Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 20 Comments

Not engaging the brain

Know those times when you don’t engage the brain before you open your mouth to talk. It usually ends badly or maybe you just end up being a US Presidential Candidate….

One of the worst ones I ever did was many years ago, in a Catholic Church in Newcastle, a friend was having his baby baptised. Badly times as there was a Newcastle game starting in 3 hours, yes a few black and white shirts hidden under respectful jackets. As the service progressed a church official came round and invited people up to take part in communion. I was first in line of our group, so the pressure was on me to set the precedent, to get the reply right. I didn’t engage the brain. I responded with a polite ‘better not I’m with the other side’, which I thought was fine as I’m an Anglican. As the chap moved on a friend behind me whispered in my ear ‘He will think your a devil worshipper now’. I just groaned…. Why didn’t I just do what my friends did and just say ‘no thank you’.

Anyways moving on…

Today I was trying to get a few things in our local supermarket when I walked pasted the skincare aisle. Some salespeople where trying to attract interest in some new moisturising thingy. They must have been desperate as one of the ladies pounced on me.

“Excuse me Sir, can I ask do you use moisturising products. We have a new product which might well interest you…..”

Really, I look like a Neanderthal these days…. time to make a quick exit.

I didn’t engage the brain…..

And my mouth opened…..

“I’ve got to that time in life where I find using Embalming is way more beneficial than skin care products “

The poor lady looked bemused and after a few seconds responded…

“I’m usually pretty up with things but I’ve not heard of the Embalming range, I must look it up“

I did the only decent thing in that case and basically just ran away as quick as possible.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 33 Comments

Walking with history

Somethings never fail to work. With Hawklad it’s HISTORY. So what better way to spend an unusually sunny day than to walk around a city with a shed load of history.

YORK

The Viking Capital of England, once for a brief time the political heart of the Roman Empire, Saxons, Normans, Middle Ages. History on History.

And wonderfully still no skyscrapers…..

If you get the chance, come and see it for yourself.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 37 Comments

Uneasy feeling

Bereavement brought in stark focus the thought ‘YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN’, NO one to bounce ideas off, to talk to, definitely SINGLE Parenting. It’s often a scary place to be, feeling like you are way out of your depth. Sink or swim without arm bands.

I’m getting that feeling again…..

All too quickly the Child Health and Autism Services that have worked with Hawklad since he was 5, that have provided support, therapy and help will be pulled when he hits 18. We’ve been warned that after that date, the support he can get will almost be nonexistent. If he does try to speak to a doctor, on the basis of at most, a 3 minute consultation, he may well just be prescribed Antidepressants, provided leaflets on Mindfulness and then sent on his way. Sink or swim without armbands again.

Definitely getting that uneasy feeling again.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 38 Comments

Mushrooms

Tropical weather in Yorkshire.

At least its the season that yields perfect mushroom weather….

I also think it’s the season that yields just a bit of muppetry as well.

We went for a very wet windy walk at a local venue. I apologised to the person sat at reception as I fumbled in all my pockets to find the season ticket cards. A few things struck me about the bloke sat at the reception desk. He was pointing vigorously at my left hand and secondly he was bizarrely almost bent double as he appeared to be trying to cover the ticket machine bar reader with his other hand. He also looked really uncomfortable as he was also trying to contort his neck into an unnatural position in an attempt to continue a call with a phone wedged precariously under the chin.

It wasn’t until the phone crashed onto the desk, terminating the call that it was all explained to me.

I was holding the missing tickets in my left hand as I fumbled with my right to dig deeper in a pointless pocket search…..

The reception chap was on a call to IT trying to get help with the poorly reception software, explaining his plight to a never ending stream of call centre IT Helpers. Been this way for almost two hours…..

And apparently he had been repeatedly and way too frequently contorting his body trying to cover up the bar reader with his hand while talking with the Helpline. Every time someone scanned a ticket, the system crashed. His back unsurprisingly was killing him now…..

Why don’t you just pull the power cable out of the back of the bar reader, no need to keep bending forward. You could also just cover the bar reader with a bag, or just put a ‘don’t scan’ sign up.….

“Pants why didn’t I think about that two hours ago when I still had a pain free back” is a more family friendly translation of what the receptionist said.

We’ve all been there, especially at this damp time of year….

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 30 Comments

Deep

That kinda day, just grim….

This afternoon we drove to a city on the coast, to Hull, visiting its large £50 million pound aquarium, The Deep. So many memories flooded back walking around the maze of tanks and glass tunnels.

The last time we had ventured here was when Hawklad was about 4. The three of us came with his Dutch friend and parents. Life was way different then, preschool Nursery was working out really well, Hawklad was flourishing with loads of friends. A never ending succession of meet-ups at various houses, parks and attractions. On top of family and work contacts, it felt like a socially full and connected world. Aspergers was still a year or so away from really knocking on our front door.

So many thoughts now…..

Piggy backs looking at the fish now replaced by someone towering over me. That bubbly child who would run up to anyone and excitedly tell them all about the sharks, now we carefully pick the moment to look at the tanks, waiting for the crowds to part and plenty of space to appear. Now we are a family of two (four counting mad pets) with a barren social diary. All the families and friends from Nursery have long since dispersed, including the Dutch family. Home based Work and College is proving socially isolating. Our Family Photos seem to feature fewer and fewer loved ones.

It’s a sobering thought, just how quickly life can change, just how easily people can become cut off and isolated within this increasingly noisy world. The other prevailing thought came from watching the various sea creatures effortlessly change direction in the large, populated tanks. At times with me it definitely felt like rudderless sailing, buffeted by the storms of life. Definitely not feeling much like effortless and intentional changes of direction of my part. But who’s to say that my planned direction would have turned out any better than the reality. Plus, in this life I’ve not yet ended up stuck behind glass windows, being gawked at, swimming round in never ending circles. I wonder how the fish feel, in control, socially connected with all the other creatures in the tank, immune from the storms in the real world or boxed in, constrained. Without the storms of life, stuck in one place.

THE DEEP ended up making me think way too DEEP.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 59 Comments

Like buses

There’s a saying here ‘You wait ages for a bus and then three come along at once’. For decades I went without ever seeing The Northern Lights, then suddenly over the last year, they just keep appearing, again and again.

This was last night’s show….

And here’s the thing, every single time, they never fail to take the breath away.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 40 Comments

Sand castles

Autumn in Yorkshire seems to be set in now. Day after day of dark, damp, dreary weather. The heating is now on full time now, guess it will be till 2025.

But then out of nowhere, an unexpected weather gift. The Day Forecast was really poor and the morning brought rain, lots of rain. But without warning the clouds parted. The first sight of The Sun in days.

Got to seize these gifts.

Three hours later we found ourselves 100 miles north, on a beach in Northumberland. With Cloudless skies and a Castle on the beach.

Bamburgh Castle, a setting for many a movie and tv show. It’s something like 1400 years old but unusually for round here, it’s not a ruin. Stately Home, Museum, Luxury Hotel, Wedding Venue. Definitely worth a visit, but with one piece of warning. Don’t bother bringing a bucket and spade to build your own sandcastle. It’s the finest sand ever, like walking in a Desert. Sand gets everywhere and I mean everywhere….. but it will not hold together. Definitely only one castle here.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 33 Comments

Bizarre

I remember that morning so vividly. 11 years ago, on holiday in Switzerland and it was a grim start to the day. I’d got up early, before the family woke up, to go for a run along part of Lake Thun. As I started it was chilly and damp but after a few minutes it started to rain, proper RAIN. It absolutely chucked it down, forcing me to shelter under trees. The rain kept on getting heavier and I kept on getting colder. Time to abandon and head back to the warmth of the Hotel. But then an odd sight. A group of joggers and running under umbrellas. How can you run holding an umbrella….. They stopped and beckoned to me, I think I’m joining them…..

A few minutes later I’m running under an umbrella held by an Italian chap who didn’t speak any English, none of them did. But they were clearly talking to me excitedly about something. Then the mad Italian umbrella group stopped. Stopped in the pouring rain and under umbrellas start to pass around a drink from a small hip flask…. I didn’t ask where that flask had been carried as I couldn’t see any pockets on any of the Italians….. I don’t know what it was but it was warm (with no pockets, a little more concerning) and tasted like cough medicine. Stood in a rain storm, shivering under umbrellas, drinking cough medicine with Italian strangers. Without understanding a word we somehow managed to figure out that we supported equally crap football teams. Newcastle and Monza…

What a bizarre morning. Especially bizarre as it was Hawklad’s mums birthday and just 2 hours later we were sat outside, in blazing warm sunshine having ice cream for breakfast….. As we enjoyed the beautiful weather, 5 Italian chaps walked past, waving, and shouting to me “Newcastle, Newcastle, Newcastle”…

Bizarre…….

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 42 Comments

Mr Blue Sky

And finally some blue sky.

What have I become…..

This week I booked the Christmas food delivery from the local supermarket. It’s arriving on the 23rd December, that’s over THREE MONTHS away…. For years I was the supreme last minute panic shopper, now I’m living the dream as Mr Forward Planning.

I’m on a roll now.

Time to book a Christmas trip out. Tickets pre booked for the Pantomime at the local theatre.

I could get used to this. Maybe I can start buying presents, booking family visits. I could start writing Christmas Cards…..

BUT you can never take the MUPPET out of my personality. Muppets don’t forward plan, they just move cockups into the future. I’ve just realised that I’ve double booked my two Christmas bookings. Food coming at exactly the same time as the Pantomime will be starting…..

I’ve started messing Christmas up and it’s only early October. Marvellous…….

Truly Living the Dream …….

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 18 Comments

Diverted

Maybe it’s like this everywhere but wow there is a shed load of roadworks right now. A few weeks back a motorway trip from here to London was like a Chris Rea, Road to Hell video. On this weekday, the 200 miles we travelled was for over half of them within roadworks. 3 lanes down to 2 or 1. Most of that done at crawling speed. Usually you can divert down the other possible motorway but that was basically a car park due to its own road work hell. A 4 hour journey ended up being double that. We even had traffic jams on the way back, at 2am…

It’s not just the motorways sadly….. Around our little bit of the Yorkshire countryside, the road work plague has gone into overdrive. We don’t have many roads here and at this time of year they should be muddy but quiet. They are definitely quiet as a good proportion of them are closed, partially blocked or about to be hit..

The Weather is fighting back and vandalising.

Mr Saddo got his map out and counted. I really need a life….

Our village has basically one road which then eventually branches out into 10 smaller roads heading out in various directions. Of those 10 branches 6 currently have road works badly effecting them, 2 more are closed for months and one of the last untouched roads is about to be hit for weeks…

Here when a road closes down the diversion takes you miles and miles in completely the wrong direction. So much worse when the diversion has to avoid other diversions. Deep sigh.

But there is a scary underlying thought here. All these roadworks around the world need lots and lots of signs, cones, barriers, speed cameras, portacabins, trucks, lighting, diggers, steamrollers and traffic lights. A mind boggling amount of stuff. For that motorway I mentioned at the start, apparently someone worked out that in the last 5 years it’s had over 100,000 different road works…. Imagine that spread across all the roads. Now imagine road utopia and there are no roadworks anywhere. WHERE DO THEY STORE ALL THE SIGNS and BARRIERS and EVERYTHING.

They can’t store it, we don’t have the storage capacity anywhere. There won’t be anywhere we can put this stuff except on the roads and motorways. Put the stuff on a road and it becomes a road works…. So we have to have roadworks and lots of them just to put stuff somewhere never mind if we actually need to fix a bit of tarmac.

We have created a Frankenstein Invasion, the Roadwork Monsters are among us permanently. All those dystopian movies about AI being the biggest threat to humanity and actually we end up losing control to ROAD CLOSED signs. I guess we had better just get used to being controlled and diverted in wrong directions.