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.