Scrooge

I resent being called a scrooge.

I mean, it’s true, I hate Christmas, but I have my reasons, you know? Coming up, as we are now, to the festive time of year, I have been subjected to the usual yearly round of fun-poking and insults (let’s face it, that is basically what they are, no matter how good natured) from friends and family who can’t understand why I hate this time of year. This, despite the fact that some (although not all of them) have contributed to that hatred; some of them, in fact, are downright responsible for it.

I’m not going to go on about why I hate Christmas because I think that I’ve already sort of done that in other blog posts and I don’t want to bore anybody with all of that because I’m not THAT miserable.

But here’s the thing though: I don’t understand why everyone who hates Christmas, and says so, quite legitimately, to other people, automatically gets called a scrooge. I’m not talking about the literary allusion because I know, and I think we all know, where that comes from; I’m talking more about the way that people apply that term in this almost jeering way because they think that it’s somehow appropriate or humorous. In my experience, if people hate Christmas it’s usually because they’ve had very bad experiences of it (as did Scrooge, in fact, in the story). And yet when people encounter such Christmas-hating individuals in society, they do not show compassion, or attempt to understand that happiness is not universal or innate to people at this time of year. Instead they poke fun and point fingers.

So here’s what I want to say now:

People who look miserable often are miserable and they are miserable for a reason.

This is something that’s always bothered me about the Dickens story, because Dickens was, apparently, a great one for Christian charity and compassion, and he was clearly very into the Christmas spirit. But, even though he does show the reasons for Scrooge’s miserly behaviour – the bad childhood and neglected upbringing, the lack of love etc. etc. – he does nothing to inspire sympathy for that character because it is generally accepted that it is Scrooge’s own doing that he became that way. It’s considered that it will be his own fault if he dies without a friend or a loved one near him and the onus is placed very much on him to change his ways because he’s ruining things for everyone else.

Now, of course, it’s not good to be bitter, but the question should really be WHY he is so bitter, and whose fault is that? Someone in the story should at least ask and try to understand it because the people around him really don’t do that – even his nephew makes fun of him, mercilessly, in public for not liking Christmas, which Scrooge is then forced to watch from his invisible place in the room. I mean that’s hurtful isn’t it? That’s a truly mean thing to do to someone, regardless of whether you think they deserve it, and it doesn’t set a great example of the “Good will to all men” that supposedly does the rounds at Christmas – Bob Cratchitt and Tiny Tim are probably the only two who remember this.

By and large, Dickens seems to want to mock Scrooge, and this is the really dangerous thing about the story because it means that very few people think about the reasons for Scrooge’s behaviour; they just take it at face value and assume that it’s ok to condemn the miserly old guy. The upshot of that, then, is that a lot of the depiction of the merry and jolly cast of characters that go around Scrooge – with their parodying and overall dislike of him – ends up producing this modern day humour (barbed as it definitely is) where people get branded with the term “scrooge”. Because these people are, like the original Scrooge, just having a really hard time with the whole concept of Christmas.

It’s like people think that it’s funny, you know? But it’s vindictive too. Other people don’t want to be brought down while they’re having a good time so they point and jeer at the people who aren’t participating because they think that, by shaming people that way, they can just get them to join in out of sheer embarrassment or weary resignation: “Yes, alright, if you’re going to humiliate me I’ll put some up some tinsel and eat some mince pies. Anything you want, just stop laughing at me!”

But it’s not funny, you see, because sometimes when people hate Christmas they really have good reason. Some people feel genuine despair at this time of year and more people kill themselves in December and January than any other time of year.

They didn’t really know about depression or consider the impact of home life when Dickens was writing – although Dickens, more usually, did seem to comprehend these things. But, I mean, we know about it now! We’re all, I think, a lot more aware of how depression and mood swings affect people – we have understanding of SAD and the harder forms of mental illness and, more widely, we know that not everybody in the world has a happy home or family.
Christmas, for a lot of people, is a wonderful, beautiful, jolly time of year where you get to celebrate with family and friends and enjoy every single second of the festivities – but a lot of people just don’t have that experience and, I think, it’s just as legitimate, under those circumstances, to be able to say that you do not like Christmas and to just opt out. It’s not that I want to spoil it for other people, I just don’t want it shoved down my throat while the whole world goes totally nuts and decides to stage a light show around me using tinsel and twinkle-lights. I just don’t want to see it, you know? It depresses me.

So when people call me scrooge it really hurts me, because I have my reasons for feeling this way. I’ve never had a good time at Christmas and even less so now that I’m an adult because I’m more or less on my own. It’s just not a great time for me and I have a hard enough time, with my SAD problems and everything else, just getting through the winter months without this great fiasco going on at the same time. And I’m not alone in that, right? A lot of people feel the same way and just want to get rid of the whole holiday and spend the time with the curtains shut just having a good sleep. Yes? I mean, that’s not just me, is it?

As I said, I don’t begrudge Christmas-lovers a good Christmas, really I don’t; if that’s what they want to do at this time of year then great. But it really makes me angry when those people call me a scrooge just because I don’t join in with their fun while they’re planning their Christmas dinner, complaining about the shopping they have to do, or figuring out what to buy their kids for Christmas presents – because that’s not going to be my experience.

I was disallowed from having much of a Christmas as a kid, and I was discouraged, really quite strongly, from enjoying it too much. So now, when Christmas rolls around, I do just shut myself away and hide. That’s what I have to plan for in the run up to it while everybody else is buying turkeys and putting up trees. But I tell people that and it’s like suddenly I’m the one who’s ruining their Christmas by being miserable and not doing the same things they’re doing? Never mind compassion and understanding, which is supposed to underpin the whole ethos of Christmas, my friends will actually sit there and tell me I’m being miserly and mean because I’m not at least pretending to be happy in front of them as they tell me what a great time they’re about to have.

It almost makes me want to say “Fuck you” to all these people and just never speak to them again.

. . .

But then New Year rolls around and it’s all over and everyone’s miserable again anyway because it’s January. And then it’s like we’re all in the same boat again, so I keep going with the same old friends.

. . .

So that was all I wanted to say, anyway. Don’t call anyone a scrooge this year just because they don’t share your love of Christmas. There’s probably a reason for it, and maybe that person is just not very happy. Rather than making fun of them or labelling them and dismissing them, why not try to understand and be considerate of that person’s wishes to be left alone. If they don’t want to pretend to be happy for your benefit, don’t treat them like shit. That’s not fair on anyone and there’s no Christmas spirit to be found in that.
That’s all. Have a good one guys.

Social Media

Well, this is more about the rules around social media than the actual thing itself . . . if “thing” is the right word. Can you call social media a thing if it’s not tangible? Semantics, word issues, ok, moving on . . .

So, I wanted to write something on this because it’s been occurring to me lately when I’ve been interacting with friends or, rather, in most cases “friends” who are not really actual friends on Facebook or Twitter. Well, ok, Twitter is a different thing really because the barriers are looser and there is no actual “friending” going on, it’s just basically a big free-for-all. So, I guess I’m really just talking about Facebook.

If you’re on Facebook you’ll know that there are basic online safety things that the guys who run the site make you subscribe to; things like not friending people you don’t know (although most people do that anyway on a minor scale, but if it gets out of hand and people start reporting you for sending out friend requests for no apparent reason then they send you semi-threatening messages to say please don’t do it any more). There are also rules about posting offensive content, although I’m not sure about the stringency of these rules either since things still seem to get posted anyway. But still, by and large, there are rules of sorts.

But, if you are on Facebook, you might also be aware that, among your “friends”, there are a number of unspoken/unwritten rules that rely, basically, on common sense and common courtesy. Nobody tells you these rules, they don’t come from Facebook as requirements of usage, and your friends don’t make you aware of them in any overt sense. But they are there.

These are some of the things I think are pretty obviously in need of rules, spoken or otherwise:

1. Commenting on pictures of other people’s children. Ok, so if you know the person in real life, or have actually met the child themselves, then this is acceptable. But, if you’ve never met any of the people in the picture, and particularly if it’s a personal picture from someone whom you’re only friends with in a work or acquaintance sort of a way; if it’s a picture of someone’s kid playing with another family member or something, then that’s not appropriate, is it? I think that one’s probably most obvious of all because we’re all, obviously, hyper-aware of the vulnerability of kids on the internet and for a complete stranger to comment on your kid’s picture, even, or perhaps especially if it’s to say something complimentary, that’s just going to freak people out. Right? So there are judgments to make there about what is acceptable – maybe liking the picture is acceptable if you’ve established a rapport with the person, but that also might be pushing it a bit.

2. Commenting on extremely personal posts. Again this is down to if you know the person and it really relies on a judgment call because if they’re commenting on their personal lives, or making statements about their relationships then a) it’s not right for people to comment if they know nothing about it and b) it’s very awkward if they do and the other person doesn’t appreciate it. I mean you could say that Facebook is not the right place to put such personal stuff anyway and, to be honest, most of the people I know don’t do that, but when they do it’s tough to know what to say and often the best thing is just to ignore it and move on.

3. Business talk. I have a mix of friends on my Facebook page. Most are to do with work or professional interest; you know, writers, publishers, people with academic or literary backgrounds mostly. But I have other friends on there too; people I’ve known from school or college, or just people I used to hang around with who I like to keep up with every now and again. Now, mostly when I put things on Facebook about what I’m reading, I will get responses from the former group, the professionals and the academics, some of whom agree with me and some of whom just want to argue with my taste or opinions. Every now and again though, I have comments on these things from other friends, some of whom do not read the same kind of things as me or take nearly the same level of interest and, often these comments will show a lack of understanding or just general boredom at me putting that kind of status out there.

What this proves, I suppose, is that work and personal life don’t really mix. And it works vice versa, of course, because the work people don’t necessarily want to read/join in with the nonsense me and my friends spout on Facebook when we’re just trying to relax and unwind at the weekend. True there’s a bit of leeway there, of course, because a lot of people use Facebook to relax at the weekends and many people choose to mess around on there, but there is still a huge grey area surrounding how much of the personal you really want if your page is, primarily, being used to gain and maintain professional contacts. Maybe it’s just because social media isn’t really intended for that purpose, that’s probably what makes it so tricky, but if you try to separate it out completely and use one of the business networking sites for all the work stuff then that just becomes impossible because you don’t want to be moving from site to site all the time, do you?

4. Offensive content. Obviously, I’ve already mentioned there are bans on offensive content and you can be reported for putting that up on Facebook, but there are more minor things that need to be thought about beyond that. Again, judgment call: how much do you want your friends to see you swearing or being tagged in less than flattering pictures? This is an image thing, I guess, you don’t want people to get the wrong impression of you and you don’t want to offend other people just by letting off steam in a Facebook status, so you have to be careful here. I myself don’t swear much in my Facebook posts unless it’s just a really necessary part of what I’m saying, and even then I’ll usually asterisk out several characters (although, I don’t really know what this achieves as it’s still really obvious what the word is . . . anyway it’s a gesture, let’s people know I don’t really want to offend them . . . I hope.)

I also get really angry when people tag me in unflattering photos without asking me first – although it’s only happened once or twice, it’s left me seriously considering unfriending the people who did it, because, you know, everybody else can see it, and I might not want that! So there’s a courtesy issue, as well, you have to be aware at all times that what you put online can be seen by everyone else and will have an impact on other people – they’ll react to it and not always in a good way.

5. Politics. This might not be such a massive issue, but there’s only so much political stuff that even the most avid follower of current events will want to put on their page; people don’t really like to have other people’s views shoved in their faces, although it is nice sometimes to know that they’ve got some. I don’t put much to do with politics on my own page because I’m not that bothered about it really, but if other people do then I’ll sometimes comment. Most of my friends are Labour supporters or just liberals of some vague descriptions. I don’t think I’ve got any Conservative friends (or, if I do, they haven’t admitted as much to me). That’s one thing that does seem to be ok across the board of social media: mockery of David Cameron is acceptable no matter what your interest in politics. It’s almost on the same level as Thatcher-bashing now and it’s quite funny too, if I’m honest. But that’s as far as it goes really, you don’t want to turn your social media time into a big political forum and debate the problems of the nation; I mean, it’s still supposed to be fun for God’s sake!

6. Moaning too much about your day-to-day hassles. This is something a lot of people do. I’ve got friends who use Facebook, principally, so that they can update everybody on all the household chores and different meals they’ve had to deal with during the day. One of my friends puts these things up in a great long continuous stream on her statuses – no punctuation of any kind, just a great long string of a sentence: “cleaned the house hoovered the carpets bathed the baby ate breakfast then off to the shops”. I mean, I’m not criticizing her or anything really, but this is every day that we get these updates, and what are we supposed to say? “Yeah you have a really hard life, we all feel so sorry for you?” . . . She’s not going to be reading this by the way, just in case anyone’s wondering.

But then, she’s not even the worst one, I’ve got other friends who do this as well, tell me and all their other friends about the horrors they have to deal with when their shower breaks or they get a cold and still have to go to work. I mean I know everybody needs to moan about things every now and again, but is Facebook really the place to do it? Surely they’ve got real people to talk to about these things, there’s no need to bother the rest of the world with it is there? What bothers me, personally, is that when they do this they actually expect a response, as if we’re all going to be fascinated by this stuff. Anyway . . .

That’s all I can think of right now, but it seemed to me that there are a lot of things about the internet that we’re still kind of feeling our way around because, as yet, the kinds of rules and etiquettes that we would have in the course of normal social interaction have yet to be defined online. It’s obviously something that’s being looked at right now, because there are so many concerns about the inappropriate content and the amount of unsavoury things you can find on social media and online search sites. The UK government has recently been talking about revising the laws for online media and I think there are far more concerns about it in the US, but the truth is there are probably always going to be concerns about the smaller issues of privacy and security online and things like common courtesy and good judgment will always be necessary tools for the modern internet user. I suppose what I’m saying is that we now have to think far more consciously about the fact that, just because we’re online, doesn’t mean we have the right to invade or comment on all aspects of other people’s lives. If you saw that person in the street, someone you didn’t actually know in real life I mean, then you wouldn’t just go up to them and start commenting critically on their outfit or telling them all about what you had for breakfast would you? You wouldn’t say things about their kids or try to take pictures of them so you could “tag” them and make some kind of personal connection with them that way. Because that would be inappropriate and wrong.

The rules around social media should be no different to rules present in society. But if you can’t see people then things change, apparently . . . It’s a grey area. Be aware.

A Book List

This is a list of all the great books I’ve read this year.

In no particular order:

1. Donna Tartt, “The Goldfinch” – a great novel that will probably take you some time to read, but which is totally worth it. See my review of it, if you want to.

2. Elizabeth Jane Howard’s “Cazalet” series – if you haven’t read this, or even heard of it, it’s one of those big, sweeping family sagas that goes across five books (the fifth one of which has only just been brought out). If you have a lot of spare time on your hands then I highly recommend this one.

3. Margaret Atwood, “Maddadam” – actually I was a little bit disappointed with this one, but I thought I’d better include it anyway because it’s Margaret Atwood and because it is the long awaited conclusion to her sci-fi (ish) trilogy.

4. Matt Haig, “The Humans” – a funny, sad and touching book about being an alien on planet Earth and trying to understand human life. If you’ve ever felt like you didn’t belong here and no one else could possibly understand you, read this book.

5. Gavin Extence, “The Universe vs. Alex Woods” – an entertaining read with a good ironic streak and a sad ending.

6. Michael Chabon, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” – this book is the best thing I have ever read that had anything remotely to do with comic books. It’s about the ascendancy of two Jewish comic book creators in New York around the time of the Second World War. Basically they are called upon to design a rival for Superman, which they succeed in doing against a backdrop of wartime worries and unseen atrocities. It’s a great book, honestly.

7. Ruth Ozeki, “A Tale For The Time Being” – I wanted more from this in the end, and would have liked it to go on a bit longer, but the story had me gripped all the way through and, I have to say, I think it was worth reading. It’s about a Japanese girl who sends her diary out into the world in a Hello Kitty lunchbox, sort of like a message in a bottle, to be found by another woman on the Canadian coast. Cue the obsessive reading of the diary and the need for said finder to locate the girl so she can a) give it back to her and, b) make sure she’s ok. It’s an interesting read, certainly, and has a lot to say about the nature of time and the medium of writing. It also references Marcel Proust quite heavily.

8. Ransom Riggs, “Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children” – what can I say, this one’s just plain weird. The next instalment is out next year and I can’t wait to read it.

9. Susan Hancock, “The Peastick Girl” – I read this one as a review copy and thought it was great. Very subtle story about a woman with psychological problems. Very well written.

10. Edwina Preston, “The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer” – Also a review copy. Great if you loved things like Erin Morgenstern’s “The Night Circus” or if you love anything that features a travelling circus of any description.

11. Charles Dickens, “Martin Chuzzlewit” – Ok this is a long one, but it’s a classic and I love the characters. I read it very easily and would quite happily have gone back to the beginning when I finished it and started again, but I had other things to move on to, not least . . .

12. Charles Dickens, “Our Mutual Friend” – whose characters are not as rich as the ones in “Martin Chuzzlewit”, in my own opinion, but which still has a highly compelling story and which kept me hooked up until the end.

13. Marcus Sedgwick, “She is Not Invisible” – This is a new book, out this year, and it’s written for children, but it has a complex structure that hinges on the number 354, and which tells the story of a blind girl and her little brother who go all the way from the UK to America on their own in order to save their dad who they know to be missing. It’s a great story, well told and I highly recommend it to everyone.

14. Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., “Kick Ass” – I LOVED this! I don’t really go in for comic books much, you know the sort of superhero, traditional comic strip stuff, but graphic novels about superheroes can sometimes be really cool and “Kick Ass” just has a bit of a twist on what we think of as the traditional superhero story. It plays with the clichés a little bit and, really wonderfully, it gives most of the action to the girl character, Hit Girl, who I love completely; I think she rocks. There is also a sequel (or prequel, I’m not quite sure), all about Hit Girl, which is also fabulous and I think there will be more out next year.

15. David Jason’s Autobiography – Ok so, if you’re outside the UK, you might not know what this is, or who David Jason is – but then again, you might if you have BBC America or something. He’s a very famous television actor and more prominent in comedy than anything else. He’s also a national institution in the UK and he’s finally written a book all about his life as he is now, I think, in his early 80s and has something of a story to tell. He’s great and the book is great, so much so that I spent hours reading it and found that I’d lost half a day (which, for someone who usually gets bored with autobiographies by about page 20, is pretty good going).

16. Neil Gaiman, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” – This was a weird one. But I love Neil Gaiman and all his books are pretty weird in some way or another. I’m not sure I totally understood the plot, because I read it very quickly, but I think it’s supposed to be semi-autobiographical and, in true Gaiman style, it keeps you reading to the end.

17. R.J. Palacio, “Wonder” – This is a short book for kids that kept me gripped all the way through. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s an inspiring story of the kind that doesn’t make you feel sick or humbled, but which really makes you feel the necessity to recognize brilliant people for who they are and not what they look like. This is a story about a boy who has had to have several facial reconstructions following a birth defect. He goes to school, finally, after being home-schooled for some years, and is treated largely as you might expect him to be treated by the other kids. It’s a coming of age story that is really all about overcoming the cruelty of school, with a bit of a twist thrown in. The ending is uplifting as well.

18. Stephen Chbosky, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” – Ok, I read this purely because I was going to watch the movie and I thought that I should check out the book first. I didn’t expect to like it just because it’s all about the teenage years and how hard it is to be a 17 year old etc. etc. But, boy was I surprised! This is a gem of a book that had me turning the pages so fast I think I got paper-cuts on my fingers. I read the whole book in one sitting and loved it. It’s witty, it’s got great dialogue, the character dynamic just works. (And yes, I saw the film and thought that was great too, but this book was SO much better than any movie!) It’s a must read. I promise you.

19. Marian Keyes, “The Mystery of Mercy Close” – Chick-lit, as they call it, is not something I generally read. (I went through a phase of reading it in my teens and then, snobbishly, turned my back on it forever in order to pursue higher things.) But Marian Keyes is a writer that I LOVE (emphasis there) with a passion because she’s just so bloody witty. Her writing is smart, clever, funny, and addictive. If you haven’t read her before then you won’t know, but you must try her books. This one here is the last book to complete a set of five (I think it’s five anyway) that cover the lives of the fictional Walsh sisters. I first read “Watermelon” (the first of the five) when I was about 14 and, even though it was really meant for grown-up women with all its sexual references and its context of post-marital-break-up, I howled with laughter and cried at the sad bits all the same. I really think she’s worth reading, so go, read!

And finally,

20. Bryan Talbot, “Grandville Mon Amour” – This is another graphic novel, very well drawn and just, brilliant to read. It’s about a detective in Victorian England – who also happens to be a badger with a shady past and a broken heart. It’s beautiful to look at and has a great story. Kids will love it, too I think, but, speaking as a grown-up, I couldn’t put it down!

Ok I’m going to stop at 20 now, because I think it’ll just go on and on otherwise, but just let me say that there have been some great books around this year, and I have read plenty that were great (new or old), across this twelve month span of 2013. I’m really looking forward to next year now so that I can get cracking on all the new stuff that’s going to come out and, although the highlight of this year for me has to be Donna Tartt’s new book – the likes of which we probably won’t see again for at least another decade because she is a painfully slow writer it seems – I think next year is going to be great.

Let me know on Twitter what you’ve been reading this year (@Authorlady2013); if you like my choices, or agree/disagree with my appraisals of them. I’m interested to know what you think of this year’s books and maybe you’ll tell me what you’re excited to read next year.

Have a good one guys

An End of Year Reflection

It’s the end of the year. Soon it will be a new one. So I just thought that now would be a great time to think back over my year and try to make sense of it, you know, starting with the question:

“Where the hell did all that time go?”

This time last year I was having a nervous breakdown. I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean an actual nervous breakdown. Last year, and most of the two or three years before it, had been something of a denial period – in every sense. I was doing my PhD, whilst juggling a continually morphing eating disorder that vacillated between bulimia and anorexia. My PhD wasn’t going very well for a really long time, but I kidded myself all through that it would turn itself around at some critical point and I would just get it, and everything would be fine.

Anyway, cut a long story short, that didn’t happen (boo hoo), and by the time it got to the end of last year, when I was supposed to be finished with it all, I was about ready to crack up. This, especially, became clear when I was then told that I couldn’t submit my thesis as it then was because it was just not good enough. Cue several more months of fighting and arguing and rewriting to get to the point where I could submit it.

So, in November last year, I remember being at breaking point. I was crying all the time during the day, driving around in my car like a crazy person whilst screaming obscene things at myself and generally just plotting my own demise. I thought that if I couldn’t get my PhD and be deemed some sort of genius with an accolade then I would no longer have anything to live for and that, basically, my mother would have been proved right all along in her, largely unspoken, opinion that I was just never going to amount to anything and I would end up just like her (bitter, alone and mentally ill with an unwanted child that never said thank you for anything . . . you get the picture). Right before Christmas last year I was desperate and suicidal and, basically, that whole breakdown culminated in my trying to starve myself to death – not an easy thing to do and, as I soon discovered, bloody painful. I had first thought of overdosing, but I couldn’t face the prospect of it not working and I didn’t know how badly I might screw it up. OD-ing, when you’re trying to do it, is actually quite hard; I’m told it’s very easy when you’re NOT trying (maybe that’s where I went wrong?).

Anyway, I’m getting off the point, I know. I was supposed to be writing about THIS year, not last year, but I guess, because I’ve been thinking so much about where I am now in relation to where I was then, I wanted to set the scene a bit. You know, because it’s not obvious if you don’t know me and you don’t know all the whys and the hows . . . but then you probably don’t want to, ok, moving on.

This year. This year kicked off with me coming out of my anorexic phase, whilst still trying to rewrite my thesis and figure out how I was going to pay for extra tuition fees at university to cover the time I was going to need. All I remember very clearly from New Year’s Day 2013 is that the highlight, for me, was staggering, bleary-eyed and sleep deprived (due to insomnia rather than anything actually fun sadly), across a freezing cold shopping centre car park to go and buy a box of breakfast cereal which I then ate, completely and straight from the box, while I wrote a book review for my friend Gillian. I wrote the whole review and, in fact, read the whole book on New Year’s Day, and then was awarded major brownie points from said friend for doing it in such a rush. It wasn’t actually necessary for me to do it for months, but I really desperately wanted to do something with my day rather than sitting around doing nothing and twiddling my thumbs and generally just going mad.

I hate having nothing to do now, that’s one thing I have learned, work stops you driving yourself nuts thinking about all the shit that you don’t want to think about, like how fat you’re getting or how much money you owe people or how much your mother drives you crazy. It’s good to have a focus.

So that was New Year anyway. Not fun, exactly, but fruitful (and fibreful too, thanks to the cereal, so that was good!) Then all I remember after that is several weeks of cold and snow – which was still around in March, if I remember correctly. I didn’t think it still snowed in March, even in this country (the UK, for those not in the know). But, yep. Snow on the ground, ice all around, and me stuck at home because, for numerous reasons, I couldn’t go outside. Well, ok, three reasons really: a) I hate the cold, b) I can’t walk on snow and ice because I fall down A LOT! and c) I had some kind of strain injury going on with both my hands so that, for the life of me, I couldn’t do anything even as simple as opening a letter or stirring a cup of tea. I mean, it was actually really bad, I woke up one morning and it was like my hands had been bashed with hammers – I suspect because of all the typing that I’d been doing although I also suspect that it had something to do with the lack of nutrients that I’d had for such a long time while I was anorexic. I’m still actually worried now that I might have done some damage to my tendons or something, but the doctor couldn’t find anything majorly wrong with me and, anyway, it got better in the end. I can operate all my fingers now and I only have very marginal twinges in my arms and hands (so I guess I was lucky). But I remember I had this problem on my birthday, which is in early March, and even I, who am not remotely into birthdays and usually don’t care what happens, could see that this was not a good thing.

Anyway, that happened. And passed, despite the constant worry of my mother and the absolute ignorance of my PhD supervisors who had no idea, and did not bother to ask, how I was.

[Incidentally, I may, at some stage, write a blog post on the unsupportive nature of my PhD supervisors and the awful experience that I had during my foray into academia, but I feel that this might also seem a bit vindictive and moany and, with the benefit of hindsight, I really don’t think there’s much to dwell on there, so perhaps I won’t.]

I was still writing my thesis up until the end of April, and I was bloody glad when I finally finished it. I knew it wasn’t going to be any good, I think, but nonetheless I was quite proud of what I’d done with it since it did, in the end, make a logical and coherent argument . . . or so I thought. I submitted it in May and then waited, dutifully, throughout that month to be told about my Viva.

By the way, a Viva, or Viva Voce, as it’s called in full, is the final exam for a PhD; it’s where you go to meet with two or more examiners (who you’ll probably never have met before) in order to defend your thesis against the grilling that they will inevitably give it. I was nervous about this, of course, but I was prepared for it, I thought, and would have been totally fine to go through with it, until I was told, albeit rather belatedly due to an admin cock-up, that I would not be Viva-ed at all because the examiners had read my thesis and decided it was crap and they didn’t see the point of giving it the credence of an examination.

Needless to say, at this point, I gave up. I wasn’t upset and I was just really pissed off with the whole thing; I mean I was tired, you know, and I felt like I’d been treated badly, so I sort of rode the wave of righteous anger for a while and then forgot it. I had other problems at this point, anyway; life was getting in the way. My uncle died in June, which really upset my mother and left us in a little bit of a mess. And I just didn’t feel like I could go on with writing a thesis that, fairly obviously, was never going to be any good when I’d already re-written it twice and nearly lost my mind (and the use of my hands) in the process. No one at my university seemed to appreciate this, but there we are.

By August I was signing up for the dole (otherwise known as social security), at the behest of my mother who would not allow me to live under her roof and not have some sort of status. “If you don’t study and you can’t get a job then you’ll have to join the ranks of the unemployed and stick your hand out for money like the rest of the losers.” Or something along those lines anyway. So, it was during this time, while I was casting about looking for actual jobs doing anything from cleaning to home helps to admin workers, that I started to write.
It was always something I had wanted to do and I knew, even while I was doing my PhD, that creative writing would be something I would eventually move onto when I was finally finished with my not so great thesis on Iris Murdoch. My plan, initially, was just to take the novel I’d been tinkering with on and off for years and put it up on Kindle.

But then I decided to try to do things properly and, not only did I put up my novel, but I also wrote quite a hefty amount of short stories and a few other things besides that, and put them up too. This all happened in September and I’m thinking now that it could, with a bit of hard work, become a career.

I didn’t rule out proper work, and I still haven’t now. But this is what I want to do, so there we are.
It’s now the end of the year and I’m thinking about where I’ve come to after all of this. It’s weird, isn’t it, how the beginning of the year and the end of it seem so different – the person you are in January, looking forward to the blank slate of the year, is always so different from the person you are in December when you’re looking back and wondering just how the hell all that happened in just twelve short months. I remember myself in January this year, being thin, sulky, miserable, cold and desperate to prove that I wasn’t stupid. Now, in December, I’m . . . well . . . no longer thin, I’m angry rather than miserable, and I really don’t give a damn now what anyone thinks.

When I was at university, I was convinced that that was the only way I could prove that I was worth something. I didn’t want to be out in the world because I didn’t think that I could handle it. University was all I knew and I guess I’d just spent too much time there. I did a PhD because I thought that staying at university forever was the only thing for me, because I’d never be employable in the real world. But what I found there, really, was that, although there were people who were prepared to accept me for my weirdness and specialist knowledge of books and movies, and while there were people who were quite happy for me to read all day and learn everything that I could in the anticipation of some great and wonderful accolade at the end, all I was doing was kidding myself. I didn’t really belong there either, and in the end it was just embarrassing because I could see people looking at me, feeling sorry for me, willing me to just get on with it and do something so that they could get rid of me too. They could all see that I didn’t fit.

Academics are kind of a closed group, you see; they’ll let anybody in, in theory, if they want to learn badly enough and have the ready wit and the keen attention to do it. But it’s a bit like being a politician in the end; if you don’t play the game then they shun you. They like people who hold the same opinions, who uphold research standards and who band together and agree with each other on important points that, in actual fact, are pretty miniscule and irrelevant in any real life context. There’s a code of practice and a mode of behaviour that you have to sign up to, and I was just the wrong fit. I didn’t want to change myself and I didn’t want to morph into some sort of myopic middle-class freak. Because that’s all most academics are really. Some of the ones I hung around with were really awful to talk to actually; I mean, I thought they were great to begin with, and I was attracted to their glamour because they were so different from the people I usually mixed with – I just couldn’t believe they’d let me into their world. But that soon wore off. I hated them in the end for being so ignorant and theoretical and, basically, just detached from real life.

I wanted to get out in the end.

So now here I am. Not giving a damn. I’m writing. And I’ll keep writing. And I’ll write whatever I want. If people don’t like what I write then they don’t. But I think that people, REAL people are better placed to judge what they do and don’t like for themselves and, for the most part, if they don’t like it, they just won’t read it. I’m not scared about that. If I find a few people who like what I write then I’ll be happy and, even though I don’t know what the hell next year is going to bring me (and really don’t want to right now), I still think this is what I want to do.

I’m still dreading New Year though so stay tuned for another blog-post of “AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!! IT’S ANOTHER YEAR WHAT THE FUCK AM I GOING TO DO WITH IT HELP ME” on January 1st.

Adios amigos and thanks for reading. See you again soon! 

A Book Review

Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch”.

There are SO many things that I could say about this book, and I apologize in advance if this blog post reads more like an essay in the end than a simple book review. But it’s a long book and extremely detailed (and it’s been ten years in the writing for the author) so it really deserves a proper appraisal.

First let me say that I am a MASSIVE Donna Tartt fan – have been ever since my teens when I read “The Secret History” – and I have been waiting for this book almost since I first discovered her. “The Little Friend” was a book that I liked, in the end, but do not love and I was starting to think that maybe she just didn’t have it any more and had nothing left to bring to a new story.

Boy was I wrong!

This book of hers, the 700-and-something-page tome, “The Goldfinch”, was published a month ago and is now being named one of the hottest books of this year. And, while for some, it seems that this author is considered to be overhyped – I’ve heard many people say, in reaction to this literary phenomenon, that “Hey, no book is THAT good” – I have to say I think it’s brilliant. (I won’t quibble with people who just don’t want to bother, or don’t like it. To those people I will just say: go and write your own blog post!) This book is truly great, in my view, just because it captures so much and sweeps so beautifully across the life of the main character and in such a way that – and I have to agree with some of the other reviews I’ve read here – with this book, Tartt could easily rival Dickens.

It’s a bold claim, but when you understand something about this book – and particularly when you’ve read it – you might understand.

So, ok, brief plot synopsis, if such a thing is possible here:

The story begins with the 13 year old Theo Decker being taken to an art gallery by his mother after he has just been suspended from school. Whilst there, he is introduced to new paintings, culture etc. and, at the same time, catches the eye of a pretty young girl who is there with an old man – her uncle. All of this meanders along for a few pages before the sudden interjection of an explosion, which caves in part of the building and kills several people, including the old man and, as is later discovered, Theo’s mother. During his time in the gallery, Theo does several things – beyond surviving the horrific event of being caught up in an explosion – the first of which is to talk to the old man and be given a ring which he is then charged with returning to a man called Hobie. This encounter with the old man will take Theo on a journey throughout the rest of his life and will still be with him as a potent memory many years later. But the other, seemingly more important, action that he commits whilst in the gallery is to steal a particularly famous painting: Carel Fabritius’ “The Goldfinch”.

It is a small painting and, from what I can make out, not overly impressive at first glance, but it makes a huge impression on Theo and the belief that he owns it, for so many years, is something that gives him hope even in the most awful periods of his life.

In later years, we see Theo moving from the relatively good care of a family in New York to an empty and neglected existence with his feckless, gambling, ex-alcoholic father in Las Vegas. Theo’s time with his father is pivotal because it takes him from being basically a good kid to being lumped in with his incredibly crooked father, while it is also allows him to form the relationships and overall outlook on life that will take him on to his later, and far more catastrophic adulthood.

In Vegas, Theo becomes a drug addict, meets the boy who will become his lifelong best friend and, in many ways, corrupter, but he also learns the valuable lesson that his family and, indeed, most of the adults in his life, are not dependable and that the foundations of his life are really not very solid. What struck me most about the teenage Theo was how vulnerable he is, and how he places his faith in all the strangest places; presumably because he has so little that is concrete to hang onto. There is no love or trust or loyalty in his life after he loses his mother; his father clearly doesn’t want him; the Barbour’s, whom he lives with for a while in New York after the explosion, clearly have problems of their own and are, despite their best efforts to hide it, glad to see the back of him. Until he meets Boris, then, he really doesn’t have anyone who loves him – and all he has instead is the picture.

The comparison that Tartt draws on most heavily here, or so it seems to me, is the one between Theo and Harry Potter. I’ll admit, this shocked me a little bit because it seemed to be so at odds with the kind of serious, emotive piece that she’s going for here (not that “Harry Potter”, as a series, was not serious or emotive in its own way, but, you know, it was fantasy, and this is adult fiction). Nevertheless, the fact that it is so clearly drawn out throughout the book, to describe the dynamic and overall relative characters of Theo and Boris, is interesting. Of course there are a lot of other comparisons to be drawn here, such as Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger, David Copperfield and Steerforth maybe. But, for me, it is the Harry Potter allusion that stands out. Boris is the first to give Theo the nickname of “Potter” because of his appearance – he wears glasses, and has a similarly slight build, etc. And I suppose that this could, in itself, be a minor and isolated thing. But the name sticks and is still being used in Theo’s adulthood.

Plus, given the fact that Theo’s relationship with Boris is what ultimately changes him and, in the end, makes him look a bit like a Bret Easton Ellis character (Patrick Bateman without the obsession to murder prostitutes, or one of the guys in “Less Than Zero” perhaps), it just kind of made me think that you could see this book as, in part, a more realistic take on what would happen to kid like Harry Potter in the world we know. I mean it’s basically the case that Theo experiences the same sort of meeting that Harry experiences with Draco Malfoy when he first attends Hogwarts in “The Philosopher’s Stone”. Theo has a similarly fateful meeting with a kid who is really just like himself – a kid who gets kicked around by life – and, rather than saying that he wants to go and hang around with the good kids (as Harry does), he just bands together with the not so good one and forms an alliance that will stay in place for the rest of their lives. If you think of it that way then, Theo’s story is the story of what would happen if Harry Potter became friends with Draco Malfoy and they just looked out for each other first and above anyone else. In a weird way, it kind of works.

At times, Boris and Theo’s relationship is quite sweet. They have a love for each other, which probably comes out of dependency and the lack of ability to find anybody else who cares. (There is a homosexual implication in there somewhere too, but I don’t think that’s the point. It’s more like they’re brothers.) And, even though Boris later becomes a drug dealer, steals from Theo, gets him involved in all kinds of trouble (including murder) he is still looking after his best friend right up to the end. All through this book, there is something very loyal and tight about these two guys, and you really get the sense of feeling sorry for Theo, despite the awful and sinister things he does towards the end of the novel when, quite frankly, he starts to look like he’s become a bit twisted; because, inside, he’s just a kid who goes through something truly terrible and needs to cling on to anything and anyone who will love him.

His love for Pippa, the girl in the gallery, with whom he has a very sporadic interaction right up until the end of the book, is something that verges on desperation and which almost everyone tries, gently, to deter him from. It’s almost like a PTSD thing, whereby you believe that you’ve gone through something awful with another person and so they are, quite naturally, the only person who will ever understand you. Theo experiences that for Pippa and goes a little bit crazy in the process because he can’t work out why she does not feel the same way about him.
It’s a tortuous thing to read, but it’s compelling and, when you feel his despair in the end, you can’t help but feel terrible at his absolute devastation.

Mostly I felt sorry for Hobie though – otherwise known as James Hobart. The guy is just a furniture restorer – the business partner of the old man who died in the gallery – and he’s somehow roped into being one of Theo’s guardians during his late teens. (He then goes on to make Theo his new business partner and things go downhill from there.) In many ways, Hobie reminds me of another character from Harry Potter, because he has this kind of big, good natured aura around him, and there is this overwhelming feeling of him being slightly blinkered where other people are concerned, particularly Theo. All of this makes me think that he is, in some way, modelled on Harry Potter’s great friend, Rubeus Hagrid and it just seems to me that you have to feel sorry for him because, like Hagrid, he puts so much faith in other people – some of whom he believes the sun shines out of – and should, in a perfect world, be rewarded for his pains.

As I read, I could almost imagine the good natured, optimistic beam of a smile falling from his face as he realized what a mess he was left with because of Theo – a boy that he’d plumbed so much hope and energy and love into, because he thought it was all going to be worth it – and it really broke my heart. (I suppose, again, you could draw all kinds of Dickensian allusions here too, Mr. Micawber for example, whose joviality should really be rewarded with kindness and prosperity, but who finds himself in a debtor’s prison and reliant – this time with a positive outcome – on David Copperfield, who is one of his only friends. It is heartbreaking that nice people like that have to suffer; you really feel it.)

I suppose what I loved about this book most of all though, was the way it seems to mix old and new styles. There is still the same feeling that this is a Donna Tartt novel. I read it with the remembrance of all the things I first loved about “The Secret History”. The rich, majestic descriptions of the art work and the culture, and the experience of learning about all of those things, are very similar to the evocative description of academia and classical learning that comes through in her earlier novel.

“The Secret History” was written in the 1980s and published in the early 1990s. It is, therefore, set in a time when academia still had a kind of grandiosity and hardworking quality (or at least it was still thought of in this way by some) with people slogging away at typewriters in old-style college bedrooms, staying up until the small hours to read Greek and sitting around in small tutorial groups during the day to talk about it with funny old classics professors. Even in her early phase, Tartt could make a college in Vermont sound like an American version of our Oxford and her first book really gave a sense of the golden time that those college years formed for the narrator, Richard Papen.

When I first read that book it inspired me, it made me want to go to university and have this experience. Although, in the end, I didn’t quite because, as I discovered, it’s not really like that in most higher learning institutions now. And I suppose that’s why, in “The Goldfinch”, all these things are slightly lost on Theo, who really only cares about art and learning, I think, because of the painting he has stolen. In the course of the book there is a move towards the more modern social and cultural concerns – terrorism being the key theme in the book with the destruction, desecration and theft of artworks hanging at the centre of the plot. But there are also more minor references to books and movies that make it feel more contemporary, as well as, more bleakly, to DVD players, iPhones and laptops; all of this makes the world in this book seem markedly different to the one she describes in “The Secret History” simply because, now, it really looks like our world.

I’m making this sound good, and in some ways it probably is, although, in a small sense, I was a little disappointed by these updated, contemporary references. I accept that it’s probably necessary, but, still, the introduction of an iPhone into a book about art, and even a long description of the anguish someone feels when the things dies out on them at a crucial moment, seems a little sad and sell-out to me. It’s the kind of thing Dan Brown would do.

Anyway, I digress . . .

This book is the best I’ve read this year, by far and away, and I would encourage anyone to read it. I know that a lot of people shy away from long books and, in many cases, I am the same. But, if you read one long book this year (what’s left of it), read this one. I promise you, you will not be sorry.

Christmas

Might still be a bit early for this, but I wanted to get it in now because I think that a lot of people are probably feeling the same way. It’s still November (just) and Christmas is everywhere. This is pretty typical for this time of year (in America it might be worse). In the UK, the shops start putting stuff out for Christmas on 1st September and they’re still trying to move the last of it in late January. It becomes depressing more than anything else because it just takes all the joy and spontaneity out of the day. I mean, it’s true isn’t it? The run up to Christmas, and the anticipation of it, is what most people look back on and remember every year when it’s all over. The day itself is just the day when you rip the wrapping paper off and clear the debris out of the way – it’s the three month build up that always makes the impression, because, hey, it lasts longer and it’s got far more time to imprint on your brain.

But, despite all of this, the shiny lights and the tinsel and the nice food all over the place, I still hate Christmas. There are a lot of reasons for this – all of which, I am aware, will make me sound like a scrooge. (Although I really resent being called that!) Basically I think I’ll just list them because it’s probably going to be easier. So here goes. All the reasons I hate Christmas:


1. It’s expensive and wasteful. Think about it. You spend all that money on stuff for other people, ridiculous amounts of money usually that just panders to the commercial roundabout on which we continually pivot and allows companies all over the world to think that it’s ok to try to screw money out of us with extortionate prices one minute and last minute deals the next. Most of the food and plastic, battery-operated junk that you’ll buy in the shops will either be broken, eaten, or thrown away by the end year when, as tradition dictates, people will then be spending whatever money they don’t have to use to pay back their credit card companies on worthless gym memberships and home exercise equipment (to lose all the pounds you’ve put on whilst you were busy eating mince pies and turkey). Why not just save the money and pass that round the dinner table on Christmas Day instead? . . . Ok, moving on.

2. There’s too much food. (I think I’ve covered that one with Point 1 but I thought it needed saying again.)

3. There is SO much shit all over the TV that it’s not even funny any more. Most of it is on repeat and we’ve seen it so many times that we can practically recite the scripts of all those old sitcoms and family films in our sleep. (This one is problematic to me, I’ll admit, because I still fall for it too. Even though I really kind of hate “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Snowman” I still find myself hankering after watching them around this time of year just because I’m tired and it’s winter and I’ve been chasing around so much and . . . yeah, ok forget Point 3 if you like!)

4. Christmas songs . . . Don’t. Even. Get. Me. Started. I don’t mean carols, I mean cheesy Christmas No.1 singles and jingly covers of old pop songs to go along with the cheesy cartoonified, tinsel-happy ads that come on sometime in October and don’t end until the last remnants of Auld Lang Syne have finally rung themselves out of our ears. I HATE Christmas songs and (even though I kind of like Lily Allen and don’t want to slate her for anything) I really kind of loathe any pop star or musician who would actively seek out the place at Christmas No.1. Because, let’s face it, whatever song gets that slot is just going to annoy the shit out of people for weeks on end through early January and then be forgotten again until the next Christmas when someone, somewhere goes “Hey, hang on a minute, what was last year’s crappy single again?”


. . . I could go on with these, but I think, mostly, it’s quite obvious what I hate about Christmas. It’s all the same stuff that everyone else hates about it. But it’s a little bit different for me just because I was never really brought up to like it.

My dad tried to give me proper Christmases – the few times when we would go to his house for it. That was when I was a kid and I didn’t have to do much for it except show up and eat the food – and when most of the presents were for me. Back then I didn’t see much of the pre-Christmas madness either, because I was at school during the week and not usually involved in the shopping nightmares that my mum or dad had to deal with. Christmas was kind of fun then. But my mum wasn’t into Christmas at all. She was a Jehovah’s Witness for a really long time – before I was born and for a while afterwards – and, of course, they don’t really do Christmas, because they don’t believe in all the commercial, overhyped stuff that goes around celebrating “Jesus’ birthday”, it’s just not a thing for them. So when I was a kid, she let me have it all, but she was always kind of sour about it. And she made damn sure that when I spent Christmas with her she didn’t have to do all the decorating and cooking and organizing that my dad would do for the occasion.

Christmas dinner with my mum, if such a thing materialized at all, was chicken and chips (with ketchup). I remember actually eating that for Christmas dinner one year – in my room, aged 15, on my own. It was always just a bit sad with my mum and I was encouraged to kind of ignore it. Now I just think that’s ok.
I don’t begrudge other people Christmas now, before anyone accuses me of that, but I don’t like it . . . or, rather, I don’t see why I should bother. And I kind of wish that I didn’t have to have it shoved in my face all the time by people who think they’re doing me a favour by bringing the Christmas spirit into my life. (Ok, now I do sound like Scrooge.)

But I think that’s just what happens when you get older and you’re suddenly not the one that all of this is for any more. It’s just really all for the kids isn’t it? Christmas? It’s a shiny, bright, happy time in the middle of deep, dark, awful winter, when everything is all about laughter and presents and chocolates and time off school – it’s a time for kids. And when you’re older it’s you that has to think about the logistics and clear up the mess afterwards. That was what I could never understand about my mum when I was younger. I didn’t get why she hated it so much and why she couldn’t just let me enjoy it. But she was just trying to teach me that the joy and brightness was only a fleeting thing – a flicker. And that soon enough I wouldn’t be the centre of attention any more and I’d be the one standing over my kid (possibly) holding the bin liner and waiting for the wrapping paper while, simultaneously, worrying about how to cook a turkey the size of a bread bin in time to eat lunch before everyone died of starvation in the middle of the day.

Of course I don’t do any of these things now because I don’t have kids, or a large family for which to provide Christmas dinner. (So, ha ha ha! I have beaten the rap there!) But still I don’t like all the bleakness of it now. I notice things far more about the plans and preparations that people, and commercial outlets, go through in the last few months of the year (I just saw the other day that my local Tesco have added a little fluorescent green Christmas hat to their logo and set up a giant Christmas tree in the front of their store – complete with fake Christmas presents underneath it that are probably made from old delivery boxes and discontinued brands of wrapping paper). And I just feel like it leeches so much away from what (I am sure) used to be a far more special day. It was, wasn’t it? Because it came up so suddenly and without so much fussing and talking beforehand. I mean, if it was more of a surprise, it would be far better wouldn’t it? If we all forgot about it until about December 20th and then started getting things together for a nice meal and a few gifts, that would be quite nice. Cut out all the crap and the three month stress-a-thon, and just live normal life until it was time to take a week or so off? Why don’t we do that any more? Where the hell has all this rubbish come from?

Anyway that’s almost everything that truly annoys me about it, but it’s not all. Mostly what I find truly offensive about Christmas – I mean the thing that really rankles with me – is the sheer hypocrisy of people who sign up for it. My mum, for instance. Like I said, she hates Christmas, always has done – and she hates most of our family too (always has) – but still, every year now, she writes out Christmas cards to the family, sends out the same routine presents to people (next year’s calendars and grey woollen socks usually) and gets out the sad little plastic Christmas tree from its cardboard box to stand it up in the living room among the cardboard boxes full of junk that, she insists, cannot be thrown away in case she needs something from them. All of this is her idea of observing Christmas – not participating exactly, but going through the motions for the benefit of the non-existent people that won’t be coming over for dinner or to see what she’s done with place. Nobody would notice, or care, if my mother didn’t do anything for Christmas (least of all me since I now really do have nothing to do with Christmas at all). So I just find her behaviour at this time completely ridiculous.

She writes cards to people she doesn’t like and buys food that she doesn’t really want to eat and knows will only make her fat (and then complains when it DOES make her fat). She watches all the crap on TV and laughs at it as if she’s never seen it before; she hums Christmas carols around the house! And she does all of this with absolutely no foundation and no real interest in having a happy Christmas but just because she thinks that she should join in with everybody else and not look like a miserable cow.

*Ahem* *Stands up and takes a proud bow for being a miserable cow*

I know a lot of people do things like that. I mean the hypocritical thing of pretending that you like people you really don’t like just for the holidays. I know that people send cards expressing best wishes to people they hate and invite people round for dinner when they really don’t want to just because they don’t want to face someone calling them mean-spirited and scrooge-like for not putting their differences aside. But why should we? What does it solve? You make friends for a day with someone you hate and then go back to hating them in the New Year? What does that do for anyone? (It’s like the Christmas in No Man’s Land thing all over again – they still had to go back to killing each other after the football match, so what was the point of that?)

I’m mainly writing this because I found out the other day that my mother is, yet again, sending a Christmas card to my dad. This is a man whom she has always hated, ever since I can remember, and whom she has always said she wanted to get as far out of our lives as possible. Even I don’t send him a card any more because she totally trashed my relationship with him (a detail which she seems to have conveniently deleted these days) and her attempts at making friends with him are, to me, not only hypocritical but possibly even vindictive.

I don’t want to moan on about my parents in every blog post I write – but somehow it always seems relevant. So, pocket history, my mum hated my dad because, as far as she was concerned, he and I forced her out of the equation – she didn’t have a problem with him so much (well, she did, but not THAT much), what she mostly had a problem with was that I loved him more than her and we would rather have been left alone together without her. In the end she took him away from me in the cruellest way possible, by turning me against him, and then tried to place herself in the role of mediator to try to bring us back together again. That’s what the Christmas card is for really – that’s all it’s for. It’s just her way of showing how she thinks she’s still got a connection to him, or that she thinks she has some right to know about him over and above me. It’s been like that for a while now. She asks me about him as if she thinks I know anything and then tries to make out that my relationship with him is somehow her personal business.

But, I’m getting off the point . . . Sorry.

All I was saying was that, if you hate people, then putting aside your differences for one day so that you can eat and be merry is not going to make you hate them less later on. All the problems will still be there and you still won’t want to deal with them. So Christmas is a fantasy really, and all the commercialism that goes around it is just our way of trying to perpetuate the fantasy so that we won’t have to focus on the crap of real life.

I can see why people want that. That’s what books and TV and all the other recreational things we do in life are for. But I don’t care about Christmas any more. It’s just another excuse to stuff our faces and get pissed. Let the kids have it, sure. But otherwise what’s the point?

Friends

So, I’ve had a lot of friends in my life; they’ve sort of come and gone a bit like buses. You know what I mean. Well, ok, maybe you don’t.

Here’s the thing though, I don’t get this lifelong friendship thing that other people keep insisting is all important. I see it everywhere, people who hang on to their childhood friends and feel bereft if they lose them. I have friends on Facebook who get really upset when people they have known for years unfriend them suddenly for no reason. They take it really personally.

But I don’t get that – that sentimentality that some people have for others, because it’s ridiculous. It’s like those people who hang on to every pair of shoes they’ve ever owned, or people who can’t throw away carrier bags, or worse, people who keep memory boxes full of old ticket stubs and passport photos, as if that stuff really means anything. It doesn’t. If you’ve got something to remember, then remember it. I do that and it’s great, fine. But don’t hang on to the remnants of it like a limpet crab, as if you think that losing it will be so terrible that you’ll actually feel pain.

In my view, and in my world, relationships are transient. People come and go and I have connections to them at particular times because we bond over particular things. When I was at school I moved from best friend to best friend in phases. There was the Tanya phase in early primary school, then the Jennifer phase, then Fiona in secondary school. Each of these friendships was important to me at the time, almost entirely exclusive (as best friends tend to be when you’re a kid), and this despite the fact that we didn’t actually have that much in common apart from the fact that we went to the same school and, somehow, had latched onto each other.

With Tanya, I was friends with her because we imprinted on each other (a bit like baby chickens do with their mothers) on the first day of school and we continued to be friends for about four years until it finally became apparent that we didn’t share any interests or even have similar temperaments (she was, if I remember correctly, a complete bitch when she got older). Then Jenny. I remember, I didn’t like her to begin with, and then we somehow became friends because we both hated Tanya. We didn’t have anything in common either, but it became a habit to hang around together. Then, when we were both in secondary school, she emigrated to Australia with her family and I ended up being friends with Fiona. I still remember when I met Fi – I was milling about on my own in the dining hall and she called me over and told me I could hang around with her. It was convenient. We weren’t alike, and we didn’t like the same stuff (mostly I pretended to like what she liked), and we weren’t in many of the same classes because she was in all the lower streams, but we were friends.

When you’re at school, you don’t see that you’re institutionalized to the point of being quite ridiculous. The relationships you form with other people are formed, primarily, because you’re all in the same boat and you have to survive somehow. It’s a political thing, and a necessity. But it’s not real usually; it’s just like people who make friends in prison, or mental hospitals or something. You need someone to talk to, to help get you through it, so you find someone and latch on and then, when you get out, it’s sort of over.

When I left school, I very quickly realized that those old friendships and relationships were not built to last, because the thing that bonded us for so many years was no longer present. We weren’t in the same boat any more, we were all in different boats, with new people and we had to make new friends.

And that’s what life is like. It sounds harsh, but I really think that it’s healthier, in most cases, to say “out with the old” and just move on. I’ve done that with a lot of people in the end. You can spend a lot of time feeling depressed about it, mourning the relationships that have gone by, if you like; but I think it’s better just to recognize that people are not meant to be together forever. People come and go.

There are some people, like I’ve said already, who hang on to their old friendships in a curiously nostalgic and, one might even say suffocating way. A lot of the people I went to school with, from the little I’ve seen of them over the years, seem to be obsessed with keeping up with old school friends and reminiscing about old times – as if school was some great adventure we all had together, or some sort of golden time, when in fact we all hated it to the point of wanting to blow the place up when we left and never look back. (I remember feeling this way even if nobody else does. Everybody knows that high-school never ends, right? It’s not news. But it’s not a good thing either; you’re supposed to at least TRY to move on!)

I’ve been cutting ties all my life. If something’s not working for me, or if something goes bad and I don’t want to have to dwell on it any more (toxic or stale relationships basically), then I move away from it. Even if it’s someone I’ve known for years. Because that can happen too can’t it? You can know someone for years and think that you know everything about them, and you don’t see any of the bad stuff because you get along so well with them. And then, all of a sudden, after years of thinking these people are great, you suddenly see their ugly side.
Everyone’s got an ugly side, I know. But you don’t tend to see it in your friends. You become blind to it. I guess this goes for love relationships too, although I don’t know so much about those. But I’ve done that with friends, certainly, fallen out of liking with them.

I had a friend called Claire, who I still think was mostly pretty great (if I’m even remotely capable of love, I think I loved Claire – in every way EXCEPT the sexual!). But I remember, towards the end of our friendship, I really started to not like what I saw in her. The attitude, the opinions, the people she hooked up with. It just wasn’t her – or not the her I knew. And that was the time to stop being friends, as far as I was concerned. Because I’m not someone who’s going to tell my friends that they shouldn’t be who they are – people change, that’s all, and when they do, you have to accept it and decide if the person they’ve changed into is someone you still want to be friends with. If not, you move on, because you have to change and grow up too. That’s natural. I don’t have any bad feelings towards Claire, I just don’t ever want to see her again. (If that makes sense.)

And it doesn’t even matter how much time has gone by in a friendship. I was friends with a guy for ten years; I thought I knew him really well, we had a similar sense of humour, and I could talk to him, you know? He was one of the best friends I’ve ever had because, if I was upset, I could tell him. If he had something to say, it would be me he would want to say it to. I met him in a totally bizarre and random way (the details of which I won’t go into because it would probably be quite tedious and bore you senseless) the day before my 18th birthday and the occasion became a memorable anniversary for us.

(I’m making this sound like we were deeply in love, which was not how it was. I don’t do love, it’s not for me. I only do serious friendship – those are my relationships. That’s as far as I go. He did tell me he loved me, but it wasn’t THAT kind of love, it was something else.)

But, anyway, my point was that he and I were really close for ten years and we were properly in each other’s lives, you know? Even though we had very different lives, we were still kind of on the same page.

And then, suddenly, this year, it was like we weren’t any more. He has children now, I think he’s married too (he didn’t tell me about that but I saw a reference to an impending wedding on his FB page and I assume it was his) and his life is just a lot more complicated, whereas my life has changed too. I’m not just some girl doing A Levels and working in a shop any more (which is more or less where I was when I was 18) and he’s not just some guy dicking around working in a pet shop and memorizing all the monsters and side-gags on “Buffy”. We’re adults now. We’re different. And when I tried to get in touch with him earlier this year it was just a bit sad, because we really had nothing left to say to each other. It was like we were strangers.

I didn’t cry about this, or get upset, or take it personally. I just accepted it, the way I have accepted the death of all my other friendships. It happens. Nothing lasts forever. So, when he unfriended me on Facebook and I didn’t hear from him by mail or text, I just dealt with it.

I’ll probably never see or hear from him again and I suppose that is the way it should be.

Now, I have friends in the sparsest sense of the word. They are a motley collection of people that have, somehow, managed to survive the cull – some of them are people I barely knew at school or college but who, for some reason or another, I have managed to find something in common with now. Other people are friends I made during my PhD (relatively recent) and I don’t know if they will go on to be lifelong or even just long-term friends. We’ll see. I suspect that eventually I will have nothing to say to most of them, since they are now all academics with well established careers and a list of publications to their name. And who am I? Certainly not an academic if the grand finale of my PhD is anything to go by (I left it under a cloud, never to go back). So I think they will get bored of me sooner or later when I cease to be of interest to them. Or I will get bored of them, and then that will be that.

I only talk to people on Facebook now really, and I think that can be deceptive can’t it? Because it fools you into thinking that you know people when, in fact, you know nothing about anyone. It’s almost like courting people to be your friends, because you can find out what they like so easily, it’s all in the newsfeed or on their timeline. So you just latch onto those stupid details and make them reasons to be friends. But if you spent all day together in real life, or if you had to work with them, would you really get on? No, probably not. So my friends are not really friends. In fact sometimes I question the fact of my ever having HAD friends at all.

I do this sometimes when it occurs to me that all of my greatest and most important friendships in life have just been built on nothing – just little things like liking the same TV shows or music or something – stupid things to bond over because they’re so fleeting and meaningless; the trends change and so do people’s tastes, it’s not concrete. But does that matter? It doesn’t to me, really, but then I marvel at the way that other people think this nothingness can be made to equal substance just by dint of them saying that that’s what it is.

Really nobody has anybody, do they? Nobody really has anybody forever. That’s just life.

Doctor Who

Well, I know that this might be a slightly boring subject for a lot of people *cough cough*, but I thought I’d just write a little thingummy about this particular TV show, you know, just because.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s kind of a nice show. I mean, it’s quirky, it’s fun, it’s VERY British and it’s been going for, ooh, I can’t think how many years now . . .

. . .

OK fine, so everybody knows what I’m talking about here, don’t they? It’s a big deal and the whole world is now obsessed with it since Russell T Davies and Steven Moffatt and all the Cardiff crew have put it out there on a global scale for all the world to see.

I’ve seen all the hype all over the internet in the last few months (it’s been going on since January for God’s sake!), I’ve seen references to the show in all sorts of places and other shows. Brian Cox, the well known Professor, is said to be a fan – I’m even pretty sure that I heard Stephen Hawking likes it. I was also watching “The Big Bang Theory” the other day and the character of Sheldon was talking about how he watches it as a part of his obsessive compulsive morning routine.

Actually, it was this last one, more than anything else, that led me to write this rambling stuff that you’re about to read because, while it occurs to me to think how great it is that the world has embraced the new Who and gone mad for all the clever writing on the show, I wonder how much of the old series and the complicated 50 year history of it is familiar territory to the rest of the world? Presumably people in America, and in other countries across the globe, have had to catch up a bit with the old Doctors from 1963 to 1989, because I find it hard to imagine that people around the world were watching it all that time (of course they weren’t) and know all about it.

I’m not being territorial here, because I firmly believe that Doctor Who is for everyone, but the fact is that it has always been a typically British thing. The way it was made for a start, with the wobbly sets and the makeshift monsters, the fact that the spaceship was something as simple as a police telephone box as opposed to some sleek, complicated UFO type thing that the people in Hollywood might, quite easily, have been able to dream up. All of that is typical of British TV in the mid-to-late twentieth century – it was done on the cheap and it showed. It was all like that I think – pretty much. Even for things like ordinary comedy and drama, certainly for soap operas – there are stories about Coronation Street, in the early days, suffering from the same wobbly set syndrome. But I guess that people remember this more in the case of Doctor Who because there seemed to be a running joke, never quite spoken but always half-acknowledged, that this makeshift element of the show provided us with unequivocal evidence that British TV could not make sci-fi. I can’t really think of any other show that really tried to do that in this country; it was just sort of accepted that it wasn’t going to work . . . unless, of course, you did what Doctor Who did and acknowledge that “yes it’s all a bit mad, but that’s all part of the plan”. It was laughing at itself in that respect I think and it was supported by a nation who, without analyzing it, really just got the joke.

There’s a thing that Matt Smith has used in his incarnation, about the Doctor being a mad man in a box. Well, he is. But he was that exact thing more than ever in the old series I think because of the kind of imperfect but always-working-out in the end world that the Doctor inhabited there. All the CGI stuff they use now has taken that away slightly, and I kind of think that that has all been done simply to secure the interest of people in the USA and, probably, here. If we consider that people in the UK have pretty much been feeding themselves a diet of American TV, and thereby raising their standards for quite some time, then it stands to reason that anything they did with Doctor Who from the production side would have to be radically updated.

So I’m curious, I suppose, about how many people outside the UK had seen or heard of Doctor Who before they rebooted it in 2005? And how many, if they have seen the old stuff, think there is anything to it? I mean, if you’ve seen Jon Pertwee or Peter Davison or, outside possibility, if you’ve watched anything of Sylvester McCoy, do you “get” it?

Because it’s not necessarily something that people would “get” in that way. I mean, I’ve seen repeats of old American TV shows from before I was born. Things like “Blakes 7” or “Battlestar Galactica” or “Quincy”. And I have to say that they cross over quite well, because American culture has always been able to invade the rest of the world and be something of an open book. But something about our style of TV in the UK just seems to be different and so much of it is taken to be untranslatable; like I said above, it’s quirky to a lot of people.

When I was growing up it wasn’t on TV, but my dad, who was a massive fan of it, was always telling me that I should see it and be proud of it because it was a classic show that WE made and that we as a nation should remember fondly. He was always really disappointed that I did not have a Doctor of my own when I was growing up in the 1990s and I didn’t actually get to see an old episode of it until I was in my teens. I knew what it was, of course, because people still talked about it, but when I first saw it I just saw one episode on repeat and, without the longer narrative, I didn’t think it made much sense.

When I was 4, Sylvester McCoy was still playing him, and I think I must have seen some of that because I have a fairly vivid memory of seeing Sophie Aldred on the show with him and of recognizing her from her work as a children’s TV presenter on the BBC. But I was always taught not to like these episodes because, according to my dad and anyone else of his generation, by the end of it all it had been reduced to nothing more than a sappy children’s show and without any sort of scary monsters or gripping stories to speak of – even the Daleks were failing to grip people at that point it seems and the new flying feature that they took on somewhere in the very late ‘80s was only seen as a disappointing and desperate attempt to win viewers.

So when it disappeared no one was surprised and Sylvester McCoy is probably kicking himself to this day that he ever took the job since, as the Doctor who killed the show, he is not well remembered. (Sorry to be unfair to Sylvester McCoy because, as an actor, he is very fine and talented, but as the Doctor he was not so good. Sorry.)
The hey-day of the show was really in the 1970s with Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker and this is what most people remember. But later I think the adult audience sort of waned.

I don’t actually think that’s worthy of too much criticism really though – “Doctor Who” has always gone hand-in-hand with children’s television and I think it must always have been accepted that the larger fan-base for the show would be kids. It was actually developed for them, principally, I think. It wasn’t supposed to be a scary adult show when they first made it. In the UK we have a kids show called “Blue Peter”, which has been running as long, if not longer than “Doctor Who”. It’s is a kind of magazine-show, you know where they have presenters who do features (almost like journalists do features for the news) on fun things for kids and they show you how to make stuff from old food containers and sticky-back plastic. It’s not a show I ever liked much, I always found it a bit too wholesome and boring, but it had a lot in common with “Doctor Who” because most of the gadgets and monsters on the show looked as if it had been made by the guys on “Blue Peter” out of old cereal packets and tin trays. You only have to look at K-9 in the old series to know what I mean, he was almost certainly the product of a crazy recycling attempt . . . but I digress.

Aside from this, as far as my memory and general knowledge serves, the Doctor of the era would usually make an appearance on “Blue Peter” at some stage to do interviews and meet kids and generally get involved with the fans. I wasn’t alive when Tom Baker had his tenure, but I have an idea that he might have gone on kids TV and offered people jelly babies and let a lot of kids try on his scarf. It’s the kind of interactive thing that they were expected to do even then.

Now, of course, it seems to be much harder to be the Doctor – almost like being the Prime Minister or something. You know. There are a set of pressures and responsibilities on people like Matt Smith and David Tennant that I don’t think any of the other Doctors had. Not only do they have to play the role now, but they also have to BE the role for the kids they meet, they have to get involved with the kind of cultural impact that the show has – it’s probably done quite a lot for tourism and culture in Cardiff where they film, and I know for a fact that they now have a big, on-going exhibition in Cardiff where they show all the disused costumes and monster masks from the show. I believe it’s very popular and, because of its nature, probably has a close relationship with the show.

Then, there are the conventions they have to go to, not to mention all the spin-offs and side-shows that have sprung up in the aftermath of the reboot, which did not exist before and probably would not have done if it weren’t for the fact that most of the writers and producers on the new show were massive fans of the old series and spent most of their youth writing fan-fiction. I read something recently that said Steven Moffatt was pretty prolific at this and I think Russell T Davies must have been as well since most of the spin-off stuff was actually his idea. But my point is that now, either because it was intended to appeal to a much wider audience, or simply because there was a demand for it, the whole thing has got bigger and more complicated than ever.

So, what we had initially, this quirky thing with a mad man running around with a funny looking electronic wand thing that he, somehow, calls a screwdriver, has now become something else. And I think, for people living in the UK, that is both a wonderful thing and a slightly bizarre one. Because we all, even my generation who hardly knew anything about it at all, all of us grew up with this idea that it was just a show for us. The old show was a part of our history and culture, like music halls, bangers and mash, Punch and Judy shows, it was just a funny little thing on TV that everybody in England watched but that nobody on Earth expected the rest of the world to understand.

I guess what I’m saying is that it’s great that other countries have taken this to their hearts as well, and I’m even more amazed that it’s so popular in America because the USA has notoriously looked on UK culture as something quaint and a little bit strange. In previous decades this has been considered a bad thing and attempts to take our inventions and creations out there have not always gone well. But “Doctor Who” as it is now, has been well received and, perhaps also, as a result of this, the old show has started to receive a fan-base there too. I just can’t help wondering about what would have been the case if they had not re-booted it, and if the old show had been left as it was, with Sylvester McCoy as the last Doctor. No one outside of this country, and certainly nobody without a tendency towards geeky old sci-fi shows, would ever have watched it would they? Or would they?

Tell me what you think anyway, I’m always interested in obsessive telly fans and what kinds of things they love and hate. Who’s your favourite Doctor? Come on. :-)

Schizophrenia

Right, so, I heard something on the radio the other day about the ever present problem of supporting people with schizophrenia. It was a sensitive piece, full of information for the uninitiated about what schizophrenia is, what are the symptoms, what are the problems of managing it, and, crucially, how difficult it is for other people (i.e. families) to handle it.

They were mainly talking about kids on this show – parents’ problems in coping with their children’s psychotic episodes and lack of trust etc. etc. – and I suppose that this might have added to their need to be sensitive on the issue. But still the whole programme made me angry because, aside from raising awareness about the illness and shoving it under everybody else’s noses yet again, the actual segment was little more than a public service announcement, complete with trained health professional whose sole purpose, I assume, was to give practical info and advice in a nicely sanitized soundbite.

What got my back up was this: this is not a new problem. Schizophrenia has existed for a long time – not always under that name, but nonetheless. People know about it. They know it exists. THEY JUST WISH THEY DIDN’T.

People have been talking for a long time about the need for more understanding about mental illness in society. These messages have been out there for a while. I don’t know about other countries, but certainly in the UK there are ad campaigns all over the TV, radio and anywhere else they can find, to show people that there is a significant number of mentally ill people who need more support and understanding and who are not getting it, and who also, perhaps more importantly, are receiving a lot more prejudice than help.

It’s true. My mother is schizophrenic and I know this first hand. There is little support for the people who have these sorts of problems, particularly in terms of the more voracious psychotic disorders, because even in this day and age people don’t know what to do about them. Every now and then there is a story in the news about a schizophrenic patient who has been mishandled and committed some sort of atrocious crime. And when this is reported it is always made abundantly clear that, if something of this nature has happened then clearly even well-trained professionals cannot handle the problem.

This, unsurprisingly, frightens people and then, less surprisingly still, anything that might have been done to allay people’s fears in the first instance will be entirely forgotten.

It has long since made me angry that, despite all these great ad campaigns to show people that they don’t really need to be afraid and that, rather, they should learn to understand, all it takes is one news report about a schizophrenic nail bomber or murderer and we all go right back to where we started. The media always reports these things insensitively; I’ve seen them do it. And they do it because they also want to put the message out there, even if it is indirect, that schizophrenics are evil and dangerous.

Don’t get me wrong, schizophrenia is not easy to cope with, either for the person who has it or for the people around them. My mum has only really had me to support her in the last three decades and, although she has the regulation amount of contact with a psychiatrist, the reality is that her family have always been expected to be her carers. This would have been fine if we were a big family and incredibly close – but we’re not. We are a small, mismatched bunch of loners (we mostly all hate each other in my family and just want to slope off somewhere and forget we’re even related) and most of the people that my mum ever really relied on had their own lives, or they were just too old and in need of help themselves. Growing up I lived on my own with my mum and we had little contact with the rest of the family, and I don’t remember any of them, apart from one of my uncles, ever giving her or me much in the way of help.

They mostly walked away because they didn’t want to deal with it and, looking back, I can’t blame them because I would have done the same if I’d had the choice (which is not to say that I’m not angry with them for doing it).
But the trouble was, of course, that nobody ever took anyone in my family aside and said to them: “Look, this is how you need to cope with this. This is what’s wrong with her.”

No one presented any of us with a handbook on how to deal with schizophrenia, because there isn’t one. And, more importantly, no one ever explained it to me – which was a huge mistake because I was the only one of the family that was left alone with her for long periods of time. I lived with her, no one else did.

When I was six she was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and sent to a psychiatric hospital where she stayed for about ten months. She was taken away in a very dramatic way. The police kicked in our front door and she was literally dragged out of our flat kicking and screaming and thinking that the ambulance men were going to kill her. I was taken away by social workers to my Granny’s house.

Now, these social workers, of course, did not take the time or trouble to explain to me where my mother had gone or what was wrong with her (because no one ever tells a child “scary” things like that when they’ve just seen something traumatic, I mean what would be the point of telling them the truth, right? It’s not like they can really understand! *Note the sarcasm*) And, forever afterwards, by almost anyone who would talk about it, it was alluded to in these terms: “Your mummy went away to hospital because she was poorly and she needed to get better.”

Nobody told me anything because they thought, stupidly, that this was a better way to protect me. They forgot that I would have to go back to live with her afterwards and they forgot, further, that you don’t just “get better” when you have schizophrenia. It doesn’t go away. So these social workers and doctors and God knows who else, came in and took care of the immediate problem, explaining nothing to anyone on the way – not even to the so-called grownups in my family, who, I think, understood about as much about my mother’s problems at that point as I did and who put all their faith in the far more learned doctors who knew all about it. (They just trusted that other people would deal with it and that that would be it.) And then, after they’d done all that, they just went away again and left us to it: me and my mum.

On this radio show that I was listening to, they were talking about the need for more support for families who cope with schizophrenic people – people who are there all the time for those people when the doctors, psychiatrists and other social worker people cannot or just can’t be bothered to be present to help. But this is surely not any kind of new concept? Surely this has been obvious for years? And if not why not?

When my mother was diagnosed it was the early 1990s and, looking back I have begun to think that the system must have been pretty slapdash and incapable at that time (more than it is now), because we were really just palmed off and patched up and sent on our way by all the people who got involved with us. The social workers did follow up visits with us after my mum came home to make sure we were doing OK. But this was only cursory and for the sake of fulfilling a requirement and they didn’t actually try very hard to find out if there was still anything wrong. They certainly didn’t stick around long enough to check up on me properly because if they had they would have known that I was having nightmares, throwing tantrums, refusing to go to school, comfort eating to the point of making myself seriously overweight . . . I also used to be told off at school for chewing on my hair – a classic sign of severe anxiety and stress that the teachers only found mildly annoying and used to call me out about in front of the whole class. But no one noticed the significance of these things – or if they did they didn’t make an issue of them. My teachers at school noticed that I was the quiet kid who was afraid of everything, and they knew about my mother, but they didn’t put any of it together.

Basically, I guess what I’m saying, is that no one ever bothered to properly ask me if I was OK. They all just seemed to assume that if I wasn’t alright it would be obvious. My mum looked like a perfectly normal person, and she did everything that she was technically supposed to do: feeding me, clothing me, etc. etc. No one asked about anything else because it wasn’t their business to.

So they didn’t know about the things she said to me behind closed doors. They didn’t know about the delusions and hysteria and crazy ranting that I was subjected to regularly when I got home from school. All of this was random, naturally, because schizophrenia is an involuntary thing, the moods of that person swing uncontrollably and the way they see things flips around very suddenly so that you can never predict what they are going to say and do next.

I was always afraid when I was growing up – I’m still afraid of my mother now really – but more so then. I craved stability and I dreaded leaving the house every day in case something changed when I was gone. If I left the house I would have to worry all day about what I might come back to. When I was at school and having a good time I was afraid to go home because I was worried that she might be in one of THOSE moods and then I would be in for something horrible. This was enough to make me rigid with terror sometimes and, even now, when I hear a certain tone in her voice, I get a sudden griping feeling in the pit of my stomach, or my heart starts pounding, because I know that something unpleasant is coming.

Other people didn’t see this though. My mother, in herself, is very good at making herself look perfectly normal most of the time, whatever voices she might have in her head, and, as for me, people just thought I was a bit weird. But they didn’t really understand; they thought I was the mental one. I still get that now from some people, because I react to my mother and they don’t know what she’s like, so that makes me look like I’ve gone round the bend as well – they think I’m making it up or being overdramatic.

When I was at school, the other kids at my school thought I was weird, and the teachers, even those who knew about my situation, thought I just needed to come out of my shell. They didn’t think about the fact that I was living alone in a house with a schizophrenic woman without any real support and with hardly anyone else to talk to. (My dad was next to useless and lived somewhere else – but I think they must have assumed he was involved somehow.) And I didn’t consider this much either because, when you’re a kid, if the adults don’t question the rightness or wrongness of something then neither do you. If there was something really wrong with this situation, I thought, then someone would have done something about it. So it didn’t occur to me that it was in any way possible to ask for help from anyone. It was just what it was. I was stuck with it.

But as I’ve grown older I’ve started to feel far more bitter about this. Because now I can recognize that I should never have been left on my own with this; particularly not at such a young age. And, far from supporting my mother, the family and the school and the social system at large, should really have supported me. I was on my own.

So when I heard this woman on the radio talking about the need to start (START!) to support parents and families of schizophrenic people, I nearly choked! I have so many problems with this that I don’t even know if I can get them all down in the space of one blog post. But here goes:

1. This should have been the case all along. Families/parents/children with schizophrenic family members have ALWAYS needed support and where the hell was all this concern twenty odd years ago when I needed it, and even further back than that when others were in need?

2. There was such a strong focus on parents who care for children that it made me think that that was their only interest in providing support – never mind anybody else!

3. And, most importantly, even though some faceless health professional has gone on the radio and said all of this, IT WILL NOT MAKE THE SLIGHTEST BIT OF DIFFERENCE. Because people do not care.

This is the crucial thing that you have to realize about mental illness: you can raise awareness about it all you like, but it will make absolutely no impression on other people who have had no direct experience of it. Those people just count themselves lucky – if they think about it at all. And then they carry on and ignore it because they don’t want to know about it. Even the professionals who deal with it every day don’t really want to know about it. They pass the cases along as fast as they can just so they can get them off their hands. Why would anyone else care? Schizophrenics are scary and, VERY OCCASIONALLY, dangerous people, and, unless you actually know one first hand, you are probably only going to see this angle of them.

This is what I have learned in my life. When you have a problem like this on the rise in society, people get scared. And when people get scared they pass the buck. No one asks any questions, no one pays any attention and no one gets involved because, as long as they’ve passed it on they can assume that someone else, somewhere, will deal with it and that that will let them off the hook.

My teachers didn’t ask me anything about my mother or my home situation, they didn’t get worried about me or ask if there was anything wrong, because they were just busy trying to teach and go about the already stressful task of getting hundreds upon hundreds of kids through exams. They didn’t want to know about problems at home, about mental illness, about what my mother did or said to me when nobody else could hear.

They might have paid attention if I had actively gone and said to them: “Look, my mother is saying things to me about how I’m the one who made her ill, and how it’s all my fault that her life has gone badly and how she wishes she’d never had me, and this is upsetting me to the point where I can’t concentrate on anything and I’m considering suicide.” That might have worked, now that I think about it. I could also have told them about the time when I was 14 when her medication stopped working and she flipped out completely so that I had to shut myself in my room and spend the night terrified that she was going to kill me. If I had told them that then I’m sure they would have done something. But you see, I never did tell them. Because I just thought they all knew that that’s what it was like. I thought they’d just left me there because they’d all decided it was fine. So I didn’t question it. It was horrible and I hated it, but I didn’t think I could ask for help to get out, so I just got on with it.

I’m only questioning it now really because I’m older and I have had the benefit of wider experience – my knowledge and understanding of things is wider and more critical now than it was before – and now I’m angry about it.
That thing on the radio really just made me wonder about how many more angry kids (however old they’ve grown to be now) are out there in the world. How many people are there who’ve had the same experience, or a similar one, as me? How many people have lived with a schizophrenic parent or family member and been left to shoulder almost the whole burden of that by themselves without support? Because I’m thinking there must be at least a few, right?

I want to know this from people. Who else thinks that the system stinks? It doesn’t matter what country you live in, in fact that would be quite interesting to see how it’s dealt with across the world. I live in England, so I know all about us, but the USA? Or the rest of Europe? Is this also typical there?

As regards the problem of informing people, it’s not just about getting people to be more tolerant or rattling off a list of symptoms that people can memorize. It’s about shaking people and waking them up and making them see that this is a REAL fucking problem! And that you can’t just close your eyes and pretend that you can’t see these people and hope they go away. They don’t go away. And they don’t get better. And they really fuck about with other people’s heads.

I needed someone with me to support me when my mother was telling me that all the things that were wrong in her head were actually things I had done to her. When she was projecting her own problems onto me and, actually, doing a pretty good job of convincing psychiatrists that I was the one who had psychological problems. When she was undermining my confidence in myself by telling me, in the most awful, seemingly kind, soothing, motherly voice, that I wasn’t capable of things or that other people who I thought were my friends were not really friends at all.

My mother distrusted everybody and she used to encourage me to do the same. Even now she tries to get me on her side against the world at large whenever she thinks people are ganging up on her. She assumes that everyone else is intent on damaging her in some way and the first thing that she will always say to me is that “We need to stick together.” As if the world is about to end or we’re about to be attacked by flesh eating zombies or something and the two of us will have to smash our way through with baseball bats like the guys in “Shaun of the Dead”.

When I was a kid she tried to tell me, in the most vindictive and head-fucking way possible, that my friends didn’t really want to be my friends and that they were only messing with me and laughing at me behind my back. When I spent time with my dad – whom I loved more than anything or anyone for most of my childhood – she always made sure afterwards that I knew he didn’t really want me. It was her way of trying to cut through the elation and security that I always felt when I was with him. I loved and trusted him unconditionally and she knew, or she felt, that if she let me spend too much time with him he would “convert” me to his way of thinking (the rational way) and she would lose her ally. She did everything she could to destroy my relationships with other people and, if I sided with them over her, that was it; her trust in me was lost and I was deemed a traitor.

This is what it’s like with schizophrenics, really. You walk on eggshells all the time. They have no trust, so anything you do can set them off and, once they become suspicious of you, you’re fucked. They will act against you in all kinds of ways because they think that they have to defend themselves against you. They see you as dangerous.

Now I know that you’re going to be thinking, “Ok, so what’s the answer then? What do we do?” Well, I don’t know, because I agree that schizophrenics need more support. I agree that there needs to be more knowledge amongst the general public about what it is and what it does to people. I would support all of that and more.

But I still don’t think it would do any real good because if you ask me the question(s): “Are schizophrenics dangerous and do we need to fear them?” I would pretty much have to say yes.

I’m not going to say they’re all going to go out and kill people – because, really, very few (1% or less) of them actually do. But, yes, they ARE dangerous. They act irrationally and they lash out at people, and they give you no warning whatsoever that they are about to do this because one minute they’re fine and the next minute they’re someone else. They’re afraid all the time, you see, they think they’re going to be hurt. And if you believed that someone or something was going to hurt or kill you at any moment (whether it’s a random man in the street or an imaginary monster that you think you can see in the middle of the supermarket where, in fact, there are only shoppers) you would probably lash out too. You know what they say about things like fear producing superhuman abilities? I think that’s what happens. Schizophrenics have a level of fear that allows them to lose all sense of what they’re doing and, in that state, they are capable of anything.

So it is dangerous. I’m sorry, but it is. And I think we all have to start realizing that there are people like this everywhere. They walk the streets – of course they do – because they’re not criminals, but they could do anything. Short of locking them away (in that age old custom that we always resort to when we don’t want to handle people any more) there’s just no answer, and pretending that there is and that we can solve this problem simply by giving public information announcements on the radio and telling people not to be scared is really not going to achieve anything.

I’ve spent most of my life locking my bedroom door and doing anything I can to keep away from my mother. But what am I supposed to do? She’s my mum. And she’s only got me.

It is at this point that I start to have all sorts of uncharitable thoughts concerning my mother, so I’ll stop here. But I wanted to explain this to people, because it’s something that other people just don’t seem to understand unless they’ve lived it. I just hope I’ve made an impression.