New Year Resolutions

Here they are, the same old resolutions, poking out to taunt me. Write every day. Finish novel. Enter Mslexia short story competition. Renew gym membership. And then all the 'Thou Shalt Nots'. Don't let blogging, facebooking, browsing on internet, erode writing time. Eat less, cut down on chocolate, drink less wine, and don't waste time watching EastEnders.

Well, this year it's different. I'm sending them packing. Nobody will get a chance to say to me, 'But I thought you said you were going to...' The only resolution I've made this year is I WILL NOT MAKE ANY NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS.

I should have said that years ago. When I was eleven I wrote my New Year Resolution on a card and decorated it with coloured crayons all the way round the edges. In big fancy lettering in the middle of my drawings of balloons, stars and, yes, golden trumpets, I wrote (no doubt at a time of intense feelings of guilt) 'I WILL NOT BE CHEEKY TO MY MOTHER'. How embarrassing when I lent my Bunty Annual to my friend next door, forgetting I'd used this card as a bookmark. How even more embarrassing when my friend's mother came round and gave it to my mother. And how damn infuriating when the next time I shouted at my mother, she reminded me of these words and waved the blasted card in my face.

But, no, I still didn't learn. Worse, much worse, was to come. A few years later, I wrote out my good intention for each day of the week on scraps of paper. I folded up the pieces of paper, put them into an envelope, meaning to pick out one each day and try to live up to it. I promptly forgot about them. When I went back to school, after being off sick, I handed the teacher a letter from my mother to explain my absence. Guess which envelope she'd put her letter in? Imagine the rate of my cringe factor when, in front of the whole class, the teacher picked out each of my notes and read them out one by one, to the amused delight of my classmates.

Anyway, back to the present. I've learnt something about myself. I'm better at writing on post-it notes and making out long 'To Do' lists than actually getting things done. That's why this year I'm not going to plan, prepare and trumpet about what I'm going to do. I'll just quietly get on with it.

One Last Dance?

This photo * of me in the ballroom at the former High Royds Hospital was supposed to go with my post of 9th December 'Forty Years On'. Unfortunately, despite how long I've been using a computer, I couldn't figure out how to put it on in that post. Each time I tried, it kept appearing in the wrong place, ie. on top of the photo I'd put at the beginning of my posting. Other bloggers manage to put more than one photo in different parts of a posting, so why I'm not capable of doing that, I do not know.

I've just found out that the Look North 'Inside Out' programme (Yorks and Lincs) containing my interview will be on Monday 18th January at 7.3opm. It's given in the Radio Times as Monday 11th January, but they've changed it to do a programme about the recent snowfall.

*Photo taken by Mark Davis (copyright).

Christmas is coming

Christmas is coming and Jean is getting fat. I've been enjoying going out for Christmas meals, and sod the diet.

It's snowing today. Brrr!! But I'm happily ensconed in front of the fire, making occasional trips to the window to enjoy the sight of it. It does look nice, I must admit. I could quite enjoy snow if it wasn't cold and wet and prone to turn to slippery ice.

Well, I've at last got all my cards sent and presents wrapped. Very few people are getting presents from me this year because I've made a donation instead to a children's hospice. I think now I've got everything done that needed doing today, I've no excuse but to get on with some writing. I wonder why I've started to put writing at the bottom of my list of priorities. Once I start writing, it's usually OK, but somehow it takes me a lot of time and effort to clear the decks and make a start on the writing.

If anyone happens to be reading this, HAPPY CHRISTMAS, AND BEST WISHES FOR THE NEW YEAR 2010.

Forty years on

Today I went back to the deteriorating former mental institution where I spent some time as a patient forty years ago. This picture shows that they cleaned up the stonework about a year ago, but not the clock tower. It still has an eerily, Gothic appearance to me.

As mentioned in an earlier blog posting, I did go back there recently to be filmed in the grounds for a documentary which goes out on BBC4 in the New Year and is to be used by the Open University. This documentary has been given the (purposely provocative) title of 'Mental: A History of the Madhouse'.

The filming today, however, was for another (unrelated) BBC documentary, one which will be shown on the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Inside Out programme, and this time we actually went inside the building.

The West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum (as it used to be called until the name changed to High Royds Hospital) was once a magnificent building (from an architectural standpoint) with intricate mosaic floors, stained glass windows and elaborate archways. It is now in a dismal state of disrepair. At first we were told we wouldn't be allowed to go inside without wearing tin hats (health and safety rules) and boots, but this was later waived. I met up with reporter Charlotte Leeming, two camera men, and a site construction official who let us in.

With a camera man in front of us, Charlotte and I wandered along freezing cold, dim corridors with peeling walls and muddy water on the floor, while I reminisced about this place in the late-sixties and early-seventies. I remembered seeing institutionalised long-stay inmates shuffling along these corridors, some chuntering to themselves, and looking dejected. I was a teenager then, who felt I'd somehow strayed into a different world.

We went into the ballroom. Yes, among the labyrinth of corridors in this house of horrors, there had been a huge and grandiose ballroom. My mind travelled back to the teenage me at a Christmas dance there, and I could picture again the sad-eyed patients in paper hats doing a largactil shuffle around the floor to the sound of a band playing 'White Christmas'. It seemed strange to be there inside that same place forty years on, and the memories were so vivid.

Look back, accept, and then let go. Time to move on.

Damn it!!!

It all started when a magazine editor contacted me to ask if I could email a photo of myself. This was to go with an article I'd written ages ago and had almost forgotten about. Of course she needed it straight away. I hadn't got a suitable one. Husband to the rescue with his digital camera. 'It'll be best taking it outside to get more light,' he said. So out we went.

I closed the front door after us, not realising that when Ian opened it, he'd left the key on the inside. Closing the door locked us out! I'd gone outside with no coat and wearing a thin T-shirt and flip-flop slippers, as I'd expected to be only a few seconds. It was a freezing cold day.

After a heated squabble on the doorstep about whose fault it was that we were locked out, we decided we'd be best channelling our energy into thinking about what to do. We wandered around the house and decided it was burglar-proof. Meanwhile, I was slowly freezing to death. Ian, too, was only wearing a T-shirt, but he belongs to the strange species who go out jogging like that in all weathers, so I figured it was worse for me.

Our neighbours are usually out at work during the day, so what a relief it was to see our neighbour's car. It turned out she was off work sick. A few months ago she would have had our spare key for the back door, but we'd lent it to a workman who had fitted our new kitchen, and never given it back to her. Anyway, we rang a locksmith from her house, who arrived about an hour later.

The locksmith couldn't open our front door, so he had to drill into our back door and then fit a new lock. This cost us £132. Damn it!!!

Christmas is coming

I'm not a Christmas person. This is something my husband keeps saying about himself, but it does apply to me, too. I really don't like Christmas; the commercialism, the false glitter, the excuses (who needs one anyway?) for over-indulgence. And then there's the wondering what to get people who don't really need anything. They might end up with the 'hideous tie so kindly meant' (quote from a John Betjeman poem, I think).

So here we are again. Stores are already displaying their Christmas wares, and pestering me with the sound of carols. Soon the shops will be too crowded to move in. And let's stick paper hats on the heads of the homeless, the downtrodden, the oppressed, and get them to sing something about dreaming of a white Christmas. White? Oh, no, not snow as well. The car won't start, pavements will turn into ice rinks and I'll slide on my bottom down the steep part of our street. Sod all that. I'd love to hibernate until it's all over.

Bah! Humbug!

What next and what now?

I'd like to say my absence from blogging for a while has been because I'm working hard on writing my novel. But, unfortunately, I seem to be spending more time trying to decide what to do than actually doing it. I have three unfinished novel manuscripts in my drawer and I can't make my mind up which (if any) of them I should be concentrating on next.

Meanwhile, there is still 'The Dark Threads' to publicise. There's not much point in having a book 'out there' if few people know about it, hence I've been forcing myself to take centre stage and jump through hoops. Here's what I've done so far which, if nothing else, has been a learning experience.

First, I had promotional postcards printed to distribute to anyone who might be remotely interested, depicting my book cover on the front and details about it on the back. I included my phone number on the cards, which (for reasons I'll leave you to ponder) might have been a mistake. Looking back, I suppose I should have first set up a website (my next task), with a means of contacting me through that, to put on the cards. But then, not everyone uses a computer.

I joined a speakers club and practised until I could stand up and talk without looking and sounding like a timid little mouse. It worked. I've done three book-talks so far: one to a university group, the second at a bookshop and the third at a library. OK, three talks aren't many, but more opportunities to talk at libraries will be coming my way soon, I am told. I also did two radio interviews.

Local newspaper reporters interviewed me, and I got extensive coverage in several regional papers. I was interviewed in London for the Sunday Times, but guess what? They lost the interview tape. I've recently been re-interviewed over the phone. Will the feature eventually appear? I do hope so, as I desperately need more national coverage if my book is to sell successfully.

I've written articles for magazines, the latest of which should soon be appearing in the HCPJ (Healthcare, Counselling and Psychotherapy Journal). Dorothy Rowe reviewed my book in Openmind, and on her website (Articles-Openmind-Two Books). I got a good review recently in 'Therapy Today'. However, I need features and reviews in magazines other than just the specialist mental health ones. I'm awaiting the next issue of my favourite literary short story magazine, 'The Yellow Room', with even more eagerness than usual, as it will contain a review of my book.

I contacted Mark Davis, and he has featured me on his increasingly popular High Royds Hospital website (scroll down and click onto 'Dark Threads'). One thing leads to another, and a BBC TV reporter has just emailed me after reading about me on that website and she'll be talking to me shortly; I'm not sure where (if anywhere) that will lead, but watch this space . . .

I have taken part in a BBC TV documentary, funded by the Open University, about the history of mental health care, which will appear on BBC4 early in the New Year. This involved filming me as I wandered the grounds of the now closed-down hospital on a bleak, blustery evening, looking pensive as I remembered the horrible time I spent there back in the sixties and seventies. I'd been hanging around in the 'gives-me-the-creeps' derelict hospital grounds for ages waiting for the filming to start. I was cold and hungry and wanted my tea, so when they told me not to smile on camera, that was dead easy! Three of the pics taken are on the hospital website (click into 'Blakeways Productions' and then scroll down to click the thumbnails on the left).

The following day the documentary crew filmed and interviewed me at a house in Ilkley. I got hit in the face with the edge of a box (as you do) the night before, leaving an ugly scar on my face (I'd been trying to reach for a box on top of the wardrobe). I arrived late (got well and truly lost on the way) so didn't even have time to comb my hair before starting. My confidence diminished further with all the interruptions during the interview; a noisy lorry outside, fridge-freezer attention seeking, someone's mobile, sunlight in wrong position, my hair sticking up at one side (the camera man informed me about half-way through) and, finally, the house owner's cat repeatedly meowing to come indoors and join in the fun. With all the retakes, I fear I'll either look flustered or bored on film.

Is getting a book published worth it all in the end? Yes, I think so. Well, nothing beats going into Waterstones and Borders and seeing it up there on the shelves.