My answer to the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was always the same. "I'm going to be a writer." Probably the last time I said that and believed it was around the age of 8. I'm now in my 50s and I am, most definitely, a writer. What happened in between? Let's have a look. Subscribe below (right) to keep up to date with Ruth’s latest blogs.
For the first time since I started Big Words and Made Up Stories, I gave myself a day off last week. Sorry about that. I’ve been inundated with phone calls, texts, WhatsApps and hand-written notes shoved through the door pleading with me to fill in that missing week*.
*I haven’t. This is all made up.
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One of the cardinal rules of blogging is to get and keep your readers’ attention with an attention-grabbing headline. Hence my title this week. Welcome.
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There are certain professions in this life which attract rejection. My days are a catwalk model are long gone, but I still remember taking my coltish limbs, pouting lips and luxuriant hair from one agent to another and hearing those dreaded words, “Sorry, darling, your look is too last season.”
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We moved from Essex to Suffolk fourteen years ago, leaving a metropolitan area on the edge of London to come to a hamlet surrounded by fields. Some of the first people I met were my immediate neighbours.
Pretty soon, I found that these ladies baked, made jam and went blackberrying while still managing to work and bring up a family. I felt a touch inferior, the city girl who used shop-bought crumble mix and didn’t know a crab apple from a bullace.
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July and August are the months of plenty in the gardening calendar. Tomatoes, beans, soft fruit and just about anything raised in the greenhouse bursts into life and keeps on doing so until the first joy of picking your own gives way to a desperate hunt through recipe books for something – anything – to use up all those courgettes. Did I mention we grow courgettes?
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As I told you in my very first ever Big Words and Made Up Stories blog on 5th November last year, I’ve never wanted to be anything except a writer. And for the last twelve years, I’ve been one. I even get paid.
I’m a freelancer, which means that someone gets in touch, asks me for six hundred words or so on a topic in three weeks and I do it. I’ve got a roster of clients ranging from charities to florists to builders to radio stations and I write blogs, articles and content for them as required. It’s taught me how to write succinctly, clearly and to a brief and I’ve learned loads along the way.
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I’m writing this on Claydon Ward at Ipswich Hospital. My 94-year old father is propped up in bed with a nebuliser clamped to his face. He’s eyeing up a tuna sandwich and looking longingly at his crossword. This time last night, I was sitting on the edge of my seat while he tried to get out of bed and pull off his oxygen mask. He was delirious, suffering from pneumonia and heart problems, and possibly not long for this world.
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Living in Britain is great. If you’re ever short of a conversational opener, you can say anything about the weather – and I mean anything – and it will keep you going for at least five minutes. Too hot? We wipe our foreheads and talk wistfully about the thunderstorm that’s forecast tomorrow. Unseasonably chilly? Well, the nights are drawing in, but they say it will be sunnier next week.
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I’ve been watching a fantastic programme on iPlayer. Starring Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne, Tracey Ullmann, Sarah Paulson, Jeanne Trippelhorn, Uzo Aduba, Elizabeth Banks, Margo Martindale, Kayli Carter and Ari Graynor, "Mrs America" opened my eyes to a period of history I knew shamefully little about.
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Which probably qualifies as one of my longer blog titles. If I had the urge, I suppose I could draw up some kind of chart or spreadsheet entitled, “Ruth’s Blog Headings” but I don’t know that I can be bothered. It doesn’t sound that thrilling, does it?
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It’s been a funny old week. I mean that in both senses of the word. Those long, uninterrupted days of early lockdown, where I could stay in bed if I liked, writing and supping tea, or amble about watering things and working out plot lines in my head are drawing to a close.
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It's the end of the world as we know it… a slight exaggeration. It is the end of a huge part of our family life this week, however. Our youngest child will be leaving primary school on Friday and with her ends nearly fourteen years of a long and devoted relationship with Wickham Market Primary School.
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If you’re of a certain age (and you’d need to have been watching Top of the Pops in 1982, by my calculations), you may remember a ditty called, “Words” by FR David which made it all the way to number 2 in the UK charts. FR had a strangely warbly voice, and even now, if the word, “words” comes up in conversation, I will either think or say, “words!” in a similarly trillworthy fashion.
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A couple of weeks ago, I took the plunge and bought a new mobile phone. I thought it would be easy peasy to switch over from my old one, but in spite of my children doing it all for me, it turned out I had the wrong sized sim card. After much huffing and puffing from me, finally, it started working. I’m still a bit hazy about what’s what, but am gradually getting there.
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…. was the way Garrison Keillor began each Lake Wobegon segment in his, “A Prairie Home Companion” radio show. Everyone knows everyone in Lake Wobegon and all the rules. Lutherans drive Fords bought from Bunsen Motors, Catholics purchase their Chevys from Krebsbach Chevrolet, everyone has lunch at the Sidetrack Tap and the Statue of the Unknown Norwegian (so called because he left before the sculptor got round to asking him his name) is the high point of Main Street.
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Yesterday morning, I was driving up Chapel Lane towards the Hill. I was on the regular trek to buy food for my elderly parents, my elderly mother in law and husband and our family. I slowed down as I noticed a mother and a little boy walking along the road. He was stumping along in a determined fashion and as I went past, I noticed he was wearing a superhero mask. His stance, his gait and his age (around three) all screamed, “I am a superhero today! I have magical powers. There are no limits to my world.”
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I’ve always been drawn to a certain type of comedy. I like quirky characters, slow burn plot development and wit. One of my favourite sayings ever comes from one of the writers of “Seinfeld”. He said their credo on the show was “no hugging, no learning.” I liked that. Stuff happened (not much of it, admittedly) and no-one ever had a neat, end of show epiphany as a result.
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We’re over halfway through week nine of lockdown. At the beginning of all this, my search history reflected what was going on in my life, and presumably, lots of other people’s too. “Where can I buy strong bread flour?” (Nowhere, was the answer, but my husband discovered that 00 pizza flour made an acceptable substitute). “Where can I buy yeast?”
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If you’d told me at the end of last year that come May 2020, I would regularly hurl myself into the path of traffic while wearing a snazzy face mask, I would have laughed in, or near your face. Had you predicted that my last major social event would be a trip to Southampton to see my sister and her family while struggling with a cold of epic proportions, I would have been surprised.
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I’m the proud owner of three battered cookery books which I count as amongst my most precious possessions. One of them is signed by the author. They’re cookery books, but they are also beautifully written statements of intent. In their own way, they started a revolution. Their author was unlike anyone who had ever gone before, and I’d contend that no-one since has ever been quite like him.
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