Category: fear and loathing

Posted on

Some thoughts…

…on the current situation which is subject to the Micawber principle.

1) Sell the van. It’s expensive to run and maintain. Probably get a grand or so for it. Its main uses are supermarket shopping – there’s a bus; visiting my father – there’s a train; camping holidays – no money for holidays. My heart will no doubt survive the damage.
2) Sell the camping equipment. Wouldn’t raise much but takes up space. See above.
3) Re-home one or both of the pets. They are expensive to maintain. Food and insurance and vet bills. However the human cost would be very high indeed. Pretty sure they could not be fed any more cheaply. Could get treatment at the PDSA. Could stop insuring them and hope they don’t get ill. The boys could live without Maizy but not without Cat. Maybe I should re-home Maizy, but I’m not sure whether my heart would survive the damage.
4) Get pay-as-you-go mobile. Can’t be without one because of childcare etc but really don’t need monthly contract. The annoyance of having a new number and all the admin that would entail would be temporary.

Everything else is either already cancelled or cut to the bone. Apart from the internet. That will go only at the same time as we have to stop eating.

Posted on

Squid ink

Secondborn was telling me about his exciting birthday supper last night at a nearby fancy restaurant.

“You remember mussels?”

“Yes, I remember mussels.” It’s not so long since I last ate some.

“Well I had those, and a lovely sauce, and that fat spaghetti stuff, what’s it called?”

“Tagliatelle?”

“Yes, tagliatelle. Anyway it had squid ink in it and so it was black. I think everyone was jealous of what I had.”

Including me. When, I wondered vaguely, might I have such a supper again?

I mentioned this in passing to the shrink.

“And of course there’s nobody to do that for Rachel, to take her out on her birthday, look after her. Ah. That makes you cry,” – the latter remark said slightly triumphantly, I thought, probably because I never cry in front of her.

Of course it makes me fucking cry you fucking bitch. Of course it does. I’ve spent considerably more than half my likely entire life dealing with that thought. Concluding that the answer is because I’m as utterly undeserving and loathsome as I’m told I am. You spend five years telling me that isn’t the case and guess what. There still isn’t anybody there. Only now you’ve taken away my way of dealing with it.

turning

My life is slipping away. Like the leaf I grow old, bruise, discolour, fade, embrittle. How to deal with this terrible wrenching desire for love, for tenderness, and the knowledge that I’m just too fucked in the head, too old for anything for me, just for me.

Posted on

Stay-at-home single mother on benefits

This is what I am.

It’s taken far longer to assimilate this fact than it should have done, but the brain is slow. And of course it isn’t actually a fact until I receive some benefits but I live in hope.

Five years since the breakdown, give or take a couple of weeks. One year since the relationship ended, give or take a couple of weeks. Half a year since employment ended, give or take a couple of weeks.

It clarifies lots of things. Work, for instance. I don’t stand a hope in hell of getting a full-time job well enough paid to cover the childcare expenses incurred by the act of going out to work. Assuming I had the mental resources to deal with full time work. I don’t stand a hope in hell of getting a part time job that would pay well enough to cover the childcare expenses incurred by the act of going out to work and cover the extent of the benefits I should lose if I started working even part time. Freelance work? as above but more so.

It’s called the benefits trap:

Lone mothers in the UK trying to get off state handouts and return to employment could lose money because of the extra taxes, the loss of benefits, and the huge cost of childcare.

The OECD found that, of all the world’s major economies, Britain has the worst benefits trap for women. A single mother moving back into work would have to forfeit 101.3 per cent of the extra cash she earned because of the extra tax, childcare costs, and relinquished benefits payouts.

So it’s time to hunker down. Cut my coat according to my cloth. I am lucky to have a house to call my own, possessions acquired during the days of affluence. Lucky too to have local friends for the first time in my life, as well as good friends further afield. I am lucky to have the internet as a creative and social outlet. I’m trying not to think about the future.

Posted on

Suck

Yesterday I heard screams of such raw and primal grief I assumed the neighbour’s baby had died (she is so ill it’s a case not of if but when). Only after some time did I realise it was the couple in the upstairs flat.

The fumes from their post-coital packet/s of cigarettes are still drifting through the window and impregnating my space with their noxious odour.

Last night, or rather this morning at 1am, the dog-hater was under the window again with a new appellation implying I possess an overweening interest in performing oral sex on men.

The house is empty, the children are still away. The sky has darkened. It is about to rain.

Posted on

Immobile

It’s been a stressful few days. I’ve had to cancel, under difficult circumstances, a trip I was due to take in September to see friends, which has been very sad. Finances are increasingly worrying. Just the sort of day when life seems like crap every way you look and a trip to the shrink seems like a necessity, healing balm to the troubled mind, rather than a routine chore.

I get in the van. I reverse gently in order to get out of a tight parking space. Steering wheel pulled hard right-hand-down I gently move forward to sail out into the road. Only there’s a problem. The van is moving forward, but only very slowly. And what’s that in the rear-view mirror?

The problem is a really big problem. A problem the size of a four-by-four with an over-protruberant tow-bar. We were attached. Intimately. Where I go the four-by-four follows.

oh shit

I tried everything. Edging forward at various angles and speeds in the hopes of ripping clear. Moving everything out of the back of the van and putting heavy things in the front to lift the back up. Hitting the bottom of the bumper with a hammer. Nothing worked. The last effort produced a small tinny clunk and a shower of rust but made absolutely no impression at all on the iron of the bumper.

I had an idea. Jack up the right-hand side of the van in the hopes that E (the lovely next-door-neighbour and owner of the extra-long tow-bar) could drive away from the van’s embrace. There was just one problem. I don’t have a jack and hers was in the back of her car. Which was inaccessible due to the proximity of a large and immovable van.

In the end I phoned the RAC. This was a slightly protracted process due to their whizzy computerised system which only foresaw a certain range of possible circumstances which could result in a call for their help. Van vaginismus was not among them, neither was tow-bar dysfunction. The unfortunate operator was deeply puzzled as to which category it might best be fitted. I suggested “flat tyre” might be the closest since the action required to solve the problem was similar, but with the added benefit of not needing to change the wheel.

Whatever category she eventually chose it had excellent results. Faster than a speeding bullet (well in about 20 minutes which is amazingly quick for such an entirely non-urgent matter) the delightful and ebullient Chris appeared with the ideal solution. Let E’s tyres down.

chris

We chatted about social networking, E and I sitting in the sun on the wall at the front of the house, Chris from his deflating position prone on the pavement. He’s a globe-trotting kiwi and a keen user of facebook and was delighted at the prospect of my putting his picture there. “So much better for keeping in touch with all your friends when you’re travelling than sorting through a hotmail inbox crammed full of spam” he said.

Once I had rolled triumphantly out from the now flaccid embrace of the four-by-four he even produced a special hammer and bashed the bumps out of the bumper.

So thank you very much, Chris. For uncoupling the over-amourous vehicles, for another reason to enjoy facebook and for generally straightening things out. If only mental dents were as easily undinted.

Posted on

The persistence of insult

“You whore, you dirty whore, I’m going to kill you and your mongrel bitch.”

1.50 am and the man next door is outside, shouting, by the front door, underneath my window. Maizy had been barking, probably at a fox in the garden. The man next door does not like it when Maizy barks.

“I’m going to cut your head off, you whore.”

Maizy was now, of course, barking furiously. At him.

He wasn’t thumping on the door, he wasn’t carrying a hammer and the children were not in the house. I opened the bedroom door and Maizy rocketed in, curled up on the bed and was silent. I went straight back to sleep. Sticks and stones, after all, may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.

Yeah, right.

My mother first started calling me a whore when I was about 12. It’s a term my step-mother has employed too, although not to my face. “That whore and her half-cast bastard.” Rather like the whore and her mongrel bitch.

As I slip down the sides of the black pit I wonder why I bother to loath myself when others have done it so efficiently, so consistently, for so long. But nobody can loath me better than myself.

Never underestimate the power of words.

Posted on

Stormy weather

Two hours the dry rasp of thunder had coughed its threat as blue gave way to cloud. Now the whole sky was layered with sheets of gunmetal grey. The leaves, stirred from their silence, hissed and seethed in dry warning of rain to come. I moved slowly across the darkening park, uncaring.

From the top of Primrose Hill the approaching storm was drawn like a dark curtain around our vantage. All others there had run aghast at the bruising of the sky. We sat enfolded in each other’s shelter watching the light shine through jagged rents closed over by skeins of rain.

The first flash of lightening was followed, seven seconds later, by a ripping crack rattling the ill-fitting sheet-iron of the sky. I always count the seconds between lightning and thunder, a habit from childhood. How far away? nearer or further?

We counted the gaps as the storm moved back and forth across the bowl of London spread before us. Five miles away, then six but seeming closer because dead ahead of the bench where we sat. There is something about the straight and forward which gives an illusion of proximity the oblique, the ascance, lacks.

Fat, lazy drops first. Plopping, big-polka-dotting the path.

When it was obvious it was headed right towards us we ran to meet it. Holding hands tumbling pell-mell down the steep slope. As we collided with the curtain of rain we stopped and kissed. Mouths mingling in the streaming water. My hands, spread, pulling his face to me as rain-rivulets washed over us, sealing in a seamless caul of water.

When the real rain came it was staccato, angry. Beating on bowed head, battering tears.

Posted on

Depilling – week two-and-a-half

There is a very annoying side effect. It’s as though, whenever I move, my brain moves rather more slowly than everything else. Think stomach-in-lift experience. But permanently, prompted by anything more than the most gentle and regal turning of the head. A cross between slightly-pissed-while-very-tired and the up and down motion you get walking on dry land after a long boat trip in rough weather.

At first I thought hey, this isn’t so bad. Not nearly as bad as the drooling catatonia of starting to take SSRIs. It’ll pass, I thought. It’s nothing, I thought.

Well it hasn’t and it isn’t and I’m getting pretty pissed off with it. Even, on occasion, sick of it. As in nauseous.

Otherwise life seems… hmm. To have a bit of a sting to it. To be complex. Annoying. Exciting. Tiring. And zesty. None of which is necessarily bad, in small amounts.

mirrors