The Third Day of Christmas

On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me.... three recycling bin bags, two cold meat slices and a wedge of over-ripe brie.

In the song it was three French Hens, which, if we are honest is the last thing we want after all that Turkey. There is a suggestion that the song was a memory aid for catholics: a catechism song and the French hens represented the three virtues of faith, hope and charity or the holy trinity of father, son and the holy toast. The third day was also a feast day of St John the Apostle, who is the patron saint of love, loyalty, friendship, authors and bin bags.

On the third day of Christmas some people have gone back to work, many haven’t but all are confused about the day. Whether you are celebrating with three French hens, left over Turkey,the third day of cheesemas or having to take extra long walks with the dog to counteract the turkey farts the third day conversation will be the same.
“Is it bin day?”
“I don’t know. Is it Tuesday or Wednesday today?”
“I think it’s Wednesday.”
“Then it should be bin day.”
“No one else has their bins out.”
“Probably all still drunk.”
“No, I think the day changes over Christmas.”
“What if we miss out this week.”
“That can’t happen. The food bin is full.”
“How can it be full? We’re still eating leftovers.”
“Turkey carcass, vegetable peelings and egg shells.”
“Thank goodness you’re not making me eat them.”
“I think it must just move on a day.”
“So, we need to put the bins out tonight then?”
“Yes. Normal bins or recycling bags?”

This is where you really need to call on the patron saint of bin bags.

Tradition

I love Christmas.

The Birthday Gas Man had insisted that no one remembers Christmas or the presents they received unless something awful happened.  He might have a point. We all remember the year I burnt the pigs in blankets.

I’m not sure I really agree with him. Some people don’t remember very much. The Long Suffering husband has an excellent visual memory and can probably remember what everyone was wearing every Christmas since 1978 but can’t remember me telling him that I was going out on Wednesday night. I’m more likely to remember the funny stories. I remember the year I got a guitar because my little sister had a toy where little people went round on an automated train, up some steps and slid down a slide back into the train and she spent the whole of Christmas Day lying on her belly in her chocolate stained baby-grow vest; chubby legs bouncing behind her with excitement as she watched the little people go round and round. “Boggies. More. Boggies!” she shouted over and over.

It is true that many Christmases blend together and it can be difficult to say which year the funny things happened in. I can’t remember if the year my mum fed sherry to the fish was the same year she had to go to bed before dinner, although now that I have hosted a family party I can definitely see the appeal of a bottle of sherry.

It’s the tradition that makes the holidays blend into one. If you do the same thing every year, how can you tell them apart? It’s also the tradition that I love.


I hoped that this year wouldn’t be one that we remembered for the wrong reasons: the first year without dad and Mum being not so well. However, the traditions have made it unmemorable in a very special way.

The Christmas Eve church service is one of my favourite things. When the light from the candles is passed from one to the other it always makes me feel a bit emotional. This year the service might only be memorable for the fact that I complimented the vicar on his amazing organ(ist), while my family shrank away and my friend tried to explain for me.

This is followed by prosecco and mince pies with some friends. This year we played cards against humanity, which is always really funny but surprisingly not memorable.

Christmas Day has its traditions that include stockings, presents, food, a snooze and more games. This year’s game was Obama Llama, which is hard to play if you don’t know famous people. It was a good day. I didn’t burn anything and we all ate loads.  I have never laughed as much as when we successfully guessed the rhyme on Mum’s card.
“Sheep?”
“No. Better wool than that. I think they have them here.”
“Llama? Alpaca?”
“Yes. Alpaca. The next bit sips a hot drink.”
“Alpaca drinks a cuppa? That’s a terrible rhyme.”
“No, not tea the other one.”
“Coffee.”
“Little frothy one.”
“Alpaca drinks cuppuccino?”
“That doesn’t rhyme. Let’s see the card . Oh, Al Pacino drinks cappuccino.”
“What’s an Al Pacino?”

As usual, I insisted that everyone stay in the same room to watch a film which I then slept all the way through.

Today, though is my absolute favourite. Now that I’m older and we don’t have to do extended family so there is no boxing or fights of any kind. A new tradition has developed: A day for eating cheese and other leftovers, while starting on my pile of Christmas books, wearing a pair of Christmas socks and drinking from my Christmas mug.

Happy Books-In Day.

Happy Birthday Mr Gas Man

We recently had a new boiler and a new radiator fitted. The boiler was fine but the radiator leaked and so my Christmas preparations have included entertaining several gas men. Some have been grumpy, some lovely, most drink a lot of tea (and never seem to need the loo) and the last one, who finally fixed the leak was chatty.

He told me about his daughter, who is having to entertain her in-laws for Christmas and how much he is enjoying watching her regret offering. This was just after I had offered to host the big family party and so I had a lot of sympathy for his daughter. He wasn’t going to let her off that lightly, though. As a difficult child he saw this as pay back that he was going to sit back and happily watch. He told me that he had always cooked Christmas dinner and we discussed the best day to go to Tesco. He and his wife often have to work at Christmas. I was surprised that people got their leaky radiators fixed on Christmas Day but he said he was just on call for the ‘if you smell gas’ duty. His wife, as a midwife, is on call for the birth of Jesus. His daughter and her husband are physicists, working at Porton Down and even after only half an hour of hearing about her I am concerned. Not only for their Christmas dinner but also for our country’s nuclear weapons programme. She can’t do anything without a list, which I think sounds perfectly reasonable. I like a list. But if she has written, “get up at 20 past,” and she sits in bed until the clock ticks to 7.21 she can’t get up until 8.20. This caused Mr Gas Man unimaginable stress when his kids were at school, because school busses don’t wait an hour for their students. Her list is rarely time focused but task focused. One day she was due to meet her sisters in London and had agreed a time. Her and her husband had written their list before going to bed. Thinking that they normally wake up at 7am they decided they had time for two episodes of Game of Thrones before she had to catch her train. The list went something like this:

1. Wake up

2. Make cup of tea

3. Get some cereal.

4. Eat breakfast in bed

5. Watch 2 episodes of GoT

6. Get up

7. Shower

8. Get dressed

9. Go to trin station

10. Catch train

The problem came when they didn’t wake up until 8.30. One of her sisters rang, “Where are you? You’re half an hour late!”

“I’m just getting in the shower. I’m at number 7 on the list.”

“It sounds as though you’ve had a lucky escape, not being invited to theirs with the in-laws,” I pointed out to the chatty Gas man. 

He told me that he wouldn’t go to hers anyway. Not on his birthday. 

“It’s your birthday on Christmas Day?” I asked, surprised that he hadn’t mentioned it before. “That must be...”

What could I say? 

I think it would be awful. 

He thought a birthday just after Christmas would be worse, “At least you always have a nice time on Christmas Day. You get a nice dinner and people try to like each other.”

“I don’t suppose it ever gets forgotten,” I said.

He wasn’t sure. His uncle always gave him a joint birthday and Christmas present but his brother got about the same and it wasn’t his birthday. 

Happy Birthday, Mr Gas Man. I hope this one is memorable and you get twice the presents of everyone else. I hope Jesus isn’t born, that no houses explode from gas leaks and that everyone appreciates your cooking.

The Hostess with the.....

When I was growing up I'm sure there was an advert that used the phrase 'Hostess with the mostest," and it has a lot to answer for. I have no idea what the advert was for; maybe Cinzano or a hostess trolley but I do remember the woman, with a frilly blouse undone to show a perfect 1970's bosom and flicky hair, simpering into the camera talking about how important it was to get a party right.

I am a reluctant host.  To be fair, I'm a reluctant attendee of a party but hosting comes with the pressure of being perfect.  I am not perfect.  I'd love to be one of these people who breezes through hosting a party with a clean kitchen floor, all homemade food and tea towels over the cooker handle with their stripes in perfect alignment and all I can do is aspire to it.

I try to make my own sausage rolls and the Long Suffering Husband wonders aloud whether it might have been better to buy some, or whether we rename them sausage meat with a side order of incredibly flaky pastry. I have been cooking for four days (that's not really true) and am now ready for bed.

My large extended family are due to arrive in less than half an hour and although I have warned them that I'm a grumpy host I'm not sure they will be entirely prepared for me settling down to read the book I have bought for the occasion. 

I also have a notebook hidden in every room because they are not dull people.  Do you think writing this  blog is fair warning?

Sausage in Banter

“There are drunk teachers everywhere,” a barman whispered at me on Wednesday night, before telling me all the schools in the area with teachers that like a drink at the end of term. I think he had a complicated system for ranking them and my school were probably at the top (or bottom, depending on your viewpoint). This was at bar 8 of the 12 bars of Christmas which comes at the end of the fun bit. As a non drinker I always enjoy bars four to eight: the work talk has stopped, there is a genuine relaxed funniness and it hasn’t started to get messy.

I love the people I work with and one day they will make a great sitcom. I keep warning them that a staffroom based sitcom is a good idea.

Our last school day was a great episode.

After church there was an extra long playtime, where coffee, broken mince pies, biscuits and chocolates were used in early preparation for the evening’s drinking. Staff were tired and the filter was beginning to slip. The language in the staffroom at the end of term is shocking and that is why teachers need holidays, to save the poor children. It is only possible to be sickly sweet with no swearing for six weeks at a time.

At lunchtime Christmas dinner was eaten in the hall with the children, so the staffroom filled up gradually, as each class went out to play.
“That was a great dinner.” We all agreed that our new kitchen staff were amazing and reminisced about passed times when we were too scared to go anywhere near the kitchen.
“Did you like your sausage?” my friend shouted down from the other end of the table.
Everyone laughed. She blushed. “I can’t believe I said that. Why did I ask you about your sausage?”
“Because you knew I couldn’t manage it. It was just too huge.”
More laughter. More blushing.
“I much prefer a small one.”
“They’re meant to be little at Christmas.”
“It was nice though.”
“Did you nibble the end?”

Let's face it, sausages are just funny.  I had seen one of the church official referred to as 'Mrs Sausage Sandwich,' on Facebook by a local cafe. It amused me so much I told my colleagues and some of the staffroom conversation was about how no one can remember her proper name any more.

I hadn't joined most of my colleagues until the bar with the whispering landlord because a few of us went for a meal first.  By then, the staff that had still been eating with their class had been told about the lunchtime sausage conversation.
"We've heard about your sausage," they said.
"Oh yes, I couldn't get it all in my mouth," I replied and winked.
"JULIA!" I was surprised at my ability to shock very drunk adults.
I noticed that my friend was missing and there was a suggestion that she had gone home because she is a lightweight but then she appeared.
"I went to get chips," she explained, "We've been sitting on the bench eating chips and a sausage in batter."

"Wouldn't it be great if the next blog that came up was, 'big sausage,'" someone said, "I'd love that."

I did intend to write it but it's Christmas. I went shopping and accidentally shoplifted some toiletries from Superdrug (I did go back and pay and no one tried to arrest me), knocked every display over in John Lewis, spent time with a chatty gas man, made a few cakes, cleaned the house, watched Elf, and made sure my sausage rolls could fit into any lady's mouth.

Then another friend sent me this picture out of the blue, which is statue at an Australian school.

I replied, "Come and feel my sausage little boy." Then I remembered that I had a blog to write.
Now, as I get to the end of it the LSH texts from the chip shop.
"They have the sausage."

There are sausages everywhere.

Being Appropriate

Every year our we have a Christmas Quiz for our Youth Orchestra and every year I am reminded that quiz writing is harder than it looks. 

With a quiz, you have to think of your audience.  As you know, music builds the brain, so our kids are very bright but we have members from the age of 7 to 18 and it has to keep them all entertained. I made a poem out of the answers in the first round and started to make the second round answers begin with N but I got bored.  I thought about rickrolling the whole thing and getting a bit of Mr Astley and Never Gonna Give You Up in there but I was too lazy.

I had every round as something to do with Christmas and forgot that to deliver the round on where different Santas were from required me to actually pronounce them.  Święty Mikołaj is Polish and is actually pronounced Schvienty Mikolai which I only found out because one of our members is actually Polish.

One round where they had to find the missing carol lyrics sounded incredibly rude when read aloud and had the other committee members sniggering naughtily when I read "Blank blank thee Lord Jesus."

I also had a picture round that I stole from the internet. I took some of them out and luckily decided not to use this one.

In case you are wondering, it is O Come All Ye Faithful. I think you have to be American not to see it as complete filth.  Ol' faithful is a geyser in Yellowstone park although it doesn't appear to be penis shaped and despite scouring the internet I see no photos of men wearing condoms on their head standing next to it.

Obviously, it wouldn't have been appropriate to use it but it is perfect for a blog.

Worried About my Brain

”If I only had a brain,” sings the scarecrow in the Wizzard of Oz.

I do have a brain and I’m beginning to get worried about it. You notice how I’m detaching myself and avoiding all responsibility here, like my brain is a separate being? Well, that’s how I feel.

Maybe my brain is weird because it’s December, I’m still a music teacher (even if I am doing slightly less and drifting through everything in a weird stress free way) and although I have come to terms with the elephant, he is still there, being elephanty and throwing the occasional peanut.

I know I have a brain, still because it wakes me up at 3am thinking about things. It wants to know why there are no B batteries, what happens if a snake bites his lip and why David Cameron is still thought of as a good guy. It also panics:
“What do you need to do tomorrow?”
“Why haven’t you got any icing sugar?”
“Have you marked those Christmas Carols?”
“You’ve got to play the piano in Church on Wednesday!”
“You haven’t picked up your contact lenses.”
“Fool! You agreed to have all the family round. You’d better organise it.”

It might be there but it’s not reliable.

At the weekend the Long Suffering Husband and I went to the Christmas market in Amiens. We were ‘Les Enfants Terrible’. Our friends were going and they had space in the back of their car. It’s one of the advantages/disadvantages of children growing up - they don’t want to go on holiday with you any more. For us, this was and advantage, as we were able to sit in the back and try not to interfere when
Mummy and Daddy were bickering about the traffic. We had a lovely time and watched a cathedral move but being away made me realise how remote my brain is at the moment. We were halfway there when I realised that I couldn’t remember putting my coat in the car. I sat quietly panicking for a while. The forecast was for freezing temperatures, biting winds and a risk of snow. I imagined myself with my coat over my arm getting in the car but it wasn’t with me. I asked the LSH if he had put it in the boot but he didn’t think he had. I didn’t think I had either but I must have done because it was there when we arrived.

On Monday I shopped for the Youth Orchestra Christmas party. I had a list, so I must have got everything but my brain thinks I’ve missed something and it keeps waking me up to tell me. I put the party food in the freezer and left everything else in a bag on the table. On Tuesday the LSH was working from home and he called me, “Did you mean to put the fudge n mince in the freezer?” He asked. I had no idea what he was talking about. He explained, “There’s a packet of country fudge and a packet of mints in the freezer.”
Suddenly I remembered, “The sweets for Tommy!”
Tommy is a traditional Youth Orchestra game that unfortunately this year will have to be played without a man in a tutu but the sweets shouldn’t have been in the freezer.

Wednesday was our work Christmas meal. We sat in the staff room at lunchtime and discussed how I was giving my friend a lift. She has been covering maternity leave and everyone was saying how much they will miss her, along with the other two people that are leaving. In front of me were the pots for leaving gift donations and the cards. I put money in the pots but for some reason never signed the cards.  At the end of the meal we walked back to the car and I opened the passenger door. I knew something didn’t look right but couldn’t quite work out what it was.
. “You’re driving,” my friend reminded me.
“I’m a bit worried about my brain,” I said and she agreed that she was also worried about it.

The first school nativity performance was on Thursday. My brain has been unreliable with the actions, causing actiongate. If you have been caught up in actiongate then I apologise for my brain. I thought I was going to be late for work and couldn’t find my phone. I rang it, as you do. It was on silent. I rang it 17 times. I could hear it vibrating in every room I went in but I couldn’t find it. It was in my pocket. The performance went well and I’m hoping no one noticed my moment of total panic when I couldn’t remember whether to tell the children to stand up or not.

The afternoon was spent enjoyably teaching. We were using stones to make music, as part of a Stoneage topic and have been practising doing the cup song rhythm while singing SingUp’s wonderful song, Two Piles of Stones.
“Okay, everyone, are you ready? Sit up straight, performance smilance.”
I laughed at my brain. “You’re making up words but I like it. It works. You always need smiling silence at the beginning of a performance,” I told it. Unfortunately, I had spoken aloud.
“It’s a portmanteau,” said the children. It’s amazing how good children are at labelling language now. Listen to any 4 year old read and they will point out the diagraphs to you.
“It is,” I said, “and I’m keeping it. If the politicians can have Brexit I can have smilance.”

I wonder what my brain will get up to today? I am slightly worried, as it’s a busy day: two performances, orchestra party and a Macmillan cocktail party to go to.

So Wrong.

George Osborne, in his new role as editor of the Evening Standard, has tweeted a political cartoon from his paper. He is proud. He is petty. He is attacking a former colleague who got the job he thought he was going to have.

I could edit this picture to be the right way round but it is wrong anyway.

When I first saw it I was confused. Apart from it being blatantly sexist (you would never attack a man in power who you thought wasn’t doing a good job by drawing a cartoon of them naked) I just couldn’t see why he thought it was brilliant. I thought it was a reference to Bob Fosse’s Caberet dance moves. Was the cartoonist trying to draw parrellels between Sally Boweles and the pre-war KitKat club? Then I found that it’s an exact copy of a photograph of Christine Keeler, except the prime minister is scowling, rather than making the pouty face models are told to make to turn men on.

Less than two days after Christine Keeler’s death an image of her, that she was forced to pose for, despite not wanting to was used to shame a female Prime Minister, not for her policies but just because she is a woman! Geoerge Osborne should be hanging his head in shame. The same paper published a long piece on the Time Magazine person of the year. This year, they have named all the women who spoke out about sexual abuse. The Evening Standard praised these women and recognised that it could be a turning point; a chance for things to change. If only.

There will be people who don’t like the current Prime Minister who think this is very funny. It isn’t though, is it? It’s just I very bad taste. Christine Keeler is painted as a temptress, a seducer, who lured those poor old politicians to their downfall, whereas, she was an abused child, groomed by older men, taken advantage of and used as a scapegoat.

I would like to say more and be more coherent about this but I am just too depressed. It seems as though things will never change.

Cassandra goes Christmas Shopping

I can see a terrifying future. A future where there are no shops, only warehouses full of robots stuffing items you’ve told Alexa to put into a virtual basket into over-sized cardboard boxes. There will be no human interaction, ever.

You would think that as someone that hates shopping (unless it’s in a bookshop) I would welcome this development. I am grateful that the shops are less crowded but still worry about the future. Without shopping there will be no chance human interactions. No smiles from strangers; no random conversations in Marks and Spencer men’s department about how nothing makes you miss your dad more than the jumper section at Christmas; no overheard conversations. It would be lonely. 

I am generally worried about the rise of technology on our health and not just our mental health. In the Long Suffering Husband’s favourite store I saw a woman looking at the Echo. She wasn’t sure but a random stranger came to her aid.

“They’re brilliant,” she told her, “I wouldn’t be without mine. Just for turning the lights on .....”

The LSH looked at me and mimed pressing a light switch. I panicked about a future where I would have to sit in the dark because I’d lost my voice and couldn’t tell the technology to turn the lights on.

No matter how many warnings I give about this bleak future, you won’t believe me. I am Cassandra.

The LSH and I decided not to buy everything from Amazon but go out and use real shops. His colleagues were incredulous at the suggestion and I did feel guilty for buying a book for £7.99 that would probably be free on the kindle but we were doing our bit to preserve actual   shops.

In M&S we talked to the lady at the till about how quiet it was. 

“Everyone shops online,”she said, oblivious to her future redundancy. “We all do it, don’t we?”

“Actually, we’re trying to use real shops. Use it or lose it,” we replied.

She was unrepentant.

“At least if you buy it online it’s fresh. It hasn’t been touched by any,” and here she shuddered, “children or anything.”

I can see it now. In the future those big shopping malls will be empty. Homeless ex-shop workers will be sleeping around the edges, while inside the lights and heating are bizarrely still on.

Back in the LSH’s favourite store, the one where my daughter had noticed a worker dusting the bins (never knowingly under-dusted), he had wandered off to find a secret Santa gift for someone he doesn’t know and there was a man trying to drum up interest in a board game. I love a board game and I felt sorry for him. Everyone was rushing past, looking at their phones, ordering their presents cheaper and fresher online. 

“Let me explain it to you,” he said, “most people think they know a lot of words but they don’t. Let’s play?”

I didn’t walk away, he beamed from ear to ear.

“Rictus. Do you know what that means?”

“I think I do,” I said pointing at my mouth, “It’s when it goes stiff.”

I blushed realising that double-entendres with strangers in department stores are inappropriate. 

He turned the card over.

“Errr...” He read slowly, started to talk about Bill Clinton’s expressions and then decided that it was just about right but he was disappointed that he hadn’t been able to give me the three options to guess from.

“Let’s try another one. Cassandra?”

“I know who Cassandra was. She was from Greek mythology: a beauty. One of the Gods, Odin maybe, fancied her and gave her gifts. She wasn’t interested despite him being a powerful god and so he raped her and cursed her so that she wouldn’t be believed.”

The LSH had returned.”It can’t have been Odin,” he said “He was a Norse God.” 

The man was looking stressed that there were now two of us knowing stuff.

“So, I guess that a Cassandra is someone who tells the truth but isn’t believed.”

The man scratched his head  and consulted his card.

“Wasn’t she to do with the Troy story?”

“Yes but that wasn’t the interesting part,” I said, climbing onto my soap box. 

He read from his card. “ Yes,  she was given the gift of being able to see the future by Apollo.”

“Odin -Apollo. They start the same,” I said to the LSH, proving that I can’t spell.

“Wasn’t He Roman?” asked the LSH, “I thought you said it was a Greek myth.” 

“He cursed her to be not believed when she rejected him." the man ploughed on with his reading but I interrupted again.
"But he raped her anyway. He was a vicious God. A powerful man who was determined to get his own way and no one believed her. It's interesting when you think about the current climate, isn't it?"
"You know lots of stuff," said the man awkwardly.
I blushed again and apologised.
The man reached for another card but the LSH steered me away by the elbow, wondering how long the man would have tried to find a word I didn't know.

Maybe the poor man would be happier if my Cassandra vision of the future does come true.  It might be better to be a homeless person sitting at the edge of an empty shopping centre than having to deal with people who know stuff and ruin your game.

The Best Ever

Everybody likes compliments, don’t they?

Compliments make you feel good.

Unless, of course, you are me and then they make you feel a bit confused. You also feel your insides squirming up into a knotted snake and your face take on the colour of your favourite Christmas jumper.

Mostly, I am able to deal with it by blaming everyone else.

“I’m just so lucky to work with such brilliant children,” is usually an effective distraction and has the added bonus of being true.

I have been involved in making music with children for seventeen years now and at every performance someone says, “Wow, that was the best ever!” or “They are so much better than last year. You’ve developed them so much.” This is something Ofsted would be very proud of: showing progression. However, it confuses me. 

Maybe, I’m more of a perfectionist than most. I hear the mistakes. I know that the choir never quite sang ‘to see if reindeer really know how to fly’ in tune. I know that at least two weren’t looking at me and so managed to sway in the wrong direction. I know that the youth orchestra forgot that there were Aflats in In a Bleak Midwinter and completely mucked up Ding Dong Merrily, so much so that one wanted us to stay out in the cold long after we had lost all feeling in our extremities. “Please can we play it again? I need a chance to redeem myself.”

Knowing all these things I think about the last seventeen years. If things have genuinely got better each time then just how bad were they all those years ago?

Taking Mum for lunch

I’m currently treating my mum to lunch once a fortnight. I admit that there are better places I could take her but you can’t beat a Marks and Spencer prawn sandwich, cheese tasters, tiny Jaffa cakes and jelly babies.

The other diners have kept us entertained and we have shared some eye rolling over things we have seen and heard.

In the waiting room (I know most restaurants don’t have waiting rooms but this is quite a special place) the maitre d’ came over to a woman, who had been waiting to be seated for 45minutes.
“I am sorry but they’ve written down your reservation wrong in the diary. It should be tomorrow. You’ll have to come back tomorrow. You can’t eat today. It’s a day too early.”
The woman looked shocked and thought about getting cross but decided she didn’t have the energy. She looked at her companion and said, “Can you do tomorrow?”
Her friend was overly cheerful, “Of course,” she bubbled, “These things can’t be helped.”
Mum and I both thought they could be helped and rolled our eyes at each other.
The Maitre d’ was very apologetic and waffled on about how busy they were. Everyone wants a seat before Christmas.

When we finally took our seats, we looked at the other guests. Most people sat in pairs but there were a couple of solitary diners. Some, who were visiting for the first time were excitable, giggling about their choice of sandwich or offering the waiters jelly babies. Others who had been many times before knew all the staff by name, often sitting alone and eschewing all food, prfering to concentrate on the free cocktails that the people in the comfy chair got.

This is a long leisurely lunch. Five and a half hours is a long time to take over a prawn sandwich and so being a work and a book-a-holic I had both with me. My work caused the man in the next chair to give me his life story. Apparently, sorting scores of Christmas carols is just like the time he wrote something about radiation in refrigeration units that had a print run of one thousand. He had made an error where he put a ‘the’ instead of an ‘and’, which was only spotted by a proof reader after the copies had been made.He had the choice to do it all again or change each one by hand. I bet you can’t guess which one he chose? Apparently, that one small word changed the entire meaning of the piece. I must admit I was confused as to what was similar to sorting my Rudolph score from Santa’s Coming to Town but he was insistent that it was exactly the same. He had never made the best of his education and music was a total mystery to him. The waiter agreed and told of how he had been told to mime by a teacher while the other boys were to sing louder. I said that music wasn’t as complicated as it looks and all it takes is practice. The waiter thought that teachers were more patient these days but the man quoted the Daily Mail on the fecklessness  of teachers and how so many children were leaving school without the education of an eleven year old. I tried to protest that most children work very hard, some will always find things difficult and that standards have changed but he countered in time honoured tradition, “I bet they can’t even use a slide rule!”

I tried to share an eye roll but Mum just said, “I wasn’t listening. It sounded boring.”

She was having much more fun watching the waiter attach a bottle of cocktail juice to someone’s jumper.

It was so much fun, we decided to do it again in two weeks time.
“A little earlier next time,” she suggested, “If we go an hour earlier, we might not have to go home in the dark.” Although I think that might be a little optimistic.

More boring voice stuff

My voice is being very stubborn this time. Like a naughty toddler or Donald Trump it is stamping its foot and whispering, “I won’t come back if I don’t want to!”

People are very frustrated for me. Adults are still full of advice (that I’ve tried) but children are amazing. They are also concerned that it always happens at this time of year, although I'm not sure it's a reliable harbinger of Christmas. If anything, the children should be most frustrated. Can you imagine trying to learn from someone who can’t speak to you? I feel sorry for them but they are brilliant.

I leap around the room, pointing and gesturing. Playing an extended game of charades.

At the youth orchestra I smiled and gestured ringing a bell above my head and they played Ding Dong Merrily on High. I wrote on my paper that there should be prizes, touched my nose and pointed at the girl who’d said it first. It seems that I am, again, showing my age, as absolutely nobody does that when playing charades anymore.

At school when I get to the completely silent stage many of the children think I’m making it up. They can imagine it would be quite useful to point at their throat and shrug their shoulders when asked a particularly tricky question. You would think they would take advantage of a silent teacher but this doesn’t happen very often.

Their advice and comments are brilliant and have cheered me up enormously.

I found one child looking under my desk. I shrugged and applied my questioning face.
“I was looking for your voice. I thought it might be hiding under your desk. It’s a busy time of year. I thought it might need a nap.”
Apparently, it wasn’t there.

Another asked me what I could do for it. When I gestured that I didn’t know she shrugged, looked at my bottle of water and said, “I dunno either, maybe drink.” I assume she was talking about water but when a ten year old suggests you turn to drink, you know it’s serious.

I love children’s sense of optimism. They still think that everything can be fixed, easily. They also think that if it’s gone on a long time you might need to turn to more drastic measures.
“It’s no good,” said one girl, earnestly, “It can’t go on like this. What will you have to do? Get a new head?”

That’s the solution, like Worzel Gummidge it’s just that I’ve got the wrong head on.

You probably don’t remember Worzel Gummidge. He was a scarecrow, played brilliantly by Jon Pertwee on children’s TV in my youth. He was made by the Crow Man, who would make him a new head whenever he needed it. He had heads for thinking, dancing, arithmetic. He had a riddle-me-ree head and a wrangling head and he once persuaded the Crow Man to make him a handsome head, which gave him teeth like Rylan, before Rylan was even born.  In the episode where he uses his singing head (which is probably the one I need to borrow) the vicar is distressed because a member of the choir has lost his voice. His wife has brought him to see the vicar to explain and the vicar says, “Speak for yourself man,” but he can’t because he has laryngitis. Oh, how we laughed. “You’d better be alright for the Harvest Festival,” says the vicar. The wife reassured him that it will be fine (that’s what wives do) and suggests that God will provide. The vicar, knowing God’s limitations slumps and says, “Not tenors, though.” The man with laryngitis and the wife walk away just as Worzel appears, wearing his singing head, humming All Things Bright and Beautiful, slightly out of tune. It’s only then that we realise how desperate the vicar was as he thanks the lord.

It’s a thought. If only I could find the Crow Man, he could make me a new head.

There is an odd synchronicity to this story, as when I first lost my voice I used to joke with the children that it had been stolen by the Crow that used to sit and tap on the hall windows when we were singing and this week a crow hand puppet appeared on my desk from nowhere.

Maybe it's time to search for Nellie (we named the crow after a music teacher who was at the school in the sixties) and demand my voice back.

Cold Fish

I've never been a warm fuzzy kind of human: not someone you'd go to for a hug.  I'm the sort of person who gets called 'strong' or 'good in a crisis' but definitely not someone who 'wears their heart on their sleeve'. This probably makes me an odd kind of friend. 

Yesterday, I met a friend in London.  We haven't seen each other for a while and I kept thinking that people not like me might have hugged and I wondered if she was disappointed that we didn't or get drunk and take selfies, pouting over the top of our over sized Margarita glasses. I hope she wasn't and enjoyed what we did as much as I did.

Standing in the cold drizzle queueing at the TKTS office she asked me what I wanted to see.  I was only prepared to say what I hadn't seen and what I knew about the shows that were available.
"Big Fish.  That sounds interesting. What's that?" she asked.
"It's new.  It should be good, funny and sad.  It's a great film."
She hadn't seen the film but we settled on that one and went to Barrafina for lunch.

Barrafina is a Spanish Tapas bar in Covent Garden.  It has smart red bar stools, a shiny counter, waiters with proper Spanish accents that mean that they spit a little as they talk. You watch your meal being prepared and the vegetables and fish are on display.

It was delicious and your glass keeping filling with free fizzy water, which is my idea of a good time out, although I wasn't sure about being watched by the fish.  Then a big red prawn thing jumped. It was like a scene from the little mermaid.  We could almost hear the chef singing about poissons while Sebastian hid under a cabbage leaf. 

As we ate we talked and I ended up telling my friend all about the elephant. I didn't mean to. Just as I refuse to give him space on the blog I wasn't going to take him to meet my friend. However, just a few questions and I described him in full technicolour detail but as though he was sitting on someone else's blog and I was just watching him. I refused to give any of his histrionic emotions houseroom.  My friend apologised. "It's fine. I can talk about him now," I said going on to explain how he was effecting everyone else.  I also talked about my Dad's last few days and grief. I can't think it was the best fun she's ever had.

We had to run across Green Park so we didn't miss the start of the show. It was at The Other Palace Theatre in Victoria, which is quite like the Mercury in Colchester and we had front row seats, which give you a bit of a crick in the neck and make you fear that a giant might land in your lap. It was different from the film but not too much. It was still about the death of a parent.

At the interval my friend looked worried.  

"This probably wasn't the best thing for you to come and see, under the circumstances," she said.

I laughed. 

You've got to laugh.

I think you know you are doing okay if you can laugh.

Big Fish would make anyone laugh. It had some wonderful comic performances and a brilliant joke or two.

"They've crossed a Hippopotomus, Elephant and Rhino."

"What do they call it?"

"Hell if I know. (Helephino)"

Maybe the elephant is actually a Helephino.

A musical can't convey the weirdness as well as a film does but it does a pretty good job.  The songs, however, bring so much more emotion into it. Most of the theatre was sobbing or at least dabbing an eye. My friend thought that it could have sent me over the edge but being a cold fish it just made my cold a little worse.

When I got home the Long Suffering Husband asked me all about it. 

"It was really good," I told him, "It had some famous actors in it. I think the man who played the Dad was someone and the the circus man was Gene Wilder."

"Gene Wilder?" the LSH asked, "He died."

"No. He didn't die.  It was the other one who died."

The LSH explained that he meant Gene Wilder had died in real life. He said that he'd been one of the victims of the great 2016 celebrity cull. I didn't believe him, so he looked up who was in the musical.

Kelsey Grammer was the Dad and the person I thought was Gene Wilder was someone called Forbes Masson, who someone should discover as a comedy genius (if they haven't already)

Not Gene Wilder

If it had been Gene Wilder then they could have called it Big Cold Fish.

Give me a sign

I lost my voice again last Sunday. I know. It's boring me too, so I decided to go to the doctor. 

I saw a GP very much like Doc Martin. 
"What can I do for you?" she asked
"I'm not sure," I croaked.
"Oh dear. You need to stop talking!" she barked, "What do you do for a living?"
I started to tell her and she quickly interrupted shushing me and saying that was no good.
"I'll sign you off for a week. No talking until Monday and steam for 10 minutes every hour."
I tried to tell her that it happens every seven weeks or so but she put her finger to her lips and said, "No talking."

I had no one to dep for me at the Youth Orchestra so I had a notebook and made myself a sign.

It worked reasonably well but conflict resolution with eight year olds and a notebook is tricky.  Sign language would only work if the people you are talking to know how to sign.  The LSH does know the few swear words I have learnt.

It is also completely exhausting to have no voice.  You are playing a constant game of charades, which although sounds fun, very much depends on who you are playing with.  

The Long Suffering Husband finds it very difficult when I lose my voice: He is used to being able to have shouted conversations from different rooms in the house, can't see well enough without his specs (and he can never find his specs) to read my notebook, doesn't have the patience to wait for my phone to speak each word that I type and he is terrible at charades. Really terrible.  I have very many fond Christmas memories of him being the worst charade player on the planet.  Let's hope he never loses his voice because if he is bad at guessing that's nothing compared to his ability to give clues.  One year we were all laughing at him, waving his arms in a circular motion, which we all took to mean, "just keep guessing until you get it." When it was his next go he pulled the card from the hat and looked defeated. "I don't even know how to begin," he said. We were encouraging but resigned to the fact that we would be there for some time.  He started by cupping his breasts. "Ship shape and Bristol fashion!" my dad shouted.  We never found out whether he cheated or was inspired. The LSH was so shocked that he couldn't speak for a while and stood continuing to gesticulate until we told him to stop.

Both my children came home for the weekend, which was handy, as they are much better at charades. 

It was irritating not being able to talk. I like talking and after four days you start to lose a sense of yourself.  I found myself checking in the mirror to make sure I was still there. By late on Sunday night, when both children had gone home and the dog was sulking I was feeling quite miserable and not like my usual cheery self.  

"The problem is not being able to talk really messes with your mind and my mind is the last bit of me that needs to be messed with," I told the LSH (I might have substituted messes for a ruder word that begins with F)

The LSH perked up and offered his services if I needed him to mess with anything; just give him the nod, tip the wink and he'd be there. Bob's your uncle.  Fanny's your.....well, you get the idea.

On Monday, able to talk again, I was driving my mum to her chemotherapy appointment and a programme came on the radio interviewing a man who had lost his voice and whose wife had cancer.  It doesn't make great radio; an interview of someone you can't hear but it is odd how everything seems to be about what's on your mind.  My mum has decided that the whole world must have cancer because everything she sees or listens to mentions it.  If you are someone of a slightly hippy nature and prone to a long flowing skirt and dangling earrings then you will be familiar with the idea of the universe sending you a sign.  A Taoist friend once told me that if you hear the same thing three times then the universe is trying to tell you something and you should listen.  

Today, in an attempt to get my head together I took a long walk (missing out a couple of hours of steaming) remaining open to any signs that might come my way. Hippy-types get very excited by feathers.  Finding feathers is meant to be a sign that angels are near.  As I walked along a footpath I noticed that someone had collected feathers and placed them in the cracks of the posts of the fence.  It was a stunning sight.  There were grey, white, black and brown feathers and then I found a green feather.

If feathers are signs of angels, shouldn't they be white? Who has heard of a green winged angel? Maybe I don't have angels but sick parrots stalking me.  I kept holding the feather until I reached the last post, when it felt right to add it to the display that was there already.  

I kept walking, thinking about signs.

Who put that sign there and why? The only way to reach this path is up or down a very muddy and slippery slope.  It must be a message. Life is a slippery surface.

Closer to home.

This sign made me laugh.  I imagined dog owners squatting on this person's garden. I thought about them sitting in their kitchen, watching owners join their dogs in a spot of outdoor defecation.  As I dog owner I get the message and will try not to foul.

Finally, one last sign.

CYCLISTS PLEASE USE YOUR BELL!  Some of us are hard of hearing and the rest don't hear you coming!

Who writes these signs? What is the message? Should I be using a bell or am I the one not hearing things coming.

I think that's quite enough signing for now.

Small Things

When you are having an "annus horribilis", as the Queen would say, it's the small things that tell you how bad it is.

Even if you are just having a, "2017 is a shit year," as my friends would say there are still loads of small things that go wrong.  You would imagine that these small things could break you but you are wrong.  In a good year, they can do that.  Log onto Facebook and you will see loads of people moaning about stuff. Fridges have broken, washing machines have leaked, the dog has been sick on the carpet, the GP receptionist was rude when someone tried to get an appointment for a cold. Friends console with the well known fact that these things only come in threes.  Enemies point out that as these things come in threes they have two more to come. Those people think that one more thing will cause a mental breakdown.

It is true that this year is proving to be a bit of a bad one for me and I'm certain that things don't just come in threes.  Big things or small things.  Yesterday, these small things went wrong.

1. I lost my voice (again)
2.The heating broke on the first cold day.
3. The steering lock on my car got stuck and I had to walk back from the supermarket (without a coat)
4. When I tried to ring the Long Suffering Husband to tell him what had happened he thought I was crying (stupid voice) and he rushed home from work.
5. The gas man said that we need a new boiler.
6. The dog stole my KitKat and ate it wrapper and all
7. I banged my head on a tree.
8.  The dog, on a sugar high, got stuck on the garden table and then threw himself at me, when I came to see what was wrong, hurting his gammy shoulder.
9.  A pupil's flute fell apart.
10. My voice completely disappeared and I didn't even sound like I was crying.

None of these bothered me.  That's how you know things are bad. The little things don't break you. Weirdly, they put a spring in your step and make you feel normal.

You also notice the small nice things.  You notice the friends that check on you. You notice the people that appreciate the effort you go to.  You notice the sun and the birds and the things that are working well.

Power

Sometime you read a book and it changes you. Sometimes you read a book and it seems to have changed society. Naomi Alderman's Power is one of those books. When I read it I wanted others to read it. I wanted men to read it but I was afraid. Scared that by liking it I had marked myself out as one of those ball-breaking feminists that wanted to harm all men.

The premise of the book is 'what if women had the power and used it to dominate men?' I love a what-if book.

Everything in the book reversed and there were things that I read that these powerful women were doing to men that I recognised, that seemed so familiar to my own life and I wanted a man to read it and tell me if they recognised it too. Unfortunately the Long Suffering Husband isn't much of a reader.

Then the Harvey Weinstein thing happened and people started talking about how he had used his power to sexually intimidate women.  Then people talked about how this was a thing in the creative industries and I thought, "It's a thing in all industries." The #metoo hashtag appeared on Twitter and it became clear that most women had felt threatened and intimidated by a man in power and that intimidation was usually sexual. People started to think that is not alright for this to be happening to half the population.  MPs got involved and started to talk about what women have suffered in that industry. It became clear that men didn't recognise the power they held.  They didn't understand that they had used it to intimidate or had defended those who did.

These real life examples have sparked a debate, which is always a good thing.  I've seen people suggesting to men that if it's not something they would say to the Rock (I confess, I'm not sure who the Rock is) then they shouldn't say it to women.

A very funny thread appeared on Twitter this morning changing all the excuses that men make for raping women to women stabbing men, like, "I'm sorry for all the times I stabbed women in the workplace, just a little.  I've had counselling. They were different times.  I've stopped stabbing women now."  I thought it was funny, anyway.  The LSH was less impressed. 
"Are you really saying it's always men?" he asked, offended.
I was confused and wondered what that had to do with anything.
"It's wrong to stab people," I said, "whether a man or a woman does it. It's just wrong."
"I mean the sex thing," he clarified.  He was cross at my wilful misunderstanding.  "Can you honestly say that women never sexually abuse men?"
Again, I was confused because that's not really the point, is it?
"They do, of course, and it's wrong I wouldn't defend them or make excuses for them. I'm surprised that you are willing to do that for men."
He conceded, reluctantly.

In my mind, though, this is a question of misuse of power.  It feels like women are constantly suffering this problem because we are the 'weaker sex'. However, children suffer as do the poor and the young of all sexes in the workplace.  We accept that those who are powerful have the right, nay duty, to intimidate and belittle those below them.  We think it's funny for apprentices to be sent out for a long wait or a can of stripped paint.  Female apprentices can be further intimidated by the use of a sexual suggestion because all women are scared of rape; we have been conditioned to be.  The MP's assistant who was sent out to buy sex toys is an example of the apprentice joke, with an added sexual element.  There is no point to these things, except to make the powerful person feel more powerful and  the other person feel weak and stupid.

When I went for an interview, once, the man locked the door to the office.  I noticed and was on edge.  During the interview he said, "Please put all your clothes in that chair," pointing to a chair in the corner.  Luckily, I was not this man's inferior in any way so I sat in the other chair and told him that I thought that was a terrible stunt to pull on a woman in any interview.  He told me that it was a good way of assessing logical thinking and praised me for my intelligence and quick thinking.  I wish I hadn't laughed.  I wish I hadn't felt superior. I wish I'd told him that he needed to reassess his logical thinking.  I wish I'd thought about the women coming into an interview with him after me. I wish I'd reported him. The fact that I didn't do these things does not make me responsible. I asked every man in the office and none of them had been asked that question but many had been belittled by him and made to feel stupid in other ways. The difference is that they hadn't felt quite as scared.

It's time to stop thinking that the powerful abusing the weak for their own amusement is a good thing. It's time for women to stop feeling scared that it is inevitable that a man will use his power sexually if he has a chance and the way for that to happen is for the majority of men to stop defending the bad behaviour.

I think this can happen now.  Thanks to a book. The Power has shown that it could be the other way round and men wouldn't like it. I love how powerful books can be.

Jeff

Yesterday the sky turned yellow and the sun went red and people rang The Sun newspaper to find out what was going on.  They reasoned that if anyone would know about the sun it would be The Sun. The birds freaked out; stopped singing or flying and sat in huddles wishing they had a Sun newspaper to call. I got a headache, the dog farted even more than usual and children acted more weird than normal.

The Sun really did have the best pictures, though

Their reply to any question I asked them was 'Jeff.'

"Do you like this piece of music?"
"Jeff."

"Have you practised?"
"Jeff."

"Can you play the G major scale?"
"Jeff can."

I knew there was something going on with the name Jeff, as last week we had done a composing task, turning a short phrase into morse code and then musical notation.  There were quite a lot of secret messages about Jeff.

"What is it about Jeff?" I asked.
"Don't you know?" they replied, "Jeff is just Jeff."
"OK.  I do know that," I said.
"But why are you all talking about him?"
"Jeff is awesome," they told me.
"Awesome?" I questioned. "He's alright but awesome is pushing it."
"Do you know Jeff?" they asked.
I had to confess that I'd known him for over thirty years.
"Is he the Jeff of all Jeffs?" they asked.
I wasn't sure.
"How can I find out if he's the Jeff of all Jeffs?"
"Ask Siri."
Siri thought she'd look it up on the web.
"That means she doesn't know," I told them, demonstrating my supreme knowledge of technology.
They shrugged.
"Who will be able to tell me about Jeff?"
"Oh, anyone."
"Really?  Anyone?  I'm someone and I don't know if the Jeff I know is the Jeff of all Jeffs and why you are talking about him."
"Well, anyone between the ages of eight and about twenty.  You are older than twenty, right?"
"Only just," I confessed, thinking that I couldn't even ask my children because they are over the hill too.

I continued to ask pupils about Jeff.  Some didn't know about him.  Then I asked someone who went to a different school.

"Oh, not any more," she said.  "Jeff is so last year.  It's all about Bob now."

Phew.  I don't know a Bob.

An apple a day

An apple a day keeps the doctor away - who knew that doctors were so scared of apples?

This curious little phrase started life as a Pembrokeshire proverb. I like Pembrokeshire and apples and dislike doctors, so I take this phrase at it's word and eat an apple every day and usually keep one on my desk to ward off unwanted visits.

When we were growing up we had two big apple trees at the bottom of the garden and every September the 3rd, on his birthday my dad would get stung by a wasp that was slightly drunk on our ripening apples.  None of the rest of us were but we didn't used to try to hit them, preferring to get on with our game of Horse of the year show, using every broom, mop and chair we could find in the house, or tying worms in knots to see if they could untangle themselves before being dropped in the oil tank.  You can't say that children didn't know how to have fun in the seventies.
My Dad's tendency to get stung always made me question the phrase, though. I did wonder if you'd be better off buying apples to eat or place strategically around windows and doors to keep doctors out rather than growing your own.

When they moved my mum and dad missed their apple trees and so my mum planted a couple.  One variety with the same name as my daughter.  That year, the apple tree didn't work very well at keeping the doctor away.  At one of the first orchestra end of year parties a small boy (who isn't so small now) ran into the tree and we had to call an ambulance. 

This has been an exceptionally good year for apples and mum hasn't been able to eat them all.  In a genius plan she puts some in a tub at the front of the house everyday and watches to see what happens to them.  People love them.  Small children stride up the hill munching on an apple, while their parents complain that they have apples rotting in the fruit bowl at home.  Old men, look surreptitiously around before filling their pockets. People say how much they remind them of their childhood. Men say that their wives have told them off when they bring them home because they say they are scrounging. 

The other day a man came along and took the whole lot, except 4 small wormy ones.
"If I could write I'd have a story," my mum said, although I'm not sure what the story would be.
The Long Suffering Husband suggested that the man was an alcoholic with a cider press. I thought he might have a horse, although he'd probably have taken the small apples too. 

All I do know is that he probably wasn't a doctor, as we know that they are scared of apples.

Coming Out Day

Today is the day we all have to come out. "Gay, bi, supportive or whatever, it's time to speak out," celebs are telling us. Some people would prefer privacy but I'm not sure that's an option.

In the spirit of the day I thought I'd come out. I'd like to be supportive but the truth is that I can't grow anything that needs support: peas, beans, climbing roses; they all fail under the influence of my green fingers. So, I am coming out as 'whatever', more specifically a basket. Soup in a basket: that great Seventies pub dish that is not fit for purpose.

Thankfully, there is the Long Suffering Husband.  He could grow sweet peas. His support is the best.
"I don't want a birthday this year!" I announced grumpily, so he bought me 4 Bounty bars and wrapped them beautifully.
"I can't sort my head out," I complained, so he brought home notebooks for me to fill with elephants and pens that will never let you down.

He's a keeper.

Lay the Blame

It has been a while since I've felt about writing about anything that has been in the news. I've been dealing with an elephant. ( Old joke: how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time but it still makes you sick.) However, Harvey Weinstein is in the news and I have something to say.

The only person to blame is Harvey Weinstein.

I could stop there because that is all there is to say but it is important that while we look for ways of stopping these things happening again we do not blame anyone other than the perpetrator. 

Society is changing (thankfully) and it is less acceptable for old men to use their power to sexually intimidate, younger, less powerful women. That is good. Women will start to stand up for themselves because they know it is wrong but if they don't then it's not their fault. They didn't make him behave like that in the first place. 

It is stupid to say that, 'everyone knew' and so it is everyone's fault. What exactly is it that everyone knew? Because knowing that someone is a dirty old man does not make you responsible for them, especially in a society where speaking up about your suspicions (because without evidence they are only suspicions) can cause you harm. 

There are people on social media today being very cross with Judi Dench and Meryl Streep, although less so with George Cloony, who seems to have said the same thing, which is roughly, "Shit, I didn't know he was that bad."  They knew that he was a difficult and powerful man. They knew he made sexual jokes. They knew he had relationships with younger women. They didn't know women had made allegations against him and were paid off. They didn't know any details of what he did.

Some people are trying to make this into a party political thing. It is cross party. It affects everyone in all areas of society. Some powerful men use sex as a weapon and they should stop.

In some areas of the media there is incredulity that he could be both brilliant and a sexual predator. We need to remember that people are complex. We all do bad things but as a society there are some bad things that we won't tolerate and thankfully this predatory behaviour is becoming one of those things.

I was listening to something on the radio about Cyril Smith, yesterday and how there was enough evidence to prosecute him for the molestation of the boys.  It is inconceivable to think that today someone doing what people knew he was doing would not only get away with it but get a knighthood, signed off by the Prime Minister after she had read the police report and that is a good thing but that hasn't happened because we blamed the people who refused to believe he could be both a good man politically and a monster when it came to what he liked to do to boys. It has happened because we believe that men can do those things.  It has happened because we believe small boys when they tell us a powerful man made them touch their willy.  It happened because we, as a society, have grown up and are prepared to blame Cyril Smith for doing awful things.

Some of social media want to blame men. All men.  All men are terrible and capable of these things, they say.  The rest wants to blame women.  All women.  All women are temptresses and have brought it on themselves or are to blame for not calling out predatory behaviour before.  A female fashion designer has blamed women for wearing provocative clothes, for which she must blame herself, based on the clothes she designs.

These people are not to blame and blaming them allows the real crimes to be watered down.  This is not acceptable.  It was wrong.  He's been sacked.  Hopefully, if he does it again there will be enough evidence to prosecute him and other men who feel tempted to do the same will know it is wrong.

Birthdays

The day before a birthday can be a little depressing.

 If you are under thirteen then you can be wildly excited, bouncing around and squeaking about birthdays. If you know someone who shares your birthday (or nearly shares it) you have an excuse for shouting high-pitched happy birthdays at them, knowing they will return the sentiment. However, once you get beyond your teenage years this behaviour isn't seemly and so you reign it in. You also remember the times when you spent your birthday nursing a you-got-too-excited-didn't-you-fever.

As you get older everything gets a bit more depressing and marking the passing of the years doesn't fill you with as much excitement as it used to. After I had my own children I struggled to remember my age and at birthdays people always ask. One year, my son told his reception class teacher that it was my birthday and that I was 83. She laughed at him but he held firm confirming my birth year of 1921. When she told me the story I shrugged, I could have been 83. Who knew? I'd stopped counting.
So I decided to pick a number and stick to it. I told my daughter that when I died I'd like her to stand up and say, "It's such a shame Mum only lived to forty two." I said that it would be funny and everyone needs a laugh at a funeral. She said it would only be funny if I was really old when I died.

Last year we celebrated my birthday. 42 for the 9th time is something to celebrate. I didn't celebrate as much as someone might a 50th. I've seen friends have parties and spa weekends with the girls but I just went for a family meal and I didn't take a book.

Waking up this morning and realising that tomorrow is the anniversary of my birth could add to my already gloomy mood but the brilliant thing about picking a number and sticking to it is that you can just miss one.

This blog is an apology to my colleagues who could be expecting cake.

Looking Stuff Up

I waste so much of my life looking stuff up. It's becoming a bit of an obsession. I can be happily going through my day when a thought pings in my head and I think, "I must look that up." It could be something trivial like, "Do spiders have ears?" (They don't but they can still hear you through their vibrating leg hair, so don't say rude things about them). It might be more important like, "When is my car tax due for renewal?" or a health question like, "What causes a twitchy eye?" (Stress, apparently).
I have a lot of questions about the human body. It's a very complicated thing that absolutely no one understands. Even the experts. I've been reading complicated papers from liver journals recently and I am stunned at the lack of understanding of such a big and important organ. You might think that I'm turning into a hypochondriac, which would be ironic as the liver is in the hypochondria region on the abdomen and pain from it is called hypochondriacal pain (I'm not making this up). In light of all this reading I might suddenly have a question pop into my mind like, "What is bile for?" (Breaking down fats in the small intestine), "Where is it stored and concentrated after cholecystectomy?" (It's not stored but released directly into the small intestine), or "What happens if the bile duct is blocked and it can't get into the small intestine? " (You become a hypochondriac, with pain in that region, jaundice ('doesn't she look well?'), dark urine, pale poos, feel a bit sick and no one takes you seriously, especially if you are a woman.).

Maybe it's a sign of age or twitchy-eye stress but I find that there isn't enough room for every day things with all these questions. When you work with children they notice. They have always rolled their eyes at me when I confuse brothers and sisters names, although in my defence I teach over 300 children every week but this week I got confused about my own name. We were singing The Quatermaster's Stores, which everyone loves because the words include a swear word. "Ummm, Miss, you swore."

There were rats, rats, big as blooming cats, in the stores, in the stores.There were rats, rats, big as blooming cats, in the stores, in the stores. In the Quatermaster's stores.

I set them the challenge to make a verse with their name and a rhyming word. I was able to model it with my surname, which only rhymes with one word in the English language.
"Or you could use your first name," I said, "So I could use....what is it?.....yes...There was Julia Julia being quite peculiar in the stores, in the stores."
"Miss, did you forget your name?"
"Erm... yes.... I've got a bit of a Swiss Cheese brain at the moment."
"Why does Swiss cheese have holes in it?" one smart child asked.
"I don't know, maybe you could look it up and tell me."
More stuff to look up. (It's a bacteria that makes carbon dioxide bubbles by eating lactic acid when the cheese is maturing.)

My Swiss cheese brain seems to be really struggling to place people.
After orchestra rehearsal us adults were chatting, waiting for the kids who had left glasses or phones or their raincoat to come back and get them. My friend, who is a human rights expert with a particular interest in space law, was talking about a conference call she had just been on with Mars and how she had told the Martians that suicide was illegal. (I might be making that up, or not). I was surprised because I thought it had been decriminalised but apparently you can still be prosecuted if you succeed. This started us talking about laws that had not been taken off the statute books or could be misinterpreted because of poorly placed commas.
"Oh yes," I said, enthusiastically, "There's the law that all men have to practise their archery for two hours every Sunday. I have a neighbour with an online archery store and he was telling me." I looked at the youngest of us and my brain leapt over a hole. "You probably know him," I thought as I visualised where he lived and where the neighbour lived.
"My dad?" he asked quietly, clearly thinking it was time to call in th men in white coats.

Did you know that it's also illeagal to eat mince pies on Christmas Day and to die in the House of Commons?

A Cautionary Tale

Five years ago, my daughter went to University and I got Fresher's Flu.  I'm not sure how it was possible for me to catch it from that distance but I definitely came out in sympathy.  I felt low and tearful and as though I had drunk too much the night before and it left me with a cough that didn't go away until just before Christmas when I ended up losing my voice for the first time. Losing your voice can be frustrating and it is something that has recurred every 6 or 7 weeks since.

The most frustrating thing, though, has always been other people.  "Have you tried..." "You shouldn't..", "If you just....", "You can't be using it properly...", "What do they say about it?", "There must be something they can do."  "It's because you're stressed.", "If you were more positive it would go away." 

This was all made even more frustrating by the fact that I couldn't shout, "F off," at them.

What would start out as someone trying to be helpful would end up as a bizarre exercise in victim blaming and I would end up feeling a lot worse than when they started.  I learnt to just nod and smile at all the suggestions, thinking, "Luckily for you, you have no blooming idea what it's like."

I'm sure I've given unsolicited advice to people who are sick before but now I am always more careful.

You see, I cursed the last person to give me advice.  "You need to use the straws technique," she said, "We swear by it."

I asked her if she had ever had a voice problem.

"Och, No," she said smugly, "I do my vocal exercises every day."

It was wrong, I know but I cursed her. I wished her to lose her voice and know what it was really like.

And she did.

The next time I saw her she told me how awful it had been and how she had always thought that if you do everything right then you wouldn't get it but both her children had a bug where their voices were croaky and she caught it.  Being a singer, her voice went for 3 weeks.  I nodded wisely, feeling secretly pleased but guilty that I had wished this on her.  Not everyone has my powers but I think it would be wise to be careful.

Almost every other advert on the TV at the moment has something to do with cancer.  The NHS have campaigns to remind people to check out coughs, strange poos and for men to feel their balls. Macmillan have a coffee morning and a campaign to go sober in October, Cancer Research are encouraging people to shave their hair off or run through mud, Marie Curie have just had a huge tea party and all of these adverts have got me thinking about what might be an awful and under reported aspect of cancer.  

Everyone knows about cancer.  They've known of someone, or read a book, or seen a soap.  They know it's awful.  They know it's caused by smoking or eating salami, or not getting enough of the right kind of exercise.  They know that people with cancer have to 'keep their strength up'.  They know that cancer treatments happen quickly.  They know that doctors work miracles.  They believe that cancer is something you have to 'fight'.  They know cancer patients have to be strong.

I've often been concerned about this idea that cancer has to be a fight.  The problem is that cancer is you.  It's your body, growing a bit more than it should.  If you fight it you must be fighting yourself. In a war against yourself you will always lose, even when you win. In the past, if I have said this to people they suck their teeth and say, "you have to be careful.  If you give up it will win."  This is bollocks.  Psychologists are beginning to study this and have concluded that mental attitude has no effect on cancer development and disease progression.  https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/04/20/new-meta-analysis-undermines-the-myth-that-negative-emotions-can-cause-cancer/

These things that people know can end up sounding like blame to someone who is ill.  "If only you didn't smoke."  "I knew eating Salami would be your downfall."  "If only you'd done yoga instead of swimming." "You are eating all the wrong things."  "You should eat something." "Even if you are feeling sick, if you don't eat you'll only get worse."  "It can't be that bad, or you'd have been seen already.  They don't leave people with a cancer diagnosis without an appointment for a month." "It will be fine.  I know someone who had cancer and they had chemotherapy for years. Oh, yes, it was awful treatment. Survive?  Oh, no but they had years of treatment. You've got to fight.  It's going to be hard but you can do it." 

When I first lost my voice I would find people's suggestions funny.  As if I hadn't done vocal exercises all my life.  As if I didn't drink only water.  But eventually it wore me down and I started to feel as though I was to blame for being unwell.  When people got frustrated because I had tried all their suggestions they would say, "So, why do you think you've got it?" as if I knew and as if knowing would help, except they would have something else to blame me for.

So, while I'm happy to eat cake (I'm always happy to eat cake) and donate a fiver to charity so they can research cures and treatments that might make people feel better I will be extra careful to not turn any research I hear about into blame for someone who has been diagnosed with cancer.  They might have witchy powers like mine and curse me to really understand what it's like.