Cupboard love

I’ve always been fat. Funny how you never turn to fruit when you’re depressed, isn’t it? Or is that just me, trained over the years to look for sustenance in place of solace. I blame my mother. Food was at the centre of everything in our house: celebrations, commiserations, visitations, confrontations. It was the only way she knew to show love. Or compassion. Or care. Or concern. As long as there was food on the table she was being a good parent. It was her response to every event in our lives.


When I fell and scraped my knee she offered biscuits. After doctor visits it was cake. Boyfriend dumped me? Sausage rolls. Missed the train? Bag of sweets. Feeling down? Cheese on toast. If I did well in exams? Well, that was expected of me and elicited no response. So I would find my own support in comfort food.

Even in my thirties she was hard to please. One particularly impressive promotion triggered no praise, just a strained ‘not before time’. I replaced her missing ‘well done’ with a steak - no, not well done, but rare, like her plaudits.

She’s been gone a decade and I still eat, associating food with everything I do. I am making myself ill in the process; hurrying toward an early grave. Perhaps in eternity she will find the time to applaud me.

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I've not been writing much lately so I'm forcing myself to put some words together about any topic that has come up in conversation, on TV, or whatever. I've read a lot of stuff about diet and body image lately. This isn't great - but it's a start.

Very well then, I contradict myself

The writer who needs a home of her own is not the one who composes press releases and promotional leaflets. She's the creative writer who is trapped inside someone who has to work at short-order writing in order to earn a crust. This one has to write because she has things to say, ideas teeming around in her head that need to be given voice. I have often been accused of having a butterfly mind and flitting from one idea to another but that is not really a fair assessment. True, there are lots of ideas in my head and they can sometimes seem to be a little random, but that is because there was nowhere to lay them out neatly and let them take their proper form and order.

Some of them have been released onto scraps of paper in the past. There are samples of my prose all over the country. I have been a journalist and have had many by-lined pieces published. The nature of the work means that I am on record in the British Library. Even I have difficulty accepting that idea. My name in print (or more probably microfiche or electronic records by now) in the nation's repository of words. My work alongside the likes of Dickens, Beowulf, Shakespeare. Maybe not on the same shelf, in fact probably not even in the same room, but in the same store. Albeit at some distance!

But even before I was a journalist I wrote. As a child I entered story contests (and won sometimes). I kept diaries as a teen. I created scrapbooks and projects and wrote endless pages of dreary poetry about how life was so unfair and nobody loved me. It wasn't very good. But it was all grist to the writing mill. I would turn out strings of words and sometimes people would say they liked them and ask to read more. And so I realised that I am a writer. That is who I am. And so it became my job as well as my passion and so it has become my life.

Words. Words, words and more words.

And they are bursting out of my mind and down my arms and into my fingers and in this modern age they are being translated into electronic beeps and blips that appear on computer screens all over the world. Sometimes people say they like them and ask to read more.

And that is how this blog came about. Because I realised that the readers who want to see my writing do not want to read recipes or look at my paintings or hear about how I had an argument with the people at the insurance company or lern about what I buy at the supermarket. All of that can stay in the original blog.

This one's all for the writer in me.

Do I contradict myself?

It's the first day of March and that seems like a good time to do some Spring cleaning. One of the things I've decided to Spring clean is my blog. Or rather, my blogs. I already have more than one blog and some of my readers will know that I have a lot of different sides to my character. There's the one who takes photos and the one who paints and draws. There's one who is a bit of a whizz in the kitchen and handy at saving money. There's the historian, the traveller, the mystic, the worker, the layabout, the nature lover, the gardener, all sorts of people. In fact one of my favourite quotes is from Walt Whitman and it's to do with being lots of different people in one mind and body.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.
I am large. I contain multitudes

All of those people have found their way onto my generic blog. MorningAJ. The one that I started out with. Then one part of me peeled away. She started out as a couple of pages called "How to..." but she became Auntie Anne. The best thing since sliced bread. And her advice, recipes, anecdotes, hints and tips have their own place now. (And their own little group of followers!) But it started to become obvious that another part of me needed space of its own. And that's the writer. The Wordsmith. So here it is. I already spend my days writing marketing and publicity for an organisation in the Midlands (and that's as far as I'm going to go in identifying it. I do not profess to represent my employer once I leave the office. This blog is mine. All my own. And the views expressed here must not be seen as reflecting on anyone but myself.)but a lot of my spare time is spent writing creatively. Short stories, flash fiction, bad poetry, and there's even a novel in progress.