Problems of Affluence

Just been to Sainsbury’s to buy hot cross buns, because I realised last night I hadn’t got any – haven’t had any this year – and today is the day when it’s okay to have them for breakfast. I wanted those, and little prawns to go in my salmon en croute for dinner (but they only had king prawns, which won’t work, so it’ll be salmon, mushrooms and parsley en croute), and eggs and smoked salmon for breakfast one day over the weekend, and maple syrup to have with waffles another day, and chocolate for Sunday because I realised I hadn’t had any since I finished the Christmas leftovers – which has been quite a few weeks, but not necessarily the whole of Lent – actually, forget I said that, because I just remembered I had some chocolate truffles for Mother’s Day.

None of that would have been possible in my childhood, because the shops would have been shut on Good Friday, as well as Easter Monday and, of course, Easter Sunday, just like every other Sunday. (Actually, I have a feeling they might still be shut on Easter Sunday, but not sure about that.) I remember one year, when I must have been well into my teens, because I went into town on my own on Easter Saturday, and my Mum had asked me to pick up a loaf of bread, and everywhere I went was sold out, from which I learned the lesson to make sure you’ve got plenty of bread for Easter weekend, until the world moved on and made that obsolete. I was quite annoyed when the shops started opening on Good Friday, even though I wasn’t a Christian, because what’s the point of traditions if you’re going to ignore the fundamentals in that way?

Now I’m more relaxed, and anyway, I make my own bread. But when I was shopping earlier in the week, and planning today’s dinner, I bought cream for the sauce filling and was thinking what else I needed for today (except the hot cross buns, obviously) and it struck me – I always have fish on Good Friday, but making it so fancy is definitely observing the letter not the spirit of the tradition – salmon en croute is not exactly fasting. On the other hand, I guess it’s pretty tame compared with what the Renaissance popes might have had, so why should I worry?

That’s when I started thinking about Sunday as well, and chocolate, and my birthday, which is next week – the second one I’ve had in lockdown. Last year I didn’t plan anything special, but when the day came I went to Tesco and bought a cake and a bottle of prosecco, then ordered a Chinese takeaway for dinner. Tomorrow is my takeaway day (alternate Saturdays), but the question is, do I skip it this week and leave it till my birthday? Hadn’t thought about that. Seems daft to have two within a week of each other. Decisions, decisions – the problems of affluence

Everything in the Garden…

I’ve already been to the Co-op today. I managed to avoid going all last week, because I stocked up the week before when I was having visitors for the weekend. And by using up supplies of longlife and evaporated milk, and Elmlea (which I’d bought to put on trifle – for my visitors – till I went to the shops again and managed to get real fresh cream); taking dinners from the freezer backlog of all those ‘chef’s surprise’ slow-cooker meals which have been building up; and a take away curry delivery on Saturday, I held out without needing to go until today. Saturday’s dinner in the slow cooker will be belly pork with cannellini beans, celery, red pepper, carrots and maybe sweet potatoes cooked in cider, because too many of the ‘chef’s surprises’ seem to have sauces based on tinned tomatoes, and I fancied a more radical change.

I have been getting discouraged about a lot of things lately – mainly the garden. My Facebook memories keep showing all the lovely things which were in flower at this time last year. Someone said to me the other day that my garden is ‘blooming’, but he was judging it from Facebook, where I have posted pictures of every single flower I’ve seen so far – sometimes several pictures of the same one, over a number of days, as I’m still trying to post a photo every day. The actual total of flowers so far has been: one yellow and three white daffodils on the forecourt, and in the back garden one blue hyacinth and a handful of mini daffodils; two hellebores (one single and, more recently, one double flower), a few blossoms on the rosemary which were only visible if you looked very carefully and a couple of yellow celandines under the camellia (which I only just remembered). The rest is a desert of weeds, rotting planks and general junk currently in transit between the sheds. Is this disaster down to the hot, dry summer last year, or a total lack of interest and attention? I assume most likely a combination of the two.

It’s the curse of social media. However honest I try to be about my general worthlessness and self loathing, it seems that people want to keep seeing me in a more positive light. Which is very frustrating – but on the other hand, if they could see me more clearly, they wouldn’t want to be my friends anyway. And then I’d feel even worse.

I honestly don’t know how to shake off these feelings, and more and more it seems that there isn’t any escape. The effort required feels overwhelming, but so is the effort to pretend to be what I’m not: brave, positive, upbeat, hopeful, happy etc. Feelings always take control over intentions to change, to find a better way to be.

I almost didn’t write today. Perhaps it would be better if I didn’t throw all this out into the void. But I usually feel better afterwards

Routines

My routines seem to be falling apart. For example, I have only written once in the last three days. Last night I went to bed as usual at 11:30, then lay in bed awake for over an hour and a half, woke after five, stayed in bed awake thinking that I’d get up when the heating came on at 6:30, but by 6:40 I still couldn’t hear the boiler. Then I remembered that it was Saturday and the heating runs on a different programme at the weekends and doesn’t come on till seven. I looked at the clock and saw it was only ten minutes away so decided I might as well wait, then dozed off again and woke properly to find it was 7:45. I finally dragged myself out of bed at 8:30, and decided to miss out my exercise routine and first coffee, skipped straight to breakfast, ate my porridge and then made waffles afterwards (this is a good thing – for my mental health, if not my body). I decided to write my blog after all, but on the laptop downstairs rather than venturing upstairs to the PC.

The study is pretty cold. The whole house seems to be cold. Yesterday I thought about turning up the thermostat, then I realised that the radiators were already on, so they weren’t even reaching the thermostat setting as it was. In the hall, I noticed there’s a draft coming through the side door, which is at the end of the hall directly opposite the front door and opens onto the gap between the extension at the back of my house and the one next door. I realised then that the two doors line up directly east-west, so the ‘beast from the east’ type of wind is channelled between the two houses then goes straight through from back to front.

I have started doing some (paid) editing work, which is gratifying and quite fun, and at least gives me the incentive to do something. Because I’m doing it for someone else, it takes priority. Things which are solely for my own benefit, like exercising, tidying away the card-making stuff from the kitchen table (only a month to my daughter’s birthday, when I’ll need it all again) or blogging get shoved to one side in favour of… knitting and sudoku. I’ve impressed myself with how well I’m doing at writing my ‘to do’ lists in my diary every day, but I’m not making much headway with the big stuff.

Just noticed that the coffee cup I’m drinking from is a dirty one from yesterday, which I must have picked up rather than taking a clean one from the rack. ‘Run dishwasher’ is one of the items on today’s list – it really is that banal.

But, I am writing, and will soon have finished with the requisite 500 words, despite my general lethargy. Then, while the laptop is still on top of my lap, I may bring my accounts up to date.

Mind Full of…

The question I posed was: ‘Do I control my thoughts or do my thoughts control me?’ and the answer is fairly obvious – my thoughts define me, determine my experiences and control my life: I am my own story. How could it be otherwise? I think, therefore I am – how could I know I was alive if I didn’t think it? Although, of course, I only think that was the question – I may have misremembered it. I could go back and check, but I’m choosing to trust my memory on this occasion.

The ‘I’ who is typing this and the ‘me’ I’m describing are the same person, that goes without saying, indicated by use of the first person singular pronouns. Why did I say that? I have no idea. My thoughts are the outcome of genetic predispositions, my life experiences and external conditions, and they feed back on themselves and go round and round and make me who I am.

But can I control them? To some extent, I suppose I do – I can decide to concentrate on one particular subject or activity – like cooking a meal, for example, which involves performing a set of tasks. But even as I’m performing them, my thoughts don’t necessarily stay in one place –while I’m chopping an onion or stirring a pan, my thoughts can be anywhere – possibly planning the next task, but in my case, more likely thinking of something completely different.

Consider what my thoughts have been doing since I started writing this – reading the titles of a pile of DVDs which I found in the study yesterday and put on my desk; considering watching Gosford Park because I haven’t seen it in years and can’t remember anything about it except that I enjoyed it and it has an exceptional cast; trying to remember the surname of the actor named Tim who was in The Shawshank Redemption, knowing it’s not Burton (he’s a director) although I always get confused between them, wondering whether they’ve ever worked together, reading on the back of the box that it’s Tim Robbins and thinking ‘oh yes, of course!’, noticing how young he looks in the picture, and also how young Morgan Freeman looks, and wondering what Tim Robbins has done since. Then picking up a book of Victorian needlepoint patterns based on William Morris designs, and thinking how lovely they are, wondering if I could somehow incorporate them into my knitting, or if I should take up needlepoint again, and whether I should try to visit William Morris’s house at Kelmscott when things open up again, because I’ve never been there…

A gull flies right to left across a grey patch of cloud outside my window and catches my eye, leading it towards a plane crossing the other way, much higher, across the distant blue.

There’s a much misused and misunderstood concept called ‘mindfulness’, which derives from Zen Buddhism, and means focussing completely in the present moment. I’ve been trying to learn it for sixteen years.

Boxing Day

Definitely not the worst Christmas ever, in fact I’m not sure I’d even add it to the list of ‘bad’ Christmases. Yes it was sad not having the family all together, but the Skyping worked well (after some initial glitches – and for some reason I couldn’t connect the laptop to the telly as I’ve been doing for months for tai chi), opened presents in the morning with my son and daughter-in-law, then later we had dinner ‘together’ (a bit later than I would have liked, as they were late putting their turkey in the oven), and we even watched a film on Netflix ‘together’ after dinner (which I fell asleep in the middle of, even more typical). It was fun cooking my own Christmas dinner, and being in my own home with my little cat – which reminds me that the last time I did that – ten years ago, with a different cat – I went for a walk in the sunshine with snow in the park by the river in Bedford – which I wouldn’t have been doing yesterday, given the reports of flooding. I could have gone for a walk by the seafront, but didn’t have time, what with all the Skyping.

Ten years – I can’t quite believe it. Life goes through its cycles – lying in bed this morning, I was thinking about the bad times – years, not specifically Christmases – and how they seem to come at intervals of three years: I’d started by remembering 2014, then 2011, and 2008… all of them particularly challenging for different reasons. And going forward, what happened in 2017? Oh yes, cancer treatment. So that I guess puts this year on the same trajectory. All of them led, in the early part of the next year, to major turning points: 2009 splitting with my husband, 2012 going travelling and 2015 moving to the south coast – (although 2017 was the exception, because 2018 was also difficult – though that was the year when I started with my current therapist, and was diagnosed with dypraxia, so maybe that was a good turning point too).

Whatever, a new year is a new year, a turning point of sorts, and currently we’re between the astronomical new year (lengthening daylight) and the calendrical one. Usually I wouldn’t be here for the latter either, but life is as it is.

I used to find Boxing Day a massive disappointment – all that anticipation, and suddenly the excitement was over. Today I think I will just take it easy – not that I ever do anything but that these days, but you know what I mean.

I’m not thinking too much about the new year – whatever it brings will come anyway. I’m not sure whether I’ll carry on with blogging – I can’t seem to raise much enthusiasm for it at the moment, that might be a temporary thing, in fact it probably is, given past experience. I guess you could say I’ve lost my sense of agency (and urgency) – but then, it is Boxing Day.

Dinner Plans

I’m not reading in the mornings at the moment – I’m between books. Maybe this is why the dark morning clouds have settled in again – takes a lot of effort to fight through them. I’ve also been late getting to sleep the last couple of nights – going to bed at the usual time, but I just don’t settle.

On Monday I wrapped up my daughter’s Christmas jumper in a parcel and took it to the Post Office. I paid for Special Delivery for it to get there the next day, and yesterday I waited for a text from her saying it had arrived and thanking me. In the evening I texted and asked if her ‘parcel’ had arrived without saying what it was. She said two of the cards I posted last Thursday came yesterday. I checked the tracking app, which told me it had been received in Southampton – presumably a regional depot – at 1:19pm yesterday. Just checked again and it was received at Bedford (again, presumably the sorting office) earlier this morning (it is now 8:24) and should be delivered today. Hooray! In the circumstances, 48 hours rather than ‘next day’ is still pretty good.

After sorting out (sort of) the business over the new router yesterday I went to Tesco, then on the way back moved my car from the side street where it’s been parked (since I went to the hospital a fortnight ago, I think that’s the last time I used it) to a spot across the road where I can see it through the window as I type. Once I’d got it started, I thought I’d go and try a couple of shops which are outside my usual (in this weather) walking area. I couldn’t park near the butcher’s, but I tried another local Tesco, and then a slightly larger Co-op, where I managed to find a piece of steak – nothing special, but I don’t often have steak. I was thinking I’d do it with roasties and Yorkshire pudding (which reminds me I need to get eggs), and I’ve got parsnips and carrots, so although I’ll obviously cook the steak on the griddle, the trimmings will be more like a roast dinner (which I also don’t have very often). And I’ve got Christmas pudding, assorted nibbles and party food for tomorrow evening (and I’ll make pate today), enough boxes of biscuits to sink a battleship, and a couple of bottles of bubbly. I’ve also got smoked salmon, so thought I’d have scrambled eggs and salmon on toasted wholewheat for breakfast on the day, maybe with buck’s fizz (again, mustn’t forget to buy eggs).

So that’s sorted – or at least, in my head it is. Would stuffing balls and chipolatas wrapped in bacon (NOT to be confused with ‘pigs in blankets’, which should be sausages wrapped in pancakes) be too weird with steak? Maybe I should have got a chicken instead – but I prefer steak.

And this year, I’ll do exactly what I want – with what’s available.