Tag: love

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That Olivia Rodrigo Song

nataliegist

In August 2021 my mother went to hospital for a routine blood test and mentioned to the doctor that she had some difficulty breathing.  The medical staff had a poke and prod of her and then kept her in – she had pneumonia.  For two weeks the staff tried a variety of different treatments to try and get a handle on it as it creeped deeper into her lungs.  Towards the end of those two weeks Sister A was called to the hospital, taken to one side and told to prepare for the worst.

Mum was moved onto a respiratory ward – essentially a Covid ward at that time.  It soon became pretty clear that try as they might, Mum had no immune system left to galvanise.  

My Mum was a stroppy cow – it is one of her gifts to me – and she wasn’t grasping that she was dying.   She was simply not having it.  I asked for a Consultant to come and explain it to her.  Mum still wasn’t getting it – not because she hadn’t heard it – but because it must be very hard to understand that someone has told you that you’re dying when you’re sat there, very much alive and you’re not ready to go.  So I explained it to her again; that there were no more antibiotics to try and that in forty eight hours all treatment was going to be stopped.  I still wasn’t sure that she’d heard everything or understood.  When a nurse appeared with “something to make her more comfortable”, Mum asked if it was morphine.  The nurse confirmed it was, and I knew then that she understood. 

On 31 August, I left for the evening with Sister A.  I told my Mum that I loved her and went into the little room outside her room to take off my PPE.  We were called back at 4am on 1 September as the nurse on duty thought Mum as going to pop off then.  In fairness she didn’t know my mother, and she clung on for over twelve more hours before she finally let go.  Sister A and I sat, holding her hand.  It took days and nights for the image of her face to fade from my mind.

The hospital gave us three blankets that they had put on my mum’s bed – specially knitted by volunteers so that people had something to keep when having lost a loved one – the last thing to touch them.  They gave us six little knitted hearts, also knitted by volunteers, to give to each of her six grandchildren.  And they gave us a print of her hand, and a lock of her hair.

Over the course of this period, Sister B and family had Covid making it’s way around each of them.  She was trapped in her house, with her three children, one of which was a four month old baby.  My brother in law had had to shield somewhere else.  Regular readers may know that my brother in law was having treatment for Acute Myeloid Leukaemia at the time, so his life quite literally depended on him being kept safe.

Sister B had called Mum regularly to try and talk to her.  Mum’s hearing wasn’t great, so it was quite a challenge.  No doubt to the bewilderment of her neighbours, I spent a lot of time standing in the shrubbery on her front garden after hospital visits, talking to her through the front window to update her as to what was really going on.  She kept putting her Covid test result up against the window so we could examine the two lines and see (hope) if the test line had faded any; it didn’t.  At least not in time.

On the evening after Mum died I drove back to Sister B’s house on my way back to the motorway, as I had done often.  Once again I stood in the shrubbery.  I left the blanket, the three hearts, the handprint and the lock of hair. I put my hand on the glass.  And instead of the tap of the Covid test on the glass, on the other side, was my sister’s hand.  

Three months later, almost to the day, my sister lost her husband to AML.  I couldn’t help at various points throughout my brother in law’s illness because of the pandemic.  And I couldn’t go when he was dying because one of my children had Covid and we decided that tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy was more than we could bear.  So I stayed home. I never did test positive.

Last week I took some flowers to my Mum’s grave with my nephew, who is now coming up on his second birthday. A few weeks before it had been what would have been his father’s forty third birthday. I try not to go too often because I don’t want his memories of our days together to be of his aunt standing in cemeteries crying.

I wish my experience had been exceptional.  Because if it had been, there wouldn’t be people up and down the country now who can recount very similar experiences to mine, and number in their thousands.  There wouldn’t be people reading this thinking “that’s very similar to what happened to me.”  And all of that, every agonising, crushing part of that would have been easier for all of us, if those making the rules had not only been taking the piss out of all of us, but then had the absolute brass neck to lie about it.

As I watched The Privileges Committee yesterday, I did not observe any semblance of understanding or responsibility.  Just a person trying desperately to get out of the massive hole that they have dug themselves into whilst others frantically try to distance themselves.  And then Olivia Rodrigo’s song wafted into my mind.  Famously performed when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade if you need to google it.  Not Shakespeare, but perfect, I think, for this.

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The White Rabbit

nataliegist

A white rabbit lives in my garden.  An escaped pet.  Not my escaped pet.  But he is now my pet.  Or as close as he’s ever going to be to being someone’s pet.  I couldn’t tell you exactly when he started to visit.  It seems now that he has always been a part of my life. Every day he comes and sits on the back wall, waiting for me to feed him.  If I am in the garden he will bound up to me and sit at my feet until I do feed him.  Or a little nose will appear through the plants just to remind me that he’s there. Sometimes he even lets me stroke him.  

In this freezing weather The White Rabbit visits every day, twice a day.  In the Summer his attendance is more sporadic.  Some days he lies stretched out under the plants, contentedly dozing in the dappled shade. Near the water bowl I leave out for him.  When it rains I put an umbrella out on its side to shield him whilst he is eating. The little bastard sits on the opposite side from the umbrella to eat and then hops into the middle of the garden, directly facing me in the teeming rain, entirely uncovered and absolutely soaked. I’ve bought him a grass house, put boxes out, hay, straw; he spurns them all.  I have no idea where he goes at night, but somewhere safe – this will be his fourth Winter.  Not bad going for a domestic rabbit who lives wild. 

On the days he doesn’t come, I look for him.  I worry that the last time I saw him was the last time that I will ever see him. And when he springs down the garden to see me, I feel a rush of joy that this unexpected and resourceful little creature came into my life. So I took a photo of him.  Just in case. One day will be his last visit.  And as the Winters pass, I know that that day is getting closer.

I went out for a festive dinner with some friends the other night.  Or ‘the girls’ to give them their correct collective noun.  We try and do this every so often – see each other long enough to have a conversation and eat a meal that we haven’t had to cook ourselves.  Like a lot of people we haven’t had much opportunity to get together over the past few years.  This has been further complicated by work, children getting older and going to different schools and one of our number having had the audacity to move half an hour down the road.  On having a chance to talk, it transpired that three of the six us have the joy of children taking GCSEs this Summer. What a delight. Another has the thrill of ‘A’ levels to look forward to.  Three had children start secondary school in September.  Two started new jobs.  Three lost someone we love in the last twelve months.  Another is enduring watching a loved one undergo chemotherapy.  Comforted by the survivor sat beside her.  Life.  Rolling on.  Relentlessly.

As she ordered a second glass of wine, Petite Blonde Friend asked the waitress if she would take a photo of all of us.  There was a murmur of protest from the assembled company, which was completely ignored. Rather than cause a last-minute dash to check hair and make-up as may have been the case for others, for some inexplicable reason, with the girls, the prospect of a photograph caused a furore of tidying.  I am considering asking them all round to my house on Christmas morning and threatening them with a Polaroid. So there, on a ‘phone and preserved for posterity is a photo of six middle-aged women in paper hats, drinks aloft an exceptionally tidy dining table. 

Like The White Rabbit, I don’t really recall precisely when the girls came into my life.  It was around the time Childerbeast Number One started primary school, as that was the place that we all had in common at one point in time.  But it was more random than that. And my goodness we’ve all lived a lot of life since then.  At this time of year, we all raise a toast to absent friends.  We miss them. God, it aches to miss them. But we should also toast our present friends.  Our white rabbits.  Whilst we have them.

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The Last Spinster in Gloucestershire’s Guide to Grief

nataliegist

I have lost three people close to me in the past eighteen months; Adella, my mum and my brother in law. Obviously it would be extremely unusual and indeed, rather fortunate, for anyone to have got to my age (twenty one) without having lost anyone.  And I do not in any way claim that my losses are any worse or more devastating than any of those which any of you may have suffered throughout any of your lives.  However, I think we can all agree that on a personal level, losing three people in such a short space of time during a pandemic makes for a challenging time.

Instead of talking about how grief feels *spoiler alert* – horrendous – I thought that it might be helpful for those of you trying to support a person who is facing it full blast, if I gave my top hints and tips from my experience as a grieving person and someone who has tried to support people grieving.

1. Do or say something

Whatever you do, saying or doing nothing is not an option.  Yes, I know we’re all British and stiff upper lip and all that, but I so much appreciated people letting me know that I was in their thoughts.  I had a lovely card from a friend that said she didn’t know what to say but she was sending me her love.  Not a long, waffling epistle. Not dramatic.  No wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Thoughtful messages, cards and flowers from friends and family to let me know that they were there.  But don’t do nothing.  That is the worst thing you can do.

2. Ask them anything other than how they are

Now I’ve said that doing nothing is not an option, when you do something, whatever you do, don’t ask them how they are.  I don’t mean don’t acknowledge their loss.  I mean specifically don’t ask: “how are you?” And I’m going to put my hands up here.  I kept doing this to my sister.  Man of the House pointed out to me that it was not the question to be asking.  Don’t say this too loudly because I wouldn’t want him to hear, but *whispers* he was right.  It was, is and remains, a stupid question. In pretty much every conversation I can think of, actually.  Everyone will say that they’re fine when they are demonstrably not.  Someone in hospital?  They’re sufficiently unwell to require a stay in hospital.  Nasty cold?  Bad day at work?  You know how they are.  They’re shit.  They feel shit.  It is shit.  And as far as loss of a loved one is concerned, it is going to be unutterably shit in some way or other, probably for the rest of their lives. Talk about the weather if you must, but please don’t ask people how they are. 

3. Remember that none of us know how any of us really feel about anything

We each have individual relationships with each other, which is what makes them special.  But none of us know how the other feels about the loss of a particular person or a particular relationship with that person because it was unique. If at any point you feel yourself about to utter the immortal line “I know how you feel” – stop yourself; you don’t. 

4. Talk about normal stuff

You are allowed, encouraged even, to talk about normal crap. Jokes and piss-taking is also permitted.  As are personal comments about the bereaved not looking quite their best, and suggestions of brushes needing to be run through hair and teeth.  We have not undergone a personality change, but a loss.  It helps for us to know that life goes on, even if we feel like we have stepped out for a while.

5. Talk about the person who has died

A work colleague died a few years ago and memories were being shared on social media (see below).  I remembered that they once made a speech at the office Christmas party which included the line “I want to keep my speech like Natalie’s skirt – long enough to cover the important points but short enough to be interesting.” His family replied that it had made them howl with laughter.  And when I think of him, I always remember that.  People are only truly gone when you forget them.  Don’t forget them.

6. But not the detail of how they died

What is expressly discouraged is trying to get the bereaved person “to talk about it”. And by ‘it’ I mean the detail leading up to and including a person’s death.  I’m not suggesting that you, dear Reader, are such a person.  But there is always one person (and I suspect that person in your life has popped immediately into your mind right now) who takes a perverse delight in wanting the gory details under the not-very convincing disguise of getting the bereaved person to unburden themselves for their own good.  The bereaved do not need to unburden themselves out-loud over and over.  And do you know why? Because they lived it. And if they do, it will certainly not be to the funerial equivalent of a rubbernecker.  It is your job as someone who genuinely cared for the deceased to identify, intercept and distract this person should you encounter them. Talk about your iffy toe, your dodgy mole, your unpredictable bottom  – anything, but keep them away from the bereaved.

7. Offer to help with something specific

When someone dies everyone connected to the deceased, pretty much without exception, asks if there is anything they can do. I have done this.  And I meant it.  But on reflection it was not helpful for me to make a nebulous offer of “help” to a person who cannot think straight in the shock of grief to consider what I might have been able to help with.  If you are able, offer help with something specific. And if you feel confident enough, just do it.  My friend offered help with lifts for my children.  I could get my head round that.  A specific task that I could consider whether or not I needed help with.  I told my sister when her weekly shop would be arriving.  Leave a lasagne on their doorstep. A cake.  I came home from Adella’s funeral to a bottle of gin. Little acts of love wrapped up in everyday things. 

8. Don’t make us go out

There will come a point when we have to re-engage with the world.  We know that.  Just don’t try to make us. After my mum died a friend took me round some gardens on a Sunday afternoon and poked tea and cake at me.  That I could cope with.  Anything more vigorous or exciting, I could not.  You will have to judge the person you know for yourself.  Of course, if it looks as if the bereaved retreating into their shell is likely to be a longer-term issue, then you may have to consider an intervention at some point.  But I am telling you now, trying to persuade them out with the same tactics as one extracts a cat from it’s carrier at the vets is doomed to fail.

9. Self-flagellatory social media posts

I’m not even sure if that is a word but if not, it should be.  Social media has its uses, many, many good uses.  It can be a lovely way for people to share memories, exchange information, and so much money has been raised for charities in memory of loved ones (see above).  In a similar vein to the cryptic poster there is the person who, usually exceedingly peripheral to the deceased, posts something about being “absolutely heartbroken”.  I am sure that they are sad.  I am sure that they are upset.  We all are when someone dies, but for the love of god, and I can’t emphasise this enough, get over yourself.  It’s not about you.  Grief is not a competitive sport.  It’s about the person who has died.  I genuinely don’t know how to deal with these people other than ignore them.  All suggestions gratefully received.

10. Don’t go away after the aftermath

There is always a lot of activity leading up to someone’s final send-off; people to be contacted, arrangements to be made…..there is a lot to sort out.  People gather to show their respects. And then, for the most-part, they drift away.  I get that.  Life goes on as it absolutely must if for no other reason than to honour the life of the person no longer with us.  I was chatting to a friend about something banal around six months after my mum died, and in the middle of it she said she just wanted to let me know that she didn’t want to keep asking me, but she hadn’t forgotten either.  Be that person.  We all need that person in our lives.

So there you go.  Take from it what you will.  You may find it utterly useless.  I hope that one person finds some comfort in some of it, someday. You may have found yourself muttering in disgust as you read it and declaring it to be “all wrong”. If you are the latter, then you are unlikely to be the former. The world still turns.

. 

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Proof of Life

nataliegist

Somewhere in this country is a man.  A young man.  Aged twenty seven.  Actually, probably twenty eight now – I have no idea when his birthday is. I don’t know where he lives.  I don’t know what he does for a living.  I don’t know what he looks like. If he’s married.  Or has children.  Likes football.  Doesn’t like football. Likes shoes.  Chocolate.  Can’t stand cheese. The only other thing that I know about him is that he is of the same tissue type as a forty one year old man.  I know nothing else about him.  I don’t even know his name.

Nearly a year ago this mystery man agreed to be a stem cell donor.  He must have already had it in his mind that one day he might need to agree to this as he was already on the register.  And when the register was searched for a match for the forty one year old man, he popped up.  Doppelgangers.  Or even double-dickers as a confused child once thought. A ten out of ten match. I am not a doctor or a scientist, but I was always taught at school that if you get ten out of ten then that is to be celebrated.  And the people who know a lot more about it than me thought so too.  So we celebrated. Cautiously.

I presume that what next happened went loosely like this: said man was approached by several doctors, possibly in a lot of PPE at the time as the nation was in the teeth of the second lockdown.  He was advised that he was a double-dicker for someone needing a stem cell transplant.  I assume he was then asked if he would be prepared to be a stem cell donor.  Then he was probably given a lot of booklets and details as to the procedure, endless forms and a lot of people coming to see him to explain the forms. As a matter of procedure, I expect he was told a lot of things, but chiefly; a list of risks even more terrifying than the leaflet in a packet of paracetamol, possible outcomes, no one was allowed to know anyone else and no money would be changing hands.

Whatever happened between being identified as a match and being given a lever arch files of papers, this man agreed. As with his donee, I presume that he knew very little about the person he had been asked to help save.  He could not have known that his doppelganger was due to turn forty one in February.  That he lived in a village.  Had just moved into the house, in fact. That he was an Estates Manager.  Married.  Two children with another on the way.  Loved Spurs.  Disinterested by shoes.  Even less interested in chocolate.  Didn’t like bananas.  He didn’t even know his name. 

I don’t know his reasons for agreeing.  Maybe it was the opportunity to give a gift that only he could give to that one person. A gift that no one who loves and knows him could have given.  Perhaps an opportunity to do something special that comes along only once in a lifetime. Even just to get out of work for a couple of days. Whatever his reasons, I strongly suspect that at the point of agreement, one person advanced towards him with a biro.  And then several more people advanced on him with a buffet of needles.  He faced the pokings, the proddings, the general inconvenience of going back and forth to hospital and the risk to his own person.  All for someone he didn’t know and would never know. No money, no thanks, no recognition.

He will never know that the man’s family and friends were beside themselves at the prospect of losing him.  And the relief in knowing that not only had a donor been found, but, crucially, he was willing to proceed.  It is probably better that he will never know how they joked about a bevy of clucking middle-aged women turning up to his house or his place of work to thank him adoringly and tend to his every want and need ad infinitum. He will never know that because of what he did that he gave precious time.  Time for the man to talk to his wife.  His children.  His mum.  Time to hold his newborn child.

He will never know that he gave not just the man, but all those who love him, hope. Hope in such a time of darkness that it is hard to believe that life can ever be good again. He will never know that the leukaemia hid.  That after everything he did, in spite of everything everyone did, that it came back.  The crushing truth that even if everyone is pulling in the same direction, together, some storms cannot be weathered.  And we will never understand why. The comfort in our grief is that an entire stranger was prepared to give literally something of themselves and expect nothing in return.  Not a note.  Not a thank you.  Not a face. Not even a name. And they did it anyway.

If you are interested in joining the stem cell register, you can find more information here:

www.anthonynolan.org/

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Eulogy

nataliegist

Thank you for coming today.  I know that some of you have come a long way and not all of you are in the best of health. We very much appreciate your support and you being with us.

First we would like to publicly thank the teams of medical staff from our NHS for caring for Mum.  In particular, Dr Macmillan, Dr Fox, Lyn and the teams of the Haematology Department at Nottingham City Hospital.  They never gave up hope – they always tried everything.  And succeeded for nearly forty years.  The gratitude that we owe them can never be adequately expressed.  If you would like to make a donation to the ongoing and pioneering work of the Nottinghamshire Leukaemia Appeal there is a box for you to do so, and we will make sure it gets to them.  Thank you.

Our mum, Kaye, was born on 28 March 1948 in Leicester, a daughter to our grandparents and a younger sister for her brother. My uncle has told you about Mum’s younger days. She was a terror. Mum went to secretarial college at fourteen and at sixteen was sent out into the working world.  She had many jobs as one might expect, but one of her favourites was as a secretary in CID which she left in late 1974 just before my older sister was born.  I came along just over a year later and then seven years after that, much to our father’s surprise, but not our mother’s, my younger sister appeared.  It was during her pregnancy with my younger sister that my mum was diagnosed with leukaemia aged thirty four.

Sadly my parents divorced some years later.  It was hard for Mum to be a single parent.  She went back to college to upskill after having been at home for many years.  Having learnt to type on an old-fashioned typewriter, it took her some time to learn that there was no need to bash the living daylights out of a computer keyboard.  Mum then started a job at college, which was where she worked in various departments until she retired.

After many years Mum met our stepdad, Rob.  One evening after they had been seeing each other for a while he told her that he couldn’t see her anymore.  He said that he had been diagnosed with leukaemia and that he was going to die.  In a response that he was definitely not expecting Mum replied that she had never heard such nonsense, she had had leukaemia for twenty years and she wasn’t going to die.  They married at Gretna Green. Their time together was short and as many of you know, Rob did lose his fight against leukaemia.  Not as quickly as anyone thought he would, in large part due to the medics at Nottingham and another due to my mum’s love and care for him.

Being widowed did not come easily to Mum- she never enjoyed being single.  Nevertheless she continued to go out with friends and have holidays.  Mum had some enduring friendships – Sue, Val and Shirley are to name a few who will have many memories.  One friend, Yvonne, recalled a trip to the States when they got absolutely soaked on a boat trip. Rather than rush for a towel, Kaye pointed out to Yvonne and everyone else on the boat that she could see the pattern on Yvonne’s underwear. Tactful as ever.

Kaye had a lifelong love of animals.  She loved horses and riding when she was younger.  She always had a furry heartbeat or two around the house to keep her company.  She also loved reading – particularly history books about the Wars of the Roses.  Mum had a busy, restless, mind – it never stopped.  And until she lost her hearing, Mum also loved music and dancing.  The Beatles,  Queen – she felt the loss of Freddie Mercury profoundly. She largely failed in her attempts to get us to do the positively ridiculous ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’. And there is a reason me and my sisters know all of the words to Barry Manilow’s songs and it is not because we are fans.

Mum delighted in being a grandparent.  She didn’t even mind a honky nappy.  She was so pleased to have had the chance to hold little her newborn grandson and bounced with happiness at holding a new little life.  She once told me that having grandchildren made her feel like her life had been worth it.

I don’t want to give the impression of our mum as a saintly figure because we all know that would be an enormous porkie – she was often bad-mannered, bad-tempered and badly behaved. She wasn’t always entirely in command of her vehicle.  During a power cut when was a my younger sister was a baby the lights came back on for Mum to discover that she had the bottle in the baby’s ear.  I was once woken up by a loud bang and found that Mum had come home the worse for wear and bumped her head attempting to negotiate her way into the bathroom.  Much to my horror, either forgetting or not caring that she wasn’t a child of the sixties anymore when in her late forties Mum bought some leopard print hotpants.  I didn’t even begin to delve into when or where she thought she was going to wear them.  I am relieved to say that they never left the house.  On another occasion at my older sister’s secondary school a Maths teacher had got the wrong end of the stick about an ongoing debacle with another pupil.  My mum was exceedingly keen to appraise her of the full facts.  So keen, in fact, that the Headmaster had to stand between her and the teacher concerned.  A few days before she died, a junior doctor was trying to take some blood and my mother told her to go and find someone who could do it properly.  The doctor looked at me pleadingly to which my response was that I had no sympathy for her as that was just the sort of encouragement I had had for forty five years.  When it came to my mother – if you were a goose who had upset her, if “boo” was all that she said to you, then you should have considered yourself very lucky indeed.

Mum was also fearless.  And peerless.  She faced numerous rounds of chemotherapy over many years.  Stem cell transplant, radiotherapy.   You name the drug for her condition and she probably had it. I wouldn’t say it didn’t bother her, but she did just get on with it.  We never saw her cry about it. The alternative was to give up, and that wasn’t an alternative to her.  So she never gave up. It was that simple. “Unique” is a word that has come up a lot in speaking to people since Mum died.  As I said, peerless.

Kaye lived her life exactly the way she wanted to.  She never let anything or anyone stop her from going where she wanted to go, seeing who she wanted to see, doing what she wanted to do or saying what she wanted to say.

When it became apparent that there was to be no escape from this particular scrape, Mum said that she loved us and was going to miss us all terribly.  We don’t doubt that she loved us.  But I hope the bit about missing us isn’t true.  I don’t want her to miss us.  I want to believe that Mum can go wherever she wants, whenever she wants, with whoever she wants.  Where Freddie Mercury is borrowing her leopard print hotpants, Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits are on endless repeat and only she can hear them and my Nana and Grandad are waiting to call her home.

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The Incredible Unlikeliness of Grief

nataliegist

Yesterday – 16 June 2021 – one hundred and fifty two thousand three hundred and ninety seven people were recorded as having died from Coronavirus within twenty eight days of a positive test. If you have read my previous blog then you will know that one of those people in that very large number was my friend.  She died on 3 January.  Adella.

I’m not claiming that I’m exceptional.  She was.  I’m not.  I know that by my age that grief has affected everyone. It is different for everyone. That it takes us all by surprise and works in very mysterious ways. I have lost grandparents, watched my stepdad fight for his life for six years only to die at forty eight. Stupidly, I never expected a friend to die. Certainly not one younger than me. This has very much been The Spanish Inquisition as far as grief is concerned.

It’s been six months.  The first six months since I was little that I have faced a world without her in it. And I know now that it will never look the same through my eyes.  I never even thought about it because I foolishly assumed that as I was older that I would go first.  And not for a good few years yet because whilst my children think that I’m positively ancient and marvel at how I am still here, we all know I’m not.  I thought that when I finally went, Adella, amongst other people would shuffle into the service and say that it was very sad but what a good innings I had.  That I had lived my life.  And it was a good life.  As far as Adella was concerned, I also expected a modicum of alarm on her part as with my departure it would mean that she only had ten months until she caught up with me.  Therefore if there was something pressing she needed to be getting on with, then she had better get cracking.  Shocked as you may be to hear it, and not for the first time, I was completely and utterly wrong. 

Some dear friends have very kindly offered their ears if I have wanted to talk. But I haven’t been able to talk.  We didn’t have any friends in common. We had pre-dated every other friendship we had or have ever made.  What comfort is there to be had to sit and weep with someone who didn’t know the person you are weeping about – for weeper or weepee?  There are no shared memories.  I can’t say to them “oh do you remember that time when….” and we can laugh and remember together.  I have been so desperate to share memories, to connect with someone who knew her, that I have sat on my hands to avoid crying down the ‘phone to her parents.  Can you imagine her poor parents listening to me whitter on?  Or her ex-husband.  I’m sure he’d be thrilled.  Even driving to her funeral I thought of something that we had giggled about over the years and my brain actually went “oh Adella will laugh about that when I see her. At. Her. Funeral.”  Idiot.

When we were little, Adella and I used to go out for a walk around the country lanes near her parents’ house.  And when we heard a train coming we would run, flat out, to get to the rickety humpback bridge ready for when the train went under it.  Sometimes we would get there.  Sometimes we wouldn’t.  But when we did the bridge would shake under our feet.  And sometimes the driver would sound the horn when they saw us waving from the bridge.

A bit older and we got into make-up. Once we were giggling so much at trying to put eyeliner on that Adella poked me in the eye with the pencil.  Which made us laugh even more.

Like every other girl our age, when we saw Patrick Swayze sashay across the screen in ‘Dirty Dancing’ we knew that he was coming for us.  And much to his inevitable dismay, George Michael was no longer the man we were going to marry. I never let her forget that she suggested we listen to ‘Darty Dincing’.  On a mixed tape.  Yes.  We are that old.  We were that old.

We grew up some more.  Adella had a baby.  I was drunk in a pub.  Adella had two more babies and got married.  I was drunk in a different pub.  I moved away.  She moved further.  We meandered.  Life was busy.  I always loved her.  I wish I had told her that.

On her last birthday, as I have said in my blog, I wished her a happy birthday.  That was when she told me she was going into hospital.  I thought about telling her that I loved her then.  I remember the moment.  I wish I had told her that. Reader, I didn’t. It haunts me. 

After she died her daughter sent me some pictures she had found in her mum’s things.  Amongst them was a poem that I had written for Adella about friendship – she had kept it with her for nearly thirty five years. Turns out she always loved me.  I wish she had told me that. 

If you love someone, tell them.  They might need to hear it. You might need to say it.  And it may not be for that moment that it is really needed – you or they might need to park it and dust it off later.  If you are finding yourself very British about it then find a way. Perhaps a well-timed personal insult will suffice if you need to warm up to it.  But warm up to it.  None of us know what’s coming for us – good and bad.  Of all of the things I could have never predicted, I never could have predicted this.  We can’t tell each other now. Only one of us has to live with it. And I got the better end of the deal.

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Stick It Out

nataliegist

As I am sure many of you are aware there is a certain level of sweariness that is acceptable in an office.  Due to this, many years ago, a colleague and I came up with a few choice phrases that we could deploy in the office that would be deemed acceptable.  So, for example, instead of dropping the c-bomb and being frogmarched into the Senior Partner’s office for a stern word about conduct, we used the word “catflap”. True, the Senior Partner may have wanted a chat about mental stability. Maybe he just thought we were crazy cat ladies and best left well alone.  Whatever his reasons, I have been collecting euphemisms ever since.

Before this all kicked off (you’ll remember when you could go out for something as mundane as shopping without fear of transmitting a disease that could be deadly to a vulnerable person) Diminutive Friend was in her car and exiting a shopping park with her teenage daughter. Someone cut her up in terrifying style, causing an outburst of foul language not seen since King Alfred realised he’d left the oven on.  Her daughter, like every other child on Earth, has the ears of the cloth when her mother is asking her to do something useful.  However, like every other child on Earth, when she is saying something that she would rather she did not hear, said child has the ears of a bat.  Immediately she pounced: “What did you say Mummy?” Slightly flustered and thinking how she was going to get out of this one Diminutive Friend quietly cringed “…er…..chicken sucker…???” as a hopeful note crept into her voice that she had got away with it. Dear Reader, she did not get away with it.  She is now reminded of it at every possible opportunity.  But I have collected another euphemism. 

My final offering has arisen from the word “doppleganger”.  This word has caused some confusion in my family of late.  The person concerned, who had absolutely no reason to know any different from learning a new word, thought that the word for a doppleganger was “double dicker”.  A gift for someone who can’t stop swearing and needs to find ways not to.

Over the past few years I have come to the conclusion that the world is populated by two types of people: those of the human race who are catflaps, chicken-suckers and double-dickers and those who are not.

Let us consider some of the evidence. On the side of the chicken-suckers, a few selected highlights and in no particular order:

  1. Fishermen being abandoned to their fate when a big show has been made by those who were very keen to put the country in the position it is now in, of the importance of our fishing industry.
  2. People who go to the trouble of bagging their dog’s poo up and then throw it in the hedge.
  3. £22 billion taxpayer pounds spent on a Test and Trace System that has never worked.  For comparison purposes, the Mars Rover cost US$2.5 billion. 
  4. I won’t start on the other contracts to mates or I might start ranting.  Follow The Good Law Project and you can rant too.
  5. People who wear their mask under their nose or refuse to wear one at all blathering on about their human rights.  They really need to go and study human rights.
  6. MPs who vote against a pay rise for NHS staff. See point 3 above.
  7. People who have mixed during a pandemic when they have been specifically told not to.  I have heard of people still having their hair done weekly, friends and family visiting their houses in number, sending their children to school when they are awaiting a Covid test result because it’s hard looking after a child when you feel poorly – no shit – (they tested positive)…..
  8. Those who have had their first jab now announcing that they can visit you, whilst neatly ignoring the fact as of time of writing, that seventy three point seven per cent of us have not.  Oh, and it remains illegal to do so.  Well, as long as you’re mostly all right.  Azincourt salute to the rest of us is it?  See point 7 above.
  9. People who are not disabled, parking in spaces for disabled people.
  10. People who park in parent and child spaces when they have no child with them.
  11. Teacher-bashers.
  12. Loo-roll brawlers.

That’s just a few.  I’m sure you have many of your own.

And for balance, on the side of the non double-dickers:

  1. Those not approving of anyone being abandoned to their fate by their elected representatives regardless of their views differing from their own. 
  2. People who donate to their local food banks.
  3. In spite of it never having worked, people who used the Track and Trace system to try to do the right thing.
  4. People who would rather that contracts being paid for with taxpayers’ money were awarded through a transparent system to companies with a proven record and that there are mechanisms in place to ensure compliance with that transparent system. So we know what our money is being spent on.
  5. People who do not need to study human rights to understand that wearing a mask may (even though they will never know it or be able to see it) help save the life of one person, and that’s good enough for them.
  6. MPs who think NHS staff should have a pay rise.
  7. People who have stayed at home, often at great personal cost in terms of their mental and/or physical health because they know in their heart of hearts that it is the right thing to do.
  8. Scientists who developed the vaccine. Badasses.
  9. The NHS who are administering the vaccine.
  10. People who have been collecting prescriptions, shopping etc for people in their locality throughout the pandemic. 
  11. Teachers who have gone into work teaching children both in classes at school and online when on many, many occasions, it has appeared as if the government have been actively working against them. And if not working against them, then giving all the signs of being bloody ungrateful. 
  12. People who have decided that they will not be fighting for toilet roll.  They will not be sweeping tins off supermarket shelves and into their trolley.  They will not take so much fresh food that it is not humanly possible to eat it all before it rots.  They will not. Because that’s not what decent people do to each other.

Again, I am sure that you have many of your own examples that could be added to this list.

Is your politics basically that if there is one parking space left at the supermarket, you would like to have it but you draw the line at the disabled spaces? Would you quite like to know where all of our money, that we have earned and handed to the government to spend, has gone? Have you spent the last nearly twelve months trying to do your best to follow the rules in spite of it making you want to weep because you just want to hug the people you love? On the few occasions you have been out have you resisted all urges to go up to someone and shout “over your nose, you chicken sucker, that big lump in the middle of your face? That’s your nose!”  Yes?  That’s you? Excellent.  I think we can work together.  And we’ re going to need to because we’re not out of the woods yet, and in spite of them being blissfully unaware, neither are the catflaps. As we move towards Spring, and hopefully the light at the end of the tunnel, thank you for all you have endured.  For me.  For my family.  And the double dickers who would not afford you the same, let alone thank you for it. We are nearly there.  We must be nearly there.  And whilst I’m sure it is going to be bumpy for a while yet, there are many lives lost that shouldn’t have been and injustices that will need to be fought that shouldn’t be. But we can only do that if we have a care for eachother. As I said to a friend who has been told to shield again and was most displeased about it – I’ll stick the homestretch out for you, if you stick the homestretch out for me.

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The Way We Are

nataliegist

2021 has started off as 2020 meant to go on hasn’t it? I thought that I should keep my expectations low and then it might end up surprising me. And it already has. But not in a good way. Death rates in this country due to Covid 19 are currently higher than in April and not looking to abate. If only the government had had some sort of warning from the scientists. Oh wait, they did.

I then watched in wide-eyed horror at the events in Washington DC yesterday; gun-toting, mainly white nationalists breaking into the Capitol. Apparently the last time the Capitol was stormed was when the British were miffed about the Americans throwing some tea into the water in Boston nearly three hundred years ago.  As I write I believe that four people and a police officer are dead.  It is a dreadful state of affairs when one is saying that they are glad that it wasn’t considerably worse.  I also had to shake myself when watching to remember that we are also in a pandemic. So whilst the building was stormed and people were taking selfies, no one was wearing masks, no one was social-distancing – it was all one big jolly.  The illness and deaths that will follow from that one act are incalculable.  But follow they will.

As I saw the footage that we’ve all seen of that man who had his face painted, wearing horned hearwear, some sort of bearskin and not a lot else, shout furiously, I decided that perhaps I should turn the television off. I picked up my book, Ian Dunt’s ‘How To Be A Liberal’ ( sounds bland, but is anything but and I recommend for anyone interested in political history).  Hoping that it might provide me with some respite from the reality of living through a pandemic where large sections of the world seemed to have lost their mind, unfortunately I happened to be on the section about Hitler’s rise to power and Stalinist Russia.  Reading that one could be forgiven for concluding that homo sapiens is quite a bit of a shit.

I have wondered for some time what some people throughout history are so angry about.  The Persecution of the Jews, Stalin against his own people.  Further down the sliding scale I admit, but still on the scale Hardcore Brexiters ranting about immigrants and fish, anti-vaxxers screeching about their human rights being violated, Trump-supporting Republicans slavishly believing every deceitful word. 

I am in the section in Ian Dunt’s book where he is talking about belonging and what a powerful pull it is.  A lot of people, furious and red-faced when we see them on the news, don’t feel like they are listened to or that they belong. So when President Fart tells them that he loves them, they genuinely believe him because they feel heard and they want to be loved.  When Boris Johnson talks about putting an arm around people, rather than their skin making a dash for the door, some people actually find that comforting. Yes, I know.  But they do. In spite of their actions demonstrating only their self-interest is at heart, the words themselves matter to people, even if they are demonstrable lies.  It’s what they want to hear.  Through a desperate desire to be heard and to belong, people believe the words.  They just want to be loved. Which means that they don’t feel loved.  That is rather sad.

Now you will tell from my tone that I am not a fan of President Fart and his British Clone. So why do I loathe them when others love them? When the PM talked about the virus being over by Christmas, as (and I am being charitable here) he continually over-promises and consistently underdelivers, I decided to entirely ignore him and listen to the scientists. When President Fart looked at the fact of thousands of his people dying, presumably landing in reports on his desk each and every day and still refused to wear a mask, I wondered if he had seen someone be ill or die from Covid.  I concluded, probably not anyone he cares about. 

All evidence over the last few years would point to a large section of people not caring about something ,or enough about something, unless it directly affects them. Not because they don’t want to, but people have busy and stressful lives and unless they see it, or feel it, they don’t believe it and have little time to accommodate it.  Rather like in Jaws when Richard Dreyfus’s character tells the Mayor that he thought he was prepared to ignore the problem of the shark snacking on holidaymakers until it swam up and bit him on the ass. So people hear a death toll of over a thousand people a day, and they know it to be true, but they don’t honestly believe it until it affects them or someone they love. Because that’s what makes it real.  It is not intended as a criticism, it is just the way we are. And that is the power of a deranged but powerful man telling rioters that he loves them.  Or the rank hypocrisy of a man who claps the NHS once a week which makes the front pages but won’t put our money where his mouth is and give them a payrise.  Their supporters feel like they belong to something or someone more important than themselves. To someone who cares for them and has their best interests at heart because they say that they do, even if all of the available evidence shows entirely the opposite.  Thousands of people are dying on their watch.  Thousands.  The numbers are real.  The people are real. Each and every one of them. And they are the numbers that they can get away with.  Remember that to be counted you have to die within twenty-eight days of a positive test.  If you linger, by day twenty nine you quite literally do not count. Except to the people you belong to, they don’t care about the twenty eight days.

A week last Wednesday was the forty fourth birthday of my childhood friend.  I messaged her to wish her a Happy Birthday, pretty much as we had done for eachother every year for the last thirty five years.  In spite of us drifting through life’s twists and turns, we still belonged to eachother.  She had been taken into hospital on her birthday because she had Covid and needed some oxygen.  I told her that that was a rubbish birthday present, but I was sure that now she was in hospital she would be feeling better soon.  She said her fingers were crossed. I left her alone because who wants to be replying to messages when they’re ill in hospital. Three days later she died. She is one of the 454 people who count as having died from Covid that day because she had the good grace to go within twenty eight days from her positive test. Except to her children, her parents, and to me, one of her many friends. We will mourn her loss each and every day for the rest of our lives. We knew and loved her; she belonged to each and every one of us. And she’s gone.

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The Sock Fairy

nataliegist

Thank goodness that in addition to Father Christmas and his elves taking the cumbersome task of present acquisition, wrapping and delivery off my hands, that I also have my House Fairy Team. This morning they were able to flutter about looking for school cardigans at the last minute because although they had been washed, The Sock Fairy had not put them into Childerbeast Number Two and Three’s drawers.  Tut, tut.

If you don’t have a resident House Fairy Team, I strongly recommend that you get one immediately for 2019. They cost nothing and really make life so much easier for everyone – usually the female in the house in particular (Human in Charge).  As we all know, more often than not, it is still deemed the female’s job to shoulder the majority of these tasks, paid or unpaid employment, full or part time – the statistics are widely and publicly available if you’d like to argue the toss with me.  I think you can mix and match your requirements, but if I run through the main team for you.

  1. The Monitor Fairy.  No, not like the lizard.  S/he (for no one has ever seen a House Fairy) is essentially in charge.  Not a very glamorous title, and not a very glamorous job either.   S/he has a number of tasks, but in summary:
  • Clothing and bedding.  S/he is expected to know not only precisely what items of clothing are in everyone’s wardrobe, but also their whereabouts at any given moment in time, their status in the wash cycle, and crucially, when the owner of that item of clothing is likely to want it to grace their person, but before they have actually communicated that wish which usually only happens at the point of dressing.   This excludes all items belonging to the Human in Charge – they’re fairies, not wizards.
  • Food.  S/he is to take a note of all of the foods that the Humans (and any animals) residing in the House like and dislike.  They are to ensure that there is an endless supply of those foodstuffs into the House in order that no Human in the house (excepting the Human in Charge) is left to the mercy of The Fridge Troll (see below).  It is also vital that there is a number of nutritious and balanced snacks available at any one time.  It is essential that these are available so that the Human In Charge can list them to the other Humans in the house who announce their hunger for the sole purpose of them being listed and subsequently roundly and repeatedly spurned, even if they were a favoured item previously. 
  • Cleanliness.  It is The Monitor Fairy who instructs The Cleaning Fairy to chisel the toothpaste off the bathroom sink and sandblast the kitchen floor.
  • Diaries – social and unsocial.  Every single Human’s movements, social and work-related are to be noted so that there is not a diary clash.  It is also vital to ensure that the points above re clothing and food can be seemlessly dovetailed to encompass the movements of everyone in the house (Human in Charge exclusion applies).  If there is a diary clash then it is to be noted that as a first solution, if the Human in Charge is one of those involved in the diary clash, then whatever they had planned (work, career, wee on own) has to be ditched first so as to cause the least disruption.  If the Human in Charge is not the cause of the diary clash, then simply cloning of self is all that is required to resolve the issue – see Hogwarts.

Also in the House Fairy Team are the following:

  • The Sock Fairy.  As I am sure you all know, The Sock Fairy is the one who creates all odd socks and let widely known, also puts all of the clean underwear away.  So when someone shouts “I’ve got no pants” in an accusatory tone five minutes before you’ve got to leave the house in the morning, you can take comfort in knowing that it isn’t you that they’re blaming for the shoddy service, but the most wayward and undisciplined member of the House Fairy Team. 
  • The Toy Fairy. S/he knows the location of all toys.  And when I say all toys, I mean toys and playthings that have been completely ignored for months, even years, but suddenly and inexplicably become the best thing sliced bread and need to be located.  This is usually when The Tidy Up Fairy is trying to sneak them out of the house to a charity shop.
  • The Tidy Up Fairy.  Not to be confused with the Cleaning Fairy, who actually cleans once s/he can get to the floor after the Tidy Up Fairy has worked their magic.  If you get nothing else get a Tidy Up Fairy.  They spend all day every day picking up toys, pieces of paper, drawings and other bits of general debris and putting them into small piles around the house.  They are so focused on their task that they go into one room with the express intention of helping The Toy Fairy but then get distracted by something that needs tidying up and then wonder why they came into that room in the first place.  They are constantly concerned that this means something more serious is happening to them rather than they have too many things going on.

Being a House Fairy is not an easy task.  There are always baddies working against the House Fairy Team, and the most notable of these are The Fridge Troll and The Toothpaste Terror. 

  • The Fridge Troll.  S/he (for no one has ever seen a Fridge Troll) sneaks into your fridge and eats all of the food.  One minute it is full, then next it is not.  This can cause such distress to one of the Humans that they feel the need to shout, immediately, whilst their head is still in the fridge and they themselves are hanging off the fridge door and leaning into it that “there’s nothing in the fridge.”  Again, this has a tone which suggests that this parlous state of affairs is All. Your. Fault.  Of course it is not, it is The Fridge Troll and their evil works.
  • The Toothpaste Terror.  Rather like Pan’s Shadow, this Creature of Darkness flits into the bathroom and layers toothpaste onto the basin in such a manner that it hardens in seconds and then, just so you know they’ve been, they spit the remainder all over the mirror. This needs particular monitoring just after the basin and mirror has been cleaned as that is the time when the bathroom is at its most vulnerable.

Before taking a team on, please also consider that most days it will look as if the House Fairy Team have been doing absolutely nothing all day.  On occasion you may well wonder why you are convinced that you can hear the tiny, high-pitched sound of fairy snoring at nine o’clock in the evening if so little has been achieved.  Please do remember that they are to all intents and purposes, invisible and their task is quite literally, thankless.  Except one day, just one day, maybe they will hear someone mutter something that will keep their heart warm when their magic starts to fade: “Mummy, sometimes when I can’t get to sleep, I put my nose into the pillow because it smells of you. It makes me feel better and then I can go to sleep.”

Happy New Year. 

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The Philosopher’s Stone

nataliegist

heart shaped red accessory
Photo by Rick Gailer on Pexels.com

 

My what a week so far! Put away the fake tan for the weekend – King Don is allowing us to bask in his orange glow from today; yesterday my British friend who works in Croatia was put in the most compromising diplomatic position since the PM had an involuntary Spring Clean of her Cabinet on Monday; and that particular Spring Clean,  I suspect caused more excitement in the Strictly recruitment team than when someone said “why don’t we put Ann in a harness, attach her to a wire and propel her onto the stage?”

Whilst the people who are supposed to be governing us are more interested in power than governing, some proper people who live in the real world have been doing some actual work. The young boys and their coach trapped in a cave have been saved by a team of people the majority of whose names will probably never be known to us, except that of the man who sacrificed his life; Saman Gunan. The English men’s football team and their manager have excelled themselves in both skill and spirit, to the nation’s pride and delight. And my eldest Childerbeast, in preparing for their last week of Primary School and born to a mother who would rather hide under a duvet than even draw a raffle in public, was in the school play; they were pirates.

If you’re a parent you’ll know the drill : the audience filed into the hall and sat, sweating in a confined space on a hot day, just as they have done every year for the past seven years. They admired the programmes made by the children, spotted their own child’s name, spotted the names of their child’s friends and then proceeded to fan themselves with the programme. The Head was legally obliged to tell us that should there be a fire (she’s a one for Cuban cigars in the school veg patch when she thinks no one’s looking) that we were all to run like hell towards the door…..Forty plus children then came onto the stage and burst into song. I love primary school children singing. It’s about the only time in life that people are not self-conscious about themselves or their voices, and they just sing. And it always sounds lovely.

The children had learnt all of the songs and their lines by heart. They all had different costumes, which I can attest, had driven each and every one of their parents’ completely mad in their creation. They enjoyed the fight scenes far too much, particularly the child who had got someone in a fake head lock and was pretending to punch their wriggling captive in the stomach. I think that it tells you everything you need to know about the school that out of everyone encumbered by wooden legs, parrots, beards, scarves, hats, mouse ears (yes, there were mice), whiskers and pieces of eight, that it was their teacher who had the most flamboyant costume of all; thigh high boots, puffball skirt and the most elaborate red hat I may have ever seen – Man of the House said it was worth the donation to school funds alone.

Now you might not consider a school play to be important work compared to the rescue of the young boys in Thailand. I agree. There are degrees of importance and thankfully no one’s life was at risk on Treasure Island last night. But children who may find reading difficult had read the script and learnt all of their lines and all of their songs – all of them. It taught all of the children about words, and music, and tone and timing and about a million other things that they didn’t know they were learning about. And when someone forgot their line, a friend quietly prompted them. Children who find it hard to stand up in front of people, stood up in front of people. Children who don’t find it so hard stood next to those who did and supported them. And finally, red-faced and sweaty, they all gathered for a group photograph to go in their year book.

Not that the last seven years have been plain sailing. There has been a lot of angst. Friendships move and change. Refusal to do homework. General cursing of the homework.  Stropping. Growing. Dear lord above there has been so much growing.  Eating. Never ending amounts of eating. And I am well aware that the door slamming is only going to get worse. But I know that fundamentally, my Childerbeast is at school with good people and there is a security in that which is about to be taken away.

Because this is the end. Probably of childhood, and inevitably of innocence. And I, and the other mothers are closing our eyes and counting to ten. Or twenty. Because it only seems like five minutes since they were babes in arms and the time has gone too quickly. We don’t want to send them into the world just yet…….Ever. We know that the world is governed by people more interested in promoting themselves and their own interests and run on a day to day basis by those doing proper, necessary and often unglamorous (pirate costumes aside) work and it seems that never the twain shall meet. So do we teach our children to beat the first lot or join them? Beat them, I say. Kill them with kindness. A cannon from Treasure Island could be swiftly relocated to the Strictly studios. So when they and their disgraceful self-interested behaviour are finally vanquished, instead of waterboarding which some of them seem inexplicably fond of, we and our kind shall dress them in sequins, stick them into a cannon and in a poof of glitter, fire them onto a dancefloor.