The Importance Of Being Idle

It’s M.E Awareness Week, and one group of sufferers is organising a march to highlight their campaign for more research into the illness. While I support the cause, I can’t help but think they’ve failed to fully consider the implications of their chosen fundraising method. With a strategy straight off’ve The Apprentice, they’re urging sufferers of M.E/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to join their mini-marathon, to draw attention to the difficulties faced by people who are often so tired their mobility is restricted. Next week I hear they’re helping out with the sponsored Archery at the local School for the Blind…

The Guardian has attempted to do their bit by publishing two articles about M.E/CFS. The first flits between being so incomprehensibly scientific that the majority of their readership wouldn’t bother to look past the first paragraph, to denouncing M.E campaigners as radical nutcases. There’s very little worthwhile information in the article, which basically tells people that an American charitable trust believes M.E/CFS is caused by a retrovirus, but that independent and governmental scientists have failed to replicate their findings. It’s amazing just how much they managed to write about the fact that they’re still none the wiser – but following the assisted suicide of Lynn Gilderdale by her mother Kay, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is still a hot-topic.

During the trial and the accompanying peak in media-interest, I was infuriated by the ignorant and incredibly biased coverage, which presented it as a terminal illness, or disease with no hope or potential for management. This is, of course, ridiculous. I’m a living testament to the fact that it is entirely possible to be certifiably-knackered and yet still make enough of a nuisance of myself in the world for my life to have some meaning. Lynn Gilderdale’s case was extreme, but her desire to end her life stemmed from a terrible depression, which was influenced by – not the sole result of – her M.E. Since her tragic case (extremely rare in terms of severity) hit the news earlier this year, I had yet to hear a medical or media professional make any of those points clear. In the first of the guardian articles “The Trouble With ME”, amidst the irrelevant information and radical opinion, one consultant does offer some sensible thoughts:

“Alastair Santhouse, consultant in psychological medicine at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, was deeply concerned by much of the press coverage, which depicted ME/CFS as a terminal illness and wrote to say so in the British Medical Journal. "It was being talked about in terms of the euthanasia/assisted suicide debate," he said. "It is an awful illness – chronic, unpleasant and very isolating – but it is not a terminal illness. There are treatments available and they are not perfect but we as a profession should not be giving up on people.”

The second of their articles is billed as a “first person account of living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” but is misleading for its brevity, though with the best of intentions.

The truth about life with M.E/CFS is a little more balanced – which of course is often far too dull for the British media! Yes, there are dramatic lows, which would probably elicit a couple of hundred pounds from Take A Break magazine if every desolate detail were exploited in full. It just wouldn’t be a very fair picture of life with M.E/CFS, which is the thing sadly lacking from the illnesses recent surge in popularity.

I began having clear problems with fatigue ten years ago when I was just 14, and failed to recover as expected from the serious illness which had blighted the previous two years of my life. No one could understand why I wasn’t showing signs of improvement when I should have been, and it became clear that the fatigue wasn’t simply a symptom of medical-malaise, but was a distinct issue in-and-of itself. M.E/CFS is more than just fatigue, it is a collection of rather nondescript symptoms which vary from person to person, but are very much centred around being incredibly tired.

The fatigue is a soul-crushing exhaustion, the like of which I have never experienced as the result of a long, hard day. It isn’t the sort of tiredness you get after a terrible day at work, or even after an extra-tough slog in the gym. It’s a mental and physical weariness more akin to the debilitating weakness you feel when you have a really bad case of the flu, or the worst hangover you can imagine – only without any of the fun the night before! The fatigue is complicated by severe aches and pains, which make muscles tremble and bones feel like they burn alternately with fire and ice. Also headaches, confusion, inability to concentrate, nausea, sensitivity to light, dizziness, lack of apatite, poor memory, and a raft of other issues mean that to some extent every day has to be negotiated through that fluey-fog. What marks out a good day is the ability to do normal things in spite of it, because it fades enough to be manageable after a few hours of being awake. On a very bad day, it doesn’t fade at all. Next time you wake up on a cold day, feeling rough, and you are so desperate to go back to sleep that – for a few seconds – you honestly can’t envision how you will drag yourself out of bed, imagine what it would feel like if that desperation lingered all day. If there was no way to shake it off with a shower, or a bit of willpower. How would your life change, if that overwhelming need for slumber was the overriding feeling for more than a few minutes, and you couldn’t muster the physical or mental energy to move yourself out of bed even if it were on fire around you?

That’s what most M.E/CFS sufferers have to contend with every day, some for a few minutes, and some for weeks or months at a time. I consider myself lucky that, in general, only the first hour or two of every day is like that for me. On a bad day when it doesn’t recede, I’ve known it take half an hour before I can force myself out of bed – which might not sound like much, but trust me, it’s really annoying on a day when you wake up needing a wee!

All that, when viewed on its own, quite obviously makes life incredibly difficult, but that’s not the whole story. Yes, it certainly makes even the most mundane day-to-day living more of a challenge, but does not make everything impossible. People are adaptable creatures, it’s what has helped us colonise the planet and remain at the top of the food chain for millennia; growing and expanding as we develop new skills and behaviours. Such is life for someone with M.E. For every symptom that creates issues, there’s a creative solution being implemented by somebody. Plenty of people manage a variety of incapacities without allowing their lives to grind to an agonizing halt. Amputees use wheelchairs or prosthetic limbs, ugly people get jobs on the nightshift, and those with M.E/CFS find ways to work around their constant fatigue. Tiredness this severe is a disability, but not a hopeless one. Admittedly, at its worst there is nothing to be done but surrender to it and rest – but at other times a moderate approach allows for far more normality than many people would envisage. Many sufferers have families, many others manage to hold down jobs - they just do it all with that fluey-fog lingering overhead, finding ways to get around the difficulties they face when their illness clashes with their aspirations or responsibilities.

The best explanation for the energy-compromise we all make is “The Spoon Theory” – written in the early part of the century by Lupus sufferer Christine Miserandino. (It can be read online here, and I really, really recommend it.) The condition she has is different, but the management is the same. People with M.E/CFS have a limited number of units of energy per day, and even the smallest tasks cost units. Getting out of bed? 1 unit. Showering? Another unit. Getting dressed, hair and makeup, making breakfast, eating breakfast, watching morning telly… All individual units expended before you’ve even left the house in the morning. Once you’ve used up your full reserve of energy, that’s it. You’re exhausted and couldn’t do anything else even if you had the mental energy to want to - which, if you’ve run out of units, you simply don’t. Most people begin each day without knowing exactly what they’re going to do, open to the possibility of spontaneous ideas or activities. Those with M.E/CFS don’t have that luxury, or at least not without having to trade off on the other things we might have planned to do.

I manage my fatigue by working from home, having a laptop not a PC, being incredibly anti-social when going through a bad patch, and taking to my bed to rest whenever possible like a spoilt Victorian aristocrat. I know that if I have a busy day ahead, I have to rest up the day before, and write off the day after, in much the same way others would prepare for a marathon drinking session to celebrate a birthday. You know you’ll pay for it after, but that’s a compromise you decide you’re willing to make.

All of that adds to the complexities we are all faced with when going about our lives, but it certainly doesn’t mean life is in any way “over”. Unfortunate as it is that there are people like Lynn Gilderdale who never find a way to live with their symptoms, they are in the minority, and the message that it is possible to have a life and a disability is one that needs better representation in contemporary media. Until we understand the causes of M.E/CFS, the least we should do is report a balanced take on the consequences faced by the people living with it.

Now I’m off to lie down, because I used up a unit writing this blog post, and have to have a rest before I can get my lazy backside downstairs to make the cup of tea I am yearning for. (Yes, this was as much of an endurance-test to write as it was to read). On second thoughts, as you'll be needing tea of your own, you can make mine too. Go on! It’s M.E Week! I’m the centre of attention here. Me, Me, Me, Me, Me.

Painting By Numbers

In an overdue bid to mark World Poetry Day (celebrated on the 21st March) here's the press-shot from the Valentine's Big Screen shenanigans outlined in my previous entry. (I'm the pallid looking creature in the pink scarf, and this photo illustrates both my dislike of daylight illumination against my blueish-white Twilight-tan, and the face that my face always freezes into the least flattering grimace whenever there is a camera present.)



As you can see it was rather a motley crew of local women participating in the event, though I think that had more to do with the format (love poems) and the fact that it was the middle of the working day on a Tuesday afternoon. While I'd like to say that only the creme-de-la-creme were selected for press participation as part of some elaborate marketing strategy championing fiery-female literature, it's more likely that schoolgirls, retirees, pensioners, council workers from the offices neighbouring the square, and my unemployable self were the only ones available at such short notice.

The poem that was originally adapted into an animated image for the Big Screen event was a crown cinquain titled By The Light. I've always struggled to write on demand - and have even more difficulty practising any economy with words when it comes to any of my writing; be it a hastily scribbled post-it alerting passers-by of the fridge to an unexpected deficit of cat food, a blog post, or an article for a magazine. Abusing my allocated word count and my readers' patience has been a stumbling block since the days of school-essays, and cinquains force me to write outside of that familiar, comfortable style.

A cinquain is a five-line poem with a very strict syllable count; two syllables in line 1, four in line 2, six in line 3, eight in line 4, and two again in line 5. A butterfly cinquain (another favourite in this style) repeats that pattern, but inverted. A crown cinquain such as the one featured here repeats the 2,4,6,8,2 structure five times.

Those very strict parameters are the reason I find it both a challenge and a joy to write cinquains. These poems require endless editing and sculpting to fit within the constraints of the style - constantly snipping down my preferred verbose similes and wildly meandering metaphors until all that remains is enough skeleton imagery and emotion for the readers own imagination to flesh out. This is always an incredibly daunting task for a writer who seeks solace in literary loquaciousness, but is equally thrilling for my inner logophile, and is an excuse to crack open my mental thesaurus. (That sounds like I keep a disturbed dinosaur around to help me find alternative words, which though not my current editing method, does sound like more fun than that irritating paperclip who lurked around Microsoft Word on all the computers at school.) There is also something charming about the purity and simplicity of cinquains that appeals to me. Without having to worry about making sense of any self-imposed rambling structure, I find myself free to really focus on the imagery at hand, while also challenging the importance of every word. It's an entirely different perspective for me, as so much of my work relies on the swirling rhythm of the overall piece, with far less emphasis on many of the words used to create it. My usual manner of poetry is literary pointillism - becoming clearer as the details blend. Cinquains necessitate an opposite approach, and it is this polarity which first attracted me to the style.

That is all a rather dreadfully technical dissection of this piece's creation, and possibly makes for a terrible introduction to a poem which - while pleasingly elegant - could hardly be described as substantial. Here it is however, presented as was required for a commission last year, with the image that inspired it.


Copywrite K Lawrence 2009

If you've suffered through this much of the blog, your name is automatically entered onto next years' list of proposed recipients for the animal* version of the Victoria Cross, for bravery and endurance beyond the call of duty.

(*Even my influence has its limits.)

Fame and Misfortune

Yesterday I was rather rudely woken by a phone call from the council. Usually this would be reason enough to throw the phone out of the window, refuse to pay my taxes, and chain myself to a local MP until they apologised for all the heinous crimes the government has committed. (Top of the list being the war, I know waking me up would only come a close second.) This time, however, the call turned out to be a rather welcome surprise.

Two weeks ago local poets were asked to contribute love poems to a special Valentines Day exhibition, to be displayed on a big screen in the town centre. I didn't really have anything that I considered to be suitable for a family audience. The first 'romance' poem I ever wrote was about a prostitute at the Moulin Rouge, and the most recent - which was published in an anthology just before Christmas - was described by the first person who read it as making an "almost pornographic" use of metaphor. So, not holding out any hope of it being accepted as 'lovey-dovey enough', I sent in a piece I wrote in the summer of last year. It was inspired by a photo of a couple on a moonlit beach, and indulges itself in detailing the soft, seductive glow of lunar lighting on young lovers. I heard nothing back, and assumed that it had been discarded, because subtle amour hardly ever has a place in commercial Valentines events.

When Craig (or to give him his full title, The Man From The Council) rang me, I was told that the piece would not only be included in the exhibition, but that the Big Screen project is run by the BBC, who had to approve all the entries put forward by the council. It was then that he asked me if I could pop down to the town centre on Friday, because the local newspaper want to run a little Valentines Day feature on the exhibition.

So once again, I have accidentally wound up with a little more than I bargained for!

This is where the poetry will be screened on Sunday 14th February between 12pm and 2pm.



Unfortunately, though a rather rag-tag band of poets turned up to do the interview, the reporter got held up. The photographs were taken, but in the absence of the article I suggested that Mr Council Man Craig get consent from the contributors to have their work printed in the paper. That way the News get their valentines poetry feature, and the council get some publicity for their big screen event. We'll see if it materialises...

The day wasn't a complete waste of time, however, as my Max Clifford coup aside, I also met a couple of people from a local performance poetry group that I'd stumbled across a few days ago. The group meet once a month in a local pub, and mix open-mic poetry readings with live music, which sounds great, and certainly warrants closer investigation at their next event!

I wasn't surprised The News didn't show up for the interview, as they've been busy all day covering the latest step to regenerate the High Street. Today was the launch of a new homewares store on the site of the old Woolworths, which had lain empty since the company went into administration. Now former-Woolworths employees have set up "Alworths" in its place, and my stepbrother - who is now working there - was on hand to help them out with the grand opening!



It's good to know they're equal opportunities employers, isn't it?

It's not only the local news which has been busy of late, as I was also deeply saddened to hear in yesterdays National coverage about the death of a remarkable man; the fashion designer Alexander McQueen. Alexander McQueen was one of the most creative people in fashion, certainly within his generation. His catwalk designs were a spectacle - and whether or not you liked his shows, his talent and imagination was undeniable. He was a really ordinary sort of man; quiet and unassuming until broached about a subject on which he was passionate, and once riled he was well known for being outspoken and reckless. That said, he was never a poseur or a pretentious diva like so many in the fashion industry - or the celebrity circuit as a whole. He was the sort of Londoner you walk past in the street every day, or hang out with in the pub.

Despite his earthy roots, his innovative approach to colour, shape and style within fashion completely redrew the boundaries for catwalk shows, and he created some truly beautiful pieces of "art". Many wonder why the death of a glorified tailor is such big news, but they underestimate Alexander McQueen's impact on British culture and style. With a list of revered celebrity clients, and a reputation for eccentric genius, he may not have made the headlines of every newspaper - but you can bet he's dressed many of the people who did, and his inspiring outfits were often the reason they'd made the news in the first place!

Had his medium been paint and canvas, or film and CGI he would be considered an artist. Just because he created his masterpieces out of fabric and leather, doesn't make the loss of his astonishing imagination and daring eccentricity any less great.

McQueen's life in pictures from The Guardian

Besides, the man made the kind of shoes I'd sell my soul for.



The news also provided me with another 'nanecdote' this week, when the teatime coverage of the woman who killed her lover by poisoning his curry, prompted the following conversation with my much-quoted Nan.

Newsreader: "Mr Cheema, known as 'Lucky' was left blinded and paralysed before he died..."
Nan: "What did they say people called him?"
Me: "His name was 'Lakhvinder'. They said his nickname was 'Lucky'."
Nan: "Why do they call him lucky?! He can't have been that lucky if he was murdered!"
Me: "Well I think they called him lucky before he was murdered. I doubt they've started calling him that since he died."
Nan: "Oh, well, it doesn't really matter. Poor man's dead now. ...I've never much liked the idea of curry, you know."

So there you have it. It's fine to have mental ex-girlfriends who try to poison you when you move on with your life, just steer clear of spicy food, for it will be your downfall.

While I'm scribbling this, I want to wish a very happy birthday to my other elderly friend, Anna, whose youth was finally ripped kicking and screaming from her clutches today.



Not sure what her excuse was before, but now she's hit her 'flirty thirties' Steve Thompson had better sleep with one eye open. ...And shower with the door locked when she's at Burnley's ground. Actually he should probably just have his kit on already under his clothes, and not shower until he gets home. To a place with CCTV. And lots of alarms...

Happy-Slapped by a Gastroenterologist

Welcome to the first blog entry of 2010. I wonder how many blogs this month have begun with variations on that introduction? I'll try to be more original in future - without resorting to the gratingly-zany wackiness of the Rowntrees Randoms advert. If I ever try and begin a banana with a random postman then you have my permission to pour custard on my cherry tomatoes. ...For anyone unfamiliar with the ad in question - who now thinks I'm still hung-over from New Years' - watch this codswallop:



Following a lovely Christmas with the newly-reconfigured family, nasty colds meant that many of us saw in the New Year with bugs that probably warrant their own X-file. I'm not a patient patient, and my cold was always much worse at night than during the day - leading to many a comparison between myself and one of the Gremlins (post midnight-snack.)

Being unwell on holidays really shouldn't be tolerated. In the same way the French protested against wheel clamping by injecting superglue into the lock of every contraption they happened across, Mother Nature should be forced to rethink; as each and any one of us shoves an Olbas inhalator up the nose of every passerby who sniffles within our reach.

My unseasonal malaise began just before Christmas, when I had to attend a routine check-up at the hospital. Due to a family history of Ulcerative Colitis (and a personal one come to that), I'm required to undergo cancer/abnormal-cell screening every couple of years. Now, it's never pleasant, but always necessary - and means letting a strange man get closer to me with a camera than even Paris Hilton would allow...

Honestly, people complain about CCTV, and "living in a Big Brother Orwellian State" but they haven't the faintest idea just how much of a liberty SnappySnaps and Co. actually take. Some things just ought not be captured on film; like any time Les Dennis or Keith Chegwin take their clothes off, or the inside of my remaining digestive tract. Colonoscopies are like clinical happy-slapping: inflicting pain on camera. Gregarious film critic Mark Kermode calls it "torture-porn" when they do so in movies, but I really don't think that what they do to me biannually is for anyone's gratification.

Ever since watching the BBC's season of charming Alan Bennett monologues, I can't help but read these more mundane of my ramblings in his distinctive kitchen-sink-drama voice. I have at least one acquaintance who finds Bennett inexorably dull, which probably lends itself better to the comparison than I have the right to seek in any other respect.

Due to a lack of inspiration - and indeed motivation - to write of late, I've found myself falling back in love with an old flame. What is the object of my re-ignited passion? ...Jewellery design.

Although as a dedicated logophile words will always be my first love, I must admit to several illicit affairs with various aspects of colour, shape and form. From a pre-pubescent love of photography, to an adolescent admiration for design, I have always enjoyed the creative process of weaving something that did not exist until I saw how it should be. All my writing stems from very similar origins, and my enjoyment of literary and fashionable pursuits have long jockeyed for position. Usually the two work reasonably well in tandem. I am flighty, and tire of projects easily, so when I become disillusioned with one outlet for my imagination, I've always been glad of the other to fall back on.

Writing is the one I could not live without - I'm far too opinionated and narcissistic not to have some journalistic outlet - but my eye for colour and unusual shapes means that design is very important to me too. It's a natural part of the way I interact with the world - I see it as an artist, albeit not one of any groundbreaking insight.

Professionally, there is very little opportunity to write at the moment, and apart from my usual poetic outlets, I've been lacking in productivity. Some poets can sit and write about any given subject 'on demand' - will themselves into a mindset where their talent is readily accessible. I, however, have never mastered that skill. While all creation - be it within science or the arts - is a somewhat magical affair, instead of being an alchemic recipe for new life and ideas, mine is far more of a New Age bastardization of Paganism. I don't mix all the ingredients and come up with something astonishing - I must just hang around on the second Tuesday of the full moon wearing red knickers, and wait for a word, or an idea to spark something into being. As the full moon this month was on a Wednesday and my red kecks were in the wash, no sparks flew. So back to jewellery design it is.

As the company I was involved with before have cut so many of its staff, I am not in the position I was previously of being able to design exquisitely expensive pieces and submit them to a workshop for manufacture. For a while at least, I will be back to making the items myself. Hopefully it will give me the chance to expand my silver and goldsmithing abilities, as I get back into manufacture as well as design. Gemmology is a subject I retain a highly-geeky knowledge of, and a return to jewellery design is an exciting prospect.

If and when I launch a few items online, it will be via an Etsy store, and I will announce the details and promotional codes here, so that those of you who suffer my ramblings have some form of compensation for so doing. So watch this space! ...Not literally. It could be a while, and if you just sit there watching then I'll end up being reported to Watchdog as the person responsible for your deaths - like the DJ who challenged his listeners to drink as much water as they could, and one of them died. While inciting such idiots to follow their natural instincts is not a crime I believe to be too heinous, nonetheless it's not the sort of publicity I really need!

So have a Happy New year, and don't have nightmares...

0-800-Reluctant-Samaritan

I've neglected this blog for far too long, and there's no excuse for it really. Since I last plagued you with the contents of my slowly-scrambling brain, my father has married, and I managed not to make a fool of myself as a bridesmaid. Two more books have been printed, and the months since have flown past in a haze.

Before I have reconciled myself the the loss of the last Autumnal warmth, Christmas approaches. It looms less than a week away and I still have yet to do much shopping or write any cards. I'm going to buy a "Happy New Year" stamp and post them as soon as I get around to it. Everyone who lives further than the end of my street will not receive glad tidings until after the main event. Maybe I'll tell them I'm actually sending mine nearly a full year early, instead of being a few days late? Or I might say I've moved to Australia and write "hope this gets to you on time!" inside each card, so that people think I did my utmost to traverse the dense outback with the letters strapped to me, being dragged half the way to the post office by a semi-retired Skippy The Bush Kangaroo. Anything but the lackadaisical truth.

As I have spent the last few months lazily hibernating from the cold, little of consequence has happened in my world. The majority of my energy has gone into battling a chest infection that has seen my lungs look like I am spawning a new generation of Slimers for a Ghostbusters remake. I have continued to write, though not a great deal of it has been of anything resembling commercial quality.

Because I flatter myself that I am one of those onerously pretentious 'creative types' I always keep a notepad beside my bed, to try and jot down any poetry or design ideas I stumble upon in that woozy, otherworldly space between sleeping and waking. The spot where dreams meet reality is often a rich source of nonsense for me, but unfortunately it is seldom constructive. The latest page reads "eat breakfast" because if I have to be up early I will remember to do my makeup, but will forget to eat. Vanity over sustenance. I'm like that laboratory rat which pushes the pleasure button instead of the food one until it starves.

(Okay, at this juncture I googled "mouse makeup" looking for a cartoonish image to post here to break up the monotony of my rambling. Instead I found this photoshopped picture of a computer mouse that doubles as a cosmetic compact. And I want one.)



Occasionally, I will wake up with seemingly-coherent yet utterly-pointless notations scribbled and then signed, as if my egocentric subconscious thinks the notebooks will be discovered some time in the future, and wishes to ensure that my astonishing insights are correctly accredited. I encountered such self-inflicted ridiculousness a few nights ago, when – after washing biro off of my hands and wondering where it had come from – I remembered to check my notepad and found this scrawled there:

When you own a cat, you will – at some point – find yourself sitting on the toilet with the cat watching you from the cistern, promising to buy her a covered litter-tray for the bathroom if she will grant you some privacy in return."

It's things like that which make me glad that Big Brother is ending before I ever got desperate enough to appear on it. I'd get out of the house only to be locked up in somewhere more secure, that was monitored by more cameras...

A Matter of Life and Death

Well it finally happened, yes it finally happened. My sister's elephantine gestation came to an eventful end mid-morning on August 1st 2009, when she gave birth to a little girl called Chloe. I use the term "little" rather loosely, as when the child took her first breaths she was already of a size not dissimilar to that of most domestic cats. (Not our cat though. Even I struggle to match the size and weight of Tuppence.)

It was a particularly laboured labour, or at least felt like it, as my sister had convinced us all that the baby would be early, and by the time she actually arrived none of us were quite sure whether or not to believe it. "Well how much of the baby can you actually see? Because unless the feet are out there's still a chance she might climb back up again!" It is that attitude which saw me accused of not treating the arrival of my niece with due seriousness – but the honour of most-inappropriately-humorous approach goes to my stepmother-to-be, Sam. When Dad asked my sister's fiancée how things were progressing, he was told that the head was visible, and the baby appeared to have black hair. Now, did Sam respond with a saccharine comparison to Snow White's ebony tresses? No, she suggested that whilst it may be true that the crowning bonce may be furnished with dark locks, it was also equally possible that Sara just hadn't waxed in a while... (Suffice to say this alone gives me cause to have unwavering confidence in their impending nuptials. Anyone who feels comfortable enough to make that joke with their betrothed about his daughter – and in the process tickle him enough that he repeats it to his other daughter – has found their perfect match. ...Or will at least be doing mankind a favour by taking themselves off the streets.)

The day she was born I visited my niece in the hospital, and for once may not have been the most tired person in the room! Contrary to popularly exaggerated belief, I am adjusting to being an auntie. I still find it an appalling injustice that the universe is allowing my generation to breed, and think it is merely adding insult to injury that the baby is also ginger, but despite that I seem to be adapting. That is to say, adapting to the newfound knowledge that it is not actually necessary to take antihistamines before I go near baby Chloe, (though I am growing ever more convinced that there's no cure for the allergy I have to her mother.)

It was Chloe's irrepressible mother who last week announced that she was "absolutely certain" that I would not only marry but have a child of my own soon. The extent to which this has made everyone roar with laughter should be enough to tell you how unexpected a statement hers was. She was saying that when she marries it will be the end of the Lawrence line, as my father only had daughters and there is no one to carry the name into the next generation. I hastily reminded her that actually I've always said that I would double-barrel my surname (and that of any prospective progeny) for the very reason that being a Lawrence is far too important for me to discard. She replied "Oh, you know what I mean. Soon I'll be a Pollard, and you'll be whatever you're going to be in the near future." I nearly choked on my tea at that point, and she elaborated "Oh yes, I'm sure you'll get married soon. And me having Chloe will make you broody too. If I can do it so can you." Her manner was so offhand yet sure of itself that I was at a loss how to argue – save point out that irrespective of my many unfavourable thoughts on the subject, there are several practical steps missing before her prediction could be realised. My independence and lack of overt maternal instinct have meant that, generally, people do not ask me "when it's going to be [my] turn?" ...And if they do, they tend not to live very long.



A few people (all so blindly misguided that they need to sack their specially-trained Labrador,) have suggested that nursing Chloe should be making me broody. It isn't. Rightly or wrongly, she has as yet had no affect on my hormones, and I really don’t expect her to. That’s not to say that I’m without feeling when presented with a newborn; when next-door's cat had her kittens I wanted one so desperately that I explored every possible avenue via which I may at least retain contact with them. As my cat isn't very friendly, had the house been even a tiny bit bigger I would have considered sectioning my home into two halves; thereby keeping the kitten as my upstairs cat and allowing Tuppence to stay downstairs. (Any of you from the North, for whom "tuppence" shares a closser affinity with the word 'pussy' than it does with the word 'cat', may be sniggering right now. Stop it.)

When it comes to the human infant in my life, however, I feel very differently. I am not uncomfortable with her presence, and may even grow to like/love her as she develops a personality of her own – providing it differs greatly from that of her mother – but she does not ignite the desire to raise offspring of my own with any immediacy. The only life-event to have ever really focused my attention on reproducing, via anything other than cloning, was the death of my Grandfather: three years ago this week.

As I have oft mentioned, he was the centre of my world in a way no one else can ever be – because he shaped so much of who I am, and how I interact with the world. My Dad has been a big influence on my life in a similar, but less innate, fashion. I have always admired my father, and wanted to grow up to be like him (which I think was bound to happen whether anyone wanted it or not!) Grandad shaped my person in a less conscious, but just as solidly enduring manner. Despite working long hours, and missing out on a lot of what would now be considered "quality time" with his family, we remained his first priority. My grandmother (slightly bitterly) relates the tale of how he missed his daughter's christening because he had to work, but he only ever did so on occasions when he considered that things would trundle along fine without him. As he saw it, my Auntie Sue would be christened whether he was there or not – whereas if he didn't go to work then there would be more tangible consequences. Of course the emotional impact on the family was a consideration, but he always felt that setting a good example, doing a job that benefitted the community, and providing us with everything we needed was of greater import. He was an impressive and awe-inspiring patriarch, who raised himself up from very deprived, and often unpleasant, roots to make a life which – whilst never blessed with riches – was as happy and secure as he could make it for the people close to him. He always maintained a high personal standard – not just of dress but of conduct. He came from a community that was considered to be of a very low class when he was born into it, and whilst never adopting false airs and graces, he was keen to be respectable. In running the community centre he held a position of authority, and always aimed to live up to the responsibility he felt to the legacy of the MP who he helped set it all up. Grandad always had a well developed sense of duty to those who depended on him, which led to him being taken advantage of a little at work, and also caused his deep determination that his family be safe and well cared for. Of course he was also stubborn, hot headed and recalcitrant, but there was no denying that in his position at the head of the family he stabilised it like no one else.

As someone who had always battled with poor health, but seldom seemed weak or 'ill', his death from small-cell lung cancer was not a surprise but somehow managed to be even an unimaginable shock. All my life – from visiting him in hospital aged 5 when he had his heart-attacks and double-bypass surgery, to hearing tales of when he fell off a roof breaking both legs – I had thought of him as a survivor. A nocturnal epileptic after beatings by his father left him with a scar on his brain, he fought and won over and over again – so when it came to it, I don't think any of us possessed the appropriate capacity to accept the fact that he was going to lose. We'd been raised on the knowledge that with medical help he would be fine, and that had proven to be the case so many times that the strength of the belief had become ingrained within us all. Science is marvellous, how could it fail him? He wasn't frail, didn't look his age, and had worked right up until the night before he was given his terminal diagnosis. He did not live like an old man, and so it was as offensive as it was unbelievable that he eventually died like one.

When I lost this stability, my emotions spiralled in all directions – back into the past, but also out into the future. Previously I had deliberately avoided thinking too much about whether or not I wanted children. First because my then-newly-divorced Auntie (who I spent a lot of time with) was pro-feminist and anti-babies, and later because my own ill health as a teenager meant I always considered that it would be unethical to have a child unless I was in a better position to provide for it. When Grandad died, I was left with a swirling cacophony of vibrant memories that I wanted to share, and suddenly couldn’t imagine not sharing those memories; not continuing the family he had worked so diligently for all of his life. He left me with so many stories and values – and sharing them with Chloe will only be of so much use, as her sense of Grandad will be coloured by my sister's less intense relationship with him.


This particular moment might be especially tough to explain to baby Chloe...

I appreciate how lucky I was to even know him – as his brothers died at far younger ages and had he followed suit then I may have been little older than Chloe when we lost him. I was instead granted a precious opportunity to share two decades with that magnificent man – as his granddaughter, but also as a surrogate daughter (I lived with him from age 5) and friend, as in the latter years of his life I'd made the conscious decision to spend more time talking to him, and more importantly, listening. I used to stay up late until he came in from work and let him unwind by telling me all about his day: which invariably meant bemoaning the customers in the bar, or the committee who controlled aspects of the Centre! I like to think that I had a very well-rounded sense of the man he was, as well as loving him just because he was my Grandad. It would be impossible for me to underestimate the influence he has had on me, and in turn the impact felt by the loss of a person so very integral.

It is, of course, easy to get sentimental at this time of year, particularly because there has already been a birth and is due to be a marriage, (my father's wedding to Sam, in case any of you are still clinging to the same wrong end of that very shitty stick my sister presented.) New additions to the family who will never know the former members of the clan will always be an emotional issue – especially as the echoes of who he was and what he taught us still so keenly reverberate through the lives of those he touched.

This blog post is, admittedly, a very indulgent one which many will not have bothered to read; but an understanding of loss is something we all discover eventually, and will all be changed by to a greater or lesser degree. Whilst I am in a position to articulate my experience and to publish it for a handful of tolerant souls to wade through, many suffer silently, and with little clarity amidst the seemingly-insurmountable emotion. There are aspects of the event I am not so eager to vocalise, and skirt around even within my own mind, because they are still too painful to address. For me, the day before that of his actual death (at a little past midnight on the 10th) is the one I find hardest to deal with, and is the reason for this seemingly pre-emptive post. It was the last day I saw him, and was the last day I went home to lay on the bed next to the phone doing what little I could to soothe the icy terror that it might ring at some odd hour, with news I neither wanted nor could think of a way to answer. After months of not being able to sleep until I had heard him breathe heavily or snore, knowing that he was in hospital and the phone was next to my bed brought with it a constant nagging fear that still raises my pulse when the home phone rings unexpectedly now.

It is with particular poignancy now, that I recall it being just such a circumstance which started me on the path to becoming a writer. My first piece was a short story titled "The Call," which when I read it back now I think was shamefully poor. For a fifteen year old with no prior experience though, it was an acceptable first-attempt. It was about a girl waiting for a heart-transplant, and explored how both hers and her family's lives revolved around their anticipation of "the call" to say that a heart had become available. It is a phone call which prospective transplant recipients can get at any time of the day or night, and which causes a low-level of panic every time the phone shrills, because of the sheer enormity possibly hidden beneath each ring. The piece was published on John Fisher's website www.heart-transplant.co.uk which I would urge you all to take a moment to visit, as he helped me greatly with both my confidence and my research all those years ago. He's a lovely man who was given a second chance by his donor Steven Tibbey, and is one of the reasons I (controversially) believe that organ donation should be an opt-out service rather than one for which people must sign up. Many are put off signing up for an organ donor card because they find it difficult to contemplate their own mortality, or because they think there will be time to explore such options in the future. So few people do register, but so many would readily join the list of those awaiting a transplant if their situation required it. Any of you who would accept an organ, I would ask to also think about signing up to be a donor. It's a very personal decision, but one which is far too easy to avoid.

So there we have it - my meandering, stream-of-consciousness discussion of "life, the universe, and everything," as I presently comprehend it. It only gets more complicated from here, but wouldn't the future be bleak without the colour that comes from complexity…

Proof of Paternity

The last few weeks, celebrity deaths aside, have been rather uneventful – which is the last thing you really want to hear at the opening of a blog entry. Let me assure you, however, that despite a lack of explosive drama, there have been enough domestic incidents which have proven a source of embarrassment and/or amusement to inspire a worthy ramble.

I’ll disregard the chest-infection I have been suffering, which required a myriad of antibiotics, all of which list more side-effects than the A-bomb. It’s tedious and not nearly as interesting as the plague I was trying to make it out to be. It has simply festered as an inconvenient cough and given me the voice of a 20-a-day Kermit. No, illness aside, the first real source of haphazard-happenstances was the recent heat-wave, which hit most of Britain with the kind of warmth we only usually experience after drunkenly falling asleep against a radiator. It wasn’t so much the temperature, but the side-effects of it which lead to my humiliation, but blaming the weather itself is so very English that it would feel remiss not to do so here.

The problem was that the humidity meant that the windows were open almost constantly, which of course fed into my paranoia that things will crawl in if I drop my guard. Specifically the “things” my imagination presents me on a Technicolor loop are former-pet tarantulas that have escaped into the wild and mutated after exposure to chemicals. In my mind they have become some sort of GM super-spider along the lines of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – but much creepier and with less of a propensity for fighting evil and more of a penchant for causing it.

My concerns were proven half-right, when I spent the hottest days of the summer so far swatting the entire cast of Disney’s a Bug’s Life, who all decided to descent upon my boudoir of an evening. Now, although I will catch-and-release moths whenever possible, when it comes to mosquitoes and spiders I have a zero-tolerance policy. If it’s going to suck my blood or creep me the fuck out then it gets whacked. It’s not pleasant, but mankind’s main excuses for killing have always tended to be self-defence and fear, so I am naught but a victim of ancestral tradition. After one particularly infested evening saw seven mosquitoes fall in battle, I went downstairs only to discover two huge daddy-long-legs spidery-things in the bathroom, who also had to be disposed of in a very girly 'jab it with a broom ‘til it stops moving and then flush it down the toilet’ sort-of-a-way. I’m not proud of this insect-genocide (insecticide?) and my murderous deeds came back to haunt me later that week. If there is such a thing as karma, then I think I got mine…

My bedroom faces a car-park and some shops, and although it’s a large window, and I have spent the majority of the summer in little more than lingerie, the net-curtain preserves most of my modesty. It becomes less effective if the main light is switched on when it’s dark outside, as everyone with any common sense will know. The trouble is, when I look up from my laptop to see a not-so-eensy-weensy spider crawling across the ceiling, my instinct is to squish it before it runs off and hides somewhere I can’t get at it. So, after a couple of minutes of gymnastic leaping around, and balancing on various articles of furniture while brandishing a feather-duster, I was victorious. …Only to realise I’d switched the light on to get a better view of the enemy, and not thought to draw the curtains first. It wasn’t until I reached over to close the window to prevent further invasion, that I noticed the security guard standing outside the opposite building, enjoying not only his cigarette, but the impromptu show.

I’ve now ordered screens that Velcro to the window to keep the bugs out. It doesn’t do much to keep me from making an exhibition of myself, but it cuts down the amount of accompanying acrobatics.

It’s also been something of a week for ‘nanecdotes,’ as I have had two comical conversations with my grandmother in as many days. The first occurred when she was sorting through some of my grandfather’s things. She stumbled across something of his that we both agreed she should throw away, but she was hesitant because of a request my auntie had made. Nan said “Are you sure I can throw them away? Your Auntie Sue said she wanted anything personal of his that we’re getting rid of.” …Now, this sounds like a perfectly reasonable query, as it isn’t unusual for family members to be very sentimental over the personal items of a loved one. Unfortunately, I had to explain to Nan that I don’t think Auntie Sue’s nostalgia extended to a NHS-issue tub containing Grandad’s gallstones, and that I think she’d be forgiven for not posting them to Wales.

Nanecdote #2 occurred today, when – following Michael Jackson’s memorial service yesterday, which she watched in full – Nan presented me with a copy of the Daily Mirror. The front page featured large photos of Prince Michael, Paris and ‘Blanket’ Jackson. She pointed to Paris and said; “I think the papers are wrong you know. All these kids look just like him! You see: she has his nose and the boys both have his chin!” I don’t need to explain to most of you why that is funny, or why a kid having a nose just like the one her Daddy bought himself isn’t really proof of paternity.

Also In The News: It's the dog's 10th Birthday this week, and whilst I only usually hold nominal celebrations, as she is entering double-figures I'm hoping to make more of a fuss of her. On my 10th birthday my mother took me into a local boutique and allowed me to choose my own clothes for the first time. I'm not going to do that with the dog.

For one thing, that shop closed down years ago.