Fun Size Magrs

 I haven't spoken to most of my family for over a decade. Not long after my son was born, things went a bit weird.  Our little boy was quite a few weeks premature. It was a very complicated birth and the whole experience was one of the happiest and scariest times of my life. I've since discovered that most parenting is like that; lots of happiness and treasured memories - but completely bloody terrifying at the same time. Anyway - within 24 hours I started getting bombarded with phone calls and texts from family members. My mother and my brother - the two people I'd spent the most time with when I was a kid - were in constant contact. They were messaging each other and messaging me. But they weren't calling to congratulate us. They didn't ask how we were doing or when the baby might be allowed home... it was a stream of passive aggressive accusations and insinuations: 'Have you told X about the baby? They have a right to know...' ' Y is upset because ...

What was the worst thing about working in local radio in the 1990s?   The long hours and unpaid overtime?   The commute - sitting on pissy buses week after week after week? The passive-aggressive pushiness of sales people?   The visits from slightly creepy ex- Radio 1 presenters?   No.   The worst thing about working in a local radio station was listening to the radio.   All day, every day.       They had speakers in the corridors and in the canteen so you HAD to listen to the station output.     Working for a local 'hits' station in the mid-1990s, this meant hearing a LOT of Simply Red and Wet Wet Wet. They also seemed to play We Built This City by Starship * ten times a day. In the late 90s they'd develop a similar obsession with Shania Twain .   Local radio stations weren't in the business of finding new music or taking risks - they were giving the public what they thought the public wanted.     A big tur...

When I was a student, I was completely broke. I met a lot of other students who also  said they were broke - but what they really meant was: ' I can't touch my savings because that's money from the sale of Great-Grand-Mama's house and Mummy and Daddy would hit the roof. ' I suppose everybody thinks they're poor when they're a student, but there's ' can't afford to go backpacking across Europe in the Summer ' poor and then there's ' picking sausage rolls out of a bin ' poor. I tried getting temporary or part-time jobs in the long gaps between University terms - but most of the time I had to sofa-surf at my Nanna's house on Tyneside or at various student houses in Lancaster and Morecambe. Sometimes I wouldn't know where I was going to be living from one week to the next. I did get some work from a removal firm in Darlington, but it wasn't regular and I certainly couldn't rely on it. This was during the early ...

Being ill is no fun.  And I kno w you can't expect it to be a barrel of laughs, but having a chronic long-term illness can mess up every part of your life. Apart from dealing with the actual illness - and whatever symptoms, medication and fear it kicks up - you can also find yourself suddenly out of work and completely cut off from friends and relatives.  It's a time when you realise that some of your friends are just people you once shared an office or a classroom with.  One of my former teaching colleagues did send me a very polite e-mail. 'I don't like being around people with your sorts of problems. It's too scary' she wrote, 'so it's better if we just leave it there.' I did keep in touch with one of my work-mates from local radio. He'd phone me now and again and we'd chat about the daft stuff we used to do: the crappy ads for crappy companies and having to deal with the even crappier sales people.  Then he went through some problems...