Category: family

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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.  

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The Guilt-Gremlin

The wind has come back. No breakfast in the garden today. It was always the height of foolishness to think that summer might be on its way before the middle of April. Lovely week to be on the river though. Yes, wouldn’t it, but it didn’t happen – deal with it.

Sometimes over the last few days I’ve been feeling guilty about rushing inside for 3 o’clock, to spend an hour sitting in the front room listening to drama on the radio and crocheting, rather than being out in the gorgeous sunshine. Ah yes, guilt. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, as well.

In the past, I’ve often been asked if I was raised Catholic – occasionally, Jewish – because of my intense relationship with guilt. A few days ago I blogged about how I’m enjoying the lockdown, and later felt pangs at admitting that I was happy in such awful times when so many people are suffering in so many ways. Yet a few days earlier, I experienced guilt because I was feeling so sorry for myself over my missed holiday and non-event of a birthday, when so many people were having it so much worse than I was- enough with the self-pity, count your blessings, be grateful etc etc.

Guilt gets you like that. I’ve always known it, but don’t think I’ve ever seen it so starkly before. There is literally no way I can ever win that argument: if I’m happy, that’s bad; if I’m miserable, that’s bad too. The only way I could defeat the guilt-gremlin would be by putting myself out there on the front line and martyring myself for the sake of others – though then, you might have to question my motives – and I’d probably get it all wrong and make things worse, so there’s the perfect excuse for sitting on my backside and not doing anything.

I’ve heard Buddhist thinkers say that compassion must start with oneself – that until you can love yourself unconditionally, you aren’t in any position to share the light of compassion with the rest of the world. I can’t see my mother having any truck with that argument. Until everyone else’s actual and emotional needs have been met, there’s no question of looking out for yourself. But how can you ever tell? You need an instinct to know what’s best for everyone else (even before they know themselves), and act on it at all times. That’s what being a good person means – you can’t relax and think about yourself until you’ve checked how every action on your part might affect others. And if you’re generally a dreamy, thinky person, not overly sensitive to reading other people’s minds and moods, social interaction becomes a minefield. Where next to stick your foot where it’s not wanted, and prepare to deal with the consequences when they blow up in your face? (See, appropriate metaphor, not just a cliché).

But I’m being unfair on my mother. Can’t go blaming her for my failings.

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Long drive

Just finished my last four NaPoWriMo haiku – only 5 days late! Been at Laura’s and only got back yesterday. I didn’t have my laptop – but more to the point I couldn’t get my head into a place where I could write. I had ideas for two of them – they came to me when I was driving, one when I was driving to Laura’s and one when I was driving to the self-publishing conference in Leicester. I had them both complete in my head at the time but didn’t write them down in my notebook and they went. Still I have managed to recreate them and one is actually better than what I had before because I took a slightly different tack. I had one leftover from the boat which I will throw in and another I wrote this morning from scratch, about bluebells. It’ll do.

I really enjoyed the conference, got back fired up and full of enthusiasm but that all seems to have gone after a week.

I was intending to come home on Tuesday, got everything packed up and loaded into the car, then we went to Coleman’s Craft Warehouse and the Needle and Awl for lunch and then we both got an email from Simon about Laura taking him and Dina from Brian’s to Heathrow on Friday. They’d talked about it ages ago but Laura had forgotten the date and hadn’t got Friday off work. Brian couldn’t take them because he’s going to pick them up and anyway didn’t want to leave the dogs alone in the house the first day they were there. So I said I could stay till Friday and take them then drive home from Heathrow.

I could have done without it because it meant I had to miss lino and my therapy session on Thursday. When I picked them up Simon was in a foul mood about being picked up at 7.00, because his sat nav said it would only take 1 hour 15 minutes, and their flight wasn’t till 11.40. We’d tried explaining to him that it would take 3 hours if we left at 8, but he wasn’t having any of it. I was pissed off because I’d messed up my week to do it and didn’t get a word of thanks or acknowledgement and he started a pointless argument because he said I’d told him the wrong exit from the M25 last time we came up and the sat nav sent him a different way on Thursday. (I didn’t, I got to the bottom of it which was that I told him I didn’t know the exit number but I still directed us off the right exit to the M1, but it wasn’t worth arguing over especially as I was driving. Usual thing as with Laura, I’m the one who has to back down because for me to keep arguing my case until I convince them I’m right would be childish and unnecessary and then it would all be my fault).

Eventually, when things had gone quiet for a while, I said, hopefully in a not-too-argumentative voice: ‘I missed my lino printing and therapy session yesterday to do this for you’ and he had calmed down a bit though I don’t think he actually apologised. Then part of the M25 was closed, he was following it on google maps and it sent us off through the wilds of Bucks and Surrey, eventually getting onto the M4 and returning to the M25 and Heathrow that way, I dropped them at 9.40 then thought I would find somewhere to stop on the way home. Drove into the Starbucks (used to be Little Chef) on the A3 before Guildford, but the car park was full (I don’t like Starbucks anyway) so decided I would keep on to the McDonald’s at Petersfield, saw a National Trust sign for the Witley Centre, pulled off the A3 and followed it but then found it was just a patch of woodland, very nice but no café; then pulled off at Petersfield but it was the wrong exit, thought if I went through the town and followed the signs back to the A3 it must be that one, but it wasn’t, I missed it altogether, kept driving and got home at 11.25 – almost 5 hours driving which has  to be a record.

When I got home the house stank of cat pee and I just sat and cried.

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Wet Sunday

No blogging this morning. I am now at Simon’s, ready for our narrow boat adventure tomorrow. It was a rainy, nasty drive, with road works on theA3 – or rather, no evidence of any actual work going on today, but one lane was closed either side of the roundabout that goes to Selbourne, and that was enough to mess the traffic up.

Southsea Soup meeting this morning, a new lady called Claire who seems to know a lot about marketing and is full of ideas, like giving people money to buy copies and then getting them to write reviews on Amazon. To me it seems that the flaw is that we have bought the books ourselves, but I kind of see what she’s getting at about the reviews.

It feels like it’s been quite a long day already – well, admittedly it is five thirty – almost dinner time.

Think I did okay with the packing, the only thing I’ve thought of (so far) that I haven’t brought is the Destination Portsmouth game. I even charged up the mini-wifi and found the card with the password on it. I got a sales call from Virgin yesterday asking if I wanted to buy one, and when I said I’d already got one she asked how much I was paying and I said £10.99 per month, she gave up and sounded quite sad because evidently she couldn’t compete with that. The stupid thing of course is that I’ve been paying that for almost three years and I never use it. So I thought, this would be an ideal opportunity. Even if we run out of data and have to pay more, well, I’ve been paying all that time for nothing, so it seems like I might as well use it.

I didn’t really think I was going to be able to find the password, I’d convinced myself it was a lost cause, but there was the box with the card in on the unit in the study, and I tested it and confirmed it worked.

I didn’t do much packing and preparation till the last minute again, I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to get started on this top-down crochet jumper (third attempt). I will crack that eventually. But as I found last week, it seems that leaving things to the last minute is actually less stressful than spreading the stress over several days – which is not what I would have predicted.

Reading the Why Buddhism Works book, this morning (when I couldn’t sleep) there was something really interesting about the relationship between feelings and thought. I will have to read that further.

I came up with a haiku before leaving home as well. I’ve actually got a few in hand now – two or three, anyway. One is quite dark so not sure whether I am going to share that one.

I mentioned at the Soup meeting about putting more on the Facebook page, like the idea I stole of getting people to add lines to a limerick. Trevor was quite scathing and said that no one had responded much to things he and Steve had put on there. I said that’s why we need to get some traffic, and he said, but nobody responds so there’s no point, and at least Claire and Freya backed me up. I mentioned about opening a twitter account and again he wasn’t enthusiastic but Freya was and she said Instagram as well, so as she uses Instagram a lot (being an artist, unlike me) I’ll do that as well. See if we can get some social media buzz going. And write some more stories as well, of course. That’s another matter.