Its Friday once again but this one is a disappointment as I wake knowing the planned exchange of contract on the London house will not happen today as anticipated. It not only marks a significant step in finalising my sisters estate but it will sever me from a place that I was never happy in and could never wait to leave. It was my childhood prison, not that my family were cruel or I was mistreat but it was a place I just did not belong. It was an aspiring working class household that worked hard and did its best to give me and my sister every chance to succeed in education and life in general. It was also a family devoid of physical contact and emotional integration. I guess we all tried in our own way but where overwhelmed by things we could not control or did not recognise. We were never cold, never hungry, always clothed and as safe as it was possible to be. All this makes my desire to be shot of this house the more unlikely, but there it is. My dyslexia was neither recognised or understood by me or my family and was in stark contrast to my sister who excelled at school and lived out the parental desires for her. I struggled to understand why I could not write or read like my peers and of course I compensated in other ways.

There were other irritants like the succession of cats that I hated and brought in an army of fleas that seemed to like me more than other family members and finally my mothers parents that moved into the house to ultimately have legs amputated in the case of my grandfather who had taught me dominoes and a grandmother who declined with Alzheimer’s and was repeatedly retraumatised by being told over an over that she could not visit her husband in hospital because he was dead. I got out before she died. So this house holds no happy memories for me despite the years I spent in therapy training and its contiguous own therapy. I saw over the years people, many criminals from shit backgrounds, recover lost family connections and memories and parental love and care that enabled them to reframe their childhood, cruelly this never happened for me so I guess my perceptions were pretty accurate in the first place. I guess others of my family have a different view, my children who sent time in the house have different memories which seem to have been happy so it just highlights the fact that its the people not the place.

One of the few things that happened in the house was acquiring a beaten up old portable type write which magically unlocked my ability to write. I later worked out why whilst doing my psychology degree. It turns out my wiring (neurodiversity) meant that I could not for the life of me convert sounds into hand movements that could translate into writing. The type write changed this process for me and made things more manageable. When I got a computer “spell checker” refined my ability, what it did not do was eradicate my inability to see when I had replicated words or parts of sentences in a paragraph. By the time I had got the typwriter I had learned to read, an accidental side effect of being read to by an inspired scout master who read to the troop Steinbeck’s Cannery Row which inspired me to read Of Mice and Men, suddenly I had the knack and read everything he wrote and then moved onto other authors. Its a trait I have to this day, its an expensive one. Only Balzac has defeated me so far. My family bewail my rooms of books but they are my scaffolding, my feeding trough and the ambrosia that feeds me continually. They if anything became the childhood family I never felt I had. This “family” gave me two things. Firstly a vocabulary far beyond I ever thought possible and secondly the belief that I could do anything because somewhere someone will have written down how to do it. Now I Google everything and watch videos on YouTube of competent people doing exactly what I want to do. So if I’ve found anything out it is the reason I am so attached to my books.

So waking to a day on which I am to be disappointed I do the check of how I am, check my messages and mail and then read the first essay of David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day. Finally I haul my snotty nose and aching ribs out of bed and eat toast and drink coffee to wash down my meds. I read more and then get ready to drive my eldest daughter to the hairdresser at the gym, where I start to draft the blog. What comes out is quite Sedaris like, I think. All of this accompanied by two women talking about the dangers of kitchen rebuilds, boiler servicing and all this time one of their swim suits has been left in a sink with the tap running to get clean. Its been an hour and a quarter of running hot water, that’s what I call getting your money’s worth from your gym membership. Others might have an other interpretation.

The afternoon goes by as I feel myself loosing spoons at a rapid rate and then I slide into the evening with its rugby and Mission Impossible film. Night meds, painkiller and bed and hope that I can shake this cold (possible reaction to COVID booster) and my increasingly sore ribs (bloody hedgehog).