the cruel vagaries of Life and Time?  

You just don't know...

Communication. Talking. Saying what you feel, what you mean. Being honest. Seriously, why are we so bloody crap at it?  I write this agony aunt column every month for Natural Health magazine (yeah, yeah, don’t laugh) and really, I could answer pretty well every dilemma in one word:  TALK!  Spit it out. Say what you’re feeling.  

Don’t be mean: say what you mean. 

Cos most people aren’t psychic.  They won’t intuit what you feel.  They won’t hear the words unspoken. You have to bite the bullet and say it. Not in an aggressive ‘you total manky bitch’ or ‘you ignorant fecking bastard’ way – but in a straightforward, honest ‘this is how I feel’ way.  Simple huh?

So why don’t we? 

I guess sometimes it’s because of fear.  If you know someone will act with anger or aggression, that’s good reason to keep schtum.  But then, I wonder, should you really be around someone who reacts that way in the first place?  Sometimes, maybe, you don’t want to ask the question because, in your heart of hearts, you’re scared of the answer.  Or you’re scared of looking and sounding foolish, of making an arse of yourself. 

And some people, of course, use silence and lack of communication as a kind of power game. 

But really, all of it drives me crazy.  So much misunderstanding. So much time, so many opportunities, lost through lack of words. So much hurt and pain sometimes.  Through lack of truth and honesty. 

The mind, left to its imaginings, can be an inventive beast. It can come up with all kinds of scenarios; all sorts of hurt and paranoia.  And thought is creative.  How we think can affect how we feel.  Magicians would go one step further and say that how we think can affect matter – because, really, it’s all just different forms of energy.  So we should be careful with our words, with our thoughts, with what is said and what is thought.  With what is unsaid.  Can something be unthought though?  No.  Only pushed away or buried or – better - replaced with something new.

Anyhow. Let’s be honest (ho ho), I’m not always great at the communication stuff myself.  I’m not one of life’s great splurgers.  Generally I don’t talk a whole load, truth to tell. I love silence. And silence loves me. And, yes, sometimes there can be too many words banded about. I once spent a car journey pondering the maths on how much Adrian speaks in comparison to me – I think it was a ratio of 750:1 or thereabouts.  I’m a good listener though – most journalists are. I guess it's balance again - a question of knowing when to speak and when to shut the feck up.  

Last night there was a deep and not remotely comfortable silence in the house.  Adrian and James weren’t talking.  Again.  Ye gods.  To be fair, Adrian is pretty good at expressing how he feels.  And he will readily admit if he’s done wrong.  But James is a tougher nut to crack. He’s a Scorpio, one of life’s natural silent brooding types.  I’m determined that, if I can teach James one thing, just one thing (after the self-esteem thingy of course), it will be to communicate; to be honest about how he feels.  To state his feelings clearly, openly, without losing the plot.  Yes, that will sometimes bring him heartache, of course it will, but it will also save him heartache in the long term.  So, after a suitable period elapsed (cos everyone needs to wallow for a bit), I followed him, cornered him in his lair and made him look me in the eye and talk.  And eventually he did.  And instead of launching off into ‘And he said this…’ or ‘And it’s so unfair…’ he talked about how he felt.  He spat it all out and felt – he said - much the better for it. 

As the old adage goes, better out than in.  

So, today, maybe…try being honest. Say what you feel.  Is there an elephant in the room?  Name it. Something you’ve wanted to get off your chest for aeons? Shift it. Can’t say it? Write it. Put it in a letter and sign it with a kiss (or knot).  Because, really, life can be too short for miscommunication, misunderstanding.  Yet another person I know died this week (no, no, please no commiserations – I didn’t know him well – the husband of a friend).  She heard his key in the door but he never came in.  When she went to see what had happened, she found him dead on the doorstep.  You never know how long anybody has got.  Use your time wisely eh? 

13 years

Today I feel…so so strange. My solar plexus is doing cartwheels. In fact all my chakras are spinning weirdly, every which way, like I’m being teased apart, unravelling, dissipating and then being crashed back together.  I take a deep breath and everything spins again. Lurches like sea sickness. Just the most massive psychic disturbance. 

Is it because my boy is 13 today?  I dunno.  Thirteen years ago I became a mother. An archetype I never thought I’d constellate.  Thirteen years ago I was in a hospital bed in Taunton squinting in disbelief at a helium balloon with ribbons dangling from it that a friend (who worked in the mortuary at the hospital) had placed above the bed while James and I slept, exhausted (the pair of us) after our severing.  

I couldn’t believe anyone could be so feckless as to allow me to be in charge of this being; this precious person.  I knew then, with total certainty, that I would lay my life down in a nanosecond for him. I still would. I’m pretty sure I always will.  When I feel as if entropy is tugging me, when the dissipation becomes almost too unbearable, he tugs me back. My lodestone.  And then I worry because I don’t want him to feel pressure from the enormity of my love; don’t want him to feel in any way responsible for my happiness.  I suffered the weight of immense parental love. Isn’t that a funny thing to say?  Most people complain they weren’t loved enough – and lack of love is a terrible, terrible thing.  But too much parental love can be onerous too.  When expectation is so high that you cannot bear to disappoint.  And I hear my mother’s voice in my head soothing, ‘Never, never.’  And Erik the Viking. ‘Don’t be bloody stupid; come here, Trollop, and have a hug.’ Yes, he called/calls me Trollop. J And my birth father?  He just holds me close to his cable-knit cardigan, the one with the leather buttons, that smells of pipe smoke and wool.  He never said much. I can’t hear his voice. No. I’ve tried again but I can’t.

Anyhow. I didn’t expect to be writing this.  I was intending to go to the gym, to see if my body had mended enough (a sneaky attack of the bloody palindromic rheumatism thing I thought I’d kicked into touch) to let me stretch my limbs but the gym was shut and so I’m sitting here going back in time, projecting forwards in time and here, right now, my solar plexus is still spinning wildly and my boy is at school and my dead parents are dancing in my head and life is so very very very strange. 

Time passing and beauty pageants

James worries about time passing. He says that time feels like it’s speeding up. I know that feeling but it worries me that he does. I don’t think I felt like that at his age. I always considered it was a mathematical thing – that, as we get older, each year is a smaller fraction of our life so far lived, so inevitably it feels shorter. But, hmm, is time speeding up?


‘I won’t be a child much longer,’ he said, sadly.
‘You’re not that old,’ I said, smiling.
‘I’m nearly a teenager.’
What?
‘I’ll be a teenager this year. And then in four years’ time...’
‘Oh stop it.’
‘Why can’t childhood last longer?’

Why indeed?

And then, as I idly clicked through Facebook, I saw that my nevermetbutmuchadored friend TL Tyson had posted a new vlog. I love her vlog. I love her, full stop. She’s a very talented writer who lives in Canada; who has just the most fecund imagination and a wild sense of humour. She’s someone who turns your thinking upside down. Anyhow, she’d posted a vlog about child beauty pageants which rams home the point about how, for some children, childhood is being cut short in a pretty dramatic way.

Watch it.



I have no words for this. It sickens me. If it sickens you too, then maybe nick the link for this and post it on your blog, your Facebook page, your Twitter account?  Can we not shame these people into stopping this travesty?

As Tee says: ‘When did child abuse become a source of entertainment?’