I just went up to tuck Rowan in and he was flat on his back, snoring, with his head under his pillow. Gave me quite a turn until I heard the stentorian nasal stylings issuing forth. He’s grown so much over the Summer that he’s shot out of all his trousers. Either they pop open over his tummer-tum like he’s Tom Kitten, or his ankles shoot forth from his cuffs like Leon the Assassin. In size 7-8 and he’s but 5. Must be all the grubbles I’m pouring down his maw – but he’s so full of sunshine and laughter, and good humour, and vitality. Growing fat on fun! He told me this evening that he’s die if I couldn’t be his mummy always. I don’t know where he hears these things – and possibly a five-year-old could have less morbid fancies – but I love them. I’ve never been as close to another human being as I am to him. Regarding what he said, I believe the boot to be firmly on the other foot.

M has come a cropper this afternoon – slipped on top of the Saracen when he was trying to close the top hatch in a pissing rainstorm and has fallen badly and scraped himself all over, banged his head and goodness knows what else. He’s a superman in many if not most respects but against the forces of nature, well – you see the result!! I have him tucked up in bed also – it’s like sardines up there – all in their serried ranks like fish in a tin – and he’s sending up zeds like a good’un. I worry about him so. He’s so fearless and punishes himself so remorselessly in a physical sense. He makes me very happy. He’s truly the kindest and best of men.

Coming home is an exercise in comfort and joy for me now. There have been may years when this was not so. Thank god. Thank god it is true in this moment.

Sitting here watching Ocean’s 12 on the second Sunday of the break. We’ve had a superb weekend, meals, drinks, went to the horse show being held locally, and just generally relaxed. Roboat is in Menorca with my parents and I am working through the hols, but it’s never as stressful as when the whole team is in. I get more done in a day during the breaks than I generally do in three during term.

These days, more is going right for me than is going wrong. I’m sorry to be so blunt! For the first time on my life, or so it seems, there is a chance that things are becoming more settled. I love Malcolm. I love being with him and we’re happy. My son is settled and funny and a joy to be with. My job may have static, but I can cope and there’s help in place, plus great opportunities and I get the holidays off!! Is it unfashionable to be so happy? Yes, I guess so but there you have it.

I remember from somewhere that you need to be emotionally distressed to produce your best work so I guarantee that mine is going to be rubbish from now on. I am currently looking forward to my new postgrad course, the rest of the Summer, challenges and chances at work, getting down to a size 10 and enjoying the rest of the Summer. and then it’s my fave time of year and THENNNN it’s Christmas. Life is good.

I feel ambivalent about this – I love working with my friends and the pub runs well when us girls and boys are in charge. I get good tips and the wage money will pay for R’s new bedroom decoration and furniture, as well as getting me a few bits and buying M’s birthday present. However. I’m so christless beat.

WE-hinge, moan. Actually, it’s going to be good fun and it’s only 10 days – after that it’s only 3 and a half weeks until the Summer holidays and I can REALLY get a rest! I think I can cope for that long. Pity M rather – he’s dashing away with a smoothing iron, running about at home doing laundry, buttling breakfasts, trays of tea and coffee and fresh towels all over the building and smiling till his nose falls off at all and sundry. He fell onto the sofa in a paroxysm of despair the other day and howled about his tribulations as a housewife which made me giggle till I cried. I think a frilly apron and maid’s cap might be coming his way in the post…

We have the delightful and gloriously refreshing JM coming to stay on Saturday – hooray! She has promised to bring gin and wield an iron while she’s with us which will alleviate things a great deal. It’s always wonderful to see her and there’s stil lhope that I can drag M up to her neck of the woods before she skedaddles back to Sydders at the end of the Summer.

In other news I put my name down to provide a course on jewellery making for the students as part of ‘Enrichment Thursday’, where all staff were asked to think up an activity for the booklet from which students could pick. I bargained on 8 students. I’ve got 20, and a waiting list twice as long as that. Heeeelp. Luckily, some actual teachers and a couple of the TAs have asked if they can come and help so I won’t be the cowardly lion among a roomful of Christians….

Getting divorced is an expensive business, and I am reminded of Grandpa in the Lost Boys, who remarks to his daughter, ‘Lucy, you’re the only woman I know who didn’t improve her financial situation by getting divorced’ but I think that was then. Now, women who divorce or are divorced most often end up in the kind of financial position you’d not wish on your worst enemy. Particularly women with children. Particularly, women with children who have the temerity to get a new partner and, shock horror, actually try to set up a home and thereby get some stability and normality back into theirs and their childrens’ lives. The state, it would seem, hate this kind of recovery.

I get a payment from my ex-husband but it isn’t much. However, as he keep reminding me, it’s what he’s required to pay by the state. Cold comfort. Meanwhile, I work term-time only and am at home in the school holidays, which is great for Ro and me, but means that I am paid only for 41 weeks of the year, not 52. On a local authority salary, this comes out as not much of the little it was to begin with.

I have another job, also, in the pub up the road. As anyone knows who’s done bar work, it’s tiring, smelly, hard on your feet, noisy and takes up a lot of time in return for (mainly) minimum wage or not much more. The cameraderie is good. The tips are useful. But a full 7 hour shift, or two, on top of a 40 hour week and you’ve got a recipe for exhaustion.

The reason I’m working like this is that I owe about £20,000. This is between credit cards and loans. I have elected not to become a bankrupt. I owe the money, and feel I should pay it back. I have entered a voluntary agreement with a debt management charity and have been working as hard as I can to pay off as much as I can for about 18 months now. It’s working well. Some things have been difficult to cope with. I now have no credit rating. None. My credit score has fallen from a near-ideal 968 to a terrible 420. I couldn’t apply for a library card and get it. I can’t hold a credit or store card. I can’t get an overdraft. I couldn’t rent a house, or get a car on lease, or take advantage of any of the little things that make modern life easier. I doubt I could even get a mobile phone contract.

The largest result is that I have to an extent lost my independence. Ironical that the very thing I value most, my ability to deal with life as an equal to anyone, has been taken away by my trying to do the right thing. In a practical sense, this doesn’t matter. I have a home and a car, a job and enough to eat. If I had to leave Three Chimneys for any reason, however, I wouldn’t do so well. Just the basics would be difficult. Finding a house to rent. Getting a phone.

Trying to better your circumstances isn’t easy. Nowadays, this sort of realignment takes balls the size of grapefruit to even contemplate, let alone attempt. My life is due to continue like this for at least another 4 years. After that, we’ll see, but I will have no good credit history so…

And all this, before I’ve factored in all the codswallop, bullshit and well-meant but utterly muddle-headed ‘advice’ I have been given by people who should know better – or at least know that they don’t know better, and so shut the frook up. The single cruellest thing anyone has said to me thus far is, ‘Well, you get *such and such a wage*. What are you spending it on?? Make a budget and stick to it!’. I mean. Please. Hello.

There, that little mantra should keep me thinking right today. A mantra a day keeps the nutcase away. My inner nutcase is trying to come and sit on my knee at the moment but I won’t let her. She smells funny and wears stupid clothes and is insanely negative and has a really ugly roll of fat around the middle, plus bingo wings and varicose veins. She’s heavy. She wriggles and pokes me and talks while I’m trying to read. I don’t hate her, but I wish she would SOD OFF and go watch ‘enders while I’m trying to move on to more important matters.

Working in the pub again; mainly because I equals skint and there’s no other easily obtainable money to be had round here that doesn’t involve petty (or not so petty) larceny. Enjoying it; and also interested to note that my anxiety levels have dropped yet again (hah – I equals not caring a fig, apparently). Useful. More relaxing, certainly. I hate anxiety. It saps me and makes my tummy go all squirty.

Having to let go of certain things – or people, actually. Harsh. Perhaps unneccessary. However. I need to be around people who are less mental than me at present. I need the normality of people who actually see depression as something other people get. It gives me a yardstick and an aspirational point. Many would see me as abandoning the sisterhood of pain or something. I don’t care. If you’re drowning, you don’t cling onto the man drowning next to you, you get hold of a log. Simple survival tactic. People who’ve been there, who are there and are dealing, no problem. People who have immersed themselves and created a reality where this twisted, egocentric view of the world is their new normalcy – no way. I don’t want to sit around in some emotional circle-jerk while John Denver softly plays in the background, commiserating with other loonies and telling loony stories and dooing loony one-upmanship and counting the scars. No. I’m going to get on with my life, go to therapy and keep taking the pills. The clouds will lift someday.

Really nice weekend, which comprised: doing nothing, gardening, doing nothing, small glass of wine, doing nothing, sleeping, gardening, baking bread, sleeping, going for a walk, snuggling with Mal, reading the Milennium Trilogy again, doing nothing, staring into space and planting tomatoes.

Slept well, woke rested and two hours into the day feel feverish, sweaty and blurry-eyed, despite it being a cool 12 degrees out. Maybe I have malaria.

In other news the swallows came back yesterday, I am wearing a nice dress from Monsoon in green with a feathery pattern in pink and white and black, with black leggings. I am feeling positive. I am feeling solvent. Heck, I am solvent. And I have reason to believe I will remain solvent until the end of the month, even better. The boss is out all day which enables me to get through the teetering pile of crap on my desk. I have split out all the massive command and infrastructure tasks that have been hanging round my neck like multiple pairs of skates and ahve put them in a box till the last week of the Easter Hols, whereupon I will be in ehre when it’s quiet, sorting out some shit.

*funny story*

My bro is a doctor, and he, his girlfriend and another intern were working as a triage team over the weekend at a very well-known London hospital. My bro is insanely, immensly tall, well over 7 feet, but his girlfriend is only 5 foot and a smidge. They went mob-handed into a cubicle to be met by a seated older lady, who graciously assented to their request to take her blood pressure. Job done, they exited, whereupon the girlf doubled up in a fit of giggles. What she’d noticed, and what the tallies hadn’t was that said lady was sat not upon a chair but a commode. They apologised. Well, you’d have to, wouldn’t you?

Just
Need
To
Get Through Today.

It’s sometimes hard to see the good in things, and there sometimes doesn’t seem to be much point in it at all. The temptation to descend into a solipsistic circular whingeing dirge is strong. Nearly irresistable. I try when this urge comes upon me to focus on something bright, positive, energetic, external to myself, so that it can act as a capstan round which I can hurl a line.

There’s good in everything but it requires energy to get it out of its base material. I breathe in, I breathe out. I do it again. Enough effort, for now.

At the moment, for example, I’m trying to chew an unbelievably tough piece of dried mango (but the flavour is so true once you get it to bend a bit!) typing this, keeping an ear out for the boss, thinking about the bills I need to pay, TODAY. Thinking about coffee. Worrying about Ro’s behaviour at school. Worrying about money. Not looking forward to the Easter ‘break’ as I’ll be working at the pub and dealing with guests. Thinking about birthdays. Ro’s thank-you cards are still unwritten, two weeks after his birthday. I’ve got to find three grand by next february to buy my car in and I know that no matter how much I scrimp, and do without, on my current salary I won’t make it. I need dental work. I need to see the doctor. I can’t get appointments that fit in with work.

People phone and ask me to do things and I get this vast flash of irritation. I get home at night and just want some time on my own, totally, to do nothing except me things. By 9pm I’m desperate for sleep and so M and I are existing in parallel universes and it isn’t nice.

Numb; good word. I’d be happier if my every utterance on here wasn’t a complaint but I just want to get through this bit, please, and onto the next bit!

*deep breath*

In other news, the garden is looking lovely, with green shoots, surprise survivals from the hideous cold over the winter, and every windowledge indoors is festooned with slips of plants, rooting and multiplying themselves, ready for a brave display. The big regale lilies I planted are sprouting well, and should get to 4 foot of exquisitely scented white trumpet flowers, if I am lucky.
David’s post discussing his lack of sartorial and editorial colour due to his happiness makes me happy, but I don’t feel any more interesting because I’m not where he is, although I wish I was. It’s a fine line. I suppose I feel as though I am what I do; if I stop doing things I will diminish, particularly if I stop doing the things that wear me out. These things are always the things that mean a lot to other people – writing letters, meeting up, supporting friends, being punctilious about manners and thank-you’s and so on. Sounds terrible, doesn’t it. I just don’t have time to be wonderful. I’m trying too hard to be normal and effective in a few, vastly curtailed areas. All I actually want to do is nothing, absolutely nothing whatever at all.

1.The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

2.Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.

 3.Never use the word “then” as a conjunction– we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.

4.Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.

5.When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

6.The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto biographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.

7.You see more sitting still than chasing after.

8.It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

9.Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

10.You have to love before you can be relentless.