Thanks. Especially for the memories

Posted by Katy Regan at 13:08 on 13 Jun 2009

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Guys, what can I say. Thank you so much for all your comments and suggestions on how to deal with recent nervous break-down (as apposed to the other five million I have probably amassed in your very good company over last few years).

I was very impressed with how imaginative you all are. If this is what you come up with on someone’s pesky old blog’s comments page, imagine what you could do with a novel to finish! Brilliant! In fact, I might turn it into one of those Internet projects, or games I play with Fergus: you write a line of the story, I’ll write a line of the story. Actually, I’ve run out of ideas, you write the last twenty chapters, ya...?

Anyway, I wanted to mention people personally. Gareth – you know who you are –  got top marks for dark humour (just chuck it in the canal and tell your publisher you’ve spent all the money.) Incidentally, Gareth – a friend of mine - has his own blog: funny, touching, a very rare example of a bloke spilling his guts  - in a very good way. It’s about his recent move, with his gorgeous wife and two little boys to India – where he is going to be stay-at-home dad. It’s at www.indianhousehusband.com.blogspot and you should check it out without further ado as it’s really bloody brilliant (how’s the Gandhi foot, Gareth?)

In terms of top marks for flattery, Lucy and Jeni are in Matt Black’s very good books. I should tell you that he / I was delighted and very amused that you girls seem to think he is ‘exciting’ and that the answer to my misery was to keep on snogging him especially since the evening after which I wrote that blog and you wrote that comment, I went round to his to find him glued to a documentary about people who keep monkeys as babies, quaffing his way through a four-pack. (He did actually say he might get a monkey baby though so maybe he is very exciting after all.)

Award for the most creative and ever so slightly scary was ‘Anon’'s advice that I should make a cathartic bonfire, burn it all, then decide whether it was worth rescuing (wasn’t quite sure how I could do that once it was burnt, but anyway...)

Last but not least, big shout out to Jo Middleton! Jo Middleton - she also knows who she is - left a comment on my blog with words to the effect of, “Sort it out woman”.  With just those four, no-nonsense words, it all came flooding back to me: Jo Middleton! Fellow northerner who I shared digs with when I was SIXTEEN (that was 1990 by the way) the year I spent at stage school in Surrey (Posh Spice was in our year. What’s that you say? I’ve told you that a hundred times? That I’ve been dining out on it for about a decade and should get a new story?)   

Anyway, Jo Middleton was a legend. She took the whole stage school thing about as seriously as me (i.e. not seriously at all) and we spent the entire time lying on each other’s bunk-beds laughing our heads off about Miss Betty Laine, the Principal of the school who was supposed to be some ex-dancer but actually looked like a celeriac i.e. knarled and rather round.  Jo suggested I draw on our past experiences at college to help me with my writing. She reminded me of the time – aged sixteen – she and I left our digs in Epsom, Surrey, without telling our land-lady and landlord to attempt to go to a ‘rave’ in HACKNEY (we’d picked up a flyer in a shoe shop in London town the day before). There we were – me wearing a Harlequin skin-tight cat-suit and a bum-bag and some bright orange Reebok trainers (nice). She was wearing hot pants and not much else I seem to remember. We attempted to find our own way to the garage rave in Hackney but surprise, surprise, we got mugged in an underpass and held by our necks over the-train track! (I think they nicked £20 and took the piss out of the Tampax I had in my bum-bag.) The lack of self-preservation was shocking. Thank God for our lovely land-lord who picked up two very frightened, not very cool teenagers. It was very scary at the time, but you may have just given me the perfect story for my next book, Jo so thank you!

Anyway, I seem to have got over mental breakdown with not too many scars. The writing is underway again. For now, and your comments have really lifted my spirits in times of need!  I’ll keep you posted and if I go silent again, you’ll know it’s because this time, I really have checked into The Priory.

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