Category: life

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Human Relations

I opened the kitchen door for Miko, and she stood on the steps, sniffing the air for a couple of minutes, had a drink from her outside water bowl, then turned and came back in. I left the door open for her while I went upstairs for my morning practice, but when I returned she was curled up in her bed. I went to shut the door, and realised it was raining, very faint and light, but definitely there. And a good thing too. My improvised water butt (an obsolete plastic dustbin) is almost empty of the collected autumn and winter rains, and I’ve been anticipating a hosepipe ban (not that I use one anyway.) I checked the camping chair that’s been on the lawn and there were spots visible on it already, so I folded it up and put it in what’s still left of the shed.

Why do I try to share my feelings, when I know no one likes to read about them? Maybe it’s because I can’t talk about them – although I’ve had someone to talk to regularly for two years now, it’s still quite difficult. It’s hard to get beyond the banal – some days that’s true of writing too, but in general it’s easier and much less stressful to write than to speak, to engage with an unpredictable human being, to have to think about their responses and respond in turn. Easier to be honest in writing, when you don’t have to be constantly on guard for the pitfalls of conversation.

I’ve spent most of my life hiding behind masks, trying to pretend to be someone I’m not, or rather, letting other people make their own assumptions about what kind of person I am, and not bothering to correct them, trusting that I won’t get caught out too often. There again, ‘hiding behind masks’ is just a rather glib metaphor, because for most of the time I don’t know myself what it is that I’m trying to hide, or what I’m pretending to be, for that matter.

I want to think of something to say in the next 150 words, not necessarily something profound, not even particularly interesting, just something… what? Have to stop and think about that. Honest, maybe? Today I’ve done my morning practice before I sat down to write, unlike the last two days, so this isn’t unmediated early-rising stuff.

Human relationships baffle me. They say no one is taught to be a parent, but is anyone ever taught how to interact with other people? I’m sure I never was, or only on the level of: be polite; don’t say that; if you can’t think of anything nice to say, say nothing. I more or less picked up the Golden Rule: ‘treat others as you’d like to be treated’ and I try to stick to it, though it’s occurred to me in recent years that the way I’d like to be treated may not be what other people want, and vice versa.

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Because

I will write this now and not give myself a chance to change my mind. I will write this now because I want to capture these feelings. I will write this now without exercise, meditation or coffee because those might make me feel better, and I want to explain how I feel right now, not how I feel when I’m looking through a positive filter of exercise, meditation and coffee . If I don’t catch it now I will never be able to explain. I will write it now before I have the chance to slip into the mask, the ‘yeah, I’m fine, it’s a beautiful day!’

I told myself last night that if I was awake early I would get up and walk to the beach. I woke before 5.00. I could have done it, but I didn’t. It’s now 6.15. I am at the computer. I am dressed and I have fed my cat, but not watered the plants because that too would probably take me away from these feelings.

I am afraid. I don’t want this. I want to stay in my bubble. I don’t want to have to go out and interact. I don’t want to be with people. I like not having to do those things. I can be happy here.

I want to stay in a safe place where I don’t have to think about what a shambles my life has been. I don’t want to read about how happy people are with their plans. I don’t want to make plans. I don’t want to feel guilty about wasting the summer by sitting in my garden.

It’s not just because I’ve been reading stories about racism and police brutality in the US; or how our daily death-rate is greater than the combined total of other European countries with comparable data, and yet restrictions are being lifted and we’ll soon be ‘back to normal’; or about the shamelessness, incompetence and venality of those in power in this country; (though none of that helps). It’s not just because I’ve been reading about friends who are getting on with their writing, promoting their books, have completed books to promote (though none of that helps either).

It’s because I am me, it’s because my failure has all been down to my lack of determination, lack of persistence, lack of ‘resilience’ maybe, if that’s the current word of choice. Why am I am I so shit in all those areas? Because I am me. Why do I f*ck up everything? Because I am so shit in all those areas. Why is that? Because of my personality, because of who I am. Why is that? Because I was never, ever going to get anywhere with all that negative baggage. Why can’t I change that? Because it wouldn’t be true. Why do I hate myself so much? Because I know it is all down to who I am. And why can’t I change and become a better person? Because, because, because.

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Let There Be Light

The light switch in my downstairs shower room and toilet has an intermittent fault. When I say intermittent, I don’t just  mean sometimes it works and other times it doesn’t, I mean it stops working and stays not working for indeterminate periods, and then one day, unpredictably, it will start working again. A friend (the same one who helps with the hedge-cutting and feeds the cat when I’m away) once took it apart and put it back together again and it started working, but he admitted he didn’t know what he’d done. It’s the sort of job that’s not really worth calling a professional electrician for, but it is annoying.

It was still working at half term when the family came, but it stopped again soon after, round about the start of lockdown. There’s no window, but there are frosted glass panels in the door, so some light comes in from the hall, good enough to get by, but really not good enough to clean. A bottle of nail varnish fell out of the bathroom cabinet one day and the top came off, so the hand-basin now has turquoise stripes (and I can’t have turquoise toenails, which is a source of great sorrow). Also I worry about the hygiene implications.

I have thought about attempting the taking-it-to-bits approach – after all, I salvaged the hedge trimmer, but I can’t quite face the palaver of it all, especially as I’m not sure I’ve got a decent torch. Even if I could find one, standing on the stepladder holding a torch would be enough of a challenge, never mind trying to wield a screwdriver (or whatever) in the other hand; and with my eyesight, I probably wouldn’t be able to see what I was doing anyway.

So this morning I was sitting on the loo in the gloom muttering to myself: ‘must remember to take the basket of washing out of the kitchen when I go back upstairs, don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget’ and thinking about my yoga teacher saying: ‘always have a place for everything and you’ll know where to look’ and me replying: ‘…I do, but the problem is not knowing where to look, but remembering to put things in the right place at the time I put them down’. In 2011 I did a Businesslink course on Self Organisation, talking about time management and list making and prioritising etc, and I broke down and confessed to the tutor that I just can’t do that stuff. She replied: ‘Maybe you should think about trying to get a job instead of starting a business’ and my heart sank as I thought: ‘If I could find anyone who would give me a job I wouldn’t be doing this.’

Well, after my exercise session I went for a shower, pulled on the switch without thinking and heard a snap. I expected it to come away in my hand, but when I noticed it hadn’t, I pulled again and the light came on.

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Happy Days (Part 2)

In some ways these last few days have been quite idyllic. Wake up in sunshine, morning routine, breakfast in the garden – with su doku – blends effortlessly into sitting in the garden and crocheting, which blends into an afternoon of listening to the radio and crocheting, preparing dinner, eating dinner (sometimes in the garden), and watching telly for a couple of hours and crocheting, then listening to music and crocheting till it’s time for bed. Okay, yesterday I went to the shop, but that’s become more of a regular variation on the routine, rather than a major disruption.

These are the kind of summer days it’s easy to fantasise about in the winter, or on any cold, rainy or generally stressful days at any time of year, so I’m deliberately appreciating them and not taking them for granted.

The obsession with crochet could, of course, be something else, like reading, writing, su doku, gardening, cooking, weaving, cross-stitching, tapestry, jigsaws, drawing, painting, decorating, tidying… Why don’t I pour my heart and soul into any of those? It can be done, but at the moment I don’t feel drawn in any of those directions.

Is it because I find it easy? But that’s just practice. It doesn’t always work out. I’ve learnt to let it go, pull it down and try again, put it on one side and try something else, or shove it to the back of the cupboard and forget about it.

I guess that’s what I do with my writing as well – shove it to the back of the electronic cupboard and forget about it. And this morning it’s not working at all. The words don’t want to come. I am looking at specks of dust on my computer, looking out the window at the street (which still seems remarkably empty). Wandering round my head to see if I can pick up any scraps of thought that might be worth recording.

Emptying your head of thoughts is not a bad thing – I spend ten minutes every morning trying to do just that.

I’ve just remembered a moment from last night, just before midnight. I’d been sitting up too late crocheting and listening to music, and when I went into the kitchen, I remembered I’d left the door open for Miko, and she was still outside, so I stepped out into the garden. Despite the neighbours’ fairy lights and the still-illuminated windows, there was mystery out there, no moon (it’s too new) but a few stars in the stillness of the night air. I called her name, and heard her scraping the gravel before I saw her. It could have been any animal sound, but she came to me and jumped up into the patch of light on the steps and ran into the house. I thought of owls (though I hear none here in the town) and night and summer, and the cool air and the mysterious life of cats, and thought about a poem but it didn’t come.  

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Happy Days

I promise no politics today, not even by implication.

I’ve just been to Sainsbury’s. It was open this week (see last week), but there are orange barricades all along the edge of the pavement. There is a small gap, and it doesn’t go round the corner, so it’s open at the junction. Presumably there’s some highway work planned, but it does seem perverse that pedestrians are being funnelled along a narrow strip of pavement. The other shops on that stretch of road (barbers etc) are closed anyway, but it must be affecting that branch of Sainsbury’s.

I mentioned a while back that I’d lost my credit card, the one that gives me 1% cashback in the supermarkets. I eventually got round to ordering a replacement, and it came a few days ago, but after last week’s trip to Tesco where I spent over £50, and worked out on the way home that having to use the other card (which gives me 0.5% on everything) had cost me 28p. Today I had my new card, signed it before I left the house, then remembered in the shop that I needed to activate it online before first use. I tried doing it via the phone app, standing in a quiet aisle (they’re all quiet at 8.30 in the morning, but occasionally you see another person), but it didn’t give me that option, so I tried using the card anyway, and it was rejected. This time it cost me 18p. Sounds petty, but I bet it’s added up over the last month or however long it’s been. If you average those two shops to about £46 (which is actually a bit higher than usual, because sometimes I can do contactless), that’s 23p/shop, or over 6 weeks, or £1.38.

First world problems.

Yesterday, after blogging, I had breakfast outside in the sun, stayed outside and crocheted. When even I felt it was getting a bit uncomfortable in the sun, I got my camping chair and put it in the shade by the fence. I stopped for a while and did a bit of weeding, then went back to sitting, crocheting, and listening to the neighbours’ music coming from their kitchen. Then in the afternoon I sat indoors and listened to 4 extra and carried on with my crochet till I’d turned my octagon into a square, and at about 5 o’clock I went and cooked my dinner. I could even tell you what that was, but I won’t.

It was a good day. I also did a load of washing. I wonder why I write about these minutiae of my life, of no conceivable interest to anyone. Maybe one day I’ll write a novel and this will all be useful atmosphere – or maybe not. I have a sort of idea for how I could write a novel that would incorporate some stuff from my blog, but don’t know how I’d end it.

Sometimes my thoughts lead to interesting stuff, but not today, it appears.

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The Way of the World

First, here is an update on some issues you may have been wondering about:

Coffee Pot: Gave it a thorough clean, paying particular attention to the threads where the two halves connect, and it seems to be okay.

Hedge trimmer: Used the fuse from the room heater, and it now works, so on Sunday I cut the edge next to the gate.

‘Walnut’ poem: Went through all the files in both my ‘blog’ folders, but still haven’t located it – though did find another (pretty rubbish) poem. I’d completely forgotten Now wondering if I should go through old notebooks in case I hand-wrote it, but that seems very unlikely given that I have this memory of someone commenting on it on Facebook.

Dodecagram: Now converted into an octagon with somewhat wobbly sides – I gave up at that point yesterday, but thought of something else to try when I woke up, so now eager to get back to it.

Other than that: how am I feeling? Well – trying not to let my anger at the current political situation overwhelm all good things, let me put it that way.

Except… Around twenty five years ago I was working with a man who was very charming, not physically attractive, but he told a good tale, very persuasive, good listener, GSOH – yes, I’ll admit that I was a little in love with him. But as we grew closer, I discovered one fundamental flaw in his character – he could say something with the utmost sincerity, conviction and plausibility, then a few days later say the exact opposite with equal sincerity etc etc. If I picked him up on it, he would laugh it off, smooth talk his way out, make me question my own memory of what he’d said previously, or just dismiss it as unimportant.  Now, I’ve said before that honesty is in some ways my downfall, I can’t tell a lie to save my life. In fact I once said to him that I wished I could bullshit the way he did – it was something I genuinely admired, the way he could always find an answer for everything , always steer the conversation to his own advantage. But somewhat to my surprise he was deeply offended.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that he always said whatever came into his head at the time he said it, whatever suited his advantage at that particular moment, and he honestly didn’t realise that he was contradicting himself, or that to do so was in any way morally wrong.

You can see where this is heading. I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently. It angers, frightens and depresses me that these days that sort of plausible deceit is just the way of the world, prevalent among our leaders, large sections of the popular media, almost a prerequisite for gaining any kind of power. Just when you think it can’t possibly get any worse, they can’t get away with it any more, it does, and they do.

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Squaring the Dodecagram

Time is strange these days. It feels like ages since I started the project I’m going to write about, but I checked out the photos on my camera, and the ones of the first attempts were dated the 9th, 10th and 12th of May, which is only a fortnight ago.

I bought this beautiful varicoloured cotton knitting yarn online, and got obsessed with it, buying up different colour combinations with no clear idea what to do with them. I crocheted two shawls, then decided I would make myself a beach cover-up/summer top. The idea I had was that the front would have a starburst pattern in the middle, which I would gradually extend outwards, then at some point I would square it off and do rows along the top and bottom to the right length. It all seemed fairly straightforward, but I thought it would be fun.

I started from the middle with an ‘icicle’ design from a book of crochet stitches, a hexagon which grew into a six pointed star. Then, still working in the round, added stitches into the space between the points, and turned those into additional points, while still extending the original six points, so I ended up with a 12 pointed star (dodecagram).

That’s when it started to get interesting.

My plan was to keep extending the star until it was wide enough from point to point to go across my body and then ‘square it off’, filling in the spaces between the points. Except… For a start, once the points got to a certain size, I couldn’t get them to lie flat. Also, if I wanted to keep working in a circle, the points would keep growing while I was also trying to fill in the gaps. I could complete the star to the desired size and then fill in all the spaces individually, but that would disrupt the sequence of colours and besides, that wasn’t what I was trying to do. So I pulled it down by a few lines. Then tried something else. Then realised I needed to go back further, so undid what I’d just redone, plus some more. And so on. Every day I give up, put it away, get up the next morning, pull down what I’ve done, and try something else.

Then I started thinking more about the geometry. If I just filled in the spaces between the points, I would end up with a 12-sided polygon – a dodecagon. After a couple of days puzzling over this, I realised I should think of it in groups of three points. If I identified four main points and laid them out like the points of the compass, the next step should be to merge the pairs of points between them. If I could flatten them out, I would have a diamond shape in the centre and then four triangles round the corners.

Don’t know if this counts as ‘creativity’ sparked by the lockdown. It’s pretty pointless. But I’m enjoying myself.

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Screws and Fuse Blues

After my post yesterday I went hunting for the poem I mentioned, and couldn’t find it anywhere. I think I know the title: ‘Walnut’; I know the last line: ‘I was younger then, and I looked good in pink.’ I can remember the experience which inspired it – both at the time I wrote it (finding a matchbox with ‘Walnut’ on the side) and the memory of that restaurant in West Hampstead which it triggered. I know it was in this house, so has to have been within the last three years (most likely 2018), and I know I blogged it (or at least put it on FB) because I remember a comment from one of my FB friends.

I’ve scoured through my poetry folders, through this blog and the previous one for that time period, even my two Facebook pages, but with no luck. All my blog posts are saved in Word in either of two folders, one on Onedrive and one on my desktop, the former imaginatively titled: ‘Blog’, the second: ‘blog’, saved with a filename of the date when they were written. I didn’t look at how many files were in those folders, by that point I was losing the will to live.

The day went on. I decided to fix the hedge trimmer (I cut through the cable when I tried using it last month). When I went to the shop on Wednesday I noticed the hedge is growing over the gate so that soon the postman won’t be able to get in (or I out – I could become like sleeping beauty, there’s a thought). So I got out all the tools and found the bit that I’d cut off (it was still over one of the kitchen chairs), unscrewed the connector that my ex attached the first time I cut through it, cursed the fact that I couldn’t find the better screwdrivers and myself for not being able to get a screwdriver into the slot correctly and hold it tight enough to actually turn it so I always ruin screw heads and drivers alike; chanted to myself: ‘don’t lose the screws’ but of course did, lost every little thing that could be lost and had to look for them all three times, but that’s my life in a nutshell, just a normal part of dyspraxia.

Then when I had it all back together I plugged it in and – nothing. Of course, it must have blown the fuse when it happened. Did I have any spare fuses? No, but I remembered two old appliances (coffee maker and microwave) were still in the bottom cupboard – but both their fuses had already been cannibalised. Went round the house looking for other things with fuses that I don’t want. Found my old hairdryer and tried that, but it still didn’t work, that probably blew when it broke as well.

In bed this morning I remembered I’ve got an electric heater I shouldn’t need any time soon. I’ll try that today.

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The Women That I Was

When I do my morning practice, thoughts often turn up in my head, potential poems, phrases from somewhere else, or bits of songs. This morning I decided to put all my incense cones into one box and mix them up, and while looking for a box I found a tiny box of matches which I remember once set me off into reminiscence and caused me to write a poem, some time last year, I think. Memory squared. I’m going to look out that poem later.

I had the song ‘Dust in the Wind’ in my head when I woke up (a song for our times if ever there was one) and as I started on my yoga stretches, and was thinking about that and the poem inspired by the matchbox, the phrase ‘the woman that I was’ popped into my head. I knew that it, or a phrase very like it, was from a song; the word wasn’t ‘woman’, but it was sung by a woman, and it wasn’t Joni Mitchell, but if I could work out what that two-syllable word was, I’d know. Then it came to me in a flash that it was ‘Gypsy’ by Stevie Nicks. I’ll have to fish that out later as well. And ‘Dust in the Wind’ – which is by Kansas, but I always forget that, or I think it’s Toto, and when it popped up on Amazon Music the other evening I had a laugh because I saw the connection between the two and why I mix them up.

The poem was about the woman that I was, though it wasn’t so long ago, about ten years. And the woman I was in it was who I was for a very short time and I’m not her any more – all we are is dust in the wind. I liked her, I liked being her. She was a bit wild, Bohemian, a dreamer, and she called herself Melinda – she came and went – like Ruby Tuesday – and she had a Bohemian adventure in 2013, but it didn’t work out the way she was dreaming of – nothing ever did – and perhaps that was her last gasp. So who am I now? Cat-by-Herself is my current persona, she emerged from the shadows – ooh, how long ago? Somewhere on a train, between the Camargue and the Balkans, perhaps, or Sofia and Istanbul, or on the shore of the Black Sea. She was the fourth corner (according to CG Jung, all threes need a fourth for completeness) – and she was the resolution of what someone flatteringly called ‘the Lovely Triad’.

I thought I’d left them all behind – Belinda, Melinda, Cassandra – but they all pop up from time to time. Melinda is the poet, after all; and Cassandra, the gloomy prophetess, the brain-the-size-of-a-planet whom no one listens to, but who still gets excited over the flash of intellectual connection; and sad Belinda sitting in chaos with her permanently aching heart. I still need to find a way to reconcile them.

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Dull

I lay in bed this morning listening to a distant susurrus – was it wind, rain or just in my head? I got up, sat on the edge of the bed to dress, and in the mirrored wardrobe door facing me I saw the clothes I’d chosen for my exercise/meditation session (purple yoga pants, red long-sleeved tee shirt) and thought they looked wintry compared to yesterday’s sunshine – not that it matters when I won’t be going anywhere. The weather app told me 2 minutes to a break in the rain. Five minutes later I checked to see if it had changed, and it said rain was expected in 83 minutes. Following from a previous post, it really is that precise. Now it just says: ‘Current: Cloudy, 16C’ and ‘Looking ahead: Pleasant Sunday’. Well, that’s something to look forward to.

I opened the door to let Miko out onto grey sky and trees shaking in the wind, but it wasn’t raining, and the ground didn’t look as though it had been. By the time I got back downstairs from my half hour session, she was curled up in her bed, so I closed it again.

Not so many people in the street today. A couple just passed, walking a dog – the man in lurid shorts, dull tee shirt and face mask, the woman in jeans and a yellow coat. Come to think of it, they’re the only ones I’ve seen so far. A few pigeons and gulls flying sideways. Every so often the sound of the wind rises above the murmuring of the computer.

I wrote yesterday but didn’t share – only with my therapist, and she agreed it probably wasn’t one to post generally (though I’m sure she has an unrealistic idea of how many people are likely to read this stuff). Maybe I won’t share this one either, maybe I’ll stop posting altogether or post on a secret blog and not share it to Facebook , or share it to a page that no one knows about, which is how this one used to be when I started it.

I have the tail end of some paid work to do, and I think that’s been responsible for my bad mood over the last couple of days. I’ve been putting it off, or rather, it’s been put off for me because of delays in the arrival of the proof copy, which finally turned up on Wednesday, so yesterday was pretty tied up. I think I should stop committing myself to doing things for other people, though this is a long-standing project –almost six years on and off, and it will be so good to get it out of my life at last.  

Just realised that that strange noise I’ve been hearing for the last few minutes is the venetian blind in my spare bedroom (where I do my exercise) banging against the wall. I always open the window when I finish to clear the smell of incense.

Time to get to work.