Grief, or, things I normally avoid blogging about...

Grief is such a peculiar creature. She doesn't behave at all how you'd expect her to. Like today, just over four years since my mum died and boom, I had to run to the ladies and have a cry because a dear and wonderful friend text me to say she's going to run a coffee morning to raise money for Macmillan nurses and would like to do so in memory of my mum.

Such a nice, thoughtful thing to do, so why the tears?

Reading the word 'Macmillan' in relation to mum my memory jumps, split-second, to attention.

Flash one: the image of the first Macmillan nurse who came to visit us, a kindly blonde haired lady who misunderstood the extent of mum's illness and thus wove a beautiful tale of a future we wanted to believe in, with my mum, sister and I taking trips to the coast, where we wheeled her up and down the promenade, poorly, yes, but happy to be out and together. We wanted that reality so much.

Flash two: an image now of the second Macmillan nurse, a blonde haired, tanned gentleman, who quickly sized up the situation we were existing within, foresaw that we could no longer continue in her little devon terrace without the necessary equipment (a hospital bed, a wheel chair and walking frame) and knew he couldn't get us those things as quickly as he could get mum a place at the hospice. "It's just for a few nights Mrs Megson," he said, and we were reassured, grateful. "Just till we get all the furniture in here and have it all nice for you."

With breakneck speed the cancer ate her all up, faster than the oncologist predicted, faster than Macmillan could've known, faster than the hospice expected. Less than a week later she inhaled for one final time.

And my grief reminds me, in flash backs more often than not, that quietly, in the background of existence, I am still waiting for the exhale, for the moment where we can pick up from where we left off.  I've so much to show her, so much to share.

Because you see that's the oddest thing, the thing that makes grief the most peculiar creature: there has almost certainly never been a time in my life when I have been happier, more contented, more delighted and more grateful for the world I find myself living in and yet.....And yet happiness is no foil for grief. She stalks the sunny days as much as the dark nights; laughter and high jinx are no protection from the sharp claws with which she'll knead you.

And cat like, this pain is one borne out of love, a kittenish throwback of shocking flashbacks and a deep deep harrowing knowledge that life is finite and once gone won't ever come back.

7 things I learned from failing #NaNoWriMo that have already made me a better writer…(and might help you too!)

This is the second time I’ve committed to NaNoWriMo, but the first time I’ve FAILED to make the magic 50k word count. 

Oddly I’m happier this time round and I’m writing more and better since the end of November. Why? Well, the lessons learned are listed below…

Cats never fail! But thanks Chuck Olsen for the photo

1) Know your enemy
80% of the novel writing effort is spent fighting demons that say, “You can’t write,” and, “You shouldn’t be wasting your time writing, who do you think you are?” whenever you sit down to write.

Lesson: Knowing that means I’m ready for them. They’ve immediately lost the edge of ‘surprise attack’.

2) Learn how to be a demon-fighter
Continuously turning up and writing pretty much every day reduces that demon fighting effort to more like 20%.

Lesson: By turning it into a routine, writing just becomes less of an effort and more normalised. I think this lulls the demons into some sort of sleepy state…

3) Mission possible
It is possible to write 40,000 words in a month and still…. go to work, have a social life, read some books, sleep 7 hours a night, meditate for 20 minutes a day, deal with family crises and have 8 days in the month where you don’t write a word at all.

Lesson: The Jane Austen/make-do-and-mend method, where you make the most of the scraps of time available, is actually pretty effective and much more workable in my world.

4) Live your choices; love your choices
It isn’t possible to write 50,000 words a month with all of the above happening though.

Lesson: And that’s okay! There’s a strong theory that you have to give up things that you love or care about if you’re a ‘real’ writer. That’s probably true for some people but look, I had a life AND wrote 40,000 words. The most I gave up on was some household chores.

The thing is, ultimately you get to choose. You. Not anyone else. Set your targets according to your choices.

5) Keep a track record
A novel is a really big thing. Even a short novel.

Lesson: Keeping a track of who, what, where, when is super challenging. I found my main character went from working at a local council, to being an accountant, to being an IT consultant (you get the drift, she wasn’t the most exciting person, right?!) depending on what I needed her to be able to do work wise to keep the story going. I found having a ‘Legend.doc’ and a ‘Timeline.xls’ really really useful.

6) Kill characters rather than your enthusiasm
Most people on NaNoWriMo seem to be writing fantasy novels with lots of battles and deaths.

Lesson: The point is they were having fun. Writing should be fun first and everything else after!

7) Find your favourite format
Writing a novel is harder and slower than reading a novel. More to the point I found the sense of having to focus on pushing the story forward (and pushing the word count probably…) meant that I didn’t get the same level of joy that I get when I’m playing with a much smaller world.

Lesson: Consequently…I’m revisiting the short story format again! I’m engaging with the short story in a much more conscious way than before and enjoying my writing more. NaNoWriMo helped me to think much more about format and what works best for the kind of stories I most want to tell.

I'm pretty sure I'll NaNoWriMo again. I'm not done with the novel and I find the focus of telling a big story in a month a really revealing writing exercise in terms of understanding my own writing process and preferences. This year was a WIN for me on that basis alone. So here's a big fat cheer to the success of failure!

5 ways being a journalist is a lot like being a smoker - and 1 way it isn't...

Journalism, like smoking, is an oddly addictive profession that isn't necessarily good for your personal health or the health of those around you. Often unsociable and these days associated with stereotypes of bad behaviour, is it a journalism ban that we most need to see in this country? 

Rebecca Megson lights up the similarities between smoking (which KILLS by the way kids) and journalism...

All the President's Men
- Journos pursuing lies at the heart
of 'democratic' government*

1) The cool and the beautiful do it on the big screen - making it look cool (Hoffman/Redford, journalistic truth-hunters extraordinaire in All the President's Men) and beautiful (a la the iconic smoker Mrs Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction. Less pretty when's she's OD-ing later but that's off topic...)

2) The first time you try it (smoking/journalism) you can feel quite sick and disgusted by it...

3) ...but before you know it you have an insatiable hunger for the newsroom/next smoke. Your heart races with excitement/stress. The adrenalin is pumping over whether you'll get the story/get caught smoking by your neighbour ('who will tell your mum what you've been up to young lady'). There is a sense of survival.

Mrs Mia Wallace in
90s cult movie Pulp Fiction**

4) As a journalist/smoker you are something of a social pariah, especially amongst professions that mistrust you (TIP: don't go to a party predominantly filled with scientists and/or doctors and admit you are a smoker/journalist unless you are ready for the cold hard stare of 'Oh, well that certainly changes how comfortable I feel about talking to you').

5) There are particular types of smoking/journalism (aka weed/investigative) that will find you locking yourself in a darkened room for days at a time, rejecting friends and family, living off snack foods and paranoia. You vet anyone you speak to for trustworthiness and then (once they pass the test) reveal everything you've found about the latest conspiracy theory.

And one way it isn't....

1) Unlike tobacco, the very best journalism can be a force for good....

For example, CBS aired the first TV news segment alleging links between smoking and lung cancer in 1955 which revolutionised what we knew and thought about smoking//The Guardian broke the first news story into what would become the hacking scandal, revealing the dirtiest and most unwholesome side of journalism imaginable at that time.

And that is what makes journalism a worthwhile career to pursue (and why we shouldn't ban it!)


*All the president's men" by IMPAwards.com. Licensed under Fair use of copyrighted material in the context of All the President's Men (film) via Wikipedia
**Pulp Fiction cover" by The poster art can or could be obtained from Miramax Films.. Licensed under Fair use of copyrighted material in the context of Pulp Fiction via Wikipedia

On finding your path or being really frustrated reading The Alchemist

A two-part blog on figuring out your purpose and then getting on with it - despite your best efforts to sabotage yourself...

Years ago a really great friend of mine lent me The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.  I really admired her and thought highly of her taste in books so I read it avidly.  It's a short book so it didn't take long to read. It was quickly evident to me that it was an allegorical tale but I stuck with it.  I expected there would be a great REVEAL at the end of the book, something that would help answer all the questions I had at that time about my purpose in life.

Let me just point out that if you haven't read it and don't want to know what happens at the end you should probably stop reading about here.  This is your penultimate paragraph SPOILER ALERT.

I'd just finished university. I'd completed a degree in English that I had entered full of optimism about becoming a journalist and a great writer. I'd been somewhat disheartened by the ruthlessness of media behaviour at the time and totally fallen in love with the process of studying so I'd emerged feeling quite confident that actually I was going to do a PhD in English Literature and become an academic.

Ma and Pa had other ideas.  They were supportive; "That's really great love", but had some practical reservations, "So how are you going to pay for it?" I blithely explained I could probably do some part-time teaching.  They pounced on this and before the day was out I had pretty much completed an application to take a PGCE in Secondary English.

The long and short of it is I signed up for a PGCE, got three weeks in, knew I hated it but was determined not to be beaten by it so stuck it out.  Once I qualified I did the only sensible thing any person in my situation would do, I ran away to the theatre, and there I met my friend, who, after some time, proffered me her copy of The Alchemist.

So, here we have a novella about a shepherd who dreams of treasure.  He ditches his calm and peaceful life with his sheep in order to go on a long and winding journey to find said treasure.  Only, when he gets to the place where the treasure is supposed to be he finds out that actually it is back home under the place where he originally fell asleep and dreamt about the treasure.  Urgh.  The irony.  Only Alanis Morisette enjoys that level of it.

I threw the book across the room when I first finished it to be honest. I was calmer when I returned it to my friend but I let her know I was disgruntled.  "Why does nobody ever write one of these kind of books about a real girl who works in a real office and doesn't know what to do with her life? Why does it always have to be allegorical."  I was moody and a bit petulant.

My friend was sympathetic and, knowing my own dream was to be a writer, suggested that was up to me to write that very book.  I nodded with a desperate sinking feeling that I couldn't do it and who the hell was I to sit around dreaming of being a writer, I should just get real and get on with the business of living, which consisted of earning enough money to pay the bills and generally getting over myself and my ridiculous writerly ideas.

Well, that was a few years ago.  I've journeyed to a few places since then - literally and metaphorically.  Wherever I've travelled the dream of writing comes with me, like some mangy stray dog, ever more insistent that I pay it attention to it, feed it, love it.  So although I came to Bristol just over two years ago with every intention of throwing myself more wholeheartedly and deeply into the theatre*, I found myself one bright September day in 2012 NOT rocking up to the first day at Bristol Old Vic theatre school but rather to UWE to start my MA training in Journalism.

And that is your first clue, in the non-allegorical, true-story, of figuring out what your purpose is in this world.  It's pretty unlikely to be something you haven't already thought about, even if you've denied the thought. It's more than likely going to be something the universe keeps tipping in your general direction.  It might be that the people you hang out with or date tend to be artists or creative types, or lawyers, doctors, wannabe actors - whatever your thing is or really damn close to it.  You probably spend your time supporting and helping them to be the thing you know THEY should be.  It might be that you find the shows you watch on TV always seem to have a character in it doing the thing that you once thought you'd really like to do but you never got round to it.  In all sorts of ways, the thing that is most essentially you will already be a part of your life, you're just probably too close and too resistant to quite go for it yet.

In my next blog I'll share with you my 'shepherd realising the treasure was back where he started' moment. Only in real life it's not a single moment, it's a series of moments....

A bientôt


#findingyourpath #underyournose #amwriting #amblogging


*Amongst other things I was just emerging from an 'accidental' and unchosen corporate career that had made great parental sense but not fulfilled me.  Bouncing out of it I, of course, again ran away to the theatre....

Auschwitz-Birkenau: the unquiet of heritage tourism

I wanted to go to Auschwitz from the moment I knew I was going to Krakow to meet up with some friends for a few days earlier this month. 

My parents were both born and grew up in Leeds, just after the Second World War.  They had lots of Jewish friends and, obviously, the war was something much closer in time and memory to their lives.

Their connection to it and to people who had been affected by it drove their personal/political outlook, and in turn affected mine.  They believed that both fascism and the Holocaust needed to be spoken about and spoken against - passionately and regularly; they believed that we should all be on guard and active against such events happening again.

So it seemed entirely appropriate that, as my most wonderful friend (and WWII historian...) Rachel and I were in Poland together, close to Auschwitz-Birkenau, we should go.

On the other hand, there is something distinctly uncomfortable about the ‘desire’ to go to a site where atrocities have been committed.  We did not want to partake in any sort of ‘day trip’ that made a theme park out of crimes against humanity.

And to be fair, the State Museum of Auschwitz endeavours to cater against this.  Between the hours of 10 – 3pm you have to be part of a small(ish) tour-guided party but if you arrive between 8am and 10am (or after 3pm, until close) you are free to roam the place on your own.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is actually two camps – Auschwitz the original camp and Birkenau the significantly bigger overflow camp where millions of people were put to death in gas chambers – some after having worked in the camps, some barely hours after arriving into Birkenau on the transports.

If you want to avoid the tourism crush you need to get to Auschwitz itself before 10am (we failed, partially because travelling with me should come with a health warning about the likelihood of getting lost.  The 10 – 15 minute walk to Auschwitz from the train station, according to all the best guidebooks, was, thanks to my special directions-based curse, closer to an hour.  And we arrived at Birkenau first…).

Auschwitz should be seen first because it is a museum. It is smaller, busier and has all the trappings of a tourist site (the shops, the cafés, kiosks, loos, the hoards of people and the coaches and car park outside).  Walking under the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ gates, with the mandatory tour party and headset, feels odd, and indeed familiar - doubtless because we have seen 'those gates' on television and in films so often.

Rachel and I found Auschwitz surreal and uncomfortable. It was loud, busy and cramped. But a part of that is because we had been to Birkenau first, which was altogether a different and much more contemplative, memorial, experience.

We spent three hours wandering around Birkenau.  It was vast, silent, apart from the frogs and the birdsong. More camp huts than we could count stretched out in all directions in the preserved areas of the camps; endless chimney stacks in the areas where the huts had long since been burned down. We walked up the length of each crematoria, stood at the entrances of the now burned out gas chambers, still and unquiet. Everywhere there were watchtowers and miles of barbed wire, utterly at odds with the pastoral landscape. 

People I’ve spoken to say you should go there in winter to really feel the rawness of the experience. I say simply go there when you get the opportunity, if you want to.

The reality is that we are fed and free from fear, limitations that can only barely be mitigated by standing in the cold for a few hours, staring at broken bricks and information boards.

As we were leaving we stopped off at the information desk to enquire about buses back to Krakow.  A group of Orthodox Jews were in front of us. They had just discovered the 'you-have-to-be part-of-a-tour-guided-party' rule.  They were not impressed.  They had not travelled all this way to receive a history lesson.  They had not travelled all this way to be part of a tour-guided party.

The mother of the family angrily cried out that she had lost five grandparents in Auschwitz and she had a right to be allowed in to honour them.  The younger son banged on the window of the information desk and demanded to see the supervisor. The harassed woman on the other side tried to reason with them, remaining adamant that they had to have a guide (though she was also frantically trying to sort them out a personal guide and, I suspect, would have waived any fee).

Rachel and I caught the bus back to Krakow just across the road from Auschwitz - thus avoiding any unnecessary but likely hour long walks back to the train station - and wondered how often altercations like the one we had just witnessed took place.

We felt bruised by our chaotic experience of the Auschwitz museum; overall the day had been exhausting, moving and compelling.  We returned to our hotel room, drank tea, read books, wrote and mused on the day and the history, trying to process the enormity of the Holocaust.

That was two weeks ago and I'm still processing I think.  WWII was not, ultimately, the war to end all wars.  The Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial, set up to ensure we never forgot and that we never allowed such horrors to be repeated, can seem like an exercise in idealism in a world where war and horror are part of our daily flow of news. None of the realities of now however undermine for me the importance of the act of remembering, of looking and of making ourselves look. The contortion of our minds to try to understand a past that is endless moving away from us, is, for me, a necessary exercise however challenging to assimilate.

Things to read to help with the 'processing'...
This way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski - unsentimental tales of life in Auschwitz-Birkenau (and a couple about the dizzyingness of life afterwards) by Borowski who survived Auschwitz and took his own life in 1951, not yet 30 years old.  Visceral, blunt, heart-breaking. 

God's Playground: A history of Poland - Vol II by Norman Davies - Beautifully written. The second volume covers the modern period from a mostly unknown (in the UK at any rate) view point, creating a pivot upon which to turn any previously Anglophile understanding of modern history.  

The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman - Apparently there was a movie??  First few pages brilliantly map the journey from being a free person in a free city through the incomprehensible trauma of being under siege and then occupied.  We're so used to seeing how things look when 'war torn' on the news, I'm really interested in that moment of change just before and just afterwards...

Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places by Erica T Lehrer - this is currently hanging out in my 'wish list' and likely to be the most money I've spent to date on a kindle book (just awaiting payday...).  I flicked through a copy in a bookshop in the old Jewish quarter in Krakow but was at that 'crikey I've spent a lot of money already' point in the trip and so, with great strength of will, put it back down.  I'm attracted by the title (which I've bastardised for the title of this piece) and subject matter because I think ultimately this is what I bore witness to and was a part of - heritage tourism and the unquiet it creates....

How reading can save the world

Just mashing up two current news stories - Gove banning* books from the secondary school curriculum that haven't been written in the UK - and the rather terrifying swing to the right we've seen with UKIP taking the majority of the votes in the European elections last week -  and I have a suggestion.

A reading list to save the world.

Yes, it's a grandiose claim, but frankly I never feel better about life than when I'm quietly ensconced somewhere with a cup of tea and a book, so what are the chances this feel-good route to zen might be equally applicable to the rest of this nation?

High, I reckon.

But seriously - we know that what we read affects how we understand and feel about other people.

Perhaps if we read more by writers from Europe and her border neighbours (as a start - the rest of the world next up on the hit list) it would revolutionise our understanding of how we fit into the great mystery that is the European Union?

It's hard to hate, or call people stupid, or call them names when you've read their history, you've championed their heroism, fallen in love with their poetry and cried at their tragedy.

So let's not stop at taking the American novelists off the reading list (and as John Steinbeck's biggest fan, trust me it pains me to say that...).

Let's take the books written by the British off the curriculum.

How might the following reading list alter the world view of our students, who will become our workers and our leaders:

• Hans Fallada - Alone in Berlin
• Bruno Schultz - The Street of Crocodiles and other stories
• Karl Ove Knausgaard - A Death in the Family
• Francoise Sagan - Bonjour Tristesse
• John-Paul Satre - Iron in the Soul
• Yuri Andrukhovych - The Muscoviad
• Jachym Topol - Devil’s Workshop
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun
• Primo Levi - If not now, when?
• Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart
• Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths

It's a random rag tag of books, by writers from various places (European and beyond).  Not better, nor worse than any other list, just made up of a selection I grabbed from my bookshelves. And I agree my approach is very Matthew Arnold - the Victorian prescriptive 'improving' nature of reading. But I think it would be wonderful if our school system helped us work towards proving the hypothesis that the pen is mightier than the sword....

And so to bed. To read, obviously.

*So it turns out Michael Gove hasn't banned any books from the curriculum - in fact he wants to 'broaden' the books that kids read at GCSE.  That the prescriptive nature of this broadening may in some circles be interpreted as 'double speak'.  Let's hope Orwell's 1984 continues to be squeezed into the free choice selection of the curriculum (as Gove himself apparently hopes it will)....

Should I even be here? Reflections on #WHA67

This is a question that rattled round my mind when I came to the World Health Assembly (WHA) last year and, arriving back in Geneva for WHA67, I find myself chewing over that same question again.

After all I'm not a doctor and I have no medical or scientific background to speak of (living with the mad scientist probably doesn't count...), nor have I been schooled in public health policy.

So immediately I'm in a position of 'not knowing'.  And there's just so much to 'not know'.

The language spoken here is at times impenetrable.  This year the conference is abuzz with discussion about the formal inclusion of 'Non-State actors' at the World Health Organistion (WHO) table.  These people are not, as it turns out, Shakespearean bards funded from a supra-national purse*, they are in fact (for those of you who hate a mystery) the private sector, universities, philanthropic funds and Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) - most of whom are currently (officially at any rate) outside of WHO inner sanctum of proceedings.

Similarly someone you know may at this very minute be suffering from a Non Communicable Disease (NCD).  Again, this doesn't mean they are particularly shy or mute, but rather that they have heart disease, diabetes or are obese (e.g a disease you can't catch, hence non-communicable).

The really scary thing is, the examples above fall into the category of 'the easy stuff'. Easy or not it can be intimidating for the uninitiated - knowledge is after all power (as Foucault would say) - and last year I was definitely intimidated.

It's not just the language or the science though.  It's the politics.  It honestly hadn't dawned on me prior to last May to think about health as an international diplomatic bartering chip.   Not until I realised that many of the ministers rocking up to the World Health Assembly were actually Minsters of Finance or Foreign Ministers in their own countries, rather than (or, in addition to) the Health Minister.  There's more than just health policy happening here then.

Health is an economic issues too - who has the money to fund the initiatives, who receives money, how much and how do they use it?  (Hence the presence of Finance Ministers as well as NGO's lobbying for their issue to be focused on and, a new one on me this year 'BINGOs' - Business Interest groups apparently acting as Non-governmental/benign organisations.  The plot thickens...).

It's also a community.  Everybody knows everyone else and there's so much gossiping (I mean important and profound conversations) about what's really going on happening in the lobby areas and coffee shops at WHA.  But like the new girl on the first day of school you can hardly just walk up and into one of these conversations.  It takes time, you have to become known and, presumably, trusted.

Last but not least in the intimidating stakes is the super size of the WHA.  Some 2000 delegates and lobbyists (and a handful of journalists....), many of whom are at the top of their professions and so represent a vast depth and breadth of knowledge in their areas, gather for WHA.  And where do they gather? In the very opulent and grand Palais des Nations - a building that by design is grandiose and imposing.

So frankly it's hardly surprising that on my first visit to WHA last year I was a little overwhelmed.  Nor is it surprising that this year's World Health Communication Associates (WHCA) graduate journalists have felt overwhelmed and intimidated once or twice.

But that is the point of the WHCA Health Communications programme.  To bring 'cub' reporters into a huge arena that is over-briming with fascinating stories and give them enough courage and support to dive on in ask questions.  We're in a perfect position to make those who talk to us explain in plain English what is going on and then to share that information with the rest of YOU who equally probably don't talk this very special blend of bureaucratic, scientific and political patois.

Despite the fear and trepidation that we shared as graduate journalists embarking on the week at #WHA67 I think everyone has emerged from it feeling more capable and able to enter the arena of public health.  Perhaps our biggest challenge if we continue working and writing in this space is to keep enough of our innocence and our everyday language in our reports.  We have to ensure that our reports continue to be accessible and written for 99.9% of the world, for the people who are impacted by the issues and the decisions made in these hallowed halls, whilst learning and knowing enough about public health to be an effective and trusted translator rather than pseudo medic or politician.


 (*although I do know a Shakepearean actor who was paid to be a virus at a WHO event once....)