The Price of Freedom

The noose has gone.

I’m waking up without a mortgage. 

For the first time in 30 years, I’m waking up without a mortgage. The relief is enormous. It’s also sad, because I don’t have a house, which was what I believed was my prize possession for many years of hard work. But my blood pressure, which had rocketed to a dangerous 156/106 is down to 120/82. I have gone from a six bedroom house in Cardiff to a one bedroom apartment in New York. I could not be happier. 

   

Before Christmas last year, I was rushed to A & E (well, I say rushed - the ambulance took three hours to get to me) with a non-stop nose bleed. I had returned from the US for Christmas to spend time in Bristol with my mother, who was due to undergo radiotherapy following a recurrence (although not secondary, thank goodness) of breast cancer. I’ve spent every Christmas with Mum, bar one, ever since my Dad died in 1990, and it really is no chore. I love seeing her and her dog Maddie, and despite the hassle that Christmas brings, it’s still a magical time of year for me. 

   

But this one began with my spending two days in hospital with what turned out to be stress-related hypertension; I literally had burst a blood vessel. You can lose a lot of blood in 48 hours - more than I even thought I had in me - and, as this was my first ever hospital stay, I was frightened.

   

I nevertheless made some important decisions while lying there, the main one being that even if I had to take a big hit on my house, which had been on the market for four years, I would do it. The mortgage and bills had been a drain since 2009, when I lost my lucrative job as TV critic on the Mail on Sunday. While I still had my Soapwatch column in Weekend magazine on the Daily Mail, I had been living comfortably on two salaries that were now reduced to one. 

   

I could have - probably should have - stayed in the house until it was sold, and after two years spending much of my time in LA, I returned to Cardiff with the intention of doing just that. However, a burglary in the middle of the night while I was watching TV in my living room, freaked me out, and I barely spent a night in the house after that. I returned to LA from where, two years ago, I moved to New York. 

Yes, I know that people will say that I incurred an unnecessary expense in doing that, but I’ve always been a risk taker, and I operate better in the US than I do in the UK. The latter is still my base and my legal home, but as an older woman, New York offers a lifestyle that is non-ageist, fun, and packed with more activities and people than one could ever hope to experience and encounter in one lifetime. 

   

The only thing that has prevented me from enjoying it as much as I might have has been the lack of money - some weeks, no money for food or even toilet paper. Yes, that bad. But I held on, avoided bankruptcy, and now, hopefully, the Seven Year Bitch as I’ve taken to calling it is at an end.

   

I didn’t have the exhilaration I thought I would, though. Yes, selling the house was a relief; clearing debts an even greater one. But last night, I was in tears. We invest so much in bricks and mortar; we build our nests around us; our stuff accumulates over many years and gives us pleasure, excitement, even a sense of worth as we find ourselves able to afford bigger and better.

   

The meaninglessness of that stuff became apparent when I tried to sell so much of it. I had to throw away most of my books - in the ease of the Kindle world, nobody wants the printed page anymore; I couldn’t even give the things away. The same with my old TVs and speaker systems - all of them great quality, Panasonic and Sony, but too big now for the world of the slimline electronic revolution. 

   

Clothes went to charity shops, furniture to friends and the new occupants; jewellery and old video cameras (who needs to carry a brick around when an iPhone does the job better?) had to be binned. 

   

The things I wanted to keep have gone into storage, and, as I have been living more simply for some time, I doubt I will miss any of them. As I look around my apartment, I have the basics - bed, desk, sofa, one bookcase (I know - how quaint; you never know, they might make a comeback), cooking equipment and utensils, and, of course, my beloved Apple desktop and laptop. I look out over the Hudson to New Jersey and, in a few hours, will watch the sun set over the river and marvel, as I always do, at the beauty of nature.

   

The sun is bright today, and it’s finally getting warmer. I’m going to walk to Central Park and feel the spring air as if for the first time, without the chaos of sums that don’t add up tearing around my brain as they have done for so many years. 

I will look up at the sky, which in this city is the purest blue punctured only by the glorious buildings that send the eye always reaching upwards. 

I’m going to have lunch out and not worry about whether that second glass of wine is a luxury I can ill afford. 

   

Most of all, I’m going to think about the family, friends and even complete strangers, whose friendship, love and support, both emotional and practical, has been central to my survival; because all the stuff in the world cannot compensate for the essence of humanity that makes people care for one another and reach out to those in need.

   

Becoming mortgage free was a practical solution to what had become an insurmountable problem. 

The enormous debt I owe to the people around me is something I can never hope to repay. 

   

   

The Art of Graphophobia and Turning Pages

There is a name for every phobia imaginable, including “fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth” - Arachibutyrophobia. Weird as it sounds, I can understand this one. I’ve never liked peanut better because of its cloying dryness, although I think that my condition is fear of it sticking to my arteries.

   

There is not, however, a listed phobia for what I discovered today when clearing out my upstairs office. It’s not the one I work in, but it has served very well over the years as a storage area for supplies - well, three areas to be precise (it’s a big house).

   

I clearly have a fear of running out of paper. I could open my own Ryman store with the amount of paper up there. Small notebooks - plastic-bound, leather-bound, cardboard-bound - and every size and shape of writing paper: lined, blank, A4, A5, Post-It notes, big writing cards, little writing cards, blank and lined, exercise books I took with me when I left my teaching job in the Bishop of Llandaff - in 1983, for goodness sake! Who keeps a stash of blank exercise books for 33 years? But there they are - ten E J Arnold olive green books, now a little faded at the edges. 

   

I’ve always liked writing in exercise books and, in the States, buy the same ones when I go to Staples, where every day they have more irresistible bargains, and none more glorious than the five pack boxes of A5 (the US equivalent of our A4). Yes, I have another paper stash in New York - rows of empty exercise books (and a lot filled with writing, too), and more paper - for ink printing, photo printing, note-taking. 

When I first moved to the States, I took ten five ream boxes of A4 and, now that I have run out, I have a fear - no, terror - of having, finally, to convert to A5. Then there is the Staples stash currently sitting in a Los Angeles storage unit, too. I think I would be happy renting a shelf to live on in Staples. 

   

But, upon investigation, there is no named phobia for fear of running out of paper. There is fear of running out of toilet paper (Endrollphobia), and fear of paper (Papyrophobia); there’s also fear of writing (Graphophobia), which I obviously don’t have (I have a fear of not writing, but I think that’s just called work avoidance), and  fear of running out of reading material (Abibliophobia). Given the thousands of books I am having to get rid of, I think I might have had that one for many years, but appear to be getting over it during this move. 

   

Not all of the paper in my possession is blank. There are boxes of ‘A’ Level notes and essays for English and History, my ‘O’ Level art paintings (all designs copied from How to Draw), university notes and essays, thousands of handwritten newspaper articles, and more half- written plays, books and stories than I could ever have believed possible even from the most prolific writers. Why didn’t I finish any of them? A cursory glance gives me the answer to that. I was a veritable little Sylvia Plath (in temperament, not talent) in the making. I half expected a razor blade to fall out of the pages.

   

Then there are the diaries, going back as far as 1977. Acres of angst over men, worry over exams, concerns over health, and even a letter written to my mother in 1983, telling her of my money worries and how, once I wrote that big novel, all would be well in the financial coffers.

   

Thirty three years on, little has changed, at least in relation to men and money. Paper is a recorder of emotions, and writing something down doesn’t change the fundamental you. Have I really learned so little since that 19 year old self wrote about her tears, crying over an unavailable man? (No, I haven’t). But there, on 1st December 1977, is the editor of the university magazine, Link, who came to see me in my halls of residence after I submitted a piece for their Letters page. 

And here’s the entry: “ He said that the letter I’d written wasn’t like a student’s; they’d thought it was a lecturer. He said it was very unusual to find a girl who could write with such punch.” I remember being thrilled. Patronising git, I’d say now. So I have learnt something.

   

So, while I haven’t made much cognitive progress with men, I can say that the paper trail has grown, and the decades of words I’ve written have given me opportunities I could never have imagined when I made that entry during my first year at Cardiff University. I have been lucky enough to write for the smartest people in journalism, and still do; it wasn’t easy, by any means, but that’s a struggle I’ll save for another day.

   

Yes, I am sure I have a fear of running out of paper, because it is my life. Every word I put on every sheet is a privilege - a privilege to be part of the family into which I was lucky enough to be born, a privilege of a great education paid for by the State, the privilege of having been born with a skill that really was the luck of the draw that so many are denied. 

   

My fear now is not one of running out of paper, but of running out of time in which to fill those empty spaces. 

But panic aside, the blank pages before me today are tomorrow’s story: a story that has yet to be written. 

Only fate will decide when the final page dictates The End.

    

Storage with Benefits

I lost it. 

Most of the time, I deal with the idea of selling up pretty well. It’s a practical decision, as well as a financial one, given that I spend most of my time in the States. I’m resigned to leaving my house, as I really enjoy the simplicity of living in a much smaller place in New York that has 24/7 security and fantastic views over the Hudson, where the exquisite sunsets can move you to tears. 

And I have a life that is rich with friendship, music and literature, in addition to restaurants and bars where a single woman of my age is not treated as a social leper. I’ve even learnt to speak American – and it’s a lot harder than you think; certainly more difficult than French. 

But yesterday, I cracked. Attending the 90^th birthday party of my friend’s mother, I met up with so many people who were in my life over 30 years ago during my ballroom dancing years as an adult (I had been a competition dancer as a child, too). I was sitting at a table with Paula Goodyear, whose Bath dancing school was the centre of my social life when I lived in the city. 

I remembered the smell of polish at the top of the stairs, which was when you first heard the music from the ballroom. I recalled Boxing Day mornings, which were the highlight of my Christmas. A trip to Antwerp, when the bus had to stop every half hour so that I could empty my tiny bladder, an event that earned me the nickname “Taffy Leak” from Paula’s mother.

I was sitting next to my mother, who is nowhere near 90, but the day inevitably made me think about aging and the inevitability of losing the people we love. When the waiters who had been serving us transformed into a musical singing duet, I went. Completely. Show tunes just do it for me. They transform me to a world in which raw emotion is everything – the here and now, and I am always lost in the occasion whenever I listen to a musical. 

I don’t have quite the same experience watching some of them. I love Blood Brothers, but when I saw it in London’s West End, the key scene was ruined when one of the brothers pulled a gun, and a strong Welsh accent from behind me, said, way too loudly: “Ooh, God, ’e’s about to shoot ’im!”

But you can’t beat a good show tune. Yesterday, what set me off was This is the Moment. I love it. I sing it. I think I’ve heard every recording of it ever made . . . in fact, I just took a little break from writing this to listen to another glorious Michael Ball version.

My tears started. Plop. Plop. Plop. They wouldn’t stop. My mother held my hand and my tears plopped even more. They stopped only when the duet went into Time to Say Goodbye, during which my tears turned to hysterical laughter (it’s a thin line between the two), as I felt it a tad inappropriate for a 90^th birthday.

Anyway, I recovered enough to get everyone up dancing, and a thoroughly good afternoon was had by all.

Reality is starting to hit home (or should that be away from home?) now. Travelling back from London to Cardiff this week, I realised that this was the last time I would be taking the journey with no permanent residence awaiting me at the other end. I even went to see a Cardiff Bay apartment I thought I might like to rent, to alleviate, or at least sideline, the emotions I suspect I will feel on the day of completion. I decided against it and returned to packing boxes. I will, however, have to take a storage unit for my personal effects and a small amount of furniture I want to keep in case I need a UK base at some point.

This means that by the end of the month, I will have storage units in Cardiff and Los Angeles, although I will be living in New York. Yes, I know it sounds daft, but storage is cheaper than renting another place. There is stuff I just can’t bear to part with – so many memories that are part of who I am. 

Who knows, I might need those reminders in advancing years, when there is a nurse shouting at me in the Last Home Saloon:  “What’s a book?”

So I’m thinking of my new life as Storage With Benefits: it serves a purpose because I know it’s always there, should I need it. 

They are units that house millions of moments of times gone by, all of them special and meaningful in their individual ways. Memory boxes.

But still I must look forward and focus on so much that is promised in the future. 

Maybe this is the moment. 

And maybe that, too, was why my tears fell.

   

Everything that Glitters is Sometimes Plastic

Ahhhhhh. Clearing the shelves in my attic, I find two oval shapes: blue at the bottom, clear at the top, with tiny shells embedded in each.

   

Plasticraft. Toy of the Year in 1972 when I was 14. Not since Santa had delivered the board game Mouse Trap when I was five had I been this excited. I think.

   

I probably had been, but every Christmas brought a new joy that filled me with such all-consuming toy lust, I was consumed by its new mystery (it’s not hard to see why Woody was put out when Buzz Lightyear arrived in Toy Story). Booby Trap – blue and yellow bobbles you had to extract from a trap without letting the whole thing blow up in your face and blinding you on Boxing Day; Pick-a-Stick (ditto – if the trap didn’t get you, the spears would); Hats Off, a gentler game perfected by our tiny poodle Emma, whose paw stayed on the plastic hats’ launch pads long after I had moved on to my next adventure.

   

Plasticraft was the first toy I remember that enabled me to make something. The John Bull Printing Set of my early childhood had come close. It consisted of rubber letters that you stuck on a rack, pressed on a pad of ink, and then watch as the imprint magically appeared on a piece of blank paper. The word made flesh. It was my first publication.

   

The art-work that will go down in history as my Plastics Period was altogether more adventurous. Now, instead of my hands being covered in ink that I couldn’t get off for days, they were glued together with dripping colours that might well cripple my fingers for life.

   

But I loved it – especially the sea life I created in each key ring, paperweight (they couldn’t have held down a dead fly, to be honest), or ornament. Ever impatient, I sat for hours waiting for the blue sea level to set before I could pour on the clear plastic that would create the arena of an aquarium. Today, I hold them in my hands, unable to part with these jewels, and remembering, as if it were yesterday, the smell of roast turkey, mince pies and molten plastic that was the purest pleasure my fingers ever tasted.

   

I have them in my possession because they were gifts I gave to my grandmother and, when she died, I took them when clearing her house. They were still in pride of place alongside the photograph she had when she and Grandpa won a prize for their garden in the Old Globe, the pub they managed in Rogerstone, near Newport.

   

Without life experience, do our primal sensations make more of an impression when we are young? I remember the smell of freshly cut grass at Cefn Mably Hospital where Grandpa died in June when I was 13, asking my mother “Do you think he’s going to be all right?” and hearing, through her tears, “No, I don’t.” 

Is it just in my imagination that I recall the smell of dark wood and the touch of the sticky sugar imprint of the Lucozade bottle on his bedside table before he went into hospital for what would be the last time? Could I ever forget the smell of freshly baked Cornish pasties baking in the downstairs kitchen when I stayed at the Globe – my grandmother up at the crack of dawn cooking for the lunchtime rush?

   

Plasticraft holds Grandma’s life in my hands: a woman who worked tirelessly her whole life, brought up three daughters during a war, and who I never heard complain. I am moved to tears now, finding things she also gave to me. There’s a picture of clowns, in various facial expressions of sadness and joy (“She’s got your number,” said a friend, at the time); my Children’s Bible; A Chid’s Garden of Verses, by Robert Louis Stevenson; and, my favourite, A Book of Girls’ Stories.

   

Re-reading the tales, these are not just any girls: if they have a horse, they are not going to be content trotting around a field: they are going to win that damned gymkhana. Yes, every girl is a winner. Was this, in my early teens, where I discovered the ambitious streak that propelled me forward? I never had a horse, but I was always in it for the race. I still am.

   

I pack my shells in plastic carefully, with bubble wrap, even though I know they don’t need it. Along with my grandmother’s gold watch and my grandfather’s banjo, they are the only material things I have left that belonged to them. But I have Girls’ Stories, and a grandmother who clearly understood me and took pleasure in the life I was about to live and she could never have. 

No bitterness, though. Get on that horse, girl, and Giddyup. It’s a long ride, but it’ll be worth it. 

Bless you, Grandma, Elsie May Culliford. I will remember you forever.

   

(President) Donald Pucker - the People's Mouth

I’ve always found Donald Trump’s mouth sexually alluring. 

There. I’ve said it. I’ve been whispering it in dark corners for months now, fearful of suggesting that I might wish to engage with anything other than the man’s opinions, but there you have it. It’s out there now. I’m a Donaholic in the oral department.

   

This in no way means that I condone his political views, but I’ve been interested in hearing people in Britain, as well as in the US – both countries in which I spend a lot of time – taking the “He’s only saying what we’re all thinking” line. At which I become involved in very heated discussions that involve low-flying beer.

   

But still, to my mind, it’s something different altogether: people are thinking what they all think Donald is saying. And I think, for the most part, they are getting it wrong.

   

Listen, I’m Hillary and Democrat all the way (and really good arguments have been made this week for Donald, in essence, being a Democrat, too), but I still can’t get away from the feeling that Donald is an ok guy – I just think he has really crap speech writers, who also say what they think he is saying (I’m not even sure he knows he’s saying it half the time). The media may be at fault also, but when your own people are fuelling the rhetoric with the same language as the people you are criticising, you are going to sound as mad as the headlines. 

Oh, Donald – if you let me write just one speech . . .

   

I’ll tell you the main reason people are fascinated by what comes out of Donald’s mouth – it’s his mouth. Not the words, the noises, the ideas – it’s his goddamn mouth. I can’t help it. I’ve always found it incredibly sexy: the knowing clench, the pouting lower lip, the slight smirk, the hysterical laugh (ok, no, I made that bit up – those lips weren’t made for laughing). I’ve never even got as far as the hair, to be honest.

   

I watched the Comedy Central Roast of Donald Trump for the second time this week, and the mouth underwent several more incarnations: mild incredulity, indifference, hurt. Yes, hurt. There were some moments when that perfect bottom lip looked as if it had been stung by a bee and was begging for a visa to escape the face on which it had been planted.

   

I mentioned this to someone who said that Hitler used to do the same thing with his mouth – a kind of “You might say that, but I know I’m right” expression. I checked it out in the archives but, to be honest, I can’t see the comparison. Hitler’s bottom lip is an altogether harder, severe one, as if he has just come in from the field after biting the heads off gerbils. Donald’s is softer, kinder, more welcoming (although still says I’m right, you’re wrong). 

Like Diana, Princess of Wales, was The People’s Princess, Donald’s mouth is The People’s Mouth. But if I had to compare it to any mouth in Presidential history, it bears the most resemblance to that of Bill Clinton (it really does; trust me on this).

   

I know that I have always had a curious obsession with mouths (or maybe not so curious: I know where I want them to go and, more to the point, fear where they may have already been). I don’t like too thin, too thick, too wet, too dry – but I’ve always been a big fan of Donald’s. 

It’s not always what you say, it’s how you don’t say it. 

And Donald Pucker has it down to a fine art.

Or President Trump, as you will soon be calling him.

  

   

No Comfort Here: Culling the Library - Part II

I’ve always thought it strange that someone whose surname was Comfort would put his name to pictures that look less comfortable and comforting than riding naked on a hedgehog.

   

Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex just popped up on my Twitter feed, as it’s World Book Day. The Tweeter said that The Joy of Sex was the book we all secretly read in our parents’ house. That made me feel very old, as I have The Joy of Sex (A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking), More Joy of Sex (A Lovemaker’s Companion) and The New Joy of Sex (Newly Illustrated and Fully Revised Edition), all of which were bought with my pocket money and not pilfered from my parents.

   

I was not sexually active when the book was first published in 1972 (heck, I was 14 and still playing secret agents with corned beef tin keys in my local castle), but was, like any teenager, curious. Resuming the great library cull in my house, I’d put all three in the slush pile, but have just rescued them to remind myself of what “joys” I must have felt upon first opening its pages.

   

The first volume sprang open at ‘Semen’ and explained: “There is no lovemaking without spilling this, on occasions at least.” I can only imagine with what horror my OCD first met this information. The fact that the book opened at this page makes me think it must have been the most worrying part of the whole sexual operation. ‘Mons Pubis’ must have been a walk in the park after this.

   

However, Mr Comfort has some comforting advice: when the stain has dried – and, get this - it’s removable from “clothing or furnishings” with “a stiff brush”. Trust me, oh blessed Comforter, it ain’t as easy as it sounds. I recall a politician I was involved with in the late Eighties, and he ruined my red sectional sofa. Mr C’s cleaning tip is a lie. Keep men away from furnishings, I say; or don’t buy foam-filled sofas.

   

By the way, should you find semen spilling onto your partner, he says you can “massage it gently in”. Apparently, “the pollen-odor of fresh semen is itself an aphrodisiac”. Forget 1972; that’s news to me in 2016, I can tell you.

   

The first volume illustrations feature a man who was way too much like the Jesus in my Children’s Bible (I’ll be moving on to the culling of my religious section next). I just couldn’t get to grips mentally or emotionally with a man who was one day raising people from the dead and turning water into wine, and the next engaged in ‘Feuille de Rose’. This was Jesus we were talking about; I just couldn’t see him using that stiff brush to dispense with any ungainly bodily fluids stuck to his robe.

   

The problem with all three volumes is that they make sex sound so . . . well, nice. Of course, it can be, but where are the sections titled ‘What to do when he’s shagging your best friend’, or ‘What to do when he’s so tiny, you need sat nav to find it’?

   

I binned my whole sex section (two shelves) along with George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, figuring that I no longer have a need for any of them. It’s not that I know everything there is to know about politics, fishing/shooting yourself, or sex, but if there’s any of the latter to be had, I’d rather be out there doing it than reading about it. And if I haven’t learned enough from the many books on my shelves by now, then I deserve to be punished and not get any.

   

They are all yellow and falling apart at the seams now (the books, not just the men I know): Love and Orgasm, The Hite Report, Men and Sex, Transcendental Sex (who could be arsed with that, quite frankly – apart from Sting), and, my favourite, Nice Girls Do. I’m pretty sure I liked that title because my Baptist background assured me that nice girls really don’t until they get married. 

I must have been thrilled to read the section headed ‘Janet takes a chance’. Janet was 31 and owned a candy store and, when her husband was playing with her thighs one night, she remembered her childhood pediatrician, Dr Rosenbloom. She loved him because he was “so gentle and he gave me suckers every time I went in for an examination.” 

Anyway, to cut a long story short, Janet starts talking about the joys of the good doctor when she’s having sex, and this sets off “an explosion of orgasms”. And it gets better: “Not only didn’t my husband criticize me, he got the hardest erection I’ve ever felt . . . This talking stuff really works!” Good old Dr Rosenbloom and his suckers. 

Anyone else a tad worried about all this?

   

I wonder what I also learned from The Opposite Sex (Telling the Teenagers), first published in 1957, a year before I was born. The focus is on home making, and there’s a whole section on furniture, which “must be easy to take care of and clean”. 

You’re telling me. Especially if the likes of Mr Comfort and his mates are popping by of an evening.

   

Do we ever learn anything about sex from books, or is it an ever elusive thing that, once you think you’ve nailed it, surprises you in whole new ways? It has to, because people are different, and what works with one might not work with another. Not being a fan of masked balls, for example, Mr Comfort’s picture of a man and woman facing each other wearing eye-masks would have me running screaming from the bedroom (or the sofa).

   

So, having briefly returned to the sex section of my bookcase, I’ve decided that the whole thing needs to be culled. It’s as much as I can do to remember a guy’s name these days, let alone what I have to do to keep him entertained. My demands will never again be as high as anything in these tomes. Forty-four years on from The Joy of Sex, if a man has a penis, that’s fine by me.

   

Happy World Book Day!