Being Me

I do apologise. Did you think I'd been abducted by Planet Zoggians? Left the country with just a bag of underwear and a passport to start a new life? Been locked in a public toilet somewhere in town for three weeks and only released when someone realised 10B hadn't had Shakespeare inflicted on them for ages and were looking unusually cheerful? 'Where's Mrs Hill? We don't know. We decided not to query it.' Facebook keeps telling me: '123 people who like your 'Fran Hill - Writer' Facebook page have not heard from you in a while. Write a post.' I'm not sure I like its tone. My 'Fran Hill - Writer' page is where I put my 'I've written a blog' updates. And any major progress on my novel. Or any major achievements in competitions ... So, I'm not saying that page has been 'quiet' but if a butterfly flew past it, you'd hear its wings like a pair of bellows. I'm sorry, therefore, for my absence on ...

Lying on my bed is a pair of black trousers. They need some sewing work done but I am to needlework what Donald Trump is to coherent discourse and am putting it off. I bought the trousers one summer, several years ago. The label said 'medium length' but when I first wore them, the hems smothered my shoes, dragged along behind me like two recalcitrant children, and yelled to the world, 'This is a shortarse if ever there was one. There's enough spare material here to cover a three-piece suite.' I turned the trousers up to a more reasonable length but, that day, didn't have any black cotton. So, I waited until I could get to the shops to buy black   used silver-grey cotton instead and kidded myself that the stitches wouldn't show if I was careful. Wouldn't show? Wouldn't show?  Perhaps if I was to needlework what Donald Trump is to verbal gaffes they wouldn't have shown. But - I wore the trousers to school the next day and taught the firs...

I'm writing this while sitting in bed very late on a Wednesday evening, unwisely so because I have to be up at six. But I usually listen to Radio 4 at this point and they're playing some of their unfunny comedy. I swear they use the late comedy slot to try out people who ring up and say 'My mum says I'm hilarious. Can I have a show?' 'Yeah, sure. We have a space at 11.15pm we reserve for people whose mums think they're hilarious.' 'Will it be a big audience?' 'Sure, we get all kinds. Insomniacs who really don't care what's on as long as someone's talking to them. Women breastfeeding and using our show to bore the child back to sleep. Drunk people: they're easy to please. Shift workers so knackered we could play them Paradise Lost backwards and they wouldn't realise. Old people who napped for longer than they meant to at 4pm and now won't sleep until 3am. Women still breastfeeding. Ex-comedians who want to feel sm...

The Boiler Man has been. If you want to know why that's even A Significant Thing, see  this post from last Sunday He took out a spanner, said, 'Yeah, I know what this is,' turned a screw, and bingo! The boiler has been renamed Whisperer. I do not have words for the relief I feel. I will just offer you these comparative situations in an attempt to explain. I get the same level of relief when I .... - have eaten a bar of chocolate and when I read the calories it says '100' where I was expecting '300'. - wake up after a dream in which forty children are rioting in my classroom, lobbing doughnuts at each other and shouting 'Out, teacher, out!' - leap out of bed thinking it's a Friday and that I'm an hour late for school, then realise it's a Saturday - find a seat on the bus next to a string-thin person so that they don't have to commune with my thigh - watch a string-thin person get on the bus and take the seat not next to...

I like general noise. I work best when in cafes, surrounded by the hubbub of gossip, coffee machines, the clink of cups. At night, I often drift off to sleep with Radio 4's Book at Bedtime murmuring in my ear. Silence worries me and makes me restless. However, there are some noises I can't tolerate. Let us talk about them. 1. My husband using the pressure cooker My husband makes stock if we have chicken bones left over or sometimes puts a soup together with all the root veg from his allotment. He likes to use the pressure cooker but he knows to warn me before it starts the hissing phase.  I have to know the exact time because I hate to be taken by surprise by that hissing: it makes me want to slap people. Maybe it's some kind of primal warning system of danger - a throwback to long ago (hissing serpents ... temptation ... No, Eve, don't DO it!) but that hissing noise crawls under my skin. I've typed 'hissing' several times now and it's recreating...

Twice now, we have accidentally had a Christmas barbecue, both times because my daughter-who-was-a-contestant-on-Masterchef has arrived at our house with the Christmas meat, over-estimating the size of our oven.  Once it was a piece of beef which was so big and boastful, we had to tell it to breathe in before it came through the front door, let alone the oven door. Last year, she brought a goose which had an ambition to be an Olympic shot-putter and had been undergoing intensive training before its hopes and dreams were cut short. Both the beef and the goose found themselves being barbecued in our back garden, there being no room in our tiny oven for roast vegetables and meat with pretensions. We took turns togging up in hats and coats to baste or check the meat, avoiding the twitchy curtains of the neighbours who wondered why, if we wanted a barbecue at Christmas, we didn't just move to Australia. This year, we went to our daughter's house for Christmas and, by design rat...

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in the land of One-Wrong-Consonant. Her name was Goldisocks. Goldisocks had bright yellow hair and socks to match. This made it hard for her. When you spend your spare time peeking in at the windows of strangers, trying to be subtle, buttercup-yellow hair is a disadvantage in itself. Having matching socks that would light up a Norwegian Arctic winter or guide a ship into port in a wild storm makes it all more challenging. Nevertheless, Goldisocks skipped off one morning into the woods and found herself in front of a cottage she had never seen before: the home of the Three Beans. Here they are in the picture below: Daddy Bean, Mummy Bean and Teen Bean. Mummy Bean is the one on the right whose face shows open distress and I'm about to tell you why. Earlier that morning, before Goldisocks was up and about, the three Beans had been arguing over breakfast. Teen Bean had been grumpy and hard to please (he's the one at the...