Category: reading

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Decisions

She isn’t dead! I knew it! Well, I kept hoping – I’ll admit, I was starting to question my intuition, pretty well given up in fact, then I started the next chapter and – there she was! Only I ran out of time (it was time to get up) so I don’t know yet how she managed to get out of the car wreck (though I know who she’s with now) and she’s clearly been out of it for the last few chapters and only just regained consciousness, because everyone’s been assuming she was dead (whose was the body they dragged out of her car, then?) but that’s something to look forward to, this evening, or tomorrow morning, or maybe I’ll have a crafty read some time today…

Sorry, got a bit carried away there. I told you I was reading a good book. I love it when it grabs you like that – that’s the joy of reading.

Well, yesterday both Portsmouth and Bedford went into Tier 3 Covid restrictions. Which means… well, over Christmas (23rd-27th) the special rules are still in place, so I can legally go. But I’d made a pact with Fate, or the Universe (as I often do when I’m forced to make a decision) that if any of us went into Tier 3, I’d hunker down and spend Christmas here, just me and the cat.

So, decision made, I texted my daughter to tell her I wasn’t coming, then talked it over with my therapist in our weekly Skype session. It was a relief, really, I told her, and myself, because the decision was taken out of my hands. My main worry was how my daughter would react, but I’d decided. At least I’d got rid of that stress over packing etc, and driving.

‘…the stress which you would have anyway, whatever you do…’ she pointed out. Hmm, yes, she knows me too well – that’s her job after all.

After the session, I wrote the family Christmas cards – with a little note in my granddaughter’s saying ‘…sorry I can’t be with you…’ walked to the post office and popped them in the box. Looked (in vain) in Tesco and the Co-op on the way home for anything nice for my Christmas dinner. Bought a small poinsettia and tiny tree in the florist.

Four Christmases ago, when I was waiting for the results of the biopsy, people asked me why I was going away when I might be called back to hospital at any time? And I thought then: ‘this might be my last Christmas, why would I want to spend it on my own?’

In the evening my daughter texted again, and then rang and said she’d spoken to her brother, and even though it’s my choice, they’re prepared to come and get me and bring me home so I don’t have to drive, and even her Dad said: ‘…she’ll regret it if she doesn’t…’

So the decision changes again. But this time it feels right.

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Compensations of Reading

I don’t want to write today. I have nothing to say that I haven’t said a million times before, only the shit I think of every morning.

A while back I thought I would write about the Madwoman in the Attic, but I never did. What are the other things I’ve thought I might write about? I have a file with a list of quotes from my posts where I’ve started a new train of thought near the end of the 500 words and then I think – I’ll come back to that – so I copy and paste it into this table. But the only time I look at it is when I have something to add, and those seem to come in clusters, there’ll be a few close together and then I’ll forget about it again for months.

One day maybe, I’ll go back and read everything I’ve written and it will make a kind of sense, a picture of who I am and my life and my feelings and thoughts. Really? A kind of sense? Or just a god-awful mess?

I know, I know, it’s a shitty time of year, I’ve said that before, I’ve hated this time of year for ages – and no, it’s not just because I’m on my own – anyway, I’m not, I have my kids and grandkids.

Anyway, saying that is just too simplistic. This dread I’m feeling is no different really from the dread I always get before I have to do something, go somewhere, even when I’m going out in my camper van. I don’t want to have to pack, I panic when I know that I have to choose clothes for several days. I don’t want to have to sort out the house ready to leave it for a few days, with a virtual stranger coming in every day to feed the cat. I don’t want – god help me – to wrap presents. And I don’t want to drive to Bedford, but I definitely don’t want to go by train.

I want to get lost inside a book. I want that total absorption that only reading a good book can provide – but I have to ration myself because I have things to do. Even radio isn’t such a good substitute, and as for telly – I don’t know why I dislike it so much, and yet I still watch it every evening. I’m not even talking about the quality of the content – it’s something inherent in the technology, it’s too busy, it demands too much attention but somehow simultaneously it’s too distracting so my brain can’t focus on it and gets bored with trying to take it in and wanders off, and then I find I’ve missed something and get frustrated. Maybe it’s a dyspraxic thing. It happens with reading sometimes too, but in general I’d say reading is much more satisfying. This is why I managed without telly quite happily for ten years, but somehow I’ve got sucked back into relying on it.

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Reading for Love

I’ve slipped back into the habit of reading in bed, in that couple of hours between waking up (usually between four and five thirty or so) and getting up (which I do around seven). At one time I was listening to podcasts, but that was when I was trying to get back to sleep. I’ve now given up on that idea – for the time being, at least. At various times in the past, I’ve thought I’d found a way of dealing with my insomnia – it might work for a while but then the patterns change, which will probably happen again, but for the time being, this is what I do.

I’m currently reading a really enjoyable novel by a reliable writer, the sort I like to read on holiday. His books wouldn’t be for everybody – they’re a bit creepy and gruesome in places – you might even class them as ‘horror’ if you wanted to be crude, but that’s not what I like about them – bloodthirstiness for its own sake doesn’t interest me at all. They’re more like mystery thrillers with a supernatural element, I’d say ‘contemporary’, except that most of the ones I’ve read were written and are set in the 1990s (which I guess doesn’t quite count as the present day any more), set in a recognisable version of this country as it was a couple of decades ago, often in semi-rural settings such as Glastonbury or the Peak District, where late twentieth early twenty-first century characters become entangled, unwittingly or through hubristic meddling, with older forces beyond their control. Gripping plots, engaging characters and a wry, intelligent writing style that never makes me cringe by striking a bum note – perfect escapism, in other words. And he seems to have a massive back catalogue, which is great because whenever I want a good read I just download another one. In fact, come to think of it, it’s become a bit of a habit for me to read one of his books at Christmas, which may be why I thought of it now – they often have a bleak-midwinter setting (although I also read one on holiday in Cyprus in September).

Anyway, as you can tell, I really like these books, and as I’m being nice about the writer, and not slagging him off (as I did a bit with somebody else a few months back) I’ll give him a name check: Phil Rickman.

Well, if I was trying to write fiction, it wouldn’t be a good idea to spend an hour or so reading a novel before I start writing in the morning, but as fiction seems to be beyond me at the moment (by ‘the moment’ I’m including the last five years), I might as well indulge myself a bit, going back to the roots of why l’ve always loved books, because – well – I just love a good story, and reading or hearing one is the greatest and simplest pleasure I know, and always has been.

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Simple Things

One card to make out of the current batch, then I need to write in them, address them, stamp them and take them to the post office. If they go today, they’re a week ahead of the final posting date. Two more to make, for my children, which I want to make a bit more special, but haven’t got a clear idea yet what I’m going to do. Hopefully I’m going to be able to deliver them both in person, but if not… maybe I should plan on trying to get them posted in advance anyway, because who knows what might happen in the next fortnight?

Yesterday I showed my therapist the Christmas jumper, she seemed particularly excited that it was blue and not red or green. I’ve still got to weave in the ends. Over Skype, she couldn’t see that, or the way the stitches pull around the motifs – besides, she’s not a knitter, so she’s probably impressed that I managed to finish it at all. She said at one point that she was ‘in awe’ of me – I’d rather she admired my writing or my academic prowess than my knitting, but I don’t think she meant that anyway.

She said last week how impressed she was with my routine, how I get up and do my yoga, tai chi and meditation, and then my writing, and yesterday she added to this the way I do my crafting. I showed her the current weather blanket and she asked what I do with them when they’re finished, so I told her the first one is in the spare bedroom, last year’s one went to my son and daughter-in-law and this one’s going to my daughter – to mark for both of them the years in which they got married (my daughter’s idea).

But all of that: getting up at seven (when usually I’ve been awake for at least two hours already), the exercise and meditation, the five hundred words, the square for the weather blanket and other crafts (and the reading, listening to the radio and su doku as well) – is about self-preservation, keeping myself this side of the line that tips over into darkness. I do them because I need to. Yes, I’d quite like it if I was writing a novel, or some great academic treatise that would put the world to rights, but at least all these activities are doable and pretty harmless and don’t involve anybody else. One day, no doubt, I’ll stop doing one or more of them, and then this year will become, not just the (first) Covid-19 year, but the time when I ‘…used to do that stuff’.

Years ago, I used to do cross stitch, and I remember thinking my life was pretty sad on the days when that was the most satisfying thing I’d done – like the wife in the Paul Simon song for whom a good day ‘…ain’t got no rain’. But I’ve learned to appreciate losing myself in simple things.

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Seasonal Rant

I spent most of yesterday getting stressed over how much I hate this time of year. All the miserable and uncomfortable Christmases in my life, even though outnumbered by the happy ones, rise up from memory like a dark tidal wave, and completely overwhelm them. I spent the morning working on the weather blanket and listening to podcasts, and then in the afternoon telling the therapist how ashamed I am that that’s all I’ve been doing, as well as about all the dark Christmases there have been in in my life, and how much I hate this time of year – in between bouts of weeping.

We got into the usual argument about what I ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be doing (‘should’ is like a red rag to a bull for her) and when she asked if it wasn’t just those voices from the past telling me what to do, I got irritated, because, no, it isn’t just that – I know for myself that I would feel better if I did all those things that I ignore in favour of sitting and crocheting.

‘What do you think will happen?’ she asked.

‘Well, it’s not healthy is it? I’d just go into a downward spiral and sink down and down’ I told her, waving my finger round in circles.

‘What’s your worst fantasy of what might happen, if you took it to the extreme?’

To the extreme??? I thought. What a bloody stupid question – like the question about what do you really want from life if money and reality and the law of gravity were no object – what’s the point of asking that?

‘That by the time I was missed, someone would have to break into the house and find me rotting, surrounded by piles of rubbish, and with half my face missing because the cat’s eaten it’ was what I actually said.

I woke as usual at four this morning, but instead of filling the time with podcasts and reading, I spent an hour brooding, just like old times. Then at five, I started reading some more of ‘Out of Sheer Rage’, and to my surprise finished it, although my Kindle said I was only 85% through it – the last 15% was taken up with footnotes and a preview of another book. I was telling the therapist about it yesterday, and how much I’ve enjoyed it, and she asked if it made me feel less alone, which it did, but like the dyspraxia forum in a bittersweet way, because it IS good to know I’m not the only one, but also depressing in that it suggests to me that there really is no way out.

But there are so many bits that I wanted to highlight, and I will share this one:

‘thinking of giving up is probably the one thing that’s kept me going. I think about it on a daily basis but always come up against the problem of what to do when I’ve given up. Give up one thing and you’re immediately obliged to do something else. The only way to give up totally is to kill yourself but that one act requires an assertion of will equal to the total amount that would be expanded (sic) in the rest of a normal lifetime.”

“Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence” by Geoff Dyer
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Dodgy Knee

I think my version of hibernation is waking three hours before sunrise and lying in bed listening to podcasts or reading from my Kindle until about seven then getting up, doing my exercises, making coffee and coming on here to write this blog. Three hours before sunrise is pretty much the same time as sunrise was six months ago, when I was waking around the same time but it wasn’t dark. The advice I had from the insomnia clinic, years ago, was to get up rather than lying in bed, so that my brain would be trained to associate bed with sleep, but that ship has not only sailed, but long ago disappeared below the horizon, and I might as well just listen or read. Sometimes I do drift back to sleep again, and some days, like today, it gets to this time (it’s half past eight) and I think – maybe I could go back to sleep now (except I can’t, because I’ve got wet hair and a towel round my head, and anyway if I lay down on the bed I probably wouldn’t get back to sleep, just waste another half hour or so trying to, and even if I did I’d hate it when I did wake up, because I’d have wasted half the day).

Geoff Dyer’s book ‘Out of Sheer Rage’ makes me alternately laugh out loud and cringe, because of his rambly stream-of-consciousness style, and because I relate to so much of what he writes about himself – and it’s all the worst bits – maybe not the worst bits of him, but the worst bits of me. One that struck a chord with me this morning was when he was complaining about his dodgy knee – the right one, whereas mine is the left. He had terrible problems with it when he was in Italy (I think – or maybe Mexico) and he saw a doctor who showed him two exercises that would help if he did them regularly, except of course he didn’t, so it got worse, then when he was back in England he went to his GP who sent him to a knee specialist, who sent him to a physiotherapist, who showed him the same exercises, which he still didn’t do. Four years ago (nearly five now), I started to notice pains in my leg, so I went to the GP and was referred to the physio, and I saw her monthly for a while, but didn’t like to admit I wasn’t doing the exercises in between, but by the end of the year I had cancer anyway which kind of trumped the leg thing, except that a couple of weeks ago I woke up one morning with so much pain in my left knee I could barely stand – I put it down to spending the previous day in a low armchair doing stuff on my laptop on a stool in front of me – it gradually eased and now it comes and goes but is bearable.

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Je Ne Regrette Rien

This morning I got up and walked to the beach. I was there in time for the sunrise, but the cloud cover was solid, and there was nothing to see. I sat on my usual bench, but the wind seemed to be blowing directly at me, and I didn’t feel comfortable enough to drink my coffee, so I walked down to the tideline and tried to photograph the waves, which were pretty fearsome. They were licking at the remains of a sandcastle, which seemed bizarre – who had been there building a sandcastle at this time of year?

I left the beach to cross the esplanade and drink my coffee in the Rose Garden, which is more sheltered, and as I turned to look back, I saw the clouds moving and parting, and a brief burst of light came from the gap and shone momentarily on the sea.

I think I finished yesterday saying something about regret, and Geoff Dyer saying that whatever you do, or don’t, there are always regrets. But I part company with him there – I think I’m quite good at avoiding regrets, over the big things, anyway. Of all the major changes I’ve made over the last twelve years, I don’t think there are any which I would undo, were such a thing possible, even the ones whose consequences were painful at the time. Not that that spares me from agonies when I have to make a choice, but that’s another matter. The torments I went through before I decided to move here – which seem ludicrous looking back from this perspective – were only finally settled when I realised that if I didn’t at least try it, I would always wonder what would have happened if I had. And now I know.

I read somewhere – a few years ago now – that it is part of human psychology to see major life choices – marriage, house purchase, choice of job, divorce – in a positive light once they’ve been made and committed to. It’s the ‘it was meant to be…’ syndrome: ‘I was meant to meet you, move here, do that – because look what happened!’ I was saying this a couple of weeks ago, I think, when I talked about fate and fatalism. We know the consequences of those decisions, and can’t really imagine what the alternatives might have been like. Of course, this isn’t universal, and I can’t remember the research and references off the top of my head, but I can see how it has worked out in my life.

In the time before I left my husband, I bought a greeting card with the legend: ‘The only things I’ll regret are the things I don’t do’, and stuck it to the wall behind my computer. It also became the tagline for the new blog I started when I moved out. I’ve still got that card, in fact if I look over my left shoulder, I can see it on a shelf. I think it’s a pretty good motto.

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Choices

For the second day running I have not gone to the beach for sunrise and then wished I had when it was too late. I was awake in plenty of time, then just lay there, and then read for a bit, and I had an idea for a poem, and when I got up I wrote it on the laptop (but don’t feel like I want to share it at the moment). I did it in Open Office, which reminded me that there are many features from Word which are missing from OO, but at least it works and I’ll be able to write in cafes or other places – come such time as I can do that again, which hopefully will return.

I should go out. I mean, I really should go out somewhere, the sun is shining today, I could walk to the beach and maybe get a take-away bacon butty somewhere. Yesterday I didn’t go out at all, or Sunday, only Saturday when I went to the shop. I know it’s not healthy to sit indoors all the time, and the weather is no excuse at the moment, but somehow… In normal times I would go out for breakfast just as motivation to get myself out of the door. In the summer I ate my breakfast in the garden most days, and stayed sitting out there with my crochet, which is better than never leaving the house.

I’ve been reading two books in parallel, one on the Kindle and one in print. After my conversation with the lady in the local bookshop just before lockdown, I felt quite ashamed of myself for continuing to support Amazon by having everything on Kindle, but it is so much more convenient. I’ve now compromised by deciding I will read from the Kindle in bed and proper books when I’m sitting. One of the big advantages of the Kindle is being able to adjust the size of the font. I have so many books that I’ve never read – mostly picked up second-hand – and I worry that my eyesight will go before I’ve read most of them. And of course I spend a lot of time listening to readings and dramas on the radio, so that I can knit or crochet at the same time.

The two books I’m currently reading both have subjects that sound quite dry – one about the history of the Hapsburg Empire (‘Danubia’ by Simon Winder – paperback) and one about DH Lawrence (‘Out of Sheer Rage’ by Geoff Dyer – Kindle) but they’re both written with such wit and humour that they’re great fun  – I think so, anyway. I’ve mentioned the Dyer one before, about how he keeps writing about how he can’t write this book. The bit I was reading this morning was about regret, and how he shares with Lawrence the knowledge that whatever choices he makes, he knows he will regret not doing the opposite. I don’t think I’m that bad.

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Process and Outcome (and losing a poem)

It’s a cliché to say that the quest is more important than the prize, the journey matters more than the destination. This is the meaning of the story of the Crescent Moon Bear, (retold by Clarissa Pinkola Estés), with the added subtlety that it is the hardships the protagonist experiences through the journey that give her the skills she needs to keep going and deal with her challenges (which are still there when she returns home).

In the process of trying to re-evaluate my life in order to better understand who I am and how I got here, this strikes a chord. There were things I was going to say. But earlier I remembered a poem that I thought I would dig out and now I can’t find it. This is the second time this has happened to me in the last few months and it is worrying. I have so many poems and they can be anywhere – well, I think there are a certain number of places where I would have saved them, but I’ve looked in all those and still no luck. Emily Dickinson wrote hers on paper, and shoved them in a drawer where her sister found them after she’d gone, but who’s going to bother trawling through my computer for mine?

I’ve gone through my assorted ‘poetry’ or ‘poems’ folders, but no sign of it – I can’t remember a title for it, which doesn’t help. I remember that I wrote it in my flat on Beach Road, which narrows the date down to between May 2015 and October 2016. And there’s no 2016 sub-folder in my Blog folder on Google Drive, so does that mean I didn’t write any blog posts in 2016? Of course, I would have been using my old laptop then, so it could be on there. But it was unfinished at the time, and then I’m sure I’ve gone back to it in the last couple of years and tweaked the last bit, so that implies it would be somewhere I’ve accessed more recently.

Well that’s blown out of my mind what I wanted to say. Process and outcome. My PhD is a classic example of a hugely significant process with an outcome that no one was interested in – not only if we assume that the ‘outcome’ was the thesis, but if we take ‘an academic career’ as the outcome I was striving for – well, that never happened either. I used to say that the process of doing a PhD is like having your brain extracted, tied in knots, and put back again so you can never see things in the same way ever again. Maybe that was just my experience.

If I think back to the time before, from the point when one of my OU tutors asked whether I’d ever considered a career in research, my aim was always to ‘do’ a PhD, rather than to ‘have’ a PhD – which reminds me of another poem, which hopefully I can locate…

I had a dream.
And then what?
I made it real.
And then what?
Dreams in daylight
turn to dust.
And then what?
How long does it take
to make a new dream?
And then what?

Linda Rushby 22 June 2012
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Not Writing, but Blogging

Where does this stuff come from? I sit down with a vague idea and the words come out in a completely different direction – like starting from a conversation about the role of fate and chance in an individual life and going off on one about Isaac Asimov and the fates of galaxies (not to mention Planet Earth).

Lately much of my time is being taken up with obsessing over getting this jumper finished – so much so that I haven’t even touched the weather blanket for a week. And a fair amount of that time, of course, is taken up with untangling wool, although yesterday I felt as though there was a better balance, and that I made reasonable progress (admittedly it was a less complicated part of the design). In fact it even feels as though I may be approaching the end – although I still have to do the sleeves, which always take longer than expected. I’ve made a start on one of them (when the body got too stressful) and I’ve decided to incorporate small candy canes into the pattern to relieve the boredom.

I still have moments (or even hours) of panic that she’s not going to like it. But then I think – too late to go back now, I might as well just keep on the way I’m going, knowing that whatever my daughter’s opinion, I’ll be embarrassed by it when it’s done. She asked for it, I tell myself, and she knows well enough it will probably turn out to be a mess.

But I’ve decided to stop worrying about the quality of the things I make (which goes for my writing too, which is why I’m still writing this blog). Also I heard on the radio the other day that only ten of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime, but almost 1800 were discovered by her sister after her death. What does it matter?

This takes me back again to ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, and the idea of the poetic imagination, or Wild Spirit, (or whatever you want to call it) being stolen or given away or strangled at birth. Looking back over my life – which I still haven’t delved into in depth – has shown me how much I’ve repressed, denied, pushed away, belittled that side of myself, while simultaneously longing for it. So I’ve decided just to do what I can without thinking too much about it or expecting anything from it. Lockdown helps, of course – as it did in the spring: I feel a lot less stressed and more content when I don’t have to go out and interact with other people. That’s something else Dickinson is famous for – it’s said she rarely left her bedroom –at least I have a whole house to myself.

Despite longing for the life of a wild bohemian, I never had the nerve or the opportunities. I’ve always been more Emily Dickinson than Bloomsbury – and at least it requires a lot less energy.