I have had this sock in my desk drawer for many years. It belonged to my older daughter, Daisy. I can’t remember the exact set of circumstances that resulted in this baby sock ending up in my desk, but I can imagine.
When you’re a mum, you tend to have a lot of random things in your handbag and of course, that bag goes everywhere with you. I currently have baby wipes and a fresh nappy in my hand bag at the moment, for example.
It was no doubt the product of one of those times where my hand bag becomes the repository of many baby related items and sometimes they come out in random places.
I clearly found this in my bag one day, nearly 8 years ago and decided I needed something I could touch to feel close to my daughter when we were apart. This little sock was one of many she owned and as such, it would not have been missed at home, but at work, it was gratefully received by me.
I have never wanted to take it out of my drawer and take it home. It is a good luck symbol, not that I can say it has given me any luck! It just makes me feel a bit better during moments in my working day when I miss my daughters a bit too much.
First and foremost, Cat is a Mum of four and Wifeypotamus (her husband has some odd pet name preferences). She has an older brother, a nurse and a younger half sister who is fifteen years her junior.
She hails from what her husband considers to be the ‘wrong side of the Pennines’, but more specifically, Merseyside. She now lives on what she considers to be the ‘wrong side of the Pennines’ – Yorkshire.
When she left high school at 16, the lad she sat next to in GCSE English wrote in her leaving book “keep bloody writing”, owing to her outrageous word count on every essay she wrote.
After finishing high school with eleven GCSE’s, she went onto study for her A-Levels in English and Theatre Studies, before going onto Edge Hill University. She studied for a joint honors degree in Drama and English and graduated in 2004.
She thinks that she learnt little from her degree in terms of writing, well, apart from the modules on poetry lead by the indefatigable Dr Rob Spence. What she did see University as though, was a very expensive dating agency, as that is where she met her husband.
She works at a University, in a role that requires her to, at the very least, look intelligent. She has had varying amounts of success with that.
During all of her education, she has read and written voraciously. She also wished that she had read and written voraciously for her course a tad more instead.
Cat’s poetry has been published in several international anthologies after winning Yorkshire region competitions. She felt that this was something of a cop-out seeing as she is not a native, but was honored nonetheless.
She currently has more projects on the go than would be considered healthy for one woman to manage inside her head, but she likes a challenge. She is currently writing her first full length novel, which, bizarrely, she has no desire to see published.
Her chief audience is herself, followed in rapid succession by ‘him-in-doors’ who says she is ‘a talented writer’. Then again, he would say that. He likes her cooking and values his life.
Her blog will contain updates on what the jingo Cat is up to, as well as publishing some of her work.
She would also like to make it clear that any updates that look like she was fuelled on either caffeine or alcohol when she wrote them, probably were.
You can follow Cat on Twitter: @Cat_Mercer
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