Rosetinted

  The Christmas holiday, it is meant to be a long awaited time off. The thing is I failed to make a decision about what I was having time off from.  You cannot - as much as you try, ‘take time off’ from yourself, that is something that you need to learn to live with, and I have been as irritating as fuck. I pushed aside my irritation by general ‘to do-ness’. Over the holidays,   I feel as if in doing the whole feasting and merriment thing, no matter how full or un-merry   I may have felt I have been somewhat connected to my ancestors. These are the ancestors who knew feeding their farm animals over the winter months was a job too far, so they killed and feasted upon all but a few- leaving meat on bone piles left behind for modern day archaeologists.   I wonder if Neolithic humans wondered what to gift Great Aunt Maud or just filled their solstice days with the kind of oblivion that is necessary when life is so hard, so short and so bloody cold. I also wonder h...

 You will have to excuse the 2 week hiatus. I tried to mess with a routine I have devised for myself, and although I swear blind that I am the spontaneous type and can cope with changes - the proof is in the pudding and I discover that I am more a slave to schedule than I think. So here I am, on a Sunday morning; before I dress, tidy or organise any offspring, I am writing. I will be completely honest with you; finding content is still an issue- I am still in a battle of personal self-censorship. I don’t know when I began to get up each morning and pick up my metaphorical layer of gauze to soften my persona, but I suspect it was quite young. I knew that I was a ‘little too much’, for my family and my questions were a ‘little too pertinent’ and my natural behaviours just not quite socially acceptable from, perhaps the age of 10. What I wanted to do and say was never quite in step with ‘the group’. That otherness has left a lasting impression; there are still certain ‘normal’ grou...

It was this time last week, when I began to write my previous week’s blog post, having promised myself that I would begin to write weekly. This is my promise to me, as I work out- publicly, no less – my purpose on this revolving ball. Of course, You scold ( You is very much a figment of my imagination) ‘you’re a teacher and your purpose should be tied up alongside that.’  I chuckle, and agree: for all intents and purposes that should be the ticket, but I can’t quite get with that program , there must be more. I don’t really want my funeral to be a eulogy, in front of the 5 people who managed to tolerate me through life,  of how I managed to be kind to a few children and managed to cope through a largely failing (in my opinion) education system.  I always hoped for more.  I blame my childhood; you cannot indoctrinate an impressionable mind with ideas of divine purpose and predestination without inducing a few ‘ideas above your station’.  Which leads me to anothe...

I said that I would write every Sunday, that is now the new regime. The plan was to use my commute to work, to conjure some witty and adroit text that would have the readers rolling in the isles. However, during my 9 minute walk to work, where I walk down an alleyway that perhaps I should avoid, my mind has been drifting elsewhere.  On Monday, I cheered some emigrating geese as they flew off in formation and for a moment I was captured in the rapture of nature. On Tuesday, I speculated about the lady litter picker, who tidies other people’s mess, all alone before 8am. She is donned in litter tongs and mask and heroically carries out her Sisyphean task. On Wednesday, I wondered how the human pooer is, and whether they’d left a log down my alley. I wonder if they were eating well, healthy and fibrous with a scatter of sweetcorn or had the junk food got the better of them, only observation would reveal the truth. On Thursday, I spent a few too many moments caught up in the futility ...

It has been 7 weeks.  7 whole weeks of working full time, I lost my Friday day off and now I am well and truly in the rat run. I remember it well from the last time I was full time, the all-consuming nature of this job makes, at least for me, pursuing other interests so difficult. I am almost nostalgic for the first lockdown (if I could step aside from the fear and anxiety it induced); when I could just concentrate on having all that precious time to do the things that I dreamed about doing whilst doing my all-consuming job. Those things that I dreamed about pre- lockdown are the same things that I try to find time to do now: write and be slightly more creative than I am in my job. It is funny how, over the years, dreams have whittled themselves down to be so simple. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Deborah Darko Davies (@roseytintz) My lockdown journals were effortless to write, it was as if the combination of time, anxiety and (blessed as I wa...

Some things I have, as a modern person, come to rely on whether or not, evolutionary speaking, it does me a scrap of good. I am a good few generations in from having to make fire or dig a well for water. Perhaps, I am a dullard from becoming too soft and reliant on switching a switch for survival and placing my basic needs in the care of others but, in my defence, I have known no other way and I cannot recall much protest from those who inhabit the western world. Of course there has been moments when we realise the whole earth does not wake each morning to running water or functioning electricity, but on the whole - most of us pampered folk have fashioned our lives around these two facts: we will wake up with clean water and electricity.  For many of us, our survivalist skills are all but forgotten, hence the abundance of adrenaline that courses around our veins. Living without a daily near death experience to expend it we've become anxious of shadows and invented fears amongst ou...