the crone

The Death of Magic

Jacqueline S

November 27, 2022

When did magic die for you?

I always believed in magic.

I mean, really believed in it.

Aged 9 I thought if I wished hard enough my cat would talk to me. That he was only hiding his secret self behind his impassive cat face because he could not trust a human. Could never trust a human, not even me. Because the truth was cats were sentient beings, velvet fur-clad Princes in disguise.

“You can trust me”, I urged into his flickering ear.

I whispered. I pleaded with him.

I begged and worshipped, adoring at his side.

But he just smiled that secret cat smile. He stretched and purred, and he said nothing.

I thought that he was hiding his magic from me because I didn’t believe strongly enough.

In my bookish world talking cats, magic carpets and enchanted woods were possible, even probable.

I was a dreamy, highly imaginative child. A bit frail, frequently off school ill with throat-closing tonsillitis or conjunctivitis. I was no good at sports, and had a lazy eye corrected by operations and interventions that still left me as a wearer of glasses.

Much of my time was spent reading and re-reading books I had at home (not enough books I am sad to say – my family were not book-ish people).

Watership Down was read to rags. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The Puffin Book of Jokes. Herbert Van Thal’s Horror Anthologies. The Sun newspaper … yeh, I know 😦 Everything and anything that was left lying around I would read. Looking back, there were definitely some books around at home that an impressionable child shouldn’t read. But that’s another story for another time.

I believed that magic was out there, waiting for me, and if I just thought about it hard enough, I could break through to the real enchanted world.

I saw everything as a possible gateway to a magical realm. A vast old oak tree – where was the small hidden doorway to Elf Land? An ancient flagstone wall – which stone did I need to tap upon thrice to open the secret portal? An empty room in an abandoned house, an overgrown garden – what magic might be there, hiding from me?

If I could only murmur the right combination of words, make the right gestures, I would be invited to step through into the Real World. The magical world, where I properly belonged.

I picked flowers and leaves in the fields and woods, chanting made-up songs. I wore my jumper inside out and turned it back again, in the vain hope that the fairy folk would come and claim me, and take me home with them. (Grandma had warned me the fairies would steal me if I did this, but it sounded like a brilliant opportunity to me.)

I wanted to be away from this banal, bland place of grey rainy streets, bus tickets, supermarkets and school timetables.

I so obviously did not belong here.

Surely I had enough belief for them to accept me, and let me in?

Aged 11 I laid on the shingle of a beach and called to the mermaids to show themselves to me.

At that time I had read no T.S. Eliot or J. Alfred Prufrock. I just wanted the fantasy to be true so very, very much. I thought I might hear the mermaids singing. I thought I might see a silver tail splash above the waves.

If the mermaids had called me, I would’ve gone.

I was in search of magic everywhere. I would often wander away on family trips or holidays to find a deserted stretch of beach, a quiet woodland glade or empty river’s edge in the hope that the fairies might find me and come for me.

I would wade deep into caves on Cornish beaches, hoping I might be the one to find the last dragon in the world, sleeping inside on a pile of dim treasure.

I would dawdle behind on visits to old castles or ancient stone circles in the hope that something would recognise me, reach out to me. Speak to me.

I would leave out useful things like cotton reels and pins and sweets to help The Borrowers, who must surely live behind our skirting boards.

I just wanted to see that there was something else besides the plainness of this ‘life’.

At one point I thought I must be an alien. That my Earth mum and dad had adopted me, but never told me the truth about how I had come to them.

My real mother was a beautiful, exotic alien being who had left me to brought up on earth (for some never explained reason).

Oh how I wished my Alien Mum would come and get me. To take me back home to my real planet again.

Maybe this was all part of a dissociation I’ve had since childhood, where I couldn’t believe I was really alive. I had died on the operating table aged three, when I was in hospital for my bad eye. Everything I was experiencing was a dream. I was in a coma. My real life would start when I woke up.

Then later, I was just in a film. It was all scripted. Phones would ring on cue. People would say things. Bad stuff happened. Good stuff happened. I wandered through it all, thinking it was all controlled by some mystic level film-makers.

This couldn’t be the real life. Because there was no magic being written into my script.

But it had to exist. It had to.

Father Christmas was one of my proofs that magic had somehow survived in this harsh and boring world. These days, I am embarrassed to admit that at an age when other girls were talking about their first French kiss, buying lipstick or getting their periods, I still believed in Father Christmas.

The magical man-god in the red and white fur coat who would fly across the world in one night – one night! – to deliver brightly wrapped presents to all the good children.

I knew He was real.

On Christmas Eve night you could strain your ears and hear the distant shiver of silvery bells as the reindeer flew overhead. You could hear the gentle thump of hooves landing on the roof above you. You’d scrunch your eyes, up, tight. Because if you weren’t asleep, he wouldn’t come.

That’s a part of magic. You have to be in an altered state of consciousness for it to happen.

Then in the greyness of early Christmas morning, you’d open your tired, gritty eyes and stretch your toes down the bed and … YES! The exciting crackling sound of wrapped boxes that told you He’s Been.

The Magic had happened once more.

How delicious and wonderful it would be to go back for one night to experience that wonder filled, fairy-lit feeling.

It was my First Year at senior school when Father Christmas died.

I was sitting at a battered old desk, dragging my brain through a dull Double Maths class. The horridly constricting light blue squares of my maths exercise book were in front of me, squashing me in.

(I hate graph paper, lined paper, or anything that squeezes thinking into a tight box or a linear pattern. The horrible horror of imprisoning your bright zippy brain into someone else’s pre-printed pattern. Ugh. They should be banned, along with Xcel sheets.)

It was autumn, my first term at Big School (which I already hated so much it gave me stomach ache). As I scrawled meaningless numerals into the overbearing squares to complete some irrelevant skill like long division, I had a sudden realisation.

There was no magic in this world.

How could magic exist in a dull world of long division, bored teachers, brutal PE lessons and computers?

And if there was no magic, there was no Father Christmas.

Of course there wasn’t a Father Christmas. A magical man-spirit delivering gifts to children all over the world?! What kind of planet did I think I was living on?

I looked up from the mind-strangling squares. The more I explored the thought of no Father Christmas, the more mind-shocked I felt.

I happened to be sitting near a window on the second floor of the school block, and could see a busy traffic light intersection from the stuffy classroom.

The lights turned red. The boring cars stopped. The lights turned green. The boring traffic moved off.

It was all so obvious. How could I have been so stupid? So blind? So utterly THICK?

Magic wasn’t here. It never had been here. I’d never even been close.

I remember trying not to show the enormous tragedy of it on my face in that dull lesson in that dusty classroom.

The sudden and complete realisation that magic, true magical magic, did not exist for me, or for anyone.

The sadness was real and immense.

I had to swallow a lump in my throat and my eyes bubbled, threatening to overflow with tears.

It was the December before my twelfth birthday, and the depression of my realisation overwhelmed me.

Christmas was not magic any more. All the gifts were cheap perfume, bad socks and pointless soap-on-a-rope.

When we went to the beach the next summer I didn’t bother speaking to the waves again.

When we walked in the woods I didn’t stop to talk to the trees.

I realised Father Christmas was my Earth Mum.

And I was all alone with my misery, because no-one else felt like me, or was as stupid as me about belief in magic.

Perhaps you can tell me different. Perhaps you believed in these things too?

Now I am old, I still want to believe in magic.

I do sometimes go and talk to the trees, and whisper to the sea, when I have a chance. But I know they won’t respond. I think I am too old now.

I do still think about that spaceship landing and finally taking me back Home. The woken dragon flying me away to the beautiful realm where my people welcome me. The fairies taking pity on me (at last!) and leading me to the shimmering glades where I belong.

Until then, I wait for my true life to begin.

Magical worlds …
Clive Barker’s Weave World is the closest thing I’ve read to putting across what I mean. It makes the idea that you could suddenly enter a magical realm, away from this mundane reality, quite believable.

My Cheese Sandwich is not Your Cheese Sandwich

Jacqueline S

no comments

June 14, 2021

My cheese sandwich is not like the others.

We all want to make a connection.

We see a news story, read something on social media, or talk to a friend. We might think, “I know exactly what you mean!”

But where we might see stunning similarities, others may only perceive glaring differences.

My Cheese Sandwich Moment

It was 1977 and my first year at senior school. I was 12 years old and deeply and hopelessly in love with David in the year above me.

Alas! A second-year senior boy would never seriously consider a first-year as his ‘girlfriend’.

But I lived in hope. I trailed around after him during break time at school. He made me laugh. I thought he might like me, a bit.

I walked home with his crowd of second-year friends, even though it was well out of my way.

David’s best friend Robert was going out with my older sister, so I held on to hope that magically, one day, he might consider us a foursome.

We could go to the cinema. Hold hands. Snog.

I adored his expressive face, his lovely curly hair and large sparkling brown eyes.

He was funny, clever, handsome and he lived in a big house. His father was a doctor. He read real books. His family were educated and worldly in a way mine weren’t.

My heart hurt when I thought of him and the boyfriend potential.

How could I, a lowly, stunted first-year ever make a connection with this handsome, smart boy?

How could I possibly make him see we were Meant To Be?

The answer came one lunchtime. We were in the playground (Ha! Dead giveaway to my senior school naivety. To call the outside tarmacked space a ‘playground’ was the height of uncool.) So, I was hanging around David and Robert as usual. I was on the edge of his vision. Trying to see if he would notice me.

He had packed lunch, same as me. I didn’t often eat mine. Except … today I saw David was eating a cheese sandwich.

A cheese sandwich.

A CHEESE SANDWICH.

A kind of logical klaxon went off in my head.

I ALSO HAD A CHEESE SANDWICH IN MY BAG!

Surely, surely this was The Sign I’d been waiting for?

It was obvious to me.

We both had cheese sandwiches.

If David saw me eating a cheese sandwich alongside him, he might just say ‘Hey, you, you’re alright!’ and we could move a step closer to my romantic dreams.

My heart was beating hard at this sublime and extremely rational plan to make David fall in love with me.

I scrabbled around in my school bag and took out the squashed cheese sandwich my mum had made. It was supermarket white bread, a sweaty slab of cheddar cheese, bound in clingfilm like a mummy.

I unwrapped my cheese sandwich hurriedly and took a bite. I wasn’t hungry, and it tasted of rank plastic. But I looked up quickly to make sure David saw that I was sharing the same lunch as him.

That he could see we were together in our pre-destined Cheese Sandwich Experience.

David did look up. He did see my cheese sandwich. And he said (in words that are toasted into my heart) “Urgh! Yuck. Poor you! Imagine, THAT kind of boring bread with THAT kind of cheese. Urgh. Yuck.”

Then he turned away and bit into his far superior cheese sandwich of fresh, crusty granary bread, flavoursome Red Leicester cheese and crisp green lettuce.

I realised I’d got it wrong.

My Cheese Sandwich was not the same as his Cheese Sandwich at all.

There was an intellectual and social gulf between us.

The bite of sandwich in my mouth turned to vile glue.

David could never love me. I was inferior in every way to him and his mighty Cheese Sandwich lifestyle.

Completely crustfallen

My crest was well and truly fallen. My heart broken. Robert (the best friend) must’ve seen, because he kindly said, “That wasn’t very nice David.”

But David just continued being himself. Looning about. Having a laugh. He wasn’t even aware of the Cheese Sandwich Moment.

It made me realise that you can’t make a connection with an experience or with someone, just because you want to.

Your Cheese Sandwich is not Their Cheese Sandwich.

The valuable life lessons that Cheese Sandwich Moment taught me:

1. Your own experiences and perceptions in life are never going to be exactly the same as someone else’s. What you might think is OK, another person might hate (and vice-versa).

2. Use a sandwich box.

3. If you get the chance, try new foods.

4. David was a sandwich-snob. And a bit of a tw*t.

Zombie Training

Jacqueline S

4 comments

March 20, 2016

There was a zombie woman on my early morning train.

Her face was a skeleton. Smooth tea-coloured skin stretched over dry bones. Milky blank eyes of faint cataract blue. Colourless dry wisps of hair stuck to the dome of her skull.

Her maw was opened. Dark. Like a tunnel. The dry lips strained. Mouthing.

She stared forward. Focusing on nothing. On no-one.

More dead than alive.

And yet, still she moved amongst us!

I looked around the crowded train to see if anyone else had noticed the Death Stare Zombie Woman on the packed commuter carriage to Hell (next stop London Waterloo).

But everyone seemed calm. Dull-witted. Asleep, yet standing.

Swaying. Clutching their phones, their tablets, their e-readers, their morning papers. Someone even had a paperback book. Old Skule style.

No-one had noticed the open-mouthed yawning look of death of the Zombie Woman.

No one was scared she might bite. Might waken into a tearing ravenous rage.

Were they all dead too?

A half-remembered line of T.S. Eliot poetry crawled through my mind.

‘So many… I had not thought Death had undone so many.’

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

From The Waste Land – T.S. Eliot

He knew it already, even then, back in 1922!

He saw it.

This sad, shambling semblance of life.

The mindless swarm, the meaningless repetitions of daily commute, of deadly life.

Going through the zombified living death, day after day.

I stared out of the window as the train slowed on the outskirts of central London.

The smut-stained streets and walls of Victorian houses, old businesses and ageing shuttered warehouses. The closed, dark, dusty past, now being overshadowed by the city’s shining steel and glass newness.

That was when I noticed something. There, poking out of the top of a rusting black drainpipe, clinging sadly to a drab brick wall.

A straggling scribble of life (‘bush’ would be too big a word to describe it).

A struggling buddleia growing – or trying to grow – from an old drainpipe, hanging from a dying building.

No soil. No nurturing.

Just trying its best to live, to survive, in a grim and hostile city environment.

Nobody loves it, I muse.

Yet still it clings to its stupid, meaningless life at the top of an old London roof.

How many years of dirt and disregard has it survived to get there?

And yet, there it is.

A buddleia – a ‘butterfly bush’.

And I thought: life persists.

I hope it was worth it, little bush.

I hope the butterflies will come to you.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter …

… I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

From The Waste Land – T.S. Eliot

The train dragged itself into the mainline station and the zombies shuffled out onto platforms to go and bite other people, or work in offices or shops or whatever they do for a ‘living’.

I lost sight of the Zombie Woman amongst the murmuring, moaning walking dead.

It left me thinking: how many years have we all survived to get here?

Half-dead, but persistent.

Often disregarded, sometimes un-nurtured, we are all clinging on to our lives.

It’s banal. It’s trite.

But Life goes on.

And so can I.

My London Observations are an occasional series
fuelled by sporadic bouts of freelance copywriting

Shells

Jacqueline S

4 comments

October 2, 2015

I’ve been talking to another blogger fourhillsfarm64 about the legacy of being a child who has grown up and lived with the long-term disease and death of a parent (or loved one).

I’ve covered some of my own thoughts and experiences on this in previous posts.

The outside calm and the inside crying

My father was disabled and horribly ill for most of my life, from the age of 10 to 45. I got so hardened to grief, shock, sadness.

I grew an emotional shell so that I could crawl, tortoise-like, through the everyday awfulness.

Yet a line of poetry, a word in a book, a certain song; hearing the echoes of a late evening train going away in the distance.

Then the shell might crack.

Then the stupid tears might soak my face and hair in silent senseless weeping.

Lying in my small box room, overwhelmed with a helpless, hopeless feeling that elsewhere, Life was happening.

That something important had been taken away from me, before I’d even got the chance to know what it was.

Bloody Shell

A shell can offer good hard protection in life. But it also hardened me to the misfortunes of others.

Where others see complete tragedy — a family divorce — a house sale falling through — a lost ring of sentimental value — I quite often think (only to myself, of course) “Meh – why are they so upset? It’s not like anyone’s DYING… … it’s not like anyone’s got an INCURABLE DISEASE or anything…”

Harsh but true of me. Although I don’t like to admit it.

My childhood hero

I thought I was like Spock.

I mustn’t show emotion. Emotion equalled weakness. And weakness meant I’d be unable to carry on.

In my young adulthood it meant I was probably not a very good friend to those who needed my warmth and friendship.

It’s been hard for me to soften up, and to understand what I lost — and the shell I gained.

These days I can be moved to tears when I see or read about human kindness and compassion.

All it takes is friendly word at a sad moment. An unexpected offer of support. And I’m suddenly human after all.

But hey, thanks Spock. You are, and always will be, my friend.

Live Long and Prosper x

Little Lady

Jacqueline S

4 comments

July 13, 2015

I went to see my daughter perform in The Mikado on Saturday.

It was great to see her on stage. Poised. Confident. Having fun.

Part of a really quite ambitious school production.

She was one of the Japanese maidens, and to see her singing in the chorus was just lovely.

It’s hard to remember now how I once held her in my arms.

Soothed her eczema with various ointments and bath oils 6 times a day. Sat by her cot on long feverish nights.

Stayed with her in hospitals. Sped along roads with her in ambulances (I still can’t talk about those occasions without crying).

I once gave her resuscitation after seizure when she stopped breathing.

Now I see her on the stage. And everything is ahead of her.

And I am so very, very thankful to have her.

A very poignant moment, watching her (to borrow from the Gilbert & Sullivan chorus she was singing) ‘We wonder …oh, we wonder, what on earth the world can be?’.

Here it is — give it a listen. Comes a Train of Little Ladies

‘…Comes a train of little ladies, from scholastic trammels free

Each a little bit afraid is, wondering what the world can be

Is it but a world of trouble — sadness set to song?

Is its beauty but a bubble bound to break ere long?

Are its palaces and pleasures fantasies that fade?

And the glory of its treasures shadow of a shade?

Schoolgirls we, eighteen and under, from scholastic trammels free,

And we wonder, how we wonder, what on earth the world can be?’

Makes me sob just hearing it.

That’s how sentimental motherhood has made a tough old goth like me.

On a magical path

GOLF!

Jacqueline S

no comments

June 10, 2025

I want to tell you about that day I was trapped in a room with a man who wanted to talk about GOLF.

Golf.

Golf. Golf.

He went on and on.

I couldn’t escape as I was waiting in hospital for an appointment (which was a long, long wait of 3 hours: I had awoken with a painful red and swollen eye and the queue for Emergency Eyes happened to be particularly long that day).

Anyway. He sidled up to me, a hopeful glint in his eye.

“Do you play golf?”

No. I replied. I do not play golf.

“Golf is great!” he said. “Of course. we’re trying to get some younger people into golf at the Club!” He smiled at me eagerly with golfish eyes.

I couldn’t even appear distracted or occupied with a book or my iPhone. Sore, dodgy eye you see, (or don’t see) so I couldn’t look at anything except GolfMan.

He pulled up a plastic chair next to me in the Golfing Room.

Of course, it wasn’t a Golfing Room.

It was a Waiting Room.

In a hospital.

Where I waited and waited while he rattled on about golf.

How much he liked golf.

A round of golf.

Good golf courses.

Getting people into golf.

How I should pop along and try a game of golf.

Golf.

Gulf. Golf.

It was a long, long, long painful AND golfishly annoying afternoon.

Can you fix it?

Jacqueline S

2 comments

February 12, 2025

Coalescence -- an art display at Greenwich maritime museum. Light droplets hang like a loose sphere against the backdrop of classically painted ceiling and walls. — **Stand out. Be different.**

I’ve been remembering one of the greatest moments of my life with my son when he was aged 8.

SCENE: A Paediatric Psychologist’s consulting room. Various toys and bricks are placed strategically around the doctor’s desk.

AFTER A PREAMBLE CHAT WITH THE BOY AND EXPLORATION OF TOYS …

Boy: “I see this wind-up Bob the Builder toy is broken.”

Doc: ‘Yes. Can you fix it?’

Boy: “I think I know how to do it^*.”

Doc: ‘Please try for me.’

BOY PICKS UP A PINK PLASTIC TEAPOT FROM THE CHILD’S KITCHEN SET AND WHACKS BOB WITH IT.

THE TOY STARTS MOVING AND PLAYS A JOLLY TUNE.

Boy: “See?”

LAUGHTER FROM ADULTS

….

AS MOTHER AND SON ARE ABOUT TO LEAVE THE SESSION …

Boy: (Very serious – to Consultant) “Now if that toy gets broken again, my advice is to take the pink teapot from the Sizzlin’ Kitchen and hit it – that should get it going.”

Doc: ‘Thank you, Boys-name.’

DOCTOR LOOKS UP AT THE MOTHER WITH A SERIOUS EXPRESSION.

Doc: ‘Mrs Steel, I am discharging Boys-name from Paediatric Psychology.’

A very happy day.

^*He didn’t say ‘Yes I can!”

We had an idea our son might be on the autistic spectrum (ASD). But we didn’t need a label for our funny, super-creative, artistic boy until the world (specifically school) started grinding him down.

He went from building crazily complex Lego models and drawing fine detailed (and very funny) cartoons and comics, to laying on his bed in his room, doing nothing.

He was crying a lot.

The worst moment was when he told me, “I am no good in this world. I may as well die.”

His self-esteem wasn’t improved by the school saying his behaviour was getting him a reputation that would stay with him throughout his school life.

But he wasn’t being terribly bad, he was just going at things differently. He didn’t always understand what was wanted of him.

He didn’t always want to do what the others were doing.

He was getting frustrated.

So, I began stumbling through the long NHS pathway to get an official ASD diagnosis, just so school would understand him better.

The memory of one parent (the mother of his only friend at school) still makes me want to weep. She was always complaining about our son, to the point she asked the school to keep them apart. Keep 8 year old friends apart!

Madness and sadness.

It felt like she had taken a personal dislike to Boys-name being friends with her precious son. To know he was now being kept away from his only friend added more painful sadness to school.

It became my mission to get him through the school system with the least damage to his mental health as possible.

I didn’t worry about results or exams. I just wanted to get him out the other side so he could be himself once compulsory education was over.

He was teaching himself more at home than he was learning at school any way.

He developed fantastic animation skills, taught himself coding languages. Built funny, creative websites and made some startlingly good apps and games. He was even invited to Aardman (the Wallace & Gromit studios) to meet the animators when they saw his work in claymation. His 2D animation film was used at senior school presentations to help orientate new joiners.

Fast forward 12 years and I’m very happy to say that he did survive the school system (mostly intact!). He is now a talented software engineer at a top four global tech company, and he is illustrating and writing a book in his ‘spare’ time.

A gentle, lovely, creative soul who is kind and hard working. He makes me so proud.

Why not be like all the others. Do what all the others do.

Nah. That doesn’t work in our family.

If you’re interested, below is a clip of poem I wrote about how I felt at the time, when he was going through the worst at school.

Thank you for reading. Stay wacky everyone 🙂

________________________________________________

His face crumples in vividly visual disappointment (in himself, in his world).

His face speaks a thousand emotions, a thousand words to me.

His robust little self struggles against the bounds of convention.

I want him to win a paper star.

I urge him to spell out the pre-packed words.

I want him to reach the golden square of achievement,

and show them all.

Show them all.

I want the teachers to understand him.

I want other children to be his friends.

He is so funny.

So different.

I fear he might get lost.

I hold on to his warm little hand.

My heart is fierce with protective love, not soppy:

I have to fight my love,

To help him understand the Sorrow of having

to ‘Fit in’

to ‘Do as he is told’

to ‘Be like all the others’.

To crush his exuberant madness,

His brainwaves,

His creative force.

To crunch him up.

Tight.

In a box.

Like school and society want.

A controllable, bland, Vanilla Boy.

Just for now.

But hold tight to your beautiful, crazy, shiny self.

It will be your shield against the world.

Blah blah blah website copy etc.

Jacqueline S

no comments

February 4, 2025

First, keep the copy dull and flabby. This ensures nobody will read it.

Treat it as a load of squiggly lines that can be put into the right sized box to suit the design.

Don’t think about your audience, or why they took the time to visit your website. Make sure you leave out anything of immediate benefit or interest.

Stuff with non-sequiturs and swamp with inconsistencies. Remember, no-one likes wading through long sludgy sentences, so keep everything meandering and muddy.

A headline goes here

It goes without saying that headlines must be bland or meaningless. They are mostly there to act as coat hangers for the design.

Of course, there is always a huge risk that website copy may persuade someone to get in touch or order from your website. To ensure this doesn’t happen, avoid using logic, purpose or compelling evidence regarding your product or service.

You won’t need silky, enticing copy that slides over and seduces the reader into the call to action. And you can forget the fizzy wordplay that delights and surprises people into saying ‘Yes’ to your online offer.

Likewise you can leave out the warm, fluffy words that welcome the customer into your world.

Words are precious, so make sure absolutely every character counts in the copy (so it fits into the wireframe).

Crispy duck with hoisin sauce

I know. I get it. There is no time to craft and hone copy like the olden days. No budget for the sweet (and sometimes bitter) millefeuille that included many layers of copy approval.

Websites offer eternal amendability, which is maybe why good copy has lost its value.

In the days of print, words were prized. They were gold, jewels, treasure. A client could make £millions from the power of the copy in a DM pack.

One word could change a meaning. One word could change a mind.

So help change my mind. Please link below if you have written a great website (lucky you) or have found one that made you go green with copy-envy.

Not the write life

Jacqueline S

2 comments

August 2, 2023

A muscular fist punches a hole through my chest.
Why so scared? Why so scared?

Why do you always want to be missed out, skipped over, anonymous?

Why make choices that no one will ever see, comment on or know?

Here I am still trying to break my arm in The Door rather than speak.

I slam myself shut. I do not let the world see the words.

I hide behind people who’s mouths work better than mine.

They click smartly into place and they use other’s backs as a staircase to climb and shine, shine, shine.

I stay at the bottom in the dark. My choice.

I comfort myself with Billy Liar dreams. If I had been the person I was meant to be, I would bring you bright kaleidoscopic fragments and phrases bursting and beautiful the brilliance slipping through your mind and hands. If I had. If I had.

The cowardly bravery of Ifihad.

But I am caught, crushed, destroyed. Made it into something less. No dangerous quicksilver here.

Safe.

Hiding in here with my child.

Time has moved on. It is no friend to me.

I know I will no longer frighten the world.

But I can protect the little girl. Look after her.
Make her laugh and sing and play and write her stories and poems again.

Behind The Door where we are safe. I can protect her.

I will try not to ignore her. I will not let her try to break her arm in secret because she is so afraid of what she can do.

I will take her away from The Door and hold her unbroken arm and she will get on that stage and I will applaud.

I don’t want to hurt her anymore. I want to make it alright.

My beautiful, bright, perfect child.
Stay safe with me.

I’ve been writing for others for over 35 years.

Using my brain to translate what someone is thinking.

Into what someone else may be thinking.

Making them read something that sells them something.

Something they didn’t know they wanted. Or needed.

Fribblesplot. Magradoodle. Botty Chelly.

Sometimes I think it doesn’t matter what I write.

It’s a silly way to earn a living. It was never the write life for me.

Moss World

Jacqueline S

no comments

February 18, 2023

I once made little worlds with moss

The soft green cushions

Were the lush green grass

Of the hills

The little trees standing so tall and proud

(They do not know they are not tall at all)

Pushed the moss cushions into a biscuit tin lid

Arranged some pretty stones

(Well not pretty – just what you can find in a scruffy back garden)

Added water for a village pond

The moss keeps sucking it up!

Add more water

The moss drinks it down like a greedy sponge…

Annoying moss!

How much water can moss drink??

Moss would be useful in a flood.

Beg tinfoil to make a pond

It doesn’t look as nice or as natural

But you can save it from the thirsty moss

And a tiny, tiny twist of white paper floating

makes quite a good swan

There

My little Moss World

Explore it with your eyes

Like seeing a universe in a grain of sand

Eternity in an apple blossom

I saw a World in the back garden moss

When I didn’t know poetry

Beyond a spider and a spout.

A William Blake in my heart, no doubt.

Moss islands. The world made small.

I used to think

Jacqueline S

no comments

June 21, 2022

*Clouds* *going home to bed on the horizon*

I used to think that the clouds went to bed at night

When I saw them softly wandering towards the horizon at sunset

I imagined they gathered together

In a heap

On the horizon

Resting

Bedded down

Until morning came

When it was time to stretch

and pull away

For another day wandering the open sky

Fat white sheep

Roaming over the hills

Or ragged drifters

Hanging above towns

Ganging up together

On mountains

Or sailing out to sea

Doing whatever clouds do

Before sunset

When they would begin the slow drift back

to where the earth meets the sky

To pile in huge heaps

Banked up

and bedded down

On the edge of the world.

*Does it hurt the sky when the plane scrapes by?*

I used to think

When a plane was flying overhead

The sound was the sharp metal scraping the smooth blue sky

It scratched.

Leaving sharp white scars on skin.

Did it hurt the sky when a plane scraped by?

Could the sky heal?

I’d watch the white trails

As they changed from hard thin painful lines

to softer plumes

Dispersing and disappearing

Until the sky was a perfect smooth blue again.

#IUsedToThink

Embracing my Agitation

Jacqueline S

2 comments

April 22, 2022

A lot of people in my business (advertising/marketing) are saying we should embrace the #SayYourAge movement.

I’ve been reluctant to join in. But why?

Why should my age go against me?

I’m still achieving as a creative director and copywriter, probably with much greater insight than in my younger days.

So, is it fear of what my clients may think?

Fear I’ll be seen as an ‘old woman’ in my industry?

Fear that connections on LinkedIn will think that I’m no longer ‘with it’?

I still think I’m ‘with it’.

But that’s the problem with ageing.

The fear that you might be considered more withered than ‘with it’.

I’m running a successful creative business, but this industry has made me so scared of ageism I’m reluctant to hold up my bony old claw and croak my age.

Feel the Fear. Do it anyway.

OK. Here goes. I am 56 and a bit. God that sounds so ancient. But please don’t judge me by age. Look at what I do instead.

I have never been more in demand as a creative or a writer. Maybe clients (unlike most ad agencies and recruiters) appreciate and understand my experience, and all that means for their projects and communications.

It could be that I’m direct and easy to talk to. That I’ve grown in confidence after 35 years in the business. Whatever it is, I will make the most of it for as long as I can.

If I’m honest, I never believed my career in advertising would last much beyond my 39^th birthday. So I’ve exceeded my own expectations.