Best Books of 2022

In the Beforetimes (ie pre-Covid), I logged the number of books I read every year on Goodreads, and then at the end of the year did a brief blog post on how many there had been, and what my favourite ones were.

In those days, I got through about 70 books a year. Much of my reading time was on the train on my daily commute to and from work.

Then Covid hit, and everything changed, including the amount of time I had to read. I was still working, but I wasn’t commuting, and although I saved time (and money) by not taking the train every day, I lost a lot of reading time.

When I finally went back to the office full time – and we went back into a new office – in September 2022, I gained back my commuting reading time.

My Best Books of 2022 post is a bit late coming, but better late than never.

In 2022 I read 56 books – not back up to pre-Covid levels, but better than the previous year. Only four I gave five stars to, which is generally my rule for listing the Best Books of the Year. They are:

Misery – Stephen King
It – Stephen King
Christine – Stephen King
The Last House on Needless Street – Catriona Ward

During Covid I joined a Stephen King book group, so I’ve been re-reading a lot of his stuff for that group, and being reminded of just why he is my favourite author of all time. Which is why three of these four are Stephen King books. These are all books I read and loved many, many years ago, and when I re-read them for the book group they had lost none of their impact. These three books have flaws, and I do understand why Stephen King isn’t for everyone, but re-reading them as a fifty-something, they had the same impact on me as they did when I read them as a teenager, hence the five star rating.

The Last House of Needless Street I read for my other book group, which is all horror fiction. And I have to say that in order to talk about this book I have to reveal a major spoiler, so consider yourself warned. This book I gave five stars for one simple reason – the fact that it gave me an entirely different view of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) – which used to be called Multiple Personality Syndrome. A lot of writers use DID as a plot device (especially film and TV writers). Most of them fail to understand how it actually affects people. Catriona Ward, through thorough research and a sympathetic and skillful writing style, gave me a much better understanding of what DID is and how people who are afflicted with it actually behave, and why. A book that is able to educate me in such a way deserves five stars.

As it happens, when I went to StokerCon in Scarborough last year – a convention that was originally supposed to happen in 2020 and got delayed multiple times because of Covid – I actually got to meet Catriona Ward in person (we had an encounter in the bar, as is the usual meeting place at these events) and tell her how much I enjoyed her book, and why. Which I think made her day just as much as it made mine.

I am still logging all the books I read on Goodreads, by the way. I have set a target of 65 books for this year – optimistically hoping that now my work life is more or less back to the way it was in the Beforetimes, this will be a realistic target. We are already a quarter of the way through the year and Goodreads tells me I’m on target – so far so good. And if anyone’s on Goodreads, feel free to friend me there.

After Times

Three years ago, we moved into a year in which the whole world locked down due to Covid-19. For a while it felt like the world would never be the same again. I started referring to the days before Covid as the ‘Before Times’.

As we start 2023, it does feel like the world is different, but Covid restrictions are largely over. Those early days of 2020, when we were all in full lockdown, sometimes feel like nothing but a bad dream. It’s not that Covid has gone away, but it feels like there are other concerns taking everyone’s attention at the moment, and Covid is just one more virus that we have to learn to live with.

I was working from home for over two and a half years, with the latter half of 2022 seeing us move into a new office. Since the beginning of September, I’ve been back in the office full time, going back to the daily commute into London.

All the other routines are moving back to the way they were in the ‘Before Times’ as well. I’m still keeping up with the swimming, even though I’m still getting up stupidly early, to get in a swim before going to the office. Book clubs, writing groups, and other such social groups are all largely back to meeting in person.

The one thing that is taking longer to get back is the writing. Since moving back to the office I’ve been able to turn my home office back into my study, and hence a writing room, which was one of the main reasons the writing stalled – that, coupled with a long-lasting bout of Imposter Syndrome that I’m still struggling with. Recently I’ve also started getting up stupidly early to go writing in a coffee shop before going to the office, which I used to do in the Before Times – and slowly, but steadily, the words are coming again.

So now we move into the ‘After Times’, and the end of what has been a very strange year, and not just because of the pandemic. The UK has had three Prime Ministers, four Chancellors and two monarchs since this time last year. There’s a lot of bad stuff going on in the wider world as well (war in Ukraine; sky-high energy prices; Cost of Living crisis) which does make it a little difficult to look to 2023 with any degree of optimism.

But sometimes the problems of the world seem too overwhelming, and you have to take one day at a time, which is what I am planning to do this year. I am pledging to get back to a regular writing routine. It doesn’t really matter if the words I write are any good, as long as I get them written down. A finished manuscript can always be edited, but you have to finish the manuscript first.

I also pledge to make regular updates to this blog, which has been sorely neglected the last three years.

I wish everyone a happy and productive 2023, no matter how big or small your goals are.

The Adventures of Shara Summers

In the early 2000s, I was reading more crime than horror – horror had fallen decidedly out of favour at that time, at least in the UK – and started thinking about writing a crime series. I was a huge fan of the strong female protagonists in the books written by Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton, and these characters were my inspiration.

But I didn’t feel confident in my research ability, so didn’t want to write a police procedural. I decided to write about an amateur sleuth. But I wanted her to be contemporary. I decided to make her an actress, so that she could use her acting ability to take on roles as she investigated murders. I liked the idea of drawing on my own experience of living in two countries, so I made her half-Canadian, half-British.

And so Shara Summers came into being. And the name ‘Shara’ came from an alter ego I created for myself when I wrote Star Wars fan fiction as a teenager, and created a version of myself to insert into that universe.

The first Shara Summers book, DEATH SCENE was published in e-book only format by Lyrical Press in 2011. It was re-published by MuseItUp, along with the second book, DEAD COOL, in 2014.

With MIU closing its doors and returning rights to the authors, Shara became homeless. I’ve looked at other publishers, but most don’t want previously published books.

So I decided to self-publish the first books. This was fairly straightforward, as they’d both been previously edited and I had permission to use the MIU covers. The first two books are now available again, in Kindle format, on Amazon. I hope to make them available in other ebook formats eventually, and maybe even in paperback, once I can get my head around KDP’s POD formatting requirements.

However, what of the rest of the series? Books 3 and 4 are written, but not published. Mid-series manuscripts are hard sells. If the first two do well, then I might have a chance of someone being interested in picking up the series, but the previous version didn’t sell well at all. The few reviews the first book got were very positive, but there weren’t enough of them to make any difference, and they all disappeared when the earlier published versions were taken down.

I’ve always enjoyed writing the Shara books, and I’ve got plans for book 5 and 6 and maybe even more. But it’s hard to stay motivated when no one seems to be interested in reading what you’re writing.

So this post is to announce that Shara Summers is back in the world, and it’s also a plea. If you enjoy crime, then perhaps give these ones a go. And to all those people in my life who say they support my writing, but they can’t read horror, then here’s something of mine that you can read.

Here are links to Book 1, DEATH SCENE (UK, US and Canada) and Book 2, DEAD COOL (UK, US and Canada). Please buy them, review them, and share links with friends. I would very much like to carry on writing the Shara series, but she will only find her place in the world if she finds a fan base.

Thank you for reading my blatant book pimping post. We now return to our regular scheduled programme.

2021 in Review

Generally, as we move into a New Year it’s time to look back at the old one. But what can we say about 2021? After being locked down for most of 2020 in the grip of a global pandemic a vaccine was developed and this time last year we were all hopeful that we’d finally see an end to it. But the virus has mutated, cases are rising fast and we start 2022 with more uncertainty.

I have been a bit quiet on the blog because I had nothing I wanted to say that didn’t seem like whining. The writing has not been happening at all – I just found it a struggle to write anything. I’ve also been suffering a crisis of confidence. Since both the small publishers I was published with have ceased to be over the last two years, rights of most of my published works have been returned to me and I have been endeavouring to get those works back up on Amazon. This has required re-reading and reformatting for Kindle publication, and becoming convinced that not only are all the WIPs I’m currently working on rubbish, but everything I’ve wrote in the past is also rubbish, and why am I calling myself a writer?

However, in trying to get past this and focus on the positives, there are a few good things that have come out of the last year. I’ve always hated exercise. Swimming I could tolerate and I have been doing this off and on most of my adult life. But when lockdown began and I couldn’t swim I realised how much I missed it. Once the pools opened again, in the middle of 2020, I made a point of booking sessions and going regularly. Since then I’ve been swimming three or four times a week for forty minutes at a time, usually first thing in the morning before starting work. Between that and my weekly training sessions – 25 minutes of one-on-one exercise with a personal trainer outdoors, so they were mostly able to continue during the pandemic – I’m probably fitter now than I’ve ever been in my life. Which is really saying something.

Berry Pomeroy Castle, which we visited in October 2021 – allegedly one of the most haunted places in the UK.

We did get a few long weekends away in the UK this year, while overseas travel was off the cards. There were also a few days out with friends, which I will never take for granted again.

I’m thankful that we got to go to Canada this year in November, over four years after our last visit, and were able to catch up with family and friends. We were there only a week, but it was so nice to be able to see – and hug – people. Canada didn’t open its borders to international visitors until September, and then we had trouble finding time that both Hubby and I could take off work to visit. I am very glad we got over there when we did, because not long after that the Omicron variant became a global concern and international travel started shutting down again.

So what of 2022? It’s not starting off too well, but let’s hope that we start to see a return to some semblance of normal life soon. We have some conventions and gigs planned this year – all things which have been postponed several times since 2020 – but I don’t want to be too hopeful because things still seem too uncertain to make plans. There has already been a lot of disappointment over the last two years, with so many things I’ve been looking forward to being cancelled.

Taking things one day at a time seems to be the best approach for 2022. I would like to make more time for friends, as I have missed seeing people these last couple of years. I have a new appreciation for our D&D games, as one thing we have been able to do this year is to have people round the table for face-to-face games, and it’s been such a pleasure having that social interaction.

Me at York Cathedral, June 2021

As for the writing, I need to focus more on it and get past this fear that nothing I’ve written is worth reading. My three previously published horror novels – SUFFER THE CHILDREN, THE WHISPERING DEATH and OUTPOST H311 – are now available again on Amazon in Kindle format – all at the bargain price of 99p, I might add – and the first two Shara Summers novels will be up there shortly.

After struggling with the sequel to OUTPOST H311 – writing an apocalypse novel in what felt like a real apocalypse just wasn’t working – I eventually decided to abandon it. I now have an idea for a new horror novel, which will be my main project this year. It’s early days yet, and I’m still working on plot and characters, but after two years of virtually no writing, I will take whatever the Muse chooses to give me, frankly.

And of course I have neglected this blog for the last two years, so I will be more disciplined about putting up posts. I will try not to whine, because I don’t think that helps anyone, but I will do what I can to post about something, even if it’s not about writing. The My Life in Music posts seem to be getting good reactions, so I’d like to carry on with those.

Happy New Year to you all. I hope 2022 turns out to be a better year than the past two have been.

My Life in Music: 1983

In September 1983 I entered Grade 9 at Grand River Collegiate in Kitchener. I would spend the next five years attending that school – Grade 13 was still a thing in Ontario in those days. It would be the longest amount of time I would ever spend at one school.

Starting high school was a simultaneously terrifying and exciting adventure. First of all, the school was so much bigger than any other I’d experienced – there were about 1300 kids there when I attended. Second, I went from spending all day with the same classmates to having new people in each class, as we moved to the concept of choosing options.

Grand River Collegiate Institute in Kitchener, Ontario. From the outside, at least, it looks much the way it did when I attended.

Options meant that I could carry on with classes I quite enjoyed – French and music, for instance – and I could drop the ones I wasn’t very interested in. Physical Education was no longer compulsory when I entered high school, and I dropped it. Like a stone (see link to an earlier post about my aversion to sports). Mathematics, which I always struggled with, sadly I wasn’t able to drop as that was a compulsory subject.

But there were also other new options that attracted me. There was a drama class, which I was looking forward to taking. A keyboarding class gave me the chance to learn how to touch type – I initially I picked it up because I thought it would help my writing, but it turned out to be the most useful skill I ever learned in school.

My homeroom in Grade 9 was the music room. The school was in the shape of a wide V, with two corridors merging into a ‘hub’ in the centre where the ‘Cafetorium’ (ie the room that served as both cafeteria and auditorium) was located. If you had a locker around the central hub, you had time to visit it between classes. The locker you were allocated was generally near your homeroom classroom. The music room was at the very end of a corridor that had very little else in it, and my locker was so out of the way that first year of high school I ended up carrying most of the books I would need for my school day around with me from class to class.

The first week at high school was overwhelming. I remember arriving late for my first science class because I got lost trying to find the classroom. But it was also quite exciting. There was just so much more going on. There were so many clubs to join, and I enthusiastically threw myself into so many of them. Choir and concert band. The school newspaper. The yearbook staff. Drama club.

Grade 9 school picture – taken about six weeks before my 14th birthday.

Although I stayed as far away from sports as I could – I think the only time I ever set foot in the gymnasium was for the Freshers Dance that was held there – the team name for the school, the Renegades, applied to all who attended the school. I embraced it in the search for identity that we all struggle with during adolescence. I was proud to call myself a Grand River Renegade.

The song for this year was actually released in 1979, but it became such an integral part of my high school experience, I still think about my high school days whenever I hear it. Styx were a huge band in Canada in the 1980s, but they were virtually unheard of in the UK. I believe they had one hit here, with ‘Babe’.

But here is their song ‘Renegade’, which will always be, for me, the theme song for my high school. This one is just audio, sadly – couldn’t find a version on Youtube with a video. Fellow Renegades, maybe it will be bring back memories for you, too.

My Life in Music: 1982

I attended Stanley Park Junior High School in Kitchener, Ontario for grades 7 & 8, from September 1981 to June 1983. Junior High was quite a different experience for me, going from junior school where we all spent all of our time in the same classroom, with the same teacher, to a much bigger school where as a class we would troop down the corridors to visit other teachers in order to have lessons from them. This was all new territory – as the eldest child I had no older siblings to prep me for new experiences, and I was still finding Canada a strange new world.

The photo is my official school picture from Grade 8 – taken at the beginning of the school year, this would have been taken in September 1982, when I was about a month away from turning 13.

Many eventful things happened to me during 1982, not the least of which was puberty hitting. Puberty brings with it many horrible things – acne; overactive hormones; moodiness; the need to shower everyday. Then there were these new and interesting creature in my life. They had always been there, as it happened, but up to that point I had spent my time trying to avoid them. These creatures were collectively known as ‘Boys’. For the first time, I became interested in their existence. But most of them seemed not to notice mine, which was a source of great anxiety.

In Grade 8 I had an English teacher – a marvellously eccentric Welsh lady called Mrs Riepert. She was the first teacher to spot my potential as a writer, and her encouragement of my writing, in those early days, should not be underestimated. Apparently she was singing my praises as an exceptional writer to her students for many years to come.

It was in her class we were given an assignment to write a horror story. I wrote a very long story called ‘Terror in Tanner’s Field’, which I later rewrote into a novel. Between that and my happening to discover Stephen King in the school library – checking out first DIFFERENT SEASONS and then CARRIE – that year I became a bona fide fan of, and writer of, horror fiction.

The other major thing to happen to me in 1982 was my first viewing of ‘Star Wars’ – a film I had turned down the opportunity to see in the cinema upon its release in 1977 because I dismissed it as ‘a boy’s film’.

In 1982 VCRs were still a new and novel discovery, and not everyone had one. A lady in Kitchener had a little business going where she would rent out a VCR, plus ten movies, for a short period of time. Thinking back I am now sure this must have been a pirate operation – all the videotapes were in plain covers, with the titles of them typed on labels. And she had two separate lists of films – one list of ‘adult’ films, the other more family-orientated.

One weekend in the summer of 1982, towards the end of August, our family rented a VCR and ten films (from the family list of course – we were a family of five with three kids). One of the films was ‘Star Wars’.

Perhaps the timing of the first time I saw ‘Star Wars’ was crucial to its impact on me. Coming as it did at a time when my adolescent hormones were raging, I fell madly in love with Luke Skywalker, and a lifelong obsession with all things Star Wars was born at that moment.

At the same time music became a lot more important. I think music speaks loudest to you when you are a teenager, and what you listen to then informs your life going forward. It was at this time I started to become interested in spending my pocket money on records – buying 45s, or ‘singles’ as they were known then. In those days they had a round hole in the middle, which meant you had to have a circular attachment on your record player in order to be able to play them.

And the song I’m going to leave you with was a big hit this year, and it’s one I did actually buy. I remember dancing around to it, playing it on the little record player I mentioned in the last music blog post.

Here’s “Gloria” by Laura Branigan. It’s still a song that makes me happy when I listen to it.

Sixty-Nine Weeks Later

Is this thing still on? **tap tap**

OK, so the global pandemic has changed the world. The UK formally went into lockdown in March 2020 – exactly 69 weeks ago tomorrow. I know the week count, because I have been keeping score, making a note at the top of my notebook every time I go into a new week working from home.

Technically England comes out of lockdown tomorrow, with all social restrictions removed, and the wearing of masks becoming voluntary, not compulsory. But several supermarkets and retail chains have already announced that they expect their customers to carry on wearing them, and London and several other major cities have also declared that mask wearing will still be compulsory on public transport. I am specifying ‘England’ here because the other nations of the United Kingdom have announced different rules.

But the pandemic is by no means over, and the uncertainty we’ve all had to live with for the last 18 months or so continues. We’ve all struggled in various ways. I have found it difficult to write during the pandemic, and I have neglected this blog. Dealing with the real world has been stressful enough – trying to work out what to write about seemed too much.

However, no matter what happens in the future I want to try and regain some focus on the writing. I have recently completed the second draft of the fourth book in the Shara Summers series. I enjoy writing about this character, but I am not sure what the future holds for this series. The first two books, previously published by Muse It Up, are currently unavailable since the publisher recently closed its doors. The third book is looking for a home and currently unpublished, and the fourth book nobody else has read but me.

I intend to self-publish the first two, once I get the rights back. It would be nice to find another publisher for the rest of the series, but I am uncertain if publishers are happy to pick up a series in the middle, and it seems no one wants to take on previously published work these days. Self-publishing might be the way forward, but that seems like a minefield that will be intimidating to navigate.

On the horror fiction side, things are even more uncertain. I have a very short first draft of a sequel to OUTPOST H311, which was a struggle to write – I found it difficult to write about an apocalypse when it felt like we were living through one. Sooner or later I do want to go back to this and finish it, but I’m not in the right head space for it at the moment.

Maybe it’s time to start something new. But I am short of new ideas at present. Dealing day-to-day with life in a pandemic seems to be sucking up most of my mental energy.

As England heads into what is being called ‘Freedom Day’ there is still a lot of uncertainty. I am still working from home and will be doing so for the foreseeable future, since there is no word yet on when we’re expected back in the office, and foreign holidays, which I have been sorely missing, are still off the table. It has been four years since I last visited my family in Canada, a place I was used to visiting at least once every two years, and since Canada’s borders are closed to non-nationals I have no idea when we’ll be able to get over there. And by the time they open up their borders, the UK might well be back in lockdown.

But I do intend to at least pick up the blog again, with a new post at least once a week. This, at least, gives me a modicum of control in a world that seems out of control.

Till next week, then, I wish you all the best in whatever it is you are doing. Even if that is just getting through the day.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

The UK formally went into lockdown on 23 March 2020. Which wasn’t actually a hundred years ago. It just feels like a hundred years.

In July and August things started to open up again – pubs and restaurants, shops, hair and beauty salons, sports centres and gyms. In August, when the government messaging changed from ‘work from home if you can’ to ‘go back to the office if you can’, our office in Westminster opened up again (albeit briefly), and we were taking it in shifts go in, one or two days a week. There were only ever a handful of us in at one time, and things were a bit strange, but it did feel like a shift back to normality. But then the government message changed once more, and the office closed again. We were told that we should go back to working from home again, and be prepared to do so for perhaps another six months. But we had the ‘rule of six’ at that point, which meant people could meet in groups of no more than six indoors or outdoors, and that meant we could start running round-the-table D&D games again with some extra safety precautions (individually wrapped snacks, for instance, instead of everyone dipping into the same big bowl).

But now England has a ‘3-tier’ system depending on the number of cases in an area, and from today all of London is in Tier 2, which means you can’t have anyone in your house who doesn’t live there, and you can’t meet your friends in a pub or restaurant. or anywhere indoors. Some parts of the north of England are in Tier 3, which has further restrictions, and in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, all of the rules are different again.

It’s all very confusing, and as well as no more D&D games this means I will no longer be able to go out for dinner with friends to celebrate my birthday next weekend, as I was planning to. The only person I am now allowed to go to a restaurant with is my husband, since we live together. So I guess it’s going to have to be just him and me celebrating.

Over the last six months of lockdown, there are a few things I have learned about myself.

1. I don’t really like working from home. It was OK for a couple of weeks, and it would still be OK if it were one or two days a week, but five days a week with no face to face contact with anyone I find really isolating. It’s making me seriously question this lifelong ambition I always had to be a full-time writer. It won’t suit me. It’s too lonely. Which leads to…
2. I am not an introvert. I always assumed I was, since I spent a lot of time alone when I was young, but this was mostly because I had trouble making friends. Truth be told, I like talking to people. Being alone I find exhausting. Over the years I’ve attended many conventions and gatherings alone because I couldn’t find anyone to go with me, and if it was something I really wanted to do I would just go, confident that once I got there I would find plenty of people to talk to. And I have made friends that way, so I would recommend it.
3. I really like swimming. I have a love/hate relationship with exercise of all forms, but since the pools opened up again I have been swimming three mornings a week and it has greatly improved my mental health. Swimming is actually the only form of exercise I do enjoy, and I hadn’t realised how much until I wasn’t allowed to do it.
4. I am really struggling to write during this crisis. Particularly horror. I am working on a sequel to OUTPOST H311, but I’m finding it really difficult to write an apocalyptic book when it feels like we’re in the middle of a real-life apocalypse. I think perhaps I am not alone in this – there seems to be a collective anxiety about the coronavirus crisis that is affecting creativity for a lot of people.
5. I don’t like surprises. I like to plan. I did already know this about myself. I set myself up at the start of the working day with a list of things to do, and another list of things to achieve by the end of the week. I like to put conventions, and gigs, and weekends away, in the calendar. I like to know what I am doing tomorrow, and next week and next month, and even this time next year. Covid-19 has taken all that away. All the things we had planned for this year have been cancelled. We can’t plan any trips away, or even an overnight stay in the UK because everything is changing so fast and we don’t know where we’ll be this time next months, or even next week. The move from Tier 1 to Tier 2 in London was announced with just over 24 hours’ notice. There is still talk of Tier 3 if Tier 2 doesn’t work, or even another ‘circuit breaker’ full lockdown for a couple of weeks when the schools break up. How can one make plans to do anything, under all of this?

In an attempt to find some balance, I am now going to try and list some positives that have come out of the last six months:

1. We are saving a lot of money by not having to pay for train fares every day.
2. We are both getting more sleep, since going into London for work required getting up a lot earlier.
3. Hubby and I are actually having conversations with each other during the day, whereas when we were both in the office all day, we’d just communicate via email. We are also getting to eat lunch together every day, which is sort of nice.
4. I have actually learned to cook. A bit. Although I am still largely hopeless, there are now a couple of recipes I can make for dinner, and they actually turn out quite well. I just have to make sure I make a point of buying the ingredients in my weekly shop, if I’m planning on making one of these recipes.
5. I still have a job. A lot of people I know haven’t any more, and every day it seems there’s someone else in my social media sadly announcing they’ve been made redundant, so maybe I need to be grateful about the fact I am still earning a regular wage.

I am reaching a bit here, because on the whole I am waking up in a rather dark mood every morning and struggling to find reasons to be cheerful. With everything I was looking forward to this year cancelled, and not able to book anything for next year because of uncertainty, there’s nothing to look forward to.

I also hate this time of year, because I hate the dark and the cold weather and I really struggle with depression in the winter. I brought my anti-SAD lamp home from the office and I start each morning at my home working desk under its very bright light for two hours. It does seem to help for a while – until I start thinking about the state of the world again.

At the moment shops and retail service providers are still open, I am still able to go swimming, and if Hubby and I fancy a night out we can still book to go to a local restaurant, as long as we follow their Covid-19 rules. So I guess we should be making the most of these things while we can, as we may well go into full lockdown again with everything closed at some point.

But by God, I can’t wait for this year to be over. There has to be an end to all this eventually. I struggle to see that far ahead, but I guess all any of us can do is get through this terrible year as best we can, and hope that better times will eventually come.

Public Information Films

In the days before mobile phones, the Internet, and even 24-hour TV channels, even very young kids used to spend a lot of time outside, unsupervised, playing in places it wasn’t advisable to play. The adults decided the best way to stop kids from playing in dangerous places was to employ scare tactics – thus the age of the Public Information Film was born.

Anyone who was a kid in Britain in the 1970s will remember these. As far as I am aware they were a uniquely British phenomena. They were all pretty scary, but the one that traumatised me most was a film called ‘The Finishing Line‘, that was all about the dangers of playing on railway lines.

The film in its entirety doesn’t seem to be available on YouTube. The full film is 20 minutes long and starts with a young boy fantasising about what might happen if his school sports day featured fun activities like running across a railway line, throwing rocks at moving trains and so on. It was commissioned by British Rail, since apparently vandalising trains and kids playing on railway lines and being hit by trains was a big problem in the 1970s. The video below is the first five minutes or so. Beyond the retro images of 1970s fashions, you might notice the nurses lining up a bunch of stretchers. In the first ‘game’ – involving running across the tracks into the path of a moving train – there is one casualty, which the nurses bundle into one of stretchers. The film goes on with other ‘games’, each one producing more casualties, and at the end of the film, pretty much all the kids are dead.

It was released in 1977 – at which point I was seven years old – and it was broadcast several times on TV, and taken into schools.

I remember a retired train driver coming to our junior school (in those days junior school was for kids age 7-11, and was between primary and secondary school), and showing us slides of damage to trains, and the injuries he suffered to his face when someone threw a rock at his train and the glass from the shattered window got into his eyes. He also told us about the kids he ran when he was driving his train, and how many pieces they got cut into. He told us he wasn’t going to show us those slides – that was for the older children.

As I recollect I didn’t see ‘The Finishing Line’ at school on that day. My memory is that I watched it on TV, where it was shown to an audience of kids and there was a televised discussion afterwards. Right after the film one young boy felt so sick he had to be taken out of the room.

The scene that really traumatised me – and this is the one I can’t find anywhere on the Internet – was the final ‘game’, where all the school kids have a race through a train tunnel, and they get hit by a train. All the dead and bloodied kids are lined up on the tracks in the final scene. There’s a long range shot of that on the film poster on the IMDb entry.

There’s no doubt that the ‘scare them silly’ tactic employed in the 1970s to deter kids from hanging around places where they might get hurt was effective. After nearly 30 years of commuting by train to work, I still worry about standing too close to the edge of the platform when waiting for my train. But every once in a while I also lie awake at night thinking about this film and remembering the trauma of watching it. Given that it’s been over 40 years since I saw it, the tactic was clearly a bit heavy-handed. Apparently I’m not the only one to think so – the film was so controversial, and caused so many kids distress, it was banned in 1979 and replaced by a less gruesome film called ‘Robbie’.

Hopefully we have slightly more subtle ways of discouraging kids from playing on the railway lines these days, and subsequent generations don’t carry around the psychological trauma we Generation X-ers do from growing up with Public Information Films.

Lockdown

Well, what a strange world we currently find ourselves in. In the UK we are now in the seventh week of lockdown. I think. Sometimes it’s hard to remember what day or even what month it is.

The beginning of March started ordinarily enough. Covid-19 (which I refer to as the C-virus) was in the news every day, but no one seemed particularly worried about it. On 7 March we flew off to Argentina for what was going to be an amazing two-week holiday. It was amazing, but we had to cut it short. For about a week or so everyone in Argentina was incredibly relaxed about the C-virus, and they are a very tactile people, with men and women alike greeting each other with hugs and cheek kisses. But then, on Sunday 15 March, we got an email from the airline to say our flight the following Thursday was cancelled. We somehow managed to get seats on the last flight to London from Buenos Aires the following day. There’s a lot more to this story and I will save it for another blog post. The day we left Buenos Aires, I noticed that the locals were no longer greeting each other with cheek kisses – they were using elbow bumps instead.

The short version is, we got back into London the morning of Tuesday 17 March. Since that day, our house has not been empty. The UK wasn’t in lockdown at that point, and we had not been told to self-isolate having been out of the country, but we tried to stay home as much as we could. We did have to go out foraging for supplies. Panic buying was in full swing. There was no toilet paper to be had anywhere, no fresh fruit or veg, and most places had sold out of bread. Over the course of three days, with the two of us taking it in turns to visit as many grocery stores as we could get to, we managed to find enough food to keep us going for a week or so.

I was in contact with my colleagues, who had heard about Argentina going into lockdown and worried we got stuck there. I reassured them I was safely back in the UK. Initially I was going to go into the office to pick up my laptop so I could start working from home the following week. Things were changing so quickly it was soon decided to courier my laptop to me so I wouldn’t have to go in.

Hubby’s office had already decided to close down their London office, and he keeps a laptop at home anyway, for home working. So the week of 23 March saw us both setting up work spaces at home. He was working from the dining room table. I moved my personal laptop out of my writing den and set up my work laptop there, on the strength that I had a desk and proper chair in there, and I know from experience that if I spend hours working on a laptop on a stool or dining chair, I get backache. And so, ever since then, this has been the arrangement. It has taken some getting used to. This is a new way of life.

There are some positives. I am not on the train every day to work so I don’t have to get up so early, and I am saving a lot of money by not having to buy rail passes every month. Hubby and I have actual conversations during the day when we have lunch and tea breaks together. In pre-lockdown life we would largely communicate by email during the day. We are both still working, and largely able to carry on our jobs from home, although adjustments have been necessary. A lot of people are out of work. There are two of us, and we have a four-bedroom house so there is plenty of space for us both to be able to work without disturbing each other. We are spending less money, because there’s nowhere to go to spend it.

But on the whole, it’s been difficult to adjust. I miss not being able to go out and meet friends in a restaurant or a bar for a meal or a nice glass of wine. All the things I was looking forward to this year – weekends away; gigs; open mic nights; conventions – have been cancelled. Although we were lucky enough to get our holiday to Argentina, or most of it – a lot of people have lost their holiday completely and are still struggling to get the money back.

I am particularly missing my swimming. I had a good routine going, and I had finally found an exercise routine I could stick to. I am probably eating too many cakes and drinking too much wine because these are the only pleasures I seem to have left in lockdown.

It’s been over two months now since I was last in the office and I am finally starting to get used to this new routine. I am going out for a walk on a daily basis. We go grocery shopping once a week, and put up with the socially distanced line that is necessary in order to get into the supermarket. Generally it’s me that goes to the grocery store while Hubby cleans and vacuums the house. I am OK with this arrangement. I hate grocery shopping, but I hate cleaning the bathroom more. We are buying a lot more food. In our pre C-virus life we generally both ate breakfast at lunch at work, so the only meal we’d have at home was dinner.

But as well as struggling to maintain physical health, mental health is a struggle as well. I found this article from the Harvard Business Review online in the first week, and it helped me realise that the feelings I was struggling with were a form of grief. Mourning for the life I used to have, that is probably gone for ever. I’ve also been having a lot of really weird dreams. Apparently this is common amongst people trying to cope with lockdown as well. It’s our brains trying to deal with the general anxiety of the situation. Some days I end up feeling really down and crying for no particular reason. Some days I am OK. This week, I feel I should add, I have been largely OK.

But the writing has been non-existent. In the first week of lockdown I got up at 6:30am and attempted an hour and a half writing session. I managed less than 700 words in that time, and each one was a painful struggle to get down on the page. I’ve been avoiding writing ever since. Six weeks now, and I haven’t written a word. And that really bothers me.

The government in the UK is now talking about ending the lockdown. We need to be cautious, no matter how desperate we all are to regain some semblance of normal life. It’s going to be a long time until places like bars and concert venues will be able to open again, and there is no doubt that even when we achieve some degree of normality, life will not be as it was. I will certainly be continuing to work from home for the foreseeable future, as our Chief Executive has already informed us all that she expects it to be ‘several weeks, if not months’ before the office can open again. It’s the getting to the office that is problem – most people in the London office travel by train or tube, and you can’t social distance when you are in a carriage so crowded your nose is in someone’s armpit. And I really can’t see a solution to that any time soon.

So, like everyone else, I am doing what I can to get through lockdown. We are spending our evenings watching a lot of films and TV shows. We are looking for fantasy and escapism; we have discovered that right now we can’t deal with anything that features a dystopian world (like The Walking Dead, for instance). Last week we went through the entire Lord of the Rings extended DVD trilogy (that’s nine hours of viewing). Video chats with friends on Zoom and other forms of video calls are really helping. I can’t meet my friends for a glass of wine, but we can talk to each other while we drink wine at home. We are even running our D&D games using video calls – not ideal, and you have to shout a lot at the screen to make sure everyone hears, but it’s better than not playing at all. And everyone needs the escapism of being in a fantasy world for a while.

I’ve also been wasting a lot of time on social media, enjoying the rather ingenious lockdown videos created by people with far too much time on their hands. I leave you with this rather ingenious stop motion Lego creation, to the tune of Abba’s ‘The Day Before You Came’.

This, too, will pass, and one day we will all be able to see each other again. But until then, stay safe, friends.