Before Hindsight

Partner still very unwell, coming up to day 14. She’s been sleeping 20 hours a day, and though she reckons she’s not getting any better, I’m sure I can detect a slight shift in mood. Still no feedback from GP, but my money is on glandular fever.

Discovered swiftly that there were no laundered clothes for kids, and found a mountain of dirty clothes hidden behind the laundry bin. Processed it all now. I’ve no idea where the clean clothes go, so I went to Tesco and got a pile of boxes, and stowed the kids’ clothes in those, stacked up in the lounge.

Decided to clean the cooker one evening, and found the main ring blocked up with grease, so dismantled the whole thing. It was 2 am before I had it back together (clean and working). Regretted it in the morning.

Have resorted to hiring an occasional cleaner for hoovering, dusting, and general cleaning. The extra costs are in danger of tipping us over Micawber’s cliff: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

Getting the kids off to school on time in the morning, but involves getting up 30 minutes earlier. Washing the dishes after childrens’ bed times, and organising next days packed lunches and clothes, while attending to partner’s needs, gets me to bed 30 minutes later. As I was living on minimum sleep anyway, I’m surviving on power naps in the office between jobs …

Shopping isn’t much of a shock, as I did most of it anyway, but those extra few pints of milk etc. midweek are intensely annoying.

I was doing all the morning, and 2 afternoon school runs, but the extra 3 afternoon runs are destroying my ability to run the business. 2 of those days enable me to offer customers a full day on site, but now I must organise a childminder for the pickup before booking a full day with a customer. The third day was my “studio” day, which is now cancelled until further notice.

Painfully, the 10 to 15 minutes I’ve been grabbing each day for music practice have also disappeared without trace. Practiced the Sax today for the first time, but I’ll probably have to put the music side of things back on ice for some months.

Friends are rallying round, and as always it’s the people you least expect who contribute most. My past experience is people lose interest in assisting after 3 months, which takes us neatly to the Summer holidays … the point at which we’re really going to need help, since the school won’t be providing convenient weekday childcare.

Childcare for 2 kids 5 days a week costs 60% of my income … assuming my days are fully booked with customers. In reality, it would probably absorb 80% to 90% of my income, making it almost pointless working.

So I’m trying to manage asking minimal favours, in the hope folks will still be inclined to be generous with child-minding when most needed.

Helen is working all waking hours, and probably quite a few sleeping hours, editing the video of Aquaphonics for her degree show. This was supposed to be a collaborative video, but given the new circumstances I’ve barely put 6 hours towards this project phase, and only then with the help of a childminder.

Most of my input has been watching what Helen has done so far, with my jaw hanging open, occasionally muttering inane phrases like “ … it’s amazing …”. She’s done an astonishing job. My only contributions have been altering the speed of some of the fades, and trawling through the help files to find out how to do freeze-frames and motion-smoothing.

For some reason, AN just published one of my regular rants on the letters page. The editor seems to like extreme generalisations and indefensible views. Is this a good thing?

Tomorrow is another day … one in a long line I’m not looking forward to.

My partner has entered a state of emotional and physical collapse. Her joints have swelled up, and she’s spent most of her waking hours this week weeping. Is this the inevitable result of 4 years as a school counsellor?

It’s one thing to listen to an adult recounting how they were sexually abused at 13, it’s another to listen to a 13 year old who expects to go home that evening and be sexually abused … while the social services, health and police flail around impotently, failing to protect anybody.

A big problem is the school is in a well-off area. People, especially teachers and parents, expect wealth will protect the kids – and conversely that poverty leaves them vulnerable. The reality is often the opposite – all close family out at work, paying for School Fees, for 90% of their waking lives, children are at the mercy of whoever steps in to fill the childcare gap. Unemployed parents may be depressed, lonely, isolated, desperate … but they are there, with their children. Poor kids know how to survive on the streets. Wealthy kids are lost in the scary world beyond their Private School gates.

I am constantly amazed at the consensus which denies the struggle and suffering lying just beneath the surface of life. The celebrity culture, the glitz and the glamour, the stuff that’s drawing us in, telling us it’s OK, and the worst thing that could happen is our laundry doesn’t come out whiter than white.

One of my many doses of reality came when I took on a role at my childrens’ after school club. I gradually became aware of children who would come for a while, then disappear, then reappear some months later … and who weren’t connected with the school.

These were the stateless children – whose parents had come to the UK to take refuge from political upheaval, but whose pleas for asylum had been denied by the Home Office. At the airport, about to be forced aboard the deportation plane, the Foreign Office had intervened – “You can’t get on that aeroplane, your lives are in danger at your destination”. Merciful. But then a whole family finds itself stateless: with no rights. No rights of residency, work, benefits, housing, not even the right to be heard in court. Non-people.

My (ultimately futile) concern over the stateless families of Oxford consumed my spare time for a year, until I was accused of racism by someone with an axe to grind. It all seemed ridiculous, having a “but you said that” – “No I didn’t, I said this.” slanging match in the face of what we were trying to deal with. Anyway, Ofsted intervened and closed down the club, as the children were no longer protected.

I’m often tempted simply to make issue-based art about all these aspects of life. But what I’m more fascinated by is this: What is it that enables people to survive, even thrive, in these circumstances? What is it that draws people into these depths of other peoples’ darkness? And what is it that keeps us (relatively) sane?

Richard Dawkins and his Selfish Gene isn’t enough; nor is Damien Hirst’s pickled lamb “Skipping round the fields yesterday, makes you think dunnit?”. No, it doesn’t. It probably gives the privileged and complacent bourgeoisie the illusion that they’re thinking for a few minutes, but it doesn’t really get to the grit, the despair, the fear, panic, anguish and desolation that life is really built from.

In the extremes, people either turn to the sacred, or abandon it. That’s one of the things that fascinates me about the sacred – When the axe falls, some can’t live without it, others can’t live with it.

I can’t live without it.

This evening, though, I’m back on the bottle, erasing the daily fact that I’m suddenly responsible for this whole chabang – kids, meals, laundry, shopping, school runs, business with the added bonus of an incapacitated adult. I’ll get used to it soon, and money will just continue to happen – if the sick leave runs out, we’ll easily survive on less; it’s a privilege to have something to lose.