Category: remembering

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Madwoman Out of the Attic

Writing is easy – just listen to the words in your head and transcribe them. That’s the way I do it, anyway. Never a time when there aren’t any words in my head, though admittedly most of them aren’t worth preserving. Which begs the question… but I’m not going down that road again, because I’ve asked it too many times and never found an answer. It’s just a habit – something I do every morning (or almost every morning) like tai chi, or feeding the cat, or listening to ‘Thought for the Day’, or defecating. (actually, the only one of those I absolutely can’t avoid doing is feeding the cat, as long as I’m here, though if I’m not here, someone else comes in to do it.)

Now my mind is wandering and I’m not actually typing. Oh, I fixed the mouse, by the way, it was just a new battery that it needed. I remembered them and even got as far as bringing them up (I wasn’t sure if it needed AA or AAA so brought both), when I remembered that I needed to bring up the loo cleaner – which I also brought up. Wonder how long it will take me to remember to take the spare batteries downstairs again? Or to clean the loo? (Only kidding, I put the loo cleaner in as soon as I got upstairs).

I told you most of the words in my head aren’t worth preserving. They’re either stuff like that, or things I’ve already said before.

Why do I tag myself as the ‘Madwoman in the Attic’? Especially as the house where I live now doesn’t even have an attic? It’s partly, of course, a literary  reference to Jane Eyre, in which Mr Rochester keeps his first wife locked up in the attic (which probably was a kinder option than sending her to one of the notorious ‘madhouses ‘ of the time). Ironically, I’ve just realised that in the ‘Husband or Cat?’ incident of 2005, it was my ex-husband who voluntarily moved himself into the attic –I’ve never noticed the irony before, but that’s a story for another time. Anyway, our attic had two rooms, and he confined himself to the larger one, which wasn’t my study, and had a telly and VHS in addition to a computer.

The whole attic thing went back much further than that, however, to a time when I thought it was romantic for writers to starve in attics (or ‘garrets’ – I’m not sure what the difference is between the two). I’d long dreamt of having an attic to write (though not necessarily starve) in. As soon as we saw that house, I knew it was going to be my room – the ‘Room of One’s Own’ as recommended by Virginia Woolf for any woman who wanted to write (literary references coming thick and fast today).

When I left, it also became the repository for all the junk I left behind… but this is the start of a much longer story…

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Rotting From the Roots

Sat down at the PC to start writing and remembered a) the mouse isn’t working and b) the top tool bar on word keeps appearing and disappearing and I can’t work out how to fix it. Weell… actually, after a few more minutes of trying the View tab and other things, I Googled it and found out that if I right click on the home tab it gives me a drop-down including ‘Minimize the ribbon’ which was ticked, so I unticked it and that worked. The first suggestion: press Ctrl F1, was stymied by the fact that I can’t see ‘F1’ on my keyboard. Don’t know how it got ticked in the first place, but I suspect it happened when I was thrashing around trying to get the mouse to work.

I suspect the mouse just needs a new battery, but spare batteries are downstairs and the mouse is upstairs, and by the time I got downstairs I’d forgotten I needed to get them. If I remember, I could take the mouse down when I go and do it then, but that would rely on me remembering to take it, remembering what I’d taken it for, then remembering to bring it back up again. For now, I’m getting more practised at using the touch pad.

Today, I feel the way this poinsettia looks. I used to buy a poinsettia every year, and this is how they always ended up looking. I think it’s down to over-watering – but you only have to do it once and there’s no getting back from the slippery slope. I’m always a bit erratic with my watering regime, I guess it’s to do with short term memory and lack of awareness. Some things die from lack of water, which is recoverable-from if you notice in time, but there’s no way back from over-watering.

I can tell you exactly how long I’ve had this one, because I bought it the day we went into Tier 3, the Thursday before Christmas. I know, because it was the day I took my cards to the post office and checked the local shops for a small turkey joint, then bought a little Christmas tree and this poinsettia on the way home. Then my family persuaded me to go to them for Christmas anyway, by promising to come and get me and bring me back, then two days later we went in Tier 4 and the plan changed again (but you already know that story).

In other words, this poor plant has been in my care for less than a fortnight, and this is what I’ve done to it.

However, that’s not why I’m feeling droopy, as though I’m rotting from my roots. It’s just that I woke up that way, as often happens. Maybe it’s because I’m always rotting from my roots, and I’m not sure whether there’s any way back from that. Well, nothing permanent, as far as I can tell, but at least I’m not actually dead yet.

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Monday Mouse Mayhem

‘This is the way the world turns…’

There was a line to go after that, it came into my head while I was making coffee, and went on for a little way, and I thought: this could be going somewhere, let’s follow it for a bit… But by the time I was sitting at the keyboard, I’d forgotten what I’d done with that second line, and so it’s gone, another aborted poem, and my head throws me a line: ‘…every song in my heart dies a bornin’.., not one of mine but from a song I knew fifty-odd years ago, and I have to sing it in my head till I get to the refrain and remember it’s ‘The Last Thing on my Mind’, by Tom somebody (not Lehrer) a sad little heart-brakey song which I always thought fitted will with Dylan’s ‘Don’t Think Twice, it’s Alright’, and if I was a singer I would sing them both at tonce, one after the other, two siodes of the same coin, but I never did because I’m not a singer.

Now something has happened to the mouse, it’s not working and it’s so long since I used the touch pad on this keyboard (even though I use the one on the laptop every time and don’t even know where the laptop mouse is), I just can’t seem to get it, and so everything since ‘…every…’ is now in italics and I can’t work out how to change it back.

Also did I mention that the top toolbar keeps disappearing, unless I move the cursor up there, which given what I just said about the mouse and not knowing how to use the touchpad, is tricky. But at least you can see that I’ve now rectified the italics, and also went back and corrected a lot of the typoes, but left just a few in to keep you on your toes, and also as a general illustration of my dyspraxia-fuelled nonsense, which I usually manage to cover up quite easily.

What an odd, yet oddly typical, start to the day. Also when I started the computer, my desktop was showing the image I was talking about a few weeks ago, the one of a harbour that I couldn’t place, but thought was either Italy or the south of France, and then couldn’t find and spent ages scrolling through the folder. This time I did identify it, checked the properties and found out it was taken on 10 March 2012, which I thought meant San Sebastian or Barcelona. Then I started looking for drafts of Single to Sirkeci  and couldn’t find where the files were, which is worrying. I found a very early version on the external hard drive, which I couldn’t open because it’s a different version of In Design, then I found a pdf of that draft, but that didn’t have the dates on each section, which I did in the later drafts…

Just realised I’ve written way over 500 words. Stopping now.

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Creative Endeavours

Last evening my cat and I huddled together listening to the storm, which shares its name with my eldest great-niece. This morning all is calm, and the sky, though pale, is mostly clear with patches of cloud, rather than the other way round. Whether Bella has spent her wrath on us, or is rampaging further up the country, I couldn’t say.

Worryingly, when I switched my computer on this morning, it didn’t show the Windows log on screen. I thought I was going to have to go downstairs and type this on my laptop, but after a few rounds of switching off and on again, it slowly and reluctantly opened up, though is still running more slowly than usual, so there’s a delay between my typing and its appearance on the screen.

Two days before Christmas, I finished off a crochet cardi which I’d started before my daughter’s Christmas jumper, and which had been hanging around waiting to be finished. It didn’t work out quite as well as I hoped, and I knew I was going to need a new project over Christmas, so have been thinking about it and planning, and started knitting on Christmas Eve, with a couple of false starts and re-starts since. It’s another one that I’m making up as I go along, a jumper using the same top-down techniques and mainly the same yarn as the Christmas one (I bought way too much) but I’m changing the neck and obviously won’t be doing any Christmas motifs, but a sort of fair-isle pattern, which I’m working out on squared paper, and for which I will use partly white yarn and partly a variegated yarn that I bought during the first lockdown. We’ll see how it goes. If I do finish it, I probably won’t wear it, because I don’t like jumpers, I prefer cardigans that are easy to take off and put on, but that’s not really the point anyway – the point is the process of making.

As a way of channelling creativity, it’s maybe not as highbrow as writing a novel or artistic as painting and drawing, but equally it’s not as challenging or stressful. There is of course a whole debate about the boundaries between craft and art, and the downgrading of skills which are stereotypically seen as ‘women’s work’, which I’m too weary to engage with at the moment. My discovery last week of abandoned sketch books containing my abortive and depressing attempts to produce visual art has led me once again back to wondering if I should make more efforts in that direction. I have drawers full of materials (mostly dried up and useless) and shelves full of books leftover from past attempts, and I wonder if I should try again, but I think I’ll stick to knitting.

Here’s one of the poems I found in the sketchbooks, written in coloured pencils, different colours for the different stanzas:

I draw flowers.
These are all I know.
They are not real, just sketches of shapes.

And on the back, I find
the beginnings of a painting,
house roofs, sky,
the empty outlines of a tree,
I scrape the brown pencil
over the ridges of the paper,
colouring in.

This is nonsense.
I channel words,
that’s all I can do.

I cannot draw, I cannot paint,
I cannot love, I cannot write,
I cannot tell you how I feel.

Linda Rushby, date unknown, probably 2015?
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Boxing Day

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

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

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

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

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

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Tiers Before Bedtime

I started by saying: it’ll be fine. Whatever happens, I’ll be okay. Either way.

Then we went into Tier 3. And I thought: okay, that’s the way it’s going to be. I’ll manage, it’ll be fine, in a way it’s a relief. The decision is made. Just a shame I can’t find anything nice to cook for Christmas dinner. But hey, it’ll be okay.

Then my family had different ideas, and they made a plan, so I could still go, still be with them, still see them all. And I thought: aww, they really care, they really love me, they don’t want me to be alone and miss out. Bless them. That’s the way it’s going to be.

Then we went into Tier 4 and the goalposts moved. And I thought, okay, so this is the way it is after all. I’ll deal with it.

Can I get round the rules by having a ‘support bubble’ that I have to travel 140 miles to be with? Or even 50 miles, if they’re in Tier 2? Can I travel out of the area? Do I want to be the person who goes from Tier 4 into Tier 2, even if I’m going there and back in a day? Can I justify that? Is a ‘support bubble’ equivalent to a household, when it’s not just around the corner? Do I break the rules on the basis that ‘they can’t check every house…’ as someone (no names) suggested to me? Wouldn’t that make me part of the problem? And if I stayed away, and needed the catsitter to come in, where would they stand? Even if they weren’t strictly breaking the rules, they’d know I was, and what would their position be?

Enough. I don’t want to break any rules, or take any risks, or put anyone else at risk.

I think perhaps, because I’ve had so many times in my life when I’ve been unhappy and not been able to share it with anybody, and had to carry on and appear ‘fine, okay’ when I deeply wasn’t, even my nearest and dearest don’t realise how used I am to having to deal with a degree of sadness and disappointment that makes Christmas on my own seem trivial by comparison. I’m not saying I wouldn’t enjoy being with my family on Christmas Day, but it won’t destroy me. I’m not saying I won’t have to shed a few tears, just as I did on my birthday – as I have done already several times in the last twenty four hours. But it will come and it will go, and it won’t be the worst thing that could happen, and even if – as I said the other day – it turns out to be my last Christmas, well, it won’t be greatest regret.

If you pin your hopes on one thing – a particular day, a particular person, a particular wish – you’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of disappointment. Take it from someone who knows.

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Crockery

Good start to the day. I’m preparing porridge – I have some flavoured packets of porridge (gingerbread, Sainsbury’s own brand) and plain porridge oats in a jar on the counter by the fridge. I get the measuring cup for the loose oats, then decide to have a packet of gingerbread flavour instead. I tear the top of the packet, but only the corner opens – it will take ages to shake it all out from that small opening, so I try tearing it again. But I lose my grip on the packet, it falls to the floor, and in the next instant the bowl, which was standing on the counter, falls and smashes on the floor. Typical early morning dyspraxident – my grasp and co-ordination are particularly bad first thing after getting up. I pick up the packet, notice the contents are still intact, so I get a new bowl, intending to use them, then promptly start measuring oats from the jar.

The bowl is a red one, fresh out of the dishwasher, a nicely hemispherical, high sided shape, one of four (red, green, blue and purple) which I bought in the big Tesco at the Novy Smichov mall in Prague, three tram stops (or was it four?) from my flat.

I have four matching plates as well, though I didn’t buy them as a set – just started with the blue bowl and plate when I was still sharing a house – I think I had a blue mug as well, and a red one, but I’m not sure about the other colours. If I had more, I can’t remember breaking them, though I must have had mugs, and I can’t remember any others, apart from one with cats on which I still have, and one from Berlin which I broke while I’ve been living in this house. The purple bowl also got broken a couple of years ago – but I have another purple bowl, from Wilko, in a similar shape, slightly bigger and not the right shape to stack with the Tesco ones.

The order is: red, green, blue, purple (alternating the primary and secondary colours, which were bought later, and with purple at the end because it’s not stackable), and the matching bowls are stacked in the dishwasher, in the correct order, so that they can be taken out and placed on the shelf on the right of the plate rack, and the plates are stacked in the same order, both in the dishwasher and on the plate rack. The purple plate is on the end because when I get to it I have to take the bowl from the other shelf. Now this system is wrecked and I don’t know how I’ll cope – except that I have three different coloured bowls (turquoise, purple and teal), with matching plates and mugs, which I’ve bought individually from the Whittards outlet shop in Gunwharf Quays.

Why am I so fanatically orderly about this, when I’m so chaotic otherwise? I have no idea.

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Xmas Plans

Yesterday I went to the beach in the morning. The boxes outside the beach café were too wet to sit on, but I found a bench on the prom where I could perch on the edge to drink my thermos of coffee. I walked back by my usual route, through the rose garden and the butterfly garden, and got to my usual café at ten past nine, to find they’ve put back their opening time till ten. In the greasy spoon across the road I had a fry-up that came with a pile of sauté potatoes. Afterwards I wondered if it was such a good idea.

I’m still making cards, so the mess is still over the table. Although I posted most of them last Friday, I’ve been making them for my son and daughter. I thought about making them for the grandchildren, couldn’t think what to do, then had an idea so started doing those. And I need a birthday card for my step-granddaughter, though she’s at an awkward teenage age. I’ve made three gluten free Christmas puddings as well – three, because I have small basins, cereal bowls, really. The mixture makes two medium sized ones, but one of those still contains last year’s failed effort (because all the dry ingredients were GF, but I still mixed it with Guinness and barley wine before I realised).

It’s ten years since I’ve spent Christmas, or let in the New Year, in my own home. This year I’ll definitely be home for the latter, and in the last couple of days I’ve become less sure about the former. The current plan is my daughter’s from the 23rd to Boxing Day, and then to my son’s till the 29th, but now I don’t know what to do – if any of us turn out to be in tier 3 after today, I think I’ll just stay here. If I do, I’m not sure what I’ll have for Christmas dinner. In 2010 I had a rolled and stuffed turkey breast joint from M&S, but don’t recall seeing anything like that in any of my local supermarkets. I’ll be all right for pudding, obviously, and also for booze.

I used to decorate my first flat on the Solstice, with candles, and evergreens picked from the old garden. In 2012, in my Fenland ‘penthouse’, my daughter and granddaughter brought me a tiny tree in a pot, which I kept, but which died of drought a couple of summers ago. Also I put up star lights in the windows, shining from the top of the building over the canal and the flat fields. But since then I’ve never bothered. This year, it will be a miracle if I manage to get the house looking tolerably tidy for the catsitter (should I need her), let alone faffing about with tinsel and pine needles.

Whatever happens, I’ll be fine. I think this year has taught me a lot, about accepting myself as I am and life as it is.

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Happy Days

When I was travelling in 2012, naturally I took a lot of photos, and I created a folder of pictures that I’d straightened, cropped and saved in the right proportions to fit my ‘desktop’, and then set up as a random display. When I went somewhere new, I would add to it, so there was at least one from each place (and many more from some). In the end there were 474 altogether (I just checked). I used it for a couple of years, then got tired of it and changed to more recent images, and not so many.

Last week, I decided on impulse to go back to it, so all of these pictures of places I went have been flashing up, changing every minute, which is a terrible temptation just to sit and stare at the desktop without actually doing anything. Some of them I recognise – some instantly, as they’re well known tourist icons, others are more difficult and occasionally there’s one which could be anywhere (or any of several places, at least).

I don’t know why I just said that, except that it’s what I’ve been doing for the last few minutes.

Istanbul, Barcelona, Venice and then… not sure, red and blue boats in a rocky harbour – Sorrento, maybe? The out of the way fishing harbour that I ‘discovered’ in the pouring rain on the afternoon of my birthday – if so, it must have been taken when I returned on the following morning (Easter Sunday), because the sun is shining. But I’m not convinced – there are so many pictures of little boats with bare masts and furled sails, in picturesque harbours. Sometimes I can work it out on the basis of the weather, what time of year it seems to be – Brittany in February, San Sebastian and Provence in March, Italy in April, Croatia and then Istanbul and the Black Sea coast in May, then the long, long stretch over the heart of the continent in June, to the Baltic (Flensburg and Stockholm) and Atlantic (Norway, Hamburg, Amsterdam) in July.

I tried to speed up the rotation, but one minute is the minimum Microsoft will allow me for each image. I’m sure it used to be possible to set it at 30 seconds, but that was in an older version of Windows.

Just flicked back and caught sight of a wonderful wintery image of a sandy Breton beach at low tide, with a stranded boat, a gull just taking off in the foreground and the mist so thick in the air – I remembered how much it reminded me of Wales. I’ve never been back, never seen Brittany in summer, I’ll always have this memory of cold and mist and constant drizzle – to be fair, that also goes for many of the places I visited in Provence and Italy, in that relentlessly rainy April.  

I don’t know what I was going to write about today. Not that. But maybe that was safer than how I’ve been feeling.

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Round Robin

I didn’t post on here yesterday, but I did write my annual letter, sent to a handful of people from years ago whom I’m still in touch with enough to send Christmas cards and write to once a year. I don’t really know if the recipients are pleased to get it or resent being sent a computer-written and printed ‘round robin’ style letter. I used to edit each one for the specific person it was going to, but as the years pass and the interval since I saw them all in person grows longer, I think – well, at least this is better than nothing. At least they know I’m still alive. One person sends me a similar letter, one sends me a handwritten letter, most just a card with maybe a few words or just the usual greetings.

The handwritten letter is from the longest-standing friendship of them all, a friend from school, who went to teacher training college in London for three years in the 1970s and returned afterwards to the village she’d left, married the brother of a girl we were at school with, and taught at the village school all her working life. The last time I saw her was at her silver wedding anniversary party in the village hall in 2004, and before that, her 21st birthday party. In the quarter-century in between, we’d lost touch, until my Mum, one day in the 1980s, had a phone call from her asking ‘are you the Mrs Rushby who used to live in…?’ and passed on my address.

The letter I wrote yesterday turned out to be a little longer (600 words) than these daily offerings, about how I’ve been, and what I’ve been up to (not a lot, apart from the wedding) and my plans for Christmas – which changed anyway in the course of writing because I got a message from my daughter saying that my granddaughter is now quarantined till the 16th because a child in her class has tested positive for Covid, so I won’t be going to see them next weekend. And as usual it’s a computer-produced letter, but I decided yesterday morning that I would make Christmas cards this year, using the vast array of card-making equipment (die-cutting machine, metal dies, stamps, inks, sheets of patterned card and paper, scissors, glue, stickers etc etc etc) which I’ve acquired over the last two years.

I won’t go into the background story of how I started that particular hobby (not today anyway), but I will say that although it’s fun some of the time, I also find it unbelievably stressful. This is partly because there is absolutely no way for me to avoid creating a massive mess with all the stuff, and also (and related) that it takes me ages to make anything because I am constantly looking for the thing that I had in my hand only ten minutes earlier.

Yesterday I started with a determination NOT to get stressed, to keep it simple, and tidy.

I will try again today.