Poem: Revolting Car

Inside of my car

You are
Revolting
It looks like someone has been moulting

The passenger foot-well

The pocket on the door
Since when did these become a store
For plastic bottles
Wrappers, hair clips?
As the car corners, everything slips

I park the car

And am disgusted
If mess is a crime, then I am busted!

All the dust and all the crumbs
Pressed into seats by my kids bums
Not one inch of cloth is clear
You'd think they ate their dinner here!

I spot a blackened banana skin

And realise my car is no more than a bin
What kind of human being am I
To drive a wheeled version of a pig sty?

So I clean it out

Crumbs, dust and hair wisps
And then someone opens a packet of crisps......

Writer's Block

I originally wrote this post to put on LinkedIn but having thought about the amount of times I've been asked what it's like to be a writer, I thought this was worth a share here :)

So....if you fancy becoming a writer, here's some stuff you should know.

Tres chic!

1. Clothing matters

Winter is a particularly important time when it comes to a writer's wardrobe: get some decent sheepskin slippers and fingerless gloves, your extremities will be grateful and your heating bill won't exceed your earnings :)

2. Never mind "writer's block", worry about "writer's face"

Writer's block can be overcome by a quick run, a leisurely walk or by banging your head against the desk. Writer's face will give you a deep groove in between your eyebrows that no amount of smiling will undo. You need to embrace the groove or get botox. But then you'd lose your writer's face - so how will people know what you do?

3. Classical music is your friend

Try listening to anything else and see how long it takes for you to put the words being sung into your work. The lyrics to "Welcome to the Jungle" have no place in a whitepaper on virtualisation. Listening to the William Tell Overture however, might help you write it more quickly.

4. Make time to get out and see people you know

Not doing so puts the milkman, postman and the lady at the village shop in grave danger of twenty minute tirades, and you in danger of looking ever-so-slightly manic every time you come into contact with another human being.

5. Green tea is useless

(c) rocketfuel.uk.com

There is a reason the Beastie Boys wrote the lyric "It's 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on." Ever been fuelled by green tea? I didn't think so.

6. Pen and paper is still king

Using a computer is the bona-fide best way to share your writing but nothing touches someone's heart like receiving a hand written letter. There's something about the way a pen has travelled across the page that tells you so much more than a character on a keyboard could do.  Having just taken down the Christmas cards, filled with the writing of people I know and love, this has never felt more true.

Who knows where the time goes?

Today marks an anniversary for my family - it's been 25 years since my dad died.  A very long time; and time enough for me to navigate adolescence and become an adult, a woman, a mother.  I have known my husband for longer than I knew my father and this year our marriage will number more years than those when I had both parents.  

His death, and all of the events since, seems equally a lifetime and a millisecond ago.  In 25 years I have changed entirely, and not at all; I am a middle-aged mother and the girl in her dad's cardigan.  A wife and the teenager playing All Mod Cons on repeat.  I'm writing this from the kitchen of the home I have built with my husband, and I can still remember clearly being stood in my mother's kitchen wondering why our next door neighbour was there, why my brothers were upstairs and why my dad was no longer in the living room attached to a morphine drip.  I'd only gone out with a friend for a few hours...time enough for him to slip away and for the ambulance to come.

This is not to say that my life revolves around one event but it's fair to say it's shaped me.  Death can blow bloody great holes in lives and families and I am grateful to have landed in one piece.  I mourn his passing but am happy he was in my life at all, thankful that he was my dad.

And what is a comfort is knowing that he lived and that he loved us all.  He embraced my mum in front of me and my brothers, played silly games and danced with us, fell down drunk on the path once (but only once), and rode his bike to and from work.  He did crosswords to help improve his spelling, had a nice line in vests that had a contrasting trim (in the seventies and eighties it was the law to wear these), taught us Tarzan jokes and fixed our bikes.  He was about us, and not his illness until it could no longer be hidden.

I called my mum, and as we remarked on how long it had been she said "it makes you realise what a drop in the ocean we are."  It seemed fitting, and poetic - because as with the lives of all the wonderful people that we have lost, his is still sending out ripples today.

never forgotten

Soundtrack: Who Knows Where the Time Goes - Fairport Convention