Category: family

Posted in Books, Celebrities, Current Events, family, london, Reviews

Unpopular Opinion: Spare is Worth A Read

Posted on by Miss Blabbaholic

I’ve held off doing this review for as long as I could, in the hopes that when I finally post it, the dust would have settled enough for the general public to look at Spare in a fair and objective manner.

I can only imagine how hard it must be to live your life under such intense public scrutiny. I remember how humiliated I felt once when one of my classmates read out some poems I’d written about my best enemy who also happened to be my secret crush (he was the Arnold to my Helga, please don’t judge me, I was thirteen). In front of the whole class. Which just so happened to include Arnold.

I remember that sinking feeling in my gut when I was called to task in front of my family because my uncle had somehow discovered that I’d lied about a school trip, all so that I could go on holiday with my one great love (and no, I don’t think its a coincidence that a lot of my bad decisions seem to have involved guys).

There isn’t a single one of us who can claim that we didn’t make mistakes, who can say with all honesty that they hadn’t been involved in a youthful indiscretion or two. We’ve all had a forbidden sip of alcohol before we’d reached the legal drinking age, and I can name a number of my friends who’d smoked cigarettes as a giant middle finger against their parents or some other figure of authority.

We’ve had our share of heartaches and heartbreaks. We’ve lost relatives, mourned loved ones, and either directly or indirectly have even come face to face with our own mortality,

The difference between us and Prince Harry is that during those times when we fucked up, it was not a matter of national interest.

It would not have made any difference to the Houses of Parliament if I stopped talking to my sister because she was being a bitch (which is every other day most weeks, and every day at certain times of the month, sorry Arlene).

And yet, when it became general knowledge that Harry and William had come to blows over their wives and royal duties (or was it the size of their royal apartments?), the world seemed to judge Harry for being so open about how he felt about it.

I read a lot of the reviews and write-ups that were published when Spare first came out. A lot of them, even the more sympathetic and impartial ones, seemed to say the same thing: check your privilege, Harry.

It’s like we’re saying he’s not allowed to talk about the things he’s been through because of his wealth and status.

I’m not gonna lie. I was one of those people who rolled my eyes when the Oprah interview came out, with Harry and Meghan insinuating that the senior members of the British Royal Family were racist. I mean, they probably were, but I was like: cry me a river.

At the time the nurses were fighting for fair pay and yet this whole “reveal” was front page news. It was all the morning shows could talk about. The fact that Meghan had difficulty getting a tiara for her wedding, and that she had an argument over some flower girl dress with the then Duchess of Cambridge, was somehow more important than the fact that the NHS was on its last legs.

I was livid.

However, the more I read Spare the more I realised how much of a double standard we have against celebrities and public figures, especially the Royal Family. After all, they don’t really serve a purpose. Some would even argue that they are outdated, a drain on our resources, a waste of taxpayer’s money (although they do wonders for the tourism industry).

So it’s almost like we’re saying we have the right to know every aspect of their lives as recompense for all that we give them. They have to justify their existence by giving us daily insight into their gilded lives, plus points if it happens to involve salacious gossip like infidelity and sibling rivalry,.

And when someone actually has the balls to call us out on our behaviour, we call foul.

Harry has chosen to tell his story the way he sees it.

As a writer, and a lover of stories, I find it difficult to condemn someone for wanting to tell his. Even if a part of me doubts his version of events, even if I find him, at times, incredibly repetitious and whiny, I still think he has the right to tell it, just like everybody else.

After all, what is truth anyway? Who is right, who is wrong? Isn’t history just a version of events as told from the point of view of the victor?

I am as surprised as anybody to find myself saying that my final verdict on this book is that its worth a read. Harry is a far more nuanced person than I ever could have imagined, and in 80% of the book (mostly before Meghan came into the picture) he came across sympathetic, likeable, and relatable.

Either that or the part of me that grew up on a steady diet of Disney movies is just naturally predisposed to forgive Prince Charming anything.

Finally though, I would just like to say that there is a family at the heart of this book, and this is what makes it almost unbearably intrusive. The systematic destruction of what was once a really close relationship, one that fell apart because of an accident of birth, was more painful to read about than Meghan Markle’s supposed struggles against the institution.

Primogeniture: it sucks.

Even as I write this, I am aware of my sister in the room next to me, practising her Japanese on Duolingo in preparation for our trip to Japan in April. It’s not every day that I thank my lucky stars that our relationship has evolved from the days when I wanted to kill her for taping over my Spice World album to what we have today, when sometimes hers is the only company I could bear to keep because everyone else is just so stupid.

In saying that, as the elder of the two, I’m probably William in this scenario. Who knows what secret resentment my sister could be harbouring against me?

I suppose I should just find solace in the fact that Arlene could not care less about going public and writing a memoir. The woman could hardly bring herself to post on social media.

I think I’ll be alright.

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Posted in College, family, friendship, relationships, Reviews

An Ode to Uncomplicated Friendships – Book Review: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Posted on by Miss Blabbaholic

By the time I reached the peak of my adolescence, I had already consumed enough teen series and rom coms to know that my life only needed two things to be absolutely perfect: a guy best friend, and for me to fall in love with said guy best friend. 

And for him to fall in love with me right back, obviously. 

These were the angst-filled days of Dawson’s Creek Season 1 and 2, when Monday nights were devoted solely to watching Joey agonise over a pre-crying meme Dawson and his inability to see that the perfect girl he’s been looking for has been standing right in front of him this whole time, waiting for him to open his eyes and really see her.

I just wrote that entire paragraph in about five seconds by the way. It’s almost as if I was a subject matter expert on unrequited love and the hazards of being trapped in the notorious friend zone. 

Yes, yes, we already know this story. It’s a tale as old as time itself. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a single guy and girl can never be just friends. One or both of them will inevitably develop pesky non-platonic feelings after which drama and a whole lot of crying yourself to sleep while your sister (who also happens to be your roommate) pretends not to hear you ensues. 

This isn’t going to be a post about that, Thank God.

I have already exhausted this subject and written enough about it to fill up a novel of War and Peace proportions. Instead, I’d like to focus on the first part of my adolescent dream, the having a guy best friend bit that I’ve forgotten in my foolish desire to write, direct, and star in my own teen drama series. 

I have said it before and I will say it again: in this world where Hallmark reigns supreme and people make millions out of romance and sex, the value of friendship, true friendship, is vastly underrated. 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about a lot of things. It’s a throwback to the pre-social-media- 90s and early 2000s, that’s currently being idealised (or sanitised, depending on your viewpoint) as that wondrous, magical time when we had what we need without the excess and extra that clutters up our lives these days. 

It’s a book about the magic of possibilities which, if you’ve read enough of my blogs, you would know I’m obsessed about. There’s a wonderful quote from the main character Sam early on in the book, which kept me from brushing this off as just another John Green rip-off. It was when he was in a rut, struggling with moments of indecision while trying to create something extraordinary, and he thought to himself:

The best part about this moment is that anything is still possible.

I love that. I have always loved the idea of having miracles for breakfast, of something wonderful waiting for me just around the corner, and of finding that ever-elusive indefinable something that, in some ways, I’ve been unconsciously searching for my whole life.

I love the idea of infinite chances, that tomorrow is another day to do better. As one of my favourite characters in the book puts it:

“…what is a game? It’s tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Its the possibility of infinite rebirth and infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

Remembering that quote has gotten me through some tough times in recent weeks.

But really, beyond all of that, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is an ode to uncomplicated friendships. 

It’s an ode to the kind of friendship that gives without taking, because you know the other person needs it more, and because you know that they would do the same for you in a heartbeat. In the author’s own words, its kinda like when you’re taking care of a Tamagotchi: you feed it, entertain it, put it to bed, and look after it when it’s sick. 

It’s a tribute to the kind of friendship you fight for, and fight to keep, even when it’s been so damaged by words and actions that the other person thinks its irreparable and just wants to be rid of you. You hound them, chase them, and spend approximately 120 minutes on the phone with them to talk out your issues, and it does get resolved eventually, even with the crappy Sun Cellular mobile network interrupting you every half hour.

It’s a love letter to the kind of friendship where you’re not afraid to let the other person know everything about you, even and perhaps especially, your faults and imperfections, because you know it’s not going to make a damn difference, they will accept you and love you anyway. 

Mostly, this book is a hope fulfilled that no matter what, you’re not going to be alone, even if you stay single for the rest of your life, because your best friend will be there, reserving a space in his attic for you and your cats.

They say that life has a funny way of not giving you the things you ask for because it gives you the things you never knew you needed instead, the things you never even think to ask for. 

I once thought there was nothing in the world I wanted more than to fall in love with my best friend and for him to love me back. 

Now I think about my best friend, the guy who’s seen the world (or at least Europe) with me, who makes me laugh when I’m down, who listens to my misadventures and cheers me on as I pursue one crazy thing after another, who opens his home and his family to me when I’m feeling stressed, whose wife takes care of me as if I was also her best friend, whose child I love like my own. 

I think about how simple and uncomplicated our friendship is, to the point where I once lost power on my mobile phone while shopping with him at Marks and Spencer’s and decided to just leave him behind, only to find out later that he also decided to do the same thing when he couldn’t reach me, and we just laughed about it afterwards. 

No drama. No hassle. 

I think about the past ten years of shared moments that I take for granted because I know it’s always going to be there, an anchor in the ocean, one of the few constants I can count on even if the world has gone to hell in a handbasket. 

It’s not every day that I thank God that he’s chosen to give me what I needed instead of what I asked for, but I think about it every now and then, and I smile, knowing all is as it should be. 

Posted in family, grief and loss, LGBT, relationships, Reviews, Uncategorized

Book Review: Under The Whispering Door (And Waking Up Somewhere Strange)

Posted on by Miss Blabbaholic

I’ve read enough books to know that literary tastes change over time and sometimes a book you hate can become a book you love depending on your current life circumstances.

I bought Under The Whispering Door by TJ Klune first of all because I was attracted to the spray-painted edges and the beautiful jacket of the Waterstones hardcover edition. I was also on somewhat of an LGBTQ reading streak after finishing the sequel to Aristotle and Dante Explore the Secrets of The Universe.

I like TJ Klune just fine. I think his characters are quirky and cute, if a bit too saccharine for my tastes. However, I do think his books are overly long and suffer from pacing issues.

The premise of this book is interesting enough: a man dies and is taken by the Grim Reaper to some kind of coffee shop called Charon’s Crossing (lol) where a ferryman named Hugo is waiting to guide him to the afterlife.

The middle meandered a bit, and this was where I started to slowly lose interest. And that’s saying a lot, as I was under mandatory hotel quarantine whilst reading this book and literally had nothing else to do apart from sleep, eat, and worry about an upcoming job interview.

I personally thought the story went in a completely different direction from what I was expecting based on the premise, so I put it away and thought, hmph, maybe this needs to go on the DNF pile because life is too short to waste it reading a book you don’t like.

Then my grandmother took a turn for the worse.

My family and I then entered a purgatory of waiting where, especially for those of us who were in the health care business, we knew that all we were doing was delaying the inevitable.

Acute kidney injury and pneumonia at her age, especially with the abysmal health care services in the most rural areas of this country, is not something that patients can easily come back from. I knew her life was measured in weeks, if not days, and on top of everything that already happened this year it all got a little bit too much.

So I picked this book up again, and my situation being what it was, it took on a completely different meaning. I somehow just got what TJ was trying to do with it. Like me, he was processing his grief in the only way he knew how, in the medium that was available to him.

The book, to me, is wish fulfillment at its best. Death is the big unknown. One of life’s unsanswerable questions. Those who are in the position to tell us what happens after we die are the same ones who are unable to do so because you know, they’re dead.

So TJ Klune, like so many before him, attempts to paint a picture of what he thinks it might be like for those who have left us.

But this book is so much more than that. In writing about death, TJ Klune somehow managed to write a book celebrating life. I think that’s what really struck me about this book. Its meant to bring some measure of comfort to those left behind, but its also an urge, a plea to the living to make the best of the time they have left to think about what’s really important.

So much about life and death is a mystery. I think there are parts of it that we’re not meant to understand, and that’s where faith comes in I guess. My faith isn’t as strong as it was. I’m not the type who believes in mysticism and signs, not like I used to anyway. The older we get, the harder it is to believe in the intangible, in the things that are can’t be explained by reason or supported by facts.

But consider this: For the whole of last week my cousin had been doing all he can to keep my grandmother comfortable. She had days and nights where she couldn’t breath and we were nebulising her so frequently we feared her heart would give out.

There was one evening where I asked my cousin to gather everyone together and started a group Messenger call because a part of me really thought that was it. When she made it through that night, my only remaining prayer was that she lived long enough to allow mum to say her goodbyes. That might be selfish, and it might mean prolonging grandma’s suffering, but I’d like to think it was what she would have wanted too.

My mum and my sister finally arrived at my grandmother’s bedside Saturday evening. She was barely lucid, she sort of vaguely recognised them and followed them around with her eyes, but she wasn’t responsive enough at that point to even respond to a ‘hello’. Arlene, my sister, said goodbye and promised she would be back to see her at 8am the following day with mama.

My grandmother died peacefully in her sleep at 5am the next day. She held on long enough so my mother was able to say goodbye, long enough to answer my prayers.

When my cousin rang me about her death, I reached for Under The Whispering Door, and found immeasurable comfort in the touching story of Wallace, Hugo, Nelson, Mei and Apollo the Dog. I think I’m a different person now to the person I was when I first started reading this. I know a little bit more and I know a little bit less about life and death than I did now.

Here are some of the things I’m certain of though. For a long time, I’ve been living a life so shallow that I’ve cared more about material things and my self-image than the relationships I have with other people. It’s funny how little those things matter when shit really hits the fan. The other thing I do know is that life really is short. At this point, some of us have more years behind us than we do ahead of us.

The last thing I know is that it really doesn’t matter that we don’t know what comes after the end. The idea is to believe that its going to be amazing, and to die with that belief is to die peacefully. There is a version of events where we are all reunited with those we’ve lost, sipping tea and playing mahjong somewhere up in heaven. This is the version that I will choose to believe.

I’ve said this a lot, I’ve thought this a lot, and many thanks to TJ Klune for this beautiful book and for this wonderful message that I am able to give my grandmother, in spirit, as I was unable to do in person:

Goodbye Nanay, I hope you woke up somewhere beautiful.

Posted in family

The Waiting Game

Posted on by Miss Blabbaholic

Time is relative.

When you’re running late for work and every traffic light you come across is stuck on a red light, five minutes can seem like an eternity.

However, when your favourite band starts playing its signature song during the last five minutes of what had been a wonderful concert, 5 minutes feels like no time at all.

12 hours of the daily grind doing a job you hate can feel interminable.

However, the last 12 hours of the weekend, when you’re staring Monday in the face (and the beginning of another busy work week) never feels long enough.

A week’s vacation passes in the blink of an eye.

A week waiting to find out if a loved one will make it through multiple organ dysfunction feels like forever.

Waiting is agony. I’m not the most patient person to begin with. I’m a woman of action. I see a problem, I find a solution. Simple. If there’s something to fix, I would want a run through of all possible options for fixing it.

But there comes a point when you start to run out of options, and every action feels like you’re only prolonging the inevitable conclusion. Its a bitter pill to swallow, knowing that there are some things you just can’t fix.

During my more morbid moments, I often wonder whether its better to die suddenly, without any suffering whatsoever, or from a prolonged disease where you have to suffer constantly but you get the chance to say goodbye to everyone (and them to you).

If you ask me, I want neither option.

I would like to die from old age with a gin and tonic in my hand, surrounded by my family and all the boys I’ve loved who didn’t love me back and who have come to express their regrets on my deathbed, with Taylor Swift playing in the background.

I know the end will come for us all. This month has been difficult. Dealing with dad’s operation and my grandmother being very very ill has brought home just how fleeting life really is, and how few moments there are in between birth and dying. What is 50 or 60 odd years really, in the face of eternity? Its a single grain of sand in a massive desert.

But what a glorious grain it is, so much so that we cling to that single grain for as long as we can. We do all we can to survive, sometimes even beyond all reason. For those of us who work in one aspect of health care or the other, we choose to be aggressive with our treatments because its counterintuitive for us to let go when there are still things that can be done. Giving up goes against every training and every instinct we’ve developed as professionals.

Oh, but the waiting.

Sometimes I imagine I can literally hear the tick tick ticking of time passing and it freaks me out. There is so much I want to do and I’m well aware that I might not be able to do all of them. To me, time is a gift, and we often take it for granted up until the moment we run out of it.

I would want to give those I love the gift of time if I could.

But time is relative. And maybe waiting is relative too. When you’re only waiting for the end, the end could not come soon enough.

There’s a certain sense of relief that comes with knowing that all things will end, one way or the other. Mostly because it means an end to all the waiting, but also because an ending means that a new beginning could and will follow.

It means knowing, one way or the other, what comes after the end.

However which way you want to think about it though, the waiting is and always will be the hardest part.

You’re stationary, stuck in limbo, unable to process your emotions because you don’t know whether you should dare to hope or start to grieve.

You carry out your plans, knowing full well you’re running out of options, running out of time, but no one wants to be the first to say it, to say the truth that’s staring everyone in the face.

No one want to say that this could be it. That we should start saying our goodbyes, something made all the more painful because this stupid pandemic will not allow for even the slightest opportunity to mourn.

The waiting leads to thoughts like these, to blog posts that ramble and make no sense because when you’re only waiting, nothing makes sense.

Sigh. I will not be held responsible for the gibberish I will continue to write in the future. I blame the waiting.

Posted in family, Lifestyle, Self-Discovery

Why One Should Never Write A Blog at 2AM

Posted on by Miss Blabbaholic

I’m not sure how I got from walking down the busy streets of Oxford Circus watching as they start putting the Christmas lights up in anticipation of the holiday season, to waking up at 2am at some hotel in the Philippines, jet lagged and anxious as shit.

I’m the kind of person who likes to plan things, often to the point of lunacy. I’ve been told time and time again that I need to lighten up and allow life to happen instead of fixating on inconsequential things that, when all is said and done, don’t really count for much.

But I was never built for spontaneity and playing it by ear,

I think the devil is in the details, and that it never hurts to research as much as you can about something you’re planning to do. I like lists; disorganisation makes me incredibly twitchy, and I believe in never ever going to a restaurant or cinema without a reservation or pre-booking. It might not make me the most fun person to be around, but hey, someone has to be responsible.

This week, the universe has just sent one giant middle finger to that girl who thought that planning for everything meant you were prepared for the curveballs life throws your way. There are some things that you just can’t prepare for, some things that no matter what you do you’ll never be ready for.

It’s funny, if you had asked me before this week how I felt about being an adult, I would have had a more positive answer. I would have said that I loved the independence, that I loved being more or less financially secure, that I loved the fact that I can get my own groceries, eat fast food, go out drinking and come home late and I don’t have to answer to anyone but myself.

But this week brought home the fact that being an adult also means being responsible. It means being in a room that may include your parents but having to make the big decisions. because everyone else is too distraught to think about the details. It means not having the luxury to break down crying because you have to make sure things are getting done.

Its realising that whatever plans you made might have to come secondary to taking care of your family’s needs, and having to grapple with the guilt of feeling sorry for yourself because you’re potentially missing out on a rare opportunity to move up the career ladder. Its having to convince yourself that you’re not a bad person for thinking about your own future, because life still has to move on for you even if the worst happens.

Being an adult is realising that nothing is ever black and white, and no one is all good or bad, that sometimes people just do the best they can with the circumstances they’re given, and no one should probably expect anything more of them than that, especially given how difficult the past couple of years have been.

I fucking hate being an adult.

I consider my childhood to be sacred. It’s like this giant marble statue I keep in the garden of my mind, full of memories that I take out every now and then when I need to bask in the warmth and comfort of the days when I had no bigger worries than what snack I might ask Papa to buy for me, or what movie we’d go see during the weekend, or how to spend 8 whole weeks of my summer vacation in the small, sleepy town where I spent all of my summers until I was 16.

But it feels like with every year that passes something happens to chip away at my childhood, until it feels like I’m so far away from the girl I once was, and it gets more difficult to see the world as full of wonder, and it gets harder to maintain the belief I’ve always held that every day is a chance for something extraordinary to happen.

You move to a new country and learn to fend for yourself, and the cracks start to show. The first time you realise the adults around you aren’t perfect, that they’re human and therefore fallible, and the cracks spread from head to toe.

When you realise that not all boys turn out to be Prince Charming, and that sometimes things just don’t work out, and you get your heart broken…a piece falls off.

You lose your job because of a mistake that can’t be undone, and suddenly you find yourself facing the yawning mouth of failure, and the prospect of going home to your family with nothing to show for your time away but the bitter taste of regret, and more of the pieces come crashing down around you.

It has to.

Because you have to grow up real quick if you want to turn your life around and stay in the city you’re only just realising you love so much.

A loved one dies, and another is diagnosed with cancer, and suddenly you start thinking about the big questions and facing the truth about your own mortality. You realise you can’t stay young forever. And suddenly your childhood is reduced to a small piece that you fight tooth and nail to retain.

I honestly don’t know where I’m going with this metaphor, or with this entire blog really. I realise that its morbid and a bit more morose than my usual offerings. But I guess I just feel the need to express my very real fears about the future, and my anxiety about the prospect of having to rearrange my life to make room for the changes coming my way.

I think I’m processing, with varying levels of success I might add, the truth that nothing lasts forever, and that I am at the age where I will start losing people I love, and even if that thought makes me want to curl up in a ball in the corner and weep, because that’s not something you ever want to actively think about, I know I somehow need to. I need to start coming to terms with it.

I don’t know, maybe things will turn out okay and I will not need to post something like this again until many many (please let it be many) years later.

Finally, I read somewhere that the thing about troubles, suffering and problems is that they always end, one way or the other. You just have to ride the wave until they do and pray you make it back to shore relatively intact.

I’m riding that wave, its coming up to a full crest but somehow I’m still hanging on. That’s about all I can do at the moment.

Posted in bloggers, family, london, Reviews

Book Review: Hamnet – Maggie O’Farrell

Posted on by Miss Blabbaholic

I had a somewhat unorthodox introduction to Hamlet, arguably one of the greatest plays ever written in the English language.

I was about 11 or so when I heard that John F. Kennedy Jr., who back then was the closest thing America had to a prince, had died in a plane crash. CNN and BBC news kept flashing the image of him that had indelibly imprinted itself in the public consciousness: that of a little boy saluting his father’s coffin during the procession to its final resting place. One newspaper had stamped these words, along with his picture, on the front page:

“Goodnight sweet prince, and may flight of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

I remember sobbing my heart out though I hardly knew the guy. Even when I was younger, I always considered a life suddenly cut short, especially when it was unexpected, to be the biggest tragedy in the world. I looked up those lines and found out they were from a play by William Shakespeare called Hamlet, and I proceeded to hunt up a copy of the play so I could read what it was all about. I was prepared to be amazed and blown away.

My actual reaction was somewhat less than enthusiastic.

To be fair, I was 11 and not nearly mature enough to appreciate the plot, and of course, the various subtexts that made the play so culturally significant and the most widely discussed among all the Bard’s plays. I only knew that it was long and confusing and I would rather have been reading Romeo and Juliet instead if I’m being honest. Needless to say, this was the first and last time I would ever read the story of the Prince of Denmark.

After reading Maggie O’Farrell’s brilliant book, I think I might just crack open a copy of the play again and see whether time and maturity would give me a different perspective. Certainly the idea that Shakespeare had named the Prince of Denmark after his deceased son, and had written it both to honour him and as a way to process his grief, gives it this air of sentimentality, so much that I expect I may never look at it the same way again.

I tend to be really suspicious of any book that wins awards, be it Man Booker Prize or Waterstones’ Book of the Year or whatever. I often find that the quality of book doesn’t quite live up to the hype, at least not in the sense that I actually enjoy reading it. Like, for example, (and I’m probably going to be roasted on the internet for this) I think Hillary Mantel’s Wolfhall series is the biggest pile of (pretentious) drivel I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading.

Hamnet, though, deserves all the accolade it’s received and more.

The plot itself is really very simple. In fact, the plot is something that a simple Wikipedia search would turn up so this isn’t really a spoiler: Hamnet does not survive this book (it says so on the very first page). He dies at eleven; and while there’s very little known about the actual cause of death, Maggie O’Farrell suggests that he died as a result of the bubonic plague that was rampant around England at the time.

It’s hard not to draw parallels at this point to the current coronavirus pandemic. I think this book had a much bigger impact on me than it would have if these had been ordinary times. I just couldn’t help but compare the family’s efforts to care for the children to that of my NHS colleagues working round the clock to give extremely unwell patients a fighting chance to return home to their families. I couldn’t help but think of reports of entire families intubated in the ITU, or young men and women whom the public once thought invincible succumbing to this deadly virus.

It’s just hard, period. If I forget to say it later, I’d quite like to thank Maggie O’Farrell for writing this book and publishing it when she did. I don’t think she realised when she started how relevant it would be to the times we now live in. And speaking for myself, I thought her writing showed she really understood what it was like to see someone go through all that suffering, knowing you were helpless to stop it, that nothing you could do could stop the virus from taking a life.

This alone would have made the book a 5-star read anyway, but then there were all the other elements that made it even better.

It is a testament to how well this book was written that us already knowing how it would end doesn’t take anything away from the build-up of tension and suspense, as the timeline shifts between the present, where the family was trying to do all they can to save the children, and the past, where we get to know more of Agnes Hathaway, William Shakespeare’s mysterious wife.

In telling the story of Agnes, the author was able to inject hints of the magical and supernatural into the book: Agnes was rumoured to be some kind of witch, although I highly doubt this is true. More like these rumours were a product of ignorant minds who simply cannot fathom another explanation for an intelligent woman, apart from this being a result of a pact made with the devil. EYE. ROLL.

I liked Agnes. I liked how modern a character she is, how she took matters into her own hands, how she was strong enough to love, let go, survive loss, forgive, and love again. Taking the time to tell her story was a clever way of keeping readers waiting and at the same time ensured that when the story reached its inevitable conclusion, we’d already formed such a connection with the characters that we wept and mourned with them, Agnes most especially.

I liked that William Shakespeare himself was never once mentioned by name in this book. Of course his legacy casts a large shadow. One never quite forgets that when the author referred to the Latin Tutor, the son, the husband, or the father, that she was actually referring to England’s (and maybe the world’s) greatest playwright. But I thought Maggie O’Farrell treated him with the care and sensitivity that the story deserved, making him just another part of the tapestry being woven.

And that tapestry had Hamnet, the boy on the cusp of manhood, at its centre. This was evident in how she opened the book: him running towards an empty house desperate to find his mother so she could tell him everything was going to be alright, knowing all the while that nothing may ever be alright again. The lack of other characters in that one scene was like the moment in a play when the spotlight shines on the main actor, alone on the stage, and for that one instant we know that there is nothing else more important than this character, that he will touch the lives of those around him for better or for worse.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the Kobe and Gianna Bryant’s death. When they died last year, the only thing people talked about more than Kobe’s legacy was the insane waste of Gigi dying so young, how she would have done so much good for basketball and for the world if her life hadn’t been so brutally cut short.

They quoted Hamlet again. May flight of angels sing thee to they rest.

It’s like the play, and now this book, has come to represent a life uninterrupted, the vacuum left by those who are no longer with us, and the empty space that those leave behind fill with what might-have-been’s.

This book ends with the creation of the play, as we knew it would, but how it was actually portrayed was one of the most heartbreaking manifestations of grief and loss that I’ve ever read in a book. Needless to say, I was sobbing my heart out. This isn’t the cheeriest of books, and I often had to take a break to read romance novels in between just to be able to get through it, but damned if this isn’t one of the best books I’ve ever read in a long long time, and I will remember it always.

Rating: 5 amazing stars.

Posted in dating, family, friendship, LGBT, Young Adult

Book Review: Loveless – Alice Osman

Posted on by Miss Blabbaholic

I had my first kiss when I was twenty seven with a guy I’d met while speed dating. I grew up with all kinds of ideas about how my first kiss was going to go. Hopeless romantic that I was (and still am, probably) I imagined either a moonlit walk on the beach or a romantic candlelight dinner with a full orchestra playing Your Song by Elton John. Fireworks were essential, both literally and figuratively.

What I didn’t expect was dinner at a sushi restaurant (bad idea) and being kissed in the the middle of Trafalgar Square (okay, not a bad location) by someone I was only dating because I felt like I HAD to. At that point, everyone I knew was pairing up, getting married, having kids – ticking all those boxes that we had been brainwashed since birth to believe were the ONLY things that gave life meaning.

At that point, I felt like the odd one, the weirdo who was holding out for something that didn’t exist. Maybe saving your first kiss for someone special was a myth that only existed in movies. As one of my friends put it, what was more important was experience. And apparently, I need lots and lots of those.

Needless to say, my first kiss was a flop, I never saw the guy again because he wanted to get serious after only the second date and I knew I didn’t like him that way. He was just a box I needed to tick, and I think I know now that every dating experience I’ve ever had were like that. I felt like I HAD to date, I HAD to make the effort, otherwise I was going to spend my entire life alone, the lonely spinster perpetually thinking about what might have been, the old lady who spends winters by the fireplace knitting, surrounded by cats – alone, lonely, LOVELESS.

Bollocks to that.

It took me quite a long time (and a lot of bad dating experiences) to accept that alone didn’t have to mean lonely. That relationships were not the be all and end all of the universe. That if people judge me for not being in a relationship, it didn’t mean there was something wrong with me, it meant there was something wrong with them. In fact, there is something wrong with a world that measures your value only by your ability to be with another person.

There are all kinds of love apart from the intensely passionate and romantic pairings we see in the movies or read about in books. There’s love for your family, a love for your friends, and a love for yourself.

I think about, for example, the kind of relationship I have with my sister. Growing up, she was this pesky, annoying, bothersome person who taped over my Spice World cassette tape (I wanted to murder her for that, but my mum wouldn’t let me) and read my diaries. Now she’s one of my best friends, one of the few people who call me on my bullshit and never let me think too highly of myself, who will feed me when I’m hungry and make me tea when I’m sick, who will send me recommendations from the British Heart Council every time my hypochondriac brain acts up and I send her a text saying ‘I think I’m having a heart attack’.

You can’t tell me that that kind of love, that that kind of relationship, is somehow less because its not romantic.

As I get older, I’ve learned to make peace with who I am: I’m never going to be conventionally attractive but I love the way I look most of the time. I like to work. Other people will think that’s sad but they do them and I do me. I’d rather read and write than climb walls and fly off aeroplanes. I’m never going to be the most fun person at a party but I’m still fairly okay at making conversation with people. I’ve fallen in love (or thought I did) a few times. Only one or two have been real, to be honest. But throughout all that, my biggest relationship has always been with myself.

And just like any relationship, it has its ups and downs and days when I can’t stand to look at myself in the mirror, but I find a way to forgive myself and to promise to do better, to be better, because I want to go to bed at night assured that I liked the person I was today. You can’t tell me that that is somehow less important just because its not really a relationship in the conventional sense.

I have rambled on as usual. Several paragraphs in and I haven’t even talked about the book yet…but everything I just said is essentially what Loveless by Alice Osman is about: the idea that there are all kinds of love, that sexuality is a broad spectrum of things from straight to asexual and aromantic, that no one gets to define what gives your life meaning apart from YOU. The book is messy, cringy, annoying, intense, funny, ridiculous heartwarming and ultimately, a real JOY to read.

I wanted to give up on it halfway through because I thought, meh, I wouldn’t be able to relate to this. I was just about to give it a DNF rating on Goodreads but I have a real aversion to not finishing a book, it just feels wrong to me. So I carried on, and I’m so so glad I did. Because despite my experiences and my sexuality being totally different from Georgia’s, the main protagonist, the whole point of the book is that love may mean all kind of things to all kinds of people, but each meaning is important, and if we could only see how universal it is because of those differences, the world would be a much better place.

The whole point of Loveless is that every story is a love story, well let me tell you one of my favourites:

I’d been living in London for 5 years and I had avoided riding the London Eye because I was saving it for when I finally had someone special to share the moment with. But in 2016, my father came for a visit. It had taken him nearly three years to process his passport, but finally, he was here, in a city that he’d only read about or saw in movies. The London Eye was something we came across on the telly back home on New Year’s Eve; we would gather around and watch the fireworks display as a family. And now there we were, riding one of the pods, just as the sun was starting to set.

Anyone who’s ever been on the London Eye will tell you that its excruciatingly slow, and at 15 minutes in you just want it to be over. But my Dad could not stop looking down on the Thames, and on all of London literally beneath our feet. And the whole time I had this big smile on my face when I looked around and realised, holy shit, my family was with me in my favourite city in the world. It was a magical moment. Better than any first kiss fantasies I’ve ever had.

Whoever you are, whatever your orientation, whether you’re alone or in a relationship right now, you deserve magical moments like that. You deserve joy.

Who knows what the future holds? Maybe next week I meet the love of my life and be married by the end of the year. Maybe I won’t.

But regardless, I wouldn’t consider myself loveless, because without even knowing or fully appreciating it, I am and have always been loved. And that is what makes this book so great. That is the message. Whether you’re gay, straight, bi, pan, ace, trans, queer, alone or in a relationship, we see you, and you are loved.

Book rating: 5 amazing stars

Posted in family, friendship, Nursing

Overwhelming acts of kindness

Posted on by Miss Blabbaholic

I was going to write a post of all the things I can no longer do because of the coronavirus pandemic, until I realised how shallow, counterproductive and self-indulgent that would be.

I an far luckier than most: young enough that the risk to my personal health is low, a profession that will pay me even if I have to call in sick in the event that I show symptoms, having the means to get treatment, and a home with access to internet and Netflix.

Other people are barely getting by. People who earn daily wages or who have been forced to go on unpaid leave are now wondering how they are going to support their families through this. The elderly population, who are most at risk, face the likelihood that if they get this virus the mortality rate is about 9%. That might seem small on paper, but it converts to thousands of deaths, thousands of lives lost, and one of them could be your loved ones.

Sometimes I read the news and its enough to send me into a spiral of hopelessness and fear. I have trouble sleeping most nights because I keep thinking of my friends, mostly nurses, who are running out of PPE; and my family, scattered all round the world, some of them with limited access to proper health care.

But there are things that keep me going, daily reminders that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and that if we all stay calm, sensible and united we will get through this. So rather than indulging in reminiscing about things I can no longer do, or things that I don’t have (or indulging in a nervous breakdown) I’ve decided to make a list of the overwhelming acts of kindness that have seen me through these past couple of weeks:

A chatgroup of fellow nurses and close friends, created initially to plan parties but have now become a place to whine, vent and generally keep each other sane.

A colleague, offering to print and laminate things for me when I seem overwhelmed with the things I need to do at work.

An unexpected ally, telling me I need to be supported because I’m so busy doing teaching, and offering to do my coordinating shifts for me so I can just focus on what I need to do.

My boss telling me to go home early so I can rest and take care of myself.

An unexpected text from a rep I work with closely telling me to stay safe on the frontlines.

An offer from another rep, asking me to let him know if things get too busy so he can deliver food for the staff to eat.

The nightly salutes and tributes to health care workers in France, Spain, Belgium and other parts of Europe.

Daily texts and messages from family and friends telling me and my sister to keep safe.

Pret, Carluccio, Leon and other restaurants offering free drinks and/or 50% discount on all items for NHS staff.

A reply from someone who means so much to me, someone I’ve unintentionally let down and been out of touch with for almost a year, a reconnection that has made my world spin on the right axis again.

And finally, a close friend sending a care package to my parents, who live in a remote area in the Philippines where access to health care and medicine are limited. Thanks to her and her partner, my parents – who own a grocery store and who are staying open so people can still buy essentials like rice and canned goods – will have a supply of masks, Vitamin C, paracetamol and a thermometer. The sheer generosity of it makes me want to cry.

Sometimes you think you’ve never achieved anything great or meaningful in your life, that you’ve made the wrong choices, and have made far too many mistakes. But I don’t know. Somewhere, somehow, I must have done something right, to have people around me that I can count on when the going gets rough.

My only aim today, as I go through yet another day in the hospital, is to pass on the kindness I’ve received. Let’s make love and generosity a pandemic, and may it continue to be so long after the impact of Coronavirus has been forgotten.

Posted in family, Health and Well-Being, Medical

Home is where the heart is

Posted on by Miss Blabbaholic

As the Philippines goes on lockdown I find my thoughts straying to where it usually goes these days as news about the spread of coronavirus pile up daily: my family.

I’ve adjusted reasonably well to being an overseas worker, living far from home and being away from my parents and most of the people I love. But its times like these when the reality of being an OFW hits you the most, when you are helpless to do anything except give your parents advice through Facebook and hope to God they’re keeping themselves safe.

There is nothing more I want to do right now than take my dad’s vital signs and check if mum is taking her daily dose of Vitamin C. I want to make sure they have supplies of paracetamol and face masks. I’m torn between telling them to stay in the remote area where we live, where the risk for contracting the virus is lower but where medical care is laughably rubbish, or telling them to go to the city where I have more confidence in the health care system but also where the number of tourists (and the sheer number of people) makes me really twitchy.

Mum goes to church every day, it is an essential part of who she is. I want to advise her not to do that anymore until this passes, but at the same time I can’t help but feel like, at this point, prayers along with sensible hand washing will get us through the day. I found myself this week going to church every day after work. The other day there was an elderly couple there praying the rosary, the only other people apart from myself in that cavernous house of worship. I stayed a bit to join them. The whole time I can hear mum’s voice in my head telling me I’m doing the right thing.

This is a really rambling post, I know. It’s mostly borne out of worry, and this really strong urge I got this morning to jump on a plane and just be with family. I used to revel in my independence, and I loved the thought of being in the big city and making it on my own. But when push comes to shove, and the world goes to hell in a hand basket, home really is the only place where I want to be. And at the moment that is not a geographic location, its a facebook messenger group where all the members of my family gather to share bits and pieces of our separate lives.

At the moment that will have to be enough…

Posted in bloggers, family, Feminism, Lifestyle, relationships, women

Mind Your Own Business

Posted on by Miss Blabbaholic

We live in a society that is ever more conscious about being politically correct. We use gender neutral pronouns, we try and respect other religions as much as our own, we recognise that men and women were created equally and that the latter deserves as much respect as the former. Its an enlightened world where people have rights, they said.

Why then can’t the rest of us who live in this so-called enlightened world not enjoy the right for people (under the guise of concern) to butt out of our business?

One of my friends tweeted a few rules of politeness once, and I have never agreed with a tweet more. It said that one should never ask questions of a sensitive nature unless the other person opens up about it first. These sensitive questions include, but are not limited to, the following:

a. how much they earn in their jobs
b. marital status
c. if married, whether or not they ever plan to have kids
and other questions that are just damn intrusive, nosy and rude.

I personally feel fine and content with my lot in life, but there are a lot of people that struggle with not being able to fit into the mould that hundreds of years worth of tradition has created for us: mother, homemaker, wife. I struggle with it sometimes myself. Its not a very pleasant feeling to sit around a dinner table and have your friends talk about their respective partners and all you’re able to contribute was your latest trip to Croatia.

I get so angry about it sometimes. When people get together its like there’s a list of questions that they have to tick off to assure themselves that they’ve had a proper catch-up. Real friends don’t do that. Real friends catch up to listen and offer support. The people you should keep in your lives will not make you feel any less of a person just because the trajectory of your life happens to be different from theirs. I am eternally grateful that I still have a handful of those friends who, regardless of the fact that at most parties I am the only one not carrying a baby carriage, make me feel proud of everything else I’ve accomplished anyway. You guys know who you are.

The point is that the world has no right to your heart, to paraphrase a line from the brilliant song ‘Burn‘ from the musical ‘Hamilton’. The world has no right to your struggles, it does not get to judge you. No one gets to define or limit who you are especially if they can’t get past their own narrow worldview to remember that you are a person first. Not a girlfriend, a wife, or a mother. You are you: and that has, is and should always be enough.