One of the things that was so especially agonising about the revelation that my blog had been being read by the colleague who made the complaint last October, other members of my team, and various senior management bods, was the discovery, upon re-reading the entire three years' back pages, of just how many times I had written about PMT. I felt no shame whatsoever about the posts that were actually being complained about, stood by them, and by the account I gave when challenged of the unacceptable stress I was under, which had led to these uncharacteristic outbursts... But somehow, in the atmosphere of humiliation generated by the whole sorry episode, one of the things that hurt worst was thinking of all these people reading repeatedly about my PMT. (Thinking of them reading the posts about my Dad's suicide hurt more, I suppose, but I disssociated from that as fast as possible...) Anyway, I thought of this when rereading yesterday's post this morning. Nuff said... Hormones suck. Oh, and the weather, which is frankly incomprehensible. A fascinating concoction of fog, rain and wind, unusual even for these parts in June...
Anyway, I have rediscovered excitement today in the shape of (in no particular order) a Kit-Kat (how can you better this ancient and simple rectangle of confectionery?), a cup of strong decaff coffee with frothy milk (IKEA frothers are clearly first cousins to vibrators, but give me a cappuccino any day of the week), the Be-Good Tanyas (Blue Horse sounding joyous after a long long time), and a Delia recipe for a roasted vegetable and couscous salad with harissa style dressing, which I plan to make tonight. Sadly the Co-op in town couldn't rise to a firm goats cheese, so I'm doing it with feta, but I see no reason to imagine this won't work ok. Simple pleasures all. Sensual pleasures designed to cheer on this day when I can't even see the Red Horse from the kitchen window.
As a coda to the first paragraph, I would like to say (again) that the blog posts that got me fired (or would have had I not found the door of my own accord) were in fact righteous and accurate rants about the parlous state of child protection services in the area where I worked, the horror of the impossible lives faced by many of the children we were working with, and (as subtext) the shameful lack of supervision support offered to me and my colleagues facing this kind of pain day after day. What I said needed to be said, since not enough was being done about the former, and nothing at all about the latter. As you can intuit I am still angry about that.
3 comments:
*Did* you write about PMT that much? I don't remember that... Shame you didn't say some really evil things about the person (I just substituted that for a more offensive word) who complained, may as well have been hanged for a sheep as a lamb.
Re the last post: I feel guilty about the fact that I do relatively little paid work, but what I do do feels like plenty, and my days seem to be perfectly adequately full, while other people do full-time work, raise families, act as school governors, practice strenuous sports, write brilliant blogs, go to the cinema etc etc the list is endless of all the things I seem to be unable to find time or energy to do. Guess guilt is just inevitable, like death and taxes. When I did no outside work to speak of, despite our not needing the money at the time (we do now) and despite having stacks of necessary things to be getting on with here, I felt empty and pointless, and subject to ennui - never has pretentious franglais been so appropriate.
I liked the image of the Red Horse and the field of buttercups, though I worried about the poor horse having to wear a coat in the weather you described. And the dry-stone walling words are lovely.
IKEA frothers...first cousin to vibrators - this has got me very intrigued, though not enough to buy one, let alone re-visit IKEA.
Chocolate is almost a necessity, I find. And caffeinated coffee - the after-effects notwithstanding.
Lucy - probably not that much about it, but so many separate mentions in passing...
I think my guilt isn't about not doing things per se, so much as about sometimes not being able to do anything at all (not so much these days, but Tuesday was a case in point)...
Signs - well, you know, electric toothbrushes, frothers, vibrators, they're all little hand-held battery operated buzzing motors aren't they...? I am fine without chocolate, until the moment comes when I'm not...
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