Fran’s School of Hard Knocks

May 17, 2021

More Lessons from lockdown

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More Lessons from lockdown

Have I learned any enduring lessons from lockdown? I have to admit to feelings of puzzlement and slightly desperate nausea when the travel industry and the ‘frequent fliers club’ enthuse about air travel getting ‘back to normal’ soon. Is it ‘normal’ to expect to fly everywhere? And should we be aiming to get back to ‘business before covid’? What about the climate crisis and protecting the environment? If covid has shown me anything, it is the vulnerability of our erstwhile ‘normal’ expectations.

I’ll not fly by plane again, unless it is to visit somewhere like New York – there not being ships available to make the journey, as there used to be in the ‘good old days’ circa 1920…  – but will be looking to travel by Eurotunnel or other scheduled ferry and overland services if the need arises. As my husband often says, “I like to make the journey part of our holiday.”

This year, I’m going to think twice before buying non-consumables, though that is proving to be a challenge. I seem to live a fairly minimal lifestyle as it is, and sometimes I yearn to splurge, but it’s a good discipline first make use of what we have, and to look afresh at all the books already in our bookcases, the cds and other things in the home. Do I need more? Can what I have be recycled? Redeployed?

If I go too far down the minimalist road, I might find all my shelves and rooms empty, except for two changes of clothes in my wardrobe and my computer. I will not, therefore, be ‘getting rid’ of my old clothes, CDs, paper books, and dictionaries, since ‘getting rid’ of these is merely passing their matter sideways. Anyway, in the course of a life, one does find favourites, and these I will keep. So until my ‘legacy’ collection of CDs is rendered entirely obsolete, I shall reinstall my CD drive on my computer whenever the latest updates delete it. A small price to be able to work with music of my choice.

I feel so blessed to live in the world as we have made it now. Freed of the need to go and find firewood and water, and walk twenty miles for healthcare, there is so much I can do to please myself. We have so many chances to be happy. These may be small, but to preserve the ability of others to access that happiness, we must do more to help each other. The world – like the democratic freedoms we have rather taken for granted – is a fragile, complex web, infinitely precious and worth preserving.

Thanks so much for reading.

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May 5, 2021

More lessons learned in lockdown

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More lessons learned in lockdown

We may never get back to the way things used to be: the ‘new normal’ may well be here to stay, and in some ways, the year-long lockdown feels to me like a dress rehearsal for the real business of saving the planet, which means that we all have to urgently redesign our lives around low-impact living: using less, saving more of our stuff, repairing, mending and tidying, instead of taking the line of least resistance and first resort to high-gear newness.

The way things have been running is expensive – I don’t mean financially – careless and extravagant in ways we are finally beginning to appreciate. And too often, it is other people and creatures in distant places that are now paying the cost for our extravagance. So what more lessons have I learned during lockdown this year?

I’m now as much of a vegetarian as I can be, which is to say I avoid meat and fish, though when I feel the need to eat a portion of chicken curry that everyone else is having, I will do so, and I will eat sardines occasionally. I’m not a meat reducer and not a vegan, since although I avoid milk and cheese products, I do reserve the right to eat eggs. Vegetarianism feels like a release from the old tired expectations of ‘meat and two veg’ as I finally give myself permission to extend my usual range and eat the things I really do prefer: grapefruit and soya yogurt with breakfast, almond and cashew butter as well as peanut butter; more vegetables and greens, more home-made soup…It’s such a relief to enjoy my food more, and to enjoy cooking. Conversely, it is astonishing to see how quickly I turn away from meat. So there is, in me, no sense of hardship, nor any need to buy ‘fake’ bacon to fill some perceived longing or lack.  

I’m using bamboo products more, instead of traditional paper options so often sourced from wood-pulp and paper; and sustainable and natural fibre clothing wherever possible. There is of course a place for using recycled paper products, and those often made from rags and such like. But once I started looking at what can be made from bamboo – food to eat, clothes, cups, utensils – I had to ask myself what took me so long to clock on.

(To be continued.) Thanks for reading.

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April 29, 2021

Life as I know it

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Life as I know it

It seems that my life as I know it is about to change, though I have no idea when. My mother, who for several years has ‘enjoyed indifferent health’ – the kind of health that Georgette Heyer gifts to the hypochondriacal mothers of her feisty heroines, so my mother would appreciate the joke: she doesn’t enjoy her indifferent health at all – is on a steady decline. Another one, following several previous occasions when her life hung in the balance. It is testament to her strength of character that she has come so far, so often pulling herself back from the brink by sheer willpower and refusal to concede defeat.

And I’m grateful for the time we have had together, time which, I reflect, we didn’t have while my siblings and I were growing up. Sent off to boarding schools – two apiece, my eldest sister and brother to one, my twin sister and I to a different one – as unlike Mallory Towers as it is possible to imagine, we grew up apart, finding solace, I suspect, in learning, reading and books, much as my mother has always done.

The times when Mum was at home with us – school holidays, mostly – I remember her working hard at her typewriter / computer, in her own thoughts, in her workspace. Determined not to follow that particular example of absenting oneself from the rest of life, I have made a very conscious effort to set my work aside whenever I have company, and so far, the effort has paid dividends. I am not as work obsessed as my mother was, nor as I used to be, since I appreciate with fresh urgency how precious is time spent with other people. A realisation that has become crystal clear during lockdown.

Being in my mother’s company has taught me to be patient, and that there is always room for cheerfulness and optimism; being cheerful and optimistic is often the best thing we can gift to any situation. That is a lesson that will stand me in good stead, and for which I am immensely grateful. Why things are as they are, is often unknown to us; but we can appreciate the progress we make in each day, being kinder and gentler with one another. In being so, there is less to regret, less to worry about. A wonderful lesson to have collected from being with Mum.

Thanks for reading.

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January 14, 2021

Dear Blog

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Dear Blog

I know a post is overdue. It’s been too long since I wrote to you.

Though I get a lot of help from my sisters, I still find myself subsisting on about five hours sleep a night: I want to go to bed early, but life gets in the way, and besides, I find the late evenings and early mornings peaceful, and just about the only time I can be sure the phone won’t ring, the family won’t need anything and there won’t be stuff around the flat that needs seeing to. I putter about sorting things, ready for the next day, and am surprised when I see 12:34 grinning at me from the kitchen clock. That time already?

Some people have a high tolerance for living with lots of stuff around them – they don’t mind leaving things in pursuit of a bigger objective – but, perhaps since I’m slower anyway, I find that harder than doubtless it should be.

Mum is still in hospital, on a general medical ward, free of covid – everyone is tested twice a week, and yesterday one case was found – and finally a diagnosis has been confirmed that fits well enough with her symptoms. Is this good news or bad? How does Mum feel about it? I can’t know. I can only go by the brave face that she puts on things when she phones me. Not too bad, I gather, and knowing her, she will be glad to have something to focus on.

Though I feel she needs to get home in order to locate something she can genuinely recognise and find soothing, I am kindly reminded by my friends that the hospital would not keep Mum in a moment longer than need be, the current pressures and risks being what they are.

With that I am content. Almost. Most of the time. I listen to loud music through my fab headphones, work, and hope. Which will have to be enough in these strange times.

Thanks for reading.

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December 21, 2020

Quiet Crises

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Quiet crises

Throughout this year, I have gained a new appreciation for those among us who soldier on: the health care workers, supermarket supervisors and the staff stacking shelves, the cohorts of recyclers, cleaners and organisers. It has been too easy, while we were taking our previously “normal” lives in our stride, to overlook the crucial parts taken by so many players in keeping our erstwhile expectations on track. I feel a sincere gratitude to those of us who get on with things, because they have little choice: a semblance of normal life has to continue.

Which has always been my mother’s rationale for keeping going, despite her increasing frailty. Recently, she was taken into hospital. On the advice of a GP, an ambulance was summoned, and asked to ferry my mother to one of the Edinburgh hospitals, where her arrival was expected. Ten hours later, an ambulance finally came to the door because my husband, coming to the scene fresh, and alarmed at my mother’s pallor, called the emergency services again; so that my mother’s case was re-prioritised; and thus, two paramedics arrived.

For our pains, and those of my mother, we received a small peroration from the lead paramedic on the use of the emergency services to summon help and a comment that he disliked the emergency ambulance being used as a taxi service.

It’s only now, after an exhausting weekend in recovery from a series of eight-, ten- and twelve-hour days in attendance on my mother, while seeing to a dozen things at once and keeping abreast of my own household’s needs, that I sense the illogicality of much of what he said: I was not at all offended that he felt the need to speak his mind; I am, however, rather puzzled by the implications.

If the ambulance service is not there to ferry sick persons about, what is it for? At what point does a sick person, unable to move, feed or toilet themselves, become an emergency? And why is it only noisy emergencies that get priority? Without re-prioritisation, would my mother still be waiting to reach her bed in the hospital as other calls were constantly prioritised above her? Must we both be in a state of collapse before someone notices our lives crumbling under the weight of accumulated impossibility? For we had no carers on hand no help manage our own quiet crises, nor hope of any. (I had had to tell my mother’s carers not to come to the house, since by then she had been expecting admission to hospital.)

In the last two weeks, I have begun to appreciate some of the complexities that underpin our public services and their organisation. I’m grateful for these insights, and can only hope that I have learned enough to carry me through the next phase of my mother’s rehabilitation. No hospital visits allowed, but phonecalls are always a route through the maze.

In this season of love and goodwill, in the midst of a million quiet crises, I wish you all well, and hope that the New Year brings us peace and joy.

Merry Christmas.

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December 10, 2020

My mother as she is

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My mother as she is

I went to a zoom meeting recently, organised by my eldest sister, and conducted at my mother’s house, on my mobile phone: Mum has neither a camera, nor a microphone, nor the will to organise such things herself, so we sat companionably side by side at the dining table – a large, reassuring object harkening back to the days of large family dinners – and warbled happily on the phone. It was good.

I noticed that at times my mother has difficulty speaking, but otherwise, she seems to me to have been much more like her usual self. My elder sister, seeing my mother under the overhead lights, expressed concern to me – when Mum was elsewhere phoning my other sister – and I said, “Oh, yes, I suppose Mum does not look very well… But she’s fine…” All the usual things one says to reassure, when one needs reassurance too.

My mother is indeed tired, so tired, that at times, her skin looks translucent. I am used to being a witness to her decline and her constant struggle to recalibrate for the things she can no longer do – for her, a heartbreaking realisation, that I have at least had time to accustom myself to, rather more than my siblings have. To them, a sudden realisation is alarming.

My mother cannot help harking back to the way she was; I too feel hamstrung, so, while I get used to that feeling, meanwhile I do my best to help, smile and hope. It’s just about all I can do. That, and make phonecalls to organise deliveries, extra help; all that kind of thing. I have to stay cheerful, and even when fatigued, I accept there is no better alternative.

My elder sister would like to phone me to talk about it. She will do that when she has time. And I will reassure her as best I can. I know Mum is lucky. She is still able to live at home and has the freedom to live unfettered by the well-meaning “supervision” of others, a word I noted in a recent advert for a care-home, which reminds me of my kindergarten days and makes me shudder.

I try not to supervise, or worry, but I do grieve, a gradual process like the tipping of a sand-timer to the inevitable empty glass.

Thanks for listening.

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November 17, 2020

A World of Opposites

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A world of opposites?

Right now, the world appears as one of opposites: Republican, Democrat; mask wearer, not a mask wearer, Brexiteer, Europhile… And more than ever, we seem to be insisting on our rights to oppose. All of which appears to be sowing division, discord, and unhappiness.

Division, discord and unhappiness are not attitudes I wish to learn or absorb into my thinking, nor would I ever think that endorsing these aspects was a good thing. It is my experience that we all have something to learn, and that if we want to begin to find solutions to the world’s very real problems, we have to begin to find a way to live amicably, despite our different viewpoints. So how can we do this?

I can see many different points of view. Depending on my mood and a host of other things, I can agree that a certain viewpoint is justified sometimes, even if I hold a different viewpoint; it all depends. So, if I lived in a country with minimal state provision for its citizens and a very thin or vulnerable safety-net for the sick or disabled, of course I understand those who insist on the right to keep working as long as they can, and who decry any attempts to restrain their freedoms in that direction, pandemic or no pandemic.

Self-reliance is laudable, but it can sit uncomfortably in the midst of a global health crisis. So, since members of my family involved in healthcare are in the midst of a viral outbreak which is having deadly outcomes and which most observers agree is now barely being controlled, and since I have friends directly involved in looking after the sick, I support restrictions on our social lives and even on our freedom to earn a living if that helps to bring the crisis under control. If I expose myself to un-necessary risk in exercising what I think of as my rights, how might an eventual illness in me or in my household add to the burdens of an already toiling health care system?

It is very apparent to me that, even in a world of opposites, although the Covid 19 virus and its ilk has not – not yet – affected me directly, it is better for me to curtail my daily expectations, since the combined effect of us all doing so reduces the risks to healthcare workers: even in times of crisis, we do not routinely choose to work in a field of endeavour in which the risk of serious illness or death is constant, and many times that of other work.  

However that may be, I can and do listen to differing points of view, and try to see the merit in all different perspectives. Despite our differing philosophies, we have to find ways to listen and co-operate with one another every day, so that together we can contribute to constructive, long-term solutions to our problems. That is what politics is all about. Since climate change, environmental losses and the weakening of democratic systems affect us all, the most enduring solutions will come from as wide a field of contribution as possible.

Thanks for reading.

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November 5, 2020

Keeping going

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Keeping going

For a long time now, possibly years, I’ve been toying with giving up my writing. In any event, lately, I haven’t been writing much at all, and the dismay of my paralysis has been hard to get my head round.

So I’ve tried to ignore this particular patch of desert, to pretend that lockdown and its outcomes do not affect me. Though my situation remains surprisingly similar to what it has always been, the realities of lockdown, with their peculiar mix of worry and resignation, make working on a fictional series about hard-pressed women – and men – rather hard to justify.

Do I need to justify it? Lately, there have been so many good reasons why I should stop writing: I have lots of calls on my time, from my husband, my daughter, my sisters, friends, my mother, even my daughter’s guinea-pigs; but sitting here, crafting and editing my work, I am reminded again that I do sincerely delight in this particular combination of concentration and escapism.

Even when so much of writing seems to be carried out it a private world that feels like a vacuum, how could I excuse a final decision to stop, when writing makes me smile and feel good? I also know that it is one real, tangible thing I do, that my husband sincerely supports. He wants me to keep writing. And I’ve seen how the things that contribute to our happiness and sense of fulfilment make the routines and hardships of life easier to live with. Constructing fictional worlds is the nearest I’ll ever get to time travel; or, at this time, to actual travel, which is another reason why I will be keeping going.

I’m working now on a final edit of my three novels, which though they each stand alone, also represent a series of characters whose lives may work out in so many different ways. I’m almost driven to conclude that my novels are, as they stand, only outlines, scoping out what might happen, never cast in stone.

That I’m keeping going in itself gives me reason to feel celebratory.

Thanks for reading.

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October 5, 2020

Taking a longer view

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Taking a longer view

My mother’s health is failing. Finally, after several years of painful struggle and wishing that things could be different – I’ve not quite lost sight of the woman who was content in her domain and saw the purpose in carrying on – my mother’s light is fading.

In watching this long-drawn out process, taking a longer view, many emotions surface. And though I don’t know on any given day which will be uppermost, and which will lie dormant and sabotage me as I sleep, I know that this period of waiting will simply have to be endured, as all painful things are.

Certainly, there is regret, and a patina of peculiar relief, as we both accept the inevitable: I can’t make things better in the way she would like them to be: herself able and competent, living in France, her son alive, well, and, (in the dream she would have liked) living a happy life… I can’t put back the clock, and I’m not sure, even if I could, that it would be a wise course. Would all the things that have happened in the intervening five or so years have to happen again? I’m not sure we could cope with that.

There is comfort, as there always is, in knowing we have succeeded in coming this far together, in peace, and finally in a clearer understanding.

As a kid and a young adult, I often felt my parents to be remote, living by adult rules and logic to which I was not, nor expected to be, privy any time soon. Now, since I see Mum most days and have a hand in keeping her affairs in order, I have, I think, proved my claim to be as content, happy and competent in my own life as most of us are: my mother can relax now, knowing that, although I’ll never reach her heights of scholarship or astonishing grasp of detail, there is enough of her in me to ensure that I’ll be okay. Different, but okay.

Thanks for reading.

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September 23, 2020

Stories of Personal Courage

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Stories of Personal Courage

My friends like to share stories of personal courage with me that they have themselves read and been inspired by. And there was a time – a period covering roughly thirty years – during which I was fascinated by them, mining individual stories of personal strength for nuggets of inspiration and advice when I needed it most. Some of the accounts I have read, I have taken to heart, and they have undoubtedly played their part in keeping me sane and alive.  

Nowadays, I feel as if I have found more of my courage, and so, I simply want to live as happily as I can, one day at a time. Does this make me unsympathetic? Not at all. When I am asked a question, or spoken to, I listen, as I hope I am listened to. But I also want to live freely, untrammelled by feelings of regret or pity.

I would not, and do not, want anyone to pity me; and therefore, while I do sincerely admire people who are living examples of courage every single day, I want not so much to admire them, as to enjoy their company, share their jokes and wish them well.

All of us, whether heroine or oppressed worker bee, at heart just want to be seen for who we are: not placed on a pedestal, nor looked up to, nor discriminated against or judged unfairly as we grovel trying to pull together our dignity from way down the queue.

I want to live on the level with others. I am not a mascot for the “unfortunate”, mainly because I don’t characterise myself or others as unfortunate, nor do I have unique access to spiritual insights, wisdom or empathy. There may be times when I feel I have something I want or need to say, perhaps voicing the views of those who may find it harder to speak out or be heard; but in this, as in most things, I cherish the hope that we are all alike in campaigning for what is meaningful to us.

Are my ambitions at risk of sounding flaccid and pedestrian? Perhaps, though while I do have ambition, my stamina is not always up to par; and for me, walking on the level is an achievement in itself.

Thanks for reading.

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