Be bad until you’re good

Putting myself out there, inviting the most supportive of my friends to like my Facebook page.  PR doesn’t come easy to a self-loathing sloth like myself.

But it’s gotta be done.  I have to claim my space and keep doing my thing, and find the courage to be bad until I’m good.  Just gotta keep going.

Love y’all.

be bad until you're good

And the seasons change

No longer living in London, I can feel the seasons more fully in my bones.  The minute we tipped into 2018, the past year was buried in the soggy ground.  December, with all her stresses and glories, suddenly felt utterly irrelevant.  My chai tea has been replaced with Three Tulsi; a different kind of spice for a different kind of year.  The breeze carries cool, fresh air and I can feel the process of renewal has already begun.  We breathe deeply to catch that subtle scent of coming spring, as our boots sink deep in the stubborn mud.  My socks are always wet these days.

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I can barely remember a time when we weren’t living like this, always rolling in mud, catching every sunset over trampled fields or swirling streams, filling our house with ivy and pine and oak. A time when we were cooped up in our penthouse flat, finding some sort of vertical escape from the city.  Still, those poorly fitted windows did little to keep out the stink and noise from outside, the traffic fumes and rubbish skips and creatively challenged buskers.  It’s as though we were compressed like a piece of corn waiting to pop.   And pop we did, into a radically different and inspiring life.

Still, I can miss the city, my thrilling decade of running down those streets chasing happiness and adventure.  Broken-hearted on a double-decker with Bright Eyes in my ears, drinking wine from the bottle on top of the Honor Oak hills with the glittering skyline stretching out before us, dizzying highs in sweaty venues, bewildering moments with strangers, midnight rambles along the Thames or the North London canals; and so very many random meetings.  I remember them all.  It was a fabulous decade, my twenties.  But that girl is long gone.  She was messed-up and confused and broken.  I may feel nostalgic about those rollercoaster days, but I would never go back.  As ever, we must roll with the times.

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Still looking for myself

A few years later, I return to my humble online sanctuary.  A little older, not much wiser, still holding my breath, afraid to disturb the spiders sitting in their corners.

This blog had been confined to the vast and dizzying graveyard of my many discarded projects.  The pattern is clear and inevitable: First, there is the initial surge of hubris and excitement – a new idea!  This could be the one; the idea I will stick with for years, the one that might lead somewhere noteworthy!  The first thing I do is, always: get the URL!  My poor husband patiently puts up with my antics and now has a list of at least ten inactive websites drifting in the foggy marshlands of the web.  I post a thing or two, my mind starts drifting, and I begin questioning my right to occupy this space, to clog up this site with more meaningless nonsense, doubt turns to fear turns to paralysed panic.  Finding Fleur was okay for a while, but that’s the thing with me – I’m ever-changing, ever-drifting, and things only seem relevant to me for a short time.  When their relevance is gone, so am I.  I’m not one to keep fighting.  I unplug the life-support and move on.

Nevertheless, here I am.  I rebooted the machine and it turns out this particular baby is still wheezing for breath, and I feel that familiar urge to have a blog even though I turn up my nose at moronic, meaningless drivel that are like the internet’s stubborn and pervasive fat cells.  Because writing, because outlet, because words, because connection.  Because why not?  Because I am still looking for Fleur.

I’ve taken a break from my new novel to work on a short story competition, 500 words with the theme ‘Good Night New York’.  It makes me tingle and wriggle with excitement because that theme is just made for me!   Then, of course, pressure immediately began to build up, and soon I was frozen with expectations far too high and unrealistic.  So, back to it, reminding myself that I’m not writing to win, just to participate if anything, but mainly because I just want to play with midnight Manhattan poetry.

It is still so hard to just have fun with it.

In the shower this morning, I remembered the horrors of my childhood mornings – alarms going off at 5:30, chaos noise stress, kids everywhere (seven siblings! I know, sigh), and the darkness that just never seemed to go away.  It was cold and miserable and just staying alive in that pack of humans was hard enough, never mind actually growing and achieving stuff.  Thus, I was overcome by a sincere wave of gratitude and relief that I am no longer there; my life is no longer that; and when I wake up in the morning there is no freezing pre-dawn darkness I must rush out into, no pressing obligations or awkward places I must go, no people I must face.  I am free.

Imagine that.

Now, if I can only release myself from my own shackles, my life will be complete.

snowflake