Earlier this week, on Tuesday morning, I told my two-year-old Polish grandpeep that I was going back to England that afternoon and asked if it was ok to go with her daddee, (my son) to drop her off at nursery (which I’ve done many times before). She loves nursery and dropping her off is usually a fun, happy moment to say our goodbyes and till-next-times. Leyla grinned and said yey-yey-yey, then pointed at my coat, handed me her nursery bag, took my hand and her daddee’s, and off we went, on the short five minute walk round the corner to nursery. Once there, as the assistant came out to collect Leyla and I waved goodbye, Leyla suddenly burst into floods of tears reaching out her arms, crying nie nie nie. As my heart cracked right down the middle, it became apparent that the poor nursery lady would have to wrestle Leyla inside, which she did.

Walking home in stunned silence, I felt an entirely new emotion – weird, bittersweet, entirely new. And not entirely satisfactory. It was a mixture of being properly distressed that my beloved grandpeep was so upset mixed with a dash of something like…dare I say it out loud… gratification – that she really, really didn’t want me to go. And then just slightly after the gratification kicked in, an after-hit of serious guilt – for being such a monster as to feel the gratification in the first place. Back at my son’s home, I tried to analyse the strange emotional cocktail.

Later at the airport, trying to ignore that also nameless emotion I’ve taken to calling airport desolation, I started Googling…and found nowt, not in English or any other language. I’ve been looking for days now – fallen reet down a rabbit hole looking. I’ve tried googling it as being a grandparent thing, I mean I certainly never felt anything like it as a parent – if my kids cried whilst being dropped off, I felt only distress; I’ve tried googling it as being a sort of schadenfreude and as a compound emotion, but nothing, then yesterday I had a terrible, terrible thought, that maybe it really is just monster-me and no-one else in the whole wide world has ever felt anything like it, ever. Which is why I’m writing this.

I often write to process emotion – usually in the form of flash fictions, sometimes in the form of creative non-fiction flashes, sometimes in the form of essays, never before in the from of a blog – but this time I really could do with a bit of help. So, if anyone out there knows a word for the feeling I described, in any language, please let me know. There’s a place for comments below this post, and I’d be so interested to find out. Also, if you’ve ever felt anything like it too, that would defo also be helpful.

Anyhoo,in other writing news, I won the South Worcestershire Literary Fest CNF prize this month, and will be reading my winning flash at the festival in September which I’m very excited about. I’m also looking forward to attending the National Flash Fiction Day event in Birmingham in June where I hope to meet some of the brilliant minds behind some of the winning micros in this year’s comp. It will be such a treat to hear those micros being read aloud by the folks who wrote them.

Reet, off to do some more googling about this wordless feeling thing. I’ve found loads of interesting words for emotions that English just doesn’t have. Here are a few that have really made me think:

Sukha (Sanskrit) – genuine lasting happiness independent of circumstances

Sehnsucht (German) – “life-longings”, an intense desire for alternative states and realisations of life, even if they are unattainable

Shemomedjamo – the feeling of continuing to eat way past fullness because the food is so delish (Georgian)

Natsukashii (Japanese) – a nostalgic longing for the past, with happiness for the fond memory, yet sadness that it is no longer there

There’s even a word in Indonesian for what it feels like when someone taps you from behind on your shoulder whilst standing on your other side – Mencolek – so somewhere, somehow there must be a word for a grandparent’s happy-sadness at leaving a child who’s distressed they’re leaving. Surely? Surely…

I’ve dreamed of this, being in a tiny isolated place, with empty days full of freedom to just write and write – but as a wise woman once said, be careful what you dream of. Now I’m here, in a dear rellie’s Welsh cottage (think one up one down, without a working fireplace, just a closed-up slate inglenook with a one bar electric fire and day after day of stair-rodding rain) – in perfect weather for writing actually, with no tellie and this gorgeous view from the upstairs window, you’d think I’d be inspired, productive and pouring out novel chapters. Not so much as it turns out.

And that even though I’m seriously determined to get back into my lets-call-it-a novel after not doing much on it during my time as a carer. But as those caring days are over now, and as I entered my novel’s first chapter into Retreat West’s eponymous comp, I really feel I must get more writ. In summer, I won a place (curtesy of the Curae Prize) at the Chester Novel Prize summer school and rewrote my first chapter in the light of what I learnt – controlling the pace, making the opening seriously startling and ending at a moment that leaves readers itching to read on (hopefully). When it was proofed and polished I then entered it into said comp, to, as I have so often done with my flashes and short stories, get validation/see what someone else thinks. When it was longlisted I felt so validated I could have cried, and then when it made the shortlist I thought I must get my finger out. But writing long is so different from writing short (for me at least). One narrative thread of my novel is written in the first person, and when I write in her voice I find myself sinking into her character, like actors do I suppose. I become absorbed in who she is and how she talks, and when I’m writing as her, it’s like I’m inside the story. Being pulled, dragged, wrestled out of the story by everyday life feels almost painful, like when you’re sunk deep into an immersive book, living, breathing, existing the story, forgetting about time and what day of the week it is, and then when you finally-finally have to put it down to wee or eat or pick up the kids, it’s like being yanked out of one world into another. Thus being here, where life mostly won’t do that. But when I arrived I just couldn’t settle. I knew the first thing I needed to do to get back inside the story, was to re-read what I’ve already got on the page, but instead I read some flash. Then I wrote some flash. Then I rewrote that flash. Polished the flash. Proofed the flash. Subbed the flash. And then when that was out in the world and no longer an excuse, I started writing this. So I’m going to go now. Stop writing (and reading) something that’s not my novel, and summon the discipline to start doing what I should have done days ago. But before I do, here are some tabs and links to a few of the wonderful micros I read over the weekend.It’s not true that micros are quick to read, by the way, because brilliant ones make you read them again and again and again and again. The first one (just follow the link), I was privileged to be asked to critique before it was subbed, and it moves me more every time I read it. The last link is to one of my own micros that I read on BBC Download last Thursday night.It was a two-hour prog but you can move through it using the curser. I’m on at 1hr 6mins and 40 seconds.

Reet. I’m off. If you see me on socials in the next few days I’ll thank you forever if you either don’t make eye contact and/or tell me to get back to the novel. Thanks. xxx

https://heroinchic.weebly.com/blog/this-isnt-the-start-of-the-story-by-sumitra-singam

August on Island of Evia: Forest Fires – Kathryn Aldridge-Morris

A Cinephile Reviews Her Relationship – Sherry Morris

I Love the Bones of You, Mum – James Montgomery

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0hhg929

There’s no such thing as an ending because they’re always beginnings. So say the wise and they do have a point, even when the referenced ending is actual death. It’s four weeks now since Bri died – on 18th February – and its been a strange hazy unending whirl of stuff and shit ever since. Seems a crazy idea that as soon as someone dies, the people closest to them have to organise what, up north, we’d call a bit of a do when everyone’s still deep in the throws of trying to fathom out what the chuff life even is, and the apparently stark finality of someone they’ve know really well and loved, simply ceasing to exist. If I was master of the universe I’d upgrade the whole death scenario with a huge database of lost consciousnesses where you could go to chat whenever you wanted. If existence had this facility,it would have made my life so much easier. My mum died when I was four and every time someone asks me that dinner party question – you know the one – who would you invite if you could have anyone from all time and space round for chippy tea (well I am from Bolton) – my first guest is always-always my mum. The others have changed over time, Jane Austen, the team that built Stonehenge, Ann Boleyn, the Virgin Mary, but being able to chat with my mum has always been first. Missing her over the years, the huge hollowness she left would have been filled with summat which would have helped had the consciousnesses library existed. Now I’d have to invite Bri too. As a passionate ex-Catholic he’d probs have a lot of questions to ask the VM.

Anyhoo, four weeks after his passing, we’ve had a funeral (non religious), half cleared the house (it is so so SO full I wonder if this will ever end), done the first batch of paperwork and started to feel the emptiness of the space Bri used to occupy both physically and inside our heads. It feels so strange and unfathomable to think he’s gone – like when you try to imagine the vast endlessness of the universe and can’t quite.

One thing that’s helped a lot as I’ve tried to process Bri’s passing, is co-judging the National Flash Fiction Day Micro comp. When I signed up to do this last year, I never imagined that I would be reading hundreds and hundreds of micros in the wake of Bri’s death. But it helped so much, as an escape and as a joy. Gratitude to everyone who entered. Reading your brilliant flashes was a tonic at a very tricky time. And so many congrats to the winners. Each and every story is a shining jewel of micro-fiction. Also, I was cheered to see some flash mates on the winners’ list. The whole comp is read blind so it was a lovely surprise to see a collection of flash buddies unmasked.

Anyhoo, suffice it to say that Bri’s passing is a huge new beginning for me because it means an end to my time as a carer. It leaves me free to come, go, travel and focus on projects and do a lot more stuff in general. His passing has also provided a salutary reminder to seize the day. I am sixty next year and did not begin my writing journey until I was fifty. In the last ten years I’ve started and finished an MA, written a memoir-in-flash which was published by Retreat West, written a novella-in-flash which won the Bath novella-in-flash comp in 2023, written a short story collection to be published in 2025 by the wonderful Northodox Press and won prizes and comps for flash and short stories hither and yon, all of which leads me to believe that, if I have another ten good years, I could write another five good(ish) books if I pull my finger out.

I am currently 30k words into a weird novel-length creation that I’m finding difficult to write because its a reimagined historical fiction/sci-fi mash up told in three timelines across two different multi verses – think Everything Everywhere all at Once, with a non-binary version of Margaret Thatcher and that-universe’s (female) iteration of Schrödinger saving their version of events from our universe’s, entangled dark energy. I know! It’s taking every bit of brain power I have to write it, but I feel sooooo driven to get it writ.

I’d also like to embark on other projects. I did some teaching in creative writing back in 2019 before I became a carer, at our local adult education centre. Sadly, now, all the arts, crafts and creativity courses have been scrapped in favour of workplace skills, so can’t go back there. I did in-person teaching because, living out here in the fens, my WiFi wasn’t good enough to teach online. Village connectivity was upgraded last year though, and meetings and readings I’ve done since have all been fine. This being the case I intend to put together a couple of on-line workshops and see how I get on, one’s that are focussed on metaphor and stories in which the protag stays unchanged, doesn’t go on a narrative journey and has no epiphany at all. Another thing I intend to start investigating is applying for residencies. I think I’ve probably missed most of this year’s application windows but no problem-o because that leaves me loads of time to get match fit for next year’s. First thing to do, it seems, is write a CV, a writer’s CV – which feels a bit daunting, but I reckon I could get one done in a couple of days hard work. If anyone reading this has done one I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Reet then. Though I said at the beginning of this, there’s no such thing as endings I was clearly wrong because every story has one and this blog is no exception. But it would be remiss of me to end here without saying goodbye to Bri. Bri was a very private person who didn’t really like people, who had a seriously troubled childhood that marked his whole life. He could rage and roar with the best of them. After contracting covid in January he went to hospital with breathing difficulties and stayed there for four weeks, getting iller and weaker. All this on top of already complex chronic health conditions made him certain he wanted to leave this world, but at home. It was not a quick or easy negation but he was ambulanced home on the Thursday with full palliative care set up, not to get better, but to die, which he did the following Monday, peacefully and in his sleep.

I read Mending Wall by Robert Frost at his funeral because Bri loved Robert frost, and it’s a poem so often mis-quoted, and a poem we, let’s call it, debated, a lot in second lockdown. We read it and many, many more poems over his final years, but we didn’t always come to the same conclusions as to meaning. I chose Mending Wall from the plethora of poems I could’ve chosen, because it was one of the few I could finish reading without choking up. When I was practising it in the days leading up to the funeral I’d channel how cross we’d get when we were arguing which kept my tears of grief at bay. I also tried After Apple Picking and practically everything by Siegfried Sassoon who he loved as much as Frost, but could never get to the end without weeping.

Anyway here he is in 2020 on his 81st birthday when he could still get out and about. We took him down the pub to celebrate. It was a happy, sunny, funny afternoon, four weeks before Roz’s terrible stroke which changed everything over night and was really, I think, the beginning of so many endings.

Its been a crap January 2024 in our house then. We all had new covid which hit us way worse that old covid ever did, and Bri my 85 year-old dad-in-law who we co-care for is still in hospital with the after-effects of it. We hope he will be able to come home next week so fingers crossed. Spent my birthday in bed with a banging headache, high temperature and no sense of taste worrying about everyone else, which was not fun. As an asthmatic who was luckily not adversely effected by previous bouts, and who kept up-to-date with all the jabs, it seems weird that, this time, it triggered strange after effects like an awful, lingering cough and intermittent bouts of total exhaustion.Feel like I’m starting to emerge from it now though, so blogging in here with what’s been occurring writing wise by way of cheering myself up and jogging myself on. I didn’t sub much in 2023 as I’m (trying to) write a novel, but in November I had a short story published in the first Curae Anthology. Here’s me reading an extract from it https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0O3rwfIEOJ/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

All proceeds from the book go to Carer’s charities in the UK, and copies can be bought here from the wonderful Renard Press https://renardpress.com/books/the-curae/

I also had a couple of flashes published in December over at Retreat West which you can read here https://westword.substack.com/p/the-moment-of-escape and here https://www.retreatwest.co.uk/writing-santa/ A bit out of season now but I feel glad I got them subbed!

I also agreed to be a judge at National Flash Fiction Day this year. You can read all the deets here about subbing to it. https://www.nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/index.php/2024-microfiction-judges/

I’m really looking forward to reading all the entries. Reading is such a great way to learn and it’s always a privilege to have the chance to read brand new work from the wonderful flash community.

I also had a teeny story accepted for the last ever edition of Ellipsis Magazine which I’m so grateful for. Ellipsis has been a big positive influence in my writing life, placing my memoir-in-flash second in the first longer-work comp they hosted, which I’m sure helped it to get published. I was in the first in-print publication they did and will be in the last which feels a bit like coming full circle. So many thanks to Steve and everyone at Ellipses. You will be missed.

Also I did an interview with Bath Flash about writing my ‘found form’ novella in flash, A Learning Curve, which you can read here if you’re interested in the form https://www.bathflashfictionaward.com/2023/09/interview-with-jan-kaneen-about-her-1st-prize-winning-novella-in-flash-a-learning-curve/

I was offline feeling seriously poorly when the winners for this year were announced so would like to say here, flipping well done everyone and many congratulations. It’s not easy getting your work written, sequenced and subbed and I can’t wait to read the books when they’re published.

Right knackered now. Not much of a blog but at least I got summat writ. Happy February everyone – the nights are defo getting shorter!

Much water (some of it tears) has passed under the bridge since I last posted 15 months ago, but also much laughter, hard work, writing progress and joy too. I’m currently away in Rome with my youngest son, Harry, which may seem like a strange time to reinstate this blog, but being away from home and all my responsibilities and the fact that I have a cool, third-story room overlooking a busy market side-street on the outskirts of the centre of Rome where traders are calling and bustling and the sound of the busy city is rising in through my open window mingled with the scents of over-ripe fruit and strong coffee, make it feel like the perfect opportunity to pick this up again. And anyway, I feel I really should punch some life back into this comatose space now my forthcoming, and (dare I humble-brag), award winning novella-in-flash is about to be published in time for the Flash Festival by the wonderful Ad Hoc Fiction. Also-also Harry has found himself a local(ish) gym for the time he’s here and is off working out and I have a summer cold so its nice to just sit and tap and take my time to truly enjoy the process of writing without fear or favour or anything at stake – just for the pleasure of it, like I used to.

The last few years of trying to care, organise and mentor for aged relies within a denuded NHS brought to its knees by underinvestment, have been wrought with worry, anxiety and frustration. Hours and hours of hanging on phones for doctors, hospitals, care homes have taken their toll, along with days spent filling in forms, arguing the toss, crying in waiting rooms for unfulfilled prescriptions often for vital repeat meds like ventolin or insulin where every interaction has felt like going to war, and when I’ve had to make complaint after complaint, even write to my MP just to get baseline service provision that would have been standard and taken for granted before this coven of self-interested anti-politicians lied their way into power. I’m not blaming the staff, they try their best and often feel as powerless as the patients in this crazy world of system-based decision making where if the system says no, they’re not allowed to over-ride it even if they think they should.

Anyhoo, suffice it say that it’s been exhausting, draining and upsetting, and makes me proper grateful to be able to sit here tapping away absolved of it all. It’s been almost impossible to write much during these hard 15 months – the most difficult time in my writing journey so far, but I didn’t not write entirely. I re-sequenced, re-entitled and added to, a collection of related flashes that I’d entered into the Bath Novella-in-flash comp in 2021. Back then it longlisted which made me think it was getting there, so I took my time strengthening the narrative arc, balancing tragedy with hope and a little bit of comedy, and was made-up to win this year’s comp with my newly renamed novella-in-flash, A Learning Curve.

I also revisited some old drafts of short stories and rewrote one of them to become Eternal Now and the Frailty of Human Perception which I entered into the first Curae prize. This seemed like a really positive thing to do as Curae is for carers and boy did I need to inject some positive energy into my caring journey. I cried when I was shortlisted which is weird because I’ve been shortlisted ALOT but, because this story is tied up in the complicated and emotion-filled gordian knot that my caring journey has so far been, it seemed to mean so much more. I didn’t win, but the prizes for short-listees are incredible: meetings with industry professionals, one to ones with agented best-selling authors, publication in a beautiful anthology published by Renard Press, free attendance at the Cheshire Novel Prize Summer School and being part of a new community of writer-carers made up of both shortlisted and highly-commended writers in the comp. Everyone in the community ‘gets’ what we all go through, and its such a relief that the back stories bubbling behind each one of us is understood, believed and empathised with.

The originator of this prize, herself a writer-carer is Anna Vaught, an amazing women/force of nature who manages not to be ground down by the relentless crapness of service provision right now which often seems to be for display purposes only in that when you try to access it not only are doors firmly closed but when finally-finally you prise them open there’s nothing behind them – well not for months or years even. Anna, in the face of this stays motivated, shouts out her journey and keeps right on keeping on. I’m so grateful for the whole Curae journey which is teaching me soo much and it feels fab to be on a real-life learning curve again which is, I reckon, another reason why I’ve got my blogging mojo back.

But enough, for now at least. Don’t want to bust my flush first day out, so by way of winding up, here are some photos of me and Harry travelling to and wandering round Rome yesterday with this year’s Flash Fiction Anthology published by National Flash Fiction Day GB. Tomorrow is National Flash Fiction Day so to celebrate, I’m taking the anthology, in which I have a micro that was highly commended in the NFFD 2023 comp, on tour. So far it’s been to Stansted, the Colosseum and The Forum, and this aftie it’s going to the Pantheon and tonight to the Auditorium Parco della Musica to hear Ludovico Einaudi play the piano, which is the reason for us being here in the first place, a birthday pressie from Harry.

May well blog again tomoz when the Flash flood is up and Harry’s working out. I’ve got a micro – an actual, unpublished new one up around midday. Happy Flash Fiction Day eve writer peeps. It feels so good to be back.

This time two years ago we, and by we, I mean humankind, were teetering on the brink of a global pandemic, and we in the UK, were on the brink of first lockdown. A year later, still restricted, the new lockdown measures in the UK felt different to me, harder to swallow in the aftermath of the first year. Also, at that point, in our family, elderly relatives returned home from hospital totally dependent on us younger family members’ perpetual care, so the days of isolated writing and creating and being in cyberspace with likeminded minds was well and truly over. Today, a year after that, as the war in Ukraine descends into something that feels so much worse than any world event I’ve personally lived through or watched play out, I can’t believe I find myself looking back almost nostalgically to those first quiet, isolated days of lockdown when days yawned long and unchartered, but which now seem to have flashed by – like dreams between alarm reminders when you live a thousand lifetimes in five minutes.

These new times, this current crisis seems crueller and madder than the days of the virus. This senseless war feels that much worse because it feels so avoidable. Seems bleeding obvious to me at least that power corrupts the human consciousness – it’s happened so many times throughout history – men (and it nearly always is men because they nearly always hold the power) from Julius Caesar to the whole Kim clan in North Korea – morph in the grips of absolute power, start to think that they can do no wrong and that ordinary moral compasses don’t apply to them because they are the chosen ones on superhuman missions. Makes me seriously think that democracy is a must if humans are ever to get past wars. I’m not saying that democratic governments are the be-all and end-all, ours is flawed and often not really a democracy at all when the choices on offer are so piss poor and the electoral system so ridiculously adversarial – but at least democracy means that power and its corrupting nature is not super-concentrated in one pair of hands, and the machinery of democracy at least means that those with most power can have it removed even when they don’t want to let go of it.

Seems bonkers to me that what looks like one man’s war has been engineered by a single human consciousness. Humankind really needs to see this because it’s bonkers that one mind, a mind at terrible risk of delusion and grandiosity because of the toxicity of the concentrated power it holds, can bring death and destruction that no-one else genuinely seems to want, and without any system of breaks or balances to check the devastation. The older I get the more I reckon humans need to big up on balance. Too much of anything just doesn’t seem to work. It’s just as bad, if not worse, as too little. And surely, as a species, we need to move into a stage of learning how to live in peace and not replicate war in everything we do. The legal system, adversarial – why? Why can’t it be two sides both trying to get to the truth? Politics, adversarial – why? Why can’t politicians hold different ideas and work together to make things better for everyone? Counties and borders – there to keep the enemy out rather than to manage the entry of potential friends. This being the way I see things at the moment, going to try and balance up the negative energy in here, with only positive news for the rest of the blog. I haven’t written in here for ages for loads of reasons – been busy with the ever-dependent older family members, been mentally banjaxed by the awfulness of stuff and shit – repeat readers of this blog will  know I write by way of therapy, to put overwhelming emotions on the page and not in me – which I have been doing even when things have been terrible, but loads and loads of really lovely stuff has happened too so here’s my list of lovely things:

List of Lovely Things

My sis, R Les, the one who put up with me writing about her in my memoir-in-flash, The Naming of Bones, bought me a forever birthday and Christmas pressie, and that pressie was Nolly the pup, who is bringing such fun and joy to the whole family. The housebound elders especially love her. She’s become their unofficial pat dog. Nolly (short for Enola) won’t ever replace my dear ole Boo, but already she is as much beloved.

On the writing front I wrote a feature for Lapidus – the writing for well-being community. They recently relaunched their membership magazine which includes my piece entitled The Long and Short of Flash Fiction, about writing my memoir and how doing so improved my mental health and wellbeing. Here’s a link to Lapidus if you fancy googling what they do. https://lapidus.org.uk/https://lapidus.org.uk/ I also had a piece of flash published in Retreat West’s tenth birthday anthology, Ten Ways the Animals will Save Us, which you can buy here. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ten-Ways-Animals-Will-Save/dp/1919608745 I am so very grateful to Amanda and Gaynor at Retreat West and I felt very moved when I was asked to provide a story. Haven’t subbed to mags or zines at all recently and entered virtually nowt, but did manage to edit a wee micro for the National Flash Fiction Day comp…and it won! Here’s the link to all the winning micros which really are something. https://www.nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/index.php/competition/2022-microfiction-results/ I Was especially glad to share the podium with Sherry Morris my feedback buddy. Her micro is so, so brill. I wrote my micro in one of Matt Kenrick’s workshops on how to write lyrically. Here’s a link to his site in case you’d like to find out about doing one of his brill courses which I can highly recommend. https://www.mattkendrick.co.uk/

But as is traditional, I’ve saved the best till last. Clears throat and sounds a fanfare…my wonderful daughter-in-law Karolina and eldest son Bob welcomed their new daughter, Leyla, into the world on 18^th February over in Reda, Poland. Cannot wait to meet her in May when I go over for a huge family celebration when I hope beyond hoping this war will be over. Here are a few pics of Layla’s absolute gorgeousness. I’ve been so heart-warmed to see how welcoming the Polish nation has been in these dark times, and feel very proud of my Polish family for so many reasons. Seeing people having to flee from their homes and lives, really drives home that being a refugee is not what you are, it’s something that happens to you, and in a world where potentates like Putin can make such mad bad decisions unchallenged and unchecked, it really does make me see, it could happen to anyone. I hope now the UK has opened its doors to Ukrainians escaping this madness that we will be as warm and welcoming as our European neighbours. In the meantime just going to stare at the version of the future that is my wonderful grand-daughter and thank all the moons and stars and seas and rivers that she’s safe and loved and healthy and here.

Haven’t blogged in forever because life’s been a wee bit all-consuming over the summer – what with renovations, caring duties and so much to worry about/organise. But things have been shifting and easing for a few weeks now and this morning at 8 when I took George to work, the weather seemed to be making a point.

The view that met us as we stepped out of the front door and onto the steep grassy bank where our cottage sits, made our jaws drop. The fen that usually yawns its way out to the lazy River Ouse had disappeared. I say fen but its more floodplain than fen, and has been since before humanity started controlling the local landscape, draining fens, sluicing and staunching the water, and building houses in places they shouldn’t. Nowadays water from as far afield as Bedford is channelled down here in wet weather, to protect houses and infastructure at risk of flooding. As as a result of this, we flood several times a year. By we I mean the people who live in the cottages on the riverfront, where the, lets-call-it-a-road (really unmarked track) gets covered in 6-12 feet of water on a regular basis. By flood I don’t mean the water comes into our homes, it stops about 4 feet below. As the water never comes into our houses, and as we all have common law rights to leave carts, coaches and now cars at the nearby pub, none of us really mind this, and we quite like it when the river ‘goes’ and our houses stand on the edge of a vast grey lake. Anyhoo, as me and George went out this morning, the road, the fen, the river the floodplain – all were gone, totally invisible, lost in the deepest greyist autumnal mist that I’ve ever seen here, and I’ve see a fair few over the years.

Usually when the mist falls, either first thing in the morning or last thing at night, it hangs low and you can still see out over the fen because it stops about 6 feet off the ground, hovering in a sheet that only exists in a shallow layer. And sometimes, it’s much less thick, and you can even see through it, to cobwebs draped in smoky wisps over rushes and grasses that some mornings seem to have been spun overnight and cover every living thing as far as the eye can see. And sometimes when the mist is thin like that, the cobwebs catch tiny droplets of water and sparkle even in the darkest light. But not this morning. This morning there was just thick grey, impenetrable mist and even the car, just ten feet away on the road below, was a barely perceptible ghost. George looked down, at the cobwebs on the grassy bank under his feet and said what a shame it was we couldn’t see the fen cobweb display – on what should have been the first of the autumn.

I agreed, but feeling not very whimsical, commented that I hoped driving visibility would be better when we got out of the village because it would be like navigating through Granny Dot’s mushroom soup. He said it would be better once we got away from the river which he reckons makes everything damper/cloudier and therefore worse visibility wise. He was wrong. Everything was soupy all the way there, and for me, all the way back again. Which got me thinking.

In the summer, as I’ve tried to navigate my way though the mushroom soup of having two vulnerable, sick and/or dying relatives to care for, who don’t necessarily always get on and who can be quite cruel to one another and the people around them, I’ve found it impossible to see any further than a few feet/days ahead. I think that has been because I sort of know what’s coming, and haven’t wanted to really look any further, because it scary and upsetting and a bit of a nightmare. So I’ve kept my thoughts reigned in and uber controlled, kept my imagination under lock and key. Which has been a total block to writing. I guess I’ve been afraid of where stories might lead me. But not seeing something, or not looking at it doesn’t mean its not there, as this morning’s mist illustrates, and maybe gearing up to dealing with difficult, even heart-breaking problems is about staring them in the face, not obscuring them in metaphorical mist.

Writing for me, since I started doing it in 2015, has been a solace, a therapy, a safe place, so I guess even in the days I was most afraid of doing it, I knew I had to get myself re-engaged sooner or later. I guess that’s why I signed up to attend the last day of the Flash Festival event this year. I’d attended none of the others but decided I really should screw my courage to the sticking place and rock up. And I’m so glad I did. It was packed full of guided writing opportunities which I did with trepidation at first, then something like gusto, and over the week that followed, I polished the three stories I’d written, to enter into the festival Bake Off comps. A week after subbing, I was delighted to find out I’d won one comp, and come second in another, which meant both stories would be published in the festival anthology and that I’d won two free entries into the Bath Flash comp. Not wanting to miss out on that, and feeling not too scared by the flashes I’d written at the festival, I started drafting a flash for Bath too, and, just like that, my self-imposed writing block was a thing of the past.

But back to the mist. I haven’t really written here about the worst of what the summer held for my family and friends because it’s still on-going, and its not time to tell those stories yet, and some of them are not my stories to tell, but what I’ve realised is that I don’t have to stop writing entirely to keep my emotions at bay. I can keep some things cloaked in an autumnally misted part of my mind whilst I write about something else.

As I sit here tapping out these words in my safe, writing place, the sun has burned away the last of this morning’s haze and the horse chestnut and copper beech trees are standing clear and bright in all their autumnal technicolour whether I want to see them or not. I know that’s a metaphor for summat or another, so I’m going to drink it all in as I post this photo of me, Dad and R Les, who I love through the mist and back. I took it when I went home to Bolton a couple of weeks ago. I love my Bolton family and I’m so grateful for how they received the publication of The Naming of Bones, my memoir-in-flash that features them all. For anyone who’s read The Naming of Bones, this was a bit of a Waltzers moment for me. I’m posting it here as a happy happy memory that I can gaze on again and again and again and again, whether I’m in full-on mist mode, or sky-bright sunshine.

Been mostly offline for a few weeks and haven’t managed to write very much due to the following confluence of events:

The garden sprang into life.

My laptop died taking passwords with it. It did very generously flicker back into life just long enough for me to retrieve most of my passwords, then passed away completely. I was quite sad. Me and that laptop have been on a right journey together. It was on that laptop that I started my creative writing odyssey, penned every flash, poured out my emotions, finished my MA. Wrote myself into better mental health. It brought me so much positivity that wee collection of metal and silicon, so RIP my worn-out friend.

My husband turned 60 and I organised a few little separate celebrations for him, as due to restrictions we couldn’t all meet at the same time.

Had to wait for cashflow to improve before getting new laptop – husband’s pension kicked in so I knew the money was coming.

Had loads to do with new caring duties now both elderly relies are back from rehab and settling into life at home post stroke and hip breakage. This has been ALOT of work. For example – this bank holiday weekend mum-in-law fell on Friday morning, banging her head and alerting her alarm service who, as well as despatching me round to sit with her, also triggered an ambulance which took 4 hours to turn up. She was then taken to hospital where she stayed for 3 1/2 hours and when we phoned to ask how she was (we weren’t allowed to go with her due to covid restrictions still in place) the hospital computer system had gone down and they couldn’t locate her with any greater detail than she was no longer in A&E. As she can’t speak very well, has limited movement on her left hand side and is doubly incontinent we were very keen to ascertain her whereabouts ASAP. After several increasingly strident and desperate calls from us, they found her and told us there was no transport to take her home so she’d have to stay in for the night. We of course collected her which was no mean task because she’s very heavy having put on loads of weight in rehab, and can’t walk more than a few strides and has only been in the car once since she came home (and then with 2 physios and me and husband to help her). By 9pm she was finally safely back in bed at home – and that was that for Friday. On Saturday morning another call. Dad-in-law had had an accident and could I go over. Three hours later after stripping bedding, aquavaccing carpet and remaking the bed, situation resolved. On Sunday we took Mum-in-law out for a long-promised drive as a reward for doing her exercises all month. This took most of the day if you include getting her ready, getting her in, doing the drive, getting her out and safely back in her riser recliner. Then on Monday, in a completely unrelated incident youngest son on his first trip to Leeds to see uni friend for his birthday, was in a 7 car pile up on the M1 on his way home. He wasn’t driving and no-one was hurt but it was very worrying and once he got back home, we all sat in garden having a glass of wine, toasting all the goddesses for his safe return, when the phone rang – mum-in-law had fallen again. Cue us all getting into Harry’s car (he doesn’t like wine) to sort her out and get her back into bed. (She wasn’t hurt). And all this is on top of cooking and freezing their meals for the week (they wont eat shop-bought ready meals); and doing their shopping (they don’t do online and even if they did they couldn’t unpack it, we’d have to do that). This weekend was particularly bad, but you get the picture – this new regime is very time consuming, emotionally draining and not conducive to writing . It’s like you’re always on stand by, waiting for the proverbial to hit the fan, so you can’t really relax or focus on writing. My brother-in-law is down now, staying till this evening so neither me or grumpy husband are on call should the alarm trigger again. This being the case grumpy husband has gone fishing and I am doing a live Q&A with lovely Gaynor Jones from Retreat West on Twitter about The Naming of Bones.

Everything about the Naming of Bones has gone really well, the launch, publication day, reviews and I’d like to say a huge thanks to everyone who bought, read and/or reviewed it so far. The feedback I’ve seen has been really heartening, and reading it all has given me such joy and a bit of a break from all this perpetual caring.

Anyhoo, if you fancy asking me any questions about The Naming of Bones, writing as therapy or anything else, I’ll be on Twitter from 6.30pm. In the meantime here are some photos showing the moments of fun I’ve been having offline.

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Last year, during first lockdown, grumpy husband planted some wild garlic. I’d been banging on about how much I miss it, being an expat Lancastrian, and how when I was a kid you could gather buckets of the stuff from practically anywhere between Bolton and Ramsbottom where it grows in pungent profusion in cloughs and shady glades. It’s so widespread in Lancashire, places are even named after it. Like the aforementioned Ramsbottom, which according to my gran (who knew loads about this sort of thing) was named not after the nether-regions of male sheep, but for the masses of wild garlic growing there, or ramsons, as we say in a Lancy twang. Grumpy husband’s a proper bread-head, who bakes sourdough every week, and baguettes and pizza bases so when I told him you can make pizza toppings and flavour your bread with ramsons and that they’re totally delicious made into pesto and served on sourdough, he planted some under the walnut tree in the leaf and branch cover to see if it would ‘take’ in the dappled light. There’s been miles more rain here on the edge of the Cambridgeshire fens in recent years, and as ramsons love damp as well as shady places, it seemed like a good bet.

Fast forward a year, and it’s done quite well. So last Thursday, on publication day for my memoir-in-flash, when I was feeling a potent mixture of excitement, anxiety, exposure and pride (the kind that comes before a fall my worry-warting thoughts were thinking) I absented myself from everything to do with writing and attempted ramson and walnut pesto. To be fair I’d never actually tried ramson pesto in my youth because pesto hadn’t made it to 1970s Bolton, but I had seen a recipe in cyberspace. So, as we still had a few walnuts left over from last year’s glut, I reasoned project pesto would feed three birds with one metaphorical peanut: use up some walnuts, do what I sort-of promised grumpy husband a year ago and act as a distraction/avoidance from the emotional maelstrom of publication day. This is what I did.

1. Picked 30g ramson leaves (you could do this in miles bigger batches if you live in Ramsbottom but I didn’t want to stress the first year plants by taking too many leaves),
2. Whizzed up 50g shelled and toasted walnuts with the juice of half a lemon. I just used a hand whizzer, not a fancy food processor or anything, then drizzled in some local rape seed oil still whizzing until it looked like pesto consistency.
3. Halved the mixture and added 15g of parmesan to one batch and 10g yeast flakes to the other, (to make vegan and veggie pesto). I then seasoned with salt and pepper, and voila!

Here’s a picture of a wee bit of pesto popped onto a slice of sourdough for your visual delectation. Wish you could smell and taste it because it really is very pungent and delicious. After I took this photo, I sterilised a repurposed jam jar were I reckon the pesto will store for several weeks kept in the fridge. Grumpy husband was well impressed and enthused that it was one of my best garden preservations ever. Next year, if the ramsons have spread like they do up north, I’ll make bigger batches and see if it freezes okay.

I’ve always found preserving what we grow and forage for, calming and rewarding, which is just as well, as pickling, jamming, freezing and drying are a really important part of making the most of a potager garden like ours, where gluts and dearths are continual. Last year in early summer, for example, when the sour cherries were ready to pick, for a brief moment, cherries were everything. We had poached cherries on porridge, glistening red cherry compote on toast, tart and zingy sour cherry summer pudding, cherry buns, cherry bread, cherry couscous salad. Then suddenly we reached cherry saturation and never wanted to see another sour cherry again let alone put one in our mouths. We decided to leave the rest to the birds. But as weeks went by and summer tipped into autumn and we stuffed our faces with everything blackberry, the remembered cherries wove a wistful memory, and after Christmas, when we were sick and tired of wintry things, we found ourselves nostalgic for the sharp tang of early summer. If only I’d dried or frozen some of the wonderful cherries, I thought, or made them into long-lasting jams, or jellies or gin. A valuable lesson for this year coming (though the birds will still get their share.) And there it is – right there – why it’s mindfully positive , growing and preserving your own – it makes you think about the future not in an anxious, everything-is-bound-to-go-wrong kind of way, but in a what-can-we-do-to-make-the-most-of-it-next-time sort of way, a future where you learn from mistakes, not avoid them.

It makes me think about more existential things too, not just the positivity of impermanent things but the fickle nature of transiency too. Like publication day for The Naming of Bones. Unlike the cherries, that will never come back, and as I write this three days later, I’m wondering what on earth I was worried about, because, of course nothing bad happened. In fact I’ve been floored by the support from the wonderful on-line flash community. I’m so grateful to everyone who Tweeted and sent messages of support, and who bought the book, and my wonderful writer buddies too, who over the last couple of weeks in particular have provided such incredible support and wisdom. I so need to remember that if my novella that’s currently longlisted with Reflex Press makes it out into the world. But anxiety is a phantom shapeshifter, that gives not one hoot for fact or logical reasoning, that’s built from imaginings and inner whisperings that echo awful nightmares that will never come to pass, most like, that clag you in a non-existent miasma that you can’t see through, so the reality beyond it disappears. And it’s physical too, a physical dread like stone butterflies in your stomach.

It’s the on-line launch of The Naming of Bones tomorrow evening, something I’ve longed for for ages, something that really should be just a moment of joy, but even today when I’m excited and anxious in equal measures, the anxiety is rising. I wish I could simply look forward to it, especially having just harvested a bumper crop of positivity the day after publication. I keep telling myself I’ve got brilliant back up from writing buds who won’t mind if things go wrong, and that all round superstar and wonderful human being Gaynor Jones is overseeing the actual event. But anxiety is a shadow that needs neither form nor light to cast it, which is why I’m writing this, I suppose, using writing like I always do nowadays as distraction, as exorcism, as therapy, and because there’s something powerful about un-secreting fear, about calling it out and naming it. Thanks so much for listening anyone who is, because I feel a bit better now. Going to bake myself into staying in this moment, by harvesting and cooking the rhubarb.