Significant events of the year, part two: the break-up

Not the Aniston-Vaughan movie, though that was also a bit disappointing, but the actual real-life event. I won't go into any detail other than to say that 2007 will probably be the only year in which I will tearfully shout 'I don't even like bloody offal!' (Presuming, that is, that I don't make my fortune by opening an offal processing plant and then get interviewed about it on Look North.) I hope Nick’s not offended at being outed as a rejecter of the Simon Hopkinson cook book featuring infeasible amounts of offal.

One pleasant side dish next to the excessively heavy offal of breaking up and everything feeling up in the air is that having no ties makes anything seem possible. It suddenly seems quite exciting to have new romantic possibilities. Not to mention the ramifications in other areas of life. I could do anything! Go anywhere! Flicking through my internet history of the last few months I note that I have investigated job vacancies with the British Antarctic Expedition and wondered if the Alaskans need any nurses to come and wrestle bears. After much umming and ahhing, however, I have decided to take the much more rock n roll option of buying a house and getting a dog.

Significant events of the year, part one: new job

I had been waiting for a long time to get a job as a community nurse. I may have had slightly high expectations of how much my life would change because I spent eighteen months thinking 'this wouldn't happen in the community!' I imagined that the new job would be like the old job without the bad bits. I thought that those lovely moments in nursing where you've got a quiet ward and you get to spend all morning helping an elderly person to have a wash and do their hair while they tell you their life story, would stretch over my whole week and the hideous bits where pcp patients can't breathe and you start to feel sick and jittery knowing what's coming next, would disappear. What I hadn't considered was the notion that the job would just be entirely different. There are certainly very few 'jesus-fuck-what-am-I-going-to-do-should-I-call-the- crash-team-why-didn't-I-listen-more-closely-in-lectures' moments. Sadly though, the pay off for not being there for people in the gritty bits is that, um, you don't get to be there in the gritty bits. Most of my patients greet me with a friendly smile but the wee transaction I have with them hardly seems more significant than the one they have with the postman every morning. One lady I visited asked me to come back later because the mobile hairdresser was due and apparently she has a very busy schedule. Makes me kind of miss washing dead people.

On the upside, one cracking aspect of the new job is that I get to have a good nose round people's houses. Who knew that people still had toilet roll holders with built in ash-trays? (I mean the standing up on a pole toilet roll holders there - just in case you're imagining a crocheted doll holding an ashtray aloft.) And some interesting situations do arise that would never have come up in hospital, a man who had only grunted at you as you changed his catheter suddenly jumping off the sofa to show your colleague his cabinet full of nazi memorabilia, including a rather large sword, for example. Yikes.

Love Me Slender

Love Me Slender is the best name ever for a slimming club based comic play. Sadly, the title of Love Me Slender is probably the play's finest attribute. As we were walking out of the theatre auditorium I overheard someone say ‘well, it was certainly different’. Different?! Different to what?! It didn't seem very different to numerous sketches that have cropped up over the years based on slimming clubs. Having said that, it may have actually been written before the other low-cal comedies, like Fat Club, Little Britain, etc. Even so, original or not, it was pretty poor. The main character’s lines were all really clipped as if she didn’t want to use excessive words. I don’t know if that was supposed to be analogous with her attitude towards biscuit consumption, but it was quite nauseating long before the curtain fell for the interval.

Anyway, the play was, er, not the thing, because we were actually going to see if we might like to join the theatre group that put it on. All my prerequisites for amateur theatre were there – a musty smelling bar with wildly inconsistent drinks prices, an eccentric audience (on this particular night comprising entirely of over-sixties, largely owing to it being over-sixties night), and a lot of red velvet. There was one further bonus: one actress so poor as to make us sure we might get a part at some point. I know somebody somewhere once said that acting is all about what your face does when it's not your turn to speak, but this woman took that comment very seriously and spent most of the play contorting her face into Frankie Howerd-esque gargoyles, stroking her chin and scratching her head in response to the most innocuous sausage-roll based banter coming from her fellow players.

During the interval a slightly odd man from the row in front turned to us and asked us if we were enjoying the play. Naturally, since I’m so honest I nodded enthusiastically. ‘Do you girls do any acting?’ Before we had a chance to answer he put on a slightly more sinister tone and added ‘maybe not on the stage, eh?’ How very odd. I’ve no idea what he was suggesting but I felt like I’d been accused of being a hustler or a prostitute and all I did was smile sheepishly and do the ‘hhhm’ noise that I do when I haven’t heard someone properly. Then he stood up, fell over and said ‘excuse me, my hearing aid’s not working’ and walked off.

Prosthetic doofer upset

I had no idea when I woke on Friday that the day would end with a fat Rod Stewart impersonator poking me in the arm with his leopard-skin-lycra-clad prosthetic penis while singing 'you're in my heart'. Though it was a bit traumatic being poked by this man I did feel sort of sorry for him. In between songs he had quite a mournful facial expression and looked quite upset that the audience weren't entirely taken with his brand of comedy singing (In case you are wondering what comedy singing might involve: imagine a man singing 'Crying' in a Roy Orbison wig and dark glasses which emit tears over the audience every time he sings the word 'crying').There is something about old fashioned club turns that makes me feel I am watching a dead-pan narrated BBC 2 documentary featuring shots of divorced fathers taking the kids to MacDonalds on Saturday.

In other surprise news I was delighted to receive a parcel on Thursday. It was only nine months ago that my brother posted me some Christmas presents so they weren't much tardier than the usual Parker sibling birthday gifts. Oddly, there was no damage to the parcel, no note attached apologising for it having gotten lost under a table in Milton Keynes for nine months. I celebrated its arrival by putting the Johnny Cash Christmas album that I found within it straight on the stereo. So now I can say what I say every year record-breakingly early. Eeeeeee, I can't wait for Christmas!

Mix tapes

Am I the only person who knows they are absolutely dreadful at making mix tapes? For some reason I always put too many sad songs on. Mine and Becca's bank holiday road-trip to Seahouses started off with a jaunty soundtrack provided by Becca. We bopped (insofar as you can whilst also steering and managing to indicate etc.) and sang along all the way to Warkworth. As we changed the disc to my own offering I immediately started to well up. The first song I had put on was Laura Cantrell's Bees. Listening to it at home on my own would make me feel a little sad in a pleasingly wistful way but trying to explain what the song was about (and hence why I was upset) was quite disastrous 'It's about this old man whose wife and friends had....' I said that sentence about twenty times before accepting that I was never going to get to the end of it without losing a contact lens. It brought back terrible memories of Gabrielle's Rise Again (I defy anyone, no matter how hard they might be, Geoff Capes even, to not have a bit of a snivel at the story behind that one). Warkworth Castle was just a fleeting blur and I skipped songs. Later on I started to have another blub at Hey Hey Helen until Bec reminded me that it wasn't actually about me and I wasn't alone with a kid, trying to put a dreadful marriage behind me.

The Big Smoke

I really can't decide how I feel about London. I was sitting in a pub on the banks of the river Thames on Friday afternoon, having a drink with my mum after looking round the Tate Modern and wondering whether there is something slightly inadequate about me that makes me not want to live in London. Sometimes it feels like everyone seems to go and live there for at least some part of their youth (if I'm still allowed to use that word about myself) and it's probably on my mind recently since four friends are upping sticks simultaneously. Even as a teenager I never really fancied it. In those days, disgusted with the provincial village I lived in, and dreaming of being a film director, I had more of a hankering for New York which seemed so much more exciting. I had probably over-dosed on Woody Allen, but it seemed easier to imagine myself nursing my Oscars in an apartment over looking Central Park than it did feeling at home in London. Perhaps because I felt that, in London, I'd be a Northerner driven there by economics whereas in New York I imagined I'd be oh, you know, just another kid chasing a dream, ahem. So here I am, living twelve miles away from where I started out! Nee oscar either. It's slow work.

At first I enjoyed walking around London and having a good spy around (and above in the case of the Anthony Gormley statues which I found very pleasingly melancholic) but the speed at which others walk seems to detract from walking's enjoyment. I'm more of a stroller or a saunterer than a strider and I felt like I was holding up 600 people behind me by strolling and peering skywards. Not to mention that, at least from where John lives, there seems to be a phenomenal amount of functional walking. It's lovely to walk to and from work and have a muse on the day's activities... but half an hour to the bus and then half an hour after the bus, just to get to the pub?! It takes him longer to get into central London by public transport than it did to get into Newcastle from home on the 684! The 684! the slowest mode of transport in the world! We did loads of fun things (including seeing the Hound of the Baskervilles and eating frogs' legs - though not at the same time) but I think I'd be wrecked if I tried combining doing fun things there with actually living there and going to work. John evidently loves living there and when I marvel at that fact I feel like the same kind of boring tool as when I want to know what the toilet facilities will be like at music festivals.

I must take after my mother. I sensed she was not a metropolitan type when, five minutes after stepping off the train, she started shrieking at the top of the tube escalator. 'Helen! Help!' I hadn't noticed that the tube escalators went so much faster than they do in other places. Apologies to anyone at Kings Cross tube station last Friday. We did not mean to cause alarm.

I am fully induced

Or is it inducted? Anyway, I have spent quite a few days in recent weeks attending induction days for a community bank job. I applied for the bank job (the nurse bank is like a nursing agency but run by an NHS trust, just in case anyone was wondering if I had moved into the financial sector) in the hope of it eventually leading to a permanent community job. This strategy proved successful as last week I was offered a permanent job with the same trust who are still inducting me for the bank job. I will soon be wearing a cape and cycling from house to house.

I hope I get to do the induction process again. I am perhaps the only person in the world who finds it quite enjoyable to watch clip art strewn powerpoint presentations. I also like having chats with strangers acknowledging that we are all work-shy skivers. 'Do you know what time it finishes?' 'Half three apparently, I'm hoping we'll get away early' 'you normally do at these things', cue official person entering: 'a little bit of housekeeping to start the day... does anyone mind if we miss a session, skip lunch and finish at two?' I don't mind staying til three actually, we're doing nothing more straining than sitting there breathing a bit after all. I just enjoy the camaraderie of everyone wanting to get off early.

The induction process in Gateshead has involved lots of presentations with some particularly inappropriate clipart. Is there really any need to have a slide with a picture of a sinking cartoon ship with the words 'HERALD OF FREE ENTERPRISE' underneath it in a health and safety lecture for community nurses? Bearing in mind that none of the people in the room will be working on or near passenger ferries. I guess the ferry disaster which killed lots of people acts as a good metaphor for forgetting to wipe up a spillage or incorrectly disposing of sharps. I also enjoyed a man saying 'Now, you'll all know about the triangle of fire...' Bum, now I've looked it up on wikipedia I realise I could have made myself the least popular person in the room by interjecting and wondering whether the tetrahedron of fire mightn't be a more useful model to employ?

One low point was an ice-breaking exercise where we had to get up and stand around the room in alphabetical order and then tell the person standing next to us what the first record we ever bought was. My partner, along with fifty percent of the rest of the room, had no recollection of this historic detail, much to my disgust (how could anyone not remember? have they not been being nostalgic about it since a year after they bought it?!). Anyway, since her part of the conversation was rather brief: 'I can't remember, dunno' I tried to make polite chat by wondering how many people in the room would have novelty records like The Wombles or Star Trekkin'. Or perhaps, I suggested, there would be lots of people who were embarrassed at having bought Shakin' Stevens records. Imagine my embarrassment, then, when this first-record-forgetting fool announced to the whole room that my first record purchase was by Shakin' Stevens! Perhaps the dignified thing to do would have been to simply leave it and walk away knowing inside that I was the better(non Shakin' Stevens buying) person. Sadly, my instincts took over and I shouted 'WHHHATT???!!!! It was NOT Shakin' Stevens!' The person leading the session chuckled and politely asked me who it was. Sadly my mind seemed suddenly empty and everyone was shuffling away in a slightly embarrassed fashion before I shouted 'It was Stevie Wonder!' at their backs.

Glory hole

According to Chambers dictionary a glory hole is ' a room, cupboard, drawer, etc where odds and ends are kept, especially in a disorganized way'. I always thought that a glory hole was a hole for a man to put his doofer through for nefarious sexual purposes. Which is why I was somewhat surprised when I let the electricity meter reading man into my mum's house only to hear her apologise 'I'm afraid you'll have to step into the glory hole'. It is hard to ascertain whether the man's smirk came as a result of being asked to insert himself in a ragged edged hole or a polite smile at my mum's embarrassment over the mess in the cupboard under the stairs. Naturally I couldn't wait for him to leave so I could ask my mum just what the hell she was trying to instigate. A disagreement ensued and the dictionary was brought down from the shelf and closed with a murmur 'what kind of monster have I raised?'

We were actually doing a jigsaw at the time (Shops and Pubs of London, in case you were wondering - a subject close to my heart having visited the great city one and a half times) - a pastime which I confess to finding quite enjoyable, perfect accompanied by a can of lager in the barren period between Countdown and Neighbours. Not long after the electricity man left the lady-who-collects-the-money-for-the-parish-magazine arrived. Up to now she's always been a bit part player without a back story (or at least I have only encountered her as a child and therefore assumed she didn't exist when she wasn't walking past my house looking for money for the parish magazine). While my mum ferreted about looking for money for the parish magazine (have you read it, by the way? It's never been the same since Jean's Jottings got axed) I discovered that she had also been a nurse and had been in charge of Project 2000 at the college. I'm sure the 4 o'clock can of Stella seemed a fitting tribute to the professionalism of nursing today. My mum pointed out later that she might not have realised it was me and not her that was drinking it. I said 'that would be much better, everyone in the village will just think that you're not coping'.

Hilarious hospital joke!

Q: Did you hear labia got in again?

A: Yeah, they got a majora victory!

Is that right? It seemed much funnier this afternoon. Oh well, hang on, did you hear the one about the man with strawberries growing out of his head?

Christmas is over

And (sort of) thank goodness for that. In recent years I have embraced the ludicrous excitement/ crushing disappointment dichotomy of the Parker Christmas experience - wholeheartedly throwing myself into the anticipatory part knowing that an inevitable episode of tears would follow.

Still, this year's disappointment surpassed itself. When I was making the Christmas cake with my mum I went to put something in the recycling box in the hallway and saw that she had received an early gift of a massive tub of quality street or similar. I said 'Oooh!' (because at that stage I hadn't been exposed to six thousand seasonal chocolate boxes at work) and scrabbled to see who they were from. It turns out that they were my Dad's ashes. The shape of the jar/urn/whatever and the kind of fancy purple bag thing it came in really did look uncannily like chocolates. So that was nice. My mum was a bit baffled as to why recycling an egg box upset me so much.

So, that's sort of one of the reasons I haven't been writing anything on here for a while. Well, in the last couple of months. Prior to that I was doing an Open University creative writing course. Naturally, I can only do one extra curricular activity at once so this blog went out of favour for a few months. The writing course started off well and I seemed to do quite well, rather unexpectedly, at the poetry section. In fact, I did offer to have a poem about my dad read out at his funeral. My mum decided that, although my tutor had praised the poem and said it 'speaks volumes about unhappiness, about emotional repression, about culture, class, patriarchy and setting' maybe it wouldn't be right for the occasion.

Anyway, the point of this post was really just to say that Christmas wasn't all that bad. It was a bit weird: Dad not being there, John being in Australia, Mum filling the 'make your own crackers' (bought accidentally) with plastic novelties she found in my teenage bedroom.