Wild

The days where the blackness descends, when my head is foggy and my heart heavy, when I don't want company or even comfort, the only thing that lifts me from my funk is hiding away in a darkened cinema.

I've been struggling a bit of late; my operation has left me with an eternal period and there is nothing quite as draining as an endless bleed. TMI? Like I care. I've felt despondent about everything - my appearance, my work, my general connection with the world. It all feels like a lot of effort, too much in fact, and I feel like I have nothing to give or contribute of any relevance.

The winter blues have grabbed me and have me in their frosty clutches. Perhaps when spring has sprung and the sun begins to shine, I too will emerge from my hibernation.

I feel like I've begun to look at things with a new perspective: really notice everything much more acutely. For example, since when did people stop listening? I mean really listening? Are meet ups with people simply to serve the purpose of letting someone hold court - pontificating on all their favourite topics: themselves and their favourite films, restaurants, their work, their exhaustingly RIGHT opinions, until you wonder why you are sitting there? Maybe just to be lectured at. If you vanished would they notice or even care? Since when did people think that their opinion was the only one that mattered and lose all graciousness when it comes to being interested in others?

God, I know I can talk for Britain, and heck, I love a movie debate more than anyone - but I hope with all my heart that I also ask questions; that I also am interested in others, curious even, in their lives, their hopes, their worries. That I am not just fixated on myself and showing off whatever knowledge I have acquired from someone else's writing and merely regurgitate it in some insecure way in the hope of impressing folk...

Lately I've begin to sit back and observe more. It is unlike me and yet it is a lesson I should have learnt a long time ago: you learn so much more from listening rather than talking. I see the incredible social awkwardness that exists in almost every sphere of human interaction. No wonder parties are awash with alcohol - what we would say to the person at a leaving do that we haven't seen in a year, if we haven't had 3 gins?

Anyway, yesterday I went to see the movie Wild, with Reese Witherspoon. It was breath taking. Incredibly moving and exceptionally well written. A journey of 1000 miles through desert and snow does not riveting viewing make - so kudos to Nick Hornby and the director Jean-Marc Vallee for creating such a captivating film. Witherspoon has never been better as the broken girl, walking herself back to the 'woman my Mother thought I was.' My friend Ayesha had read the book and long ago recommended it to me - I now wish I had read it. Without giving away any spoilers, Sheryl mentions her mother saying that every day there is a sunrise and a sunset and you can ignore it, or choose to see the beauty in it.

I'm trying to see the beauty. I know, shortly, I will.

Things I am digging - Fashion me Now etc.

February is meant to be mercifully short but boy has it d-r-a-g-g-e-d. I am more excited about March and spring than all the lambs in Christendom.

For one, I will be getting my arse to the gym, where a guy called Paul who looks as sweet as pie but who takes no prisoners, will be whipping me into shape. God it is gonna kill. I'm mentally psyching myself for the journey ahead - 6 weeks of abstinence and lunges - by eating as much cheesecake as I can get down my gullet. I am ready. By the time I turn 42 (WTF!!!) I will be a different person. Or at least will have discovered my biceps.

So what has been floating my boat as winter has worn on? What has got me through this dark miserable days when that shite Emperor's new clothes film Birdman stole Linklater's Oscar triumph from under his nose?

No. 1 House of Cards (season 3) is back. Yesterday it hit Netflix and tonight Husband and I will hunker down and try and limit ourselves to 'just the 3 eps.' But as 1am hits and we fight over who will get up the kids it may go on...and on... and on....

No. 2 I've found this great website for all things stylish. Called Fashion Me Now, it is the blog of stylist and writer Lucy Williams. She looks like a model, writes like a journo and has impeccable taste. Her boyf is a photographer and his shots are simply sublime. You just have to remind yourself that just because clothes look good on tall slim gorgeous bronzed Luce, doesn't mean they are gonna look the same on you. Her life looks enviable, but not so much that she comes over all Paltrow. You can relate to her, appreciate her fashion know how and ooh and ahhhh over her pix. You can thank me later.

No. 3 Nespresso delivered. HOO-RAH. Waking up to coffee is a JOY. But why on earth do they not bring back the Hazelnut flavour goddammit!!!

No. 4 Divine chocolate. OMG. The milk chocolate with toffee and sea salt is SEX IN A BAR. Plus Divine is the only Fairtrade chocolate company which is 45% owned by Cocoa farmers. Fairtrade ensures that farmers receive a better deal for the cocoa and additional income to invest in their community - plus company ownership gives farmers a share of Divine's profits. Sold in Oxfam and Waitrose, you can buy knowing you are being ethical aware and getting the best choc around. A double win.

No. 5 Busaba Eathai, my favourite restaurant on earth for week night eats, has started a kid's menu. So all the yummy food that I have been scoffing since 2000 is now available in smaller portions for your rugrats to munch on. My kids loved it - the guava collins drink went down a storm along with the lemongrass chicken. It is without a doubt the thing I most miss about living in London. Plus, we had an epic game of thumb wars. Ace.

Whiplash is simply wonderful

In my time, I've cycled through rain to get to a 9am screening; driven over an hour and a half to catch a flick at some obscure cinema, or cancelled plans to head to the movies alone. And it's all worth it, when the film is brilliant. This of course is a sadly rare occasion.

But last night, driving for an hour to get there and (due to an insane amount of roadworks) an hour and a half on the way back, paying £24 for tickets and £8 parking - I was still smiling. Why? Because I saw Whiplash. What a glorious, subtle, thrilling little gem of a movie it is. And I fucking HATE jazz.

'It's about a boy and a teacher..' someone said. Ok, so far, so Miyagi. Seen it all before. But this time is it Miyagi or the drill Sargent from Officer and a Gentleman? That was the burning question... With incredible performances from JK Simmons and Miles Teller (previously amazing in Rabbit Hole) and a director who makes jazz as thrilling as Fincher made coding (in The Social Network) and a script so perfectly tight that every single line is crucial, it is story telling at it's finest.

After Birdman I'd have been happy never to hear a cymbal crash EVER again, but here, I was mesmerised - someone willing to bleed for his art, quite literally. So many gorgeous themes were touched upon but not rammed home: was Andrew the little drummer boy, looking for acknowledgement from a teacher simply because he didn't get it at home? Or was it that his Dad - too busy adding chocs to the popcorn at the movies - just failed notice what really drives his son? If he didn't even realise his kid had to eat around the candy, then what else doesn't he see?

We all know that in every good climax there is a battle of sorts - but I have never seen one take place over a drum kit. To say it is beyond tense is an understatement. I won't add in any spoilers because it is simply too ace to ruin a second of your viewing pleasure. Go see. By the end of it, you may even be a jazz convert... 

Job done

Phew!! Operation - done. Glad that's all over. The worst part always is having a cannula put in - and then having to sleep with this thing in your hand for the night. It took me back to the C section days - except this time I could just focus on recovery and not have to think about the small being I'd just created.

The staff at The Spire Hospital in Harpenden couldn't have been more fabulous. In fact, I almost enjoyed my night away in my own little room, getting peace from the family - if it hadn't been for you know, the surgery bit. Also, getting to do nothing for a few days - is bizarre. I find it a virtual impossibility to relax at the best of times - so being made to laze around feels very weird indeed.

The thing that made me most grateful was the kindness of others: several lovely Mums from my daughter's class texted, emailed and cornered my husband to check how I was and if there was anything they could do to help. Friends and family rang and cared - although the male members of my family stipulated 'I want to know absolutely NO details of your surgery - other than, are you ok?'

I think the weirdest part of it all, is the discovery that things can be going on inside your body and you have no idea; you attribute your symptoms to stress, or whatever things you can grasp, to explain them away. It made me feel oddly more vulnerable - but more than ever, glad I had myself checked out as soon as I realised something does not compute. If in doubt - get it checked. The worst part of all of this was the not knowing what was wrong - the mind is a dangerous place, especially when you google symptoms...

The cold spell has passed. My fears have all but subsided, and now I can look forward to the magic of spring. Being healthy is something I have often taken for granted. This small insignificant blip made me appreciate my body - cellulite and all - for all it can do. So with that in mind, this will be the spring that I shall whip it into a new shape. Not thin. #fitnotthin will be my mantra. Well, I've gotta balance out my cake love somehow, eh?

7 Things

So the whole 7 things you never knew about me is doing the rounds on Facebook and what-not and the bizarre thing is trying to think of 7 things I haven't shared - as I am QUEEN of the overshare and always tell everyone everything. If I come back as anything - I want to a mysterious brunette with a sultry voice and a 22 inch waist. I have kind of done this before, but why not try and tell something new?

So here goes:

1. I once broke my arm aged 8, simply walking up the stairs back into school after break time. I tripped landed on my left arm (I think) and my only fear was that Richard Milligan would see my enormous regulation navy knickers. I broke the bone in two places, bent it, chipped it and twisted it. The worst bit was when they took the cast off it was attached to my skin - which they proceeded to rip off. Plus I had spent the day of the accident covering my arm in temporary tattoos and the docs throughout the leftover blueish marks in weird pirate ship and skull formations were in fact bruising and almost put the cast back on...

2. Between the ages of 14 and 18 I taught kids to love Jesus; taking Sunday school for a load of 4/5/6 year olds with my mate T. Often I was slightly hungover and regularly we would play hide and seek and leave the kids hiding for longer than was necessary as we dissected the previous evening's events. I did this to obtain my duke of Edinburgh bronze medal thinking I needed to do it for 2 years - when in fact, you only needed to do it for 6 months.

3. In the summer of '99 I was walking through China Town in London when I bumped into a hot stranger. We stopped, chatted and exchanged numbers. Turns out he was an actor who had just come off stage. The very next evening I arrived at a dinner party - to find him there. He pounced. Back at his flat, I noticed in his bedroom a picture of his (I thought ex) girlfriend beside an ENORMOUS black and white photo of himself in some awful pose. I spent the night but refused to have sex with him. He was a typical player. If I read any showbiz stories about Gerrard Butler, I see that he still is...

4. I still have a comfort blanket that was on my cot as a baby. My Husband calls it the 'piss rag' and refuses to touch it. Fair enough...

5. My only regret in life is not going to see U2 in the summer of 1993 with all my idiot schoolmates, who decided to hire a limo to take them from Belfast to the gig in Dublin, or was it Cork? Anyway, as they pulled in at a hotel - a whole wedding party flocked around the car convinced U2 had arrived, only to see my drunken and stoned mates all pile out needing a wee. They had a ball and I wish I had gone, but being a poor student at the time, I refused. Damn.

6. According to my husband I proposed to him 33 times before he proposed once and I accepted. The first gift he ever bought me in our relationship, was a bracelet with a small silver smooth stone hanging from it. I asked him to engrave it - hoping for some words of love. He gave it to me and winked. At the time I had proposed 3 times. The stone said, 'Lucky number 4?' Some guys just play hard to get....

7. The worst haircut of my life was aged 14 in Belfast at a cool hairdressers (the only one at the time in the provence) called ZAKKS. The guy cut my hair to an inch below my ear and then permed it. I was thinking of a Madonna look - he gave me a dirty blonde afro. I slept with conditioner on my hair for a week and immediately got the bus to town and bought a black cap which I wore all summer to hide my do. At the local ice rink 'Dundonald Ice Bowl' I bought a doughnut and the woman handed me my change saying, 'there you go SON.' Not what I needed to hear as a 14 year old girl with bad teeth and a bad perm....

Happiness is a double stuff Oreo

HOO RAH January is almost done.

Also, as I type I am alone in the house. This is a rare occurrence. Husband has taken sprogs to the movies and I find myself  wondering WTF to do. It is actually quite unnerving to have no blogs needing written, no script that needs a polish, no studying of telly to do. I'm not good at the old relaxing malarky. So here I am, having a blog moment.

Life is pretty bloody good at the moment which is slightly unnerving. We're not good with happiness are we? Much more comfortable having a moan, needing change, wishing for more. So when life is just swell, there is a sense of foreboding doom that waits for us over the horizon, just ready to pounce when at our most comfortable.

Ever since Husband changed his job, my life did a full 360. (Or does that mean I am right back where I started? Should it be 180? Maths was never my strong point). Basically, having spent years as a single parent while Husband ran bars until the wee hours of the morning, he is now around. A lot. It means he can take Sproglette swimming (I abhor council swimming pools, the smelly changing rooms, the sauna like heat at the side of the pool and the freezing water that awaits), make dinner (he is by far the better cook), do bath time and share the chores of raising a family. It means also, that finally, we all eat together as a family every evening.  We chew the fat, Sroglette turns her nose up at the 6 hour slow cooked Jamie Oliver winter chilli that Husband slaved over ("I like the chilli, just not the bits in it") and we always ask, 'what was the favourite part of your day?' I began this tradition, because I wanted to focus on the good and now Sproglette insists we ask it no matter what. Sometimes, after a day of writing and chores it is hard to pick out a resounding highlight, but I've persevered...

These meal times make me happier than I think I have ever been. Tis odd that such a small thing has such an impact on my life - but it does. We finally feel like a family - and the kids are such gorgeous ages (8.5 and 4) that the discussion is never dull. (Plus it takes Sproglette about 5 hours to eat 3 freakin' peas so we are at that table for a loooong time...).

Sproglette is full of nursery stories, 'Ella pooed on the floor and so and so had to have time out...' (she is such a monitor it is incredible) and Sproglet wants football results and how chuffed he is to have got 'pen license.' Usual, mundane stuff - that I love. Sometimes I find myself thinking, 'it doesn't get better than this.' Both kids snuggle under a soft wool blanket to watch a movie or Sproglet's fav Modern Family. They still let me stroke their hair and kiss the backs of their necks. This won't last. Soon they will be sulking in their rooms only gracing us with their presence to ask for food or money or a lift to some godawful club.

Soon they won't care that I make the best hot chocolate in the world, or want to break open a packet of Oreo double stuff (try them) with me. They won't get excited to have cake on a Friday, or run to the park and feed the ducks on a summers day. They won't want to watch Nemo - again. Or even Jaws. I'll be embarrassing and uncool and annoying and it is the moment I dread the most. At the moment I can convince them that the most prosaic things are magical - soon my powers will cease.

We crave the moments when they are asleep to finally have peace, then we wish they were awake and bouncing around. Like today, I'd have given my eyeballs to have a few hours to myself. Now I'm here alone and the house feels quiet - too quiet. The snow falls and the fire crackles and I miss those little nightmares.

Tonight is Star Wars monopoly, home made banana chocolate cake (divine and I don't even like bananas), The Voice (who will turn.. dun dun DUN) and the beginning of Spiral. So all that is left to do is start thinking about what the best part of my day has been...

Letting go of the burden of hate

January has been FULL ON.

Normally it's a slow old month, crawling to the finish line, filled with failed resolutions and empty bank accounts. But this January has been busy busy busy and has zipped past. Not though, without the odd bump.

For several months I've had a health worry - one that I put down to all manner of things, but eventually realised something was wrong. So my GP referred me to a consultant and I've got to have a small operation in mid Feb. Nothing to worry about, which is wonderful - but for a couple of weeks when I hadn't had my diagnosis, I was frantic. I kept thinking that life has been so damn great, that something was gonna come a cropper... I worried that just as everything might fall into place, the one thing I need the most: my health, would fail me. It puts everything in perspective, when you are scared.

In the midst of all this I met up with a bunch of old schoolmates. Most of whom I see anyway - they are still a big part of my life - but a few I hadn't seen in 20 odd years. One girl J, was understandably nervous about seeing a gang of 15 people she hadn't set eyes on for two decades, so we met before the actual meet.

It transpired that J reads my blog, so knew about my life. J mentioned she had just resumed contact with a schoolmate of ours, whose wife used to be a close friend of mine, but cut me off several years back. To my horror, even though this ex-friend had never ever had the courage or courtesy to tell me the reasons why she terminated our friendship - J knew it all! Brilliant! So I was sitting there, looking at a lovely woman who hasn't seen me in 23 years (but looks exactly as she did all those years ago) who has heard all this poison about me. My head was spinning.

Thankfully J knows me of old, so wasn't in any way judging me. She knows that I try to have a good heart and am (hopefully) a good person, so I didn't need to defend myself to her. She said to remember that ex-friend of mine was filled with grief at the time this all happened, having tragically lost a baby. 'Grief causes people to react in all kinds of strange ways,' J wisely said.

At first I was livid. Ready to fire off some email of rage - how dare someone slander me so badly! Then I thought on what J said. That grief does strange things to people. I've never lost a child, can't imagine how horrific and sad that must be... You can't know what someone is going through unless you have walked in their shoes, but that is no excuse.

In this case the ex-friend took as a slight that I called my daughter 'Riley' - a name I had held for years since I learned it was Elvis's Granddaughter.  (Not a massive Elvis fan - just really liked the name, also because it usually is a boys'). My Husband, an Aussie, nicknamed her 'Roo' when he saw her in a baby Bjorn one day. This was apparently hurtful due to the name of the child she lost. Did I have a clue about this, or even think that my Husband's innocent nickname would be such a bone of contention? Nope. No idea. Who thinks this way - that you name a child to slight someone else??? Only those who think the world begins and ends with them. There again, grief does strange things to people...

Instead of being annoyed at something that to me, had been so twisted, I just felt sad. Sad that communications get so broken down. Sad that people can join dots that are not even there, to come up with a sum that makes me the bad guy. Then I thought some more: Maybe I was the bad guy - in not even realising I was being him. But how can we realise we are doing something wrong if NO ONE TELLS US?

It all comes down to one word: value. If we value someone, and they hurt us - unwittingly (as in my case - I'd never wittingly hurt a soul) or wittingly - shouldn't we tell them? A friend a while back called me on something I did without really thinking it through and we talked it over, over coffee. At the end, she had explained the reasons why she had been disappointed. I explained why I did what I did and was utterly apologetic that I had upset her in any way. We moved on. Air cleared. She valued me enough to tell me I had upset her.

It is hard of course, to tell people when they upset us, disappoint us, let us down. Perhaps we think they should know what they've done? But people aren't telepathic. They often walk around having no clue, while we seethe. But if we want them in our lives, then isn't it better to say our beef - give them a chance to explain, or apologise?

If we don't, it is that we didn't want them in our lives to begin with.

I know this, because this month I also got to tell someone why they had upset me: that every time I see them they are abusive in some way, or confrontational - so I'd rather just keep my distance. No anger, no issue, no dislike, just - I don't want to hang out with you. They wondered why I had waited almost 2 years to tell them. Well, I hadn't seen them in nearly two years - so that's a giveaway in itself  - but also, I prefer to say things face to face and hadn't had that chance. I was happy to explain how I felt. I'm always one for getting things on the table.

We can walk around bitter about perceived slights, angry at deep hurts and painful neglects, but it us who carry this heavy baggage of anger, resentment or hate. Isn't it better to let it go? Unburden ourselves, or make peace with it?

For a long time I felt rejected by this ex-friend and it was hard to emotionally let it go. I pride myself on my friendships - my friends are my family - so losing one was devastating. More so than any of the past romantic relationships I had that went by the way side. Whilst I never want her back in my life - how could I trust her again? - I do forgive her. Because carrying hurt and sadness - that aint my bag. I'm a cheery person who wants a life filled with positivity and honesty. (I sound like a nutter don't I?).

Sorry to quote from Frozen (Christ, I've been to so many Frozen parties with Sproglette recently if I never hear that song again I won't be upset) but shouldn't we all just 'let it go?' Forgive even if we can't forget? Elle MacPhearson once said at parties she breathes in love and breathes out her fear. Forgive that friend that kissed your boyfriend, the neighbour who never gave back your scales, the Father who missed your graduation, the husband that stayed out until 7am on a school night. Even if you can't do it to their faces, do it inside YOURSELF. Take a load off. You might not mend bridges, you might not resolve old wars, but you sure as hell will find peace.

x