Month: May 2020

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Tai chi in the Garden

I’m not going to the shop today. This is a chain of events triggered because I made lasagne on Friday, which meant I used a pint of milk, which meant I ran out of milk early, so I started one of the cartons of long-life milk which I bought to make yoghurt, but also for emergencies; so I’ve still got plenty of milk so I don’t need to go to the shop today.

I opened the door to let Miko out into the garden. The sun was up, of course, but not shining through the clouds. I stepped out onto the steps that go down to what I laughingly call the ‘patio’, although it’s not paved, but gravelled, and if you poke through the gravel you’ll find compacted builder’s rubble – not that that deters the weeds.

There was no wind, and a blackbird was singing into the empty, quiet air – that beautiful, haunting sound, as though the space between the earth and clouds is hollow, and the music is an echo without a source.

On an impulse I kicked off my slippers and walked down the second lot of steps to the grassed area (I hesitate to call it a ‘lawn’, though I did mow it a few days ago, for the first time in weeks). I took a few slow, deep breaths then began my tai chi practice. Tai chi, as you may know, consists of a sequence of movements which is known as a form (or ‘the form’ for each specific tradition, though there are multiple traditions). As a beginner, you learn a small number of moves one at a time and gradually learn new ones as you perfect the earlier ones – so it is a challenge to the memory and concentration as much as the body. I started learning it towards the end of 2015, went for a year then took a break for most of 2017 after I started chemo. In 2018 I went to a beginners’ class with the same teacher, slowly worked my way up to the point I’d reached before, then added on more moves. It’s not unusual for the same class to have students at different levels, and I liked the class, it was convenient and suited me, and the teacher was happy for me to continue with them.

Since the start of lockdown, we’ve been doing Zoom classes on a Wednesday evening, usually only about six of us, at all stages. I’ve discovered that when the classes stopped, I’d reached a point just before a whole sequence of movements in the form is repeated, but I don’t know the connecting move before that happens. I’ve tried to pick it up from Zoom, but I know I’m fudging it. I should probably try and find it on Youtube.

I started writing about the garden, but ended up with tai chi. Both deserve a bit more attention, but this writing randomly is so much easier and more enjoyable than staring at the screen.  

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Somebody Else’s Problem

Today I think I will write about what I was planning to write about yesterday, before I was hijacked by a poem. But first I’d like to observe that the sun is shining, the gulls are flying past the window, the pigeons are woo-wooing, Miko is at her neighbourhood watch post and not bothering the keyboard, and for once it feels as though the day is off to a good start.

I used to joke that my mid-life crisis began when I started a PhD at the age of 38, and has continued ever since. I remembered that when I was sharing all those memories from Facebook at the start of May, and realised that, though I may still feel in crisis some days, it’s definitely no longer a mid-life one. So I started to ponder on when exactly that transition happened.

My first thought was – well – it must have been when I moved to Southsea in 2015 – that was a major break in my life, and marked the end of that period of rootlessness which had been ongoing since I split with my husband in 2009. But then I thought that my first months here were still part of that churning, the excitement of a new life, new place, new people, all that. Plus of course, the curse of the Madwoman in the Attic – the stuff that had been left behind in the old house, the emotional and physical baggage which had remained unresolved – was still hanging over me. That wasn’t sorted out till I moved into this house in autumn 2016 –that was the next significant point. But then what happened? Yep, 2017 – cancer year.

So now I think that when I look back over my life and mark it off into chunks, chapters of my autobiography, if you like (though this is the closest I’ll ever get to writing one), the present stage started at the beginning of 2018, when I began to pick up the threads of a life no longer dominated by concerns over my health. Comparing notes with my brother (who was treated for prostate cancer in that same year) and my therapist (who I started seeing in early 2018), I discovered that it’s a known condition for people who’ve survived cancer to experience depression after the treatment is over. For me, intellectualising it two years on, it’s about ‘what now?’ – the realisation that there was more future than I’d subconsciously been anticipating, and that finding things to do with it could be a challenge.

And – this has just popped into my head, and I have 70 words to express it in – being treated for cancer, travelling round Europe, being in lockdown – all have this in common: every day is just about itself. The future can be put to one side; maybe it will happen, maybe it will be somebody else’s problem. ‘None of the crazy you get from too much choice…’, no stress, no sweat.

Well, that’s something to talk about on Thursday.

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Memories

Yesterday afternoon I wrote a poem, I thought I would post it today, but now I feel perhaps it’s better to leave it where it is and go back and look at it some other time.

The beginnings of another one came to me in the shower, now I don’t know what to do about it.

What happens to sadness if you push it away?
Does it fester in the dark, like words never written?
Does it burrow its way into your soul
and feast on what it finds there?

From the surface, you brush away the dust,
shake out your feathers
and get on with life.

You won’t let it hurt you,
you’ll face the new day,
and the next, and the next.
Slide into the mask
and smile for the camera.

Then thirty years later
you look at that smile,
and remember, remember,
the pain that those moments
were trying to cover.

Linda Rushby 17 May 2020

Well, there you go. I finished it (I think). That’ll do, anyway.

Yesterday I came across a photo from 1987 and posted it on Facebook. I remember that time as being amongst the most miserable of my life. We were living in Dallas, I had given up my career to be an ex-pat wife, and found myself sitting in the wreckage of the fantasy that at last I would have time to do some ‘serious’ writing. I had left behind my family and friends; I was getting hardly any sleep, struggling to cope with this terrifying new role of ‘mother’ for which I felt utterly unprepared and unsuited; wracked with guilt and shame for having those feelings; convinced that my son would grow up to hate me because he cried constantly, while I was incapable of meeting his needs; totally dependent on and in awe of my husband who, as well as doing a full time job, was able to understand, soothe, and care for the baby with endless patience and all the parental instincts which I so badly lacked.

And needless to say, I was far too ashamed to seek outside help, even if I had a clue where to look for it. The few ‘friends’ I was able to make were other young mothers, all much more well-adjusted than me, all making it seem so easy, so how could I own up to any of them what a monster I felt inside?

With all those memories, I looked at the two smiling faces, my own and that of the perfect little child, standing with hands holding onto the coffee table while I sat on the sofa supporting him under his armpits.

Oddly, when I look back over my life, it seems that ‘motherhood’ is the one thing I somehow got right, the one project of my life whose outcomes – two wonderful, loving, caring people – I can look at with pride (or maybe that’s down to their father’s contribution, rather than mine).

I don’t know why I wrote this. It’s not what I expected.

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Hedgehog Song

I’ve got into the habit of ending the evening by listening to Amazon music. I try to avoid watching telly after 10 o’clock, though I’m not always very good at sticking to that. I don’t really understand how these streaming services work, obviously they go on the basis of what you’ve chosen before but the random playlists can be extremely random. It’s moved on from giving me lots of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills and Nash, Cat Stevens and Fleetwood Mack to deciding I like early 70s folk-rock, which is quite intelligent of it really, though I haven’t heard a lot of those artists for a very long time. In particular it’s picked up on the Incredible String Band, which I didn’t know much about and I find their songs pretty mixed.

Last night it flashed up ‘The Hedgehog’s Song’ (by ISB) which made me laugh, because it reminded me of Nanny Ogg’s Hedgehog Song from the Discworld books. But as soon as the music started, I knew it instantly, though I don’t think I ever knew what band it was associated with. It was just one of those songs that everybody sang in the folk clubs of fifty years ago:

‘Well, you know all the words, and you’ve sung all the notes,
but you never quite learned the song’ she sang.
‘I can tell by the sadness in your eyes
that you never quite learned the song.’

Incredible String Band

Naturally, I sang along, as I’d probably done dozens of times in my youth in smoky clubs and pubs – it had a jaunty tune, quirky rhythm, and apparently silly but actually quite thoughtful lyrics. I thought about my eighteen, nineteen, twenty year old self not giving a thought to the woman who would be singing it half a century later and ruefully reflecting how accurate it was.

Sometimes with these songs from those days I think about the fact that the people who wrote them, if I could see them now at the age they were then, would seem ridiculously young, but at the time they were so much older and more mature than me, role models I admired and hoped to emulate. But here I am with all these years, experience and supposed wisdom, still haunted by adolescent confusion and doubt. I knew all the words, and I sang all the notes, but I never quite learned the song. You can tell by the sadness in my eyes, I never quite learned the song.

No, that wasn’t going to be me. I wasn’t going to turn out to be that sort of sad old lady.

An old friend commented on yesterday’s post that maybe heartache is harder to recover from than heartbreak. I think she’s right, because a broken heart is an acute trauma, that you have to deal with and move on from, but heartache is something that lingers, a chronic condition that fluctuates but never completely goes away. Maybe that’s why my therapist used that word. Interesting.

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New Morning

Wasn’t really expecting a poem today, but here it is:

New Morning

Coming out of the darkness, temptation whispers
how good it would be to return to oblivion
and slide back down into happy dreams.

‘That’s not how it works’
cries Morpheus, slamming
the door on your pleading.
He won’t take you back
any more than the womb
will take back the newborn.
This is the new day.
You’re on your own.

Though the smiley sun
may peep round the curtains,
the darkness still hovers
at the back of your mind.
Thoughts cluster like midges,
buzzing and nipping
with spiteful glee
as you pull round the blankets,.

There is no escape from
the heartache that lingers,
the memories that creep near
and poke bony fingers
at the half-healed bruises
you thought you’d forgotten.

You must make the choice
(though you know there’s no option,
and choice an illusion),
or regret it forever.

Every day, every morning,
the same demons taunt you
till you gather your strength,
and all of your will power
and get out of bed.

Linda Rushby 14 May 2020

And here’s one I opened at random yesterday and found left on the computer when I started it up this morning:

Look Inside

What do you see when you look inside?
Fear, frustration, disappointment?
All of those.
Loneliness, anger, regret?
Not so much as once there was.

After all this time and striving,
don’t you think it should be clearer?
After all this time and striving,
this is as clear as it is.

Do you long for the striving to end?
Do you think of what that means?

Linda Rushby 17 January 2016

From the tone (and especially the last two lines) I thought it was a ‘chemo’ poem (I’ve got at least one of those, and probably others lurking around), but was surprised to realise it was a year earlier, from January 2016. I don’t really remember it, but it definitely feels like another first-thing-in-the-morning poem.

This is pretty much how every day starts for me – any time between about 4 and 7, that limbo of ‘should I get up now?’ or ‘I’m sure if I stay here I’ll doze off again’, and sometimes I do, but mostly I don’t and realise after a couple of hours that there’s no putting it off any longer. Today was perhaps a bit worse than usual because of quite a heavy therapy session yesterday, in which at one point the therapist said: ‘you’ve had quite a lot of heartache’ which is why that word popped up, and in retrospect, I think: she doesn’t know even the half of it, and do I want to go back through my emotional life and dig it all up and show it to her, including the most painful, shameful and embarrassing bits? But maybe that’s what I need to do.

Aside from that, I’ve said in the past that sometimes I think getting up in the morning is the most difficult and stressful thing I do all day, and this is what I mean.

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Corrections and Clarifications

The anger came back this morning, in the I-should-get-out-of-bed-but-not-yet time. I suppose it may have been partly triggered by the new uncertainty caused by images of commuters on trains and station platforms. However, as always, it was turned against myself. How can I keep writing about my real feelings and put it on show? How can I come on here and share my true thoughts, take that risk of being seen for who I am, all that self-pity and negativity and doubt? I’ll stop, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll give up again as I always do with everything.

But I got up and did my half hour practice, and when I went downstairs and made coffee I realised how valuable that is, that it actually does help – or something does. Routine and discipline, you see – it makes life possible. Which I guess includes this as well. Here I am at my keyboard with Miko on the desk beside me, supervising the street outside, both of us listening to a sudden outburst of gulls. Blue sky and sunshine, and I can’t really tell whether there are more people and traffic, though I can see that there are at least six empty parking places across the road whereas they’ve been full for the last few weeks, but I guess the consolation is that at least six drivers aren’t taking the bus.

I didn’t speak to my daughter yesterday, but I assume she for one hasn’t gone back to work. She’s not waitressing any more, but she still works in the leisure/hospitality business, her job involves visiting pubs, so I’m guessing she’s reprieved until they reopen. Anyway, she has two children at home.

I am still in my cosy bubble, for as long as it takes. I may never come out. I still feel that life is less stressful like this, but I keep panicking that eventually I will have to engage with the world again, and wonder what exactly that will mean. It’s like when I was travelling and would every so often get a reminder that, at some point, I would have to come back and face up to life again.

Just remembered that I have some corrections and clarifications for my quote from the Joni Mitchell song yesterday (I finally looked it up). The song is Barangrill and the corrections are: it’s three waitresses (not two); they’re talking about Singapore SLINGS (which makes so much more sense than ‘sleeves’, a mistake I’ve been making for almost 50 years), and there’s ‘not one ANXIOUS voice’ (I think I said ‘angry’).

So there you go, I’m not perfect (as if I ever claimed to be).

Oh my goodness, I just glanced through the window, (checking for swifts) and saw a plane flying over – it looks like a commercial airliner, rather than anything naval/military. Strange how something so familiar can disappear without being missed until suddenly it’s there again.

Check out Barangrill, if you like Joni. I hadn’t heard it in years.

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Routines and Decisions

Structure and chaos. Rules and freedom. Dyspraxia and social inadequacy – nature and nurture. Cats and husbands. This and that. Writing and not-writing.

I’ve been awake for two hours already, but I observe my routines. Time is open-ended – until 1pm, when the afternoon’s radio marathon begins (though I can delay that by setting the TiVo to Radio 4 Extra so that it can be paused and rewound if I miss anything). Little happens in the mornings beyond the routine of: feed cat; half hour yoga, tai chi and meditation; shower; coffee; blogging; breakfast (which can end up being at 11, or even later). Except for shopping days, of course, but that was yesterday. There are other day-related things, apart from shopping (which isn’t strictly day-related, but has fallen into that pattern because it takes me exactly a week to use up two litres of milk), like putting the bins out (Tuesday), Zoom tai chi (Wednesday), Skype therapy (Thursday), but they all happen in the afternoon or early evening.

This is very different from pre-lockdown routine, when on most days I needed to be up and ready to go out by a certain time. Which may mean – if those activities eventually resume in a similar format to before – that post-lockdown life (which, may I say, I’m not anticipating any time soon), will be different again.

None of which is what I was thinking about in those two hours before I sat down at the keyboard.

By the way, the Joni Mitchell song I quoted from the other day wasn’t ‘The Blonde in the Bleachers’, as I said, but the one that begins:

‘Two waitresses both wearing black diamond earrings
talking about zombies and Singapore sleeves.
No trouble in their faces, not one angry voice,
none of the crazy you get from too much choice,
the thumb and the satchel or the rented Rolls-Royce…’

Joni Mitchell

But surprisingly, even though I can now hear it clearly in my head, I can’t get as far as the refrain to remember what it’s actually called (nor do I have a clue what ‘Singapore sleeves’ are) – and I still haven’t got round to looking it up.

Choice as tyranny, that’s what I was going to write about. The comfort of routines versus the horror of being forced to make a decision. That’s why I cling to them in the mornings; though I don’t always wake – or get up – at the same time, the sequence of activities is quite consistent. Otherwise I lie in bed and do nothing – which is not, repeat NOT healthy for my emotional wellbeing.

I still have to make decisions, of course, and I find the two most terrifying are: what to wear, and what to have for dinner; terrifying because they are relentless. And every decision (however trivial) entails judgement: options must be evaluated, probabilities and utilities assigned; projected outcomes considered (especially unanticipated ones) in order to identify and attain an optimal solution.

It’s exhausting. Better to sit in the sun and drink coffee.

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Hors de Combat

I’m back from my weekly Tuesday morning shopping expedition. The emergency run for cat food two days ago doesn’t count, because I couldn’t bring myself to do the sensible thing and work out a full shopping list before I went, so I ran out of fresh milk yesterday as usual.

Before I left, I prepared breakfast for my return, and, in the process of slicing the end crust of the loaf into two to fit the toaster, cut my left index finger. I held it under the cold tap, wrapped it in kitchen roll, and kept pressing it and moving the kitchen roll as it became soaked in blood. Then went looking for plasters, which I found in the form of continuous strips in the downstairs bathroom. Hunted for the scissors – on the kitchen table, among all the card-making stuff. Cut a biggish strip off and wrapped it over the wound and round the end of my finger.

Collected together bags, wallet, phone, checked I had the right cards, filled Miko’s water bowl, made sure she was inside, she started running around manically so I spoke to her gently and sat down with her for a few minutes to calm her down, checked the list (on my phone), picked up the scarf I’ve been using as a face mask, wrapped it round, left the building, and in locking the door realised there was fresh red blood dripping down my arm. I must have put pressure on the wound somehow, probably when pulling up the door handle.

So I went back into the house, and tried to work out where I’d left the plasters and the scissors. I noticed that everywhere I’d walked there were perfectly spaced, perfectly round bright red drops of blood on the floor. They looked like tiddlywinks.

I thought: never mind wrapping a scarf round my face, I really can’t go round Tesco dripping blood everywhere. I decided I was hors de combat, and could justifiably excuse myself from shopping duty – the main priority was milk, and I’d got a carton of UHT (bought for making yoghurt, but also as an emergency reserve) and a tin of evaporated.

I found the plasters back in the bathroom cabinet, but only at the second iteration – the box was lying down behind the lip at the bottom of the cupboard, and I didn’t recognise it. I stuck another one over the first and that seemed to do the trick. Might as well go shopping after all, as I’d psyched myself up.

So, once again I went through the whole palaver of remembering everything I needed to take, including the scarf which I’d discarded over the back of a chair, and this time I opened, closed and locked the front door without injury.

I haven’t even got enough words left to tell you what happened en route to the supermarket and after I got there. Give me rules to follow, and I’ll panic about getting them wrong. Thoughts for another day.

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Coffee Angst

‘Stay alert.’ Your country still needs lerts.

I won’t make political observations on this blog, unless it becomes unavoidable.

How is the world this morning? The sunshine has returned, after a day’s conspicuous absence, but the wind is rough and bitterly cold. Probably no breakfast in the garden today.

My stovetop espresso pot has let me down twice in a row. I am concerned. Did I just not screw it up tightly enough? Twice in a row? Does the seal just need a good clean, or replacing? I used to have a spare seal, among the stuff that got moved from place to place, one of those things that you don’t expect to use so shove it somewhere and forget about it. I’ve checked the kitchen drawers, it’s nowhere obvious. It came in a pack of two from the Italian supermarket in Bedford, reminder of happy times in my first flat. I wonder if it’s open? Not that I can drive a 250 mile round trip to buy another even if so. I can’t remember how old the pot is, but it’s had a long and useful life, maybe time to let go. Once I was surrounded by coffee-making devices, but all I can find now are the Portmerion cafetiere, which is too big for one person, and the Tassimo, which requires pods, and I have a limited supply. Anyway, the espresso pot is my favourite. I will check the Caffe Nero and Whittard’s online shops, though I wonder how much they charge.

Coffee is important to me, it contributes significantly to my quality of life and sense of wellbeing, but when I start to think about the conditions of its cultivation, processing and transport across half the globe I feel a sense of gloom and angst stealing over me. Tea is probably no better, not to mention chocolate. We take these things for granted, these products from the other side of the world, we expect to pick them off the supermarket shelves in their shiny packaging and not give them another thought.

The mug from which I’m drinking bears the message: ‘Save water, drink Prosecco’. Enough said. I am lucky, I have a good life, I like to think I am a good and thoughtful person, I like to laugh, I like to drink coffee and eat chocolate and enjoy a glass of wine with my dinner. Sometimes I get a glimpse from another place and think: is this a fools’ paradise I’m living in? Am I part of the problem?

The wind howls and rattles its way round the edges of the window, the wires radiating out from the telegraph pole vibrate ominously.

I don’t know where these thoughts come from, or what I will write when I sit at my computer in the morning. Every morning it happens this way. I may plan one thing, but I ride the current and it takes me to another place.

Happy Monday friends, and always remember: our country needs lerts.

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Writing Joy

Everything I say or write
comes from a thought,
a spark inside my mind.

That almost – almost – follows a haiku structure. Just needs a little tweaking to fit it into that 5/7/5 syllable pattern. That’s what the words do, when they occur to me, they often lay themselves out in a rhythmic structure – usually iambic, often in short, sharp lines like these. Sometimes I’ll combine them together into longer lines, hexameter or even heptameter, and then I might throw the odd shorter line here and there, maybe at the end of a stanza. So, in the three lines above, the first two could be combined into a single line with six feet, followed by one of three.

Don’t ask me why I’m sitting here analysing my own poetry style this morning, god knows, it’s not as though I don’t have other things to write about – though having said that, I can see why I did it that way, it was just that the first sentence that came into my head when I sat down at the keyboard did so in that rhythmic way, so just for fun I laid it out as a poem – albeit a pretty trivial one.

You may have noticed that when I’m writing prose, I often go in for long, rambling sentences, lots of embedded clauses, lists of this and that, shamelessly long processions of adjectives and adverbs, diversions and distractions, self-references, repetitions and contradictions, mixing metaphors with abandon, alliterating whenever I can get away with it, indulging myself in ways that no decent editor would stand for thirty seconds. That’s when you can tell that I’m writing for myself, for the sheer joy of the words and the exhilaration of it all and because – well – I just can’t stop myself. Personally, that’s when I think my writing is at its best, when I read it back and it makes me smile for the fun of it and the magic of it. That’s what I think of as my Tristram Shandy style, and I hope you (if there is a ‘you’, whoever and wherever you may be) enjoy it too, and don’t find it too irritating or forced, because it isn’t forced, not at all, even though (as now) it may sometimes be self-conscious, that’s not because I’ve deliberately set out to write this way so much as I’ve stepped into that stream and allowed myself to be taken along by the current, because I’m enjoying myself.

Isn’t that something like what I was writing about yesterday? I remember using the metaphor of being a surfer – being carried by the waves of thought, not able to control them but managing my responses to them. Oh, so much I thought about saying before I sat down in front of this keyboard this morning, and none of it has been said, or will be said in the twenty words remaining to me. But I’m glad I’ve written this, and hope you who’ve read it are glad too