The last parent and death

I accepted my dad’s death really well. I was prepared for it and, to be fair, we had thirty four years to get used to the idea. This might have made it harder because they cured his first death (a heart attack at 40), several others that followed and that could have made it hard to accept that all death couldn’t be cured. However, this wasn’t a problem for me. I was able to say goodbye and grieve normally, go straight back to work and get on with my life with hardly a tear shed. Then, one day, I had left some music at home and decided to pop and get it during a break from teaching. I got in the car and a man was reading from his memoires on radio 4. He was talking about his elderly mother and said something like, “It shouldn’t have been a surprise because as soon as one parent dies you are unconsciously waiting for the next to go.” It floored me. I sat in the car sobbing so hard I had to pull over and ran out of time to get my music.

This fear of losing your second parent seems to be instinctive. People I have spoken to, sheepishly confess to having felt like that. The man in the memoire confessed to feeling some relief when his mother finally died because he could let go of that worry. It’s not something we really like to talk about. It feels too much like wishing death upon your parent. I know lots of people whose mother ended up with dementia following their father’s death and the guilt they feel is enormous. On the day of the evening my dad died I was at a friend’s funeral. (I know; it’s been a shit couple of years). Someone I hadn’t seen for a while, who knew my parents, asked me how they were and I had to tell her that Dad was dying. “Oh,” she said, “Keep an eye on your mum, won’t you? I’ve just had to put mine in a home,” and then she mouthed the word “dementia” at me. I stubbornly refused to accept that my mum wasn’t a candidate for a long and happy widowhood. She had plans, was going to travel, really get going with her art. 

The other day, novelist Marianne Keyes posted on Twitter about this subject. Her dad died recently and she wrote: 

The replies that followed were lovely. People said how normal this was and how thirteen years later  they still do this.

I wanted to give comfort but couldn’t. Sometimes the second parent does die soon after the first. Maybe if I had been more open to the idea it wouldn’t have been quite so difficult.

Weird Sort of Rub on the Arm - another blog about death.

I've given you all a break over Christmas but now that we are full of cheese and mince pies and we are thinking about New Year I'm going back to my death series.  As a child, I thought New Year was the day that all the celebrities died.  It never occurred to me that they were just listing 12 months of deaths and so I thought of it as celebrity death day.  I thought about things like death, as a child and thought that being a celebrity would be quite useful because at least you’d know you were going to die at New Year. Maybe that was unusual.

After I wrote about some of the things I found difficult at Christmas this year  ( https://juliaofalltrades.blogspot.com/2018/12/christmas-and-death.html ) people seemed surprised.
"If only I'd known," they said and threatened me with hugs, or because I'm not a huggy sort of person a 'weird sort of rub on the arm'.
I was surprised that they were surprised.   These are things I knew happened to the bereaved, even before I lost someone.  They are normal things.

It was nice, though: to know that people care because you don't always know.

Then this weird thing happened.  I got messages wishing me a Merry Christmas that came with the caveat that the person sending the message knew that I wouldn't.  They said things like, "I know this year is going to be difficult but have as good a Christmas as you possibly can."  Had I brought this on myself by talking about the normal aspects of grief at Christmas? Had I given everyone the impression that there could be no happiness in my life now that my parents had died?

Honestly, I had a nice Christmas.  Any difficulties were in the build up and nothing could have been as bad as last year when I thought I was the only person who knew my mother was dying.  In our death denying society, this was harder and so the blogs I'm going to write are my attempt to encourage you to think about and talk about death but today I just want to give anyone who is grieving, permission to be happy.  Grieving is a roller coaster.

Christmas Cards and Death

I’m not a fan of Christmas cards. A few years ago, I stopped writing them and I was happier. It also means that  I received less, ending the need for cardboard tree shaped card holder or a washing line and tiny plastic red and green card pegs. Then my parents died and I became the oldest. I felt it was my responsibility to keep in contact. So I bought a pack of cards. I remember Mum sitting down in the evenings in the run up to Christmas with simmering frustration that even a glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream couldn’t soothe.

When I die if I find myself being forced to write Christmas cards then I will know I’m in hell. 

I’m trying.

It’s a minefield of social etiquette. What do you write? Should you acknowledge the death? Is it alright to celebrate in a happy way when you are mostly sad? The Victorians had the perfect card for the occasion. 

Cards have been arriving at Mum and Dad’s house. Some to me from people who don’t realise I haven’t lived at home for thirtyish years and some for my sister, who is living there. The other day there was a card to Mum and Dad. My sister hadn’t opened it. My instinct of being the oldest one who had to deal with these things kicked in. “I’m going to have to send a card back and break the news,” I said.  We opened the card.

“Can you read that name?” I asked my sister. 

We looked at it from several angles. We tipped our heads, turned the card round, and squinted. We tried several names out but none of them seemed to fit and none sounded like anyone we knew.

I thought this was a funny story but now I’ve written it down it just seems sad.we laughed though.  It’s probably the way I’ve written it, which may be because this blog is brought to you by one extremely tired music teacher: a music teacher who is so tired she tried to kiss a parent yesterday. 

The choir had just finished their last gig of the year. We sang in the High Street to a few of our parents. It was lovely; no pressure; just being outside bringing some festive cheer but as soon as they had finished I suddenly felt all my energy go. The children lined up and the parents said goodbye, feeling very excited about their last afternoon of freedom. The parent standing next to me puckered up and said to her child, “Gis us a kiss then,” and so I nearly did. I had to apologise. “I’m sorry, you didn’t mean me. I’m just so tired.” I think she saw the funny side. 

Christmas and Death

There’s no good time to die but I really hope I don’t go at Christmas time.

My Nan died on New Year’s Eve and the Long Suffering Husband’s mum watched the millennium fireworks from her hospital bed, shortly before her death. New Year has therefore always been a miserable time for my family. I would hate to forever ruin Christmas for my loved ones with an untimely death.

Christmas, being a time for reflection, is particularly hard when you have lost someone. Standing in the men’s jumper section of Marks and Spencer with tears in your eyes or opening your cookbook to have your mum’s recipe for a Christmas sauce fall out can fell you, like a tree cut at the knees. You realise that you’ll never again be able to buy a salmon pink jumper that is truly appreciated or call up to check if there really is that  much brandy in the recipe and you feel lost. Your frame of reference for life has gone. When both parents have died nothing can quite prepare you for how much you feel like a little lost girl again. You thought you were a fully fledged adult but you couldn’t have been more wrong.

The run up to Christmas is such a busy time and we place enormous pressure on ourselves to make it perfect, or at least, better than last year. Each year carries special memories that get woven into each other, traditions that simply have to be observed and pressure for the people trying to hold it all together. The recently bereaved can find all of this a little overwhelming.

This year, I have found these things particularly hard.
1. Being too busy. There is not enough time for reflection and just being with my own thoughts. I
think this is part of the healing process. My counsellor warned against it but I didn’t listen. “I’m an
all or nothing kind of girl,” I told her.
2. Cooking. Apart from the factor of the first point, this is the season of parties and ‘bring a plate of food.’ My go-to Mum’s Lemon Drizzle doesn’t seem the best thing to bring anymore. Appetite can take a while to come back after a bereavement and Christmas is all about food. “Have you ordered the turkey or are we having something different this year?” the LSH asks hopefully. It is tempting to suggest beans on toast.
3. Chocolates. ‘‘Tis the season of the Quality Street tin on the sideboard. I can’t quite explain why this and the Radio Times Christmas edition makes me feel so sad. Also, when you are too busy (see point 1) they become your most important food group. Last night, I had time to cook a proper meal (lamb hotpot), unwrapped the lamb stock cube and popped it into my mouth. Lamb stock cubes and caramel swirls do not taste the same.

4. People. People are wrapped up in their own busyness and can, without meaning, trample all over your feelings. People take a lot of my energy and because of point one I don’t have any spare.
5. Old people’s homes. As as musician it is traditional to take children to care homes to torture old folk with their singing. It never occurred to me that staring into the eyes of dying old ladies would be so triggering. Oh, and their pianos are terrible.
6. Churches. Musicians spend a lot of time in church at Christmas. It is particularly challenging to co-ordinate a church service with all the music for a whole school, with people who are too wrapped up with their own problems to give you much of a hand, in the church where your parents funerals were. It’s impossible to just look at the ceiling fighting back tears when your choir is standing where your mum’s coffin was only seven months ago when they are looking expectantly for direction and encouragement.

Our school Christmas church service is the thing I find most stressful and so if you see me and I don’t talk to you, or worse still snap at you please forgive me and remember that I ate a lamb stock cube last night thinking it was a chocolate.

Dogs and Death

One of the few times I remember publicly crying about a death was when I was 11 and my gerbil had died.

I stood in a classroom and balled my eyes out in front of a bemused RE teacher ( whose name I can’t remember but who had a very progressive attitude to spirituality and a PhD in theology from Cambridge). I was embarrassed.
“I don’t cry!” I told him. “I didn’t even cry at my grandad’s funeral and that was sad, especially when we drove past where he worked and everyone was standing there waving hankies.”
He nodded quietly and said with his silky smooth chocolate voice that would have made him an excellent vicar if only he wasn’t gay in the seventies, “It’s why we have pets. Just wait until you have a dog.”

He went on to tell me his theory about how the end of a pet’s life and particularly  a dog’s, enables us to think about death in a way that is impossible when another human dies. He said that we are much more honest about our feelings because a pet’s death doesn’t make us question our own mortality.
“It’s normal to be sad. You are going to miss your hamster,” he said
I bit my lip, trying not to scream ‘gerbil’ at him but said, “I was going to miss my grandad too but I didn’t cry like this.”

He just nodded wisely and said, “Yes and wait until you lose a dog. You’ll cry more than you do when your parents die. You won’t be able to think about being sad at all then because you’ll realise that you’re next and crying will feel selfish.”

He was right. A few years later, when my Dad was recovering from his first by-pass surgery, I sat in
the middle of the busy road we lived on, bathed in the beautiful blue light of a police car, cradling
the dog in my lap, sobbing my eyes out. I refused to let the vet take him until he was cold.

We can accept that pets are going to die, we can even let them go early, saying that it’s cruel to let them suffer.

Dogs can tune into their owner’s feelings. The beautiful black Labrador in our lives became nursemaid for seven months, fussing and fretting and not leaving Mum’s side. She also grew to the size of a coffee table, as she ate all the food mum slipped her. For a while after, she looked sad.

As a dog walker, you make fleeting connections with other owners. My dog has a fascination for old men in caps and so over the years I have become nodding acquaintances with several old men with dogs. When they die, their dogs come running up to me for strokes and reassurances and their wives can’t understand what is going on until I tell them my dog’s name. It seems that my dog was as popular with them.

Generally, I prefer to walk on my own and not talk to anyone. One of the reasons we chose the  woodland burial at the cemetery was that we like to wall our dogs there. If you do see people you
don’t talk because they are dealing with their own grief. Now that we have another reason to go it has
become a favourite walk.

Dogs have no respect for our human conventions of honouring death. How could they?  They don’t understand that the conveniently placed stone or carefully planted tree isn’t a place to cock their leg. Digging dogs don’t understand that it’s not a great place to find bones. I’ve seen dog owners shouting at their confused mutts for all these things.

It’s not the animal’s fault. That’s why I was so upset the other day. It had to be my fault.  It was the first time I’d cried in the cemetery: usually, holding it together in public. My dog is ten years old and has never caught anything. He can’t catch a ball, a fly, the hedgehog in the garden or even the small aircraft that flies above, doing loop-the-loops on a Saturday morning but not for want of trying.
The established woodland area has become like a nature reserve and sometimes the dog will chase a squirrel to the edge of a tree, or jump as a bird flies past his nose. This time, he saw a rabbit and took chase. Normally rabbits are much too fast and are gone before he has any idea what he is doing. This rabbit decide to run round him in circles and he caught it, shook it like he would his favourite hedgehog toy and stood with it in his mouth looking very pleased with himself.  It all happened so fast. I shouted at him to “leave it”, which is a command he knows but he didn’t want to. He wanted to bring it with him. I shouted again, realising that I was too squeamish to try and take it off him.  He looked at me and smiled, rabbit still firmly wedged in his jaws. He saw that I wasn’t happy but didn’t want to give up his prize. He looked around for somewhere to leave it. He saw an old headstone amongst the trees. Someone had left a vase of silk flowers next to it. He walked over and carefully laid the perfect, dead bunny next to the flowers and came back to me, expecting a treat. I put him on the lead and walked a little way before I found myself staring at mum’s grave with  tears in my eyes.
It made me remember the RE teacher and his insistence that dogs and god were both there to help us deal with grief and that it was no coincidence that they are the same word spelt backwards. Mum always said that religion was a comfort for people who are too weak to get through things on their own, which now that I need a dog, seems a little harsh.

This blog is brought to you by a very tired music teacher in the run up to Christmas.  I'm so tired that this morning I thought I saw a thousand Santas running around as I played a defective bass clarinet.  I apologise if this current set of blogs are too morbid for the time of year but I did promise I would try to talk about death.  Apparently, it's going to be good for all of us.

Let’s talk about death

Let’s talk about , death baby.

Let’s talk about you and me,

Let’s talk about all the good things and the bad things that may be.

Let’s talk about death.

Let’s talk about death.

Yo Pep, I don’t think they’re gonna play this on the radio.

Why not, everyone dies.

Strange weather for the time of year, don’t you think?

Taboo subjects are difficult to write about but  Salt ‘n’ Peppa managed so I’ll have another go tomorrow.

Moving On

Now that I’ve finished reading the Brexit report and I’m fixed (so that the constant videos of the last moments of my mum’s life aren’t playing behind my eyes) it’s time to ‘move on’ and so I’m going to write some blogs that deal with uncomfortable truths about death, bereavement and grief. Today’s blog is about support.

After I’d written the fixed blog people told me their stories and said that it had been helpful to read. Other people had told me that they’d sent it to friends who were struggling with grief, or madness.
I was surprised by all of this, as I thought my experience was pretty unique. Obviously, I hadn’t given the details of those final images but my descriptions of how I acted with PTSD resonated with many people.

When life is difficult for someone the people around them want to help. It is hard to know how to help and even harder to know if you are able to.

The truth is that there are no rules. A psychological study has shown that there is no right thing to say https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2018.1509341  Things that helped me might not help someone else but I’m going to tell you  just in case those things are universal.

On Thursday I’m taking some friends out for dinner who were very supportive. We are going to celebrate my being fixed with sparkles, bubbles and food. Looking back, I realise how lucky I am, to have so many friends and family who care and did exactly the right thing for me. And also how lucky I am that there were so many others who tried to help and failed. I think of the Long Suffering Husband who failed at least 30% of the time but never gave up.

Most of the time, for me, when people failed it was because they were trying too hard. They wanted my pain to stop. They couldn’t understand it but thought they could. As soon as someone jumped to a conclusion I was lost. “I know exactly how you’re feeling,” they’d say and inside I would be    screaming. I think that whatever someone is going through it is totally unique and no one ever really  knows what it’s like to be inside their head.

“It’s because..” was another conversation starter that would make me curl up inside. This was terrible on two fronts. The first was that they were usually wrong but the second and more terrifying was the fear that they might get it right. When you are at your lowest and really struggling with something then the last thing you want is to be noticed.

“You should...” Oh help! This was the worst. Even if the advice that followed was good advice I generally couldn’t have heard it because it was framed in arrogance and judgement. There were bits of advice that were funny, like “You should eat more bananas.” (I’m still not sure why) and others that still hurt when I think of them now, like being told it’s time to move on.

I titled the blog ’moving’on because this is probably the least helpful thing, ever (in my opinion). In  an age where growth mindset is all the rage, resilience is taught as something you can have just by saying,  “get on with it,” and that anyone who can’t get over something is a snowflake (stupid term because snowflakes are amazing), this phrase is going to be said more often. The truth is that a person can’t always move on. I couldn’t and I am a pretty resilient person who has suddenly become a bit freaked out because the things she's always said are suddenly trendy.  Until the video images stopped playing behind my eyes there was no way of moving on. I was stuck. And even now, I am still bereaved. My parents have still died within 18 months of each other, I have still dealt with things no squeamish person should ever have to deal with and I feel forever changed. I have good days and bad days. This is normal. (I’m telling myself as much as I’m telling anyone else).

So, if people failed because they were trying too hard then would it be better that they didn’t try at all? No. No. Absolutely not. I have more respect for people who tried and got it wrong (even if I was hurt by their trying) than those who just didn’t bother. The loneliness of dealing with these issues is indescribable.

The connection between people is hard when you are struggling.  It's even harder if you are struggling with something that society doesn't like to talk about.  Death is still a big taboo, as is mental health and menopause.  Doing all three things together makes you a very difficult person to be around and you know it. 

The people who were really supportive for me didn't care about any of that.  They didn't need to talk about those things.  They just let me know that they were there.  They would swim alongside me, or invite me for coffee, or send me a text to ask how I was and be happy with my answer of 'OK'.  They talked about other things and didn't get cross if I zoned out.  They didn't hug me (that might be a personal thing).  They didn't give up. They told me their stories without assuming that mine was the same.  This, I think, is important.  Other people's experiences help you work out what you might need.  The more I heard about people's experience of grief the more I realised that I was in a different place.  A conversation with a chap in a coffee shop, however, who had been a soldier and told me about his PTSD did make me feel much less alone as did the story a dog walker told me about their mother who had never been the same after nursing their grandmother through cancer.  We should talk more about death. 

One of the things that really kept me going through the early darkest days was that every morning I would get up to a message from a friend that contained a gif of the Pope doing something strange.  It made me laugh and if someone can make you laugh when everything seems pointless then they are doing really well.

585 pages

I’ve been quiet again. Don’t panic, though I am still fixed. Apart from being a musician in the run up to Christmas I have been busy reading the 585 pages of the draft Brexit agreement.

“You are sad!” said my friend believing that I was going to be the only person to actually read it.
The truth is that while I have read every single word I can’t claim to understand it. It took me all this time to read because there was so much to look up. I didn’t even know where the South Sandwich Islands were or if there were any North Sandwich Islands (near the Falkland and I don’t think there are).

Then there was the legal language, which did get easier as it went on but all this ‘party of the first part’, ‘notwithstanding’ and ‘by way of derogation’ takes a while to tune into. Even when you are tuned in they throw foreign words in like pari-passu, which just means doing stuff at the same time on a equal footing. Oh, I’ve just seen why they used it: 585 pages of unintelligible words are quicker to write than 2000 pages that we can understand. I also have a problem reading anything financial. My brain feels like it’s going to explode as soon as there is any talk of amortising or non-amortising loans and as my brain has had a lot to cope with recently, I thought I should take it easy.

For a long while I got stuck on the conundrum of why they had left page 301 blank. I have no answers to this that don’t make me sound like a mad conspiracy theorist.

“What do you think?" is the questions I get asked when I tell people I have read it. Mostly, my answer is that I don’t know, so I’m going to use the rest of this post to try and work out what I think.
 
I’m going to number my thoughts but only because I like a list and it’s easier to read.

1. The draft Brexit agreement probably isn’t the first thing you should read after recovering from a
panic disorder that was rooted in your inability to control anything. It has left me with a feeling that we are in an antebellum age, where the slightest thing could tip us into war.

2. This is a draft and still has to be agreed. If it has taken me this long to read it, I can be fairly certain that my MP won’t have time and so when asked to vote on it he won’t be doing so fully informed.

3. Any break up is tricky but this is like a divorce between 27 people who have thousands
of children and one cat. How do you decide who gets the cat?

4. This document doesn’t actually say anything very much. It doesn’t say who is going to get the cat, just how everyone is going to behave while we try to decide who that cat will live with.

5.  There are deadlines for agreeing most things, which is very sensible. Most of these dates are
between 2020 and 2027, which almost certainly means that if the agreements haven’t gone well the fallout will be the problem of a different government.

6. OLAF isn’t a snowman.

7. There are several things that we would like to still use that belong to the EU. Some of those things they won’t let us use (like the Galileo satellite system - which is alright by me because I love a map!) and some things they will charge us for during the transition period  (like OLAF who deals with
international fraud and Tom who controls anything nuclear - more on Olaf and Tom later). The draft agreement doesn’t say how much these things will cost but does say we will get the bill in 2020. (Again: problem for next government)

8.  I’m still cross that the public was ever asked to vote on something that was too complicated to
deliver. There is an analogy doing the rounds on social media where someone has a cake and wants to get their eggs back out of it. I confess that I am someone who preferred cake to eggs but most of my anger comes because it’s cruel to show someone a cake and tell them that they can have the eggs.

9. I belong to the gym and  know that if I only swam 3 times a week it would cost me more. We don’t know how much of the EU we are going to use and how much that’s going to cost us because that is still to be agreed but it won’t be free and I suspect it will be more than three swims a week.

10. Much of the draft agreement refers to laws that are already in place and says what we will stick to or can ignore (and I was often confused about which way round that was)  but without the original articles in front of me I had no idea what we might still have to do or not have to do.

11. The draft agreement has worked hard to protect the Northern Ireland boarder but loads of people won’t like it because if we can’t agree we stay in a customs union indefinitely.

12. Actually, it might not be indefinitely (I’m not sure if I’m the only one to have read this) but it says : "If the application of this protocol leads to serious economic societal or environmental difficulties liable to persist, or to diversion of trade, the EU or the United Kingdom may unilaterally take appropriate measures."

13. Fish: I have sympathy for the fishing industry and can completely understand why they want Brexit.  The EU helped to destroy the small fishing industry but did help to replenish fish stock with quotas. 

14. Fish: Agreeing anything about fish is going to be difficult and so the deadline date for agreement is 20XX.  I'm assuming that gives us 82 years to agree, which I don't think is very optimistic.

15. Fish: We have agreed to stick to quotas on two types of fish, neither of which I've ever heard of.

16. Lawyers qualifications will be recognised in the EU.  I shouldn't have been surprised that this was one of the first things in the document written by lawyers.

17. There is a lot of information about protecting the pensions of people who work at the EU.  This confused me but I think they are OK.

18. I think we are always going to need OLAF and Tom. Tom owns our nuclear power stations and controls the radioactive material for scanners and cancer treatments.  We might have given OLAF most of his data but he now owns that data.

19.  The agreement does state that we will be able to 'control our boarders' and that we intend to develop a points based immigration system.  If you voted for Brexit to keep Polish people from coming to England unless they have skills we can't provide here (which could be being prepared to work for small amounts of money) then you have got what you wanted.

20.  There is something about people who have been working in the EU and their rights to access UK benefits.  I think it means that if you've worked in the EU then you will have to pay for NHS treatment (although I'm not sure).

Having read it and now listed my thoughts I'm still none the wiser about whether I think it's good or not.  Generally, people like me, who are in the middle will be roughly alright whatever happens but I do worry about the people on the edges.  Any change affects them the most.

Sleeping Beauty

The game my daughter most enjoyed playing when she was two was Sleeping Beauty. It was her favourite Disney film at the time and this is how we played it: I had to pretend to be asleep on the sofa and she would carry on playing as if I didn’t exist. She would trot around in her silky pyjamas, tiara and plastic princess shoes, reading books, doing jigsaws and building things with mega blocks until she got bored. Then she would clip-clop her way around the house, pretend to be surprised that I was on the sofa kiss me and demand that I wake up and talk to her. She was a child who needed to talk, so I was never left to sleep for very long but I would often consider how terrible it must have been to miss 100 years.

The First World War ended 100 years ago and it’s hard to comprehend how many changes there have been in that time. Last night I dreamt a modern day Sleeping Beauty story but from the perspective of what happens next. Her excitement about being awake soon turned to disappointment that it hadn’t been the war to end all wars and rapidly turned to confusion and fear, as she grappled to understand the world she lived in now.

I’m quite excited by dreams at the moment because I haven’t had many in the last six months. I did have one about shoving elephants in filing cabinets after my first EMDR session but normal weird confusing dreams that come from nowhere were just missing. The dreams that turn your experiences into metaphors that your brain can file away don’t seem to happen when you have PTSD.

Sleeping Beauty isn’t the Disney Princess I would choose. (It’s Belle, in case you are wondering. I’d do anything for all those books!) Maybe, though, my daughter, at two, was preparing me. I feel as though I have woken up and although I am still quite excited, reality is reminding me that there are things to be done and that this is my busy season.

There’s still loads to look forward to though because Aurora has three fairy Godmothers and lives happily ever after.

Remembering

The first World War ended one hundred years ago and my mum died six months ago.  Rememberance services remind me of my dad, who would play the last post in the High Street and my grandad who was a soldier between the two wars.  This year, though, I was thinking about my mum and the artist that inspired her.

When I was fourteen I went on an exchange trip to Germany. During my stay we went to an exhibition about the war.  They told me that this was the first of it's kind and were shocked at my descriptions of huge British war museums.  Neither of the wars were something that was talked about they said the German people felt huge shame and would prefer that it just hadn't happened. When I told them about Poppy Day they were equally shocked. They thought it sounded like a celebration. I told them about the money it raised to look after people that were hurt in the wars and wondered what the Germans did. 

It has always upset me when people use this day of remembering in a very partisan way.  People on all sides were hurt.  Discussion, cooperation and peace should always be the aim in future. 

Kathe Kollwitz was a German artist and printmaker, who documented human suffering.  She was born in 1867 and became noticed for her work with a series about the weaver's revolt.  Kathe made many portraits of women, which I love but Mum was particularly taken with her work that featured mothers.  Many of them are very sad.  Mothers whose children have died, or are starving feature alongside pictures of her own children.  In 1914 Kathe's younger son, Peter, volunteered for the war and shortly after was killed in Belgium. That was when she became a pacifist.  She made posters, a series on war and ventured into sculpture to create amazing tributes. Her final works were concerned with death and seemed to be a farewell.

Fixed

I’m probably about to wildly over share but I’m so excited that I just don’t care.

I have been stuck in a living hell for the last six months. Not to over dramatise the situation but it has been really awful.

The trauma that I suffered because of mum’s death is more complicated than I want to go into but it left me with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This meant that my brain was broken. For a long time I couldn’t close my eyes or look at my hands without replaying the traumatic images in my head. Smells would leave me being unable to breathe. I couldn’t sleep and if I did I would wake gasping for air and gripping my upper arms hard enough to bruise them. I lost my appetite and felt permanently nauseous. I was terrified of seeing people just in case they said anything that caused the images to replay. I couldn’t watch television or cope with loud noises. My brain felt like it was constantly fizzing. As time went on, I felt depressed and defeated by the situation and wondered how I could go on.

People were sympathetic but because I couldn’t explain what was really happening for fear of replaying the images, their sympathy only isolated me further. When people said that it was understandable because both parents had died so close to each other I felt like a fraud. You see I’m a bit hard. I don’t cry. I don’t have an issue with death.

Instead of normal but extreme grief I have been dealing with a constant video playing behind my eyes that left me feeling useless, out of control and not safe.

Some people would give up, drink, take drugs and pull the duvet over their head. I used to fight giants so I walked, drank water, did yoga, swam, ate three meals a day whether I fancied them or not and practised mindfulness.

As a psychology geek, I already knew that the therapy for PTSD was EMDR. (It’s always important to fight acronyms with acronyms) and when I told the consultant at the hospice what had happened and how it had turned me into  ‘Lady F-ing Macbeth’ (“Don’t worry,” said my sister after, “pretty sure that’s her middle name.”) she confirmed that EMDR was the way to go.

It is only available privately, so I found wonderful Helen at the Silver Street Clinic. I’ve had eight sessions with her, with only three of them being EMDR.  In the first we talked about what had happened and how I was feeling. The second gave me strategies for dealing with the anxiety symptoms. The third and fourth were EMDR sessions, after which I felt able to go back to work. The images were mostly under control and we locked them in a box.  In the fifth we talked about my difficult return to work but decided that it was alright to stop treatment.Then I cleaned my mum’s kitchen cupboards and the videos started to play in my head again along with a return to bruising myself in my sleep.  Those images refused to stay in the box.  Session six was to assess what had happened and a few more coping strategies. On the seventh visit we got distracted talking about death in general and things that can’t be changed. On Tuesday I had the EMDR session that fixed me. The images came out of the box, we turned them black and white and dealt with the difficult emotions in a safe way.

Everyone has heard of PTSD in terms of soldiers coming back from war. We know that it’s an anxiety disorder caused by witnessing traumatic events.  It's not so common in every day life.  Mostly, us humans are very efficient at dealing with seeing an isolated trauma.  Our brains have mechanisms which allow us to file the event away in a safe way.  Much of this work is done while we are asleep.  We dream and our brains relieve the trauma in different ways.  Usually, while we sleep the amount of nor-adrenaline released is reduced and so relieving the trauma in REM sleep is safe.  In patients with PTSD this mechanism of the brain in broken and instead even more of this anxiety inducing chemical is released. 

I referred to the time from Mum's diagnosis to her death as the Great Elephant Wars of 2018.  The whole thing was like fighting the proverbial elephant in the corner.  Something that you shouldn't really mention but had to constantly fight. It wasn't a real war, though and I was furious at myself for being so weak to have been this troubled by the situation.  Helen explained that your brain is like a filing clerk and because of  how busy I was (still fitting in concerts, clubs and pupil exams alongside wanting to care for Mum and grieving Dad) my filling clerk was overwhelmed.  It had an over full in-tray and was really beginning to panic about ever getting on top of the job. Then the traumatic death occurred generating a black sack full of paperwork but there was no room in the in-tray so my brain and it's desk got buried in papers to file.  It broke.

EMDR (Eye Movement De-sensitisation and Reprocessing) therapy works by simulating what your brain does during dream sleep.  Your eyes are moved from side to side while you visualise the trauma. You can follow a light, be tapped on the knees or have beeps played into alternating ears (which worked best for me).  A skilled therapist takes you through the visualisations and asks you what you are feeling and where.  They use techniques like turning the image black and white which help to keep you feeling safe.  You can stop at any time you want.  It is like some sort of voodoo magic. 

I came out of the last session and knew I was fixed.  I felt hungry for the first time in six months and realised that I didn't feel sick anymore.  I could go into Marks and Spencers without my heart pounding in my chest (I bought myself a pain au chocolate because I fancied it).  There was a spring in my step and I noticed that I felt happy.  Since then I have been able to watch TV and sit in the staff room. My head feels lighter and the Long Suffering Husband has commented that I have lost the 'haunted' look.  I can feel that my smile reaches my eyes.  I'm sleeping properly (except for Thursday night when I was like a kid at Christmas and couldn't wait to wake up and start the next day).  I have been bouncing all over the place and decided to write this blog and over-share just in case you hadn't noticed.

Missing you

I miss my blog. I wish I could trust myself to write.

French is a tricky language

Being a teacher is hard. Every minute of every day you have to keep thirty people happy. Thirty people who are a group that you are not part of. The psychology of group behaviour tells us that this is a dangerous position to be in and worse if they perceive you as different. If the group aren’t happy they can turn on you. My first form teacher at senior school was a young French teacher. My form, as a group, decided that they didn’t like her. It was instant and those who hadn’t made up their minds had no choice but to go along with it. There were times when my form made her cry and no matter how uncomfortable I might have felt about it, I did nothing. I hope I didn’t join in but I know there were people in the class who did, despite not liking what they were doing. One day, the class locked her in the cupboard. I sat, horrified, whispering to the girl next to me, “This is horrible!” but we didn’t help her . In my imaginings, I stand up and let her out, or wait til the class has gone and make sure she is alright but I’m fairly certain I did none of this.

Being the leader of a group of thirty can also be dangerous if they are on your side. You can get them to do anything and throughout history I’m sure there have been teachers with psychopathic leanings who took advantage of their position. Luckily, I have no stories like this.

I’ve often wondered what happened about the teacher in the cupboard incident. Did she ever tell anyone? Were the ring leaders ever spoken to? Did they tell their parents? Did I tell mine? I have no idea. I’m sure my parents would have been horrified and I’d like to think that the parents of the jeering, clapping, laughing crowd would have been too but I’m not sure.

Parents don’t always back the teacher. Sometimes, when a child goes home and says they don’t like French, the parent will see the teacher and complain that their child shouldn’t be made to speak that disgusting spitty language, full of oui oui and poo poo.

Teaching is hard anyway but can you imagine doing it in a foreign language? Our school is lucky enough to have a lovely native French speaker to teach the language. I feel very protective of her, probably thinking about my first form teacher and have tried not to laugh when the children tell me that she swears in lessons. Don’t panic! She doesn’t actually swear but when she says,”Shhh” she closes it with a ‘t’ sound. This is probably how it’s done in France. It’s a minefield.

Before we went into a lesson she said, “Julia?”

I love the way she says my name, all singsongy with a soft j at the front.

“When you go swimming how many lines are they?”

We had a conversation about how busy it is at the pool, the best times to go and other pools that are quieter.

“It’s no good,” she finally said, “You see I can’t stand the promiscuity,” and walked off to teach her class.

I stood for a while, scratching my head until I finally decided that she had just mis-pronounced proximity.

Because I feel protective, I thought I’d mention it. I didn’t want her going to reception and demanding non promiscuous swimming. 

“But you have the word in English?” she said. “What does it mean?”

I told her and she was horrified. I asked her what it means in French.

“It’s just, you know, where you have too many people."
"It's probably just a little more specific in English," I told her.

I'm so glad the only French I have to worry about is the names of composers, although this has proved tricky this week. "What is EDF PDF?" one pupil asked.  I think she meant Edith Piaf.

Rewind

I've just re-read and deleted my last two blogs.

They just didn't sound like me.  It sounded like I don't like my job, that I don't work with wonderful people who care (even if they don't always know what to say), that the Long Suffering Husband is forcing me to learn Japanese and not listening to my wishes to not have adventures. None of that is true.

I used to be someone who loved my life and I want it to be like that again.  I used to be someone who laughed at everything and that's what I want.  I want the small regular life I had. 

I might not write again for a little while.

Poems

Yesterday, I posted a photo of a poem on Facebook. My grief hung out like freshly laundered underwear.  There for everyone to see but hoping that no one really looks.

I wasn't hoping for sympathy I just wanted to share a brilliant poem that had made me feel.

After my dad died last year I wrote what I hoped were mildly amusing blogs about grief.  This time has been different. I could only write about birds.  My brain broke. I fought elephants in my sleep and I couldn't even begin the process of grieving; being normally sad that my mum had died.  I told my GP everything that had happened and she told me that it would take at least 9 months if not 2 years.  She didn't say what.  Gestation times, maybe? Humans and elephants. But I had some therapy that I can't recommend enough (will blog about it separately) and now I feel sad. 

It's alright though because it's normal sadness.  It's what you are meant to feel after someone you loved has died.  It's normal.  People die and people you love leave a hole in your heart once they have gone. 

Social media is often full of people's grief.  They post photos and memes which sometimes makes me feel uncomfortable and I worry that grief that is managed quietly is somehow less. 

Maybe I posted the poem picture because it was time to be less quiet.  Time to show that I cared. 

Or maybe I posted it because poems are brilliant.  They speak directly to your heart.  Distilled down to just the most important words, with meaning in the gaps they say everything they need to.  I wish I could say more in the gaps.

I had to buy the book because I picked it up in Waterstones and read the poem about being cast adrift amongst the furniture with no one to tell you off and I cried.   Wendy Cope is a poet that always seems to speak to me in a way that makes me wonder if she is following my life.  The first poem in her Anecdotal Evidence collection explained my need to be with birds.

Evidence

Centuries of English verse

Suggest the selfsame thing:

A negative response is rare

When birds are heard to sing.

What's the use of poetry?

You ask, Well, here's a start:

It's anecdotal evidence.

About the human heart.

The birdsong is healing, the poems are healing. And wait until I tell you about the voodoo magic that is EMDR.

Godwit

Godwit day. 

I'm not a bird expert.  I'm not an anything expert but birds are still following me around.  They are everywhere, judging me and making comments on my life. So, when faced with a large group of long legged, long billed wading birds I wasn't quite sure what they were.  Wading birds near us need long legs and long bills, so that they don't disappear completely into the mud and they can get the insects from the bottom. They could have been sandpipers or snipes but they had a red/brown body and black  and white stripey tail and wings.  Usually, they hang about in big groups but there is always one that is shunned by the crowd, going it alone, preferring it's own company, not joining in the general seaside chatter.  I was watching the lone bird, wondering why he chose to be on his own.

If you walk along the sea wall you can see these birds by the lakes at dusk.  They gather and shout at passing humans. The humans, in turn, try to photograph them.  Some humans have flash equipment: tripods, long lenses and light meters and stand still or sit in hides being quiet and thoughtful.  I keep walking, as I take photos on my automatic setting, chatting to the people who are taking it seriously.

"What are they?" I asked the young besandaled woman with knotty hair standing by her tripod.
"Oh, they're just godwits," she said, "but on the bank up there is a heron."
I looked through my camera and zoomed in, confessing that I probably wouldn't be able to see it.
The Long Suffering Husband laughed loud enough to frighten a few gulls into flight and said he thought I had lens envy.
The young woman looked very serious and said, "It's not all about size though is it?"
It was then I saw that she was with a man.  I could only see his camouflage trousers and that in his hand he had an enormous camera lens as the rest of him was obscured by her and the camera.
"Oh, I don't know, it helps."I looked up and walked on, catching the man with a full on wink.

It was only then that I realised that I knew him.  He was the ex-husband of a friend and he looked as if to say, "What has she been saying about me?"
The godwits changed from their general seaside noise to a very clear, "You're a twit. We are godwits but you're a twit."

It's been a while - crack on

It's been a while since I wrote a blog. 

Sometimes my mind gets a bit clogged up with things that would be funny to write about but because I don't blog straight away it feels too late.  I was enjoying my bird a day theme but we've missed curlew, marsh harrier, sparrow and wren, which all came after 'Tern day' which was the day I thought I started to feel a bit more normal (whatever that is) and began to speak to  real living people again.

We went to Aldeburgh for a few days away.  This is where all the posh people live, or have holiday homes.  I have a natural aversion to a plummy accent and the sense of entitlement that goes with it.  

The teenagers in Suffolk are particularly funny and are probably the basis for Mitchell and Webb's Pilots.  

We first realised that we had stepped into the linguistic upper class when a shop keeper said, "Would one's dog like to come in?"  The Long Suffering Husband thought that only the Queen used 'one' as a pronoun now.  

The next morning at 6am, we were walking along the beachfront towards Thorpeness.  Once we got past the area where the signs told us dogs were not allowed we moved to the water's edge.  After a while we saw an old couple, who were just preparing for their early morning swim.  The woman was furious.  

"One is not allowed on this bit of the beach with one's dog," she shouted. "One should be able to read the signs."

We were confused, as there had been no signs that we could see, although once we got back on the promenade we could see that she was right and one vowed to read all the signs from then on.

Here are some of the signs we saw.

Widdling is an underused word, I have no idea what a barking gate is, I agree with the sign about parents, and I can't help think the large crack down the town steps makes a mockery of the impervious paving.

The last sign was fascinating.

"Do you think swifts can read?" I asked the LSH.

"I doubt it," he said "but the signs are always where there are swift boxes." He pointed to one on the eaves of the roof above the sign.

"Do you think they pay rent?" I asked.

"Hummm," he thought for just long enough to make me think he wasn't listening. "Maybe not but they certainly leave a deposit!"

Pied Wagtail Day

In the good old days the sun shined all day, children played on railway tracks, parents told their kids to count the traffic or to catch butterflies and stick pins through their wings, sweets cost 1d for five, and there were pied wagtails everywhere. This weather is reminding me of my childhood.  Obviously, it never rained in my memory until I became a mooning teenager, writing names of boys I fancied, who would never look at me twice in the condensation on my bedroom window, so my memories of being a child are filled with long hot sunny days, roaming the streets until my friend had to be home for tea at five. We would hang around the park or go for long cycle rides in the countryside or just set up some chairs and canes to compete in our own version of Horse of the Year Show in the garden.  In 1976, which this year reminds me most of, my dad made a sprinkler with a hosepipe and an old Quality Street tin that he had put holes in.  We weren't allowed to use it until after 5pm, when the water inspectors had gone home but then the neighbours would join us and children and adults would run through the spray, squealing with delight.  

Describing this idyll could easily fool you into thinking that things were so much better then. I'm always wary of falling into that trap but there were pied wagtails everywhere and you hardly see any now.  I always liked this bird.  It seemed childlike, full of fun, bobbing it's head and tail up and down as it bounced around the garden, collecting insects.

I was reminded of these birds because I saw two.  I was walking up to the High Street (to buy more bird food) and there was one on a garden fence, giving chirrup-y instructions to his mate on the ground.  "That's it.  Pick it up.  Soooo pretty.  Nice in our nest."  I looked at the other bird who was struggling to pick something up from the ground.

"NO!" I shouted, waving my arms and scaring the birds away.  "Maybe that's why we don't see them any more," I thought.

When I got home I told the Long Suffering Husband. "Hmmm," he said, making me think he wasn't really listening.  

"What I don't understand is if they can put them out, why can't they bring them back in," he said in his most judgy voice, simultaneously failing to sweep away the crumbs from the bread he had just cut.

"People don't realise," I told him. "I bet most of them shared the David Attenborough thing about plastic in the sea on Facebook.  They'd be mortified if they knew."

"Hmmm," he replied, scanning through the Sky listings.

So, a week after Cabbie Day I made it my mission to collect what remained of the brightly coloured pieces of rubber.  There were a few whole balloons still attached to lamp posts but most were in pieces on the floor.  If it had rained they would have washed down the drain and into the belly of some poor unsuspecting turtle.  

Balloons collected after Cabbie Day (£1 for scale)

If I were a pied wagtail, full of childish bounce, I'd probably think it looked like a good nest too.

Starling Day

Today is Starling day.

Starlings are noisy and can never agree whose turn it is to go on the bird feeder.  They square up to each other and squawk, "Come on then, if you think you're hard enough." They are all on the same side and would see off a pigeon in seconds but they just can't help squabbling among themselves.

It was a noisy day to try and sit in the garden reading a book. There was a children's party, that sounded like a thousand kids in a swimming pool, in one neighbour's garden.  The smell of lighter fuel and burning sausages mixed with the foamy beer smell that followed the click and pop of a can being opened, gave away that people were watching football and the starlings were shouting.

I know that people enjoy and get (over)excited about football.  They say things like, "We nearly had that," and blame the professional footballers for missing shots that they would me able to make with their eyes closed.  They count their eggs before they've hatched.  "It's coming home."  It becomes personal.  In fact, there seem to be an awful lot of starlings around.  

The TV commentators, apparently think that people who choose to read a book instead of watching need to get a life.  That makes me uncomfortable because I'm sure you can read a book and like football and I'm sure you can have a life and not like football.  You can also be patriotic and not like football.

Personally, I probably do need to get a life.  I'm not sure that running away from tigers, fighting elephants and watching birds counts but even if I wanted to I couldn't watch football at the moment.  It's just too noisy.  Unfortunately, my brand of bonkers comes with a noise limit.  This proved to be a small problem, as I could hear the game in glorious octophonic sound, with the accompanying shouting. 

I thought England had lost.  There were two shouts of delight and four angry groans.  The bird feeder was swamped and someone shouted, "Starling, you're a f***in' w***er!"  I had to agree but the starlings couldn't decide which one of them they were talking about.

Angry Robin

My GP suggested I try writing stuff down.
"I'm writing about birds," I told her, "But that's quite common isn't it?"
She looked at me quizzically and decided, instead, to tell me about how hard talking about death is for doctors.

What she may not know is that all throughout history there has been a link with birds and bereavement.  People who are bereaved suddenly notice birds where none had been before and somehow recognise their departed loved ones in them. 

In a fascinating but alarmingly racist, book Ernest Ingersoll (1932 Birds in legend, fable and folklore) describes incidences where people link birds to death in some way from every country and culture in the world. (It is comforting when you find out you are not mad but just tapping into universal ancient wisdom).

Birds are often seen as omens or harbingers of death but also bringers of wisdom.  We often say, "a little bird told me."
Izzy Judd, wrote, in her memoir about her IVF treatment and the loss of a baby, "We found a pigeon had flown into the window of our conservatory and died.  By the strangest coincidence I'd seen exactly the same thing.......on the day my mother's sister died." Birds flying into the house or down a chimney are seen as a sign of death in almost every culture in the world.

Birds are thought to act as psychopomps (don't you just love that word?) , carrying the spirit of a dead person to the next life or to heaven.  The Romans would release an eagle at the death of an Emperor to carry his soul to heaven and in Japan and China Cranes are believed to carry the souls of those who have achieved mortality to heaven.  (Odd that in our culture storks bring them back).  There are also universal tales of the spirit of a dead loved one arriving in a bird to impart an important message.

I have been wondering why this should be.  What is it about birds that makes us link them to death? Christopher Moreman in his paper 'Relationship between birds and spirits' (2014) argues that "birds embody the quintessential archetype for the transcendence of fear of death and it's resulting selfishness." "A quinti-what? you say." This is why Christopher is an academic and I write blogs.  He defines an archetype as something that is shared by all humans, like the ability to make music,  use language and smile. (I was taught archetypes were developed by Jung to explain his idea of twelve personality types and the collective unconscious but maybe I wasn't listening properly)  He is arguing that all humans fear death and that we have a shared affinity to birds when confronted with it, which stops us "falling into a void of despair at one's impending extinction."

Whilst I agree that we don't like to talk about or think about death, I'm not sure it is always about facing one's own mortality.  My current madness is not, in any way, linked to a thought that I may die even if it does all stem from a lack of communication around death.

I think that bereavement leaves you in a state where you are stuck in your head and that walking, gardening, breathing and looking at nature helps to ground you.  Obviously that doesn't necessarily explain birds but there are an awful lot of them around that we don't normally notice. 

But.....

What if.....

What if it isn't some weird construct developed by all humans to help them cope with dying and bereavement?  What if it's all true?

We can't talk about death because we don't know and we never will.  Nobody will ever develop a mathematical formula to give the definitive answer to the question, "What happens after we die?"  By the time there is any definitive proof, or otherwise, of something next we won't be able to tell anyone.

I was listening to the radio this morning, as they were discussing near death experiences and saying how there is a universal description of a passage or tunnel with light at the end, through which they are guided by other spirits, often loved ones.  There is also an acceptance that once they cross the boarder they can never return to their body.  I thought that if spirits can get into the tunnel to guide the dying then maybe they could get into birds to guide the living through death.

If they can then my Dad chose a robin. 

A few days before Mum died, when my sister and I were out of our depth, alone and frightened she walked the dog down the lane asking for a sign.  A noisy robin appeared on the fence and followed her home.  He popped into the garden at regular intervals, refusing meal worms in favour of lemon drizzle cake.  It was almost as though he was saying, "It's alright.  I'm here."  On Sunday, a bird, that looked like the same robin visited my garden.  He sat on the fence, shouting.  That robin was furious.  All evening he kept up.  We searched the garden in vain for cats and laughed, wondering what could be making him so cross. Then my sister sent me a photo of a baby bird in a shoe box.

If you are ever looking for suggestions of something to give to a person who is grieving after nursing their loved one through a complicated death then probably a very sick baby bird would not be the best choice. That person would do their best.  Amazing carers always do.  They would give it a bath and pick over twenty huge mites off it, grind up meal worms in the coffee grinder, feed it water through a pipette, sit up with it all night, cut a bra in half for it to sleep in, google the best way to care for it and all of those things will feel familiar, along with the impending sense of doom that nothing they do will keep this little bird alive.

The robin was still on my fence, shouting.  I listened more carefully.
"I've always hated that woman," he chirruped.
"I know," I told him, "but I never did understand why before."

The baby swift was taken to a wildlife hospital and the robin has gone back to his own garden, singing sweetly, maintaining a watchful presence and hoping for lemon drizzle cake.

Pigeons, Doves, Bobs and other annoying birds.

On Thursday, it was a Jay day.
"Did you see that bird?" I said to the over-excited estate agent, who walked into my mum's garden with his clipboard. "I think it was a Jay."
"It's a beautiful garden," he gushed.
"Yes, yes but did you see the bird?" I asked. "I don't think it was a normal magpie. There was a flash of blue. It might have been a Jay. They are quite shy birds, often stay in the woodlands.  It's probably quite special to have a Jay in the garden.  I'm sure there's something about ancestral wisdom with Jays."
Sighing, the agent realised that he would have to talk about birds to have any kind of meaningful conversation with the mad woman he had just made cry.
"The problem with feeding birds," he said, "is the pigeons. I hate pigeons, they're really annoying."
I thought that they weren't the only ones but I said nothing.
Jay days are difficult and a bit elephanty and so I'm going to write about pigeons instead.

Every day is pigeon day. The agent was right.  If you feed the birds you get the pigeons and they sit on the fence, pooping on your nice sun loungers, bobbing their heads to impress the females, having noisy, flappy sex if their bobbing has done the trick, and annoying the dog.

We don't get the Rock/Feral Pigeons that you see in London, spying on the world from their strategic positions on top of the statues and buildings. Our pigeons don't have the two-tone green and purple breast that looks like an oil slick around Southend pier on a sunny day. We don't hear the burbling coo of secrets passing between them. Oh no.  Our pigeons are noisy. 

The Long Suffering Husband has been woken by the birds at 3.30 for the last few mornings and he's had enough. It would be alright, he thinks, if it was just the little birds. Twittering tits and squabbling starlings he could cope with but the pigeons take the biscuit.  Actually, they don't just take the biscuit they take the whole packet.

I wanted to know what type bothered him the most but he was confused. He just thought there was one type of pigeon.  I explained how we didn't get the London Pigeons but how we had two other types of pigeon birds and they sounded different.

The wood pigeon is the fatter of the two, is dark grey with a white ring around it's neck and possibly a little green tinge on it's breast.  It has an orange beak and more beady eyes. It's coo is softer.

The Collared Dove is a light grey, slim line variety, with blacker eyes, a thin black collar and, surprisingly, a football hooligan voice.

"So, did it say, 'Who is Bob Austin?'  or did it shout, 'Who are you? Bob Austin?'" I asked the LSH.
He just laughed.
"It's how you tell the difference," I said.
"Yes, but who is Bob Austin?" the LSH wanted to know.

It was my Dad that told me the difference between the two bird calls and he would often do this odd thing of wandering around the house randomly saying, "BobAustin," when I was small.  I think he just liked the way the sound of it bounced out of his mouth.

"He was the bus conductor," I replied and then told the LSH about how, when my parents were first married and dirt poor, Dad had often run out of money on a Thursday before he was paid and how a nice bus conductor used to let him on, knowing that Dad would pay double the next day. 

"You made that up," accused the LSH.
"Did I?" I winked. 

Today is Swan Day

Some days, it's difficult to get out of bed.  That's not strictly true.  Some days it's difficult to stay out of bed.  The temptation to go back and pull a sheet over your head, read a book, play an online game, or just think random thoughts is too much.

"Are you working today?" I sent a text to a friend.  If I arranged to meet her there would be a reason to get out and stay out.  I had promised myself that I would clean the patio and ring the National Trust about the cheque they had sent in my Dad's name but neither of those things felt like a good enough reason to stay out of bed.

We met and then I walked. Walking and breathing are wonderful things. Never quite sure what route I'm going to take, or how long it might take me to get home is very freeing.  It's nice to feel like nothing matters.  The sky is blue, the ground is under your feet, there are no elephants to battle and there are birds everywhere. 

I walked along the canal, noticing today's terrible golfers when I saw something ahead of me on the path.  It looked like a big pillow.  I kept walking and as I got closer I could see it was a swan.  A swan on the path. Now, a swan isn't a tiger and so there is no need to run away but I did feel my breathing quicken.  The little voice in my head said, "Swans are bolshy. It could break your arm."
I breathed.  Have I mentioned that breathing is good? I got close and the swan plucked a feather from behind its wing and chucked it at me.

"Excuse me," I said, "What did you do that for?"
"Well, you know, white feathers, angels, good luck and stuff."
"Don't be silly," I said, "You know I don't believe in all that and it's clearly not an angel's feather because I saw you pull it out of your back."
The swan pouted.  Yes, I know! I didn't know swans could pout either.
"Today is swan day, today is swan day, today is swan day, everybody's happy, well I should say," sang the swan.
"Really?" I asked, "I was hoping it was going to be something more exotic."
"More exotic that a swan?" the swan said, incredulous at the idea.
"I was hoping for a kingfisher," I told her.
She laughed.  "You'll never see a kingfisher, you can't sit still for long enough."
She had a point.
"Maybe down by the falls but I think you'll find it's swan day down there too."
I was disappointed. I didn't want it to be swan day.
"What does swan day even mean?" I asked.
"Well, you know what they say about swans don't you?"
"Break your arm as soon as look at you?" I replied
"No, not that," she said. "But I might if you don't think about it." She winked.
I shrugged.  There are loads of myths about swans.  There's the one about the eight sisters, the idea that they are shape shifters between human and swan form being common. They represent love and fidelity, mating for life and are a symbol of light.  The ancient Greeks thought the swan represented the muses.
"I'm not going to have to write poetry, am I?" I asked, thinking of the Greeks.
"Don't make me laugh," the swan honked, "You are terrible at rhyming. You're not going to get it are you?"
I confessed that I didn't think I was.
"You know, how we look all calm on top but underneath we're paddling like f..."
"Hey," I interrupted "Careful! I've been told off for swearing in the blog before.  People don't like it."
The swan stretched her neck, re-positioned it into a question mark and fixed me with a look of contempt that shot straight down her bill.
"paddling like fury underneath."
"Oh yes, I know that one."
"Well, it's a myth. We have big fat feet and we push and glide.  We don't go very far and we are just as laid back as we look.  You should try it."
"You mean you're not working hard all the time?"
"Of course not," she snapped, "You humans, always looking for an excuse to be busy. If you want to be a swan you need to glide and take a break."
I started to walk away, wondering if I might see a kingfisher by the falls.
"There once was an ugly duckling...." the swan sang.
I looked on the canal and saw her five babies.
"They're not ugly," I shouted back, "taking a break then are you?"
"Be more swan," she shouted in reply.

She was right, it was swan day by the falls too. Not a kingfisher in sight.  Just swans gliding and paddling up the slope, sucking tasty morsels out of the weed. I sat by the canal and thought what it might be like to be more swan but my legs were too restless to keep it up for long. Just as I was getting up the swan flew over the top of me.
"Ha! Knew it!" she called, "Far too human to be swan."

Barcelona Birds

It was my fault.

It's always my fault.

"I can't talk to anyone," I sobbed at the Long Suffering Husband, "I just want to run away."

The LSH is a very nice man, although, at times, rather literal and that is how I found myself on the way  to Barcelona for a long weekend.  If you are going to run, it might as well be to somewhere nice and sunny and if you can't talk to anyone, you might as well go to a country that speaks a language where you only know one word.* Spanish has always been a mystery to me and I'll never work out the phonics of the letter c.

There were challenges.  Travelling when you are anxious is tricky, as are crowds, noise and bizarrely, churches. However, as walking, while looking at my feet or the sky and noticing bird have been my saviours, my view of Barcelona was unique.

I can't tell you about the Segrada Familia (except that there are doves and a bassoonist carved on the outside), the cathedral, the beach or any of the bars but I if you want to know about the trees, pavements and birds of the Catalan capital then I'm your woman.

The birds were the first thing I noticed.  They sounded different. Noisier, faster in their chatter than British birds.  They were somewhere hidden in the trees lining the streets.  Trees that burst with loud colours. No muted pink and white blossom of English trees.  The trees in Barcelona were proud and loud. Bright orange flowers of the Tipu tree, with it's pea-like leaves competed with the regal purple of the Jacarandas.  The flowers fell and covered the pavement stone carved with child-like flowers.

There were the usual sparrows (but bigger and noisier) and pigeons (there are pigeons everywhere) but there were also Swallows  and the larger paler Alpine Swifts diving, gliding and swooping, even in the heat of the midday sun, shouting for everyone to admire their acrobatic feats.

"One swallow doesn't make a summer," I muttered.
The LSH thought that Summer wasn't in doubt.  "Swifts flying high, weather staying dry." I replied.
He seemed relieved, as we do normally get rain when we go away.
They were making a lot of noise.
"It can't all be coming from the swallows," I said to explain why I kept stopping and looking up at the trees. "All that noise."

Then we saw them.  Bright green, chattering parakeets, with white faces.  Once you have seen them they are everywhere and the longer you are in Barcelona the less bothered by you they are. It's a good job we were only there for a long weekend, or I would have had a Monk Parakeet riding on my shoulder, learning English. These birds are thriving.  The descendants of escaped pets from the 1970s there are now over 10,000 of them.
"Look, there's a falcon!" The LSH had spotted a Peregrine hovering, hoping for a small bright green bird for tea. The authorities had introduced them to keep the numbers of parakeets down.  I'm not sure it's working and I'm glad.  I became quite fond of those bright green birds. Much better than pigeons.  In a flock of pigeons, you should always choose to be a parakeet.

At Park Guell, (where Gaudi lived and played) even the pigeons are decorated.

"Is there anything you want to see?" The LSH thrust the guidebook at me, hoping I might want to follow the tourist trail.
"There is a statue called woman and bird, I think we should see that."

We looked at it from several angles.

"Is it me, or does that look like a penis?" I asked.

The LSH agreed that he couldn't see a woman or a bird.

Here are the rest of my holiday snaps.

*The only Spanish word I know is sacapuntas, which means pencil sharpener (not pencil case, as my daughter told me.)  It is a word I kept hearing while the LSH was watching football. Spanish people apparently shout "pencil sharpener!" when they get excited.

(Who said, my one word wouldn't come in handy?)