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My ‘Oldness’

13 Sep

Rolling over in bed last night I got a bit of my insides caught in my ribs.

This has never happened to me before. Unsure of how to remedy the situation, I carefully rolled back to my original position, untucked my inner wobbly bits and rolled again more carefully without snagging my innerds on my ribs.

I can only assume that I caught my  ‘oldness’ – as I’ve dubbed it – unawares and that as I age, the bits inside me will start sagging as much as the drooping exteriors. Clearly they’ve already started.

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Writing a la Sex in the City ain’t all it’s cracked up to be

13 Mar

Much of my twenties was misspent watching crummy rom-coms, Friends and Sex in the City – I now find myself the freelance journalist I aspired to be back then wishing I could be like SJP.

Funny how when you get what you want in life it’s never quite what you’d hoped it would be. That’s not to say I don’t like doing what I’m doing. No, it’s safe to say I love the work bit- dabbling in hotels, restaurants, food, mumsy stuff, flitting from subject to subject as the commissions take me – that’s great.

What I object to is being sold the SJP myth that you can write on your bed. I’ve tried sitting lengthways, cross-legged, lying down, on the edge, in the middle – you name it I’ve done it – it’s all impossible. You really can’t do it.

Well that’s not strictly true, you can, but if you’re the wrong side of 35 then within a minute your back starts giving you jip, your coxix goes numb and your neck gets stiff from being forced into the wrong kind of work position.

I can only imagine what those corporate work-station assessors would do if they saw me now – I can hear the tut tut tutting already. But then maybe I’m just being silly – it is a lap-top afterall…

Death changes everything – or does it?

27 Feb

As usual, I’m way behind with my reading – piles of things I want to or feel I should read are littered around the flat but, as I battle my way through days with the two babies, I very rarely get the chance to read a nib, let alone a full blown article.

So I finally got round to reading – in The Week, so at least a week delayed anyway – the back-story of Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit and vegetable seller who set himself alight and was the spark who lit the tinder keg of the Middle East. I must point out that although I love both international and domestic politics, I’m by no means an expert – I leave that to politics teacher-hubby, but I wanted to share a more personal take on this.

When my dad died almost exactly a year ago, it was sudden and totally unexpected. For my mum, sister and I the world stopped and has never been the same again since. It was a cataclismic event that has changed our lives irrevocably.

Yet, nothing else changed. Not a jot. The very next day life went on exactly the same, the neighbour who’d been with my mum as the police and ambulance arrived went off to work, did a normal day’s work and returned at her usual time. My sister got two weeks compassionate leave and was back at work. When she returned her timetable was still exactly the same – so every thursday afternoon she was in the same lesson, in the same place, remembering that one, two, three weeks ago it was there that she had learned that our dad had died. 

It may seem a petty point, and possibly a ridiculous one given the horrific bloodshed now occuring in the Middle East, let alone the uncertain, possibly dire outcome of all this mess. But on a personal level I find myself wondering if Mohammed’s family take comfort in the fact that for once the world really has stopped because their loved one died. The world will never be the same because of his death.

I find it hard to believe that the world can carry on regardless after the death of my dad, we all felt something shattering should’ve happened to mark this momentus and awful event, yet nothing did.

That fact is, it’s one of the hardest things to deal with and Mohammed’s family are ‘lucky’ to have had his death marked by such momentus world events. Let us hope they have a happy ending too.

twitter – the beauty of being a s’leb

10 Nov

The great Giles Coren – has 70 odd followers and is followed by 35,000 +. He talks about  ” shitting followers like a typhus victim in a laxative factory” and gets away with it. I mention baby josh has a squitty tummy and snot coming out the wrong end and people are up in arms – not funny apparently and way too much information.

Oh well, we live and learn.

Moral of the story: get critical mass of people who find you funny before talking about bottom stuff

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