Out With The New, In With The Old

After we emerge from the hangovers of New Years Eve, you always see one catchphrase.  New Year, New You.  I hate it.  The idea that on the first day of the year, every year, companies and society tells you that you are not good enough, you have to improve you.  I talked about my dislike for this in my New Year Post

What I prefer to do is add to my character, not change it.  This year, I want to revisit the classics.  Not Shakespeare, but books from Jules Verne like Journey to the Centre of the Earth, must reads like Little Women and To Kill a Mockingbird.  Books that stand the test of time.

Films are like that.  There are some films that will last forever.  Films that can not, and should not, ever be revisited.  I do not mind a "remake" if the original can be improved or the story can be added to, but there are some films that you should never, ever, touch.  Films that cannot be improved by CGI or a 21st century mindset. 

Films that are perfect, just the way they are.

Jaws for example.   Could the special effects be improved?  Of course.  But would I change one iota of that film for a more realistic shark?  Never.

I am currently running a competition on Twitter to win some classic films, see below for how to enter.

 These films should never be touched.  Can you imagine anyone else ever playing Celie from The Color Purple than Whoopi Goldberg?  Can you comprehend a remake of the Towering Inferno? Tom Cruise playing Steve McQueen's character, scaling down the building Mission Impossible style?  The Rock?  NO.  Just no.

To win the classic movies as pictured above, all you have to do is head over to Twitter and RT the competition tweet (here is the link) The competition ends at midnight on the 31st January and is UK only.

Should you wish to buy any of the films about, they can be found here

What is your favourite classic film?

The Stigma of Mental Health

This is one of those posts where I am starting with no idea what the end will be.  I am just talking, through my fingers tapping against the keyboard.

When you have a headache, you take an aspirin.  When you have a cold you take Vitamin C.  When you wake up in the morning feeling really ill, you call in sick at work.  Mental health is different.  It is stigmatized by society in a way that you feel that you have to hide it.  Are obliged to.

My work is great.  I have never had any indication that if I called in with a mental issue, that they would be anything but nice about it.  But yet, I hide it.  

Last night, I was having major anxiety.   I have not had an episode for a while now, but like a boomerang, eventually, it always comes back.  At 1.20am this morning I posed a thought on Twitter which still plagues me now, whilst my anxiety ravages me once again.  I was praying for physical illness today.  To have a "real excuse" to call in sick.

I got to sleep around 3.00am and awoke with the same feeling.  Sometimes my anxiety lasts a few hours, sometimes a few days/weeks.  The feeling is always the same.  Irrational worry, fear, panic; tears.  When I woke this morning I begged my head to sort itself out.  But instead, I cried when my eyeliner broke, whilst simultaneously thinking how utterly pathetic I was for crying about eyeliner.

I wasn't crying about eyeliner,  I was crying because my damn soul hurt.  For reasons I did not know or could explain.

Yet, I got ready for work.  I piled on the makeup to cover my ravaged face.  I put a nice dress on to detract people from looking directly into my eyes.  I stood at the bus stop, wondering how the hell I was going to get through the day, eyes streaming from pain I could not, can never, understand.

9.00am hit and my "I'm fine" personality kicks.  I smile, I joke, I overcompensate.  No one notices.  I have played this game so many times before that I wonder if my personality has split, like the pieces of a Horcrux.  Regular happy Vicky, mentally screwed Vicky, work Vicky.  

There are so many pieces of me, so many images that I portray that sometimes I wonder who the real me is.  The real me is the one I was at New Year.  Drinking cocktails, sharing fun with friends; throwing death stars; shoulders utterly relaxed and my mind clear.

It is midnight now.  My heads is clearing a little as I write.  Writing helps me.  But yet I know that as soon as I stop tapping the keys, the cogs of my mind will start turning again.  The fear, of what I do not know, will come back.  The tears.  I am tempted to use my coping mechanism, which can work on the second night of an episode.  A complete brain switch off.  My mind locked away whilst music plays in my ears.  An escape from me. 

The cycle will start again tomorrow.  Either I will wake up and my anxiety will have left me, or it will keep its hold, while I fake my way through the day ahead.

It should not be like this.  Someone with mental health issues should not have to do this.  Yet we do.  Some people, every damn day.  We should not have to hide, which only makes us worse.  We should not have to fracture our personalities to hide what we are going through.  Someone with the flu is visible, we are the invisible.

I guess one way to combat this is through awareness.  Being as honest as we can, as I am being now.  Yet I am a coward, because tomorrow again I will hide.  Because we know what society thinks of mental issues.  How those who do not understand will never look at us the same way again if we admit our struggles.

Writing at this time of night gives me clarity.  Honesty.  I say how I am feeling, without a filter.  It is my sanctuary, for a short time, until the laptop lids closes.  But I have recorded me tonight.  My feelings.  No filter.

Someday, I hope, that the filter will be gone.  That I will not be ashamed of something that I cannot control.  This is a small step.  It is the second step though, not the first, that takes us where we really want to go.

Home Security

When it comes to home security, we all know how to keep our homes safe, as much as possible.

Burglar alarms, locks on our doors, our windows, timer lights; they are all things that we have in place and do without much thought.  When it comes to our outside spaces however, I know that I for one am a bit lackadaisical.

With that in mind I thought that I would share an odd little story with you today of what happened to us a few weeks ago.

We live in a Northern town at the top of a small cul de sac.  We are very lucky in that our bungalow is mostly surrounded by green space owned by the Water Board so looking out of the majority of our windows, you could believe that you lived in the country.

Our garage is a brick free standing space which is mostly used for storage now as we do not have a car now.  Everything from electrical appliances and our clothes dryer to the general junk that everyone stores in their garages.

Having lost the main garage door key ages ago, we have been relying on the back door to go in and out.  Being in an enclosed space with access only through a gate or over a high wall, we have never worried too much about security.  The key was frequently accidentally left in the lock and we often lost the key, only to find it later in a coat pocket.

A few weeks ago however the key went missing.  Coats were searched and the patio area were fully searched but to no avail.  Sure that the key would turn up at some point, but needing access to the garage, we decided to change the lock after a few days.

Now this is where the story gets weird.  Because the day after we changed the lock, the old key showed up.  Not in a coat pocket or a kitchen surface, but right outside our front door.  Not in a place that we could have overlooked, we would have literally had to step on the key to go outside.

This was very worrying to say the least.  That someone potentially had taken the key with a view to accessing the garage to steal or who knows what was a frightening prospect.  Especially we have previously always felt so safe here.

Having checked that nothing was stolen, we took some additional precautions.  There is now a security light on the gate so anyone trying to access our patio area at night will trigger it.  The back door to the garage now has our overfull garden bin next to it, not easy to move if you are trying to be quiet.

In addition, we located a replacement key service and now use the main garage door as our access point.

It just goes to show that you can never be too careful when it comes to security in and around your home.

What security improvements do you think you could work on?

*In collaboration with Fastkeys