Gym Palace

As part of my recovery package courtesy of the NHS (thanks everyone, including me). If only there was champagne in that package, and Botox inducing face masks or the like, but no, I am being given cut-rate gym sessions at the local gym (not gin, sadly) palace. I see someone called Dion who takes me through the equipment at the gym while we discuss Oasis and other bands from the 90s. He's a spring chicken but his taste in music is sprung. We discuss the lack of guitar music these days, along with my lack of muscles, these days. I reliably inform him that this time last summer I was 2 stone lighter and fit - running up that hill fit - the one most people can't get up without taking a rest. He looked sceptical. Dion then gives me a list of classes to attend. The first one is called Circuits. Sounds hectic. Just the ticket to knock off a few, pounds that is, but when the other gym gear clad grannies and granddads arrive, they look like they are about to be knocked off the planet. Clearly Dion did not believe a word that I said. I cheer up when I see a basketball net. I smugly toss the ball through the hoop, over and over again, from further and further away, just to make a point. The instructor and the coffin dodgers ignore me.

The B52s start playing and the gym instructor gets on the headphones, whilst showing everyone how to have a knees up, but not the kind I prefer, he points his knees up to the ceiling and taps them to the floor getting a bit of a wiggle-vibe on as he does so. The old folk join in but only lackadaisically, given its a bit of a social club and chat-wise, they are warming up. There are ten circuit stations, ranging from standing up and sitting down on a chair, using a rubber band to discourage bingo wings, using a gym ball to polish the wall, using some tiny weights that Jerry would laugh at, and, piece de la resistance (but not with a resistance band) walking up and down. I decide to really give it some welly in order to feel the burn so do everything at triple, nay, quadruple speed, which ain't hard to maintain given the competition. At the 'throw a ball to one another' station, I fling the ball through the hoop like a crazy person. Instead of walking up and down, I tear from one end of the gym to the other like I'm sprinting to my car in Llandudno after leaving it for 92 and not 90 minutes. 90 was also the average age of the folks in my class, but they were good for a chin wag at the water station, where they gave me plenty of tips, such as how I ought to take it easy. When I splashed my face in the ladies afterwards, it was the colour of allotment beet.

I decided to supplement my exercise programme by ducking and dodging the tourists and old folk down Conwy High Street like a pro skier on speed, coming at them at an alarming rate and keeping it up in the Spar for good measure, almost unsettling the stacked baked beans in the process, which, if I'd taken Dion's advice, ought to have been used as weights during my supermarket sweep. I haven't been back to circuits yet. I may try speed cycling next, but I had trouble getting into the stirrups at the gym, and wouldn't want to make a spectacle of myself.

Why I brought a #1975InheritanceAct Case 2

Blog before last I wrote of my recent win in a #1975Inheritance Act case. Following the blog, The Family as the judge referred to them, left a series of public comments on these pages, basically telling me I deserved cancer. (I have recently recovered from chemotherapy treatment for an ovarian tumour; I also detailed what the last 3.7 years have taken on my mental health). The comments were anonymous, but linguistically, they remain true to form - the incident that led us all to the courtroom this year, began in 2015, with a public Facebook attack that The Family left via my author profile (it caused the rift that caused the split - family and financial). The public chastisement of women is a thing for The Family and one it seems, they are not going to let up from. For the past 3 and a half years and counting, my sister’s husband has used every opportunity to vilify and attack, in writing, my husband and myself. I have a file of this written abuse from 2015 to several weeks ago. Despite being trounced in court (he was the second defendant) he has stalked my every social media page and this blog since his vendetta began. "How can you take your own family to court?" The Family also queried. I think the former explains the latter and besides, I would never take my own family to court. I have been unable to write freely here until the case went to trial, given my sister's husband would police everything I wrote for his 'witness' statements, but also the case had not gone to trial, so the principal of open justice had not been triggered. Speaking of triggers, 2 things spring to mind: I now know mine comprehensively and avoid them at all costs. 2 of the men in my family who have been shooting at me have actually been shot at and are best avoided.

The facts of the case are these: My great-grandmother left her estate to her son, my maternal uncle. A year before my mother died in 2016, my maternal uncle left his/his mother's estate to my mother and her sister, stating that in the event of their deaths, the estate should go to her survivors. It also stipulated that it not be sold for 6 years. My mother assured me verbally on numerous occasions, and in writing, that the house would be left to her 4 children of which I am one. Shortly before my mother died she made a will specifically cutting me out and leaving the entire estate to her husband. Not a penny or a brick in the estate was marital money as I have always protested, (all of it was my maternal uncle's, and, as the judge pointed out, it would not be seen by the courts as such). I had no issue with my mother's husband having my uncle’s money, despite my uncle being very clear in his will that my mother’s husband should have his MG and 5K only. I also had no issue with my mother’s husband remaining in our family property until he died. Further, I would never have cut my 3 siblings out, reprehensible as I consider them to be. But The Family, 3 of them in particular, had plans to benefit themselves only. The others may just be daft. Or, given the prevailing cult-like atmosphere in The Family: brainwashed. Yes. There were cults too. 

Following my last blog The Family also complained thus: "And now you're blogging about it?" Yes, I've been blogging about my life since 2011, apart from the enforced many months gaps I mentioned. Amongst various vocations I have had in my 36 years of work (I began work at 14), I am an award winning writer, though The Family don't know much about me. We were informed, via their witness statements that I am a drug smuggler who smuggled drugs into the country on the backs of dog collars (imagine my dogs and those of the police meeting!). I am also told that I am (presumably), a violent schizophrenic I am afraid of her becoming unwell, because she knows where I live. I kid you not kids. My sister unreliably told the court (no evidence, because it never happened) that I have threatened her at the 2 private schools that she has been head at. The only true stuff that I could pick out, was the stuff about the witches. Yes, you really can make it up as you go along, as long as you get all your witnesses to sing from the same, orchestrated hymn sheet. But The Family are right. Form-wise, the blog doesn't cut it.