Life is a chocolate biscuit

When I was in my twenties, I naively supposed that, once you'd got over a few bumps and knocks, life started to get better and went on that way, blossoming into a soft, perfumed bed of roses by the time you were ready to drift painlessly into the after-world.

Wrong. And how! Which is why I now feel that, rather than landing on a bed of roses in my later years, I have sunk up to my neck in a steaming dung heap! I could cry myself to sleep every night bemoaning the wrong choices I made, the opportunities I turned down, the times I've let people down, the huge amount of money I've wasted through buying clothes to cheer myself up when I've been sad.

Some people can look inside themselves and draw on reserves of strength and courage. Rather than being made of stern, stiff-upper-lip grit, my soul, psyche or whatever is more like a leaky bucket from which the courage seeps as the regret expands. Oh, stuff the similes. I have a sieve for a soul. A sponge for a backbone. A tea-strainer for a spirit. I am not the type from whom burning-building-rescues and Amazon treks are made. When the shit hits the fan, you'll find me cowering behind the sofa, whimpering plaintively, clutching a packet of chocolate digestives, my universal panacea for panic and uncertain futures. I have eaten two today already.

Recently, life has squished me deeper into the smelly stuff. Twice in the last month I have had to ring for an ambulance because Mr Grumpy has suffered TIA's, or mini-strokes. The last occasion was particularly scary because he went blind in one eye, couldn't feel the floor beneath his feet and his left arm went numb. Fortunately, he recovered later in the day, but there is always the worry that a major event is waiting in the wings. (Pass me another chocolate biscuit.)

The other rotten thing that's happened is that poor old Flad is rapidly going downhill. He's thin, weak and has started having 'accidents', so I went out today and staggered back with a bag of cat litter, a litter tray and a scoop. I have suggested shutting Flad in a room by himself at night, so that Charlie, who is a big bully, will leave him alone. We also don't want Charlie to start using the tray. But Mr Grumpy has overruled me and insists Flad should be allowed to carry on sleeping on the sofa "because that's where he likes sleeping." And he won't allow me to close the door in case Flad wants to go out at night. The fact that our poor, doddery old mog is too stiff and weak to use the cat flap hasn't occurred to him.

I give up. I'm too sad to get on with writing my books. I feel in limbo. When we first met Flad, he was a few months old and living wild in the garden, eating the scraps we threw out for the foxes. This was in July 1997, three months after Mr Grumpy and I got together. From being a nervous feral who didn't purr till he was four, he blossomed into a beautiful, gentle, lovely animal who captured my heart. Seeing him decline not only tears me in two, it throws a parallel light on my relationship.

I shall say no more. Another biscuit, please. No - give me the whole damn packet.

A gym slip

Today we had a power cut. Everything went off. I couldn't use the landline and without my computer, I was pacing the garden with nothing to do except a bit of weeding. Having no electricity made me feel helpless. I had my mobile phone, of course, and used that to ring a couple of non-local friends and have a moan. One kindly looked at a website that tells you about power cuts, but there was no mention of one in Uxbridge.

Up and down the road, burglar alarms were shrilling. Mr Grumpy was out. It was 2.15 pm. 'What on earth am I going to do with myself?' I wondered. Then up spoke the voice of my conscience. 'Go to the gym!' it ordered. 'You know you need to. You've put on 12 lbs since before Christmas, your blood pressure is up and you're not walking your 10,000 steps a day.'

I acceded to its demands, put on a pair of black leggings, found a suitable t-shirt and off I went. To my surprise, my swipe card still worked. With great embarrassment, I found myself having to ask where the female locker room was, as I had forgotten. When I got to the ladies-only gym (the mixed one is upstairs and no way am I ever going to display my crinkled old flab before the disgusted eyes of all the muscle-bound studs groaning and grunting as they lift gut-busting weights), I found there was only one other person there, a young woman pedalling away on an exercise bike whilst reading a paperback. Way to go!

I did 20 minutes on the treadmill, then 5 minutes each on exercise bikes and air walker, and then I did some leg presses. 'That will shut you up for a while, Conscience!' I thought smugly.

I needed to get the ring I wear every day repaired, as a stone had dropped out, so I visited a couple of repair places until I found someone who told me to bring it in next week. I passed the dress stall in the market and found myself buying a £10 sun dress in poisonous purple and putrid green (why, oh why?) and then... here comes the big confession... my trainers tugged me into the M&S coffee shop where I counted out the coins I had in my purse (I'd left my wallet and cards at home, in case they got nicked at the gym) and discovered I had just enough for a cappuccino and... oh no!... a thick wodge of carrot cake, for which I have a great weakness.

So I sat there piling back the calories I'd just worked off, while my conscience nagged me mercilessly and told me what a weak-willed wimp I was and that if I carried on this way, I'd never get back to 9 stone again. I sat on the bus home (should have walked the three miles but my foot was hurting in my new trainers) and felt bloated and guilty.

At least the electricity was back on by the time I got home and the freezer hadn't defrosted. I suppose I shall have to go to the gym again tomorrow now, to lose the carrot cake calories. There must be an equation here somewhere: Energy = Marks Carrot cake squared. Or rather, my waistline rounded.

Book overload!

Something went a bit wrong with my Kindle the other day. It wasn't turning on and off properly; if I turned it off, it popped back on again. Weird! So I handed it to Mr Grumpy (my partner, for anybody new on here) as he is Mr Fixit for anything mechanical.

He hummed and hawed and asked me if I had reset it lately. I told him I had (just last week and quite by accident when I hit the wrong button as I was dozing off). "Well, I'm going to do it again," he said. Then he told me I hadn't been turning it off correctly as I wasn't using the Power Off button.

Ha ha! That was my chance to score one over him, which happens as rarely as rocking-horse doo-doo. "It hasn't got one!" I said triumphantly.

"There has to be one, you just haven't found it," he said, in the tired tone of a teacher fed up with explaining something tedious to a thicko student. He turned the reader this way and that; no button. I knew there wasn't. For once, I had RTFM'd (Read The Feckin' Manual).

He gave up. By now, it had finished resetting itself. He gazed at the screen, sliding through page after page. He held it up to his face and squinted at it. "Do you know you've got eighty-five books on here?" He sounded appalled rather than astonished.

"Yes."

"How on earth are you going to read them all?"

"Easily." Three a week... twenty-one weeks' supply. Less if I go on holiday. And some are reference books that I'll only read when I need them, such as How to Format Your Book for Kindle. And there are one or two I may not like and will consign straight to the Cloud, to join The Miniaturist, which I couldn't get on with at all.

Eighty-five books hardly constitute a library. They would hardly fill three shelves. Languishing in Mr G's garden shed are at least twenty-five boxes of 'proper' books - books made of paper, touch-feely reads that seem almost sensuous when compared to the act of stabbing a cold, hard screen to turn the pages. One day I shall have my own place again. My own study, my own library. I will have my external library and my internal one, inside my Kindle. And, of course, the neatest, most portable one of all - the one inside my own head.

Torn From My Arms!

I have paraphrased the heart-rending title that appeared above the article on adoption in today's Daily Mail, in which my daughter and I had a starring role. I rushed out and bought several copies, but in fact the online version used more photos and looked better, I think.

Here is a link:

http://tinyurl.com/q38d8uu

We were asked to be on Good Morning Britain tomorrow but my daughter is down in Devon and they wanted us there at 6 am. No way! I have never been able to do early mornings. The Lorraine Show has also asked us, along with Veronica, who heads up the Movement For an Adoption Apology (MAA).

We, and many others, believe that the government, as the spokesperson for Society, did single mothers a huge disservice pre-1977, when single mums were able to get council accommodation. Prior to that, not only was there no support, either financial or with regard to housing, but we were treated like criminals. Worse, in fact. Some poor women were locked up for life in mental hospitals, branded 'moral degenerates'.

At least I escaped that fate, but I was still deemed unsuitable to bring up a child, being nothing but a 'feckless little hippy with nothing to offer a baby'. How about a mother's love? How can that be called 'nothing'?

If they want me on telly, I'll let you know.

Things my mother taught me

Me (11), Mum (48), my sister Marian (7)

A friend with a twisted sense of humour rang this morning and asked, in a mock-sincere voice, "Tell me, how does it feel to be almost seventy?" My reply was a common two-word expletive!

When my mum was in her mid-sixties and I was a mere 28, I asked her what it felt like to be her age and she told me, "Like a young woman trapped in an old woman's body."

Now, I know exactly what she meant and she was so right. My personality, my spirit, my humour, my like and dislikes, even my ambitions, haven't changed one bit. What has changed is my energy level, my sex drive, my optimism and my ability to carry out certain tasks without pain and joint stiffness getting in the way.

I would say that three days out of seven, I wake up feeling so aching and exhausted that there seems little point in getting out of bed. I cancel a lot of arrangements because I just don't feel well enough to enjoy them. I can no longer play the guitar as my fingers won't bend sufficiently. I am now enduring the legacy of the severe whiplash I suffered when I was 40, in the form of a stiff, painful neck which produces frequent headaches, and permanent pain mid-back and in the lumbar region.

I take supplements. Vitamin D, zinc, fish oils. I have recently added Co-enzyme Q10 in the hope of increasing my energy and decreasing my blood pressure. I read up on herbal and homoeopathic remedies, I tinker, I experiment with this and that, which was why I started this blog in the first place. I still hope that my current exhaustion is just a passing phase and that I will wake one day full of the joys of spring. After all, it has happened once this year, about three weeks ago. I got up and started whistling and singing, then stopped in my tracks and thought, 'Wow, this is what normal must feel like!' But it didn't last. Next day, I was back to poor sleep and feeling tired out once again.

I know I shouldn't write myself off because of my advancing years, though it is tempting to think I've had it! Some 70-plus-year-olds are bouncing with vitality. My sister and her husband, for instance. He, poor man, has just broken his leg in two places while skiing. He's 75 but is looking forward to being back on the slopes next season. My sister, 67 this year, walks miles in the Lake District fells every day.

My mum was very wise. She was fascinated by health and the human mind and body and would have loved to have been a doctor, but was forced to leave school and start work at 14 to support her ailing parents, she being the only child. I have just remembered a dream I had once, involving her. In it, I was crippled and in a wheelchair and she stood in front of me, telling me to get out of it and run. So I did. I stumbled and swayed and suffered pain at first, but the more I ran and the faster I got, the better I felt, until all my aches vanished away.

I think the core message was exercise. Something I haven't done much of for a long time, since my gym kept having the lockers broken into and robbed so I stopped going. There are no parks around here, no places to walk. I do a few desultory stretches at home and have put on a stone in weight since this time last year. There is a council swimming pool, but it is two buses and a long walk away, if you don't have a car. Yes, I know; excuses, excuses. But who fancies shivering at two bus stops on a cold winter's day when they are still damp from their swim?

Last Saturday night, I was at a 40th birthday party. The band was great and nothing could keep me off the dance floor. I was the oldest guest and I danced the most. Yesterday, all the pain in my back and neck had gone. Today, it's creeping and creaking back again. But I know the answer: get off my typing chair and dance. As I wrote in an old song of mine:

I was not a model child. Sometimes I ran wild until they caught me.
Then at times I'd look around, hear the sounds the teachers hadn't taught:
Screams of a dollar hot in the hand,
Scenes I could not understand...

For life is a search after gold, they tell you.
If your life could be bought or be sold, they'd sell you -
Don't give them a chance, dance away, don't give them a chance, dance away.

So that's what I need to do: dance away. Watch this space, to the accompaniment of Absolute Radio '70s!

Hair and there

I am off cat-sitting in Camden Town again on Friday and while I am there, I intend doing something about my hair. Many moons ago, it was long, flowing, hippy-like and auburn.

Gradually, it faded to ginger...

At this point, it was a lot shorter. Then I had it cut really short - well, short for me!

But I missed my flowing locks and let it grow again. Now, though, it has so much grey in it that I have to colour it, with the inevitable consequences; dryness, lack of lustre.  So now, with the mighty birthday coming up, I have a strange desire to do something really drastic. Short and spiky? Or long with purple streaks? I won't know will I go to a trendy Camden salon and see what's on offer. Perhaps Mr Grumpy won't recognise me when I get back. (Mind you, he returned from the Turkish barber's yesterday with no hair at all!)

A big birthday

I have a birthday coming up next month. A big birthday. A completely terrifyingly huge one. I'm not looking forward to it. I don't want to be this age. It's not right. I feel wounded by it. I want it to go away and not bother me. I want it to not tell anyone, and definitely not bring me one more wrinkle or grey hair.

They talk about entering one's second childhood. The unfair thing about that is that the second one doesn't restore the wonderful skin and hair and energy and flexibility one had as a child. What's the point of having a second childhood if one can't run to the top of a grassy hill and roll down? If one can't turn a cartwheel on a whim, or leap over a park bench as I used to do without a second's thought. If one can't eat some rich, yummy concoction of cake, jelly and ice cream without wondering where the Rennies are?

I was a great jumper once. Imagining I was a horse, I would mentally rear up on my hind legs, take a run, gather my muscles and leap from one grass verge to the next, across someone's concrete driveway, all the way up the road to the park. Once or twice, I even leapt the width of a double driveway. At 13, I could jump my own height over a rope. Yet I never entered for competitions. I was hopeless at school games. But I was great at being a fantasy show-jumper. All I ever jump at now is my own shadow.

I guess if my birthday won't go away, I'll have to. Hole up in a nice hotel somewhere, all by myself with a laptop, a Kindle and a bottle of champagne and forget the birthday is happening at all. A trip to the Mediterranean would be nice. Shame my birthday is in March, though.

American poet Samuel Ullman had a lot to day about ageing. Here's a quote:

'Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.'

Philosophy notwithstanding, don't you dare send me a card with the actual number of years on it. If you do, the wrinkles may just appear on your backside after I've kicked it!