Phew, for a minute there I lost myself.

I was a little nervous, to be honest. There have been points this week when I thought I might be going mad. I tried to put that into accurate terminology, but I always find it sounds more serious when you say it how it is. Mid-week there were instances of paranoia, where I became really extremely upset about my influence on events which had absolutely nothing to do with me – only to realise that there were other explanations literally hours later. I had been over-doing things coping with everything, and I thought I might have snagged a wire loose.

Now I’m thinking it was probably a combination of things; exhaustion, meddling with my painkillers and a profoundly exaggerated startle reflex which at one point had me crying out loud and then trying to work out what noise or movement had set me off. This was further exacerbated by deteriorating co-ordination which meant that I was bumping into things all the time – and then jumping out of my skin every time I did. Then several nights running I had such terrible, violent nightmares that I would wake up early in the morning unable to get back to sleep. To say I was a nervous wreck is a cliché, but if the hat fits...

So I’ve been in bed for a few days. It has rained a lot against my window, which is nice. Rosie phoned and talked endlessly about baby matters. When I have finished the Alphabet Cards she wants me to make Tinker a cloth book about the adventures of Weird Beard. She said, “I want Weird Beard in my child’s life!”

Weird Beard was a character from our childhood, of my invention. Remember the eighties craze for Top Trumps? Well R and I made our own pack with these odd characters we drew and gave certain attributes to. I can't remember many others, but I created Weird Beard, a character with few discernible features beyond his long multicoloured magical beard. Rosie thought it was hilarious and the idea of Weird Beard became a running joke. We have since raised the subject of Weird Beard in all sorts of inappropriate circumstances.

Another thing we discussed was how to introduce Tinker to The Sacred Language of Cheese and Ham. We were on holiday in Yorkshire and were having a picnic. Only it was raining so we were stuck in the back of our parents' car. Mum had labelled our sandwiches Cheese and Ham and for some reason the car was stationary long enough for us to get immensely bored, tear up the labels and create a whole new language based on the letters of Cheese and Ham and spoken with a Yorkshire accent.

“Eh Ehcemas,” was the initial greeting, which should be answered with “Eh Ahcemes.” and so on. I must say the complexity of this language, consisting of only six different letters and a maximum of one C, A, M or S, two Hs and three Es in any given word or phrase, was rather limited. Also the fact that we developed the whole thing from scratch in the space of half an hour – probably had as much chance as Esperanto in the greater scheme of things.

I don’t really fancy making a cloth book that a baby can play with. What kind of story can you get into a book made of cloth? Instead, following the (if I say so myself) success of Kettle, I may actually attempt to make Weird Beard as a soft toy. I think he was some sort of wizard. I thought if I made his beard out of several different colour and texture fabrics… Is it possible to have some sort of pathological creativity? Is this what I do instead of making babies? Or um, writing books…?

Really I will do something useful soon.

Mind The Gap

I’ve been in bed for a few days, have got up to have a ramble.

Imfunnytoo wrote this blog last week on the subject of brain damage. She’s written several thought-provoking blogs lately, so do go over and have a read. However this particular blog started off with a family member suggesting that because Imfunnytoo isn’t so hot at maths, she must have had that part of her brain damaged as well as the cerebellum damage associated with Cerebral Palsy.

Now we know that Imfunnytoo probably has no issue with the areas of her parietal lobes associated with mathematical ability, only it just so happens that she’s not so talented at maths as other family members are. This could be to do with brain architecture – she just didn’t inherit the maths-whizz gene - or it could simply be because she wasn’t particularly interested in maths and developed her talents elsewhere. Clearly the lady has significant talents elsewhere.

This raises several issues. Imfunnytoo’s own blog focuses on whether she might be insulted to be considered “brain damaged” and I’ll leave that to her.

Another issue is the fact that non-disabled people all too often associate all our personal strengths and weaknesses with our impairment, one way or another. Usually our strengths are described as being despite our impairments, and our weaknesses - physical, cognitive and emotional - are thrown in with the package. Both are subject to exaggeration; Imfunnytoo couldn’t just be not as good as maths as other family members she had to have a cognitive impairment consistent with (more extensive) brain damage. And we’re all used to hearing how very very brave, bubbly and bright we are despite it all.

But yet another issue is this really troublesome issue of relativity. Surrounded by people who are extraordinarily good at something, the any of us could be at a disadvantage. I really do feel that when we talk about impairment and particularly those with the most stigmatised of impairments; learning difficulties, conditions like Autism and even mental ill health, there is an awful lot of mileage in considering the great diversity that exists among non-disabled people and seeing impairment as a natural part of this diversity.

The thing that baffles me is why it should be so very difficult to do this, without actually concluding that impairment doesn’t actually exist. Of course we can never know what it is really like in another person's shoes, but we can use our own experiences, imagination and powers of empathy. There are physical and biochemical differences in all our brains. We all have intellectual and emotional strengths and weaknesses. We all have to grapple with the juxtaposition of words, spoken or written and their syntax, context and meaning etc. If we think about these experiences, we can surely see the potential for having a great deal more difficulty and at least begin to guess what that must be like and how we might make life easier for one another.

Non-disabled people are particularly keen on dismissing those less tangible conditions altogether; children with ADHD are merely badly disciplined, dyslexia is an excuse of being a bit thick, people with depression just feel sorry for themselves. I don’t see it, I don’t understand it so it doesn’t really exist.

And yet, without pretending that “we’re all a little bit disabled”, impairment is an intrinsic part of the human condition and our experiences of limitation are only the extreme ends of the spectrum of limitation that we are all part of. Many people, for example, have a serious lack of imagination.

God be praised! It's a girl with a winkle!

Tinker finally makes an appear -ance! Turns out we have another nephew on the way. I think R was relieved to find that there was actually a little person inside her and she'd not just been eating too many pies. Well there it is and apparently he has a winkle. May it give him tremendous pleasure.

If I had had a winkle, I would have been called Desmond. I mean, can you imagine a blue-eyed Desmond growing up in the eighties and nineties? My Grandfather was a blue-eyed Desmond of course, but he was born in 1920. Thank God for small mercies.

I danced myself right out the womb

I will never have confidence in my ability to write books until I have finished writing the first one. Publishing is a secondary consideration, although of course I hope for that too. Unfortunately, this lack of confidence is really the main obstacle between me and the finished thing. Of course my health doesn’t help much, not much at all, especially in these late stages when progress is going to be slow anyway and I often need full concentration, far greater concentration than is required for rambling away on here. However, if I knew, if only I knew that this could be finished and it would be all right. Well, I would have a hell of a lot more stamina for it.

Soon, soon. Really soon.

Meanwhile, my alphabet cards for Tinker are a disaster. Went to a great deal of trouble to track down a great enough quantity of A3 white card at a reasonable price (as is very often the case, I looked in all the sensible places then I found the stuff on eBay). But my co-ordination… some days I can paint all right and other days I cannot colour-in. Unfortunately, until I have well and truly messed up some project or other, I don’t know what sort of day it is. Oh well, I think something can be salvaged.

Why is it that I am compelled to make so much stuff? Why can’t I just buy some alphabet cards for my niece or nephew? By the time I have bought the extra card I now need, it would probably have been cheaper and it’s not as if mine were ever going to be so fantastic.

Anyway, Rosemary is having an ultrasound scan on Thursday – in Hampshire the first scan they offer is at twenty weeks apparently. So hopefully by the end of this week I will be subjecting you to a blurry photograph of the famous foetus. I know you can’t wait. They might even be able to tell whether it is a he-tus or a she-tus, depending on its exhibitionist tendencies. This also means that Tinker is approximately half way between nothingness and somethingness.

You know foetuses cry in the womb, but because there’s no air, we can’t hear them? When I read this I wondered, what on Earth does a foetus have to cry about? It is safe and warm, has everything it needs in the way of food and drink and it doesn’t see anything scary. What’s more, it has always been there. They can hear things though, and apparently, the foetus will later remember music and voices it hears at this stage later on when it is a person. Adrian proposes to play it nothing but Bach, but I know Rosie is secretly subjecting it to Songs from The Musicals. Hmm yes, I have now answered my own question about what foetuses might have to cry about.

I don't think you want to know anything more about foetuses, do you? No? Okay. Do you want me to put another T-Rex song in your head? No? Fine, fine, please yourself. Weirdly enough, when Cosmic Dancer came to an end, the next song that randomly kicked in was Chapel of Love by the glorious Dixie Cups. You try getting that one out of your head. I know. I'm not proud.

The Secret of Happiness #2

Well, I'm still firmly wedged up my own arse so my second lesson which it would have been useful to have had instilled from birth is:

Question Actions, Not Feelings

Many years after his death, folks began to speculate that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll, may have taken some erotic as well as aesthetic pleasure in his friendship and photographic fascination with little girls. There is no evidence that he ever behaved inappropriately around children, but he clearly enjoyed the company of children whilst having no family of his own (not unlike Beatrix Potter, J. M. Barrie, Hans Christian Anderson and Louisa May Alcott – obviously all raving perverts). Bored Freudians picked up on any reference to inner turmoil or conflict in his work and concluded that he must have been a paedophile – you didn’t think that inner turmoil and conflict were part of the human condition, did you? Dodgson, or Dodgy as I like to call him, also had epilepsy, impaired hearing and a stammer, and was thus overqualified as a fictitious villain.

The whole thing is poetic; the guy was both delightful and disturbing in his writing which explored the nature of the innocent and the sinister, eccentricity and madness, wisdom and ineptitude and various other issues which we struggle with even more now than in Victorian times. Of course there must be something sinister about him! Instead of thinking about what darkness it might be within us which makes the reading sometimes uncomfortable, let’s put it all down to his own darkness. Nothing to do with us.

Now I have a great affinity with Dodgson. He was a crip, an adopted son of Whitby, he provided the title of my book and he invented the portmanteau “chortle” - surely one of the greatest words in the English language. And when I was younger, until I actually read about his alleged suppressed paedophilia and realised it was as sturdy as the other accusation laid against his memory - that he was in fact Jack The Ripper - I even had sympathy with the chap in this respect.

Not that I had a thing about children or anything nearly so problematic, but I was tormented by feelings I didn't want to have. I mistrusted people I was supposed to respect, felt contempt for those I was supposed to admire and even disliked some of those I was supposed to love. But by far my greatest problem was the grand infatuations I would develop for totally and utterly inappropriate people.

Only that wasn’t quite the problem. Infatuations ought to be fun; you get all sorts of chemical rushes, the world seems like a better place and everything you look at is blue and kind of sparkly. The problem was that I tried to resist them.

We are taught that the only healthy attachments are mutually felt. If we love one another as friends, lovers, family members or whatever, I must love you just as much, but no more, than you love me. Any imbalance in this is harmful; one of us must be obsessive or the other emotionally stunted.

I question this. For one thing, even if this were true; if there was something unhealthy about anything other than total emotional reciprocity, how the hell would we ever know about it? But most importantly, how does even a dramatic disparity actually cause harm to anyone?

For me, it wasn’t about the frustration of wanting something that I could not have; I guess it could be for some people, but not me. It was more like wanting something that I did not deserve to have. In fact, it wasn’t even that; I never exactly wanted anything in particular, I just had these feelings which were much too strong, of an inappropriate nature and perhaps most essentially, totally and utterly unrequitable.

So I felt lecherous and miserable and spent a great deal of time terrified that at some point, somehow, all this would slip out. I don’t know quite what I expected would happen then; that I might be dragged from my bed and lynched by torchlight, I don't know.

However, the essential point in all this is that it never did slip out. All that worry for nothing. Because even really big feelings do us little harm, so long as we don’t act on them. And indeed, exactly the same thing happens now with infatuations and I enjoy it, confident that the experience is mine alone. All this sin in thought stuff is nonsense; we only have so much conscious control over our thoughts, and very little control over our emotions.

And as everybody knows, the more one attempts to cast thoughts from one’s mind, the deeper they intrude (On a vaguely related subject in case anyone’s interested, here is a interesting if random article about religiosity and OCD). All we actually have a choice about is what we do and say about them – and here, usually, it is possible to keep them entirely under wraps if one so chooses.

So back to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (the Lutwidge is important; Lutwig is German for Lewis, Charles in Latin is Carolus, thus Carroll, see? Utter nonsense.). Of course I take the view that all Art should be looked upon completely separate from the Artist anyway, but even if we must lump the two together, we know of nothing that he did wrong. Maybe he was sexually attracted to children. Maybe Napolean thought he was an early incarnation of Elvis. Maybe Darwin's fascination with those Galápagos tortoises went further than it appears.

None of this actually matters a jot. It is of no consequence to anybody.

I have a sense that nobody will know what the heck I am rambling on about today. However, I do think that this is one of the most important lessons of my life so far, so there.

The Secret of Happiness #1

I tried starting this on Friday; something like this appeared on Friday ever so briefly, so apologies if you've read this or something like this before.

Recently I have been thinking about little Tinker, sitting in a comfy pink uterus with another five months to spend playing with its fingers and toes before it has to make its journey into the world to meet us all (Tinker is played by an actor). And I have been thinking about the lessons I have learnt in life which would have made things a damn site easier had they been instilled in me from the start.

I have also been thinking about this hateful self-help industry, which I have touched on before. I don’t mean self-help when it comes to a particular dilemma or a medical condition or something, but this “Your Wallpaper Can Change Your Life” hogwash. Plus all the promises of happiness we receive from those offering us products and services. When I recently opened a new bank account and received the bumph in the post, I had this glossy brochure entitled Three Steps To Happiness which contained the three step instructions to activate my account. But Happiness?

However, I do think there is much mileage in sharing experiences and perspectives on life and so, perhaps rather than leaving this stuff to self-appointed gurus or commercial interests to issue us with their saleable wisdom, I think perhaps ordinary people should just share what they have learnt with one another.

People are afraid to do this, afraid to assume authority. We struggle to say, “This works for me” – perhaps we think that in order to say such things, we must have perfect lives? Which brings me to the first important lesson I have learnt in life so far.

Happiness is only ever part of the picture.

One of those miserable German philosophers, Nietsche or Schopenhauer or some such person, said something along the lines that if we had immortal life, we would not experience love, particularly erotic love, because there would be no urgency, no prospect of loss. This chap (who might not even have been a German come to think of it) said that you can only truly love something which you know has a finite existence, something which you are certain of losing. One way or another, we will lose one another.

When such losses occur, of course, it hurts like hell. And even before such losses occur, we worry terribly about our loved-ones, and experience doubt, frustration, jealousy and disappointment. Like Buddha said; He who loves 50 people has 50 woes; he who loves no one has no woes.

Love is only the most obvious example; exactly the same applies to any project or cause that you chose to invest in, any goal you work towards, anything you care about at all. All of this will bring you at least some suffering and none of it is going to last forever.

I think we are living in a strange time in the West just now, where we may be losing touch with this particular truth. Suffering has become intolerable to us. Nobody should be allowed to suffer, in any way, ever. If you have any kind of hunger, feed it. If you have any kind of pain, numb it.

At the same time, we have just come from the opposite and similarly ridiculous extreme, where having been conceived in sin, we were born to suffer and submitting to all manner of unnecessary misery and pain was seen as positively virtuous – especially for women. We really don’t want to go back to that.

And yet, if an individual was to get to the end of their life without ever really having suffered, they probably wouldn’t have had a very worthwhile or enjoyable existence at all. It does not necessary follow that all suffering is associated with some greater happiness – I wish it were. Unfortunately there seems no natural justice and some experiences in life are far more painful than they are pleasant.

It is however my experience that such things are not altogether useless, not given a little distance. Often they teach us a great deal about ourselves, other people and the world around us. We could live without them for sure, but we may learn something from them. And fortunately, there are also very many experiences in life which are far more pleasant than they are painful. And indeed, very often those things, those relationships or projects, which you have to work the hardest at and suffer the most for, are also those which offer the greatest rewards and indeed, are the greatest source of happiness.

However, the price of things is something that we have to come to terms with in order to get on and not spend our lives wishing for some change that would bring about perfection or wondering what is wrong with us because we are so very fortunate and yet still feel anxious and melancholy from time to time. A degree of dissatisfaction is necessary for progress.

Life is beautiful, but it is an animated, complicated and flawed beauty rather than something air-brushed, still and symmetrical in a magazine. And indeed, it may well be the transience and imperfection that make our passion for it so very intense.

Where does the pollen go?

My chief memory of sex education in school is not the class itself but a Maths lesson which followed. I arrived there late with rather damp hair. Mrs E., the least pleasant teacher I encountered in my school career, demanded an explanation. An explanation that I could not give. Oh, but I can tell you.

It had been the banana and condom lesson. Everyone under forty had one of these, right? Our Biology teacher began by producing a condom which she had allegedly bought in a Czech supermarket; it was bright red, had a painted smiling face and… horns.

We were told about coils, levers, pulleys and variable frequency oscillators and then left to lark about with these (common or garden) condoms we’d all been issued with. We were encouraged to test their strength, but the lesson quickly descended into a contest as to whose condom could stretch to the greatest capacity. This involved hooking them over the taps and filling them up in those huge laboratory sinks. Five or six gallons average, before they exploded. And they did explode. Which was how I came to be so late and wet for Maths.

The talk we had from the Old Girl (former pupil) who came in to describe her pregnancy was of similarly dubious value. She explained that she didn’t want any drugs or to be pushing against gravity, so she had stood at the window looking out on a glorious summer’s day and sipping her herbal tea. The baby then painlessly dropped into the waiting arms of her husband. Hmm.

Actually it was all fairly useless. My parents are not religious or particularly weird, but it was always too early for me to have my questions answered and by the time they might have been prepared to speak, I was too embarrassed to ask. So I didn’t really know what was happening when I started my period, because we hadn’t covered that in biology yet and Mum had sewn me some myth about how it couldn’t happen until I was at least sixteen so there was no need to talk about it yet (I was in fact eleven). Everything else I learnt from shameless older friends and books.

So there is a young lass who’s about to marry a sailor and her mother takes her to one side and tells her, “Now sailors are a funny lot and at some point in your married life, your husband may suggest that you make love the other way. But if he asks you, you must say no, because that is an altogether ungodly practice.”

So the young lass and the sailor get married and after a few months the lass begins to wonder why he hasn’t ever made this request.

“Darling,” she says, “Why is it that you’ve never suggested that we make love the other way?”

“Oh, we don’t want to do that,” he says, “that’s how you get pregnant!”