Thursday, September 27, 2007

We are free, Be merry

It’s been a busy and rather stressful week and a half since I last blogged. My ex husband Mark who decided he wasn’t going to come down after I said I didn’t want him staying here, did come down in the end. I knew he wouldn’t fork out for bed and breakfast so the compromise was I disappeared for the weekend while he came down. Luckily I had the opportunity to stay at a friend’s caravan while he was away.

Mark came down on the Friday, and on the Saturday I drove Tamsin to Exeter to her new house, ready for the 2nd year at Uni. It took 2½ hours to drive up, due to getting caught in slow traffic. The house is great, she sharing it with 3 girlfriends and they had already made their mark on the place. One of the girls had done drawings of all of them, and there was one waiting for Tamsin to put up on her chosen kitchen cupboard. I made better time driving back and got back around four.

On Sunday morning and I got a text from Megs saying ‘Dads gone we need bread milk and toilet roll’. Typical I thought, this is why I’m wiping my hands of him; he had stayed all weekend helped himself to food, but had not gone out and brought anything that had run out. Instead of buying Megan the camera she needed for GCSE work he had brought her his old one, which is good but I have to buy an attachment so we can load photos onto the computer. After not contributing financially towards Megan’s keep for so long, he gave her £20! Whoopee do!

On Monday it was back to normality, and I was able to get on with some writing. I’ve been helping a friend out who is producing a media project for the Port Elliot Literary festival, and needed to get on with writing up the talks I had seen there. One of the talks I had been most eager to see was Tom Hodginson; founder and editor of the ‘Idler’, who was talking about the history of Anarchism. He wasn’t the best of speakers and it didn’t flow particularly well, but the content of the talk was very interesting. I started writing it up and after two days I think I had got it to flow. At the end of his talk he read out his ‘Freedom manifesto’ he had written for his book ‘How to be free’ which I had got on the Dictaphone very clearly. I suggested to my friend it would be great to have a link to the sound recording on her media project. Anyway here it is:


“Death to the supermarkets
Bake bread
Play the ukulele
Open the village hall
Action is futile
Quit moaning
Make music
Stop consuming
Start producing
Back to the land
Smash usury
Embrace beauty
Embrace poverty
Hail the chisel
Ignore the state
Reform is futile
Anarchy in the UK
Hail the spade
Hail the horse
Hail the quill
Love thy neighbour
Be creative
Free your spirit
Dig the Earth
Make compost
Life is absurd
We are free
Be merry”


PS. Look out for the full article on Jax writers spot blog in the next couple of weeks (link on the right of this page)

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Atonement

I’ve been to see Atonement today at the Cinema. It wasn’t what I expected, or as good as I expected it to be. It was however very emotionally powerful, and the cinema-photography was absolutely top notch, and I loved how it played around with time. It showed an event as seen through one character and then shows it again as seen through another character. It was successful in portraying how people’s perspectives can be completely different, upon witnessing the same event, and how judgements and conclusions can be made.

However I expected more from it, it didn’t have that element that had you constantly thinking what’s going to happen next. It was actually quite boring in places. It failed to draw me in. Anyone who’s seen the advertisement for it probably knows the lead man (Robbie) gets accused of something unfairly. After that happens the film, I think, loses it’s identity. They seemed to forget the story and only want to deliver the message of how crap it was for soldiers in France in the 2nd world war, of which they did a faultless job. In doing this they lost the essence of the film, which was the love between Robbie and Cecilia.

In conclusion I would say go and see Atonement at the cinema to see the amazing cinema-photography but don’t expect much else.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Confucius says:

"If you look into your own heart, and find you have nothing to worry about. What is there to fear?"

Saturday, September 08, 2007

I've had enough

I am so angry! It’s probably not a good time to do a posting. I’m giving up on my useless ex husband. I don’t care if I never see him again in my life. All I ask is he gives a bit of money towards Megan, to help pay for stuff like clothes, things she needs for school etc. I asked him if he could help pay for her camping holiday this year as I couldn’t afford it on my own, and he said he would but didn’t.

He didn’t even get her or Tamsin and Alice, a Christmas or birthday present, and I end up paying for everything. I sold the family home because he wanted money, and I wanted to stop the constant phone calls hassling me. He’s spent all the left over money he had on travelling around the world, while I’m still paying out whenever any of them want anything. So today I get angry, it really is like talking to a brick wall. Does he not understand although Megs is here he is still jointly responsible for his children?

Trouble is as he’s in India most of the time now, there’s nothing I can do about it. If he was in this country, and they hadn’t seen him or seen any financial support, I would have approached the child support agency by now. I’ve had enough I’m wiping my hands of him. Over the past few years the kids have lost a lot of respect for their dad. Megan gets really upset, because she’s only seen him once this year and he was going to go back to India without coming down and seeing her again. It’s me that has to console her when she’s in tears because she thinks her dad doesn’t want to know.

Instead of me rushing around trying to get him to come down to see them, it’s now up to him and he can sort it out with them. I’ve had enough.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Normal blogging will now resume after the summer break.

Although I spent a couple of hours baking in the sun on the beach today, it is still the end of the summer holidays. We’ve been to the last festival, and Megs is back to school on Thursday.

The Aeon festival was great, and the sun shone for the whole weekend. I would have gone home if it had rained after the last two mudbath festivals. It was small and intimate (I think they sold around 1400 weekend tickets) and it was easier to get chatting to people. The bands I saw were great including Evie Vine and Obedient Bone. They had an exhibition with some amazing art, and a farm shop selling some lovely organic food and drinks.

One of the highlights for me was the bookcycle stall where you say the price. Bookcycle raise money to send books to schools in poverty stricken areas of Africa by selling books. What a brilliant idea. They were situated in a marquee type tent at the top of a field with amazing views, and they had armchairs and cushions in so you could just sit there and read

I had taken a few beers and some gin and tonic, and although they had a bar, I only spent £30 all weekend. £15 of that was in the farm shop, £3 was spent on a present and we also got 7 books between us for which I paid at least a pound each. It was great value for money.

It was great to spend time with Alice, my daughter, who lives with her boyfriend in a flat in town. She is 18 and has two jobs to pay all her bills etc, so I hardly get to spend time with her. Only problem was she is not used to spending time outside, and it was so sunny on Saturday, she got sunburnt and spent the evening feeling unwell, shivering but hot.

Now the summer holidays are over I need to get on the case with writing and need to try and sell my writing, as well as working on my book. There are no excuses any more. Normal blogging will now resume.