Array of hope

That’s a wide array of hope, which is what comes to pass when a child is born ;).

This morning started with a quick trip into town to pay some money into the bank, which was depleted from paying for NicCamp food on my card and collecting cash off everyone so I needed to put some of the cash back into the bank. Every single time I go to the bank – at least once a month to either pay in or withdraw cash in my new improved awareness of the state of our bank account state I get asked if I’d like to upgrade our account. We have a very basic account which allows direct debits, a cash point card which has recently been upgraded, without asking, into a VISA electron card, which is fine as it does a check on the balance before every single transaction so still wouldn’t allow us to go overdrawn, no overdraft, no cheque book etc. It is precisely this type of account which has kept me in line these last two years and is also one of the many conditions of our debt management plan that we have no facility for credit. But every month I am offered different accounts, credit cards, overdrafts and asked about switching our mortgage over to one of theirs, this despite telling them we have bad debt and only manage to pay interest only on our current mortgage. I know they are trying to get my ‘business’ but really, it’s hardly worth it unless they want to be added to our long line of creditors – does make me tempted to take one of the ‘financial products’ they throw at me sometimes, just to blow the lot on frivilous things and then say ‘well I did try and tell you!’ when I inevitably default on repayments. We still get at least two pieces of mail declaring us ‘pre-approved’ for secured loans each month too. 🙄

I dropped Ady and the children off back at home and headed over to Ali’s. Ady has been listening to Christmas music in his car for the last week or so already so I listened to some too, hence the blog title. First time of listening to it this year and it had me in tears as usual with it’s noone being forlorn for a spell of two bit.

Ali and I headed off to our Writers Retreat Day – my fourth such day in the last year. I’ve never really blogged about them but they are something I get huge amounts out of on many levels. In much the same way as I do at Reading Group (ooh get me with my adult literacy attending both reading and writing groups :)) I often feel my ‘uneducated’ status quite heavily. At both I tend to zone out slightly when there is highbrow talk of books they have read, genres I am unfamiliar or plain not interested in and references to things I don’t understand. It’s taken me a long time to make peace with that element of myself, to not feel inadequate when I’ve not read the Shakespeare play being referenced, or seen films being talked about in reverential terms or to even be ok with the fact that often I’ve not even heard about some of the things being talked of. I don’t think I had a fantastic education – it was basic state secondary at which I did medium-well with a bias towards academic stuff coming heavily from my parents to whom I was a ‘bookworm’ said in faintly derogatroy terms being the only person in the house who ever read anything for enjoyment, but my actual bias probably being towards the things that were squashed out of me as not very worthy. I certainly didn’t shine in any one area. My parents are also fairly uneducated, not very cultured but were very much of the work hard and you’ll achieve mentality and both had their own businesses from my very early childhood, which they both did well out of materially but I doubt either of them would presume to claim any level of satisfaction or even great enjoyment from.

I’ve pondered what exactly I was doing with myself when everyone else around me was doing all this reading and film watching and the only conclusion I can come to is that I was busy. One of the reasons I nearly got kicked off my A level courses was that I was also working 30 plus hours a week alongside full time studying – something fully expected of me by my parents – 2 seven hour days a week (Saturday and Sunday) were spent working for them in their restuarant from age 14 and from 16 when I started A levels I also worked at B&Q for 3 hours a night Monday to Friday. Somehow I fitted in the other reason I nearly got kicked off my course around all this college and working, which was hardcore socialising with nightclubbing 3 nights a week, pubbing the other 4 and fairly frequent all night staying out at my boyfriend at the time’s flat. When I left college I continued both the crazy working hours and the crazy partying, with very little time leftover for sleep let alone reading Shakespeare or well respected poets. By 20 I had a mortgage and a retail management career so while the partying had stopped the working hours had increased to fill the gaps – there is a whole generation of TV shows that I never watched simply because I was never sitting down infront of a TV – things like This Life, Cold Feet, shows I hear other people my age talk of fondly simply were not on my radar.

I then went from working 3 weekends out of 4 with 10 hour days the norm let alone the 14 hour plus days we’d pull off during stocktakes, sales and Christmas to pregnant within a month so when I did pick up TV viewing again recreationally it was for Richard and Judy, Ready Steady Cook and The Weakest Link – oh and of course Teletubbies, Tweenies and Zingalong. And reading? Well that was reduced to Spot or Gina Ford really, so while I could debate at length the works of Doctors Seuss versus Green (Christopher, Toddler Taming) the ever elusive french subtitled films or Lord of the Rings the second time round (I missed the first time too, much though I read lots as a child that whole fantasy world stuff never did it for me) wasn’t really on my agenda.

I think looking back the reason for lack of culture and education is that I was quite simply, busy. I was doing Other Stuff. Also there was always that suggestion that simply sitting around watching TV or reading a book was actually A Bit Lazy, which probably explains why both my reading and writing groups feel quite so decadent, luxurious and much though I enjoy them both also make me feel a little guilty too as they are a bit self indulgent, a bit Nic-focussed and probably take me away from stuff I *should* be doing instead. I think the other thing is that I’ve always been a bit crap at doing stuff just because someone else thinks it would be beneficial. I’ll give a suggestion a go certainly but unless it’s intrinsic value is almost immediately apparent to me I’m likely to lose interest pretty quick. And the odd bits of these culture things I have dipped into have utterly failed to grab me and life’s just a bit too short to do stuff which doesn’t delight and entertain and amuse you really isn’t it.

So today I realised that what I always highlight at the best bit of both reading and writing groups is the people, the eclectic mix of people I wouldn’t normally cross paths with that I get to sit and chatter with. And it’s the chattering, the incidental asides and idle catching up with snippets of each others’ lives that punctuates the undeniable enjoyable pursuits of discussing a book we’ve all read, or writing exercises and sharing our work afterwards, with what I really adore about them. I think what I really like, what I’m really interested and endlessly fascinated with is people. The more diverse and different to me the better, what I like to do above and beyond anything else is talk to and listen to people, to share ideas and experiences and dreams and life stories. I don’t want to read what Shakespeare wrote but I’d love to travel in time and meet him for a chat, I’m not interested in fantasy and sci-fi films or books, I’d far rather sit in a cafe and people watch or talk to someone I know about something in great detail.

Anyway, writing group was great, it was with a theme of Fairy Tales so we had various writing exercises based around them. One of mine was a brief to write a story around this plot line:
“A tiny fairy child no bigger than a thumb is born. They are ridiculed but the Queen realises that having a miniature spy is very useful and rewards the tiny child with a lord/ladyship title”
which also had to contain the twist:
“The hero/ine discovers they bear a resemblance to the prince/princess so they swap lives for one day”
chosen randomly by number from a long list.

Next was writing a modern take on an old fairytale, my chosen one was Rapunzel which I enjoyed doing and producted lots of great stuff within the group as we all had fun with that one.

We then did an autobiographical piece where we introduced a fairytale character to a bit of our own life and got the character to help us through something difficult.

We each chose an image from a fairy story – we were offered (non Disneyfied) pictures from Bluebeard, Hansel & Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood and had to answer a series of questions from the perspective of the anti-hero of the story and finally we had to write about an everyday or mundane scenario with a fairytale twist of a character coming to either help or hinder the situation.

We had our usual bring and share lunch, which was less successful than normal for me today with about 15 different varieties of cous-cous and chickpea based produce and not a lot else. I ate french bread, lots of it! It was as usual a good day which I came away from feeling I had been productive and gained some ideas for writing, some of the stuff I worked on I may well try to do more with, but as usual that will feel like something too indulgent to be spending time on when there is ebaying to be done, children to feed, general martyrring of oneself to attend to ;).

I sang along to more Christmas songs all the way home and arrived to find a very peaceful household. Scarlett had been doing hama beading and Davies and Ady had had a puzzle fest. Clearly getting everything all accessible worked wonders :). They’d also spent some time playing with the bantams, watched a film, done more puzzles, played a Simpsons game online, done some drawing on the aquadraw mat where apparently Scarlett was doing writing and learning how to spell Mummy, Daddy, Davies and Candle. She’s into the idea of reading and writing lots at the moment with plenty of observations of words that rhyme or have the same letters and sounds in them. She told me David Tennant made a good doctor the other day because there were sounds the same in David and Doctor 😆 Scarlett painted my nails and generally fussed round me insisting on having a (very diluted with water) glass of wine when I had one and sharing my bowl of peanuts.

Davies carried on puzzling with Ady but did come and sit with me for the end of X Factor and started to watch Family Fortunes, which he was surpisingly good at. 🙂 We finally chased them away to bed around 830pm but then when I went upstairs to say goodnight to Davies he was sitting up in bed with ‘I can read with my eyes shut’ And sounding out whole sentences beautifully, so I stayed with him and helped him with a few more pages. He has suddenly clicked with the whole thing I think – amazing to see if actually happen after about 3 years of thinking he’s on the verge of it with knowing letter sounds. He is now totally capable of sounding out a word and working out what it says, seeing the patterns of rhyming words in Dr Seuss so using that to help decode stuff but above and beyond all else he is enjoying it and doing it because he’s decided he wants to read, which frankly can be no better reason in the world to do something. I promised to sit with him tomorrow with any book he likes for as long as he wants and do more, assured him how very proud I am of him for getting it but mostly just establishing that he is proud of himself and pleased with it, which he is. I’ve long said I can see D & S learning to read together and I can still see that likely to be the case as she is similar in levels of enthusiasm and wanting to do it. It’s great 🙂 :).