A Consignment of Books!

I have done something liberating and joyous this morning: Ordered five copies of each of my books! Various reasons for this, the main one being the need to overcome an inhibition – not of my making – which has crippled me ever since I published the first one on December 22nd 2014.

The decision to go for both the e-book option and the print-on-demand one caused such unpleasantness that, for the past two years, I have felt terror and shame when confronted by ‘real’ copies of these books I laboured over with such love and hope. This nastiness was one of several nails in the coffin of my marriage – and it has taken me a long time to feel that I deserve to be a published writer and to feel pride in my creations.

They will arrive in a big box, shipped over from the United States, towards the end of next month. This time, I shall be able to take pleasure in opening the book. This time, I will not need to feel tense and afraid about the response, or worry about the financial side of the transaction. This time, the twenty-five new books will be a source of delight and not guilt.

I remain frozen inside in some significant ways – and I do not think I will be publishing anything new until the thawing process has finished. But who knows? I did not think I would ever step into a classroom to teach again! Boy, was I wrong there!

I no longer need to sell books in order to survive. In fact, I never did: That erroneous conceit was the brain-child of a materialistic other. I do not need to create a best-selling novel in order to have worth, nor do I need to feel ashamed that none of my books have sold in vast quantities.

I am no longer under a Dictatorship. I no longer quiver under the umbrella of Tyranny. Let me just share one final moment with you. When I published ‘LLB’, I gave my then-husband a copy as a gift. Back in the Autumn, when we were beginning to pack up the house and rationalise our belongings, I found that the copy I’d given him was one of only a handful of books placed upon his discard pile.

This was a symbolic act. It represented his whole attitude towards my writing and publishing efforts. By then, I was almost beyond hurt where he was concerned – but I still registered the moment. It freed me! It broke down a wall I wasn’t even consciously aware I had erected. It gave me back full ownership of my writing, my creativity in the wider sense – and my autonomy as a person.

This consignment of precious books written, and made manifest, at a time of deepening marital crisis and misery, will mean far more than twenty-five colourful tomes. They are symbols of my right to be a writer, my freedom to create what I want when I want. They are my voice box returned intact. They are all about my survival. They are an integral part of the Ali Phoenix risen, once again, from the ashes.

Loss of confidence and faith

I write this with tears in my eyes, and a feeling of terror and failure in my heart. Today has been incredibly challenging, and I do not think I am any good as a supply teacher. I don’t seem to have the requisite skills: Am too confrontational (through fear, mainly) and panic when behaviour slips out of control. I fear I have lost the ability I once had, that I am too old and have left it too late to go back into the profession, even on a part-time basis.

I am having to face up to my utter fear of being laughed at – and it is proving to be very very hard. I cannot go into details because it would be unprofessional to do so – but I am scared and unhappy, and my belief in myself – never the strongest part of my character – is wilting and waning.

Part of the problem is that I have stupidly high standards – of the kids I teach, but mainly of myself. I beat myself up at any opportunity, and am incredibly critical of my own faults and failings. I know that the problems I have faced have been of my own making in the sense that my handling of these difficult situations, and volatile adolescents, has been crap – and there is no excuse: I am a highly-trained and very experienced teacher; I should be able to adapt my approach, to avoid shouting, to deal with the bolshie kids in a better way. It is no good blaming them. They are teenagers. I am an adult.

I feel deeply ashamed of myself – not for the first time – and am thinking, ‘What if I can’t get this right? What then?’

I am trying so hard to be positive, to get my life back on track, to carve a new path for myself – and tears trickle out at the thought that I could so easily fail; that my own anxious and fleeing nature could already be jeopardising this second bite at the educational cherry.

I have to learn not to react, not to over-react; I have to learn to still my over-active amygdala. Trouble is, I feel intensely threatened by aggression and loud naughtiness and refusal to co-operate. I am terrified of losing control, of being abused and hurt and attacked, of not being able to wrench a deteriorating situation back. So I tend to go to the opposite extreme and shout a lot – which, as anyone with any experience of teaching will know, rarely works and usually simply puts the kids’ backs up and makes them even less inclined to co-operate.

So, here I am: 59 years old, with thirty years of teaching experience behind me – making the kind of mistakes Newly Qualified Teachers are prone to making; digging a trench for myself to fall into; failing to calm down and breathe; failing to remember that it doesn’t matter of they don’t do all the work.

This has triggered a very deep fear – of failing, of being helpless, of a whole class turning against me (when I was eight, not as a teacher), of not being able to stand up for myself, of being small and unprotected in some odd way.

But I also realised, as I started this piece, that I have kept an awful lot of emotion under wraps, inside; that I have been very busy – deliberately so – since moving here and that this, in part, was a way of putting my grief or stress (or the cumulative horror and distress of the past two years) on hold, for a more convenient moment. Hoping, perhaps, that it would go away so that I didn’t need to feel that vulnerable and fear-frozen again.

Perhaps I needed the trigger. Perhaps, at some level, I sought it in teaching – unconsciously searched for a wall of fear to confront.

I write this with tears in my eyes…

A Bundle of Insecurity

The divorce, with its many ramifications and aftermath, and the imminent move together have triggered the worst attack of Global Insecurity I have had in ages.

My ex is staying, for a few days, with relatives, away from the area, and Lad and his Lass are on holiday together for a week. I am, therefore, alone.

Almost immediately, the positive, cheerful, ‘I am coping!’ mask slipped – and all the terror I had bottled up for weeks began to come out. I am restless, pacing up and down, trying to out-walk the distress which seems to be building, like a giant wave, far out at sea while I, both petrified and mesmerised, stand on the shoreline unable to move, just waiting for it to engulf me.

What strikes me now is this: Despite everything (and I have only scratched the surface of it all on here), I have kept going. I have not given in permanently to despair or fear or bullying or disappointment or financial hardship or the loss of people who mattered to me.

But now, it suddenly all feels like too much. The buoyant cork that is Ali in nature is battered and waterlogged and struggling to pop up again.

I think the busy – at times, frantic – nature of the past year’s events has kept my mind from giving in to sadness too much: There has been so much, in the practical sense, to do – dealing with solicitors, looking at houses, phoning estate agents, trying to offset the worst of the emotional fall-out – that I have not had time or energy to grieve and cry and get angry.

And now it has hit me, hard: How ambivalent I am about moving; how afraid of being forgotten; how terrified of being lost, emotionally, in the new place; how much I fear the gap left by my absence closing over without so much as a backward glance; how distraught I am as a result of those who have bled out of my life because of the divorce and the panicky, hysterical wailing horror that they might be joined by others once I move; how traumatic the divorce was – and how angry, furiously ragingly angry, I am with my ex and all those who have sided with him.

I am not claiming these thoughts are logical. High waves of emotion rarely are. I am not saying that they are even realistic. Terror strikes out wildly and indiscriminately through the Amygdala and, like a storm, leaves damage in its wake – but the weather eventually clears and goes back to a more normal setting.

My throat closes, and my eyes fill, at the very thought of saying farewell to the house, the village I have lived in for so long – and, most importantly, the friends I have made here (some very dear, and important, to me).

I know that I shall only be twenty miles away – and that, for some, this will not (I hope) prove an insurmountable barrier; but I have already been burned by people leaving my life and that insecurity is, therefore, very real and very hurtful in my heart.

At times like this, I always feel insubstantial, invisible almost. I feel, right now, like a ghost in my own life, as if I am haunting the familiar sights and people, and they are vaguely aware of a presence but put it down to draughts or uneasy dreams.

Untethered, I drift between the house I live in and the one I am buying, between those I love here and those I hope to get to know there. Untethered, I want the move to speed up and be over, and I want this Limbo to go on forever so that I won’t have to face the terrible wrench of saying goodbye. I want to stay – and I want to go.

Life, as we know, goes on, uninterrupted, without the dead. It has to. The spark of life carries a wonderful imperative which no individual loss can disobey or hope to change.

Divorce is a little death, moving another, loss of friends a third.

Three in a row.

So, forgive me, if you actually know me, if I seem a little distrait, very clingy and insecure, nervous and unable to settle to anything. Forgive me if I rage or weep or seem un-trusting in your presence. Forgive me if I withdraw and stop trying things out short term. It is not you. It is the trio of little deaths bringing my earliest and most enduring fear of loss and rejection scenario up once again.

It is the ghost of the baby me who wails and totters and cannot get relief and peers endlessly out of unfamiliar windows to see if her missing parents are ever going to come back.

They did – and so will those with whom I have a strong and enduring bond. Although I will not carry them with me physically, those who are lodged in my heart are here to stay emotionally. Trust comes hard. But that is the orange ring I need to cling onto, and have faith in the strength of.

Love survives divorce, a move, death. That is the lifebuoy I need to keep within my sights during the next few scary weeks.

Learning Competence

There are people I know who seem naturally confident, competent and self-assured. They seem completely sure that their decisions are absolutely right, and that they will succeed in every venture they set their minds to.

I think for many of us, however, competence is something we learn through trial and error; through constantly pushing our self-doubt away; through giving it a go despite being convinced that we will fail.

I am someone who tends to give her power away to other, more dominant, characters. This I freely admit. I assume – or am told – that I cannot do certain things, and, in the past, have given up at the first gate.

These grim assumptions concerning my level of competence have proved to be wildly inaccurate, however. I am more resourceful that I think. Many of us are.

Once I stopped panicking, I was able to fill in the dreaded forms with relative ease – and that skill (honed during thirty years as an English teacher) came back quickly. You see, sometimes we watch other people’s anxiety concerning life tasks – and, if we privately see the other as a stronger person than us, we can take on his/her struggle as our own through a kind of negative osmosis. After a while, we forget that this is something we actually can do, and the other person’s anger and fear in the face of this thing makes us think, ‘God, if he/she can’t do Task A, I most certainly would fail dismally…’

We can bend the truth in order that we do not threaten the other by being more capable in certain areas than he or she is. We play dumb, or stupid, or unable to understand, or physically weak, in order to please, to stroke another’s fragile ego.

I think this behaviour is particularly true of women. Men often feel that they should be the strong, capable, physical ones. This can be a strain on them, and can also mean that they find it hard to cope with partners who show signs of being more able to cope with some of the traditional male chores.

Women often feel that they have to be girly and childlike, to ask for help in matters which, actually, they could do standing on their heads with eyes closed. They often feel that pretending to be useless and weak is flattering to men, and gets them more Brownie Points in the great Attraction Game.

But, women can dig themselves a deep, almost inescapable, hole by adopting such tactics. It is all too easy to actually become that drooping, clinging, princess-like little woman that one pretends to be; all too easy to allow one’s competence to be questioned, undermined and, finally, stolen altogether.

It is like any muscle. If we don’t use it, it withers, becomes flabby, is no longer fit for purpose. We have to learn competence, men and women alike, and to practise its many skills.

And, if we are women, we have to stop telling ourselves that being incompetent, being unable to cope with certain things, makes us more attractive, more loved, more wanted. We also, I think, have to face another truth: Men do not have to be the all-knowing fixers and providers in order for us to love and want and desire them.

Being able to change a tyre, or fill in a form, does not make a woman any less feminine, sexy or desirable; the inability to do these things does not make a man unmanly, weak or effeminate.

Competence is vital for all human beings irrespective of their gender and sexual orientation – and we do ourselves no favours by faking a lack of it to be popular.

Death Denial: Response to ‘Griefwalker’

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/circus/

Many of us disapprove of the circus, feeling it to be cruel and barbaric, scary and potentially lethal. Yet, we cannot resist the temptation to nip along to see, often through slitted eyes, the death-defying acts, the sight of huge and dangerous cats being controlled by a human being, the ghastly funny-sad faces of the clowns, the freak shows large and small. We thrill to the fear factor, and to the colour, the variety and the unknown hovering behind it all.

So it is with the circus that is death: We are unable to resist watching the graphic programmes on the television, reading horror books and detective stories, gawking at horrendous car crashes, feasting our eyes upon the evidence of the recently-departed.

We fear – and yet we engage.

Circus. Death. They have more in common than you might think. Read on…

I have long been terrified of death. I think a lot of that is down to the whole Christian, Death-as-the-wages-of-sin upbringing – and, underneath it, a never-discussed current of death-fear flowing inexorably from my mother. So, apparent reassurance about some kind of angelic life beyond the grave became tainted with the utter gut-wrenching fear of an abyss which seeped from her every pore.

We do not, as a society, treat death as something natural, cyclical, normal. We have made it the enemy, the dark horror, the epitome of all that is grievous and taboo and sinister.

For most of my life, I have tried to force that fear into the dark cabinets of the subconscious – or have gone into panic mode about the nothingness so many of us fear, or the actual moment of no longer breathing, the potential agony of it all.

I am not alone.

The strange and sad thing about it all is this: We see the death of animals all the time; our roads and verges abound with road-and-predator kill; we eat the flesh of creatures (not thinking of it as, basically, death on a plate); we celebrate the beauty of Fall/Autumn – with its inherent irony that death fuels that colourful, and then stark, magnificence – and yet too few of us truly claim death as our common humanity’s inevitable end; too few of us live, as Carlos Castaneda/Don Juan had it, with death always over our left shoulder.

I think there is an underlying assumption (unspoken, unthought even) that, somehow, if we deny the reality of death, it’ll deny us the experience too; that, if we hide from death, the scythe will not find us; that, if we are special enough, death will make an exception for us!

But, moving from general to personal, what are my repeated doctor visits about if not acute fear of death? Am I not, actually – and under the individual symptoms – simply asking, ‘Am I dying?’ and hoping for the temporary reassurance of, ‘Not this time…’

This is no way to live a life.

The film made me cry. My whole body tensed watching it. I felt scared, then moved, then, amazingly, inspired and bolstered. Jenkinson is RIGHT, gods damn it! It is not human to fear death. Nowhere else in nature is the death terror evident. We have claimed that fear as part of our religious brain-washing: The trade-off for Salvation is, with sickening irony, craven fear of both life and dying – mainly because the whole concept has been tied in with sin and suffering and punishment.

My body convulsed, post film, as all the vulnerable instruments tuned up and joined in the orchestra’s loud symphony of pain. And, yes, the little girl part of me was wailing, ‘Am I dying?’

The reason I wept was in recognition of something fundamental: This constant Pain Watch is not living. This constant thrumming of the Death Watch drum is beating a rhythm so loud that it often drowns out the sweet pipes which play the Love of Life melody so beautifully.

I do not regret watching the film; in fact, I am so glad I did. It felt like something I very much needed to do. It felt utterly appropriate, given the mini-death that a divorce actually is, that I should be facing the bigger spectre I have tried to push away for so long.

I am going to die. One day, I’ll be dead. My body will be still and pale; the spirit which animates my face will be gone. I will be cooling flesh and then host to the amazing bacterial miracle which allows our bodies to be consumed from within and then recycled. I will decompose. The hands which are typing this piece will stiffen in rigor mortis and the skin will slough off like a glove. If I am not cremated, the bones of my skeleton will, eventually, push through. All that is Alienora physically will disperse, go back to the source one way or another.

Isn’t it wonderful, though, that nature is so clever, so economical with its beings, so green in terms of waste disposal? That built-in obsolescence has something truly beautiful and intelligent about it: Waste not, want not on a grand scale!

I, the warm breathing me, will disappear. We all will when our time comes.

But something of me will remain. Call it my spirit, my soul, my essence. Call it the impact I have had, and will continue to have, upon others during my life. Call it the power of love and memory. Call it the spark of the divine, the light we all have.

‘Death feeds everything that lives…’ (Stephen Jenkinson)

Yes, it does.

Facing death-as-an-absolute-truth is what I need to be doing now – because in the reality of our end we find the freedom to dance and sing and embrace life with all our strength and passion. We find, and are able to use, the strongest rays of our individual light sources when we know that they are surrounded by, and illuminate, a vast darkness.

Death is not going to go away or be denied or make an exception for an Orange-Haired Alienora! Nor should it! Death is the final adventure in life. It is the Path Working from which there is no bodily return (at least, not in our current form). It is the portal to a new country, a new form of existence.

One day, I will die – but now, on this sunny Tuesday in latest May, I am vibrant and alive and, despite current pain and fear, passionately in love with life.

And fear begins to give way to curiosity and interest and a shimmering of wonder.

Terror and Temptation: The Green Girdle

It has come, as I knew it would. My ability to hold firm is wavering. The slithering seductress of temptation leans over my bed and whispers words of apparent comfort in my ears. I know that, if I give in to her honeyed rhetoric, the pain will go away and I will be, in material ways, safe once more. I know that, if I take that shimmering and beautiful green girdle from her hands, and hide it beneath my armour, the axe may nick my exposed neck but it will not sever my head – and droplets of blood upon snowy ground will be minimal.

I am not Sir Gawain. I am Alienora. This is not the lovely Silent Eye ‘Foliate Man’ weekend. It is my life. I am not about to meet The Green Knight at the Green Chapel for the return blow. I am in the closing stages of divorce. But the principal is the same and the urge to defend myself (and others), to keep from harm, is almost unbearably strong today.

The snake sibilants susurrate over the silken bed coverings.

‘Stay where you are,’ they say. ‘You cannot afford to live any other way. You know this. Mathematician, you may not be, but even you can add two and two and make four. The sums do not add up and you are in danger of plunging everyone into serious peril. Desist! Accept this tiny gift, this green symbol of sustenance and hope…’

And, five months to the day from the moment when the chronic endless pain started, I am almost overwhelmed by a longing to call a halt, to allow the chains of severance in a marriage to clatter noisily to the ground, but to keep the super-structure of life-as-I-have-known-it intact.

The Green Girdle, for me, is the dwelling in which I live – or, rather, the absolute childlike terror that, beyond it, lies an excruciating landscape of pain, blood, hardship, loss and ruin.

The Green Girdle is singing a lilting lullaby – but, if you listen carefully (and I do), it uses childhood’s bogeymen, and other beings sequestered under the bed, to warn and cramp and trap, to fear that the slightest step out of the tried-and-tested will bring cataclysm, suffering and death.

‘You will not survive,’ the inanimate green temptress says. ‘The pain will kill you, or the lack of structures will. My way is the only way. You are not deserting your principles, simply accepting a compromise, a way of doing things which would make it easier for everyone The cost of freedom is beyond you. Do not wallow in the toxic lakes of intransigence…’

I feel tears puddling on my pillow. The voice is so loving, so convincing, so sensible – like the ideal mother we all long for. It tells me that, if I leave this castle, I will only be able to find shelter in rude huts, shacks abandoned by shepherds, echoing caves cut into inhospitable hillsides. That I will be potential prey for wild animals and wilder men and women. That walking over the drawbridge and setting off alone will cause untold damage and suffering to those who also inhabit the village-world of castle life.

I rock in my bed. Fingers and wrists, ribs and back, hips and neck all feel swollen with anguish and agony. My hands are not big enough to soothe and contain this amount of pain, nor can they make a cup sufficiently large to catch the river of tears.

I am, to use expressions coined long before I slipped from my mother’s womb, between the devil and the deep blue sea, a rock and a hard place. There is no decision I can make which will not hurt someone. There is no way that this next part of the path is going to be anything but ripping of the soles, a back thrumming with pain and bowed down by responsibility’s heavy baggage and a palsied hand trembling upon a thick carven staff.

I am no longer afraid of the wolves. They are warm and steadfast, loyal and simple in their needs. No. I am afraid that the threadbare and rotting home I dreamed of so often as a little girl is all I will find as shelter in the coming months and years. I am afraid that a flat landscape of unrelenting snow, an endless winter with no hope of spring, summer or autumn, will be the season and colour of my life to come.

The Lady, with her beauty and blandishments, is my mind – though its words and thoughts have been primed by an expert teacher. Her dizzying temptation bites deep into my most insecure places and brings forth the wail of the abandoned child, the night-time horror of a collapsing home and the primeval human fear of a life alone in the Wasteland.

I am sore afraid.

Keeping the wolf from the door

I seem to be going into a wolf-theme-related phase. Time to confront the lupine part of my own nature, I guess…

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/phase/

It was only after reading three amazing, and so helpful, responses from three friends this morning that the deeper levels of yesterday’s wolf-dream post unfolded, like dark and vibrant blooms, in my mind.

The dream which so haunted my early childhood, and the images which are stirring up the already-choppy waters of my psyche at present, centres around keeping wolves from the door.

What do we mean by this phrase which, expressed metaphorically in so many fairy stories and folk tales, has become such an important part of human mythology and the collective unconscious?

It seems as if the wolf has come to represent the forces of scarcity and destruction, of hunger and poverty and loss – and this chimes in very well with my childhood dream and a dominant attitude which has recurred in my life: A fear of scarcity which, in fact, has no basis in reality.

My childhood was dogged by the spectre of the wolf howling at the door, of imminent disaster (both financially and medically), of chaos held back by the thinnest thread. We were told constantly that we were ‘hard up’, that we couldn’t afford the things other children had – and, although it was never expressed overtly, the sense we got was that we were just one step away from the modern-day equivalent of the Poor House.

Was it true? No. My parents had a detached house. My father was employed as a teacher. We had ballet lessons and music lessons. The house was extended in 1972. We were not, it has to be said, as well-off as people living in the academic enclaves of North Oxford – but nor were we impoverished.

Yet, the slavering spectre of that wolf hung over everything.

It is only now that I see that wolves have traditionally had a bad press they do not deserve – and that it is not the wolf we wish to keep from our doors, but the fear of hunger and loss of material possessions or money.

We often choose situations in life, albeit subconsciously, which replicate some aspect of our childhood which remains unresolved, which represent an unhealed wound, which give us a second bite at that particular sour cherry.

And so with me: Having picked a soul obsessed with wolves and doors, scarcity and terror, it never occurred to me to question the reality of the scenario painted in such lurid and disturbing detail in front of me. That huge wolf had to be real, didn’t it? That splash of blood on the snow was a warning, wasn’t it? Opening the door would lead to annihilation, surely…

And yet, from the earliest age, I have had a great affinity for dogs – which, let’s face it, are nothing but wolves in a domestic setting! – despite being bitten badly in the thigh by a German Shepherd (surely the most wolf-like of all the breeds). And the fox motif which came so strongly in my recent Foliate Man experience was, I am sure, a loud rap upon the doors of my soul.

Was there any truth in the latter-day wolf-at-the-door inhibition and terror? No, there wasn’t. It was fantasy, a Grimm’s tale as powerful as any written by those brothers so long ago – but, ultimately, reflecting the symbolic forests we all have to battle our way through rather than any true fiscal calamity.

Now? Now, afflicted by the contagion of fear passed down through the decades, I have a choice. I can continue to bolt that door, refuse to look at what is actually outside, shiver and quiver and hide and cry – or I can open the door wide, invite the wolves in and face the true story behind the fiction.

Fear of poverty and hunger are both very potent, and extremely ancient. They have become part of our underworld, the dark places we try and avoid. They are, I often feel, an undercurrent we are unwilling to get drawn into, an area which makes us strive to make so much money that, eventually, we might feel safe; to hoard as much food as we can just in case we are caught out by lean times.

But the act of hoarding gives us neither satisfaction nor reassurance. It becomes a cycle we cannot break out of. We delude ourselves when we continue to think that possessing things, getting what we want, can possibly fill a gaping rent in the spirit.

And the act of controlling others through one’s own fear of scarcity does more damage, in my view, than any tale of mythical wolves tricking equally mythical grandmothers, or gobbling up trios of house-building piggies!

I go to face the wolves!

I am not following anyone at the moment…

This is the elephant in my blogging room: The glaring and vast beast which I can always see, but have been too afraid – and shamed – to mention.

There are valid reasons for this decision to, I hope temporarily, stop actively supporting my fellow writers. One is the muscular pain which makes typing such a nightmare.

The other is far simpler – and yet far more distressing and stress-inducing: I am going through a divorce, and have, therefore, to be very careful what I say on here – and I have, if possible, to keep my blog pretty obscure for the moment. To put it bluntly, I cannot risk befriending unknowns, even knowns, because I simply do not know who reads their blogs (if you get my drift) and am unwilling to put myself in a position where I am being read by the wrong people.

I probably shouldn’t be blogging at all, to be honest – and the real reason why I have started and then deleted several blogs in the past two years was to get away from those who were either hostile readers, or simply ones who misinterpreted my situation.

I sacrificed a big, relatively successful blog (with a couple of thousand followers) for this little one because I had to. I had no choice in the end – and, if I have to leave this one behind, and delete all my posts, it will be for the same reason. But I will not be silenced in this way for much longer. On that point I am adamant.

So, for the moment, I am using my blog as a very necessary means of self-expression, of therapy, of allowing that poetic side through during a time of unhappiness and fear – and of appreciating the many beauties of this world we live in when, sometimes, I am tempted to give up.

I do not know when the situation is going to be resolved (in so far as such things ever can be) – and, even if I did know, I would not say.

As any of you who have had to make this difficult and painful decision will be aware, this is a time of great insecurity and terror and bouts of fear for the future. My recent novel-related blog-pushes have very much come out of that scarcity space – and I can only apologise for that.

So, now it is out in the open. Thank goodness. I am not naturally deceitful. Lying and pretending do not come easily to me. Elephants loom vast in my rooms – and, eventually, I always have to name them.

Bear with me if you can – and, if you cannot, I will quite understand.