'This bed is on fire/with passionate love'

Sleeplessness, should you be interested enough to ask, continues to be not much of a problem in Suburban Mansions.

I had a brief visit from the bad fairy Insomnia several years ago when I momentarily went mad, where - it has to be noted - the inability to sleep caused most of the problems.  Chicken and egg = crazy omelette.  As my GP pointed out many, many, many years ago, the main cause of Post Partum Depression is lack of sleep.  It really can drive you bonkers.  But in this latter case we're talking seriously not sleeping, not just waking in the night, or staying up till the small hours become large ones, and the fact that the lack of sleep was being enforced rather than organic was an important added factor in the dish of despair.

When seriously insomniac, the problem was banished by hypnotic drugs which I embraced with the fervour of a new convert to Christianity at a tent revival.  Addictive?  Didn't give a stuff.  I was so desperate I would have signed up for a week in a coma just to experience that wonderful oblivion and the respite from being awake and suffering.  The pill regime lasted a month and I was lucky enough to come off them without any nasty side effects when my natural pattern of sleep re-established itself.  Well that and the Valium.  Don't run away with the idea that this is easy stuff.  It's not, and while, in a less fraught time (abandonment by partner of 25 years) watching boxed sets got me through months of bad sleep, when the panic of worse times set in, I needed the big pharmaceutical guns to get me over the hump.

But now, normal service has been resumed.  I go to bed in the Barbie plush dream palace, curled into the warm back of Saint Juliano who has mystifyingly agreed to share it with me, my head resting on charity shop silk pillowslips, and a cat or three snuggled between us, on top of us, across us.  Beside my bed there's a laptop, a phone an iphone and a kindle.  Not one of their blue lights keeps me awake.  Outside there's the orange glow of the London night and a constellation of red stars from the nearby cranes of the Imperial College building site, and none of it, not even the bright moon as it sweeps across the sky, even permeates my consciousness.  In the summer, the flocks of parrots roosting on the nearby scrubs chirp at dawn, and if I hear them at all I merely think 'how lovely'.  The sun bangs on the window but I pay it no heed.

If I wake to pee, I go back to sleep almost instantly and it would all be perfect if not for one thing...

Just as I find someone to share my slumber, it appears I gravely disrupt theirs.

Because, reader, I snore.

I snore like Concorde breaking the sound barrier, like a garbage truck toiling up the road, like a high speed train carrying nuclear waste barreling up the line, like juggernauts overtaking slow lorries on a steep hill.  I know this for two reasons.  Firstly, I have, on occasion woke myself up snoring on trains, cinemas (I know - CRINGE) and once, a plane, and can tell by the fact that, when traveling Club, I go to sleep on good terms with the person next to me in seat 1B, who refuses to meet my eye when we wake up together the next morning.  Or at least, when I wake up.  He probably hasn't had any sleep at all.  And secondly, I know I snore because Saint Juliano keeps on digging his elbow into me to try, in vain, to get me to shut up.  Occasionally I've woken and found him wresting the pillow out from underneath my head.  He claims, this is because I snore less if I lie flat - though other sufferers say they benefit from sitting more upright.  I sometimes wonder if he's really just going to put it over my face.

So he pokes, and he prods, and he shakes and he hisses, and I get cross, and groggy, and tell him I'm already awake, because it often feels that way, when in fact I'm just talking in my sleep - my snorey, snorey sleep.

He has two sets of earplugs, one that muffles everything, including Armageddon, and another set that allow him to hear the alarm go off, but still be bothered by the snoring.  If he wears the first he doesn't wake up for work.  If he wears the second it's lose, lose, lose, and I get battered.

I honestly don't know how he puts up with me.  I'm not even that good in bed.

So I'm off to the Sleep Clinic at Charing Cross in June to spend a night in hospital and see if there's anything they can do to stop St Juliano killing me before the sleep apnea that - I at least - am unaware of, kills me first.

However, if I do happen not to wake up one morning, just check the pillow doesn't have a face shaped indentation in it first before you assume I choked to death on my own snores. 

Friendless in the Fifties..

I have no friends.
Okay, a few.  Like a handful. Like a handful with a couple of fingers missing.
86 on facebook, 3 of whom cross over to real life, more or less, and some colleagues.
My eldest daughter tells me not to worry that most people have only seven significant people in their life and the rest are just padding.
But I don't have seven, I say, slightly panicked.  I mean, I'm padded, god so well padded with acquaintances and half-friends, and pseudo friends, and people I once had dinner with, or met, or knew, or still kind of know, or know someone who knows someone, or holidayed with, or spoke to at a party that I could fill a hall with people I waved at once across a room, but though I can anecdotally chat about Ed Balls and Phillip Roth and Salman Rushdie and The House of Parliament Dining Room and Gordon Ramsay, it's all just bullshit, true bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless.  The significant seven are real, or would be if I had them...
Yes you do have seven people, think of it - four kids, Dad, Juliano, Maria...  The girl says.
Oh god, my seven significants consist of four people I gave birth to, one I was married to who left me for another woman, my current partner and my dear friend Maria who lives half the time in Brazil and who I see maybe once a fortnight when she's here, and who communicates with me by What's App.
Kill Me Now.
Or rather don't, because nobody would come to the funeral.
I'm dubious about my daughter's maths as, of the four kids, even she hasn't returned my last two phone calls and we haven't spoken for maybe two weeks.  One of my sons may have emigrated to another country and forgotten to tell me as I haven't heard from him since Christmas.  I don't even bother calling him now as he never answers, and my texts and emails are ignored.  I think he loves me, but joined at the heart compadres we are not - or maybe we are, we just don't talk.  And my husband, well we met last week, but haven't heard since and he has a new partner and an 18 month old baby, so can't think I'm high on the list of priorities except when he's urging me to kick one of the kids out (two of them live with me so do get to count as significant, albeit by default) so I can sell the house and give him half.  A bit of self interest in that friendship maybe?
So am I unloveable, unlikeable, unfriendly, antisocial?
Maybe, hope not, no, a bit.
For the years of my marriage I was sure both of the first descriptions were true.  Not because my husband made me feel those things, but rather that he made me feel that he loved me DESPITE them being somewhat true.  My current partner, when asked why he hung around after the sex became routine, said 'because I like you'.  Gosh.  There's a novelty.  I realised that this was one of the first time anyone had said those three little words to me.  I've heard love many times from many men, like it's a toy currency you can wave about but not really spend, but 'liking' is a rarer commodity, and one I've never been blessed with.
Is it a parental thing.  Absolutely.  My parents, lovely people though they were, could criticize for Britain, and show disapproval like they were up for a Bafta for it.  I never felt they liked me.  Not whining about it, just saying.  They tolerated me.  The loved me despite (see the trend here?) my many perceived character flaws which they often pointed out, sometimes adding that I should see a psychiatrist.  Being a kid in our house was akin to madness.
So I've kept that feeling with me for life, internalised it, nurtured it, and projected it on to anyone who'll have me, or not as the case may be.
The nice thing about age is that it has finally allowed me, not to shelve the feeling, but not to give a fuck about who likes me or not, even though I admit I just start from the point that nobody does, or won't once they get to know me, but who cares?  I've got cats instead.  One of them doesn't like me much either, but she's a temperamental diva who shuns everyone, so I'm not special. The others sit on my knee and purr.  When I get really low I think I'll get a dog too, 24/7 total approval adoration and tail wags - what's not to like.
But do two cats and a virtual dog count as significant beings in one's life?
Judging by the number of both species on facebook, I'd say they probably do.
But that still leaves me short of friends.
I truly don't mind that much.  I think that some people have the gift of making friends and I'm just one of those who doesn't.  I can get along with people well enough in the day to day, and when I meet people, I often warm to them and  enjoy speaking to them. I can talk to most people happily and with pleasure.   But as I get older I find I have become more and more reclusive.  I think - shall I have people for dinner?  And decide, immediately, nah.  Can't be bothered.  I'd have to cook.  I'd have to think of things to say.  And - this IS an absolute truth in my life, they NEVER ask me back, so what is the point?  I don't want to be the one-sided friend that much if it involves two hours of competitive cookery and a lot of washing up.  I've done enough of that in the last thirty odd years.  It's not the making friends I find difficult (well not so difficult) - it's the keeping them.  Two of the people I liked most in the world at the time dropped me.  Dumped by a friend.   Ooooh, not one for the CV when you're shopping around for new ones.  Others drift away because of natural atrophy, and some I've dropped because things change and I just find I have nothing in common with them any more.  Another pleasure age brings is that I find myself less interested in putting up with nonsense.  Time is too precious to hang out with people who make you feel bad about yourself, or who you just don't find uplifting.  And I'm also more guarded, more cautious, less generous, less interested.
Still, doesn't it stick in the craw a wee bit when you see other people just gather friends around them, to retain the devotion of others while being total bitches/arses/tools, but you get left off their Christmas card list?  It does me, but only momentarily.  The people I do have in my life I am grateful for, and they are few, but good.  There may not be seven of them, but they will turn up for me if I need them.  Yes, some are related to me, and have to turn up out of duty, but that's what families are for.   To ensure you still have a 'person' when the rest of the world thinks you're a pain in the arse.

Living off the fat of the bland

Folks I am fat.  Not two seats on coach or weigh yourself at the zoo fat, but fatter than I've ever been in my life, and  I say this
'thinking' I was fat for almost as many decades as I've been alive when I really wasn't (except for the first two when I thought I was - naturally - skeletally thin - and I was, too,  as wincingingly thin as I am now chubby).  As the facebook adage goes:  if only I were as fat as I was the first time I thought I was fat.  But there's no dressing this up in anything less than (tight) size 18 trousers - this time it's real.  My hourglass has dimples in every conceivable spot and is actually more of a couple of hexagons balanced.  With cellulite.  I don't have curves, I have undulations - rolling fields of arable land, hills and dales, even - sadly - a few trickling brooks.

Not only am I afflicted by the fat, but - something new, that's only developed over the past 15 years - and that is self-loathing.  In the old days I didn't hate myself for my - mostly imaginary fat.  I had my issues, loads of them, like the next angsy mother of four with no proper career and an African bum despite being resolutely Anglo Saxon every where else.  But the self loathing has crept in on the side, like that unwanted serving of coleslaw you never eat, that you get with the burger, that you do. 

Cos, it's not a surprise that I'm fat.  I mean it's not my 'big' bones, or my underactive thyroid (despite having one of those) or my poor metabolism - it's that unlike the fat that I carry around saddled to my thighs, the stuff that comes in 250g blocks market 'finest butter' (or frankly 'Sainsbury's value'), the stuff that comes in pyramids that melts when you lop the top off and stinks up the fridge, the stuff you ladle on scones and jam, the hidden content in almost everything that tastes good - that fat, I LOVE.  And I love the bread in all the myriad of forms the evil temptress takes - wholemeal, stoneground, rye, long, thin, sliced from a packet, the pasta, the risotto, the cakes, the cookies, the chocolate - in short - the crap.  Yeah, I do eat vegetables too, and salad, and fruit, and acai berries and nuts and almost negligible amounts of meat, and I don't drink, but my heart belongs to pastry.  I love fat , I just hate fat Marion.  Can.  Not.  Stand.  To.  Look.  At.  Her.

Here's the thing.  I've been on an almost continuous diet for the past ten years.  Sometimes I lose weight and have thigh gap and wrinkles and have even managed to shrink low enough to get into a size 10.  The diets that worked were the 'sudden fear of a stroke diet', the 'husband left me for another woman diet'  and the 'brand new boyfriend love diet' - twice.   Sometimes I don't lose any weight and just stay static at a size that's neither thin enough to let me enjoy it, or fat enough to call for the glazier to lift me out the window if I died in the chair.  But this period of stasis is called Misery, because I'm watching every minute mouthful I take, and eating what I 'shouldn't anyway' so getting none of the results and all of the pain.  This last spring I became an 'almost' vegetarian as in almost never eating meat.  Over the summer, I tried not to eat carbs.  In effect this meant I ate the carbs but felt bad about it.   In autumn I gave up sugar, all refined sugar.  And then about November, as my body continued to grow and the number of clothes in my wardrobe that fitted, to shrink, I thought Oh shut the front door, damn it to hell, and just ate what I wanted.  Anything.  Twice.  I indulged my every calorific whim. 

Since then my bras are all on the last notch.  My jeans (which are in any case jeggings from New Look) leave little pocket indentations on my bum and since I keep my credit card in my back pocket, when I take them off at night, you can see the long number embossed in my flesh.  I have five outfits that fit, one more than the days I work in the week, my boots don't zip up, and - as far as food and life are concerned, I can't remember when I was last so happy.  I love being able to eat exactly what and when I want without worrying.

But old self loathing has decreed all mirrors should be shrouded and when I catch sight of myself by accident I am slightly aghast to see myself a dead ringer for my equally dead, fairly mad, aunt who had bosums like a ship's figurehead and wore huge frocks, entering a room like a galleon in full sale, except that she had buck teeth.  And that's the good part.  When the big frock comes off the fat lady doth not sing.  She whimpers.  She hangs her chubby cheeks in shame, over the new chin that only arrived last year but seems to have settled in for the duration.

I am so tired of it.  There is enough to hate in the world without devoting any of myself just because I'm fat.  But I truly don't want to begin to love my fat.  It's not a relationship I want to pursue.  I want it all - cheese, chinese dumplings, egg fried rice, fruity toast and a swimsuit body that doesn't elicit whale watching  jokes.

I know it's not healthy to be this fat, but comeon, lets face it, not all the skinny are healthy.  Body size is not necessarily a marker for health, especially mental health.  You may not get diabetes but you thinness can bring its own dangers.

So what do you do?  Happy as pie on the inside - looking like pie on the outside.  It's a dilemma...

Day one

1st of January 2016 and I'm sitting here alone but for some cooking smells that are not mine emanating from the kitchen, that is.  And I'm feeling bluer than a new pair of 1970s Levis, with the dye all ready to run out.

I've said before, somewhere else, that my life has turned into an exercise in simple arithmetic.  I just turned 58.  That's two more makes sixty.  I can't possibly be sixty.  It's terrifying.  Like coming home from the store and discovering you've accidentally shoplifted a Tiffany necklace and it's only a matter of time before the CCTV exposes you.  Not that I've been in Tiffany more than twice in my life and frankly, if I had shoplifted anything from there, it really would be an act of madness as I care nothing, less than nothing for the ridiculous crap they sell.  I like the blue boxes though.  A metaphor.  I hate the crap, but like the packaging.  But the thought of actually being me - at 60, such a foreign number, such a foreign place, is just beyond my comprehension.  My bones, my poor aching, beaten, battered bones that ache from doing nothing more than being attached to my body, are less surprised and aghast at the idea than I am, but there it is, and the maths begin.  How long do I have?  ten years or so until I can retire in legal terms, though financially I should work till maybe two years before I die as then I'd have enough money to live till the last day.  Unfortunately, in most cases, you don't get that sort of notice.  Or fortunately, even, as who'd really want to know.  If I move this year into another house, I have maybe ten years before I need to think of moving again, downsizing to the sad little old lady pad where I will live with my cats and two pieces of the furniture from my previous life that doesn't fit in with the proportions of the new place.  If I don't get Alzheimers in the meantime.  Because all that is a distinct and reachable possibility now.  Death, disease, dementia, disability - they are all there, hovering, like pro-lifers outside an abortion clinic, ready to grab you as you walk past.  What will get me.  How many years before they do?  One, or twenty?  And so I do sums.  None of my kids have children yet.  Only one is married.  None look likely to make me a grandparent any time soon, so say I get one in the next five years - I'll be 63.  That gives me ten good years of being around and available, all being well (and who knows?) so the likelihood is that I may not see even my first grandchild graduate from college, let aloe get married.  Will I be around long enough to know them.  To make any sort of impression.  To get the chance to rehabilitate myself from being a fairly terrible mother into an okay grandmother? Will I be gone as my own parents were when and if my kids' lives hit a bump and they need help?  Can I be there for them?  Will I have time to just be there for myself?  At 58 I'm still sharing a home with my adult children.  I've never actually lived alone with a partner.  My ex and I had fifteen months alone before we were parents and though he left, I stayed and got the kids, albeit the grown up kids.  And now one of their wives.  My lover moved in when I was ill three years ago and we had five months alone, with a lodger while my youngest was in College and my other son was at University.  But since then both those kids have returned, left and returned again.  I've never really known what it's like to be a partner in a relationship that existed only for we two.  Will there be time?  Will I plant and plan a garden?  It's not over yet, but I realise I haven't even started.

This year I have to move.  I have to pack up my old life and move to a new life in a place I don't want to be in a suburb I don't know, in a house that isn't this one.  I'm happy to change.  I'd move tomorrow, yesterday even for a new start, but I hate that circumstances are forcing me to live in an area I don't want to away from everything I know and love, from neighbours and history.  I say it will be good for me, and it will, but that too is terrifying.  I want to wind the time back, not to replay what I've done but maybe do it differently.  I want to stop everything, hit pause, and sleep for a year, and figure out what I'm going to do next before I restart the clock.  I want my kids back, I want my kids gone, I want to keep them close, and see them settled elsewhere.  I want to settle down and I want to kick it all up and just take off.  I want adventure and safety, calm and excitement. One day I want nothing more that this and the next I feel I'll die if I don't get away from it all.

Blue, blue, blue, blue.
And so fucking fat you could see me from space.

The other side of Karma

I've had to sit myself down and do some soul searching.  Finding it was the first problem.  I have it buried underneath so many layers that it takes a bit of digging to get to the real stuff.  Not that others seem to have trouble hitting the tender core.  No matter how much you wrap it up, it's like a tooth, there's always a nerve others can hit.  But getting down to it oneself is a different thing.  You know that something is painful - the crippling, hunched-over, agonised whelp is a bit of a giveaway - you just always don't know why - I mean really, really know.

So book three, written, finished, sort of there in the way you are when you go to an unfamiliar city.  You've done all the planning and got there with your list of things to do, but where you'll actually go is open for discussion.  And I send it off.  To a young agent who takes me out for coffee to meet me (somewhat redundantly since I've never heard back from her so there was little point in us doing the whole face to a name thing), and then to a more senior agent who was sort of nice about my previous book (didn't like any of the characters) and turned it down - a member of the Club of 6 - who I did hear back from eventually, or rather from her assistant who said it didn't have a good enough 'voice'.  'What you have,' says my colleague who read a 'bit' 'is a great voice'.  So go figure.  That's the problem with showing things to people.  One will say you've written three books in one, and another will say you need to make it more commercial.  Another will say take out this bit, and another will say leave it in.  One will say you manage all the different voices so well and someone else will get confused.

In the end you are the one confused.

The first book was only read by my then agent who took two months to tell me her assistant had read it and didn't think it was quite there yet.  That was it.  No encouragement, no suggestions, no 'can't wait to read it when you've pulled it together' just not 'there'.  Like where the fuck is 'there'?  You're suddenly in a car aged five asking your mother if you're 'there' yet without knowing where you're supposed be going, just that it would be good to arrive.  I was devastated.  Like dead dog devastated.  I put the book away in a drawer - well in the furthest reaches of my Dropbox, and forgot about it. Or let's be honest.  I didn't forget about it for a minute, I just told myself I had forgotten about it while continuing to agonise over its failure with a little dash of frustration thrown in.  It's hard when you spend a year or so on something to have it dismissed with a few words.  After I'd licked my wounds enough to wear a patch away on my fur, I resolved to rework it.  I've now done this twice and still never shown it to another soul.  I've reworked it so much that half way through the third time I've forgotten what I'm doing to it.  It's like trying to even up your fringe with a pair of nail scissors.

So, okay, on to number two.  I've written all this before and lost it when my computer crashed.  Time to rewrite I think.  And I do.  In seven months.  I'm fairly pleased with it.  I send it to a friend.  Love emanates for me it, and every step I take on the earth.  He's a good friend.  I should have married him.  So then I send it to the 6 'new' agents, having decided that the old one, who never calls except to speak snappily to others in my office, or otherwise enquires as to whether I'm still breathing unaided (during which time I've had a nervous breakdown and spent a week in the nuthouse, had a tumour removed from my foot, and also spent a month laid out with back pain), has lost interest.  Nobody likes it or me.  Nobody wants me/I'm nobody's child.  People in the office read it.  Three never say a word to me about it - draw your own damning conclusions.  I did.  The other three said conflicting things. Another two liked it.  But no agent. One later insisted she had spoken to me about it, but then corrected herself and said she'd spoken to another colleague about it.  A little bit of me died.

I realise at this point the world is neatly dividing like the Red Sea into those who say - you're crap, give up, and those who say - but there are a thousand agents, keep going, remember Harry Potter/insert another successful book/author here that wasn't placed for ages.

Yep.  I'm in the give up category, deep in my soul, but what's the band aid of denial for if you can't whack one or sixteen on top of the wound?  So I decide to write another.  A lighter tale, with more humour, something of a romp, something simpler, less pretentious.  And I do.  In five months.

'This is the best thing you've ever written' says a colleague.  'I loved it' says my daughter who hands out praise the way David Cameron gives state benefits.  So I give it to another two colleagues and my previous publisher who bought the first book, and three agents.

The colleagues never mention it again.
The previous publisher who wanted to 'built me' does not deign to respond after three months of silence.  When I eventually drop her a note to say, well I'm guessing the silence speaks a thousand words of no' she fails to respond to that too.  Go Viking.  The Caring Imprint.
Of the three agents, well you've heard the response of two.  The third said by return: 'I'll stop you there as I've just sold a book with the same premise to Quercus.'
I respond.  'Oh yes my friend said there was another she'd seen (she's a reader for Picador amongst others) but she liked mine better.'  Okay, okay, it doesn't sound like the way to win friends, agents or influence people.  I should have added the smiley face. I said it with a rueful smile, but it didn't read that way.  Agent snaps back 'Thanks for telling me that she liked yours better the one I represent.'  Bless, her feelings are hurt.  She with all the power and none of the grace, is offended.  Apparently I was incredibly rude.  'Incredibly rude.'  Not just a bit out of order, but 'Incredibly rude.'  Fuck me and all my sisters.  Really?  I responded by saying that I was merely whistling in the wind and that obviously that since her book was the one with a publisher and an agent, and mine wasn't then we both know which one was the best.'  But nope.  I am, dear readers, 'INCREDIBLY RUDE'.

I had to go home and lock myself in my bedroom after that one.  I felt like a snail that someone had pored salt on.  I mean, who is the one who can afford to be generous here?

That happened before the other agents assistant told me I didn't have a strong enough voice.

So now I do give up.  Why am I doing this?  And thus the soul searching.  It's a good question.  Why am I doing this?  I suppose I want affirmation.  And I get it, but the wrong things are affirmed.  It's rejection, failure and even worse, irrelevance, the feelings of not mattering, being brushed aside, not being good enough, being a nobody, a nonentity, unwanted, of no consequence.

I realise it's not even about the actual rejection, it's about my reaction to it.  It gets through my armour, through all the defences, to the dark, curdled recesses of my poor beleaguered soul, that the act of writing is supposed to nurture, not damage.

I'm not going to be one of those people who gets published on the 19th agent.  Let's face it, the agent is only the first of many hurdles on the way to getting your book not read by the book-buying public. In my ridiculously naivety I thought it would be the easiest part - former journalist, previously published novelist, but no it doesn't work like that.  You're only as good as your next article in journalism.  In novels you're only as good as your last book, or you're an as untried debut novelist who has yet not to sell and prove yourself unworthy of a second go.  Of course, it's all about the book.  Not really about it being good, though that too, but about it being saleable.  Honestly, honestly, honestly, I don't think my book is that great.  It's more than adequate I'd say, and certainly I see books coming through here all the time which in a race with mine I don't think would necessary beat it - though having a publisher already means they have.  It's so subjective.  But I do know it's almost certainly not going to race up the bestsellers chart or win The Orange Prize.  It's a jobbing novel with a beginning a middle and an end.  All three of them are.  But they are my worlds, that I made up, and formed and plotted and can see, clearly, in my head as though they are real places with real people in them.  Maybe that's why I keep on writing.  And fuck it if nobody reads them and they are not given the publishing seal of validation.

Maybe I should start my own Publishing House and call it Second Chance, e-format only, for people like me.  There are so many of us.  I know because with my other hat on I reject them every day.

Make yourself happy

I grew up in an age and place where nurseries were places that raised begonias and pre-school care was being tied to the clothesline to stop me wandering off.  As a result my early learning was somewhat legoless. Access to play-doh was limited (my house-proud mother didn’t like it because it got in the carpet), and paints were considered the messy anti-Christ.  Generally in our house, artistic expression was a euphemism for a tantrum – or being gay - and art was a photographic mural of Loch Lomond on the sitting room wall.

I attribute this lack of kindergarten finger-painting in my formative years to my fascination in later life with all things even vaguely crafty.  Give me a Prit Stick and point me in the direction of a toilet roll, and I immediately come over all Blue Peter. In the seventies I batiked, in the eighties I rag-rolled, in the nineties I papier-mached.  With my own children I built cereal box forts and won the Art Prize at several different schools. When my youngest was born I decided to study fine art full time in the evening, only to have my work was labelled, ‘illustrative’ (meant as an insult) and, even more cringingly heinous, ‘decorative’.  So I changed to design. When life makes you a lemon, then produce, lovely figurative, illustrated lemonade.  I wasn’t going to wait for art snobs to validate me.  Bring on the decoration.

I’ve always been a joiner.  Classes for Italian; classes for cookery; A level history, a part time degree in Arabic; Photoshop for Dummies.  But it wasn’t until I took a short course in Book Binding that time stood still and I fell totally and utterly in love. I discovered that just like love – craft, the making and perfecting of something ; be it the icing on a cake, the seam on a dress, or in my case, the spine of a book - makes you feel like your best, most alive, and most essential self.  In short, Craft is good for the soul.

‘Oh but I’m not creative,’ I hear friends say.  Of course you are. All children draw pictures and all children paint.  They’re given crayons and modelling clay as toys, told to draw’ whenever you need them to amuse themselves, and sticking things with glue is an integral part of the nursery school day.  So why is it that when we grow up so many of us think we’re ‘not artistic’?  Who says?  Few kids turn out a Hockney in the painting corner (though most can manage a Pollock), but it doesn’t stop them being enjoyably immersed and proud of their works of art.

Too often dismissed as the ugly, fat sister of ‘Art’, Craft serves the dual purpose of letting you explore the world of creativity at the same time as developing a skill.  You produce something useful, something beautiful, something that is unique and exists only as a result of your efforts.  A baby without the breast-feeding and the sleepless nights.

What’s more is that, unlike love, where the ideal is to fall only once, faithfully and for life, with craft you can be as promiscuous as you like, and rather than harming you, it actually enhances your life.

From bookbinding – the creation of a lovely, hand-made book with nothing more than card, paper, flour and water paste and a needle and thread – the most prosaic things that everyone has lying around in their house, I got rather carried away with the wrapping paper we used to bind the book.  Why stop at a book cover, I thought?  Then it was box making.  Then I began covering chairs, cupboards and chest of drawers until my children joked that they were afraid to sit down lest they found themselves covered with Paperchase wrap, and sealed with a coat of varnish.

I love colour, though I accept that I may not know how to use it.  I have an eclectic, some would say, eccentric house, but note the important pronoun here.  I. When my  marriage broke down and I was left in the family home, a shrine to all things ‘us’ it broke my heart.  I was surrounded by the things we’d chosen together, the relics of the shared life that I could no longer share.  But then I realised that the house could be a blank canvas for my own taste, my own expression, my own ideas and slowly I began to change it.

After I’d wrapped up all the furniture – I did a course at the Phoenix on Goldborne Road in London, a stockist of Annie Sloane Paints – dear Annie, the patron saint of the lazy decorator.  No sanding, no rubbing down, no prep at all, just whack it on and the ugliest table becomes a canvas.  It’s a fact known to few people that I discovered Shabby Chic back in the day when it was just shabby.  My home is a shrine to the battered furniture that nobody else wants, the slightly tatty, the outright wonky Ikea.  But with a wash of colour, a pot of paint and a bit of footballer’s wife – fake gold leaf – bob’s your uncle and Annie’s your aunt.  I painted the stairs with a pink stripe down the middle and from a place of sorrow, my home has become my solace, my joy, my playground.

My latest venture has been into mosaics.  Catherine Parkinson, an artist from my other food-for-the-soul-venture, my choir, is one of the few people to teach Mosaics in London.    I became instantly addicted.  Not only is mosaic a metaphor for life – just think, you take a lot of broken pieces and reassemble them in a different form, for a different purpose, that is a pleasure to behold (at least I think so).  If you break a plate – worry not, it has a new lif e in your mosaic.  In addition there’s the  sheer, unbridled sense of belonging that comes from sitting in a studio with five other, very different women (yes it has to be said, craft is often a women’s thing) each creating, working, making, while talking gently as the mood takes them.  It’s almost religious.  A quaker meeting with embelishments.  It’s a quilt circle, a knitting bee,  a song, - the sort of elemental thing women have done together down through the ages where you’re not a mother or a wife, just a fellow crafter.  More than a pastime, more than a hobby, craft is something totally life affirming.  Even if you can’t draw or paint in the traditional sense, if you can cut and paste, hold a paintbrush, you can beautify your life.

Time Flies

And I'm back at work tomorrow.  More than two long, lovely weeks at home with nothing to do but relax (at least that was the theory) and it's back to normal.

Just in time really, not that I'm anxious to rise at 6 and brave public transport, nor am I anxious to go into the office first without my regular morning buddy who has left to take another much better job.  It's going to be hard for a few weeks until I get used to it.  But you do.  It's not the individuals so much as the slow, slow drip of people we've lost over the past year that gets to you as slowly, slowly, the death by a thousand cuts, the landscape changes, and I guess one day it will just be so totally barren I won't want to be there either. 

I was sitting on the sofa trying to organise my thoughts - what I needed to do, what I needed to finish, start, arrange, organise, ready for tomorrow, and I realised I hadn't thought about the coming year.  What do I want to do?

For the past several years I've had finish a book at the top of my list.  I've done that now twice, and am half way through a third, but it's the publishing them that's hard.  One I never sent out, the second I sent out but got rejected and need to change it, and the third I'm still working on.  It seems like goal that recedes further each year, seeing the book in print, and I can't say that this doesn't dismay me.  Not because it's a tragedy, but it just seems to be slipping away, that idea I had of myself as a writer, not because I can't write but because the market that would support my sort of writing just doesn't exist in as wide a form as it did even five years ago.  It saddens me to think that my novel was a flash in the pan, but at the same time, I'm proud of it, and if that's to be the only one, then it's a fine one to represent me.  And there's self publishing, too.  I can do that with not too much downheartedness, but just as if I were publishing it with a reputable publishing house, it still has to be in top form, the best it can be, and self means just that, no editor, no editorial advice, no guidance, no feedback.  i gave the last one to several people.  SOme loved it and some didn't say another word to me about it again (draw your own conclusion) and those that did talk to me about it had such differing comments that I was left bewildered as to which way to go in the editing process.  So I did nothing.  There's something a little soul destroying about spending another four months on it getting it into some sort of shape that I feel good about, to sell it for 69p on Amazon and still have nobody read it.

And it's the writing I love, anyway, though naturally you write because you want to be read.  You have an invisible audience in your head and you want to engage this reader.  You don't write just as an exercise in vanity.  It's from an urge to communicate.  Though vanity does come into it, of course it does, otherwise why does one want it published 'properly'?  It's ego, and self-image, and self-worth.

I realise thought that I am, have even, given up on the idea of myself as a writer, a published writer, and am quietly becoming accustomed to the idea that I'm a nonentity, just another scribbler.  It is sad and a bit dispiriting.  But the world does not crack into two, and nobody cries.  I suppose it's life - that you have to scale back your ideas, your dreams even.

Does this mean I'm giving up on writing.  No.  I'm giving up on caring about it as a means to define myself publicly.  I mean, publicly?  What public.  I live a quiet, semi-solitary life and see few people, there is no public.  I like it fine, too.

My resolutions for the next year are to NOT care what people think of me, unless I feel I've let myself done by acting badly towards someone.  But as Maya Angelou says, people can only make you feel small if you give them permission.  I don't.  I don't need anyone's approval.  They don't even need to like me.  I'm fine as I am.

I will always diet because I like the way I look when I'm thinner and I have a wardrobe of clothes that like me better too when I'm thinner.  However, I do plan to make the absolute best of myself whatever size I am.  I have drawers of scarves and earrings and necklaces and I never wear them because I can't be bothered.  Bother, Marion.  They're lovely.  Use them, or give them away.  Enjoy them.  Enjoy being me in all my fat arsed imperfect dyed blonde glory.  Nobody's looking at me anyway.  Even if I weighed 9 stone, I'm past the turning heads stage.

There are more.  But I need my ugly sleep...