Wally the Wombat Flies In!

My darlingest Woo at Curiouser and Curiouser send through a parcel for Roro and it arrived at the weekend, diverting him neatly away from an incipient tantrum complete with teakettle whistling, stamping and shouts of “It’s NOT FAIRRR!!!”, which is his new black.

Now, I love Woo for multifarious reasons, not least of which is a little-seen and seldom-studied form of advance strategic present telepathy which she possesses; the abilty to set the chain of events in motion, weeks ahead of time, so that fractious children receive the balm and diversion of a present at exactly the right moment to prevent their parents going into meltdown. God, I love her.

Anyhoo, in the parcel was a disquisition on the rights of the Wombat by Michael Morpurgo (rather as if Annie Proulx suddenly went mad and started writing intelligent children’s books – it would beat the crap out of the Oxford Reading Tree – !) and an adorable stuffed womber bat which Ro has attached himself bodily to and who is called, predictably, Wally. Ro takes him everywhere. He is a good dreams wombat – the best possible wombat to own.

Thank you, thank you, thank you my Woo. You are a princess and a lovely friend.

Coming Back Up

Cracked up and have been re-dosed. Thank god.

I suppose, really, ‘cracked up’ is putting it a bit strong. The mountains in the way simply became too hard to climb. You know you’re failing when everything looks like too much effort, including just breathing and getting from dawn to dusk in a civilised, organised and poised manner. I managed 3 weeks off the pills and have reached a point where I know, categorically, that I am not able to cope without them.

This is chastening, and upsets me a great deal, but I’m not insane – why not take them, if they help?

The Doctor was very kind, and said that there were people that she treated who took these pills for the length of their entire lives. That, if I had depression in the family, I was to expect to need them and to accept it. As it happens, I have a great deal of trouble accepting it. But I will, for the sake of my own peace of mind, and the health and well-being of me and of my son.

I don’t want to take anything like this, in the final analysis. However, as it seems to be the only thing keeping the machine that is me running, I need to look at it more as the grease that oils the machine, rather than the fuel. The fuel is me; the means by which it is distributed is the medicine I take. Like any other chronically-ill person, I have limits beyond which it is foolish to push myself. I need to learn where they are, get to the point and then stop.

Withdrawal. Comedown. Call it what you will.

After thought, I’m making this post public. I need to say this stuff – and someone might need to hear it.

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I’m off my antidepressants and oh, Barbara, how I wish I wasn’t. I want them back. I crave them in the atavistic, visceral way any junkie craves their fix. I feel appalling – tired, ill-prepared, unloveable, fat, clumsy, weepy, ineffective, miserable, banal, unfocused, stupid and mean.

I hate them for altering my normal settings to the point that being normal makes me feel so abnormal. I hate them, because they’ve caused me to work harder, faster, for longer, stretching my natural resistance and energy thinner and ever thinner, till we get where I am now – a shaking travesty of my regular self, dragging myself about, utterly wrecked. I fucking hate them.

I’m going to try to grit it out till next Friday. I have an appointment with the lovely Dr S, my heroine (I didn’t realise the bitter irony of calling her that till I’d typed it, and I’m going to leave it in there for the slap value).

I’m praying that this is a blip, and that soon (soon!) my body will rid itself of the chemical garbage floating about and I’ll get my life back, untrammelled by drugs. I want myself back, in all my sharp, witty, poised, confident and scintillating splendour. I want my happiness to show again. Authentically, not because my brain is being held hostage to a daily dose.

I don’t do addiction. Smoking? Packed it up cold turkey. Drinking too much? Stop drinking too much. Food? Moderation! I am going to make myself forget I ever took them. However, the main reason why I hate these fucking tiny little pills is because, for the first time in my life, I fear might actually need them in a way I can’t manage otherwise, net result being that I will end up taking them again, despite not wanting to.

Crisps and other matters….

There should be a word for the feeling you get when only salt and vinegar flavoured crisps will do.

I have a morose and speechless lust for salty snacks; anchovies, nuts, crisps, pickles, you name it. What I can do to a jar of cornichons and onions isn’t printable in a mixed forum. Just ten minutes ago, I found myself stumbling to the caff, other-directed, holding out my 50p piece like a sleepwalker, praying they hadn’t run out of s & v as they so often do on a Friday. Praise be, they had not, so I got my fix. Incidentally, the snack fulfils 3 out of the 4 daily requirements under the great P J O’Rourke’s guide to Bachelor Foodgroups; starch, salt and sugar.

The fourth, alcohol, was sadly not represented here but it will be this evening as my inestimable cousin Button and I set the world to rights avec plusiers des scoops.

Tomorrow to the Hay Festival once again; me to see Antony Beevor discussing the D-Day Landings, and Button to see Robert Kennedy Jnr talking about pig farming. Yes, well. A mooch about, a few drinks in The Three Tuns then dinner and bed, at a house kindly loaned by a friend for the occasion. Home once more and I must commence packing for my great Ibithencan adventure – lunch out with friends rounds out a perfect weekend, then my driver appears at 0330hrs Monday to take me to the airport. Yippee!!!

Musical Infantilism

Metro Station~Shake It Music Video

So I have no idea what either possessed or inspired me, but I have just downloaded the Metro Station album from iTunes.

Let’s embrace the worst, first – this is a band made up of bendy little rubber boys, led by Miley Cyrus’s older brother Trace (really? Billy Ray must have been tripping that day). Not only that, but the co-lead is Mason Musso, whose older brother actually stars in Hannah ‘I wanna be thinna, I’m not a sinna’ Montana. Trace is the one with the face furniture and the rather superb and snazzy body art – Mason appears therefore to be the little emo smurf with the dodgy hair and the drainpipe trousers that would see Gok Wan have 40,000 fits and send him off for some sartorial readjustment.

Mason Musso has been watching too many Cure videos – he sings like Robert Smith, hugs the camera like Robert Smith, but has failed signally to note that Robert Smith was an unutterable dreamboat at 25 and also had the most extraordinary voice. Doing the camera lunge from In Between Days isn’t going to make you into the man himself.

But, slag them off however I like, despise their hideously over-manufactured schtick, they make exemplary light emo electro-pop and some danged good tunes too. Straight onto CD and into the jalopy. No apologies. If I am going to reprise my youth I’m bloody well going to do the job properly.

And just for general edification ~ I posted the video. Enjoy!

Bolthole Bliss

My little house is so tiny that, if the sitting room was a stomach, it would have been stapled… there is a sort of belly or eddy at the bottom of the stairs which allows people to slow down and stop off on their way to the kitchen. In this tiny space I have made my refuge.

 There’s room for my super couch, my books (or some of them at any rate – there’s 600 of them behind me on another bookcase!) my reading lamps, my footstool, and my tiny weeny television, which barely gets used. I spend the majority of my evenings curled up at the far end of the couch, reading; the computer on at my elbow giving the best that iTunes can offer, my phones like ducks in a row;  I’m lurking, shrined in retirement behind draped voile and blinds. No-one need ever know I’m there.

And if I get snoozy, as I always do, the blankets come out and I slide down the hill into my cranberry cloud-like couch, and drift away. It couldn’t be more perfect.

I’m enjoying inviting new people into my home – it’s mine to do what I like with for the first time in a long time. I’m posting this photo now as a statement of identity – and new identity. My divorce becomes legal on June 2nd 2009 at 10.15am.

Chocolate! and other things it is useless to resist….

I always do this. I get three quarters through the day after being virtuous and eating high fibre, low fat / salt / sugar, loads of fruit, loads of water, aescetic lunch, omega 3’s yada yada, and kill it all stone dead by eating a Kit Kat Chunky as fast as a 40 foot pine trunk going through a chipper. Shards of chocolate everywhere. Where’s my ruddy backbone??

Which feeling serves to remind me that I am far from immune to other temptations, currently; I’m fighting the good fight against wine, large portions, spending money, and sleeping the days away. So much effort on so many fronts, just to maintain the appearance of standing still!

Sod it, girl. Have some chocolate, it’ll make you feel better.

In which I examine my attitude to Others…

I love hindsight. It’s such a powerful tool for making oneself feel tiny. If you hate yourself enough, you can actually skewer yourself on the tip of your hindsight spear and wander about like some cursed knight of old, condemned to be impaled forever on the forks of your own regret.

However, I don’t hate myself enough for this sort of self-regarding nonsense. In fact, I don’t hate myself at all!

How do I relate to other people? With candour, with love; with the sort of frankness I’d like to get back. I don’t play games. I don’t coerce responses from others by holding back. I take evidence of the correctness of my actions by looking at the calibre of friends that I am lucky enough to have: honest, generous, intelligent, beautiful people, inside as well as out. Loyal, unswerving and brave.

So if I stumble during this time of re-adjustment to the single life, if I mis-interpret or (heaven help us!) over-believe the hype, if I don’t ‘play the game’ the way other people want me to play it, I shall not be sorry; I’m being me, and can’t be anyone else. I love the learning and if it makes me laugh at myself in wry fashion, that’s good too; I’ll remember that I am NOT, after all, Katherine Hepburn (worst luck!) but that I am, withal, me – worthy of love, and honour, and support, and care, and respect, and with the same if not more to give back.

Grammatical Pet Hates # 754

Noticed today on the website of a multinational company who should certainly know better:

All fields marked with an asterix must be completed

If the requisite fields are indeed denoted by the appearance of a small Gaulish warrior I am yet to be aware of it!  When I pointed the faux pas out to the company in question there was a distinct lack of humour in the response. You’d think it would have made their day.

The Devil makes work for idle hands…

… and therefore I am working on a Public Holiday, to avoid the possibility of temptation!!

I realised the corrupting power of decadence, yesterday evening; lying at full stretch on the couch, touching neither end, one of the 6 or is it 8 cushions settled under my head like a cranberry coloured cloud. Like being hugged by a bear upholstered in velvet. Amazing.

To stop myself from inhabiting said couch all today, tomorrow and possibly Sunday as well, I’m in the office doing an audit. This will both get me ahead for next week, and allow me to spend all Sunday lurking, reading, snoozing and scratching luxuriously without feeling even the remotest scintilla of guilt. And if the devil wants to make work with my idle hands, let him.