New Year Resolutions

A great idea in one of the newspapers for the New Year. When packing away your Xmas decorations, put in a note to yourself to be opened next year when you get them all out again. I guess the note should be more than just a billet doux. It should say what your resolutions are, and you can then see how well you did.
    Last year I vowed to lose weight and write an Anastasia novel. Well, as of Jan 1st 2012 I have lost nearly 3 stone. I have put on 5 pounds over the Xmas period, so call it 2.5 stone. I've gone from a tight squeeze into size 16s to a fairly easy size 10. My diet tips will follow.
     However I only made a start on my  Anastasia novel. I developed an addiction to This Morning, Food Network, and other daytime fripperies which whiled away the time and whiled away my motivation, too. Then in the summer, my Primula Bond editor told me and his stable of respected authors that the powers that be at Harper Collins were looking to jump on the 50 Shades bandwagon (which I prefer to read as knocking that bloody book into a cocked hat) and totally overhaul the way we've been writing erotica. Actually, it's all to the good. They want less graphic, full on and explicit language and more focus on relationships a la Christian Grey/Anastasia (yes, I know!) but with better writing basically. Now, that I can do, but it wasn't quite as easy as I thought throwing off the shackles of Primula Bond's previous style. So the autumn has seen me writing and then re-writing my 50 Shades competitor and it is, as we speak, with the editors for final approval - or rejection.
  What I haven't told my editor is that if Avon reject it, I have an agent over in the States who is keen to see any Primula work that hasn't been sold over here, so I reckon doors are opening.
  And this has gone on long enough, so I will tell you my New Year Resolutions when I wake up tomorrow morning.  For now, the last day of 2012 is going to be spent watching THE SOUND OF MUSIC and then after various other plans went awry I am going out to dinner with my family to our favourite pub The Old Forge.

Wacky Races

Not a lot of people know you can borrow a wheelchair from the Red Cross for free if you find yourself incapacitated with a broken toe or worse. So my first driving trip last week after ye accident was to Red Cross and thank goodness I did. I can move very slowly round the house on crutches, but am not safe outside. Too slow, terrified someone will stand on my toe, and not very stable. 
   And so to Tesco, with Richard pushing the chair and Edward refusing to do that (though he loves whizzing round the house in it) and on trolley duty. I felt a little like Boadacea urging on her troops as we whizzed round the aisles and gondolas (did you know that's what the lines of shelving are called? My sister Min, who used to manage a supermarket in Jersey and now runs a flying school near Perth, Australia, told me that), avoiding other people's children and ankles. I know my way round, which neither R nor E do, so it was a pretty brisk trot around the supermarket but how funny is it the way people react to someone in a chair.
    I'd put red lippie and a jaunty scarf on especially not to look, you know, properly disabled, but still people glanced, once they'd been jabbed sharply in the shins, with a strange kind of glazed pity when they saw what/who had attacked them. Maybe it was the red lippy, come to think of it.  Did I look like a kind of deranged Hollywood ex-starlet who doesn't know it's not 1943? I tried staring back at them with assumed confidence, or waving my arms around to show I'm not totally disabled, even talking loudly and intelligently, but the more I think about it the more that would have confirmed their first impressions.  A crazy, arm waving, opinionated has-been. Helped along by my son's refusal to come anywhere near me in the chair, and R's breaking of the speed limit as we charged for the tills, indicating that he wanted to get me out of polite society as soon as possible.
    Next challenge: negotiating the posh shop of Hambledon in The Square, and Winchester's world famous Christmas market.
 

Broken Toe

No, not the name of a mountain, or a Cherokee Chief, but a broken digit at the end of my foot, and it's no joke. I am writing this from a prone position on the sofa where I am trying to enforce rest on myself and elevate my foot and get the other end of me, my head, round how much has to be done and thought about when you're a wife and mother. Stereotyped, but true. What they have to take to school each day. What they must do when they come back. Jobs they have to undertake around the house. Making sure they come upstairs to give me a kiss before they go. Trying not to get at the husband, who is fantastic bless him and a natural at dishwasher emptying, washing hanging, children dragooning.  I am still in charge of cooking, though.    
   Viz work, thank the Lord I covered several days last month, and don't have a rigid full time job commuting to London or something, because hopefully I can get away without going to the office until after Xmas.
  So, how did it happen? With a wobbly left leg already, I managed to get my big toe tangled in Ed's draw string PE bag, dragged it halfway across the hall, felt a huge wrench, and when I landed on the bottom step of the stairs I felt no actual pain because of the numbness in my foot, but there was my big toe sticking out sideways at 90 degrees like something out of the Exorcist.
   Long story short, my father took me to A&E as I felt too peculiar to drive myself to Winchester (spots before eyes, nausea etc) and Richard had unavoidable commitments at work. The A&E at Andover, nearer my parents, is very small, new, neat and quiet.  Even so we were there for 3 hours. I have never broken a bone before, despite plunging off horses when I was young, playing hockey, slipping on ice rinks, increasingly falling over in streets, and being chucked off the back of a motorbike on Shepherds Bush roundabout in 1987. But  the X ray showed that now I have a dislocated and broken big toe. So two very nice nurses lay me down on a couch and 're-aligned' the dislocated joint like they do in 'Casualty' and boy did the feeling come back to my foot then. It was shocking, sickening pain, and horrible, but I eschewed gas and air although I loved it when having my babies because it meant staying longer in the hospital.
   So.A follow up visit to the fracture clinic where Iwas shown my own Xray and the wide crack running down my toe, and was told no weight on it for 2 weeks, and probably won't be fully mobile for 4-6 weeks. Apparently a stick glue will form, forming a callus to heal it. Meanwhile, enforced rest. Elevated foot. Lady Muck barking orders from bed or sofa. Crutches to hobble round the house, and I borrowed a wheelchair from the Red Cross for Richard to take me round Tesco. Not a lot of people know that you can do that. It's free! No reason to be housebound, which can also make you agoraphobic. Wheelchairs. There's another story. How people react differently to you, even if you're wearing lipstick. Will talk about that in my next post.  For now, I have no excuse not to get on with writing projects including this blog. More anon!