In A World Gone Mad

In A World Gone Mad

 

Sunday: 26 April 2020

 

My name, for the purpose of purposing and because I need one, is Sarah. I have left Harpie behind and rebecome. This first entry is about explanation.  I have kept a diary, published with some small following, for almost twenty years.  Previous readers will know that it was born as an experiment in honesty after a discussion with other up-their-arse writers like myself in the wee small hours and in the company of vodka.

It was said that it is impossible to lay yourself open and write honestly, that writers will always put a spin on it to show their psyche in a good light.

 

I said, ‘Bullshit.’

 

And so, the Jane Doe diary was birthed, after nine years it was discovered by family and my cover was blown. I tried not to write it again and stuck to fiction for a short time. That seems like a reasonable and simple statement but there is nothing simple about it, my diary was my crutch. I was an addict and my fix was writing several thousand words a day—about the day—to order things in my head.  They were therapy—but, so I’ve been told, they had a raw satirical humour to them that made them lighter reading than intended. It’s hard to believe, but people—some people—liked them. I’ve never got that and don’t to this day.

 

When cold turkey didn’t work, I compromised. I would write them but not put them out to the world and his second uncle twice removed for public display.  Yeah, like that was ever going to work. I liked that people like them.  Why do we expose our writing: to save the world, to end famine, to fund the animal charities?  We put our writing out there because we like people to like it.

 

 ‘She,’ Jane Doe, morphed into Harpie Harper and it was given a new title of Goodnight: and Thanks for the Vodka. Everything good, bad and indifferent went into those books, one a year for fifteen years, running Jan 1^st to Dec 31^st. If somebody so much as farted –it was recorded.  They are drivel, me spouting and pontificating on whatever was whirling around in my head at any given moment, but I couldn’t stop writing them.

 

I met a man.

 

What story of drunkenness and cruelty doesn’t begin with a man?  He was a bad`un. Christ, we had a short fling that lasted months. I knew he was no good—but he was kind to me.  For Fuck’s sake, that’s all it took for me to drop my knickers— for an alcoholic in a pub to show me kindness.

 

It ended.

 

It should have been end of story—next!

 

However, cue the melodramatic music, that man destroyed my life.

 

He stalked me.  And I mean that in the most literal sense of the word.  I could—and did—write a hundred and ninety thousand words about what that man did to me. He took me to the edge of sanity and eventually ran me out of town.

 

I lost my job, my home, my friends—the few that I had left—everything.

 

 It was the best thing anybody could have done for me.  I came back to Cumbria where my sons live and have rebuilt a new and better life.

 

It’s all ancient history.  The point is that I had to remove every trace of my diary from the writing sites and de-publish the novel versions.

 

I learned my lesson.  Harpie Harper died and went to hell in a plume of black smoke. In the last four years I’ve barely written a word. Just two shitty poems, I think, in four years. As a sideline to my real job as a government interviewer, I’m an editor, that is I get paid for editing other people’s novels, so I guess that earns me the title. It should have been torture editing other writer’s books, but not once did I feel the need to write, not fiction, not fact, not anything.

 

Until now.

 

Three things have brought me back to my diary.

 

Covid 19, since the Spanish Flu pandemic the world has not seen anything ‘remotely’ like this. The world, and it’s advancement since the 1920’s, has never seen anything ‘specifically’ like this. It’s history. I’m a writer, a shit writer, but I write, therefore I am. I can own it. As a writer, along with everybody else who writes in the world, how can we not write –this.

 I wish I’d started in January to begin at the beginning of a new year, and to document it from the beginning.  My household were the eight, ninth, tenth and eleventh to get the virus in Cumbria.

 

My ex-husband said to my son when it was first announced that a new killer disease was coming to  England, ‘Huh, nowt surer than your mam’ll get that, you mark my words, if anybody’s gonna get it, it’ll be her.’

 

Bastard.

 

And I say that in the fondest terms because it brings me to another point about my diary that I’ll come to when I’ve finished waffling on my second reason.

The second thing that made me write again is my other half, Max.  After getting Covid19, it triggered a huge decline in his father’s Alzheimer’s, and seven weeks ago we had to bring him to live with us. Life is hard, lockdown is bad, lockdown with a senile old man demanding 24-hour surveillance is off the scale.  

 

Max said I should do it.

 

‘Max, love, do you think I’m mad? After what I’ve been through with Knobhead the knobheadesque knobheaded stalker, not a chance in hell.’  

‘Aren’t you tempted to write it in your words, not even a little bit?’

‘Nope.’

 

Okay, he wore me down. I’m tempted.

 

The third reason is that ding, dong, the Knobhead is dead.  I only hear from a few people in my old town but while he was on his deathbed with organ failure, they all came scattering out of the woodwork like lice to get in touch and tell me. He died just before Christmas.  RIH Knobhead…Rot in Hell, you absolute waste of a human being.

 

It’s going to be a different fish dish from my other diaries. They were all about the honesty, I had to write every word, thought and feeling. This is going to be the same, but I will not type a single negative word about my two sons, their children, or my son’s father, ever. When I called my ex a bastard earlier it was done in jest—repeat for the hard of seeing—in jest.  That hornet will not come back to bite my arse again. No Sir.  This typing idiot has learned her lesson this time.

 

And therein lies the dilemma. Max has persuaded me to do this, he wants me to do it.  He says it’s my diary, my thoughts and to write it real and put down, and subsequently publish, anything I want to. What about when I say that his dad is a selfish, disgusting –he spits in my sink—greedy old man.  We not only have his dad, but somehow, I was conned into having his, at the time, eighteen-year-old son with drug issues move in with us.  What about when I call his perfectly normal bed dependant, now nineteen and without drug issues, son a lazy little bastard who won’t do shit for anybody but himself. And when I say that I didn’t sign up for this and had I known three years ago when we met that this would be my life, I wouldn’t have gone near him with somebody else’s.

 

He says he has no interest in reading it, I believe him, he’s laid back in many respects—but he says that now, it’s easy to say that now. I’ve been here before. I can see old readers jumping up from their sofas and yelling at the top of their voices, ‘Are you mad, woman? Don’t do it.’

 

There is an episode of the Simpsons where Bart puts his finger in a live socket to see what it does. And he does it again to see if the result is the same, and again, and again.

 

Buckle up: I will not start the car until all seatbelts are fastened.