This year I’m with my son, daughter-in-law and the ‘boys’ (dogs) at the ‘cabin’ (the name we seem to have settled on as sounding less pretentious than the ‘lodge’) in the Surrey Hills – hopefully another ‘first of many’. I came for a couple of odd days when they first picked up the keys and for my birthday, when things were still in lockdown. Now it’s busier – the swimming pool is open, but for pre-booked sessions for single-cabin-only groups, and yesterday morning I booked a slot and had my first swim since September in Cyprus, all by myself in the empty pool. It was glorious, but the changing rooms aren’t open, so I had to walk back with my clothes on over a wet swimsuit – which was okay, apart from the seat of my jeans, which got soaked, and I hadn’t brought a spare set of bottoms because I’m travelling on the train and had shoved everything into my backpack – including my swimsuit and towel, which my son scoffed at but I really enjoyed that swim. My daughter-in-law kindly lent me a pair of trousers while they dried over the radiator.

It’s close enough for me to easily come over for a day, and I have my own key now so I can come whether or not they’re here. Admittedly it’s a hundred mile round trip, but not a bad one, mostly on the A3.

Tuesday 4 May 2021

I didn’t finish writing yesterday because the others got up and I never got back to it. So I’ll cheat today and just add to what I’ve already written.

There’s not much to say. We went out for a lovely walk across the fields in the sunshine, came back and then the weather changed and it was wild and stormy all afternoon. We played board games, laughed and got grumpy as families do. The wind is still wild now, but it’s not raining.

Going home today. It’s been a flying visit, but a peaceful one. Home today, on the train. Never want to leave, never want to go back. I don’t know how to get round that. I don’t know how to fight off the great waves of hopelessness that well up from time to time. Is there an answer? I’ve been looking for one for so long. Being with people helps sometimes; sometimes it makes it worse. Ditto being on my own, the advantage being not having to consider and deal with the reactions of others.

The wind howls around me, but the sun is still shining.

It has been an interesting challenge, I must say. I didn’t know where it was going to go when I started, but it got me writing and I think it all hangs together surprisingly well, so that it might be worth doing something else with it, but I’m not sure what. In 2018 I did haikus for NaPoWriMo, and I had an idea of producing a hand-made book and I went to a book-binding workshop and bought a book-binding kit (and an online book-binding course), but I’ve never really done anything with it since. I had a title: ‘Month of Fools’, and I wanted to do a lino-print for the cover, but then I completely stalled because the lino-print was so poor, I gave up on lino-printing, book-binding and the whole idea and haven’t touched it since. The lino-printing course was cancelled not long after anyway, and though I have equipment I could use by myself, without the tutor telling me exactly what to do I just can’t get my head around it.

Anyway, if I’m going to do anything these days, I just stick to knitting and crochet, because I can do that without getting too stressed.

Keeping going at something and not getting discouraged or disappointed with the results is the hardest thing for me. I suppose that is one of the themes of my NaPoWriMo (I can’t quite decide if it’s a long poem with 30 stanzas, or a cycle of 30 individual poems, or how to describe it). It’s all very well to write about grasping the flame and letting it burn you again and again, but that’s just a poetic metaphor, and I’m such a coward. I could say to myself: ‘I managed to stick at that, and I’m quite pleased with the result, so why not try something else, like going back to lino printing, or doing this book, or going back to my novel…?’ but, but, but… I’m such a coward. And yesterday, for example, by the time I’d posted the poem, I couldn’t face writing a post for here as well.

None of this is important, I know that. Nothing I do matters, I could not write another word as long as I live, and the world would be no worse off.

Yesterday I went back to the jigsaw puzzle I started in last year’s lockdown and haven’t touched since goodness knows when. I made quite good progress, too.  

The process of making cards, while both creative and fun, is also quite stressful, and the clearing up afterwards even more so. It involves a lot of processes, with lots of bits of equipment and materials, some of them very small, others which are messy (glue and ink), and great potential for things getting lost, spilt, sticking to each other, hiding behind each other etc. As well as that, the creative process itself, the design of the thing, from sitting down with a mental connection such as: ‘Laura – tea and cakes’, ‘Chris – fishing’, ‘Simon- robots and/or dinosaurs’ (my 34 year-old son, by he way, though it could equally be my 5 year-old grandson), assembly of any materials relevant to that topic and trying to come up with something significantly different from last year’s effort is quite taxing in and of itself. Because I’m making them to give to other people – this has really only just occurred to me – it’s a lot more stressful than starting a jumper or blanket or whatever in knitting or crochet, when I know that it doesn’t matter what a pig’s ear I make of it, because no one has to see it but me.

Now, that is an interesting though. Making cards always implies the intention of creating something to give to someone else. Perhaps I should spend some time on using stamps, cutting dies and paper just for the fun of the process without producing anything which might be seen and/or judged by anyone else? When I started doing this craft, I was going to classes and workshops, where I was just making for the sake of it – I have stacks of cards made at those events hidden away in the cupboard, which I wouldn’t dream of giving to anyone else.

This is not what I started to write about – but I think it is a valuable insight, and it applies to lots of things I do – including writing this blog. I can do it because I know it is just for myself, although theoretically it could be read by anyone, very few people ever actually do read it, and so it doesn’t matter, there’s no requirement for it to reach a certain standard of quality, it is just itself.

I picked up my new glasses yesterday, but I’m still wearing my old readers, which is a bit daft. I think part of me was thinking I’d keep the new ones downstairs and the old ones upstairs, but as my PC is upstairs and I look at my phone a lot in bed, that doesn’t make much sense. I think they need to be consigned to ‘emergency’ status and I’ll have to continue carrying the new ones up and down stairs with me.

The optician was quite surprised when I told her that I wanted reading glasses as well as varifocals, but I just don’t like using varifocals for close work, and especially for screen work. I don’t know, maybe the gradient is in the wrong place, or I wear them in the wrong place, or hold my head at the wrong angle. I get very stressed in eye tests, especially the bit where they keep changing the lenses and asking which one is clearer. It’s like everything else I suppose: what if I say the wrong thing? I’ll end up with the wrong glasses and spend a lot of money and get more headaches and have to keep squinting all the time (specially if I don’t wear the new ones). But I can never trust my own judgement, and I panic when I’m asked to make choices, even with something like that where nobody but me can say whether it’s right or wrong – worse, even, because no one can correct me so I have to live with it.

The shed is up now, but it’s not in the place where I want it – which is where the shell of the old one is still standing. I haven’t put any stuff into the new one yet, except the shelves, because it will need to be moved at some point.

What else does that remind me of? A few days ago the image on my desktop was of a map of that corner of the Med, a mural on the wall of Bordeaux station, where I was stranded for a couple of hours or so during a train strike when I was en route from Brittany to northern Spain. Something piqued my interest when I saw it again, but I couldn’t remember what it was, so I opened the file in Photoshop to check, and still can’t see why. It’s quite a poor quality photo – from an old, pre-Smart Nokia phone – so zooming in hasn’t helped. Maybe it will come to me.

I’ve mentioned before about the Magic Refilling Data pot, and how my efforts at clearing space on my google Drive by downloading photos from Google photos to my hard drive and then deleting them from Google photos were being thwarted because every morning my phone was being backed up to another file on Google Drive. Over several days (because it takes a long time to select and delete that many photos and my PC is four years old and quite creaky – and also it was refilling again every morning with the ones I hadn’t backed up and removed from my phone) I managed to get all the photos up to the end of 2020 from my phone, onto my hard drive, and removed from the backup file on Google drive. The day came when I logged on to my computer, opened my Gmail, and was informed that I had used 11 Gb of my 15Gb allocation. That lasted a couple of hours before the messages started to appear telling me that my Google Drive was full again.

I listed all files in descending file-size, and found that the photos I’d already deleted were still appearing on the list. By clicking on each file, I was given a side panel with details, including the folder where the file was located. Clicking on the name of the folder led me up the tree to the folder where it was, and so on until I reached a folder called ‘Desktop’, and above that, another one called ‘Computers’… tbc

I spent a lot of time on Sunday downloading photos to my hard drive and deleting emails from my Gmail account, and got the drive down to 75% full, only to get up yesterday and find that, once again, Google was screaming at me that my storage was 99% full and I needed to buy more space.

When I logged onto my Google Drive it showed me the standard folders I always have: Accounts, Crafts, mp3 files, Meditation and Poetry , with no ‘loose’ files (I sorted all those out ages ago, and only save things into those folders). But when I clicked on the link to ‘list files in descending size order’ I was shocked to find screen after screen full of other files, including lots of photos which I knew for a fact I’d deleted the day before. I clicked on one, and in a panel on the right of the screen titled ‘details’ I found out it was in a folder called ‘Huawei  P20 Lite’ (which is the name of my phone) – which didn’t appear in the list of folders I could see.

What had happened (I surmised) was that it had noticed that there was some space available on my Google drive, and decided to fill it by backing up everything from my phone.

I then had a look at the space on my phone, and found that I’d used 57GB out of a total of 64GB, of which 25GB was photos. I had photos on there from when I got this phone – in August 2018, and all the ones I’d taken since – which is a rather a lot. So, I spent most of yesterday morning deleting (again) files from my Google drive, and also deleting the older ones from my phone.

Now, you might ask yourself – as I asked myself – what possible justification can there be for supplying 15GB of free cloud space to back up a device which has up to 64GB capacity? – but a moment’s thought shows there’s a perfectly rational explanation, centred round that word ‘Free’ – Google is quite happy to supply me with more cloud space to backup my data, at £16/year for another 85GB. Now, admittedly that’s not a huge expense, but bear in mind that I already have over four times as much unoccupied space as that on the 1 Terabyte hard drive which came with my PC.

Not only that, but as I type this, my server has been merrily chugging away backing up the data from  my phone onto my Google drive yet again, and has just informed me that my storage has now gone from 77% to 88% full, so that soon I won’t be able to send or receive emails, and I might like to consider buying some more…

I mention all this partly because it took up a lot of yesterday, but also because it seems like a good metaphor… to be continued.

I’ve had my current phone since 2018 – when I returned to Android after a two-year flirtation with iPhone – and in all that time it has never been backed up because it always tries to back it up to my old gmail account, and every so often sends me a message to tell me that the backup has failed because there is no space, and that it hasn’t been backed up for 700-and-something days. Last week I managed to change the settings so it will backup to my current account (which may ultimately prompt the necessity to start another gmail account), but I couldn’t find out how to change the photo backup, which still goes to the original gmail account and is still permanently full.

This week, in a fit of displacement from thinking about doing anything about the actual physical chaos in my life, I started trying to clear out my Google Drive space. As I said, I’ve made previous efforts: deleting all emails with attachments; deleting files which I put on Google drive to share access between devices; downloading and deleting some old photographs, and so on. (Incidentally, I have 707gb free of 918gb total on my hard drive, so it makes sense to stick my photos on there rather than pay to increase my 15gb Google drive). Also, I’d been kind of hoping that I might find those photos from 2012 that I mentioned the other week, but they’d obviously gone in a previous purge (still haven’t found my old-old laptop, by the way)  – there were just a handful of photos from pre-2015, so I put those all into a folder together on the hard drive a couple of weeks ago, and this week started methodically downloading all photos from 2015 onwards, copying them into a folder called ‘Photo backups’, deleting them from Google drive and then emptying the Google drive bin. I’ve been doing this a month at a time – sometimes having to do two downloads for a month because the download limit for one zip file is 500, which I have occasionally exceeded in a month.

I finished 2015, and was getting messages to say my Google Drive was now 70% full, which was very reassuring, until the next morning, when I logged on and found it was 99% again… to be continued

But I know they get snow in Texas, I’ve experienced it. Ex-Hubby and I lived in Dallas from March 1985 till May 1989, so we spent four winters there, during which time we twice saw snow lying on the ground for several days, which was about as much as we could expect to see in Bedford (and a lot more than I’ve seen in Southsea in six years).

The clearest in my memory was at the beginning of March 1989, the weekend before I was due to give birth, when the baby shower had to be cancelled because nobody wanted to risk driving – least of all me, who didn’t fancy risking walking either. I have a distinct memory of stepping gingerly over compacted and frozen snow ridges to get to my car, though goodness knows where I was going that was so urgent

I’m sure there must be photos somewhere – but I have been looking for them in the study and have now given up the will to live. I pulled out the albums from that time, and found the one from March 1989 which should have had some, but couldn’t find any with snow on, just lots of baby pictures. There didn’t seem to be an album covering December 1987, which would have been the other snowy occasion – there must have been one, but goodness knows where.

Once I’d got all the albums off the shelf and flicked through them, I couldn’t face putting them back. In my defence, getting to the shelf required me to lean over a pile of junk on the floor and hurt my back. I did manage to get to another shelf which was slightly easier to get at, but just dumped them on there without any attempt to put them in order, which of course will make it even harder to find the next time I want to. This is why my life is such a mess, and yes, I am my own worst enemy, and no, I never get any better.

I am feeling lost now, lost in the past and the chaos and detritus of my life, and my emotions, and an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. Which tells me I don’t want to do any more today. So I put my arms around my cat – who is sitting on the desk right in front of me – and bury my face in her fur. To my amazement, although she wriggles a little, she doesn’t try to get away. I do it again, gently, and she lets me stay for several seconds, then turns to look out of the window, and I let her go. I follow her gaze into a drizzly February day, and watch the steam curling out from a pipe just under the roof eaves of the pub across the road against the grey sky.

Ironically, I also listened to a programme on boredom, but I didn’t take much of it in.

I’m getting bored with the jumper I’ve been knitting, the one I pulled down because it didn’t fit, and I haven’t quite caught up to where it was before. I’m not looking forward to doing the sleeves, which are going to be fiddly, but I want to get it done so I can wear it at least once before the weather gets too warm. If current trends continue, it may be even smaller by next winter (think about it).

Which reminds me, on this morning’s weather forecast they said that it will get a lot warmer, maybe as high as 17^o  this week, which would be white and green within a week!

I saw a picture on a Facebook crochet group last week of a blanket with an amazing spiral pattern. There was no pattern attached, and I couldn’t work out from the photo how it was done, so I Googled it, and found a simple technique for making a four-colour spiral – not quite the same, but still interesting. I made a start with four colours of cotton yarn leftover from last year’s weather blanket (I have changed to using a different, lighter yarn this year), and it’s given me the spark of an idea.

I also saw a cartoon on Facebook yesterday titled something like: ‘The Mind/Body problem’, showing a man sitting on a sofa, with a thought bubble coming from his head saying ‘Get up!’ and one from his body saying ‘Nope!’ or words to that effect – exactly summing up my mood, but I can’t remember where it came from.

But for this morning I have some editing – which will be interesting and, being a commission for someone else, takes priority over housework, decluttering, study-tidying or any of those other multitudes of Jobs That Needs Doing.

I keep thinking of things I could do, hobbies that I could take up or restart, projects that I would enjoy getting stuck into, most of which I already have the materials and equipment for, or could easily get hold of online. Books to read, jigsaws to do, projects to complete, all at my fingertips, but can I be bothered?

There is insufficient memory or disk space. Word cannot display the requested font.

As far as I’m aware, I haven’t ‘requested’ any special font, I’ve just opened Word as I do every morning. I close the message, and the usual one about my cloud storage being full. The blank page appears in ‘draft’ format – the right-most of the format icons on the bottom tool bar. I click on the left-hand icon, which is apparently called ‘print view’, and the page appears in the normal format. This is the second time this has happened lately.

I check, just in case, on File Explorer, and note that my hard drive has 718 GB free out of 918 GB – in other words, oodles of spare capacity. I should really do something about the cloud space though, delete some more photos from Google photos, but it will only fill up again – it’s been like this since at least before I got my current phone, which regularly reminds me how many weeks it is since it’s been able to backup to the cloud – well over two years’ worth, if I remember correctly.

Speaking of which, I mentioned the other day that it was surprising that my rotating desk top photos didn’t include any from the last part of my journey. I decided to correct that, and had a look in the ‘Europe 2012’ file on my external hard drive, when I had a shock. This drive holds the contents of the old hard drive of my original laptop, made for me before I went travelling by an IT guy (met through those networking breakfasts) who advised me on a replacement laptop. He offered to take the old laptop off my hands and put the drive into a casing for an external hard drive, so I could keep all the data from the original laptop, and also use it as a backup drive. When I was travelling I backed up my photos, notes and blog posts onto it, and I still have it attached to my current PC, which is where I found the desk tops file. The shock came when I realised I didn’t have any folders at all for the later places: my last few days in Norway, then Hamburg, Amsterdam and Brussels. Nor did I have any backups of the ones taken in the following years including all the ones I took when I lived in Prague.

Those photos should all be on the laptop I used in those years, until the beginning of 2015, just before I moved here, when I got a new one (the one I spilt coffee over and replaced with this PC in 2017). Fortunately I still have that laptop which I took travelling, the one I call my Old, Old laptop. I’ve seen it – and had it working – in the last year. I’ve been looking for it for two days (well, on and off). It must be in this study somewhere…