Variable 4, becoming westerly 5 to 7 later.

December 31, 2014 / lynseywhite / Leave a comment

Dear Lynsey,

Whilst blowing an eyelash from your fingertip at 9.42 a.m. on 31/12/14 you radioed a wish for general happiness in the year 2015.

We at the Met Office intercepted this signal whilst sailing the high seas in our yellow sou’westers, scanning the far horizon with our salty binoculars (because this is definitely how we prepare the Shipping Forecast, and don’t let anyone tell you anything different or less romantic).

Owing to God’s absence (which was reliably confirmed by ourselves and our salty binoculars a number of decades ago) and the somewhat vague nature of the ‘universe’ to whom you were appealing, we at the Met Office have stepped into the breach to offer our own predictions for 2015 based on careful assessment of incoming clouds in the Norfolk area and the consumption of a celebratory Bacardi and Coke or two.

Our results are as follows:

Completing the final draft of your novel, entitled Madder Hall: fair, to good.

Sexual intercourse: slow moving with little change.

Defrosting the fridge: wintry showers expected.

Taking more exercise: drifting slowly east.

Submitting novel to agents: rain at times.

Eating less cheese: moderate, becoming poor.

Keeping on top of paperwork: warning of gales.

The general synopsis is moderate, becoming fair, good, poor, then moderate again. But we at the Met Office subscribe to the internet-approved statement that life isn’t about waiting for the rain to finish, but learning to dance in the rain. Here, indeed, is a photograph of a lady drinking tea in the Blitz to illustrate our firm belief in the following: (a) all storms can be weathered eventually; (b) the sun’ll come out tomorrow: a fact on which we have bet our bottom dollar; (c) there are few situations that can’t be improved by putting the kettle on.

Put the kettle on, love. (All right, if you think it’ll suit me.)

It only remains for us to wish you smooth sailing in 2015 and beyond.

Yours sincerely,

The Imaginary Met Office.

Found art: a poem in blog posts

December 18, 2014 / lynseywhite / 2 Comments

It’s nearly the end of 2014 and the world and his wife (or something less egregiously sexist) are blogging about the year just gone. I was reading this rather good blog t’other day, findingtimetowrite.wordpress.com, and I found a cool idea for assessing one’s 2014 through a very specific lens: namely, the first line of the first blog you posted each month.

So I tried it.

And?

The results were quite dull, to be honest. It turned out I didn’t like having to choose a particular line, by default.

But I did enjoy skimming old posts for the sort of line that JUMPS OUT from the page. So I put my own spin on the game, and I made a found poem with chronological scraps from my blog posts, season by season.

And here it is…

Untitled 2014

Winter

On a day like today there is cake,
Ten seconds of toe-tickling or
an accidental pin-prick.

Dear People of Planet Earth
I’ve grown cobwebs.
Occasional pinholes appear.

Spring

I’m a terrible knitter.

When my daughter was little
(a cup of sweet tea when you didn’t expect it).
But I digress.

What do you do with all this – all this life,
all this shit – if you don’t
write it down?

Summer

Here’s something I hate.

Autumn

By now you may be wondering
how to be interesting.

All the good stuff will happen tomorrow.

The moon has moved on
to a new piece of sky with
hand-stitched lace.

I’ve just been a-Googling and
hey nonny-nonny.

The hairs on my neck must be lazy.
I have fallen through the hole in the
paper. I like the number
eight.

Congratulate yourself. You wait all
day for a pirouette and then
three come along at once.

A little too much about snot.
David Cameron in his underpants.

It’s been a long week.

All the bells and whistles please.
I turned some water into
wine and verily I did drink it.

I’m feeling a little peculiar.

Somebody’s left you a shit in the pan.

Bliss is fragile.

Winter

Everything will probably be okay.
It must be peculiar not to exist.

Don’t neglect your hot meat.

Hot meat and the skateboarding George Orwell: a thing about voice.

December 17, 2014December 17, 2014 / lynseywhite / Leave a comment

‘It’s one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window.’

So says Holden Caulfield of good ole’ Pencey Prep (still my favourite ever school name; Malory Towers a close second) in The Catcher in the Rye.

Image source

I’m a writing teacher. Most of the people I teach are beginners. A few have raw talent that just needs the edges hemmed, and a few have a talent that’s medium-rare to well-done (though they still mightn’t have the discipline for the long slog of drafting again and again) and a few are so good I do wonder if they should be teaching the class instead.

But the things I see oftenest, as a teacher of novices (briefly visualised myself as a nun there, just for a second) is writing that’s meant to be very sophisticated and all but ends up being merely phony.

If I was a different sort of teacher (i.e. a bitch) I might award badges.

But I’m not. So I don’t.

Not least because I’ve been guilty of phoniness myself on more than one occasion and, anyway, these are beginners. You don’t sit down for your first piano lesson and come out with this:

But neither can you ‘allow’ people to carry on writing like phonies without at least pointing out that, hey, there’s another way. And that way is actually lots more fun. It allows you to write with your Own Goddamn Voice, as Holden might put it.

‘Never use a long word where a short one will do, said George Orwell very sensibly (and English-ly) in his essay Politics and the English Language (1946). He also said:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

... and he's cross that you wrote cerulean when you just meant blue.

… and he’s cross that you wrote ‘cerulean’ as a fancy way of saying ‘blue’. You dick.

I part company with Orwell somewhat on the word ‘barbarous’, which no doubt was less of a sore-thumb sixty-something years ago when the essay was written. But otherwise:

The fewer blankets of snow, and skies of gun-metal grey, and light flooding through windows, the better.
If it is possible to cut a word out without spoiling the sentence’s cadence, cut it out.
Use a passive occasionally for particular effect. (Penelope Lively’s Next Term We’ll Mash You has a perfect example: a schoolboy being borne away by a headmistress)
Anglo-Saxon all the way.
To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, you are free to do whatever you can get away with. But no one in fiction has ever gotten away with much…

Curiously, since these six rules seem ruddy good to me, and fairly inoffensive, Will Self got his knickers in a twist in The Grauniad a couple of months ago, with an article declaring Orwell ‘the supreme mediocrity’.

The comments, of course, are rife with ‘smug git’s and ‘takes one to know one’ and a reference or two to Self’s affliction with the most socially acceptable of the diarrhoea family: the verbal variety. In Self’s eyes, Orwell seems a Michael Gove-like repressor of young minds, rejecting the language’s tendency to mutate, a bit like a virus, and telling us all we’ll be shot in the face if we dare to use words of more than one syllable.

Talk about making a drama out of a crisis. Or indeed a mountain from a molehill (she says, offending against the first of Orwell’s rules). I was reading, t’other day, about something called ‘outrage porn‘: intellectuals enjoy being irritated as much as Disgruntled of Norfolk in his/her letters to the editor of the local rag about disrespectful youths on skateboards, and Will Self has whipped himself into a froth about Orwell in much the same way. What he’s basically saying is:

Oi, Orwell, your wheels are too noisy, you’re going to trip someone up in a minute, and get yourself a haircut, boy.

Oi, Orwell! You're not big and you're not clever and I'll wrap that skateboard round your fecking neck in a minute.

I’ll wrap that skateboard round your fecking neck in a minute, son.

Self can’t subscribe to the Orwellian way of writing because it isn’t his way. And that’s fine. You only need to catch a clip of Self on the telly, talking the talk, to know that Self is naturally verbose, and erudite, and borderline-pompous. That’s his voice. It works on the page, as it works in person. It isn’t quite enough to make you want to shout Park Life! at the end of each sentence

but that’s only because Self drawls and pauses and generally talks at the pace of a snail in one of those dreams where the floor’s turned to syrup and forward movement becomes an impossibility – but Self, like Brand, wears his vocab on his sleeve, and why shouldn’t he? Nothing wrong with that.

But the chances are that Orwell’s ‘rules’ were intended for novice writers. And, speaking as someone who teaches novice writers, there’s nothing wrong at all with encouraging people to write simply.

Hum Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, for instance. (Even if you don’t think you know it, you definitely do.) Watch the green notes in this piano tutorial:

and note how stunningly basic the tune is, moving in steps up and down the keyboard. And yet, how memorable. And how well it lends itself to development…

I love a short word, me. I’m Orwell’s bosom bud in that respect. A favourite exercise of mine is to write a scene using words of only one syllable: the result is always tight, clean prose, and it’s most of all useful for those who must first insert a poker into their derrière before commencing the transference of their thoughts from brain to paper, as if they’ve never actually heard themselves speak and have no clue at all what their own voice is like. Of course I understand that certain of your characters may care to describe the lowering of their denim-clad derriere into the ready embrace of a chintzy armchair whilst relieving a curved fruit of its indigestible yellow skin, but ‘she sat down, peeling a banana’ is a perfectly decent sentence and not to be sniffed at.

Tiny words, I salute you.

The ‘hot meat’ of the title has nothing to do (thank God) with the contents of Self or Orwell’s trousers. I gave my most recent class of beginners the task of writing a scene in single syllables – and, because it’s Christmas, the scene was ‘cooking Christmas dinner’. Straight off, turkey’s out the window of course. (Not literally. Although that might have been an interesting way to go…) So immediately your brain’s got to find a host of short, sharp words that it wouldn’t ordinarily have looked for. One student (lovely and smiley, and I hope she doesn’t mind me quoting her if she ever reads this) was forced to return ‘the smell of the cooking turkey’ to the Shelf of Mediocrity, and instead wrote the rather joyous sentence:

The cat smelt the hot meat.

Something, of course, that a child could write. But the same argument that applies to modern art (‘I could’ve done that myself!’ ‘Ah yes, but you didnt…’) applies in spades here: yes, a child could write that, but we, as adults, with all our fancy long-syllabled crayons on the table, so often forget that simple can be beautiful. What did the cat do? The cat smelt the hot meat. I understand all those words perfectly, immediately, and my brain doesn’t have to perform an obstacle course in order, BANG, to grasp that image straight-a-bloody-way.

Red and yellow and pink and green… violaceous and apricot and cobalt…

I’m not saying you can’t play with long-syllabled crayons: of course you can. (Occasionally, sparingly, or all the fricking time if that is your natural voice – or the natural voice, of course, of your first person POV… or third person free indirect… yada yada.) But don’t neglect your hot meat either, because here’s the thing: the most beautiful, lyrical prose has to do with the way – like musical notes – those words are joined together, the music they make on the page, in the ear, for the eye. Even Will Self would agree with that. And if he doesn’t… just flip him the bird as you rumble by on your skateboard.

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

December 9, 2014April 20, 2017 / lynseywhite / Leave a comment

It must be peculiar not to exist.

Your strength is invisibility. You’re excellent at imitation. Your self-effacement knows no bounds.

You’re the wire that hoists actors into the air, or the stunt double donning a wig, or Zac Efron’s crooning in High School Musical, or perhaps you’re even Britt Ekland’s bum double in The Wicker Man.

You’re there to make others look good. (Or, in the latter case, to flash your arse for the cameras, because Ekland refused to flash hers.)

You have numerous names for your numerous roles – but in publishing you are known as a ghost.

The sister on the left was said to have died 2 days earlier… Think about *that* next time you’re listening to a Kenny G solo, alone in the house, after dark…

Image source

This post has been prompted by the ‘news’ that outrageously popular You Tube star Zoella (a name oft on the lips of my teenaged daughter) accepted a six figure sum from publishers Penguin for a novel, Girl Online, that, well, that she didn’t actually write. She did, however, come up with the ‘story and the characters’.

Zoe 'Zoella' Zugg, whose You Tube vlog has over 3 million subscribers at time of writing. This is small fry, of course, compared to PewDiePie who has over 30,000.

Zoe ‘Zoella’ Sugg, whose You Tube vlog has over 3 million subscribers at time of writing. This is small fry, of course, compared to Swedish gamer PewDiePie who has over 30 million.

After out-pacing Dan Brown, J.K. Rowling, and E.L. James with her first-week sales, things nosedived spectacularly for the smiley star when rumours arose that the novel was ghostwritten. Zoella tweeted this in response:

Bare with me on vlogmas. I'm taking a few days out and off the internet because it's clouding up my brain. Thanks for understanding ❤️

— Zoë (@Zoella) December 8, 2014

It’s fair to say she’d have needed some help with the spelling in her novel, if nothing else…

But we like Zoella in our house. She says useful things to teenage girls about her own anxiety issues, and also she has lovely hair.

I’m not meaning to patronise her (although I have, perhaps, patronised her a tiny bit so far). What I’m mainly saying, is no harm, no foul. Yes, it’s kinda shitty to take a six-figure sum from Penguin (who’ve also behaved kinda shittily from an outsiders’ point of view) when the person who actually wrote the book earned seven thousand, according to my informant (my daughter), and, yes, it’s kinda shitty to let legions of teenaged girls believe there’s no end to your talents (thus, perhaps, doubting themselves just a wee bit in response), but IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME. Hence I find myself feeling a little bit sorry for poor old (actually, young) Zoe Sugg. I think she’s learnt her lesson. I don’t think she’ll do it again.

But, Penguin? They will do it again. As will every other publishing house so long as we, the public, are keener on buying a book because somebody famous wrote it (even though, nudge nudge, wink wink, we all know they actually didn’t) than because of the words inside. The words inside might be good, but it’s usually seen as hack-work, this ghost writing business. A writer who lovingly rubs each phrase till a genie pops out of it is unlikely to let Katie Price or Naomi Campbell take the credit. Instead they’ll hock them any old shit, because no one is buying the book on its merits. They’re buying it because it’s… pink and shiny. (I have tried for literally seconds to think of another reason they might buy a book that purports to be written by the human being formerly known as Jordan, and I cannot.)

(The internet says she also has four volumes of autobiography. To which I say: WTF? Her entire life has been televised, hasn’t it? What is there left to find out, for the love of God?)

Look inside ‘her’ first novel, Angel, on Amazon and you’ll find the following:

This was, in fact, written by a former journalist called Rebecca Farnworth. Very sadly, Farnworth died recently, of cancer, at the horribly early age of 49, which makes me disinclined to run on at any great length about the quality of this extract – except to suggest that Farnworth herself knew very well what she was doing. And what she was doing was writing by numbers.

There is more writing by numbers in Katie Price’s recent book, Make My Wish Come True:

This one wasn’t written by Price, either. I’ve made a cursory search online (including the book’s ‘author information’ page) and can’t tell you who did write it, but if Price – like Zoella – came up with the characters (in particular, if she came up with the heroine’s name) then I’m glad she didn’t write the book herself. It’s bad enough as it is. Once upon a time it was curious and new to read of sunlight ‘streaming’ through a window – but it isn’t anymore. Is warmth in any way watery? Why must sun ‘put in an appearance’ instead of simply shining? As openings go, this one is an omni-shambles, to quote Malcolm Tucker. If football pundits wrote novels, they’d write ’em like this.

An adverb here, a cliche there…

It’s muzak for the eyes, that’s all. And there may be a stonking good story, once Storm’s finished basting that turkey – but I, for one, will never know, because life is too short to be squandered on Katie Price’s oeuvre. I’ve been known to remark, whilst listening to Radio 1, that if ‘music’ consisted of only this one particular song that my ears are enduring right now (I will mention no names) then I’d rather have silence. Forever. The End. And if Make My Wish Come True was the only book that existed, then quite honestly I’d have to give up reading.

(Ah, who am I kidding? I read the back of cereal packets. I read bus tickets. I read literally whatever’s in front of my eyes. But I’d hate myself while reading it. And I’d hate all of humanity. And I’d burn the book – and myself – afterwards.)

‘Everybody does have a book in them,’ said Christopher Hitchens, ‘but in most cases that’s where it should stay.’

Wise words (which, on bad days, I apply above all to myself). You see, having a story to tell is not the same thing as being able to tell it. And that’s fine! Why should everyone be able to write a (publishable) novel? They shouldn’t, quite frankly, and to suggest that they can – that they ought to be able to knock one off in their lunch break – makes a mockery of the profession of Writer.

Most artists can only do one thing really well. Shakespeare didn’t have a sideline in lute playing (that I know of). Margot Fonteyn wasn’t also a talented painter. Picasso didn’t compose symphonies. John Lennon didn’t write novels. The list goes on…

Bob Dylan did write a novel. Reviews ranged from ‘not good’ to ‘unreadable’.

Sylvia Plath was talented with a pencil as well as poetry:

More pictures at Brainpickings.org

It’s just that she was more talented as a poet…

Before you go, Lyns, what’s to do with the title of this here post?

Why, thank you for asking. It’s the epitaph of the poet John Keats, inscribed on his grave in Rome.

And what’s it got to do with celebrity writers, pray tell?

Well, Mr Keats? Over to you.

‘If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.’

Unless, of course, Ode to a Nightingale was ghosted by an ancestor of Miss Katie Price. In which case, I’ll look a bit of a fool.

If twitter was a pub.

December 5, 2014November 19, 2018 / lynseywhite / Leave a comment

Welcome to twitter. Please enter quietly, and close the door behind you. We highly recommend the purchase of ale or stout in preference to Babycham or Bacardi and coke, as refusal often offends. The bar nuts may be covered in wee, but avoidance of said nuts will be viewed by the clientele as snobbery (village urine not good enough for you, eh, Londoner?) so get ’em in your gob and swallow, and, whilst we’re on this theme, there’ll be nothing but icy water in the toilet taps and if you want soap I suggest you go back to London. (There may be a morsel of soap, the approximate size of a cough lozenge, under one of the sinks, but the odds are it’s fallen in something you’d rather not touch. It’s a swings and roundabouts situation.)

The best chairs are already taken. The best chairs will always be taken. Contrive to stand artfully, casually, with an arm draped on the fireplace, and await an appropriate moment to join the conversation. The conversation will not stop for you. The conversation does not want you.

Stranger: ‘Do you have any hot soup?’
Twitter: ‘No.’
Stranger: ‘Do you have any coffee then?’
Twitter: ‘No.’
Stranger: ‘Do you have any, uh, hot chocolate?’
Twitter: ‘We’ve spirits and beers. If it’s something hot you want, have tea.
Stranger: ‘Then you have tea?’
Twitter: ‘No.’

An American Werewolf in London

Compose your opening gambit with the sort of care otherwise reserved for wedding vows, eulogies, excuses for why you weren’t, in fact, working late at the office when you claimed you were. Charming self-deprecation is the way to go. ‘Tiptoeing onto twitter with all the panache of a geriatric tortoise’, for instance, although it’s possible someone (currently writing a blog not a million miles from here) may have used that one already. At any rate, it’s wise to be inventive with your self-deprecation. ‘I really don’t know what I’m doing!’ or ‘What’s this all about, then?’ have all the freshness of the year-old turd you will find down the back of the gents’ toilet if you poke about for a bit.

Whatever you do, incomer, don’t announce yourself with a pocketful of flyers. It’s advisable to buy the clientele a round of drinks before trying to sell them your book/film/interpretative dance project. Twitter is a conversation. Peruse the word ‘conversation’ in your dictionary. Reconsider your pre-planned material. Respond, instead, to a topic in mid-flow, unless you’d quite like to be chased all the way to the village green by strange men wielding pitchforks and banjos. I mean, picture the scene: there’s a nice juicy chat going on, the beer’s flowing, another few logs have been thrown on the fire… and up you jump, the cuckoo clock of the pub customer, with a frankly shit line from your novel. And picture, too, the peculiar looks you’d earn if you’d brought along your coterie of ventriloquist’s dummies, and every hour, on the hour, one of those leapt up as well with a frankly unbelievable review of your novel. And everyone could see your lips moving.

These things will not endear you to the clientele.

This is a local pub for local people.

And then, suddenly, before you know it, you are the clientele. You’re in one of the chairs. (Not the chairs by the fire, but still… small mercies.) You’re composing blogs about how to behave in this pub that you think of, now, as your own. You look up, disgruntled, from your oddly-named ale, at the stiff blast of wind when an incomer opens the door. You tut when ‘something white, not too dry’ is asked for at the bar. ‘What’s wrong with the nuts?’ you say quietly. You have long come to terms with the fact that some of the cleverest things you say will slip soundlessly into the ether. You don’t even mind.

Because this is a noisy pub. And on twitter, as in life, it’s not always about you.

Mine’s a vodka, if you’re asking.

Everything will (probably) be okay (in the end).

December 4, 2014December 4, 2014 / lynseywhite / 2 Comments

When is a writing blog not a writing blog?

In the case of this particular blog, the answer is: today.

Ordinarily, I write about writing. You can see it right there in the tagline. I’ve just done thirty posts for thirty days of nanowrimo (which you’ll find in the Recent Posts to your right), or let me direct you here or here or here or here if you’d like to take a pot luck stab at an older, more writer-y sort of a post.

Today’s post is about depression. If I was the sort of a person who understood Venn diagrams, I might use a Venn diagram here:

Blank space where a Venn diagram should be.

… with writers in one circle, and sufferers of depression in the other circle, and I’m willing to bet (all of twenty pence) that the overlap would be LARGE. It might even be XXL. Here’s a roll call:

Sylvia Plath

Ernest Hemingway

David Foster Wallace

Virginia Woolf

Anne Sexton

Primo Levi

And those are just some of the ones who, very sadly, didn’t make it out alive.

But I’ve talked before about writers with depression, and that isn’t the point of this post. The point of this post, as 2014 rolls to a close, is to write an ending to my own Depression Story, as detailed in my previous wafflings.

Above all, what I want to say, as I pretty much said in the title, is that everything will probably be okay. Eventually. You just have to hold on. That isn’t to say it won’t be not-okay, again, at some point in the future (this wasn’t my first spell of depression, and, much as I hate writing this sentence, I have to face facts: neither may it be my last), but then, after that, it will be okay again and… I’ve just tripped over my own fingers writing this sentence.

But saying that ‘things will probably be okay’ is chocolate-teapot-ian in its uselessness if I don’t back it up with some rock hard evidence, right? So I offer the following neatly bullet-pointed list, containing everything I did to get better, and if it’s raining in your head right now you may choose to try some of the things on the list.

I took drugs. Still take drugs. Specifically Sertraline (Zoloft in the US) at a dosage of 50mg. The first 24 hours weren’t very nice. I began to wonder if Sertraline was, in fact, a mega-dose of Blue Smartie. It was hard to sit still. I was thinking at twice, or even thrice, my normal rate, and the thoughts were universally horrible. If you’ve ever poached an egg without the assistance of an egg poacher, you’ll know that the water needs to be swirling, fairly dramatically, before you can drop in the egg. After 24 hours of swirling, I snapped my pills in half and took 25mg instead for a week. The water stopped swirling. The egg still poached, eventually. I also took Zopiclone, which helps you fall asleep, and (best of all) releases a dose of feel-good chemicals that your joy-starved brain can party with for twenty minutes or so before nodding off.
I took ten to twenty minutes of exercise every day. This was usually a bike ride through the woods. Sometimes it was indoor exercise of the close-the-curtains variety (which has created an unduly masturbatory aspect, I now realise) accompanied by a cut-price DVD (not helping myself, am I?) of a go-get-’em American woman assuring me I’m the best, I can do it, etc (could I dig this hole any deeper?)
I wrote down three new things every day that I was grateful for. They have to be new. You have to be actively beach-combing your day for the shiny shells amongst the crisp packets, condoms, and dog faeces. Even tiny things can be shiny. One day I was grateful for the wind on my face. One day I was grateful for seeing the beauty in a windblown stinging nettle. (NB: there were other things not involving the wind.)
I focused on other peoples’ life stories (radio 4 has a good cache of this sort of thing, in particular their One to One strand), and looked outside myself. I listened to BBC reporter Frank Gardner describing the day he was shot in the spine and his subsequent life in a wheelchair. I read a book about living in North Korea. I reminded myself every day, several times every day, that, yes, some people (appear to) lead Charmed Lives, but those people are best ignored when you’re feeling depressed (unfollow anyone on Facebook, for instance – you don’t have to unfriend them; they need never know – who fires heavy photographic artillery of the My Life is Amaze-balls variety). Open your heart, instead, to the elderly man who’s had nothing all week but frostbite and shit telly for company, or the children who mightn’t eat tonight, or the factory worker who stitched this onto a Primark label:

I learnt about radical acceptance. If your depression has a particular cause (as mine did) you may find this helpful. The principle is this: when things go wrong in our lives we have four options. (1) Solve the problem (if it’s possible to solve it). (2) Change how you feel about the problem. (3) Remain miserable about the problem. (4) Accept that you can’t solve the problem, but life can still be worth living. So if (1) isn’t possible (as it wasn’t, in my case) you must radically – by which they mean fully – accept that there’s bugger all you can do about it, and perhaps (as in my case) you can’t do number (2) either, because it isn’t possible to feel positive about some things, is it? It just isn’t. So, instead, you have to ‘turn your mind’ (as it’s called) by stopping the endless flow of Why me? This shouldn’t be happening… Perhaps God or Zeus or Paul Daniels will wave his most magic of wands and make this not have happened, if I don’t do anything else wrong, ever, for the rest of my life… You have to watch out for this shit, like red lights when you’re driving, and turn your mind to acceptance instead – for which the phrase shit happens comes in very handy. There were days when I read and reread the stuff on this site and then read it again, and I clung to those pages as Harold Lloyd clung to the hands of the clock in Safety Last. So, yes, although radical acceptance does sound a little mung-beans-for-dinner-and-breast-milk-in-your-tea, it’s actually just bloody wonderful.

I asked for help. Sometimes it was horrible, asking for help. One GP leaned back in his chair, like the cock of the walk, while pondering whether or not he would give me the drugs I wanted. I sat for two hours in a Sunday morning emergency waiting room with my greasy hair over my face. I was pushy, I argued, I insisted. If you’re not in a place to be pushy yourself, find a friend or relative who is happy to go a bit postal with the medical service on your behalf. (Some friends actively enjoy this sort of thing and are only too happy to have an excuse.)
I took fish oil. As recommended in this great TED talk from Shawn Anchor.
I practised mindfulness. I didn’t realise I was practising it (I was told, years ago, that mindfulness meant staring at a raisin for a really long time, which, in retrospect, probably wasn’t entirely useful or accurate). If a piece of chocolate tasted sweet, I noticed that it was sweet. If my head felt comfortable on the pillow in bed, I noticed that too. My brain was a child that wanted to play in the Past Failures ball pool. Mindfulness was the parent who ushered them towards the All That Really Exists Is This Moment slide instead. (Alton Towers, you need one of those.)
I watched videos about ballet dancers. Now, this one may be specific to me. But you can customise it. It’s soothing watching physical activity, especially if it’s set to music, and especially if men with shapely buttocks are wearing lycra whilst doing it. It gave my eyes something to focus on that was mentally undemanding.
I took up knitting. This gave my hands something to focus on that was mentally undemanding.
I played video games. This gave my hands and eyes something to focus on that was mentally undemanding.
I swore a lot to myself. I borrowed a catchphrase from Withnail in Withnail and I, and I said it (silently or aloud, when alone) if I felt my mind drifting towards things, and people, that in all honesty it was better off avoiding. Some people have om as their mantra. Mine can be found at 1.21 in the link below:

I watched ASMR videos on youtube. Relaxation videos don’t work for me: being told to relax is tantamount to telling me not to think of elephants. I need to secretly relax myself whilst my brain is distracted by people doing relaxing things. And if you think that’s something you’d like to try then read more here.
I drank Complan when my mouth refused to eat solid food. I’d lost two stone in less than a month. It was time to take action.
I talked to my friends by email when I couldn’t talk in person.
I googled depression and anxiety and sadness and read everything I could find on the subject.
I let myself cry when I wanted to cry.
I took a break from work. A long break. As long as I needed.
I had a few therapy sessions.
I cuddled my daughter.
I tried to watch funny things on TV.
I read biographies when fiction was too much.
When I was able to write, I wrote. When I wasn’t, I didn’t.
I stayed alive even though I didn’t always want to.
I wrote an occasional blog about being depressed.

And now we appear to have come full circle. To the best of my memory, this is everything I did on the way to recovery.

I’ve been thinking for ages now that I ought to write this post, because – thinking back over my annus horribilis as Queenie would say – it was posts like this that kept me occupied for five, or ten, or twenty minutes and five, or ten, or twenty minutes of calm sailing is all you can ask, sometimes, when the wind blows.

And now it seems I’m back to wind again.

There’s an awful lot of wind in my novel, too. But that’s another story…