Another Really Good Sandwich

Currently, I do not feel the urge to blog. My life is a nonstop whirl of work, because uni hate me and set the deadline for my dissertation proposal/sample chapter for the 9th January AND I HAVE TO POST THE FUCKING THING IN THE ACTUAL POST, so realistically, I need to finish it and post it by the 5th at the latest. I am, however, well proud of what I've got planned. Soph: Crime and Sexuality Historian at your service. I have a four month research break from January-May and then seven months of write up...and then, fuck knows. A job? Hold tight, NHS, I'm coming back to administrate you!

As well as work, I am trapped by the twin rock of grief and anxiety. Grief for my mum, whose loss lingers in every lit up window, in every Christmas card, in every present wrapped. Grief in every present I would have bought her. Grief in everything I want to phone and ask her ("Mum, are you sure this bloody pudding needs three hours steaming??"). Grief in everything I want to share with her, every nativity and every funny thing Alex (experiencing his third Christmas, but his first as a properly aware person) comes out with. 

And anxiety, because having a stupid fucking anxiety disorder which has MOSTLY gone away since The Worst Thing That Could Happen Happened And I Survived, rears its hideous and unwanted head at Christmas. "What if you all DIE ON CHRISTMAS EVE?" it whispers into my ear. "DID YOU LEAVE THE OVEN ON? WILL THE HOUSE BURN DOWN? I BET IT WILL". "YOU'LL VOMIT ALL OVER YOURSELF AND THE CHRISTMAS DINNER AND THE CHILDREN WILL HOWL AND YOU WILL REMEMBER THIS AS THE CHRISTMAS OF PUKE". I know it's irrational. It doesn't make it any easier to bear. My festive anxiety is not a new thing. As a seven(ish) year old, my parents had to take me to the emergency doctors on Christmas Eve because I was in such excruciating pain. It was just excitement. I used to puke every single Christmas Eve. The last time was when I was about 22. It's quite irrational. Thankfully, my endometriosis painkiller is also an anxiolytic, so at a push, I can eat them until I fall into a passive coma (*don't try this at home, kids*).

But this is all by the by. I came to give you a brilliant recipe for your leftover turkey, because I have always been revolted by the very fucking idea of cold turkey with a plate of bubble and squeak (sorry Dad). On Boxing Day, we don't have the older two boys, so I tend to breakfast on prosecco and REALLY EXPENSIVE bacon sandwiches like a luxuriant slattern. But you can't actually live on prosecco and bacon (and cheese) for the entire festive period (I KNOW, SO UNFAIR). 

This is an adapted form of the Vietnamese sandwich, Banh Mi, which I have bastardised from a recipe by Niki Segnit in the fabulous The Flavour Thesaurus. If you're carnivorous, you can probably assemble this sandwich from what you have on hand. And it is WORTH getting rice wine vinegar in just to make it, believe me. It needs a little work in advance, but not like Christmas dinner levels, and it's bright and refreshing in a sea of fat and carbs and fat. 

Sorry, no veggie/vegan alternative, but the pickled veg is bloody lovely in most things or indeed, on its own. 

You Will Need For About Four Sandwiches:

For The Pickle

A peeled carrot

An unpeeled cucumber

Rice wine vinegar

Salt

Sugar

For Assembly

Pâté - chicken liver for preference, but it's Christmas so whatever you've got. Nothing too spicy or herby though. 

Mayonnaise - Helmans is fine

Fish sauce (aka nam pla)

Soy sauce

Leftover turkey shredded into strips

Four short baguettes cut not-quite-in-half lengthways

Fresh coriander, but it's not essential

This is a recipe of two halves, so you need to plan it a tiny bit. 

First, pickle your veg, Cut your cucumber and carrot into matchstick pieces. I am crap at cutting them this fine, but you want them fairly thin because nobody wants to bite down on a fucking enormous piece of carrot in their sandwich. Take the seeds out of the cucumber as you chop it up, or the resulting pickle will be a wet seedy mess. Once they are cut, cover them in salt and leave them for ten to twenty minutes. I do this with them on a piece of kitchen roll in a colander in the sink, because the salt draws the moisture out and then it drains straight out into the plughole rather than sitting about, sludgily. When you think they've had long enough, rinse them, dry them and then put them in a bowl. Mix about four tablespoons of rice wine vinegar with a tablespoon of sugar and then pour if over the veg. Leave it in the fridge to marinate until you want it. I tend to do this in the morning if I'm eating in the evening but you can really do it any time in the 24 hours before you want to eat. This sounds a faff. It is not. 

And so to assembly. Drain the veg. Mix some mayonnaise with a dash of fish sauce and a dash of soy sauce - you don't want to make the mayo too runny. Then spread one cut side of the baguette with mayo. Spread the other side with pâté. Warm it through in the oven. Then stuff the baguette with drained veg and shredded turkey. Add fresh coriander.

EAT, GORGE, CONSUME! MAKE MERRY! 

At this rate, my first book will be Soph's Big Book Of Fucking Amazing Sandwiches.

Merry Christmas xxx

Stir

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people

When I was a child, Christmas began at some point in late November, when Mum made the Christmas pudding. The last Sunday before Advent, known as Stir Up Sunday, was the Pudding Day by ecclesiastical law. 
My mum, never one to do things by halves, made enough puddings to feed the five thousand. An enormous washing up bowl would be summoned from the utility room and sterilised. My dad (or later, me) would be sent to the shops to buy suet or mixed candied peel, or some other seasonal obscurity. A quantity of booze, usually untouched in a cupboard for eleven months of the year, would emerge. And then the weighing and measuring. She used an old Delia recipe, much amended, and a truly ancient kitchen scale that only measured in pounds and ounces. And the house would be suffused with the smell of allspice and clove, beer and fruit, the same sweetness you get in mincemeat but amplified. 

When the washing up bowl was full, sticky and incorporated, we would be summoned to stir the pudding, traditionally with the youngest going first, but as we grew older, whenever Mum could pull us into the kitchen to stir it. She was loath to portion it up for steaming until we'd all had a stir. Long after I'd left home, I would try to arrange to go round every Stir Up Sunday. It was her labour of love, giving puddings as gifts to loads of people, putting her heart and soul into it and then FURIOUSLY STEAMING THEM FOR ABOUT A DAY once they were made, in a great tower of constantly refilled steaming pans. 

In 2015, my mum's last Christmas had we but known it, her carpal tunnel syndrome was playing up so I made the pudding up. She portioned it all out, I mixed it up and got elbow-deep in pudding mix, working it together while she watched on and told me when I was doing it wrong. 

Last year, she'd just died. My brother in law, Scott, made the puddings. I'd just had surgery. Everyone was a bit numb still. There was no stirring event.

So, as it so often the case, it's this Stir Up Sunday that hurts. I could have made enough pudding to feed the five thousand, but I can't bear the thought of it, the smell, the feel, without Mum there. It's fucking freezing outside, the house down the road is beginning to put its amazing light display up, I've done most of the shopping, but it all feels unreal. 

I miss my mum. 

The Anniversaries

My dad said, rhetorically, on the anniversary of my mum going into hospital "Why do the anniversaries hurt so much? What makes that day different? Why a year and not eleven months and two weeks"

If only the anniversary of Mum's death was one day. If only the whole of autumn was not stained by loss. My mum lay dying in the garden as the leaves turned yellow and red and brown, and as they fell from the trees, her life fell away. There were conkers and chilly, bright days. There were crosswords, and quiet reading wrapped in fleeces, and five different drinks in case she got thirsty. There was family everywhere, always. The fairy lights twinkled around the garden. The rain swept in and our frightened tears turned to a strange mix of waiting and desperation. It turned cold. Mum still went out for a fag, even if she forgot to smoke it while she was there. And she slipped away quietly, without an audience, on a dark October night. That day was eleven months and two days ago. That day, to quote my six year old, was ages ago. That day may as well have been yesterday for all the difference time makes.

They say time is a healer, and they are quite right, but grief is an unfathomable chasm to cross. It is far easier to say she died eleven months and two days ago than to admit she will always be gone. The first anniversaries are always the strongest, whether it be a happy anniversary or a bad one, but I have no illusions that everything will be fine in a month's time. Or another year. The shock has faded. The reality is unconscionable. The memories, some wonderful, some unpleasant, churn around and keep me awake.

I am flattened by grief at the moment. I wake up exhausted regardless of how much sleep I get, and my head hurts, and my eyes are swollen, and my body is numb. It's as though I have cried all night, but I cry so rarely. I sometimes wonder if my soul is crying all night and my body just hides it away. Maybe I'm doing the grieving in the background because I ensure I have too much to do to ever let it overwhelm me. The slightest hiccup sends me floundering without anchor.

Anniversaries are hard. And when a whole three months is anniversaries, it's even harder. We will endure.

I Miss You

To grieve is to be human.

We all love. We all lose people we love. It never feels timely. It never feels right. There is a grave injustice implicit in loss. There could always have been one more day. One more perfect day, spent well in good company. There is so much regret. There is so much to miss.

Grief is so lonely. For such a collective experience, there is isolation in grief.  Those who know grief understand. Those who have not yet experienced it are wary, struck dumb by not wanting to say the wrong thing or full of platitudes. Lord knows, it is hard to say the right thing.

For the one grieving, there aren't words. There aren't words invented to express the spectrum and depth and breadth of grief. There aren't words to describe the cold-water shock of the world without them, the torrent that sneaks up to engulf you when you don't expect it. Metaphor and simile are a poor substitute for the silent, numbing, screaming agony of loss.

It was my third wedding anniversary last week. On my first wedding anniversary, I had a month old baby. My mum made me and Tom a three course, takeaway meal and looked after the baby for an hour so we could nip to the pub where we had our wedding anniversary for a drink, and the kids for a bit longer so we could eat our takeaway meal in peace. On my second wedding anniversary, I held her hand in hospital. This year, we went out for lunch and as we were leaving, I went to grab her a menu*. And then I remembered.

The slings and arrows of grief come suddenly, from nowhere. It has been nine months and nineteen days since I saw Mum breathe. I have not recovered from the shock of a loss we knew was coming for three months. I have tucked my pain away in a pocket called "later", holding it at bay for a time when I have time to consciously grieve. But there will never be time, so instead it lies beneath the surface and comes spilling from the blue, particularly at this time of anniversaries. The anniversary of her initial illness has passed, so has the anniversary of her diagnosis, and her hospital discharge. But the next few months are chequered with memories of the same days of last year, those nightmarish, weird, unreal days of happiness and fear, joy and pain.

I wrote last year how I might not get to taste my mum's roast dinner again. And I never did. She taught my dad how to do it, but it's not the same. Such a tiny thing to pierce the soul. There are millions of tiny needles, just piercing the skin, each one labelled with something she did that she doesn't anymore, and sometimes they don't hurt at all. Sometimes they dig deep.

This is nothing unique. This is nothing special. This is universal. So why does it feel so lonely?

I miss you Mum.
In every single thing. In every phonecall I would have made. In every word I write. In every book I read. In every photo that you're not in.  In every photo that you are in. In every conversation I have. In every meal I cook. In every meal I eat. In every news story, in every tennis match, in every gathering.
And every time I go to bed, and every time I wake. And in everything the children do, and say. In everything I do and say. And everywhere I go.
In every sunset, in every sunrise. With every tide. On every single wave. In every shooting star. In every breath of late summer breeze.
I miss you. The world is not the world without you.




* Mum collected menus. She had hundreds, stolen from such diverse places as Spanish kebab shops and Rick Stein's restaurant in Padstow. The rules of eating out for us children were simple: nick a menu or memorise what you ate, because there will be questions.

Racing for Life

Me, my siblings Eliza, Jess, Sooz and George and my sister-in-law Rosie are doing Race for Life 5k at Peterborough on Sunday in memory of our Mum.

My mum never saw an oncologist. She wouldn't go. She knew there was nothing they could do, so she wouldn't go. It made no difference. But it meant we were never offered genetic counselling or testing to find out if we carry the genes that make some women more susceptible to ovarian cancer. We don't even know for certain where Mum's primary cancer site was; the histology was not clear. Having endometriosis means I have an increased risk of ovarian cancer anyway, but my gynaecologist is reluctant to test me for the genetic fault on the NHS until someone else in my family gets it. As the oldest ovary-containing child of my mother, the test case is me.

My mum's type of cancer was unusual and incurable. Even if she had been diagnosed two years before, when we suspect it started, she would have been dead within five years. And she would have hated that. She would have hated the tests and the treatments, the desperation and the fear and the hope that led nowhere. I am glad she didn't know. As we come up to the anniversary of her diagnosis, I am glad that we didn't know.

But now we know.

We are not just racing for life. We are racing for hope. Hope for ourselves. Hope for others. Mum has not been the only cancer death close to us in the last year.

So we run (/walk) the Race for Life, and we hope that we live to be a hundred. We will walk around a field on a Sunday morning in the hope that we never have to go through this again. We will walk, we will sweat, we will giggle, we will pant because we are hopelessly unfit, and we will hope that if it happens to us, they will be able to help.

As of today, we have collectively raised £815 (+£167.50 gift aid) and we are so grateful. That's the cost of two MRI scans. The cost of two colposcopies to diagnose cervical cancer. Four prostate biopsies. Eight sessions of chemotherapy.

It's a lot. It's not a lot.

Please donate if you can, if not to us, then to someone who else who is racing or directly to Cancer Research.

August 2016 <3

Bread and Wine

Communion smells of red wine. Of the resurrection and the life to come.
Communion smells of red wine. Communion smells of Mum.

Six days before Mum died, some of us gathered at her bedside and the vicar came and did Communion. I didn't know they did that, but they do. She brought the wine and wafers in an ornate box, and we sat on an odd assortment of pews and we prayed together. Mum, by that point, was quite beyond conversation. She was confused, she had terrible shakes, she was in pain. We did not know if there was much point in Communion, except that Mum wanted it. Before her illness got so severe, God became more important to Mum than ever. Many would lose their faith in the face of suffering. Mum's got stronger. She did not fear death because she had great faith in what was to come, and the suffering was part of that. She believed in the cleansing power of pain. Mum saw nothing unnatural in dying, nothing unusual in it. She did not pity herself. She enthroned herself in life.

I digress. We sat by Mum, and we had Communion, a short form. And Mum, unable to swallow, swallowed the bread, the wine. And she knew all the words, she mouthed them along with the vicar as she shook and spasmed and faded away. The words she'd spoken every single Sunday as a child, and as many Sundays as she could as an adult were deeply embedded in her consciousness, away from the pain and the toxicity. She knew.

The vicar made arrangements to return the following week, but was about twelve hours too late.

I could not bear to go to Communion again. I could not bear to break the last covenant made with my mother.  I could not bear to speak the words, to go to the altar and taste the bread, the red wine. I could not bear to sit there alone, without her. I could not bear the pain.

But Easter came round and I knew exactly what Mum would say to that. She would call me a bloody heathen and harumph and judge as she busied herself with cooking. Not going to church on Easter Sunday may not get you excommunicated anymore, but as far as she was concerned, it bloody well should do.

So I went. And the claims of eternal life and resurrection felt hollow. Death has not lost its sting. Heaven feels far away.
And an old woman was ill during the sermon. I took her pulse. It felt wrong. I told her husband to call a doctor. I sent her home. I had no authority to do any of those things. I just did. Someone had to. I don't know if she died. That would be a bitter irony.
And then it was time for Communion and I went to the altar, and I tasted the wafer. It stuck in my throat, dry and fresh for Easter. I sipped the red wine. It tasted of Mum, and life, and death, and alcohol first thing in the morning.

And I broke that small link between me and Mum and I cried.

Because grief does not stop with the funeral. Grief does not stop with the seasons. Grief does not know how many days, weeks, months it's been. Grief is a tidal wave, every single thing resonant with meaning. Grief is frightening. People who are not grieving fear it, they shy away from it because they don't know what to say. They don't know what will help. They have not learned that nothing helps except time, but time itself feels like aeons of pain. I am afraid of a life without my mum. It has been almost six months and I am still so afraid, afraid to live and to keep going. I have so much to tell her and she cannot reply. I am scared I will falter without her guidance. I am scared I will fuck up.

I work. I look after my kids. I study. I try and see my friends. I try and be normal. But I am marking time until I feel normal again, knowing it might never happen.

Taking Communion was one tiny step, with huge symbolic meaning. There are many more steps to take.

Moisturiser

Content Warning: Death. Medical details. Cancer. Woe.


Your guts live inside a sort of bag in your abdomen. This bag is called the omentum, and the idea is to keep everything snug and safe, and together. If anything should rupture within your abdomen, through cancer, or infection, or ulceration, this bag has to be opened up, emptied and cleaned if you are to have any chance of survival. When Mum's bowel burst, that's what they did to save her. As you can imagine, sometimes you miss a bit, and this also happened to Mum. This tiny missed bit grew into an abscess right on her liver. The cancer had so convoluted Mum's insides that attempting to operate again would have been enormously complicated and probably hastened her end, thus being a massive waste of money and quality of life. So, instead, they decided to stick a drain in it.
They stuck it in one lunchtime. You cannot imagine the smell, the miasma it created. Just the tiniest drop of pus would stink out a whole sheet. It really upset Mum. She was a very clean person, obsessed with food hygiene and the fact that molecules that could be smelled could be inhaled. The intention was to remove the tube, but this was impossible because first the infection kept filling back up, and second it was in a tumour. So, the tube stayed in and she had a 600ml capacity bag strapped to her leg. When it first went on, it fit perfectly. By the time she died, it flapped around and didn't fit to her leg at all. It was a very visual reminder of how much weight she had lost and how quickly.
She was terribly distressed about the smell, and the next morning, I was wracking my brains about what I could do for her to make her feel less violated. I found some travel Molton Brown bath gels and I took them into hospital, and bought some flannels. She couldn't have a bath or a shower with the drain in, so she chose the one she liked best and I put it on a flannel for her to smell instead of the drain. She liked White Sandalwood the best.
I had a travel sized pot of the white sandalwood moisturiser at home, so I took it round once she was home, and I spent a long time putting it on her. I'm not sure whether it was because she was chronically dehydrated, or the liver failure, or the immobility, but her skin cracked really badly and she hated it. The moisturiser helped a little bit. I ended up buying her a massive canister of the stuff as a reward for being so brave. As an early Christmas present. As an attempt to make her smile.

And so I spent the rest of her life gently stroking her with moisturiser, trying to restore some life to her dying skin, trying to keep in contact with her because I was afraid. I recall me, Jess and Sooz ALL moisturising her at once on occasion. She loved to be touched. She had trained as a massage and aromatherapist when I was young, and she had such an art when she gave you a massage. Jess has the same gift, but I do not. But I tried. And I'm not usually very physical, but I wanted to do something.
But as time went on, her skin became unbearably fragile and painful. I hurt her by accident so many times, because I got the pressure wrong. She would snap sometimes; she wanted us with her but she wanted to be alone. She sat in the garden, covered in fleeces, reading magazines, chainsmoking, and we would sit by her and try to read too, but not really taking in the words. I would try to stroke away the sloughing of her skin, the chafing of her frustration - only very occasionally expressed - and try to make her feel normal again.
After a while, she lost the feeling in her skin. We could touch her properly again, although I don't know if she could feel it. Dad could move her more easily. Whenever I was with her, when she couldn't have a conversation, which was most of the time, I reflexively reached for the moisturiser. I brushed her hair. I did the same things I do for my babies when they are poorly. I tried to show her how much I love her.

And now I will never ever be able to smell white sandalwood moisturiser again without smelling the bag of toxicity hanging from my mother's leg. Without smelling the hint of cigarette smoke that surrounded her right up to 48hrs before she died. Without feeling the cracked skin under my hands, desperately trying to rehydrate her by willpower alone. Without recalling the desperate urge to somehow stave off her death.

Which is a shame, because it was my favourite too.

Me? Doing a Masters?

I think it's a fair shout to say I haven't had the best start to doing my MA.

I signed up on July 27th. On July 29th, my mum became critically ill. I debated whether to defer for a year. I debated whether to do it at all. The more I read about the course, the more I wanted to do it.

I've been interested in social history for ever. I've spent the last year working on family trees for me and my friends, and become intrigued by family structure particularly in rural areas. I've got a talent for creating narratives from primary evidence, for constructing strong arguments, for finding links that aren't immediate obvious and for holding vast stores of intricate genealogy in my head. Local history extends this into the landscape - who lived where? Why did they live there? What did they do? What did they earn? How were they linked? How does this compare to other areas? It's a natural step up from family research and it appeals to my soul.
Then there's my mum. Mum loved social history. She was fascinated by the rise of leisure time in the Victorian era, and the link to the railway network and how resorts were created to supply demand. Having experienced the stigma of being a single mother in the sticks, illegitimacy interested her. Coming from a big family, and having one herself, she read about other big families. She encouraged me. We would talk about history more than almost anything, monologuing at each other on the phone for hours. When I did the preliminary tests for getting on the MA, one of the questions was on the rise of Blackpool. Mum was a bubbling torrent of information on it when I told her. I am devastated that she's not here to talk to about it all anymore. She didn't want me to do the MA when I first discussed it with her, way back in June. She thought I should go directly into writing (my eventual aim) so she could read it. But I didn't feel qualified to write about it without a single history qualification to my name.

So, I decided to do it anyway. My start date was 1st October, by which point my mum was nearing her end. I worked hard but sparingly. It is terribly difficult to focus when the person you need most is dying. You think about little else. You worry. You want to be with them. You don't particularly want to be reading about tiny Highland communities in 1780. Or doing anything really. It's hard. But I did it.
Then she died. She died and I had a deadline. I postponed the deadline, but I still knew it was coming. Everything I had studied before fell to fog. And since she died, every time I read something she would have loved to know about, I feel a stab. It's not fair.

So I wrote my essay. I struggled a bit, just to get my thoughts in order (complicated by having a general anaesthetic a few days before) and then to write it, to use a whole new system of referencing, and to write about something I've not really done before. There is a lot of crossover between modern history and sociology, but they require different styles, and the essay was theoretical. I got it in. I got 63%, which is far more than I hoped for. It was not easy to write, but I found my style and voice much faster than I ever have before.

Now I'm looking to my next essay, getting to grips with the vast amount of potential literature on offer, and having to decide for myself what is and isn't relevant. Before I began this, some mansplaining dick told me that there was 'lots of reading' involved in an MA. I was pissed off because...well duh, but it's the quality of reading that counts. History perhaps generates the most written material of any subject, and some of it is diabolical quality, and some of it is absolutely essential, and some of it is absolutely essentially and like wading through treacle. And you have to decide what's good. I am currently sitting with no less than six relevant books, another two on the laptop to work through, countless potential journal articles that might be useful. I might only use one paragraph from each book, but I need to find it. Your undergrad is SPOON-FED to you in comparison to this.
And I daresay for those who go on to do a PhD, a masters is equally spoon-fed.

I love writing history. I love writing, full stop, but history is a particular pleasure. Telling the story of people who lived long ago, who never hoped to be historically relevant, who did nothing to immortalise themselves. That's a privilege. Finding their stories, hidden in the records, and understanding their context. That's my favourite thing. Reading ancient newspapers is much better for the soul than reading facebook. I don't know if I can actually making a living doing this - probably not, the world is awash with historians and you have to be pretty fucking ace to get published - but even if I can't, I will try. I will try for my mum. I will try for myself.