Life in perspective – car crashes, glass and tears.

This rant…ahem, post was written a couple of months ago, but, I was feeling too delicate to post it. Although the situation is still ongoing – lawyers and insurance companies take FOREVER, I thought I’d post it anyway. 🙂

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On Saturday 13th February I was involved in a rather serious car crash. I say involved…I was driving to work when I approached a set of traffic lights at the Tetbury A46 junction in Gloucestershire, UK. I slowed down but then the lights turned to green as I approached so I thought, “Great, I can keep going!”

Two cars on the opposite side of the junction were indicating to turn right, across my path. They are supposed to wait and give way to incoming traffic, as the yellow signs say. They did not. The first black car crossed right in front of me, I flashed my lights at him and slammed my feet on the brakes. The second blue car hesitated and stopped, as they should. “Great I thought, bloody right, it’s my right of way!”. So I continued on…unfortunately the idiot woman in the blue car then changed her mind and thought she could somehow make her illegal right turn in front of me before I reached her. She was wrong.

As I’m crossing the road this woman’s car slams right into me, ramming into the side of my car, shattering the windows, setting off the door airbag (which I didn’t even know I had) and ramming my car off the road and towards a solid stone wall. With the force of the impact, according to the police themselves, if I had hit that wall head on I would not be here. They actually praised my driving! The strange thing is the whole thing happened in slow motion. I remember suddenly being slammed into then the wall coming up, I managed to turn the steering wheel and slam my foot on the brakes as I was sliding, missing the trees and solid wall completely and resting high way up the grassy verge.

I sat there in stunned silence, covered in glass. The woman who rammed me was already on her phone, I suspect she was on her phone when she crashed into me. She asked if I was alright but I couldn’t answer.

A very kind passer-by stopped and helped me. The car was filling up with smoke. The driver’s side was completely mangled, so he opened the passer door and helped me out. I was shaking violently and couldn’t stop crying. He put his coat around me and eased me back to his car to sit in the warmth. He and his kind lovely wife looked after me, gathered my bag and things and were just…amazing. I can’t thank them enough.

The police and ambulance turned up. The police took my statement, between my ridiculous sobbing.

The shock still hasn’t sunk in fully. In over twenty years of driving, I’ve never had a point on my licence or even a parking ticket and have never been involved in a crash.

The car, my beloved car, is completely totalled – a total right-off. Her car had damage to the front corner where she drove into me, but looks easily fixable. The woman in question looked wealthy, well-to-do, but me? I’m on minimum wage, money is so tight it keeps me awake at night. Long gone are the days when I was teaching and on a high salary when I could afford a new car. Since my illness ended my teaching career and a job I had slogged my guts out for 12 years, I am unable to work full-time and can’t teach at all as I get too dizzy and sick. So, having always worked, I found myself in a dire situation, no job but still with a hefty mortgage and huge bills to pay. I ended up finding a lovely part-time job working in a library with lovely supportive people which also gives me time to continue my writing. The only down-side, is that the pay is terrible, minimum wage, so when something like this happens it is truly devastating.

Despite having insurance, at best it will still leave me without a car in the short term (and living in the sticks that’s no joke) but could possibly leave me without a car in the long term. My car is 6 years old and worth very little now, so the probability of my being able to get the same car again on that money is remote to say the least.

The ambulance checked me out, whiplash, bruising, shock and a few cuts from the glass but miraculously unhurt given the force of the impact. Of course I was shaking uncontrollably and couldn’t stop crying. But I must say a huge THANK YOU to the Gloucestershire police and ambulance service and a MASSIVE thank you to my knight in shining armour, Neil Fraser and your wife…the kindness of strangers, eh? THANK YOU so much for looking after me, in my worst blubbering state. ❤ xxx

I was picked up and taken home, was sick with terrible head pain and promptly fell asleep for about 6 hours+. Amazing how the body goes into preservation mode and there is nothing as restorative as sleep. And yes, shock meant that I was absolutely FREEZING. So now I’m at home, finally awake and under a pile of duvets and copious amounts of sweet tea. My whole right side especially my hips, neck and shoulders are very painful and will no doubt come up in an assortment of bruise colours, but despite feeling rather sorry for myself, being desperately worried about the money/car situation and being very angry at that stupid cow who caused all this…I have also been very lucky and I know it.

So…in the spirit of recognising when something could have been so much worse…I forgive that driver. Yes your actions were stupid and thoughtless and I’ve been the victim of them, but, it was an accident an occurrence with no malice behind it. So, I forgive you.

Tomorrow, I will have to take a deep breath and deal with life again. My crunched car is still out there on that verge where it was rammed into, albeit with a police sticker on it. So tomorrow I will have to phone the insurance people, garages etc and get it towed and start the whole process. My lovely work colleague even phoned when I was asleep and has even sorted cover for my shifts on Monday knowing I’ll be too shaky, which I will be. I still have pretty bad head pain and pain all over really, but I am a lucky lady…

So…what is the lesson to be learned from this?

• The kindness of strangers really is a thing, a beautiful thing.
• When you’re feeling down, or if things are going badly, just take a deep breath and realise that things could be so much worse.
• At the end of the day, despite our worries, the pain we may carry (emotional, mental or physical) …we are all pretty lucky. 🙂 xxxx

Love to you all and drive safe. ❤

Passing 20,000 and planting seeds of success!

Spring has finally sprung and thank the gods that it has!

Everywhere, I see the signs of winter being discarded like a weary woollen coat that has out-stayed its welcome – too heavy, too grey and too oppressive for the youthful zest of crocus colours, the flash of dazzling daffodil yellow and the yearning of the trees to sprout new growth. Spring is here! YAY!!! 😀

Well, with all the wonderful signs of nature being awoken and the inherent hope and optimism that brings, together with the oh-so-welcome warmth of our first sunny days, I too have begun to plant some seeds of my own, in the hope of them growing into fresh shoots of success! A few of these seeds I shall keep private for now, but others I wanted to share with you straight away.

So, as my little blog passes the heady heights of 20,000 visitors (for which I am hugely grateful and tremendously humbled), I begin another chapter in my strange little life and take somewhat of a spring leap!

Having completed a BA (Hons) Degree in Fine Art, way back in the mists of time when my hair was blonde and I was…ahem…a little lighter on my feet, I was an artist. Yes, a takes-herself-way-to-seriously-full-of angst-entirely-black-clad-deep-and-meaningful-and-more-than-a-little-pretentious artist!

It was the 1990’s. I was seriously into grunge music, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice In Chains, even Mother Love Bone and Soul Asylum, as well as heavier rock bands like Guns N’ Roses and Metallica. I took to wearing all black, apart from the odd green or red lumberjack loose shirt, a kind of torn uniform for all us Seattle-loving-grunge-rockers. I had the usual paraphernalia in my student room – incense burner with sticks and various yellowed bottles of pungent fragrance, a load of melted candles (much of the wax embedded into the carpet fibres), LOTR posters and music posters, my ‘ghettoblaster’ and Hi-Fi with a large selection of tapes and vinyl and near the end of my student days, some new fangled CD’s, an Indian throw with other ‘very cool and multi-cultural’ objects around the room and yes…the ubiquitous bright orange flashing traffic cone! Don’t ask me why, but every student HAD to have a traffic cone! But amongst all this ‘stuff’, there was me and my ‘art’. Huge canvases, some way too large to transport in my VW Beetle, ‘Mr. Jiffy 2’, even with the roof off, and so these had to be carried right through the centre of Cheltenham up to the art college – a prized moment to show off to people, as the plastic wrappings to protect the canvas would invariably waft open, revealing snatches of the masterwork beneath…dear dear!

Anyway, despite the pretentiousness of all art students, and yes, we’re ALL like it, I really did just love to draw and paint. Above everything, any crap that was happening in my life, any traumas and dramas (for which there were many) …for me, I was never happier than when I was either reading a book, writing a story or holding a paintbrush. I still LOVE the smell of linseed oil, liquin medium (alkyd resin), white spirit…ahhhhh….glorious concoctions in messy jars, palettes so encrusted with paint you could hardly use them but always did, brushes stiff from hardened oils, the excitement at the sight of the massive roll of canvas…then stretching them like giant sails across the floor. A quick trip to B&Q with some tw0-by-fours, a handful of nails, a saw and a staple-gun, and suddenly you had a stretched canvas panel, ready to be primed in white wash, ready to be made into something…astonishing. A world of possibilities just there in that bobbled linen fabric! 🙂

Yes, I loved it, every single moment of it. In fact, back then, without the life experience I have now, the only thing I didn’t like about art college, was the selling part – having to ‘talk the talk’, sell yourself as ‘creator extraordinaire’ and your work, as the next big undiscovered super-talent. I simply couldn’t do it back then. I didn’t have the confidence or the inclination. I saw other ‘artists’ who couldn’t draw a damn, had no idea about composition, had lousy technique and really just couldn’t paint to save themselves, excel far above those of us who did have the talent and skills. Why? Because they understood the dynamics of it better than we did. Art to them was a business not a vocation, not a way of soulful expression, but a way of getting ahead, getting to where they wanted to be. They could ‘talk the talk’, spout poetic jargon phrases that made no sense to those of us that knew, yet elicited the cooing responses of the ‘art world crowd’. They made contacts, and used them effectively, they succeeded where the rest of us failed.

Am I bitter? Certainly not. For me, my art was never about being ‘in fashion’, and I was never about being the focus of attention. I wanted the work to speak for itself, rather than me spout some pretentious twaddle about what a certain brush stroke meant! So no, I had several very successful exhibitions, beat off those art schmoozers and over 10,000 other students across the country to get second place in a very prestigious national photography competition with my work exhibited in London, and sold a few paintings to very happy customers along the way. The point is, I never fell out of love with art, because I never viewed it as a business. I was and am simply small-time me, not showy, not shouting, not glaringly anything. Just little old me, now wearing other colours rather than just black, still listening to my music at ear-splittingly loud levels, still lighting candles and standing in my garden staring at the stars at 2am, still forgetting to wash my brushes properly and sniffing linseed oil like it was Chanel No.5. Just me! 😛

So…why all this elaborate walk down memories past?

Because, finally I get it!

Much like life itself, things are never really just black or white, we all live in shades of grey…er…no, not that crappy book, lol, I mean…life is beautiful and complex and full of hard edges and soft fuzzy bits…it’s a messed up fruit salad of emotions and happenings and all we can really do, despite our yearnings for control out of chaos, is simply to dip our spoon into the bowl and see what fruit lands on our plate!

In other words…all these years later, I still LOVE to draw and paint, it’s still a huge part of who I am and how I function, but I don’t need to get so damned pernickety about it. Art and business CAN live together, without one diluting the other. I finally got what those students were dong all those years ago, using their heads as well as their hearts.

And so, with head and heart in tow, I have decided to combine what I love to do with how to make a living. I have started a business, Sophie E Tallis Illustrations!!! Yes, a business, albeit in tiny baby steps, but a business of illustrating books and producing original commissioned artwork for other authors…and I absolutely LOVE IT!!!!

I’ve only done a few commissions so far, one of which involved creating 7 pen & ink illustrations for a children’s book, Snort and Wobbles http://www.willmacmillanjones.com/snort–wobbles.html, by multi-talented author, Will Macmillan Jones http://www.willmacmillanjones.com/, but I adored every second of it. Already, with just a few illustrations on LinkedIn and some other places, I have a small publishing house in Kingston-Upon-Thames who is interested in having me on their books as an illustrator, have several authors asking me to do some illustrations and book covers for them and I have just set up a sparkly new website http://sophieetallisillustrations.weebly.com/ (and Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/SophieETallisIllustrations) and loaded some of my illustrations and paintings on there! Already the response has been tremendous and utterly overwhelming! Why oh why didn’t I do this years ago???!!!! 😀

So, my little Spring seeds…it is never too late to change direction and change your life, to shake things up and remember what it was that you loved all those years ago. For me, it was remembering my loving and wanting to do something creative for a living, and now it is finally happening. What better way to make a living than to combine the two things I cherish most in the world – books and art!!!

Lol, Spring is definitely in the air, as I plant my little art seeds and see them take root and grow…who knows what tomorrow will bring! Check out my new website guys! http://sophieetallisillustrations.weebly.com/ 😀 xxxxxxx

A HUGE thank you to all my family and friends and my lovely fellow bloggers, all 20,000 of you, who got me through my illness and the last difficult year and who have helped me to stay positive and to see all the marvellous possibilities of life…!

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you! 😀 xxxxxxxx

❤

Passing 2,000!

Like many of us, I’m sure, it’s true to say that I’ve been doing some frenzied juggling of late.

Between heavy workloads, writing my second book, other creative commitments, family life and life in general, my ‘Daily Hello!’ has undoubtedly become a ‘Weekly Hello’!

So, I am utterly astonished, thrilled and very humbled, that my little blog, which only started life at the end of January this year, has passed the 2,000 hits mark!!!

 

WOO and HOO!!!!!!!!!

Thank you to all my supporters, whether you are frequent visitors, friends or inquisitive one-time frequenters. I welcome you all, and to you all, I give my heartfelt thanks.

I am genuinely touched…a MASSIVE thank you! 😀 xxx

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