Accidental Recklessness by Ruby Holmes

Accidental Recklessness
£12.00


By Ruby Holmes
ISBN: 978-1-84747-025-6
Published: 2006
Pages: 228
Key Themes: manic depression, bi-polar disorder
Description
With post-modern wit and pre-Raphaelite passion Ruby Holmes tells how mental illness can be survived without sacrificing the adventures of youth. This book is about mental illness, the ways in which it has manifested itself throughout Ruby's life and the extraordinary times she has had along the way.
About the Author
I am ginger and in need of therapy - the two are intrinsically linked. I love the ocean and big, big waves. Lighthouses! I love lighthouses. Toffee cheesecake with zopiclone sprinkles. Wild horses. Writing my second book and taking laziness to new levels. I miss Vancouver. I also miss California. While we're on missing places I guess I miss Kosova. Marmalade cafe in Malibu does the best breakfast in the world. Strangely I know the prices of bananas in every shop in a ten mile vicinity of home. I want to move back across the pond so I can yell 'road trip' and not drop off the top of Scotland 10 hours later. Perfection is an afternoon nap. Restlessness breeds adventure. My cat will one day take over the world. I find people in scrubs rather attractive. When hell freezes over I'm going to be busy.
Book Extract
I was in my Granddad’s chilly house in Surrey on Boxing Day, 1987. I was six-years-old and wrapped up like a pile of knitting to contain the teeth in my chattering jaws. Central heating took the form of two open fires in the draughty 1920’s detached property in the wealthiest county in England. Granddad, after years of practice, had managed to get everything into the living room that could possibly be needed so that nobody had to move more than two feet from the hearth. The toilet was upstairs and thus out of reach of the warmth but, if he knew we were coming, Granddad would fill the bath with hot water from several kettles to raise the air temperature and thaw out the loo seat. The long run up the stairs from the front room to the bathroom was something of a frosty gauntlet that, although shiver-inducing, rewarded the conqueror with a renewed appreciation for the heat from the fire that roasted the toes and pinked the cheeks upon their return. It was suggested every year that Granddad travelled to Devon and stayed with us for the festive season but this, he reiterated annually, would run the risk of the pipes bursting on account of his absence from stoking the coal fires.
This Boxing Day was typical in every way: the huge roast at lunchtime, the scones and mince pies at tea time and the gorging on chocolate tree decorations that made me hyper well past bedtime. The living room at home was a scene of a wrapping paper massacre and Granddad’s was about to become something similar. My sister Sarah, three years older and slightly calmer than I, would wind me up by hiding each of my stocking filler presents behind her back until I could guess what they were which, given that I couldn’t even see the shape of the gift, was a tad unfair. The regulatory soaps, socks and snow-shakers were strewn across the hearth as I was waited for the final present. I have always thought that, no matter how pressing the curiosity, the last present should be the biggest but Boxing Day meant the presents that were small enough to fit in the boughs of the Christmas tree. When you’re six years old it’s hard to find anything that doesn’t pale in comparison to being given your first My Little Pony Fairy Castle. But there it was…the final present…I peeled the sellotape off the corners, savouring the moment in the hope of shortening the time left of the next three hundred and sixty four days of the year. All eyes on me. And then it was over, I had in my hand a Rubics Cube. The amount of sarcasm gushing into my young mind made me breathe sharply, which in turn was interpreted as delight by those around me. ‘Thank you!!’ I gasped overcompensating for the utter disappointment at a four inch box not containing a real pony. Now I’m not sure if this is universal but I learnt the unspoken rule that one must show interest in your presents for an undesignated length of time so as to ensure you have expressed lavish amounts of gratitude, no matter how sparsely genuine it may be. So there I was. Me and a Rubics cube. Wow. Where to start? More to the point how could I discard this as soon as possible to return to the Pony Palace? Luckily my bladder thought faster than I did and graced me with the need to leave the warm spot and dash up the stairs at record breaking speeds. As I waited for nature to finish I twiddled and twisted the quadrants of the puzzle. Apparently it took most people about a year to figure it out. It took me three and a half minutes. This included one minute of staring at it, one minute of trying to wiggle the cubes into lines and the final minute and a half re-sticking on the coloured stickers that had unpeeled themselves in the steam from the kettle filled bath. I returned to the living room a genius.
Now I’d like to point out the foreboding and auspicious meaning of that story about working on a problem and then say something profoundly thought-provoking about overcoming adversity but I won’t. I was six and couldn’t have cared less how it was done just so long as I could get it out of the way and carry on with more pressing matters, such as which plastic pony to put in which plastic stable (before either or both were melted by the fire). I still believe that the Rubics cube was intended for my sister who had a longer attention span than me. In fact the only time I’d spent more than ten minutes on one activity was when Mum took the spring out of my Buckaroo and I spent a tense two hours piling things on the saddle and ears. But Sarah never had a chance. I had completed the puzzle in a flash and that was that. Now, where had I put that pony brush?