Maggy van Eijk (2018) Remember This When You’re Sad.

I don’t know Maggy van Eijk, but I’ve read her poetry on ABCtales. It’s memorable because it’s amazing. But don’t ask me to tell you the names of any of her poems. Often I can’t remember my own name. What stands out is her loopy ability to juxtapose two images that makes sense. I’d like to give you an example, but I can’t be arsed looking. I had her down at one of those exotic younger women that had pretty much everything and jam on top. ‘Remember This When You’re Sad’ suggests that I wasn’t looking very hard. I wasn’t looking very closely. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, that makes sense.  Most of us don’t, even when we do.

I hate that ‘brave’ description. Maggy isn’t brave, but she’s honest. If you can’t tell me how it is honestly then you can just fuck off.  I won’t read your work and I won’t ‘like’ your page. Maggy tells us that by 2030 one in four of us will experience mental health problems. I’m pleased with that because that means I’ll still be alive in 2030.

I didn’t read Remember When You’re Sad in one go. I nibbled at it, a couple of pages at a time. It reminded me a bit of Christine Hamill’s B is for Breast Cancer. I also remember Hamill’s prototype on ABCtales Harry Hill, something or other, that metamorphosed into The Best Medicine.  I claim credit for both books because as Maggy reminds us the internet has been created for the singular purpose of telling whopping lies. Instagram pictures of Maggy, for example, out partying and enjoying herself also show a bandage on her arm where she had cut herself or burned herself with a cigarette. I find that sad.

It also enrages me. Maggy recognises our glorious NHS is underfunded and falling to bits. I’ve long know that there is a pecking order in the NHS as there is any other organisation and mental health is aligned with old-fashioned geriatrics (care of the elderly) where those in medicine that can’t quite cut it in the elected fields of surgery all the way down to the fields of urology, general medicine and paediatrics are all better funded because mental health is where losers go –literally.   Remember This When You’re Sad reminds us that such demarcations are stupid, but the resources attributed to other specialities make it real. There’s no them and us. There’s only us. Humans (and sad Tories).

There are bits of the book I didn’t quite get, but that’s a generation thing. I remember about two years ago in the Horse and Barge somebody said I hadn’t friended them on Facebook. My phone is old fashioned. It doesn’t take pictures. It doesn’t do all that other stuff. It’s worth ten pence. A phone call costs more than my phone.  My response,  who gives a flying fuck about Facebook just about covers it. Maggy tells us she worked for BuzzFeed, she mentions the angst of Instgram, Reddit, blah, blah, blah, that’s just noise to me. Negative noise.

Sometimes as Maggy points out, we all need a holiday from ourselves. I once used that line in a story I wrote. I quite like the bit about Maggy loving dogs. My partners like that about most animals too. I guess it’s an energy thing. I keep my distance. But I like kids because they haven’t got any distance and they’re funny. Maggy tells a story about when she was a cocky thirteen-year old in Oman or some other Gulf State coming back from a teenage party and falling backwards into the pool in her party dress. It would be foolish to declare that’s when it started to go wrong or right, because it’s not a morality problem, it’s not a mental health or medical problem, it’s just life, in the raw. Remember that when you’re sad. Honesty is truth. Maggy’s got that cornered.  I wish her well.

Comments

Another one for me to seek out.

 

It sounds interesting. I plan to read it, I liked Maggys poems in the 'my baby shot me down' collection. But what makes me sad/angry is seeing the familiar faces around the shopping centre in their shabby old clothes, younger than me, who have been given too many meds for too many years and consequently have too little energy to write a single line. They are not visibly happy or sad they have become local  'characters'. And before 'mental health' happened to them they were people with a wider life and identity, whose energy had not stagnated.

aye, for every grass arena and lucid tales of woe there's stuff we'll never know. Sometimes for the best.