Up until my mid-fifties my life was chaotic. The bipolar disorder that occupies my mind and body was running rampant, my physical health was poor and my home was beginning to look like one that could be featured on a television series about hoarders.

It wasn’t that I didn’t throw anything away, I did but just not very often. I didn’t want to keep stuff but I didn’t know how to throw it away. I later learned that the feeling of waiting to get permission from my brain to do it was executive dysfunction.

As a teenager my mother screamed at me in an effort to motivate me. When I moved in with my husband we would do a massive clear up when we invited people round except when we were passing the doobie.

So what changed things?

I decided that I needed time away a few times a year and I had to learn to be tidier before letting a pet sitter in to feed the animals. Four rats and four cats can make a huge amount of mess and added to mine… At least the kitchen was tidy.

Wanting to go away for a few days at a time felt like a brave thing for me to do. A year or do prior to making the decision to go away now and then I had been at great risk of suicide  and had been seeing my GP as often as once a week at one point.

During one of our appointments I mentioned what I was planning and said that my depressive episodes were fuelled by my lack of domestic organisation which in turn decreased my ability to look after myself.

He suggested something so simple I was surprised that I hadn’t thought of it before.

He told me to choose a level of chaos I could live with and then attempt to live slightly below it. It worked.

Slowly I grew tidier and things began to get tidier. I recycled household waste which made me feel as though I was doing something more positive than just tidying up the flat. The process took years rather than months and having my kitchen revamped making space for a washing machine made a big difference as there are fewer opportunities for piles of laundry to build up.

One thing I have recently started to do has helped me enormously. I half fill a utensil container with warm soapy water each morning and as I use cutlery I pop them in dirty side down. By evening they are clean and just need a quick rinse under the tap. It’s such a simple idea but saves me a lot of angst.

Becoming less chaotic hasn’t been a sudden change in my life, it has taken years. Occasionally I look around and wonder how the neatness in my home came about. I’m not perfectly tidy and I don’t think that’s possible with three cats and a dog in residence but I am messily tidy and it pleases me.

I haven’t celebrated my birthday since 2019. I usually spend a few days in London catching up with people but the Covid pandemic put an end to that. This year the rail strikes have made it even harder to plan a trip so I had convinced myself that I had no way of celebrating my birthday. I was wrong.

A chat with a friend led to us discussing some ideas of what we could together. We ruled out a trip to the zoo or the Wild Place. I suggested a museum and as she had never been to M Shed we decided that was the place to go.

While leaving M Shed with smiles on our faces we pondered on where to go for lunch. Having birthday money to spend made the choice easy – The Stable. Dessert was at Sprinkles Gelato via a look at the unicorns on City Hall and the children riding sea horses on the roof.

My friend had indulged in a vodka slushy and decided that we should try our hand at the archery stall in the little fair in Millennium Square. We both hit the target twice but it was more good luck than talent.

Wandering back to the Centre I made an idle remark about how I’d never taken the open top bus tour and she declared that a trip on it would be my birthday gift from her. While waiting in the queue we chatted to a Brazilian woman who had came to England to study in Norwich and had stayed. She said she had talked to more people in Bristol in a few days than she ever had in Norwich and that she didn’t know her neighbours after 23 years at the same address. She has plans to move to Bristol when she retires and it would be lovely to think we could bump into her again.

The tour was nice and it was fun being on an open top bus but apart from the pub I used to run neither of us saw anything that was new to us. If you want to see Bristol then buy a day rider, Google things to do in Bristol and set your own timetable.

My day ended walking Leonard and during the walk I realised a few things. My regular museum visits need to happen again, I have a free bus pass, live in a great city birthdays don’t have to be spent in London.

I haven’t written regularly for almost a year. I’ve blamed the pandemic, ”forbidden” topics and the thought that every piece that goes on my blog has to be significant.

My blog started as a means to cope with very poor mental health and from that a whole website has evolved. It’s a place of some things and nothing and reviewing it recently has reminded me of how much I love it.

The idea of simplifying writing by moving back on to a blog site again partly because of the terrible adverts that overwhelm the pages and, more importantly, I was looking for a reason to justify my lack of writing. I wasn’t challenging myself, I was conning myself into thinking I could no longer write

The website hosting isn’t cheap but neither is it wildly expensive and a few cut backs will go a long way towards the cost. I need to cut down on sugar anyway.

I have been sober for 31 years today so to say that I’m celebrating alcoholism seems a bit odd. Being an alcoholic and knowing what drove me to the bottom of my particular gutter has given me insights into me and shaped me into the less than perfect person that I am.

There is no secret to why I drank because the reason I drank is the same as all alcoholics do; to change the way we feel about ourselves. I never felt good enough to be loved. I felt as though I was a tool for a series of people who used me to gain happiness for themselves and therefore I was unloveable; it was my fault.

I started drinking problematically at 16. I was engaged to a man two years older than me who was in the army. I’d planned to stay on at school and go on to teacher training (I realised later that I was being steered into fulfilling someone else’s fantasy future) but I was cleverer than he was and I found myself working in the local lemonade factory while he was away training. Middlesbrough wasn’t a town that had much to entertain teenagers in the 70s. Weekends were a visit to the pictures and the pub afterwards. My friends would sit with half of warm lager all night and I would down Blue Niles (whisky, lime cordial and lemonade) like they were about to become unfashionable.

There began the pattern of my life. A string of failed relationships, lousy jobs and drinking with a succession of friends until I began to work behind bars.

I had a reputation in Middlesbrough for being difficult to handle when I was in my cups and got away with behaviour in pubs that other people wouldn’t. I wasn’t violent, I wasn’t physical I just had that dangerous air of ’not quite sure’ about me. Largely because I wasn’t quite sure about myself I guess.

I eventually got married and escaped Middlesbrough. The marriage was doomed before we met but he was a way to leave my home town and he cloaked my drinking. No matter how bad I was he was worse. I was unpredictable but I was the unpredictable arsehole that could get him home.

About a year after moving to Bristol I realised that I’d got to the point were I could no longer take a break from drinking and that scared me. Not enough to make me stop drinking but it scared me all the same.

Fast forward to 1991 and we were running a pub. Dave was almost constantly hallucinating by then, his physical health was non-existent and so it was no surprise to anybody when he started vomiting blood in the waiting room at the doctors surgery one morning. I was sent to the hospital to say my goodbyes which were short and not very sweet.

I handed our notice in at the pub, threw away eight years of accumulated rubbish and began to look for somewhere else to live while drinking my way through the profits.

Then it happened.

On 23 April 1991 my GP called me over to see him for a chat. I’d had my usual whisky breakfast that morning so had a half of shandy so he wouldn’t know I’d been drinking. (Yes, really.) Even before I sat down he told me that unless I did something about my lifestyle that two years down the line I’d be where Dave was. In a hospital bed, blood coming from every orifice and nobody by his side. I wasn’t going to party and drop down dead happy, I was going to suffer in agony as the alcohol refused to work its magic and then die unloved, unwanted and a waste of a hospital bed.

I haven’t drank alcohol since. There are times, some very recently, when I have wanted that cold beer on an afternoon, something nice and sparkly with a bowl of nibbles or a really nice vintage Barolo. The thing is, alcohol was my lover and, when bad relationships end, it’s easy to remember the hazy good bits and not the reality of despair and degradation.

I found my elderly neighbour dead in his flat last week. His daughter in law asked me to go in with her when he hadn’t been seen for a few days. Another person who lives close by is waiting for the jury’s decision in the trial of the murder of her son, a young man who I’ve known since he was a child. A friend is going through a really hard time and I’m her surrogate Nan, another calls me his Aunty Sid.

All of these things and none of those things have made me want to visit my long lost lover of late. You see, the reality is this, if I drank something alcoholic today it’s because I wanted to and I was just using anything as an excuse to do it.

I no longer feel not good enough to be loved, I accept that sometimes other people ask me to help because I’m loved, I’m reliable, I’m ME.

I’m a crazy, cranky old crack pot but I am me and I’m grateful that alcoholism has given me the opportunity to see this.

I went into the cafe that helps homeless people on my local High Street today to say hello. It’s run by a team of Christians and they evangelise from time to time on the street.

I haven’t been in for a few weeks and so it was a good opportunity to catch up with people. One of them, Billy,  was somebody I’d never met before and he had a little story to tell.

Billy told us that he’d recently learned how pearls are formed within oysters. He told us that when an oyster is irritated by a grain of sand or something similar it begins to cover it over layer by layer forming a pearl as it goes. It covers the irritant and makes itself less irritated.

Billy thinks that Jesus sends irritating people your way so that you can learn to change from being irritated to being beautiful. He also thinks that when you die you have become almost perfect and will live forever with Jesus.

Irritating people make me laugh at and I feel sorry for them. They don’t make me less irritable or place a pearl of great beauty in my soul.

Perhaps I’m not as holy as Billy or perhaps I’m just more rooted in realism.