Reading Joanna Trollope’s The Soldier’s Wife I come across this passage early on, which had me leaping out of bed
‘….Dan had said that deployment on active service made you long for extremes, either the supreme domesticity of home when you were away from it or the violence of action and danger when you were back. You couldn’t halt the pendulum, he said, you couldn’t stop it crashing from side to side, often out of control. Even if it sometimes hit her – or the children – as it swung….’
Something about this passage resonates with me.
I habitually spend time waiting around – still waiting – for others to come back, for life to tell me what to do, for the push that I need to venture forth. And I have always blamed that particular passivity – shyness, failure, fear – on disability.
But perhaps it has more to do with an abiding sense that my life, the patterns of it and the way the weave and weft wraps itself around me, has been defined by what other people need and decide: the parent who works abroad; the partner who cannot make up their mind whether to leave or stay; the children who have to fit in with patterns set up by others – the need for continuity which boils down to a choice of boarding school, where patterns are set in stone…. but which haemorrhages a domesticity that my husband, for example, can take more for granted.
I suspect that one of hubby’s templates says to him, ‘Parents are here and will always be here, so you may venture – go!’ but my templates tend to suggest to me that I should wait and see what happens, what others decide, because their choices will define what I can do.
But none of us can live our lives like that, not really, not always. We have to jump, and hope that we have a good landing. We have to dive in and see what happens, experiment and hope for the best. Otherwise, what happens to the quality of our lives?
I’m well aware that, writing a book about how to be happy, I’m likely to come in for a certain amount of stick from certain quarters. Hey, even my internal critic has a go at me sometimes, What the hell do you know, sitting in your ivory tower while the world is going to Hell in a hand-basket. Grow up!
Apart from the context, that I have been – was – depressed for many years and found a way to claw out of that; Apart from the realisation that writers write about things so that they can understand them, and in that sense, happiness and the achievement of it deserves as much attention as any other subject we can write about, there is a more basic point running through all this.
Happiness Matters, because so often, people are anxious to deprive us of it. And in their attempts, they so often succeed. They succeed, until, one day, we decide that Actually, No, I AM going to be happy, because, I may be stuck in the social, emotional and psychological equivalent of a Gordian knot, but I defy anyone to take away my right to be kind, caring and loving, and to enjoy my life.
It is only when the chips are down and we are facing our nemesis – okay, now I know that this person doesn’t care how much damage s/he inflicts, now I see that; now I know s/he doesn’t care if I live or die, that s/he is quite calm facing the prospect of my demise – or more seriously, causing the death of a close family member I can’t get to, perhaps – it is only now that I truly understand why my brother insisted that we be happy, as we watched his struggle with cancer. To transcend suffering means to defy it to turn us ugly. Even as we cry and worry and wish things could be different, we have the power to enjoy.
In difficult circumstances, gentleness and being joyful and loving are our true gifts, the only things we may have to offer in a horrible situation; and the only way we will ever claw back enough energy to smile again, to keep going forward, and to enjoy life, appreciating the gifts offered by blameless, generous, kind-hearted souls who know nothing of our torment.
We would no more allow someone to savage a painting with a knife, than we would wish to weep and rant and go ever so slightly crazy in the midst of a maddening situation. Happiness is a prize worth protecting, and fighting for. Because happiness really does matter.
So in the midst of a busy Tuesday – riding, laundry, shopping – last week I went to the library and quickly collected four books, all different, and so far, all good. If you want to see what they are, visit Goodreads where I have updated my ‘currently reading’ shelf.
The interesting thing is, so far, that apart from being grateful that they are all good enough to keep me reading to the end – some are better than merely good – these books have all, in their varying ways, reminded me of something valuable. Something to do with the importance of language to communicate experiences that I won’t be living directly. More than I’m usually aware, I’m learning from even fairly fanciful plots – I will never live in a lighthouse on a tidal island or run my own village bakery – about motivation, what love means, and why it matters that we should each make our individual and very particular contributions to the world.
I hope to review each of these books. Meantime, it is a wonderful relief to reacquaint myself with the thought that reading books – good books – is good for me and goes way beyond mere escapism or time filling. I read quickly and sometimes deliberately to forget stuff going on, or to allow my head some down time. For example, it is better for me to read books in the evenings, tucked up in bed, than to spend hours staring at the computer, checking messages in the blinding white back-light that keeps me awake for far too long afterwards.
Reading encourages the discipline of getting to bed at a reasonable time, and staying there; a discipline worth encouraging after years spent endlessly thinking, typing, plotting and planning. If I can glean some value from what other authors are plotting, then so much the better.
The publication of my latest book Happiness Matterson kindle yesterday marks one small milestone on the ten-year journey to put my dreams for a bit of daily peace and joy into practice.
It has taken ten years, from the time I first sat at my computer and said, ‘So now, I am going to write about how to be happy’.
Writing about happiness matters seemed a bit presumptuous, back then, until I realised that writing is how I express myself best, and how I make sense of things. I desperately wanted to be happy, and besides, making that decision I felt happier almost immediately. (If I’d known it would take ten years from inspiration to publication, I might have thought better of it. I’m glad that we can’t see that far into the future.)
So often I have known, with my head, what it means to be peaceful, yet each day presents me with fresh challenges, fresh teasing reminders that the journey to peace is ongoing. Given what we learn from the news, in social media and from our friends, family and our colleagues, it can be an effort to maintain serenity in the face of ongoing frustrations. In my bleaker moments, I walk a path strewn with obstacles, with questions that seem to float out of reach, chasing answers that shift all the time.
But despite the temptation to be gloomy, it is better for me – and for everyone around me – if I can at least try to be kind, conciliatory, peaceful and forgiving. Life works out better and I get along with a lighter step, instead of a heavy trudge that might collapse sometime soon….
There have been bleak moments and there have been sunny days. The publication of Happiness Matters is a whole sunny afternoon!
Happiness Matters on kindle is to be followed shortly by the paperback and wider distribution through a number of platforms. If anyone would like a review copy meantime, please just ask.
It’s very rare that I read a book I really, really don’t want to end. A book in which I feel so invested, I want to congratulate the characters for what they have achieved.
This is the story of how a young boy’s mother dies, leaving him an orphan – his father, a shadowy figure, introduced his mother to the drug habit which killed her and apparently left behind nothing, except that Billy looks exactly like him – and the quest to find Billy a new family. Since Billy is not a cute Guatemalan girl of five, his chances, apparently, are less than bright, especially after his mother’s parents turn away from him in their grief.
What strikes me about this novel is the strength of the characterisations. I agonise with the social worker, charged with the job of finding Billy a new family; I empathise with the grandparents, riven and destroyed by grief, blinded to the needs of their grandson until it is almost too late. The thoughtful and searching interplay of the characters is so true to life, I was pulled along by this story, and now I really want to hear more about them, and what happened next. Will Kay Langdale write a follow-up?
Motivations are part of what make a book credible, whether the ending is happy or not. If the characters come alive to me, and I can hear their voices, I don’t really care if they believe in Santa, live in a mansion in Santa Barbara, or in a squat in Glasgow. I want to listen to their voices, hear their story and cheer them on. And Kay Langdale manages that process so beautifully, Choose Me really is a marvellous story.
I won’t tell you what happens, because I think you should read it.
When I was a beneficiary of its expertise, Remploy was still owned by the Department of Work and Pensions. Following extensive factory closures, it is now in private hands, owned by Maximus and an employee trust. Since the reorganisation, what has happened to its disabled employees? They have not just gone away, and there will be hopeful for suitable openings, as anxious as the next person that their last job will not become a distant memory.
I was in and out of work as a solicitor over a period of twelve years. At one time – how embarrassing to admit this – so poor was my bargaining position that I desperately needed help to regularise my pay and paperwork. My well-intentioned boss was a single practitioner too busy to deal with it. Remploy agreed to accept me onto their books and was able to set my pay to rights, provide me with pay slips, sort out my national insurance contributions and offer a pension, as well as day-to-day advice and support. During periodic visits, my Remploy supervisor saw me working and asked why I didn’t find myself a proper job: funding limits meant that I was at the top of my pay bracket and likely to stay there. He obviously felt I deserved better.
Taking his words to heart, I did find another job quite easily. Because my new pay increased substantially, Remploy could not continue to support me and I bid them a fond farewell as I prepared to take my chances on the open market. But pay was only one part of their remit. They provided understanding, a position of bargaining strength and expertise, all of which I lost when we parted company.
Aware of my limitations, I took another post advertised as part-time, thirty hours a week. But as always, the devil is in the detail. To do the job, I was expected to accept unrealistic deadlines set by other people, and was forced to work after hours. The pay was great, but nothing was added for overtime, which stretched uncomfortably until I was easily putting in forty hours a week. For an able-bodied colleague that might be a nuisance. For someone with a disability, the effect is more insidious. After six months, I had to rest, but when I asked for a day off each week – planning to fit thirty hours into four days – twice my request was refused without any discussion. Exhausted and faced with targets I struggled to meet, I had to leave. These days I work from home, aware that when I put in a forty hour week, at least I can do so from the comfort of my armchair and take frequent breaks. How many employers can afford to be so relaxed?
For those of us who might wish to work independently in the job market, the truth about Remploy is that their continuing support has been vital for longer-term success, though this is not always obvious at the outset. Remploy helped me to stay in work because they understood my practical dilemma, which no other employer would take account of in the normal course of business: I needed to be able to pace myself. Remploy were able to find a formula that worked. In so doing, they enabled me to take a longer-term view. Once their support was removed, I soon found myself unable to manage in an environment unapologetically geared to an able-bodied workforce.
According to the Sayce review which recommended the closure of Remploy factories, funds available to make finding a job easier are better targeted at disabled employees directly. In the same way that disabled consumers have the right to visit shops unimpeded, employment seems increasingly to be treated as a matter of access. The disability alliance website notes that “Access to Work helps disabled people and employers with adjustments to premises, transport costs and other in-work support” all of which certainly help. But what happens once an employee with impairments has a foot in the door?
Overwhelmingly, employers consider one aspect of work: their financial costs and gains. While disability discrimination legislation has made great strides forward, there remain many aspects in which the market driven-economy can skip neatly around its obligations to disabled employees. In hidden and insidious ways, a disabled employee often remains at a disadvantage, no matter how many hours are devoted to employee relations or however many policies exist to allow flexible working. Unfavourable comparisons around productivity, punctuality, sociability, public image and teamwork remain.
A friend of mine who is disabled and writes plays about disability wrote to me, “(we) should be judged according to others in your circumstances”. But how many disabled people can keep their place securely in mainstream employment? It is a difficult conundrum. In the Remploy factories, impairment has always been the norm, which was at least useful when it came to making meaningful comparisons.
So long as each former employee of a Remploy factory has found work and access to the same levels of continuing support, the changes in workplace structure and ethos may not impact too badly. But somehow, I doubt that the necessary levels of support will remain available over the long term.
Remploy has efficiently and quietly gone about its business over many years. If it had been making a lot of noise and grabbing the headlines, its contribution to the lives of disabled adults might not have been so easily refashioned to suit an ideology which assumes, on scant evidence, that for a disabled person the difficulties of finding and keeping a job are easily sorted with a bit of remodelling. The architects of the changes will not be waiting around to pick up the pieces if their optimism turns out to be misplaced. Yet, as news reports of the time indicate, barely one third of the employees made redundant during the privatisation processes have found re-employment. Old-style supported employment has its place in the scheme of things, after all.
I hear that Labour are planning to re-nationalise. Will they re-nationalise Remploy?
Sixtyfive Roses by Heather Summerhayes Cariou tells the story of her sister, Pammy, born with cystic fibrosis, and the effects this has on their family: two parents, four children and grandparents.
Heather, older sister of Pamela, is naturally protective towards her younger sister who is diagnosed with CF in infancy because of ‘failure to thrive’. Pamela, it is clear, is lucky to survive her birth, and lives to the grand age of 26, at that time a most astonishing testament to the power of life to endure despite chronic, progressive and seriously debilitating terminal illness, in which at the time, children were considered lucky to survive into adolescence.
Daily treatments, the constant risk and actuality of hospital admission and the unpredictable trajectories of an illness that can flare up at a moment’s notice, produced a constant underlying anxiety within the immediate family, who were unable to plan ahead, have ordinary expectations, or to grieve fully – Not knowing what would happen or when, they endured a medicalised existence as best they could.
I so empathised with their struggle for normality in the face of incredulity and some latent hostility and incomprehension among members of the wider family, a feeling that the challenges for Pammy and her immediate family were overstated – she lived a long time, didn’t she?! Strenuous efforts were made at home to preserve a veneer or normality at all costs, but it became clearer as I read this often harrowing account, that in fact, the family adapted by absorbing an enormous amount of medical detail into their daily routines, which became second nature, while isolating them from ‘ordinary’ families and spontaneous enjoyment.
Heather is an articulate and expressive author, deftly managing the tide of sweeping emotions that threaten all the time, to undermine precious time spared from the grim reaper.
Hers is an intimate and balanced account of the trauma that everyone endures, when a child of the family is born with a life-threatening impairment. It seems a miracle to me, that any kind of normality was achieved, but in that, there was also the risk that the compromises hewn from the rock of unfairness – medical costs leading to bankruptcy, why me?, the strain that told on their parents – the heroism that procured the illusion of an everyday existence worked against the family too, as they were routinely misunderstood and accused of overstating their difficulties.
The echoes of the challenges that my own family faced, when I made my appearance in the world, are not lost on me. It is a common dilemma that disabled persons face. They do all in their power to achieve the appearance of normality, and because they are successful so much of the time, they are accused of overstating the difficulties they juggle with. Yet, ‘normality’ perches on a knife edge. One fall, one bad crash leads not to minor inconvenience and aches here and there, but to a month of housebound agony, an inability to walk or move quickly…. Having had two bad falls recently, I can recognise the challenge that is the thin line between success and utter catastrophe.
This is a remarkable book, and one which deserves to be widely read.
We all do things in our own ways, and indie publishing is one area in life where it is impossible to generalise. The technology and the rules, the specifics are always changing, so publication represents a best guess snatch at the options, which will have changed again by this time tomorrow.
But how exciting to realise that the indie landscape is constantly evolving: so many other landscapes are fixed and uniform, it is delightful to consider that indie publishing creates and fosters a huge number of choices, an infinite number of options.
It has been commonplace to assume that indie publishing is the new kid on the block, a parvenu who has a lot to learn. But indies have a lot to teach, also, about the power of publishing, the mobility of modern communication trends, and the right of all to have access to publishing media. Many, many books which have long been classics on our shelves started life as indie published books, modern indie publishing merely refreshes a trend that has been around for hundreds of years. In some ways, indies are keeping alive a noble tradition, and helping the industry to evolve and keep pace with modern communications.
A president of the Michigan Savings Bank said to Henry Ford’s lawyer, “The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad.” He ignored the advice. Publication is an adventure that we learn from, and that teaches us there are as many publication variables as there are flowers in the park, and the remit is constantly expanding.
I am enjoying preparing my second book Happiness Matters for publication, which should be happening later on this month. The details of how that will work, once broken down into bite-size chunks, are manageable…and meantime, I’m looking forward to having another publication to my credit, another string to my bow to make music with.
It is good to listen to our audience, and taking advice is always useful, whether that is from a single reader or a roomful of expectant hopefuls. As I may have mentioned, writing is a solitary and often isolating preoccupation, so it is essential to maintain contact with people in the real world outside. Without that grounding, our work, and our whole world, can come adrift.
But…. we mustn’t listen so hard to our audience – unless we are a paid writer of text for a company brochure or publicity machine – that we become bendy like spaghetti.
For a first-time fiction author, the temptation is to listen and incorporate all changes, ideas, thoughts and suggestions, in the hope that doing so will make our work more appealing and marketable. But our energy creates our work, and if we listen too closely to what others might suggest – do we run the risk that we give up writing all together?
Who are we writing for? Ourselves, first of all. The first stage of any creative project must be free of self-consciousness. It must be free to fly and fart in the face of critics and friends alike, blissfully shielded from concerns about marketability, reader appeal or plot holes. That kind of energy is what makes writing a joy, a privilege and a rare pleasure, and while in the midst of creative frenzy, we have to feel free to say, ‘Go away, I’m not finished yet.’
That initial process is taking me far longer than I thought it would. With my rational mind, I calculated a year is enough time to get a book down and dusted. But, creatively, especially as I work best with several projects on the go at once, I’m finding that two years is about my minimum. The longer time-frame, paradoxically, allows me to work more freely, not worried about time scales and deadlines. And in all that time, we are really writing for ourselves, first – because that – selfish? – motivation keeps the voice alive, allows it to anchor and refine, before other people get a look in.
The processes of indie publishing may seem complicated, but like every task in life, they can be broken down into sections which we tackle one at a time, in sequence when it suits.
First, we decide that going indie might be a good idea, then we start to enquire, find resources and read about it. Then we read some more, then we venture to work out what the jargon means… and we keep reading.
Then we look at what to do – finish writing, edit, send out to external editor, re-edit some more, and some more…. There are always glitches and typos to fix…. then decide to get it formatted and how to do that, write up pitches and cover material, consider metatadata and pricing then decide about book cover design….
The step up to indie publishing is huge, yes, but if we break it into small steps, each becomes achievable in good time, with a bit of focus and patience. There is practical stuff to deal with too, such as deciding about distribution channels, opening new accounts with Amazon, IngramSpark and Neilsen to buy ISBNs and register our books. Not to mention tax, reciprocal arrangements for withholding, ITINs, and the rest. Having been through some of this already with my existing publisher helps a great deal.
I have started a body of notes which I add to as time goes on. These are updated every day, and they help me to navigate the processes without all the details getting lost. Notes save my brain from the twin hazards of forgetfulness and interruptions, neither of which is predictable. With a steep learning curve and limited time, taking notes saves having to remember all the details.
This is an exciting learning curve, a bit what I imagine ski-ing must be like. Lots of highs and adrenalin rushes.
May 22, 2017
Reading Joanna Trollope
Fran Macilvey 'Trapped: My Life with Cerebral Palsy', Fran Macilvey, Happiness Matters, Memoir 2 Comments
Reading Joanna Trollope’s The Soldier’s Wife I come across this passage early on, which had me leaping out of bed
‘….Dan had said that deployment on active service made you long for extremes, either the supreme domesticity of home when you were away from it or the violence of action and danger when you were back. You couldn’t halt the pendulum, he said, you couldn’t stop it crashing from side to side, often out of control. Even if it sometimes hit her – or the children – as it swung….’
Something about this passage resonates with me.
I habitually spend time waiting around – still waiting – for others to come back, for life to tell me what to do, for the push that I need to venture forth. And I have always blamed that particular passivity – shyness, failure, fear – on disability.
But perhaps it has more to do with an abiding sense that my life, the patterns of it and the way the weave and weft wraps itself around me, has been defined by what other people need and decide: the parent who works abroad; the partner who cannot make up their mind whether to leave or stay; the children who have to fit in with patterns set up by others – the need for continuity which boils down to a choice of boarding school, where patterns are set in stone…. but which haemorrhages a domesticity that my husband, for example, can take more for granted.
I suspect that one of hubby’s templates says to him, ‘Parents are here and will always be here, so you may venture – go!’ but my templates tend to suggest to me that I should wait and see what happens, what others decide, because their choices will define what I can do.
But none of us can live our lives like that, not really, not always. We have to jump, and hope that we have a good landing. We have to dive in and see what happens, experiment and hope for the best. Otherwise, what happens to the quality of our lives?
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