Tom? She wants Tom of all people to accompany her to the docs to see if she can still conceive? Has she no inkling what Tom is going to think if she gets passed as fertile?
It would almost, I say almost, be better to have Helen by her side and yes, I do realise what I am saying. Of course her best bet would be to stay well away from the BFNI altogether.
Anyone else want to shake her till her teeth rattle? Yes, Gus dear, I know you nearly always do, but now especially?
Mad as a hatter. And yes, I want to shake her more than ever and possibly also slap her about a bit.
Heâs not the brightest at the best of times, but Tom will be exceedingly confused when next she tells him to butt out/sod off/take his mucky paws off her this minute. And for once, heâd be within his rights to be.
Kirstyâs high point for me was âaaaaaaaarghâ on 24 April 2014. Her hanging around Ambridge since then just continues to lower her in my estimation.
Yes, why on earth did she come back there? It is not her home, she had nowhere to live there and no job either, plus a family which she ought to have been happy to run several miles to avoid: why set foot in the place at all?
Her coming back to Ambridge was plot-related. She was needed, so thought the storywriters at any rate, to see what was going on with Helen and rescue her. But yes, why on earth would she come back?
I believe they could have handled the Helen/Rob story perfectly well without Kirsty just by having the whole of Ambridge not be blind and deaf to anything Rob-related, but there you go. People ought to have been talking like mad about Robâs nasty, bullying behaviour and they ought to have been saying at first, âWell, nasty git, isnât he? At least he seems devoted to that odd wife of his.â Then that would gradually evolve to their noticing that he wasnât actually awfully nice to her either.
Oh, well, thatâs water under the bridge. Now, I think theyâre handling the Kirsty and Tom business in equally annoying fashion. I loathe the way everyone told Kirsty she wasnât ready to go back to work and hey presto she wasnât ready to go back to work so now she has to apologise for not doing as she was told. If everyone had been talking to me like that, Iâd have gone back to work out of bloody-mindedness, ready or not as perhaps Kirsty did. Did all those people telling her she âmust take time to grieveâ think of that?
It occurs to me that what is now called âtaking time to grieveâ looks perilously close to what my mother called âwallowing in self-pityâ.
Neither Tom nor Kirsty can be grieving for somebody they knew, because they didnât know that baby. What they are upset about is what happened to them, in each case; and not to each other, either.
The same is true, even more so, in the case of Ruth, who was aware that she was pregnant for twelve whole days of which she spent at least six not wanting to have another baby and frightened because it was sure to be a difficult pregnancy. Any âoh I am so sadâ there is self-pity plain and simple.
Iâm a little softer than you, o Fish, but I think there are two components here.
â The amount of trauma you experience from a bad thing happening to you is largely determined by acculturation. If you have been told that a miscarriage, or failing your exams, or being raped, or losing your job, is just something to expect every once in a while, youâll be less thrown when it happens than if you have been told that itâs the end of the world.
⥠Once someone has gathered that load of trauma, the level of which may be uncorrelated with how bad anyone else thinks the thing that happened to them is, they need to do something about it. While there are some techniques that often work well, thereâs nothing universal, and no way of working out how much time and effort someone will need to recover.
This being TA, a course of lemon drivel usually suffices. In rare cases where that doesnât work, raiding the Peggybank is a most effective panacea.
Damn right! And yet everyone in Ambridge, it sounded like, seemed to think they knew better than Kirsty how she felt about it and what she needed to do about her feelings.
Gah.
That absolutely was the part I found infuriating along with those listeners on various social media nodding approvingly (as I saw it) at all those platitudes levelled at Kirsty about âneeding time to grieveâ. Oh, and âyou must be devastatedâ - that little jewel came from Helen. And then taking criticism of that to mean one was saying Kirsty should be stoical and stiff upper lip.
And now, Kirsty having to grovel to those who knew better and were proved right is particularly nauseating.
I kept hearing an implied ââŚor elseâ
Oh, joe, thatâs a little unfair. Helen wasnât wishing Kirsty to be devastated as such, she just had this script of âThis is Me supporting a Devastated Friend post miscarriage, so I can bring all my recent experience of popping out a live one to bear - oops, see what I did there?!! - and showing I have Grown and Maturedâ (into an even more swollen and self-obsessed arse who stalks people round the bird hides, but hey - detail).
I am sincerely hoping that Kirstyâs well intentioned but entirely unnecessary guilt baking of the inevitable Lemon Drivel should include a magic ingredient - Lactulose. That way, all the scoffers can truly share the experience of âLetting it all goâ .
Note to self: never accept cake from a âcreative thinkerâ like Migrant
Tee hee!
Itâs not as though you werenât warnedâŚ
Itâll be cheese next, wonât it.
Prompt Mankwold Excursion?
Que? Not ââŚsadillaâ, just âque?â
yrs, fickaspigdribble.