An excerpt for you...

Mr. Barker was a very tall, very thin man. If he was alive today, he’d be an internet meme. His height was bad enough for a child like me who was small for his age, but compounding his looming creepiness was a permanently ghostly white complexion, emphasised by a fierce bluish beard shadow even at the start of the day. Steely, dark eyes peered out malevolently at the world as he bestrode the corridors and revelled in his power as the not-quite-but-almost boss of the school. He was never seen to smile (not even if a child tripped and injured themselves right in front of him), and the consensus was that he never blinked. Rumour also had it that he was married, but kept his wife locked up in the house when he was at work. How the heck the person who started that one came up with it, I’ll never know - but I believed it for several years. He was that kind of man.

Mr. Barker always, always dressed in a brown suit with drainpipe trousers. The suit – made of high quality rayon - rustled slightly as he walked, the interlocking fibres generating thousands of volts of static electricity. Every ten or twelve paces, he would pause to ground himself on a metal window frame or door handle, the pain of each static shock strengthening his resolve to never stop hating the children under his supervision. Mr. Barker, through word and deed, was the living manifestation of the grim reaper whom we all feared. Following my innate sense of self-preservation, I kept my distance and allowed my terror of him to quietly and steadily develop.

Until…

At one time, together with a couple of my friends, I took to spending time inside the classroom at lunchtimes, where we would read, tell each other silly stories, and draw. It was simple stuff, innocent and utterly harmless. Staying indoors wasn’t exactly banned, but was definitely frowned upon (the staff didn’t bother with ‘gently discouraging’ anything, and instead leapt straight into frowning disapproval), since the merciful Lord’s fresh air was deemed to be good for us. Other teachers had seen the three of us making our own fun and had quietly warned us to not make any noise, but otherwise left us alone, since we were doing no harm and not actually breaking any rules.

One day we all decided (for the same kind of reasons that kids will stand in the shower with their raincoat on, or try – just once - to drink milk through their nose) to sit underneath one of the classroom tables and read a favourite story from the library shelf. It felt a little like camping – it was fun! For a while we quietly giggled and chortled at something very innocent, but were interrupted by the shock of a huge BANG on the top of the table. For the first time in my life, I farted with fright. I looked up to see – to my horror – a pair of brown drainpipe trouser legs standing motionless next to the table, an occasional crackle of high voltage sparks playing across the surface of them. Mr. Barker, the seeker of all things sinful, had found us.

His curiously high-pitched and hoarse voice reached out to us like a whiplash; “Come OUT of there at ONCE!”. The indignation in his tone was palpable, as was the magnetic field being generated by his suit. We didn’t even look at one another, so deep was our terror. Trembling, we emerged from underneath the table to stand, huddled together for protection, under the distant gaze of the fearsome electrified man. Above him boiled and rolled a black cloud, from which lightning bolts flickered and jabbed. Obviously he hadn’t grounded himself in the last few minutes…either that, or I was hallucinating. “WHAT do you mean…” he hissed, baring yellow, narrow teeth in oversized gums; “…by this BIZARRE behaviour?”. I was nine, and had absolutely no idea what the question actually meant. Nobody had ever thrown the word ‘bizarre’ towards me before. As for what did I mean…well…I didn’t mean anything! I was just having fun. I doubled the amplitude of my trembling. “WELL?” roared the mighty pipe cleaner, flaring his impressive nostrils. My dad had big nostrils, with bits of hair poking out of them, but Mr. Barker had him beaten on that count by several dozen as far as I could tell. I wondered why I was noticing that detail at such a  dangerous moment. “I don’t know sir.” a small, reedy voice said. I was a little shocked to realize that it had found its way out of my own mouth.

I knew instinctively that – feeble, contrite voice or not - this was a poor response. He flared his mighty air intakes again; “YOU DON’T KNOW?” he bellowed (as well as he could, with his sinister, hoarse voice), his eyes widening to the point where we could almost see them. “You don’t KNOW? How can you not KNOW? What on EARTH would lead you to…to…sit under a table at…at…lunch hour?” The latter part of the question was delivered with an almost hysterical emphasis and prompted me to wonder if he thought that sitting under a table at some other time of the day was perfectly acceptable. Worryingly, I could see some white, foamy spittle forming at the corner of his mouth. I suspected that I needed to stop noticing details such as that, but I took the spittle to be a bad sign, and allowed my bottom lip to quiver accordingly. To my left, my friend Paul grabbed the leadership role and burst into tears, to the accompaniment of soft sobs and the gentle vibration of his mop of blonde, curly hair.

The fearsome man croaked again, warming to his task now that he had caused some real distress; “I have never come across behaviour of this kind before; I find it quite incomprehensible.” I found his sentences pretty hard to understand too, but I decided not to mention it, as well leaving out my thoughts about his nasal hair. I was also still a little fixated by his spittle, the sight of which made me feel a little nauseous. “You boys...” he went on with ill-disguised relish, “…will stand outside my office in silence for the REST of the lunch hour. THEN I will decide what to do with you…”. The last part was left hanging in the air, as if everything up to and including public execution might be one of the options he was considering. I wouldn’t have put it past him. Trying my damnedest not to wet my short pants, with my two fellow criminals I dutifully made my way along the corridor, past the open door of the staff room and up to the wall adjacent to Mr. Barker’s small office, there to wait below a large and rather explicitly gory crucifix, for our fate to be decided.

I felt this was too good to not be purloined and shared:

A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
A question mark walks into a bar?
A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."
A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
A synonym strolls into a tavern.
At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
Falling slowly, slowly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.

I was going to put this on the 'snippets' page, but then I lost the inclination to do so...

The evening had started well for the splendidly - and as it turned out, rather optimistically - named Richard Edward Hercules Hampson. Celebrating his re-emergence into the world outside of the prison fence, Richard – or ‘Ricky’ as he was most frequently called - although he’d occasionally been known to answer to ‘Asshole’ too - set out to tie one on with a hundred bucks withdrawn from his creaky old credit union account just as soon as he had made it down the hill into town. Only two short hours after the seemingly endless process of signing himself out of prison clothing and into his old, stiff and mysteriously stained denims, Ricky was successfully hammered - and man; it felt good. He knew, of course that it would soon stop feeling good and within a short time start feeling shitty, but for now he’d take what enjoyment he could from the taste of that liquor and the who-gives-a-shit feeling that it gave him.  It had been eight months since decent liquor (in other words; not that God-awful prison hooch) had passed his lips, and there hadn’t been a day that he’d not missed it. Hell, he’d missed it even more than he thought – more even than the feel of a woman’s skin, and the realization bothered him; bothered him so much that he’d drunk even harder to make that realization disappear.

Two hours in The Pitsnake bar had numbed his lips, his worries and his good sense – not that he’d ever been blessed with an over-abundance of the latter, as his criminal record and list of short, dead-before-they-started relationships would testify. Over the previous ten years, life had been a roller coaster of good booze (sometimes), bad women (almost every time), way too much heroin, a little crack here and there, and a total of about four and a half years spent looking out at the outside world through a chain-link fence from the inside of one institution or another. Ricky wasn’t a bad guy, no sir; he was just an ordinary fellah trying to break a long streak – a very, very long streak – of the worst kind of luck. That’s what he told himself, five or six times each day - just to stay on the right side of crazy.

He’d never hurt anyone (except for that one time the snot-nosed kid had come at him with a broken bottle; he’d been askin’ for that) but, shit; he’d been hurt plenty of times himself. That old stab wound in his side ached when it got cold or just kicked him in the gut out of spite if he moved the wrong way or too fast. The only time that pain went away completely was when he could get himself on the outside of a large amount of some hard liquor. A time like tonight.

By the time he hit (literally, with his head) the battered exit door of The Pitsnake Bar, that old bite had stopped hurting. Pretty much everything had stopped hurting – unless of course you didn’t forget the absolute one hundred and ten percent pain-in-the-ass-truth that life was a fucken bitch, and that then, when the shit was finally piled on you deep enough, you died. Life sucked, and Ricky, numb as he was and with alcohol doing its thing to his brain, had plenty of time to think about exactly just how fucken much it sucked as he walked back up that fucken stupid hill towards his sister’s fucken house - the house that had been their mom’s, and should’ve been his. Just another fucken injustice to add to life’s pile of shit.

Earlier in the day, on the way down the hill after his release, he’d dropped off what remained of his belongings, leaving them in a plastic-wrapped heap in the front porch so that when she got home from work she’d know he was back out and to expect him some time after the bars had closed. She knew exactly what to expect; she’d been through it enough times with him. As a social worker she knew how it worked all ways round, knew from the outside and up close how booze and drugs had sucked him in and spat him out time after time, how he’d learned to not give a shit about who he pissed off if it meant that he could score; knew that he would probably die one day when he poisoned himself, whether it be with  legal shit or illegal shit. When that happened, he figured that it didn’t much matter what the law or anybody else thought, anyway. Dead was dead. The idea that he could drink himself to death quite within the bounds of the law (and pay fucken tax while he was doing it), but would be arrested for simply getting a fast high made him smile grimly as he dragged his sorry carcass up the stupid, pain-in-the-asshole steep hill. The fucken law made no sense. Life made no sense and therefore his philosophy was simple and to the point: fuck it.

He paused outside the familiar house for only the second time in eight months and three days, exactly – almost to the minute, his chest rising and falling after the long uphill stagger. A few hours ago he’d flung his bag of shit onto the porch without giving the weary old place a second glance. It was good to be out, but like him the Hampson house was tired; worn out and almost at the end of its rope. Something had to change; he really was too old to be doing this shit any more. Maybe, perhaps, this time was the time when he could keep a promise.

Eight months and three days ago he’d been arrested on that very same spot, on the way back from the bar on a cold, wet night and having failed spectacularly - yet again - to get inside Laura Deacon’s panties. As a result, he was feeling as mean as a starving dog when the young cops pulled alongside him and called out to him by name with goofy smiles on their pimply faces. He’d felt even worse a few seconds later as his arms were forced roughly up his back and the cuffs were tightened around his skinny wrists, but he'd learned long ago not to give the cops an excuse to take their fists to him, and made his feelings known, not by physical resistance, but with a stream of the worst insults he could come up with, given that he was still feeling pretty humiliated by Laura calling him ‘Needle dick’ in front of the other customers in the bar. His howls of protests had brought his sister to her window, and her plaintive call-out to the cops had eventually led to a shouted explanation of sorts – another fucken warrant. A warrant. Fuck the law.

He’d seen her shake her head and slide her window shut, slide it shut on the world and him in particular. That was a long time ago – eight, long, hard months ago, but now he was back.  Well, he thought; fuck her, she was still his sister and she knew that he needed help, dammit. He knew that she knew that he had no other place to go, and despite his liquor-fuelled bitterness and petty spite, he also knew that she would forgive him one more time, just as she always had - and just as their parents had never done. She loved him, and he could never figure out why or how. In return, he loved her to pieces and he knew exactly why, but in thirty nine years he’d just never worked out how to show it, or even how to tell her.

The light was on – that was a good sign. It meant that she was waiting up for him, and that usually meant that she would be pleased to see him - maybe even had some home-cooked food ready. As he walked unsteadily up the overgrown path – Sadie had always hated gardening – it struck him as a little strange that the blinds were still open. She was usually a stickler for her privacy, to the point of locking her bedroom door even if she was the only one in the house. No matter, he thought, hopefully she’d got something good waiting in the oven for him – cherry pie, even. Cherry pie would be very good.

He stopped when he noticed his plastic bag on the front porch, exactly as he’d left it a number of hours earlier. That was not a good sign, for fuck’s sake. That quite possibly meant that she was pissed – probably because the cops had paid her yet another visit while he’d been out. He’d been pinched at the prison gates before today and taken to the courthouse before his clothes had even gotten warm, only to be back in the big house by nightfall, but he’d also had the only slightly less aggravating experience of being out a few hours before the warrants caught up with his release date. Perhaps this was another one of those. Fuck. What the hell was it for this time? He didn't even try to remember - it didn't matter in the long run. Jail was jail, no matter why you were there.

Slowly climbing the three steps, Ricky the drunken fool approached the front door and tried to open it. Nothing doing. Shit and bastard! Trying as hard as he knew (i.e. not very) to not sound like a pissed drunk, he banged on the front door and called out to Sadie. Nothing. Shit – the last thing he wanted was to wake the neighbours and have the cops around - but dammit, Sadie was being a bitch. Biting his tongue in concentration, he unsteadily negotiated the darkened steps down to the garden level and wound his way through the thick unmown grass and weeds to the kitchen windows. The light beamed out from the chest-high windows across the small yard and lit up one side of the tall, unkempt hedge. Despite his irritation, the idea of startling her by suddenly appearing at the windows had him grinning like an idiot as he approached the stucco side of the house.

The windows were all shut – again, unusual for a woman who liked to have the air moving through the house as long as it wasn’t freezing outside – but Ricky chuckled to himself, knowing that the surprise would be all the greater. Pausing to allow himself to stop laughing and setting his face in his favourite Jack Nicholson expression, he crouched down below the window line and began to slowly rise into the light. Keeping his face rigidly manic and eyes focused on the far wall, he rose fully into view, ready for the scream that would surely come from his sister’s mouth. She’d always been so easy to scare, especially when they were kids and he would jump out on her at the bottom of the stairs. Her strange quavering cries of dismay and shock used to reduce him to tears of laughter. Hell - he wished he could be that happy again.

Staring at the furthest wall for maximum creep effect, Ricky’s expression began to lose its rigidity as he realised that Sadie wasn’t reacting as planned. Relaxing his face and cursing her silently, he blinked a few times to get the old peepers working again, and stared intently into the kitchen.

Sadie wasn’t there. What was there was a horrific,  grotesque thing lying awkwardly on the floor, wearing Sadie’s clothes and surrounded by what looked like a pool of black pitch. The fact that most of the back of Sadie’s head was a matted mess told Ricky the rest. As his eyes took in the scene, his mind quickly began to overload. This…this…couldn’t have happened, not to Sadie, not to him. A high pitched whine began to ring in his ears and a grey tunnel started to form around the edges of his vision. “No!” he thought, desperate to cling to consciousness; “Not now!”. The ringing in his ears became a deafening high-pitched shriek, and the world faded to a stop.

Two posts on one day? Yes, well my lovely website host decided to screw around with me for a month or two, hence the recent hiatus...I thought that in celebration of my return to activity on this site, I might overwhelm you with two posts almost at the same time...

Under normal conditions, I would shy away from writing an end-of-year reflective piece, but my condition is not normal. That’s to say, it isn’t the condition I had become used to, although I may have to accept it as my new ‘normal’.

Many things have changed during 2018. I began the year believing that I had – at some point in 2017 – suffered a stroke which was causing the problems I was experiencing with the sight in my left eye. I was wrong about that, just as I’d been wrong to ignore my developing battery of symptoms for so long. I’d been scared of what I might discover about my health if I investigated matters. I’d been a fool.

In 2018 I learned – and I’m still learning – how to go about accepting what is. That, I think, has been one of the major lessons of the journey that my family and I have been on. Things – regardless of how I might feel – have changed, and there is little that I can do about many of the changes that have arrived to test my endurance or patience. I must instead accept them.

For much of my life I have lived within a dichotomy; a shy, oversized man employed in roles which required me to behave forcefully and confidently. A large and (yes, I must accept this) strong man capable of being proficient in various sports, and of using my physical power to be useful in a wide variety of situations which might cause difficulties to anyone smaller or less strong than I. These things have changed. I must accept a physically reduced version of who I once was. I must accept those things of which I am no longer capable. I must accept the word ‘disability’ as it now pertains to me.

I’ve learned this year how much my physical stature and strength was part of what helped me survive emotionally. As that physical strength has been stripped away, my emotions have been laid bare, my vulnerability visible (it has seemed) for all to see. My lack of emotional strength has been painfully apparent as, at various times of the year, I’ve leaned so heavily upon my wife’s remarkable depth of love for me. I’ve become aware of it, and accepted the truth of it. It has always been who I really am.

2019 sees a different person looking out at the world from this familiar-looking face. The face in the mirror looks much the same (a little more grey, a little fatter, a little more tired) but I’m not the same; I couldn’t be.

Counter-intuitively perhaps, the easiest response would be to fight against the difference; to try to regain what I once had and to try to be who I once believed I was. The harder course is the one that I am choosing, because I believe that wisdom lies along the way. I choose to embrace the difference and to rebuild my small world in acceptance of who I am now.  I’m assisted by the fact that my new community has never known the previous version of me, and so there is little or no pressure to revert from the people who have met only this version of me.

My partner in life, and my children know, of course. What, I wonder, is this like for them? What is it like to see a person they love changed in this kind of way?
What is it like, and how, now, can I – with all the love I hold for them - help them?

Life surprises me with delicious irregularity. Since I was reunited with my first love almost exactly ten years ago, reflecting upon my stunning good fortune has been a constant habit; a foil to my natural grumpiness and an antidote to my glass-half-empty outlook. Five years ago, after twelve months of grieving for my father,  I sat down in front of my computer and reflected upon some of the issues in my life. This year, events have not-so-gently nudged me towards repeating the exercise with a slightly different flavour. Today, as I stare at the small screen before me, my mortality stands alongside, a reminding hand upon my shoulder. My journey continues to teach me valuable lessons.

Firstly, I missed my father. He left this earth more than six years ago, but I don't just mean that I miss him - which, by the way, I still do - I mean that I missed him. Like a fool I missed my chance to find out about him before his last illness diminished him so cruelly, and while he could still share something of himself. Over the preceding years I didn't ask enough questions, nor ask them persistently enough to elicit meaningful  answers. All I know of my father is ‘Dad’; the little that this quiet man allowed to rise to the surface - an idea of which can be gleaned from the fact that after over eighty years of life, all he ever wrote down about himself was – at my urging, I might add - four or five pages. He barely told us more face-to-face. He was a generous and loving man, but he made a sad mistake in this regard. He left us wondering, and unknowing. I cannot let the same thing happen to my children.

His lost legacy is now the reason I write; I write – consciously – for and to them, and to their children. I am so very grateful for the lesson my father unwittingly taught me, and for the opportunity to avoid repeating it.

It took me a long time to learn to be loved. Indeed, I’ve only very recently – lying in a hospital bed and watching my lady loving me with a benevolent and passionate ferocity – begun to understand it properly. Even the thought of it now moves me to tears. I have always loved intensely, but I was always an unhappy lover, and only recently, in my mid-fifties, have I realized that I was eye-wateringly terrible at being loved. I denied it, I refused to believe it could be true, and I closed the door upon the joy of it. I loved desperately and hopelessly, and as a result, I lost. Awakening to being loved has transformed my outlook. Suddenly, my world is full of colours, filled with happiness and chances to return that gift.  How blind I was; how beautiful is this new glorious panorama.

Looking forward is still fun. My lovely lady and I long ago formulated a step-away-from-it-all plan for our semi-retirement which we have now managed to bring to fruition. It's a simple idea, but one which fills us with excitement at the thought of creating a new chapter of our lives together. We managed to achieve a major part of it before I fell ill and were forced to put many of our intentions on hold. We never lost sight of our goals, and we find ourselves now in a delightful, peaceful part of the world, surrounded by natural beauty and softly embraced by our small community. Our future, for a while veiled and uncertain, has returned to clarity and a measure of certainty as we embrace a fruitful last third of our lives. It is a fresh idea and as such is entirely ours, with few echoes of our prior lives. It’s an adventure (in a gentle and not particularly dangerous kind of way), and it gives me a great deal of joy to anticipate living within our little dream, with the person alongside whom I wish to grow very, very old. Looking forward Is not the sole preserve of my young self, after all.

I'm fortunate. Not just lucky, but incredibly fortunate. I am deeply in love with my lady, and she with me (and that alone is enough to make the world worth living in). Together we have three fantastic children - now adults - of whom we are very proud, and we live in a spectacular part of the world. Despite the different routes that we have taken to eventually get here, we have made this happen. This year, we have come through fear, pain and an uncertainty neither of us has faced before. I could not have done it alone; I will be forever grateful, forever aware of the fate that we have been so fortunate to avoid and so fortunate to bring to fruition. We've worked hard to be here today; we deserve our happiness, but we also appreciate how lucky we have been.

It's not over until it's over. My wife and I lived apart for most of our adult lives. We first got together on the stroke of new year 1983/4 and became an 'item' within seconds. We were together for nearly three years before – mostly as a result of my previously noted troubles with being loved - we went our separate ways. But then, as 2008 came towards an end, we found one another again – or should I say she determinedly hunted me down half a world away. The road between 1986 and now has been...interesting. There have been full lifetimes’ worth of ups, downs and sideways-es in the interim, but I have to say that none of that really matters. We have both lived interesting lives on two continents, and we have loved, laughed and cried apart from one another for many, many years. These days, we laugh more than we have ever done, we remind ourselves of how loved we are, and we find joy in our instinctive outpouring of love for one another. Life - and living - is good.
We are now, after all - after all these years - where we truly belong. Together.

And now, I find myself reflecting upon my reflections. When the shimmer clears, when the ripples upon the water’s surface fade away, my reflection is clean and clear. At last, I know. Life – my life, at least - is about love; being loved, loving and demonstrating that love. Over the last year, the reflection in the mirror has changed more than ever before, as have my reflections. As my hair and my beard have grown whiter, my reflections upon the last fifty-plus years have become brighter and more positive. As my life lost its guarantees, it became more valuable and more valued. Life is good, and for the overwhelming majority of time, has been so. I’ve wasted time in not appreciating and enjoying that fact. It is time to change that now.

For ever.

Under normal conditions, I would shy away from writing an end-of-year reflective piece, but my condition is not normal. That’s to say, it isn’t the condition I had become used to, although I may have to accept it as my new ‘normal’.

Many things have changed during 2018. I began the year believing that I had – at some point in 2017 – suffered a stroke which was causing the problems I was experiencing with the sight in my left eye. I was wrong about that, just as I’d been wrong to ignore my developing battery of symptoms for so long. I’d been scared of what I might discover about my health if I investigated matters. I’d been a fool.

In 2018 I learned – and I’m still learning – how to go about accepting what is. That, I think, has been one of the major lessons of the journey that my family and I have been on. Things – regardless of how I might feel – have changed, and there is little that I can do about many of the changes that have arrived to test my endurance or patience. I must instead accept them.

For much of my life I have lived within a dichotomy; a shy, oversized man employed in roles which required me to behave forcefully and confidently. A large and (yes, I must accept this) strong man capable of being proficient in various sports, and of using my physical power to be useful in a wide variety of situations which might cause difficulties to anyone smaller or less strong than I. These things have changed. I must accept a physically reduced version of who I once was. I must accept those things of which I am no longer capable. I must accept the word ‘disability’ as it now pertains to me.

I’ve learned this year how much my physical stature and strength was part of what helped me survive emotionally. As that physical strength has been stripped away, my emotions have been laid bare, my vulnerability visible (it has seemed) for all to see. My lack of emotional strength has been painfully apparent as, at various times of the year, I’ve leaned so heavily upon my wife’s remarkable depth of love for me. I’ve become aware of it, and accepted the truth of it. It has always been who I really am.

2019 sees a different person looking out at the world from this familiar-looking face. The face in the mirror looks much the same (a little more grey, a little fatter, a little more tired) but I’m not the same; I couldn’t be.

Counter-intuitively perhaps, the easiest response would be to fight against the difference; to try to regain what I once had and to try to be who I once believed I was. The harder course is the one that I am choosing, because I believe that wisdom lies along the way. I choose to embrace the difference and to rebuild my small world in acceptance of who I am now.  I’m assisted by the fact that my new community has never known the previous version of me, and so there is little or no pressure to revert from the people who have met only this version of me.

My partner in life, and my children know, of course. What, I wonder, is this like for them? What is it like to see a person they love changed in this kind of way?

What is it like, and how, now, can I – with all the love I hold for them - help them?

A little part of me in the big, wide world:

www.holstee.com/blogs/mindful-matter/the-surface-stills

One part of my journey through recent illness has been – so far, at least – ignored. I have avoided dwelling upon it, and yet the issue has been in my consciousness ever since my return home from the second surgery. Since then, I have written much about my experiences. And therein lies the matter; the effect upon my desire to write. In truth, even that is not quite accurate; the issue at hand has been my need to write about the events of the last ten months.  I’ve tried to avoid the subject, largely because I have an instinctive dislike of the hyperbolic ‘struggling artist’ who ‘needs to write as much as I need to breathe’; an animal which inhabits – or infests – the internet these days. I don’t go in for artistic angst, creative struggles or existential crises in the name of my hobby. But suddenly, I needed to write.

I still do.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. My writing began from a desire to document my past for the benefit of my children; a desire almost strong enough to be a need. It drove me through the process to commit to my pages more than one hundred thousand words. It pushed me through the tedium of editing, rewriting (more than once) and finally to the biggest risk of all: publication. As it would turn out, the risk was a financial failure, and  I have sold few volumes of my work, but my enjoyment of the creative process has kept me coming back for more (one finished book still being edited) and more (another three-quarters completed).
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Recently, I’ve been writing about the recent past for different reasons. I experienced my illness - and the treatments for it - as traumas, and I’ve needed to deal with the emotional fallout of new and at times disturbing  experiences. My writing has been integral to processing my feelings, understanding my responses to recent events, and finding ways to move forwards and into my future. Writing has proven to be genuinely therapeutic, and as a result, has a new place in my world. Writing has evolved from a straightforward hobby into a new thing; something more, something bigger. It feels, for the first time, like a friend.

I owe writing a debt, now. It has helped me, and continues to do so as life moves away from dark times and towards light. I feel an obligation to pay more attention towards it, although I remain pessimistic about my pursuit of accomplishment ever amounting to something tangible or – dare I say it – lucrative. My intention is to do it because I enjoy it, nothing more or less. Any recognition or success would (I cannot say ‘will’ without snorting internally) be entirely incidental – or perhaps I mean accidental. The pressure to succeed is no greater than it has ever been, but the motivation to write has subtly changed. I now write because I can, because I want to and – if I can say this without drowning in conceit – because I’ve improved, and I know that at least some people enjoy how I do it.

One day I may or may not look back upon this period as critical, but right now I recognize that it is at least of some significance. I’m happy to ride that wave of…whatever it is. I wonder to what kind of shore it may take me?

An idea I am allowing to ferment:

'​With gentle movement, the floor groaned like a cranky old man rising from a deep chair. The weight of the sodden walls bore down heavily upon the old beams and boards, but the floor no longer cared. The house, in fact, no longer cared about anything. Old beyond reason and forgotten by too many minds, the house had grown bitter and angry. It had become a being long ago, the death of its last occupant somehow bridging the void between nature and legend, myth and magic; nature, and the malevolence of the earth before mankind. The house no longer cared about anything or anyone except its self. Self – and its perpetuity – had become an obsession. Impossible though it seemed, the house lived.'

My latest attempt to write an article with a 500 word limit...


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What Moves Us
“Move pen, move - write me a mountain.”

A sentence among hundreds in a TV documentary some time ago about a famous performance ‘slam’ poet. I have, for as long as I can remember - and without knowing why - felt that poetry was an overblown, pretentious art form with little relevance to my life. Nevertheless I was intrigued by this programme and resolved to watch it through.

I spent much of the ensuing ninety minutes watching the screen with tears streaming down my face. This man has a unique gift with words. Not just the words that he chooses, but the ways in which he strings them together, weaves them and throws them at his audience like a warm water bomb. His audience became saturated with his word craft, swept along upon a tsunami of emotional exploration and realisation. His words overwhelmed me. Quietly, I admitted to myself that I envied him for his talent and his drive. Even as I was enraptured by his gift, I wished that it was mine.

I also write, although he and I inhabit different spheres of ability and achievement. Perhaps that’s how it should be. We have, after all, lived different lives and experienced the world in very different ways. Two things we share, however; we write about ourselves and we are moved by our relationship with our respective fathers.

I began – tentatively – to write about five years ago. My father had died, and I travelled to England for his funeral. Standing in a church for the first time in many years and – to honour his memory - speaking the words that I no longer believed, I realised that my father was gone. He was gone, and I had no idea who he really was. All I knew was the ‘Dad’ persona; the side of himself that he had made available to me and my own children.  ‘Tommy’, however, was a stranger.

I’m not bitter. He was a quiet, self-effacing kind of man. Talking about himself did not come easily to him, but reading between the sparse lines of his story, I know that he led an interesting life, and was a good man who left behind many friendships.

Twelve months later, the truth slapped me in the face. Finally it dawned upon me that I must not leave my children wondering the same things about me. Somehow, my story (hopefully nowhere near its final pages) needed to be told. The resulting memoir – all five hundred pages of it – took almost three years to write, re-write, re-write again, walk away from and finally return to. It took more nerve than I had guessed to publish it, but finally doing so became an emotional triumph.

My father taught me many things  - not least: how to wound oneself performing any banal household task – but his greatest teaching was unintentional. His biggest lesson was to never leave unsaid that which can bring joy to others.
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My words are my gift to my children.