Ramblers

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I heard my children designing a garden for me. I happened to pass by their pretend play, and their conversation fell upon my ears. Their little childish tones often blurring into a background hum for me, with my mind racing as it always does, to-do lists and next steps.. but this time their sweet little high voices filtered through the chaos and I heard them loud, bright and clear.

And it will be filled with all Mama’s FAVWUT flowers!

And what are those? Hydrangeas?

No, silly, she loves roses.

No, I think she loves hydrangeas.

I think you’re wrong, hydrangeas don’t even smell nice. She wants roses.

Well, let’s just have both and then she can choose!

They’re both right (and sweet). I love both flowers for their vibrant blooms, but the rose has a soft spot in my heart. It might be because my grandmother had beautiful roses in her garden. She loved her plants, and her garden bloomed with all sorts of colour in the summer.

I love the rose because of its wide variety of scent. I love how it nods happily come rain or shine, it’s many velvety faces looking out at the world in a sort of rosey wonder that only the fairy world can understand. And perhaps some favoured souls may be privy to this world. I quite fancy I have had the privilege to be allowed a glimpse or two myself.

If I could have a garden filled with only one type of flower, it would certainly be the rose. Why I could lie myself back and feel a soft, cooling waft of air, and inhale their sweet, fruity, lemony scents, and know in their companionship, nodding away in the breeze with me, I could feel such contentment.

My favourite kind are the ramblers. The rambling rose, for she drapes herself so cheerily, confidently, over anything she passes, and dresses it most beautifully, whether it wants to be dressed or not. And you often find it comes away feeling mighty pleased with itself, for being so graced by her majesty the rambling rose.

On being low.

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I am tired. I don’t know if I have ever felt this tired in my entire life. My very bones are exhausted. They scream at me when I roll/haul my bloated self out of bed.

I feel like each day gets harder and harder to get through, but still I pull myself through the days. Dragged by the ragged rope that is my sense of responsibility towards my family and children. Otherwise, believe me, I would be wrapped up in the soft yet firm cocoon that is my bed, and I would stay there. For hours. Days, even. Emerging only to bathe, eat, pray, and freshen myself up.

I want to be put on bed rest, but I don’t need to be.

Why, even typing this out feels exhausting on my limbs. Elbows, fingers, hands. I just want to stop, close my eyes.

But I cannot. My babies need me.

I sat the other day in between a stint of shopping with my kids for some summer clothes – the scorching heat has already encroached on us – anyway, I sat. I sat and I thought, how on EARTH am I going to make it through three more months of this?! Well, two more months.

I don’t know if I can stumble through this week, let alone two more months of constant GROWING.

I do NOT remember feeling like this during my last pregnancies.

I took a blood test last week, and it said my iron levels were ‘normal’, but when I checked the numbers against the metric, my levels actually very dangerously low.

Anyway, the world doesn’t feel so catastrophically hard anymore. Well, it DOES, but there is a reasonable explanation for it. For my catastrophising. For my exhaustion. For my lack of will to keep taking a step forward.

Low IRON, that’s it!!!

Well I hope that’s it. Let’s fix us some iron, shall we?

Life, Discontinued.

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How do people measure that something can ‘increase a lifespan’?

lifespan

What makes it so people expect that they will live to be a certain age? Why do people say ‘she died too young’? or ‘it wasn’t his time’ if somebody dies while they are young? Lots of people die while they are young.

Their life ended. It was over. It finished.

Did this death cut their life short, somehow?

I don’t think so. I think their death came at the exact time it meant to. Their life did end. It wasn’t interrupted.

So why do they say, “such and such will increase your lifespan” or, “if you do this, you will live longer.”

Well, you won’t. You will die exactly when you were expected to. You might be hit by a ship one day as you kayak the sea on a spontaneous whim. Or you might have your leg chewed off by a crocodile, and die from the infection. You might even die when you are ninety six and three days old, peacefully in your sleep.

You might die after two weeks of heart failure, your organs slowly deteriorating as each hour passes. Your daughter next to you, nodding off to the gentle labour of your slowing breaths.

You might die one day, far away from all those you love, because you didn’t spend enough time with them.

You might die when you are a child, shattering the hearts of your protectors.

How will something ‘increase your lifespan’, then?

It won’t.

You might try to live a stress-free life, to be happier, healthier, live longer, but ultimately you will die exactly when you are destined to.

And that is why they should say ‘decreases risk of disease’, rather than ‘increases lifespan’. Because that is what it does, isn’t it? It lowers the risk of you dying of a disease. That is what they really mean. Nobody wants to die from a disease, so if you eliminate disease, what do you get?

You get death from another cause.

lifespan (1)

Impression of Heat

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There is deep exhaustion everywhere. The kind that climbs onto your shoulders, places warm sweaty palms on your eyes, and rests its long tentacles along your bones. You can’t shake it off, no matter how much you sleep.

You long for the respite of the cool night air, but it never comes. Perhaps there is a moment of happiness in a new ice cream cafe, a walk with a friend sipping iced lattes at 11pm, the discovery of a new book to take you away from this fetid existence. A moment, maybe. Two of them.

Air conditioning units humming through the night, causing your throat to dry out like sandpaper, causing your cough to hack you awake from restless and clammy dreams.

Then you decide enough is enough, you will venture out, bring the world to your eyes so they may drink, make the most of where you are. But it is a concrete wilderness. House upon house, bridges stretching over gleaming highways. Bloated with traffic. The kind that has sharp, hot, exhaust-fumed edges and dogged determination. Every exit is a game of chicken. Cars coming out of intersections at the speed of bullet trains. Do I brake, do I carry on, do I assert myself, do I give in.. so much at risk though. So much. So ultimately, do I really want to be outdoors fighting for my life against these metal machines driven by people who believe they will live forever?

It’s a gleaming, shining, sterile city, if you choose to look at it that way. Malls and shopping complexes, five star dining and the most luxuriant cosmetics and decadent foods. Women dressed like queens, men smelling like musk and oud. Pristine. Polished. Smooth. Convenience on a plate. Someone will take your groceries to your car for you, happy to carry your children, clean your home, cook your food. You don’t need to lift a finger if you don’t want to. If you don’t have a maid or nanny there is shock in their eyes.

And dust everywhere. Brown sky, brown ground, plants wilt and die, death rises up to meet death.

A bed of luxury at death’s doormat.

Do we walk away from Omelas?

“Wuthering Heights”

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I staunchly defended this Emerald Fennell’s right to create an ‘interpretation’ of a lauded classic, for many weeks before I actually sat down to watch “Wuthering Heights” as it is so named.

I said, people must be allowed the freedom of expression to express their creativity on a piece of literature such as this!

Mind you, I am a purist. I love Emily Bronte’s dark and insane work. It spoke to me at ten years old in one particular way, and then over the years as my ever-growing brain revisited it, it spoke to me differently each time. The older I get, the more weary I feel towards it, but it still has its inexplicable pull.

As younger me put it:

I finished a re-read of Jane Eyre last month and yesterday I turned the last page on that chaotic nightmare that is Wuthering Heights. It’s my fourth time reading it and I tell you, it’s emotionally unhinged. It tells me a different story each time I read it. This time, it spoke of futile hope when love and kindness are not given freely. Also that people ought to socialise with people other than their own families sometimes lest they all marry each other for want of better things to do.

So I watched this controversial “Wuthering Heights”. I was prepared to put aside all judgement and criticism and just attempt to enjoy it for what it was but I fear.. I … could not!

Oh I could not. Oh how disgusted I felt! How stunned and how witheringly irritated. I felt as though it had been stripped bare of all of Bronte’s painstaking intricacy, only leaving the haunting imagery of a weak sexual fever dream of what a fifteen year old, over twenty years ago, would have imagined it to be, not having understood it at all.

We have a tortured love story, consummated towards the end, but never satisfied with an everlasting union, and a set decked for conquest. Adorned for gaudy exuberance. Attired for extravagance. We are shown so much visually, but are told so little. I see feeble attempts at deeper analytical exploration, but it all falls so terribly flat. We have the brilliance of a woman who lived a short life over 150 years ago stripped to bare, primal essentials, and dressed in modern-day fluff.

Oh, it was awful. I tried to detach from Wuthering Heights to watch it as it was meant to be, an entertaining piece of pulp, but I could not. I found it lacking substance. Empty like a vanity cake. Decorated so vibrantly, nothing inside. A rotten core. No core at all. Where is that rich, decadent yolk? We just have a cracked shell.

The film did fantastically well, of course, so I expect the makers got what they desired from it, and that is all that matters, isn’t it. I do wish they had named it anything other than ‘Wuthering Heights’ – because they could have made it any story at all. They didn’t need to say it was what it wasn’t.

Savoury Life

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I don’t know if my brain is becoming smooth.

Ideally it should be more wrinkly, the wrinklier the better, I am told.

AI usage, mental convenience and delegation and short-form content on the regular are making my attention span shorter.

I feel any information I do consume stays in my short-term memory box, and I am left on a weird intellectual loop. Saying, thinking, planning the same old things month in, month out, year in, year out, with no significant change occurring.

This is where I say it will all stop but I guess I am just fooling myself. At the very least, I am aware. Being aware is one step closer to making a change, is it not?

I am based in the Middle East currently. Since the 11th of May, 2025, actually. The situation here is stable but volatile. People are going about their daily lives while missiles are being intercepted every day – sometimes you hear them and the house shakes, and alerts go off on your phone that you can’t turn off saying to head to a safe space… except there are no safe spaces. No basements or bomb shelters, so you have to think where is the safest place in my house where I won’t get crushed? I am more worried for my kids than myself. If this war escalates to something nuclear I think we are all screwed, no matter where we are in the world. And I think it’s safe so say we all know this is a war fuelled by ego, Epstein file cover up, the US being in Israel’s pocket, Israel furthering it’s Greater Israel agenda and keeping Netanyahu out of jail… the US is ruled currently by an illiterate madman. But hey, are we surprised? No. We just hope to be safe, I think we can all agree on that. I am just really sad and shocked and worried for my kids’ future. The world we seem to be bequeathing to them is chaotic, frightful and full of smoke and mirrors. What is real, in this age of AI and corporate lies?

I shall try my very best here, in this torrid place. Summer is creeping back in, for there is no winter here, no spring and no colourful autumn.

Just summer, hot hot burning summer, and then… gentle summer, or what people here call winter. I used to dream about this place, for it is where I grew up, but I am back now, and I long to escape once more. Just as I did as a child. Rose-tinted glasses, folks.

We are at the mercy of electricity here. If it goes out, the cool air goes, and we are left to bake in an aching dryness that feels like death. It is death, it’s death. How can I raise my children in death?

Like I was raised in death?

Taught to fear everything, never to feel secure?

But I see people here and they are so secure. They are secure from the bombs falling, not even gasping or running when the shopping mall booms and shakes from interceptions above. Swishing around in their expensive clothes, heels clicking on polished floors, they feel secure. Their children are secure, no anxiety, nannies running after them, adhering to their every whim. Why then, am I insecure? Why are my children worried, afraid to fall asleep because a plane sounds too loud, afraid to go on a school trip because they may be left behind? Are they swallowing my insecurities? If so, that is very very bad.

I long to be back in a nature that envelops me and does not seek to devour my moist flesh.

I long for my children to run in fields again, to climb trees, to fish for frogs in puddles and to collect the sweet scented roses that are abundant in my garden. I long for my little girl to pick up worms again, kiss them fondly and name them, to cherish the ladybirds that infiltrate our house through the seasons, hibernating in the corners of the ceiling for months on end. I miss the old oaks, the spring explosion of magnolia and cherry blossom.

But I don’t know what this future holds. And perhaps seeking financial stability that comes at the cost of health and happiness and a cool breeze is just… not… worth it.

Thirty Two

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I am thirty two today. It slipped my mind entirely. I am expecting.

Guests and a baby.

I am also so exhausted and burnt out. I feel like I don’t know where I begin and end. Where does daily life meld into anything to do with myself. Am I just a blob drifting through this life? Do I want to live this kind of life? Maybe it’s got to do with my perspective.

ANYWAY. I didn’t mean to get all morose!!

I am thirty two today!

The only person who ever remembers this fact is my mother. She is not well at the moment. Mentally. She is there, she is aware, but at the same time she really is not. It’s such a strange experience. I miss her dreadfully. I miss her voice. Her little ‘isms’. Even the things that used to annoy me about her, I want her to have a go at me for complaining about the smell of cooking on my clothes.

Anyway she isn’t well so of course nobody will remember. This doesn’t bother me because I don’t bother about birthdays, nor have I ever bothered about them. So it’s fine, of course. It’s just a thought I have though that even something insignificant to me, would have been significant to my mother.

I just really miss her.

I also now have a deeper understanding of mental illness. A deeper appreciation of it, and people who go through it, in a way I never did before.

There’s thirty two!

On Concordes and Helicopters

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One of the nicer moments I had with my mum before her recent lapse into severe anxious depression happened in the summer of 2025.

We were at Manchester Airport’s Runway Park, one of my son’s favourite places. There is a real retired British Airways Concorde in a hangar there, and he got to see up close the mighty point and the smooth, seamless majesticity (is that a word?) of it.

My mum was only just starting the slippery descent into depression and I was missing all the signs. I felt the foreboding feeling radiating from her and cloaking me in its clammy presence, but I ignored it, I shook it off, I tried to point things out to her that would please her.

There was a moment where my two children were running wild in a field after we had finished our picnic lunch, and my mum and I sat watching them. We watched my boy reach the far end of the field, and I said to my mum, “watch, watch him now. He is going to stick his arm out in front of him like a point and run as fast as he can, just like a Concorde.”

He did do that. Zooming towards us, pointing, with his little sister rolling her arm like a windmill as she ran because she was still in the ‘helicopter’ mode that her brother had previously been in before the Concorde took its place in the ‘current obsession’ part of his mind.

My mum laughed.

Oh she laughed aloud. I hadn’t heard her laugh loudly like that for weeks. I didn’t realise this until now, nearly a year later, watching her suffer in some deep dark place in her mind.

When he reached us she put her arms around the little Concorde and said how she loved him.

That, I think, was the last nice moment we had together.

Before her descent into deep deep depression.

Take care of your mums, folks. Life is a dreary and drab place when they are not there.

Things Said [1]

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In today’s episode of ‘Things I Want to Remember my Child Saying’, we have my daughter, newly turned 5, self proclaimed ‘Princess Flower Nice Doctor Giraffe’, not easily embarrassed, with starlight in her eyes and sunshine in her steps..

I was brushing her hair, and happened to mention the voice note she sent to a friend containing a joke she had newly heard was received very well by the friend. Let’s call him Apple.

‘Apple loved your joke’, I said, twirling a curly lock of her hair in my fingers and setting it on her shoulder, before beginning on the next lock.

‘Oh, that’s good!’ said she.

‘Do you remember Apple?’ I asked, because it had been nearly a year since we moved away from the UK, and she hadn’t seen him since May.

‘Yes Mama, of course I do. I always remember people, I am a Remembering Girl.’

Yes indeed. You really are.

Random Thoughts 2022

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Stephanie Meyer published a book called ‘Midnight Sun’. It is a retelling of her famous Twilight novel from the perspective of the male love interest, a vampire named Edward. In 2009, when the Twilight series was all the rage, I was fourteen years old. I was enamoured, to be honest. My parents forbade me from reading vampire romance so reading in the dark, in secret, made it all the more glorious. Oh I savoured every word. Anyway. All this is to say that hearing about Midnight Sun sparked some curiousity so I read some reviews and watched some ‘booktubers’ talking about it and have come to the conclusion that my 27 year old self really doesn’t have the time to read about the inner thinkings of a hundred and something year old vampire who decides, with the gift of immortality, to spend time in a highschool with sixteen year olds, and falls in love with one of them. I mean. I am 27. If I was immortal, highschool would be the last place I would spend my time, my goodness.

I realised this week, when my 2 year old had his first ever tummy bug, that I have to put my own tummy bug on hold in order to deal with his. I had to still rush up and down stairs, cleaning out vomit from sheets and floors and buckets, disinfecting everything. I had to make sure he was hydrated, and lie next to him ready with the bucket at his slightest stir. It’s amazing how the human body works. One minute I was so exhausted I couldn’t get off the sofa, and the next I was hurtling across the room to catch my child, who was shivering and hot and had vomit in his hair. Lovely.

There is also a ‘petrol shortage’ in the UK. I think it’s just a combination of panic-buying and a shortage of lorry drivers due to Brexit. Funny that, isn’t it. Leavers were worried ‘foreigners’ were taking all their jobs… now not enough ‘foreigners’ are taking the jobs. Funny funny irony. Thankfully we do not use our car much, so we are alright. But I have heard tales of ambulances not being able to fuel up due to the ‘shortage’ and have seen plenty of memes about ‘loo roll wankers’ being the same douchebags who are filling up plastic water bottles with petrol because this is apparently the end of times and what do we need most in an apocalypse? Petrol. Oh. Humanity.

I spend a lot of time thinking but my thoughts are to-do lists.

2026: Why I am publishing this list of 2022 thoughts now, I have no idea. I came across it in my drafts folder and sentiments sure have changed in 4 years. My 2 year old is now almost 7, and I have a nearly 5 year old, and my thoughts are occupied by far more complex things! But why not publish this, why ever not.