Prozac or prayers?

There is nothing worse when you're depressed than being told to pull yourself together. The illness is all consuming, the black dog, a thick blanket smothering everything, even joy. And it can descend when you're 'supposed' to be happy, like when you've had a new baby, or your life looks rosy every other way.
  Since joining Twitter I've had snippet conversations with interesting, inspiring people who really do have reasons to be down, but are intent on helping others. My story is no way as deep as some, but I still have one and have sympathy with others who have it and are afraid to admit it.
   I think I was prone to depression or at least melancholy even as a child. I can remember the mournful thoughts from earliest memories. I was third of four children, picked on and teased because I was skinny and serious. While my sisters got into trouble of various sorts, I kept my head down, studied, achieved, was head girl, got into Oxford, sang soprano - but somehow it was never quite enough for the family. Or so it seemed.
   I remember some moments  in my first year at Oxford when I sat in my lovely room in Turl Street, listening to voices and footsteps rollicking past, and hiding from the knock on the door. Why? Low grade depression. Pressure of being surrounded by brilliant people. Nearly dropped out, but didn't, and bizarrely, in my third year when I had finals and was dumped by a longterm boyfriend, I was really happy. Why? Because a gorgeous first year made me feel beautiful again. That sounds shallow, but it worked.
  More seriously I became v depressed as a single mum. The usual symptoms (though I didn't know it) of waking early with thumping heart and feeling of dread. My little boy came in wearing his school uniform and said, 'Mummy can you do up my top button?' I stared at him. Couldn't even do his button for him. Realised I needed help, for his sake, as well as mine. Took him to school and went straight to my GP who realised I knew what I was talking about, and prescribed Prozac.
   Some say you can be addicted, but I was only on it for a year. But in that year the sun came out. I likened it to being a boat being pushed gently off the shore into the ocean, calm seas, not storms. I made plans. Sold my house, moved my boy and back to London (see previous blog - it didn't pan out as I planned, but at least I had planned), got in touch with his father and saw them grow close. So much more.
   What I'm saying is recognise it. Tackle it head on, before someone close to you suffers. And don't dismiss medication. It's not for everyone, and some react badly. Don't come off it without guidance. But when it works, boy, for some of us

 it really is the answer.

 

Stabbing the Rain

This is the cover of my collection of short stories. Available on Amazon in e-book and print. Enjoy!

Single Mum to Host Mum

This is random in the sense that it's not chronological, but although I want to pursue those earlier memories of single parenthood, I've been deflected to write a little about how to beat this wretched recession by having lodgers. In our case foreign language students.
   The little boy who I dragged to London aged seven was now 19 and off to do an art foundation course. We needed money to pay for his fees and accommodation and brutal as it sounds we now had a double room going begging. We could put his two little brothers in together to release the little back bedroom and take in lodgers! Now this scheme is anathema to most people who wouldn't dream of sharing their house with a stranger. But needs must when the devil drives and it's actually as easy as pie. I had done it before, when as a single mother I did it, when G was little, in my wee house in Andover. I had two lodgers, swiftly but carefully vetted by me, always male, and it was fantastic. They helped with the mortgage, put up shelves and bunkbeds, even babysat sometimes, and buggered off back to their own families at weekends.
Not so foreign students, who can stay for up to six months and need food and conversation. it's not a job for the chronically anti-social or those who are married to a chronic anti-social. Most wives could do it, very few husbands, but mine is great and I've often left him having a convoluted conversation about corporal punishment or the finer points of cricket with a pair of bemused Koreans. Or, just occasionally, a very handsome Spaniard..
 

Streets not paved with gold

My intro to Twitter has had me wandering up and down all sorts of highways and byways, in and out of people's life experiences, and in particular one today has struck me, about the challenges of being a single mother which takes me right back to the days when I was a single mother with an adorable little boy who didn't meet his father till he was seven. How that came to pass will wait another day, because it's one hell of a story.
This is about thinking that although he was born in Hampshire I felt my real home was London. So when he was nearly 7 we moved back there, back to the place where I had been footloose, fancy free, and indeed where I got pregnant in the first place. I assumed my lonely single life would magically change just by being in the big city. In Hampshire all my friends were married - although 20 years on they are all, without exception, divorced.
   My little fourth floor attic (87 steps) was in Earls Court. £80,000 odd in 1995. My God, last time I looked it was selling for £400,000 or so. Tiny, studio, two bedrooms carved out of it, a floor bowed in the middle, leaking roof whenever it rained. Worse leaks for the neighbours beneath whenever I used the washing machine. I  hoped it might become a kind of atelier love nest, perched as it was above the District Line, rattled as it was by the vibrations of the Piccadilly Line deep below the ground. And located as it was right in the middle of Earl's Court , then an affordable slice of South Kensington full of rangy South Africans, but probably now tarted up out of anyone who isn't an oligarch.
   But actually life as a single mother was not as I'd envisaged when I returned to the haunts of my carefree youth. Because it meant finding not only good local schools for my son G but also childminders to fetch him after school, as I was working full time. I cringe to remember two of those childminders, total strangers, one an Italian grandmother living in a weird kind of garlic-flavoured shrine off Redcliffe Gardens where you had to push through endless tinkling curtains to get to the hunched figure of your son doing his homework at a vast mahogany table large enough to lay out your grandmother. Another was the single mother of a vast child who lived at the top of a council block on North End Road, and that's where G got his first taste of computer games. Eventually I found a nursery called Pippa Poppins in Fulham Road which was a kind of oasis of trad calm and efficiency. Amongst other amazing services such as providing hotel accommodation soley geared towards kids, it picked up your child from school, took it back to the yellow painted house near Fulham Broadway, gave him tea and supervised his homework. A lifesaver until I got a job opposite our flat and was able to walk to the school to pick him up.
   If you're a single mother in London you can't just nip on impulse to the City to have champagne with your exceedingly rich, unmarried, childless mates from university, because you must first get a babysitter. You can't just mooch down the Kings Road shopping because you don't have any money. You can't bring a man back to the flat because he's likely to be accosted by a little ruffle haired boy waving toast at him and demanding, 'Are you going to marry my Mummy?'

 

Unusual jobs for boys

Is university the right or only answer? The debt is bad enough, but the job prospects after graduating are bleak, too. If your children aren't going to be lawyers or medics or academics, what is the point? I'm pretty sure my boys are intelligent but I'm not sure they have the bite and drive that will get them to the top of the class. Plus they have their own individual gifts which are still fledgling. Early days, I know. Who can say how they will have developed come year 9 when they have to make their choices? To date Ed hasn't thought about a career, though I'm sowing the seed of a paper round for starters. Or running a babysitting cartel. He could make a killing on a New Year's Eve..Dom wants to be a saxophonist, but resents the practice that that entails. I think he can start off busking in the town centre when he's old enough, and see what response he gets.
    As for the jobs I would like to see them doingas adults, well, I've raised eyebrows by saying it would be fun to have a hairdresser in the family, and definitely a chef. Whatever they do, it needs to be training while earning. Everyone mocked the McDonalds degree, but why? The hospitality trade seems to boom even as we are all cutting culinary corners at home (see later blog about feeding six people on half what a London couple I know lives on), so surely that is one area to explore? Hard graft, but restaurants bars or hotels seem to be the way forward in these hard times. The Hotel du Vin, my favourite chain, do training courses I believe.  Being a baker, or cheesemaker seems pretty cool.  Another idea is graphic interior design, if that were possible without the architectural/mathematical side of things. Designing people's interiors on the computer. Ed would like to have a Saturday job stacking shelves or working in a furniture emporium, so he can arrange the goods himself.  Taking words from the wise eldest son who is doing well as a graphic designer, Gabes reckons that everyone should be computer savvy and particularly in web design because everyone and every business needs a website now and that is not going to change.
   What about erotic writing, I hear you ask? Er, no. It's a hobby that barely pays, although watch this space for Primula's new offering later in the year..
  
   

Lego Lady

So, hair. At my age it's probably the single most important aspect of grooming. Get it wrong and the rest of you looks wrong, too, either in the mutton sense or in the old hag sense. Get it right and you can shave years off with no invasiveness whatsoever.
    As a child I dreamed of having long flowing locks, in line with my general princess fantasy, but was repeatedly subject to the pudding bowl treatment either from my mother's visiting hairdresser or my older sister's scissorial experiments, which included an unintentional Vidal Sassoon assymetrical chop which caused hilarity when I returned to boarding school after the holidays.
    When I was about 14 I discovered henna, and started growing it, and lo, it looked fab. Pre-raphaelite, in line with my angular face, and it grew right down to my bra strap. My mates and I used to plait each other's hair to make it kinky and frizzy - again, how to fill the long winter nights at boarding school. So apart from a disastrous perm in my third year at university, and it falling out when I had my first son, my look was long auburn hair. At last I was a princess. I made a secret vow to myself that I would keep it long until I got married, so that I could wear it down, and what did I do? Wait until I was 38 to get married, and allowed the hairdressers to put it up. Why do they always make you look like Princess Margaret on your wedding day? Why did I let them? I pulled some tendrils out, but looking back at the pictures I wish I'd had the nerve to let it all hang out.
   But I was, at last, a princess.
   So what now, at 51? Well, it won't do now to keep it long. There are some quite funky stripes of grey there which I might keep, though not 50 shades of it, but it is getting thinner and since also losing 3 stone last year it makes my face look even thinner. For my 50th birthday party I had it cut into a just below chin length bob, and got the hairdresser to tong it for the party. Cute, and cool. But it grows quickly, and I decided to give it one last blast until last week, when he cut it off again to a bob. So long as I keep it tousled, I think that'll do.
     Now it's the colour. I also decided to grow out the red colour, which inevitably turns rusty orange if I don't take care of it, and see what it's like au naturel. And emerging from the roots is the dirty mouse colour of my childhood, but highlighted with grey. When it all grows out, if it isn't too witchy, I think I'll get them to put silver highlights in. If you can't beat it, join it.  But how exactly would that look?
    And then Dommie, my 9 year old, gave me a Lego lady to look after. 'This is you, Mummy,' he said. And she was! She had kind of Veronica Lake hair with a side parting and a lovely wave down her cheeks to her neck, but it was russet with two glorious grey streaks on either side of her face. Cool, funky, age-appropriate.
    What will my hairdresser say when I go in with my Lego lady and ask him 'I want that one?' Watch this space to find out his reaction!

 

Writing Dialogue

Dialogue is the hardest aspect of fiction to get right, realistic and relevant. Yet it's the pivotal mechanism that gives life to characters and drives along the narrative and plot. It's essential in a compelling, attention-grabbing novel to avoid producing wooden, pompous or dull conversations which jar on the reader, argue with the character's personality, and contribute nothing to the development of the tale.

One key task for any aspiring writer is to read how other writers successfully reproduce dialogue in their novels. I would add a second task. I find, as a TV and movie buff, that listening to dialogue particularly in soap operas is incredibly enlightening. I have no truck with critics who claim that soaps are trash. They are a tremendeous, fun example both of great acting and of great script writing, and the spring board for some very successful TV and movie writers.

In a soap the action is brought to us entirely through the reactions and words of a cast of characters. The drama, arguments, fights, accidents, love affairs, tragedies, comedic moments, have all come through those characters' personae and through their mouths. If you listen carefully there are rare occasions when the script writers don't get it entirely right and you are entitled to criticise and to learn from that. One example that always strikes me is how many dramatised mothers call their children by their name, instead of say 'darling' or 'honey'. I'm not talking about soppiness. I'm talking about natural affection. It's rare in my life to hear kids addressed without some kind of endearment. My own kids have all manner of names, some of which I'm trying to shed now that they're pushing teenage-hood. My sisters and I were only addressed by our full names when our parents were angry. The rest of the time we were known as The Buns or The Pickles which in itself is a long story..

Ditto couples and lovers. Watch how they address each other on screen, and ask yourself if that's realistic. ~Why not be an armchair critic!

Sometimes after watching a film or programme I have been particularly moved by I find myself writing dialogue like charactersI have just been watching. If I was teaching a creative writing course, I would perhaps get my students to write a scene in the manner of say EastEnders or Silent Witness or Mad Men, or Downton Abbey.

So, back to the writing. The fourth exercise I recommend to writers is to read out loud the dialogue they've written - or with a very patient friend - so as to see if it's realistic. But the final exercise for writing dialogue came to me today as a brain wave after my nine year old son described his English test. It occurred to me that it would be a brilliant exercise to give aspiring writers in a workshop scenario, where there's a classroom feeling and also the opportunity to see how others achieve it and what they think of your efforts.

Basically take the outline of a story or a play, a film, perhaps a newspaper article. It doesn't have to be particularly dramatic or interesting or creative or artistic. In fact the challenge would lie in taking one that wasn't obviously fascinating, such as a financial report or a scientific discovery. Because the exercise is then to bring that piece of writing, that chunk of information, to life. Using only dialogue. This could be done as an interview, say a radio interview, but that risks coming across as too stilted or formal. Nevertheless, it would be a good vehicle for regurgitating the information in a different format. Another way would be to have two or three characters talking about the incident/contents of the report/scientific discovery, telling each other what it involves, what they think of it, what it might mean. They could be personally involved, or they could be observers.

Either way the challenge is to take a story or factual report written as prose, and turn it into a conversation.

See my own short stories 'Stabbing the Rain' on Amazon. Short stories are often thought of as more musing, introspective prose pieces, but perhaps because of my love of televised drama, I tend to use dialogue a lot because I can hear the characters. I can also see them on screen, perhaps in a Hollywood version of my work. With Julianne Moore playing me!

Well, we can always dream! Here is the link to my stories:

http://tiny.cc/rkqaow

New Year Resolutions Part Deux

To make it onto supermarket shelves firstly with my latest erotic work which I won't name until it's accepted and paid for by Harper Collins. Then to finish the literary novel I started last year and persuade my agent to read it and submit it. To see my short stories 'Stabbing the Rain' do well on Amazon or even in America.
  Not to shout, especially at the kids. Maybe at the telly occasionally, like a Grumpy Old Woman.
  To get to France.
  To sort out my hair. Am growing out the colour to see how grey it is. I haven't seen my natural colour all over since I started henna'ing it (is that a verb) when I was about 14. To remain grey if elegant and cool in the manner of that French woman who runs the IMF - Christiane Lagarde? Otherwise to dye it again, brazen harlot colour or claret colour, or silver streaks. Work out if I want it long enough to wear up or cut it in bob, again in maner of Christiane Lagarde.
  To keep the weight off and remain around 9 stone 8 ish.
  But to eat out more.
  To have more interesting resolutions next year.
  To write my blog more regularly.