Today the news is full of outrage because the boss of a major bank, owned by UK taxpayers is to receive a huge bonus payout, a little short of a million pounds. I was also financially outraged today, on a slightly smaller scale ;-), when I went to make a purchase. I’ve had a cold for a few days, quite unusual for me, and this morning I’d dripped my way through all the tissues I had with me. So in my lunch break I popped into the small branch of a certain major news retailer, set up as a convenience store in the hospital, during my lunch break. I saw three choices and asked the price of each, expecting to pay through the nose (PTP!) a little. My first option was the equivalent of the quality you would find in a pound shop, the next the basic version of the brand name and the last the man sized brand name. The prices, can you guess? £2.49, £2.99 and £3.79, I kid you not, this is for a single box of tissues, and I nearly fell through the floor. ‘What? I only want one box, I would expect twin or triple packs for that.’ They looked at me as if I was crazy and offered a handbag ten pack for 99p. As it was that or my sleeve I had to fork out. Is it that I am a complete raging crone? Or do you agree that it’s totally nasty to charge prices that high, when most of the customers are patients or their visitors? Being in hospital is stressful enough without being ripped off and taken advantage of by a large national company. Grrrh.
Tag: Musings
Ten Things that Puzzled Me Before Ten o’Clock Today
- A young woman out running at 8am in just Lycra shorts and cropped top. It was cold and although she would have been working up a sweat, how can it be good if so much skin is exposed and cold-burnt red?
- Seeing that a man I know of is still working in his mid seventies. He is probably close to being a millionaire and has been really ill in the last couple of years. So why not kick back and have some fun while he can?
- Young women that are kilogramily challenged still have waists, older women usually don’t. Why, how is that fair?
- When workmen speak to me they have the sort of look of respect on their faces reserved for wise old crones, when did they stop with the leering look?
- I can understand people buying sandwiches I do it myself sometimes – with some unusual filling if I’m away somewhere. But why pay £2.50 from the corner shop for a round of simple cheese and pickle when for a fiver you can buy the ingredients and make five rounds and have leftovers?
- There’s a black cat that crosses a complex crossroads with four crossings and traffic lights all over the shop. Mademoiselle has various routes but whichever one she’s taking she always stands and waits until the little man goes green. Do you think someone could install a push button at cat level and make it a little cat going green instead?
- How people are in such a hurry that they aim and dash through traffic on a busy road with pushchairs – in front of them!
- Why those children are pretending to be med students when they should be revising for their GCSE’s.
- Just how many tired people the hospital can spit out after a night shift, to be replaced by all of us bleary eyed day types. Several thousand manage to slot into their roles on the campus with hardly any confusion, how is this possible?
- There was an exception to number 4 above, when I was quite definitely flirted with by a doctor, who wasn’t even vaguely grotty.
Answers for the above on a postcard please – virtual of course. I really need help with some of the many things that cause me confusion.
Three Words from a Crazy Polish Woman
My crazy Polish friend gave me my three words today. She’s a very intelligent woman who is slowly inventing a new language sprinkled with dedeeeee type sounds, and I’d hoped that she would come up with some inspiring choices, or even specially invent some, that I could help to define and progress. But no, she gave me some dull accountancy type ones and I thought twice about whether to bother writing from them.
Walking home in the sunshine I started thinking about the thirteen months I’ve been in this job. I work in a finance office in a large NHS foundation trust, a very small bee in a vast hive and it gives me a real buzz. Unlike previous jobs I’ve had, I don’t carry it home and there is zero stress. My colleagues are a diverse bunch who for their own safety, would probably be best permanently contained in the rabbit warren we inhabit for thirty seven and a half hours a week. We have the class clowns, the stroppy mood swingers, the mother hens, wannabe Romeos and the enfant Perdue’s, they’re glorious and I love watching them act out their roles.
The work itself isn’t challenging and many would think it sounds incredibly boring doing credit control for a big part of each day. The thing is, it’s about working people – quickly assessing how to handle everyone you call to get the best result. With some it means being quite firm and assertive, most just being genuine and once in a while – especially with the Welsh men – a touch flirtatious. And then there’s the call centre in Mumbai, renowned for the difficulty in communicating, but I just sit back and enjoy their accents and dream about being in the heat of India. It’s always about building relationships over a period of time, and I think because I’m quite good at that, I’ve been able to make a difference in my job, when the payments reach the bank as promptly as possible.
I’ve had more responsible jobs in the past, ones that would keep me awake at night thinking about those three words my crazy Polish friend gave me, depreciation, overheads and capital, but those are boring and I’m happy being unchallenged. I have two windows beside my desk, I can see trees just outside and the distant hills. I can drift away with lots of sky and birdsong. Other people can do accountancy, I’ll stick to people persuading for as long as they’ll have me, and find my challenges in other directions.
Gifts, Secrets, Heart
Gifts to cherish are the gifts of the heart
beauty, both hidden, and the effervescent,
that blooms then fizzles with time.
Treasure the gift of a child, of knowledge, of a God given talent.
The joy of a souls recognition, the prize of a love shared.
Gifts to cherish are the secrets of the heart, a secret shared to a love.
A story entrusted and kept to self, withheld. A breath and then release.
A secret diary of herstory, held for a generation, now whispered.
Next, shout it loud, a tunnelling to the future, an echo.
Gifts to cherish are the gifts of faith in the love
of a heart eased of pain. No longer bloody blood red,
not shattered, but reshaped by the song of a valentine.
A soul reaches, emerges from the diary of gifts,
for-giveness through towers of forgetfulness.
Gifts to cherish are hearts that hold secrets
deep beneath distant landscape they rest.
Shout loudly, resonate, herstory – history colliding
and healed for eternity, intact.
Around the Charity in Thirty Minutes
There was a middle aged man sat on the ground outside the post office when I walked past on my way to the cemetery with the dogs. Scruffy, unkempt, unwashed and down and out. I made eye contact because I hate ignoring people – but maybe doing so was patronising? His eyes saw me blankly before we both looked away. He had a bottle of supermarket white cider half empty beside him, it was 9.45 am. I had never seen him or any other homeless person around my neighbourhood before but times are hard and services have been cut.
I went on into the graveyard, pulled the dogs away from the squirrel hunting spot just inside the gate and headed towards the 1887 theatre fire monument. There behind it I saw a fresh grave with the biggest, most ostentatious pile of wreathes and bouquets I had ever seen. I was instantly stuck by the contrast; our society’s caring more for the dead than the living. I did a quick calculation, there were about 25-30 lots of flowers there, some very expensive, others less so, but about £500 must have been spent. Enough to feed that guy, put him in a hostel for a month and get him some new clothes.
When I die I want a cardboard box coffin or better still a silk sleeping bag liner. I do not want anyone to bring more than one white lily to my funeral; if they want to spend money then they can give it to a charity. How do you choose which charity is most needy these days? They say that charity begins at home and if so then that homeless man and many others like him are right on the doorstep. Alcohol though, many would consider that he does not deserve charity. It’s easy to judge isn’t it? He’s brought his troubles on himself, he’s hit the booze and pissed it against the wall hasn’t he? How often do we stop to ask the cause? Who knows what despair has brought him to the gutter by Ladysmith Road Post Office?
I will always give to cancer charities, like many people I have lost family and friends to the creeping devil disease. The NSPCC have benefited recently when my friend and I had a craft table at a country fair and I regularly get caught for sponsorship at work. One of my pet hates is when teenagers, some as young as sixteen are ‘raising money’ so that they can spend two weeks in a third world country to help build a school or plant a garden, you know the kind of thing? These trips usually cost a thousand pounds or so and no doubt they struggle to get the cash together – sitting in a bath of baked beans, abseiling from somewhere high or eating fifty hot dogs in an hour – but who really benefits? Maybe they realise how privileged they are, they mean well, but do they make any difference? Do they have any skills of any value to offer? Most often they come from middle class families whose middle class friends happily chip in so that said offspring can go on the adventure, but wouldn’t they do better to just send a cow? Or some seed and tools?
One of the craziest projects in recent years has to be the aid programme that decided to help the Turkana people in Northern Kenya by supplying them with equipment to fish and a huge freezing plant. The plan was to both improve nutrition locally and provide an income. The Turkana cooperative allowed themselves to be taught to fish and a new food mountain grew. It’s unfortunate that no one did enough homework to discover that the Turkana are nomadic pastoralists and DO NOT EAT FISH!
Seeing that man with his cider bottle sent my thoughts on a roller coaster, all on a thirty minute stroll through the cemetery. I might have popped into the shop and bought him a pasty, but he was gone by the time I walked back. I hope he found some appropriate help.
I Am a Writer, Right?
I am a writer, right? I have a Diploma that says I can write and a blog with lots of hits that shows that real people, like you, read the things I write. But the problem is that I’m a woman of few words (some would say its better that way) and that is not the writers way. ‘Normal’ writers scrawl copious quantities of words and have to edit, chop and further edit their excesses. There was a 5% leeway for the assignments on my creative writing courses and I kept hearing how people had written double the words and were struggling to pare it down before submission. Not me. To reach the word count, I’d have to edit to find three words where I thought one was adequate. The term ‘murder your darlings’ coined by someone whose name I maybe should remember but don’t would never apply to me – I don’t have any darlings! Don’t get me wrong, I love writing words, I love language, to listen, to talk to people and to write is my passion.
At the beginning of my writing studies I bought a lovely little book, ‘Eyes like Butterflies’, a treasury of similes and metaphors, gathered together by Terence Hodgson. I read with delight entries like in the section headed ‘Nipple’:- ‘the great peach thermometer of her nipples’ and wondered who thinks of stuff like that? Joe Coomer in Apologising to dogs apparently. TH has also included Janette Turner on ‘Eyebrows’, ‘her eyebrows knitting together like offended caterpillars’ in Borderline. Is it possible to offend a caterpillar and if so how do we know that the soft centred beastie is offended? Nah, I could never dream up stuff like that.
This lack of ability to waffle on has often made me question my own intelligence but I can’t be bothered with using ‘big words’, if someone needs to go look up a word I’ve used, then it’s taken them from the immediacy of the read. This probably makes my writing seem immature, I don’t know, but I must do something right because I get quite good grades. I do know ‘big words’, lots of them, there’s ‘large’ and ‘huge’ for instance or even ‘etymology’ – now that’s one that I love!
Another thing that fellow students seem to have to do is first, second and even third drafts, in fact the textbooks say you must! Guess who doesn’t? Yes that will be me. Except for when I wrote my final assessment, I just do it, tweaking as I go, a final read through and that’s it. No endless redrafting for me. A few months ago Myslexia interviewed the prolific Susan Hill who said she only ever does one draft, sounds like my kind of woman, hooray! I must give her a read sometime, recommendations as comments welcome please. . .
The thing that I do is festering, I work a story in my head for months only making vague occasional notes that I can’t read when I need to, because of my dreadful handwriting. I do it anyway with the faith that the act of the scribble will consign it to my memory, which sometimes happens and sometimes doesn’t. You know as I’m writing it’s occurred to me that I should try writing books for children, that would be an excuse for not writing very much AND using little words. Um, interesting thought to hold, watch this space.
It could be you one day
I met an elderly man today. He had come to out-patients for one of years of appointments in cardiology, nephrology and the eye unit. He had a sparkle in his eye, stains on his shirt and his trouser fastenings were quite suspect, but I liked him. He chatted to me about his ailments and I helped him to sort through his paperwork amongst which was a poem. I tried to peep at it but couldn’t quite see, and after a while he offered it to me, saying that it was about the ageing process and he had ‘adapted’ it to include bits about his health. You can Google the original, it’s called ‘The shape I’m in’and each stanza ends with those words.
I could see behind him that someone was shifting from foot to foot, a young medic who probably hadn’t yet been on a geriatric ward. Now, whenever someone gets impatient like that it makes me slow down even more (one day I will regret it because I do it when driving with some idiot on my bumper) so I made the paper shuffling look more professional for a few minutes. Once I’d had my game, I asked Mr so ‘n’ so if he minded holding on while I dealt with the next person. He didn’t of course; and when I’d finished with Dr Shifty, he was thrilled to have a captive audience.
We talked about poetry, pills, the country bus service and that although he had been to most departments for treatment over the years, he still had most of his brain cells. I told him he was doing well as most of mine seem to taken the low road when I took the high. It was good timing, I had a quiet spell and could indulge him, but confess I had to pinch myself a couple of times when I realised I was losing focus.
His conversation with me was possibly the longest he’d had for a while but it cost me nothing and do you know what? He was good fun and I really hope that I get to see him again. I can’t help wondering how my life will be when I’m his age in I don’t know, twenty or twenty five years. Will I be lonely? Invisible? Will my toe nails be unkempt because I can’t reach them? Will I have stains on my clothes because my vision isn’t sharp enough to tell? At the moment I plan to be outrageously eccentric, but will I be able to make that choice or will it just happen to me?
Sleepy Devon
One good thing came out of my car breaking down today. This has been just the second occasion that I have spent any time with my daughter’s boyfriend and I have decided that he is a love. Why? The way he reacted to our plans going awry. We left home at 10.30 and should have been at Hound Tor in less than an hour, but my car broke three miles from home. While I waited for the mending man they took the dogs off for a walk, got a taxi home to pick up girlies car, came back to take the dogs off my hands again while the mending man followed me limping to Halfords. We went to browse a motorbike dealership while a new battery was sorted and I began to understand his passion and just how knowledgeable he is about bikes. I felt thoroughly out of place there though – never seen so much power and shine under one roof.
We got my car back, headed home for a quick snackette and situation re-appraisal and around 2pm set off for the moor again. This was supposed to be a treat for him, his first trip to one of Nina’s and my favourite places. I thought how sweet of him to squidge his six foot three into the back of my tiny Sadie, leaving Nina and I to chunter on, as the glory of the south Dartmoor hills opened up on the horizon. Dido and Daisy his new best friends gazed adoringly at him as he slipped off to sleep and only woke as we thundered over the cattle grid and got our first view of the lovely granite outcrop that is Haytor.
‘Wow’, Nina and I in stereo, just as we have a hundred times. ‘What do you think Steve, isn’t it stunning?
‘Uhhh’, he’s awake but not as we know it.
He recovered in time to scramble up Houndtor ten minutes further on,
and was a very happy puppy with his ice cream, camera and a focus worth of scruffy sheep in need of threading. Down the other side of the hill with views clear back to East Devon
lies the ruins of a mediaeval village where Steve and Nina made ‘Grand Designs’ that even included a granny annexe (on the edge of said village way beyond the cowshed), although he wouldn’t commit to which granny!
I should probably take it as a compliment that he managed to fall asleep again while I barrelled through the back track to Ashburton; if I had been the passenger I’d have been clinging to the dashboard muttering to any goddess I could think of. I think he then managed a few miles of wakefulness but was gone again through Totnes and until we parked in Dartmouth.
Coffee and chips by the waterfront kept him going as did the crossing on Higher Ferry but quelle surprise, we lost him again until Paignton, which is perhaps best slept through.
I’m fairly sure that Steve enjoyed Devon; he did get to sleep his way through countryside quite different from flat, overbuilt Portsmouth. Our rolling hills and picture skew villages giving way to azure sea are clearly soporific and I’m looking forward to sending him to the land of Nod again soon. It was great having such an easy guy around when the car was poorly; I know a few who wouldn’t have been so laid back.
The thing that’s not called writers block
I’m back. From two weeks and two thousand miles in Turkey where I have seen things fit to make even my hair curlier. I started with well meaning intentions of keeping my travel journal (thank god I resisted buying a sexy new one). Within twenty four hours the intentions had become ‘As long as I keep some notes my photos will help to fill the gaps’. Within seventy two hours I was thirty six behind. Hot, thirty eight degrees (where does that tiny round symbol hide on the keyboard?), getting tired from not sleeping on board hard beds and rising too early. Because we need to get moving ahead of the traffic, because we have to get there before the cruise ship spillage, because we have three hundred kilometres today, making me crabby, I’m on holiday right? Right but you didn’t want to lie on a beach G.
The damn bus was not conducive to writing legibly. That’s not true; San managed it because she can form beautifully neat words. I’ve seen opium fields, Troy, the Blue Mosque, temple cats, those hideous cruise ships sail into port like floating mounds stuffed with three thousand termites. I’ve met an Aspergic American, a beautiful young woman from Pakistan who had fled a ten month abusive arranged marriage and I have forced a smile from the grumpiest Istanbullu Maitre D’ imaginable. I went to the house where the Virgin Mary is reputed to have ended her days on this earth and shamefully touched immeasurably old artefacts with ‘Do not touch’ signs beside them. Emeralds the size of my fist dazzled me when rain fall like the Sunderbans trapped me inside Topkapi. So why am I not writing these stories? There is enough material to keep me occupied for months. Writers block doesn’t exist does it? If I was dedicated, I would be writing at any spare moment, anyplace. So maybe I’m just lazy, maybe I’m just not a writer. Not true, I am and I just have to do it – to write on through the dribble and find the discipline.
Day the fourth
Well that last blog was a bit of a cop out because I wrote it ages ago. I felt I had to blog something but couldn’t think what and I guess I always wanted that piece to be ‘out there’ so why not here and now?
Yesterdays warble about the office window caused a bit of a stir when the returned retiree read it. Of course he had to comment, he told me to go forth, we had considerable fun at each others expense and so did a couple of our colleagues. It brightened up a very slow day at the end of a slow week when our systems have been down.
Borneo was my first attempt at travel writing despite a nice amount of travel in slightly unusual places. Like a million others, I would love to travel write seriously. I’m sure the world needs a middle aged adventure traveller, to do a telly series aimed at silver topped gappers. And think how beneficial it would be for tourism in Mali, if I inspired a huge increase in visits by well heeled seekers, to their stunning country. Mali is my ultimate dream destination. I first heard the name Timbuktu, Timbuctoo, Tombouctou as a small girl when it was short for the ends of the earth, about as remote from anything or any place as it was possible to go. Back then I had no concept of what it may be like, but it sounded magical and still does. I need to go there, and to Djenne, Mopti and Bamako. I also need to go to the Ethiopian highlands and the Namib and strangely the £15k or so that would make that happen seems to be missing. So far, the tourist boards of those wonderful countries have failed to see how powerful an investment it would be to invite me!
Lucid Gypsy 