Don’t Tell Mum

I’ve just had one of those portals to another realm moments.

    Chatting to Hubbles, not far off 18 now, the conversation lead to our old coffee table. This was a big heavy chunky reclaimed wood beast that served us well for several houses. (Sadly not this small one.) Hubbles said he remembered him and elder brother Boom placing a balloon under one of the legs - and it didn’t pop. Then they got nervous about getting it out again - it has to pop right? Who’s gonna be the one? They teamed up and both survived, as did the indestructable bloody balloon. No amazing punchline, the story itself isn’t the thing - The Thing is how my mind went pop.

    Obviously I know all my kids have their own minds, thoughts, shenanigans with their friends - yet it only just struck me that they had/have an entirely secret world within my own - in the house. With each other, or alone, there is whole Other Life that I am not part of. 

    I know… I already knew. Shrieks and thuds from other rooms are a constant, I regularly found a box of icing sugar at the bottom of Boom’s bed, there was that hilarious piece of film I found… (Oh where is that?) Me and my bruvs had our Other World within Mum and Dad’s World, I have my own secret life from Roving Blade and the kids. All clues. But all of a sudden I WANT TO KNOW what else they all got up to in this other world. This Other World.

    Hubbles thought my epiphany face was amusing and shared how back in one particular house (we judge time by houses as we’ve moved so often) he climbed up on the kitchen counters to get at the medicine tubs above the high cupboards. He would have been between two and eight in this house. The medicine tubs were up high for a reason. Hubbles’ reason however was that medicines made you feel better so he wanted some. He wasn’t feeling unwell, he just wanted to feel EVEN BETTER. So, as difficult as the task was, he managed to get into the tubs and took one of everything.

     WHA?

    At that age he wouldn’t have ever had a tablet, it would have always been a spoonful of something. The little shit!

    Where the fuck was I? Or his dad? Or anyone? 

    Other World.

    I’ve decided I want to create a group for the four kids to swap stories/remind each other of past ventures/share larks - without me in it (I’ll set it up, coz they won’t, then I’ll bugger off). On some significant date I want to be allowed back in to read it all. 

    They’d never pick up a pen - this way they might egg each other on and have a giggle. But it’s still unlikely. One of Mum’s stooopid ideas… If they did it I bet they’d never let me back in - or keep the really juicy tales back. Maybe I shouldn’t know this stuff - maybe that’s the point… There’s a ton of stuff we all got up to on our old Home Ed gatherings that Roving Blade never needs to know. He was a Grand Master-Worrier. Still is. I’m keeping schtum.

    Telling my now 22yo daughter that I once flung her into the air as a babby at Nanny M’s house and bashed her head into a light-fitting spike didn’t get the ‘Ha ha so funny’ reaction I’d expected - she was horrified and made me feel a previously unexplained dent in the top of her head. ‘Oh shit!’ At the time both me and my bruv had gone ‘Oh shit! Don’t tell Mum!’ We were both in our thirties…

    Maybe the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows will have a word for it? There is one for the sudden realisation that the strangers you pass have full lives. (It’s sonder. Son-der. Pronounced sonder.) Is there one for: your kids are even more mental than you think? Is there one for: your mum is even more mental than you think?

    But there was another mind-pop - about that old coffee table. Hubbles wouldn’t have remembered a time before it, it would have been massive to the kids then yet the perfect height for them. It was a coffee table, dinner table, artist studio, lego platform, den, stage, launch pad, kitten zoo, keeper of all discarded treasure, supporter of tired feet, part of my secret world, part of theirs. It lived in four of our houses, and then us practically-minded parents sold it off and sent it away when we moved here five years ago. ‘You lot just dump your shit on it when you come in and there’s no room to get round.’ 

    I hope that old table is well loved wherever it is now. I’ve never liked this house much. It’s never felt homely. The kids don’t gather in the living room, it’s too small and doubles as Roving Blades’ office. At Christmas we borrow folding chairs from Reg next door and wipe down the big table in the conservatory (my bedroom) that otherwise serves as the excess office dump, Covid testing zone, swimming bag station and camera battery graveyard. We only kept that as RB’s desk and got rid of the chairs. He uses a smaller desk now. The conservatory makes a crap office coz there’s light bouncing off the computer screen no matter where you put it. Could we make it into a gathering place? I think it’s too late.

    When my daughter is back from uni in a week or so my youngest will be turfed out of her bedroom and slink back to the corridor laughingly referred to in the estate agent’s bumph as the dining room. I will have to clear all the folding and golf shit off the bed. I’ve never managed to get this house to work.

    In quiet moments you can find me fantasising over pictures of really tiny houses and clever space solutions on Pinterest. In what Other World lives my brain? In Cabin Porn World. In real life I am ramming cupboard doors shut with all my weight and kicking avalanched shoes back up to camp four. Everyone stays in their own pod now. I refer to my dream tiny cabins as pods. 

    RB has banned the word pod.

    Oh the sobbing when he posts up a photo of small savages lobbing cushions at each other in dinosaur-carpeted crash sites. All the mess. Utter chaos. I can hear it. (It was wonderful.) And in the background, there will be the coffee table. 

    It has taken its secrets with it. Ooh if coffee tables could talk… If coffee tables could set up online chat groups… If I knew the half of it… 

    I’d like to reclaim it, rereclaim it, and make a den underneath. I’d curl up in my tiny ((pod)) and ask it, ever so nicely, to spill the beans. I’m imagining I’d look up to find OH SHIT DON’T TELL MUM carved on the underside.

Shit...

I am deleting The Book. Chunk by chunk.

    What the fuck woz I finking?

    There may be a few lines left once I'm dunned.

    And several filed paragraphs for a different book. Or three... Seven... 

    I could have continued with this stooopid blog the whole time. There was plenty of crap to go round. 

    Maybe it was for the best. 

    Maybe 'writing a book' is an interesting (time-consuming) hobby. Publishing it - not the main goal after all. 

    But hopefully I will do the Big P. I need to tick the box to validate the time spent. The time other people spent asking me if I'd finished it yet. 

    I do have a point. Sadly I hid it in a haystack of repetitive analogies. Now all I gotta do is find the little prick. 

    Shit. 

    Dunnit again diddun I?

    Sigh. Chapter One...

ID Hole

Are my thoughts my identity, or my appearance, or my street where I was born? Or my current bedtime book, hairdo or address? 

      In my head my identity switches from saviour of the world to melting slug. Sometimes I want to be a cat – when I was a kid I’d totally be a cat. Pick any moment and I might want to be a roller disco goddess, or a tree, or a sorceress.

      Once I genuinely believed I was a sheep for three peaceful minutes – I swapped identities through the train window.  *Ping* I was me again. I didn’t think ahh here I am again a cis white lapsed Catholic student menstruator – no I thought fuck my brain’s mad, where’s my sandwich… My identity was: hungry. 

      No – that wasn’t my identity, that was my digestive state in charge of my thinking – I didn’t identify with the world’s starving. No, my identity was: person with a sandwich. 

      And I can’t have been a sheep for three minutes, more like three seconds – the lengthiness was my perception. It was peaceful – time seemed slower. If anyone was watching me their perception would have been: girl. White girl with a sandwich, a train ticket and a small tartan case. 

      Would a woman have wondered how much she could fit in that case? Would a man have been ranking me out of ten? Would that be their identities? No. That would be my presumption. Woolly thinking. 

      Once I’d stopped being a sheep, did being a human feel more humany? It felt being-on-a-trainy, it felt fast, it felt packaged. If I had been leaning on a gate out there, I may have felt relaxed, bipedal. At one, at odds. I may have felt I had power over the gate lock or my direction. How much of that is humany? (Hmnn, there's a teaser.) Which of us would believe they were Observer-in-Chief? I have felt harshly judged by a sheep through a fence before. 

      If I was in a carriage surrounded by men would I have felt more conscious of being female? Definitely. Would I have felt more humany or less?

      Is your identity what you contrast with, project, or believe in or side with? Or what someone else sees, hears or translates into their own programmed belief system? Is it our unconscious bias or our sandwich board? 

      Sandwiches again. I identify as a sandwich. I think I always have. I’ve always felt sandwiched. But really, am I not just a silly privileged girlie who doesn’t understand anything prattling away out of turn?

      Oooh. Maybe ouch.

      I definitely was a sheep though. Watching a girl on a train. I wonder what the sheep was thinking when we pinged back into being ourselves again. Maybe 'Why do I fancy a peanut butter sandwich? What the fuck is a peanut butter sandwich?' 

Wotsit All About?

Writing a blurb about a book wot you wrote is harder than writing the flipping book.

Wot have you dunned today? That's harder than wot have you dunned over the last eight years.

For the last eight years I have been writing a book. Amongst other things, such as not writing. Such as eating a lot of savoury nibbles. 

Today, I tweaked a : and two ;s into 'is' and a ,. 

A day's work. 

But I think I have dunned the blurb. 

So wotsit all about? I've been asked this repeatedly and still it was excruciating squeezing out a coherent description without being cheesy. 

It's about the details. 

And now, I squint my brain at wot to put on the back of the book. This could take another two months. I want something original... I need more savouries to get the cogs working. 

I wish I had some Wotsits. They remind me of Saturday afternoon swimming. Specifically, the vending machine afterwards. Wotsits and a searingly hot hot chocolate in a criminally fragile plastic cup. Preparation for a wet walk home and an evening of still stinging eyes.

Now, Frazzles. They are a pub family room in Devon in which to spend the summer evenings with a pool table for my brothers and Don't Go Breaking My Heart on the juke box. 

Fangs were a free transfer of a funny vampire face I sent away for with tokens from the back of the packet and Mum ironed the image on a yellow flowery top for me. A funny combo, but it was a funny top - sleeveless but with a polo neck. Best accompanied by roller skates. 

Monster Munch, pickled onion flavour, were gaspilicious and to be devoured out of doors in raucous company, almost like an initiation trial. 

Hula Hoops tasted better bitten off fingertips. Getting ones to fit thumbs were trickier, but not impossible. 

Chicken Wickers tasted disturbing, like crusted burnt fat, but you'd keep eating them to confirm how inedible they were coz you could imprison your tongue in the structure before it disintegrated which was fun, like a mini jail break. The jingle still lives in my head. I'm liable to squeal 'They're terribly tongue-tickling' at inappropriate moments. 

Crisps, or maizey foodstuffs, seem to be important to me.  

While writing the book I ate my bodyweight in peanuts a thousand times over.

No wonder I'm so salty. 

Perhaps, instead of words on the back cover, I could infuse it with salt. Like a salt lick. Bet that's not been done before. 

So am I ready to publish? 

First edition, original flavour: ready salted.