modern life

The Game of Life

~ tidalscribe.com ~ 1 Comment

Warning: Do you dare to play the game of life? If you don’t want to read about illness and death or you dislike dark humour please avoid this blog, but I hope you will continue to visit my Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday blogs.

41290243_2273528329343611_2462619236892147712_o

 

Cyberspouse is feeling rather a fraud; having initiated drama, compassionate leave, flight booked, Christmas brought forward, he is feeling fine. But a letter arrives with NHS on the envelope; the copy of the letter sent to his GP from the oncologist. It wasn’t a joke after all, there it is in black and white. But there are still plenty of jokes in the house. We catch up with a film on television, looks like a good British comedy, winter comfort watching, all the familiar actors. ‘Finding your Feet’, retired people having fun, we know all about that. Our retired friends dash around the world, passionately pursue hobbies, whiz around with their bus passes or lounge at their beach hut. We do all of those except the first. But the film has included all the cliches, the sad widower, the wife with dementia and then… one of the characters has cancer, but of course doesn’t want to tell anybody and spoil their fun… you have to laugh, that was a good choice of film…

 

 

 

Friday Flash Fiction – Secret Society

~ tidalscribe.com ~ 4 Comments

It started as a joke, Barbara got the idea from Saga magazine; she thought it would pep up our sex life.  Dressing up and meeting new people; I wouldn’t call it an orgy and we didn’t believe we were really worshipping the devil. Obviously we met in a deconsecrated church, we didn’t want to upset the new lady vicar at Saint Stephens, especially as Barbara’s flower arranging club meets in their hall. Saint Peter’s has gone Pentecostal, so they would have taken us too seriously. The community centre was off limits with all their health and safety rules.

We managed to attract quite a few young people, which was nice. As Barbara said, in the dark what does age matter and as we were all anonymous it was very pleasant and relaxed. I was High Priest, but we were due to elect a new committee in the spring. We had bought all the costumes and paraphernalia on the internet, amazing how many sites there are. It was through the internet that Geoffrey got in touch, a mousy middle aged man who Barbara tended to avoid, but he was a good addition to the group, had some very imaginative ideas and some good props.

 

A typical meeting? Well we didn’t kill any chickens, I get queasy at the sight of blood. The setting of the semi derelict church made it very atmospheric; burning of herbs, spreading of salt, raising arms, throw in some Latin, then a few fertility rites. Barbara said she was having nothing to do with Geoffrey, he was creepy. She preferred the young chap who worked in Sainsburys, we did not let on we recognised him of course and I doubt he recognised us behind the shopping trolley.

When did it start to go wrong? The girl who had the fit was fine afterwards, lucky we had a paramedic amongst us, but we didn’t see her again. We did wonder if it was she who contacted the local paper. It was Geoffrey who spotted the planted reporter. I was just summoning ‘The Devil’ when we thought we heard a snigger. Geoffrey looked him straight in the eye, his usual reedy voice sounded different that night.

Do you think he has horns or will he arrive in a dinner suit, tall dark and suave? He’s here already, has been all along.

I’ll just catch the football on telly if I leave now said the young man shakily, adding as he safely reached the outside door and if I wanted to attend an orgy it wouldn’t be with you lot.

Numbers were down at the next meeting, though I could hear excited mumblings as I got robed up in the vestry. I was just about to start my opening incantation when Geoffrey interrupted.

We were just having an interesting discussion; did you hear what The Pope said yesterday? For a priest to abuse children is as evil as conducting a black mass; rather touching I thought, at least he gets it.

I didn’t understand what Geoffrey was getting at and assured him we were all consenting adults who broke no laws. It was as if he could read my mind.

No, you don’t GET it do you, I’m re… I mean HE’s REAL. Why have people in the past couple of centuries considered themselves cleverer than their ancestors?

By now he was addressing all of us, a chill I can’t describe had descended upon the room.

Why do those in the Western World dismiss traditions in the third world as ignorance. You give Him no credit at all; murderers are always mentally disturbed, forgotten their medication or taken too many steroids…or you blame it on other innocent humans, too much bureaucracy, not enough bureaucracy, hilarious that no one dares blame crime on Evil. Of course it’s the more insidious influence I enjoy, infiltrating every human institution.

Can we just get on with the evening entertainment called out a voice muffled by his mask.

That’s all it is to you isn’t it, all of you.

Geoffrey seemed different now, taller, his voice deeper.

I don’t need all this play acting, but what will you play next, the end game?

We all shuffled nervously, some sidled towards the door. Whoever he was you couldn’t argue with what he said.

Pathetic; every century you think you have the answer to improving the human condition; religion, science, education for all, democracy, communism, medicine, love, communication, even space exploration, how on earth (forgive the pun) is that likely to work? By the way, there is nothing out there so don’t bother looking.

Then he was gone, I mean literally, he was there, then he wasn’t.

Muffled voice said he was going to call it a night, wasn’t in the mood any more, nobody else spoke, they just shuffled off.

Barbara said her instincts about him had been right, but she still refuses to talk about any of it. I suggested we could still dress up at home, but she said rather sharply that it would hardly be the same.

They’re turning it into a Tesco now, that redundant church.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tackling Taboos

~ tidalscribe.com ~ 16 Comments

Mum and Dad bought their first house when I was six; they were very happy to live on the ground and have a garden and Mum said we wouldn’t move again now we had our own house. But the new estate was a long walk from the shopping parade in the little town. Luckily the greengrocer came round in his van, the butcher’s boy came round on his bike and the milkman delivered a box of groceries weekly.

 When I was old enough to go cycling off on my own I would be sent on urgent errands to the little parade of shops on the next estate. Sometimes Mum would give me a note to hand to the lady in the drapers. She would reach under the counter, put a packet in a brown paper bag and give it to me, these were Mum’s sanitary towels.

We emigrated to Western Australia when I was eleven, exactly five years after Mum said we weren’t going to move again. After a few weeks at school the summer holidays started and so did my first period. I was not shocked because my mother had told me what to expect, but I was mortified and furious that it had happened so soon, ruining the holidays. One day I came home and said Christine’s mother wanted to take us all swimming. Mum said Did you tell her you had your period. I replied that I had been too embarrassed. Going to the local chemist was also nerve racking, the sanitary products were not hidden away, far from it, illuminated signs advertised Modess in larger stores. But if I went into the chemist and there was a man behind the counter, or a male customer walked in, I sneaked out empty handed.

I started at my new high school of fourteen hundred pupils. One day all the boys were ordered to stay in the classrooms and all the girls ordered to the largest quadrangle to be addressed by the headmistress. The talk was about the correct use of the new incinerets being installed in the girls’ toilets. I was always rather nervous of these machines.

By strange coincidence they were discussing periods on Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio Four, just as I started writing this blog; no taboos on this daily programme, they talk about everything, but modern schoolgirls still feel periods aren’t treated a normal.

 Men would not put up with it, or perhaps not survive. Forty years or more of our bodies getting ready to conceive every month, keeping the equipment working when we may want to use it only once, twice or never. Suffering varying from cramps to endometriosis laying you up every month. In my mother’s young days at the bank she was dispatched every month in a cab to deliver her poor colleague home, ill with her period. They must have had an understanding boss. Modern life has not dispatched with the age old problems, but recently there has been a flurry of discussion from every angle.

A while ago a marathon runner apparently decided to run without period protection, I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. It sounds like my worst school PE nightmare come true and I’m not sure what she was trying to prove, that we shouldn’t be ashamed presumably. There are plenty of cultures where women were and still are ( according to the posters in Ladies’ toilets at motorway services ) expected to go and sit out in the desert till their period has finished. Some major religions connect menstruation to spiritual impurity.

But even when periods are treated as normal and healthy there are other aspects which have come up for serious discussion lately.

 There is the environmental issue and some women are making their own reusable pads; things have turned full circle, my mother and her sisters made their own pads out of torn up old sheets and had to soak them in a bucket of salt water.

Then there is period poverty. At first we smugly thought it only happened in third world countries and to refugees on the move with none of life’s necessities. Then it turned out many school girls in Britain can’t afford to buy sanitary protection, making my teenage trials and tribulations seem petty. Scotland is leading the world in supplying free products to all schools and colleges. In the rest of Britain charities are donating products to schools and food banks. 

My novel Quarter Acre Block is inspired by our family’s migation to Austalia. The story is told from two points of view, eleven year old Jennifer’s and her mother’s.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quarter-Acre-Block-Janet-Gogerty-ebook/dp/B00A6XDUQM