Category: places

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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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Shoulds

I can see from my window that it must have been a glorious sunrise, but even though I was awake in time – even though I was up in time – I didn’t go to the sea to watch it, and now I wish I had. Wait, didn’t I say a while back that I didn’t do regret? I think you’ll find I said that the only things I regret are the ones I don’t do, and I didn’t go to see the sunrise.

Yesterday was such a nice sunny day that I thought, I should really have taken my van out – I thought that at about half past eleven, when it was really too late, so I told myself that today I’d plan to go out and take a picnic, because if I tell myself in advance there’s a better chance that I’ll do it. But then yesterday evening and first thing this morning I looked at the weather forecast, and it said it was going to be cloudy, so I more or less convinced myself that that was a good enough excuse not to do anything about it, to stay home again listening to the radio and sorting out my weather blanket. Now I can see sunshine on the roofs opposite and a clear sky behind and I’m not so sure that that excuse is valid.

Taking the van out always feels like it’s going to be a chore, to make sure the battery doesn’t pack up and avoid getting a telling off from the guys at the garage. It’s taking up time that I could be spending sitting in the armchair crocheting. Because yesterday I finished the Christmas jumper – apart from annoying tasks like sewing in the ends, and I’m not seeing my daughter till Friday week, so there’s plenty of time to sort those out.

Now that shaft of bright sun has disappeared, and I can see that what looked like a ‘clear’ sky is actually a solid sheet of high, light cloud – but it still doesn’t look bad enough to use as an excuse. And it’s a month since I took it out – once a month over winter should be enough to keep it ticking over. Do I have to go all the way to the country park? My parking season ticket is still valid. I can go into Sainsbury’s on the way and buy a picnic, drive there and park under the trees, make a cuppa and sit inside the van if it’s raining.

I know that’s what I should do. Here we go again, about the ‘shoulds’. This is not just what some voice from childhood is muttering into my inner ear. It’s something that I know will make me feel better once I’ve done it, and that I also know won’t be as bad as it seems once I get started – but I still don’t want to do it. Which is the story of my life – so really, I know I have to go.

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Je Ne Regrette Rien

This morning I got up and walked to the beach. I was there in time for the sunrise, but the cloud cover was solid, and there was nothing to see. I sat on my usual bench, but the wind seemed to be blowing directly at me, and I didn’t feel comfortable enough to drink my coffee, so I walked down to the tideline and tried to photograph the waves, which were pretty fearsome. They were licking at the remains of a sandcastle, which seemed bizarre – who had been there building a sandcastle at this time of year?

I left the beach to cross the esplanade and drink my coffee in the Rose Garden, which is more sheltered, and as I turned to look back, I saw the clouds moving and parting, and a brief burst of light came from the gap and shone momentarily on the sea.

I think I finished yesterday saying something about regret, and Geoff Dyer saying that whatever you do, or don’t, there are always regrets. But I part company with him there – I think I’m quite good at avoiding regrets, over the big things, anyway. Of all the major changes I’ve made over the last twelve years, I don’t think there are any which I would undo, were such a thing possible, even the ones whose consequences were painful at the time. Not that that spares me from agonies when I have to make a choice, but that’s another matter. The torments I went through before I decided to move here – which seem ludicrous looking back from this perspective – were only finally settled when I realised that if I didn’t at least try it, I would always wonder what would have happened if I had. And now I know.

I read somewhere – a few years ago now – that it is part of human psychology to see major life choices – marriage, house purchase, choice of job, divorce – in a positive light once they’ve been made and committed to. It’s the ‘it was meant to be…’ syndrome: ‘I was meant to meet you, move here, do that – because look what happened!’ I was saying this a couple of weeks ago, I think, when I talked about fate and fatalism. We know the consequences of those decisions, and can’t really imagine what the alternatives might have been like. Of course, this isn’t universal, and I can’t remember the research and references off the top of my head, but I can see how it has worked out in my life.

In the time before I left my husband, I bought a greeting card with the legend: ‘The only things I’ll regret are the things I don’t do’, and stuck it to the wall behind my computer. It also became the tagline for the new blog I started when I moved out. I’ve still got that card, in fact if I look over my left shoulder, I can see it on a shelf. I think it’s a pretty good motto.

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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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Starlings

I looked at the clock and it was 6:21. I looked at the Accuweather app and saw that no precipitation was expected for 120 minutes, it was currently 11° and sunrise would be at 7:27. So I immediately decided I would get up and go to the beach with a flask of coffee, and then thirteen minutes later I got out of bed and dressed, let Miko out for her morning constitutional, filled her food bowl, made coffee, put on my shoes and winter coat and walked to the beach, arriving on the dot of 7:27.

I hadn’t thought about the clouds. There was a grey curtain hanging over the sea, and white overlapping ones over the land. And a surprising number of people out and about – not so surprising really, because it’s always like that, but somehow it always surprises me. Even more surprisingly, I wasn’t the only person just walking on the beach for the sake of walking, on their own, without a dog, or a metal detector, or a litter grabber and plastic sack. When my parents were ill, and after they passed away, I would go out for walks by myself, just generally through the fields around the village where we lived then, and along the old railway track, and the people I met invariably had dogs, and I always felt self conscious, as though walking by myself was vaguely suspicious, and I must be up to no good somehow. Until this year, it’s always been like that on the beach too, but now it seems people do go out on their own walking without ulterior motive – even walking normally, in normal clothes, like me, rather than ‘power’ walking (or whatever it’s called) with their elbows flailing.

I sat behind the café, where I always sit, and gradually the white clouds became tinged with pink, which was strange because they were over the land and hence further north, but evidently the light was seeping out from behind the darker clouds as the sun crept up surreptitiously, with none of the usual showy light across the sea. I watched the gulls and listened to the waves and drank my coffee, wondering why there were no starlings on the street lamp this morning, then a few minutes later I heard them chattering and looked again. I counted five on the lamp, none on the wire, but gradually more turned up, and I’d just got my phone out to take a photo when they all flew up at once and formed a small cloud which passed out of my eyeline then reappeared over the park. Two women with a beagle on a lead came from behind me, past the café. The one holding the dog’s lead was trying to jog and her friend was trying to take a photo of her, but the dog wasn’t co-operating, and stopped for a pee against a bunch of seakale. When they’d passed by, the starlings came back, so maybe the dog disturbed them.

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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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Dreams and Explorations

I mentioned a few days ago that I haven’t been remembering my dreams. Yesterday I tried to remember as soon as I woke up, and retained a few things, which I didn’t write down and now they’ve gone, but today I did the same and am going to write what I can remember.

The main theme was that I was visiting an old, strange house, near the sea – not here, but somewhere with cliffs and a rough grey sea, a dangerous sea. The house appeared to belong to my ex husband (although part of it was rented out to some other people), slightly ironic because I was always the one who wanted to live near the sea, and he was never interested. Rough seas and old, strange houses have cropped up in my dreams from way, way back, though I can’t remember them ever occurring together before. Exploring an old house signifies exploring your own psyche, and I’ve certainly been doing a lot of that. I don’t know about rough seas, but I wasn’t on the sea or threatened by it, just watching it from the beach, and also from the house.

One specific incident in the dream that I remember was that I got stuck in an automatic door leaving a supermarket, and couldn’t move to go either in or out. I could see my ex, who was loading shopping into the back of a car in the car park, and I kept calling his name to get him to come and help me, but he couldn’t hear me because he was busy with the shopping. I don’t think you have to dig too deeply to find a message in that. Another man came up behind me from inside the shop and I suppose he freed me. Also, later I was in the house and washing up at the sink, when a strange man came up behind me, put his arms round me and kissed the back of my neck (or was it the side of my face?)

Thinking again about the stuck-in-the-door incident, I don’t actually remember the second man freeing me, just talking to me. So it could be that I managed to free myself – which would be a better reflection of what happened in my life.

Yesterday in my therapy session I read what I wrote on Wednesday about my childhood – though she’s heard the story before, of course. I’m still reading my way through ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’. She recommended it – two years ago, when I didn’t read it – because of the part about transitioning into the third stage of life, as the Crone or Wise Woman. But it’s leading me to re-evaluate the whole course of my life – which is why I wrote about my childhood expectations of what life as a woman would be like. Often I read things in it which bring me up short – about being lost, wandering, not knowing what you’re looking for – and finding a new self.

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Sunrise

Add to the list of things done this week: sunrise walk. I was awake from 4:30 anyway, so got up around six, got dressed and made coffee to take out in my flask. First day of lockdown, but there were quite a few people on the streets and at the beach – joggers, dog walkers, and the regular wild swimmers. I sat in my usual place to drink my coffee, then walked down to the waves’ edge to watch the sun come up behind the bank of cloud low over the sea. Walked along the beach and through the Rose Garden, then through the gardens behind the natural history museum (surprised to find the gates open so early). Nowhere to stop for breakfast, so I was home before eight – which meant that I thought maybe I should still write.

I did take a notebook and pen out with me, by the way, but didn’t feel inclined to write anything on the beach. Didn’t do much of anything really, just sat and walked and watched for the first appearance of the spot on the horizon where the light came through a crack in the clouds.

Being there is important. Getting there doesn’t always feel that easy. The urge has to be followed when it arises.

I wrote something at bedtime last night – onto my phone, so I wouldn’t forget. This is it: ‘I have to keep reminding myself that, although fundamentally nothing ever really changes, some days, hours, moments are better than others, so I have to believe that those are worth hanging on for’.

It’s a privilege to be able to get up in the morning and walk to the beach in time to see the sun rise over the sea. It never gets boring – god knows how many photos I’ve taken of it over the last five years since I moved here. But the motivation isn’t always there. Today, for some reason I can’t explain, it just felt like the obvious thing to do. But most mornings are not like that.

Being on the south coast, it’s possible to see both the sunrise and the sunset over the sea, but I’m not usually out for the latter.  

Granny Weatherwax has something to say about sunrises, but I can’t remember exactly what. I think it’s in reply to being asked what she believes in, and she says: ‘sunrises mostly’ or words to that effect. Which just reminded me of some good advice given to me years ago by one of my first meditation teachers: ‘if you’re still breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong’. If the sun rises, there’s more right with the world than wrong. Another breath, another day, another spring and summer to come (eventually).

I still haven’t quite got back to cause and effect, destiny and fate, Taoism and whatever else I’m always on the brink of mentioning. Today might have been a good opportunity for that. But there’ll always be another sunrise to walk towards.

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Here We Go Round Again

So far this week: last yoga class before lockdown; last tai chi class before lockdown; last trip out in the van before lockdown. I mentioned last week about my yoga teacher being homeless and having to cancel classes – the next day she sent a text to say that someone had offered her a lift, then came the lockdown announcement, so there was a class on Monday evening, and ditto the tai chi yesterday morning, after which I picked up my camper van from the garage and drove to Queen Elizabeth Country Park on the A3 near Petersfield, and had a walk among the trees and a picnic. I love taking the van there, because there are car parks spread among the trees, often empty (on weekdays when I usually go), so although you can’t actually camp, you can get some of the feeling for a few hours.

The weather has turned dry and sunny but noticeably colder than it was, and today looks to be about the same, with a clear blue sky. I really should get out and do some tidying up in the garden, I tried cutting the hedge on Monday but the trimmer kept cutting out. Because it stopped and later started again, it had to be a loose wire. I took apart the connector that joins it where I cut through the cable in the spring, unscrewed the little screwy things inside, couldn’t see anything obviously loose, then got into a horrible dyspraxic muddle trying to put it back together and gave up for the day.

I read some more of ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, this time about creative blocks. The author suggests the usual things: keep trying, don’t self-edit, do a little every day, expect to fail, but keep going anyway. This is what I’ve been doing forever. Back to the old question of whether it matters that it never gets me anywhere? Apparently, it doesn’t. Either one day a miracle will happen and I’ll suddenly start writing something worthwhile, or I’ll be gone and someone will come along and wipe my hard drive and that will be that.

Last week I read the poem about the ‘Wild Thing’ to my therapist, and she said I should try to get it published. I haven’t done anything about it. Strictly speaking, I think posting it on here counts as publication, which disqualifies it from most competitions anyway.

I’ve been thinking about Daniel Defoe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’. I think this definitely counts as a ‘plague year’, but I don’t think this journal of mine is in the same class.

My current yoga teacher once said that destiny is what has to happen, but fate is what you make happen (or words to that effect). She is not having a great year, even worse than most of us. But she has faith in the fundamental goodness of the world, and I envy her for that. Today, I fear for the fate of us all.

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Tuesday plans

Reached the third of the month, and I haven’t yet mentioned NaNoWriMo. That’s because I haven’t got any plans to do anything about it. Two years ago I wrote 50k words, last year I read them and couldn’t see that there was anything I could do with them. Maybe this year I will think about The Long Way Back again – I think the last time I looked at it was in spring 2018. But one big ongoing project has been finished and gone this year. Maybe I could start thinking about it again. We’ll see.

I spent some time yesterday on the weather blanket, as I said I would. Every month (in the middle, not the beginning) I add a colour to the border – in two weeks time it will be the tenth and last. Quite a lot of my time yesterday was spent in untangling the previous nine. The only way I can see of avoiding that in the future would be to leave the border and do it all at the end, which would be massively tedious and probably mean that it wouldn’t be finished till about March. I have some plastic bobbins which are supposed to help, but only a few large ones. I will try to be more systematic about it next year.

The camper van went in for its MOT yesterday, and miraculously it passed on the first go (for the second year running). It was due in June, but was covered by the six months extension, which would have got it to January, but I wanted to avoid that because the tax is due then, and car insurance and MOT in March/April, so I decided to spread it out. The garage called me at about 5, and I didn’t really want to go and collect it then because that would have meant trying to reverse it into the garage in the dark (a nightmare) so I asked them to keep it for me till today. As the sun is shining – and the sky clear for the first time in ages – I am going to attempt to take it out for a picnic. I wasn’t sure if my season ticket for parking at the country park had been renewed or not, it was due in September but the direct debit didn’t go out. However I just had a rummage among my emails and found that they’ve extended it to the end of the year because of the closure for the first lockdown.

I will make sure I take a cup this time, and my coat. But I can’t stay too long, because I need to make sure I’m back before dark. I need to make sure I take it out at least once a month over winter, so it doesn’t end up in the same state as this spring and last. All this seems as good a reason as any to take it out today, before the next lockdown starts. A good sort of day.