Tag Archives: family

Dec 30 2025
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Loose Threads

As we approach the end of 2025, I have been given a moment or two to go through my old diary to check whether anything needs to be transferred into the new one. It comes as no surprise that I have had quite a year. According to the Chinese Horoscope, I fall under the sign of the Snake, it has apparently been MY year. I suppose that in a Buddhist sense, it has, because I certainly have been tested, in my own emotional abilities as well as my intellectual capacity. I also turned 60 this month, which has seriously added the icing to this very dense, somewhat morbid cake that has been baking over the past twelve months.

Listing the pros:

I changed my representation as an actress just over a year ago, to see if a new approach would alter my prospects for the better. It is always positive to go into new pastures, and I have no regrets and a certain amount of pride in achieving the transfer, since my type of casting ie white, middle aged and female is dreadfully out of fashion these days, (plus ça change) therefore I might have been undesirable on the the books of a new aspirational agent, but I managed to bond well with my new one, who was rather taken by my showreel. I have had some good castings earlier in the year, they slowed down a bit recently, but they have for everyone, so I am satisfied to continue my groove as it is.

I am still managing to get some writing done, one in the form of my second novel set in Malaysia in the 1970s and one in the form of a film script set in the 16th Century. I get good feedback from the few who are allowed to read it, so I will continue that groove too.

I will list the cons, which the level headed out there will argue are the pros, because all of the cons are character forming.

My mother died in April this year, very suddenly of a horrific stroke. A woman of such extraordinary articulation and grace was rendered unable to form words or swallow or move her right arms and legs for the last 8 days of her life. I was there in the hospital with her for the first five, but was advised to go home and take a break and she died three days later, although the staff had expressed no point of view as to whether she would live or die. I hate living with the fact that she died without me there, holding her hand, although I will admit that when I was there, she kept nudging me to go, trying to tell me that she felt sorry for me (because I would not stop crying or calling members of staff) and when I left, some instinct told me to hold her and tell her I love her for as long as I could without collapsing in the corridor. Letting go of her, after we lost my father 9 months previously, has been and is an impossible task, filling me with such sadness that I do not know where to place myself, when my soul and heart get taken over by her (and his) eternal absence.

Dealing with the probate and wills and bills and horrors following my parents’ deaths and navigating that with a sibling who is also grieving is extremely difficult and challenging. The sibling, my very dear only brother, had to undergo open heart surgery a few months after we had said goodbye to my father, so that he was not physically able to say goodbye to my mother. I was asked to attend the hospital on the day of the surgery, (a month before my mother’s death) because of his terror. I had to come to terms again with the concept that I could lose him as well. At the same time his wife, my sister in law, had a return match of her breast cancer, which also affected all of our emotions, in terms of attempting to stay strong and cope with it all.

The focus, to pull me away from all of this living hell, was to plan a huge and long lasting set of celebrations for my sixtieth. Many of these went askew because The Captain, my beloved husband, fell terribly ill throughout the last month. It began with a random attack of viral gastroenteritis that lasted over two weeks, developed into a flu that pervaded his body, and when he began to have massive temperatures, with the house filled with endlessly laundered sheets and nightwear, we decided to go to the doctor, who sent us straight to hospital, who eventually after a range of diagnoses, including terrifying ones, discovered that he had pneumonia, with a possible side order of shingles. All dinners and plans cancelled, and at one point it looked like we were not going to India to celebrate my “coming of age”.

There were a few other blocks that stood in the way of our possible journey. But I won’t go into those now, as it looks like we might still be able to go, and I do not want to jinx it.

Another pro, in this year of 2025, has been that despite all the shit, yes you heard it, shit, I noted that at the beginning of the year, we travelled to Abu Dhabi for six days, which we both loved, managing to see a couple of friends, sunbathe, swim and forget. I travelled to Rome to see the Italian, who hosted me well (very soon after losing my mother) and she had kindly booked the Caravaggio exhibition for me to catch, which was marvellous. I travelled to Bologna for a long weekend with the Captain in mid June, and we walked all the way up to the Basilicata in 40 degree heat, then ate Tortellini al Brodo (which the Captain repeated using a Gandalf tone), to our heart’s content. We travelled in August to Brussels on a job and Reims, by car and ferry, and stayed in a luxury castle drinking endless Ruinart Champagne. I went to join some good actor mates in Skiathos for a few days, and enjoyed their loving and unconditionally caring company and sunshine.

So, from an outsider’s view in, I live a good life. But all of the experiences are soaked in a sense of grief that is taking an age to go. As well as a burden of how to deal with the remaining material goods of the now departed.

I will leave you with a strange little bit of prose I found among my random, scattered bits of scribblings on one of those holidays:

Leaves are glittering with tiny, moist prisms. A sky is picked with blue, where clouds float like curvy mountains, watched by crows who stand on roofs; the custodians of this lofty universe. A breezy, light amber hangs in the air, promising hope.

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Oct 01 2025
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Grief: The New Norm

So, if I repeat myself in this blog, too bad. I am just recording events as they occur and observing them. My father died shockingly on 16th June, 2024 on Father’s Day, in hospital under ghastly circumstances. My mother died shockingly on 1st April 2025, April Fool’s Day, in hospital under ghastly circumstances.

The lead up to my father’s death was 10 months of horrific, unmanageable illness and the lead up to my mother’s was a general failing of her body, which led to a massive, horrendous stroke. I was there for most of it and became a ghost of myself as I dealt with the knives that were being hurled in our direction. Are all deaths this grim? It is all I can think about. They were lucky enough to have me and my brother and when my time comes, I may have no one there as the Captain,my husband, is determined to go before me.

In the end, despite every attempt on my part, I was not there in the last hours of either parents’ death and I will forever feel dreadful about that because I would have wanted them to know that I was thinking of them and loving them every minute of their existence. I’m not sure they felt that way about their respective parents. Yet I feel as if my true north has gone in both of their absences.

I have managed to get my health back in check. My blood pressure had escalated and I was slightly underweight and not really eating or sleeping normally for the last two years. My husband felt he had lost me for that period and meanwhile my brother had just retired and discovered that he was going to have to have open heart surgery for a heavily leaky valve. My sister in law had a revisit of cancer at the same time, and so there seemed to be a relentless battery, aware that I needed to be there for everybody, whilst somehow emotionally trying to find a reason why life was actually worth living.

One of the difficulties, I reflected often on this, was that without children of my own, who might have played some part in supporting me through this, the meaning of it all became utterly void. There were moments where I felt as if I was trying to delay my parents deaths, because after their departure, mine was inevitable. What had been the point, therefore, in my being here in the first place, was my repeated question.

Readers of this blog will know that I could not have children due to two ectopic pregnancies, failed attempts at IVF , fibroids and an early hysterectomy at 45 years of age. The only thing that kept me going, apart from the love of my husband, was the hope that meaning could be brought to life in the form of being fulfilled with my vocation, acting. But, no, that did not work that way. Acting has never worked in a way that is convenient. On the contrary, it is a bad lover, who turns up at 3.00 a.m with flowers stolen from a graveyard and declares that it loves, nay, misses you and can’t live without you.

The Captain has been extraordinary in his valiant efforts to bring joy into my life and he has succeeded beyond expectations. He has managed our property which will work towards being our pension one day. He has created an entirely new profession for himself in film production to add to his very present skills in acting. He has taken me to Abu Dhabi, to Bologna, to Reims, and that’s just this year. I, since I am lucky, was also invited to Skiathos to join a dear friend, and some of my friends, to relax for a few days. It was bliss, but my sense of grief never left me.

My dilemma is how to stop being haunted by the pain of grief and loss. It catches me so harshly often at the weekends, when the prospect of not having either of my beautiful parents to confide in and laugh with ever again feels like, literally a massive kick into the stomach, so that I retire to bed early and weep for a few hours.

I saw my therapist all the way through this, but we both decided it was right to take a small break, as sometimes, you just have to go through the pain of grief, as it evolves. I continue to receive good massage therapy as well, but I believe the only way to brave this is to soldier through the storms and weather, as eventually some type of survival and joy will kick in, either in moments or for extended periods of time.

I have had a few castings for tv, and recently agreed to join a bunch of young talents to be part of their scratch evening at the Golden Goose, so don’t worry about me. I just needed to share where I am at right now.

I am half way through a film script that I am writing and quarter way through a second novel, so the grey matter continues to be nourished. Here’s hoping the pain I have experienced somehow feeds the artist in me in a productive way. Maybe I’ll use it in the self-tape that I am about to record. Watch this space.

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Jun 12 2025
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My Beautiful Mother

I lost my mother on April 1st this year, 9 months after losing my father. I have already written about him, and I have added the eulogy I wrote about my mother here:

Renate, our mother was born in Spandau in Berlin in 1932, and according to our maternal grandmother, was, a perfect looking little baby.  However, her curiosity and naturally inquisitive nature began to develop so that by the time she was four, my grandmother had to drag her off the bus because she had persisted in asking every elderly gentleman why they didn’t have any hair.

They moved to the North of Germany when she was about six and life as the middle child of four other siblings became filled with the fear of the Russian invasion, culminating in her becoming a refugee on her thirteenth birthday and fleeing to the south via various relatives.  During this time, she spent occasions in hospital, once for her tonsils and once for her appendix, and spent most of her recovery wandering around, writing love letters for long term patients and sitting by the beds of others asking them questions about their lives.

At sixteen, she went to a boarding school that specialised in training towards teaching and drama. There she was offered a scholarship to the equivalent of RADA in Germany, but she turned it down.  She didn’t mind speaking in public, but she hated the idea of being or playing anyone but herself. 

By the time she was 21 she had learnt shorthand, typing and English, and went to a posting in the North of England to improve her language skills, while working as an au pair.  She managed to become friends with other au pairs, went hiking in Scotland with them and reached her 22nd birthday. The plan was to return to Germany for good after that but her friends invited her on a coach trip with other locals to the Lake District.  Little did she know her fate was going to alter from that decision.

She met our father, the eighteen-year-old Terry Walsh on this fated trip. He had specifically agreed to come, because he had heard that there were some interesting, not English, young women joining.  While he decided on that day that he had met the woman he was going to marry, describing her as a woman with a beautiful soul, Renate was not quite as fast in feeling the same way.  She was struck by his deep voice and soulful manner, but she had much to achieve in the next few years.  They spent her last two weeks in England dating, she being introduced to our paternal grandparents, who had hoped she might too flighty to be a keeper for their young son, but they found that Renate was the opposite of that.

Renate returned to Germany, Terry and she agreeing to write and to visit each other.  She moved to Dusseldorf near her eldest beloved sister Barbara, where she started looking for work.  She got work as a bilingual secretary for several organisations, but the job she loved most was an American Management Consultancy named George S May.  She was by this time earning more than Terry in England and was posted at one point to Paris where she stayed at the famous George V Hotel and worked and played hard.  There is a photo somewhere (cut?) where Renate is high kicking in a hotel room, to demonstrate just how high her legs could go, the rest of the team applauding.  The letters she writes to our father are peppered throughout with stories of her having met a nice Englishman here or an American man there, all of whom save their last cigarette for her.  It must have driven Terry mad with jealousy.

He popped the question finally, although worried that he might not ever earn enough to look after her and a potential family, and they married in 1960.  Terry had looked for work for Renate when she came to live briefly back in England before they married, and she settled for more au pair work, having had to hand in her notice with a very reluctant George S May.

A tough time began for them in which they moved around northern parts of the UK, where Terry was originally from. At this point Terry was working for Cross & Blackwell.  Jonathan, their first child was born in 1962, and Renate later told me that his arrival made everything good with the world.  She felt totally in the right space to be a mother and embraced its challenges with joy.  Her second child was born in 1965, my good self, and she felt that completed the picture.  However, major adventures were afoot, beginning with a spell in the South of England.

Around 1970 family Walsh were posted to Bangkok, Thailand.  Our mother looked after us and the home, but her work did not end there.  Once the German Embassy had heard that a fully qualified, bilingual secretary had arrived, they demanded her presence.  She didn’t even lose the job when Terry came to one of the parties and imitated Hitler, using a comb for a moustache.  In fact, they insisted she bring him to all their soirees.

By 1973 family Walsh had moved to Kobe Japan, where Renate found herself teaching English language for adult classes.  Somewhere on this globe, there must be a few Japanese people who are equipped with grammatically perfect English and a whisper of a German accent when they speak it.  As a little girl, whenever I was in her company, our mother Renate commanded a great presence.  New noodle shops would invite us to sit and enjoy the first meal on the house, because we were told we would bring good luck.  That was the effect she had.

1976 took Family Walsh to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where once again the German embassy leapt with joy to be able to have Renate Walsh run the office, this time taking on the important role of helping hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who had arrived.  She had a special key that hung around her neck that opened the safe which held the stamp.  That stamp would free the refugees to enter Germany and begin a new life.  She loved the work because she felt she could do good, the way she felt the English Quakers had, when she had been a refugee.

Around 1981 family Walsh found themselves in Seoul, Korea.  The first British school (do you mean a school for British children or a British school for Korean children?) for English speaking children was set up there, by our mother and a handful of others.  Perhaps the pain of having had to send both my brother and me to boarding school due to the lack of expatriate good education had forged her mindset to ensure that other parents did not have to suffer that kind of separation in the future.

By this time, my brother and I were adults and our parents now resided in Switzerland, where Renate became a keen player of bridge, hosted many Christmases  for us and our friends, and enjoyed the fact that she was able to speak to her son or daughter as often as she liked on the phone or even fly across to the UK to see us more frequently. It was in the Swiss mountains that she one day came across a woman desperate to escape her cruel ‘employers’.  Renate recognised a woman in trouble when she saw one and without a moment’s hesitation took the woman to her own home, contacted her embassy and ensured her safe escape from what turned out to be a case of modern slavery.

In 1996 Retirement brought our parents to West Chiltington, West Sussex.  My mother and I went on several trips together – Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid, York and a regular twice a year haunt was a health hotel called Grayshott.  She had got into the habit of Kneipping (pronounced kanipe-ing).  This was based on a herbalist called Dr Kneipp, who believed you got energy from the dew in the grass if you walked on it barefoot at dawn.  My mother and I could be seen around the hotel lawns, barefoot at dawn, wandering in our dressing gowns.  It aroused interest in the manager who consequently invited us for drinks, (which is something that happened all the time with our mother).

She was a complete original, who never really minded what other people thought of her. She was not only our mother, but my best friend and we shall miss her and remember her forever.

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Now I have to learn how to adjust to a world without them both. Both parents were in my life until my ripe age of fifty-nine. It is not just that I miss them both so very much, but I miss the world with them in it and prefer to believe that they are still in it.

The existential angst that has accompanied this horrible time plagues me regularly, making me beg the question of why does one bother marching on. The answer has to be that if marching on is the only thing one can do for now, then so be it. I am lucky enough to have a large set of loving friends and a very supportive, caring husband. I am unlucky enough not to have had the fortune of bearing children, due to the earlier ectopics, fibroids and the hysterectomy that I underwent as a consequence. Growing older is going to have to be a challenge that I face without the exceptional love and adoration that I regularly received from my parents. I do wonder at my age why I am persisting to attempt to express myself, whether that is through my acting ability, or my novel writing or my film script writing or whether it is when I attempt to put colours on paper or canvas. I keep reminding myself that the sheer, random luck of having been born at all is something to be treasured and celebrated in every which way. Travelling will be my mission with the husband and learning methods to enjoy all that life can give. My garden, the glorious Thames and its rich history, the mystery of why we are all here sharing this experience.

On a practical note, I enter this new period in my life with a relatively new agent in addition to my commercial agent, new headshots once again, as the body and face continues its rapid changes so that self discovery appears to be an industrial daily habit, new membership of a few clubs to do with women in film, tv and writing, so that I can generate some motivation and get my engine running. I see both a physical therapist and a psychological therapist regularly to work on how to get my balance on these moody waters. And that is it, for now. Wish me luck and love, as I climb aboard and get my sails ready and wait for that wind to blow.

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Feb 24 2025
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My Beloved Father

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It has been a very long time since I wrote in this blog, mainly because I found it too difficult to put into words what happened in my life over the last year and a half. In the last blog, I mentioned that I couldn’t frame what had happened as it was too traumatic to retell. But I’ve decided I must, now, do so. It has been so epic that I hope I do not bruise anybody within the narrative.

On the morning 31st of August 2023, I called my parents, in my customary way. My father had a couple of months previously, taken to his bed for 48 hours after a nasty digestive attack that he blamed on some turmeric pills, so that may have been the first warning shot. On that morning at the end of August, my brother and sister in law were heading off for the first holiday after recently retiring. That morning, my father, after suffering a huge set of digestive bowel attacks from all directions, had agreed for my mother to call an ambulance. They were waiting for the ambulance to attend. I immediately packed and left our house in London, taking the first train to the village in West Sussex where they lived. When I called from the train, it was clear that the ambulance had been and taken them both to a hospital, as there was no reply on their phone. I then called Worthing Hospital several times and began to panic, when there was no evidence of their admission, but a helpful fellow passenger told me to try Chichester Hospital. By this time I had arrived and managed miraculously to get a cab, who said that she would wait outside their house while I called Chichester. It was confirmed that they were there in the Emergency Room, and the cab kindly took me on for an hour’s drive to Chichester.

I found my ancient parents, my father lying down on painkillers, mother seated holding his hand, in the chaos that is an emergency room. Apart from blood pressure and painkillers, they had been there for an hour and no doctor had attended him. I asked a nurse whether I could approach the doctor, they discouraged it, but I did so anyway. When she told me that she would look at him at some point, I asked her if she also had a father, and whether she would be comfortable knowing that her father, with a completely bloated abdomen, was not being seen.

She looked at me, and stood up and went across to my father, making a comment to him about his daughter. On morphine, my father smiled and said, “Yes, she is like that.”

Over a speeded up set of episodes, it became clear that scans, xrays and many tests had to be done quickly because it became a suspicion that the abdominal bloat was sinister. An incredible surgeon eventually approached me and asked for my father to be wheeled somewhere slightly more private, my mother alongside and myself, and my husband had also arrived. The surgeon took me aside and explained that any close family members needed to be contacted, that my father was in serious danger. He knelt down and took my father’s hand, aware that my father could not hear well. Carefully and audibly, he explained in front of us that my father had an enormous cancerous obstruction in his bowel and that he had two choices. They could operate, in which he had a 20% chance of survival or if they did not act, he would die in agony, within the following four days. No amount of morphine would be enough to stem the pain. My father blinked and asked if there was a humane injection he could receive to just go to sleep and die, but legally, that was not a choice in this country. So, at this point, I was instructed to call my one sibling, my brother who had gone that day on his holiday to Greece with his wife. We arranged that night for my brother to speak on his mobile to my father, because it was assumed that this would be goodbye.

My mother and I were driven home by my husband and from that point, a long string of shocking, overwhelming experiences began. My brother was in complete shock returning immediately from his holiday the next day, his wife on the next flight. My father survived the operation, but proceeded to asphyxiate, have a deathly lung infection, get covid, had kidney problems, post op dementia, became unable to walk or stand, became catheter dependent and despite the promise of contact from the hospital, once he was as well as they could get him, they sent him to a ward, the Ashlyn at the Chichester, which appeared to be a ward where they, having spent so much time saving his life, were starving and dehydrating him to death. We visited almost daily (an hour there and back, the taxis of which I booked weeks in advance for my mother and me) and we managed to get a care company to organise a discharge, with two carers and a hospital bed arranged in my parents home. My brother oversaw his arrival home, despite the refusal on the ambulance workers part to bring him in because of a ledge on the doorway. My brother nearly broke his back insisting on carrying him in. The carers fed and rehydrated my father over those months, I arranged a recliner chair so that he had something to aim for, and slowly his normal mind and body returned, his home a mini hospital downstairs, my mother in shock and pain from all that was happening around her. Over those months, I organised my father’s banking and a stairlift and tried to help him emotionally because he cried nearly every day. He had wanted to go and now he was stuck here. The carers used a Sarastedy to teach him slowly how to develop muscles back in his legs, to learn how to walk and stand again and slowly his digestive system miraculously tiny and sewn together, began to work. He could never rid himself of the catheter for his bladder which was a heartache. In June 2024, he stood when the carer was out of eyesight and my mother was upstairs and reached for his remote control, fell and broke bones in his leg. My brother was attempting to actually have a holiday and on the day he was returning, my father was carted back into hospital, this time Worthing, with a broken femur.

He underwent yet another operation, survived it, and appeared sane and yet made some rather strange demented comments about me and various things. Within three days following the op, his organs (lungs, kidneys particularly) stopped functioning properly, so that it was just the tubes he was attached to that kept him alive. He lost real consciousness and was tossing his head around in a kind of trance that made me want to scream for him. It was explained to us that their attempts to encourage him to take the oxygen mask were being rejected by him, and his body was letting him down. He died 16 June, 2024. Father’s day.

There are no words for how it makes me feel. I can only sob thinking of it. The hospital phoned on the night of his death saying that someone had to collect his things. That they would not keep them for long. When my husband went to collect two days later, they sent possessions belonging to some poor other soul. My husband being my husband, took the incorrect possessions back, 30 minutes drive away.

My father had made me and my mother the co-executors, so I had to do all the work on every aspect of what happens, as well as my father’s tax. My brother, a lawyer, was shocked and hurt by that decision and helped in his best way, by putting me in touch with the right lawyers. Neighbours helped with advice about the funeral, while the Coroner decided to question the cause of my father’s death, which delayed everything from death certificates to other things.

The funeral took place in the local village church and my father was buried there, amongst trees and a gentle feel of the place, with cats treading about curiously watching our little party as we said goodbye to him.

I will never really say goodbye to him. He feels as if he were with me now. We knew and understood each other despite our stormy clashes. He was diagnosed young as a manic depressive and was on medication for large chunks of his life for it. He left school (very Catholic School) with several nervous breakdowns, went at 17 to night school to do a maths o level that he forgot to attend and worked in Billy Birtwhistle’s weaving factory where he quickly got promoted to manager. He trained as a salesman for Proctor and Gamble and ended up becoming a business man working around the whole of South East Asia, landing up in the end, in Switzerland and retiring in West Sussex. He played the guitar and piano and sang wonderful songs and when we lived in Japan, he and I sat together in his car driving me to school listening to the Seekers on those tapes that looked like VHS ones.

He was very against my becoming an actress, but over the last twenty years, he admired my tenacity and believed strongly in my “many talents” as he called them. I will never never forget him and I will never really say goodbye to my beloved Daddy.

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Apr 10 2022
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God of Smells

Today is the first day in a week that I have not had to lie down on the sofa and fall into a brain clogged stupor for four hours just after breakfast. The Captain and I have had COVID. Of the variety that one catches after three vaccinations, so I’m guessing it was in its latest strain. We were COVID virgins and both of us experienced it in very similar ways. We both had one night within the six days of it in which we thought we were in “the eye of the storm”. That experience alone was a test.

I sat upright the entire night in order to manage the mucus in both nose and throat, so that I might be able to continue breathing. My head spun like a washing machine and my dreams were made of dark materials. My throat was so raw that swallowing was a challenge that had to be planned in advance, alongside gargling aspirin and gasps. I would not wish this disease on my worst enemy and this one was the sanitised post vax version. It took me back to childhood illness when the sore throat and temperature felt like a death knell and in moments you would wish just to be struck down so that the hell could end.

Yes, alright, I admit it. I am a hopeless patient. Thank goodness the Captain and I went through it together because we practically crawled around letting out long groans like animals preparing for their own slaughter. It would have been unbearable for any other person to tolerate.

The worst of it was that it completely removed my sense of smell and taste. I had not realised how dependent my entire psychological well-being was on smell, to the point that its temporary disappearance left me in a depression. Smell marks the beginning and end of my day. It begins, when not suffering from COVID, with waking up to a toasty smelling pillow and the sense that the Captain’s warm body, clothed in a soft, musky T-shirt is close by. I get up and open the window, and the air carrying scents of bluebells, daffodils, tulips, primroses, grape hyacinths make themselves known to my nostrils. I go downstairs and put on the kettle. I squeeze the teabag into the boiling water, so that the amber liquid exudes the strong, quality unique to the dried leaves from the Camelia family. I add milk, a comforting sniff of that before it goes in, just to check its freshness.

Showering follows, in which hot water is combined with a range of gels containing jasmine, rose, lavender, rosemary and geranium foaming all over my body and once again its perfumes float up my nostrils. This set of rituals gives me the firm indication that the beginning of the day has taken place. Without it, I do not know where I am, if I am awake or indeed the walking dead. Imagine, once the mucus has cleared, breathing in through the nose and no sensation enters your brain. It makes you feel like a ghost, a shadow in your own life.

The next smells are of the breakfast type, which might entail coffee or toast, all of which produce a party of smells to enjoy. They also, in turn, message my body to feel hunger and the need to satisfy itself, as my system goes into full preparation for eating. Need I go on? Can you see what I am saying? Having no sense of smell removes all of this experience, and that’s just in the morning. A complete lack of sense of time and life pervades me when deprived of my sense of smell. So you can imagine how overjoyed I was yesterday when it came back. So, Gods of Smells, I worship you, I praise you, Oooooo you are so good, Amen. Please never leave my body again.

In other news, my second novel continues, while I restructure it from an old novella and rethink its narrative. I’ve entered a few competitions with my one act play I wrote a while back, but it always seems to be other people who manage to get the literary agent or a deal at a theatre or a role in a film.

My acting “career”, if I dare still call it that, continues with self-tapes and the odd audition, in fact I have to complete an advert self tape by lunchtime tomorrow, but sometimes the experience, metaphorically, of writing a message which you put into a bottle, placing a cork in it and throwing it out to sea can become very, very, very unsatisfying. Especially when you notice other people’s bottles being picked up by enthusiastic agents and publishers and directors and plastering their messages all over Twitter, as if entirely to annoy me. It does make one feel like one is living on an island, understood only by the plants.

I embark on an oil painting course in June and for some reason I am scared. About the amount of materials I need and about how crap I will actually be. But, some might say that I am lucky to have the chance. That I am lucky to not be a refugee. That I am lucky to have a loving family and to have love in my life from husband and friends. That I am lucky to have access to my talents and to be able to mark the minutes of the fast flowing days by using them. And they’d be right.

But right now, like the weather, my heart is raining. And until it stops, I will be miserable. But it will stop. Eventually. And when my heart sees its own sun again. I will agree with some, that indeed, I am lucky.

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