THAT'S not what you said in the Jeffries' Tube

... is all I ever seem to post these days, isn't it?

I have been back to the quack to discuss my test results. The quack did a manual exam* and has booked me in with the vampire** and the batscanner***.

I am still in constant pain, and the bleeding is still constant.

If I am grumpy with you at all, this is probably the reason. I can at least now self-medicate with gin.

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* Yes, THAT kind of manual exam. And I had to explain to her what a mooncup was. And having my uterus prodded at from all angles did not help with the pain.
** Apparently not everyone refers to having bloods taken as "going to see the vampire"? I'm sure the seasoned phlebotomist will have heard the term before
*** Ultrasound scanning person

If you're trying to contact me for the next couple of days, you're probably best either phoning the landline, or going through Mat if it's text-based communication.

- Samsung were supposed to collect my phone yesterday, so it got reset to factory settings and powered down. They didn't come.
- My new phone has not arrived yet.
- I am typing this on Mat's laptop because Tiny Laptop is broken, and has been for ages, but I never got round to fixing her because I was fine with my phone.
- Alisdair's phone (my old Note 2, so 3 phones ago) is proving increasingly unreliable after nearly 5 years of constant use and keeps dying on him, so contacting me via him is not going to be a reliable option.

In health news, I am still in pain from the original, still undiagnosed, problem. I am having horrific side effects from the antibiotics they gave me to treat the secondary problem they found while looking for the original problem. And I can't even play stupid games on my phone to distract me from all this.

All in all, I'm a bit low.

Sorry not to end on a more positive note...

... but only because so many people I care about made such impassioned pleas (and in some cases told me their own tales of teetering on the edge of leaving).

I'm not the world's happiest bunny right now. But I'm clinging on.

A couple of days ago someone I had a great deal of affection for passed away. It was not terribly unexpected - she was past 90 years old - but it was quite sudden. She had a stroke. The funeral has been set for a week tomorrow, at 2.30pm, in Devon.

A week tomorrow, at 2.30pm, my schedule says I am zooming through the midlands because I'm due to be on a train from the civilised north to the wilds of Bournemouth for Lib Dem conference. The ticket was booked ages ago, on a two together railcard, to maximise savings, because even with my new job money is still a struggle. Because it was booked on a two together railcard, if I don't use that ticket I'll be screwing over the other person on the two railcard, who will have to buy another full price ticket to go to conference.

I could try to find two people who are 1, travelling to Lib Dem conference from Calderdale AND have a Two Together Railcard AND haven't already booked their tickets, but this seems to me to be massively unlikely.

I could borrow money so I can help my Two together partner get a solo ticket, and then all I have to do (all!) is get from Devon to Bournemouth after the funeral in time to check in to my hotel room - which I would now have to pay for whether I use it or not.

Or I could not go to the funeral.

Whatever I do, I am perpetrating an injustice. I hate impossible choices.

I have been thinking about this on and off all week, and sleeplessness is making me blog about it now. Sorry it's not the cheeriest subject for a Saturday morning...

One of the consequences of my past is that I never feel 100% safe and secure. Even in a blissful post-coital embrace with a lover, even if I trust that person with my life, there is a part of me fretting about my safety. And not only do I never feel truly safe, but I have different things that increase my meagre sense of safety to most people. So where most people feel safer at night if they have locked the doors, I feel less safe if my escape route is impeded. I understand that locking the doores at night keeps burglars out, but I don't like it. I HAVE to know where the keys are, and I don't like having interior doors shut at all, at any time.

I feel safer sleeping on the side of the bed nearest the door. If I go to a new place I have to plan how I would get out, and am anxious and jittery until I have. I need to know where the train station is and that I can get to it at all times, wherever I am; and I always need to have a travel pass, or enough money to buy a ticket to get away if I need to.

When you've had a relationship where the person you love IS the danger, even if it is only one of many relationships, it really screws with your head. And there's always a part of you wondering if it WAS your fault, and if you could make THIS lover treat you the same way.

Intellectually, of course, I know it wasn't my fault. He was just a violent person. I also know that were anybody to try to treat me that way now
1, I am physically strong enough (and have done enough self defence classes) to make sure it wouldn't be me came off worst
2, it would only happen once, then I would end the relationship.
... but that's still not enough for the creeping sense of "what if" to go away. It worms around in my heart, and makes me doubt myself and other people. In this context, allowing myself to love ANYBODY at all is counterintuitive.

I am lucky enough to have more than one person to love. There are people I would trust with not only my own life, but my daughter's. They have proved to me on countless occasions that I could feel safe with them, if only my treacherous heart would allow me to do so. They understand, and they are patient and kind, and do what they can to help when I don't feel safe at all. Allowing myself to love them is my small act of rebellion against the forcible indoctrination that if you open your heart to someone it only leads to physical and emotional pain. I WILL NOT allow myself to believe that is true in all cases, and so I prove to myself it's not by loving people as hard as I can.

This can be a bit intense if you're on the recieving end of it. All I can say is that I am grateful, hugely grateful, for the people willing to be subjected to my love.

You know who you are. Thank you.

So I am physically ill, again. I don't think it's anything serious but it is leaving me exhausted and yet insomniac, which is always a great combination.

I've also been under a bit of stress the last few days - entirely of my own making - which has pushed my never-particularly-stable mental state into full blown beat-myself-up mode. This means that the tiniest thing I get wrong feels like a disaster, and the smallest of my flaws feels like a reason I should be put to death to save the rest of the universe the embarrassment of having to put up with me.

I'm not able to do anything that involves leaving the house because of the physical illness (which makes me feel incredibly guilty and makes the mental problems worse), and because ofthe mental stuff I'm incapable of concentrating enough for books or games or even telly. I'm just about coping with Twitter (while starting the odd pointless argument).

I am posting this so that if I am unexpectedly grumpy or short with you, you know the reason. And I am turning comments off because, frankly, if I get the sort of comments I usually get on an entry like this they will only make me cry at the moment; I know I have people who love me, but right now I can't understand why they do when I'm such a useless piece of crap. This will probably pass. But until it does: apologies in advance if I say something bitchy or cruel or below the belt to you. It's not your fault.

I am now 36. For various reasons a number of things that have been percolating for a long time all decided to come to fruition at once yesterday, PLUS lots of new and exciting problems all decided to crop up at once too. In terms of personal, political, and mental health issues it was Not A Good Day to put things very mildly indeed. Most of the things that went wrong were at least partly my fault* and as is usual when I'm having a bad brain day this all got magnified in my head till I was fully convinced that I was the worst piece of human scum to have ever walked the earth.

And then I snapped, and went to the pub.

I sat there in the pub feeling like the worst lump of morally bankrupt detritus on the planet, and consumed with self-loathing. I felt like all I had in the world was the glass of beer in front of me and huge amounts of chest pain**. And then I finished the beer. And it was oddly liberating. All the various things that I fret about all the time had either blown up spectacularly in my face or gone away; but whichever category they were in I suddenly realised that meant I didn't have to worry about them any more.

What does one do when one is suddenly freed from all one's worries? Well, I'll tell you what I did. I ordered a large brandy and tried to recruit the barmaid and her friend to the Lib Dems. And I think that tells you more about what is essential to my being than pretty much anything else I have posted on this blog ever.

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*with the honourable exception of First Busses stranding magister in Leeds, which meant he had to get a train to Huddersfield and then a taxi from Huddersfield home...
**which is OBVIOUSLY not true, I am in fact incredibly lucky, but when I get into a boo, I don't go halves.

So said Grayson Perry on the radio just now, talking about photography, but I wonder if it applies more generally.

I am tired of having backache.
I am tired of having headache.
I am tired of my brain's relentless negativity.

I'm not smiling today. This means I am art.

... the cellar has flooded again. In between the cellar flooding last week and the cellar flooding tonight, I fell over walking the dogs and ended up in hospital with a suspected broken patella (luckily just bad bruising but I still have crutches and huge amounts of pain).

This means I have missed some shifts at work, and will therefore be missing my wage for those shifts. I was trying to save up for conference, which is less than two weeks away, and now it looks like I won't be able to meet the rent. At least we paid for the train tickets in advance...

We are hopefully going to be moving house soon. Instead of us paying X amount for this house and James paying X amount for his place, it makes sense for him to move over here so we are paying 1.5X between us and he isn't paying train fare every weekend and we get a much nicer and bigger house for less money. Sense is being made, right? But this involves sorting through all our huge piles of crap. I suspect this will unearth previously unknown civilisations, and possibly the lost valley of the dinosaurs.

On top of everything else, Roxy's skin condition has flared up again, and Holly goes back to school in the morning.

It's at times like this when I thank Cthulhu for the invention of gin.

In this week's mock the week, Jack Whitehall made a joke. He said "the north! Where men are men... And so are quite a lot of the women." As one person, both Mat and James turned to look at me. Grinning. Just because I was amused by them discussing house work earlier.

I feel picked on.

* lip wobble *

... are the ones who want to "share" it with the rest of us?

I want to blog about stuff: elected House of Lords, royalty, the awesomeness of Vince Cable, the shitstorm that has blown up around Gail Simone this weekend, my wife's marvellous bread-making abilities, internal party election rule changes and why they are needed, etc. etc. etc..

And yet somebody outside the house is playing loud irritating music and I can't form coherent thoughts to put down on the screen. All I can think is SHUT UP SHUTUP SHUTUUUUUUUUUUUUP!!!! I mean, is there any need for Mika? Just because it's sunny?

In other news, Ash at work has decided he is going to start calling me Eeyore. I doubt these two things are unrelated.

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But more than that, I hate the reaction they bring out in me. For, having received a diatribe three times the length of something I originally tossed off as a bit of fluff to help someone out, which totally misses the point of my bit of fluff, and lays into me in quite a nasty manner, what is my first response?

Is it "this man is a cock who can safely be ignored"?

Is it "why, what an impressive straw man you have built there, sir, may I set fire to it?"?

No.

My first, instinctive, response is "He hasn't got what I was saying and is vehemently agreeing with me while telling me how stupid and ill-informed I am. I must have not been clear enough".

My first response is to blame myself. How deep our socialisation goes.

No, you're not getting any more detail than that. Normal blogging may recommence at some point soon. Life is still v hectic chez Jennie.

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