But what did the most damage and hurt the most was the comment: “Childish”

And the reason it hurt was because I know different and I can’t tell that person.

This is what I want to tell that person:
I wrote that poem because I know how it feels to lose and to hurt. To hurt very, very badly. I know how it feels to desperately look for something that describes how you feel and not find it. I wrote it when in a deep state of grief after finding poem upon poem that I couldn’t connect with. So often I hear funeral poems that make me want to scream. I didn’t think it was a marvellous piece of creative writing, but it was as much from the guts as anything I have ever written and to be given a one-word review like that was, quite simply, unfair and rather nasty. I wasn’t trying to be clever I was deliberately being simple and honest. In fact I made a point of writing in the blurb for it that it is ‘simple.’ (I’ve just checked and the actual word I used was ‘uncomplicated’) It was also free so I’m not sure it was necessary to be that nasty.

I didn’t learn to write poetry at school. I wasn’t taught to appreciate poetry. In fact, I spent nearly forty years being scared of poetry. Poets were part of some special elitist club for snooty poetry brains. Thanks to the education system in this country, I know I am one of thousands of people who feel like that
And then 2 years ago I discovered that the elitist bit wasn’t true. Poetry is for whoever wants it (although there are some academic snobs that would like to keep the normal folk out still). I bought myself some audio CDs of poetry readings and realised that poetry is simply a matter of taste. Someone else’s dull might be your idea of deep and meaningful. My idea of too long might be someone else’s perfect escapism, for example…

Anyway, my point is if my words were not the ones you were looking for – Mystery Feedback Meanie, then think about how yours were much less imaginative. And I have to suffer the consequences of yours every day

Here are some alternatives:
‘It’s not for me.’
‘I didn’t really like it.’
‘Not my kind of thing.’
‘I prefer Auden.’

‘Childish’ is just … childish, really.

… is all about acting like you know best
even when you don’t
and pretending to have all the answers
even when you don’t…

…and getting paid for dressing up,
riding on trains,
and playing with money

It’s just like being a child really
only you don’t always get to say where the money goes…

…unless you’re a politician.

So when I grow up
I’m going to be a politician
then I can carry on acting like a kid.

She was looking for a well-presented man. He hadn’t shaved and had long, dark, greying hair.

No good. She’d always imagined her future husband to have short, blonde hair.

She liked quiet Sundays indoors with softly-scented pampering products, a movie and the clean, ever-cleaning cats. Everything about him said ‘muddy walks with dogs’ (particularly the presence of his two filthy dogs and the mud-caked walking boots he wore).

The List was not going well. She wanted to walk back out of the pub. He did not fit the criteria of her perfect partner in any shape or form. But he saw her and walked over.

‘Hi. I’m Steve,’ he said in a Belfast accent, holding out a rough hand to shake hers firmly.
‘Oh Jesus,’ she thought, in a Home Counties accent, slipping her manicured digits back through his calloused, soil-stained grasp.

But perhaps the ‘Suitable for parents’ criteria wasn’t really worth keeping on the list now that both her parents had died of old age.

She mentally referred to her list. The list she had written at eighteen, now etched on her memory and referred to every time she met a man:
Where were the blue eyes suitable for her future babies? His were brown.
Where was the evidence of security and financial stability for the family they might have? He had holes in his t-shirt.

Perhaps, as her friends had pointed out, she was too old for children now. Perhaps, as her sister had pointed out, a good companion was more important than money.

She had to do this. She’d promised. She would make polite conversation, smile, have a couple of drinks, swap phone numbers, thank her friends for setting up a blind date and then never call him. In a couple of weeks she could say it just didn’t work out. There was no way she was committing herself to this guy while Mr. Right was out there waiting for her.

3 hours later, he led her into his house and showed her the hall, the bathroom, the kitchen, the sitting room and the lizards. They wouldn’t be languishing so lazily under their heat lamps if her cats were in the room, she noted aloud with a snigger.
He laughed too and cleared some papers from the sofa so that she could sit down.
Real ale seemed good for the inhibitions and the OCD she noted with a belch, plonking herself onto a stinking dog blanket and grinning.

He grinned back fondly and sat himself opposite her. ‘You’ve a good sense of humour. I’ve not laughed so much in a while.’

‘I don’t usually make men laugh,’ she tilted her head, thoughtfully. ‘It must be the beer.’

‘No. It’s not you. It’s the men you’ve been dating. You should always make sure someone’s got the same sense of humour as you. It’s number one on the list.’

‘You have a list?’ She leant forward in interest and nearly fell off the sofa. ‘This could be the start of something really ugly,’ she laughed, righting herself and pointing to a rotting half-eaten apple on a corner table behind his elbow.

‘I wondered what the smell was, ‘ he said, jumping to his feet, grabbing the apple and running to the kitchen bin with it.

She watched as he washed and dried his hands carefully and then returned looking about him as if in shame.

He was making an effort for her. She realised she liked that in a man.
Why wasn’t that on The List?

…

( *The prompts: ‘Presentation isn’t everything.’ … ‘There’s a half-eaten apple on the table in the corner of the room. Why?’ and ‘Lizards languishing lazily’ (yeah, thanks, Mandy…) )

Written in a hurry and not edited. Life on the edge, huh?

The facts:
The missing man’s name was Darren and he was a diver. He started behaving oddly after losing a foot in a diving accident five years ago. Recently his family reported him missing and that was when the rumours started… Tom was the only one he had allowed to see him in the last five years. The family will talk to no one. The police will talk to no one. The marine biologists have gone very quiet…

The stuff we can’t be sure of:
There’s a rumour that the policeman who went to search Darren’s house after his disappearance was so disturbed by what he found that he took to drinking and was last seen huddled in the entrance to Plymouth Marine Aquarium, dressed in old fishermen’s clothes, telling tales of a horrific half man/half sea creature with only one foot that expelled waste from his head and killed himself with his own poisonous tentacles.

It’s disturbing and I don’t want to do this but I’m the only one Tom will talk to so I guess I’m flattered really. Besides if I get nowhere no one need know and if it’s a good story then I can afford Bella’s university fees. As a freelancer I have nothing to lose. Except perhaps my sanity…

He’s waiting for me inside the fence, restraining a large, angry dog on a chain.
‘Sally.’
‘Tom.’
He’s changed. I hardly recognise the man with guarded expression and stiff posture as the effeminate boy who swapped Pokemon cards with my eldest son fifteen years ago.

He takes me to a sparse, windowless utility room at the back of the house. As he shuts the door the insistent dog barking and the hum of traffic cease. There is a soft electrical buzz but otherwise the room is quiet and intense. Tom points to a plastic chair and I sit down and reach for my laptop. As I turn it on he spots my Internet dongle and swiftly confiscates it while he begins to talk…

‘Darren was my diving instructor. I worshipped him. We spent time together on dives and trips around the world – just the two of us. He had this special interest in anemones, you see, and didn’t care for the more extensive dives organised by other people. I fell in love with him. I assumed that he was gay too because he didn’t seem to like women. But as the months went by I began to realise he didn’t feel that way about me. I stuck up for him when people said he was going mad although deep down I wondered if I was wasting my time. He collected anemone eggs and sperm samples to take home and became fixated on asexual reproduction. Bits of anemones can break off and form into new anemones, you know? He said he wanted me to help him with some research and although it sounded far-fetched I would have done anything for him. There’s something a bit obsessive about loving someone you know can never be yours… I hung on his every word, agreed with everything he said, became as passionate as I could about everything he was passionate about.’

I nod. I know all about misguided loyalty. ‘I’ve seen photos. He was quite something,’ I say.

‘ “Was”? He’s not dead.’

I fumble, not wanting to stop him talking. Then I remember the rumours. ‘He changed though? Put on weight? Grew pale?’

‘In the early days, when we first started going off on our own, the other divers said he must have suffered decompression sickness because his face swelled up and he forgot people’s names. But he told me he didn’t dive deep enough.’

‘Weren’t you with him?’

‘I was on the boat.’

‘So he might have. Didn’t he suffer from weak joints too?’

‘It wasn’t that though. He knew what he was doing.’

Now, I’ve researched the bends and it sounds to me that – as it went untreated – that was exactly what brought about his madness and demise but I feel I am on the brink of something so I wait.

Tom seems to read my mind. ‘Just because someone displays the symptoms of something doesn’t mean that is what they have. He’s a genius who knew exactly what he was doing. The foot wasn’t an accident. That was part of his research.’

I feel sick.

He unlocks another door and beckons me through. I hear bubbling and splashing and taste salty air. In the dim light I make out three head-height glass tanks taking up the walls of the room. Dark shadows and bright flashes move everywhere. Tom takes a fishing net from behind the door, scoops something out of the nearest tank, and carries it to the tank at the far end of the room. I follow.

As my eyes become accustomed I see what looks like a human foot on the bottom of the tank. It is enlarged and viscousy but as I slowly make out toenails and an ankle I see that it is definitely human. I clench my teeth together and try to swallow the disgust pushing at my throat as I see, growing up from the enlarged ankle, several giant tentacles waving as they stun and trap in a split second the fish that Tom releases into the tank. The tentacles lower the fish into an opening in their centre.

‘He started injecting himself with the anemone samples ten years ago. That’s when he swelled up. Then he cut off bits of skin and ear, thinking if he could keep growing himself on from bits of his own body that he would never die but when they didn’t grow he intensified his treatment by injecting his brain, his heart, his groin. But he couldn’t do it on his own. The injections were making him ill. So he cut off his foot and instructed me how to look after it – to make it survive on its own just like an anemone. And it worked – to a point… The rest of his body became a giant anemone and he began to drown in the air and his tentacles poisoned everything except his other foot. That foot found in his house won’t survive in the hands of the scientists… But this one will.’

I’ll never be sure why I did that. It could be because our youngest child had started school, I had had a four-year break from OU and was missing it. Also, I was incredibly fed up with doing mundane things that weren’t appreciated and were undone in no time. I didn’t see the point in my life as it was and I was feeling completely dissatisfied and unfulfilled. So maybe it would have happened like that anyway…
But I suspect a year full of pain, bereavement and chaos had a lot to do with the way I threw myself hell-for-leather into such an intense experience that I became an unapproachable speed demon like the Looney Tunes Tasmanian devil.

The thought of stopping still scares me, worries me, upsets me. I don’t want to go back in time. I don’t want to be a picker-upper of other people’s things, or chief waitress at Café-of-Mum, watching everyone else have outside interests while I run along tidying up behind them. I don’t want to take my eyes away from focussing on the road ahead only to see the dust and splat insect spots on the windscreen that need cleaning. If I stop and get out and never get back in I might just turn into a screen-washer for other drivers – a supporter and not a player or a grower.

Sometimes, before I started studying again, I would get so wrapped up in the minutiae of daily life and running a house that I forgot to appreciate the world – or even the garden. It was always about who needed what and when and where, what need doing, buying, cleaning and washing, and rarely about we and us, and never about me. Low self-esteem makes it very difficult for its suffers to grab any enjoyment of life, and a very easy target for criticism.
It’s great to support your family but it’s better to be one of five sunflowers growing together and propping each other up rather than a garden cane propping up four other sunflowers while they reach for the sky. (I’ve heard that sunflowers don’t have a huge amount of respect for garden canes and their inability to grow…)

So I steadfastly refuse to go back in time. The best things in life might be the simple things (although, as someone who is able to complicate absolutely everything, that’s debatable!) but they certainly are not the little things – the dust, the dirty windows, the dog hair, the mending, the decorating, the weeds (No, I take that back. I actually quite like most weeds – have you seen how much bees love them!? I am quite happy to live with them. I just wish other people didn’t see my weeds as a problem. They’re only bloody wildflowers. ), and I absolutely refuse to stop being a student, a learner, a grower, a sunflower and a zoom-off-into-Rachel World-er.

But I do have to apply the brakes right now.

So… I’ve made the decision that it’s time to have a break from academic testing. I am – rather strangely – now withdrawing from a course that suits me down to the ground. I’m doing this because I wasn’t studying it properly. I had begun to apply a fifth-gear-get-to-the-end-of-the-race-and-collect-your-prize mentality to my study, had flooded my engine and I started to feel rather tired. Tired of performing, tired of being tested, tired of reading in order to write an assignment and not enjoying the magic of absorbing information and flourishing, thriving, sprouting stems and maturing. I’ve noticed an annoying fashion for people becoming obsessed with targets, competition, performance and end results instead of reasons or purpose in education. I can’t stand the word ‘competition’ anywhere near the word ‘learning’ – I see evidence of people out-performing each other without necessarily out-learning or out-thinking each other (cue massive can of very many worms…).

Right now, I’m waiting to hear whether I can defer my literature studies to another year when I can continue in a calmer mode for the right reasons.

In order to keep myself from returning to the self-punishing ‘if she doesn’t keep her house clean, and her driveway weeded, what does she do?!’ 1950s-style dutiful housewife who denies herself “guilty” pleasures again I’m going to squeeze in as much creativity as possible, so in the meantime, I have signed up for the OU’s Digital Photography course and will be writing whenever and wherever I can to balance out the boredom of the dreary spreadsheets, facts and figures I have to deal with in order to earn my keep.
And I will, of course, be attempting to talk to my fellow sunflowers occasionally instead of whizzing away from them at top, slightly disturbing, speed.

I’m not stopping, though, I’m just trying my brakes.

‘Will we give the other residents some cake, if there’s enough?’ asked Fiona.

It’s weird.

Facts:

I’m on my 12th OU module

I was 30 when I took my 1st course. I am now 42. (I stopped studying for 4 years when child No.3 was born.)

Although I have completed 11 modules successfully, I dropped out of 6 (4 of those were only short courses) before I knew in which direction I wanted to head.

I have stuck at and passed every single assignment and every single module in the last three years despite the grief of losing a parent and my son suffering from a head injury.

I now have a BA, and if I finish this current module, I will have a BA honours.

I’m already 3 assignments into a 6-assignment module.

The final 3 assignments are in Feb, March and April. Plus 1 end-of-course assignment (instead of an examination) in May.

But…

I have stopped opening my books.

I am worryingly behind with my reading.

I like what I have been reading but I don’t want to do the work bit.

I keep thinking, ‘Maybe tomorrow’ … ‘Maybe later…’ … ‘Maybe I don’t want to do this at all…’

I should have started work on the next assignment but I’m in no position to and I have no inclination to.

Why have I stopped?

What if I drop out? It’s no big deal is it?

If I drop out of this course I will not complete my honours degree. I will have spent A. Lot.
of money on a course I didn’t finish. I will have sniffed at but not touched the finish line.

The regrets may build over the years. The me in the future will be cross with the me of now.

What am I doing?

I know I can do it.
So why am I not?

I don’t know.

The student’s not talking to me.
I can only assume she has some sort of burnout.

It had been many months before they knew the extent of their age difference, background differences and physical differences. But by the time Carla found out that Joanna was in fact a tall, bony, soon-to-be great-grandmother of sixty-nine, and Joanna had found out that Carla was in fact a short, plump, childless, 27-year-old with a history of drug abuse it was irrelevant to the strong bond they had already built.
They’d got to the core of each other, you see – the bits you often never even find in those you see every day.

They agreed to meet, on neutral ground, on the Norfolk broads and for half an hour they simply took in each other’s appearances and recovered from each other’s accents, making self-conscious small-talk. It was all so polite, none of the usual teasing, and – if they were honest – it felt a bit wrong. As if they’d met up with strangers.

After awkward tea and sickly cakes, surrounded by quiet old couples in a small café, they set off for a walk. Side-by-side they battled, heads down, against the Easterly wind and slowly began to wonder at the sheer horribleness of the whole experience. Tears of wind-beaten pain glistened in their eyes as they turned to each other and roared with laughter. They preferred honesty. They were the same.

‘Fuck this, Jo,’ Carla screeched. ‘I could have shown you a better time in Bexhill, love!’
No one else ever called Joanna ‘Jo’ and she’d always liked reading it in Carla’s tweets. People weren’t pally with Joanna but Carla was pally.
‘All right. How long will it take to get there?’ Joanna offered.
Carla grinned up at Joanna and took her arm as they turned back inland towards the carpark. ‘Bloody hours but we’ve even got pies. You’ll feel right at home there, Chuck.’
‘And mash?’
‘We’ll mash up your chips for ya. You’ll probably need everything mashing up, won’t you, old girl?’
‘Fuck off.’ Joanna laughed but she wanted to cry with happiness. She’d never got to say that to anyone before. It was great. ‘Did you like those cakes?’
‘No. Too sweet.’
‘Far too sweet.’

…although I do secretly crumple with sadness and worry for humankind a little inside.

1. ‘I’m good’
When asked how they are if people respond with, ‘I’m good’? I think, ‘That’s great but didn’t ask how well behaved you are.’ What wrong with ‘I’m well thanks,’ or ‘I’m fine, how are you?’ or ‘Oh you know… getting by.’ Or how about surprising them with, ‘Still getting over that lottery win!’ Or ‘Just had to have my dog put down and I really need a hug.’

2. ‘My bad.’
Yucketty yuck balls. spit spit spit. Since when did people perform ‘a bad.’? How about the original and best: ‘My mistake,’ or ‘I’m sorry.’ It seems to be the new way of skating around accepting you’ve done something wrong. And it’s twee. I don’t like twee.

3. ‘I apologise.’
Go on then…
We don’t say to our children. ‘I cook your tea,’ and yet do nothing.
We don’t say to our betrothed, ‘I marry you.’ and then not turn up for the ceremony to say ‘I do.’
Worse still is if someone says, ‘If I offended anyone, I apologise.’
No you don’t. Because you haven’t accepted you’ve done wrong.

There are plenty more but I’m going for a walk now. I’m hoping the fresh air and exercise will make me less picky.

‘Catch you later!’
(When you fly through the air and almost land on me)