Category: Mondays

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Wind on My Face

Monday morning, sunny, I walked to the rock gardens again, like last week. I was later than usual – didn’t leave home till after eight – so instead of taking a flask, I went to the kiosk and bought tea and a bacon bap and took them to my favourite bench, passing the café on the way, and noticing that the doors were open, although I thought it wasn’t open until nine. Maybe it was special early opening for today. Still, I was okay in the garden. I’d also noticed, after I ordered tea, that the kiosk is run by a coffee shop I’ve been to a couple of times, so their coffee is probably decent coffee – normally I avoid buying it from the kiosks because I assume it will be instant. Of course, decaff is often instant anyway, but next time I go that way I’ll ask.

In the gardens I went to check on the fish in the pond. I saw the two big fellas – one black, one coppery – and looked out for the tadpoles clustering along the edge – there were still some, but not as many as before. I walked round to the other bit of the pond, below the waterfall, and saw a man holding a camera. I paused and realised why – I don’t remember there being a plastic heron over the other side of the pond before, and then it moved its head. The first time I saw the tadpoles, I remember being amazed by how many there were, and then thinking: ‘if a heron finds them, it could clear this lot’.

Something I was thinking of yesterday in the context of plans and failure was a story my therapist told me on Thursday, about a past client from years ago who, towards the end of her therapy, revealed something about her life that she hadn’t mentioned because, as the therapist said, it ‘didn’t fit in with the story’. I’ve been wondering what she meant by that: was it just to tell me that things can change, however stuck and entrenched they feel, or was she suggesting that I’m holding back something because it doesn’t fit my ‘story’, either from her or maybe from myself?

I haven’t expressed that very well, and now I can’t see the connections with the planning thing, though I’m sure there was one. If I keep writing, maybe it will come to me.

Then there was that quote about ‘living your way into a new kind of thinking…’ rather than ‘…thinking your way into a new kind of living…’ (I had to look it up again) which also seems relevant. That seems to me to put the emphasis on doing (living) rather than planning (thinking) – so that doing something – whether that be knitting or other crafts, writing, walking, gardening, even a jigsaw – is better for me than when I am thinking about what those actions are leading to, or how best to do them – which sounds either very profound or utterly banal.

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Monday

Already written my NaPoWriMo poem for today – and, incidentally, I seem to have resolved my issue with the keyboard. I turned it upside down and shook it vigorously for a while, watching the crud cascade out from between the keys, and although I’d already tried that method several times, it seems to have dislodged the specific bit of crud which was causing the problem and for now the problem has gone away (without my having to buy a new keyboard).

Well, all that happy news has got me started, but I don’t know where I’m going from here. Except that I’ve just discovered that I have two avatars on WordPress – possibly three, if ‘Southsea Storytellers’ also counts. Sorry, I just got distracted again, into trying to work out how the ‘community’ feature works on WordPress. I really know nothing about the software I use every day – except the bits I use every day. I’m probably using it all wrong.

But that’s how I found out about the other avatar – from the community feature. I saw a picture of my own face from 2008 in Paris, not a bad picture but terrible resolution when it was squeezed onto an avatar. I clicked on it and it took me to ‘Gravatar’ which , rather disturbingly, had a ‘Contact me’ followed by an email address I still use – fortunately, no one has bothered to contact me through that route, as far as I’m aware – or maybe they’ve all been trapped by the spam filter.

I don’t really know what I’m doing and I don’t know what to say about it. Pretty much sums up my attitude to life this morning. I don’t know why I write 500 words a day. Sometimes it works and sometimes it just goes horribly wrong. Mostly I feel better for doing it, but today it is just a massive slog.

Sunny at the moment. I’ve got no plans to go anywhere today. I might go to the knitting shop – I said that last Monday, when they opened after lockdown, then I found out that I have to make an appointment (it’s a really tiny space) and I didn’t feel like committing myself to a specific time so didn’t do it, even though I’d been waiting for it to open to get a 5.5mm circular needle, which I need for one of the jumpers I’m making (the old one is on the verge of breaking, with one of the needle ends coming away from the connecting plastic wire, if that means anything to you). But I’ve got plenty of other projects I can be getting on with, and even if I finish it I won’t want to wear it till next winter, so there’s no rush.

I just remembered I haven’t typed up the poem I wrote yesterday morning. A couple of the words were quite hard to read, I think I’ve got them now, but I’d probably better write it up soon – if I want to keep it.

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Cloudy

I decided this morning that if I ever publish another book, on the back cover, under the blurb, where real books have glowing reviews, I will place the following:

‘A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.’ W. Shakespeare.

Do I have plans to publish another book, maybe this year? Well, I might – at some indeterminate date between now and my final gasp – but I don’t have plans. Anything’s possible.

I do plan on finishing this jumper I started knitting on Christmas Day – though I’m a bit concerned at the moment about the size. Did I separate off the sleeves from the body too soon? I was aiming for the same number of stitches as the Christmas one I did for my daughter (it’s the same yarn) but stopped when the sleeves hit sixty, when the front and back for some reason were only at 112, although on the other one it was 120. I can’t really tell by looking, because of it being on circular needles, and that also makes it a pain to try on – and I’ve lost my spare circular needle, which is what I used last time (front on one and back on the other). Bigger better than smaller, surely?  Should I undo what I did yesterday, to be safe? Yesterday I undid two squares’ worth of weather-blanket backing that I’d done the day before, because I wasn’t happy with the way it was working out.

I’m thinking now about Penelope, at the end of ‘The Odyssey’, weaving by day, and in the night unravelling what she’d done the day before, waiting for her husband, Odysseus, to return from the Trojan War (spoiler alert: it took ten years, on top of another ten years for the duration of the war). The process matters more than the outcome, the journey is more significant than the destination (evidently so in Odysseus’s case, I’m not aware of any stories about what happened after he and P were reunited). The process of unravelling is a bit frustrating, and as it’s knitting, picking up the stitches is a lot more of a pain than the crochet equivalent, but as long as there is no deadline, it’s surely preferable to a finished garment that’s too small? (Or maybe not, given that I’ll probably never wear it?)

Incidentally, that last sentence was just highlighted by Word, presumably because it thought it was a double negative – not so clever, eh?

This isn’t what I was going to write about. No resolutions, no plans, no expectations – not that I was intending to write about any of those – on the contrary.

Gazing out of the window, I watch the slow procession of clouds drifting across the gap between the end terraced house across the road and the pub on the corner. A woman in black leggings, a lime green top and head phones runs past my line of sight. Will I be like the running woman or like the clouds this year? What do you think?

Cloudy’, Simon and Garfunkel

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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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Decisions

After I finished writing yesterday, I thought about how often I mention Monday in the titles of my Monday posts – I can’t be sure, but it feels like it happens that way more than any other day, or has done recently, at least. Years ago, in my major blogging days, I would sometimes use the day of the week as a title when I couldn’t think of anything else, and that was always a bad sign. Monday, specifically, has a bad reputation of course, as the first day of the conventional working week. But after I’d written yesterday, I worked out that it’s seventeen years since the last time I had that kind of Monday to Friday job, so why should it be an issue? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way, I have no expectation of finding an answer).

Tuesday is significant in two ways, one because it’s bin preparation day (they’re supposed to be out by bedtime for early morning collection) and the other because of Tuesday morning tai chi lessons at the community centre, except they only restarted after lockdown at the beginning of September, I went to the first one and then was in Cyprus for the second, and the teacher then went to Spain  for two weeks and has been self-isolating since she got back. So it should be starting next week – assuming things don’t go back into lockdown, which who knows, given the way things are going.

There is something else on Tuesdays, which is Zoom meditation in the evenings, which I haven’t done for a while because I don’t much like the person who usually leads it. But there will be Zoom tai chi tomorrow – I missed it last week when I was at my daughter’s.

I made some progress on both my projects yesterday – some. I’m trying to do the website on WordPress, because I don’t want to host it myself. When I was trying to do the website thing as a business, I used to set all the sites up as sub-folders on my hosting, but earlier this year I let go of the last one on there (the owner having passed away). It’s quite expensive to pay for hosting, and getting more so – and I don’t get much traffic on my own site, in fact this blog is the only thing which is really still ‘live’, so I keep questioning whether it’s worth continuing. I paid last year for two years’ hosting, so am now into the final year, and I need to make some decisions, which is not my favourite activity. It is a lot of money, as I said, but on the other hand I can afford it – just it seems daft to keep paying for something which I don’t really make use of – and if I do stop it at some point in the future, my client will be left having to find hosting from somewhere else (or rather I’ll have to do that for her).  

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Gloomy Monday

I am here again – today, anyway, though it remains to be seen whether I will post this or just rant to myself. I went to stay at my daughter’s for the early part of last week, after my infusion at the hospital – quite a last minute decision, to do with me going to see their new house before she goes back to work full time, and not knowing when we might be able to meet again. I came back on Wednesday and came down with a cold Wednesday evening, which I’m now over except for an embarrassing cough, a nasal whine and a cloud of gloom that I’m struggling to get out from under.

Aha, autumn, increasing darkness, getting colder, and nothing to look forward to in the next six months but more of the same. Yes to all of that, but also commitments; an Xmas jumper promised to one person and a website to another, both of them started over the weekend, neither of them particularly well.  

One of the joys of combined singledom and retirement is not having regular commitments to do things for other people. Although it has been said to me that the best way to make yourself happy is to make other people happy, for me it just creates so much stress and worry beforehand, and the outcome is so uncertain – what if they don’t like what I’ve done when I’ve done it? What if it all turns out to be crap? For example, if I’m crocheting something for myself and I hate it when it’s finished, I can either unravel it or shove it into the back of the wardrobe and never have to look at it again (which is what mostly happens with the things I make). But if I’m doing something for someone else, I have a certain responsibility, and they have certain expectations which I have to meet. And what would happen if I fail to meet those expectations? Another failure to throw on the ever-growing pile, but with the added sense of shame and guilt of knowing that my failure is not just a private one but visible to others.  And even if they say they like it, how can I ever know that they’re being honest and not just trying to spare my feelings?

A crowd of starlings just flew past my window and over the roof – or the roof of the next house down the terrace perhaps. There’s a word for it – isn’t it ‘murmuration’? Or is that when they all get together and make a noise?

Yesterday was sunny but chilly. I stayed indoors, though I know there’s lots that needs doing in the garden to stop it descending further into an ugly green mess. Will the weeds die back in the winter? There’s no guarantee of that. Today it’s grey and gloomy, which is a good enough excuse to stay in. Already been to Sainsbury’s, and committed to going to yoga this evening. That’ll be enough.