I know that place

Occasionally at work I'm pulled in to run the show when others are busy. Today I was told the act I was working with was originally very famous, having at one point sold out Wembley Arena and toured the world before having a mental breakdown and retreating into obscurity. I was told he doesn't like to remember,  which is absolute fair, there are a solid two years of my life I'd gladly ignore. But how does a person go from selling out a 12,000 capacity arena to playing to 40 people in a glorified cellar? This is actually something I've seen quite often, fame is such that what goes up eventually comes down, or just blips out of existence, and you don't notice because that's the nature if fame.

So I met this man, and I was struck by his kindness. The kind that comes from suffering. The sort of fragility that comes from hitting the bottom and finding a new normal where you're creaking and shattered but just so so glad it's leaving you, whatever it is. Because almost always it's a case of it leaving you, because you leaving it suggests an element of control.

He was absolutely fragile. Like a child. And utterly self-conscious to the point of bombarding me with a constant stream of questions about myself, which (forgive me, famous people) is completely out of the ordinary. But I understood what he was trying to do. To keep the conversation from yourself you ask all the questions. You tease out and linger on the details of anything else. And it pulls you away.

So I just keep telling him about the time I fell offstage and think I know this. I see this. I know that hell.

I'm writing this out now because it hurts that I saw it so close I guess.

And perhaps because I kind of feel like a broken person too.

Another me, another me.

Every so often I get hung up on who I am and who I have been.

We had a lecture with an author called Nuala Casey today and she spoke about past selves, and what happens to them when you aren't that person anymore.

I've just done a massive sweep of this blog to clear it up for human consumption and I've rediscovered many versions of myself.

There's Nicole circa 2006 who was scared to so much as wear her hair up in case someone made a comment about it. I'm not her.

There's the one from 2008 who was so scarily hung up on a guy that looking back on it makes me slightly concerned. Not her either.

There's 2009, choked up with depression, school drop out and worker bee.

There's the one who went to college and shopped at Primark all the time I tried to do the girly thing and failed miserably.

There's the me who went to university to study live events production and was so sure she was in the right place, doing the right thing. And then she took a sharp turn and ended up in 2015 starting all over again.

Who am I now? I was this person who speaks way too languages and travels over to Norway all the time, but I haven't been in months. How can I be the same person who tours with a band seeing and doing so many crazy amazing things when I'm sat in a lecture on metaphysical poetry at 9am? How can I be the one programming lighting consoles and hauling cables and microphone stands around when I'm sat writing a poem?

These don't feel like the same people.

And then there's the people I knew back then. I feel like I should know them and I don't, and I don't know how to be who I was so I can know them again.

I suppose it's the realest example of time marching on, but it still caught me out today. Where are the ones I was? I'm not them.

The people who are

I've found that life is significantly better when you surround yourself with good people. This might seem like an obvious thing but it's taken me a while to come round to it.

 

Last year by all rights should have been horrendous. I lost my grandma to the absolute shitpit that is cancer, and in the last few weeks of her illness I felt like I was dying, because how could I possibly stand it? When she got to the final stretch, at first I couldn't even look, because it seemed perverse to be able to count someone's ribs from across the room, to be able to see their heart beating through their chest, to hand them a sippy cup of luke warm, extremely weak tea that weighed nothing and see their arm drop to the mattress like it was a dead weight. In the last week, I stayed in her house, by her side, talked away to her even though she couldn't hear me anymore. I never knew what to say to my grandma, and I always thought that out of all her granddaughters, surely the one with multiple tattoos, facial piercings and neon pink hair was the biggest disappointment, and maybe I was, but she loved me. So I prattled on, I read and re-read the death-and-dying leaflets a nurse had left me and when the time came, I knew exactly what was coming next. I watched her breathing turn into a spasm, I held her wrist and felt her heart stop. I took her pulse whilst my family watched and, bizarrely, panicked when I couldn't find it.

 

By rights the last year should have been the worst of my life, though I'm pretty sure I say that every year. But it's easy to hold on to the shit in life and ignore everything else.

 

Actually, last year was the best. Last year was fantastic. I've never been so consistently happy, and I think it has a lot to do with who I've surrounded myself with.

 

I've spent the last year jumping between being on tour with a band and studying for a new degree. Starting at a new university has been fantastic, I had no idea how much I'd love it, how different it is from my last degree, and that I'd make such goddamn excellent friends. Getting to do a degree with such a creative angle has given me so much to experiment with, and I love it.

 

I can't adequately describe touring. I've grown up with the band, their music is the music I listen to when I'm homesick, and being with them feels like home. Clichéd as it sounds we are a family (actually one member is my family), there's nothing I could do that any one of them would judge me for. Even without the element of going all over the country and out into Europe seeing new places and playing shows, the times spent in the tour van listening to everyone's favourite songs and just talking is the best feeling in the world.

 

 

(My guys and my ladies. Photo by Howard Rankin)

 

The shows are hard. I load and unload everyone's equipment from the van, I set it up, I go into a new venue every night and learn the lighting rig in time to produce a lightshow every night and come home bruised and achy, and it's the most rewarding job in the world. Not only do I get so see the band pour their whole heart into their performance every night, I get to be part of it too. And we get the occasional day off in Amsterdam too, which is always, always an event.

 

I was low-key terrified that there wouldn't be a tour this year, that it would be an album-writing year, but last week we started up again, and after six weeks off it was such a relief to get back on the road again. There's nowhere else I'd rather be than everywhere with the best people.

This was not done under duress.

S ome of the more long-term readers may have noticed that
E very so often I refer to my sister as "fuckface ravioli" or other
N ames that are not really all that complimentary.
D ue to this, would like to make the following statement:

H aving come to terms with the fact that my sister is
E asily The Most Awesome Person That Ever
L ived, I will now accept that she is just much cooler than mortal
P eople and I am just grossly jealous of that fact.

N icole.
O wner of this blog.
W ell, sort of.

Bindings

I have read so many books. I know so many people in those books. It's impossible for me to feel like a stranger in a bookshop, which is a lovely warm feeling.

It probably sounds like something featured in the ramblings of a crazily lonely person, but when I see books I see people I know. I know their stories. I know their quirks and choices and their best and worst moments. I know that they order mu shu pork from the takeaway. I know they're allergic to pollen.

I can wander around the bookshop and know people everywhere. (Raging spoiler alert) Young adult fiction, Alec and Magnus are wandering around New York being ADORABLE. Epic fantasy, I don't care that you died Joffrey, you're still a dick. Mystery, hello Sookie Stackhouse, how are you? A quick detour back to young adult and NOOOOO TRIS, WHYYYYYY? And at that point I go to the café and mourn for half an hour over tea and cake before wandering down to look at the classics where Mr.  Darcy is still frolicking about in high boots.

I met someone at university that told me that he hasn't read a book in ten years, whilst looking at me like I was hilarious. And it just made me sad for him.

If you can't sink into a story, escape for a couple of hours and come back with new experiences every time, what's the point in anything?

Heart lines

I'm finding it hard to frame the grief I'm feeling.

When my grandma, Rosie, died, her health declined very quickly. She was only meant to be in the hospice for two weeks so she could sort her medication out and get back on her feet, but she died eleven days after admission. I was working a lot at the time and so didn't visit during the first week but sent my love across, when I was sure she would be out and home again soon. When my mum told me she wouldn't be going home, I started to visit. The change was terrifying. I'd seen my grandma ill, she had breast cancer twice and beat it both times, but now she looked shrunken in, she barely recognised anyone and the nurses were being too kind, too soft-spoken. I'd just got home from school (1st of February 2010, 4.15pm) when mum called me to say she'd died, and I had to go pick my sister up from school and tell her the news. I can't remember how I broke it to her but I know I wasn't kind. My only excuse was that I now know that since having seizure the previous summer, I'd been suffering from severe depression but wouldn't be diagnosed until two months after my grandma died.  

She was comfortable and sleepy and loved when she died. I took the time off school to arrange the funeral and never went back. Helping with the funeral planning was cathartic. There's something very practical about people in the funeral and death certificate business. Closing all her accounts, settling debts, talking to the florist and drinking cups of tea whilst choosing a coffin helped in the process of letting go. I felt collected enough to view her body, but ended up being held onto by my two aunts, sobbing uncontrollably in the family room at the hospice that is meant for that kind of thing.  

The hilarity of the funeral, the vulcan death stare the vicar gave me when my sister announced too loud that I had refused to wear a cross, the same vicar's robes going missing, the wrong song being played... my grandma would have howled at our pitiful attempt to be formal. Clearing out grandma's house, tearing out and refitting the kitchen, writing "NICOLE IS A LOVE MACHINE" on the wall before repainting, spreading her ashes on a field and accidentally inhaling most of it when the wind blew the wrong way, it all helped me say goodbye to my grandma.   And I'm writing this now, just under five years later, because my other grandma, Thelma, has terminal liver and bowel cancer and there's nothing I, or anyone else, can do.  

I've known for a few months now, and whilst I'm relieved she chose to live it out as comfortably as she could rather than doing chemotherapy, and that the doctor seems to think she has a while left yet, this long, protracted way of going is in many ways crueller for those who have to watch it.   And selfishly I'm at a point now where big life events are about to happen and I want her to be there. And so the questions are, will she be at my graduation? Will I be able to tell her I've applied to another uni? Should I not tell her in case I don't get in? Have I got my last Christmas card from her? I didn't want to open it. My children are never going to meet her, and she's wonderful.  

Every time my mind takes me down a morbid path I have to tell myself over and over that I'm not the one that is dying, and that there is a time to grieve but it is not now, while she's still here and alive and kicking. And that she doesn't want us to be morose. The jokes my uncle makes about expiry dates when he takes my grandma shopping and the blasé way in which my mum refers to her illness makes me feel that I should have accepted it by now and not cringe whenever it is mentioned. And in many ways I have accepted it, and it is just part of the inevitable, but I'm still allowed to want my grandma to stay, surely? I'm sure jokes and blunt statements help them ease the process, but for me it just underlines the loss. I don't know how to deal with what I'm feeling. I don't know how to process this grief. I don't know how to show it. Right now I'm just bearing an unbearable thing, and making it bearable.

"If you're going through hell, keep going."

Doodle doo.

I need to talk about my dog. I slipped a disc working at the comedy club and I can't get to my mum's house to see him, and I miss his floofy face.

Barney, Barney Bear, is a goldendoodle. He's a cross between a poodle and a golden retriever. The name goldendoodle is daft but it was either that or Poo Retriever, and he hasn't learned that trick (thank god).

When we went to look at puppies at a lovely lady's farmhouse, Barney was one of six gorgeous little fluffballs. Barney was the fluffiest, with the lightest fur. He was the first puppy I held and I was adamant that he was the one. He was also deceptively mellow, and when him and one of his brothers ate a poo off the ground whilst the breeder wasn't looking, I covered for him. He was my little comrade.

Me and Bear have an understanding. I get to sit, plait his fur and grumble and in return he gets an unending supply of treats. And braids.

He's mental. He's great with the kids and babies in the family. He has claimed sole ownership of my sister. He doesn't like potatoes but if you offer him one he'll act really happy about it then dispose of it when you aren't looking. He's a polite dog. He is also so fluffy he absorbs water, mud and smaller dogs like a sponge. And he does a world-class impression of Davy Jones when he's wet (will dig out a picture at some point).

And his fur smells of biscuits.

Je t'aime, little cookie dog!