October 25, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 107 A Change in Time

Well here we are on a Friday again and it seems like yesterday is was last Friday.

I know that as we get older we find time passing more quickly, but even young and sprightly things tell me they find it’s the same for them. We have endless encouragement through the wise sayings of Deep Thinkers to make the very most of every minute, and we all nod, because we believe in such a truth and then carry on rushing past precious moments and precious people.

As a young mother I would decline all offers of a ‘quick cup of tea’ because I always had to be somewhere ten minutes ago, and calmly so. I left, rushed, arriving way too early in a bright pink fluster, having no doubt remonstrated with one, or a few, of my children at the top of my tension, parked badly and banged my knee as I cornered too fast.

Why did I do that? And worse, why did I keep doing it? To arrive anywhere with my chest calm, my heart softly beating, my blood moving steadily and freely was a very rare and tea-less occurrence.

I can still say no to a cuppa and leave wondering why. If I have said yes, and sat my butt on a stranger’s chair, patted another person’s dog, looked around another’s room, I have come away, not necessarily with the best cup of tea ever slopping inside my belly, but with my heart and head completely changed. It was the encounter that mattered and the pleasure I gave and received by just saying yes, and giving myself to another soul.

The conversation can be wild, can be funny, can be informative and is sometimes astonishing. The things on the inside of us never see the light of day in a shopping queue. It is only when we sit and share something as ordinary as a cup of tea, that a person opens their heart.

‘Life is short’ is one of those immensely irritating cliches that makes me want to scream. The reason I want to, but don’t, of course, is that saying these well known throwaway words make absolutely no difference to either the person saying it, or the person hearing it, for all the smiling and nodding that goes on. However, it is the truth. Over one single day, I know of people fighting for their very lives, when last Friday they were full of healthy bounce. When they recover, they will truly know that Life is Short and both will change their lives, and the one area that will enjoy their total focus will be that of relationships.

All those terribly worldy concerns will melt away into a dirty puddle. Suddenly, and it is sudden, the choice of family over work is easy. Suddenly, it no longer matters if there is an immovable stain on the carpet, or the cooker stops working. It no longer matters that our mother/sister/neighbour/cousin said something or did something to let us down, either yesterday or when we were six. The familial baggage we lug through our healthy years, we can lay down and walk beyond. Just like that.

What matters is the happiness within the home, the smiles we can bring to the faces of our loved ones, by forgetting Things and putting Them first. There will never again be a chance that we would say yes to the boss, and call to cancel dinner out.

Nothing travels beyond the coffin, but the spirit of a person. All else becomes dust.

We, who are still bouncing this Friday and not fighting for a second chance at life.. we who can change everything right now……. might pause for thought.

September 11, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 100 – Life, Death and Other Animals

I did wonder, as Island Blog 100 moved closer, what I would choose to write about – where my fingers would take me, what tale I would give life to. It seemed such a big number and worth due attention.

Then the subject chose itself and not in a way I would have guessed, nor wanted.

But, my dear, I tell myself, in that gentle motherly tone, such is life.

Or death.

One moment Sula is running along beside me, or, more likely, way out front, or miles behind and busy being her completely independent self, and the next, broken in the road. I wasn’t sure if I would go into that bit, and yet, I cannot, nor will I, hide from the truth of anything. As a……now, what’s that word they use to describe me in reviews of Island Wife…….? ah, yes, ‘cosseted’……. young woman, I saw little of the nasty side of life or death, for my parents protected me, protected all of us from things unsightly, the stuff of nightmares. I would have done the same for my own children, given half a chance and with no access to the blood and guts of hill farming, but that is not how it was for them, and, because I was there too, with eyes open for the looking, I saw it as well.

With hindsight, I am glad they did see it, for the alternative is not the truth, not balanced, not real and it just makes the inevitable, inevitable. One day, they will see, we all do, and the earlier the circle of life and death and life again is accepted, the better our hearts and minds can deal with it.

The response to pictures and words about Sula on Facebook pages, the messages by card, letter and phone, words of compassion and genuine sadness – all those mouths full of memories spilling into our ears, are helping a great deal. We don’t know until something crashes into our lives and breaks it, what any of it meant to those we meet on our journey.

This is the Life after the Death.

The first Life bit we take for granted. However thankful we may be on a daily basis for the gifts we are given, the lovers, friends, partners, children, pets, we don’t spend a lot of time second-guessing their life span. We just live it out, honestly, realistically, focusing on the little add-ons such as what to put in a child’s pack lunch and whether or not the gym kit is clean for Tuesday. We can be careless with our goodbye’s and our hallos. We can be snappy and regret it, but not say so. We are caught up with concerns over our own footwork on the hamster wheel, and we can miss times we should never miss. But, we are human. We are frail. We get it wrong, we get it right, but mostly we fall somewhere in the middle and we do okay, although it often takes someone else to remind us of that, so filled we are with self-doubt.

I know I looked after her that day, as I always did when the sailor went to sea, you see, and left her in my care. Yes, at times I moaned about being tied. Yes, I was raging with her when she climbed out the car window, because it was too hot, or took off in a different direction, costing me time and emptying me of puff; when she refused to come to my whistle, and sat down in the middle of the road, her favourite place to sit. Yes I snapped at her when she followed me around the house, up the stairs, down again, into the kitchen, out again, and all because a bluebottle had flown overhead. One slight buzz and she was off, pushing through any number of garden barricades and out onto the road, where, oddly, she felt quite safe once more and all the drivers passing by had to stop because she would not step aside for any size of vehicle.

Then the inevitable happened. I knew she was dead immediately and held her, talking softly, even though she could hear nothing by then. I lifted her through the gate and cleaned up the road and the sun shone and nobody came, no drivers, no walkers as if everyone knew this was our time to be alone. There was not a mark on her body, not even a graze. I closed her eyes, and covered her with a sheet, and then I sat for a while looking out across the sea-loch, where the gulls wheeled and cried above a jagged line of spume and kelp, the markers of a new tide bringing new life.

August 13, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 92 On Writing

As you may know, it is essential to read, especially if you are a writer. I read avidly, even during the day sometimes, which would have had me thoroughly tutted at by Granny-at-the-gate. Reading is for pleasure and wifeys don’t do pleasure inside of working hours which numbered, in my recollection about 22 per day. But now I have less demands on my time by little or big people, although sometimes, just before collecting my book and settling into a chair, I do check the clock and feel a frisson of minor guilt. It is so much easier to busy up with faffing jobs that lift the dirt or fill the larder with goodly smells, leaving the me part of me just a bit skinnier.

When I am writing, I become lost in the story, as I am now. Nights are broken as I weave my web, and ideas come at the most inconvenient of times, when the night is dark as a cave and I know I should fight on to achieve my 6 hours of rest, but once the next idea comes, the something that might happen to someone, the how of it and its consequences gets a hold of me, then Lady Sleep leaves the room. Over the years I have worked with various top tips.

Get up and start writing. No thanks, its too cold downstairs.

Keep a pad beside the bed and write down your idea. Yes I do that sometimes, if the story is just a foetus without a name, but if I am well on with the tale and the tellers of it, I can just lie there and follow the thread. Often, almost always, a character takes me in a direction I never mapped out for them, and that aspect of story-telling has always surprised and delighted me. It is, as if, once named on a page, each character accepts an initial structure, quite quietly it seems, until he or she decides I’ve got it all wrong and should listen to what they have to say about themselves.

Yesterday, a woman took an action I would never have expected of her, with a confidence that never came from me. That action changed the whole course of the story and I sat back in my chair, fingers hovering over keys that had just become a jumble of confused letters. A moment or so earlier, I knew just how to write a sentence. I knew where he was going, what she would say, what they would do as a result. Now I stare down at a keyboard that is singing me, not the other way around. I have become a player in the greater game.

Some writers don’t like this state of affairs. Some painters, musicians, song-writers too. But for me, it is the time when I can, to a degree, let go of control, and enjoy learning about each character by listening to their guidance. I move wholly and completely into their world. I work to understand their feelings, often not my own, about what has happened to them. I endeavour to find empathy with choices I would never make, have never made, although I do wonder if that bit is quite true. If I have considered, even for one minute a choice of action not in sync with how I see myself, might that mean that I could do that thing in different circumstances?

When I am writing a story, I move into it. I have to, or nobody would believe in it and the book would be closed and sent to a charity shop, un-read. Good drama draws us in, involves us and we can emerge from a book feeling angry, upset or filled with a happiness that never came from the outside. We can love a character, or hate them, wish them joys or want to punch them in the tonsils, but we can never find them dull, for if we do, we won’t bother to read on because we just don’t care.

Once I have found my characters, and, believe me, I do find them, or they find me, more truthfully. These characters came to me in an ordinary moment when I wasn’t looking for them at all. Two people sharing lunch in a café, and the dynamic between them. It captivated me and the story began to tell me how it wanted to be written. I made notes, kept looking at it as I walked, worked, cooked, cleaned and gradually the protagonists revealed themselves. How they dress, laugh, eat. How they love, how they live, and how they wrote their past.

Then, one day, I know it is time to begin and not long after I do, there is a knock at the door and in they all come.

July 5, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 74 – Spontaneous Adventures

I rarely plan adventures. They just happen to me, swooping round corners and whopping me in the eyeballs.

Here I am ! Look at me!

And there it is, the adventure, full frontal and blocking my path.

I could, of course I could, step around it. I could cite a whole gamut of plausible and dull reasons why I can’t take this adventure by the hand and let it lead me astray; like it’s nearly lunchtime for instance, or I must catch this ‘dry’ for a load of wet sheets, or it’s only Wednesday and nobody adventures on a Wednesday.

But, I say, and but again, the best times I have had in my bonkers life have been spontaneous adventures, when logic is wheeched over the fence leaving ample room for imagination and emotion to fill the inner void. Then, and only then, does the adrenaline fizz like bubbles in my veins and my head feel light as goose down. I never get that fizz hanging out the sheets.

Yesterday we were planning to turn left. The day had arrived in its customary shapeless grey but as we walked the little girls through the woods that climbed into the sky, we noticed a patch or two of blue. Avoiding as best we could, the manic desire to search for more, we found a bridge with fast-running peaty mountain water and looked down to play Pooh Sticks. We went under the bridge and sloshed over the slippy rocks, and climbed up the banks till our knees were brown as caramel and we were dizzy with giggles. When we looked up again the day had shucked off the shapeless grey and the sky smiled blue and gold and warm.

So, instead of turning left for home, a sensible lunch preparation and an even more sensible change of trews and wellies, wet on the inside, (overly enthusiastic Pooh Stickery), we turned right and headed up and over the hill on the skinny track that first laid itself down, hundreds of years ago, beneath the feet of animals. We turned up the tunes and sang our way up and down again, stopping only to remove a jumper or to admire the view or to encourage a mother and lamb to step onto the verge. We passed by the little school shed with its beach hut stripes (The Square Rainbow) and turned down the track to where the little ferry would take us over to lunch. We pulled back the slide to reveal the red square, and the little boat cast off it’s moorings and began to move towards us.

Lunch, as I have said before, is a really delicious experience at the Boat House. The welcome is warm and gentle, the food superbly prepared and presented. We sat outside, watching the seabirds, and eating fresh prawns and I don’t mean those piddling shrimps most people understand to be prawns. I mean island prawns, big and meaty and you only need four to be quite filled up. The bread was straight from the baking oven with a lovely crust, the salad crisp and fresh and the dressing delicious. But, it is not just the food that makes this place, run by Becky and Emma, so very good. It’s the light in their eyes, the passion and enthusiasm for their business, their island welcome, their no-fuss-about-anything attitude. They think outside the box. They don’t say NO. In fact, there is not a single NO visible on the island – such a joy to see in a world where NO is the most overly used word in all public places.

On the way home over the hill, past the Square Rainbow, we stopped to buy fresh strawberries from a roadside stall with an honesty box. It was the last bag and as we put our money in the little till, and I saw the amount of cash already there, I thought…. how wonderful it is to adventure, to take risks, whether it be leaving an honesty box by the roadside, or opening a restaurant on a tiny little island or simply by turning right instead of left.

July 4, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 73 – To Give or not to Give

I learned recently of a man who gave his wife a lovely piece of jewellery.

And then left her.

She kept it for some years, eventually making the decision to sell it.

Of course, any beauty it ever had was lost way back when it no longer spoke of love and giving, but more, perhaps of duty and guilt.

It made me think of what really is beautiful to our eyes, and not for a moment, but for always, and the answer is that it has little to do with eyes and everything to do with heart.

Gifts are often given to alleviate guilt, to fill in that huge empty void, so often an unwelcome part of a relationship, the place where communication forgot to settle and make into a home.

I don’t know how to love you the way you want, so I will buy you this, once I’ve checked the price tag and been suitably impressed. I won’t even be sure you will like the gift, but you won’t be able to show anything other than delight, once you realise how much it cost me. After that, I can go back to not communicating with you for another year.

Phew!

Lovely gifts are always free. We never remember the gifts that were bought and paid for, unless they directly reflect the level of communicated love we receive from the giver. If this giver always criticises and grumbles at us, then suddenly presents us with a pretty gift they just know we will love to wear, but have never worn before, what on earth do we believe of them?

Confused, no dot or com.

So each time I put it on it feels awkward for it is not something I ever wear nor ever have worn so why…….

Aha! I get it. This is what you would like me to like, so that you can like me better, because, then, I’ll be more like you, not me!

No longer confused, although I do wonder if I’m really here at all.

The giving of gifts is a free offering, without expectation of anything. Not even a thank you letter.

Otherwise, it is just control. Of course, I am excited to give whatever it is I am giving you. It could be my time, my smile, my kind words, my whole life, but I must remind myself that, unless I give these and many more similar gifts, freely, I am not giving at all, but taking.

So what do I do when my giving is not received as such? When it is, at best, unnoticed, at worst, rejected? Do I keep giving, fighting back the hurt and resentment that curdles my belly, or do I stop altogether and be true to myself?

Many have pondered this one but only a handful ever managed to get it right. I don’t mean a handful this year or even this century, but ever in the whole history of time. A handful.

For those who seek this blissful state of giving without expectation, there is a huge and lucrative business out there just waiting to welcome us in. There are ‘Find Yourself’ workshops, group therapy sessions, counsellors and psychiatrists all trained and qualified in this method and that method and many, including myself, have benefited from their wisdom and guidance. But there is no quick fix answer that works across the board.

I think it is a daily journey, as long as we are seeking a better way to love. And never giving up.

July 1, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 72 – Back to the Future

I’ve been digging. Not in the garden, which, this year is doing without me. First, I announced I was no longer the Little Weed Weeder. No, not true. First I looked out across the brown shrubs and trunks of winter resisting furiously the spring urge to spring, and not surprisingly, as the sky was still the colour of ice and the wind sharp enough to cut through fast food packaging. Although part of me longed for the warmth, there is a price to pay for warmth I have found and it arrives overnight in wide seas of determined green, growing more determined as the days follow the nights. I had gravel outside the door a month ago. Not any longer. Now it is a wondrous display of dandelions, plantains, campion and thistles. Much softer underfoot.

That’s when I made my announcement.

Yesterday I did waiver eversoslightly when Guilt nudged my elbow and made me take a good look at the sloppy trollope I have become.

No, I said, No….go away (or words to that effect) – for I have a book to write, a new one and if I start following your fat batty guilt as I have done for centuries, I will find my gravel but lose my raison d’etre, and, having only just found it, I don’t plan to do that.

Back to my digging.

In boxes, cupboards, drawers and the like, I am finding trinkets and gewgaws from 200 years ago and marvelling at the quality of materials and workmanship. These things may be cracked or damaged, and they all smell funny, but they still work, still open and close as they did at first and that is a lot more than can be said of pretty much anything for sale on our high streets today. I am careful how I word that bit for there are indeed exceptionally high standards of workmanship spread right across the material world, but the attitude of care and accompanying skills in crafting each item as an individual piece is no longer something we expect.

As I find each piece, I can tell you nothing about it. Chaps no longer keep a personalised manicure set bound in leather, each piece resting in a nest of soft blue velvet. For a start, it is cumbersome, and would probably make his hand luggage too heavy. For the ladies, a weighty and heavily ornate ladies make-up mirror. Something else to dust and polish and blow that for a lark. Leather bound snuff boxes, cigarette cases, monogrammed and silvered up enough for royalty, silver lighters, personal ash trays, also monogrammed, for waistcoat pockets or handbags. Nobody smokes anymore and those who do have packets in pockets and hide round stony cold corners. There would be little interest in the sporting of flashy pointers towards the habit they would dearly love to break.

And so on and on.

So, what to do with it all? Do we, as Keepers of the Past, keep it? And for what? Our ikea children?

I don’t think so. I think we should hold the stories and tell them into the ears of the children who want to know. After all, not everyone is interested in great granny’s trinkets, having never even met the old girl. And then, I think we should clear our attics, empty our veneered cabinets of decorative cups and quaintly useless fal-de-lal, and move them on. Otherwise, trust me, when we are pushing up the daisies, some poor soul will have that awful job of clearing it all out in a volatile atmosphere of ignorance, guilt and sentimentality. In my own role as Clearer Out, I struggled a lot. Not with the clearing, for we could hardly breathe in this little place for lumpy trinkets and I could hardly wait for the new wheelie bins to be delivered- but with the familial tussle over letting anything go, as if, in doing so, we would threw out granny’s memory as well.

What we need to learn is to let go of things that do not take us forward in our lives. So many of us, including this sloppy trollope, waste our precious days in general maintenance, allowing our God given gifts to float away into the recesses of our minds like clouds. Come the day we lie, wondering what on earth we have achieved in our life, we just know we didn’t get it right. Oh we may have polished, and labelled, looked after and managed, but did we create something completely new? Did we say Poo to all that grey mind-numbing drudge and turn towards doing what we know we love, even if we don’t yet know how to make it work? Did we risk? Did we clear out the ‘granny junk’, still remembering her sparkle, her wisdom, her humour, those things that changed us and made us who we are, or did we store it in the loft, in mice-chewed boxes, moaning every time we had to dust or polish things we hate looking at?

Letting go is not easy for most. And yet, it is the only way to clear space for the new and I do not mean substitute material trinkets.

I mean space. Emptiness. Nothing. Patience.

One day, an idea will come. Let it settle.

Then begin.

June 24, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 70 – Life is a simple thing

fig: http://favim.com

It’s all about breathing in and out for decades, something that happens to us quite naturally. We can take no credit for this and it’s not complicated, until it stops, of course, or struggles to continue. All we have to do, as out heart beats and our lungs fill and empty a thousand times a day, is to get on with living.

Ah, you might say. That’s the rub. My life is so much harder than just breathing in and out and getting on with things. My circumstances, you see…..well, life is not simple at all.

Yes, I say, it is. It may not be easy, but it is simple, and then I draw back in case I get swiped, because why?

Because people love to complicate things, all things and especially their own things.

I know people who have come through cancer and people who have not come through. I am not one of them. Therefore my life is a breeze.

I know people who have lost a child. I have not. Therefore my life is a breeze.

I know someone disabled, paralised, in prison,bereaved,destitute and hungry.

I am none of them. Therefore….etc

At Jenny’s funeral yesterday, I listened to the tributes. I counted 250 at least in the church. I caught the sparkle of a woman who refused to moan, although, believe me, she had plenty of reason to. In fact, she had absolutely no time at all for moaners.

On the way to the church, down winding country lanes, I saw a land rover parked in a driveway. Across the top of the windscreen the words in bold black said this:-

ONE LIFE. LIVE IT.

Jenny did.

Short or long it is the same for us all, as far as we know, although one friend whose family are fisherfolk, plans to return as a crack shot seagull.

Whatever our piddling ailments, our list of miniature disasters, we were born with laughter in our hearts and we all know it.

We might consider laughing more and particularly at ourselves.

June 19, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 68 – Songs for the Girls

fig via: futureengagedeliver.com

I wrote a song for Jenny and one day I will sing it out, perhaps after the funeral. And then I wrote another for my little grand-daughter, the youngest thus far whose naming ceremony is being celebrated the weekend after.

How life organises these things I cannot say, but she always does and it makes a sort of sense. It’s not about one life replacing another, but more that the sharp-edged void created in a heart, when someone dies can be softened by a new life. These two girls will never know each other; will never come together except in my heart, and that is something rather wonderful and quite uniquely precious.

When I write my songs, or create my paintings, or lampshades or cushions or whatever, I work for one person. I think of who they are and what colours they wear and what stories lie in their eyes, and I work to honour and recognise them all. This is why I won’t create a production line, nor paint the same, but in blue, to match the furnishings. Every single piece of work is a one-off.

Much like a life.

The song for Jenny celebrates her as a woman of the sea, of the world and now, of the beyond, wherever that is. The words are taken from a well-known poem and personalised, and I don’t suppose anyone will mind, because they will hear what they want to hear and think what they want to think about Jenny as they take it all in. The music will lift them and pull on their heart strings and someone may well recognise parts of other melodies and other phrasing from a different song for there is nothing new under the sun.

And yet, everything is always new when someone catches a thing and forges it again in the fires of their heart.

The song for my granddaughter is different in that the words are all mine, and the melody pinched from a couple of other musicians who won’t know and wouldn’t mind anyway. We are not talking chart topper here. The words had to be bespoke, just for her, and with respect paid to her mum and her dad and the fabulous crazy wild people they are, and all those attributes now handed on to one little girl. It’s light-hearted and fun and will bring smiles to all the faces watching me stand and deliver.

We are all unique, but it is a rare bird that can fly alone into a busy sky, with its own song to sing, certain that just by singing it, everything is new.

June 4, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 63 – Silver Girl

On June 1st Jenny died.

We have been friends for over 4o years, the same as my years of marriage.

Our children knew each other as little ones and those children now have little ones of their own. We had a bet going, she and I that her daughter-in-law would give birth before my own did. The due dates hold hands, they’re so close. I will see my new grandchild, but she won’t see hers.

Over the years, our roads travelled in different directions, but we kept in touch. When she first got breast cancer, she was completely herself about the whole thing. No time for this, she said, need to sort out treatment and keep moving. She went sailing after that, for 7 months, she and her man, in a yacht to beat all other yachts with big-ass sails and comfort below deck, every comfort, and the wind in her hair and salt on her tongue, whilst I became an Island Wife. But women who connect at a wild and deep level, who recognise each other’s spirit and love it, never lose touch, even if the contact is once a year.

We sailed with them once, meeting them on a Greek island. We all wondered how it would work, four of us converging where Two Roads meet, after 30 years apart, and living in close quarters for a couple of weeks.

I could have been a big pain in the ass, I said.

You are. She replied and handed me a beer.

In the evenings, moored in a little warm harbour, we would cook, eat and make music. They taught me songs, and I them, and there was something magical about the candlelight, the warm nights, the laughter and song.

She did much with her life and was never still. She was the second woman ever to command a Royal Navy warship. A transatlantic skipper, a magistrate, a wife, mother grandmother, although that title sounds way too old for her. She adored her family, and actively showed it. She was feisty, impossible, decisive and noisy and there is a big hole left now she is gone.

But what will stay with me for ever, and this may sound selfish, is what she gave to me. She never faltered and when I did, she whooped my butt. I’m not saying, or even imagining, that she had life sussed, because I know she didn’t think that at all. I saw, at times, such sadness in her big eyes, and she might tell me, briefly, or she might not. When she knew she had only time left, she would still pick up if I called, or answer a text with humour. She came to my book launch down south in a bright pink wig after aggressive chemo. It was our last hug.

I salute her. She is a woman who challenged me to be the best I could be, just as she challenged herself.

Sail on Silver Girl.

May 27, 2013 by judyfairbairns

Island Blog 61 – Reading and Believing

As of this blog I have now surpassed myself. In age I mean. I have yet to experience the dizzy delights of turning 61 and yet, quite without the right boots, here I am. Post Woman’s Hour.

My mum used to listen to Woman’s Hour a hundred years ago whilst I enjoyed Listen With Mother, sitting as comfortably as I ever could manage. I loved the stories of Creatures and Fairies and Kings, and Animals with huge brains, and a great sense of right and wrong. Noddy and Big Ears, The Famous Five, Rupert the Bear, although, to be honest, Rupert was more a boy’s bear. Winnie the Pooh, on the other hand was anybody’s bear. Something to do with his lack of public schooling I think. He just bumbled about in Hundred Acre Wood and got stuck in doorways and had bonkers ideas that always made me smile.

Now it is not only I who listen to Woman’s Hour, but I was actually one of Jane Garvey’s guests last Monday May 27^th, talking about my own book, Island Wife, published by Two Roads.

Who would have thought life could become as it has? From that little uncomfortable girl to a 60 year old with a book hitting the shops, a blog, some new songs in the making and book signings ahead next week in Edinburgh. A full day, in fact, beginning at the Edinburgh Book Shop at 9.30 and spinning through many more by bedtime. The next day, I have to be at the BBC Studios (again!) for an interview with Sally Magnusson for her programme ‘Sunday Morning’.

Next Sunday 07:05 BBC Radio Scotland (add it to your diary now so you don’t miss out)

All I did was write down my life. The feedback, the comments tell me it is unusual to write with such honesty, but I have nothing to hide as you will see when you buy your own copy. As stories I read during my own years on earth have helped and guided me, so I hope mine will help you in some way. Someone once said, wisely, ‘we read to know we are not alone’ and that person was spot on. It could be Avatar or Winnie the Pooh. It could be a quest to Everest or a lone woman canoeing the Amazon. It could even be a text book although all those proven facts worry me somewhat in a world where nothing is as it seems. I can lose myself in someone else’s life, picnic, journey, song and there will be something inside it that touches me, lifts me, teaches me something I may have known but didn’t know at all.

I don’t know what I thought my life would become, although I always knew the Hundred Acre Wood was an important part. When a writer lays down a story for children, he or she is not a child, but is looking back through their own lives to take hold of truths they still hold dear. The sparkle and twist of a sugar spun tale comes from experience and it is a gift we have who can bring it into today’s light and make it sparkle anew. We seek the values that take us out of our ordinary lives and into one that makes us dance. We read on because we want to know what happens in the end.

And when it does end, what then? Do we lift our sights higher, consider how we might change the parts of our textbook lives that bore the shenanigans out of us? Or do we put the book aside and do nothing?

It takes courage to step out. But therein lies the key. We don’t have to know how to do anything. We just have know why we want to do it.

That’s when Lady Providence steps out of the shadows to walk beside us. Inside every one of us lies genius.

We just need to believe it.