Time Will Tell

The truth of the matter is that I am not a Tardis-flying, sonic screwdriver-wielding, Dalek-conquering Time Lordesse. I am a mother who worries about her son being in Israel (having extended his ticket) without mobile phone connection. I am many other things also, but at the moment I am primarily that. And please do not tell me that everything will be all right. I know this, but the primitive being that is my Core Belief system will have none of it.

The funny thing is I’ll be seeing him on the telly tomorrow night, just after we and the rest of the universe finds out whether The Doctor is really dying and regenerating into Robert Carlyle or whether it has all been a cynical ruse to bump up the ratings. Well the latter we should, perhaps, take as read though I don’t like to dwell on such things. Anyway, it is all over the news, for goodness sake. But as I said, Son of Signs will be on the telly* – singing with one of the (pre-recorded) groups that got through into the next round of Last Choir Standing. Not allowed to tell you which one though.


* - though as it's the first one, there's a chance that his group won't be in it yet.

What If? (or how I might be saving the world and no-one even thanks me for it)

It often surprises me to hear what people think I’m like. Obviously they don’t tell me the uncomplimentary things, nor would I encourage this. The word “calm” is something I frequently hear, and “unflappable.” While these are pretty neutral in terms of how one assesses a person’s character, they seem to be qualities much coveted by people who lead lives that are increasingly rushed and stressful. I wish I possessed them too, to the degree that I appear to. In reality, I am a prey to every flying thought and a mere change in the wind’s direction is enough to increase the pulse rate. My daughter travelling across London during an underground strike is a minefield of what ifs, and don’t even begin to talk about night busses at three in the morning. I shut up about it most of the time or I would drive everyone and myself bonkers. There is no-one better in a crisis than me because I am always primed for it – I never need to read any of those Worst Case Scenario books, my undisciplined but vivid imagination has pictured it all. The single useful thing a cognitive behavioural therapist identified was that one of my Core Beliefs seemed to be that anxiety was in some way helpful: that by worrying one perhaps prevented the worst from happening. Obviously it isn’t helpful. “I” know that, even if my core believer doesn’t. It takes energy. It is not a good thing. On the other hand, but this will remain forever unverifiable, perhaps it is only my anxiety that is preventing the world from falling into imminent destruction – in which case, dear reader, you should really be thanking me. I’ve been doing it too long, though. Someone else want to take over?

Proof of the Pudding

Things are a bit unsettled in the Signs household. Having put these words down I realise that this is not particularly true. The household, apart from the cat giving herself therapeutic grass emetics and leaving mysterious puddles on floors and windowsill, is as normal. I am unsettled. Worrying too much is one of the things I secretly do, and the focus is often my children. Sometimes, though, there is good reason, as when distressed daughter telephones at two in the morning because of a volatile situation with boyfriend. The gremlin in my soul has whispered for a while that there would be trouble ahead and it does so now, but life goes on.

I have, as a direct consequence of the above, made a discovery: Fray Bentos steak and kidney pudding. I can explain. On a recent shopping trip to the supermarket (this kind of excursion being severely rationed at present), I decided to stock up with a couple of Useful items in case of worse to come in the way of M.E. debility, floods, snowstorms or any other kind of disaster, natural or otherwise. Anyone who has been here before will probably have picked up that I am pretty good about organic veg, lentils and such and eat, more or less, healthily and if I buy tins of anything it will tend to be of things like sweetcorn and kidney beans. I last had a Fray Bentos pie in the 1970s and here, I think, is a clue – that since the second series of Life on Mars began I, with Sam Tyler, have been beamed back to the 1970s and feeling a touch homesick for it. It is pure indulgence and escapism, but harmless unless you happen to find yourself stuck there. So I looked up at the flying saucer tins of Fray Bentos pies that I used to eat in the bedsit with the swarms of silverfish around the sink and fungus growing in the corner of the loo, and very acceptable they were too, eaten with Batchelor’s giant marrowfat peas. It would do for my son, I thought, when he needed something quick and substantial. It would be a novelty and I could sit and tell him about the good old days while he ate it. But my hand reached for the pudding instead. It was the promise of “made with Oxo gravy” that clinched it, and it was for me, not my son, that I wanted it. Food as mother never made it. I put it at the back of the cupboard and the back of my mind, but today, weak-limbed and worried about my daughter, with nothing in the house to eat but the hard end of a black unyeasted rye loaf and a jar of organic capers, and feeling hungry in the low blood sugar must-eat-soon way, I ate it. It was wonderful. There was too much of the pudding bit in relation to meat, but still. I wouldn’t have complained if I’d been served it in a proper restaurant with side-dish of steamed veg to accompany (which in this case I did not have). The down side is that I will need to schedule in another trip to the supermarket, and there may still be trouble ahead. I am, for the moment, fortified.