Category: Reminiscing

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Plan to Plan

Ten years ago, when I was going to business networking meetings, I was part of a team of three people organising meetings in a local pub on alternate Wednesday mornings. I was in charge of sending out email and text invitations, chasing up invitees to confirm numbers, collecting payments and paying the pub for breakfasts consumed, working with a woman in her forties who was an area rep, in charge of a number of fortnightly groups locally. The third member was a an older man (older than  I was then but probably younger than I am now), whom I’ll call Charles (I can’t remember whether that was actually his name) who chaired the meetings and was a general figurehead for the group.

The reason I’ve been thinking about him this morning was that he would sometimes give The Talk – there was always a ten minute talk over breakfast, usually given by a guest speaker – who, when I look back now, were probably drafted in from other groups in the region or more widely spread (it was that sort of organisation). I’m guessing that possibly part of Charles’s role was to stand in when no other speaker was available, and his talks were always on a similar theme, the gimmick being that the titles consisted of an increasing number of words beginning with P. This had obviously started long before I’d joined, and would always induce a groan (in the nicest possible way) from the assembly. Anyway, what set me on this train of thought was that a typical example would be: ‘Perfect Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance’ or words to that effect.

And the connection is: that as I was lying in bed this morning I was thinking about my inability to plan anything whatsoever. At five thirty I was reviewing my options: walk to beach; take van out for a picnic; stay home and start on editing of TLWB (reading Prague blog posts) etc. The conclusion was to stay home and get on with gardening, which I didn’t do a lot of yesterday, just half an hour or so’s weeding and not planting of plants purchased (I’m starting to sound like Charles), which should really be a Priority (definitely one of the words he would have used) as they will Probably die otherwise.

So I got up shortly after six, did my exercises, made coffee and here I am, doing my daily Post (Pontification? Pronouncement?) – which, incidentally, I am still doing, despite moaning last week,  because – it feels important to Persist, in fact, maybe (or even Perhaps) Persistence is Paramount. Some days I dread it, but I always feel better afterwards – no matter what it is, however trivial, or complaining, or ranting, or self-Pitying  – even Pathetic or Pointless – the results. I write every day – as long as I’m home, and sometimes even when I’m not – and I stick to my 500 words because it is a discipline, and that’s that. And I Plan to keep on doing so.

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Vyšehrad

The other evening when I was cooking dinner, Radio 4 Extra was on in the background, playing ‘Soul Music’ – a programme which you can only imagine being made by the BBC. Each episode takes a piece of music which has a ‘powerful emotional impact’, with a handful of speakers talking about it and what it means to them. It is a wonderfully eclectic programme, and the musical pieces come from everywhere: ‘Life on Mars’, ‘Once in a Lifetime’, ‘I Wonder as I Wander’, ‘Sunshine on Leith’ (I’ve never heard of that one), ‘Lean on Me’ and ‘Dock of the Bay’ plucked from a list on the website.

This week it was a classical piece which at first I didn’t recognise and wasn’t paying much attention to, when I heard a voice saying something about a hill which was supposed to be the site of the original castle, rather than the current castle further down the river on the other side, but this was just part of the foundation myth of the city… and it dawned on me that they were talking about Prague. Then it cut to a piece of music which I definitely recognised, but couldn’t have told you the name or composer, and I heard the words: ‘Vltava’ and I knew before I heard it that the site they were talking about was Vyšehrad.

Vyšehrad was one of my favourite walking places when I wanted to avoid the tourist crowds. It was directly across the river Vltava from my flat, something that I only realised when I was there and looking back to my side of the river managed to pick out the funny little church across the road from me. But to get there I had to take one tram to the interchange at Novy Smichov, near the big Tesco, and then change to get across the river bridge, get off and either catch another tram back up the river or walk along that side. Once, not so long ago, I could have told you all the tram numbers, but I don’t remember now.

But I have to tell you first that the music was by Smetana, one of the three great classical Czech composers, the other two being Dvořák and Janáček. Smetana was the only one I’d never heard of before I went to Prague. ‘Vyšehrad’ and ‘Vltava’, I learned from ‘Soul Music’, are two of six ‘symphonic poems’ that make up a patriotic symphonic cycle called ‘Má vlast’ (‘My Fatherland’), inspired by the history, legends and landscapes of Bohemia.

I have seen his grave in the cemetery on Vyšehrad, overlooking the vineyards reaching down the castle mound towards the river. I wrote at least one blog post about it, but on a blog which is now defunct (though I still have the content somewhere). I was walking there on a Sunday afternoon in February, seven years ago, when I read the text from my daughter that brought me home to England by the next Wednesday…

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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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Dreams and Achievements

In the process of digging out the poem I shared a couple of days ago (titled ‘I Had a Dream’ and posted when I was in Berlin in 2012, about my fears and dread of having to come back to England with nothing resolved and no plans for what to do next), I read the comments in response to it from other bloggers. This was one:

hmm, sounds a bit pessimistic. Maybe it depends on how well formed our dreams are when we go after them, how high our expectations are. If we do not know why we have the dream, then when we go after it we do not know what to do when we “achieve” it, and do we even recognise achievement?

no idea really, not sure I have consciously gone after a dream.

22 June 2012

I was irritated when I read it, thinking that the poster didn’t seem to have much empathy, and wondering what kind of life it is if you never ‘… consciously go after a dream…’ I probably felt much the same at the time, because I hadn’t bothered to reply. But reading it again now, what did she say?

  1. How well formed was my dream? To go travelling across Europe, overland (no flying), visiting various places, staying with friends in some of them and ‘…hopefully making new ones along the way…’ (which, not surprisingly, never happened).
  2. Why did I have the dream? A whole complex mess of reasons I suppose, but fundamentally because I was unhappy with the person I was and the life I was living, and thought that by this massive act of ‘running away’ I would ‘…turn my life around…’ – a phrase I initially included in the blurb to Single to Sirkeci but later removed because it didn’t work out the way I hoped. And what way was that? By finding a new man, or a new place, or a new purpose in my life.
  3. Did I know what to do when I’d ‘achieved’ it? No
  4. Did I even recognise it as an achievement? No.

So, it pains me to admit it, but I can’t really argue with the things she said. I couldn’t explain why I had that particular dream; initially it wasn’t very ‘well formed’, although it became clearer once I’d started to ‘make it real’; I didn’t know what I’d achieved or what to do afterwards – although the same person later gave me a great phrase when I was closer to returning, and she said I would be ready to ‘…hit the ground running…’ and my reaction was ‘…or like a lead balloon…’ so that ‘Hitting the Ground’ became a title for the blog I wrote after my return.

But I did enjoy the experience – sometimes. And I did write the book – eventually (but only published the first part). Travelling and writing about it – or staying in the same place and writing about it. That’s what I’m still doing.

And hoping. That’s what’s important.

PS The featured image is a screenshot of what came up on Firefox when I opened it to post this. I recognised it instantly, because I’ve been there and taken multiple versions of the same view: it’s the Old Bridge (Stari Most) in Mostar, Bosnia/Herzegovina, which I would never have visited if I hadn’t followed my ‘dream’.

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Trains of Thought

This morning I have quite a vivid memory of dreaming, which is awkward because I already had an idea of what I wanted to write about, which I’ll have to try and retain for another time.

I was at Bedford station, waiting for a train to London, only it wasn’t exactly the Bedford station I know, because it was much bigger, and a lot of renovation and construction was going on, in particular there was a large restaurant/lounge, as opposed to the ATM kiosk where I used to grab a Café Maya or chai latte in passing, or the Starbucks which is now in the place of the old newsagent. I had a special ticket which entitled me to a free drink and cake in the restaurant, but I realised I hadn’t got my rail card, and wondered if I should go ‘home’ (my old flat was only 15 minutes walk away) to get it. I got talking to an old friend, then I realised it was getting late, and I didn’t know what I was going to do in London, or whether I’d have time to do whatever it was, and if there was even any point in going anyway.

Running out of time requires no deep explanation, and train journeys are also very familiar. I always associate them with running away, and when the Eurostar terminal moved to St Pancras, I was very excited about the fact that I could go from Bedford to Brussels or Paris with only one change of train – and from there, of course, all the way to Istanbul or anywhere in Europe or Asia. At the station in Sofia, waiting on a very wet day (kind of like today) I saw on the timetable, and heard on the announcements, that there was a direct train to St Petersburg, and checking the ferry timetables in Istanbul, I discovered I could get one to Odessa (but not to Constanta in Romania, which is what I was hoping for).

But the thoughts I had yesterday, after I’d finished writing, were about fate, and destiny, and Taoism, and can I remember what that was, am I fated never to get to the end of that thought, or even to the point? I believed in fate when I was young, I remember a conversation in which I said this, and someone said: ‘I don’t because I could never have predicted that I’d end up doing this’. But that was the exact point that made me believe, because of the small chances that can have such a strong impact on life. However, I didn’t know how to explain myself, and since then I have come to believe the opposite, that fate and destiny are illusions, things aren’t set in stone, because we can never know what the alternative choices would have led to. Even if we can untangle all the chances, choices, causes and effects that led to a specific event, we still can’t say ‘this had to happen’.

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Detritus

I think: if I start writing, maybe the ideas will come? And in a way they do, but they’re not necessarily ideas I want to write. I think: if I do twenty minutes of movement, light candles and incense, sit quietly, maybe the thoughts will go away? And sometimes they do, but mostly they don’t. I lie in bed and do backwards-counting exercises to try and stem the flow so I can get back to sleep, and sometimes it works, but mostly it doesn’t.

Why am I constantly engaged in battles inside my head? Is this just normal, does everybody have this never-ending struggle to manage their thoughts? I used to think that, and that it was just me doing such a lousy job of it. Now I’m not so sure. Now I think: maybe it’s my curse, maybe it’s just another part of my chaotic weirdness. Maybe it’s the cause of everything.

This morning, in bed and after, I was thinking about fear. What am I so afraid of? Failure and rejection, that’s what I thought. I deal with rejection by avoiding contact with other people, pre-emptive rejection. Failure is trickier (not that avoiding human contact is always easy). The best ways of avoiding failure are never to try to do anything and to give up – I am an expert on both of those.

But what did I say a couple of weeks ago? ‘The greatest pleasure in life comes from doing something you don’t want to do and then knowing that you’ve done it’? True enough. Life is a bugger sometimes.

I remember getting into a conversation on Facebook a while ago about the ‘detritus’ that accumulates in your mind, that you have to wade your way through. I feel like I said something quite clever, but now I can’t remember what it was. There is certainly a lot of detritus in my mind.

I’ve just remembered a conversation with a counsellor over twenty years ago – I know it was in autumn 1999, because I saw that particular counsellor then after my parents had died in late winter and we’d moved house over the summer and I was getting about three hours sleep a night and was referred by my GP for six sessions of counselling, but she was offering bereavement counselling, and as I told her, after six months since their deaths I didn’t feel I’d even started to mourn them. But what I remember telling her was about this big well of shit in my head, which I can never empty and which keeps getting refilled all the time. I think the idea came from the title of ‘The Well of Loneliness’. But what was in my well? Loneliness, certainly, but not just that: shame and guilt and fear, and of course , failure and rejection.  

Within ten years I’d left my husband, in the hope that that would bring me new opportunities – which it has, it has, but why has so much stayed the same?

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Plus Ҫa Change

New day, new week. Almost a new month. Sunny but chilly.

Found out over the weekend that my local swimming pool won’t be reopening. When I moved to Southsea it was on my doorstep, and I started going in the mornings, then having a bacon butty and pot of tea afterwards at the local seafront café. When I first moved from the flat into this house, I stopped because it seemed too far to walk and I didn’t want to drive there. Then in spring 2018, after I’d finished my cancer treatment, I started going again, walking (it was only 20minutes away) first thing in the morning, only once or twice a week. The café had changed hands, but everything else stayed the same, and I would come out of the pool and stop for a few moments on the prom watching the sea and filling myself with love for this place. Then my writers’ group started meeting at the library on Monday mornings, so I would walk from the seafront into the town centre, and in the process found another café for breakfast. During that time, first John Lewis and then Debenham’s closed down, and our Sunday meetings moved from Debenham’s café to the library as well as the Monday ones.

I’ve lived in Southsea for well over five years now – in this house for four years next month. To me, it doesn’t feel very long, but in that time, so many of the things that I felt made the place special have gone or changed – of course, this year has accelerated that, but many went before that – in fact, of the things listed in the previous paragraph that have now changed or gone, only the pool and the second breakfast café (the one in the town centre) have closed as a direct result of the lockdown – and both were already in financial difficulty – this has just been the final blow.

Places change – that’s how it is. The sea is still there, and the park, I can walk there whenever I wish. Most of the people I’ve met over five years are probably still here, even if I’ve lost touch with them.

I came here intending to start a new life, and I’ve done that in many ways, and I guess I can do it again, even if so many things and places I treasured/took for granted have now slipped into memory (like riding my bike over the Common in that first summer and having coffee overlooking the harbour, watching the Isle of Wight ferries and other boats coming in and out – and when the weather got colder I started going swimming instead). I’d come out of a period when there was very little stability in my life, and the future had always seemed fluid and unknowable. Well, I guess that’s always true, but the human heart likes to kid itself that it isn’t.

I didn’t know when I sat down that this is what I would write today.

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Camping in the Forest

It’s a year since I camped out in my van – for obvious reasons. Although the campsites have been open in theory since the beginning of July, I haven’t felt like going, or even hassling the garage guys to sort out the battery, till the last few weeks. As with everything, I have to psych myself up – or bully myself – into doing anything about it.

The last time I slept out was in Holland’s Wood campsite, near Brockenhurst, this week last year, the first week after the end of the school holidays, when the New Forest Tour Bus was still running. The first time I went to Holland’s Wood was the same week five years ago, when I took the bus for the first time. I don’t know if they’ve been running it this year, but if so this will be the last week.

What struck me then was not just the beauty of the landscape, but also the way the Forest has the feeling of an island, so that distances become distorted, and place names which are on ‘the far side of the forest’ suddenly appear on signposts as being 8 miles away. It feels like a quaint and mystical land, and yet the M27/A31 and the mainline from Waterloo to the West Country run straight through its most northerly, wildest part.

And it’s on my doorstep. On any given day, I could get in my car, drive down the motorway, and within an hour I could be enjoying a cream tea at the Buttery in Brockenhurst, or buying local produce at Setley vineyard, or drive a little further to watch the boats in Lymington Habour. Taking the train down to Dorset – which I did for a few years even before I moved here – I’ve always felt a buzz of excitement after we leave Southampton, and start looking out for the first ponies grazing near the tracks.

Hollands Wood is my favourite of the (admittedly not very many) campsites that I’ve stayed in – though I’ve never stayed longer than a couple of nights – there’s no electricity, although the reception will charge your phone up for you for a pound. But you can camp under the trees, and wake in the morning to see the ponies appearing out of the mist lifting over the ‘lawn’. Or catch the bus into Lyndhurst, from where the Forest is your oyster.

Having lived most of my life in Bedfordshire, where the Home Counties meets the Midlands and East Anglia between the M1 and the A1, the New Forest is for me a reminder of how surprising England can be. Not that there aren’t interesting places and pretty countryside there too, but you can draw a circle 50 miles in radius around Bedford and not find anything quite so special.

Ah well. Maybe, in the coming autumn and winter, I’ll take the van out regularly and have picnics, as I always plan to – or maybe I’ll just hunker down like I do every year.

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Another Morning

Been thinking that maybe I should reorganise my morning routine. If I did the writing before the exercise, that would be more in keeping with Dorothea Brande’s original instructions. I could get up an hour earlier and write, instead of lying in bed trying/hoping to get back to sleep. I resolve to do it, and then, when the time comes… I could move the ‘gentle alarm’ on the Sleep Cycle app forward from 7-7.30 to 6.30-7.00 – the half hour is because it’s supposed to detect whereabouts your sleep is, and go off when you’re in the most appropriate sleep phase for waking (until it comes to the end of the period, when it goes off anyway). It’s fairly immaterial, given that I almost never hear it because I’ve already stopped the app before then – except for the extremely rare occasions when I HAVE managed to get back to sleep.

Whatever, it’s only going to get harder as we move inexorably from the light half of the year into the dark.

Had a day out yesterday, with my camper van, which only got back on the road after lockdown last week. Another new battery, another stern warning from the garage that I need to use it regularly. The new (refurbished) battery they fitted last year was so tightly connected that I couldn’t disconnect it over winter, so when I tried it in March they said they would come and recharge it, but it wasn’t a priority either for them or for me in the following months, so although they’ve had the keys all that time, I hadn’t been chasing them about it.

Well, it’s going now, and last week I took it out for a picnic in the Queen Elizabeth Country Park, off the A3 heading for London, and my favourite go-to place for a significant non-overnight jaunt. Yesterday I went in the other direction, to the New Forest, which I’ve never done as a day out before, always camped, even though it’s only an hour’s drive. I had a vision of a memory from the last time I was there, this time last year, of the empty moors covered with purple flowering heather, seen from the open-top tour bus. I had another memory too, from a few years earlier, when I drove my old Micra back from Dorset to Bedford over two days with an overnight stop in Salisbury, of walking on the same moors in early summer.

I should write more about this. Why am I reluctant to write about happy things? Perhaps because I’m afraid I can’t do them justice? Or because, when you try to describe something like that, you – I – never feel I can capture the essence of what made it special? Like trying to take photographs and then being disappointed with all of them. Writing words and being disappointed with all of them. I got lost, I found somewhere to stop, sat on a tree stump and looked at the view.

Maybe I’ll try tomorrow.

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Spontaneity vs Inspiration

I was talking yesterday about why I write in the morning, following the advice from Dorothea Brande’s book ‘Becoming a Writer’, but how that’s also usually my unhappiest time, as I try to sort out in my head what I need to do for the day.

When I first tried to follow the advice, in the late 1970s early 80s, I was trying to write a fantasy novel, of the then conventional swords-and-sorcery genre, which was hopeless, because it inevitably had to involve a certain amount of fighting and war craft, which I couldn’t get my head round at all. In fact, I didn’t even like reading about that stuff, even though I loved the Tolkien books, I would skip all the fighting parts and just read the adventuring. This was in the days before the genre had opened up with more female characters and writers, such as Ursula le Guin, Julian May, Anne McCaffrey and Marian Zimmer Bradley. I didn’t see how it was possible to have fantasy books outside that patriarchal paradigm, or how I could write within it, so I really was on a hiding to nothing.

Be that as it may, I tried, and I tried in the mornings, and then I discovered that if I sat down to write for a specific purpose – such as to continue my novel – I was paralysed. All I could write was what was in my head – such as what I’m writing now, and write most mornings, about my life, my thoughts and feelings. I was going to say ‘write spontaneously’ but that seems odd, in that the daily writing is quite regimented – but there again, it is spontaneous in the sense that I don’t always know what I’m going to say until I start saying it.

Now I’m confusing myself. Because the other kind of writing – the way I write most of my poems – is the stuff that comes into my head at any time of day, and I need to capture it – so that by the time I sit down at the computer, it’s already there, and I’m just ‘taking dictation’ – so is that spontaneous or is it the other? Because that is what I think of as being ‘inspired’ writing, and I have no idea where that comes from or how to make it happen – it’s outside my control except… for the times when it isn’t. What about all those poems I wrote in April, for NaPoWriMo? They were ‘inspired’ somehow, so how did I make that happen?

There was also a period in 2005-6, immediately before and around the time when I started both a creative writing course and blogging, when I WAS extending my novel (not the original one from twenty years earlier, but a more feminist one) by writing 500 words daily, developing the plot in classic ‘seat of the pants’ fashion. Why did that come to an end? Because my writing energy was diverted into assignments for the course and blogging, perhaps?