Geraldine Firequeen
  • home
  • My Story
  • My Books
    • Free downloads >
      • Dad
    • Review of Collected Poems
    • Cookbooks >
      • free recipe book
    • Poetry
    • Autobiography picture files
  • My Mystical Path
  • My Four Husbands
  • My Blog
  • Contact me
  • Geraldine's Cookery Videos
  • Geraldine's fashion tips
  • Geraldine's Travels (Pendle)
  • Geraldine's Travels (Germany & Ireland)
  • Cookbooks and other publications
  • Free recipes
  • Link Page
  • Bedbugs, Hairy Arses, Snorers and Blisters

Geraldine Firequeen

One day I picked up the phone, and a voice asked "How would you like to stand as MP for Pendle?" Not too sure, to judge by the picture!

read more about me

Semaine Federale

30/6/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
As well as the Tour de France, of which everyone has heard, the French have an annual cycling festival called Semaine Federale, held in a different city each year. A good plan, as it shares out the profits as well as the inconvenience and disruption to people's lives. I wouldn't have known about it if it weren't for the skulls . . . . crystal ones that is.
    By 2004 I'd acquired four of them - buying one is a mistake, since it lets them get started in your home. That first one paves the way for the second - the two of them put their heads together and soon there are four. Once they had a power base, things started seriously hotting up. 

Picture
They demanded things - they wanted a table to sit on, and I gave them my tarot table, covered in an embroidered cloth. It seemed flowers made them happy, so I picked roses from my garden. Candles, incense and feathers came next. I should have known, the day they asked to go under a cloth, that things were getting serious. Now I could not see them, but when I passed their table they would give out messages. They were working to bring another skull, they said, it would be citrine and its name was Frankenstein. I told them that was not a name I liked.

Picture
I told Joshua Shapiro, my crystal skull mentor, what they were up to, and he said he did not know of any citrine skulls. Nevertheless, they were certain - Frankenstein was coming! Joshua was launching the world's first crystal skull conference in Switzerland. He invited me, but I declined. That kind of thing is outside my income bracket.
    One day, passing their table, I heard the skulls say "We're going to Switzerland".
    "I don't know how you'll get there," I said, "because I'm not." But they didn't drop it. And the citrine skull turned up on ebay - he was in Brazil, and very expensive. I put him on my watch list, and wrote to the maker saying we would do our best to meet his price, but if he could come down a little, it would make things easier.

    Summer arrived and I started thinking about a holiday - on my bike of course. I remembered the chap we went to Normandy with in 2000, in an old banger of a bus. He was cheap. He might be going somewhere. I went to his website and noticed a flashing icon - 'late availability' - I clicked on it.
    He was taking the bus to Semaine Federale at a place called Cernay. I typed Cernay into a search and found there were six places all with the same name. One was within two days' ride of the conference in Courtemaiche, Switzerland. "All right," I said to the skulls, "I'll find out which Cernay it is, and if it's that one, we will go."
    It was. We did. When I told Joshua the story of how we got there, he iinvited me to speak to the conference. In a meditation, the skulls revealed how they could be used in  healing, and I conducted individual and group sessions using them, something I had never thought to see myself doing.
    After the expense of the holiday, I thought I could wave goodbye to the citrine skull, but when I got home I found an email offering him at a price I could easily afford. The maker had been told in a dream that he was meant for me.
    He arrived. His name is Frankenstein because, after all, he is a creation of the Gang of Four, and they had already named him. Who was I to argue?

Pictures: Top - Ready for the off - Semaine Federale
Middle:
Jethro (Indian Amethyst) and Marguerite (Rose Quartz) - skulls 2 & 3
Bottom: Frankenstein arrives. His skull mentors/creators in the foreground are (l to r) Haakon (malachite), Marguerite, Princess Xena (astrophyllite), Jethro.
Below: the situation by 2006 - Gang of  Four, centre front, behind blue agate slice. You will see they had now begun collecting crystal pillars and angels.
Picture
0 Comments

"Oh, Doctor! I'm in trouble," - "Well, goodness, gracious me!"

20/12/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
All my life I never bothered with doctors, but I did assume their services would be available to me if/when I needed them. Now that I do, all I find is total inefficiency.

Consider the following 8month saga:
1. You injure your thigh muscle through using a ball-throwing device, after going at it like an Olympic discus thrower.
2. It gets worse, so when you cannot even lift your foot from the floor, you visit Doc. You also mention you have noticed a strange swelling on the outer edge of right foot.
3. He sends you for an xray on your foot.
4. Results take ten days to travel four miles. Says nothing wrong with foot.
5. You do not get any better. You visit again. You lie on a couch, he picks up your leg, waves it one way, then the other and declares you have a hip problem, nothing can be done, come back when it is bad enough and you can have a new hip.
6. You suffer some more, your holiday in Ireland is spoiled because you cannot walk far, if at all. You go back and insist on xray of hip (to rule it out, in your opinion).
7. Results return after 14 days. You are not shown any xrays, nor is there any discussion. Verdict: Moderate damage to right hip; mild to other. You ask what does that mean? Eejit starts to tell you what arthritis is. You cut him short by asking: “Do I need a hip operation?” Answer, “No.”
8. You say now that that is ruled out, can you see a physiotherapist about your muscle problem. He agrees. Again, has to come from you, has to be forced. He says waiting list is 2 months, You say you  can wait.
9. After almost three months, you ring surgery to ask what has happened to your physiotherapy appointment? Answer, it does not appear to have been made. They will do it now and mark it ‘urgent’. You wait.
10. A week later you get a letter asking you to phone a clinic. You imagine this means you will now get an appointment, Wrong. After asking some questions, you are told you have now ‘registered’ and will be placed on a waiting list.
11. Another letter comes. ‘Your doctor recommends physiotherapy concerning your back problem”. Fury. Rage. One thing you do not have, thankfully, is back pain. You telephone the number and are slightly cross. You also note the letter says that when  you have 'attended the back pain clinic’ you will be ‘placed on a waiting list’. And God knows how long you will again wait for the wrong referral to the wrong department.
12. Just put me down for the crematorium. It will be quicker.


0 Comments

Writing

17/11/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
It is coming out more and more that self-publishing (Lulu) is the best way to go nowadays. It was always the Holy Grail to find a 'publisher' by which we meant someone that would do all the work and sell your book for you. Now apparently that is no more. Even if you achieve this HG they still expect you to do all the marketing yourself and do not put any money into this (except in a few cases). I also frequently read that a writer should spend 95% of her time marketing and 5% writing. Not many of us can do this. What we want, what we really really want, is for some devoted fan to dedicate their life to promoting our talent, while we get on with what we were put on this earth to do - live, observe and write. So there is fat chance I will ever become famous. I wanted to leave my mark on the world - time is getting short, but my Spirit Guides whispered in my ear - "Your life is your memorial - who you were, what you did. No one is going to forget that." And they are right.

0 Comments

Signs of Old Age?

26/8/2013

1 Comment

 
Picture
I just watched Daytime TV for the first time ever. Hitherto this has been tabu; I never put it on before 6pm, considering it the height of decadence to watch before this watershed.

Is this one of the ‘signs of old age’ we are always looking for? Like wearing your first cardigan, getting your first shopping trolley, or acquiring a walking stick - two of which milestones I have passed, though I draw the line at cardigans. Being forced to wear one daily at school caused me to eschew the practice ever after. No, I believe it to be a consequence of the deterioration of radio in modern times. From the four alternatives available for after-breakfast listening, none of them are worth the effort of bending my earlugs.

My first ‘hit’, BBC1, produced a most entertaining narrative - excellent for a writer, as it dealt with the unravelling of unknown people’s life stories. This was ‘Heir Hunter’. Fascinating, yes, riveting, certainly, but how sad that no one traced the now sorrowing relatives of these people while they were still alive, bringing them to their door while there was still time to share and reminisce. The crocodile tears of one participant, visiting the home where her cousin had died ‘to be sure that she was happy there’, did not impress. “That is the main thing,” she said, but no, the main thing would have been for her to give some human warmth in the final years, not turn up to collect the legacy.

Yes, and you might ask, what am I doing to cheer and comfort forgotten relatives of mine? You are quite right, nothing. I am as guilty as the rest.

picture: My Dad, who died in 1996, with his Murfin-Shaw cousins in their native Derbyshire


1 Comment

Unpicking the Past

6/11/2012

0 Comments

 
Picture
Can't believe these women who want to sue undercover policemen for sleeping with them. Are we all going to start suing every man who ever lied to us to get into our knickers? Goodness me - read Mrs Jackson Rides Out and weep! Several men must be shaking in their shoes and I could be a rich woman!
    All this retrospective justice is wrong. You cannot go back in time, examine people's motives and actions and apply today's standards of behaviour to them. And as for the Jimmy Savile Groping Scandal - where I come from (born 1941) groping came as standard, it was part of growing up and learning what the world was about. I was only small, about eight years old, when I exited the family sitting room to go to the toilet. When I came out, all was dark. I did not scream for Mum (fat lot of good that would have done, we were tough in those days), I probably assumed a bulb had gone. I did not know my 'not all there' Uncle had turned out the light and was waiting at the end of the passage to grab and grope me. I extricated myself - silently - ran back in the warm room with its roaring fire and thought no more about it - except to steer even clearer of Uncle Jack, whom I did not like in the first place. I never even remembered this incident until, writing my 'novel' Four Geminis and a Jacuzzi , I wrote this: 

"He brought me in the health centre - I thought I was safe anyway, the place was full of workmen. There was that Roy, and Kevin, and some others. He says, 'go in there and see that sunbed that's just come,' - in that little room opposite here, you know," she explained, "then when I was inside wondering what I was supposed to look at, he came in after me and shut the door.
    "It was all dark and I was frightened, wondering what he was gonna do. All I could see was this little red light where his cigar was. He kept laughing and grabbing at me. I tried to stop him. I said, 'come on now, Mr Pinchbeck, a joke's a joke, let me out,'" - she sounds frightened even now, thought Sally, a poor frightened child with the friendly uncle who turns into a monster in the dark - "

This stopped me in my tracks, astonished. "Now where did that come from?" I asked myself, and then the memory was there. That's what's so fascinating about writing, isn't it - you learn so much!

As for Savile, it appears he groped the girls (which could never be right, given their ages and his) and met with no resistance - except in the one case we have heard, where he never went near the girl again. In his simplistic (or warped) mind, if they had not objected, he could do it again and even go further, as we hear he did in some cases. One has to ask also, since the girls were not of an age where they could understand or deal with what was going on, where were their mothers? I would not have been allowed such freedom at fourteen, even fifteen.

It's never going to be right, it isn't right, but to drag poor old Gary Glitter into it again (hasn't he suffered enough, and I always had the feeling he had been fit up in the first place and then hounded ever after) and the surely harmless Freddy Starr, oh dear. What is  going on? One explation is Saturn in Scorpio - the Grim Reaper come to question us about our sexual conduct. It's just the latest version of the Witch Hunt, and I for one would like to see a total amnesty and an End to It All.

0 Comments

It's a Patterdale thing!

19/7/2012

1 Comment

 
Picture
Out walking on the canal yesterday, met two Angels! Before going out I had phoned the rspca, and the dog behaviour people they recommended, and received advice - some useful, some bonkers. Main thing I got from it was not to become involved in Lola’s problems, but to act matter of fact and confident, as though everything was going swimmingly, and BE IN CHARGE. I did start out with intentions such as these, but somewhere along the way I identified too much with HER problems and HER feelings (which is an occupational hazard when you are a Sensitive). So we began afresh, as we mean to go on. I was in charge, I had the lead, and we went where I wanted to go. There was some resistance, firmly overcome. I actually found it a relief to have her on the lead, it removed my anxiety about what might happen, and nothing did.

As we went under the motorway bridge, I saw a man peering at us from behind a pillar. Not being in the mood to chat, I walked on. Then he appeared at the other side of the pillar, still looking intently at us. Then he stepped forward.

“Excuse me,” he said, “what is that?” Overjoyed to find Lola is a Patterdale cross, he immediately launched into the story of his own Patterdale, which he has had two years now, from a pup, and which he is only just beginning to get anywhere with.

I knew the Angels had sent him and his delightful redhaired wife, since this was exactly what I needed to hear! And I had only had Lola four months, and from a bad background. So I was not doing as badly as I thought.

It got better. We exchanged numbers, they are on a boat at Burnley, and promise to bring their Patterdale (appropriately named Scamp in a flash of intuition, before they knew what a trouble he would be) to meet Lola and help her socialise.

I do believe in Angels!

1 Comment

Surprise, surprise!

16/7/2012

0 Comments

 
Picture
This afternoon I walked down to Asda to get some milk, as I had run out, and on the way realised I was looking forward to rummaging in the 'Surprise Shelf' - where they put the reduced stuff. It's not worth it for the reductions, which are pathetic, but it's a bran tub sort of place, where you never know what you will find. It also saves a tremendous amount of time wandering about the store trying to find something to eat. But by far the best reason to head there is that you see stuff you never even knew existed, so you get to try new things. And you can work out some interesting combinations.
    It reminds me of what Dad said to me once, when he was alive (he left us in 1996). He said he looked forward to me coming over, as he never had to buy anything in. He knew I would look in the cupboards and fridge, and concoct something delicious.
    He loved the inventiveness of it. Mum's cooking was a bit 'samey' and he liked a bit of spice in his life. Good old Dad. I don’t think of you often - or often enough. Hope you’re well and happy where you are.

If you fancy a a bit of spice in your life, try The Curious Cook's Book


0 Comments

Monkfish - it don't get any better

5/7/2012

0 Comments

 
Picture
I just tried monkfish again - first time since 1969, and I can tell you it didn't get any better. That first time I was on a caravan holiday in Grimsby - yes, I was wondering why anyone would want a holiday in Grimsby, but it's a long time ago now and I can't remember. I went there with my two young kids - they would be 9 and 7 - and my new husband (No.2). I remember it was cold, it rained, we were miserable - in fact the average British summer holiday. My daughter wrote in her diary - "There was a circus and we said let's go and John Kirkham said, 'not if it is too much money' and it was so we didn't."
    Looking for something to cook for tea, the fishmonger sang the praises of his monkfish, and I bought some. Back at the caravan, I slapped it into the frying pan whereupon it immediately curled itself into a hump in a corner of the pan, refusing to come out and co-operate. I did my best, but it was so rubbery no one could face eating it, and we threw it out.
    With the rise of tv chefs, and Gordon Ramsay in particular - just my kind of man when he was all craggy, till he went and spoilt it - I often heard monkfish praised - but remained incredulous. Today, in Asda, seeing some lying there, looking creamy and delicious, I decided that forty-three years of estrangement was quite enough, that I must after all have been wrong, and bought some.
    I have to report that it is still rubbery and gruesome, and that it followed the path of its ancestor, into my bin.

For some really good food, see The Curious Cook's Book 

0 Comments

Milestones on a Dusty Road

25/6/2012

1 Comment

 
It was the end of a perfect ten days in Norfolk, walking in blissful solitude with my dog along tree-shaded lanes filled with flowers, along white, winding roads. Sitting on the garden steps of the holiday cottage, the sun warm on my face, suddenly a Poem swept over me - milestones on a long, white dusty road, not stones, but People – as though waiting for me, but forever beyond my reach. I did not go back when there was Time, and now they are swept away by that ever-rolling stream. The sadness we feel as we age, and realise we Can Never Go Back . . . . not strictly a poem, but definitely Poetic . . 
Picture
Milestones on a Dusty Road
You think they’re all back there waiting for you; you think there’s a past you can walk into; as though you were a Bit Player who went for a break – Mousy Webb at the King’s Head in Bingley, his trumpet held high over his beer belly, sweating and blowing, while Brian Preston, behind him, bangs the drums and winks – not at you, not at anyone, it is a nervous tick – Brian, who takes his holidays in Youth Hostels, where he and his wife have to sleep in separate dorms – “It is a holiday, after all” he says, laughing  his snorting laugh. And you, who think Sex is Everything, cannot imagine how that would be.  “Anyway, how are you?” he says, changing the subject because, as always, it embarrasses him to talk about himself.

Norman, Keeper of Brownsea Castle, big and hearty, striding the lawns that run down to the sea, laughing at the new intake of ‘grockles’ – a local term he loves – arriving in their coats, which they will never need, and which will hang in their closets until they leave again for the Frozen North – Liverpool, Edinburgh – whichever John Lewis store they came from.

Bert Maggs, wheezing Welshman with diseased lungs, tending whippets on his smallholding in Essex, where my brown-eyed daughter was born – 51 years ago now, but seems like yesterday as I lay on that bed, pulling on a rope the Essex midwife tied to the iron frame, advising me not to take gas and air, telling me it would make me sick. And the small creature, when she arrived after three days straining, undersized due to there being No Money, and my having once lived for a week on a box of broccoli a neighbour left on the doorstep, and a few eggs from the chickens that scraped around Bert Maggs’ door.

A long way . . . come a long way since then . . . but I can see them all standing there, like milestones on a winding road, that could be revisited . . . if we had the means . . . if we had the time. . .

See some recent poems

1 Comment
Forward>>

    Geraldine is

    Poet, author, chef, witch, astrologer, organic gardener and all round humorous human being 

    Archives

    January 2020
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    August 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    June 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    August 2013
    November 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012

    Categories

    All
    Caring
    Contact
    Daytime Tv
    Deceased
    Genealogy
    Relatives

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.