Category: places

Posted on

Life Writing

When I was travelling, I wrote erratically, and never felt I had very much to say. When I got back to England, and tried editing it all into a book, I realised that although I had far more material than I’d thought – more than enough for two books, even by the fourth edit – what I had wouldn’t make a coherent book. It was a series of anecdotes and reflections, some more or less interesting than others, but it had no real narrative, no dramatic tension, no resolution, no plot. It was held together only by the sequence of events and places I moved through; it was a journey, but it wasn’t a Hero’s Journey (or even a Heroine’s).

It is similar in that way to this and the other blogs and journals I’ve written down the years. I’ve wondered casually whether what I’m writing is the basis for an autobiography – or at least, memoirs – but it would be a very scrappy one, because there are large and significant portions of my life – like living in Dallas, or when I was doing my PhD – when I wrote very little, and others, like now, when little happens but I write about it quite intensively. The same happened when I was travelling – there are places I went to which, when I went through my notes and blogs, I found I’d written hardly anything about at the time, but when I was writing the first draft, it was quite recent in time, so I managed to scrape something together, often using my photos as aides memoires, and picking up additional information from the internet. Towards the end (of both the travelling and the writing) there are places (such as Kristiansund, Oslo, Hamburg and Amsterdam) that I skimmed through with very little attention and interest, but these are mainly in the still-unpublished second half, The Long Way Back.

Interestingly (perhaps), since I’ve had the selected photos rotating on my desktop, I’ve noticed there are also very few from the last weeks included in the sequence – not because I didn’t take any then, but because I never bothered to go through them, select them, edit for size and add them to the folder. On the other hand, there’s a preponderance of Brussels, Paris, Brittany and San Sebastian, the first places on the itinerary.

January comes to an end today. I used to hate this time of year, but that was when I set a lot of store by Christmas, and found the new year always an anticlimax. Now I find that this can be quite a hopeful time – even though it usually has the worst weather of the year, at least the light is slowly coming back. A daffodil opened in my forecourt a couple of days ago, but was immediately so battered and droopy it hardly deserved a photo. I can confirm that this has been the coldest and gloomiest beginning in the four years I’ve been crocheting weather blankets.

Posted on

Home to Roost

In my study, but once again, Microsoft decided it needed to reconfigure my version of Office, so I had to wait. I spent the time picking some more books to go downstairs on the new shelves, and looking for more yarn to match the cardigan (or maybe it will be a blanket) I started crocheting two days ago, when I realised the fair isle jumper was going to be too tight, so I gave up on it till I decide whether I’m going to pull it back to the armpits and do it again, or leave it unfinished like so many other things I’ve started in my life.


Then I felt the urge to listen to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Judgement of the Moon and Stars’, which I’ve been listening to on cassette in the kitchen, and I thought I must have uploaded onto the PC when I was doing that a few months ago. I couldn’t find it, but I did find the files for her album ‘Hejira’, and played ‘Amelia’, which got me into a sad and thoughtful mood, which wasn’t necessarily where I wanted to go.


By that time, Office was reconfigured and Word was open. I suspect it’s now reconfiguring every time I restart the PC (which should be every day, but I must admit sometimes I forget to switch it off properly and it stays in hibernation till the next morning). I don’t use the PC much in the daytime after I’ve finished blogging, now that I’ve got the laptop downstairs, where the wifi’s better and it’s warmer – I don’t have the radiator switched on in here because it’s under the window, behind the desk and printer. Ironic to think that I bought the laptop at the end of 2019 so I could take it out and sit in cafes to write – one of many small ironies of the last twelve months.


Maybe what I’m doing here is reconfiguring my mind every morning. It’s a thought.


In telling the story of the Madwoman in the Attic, I flitted around quite a bit chronologically, and I think I may have missed out completely the time in Prague. I started going through the blogs from that time about three years ago, after I finished the first draft of ‘The Long Way Back’, but I gave up on it quite quickly. Maybe that should be a task for this year – or would be, if I was setting myself tasks, which I’m not.


The gist, I suppose, of the Madwoman idea, was that through those limbo years until I moved into this house in October 2016, the Stuff was always hanging around in the dusty corners of my mind, along with the knowledge that at some time the house would be sold, and it would come home to roost, but also I would be in a position to buy a permanent home for it (and me). And yet, although I’m here, and it is too, the chaos remains unresolved.

Amelia, Joni Mitchell

Posted on

What Changed?

When I returned to England at the end of July 2012, I found that not only had Ex-Hubby not put the house on the market, he wasn’t in any great hurry to do so. With a sigh of relief, I made plans to return to Central Europe the following year, not to Budapest, but Prague, where I’d found I could do a crash course in TEFL with a (potential, but at the time I thought it was definite) six month placement to follow. Neither of us knew then that it would be a further four years before things were finally settled. Looking back, I can see that he was procrastinating no less than I was, each in our respective Limbo, his of denial and inertia and mine of footloose running away. During those four years I was to live in five different locations: with our daughter; in the attic flat in the Fens; in Prague; sharing with him in the old house and finally renting a flat in Southsea.

Going through those old blog posts from 2008, I found one in which I shared an old fantasy about travelling across Europe until my savings ran out, in the hope that something would turn up before I had to come back. The same person who commented about me undervaluing myself had this to say:

I would guess that if you did take off and travel on your savings for 3, 6, 12 months or whatever it took to exhaust the piggy bank, at the end of it your circumstances would be vastly different. Your experiences during those months would have inevitably changed your outlook. Maybe for better, possibly for worse but I am willing to bet you would have found the time has led to any number of possible situations.

Maybe sitting in a cheap hotel on a Greek island, lap top at your side and your new found male friend opposite? Surrounded by people you have met during your travels who have altered your perceptions of who you are, what you want out of life and where you are going.

All I can say is – your state of mind would not be as it is now.

Comment on Husband or Cat, 17 October 2008

Well, although I stayed with existing friends in some places, I didn’t make any new ones, male or otherwise, or even have any racy encounters. On the contrary, rather than ‘possible situations’ and any alterations in my ‘state of mind’ or ‘perceptions of who I am’, what I discovered was that travelling is a great way of avoiding contact with other people. I became the Invisible Woman, anonymous and solitary, sitting on trains or in cafés, reading, writing, or doing killer su doku, living in cheap hotel rooms, behind whose doors I was safely insulated from the world. Now I have my own door to hide behind, complete with cat, and other hobbies to pass my time with, and the sense of isolation is not so different, except that the view doesn’t change.   

Posted on

Existential Choices

…I wanted stay in the flat in the Art Nouveau building with its courtyard and rickety lift, stroll to the café for breakfast every morning, and then along the river to the tram stop and ride somewhere, maybe across the bridge and up the hill to Buda Castle, and look down on the city. Walk down through the gardens of Gellért Hill, maybe go to the baths (I never did that) or walk back into Pest across the Elisabeth Bridge, rummage through the flea market and find a café to sip coffee Viennoise or hot chocolate, maybe even a glass of sweet white wine with my cake…

After I started that sentence yesterday, I kept thinking of the lines from Joni Mitchell’s  ‘A Free Man in Paris’:

‘…If I had my way, I’d walk out that door and
wander down the Champs Elysée,
going from café to cabaret…’

From ‘A Free Man in Paris’ by Joni Mitchell

Then I had to play the song, and after rummaging through the box of cassettes in the study, I found it in the sideboard drawer, right under the music centre, first place I should have looked.

Ah well. I never went to any cabarets, but I did sit in a lot of cafes.

Three weeks after leaving Budapest, I walked up the complex of white ramps to the roof of the Opera House overlooking Oslo harbour, thinking again about the future, and ‘home’, about the need to make a living, and the responsibilities of selling and buying houses – and about the weight of the past, the ‘stuff’ still waiting for me in the old house, which would need to be sorted out and disposed of and/or moved to… some indeterminate future place. In another three weeks I would be back in England, and then what? I was going back to live with my daughter, and I knew there was £20k waiting for me in the bank from the balance of what I’d had from Ex-Hubby before I left England, that should keep me for a while, until the house was sold, and/or I could find (against all past experience) a job, and in the meantime I could write, and one day maybe start to make a living from that? But buying a house would mean committing to one place, and the thought of all the stuff from the attic and elsewhere banged around in my head, a burden dragged around behind me like Mother Courage’s cart.  What about going back to Budapest and living and writing there, then what would happen to the stuff, I couldn’t take it with me, so where would it go? If the house sale went through in the next twelve months, say, it would all have to be resolved

Once again, there were existential choices to be made, and the whole point of running away was to escape them and come back with new ideas and fresh opportunities, a new path to follow, but inside nothing had changed, and I felt no closer to finding my future.

Posted on

Other Attics

My routine was disrupted yesterday: I was awake half the night then fell back to sleep when I should’ve been thinking about getting up, and slept through till eight, lay in bed till half past then got up and went to the shop, and when I got back I decided it was too late to write.

This morning, I’ve been looking at my desktop photos again. One came up that I didn’t recognise, it was of graffiti that read: ‘time you ENJOY wasting was not wasted’. I was trying to work out where it came from, I saw the date was 18 June, and thought maybe it was Copenhagen, then realised it was far too early for that because I was in Berlin on the summer solstice (when it poured with rain and I spent the whole day in the museums), so it must have been before then – I think it might have been Prague, though I haven’t checked yet. But if so it was probably the John Lennon graffiti wall, which surprised me because I remember looking for that the following year, when I was living there. I guess I must have passed it the first time without knowing anything about it. My memories of those few days I when I passed through Prague are a bit hazy, overwhelmed by later memories.

I will jump back into the Madwoman/Attic story now because I’ve described the beginning and the end without saying much about the times in between. Let’s start with Budapest, where I stayed for two weeks in a studio apartment a ten minute walk from the Pest bank of the Danube. That’s when I had the idea of going back, living there for a while, writing and maybe giving English conversation classes. Looking in the window of an estate agent’s near the flat, I worked out that I could buy somewhere similar (or a little bigger) for about £40k. Because, at the back of my mind was this awareness that at some point, the old house would be sold, and I would have my share of the proceeds, which would allow me to buy my own place, a proper home for myself, with no worries about where the rent was going to come from. It was a ‘some day, one day…’ fantasy, but it was also a reality, that one day I would be in that position – in fact, according to the divorce settlement, it should be happening very soon, within a matter of months. But the flip-side of that was that it would mean an end to my wanderings, and I wasn’t ready for that just yet – in fact, would I ever be? Ready for it? I couldn’t imagine that, how it would work, where I would be by then – I didn’t want to think about it.

I wanted to stay in the flat in the Art Nouveau building with its courtyard and rickety lift, stroll to the café for breakfast every morning, and then along the river…

Posted on

More About the Madwoman

When I left my husband and both cats, I didn’t exactly walk out with just the clothes I was wearing – that might have been more dramatic and romantic, but it’s not what happened (not that time at least – but that’s another story).

I found a flat in the nearest town, I had enough money saved up to pay for six months rent in advance, and I moved out in February 2009 (actually collected the keys on 14th February, also another story – or several). I hired a van, took some basic furniture from the house (agreed with Hubby): desk and chair, bed, small sofa, wardrobe, dressing table etc, and with help from my daughter, her boyfriend and his parents (and Hubby), moved in for good on the 22nd.  It was a Sunday. I remember us all sitting round the big kitchen table in the old house drinking tea, then I drove back into town to find the chippy wasn’t open (I found another one that was).

I also bought some things – a coffee table, various kitchen items (mostly from charity shops or Wilkinson’s, which was a handy 5 minute walk from the flat), and a laptop and pay-as-you-go dongle. I gradually transferred various bits and pieces from the house over the next few months, as I went back and forth quite a lot – my main computer was still there, in the attic. In April, when my daughter and her boyfriend hired another van to move into their own flat, they brought some more stuff for me, including the office furniture and computer, which I set-up in my ‘study’, (the larger of the two bedrooms in the flat).

But an awful lot of stuff got left behind. I always intended to ‘sort it all out’ one day. I did purge some things, but mainly it was to be done in the future, when everything was resolved, when the divorce was settled, when the house was sold… After three years I left the flat to go travelling, and the things I’d taken with me – and acquired over the intervening time – got packed up and taken back, stacked in the spare room and attic. Six months later I came back to England, moved in with my daughter and granddaughter for a few weeks till we drove one another to distraction, then found another flat, which was all attic, fluffy carpeted and pointed ceilinged like a prism, with three windows looking out over the Fens and a flashing star in the top window at Christmas. I intended to sort out the Stuff in the house, and made a few attempts, including throwing out my mother’s and grandmother’s knitting needles and paraphernalia (which I hadn’t used for years, but was to start replacing only a couple of years later).

The decree absolute came through that year (2012), and part of the divorce agreement was that the house would go on the market in the August – when I returned from travelling. That didn’t happen… To be continued.

Posted on

First Sunday in January

Every morning, I wake up feeling myself to be at the bottom of a dark and muddy pit, and I have to drag myself out of it and face the day. That’s the meaning of the routine I described yesterday, because it gives me a sequence of things to do and ensures that I don’t have to make any choices until late morning (apart from deciding what to write on here, of course).

Last night I must have had quite a vivid dream, because I distinctly remember thinking: ‘this is really good, I know I’m dreaming but I can remember all that’s happened quite clearly and it all makes sense!’ I can remember that much, but not the content of the dream I felt I was living through at the time.

I keep seeing friends’ pictures on Facebook of their morning walks, but don’t feel the urge to go myself, even though this is the easiest time of year to see the sunrise. One set of pictures of the boating lake and beach on Friday morning just brought back a memory of walking by the Thames and going up in the London Eye on New Year’s Day morning in 2010 – the first anniversary of the post I shared a couple of days ago. Circles and spirals. On my own for a year, and looking down on a new world and a new decade (I personally think that, as the calendar is a cultural construct anyway, it makes sense for a decade to be defined by its third digit). Anyway, one year into my new life, I felt that the year ahead was going to be the one when things would really start to take off for me.

People (by which I guess I mean, ‘myself, but I don’t want to admit whatever it is I’m about to say’) always seem to put too much stress on that mark on the calendar (which reminds me, I haven’t even got one, because I still haven’t got round to organising it, probably too late now, and I haven’t taken the old one down from the wall).

I’ve observed it with a minimum of fuss this year, I suppose that’s largely down to being home alone. In the past I’ve been criticised for having expectations ‘…through the roof…’, though these days I have very few expectations of myself, or of the world. All those years of trying to change the external conditions of my life, then trying to change myself into a ‘better’ (in some nebulous way: More organised? More productive? Less selfish? More altruistic?) person, and finally trying to change how I felt about myself: (More accepting? More fulfilled? Happier? More at peace?) have not freed me from the early morning dark and muddy pit that I scrabble out of every day.

In my yoga session this morning, this question popped up: ‘Do you love me?’ and back came the reply: ‘of course I love you, now, bugger off and leave me alone’.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.