Posted by I’ve been listening to the book My Salty Mary by Brodi Ashton, Cynthia Hand and Jodi Meadows. A fun story of mermaids and pirates. It is narrated by Nneka Okoye who makes it incredibly funny and a real joy.
In one chapter, one of our protagonists is walking down the street rehearsing aloud how he will propose:
Please consent to becoming my wife.
To which we then hear:
Arrrrrrrrr.
From an old pirate with a peg leg who walks past doing the statutory pirate greeting.
Our character replies:
Arrrrrrr yourself!
Apparently, the proper response.
This exchange made me laugh so much and was so unexpected, especially with what had gone before, that I have chuckled about it ever since. I even tried the proper response on my neighbour this morning. Not that she greeted me with the statutory pirate greeting to begin with, or even greeted me at all. I’ve blogged before about my neighbourhood, they are nice enough, but tend not to remember me or indeed each other. They are just so busy, so stressed, so something, so not present in their lives, that they do not see or remember their neighbours, even after spending time with them. It’s odd.
In any other circumstance – with real people – this could have been awkward, but this lady doesn’t really speak normally when I say hello. She just looks at me quizzically like she’s trying to fathom whether I might be related to her or that I am about to pull a fast one. Invariably, with my inexplicable salutation and vivacious joie de vivre, she braces herself for the latter. All in all, this morning, it wasn’t any more awkward than usual even after shouting: Arrrrrrr yourself! The only difference was I laughed all the way down the street afterwards. I am laughing as I type this and will laugh again every time I read it. It reminds me a bit of when I used to go play bingo with my mam and tell her that if I won that I would shout: ‘Ere you are, as people, in the Boro, would do.
‘Ere you are, AIrrrrrrrr yourself
My mam would look really shocked: Oooh you won’t, will you? I don’t know why it bothered her so much, but I loved it when people shouted it: ‘Ere you are. I wish for one more night with her, so we could go together even though I always moaned – I am not a bingo fan. I would tell her that if I won I would shout: Arrrrrrr yourself, to see her reaction. Not that I was ever anywhere close to shouting: ‘Ere you are. Perhaps I can try that at my neighbour tomorrow instead. It definitely sounds like a Boro greeting, my favourite being: Now then.
Thinking about Arrrrrrr yourself and The Salty Mary, led to me asking AI to make me into a pirate captain, using the picture my hubby took of me, the other week, as I was leaving to go give a talk at Maple Village. The AI did indeed transform me and the resulting picture is the one of me at the top of this blog post. It also explains why The Pirate Captain Ruth is wearing a 128GB flash thumb drive (thumbstick in ye olde English) around her neck. It has her slides on it: AIrrrrrrrrr yourself!
The one below is the original.
The pictures my husband takes of me are always a bit weird.
Don’t make me look like I have a moony face, I say, as he often makes my face look big and round. I don’t know how manages it, he must zoom in on a special moony face mode. My face was okay this time but I had other questions:
Why am I standing like that?
I don’t know. I didn’t ask you stand like that. You stood like that.
I look like I need a wee.
Well that’s not my fault.
He put it the family group chat and my eldest said: Errr, is that my top? I borrowed it to go with the belt, which I was given after a photoshoot last year (blog coming soon about that experience). The belt is brown and I really wanted to wear it but couldn’t find a top that it would go with it until I remembered hers. I had to sneak back in when I got home late that night.
My AI teeth
The AI drew me with an eye patch, so I asked it to remove the eye patch, as I wasn’t ready to have lost an eye in my pirate life. Although, I have read that some pirates wore an eye patch so that they were always ready to fight on the deck in the light, or below deck in the dark. Each eye was already primed. On the deck one was ready for daylight, below deck in the dark the other was ready for night, they could lift the eye patch and carry on swashbuckling. I like the idea of being prepared, like a pirate girl guide. Though I have neither been either, pirate nor girl guide. I probably would have ditched the eye patch on a hot day and then been scuppered when attacked.
However! No eyepatch drew attention to the teeth. In the original photo, I am not showing my teeth, so it generated some other teeth for me which look like my mother’s false teeth. Now this is quite apt as I went to the dentist first thing on Monday morning and unfortunately the dentist was late, so I had time to chat in the waiting room where I felt like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, which I studied at ‘A’ level. I hate the dentist, it freaks me out, I think because dentistry wasn’t what it is now when I was growing up, and also because my mum had all of her teeth out when she turned 40, which was common back then. I was only eight-years-old and petrified of her for ages afterwards. I slept at my auntie’s house for a little while.
It is an ancient Mariner,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834)
And he stoppeth one of three.
‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
The Ancient Mariner at the dentist
So, there I was, with my long grey hair – instead of the beard, though I had tweezed out a couple of chin hairs that morning. One was definitely grey, the other was balayage ‘cos I’m still with it – and glittering eye telling everyone about my mum’s teeth until my dentist arrived and rescued them. I felt really bad going on, but couldn’t stop myself. I gabble on when I am stressed! My teeth are fine, but each time I go we have a chat about whether I need to fix my jaunty teeth and whiten them up – well just the one at the front which is yellow, after I landed on it after going over the handlebars of a neighbour’s bike that was far too big for me when I was about 10-years-old. Turns out looking at this picture of me with a perfect smile has made my mind up for me. I like my jaunty teeth and won’t fix them unless they need it.
Theoretically, I could whiten the yellow one but it would need some extra special dental shenanigans and perhaps a root canal or even a veneer, so since it’s perfectly healthy as is, well not that healthy as the root has fossilised or something leaving it difficult to inject with whitener or indeed do a root canal, I am leaving well alone. The advantage is that I probably could have a bit part in a pirate adventure film, as most actors now have unnaturally dazzling big white Hollywood teeth and no wrinkles that do not fit in a costume drama. So, sign me up as I have my headshot now, though I would have to cut and paste my jaunty teeth back in. Lucky for me, AI etched in my wrinkles very deeply and weirdly plumped up my face.
Comfort food
Aw but I was so relieved to have left the dentist without treatment that I bought myself some comfort food which I have not eaten for years: Cheese savory sandwich filler, which wasn’t as nice as I remembered. It had a gloopy texture from the xantham gum in it. And cottage cheese, which is something I have never really liked but my mam did and I am missing my mam as it’s that time of year, and especially after all that teeth talk and scary dentist, I felt like shouting: I want me mam. Though to be fair, my dentist is lovely and always right and manages to get me to do the impossible. The x-ray chomp-down plastic-holder is impossible and even a child’s one does not fit in my mouth without a great struggle, which my dentist manages and then somehow persuades me to relax and clamp down on even though I am gagging and choking. She is patient and marvellous, and I want her to come live with me and coach me through my writing life, telling me to keep my eye patch on. I would be unstoppable with her saying: You can do it, Ruth, Arrrrrrrrrr.
Arrrrrrrr yourself! I would shout and then get on with it.
There is something so attractive about, well only in my imagination, the pirate lifestyle. We went to the Pirates exhibition last year at the Royal Naval Museum in Greenwich and it was wonderful.
The reality of their lives aside, which were probably very grim, it was very entertaining, and ever since I have been enjoying a whole host of female-led pirating stories. The Salty Mary is great. As is Shannon Chakraborty’s The Adventures of Amina al Sirafi which has a lot of magical and mystical elements, as well as an older protagonist. Lameece Issaq’s narration is so much fun. I have listened to it more than once and cannot wait for part two to come out.
I also loved Fable by Adrienne Young and the rest of that series which had several wonderful narrators all with captivating voices. Again, I listened to the series more than once. It too has many fantastical, delightful elements in it and, all the books contain vivid, salty fresh descriptions of life onboard a ship sailing the seven seas.
Salty Ruth
The only thing I miss living in London, apart from friendly neighbours, is the sea. I love that sea-fret rain that you only get to experience in a sea town. I love sitting on the beach and drinking a cup of tea and afterwards finding sand everywhere. Or those little stones which get into the turn ups on my jeans like they did the other week when I was in Brighton. And I love the way the salt air makes me hair curl right up into wonderful curliness and that I sleep better after inhaling the air. I don’t know if I really do but that’s what everyone says and I do believe that we believe the stories we tell ourselves, so I am loving that we are now hearing more stories about women.
As, I always say you have to see it to be it. Not that I would have necessarily chosen the life of a pirate, like I did the life of a university student, after seeing that I could on the telly, but I might have chosen to be more bolder, freer, saltier, recognising myself in the heroine’s role of my own life earlier on, regularly roaring the joyous salutation:
Arrrrrr yourself!
All the while knowing that answer or not, the joy is in the salutation and my shipmates are awaiting, I just have to keep on keeping on. AIrrrrrrrrrr!