Stop. Please just stop.

The time has come, the walrus said...But not the walrus, actually.  Me.  The time has come, I think, to respond.

Years of constant abuse, harassment, lies, conjecture, tears, hysterics and yep, occasional violence (didn't you try to kick my back door down?) and what have I EVER done?  Nothing.  I have NEVER responded.  I have never answered back.  You have had nothing but my silence and my willingness to have you back in my life, time and time again, whenever YOU have decided that equilibrium can be restored.  I have never, not once, demanded apology, qualification or explanation. And do you know how hard that is?  After everything you have said and done? No.  Of course you don't.  Why would you ever know that?

But you must now allow me some brief response.

I have a file on my computer called HORRID.  That is where I store all your emails of poison and accusation. I know they are there and just seeing the file makes me bilious.  But I have never answered any of them.

But hey, lets look through them. Lets look at what you have accused me of.  Lies, conceit, viciousness and self-serving cruelty seems to be the common theme, and yet - oh -  there are no actual examples to back these up. Sluttishness, sloth, avarice and gluttony also crop up with amazing regularity. And attempted murder, once. You remind me with startling regularity how my friends hate me, how my family despair of me, how my husband fears and detests me and, oh delightfully, how my late mother would have been so very ashamed of me. Again and again and again.

However, what strikes me now, is that you have never, ever accused me of stupidity.

Why is that?  Why have you never thought to call me stupid? Are you put off by my languages, my instruments, my ability to cook and garden, the nature of my job?  The fact that I am not fazed by the states of America or the geographical location of Bhutan? Is it because you actually think that I am NOT stupid?

Because here I do not agree with you. Naturally I refute all the other accusations (with the perhaps exception of sluttishness around the house, but I am SORRY - I will not give my life over to housework). But - look! - there is a gaping hole.  You SHOULD add stupidity to the list.  Can you not see it?

I have been so glaringly stupid. Stupid in my failure to answer back, in my being so utterly mistaken in thinking respect for others is more important than defending myself. And most of all, MOST of all, prodigious, unmitigated stupidity in the hours of my life I have given over to worrying whether ANY of the vitriolic imputations you have launched my way could in any way be true.

To have allowed you into my mind? THERE is the real stupidity.

And so now you are calling my friends to inform them - (no WARN them, wasn't that what you said?) - of my perfidious, nasty, lowliving nature.  My lack of integrity.  My odious cruelty.  My ever-corroding mental state. And to regale them with a host of things you insist I have done but which we both KNOW have never been my actions, but yours. We could of course label this as blatant defamation, but lets leave that as a technicality for now.

What do you not understand?  They are my FRIENDS.  They are not going to be influenced with a rambling anihilation of my character .  They know me as I AM, and not as you so dearly wish I could be.

So here is an idea. Don't waste your time with all of that.  Instead, tell them this.  Tell them I am indeed stupid. Really, truly, indubitably STUPID. Tell them I have put up with you and your incessant bullying for years. Tell them I have kept much of it a secret because I believed you could not help it, and perhaps were not quite in control.  That I have clung to the failing shreds of sympathy that no one could be in their right mind to do what you do. Tell them how often I have turned my back on what I have KNOWN to be right, merely to keep YOU from flying into one of your campaigns of persecution, because they are so horrendous for everyone.


So indeed I have been stupid. Rip up the old list because it is so full of falsification, and begin anew.  I've even given you a start now.


AND NOW WILL YOU PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE?

How many languages do you want that in?  (I have five.)

"I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” (Churchill)

I was part of a rather coxcombical conversation recently where everyone urged everyone else to Take Pleasure in The Moment, to Digest the Here and Now and to See Joy in Small Things. Etc. You can find happiness, gratification and comfort when you least expect it, went the general theme. It was, to be very truthful, not massively my kind of conversation,  but - fain to deny it - there is within its cliche a point worth the making.

In view of this, then, I can hardly describe the excessive happiness-gratification-comfort I found in one small moment this morning, on the school run, in the sight of the local recycling collectors in a knee-bent struggle with my friends' recycling box.  "Heave HO" one puffed, delightfully for me, as they staggered, weaving under it's clinking and clanking weight in a desperate zig-zag towards the truck, where the crashing cascade of a week's worth of wine bottles resonated up the lane behind me and my mirth.

There was certainly happiness to be found in the spectacle, but even this was outdone by waves of gratification.  Gratification that other people as well spend a fortune they probably haven't got on wine.  And yep, comfort too.  Comfort in the idea that when my pickled-pink liver and I shuffle sheepishly towards a frowning St Peter at my end (my premature end, as this government would no doubt remind me, while wagging a nannyish finger towards its haloed guideline of 14 units a week), then at least I should have a boozy buddy or two to meet me there.

So. Thank you to my supportively intemperate friends for jolly good 30 minute chuckle, which took me all through the stacking of the dishwasher and into a good ten minutes of Women's Hour.  Lovely.



(Cartoon from the rather super Jackie Fleming.  Always worth a look)