Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em

Being minus a mother, there are times when I feel the absence of said maternal being more keenly than others. Mothering Sunday (March 26 in the UK) is just one of those days.

Now, Chicken the Oven Ready is well aware of my feelings as regards this particular day. Even still, he announced to me on Friday night on arrivng home from the rugby (Wigan were not terribly good, he couldn't see much because of the fog, waste of bloody money etc), that he hadn't managed to get his Mother's Day present yet and so could I possibly source an orchid for him?

The reason for this request was that he was racing remote control cars in Wakefield the following day with our neighbour, TechyDave, and a bunch of other weirdos who despite being allegedly adults like to buy expensive bits of kit that require putting together, painting, covering in decals, radio gear and electrics and remote control purchasing separately and so on at great length. It's an expensive hobby, but they enjoy it and it gets them out in the fresh air. And if he ever finishes building the second-hand Super Sabre he bought off Ebay, I will have a car of my own to race.

So, Saturday morning dawned. I was kicked out of bed at 8 am (on a Saturday! Argh!) and sent off to Dave's Village Bakery (another Dave) to buy breakfast. He departed just after 9 am and I headed for the net to find a local florist to enquire about orchids. Three hours later, I remembered why I'd actually gone on line and located a florist locally who had orchids. I presumed he meant a spray orchid, so asked them to keep one for me and then rang him to confirm. No, he actually meant the whole growing plant. I knew they had some of those too, so no worries there.

His mum is now the proud owner of not one but two phaleonopsis plants, both displaying different shaded blooms. She is delighted with them. Buying them was something of a production though, involving me ringing himself trackside and describing flower colours to him over the sound of revving engines and excited squeals from TechyDave. Not the easiest thing to do, really. 'This one is sort of pale greenish with kind of yellow-pinky stripes on the bloom. Yeah, it looks very orchid-y. You like that one? It's 14.50. You want two? The same or different? Yeah, OK. Well, there's one that's like a white with dusky pink in the centre and then dark pink stripes? Or there's a dusky pink one with no stripes but stronger pink. The first one? You sure? Yeah, okay. Gift wrapped? Well, the one you already said is in a gift bag. Plastic. Sort of you know, thing. Hallucinogenic. No, you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah. That's what I said. Oh, didn't I? Well, it's what I meant'.

We had slow-roasted lamb shanks for tea, with melon and serrano ham to begin and meringue nest with raspberries and ice cream for pudding. Very lovely indeed.

Driving home, I had the radio tuned to Radio 2, which is usual for me. The tape deck packed in a few weeks ago, and given that the car is being junked soon there is no point in having it mended, even if that were to prove possible. So, I drove along listening to Canon Roger Royle. He has a half-hour programme on a Sunday evening from 8.30 in which he plays some of the nation's favourite hymns and psalms. The theme of the last few weeks has been connected to Lent and tonight was about the prophet Elijah who went off into the wilderness to try to escape the voice of God. Of course, he couldn't.

Elijah was indeed spoken to by God. There was in the wilderness an earthquake, a storm and a fire. These are all ways in which God was said to communicate. But it was not in the noise and tumult that Elijah heard God, but in the calm that followed. There was a lovely piece by I think Mozart, and this was followed by one of my favourite hymns, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, sung to the tune Repton. My absolute favourite. Now, the good Canon had already made reference in passing to it being Mothering Sunday. As drove along, the words of the hymn and the beautiful tune swelling around me, I had tears in my eyes and I couldn't at first think why.

It was then that I remembered. I chose that hymn in particular for my mother's first funeral service at the local church in Ullapool. Funnily enough, it isn't one of the hymns they especially like in the Church of Scotland - I'd never heard it till I was a student in England and began going to church on a fairly regular basis, after ten years or so of estrangement from the established Church. You'd have thought a congregation of some 400 souls would have been able to sing it, but no. Even the minister didn't know it. There was myself and maybe two or three others who sang it. That kind of fits in with the words towards the end.

Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.

Somehow I felt like that still, small voice of calm. I felt so buffeted by emotion and assailed by the sense of loss and anger that came with losing someone I loved so very much, I felt as though the best thing I could do for her to was be calm and to be still and to accept what had happened. Singing on through the hymn was my tribute to her.

Driving on through the night, my eyes filled with tears, I felt her presence so keenly I cold have stopped the car and sobbed on the roadside. Instead I dashed the tears away and drove on into the night.

Bugger still doesn't work right!

The bugger in question is two-fold:

the Crimson Brick is still not quite there, but as has already been said that is of little import. Providing always that I manage to safely negotiate the highways and byways as I potter about the North Midlands and West Yorkshire. And it is rather more there than it was - it only takes about ten seconds of embarrassed stick-it-into-neutral-turn-the-key-gun-the-throttle-and-swear-a-blue-streakness for it to pick up and scoot off again (albeit with the accompaniment of a degree of chuggery), and the fuel consumption appears a little better. So there is some improvement. But the outlaw still hasn't found his new car. And I still need Chicken the Oven Ready to have his car and the outlaw's old car at the same time for a while while he transfers the numberplate from one to the other.

The other bugger is of course my broadband connection, or rather lack of it. I ran a test on the outlaws' computer to see how long their telephone-line based cable (different ISP but same make of modem) takes to initialise the ADSL line. Answer: ten flashes of the right hand green light. Not, in any way shape or form or indeed by any stretch of the imagination does it take between four and five hours, nor depend on making a phone call out first to get it to pick up the connection.

Some nights it plays ball. I mean, on Wednesday night I was on for about five hours. Long enough to download iTunes (only to find that all the music in my account that was authorised on this computer is inaccessible from the other computer, even having authorised that computer, which I am bloody well annoyed about - I am NOT allowed to download iTunes back again onto this machine because CtOR has heard horror stories about the Bonjour gateway service). And also long enough to download the driver for my soundcard - hence the iTunes download. I have downloaded other essentials too, of course, such as AdawareSE and AVG (first thing I downloaded above all was ZoneAlarm, even when I was on dialup, and that took best part of four hours to load and install. And don't talk to me about Java!!!!).

Other nights, I can get on for 3 and a half minutes tops. But only after I make a phone call, which has to be answered so it means either ringing home to speak to himself or leaving gibberish on the answermachine, which he is really not happy about. But then as he has spent most of the last two weekends moaning at me about trivial little things I am in all honesty beyond caring. But let us not go there.

It hasn't been that bad so far, I suppose.

Cold and Colder

That was me, last night.

Bad enough there were three or so inches of snow when I departed from home. Which had to be shovelled off the car before I moved it. There wasn't any snow once I got about ten miles away, but the Crimson Brick ground to a halt on me about a quarter of a mile before the last roundabout before my turning into the village.

This is where the A1(M) splits off to join the A1, the A614 and the A57. We are talking major, big roundabout (it's called Five Lane Ends - hint?) and there I was, stuck in an immobile car with an engine that refused to restart, half on the main road and half off it and able to think of nothing save sticking on the hazard lights and clambering over gear stick and handbrake and getting the ferk out of Dodge before a lorry slammed into the back of me.

You may well ask where cold comes into things. Well. It may not have snowing in North Notts, but it was colder than a witch's you-know-what. I waited well back from the road down a farm track (well away from the car - just in case that lorry did happen to slam into the back of it) for nearly three-quarters of an hour before my knight in yellow refletive overalls turned up in his AA van. He was far too cheerful. And the verdammtes car started first turn of the key.

So my nice AA man followed me the four miles home and gave it a quick check when we arrived. No rhyme or reason to it cutting it out - nothing to do with my firklings with carburretor cleaner which entailed cracking open the round flat thing with the air filter in that sits on top of the carburretor. (Look, I know how to dismantle bits of my car - that doesn't in my view necessitate knowing what they are called). Nothing to do with the missing bit of flexihose twixt manifold outlet and air intake. (Though my former apprentice mechanic brother muttered something about vacuums and powerloss and shocking fuel consumption).

The CB actually is running sweet as a nut today. Pulled out onto the A1 this morning and there was no power loss, no jerking and shuddering like a fitting bucking bronco. Most relaxing!

There will be a slight delay in getting the new old car. CtOR has the car I am going to have, you may recall. I'm sure I mentioned it...Anyway, this is his Dad's old car, which has the vanity plates on that his Dad bought him for his 18th (the car was always going to pass to him in a few years). He gets his Dad's current vehicle and passes the old one to me. But, to transfer the vanity plates, he has to own both vehicles at once, the old car gets a new registration number and I buy new plates for it with that number on. And then it gets transferred to me. Oh, I need to probably increase my insurance a bit cos it's a 2.0 litre SLX as opposed to a 1.3 litre Pony GXi or something like that. The blue car goes like a rocket. The Crimson Brick goes like - well, a brick, obviously.

Oh, well. Mustn't grumble!

Overtaking Manouevres

I would just love to know - having spent approximately one-third of a nearly 70 mile journey travelling at 50 mph or less on a road designed for 70 mph - who the hell felt the need to sit in the inside lane of the A1 and prevent anyone else from passing the slower-moving traffic in the other lane? Which eventually became the lane that people switched to to undertake the slow person at the front of a long, long jam of extremely frustrated people.

It's dangerous. It's also selfish, but the dangerous angle is the more worrying to my way of thinking. I know that road, I know it well. It is very easy to do 80, 90 mph and more (though you shouldn't) without causing a danger to anyone else for much of its length. And yet, being only a dual carriageway, you often find a convoy of lorries overtaking a slower-moving lorry. They usually all decide to go at once, more often than not at the bottom of a very steep hill, so that all the lorries struggle to keep above 40 mph. It can take five minutes and more to get them all past the slower object, and then usually no sooner have they all crawled back to the 'slow' lane than they all pull out again, normally after one or possibly very lucky two cars have managed to get past them.

I think that's one of the reasons the A1 is so dangerous!

Anyway. I am glad to be home. I am very, very tired. Wanda was too upset with me to run away when I came in. I just got this sort of feline glare and a 'harrrummmpppphhhhhh' from her as she curled up a little tighter on her cushion.

So nice to be loved!

Glad I didn't go to the match. I was also supposed to be going on a leaving do for someone I used to work with at the last place of employment. I quite frankly coudn't be bothered. Same old bitching about the same old faces, and L maundering on about the state of her marriage and how R won't leave her alone even though she dumped him.

To use a much-overused phrase of L'sL 'Whatever!'

Time for bed soon. Just waiting for the man to arrive home from the match. Cold and wet but happy because we won. Not by very much at all, but a win is a win.

On Grief

It is a funny thing, the grieving process.

Ever wonder why it's described as that? A Process?

Well. Maybe it IS something that you 'process' through, as it were, in respect of the fact that it has different stages that we have to pass through.

I'm at the stage now (four years, seven months and one day) after losing Mum, that I can go throughout probably most of a two or three day period without at some point having a twinge of the 'I wish I could tell Mum about X' or 'Mum would have loved to have seen/done/heard about Y'. Or just plain and simple missing her for no apparent reason, or thinking of her suddenly.

Thing is, when I am rudely jolted into remembering that I have no mother, it hits me like a slap round the face: my mother is dead.

I've just been over to the market place here, across from the office and up the hill a little way. I am such a magpie that things like handbags and jewellery captivate me and haul me in to peer at the glittering pretty things. And so it was that one poor man engaged me in conversation whilst I cogitated over what I might like to spend my (increasingly and alarmingly) dwindling funds upon.

He was doing so well until he chirped 'We've some lovely things for Mother's Day'. (Those of you who live outside the UK and may chance to read this should note that Mother's Day in the UK is celebrated on normally the last Sunday in March which this year is March 26th).

I find Mother's Day incredibly hard to deal with. I was almost hysterical the first year after she died when CtOR and I went to Asda to do our shopping in February and all the Mother's Day trappings were out. It physically hurt me. I always saw that day as being even more special than Christmas and birthdays because it was all about her in total - all about thanking her for being my Mum, and being quite simply the best Mum in the whole world ever. Mum was my best friend. She was the first person I thought of whenever good things or bad things happened, the one person I ran to when it all went wrong. The one person who really knew me and would never judge me. I absolutely loved her to pieces. I always will. She made me laugh like no-one else could. Or can. Roll out the clichés, because she was like a sister to me. I count myself lucky beyond words and rich beyond the dreams of avarice to have had such a fantastic mother, and find it heartbreaking and puzzling - baffling - that other people aren't as close to their mums as I was to mine.

I am ashamed to say that I smiled at the poor chap on the stall and chirruped blithely: 'I'm afraid that that isn't something I need to worry about any more, unfortunately'. Well. He felt dreadful, poor chap, and was desperately trying to apologise. I fled. I was on the edge of tears, and I don't want to be tipped over the edge. Not now, not when I have to go to work and put on the happy face for the clients and sit and listen to them without losing my temper.

By the time I was almost back at the office, it had occurred to me that I really had behaved rather rudely and shouldn't have said what I did. I was idly programming the microwave to finish heating my lunch when it dawned on me that today is March 8th. Which means yesterday was the 7th. Which means that it was not just 4 years and 7 months since Mum died yesterday. It was also 4 years since my Nan died, my mum's mother.

I was more upset about forgetting that than anything else. My relationship with my Nan was a complex thing. As a child, I adored my grandparents, though I was always my Grandad's little girl. He died when I was 7 and that broke my heart. It broke all our hearts. Nan spent the rest of her life wishing she was dead, too, and became increasingly difficult and reliant on Mum. Mum, in turn, was not a well woman in some ways. She was also overworked, an insomniac so always overtired, had two children in my brother and I who took her for granted even while loving her to bits, and a husband who spent months at a time not talking to her and could be - and was - extremely violent in every possible way. The added burden of being a round-the-clock carer to her own mother as well was simply too much for her, and so Mum died at 61, two and a half weeks short of her birthday.

Nan blamed herself. She was no longer a senile, cantankerous, demanding, nasty, sly old woman, but briefly alert, clear-minded and filled with the sort of self-realisation that I can only imagine was excoriating in its awfulness. She turned to me after the funeral, when we were going through some old photos together, and said to me 'I killed her. It's my fault'.

I told her that that was rubbish and she mustn't think that way. I'm not sure that I wholly meant it. Worse, I think she knew that.

Outside, the rain lashes down as it has for the last two days. It matches my mood and envervates me. I think I would really like to go home. I'm not sure where I mean by home. I think that ideally I would like to be standing in my mother's kitchen, me leaning against the sink while she leant against the worktop to the side of me and we just talked about everything and nothing and made each other laugh. Or maybe that means clowning around behind the counter in the shop and making the customers laugh almost as hard as we were.

Where Do I Begin?

Well, it has been a while, hasn't it?

Where to start?

The cats are blossoming in my care. Both were riddled with fleas, Loki had earmites, a long-standing eye infection and a dreadful stomach upset that had left him with permanent diarrhoea. All of those are cleared up with the exception of a few stray fleas that I keep finding on combing out of both cats' fur.

Neither of them had ever had any of their vaccinations whatsoever, and of course the previous owner has not shown up with the money for them as promised. She also left a load of debts behind her, which caused me to have to change my phone number so I could get online at home - she'd had the same ISP I wanted to sign up with and the debt attached to the phone number.

Dialup truly sucks - I'd forgotten how frustrating it can be. So, I have broadband coming on Friday courtesy of Mr Branson's fine company.

Work seems to be okay. It is very quiet compared to how I'm used to things though. I get the impression the previous incumbent had been running things down prior to leaving quite horrendously. There are maybe 50 live files. Not the 188 alleged on the file list! Some of those are care cases, but they're mostly being run by a guy in a different office. I got to go to court today for the first time in this post! It was much better than the last time I'd had a lay off - but then it's been five or six weeks as opposed to 8 months!

On the bad side, my secretary's husband had a heart attack on Sunday morning, about 8ish. He had a further, massive attack in the back of the ambulance as they went to the local community hospital and had to be resuscitated at the roadside before they could continue the journey. He's now in the City Hospital in Nottingham. It seems he had a blockage in an artery so they have him on warfarin. Hopefully he will make a full recovery and not need surgery.

He's a truly larger-than-life man, with a huge laugh and a pirate beard - he's referred to as 'the Pirate' by us all. He's one of the friendliest, easiest men I think I've ever met. A lovely man.

Everyone is great, really, at work. No problems with anyone as yet, though there is clearly a lot of office politics. I am keeping well clear! Not wanting to get involved at all. NO way - not this time! Once bitten very definitely twice shy.

Landlady still a nutter but not being anywhere near so obtrusive as she was. I don't see her for a couple of days or more at a time now! The youngest child has discovered me now though, although more to the point she has discovered CtOR and thinks he is the bees knees! A four year old fan club. Good, eh?

I think I will update further later cos I am tired now and it is nearly time for the steampowered dialup two hourly boot.

*snarls*