BLOG 287: The Expert

"An Expert is someone who delivers three correct guesses consecutively" 

Dr Laurence J Peter  

 

You know it never fails to unimpress me how much unsolicited advice there is available to the average person every day of the week. 

It also never fails to impress me how deeply unqualified those dispensing the advice often are. 

But being unqualified (sometimes to the point of being offensively so) does not deter those motivated to inaugurate a 'special teaching moment'… which of course only they can dispense. 

This is not limited to well meaning friends and aunties serving wisdom with a cup of tea... everyone seems to be at it! From young people giving advice on the ageing process, to men giving advice on childbirth, to celibates giving advice on marriage... our society is riddled with those who have not a clue about what they are talking about advising those who could quite happily live without the tutorial! 

 It's just irresistible, I suspect, that when presented with a juicy and quite often controversial subject to not sound flummoxed . This is The Age of Google after all. We are all finger tip experts on any given subject. 

And once we hit our trusty search engines, who do find substantiating our newly acquired knowledge? Celebrities. I kid you not. Google anything and you will find a celebrity bleating their heart out about it and inviting you to take a walk in their shoes so that you can almost have first hand knowledge of any degree of human suffering. Because if you didn't know it.... no one feels pain like a celebrity. 

You don't believe me? 

Okay lets try with just a few things that may be on my mind at the moment. 

Google... you magic 8 ball of the 21st century.... I need to understand what to do about: 

Q: How do I get my son settled into uni life/ living away from home for the first time? 

A: Cherie Blair tells us how. She bought her son a 1/2 million pound flat when he went to Bristol Uni to "protect him during that rough settling in period of the 1st term".  Apparently a student pad that costs more than the average family home is not mollycoddling. 

Gosh... I was thinking a 6 pack of 1664 and a top up on his pay as you go phone... but thank you Cherie,  I see the error of my ways! 

Q: How to I do my bit for the environment and stay stylish at the same time? 

A: Trudie Styler knows all about this. In fact she has no worries about being the founder of the Rainforest foundation and private jetting her hairdresser from New York to Washington for a party. Apparently carbon footprints do not apply to private aviation. 

Ah... I was thinking putting designer house number stickers on my wheely bins... but I hear you Trudes...  I have to think bigger.

Q: How to I drop the 11lbs wine fat I've put on following a bereavement? 

A: Gwyneth Paltrow  knows all about gaining poundage after losing a beloved family member and offers inspirational guidance for a simple way to shed them. All she had to do was just set her mind to lose them... so she did, and she's never gained them back. 

WOW thank Gwynnie very motivational as I am sure a personal trainer coaching you along through every pushup and crunch and a  nutritionist buying your groceries, planning your diet, fixing your meals and watching every calorie you put into your body has nothing to do with it at all. I'll just set my mind to it. 

You see... it's clear... none of those three have a damn clue! They are just NOT qualified to dispense advice. At least NOT to such as we. 

Even huge multinational companies are at it! Believe it or not  at a leading broadcasting company, a Negroid female subject to a lengthy tutorial on how not to be a racist to her own race! This was dispensed by a collection of Caucasian females -  who on the advice of an couple of Asian males felt best qualified to give pointers regarding the experience of being a member of the said females race.I believe the female in receipt of said tutorial no longer is employed by that broadcaster.  Quite remarkable when one considers that the broadcaster in question has no problem paying for a football pundits valued contribution to sport... when said pundit once referred to Marcel Desailly as  "a fucking lazy thick nigger". But then I suppose as a Caucasian said pundit could not possibly be found guilty of causing racial offence when one examines the values in question.        

                         

But out here in the sane world one must ask....What the hell is it with people who have not one clue about what they are talking about giving advice to those who really should be teaching them! 

In recent times I have been subject to advice on housing, employment and bereavement - gleefully dispensed by those who have never had an issue with any of the above. It has been the most humorous of all the things that have happened in the past  6 months - lengthy tutorials in how to survive crisis's that have thus left their own personal lives unblemished. 

I have no idea why it is we as a society now feel that to demonstrate that we care about something we have to be an expert on it (even when quite clearly we know sweet f a about the given subject ). We really do not have to do this.   

There is an old fashioned way of showing you care about something. It was called LISTENING. 

In the old days... that's what people did to comfort someone who had a crisis on... they listened to them. They let them raise their concerns and then they'd simply say they'd be there for them to see them through the crisis. And then... they were. 

And you know what's hilarious.... 

By doing so they actually really and truly.... became EXPERTS. 

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BLOG 286: Moving the ghost

"Goddammit - your Zombie Boyfriends forgot his keys" 

From: My Favorite Undead Tenant (1983)

Considering that the big benefit of the move from my old house was getting away from the ghost of Christmas past it seems bizarre that ever since I moved home I've been thinking a lot about my late boyfriend. 

Actually, isn't late the most ridiculous term for someone who has ceased to live? Early seems more accurate... he departed too early - not late! Anyway, I digress... what a change...not. 

One of the reasons I was quite keen to relocate, was because of running down those stairs at the old place. I never failed, not once since he died, to run down those stairs and expect to see his shadow through the stained glass window on the front door.  For the first couple of months I actually really expected and wanted to see him there, then after a while that hope turned into fear. I mean who actually wants to open the door to the dead... no matter how much you want them back... you actually don't want their undead self. I guess that's when I realised I had come to accept not only my non-widow status but also the fact he had really gone. Pity the bereavement books don't warn you more about fear of zombies.

But seriously, one of the reasons why relocating was good, was that he had filled my home with memories good and bad and they'd cinematically play out to me far too often for me not to feel haunted. I couldn't even use the rotary washing line without seeing him at the bedroom window, leaning out and smiling saying "There's my girlfriend hanging out the washing"… he was odd like that, he took a childlike delight in narrating the most ordinary of things. Which of course meant that the most ordinary of things have all become haunted, be they walking down the road or pushing a trolley around Morrison. He was everywhere. I desperately needed to live somewhere else, where even my bathtub didn't relay conversations with the departed.  

So here I am deeply ensconced in somewhere else. This place couldn't be more different. Gone is suburbia - there is a distinctive rural edge to this place that reminds me of my time living in Devon. To be honest I feel like I'm in an episode of Escape to the Country: Downsize edition. And despite my reservations - lets be honest...I SLATED this place to hell before I moved in  - now, with the son, the cat and our downsized collection of belongings all in place, I quite like it. It's good to look out the window and see fields beyond the greenhouse and shed at the bottom of the garden. - a completely different view. And it's so quiet... no suburbian V8's racing past or neighbours playing snooker under the awning on their decks. Even through the double glazing the noisiest thing are a couple of argumentative birds in a tree. 

I don't feel haunted now. I think I am at last free to remember him without the searing pain of early grief or the heavy burden of living in the midst of so many sets from scenes of our time together.  A little distance - all be it a physical one - was certainly needed. 

I'm trying to find the words to say how missing someone feels now. I have to admit to be struggling for the right word. 

When he first died, it was white hot pain. I felt hollowed out, bereft, hopeless and literally found breathing a chore. After a few weeks I'd got breathing down and was able to make a facsimile of a functioning person - modifying myself with drastic haircuts and a different wardrobe - because I didn't want to see the reflection of HIS girlfriend in a mirror. By January I'd say I was pretty much crazy...the white heat of pain now glowing red and making me self harm and fail abysmally at suicide. Add to that I felt hatred for everyone who ever had a cause to celebrate - yet throughout this entire phase pasted a fake smile on my face and did what I had to do. Life is incessant in its demand to go on.  That’s when therapy upped it's game and spent till early March talking me off the ledge I was preparing to swan dive off. Through all of these phases I could have told you exactly how I felt. I felt finished with life.

I felt like one of those creatures the cat drags in from time to time: more dead than alive, barely functioning and desperate for a quick merciful dispatch as death it self has never looked so merciful and life so damn painful and cruel. 

Well things a slightly different now. For sure, I am still counting in days..Without a calendar I can tell you that  I've lived 132 days without him. And that fact remains painful and as it remains cruel. I wasn't in any way prepared to go from happy which I was when I awoke that day to devastated which I was when my fretful head hit the pillow that night... to be honest I'm still not, a part of me continues to yearn for life before 5th December 2013.. But I can no longer aliken myself to one of Skyla's play kills. I'm no longer looking for a quick and merciful death. I'm just slowly finding my feet towards a hopefully merciful life. 

And thanks to the move, I am not expecting a visit from the undead hourly. Scenes do not playout cinematically as I go from room to room and the streets beyond this house hold no memories of him. I am finding it so much easier to breathe. 

I am beginning to find it doesn't hurt me so much when people talk of him. Of course it is so still hard when those who don't know of his passing ask me about him. Funny enough on the day of the big move his favourite taxi driver asked me if the journey between my late boyfriends house and my new location should be one he programmes into his sat nav. Poor man... wondering why he hasn't seen his favourite fare...asked me if he is away working! To be honest I was so blind sided by his enquiry that I just nodded and smiled. No one ever tells the taxi driver... do they? 

But my friends can talk of him with me now. Apparently I was too much of a basket case to deal with their loss on top of mine. But now people like to "remember when he..." and even I have to smile when they a recall a man who would tell off nightclub bouncers for their lack of gentility and yet would giggle like a school girl because a museum was called The Horniman. I am discovering friends have memories of things they shared only with him that they want to share with me, especially the friends that gave him the third degree when we first got together! It's nice to add those to the thousands of memories that are first hand and all mine. Though quite often in my head he is always swimming on the rooftop spa watered pool in Bath City alerting all to the presence of a rainbow. I recall his grin when the word rainbow echo'd around in many languages and everyone stopped and looked to the sky - he'd caused a moment of wonder. I can talk about him with people now. And it is so lovely is that they tell me how sorry they are to have lost him and the possibility of knowing him more too, and it is actually comforting not to be alone in the loss - nice. 

There was nothing nice about his presence at the old house, the old location. It was just about my loss. I'd shout at the ghost that he should know that by not telling me that his death was a possibility he committed the only single cruel act towards me that he ever did.  He took that omission (and all the guilt that holding onto that information while I prattled away about the future must have caused him) to the grave. He knew and chose not to share... and in not letting me have that information he took away my chance to make my own decisions.  I'm not sure if my vocalising my displeasure at this could be heard by the dead or the undead but the neighbours were not sure it was healthy! 

Its all a lot healthier here. I'm not shouting in empty rooms or staring at vacant windows while putting out the laundry. If haunted means an uninvited presence... moving has certainly stopped me having that experience.

His presence in this location is at my invitation. Yes his photo is in a frame in my bedroom but it's as much a happy photo of me as it is one of us together. It’s a picture of us doing something exceptional, stuff that is worthy of a precious metal frame … I'm not haunted by those memories, it's right they be celebrated. But whats's really great is that I don't feel tormented by my memories as I once did... and if the move had something to do with that  - COOL! All I know is that after such a dramatic struggle to get to this point it is lovely to be able to think of him without that gut wrenching pain. Because we were happy as almost every moment we were together generated some genuinely happy times. 

So that is where I am at now. Learning to live with the happy memories. Now that's a trick I have not yet a handle on. But having a new location has at least freed me from having to live on top of them.

Oh and worrying about zombies at the door!

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