blog

Foe is Me

Standard

Not getting any better. Not even remotely. HRT would help enormously, but I can’t have it – they won’t do the op if you’re taking it. I have no choice but to suck it up and get on with it until my organs are sucked out of me. Which is likely to be September, I’m told.

But get on with what, exactly? I don’t want to do anything. I can’t do much at all, really. In this heat, I am all but absofuckinlutely, well and truly, utterly fuckin’ buggered. My knees and my hips keep seizing, my collection of gooey gynaecological objects has gone cuckoopants, and I am so high on painkillers that a flock of seagulls has just flown past me. And yes, I did have that hairdo in the eighties. (More like a hairdon’t, but I digress.)

Despite the one-foot-in-the-grave*-ness of it all, there is a thing, and the thing is this: I might be signed off sick but I still have to parent. I am still a carer. I still have to do the mom-stuff and the daughter-stuff when I can’t do the day job. Which means I still have to get the shopping in (which all but kills me), feed people, deal with my elderly mum’s care needs, and do all the Mom-as-PA nonsense with the kids’ schools.

(*I wonder what the cremation version is. One speck of ash in the urn?)

My brain (cell) is all NOPE, probably because it’s in tune with my equally nopey body. And as meltdown malarkeys would have it, I have little aptitude for thought. What little thinking I am doing includes but is not limited to the likes of:

“Is it completely inadvisable to operate on oneself? I have a delightful kitchen knife…”

Alright, so I am my own worst enemy. I’ve never been a fan of myself (or my stupid body), and lately, the self-loathing has reached a new low. But I do have moments of clarity. Moments where I try to have a word with myself, and stay positive. So, with that in mind, I thought it might be just spiffing to shelve berating myself for a while. Stop beating myself up for not being able to work/take the kids out/do normal human things. I can’t bake; hell, I can’t even do the wordthang (there’s a novel that isn’t going to write itself, a poetry collection to compile, and my collection of Liverpool horror stories needs an edit). That’s how I know I’m ill. I’ve lost the will to write, to pun, to rhyme (Is that one collective will or three discrete wills? I ask my annoying self…).

So, I started a sentence with ‘So’. Then, in the interests of staying just PEACHY POSITIVE, I wrote a list of things I am able to do at the moment:

  1. Write lists
  2. Mope
  3. Complain
  4. Whine
  5. Shout at clouds.

That’s it. I’m officially ancient. I don’t need to yell, “Where’s me cane?” because I already have one. I use it to point at things.

Start Worrying and Hate the Bomb

Standard

There’s an unexploded device. It’s by our house. Right outside, apparently, according to the police presence. They’ve cordoned off the entire block—just after 3pm, I had to leg* it to intercept my kid on his way back from school, what with his usual route being taped off.

*Hobble pitifully

It’s gotta be a wartime jobbie. Two or three houses a couple of doors down were razed to the ground in the Blitz, after all. Maybe the neighbours have dug up a little relic. Of course, that’s merely speculation, and isn’t that always rife by default?

In keeping with said rifeness, gossip swirled around pretty swiftly: “Someone’s left a bomb on the police station doorstep.” (As y’do.)

The truth is somewhere in between. The story (so far) goes that some bright spark had taken a bomb to the copshop, and it turned out to be unexploded ordnance from the multi-billion-dollar sequel to the First World War—the second local explodey in as many weeks, what with the sitch at Bidston tip last Monday. (We also had one in Hoylake in December gone, and at least one in Birkenhead in ’24, so maybe we’re going for some kinda record over here.)

(Note: If you do so happen to uncover any sort of weapon—be it a shooting device, a stabber, or an otherwise suspicious-looking gadget—be sure to call 999 immediately. Don’t be carrying bombs around, kids.)

How does it make me feel, though, being told to stay indoors, awaiting further instruction? How does it feel having to keep the kids away from the windows, holed up in the kitchen?

Lucky. I feel lucky.

This is Good ol’ Blighty, where (most) explosive matters are typically sorted within a matter of hours. This isn’t Palestine. It’s neither Ukraine nor Venezuela. And before I’ve even finished writing this li’l piece, the cops have vacated, with nary a word. I think we’re supposed to assume it’s safe, now.

And for us, it is. Halfway across the globe, though, there’s a heckuva lot of folk safety eludes. People who never get to assume, wondering instead whether their kids will survive another day, whether it’s safe to go outside at any given moment. This whole fuckinpocalypse is a sleeper; a creeper. It’s not about me, sitting in relative safety in a Victorian semi. It’s about you. All of you.

So why the blog? Simps: the journalist in me has to write about it. If she doesn’t, she ain’t breathing. Which is more than can be said for countless Palestinians, Ukrainians, and Venezuelans.

People are pissed. We’re all unexploded mortars.

Just wait ’til we go off.