Signed, Sealed, and (Hopefully) Delivered

This week my thoughts, many of my conversations, and – most contentiously – my Facebook timeline, have been consumed by the unfolding refugee crisis. Simply the fact that I choose to use the term “refugee” there rather than ‘migrant’ will be enough to see some of you read no further, so discordant has the issue become. I don’t think British culture has been so divided on a matter of national identity since an American friend asked whether or not milk should be added first or last when making a proper cup of tea. (The answer was last, obviously.)

I’m not going to use this post to preach about to whom I feel we should provide shelter, or how. I have neither an exhaustive enough political education nor enough Neurofen to spend this evening trawling through the facts and figures to support my perspective, or refute those to which it is vehemently opposed.

The thing about which I do, passionately, feel we should remain united is helping people who are in desperate need. In recent years this has come in the form of the Rucksack Project, distributing kit to homeless people across the country to help them get through the winter, and before that it was Live Aid, Comic Relief, and every sponsored silence or Great South Run that we as a nation have thrown the full force of our support behind. So I was heartened when a group of local people, (the fabulous ‘Don’t Hate, Donate’) began collecting aid to distribute to those who have left behind their lives and belongings, and was keen to help out in the best way I knew how. Unfortunately, I swiftly realised that I’m not actually very useful. Until the day comes when a freshwater pearl demi parure is all that stands between life and death, I don’t really have the transferable skills required to pitch in and make a difference. (But if, in the inevitable zombie apocalypse, they discover that tiger’s eye really can soothe neurological ailments and lapis lazuli wards off the apocalyptic virus; I’m your girl.)

We made a few lists of things which would be useful for anyone who finds themselves displaced and without much assistance, and gratefully raided the various pound stores and charity shops for which our local High Street is so oft derided. Nineteen pairs of socks and thirty-three toothbrushes later, I could either help several refugees feel a bit more comfortable or keep just over a third of a monstrous, many-fanged centipede cosy-toed and minty-fresh. I was proud of how many boxes we’d filled with the basic necessities, but still didn’t feel as though I was really giving much of myself to the project. It didn’t feel personal, and it should.

Remembering back to the Boxing Day some years ago when I volunteered at a Christmas lunch for the homeless, elderly, and vulnerable, I recalled the difference it made to some of the guests when they were given one of the Christmas cards I’d spent the previous few days writing. For some of them, it was the only card they would get, and it seemed to matter to them to know that someone cared. That someone had thought of them, and taken a moment to show it. I decided to apply the same principle to those seeking shelter, asylum, and lives free from the chaos of conflict. So I reverted to doing the thing with which I am often most at ease, and started to write.

I wrote a handful of messages of support inside blank greetings cards. Nothing lengthy or exceptional, just a few lines of comfort to those for whom hope was proving hard to find. I asked my friends and family to contribute messages too, and slowly the pile began to grow. "Dear Friends, you have not been forgotten. Please keep going…"

Most were supportive, but a few were cynical. One asked why I was “writing to terrorists,” and how I felt about these missives being received by “our enemies”. As I began to answer that of course I didn’t want them to be read by murderous lunatics, I realised that – perhaps – I do. Whilst IS are unlikely to be thwarted by a postcard of a kitten and a sharpie-scrawled quote from Winnie the Pooh, they’re not the people who make up the majority of the refugees. (Whatever the Daily Mail may tell you.) Many of the people who are in those camps, however, are young men. Young men who are lost, and angry, and frightened, and being stripped of their dignity and humanity by successive nations who don’t want to help. If one, just one, of those vulnerable young people feels valued and supported for just a moment, then maybe that’s all it will take to help keep them on the right path as they complete their unimaginable journey in search of a better life. We’re all often just a heartbeat away from having our lives altered irrevocably, and sometimes it’s the smallest thing that tips the balance the right way.

Were it not for some happy accident of birth, I too could have been born into another culture in a less privileged land, and the chances are that if that were the case I wouldn’t still be here. My health, or lack thereof, has nearly bested me on several occasions during a lifetime that has only managed to continue this long because of the support systems which life in this country provide. On the 11^th of September 2014 – one year ago today, on a date already significant for so many – I had the most recent in a series of operations that have saved my life. Had they not operated when they did, the extensive infection which had spread through to my bones would almost certainly have overwhelmed a system compromised by years of illness and immunosuppressants. I was lucky, and I’ve been just as lucky before. I’m aware, perhaps more than many my age, at how many points our fragile lives rest on a knife-edge, ready to fall one way or another. Many of the scientists I admire believe that those moments translate to infinite parallel universes within which all the alternative options are explored. Perhaps there is one where a version of me, someone a little Kate-like – but not much – is healthy. And perhaps there are others where I wasn’t as fortunate as I have been; where I didn’t receive the necessary help on time, or where I was raised in a place that just didn’t have the resources to try. Considering the nature of my life’s complexities, I have to accept that – if there are multiple worlds co-existing alongside this one – then in most of them I’m probably dead.

So, you see, it’s more important than ever to make this life count. To help others if and when I possibly can, and to recognise that even the smallest gesture can make a big difference if it happens to come at the right time. If that means writing a letter to a potential terrorist, then so be it. Maybe if we can all send out a little more love, and hope, and courage into the world there will be fewer people who feel that the only way to make an impact upon it is to spread hatred and violence. After all, Bin Laden wouldn’t have looked half as threatening in those videos if he’d accompanied the long beard and flowing robes with a bit more tie-dye and a bit less TNT...

Of Mortal Fears and Mermaid's Tears

As the sun sets on the last of May, the
significance of knowing that it will rise next on something quite new feels more poignant than it usually would. Quite the opposite, in fact, of the view I would normally take. This year seems to have flown by thus far, and I would typically bemoan the swiftness with which the time were lost. Tonight, however, it's oddly exciting to think of that new dawn and all the possibilities contained within it. It feels like a new book, or a fresh bed; clean and crisp and aching to be explored. Full of the most vivid dreams and the grandest adventures.

The theme of the last month, and I expect the next, seems to have been "change". Not just for me, but for so many of the people whose lives share spaces with mine. Usually all the uncertainty would be exhausting, and admittedly there are times when it still threatens to overwhelm. I've never been one to embrace change, instead clinging stubbornly to familiarity long beyond the point where I know if I still want the things to which I steadfastly adhere. So many of us fear change, yet conversely it's one of the few things that can be depended upon with any certainty, and we never escape it for long. The inconsistency of life is one of the most reliable aspects of living. When I first had to admit the extent to which the associated anxiety had become an issue, it was because I wasn't sure what frightened me more; that everything could change, or that nothing ever would.

Alongside the apprehension, there's a kind of peace to knowing that some of the changes I face are inevitable. It's less fatalistic than resignation, and more an acceptance that things cannot remain the same. That they should not. It's not the way of things to be too fixed, but that doesn't mean that every change has to be a shock. Some differences are so gradual that their scale and their beauty is only apparent upon looking back. This week a very kind friend sent me a surprise gift, and in the parcel was a pendant made from sea glass, which I have always loved. Little shattered pieces of another life, wending their way through turbulent waters to become something precious. There's something quite lovely about knowing that its beauty begins with irreparable brokenness, and develops not from repair but with more scarring and scratching. Its journey through the world is slowly etched into its surface, as is ours, each just as surely shaped by our travels as the other, and often neither any more aware of it at the time.

From my current vantage point overlooking the city, it's hard to imagine life ever standing still, or stagnating. There's such a buzzing and bustling to the nascent nighttime, with Portsmouth looking rather pretty from such a distance in the dark. (The same has been said of me on occasion.) So much life unfolds between those twinkling spots and dazzling stars, showering sparks into the darkness until their glow is matched by another day.

When the sun rises on that next tomorrow, it will introduce us to June. I don't quite know what her plans are for me yet, and despite acknowledging that change is unavoidable, it's still difficult to confront it courageously. As I prepare to welcome the new day and new month that hover just over the horizon, I know I must greet the approaching challenges and opportunities it presents with the tried and tested blend of acceptance, curiosity, and fortitude that helped me survive those past. The only thing of which I can currently be certain is that I can be certain of very little. The voyage ahead is likely to be quite a rough one, but I know that by the end of it a few of life's sharpest edges will have smoothed, and that is something rather precious.

The Ties That Bind

Sometimes perspective is subtly gained, and other times it crashes into view and simply obliterates the previous mode of thinking. The hospital which has been its stage - and my home - for the last week is a master of shifting attitudes; an arena so cacophonous with extremes of emotion that few are seldom fixed.

Being quite experienced in pain and complexity, I've struggled much less with the physical reality of this current unwellness than I have with some of the wider questions it has thrown into my path. The now-unavoidable gastric surgery carries with it substantial risks to fertility, the extent of which I am only just beginning to explore with the help of relevant specialists from the field.

Suddenly finding myself asking very big questions about my future has been made particularly jarring because I had never given much thought to it before. My mother was in her late 30s when she became a parent, and even as a child I had always presumed that the same would be true of me. As ever greater numbers of my peers have begun to have families of their own, and the quantity of nieces and nephews I've amassed threatens to overwhelm the world supply of Jelly Tots, I still felt under no pressure to consider my own reproductive responsibilities. It was a question for another time, another decade. Something that seemed so abstract and far away, and felt almost ridiculous to ruminate upon seriously when it was so far from being relevant.

It is a theme repeated, I suppose, by couples everywhere who find themselves actually having to think about fertility. It's an aspect of our health we take for granted in a more absolute, evolutionary sense than we might any other, and do not test until it fails us. I had been as naive as anyone, never questioning my ability to have a child of my own, and indeed focused more on the rights and responsibilities afforded me not to get pregnant than anything else.

Much as I adore the cheeky, sticky, noisy, lovable riot of children to whom I am Auntie, I have been perfectly content to postpone any thought of adding to that brood myself. I'm not the type who coos and clucks over other people's babies, and don't have much experience entertaining children. This awkwardness led to a general assumption that I am not a very natural mother and a much more intuitive Wicked Queen. (It may also have something to do with the tiara, but I still deny responsibility for those poisoned apples.)

Despite the teasing, I don't think I had really given the concept of motherhood much thought at all until I was twenty. When my grandfather died it was earth-shattering, but somewhere amidst the shock and the grief and the pain was a strange kinship and familiarity. That moment of devastation linked me to the past in a way nothing could have done before. The loss of that great man and all that he was to us, and the staggering realisation that from that point on he could be only a memory, was when it all fell into place. I have referred to it since as my "circle of life moment", because I knew, there and then, that our lives have power and purpose simply because we share them. As I felt both the privilege and the loss of having been loved so much by someone I so admired, I recognised my place in the order of things in a way I had not done before. I wasn't just a daughter, or a granddaughter, I was a link in a chain that stretched back generation after generation, and - most startlingly - would reach out just as far into the future too.

I've touched on the significance of that moment before, but have found myself remembering it so much more acutely in the shadow of this latest news. As I indulged the self-pity and allowed myself to sink a little deeper into what was becoming quite a comfortable sulk,  my whinge was interrupted by a whisper.

"Please let me go. Tell the children that I love them, but they must let me go."

An elderly lady in a bed across the ward is receiving only palliative care, and her lucidy drifts somwhere between remarkably keen and hopelessly lost, never certain which is cruellest. Tonight she has called alternately for her children, and her parents, earnestly seeking the comfort of those greatest loves as her life begins its end.

Her family is large and caring, guilty only in their eagerness to cherish the moments of respite from distress, despite - and because of - their rarity. It is impossible to watch life unfolding and untangling itself at such close hand without realising how small a part we each play. How insignificant the knots are in which we find ourselves tied, time and again, until there is no time. No "again". It isn't blood she calls to, or to which they cling, it's bond. A bond formed by loving as deeply, resolutely, and fearlessly as family demands, but which is not exclusive to genetics. It's the quality of the relationships that surround her which have brought the greatest joy to know, and are causing the most pain to leave, not their heritage.

As the spectre of their loss calls to the ghosts of mine, I find myself so very grateful for those in my life whom I would be most loathe to leave, family and friends, and equilibrium begins to restore. It's hard to be too dedicatedly self-pitying in the face of so much love, and life, and potential for more of the same. I may not know what shape my future will take, or how far it may deviate from the course I'd expected, but in this moment it is enough to possess the luxury of time to find out.

As the last of the ward lights are dimmed and the day's visitors reduced to a cluster of empty chairs, so she whimpers to the night and asks it to take her; eased of the pain her illness delivers but wracked with the agony she knows awaits them. She quietly asks the nurse if she can have something to cuddle, and they give her a pillow. As she falls asleep with it cradled tightly to her chest my heart breaks for far worthier tragedies than my own, but this single bed has never felt quite so vast.

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...