Vampire snippet

Here is a snippet to one of my vampire novels opening chapters, to give you a taster of what I have written in the past.

This is one of the stories I was close to finishing when I gave it up because of the lack of enthusiasm for vampires in the publishing world.

I do miss writing my vampire stories, but I am sharing this small snippet to ask your opinion as a reader – do you think I should go back to writing my vampires or do you think I should leave them abandoned for now?

Here’s the snippet…

The rain was pouring and Amber was on the streets of London soaking wet; the droplets of rain sliding down her face and onto her delicate pale breasts, her heart thumping against her ribs in mixed emotions, mostly fear of the man in the shadows in front of her. 

He was so close she could feel his breath upon her neck and his gentle quivering lips getting closer to rouse her into submission to him.  It would be hard for her to move back away from him now, she was trapped; Backed against the wall of the dead-end alleyway at his mercy.

He caressed her, asking for her to go back with him quietly, things will be better, he promised, he promised he won’t take her underground again, she will be just like Isabella, free to roam the nest as she pleases, become his princess. 

But she knew his tricks now, his love and sweetness only lasted long enough for his needs to be met.  She remembered falling for it before; she remembered becoming weak at the knees in love with him and surrendering to his sweet talk and caresses.  Oh he was so good at knowing what you wanted, what you loved and so excellent at executing pacification and looking at you in a way your heart would simply melt.  Puppy dog eyes for sure.  Don’t look at them she said to herself, don’t look in his eyes and you can’t be fooled again. 

I know this is full of clichés, I didn’t actually confess until now, this is one of my earlier works that is probably one of my oldest vampire stories and I have come a long way now days. 

Please let me know in the comments below what you think of this snippet – many thanks!

Thanks for reading!

I come from

I come from the smoky rooms of former North London cottages

A place where, as time goes by becomes more urbanised and exotic as does its people

A close peaceful community nudged out by hordes of shoppers, losing your family in the chaotic crowds as the familiar becomes ever increasingly strange

The cosy smells of fish and chips, apples, fruit and wool, overtaken by spice and petrol as new buildings pop up like toadstools in the night

The meadows I played on with dogs and cousins too polluted now, the solution?  More pollution of course, another hundred toadstools pop up to house more strangers, till the village is devoured by the ever starving beast called London

I come from the gossiping nurses and the nagging sheet metal workers, sitting around smoking their money and complaining that making it is too hard!

The smell of bleach stuns your senses and makes your eyes bleed but at least it’s clean

Helicopters sing you lullabies as you fall asleep and police sirens wake you up the next day

I come from neighbours leaning over your fence, giving you gardening advice and cake and eventually curry!

Stray dogs chasing loose cats and getting run over by milk carts

Pigeons swamping the garden pecking at stale bread and the last lizard I’ll ever see gets taken by a fat crow, falling down roof tiles and into a gutter unceremoniously

I come from two sides of a road that society says shouldn’t be crossed

But here I am and I am me and both sides are equally mine

I come from sugar, fat and bread, fizzy drinks and tea

Pure white walls broken by ivory and chrome

Vacuums replaced yearly due to overuse and the bigger the telly the more kudos to you!

I come from a large garden, a sanctuary and au pair

I come from fashion critics, jealousy and violence

In books I hid myself in multiple worlds so that it could never touch me

So I would be free to be me and not them

Finding my own way to a new place

A place that is more like me

It is lost forever now, that place, where I come from.

Gypsies & cockneys

Today I want the gypsy look, a beautiful ruffled light brown skirt with gold coins sewn around it, a lacy crocheted camisole and beaded jewellery; big double circlet earrings, anklets and bangles and wedge heeled sandals.

That’s the look I’d like today, I have the skirt, but not the top, I have the shoes but not the style of jewellery.

Most of my jewellery has gone now.

My best crocheted light brown cardigan which had a sort of gypsy/Slavic style to it has lost some of its patterning with age and had to be thrown recently, that was a shame, it was my favourite summer cardigan, worn for comfort not warmth.

My hair would be styled with the curling tongs, that suits me a lot and makes me look like a porcelain doll, especially if I had make up to glamour myself up a bit better instead of making do with being a pasty natural thing.

I’ve always had a passion for the gypsy look, since I was a kid – well it’s in my blood, my grandma on mum’s side always said she’d half Romany and sent me to visit various locations where the gypsies lived to introduce me to them.  Two places mostly, a caravan in Portobello road is a distant cousin and there is a fairground ride repair place in Hendon, which are all apparently relatives of mine.

I miss Portobello road for lots of reasons, it’s a place I sorely miss since leaving London.  I visited it three times a year before I left London; I haven’t seen the place in almost fourteen years now.

The Cockney’s pie & mash shop there knows me well, saw me grow up – I often wonder if fourteen years is too long and maybe they’ve forgotten me, I hope not!  I hope they’ll remember me when I got back again someday, I hope the lady who runs it will be there again.

I was afraid just before Covid hit, there were rumours Cockneys pie & mash shop was going to close down due to a lack of custom, I hope not.  I have checked recently, they appear to still exist.

It’s one of the first things I want to do if I ever go back to London – have lunch at Cockneys!

Thanks for reading!

Abstract art and the subconscious

For the first time in months I have done art.

Yesterday, late afternoon to early evening I spent time doing art and I did it in a rebellious kind of way.

So tired of never having access to my art table I did a very childish thing and sat crossed-leg on my bed and risked ink stains on the bed covers to do it.

I did get a green splodge on my duvet, which looks black against the red polka dots that were originally on it.

But it wasn’t as messy as I thought it would be.  Paul moaned, of course he did – ink splodge on the bed covers, but he didn’t say as much as he usually does because he knows in a way, it was his fault this happened.  My art table has been taken over by the whole household, except me.

I made abstract conceptual art of a beauty boutique with inks, coloured pencils, biro and sharpies. 

I also made a lady and cut her out as part of a big collage I intend to do as part of a free course I signed up a week ago to – thing is, I haven’t done the project yet, because I couldn’t find a wooden palette big enough to continue.  I have everything else though – but the palette is meant to be the canvas!

I also learned today when experimenting with different music on Alexa that I’ve been a big fan of The Kinks my whole life and never knew.  Every song of theirs I was like… ooh this is my most favourite song of all time, I was like that with around ten of their songs I listened to.  But I’ve told you all before, I have the memory of a sieve.

I probably knew once, that I liked them.

As stupid as it sounds I thought quite a lot of their songs were from The Beatles, The Beach Boys or The Monkees to be honest.

So yeah, I learned I like The Kinks, typical really upon reflection.

A new short story series has entered my mind today, which I was also practising art for.  I wanted to make the art of a Goth girl, as the main character is Goth – I want to write three short stories before I do my plan.  The plan is, to post them here on my blog as a weekly thing. 

I probably won’t, but who knows.

It’s a black comedy comic strip.

Still intend to write the other projects, but my heart isn’t in something since I found out someone wanted to steal it, I am tired of idea thieves.  It really is disheartening.

So, that’s what I am up to lately.

To me, that’s huge progress.

I’ve been in a huge depression slump since September; this is my first creative foray since then.  Well on a major scale that lasted longer than thirty minutes in any case and wasn’t poetry either!

I’ve been eager to get heavily into art actually; particularly conceptual abstract in mixed media format and collages.

I’ve been trying to learn off and on for about a year now, what abstract art actually means – to try and develop respect for it, because to be honest with you, up until recently I had a very naïve and uneducated idea about abstract.

You know… anyone and their dog can do it.  Ouch.

Actually there is a lot of thought and feeling that goes into abstract work, a lot more than you realise.

You realise that in the first few minutes of abstract the artist genuinely doesn’t know what they are doing, they are just adding colour and shapes to the canvas to fill it up – then they layer it and cover up a lot of what they’ve done in order to make something special to them.

You see the thing is, abstract really is suggestive.  The artist sees something that you and I won’t, then give it a name based on what they see.

I remember an art class I did once in the last school I’ve ever been to – where I was at the frustrated sweaty end of a ranting art teacher, because he felt I was disrespecting the craft because I couldn’t grasp what abstract or even surrealism was at the time.  He wanted an abstract painting or sculpture of a musical instrument and I couldn’t do it for the life of me.

He forced me to read loads of books for that whole lesson and I realised what I was doing wrong.  I was attempting realism, because I thought that’s what he wanted from me.

I thought abstract at the time meant bold unusual colours with blocky patterns in it. 

When I finally grasped what he wanted, he was so happy he was bouncing off the walls for weeks and from being the most hated pupil he ever had, I became his biggest success in his words!

I realised what he wanted me to do was to create a musical instrument of my choice, but make sure it doesn’t look normal – that it looks contorted, sort of trapped between realities and maybe make it in a way in which if you squint and put your head in a certain position it will actually look like the guitar you meant for it to be.  Weird, but then again – it’s all thinking outside of the box.  We can all look at a picture, but do we really see it?

How deeply do we look at it, do we see details?  Do we try to see beyond splodges and shapes or do we take it for granted?

That’s the thing with abstract, a lot of people do take it for granted and pooh, pooh it.

The best way I’ve found in understanding abstract art, is to get used to looking at shapes in many forms.  Silhouettes are a good start.  Splodges on paper, but don’t just look at the splodges – look at them as silhouettes, what could they be the silhouettes of?

If you squint your eyes or tilt your head slightly or a lot does the silhouette look different?

That’s the understanding behind abstract art I’ve found.

Sometimes, yes, it’s just random stuff people throw on a canvas, but a large amount of abstract artists really do over think how they make things appear.

Another way in learning about abstract art that helped me was the idea of junk journaling and collage.  You take scrapbooking papers and you cut them into shapes and you paste them onto a paper, you have a square and a triangle, put them together and it is a house, but they are random colour and patterns the shapes – all of this helped me understand better.

So abstract is both the worlds of random paint throwing and thinking deeply about what you’re doing – this is something I’ve learned from almost every abstract artist.

They really do start off, just piling paint onto a canvas for ages until they squint in a certain way or tilt their head or just simply see beyond what they are doing – this is why they pause and focus on the picture regularly – they are trying to see what their subconscious has just made and it does give people a huge insight to the state of the artists mind.

It’s all subconscious, it’s not meant to be 3D realism. 

Today, I was concentrating on my abstract picture, without a hope in Hell knowing what I was doing, I just went back to being five years old and threw different shapes and colours and textures onto my canvas until I saw what looked to me to be a mess of clothes, boots and shoes all over a carnival style boutique, I outlined some things and I did some random scratches and texts and to me it works.

I didn’t intend to make it some flamboyant carnival style clothing boutique, I just wanted to paint and play.

But it is funny how my subconscious did that, because I haven’t had a shopping trip for six years, not where I can impulse buy more than £10 and in the past few days I’ve really missed my old haunts in London and the ability to go out for a shopping spree of £300 without battering an eye lid like I used to!

So by throwing myself into abstract art, I’ve found I am learning a lot about myself and my deep desires.

I really do miss London and I did notice along the flanks of the painting, it looked like some foggy scenes of a London high-street!

I missed doing art and todays lifted my spirits slightly.

Thanks for reading!

Old bucket list

I found one of my old Bucket List Note Books today, some things I have put in there I have completely forgotten about – which is one of the reasons why I put them in there in the first place, because I was afraid I’d forget about them.  In particular places I’ve seen on TV or in magazines that look interesting to go to.

I haven’t dreamt big for a long time, these are things I thought were attainable within 5 to 10yrs, but after our money cutbacks and the UK’s heat or eat crisis, even half of these look like a never thing now.

Over the past 13yrs I’ve seen our weekly budget cut like this £200 a week, £120, £80, £50, £40 we can’t survive another cut, which is predicted by the government in the UK in February 2023.

Such as going to Efteling theme park in Amsterdam in a place called Kaalsheuval – would never have remembered that in a million years!  I haven’t seen it advertised since the program I watched in 2018 showing it!

I may or may not ever do this – get a tattoo of a specific design I have in mind of a raven on my upper left shoulder or shoulder blade.

Grow the meconopsis (Himalayan blue poppy) from seed successfully, they are notoriously hard to grow and I have failed twice so far – but I may not grow it after all.

Go Christmas shopping in New York, that’s been on my bucket list since I was 8yrs old, only when I was 8yrs old I didn’t know what a bucket list was!

Go to New York’s Serendipity 3 and order their famous Opulent Sundae.

Go to Ireland, particular the areas Cork, Leinster and Roscommon, where some of the Irish ancestors came from – for example, one set of my ancestors was a Duke of Leinster (via a 6x great grandmother’s maiden name FitzGerald) and my great grandpa came from Roscommon.

Go to a huge water park, I love water parks – I haven’t been to one since I was 10yrs old, one of my cousins used to take me annually from 4yrs old till I was 10yrs old but then it stopped when she moved too far.  I only like the kind of water parks that let adults on the slides too!  I am a big kid!

Take Henry to the London Dungeons with me, I love that place!

Grow a Japanese acer, they’re so pretty!

Grow a cherry tree from seed to harvest!

Publish a novel.

Get a huge house with 4+ acres of land!  Actually I think the acreage is too small now, I have bigger plans for the garden and making a sustainable food forest type home with some animals like goats etc.  So now my minimal acreage is around 10 acres now.

Make my art project Kabbalah – it’s a woodwork project I have in mind based on the Kabbalah!

Make mosaic planters.

Home make my own garden paving slabs!

Create a large swimming pond, not pool, pond, I want it to be natural… I also want a proper pool too, but there you go.  Hey, I was a kid who loved catching frogs and caring for frog spawn, what do you expect?

Build a rockery/alpine garden.

Go to the Chelsea flower show.

Go to Crufts as a competitor with my dogs… I want to do best of breed but also agility and fly ball at some stage.

Breed a pair of dogs and keep their bloodline for generations, 1 pup from each generation.

Take a cruise on the river Danube.

Have a minimum of 5 children – still wanting that!  I have 1 so far, I need 4 more or I will get grumpy.

Go to the Jurassic coast and look for fossils and amber and generally do some rock pooling or something.

Go to Whipsnade zoo with Henry.

Own some chickens – buff Orpington’s.

Own some goats.

Make an insect hotel.

Go camping with my family.

Go to the Natural History museum with Henry.

Go to the science museum with Henry.

Go to a musical theatre with Henry.

Go to the London aquarium with Henry.

Go on the London Eye.

Go into the tower of London.

Touch a real live, raven.

Have a 6ft aquarium again and decorate it myself.

Build a large hamster city.

Grow Hollyhocks from seed.

Grow and harvest several gourd varieties at once for an excellent autumn photo shoot!

Get a GCSE in math.

Go to a fetish club, never actually been to one, Paul has promised over the years but never got around to it.

Go to a jazz club.

Go to a cocktail bar.

Go to an Italian restaurant that isn’t run by my family!

Go to France and buy macarons.

Go to Hungary and eat proper goulash in a restaurant – I know how to make it, but I want the real stuff!

Make ratatouille for my family.

Home make vegetable soup for Henry – he’s never had it as we could never afford to make it since he was 3yrs old.

Home make onion soup for someone again

Get my ears pierced again as my mother did a bodge job when I was 5!

Go to the day of the dead celebrations.

Go to the Notting Hill carnival.

Go to Mardi Gras.

Grow oyster mushrooms

Make Barbie clothes for a little girl’s doll – preferably a daughter.

Get Cubase back

Compose and sell my own music and lyrics

Make a close circle of Bohemian friends.

Go to Rutland garden centre

Have a jewellery vault like Scrooge McDuck and sit in there like a guarding dragon!  Yes, I know materialism is a bad fantasy, but I’ve always wanted this since I was a kid and I saw Scrooge McDuck and then I saw dragons guarding hoards of treasure and I like magpies and I like shinies…  But knowing me it will all be what my gran calls “a lot of your cheap costume jewellery crap”!  But it makes you feel like you have a big hoard!  They are still shiny, even if they are mostly fake, no?  Another thing about this is, I care for jewellery – so I am hardly going to throw it on the floor of the vault and swim on it.  In any case, they’d be in glass boxes and easily visible in good lighting like a mini jewellery museum, if I had my way!  Weird thing is, other than bangles and finger rings, I don’t like wearing jewellery outside of special occasions.

Become fluent in 5 languages before I am 80yrs old!  

Become fluent in Italian

Become fluent in French

Become fluent in Hebrew

Become fluent in German

Become fluent in Japanese

Learn the tango and the paso doble with a sexy virile man who’d be my husband, because in my best reality I’d have a husband who loves that sort of thing!

Have a hot stone massage

Go for a reiki session

Go to a sauna

Be a regular donator of the shoebox appeal, if I was ever a rich woman I can see me doing hundreds of these boxes at Christmas, I just love kids!  Up until our money got cut badly, I used to do 3 a year.

Have a Indian head massage

Go to the arctic to see wild arctic life, in particular foxes.

Adopt a couple of rescue donkeys

Go to Christmas pantomimes with Henry

Go zorbing

Go on the world’s longest zip wire

Go paintballing

Go to a Centre Parcs holiday

Go on a huge shopping spree offline – I haven’t had one in ages… the last best offline shopping spree I did was £200 for Christmas 2016 and before that it was a £300 clothing only shopping spree in 2010 after I lost 40llbs when Henry was born.  Big contrast to my life before Henry, where £900 a month was a regular treat!  I am way over due for retail therapy.

Buy the latest console with a good set of games!

Go to India with Henry.

Go to Dollyworld with Henry.

Go and swim with the sea turtles with Henry!

Join the women’s institute – used to think I’d like it.

Meeting a huge bunch of celebrities was on my list, too long to mention everyone! 

Take up amateur dramatics again.

Become more active in my party… I’m a member of the labour party and since becoming sick I’ve been inactive – meaning I don’t attend meetings etc. in the village hall anymore and I miss it.

Make sock puppets again

Make puppets for charity

I love Debenham store’s and really wanted to go to one at Christmas with Henry to the biggest one in the UK, but they’ve gone bust as a brand since this list was made!

Go to Hamleys.

Go on the flying Scotsman

Go to a New Year’s Eve party, haven’t been to one since I was 6yrs old!

Go to a Christmas Party, never been to one.

Go to a German Christmas market.

Have an annual un-birthday party – huge fan of Alice in Wonderland, can you tell yet?

Go to the Eden project.

Go to a beach and find fairy glass.

Walk Offas Dike

Walk the entire length of the river Severn as a holiday.

Go to an encounter group

Become proficient in playing the recorder and then moving onto clarinet and saxophone.

Start a YouTube channel

Do a TedTalk, but not sure on what yet lol

Go to the last night of the proms!  BBC proms.

Go shopping in Ross on Wye

Go shopping at Hammersmith again

Go to the Carpathian foothills

Go to Venice for a masquerade and buy lots of Venetian glass and masks!

Go shopping at Covent Garden

Learn to roller-skate!

Learn how to ride a bike!

Go skiing

Go fishing

Holiday on a barge

Party for 3 days on a yacht with a pool!

Go to Styal Woods Wilmslow Cheshire

Go to the Chonqing caves

Go to the Northern Italy black sands caves

Go to Aveline’s Hole – another cave

Go to the Naha suicide tunnels

Go and see the Cheddar Man

Go to Salina Turda Romainia

Go to the Terezia mines in Romainia

Follow the source of the river of Timavo

Go to the Ardia event in Sardinia

Go to a gay pride event

Visit the Karst of canin river and mist forest

Go to the Benin underground city of the Agoji

Go and hear the glaciers sing in Knud Ramussen

Go to Dolly’s desserts in Barnsley

Go to M&M world

Go to China town London

Have cream tea at Fortnum and Mason

Cream tea at the Ritz

Go to American Candyland London

Buy Gucci stuff

Buy Moschino stuff

Buy a Penthouse in London and another in New York or maybe a house in the Hamptons

Go to Duke’s donut shop in Headingley Leeds

Buy Florentine Marble paper

Be on the front cover of Vogue magazine – but I have to get over the fact I am scared of fame first huh?

Start several types of businesses, I have a lot of ideas, but I know it can only be done in baby steps if I want them all to succeed!

Sell merchandise based on my art and stories!

Buy back an ancestral home that’s been turned into a hotel, there’s a handful actually!

Paint with gold leaf

Go to a Holi event – Indian paint throwing

Lose weight and tone up!

Learn to trust and be happy and relaxed!

Thanks for reading!

Got to be grateful

I have a bunch of friends, mostly online but there some friends that I once knew offline when I lived in London, but maintain contact with them online only these days.

Quite a few of these friends are new age, hippies, gothic, artistic or writers of some description or another and at least two thirds are part of the LGBTQ community – nearly half of which believe in doing one thing regularly;

Being grateful or finding gratitude in things, no matter how hard they might be.

This is something I have never really thought about for myself.

Ungrateful cow, eh?

But some of my friends are encouraging me to become grateful even for the hard times, because it will result in healing old wounds.

They have claimed it has helped them somewhat.

Becoming more self-reflective is key to understanding the pains and turmoil’s of the past, so you can then sweep the negative space clear and put in a positive vibe via gratitude.

Nobody has ever really taught me to be grateful, not in the way I have always tried to encourage Henry to be.

It’s funny that – how I’ve always made a point in ensuring Henry is always grateful for what he has, yet I never practised what I preached there for myself.  Well, to tell the truth, I am grateful for what I have now, even though it is much less than what is comfortable and much less than what I used to have – but I am grateful I am not in a worse situation than this, I’ve always have been.

I am very grateful for living in a country that cares for its poor and sick like they do, I am very grateful not to be a situation of many other people in the world.

I am also grateful for no longer being in situations I used to be or having certain people in my life anymore.

But that’s just generalising and in order to do this properly I shouldn’t generalise, I should be more in depth about what I am grateful for.

Things from my past;

I am grateful that although my mother wasn’t the best, she at least had one personality trait which stopped her being much worse than she was – that is the fear of what others thought of her.  This always held her back from doing the things she really wanted to do to me, because she would often tell me exactly how she felt, but how she wouldn’t do it, because of so and so.

But she was still who she was, despite this.  Imagine if she was more self-assured, what my life could have been like if she had been more confident to be herself.

I am grateful for the situations my family put me into, living amongst addicts and drunks and domestic abuse temporarily and then moving me onto more stable homes, so I learned to appreciate what my true home life was like in comparison!

I think that’s why my mother did that – move me around a lot to different people for weeks on end, to show me, that in the scheme of things – or in the scheme of what is available in the family, our house was a haven in comparison.

Even if it was a prison, it was quieter, more predictable and physically safe if you did what you were told.  In some of the other homes I spent time in, it didn’t matter if you were good as gold, if they were inclined to hurt you, they’d hurt you!

I was always grateful for how clean, organised and fresh the main house was in comparison to some places I was sent to live, where their houses were infested with rats and beds weren’t made, they had no bottom sheets and in the winter in order to keep warm you had to snuggle up with the kids you shared the bed with and the dogs just to keep warm!

It’s funny looking back at how those places were actually considered my happy places, my favourite places to go to, to get away from mum.  The people were nice, but poor, much poorer than Paul and I – this is something to be grateful for.  I don’t have to scrounge around at neighbour houses begging for 50p for the electric metre like the mother of the house did and then go to her dad’s house to get them fed, because her husband drank away the food money for her and her 5 children and an extra to boot!

It’s one of the reasons why I am tired of sausage and beans, it was a staple there.  My mum tried to teach me to be grateful by showing me we are much better off, because we would also have sausages and beans, but with chips and fried eggs and buttered bread and double portions to them around twice a week on average.  Good living, she thought, though she could afford more, it was laziness more than anything when she was home cooking. 

This is why from the age of 7yrs, she insisted I would be the main cook of the house as she had night shifts to do and couldn’t spend the time to cook for everyone, so left it to me – because it’s normal I her family that the eldest or only daughters are fully domestic by 7yrs old and can take a mothers place at the drop of a hat.

I learned by 9yrs old, there is one thing you should never do as cook of the house and that is ask dad what he fancies for dinner as it will almost always be steak and chips, pie and chips, fish and chips or a full English breakfast!

By the time I was 11yrs old I learned lots of recipes from other relatives and I diversified our diet a lot, mum pushed against it for a while, until she learned that some of the food I was making was actually nice.  She never had a Bolognese before I was 11 and it became one of her most favourite meals of all time ever since!

As time went on the diet got healthier, for them.

I am very grateful for the freedom I had in choosing what I cooked in my main home.

Always had compliments throughout all the family over the years about being “the proper little housewife”, someone who didn’t laze around, always willing to help, someone reliable and dependable.

It’s why it’s hard being here now, where I feel like I am not needed by anyone and if anything in the way!  Its poles apart from the life I used to have, where I’d skip from relative to relative, living with them temporarily and cleaning and cooking for them.

Everyone was happy to have Tina over for any length of time, I was a treat for them, I even remember my mum setting up rota system, and it was almost like a bidding war to get me to stay with them at times!

My maternal grandmother, Uncle John, honorary aunties Gina and Anna (which turned out to be distant cousins), Cousin Jenny and neighbour Debs, honorary granny Esme, got me the most though!  Seems a lot of people but actually weren’t a lot to me.  Mum wouldn’t let me stay anywhere more than six weeks in case I bonded too much!

I am grateful that I had that kind of life, shifting from person to person, it made me broadminded and adaptable, it also taught me how to change like a chameleon – I suppose it taught me acting skills.  Because each household was different, some were really poor and I mean this in the best possible way – but common, others were posh, others middle row and you had to adapt your behaviour and speech to where in the country you were going and the class of people you are going to socialise with the most at the time.

It really was adapt or die, or at least have a hard life there!

This even meant my religion had to change to whom I stayed with as many of these people went to church, the cathedral, the JW meetings and so forth.

I remember going to stay with some relatives where egg and chips is a luxury, you wear jog suits and hoodies, you have to be into RNB and rap and you have to play console games and learn how to talk about football.  If you didn’t you didn’t get to have friends, you were ignored in the corner as the weird posh girl.

I also remember going to other places where I have to groom horses and talk about horse racing, horse breeding, dog shows, dog breeding, gardening and sitting in watching cousins learn gymnastics and ballet – I wanted to join in but my mum wouldn’t give my relatives the money for me to participate.  Do you have any idea how humiliating it is seeing your thin beautiful cousins doing all that, whilst you are the fat girl sitting on a bench watching grumpily whilst the tutor tries to talk you into making your mother part with cash so I can join in for the benefit of my health and being told umpteen times at the age of 9yrs old that I am responsible for my weight, not my mother?

It’s really humiliating actually! 

Just as embarrassing is being the only fat person in a household of half-starved poor kids, especially as I was the most vocal about being so hungry all the time!  I feel bad for them now, back then I was very selfish upon reflection and didn’t have much empathy for them, I was entitled I guess.

I sometimes wonder if the universe is cruel enough to punish people for their lack of insight as children when they are much older… like living here in poverty like this with Paul is some kind of karmic debt?

But I was never mean or rude about it; I was just self-absorbed that’s all – I mean, isn’t every child?

I know I was ungrateful back then for a lot of the kindness I got.  I remember thinking sometimes that their dog ate more than we did in some of those homes.

I even remember saying this once half-jokingly and the mother said, we have to feed the dog he works!  The dog belonged to her husband who was a security guard and the dog went to work with him every night!

It’s a funny contrast too, when you are with the richer families who are super posh and they seem more self-absorbed than you – but on Sundays they go to do charity work as a family at soup kitchens etc. and you tag along to help them.

You try to tell these people, you know the soup they need should contain noodles, meat chunks or vegetable chunks, not be pureed within an inch of its life, it’s not filling.  They look at you and rightfully challenge “what would you know”?  Because they didn’t think I had other lives with other people who were like the people they were helping, they thought I was like them and they didn’t know any better!

I remember telling them once about what I have experienced, they laughed raucously and told my mother about the funny little stories I make up and how I definitely will be a writer some day!

Mum never told them the truth, just laughed along with them agreeing!

I will always be grateful for whatever food or shelter I get, whatever warmth I get, whatever attention I get and whatever help I get.  My life has taught me never to take anything for granted, because you never know how long it will all last.

You can be the richest person ever and lose it all over night due to a storm or a thief or anything, but you can also be a pauper and strike it lucky and find your feet and soar.  I’ve seen it happen to the best and worst of people – I am grateful for having such an enriched life full of varied experiences, no matter how painful they were.

I learned a lot.

I have learned what I am comfortable with and what I am not comfortable with and the types of people that make it better for me in the long run.

I’ll admit I prefer the comfort and mindlessness of buying a whole bowl of fruit without pinching the pennies, I would love to go back to the place where the idea of choosing blueberries or pomegranates this week is laughable, just stick them both in the trolley, don’t be silly, we’re not that bad off!

Of course, anyone would! 

I remember spending £25 a week on just a handful of different magazines, £50 a week on take outs, £20 a week in lunch money, £20 a week in bingo with gran and anything up to £75 a week on books and clothes – this is a dream these days!  Those days died out for me fourteen years ago! 

I can’t buy any magazines anymore, not even once a month.  Take outs never more than £14 once a month if we can afford it or cut back on other things for the treat, we can’t spend money on the lottery anymore let alone bingo – £40 is our average food bill for the whole household and there is nothing spare for books and clothes, clothing money goes to creditors through catalogues if we’re desperate. 

I suppose I should be grateful buying things on credit is an option, especially as there are rumours the government wants to ban those sorts of enterprises. 

Thanks for reading…

Never have I ever

Things other people take for granted, that I have never done, but would like to;

Been on an airplane (need a passport)

Did offshore foreign travel (went to Wales & the Isle of Wight, that doesn’t count)

Been to a music concert – I really want to someday, I am a huge fan of Bon Jovi, Fozzy, Queen, Lady Gaga, Lizzo, Three Days Grace, Alice Cooper, to name but a few!

Been to the tower of London and did various normal tourist things in London (I may have lived there but it doesn’t mean I did anything)

Been to a theme park or gone on a rollercoaster

Had any kind of graduation or celebration for my life (except the last birthday party I ever had when I was 7yrs old)

Never actually got married but got engaged quite a bit, lol and only had 1 ring from 1 person ever!

Been on a proper restaurant type date or been in a proper restaurant full stop, the only restaurants I’ve been to are big chains like Harvester, McDonalds, KFC, and TJI Fridays or pub restaurants but you know, nothing classy.  Only dates I’ve ever been on are picnics or having a green tea in the café of a W.H Smiths store.  Never done formal dining, despite my paternal family!

I haven’t been to the cinema as an adult ever, last time I went I was 12yrs old and I saw the first ever Jurassic Park.

Never had any kind of night life, never had anyone who wanted to go with me, I won’t go alone to places like that!

I’ve been to the beach twice, once when I was a few months old and the other time I was 15yrs old, so again, haven’t been to a beach since being an adult. 

Never had a home where I can choose décor and furniture from scratch.

Never had a driving lesson, too much of a daydreamer.

Never danced with anyone but my dad, have had very introverted/sensible exes and current partner.

Never been to a professional sports event as a spectator, other than a local wrestling match

Never been to Stonehenge, or the Shakespeare’s Globe or anything specific; I have been to see Buckingham Palace on the outside and went to some museums, but that’s about it really, had a sheltered life.

I am sure there are other things people take for granted that they’ve done and what normal people in society have done, but I can’t think of anything else at the moment.

Why haven’t I done many of the things above?  Because I have been mostly poor, and the people in my life aren’t interested in a lot of the above and don’t like going out much, so I have been pretty stuck.

My mother for example very rarely wanted to leave our house beyond 3 miles, but she did always make an effort to take me to museums and zoos. 

Thanks for reading!

Defining self update May 2021

Since 2012 I had been trying to learn how to define myself – why?  Because I had such a suppressed, isolated and abused life before that time that I had never developed my true personality, likes and dislikes etc; because I was never allowed to be nurtured as an individual.  I was literally born to become a facsimile of my mother’s dreams and wishes and because her dreams and wishes went against a lot of my own instinctive nature, both of us were very unhappy with the result and neither of us got exactly what we wanted from my existence.

Where it was my nature to sit quietly, drawing, cutting & pasting, playing Barbie dolls and watching cartoons, it was my mother’s nature to force me to listen to pop music, watch top of the pops, worry about fashion, gossip and EastEnders and to try and teach me to give certain people Hell on Earth. 

When I was bullied by other children, it was my nature to ignore them, but confide in my mother and hope that she would try and help to advise me or complain to the parents or head teacher on the rare occasions I went to school; but instead she responded with the concept that I had to play dirty and hit them back or I was considered weak and therefore would only get bullied continuously.  There was a situation with my mother’s close friend, where her two children bullied me and pushed me off my own swing in my own back garden, I ran indoors crying and both my mother and their mother dragged me outside with a broom and told me to hit those kids as hard as I could or else I would get it instead.

Looking back I still can’t believe how both my mother, her friend and her children would sit back and laugh in recollection of that day, especially as I chose not to hit the kids with the broom and instead scarper upstairs as fast as I could and bolted my bedroom door up with my bed to stop any punishment of my supposed cowardice.  I stayed in my bedroom for the rest of the day, because I knew once my dad came home my mum couldn’t continue her plans, as dad had a sweet nature and wouldn’t allow it.  A trick I had learned to use for most of my life – hide till dad gets home.

I had to learn to be partly how she wanted me to be, as long as it didn’t go against my personal morals within reason.  I am glad to say, I have a higher standard of morals than she does.

The amount of times she had tried to train me to be violent, it had worked in some cases, but in others it only taught me how to literally close my emotions off at dangerous situations.  I easily phase out when there is a dangerous violent person around me ranting and raving and throwing things around, I go blank, close down, and become almost robotic.  It is something I have been told I need to alert the doctor about, but I won’t because I feel that they might try to think it would be helpful to keep me switched on.  A lot of people state that switching myself off emotionally during these times can be very dangerous, a sign that I could become a dangerous person, but I am by my very nature, quite passive unless provoked too much!

I just want a quiet life where I am loved, that’s all.  I want happy people who dislike drama and just want to get on in life, not bored, arrogant people who thrive on bullying and drama.  That’s not for me.  I don’t want that kind of attention.  I just want love, peace, getting on with my art, games, gardening and pets.  That’s all.  Boring I guess to a lot of people, but I would be very happy.

I am learning that a lot of things I thought I loved when I lived with my mother are actually things I was taught to love because she liked them.  Since moving away, on every context of my life, I am unrecognisable.  I don’t hold myself the same way anymore and I certainly don’t have the same voice anymore, strange I know, but even my voice has changed a lot!

There are a few things I wanted to be, do and have, when I lived with my mother, that I still want to be, do or have now; but not much of it. 

I still want to be a writer that gets her books published, but I understand that for now, it is best not to get published before Autumn of 2022, for certain personal reasons.

I still regard myself as bisexual, something that I have never been open about to any member of my blood family, due to stigma, my mother has a problem with gay people – she wouldn’t hurt them, but she is ridiculously avoidant of them and I have heard the kinds of things she says behind their backs!  The rest of the family are kind of open to homosexuality, but they are very Catholic too, so it is a stiff subject to rise with them.  Some of those family members will now most definitely know, because I know they read this blog.

Despite being sick, I have always wanted a homestead or a smallholding.  But I have to be realistic with what I can physically do, but I am trying hard to find a way in keeping to this dream, but working around the disabilities too.  I don’t have a big enough property yet, to do it, but I am researching a lot about chickens and food forest permaculture style gardening and that sort of thing.

I used to regard almost shamefully how much of a gamer I am, but these days I am starting to feel a part of a proud community of gamer nerds.  It is becoming cool to be a gamer nerd these days and it is a huge boost to my confidence about admitting to people my love for PC games in particular.

I also used to feel slightly ashamed at being a reader, because in my mother’s side of the family in particular, to be a reader, was regarded as weird as you admitting that you are a lifestyle Klingon who actively understands the whole of the Klingon dictionary!  Actually I know some Klingon words, an ex-online long-distance boyfriend of mine was a lifestyle Klingon who moved to USA and became pretty famous for it… so there you go!

I have always wanted to be a larper too, which is something that Paul has always wanted to be too, so we might do that together someday.

But there is a whole host of other stuff I never knew I liked before recently.  Really strange things that are even starting to raise Paul’s eyebrows in confusion as to…. Why is this interesting?  But I honestly can say, I don’t know why I am finding life of bacteria, soil health and microbiology so fascinating lately; as well as the entire lifecycle and habits of bees.  I also read a lot of books on cosmology and physics and this is puzzling to Paul because I can’t do math, don’t understand any of the maths involved in all of this and therefore only understand the non-mathematical parts of the stuff I am learning.  I have dyscalculia, it is dyslexia for math, and it has been confirmed professionally by the OU.

I have been thinking about joining SkillShare to see if there are videos that would help someone like me learn math to as high as I possibly can despite this problem.  But I won’t be able to afford that for a while, until the debts have been bought down a bit.

I don’t know why I want to learn math, especially as I don’t really plan to do anything with it, other than learn stuff I don’t really need to learn because I won’t have a career in microbiology any time soon.  But it is fun stuff the bits I do understand.

I am very geeky, I admit it.  But there you go.

Another thing my family will not recognise is my eating habits.  I don’t eat like how I used to because of medical reasons.  I can’t eat lactose (dairy) at all unless it is vegan, because my stomach can process it anymore.  I shouldn’t eat gluten (wheat) because it irritates my skin and asthma, but I do slip that in more than I should and I should avoid eating more than 2 eggs a week.  Because all of this can aggravate my problems; my main diet looks like this – 70% vegetables and the rest meat or fruit.  I have less than half a plate of my usual dinner size meal per day, for the whole day.  This is regarding what my mother would expect.  When I lived with my mother it was normal to consume 4500 calories per day – since cutting out a lot of the allergen foods and because of my illness, I can barely manage 1500 calories most days.  I am on high doses of most vitamins and minerals because I can’t process a lot of them.

My mother would think I am starving to death if she saw me eating 1 chicken fillet with a Mediterranean style salad and 2 roast potato halves, which is my usual meal and often only meal of the day.  Because I just can’t physically cope with more than that anymore.  Weirdly, I am just not losing weight, but I am losing inches.

Funnily enough doctors aren’t too worried about this because according to blood tests, my iron is the best levels they’ve ever been my whole life, lately!  I used to have constant anaemia when I lived with my mother and even was diagnosed with an auto-immune disease called pernicious anaemia too.  I have problems with B vitamins or something, which is now worse because of the lack of gluten in my diet, bread is rich in vitamin B, but I can’t have normal bread.

The new me is becoming very different to how I imagined I would be.  A lot of the things I thought were my deepest desires are now considered things I no longer want.  I wanted a large family, but because the cosmos has contrived to make my family as tiny as possible I have gave up fighting for it and no longer want any more children.  I never wanted to live in a rural area, I always wanted to be a suburban homesteader, but now I want to be as rural as I can get, whilst maintaining at least an hours journey from a major British city, London or Manchester.

I never wanted to become vegan, but I have to say, that my body is doing better with a plant based diet than not – though I am not giving up meat anytime soon, just yet.  But I am surprised that my diet is literally 75% plants, whereas before, it was around 20%

I am having a problem with sugar lately and I am finding candies less enjoyable than berries and vegan vanilla ice-cream.

All these are in my opinion are major changes.

I had very little respect for certain types of art and music and now I love them and will even fight for them.

I am becoming so very, very different; it is both exciting and scary!

I am shocked at who I am becoming.

Thank you for reading.

Just couldn’t read more…

Because I found a certain sentence indigestible in one of my previous reading books, I had to stop reading it.  So, I added another to the reading pile and I hope that it will be finished by the 1^st march too – the newly added book is called “The library of the dead” by T.L Huchu.

The book was “The Prophets”.  I was finding the book very enjoyable and had rated it 4 stars until I read just one simple sentence which I felt did nothing for the book or the writer other than causing racial provocation.

The whole book is racially provocative anyway, because the subject of slavery can’t get any more provocative than that, but in my mind – there is a fine line between what is acceptable to write and what is acceptable to keep to yourself.

Coming from an ancestry where my many times great grandmother was a slave in Boston USA, I can appreciate books like these, but I cannot endorse something which could talk of revenge killing an innocent baby – that is just not on.

My ancestor was raped by her master’s son and her daughter was raised by her white grandfather and educated, both he and she had problems within both communities, especially when my great great grandmother was being educated as a governess – nobody wanted a “mulatto” for a governess in Boston in the early 1800s.   So rejected by the American community my great great grandma moved to Gibraltar and a couple of years later met an English sailor who took her to London to be his wife, she had to live a life of pretence in London, pretending to be of Spanish descent just to fit in with the locals and they bought it. 

I just can’t visualise these people in my ancestry who could bring themselves to sneak murdering a white baby in cold blood, just because of their situation.  I just can’t.

This little rant of mine will probably fall on deaf ears because as the years has gone by the family have got whiter and whiter and I am white, but I have black slave ancestry too and that is something that some people don’t realise – they don’t realise that some white people have black ancestry too and quite recent!

The book definitely touched a nerve and I know it really should, because slavery is just horrible, it is more than that, it is utterly disgusting!  But still, there are some things that should be said and other things best unsaid to prevent further racial division in the world!

Birthday poem for Nanny Howe

I miss you now you are gone

I miss your funny ways

Such as waking up at six O’clock to carboot it all the day

I miss your dusty, ashy house; I miss how you used to swear

I miss everything about you gran, I wished you was still there

I know a lot of people would call you crass and uncouth

But if you weren’t there every day, I would have had a worst youth

You showed me what normal should be like

You bought me down to Earth

You taught me nothing domestically

But you always had a warm hearth

Literally, like in the summer, we are all baking hot

And you will still put the fire on, killing us lot

I miss how you used to guzzle tea and mispronounce your words

I miss how you used to talk about the fights you had with birds

I miss all of your gypsy superstitions and your weird little ways

I miss you so much gran, I think I will always

Happy Birthday Nanny Howe

This poem was for you, you silly cow ❤

For those who don’t know my gran, she really wouldn’t have been offended by the last line, it was more or less something everyone said to her and she was so confident in herself she literally rolled her eyes and ignored us.

If anyone wants to know what she was like, I am telling you now, the likeness of personality between her and Catherine Tate’s Nan is amazing!  It is almost like Catherine Tate knew my Nan herself!

But my gran physically looked very different, very exotic to some.  She had dark olive skin, thick black tight curly hair like an Italian style, she always said we had Romany gypsy in us, Italian, Chinese, Hindu and black, but no one ever believed her.  I was told to ignore her, but I never did, I always felt she was the most honest person I ever knew.  As it turned out, two years ago I discovered she was right about certain things genetically.  I found it wasn’t a Chinese man who was supposed to be her great grandfather, it was a Vietnamese man, I found out on GenesReunited.com he adopted the surname of his English wife to fit in to Victorian Britain.  I also found out that her great great grandmother from 1840 was born in Boston USA and was mixed race, her mother’s former owner was so kind about her situation he had her educated to become a teacher but something happened by the time she was twenty three which meant she needed to go to Gibraltar, I don’t know what, but there she met a sailor who was British, married him and went to live in Kensington London.

So my gran was right to attack my mum all those years about racism, she was right in saying “we’re not all white you know”.

I was never sure of the gypsy claims though, but I do know that she took me to Portobello Rd Market once and introduced me to Old Gypsy Lee who lived under a bridge and he recognised her as kin.  I do know that Nan was raised on a farm in Enfield and that gypsies in the olden days often worked for farms, so it could be true, the family do have a big love for horse brasses.

Haven’t found the Hindu bit yet, but there was something in her history which showed in the 18^th century that there was a Spanish lady who apparently was thought to be of Muslim origins, which makes me wonder about another claim gran had – the one about us being Egyptian somewhere down the line too.

I never forget the time that I was arguing with my mum about grans claims; mum was adamant we have an all-white and all British history that goes back before time, so I asked her to explain grans colouring and mum was quite offensive with her reply.  She said that she got her colouring for not being hygienic and washing enough, gran was there at the time and slapped her one, it was classic.

I got a slap too and was chased to my bedroom and threatened with all sorts of things by mum when I blurted out that she deserved that as it was a disgusting thing to say.

I believed gran more than mum because I have found evidence of these things a lot since leaving home.  I found out that gran was right about great grandpa Ernie being born and raised in a workhouse and he ran away aged thirteen and stole food from allotments to survive until someone employed him as an assistant gardener.  I found his workhouse papers on Genes Reunited; mum reckoned this never happened because she would have known about it as she was close to her grandpa Ernie; but mum fails to understand that before the 70s a lot of people didn’t like to dwell on a bad past because life was tough enough to go around wallowing in self-pity and many people liked to be private, so they never did talk about things, not even to family it was almost seen as a taboo to be nostalgically gloomy and my mum likens herself to being an avid historian – yeah right.

God I miss my gran.  I miss staying with her overnight, watching wrestling, horror movies and the shopping channel, whilst munching on fish and chips as she couldn’t cook to save her life, I reckon its why she visited us every day, because we fed her.  She wasn’t at all domestic, not the type to keep house, granddad did all that when he was alive, me and a couple of cousins tried to keep on top of it for her when she was alive, it was why I spent a lot of time with her.  Mum allowed that because it would keep me out of her hair and secondly it was to keep an eye on my dippy gran, as gran would do stupid stuff and that was normal even before her dementia.  She was in every way a bimbo and she knew it and she relished in it, because a bimbo can’t help it see, it works out good for her in a lot of things – to play ignorant that is.

It was a miracle my gran was alive at all, born in the early 30s with a heart condition and having a heart operation every 18 months her whole life and being on warfarin since she was in her mid-twenties, one of the first she claimed to get that medicine, coincidentally as gran was accident prone she was also haemophiliac which was scary as she was given a snappy jack Russell called Star.

You are probably wondering why I keep skipping from gran to Nan a lot when talking about her, it is common even when she was around, everyone called her Nan but I always alternated.  Her name was Doris-Dorina but everyone called her Dolly, which suited her bimbo nature.

I love you gran and wished you were still here.  But blimey gran, you’d be 88 now if you were. 

She died too young by today’s standards.  She died in 2006.  She was absolutely fine before she got ill; she got ill because of a car accident.  She had a car crash which caused her to have a head injury, like a fool she didn’t bother to go to the doctors and the crash was so mild that neither parties car was damaged and so she and the other party decided to not mention it to anyone and gran went home, she suffered migraines for a while and started to do silly things over a six week period – eventually we took her to the doctor as she was showing signs of dementia and a quick forming one too – turned out we were right and it the dementia was so fierce that within six months gran couldn’t talk anymore and would only stare into nothingness and needed to be forced fed.  Within a year of silence, gran died of a heart attack whilst at hospital waiting for a place to go into councils old peoples home.  She was living in a hospital for over a year waiting for some other old biddy to die so she could have a new home being cared for properly.

Apparently it can happen even to young people, a head injury in a certain way and within months you can become vegetative.

My gran hadn’t even retired when the accident happened, she was a cabby.