I found the Belief-O-Matic quiz at BeliefNet really interesting. You answer 20 questions about your religious and spiritual beliefs, and based on those it lists the top 27 religions you most closely identify with. The top five it listed for me were:
Unitarian Universalism (98%)
Neo-Paganism (97%)
Liberal Protestant (84%)
Liberal Quaker (82%)
New Age (77%)

Interestingly enough, despite the fact I was raised and schooled as a Roman Catholic, it came in at the very bottom of the list at 15%. I guess my personal and moral beliefs have changed radically in the past 10 years.

There was a ruckus going on in town as I made my way back to work.
A young girl, maybe only in her mid-teens, was screaming and swearing at the top of her voice (”Get your fucking hands off me!”) as two plainclothes security guards each held one of her arms and tried to gently lead her away. All the way up and down the street people were staring and listening with shocked expressions as she turned the air blue.

Two things about this blog:
1. I don’t often swear on it.
2. My Dad regularly reads it.

The last time I did swear, I got a disapproving e-mail from my Dad along the lines of how ineloquent and common it was, and how there were much better, nicer, and educated ways to express negative emotion. So this link is just for you, Dad. I’m sure it’ll appeal to your sense of humour

There’s a supermarket near my house that I use occasionally, and the side wall up until recently was covered in grafitti, almost every square inch to a height of seven feet or so. I assume the management got fed up of it, because it was painted over about a fortnight ago. I was up there yesterday, and the grafitti has started to reappear again, the usual stuff - Tracy loves Steve, Heather blows goats, and other lovely sentiments.

Grafitti always reminds me of a visit to Northern Ireland with my Dad and sister when I was about 6 or 7. In a public toilet in the middle of nowhere, someone had written a mindless little statement:

“If you notice this notice, you will notice that this notice is not worthwhile noticing.”

Funny how sometimes the most mundane and fleeting of experiences can stick in your mind.

Back in Sheffield after an excellent weekend down in London at the UK Bloggers Party in the Park. It was great to put faces to blogs and get to know people better, and thankfully the weather held all the while out in Hyde Park. I *think* I’ve added links to all the blogs of people who were there..if yours isn’t, get in touch with me.

Events and topics of conversation throughout the day ranged from mundane (isn’t it great the weather’s holding?) to extremely funny. Highlights included:

* Mo being attacked with a frilly pink umbrella
* Nick, the three-legged cat, and the Jehovah’s witness
* Graybo mentioning Chichester in every other sentence
* Mo developing a suspicious cough whenever Chichester was mentioned
* Nick declaring he would take up any challenge, prompting Mo to promise he would think one up; so far it involves a battenburg and the Chichester bypass…watch the UK Bloggers for updates!
* Cal hitting me with Graybo’s frisbee
* Nick’s painful genitalia related stories, and Mo’s impression of such (”…like the time I hammered a nail through my cock..”)
* Mo’s unbelievably solid hair
* Frisbee antics (or should that be frantics?)

…and loads more besides. Graybo and Nick also have accounts of the day on their site, with probably more to follow.

I’ve been thinking about my paternal Grandad quite a lot recently, for no particular reason I know of. He died in 1986 from asbestos-related mesothelioma (cancer). Whilst looking at old photos last weekend at my parent’s house, I came across a very old photo of me sitting on his knee at their old house in Birmingham. I must only have been around 4 or 5 in the photo, but it brought a lot of memories back.
My earliest memories of him are him tricking my sister and I with ‘Two little dickie-birds’, which my Dad also did for us several times. For anyone not familiar with it, but it went something like this.
He would put a circle of paper with a little face on round the index fingers of each of his hands, and holding up his hands so we could see them, recite:

“Two little dickie birds sitting on a wall,
One named Peter, one named Paul,
Fly away Peter, fly away Paul, [at which point he’d put his hands behind his back and bring them back, paper circle-less]
Come back Peter, come back Paul.” [hands behind his back again, and the circles of paper would re-appear]

My sister and I were amazed at the ‘magic trick’, and would run round his back trying to find these little circles of paper that we were sure he must have dropped on the ground, or hidden in his pockets, but we never found them. It took us a LONG time to realise that he’d just switched fingers, hiding the papered finger behind his thumb. We were too young and unobservant to notice the change.

Another time, he took us into the back garden and pulled a leaf off a bush in the corner, telling us to taste it. Of course, I was extremely reluctant. Eat a leaf? That’s crazy talk! He told us it was mint, so after a bit of coaxing, I tried it. I remember thinking it didn’t taste anything like mint.

On another occasion, there was a partial solar eclipse - the first eclipse I ever remember seeing. I don’t know for sure what date it was, but looking up old eclipse dates, I figure it must have been the partial eclipse of 30 May 1984. He took us out into the garden and gave us each a piece of smoked glass to look through to see the sun (yes, I know you’re not supposed to, but I was young).

I wish I’d known him longer.

Many years ago, pre-secondary school, I used to have a recurring dream. It wasn’t very long or involved, but I never forgot it. I would be sitting at the bottom of the stairs in the house I grew up in, looking straight up to the door to my parent’s bedroom. I was alone in the house, but the bedroom door would open, and a Dalek would glide out. It would point its’ eyestalk and gun at me, and I would find myself rooted to the spot, unable to move. Daleks were scary.

But now, there’s a KitKat advert that’s recently started on television that amongst other things, includes a couple of Daleks roaming around a shopping centre intoning, “Give us a cuddle!” and “Peace and love!”.

Very bizarre.

Bought two books while out at lunch - One For the Money, by Janet Evanovich, and Welcome to my Planet, by Shannon Olson. Also got given a guide to San Francisco book by Gill as I’ll be going over there myself in December, and she had it going spare. I plan to curl up on the sofa with at least one of them tonight.

I love books. I devour books.
I can quite easily get 3 or 4 books for, say, Christmas, and have read all of them before New Year.
I know a number of people who have a much more relaxed (read: weird) attitude when it comes to books. They’ll buy one, take it home, and then just put it on their bookshelf. They won’t read it immediately. They’ll forget about it for a while, and only remember it a week or so later when they glance at the bookshelf and notice it. They’ll think, oh, I must remember to read that, and not get round to it. And so the circle continues.

How can people do that??

Books and reading are passions of mine. I’ll read a book cover to cover without pause if I have the time. I’ll read and re-read a book. I’ll lovingly care for it, and lip-tremble if the cover gets mangled after it gets lost in the black hole that is my bag. I’ll go into bookshops (aside : I love the smell of bookshops. If you’re an avid reader and book-lover, you’ll know what I mean) and only be able to tear myself away with an extreme force of will.
Hey..that reminds me. I’m sure the bookshop on the Moor has a sale on. Maybe I can get there before it closes at six…

About a month ago, I got a phone call from my Mum. The conversation went something like this:
Mum: “Hello, darling. What are you doing the second weekend of July?”
Me: “Um. Nothing?”
Mum: “Oh, good! There’s a summer fete at Waterford Court on Saturday 14th, and I was hoping you’d be free to do some of your palm reading and astrology stuff there.”

Now the truth is I can do birthcharts and astrology stuff, as long as I have my computer in front of me, so I wasn’t too concerned in that respect - get some details, take them home, and run off the report.
Palm reading, however, is slightly different. I got vaguely interested in it back at university, more in a background ‘this is kinda cool’ way than a ‘cross my palm with silver, here’s what I see’ practical way. My interest had kind of waned since, and it had been at least 3, maybe 4 years since I’d last thought about it. So, understandably, I was rather nervous, finding myself on a train last night, desperately trying to jog my memory and absorb every word of a teeny tiny illustrated guide to palmistry. I confessed to my uncle that it was probably going to be 10% knowledge, 90% bullshit.

It came as something of a shock to me once I got to Waterford Court (which is a retirement housing complex) to find that oodles of people wanted their palm read. It was even more of shock (about 30 palms, several breaks to stop my throat drying out, and one glass of orange cordial over my trousers later) to hear that people had been wandering about with comments like:
“Ooh, go see the palm reading lady, she’s ever so good.”
“She was really accurate!”
“She knew I’d always wanted to be a firefighter!” (yes, I seriously heard that!)
and even, “She’s got really unusual eyes, lovely colour.”

I was left at the end of the day with a huge grin on my face, wondering if I’d ad-libbed really well, or if there was actually something in this ‘palm-reading malarkey’ after all

Thankfully, the medication review was just in ‘n out again. Nothing’s changing, and all I need to do is have a blood test booked. No biggie.

So, epilepsy.
Shortly after returning to school after the summer holidays in ‘87, I was in a maths class when I felt really strange. The best way I could describe it, at least back then, was a memory blank. I turned to Joanne Kenyon, sitting next to me, and said, “I can’t remember anything!”
She frowned slightly. “What’s your name?”
I blinked. I knew that. “Elaine.”
She shrugged and turned back to her work. I looked down at my exercise book. It could have been in Swahili for all the sense I could make of it. I didn’t know how to describe what was happening, so didn’t say anything. After a minute or so, the feeling passed and my head cleared again.

Over the next few years, I would have the same sort of episode maybe every few months or so. I generally knew if it was going to happen, as I would wake up in the morning and feel ‘fuzzy’. I’d go through the day wanting the memory blank to come and go, just so I’d feel normal again. I remember some instances more clearly than the others.
Lunchtime at school - I hid in one of the toilet cubicles and banged my head with the heel of my hand to try and knock some sense into my brain again.
At the hairdresser’s getting my hair washed - I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed that it would pass before the girl finished, as I didn’t think I’d be able to make my way to any chair she indicated I sit down at.
At home in the living room - I’d mentioned earlier in the evening to Dad that I’d gotten some clothes from a catalogue. He asked to see them just as a memory blank came on. I stalled for time by pretending to finish a chapter in a book, when in reality the words meant absolutely nothing to me.
At home talking to Mum when she had a friend round - I left the room quickly, although I couldn’t be sure whether or not I was in mid-conversation.
I couldn’t express exactly what was happening because I just didn’t know. I was just thankful it passed quickly.

By this time, I’d taken my GCSEs (exams taken at 16), and was just starting sixth form. I remember it was a Monday, and it was September 1991. I was sitting next to a friend, Dawn Harvey, during a study period, when one of the memory blanks came over me. Coincidentally enough, it was in the same room as I’d had the first episode. I sat very still and kept quiet and waited for it to pass. The next thing I knew, I was lying on my back on the cold tiled floor of the room and Mr Turrell, a science teacher, was kneeling beside me.
“Just keep still,” he told me. “How are you feeling?”
My classmates were looking over me, worried. I was extremely confused. “What happened?”
“You started shaking,” said Dawn. “I told you to stop but you didn’t answer, and you fell off the chair.”

After 10 minutes or so, I was helped up by Mr Turrell and guided to sick bay. My Mum arrived around 20 minutes later to take me to Good Hope Hospital. I still felt tired, confused and ill. We’d only just driven out of the school gates when I asked Mum to pull over. I got out of the car quickly and vomited in the gutter. Getting back into the car, nauseated, we carried on to the hospital. After a long wait, I was poked, prodded and questioned by a doctor. They couldn’t find anything particularly wrong with me, and suggested I may have a mild virus.

Three months later, I was in the Great Hall at school during a mass service. The whole of the school could fit in there in tightly packed rows, and we were standing up during the Homily, I think. I came to in the lower girl’s changing rooms with a lump on my head. Apparently, I’d just keeled right over and hit the floor before anyone could catch me. Mr Cox, the RE teacher, had his hand bandaged for a week after that. It wasn’t until a while later that I discovered it was because he’d put his fingers in my mouth to make sure I didn’t swallow my tongue. I’d bitten down hard. Again, I was taken to the hospital. This time, they suggested EEG and CAT scans. By the time they’d been booked for me, I’d blacked out again, this time on the school bus.

All the scans turned out perfectly normal. It took another seizure or two (in the sixth form common room, and at home - where I remember hyperventilating in the bathroom and crying that it wasn’t fair, why me?) before the doctors decided to put me on anti-convulsant medication. I remember crying when Dr Jamieson told me I probably had epilepsy and I would have to take the medication for the foreseeable future. I was 16. It took them a while to get the dosage right, but it works.

I’m luckier than a lot of epileptics. My epilepsy can be mostly controlled by medication, and at a relatively low dose. I don’t get many, if any, side effects from it. Occasional drowsiness and dizziness. I can handle that.

As for technical terms, I know now that the ‘memory blanks’ I used to have (and now that maybe occur once or twice a year) are actually simple partial seizures, and the blackouts are secondary generalised tonic-clonic seizures. I don’t remember anything that happens during the tonic-clonics, but thankfully it’s been many years since I’ve had one. I deal with it, and don’t let it affect my life. It’s just me.