Category: places

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Remembering Cannes

No romantic poetic thoughts about the French Riviera last night. When I was in Cannes in 2012, I remember it struck me as tacky, over-privileged, overcrowded, superficial, artificial. I spent a lot of time there in McDonald’s, home-from-home of the American teenager, using the free wifi to work out my onward plans and arrangements. Maybe I should have gone to Nice, as a friend recommended, for the flower market and the Matisse (or is it Cezanne?) museum, but for some reason I thought Cannes would be more ‘classy’ – when it was just more expensive.

But I must have done something other than sit in McD’s getting stressed over Google, surely? There was the flea market, I remember that. I walked up a hill to a chapel with a view, a posing pigeon, a sexy photographer, a statue of an oddly grinning Madonna and child, and a museum which was closed for lunch, so I ate chocolate and drank water in the garden instead. How do I remember all this? Because I wrote it down at the time for my blog, then used it (or at least re-read it) when I was editing ‘Single to Sirkeci’. I even have a photo of the statue somewhere, which is why I remember her odd expression. Also one of the posing seagull – it wasn’t a pigeon, see, my memory’s not that good – although my alliteration is admirable. I ate crepes on the promenade, had a fabulous Provenҫal seafood dinner on my last night there (onward travel arrangements and accommodation having been confirmed) and swam in the sea. It was the vernal equinox – or thereabouts.

By the summer solstice, I hadn’t quite made it to Norway, as planned, but was in Berlin, in freezing cold and driving rain, sheltering in the national art museums, poring over an exhibition of Goya’s engravings of horror and war. And eight years ago today, where was I then? From the ‘memories’ of Lübeck and Flensburg that popped up on Facebook a few days ago, I guess I would have reached Copenhagen by now. Yes, I am lucky to have those memories, lucky that I wrote them down, and I should probably finish off that book with the later ones.

What was I thinking about when I woke up? Trying to remember what I’d been dreaming about, whatever that was. Then the usual probably. Or remembering Cannes, which would explain why I wrote about it just now.

Life is a story that we tell ourselves, over and over, and maybe it changes with each retelling, because how would you know? I seem to remember writing, somewhere on my travels, about how life distracts from writing and writing distracts from life, how they feed on one another and interfere with one another in an incestuous, abusive relationship – or maybe that’s not how I put it, maybe that’s what I thought just now.

One thing I know for sure, we can never know the ending of our life-story until it’s too late.

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Rising and Retiring

While the cassette recorder is on my desk, there’s even less space than usual for Miko to squeeze into. Which makes typing even more than usually awkward. At least I have my reading glasses today.

Yesterday evening I was writing an email to an old friend and listening to music, and I got to thinking about the south of France, the scents of flowers and herbs, and the little shops in out of the way towns selling unbranded local soaps and colognes; the paintings of Van Gogh (partly because of the jigsaw I was doing earlier that morning when it was pouring with rain here); the woods around the retreat centre in Limousin where I stayed six years ago. I started putting together bits and pieces for a poem, including kittens playing in a pile of nets in the harbour at Sorrento (different country, I know, but same sea). Then into the music stream popped a young Joan Baez singing ‘Plaisir d’Amour’ and I thought ‘oh, how appropriate!’ but I’d already sent the email by then.

Why is it that I often feel quite peaceful and comfortable with the world in the evenings, but then almost always feel miserable when I wake up? No, it’s not related to alcohol consumption – I’ve thought of that. Someone once told me that what you think when you wake up relates to what you were thinking when you fell asleep, so make sure you’re always thinking happy thoughts before you drop off, but this is clearly nonsense. How can you know exactly the point you will be falling asleep before it happens, let alone control your thoughts in preparation? What would happen if you were lying there thinking: ‘Right, am I asleep yet? No? Better think of something happy then. How long can I keep this up for? How long do I need to keep it up for? Has it happened yet? How long am I going to have to keep up these happy thoughts? What if I drop off just when I’m getting frustrated or stressed?’ etc etc. You’d never actually fall asleep – unless this is just because, as I keep forgetting, my brain is weird and doesn’t act in the same way as normal people who can control that stuff?

I’ve been told: ‘You’re obviously not a morning person’, but that’s not true, I’m better if I get up in the mornings, I hate lying in late and losing half the day. But it’s like everything else, I have to motivate myself to do it, the activity, the process of getting out of bed, it’s not even that I particularly dislike it when I do it. Sometimes I even talk myself through it: ‘right, duvet off, one foot on the floor, sit on the bed, second foot on the floor, brace yourself with hands on the mattress, push down and straighten legs’. It’s the gap between thought and action that stretches out and out, as though thinking is a substitute for doing. 

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Old Songs

Can’t find my reading glasses. I had them in bed, because I was reading for a while, I remember that. Now I can’t find them anywhere around the bed, or in the kitchen, or the spare room where I did my exercise. Not even in my dressing gown pocket, because I didn’t wear my dressing gown this morning. I can write okay with my varifocals as long as I don’t have to look at the screen – I just stare down at the keyboard.

I’ve thought once or twice recently about writing – proper writing, not this daily drivel. If nothing else, I suppose, I should finish off ‘The Long Way Back’. The first part – the return journey from Istanbul – is written and edited, and it feels as though I’ve cheated those kind people who have gone to the trouble of reading ‘Single to Sirkeci’ to leave it all dangling. My idea was to pad that out with an account of trying to piece my life together afterwards, hopefully coming to a positive conclusion and some lessons learnt. And so far I’ve edited enough material together to get me to May 2013, when I left for Prague. At one point I even thought I might turn it into three books, with a Prague instalment as well. But so many years have passed now – another three even since I published S2S – and so little changes, I’ve ‘learned’ so few life lessons from those experiences, my heart sinks at the thought. When I tried reading the blog posts from the Prague times, and realised how depressing that all was, it wasn’t something I wanted to revisit.

What about the famous thirty-years-in-progress fantasy novel? Or rather, fifteen years, from 1990 to 2005, because I haven’t touched it since then. It ground to a halt in October 2005, when I started a creative writing course and, coincidentally, started blogging, though I’ve never been able to fathom which (or possibly both) of those circumstances was responsible for the stasis.

But if this daily writing doesn’t help, then what’s it for? A question without an answer.

Old songs. My pre-bedtime wind-down habit of listening to Amazon Music through the telly has led me back into the past so that now I’m returning to songs of thirty, forty, fifty years ago. Vinyl albums in tattered cardboard sleeves stand in no particular order on my IKEA cube units, a shoebox with the marker-penned legend: ‘Cassettes Study’ by my side on the floor. The USB turntable and cassette player – both presents at different times from my ex-husband, the latter, from the final, fateful Christmas – spent many years stashed away in boxes, but earlier this week I ordered a new stylus cartridge for the turntable, and finally connected the cassette player up to my PC. The sound quality is pretty uneven, especially after thirty years of listening to CDs, but the songs and lyrics are the same.

So today I’m uploading Jon and Vangelis: ‘Somehow I’ll find my way home.’

One day.

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Beach Walk

Why bother trying to draw a bus shelter?

Because it’s the only thing I can see that I stand a chance of drawing. This is a new notebook and I forgot it doesn’t have lines, which means it’s intended for drawing.

Sometimes I can draw, mostly it’s just crap. I can always write, but that’s mostly crap too.

Coffee’s too hot. Last time I thought it was because I filled it to the top with hot water, so today I left a gap. But it’s still too hot.

Sitting outside the Beach Café (or I was an hour ago when I wrote in my notebook. Now I’m transcribing at my desk).

In the sea, a boat so small it almost looks like a toy. Maybe it’s further away than it looks. It’s rushing off somewhere, nearly out of sight already.

Silver light on the sea and small patches of sky-blue sky between the clouds. I tried to think of a better way to describe the colour of the sky, but sky-blue is the best I can come up with. Matches the colour of the ink I’m writing with.

Half a dozen litter-pickers in hi-vis jackets carrying white plastic bags just came round the corner.

Coffee still too hot to drink even though I left the top off.

Sun out now and on my face, so I start to unzip my coat – the same coat I was wearing in the winter, but I put it on because it’s got a hood, although the weather app at six o’clock said ‘no precipitation for at least 120 minutes’.

Spent ages (of course) deciding whether to come for a walk, and then getting everything together: coffee; wallet; which bag? Shopping bag or hand bag, or handbag inside shopping bag, or shopping bag inside handbag, which is easiest to carry? How many shopping bags will I need? Notebook and pen, or puzzle book and pencil or both or neither? Life and energy frittered away on logistics and indecision – that’s what it comes down to.

Not so many people today, or perhaps I’m more prepared for them. Not so many wild swimmers, just the regulars. Suddenly the sky is full of gulls, wheeling and intersecting (but silently), then when I look up again it’s empty.

Coffee still hot. Catches in my throat and makes me cough. Hope no one notices. Then I touch my face. Remember all that? Does anyone still follow those guidelines?

Forget ‘A Room of One’s Own’ – I have a whole house. Forget £500 a year – I have more than that a month and then some – but it’s nearly a century since Virgina Woolf wrote about what a woman needs in order to write – necessary but not sufficient conditions.

I watched a TED talk someone sent me – an American woman talking about her abusive childhood, bouts of homelessness and drug dependencies, train-wreck marriages etc and the writing opportunities she pissed away. Guess what? She did it in the end. Guess what? I didn’t.

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Memories

Yesterday afternoon I wrote a poem, I thought I would post it today, but now I feel perhaps it’s better to leave it where it is and go back and look at it some other time.

The beginnings of another one came to me in the shower, now I don’t know what to do about it.

What happens to sadness if you push it away?
Does it fester in the dark, like words never written?
Does it burrow its way into your soul
and feast on what it finds there?

From the surface, you brush away the dust,
shake out your feathers
and get on with life.

You won’t let it hurt you,
you’ll face the new day,
and the next, and the next.
Slide into the mask
and smile for the camera.

Then thirty years later
you look at that smile,
and remember, remember,
the pain that those moments
were trying to cover.

Linda Rushby 17 May 2020

Well, there you go. I finished it (I think). That’ll do, anyway.

Yesterday I came across a photo from 1987 and posted it on Facebook. I remember that time as being amongst the most miserable of my life. We were living in Dallas, I had given up my career to be an ex-pat wife, and found myself sitting in the wreckage of the fantasy that at last I would have time to do some ‘serious’ writing. I had left behind my family and friends; I was getting hardly any sleep, struggling to cope with this terrifying new role of ‘mother’ for which I felt utterly unprepared and unsuited; wracked with guilt and shame for having those feelings; convinced that my son would grow up to hate me because he cried constantly, while I was incapable of meeting his needs; totally dependent on and in awe of my husband who, as well as doing a full time job, was able to understand, soothe, and care for the baby with endless patience and all the parental instincts which I so badly lacked.

And needless to say, I was far too ashamed to seek outside help, even if I had a clue where to look for it. The few ‘friends’ I was able to make were other young mothers, all much more well-adjusted than me, all making it seem so easy, so how could I own up to any of them what a monster I felt inside?

With all those memories, I looked at the two smiling faces, my own and that of the perfect little child, standing with hands holding onto the coffee table while I sat on the sofa supporting him under his armpits.

Oddly, when I look back over my life, it seems that ‘motherhood’ is the one thing I somehow got right, the one project of my life whose outcomes – two wonderful, loving, caring people – I can look at with pride (or maybe that’s down to their father’s contribution, rather than mine).

I don’t know why I wrote this. It’s not what I expected.

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May Day

Today’s memory is from a year and a day after the previous one (a lot can happen in that time – in fairy tales, at any rate).

On the beach at sunrise with a smallish group of friends and friends-of-friends, one of them a Pagan celebrant who led us in a ceremony of welcome to the sun on May Day morning. I remember chanting, facing in the four directions (towards the sea, the land, the sun and… towards the pier? -it’s all I can think of in that direction!) There was also singing, djembe banging, some mandolin playing, probably dancing and definitely consumption of brandy supplied by her partner (not something I normally do at six in the morning, not even on May Day!) And breakfast in the Beach Café.

Thinking back, I realise I hardly ever see that group of people any more. When the world passed around the sun again, I had entered the year of my own personal self-isolation, of chemo and surgery and radiotherapy, and when I emerged from that into 2018, it seemed as though everyone’s life had changed, not just mine, the dance had shifted, we had all taken up new positions and our paths no longer intersected – except sometimes on Facebook, repository of friendships and social medium of choice for my generation.

That wasn’t the only memorable thing that happened that May Day, however. When I got home to the flat, I had an email from my ex husband, saying that he’d received and provisionally accepted an offer on the old family home; obviously my formal agreement was needed, but that was hardly in doubt. The beginning of the real end of that chapter of my life, a summer of driving up and down between here and there, clearing out everything, including the attic where so much of my past had accumulated; helping him initially to move into his new place in Bedford (and in the interim our son and his fiancée from their tiny studio flat in Guildford to a two-storey maisonette), and finally, in October, moving into this house, with one van of stuff transported professionally from the flat, and another trip for me up to Bedford, another rented van loaded and driven down by my daughter’s partner, another drive back southwards in my Micra with another terrified cat in a basket on the passenger seat.

If I’d known on that spring morning that it would be almost another six months before I was finally settled in my own home… well, I don’t know what I would have done. But it happened, all the dusty accumulation of the past, the physical stuff and the emotional clutter which had haunted me, all moved, all resolved, and here I was.

Maybe the stress of that year contributed to my body’s next bombshell – who knows? But I got through that too. And here I stand, and every day, whether May Day or any one of 365 others, the future still knocks on my door.

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Home

Five years ago today, it was a Thursday. At least, I remember that the subsequent two days were Friday and Saturday. So this is one of those odd combinations of years when the days are the same after five years, not six – a moment’s thought makes it obvious, because those five contained two leap years.

I remember taking Flick to school and walking the dog. Laura must have been working an early shift at the care home, and I would have stayed at hers the night before. I sat in my car outside her house and thought – this is it. It may have been drizzly – I don’t remember the drive – I would have been concentrating because it wasn’t familiar then. There were road works on the A34 at Milton, south of Oxford – they went on for years – the southbound traffic was diverted off the dual carriageway, and I stopped at the Costa.

In Southsea, the sun was shining. I went straight to the agent’s, signed the paperwork, picked up the keys, drove to the flat. The doors were open, the landlady was there with her little dog, and someone was putting up a curtain rail. It was the first time we’d met, so introductions and a few minutes of polite chat were obligatory, till I walked out, turned right, found the alley between the houses, where the wisteria wasn’t quite open, a quick right and left at the end, crossed the esplanade, through the rock gardens, and reached the sea. I could hardly believe it was so close.

I walked along the seafront as far as the Coffee Cup, then turned inland down the quiet road that leads to Eastney and the Highland Road roundabout – I remember passing the strange cake shop. Turned left onto Highland Road, past the cemetery and the junk shop, then onto Albert Road, the bike shops, the crystal shop, the church with the Italian bell tower, on the corner of where I live now. I was looking for a road leading towards the sea, but I’d missed them all, until I came to the traffic lights which I knew would take me back to the flat.

I had the small fold out bed (or maybe just the mattress), a camping chair, kettle, toaster, radio, laptop (but no wifi) – microwave? I couldn’t carry much in the Micra. I walked the empty rooms planning where the furniture would go. I must have eaten that evening – fish and chips, of course – did I know the chippy was there, just round the corner, or was it instinct? There was bound to be one, and I had the car, I would have found something.

Next morning, I drove back to Beds, collected and loaded the van with Laura and Chris, and on Saturday drove back with Murka in a basket on the passenger seat, via Guildford where I picked up Simon.

In memory, banal days become significant, and significant ones banal. Thirtieth April 2015 holds both in balance.  

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Day 18 – Istanbul

I saw a photograph today,
of a sandstone palace,
frosted with blue and white tiles.
And I thought of Istanbul,
though I knew it couldn’t be.

‘Germany’ I guessed,
‘another of Mad King Ludwig’s confections’
(I’ve been caught out like that before).
But no, it was Seville, and I thought
‘Aha, Moorish influences!’
and ‘I must go there one day,
to southern Spain.’

But oh, Istanbul,
beautiful, dirty, noisy city of my dreams.
Byzantium, city of Constantine,
with your minarets and domes, gardens and palaces,
cats, magpies and wonderful cafes,
sunshine and storms and clinging fogs,
and best of all, your waterways,
ships and ferries and fishermen on Galata Bridge.

The taste of that fresh fish sandwich,
bought from the boat, where I watched them fry it
over a brazier by the water’s edge.
Or the tea I poured from a double pot,
the russet colour, clear as the glass I sipped it from
as fragrant as the roses in Gülhane Park
a sensual delight, sweet as the pastries
in Hafiz Mustafa’s.

Perhaps one day I’ll find
my way back to you,
(though somehow I know I won’t)
but you’ll always be there
in my heart.

Linda Rushby 18 April 2020
Gulhane Park, Istanbul May 2012

http://damson-tree.co.uk/travel/?cat=39

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Day 5 – Circle of Friends

Circle of Friends

Three months ago, or thereabouts,
a circle of friends sang songs of hope.

Knowing we must part,
knowing we would meet again,
but not knowing when.

Knowing there would be hard times,
not knowing what.

Knowing we would all find joy
not knowing how.

Another year, another song.

The memory of that evening comes to me,
and makes me smile,
for the time when we will meet again,
and touch, and hug, and maybe kiss,
in the place that joins our hearts.

Linda Rushby 5 April 2020

It’s good when a poem comes like that, when I was getting dressed, and making coffee, and feeding the cat, and taking pots from the dishwasher. So that by the time I sat at the keyboard, I already knew what I was going to say.

Sheesh, if only it was always that easy!

Can I get away with that today (at least it’s not a haiku!) or do I have to keep on writing? Well, I set the rules, so I guess I can do what I like.

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All for what?

Lambeth Bridge from Millbank, London

I didn’t go to the beach to photograph the sunrise, though I was awake in time to get there.

Instead I lay in bed, as I do, thinking.

And then it was seven o’clock, and then it was eight o’clock, and I was still lying there. And I thought how pointless everything is, and wouldn’t it be better to just let go, let everything go and stop trying to find reasons to stay alive?

All these stupid tasks I’ve been setting myself, like doing yoga and tai chi and meditation in my spare room, and writing 500 words. All for what? To make me think I’m doing something worthwhile with my days? All that self-bullying that I usually put into getting myself to leave the house I’m now focussing on creating a ‘structure’ for my life (though not on housework, no, never on that). And I resent it just as much, and find reasons for telling myself how pointless it all is, nobody’s making me do it but myself, so why shouldn’t I just lie in bed all day hating myself and feeling miserable, because that feels like the easiest and most natural thing in the world. After all, it’s what I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember, why change the habits of a lifetime? And now there’s no one to judge me for it but myself (and anyone who happens to read this, of course).

Someone said in a private message last week that I ‘torture’ myself. Well, why not? Maybe I deserve it. Maybe it’s all I know how to do.

While I was sitting on my cushion I thought about being on Millbank, upriver from Tate Britain, leaning on the wall and looking at the river and the new spring shoots on the plane trees, unfurling between the bobbles of last year’s seeds. I feel as though I have been there many times on lovely spring days taking photographs in the sunshine, and later crossing Vauxhall Bridge and going to the café which I can never remember the name of, but it’s also an antique showroom, and sitting outside drinking coffee surrounded by quirky statuary and old garden equipment, hiding from the noise and stink of buses. I’ve been going there for years, but I know it was still there last summer (maybe not the next time I go though, if there is a next time).

Hiding and running away are two sides of the same coin – yes, yes, I know, I know, I repeat myself, keep churning out the same old nonsense time after time. So why can’t I repeat the ‘good’ stuff? How the f*ck do I know? I don’t have control over what pops into my head. It’s all just bollox anyway, whatever I say.

I was planning to venture out again when I run out of milk – which will probably be today, or maybe I can stretch it out till tomorrow. Fact is, I don’t really want to any more.