I'm giving. Are you?

The holidays are coming up fast and, as usual at this time of the year, many of us are thinking of the less fortunate. For my part, I’d like to make a quick plug for my charity of the year:

Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research

They are still the only national research charity solely devoted to blood disorders in both adults and children. 24,500 people in the UK every year are diagnosed with a cancer of the blood and leukaemia is the most common form of cancer in children in the UK. They rely entirely on voluntary donations.

My mother died suddenly of leukaemia about 18 months ago, which is why I’m plugging them (instead of Cats’ Protection who I’d normally opt for).

They have a webpage here and tons of auctions on eBay.

Thanks for listening.

Yahoo news has an article today about an amazing therapy that has wiped out leukemia in two of three test subjects and greatly improved the condition in the third. This could be a big step forward in the search for a cancer cure.

Of course, it still needs extensive testing and the long-term effects must be evaluated (it’s only a year in at the moment but the patients remain in remission) but it’s great news.

Something to brighten your day and bring hope to millions of cancer sufferers around the globe.

I’ll be posting another excerpt from my upcoming release in my next post, so you can expect something extraordinarily useful (as usual, of couse!).

Watch this space!

To me, life is one pure stream of logic, interrupted only by the peregrinations of the human race as we mess around with the way things were supposed to be. Logic applies to all things (even my good lady, in a strange way). That’s not to say I’m an emotionless robot-man, of course: I just fall back on the scientific and logical more than the emotional.

There is, however, one thing that defies my logic.

My lady is lucky enough to have what I call “a poetic heart”.  When she thinks of clouds scudding across the sky, she doesn’t think of the water cycle or what kind of clouds they are; instead, she thinks of comparisons about feelings or faces or places or sensations. In other words, she is an bottomless mine of analogy, metaphor and simile.

I have always been jealous of this.

Whenever I read novels, I try to pick up on the sort of imagery used and how it works. I try to think of similar things I could when describing people, places and objects in my own writing – but since I’m very logical, I approach it more from a functional than an emotional standpoint.

To me, this is a shortcoming of my creative writing. It doesn’t matter so much in the day-to-day marketing materials I write or the process of editing someone else’s copy but I still feel the gap in my set of skills.

Hopefully, this way of thinking is something I can learn as I practice it. Hopefully it will become second nature (or at least third) in time. But I still have the nagging fear that it’s something she was born with and which I will never achieve.

How about you? Is there something you feel you’re missing and which continually escapes you, no matter how hard you try? Tell me about it…

A bacon rasher. Much nicer than a skin rash.

I woke up this morning – and several times in the night – with some kind of annoying, itchy rash. This probably means I’m allergic to something I ate yesterday but it made me wonder:

Why do I assume I’m allergic?

Being a reasonably (OK, admittedly far-too) logical and positive person, there is only a certain number of explanations I am willingly to apply to a given situation.

This is entirely normal for a rational adult: our upbringing and experience of the real world sets limits on that which we define as “normal” or “acceptable”. We all do it, every day – that guy over there with the bulge in his jacket isn’t carrying a gun; the bus didn’t stop because it was full, not because the driver hates me; a job is a worthwhile use of my time… the list of rationalisations to keep ourselves sane is endless.

But then I mentioned the situation to my good lady…

Suddenly, I was confronted by an altogether-different list of possibilities. Perhaps I have chicken pox. Perhaps I have a serious skin disease. Perhaps it’s scarlet fever. Perhaps I should seriously consider visiting the doctor to find out if one or more of these is true.

Apparently, my set of acceptable reasons to have a red, itchy, annoying rash was ill-considered. I spoke to a pharmacist and took an anti-histamine as a sort of compromise, since she would otherwise not let me have a moment’s peace.

But then I mentioned the situation to my writing imagination and suddenly a completely different list of possibilities came to mind:

1. I was abducted by aliens in the night and the rash is a result of the tests they did on me before implanting some kind of galactic tracking device that will allow them to pursue their secret and decidedly ambiguous – though not necessarily evil – plan for humanity’s future.
2. I am transforming into some sort of über-human as the result of chemicals introduced into my diet by a secret government agency bent on undermining what little influence I will ever have by making my skin bright red. And itchy.
3. I slept too close to the window and ξ-rays emanating from a passing anomaly in the universe have affected my genetic makeup, slowly transmogrifying me into a real-world version of Mr. Fantastic. I will end up being Mr. Scratchypatch or Rashman, complete with fabulous super-powers to halt crime by causing the perpetrators to stop and itch uncontrollably.
4. I am slowly dying from some kind of skin disease but a mysterious stranger will appear on my doorstep to take me on a wonderful adventure where not only will I find a cure for this (and all other) form(s) of human suffering, but I will meet incredible people, visit implausible places and perform unlikely acts of heroism to capture the heart of a beautiful princess. Who I will then dump, since I’m happily engaged.

I am inclined to believe that I am allergic to something. What do you think?

That all changed when I had one myself.

Are you one of those people who says they’ll unpack everything when they move to a new home, then completely fails to do so and ends up with a room full of unmarked, anonymous brown containers with… well, goodness only knows what in them?

As you’ve probably guessed, I am. I must have been in our current house for at least four years now and some of the boxes sitting in the computer (box) room probably haven’t been touched since I left France. That was about seven years ago!

Today, I finally finished reorganising and going through everything (barring a few that still need sorting out). It’s amazing the stuff that was in there – souvenirs, memories and things that I must have thought would be useful one day.

Among the more bizarre items are some old Atari ST games (for which I no longer have a machine to run them), half a dozen electrical adapters for appliances that could be spaceships or DIY equipment for all I know (though neither is likely) and a gigantic bag full of coat hangers. Given that I only own two coats, this is very strange.

The world is a better place for the bin bags that now sit outside the house, waiting to be removed.

Ignoring those things, though, there were some wonderful little items that reminded me of who I used to be and made me ponder the changes my life has gone through:

• A box of 5¼-inch diskettes. I still remember how proud I was of filling a double-sided disk for my A-level project. These days, that wouldn’t even hold a photo!
• A pile of training documents from my first “real” job as an IT trainer. I have to admit I got a good chuckle out of reading my writing from some fifteen or more years ago.
• A four-CD player that I had in an old PC. I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread because it could hold more than one CD… even though the access and read times were appalling.
• A box with all my old company documents from when I was an IT freelancer in Paris. I can’t believe how organised I was back then and how important it all seemed!
• My old address book from University. Flicking through it brought an enormous grin to my face as each name evoked an image of someone I’d not thought about in years. I wonder where they are these days and what they’re doing…

Admittedly, I’m not one to sit down and meditate on the various stages of life but I have to say that finding dozens of objects like these is great. It puts perspective on how I spend my time now and the relative importance of things that seemed vital at the time.

Have you opened an old box recently and found some  memories waiting inside to be rediscovered? Good ones or bad? I’d love to hear about it!

There’s a lot of reasons, not least of which is my becoming an orphan. Now there’s a strange feeling: I’ve read plenty of books where the hero/ine loses one or both of their parents and felt sympathy for them. I’ve seen loads of Jackie Chan movies in which he frequently plays an orphan for extra sympathy for his character. I lost one parent ten years ago. I thought I knew what I was in for.

But nothing – and when I say “nothing”, I mean nothing – can express the feeling of losing the eternal, reliable rock that was your mother and father. It’s a real slap in the face to suddenly discover they’re not eternal after all, that they won’t always be there to listen to your nonsensical crap that seems so important or to do your washing when you pop home for the weekend. As one friend put it when she heard the news: “Nothing’s ever quite the same again.”

Even worse is when they’re taken without warning. My dad, for example, had a long illness that meant we had time to say all the things we wanted to say, to sort out the bad stuff, to get answers to certain questions and to be at peace with the whole thing.

But my mum went quickly. One day she felt a bit ill, ten days later she was gone. There was no time to talk, no time to ask the things I so desperately want to know now – just enough time to sear a couple of excruciatingly painful memories on the inside of my forehead, where they remain, branded into my skin and forever in view of my mind’s eye.

It’s like someone’s torn out a piece of me and dropped a singularity in its place: no matter how hard I try, no matter what I do and no matter how many things I throw into that hole, it just eats them up and stays empty.