Category: places

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Anniversary

Six years today since I came to Southsea and picked up the keys for the flat. It was a Thursday, and the sun was shining, I think it was probably a bit warmer than today, but the wind must have been cold, because it always is. I walked out of the flat, five minutes to the sea, through the Rock Gardens, onto the prom, past the pier (which was closed for renovations), along the beach, I might have crossed the road and gone through Canoe Lake Park and into the Rose Garden from the other side, then back out onto the prom again – I’m not quite sure, but I vaguely remember reading the notice about the Cockle Shell Heroes and sitting on a bench for a while, reminiscing about the rose gardens in Prague.

I’m getting a massive sense of déjà vu now, not so much about the actual moving day but because I think I must have written about this every 30th April for the last five years, and I’m sure I’ve read it not that long ago. I stayed overnight on a camp bed in the flat then drove back up to Bedford the next day to collect the rental van and fill it with stuff, then on the day after that I drove down in my car with my ginger cat in a basket on the seat beside me, via Guildford, where I picked up my son, while my daughter and her then partner (now husband) drove down in the van, which had to be parked at the end of the road, because there was no room outside the flat, and the furniture and other stuff carried through the drizzle and up the stairs into the flat.

Every year I feel as though I should mark this date in some way, which I’ve done today by going for a walk, retracing some of the steps of the first day – except that that was really a coincidence because I only thought about it when I was sitting on the bench behind the café drinking coffee from my flask (because the café doesn’t open till nine on week days).

What I did think about when I was walking was how my regular walking route has changed from when I lived in the flat. That first day I walked along the beach to the Coffee Cup and then turned inland, and walked past the cemetery and along the road which passes the end of the road where I live now, past all the shops and then the traffic lights where I turned back towards the sea again. That first summer, my walks were mostly in the opposite direction from where I was today, through the Rock Gardens, past the castle and across Southsea Common towards Portsmouth Harbour. Over the last year, while I haven’t even been going to the swimming pool, I’ve stopped going over that way altogether.

Maybe it’s time to start revisiting some of my old haunts again.

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Morning Walk

I remember in a previous life – about ten or twelve years ago – having a conversation with a man at a conference in Oxford. I wouldn’t say he was a friend, exactly, but I had met him at previous conferences. The gist of his message to me was this: that I was unhappy because my life was chaotic, and he suggested imposing some structure on myself by getting up early and going for a walk with him and a group of other conference attendees.

I said he wasn’t ‘… a friend, exactly…’ but looking back now I can see he had a deeper understanding and empathy than most of the other people I met at those events, who were eager to tell me how great I was, but never noticed what was going on under the surface.

Anyway, I don’t think I met up with them, due to some mix-up rather than intent, but I remember walking alone by the canal, taking pictures of the narrow boats.

The other day I mentioned that I’d gone for a walk, with that same intention of improving my well-being. I don’t think I said that afterwards I had a miserable morning, full of buried rage, but I’m sure that was just coincidental.

Today I woke around the usual time (four-thirty to five), but some time after six, when I was thinking about getting up once the heating came on at six-thirty, I dozed off again and slept in till half past seven.

I got up and dressed, and instead of doing my yoga/tai chi routine I decided that I would make a flask of coffee and go for another walk. As I walked, I thought about the mornings when I used to walk to the swimming pool – which is now closed, of course, and has apparently done so for good.

I walked to the beach, and then along the beach, briefly thinking of doing tai chi in the stretch of damp sand and scattered pebbles between the waves and the ridge which marks the usual high-tide line. It was later than I usually walk, there was at least one wild swimmer, but also two ladies in anoraks with bicycles behind the cafe, who I thought could have been two of the regulars, now presumably dried and warmly wrapped up.

I went up the steps by the crossing opposite the Rose Garden, my usual route. I hadn’t stopped outside the cafe with my coffee, as I usually do, because there were clearly people there preparing to open up. I’m not sure what the rules are now, but I know they’ve been operating a take-away service, and they have tables outside. I found a bench in the sunshine in the Rose Garden, and spoke to a robin – I invited him back to my garden, but warned him that I have a cat, albeit an elderly, dopey one, and he cocked his head and looked at me, but didn’t take up my offer.

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The Long Way Back

Yesterday was the anniversary of one of my most vividly-remembered days described in ‘Single to Sirkeci’, when I arrived at Port Camargue. Earlier in the week I was remembering Prague, and it all set me thinking about ‘The Long Way Back’, and whether I’m ever going to finish it. I’ve been thinking about it for years – or, more accurately, I’ve been avoiding thinking about it. At first I used to start each year with the resolution that: ‘this is the year I’ll finish and publish it!’, but gradually I got over that, and recently I have been trying to learn to let it go, along with all my other failures.

I spent about six months, from autumn 2017 to spring 2018, trying to make something of it. It started with the ‘rump’ of around forty thousand words describing the return half of the journey from Istanbul back to England, which I’d chopped from the sixth draft of ‘Single to Sirkeci’. Prior to deciding to split the manuscript, I’d spent a couple of years on the herculean task of trying to edit the 200k word first draft down by half, and after brushing off multiple suggestions of chopping it into two books, and stalling at 140k, I gave in to the inevitable.

When I published ‘S2S’ in early 2017, the plan for ‘The Long Way Back’ was to combine the material I had on the return journey with a briefer description of what had happened after my return; my time in Prague; my moving to Southsea; and some reflections on lessons learned from the ‘life journey’ (if I could think of any) – I even wrote an introduction and blurb to that effect, which I must dig out some time when I need a good laugh at the ironies of over-ambition.

Giving myself six months to deal with cancer and chemo, I started in September 2017 to go through blog posts from the time between returning ‘home’ at the start of August 2012, and departing for Prague in May 2013. Rather than the planned précis, I found myself editing a tale of disappointment, depression and yearning, as I struggled to come to terms with life – while, in the present, also struggling to come to terms with moving on from cancer. This resulted in a further fourteen thousand words to add to the forty, and I hadn’t even started on Prague – which, when I went back to it, was also a saga of depression and disappointment, although alleviated in places just by the fact of being in Prague. Then there was the year after, living back with my ex (working title: ‘Madwoman in the Attic’), mystery illness, moving to Southsea – and then what?

For a while I toyed with the idea of turning Prague into a third volume, and spent some time trying to find three–syllable words starting with either ‘B’ or ‘R’ to make a catchy title: ‘Bohemian Something-or-other’ but with no luck.

Then I just stopped. I just stopped writing.

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Desultory Equinox

Yesterday I was thinking about Prague – in fact it has been in my mind on and off for the last few days. Often, when I was there, I used to question why I was there, and what I was doing. If I could have found a compelling reason to stay, I think I would have, but my presence always felt anomalous; I wasn’t a tourist, but nor did I ever become a resident, nor even an ‘ex-pat’, just this invisible woman who slipped around the city with no-one really noticing whether I was there or not – except possibly my landlord, when he made his monthly visits to collect the rent (in cash). In the end, coming back to be near my daughter and granddaughter and make some efforts towards selling the old house and ‘moving on with my life’ had to take priority

Those same questions keep coming up lately: Why am I here? and What am I doing? At least now I have some answers which make sense superficially: I’m just another retiree who’s decided to come and live near the sea, buy a house, make this place my home. After six years, the deeper questions don’t seem quite so compelling – I’m retired, with a comfortable pension, and the sale of a large family home enabled me to buy my little Edwardian mid-terrace outright, so why shouldn’t I be here as much as anywhere else? It’s a lot more congenial than either of the two places where I’ve spent most of my life.

This lockdown has felt harder than the one which started this time last year, but I think I’ve become ‘harder’ too, more settled with being at home on my own – most of the time. But if you asked me – if I ask myself – what I’ve been up to, what I do with my time, I’m hard pushed to come up with an answer that makes any kind of sense. I’ve got my editing job, which I’m doing two chapters at a time as the client sends them to me, and each chapter takes about an hour; I do my half hour of exercise and write my 500 words most days; I listen to the radio; crochet my blanket (which also takes about an hour each day) and mess about with other craft projects in a desultory way. Since I finished the blue fair isle jumper, I’ve picked up another top-down jumper, in different yarn on a bigger needle, which I started and abandoned about six months ago. Because it’s a ‘cake’ style yarn, with long stretches of colours blending into each other, I decided to do a design on the front with different stitches, rather than different yarns, but I’ve tried one idea, pulled it back and tried another, and that isn’t going very well either.

But this is just a temporary setback – isn’t it? Something will happen soon. That’s the way it goes, I’ll break some more bits off the old shed and keep going.

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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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Floods of Dreams (or Dreaming of Floods)

This morning I fell back to sleep and had a dream and remembered (some of) it.

I was living on my own but not here, in a house I didn’t recognise. A man came to my door, someone I knew from the past, a fellow student when I was doing my PhD, around twenty-five years ago. The last time I saw him must have been in 1998. He had changed, but he didn’t look older so much as smarter. He was wearing a suit, had a tidy hair-cut and was clean shaven, though when I knew him he used to shave his head and had a straggly bear. But I knew it was him because, of course, this was a dream. Sorry, I just read that back and realised I said he had a ‘straggly bear’. I know you realise I meant ‘beard’, but I’m not going to change it because I know you know that, and I like the idea of a straggly bear – and if anyone was going to have one following around, it was him – more likely than being clean shaven with nice hair and wearing a suit, anyway.

I asked him why he had tracked me down and he said: ‘because I remember you were beautiful’, which put me off my stride because I had to think he must be confusing me with someone else.

We were starting to get reacquainted when I realised there was a strange woman with a small child in my room, and I asked her what she thought she was doing in my house, and she was rude as though it was none of my business who was in my own home. Then I went into another room and there were more strangers, and I got really angry with them and told them they had to leave. Then I looked out of the window and realised the land was flooded and my house was the only one still dry, and I felt ashamed of myself for not wanting to take in these poor people. We all went out into my back garden and there was a terrace which was a wide, flat boat, which we all got into and sailed over the countryside. I realised then that we weren’t on the coast but in the Cambridgeshire Fens, where I lived eight years ago before I went to Prague, in a flat at the top of a Victorian flour mill. It was flooded at this time of year when I lived there, but not high enough to come to my fifth-floor windows. Still, I remember making jokes about my plans to move to the seaside (which finally happened two years later,) and saying maybe I should just stay where I was and wait for the seaside to come to me.

I took some photographs of the floods at the time, I thought I couldn’t share them because they’re on my old old laptop, then remembered they were in an old blog post.

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Soundscape

Today is the day my son and daughter-in-law are coming to put up the new garden shed. They will be staying the night, but it’s all legit, because they are my ‘support bubble’ and even though I haven’t seen them since September, I haven’t had any other visitors to my house since before the current lockdown started, so I’m not breaking any rules. Plus, of course, I’ve had my first vaccination, which I know doesn’t affect the legal requirements, but does make me feel more comfortable about the situation.

Quite what’s going to happen to the weather, I’m not sure. It’s not raining at the moment, in fact it’s lovely and sunny, but the wind is still loud enough to be audible, and the draughts are coming through my double glazing as though it was tissue paper.

Incidentally, I know about listening to the wind in the trees, but what causes the sound in an urban area? I’m looking through the window at a city street with no trees in view, but the wind gusts almost drown out the traffic noise. There are wires across the street, and they are definitely moving, but can they be responsible for that much noise? It seems to come from the wind itself, rather than contact with anything more solid.

Yet another day when I’m looking out the window because I don’t know what to write about.

I just heard the sound of a ship’s warning signal, also known as a ‘fog horn’, although there’s no fog today, so presumably it’s being sounded for something else – surely nobody is sailing a little boat out on the Solent in this wind and getting in the way of the ferries? Fog horns and strong winds are the two signature sounds of Southsea, in my experience. Oh, and gulls – one just flew sideways across my eyeline, but it wasn’t screeching for once. I love the sound of the gulls – and the fog horns too, funnily enough – they remind me that I finally found my heart’s home, but that there’s still a big wild world out there.

I wrote three versions of that last sentence – first it was ‘came’ home, then I changed it to ‘found my home’ to emphasise that I hadn’t ‘come back’ here, because I’d never lived here before almost six years ago (though I had lived further along the coast in Southampton), then ‘found my heart’s home’ because, even though it sounds a bit corny, that’s the sort of connection I feel to where I live now, as though something within me has always yearned to be here.

I think about the time I lived in Prague. I loved the city, but not the life I was living, because I knew that I couldn’t stay forever. On the darkest days, I would step out my door, take the first tram that came along, and always find somewhere beautiful at the end of it.

Here I can take that step and walk to the sea.

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Tackling the Chaos: Memories Lost and Overwhelmed

Clicking through photos again to track down another one which came up on my desktop recently, I thought it was from Sête in Provence, but it was a little further east along the coast, at Le Grau du Roi in the Camargue, taken on a very grey and damp Spring Equinox in 2012 (of course). Which reminds me of my late friend Douglas Jeal, who, after hearing my tales, went to the south of France at around the same time the following year, then grumbled at me because the weather was horrible. What did he expect? Well, he had lived in Barcelona for a while, which has its own microclimate, so I suppose he can’t be blamed for thinking it might be similar  a few hundred miles along the Mediterranean coast.

What else does that remind me of? A few days ago the image on my desktop was of a map of that corner of the Med, a mural on the wall of Bordeaux station, where I was stranded for a couple of hours or so during a train strike when I was en route from Brittany to northern Spain. Something piqued my interest when I saw it again, but I couldn’t remember what it was, so I opened the file in Photoshop to check, and still can’t see why. It’s quite a poor quality photo – from an old, pre-Smart Nokia phone – so zooming in hasn’t helped. Maybe it will come to me.

I’ve mentioned before about the Magic Refilling Data pot, and how my efforts at clearing space on my google Drive by downloading photos from Google photos to my hard drive and then deleting them from Google photos were being thwarted because every morning my phone was being backed up to another file on Google Drive. Over several days (because it takes a long time to select and delete that many photos and my PC is four years old and quite creaky – and also it was refilling again every morning with the ones I hadn’t backed up and removed from my phone) I managed to get all the photos up to the end of 2020 from my phone, onto my hard drive, and removed from the backup file on Google drive. The day came when I logged on to my computer, opened my Gmail, and was informed that I had used 11 Gb of my 15Gb allocation. That lasted a couple of hours before the messages started to appear telling me that my Google Drive was full again.

I listed all files in descending file-size, and found that the photos I’d already deleted were still appearing on the list. By clicking on each file, I was given a side panel with details, including the folder where the file was located. Clicking on the name of the folder led me up the tree to the folder where it was, and so on until I reached a folder called ‘Desktop’, and above that, another one called ‘Computers’… tbc

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Wishes and Banishments

Some years ago – when I was living in the flat in Bedford, between leaving Ex-Hubby and going to Europe – I gave some thought to what I wanted to banish from my life. I was quite cautious when making my choice, aware that wishes have to be thought through very, very carefully or they will almost certainly backfire, and I didn’t tell anyone, because I’m also aware that to do that is to jinx the process, but after ten years I guess it’s quite safe to share. It was a fairly long list, but I boiled it all down to two things: fear and loneliness. Note that I wasn’t wishing ‘for’ a lover, knowing that they often bring more trouble and heartache than they’re worth, but ‘against’ loneliness, and realising that if I could learn to manage that, it wouldn’t matter whether or not I was ‘with’ someone.

Where have I got to, roughly a decade later? I think I’ve handled the loneliness pretty well, not perhaps in the way I hoped for at the time, but that’s why I was cautious and non-specific. And as for fear, I’ve come to acknowledge that it too is just an inevitable part of life. What am I most afraid of? Disappointment, failure, rejection… which is odd, because I’m so used to all those things, shouldn’t that make me less afraid of them?

I don’t know where my mind is going this morning. I thought of this as a topic to write about a few days ago – probably when I was writing about love – and I thought I’d tackle it today because I couldn’t think of anything else.

I don’t think I’m afraid of death. There have been a very few occasions – mostly in 2017 – when I’ve gone to bed thinking that I might never wake up, and that is a very visceral fear – but if it comes to me again, I hope I will be able to see how irrational it is. My life will come to an end one day, that’s inevitable – why should I worry about what I might or might not do between now and then? I’ve got the rest of my life to sort that out, and if I don’t, well… it’s not going to be my problem anymore, is it?

Where am I now, in my life, staring at this screen, thinking about going downstairs and getting breakfast? I took some sunrise pictures outside my back door this morning when I got up. I found a photo of myself as a little girl a couple of days ago when I was looking for photos of snow in Dallas. That day I also put together the bits of my tapestry frame – a present from Ex-Hubby before he was even Hubby, about forty years ago. There’s an uncompleted tapestry on it – not quite that old, probably mid 1990s. Will I start it again, maybe even finish it? Will I take that off the frame and start something new?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT6mw4GaPYQ
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Snow in Texas

When I switched on the radio this morning, I heard a meteorologist from Houston explaining what ‘black ice’ is, which struck me as somewhat surreal.

But I know they get snow in Texas, I’ve experienced it. Ex-Hubby and I lived in Dallas from March 1985 till May 1989, so we spent four winters there, during which time we twice saw snow lying on the ground for several days, which was about as much as we could expect to see in Bedford (and a lot more than I’ve seen in Southsea in six years).

The clearest in my memory was at the beginning of March 1989, the weekend before I was due to give birth, when the baby shower had to be cancelled because nobody wanted to risk driving – least of all me, who didn’t fancy risking walking either. I have a distinct memory of stepping gingerly over compacted and frozen snow ridges to get to my car, though goodness knows where I was going that was so urgent

I’m sure there must be photos somewhere – but I have been looking for them in the study and have now given up the will to live. I pulled out the albums from that time, and found the one from March 1989 which should have had some, but couldn’t find any with snow on, just lots of baby pictures. There didn’t seem to be an album covering December 1987, which would have been the other snowy occasion – there must have been one, but goodness knows where.

Once I’d got all the albums off the shelf and flicked through them, I couldn’t face putting them back. In my defence, getting to the shelf required me to lean over a pile of junk on the floor and hurt my back. I did manage to get to another shelf which was slightly easier to get at, but just dumped them on there without any attempt to put them in order, which of course will make it even harder to find the next time I want to. This is why my life is such a mess, and yes, I am my own worst enemy, and no, I never get any better.

I am feeling lost now, lost in the past and the chaos and detritus of my life, and my emotions, and an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. Which tells me I don’t want to do any more today. So I put my arms around my cat – who is sitting on the desk right in front of me – and bury my face in her fur. To my amazement, although she wriggles a little, she doesn’t try to get away. I do it again, gently, and she lets me stay for several seconds, then turns to look out of the window, and I let her go. I follow her gaze into a drizzly February day, and watch the steam curling out from a pipe just under the roof eaves of the pub across the road against the grey sky.