Blogger, traveller, poet, indie publisher – 'I am the Cat who walks by herself, and all places are alike to me'
I had three haikus up my sleeve for today, but this one popped out randomly when I was eating breakfast in the garden.
And it shows I can rhyme – sometimes – but only with my tongue firmly in my cheek! 😉
Columbine, where is your Pierrot?
Waiting at the theatre door?
You will find him, never fear; oh
love will triumph evermore.
You deserve a ream of sonnets,
Linda Rushby 30 April 2020
so delicate and pinkly pretty,
but you’re really granny’s bonnets,
so please accept this little ditty!
Five years ago today, it was a Thursday. At least, I remember that the subsequent two days were Friday and Saturday. So this is one of those odd combinations of years when the days are the same after five years, not six – a moment’s thought makes it obvious, because those five contained two leap years.
I remember taking Flick to school and walking the dog. Laura must have been working an early shift at the care home, and I would have stayed at hers the night before. I sat in my car outside her house and thought – this is it. It may have been drizzly – I don’t remember the drive – I would have been concentrating because it wasn’t familiar then. There were road works on the A34 at Milton, south of Oxford – they went on for years – the southbound traffic was diverted off the dual carriageway, and I stopped at the Costa.
In Southsea, the sun was shining. I went straight to the agent’s, signed the paperwork, picked up the keys, drove to the flat. The doors were open, the landlady was there with her little dog, and someone was putting up a curtain rail. It was the first time we’d met, so introductions and a few minutes of polite chat were obligatory, till I walked out, turned right, found the alley between the houses, where the wisteria wasn’t quite open, a quick right and left at the end, crossed the esplanade, through the rock gardens, and reached the sea. I could hardly believe it was so close.
I walked along the seafront as far as the Coffee Cup, then turned inland down the quiet road that leads to Eastney and the Highland Road roundabout – I remember passing the strange cake shop. Turned left onto Highland Road, past the cemetery and the junk shop, then onto Albert Road, the bike shops, the crystal shop, the church with the Italian bell tower, on the corner of where I live now. I was looking for a road leading towards the sea, but I’d missed them all, until I came to the traffic lights which I knew would take me back to the flat.
I had the small fold out bed (or maybe just the mattress), a camping chair, kettle, toaster, radio, laptop (but no wifi) – microwave? I couldn’t carry much in the Micra. I walked the empty rooms planning where the furniture would go. I must have eaten that evening – fish and chips, of course – did I know the chippy was there, just round the corner, or was it instinct? There was bound to be one, and I had the car, I would have found something.
Next morning, I drove back to Beds, collected and loaded the van with Laura and Chris, and on Saturday drove back with Murka in a basket on the passenger seat, via Guildford where I picked up Simon.
In memory, banal days become significant, and significant ones banal. Thirtieth April 2015 holds both in balance.
Wrote this yesterday evening. Spent most of the morning clearing a space on the table from my previous papercrafting projects.
May or may not be finished today – don’t hold your breath!
Tomorrow I will make a paper sunflower.
I have the stamps, the dies,
the coloured paper.
A small act of creation
with glue and pencils, paper, ink
a little effort.
It may not be
Linda Rushby 29 April 2020
a thing of beauty.
Just a pleasant way
to spend the time.
But there are worse things
I could do.
I started this two days ago, couldn’t see where to take it or how to finish it, lost it because it was saved on my laptop instead of PC, realised I’d got nothing to post for today, found it again, read what I’d done, added a bit, still couldn’t see where it was going, but what the hell, maybe it’ll make sense another day, and this all I have for now.
In the draft I’d given it the title ‘Changes‘, but ‘Work in Progress‘ seems as good a title as any.
Sometimes I reflect
on the changes I’ve made in
my external life.
The things and the people
that I’ve left behind,
including: two husbands
three cats (two came back)
five flats and five houses,
three countries,
four counties,
two professions
one novel unpublished,
one novel unfinished.The things that remain
are those in myself,
the voices that taunt me
for sixty years
the person inside,
the grief and the sadness
that come back to haunt me.What changes, what stays?
Linda Rushby 28 April 2020
Is there no final answer?
All the layers, the strata,
the sedimentation
that makes up the whole
of the soul that continues
the core of the woman
who can’t see the future
who can’t see the ending,
who has to keep going
who hopes to make progress
and someday, perhaps,
will rest on her laurels
and look at the whole
and see it completed?
I keep thinking I’ll get up first thing and walk to the seafront. Delayed gratification – I know it will make me happier, but I still don’t do it.
Yesterday, I thought: I’ll run out of milk by the end of the day, so I’ll wait till tomorrow, and go to the shops on the way back. Because the lovely sunny mornings are here to stay, right?
I could hear the rain when I woke up. I dozed off again and woke at 7, and got up and dressed ready to go. I’ve been rotating around Co-op, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, it was Co-op week, and I remembered they don’t have self-checkout, but thought, I’ll go there anyway, they might have stuff I can’t get in the other two.
The plan is go-straight-there-and-get-it-done. No exercise, no writing, no breakfast, not even coffee. I started looking for my credit card, it’s not the only one I’ve got, but I get 1% cashback for using it in supermarkets. Looked everywhere – no sign. This is hardly unusual, but still annoying. I know the last place I used it was in Tesco last Tuesday. I checked my online banking and it hasn’t been used since then, so it’s probably still in the house. How desperate am I? Milk’s the main thing, and I’ve got a pint of UHT (for making yoghurt, but also as a backup). That’s ok then, I don’t have to go out after all. Leave it for another day, when I’ve got my card and it’s not raining.
Well in that case, I’ll revert to normal morning routine. Did my half hour tai chi/yoga/meditation and felt loads better. And it had stopped raining. Right then, it’s still only 9 o’clock, off to the Co-op after all.
There was no queue at the shop, but no baskets, just the things with wheels that the baskets are stacked in, and trolleys which require a pound, and I’d only brought my phone, credit card and loyalty card. I looked around for someone to ask, and saw someone using one of the basket holders as a substitute trolley, so thought, I’ll do that then.
I found most things I wanted, including the last bottle of Lea & Perrins but not Marmite. I got to the checkout and got into an altercation with the checkout lady about why I’d got the basket holder.
‘You should have got a basket, or a trolley.’
‘There weren’t any baskets.’
‘They’re just over there.’
‘There weren’t any when I got here.’
‘Well you should have asked.’
I got angry and swore. I knew it was myself I was angry at, not her, so I apologised. Then I tried to swipe my card but it was too much, then I used the wrong pin number because it wasn’t the card I normally use.
‘It’s getting to all of us’ said the checkout lady kindly. But I wanted to tell her: this isn’t who I am. Well, the chaos is, but not the rudeness.
No poetry at all today, so here’s one I prepared earlier (last week in fact, same day as the Power Tools).
My cat listens.
She sits upright,
her paws just-so
her tail wrapped around
and looks me right in the eye.‘It’s okay’ I tell her,
‘Don’t worry,
I’m not talking to you!’Her eyes narrow.
Linda Rushby 27 April 2020
Perhaps she’s thinking:
‘Silly old bag.
Don’t you realise
I’m just a cat?’
Every post on this blog (except the individual poems) is exactly 500 words long. I started that when I first set it up – which I believe was two years ago (I’ll have to check). I keep an eye on the word count as I go, but sometimes when I get to the last sentence I have to go back and edit a bit to get the final total just right.
It’s quirky, I know, but it stops me going off into long rambling discourses which take half the day to complete. And… I want to be quirky. It satisfies my sense of myself. Also, I don’t go back and read what I wrote previously. While I’m in the process of writing, I prefer not to check what I’ve said, or look up information that would be easy to find (like when I started this blog or the name of that Bob Dylan song – it’s ‘When the Deal Goes Down’, if you’re interested). Quirky, right?
I suppose that’s because I don’t take this writing malarkey seriously, and that’s largely because I really don’t expect anyone to read it – however much I paste it on Facebook and Twitter, I can’t force it down people’s throats. And that gives me a lot of freedom to write what I want, how I want.
About the same time I started blogging, in autumn 2005, I also started a creative writing course, which ran on Monday mornings for two ten week terms a year. I did it for four years, and in about the second or third year the subject of blogging came up, in the context of the relationship between truth, fiction, factual writing, literary truth etc (at that time ‘fake news’ had not been invented, though there was already a lot of it flying about, and if it had been, it would certainly have been on the syllabus). The tutor said that blogs were fundamentally dishonest because online you can claim to be anyone, with the implication that all bloggers contrive to make themselves sound more interesting than they actually are. I argued that on the contrary, I am more open and honest about myself, my failings and insecurities on my blog than anywhere else, because of the freedom inherent in writing rather than speech (which requires direct social interaction, with a listener who may respond in any number of ways – actually, I think that might be a good topic for another time.)
Quickly glancing at the word count, I realise that I need to wrap things up, and I still haven’t got to the point I was thinking of when I sat down, which is this: yesterday I know I ended with two rhetorical questions, on the lines of: should I go for a walk or should I do housework? In case anyone thought these were genuine questions, the answer is that I did neither (though I did start cutting the hedge). But now I think I’ll have to leave that hanging again…
I was going to write something serious today, but this happened:
There are jobs I don’t mind doing,
and some I can’t be bothered.
I’m an independent woman
but I’ll take help when it’s offered.Now in these troubled days, we all
must help our blighted nation,
and I wouldn’t put my friends at risk
in times of isolation.
So I thought I’d cut my hedge alone
Linda Rushby 26 April 2020
to prove that I am able
and this is how much I got done
before I cut the cable.
I sat on the edge of my bed earlier and said, out loud: ‘I love you. Don’t do this to yourself’. At the time it didn’t make any difference, as I knew it wouldn’t. But thinking back on it now, and writing it down, it seems significant that even when I was trying to encourage myself, it was framed as a prohibition and inherent criticism.
In my head all this feels entangled with a kind of grief, and the stages of grief (which I’ve heard about so many times, but have only a hazy perception of now and am probably taking out of context). As I recollect there are four main ones: denial, anger, depression and acceptance. I feel as though my whole life (not just in lockdown) is a cycle of the first three, without ever reaching the final stage – or at least, only in a partial way. What feels like happiness to me is largely denial, avoidance, coping, filling life with distractions and temporary pleasures. Bob Dylan has a wonderful phrase for this, I think it’s: ‘transient joys’, but I’m not sure of that, or even what song it’s from. Maybe if I can let it run in my head for a few minutes I can pin it down. Aaagh, no, I’ll have to look it up and I’m not doing that now! There I go, getting distracted again, when what I was really thinking as I wrote that was – maybe that’s true of most of us? That the pleasures we seek out from whatever sources: work, play, art, creativity, writing, reading, entertainment, sex, sport, nature, food, drink and other addictions, maybe even the company of other people – are ways of burying existential sadness? Well, maybe that’s not everybody, but perhaps more people than would admit to it.
But for years I’ve been saying/thinking that all the activities with which I normally fill my life, (swimming, yoga, tai chi, writers’ groups, choir etc) are ways of forcing myself to go out, to be with people, and that I have to bully myself into doing them. At the start of the lockdown I speculated on how I would cope without them. The answer initially was that I was quite happy to have an excuse not to go out – I sit in the garden, I do my 30 minutes exercise/meditation in the mornings, I write, interact on social media, listen to the radio, crochet, etc. I don’t even take advantage of the ‘daily outdoor exercise’ we’re supposedly allowed. I go to the shop once a week when I run out of milk and that’s it.
So why don’t I make a flask of coffee and walk to the seafront, instead of sitting here moaning? Why don’t I at least get off my backside and do some housework?
Not feeling poetic
or even writerly.
Out of touch
with reality.
Starting to wonder
what is this reality
we thought was so real?
And maybe one day
Linda Rushby 25 April 2020
we’ll reach that reality
that’s really real,
and what happens then?
Posted something on another blog this morning, and thought i would be able to share it on here, but apparently not.
And I couldn’t really think of a poem, so sorry about that.
https://southseastorytellers.news.blog/2020/04/25/treasure-trove/amp/