And then an assistant asks me what I would like, and I look at the array of produce and say bleakly, ‘A Scotch egg, please.’
‘Just the one?’ Her tongs quiver over the tray of meat-blanketed oeufs.
‘Just the one,’ I confirm.
She bags up the solitary golden orb.
‘Will there be anything else?’ she enquires, handing me the bag, the contents of which fit perfectly into the palm of my hand.
I shake my head, hand over some coins, scuttle out and, dizzy with grief and oblivious to those around me, steady myself on a waste bin and howl in pain at the searing loneliness of buying one Scotch egg.
Still, it was delicious.
GROOGLING THE NIGHT AWAY
I wish I lived in Spain and could just put on the ‘Widow’ black so that everyone would know and therefore not ask or expect anything from me. ~ Deena
I’m sure that I’m not alone in surfing the internet for something I shouldn’t, only to stumble across something I wish I hadn’t. I’m not talking about naked ladies posing suggestively with tropical fruit, or the time when needing a picture for a presentation I innocently typed ‘Nuts’ into Google Images, and found an alarming montage of human meat and two veg. No, I’m referring to something potentially much more damaging: egosurfing, the practice of putting your name into a search engine to see what comes up.
My career means I’m named on various internet sites across the World Wide Web. I’ve long since learnt that tapping my name into Google after a couple of sherries late at night is a recipe for disaster: 20 great reviews are meaningless compared to one where the author slates what I’ve written and holds me entirely responsible for everything they believe is wrong with the youth of today, from teenage pregnancy to thinking Jordan’s humungous breast implants are something to aim for. Fizzing with tears and/or anger, I’d burst from my study waving a printout of the offending article and thrust it towards my husband, irrespective of whether he was watching TV, snoozing or having a shower. And because JS was a calm, thoughtful and measured man (unless someone blocked our garage, when he’d make John McEnroe’s 1981 Wimbledon outburst look wussy), he’d soothe my angst, put it all into perspective, remind me I’d feel better in the morning, and only later admit that he was seriously tempted to track down the reviewer and wreak terrible and lasting revenge in retaliation for hurting his wife.
But I have discovered there is one thing worse than egosurfing, and I discovered it on a dark and rainy Saturday: Grief Googling, or as it shall be known henceforth, Groogling.
It all started innocently enough. I was sitting at the computer, trying to work out if keeping the heating on low constantly is more economical than firing it up twice a day (the jury is still out according to Money Saving Expert), when I found myself Groogling: typing my late husband’s name into Google and pressing ‘Search’.
Up came the industry obituaries and the notice in The Times.
As my heart was already banging away in my chest at the sight of JS’s name on the screen, I should have stopped there, gone back to Martin Lewis and the central heating conundrum, but no, like a moth to a flame or a Page Three model to a footballer, I clicked on ‘Images’.
And there was the picture I can’t look at, the photograph displayed on the lid of my husband’s coffin at his funeral, an image taken at a wedding in Australia in 2008. JS hated having his photo taken and usually adopted his stern ‘photo face’, but catching JS off-guard, the professional photographer had captured the essence of the man I love and have lost: smiling, a twinkle in his eye, kind, fun, decent, caring. My soulmate for almost half my life.
The pain felt as if someone was pouring boiling water over my already scarred body. When it wouldn’t go away and my grief reached such a point I felt scared for my own safety, I rang Aussie Jo, a friend who isn’t afraid of my tears and my terror, and who will always put her busy life on hold to help me. Aussie Jo did what JS used to do: she listened, she soothed, she consoled, until scores of damp tissues later, I calmed down.
She was and is marvellous.
But there was one thing JS used to say to me that Aussie Jo couldn’t. ‘You’ll feel better in the morning.’
Because when morning comes, even if I am not always outwardly convulsed with tears, I don’t feel better, not even a little bit.
ON THE COUCH:
COUNSELLING PART ONE
I saw a counsellor who had not experienced what I have. We failed to hit it off at the point where she thought it appropriate to mention the ‘and you’re so young’ thing. I decided leaving was better than punching her ruddy lights out. ~ Nancy
Ten years ago, whilst sitting in the stalls at the London Palladium watching Dennis Waterman belt out Get Me to the Church on Time as Alfred P Doolittle in My Fair Lady, I had a heart attack. At least, I thought it was a heart attack; the crushing pain in my chest, the dizziness, the feeling that I was going to pass out at any moment certainly felt like I imaged a heart attack might. Drenched in sweat, I fled the auditorium in terror, stumbling over and stamping on the feet of those next to me. Strangely, my heart attack stopped the moment I was out of the theatre. Instead of calling for an ambulance, I flagged down a black cab and, frightened and bewildered, sobbed all the way home to be met on the doorstep by a less than sympathetic JS. The following morning, on my way to work and still rattled by the events of the night before, I was hit by a tsunami of the same terrifying symptoms the moment I opened the front gate and stepped out into the street. I made it into the car, but 20 minutes later, sitting in the outside lane of three lanes of traffic at a red light on the Holloway Road in north London, I had a strong urge to jump out of the car and run into the road. I didn’t, but only because JS shouted at me and locked the car from the inside. I really thought that I was seriously ill.
I was due to fly to New York a few days later, and, as I didn’t fancy being the reason for the broadcast at 33,000 feet of ‘If there is a medical doctor on board, please could he make himself known to a member of the cabin crew,’ I trotted off to my GP who diagnosed something much less dramatic than a dickey ticker: a panic attack. He sent me away with a prescription for beta-blockers, and a suggestion that if nothing improved, I might consider counselling. I wasn’t keen on counsellors or counselling. Some years earlier, I’d become embroiled in a ‘situation’ and one of the people involved wanted everyone to see a psychotherapist. I sat for three hours being assessed by a fat, wheezy man who at the end of the session told me that despite my emotionally chaotic childhood, rarely had he come across someone more quietly confident, grounded, balanced and secure as me. I remember thinking that he probably wasn’t a very good psychotherapist, but still.
Despite my reservations, one Wednesday evening and several panic attacks later, I find myself opposite a bearded gnome of a man who’s wearing black leather motorbike trousers and a tight grey T-shirt, a garment which accentuates his impressive man boobs. It occurs to me that if I were a woman with body-image issues, specifically lack of ‘va va voom’ in the bap department, it would be disheartening to find my male therapist sported bigger baps than me. The weirdest thing was that whilst I perched on a hard-backed chair, he reclined on a couch in a pose reminiscent of a Roman emperor dangling grapes over his mouth.
Beardy-Weirdy boasts that he’s such a brilliant therapist he has celebrity clients who have stuck with him for years (er . . . ) and angrily accuses me of taking the mick when in answer to his question, ‘What is your coke intake?’ I reply innocently and truthfully, ‘I don’t like either Coke or Pepsi. Fizzy drinks make me burp.’
It doesn’t take long to realise Beardy-Weirdy isn’t for me.
I tell him.
He maintains that without him I will never recover. I will be forever damaged.
I decide