Oooofy

 The English language is missing a word. 

It’s not surprising because it’s a grief word and we are really not very good at talking about death. Here I go again, though. You’d think I’d be over it by now. No one likes a grief-dweller. Stop banging on about it. Don’t make me think.

I understand. However, there’s still a word missing for a phenomenon that is happening more and more often. You need this word when you are forced into a situation where you remember a person you loved that has died. It’s different from when you intentionally seek out a memory. It’s not choosing to look at old photos or reminisce about the time your dad tied a wire to the cat and tried to coax it under the floorboards in a blog about grief to lighten the mood.

No, this is the feeling you get when a memory is forced upon you. It used to be rare. The jumper section of Marks and Spencer’s at Christmas, someone walking past wearing your mum’s perfume or a dream (bloody dreams). The sensation is like a punch to the gut. It doesn’t necessarily make you feel bad. The memory could be good. Nice. Soothing or calming but it’s the unexpectedness of it that does something to you that has no word in English. Other languages may have a word. The Germans have probably invented one by shoving loads of words together (SuddenGriefGutPunchMemory).

Facebook or your phone camera reel puts you through this on a daily basis. You flick through looking for a picture of your dog and ooof there’s your loved one. Facebook sends you memories and sometimes they ooooof you straight away and then others sneak up on you. Look at this memory you posted about digging the allotment and then you click it and your loved one is speaking to you. ‘That was a bit oooofy,’ you think. 

It can take a little time to get over being oooofed. Do you share the memory with the world with the risk of becoming a grief-dweller, someone who’ll understand (possibly sharing the ooof), or just keep it to yourself, allowing the little ooofs to build up until you feel slightly sick. 

Wouldn’t life be so much better if we could just name it and move on? Excuse me a second, I’ve just been ooofed. I’ll be ok in a moment. 

Levels of self care

 You’ve had a difficult day. Maybe you had to make a whole office redundant, you heard that your friend’s mum died, Microsoft were playing silly buggers with your work computer, a customer was rude to you or worse, several were rude in a row, the golf club have just insisted that you spend £150 in the bar a year, or it was just Wednesday and your turn to try to teach 5 year olds before or after they have PE. Any of these things will require self care.

You might reach for the gin and tonic or a large glass of wine. A walk, a swim or a sing can help. Chocolate is a well known cure. And each person will have a hierarchy of self care.

Last night, I realised that I had reached peak overload.  The evening walk (which has become a routine self-care measure since I got parent shaped holes in my brain) wasn’t quite cutting it but I felt too cold/tired for a swim. I couldn’t focus on reading and the TV was too flashy. This was a clear indicator that it was time to change the lightbulb. Quick, put the red bulb in. This is a red-alert, don’t panic, everyone remain calm but initiate top tier self-care package. 

Action stations. 

Make sure the water is hot. Put PJs or other comfort clothes on radiator. Oven on, shake frozen chips from a packet onto a tray. Sit in a dark room until oven timer pings. Thickly butter two slices of bread. Smother chips in salt and vinegar and make an oozing chip butty. Cut into rectangles, never triangles, you are worth it.  

Take plate upstairs and run the hottest bath you can bear. Sit in bath, eating chip butty and listening to a murdery podcast (or better yet, Comfort Eating with Grace Dent). Stay in bath until water starts to get cold and fingers resemble dried peas. Get out. Put pyjamas on. Search house for chocolate that doesn’t belong to you. Sit in dark room eating stolen chocolate (KitKats are perfect). Wonder where the last 5 hours have gone. Go to bed.

This morning the amber bulb is back in. Just don’t ask me anything complicated, like remembering a password. 

Books taxes and class

 A senior conservative politician, while Chancellor of the Exchequer ‘forgot’ to pay tax on money he had hidden in another country in his parents’ names to avoid paying tax. When HMRC found out he had to pay £5 million in tax (including a fine). ‘Easily done’ say other MPs. ‘We will wait for the enquiry’ says the PM who is running out of MPs to appoint in his place. ‘Tax forms are complicated’ says a sister. 

Of course.

Tax forms are complicated. I just did mine. I did my own because I don’t have enough money for it to be difficult. If I did then an accountant would do it for me.

We can forgive him for his mistake, can’t we? I mean that’s ok. It doesn’t matter if he’s tried to hide a little bit from the tax office, everyone does it. There’s not enough money. Of course we can pay £20 each time we see a GP.

But if you are earning minimum wage then it would take you 250 years to earn the amount of tax he forgot to pay.

Tax is a class issue. Class is a wealth issue. Our complicated tax form is there because the system is designed by the rich and allows all sorts of ways to wriggle out of paying. If you are middle earners, however, the tax form will probably cause you to pay tax on things poorer people who don’t complete a tax form don’t pay, like interest.

Just like books.

‘When I grow up and I’m rich I’m going to have a room like this’ I said when I was 9 and visited Sissinghurst

Books are a signifier of class.

Books are also a touchy subject.

A lucky Guardian journalist went viral with her piece on books yesterday. She felt that owning books was a pretentious and middle class thing to do. People got upset.’Leave our books alone’ ‘I’m not middle class. I just like books.’

There’s nothing wrong with being middle class. It’s a privilege to have enough money to buy books. It’s a privilege to be asked to pay extra tax. The tendency to hoard comes from a fear of loss or remembering you didn’t have enough before.

She might have had a point though. Keeping books. Buying books is something you only do when you have disposable income or a house big enough to keep them in. Before that you had to give them back to the library. Even if you loved them like one of your own children.

The very rich probably don’t keep their trashy paperbacks in their inherited ancestral library because it would lower the tone but they are keeping first editions of all Booker prize winners and anything they speculate might be important. They will keep Prince Harry’s Spare, even though the metaphors will have it trying to jump from the shelf to the bin.

If you are middle class then you probably keep everything. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not hurting anyone.

If you want to be upper class or rich then you should jettison your books and hide as much money from the tax office as possible. Or you could be happy in the middle, hoping for a fairer more equal world where being in the middle is the place to be.

 Buy books. Pay taxes. Be happy.

How do you eat an elephant?

 How do you eat an elephant?

‘One bite at a time,’ I hear you say. 

No. No, no, no, no and no.

That’s not the answer. Don’t eat elephants. Elephants are too big for one person, the meat would spoil before you’d finished it all assuming that you could catch and kill it in the first place, with its huge strength, wild batting trunk and tough hide. They are also protected animals.

It’s the season of the motivational meme.

January is hard. February tougher. This year, though, it’s all much worse. We were promised sunlit uplands and we have post-pandemic recession with a government that can’t negotiate. Most people have switched off from the news, fingers in ears, la la la, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know about strikes or patients dying in corridors, or redundancies, or men hitting their wives over the head with an axe because they kissed someone from Towie. Even Towie isn’t going to drag me into that story. They’ve even started reporting climate change because we’re not following any news, so they might as well.

When life is difficult people will encourage you to push through. Eat that elephant. One bite at a time.

But elephants shouldn’t be eaten. 

I checked. It was my 3am question last night. Do people eat elephants and if they do what do they taste like?

I went to the journals of Victorian explorers who were chided into eating elephant by locals. Mostly though they didn’t enjoy it. 

Paul de Chaillu wrote in his book for children (1898) Wildlife Under the Equator, ‘The first mouthful I put in my mouth caused cheer after cheer to go up. “The ntanga is eating! The ntanga is eating of the elephant!”’

I’m struck by how good this tribe’s English was but also how they used an untranslatable name for him. 

He goes on to describe it as a pretty tough piece of meat, ‘the grain course and the meat tasteless and dry.’ He had been given his own, specially cooked dish, ‘boiled smoked foot of elephant’ rather than the large piece of elephant that had been boiling since the day before. He was so pleased that he had been fed the part considered to be a delicacy.

Dr Livingstone (I presume) was also given the foot.

We had the foot thus cooked for breakfast next morning, and found it delicious. It is a whitish mass, slightly gelatinous, and sweet, like marrow. A long march, to prevent biliousness, is a wise precaution after a meal of elephant’s foot. Elephant’s trunk and tongue are also good, and, after long simmering, much resemble the hump of a buffalo, and the tongue of an ox; but all the other meat is tough, and, from its peculiar flavour, only to be eaten by a hungry man.

This wouldn’t be my description of delicious but the chocolate digestive hadn’t been invented.

Business psychologists have been talking about a phenomenon they have called ‘quiet quitting’, which is a stupid phrase implying that refusing to eat the elephant is the same as eating nothing. The rich are furious about this. How dare people only do the work they are paid for? 

Going above and beyond is fine. Do extra if you want to but if someone asks you to eat an elephant please remember that chocolate digestives were invented in 1925.

Frostbitten Penis

Aubergines killed by frost

 Made you look, 

Made you stare,

Made you lose your underwear.

The playground joke never gets old. Say something not true or outrageous and when your friend (or mortal enemy - depending on unknown factors) looks at it, you laugh at them and shout the rhyme, running away with glee at their stupidity. In other parts of the country the rhyme might be different: the barber might cut your hair, you might trip into the dragon’s lair or even eat a rotten pear but the sentiment is always the same. You’ve been fooled and we can laugh at you. 

The title of this blog might have done that. Clearly, I know nothing about frost bitten penises but it might have made you read it. 

I will read Prince Harry’s book. I always intended to and assumed that it would be just as boring as the documentary. Honestly, they really are just a boring couple who quite like each other and social media. I could get cross about all the ‘normal’ people writing books that will never get published or have such a dedicated publishing team but I’m here for any story that tries to break the archetype. 

The publishers have been absolutely brilliant with this book. I’m fairly certain that we will know all the good bits before the publication date. The good bits being those that follow the archetype: Prince who will never be king has punch up with Prince who will, wicked wives, The Graduate type sex and a frostbitten penis. The title is genius because it draws us into believing that he is trying to usurp his brother - Spare.

I, however, am here for the boring story. I like the everyday. I want to know that he prefers Cheerios to Cornflakes for breakfast. I like to hear about the routines of people’s day. You won’t feel the same. You will be disappointed. 

Nothing can live up to a frostbitten penis.

Spare yourself unless you don’t mind losing your underwear.

Back to school blues

 I woke up this morning

Last night’s dream in my head

The country is crashing

Who can I blame instead?

The wonderful thing about dreams is that they allow your brain to file all the information from the day. 

For the last 4 years and 7 months I’ve had none of those dreams. Every dream has been the same and every dream has woken me - the sweaty ragged breathed idiot. 

“It will be 3 to 5 years,” my GP said when I saw her - after. I wasn’t sure what would be 3-5 years but it seems as though she was right. 4 years and 7 months until a full night’s sleep and a normal dream. In fact, I’ve had a couple this holiday. It’s not consistent and a consequence has been that I really miss my mum because I can think of her so my eyes are a bit leaky but it’s progress. 

As we all head back to school, many of us will have had less sleep. Stress. Creeps back. Fear of not waking with the alarm. Dream brain solving problems that don’t really exist. 

In my two dreams I solved problems and I think that’s what Rishi Sunak did with his ‘back to school’ announcement yesterday. 

The first problem I dream-solved by quitting my job. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really a problem that needed solving. I haven’t been asked to teach RE because my headteacher met a bloke in a pub that he thought could teach music better with my supervision (although to justify paying me I had to teach RE but it was OK because no one cares about RE). That wasn’t a real problem to solve. The second was how to get Christmas trees out of the house without dropping pine needles everywhere. My dream brain came up with the perfect solution.  Put them in an old duvet cover. 

GENIUS

That’s what I thought. However, it turns out that I didn’t have the right old duvet cover. A single was too small and the process of trying to push the branches into it left it bald and my carpet looking like a Norwegian forest floor.

So, there’s the Prime Minister in bed the night before he has to go back to school. The country is in tatters. His government, a war in Ukraine and global pandemic hasn’t helped but still it’s his government’s fault. They ran down public services, put narcissists in charge and tanked the economy. His dream brain tries to solve the problem.

So, Rish, what we gonna do then bruv?

I just don’t know. It’s hopeless. We need a Labour government but I can’t say that.

You just need someone to blame, right? 

But the ‘it wasn’t me’ line isn’t working anymore. 

Well you’ve got to think of something. Back to school tomorrow mate. What’s the answer?

Maths.

What?

Yes, maths. Maths is always the answer. We’ll get kids to study more maths. I love maths.

Except that when he woke up and told everyone they laughed at him. They knew the duvet was too small. They knew that maths won’t solve the problem if you’re not asking the right questions. They’d read the Hitchhikers Guide. Knowing the answer is 42 is absolutely no use if you don’t understand why.

Whatever your back to school dream was I hope your first day back is better than Rishi’s.  And if you meet me then beware. I’ve had a couple of full night’s sleep. I could be dangerous.