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Hello Carole Ann,
You know, sometimes it takes life-changing news to slap you upside your chops and make you see things differently. We, as a family, received some very sad and frightening news about a beloved’s health last week.
Time has a way of bending, flexing and slowing down to a pace that makes a minute feel like an hour. After panic, denial, chaos and unending questioning there comes a lonely place of acceptance. Everything becomes heightened, super real, crystal focused and then deeply foggy.
I swear I heard a worm yawn as life ground to halt.
A cloud passing across the sun, a bird’s welcome cheep, the need to make even more tea than is fit for human consumption, the struggle to find meaningful sentences, an incoming text that makes you jump. The comfort of a cat’s purr. Leaden silence.
The text was just Uncle Frank saying “Hope you get the results quickly and things get back to normal soon”. Never before has “normal” seem so utterly desirable.
Walking on the Wild Side
I have spent my whole adult life actively rebelling against “normal”.
As a cropped-haired punk in my teens, having my own TV show in my 20s, doing time as a TV puppeteer (I worked a snail’s derriere) and interviewing Stephen Fry, Paloma Picasso and Terence Stamp among others as a self-taught journalist – being “normal” was something I considered was the lot of the Joe and Josephine Straights of the world.
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