Woman goes from tip to tips with book about family life

SEEING a book in print 40 years after being told “You can write” is a dream come true for Tracy Richardson, a mother, author and blogger.

Tracy, 61, received the advice at a creative writing class all those years ago but it was a financial adviser who finally prompted her to publish a book, Words from a Bird.

Her husband Neil Grindey and their four children had calculated that she had written more than a million words and nudged to make the move to print.

Tracy, who lives in Nuffield, began by giving away hard copies of the blog and producing what she calls a “War and Peace” collection of four paperbacks of her scribblings.

The adviser, Tom, was the straw that broke the camel’s back after he made her promise to publish.

Tracy says: “This will sound really middle-class but I was having a financial review in January last year and Tom said you’ve got to do something with that million words and so I have.”

It took her months to get the book, which began life on January 1, 2016 and covers the first six months of the year, into a form that she was happy with.

The blog started as a whim and a new year resolution. She had given up a job she loved at Grundon, in Ewelme, where she had worked for seven and a half years as a waste adviser helping pubs and restaurants in Henley and South Oxfordshire.

When her mother developed dementia, Tracy wanted to spend more time with her. “Along with all my other commitments, I just felt like a clown at the circus juggling balls,” she said. “I had to spend more time with her.” But with work gone and her children making their own way in life, Tracy was left with a hole to fill. “So I started blogging … I should have been a journalist or an English teacher because I love words and the English language.”

The blog, which documents the nitty-gritty of daily life in a household of older children and deals with everything from broken limbs, feisty dogs (miniature Schnauzers, Percy and Reg, aged 12 and nine) and having children in the modern era, has gone from strength to strength, with 14,000 followers at the last count.

It is quirky, light-hearted, funny and delivered in bite-size sections every few days.

Tracy says: “It seems to ring bells with people and is very down to earth. A lot of people contact me and say that what I write is so relatable. At the minute I am writing about my mum’s Alzheimer’s, which she calls the dreaded fairy dust, and a lot of people are identifying with that.”

Her mother, Sandra, 83, reads the blog, which has each entry headlined by a song title to reflect Tracy’s love of music, with titles ranging from Everyday I Write the Book, a record by Elvis Costello to When I’m Cleaning Windows, a ditty performed by the Lancastrian comic and ukulele player, George Formby.

Tracy’s mother features in many entries, including one from October called Lost in the Supermarket — a 1979 song by The Clash — in which she had mislaid her bag before a shopping trip.

She wrote: “The mother was back to her usual self yesterday. I tipped up at hers to collect her for our weekly foray to the supermarket, only to be greeted by an old lady version of Freddie [Parrot Face Davies] Parrott, courtesy of a hat of Nanny Joyce’s. ‘Have you seen my bag?’ …”

After a fruitless search the pair head to a shop: ‘Can I help you?’ asked the shop assistant who was groomed to within an inch of her life. Waltzing into the store, the mother piped up, ‘This old bag needs a new bag’. She had the decency not to wave her hand at her daughter …”

In Run Rabbit Run, from April 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic, Tracy writes: “Talking of the demon drink, I was speaking to the Mother over the weekend, who almost always seems to have a glass of red in her hand, irrespective of what time I video call her. We were discussing the people who are being furloughed at the moment, and she piped up…

“‘I’ve been more Merlot’d I think’…”

Tracy says: “My biggest selling point is that I don’t think about what I write too much, people who know me say that they can hear me talking, so I write the way I talk. I am warm to my readers and just tell people what has happened in my day.

“There’s nothing like it out there in the book shops, it’s all celebrities spouting off about how dreadful their lives are, there’s nothing out there that just says ‘I’m like you, let’s have a giggle together’. It’s funny and relatable to mums with children in the 18-plus age range.”

The blog has followed the adult stages of the lives of Sophie 34, Samuel 30, Gaby 29 and Elliot 27.

“The children are incredibly proud, they never read it when they were younger, I suppose I was vicious towards them, with stories about bringing bags of dirty washing home [from university] and about their rooms that like had a police tape across the entrances.

“But now they are sharing the stories on LinkedIn and elsewhere with their friends. My second daughter, Gaby, said thank-you for capturing it, mum, because we would never have remembered all that.”

There is no escape in the blog for Neil, 61, who owns the construction company NPG Benson. He hails originally from Warrington, in north west England, but has worked in and around Henley and South Oxfordshire for 40 years.

On the hassle that comes with being a working mum, Tracy recalls one hectic day when her husband appeared and offered to help.

She said: “You can sometimes feel very alone with life and just trying to work out what you are going to have for dinner tonight? Why is the garage messy? Why is so and so not right … And why is my husband holding up two ducks and saying ‘Shall we have these for dinner after going shooting somewhere’.

“Two whole ducks. The look I gave him over the varifocals said it all. “What am I going to do with them?” Tracy’s deep affection for Neil is evident throughout the blog.

The couple first met in Henley as teenagers. “We went out together when we were 16 and got back together in our late thirties,” she says.

That was when the couple welded their respective children, Neil with Sophie and Samuel plus Tracy with Gaby and Elliot, into a solid family unit and married in May 2007 underneath a copper beech tree outside their home.

Neil features in a post from June 2022 about wedding vows, called “I do, I do, I do, I do, I do…” referencing the Abba song released in 1975.

She wrote: “I wish they’d update the marriage vows though. Wouldn’t it be lovely to be able to say ‘I might’ or ‘I do, but not in the way you’re thinking sunshine’. As all of us ladies know, the following vows would be far more sensible ... ‘Will you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?’ ‘Yes, I will’. ‘Will you promise to do everything she ever asks you to do the first time?’‘Yes, I will’. ‘Will you accept that she is never wrong?’ ‘Yes, I will’. Will you manage at least fifteen ‘yes, my dear’ comments every week?’ ‘Yes, I will’. The husband has managed to live his life to almost all of these rules, and we seem to muddle along quite nicely. I say most of the rules…

Fourteen years to get my bathroom replaced. That’s all I’m saying…”

It has been a long journey for Tracy, who “with a gift of the gab” has also worked as a car saleswoman for Toyota and Mercedes dealerships, 40 years after being told to “do something” with her writing.

Words from a Bird is now on sale in Henley and she has two or three years of books worth of material to go and a second book is due out soon.

“In 2015, I started doing these stories on Facebook when I went away with my mum and I called it Words from a broad — as in the American slang for a woman who was overseas. It kind of went from there, and the name was changed to bird. I just like the title.”

And her goals for the book and the blog, which will be nine years old on New Year’s Day, are just like her writings, down to earth.

“For somebody to say ‘Oh I really quite this’, that’s all I want really.”

l Words From a Bird is available at Bell Street Bookshop, Henley.