In which MTM has a somewhat mixed week … just call me Trevor (see illustration).
It’s Friday as I write this, as I think touching a computer tomorrow morning may bring trouble upon my head when there are things I am supposed to be organising.
This week I am a combination of thoroughly pissed off and insanely happy. Let’s do the whinge first so we end on a high note eh?
First up, Mum hasn’t been great. She was in great form on Wednesday, but she’d forgotten she’d ever read any of my books, which was kind of alarming because she absolutely loved the K’Barthan Series. But then we like a lot of the same things, so, since I wrote it for me it probably would work for her. She’d also forgotten a number of other significant events that happened in our lives, my cousin being epileptic, for example (I discovered she’d forgotten over the course of a conversation about how my niece, is doing, as she is epileptic too). So that’s a bit sad. Although Mum is still on great form at the moment, still happy and still very much Mum, but this is a whole post, in itself, so more on that next week, I think. Back to this week’s news.
A few days ago, I woke up with a cold, unfortunately it’s one of those ones which takes ages to come out, so I’ve been feeling gradually shittier each day since Tuesday. Last night, I had to make a very flying visit to metal detecting club which pissed me off because I was really looking forward to it. But I was running a temperature by that time and didn’t want to give anyone my lovely germs. I had to go to pick up a book I’d bought, and drop off some batteries to one of the other members – which I forgot to do (head desk) – but once I’d bought the book and donated a raffle prize I made a swift exit.
Just to piss myself off even more, I also sprained my ankle yesterday. Not badly but just enough to be an irritant and make walking hurt. On top of that, I discovered that all those codes for free set up on Ingram from the Alliance of Indepenent Authors, Nanowrimo and the like are not accepted by Lightning Source, despite the fact it’s branded Ingram for everything else. So I’ve still had to pay £50 to set up my book. Worse, through my own twattery, I pissed off McOther and now I have totally cocked up on the school front and pissed off McMini as well.
Scores on the doors …
Chaos Fairies: nine million, eight hundred thousand and sixty three. MTM: one.
Shite.
McOther is usually an easygoing, cheerful chap but he is a perfectionist control freak, and stress gets to him, so he has trouble letting organisational malfunctions go. Because they do his head in. In life, he has to plan and double plan, and because he’s really smart, this works. He is not a being who busks it with much enthusiasm. Whereas I find that when I plan, I’m too thick to foresee everything that might happen, although in my defence, quite a lot of things happen to me that nobody would have any right to foresee. But things tend to turn out so monumentally at variance to the way I’ve foreseen them that it’s, frankly, a waste of time for me to plan. I’m better just equipping myself with everything I might possibly need and winging it. McOther finds that approach extremely stressful, so I have developed a method of making it look as if I’ve planned meticulously in order to keep him calm.
McOther’s job is a bit of a high-octain stress-fest. He’s high powered, people want to protect ideas or invent stuff, they come to McOther. Professor Sir Stephen Hawkins was a client. McOther’s invented stuff too, which is probably why he’s so good at helping other folks with their inventions. But it comes at a cost. He likes them, he takes it extremely seriously and … yeh, he finds it stressful. He has high blood pressure and he’s on beta blockers and while it’s a family trait, I could seen him finding, after he retires, that he no longer needs them. He is uncharacteristically dour at the moment – I suspect he’s reaching the point where they need to recruit someone else to his staff – so I know he needs things to run smoothly at home. He only works thirty minutes away, but he has clients all over, and he has to spend a day in London each week at the firm’s London office. He also has to go to Oxford a lot which is a pig of a drive from here. I just hope it’s not going to be the death of him, all this running about, and that he hits retirement age before things get even busier as post Brexit, when the massive recession hits, lots of scientists will be made redundant and they’ll decide to speak to a lawyer about doing something with that thing they invented in their shed …
Anyhow, with McOther at full stretch, and some, I try to do all the organising McMini stuff so he doesn’t have to. But there’s quite a lot of it, which has probably made him more nervous. And now, at the worst possible time, there have been some malfunctions.
The first one, I forgot to check McMini’s PE kit when he got home yesterday. In my defence, with my newly sprained ankle and shitty sinusitis with new, super-duper, improved added temperature I was actually feeling quite chuffed with myself for staying upright. I haven’t quite got the knack of the way McMini’s school functions on a couple of levels and PE kit is one of them. First he needs a lot of PE kit and after rugby on Wednesday I have to wash his kit the minute he gets home so I can dry it – well … principally, the socks – over night for him to use in PE the next day. It being Thursday yesterday, I’d been somewhat louche about conducting further checks, only to discover that there was PE on Friday, too.
That pissed McOther off, because it meant I’d done a whole half term without hoisting in that PE happened on a Friday (I knew football did but that’s an after school club). Worse, McOther had clearly had a really grim day at work (as demonstrated by our conversation as he arrived, did you have a good day? No. End of conversation) so he was not reassured by the fact I’d forgotten. He’s a control freak, so if he’s presented, too honestly, with the reality of how much stuff I forget it makes him nervous and stressed. I can usually manage to avoid any unfortunate encounters with the true depths of my muppetthood but yesterday the veil slipped for a moment* and it was all a bit grim.
* this is an understatement. Basically, it got torn off and is hanging on a tree about thirty miles away.
Unfortunately, I’m also still adjusting to the way the school communicates. Yesterday, they sent an email reminding me that it was harvest assembly today and I needed to send McMini in equipped with items for the food bank. Luckily, as we were putting McMini to bed, I read said email and, feeling inordinately smug, I managed to cobble together a nice selection of the suggested items and sent McMini in with them. Phew.
I woke from a strangely disturbing dream about McOther knocking down all the interior walls in our old house and covering everything in some very unpleasant pink and white paisley carpet to discover I felt worse than yesterday. Today was not a day to be late up, so I ditched dressing in favour of going downstairs and doing the morning school prep in my pyjamas so as to ensure I was there, doing the THING on time for McMini to leave – McOther takes him in on Mondays Tuesdays and Fridays.
Off they went with the bag of harvest stuff. Woot, in the face of total twattery MTM pulls it out of the hat at the last minute!
… Or not. There was an even bigger, more monstrous balls up waiting …
Yes. It was a home clothes day today.
McMini went to school only to discover that every other child was in mufti.
Fucking fuck.
The humiliation.
Poor little lad.
Turns out there’d been an email sometime last week, McOther told me, rather tersely, on the phone (although he may just have been tense).
There had? I hadn’t fucking seen it. Had McOther seen it, I wondered. He hadn’t mentioned it. In my defence, it was, apparently, lost among many others and one of the mums on the Facebook group had to pretty much force her son into home clothes at gunpoint, because he didn’t believe her. This school is much more laid back, which I like, but sometimes I miss the rather imperious text messages the other school used to send, reminding me that x, y, or z was happening the following day, because they were a godsend for those of us who are a bit dim.
McOther sent his version of the email to me when he got to work. In order not to bombard us with about a million emails, each dealing with a separate thing, the school sends them out as one long one. This is a good thing. The trouble is, I haven’t quite got my head round their propensity to do this. Yes, it turns out I did get the email, I just I read the first one, thought it was all there was and scrolled no further.
So it’s my fault. I’m not going to admit this. But I hope McOther’s forwarding it to me wasn’t his way of insinuating that he knows and I should have fucking read it. Gulp. If it is, we are in for a rather strained evening.
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OK, it’s tomorrow now, but let me add the rest of the story. After writing this, I went to collect McMini from school. We went to get his sports bag to take home because he’s doing a rugby workshop today and so he needs his boots and kit. I waited with his other bags while he trotted off to get it and a few moments later back he came.
‘Mum, my bag isn’t there,’ he said.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
Both of us looked at one another and McMini put our thoughts into words.
‘Dad isn’t going to be in the mood for this,’ he said.
‘No.’ I agreed. We were so in the shit it wasn’t true. There was a short silence, while we both did a lot more thinking on that topic but neither of us said anything.
‘Right, let’s search every single place it could be, explore every option and cover off every avenue so we’ve done absolutely all we can to find it.’
‘If we do find it, you won’t tell him, will you?’
‘Not until he’s less stressed.’
‘What if we don’t find it?’
Luckily, McMini had had an after school club last thing and so he was wearing his PE kit.
‘OK, look. You have your tracky bottoms, on I have a spare rugby top and shorts at home because I washed them this morning, I can whizz up to town tomorrow morning and buy you a boil in the bag gumguard, you have some school tennis socks so then we just need boots. We might be able to borrow some football boots from one of your old school friends. I’ll see. I’ll also email your PE teacher and explain and see if you can still play, you’ll probably pick up a lot from watching anyway.’
So we searched. We went to the school office, really just to see if a teacher had moved it and mentioned it in passing, we looked where it was supposed to be, where McMini had left it and we even went into the boarding house. The only upside was that there were two other bags where McMini had left his.
‘Where, exactly, was your bag?’ I asked him.
‘On top of that one.’
‘This one here with the red ribbons tied to it?’
‘Yes.’
‘On top?’
‘Yes.’
Hang on, red ribbons?
‘D’you think the chap who owns this bag might have taken your bag home?’ I asked. ‘I mean, looking at these ribbons, it would suggest he has form.’
McMini brightened, ‘Thinking about it, yes, he could have done. He’s in my year, I know him.’
‘Right, all may not be lost. It’s true that I might end up having to drive to Holt or somewhere tonight but sod it, let’s go home. We’ll check the sports centre on the way so we’ve covered off every single option here, and then, I have a spreadsheet of contact details for parents in your year, I’ll ping his mum a text and ask.’
‘I’ll email him,’ McMini said.
A quick word of explanation to anyone who hasn’t seen a British public school. They’re massive. I grew up in one, lived in it for 18 years and there were still places on the site that I had never been to. What I’m saying is, all this searching had taken us about half an hour. Still we knew now that the bag could only have been confiscated, which seemed unlikely given that there were two others there, or the lad with the bag with the ribbons on had taken McMini’s instead of his.
McMini goes to Boys Brigade on Fridays, which is a brilliant organisation, I can’t praise it highly enough. It starts at seven so the poor lad had about five minutes to eat a plate of hastily cooked sausages and peas when I got home, before it was time to go to that. Meanwhile, he’d emailed his friend and I’d discovered, to my horror, that the lad’s mum’s number was not on the list of parents contact details.
Bollocks.
McOther arrived with inconvenient timeliness and looked disapproving as he realised I was making McMini’s tea late. I suspect his disapproval was compounded by the fact I was tapping away at the screen of my phone while Mr Ticky, our kitchen pinger, counted down the minutes until I should drain the pasta. Little did McOther know I was putting a desperate plea for help on the school’s parents’ Facebook group and sending an email explaining our situation to the sports teacher, too.
In the face of McOther’s stern disapproval, I explained that we hadn’t got home until after six but not why. White face and tight lipped, he went to take his bag upstairs and stopped in the hall.
‘Where’s the sports bag?’ he asked.
Fuckity fucking fuck!
‘Ah. Um … about that.’
I explained what happened, being careful to list the extensive search we’d conducted and to outline the phorensic thoroughness of our investigation into the whereabouts of McMini’s bag. A couple of people had already replied to the Facebook post wishing me luck and saying they didn’t have the bag and after a bit of deliberation, I had named and shamed the child we thought might have it, adding that I didn’t have his Mum’s details and couldn’t be 100% sure it was him.
McOther was seriously unhappy but, thank god, demurred from actually going into orbit. He was just paler and even more tight lipped than before. He went upstairs to change and dump his bag in his office. I took McMini’s dinner through and apologised to him for the speed with which McOther had rumbled us. The PE teacher replied saying it was fine if McMini came wearing what we had, so that was a relief. Unfortunately, McMini’s friend hadn’t as yet.
When we got to Boys Brigade we were late and had to bang on the window to be heard so they’d come and let McMini in. After the day we’d had it was probably par for the course. Never mind, on the upside, I hadn’t had time to notice how utterly ill I felt so that was a bonus.
At home, still no news. I sat in the kitchen with McOther and he asked me why I wasn’t wearing my pyjamas. I explained that I had to go up to town to collect McMini from Boys’ Brigade. McOther said that he would go.
This was an Olive Branch. The worst of his rage had passed.
Then it happened. The mother of errant child replied on Facebook. Yes, she had the bag and yes, she was coming over right now.
Hallelujah! (You have to imagine that as the sung Handel version to get the full effect).
I want upstairs, had my shower and when the other mum arrived, I greeted her in my pyjamas. She looked a bit surprised but I just carried on as if wearing pyjamas at seven thirty in the evening was perfectly normal and she relaxed. I could see her thinking, OK, if you’re not bothered I’m not. Luckily she hadn’t had too far to come. Apparently her son has managed to come home with his friends’ back packs on several occasions and the red ribbons on the PE bag were due to the fact he’d come home with someone else’s already that week!
I thanked her profusely and off she went. McOther visibly relaxed as I rooted about in the bag, removed the dirty stuff and bunged it in the washing machine. And of course, it was very good for him to understand that he really is in the top five percentile of organisedness and that, while McMini and I are probably in the bottom 40% we are, by no means, as bad as it gets.
Moving swiftly to the up side …
Two completely chuffing marvellous things have happened this week.
Small Beginnings, K’Barthan Shorts, Hamgeean Misfit: No 1
This is now available for preorder. If you are interested there is a page which gives you link to the main book vendors. Just click on the picture or follow this link here …
http://www.hamgee.co.uk/infosb.html
There will be print links, to follow, but the print version probably won’t be through the hanging about stage until sometime next week. So there’ll be some more good news next Saturday, which is nice.
Why am I stoked? Because this is my first new release since 2015! And though my mother is standing at the top of the same hill as my father was then, maybe, in the short breathing space I have before it starts to hurt too much, I might get the next K’Barthan series of long books finished, or possibly sort out Space Dustmen. Anyway, I’m optimistic. Plan for the worst but always, always hope for the best. That’s my motto.
Box Set Release … Gorge yourself on free sci-fi!
What Box Set? I hear you ask. This box set! Future adventures.
This features full length novels from eight science fiction authors. And seven of them are really accomplished ‘proper’ authors and all. The other is me! Woot yes, that’s my name on the cover there and yes, I am way above my pay grade here. I haven’t read the books in this volume but I have read other works by these authors and I can vouch for the quality. This is what I shall be reading on holiday. Yes!
No new releases for three years and then two come along at the same time like badly scheduled buses, although I suppose this isn’t a new book, per se, since my offering in this one is Few Are Chosen, the first book in the K’Barthan Series.
But, if any of you haven’t read that, and would like to, it’s in this book, which is free, but more importantly it comes with all these other brilliant stories by seriously accomplished wordsmiths who really know what they are doing. So, you can grab a copy of Few Are Chosen with seven other books by authors who are seriously gifted and of whom I am, frankly, a bit in awe. And all for zero pence. If you want to pick up a copy, just click on the picture to visit a page of links to find it on all the major stores … or click on the link below:
http://www.hamgee.co.uk/infofa.html
K’Barthan Audio Books
So the third thing is that, despite all the forgetting things I’ve done this week, and the irritating issue of feeling like warmed up pooh, it really looks like K’Barthan Audio Books are actually going to be a thing, too. I’m listening to the third version of Unlucky Dip at the moment and it’s bloody brilliant! I can’t quite believe this is happening, it feels slightly unreal. I think Gareth (the voice) Davies and I are both feeling like that, even though we know we’ll only make pence on this project. Although with any luck he’ll make stacks of cash reading better selling books for other authors on the back of his work on mine. I hope so. The thing is though, it’s another income stream, another avenue through which to reach people. Blind people can read my books now, or at least, they can hear them read really well as opposed to by their kindles in the voice of Professor Sir Stephen Hawkins. So yeh, that’s all good.