Beginnings

        Hello.  My name is Sealey Fisher.  My mother was a Sealey and Pa was a Fisher.  They were both burdened by Christian names that they neither liked nor felt obliged to follow family traditions in sharing.  My aunts and uncles had no such scruples and some cousins of both sexes bore both masculine and feminine names.  I could have been a Barbara or a Donovan, or even both.  And no, Barbara Donovan is not a relative, well not the one you have heard of at any rate.  The internet had not got going when they were in their prime so their embarrassment stayed local which it was, as always, more acute.  People more ordinarily named needled them throughout school and college.  My cousins noted all this down for the future and got their own back by leaving and becoming successful, some or none of which related to their unusual nomenclatures.

        My grandmothers, Lucilla and Barbara, took this badly.  I don't think I would have minded Lucilla - though I would have felt obliged to buy a large, dilapidated house and become wildly eccentric in later years or alternatively been a Southern Belle.  Both unlikely as it turned out.  My waist was more than 17 inches by the time I was six and I was, at the time, the wrong sex.  I never heard the thoughts of my grandfathers.  My parents got around the problem by moving a very long way away where I acquired an instant veneer of exoticism which was wholly undeserved but which I instantly started to work on.

       
        I was the youngest child for seven years.  My parents were in their mid forties by the time I arrived.  They had given up on the idea of having children and had started having sex for fun.  Isn't that just a lesson.  They were even more surprised when my brother arrived seven years later.  Fortunately life didn't have to go on teaching them the same lesson as the menopause intervened.  I wished they had started earlier and had provided me with a sister, even one strangely named, although my parents had a stubborn streak that I see so clearly in myself.  Or that my brother could have been a girl.  I wouldn't have wanted him to change sex as men just don't make believable women.   I suggested they call him Fisher Sealey and was told not to be silly.  My parents had done with names consisting of surnames and named him after the town in which he was conceived (they thought), Keflavik.  He is known as Kef, or Kev to the casual of hearing.  He doesn't mind people thinking he is called Kevin, though I would have.

      As a result of being the only child of aged parents, I spent a lot of time in my own head and in reading.  I wrote terrible poetry and picked fights with the other kids in class.  My mother decided to pimp my image and gave me a permanent (home style) and some earrings.  I looked like a mock up for a fifty year old women.  I had bad teeth from the sugary medicines that didn't keep the recurrent bronchitis at bay and a worse attitude.  My parents charitably though I was shy.  I was actually watching people closely.

      I tended to hang around with the kids no-one else wanted to hang around with.  The girl who always had some part in plaster and who wore a seahorse in perspex around her neck, the spotty girl and the Christians with their guitars who didn't give a xxxx if the kids didn't love them because God did.  I thought actually that this was good - the alternatives were to spend time booting a ball or the other kids or to listen to girls endlessly wondering if so and so liked them.  I used to say yes of course whilst actually knowing that so and so wouldn't notice they unless they turned out in football kit.  All that painting and curling and primping for nothing.

      I did a lot of reading and a lot of thinking about writing and then became now and I have finally gotten around to it.  I like what I write and all my stories contain a little bit of me: a dream, something that popped into my head, something remembered.  Yes, people always die at the end but isn't that just life?

      Next blog, I will tell you how I pitched up in Helsinki.  Until then, keep warm.  It probably isn't -16 where you are sitting today.