Who are these blinking drug addicts

Hand of an addict. Charcole on paper.

One of the most difficult parts of being alongside addiction for me, is remembering that these crazy addicts are also people.  Dealing with someone who is intoxicated can be very challenging.  If you don't need to engage, that is fine.  If you do, then anything can happen and it is frustrating, chaotic and sometimes frightening.  If someone kicks off in your presence while having taken something (or many things) and you are faced with an irrational, disinhibited, paranoid and angry melt down, it is unlikely that you will say, "Oh, that is just the drugs.  The person themselves is actually very nice."  If you are sensible, you get the hell out of the way or if you are feeling threatened, call the police. 

Many of us have tried to reason with someone who has drunk too much at one time or another.  Many of us have experienced how quickly they can become angry, unreasonable and aggressive. When they are sober, they have no recollection of how badly they behaved. How about someone acting out on crystal meth?  Or cocaine?  Or someone causing enormous chaos while coming down from something or at a critical point because of needing another fix?  These are not people we can chat to or reason with or discuss how their behaviour is making us feel.  How, we ask ourselves, can they possibly allow themselves to get so bad? Where is their sense of shame, where is their self control?  We cannot understand why they do not get help.

Yes to all that.  And also, addiction is not rational.  An addict may defend their addiction to the death, literally, and blame you, me, everyone else, especially loved ones, all the way down. Addiction, to an addict, is reality.  The need (and it really is a need, an absolute catastrophic need the like of which we who are not addicted can have no idea) to keep using makes them manipulative, amoral, paranoid, psychotic, clever, dangerous and without conscience, boundaries or responsibility. And yet.  It is not always like that. There is always someone in there.  There are times when the person lost inside is visible, often it is very poignant.  Sometimes it is astonishing - how can that person who ranted and raved at the bus stop all last night be so interested in and interesting about music?  Or politics? Or whatever?  I have seen someone very addicted to alcohol and opiods sit with a frightened young addict who was hearing terrible voices, talking gently to calm him down and help him feel safe.

The thing is, at some point that person was not an addict.  When they first took something to make the pain go away, or perhaps because it was just what their family or peers did, it seemed a magical answer. It really worked.  It allowed them to self medicate and forget how bad life was, it allowed them to feel in control, it gave them confidence and helped them fit in when they felt isolated and alone, when dealing with abuse and violence at home and around them, when frightened by an undiagnosed mental health condition, when living itself was intolerable.  Checking out of pain and abandonment through substances is a powerful relief.  The person entering addiction feels as if they are in control.  Even when it is patently obvious further down the line that they are not in control, they can insist that they are.  This is denial, and addicts can be great at denial.  

I spoke to an addict recently who dismisses the idea that he is addicted.  Let's call him Bob.  I have a dependency, Bob said, I am not an addict.  Everything about Bob's life and choices points to a deep and long lasting addiction.  No! He said, I am able to stop at any time and I have a dependency.  It seems obvious that Bob cannot stop, regulate nor manage his substances.  How can he not see it?  I thought.  One of the reasons for dependency not addiction, I learned, was that once his medical records had Addict on them he was, according to Bob, discriminated against by the medical profession.  He would not receive proper treatment and would always be seen as a problem.  I do not know if this is true, but I have seen how badly addiction is treated by many (not all) medical professionals.  I must add here that I do not blame them, they are acting in accordance with what they have been told.  I think that addiction is vastly misunderstood, judged, untreated and dismissed.  It is at present, almost impossible to find reasonably effective treatment that is not private. Addicts are the modern day lepers with knobs on.

As we talked, Bob explained how wonderful the drugs are that he takes.  How good they make him feel, how so much of his time is spent looking forward to preparing and taking them.  Bob could describe how all the different drugs he takes affects him, how to inject certain ones to increase the effect, and how to experiment with mixing them all up.  "I love my life," Bob says.  He drinks heavily too, but mostly will not admit to it.  "I used to drink," he says, "but not recently."  I see empty spirits bottles all over the flat, under the bed, in the bins, and some by the bed still half full.  That is not true, and I think, denial.  More denial.  

I have seen Bob in powerful rages in public places because he could not get what he needed.  I have seen Bob in pain in between using, longing to feel a part of the world and to get better, I have heard him talk about loneliness and self hatred.  I have seen how he rejects help, sabotages kindness, chooses chaos and danger time and time again, and I think - are you in denial about all this too?  When you say you love your life?  But I see that whatever substances he is taking are succeeding in obliterating the terrible pain of real life.  It is a vicious circle and it feels like an insurmountable problem.

It is a problem.  I will never forget an addiction counsellor once telling an angry, distressed wife at the end of her tether, that she did not have to rescue her husband but that she could still be kind.  When her drunken husband fell out of bed onto the cold stone floor, she wanted to leave him there all night and make him suffer.  The counsellor understood her anger, understood her feelings of powerlessness and the fact that she had tried everything to help him.  "You cannot help him," the counsellor said, "but you can be kind.  You can put a blanket on him and leave him there."  

When dealing with addiction we try not to rescue, we try not to enter into the madness and we know we have to establish very firm boundaries to keep ourselves safe.  But, we can be very judgemental and unkind to both our addicts and ourselves.  We can want to punish our addicts for their awfulness and madness, and we cannot rid ourselves of that fear that perhaps the addict is right, it is our fault.  Kindness does not mean weakness, compassion does not mean we condone addiction.  We know we have to keep ourselves safe with firm boundaries which can feel counter intuitive at the beginning but are not.  We practice detachment with love and, at least for me, keep hoping for that miracle. And most important of all, if we cannot change our addict or deal with the fall out, we can try, really try, to be absolutely loving and forgiving of ourselves.  A wise man once said that when all else does not work, all we can be is a good example.

I have had to call for help many times.

Who are these blinking drug addicts then?  Without being sentimental or foolish because addiction is an absolute bugger, they are our children, our parents, our partners, our friends, our family.  They are Everyman and Everywoman. And, they could be us too. 

I have just been a guest on the Zestful Aging podcast hosted by Nicole Christina in New York.  We talk about addiction in my family, and how as a mother and of the hope, despair, troubleshooting and lessons I have to keep learning.  We touch on the Addicts and Those Who Love Them exhibition too.  Nicole is a wonderful interviewer.  She is a practicing psychotherapist as well as a successful podcaster.  You can listen to it here.  

Young addict, detail, oil on wood.

 Subscribe to my twice monthly newsletter, with insights, plans and ideas from the studio and life, here

My website  is here

Follow me on Instagram  here

Follow me on Facebook here

Have a look at my YouTube channel here

Renaissance grandma

Portrait of my Dad, looking for him behind his Alzheimer's.  I added a little landscape behind my father, with a little figure in a boat on the right hand side of the painting, echoing the tiny patchwork landscapes of my favourite Italian Renaissance art.

In the beginning

It is a well known fact that I am an artist.  I paint, gaze into the middle distance, and once upon a time I had bright pink hair which looked lovely.  If there is an archetype of an artist, I am it.  Being an archetype does not mean I am a wonder, a genius, a trail blazer though I am quite good at painting and writing etc, it means I am a typical arty type and visible as such from miles away.  "Are you an artist?" people ask me, and long ago in my youth, I would not be surprised.  I embodied the bohemian, crazy, eccentric look.  The only other question they could have asked was, "Are you quite sane?" which would have been provocative.  As time has gone by and I have settled into a nice grey haired lady with colourful skirts and earrings, and always the red lipstick, I am a bit surprised when I am asked if I am an artist.  I think I blend in brilliantly with other middle class older ladies who have gone a bit boho. "But how do you know?" I want to say, but don't because it sounds defensive.  "Yes," I say instead, "how clever of you." 

My journey to art-hood was not through art school.  I always knew I could draw and it felt fragile.  Perhaps I felt fragile with it, because as a child and young person I was terribly easily swayed by strongly opinionated people and could find myself in a lot of trouble. Believing I was a fairy too from an early age did not help with my being grounded in reality.  But one thing I did know instinctively was that I could do art and if I went to art school I would lose whatever I had.  If I had to follow art rules, if I could not follow my own inspiration and protect this teeny little flame of absolute certainty that I was already an artist, I would become dissipated and fragmented and stop wanting to create.  So I chose university instead.  I would be safe there, I thought.  Based on what? I hear you say. Precisely.  I have no idea.  But when we are young like this, sometimes we just know things, with no grown up tendencies yet to analyse and dismiss what we instinctively feel.  I ended up studying History of Art at Aberdeen University and left in 1983 with a Masters in Art History.  And during those four years I discovered all I needed to know about the kind of artist I wanted to be.  We had an art library where I would sit for hours pulling out books and reading the lives of artists, looking at their work, and feeling as if I had absolutely come home.  

Pieta by Giovanni Bellini c1455.  Look at the intensity of the expressions, the light on the hair, the halos and the landscape in the corners.

To back track a little, by the time I arrived in Aberdeen I had already found my passion.  It began with my father showing me a Bellini Pieta when I was eight years old.  It blew my mind.  I had never seen anything so powerful, so beautiful, so extraordinary.  Later, while studying art history during my school sixth form, I was introduced to art from the Italian Renaissance, and was hooked.  It touched that nerve that had reacted to the Bellini Pieta when I was eight, and I developed a love paintings (and some sculptures) from about 1390 to about 1500, taking this with me later to Aberdeen, where I was able to study them in more detail.  This then was my passion.  Italian Renaissance frescoes, religious paintings, the lives and loves of the artists themselves and the amazing societies in which they lived.  

In the middle

I don't remember making a decision to base my artistic life on the Italian Renaissance.  It just seemed to happen. Painters and artists in fifteenth century Italy (and Europe) worked for a major family, or the church or a civic body.  These patrons paid for the works they commissioned and the artist and their studio could do very well both professionally and financially.  In my own century, a patron would be a client so I looked for clients and sought commissions. I found I could do portraits, and as a Renaissance artist in the twentieth century as it was then, I took ideas from the works that I loved and began to add attributes to my portraits - clues to who was in the painting, for example a person with a love of music would hold a musical instrument.  A sports player would have something from their sport with them like a tennis racquet or a rugby ball.  I put halos on everyone.  A halo is a circle of light that is painted around the head of a holy figure to tell us that they are divine.  Fine, I thought, I will do that.  Many of my portraits and paintings from the beginning until right now have halos.  I love halos. 

 Jesus on the Tube. A modern icon.

During my time in Aberdeen I found Greek and Russian icons too with the same wonderful lines, patterns and stylised images of the Christian Trinity (God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost), of Saints and Angels that I saw in some of the early paintings in Italy.  Oh my, I loved them all.  For a long while when trying to find my way in the real world after university, I painted modern icons where I updated the subject matter and not only made it modern, but gave it a sense of humour.  For example, I painted an icon in the old style, of Mary, the mother of Jesus, having just given birth to the baby in the stable and having an argument with the Angel Gabriel, who had announced nine months before that she was to have this baby.  Gabriel, a top angel, an Arch Angel, had told Mary the baby would be called Jesus and be the son of God.  In my painting Mary was sulking because she wanted to call the baby Duncan. On a table beside her was a congratulations card welcoming Duncan.  From these icons came the Jesus on the Tube painting which showed Jesus sitting on a tube train looking straight out at the viewer, and being ignored by everyone in the carriage, all of whom are looking away. This Jesus on the Tube painting is my most well known image, having been used all around the world in schools, churches, books, Cathedrals, seminaries and convents.  

And now

Fast forward to where I am now where I can look back with all the benefits of hindsight, where I can make sense of things.  I no longer take commissions, my painting now concentrates on making sense of projects that are close to my heart and these projects are all about me, really.  The A Graceful Death exhibition explored death and dying after the death of my partner Steve and to do that, I needed total freedom to follow where the exhibition and subject would lead me.  These days my painting work is focused on addiction, on telling stories of those in and around it, and for this project I continue to need total freedom and autonomy to follow the subject.  

Lou, from the Addicts And Those Who Love Them exhibition.  Note the halo, the decorative motifs on her clothes and the fact that it is painted on a block of prepared wood.

 But! I carry my Renaissance aspirations with me still.  I add halos to, and tiny decorative motifs on the clothes, of people in my paintings.  Once or twice I have added little far away landscapes behind a portrait, and I am still moved and delighted by those early frescoes on the walls of the churches I used to visit in Tuscany, Northern Italy.  In the old artists' workshops the students would learn their art from their master.  There would be apprentices attached to each workshop and some would go on to become masters themselves, some would not.  Some would be more famous than their masters.  These apprentices all had jobs to do on whatever the studio was working on, perhaps painting the foliage on the bottom right of a painting, perhaps helping to create the long flowing material that the figures wore. Perhaps to paint a whole work themselves if it was a minor commission, so that the master would be free to work on and oversee the bigger projects.  I loved the idea of the bustle and industry, I loved how the skill of painting would be honed over time with actual painting, with just doing it.  This is how I learned my painting, by just doing it.  My teachers were in the books at university, on the walls of the churches and galleries in Italy and in my own imagination.  I was never taught any methods, never explored different media and had no instructions in painting itself which is why, probably, I only paint, draw and write. 

In my own life, that atmosphere of the bigger working environment of the old masters' studios came with meetings with, talking to and interviewing all the people who are part of the exhibitions, and creating with them the images to go into my two projects, on end of life and on addiction.  The meetings take place in my studio here, ideas are discussed and we go over how someone will be represented with their story.  And often, my inspiration comes from fifteenth century Italy.  

Today, I don't have to struggle to know who I am.  I have a clearer idea, and of course we never really know ourselves fully.  It is a life long process.   One thing I can say, is that I am still an artist and that if I were very bold (which I can be) I would say I am Renaissance Grandma. 

 

The Duke and Duchess of Urbino painted between 1465 and 1472 by Piero della Francesca was the inspiration for the painting below of Stuart and Sue Pryde.

                               

Painted for the A Graceful Death exhibition, we have the bright blue sky of Tanzania where Sue grew up, and the cottage garden flowers that both Stuart and Sue loved so much.  Sue ended her own life, and this is a diptych in her memory, as much as the above diptych by Piero della Francesca was a betrothal portrait.

 

Subscribe to my newsletter here

Subscribe to my You Tube channel here

Follow me on Instagram here

Follow me on Facebook here

My website is here

Settling into myself.

 

Me as a young mother with Lexi, my oldest, aged 7

Pondering at nearly 61

I am going to be 61 in a week or two.  I remember being 10 and spending all my pocket money on some lipstick for my mother's birthday and a Bic biro for my father's and feeling very grown up. I have a handle on life, I thought, I know what these grown ups need. Theoretically I am grown up myself now, and I am very glad.  There is much to be grateful for, not least that I do not have to go through the learning any more that has led me to who I am now.  The learning is not over, it never is, but the hard lessons during my travels to where I am today, are over.  They still reverberate and I deal with the fall out from time to time, we all do this, and the fall out can be good too.  Then I am relieved and feel that we never really know how things will turn out.  With the best will in the world, struggling through the business of being young, trying to work out how the world works and who we are in it, sometimes our worst decisions can end up being beneficial in the end, after many years, despite the fall out at the time. 

Being a young mum

The most difficult times of my life were as a young mum.  I was not as young as some, my first child was born when I was 30, my last when I was 36.  I did not have a clue how the world worked and did not have a clue who I was.  My first pregnancy was a complete shock, I had only just met the father.  None of my clothes fit me any more and I felt sick and exhausted. "You're pregnant", said the doctor when I went to see her, and I was outraged.  "How very dare you!" I said, and changed doctors.  At the new surgery, the doctor said, "You are probably pregnant," and as I made to leave in a huff, she gave me a pregnancy test and told me to come back and see her with the result.  It was positive.  OMG. I was so clueless.  But in this strange and confusing world, where I was now to have a baby despite feeling totally disconnected to life, my own mother was a lifeline.  She was calm, loving and practical.  She was the grown up, she was the real mother.  I was stunned.  A baby.  Blimey.

I found motherhood both beautiful and glorious, and terrifying and challenging.  I made it up as I went along, I meant well but had absolutely no grasp on reality.  Sometimes I thought I was only three months more emotionally mature than my children.  I had no idea how to do it, what the rules were or who I was.  And after my divorce and two children later I was, for most of the time, a single mother.  To say I was anxious and frightened was an understatement.  We were poor, chaotic and for much of the time I was ashamed of how bad a mother I thought I was.  Not only that, I thought I was a bad person.  I just wasn't like everyone else, and I felt too different. Of course I was never a bad person.  I was different, I wasn't like everyone else, but I lacked the experience and insight to understand that that was my USP.  My unique selling point.  That was my strength.  That is what artists are.

But

With all those years behind me, with the benefits of hindsight and time passing, I completely see I wasn't so bad.  This is the good bit of settling into myself.  I wasn't so different from other mothers, though I thought I was at the time.  Somehow the kids and I got through and everyone is still alive today, which in some places, is a huge success.  All those years of ups and downs, good and bad decisions (lots of very bad decisions) made me work out who I am and what I want.  There is nothing like being on the front line of experience to make you decide to sink or swim.  

My own daughter has four little children and a lovely husband.  She has everything right in ways that I had not. But her struggles with being a mum are, actually, the same as mine were and, I see, the same as all of us.  Despite making excellent choices, and despite being a very sound family, the actual job of parenthood for her looks as difficult as mine was.  I am reassured that perhaps the bottom line for many of us who have children, is that we really do love and we do the best we can.  The rest is just a muddle. Life happens around us at the rate of knots and we do a great job of running as fast as we can to stay as still. I know who I am now because for so long I did not know.  All those years of struggle have led to a degree of calm now, and the calm is not just from outside because all my children are grown and living away.  That does help, boy does it help.  But the calm is also from inside -  we have all staggered through the good times and the bad to right now, and though my children are all beginning their crazy journeys through life, I am beginning the long last road of mine.  I am not old and am not intending to die just yet but I am looking at about 20 years with luck, and I know now a lot more about what not to do, and how not to fall into traps which leaves me with what I do want to do, and, of course, what I can do.  And, I am deeply sympathetic to my own mother too as I get older. 

Work

My work, my family and my social life are all linked together in a big crazy knot. While a young mum, I became a self employed artist almost by accident, I announced it one day out of the blue and then had to learn about business, about clients and new things called the internet and mobile phones.  It seemed such a huge deal at the time to admit that I was an artist, even though in my heart I never was anything else.  A friend held business support sessions and encouraged me to think big.  This is where Artist Extraordinaire came from, but for the first ten years or so I used to whisper it in case anyone thought I was uppity. Yet I didn't reject it.  Funny, really.  Like I knew I was an artist extraordinaire but no one else would. 

About to set the world on fire at uni

I have not set the world on fire.  At university, my aim was to soar to the greatest heights and change the world.  To what, never crossed my mind.  It was all about me.  The hard task of life got in the way of all that, and for many years it seemed I was never going to amount to much.  It was all such hard work.  Trying to be a mum, doing my own growing up (painful), following a dream and navigating the real world as an artist meant that all I ever seem to do was get it all wrong and tread water.  That is how it seemed.  I still stuck at it because that is what I do, I stick at things.  And because in my heart and soul I had never ever wanted to do anything else than be an artist.  So when I look back at all the crazy, I see someone who was just a bit different, who did not conform to anything much but had so little self confidence that she thought she was just wrong.  But what I also see disguised in there as stubbornness, is self belief.  Wow.  That's good.  Self belief helped me to choose and stick to my destiny as an artist even though everything around me was mental, and everyone else thought WTF.  

And so -

 Here I am today.  Feeling chilled about life in the way I used to marvel at in my grandparents.  In my opinion, they had finished living because they were happy to do gardening and reading, and have early nights.  I see the almost spiritual benefits of that now.  I can't wait to do some gardening and take a book to bed for a night of reading.  Damn, I would have considered that a punishment at one time.  Time is different to me these days, and I suppose will continue to change and morph.  I don't have to rush about now, and I am learning that whole chunks of time spent not being an amazing human being are not only preferable, they are a relief. And they are possible!  The world does not end.  By now, being an amazing human being is less about changing the world with a fanfare and lots of praise from the outside world, and more about getting a balance between me and my soul. I don't have to do anything to be amazing, I just have to be.  Then, I notice that everyone else is an amazing human being, and we are all in this together.  Life changes over time, and it becomes less about the outside and more about the inside.  The great Franciscan priest, author and spiritual teacher Richard Rohr says that we spend the first half of our lives building our container, and the second half examining its contents.  Well, I am examining the contents of my container, and finding much of what is in there can be gently removed and the space that it leaves filled with only peace.  

I will just end by saying that to the outside world I am still constantly on the go.  Yes, I am.  But I can, and do, stop and spend the time chillaxing alone that once I would have spent with children, life and ambition.  I am full of projects, thoughts, events and stuff.  I am a whirligig.  But I am not driven now, there is no point, I can't change the world.  I still want to get things done and make a difference, but where I once wanted to change the world, I now understand that my journey is not to do that.  I can still make a difference, as can we all, and it is lovely to make a difference every now and again and feel good about it.  I am settling into myself very well these days, and finding that it is nice, being nearly 61. 

Nearly 61 with my little granddaughter Lilz. All the world ahead for us both.

Subscribe to my newsletter here

Subscribe to my YouTube channel here

My website is here

Instagram here

Facebook here
 

Look at you, you great big booby.

 

Little boobies

Everything about those that support the Covid narrative and those that don't, has mostly been said.  There are those who follow it, there are those that sort of follow it, and those who don't follow any of it.  I try to keep myself in check, remembering both to love my neighbour blah blah blah, and that, according to my Qi Gong teacher, energy follows thought.  That means something along the lines of I have a thought, it creates energy, energy creates matter and boom, I have created my reality.  If I engage in negative thoughts about people wearing masks, washing their hands every time they pass someone in the street and keeping as far away from me as they can on a small path as if they are both doing me a favour and furious that I am not climbing the fence to keep out of their way too, then I create my experience of lower vibration hostility and judgement.

But. It is hard work.  I took my car in for an MOT last week, and found myself wanting to stop being so reasonable.  I am reasonable, because we get nowhere challenging very convinced people.  After all, I am a very convinced person too, and I am utterly unmoved by the Covid pantomime. 

At the door of the reception in this garage is a notice telling me not to cross the threshold.  There is a bowl on a small table for my keys, and some hand gel in case I have suddenly got Covid on my hands. The staff sit about fifteen feet away, safely behind clear perspex screens with little holes to receive money and paperwork. Most of the staff are big, lumbering blokes.

When I went to collect my car, I walked into the reception thinking that as they would like my money, this was allowed.  "Where is your mask?" asked the big burly fellow sharply, sitting by the little hole in the perspex where I would be paying.  "I'm exempt," I said.  "But I'm not," he said with suppressed bad temper.  I dug out and put on my exemption lanyard, and he said with a curtness that told me what he thought of me, "Oh.  I see."  Despite the disapproval in the air and the feeling that I had personally offended him by my death wish behaviour, we had a civil transaction, and I left.  I hadn't noticed him moving his chair further away from me as I approached though, nor was he wearing a mask himself.  Perhaps he had not thought about the rules very logically, and wearing an official lanyard was safe as a mask because the virus has had the memo from the Government and knows to leave them and masks wearers alone.  Though not as safe as if I had stood at the doorway fully masked wearing my laminated "I have been double jabbed" badge, and thrown him my money to him across the no mans land where the virus waits to bring him down.  I wondered if he knew the virus might go through the hole in the perspex and get him that way but he didn't seem to have thought of that either.

You big booby!  I thought as I left.  Look at you, a big healthy fellow like you pandering to this nonsense!  Here you are, young and fit, probably double vaccinated, hiding behind a plastic screen and feeling hard done by because I, an actual old lady who you have been told should be clinging on to life with my fingernails inside my motorised perma-sealed bubble mobile, am walking free, ignoring the rules and do not have a mask.  You big soft lump.  What on earth has made you into such a weakling?  Oh for goodness sake. And I thought, how have these previously proud and fit youngsters been cowed into such foolish subservience?  That bearded, tattooed bloke in the garage, treating himself as if he has special needs, who must have created all his muscles in the gym and lifting cars to work on them in order to look like a tough guy, has become a self righteous school prefect. Pompous buffoon, I said to myself.   

There are so many who are not like this, but I do see these self important boobies everywhere, masked up to the nines, swerving to avoid each other delighted to be following the new protocol in politeness and social acceptability, checking their phones to see if they have been pinged by their app telling them to self isolate.  "Look at me look at me!"  They seem to imply.  "Even though I am young and healthy with my life ahead of me and a stupendous immune system evolved over millenia, even though I smoke and drink like a fish, I want to be prematurely old and terrified into delicious paranoia and join your gang, the one where nothing in our lives will get us no matter what risks we take except for this one virus.  And," they may continue, "we agree that plastic will save us, and wearing masks will save us, and being alone for the rest of our lives will save us, thank you very much for this amazing life saving wisdom." They remind me of the little green aliens in the Pixar film Toy Story.  

I think, what happened to you all? Young people need to rebel and question the older lot who decide the rules.  Young people are quite literally the future. What have you done with your brains?  What are you doing, you ninnies?  What happened to you that you feel safer behind a bit of perspex when the air around you is swimming with bugs and germs and long legged beasties that never bothered you before, and what makes you think that the perspex is going to fool all the swirling bacteria and viruses in the air now?  Can't these beasties see the holes in the perspex for money transactions?  Can't they pop over the top and around the sides?  Can't they pop into you through the gaps in your masks round the ears and nose and don't they rush at you when you take your mask off to take a bite out of your sandwich? And what in heavens name is going to happen to you if one virus with a 99% chance of survival gets you?  You will probably survive.  And then what?  My mask free youngest son is 6'7" and makes a point of peering over the top of the safety screens in shops because they only come up to his chin, and no one has been carted off to the crematorium yet.  No one has asked him not to because he is far too close to the cashier and breathing down on top of her head.  They think it is funny and everyone laughs at how tall he is.  No one has noticed that he is a killer in action.

So I will go back to my loving my neighbour as myself thing, and remember my Qi Gong energy follows thought thing, and try not to swerve into people as they swerve to avoid me.  And I hope that these big boobies get bored with all this fuss, and start to swerve into me too. Then I know we are getting back to some kind of normal.

Yeah, well.

 Subscribe to my newsletter here

My website is here

"We have to learn what kind of love works for us." Love in addiction.

 

No matter how wise I think I am about other people, I can feel clueless about myself.  Someone called me once, at her wit's end, because her daughter was doing the crazy, angry, help-me-it's-your-fault-give-me-money-or-I-die thing.  I had been supporting this lady over an entirely different health matter but what she needed on this call was immediate and intense help with how to cope with her daughter's out of control drug habit.  She wasn't supposed to have my number but we had realised very early on that in the background we both had addiction problems in our family.  I gave her my number for this reason, and because other people had been so kind to me when I was overwhelmed at the beginning of my own journey. I knew how helpful it was for her to have a no holds barred conversation about a loved one's addiction, because I have been where that lady was.  It was crisis time for her to recognise the depth of the problem, how she was going to protect herself, how she was going to detach with love.  I repeated one of the Al Anon pieces of advice given to me when I needed it - do not cause a crisis, but do not get in the way of one if one is naturally occurring.  I knew how bad she felt about not being able to help or protect her daughter.  I knew that awful helplessness in the face of drug and alcohol fuelled self pity, drama and manipulation. This lady had called me was because she knew I knew about the handicap, as it can be, of loving an addict.  Her story is my story.  It may be your story too.  Our phone call gave her permission to love and be ruthless and be safe.  It is not easy.  It doesn't feel like love at all, because love is kind and gentle and saves the world.  It feels like rejection, cruelty, selfishness bordering on sociopathy, and it feels like everything a Mum should never do.  But it worked for her that day, and she was able to put herself in a place of safety, detach with love, and make herself a priority for once.

Here I am today then, in a muddle myself, wanting someone to come in, be a grown up and take it all away. There has been so much disruption and madness with drink and drugs this past week, and when it is in my family, when I am the mother who has to rethink her idea of love in a split second or go under, I can't remember any of the things I have learned about how to survive it.  I have had to call on other people to help me remember what is real and what is not, and to breathe, and to not be afraid.  I had to do what that lady did when she called me.  Thank goodness we all have each other.

I want to talk about love.  It is this in all its different layers and manifestations, in its abundance and in its absence, that makes everything so complicated.  If I had no love for anyone, it would be so easy.  I could dismiss everything that got in my way and have no feelings about it at all except possible satisfaction.  If I had no love for myself, I would fall prey to everyone and anyone who said something nice to me, and blame myself when it went belly up.  So having no love is not a good thing.  Over-loving is as messy as under-loving.  If I love too much, I misunderstand the idea of love and think that I should give it all to everyone without limit.  Without boundaries.  When it goes belly up I blame myself again, and carry on with my warped idea of love (which always goes out, and never comes in) until I am a pale shadow of a person with no will of my own left to save me. 

We have to learn what kind of love works for us.  How to do it, what version is going to work best for the person giving and the person receiving. It is easy to love the lovable, and very hard to love the unloveable.  When challenged, in an emergency or when the chips are down, our idea of love can become tangled with other emotions like guilt, sentiment, anger, control and punishment to name a few.  Love is meant to be uplifting and purifying, but so often isn't.  It is painful and confusing and we need help to work it all out.  Do I love, or don't I?  Is this how love behaves?  Am I loving enough?  Am I loving correctly? Is it my fault that my love is not working?  Am I to blame?  Is my love not good enough?

Over the last few days I have expressed tough love.  I have done this a few times now and it is never easy.  The first times I put it in place I did so as a last resort to protect myself from addiction behaviour that threatened to stop me functioning at all.  It was then, and is now, so hard.  It feels like abject failure to turn my back on all the crazy that is trying to pull me in, because the crazy is so powerfully painful and I need to make it better.  The addict is in meltdown acting out all their pain, fear, illness, trauma and rage; I am watching someone out of control with mental, physical and spiritual agony but whatever it is that they are begging, shouting, crying and demanding I do, I ignore.  I walk away. I turn off my phone, I do not take calls, I ignore all the calls from the emergency services and I will not engage.  No, I say, this is not for me and I must put myself in a safe space and keep myself there.  And then I ask myself , "How is that love?"

I cannot love you until I love me.  My own love, for me, has to survive all the sabotage and cruelty that I put in its way. It is an ongoing struggle to love myself, especially when tested by the extreme distress and drama of someone who I am supposed to keep safe and love forever, kicking off.  If I have worked on my own self love I will know what I can do and what I can't do for someone else.  My self love has weathered its own storms of self doubt and self loathing.  Of course it has.  We all have messages on a loop in our heads that insist that we are unworthy, ugly and failed.  Self love tries to address that narrative and limit the damage by consciously choosing another one.  I am worthy, I am beautiful, I have done well.   I have also learned that giving into sentimental self love is OK sometimes but mostly leads to self indulgence and superficial relief. If my go-to self love tactic every time I am distressed is to eat cream buns, watch Bugs Bunny on a loop and lie on the sofa, and this is my only response, I may feel instant comfort and distraction but I will end up fat, spotty and a bit emotionally stunted.  It is when I am challenged by myself, in loving myself, that I learn to persevere and keep on trying to believe that I am worth it.  I end up learning to love me even when I feel lost, frightened and unloveable. It is good training for dealing with someone else's crazy when they are demanding the impossible.  When they demand to be saved from situations in which they put themselves time and time again, with no self awareness and no intention of not doing it again, I discern that the love I need to access is not the love they think they want.  

How is this not love? 

Here is tough love.  I do not play the game any more.  I will not dance this dance.  I step out of the madness leaving the addict to cope without me.  If mere words worked, then we could have talked about it.  Words have not worked yet and it has been years.  If diving into the crisis helped, I would only have had to do it a couple of times, but the crises continue.  My love becomes weak and confused and I no longer know what to do if I enter the fray. I get ill, the addict gets worse, I feel responsible and the addict continues to take without a conscience and maintains the story that I am in fact, responsible.  Nothing changes for the addict except that when I am truly under and far too crushed to continue, they need to find a new source of attention and money.  That is not love.  That is abuse. 

I have to remember to step away and focus on myself, keep trying to learn compassion, love and respect for me. I put myself in a place of safety and I learn from all the stuff I have done and failed to do up until now.  I learn to be kind to myself and I learn how others have coped and I share my experiences.  All this is done so that I can see clearly that my addict is doing the addict thing and I need to toughen up so that when, if, I can help and support, I am strong and experienced enough to do it.  Love can be soft and kind, it can be gentle and insightful and save the world.  It can also be powerful, robust, challenging and tough.  It can be boundaried and it can say No.  True love does not shut down, it strengthens, challenges and demands truth from the person working with it.  It keeps an eye open for a chink in the armour of addiction and prepares to go in to do what it can however many times may be needed without getting lost because it can retreat as well as advance.  And if nothing else works, I heard a wise man say once, and nothing we say is being heard, the last thing we can be to those around us, is a good example.  

 

 Subscribe to my newsletter here

See my YouTube channel here

My website is here

Buy my book As Mother Lay Dying here

Follow me on Instagram here

"Even in the most crazy, terrifying moments, we are not alone." The exhibition is done, what a week.

 

The Addicts And Those Who Love Them exhibition in Brighton last week

Busy week.

I am sitting alone in absolute silence on my pink sofa in the empty house, feeling exhausted.  Today is the first day in a long time that I am, theoretically, doing nothing. Except today is the only day I have in which to do my blog and newsletter and so I am not quite doing nothing.  And, I am dressed in my walking clothes because this afternoon I aim to go back on the Downs for a walk.  Have I been invaded by aliens?  Probably.  I was looking forward to today so much, imagining myself lying on my bed in glorious well earned abandon, pots of tea on my bedside table, a plate of shortbread within reach and a smile of absolute success on my happy, sleepy face.  Interestingly, I have my lipstick on in this mental image.  I think I was imagining it on the front cover of a magazine.  The idea of a day of joyful snoozing has been the carrot that has kept me going.  But, I am not doing that.  I did a bit of it and then decided to get up and get stuff done.  And, I am really looking forward to a walk this afternoon.  I have even made the salty soup that I took on my walks while training for the Macmillan Mighty Hike, the 26 mile sponsored walk that I completed two weeks ago yesterday.  I think I am a changed person, taken over by aliens, or whatever, because where once my greatest love was to sit on my sofa where possible and live my life from there, now I am wanting to put on my walking boots and go for a hike on the Downs. Crazy.

A week ago today was the last day of the exhibition Addicts And Those Who Love Them.  This was the culmination of two years of work putting together paintings and words by me, drawings by Marie Paul and photographs by Michael McAlister on the subject of addiction.  The exhibition tag line was "behind every addict is someone traumatised by loving them", because though I am not an addict, there is addiction in my family.  The ongoing, messy, destructive, chaotic and ghastly business of living with and alongside addiction is something many of us experience.  Working through art to tell stories, paint portraits and share experiences of addiction helps us understand how other people manage. It is also the only thing I can think of to do.  I cannot change the addiction in my family, I can't make it go away and I can't escape from the fall out.  I have to find a way to manage the damage and to keep myself strong and boundaried while hoping for a miracle and keeping my idea of love strong and bullet proof. I will need it for myself and it had better be robust.  If I keep working on that love for me, I can hold it for my addict. It is a hard lesson to remember, that if we believe love is all, we must love the unloveable.  The love is there but it is tough, and real, and detached and keeps us going when we are in despair. This love is about letting go, walking away, and maintaining a distance from the madness (which is not ours) while keeping our hearts ready to respond if that response is going to work.  It is about hope. But a realistic hope.  

The week of showing the exhibition in Brighton, as part of the Brighton Fringe and supported bymy friend Ian's relapse prevention support group Arun Exact, and the excellent charity supporting families in addiction Adfam, has been intense, beautiful, enlightening and amazing. It has been hard work.  It seems that the people who came all needed to be there for whatever reason.  There were tears, powerful stories, insightful comments and interesting interpretations.  There were some crazy people, there always are, but they have stories too.  I met with and talked to many brave people who were living with, inside, and alongside addiction.  There were two fellows who left their cans of beer outside and came in for a cocaine filled experience of Addicts And Those Who Love Them.  After a while I asked the less buzzing of the two to take his friend out now, as he was not going to stop whizzing about and talking unless he was removed by his friend.  They both had a hug, gathered their beers, and left.  

Cousin Maddy helping to set up

We had an eighteen year old couple with addicted parents visiting every day, and telling their stories.  They had been together since they were thirteen, and seemed to be both way older than eighteen and also lost in a stunted childhood that could not progress.  I am hoping to work with these two youngsters to tell their stories and create their portraits. They would touch a great many people who have the same lives but who are no so articulate.  I met people with brain damage who were living free of active addiction.  I met a lady who I hope to work with, who is sober now in her seventies but with parents, children and grand children drinking as she had. Her husband died of drink.  Her story and portrait will be very important. One evening, we had a whole AA fellowship group come to see us after their meeting.  That was lovely.  All those people had found God, each other and hope.  It does not follow that they were all sober though. After listening to the stories from the week I am aware that giving up alcohol and drugs often takes more than will power and a good fellowship.  It helps, they say, but rehab is where many were able to stop.  And even that, I am told, is not necessarily effective only once.  It may take many rehabs.  There is a rule of three, my friend Ian tells me. Ian is ten years sober and clean after forty years of addiction.  He says that one person will relapse, one person will die and one person will recover.  The rule of three.  So speaking to the visitors in recovery last week, and having a whole fellowship meeting come to see us, was a powerful expression of hope.  And I suppose, it keeps me going where my own addict is concerned.  If these people who were so deep into addiction found ways through, maybe my addict won't die an addled death alone somewhere, maybe we can visit each other and have tea one day and talk about life, and sit together on the sofa in companionable silence.  Maybe. 

The next stage

 I will gather all my notes, new contacts and thoughts into some order from last week now.  Then I will start to paint and speak with new people from the exhibition just gone to create a new body of work for the next showing of Addicts And Those Who Love Them.  I don't know where I will hold the next exhibition yet, I will find a gallery or an exhibition space and take it from there.  Michael McAlister, a dear friend and colleague, will show his photographic series of powerful and challenging photos called Small Signs.  These are the small signs that describe his thirty years of addiction.  Sober and clean for many years now, Michael's work is deeply inspiring.  Marie Paul, another dear friend and colleague, is hoping to add to her dark, beautiful and mysterious drawings in charcoal, pastels and black crayon.  Marie's work is skillful, detailed, and personal to her own journey with drugs and addictions. It is the insight and creativity that Marie and Michael bring to the exhibition that inspires me too. They are part of the story of the exhibition through past addictions and are now exhibiting their own artwork from a position of recovery.  I am looking forward to working with new people for the next showing, though I am a bit nervous because there is so much work to be done to get to the next stage.  However, "nothing comes of nothing" as Shakespeare says. Or "get a move on" as my late husband Alan would say.

The Addict's Room.  Oil on wood.

Thank you

The exhibition ran smoothly because of the help and support I received. The generosity of all those heroes who helped to fund it through my Go Fund Me crowd funding is deeply wonderful.  Thank you all.  My two cousins Maddy and Kirsten stayed with me for the week and provided food and care at home here, and practical exhibition management support with me daily in Brighton.  My cheerful and efficient assistant Lora from Pink Spaghetti has helped from the very beginning, and everyone who came to this first showing of Addicts And Those Who Love Them made the week so worthwhile.  Thank you.

And it was sunny. Most of the week was downright Mediterranean. Cousin Kirsten turned a healthy shade of mahogany during the week and fair skinned freckled Maddy turned a gentle salmon pink despite being in the shade for most of the time.  The Fishing Quarter gallery where we were exhibiting overlooked the beach on the Brighton sea front, which meant that we had to have lots of chips.  We had to.

And now

It is time to rest and recover. Whatever I do on addiction is only a single grain of sand on a seashore. I want to gather together all the stories of the people I met last week and plan my next exhibition phase. In my own life, I have always decisions to make about the addiction in my family.  It does not go away, at least not for long.  It is unsolvable, constant and destructive.  It is distressing, frightening and confusing. I suppose one of the most important messages from this work I am doing is that we are not alone.  Even in the most crazy, terrifying and out of control moments, we are not alone.  And we all need each other.  Keeping quiet about what is happening to us when it is traumatic and distressing (whatever it is) is unsustainable, and it is a shock to meet other people and hear that your story is their story too.  We can get lost in the shame and stigma of having this thing, addiction, in our lives, and try to keep quiet about it.  We make excuses, explain things away, take the rap, try and cover up the damage.  And when we don't any more, and the world does not end, because we have found the support of a community who know how we feel because they are feeling it too, we can move forward.  I remember walking into a drugs and alcohol support meeting many years ago for the first time, and collapsing in tears when it was my turn to speak.  I heard myself saying that I hated my addict, and I wanted them dead.  I was taken aback by what I had just said, feeling a little out of control and was expecting the group to ask me to leave. Instead, they listened, gave me tissues, hugged me and said they understood.  Many of them had come to this group with the same feeling, and look at them now, they said.  Of course I would feel this way they said, it is intolerable dealing with so much on my own.  It isn't that I want my addict dead they helped me see, it is that I wanted the situation to go away.  And I hated the addiction, they said. If I hated the addict, I would not be there with them in floods of tears with my heart breaking.  

And so this project continues.  But first, in a minute, I will go for a walk.  I has been an insanely busy time.   

 

Marie, Me and Maddy. What a wonderful week.

I am looking for stories and experiences of addiction, either your own or someone who you love, for possible use in the Addicts exhibition.  Stories can be anonymous too. Email me here in confidence.

Subscribe to my newsletter here

My YouTube channel here

My  website here

Buy my book As Mother Lay Dying here

Follow me on Facebook here

Follow me on Instagram here

It's all over by the time you read this. In a good way.

The Walk

A photo of walking equipment in my nice quiet sunny kitchen today.

By the time you read this I will have completed my Mighty Hike walk for Macmillan.  I am heartened by thinking that this walk will soon be in the past, meaning I will have done it and won't have to think about it ever again.  Yesterday, as you went about your day without a care in the world, I walked 26 miles from Brighton to Eastbourne with 499 other people and let me tell you, it was tough.  I don't actually know that yet, but I expect it will be. Near the end of the walk, at about the twenty mile mark, there are the Seven Sisters which from what I gather from our walking Facebook pages, are seven huge hills that will kill all of us.  Apparently they are very difficult even without having already done twenty miles.  "They are tough, there is no denying it, and many may never walk again," say the experienced walkers on the social media pages, who have done Mighty Hikes with the Seven Sisters before, "but just enjoy the day and look at the view."  Oh that will help. I will just admire the view as my legs fall off.

There is always a chance that I didn't make it, and that I am still there on the route, lost and confused and a long way from home.  If you don't read this blog, then that is why.  It never got posted because I am still walking twenty four hours later and may have gone mad.  No one can find me and Macmillan will have to send out a search party.  They will have to lure me off the Seven Sisters with flasks of tea and eggy sandwiches.

The training for this Mighty Hike has been a lesson in perseverance and strange rewards.  In the beginning I would walk for an hour or two, and think that there was plenty of time.  As time went by I planned longer routes and eventually, with a new tiny turquoise ruck sack, a flask of salty soup, water and my excellent (new) walking boots, I would take a whole day and do up to nineteen miles. On some walks the weather changed suddenly and became very unpleasant.  Twice, I was utterly caught out, unprepared and under dressed in just a pink dress, a jumper and no coat or hat.  I squelched back to the car in a crazy downpour with gusts of freezing winds thinking, this is what it must be like on a mountain when the storms come and no one is prepared.  Those eight miles back to the car were absolutely awful and when I got to the car, I couldn't open it.  When I did get into the car, I found that the peanut butter sandwiches that I had wrapped in water proof bags were holding water like a sponge.  The treat that had spurred me on through the storm had been snatched from me by the elements and I was left to drive home cold, hungry, miserable and drowned.  The strange reward from this walk was that it would probably never be that bad on the day of the real walk, and that I had survived.  This was SAS level training, I said to myself, you're tougher than you think.  

Training for the Navy Seals.

 

As I write this, I see that on Saturday the weather will be hot and sunny.  I have all the things I need; a new sun hat, factor 50 plus suncream and lots of books downloaded on Audible to listen to.  I am revisiting all the Inspector Rebus books by Ian Rankin.  It will be interesting to walk through brilliant hot June sunshine on the beautiful South Downs by the sea while being a part of a dour Edinburgh police team searching in a freezing winter for unspeakable baddies and led by an alcoholic misfit genius. I will be in Edinburgh for much of the Mighty Hike.  I also have a plan, which may or may not have worked as you read this.  At the foot of the first Seven Sister cliff which looks terrifyingly like climbing to the moon in the photos I have seen, I will have a flask of sweet tea. I did this at the bottom of another hill when training and it was so delightful that I think of it still.  I sat on an old mossy log underneath beautiful trees and luscious green leaves at the bottom of a very steep mile long woodland ascent from Washington village back up to the Downs one sunny afternoon. I was trying out my new idea, a flask of hot sweet tea on a long walk.  I always take hot salty soup with me, as it seems to hit the spot.  This time I trialed sweet tea and boy, was it good.  On the actual walk day I will take both, a flask of salty soup for half way and sweet tea for the last climb over the Seven Sisters.  It may be the last time anyone will see me. 

You can still sponsor me through Just Giving and all the sponsorship money goes direct to Macmillan.

Post script - I did make it and here is a photo of me going directly to the Macmillan fry up at the end.  My sister in law Jacky was there to greet me and bought me a bag of crisps and chocolates.  She put an apple in the bag too but I didn't want that, fed up of healthy stuff, I wanted the crisps.

 

Not wanting to be fobbed off with healthy stuff.

The Exhibition

A six foot banner in case anyone can't remember what they are looking for.

If I don't come back from the South Downs on Saturday then this next bit is an apology.  Sorry, the exhibition is off.  I am writing this before both the walk on Saturday and the Addicts And Those Who Love Them exhibition opening on the Tuesday.  

Assuming all is well, the exhibition will be opening to the public at midday on Tuesday 8 June and I am spending this week before everything happens writing lists.  The paintings are all finished, the writing is nearly done, wrapping up all the paintings is not a problem so can wait a bit.  But there is all the other stuff to remember like a giant kettle for tea for the week at the gallery.  A coffee maker, a cold bag for milk and lunches.  Hanging equipment - hammer, nails, picture hooks, measuring tape, sellotape, blutac, string. I must remember the easles and the A-boards, and of course the new six foot banner I had made to go over the door outside.  That reminds me, we need a ladder.  Then there is the planning for the private view, which includes all the (low key) catering, and always the constant remembering to tell people about the exhibition in the first place.

 Addicts And Those Who Love Them is a serious exhibition. The idea behind it has always been to tell the stories of people dealing with addiction, and that is not just the addict, but the people behind them. 

I first began creating a body of work in 2018 on the subject of addiction.  It was in response to my son’s struggle with opiates, and it was called The Brighter The Light (the darker the shadow).  I showed it here in Bognor, and it resonated with others who were experiencing the same thing.  From that exhibition came the idea for this next one, Addicts And Those Who Love Them.  It seemed that we who witness and journey alongside addiction in our close circles feel vulnerable and alone.  When we eventually do talk to someone who understands, and when we tell it like it really is, which is very horrible because we expect not to believed, the relief is enormous.  At this first exhibition, I remember a mother coming in and walking around the paintings in shock.  When she managed to come and ask about the stories behind them, and I told her exactly what had happened and was still happening, she broke down in tears.  She and her daughter were living in a silent nightmare of the daughter’s addiction.  The mother, feeling (as we do) that it was her fault (and addicts are expert at blaming others) finally understood that she was not alone, the addiction in her life was not her fault and that there were places she could find help and support without judgement.

Though this lady does not feature in Addicts And Those Who Love Them, the whole idea behind it was inspired by her.

I have a great team with me for this exhibition.  My two cousins Maddy and Kirsten are coming to stay with me for the week to make sure there are always two of us in the gallery, and that someone (Kirsten) will be doing food. There is so much organising, and I have a wonderful VA (virtual assistant) called Lora, who does so much of it, with her lovely cheerful smile.  I am grateful to have the support of Arun Exact, a peer led relapse prevention group in Littlehampton near here, and of Adfam, a wonderful charity supporting and educating families and friends of addicts as they deal with the addiction journey.  Perhaps I could call it the addiction lifestyle.  I have also, with huge gratitude, had wonderful support from all the people who have donated to my crowd funding pages to help pay for the costs of this project.  All the work I do is free, and the exhibition is free.  That is why the crowd funding has been so important and special. 

I have two Go Fund Me pages for this exhibition. The first was set up a year ago in 2020 when Addicts was meant to show at the Brighton Fringe.  Of course, everything was suddenly cancelled last year and when I was offered a slot this year I couldn't find my old page and so began a new one.  Then I found my old page.  Both had donations on them and I simply had to pretend I always wanted two pages and that was how I rolled.  If you would like to donate you have a choice.  The first page is here and the second is here.  You could donate to both, in order to maintain balance.  I will not stop you. 

In the studio holding a portrait and words of Ian from Arun Exact.

And so

I write this blog before my busy week begins.  If you are reading this, I did make it on Saturday and I am taking the Sunday to rest before hanging and preparing the exhibition on the Monday.  I have toyed with opening the Addicts And Those Who Love Them from a wheelchair but I have bought myself some orthopedic flip flops instead.  I will be supported by them and look nice too. 

Just as a little extra, my darling brother John is getting married in London on the Friday before the walk and exhibition. So I will be partying on the Friday at the wedding.  My train home arrives at Bognor at 11.30pm, and I am up for 5am the next day ready to make my mark on those Seven Sisters and earn the right to wear the orthopedic flip flops for the next week in Brighton.  

Subscribe to my fortnightly newsletter here

Subscribe to my YouTube channel here

my website here

Buy my book As Mother Lay Dying here