“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”  Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I sometimes wonder what Sylvia Plath would’ve made of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. In a nutshell, CBT teaches you to recognise errors in your thinking and to change them, thus changing your usual behaviours and making yourself feel much better. Errors in thinking might include, for example, ‘catastrophising’ and ‘fortune-telling’, where you might think “Today is going to be a total nightmare, because year 9 hate me and do everything they can to piss me off”.

The trick is to break the thought down into more sensible, rational thoughts: “Year 9 don’t hate me, one of them smiled at me in the playground last week”, “Children aren’t naughty to annoy the teacher, in fact, they rarely think about how the teacher might feel anyway”, “There might be many wonderful things that happen today if I get out of bed and go see”.

And so, the thinker doesn’t stay cowering under the duvet and, instead, leaps out of bed full of the joys of spring and the whole day is wonderful. (sorta).

There are countless studies about how effective CBT is, compared to medications, other forms of therapy, and any other way you might try to treat depression and anxiety… but it has one flaw. You have to believe in the premise. You have to believe that in order to get better you have to change the way you think. You have to accept that YOU THINK WRONG.

And so, I wonder what an intelligent, creative woman like Sylvia might have thought.

My thoughts, for a long time included some of these beauties:

1. If I accept that my thinking is wrong, I have to accept that I am STUPID. I am an intelligent, creative woman… so my thinking must be perfect.

2. I do not want to be a smiling, affable goon. I want to fight injustice and get righteously ANGRY… and CBT will stop me from doing this.

3. I’d rather have a lobotomy and I bet it’d have the same results.

4. People who are happy and content all the time don’t get anything done. If Gandhi and used CBT, where would we be today? I am like Gandhi, obviously.

5. Teaching really *is* crap and people really *do* look at me funny and everyone else in the world is stupid and doesn’t *feel* things the same way I do – I am special and sensitive and better than most people. I am not of this world, and so your rules don’t apply.

And, for months, maybe years, I was comforted by these totally reasonable thoughts. I read The Bell Jar as a teenager and found it uplifting and inspirational. I read Prozac Nation and giggled at all the idiots she was surrounded by. Girl, Interrupted only made me love crazy Winona even more. How beautiful it was to be a crazy, intelligent, creative woman.

And how utterly pointless.

Because, now that I start to feel a little better, I can see that there are a few flaws in those thoughts of mine. So, to CBT ’em:

1. You’re intelligent… but you’re also prone to exaggeration, melodrama and romanticism. All of which might make for a good writer (one day) but not a very effective wife, friend, or teacher. Nobody’s thinking is perfect.

2. It will be a great deal easier to change the bits of the world that you want to, if you can actually get out of bed in the mornings.

3. If all you’re doing all day is staying in bed or drinking yourself into a stupor to cope with the crapness of life, then no one would notice if you had a lobotomy either. You are not being a creative, intelligent woman if you don’t change out of your pyjamas for days on end.

4. You aren’t Gandhi. And, even if you were, Gandhi did a great deal of smiling and laughing. None of which you are doing right now. Also, Gandhi got out of bed. (but he did wear the equivalent of PJs, but that was for a good reason).

5. Blah blah. Life isn’t always good, obviously. But, listen, no one owes you anything and things certainly aren’t going to get better while you sit around complaining. Nor is anyone else going to be able to fix this for you. However much they love you. Now shut up.

So, it seems, somewhere along the way, I got sold on the idea of CBT. And I feel so much better… and I am a great deal more pleasant to be around… and I am writing more… and I still get to wear a silly hat, and be ‘different’ and creative … but now I can do it all whilst smiling. (which, it turns out, makes you feel a lot better than sitting around cynically bemoaning the state of everyone else).

Having read the news today that the chief of OFSTED, Sir Michael Wilshaw, believes that teachers don’t know the meaning of the word stress, I find myself speechless. I’m not angry, though I might once have been, because I have become resigned to the idea that so many people outside of the occupation have no real idea of what it’s like. We all went to school, so we all think we can, in some way, comment on what it must be like to be a teacher. I have friends who “think about teaching” whenever they are lost for where to go next. I have friends who tell me “yeah, but you work at a comprehensive in Surrey” – as if that means it must be easy. I get it. I don’t understand it – just like I didn’t understand the GP who, after signing me off for six months with chronic stress, anxiety and depression said “I often think of being a teacher just for the summer holidays”. But I get it. Teaching must be lovely. You finish work at 3.30, and you get 13 weeks off a year – utter bliss.

Wilshaw tells us that teachers can’t understand stress like his unemployed father did. (We have a regular job after all.) That we can’t understand how it was when he started teaching – when things were so much worse (I wonder if they could still hit the kids back then?). It doesn’t seem to matter to him that teaching has the third highest amount of stress-related sick leave. We just have it easy.

I am a good teacher. In my years of teaching, I have progressed through the ranks from a ‘mere classroom teacher’ to being the head, at one time, of two fantastic departments. I have trained other teachers, I have passed leadership training courses, and I have Chartered London Teacher Status. My behaviour management is excellent, and on more than one occasion, I have taken exam classes that blew their ‘target grades’ out of the water. The last GCSE cohort I taught, got 9 A*s in a class of 21. I am a good teacher.

So, how is it that I woke up one day and couldn’t go into school? That it was so bad that I had to take six months of work (even when I begged them to let me go back – but they told me I wasn’t ready?)? I’ll tell you. It’s because teaching is, by it’s nature, a stressful job. Kids are unpredictable and unpleasant on occasion. Other teachers more so. If you work with difficult adults, then you only come half way to understanding difficult teenagers. Teenagers don’t reason, they don’t believe in politeness, they don’t worry that if they treat you badly they might look bad. Teenagers are not adults.

The problem, if you ask me, isn’t that teachers don’t know that they’ve got it good, but that people who used to be teachers (Ofsted inspectors, and Leadership in schools) forget what it’s like for the little guy. We are the front line. The victims sent OTT – while they sit back in their offices and think up new, and ridiculous, ways to get children to be ‘more involved in their learning’. “Be gentle with them” they say, because everyone knows how hard it is to be a teenager. Yes, but not as hard as it is to sort a teenager out once they’ve been pandered to all their lives. “He says he’s sorry” they say, but only because really they are far too nervous to tell the child off further, in case said child ‘loses their temper’.

Here’s a way to improve grades and make a better generation for the future (and it doesn’t involve making exams easier)- put your teachers first… if you can do that, then the fantastic ‘teaching and learning’ will naturally follow.

A little snippet from the course I went on today, which was about writing in the style of Milligan, Lear, Lewis Carroll, etc. It’s probably not a type of writing I think I’ll focus on in my own work, but it was a really useful lesson in not taking my writing seriously – just having fun with it. One of the final (ten minute) activities was to write a nonsensical obituary. Here’s mine:

Lucien Bell, inventor of the Time-splitting device that took his name, passed into the night on February the second after a short illness that had not yet taken hold. Born before his elder brother, Frederic, Lucien was always a child of which no one could say anything, although his mother often did. 

Bell was educated at an Inner London Academy in the 1830s and graduated from Cambridge at the age of eight, in 1945. He spent the war years in Ancient Rome where he met his first wife, Claudia. Their marriage was short-lived, however, as Lucien was forced to return to the 1920s, and there he met his eighth wife, Millie. Though Claudia and Mille never met, they were said to spit at each other whenever they did. 

It wasn’t until 2012, when Bell created his time-splitting device, that his life really began, and only shortly before that, he was dead. Lucien is survived by his grandparents and his fourth wife, Maud. His fifth wife is expected to be born on the day of the funeral, so will be unable to attend. 

The husband sent me a link to Nick Nolte’s This Much I Know in the weekend’s Observer. I was really struck by the line in which he says: “ I don’t believe you should be a professional at anything until you’re about 35″. I love this.

I have spent years now wanting to change what I am doing, and have felt sure for a long time that it is JUST TOO LATE. I berate myself for not knowing what it is I want to do, or worse, for all the years I have seemingly done nothing-and-now-time-is-running-out-and-very-soon-I-will-be… dead. I was reminded of something I had read about Alan Rickman getting his first acting job at 46, and figured there must be many more people who were late-bloomers, if you like. A google search will show you that there are.

As for authors, many of them started a lot later than I am, now. Raymond Chandler was first published at 51, Richard Adams in his 50s, Laura Ingalls Wilder not until her mid-sixties. I think Iris Murdoch didn’t get published until she was 35, and I’m still quite a way away from that ripe, old age.

Peter Roget, who invented Roget’s Thesaurus, only did so at 73.

I have many good years ahead of me. As, I’m sure, do you – however old you are!

Finally got the last component of the Cavy Castle, so now I feel I can upload photos of the thing in all its beauty. Audrey has been jumping all over the place, which I think is a sign she likes it. The ramp, though they have mastered climbing down it, is still causing some problems, although I suspect they are teasing me… When I left a trail of parsley up it, and left the room, it all vanished in a matter of seconds… but they won’t show me how they do it!

The fleece ‘bedspreads’ were made by the Lovely Lorraine, of Guinea Pig Comforts. They’re so easy to put on, and look like they’ll make cleaning up a great deal easier, too.

Frida is, of course, named for the artist Frida Kahlo. We visited Frida’s home in Mexico when we were there, and her life has always fascinated me. Her paintings, dark but somehow still beautiful, haunt me. I think they might even have inspired the novella I’m working on at the moment. As you will know, Frida always painted herself with an impressive monobrow. Thus the name. Frida was the first to eat from my hand, but is also the least brave. She doesn’t jump around quite as much as her housemate, and she often burrows her way under the bedding so I lose her.

Audrey wouldn’t let me touch her for the first few days. She could run – fast – so she always outran my advances. I was overly timid, perhaps, until my Mother-in-law-sister came over and just reached into Audrey’s hidey-hole and fished her out. Since then, Audrey is happy to be held as long as you don’t annoy her and then she’ll give you a nip on the finger. She jumps around the palace like a crazy when I’m not there, and has started to be a little braver about doing it while I’m in the room.

As I type, they are both listening to Leonard Cohen with me, and even Frida has popped her head out for a little exploration.

A grid structure alone, does not a home make. The second part of building the cage involved cutting up a mammoth sheet of corrugated plastic to make ‘trays’ that would fit inside the grids. I have to confess, the whole idea of it just seemed too daunting. I have never been one for measuring things that need to be a perfect fit. Luckily, the husband was home from work after a late-night Superbowl party, so I made use of his talents.

There are many step-by-step instructions for making these trays on the web, so I won’t go through it here. Suffice to say, I wouldn’t have had the patience!

The sides need to be at least six inches high, to avoid the piggies hopping over, though I’ve read somewhere that some can even jump the 14 inches of the grids… Let’s hope we have less athletic pigs.

Score the sides six inches in and you can then fold the sides up.

And here is the finished article. A two story palace for out little guys. The ramp is still something that will need a bit of thought… More on that later.

Not a post about guinea pigs, but one about myself.

I am reminded, often, that I must have led a very sheltered life. Not because I don’t understand pain and poverty and illness (though I’m sure I don’t understand it as much as some), but because I am often surprised by attitudes in people that seem medieval to me. I was brought up to believe in that eternal truth – the one that can be found in all the religions that ever were – ‘Treat other people as you would wish to be treated’. I teach a whole lesson on it at school. The kids, some of them, even guess it before I reveal quite what the Golden Rule is. Because it is timeless and it is perfect.

So, why is it, that so many people – especially ones who claim to follow this rule – are so narrow-minded and so cruel? Why is it, that so many Christians believe themselves to be ‘allowed’ to judge others in the name of God, or tell other people how to live their lives? Once, I knew a God who loved people. Yes, He said that I should go out and convert people, but I believed that was because people would be happy with God in their lives. I still believe that, but I’m not so sure that most Christians do. Most Christians, I suspect, tell you about God because it makes them feel superior. They are going to Heaven and you aren’t. You silly, little thing.

But I’ll tell you this. I don’t want to go to Heaven if, when I get there, it is full of judgemental, poisonous people. I don’t want to share ‘paradise’ with homophobes, racists, misogynists, idiots. The Jesus I read in the Bible surrounded himself with women, though they were considered lesser; he invited the children to come to him, when his friends said they were a nuisance; he loved women who may have been ‘fallen’ and men who had dubious careers. The only people he didn’t want to spend time with were those religious, judgemental people who kept telling everyone else they were wrong.

The greatest commandment is this: Love the Lord your God… and love your neighbour as yourself. When the Christian Church gets this one right (and not just in rare cases like my Daddy, or lovely Rowan) I might consider coming back.

Project guinea pig continues. These pigs (when we eventually go out and get some) are going to have a better home than I do!

Today, still waiting for the corrugated plastic which should arrive on Monday, I set about decorating a couple of hidey-holes for the little guys. I started with some very simple wooden huts which I bought online.

Then, using a paint I was assured was pet-friendly and wouldn’t cause too many problems if it got chewed a little, I made them my own. If, when we get the pigs, they decide they like to chew them a little too much, I’ll probably take them out – not sure I like the idea of them eating paint, however ‘safe’ it is.

But paint alone does not a home make. So I decorated them, too, using little wooden embellishments, painted to match.

A good morning’s work. Now to wash the paint out of my hair (don’t ask!).