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
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!
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 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.
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’.
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!
This morning, I have been gifted with contrasts in nature: Woke to spiders’ webs, pearled in misty dew, taut against a sullenly grey sky – then, moments later (or so it seemed), an abundance of sun jewels, in every colour, displayed upon walls, ceiling and floor, while a bloom of birds hung ripe and ready in a neighbour’s tree. The calligraphy of dullness is just as fine as brightness upon a white page!
This is a difficult, and painful, subject for me to write about – but, since I know I am not alone in struggling with certain types of silence, I am opening this up to a wider audience than my own, at times troubled, mind.
Silence can be golden: A soft and gentle radiance which lightens the heart and provides wings of peace for the soul’s ascension.
By contrast, silence used punitively can break spirits, force tendrils of terror into the psyche – and create a long-term inability to cope with certain powerful, if misdirected, triggers.
Sending to Coventry sounds such a humorous, light-hearted phrase to use for a specialised, highly dangerous, form of mental and emotional abuse, doesn’t it? I am not talking here about the cold shoulders we all give one another from time to time, nor the froideur which tends to accompany any kind of domestic rift.
No. I am thinking of the malevolent training of the mind which comes courtesy (or should that be ‘discourtesy’?) of a sustained and deliberate withdrawal of voice, look, touch in order to punish the victim – often for imagined slights, always as a means of control.
This kind of silence is poisonous in the extreme – and can cause serious damage, if used for long enough (and I am talking years, even decades, not days here); it can create an absolute terror of any kind of angry silence, and a profound fear of abandonment. The one being ignored will go to almost any length to put a stop to the silence: Grovelling, pleading, apologising (even if not at fault), having sex with the silently aggrieved one, giving money or presents – even accepting physical violence and agreeing that it was deserved.
The snake image below was chosen deliberately because these silent abusers often use their eyes to mesmerise and intimidate and, coiled in their fury, they are as unpredictable serpents: The victim never knows when they are going to strike, or whether they are ‘hungry’ or not.
The victim learns very quickly that silence has occurred because they are deemed to be at fault in some way – and this, in turn, causes a terrified and speedy glance through all recent behaviour (often in vain) in order to locate the sin and appease the other.
I was subjected to this kind of abuse over a long period of time – and it has left deep scars. It has made some very mundane and ordinary human situations extremely difficult for me to deal with.
Gaps in communication with close friends and family can leave me utterly panic-stricken and as bereft as a small child. I become convinced, very quickly, that I must have transgressed; that the silent other no longer wishes to have anything to do with me; that I am not worthy of friendship/sibling bonds.
In the past, such silences have reduced me to frozen terror and/or tears.
Recognising the symptoms and understanding the back story has proved helpful, however: A spell of counselling, with the local Talking Therapies Team, was extremely useful – and gave me questions to apply, as well as strategies to use.
That instinctive rush of toxic adrenaline still kicks in automatically, the Amygdala not being a reasoning part of the brain; fight or flight (in my case, the latter) will still rear its ugly head and hiss through glistening fangs – but I am getting better, slowly.
It is not that I lack imagination, sympathy, empathy or understanding of other people’s lives: I know, logically, that quiet phases in a bond are healthy and attributable to life’s rich pageant playing out its colourful scenes; I know, with my adult mind, that it is not personal; I know that people are busy, stressed, off-line, away, doing other things.
But – and this is, I feel, the crucial point – that lizard brain is more akin to the instincts and reactions of the infant self than the adult. Babies scream because they are hungry or cold or in pain or lonely. We, by and large, do not – because we have learned that food is available, heaters can be turned on or off, analgesics can be downed, friends summoned.
I believe, however, that long-term abuse can reduce us to infant status in certain triggering situations. Mine, as I have said in this post, revolves around certain kinds of silence. I suppose, at some very deep level, I believe that the other will never come back; that I will never be forgiven; that something I have done or said or been has snapped the bond completely.
I do know that the origin of the baby-like fear predates the adult abuse: I was left, with relative strangers, aged thirteen months, while my next sister was born – and, long story short, was punished for wetting the bed. I felt utterly abandoned, I am quite sure.
I am determined to turn this problem around. I always recognise when its deep feelings are with me, and have adopted a question to use at times of actual panicking crisis: Has this person ever used punitive tactics, silence or otherwise, in the time we have known one another?
And, of course, the answer – generally a firm, ‘No!’ – reassures me and tells me that, actually, most silences are non-toxic and do not need to churn me up inside at all. In the rare (very rare) cases in which a ‘Yes!’ answer comes back, I know how to deal with this too – but that is for another post!
Control by toxic silence does exist. It is a weapon of choice. The vast majority of people in my life would not dream of stooping so low, however – and, with that in mind, I am hopeful that I will, eventually, be able to exorcise this particular demon – and face life’s social silences with equanimity.
Torrid Tales From Booby's Boudoir! 