Recent graduate powered by energy drinks and jelly beans. Please support me, some veggies would be nice to add to my diet
https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/301NF12DPFFS5?ref_=wl_share .
Listen. When I've figured shit out I'll have a very shiny, family-friendly blog where I talk about my writing like a polite little gremlin who’s never cursed in their life. This is not that blog.
This is the backstage pass—where I yell about:
The ~themes~ lurking under my "for kids!" writing (dark? sweet? existential? who knows!)
First drafts that look like a raccoon typed them
Publishing hurdles (rejections: my toxic love language)
The fact that I’m chronically bad at social media but trying to post more (hold me accountable. or don’t. I’m a ghost.)
Random gibberish that leaks through the cracks in my marbles at insomnia'o'clock
WHO’S THIS FOR?
👉 Me (it’s a journal with wifi)
👉 You (if you’re also screaming into the void about writing)
👉 Universal Credit spies (yes, I’m actually trying to gain paid work. Here’s my proof. *flails at book ramblings* )
WHAT TO EXPECT:
Unfiltered process rambles
Celebrating/lamenting with other writers
The messy bits I can’t post on my “professional” spaces
Zero pretending I have my life together
TL;DR: This blog is my brain with the lid off. If that’s your vibe, stick around. Masterlist under cut.
(Also, if you’re here from UC: waves, I am technically a functioning adult. See? Words.)
Please consider helping tape me together and topping up my ever depleting stationary on amazon (Please tell me if there's gift list providers you'd rather use, amazon's just the one I know of).
{Poetry}
The Oestrogen Letters
Absurd Arguments
Gale Goretti's speeding ticket
A response poem
Mystery response poem - But I loved you.
{53 Word Prompts}
Swing
{Competition Entries}
What comes next?
The Engineers Love Letter
An Unexpected Night In
{Fan Fiction}
An Unofficial Guide to Harrington (now finished 10chapters/ Steddie)
{Prompts and Image Responses}
Can I dream a little more?
The Truth Burns More Than The Lie
Célestin Nanteuil (1813-1873). 'Nymphs', date unknown
Four prime 53 poems - 53 syllables, 11 lines, four stanzas, ABA, CDC, EFE, GG - tracing a writing day from blank page to final count. Ordered to end on the full stop of the process itself.
I: a Writer's Hope
II: Beach Weather
III: A Day in the British Summer Time.
IV: Syllable Sighs
Pompey Potholes & Sanatorium Chic: Directions Through Material Impermanence
The city begins at my front wheel. It says: lip. A wooden strip where the door frame meets the floor, the height of a thumb and long as your foot, modern and welcoming to those whose limbs lift off the ground, just another hurdle for me. I pop it. The chair jolts a small violence, transmitted up through the frame, into my sacrum, my shoulders, my jaw. Every exit begins with this jolt, whether the kids room or mine, a jailbreak from fenced capture. I have come to think of it as the flat's goodbye.
The floor inside is wood print lino. Let me be precise: it is not wood. It is a photograph of wood, printed on plastic and laid uneven over screed. The grain repeats every three feet. If you look closely and I have looked closely. I have spent a year looking closely at a floor that pretends to be warm while being cold impermeable and easy to wipe down. Wood absorbs. Wood takes the mark of a dropped cup, a life. Lino denies. Lino is a material of places where lives are expected to be brief and clean, and leave no trace.
Fifty-Two days, they said. Temporary. A stopgap. I have been here a year and still the walls are bare, sanatorium chic. No painting. No picture hooks. No Blu-tac - the tenancy agreement lists the things you cannot do, and living is most of them. The walls are clinical white. A white that will be painted over when you leave, covering whatever ghost of your presence might have clung. But the lino won't need much. It won't even need scrubbing. Just a wipe. A quick turn around.
Wide door frames, they told me. Accessible. And it is true - the frames are wide enough for a chair. That though, is where access ends. The bathroom is a puzzle box. The old wet room chair blocks free movement for guests but aids mine, yet the lip's gap between my chair and the seat is a span I must cross with no dignity. Shuffle, brace, pivot. The bath board in narrow plastic planks bridging the tub, the handle a balancing act, a body suspended between contraptions, none designed to work with the others. The floor is bathroom vinyl, a different pattern, the same principle: impermeable, wipe-able, forgettable. The whole flat is a system for processing bodies, not housing them.
Two heavy doors between my flat's entrance hall and the lift. Fire doors - they have to be heavy, I understand the physics. But physics doesn't care about my shoulders slippage or my spine's misalignment. I haul the first door open from my seated position, push through, shoulder the second before the first swings back and slams my back wheel. A choreography of strategic pauses.
The landing between the doors is a solid white floor. Vinyl tile or polished screed, a surface that doesn't pretend to be domestic. It shines under the strip lights. Across it, the record of movement erased each Wednesday: black scuffs, long streaks, the rubber signatures of shoes, bike wheels and dragging boxes. Movers shifting families in and out. Quick turnaround. The scuffs accumulate until someone decides it's worth the effort, a mop erases them all at once. The floor forgets in a single pass. my castors leave no mark. My chair is careful - it doesn't scuff. I am always aware of the surfaces I travel over, the damage I may do, the attention I might draw. The scuffs were made by people who didn't have time to be careful. People being moved at speed.
The lift is well kept, large enough for multiple bikes, which is a small comedy - even here bikes are treated as the main thought, our chairs just happen to benefit. Even in a building supposedly half filled by people like me, our access is a side effect. It hums reliably and hasn't broken yet, though a leaf once held it in a scream for a day, all 14kg of myself ill-advisedly carried up the stairs by a tired friend; there are no staff hired to fix the lift or the front door on weekends, no help will come till Monday. But today the lift isn't scared and the doors open smoothly, getting out at ground is a small mercy; the ground floor asks nothing more than for me to leave.
Outside, the pavement begins with potholed concrete. A single pour, laid not too long ago, already cratered. The holes fill with rain and dew, sheltering it like rocks do tide pools. My castors know every one: the shallow crater that shivers up the frame, the deep one I skirt entirely swinging wide and the crumbling cliff faces that lead to pavements of patchwork. The following paths camber in rolling lopsided hills here, the camber of drives sharp, the pavement itself already tilts towards traffic. And I am always correcting, left arm pushing harder, right arm braking. Standing bodies don't notice the natural slope in between the miniature concrete hill rolls. Their ankles compensate, their hips adjust. I feel every degree.
Then the slabs begin.
Old paving stones, wide and true, laid long before I was born. They've been walked on for a century or more - feet, buggies, the slow shuffle of age, the drunk amble of those coming of age and the quick scuff of children. The footfall has worn them smooth. My castors glide, lending an almost silent ride, a low purr of polyurethane on stone polished by lives and hidden under the life of cars whizzing by. This is what care looks like after it's been used. This is what happens when something is built well and then loved, even if the loving is just walking.
But the grout is washing away. The mortar between the slabs has begun to crumble, returning to the sand, and the gaps are widening. Some slabs tilt, one edge sinking, a corner lifting, further displacing the silt. A castor can catch. I am always watching. These stones are a map of where the poverty line has moved. They were laid when this street mattered - when the council had a budget for paving that wasn't just patching the worst holes, matching new with the old, before it was laid as cheap and quick as the quickies behind pub gardens. The care was once here. You can see it in the quality of the stone, the width of the path, the fact that someone thought about drainage and the long procession of bodies that would walk this way. That care has moved now. It's followed the money, retreated from these terraces, tightening its radius. It constricts year by year. The terraces haven't dropped into some new poverty; the poverty line has been redrawn like a tide-line further up the shore, a new sea wall erected by a government deciding who warrants care and who can be left to the water. These terraces are below it now. They haven't moved. The line has. And the tide doesn't ask.
I glide where I can and jolt where I must. The smooth slabs an elegy. They remember what the city has forgotten. They're a love letter from a time when the public realm was still public, for everyone and worth the labour.
Let's not forget the drop kerbs. They come in kinds. I've catalogued them.
The Car Drop: New, poured in the last decade or two, long and wishy-washy, sloping down towards the road with no particular commitment. Some a smooth kiss of concrete to asphalt, others dropping sharply as if the builder lost interest. Bowing awkwardly across the roads, tables laid for someone else and I'm just a reverent guest pleased with scraps from it.
The Cobbled Drop: Older, dropping steeper with each rained river. Corner cuts flush with the current layer of road lined with cobbles. Originally level, a textured warning for the blind. But the road's now worn and they stand proudly like miniature bollards. What once was safety, now an obstacle. Time undoing once good intentions.
The Braille Plinth: Newer and smudged-grey yellow. Most sit unmoored on sharp cut kerbs on skinny paths or sunken and drifting from being used as a ramp for cars to half park on walkways barely wide enough for lovers let alone strangers. A ticked off checklist nailed to existing infrastructure planning. Accessibility in feature - a sculpture of care, not care itself. The city's attempt at language without learning the grammar. The right words in the wrong order and calling itself fluent.
Your 20 minutes, my 45.
Arms aching with the last tree root hump the ground changes as I roll my approach to Gunwharf.
The council grey and old stone white give way to block paving, tight fitted and new. The bins hidden unobstructively, the planting deliberate. I am being welcomed, or something like me is being welcomed: a version of a body that carries a wallet worth more than the change it holds, fattened with cards instead of pennies.
Then those perfect picture cobbles on an uphill.
They're set into the entrance, a rumble strip of setts. Bike safety apparently. Traffic calming supposedly. A suggestion to cyclists: slow down here, there are pedestrians, prepare to dismount soon. And the cyclists do slow…fractionally, but their tyres are pneumatic, their frame sprung by metal and natural unconscious human give. The cobbles send large vibrations up through my frame, wheels catching, tipping exercising my poor core, and then we're through. The pause costs them nothing.
For me each sett a separate blow. Castors hit and judder, vibrations climbing forks and spine alike. Taken at an angle, slow diagonals analysed like a detective.
And the poles. Bollards set to stop cars and break up large hordes of moving goers. The cyclists thread them while barely slowing, a small tilt and gone, in my chair I still take in a breath hoping it will make my wheels stick out less, hoping not to graze my fingers or dislocate a thumb again.
This is the material truth of the city: we will inconvenience you to mildly slow them. The design is a vote and the vote says: you are not the body we envisioned this place for.
The white of my flat is the white of these prettified streets - sanatorium chic to tourist clean - both of them scrubbed of anyone who might linger without buying. Both of them temporary in different keys. The flat won't hold me, this place will only hold me as long as my wallet keeps spending. The lino at home forgets my weight; these cobbles remember it as a problem. Same lie, different surfaces. Accessibility as decor. Care as kerbside appeal.
All this for an allergen-free pizza they can't deliver—
—god…how do I get this back? I should have brought the kids.
"You should be rul'd and led
By some discretion that discerns your state
Better than you yourself."
— King Lear, Act II, Scene 4
For the social workers with kind smiles,
and for the daughters who will see them coming.
A sequence of 5 poems about puberty, fertility, and the surveillance of disabled mothers' bodies.
📜 Poem 1: The Difficult Conversation
📜 Poem 2: The Carved Line
📜 Poem 3: Whose Choice?
📜 Poem 4: We Suggest You Must (And the Men They Asked Instead)
📜 Poem 5: The Boys Arround Us
These poems were inspired by my own experiences, my daughters, my mothers, my friends, gossip in groups and from the lovely ladies who talk to me on the bus.
Daughter:
My classmate Jack told me puberty is gross.
He said girls get weird.
Then he tried to look up my skirt.
Mother:
At your age, a boy named Darren told me
my fuzzy lip meant I was part man.
Then he asked to touch my chest.
Daughter:
Your brother — my uncle — he cried when I got my first period.
Not because he was sad.
Because he didn't know what to do with the blood.
He brought me chocolate and hid in his room.
Mother:
The men at work try — that much is true.
They nod, they read, they don't assume.
They say it's natural, then turn pink and mute.
But still they'd rather you had just stayed home, not in the room.
Daughter:
The boys at school laugh when I ask questions.
Why do you need to know? they say.
Because my body is doing things I didn't ask for.
Because Muma's body is doing things she didn't ask for.
Because someone has to notice.
Mother:
The men at the clinic laughed too — not with their mouths,
with their silence.
They let other men speak for me.
She doesn't need to know, they decided.
We'll ask her partner.
Daughter:
Jack told me his dad says women are too emotional.
I said your dad cries at football.
He didn't know what to say to that.
Mother:
Your father said I was too much when the hot flashes started.
Too hot. Too tired. Too sad.
I said you are too little.
He didn't know what to say to that either.
Daughter:
So the boys don't know what to say.
And the men don't know what to say.
And we just keep bleeding and sweating and crying at dishes.
Mother:
Some of them learn.
Your uncle — Brainbasher — he learned.
He cried more than you ever did.
That's the kind of boy I want around you.
Daughter:
Jack is not that boy.
But maybe Jack will grow up.
Maybe his dad will grow up.
Maybe the men at your work will grow up.
Mother:
Maybe.
But we can't wait for maybe.
So we talk to each other.
We write poems.
We name the kind smiles.
Daughter:
And when Jack looks up my skirt again —
Mother:
You look him in the eye.
You say no. Loud. Clear. Not a question.
You say my body is mine. You don't owe him a smile.
You say ask yourself why you think looking is a right.
And if he doesn't stop —
you leave. You tell a teacher. You tell me.
You tell every girl in the class what he did.
Because no is a full sentence,
and a boy who doesn't understand it
is not a boy who deserves your silence.
Daughter:
And if he says I'm overreacting?
Mother:
You say overreacting is what people call women
who refuse to be small.
Then you walk away.
You have nothing to prove to him.
Your body is not a debate.
Listen. When I've figured shit out I'll have a very shiny, family-friendly blog where I talk about my writing like a polite little gremlin who’s never cursed in their life. This is not that blog.
This is the backstage pass—where I yell about:
The ~themes~ lurking under my "for kids!" writing (dark? sweet? existential? who knows!)
First drafts that look like a raccoon typed them
Publishing hurdles (rejections: my toxic love language)
The fact that I’m chronically bad at social media but trying to post more (hold me accountable. or don’t. I’m a ghost.)
Random gibberish that leaks through the cracks in my marbles at insomnia'o'clock
WHO’S THIS FOR?
👉 Me (it’s a journal with wifi)
👉 You (if you’re also screaming into the void about writing)
👉 Universal Credit spies (yes, I’m actually trying to gain paid work. Here’s my proof. *flails at book ramblings* )
WHAT TO EXPECT:
Unfiltered process rambles
Celebrating/lamenting with other writers
The messy bits I can’t post on my “professional” spaces
Zero pretending I have my life together
TL;DR: This blog is my brain with the lid off. If that’s your vibe, stick around. Masterlist under cut.
(Also, if you’re here from UC: waves, I am technically a functioning adult. See? Words.)
Please consider helping tape me together and topping up my ever depleting stationary on amazon (Please tell me if there's gift list providers you'd rather use, amazon's just the one I know of).
{Poetry}
The Oestrogen Letters
Absurd Arguments
Gale Goretti's speeding ticket
A response poem
Mystery response poem - But I loved you.
{53 Word Prompts}
Swing
{Competition Entries}
What comes next?
The Engineers Love Letter
An Unexpected Night In
{Fan Fiction}
An Unofficial Guide to Harrington (now finished 10chapters/ Steddie)
{Prompts and Image Responses}
Can I dream a little more?
The Truth Burns More Than The Lie
Célestin Nanteuil (1813-1873). 'Nymphs', date unknown
We Suggest You Must (And the Men They Asked Instead)
Content warning: family court, social services, reproductive coercion, discussion of abuse, medical gaslighting
I dreamed of being a mother
before I knew my body would be
a case file.
When I was pregnant — with your brother, with you —
they didn't say congratulations.
They said we have some concerns.
They said who will help you?
I was with your father.
That saved me — not from judgement,
but from the worst of it.
With stipulations, they said.
Home visits. Their choice of hospital.
As if a baby was parole.
And the coil. God, the coil.
A routine tug at the cervix, a cramp, five minutes —
and suddenly every man in my life was to be given an opinion.
My ex. My boyfriend. My own father.
They wanted their opinions, before mine, on what went on inside my uterus?
Because they assumed — everyone assumed —
that a disabled woman's womb
belongs to the nearest able-bodied man.
But worse had passed.
Leashes disguised by perceived help.
They came with kind smiles.
We suggest you must attend every appointment.
We suggest you must prove you can change a nappy.
We suggest you must accept our help.
We suggest you must go where we deem fit.
We suggest you must.
We suggest you must.
We suggest you must.
Like a cult's lullaby.
Like a prayer you repeat until you believe
you are the problem.
I did everything.
Every appointment. Every assessment.
Every nappy demonstration with my own two hands —
And even when the split happened,
I jumped through those hoops,
In your wheelchair how can you stop them?
Even though by then,
You were nine.
Your brother were ten.
No nappies. Just children.
Children who watched me play with them,
teach them,
care for them,
day after day after day.
The workers saw it.
The ones who came to our home,
who watched me help with homework,
who watched you climb into my lap
despite the wheels,
who watched me be your mother —
they wrote glowing reports.
So dedicated, they said. So loving. So capable.
I carried those reports into court like armour.
Then the final day came.
The head worker — the one who had never visited our home,
never watched you show her your drawings,
never heard you call for me in the night —
she decided against me.
The reports of his anger? His manipulation?
The things he did to me that made me leave?
All of it written. All of it witnessed.
Ignored.
Because an able body is safer than a wheelchair.
She had kind eyes, too.
That's how they do it.
You was nine.
Your brother were ten.
You had eyes. You saw everything.
And still —
still —
they gave rights to the man who hurt me
because his legs work.
I cannot just get pregnant.
The act itself would be read as hostile.
Social services told me outright:
if you fall pregnant again without approval,
we will review your parenting of the children you already have.
That is not a choice.
That is a cage with a garden view.
Your time is just starting, my love.
Mine is a countdown
while men I never married
get asked their opinion on my womb.
But you are still here.
You and your brother — you are still here.
They did not take you.
That is the part I hold.
And I am telling you this
so you know:
glowing reports don't save you.
Witnesses don't save you.
Children climbing into your lap don't save you.
Only the right body does.
And yours, my clone,
will be judged by the same eyes.
I'm teaching you now
so you're not surprised when they smile.
So here is what I need you to teach your friends —
the girls with unformed fists:
Ask questions. Loud ones.
Before they learn to whisper.
Say my body is mine before anyone else tries to claim it.
Say no like you mean it, then say it again.
Say why are you asking me that? to every man
who thinks his opinion outranks your pulse.
Because I fought so you wouldn't have to fight the same war.
And if you still have to —
you won't fight alone.
| You said only the right body does. | I said it because I need you to live with your eyes open. |
You told me that some girls can just decide.
They grow up, fall in love, or not, and then
they try for babies, simple as a wish.
But you — when you were pregnant with me —
they looked at you like you had done a crime.
Not a crime with handcuffs. Worse than that.
They looked at you as if your body, disabled,
should have known its place, should have said no thank you.
You had a partner, so they let it slide —
with stipulations. Like a prisoner
allowed to walk the yard because she's good.
They watched you. They wrote notes. They asked your partner
questions they'd never ask an abled's partner.
And now — you wanted just your coil replaced.
That tiny plastic thing inside your womb.
But first you had to fight. And who fought whom?
Your ex? Your boyfriend? Your own father?
They said she needs permission, ask the men.
Muma — they wanted men to sign off on
your hormones, on your future, on the coil
that sits inside the core of you.
You said no. You fought. You won that one.
But other women lose it every day.
I'm learning in my English class that power
is not a crown — it's who gets asked, and who
gets handed forms, and who can simply say
I want a child and no one calls the social.
So here is what I see, Muma, even at eleven:
The able world looks away or coos
how sweet, she thinks she gets to choose like us.
But your body is a hostage in plain sight.
And so is mine — because I am your clone.
They're not just watching you.
They're practising for me.
| They're practising for me. | Then we'll practise right back. Every kind smile, we'll name it. |
Darling,
do you know this place —
the little dip tucked behind your ear?
You flung your head back as a toddler,
just a bump on the table.
No blood. Just tears.
But not yours —
your leaky blob of an uncle
cried more than you ever did.
Panic tears, scooping you up,
checking your pupils,
already mourning a brain injury that never came.
And you?
You laughed.
That's how he became Uncle Brainbasher.
I tease him with it to this day.
He pretends to mind. He doesn't.
Your favourite uncle from that day on.
My body is full of those maps too.
The line from my belly to the world
is where you entered —
not a scar, a door.
They cut me open to find you
and I said thank you
through the morphine.
My fuzzy lip came from Grampy, yes —
It arrived when my brother
could only dream of his own whiskers.
Is that a good thing?
Who knows. Genetics is a lottery
where everyone loses eventually.
You asked about the difficult conversation.
It's not the bleeding or the hair
or the sudden urge to punch a pillow.
It's that no one tells you
how long the conversation lasts.
Teachers say a few years
because they need you to stop asking.
The truth?
Your body is a story
that keeps editing itself.
I'm thirty-something and my chapters
now include night sweats and forgetting
the word for spoon.
So no — it's not a few years.
It's the rest of your life with a different font.
And those dishes you see me crying over?
It's not the soap, not the plates, not you.
It's the weight of being watched
while I do something as simple as rinse a cup.
| You cry at dishes. | Because crying at dishes is safer than crying at them. |
rbing this cause it gives me the same satisfaction "She told him that she loved him" (put "only" in front of any word in the sentence to change the meaning) gives me
Muma, why do the teachers drop their voice
when saying puberty? It's like a curse,
or like a ghost they're scared to name aloud.
They tell us it lasts only a few years,
but your hot flash just melted in my hand
the ice lolly I gave you for the laugh.
You speak of hormones like a messy flatmate
who leaves the towels all across the floor.
Is that the same flatmate they say is coming
to visit me, to mess my room, to stay?
And if it's truly just a few short years,
then why's your lip still fuzzy, soft and dark?
Grampy gave that to you, you always say.
But I'm your clone — I have your stubborn chin,
your way of sighing at the evening news.
I also have his tan: I turn to bronze
while you float through the summer like a ghost.
So does that mean the moustache comes for me?
And Muma — tell me why you cry at dishes.
Not sobbing, no. Just standing at the sink
with one wet plate, and tears fall in the rinse.
You say it's nothing. Nothing's not like that.
I'm starting to believe that puberty
is just a lie adults tell smaller kids.
Like Santa. Like the Tooth Fairy at my bed.
Like "we are nearly there, just five more minutes".
Does anyone grow up and leave it, Muma?
Or does it just change costumes, shift its name,
and follow us like weather we can't shake?
| I'm watching you, Muma. | And I'm watching you watch me. That's how we'll learn. |
