Writing Prompt:

Write a story or poem inspired by a famous painting.

What I've learned this week: The Importance Of Keeping Fit...

The Importance Of Keeping Fit! 

As we have all been told, it is important to exercise while on lockdown in order to keep yourself fit and healthy.  The problem is that I didn’t do much exercise before lockdown.  In fact, my life wasn’t really all that different before lockdown to now, except that I went to coffee shops and ate less.

In the first week of lockdown, I started doing online yoga again for the first time in months. I also did the ‘soothing stretching exercises’ recommended by a video I found on Amazon Prime, aimed at ‘those with chronic pain caused by conditions such as fibromyalgia’.  These exercises appeared very gentle but the instructor was secretly an evil witch – I woke up the following morning feeling like I’d been wrung out by a beefy Victorian washerwoman. That instructor clearly had a short, fat poppet with badly cut hair and glasses in her back pocket.  Twenty minutes of these so-called ‘soothing stretches’ managed to inflame my entire body (and not in a good way). I spent the following three or four days hobbling round like a professional hypochondriac, convinced I’d got Covid-19 as every part of my body hurt.

However, a fortnight later, I started going for walks.  Counter-intuitive as it might seem, spending all my daylight hours, and quite a few night-time ones too, typing at a laptop tends to make me a tad stiff. Who knew?  Mother Nature was also being either exceptionally kind to the poor creatures confined to their houses and gardens, or exceptionally cruel, depending on your perspective. The weather was gorgeous.  My husband had been taking daily walks down to the local park and reservoir since lockdown began, adopting sensible social distancing measures of course.  So I decided to accompany him.

About ten minutes into every walk, my back started hurting.  I was sure I’d seen one of those van Tulleken twin doctors proving that exercise could cure chronic pain better than pills, and that was on TV so it must be true.  Therefore, I knew I only had to persevere and the pain would ease up.  

It didn’t. It got worse. So I came up with a genius idea: I would take the painkillers an hour before I went on the walk, giving them time to start working, and that would keep the worst of the pains at bay during the walk. If I did this for a week or so, I figured that my body’s natural alignment and muscle strength would return and I could stop taking the pills. 

After one week, I went for a walk without a paracetamol or ibuprofen crutch, and guess what?  My back ache returned with a vengeance!  Traipsing downhill through the wood near our house, I felt as if a goblin was walking behind me and hammering on the muscles below my waist with a lump hammer.

                                             

Well, it just hasn’t had enough time to work yet, I thought.  

A week later, I was mentally refreshed – the bluebells and wild garlic in the woods really are stunning, and the reservoir is a thing of true beauty under a bright blue spring sky, and the people who were keeping a safe distance away from us were all friendly and cheerful.  Who’d’ve thought a pandemic could be so pleasant?  So I stopped taking the painkillers again.

Rumpel-lumphammer was back, this time adding extra resonance by gently plucking my sciatic nerve with a pair of pliers.  As I lumbered down the hill, tripping over tree roots and cursing the van Tulleken twins ('Damn the van Tullekjen twins, however east-on-the-eye they might be! Call themselves doctors? They're nothing but bloody charlatans! And I bet this tree trunk is covered with coronavirus!), my knees made a sound like an old grandfather clock winding down.

So, here's what I achieved by two weeks of exercise:  

• hay fever due to the bluebells and wild garlic 
• a limp worthy of the hero of a 1940s romance 
• I’d ingested more painkillers than I would normally take in six months.  

So now I’m back to a ten minute limp down the canal path when no one is about, and fifteen minutes a day of ‘Yoga For extremely-unfit-middle-aged-beginners-with-fibromyalgia-and-the-kind-of -bodies-that-just-won’t-do-what-they’re-told  With Adriene’. Adriene is a woman whose video-ed yogic-contortions have impressed me in the past, though I am a long, long way from emulating them. She’s an American and talks too much which often makes me very tense with irritation (which is the opposite of what yoga should achieve), but I’ve learned to distract myself by counting the number of clichés she can pack into one yogic position (I counted twenty-eight this morning).

                                                      

Don’t get the wrong idea. I do sometimes move away from the laptop.  I have a frequent compulsion to bake cakes and talk to my little nephew by Google Hangouts, and I am teaching a couple of private tutees by Skype (yes, I am now able to use ‘multiple’ online video calling apps), and there is housework (which P is doing most of at present because I am in such pain – when I iron, I have to prop myself up against the table and take a ten minute breather between each item). 

And there is of course the ten hours of procrastination I have to fit in each day.

Well, someone has to do it!

Self-Isolation Recipes: Lime and Coconut drizzle cake

Lime and coconut drizzle cake

        

Ingredients
4oz/100g self raising flour, sieved
4oz/100g caster sugar
4oz/100g softened butter or spread (I used Flora)
2 eggs
zest of one lime stirred into flour
a handful of dessicated coconut 
For drizzle:
two limes (but one would do), juice squeezed into a cup
roughly same volume of caster sugar (or icing sugar) as lime juice
a few dessertspoons of canned coconut milk


Method
1. Grease a loaf tin and line base with baking parchment
2. Beat sugar and butter together until light and pale
3. Add eggs and beat into sugar mix
4. Fold in flour and lime zest
5. If you are using an electric mixer, you could probably just throw all ingredients into bowl and 'whazz it up', as Jamie Oliver would say.
6. Stir in the dessicated coconut, if using. I planned to use this, but discovered that my dessicated coconut was more than a year past it's use-by date, so I decided against it!
7. Bake in a moderate oven (mine is a fan oven and I put it on 180 degrees) for around twenty minutes, or until a skewer stuck in its middle comes out clean.
8. While it is baking, heat up the lime juice and around the same volume of sugar in a pan until sugar melts. Add the coconut milk. Stir well. Make sure it is hot before drizzling. If you want to test the syrup to see whether it is sweet enough, take a small teaspoon of it and let it cool on the spoon before tasting, to avoid burning your mouth.
9. While cake is still warm, tip it out of loaf tin, prick top all over with a fork, and spoon the lime and coconut syrup over the cake, letting it soak in.  Use up all the syrup.
10. Once cool, sprinkle with icing sugar if you want to.

What I've been reading this week: Haven Wakes by Fi Phillips

Haven Wakes by Fi Phillips


I first became aware of this novel, which is aimed at the 11+ audience and published by Burning Chair Publishing, when Fiona mentioned it on the Open University's Write Club Facebook page. I downloaded it onto my kindle partly out of a sense of writerly solidarity - I like to support new authors - but also because I too am writing a fantasy novel aimed at the same age-group.  I didn't even find time to read it until recently but I wish I'd started sooner as it turns out to be a lively, entertaining, imaginative read.


                                                   



The novel is set in a future version of our world, and begins excitingly with a mysterious shadow creature being chased and almost caught by two thugs and their mean, magical master, Kendra, who is searching for something.  As the narrative progresses, we discover that the magician is being employed by an even scarier magician, Winters, who is involved in the murder of the CEO of Haven Industries.  The murdered man's nephew, Steve Haven, is left at an unpleasant boarding school while his mother goes off to search for his missing father.  While his parents are gone, Steve is caught up in an increasingly mysterious and exciting adventure involving a magical place, Darkacre, attached to his own world but unseen by most 'workadays'.  He meets numerous fascinating and often frightening characters and learns things about his parents and his world.

The novel is the first in a proposed series, and it certainly caught my attention and sucked me into the narrative quickly.  Fi's style is fast-paced, compelling and readable - there are very occasional minor 'glitches' (too many characters are described as 'bone-thin', for instance), but only the sorts of things that people like myself, currently studying creative writing and engaged in a great deal of beta-reading, would notice.  The plot is original and there are some brilliant moments - I loved the fire imp, and Hartley was a wonderful character. There is genuine suspense and the action sequences are well-paced and well-controlled. Dialogue is plausible and helps to develop characters and move the plot along.  I haven't read the whole novel yet, but so far it has gripped me completely and I want to read on. I would have loved it when I was twelve or thirteen, and I am definitely enjoying it even now at my advanced age.

I hope Fi does write the sequels and I think this is a series that ought to find a loyal readership as I think it would appeal to any young reader who likes adventure, fantasy and intrigue, well-drawn characters and imaginative ideas.


You can find Fi at http://fiphillipswriter.com/

RATING:
Haven Wakes

**** 

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way

Writing Prompt

Look in your fridge or fruit bowl or food cupboard.

Find ONE interesting item.

It might be a bit of cheese with a mouldy rind, or a single squashed grape, or a bowl of leftover mashed potato, or a whole perfect melon, or a slab of steak, or a jar of homemade jam.

Anything.  In any condition.

It just has to be one single item.

Jot down everything this item makes you think of - memories, associations, connotations, the obvious and less obvious.  Let your thoughts fly free.

Then write a poem or a story inspired by something in your notes.

What I've learned about writing this week: Self-isolation is just another way to procrastinate

Writers are famous for procrastination.  When we claim we have 'Writer's Block', we are just attempting to glue a fancy label on what is basically an unwillingness to just get on with it.  As every writer knows, deep down in their hearts, the only way to overcome 'Writer's Block' is to write.  To write anything. To write gibberish. To warm up the brain and wait it to find the right gear.
          People who don't write often think writing is easy.  After all, it's sit-down, indoor work. Most writers work at home, close to the TV, close to the fridge and the toaster, close to their beds...!  And it is certainly true that it is a much pleasanter way to pass your time - for those who enjoy it, at least - than emptying bins, serving in a cafe, laying bricks on a building site, filing, or sitting in a boring meeting.  [Though, to be fair, most writers earn so little that they often have 'day jobs' anyway - and then there are children to look after, caring duties, housework, dogs to walk, meals to plan, errands to run, etc].


                                                      



          Having said that, many people would consider the idea of sitting at a keyboard (or with a pen in your hand) for hours at a time to be tantamount to torture.  My niece would feel she was receiving cruel and unusual punishment if she was told she had to write a story.  Most of the teenagers I teach clearly consider any sort of writing, including 'creative writing', along with any sort of reading, to be a form of child abuse. I once left a good job so I could focus on my writing for a year, and I remember a colleague asking what I was going to do. When I told her, she looked horrified and said 'Oh, I couldn't stand that, just sitting around all day at a computer. It would drive me bonkers!'.  It's horses for courses.
          Which reminds me of something P once told me. He's a keen chess-player and he used to belong to a local chess club. A fellow member once told him that, while he was playing a game, an elderly man observing them shook his head, pursed his lips and said:  'Oh, I couldn't be doing with sitting there like that, for hours on end. My mind's too active for that game!'
          Even though you can sit in the warm and not get rained on, writing is mostly hard work.  It's surprisingly physically-demanding - typing for hours, particularly when you're not a touch typist, can be very draining.  And concentrating for long periods of time is exhausting.  I know this sounds absurd, but it is an act that is mostly wearying and unsatisfying, but there are moments of glorious bliss that make it worthwhile.
          Nevertheless, the proximity of the biscuit tin and the kettle, the ease with which you can make yourself a quick slice of cheese on toast or watch an episode of Futurama, does make it difficult to focus.  The lengths writers will go to avoid writing should give you an insight into how difficult it can be.  When the lockdown began, I think that most of my writing friends and acquaintances were, like many people, shell-shocked and in a state of low-grade anxiety that sapped their ability to work on creative projects.  But this has worn off for many of us now, as we adjust to the 'new world'.  Yet, while some people are now using their extra time to dive into their ongoing novels or write some poetry or keep a proper diary which they'll eventually turn into a fabulous piece of CNF (Creative Non Fiction), I'm still distracting myself with other things.
          Any other thing, in fact.
          I have no shortage of things I should be writing.  A coursework deadline is fast approaching and I have several half-written stories that I need to finish and select from.  I'm also supposedly doing the Write Club's monthly writing challenge, but I only managed a rubbish poem for February and a very short story for March.  I have piles of reading to do for the course as well as preparing for the 15,000 word End-of-Module piece due in October.  But do I do these things?  No.
          I began my attempt to focus by trying to catch up on all the posts on the Masters course online forum.  People had posted work needing feedback, or completed activities from the course material requiring contributions to discussions, and I thought it would be a good idea to work through the forty-odd unread posts on my screen and respond to as many as I could.  This was fine except that naturally I kept being sidetracked into non-writing-related conversations, mostly about Covid-19 and self-isolation.  And that's before I took a look at the MA course Facebook page, or the Open University's Write Club Facebook page, or the Write Club Forums where there were pieces of work requiring feedback.  For someone who doesn't think of herself as being social-media-savvy, I sure do seem to spend a lot of time on it!
        I've also been spending large chunks of every day texting, emailing, phoning and even video-calling friends and family, much more than I ever do normally. As you know, I'd never video-called anyone before lockdown!  People must be sick of talking to me.
          Anyone who has read this blog over the past few weeks will have an inkling of the other things I've been doing - inventing ways of using up leftover food, making children's toys out of toilet roll inner tubes, sorting the various documents on my various USB drives into folders (takes longer than you'd think), doing 'play' archery and wakeboarding on the Wii machine, preparing the lessons for my private tutees (whom I am teaching by Skype) in unnecessary detail, inventing new household chores and then beating myself up psychologically if I don't complete them, watching TV, looking at things unrelated to my writing on the internet (for instance, I spent an hour earlier working out the chronological order of the Roman Emperors for no good reason at all).  And writing this blog is a major procrastination activity.
          Twenty years ago, I began making a hand-stitched patchwork quilt.  I don't know how to make a patchwork quilt. No one has ever taught me, I've never read a book or watched a programme on it, and I don't have a sewing machine. I have no idea what possessed me. But nevertheless I began making this quilt.  After a few weeks, I got fed up and put it away for several years.  Since then, it's been dragged out of the cupboard once or twice over the years for a few weeks' sewing until I get sick of it again.  Guess what I've started doing this week?

                          

So, I might end up failing my Masters course but I will have a patchwork quilt made out of bits of old shirts, so that's ok...

What I'm reading now: Alice Munro

Alice Munro Dear Life

In an effort to focus my reading on the Masters course I am doing, I have started to read this collection of Alice Munro's short stories, and though I'm only halfway through, I felt I had to write about it here.  Munro is a Canadian author who won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, and she is generally considered to be one of the finest writers of short stories in her generation.  Dear Life was published by Vintage in 2013, though several stories in it were first published elsewhere.

                        

                        

I had never read any Alice Munro stories before I began Dear Life, though she had been recommended to me as a brilliant short story writer several times.  What I have discovered is that I wish I'd started sooner. There must be something in Canada's atmosphere that produces terrific women writers: Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, etc.  She reminds me a little of Carol Shields and Anne Tyler in her style, though she has her own distinctive way of writing.
          What struck me immediately was how 'old-fashioned' her writing is. She breaks many of the 'rules' we have been advised to follow on the Masters course.  For one thing, many of her stories are characterised by having omniscient narrators who have an overview of events, but who don't take it upon themselves to comment too much on what is happening.  There is a certain psychic distance established between reader and characters that might be off-putting in a lesser writer.  She does a great deal of telling, whole pages passing by with barely any showing, but her telling is so astute and sensitive that it just doesn't matter. It didn't matter to me, anyway.  When she does use dialogue, it is spot-on; when she tells us what characters are thinking, she tells us just enough.  There is a lot left out of her stories; they are pared down to their essentials and nothing much happens in terms of 'plot'. They focus on the epiphanic moment, and are informed by the narrator's awareness of time passing, time wasting, time running out -  the limited nature of human existence.  
         This all sounds deep and therefore potentially dull, but I haven't found the stories I have read so far to be at all dull.  They have been quiet, thoughtful and psychologically insightful.  The characters, particularly the women, are vividly drawn, each an individual, and she doesn't try to tell us everything about them. She has the courage to step back and tell us just the things we need to know, leaving the epiphany to resonate with us long after the story ends.  These aren't flashy tales; there has been so far no twist-in-the-tail, no whizz-bang experimentation with tenses, viewpoints, peculiar imagery or unconventional forms.  The stories do jump between viewpoints sometimes, often briefly. 'To Reach Japan', for instance, appears to be from the pov of the husband Peter at the beginning, and it slips into the child Katy's pov at the end, but the majority of the story is told from Greta's viewpoint. 'Amundsen' is told in the first person, but somehow even this narrator seems omniscient, like someone recalling a past event from a position of superior knowledge and experience.  But despite the potentially distancing effect of this narrative voice, Munro's characters leap off the page. Even minor characters are utterly believable, their dialogue accurate and convincing, their behaviour plausible and acutely drawn.
      If you like fast-moving plots with lots happening, you probably won't like these stories.  They eschew the supernatural and fantastical (as far as I can tell so far!), and focus on small stories that could happen in the real world we all recognise.  There is a powerful sense of place in them too - most of them set in and around Ontario in Canada. They are simultaneously universal and particular.  There is a vein of quiet humour running through some of them, and an occasional hint of satire, but they don't provoke belly-laughs.  There is a poignancy about many of them, though they make you think about life rather than becoming depressed about life.  If I could write a story half as good as Alice Munro's, I would consider myself to have achieved something worthwhile, whatever mark it was awarded by my tutors on the Masters course.

RATING:
Dear Life 

***** 

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way

Self-isolation stuff to do with kids: toilet-roll holder crafts

Anyone can make stuff out of the insides of toilet rolls.  And those people who bought in bulk in the run-up to the lockdown (fearing no doubt that they would be suffering from dreadfully upset digestive systems due to the stress of self-isolation) will now have loads of cardboard tubes to play with.

SUGGESTION ONE:

Stair Tunnel

Stick a lot of cardboard tubes together to form a single tube long enough to stretch down your stairs. Make one of these per child. Lay them on the stairs (someone will have to be at the top to hold them), then roll toy cars down inside the tubes, racing to see whose car gets down first.  A child on his/her own could test different types of cars against each other.

Warning: the cars can shoot out of the end very quickly and might chip paintwork or even hit someone, so have some cushions at the bottom to catch them.


SUGGESTION TWO:

Toilet Tube Car

Here are the things you need:



Note that the toilet roll tube has had an oval hole cut out of its side.

I forgot to add that you will also need two circles of coloured paper, the same size as the wheels, for the front and back of the car.  You will also needs paints or crayons of some sort to colour in the wheels and maybe decorate the car.  Covering the toilet roll holder with coloured paper makes it quicker to 'colour' it, but your child might prefer to paint it or colour it in.

First, cover the toilet roll tube with coloured paper, starting at the side with the hole. Snip the paper that covers the hole so you can push the flaps inside the tube - this is where the driver will sit.



Second, glue the long strip of coloured paper so it covers the place where the other paper meets (tuck the end into hold).  This strip of paper will bend over the end of the roll, along the bottom, up the other side and should be long enough for you to tuck the end into the other side of the hole.  When you reach the ends of the roll (front and back of the car), slip in the circles of coloured paper to form the back and front of the car.




Third, paint or colour the wheels in any design you fancy.



Fourth, attach two wheels on one side of the car with glue. Leave to allow the glue to set completely before turning the car over and gluing the remaining two wheels on the other side.



Finally, when everything is dry, pop a little driver into the hole.


  

Obviously, there are further decorative embellishments you might add - headlamps drawn on or made with shiny star stickers or beads, doors and handles drawn on the sides of the car, an exhaust pipe made out of a piece of a straw, etc.  I have given you the basic idea, but it can be taken wherever your child wants to take it.  Handy people might want to make proper turning wheels on an axel made out of a wooden skewer or some such item, and a roof to cover the driver made out of a clear plastic lid from some sort of container, or a steering wheel made out a large button, or...well, you get the picture!

There are a multitude of other things you can make with toilet roll innards: people, trees, houses, etc.

                    

[NOTE: You can't make a working hard drive out of cardboard tubes!]

Self-isolation recipe: Leftovers Salad

You can make this with whatever you happen to have in your fridge, within reason, but here's what I used:

• the last few leaves of a Little Gem lettuce, chopped
• six piccolini tomatoes, halved
• a quarter of a large red bell pepper, diced
• a stick of rather floppy celery, diced
• a single large closed cup mushroom, wiped and sliced
• a quarter of a medium-sized onion, finely diced
• half an avocado from a few days earlier, brown bits cut off, rest chopped into bite-sized pieces
• some pink and green grapes, picked off an old bunch that had been in the fridge a while - I picked off best ones and threw rest away as they were too manky (I hate throwing food out but these had been pushed to back of fridge by P and we'd forgotten they were there)
• half a can of mixed beans (not in tomato sauce!) left over from day before
• parmesan cheese, grated
• lemon zest, microplaned (optional)
• black pepper
• French dressing (bought)

All the effort goes into the prep.  Make sure you wash and dry all the veg, and obviously don't use stuff that is definitely going off. However, many things that are past their best but not actually mouldy would work well in this type of salad. Rinse the beans in a sieve.

Mix everything together except parmesan and pepper.  Cover liberally with dressing. Add parmesan and black pepper at the end.

It was delicious, much better than I expected. We ate it with a shop-bought quiche lorraine out of the freezer.

VARIATIONS: You could easily experiment with other raw veg and fruit - courgettes, cucumber, carrot, spring onions, raddishes, peaches, apples, pears, etc - and things like seeds and nuts.  You could experiment with different dressings, and/or make your own.  You might drizzle a little runny honey onto the salad and/or some lemon, lime, orange or grapefruit juice. You could try out different herbs and spices.

This week's Writing Prompt

Write a story or poem inspired by something hanging on, attached to or drawn on a wall inside your house or garden. 

It might be anything - some possibilities:

a picture or photograph, a calendar, an ornament or souvenir, an item of clothing on a coat hook, a kitchen implement, a jar of spice on a wall-mounted spice-rack, a climbing plant or hanging basket attached to a garden wall, a wall-clock, a child's finger painting, graffitti, a paint sample, a dado rail, a mirror, a light switch, a thermostat, a key box, a toilet roll or towel on a rail or holder,a shelf, a wall-mounted cupboard 

What I've learned this week: The TV is your enemy...

Last year, we bought a Smart TV.  It was part of our ongoing efforts to try to update and improve our house.  And, since the Covid-19 outbreak, we are SO glad we did, as without it we’d now be forced to talk to each other and play card games, like we used to during times of national crisis. 

           It's main effect has been to make us recognise the sheer dreadfulness of mainstream TV. We watch Only Connect and University Challenge on Mondays, and flit in and out of Masterchef (trying to cut out the bits where Greg Wallace chuckles with inappropriate heartiness before giving a faux cockernee ‘THAT…is…DEEvine…, THAT is!’, and the shots of John Torode munching food like a cow chewing cud). Occasionally there's a good film on which hasn’t been repeated six times a day for the past three months. Talking Pictures is the only channel I can stand, if I’m honest, and that’s only because I love black-and-white British melodramas starring John Mills, Dirk Bogarde and any child actor you care to mention.  If they showed Bette Davis films, and film noir starring Dana Andrews, I’d watch nothing else. 

               I like cookery shows, because I like food and cooking, but I often find the presenters unbearable. Jamie Oliver, for example, cooks fab grub but his ‘bish bash bosh, guys, whazz it all up in a blender, happy days’ spiel leaves me wanting to hit him with a frying pan.

               One of the programmes I particularly enjoy is Gogglebox, which is a surreal experience – I am being entertained by watching people watching TV programmes, most of which I’ve never seen.  Twenty years ago, I’d never have guessed that watching people watching stuff could be so much more interesting and funny than watching the actual programmes they’re watching. Maybe in the future we’ll watch families watching Gogglebox?

           Different channels do their own specific brand of awfulness, I’ve noticed.  BBC1 is just unwatchable.  Eastenders alone puts me into a coma. BBC2 ties with BBC4 as being my second favourite after Talking Pictures. ITV is full of drama serials which people assure me are well worth watching but the adverts drive me up the wall, and I miss episodes because they’re always changing the broadcasting times.  Channel Four is wall-to-wall public information-type documentaries about the corona virus which leave you gibbering in a corner  - How to Disinfect Your Garden Fence, or Ten Deadly Microorganisms You Didn't Realise Were Lurking In Your Shoe-rack, or Cats: Deadlier than Ebola!... And there are adverts there too!  Channel Five is back-to-back freakshow-TV:  My Nazi Trans Mother, or Cockapoos: The Hideous Facts Your Vet Didn’t Tell You, or Britain’s Top Ten Favourite Serial Killers In Their Speedos.

           So the smart TV has been a godsend during lockdown.  I took out a subscription to Amazon Prime, which I think is great. I’ve watched entire boxsets of several long series since we bought the TV, and I’m constantly finding new things to enjoy. We’ve just got into Tales From The Loop.  Because I’m slow on the uptake, I didn’t realise you could watch stuff like iPlayer, All Four and You Tube for free, so I’m just beginning to discover their delights.  On iPlayer and All Four, I can watch stuff I actually like when I want to (Number 9, Stewart Lee, University Challenge – and the Channel 4 series about RSPCA training, Animal Rescue School,  which was filmed during the year my niece undertook the course so she pops up in the background every so often). And the National Theatre, Globe, Royal Opera House, etc are streaming stage productions into our living rooms now, which means I’m experiencing more culture than I did before I went into self-isolation!

            When the lockdown began, I honestly expected I would get fitter and would do loads of writing.  I intended to eat less – empty supermarket shelves suggested food might be in short supply so in the first week of self-isolation we cut down from two to one slices of toast in the morning, had just a bowl of homemade soup for lunch, and ensured we had modest portions of an evening.  But once we realised the supermarkets had restocked their shelves, and our fridge, freezer and cupboards were overflowing with food, we quickly started slipping into bad eating habits.  When you’re bored, you find yourself thinking obsessively about that box of Jaffa Cakes you put in the drawer at the bottom of the bookcase to save for when you were really fed-up, or the pack of hot cross buns you stashed in the freezer for a rainy day.  Yes, you do – admit it! Before you know it, you're asking your partner to throw another sausage on your porridge and melt some cheese on your fruit cocktail because 'it will only go off and have to be thrown out'!

           I also anticipated going for local daily walks and then doing my daily yoga workout (which I haven’t done for about two years!) and an exercise routine I’d found online.  In the first week, I managed to hurt my neck doing supposedly moderate stretching exercises aimed at people with chronic pain caused by conditions like fibromyalgia, and this triggered two days of non-stop migraine-type headaches that left me dizzy and nauseous, with visual disturbances, convinced I had a brain tumour. Since then, these have returned twice but for a shorter duration, but they put me off the yoga and stretching exercises.  I have been for a few walks, but mostly my exercise has been doing modest amounts of housework and lots of typing!  And of course dragging my flabby body to and from the sofa and the table where my laptop is set up uses up calories. 

           If I continue like this, by the time we get permission to go back to normal life I’m going to be one of those stupendously fat people who can’t get out of their houses without having the walls removed, who lose the TV remote in their rolls of flab, and who can't stay awake for longer than half an hour at a stretch.

           But I’ll be an expert on US box-set drama serials.

                                            

What I learned this week: The Perils of Boredom...

I might be confined to the house most of the time, but I am not short of things to do.  I have Masters coursework to work on, and two chapters I still haven’t looked at properly.  I have background reading to complete. I have the first few months of the Write Club monthly writing challenge to compose (it’s ironic that I haven’t yet contributed anything as I was one of the people begging for it to be brought back!).  I have what feels like a multitude of texts and emails to respond to, and phone calls to make. I have shelves full of books, half-watched dvd-boxsets, all the so-far-unwatched stuff on Amazon Prime. There is also housework, ironing, cooking, several household decoration jobs for which I actually have the materials necessary here in the house already.

Nagging my partner, P, takes up a large chunk of every day.

            So, why then did I decide to cut my hair a few days ago?  I was washing my hands in the sink in the downstairs toilet, which is the only room in the house that has a mirror low enough for me to see my whole head.  The bathroom mirror is just a tad too high so I have to stand on tiptoe and even then I can’t fully see my neck and chin without jumping.  There’s a full length mirror in our bedroom, but it’s in a dark corner behind the door because that’s the only place we could put it, and it’s extremely difficult to see yourself in it without squinting and having to find a torch. So, seeing my whole head without effort was quite a novelty, and I found myself considering my hair in a critical fashion.

               I have let it grow long for the past few years, though I usually wear it in a pony tail or, if I’m feeling glamorous, I twist it up in a hair-gripper-thingy.  I sometimes get the straighteners on it, but I think it looks better with its natural wave – straightened, it reminds me of one of those non-iron ‘pre-crumpled’ shirts that your mum has accidentally ironed.  I have bought several electrical items which have claimed to help people create gorgeous curls of various kinds easily at home, but none have proven satisfactory.  The heated curlers made me look like Shirley Temple, a look not recommended in the middle-aged.  The heated brush, resembling a World War 2 German hand grenade according to P, is unwieldy and I am constantly dropping it.  I find it impossible to use the Mark Hill curling wand, despite watching Youtube demonstrations, as I just can’t get my hair to stay put long enough to set into a curl.

               So, I thought, gazing at my reflection.  I could make it look a bit different by cutting off a few inches and making it into a shoulder-length bob. I mean, how hard could it be?  First problem was that I couldn’t be arsed to go upstairs to get my sharp hairdresser-type scissors, so I decided to use the kitchen scissors – these are huge and designed to cut meat.  P refers to them as ‘the chicken scissors’ which always makes me imagine they are made of chicken bones and sinew, a kind of hideous witch’s torture implement.  They have a little spring on them which sometimes pops out of its housing rendering the blades unusable. Needless to say, this happened frequently while I was hacking at my hair – on one occasion the spring sprang away and landed in the (fortunately clean) toilet pan so I had to fish it out.  Making a mental note to remember to boil the scissors before I next cut up any meat with them, I gave them a quick rinse and continued. 

               The problem is, as anyone knows who has tried to cut their own hair, you get one side to a perfect length only to discover that the other side is a tad shorter.  Then of course, when you try to even them up, you end up making the first side too short, and then you realise it’s harder than you imagined cutting the back, so you call your partner in and ask if he could just cut a couple of inches in a straight line off the back, and he says:

               ‘With the bloody chicken scissors? Are you crazy?’ And you have to glare at him and tell him to just do it.  And of course he ends up cutting the back in a zigzag line so by this stage you look like a punk rocker who’s forgotten the orange hair dye.

              Then you think, Oh, I know what I can do! I’ll layer the hair that’s left – it will look 

fashionably straggly, like I intended it to have uneven lengths all along, once I get the hair-dryer round it.  But chicken scissors, though they cut off quite a lot of hair at a time, don’t do it very consistently. 

Look, let’s just say that after half an hour my hair didn’t look as good as it would have done if an actual hairdresser had done it, and leave it at that…

              

                ‘Anyway,’ I said, bravely, watching P trying to stop himself laughing. ‘No one important is going to see me. It isn’t like I have to go to work, is it? And the neighbours are used to me looking weird.’

               ‘I thought you were teaching your two private tutees tomorrow?’

               ‘Yeah, but not face-to-face. It’s online…’ 

               I realised what I was saying, just as P said: ‘They can see you on Skype, you know. It isn’t just one-way video.’

               So, that’s why I taught my two tutees while wearing a pink chiffon scarf round my head.  I’d considered wearing P’s old black woollen beanie but it made me look like I’d recently done a bank job, so I thought it was the wrong image.  I did try wearing the scarf in various stylish ways, such as tied in a bow round my blow-dried hair in a manner reminiscent of Molly Ringwald in Pretty In Pink (I looked more like Divine in Female Trouble), or in a kind of turban, a look which always looks fab on people like Jennifer Saunders but on me it just looked pretentious – possibly because I’m in South Yorkshire where women just don’t wear things like bright pink turbans. But in the end I wore it in the style of one of the older, more staid members of the royal family.  Utterly inappropriate when sitting indoors teaching a lesson, but I figured that with the headset and mic on top it would be barely noticeable…

               Fortunately, after an initial extremely slight widening of the eyes, my first tutee (a girl) seemed to just accept my appearance without comment, and my second (a boy) was too concerned about convincing me that he didn’t need any homework to pay any attention to his teacher’s head adornment.  I’m now considering making a feature of my headgear during the tutorials – maybe wearing a fedora one week, or a wimple, or a wizard’s hat, or chrysanthemums.  Just to see if they’d notice at all.