bluesinateacup

Yesterday morning was crisp and cold. Classic January. It was minus six I’m told by friends who have sophisticated electronics in their cars. Bloody freezing my hands told me by the time I got to the cash machine on the corner. I found my gloves and decided to take the scenic route into the city. The sky behind me rippled with dawn as I cut through Rosa Parks Lane. A man came running up the hill towards me on Stokes Croft. Ragged dreadlocks. He looked like he’d slept on the street. He fist-bumped the guy in front of me, smiled a good morning to the girl on my left.

Hey, I’m real. I’m not frozen!

Sometimes it’s just good to be alive.

Today the sky’s a sludge-grey blanket. No sunrise, just a reluctant dispersal of darkness. This city was European Green Capital last year. The hoarding at the crossroads shouts at me as I pass.

2016 – It Doesn’t Stop Here

Red-trousered greenwash, someone’s graffitied in bright red letters. Fellow Bristolians will understand the reference. The air’s catching at my throat as I head through the heart of St Pauls. This neighbourhood parties late and wakes late. There’s almost no traffic so early, but a fug of fumes still hangs in the air. It smells like gridlock, with not a vehicle in sight. Further on and I take a short cut through the shopping centre. It’s eerie when the crowds aren’t out. A briefly-abandoned temple to consumer culture.

On the bus at last, I notice again today that the engine cuts out every time we stop. Yesterday I thought there was something wrong with the bus, today I can’t work out if the vehicle’s designed this way, or whether the driver’s been instructed to switch off to reduce pollution. Good on someone either way, but given the quality of the air, I can’t help feeling it’s shutting the stable door about forty years too late. I get off the bus at the top of the hill. The air feels cleaner and I expand my lungs. At least my grandchildren aren’t inhaling so much poison up here. I think back to the smogs of my childhood. The smell of coal smoke through the wet wool of the scarf my mother wrapped tight over my nose and mouth as I left for school. Everyone knew the London air was poisoned by the smoke of thousands of fires. You saw the smuts on walls and pavements, and the evidence was there in your starched handkerchief every time you blew your nose. Today’s poisons are more subtle. You can see where you’re going of a morning, and the chemical haze that shrouds the city as I look down from the crest of the hill doesn’t show up in every tissue I use.

I’d hate to be a politician. People have suggested down the years that my views on feminism through pacifism to green issues and social justice might make me suited to the role. I can’t think of anything worse. Imagine having to make huge, life-changing decisions on behalf of millions of people. I’m a people-pleaser. I consult the TV schedule before I phone my mother, in case I mess up Holby City. It takes more brass neck than I’ll ever have to assume you know what’s best for everyone else, and something worse to act as if you know how to achieve it. You surely have to be a control freak. A sociopath. I’m not certain who first suggested anyone that power-hungry should automatically be debarred from public office, but think Donald Trump and you’ll see the wisdom.

People who crave control have an eye to the big picture. They’re often pathologically incapable of understanding the effects of their actions. Empathy isn’t in the repertoire of the CEO or the career politician. They just don’t need it as much as those of us better connected with reality. I’ve no doubt Tony and George W expected go down in history for taking out Saddam Hussein. They will of course, but likely because of the havoc they caused rather than as saviours of the world. When it comes to the crunch, freedom ain’t worth the paper when there’s no water, no electricity, your kids are getting shot by marauding gangs and ISIS is being born.

If you look back a paragraph or two, you’ll see I said I’m a people-pleaser. I said it as if that made me the opposite of a control freak. I’m clearly better suited to politics than I pretend. After all, if you’re to have so much as a sniff at power you’re going to need to please one hell of a lot of people. People who fund you. People who vote. People who own newspapers and produce television programmes. You’re going to have to engage the full panoply of the people-pleaser’s armoury. You’ll need to lie, schmooze, compromise and manipulate. You’ll have to pretend to be someone you’re not, to believe things you don’t, to hate things you love and to like people you despise. If you do it well, you’ll forget where you came from in the first place. We people-pleasers are nothing if not control freaks. Think it’s all about selfless concern for others? Sorry, what we really want is for everyone to think we’re wonderful. Needs must, and a full-blown people-pleaser will stand every principle he ever had on its head for a single taste of that.

For so long now I’ve been wringing my hands over the callous disregard David Cameron and his cronies have for ordinary people. I’ve expended gallons of virtual ink railing against injustices perpetrated by this government and the last. I couldn’t understand how they slept at night while ninety people a month were dying after being assessed as ‘fit for work’ under their new guidelines. I didn’t get why they would accuse food banks of scaremongering. I was confused by their attempts to redefine child poverty. I didn’t know how David Cameron could stoop low enough to joke about ‘a bunch of migrants’.

On a sunny Saturday I’m drinking coffee in good company when the conversation strays into politics. It often does when I’m around.

I think David Cameron’s just a bit stupid.

I’m going to stop right here and confess the thought had never occurred to me before. I’ve always assumed our politicians to be intelligent people who had major issues around integrity. It had never entered my head to see it any other way. But what if David Cameron’s just plain thick? What if he can’t see that his policies are appalling and cruel? What if he doesn’t have the capacity to grasp the consequences? It’s a far from comforting idea, but at least it makes sense.

In all my life, I’ve never been more convinced of my own rightness than I was in my thirties and forties. Questions and uncertainties were swept under the carpet. I was grown up. I had life figured. Joining an eighties-style house church didn’t help. I swallowed right-and-wrong-us-and-them-hellfire-and-damnation stuff by the bucket. Believe six impossible things before breakfast? Toss me a dozen and watch me choke them down. It was people-pleaser heaven for a while, but it didn’t take long for the cracks to appear. My certainties were often off the church’s piste. I simply couldn’t stomach their monstrous god, whose delight was in sending sinners to hell. After all, some of those sinners were the people I loved best and I didn’t want to do heaven without them. The edifice finally disintegrated when the pastor’s wife got it into her head that I was embroiled in a lesbian affair. With no right of reply, I was ignominiously thrown out of the church. I’m ashamed to say my inner people-pleaser was mortified anyone could even think it of me.

The last time I spoke to said wife was when she pronounced her judgement on the stillbirth of my youngest daughter. I think she was one of those people whose world view never was ruffled by reality. Maybe I’d have ended up the same way if life hadn’t backed me into so many corners. I’m not proud of my self-righteous phase. I was immature. I thought being an adult was about having all the answers. I did a lot of damage. Now I’m a grumpy old woman who has no idea what she’s talking about, and I’m proud of that.

All the same, I can’t help wondering whether a lot of politicians aren’t stuck in just that self-righteous phase. David Cameron’s not yet fifty, and George Osborne not forty-five. From where I’m standing they’re little more than children. Neither has experience much beyond the world of power and politicking. Why am I surprised by their lack of intelligence? Their world’s about schmoozing, manipulation and arguing black’s white to get what you want. Small wonder they’re out of touch with a reality where flesh-and-blood people get hurt by their decisions.  Where our beautiful earth’s dying from their refusal to bite the bullet of man-made climate change. Why would they be bothered by the suffering of people who were never going to vote for them in the first place? Why worry about green crap? It’s only going to annoy people you need to please. When you know all the answers, why should you go through all the hassle of putting stuff before parliament rather than slide it past on a statutory instrument? It makes perfect sense when you’re blindly convinced you’re right.

There are daisies in the lawn outside the building where I live. It’s January. The Zika virus is on the march. Daisies and mosquitoes thrive on climate change, people less so. Still politicians are failing to offer any coherent response. There are good intentions of course. Greenwash comes in trousers of many hues. There are climate change conferences and European Green Capitals. It pleases people to think something’s being done. No matter whether our main concern is the economy, global warming, the refugee crisis, the NHS, something else or all of the above, we’d prefer to believe our political leaders when they tell us they know best. The sad truth is politicians are human though, and as such they’re no better than the rest of us. They’re idols with feet of clay: immature, self-righteous, people-pleasing and not very bright to boot. No matter how full of good ideas, they need to be held to account, lest they forget they have no right to the power of life and death over the rest of us. After all good intentions, greenwash included, are the paving on the road to a place nobody wants to go.

It’s a miserable afternoon. Classic English seaside weather, and not so much as an ice cream van to redeem it. We’ve eaten a Bengali picnic in the middle of a shopping precinct. I can barely move for all the food that’s been pressed upon me. Now we’re back on the coach and headed along the Sussex coast to Rye. The back seat’s packed with teenage girls, still passing food back and forth. At every glimpse of the sea they rush to the windows, chattering like the murmurations of starlings that curl and weave over the passing marshland. Rye’s the last stop before home. The staid older students head off in search of antiques and fish-and-chips. The girls beg me to stay with them. They want photos at every opportunity. They’ve not seen a place like this before.

The rain holds off just a couple of hours. It’s starting again as the coach pulls out of the car park. The girls are singing Bollywood classics by the time we join the motorway. They know every note. Every word. Samaya dances in the aisle to the swish of the windscreen wipers. I think the older students are wishing the coach floor would open and swallow her. What none of us knows is that this is her last taste of freedom. The pressures of marriage and parenthood are about to close in on these girls. Samaya, I’m never going to see again.

I worked in the language school for four years. Hope, it was called and I like to think that was what it brought, at least sometimes. I loved my job with passion hard to describe. When I first fetched up there it was nothing short of a miracle I could teach at all. Charlie’s grip was absolute then. I could barely string a sentence in real life, and I learned to switch my phone off when I taught, just to stem the tide of abusive texts. As soon as I stood in front of a class, I came alive. I loved connecting people. The priceless moment when a beginners’ group first grasped the words ‘coffee break’, or the smile of delight when two students discovered they could speak to each other at last. Women from across the globe bonded over custard creams and childbirth stories. A Bengali lad adopted a French nun as his substitute mum. Naz brought chai masala and boiled it in the kettle, so everyone’s coffee was slightly spicy for the rest of the week. Lifelong friendships were forged. We shared international meals, circumcision celebrations and afternoon teas. We organised a fund raiser after the earthquake in Haiti, and sipped Turkish tea while eating English cupcakes. It broke my heart when the EDL held their first rally in Luton. They shut down the town centre one Saturday. I spent an entire week explaining, and apologising for the idiocy of English extremists. And we went on that wonderful coach trip to the seaside.

Of course the idyll had its dark side too. There was the Afghan schoolboy who talked of nothing but guns. The Bengali teenager who was bussed two hundred miles a night to slave in a restaurant kitchen. He fell asleep on the desk most days. I met mail-order brides. May, from China, was deeply miserable. She disappeared as soon as her English got good enough for her to complain. Cynthia, on the other hand, gave her purchaser a run for his money. He definitely bit off more than he was expecting to chew when he handed over the fee. She used to tell me about Thai friends who hadn’t been so lucky, or so feisty. Her best friend worked all hours in her owner’s sandwich bar. He wouldn’t let her learn English in case she ran away.

Halima still worries me now. Her husband brought her to the initial interview, and I just knew. When you’ve been where I have you develop a sixth sense. She was quiet and shy. Highly intelligent. She’d been a teacher somewhere in north Africa. She broke down in the classroom one Wednesday afternoon. Why did he beat her still, now she was six months pregnant? He’d taken her passport. He’d told her he’d have her deported and keep her baby if she breathed a word. What can you say about a man like that? I tried to put her in touch with people who could help, but she was far too scared. My boss came in with a cuppa when she’d gone.

You think you’re just teaching them English, don’t you?

That’s what I’m here for.

You’re not, you’re mothering them too.

I know, I know. But that’s who I am. It’s why I was never going to be a millionaire, and just why I’m spitting nails this morning. Managers. CEOs. Chancellors of the Exchequer. Prime Ministers even. They think in strategies, grand plans and long-term goals. They don’t see the effect of their behaviour for individual lives. People like me? We work the front line, battling to clean up the mess they trail in their wake, each of us playing our little King Canute to the rolling tide of destruction.

Aside from my age, the main reason I struggled to find work when I moved to Bristol was the ongoing reduction in government funding for ESOL classes. Hope had been a church-based school. I’d taken a pay cut even there because money was tight, but at least the premises were comfortable and rent-free, and as I may have said before I’m not high-maintenance. In 2012 teachers were losing their jobs or having their hours cut all over the country. Last year all public funding for ESOL classes was removed. I’d love nothing better than to resurrect Hope Language School here in Bristol, but the very people who need the classes are those who can’t afford to pay, and even low-maintenance needs to eat once in a while.

David Cameron seized and devoured a whole packet of custard creams yesterday. His pronouncements on the imperative for Muslim women to learn English were at best ill-conceived. Lazy and sloppy, in the words of Baroness Warsi, who’s not a woman I’d normally have truck with, they seemed designed to appeal to all those stereotypes that reinforce the worst kinds of prejudice. I’ve worked in a community with a large Muslim population. I’m well aware there are controlling husbands and families out there. Halima’s husband’s a Muslim. Rabina came to just six classes when she arrived from Pakistan, all under the close supervision of her sister-in-law who spoke perfect English. But May’s married to a white Brit, and Cynthia’s friend’s owned by one. What are we going to do for them? Oh yes, nothing. Helping them won’t win the UKIP vote.

If I’m honest, the whole thing puts me slightly in mind of something I wrote when George Osborne demonstrated his munificence by ploughing £15m of tampon tax into domestic abuse services he’d recently de-funded. Quietly cut a vital service, then make a song-and-dance about giving back far less than you took away. Hope no-one notices it was you who messed up in the first place. Job done. The icing on the biscuits was that Dear Dave managed to shift the blame onto Muslim women themselves, for not using a service that didn’t exist. My own experience suggests that the vast majority of people arriving in the UK are only too happy to learn English, irrespective of gender or religion. English is the most useful language anyone can speak. And why would you choose not to speak the language of the country you live in? The biggest barrier to learning is funding and facilities, not a lack of enthusiastic students or teachers.

The most worrying aspect of this salvo is the way the Prime Minister’s tapped visceral fears by implying a connection between inadequate English and radical extremism. Admittedly it’s a very real connection if you look at hardcore British right-wing pages on Facebook, but I don’t think that’s quite what Dave means. Today’s news suggests he wants to dress his policies as empowerment for oppressed Muslim women. Much though I hate to agree with Baroness Warsi, she’s not wrong when she says that to threaten deportation if women fail to learn English is a very unusual way of empowering and emboldening them. Seriously Dave, if you can’t do better than this, I think you’d do well to admit you’ve no idea what goes on in the real world. It pains me to have to quote yet another Tory woman, but you really are a posh boy who doesn’t know the price of milk, and I’m not the only one out here who’s heartily sick of mopping up the mess.

The last of the weekend dried and put away I emerge from the kitchen with the first coffee of the morning. The mirror’s on the wall directly in front of me. I can’t help but stop and admire it. Procrastination and power-tool-paranoia left it languishing in bubble-wrap behind the armchair for more than three-and-a-half years. Now here it is, placed to perfection by a man with a drill, and looking exactly the way I’d always hoped it would. So good. There’s just the one thing makes me hesitate, and that’s the picture enclosed by its heavy, wooden frame.

At first I’m inclined to be critical. For the better part of four years, the only mirror in the place has been above the bathroom sink. The lighting there’s artificial and kind, and I can’t see most of myself anyway. The light in the living room this morning’s cold and grey. It hides nothing and the image is nigh on full-length. In addition, I can see the abandoned decorating tools in the hallway, the marmalade pan on the cooker and the wilting poinsettia on the bookshelf in the background. The woman looking back at me is not young. She’s wearing glasses and a shapeless sack of a top, and she could do with a cut-and-blow-dry, although without the glasses she likely wouldn’t be able to tell you that. I want to be depressed. Then I take another look.

My hair’s silver, aside from the purple streaks. Not grey, silver. I used to tell people it was platinum blonde. A woman in the hairdresser’s last year asked how I got it this colour. She’d been trying to dye hers just this shade, she said. Took me sixty years, I said. Then there are the curves. I haven’t seen them in a while. Hips broad enough to have cradled four babies and breasts that got to feed only three. A face wise and sad enough to have weathered that storm. There are the hands that have created, eyes that have seen things no-one else will and the belly I battled so long to lose and wound up loving, its hidden scars all whispering stories of their own.

In a little over a month I’ll be sixty-two. Quite how that’s happened is a mystery to me. My grandfather retired when he was two years younger than I am now. He took to a bungalow in the country and refused to leave his armchair. It’s not an option I’d have, even if I wanted it. Nevertheless, I sometimes think our society would prefer me to be invisible. I came home to Bristol in May 2012. Half a lifetime of domestic turmoil and some unwise choices had left me little to call my own. I moved in on May Day Bank Holiday. Tuesday morning I was on the doorstep of the Job Centre at nine. I’d polished up my CV in advance. I’d called every language school in the city, and most had responded with enthusiasm. It was the right time of year to be looking for work as a teacher of English as a foreign language, and I knew it. Everyone takes on teachers for summer schools and I had exactly the right experience and qualifications. I’d sent out the CV a dozen times and more. Not one single response. I sat across the desk from my new Employment Advisor.

Do you think it’s my age?

I can’t tell you that.

Of course she couldn’t tell me. It’s been illegal to discriminate on grounds of age since 2006. It’s also been illegal to discriminate against women since 1970. This didn’t prevent us from earning on average 15.7% less than men in 2014, or in more stark terms working almost two months of the year for nothing. A bit of a double whammy if you happen to be a woman of slightly-beyond-a-certain-age.

I don’t consider myself high maintenance. I’ll confess to a lingering penchant for books and CDs. I like good coffee and the odd glass of red wine. I’ve even been known to buy new clothes from time to time, although almost never at full price. In general however, I don’t have an expensive lifestyle. I decided to opt for self-employment. At least I couldn’t discriminate against myself.

I’m my own worst enemy when it comes to selling my skills. Pride comes before a fall, don’t run before you can walk, all that jazz and I’m scuppered before I’ve started. I have a steady few students and a part-time job that keeps the wolf just shy of the threshold. Nonetheless I live with a growing sense that, false modesty or no, I might be worth a little more than this. Oddly, looking in the mirror in the harsh light of morning, I feel the sense stir again. I love teaching. It’s performance art and regardless of whether you believe me, I’m nothing if not a show-off. Every class pitches me into agonies of stage fright. That’s one thing that’s not got better in all these years. The moment I open my mouth the fear’s gone and words flow like magic. I end on an adrenaline high. What could better?

Yet, if I’m honest, there’s one thing makes all that pale and pointless. Writing. Writing comes from the core of me. I’d not cling long to the remnants of sanity if I didn’t write. Objectively, I don’t think I’m too bad at it either, although I realise I’m the person least qualified to comment. Now and again even my internal editor, the worst critic bar none, will look at a piece and say: Hey, that’s not so bad. Better still, one or two people whose judgement I respect tell me they like things I’ve written. I hope to god they’re not saying it because they think I’ll hate them if they speak the truth.

Most of the time this blog doesn’t attract much attention. I’m crazy happy if fifteen or twenty people read a post and over the moon if one gets thirty hits. If nothing else it means I’m not sitting here talking to myself all the time. Thus I was stunned to come home last Thursday and find 170 people had been reading a post from last December while I’d been out. I’ve no idea how they found it, and for all I know every last one of them thought it was crap, but at least they read it.

On the basis of my not being the worst writer ever, I’ve pitched to one or two publications over the past year. Nothing major, just local rags. The response? Zilch. A glance in the mirror and I wonder if they just couldn’t see past that old woman in the grey sack. Age is a formidable barrier. In an image-obsessed society first impressions can be deadly, and my pitch has always been honest. I’m a feminist idealist, who writes from the dubious wisdom of sixty-plus colourful years. What else can I be? I don’t do buzzwords, soundbites or jargon. I do truth as I see it, and these days I’m no longer afraid of the consequences. Truth always has more than one level though. The old woman’s no more than the surface. The curves and the scars go deeper. I know my own heart now. I’ve lately grown to love it, and that’s a gift only experience can bring. Sometimes you have to know what you’re searching for before you’ll see, but look long enough into the mirror and you’ll find it’s all there.

It’s been a weekend. Growing old disgracefully doesn’t come easy as you’d think. Happily, Monday’s my day off. I haul my aching body out of almost ten hours’ sleep, roll over and check my phone. The internet’s alive, but someone I once thought would live for ever no longer is. So many legends lost to the world in the past few months, but this one’s different. This one’s the author of my song. This one’s part of my personal soundtrack. This one’s David Bowie.

One day, though it might as well be someday … Not twenty-four hours back from here, I’m eating well-buttered toast in unaccustomed company and talking about Blackstar. I haven’t heard it yet. Sometimes I don’t keep up so well these days.

It’s dark. Very dark.

I guess I might make dark music if I knew how close the end was, and listening thirty-two hours later I can hear that he knew. But wasn’t Bowie always dark? That’s why I loved him. The glitz all on the surface. But camp always bears the miasma of darkness in the end.

I’m in my grandmother’s room, stealing precious time on her walnut-veneer radiogram. My parents don’t do music and I’ve fought hard for the concession. I can play my records quietly. With permission. When Nanna’s not there. I take the single out of its paper sleeve, check the surface for scratches and wipe the duster over it. I set the switch to 45 rpm, blow the near-invisible debris of my last visit off the needle and lower the stylus tenderly onto the very edge of the black disc. No matter how careful, my fingers always shake. The ritual. A crackle or two. Twenty seconds of near-silence. Ground control to Major Tom … Check ignition, and may God’s love be with you … Here am I, sitting in a tin can … I already know there’s no happy ending. The late 1960s was the best time to discover music. Everything was new. The stranglehold of commercialism wasn’t total then, and Bowie rode the wave into the 70s and beyond like no-one else. Friends of every age are posting on Facebook today. Most know far more about him than I ever will, and that’s all as it should be.

I was a good Methodist Sunday School kid from the age of three. I grew up on hymns. I still remember most of them now. Change and decay in all around I see … See, from his head, his hands, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingling down … I lay in dust life’s glory dead … dark stuff for a childhood. I’ve never understood how it didn’t make the same ache for music in the people who put me in its way. When I decided the god of my childhood might not exist after all, the hymns were what I missed most. Never mind just love, music’s fed my soul through light and darkness. Each and every song has a tale to tell, often more than one. It’s Sunday afternoon. I’m walking through the tunnel of ever-changing street art between home and my allotment in unaccustomed company. In the entrance, a man’s making music. The acoustics of the tunnel are breathtaking. One day I’m going to sing my heart out in here, but the song he’s playing now I sang at my daughter’s funeral. I can’t even speak.

My parents chose my name without sentiment. It may not have been beautiful, but at least it couldn’t be shortened. I’m not sure they gave a thought to its rhyming with ‘bean’. This dismal lack of romance means my appearances in song have been rare indeed. Cheer up sleepy Jean … I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair … although strictly speaking ‘Jeanie’ doesn’t count. The Jean Genie burst on the scene late in 1972, brimful of attitude. I was at Essex University, hub of student revolt back then. I fell head over heels. Bowie’s androgyny tuned with my nascent feminism. His strut and rebellion played counterpoint to my reticence. Friends coined the nickname for a time. Jean Genie, let yourself go … and for a brief moment, I did just that.

And yes, my memories are old, personal and of their time. Space Oddity. Jean Genie. The Prettiest Star. Ziggy Stardust. This is ‘my’ Bowie and will remain so. Music’s made in the heart, not the intellect. She’ll come, she’ll go, she’ll lay belief on you …  Bowie’s music whispers of places long forgotten.  Some perhaps best forgotten, but no less a part of who I am. The whispers are sometimes of sadness. More often now they make me dance and laugh for the sheer joy of living.  That’s when the Jean Genie lets go once again. So the last word belongs to the man himself: I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.

In a past life, I used to squeeze the occasional walk with the dog in between shopping, washing, cleaning, cooking, holding down four part-time jobs and being shouted at. Dog-walking’s a pleasingly solitary occupation. A dog, a rubber ring and me, stomping round a muddy field together. It was the bliss at the start of yet another day’s madness. Of course there were always other dogs and their walkers. The Jack Russell, who savaged my son whilst his owner stood by and did nothing. The Westie whose walker carried him because she couldn’t bear the idea that he was no longer able to walk. There was the pedigree gun dog we had to avoid because his owner didn’t like him to mix with other dogs, and of course there was the gorgeous Golden Retriever whose walker hand sewed his own equally gorgeous dresses. If our paths accidentally crossed, we humans would perform the essential grumbling-about-the-weather ritual, while the dogs did the canine equivalent, then we’d go our separate ways.

Come January, all that used to change. On New Year’s Day there’d be ten or a dozen joggers sweating their way round the freezing field, churning up the mud with their brand new running shoes. Jess tried chasing one the first time she saw them. She soon got fed up with that. As time wore on, their numbers would diminish. Mid-month and the last two or three would still be doggedly pounding the turf. By the beginning of February, it was business as usual.

In recent years, the main use for New Year’s resolutions in my world has been to explain the use of ‘I’m going to … ‘ to students of English.

I’m going to lose three stone.

I’m going to go to the gym ten times a week.

I’m going to read everything Shakespeare ever wrote.

No, not ‘I will’, ‘I’m going to’.

‘I will lose three stone’ might be a statement of fact. ‘I’m going to climb Mount Everest’ has more to do with insane optimism. ‘I’m going to … ‘. Big on dreams, small on delivery. The first time I researched the topic, Wikipedia told me a mere 12% of us keep our resolutions. It seemed a rather generous estimate, but being Wikipedia it may or may not have been accurate. However, there is one thing any New Year’s Resolution’s guaranteed to deliver in bucketfuls.

Guilt. There are so many things I ought to be doing instead of writing. I’m a hundred miles or so from home right now, so the half-painted wall in the hallway, the apples turning into cider instead of chutney and the mirror that’s been behind the armchair for three years because I’m paranoid about electric drills are going to have to wait. Nothing I can do but tick them off the worry list, and that’s no end of a relief because there are any number of other things I ought to feel bad about. The phone calls I’ve put off. The emails I haven’t sent. The family and friends I haven’t seen because there wasn’t time on this flying visit. Then there’s the weight I’ve put on this year. The publicity I didn’t do for the business. The abandoned creative journal. Even the fact that my friend’s scuttling round making lunch on her own and refusing all offers of help. I can feel guilty about anything.

I came into the world less than ten years after the end of World War II. I’m told I was one of the very last people to have a ration book issued in my name, although my parents never actually used it. Wartime austerity was a thing back then, and guilt was the stock-in-trade of postwar parenting. Guilt, and what-will-the-neighbours-think.

What do you mean, you don’t like tripe? Think yourself lucky. We couldn’t get this during the War you know.

In the end, even Mum had to admit tripe was a failure. Dad struggled to eat it, and he’d have eaten his own legs if Mum had asked him to. It was simply vile. We never saw the stuff again. Other tactics for inducing guilt were far more effective. The Sunday School Scripture Exam, for example. My mother wanted me to come top, and nothing less would do. She’d drill me for weeks, convinced I was fluffing my memory verses on purpose, to spite her. No matter how much she yelled, Colin Rowlands beat me every time. I’d do the walk of shame to the front of the church to receive my certificate with could have done better ringing in my ears.

We moved into a wonderful, ramshackle Edwardian house with my grandmother when I was eleven. The inaccessible loft space of the three-bed semi I’d grown up with was replaced by a long room with sloping ceilings, which became my brothers’ bedroom. Once upon a time it must have been the servants’ quarters. I used to imagine maids in starchy pinnies running down the stairs at the pull of a bell-rope.

Tucked into the eaves by the bedroom door was a tiny, triangular attic. All the contents of the old loft were stuffed into this space. I’d read ‘A Little Princess’ far too many times. My head was full of mysteries and long-forgotten secrets. I yearned to stumble across evidence that I was an orphaned princess after all. One of my pastimes was browsing through the back-and-white photos in the sideboard drawer. I studied the family tree in my Baby Book, asking endless questions, until my mother dumped the silver polish in front of me and told me I could polish the best cutlery if I had nothing better to do. The loft had always been where all the really interesting stuff was kept of course. There were ancient toys that had belonged to my father, stamp albums with pictures of Queen Victoria and boxes and boxes of photographs. For the past eleven years I’d only been able to see it from the bottom of a ladder. Now all of a sudden it was there for the asking, but for one small problem. I was strictly forbidden to go into the attic.

One advantage of being a solitary child is that a lot of what you do passes under your parents’ radar. My brothers were also strictly forbidden to dangle toys out of their bedroom window on bits of string. It didn’t stop my father having to fish trains and boats and planes out of the gutter below the window most evenings. They were noisy rebels. Meanwhile, I discovered the value of quiet defiance. I spent hours squished among the boxes in the semi-darkness of the attic. So long as I made no trouble, nobody would come looking, and if I put things back where I’d found them, no-one would be any the wiser. Seek and ye shall find. But it won’t necessarily be what you hope for.

I’m deep in the attic, curled between the boxes under the slope of the eaves. I’ve found a battered sepia photograph. In the dim light, I can see that everyone in it’s dressed to the nines in proper old-fashioned clothes. One little girl in a frilled white pinafore looks a lot like my grandmother. Nanna was one of ten children. Some didn’t survive the First World War. Half of them I’ve never met. I’m old enough to know there was a lot of falling out in my grandmother’s family, but not old enough to understand why. There are so many questions I want to ask to ask. I consider taking the photo downstairs and sneaking it into the sideboard drawer. Maybe I could ‘find’ it in a few days’ time.  Somehow, I don’t think Mum would be fooled. I’ve already been in here too long. The butterflies are gathering in my stomach. She’ll notice I’m missing any minute, either that or one of the boys will come storming upstairs and blow my cover. I tuck the photograph away. In the bottom of the box is a pile of envelopes I’ve not seen before. Just one last peep … Inside the first envelope is a simple drawing. A smiling stick man in a sailing boat. There’s one word, in Dad’s handwriting. ‘Me’.

My father was the world’s worst worrier. He and Mum had been through tough times in the early stages of married life, and the rapid arrival of the three of us hadn’t made things any easier. Even with those hardships long gone, Dad loved to recount how he’d had to walk to work, carrying only the price of a cuppa from the tea trolley in his pocket so his colleagues wouldn’t guess how hard up he was. I think we children were supposed to learn frugality and the importance of keeping up appearances. What I actually learned was that my parents would have been better off if I’d never been born. Now I’d found the evidence. My father’s self portrait. His future as a happy yachtsman all blown to the wind because of me. To my eleven-year-old mind the logic was unassailable. I was the reason for my parents’ ill-concealed misery. I never told a soul, of course. You don’t go sharing secrets as guilty as that. Especially not if you were where you shouldn’t have been when you discovered them.

The guilt I acquired became my constant companion. My familiar. The excuse for fear and failure. The reason not to try. Doesn’t everyone need a friend like that? Could-have-done-better became the mantra of my school reports. Guilt whispered I had no right to succeed. The first boyfriend dumped me. Guilt told me he was too good for me anyway. I made resolutions. Guilt made sure I failed to keep them. Then it flourished in the manure.

I don’t drive. I failed my test twice and after the second attempt I decided there had to be better uses for all that money. As a result I do a lot of walking, mostly without a dog these days. I’m pondering my predicament on the walk from my brother’s house back to work one spring afternoon. Charlie and his predecessor are history now. My life should be my own, yet I’m still scared of everything bar my shadow. It doesn’t make sense. The bad times are behind me, why don’t I feel better? I’m admiring the daffodils in the hedge when the truth hits me. I’ve spent nigh on fifty years pretending to be like everyone else, when I believe deep down I’m not. In the past few months everything’s come apart at the seams. I’ve fled half way across the country to escape Charlie. My life’s a mess, and everyone knows it. Why am I still pretending to be normal? Don’t I have a choice here? Of course I do.  I can keep up the good-girl-hard-done-by act, go on wearing the mask and spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. Or I can forgive myself for mistakes and bad choices. I can stop living what-will-the-neighbours-think, let go all that bloody guilt that was never mine in the first place and start living as if I have nothing to hide. I can’t describe the relief. Call it resolution if you like, in every sense of the word.

And she lived happily ever after ….

Well, almost. The truth is, I still have a to-feel-guilty-about list, but these days it’s my own mistakes. Forgotten birthdays. Missed appointments. Messing around on Facebook when I’d be best cleaning the bathroom. Writing blog posts when I should be doing lesson plans. My choices. I’m no longer responsible for anyone else’s happiness. No more could-have-done-better, nor what-will-the-neighbours-think. The latter was never any of my business anyway. I resolved some time ago that New Year’s resolutions would no longer be a part of my life. There’s altogether too much scope for failure for my liking. This year I think I might break my resolution though. I’m going to give up all those remaining niggles of guilt once and for all. As resolutions go, this one’s pretty much foolproof I think. After all, if I do ever have the odd twinge, at least I won’t be able to feel guilty about it.

I emerge from the freezer with a box of sausages. I’ll swear I’m going to find a body the day I get to the bottom of that machine. Back out in the cafe, the atmosphere’s tense. Most of the food bank staff are by the door and there’s a lot of shouting going on outside.
“Don’t go out there. There’s a fight.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Ben and Izzy.”
A couple of women are standing in the porch. One I don’t know. The other I can’t help but wish I didn’t. She nicked a customer’s phone last week, then demanded twenty quid from the owner before she’d give it back. She caused no end of a headache on a busy morning when I was in charge. Why do these things always happen when Anne’s not there? Anne’s nowhere to be seen now. Everyone’s jumpy and the fight’s moving closer to the door. I’m going to have to get assertive with someone, although I can’t help thinking my supply of assertiveness ran out around two hours ago.

It’s more than half dark outside. Don’t you just love December afternoons? There’s a bright green bike chained to the drainpipe, and it’s blocking the fire exit. The dog that’s running round the garden looks a lot like a pit bull. On the pavement opposite, Ben and Izzy are hurling abuse at each other. Ben’s strutting and ranting and reminding me an awful lot of Charlie. The dog’s lead’s getting a few mentions, in between the effing, so I guess the unfortunate creature must be theirs. They can’t find the lead, or one of them’s forgotten it. I can’t quite make out which. Maybe they don’t know either. The dog makes a bolt for the road. I grab her harness as she passes. There’s a length of parcel string attached where the lead should be. She seems unfazed at being restrained by a total stranger. In fact, she’s altogether the least worried of the lot of us, but I suppose this is more or less normal for her.

Woman-I-wish-I-didn’t-know’s in the cafe now, and altogether too close to the till. Maybe I should have cashed up before I started excavating the freezer. Not for the first time I wish I had eyes in the back of my head and Inspector Gadget arms. I know her of old. She’ll have anything that’s not nailed down. Ben’s in my face. He grabs the dog, and heads off up the road. Izzy starts screeching. He’s going the wrong f***ing way, she says. He needs to take the f***ing dog home first. He lets go of the dog and tells her to take the f***ing thing home herself. She can’t, she says. The f***ing string hurts her f***ing fingers. Suddenly, they’re walking off into the sunset together, in quite the opposite direction from the one Sam was headed just now. The dog comes back to me. Even she looks confused now, although less so than I feel.

“COME BACK HERE, RIGHT NOW! YOU’VE FORGOTTEN YOUR DOG!”
It’s worth it just for the stunned silence that follows. I’m not noted for raising my voice. Ben comes back, tail between his legs. I swear the poor dog sighs.
Back in the warmth of the cafe that woman’s still far too near the till for my liking. I pin on my smile. Sometimes the only option left is to be nice.
“Are you all right?”
“Is there any food left?”
The cafe closed two hours ago, and I’m not in any mood to be generous.
“Depends on what you want.”
“Anything you’ve got really. I’ve got nothing in the house.”
Great. It’s not my problem after all. This is a job for food bank. Sue bustles up with her clipboard. The woman slumps onto a chair and starts answering her questions. All of a sudden, I hear myself offering her a cuppa. Two minutes later I’ve collapsed onto the chair opposite and we’re drinking tea together.

I’ve learned more than I ever needed to know about the world in the past ten years or so. You might imagine I’d be hard-nosed, and I admit that sometimes I’m more so than I like. Mostly, though, it’s more difficult than ever to turn my back. Jane, who’s in front of me now, has just lost someone she loved. If I’m honest, I’ve known that for the last three weeks, but I’ve chosen to ignore it because of her behaviour. And also because of who he was, if I’m going to be even more honest. Yes, I still have to wrestle with my judgmental streak from time to time. Faced with her tear-stained face across the table now, I have to admit that, although he was quite literally her partner in crime, her heart’s no less broken than mine would be. She’s hit the bottle hard. She’d known him since she was seventeen she says, between gulps of sweet tea. My cynical side thinks he was likely the one who introduced her to this murky half-life. He’d done the same for a goodly number of young women by the time he keeled over with a crack-induced heart attack, barely an hour after leaving the cafe on a Thursday morning. Anne wasn’t here that day either. Was ‘pimp’ a conscious career choice, I wonder, or did he just drift into it after a stint on a Youth Training Scheme?

Jane’s got just enough booze inside her to loosen her tongue. She’s not yet reached the stage of being abusive or mendacious, or at least no more so than goes with the territory. I’ve learned to take drunken tears with an awful lot of salt, but I can’t help thinking she means most of what she says today. She’s got nine children, she tells me. All of them taken from her.
“I go to my daughter’s sometimes. But I’m a drinker. I always run away in the end.”
I’m struck by her fatalism. It’s as if she’s long believed she deserves this nightmare she lives in.
“Do you have a support worker?”
“Yes. But she’ll shout at me if I call her.”
She tells me the worker’s name, so I know I can say this next from my heart.
“She’ll only shout because she cares about you. She knows you’re worth more than this.”
She shakes her head and changes the subject. Next week she’ll steal the soap and toilet rolls, as usual.

The following Wednesday I’m late for work. I’ve been to a meeting and had to wait for a bus. I know Anne will be gone by the time I arrive. As I steam up the road towards the cafe, I can see a small crowd gathered on the pavement outside. Why is there always a queue when you’re running late? John and Alan are besieged inside the building. Anne’s left them strict instructions not to let anyone in until I arrive.
“OK. Let’s get these tables outside and get going.”
Pat and Joe are at the head of the queue. I try to commandeer them quietly, while no-one’s looking, it’s never going to work though. Suddenly, the whole queue’s in the café, dragging tables and chairs into the garden. I’ve barely got my apron on before they’re lined up at the counter, ordering toasted sandwiches. Pat grins at me from half way down the line. He and Joe are in the midst of a monumental battle to kick the booze. He’s got a can of energy drink in one hand, as usual, and a herbal teabag in the other. He loves the Three Ginger ones.
“How’s it going?”
“Seven weeks.”
He doesn’t sound as thrilled as he ought to.
“Only now all the stuff that started me on it in the first place is coming back.”
He’s not keen to talk. I take fifty pee from the till and he goes off to the shop to buy a newspaper. At least it’ll block the demons for an hour or so. To this day, I know nothing about Pat’s past. I met him first a little over two years ago. He and Charlie were drinking partners back then. They’d lived together on the streets for a while. He was three stone lighter, and could twirl a drum major’s baton like a pro. I now know he’s possessed of dignity, courage and a generous heart. Of all of us, Pat was the only one with the guts to stand up at Charlie’s funeral and pay tribute to his friend. Had I known this was one of our last conversations I’d be saying something different.

Two weeks to Christmas. Yesterday, Pat and Joe were telling everyone about their Christmas dinner. They’d bought everything they needed, right down to a frozen turkey. They’d been worried about Christmas before that. It’s the worst time of all when you’re trying not to drink. This morning they’re not here, and come midday we’re worried. The cafe’s quiet. Susie says she’ll go round the corner and check on them. She’s gone two hours. The moment I see her face, I know. In the middle of the crowded cafe we hang onto one another and sob. There’s going to be one hell of a lot of people doing that over the next few days. Pat had more friends than he knew. He and Joe had bought some pills to help them through the cravings. The pills and the energy drinks hadn’t mixed well and Pat was gone before Susie got there. The paramedics did their best, but he wasn’t coming back. Susie probably saved Joe’s life, but I’m not sure she’ll ever forgive herself for missing Pat.

The thought comes to me as we’re locking up to go home. Pat and Charlie will be together for Christmas. Some party that’s going to be. And do you know what? I really don’t care whether it’s true in any literal sense. It makes Susie and me smile through our tears and that’s what matters. There are times when we all of us need to believe that the universe is a kinder place than it appears to be.

Charlie’s sulking again. His sulks are deep, brooding silences, heavy with threat. I believe they’re intended to convey that something I’ve said or done hasn’t met with his approval, but often there’s no discernible trigger. Today’s one of those days. He’s at the desk in the corner. I’m on the edge of the bed, waiting for the storm to break. I can’t help thinking he’s revelling in the control, although in truth I have no idea what’s going on in his head. I feel as if I’m in a courtroom where Charlie’s prosecutor, judge and jury, and I haven’t so much as the smallest inkling of the crime I’m supposed to have committed. I told him that once. He smirked into the middle distance and said nothing.

Mercifully, the tsunami blows through quickly this time. I dry my eyes on the hem of my T-shirt. Charlie’s still rumbling, deep in his chest, but the worst is over.

You know your trouble? You think you’re a victim.

If I did, I might have a point, but it’s more than my life’s worth to say so. He warms to his subject.

That’s the difference between you and me. You see, I really am a victim. You just think you are.

He doesn’t go so far as to say so there. Instead, he hauls himself out of the chair and lumbers off to the kitchen in search of tobacco.

I’ve no intention of analysing Charlie’s control issues here. All that’s long gone, and anyway no-one could expect sweet reason from a man who’d happily jump in front of an oncoming vehicle, rather than step on three consecutive drain covers. Nonetheless, it doesn’t take a lot to trigger the memories. A newspaper article. A scene on the telly. A chance conversation. On a bad day, any one of them can reduce me to tears. Now, at long last, the kind of coercive control at which both Charlie and his predecessor excelled is to become a criminal offence, punishable by up to five years imprisonment. You could be forgiven for thinking I’m dancing in the street. If only life were so simple.

It’s possible I’m the only person ever to have broken an arm ten-pin bowling. I’m told my fall was spectacular, although I was too busy howling with pain to notice at the time. The paramedics were just as sceptical as you are. They thought I was making a fuss over nothing. They hauled me up unceremoniously, bundled me into a car and dumped me in the waiting room at A and E. It wasn’t till some four hours later that the doctor looked at me over the top of his spectacles.

It’s not good news, I’m afraid.

I could have told him that.

Luton and Dunstable Hospital’s A and E department is not a place you’d want to spend four hours of a Friday night, especially when no-one’s thought to offer you any painkillers. Through a haze of agony I became aware that the girl across the aisle had broken her ankle on a skiing holiday and come straight to hospital from the airport. Then the police arrived. I couldn’t tell you a thing about the woman they brought with them, except that she was covered in bruises and had probably never been on a skiing holiday in her life. I’d not long left Charlie for the umpteenth time. I could hear the officers pleading with her to press charges. I knew she wouldn’t. After a while they got an urgent call. When I next came to, she was gone. There but for the grace of God … I couldn’t get the words out of my head.

Yesterday, an article about the new domestic violence law passed down my Facebook feed. While I freely admit to being a social media addict, I rarely comment directly on news articles. It’s a murky world, inhabited by trolls, bigots and misogynists who do nothing for my blood pressure or my sanity. I do my best never to venture into it. This time I succumbed to temptation. The very first comment on the article had been removed by the moderator. A number of others conveyed, with less abuse but no less assurance, the ‘Charlie perspective’ on domestic violence. We men really are victims. You women only think you are. Empathy for the writer, who’d found herself homeless with a young child just before Christmas, was in very short supply.

As I’ve said, I’m not even going to start on the reasons why a perpetrator of abuse might want to believe himself to be a victim. Nor am I going to suggest that domestic abuse is an issue that affects only women. Far from it. Instead, as I read and re-read the article, I was forced to revisit the sheer helplessness of being neither heard by my abusers nor believed by those who had the power to help me.

‘Ten years on, and just reading this took me back to a place I never wanted to go again. It’s so hard for anyone who’s never experienced coercive control to understand how the perpetrator can get inside not only the victim’s head, but also those of the professionals involved. I applaud the government’s initiative in making this kind of abuse a criminal offence, but I suspect that even in the criminal courts it will be hard to produce enough evidence to get convictions. I’m sometimes asked why I remained in a coercive relationship for so long. The answer is complex, but in many ways quite simple. I had no bruises. My ex was manipulative. Even the professionals involved accused me of ‘catastrophising’ the situation. Put simply, no-one believed me and I had nowhere to go. It’s a level of helplessness that’s hard to understand if you’ve never been there.’

Needless to say, the first reply to my comment had to be removed by the moderator.

Much like a comments’ thread, the floor of a bowling alley’s an unforgiving place. I remember trying to make myself pass out. Anything to get away from the pain. Of course, the paramedics weren’t to know my left arm was broken clean through, just below the shoulder. After all, who does that to themselves ten-pin bowling? The thing that hurt most was the judgement they made. In their view, I couldn’t possibly have done that much damage, so I must be overreacting. They grabbed the belt loops of my trousers and dragged me to my feet, kicking and screaming. Quite literally.

Maybe you’re just going to have to forgive me if I’m not quite ready to party on the strength of the latest initiative on domestic abuse. It’s one thing to outlaw coercive control. It’s quite another to persuade people to listen to its victims without judging, and to empathise with their pain. The victims of most crimes can offer incontrovertible physical evidence that a crime has been committed, yet even in the face of this convictions for crimes such as rape remain at a depressingly low level. Instead the waters are muddied by judgement, excuses, or spurious justifications. She was drunk. What did she expect if she was dressed like that? She was gagging for it. Incredibly, in the twenty-first century it still remains possible for a prominent female barrister to hold women responsible for sexual assaults on themselves. What hope is there for the victims of emotional abuse, where the physical evidence is more or less non-existent?

There were a number of professionals involved in my life when my marriage ended. Three experienced paramedics came to my rescue at the bowling alley. Not one of these people was able to empathise with my situation, or to accept the evidence of my distress at face value. The paramedics took one look at me and made up their minds I couldn’t possibly be be seriously injured. They made a judgement about my character instead. Hysterical woman. She can’t be in that much pain. Making a mountain out of a molehill. I imagine the people who told me I was catastrophising back in the day went through a similar decision-making process. Only I wasn’t lying on the floor at their feet while they talked about me that time.

The process of bringing abusers to book is fraught with far more hazard than this government’s new legislation admits. I can envisage victims of coercive abuse having their sanity questioned and their reputations dragged through the mud in court by the very abusers they seek to escape, and with even less hope of a conviction than there is in a rape trial. After all, given a choice between the evidence of a pre-judged ‘hysterical woman’ and that of a plausible control freak, which way is a judge’s decision likely to go? I wouldn’t want to call it in the victim’s favour.

In the end, more legislation isn’t going to stop domestic abuse. At best, it might put one or two a**holes behind bars for a while, but it won’t change anything fundamental. Instead, why not try listening to victims and survivors? Not judging us, but believing what we say. To anyone who’s lived with coercive control that’s going to come as rain in a desert, take it from me. We’re accustomed to being ignored. To having our integrity and our veracity called into question. We’re used to being told that our reason and perception are inadequate. That our abusers are really our victims. Gaslighting‘s a standard weapon in the abuser’s armoury. We don’t need other people to use it too. What we do need is safe places to go. The most dangerous time for any victim of abuse is after s/he leaves. We also need basic support to rebuild our lives. An adequate income and a roof over our heads and those of our children would do for starters. So many of us are trapped in abusive relationships by sheer practicalities. Our abusers make sure we’re short of money, and we have nowhere else to go. When we’re safe, we’ll probably need counselling to help us shake the shame. That constant, nagging belief that we brought all this on ourselves. We’re strong women, every one of us, but our self belief has taken hammerings beyond anything most people can begin to imagine. It’s empathy we need, not condemnation. And when all that’s in place, someone might like to start asking the Charlies of this world why on earth they think they have the smallest right to control our lives in the first place.

Suddenly a terrible commotion fell into the baby princess’s cradle, and the baby princess picked it up and chewed it. My mother won a guinea from the letters page of a well-known women’s magazine for those words of mine. That was back in the days when twenty-one shillings could buy you something worth having. I’ve no idea what she spent it on, but I hope it was something special, because nigh on sixty years later it may yet prove to have been the only time anyone ever made a penny piece from my love of words.

And oh, how I do love words. As a child, I lived in a world of books and dreams. The stories I wove were my imaginary friends, blissfully free of playground politicking. Fairy tales and Saturday excursions to the library with Dad fed the flames. Christmas stockings yielded Alice in Wonderland and Black Beauty, both here beside me as I write, despite all the upheavals of my later life. Next came Wish for a Pony, Jill’s Gymkhana and My Friend Flicka. No prizes for guessing what I longed for every Christmas then. Reality was never a patch on the treasures between their covers. Swallows and Amazons followed hard on their heels, alongside Jane Eyre and David Copperfield. In adolescence, I devoured Jean Plaidy, Georgette Heyer and Elizabeth Goudge. If I’d known those starry-eyed romantics were to carry at least part of the can for disasters to come would I have done different? Not for one moment.

My mind’s eye always conjures a tearful boy and a gipsy caravan, so I think it must’ve been in a long-forgotten book I first heard it. Sticks and stones may break my bones … Even as a naïve eight-year-old I knew the rest was a lie. I’d broken my wrist playing in the snow by then, and thus found out there were things in this world far worse than breaking a bone. The words of an angry parent for instance, or a playground bully. A broken bone will heal in weeks. A trampled dream can take a lifetime.

In a small town bank, with wood panelling and clerks who wear suits instead of uniforms, I’m waiting for a friend. Her children and two of mine are on the floor at my feet, squabbling quietly over toy cars. A mum I know less well wrestles a buggy through the door. Her loose toddler makes a beeline for the counter while she’s struggling, and pulls down a shower of paying-in slips.

Rosie!

The child squats and scrunches paper.

Stop that, now!

The mother grabs Rosie’s arm and yanks her to her feet.

You’re a pain in the a**e Rosie. Do you hear me? You’re nothing but a pain. What are you?

I will her to stop. She doesn’t, of course.

What are you?

Rosie sniffs. A tear slides down her cheek.

A pain.

That’s right. You’re a pain in the a**e. Don’t you forget it.

Thirty years on I still think of Rosie sometimes. Maybe she’s forgotten the incident. Her mother has, likely as not. But words cut deep. We teach our children not to lie, then wonder why they grow up to think the words we threw in fits of temper are immutable truths.

Such wisdom I have about words, yet still I choose the wrong ones. It’s eight o’clock on Thursday morning. I’ve locked the front door and I’m picking up my bags when my neighbour emerges.

Good morning! How’s the world?

I’m a doting Granny, thus ‘nativity play’ and ‘yesterday’ trip out upon my tongue without a thought. Your average bull responds more sanguinely to a red rag. By the time I reach the lift he’s kicking up a right royal commotion, berating me on the evils of Christmas.

I’m neither a Christian, nor a capitalist …

Fair enough. I’m not going to call persecution, despite all attempts to convince me that Starbucks are undermining Jesus by not having snowmen on their festive takeaway cups this year. It’s when he starts on the iniquity of Food Banks I have to bite my tongue. The trouble is, I agree with him. Of course we shouldn’t have Food Banks. I’m ashamed to live in a country that’s regressed enough to need them. But the fact is there are people out there hungry, and they don’t have time to wait while we sort out the political morass. They need to eat now, not just five years down the line.

The anger’s deafening. He can’t hear a word I say. I know it’s not personal, but for a horrible moment, it takes me somewhere I never wanted to go again. I gave up fighting back so many years ago. There’s no point arguing with someone who doesn’t hear even his own words. Instead, that little woman in my head used to huddle in a corner and throw things at the walls while he hurled hatred at her. Never a broken bone. Not so much as a bruise. Such destruction, and all of it wrought with words. It wasn’t till a day or two ago I realised how obvious the wounds of it all once were. I met with an old friend at her fiftieth birthday party. We hadn’t seen each other since I walked away from him. Wow, she said. You look happy.

My neighbour knocks on my door when I get home. It takes guts to admit you’ve listened to yourself and not enjoyed what you heard. That’s a kind of courage I can live with. Mind you, I imagine if you’ve once faced down Iain Paisley, anything else is a stroll in the park. Now there was a man who liked nothing better than the commotion of his own words.

Despite it all, I love words with a passion hard to communicate by their use alone. I’ve known people ascribe quite terrifying cosmic powers to words. I’ve met name-it-and-claim-it Christians, who believe you have only to use the right words and God will be obliged to give you anything you want. Oh, such control over the creator of the universe. The same people will also tell you one careless word spoken from your cradle can ruin your life to the grave. Stuff that. It’s not a kind of power I’d ever want. I’m happy journeying through my universe of words. Mulling stories. Drowning in dreams. No more terrible commotions, and never the need to eat my words. If you want to join me for a mile or two, or more, you’ll be made welcome. Just be sure to bring along those seven-league boots. Baby princesses can throw a few surprises when they get to my age, especially ones who used to chew commotions.

The pub’s noisy and packed. I’m aware of my parents, smiling bravely while hating every minute. Pubs to them are dens of iniquity. I remember Mum telling me how much she loathed even the smell of a public house as a child growing up in London’s East End. She and Dad have been teetotal for years. I have dim memories of Christmas past, when my uncle used to arrive with crates of sherry and all the adults would be a bit strange by the middle of the afternoon. Methodism put a stop to that when I was five or six. Instead, the annual ritual of selecting exotic fruit juices from the Amethyst catalogue emerged. Guaranteed non-alcoholic. I remember the drinks arriving in a huge cardboard box about a week before Christmas every year. There was always guava juice, although I’d never seen a guava in my life. It was purplish as I recall, and it tasted like cough medicine.

Tonight’s my night I reason, suppressing the guilt as I see them shrinking into the corner of the function room. I’m reminded of my twin brothers’ brief dalliance with the local nursery when they were three years old. They sat side by side on a wooden bench holding hands and looking miserable. They were still in the same place when we went to collect them after school. Mum never took them back. But this is my fiftieth birthday party. I’m not a child, and neither are my parents. Half a century. Doesn’t that give me the right to choose my own celebration? To let my hair down a little? My son’s band are about to play a selection of 1970s rock classics in the main bar. Mum and Dad were never keen on music either, especially at high volume. I must’ve put them through hell when I discovered Led Zeppelin. Ah, that was a moment. The transistor radio crackled and spat, even when positioned at the optimum angle on the end of the sideboard. We were in the middle of Sunday tea when I first heard those chunky bass riffs. Dazed and Confused. I’ve been that way ever since.

I used to spend Saturday afternoons in the bath with John Peel. Not literally, of course. I should be so lucky. I did meet him once, mind. It was in the basement of the BBC’s Paris Studio, which was in London, not in Paris. Still is, for all I know. I was lost. He told me where to go. He seemed like a decent bloke. So much wonderful music he introduced me to, all forgotten now, except by hardcore aficionados. When do we ever hear of Caravan, Kevin Ayers, The Edgar Broughton Band or Blodwyn Pig? Who remembers Bridget St John, who could hold a whole room silent by the power of her voice? Or King Crimson? Terrifyingly, I heard a classic of theirs on a perfume ad last week, though I wouldn’t mind betting there weren’t many who recognised it. 21st-Century Schizoid Man. The 21st century was beyond imagination when I first fell in love with those scorching discords.

The band are warming up. Checking leads and counting into microphones. One two. One two. Some things don’t change. My eighteenth birthday party was a very different affair. For a start, there was the scheduled power cut at 9 o’clock, so music was out of the question. Amazingly, we had alcohol, but only because my friend and I had enrolled on a beer-making course as part of the sixth-form General Studies programme at school. Yes, you really could do that in 1972. We’d made barley wine, but we’d misread the recipe and ended up with less than half the amount we should have had. The resulting brew was satisfactorily lethal, but rather short on supply.

The band launches out with a drum solo. It’s been a long time since I rock ‘n’ rolled … I’ve always loved a good drummer. Who knew I’d someday give birth to one? My whole body aches to dance. To let go the gravitas of half a century and blast into the space in front of the speakers. Why, oh why do we worry so much about what people will think?

I’ve never been a classic beauty. In fact, I grew up believing myself ugly and ungainly. I was tall, clumsy and angular. I had freckles and big feet. My hair was unruly and refused to grow beyond shoulder length. A hideous brace put paid to the worst overbite my dentist had ever seen, but I never quite forgot that it was my own fault for sucking my thumb. All this before I’d finished my first decade on earth, and I don’t imagine for one moment I’m unique. From birth to oblivion we worry about image. My mother longed for snowy nappies and angelic toddlers. Twenty-first century man wants bulging pecs and six packs. Women are encouraged to worry about weight. We’re never quite enough as we are.

Fast forward the better part of twelve years from the party. I’m looking at a fading photo of a little girl with a doll’s pram. She’s confident, smiling. A dusting of freckles across her nose and a halo of dark curls. Nobody’s told her yet that it’s not OK to be who she is, or if they have, she wasn’t listening. By the time I see her next, she’ll be grinning awkwardly between her younger brothers, and trying to hunch herself small. I think I’ve been doing more or less the same ever since.

If I told you being over sixty doesn’t scare the living sh*t out of me it would be a lie. But with age comes wisdom, and not always in the way you expect. While my body lets me know I’ve been ill-treating it for six decades, my head’s in the bath with John Peel still. Only now I know it doesn’t matter what other people think. All the image and gravitas of my oh-so-grownup past were worth no more than a will-o’-the-wisp. If I so choose, I can dance naked round the living room, walk to the Post Office in my pyjamas, or stay in bed and read Barbara Cartland novels all day … no, don’t worry, I’m not that far gone yet … my life’s nobody’s but my own. The little girl in the photo had it right. Six packs and crash diets buy at best only slightly less misery. Give me kind eyes, strong hands and a wild heart I’ll be happy now. But getting here … in the words of the song, it’s been a long, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.