Agony Aren’t

It has come to my attention, dear blogees, that there is something sorely missing from this site. I can only assume that you have been way too polite to mention it to me before.

There is no advice column.

Now I’m not for one minute implying that you are all emotional wrecks in need of saving, but, you know, we all go through various agonies at one stage or another in our lives and I feel it only right and proper that I offer my help and support.

However, I feel I ought to let you know the inspiration behind this new venture and the school of agony auntdom that I am a student of.

After reading a most insightful article about advice columns over the years I have decided that the style of ‘agony’ most close to my heart (and the one that would give me the most fun) would be from the Girl’s Companion circa 1908.

In order to get the ball rolling and to give you a taster of the type of advice you can expect please allow me to share with you the following letter and response taken from its pages and not altered in ANY way:-

Problem Letter:

“Is there any harm in a young lady permitting a gentleman whom she met at the seashore, and to whom she has not been formally introduced, to see her home?”

Agony Aunt’s Reply:

“My dears, there are few graver follies committed by the thoughtless and heedless than forming the acquaintance of strangers in the way you describe. Unfortunately men are not labelled, informing the world at large, women in particular, of their calling. The handsome, debonair, well-dressed, agreeable young man may be the daring thief who broke into your house last year; or the highwayman who held up your next door neighbour only the month before, leaving him for dead on the pavement from a blow from a concealed, murderous pair of brass knuckles which he usually carries with him. Or he may be an escaped madman who has just broken out of an insane asylum. Such people have a peculiar mania for making the acquaintance of young girls wherever they come across them and their real condition is not discovered until some terrible deed has been accomplished by them. The girl who will flirt and talk to a stranger, honourable young men shun when they are looking for a wife. Remember that.

Hmm – so I guess that’s a no then?!

If you would like to post your problems / questions via this blog I would be delighted to offer you equally detailed and no nonsense advice.

I look forward to hearing from you my dears and in the mean time girls remember this – no talking or flirting if you are looking to find Mr Right!

Month of Brave – Week One

So, I’m approaching the end of the first week on my month of brave (is anyone else doing this by the way, or am I the only one mad enough?!)

Actually it has been really good and I think Eleanor Roosevelt might have definitely been on to something when she said we ought to do one thing that scares us every day. It certainly does seem to make for interesting times.

So, for those of you who are curious to know how I’ve been getting on here are my ‘brave’ highlights from this week:

• I took part in a film for London’s Literature Lounge, reading an extract of my latest novel Dear Dylan whilst being filmed with various light projections being beamed upon my face! It took me years to read in public confidently so reading to the camera was definitely a challenge for me. But although I was dead nervous beforehand I had a great day and it was a fantastic experience.
• I wrote a poem and started two others (see previous Month of Brave blog for what an achievement that is!)
• During one of my lunch breaks this week I made myself go off exploring rather than beat my usual well worn track to the nearest coffee shop. I ended up in a derelict East End warehouse that had become a temporary home to a photography exhibition. The photos on display were fantastic and I have now enrolled on a photography course for next year.
• I met up with two other author / writing coaches whose paths had crossed mine online. One of them, Amanda Hampson was over here from Sydney and it was fantastic to discover how much we all had in common. The other was Jacqui Lofthouse, whose own blog had inspired me to embark upon a Month of Brave. The ‘brave’ part of our meeting was that I have decided to launch a range of downloadable products for writers – coming to this website soon!

• I have also made the momentous decision to self publish my novel Dear Dylan. I did have a traditional publisher for it but they had been messing me about a bit so what the hell – why not go it alone again? In my role as self publishing editor for Writers’ Forum magazine I have witnessed so many self publishing success stories it’s been very inspiring. And what better time than a ‘Month of Brave’ to make that decision?
• And my final ‘brave’ act of this week? I am going to publish one of this week’s poems on this site. As you will have seen from my previous ‘Brave’ blog, in doing this I am overcoming a lifetime of insecurity and poetic doubt, not to mention the post traumatic stress counselling (tee hee). It’s called ‘xxx’ and it’s only a tiny one, but at least it’s a start!

xxx

Like fireflies our texts

Flit through the ebony sky

Every x a spark

Falling to earth to warm our hearts

Like bonfire embers upon the breeze.

Miss Quote

Oh dear.

I’m afraid I’m going to have to interrupt my ‘Month of Brave’ blogging to tell you of a travesty of journalism that makes Jan Moir look like John Pilger.

For three days of the week I work in a part of London that is achingly hip (or maybe just ‘aching hips’ judging by the tightness of the men’s trousers).

I work in Brick Lane in the East End and East is currently the new West, innit?

You can’t pop out for a skinny-mocha-soya bean-latte-ccino without bumping into a pop star (the other week I saw Mika launching his new album from an ice cream van, which was like, totally rad, man) or tripping over an art display constructed out of like, rubbish and signposts and snot and stuff.

So the other week, when I was waylaid on the way back from Tescos – sorry The Big Chill Vibe Bar – by some ultra cool media student types asking me if they could interview me for their like, magazine I was only too happy to oblige.

They told me they were doing a special 1994 tribute edition and would like to ask me some questions about what I thought of the nineties.

I happily took the trip down memory lane and only had cause for a niggle of doubt when they got me to sign some kind of disclaimer at the end.

But they had been taping our conversation so I figured nothing much could go wrong.

Wrong!

What follows are their questions followed by my real answer and then the answer they actually printed. The title (and I honestly kid you not) is “How Do You Feel About, You Know, current Events and Stuff?”

Do you like house music or beery guitar music?

Real Answer: Beery guitar music. I did once go to a House club back in the 80s – I think it was called the Mud Club – and the owner used to stand by the door wearing a kaftan. He was a bit of a twat really.
Printed Answer: House all the way. I go to this club in London called the Mud Club, it’s really underground, and the guy that owns the club is always at the front door wearing a kaftan. It’s really cool but also kind of naff.

So no Britpop for you?

Real Answer: I loved Britpop – I was an Oasis girl, definitely not Blur. Once I went to see the Channel 4 show The White Room being filmed and afterwards my friends and I got into the VIP bar and met Oasis. My friend told Liam she thought he was cool. He told her to f**k off.
Printed Answer: It’s OK. My friend and I met Oasis once when they were on The Word. We snuck into the VIP bar afterwards and went up to Liam and Noel and said, “I think you’re really good!” Noel just went, “Fuck off!”

How do you feel about the rise of “ladette culture”?

Real Answer: Ah yes, I remember that. The likes of Zoe Ball and Sara Cox falling out of bars or tripping up the aisle clutching bottles of Jack Daniels.
Printed Answer: Me and my friends are into it. We drink pints and Jack Daniel’s and love hanging out in the pub.

As I said at the start – oh dear!

Month of Brave

I was reading author and writing coach Jacqui Lofthouse’s excellent blog yesterday and it has spurred me into action.

Inspired by the Eleanor Roosevelt quote, ‘Do one thing every day that scares you’, Jacqui has decided to follow this advice for a month, making sure that every day she does something that nudges her out of her comfort zone. Already a week into it, she has seen some amazing results.

So I have decided to follow her call to action and will report back on my progress on this blog.

If you like the sound of being scared witless every day for a month then please feel free to join in and post your results on this site too.

Tomorrow I am going to begin my Month of Brave by writing a poem.

Now this might not sound like any great shakes to some of you reading this – ‘What about bungee jumping or watching Strictly Come Dancing’ I hear you cry. I know some poets who can trot out a perfectly respectable stanza in the time it takes me to sneeze – but writing poetry scares the hell out of me.

Like that great poet Phillip Larkin, I blame the parents – or more specifically my dad, whose feedback on one of my first serious attempts at poetry has scarred me to this day.

It was back in my angst ridden teenage years when I was going through a period of insomnia. As it was before the time of the internet and the joy that is late night facebooking I turned to poetry to pass the long lonely nights. And what better way to deal with your problems than to write poems about them, eh?

My poem on insomnia was called, ‘This Wolf Called Night’ and it started with the immortal lines:

Howling at the moon

It stalks into my room

This wolf called night.

And it got much, much worse, trust me.

At the time however I had thought it pretty damned cool. And had shown it proudly to my dad.

I remember there being a long pause after he finished reading it – in my naive, ever hopeful teenage mind I had imagined it to be the type of pause that is usually described in novels as ‘awestruck’ or ‘silenced in the face of literary magnificence.’

You can imagine my shock therefore when he eventually uttered the immortal words (add your own sarcastic Irish accent for full effect):

‘Jesus Christ, what the hell are they putting in the water over here?!’

My poetry career was over before it had even begun.

But I continued to love poetry from afar – attending spoken word events and occasionally scribbling an elicit line or two of my own on the back of a till receipt – before remembering my dad’s harsh words and throwing my words to the wind.

So what better way to start my Month of Brave than by having a serious stab at a poem – and if I’m feeling really brave the following day I might even publish it on here!!

A strange and Troubling Take on Life…

How tedious. A young homosexual pop star dies and a Daily Mail hag hack takes the opportunity to indulge in a bit of gay bashing.

In case you haven’t seen the internet storm currently raging around Jan Moir’s article on Stephen Gately’s death allow me to fill you in.

Entitled, ‘A strange, lonely and troubling death…’ Moir argues that there is nothing natural about a 33 year old man climbing into his pyjamas and going to sleep, never to wake up again.

Oh yes there is, Ms Moir, if the man in question has a congenital heart condition.

But Jan is obviously on a mission and despite admitting in her column that Gately’s post mortem showed that he died from acute pulmonary oedema (a build up of fluid on the lungs) she seems intent on linking this with his ‘sleazy’ gay lifestyle.

Forgive me for appearing a little naive here, but how in God’s name can being gay somehow cause pulmonary oedema?

But according to Moir this is not the only ill gay partnerships cause. She goes on to cite the recent suicide of Matt Lucas’ partner as another incident ‘raising troubling questions about what happened’ to Gately.

Eh?

So heterosexuals never kill themselves after the break-up of a marriage then?

Of course, this type of ‘journalism’ is not new to the Mail. I remember several years ago they published a piece by another bile oozing old crone – this time making fun of the former Northern Ireland secretary Mo Mowlam because she had put on some weight.

Mo Mowlam was actually suffering from cancer at the time but had wanted to go through the trauma of her treatment with a bit of dignity and minus a media circus, so hadn’t told anyone.

I can only assume that Jan Moir is not a parent.

Her crass lack of respect for Gately’s grief-stricken parents is astounding.

She ends her piece with the line, ‘the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see.’

I would suggest that the only thing oozing and seeping right now is the poison from Jan Moir’s pen.

Shelf of Dreams

Several years ago, when my first book was no more than a twinkle in my biro’s nib, I attended a workshop on becoming a professional writer.

It was a day long workshop in central London and crammed full of useful advice for would-be writers such as, ‘don’t worry, rejection isn’t personal’ and ‘Catch 22 was turned down by 2,457 publishers before it was eventually accepted.’

My favourite moment of the day came when the workshop leader asked us to close our eyes and picture what writing success would mean to us. She suggested picturing book signings, television interviews or our names at the top of the Times Bestsellers. I pictured a bookshelf full of books, I assumed all written by me.

Now I bet you’re thinking, I know what happened next, she went home and built a bookshelf just like Kevin Costner built a baseball pitch in Field of Dreams whilst whispering enigmatically, ‘If I build it they will come.’

Not quite.

However, a couple of years later I did purchase a very nice self assemble set of pine shelves from Argos. And I did put it together myself.  Although I didn’t whisper, ‘If I self-assemble it, they will come.’ It was more like, ‘Oh bollocks, where the hell is screw A?’

Anyway, I made the shelves.

And I wrote some books.

And, just as I had pictured in my visualisation of years earlier, the shelf began to fill with books bearing my name – some of them even in German!

But then something strange happened. Something I hadn’t forseen in my visualisation.

My marriage broke up and I became a single parent.

And my writing career suffered a bit of a setback.

So I decided to set up a small coaching business called Finding the Plot in order to put everything I had learnt to good use and help other writers and hopefully provide my family with some financial security.

One of the more recent services I offer at Finding the Plot is editing. Last year I edited many novels by other writers. And this year they all seem to be being published.

One by one, copies of these books have been sent to me by their authors to say thank you for the small part I played in helping get them into print. And one by one these books are joining my own on my Argos shelf of dreams.

It never occured to me back when I was starting out that some of the books I visualised on that shelf would have been by other writers. But I am so, so pleased that they are.

Sniffer Dogs

A couple of weeks ago I had coffee with a friend and she told me all about a nightmare she is currently enduring.

My friend works in the same office as her boyfriend – and a woman who clearly wants to bed her boyfriend.

Every day she has to endure this woman’s blatant come ons to her partner and every day she has to keep her mouth shut and retain her cool so that she doesn’t appear a ‘neurotic girlfriend’.

Meanwhile, unable to show anything like as much restraint, the other woman flirts and coos with her man with gay abandon.

I call these kind of women ‘sniffer dogs’. Sniffer because thats what they like to do around other women’s partners and dogs because…

I sympathised with my friend over bucket-sized mugs of cappuccino, wondered out loud about why these types of women have no respect for the ‘sisterhood’ and offered good, constructive, coach type advice, such as snap the silly cow’s stillettos and stick her head through the shredder.

Then today something horrible happened. I learnt that I have a ‘sniffer dog’ of my very own to contend with.

My boyfriend has a female friend who lives in another country and who regularly emails him.

Now I’m pretty laid back when it comes to this kind of thing and didn’t think too much of it until one day, a couple of months ago when he expressed some concern at why she was emailing him so much.

An alarm bell sounded in my head – but it was more of the pocket travel clock variety than a full on siren – so I let it go.

Then, about a month ago she came over to Britain and I met her for the first time.

She was as nice as pie (bullshit pie as it transpires, but at the time I was won over).

But today I happened to see a selection of the emails she has been sending my boyfriend (of five years) and it was the verbal equivalent of eating Death By Chocolate with a syrup chaser.

Her pet names for my boyfriend are, Mr Gorgeous, Mr Handsome and Mr Charming. And although the emails are full of the kind of news that any friends would exchange, a sticky seam of schmaltz runs throughout all of them, declaring my boyfriend to be the most gorgeous, cheeky, talented man who ever lived. Which of course he is – but there are some things only a girlfriend is allowed to say.

My boyfriend for his part has done absolutely nothing to encourage this – waxing lyrical about the joys of life with me in every one of his replies.

But to some women the existence of a girlfriend / fiancee / wife means nothing.

The most infuriating thing about this whole sick-making incident is the fact that even after she met me she was straight back online emailing her ‘Mr Gorgeous’ and hoping that maybe they could meet up before she went back home.

I’m not writing this blog in the hope that she’ll read it – she is so self obsessed I don’t think I even registered on her radar.

I just wanted to let off a bit of steam.

Am I naive for thinking that us women should stick together and respect each other’s boundaries?

Am I stupid for thinking that she was nice?

R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

Last Sunday I had to stand behind a ticker tape emblazoned with the word RESPECT.

It was even in capitals.

And I wasn’t at an Aretha Franklin concert.

I was actually watching my son play football and the tape was there to remind me not to run on to the pitch and beat up the referee / opposing team coach / opposing team players.

My son is twelve.

The RESPECT barrier is part of a new initiative by the FA to keep parents under control at kids’ football games. You might have seen the recent TV ads starring Ray Winstone as a psycho dad who ends up screaming at an empty pitch. The point being that the behaviour of some parents is leading to a steep decline in those willing to ref or coach kids’ football.

For those of you who don’t have footballing kids this might all seem a tad OTT.

I know that when I took my son to his first ever football game at the tender age of six I imagined the parents all sitting on picnic blankets in the sun – chattering about soap operas while birds chirruped in the background, pausing every now and again to cheer when little Johnny scored a goal / saved a goal / won a tackle.

Dear reader, I was sorely mistaken.

Firstly, due to the football season falling squarely outside of the four weeks we laughingly refer to as summer, there are no picnic blankets. Ever. There are plenty of welly boots and woolly hats, frozen cheeks and frostbite however.

Secondly, there is no chirruping and chattering (apart from the teeth). Instead the soundtrack to the average kids’ football match at any given moment in time will go something like this:

“Kick it Johnny, kick it! No, not like that! Remember what I told you about how daddy used to do it? Oh for Christ’s sake! Don’t you want that new Nintendo DS / Playstation 3 / X-Box?!! Refereeeeee! There was no way that was off-side. Lino? Lino? What the f**k?!! Johnny get up! Clatter him Johnny! Johnny just kick him! Kill him Johnny! Kill him!! Refereeeeeeeeee! What are you sending him off for? Jesus Christ!”

And so on.

Thankfully, my son plays for a really nice team, with really nice coaches and really nice parents.

So the RESPECT barrier was a little bit lost on us on Sunday.

However, in previous games I have seen parents giving the half time talks accompanied by a pack of growling pitbulls. I have seen fully grown men reduce their seven year old sons to tears. And a fully grown woman threatening to ‘smash up’ another woman because their sons were involved in a slightly over physical tackle.

The best part about last Sunday’s RESPECT barrier was the fact that while us parents remained immaculately behaved behind it the (FA approved) opposition team manager was up to all kinds of shennanigans.

Prior to the game starting he was spotted behind an oak tree ,Dick Dastardly style, furtively blowing the balls up to bursting point – a tactic designed to baffle our team and make it impossible to win a ball in the air. It is also highly dangerous. Within two minutes the ref had stopped play, inspected the balls and demanded replacements.

From that moment on the manager was on the ref’s back, screaming increasingly vitriolic comments at him as the game progressed.

The ref was 15. The coach was in his late 40s.

Midway through the second half when my son (who is a defender) won the ball in the box and stopped a shot on goal, the other team’s coach immediately demanded a penalty.

The ref refused.

The coach ran on to the pitch.

My son suggested he ought to try acting his age.

The coach yelled at him to “Shaddup!”

Respect indeed.

Say it isn’t so!

The artist Tracey Emin (she of soiled bed linen fame) has said that she is thinking of leaving Britain if the government bring in the proposed 50% tax rate for those earning over £150,000 per year.

She says she is fed-up with the lack of support our government show artists and that she would be far better off in France (the country that is so supportive of artists it even turns a blind eye if they have a penchant for sodomising 13 year old girls, eh Roman?)

Hmm – I think if I had been lucky enough to have made my fame and fortune from a country that procclaimed my messed up bed to be a work of art I would be keeping my mouth firmly shut and counting my blessings rather than my bank balance.

Still, if Emin does go then perhaps the numpties who revere her might just realise that while they were spending hours deliberating the artisitc merits of her bloodied tampons in ‘My Flange is Wet With Fear’ the emperor had not just performed a striptease but had been streaking with gay abandon through the galleries of London’s East End.