Category: life

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Day 12 – Mr Fox

You asked me to send you a poem.
I sent you an old one, generic in intent
(though you were in there).
I never wrote one just for you,
till now.

We never shared that bottle of champagne.
I never wore that silk dress for you –
(they didn’t make it in my size.)
You never got what you deserved,
yet you were always kind.

I saw you run across a snowy field.
I saw no hounds upon your tail, and I was glad.

I never felt that I deserved you,
but I remember you with fondness.
Do you remember me,
my foxy-whiskered friend?

Linda Rushby 12 April 2020
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Easter Sunday

I wrote a poem yesterday evening, and announced it on Facebook. But now I don’t know if I want to share it – it’s a bit personal.

Seems a waste, though, if it means I have to write another one today.

I haven’t done my yoga etc half hour yet, because when I got up I thought I had something to say and if I didn’t say it, it would annoy me because I’d forget what it was and have to think of something else. So here I am.

It’s just that I was thinking: have I done this long enough to prove that I can do it? Have I done it long enough to prove that there’s no point? I suppose it kills the time – but then time passes anyway, whether I do anything or not – it has no regard for human intentions. Now I remember that when I was downstairs feeding the cat and getting a cup of water – or rather, after that -I forgot to bring the washing basket up from the kitchen.

When you write a journal, is it/should it be about momentous things which have happened, or just whatever rubbish pops into your head at the time of writing? The latter is easier, and sometimes it throw up some surprises. That’s my excuse, if I need one.

I need excuses for everything I do. I feel pressure to justify my actions, even though, realistically, I know that no one cares or is interested. My life trundles along its predictable daily paths, and if it wasn’t for social media, no one would know – or probably care. That’s significant, that I think my actions and thoughts are of no interest to anyone. I am anonymous and invisible, even more so at the moment. If anything happened to me, I wonder who would be the first to notice, how they would notice, how long it would take, and what would they, or even could they, do about it?

My main concern is what would happen to my poor little cat. Anyone else concerned can look after themselves, but I worry about her, trapped here alone and starving. Perhaps she would finally be brave enough to go out through the cat flap, and once out there, she’d probably be a lot tougher and more resourceful than I give her credit for. They’re like that, aren’t they, cats? Someone would find her and maybe take her to a vet, where they’d scan her and get my details from her chip, and try and contact me. Maybe that’s when they’d realise I wasn’t responding, and call the police, and they’d come round and find me? Or maybe not, in these times, when everyone has more important things to worry about than a stray cat – or a stray woman, come to that. One more or less in the grand scheme of things. Who knows what might happen? And I didn’t write about moths. Maybe I should keep that one for tomorrow now.

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Happy Days

A couple of weeks ago, a friend said to me on Twitter: ‘This must be a good time to be alive for people who don’t like to go out’. Which incensed me because what I’d been saying was that I need to make myself go out and interact with people, because otherwise I’m worried that I will close down and disappear inside myself. Anyway, who was he to tell me how I was feeling?

But, strangely enough, I am enjoying life at the moment – well, I know I wasn’t a few days ago, but that was for other reasons. The relief of not having to think: ‘It’s such and such a day, I need to be there by this time and be with them…’ is actually helping me to relax and accept life. My simple routine is starting to sort out my days. I aim to do my half hour of exercise and meditation, feed the cat and let her out, and be at my computer with a cup of coffee by 8 o’clock – it doesn’t always work out that way, but I don’t beat myself up if it doesn’t. No one is expecting me to be anywhere else.

My health is good, my finances comfortable, my freezer full. The sun is shining; I have breakfast outside every morning after I’ve finished my 500 words – sometimes it’s as late as 11, but it doesn’t really matter. Last week there were three times when I connected with people through Facebook, Zoom or Skype: for meditation, tai chi and my weekly session with my psychotherapist. The fixed points of my routine are more frequently dictated by the radio schedules – 1 o’clock on weekdays for the half hour drama serial on 4 extra, and 3 pm every day for an hour of drama on 4 or 4 extra (though I can always catch up online). I’ve had to go out to the shops on four days out of the last seven, but for now I’m fine, until the milk runs out, which will be about Tuesday.

Having reduced housework to the level of: ‘I’m out of clean knickers, better put a load of washing on’, I’ve caught myself once or twice spontaneously tidying up some small area just to make my living space more pleasant, rather than because I’m frantically looking for something vital – yesterday I even started weeding the garden, and found myself enjoying it – I think partly because it’s quite satisfying to be pulling things out, rather than trying to coax them to grow. I crochet and weave – I tried something new in my weaving the other day, which didn’t work out, so had to undo it, but that’s ok because now I can do it again but better. My paper crafting stuff is all over the kitchen table and has been for weeks now – I keep thinking I’ll do something with it. Might even revive the idea of making a book from the haikus I wrote for NaPoWriMo in 2018.

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Day 9 – A Strange Road

I stepped onto a strange road
and oh, the excitement of knowing
the not-knowingness of the world.

The future an empty page.
The adventures I planned,
and those that I hadn’t.
The paths that I travelled,
the places I saw,
the people whose paths
crossed with mine.

Then one day I stopped,
and looked around
and saw there was no one
who made me their centre,
their lodestar, their true heart.

I have known
the devotion of children
the whispers of lovers
the kindness of friends,
and I’m grateful for these.

But only one person
can fill my void
and I must learn
to be that one.

Linda Rushby 9 April 2020

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Any Other Day

Trying to write a poem – the first line came up as: ‘Any other day…’ but nothing after that.

Maybe writing a poem about trying to write a poem? That sounds about as mad as the idea I had of trying to write a novel about trying to write a novel… another non-starter.

Any other day… and it wouldn’t matter so much. Why not? Come on, it’s just a day – a Tuesday, in fact – tai chi day, in normal times. Except it wouldn’t have been ‘normal times’ anyway, because I wouldn’t have been here, but on a narrow boat called ‘Teasel’, pootling about the inland waterways around the Hampshire/Surrey border with my son, his wife and their dogs.

I keep telling everyone -especially myself – that I’m fine with this lockdown thingy. Missing a holiday and spending a birthday alone are nothing in the grand scheme of things, nothing compared with what others have to deal with.

So here I am, putting all that to one side and getting on with it. Trying to write a poem – or failing that, just 500 words of any old nonsense, nothing too whiney, nothing too self-pitying. Do some gardening – I’ve been putting that off, till I realised that weeding could be quite appealing, it’s destructive after all. But I might miss the postman, there might be a delivery, so I can’t go in the garden until after then.

Waiting. Waiting for an indeterminate period, for an indeterminate outcome. Waiting for Godot. Beckett on failure: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’. Story of my life.

Late this morning – in fact, it’s just turning into afternoon as I type. Awake half the night, early enough to fall asleep again and sleep in till 8.30, then do my morning stuff and it gets later and later, and my sister rang to say happy birthday, and I tried to call my brother (his birthday too) but couldn’t get through.

So, having made my mind up to do some weeding, I thought about the possible delivery and decided to wait in the front room, and in the mean time to do the writing that I didn’t do before breakfast. Waiting.

It’s not so much the activities that I do to break up my weeks that I miss so much as the café-sitting. It’s a habit I picked up in my flat-dwelling years – in Bedford, Ramsey, Prague and here in Southsea – and the months when I was travelling, when I would inhabit the public spaces – cafes, parks, seafronts and riversides – rather than sitting in hotel rooms. Now I have a garden, and the weather (at the moment) is good enough to be out there. But hunkering down in your own space – however appealing – can become a trap.

Just been interrupted by a phone call from my brother. It was nice to hear his voice, but has broken my chain of thought. We don’t always get on very well, but good to know he’s there.

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Unknown unknowns – or are they?

I had an idea for the start of a poem in the shower, but as I mentioned the other day, poems don’t tend to come when I’m already writing, so not sure what to do about it. Not sure I even remember it now.

Something about balance, and equilibrium, and the middle way. No, even the first couple of lines don’t seem to be coming back. Bugger.

Maybe it was: ‘We live on a knife edge’ – no – ‘Life is in the balance…’ No, because I thought it could be the start of a haiku, and that’s too many syllables (whereas ‘Life is balanced’ is too few). ‘The balance of life…’? That’s about right. Then I followed it with a few comparisons: ‘Freedom and security/Joy and despair…’ That sort of thing.

Pretty trite stuff anyway.

Might have to leave it and see if anything else comes to me.

A friend keeps asking in emails if I’ve seen the Bill Gates (I think it was Bill Gates, somebody like that anyway) TED talk from 2015. I haven’t – not recently at least – but I think from the context I can guess what it’s about.

Something to do with the fact that scientists have been predicting a global pandemic for years, and how devastating it could be? It could have been SARS, it could have been swine flu (or was it bird flu?), it wasn’t, but it was inevitable, it was overdue, and it would come suddenly without anybody taking notice of the warnings?

I’m being completely honest here and the video might be about something totally different, but I have been aware of the science. It’s not that obscure, it’s one of those things that comes up on the news every couple of years, then everybody goes back to whatever the current worry is, and forgets about it – except the scientists directly concerned, and people like me (who as it happens made a detailed study of individual and societal reactions to this kind of high-cost –low-probability risk in the 1990s, and was awarded a PhD on the strength of it).

It’s the same psychology that brought us the 2008 banking crisis and is bringing us climate change and Brexit (don’t forget they’re still lurking in the background).

Twas ever thus.

If I have to sum up my PhD thesis in a single sentence I tend to compare it to Murphy’s Law, with a corollary: ‘Shit happens, but nobody does anything to stop it until it hits the fan’. No amount of forewarning, scientific investigation or crisis planning is ever quite enough to forestall disaster when it comes. This is where my alternative person, ‘Cassandra’, comes from. However we think we can manage and prioritise our lives, there’s always something that creeps up on us that we’ve avoided addressing. Emergencies emerge, that’s what they do. Donald Rumsfeld was ridiculed for warning about the ‘unknown unknowns – but even when they’re ‘known’, reactions depend on who they’re known by – and who chooses how to respond.

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Day 5 – Circle of Friends

Circle of Friends

Three months ago, or thereabouts,
a circle of friends sang songs of hope.

Knowing we must part,
knowing we would meet again,
but not knowing when.

Knowing there would be hard times,
not knowing what.

Knowing we would all find joy
not knowing how.

Another year, another song.

The memory of that evening comes to me,
and makes me smile,
for the time when we will meet again,
and touch, and hug, and maybe kiss,
in the place that joins our hearts.

Linda Rushby 5 April 2020

It’s good when a poem comes like that, when I was getting dressed, and making coffee, and feeding the cat, and taking pots from the dishwasher. So that by the time I sat at the keyboard, I already knew what I was going to say.

Sheesh, if only it was always that easy!

Can I get away with that today (at least it’s not a haiku!) or do I have to keep on writing? Well, I set the rules, so I guess I can do what I like.

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Connections and Constrictions (but no poem)

Why do I always come up to my study to write my blog on the PC? I don’t know – there’s no reason why I shouldn’t sit downstairs and write on the laptop. I’ve been working on here for the last couple of weeks, finishing off the book design job because I have software on here which isn’t on the laptop. So it’s habit, I suppose, sitting here feels like I’m doing something serious (as if).

The two poem lines I started with yesterday, I was questioning them before I even sat down to write about them, then I got carried away down tunnels of memory and snatches of songs which made me think of other things. But the distinction I initially made in my head – of a net that links versus a web that binds –  was always a bit of a false dichotomy, because a net, just as much as a web, is designed to trap whatever blunders into it. I was thinking more of a net as a network, a positive kind of connectivity, which links us with the necessities of life. As a corny example (no pun intended), the connections between people through the supply chain for food – farmers, processers, distributors, retailers, cooks – ‘field to fork’ – even that’s a gross simplification, which can be extended indefinitely in either direction, with microlinks in between. (Note to self: ‘Chain’ is another monosyllabic word, but when you think about it, that too can imply constriction as well as connection.)

There’s a lovely quote, (I think it’s from Martin Luther King), about how by the time your food reaches your table, it’s already travelled half way round the world. Though that’s not such a good thing is it? There was a time about twenty years ago when I used to get incensed about air miles – even had a letter published in The Times about it – but as always, nobody listened.

Which reminds me – yesterday I invited people to like the FaceBook page which is linked to this blog, but quite honestly, if I keep drivelling on like this, won’t I scare them all away? As I’ve tried to explain to a friend who was encouraging me to share my writing more widely, I can’t always guarantee to write ‘the good stuff’, and I don’t see the point of just trying to pick out the odd sentences that ‘work’ and sharing them out of context.

But on I go, and here I am again, pumping up the word count. Guess I should try and write another poem today, only four days in, ye gods, how am I going to do this for a whole month?

Connections and constrictions – that’s the point really I was trying to make. And perhaps the two are inseparable? Anything which supports us breeds reliance, holds us into a familiar position, if only by imposing a sense of reciprocal obligation.  You scratch my back…? ‘We’re all in this together… ‘ at a minimum distance of two metres, naturally.

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A Poem That I Meant to Write

‘The net that links us

Is not the web that binds us’

Linda Rushby (unfinished)

I thought that was going to be the start of a poem, but after an hour of rattling around, nothing else has appeared. So now I’m sitting at the keyboard, and – I don’t think this has struck me before – although I usually write as I go directly on the computer (which is why my posts ramble quite as much as they do), it doesn’t work that way with  poems. Mostly they come into my head fully formed, and then I have to write them down before I forget them – like a line from a Paul Simon song of 50-odd years ago :

‘I was twenty one years when I wrote this song.

I’m twenty two now, but I won’t be for long…’

Paul Simon, ‘The Leaves That Are Green’

You said it, Paul. And the first time I heard it I was even younger – sixteen, I believe – though the song had already been around for a few years. I think it was the first time I grasped – or at least caught a glimpse of – an adult understanding of the passing of time. That and Neil Young’s ‘Old Man’ from about the same: ‘I’m twenty four and there’s so much more’. (To me at that time, even twenty seemed impossibly mature).

How did I get here from there? Oh yes, ‘The Leaves That are Green’:

‘Once my heart was filled with the love of a girl.

I held her close, but she faded in the night

Like a poem I meant to write

And the leaves that are green turn to brown.’

That one: ‘Like a poem I meant to write.’ Exactly. If you don’t grab them while they’re there, they get away from you – Poems, I mean, not girls (or boys). I wrote once about ‘catching the words in flight’. It may be in ‘Single to Sirkeci’ or it may just have been a blog post. It might be the one I wrote in Tulcea, on the Danube Delta – which would have gone into ‘The Long Way Back’ – if I’d ever got round to finishing it. Or maybe it was just a random, throw away blog post that at most a handful of people might have read.

Do poems matter more than people? That’s a bit contentious – though once out they’re out there, they can live forever – I’m not claiming this for mine, I hasten to add, but I was thinking of the likes of Wordsworth (whose birthday is next Tuesday – I have a reason for knowing that which some of you might work out), Ovid (who was exiled to and died on the Black Sea Coast at Constanta, from where I went to Tulcea) or even poor Sylvia Plath (enough said).  Even mine will still hang around for a while after I’ve gone, out on the internet and in unsold copies of ‘Beachcombing’. Some have already lasted far longer than the relationships that provoked them – but that’s another matter.

Of course – a haiku!

‘When we are ourselves.’

Linda Rushby
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Raw poetry

Not a haiku today, just something that popped into my head – partly inspired by a photo of myself on Facebook from seven years ago, which I hadn’t seen before.

That’s how it goes, I think of something, and then I write it down (or not). I don’t really put any work into it. It just happens (or it doesn’t). So sometimes I share it, and sometimes I don’t.

I suspect there will be a lot of this stuff this month (unless I give up). I was trying to remember the word for oil when it’s first extracted, before they refine it, then it came to me: ‘crude’. I don’t think ‘Crude poetry’ conveys quite the right meaning, so I’ll stick with ‘raw’.

NaPoWriMo 2 (No title)

Nearly a grandmother,
wasn’t I too old
to start again?

Why do I go back,
Endlessly filleting
the years that were?

I’ll never change the past,
The present’s hard enough

Sunny days beside one river,
or another.
Mornings on a beach.
What’s here is now,
Another spring.

Linda Rushby 2 April 2020