Author: alienorasanthology

I have been blogging since 2012. The author of eleven published books, and winner of a First and a Third prize for two of them, I live in Glastonbury and have been writing a journal since I was thirteen.

Alien Aura Within: Aspects of Autism in Women

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At the end of 2023, I started writing a book all about my experiences as a probably-autistic woman. Although I have not yet been diagnosed, all the clues were in place from childhood onwards – and, having now met many women who struggle in very similar ways, I can see a definite set of habits, fears, behaviours and so forth which all point towards some form of ASD.

The book (title above) was heartbreakingly difficult and painful to write – and I am not ashamed to admit that I cried and cried during the process, as child-and-adolescent memories surged back in all their confusing horror.

Those who have read the book thus far have been touched, enlightened and, in some cases, comforted. Various people have said that it is a very brave and honest book – and that it could be really helpful to other probably-autistic women.

I do hope so. Sometimes laying one’s soul bare is of benefit to other human beings – and, no matter how excruciating the process, the end result can be both healing and an act of generosity towards others.

The book can be found on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

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Surgery: blind as a bat!

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Have you ever had surgery? What for?

Dailyprompt 1984

Oh, my goodness gracious me! Surgery? Yes, indeedy – and eye-wateringly gruesome too, though fortunately I was off my head (as the saying goes) on some drug or another, and lurched into theatre on the arm of a friendly nurse…

A year ago (almost to the day), and having been squeezing droplets into my right seeing orb all night, I was driven to a local hospital for cataract surgery. Gurt lush – NOT!

What I didn’t realise was that the medication both numbed my eye, and left me feeling as high as a week-old-demised-stoat, and the short walk to the OR (as the Americans like to call it) was fraught with difficulty. Just as well I had a helper, otherwise I would have gone arse-over-tit almost immediately.

Lying down upon The Bed of Ocular Doom was a tad anxiety-provoking, and the idea of my entire face being covered by a cloth induced a kind of stoned paranoia I would not wish upon my worst enemy. Fortunately, ’twas only my eye that was veiled.

Pain wasn’t really a problem, though the procedure was uncomfortable and seemed to go on for about six months. The eye surgeon and I kept up a barrage of light chat and (in my case) drugged repartee throughout.

At the end of it, my eye covered with a plastic patch doodah, I staggered out – and, blow me down with a rogue hairdryer, could see things clearly for the first time in I know not how long…

A relief all round. Just don’t get me started on the colonoscopy!

#surgery #daily prompt #humour #operations #eyes #cataracts

‘Booby gets Stuck’, Part 2!

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In yesterday’s episode, we left Booby and her son-of-the-soil amour reclining upon a chair in the garden. Read on!

This decrepit leviathan of a seat has been in the shed for donkey’s years – and Kevin obligingly heaves it out into our little trysting spot(a sheltered area, near the sundial) each time he visits.

The weather being exceptionally clement – and all thoughts of Ecclesiastical godparents forgotten – Kevin and I abandoned ourselves to the exquisite lists of lust – and, after a satisfyingly brisk canter upon his lance, I was sated (for the nonce) and lying upon the dear lad’s hirsute pectoral area when, to my horror, trilling voices, and the clatter of cutlery, disturbed the afternoon’s post-coital peace.

Kevin’s ejaculated, ‘Jayzus Christ!’ didn’t exactly help matters.

Fortunately, we were both dressed (other than open zip and fuchsia-flung-panties) – and could have pretended he was just helping me mend the chair, had it not been for three things.

As Godmother Honoria hove into view, warbling, ‘Berengaria, dearest!’ I realised that the springs had finally given up the ghost; that shock had caused Kevin’s battering ram to lock inside my keep – and, worst of all, that we were both immovably wedged and being attacked on all sides by ancient cushion fragments.

With a frisson of horror, I watched the Reverent Percival – who is as blind as a cave crayfish – trip over an inconveniently-placed mole hill (the little buggers get everywhere) and fetch his not-inconsiderable length against the tea table, bestrewing scones, cream, jam and divers biscuits all over the lawn, and shattering much of the rather fine Spode tea set/family heirloom.

Bless him, he then realised that his Christian duty lay in trying to prise his godchild-by-marriage out of her predicament (and, had he but known it, one of her main squeezes out of the old love tunnel).

Blinking amiably, and crunching shards of irreplaceable china underfoot, he said, ‘Do you need a hand, M’dear?’

The resulting half hour was like something straight out of ‘Winnie the Pooh’ – the bit where Pooh gets stuck and all Rabbit’s friends and relations come to the rescue – with much heaving and hoeing and grunting and groaning. The neighbours must have thought I was having a very kinky Vicar-and-Tart-based foursome.

We were flung out, by an exceptionally vicious coiled wire, in the end – and Kevin slunk off, muttering what sounded to me like a Hail Mary. Never knew he batted for the other ecumenical side!

Percival chose to believe my tale of dropping an earring down the back of the chair, Kevin helping me and us both being gratuitously assaulted by an aggressive cushion.

Helga – and I say this reluctantly, for she is not in my good books – certainly came into her own regarding replenishment of supplies, whisking out the second-best tea service and generally smoothing things over.

I will confess, however, that during the melee described above, the faintest second cousin (once-removed) to a blush threatened, briefly, to stain my cheeks.

I may have to retire from society for the foreseeable…

Image of the author with ‘Booby Fellatio’s Lockdown Diary’

Booby gets Stuck!

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Booby Fellatio – aka Lady Berengaria Hermione Agnes Horton-cum-Studley – is a fictional character, who has appeared in my sixth book, entitled ‘Booby Fellatio’s Lockdown Diary’. She is, as the late Sir Terry Pratchett put it, a lady of negotiable affection – and, though well past the first flush of youth (and the second!), manages to attract a bevy of beauteous youths…

This is an extract from a short story (which can be read in full in the above book) entitled ‘Booby gets stuck’:

‘Dearly beloveds! A prostrated Booby here, reduced to a limp rag after a most trying afternoon. My dears, I came within a capillary of blushing, something I have not done (sex-flush apart) since my early teens…

Rude interruption from my tactless nemesis/nursemaid, Helga (I dictate; she scribes – which is as it should be), bleating on about hot flushes and other menopause-related nasties which – and I want to make this abundantly clear – I am nowhere near old enough to experience.

Just because she is going through the most alarming and protracted change of life I have experienced – since Great Aunt Pandora ran naked through Whipsnade Zoo, quoting Goethe loudly in Swahili and crunching a packet of Sherbet Pips – does not mean she can tar me with the same ghastly brush. Really! Now my train of thought has gone down a track not yet completed.

Ah, yes! Blushing!

It all stems from the undeniable fact that I am much in demand socially, as well as from those who flock to my Life’s Mission – and am oft confused as a result. Helga’s minuscule writing on the calendar certainly doesn’t help matters, nor does her irritating habit of changing the names of my amours willy-nilly.

As a result of this inexcusable inefficiency, I double-booked (or rather, Helga did) – and, having invited the Vicar and his wife for afternoon tea (she is my godmother, and I felt I ought to get the annual homily out of the way), I promptly forgot and pencilled in Kevin, a rustic Irish youth who is becoming a bit of a Mellors to my Lady Chatterley, though I draw the line at having honeysuckle plaited through my basement thatching.

Obviously – with social distancing and all that grim business – I was to receive Godmother Honoria and her buck-toothed husband, Percival, in the garden – and, accordingly, got Helga to set out the chairs, table, best china, napkins and other essentials in plenty of time for what I thought was a 4pm engagement, while I sloped off for what Percival would, no doubt, see as a spot of sinning.

Kevin, who is as keen on ploughing a furrow outside as I am, has latterly taken a shine to a large cane garden chair, which belonged in the Nursery when I was young and has suffered somewhat in the intervening years – the ancient cushion being as bristly as a porcupine, and some of the struts but one woodworm attack away from sawdust…’

And there we leave Booby (though the full ghastly story can be found in the book mentioned above).

NB: a friend of mine suggested a wonderful title for this blog – ‘Torrid Tales from Booby’s Boudoir’ – but changing the title was beyond my technical ability, and the blog will be about more than just Booby, entertaining though she undoubtedly is.

Eleven Pipers Piping!

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And so it is, three years on, that I leap back into the world of blogging, music trilling from a previous stint upon the treble recorder – and the eleven books I have now written jostling for attention: pushing and shoving one another, like naughty children, and squawking to be noticed.

For my eleventh book a ‘writing, I plunged deep into the world of women with autism – having long suspected that I was of their number – and brought to the surface many sad treasures from the bottom of that emotional ocean.

The finished book itself – ‘Alien Aura Within: Aspects of Autism in Women’ – was hard to write, and I shed many tears in the process. Unable to resist that play upon my own first name, and always drawn to alliteration, I feel that I have both captured something of the essence of women with autism and purged my own soul of long-hidden pockets of shame and distress.

Like the three travel-journal books (written in 2022 and 2023), this latest book has photographic images as an integral part of it.

My literary alter-ego, Booby Fellatio, will, I am sure, pop up on here before long – and her bawdy tales from the boudoir may well result in a twelfth book eventually, though I have to admit that she already features largely in my lockdown diary book, aptly named, ‘Booby Fellatio’s Lockdown Diary’.

‘Under Cader Idris’ and ‘Booby Fellatio’s Lockdown Diary’

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Astonishingly, I wrote two books during Lockdown. The first one was ‘dictated’, in part at least, by an old character, Booby Fellatio (a woman of negotiable affection with a penchant for young men): she first appeared in 2014, had her say in a previous book and then rode off into the metaphorical sunset, never (or so I assumed) to be seen again. In this, I was wrong!

Those weeks, and then months, of being in silence, for the most part, and fear and loneliness; those months in which loved ones were far away and out of reach, and human physical contact was prohibited; those months in which Covid 19 strode the Planet’s highways and byways, a modern-day Grim Reaper, with scythe made up of toxic virus particles, felling all-too many; those months – you know! – also provided the ironic stimulus for writing.

It started with sharing Booby’s misadventures with friends on Facebook. She proved very popular, and made many people laugh. This gave me the idea of combining her outrageous diary entries with my own genuine, though carefully edited, ones. The contrast between Booby’s humour(inadvertent usually) and the grim reality of what was going on in real life actually works well. The two reflect upon, and feed off, one another.

The finished book, ‘Booby Fellatio’s Lockdown Diary,’ was published in September 2020, and received some good reviews.

In October 2020, I went back to a book I had started in my mid-twenties – and basically re-wrote most of it over the next three months. There were two reasons for this: I had lost great chunks of the original over the decades, and I felt that the writing styles of my younger and older selves needed to be smoothed and combined into one. A great deal of hard, concentrated work went into this novel – and it was finally ready in early January, actually being published on the 7th of that month.

This second book – ‘Under Cader Idris’ – is set in West Wales, and has some excellent reviews on Amazon.

It has a Press Release and this will be sent out later in May.

It is three years or so since I last blogged, so this piece may remain unseen. We shall see!

Paperback copy of ‘Under Cader Idris’.

Ghost Weed: Goin’ up the country!

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Ghost Weed performing at the Cider Barn, Draycott, Summer 2018. From left to right: John Arnold, Matthew Peach, Neil Phillips and Mark Halper.

It promises to be a busy few weeks for Wrington-based band, Ghost Weed, as they juggle stoups of hilariously-named ale (Pump and Grind – Whooaarr! – being but one example!) with an action-packed set (or two) of groovy music – this all happening at Wrington’s first Beer Festival (8th and 9th March) – and, two weeks later (23rd March), play and sing their respective hearts out/socks off for Redhill Social Club’s Charity Evening.

This past year has seen them gradually extending their range, both geographically and musically, with several appearances in the venue shown above and a rip-roaring evening in Bristol’s Thunderbolt, to name but two.

Now, indulge me while I reflect upon a necessarily-potted history:

The band first started in July 2013, with what I would call a loose collective, or possibly conspiracy, of local musicians who came and went (as musos are wont to do) in waves.

An eclectic stream of both instruments and individuals have passed Ghost Weed’s way in the intervening five-and-a-half years: Bodrans, fiddles, flutes, saxophones, hurdy-gurdies, guitars, drums and whistles have all been tried (and, in some cases, convicted!). Men and women have come and gone – and, for all that a recent line-up included the names Matthew, Mark and John, it is not essential to adopt gospel-related nomenclature to join in!

They had me for a while – if you’ll excuse the somewhat unfortunate turn of phrase – and, though I added much in terms of bawdy conversation, delectable cake and fiery orange-haired-ness, I was not exactly Yehudi Menuhin/Stephane Grappelli on the old violin; in fact, vile-din would be a more apposite phrase for my playing back then!

Since leaving (both band and area), I have, according to the Lads, become their Number One Fan. I follow them around like Mary’s Little Lamb, posting hearts and likes on their posts, and generally behaving like a star-struck adolescent! Tragic, I know!

But, biased though I may be, stupid I am not: Ghost Weed are up-and-coming. They have charisma and verve; they are funny and charming; they light up a stage; their blend of originals and personalised covers are becoming known and appreciated; they do a fine line in silly hats; they have had audience members dancing on the tables and fans crowd-surfing into the instruments/music stands. It’ll be knickers, thongs and bras next; you mark my words!

For their March 23rd Redhill gig, they are going to be inviting guests! Oh, yes! And I don’t mean dreary celebrities who once bared a nipple/got caught in the Congress of the Antelope in ‘Large Male Relative‘(have to be careful not to get sued at this juncture!); I refer here to past members of the band who will, I hope, be trundling out their trumpets, rosining up their bows and hurdying their gurdies (which sounds disgusting and is probably illegal in several counties!), before joining in with the band.

I, as Numero Uno Fanatic (and scraper-upon-the-strings-with-wood-and-horsehair), will be there. I have invited numerous Glastonian friends to accompany me. Will you, my reading public, fetch up at Redhill too?

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Bass player, Michael Lloyd, at the Cider Barn.

Dead Poets and Me!

On By alienorasanthologyIn Humour, TeachingLeave a comment

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Quince bush!

I detest most meetings. They tend to encourage the sanctimonious, self-important and slitheringly upwardly-mobile to grab any available space for tedious dramatic monologues and sleep-inducing soliloquies! Many such speakers need – with a fair degree of urgency – to learn two important skills: The Art of Summary and the Craft of Grabbing an Audience by the Balls!

When bored, lectured at or sanctimoned (new word!), I tend towards disruption – and can, at times, be outspoken, crude, vulgar, inappropriate and, I am sure, murderously* politically incorrect (*as in, those in my proximity would dearly like to gralloch me by hand and explore the contents at their leisure!).

Staff Meetings (akin to the Peace of God: Passeth all Understanding and Endureth for Ever!) and English Departmental (with the emphasis on the ‘mental’) ones were a particular bane of my life: Even my favourite Head of Department (a like-minded soul and a post-teaching friend) was not able to do much against the sheer turgidity of the syllabus, the oleaginous creeping of colleagues on the make and the endless bloody initiatives heaped upon us by the government.

One meeting stands out: We were discussing poetry and Ted Hughes came into the conversation. Now, I had seen – and lusted after – said Easter Island Style of Good Looks man back in my university days – and said so, in no uncertain terms, possibly along the, ‘Wouldn’t chuck him out from under the yurt…’ lines.

A colleague (whom I won’t name and shame!) inadvertently tossed me a splendid ball to play with when he/she said, ‘But Ted Hughes is dead, Ali…’

‘Doesn’t bother me!’ quoth I. ‘Dig the bugger up and have my wicked way with him!’

Having thus forced the assembled decrepitude into decidedly murky, not to say Cathy and Heathcliff, territory, I sat back, mentally doing a High Five and happy that I had managed, albeit briefly, to derail the train of tiresome twittering.

Thing is this: I totally understand why kids get pissed-off and behave badly in lessons: Teachers can Bore for England (and many of them actively do). Being a PhD in one’s subject, having Mensa level IQ and a photographic memory does not have anything to do with the ability to actually teach, engage with people and get knowledge across in a vital and memorable way.

Our government (successive waves of the sods, actually) have done their best to ruin education: Bringing ever-tighter rules; weeding out all the mavericks; demoting the children to statistics whose sausage-factory-forced exam success will grab the school an Outstanding  from Ofsted; undermining the to-me-vital pastoral system under the farcical idea that all children should be emotionally resilient (seriously) – and covering over the widening cracks with jargon and impenetrable edu-bollocks.

Teachers are no longer encouraged (allowed?) to socialise at breaks and lunch times; they are working ever-longer hours and facing an increasing number of seriously troubled children. Breakdowns and alternative career choices are soaring.

Coming back to my disruption of meetings: I very much doubt I would be able to get away with such naughtiness these days; in fact, I am certain the I would be placed on a high stage of the Suspension Procedure, warned off and, basically, silenced. At least when I was a teacher, we could say, ‘God, this is boring!’ and mutter mutinously among ourselves as some jumped-up twerp in a tight suit (male or female) waxed un-lyrical about Records of Achievement (remember them?!), Pointless Initiative Number Three Million – or the reason why it was no longer deemed acceptable to call a problem a problem, when such linguistic horrors as ‘Anger Management Issues‘ could be perpetrated upon the pained public!

As for Dead Poets – and my frivolous flight of fancy concerning one of them – such levity would, I fear, be a hanging offence (with optional drawing and quartering) –  though, I suspect that the meeting in which my fate were explained to me would cause me to reach through my uvula and bring the whole digestive tract out through my swearing-bitterly-till-the-end mouth!

The photo of quince, by the way,  has been deliberately inserted in an attempt to calm myself down after this bouillabaisse of belligerent bawling!