Which is The Right Corner for The Label

People think living with other people, like your parents, for example, is pretty simple, or you're going to argue because of huge issues like political differences or something. In my experience, the bits where we've really struggled are the small things. For example, making a bed. To me, the label on the mattress sheet goes at the foot end of the bed. As far as I can remember, I have always been this way. Mum assures me we have always put them at the head end. To me, this feels, quite frankly, completely unnatural. 

Thankfully, because we both make out own beds, don't share sheets (partly because I'm back in my childhood single and my mum has a double so we can't even do so by accident) and once the sheet is on the bed you can't tell anyway, we're just letting that one go, but there is one thing I can't make my peace with. If there are buttons instead of press studs or snaps on the bottom of the duvet cover, she fastens them with the button on the outside. What savagery is this? I mean, take out the idea that buttons could then get stuck on something, anything, everything, and I say that as someone who goes to sleep with a duvet one way and wakes up with it another with alarming regularity, but also, they're cold against your feet, and the press studs go on the insides, so why wouldn't the buttons? And it's not like you have to butcher the sheet to get them to do it. When I help out making any of the other beds, I do it wrong, because there is no way to get my head around the buttons on the outside of the duvet. It just doesn't seem comfortable or like it would make the end of the duvet look tidy. 

Strangely though, when I first got here it was more a frustration, from both of us, that I couldn't figure out where the tea in the jam jar was caffeinated or not, and I couldn't keep in my head for long enough if the tea caddy was decaf. As it turns out, jam jar is decaf, tea caddy is caffeinated, but I had to ask for weeks (actually, I've just read back over that after making a cup of tea and realised I'm completely wrong. Jamjar, morning, caff-caff, tea caddy is for afternoon, so decaf) because in my house, most of the tea lives in it's own packets, most of it is loose-leaf and decaf is a dirty word only used when you get really decent decaf coffee and a problem with insomnia which means no coffee amounts of caffeine after two in the afternoon. 

The idea of a laundry schedule is also baffling to me. No, I don't do certain kinds of laundry on certain days, I do my laundry when I have the time or when I realise I'm running low on the number of clean pairs of pants or socks I have in my drawer because I don't want to go sockless or commando.  One of my big triggers is when I do a few loads on laundry in a day and have to have it on an airer because the thing just occupies far too much space in my flat. If I had a tumble dryer, I would do the laundry more often. Especially in winter. I miss having a tumble dryer in the winter because I used to pick out the clothes I was wearing, run to the laundry room in halls and give them a quick spin, then show them up my jumper to take them back to my room still really warm. That was university though and it was before my halls decided they could make more money out of their students by charging them for the convenience of using a washing machine and tumble dryer. People wonder why students get a reputation for going home to their mum's with their laundry or being the great unwashed - look at how different it was when we had free access to the laundry room to when they started charging and I wouldn't be surprised if students didn't use the laundry to save money, especially in expensive halls like mine. Anyway, breathe and refocus. 

I don't really know why these are the things we've clashed on, me and my mum that is, and it's not as though they have been blazing arguments, but there have been other things like where stuff can be stored - that's been more tense - but there have been a lot of little things we have needed to compromise on those things, and we're all having to bend a little bit. It's not something that comes easily, because I'm used to living alone and my parents are used to not having any 'kids' living at home since I moved out at eighteen and my brother moved out last year. 

It's not all bad though. My mum is trying to convince me breakfast isn't evil which is pretty damn good for me because even though I'm having breakfast at my desk whilst working, I'm actually eating Weetabix in a morning and it makes me less grouchy and means I snack less. Granted, I've had to accept that in this house, we have 'normal' milk. My parents drink dairy milk, and it was way too much of a faff to try and find a dairy alternative that I can tolerate in the places that they shop. Also, it seems a lot more expensive for the alternatives I like, so I'm just having to go back to dairy milk... Not the chocolate. She's also making sure there's salad in the house for either on sandwiches or next to them, which is good because when I try to do it for myself the ingredients often go off before I've finished them or I get bored of them and the same happens. She's also making more vegetarian food so that she doesn't have to cook two things, and that's been pretty cool because she's been trying different recipes and that's been pretty awesome.

What I'm having to remember about this is my parents are doing me a big favour. I want to buy a flat in London and that is by no means easy. I want to save for more of a deposit than I currently have and living with my parents is a lot cheaper than living in London. They're also reminding themselves of that and also that this is the most time we've spent together since I was eighteen because when I went away to university, I didn't come home for the summers. I loved being in London, so I just stayed there and worked and explored. When I graduated, I thought I had my life pretty sorted. I had a job, I had a partner, I had a place to live that seemed to be everything I needed, so I planned to stay. The place to live went wrong, the partner was clearly wrong, and the job wasn't ever supposed to be long term, but even with all of that, I never thought seriously about coming back to Manchester. I thought about it for fleeting moments when everything felt like it was going wrong, but it never really takes much for me to fall in love with London again. I just need to head over to the city center or Chelsea or any of the markets and I remember that everything is just a train ride away and this has been my home for nearly ten years. It made it really difficult to make the decision to move back to Manchester, even temporarily and for a purpose. Even though for a long time we've not been able to go out and do things and it'll be a while before it feels safe to spend time with my friends the same way we did pre-COVID, it was really hard to decide to be physically so far from the place I see as my home and the most of my friends who are there, too, even though I know the move will mean better things. 

Despite all of this we're making the most of it, and it's already been quite a lot of fun. We're planting vegetables and herbs and that's been a lot of fun, we're working on the garden pretty well, too, to make it a bit more veg patch friendly and also to get rid of some of the plants we're not that enamored with. We've got fence lights and a bridge that looks like it's over watery pebbles and a new table, chairs and sun umbrella. 

We are spending more time having meals in the garden as well, which is nice. We've got plenty of citronella candles to keep the hoverflies away, but we are still getting a lot of bees and a couple of them have needed to be rescued from the grass, but we've rescued them and then sent them off on their merry way and that's been awesome. 

So, we're doing okay, we're keeping it together and we're getting on pretty well, and when we've had bad news, and there has been a lot of it about recently, we've been together to face it and that's been easier, but I'm still excited for the next few months and saving towards my dream flat in London. I want to be back home as soon as I can and create a place that can be my little utopia, and a space to hang out with my friends and for us to be able to write together like we have in the past. 

Charlieswrite

Say Something Positive For God's Sake

In a voice of snark usually reserved for my anxiety, when thinking about what to write for the blog today something told me to write something positive, so I guess I will. 

Last week was a long old week at work. In fact, we've had a few long old weeks at work. It's been a long old month or so planning the temporary move back up to Manchester and it's been a damn long lockdown and everyone is feeling it, so when my mum asked me to get up early on Saturday morning part of me wanted to say, are you kidding me? I want to spend the whole day in bed reading my book and enjoying the fact I have nothing more to do with my life than that, but when I asked why, Mum said we could either go to an outlet or to the market. I love the market because there are sewing places and wool places and all sorts of other things. There's a place that makes vegan black pudding - made with black beans, I believe - and here's the place where my granddad gets his word searches and he's still hibernating, as my gran says. 

Anyway, Mum said the outlet trip was probably more urgent and I agreed, so off we went. We did our normal thing of having a good giggle whilst we were waiting in the line to get in and then there were signs everywhere saying everything is an extra 50% off. We thought there was no way this extended to literally everything, but it did. I got a couple of new pairs of shoes, both are vegan (which I like because the idea of any sneaky animal products in my footwear is gross. I do, occasionally, still have leather shoes, but at least they're not hiding where that came from...) one pair was six pounds and the other was LITERALLY four pounds fifty. I wasn't just thrilled because everything was stupid cheap though - I was also thrilled when I got home and tried on my new shirt - pale pink, three-quarter sleeves and totally gorgeous for work - and found out that, even though I got a fourteen to accommodate 'the girls', this shirt has extra, not visible buttons in the chest area to prevent them looking like they are making an escape attempt as they often do. It's such a simple fix, but it works so well that I nearly cried. Mum enjoyed the clothes shopping, too, but was even more thrilled when we got home and got her a greenhouse off Facebook market place and it was only down the road, so my dad went off to get that. 

It took a long while to get down, but the guy getting rid of it was getting rid of a pile of other potting shed related things, and my mum has got pretty into her vegetable growing now, so it was like a little treasure trove and we spent today sorting the garden out ready to have the new greenhouse rebuilt once my dad has built a timber frame for it to sit level on, getting rid of some plants, re-potting others and generally enjoying the weather. After waking up and feeling terrible, it was great to feel like I could actually do something useful. 

Even though I'm in pain now, because gardening is a lot for the back, and I have irritating scratches up all four limbs and a blister plaster on my right middle finger (wind me up and you will see it) I'm tired in a good way, and all of the happy endorphins were buzzing around from the effort and being outside, and getting to sit back and realise that, whilst the garden is not "finished" (as if it ever will be) we've made a lot of progress and we've got a lot planned and the means to push it forward, so that felt really positive, and in turn that makes my mind a happier and quieter place. 

I had wanted to get on with mask making this weekend or writing some more, but it's been pretty full-on and I am beat, so I'm glad I learned to lay off myself a little about doing everything and just gave myself the space to feel a bit better and be positive. 

Charlieswrite

When Anxiety Takes the Wheel

I have written on here about my anxiety before, and I know I have said that how much I sleep affects it. Honestly, as soon as I'm tired, it's like I give up the will to fight against it and all I want to do is curl up in a ball under the desk and pretend that everything that is hard and everything that hurts isn't there, because then it would be easier, wouldn't it? Thankfully, I'm stubborn, so I think I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I have actually done that. 

I've been meaning to get some things done for a project for weeks. It got a green light pre-COVID and I really wanted to start making a move on it, but it's a fear thing. It's always something that I have thought I shouldn't have to make myself do, but the problem with that is that if I don't make myself do it, it just doesn't get done, so after a couple of good night's sleep (and a trip out this morning to the shops where I bought a couple of new pairs of shoes...) I decided to get on and do it, because, for once, the anxiety is more of a buzz in the background and there's something in the foreground yelling at it to be quiet, and though that's not as good as it can get, it's good enough for me to try and get on with things I have wanted to be doing, so today I'm going to spend some time looking at creating websites and see if I can get to the stage where I'm happy enough to dive into the other project I want to do, which requires me to be able to do all of this stuff with at least a limited degree of success. Or I might get too tired, take a nap and go back to reading my book. Ruling nothing out at the moment. 

Well, no, that's not true. I am ruling out walking around the house in my new heels because they are pretty and comfortable, but I would likely forget I was wearing them and have to chase Teddy outside to stop him eating soil, and would ruin the shoes in the process or I would forget I was wearing them, walk into either the kitchen or the bathrooms and ruin the flooring and that is more than my life is currently worth, so they just need to sit and look pretty on my bed until I can find somewhere else to put them until I find a time to wear them, which may be a long while off yet, unfortunately. 

Charlieswrite

Write Crap or Face the Consequences

Once upon a time I had a love of something called Write or Die to put the prod in my productivity. It had a setting called kamakaze (I have never been able to spell that) that would delete your text word by word after a short grace period if you weren't writing and it was great at keeping you writing. There was also this one that wasn't greatly effective on me because it was someone playing a violin (actually, no, it sounded bigger than a violin) but it was out of tune and they were scratching the hell out of it and it was just a whole pile of uncomfortable. The problem with that one for me was that it felt like nails down a chalkboard feels like to most people. I know it's not physically possible to experience pain within your brain because there are no pain receptors up there, but it felt like it was causing physical pain up there and the creative process would jam to a grinding halt until way after the sound stopped, but to stop the sound, you had to write, so most of the time I just bashed at the keys for something unintelligible, highlighted it when the thing stopped and started typing over it. This is one of those moments where the means friends you had back in the two thousands would give you a thumbs up and say cool story, bro, but in the nineties, I probably used it as a wrong use of the phrase and what? 

Basically, Charlie, why the flip are you telling this story? If you have followed me through anything NaNoWriMo related before, you'll know I'm not a planner. I don't do planning much, if at all. I scribbled down a list of blogs I could think about writing this month and it was maybe nine things, but I've used about two of them because I've just picked up things as I've gone along. That's what I'm doing tonight. I spent too long in the bath washing my mane of hair (that is quite short these days, for me anyway, so I could probably dry it to look like a ginger lion's mane) and reading VOX, which was what I was originally going to write about tonight and time ran away with me and I was thinking, argh, crap, I need to write my four hundred and forty-four words before midnight and have time to post a blog and I have a to-do list as long as my arm of things I haven't even started doing yet and I REALLY WANT TO SLEEP! 

But like I did the year I started writing Fairies, actually, the month I was writing Fairies, I thought just write about writing. Just write about something you know and something you love and the rest will come. Inspiration for Fairies took three days to arrive. The proper inspiration for the sequel took nearly ten years; thankfully this blog came along a lot quicker. 

If this teaches you nothing else, let it teach you to get up, get out whatever you write with and just make a start. Write about the landscape outside of your window, write about the people on the plane up in the sky above you, or write about what the fairies at the end of the garden are up to. You can't edit what's not on the page, so just jump the first hurdle first. 

Charlieswrite

Today Is a Day Where I Don't Want to Write

Today has been a really tough day. Most of the last couple of weeks have been tough because work has been long and busy and tough and that makes for some really tough days, but today was tough because last night, I couldn't sleep. 

Usually, when I can't sleep it's because of a running commentary of anxiety in my head, but last night there was a pain in the bottom of my guts which I could only imagine was because I'd eaten something that upset my system. It's happened before, and it can happen because of stress (and there's been a lot of that going around in our office recently) but it's also down to food sometimes, so maybe I ate too much dairy, maybe having tomatoes in my sandwich every day is irritating my stomach too much - I don't know. The fact that I'm feeling much better today on that front means I don't really care so much, but I do care about the fact that I'm completely exhausted. Trying to function has been difficult because it's like a grey fog has descended over me and my brain hasn't been working at the speed that it normally does. Even trying to write this has actually been quite challenging. At least if you're trying to walk, it's just one foot in front of the other, or even running, I can normally cope with that, but anything, where I have to use my brain, takes a long while and also kind of hurts. I get a weird physical pain like hitting a wall, and it's everything I can do to stick to the goals that I have, but I'm doing it because that wall is going to be there the next time I'm running, it will be there. When I next get to take on a half marathon, it will be there and when I FINALLY get to London Marathon, that wall is probably going to be there on the Embankment and I'm going to wonder how the hell someone built that overnight because it wasn't there before and it won't be thereafter, but it'll be there for me to try and get past as it will be for many other runners, but hey if I can do it now, I will be able to do it then because I can eat all of the sugar that I want to and then it's just one foot in front of the other and get moving after the person in front of you. Follow that person, following the person in front for a few thousand people, who are following the lead car or the time car or whatever it is which is leading the runners out of East London, around Cutty Sark and Greenwich, over to Tower Bridge, back through the Isle of Dogs and every beautiful view around Canary Wharf, back along the Embankment, into Westminster and around to finish on the Mall after a quick wave to the Queen rounding the last corner near Buckingham Palace. There might be a few times when I hit that brick wall across a twenty-six point two-mile course, but hopefully, by then I will be physically and mentally ready to get myself around the course no matter how many brick walls I run into. 

Anyway, I wrote, I did my four hundred and forty-four words for 4 the words, and now I'm going to tuck myself into bed with my book and try to recover enough brain power to function through tomorrow because I have catching up to do. I'm going to drink my tea, read my book, and tuck myself into bed, then hope that tomorrow goes a little better. 

Charlieswrite

Love The Ones Your With

There's only so much I'm allowed to say about my job on here because I work for a sensitive bit of the Civil Service, but I really wanted to talk about people today and the people in my team made me want to cry this morning. They're awesome and inspirational people and I'm so proud of them it makes me want to burst. We had a lovely call where we talked about how busy we were, but how we were all there to support each other, but also how proud we were of each other and the successes that we have had. 

I have a similar group of people that I'm involved with in the Twitter Sprint Leads. They are amazing people and so committed to helping others to complete their projects and keep going through one of the strangest times we have experienced in our lives. We only communicate by email, but we're all so open and so honest with each other about what's happening in our lives, and they're met with so much support. We try and keep our Twitter page super upbeat and encouraging, so our personal troubles are kept away from that, but between us all, we deal with our personal crap and keep that going as best we can. We try and support our participants as well, whatever they are going through. 

I know, as a woman, it can be easier for me to say I love my team. Sometimes people think it's weird, sometimes it feels weird, and when it's a group of your peers, it can feel weird to say that you are proud of people, but actually, it's nice to have a gush about people every so often. It's nice to say I love the people I work with because they are all kind, inspiring and supportive women who make it easier for me to drag my butt out of bed and be committed to my job. I love what I do, but there would be plenty of occasions where it would get me down if it wasn't for the team I work with. 

If you do nothing more today than tell another person how much you appreciate them, I'd call that a really good day. 

Charlieswrite

I Am Literally Going to Explode

No, you are really not. 

This isn't the blog I was going to write today, because there have been a few posts which have got kind of snarky (not by me, for once) about being careful about language, but then today I was Twitter-ing in my lunch break (def: Twitter-ing; lurking on or reading Twitter without actually Tweeting) and came across someone who said they were "literally lynched" over something to do with the whole Rowling issue. First of all, can I say I'm so done with the debate over this woman. I am in the group who think her views are abhorrent. I admire what she did to build her writing career, I admire her success and I know she's done wonderful things for a lot of charities with her money, but the woman herself has gone down in my estimations considerably because of what I see as poisonous views about a minority community. Agree with me or disagree with me, but I'm kind of done reading about it. 

Anyway, there was a thread that seemed more positive about Jacqueline Wilson. I loved her books growing up. I used to watch Tracey Beaker on the TV when I got home from school and I thought it was fabulous. Girls In Love was amazing because of the issues it dealt with. The fact that during part of the series it talked about young women being pressured into sex was probably the first time in my young life I had ever heard of that as an issue and it made me more aware and, in some ways, I think that kept me safer. Then there was this tweet from someone who said they were "literally lynched" and I'm wondering how a ghost is operating Twitter. Maybe I'm being a bit oversensitive to the use of the phrase because this morning I read the account of a black man who was attacked in America and the white supremacists who attacked him tried to lynch him, and the detail with which he described it shook me, but I would hope that on any day I would tell that person to stop being an idiot. Literally is not an adjective to say something is more extreme. Literally means this is the purely factual account of something which happened. The word means using the original meaning of a word. Lynching does not mean having your ass handed to you on Twitter, but it is the hanging of a person. It's a mob rule punishment, and very often, the only crime is being seen as less than another person or being black. Sometimes, lynching is because a person is presumed to have committed a crime, but that's not what is happening today. 

I have read that black men are being found hanging in trees in America and it's being deemed as a suicide far too quickly, with little investigation as to whether this was lynch mob activity. The account I read this morning stated that the police had attended, spoken to the white supremacist attacker first and then told the black man who was attacked and obviously injured by the attacks on him that they would not be arresting the men, despite many witnesses being present and filming the moments when the white supremacists shouted to one another for a noose, threatened to kill him, said they would break his arms and called him multiple racial slurs on the basis on his skin colour. 

Whilst the author of that tweet may not have read that account, it's completely ignorant to say you were "literally lynched" from the comfort of your computer. There are certain words we must be more careful about using. Literally is a big one. Lynched is another. I've spoken before about stepping away from using the word commit when we talk about suicide and tweeted about stepping away from Aspergus when we talk about Autism. 

This is not about a prohibition of language. There is space for their use within society, but that use must be careful and it must be considered. When people say things like, please be mindful, they're just asking you to try and think about what you are saying. If someone prompts you to remind you, it's not meant to be malicious and they're not saying it believing you are being malicious, most of the time anyway. It's really hard to remember that certain language is really hurtful. Six months on from becoming an ASIST Life Saving Caregiver (Suicide First Aider) I still slip into saying "committed suicide" because, for twenty-six years of my life, that's how these things were said, but correct yourself and, kindly, prompt others. No one is asking anyone to be perfect, but I will ask you to try. I want to ask everyone to do better and the step that you take towards that is to try. Your efforts might not feel important, but they really are. 

And yes, I was fuming when I wrote this. 

Charlieswrite