ryhall

ryhall

All about me

I have forgotten Short Shorts' camera  today, so I have included photos that I took when I went to Burghley yesterday. I am lucky enough to live very close to it and love it dearly.

So, just recently, I have become sluggish and out of shape. I am very baggy everywhere, especially naked. I have good reason that I won't go into, but all the same-my beloved daily 3 hour walks have been a thing of the past for over a year as I put a similar effort into the Gilmore Girls and Pancakes.  I have been feeling stagnant.

However, within 5 minutes of coming out here to beautiful Rutland Water (I write in situ on my new Samsung Note book) I have discovered something very important about myself.

1.  I'm freezing and
2. The keys are tiny and my fingers are large
3. I have forgotten to put my bra on
4. I am a loner
5. I have forgotten the mobile and so need to go home earlier than intended to avoid a Mildred Pierce situation.

Let's ignore number 3 by zipping up my kagoul and return to Number 4.

I love being alone. If there was anyone else here with me, it would spoil my experience and appreciation of the calm of the water, the rustle of the foliage, the wildlife that normally goes unnoticed and the nip in the air.  This is nothing new - it has always been thus. However, knowing I am a bit of a loner, rather than that I simply enjoy my own company, is a huge relief.
All these ruddy years, I have wondered why I have not been at events that my friends remember with fondness and I have felt a bit confused, baffled - hurt even. I have berated myself for hating Tupperware parties, for not wanting to have the closeness of having someone to see every day or an event to schedule on a regular once or twice a week basis. I simultaneously love my friends and would do anything for them, but can't move round in a social circle daily, I start to feel naked, or as though I was in a goldfish bowl. Again, I have a clearer view of why I used to drink that bit too much in social situations. Life makes a bit more sense.

And do you know what? It's OK to be a loner, another part of my jigsaw has slotted into place with a satisfying thwack! It makes life so much easier to accept yourself and not struggle against it constantly.

This is not to say I'm anti-social or a hermit! I like to make people laugh, I like to entertain, I like support, I like fancy dress parties; but these are milestones in a quiet life rather than vice versa .

5 teetotal months now.
  Strangely, never having been a ballerina, I have actually put on even more weight since stopping the drink. The alcohol must have been burning off chip fat!

What has brought me to this place of solitary clarity? Beautiful Rutland Water which has meant so much to me over the years and has always helped me to think. I love being outdoors; no-where else am I so peaceful and calm.

 However this past year, I have spent almost all my time indoors as I got to grips with this new me whose 20 year career has come to a voluntary stop and whose wages have decreased 10 fold.

My life needs to happen outdoors and this year off has allowed me to see it.

I'd love to know what makes sense to you in your life? What have you discovered about yourself that has changed the way you live your life?
Post the link in the comments section -I'd love to read it!

GlampItUp is launched!

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/lesley2005turquoise

My ebay shop is up and running at last. I haven't got everything on line yet but it will get there, keep checking back. I do not really believe in adverts on blogs, but if it's for myself, it seems silly to waste the opporchancity :)
My kids will be going hungry at Christmas otherwise.
Mention the blog when you order for a free gift and a shout out.  Can do any combination of things to suit any budget xxx

Short shorts and Me.

Short Shorts was 16 yesterday and she's beginning to find her own way in the world.
 The whole house was filled with excitement as her brother, sister and I got up at 6am for her birthday breakfast of pancakes, fruit and maple syrup. At least 2 of us were still asleep. All I asked  as I ferried the food back and forth from the kitchen, was that they leave me a little maple syrup.
5 minutes later, I sat down to dry pancakes and tried not to think about all  the things that she is now legally allowed to do.
Recently, we discovered that she is a talented photographer - well more than talented . Even photographers have told her she's talented.

 She took this of her sister.

So, I sold the dog and bought her a very expensive 16th birthday camera. It was second hand, but to put this in perspective, Christmas is cancelled.
I made her a cake.
Sort of.

Well, she loves those giant cupcake things but it was too expensive, so I bought a victoria sponge and balanced a lemon drizzle cake on the top. Then I piped icing in a helter skelter fashion on the top and wrapped it all up with a crepe bow.

 My daughter thinks I am a genius. I told her I'd made it, and I did.
Sort of.
She informed us that she was going bowling and then on for a meal with her friends after school.
It was to be financed by birthday money from her Gran. She did not take kindly to my reminding her that the camera that stole Christmas was only bought (after she posted the link to it on my FB page) once we had established that all birthday monies would come back to me in part-payment.
This had been conveniently forgotten and too late to cancel the birthday arrangements that had been made without my knowledge.
What could I do? Generally speaking, Short Shorts is a lovely, thoughtful girl and I didn't want to ruin her birthday but - oh dear I did feel sorry for myself :(

 I have learned my lesson -contracts need to be drawn up ahead of her brother's 16th!

So, though I started the week, feeling a bit like Mum of the Year, someone who has encouraged her daughter in her passion from an early age; a mum who lets her daughter be all she can be and makes sacrifices to do so; a mum who gets up at 6am cos her new 16 year old gets on the bus at 7.15 and above all, a mum who supports her daughter; it turns out that I can be a bit petty.
It turns out I am a mum who spends hundreds of pounds on a camera she isn't allowed to borrow, on a daughter who doesn't come home till 8.15 pm on her birthday and even then I had to fetch her.
I am a mother who sits with her 2 younger children and a fantastic birthday cake, waiting with love and excitement for a child who has already been  made a Minstrels cake by her friends at school and couldn't eat another bite.
I am a mother who looked at the 10 million excited photos taken at school, bowling and then a restaurant on the day of her daughter's sixteen birthday. I am a mother who wouldn't dream of saying 'But we were all so looking forward to your birthday tea' or of making her feel guilty.
 Is she worth it?


I reckon so. xxx

Paundy : A letter for my Dad

Mum calls you Aundy. That's 'cause it's Scottish for Andy. I always thought it was a nice name, Andrew. That's you that is. Andrew is a terrified 7 year old on his own and ill in hospital in 1949. It is too far for your mum to visit more than once a week and neither of you knows what is wrong with you or why you are so ill; Why you will always be so ill.
Now you're 69. I am too far away to visit more than 3 times a year - and you're back in hospital again, again. How much of your life have you spent there? How much of mine?

It's been 34 years since you had the transplant. 

Mum says that at the hospital today, the young doctor said he felt that you must be the longest surviving kidney recipient; that generally 10 years is the average life expectancy. He had once heard of someone who had survived 30 years, but never 34. You told the doctor that you were only the 3rd longest surviving patient, but you and Mum have forgotten that time has passed since someone else held that record.

Andy Pandy was one of my favourite TV programmes. His striped pyjamas always looked so fresh and cosy. As I grew up and practised being cheeky, I called you Aundy Paundy because I was Scottish back then too. Finally, I settled on Paund. You were furious:Where was my respect?

 Now, you find it endearing.

 At least I hope so since it's been about 20 years since I called you Dad.

 Dad.

 My Daddy...

...looked a little bit like James Garner , if he wore his leather jacket.

My Daddy wasn't around much and when he was, he was ill..
 My little brother and I would sit tearfully around hospital wards,kicking chair legs after school and at weekends. We'd spend interminable hours on a bus to Edinburgh for afternoon visiting, then go on to the Museum to pass 4 tedious hours and to eat sandwiches out of tinfoil. Then we'd come back for evening visiting before starting a long, travel-sick journey home in the dark and way past bedtime.
Sometimes Paund, you were the very embodiment of cheerful playfulness and at others, you would weep at the sight of us and be unable to stop. We didn't know why you were crying and Mum said you were being dramatic.
This was our life. We had no knowledge of another way. We still have none.
 I would be in trouble at school for not doing my homework, but the bus was too wobbly to write in a jotter balanced on your knee and the freezing black road, punctuated by dim 70's headlamps, ate the free time.I didn't explain why, I just did the extra lines I was given.

Before the long journey, and after school, we'd go with Mum to work. She cleaned buses. The yellow, blue and red swirls of the bus seat and the smell of vomit and disinfectant from the chemical toilet are as clear in my nostrils now as they were in the days when we tried to make a 48 seater bus into a playground. I loathed it all.

Sometimes, when the conductors were all on shift, we were allowed into the bothy for a change where a huge refectory table smelled of dust and must and old tree. Countless drivers and clippies had scratched their names into the surface - fag butts strewn across the floor like confetti.

Then it was back to school; back to hospital and to the smell of sick people, old people and my Daddy.

Daddy with tubes, Daddy with bandages, Daddy with an ever present cannula.
Daddy so bloated with his own urine that he was drowning in it, unable to walk or play with his children in the park his skin stretched so taut that it was a miracle that he didn't split open.
Stranded in the park, children and Dad. 

I can't remember how but help arrived. I am told that this was the time that everything changed. My Mum's youngest sister put you in a wheel barrow, wheeled you into casualty and at 5' high, ordered them to finally, once and for all, sort this bloody 31 year life of shit out..to do what they were paid to do. 

Then came dialysis and life improved for a while. There were holidays in specially adapted caravans that family and friends had walked to provide, in kilts and with bagpipes on the only sunny day of the year. But this  was short lived. Dialysis patients didn't last long and the hunt was on for a donor. Everyone who could walk upright and sign their name was tested for compatibility. 

Finally some poor bugger died in a motorcycle accident and our family got 'lucky'. Well, lucky-ish for we were warned that most transplants failed and there was an NHS 'Two Strikes and Out' rule for translplants. So, the week that I started secondary school and the week of your birthday, there was a new hospital to visit and you Dad, stayed there inside a large plastic room where we could see you but not touch . It was agony. We talked through a grill and anything we gave you went through a sterilising machine that made everything taste and smell of disinfectant.
That's the first time that I saw Mum cry. The doctor opened the bubble door unexpectedly one day during visiting hours and she sat on your knee and cried. I cried but I wasn't sure what for. The doctor led my brother and I away so that you two could have some alone time and we stood behind a pillar watching a rare moment of intimacy. Two halves of a single person being re-glued. We two felt alone and when we returned you told us to press our ears to your wrist where a 6" cut was healing and we felt a warmth and a gurgle and a whoosh, whoosh whoosh noise. It was yeuchy.
Then days later it was back to drips and machines and panic as the kidney rejected.
But I knew it would be OK.
 I didn't worry.
I knew my dad would fix it.
 And you did.

Not like the girl who had a transplant at the same time -driven mad by the thought of housing part of someone not long dead within her young body. The Exorcist was in the cinema.
The doctor said that you ordered the kidney to change it's mind by the sheer force of your bloody will, he had never seen anything like it. You told him that you had a wife and two kids and that you refused to leave them.

You've been refusing ever since.
It's been 40 odd years now for me and my brother and longer for Mum.
40 years of dashing up the A1 and panic over, returning home shattered and shot; 40 years of hospital visits and cannulas and a cocktail of pills slowly eroding heart, arteries, bones, teeth, bowels, limbs and memories; of watching you die on numerous occasions; of this definitely being 'it'. Triple bypasses and heart attacks, angina, anaemia and skin cancer, cataracts and vertigo and all the time the vein they took from your leg and replanted in your arm to pump the cleaned blood round your system has made a noise like the sea if you put your ear to it and the kidney hasn't dared to reject you.
So, today another phonecall and Mum is in bits. She watched you die again today and she is scared because Monday's blood transfusion needed doing again by Thursday and the kidney can't keep up and now bone marrow is being tested and for the first time ever she wept down the phone.
And I wonder how many years I have been sick with it all and how many years my brother has spent in hospital and how my mother's life consists of trauma; and how tired I am and how sometimes I wish the call would be the last one and then I wish that I hadn't wished that. I sometimes wonder if its selfishness that keeps you alive and then I feel so utterly selfish for thinking so.
 I bought myself a rag doll the other day Paundy,  and not being a toy person, I felt baffled by that.

 But the universe provides you with what you need if you let it and I have it with me in bed tonight.

Tonight, I am a little girl a long way away from her Dad and the sea is silent.

xxxxxxxxxx

Better than Sex!

...well, I think so. It's been so long that I can't quite remember...but in any case, this week has been one of the best ever!


It's been a week of getting things done. Actually, I've been getting things done all summer.
 I have been clearing out, dusting down, clearing out then washing. Then I cleared out and dusted down and cleared out and had a car boot!
Then I cleared out, organised and had another car boot.
Then I cleared out, had a change round and had another car boot! 

Then I thought I'd do a bit of sorting and chucking out but was thoroughly hacked off with car boots and so stuck stuff at the bottom of the drive with an honesty box.

Wish I'd thought of that before all those early mornings.

It felt marvellous; free if you will.

Free even if you won't.

Then, I got a man in. He put my blinds up and assessed my awning (too much material apparently)

I enjoyed that so much that I got another man in who took two days to flatten my mound.
It looks so much better and he had the good grace to leave a plum tree marking the spot.
He taught me lots about planting and trees and  that rats like dry roasted peanuts. 

Who'd have thought?

He arrived on the same day as my painter.
The painter and the mound flattener didn't like each other.
There was a bit of a Mexican stand off under my hanging baskets. It was so embarrassing.
They've gone to seed.
  (This house has been changed to protect identities)

The painter taught me patience, how to concentrate on 1 thing at a time and not fly off in all directions willy nilly . He taught me that I deserve 1 lovely room to sit in and to have someone do it properly. He taught me to value myself.
 He taught me that painters need an awful lot of tea.

Then I got a woman in to tend to the rest of my garden,which had gone a bit hysterical and then had a   breakdown.

She came round with lots of power tools and I got very excited. I love power tools.
There was the petrol strimmer -it really kicked the shit out of the triffids.
Then there was the 'hedge trimmers' -they seemed to masquerade as a chain saw. There were leaf blowers and loppers and choppers and spikey things and funny shaped spades. I was labourer all day and just  giggled because we were showing the fucking bastard garden who was boss at last.
I saw a couple of frogs.
I can see where edging is now....

................

..........................Sorry, just had a small weep of joy.

Oh and I had the most fabutastic massage yesterday. Guess what my fave bit was? (It was an all over body massage)
Nope! It was my hands and feet...Apparently we hold lots of stress in them. Something tells me if I had a petrol strimmer and industrial hedge trimmers, I'd have less stress.

Anyway, the point is, that I have finally and irrefutably discovered the joy of 'support'. I have always felt that I should be able to manage. But I can't and as my philosophical painter said, neither can he. We all need people to help us to do the stuff we aren't so good at, and sometimes, that needs paying for.

What I didn't expect was that, rather than feeling completely skint, I feel ...happy!
I think that's it, but it doesn't visit here very often. Overwhelmed visits quite often, but I think 'support' might be the antedote to overwhelmed. What's more it's totally addictive. I can't stop organising support.
The house has had to be tethered to the ground after all that clearing out. It feels so light and spacious and breathable that it thinks itself weightless. Then, like everyone who loses weight, it felt like sprucing itself up and showing off with some new clothes and  the combined effect is that there is enough space in my house to create enough space in my head to get on with work. Spending money might actually help me to earn a wage.

My life feels like it's being put through one of my dad's old garden sieves and the ground is smooth and fertile beneath. Those old bits of pottery and rock  and straw are slowly being put at the end of my life's drive.

It's surely better than sex for the effects will last much longer.

What's better than sex for you?