Work in progress

To make up for the bad form of posting a long, self-obsessed post, I thought I'd post this shorter, self-obsessed post.

Basically, I've been quiet, but I have been working, and this is a sneaky-peak at the new novel.

Please be aware that this is a first draft, needs some pretty heavy editing, some lines and colour putting in, and the finished version might look quite different. I think what I'm saying is; don't judge me too harshly! I am very much a novice!

Pip xxx

Gren Peppard: Chapter 1

Marie Fletcher smiled nervously at Madame Sylvia Peppard, as she sat at the opposite side of the table.

“Lovely weather we’re having for September,” Marie said.

“Yes.”

She was sitting in the shadows and Marie couldn’t make out much of her face beyond the wide eyes, heavily outlined in kohl.

Marie glanced around the room and brushed her well-manicured fingers through her perfectly set hair. The window of the room was too small for it’s size, and it had been covered over with long, patterned, coloured silks. There was a small lamp on the table to her left, but it had been knocked slightly so the little puddle of light shone onto her own hands. She wrung them slightly, but then noticed what she was doing so sat on them instead. She resisted the urge to straighten the lamp.

Madame Sylvia had clearly spent enough time examining her, and she stood and walked to the shelves behind her. Marie watched the light catching the sequins on the long, full skirts. There were bare feet sticking out the bottom and she suddenly realised that Madame Sylvia was quite short and slender.

There was a small, wooden, set of drawers on the shelves, and Madame Sylvia opened three of them, and took a deck of cards from each one. She came back to the table, glancing at Marie as she did so.

Marie smiled nervously again, and reminded herself it was rude to stare. She looked over at the smoking incense burner behind on the fireplace instead.

Madame Sylvia sat down and lay down the three decks of cards in a row.

“Choose a deck,” she said.

Marie instinctively started towards the plain, new and nicely clear cards, but at the last moment, she pointed to the ancient, colourful cards next to them.

She smiled at Madame Sylvia, and was rewarded with a frown.

The other cards were removed from the table and Madame Sylvia briefly shuffled the cards, and then lay them down on the table again. She spread them into a fan.

“Choose seven.”

Marie startled. “Oh, I was thinking, could I perhaps go for the full Celtic Cross? Have you the time? I’ll pay for the full hour.”

Madame Sylvia nodded.

“My friend, the one who recommended you, Lisa, said that I should cross your palm with silver. I’ve been polishing fifty pence pieces.” She giggled.

“Lisa was ripping the piss,” Madam Sylvia murmured.

“I’m sorry?”

Madame Sylvia cleared her throat. “There’s no need for silver. You can pay in the shop for the extra time.”

“Oh. OK.”

“Choose nine cards.” There was an edge of impatience in her voice now.

Marie obeyed and with a slightly shaking hand, she started slowly pulling cards out of the deck.

Madame Sylvia picked them up, and laid them out on the table in a pattern. She put her head in her hands for a moment.

“Is everything OK?” Marie whispered.

“What? Oh, yes.” Madame Sylvia looked up again and gave her a somewhat uncomfortable smile. “You have a pet. A new one.”

“Yes! Charlie’s a Yorkie! He’s lovely!”

“Yes. He’ll give you much joy, he’ll be a constant companion and will live a long life.”

“Oh that’s nice!”

Madame Sylvia shifted in her chair slightly and frowned at the cards. Marie suddenly realised that she was a lot younger than she’d previously thought. Beneath the heavy make-up and ridiculous clothing, she was little more than a child. She’d put her at 22 on the outside.

“Yes. Er, what else…” she looked at the cards for a moment and glanced at Marie again. “You don’t need to worry about money.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, I know. I mean; you’ll never have to worry about money.”

“A windfall?”

“No, that’s not what I mean.” Madame Sylvia glanced about the room for a moment and sighed before looking at Marie again. “Look, I think one of the things you need to bear in mind, is that some people worry about money constantly. They don’t know how to feed their families, they can’t answer the phone or the door for fear of debt collectors. Every time there’s a minor mishap and their child loses their coat or something, they want to cry because they simply don’t have the funds to replace it.”

Marie stared at Sylvia blankly. Sylvia leaned across the table and spoke earnestly to her.

“What I’m saying is, that whatever happens, you need to keep in mind that that will never happen to you. You need to keep that in mind, you don’t have to worry about money. You won’t be minted, but you won’t be poor, and in this world that counts for a lot. OK?”

Marie frowned and nodded slightly.

“Er, are you saying I should be giving more money to poor people?”

Madame Sylvia drooped her head and sighed.

“No. I’m just saying; you don’t have to worry about money. Whatever else might happen, money issues will be fine.”

Marie brightened and smiled. “Well you’re very good, aren’t you! I don’t ever worry about money, I never have! David deals with all of that!”

Madame Sylvia rolled her eyes and sighed again.

“For goodness sake, Marie, David’s having an affair!” she snapped.

Marie sat quite still, her eyes wide.

“What?”

“Affairs! David! Your husband! He has them! Two, in fact, at the moment! For goodness sake, how can you not know that?”

Marie didn’t move.

“Look, I’m sorry!” Sylvia went on. “From my point of view it’s not a big deal. So, he’s not faithful, now you don’t need to be either. You might see that as a good thing! Clearly you can do much better!”

Marie seemed to come to her senses. She looked at Madame Sylvia with angry tears in her eyes.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I think that making these vile, baseless accusations is utterly wicked!”

“Fine, he’s not having an affair then. Whatever. It makes absolutely no difference to me!” She stared at the cards on the table. “Do you want me to finish the rest of the reading?”

“No! I think you’re a nasty, vicious piece of work, and I will not be paying you for any extra time.”

Sylvia glanced at the clock. “You haven’t had any extra time.”

“I want a refund then! I will not darken your door again.”

She stood up haughtily and stormed from the room, sniffing and wiping her eyes.

Gren sighed and rubbed her face for a moment and drummed the table with her fingers. After a moment she shook herself out of it and pulled the headscarf from her head and brushed her hands through her long hair. She stood up, unbuttoned the skirt, which dropped to the floor and rubbed the mark on her side where the waistband had dug in slightly. She retrieved a pair of jeans that had been stuffed behind an armchair cushion. She hopped and jumped across the room while pulling them up, then headed towards the shop.

Pip Mulgrue: A Warning From History.

Depression seems to be a hot topic at the moment, and look, I’m jumping on the bandwagon. This is despite me going on and on about my bloody Depression. I can say with utter certainty that nobody reading this will have the reaction ‘huh, I didn’t know she was Depressed!’

Actually, to be fair, it's that time of year again when I'm coming up to getting a year older, coupled with Christmas, which basically makes me think over and over about Claudia getting ill, and for the past three years, I’ve spent much of this particular week of the year in tears. This year has not been an exception.

In addition, I can’t help but feel we still need to have the conversation. There have been a couple of high-profile cases of late, and once again, there has been the brilliant outpouring of ‘we need to be open about depression! We need to start understanding this!’ but there has been another outpouring of ‘I just don’t get it’, and more worryingly ‘at least that will never happen to me!’

There’s also a lot of suffering at this particular time. The light, the weather, the stress of Christmas looming, the financial situation that the world is in, the stress and panic about what’s to come… These things build up and after a time they start knocking you down. In the last two weeks, of the people I know personally or on line, six of them have independently mentioned to me that they’re really going through a rough patch at the moment.

I think that there probably is a lot more of this about, so in this space today, I’m going to write my whole Depression story. I’m going to follow this with a list of hints, tips, thoughts, feeling, and in honour of Hugh Grant, some of the myths I have heard about Depression.

So you might like to get yourself a cup of tea before reading on.

I’ve been chronically, clinically Depressed since I was 21, possibly longer, but that’s when I was first diagnosed. During that time I’ve had a two year period where I was very ill, a fairly long time of being mildly ill or having depressive episodes but shaking it off without too much intervention, followed by a three year period of being very ill indeed.

It’s that second, most recent period that I’m going to focus on (the first is painful, but a hazy memory now).

I moved to London. I had fun. I met my husband, we had a child. I did not experience post-natal or any other kind of Depression at that time. I started getting ill when Tom was about a year and a half. In that time we moved house, I had two miscarriages, I moved jobs, we were burgled. There were a series of quite serious stresses going on, and so, when I finally became pregnant with Claudia, I was already Depressed. Because I was pregnant, I stupidly decided not to get treatment.

I was Depressed when Claudia was born. To say I felt absolutely nothing for her when she was handed to me for the first time is a lie, I felt disappointed with and ashamed of her. Not an auspicious start to our relationship.

What happened next was breastfeeding. It hurt, it hurt a lot. With time and research, I now know that the broken and misshaped nipples were because her mouth was very small, and I was being crushed against her hard pallet. I can also recognise that I was having a weird and thankfully rare reaction to the milk let-down hormones. (These are hormones that stimulate a ‘let down’ of milk when the baby his hungry. This happens once every minute or two when the baby is feeding). I'd experienced a similar reaction with Tom, but because my physical and mental health was so much poorer to start off with with Claudia, feeding her was nightmarish. It was painful, I'd feel nauseous and dizzy, have feelings of despair, and I’d have really strong feelings of violence that I'd have to fight against every time she was on the breast. And, on account of being a tiny newborn, she wanted to be on the breast a lot.

I demand fed in the early days, and quite quickly I learned to associate the sound of her crying with the feelings of pain and depression.

At about two weeks, I switched to expressing breastmilk and feeding it to her from a bottle. As luck would have it, I could express a feed in about 15 minutes, so though I'd still have those unpleasant feelings, at least Claudia was safely in the pram or being rocked in her bouncy chair while it was happening, and then I was able to cuddle and feed her without having to fight the urge to push her from my lap or pick her up and shake her.

It wasn't a perfect result, and there would still be occasions where she'd cry, and I wouldn't have a bottle ready, and she'd go back on the breast.

What seems to have happened then is that my body started to respond to her cries with panic. My back would tense up, my heart would race, my mouth would go dry, I'd want to vomit or run away. Being a baby, she cried a lot.

After eight weeks, I switched to formula, which resolved the let-down hormonal problem, but it didn't stop me feeling the stress of her crying, which was now pretty much ingrained into me. I remember wailing 'she cries all the time!', which I now know wasn't true. I think that she cried at the high end of the normal spectrum.

What was happening quite quickly was that I was obsessing about her crying. I was tense between times, waiting for the next cry, my world was occupied pretty exclusively of trying to find ways of occupying her and calming her without touching her because my body had learned that it didn't want to do that. I remember calling my husband and sobbing because the batteries in the mobile had run out (the sort that hangs over the cot - not a phone), and that was the one, sure fire way of me getting ten minutes break from the crying.

I dabbled half-heartedly in some Depression remedies over that six month period. Notably SSRIs which was pretty damned silly because I know I don't react well to them. I was facing that common triple whammy of symptoms; denial, fear and shame. Several people during that time suggested all was not well with me and it made me hugely angry. I'd stomp around my room like a teenager stropping; 'They don't understand! They think I'm weak! I'll show them! I'll never ever talk to them again, ever!'

I'd legitimise all the bad feelings I had about her; 'nobody would like a person who cries and pulls their hair and screams at them, so it's normal for me not to like her!' and 'I can't like everybody! We'll just have to be one of those mother/daughter combos where we don't love or like each other. As long as I continue to mechanically care for her, it doesn't matter; what difference does it make?'

Over the course of the pregnancy and early months of Claudia’s life, my relationship with Tom became spectacularly unhealthy. I suddenly became preoccupied with him just being good! I remember when I was pregnant, I took him to a friend’s wedding and I spent the occasion in a huge panic because he just wouldn’t sit still and behave. I knew one of the brides and her family well and I know for absolute certainty that nobody in that room cared that my two year old was acting like a two year old, apart from me. Several people laughed and played with him. Meanwhile, I’d be looking at him thinking ‘Oh my God!!! He’s looking at the piano!!! That will lead to touching the piano!!!’ and I’d be reacting as if this would surely mean the end of the whole world.

I spent most of my time with him exhausted and just screaming and shouting when he stepped out of line. He didn’t stop stepping out of line. This was probably because he was two. The only difference it made was that he stopped being the laid-back, affable little boy he had been, and he started reacting to my approaching him with a look of fear and panic. There were several occasions when I was changing his nappy, and he started kicking his legs (being two, that sometimes happened) and my instant reaction was to grit my teeth and raise my hand. I didn’t hit him. I can honestly say that if I had have hit him when I was that out of control, it would have left a bruise and it would have been completely and utterly unacceptable.

I screamed in his face once. I leant in over him when he was strapped in his pushchair and screamed right in the child’s face. Imagine how terrifying a sight that was to a child of two. I refuse to forget that moment, or to brush it under the carpet, or to pretend that it didn’t matter.

Now I’m not saying this because I want a response of ‘oh but you’re a brilliant mother! He’s fine! He’s perfect!’ because part of the point of this post is to recognise the fact that I was very, very ill. I was quickly out of control, and the effects of that illness were felt by a far greater audience than just me.

Plus… Tom had a mother he loved and trusted, who quite suddenly changed into a mother who was scary and erratic. That is a simple truth, and it would be foolish and irresponsible for me to deny responsibility for that. Our relationship broke slightly, and it was absolutely not his fault.

Tom and I have worked pretty damned hard at both of us staying calm and acting sensibly when he makes a mistake or does something naughty, but I still see a look in his eye of panic about how I’m going to act. It’s usually gone in a second, but it makes me sad (but not depressed) when I see it. We've spent a lot of time getting to know each other again. At some point when he’s more mature, I will sit him down, I’ll talk about that time, and I’ll give him the explanation he deserves about what happened, and I will apologise.

So that’s the person I was when Claudia was six months old. A lot of people, including me, have sort of stepped to the conclusion that my Depression was caused in a large part by the shock of Claudia getting desperately ill. What I’m trying to explain here is that I was already pretty damned sick, but I was determinedly refusing to be treated.

I don't think I can imagine a parent more eager to send their child to nursery. I pretty much threw her through the doors and waved and ran.

When I got the first phone call from nursery to tell me she needed picking up because she was ill, I resented her so much! I'd just arranged this place where her crying was no longer anything to do with me, and they wanted me to take her back! How dare they? This is what I'm paying them for!

So to be honest, when she got very, very ill, I had absolutely nothing left. I was pretty much done. Alongside the shock of seeing her fighting for her life, was the sudden recognition that it was my fault, for having wished her away so often. Alongside the panic I felt whenever she was with me, I felt another sort of panic every time we were apart.

I have tried, over time, to give names to the various ‘Depressions’ that I was by now experiencing. Pre-natal depression, post-natal depression, hormonal-related depression, post-traumatic stress disorder… It really doesn’t matter. There was probably a bit of all of them in me at that time. I was pretty committed to ignoring all of them until the last one hit.

Suddenly I had an acceptable excuse for getting treatment. At the time, I was fooling myself that I only needed treatment for that last one, but whatever. At that point, I decided to get treatment.

Hoo-fucking-ray!

Unfortunately, by that stage, I was already fucked. From that point it took eighteen months for me to feel vaguely normal. Eighteen months during which I was receiving treatment, but during which I couldn't be left alone with the children, I barely spoke to my husband, I was physically distancing myself from the world, and a lot of my new, embedded behaviours of screaming, shouting and panicking continued to happen.

When I reached ‘normality’ it was probably a further six months before I started feeling happy, and started to feel joy in situations, and to feel properly confident about being around my family in various combinations, and responding to them appropriately.

Where I am now is that I'm maxed out on sedatives, and at the last review (about six weeks ago) the doctor and I decided we are going to treat them as lifelong medication. While we both recognise that things may well change (please god, let the menopause help with some of this), we're not going schedule a drugs review again, because it makes us (well, me) preoccupied with the concept of getting better and coming off them. I'm still reacting in a problematic way to stress (so I’ve also got beta-blockers). I've had months of therapy. This is probably as 'well' as I'll ever get.

To be honest, this level of wellness is absolutely fine! I am now happy an awful lot of the time, and I've got a wide circle of people I can communicate with! I’m productive and a lot of the time I’m producing work I’m proud of! I'm doing well!

I bloody love both my children unutterably. My relationships with them are great, and I instinctively know how to behave around them! There needs to be a little more work and attention with Tom, but generally, I can make them laugh! I can sit there while they pile on top of me and enjoy it rather than feeling crushed and needing to get away! I just took Tom and a friend to a cafe to eat and I didn't raise my voice once! These are all activities that would have been completely beyond my reach just 24 months ago.

But, and this is where this becomes a bit of a cautionary time, three years of feeling like that is a frickin' long time.

Three years! Those are three years of Tom and Claudia's lives that I'm never going to get back, ever. Three years during which my relationships with a number of people were damaged or lost. Three years of pain and misery because I spectacularly fucked up and didn't get the help that I needed immediately.

So there you go. What happened happened, and it is what it is and I'm now this and that's OK! I quite like myself. But I wish that I could have those years back, and I can't.

So please, for the love of all that is good and great in the world, if you think that you are down, or just a little wobbly, don't wait until you're catastrophically ill before getting help, because well, two years recovery time and a lifetime of drugs perhaps could be avoided.

Managing Depression – hints and tips.

And as a disclaimer here; this is written from my own experience entirely. I’m not an expert in any way, other than the fact this happened to me.

1 - Keep a close eye on your mood and behaviour. I’d suggest keeping a diary and making a note of it every day, but if I did I’d be a hypocrite because I’m in no way energetic enough to do this. I have, however, kept a diary at times when I’ve thought that things haven’t felt right and I’m not sure why. I just briefly put my general mood over the course of a day, and my general behaviour, so it might read Mood: low. Behaviour: wrote angry shite on the Internet. It’s a good way of spotting patterns, and noticing when things have been going on too long.

2 - Feed yourself. This can be hard; there are times when I want to spend weeks eating nothing but chicken soup and toast. But paying attention to a balance diet, eating regularly, and generally reining in the unhealthy crap can be really beneficial.

3 - Concentrate on your sleep hygiene. If you get into a habit of playing heart-stopping computer games, or working away at something until the early hours and then fall into an unmade bed and then suddenly realise that you’re hungry, then you’re going to exhaust yourself. Especially if you’re prone to lying in bed and fretting. Go to bed with enough time to get decent amounts of sleep, have some wind-down time before you go up, try hot milk drinks if you need something to settle you, read a distracting book for maybe a half hour in bed, and at least give your body a fighting chance to get the sleep it needs.

4 - Exercise. Fifteen minutes of whatever makes you sweat and gets your heart racing every day. This to me, is probably the hardest part of the ‘staving off Depression’ routines. There have been times when I’ve forced myself to choke down some green vegetables, and go for a brisk walk around the park, and I’ve had to fight the urge to go and crawl into bed with every step. However, there have been two occasions that this have picked me up sufficiently that I’ve avoided medication.

5 - Communicate. Try to aim to have three actual encounters a day. My favourite way of doing this is to walk to the corner shop, buy a newspaper/milk/epic amounts of chocolate, and say ‘hi! Just these please!’ with a manic grin. You can experiment with commenting about the weather if you choose. Another could just be a ‘hi! How you doing?’ email. Or just offer a colleague a coffee. You don’t need to suddenly spout a soul-searching speech or to explain the nature of the universe. You just need the stimulation of that eye contact and human interaction.

6 -  Have a plan. So you’ve got your diary, you’re eating and sleeping and exercising and reaching out. What if that doesn’t work? I have, in my ‘stress diary’ occasionally written out an actual plan. Mood low, behaviour erratic. Think I’ll feel better in two weeks, when X is out of the way. IF I DON’T FEEL BETTER ON X DATE, THEN I WILL… and work out what the next step is.

7 - Get help. This is an illness. It regularly fails to go away on its own accord. It has a tendency to get harder and harder to treat. But, and this is an important but, you absolutely do not have to manage this on your own!

And yes, that does seem like an over the top regime that places far too much importance on an illness. I, along with my husband and other family, spend an awful lot of time managing my Depression, but to be honest, I think it’s necessary and worthwhile. 

Depression kills. Stress kills. I do not want to die simply because I failed to take my mental health issues seriously.

Myths about Depression.

With the same disclaimer; these are perception and experience only.

1 - ‘If I go to my doctor for depression, he’ll instantly put me on drugs/send social services round/section me!’

OK, well they might, but it’s incredibly unlikely. Even with a long history of depression and two small children in the house, drugs were not the first action my doctor and I tried, and Social Services were contacted in an FYI letter only (it was a ‘this is the situation and this is how we’re fixing it’ letter). I have, on several occasions, gone to the doctors simply because I want it registered that I’m on a ‘low’. I want to know it’s there, so that if I’m still on a low in ten days’ time, the doctors have it noted and can move onto the next stage of treatment accordingly.

It is likely that medication will be suggested as an option. You ARE allowed to refuse it, though it’s probably more sensible to say ‘can we wait for a few weeks and then see’. There are other treatments, such as talking therapies and rest and these will probably be discussed too.

2 -  ‘Antidepressants are addictive.’

Well, yeah, in the same way that insulin is addictive if you’re a diabetic. The fact that you need a medication every day is not the same as being addicted to that medication.

As a mate said to me once; ‘If my medication was addictive, I probably wouldn’t forget to take it all the time!’ (Oh, that brings me on to another tip: if you’re prone to forgetting medication, have a reminder or two dotted around, and carry a couple of extra pills in your bag.)

3 -  ‘Antidepressants are placebos.’

Ironically, often voiced by the same people who think they’re addictive. Those addictive, addictive placebos.

There are several different types of antidepressants, and two of the common groups are SSRIs (Prozac, Citalopram, Sertraline etc.) and tri-cyclic (the only one I know is the one I’m on; Dosulpin). Within each group, as you can see, are many, many variations. Some of these will work better with some people, and other people will need something else. It is possible that if the period of Depression is a long one, it might take time to find the right drug for you. You’ll probably find that your doctor wants you to come back every few weeks at first to update on how they’re going, what side effects you’re experiencing and so on. This generally isn’t because they want to be irritating, but because they can change and tweak medications until they find what’s called the ‘therapeutic dose’ for you.

4 - ‘Depressed people are weak, take loads of time off work, and make their colleagues pick up their slack.’

No. Depressed people are not ‘weak’, they are not deliberately downing tools and being lazy. It’s very similar to other long term illnesses. You can’t help getting ill, and given the right help and support, you can generally find your way back to good mental health really quickly.

I’ve had more time off work because I’ve been avoiding treatment than I’ve ever had when I’ve been receiving treatment. The untreated times lead to me being erratic, slow of concentration, likely to need to leave work every early. Kind of the way I behave when I have any other form of illness.

5 - ‘I will never be depressed. I’m just not that sort of person.’

No. Just no.

I hope and wish nobody else in the world will ever get Depressed ever, but it’s a pretty stupid and pointless wish. People will. Lots, and lots of people will, and denying it isn’t going to be doing anyone any favours.

However, with understanding, a little bit of thought and a whole lot of care, people who do get Depressed can hopefully work their way to wellness quickly and with as little permanent damage done to them as humanly possible.

Pip xxx

Fuckwit of the week, 15 September 2001

OK, realistically, this is fuckwit of the… (mumble) time since I last wrote a blog post.

Yeah, sorry about that.

On the other hand, the novel is very nearly finished, and every time I do another edit and change things, I’m getting closer and closer to an end product that I really like, so grateful thanks to all my readers so far!  The plan at the moment is to enter it into a competition with a closing date of 30^th September. When it’s rejected from that, I’ll start sending it out to publishers, but probably only commit to doing this until June next year. After that, I’ll publish as an e-book online. As and when that happens, I’ll let you know.

Right, back to fuckwits.

I have quite a list of contenders today.

First up is me.

For those of you who follow my Twitter stream, you’ll probably have noticed a string of self-pitying whines from yesterday. Sorry about that.

So, yesterday I had the worst flair up of Depression than I’ve had for… well, easily six months now. Possibly even longer as I can’t remember being too bad when I had pneumonia and I was expecting it then!

Anyhow, one of the many, many symptoms is that I feel compelled to write self-pitying rants and fling them up on the internet. In part, this is because I crave sympathy, but mostly it’s because I can’t not do it. The part of me that doesn’t post self-pity whines stops working.  Yesterday I deleted more than I published, so that’s good. The whole thing only lasted two or three hours, and it didn’t spiral into a second and a third patch of self-loathing, so that’s a positive too.

The biggest positive is that I don’t recall when I was last having a ‘blip’ like that. That used to be my status quo, and I’d have probably three or four periods a week of fairly horrendous thoughts and just fighting the urge to just, well, check out.

So let’s celebrate the fact that I’m currently stable enough that yesterday was a surprise!

Though, and this is the reason I’m a fuckwit, it also wasn’t a surprise. I’ve been working long hours between work and book, there have been a series of stressful events over the past two weeks or so, and several at the early part of this week.

I manage my Depression well. I know that Stress + overwork + poor diet + lack of sleep = breakdown.

So why I thought I should just plough through it all is a bit beyond me.

Anyhow, the good news is that I’m now taking things a bit easier. I am at work, but I’m happy to take time off if I start feeling any wobbles, no matter how slight, and I’m going to rework the diet and exercise, and all that stuff.

I have some brilliant and wonderful friends who saw what was happening and a) gave a shit and b) gently joked with me and kept an eye on me until I came out of it.

Right, so enough about me and let’s look at the other fuckwits of the world. Who might be on my list?

Nadine Dorries.

Yeah, she had to be, didn’t she?

Now, I respect that there are many, many people in the world who find abortion distasteful, or who believe it should not happen full stop. I respect their opinions about it. However, I think that wrapping that argument up in anything other than ‘I don’t like abortions, I think it should stop!’ or even 'I care more about the unborn child than I do about its mother' is pretty darned silly.

For Nadine Dorries to get up and pretend that this is a woman’s rights issue is just odd. To imply that she’s protecting a woman from a big, monstrous decisions that she frankly doesn’t understand, is frankly insulting.

You know what? At no point during any of my pregnancies was I offered counselling to make sure I understood the mental and physical damage that would be done to my body during pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. Let’s be realistic, there are many cases where these things are quite shocking and terrifying. If someone had sat down with me to discuss these things, I would have chosen to have my children anyway.

BECAUSE I KNOW MY OWN MIND!

But that isn’t the problem, Dorries is happy that I’ve made the right decision, no matter how damaging it might be to me, because it fits with her preferences so that’s all OK.

The thing is, there were a lot of words in that amendment that I agreed with. My personal feeling is this.

Any pregnant woman of any age, who feels she needs support when making the decision to keep or abort her pregnancy, should have that support. It should be free, easily accessible, it should be professional, and in these circumstances, it should be delivered by people who are experts in pregnancy, childbirth and abortion, people who are unbiased, which means that they should not be pressured by their own religion to force a woman in one direction or the other.

Oh wait a cotton-pickin’ minute! That already happens!

The suggestion that counsellors are pushing women into having abortions that they don’t want is abhorrent. These are non-profit organisations. Marie Stokes in particular is committed to extending education on sexual health matters on a global level, and aims to provide advice and contraception in areas where no such service exists at the moment.

Are the government doing as well to provide efficient and well-balanced information about sex to our nation’s children? No they’re not, so on this they should shut up and sit down.

Right, next on my list? Well, it’s the delightful duo of Cameron and Clegg.

But what for?

OK, well privatising yet more sections of the NHS is at the top of my list.

I’ve harped on about this before, but this really, really matters. When you’re ill, it’s really, really important that you’re not also weighed down by the stress of ‘can I afford this treatment?’

Look at me. I am able to function on a day-to-day basis because I am on medication, and received some excellent talking-therapy when I needed it. And I’m one of the lucky ones because there are still many, many people who are frozen out of mental health care because waiting lists are too long. These are not people who could simply choose to go private. Hell, I was offered a private service during the year that my name was slowly rising to the top of the waiting list, but I couldn’t afford it. It isn’t a choice between NHS and private care. For many people, it’s the choice between NHS or nothing.

Let’s look at Claudia for a second.

Between mid-November 2008 and mid March 2009 I was taking her to the doctor at the rate of once a week. She’d been several times before then too, but that was the period at which her health was at it’s most critical. Looking at our nearest neighbour, Ireland, it costs €60 for each doctor’s trip (£52). So if I’d have had to pay for each visit at that time, it would have cost round about £624, just for the trips to my local GP.

Did I have a spare £624 at the time? Did I fuck. The choice would have been between that and food.

In addition, there was the time that I had to take her to the out of hours doctor, which was fortunately in the hospital to which she was immediately admitted. This was the occasion when there were two, one-hour periods when doctors were refusing to leave her side, even when there was another emergency call, because she was still considered to be the most sick child in the building. They couldn’t leave her for those two hours ‘just in case’.

My God, the guilt and pain I still feel remembering those two hours! If at any point I’d have had to think ‘how will we pay for this care that she so clearly needs’, it probably would have killed me. If there had been any part of me that had doubted that she needed to be in hospital, and if I’d have been pressed by those doubts, she would have died.

I don’t know how much that time would have cost, and I’m slightly frightened to look it up.

Oh, yes, and then there was the final week of that illness, during which she saw our local doctor three times, she was admitted to hospital where she underwent an emergency operation and then had four days of hospital led recovery and frankly shed-loads of antibiotics.

Do I think I’d have been able to afford insurance that would have covered that little lot, a time of confusing diagnosis because the presentation of the illness was so odd? No. There’s no way.

So the NHS is important, and having it privatised it by stealth is something that I am extremely wary about.

So yeah. They’re on my fuckwit’s list.

Oh yes, and hearing yesterday that they want to reduce summer holidays as a way of winning back women voters.

While I like the idea, it drives me to distraction that the coalition seem to think the word ‘woman’ is synonymous with the word ‘mother’, and indeed that they are progressing the fallacy that childcare is the responsibility of the ‘mother’ and not of the ‘parents’.

Fuckwits.

Who else have we got?

OK, I recall being incensed by Michael Gove for one day of the last month, but I can’t remember what for.

Probably just being Michael Gove.

As he’s yet to open his mouth to say something sensible and well researched, let’s assume he’s a fuckwit for being Michael Gove while talking.

And then there was also this story that’s been winding its way around the Internet, and apologies that this isn’t well researched, it’s because I’m still knackered following yesterday’s afternoon of fun.

Here is one article on it

http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/genreville/?p=1519

A publisher of Young Adult fiction in America has asked a writer to change the sexual orientation of one of the characters in her book. The four other relationships, all straight, are fine. The fifth is no more explicit than the heterosexual ones but apparently boys kissing each other is wrong.

Well, clearly they’ve got a point! Surely, if we stop writing about gay teens, they’ll all suddenly stop existing!

And what might happen should a teen read about a gay couple in a book, and perhaps tentatively kiss someone who’s the same sex as them? Oh no! They might like it! They might suddenly find that they’re in a world where they’re able to love the person of their choice free from prejudice and hatred!

How horrible that would be!!!

Fucking fuckwits.

So who gets my special award this morning?

Actually, it would be the person who was cycling with no lights, no helmet, no reflectors, the wrong way down a one-way street who scared the bejeezus out of me at the break of dawn this morning.

I’d really like to exit this world without having killed anyone. Could you please make it a touch easier for me to do that?

Ta muchly,

Pip xxx

I am still here.

I didn't swear myself into an early grave. There were times when I thought that I would burst into an angry ball of flames at any given moment, but I just held it together.

I'm finally writing the novel. It has a plot, it has characters, I've got several thousand words down that I don't hate, and I have three pages of crib notes to keep me on track. More significantly than all of that, I have enthusiasm about it that I haven't had before. It works for me now.

So yey! Good for me! The only thing I have to do now is to get the ruddy words from my head and onto a page before they vanish forever. Consequently I'm keeping my head down at the moment.

Still, it keeps me out of trouble.

Pip xxx

Dear Mr Cameron...

Dear Mr. Cameron.

I have five questions to which I would like the answers.

One: Why do you keep saying Andy Coulson did a good job for you when he was based in Downing Street. He was your Director of Communications. He failed to say ‘if you hire me, it sends a clear message that you prefer to consort with criminals and the people who hire criminals.’ If he was doing a good job, he might have indicated that his name might just come up again in relation to criminal activities that were going on at the News of the World while he was Deputy Editor and Editor. That was quite a lapse he had there.

Two: Why do you keep saying that you weren’t warned that Andy Coulson’s name might come up in investigations into the criminal activity that took place while he was working for News International? You were warned. You were warned both directly, by Tom Watson, MP, in a letter in October 2010, and you were warned indirectly by the people working at the Guardian newspaper via your Chief of Staff, Ed Llewellyn. The Metropolian Police Service also asked if they could brief you and were denied access.

Three: Can you explain to me who made the decision that you should be shielded from all information regarding Andy Coulson and Neil Wallis in relation to phone hacking? Was it your decision, or did Mr Llewellyn choose not to keep you informed, either on his own or in consultation to other members of your staff?

Four: You we’re asked a question in the House of Commons about the specific warnings you were given related; why did you not respond to that question, but instead state that Andy Coulson worked well for you? The people in Britain are really not so stupid that they won’t notice you didn’t answer the question, and to presume that they are is disrespectful to the highest degree. Also, see question one.

Five: In reference to whether you discussed the BskyB bid with Rebekah Brooks, you answered that you hadn’t had any ‘inappropriate’ conversations with her. Can you give me a clear definition of what you mean by ‘inappropriate’ here? Because I’m really not sure your definition matches mine.

You have suggested that the people of Britain should decide whether you have acted well on this matter, or not. I’m more than willing to judge you right now, but I’d prefer to give you the opportunity to answer these questions first.

Regards

Pip Mulgrue.

The above letter is going to take some more revision; I’m going to look at it again tomorrow when I’m not so tired. It turns out that I do care more about letters to the Prime Minister than I do about the random stuff I publish on the web.  I have been working quite hard to get it that far. Here is my first draft:

Dear Mr. Cameron.

Stop fucking lying, you lying, lying piece of shit! Stop treating the British public as if they’re stupid, you ignorant, arrogant fuckwit! How dare you continue to lie to the people who pay your salary!

Stop pretending that you don’t know anything and that it was all other people and that you simply didn’t know about Andy fucking Coulson! If you didn’t, you should have done!

Stop with the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ and the ‘second chance’ shit. If a kid’s got a record for shoplifting, would you let him come and work in Downing Street? I bet you wouldn’t you two-faced git. I believe in innocent until proven guilty but I don’t investigate stuff by ramming my fingers in my ears and singing ‘la-la-la! All happy here!’

Stop refusing to answer basic questions you spineless shitbag! Stop with the ‘I’m so superior to everyone else that I don’t even need to attend fucking parliament’. You’re not! You have to answer to the British Public!

And unfortunately at the moment you’re doing a piss poor job. You know what? If you were to offer your resignation; I’d accept it.

Oh, and don’t think that we won’t notice that you’ve started the moves to privatise the NHS because it was cleverly announced on Tuesday when people’s attention might have been elsewhere.

It wasn’t. It was a stupid and cowardly act.

Yours,

Pip Mulgrue.

Other people who have caused me to fall into a sweary, ranty rage in the past two days include…

John Yates, Kier Starmer, The stupid fuckwit with the pie (I’d look up his name, but I really don’t care what it is), Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch, Nick Clegg (primarily, for just sitting there doing absolutely nothing), my husband for leaving the dishes to soak, both of my children for actually quite minor transgressions, and one of the guys at work for reasons that would bore you to tears but who was really fucking selfish.

Oddly, I failed to be moved to anger by Rebekah Brooks. Partly because I’d short circuited at that point and was failing to respond to anything on an emotional level. But partly because she struck me as someone who had been promoted far too quickly, and far beyond her ability, and she was just floundering in the recognition of how rubbish she basically was. She appears to have made her way through life fuelled entirely by spite, arrogance and greed. Oh wait, my anger for her was just on delay.

Anyhow, I’m done to death. And I’m beginning to think this wasn’t the right week to give up cake and sugar and switch to salads for lunch. I'm now going to go and eat my body-weight in chocolate.

Pip xxx