Brand New
Every now and again it helps the soul to try something new.
Forget plastic surgery, forget Class As, forget religion, forget winning the lottery. Being happy has a lot to do with new-ness. For some the thrill of the new may be something reasonably perilous like climbing the north face of that mountain those two blokes fell down in that film, “Touching the Void”, or even trying out the trickier Kama Sutra positions with an orange* in your mouth. For the rest of us, experiencing the new might not need to be life threatening, or as embarrassing to the family members that have to call the ambulance.
After the radio show this weekend which is the first time ever I have been on the radio, I realised that no matter how wracked with nerves I was, the adrenaline rush was not to be sniffed at. And then I began thinking about all the new things I have done this year.
My whole life I wanted to go to Thailand. This year I went. It was better than even I imagined. And it was all about new experiences every day. I’ll never forget it. You can keep the Costa Del Sol!
In the New Year I painted and sold my work. It was one the best things I have ever done in my life. It still makes me smile.
In the summer I got a new job and left my comfort zone of teaching. Terrifying, still. But a good decision.
Then I got a dog. It’s been hard work but there’s not a day goes by that I don’t think, “Jeez, I just love that wee boy!” Watch this space for a coming soon blog and me and Sonny at Dog School!
I went freelance full time and left the days of clocking in and out behind me. Safety net…removed! (Audible gasps from the assembled crowds)
But it isn’t just me. I look around myself and I see that I am surrounded with friends who are not afraid to embrace the new. Maybe that’s the reason I hang out with them.
A friend of mine went for five weeks travelling to Thailand and Australia and left her husband to take care of the kids at home because she’d always wanted to go but never had the chance before. My sister has taken up the cello. My husband has joined a new band. My brother in law has become an accomplished songwriter. My friend is joining the police force after a life unhappy in various jobs. My other friend has gone back to college at the age of forty, despite being absolutely terrified.
I swear, if you’re feeling that you need a boost, try something new-preferably something that really puts yourself out there and see what happens. Even if it’s running outside naked for five minutes in the snow just to say you did. Go on, do it now.
(And then blog it!)
*start with a tangerine…much safer.
Misssy’s Big Decision
I’m up at 2.30am. I can’t sleep. This post is going to be absolutely infuriating. I warn you now. But I have to add, it does NOT contain vomit, which I’m guessing will be a huge relief to some, if not all of you. You see, the Gods have decided to mess with my head. There I was, quite happily trotting along, living my wee life, thinking myself bloody lucky with no general complaints other than the following: 1. Why can’t I have a dog? It’s cruel to leave a dog indoors without company. But I want one! Yesterday I got headhunted for a job. A career change that could mean that I am able to wipe off all five of those items from my blackboard. A few other niggles might even get wiped off in the process: 1. Mmmm, I never meant to stay in teaching this long. Will I become one of those people who used to be, rather than still is? In my case, used to work in a certain industry, now teaches teenagers to do it and only dabbles occasionally when she can be arsed or wants to buy a new car or go on holiday. 
So here I am, sitting in the semi-darkness writing about something I can’t really go into in any detail about. I’m in my jammies, with a headache and a furrowed brow wondering if I can sacrifice the following positive things, in order to wipe the aforementioned nine items off my grumble list:
1. Lovely people I work with.
I could go to bed now, but I know I’ll be up for a while now wondering when I am going to be able to make a decision.
Because, right now I just can’t.
(Looks out of window)…It’s getting light. Argggh!
Tag, I’m it!
For the first time ever I’ve been tagged to write a post. It’s on High Vibes, which I believe to be on the subject of what you do to keep yourself positive. Thanks for the tag, lovely Taexelia, Queen of the Foxes.
One apparently has to share five tricks for staying positive. I’ve decided to tell five little stories about times when I needed a bit of positivity and what I/others did to get my/their mojo back.
1. The Story of the Evil German Bastard who Broke My Heart When I Was Nineteen.
I was obsessed with a German exchange student 8 years older than me at University. For three years we went back and forth to Scotland and Germany. I was deliriously obsessed with him. The female members of my family loved him, the males didn’t. That should have been a warning. He was so good looking and charming that I couldn’t believe that he would even look twice at me. My dad, who is a normally personable chap, would sit and glare at him whenever I took him home. My mum and sister would look at him with awe.
After two years he dumped me for a nurse whom let’s face it he’d been shagging all along. I was borderline suicidal. I had fantasies of little blonde bilingual babies. But for a year after dumping me, he would still visit. He would invariably sleep with me, raising false hope. Then one night after doing this he felt all guilty about cheating on his girlfriend. He was actually in tears. The utter cheek of him! Something in me snapped. I took his bag, jacket and shoes and flung them out into Great Western Road (Glasgow’s main drag) and told him to leave. I actually flung him out the door in a T-shirt and boxers in February. My flatmates practically gave me a Mexican Wave. Two years later I met Meeester and I thought, “Thank God.”
Item One: Get rid of bad people from your life who stop the good ones coming along.
2. The Story of Leaving My So Called Fabulous Production Job
This is worthy of a longer post. So see this as a kind of trailer. When you work for a company for 8 years and have (along with your colleagues) turned a little production department that made crappy videos for colleges into a major player in the commercial production world, heading up Global Live Broadcasts for Blue Chip Companies, you’d think a payrise to bring your salary up to a measly £25,000 wouldn’t be out of order. Apparently it was. I left.
Item 2: If anyone takes the piss, then leave.
3. Surprise Story!
At the end of last year I was very ill. I won’t go into details. For my birthday I wanted nothing, but a surprise. On my birthday Meeester set me a challenge. He gave me a canvas, paints and brushes and told me I had 30 days to sell my work on Ebay for ANY money. Here it is:
I got £73 for it and I gave the proceeds to the Cats Protection League. As a reward Meeester let me choose the jewellery of my choice in Thailand but the real reward was the painting. Doing that painting and seeing all my friends and family (and some unknown bidders!) bidding for it, made me well again. And I’ve been painting ever since.
Item3: Surprise someone. Life’s too short on surprises.
4. The Travel Bug
I’ve always been a traveller. Sounds like the start to a ropey folk song, doesn’t it? Travel is the best thing ever. I’ve turned my husband and kids into travellers too. That’s why I call us the Flying Martinis.
I would love to write a travelogue and was delighted that so many of my friends and family enjoyed reading my daily emails from Finland and then when I started blogging, my Sri Lanka and Thailand Travelogues. See some of them here and here (or look in the April archives)
By the time I’m 40 I am going to get a travelogue published. I am, I can. No question.
Item 4: Have an ambition and realise it.
5. Music is Soul Food
What a flipping hippy thing to say. But it’s true. Tonight I am going to watch the wonderful Meeester and some of my most favourite people in the world play their 6 new songs live in front of a small audience in a dodgy little dive called The Moorings before they take them to various festivals in the summer. The band, the Lorelei, are in their second wave. To cut a long story short they made a very emotional and difficult decision to part with their original lead singer and songwriter about 10 years ago even though they were quite successful.
It’s not been easy. They’ve had to find a new singer (Meeester), turn their hands to writing without the powerful but often destructive presence of lead singer No1, and have been scrutinised by all the fans of the band from back when. All that and the old leader singer turns up at their first gig and stares them all out. Toooo difficult.
Despite all that they have been booked up for festivals, easily pack out Aberdeen’s Lemon Tree every time they play and are gaining new fans every day.
Tonight they go back on with all new songs, a lot happier and creative than they have ever been and I’m so proud of them all. One more thing, if any of them are reading this, gonna sell some flipping records now so that we can all live La Vida Loca?
Item Five: Have faith in yourself and prove your critics wrong.
So there we are. Now it’s my turn to tag five others:
KayessJayKay
EvvyB
American Scot
Joseph
Surviving Motherhood
Anyone else who wants tagged let me know and I’ll add you to the list. Simply click here for the rules.
You’re It!
Sixteen Year Old Misssymartin, Doris Day and Me
Will I be a top journalist, covering breaking news all round the world?
Will I be a defence lawyer going to the wire for my client in every case?
Will I be a writer of non-fiction travelogues that would make people long to follow in my footsteps?
Will I be the first female Director General of the BBC?
Will I be the first Prime Minister of Scotland?
Will I win the Eurovision Song Contest?
“No, you’ll be writing offshore training modules”
Que sera sera…etc.. Thanks Doris.
(Check out how I make no attempt to make that rhyme or fit in with the tune of “Que Sera Sera”. I’m tired and should be in bed. )
Started the freelance job today. Worked til my brain exploded and then scraped it all back into my skull and drove home checking out new Minis on the way to keep me going. Still grimacing wildly at the drivers, by the way.
Funny how life turns out. I wonder what the sixteen year old MisssyM would have to say about all this. I think about that sometimes. I think I would be astonished that someone agreed to marry me for one. I was never very confident on that front. On the career front I think sixteen year old Misssy would be a little confused. She may even be disappointed. In fact I know she would.
Last week some BBC ladies came to speak to my students and very nice they were too. When I was about 20 I would’ve been peeing my pants in excitement at the prospect of getting a foot in the door at the Beeb. Certainly, the general feeling that I got from the women was that people should be peeing their pants in excitement to get in at the Beeb. (Personally, I think anyone wanting to work in telly is better off scoping out the indies, as they make all the programmes these days).
However, I felt completely numb to it. Instead I was excited for my students…and even a little worried for them. What was really on offer here? Unpaid work, digitising and logging tapes for hours on end? The occasional running job, getting coffee for Sally Magnussen? Answering the phones on “Children in Need”? If you’re lucky in five years you might get a researcher’s job on some farming programme that is broadcast on a Sunday afternoon?
Even to get in to do these poorly paid, bottom rung of the ladder running jobs you’d have to jump through a million hoops, “Apprentice” style, to even get shortlisted. Fighting for floor space in a group exercise with some over-confident, over-bearing wannabes that would stifle your every attempt at being heard above them *Shudder*
It’s fine for those who want in…and maybe that was me fifteen years ago, but thank God it’s all over! Something has made me stay in Scotland and take a different path into teaching and writing/producing commercial and technical stuff and it doesn’t bother me anymore that what I said I’d do on leaving school hasn’t happened. Because other things have.
So for now, it’s procedural training, offshore safety and risk assessments for me. Last year it was programmes for schools. You can’t say my life isn’t varied, I s’pose. And I’ve only had to sell a bit of my soul to Satan…..
By the way, you’ve not heard the last of Sixteen year Old MisssyM. She and I have more conversations to have.
Pass me the quill, wind up the gramaphone and get out the instamatic
Disaster has struck the Martin Family household. The mother board on the family PC has gone into meltdown and we faced the prospect of losing all the photos from Eve’s birth onwards, all our documents and all our downloaded music. It’s too horrible to even contemplate, so for a couple of days whilst the computer was in intensive care at Northern Peripherals we were in a bit of denial of what this actually could mean. Every holiday, every Christmas, my kids growing up, every one of John’s bizarre hair/facial hair phases- four years of your life sucked into the vortex that is the PC blackhole.
Incidentally, this is also the blackhole populated with that unsaved dissertation you spent hours writing for your finals, the latest copy of the edit you did with that really fiddly bit that took bloody ages that you forgot to save, the e-tickets you downloaded for your flights that have gone awol and you can’t get onboard without. Oh, and it’s also where all the biros and hairbands end up. Fact. “It’ll be fine, these things can always be recovered,” we fooled ourselves into believing. To an extent, we were right. These things could be recovered, but at a cost of over £200 for man hours involving a bloke doing god knows what to our flux capacitor , transducer, transponder, and megadrive. I don’t pretend to understand. I’m more of the run around and panic type of person when technology goes wrong.
When people talk to me of these things, I look like I’m listening but really I’m playing a favourite movie in my head or I go into screensaver mode with tropical fish going round and round in my head. The technicians in college have already cottoned onto this and have been known to roll their eyes in anticipation as I approach. But as I’m annoyingly fond of saying “I’m a producer, I don’t need to know what buttons do, I have boys to do that for me”, or simply “Can you make porn come on my telly?”
But don’t get me wrong, I like using technology. It’s just when it goes wrong that I get panicky and confused like a spooked horse. Maybe some whispering will do the trick, “Shhh! Shhh! It’s ok girl,calm down and switch it on and off again. Have you tried plugging it in? Easy now girl, it’s aaaaalllll going to be ok, let’s just see if we can reboot. Easy! Easy! Whoa there!”. That kind of thing.Anyway, the panic is sort of over; our photos have been recovered and we can relax. Of all the things to lose these would be the worst so they are now safely backed up. But even though I am eternally grateful to the Megadeath T-shirt wearing Poindexter that saved our family memories, I am a bit pissed off that I’ve lost all my music. Luckily, I have about 200 tracks saved on other media, like phones, laptops, CDs etc and I am currently ripping them back into my PC (see, I said “Rip”, I do know some stuff!). Only problem is that Bastard Itunes and Goddamn Windows Media Player don’t recognise any of the track artists and titles so I’m having to play a tedious version of Tom O’Connor’s “Name that Tune” to get them all catalogued again. It’s like a music version of Trivial Pursuit that will never end. If only I lived with Paul Gambaccini. Actually, on second thoughts, no, I think I’ll just do it myself.
So, if you’re round my house, don’t be surprised if I involve you in the music quiz too. Like there’s this one track that goes, “Da Da nanana nana nan naaa!” and for the life of me I can’t remember what it is. C’mon you know the one, it goes “Da Da nanana nana nan naaa!” for god-sake. It’s by that guy that used to be in that other band with whatsis name…..grrr……
