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The album that nearly never was

If you heard our practices you’d probably wonder how we ever managed to learn any songs because quite frankly the laughing often outweighs the singing.

Some of you will know that for many years I have been part of a singing group called the Kettle Girls. One third in fact, for we are a trio of ladies who sing three-part harmony a Capella. And yes, we have long felt that now being grown-up women the ‘Girls’ part of our name is perhaps stretching things a bit, but once you have had a name for a long time it becomes quite difficult to change.

We began many, many years ago, before we actually began. Let me explain. The Kettle Girls are me, my mum and my best friend but we began singing together in a very different way before this. Let’s scoot back an horrific amount of years to the early nineties when my mum ran a church youth singing group where she somehow herded a large group of children through songs to perform at various church events. As is often the case, we children grew up, turned into disinterested teenagers and the group eventually ebbed to a close.

If I’m honest, I can’t really recall the transition time but from one to the other mum, bestie and I found ourselves continuing to sing together, sat at mum’s kitchen table – but this time we went folk. It’s not surprising really seeing as I come from a lineage of folkies on both sides of the family and so had been steeped in shanties, finger-in-ear tuning and nylon string strumming my entire life. And so, we sang – pretty much mostly in the key of D to begin with.

As the years have gone on I have to say I am very proud of what we have done. We managed to break out of just folk to embrace a multitude of genres, we’ve performed at an amazing array of different events (including once having to do battle with an ever-encroaching bagpipe band) and have made three albums. I’m glad to say we also now span a much wider singing key, although as we’ve got older it is generally now Bb.

CUE BIG PLUG HERE

I can’t be backward about being forward here, yes, this piece is very much to let you know our latest album is ready to buy – but it is an album that very nearly never was.

I promised you a piece of writing that was not entirely about cancer, but, seeing as that is what my daily life contains I can’t give you a blog without any mention at all.

As I mentioned above, we have moved on from just folk to a wide variety of genres but I think we have perhaps become best known for our comedy songs when performing. Even though we always tried to curate sets that included a little bit of everything, knowing how well the more amusing pieces went down we perhaps erred on the side of a few more of them; they were certainly the most requested. But this meant that we increasingly had a collection of beautiful songs we have nurtured into being and loved that weren’t necessarily getting the attention they deserved. So we decided to put them on an album. (To the mild horror of our Long-Suffering sound engineer.)

Life though has a funny way of throwing a few spanners in the works and in this case it went full on for it with an extra crowbar and screwdriver too. First up: The songs we had amassed seemed to fall into two categories: lullabies and sea-based songs and it soon became evident that these genres often and largely are about death and dying. Now, that made for interesting practices when you have not long found out that your cancer is now considered incurable. I believe the amount of cognitive dissonance the three of us must have executed for months must be some kind of record. But, the songs are beautiful – we were determined.

Now the really hard part – finding a time that the three of us and Long-Suffering sound engineer could all be available to record. We began looking at the beginning of the year (2023) and eventually found a date in October. That was it. Our one chance. As the date neared events conspired against us once more so that by the weekend of recording I had not only cancer to deal with but had just begun chemotherapy again – and had Covid (although the tests hadn’t confirmed that at the time so I thought it was just a cold and I was just struggling with breathlessness because of everything else.) To cut a long story short we did record but goodness we gave L-S sound engineer the worst possible scenario to work with – a maximum of two takes per song, some not even that.

He is some kind of sound wizard with the patience of ten-thousand saints because – WE HAVE AN ALBUM! We are particularly proud that this album contains some of our own self-penned songs too.

We would normally take our CDs out with us to the places we perform but, and I promise not too much more of this, we are unable to do any gigs as I just do not have the stamina because of my cancer and treatment but also I have only half a voice now and no lung capacity. I have found in the past that for some reason chemotherapy did make me lose strength in my voice but over time I managed to mostly get it back. This time is a little different as I had radiotherapy to my neck area and this can and seems to have damaged my vocal chords. In short when I sing now I can no longer guarantee if anything will come out or what it will sound like if it does.

It is a strange thing to happen to someone who has been singing in one format or another for their entire life. I am determined to view it as temporary still and that with time I will get my voice back again. We still get together to sing each week and I am very much in favour of giggling at my cracked or missing notes rather than getting upset by them.

This leads me onto my final thoughts about the Kettle Girls. We say it often and it could not be more true; we are more than a singing group. We are family, we are a support group, we are friends and a whole thing bigger than three voices. If you heard our practices you’d probably wonder how we ever managed to learn any songs because quite frankly the laughing often outweighs the singing. And we share a lot of food and drink too – dreadful for singing, but wonderful for bonhomie.

I believe that life is filled with love stories. Not just romantic love – all of the loves, and finding something like being part of the Kettle Girls is one of the love stories of my life.

This album may be our last if my voice does not manage to recover (so you better get yourselves a copy – hey, hey, unsubtle nudge). Or it may not. If I get my vocal chords back in order one day I have a feeling the next album will be of our more amusing songs (I’m sorry (not sorry) L-S sound engineer.)

Until then our new album Drifting is available to buy (£10 plus p&p where applicable) by contacting a Kettle Girl.

And to entice you, you can have up to three free listens to one of our self-penned songs, ‘Softly Come Sleep’, just click here.

Drifting is a collection of sea songs and lullabies either written, or chosen and arranged by the Kettle Girls to create a beautiful album of gentle listening. Whether you close your eyes and drift away on the ocean, or softly let go and drift off to sleep, let the soothing sound of this album take you away.

thekettlegirls@gmail.com

f @thekettlegirls

I am but human

I am writing this sat at my desk on a cold and windy late November night having just finished a crossword. I have a glass of wine and have just had a mini mince pie, having broken my, not-before-December, rule and gone early. Oh, and I’ve just been kicked in the chest by a wallop of anxiety.

It has been a tough couple of weeks and I have coped from anywhere on the scale from, really quite well to absolutely crushed. It is a strange thing to live with incurable cancer in that life still goes on. You end up living almost in two worlds; one where I am writing shopping lists, cooking meals, hanging out washing, having normal conversations, and the other where the crushing grief and the physical difficulties of disease and treatment reside. Sometimes I can be quite happily ensconced in the former when the latter comes crashing in, kicking reality into the bottom of my stomach.

One piece of reality I’ve had to face over the last two weeks is acknowledging that I’d have to give up work. As a fiercely feminist and (mostly) independent woman I have found this a very difficult pill to swallow. But the truth is, dealing with this cancer is a full time job. I’m averaging three to four days a week having to do something hospital based. When you add in recovery on top of that and trying to keep on top of basic life / home things – there just simply isn’t time, let alone the mental capacity to work as well.

So what is it that has taken up so much time to make me have to come to this decision? Let’s go back just over a week. We begin on the Monday with pre-chemo blood tests. Tuesday is chemotherapy day and I also begin immunotherapy. But, the chemo is cut sort as the canula in my hand does not stay correctly in my vein and there is wide concern (four nurses and a doctor, as well as the hospital photographer are deployed to my side) as there is a chance the chemotherapy drug is not going into my vein but under the skin – which is very dangerous. So, back the next day for a follow up check. Friday is more blood tests including for pre-op – and another follow up check. Sunday is CT scan. Monday I had a small operation to have a port put in*. Tuesday is more chemotherapy. This Sunday is an ultra sound scan, then Monday pre chemo bloods, Tuesday chemotherapy and Wednesday seeing the oncologist. And round and round we go. It is exhausting and that’s not even taking into consideration all the recovery and side effects. On top of all this the pain caused by tumours pressing on nerves has taken my pain levels to a new high I didn’t know existed, rendering me literally unable to move at times, but just sit and cry.

*What is a port? Well, it’s what you get when you’re veins are so collapsed from years of chemotherapy that they are no longer usable. It is essentially a tube that is inserted under the skin of the chest that goes directly into a vein in your neck. At the other end is a chamber, which also sits beneath the skin and has a kind of self-sealing membrane into which medication can be directly given or bloods taken. The ridiculous catch-22 I had with it all was that, I needed a port because my veins are no longer usable, but to have a port put in they needed to access veins for blood tests and cannulas. At the moment, my arms and hands are black and blue from multiple failed attempts to find any veins that could be accessed to get this operation done. I also have two fetching rows of navy blue stitches on my neck and chest.

So yes, the last two weeks have been tough but I do still try to stand back a little, when I can to hear what’s going on in the wider circle around me, as well as how I am aligning with my own thoughts and beliefs. And this is what keeps coming back to me from this fortnight: acceptance and other party guilt.

What do I mean?

Other party guilt: I am going through bad stuff, let’s face it, pretty much as bad as it gets – BUT, that does not mean no one else is. What I’m finding is people are caveating telling me about things with, ‘Oh, but it’s nothing like what you are going through, so I probably shouldn’t say anything.’ Please, don’t do that. I haven’t turned into someone who can, or will, no longer empathise with other people’s upsets and pains. I don’t want those close to me to feel they can’t grumble about a headache, tooth problems, bad back – just because I have effing cancer. Those things are still rubbish. I still care. We don’t need to pit one suffering against another and back off if we don’t think ours is as big. As humans, we care, share and feel each other’s difficulties. I am still human too, you don’t have to edit yourself around me.

Acceptance: this is harder and very much in the realms of not always being able to practice what I believe.

I hold the belief that to be able to do anything about something you have to accept it first.

Here are a couple of things I have pondered upon about acceptance:

Acceptance is better than fighting. If you are fighting something you are essentially denying it. How can you change something that you deny exists? Fighting and denial merely prolong getting to the lowest point and means that when you get there it is from a negative and reactive place. Acceptance means that you have made the proactive choice to move. Acceptance brings a peace from the cessation of fighting. It doesn’t mean that what is happening is okay or that you’re not going to do everything you can to change it. It just means you will deal with it facing forwards rather than when trying to run away. Acceptance can be for the short term. You can accept something as it is in that moment but not that it has to stay that way forever. It gives you the opportunity to ask yourself what you can do to change things. If it is something you need to accept as forever, then it gives you the time to ask yourself, what can I do to deal with this in the best way possible?

This is what I am trying to do about giving up work. I didn’t want to but I have had to accept that I had to. My job now is to live as long as I can in the best way that I can. It may not bring in an income, I may have to learn to be more dependant but I hope that by doing so I can bring other things into the lives of those I love by being here and with them in the best ways that we can share. As for accepting the wider implications of my circumstances, well I’m still working on that, I am but human** after all.

**Human, but starting to feel somewhat bionic with the latest of my additions, the port. Darling husband says I need to run everywhere in slow motion making the chuh-chuh-chuh-chu-chuuuuhhh noise of the Six Million Dollar Man. I just raise my eyebrows at the idea of running, quite frankly.

The simple pleasure of a pine cone

This week the weather quite clearly has no idea what it is doing. Or, if it does, it is working to some indecipherable plan that we are not privy to. I had to put a jumper and socks on today, for which I was actually more than happy. The few days we had midweek week where the temperatures tipped into the thirties, were far too much for me; I barely functioned. Perhaps it’s because I spend a good ninety-five percent of my life feeling cold and wearing at least three more layers than everyone else (I have been known to wear seven layers in winter) that when I finally get warm, my body has no clue what to do. After the scorching heat and dragging the electric fans out of the cupboard and discarding the duvet, the last two days have been more bearable, even if a little confusing.

We were promised thunderstorms this week; they did not come – which I was annoyed about. We have had some rain, intermittent sun and
cloud but goodness, a lot of blustery wind. But that didn’t stop me taking a post work stroll on which I experienced hot sun, high winds and rain in regular revolutions.

On my walk I had two incidences where I was very aware of how I am becoming more and more accustomed to simplicity and the pleasure and freedom it brings. The first was when on leaving the house I pocketed only my keys and my phone (and a tissue, but there is always at least one of those resident in any of my pockets). A while back, when we were in much stricter lockdown and supposedly not leaving the house but for the essential shop, I tweeted about noticing that bags seemed such redundant irrelevances. They sit there waiting to be filled and carted about and for some reason they struck me as rather absurd at that point. And I am someone who has far too many bags of all shapes and sizes – just in case! But today there was a feeling of lightness and liberty in the grab-and-go of so few items. (I wonder if this is how men have always felt. Perhaps if decent pockets in women’s clothing had been de rigour from the start we wouldn’t have become so accustomed to dragging bags around with us at all times.)

The second moment was as I neared home. I was mildly grumping at this point as the last public footpath, that takes me across a field to my home, has once more not been looked after by the land owner and is again impassable; so I had to take the road route. But, by doing so I passed some large pine trees under which many cones had been scattered on the ground, most crushed by passing cars but one excellent, fat specimen called to me. As I picked it up to bring home I realised I experienced the same feeling as I have done in the past when buying a new item of clothing or the such. I read a book recently which talked about how we get used to new things so quickly that they lose their ‘spark’ in very little time which is what compels us to then buy again and again and again. It’s why some very rich people have multiple cars of huge value and still never feel satisfied. They are merely looking for the next hit of new. That being the case, perhaps a pine cone really can have the same excitement-producing reception in the brain that a new pair of boots can.

In some ways we have all had to live a little more simply recently and at the beginning I had hopes that this would have a positive impact. But, like so many people, I have been appalled and quite upset at the sheer magnitude of people and the destruction and littering they have left behind at some of our destination spots. I dared to dream that out of this strange time we are living through, there might have risen a more compassionate, thoughtful and caring collective consciousness. But it would seem that now, perhaps more than ever, we appear to be a species divided between those that think beyond their immediate bubble and those that don’t. I find it hard to not fall into the thinking that, I am right and they are wrong, nothing is that clear-cut of course, but I simply can’t understand the continued devastation on large and small scales across the globe of the beautiful world we are lucky to inhabit. Nor the drive some seem to possess to split us into divided groups of people based solely on geography, aesthetic, lifestyle choices and all the things that make us so wonderfully rich and diverse and of these differences that we should be celebrating and sharing.

It doesn’t help that there are so many ways now to see so much of this negative behaviour. Sometimes I have to go on a news and social media break just to give my (admittedly very sensitive) heart and brain a break from it all. I want to believe there is more good than bad. It is always worth seeking out happiness and care and opening our eyes to the little things that can bring comfort and hope, and to find the joy in the simple things.

To this end, my pine cone and I will be quite happy at home. It will sit in my bowl of found natural treasures, all of which make me smile – yes, even the skulls. And if you need a break from the treadmill of bad news, you can join me on a very blustery walk in the video below. The wind shaking the trees and rustling the long grasses speaks louder than I can, but I don’t mind being drowned out by nature.

Shrews – living life in the fast lane

If you thought that a shrew was just, ‘a kind of a mouse with a funny nose’, then you’d be wrong. These tiny mammals actually have more in common with hedgehogs and moles than they do rodents and are pretty interesting in their own right.

But, why I am writing about shrews? Whilst eating breakfast I saw our Big Cat faffing about like a ninny on the lawn. There is nothing particularly special about this, he is a strange fellow and is often seen behaving in delightfully joyous, but daft ways. At first it looked as if he were trying to dance a jig on four legs, but from past experience I knew that he was excited – he had caught something. Now, big cat is not an adept hunter (for which I am glad) and he is such a sweet, gentle and odd soul that, when he does actually catch something, he has no idea what to do with it. He will often wander around with it held gently and unharmed in his mouth and will let me take it from him. (It is small cat who will one day take over the world and destroy everything in his wake to do so.)

And so I found myself relocating a tiny shrew into one of our tree-lined hedges.

Let us examine the shrew. They have dense, velvety fur which is white-ish underneath, pale at the sides and is darker on top. We cannot ignore the long nose, which makes it so readily identifiable, it has small ears and poor eyesight. Unlike rodents, whose front incisors continue to grow throughout life, the shrew has small, spike-like red-tipped teeth which wear down over time – and that’s after having already lost its milk teeth before birth. They are small, 5-8 cm, with a tail of around 2-4 cm but, and this is where I land the first awesome fact for you, they can shrink – on purpose.

Shrews do no hibernate, instead they enter a state of torpor over the winter months. To aid this reduction in energy cost and need, they undergo an amazing morphological change; they shrink. Their spines shorten, their internal organs, bones, brain and even skull reduce in size. When the weather improves and they are able to go about their foraging with vigour once more, they grow back to their bigger size.

They are foragers and will eat insects, spiders, worms, small slugs and snails, chrysalis as well as nuts and seeds; and they need a lot. Shrews need to eat every 2-3 hours just to stay alive and will consume between 100% and 300% of their own bodyweight to survive; partly because they are frenetic creatures, zipping about at incredibly fast speeds. (The average weight of a woman in the UK is around 70kg, the equivalent of the shrew’s intake would be like consuming 350 200g bars of chocolate – a day!)

Shrews are feisty and promiscuous. That’s right, when the mating season begins its worse than a Saturday night when the nightclubs have closed and it’s a free-for-all; a-fightin’ and a-lovin,’ and naturally, the shrew equivalent of a kebab after. They are highly territorial creatures and the females (who will have 2-5 litters of 5-7 young) will often raise a litter fathered by several different males. But here’s the awwww moment, shrews have been seen to move in a ‘caravan,’ whereby the young follow their mother in a line, each holding the tail of the one in front in their mouth.

But all this activity can be dangerous exposing them to their varied predators. They are most often killed by owls, but weasels, stoats, foxes, kestrels and cats will have a go to. However, they do not prove to be the fine dining experience wanted and are often abandoned due to secreting a foul tasting liquid from glands on their skin. Which is why, if you are a cat owner you may find shrews abandoned in various places about the house. Your cat is not showing you adoring love by giving you a gift, it just doesn’t like the taste of its take-away and wants you to get rid of it for them.

I mentioned at the start that shrews have poor hearing and eyesight but they have a possible secret talent to aid their foraging and navigation. It is thought that they perhaps use a form of echolocation; not the clicks, but ultrasonic high-pitched squeaks to create an echo scene of their surroundings. (I have also just read that hedgehogs use ultrasonic whistles – I must look into this more!) For hunting, they make use of that mobile snout and highly sensitive whiskers which they waggle around constantly and once they brush up against something recognised as prey, they attack at high speed and with pin-point precision.

To recap: red teeth, can shrink at will, eat more than their body weight a day, love a good fight and getting some lovin,’ echolocate and secrete foul liquid from the skin – pretty awesome, hey?

Most shrews do not live longer than a year, so it’s perhaps little wonder that they live life in the fast lane; feasting, fighting and f-well, you know.

Common Shrew – Sorex araneus