Category: dyspraxia

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Wenesday Morning

I was going to go to the shop, but slept in and didn’t get up till half past seven, so decided to skip my exercise routine and get dressed straight away. But when I looked at the shopping list, I thought: I’m not desperate for any of these things, I haven’t got enough milk to last the day but I’ve got some long-life in the cupboard, and whatever else I need will depend on what I’m going to eat over the next few days, and I can’t think about planning what I’m going to eat so I’ll leave it till tomorrow – except tomorrow I have to go to the doctor’s for half past eight to get a blood test to check on how my cholesterol’s doing – so better not have anything too cheesy for dinner tonight – and I guess I can go to the shop after the doctor’s, it will be a bit later than usual but hopefully not too busy.

But what am I going to have for dinner tonight, or the next few days? What’s in the freezer? It’s full of plastic boxes, and since the start of the year I’ve been making a list of what’s in there and tallies to tick things off, but there are no labels on the boxes so I have to guess. Because on alternate Saturdays (I have takeaway on the others) I make a casserole in the slow cooker, and put three quarters of it into plastic boxes and freeze them. But which is which? They look pretty much the same. This one has cannellini beans, I think that’s from before the time I started writing them down, and it’s either lamb hotpot or belly pork in cider. It’ll do.

The sun is shining and the dead heads of the hydrangea are looking at me through the window, the ones I didn’t cut back in the autumn. If I cut them now, will I cut off the new shoots as well so it doesn’t flower?

What to do? Make a cup of coffee, prepare porridge and put it in the microwave ready for later, and put away the things from the drainer because they must be dry by now. Like any other day. Then I’ll go on the computer and delete some more files, because the backup from the phone will be on there by now, or will be as soon as the phone’s connected to the wifi. And write? Or do I feel too shit to share?

When I get upstairs I remember I need to do the washing today, and it’s sunny, so I sit on the bed and think – what needs to go in and what am I going to forget and kick myself about later? Two pairs of ripped jeans should be in the bin, I forgot them last week and again today because the bin men have already gone.

Groundhog day all over again. Spring is coming, but what changes? At least I’m up and dressed.

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Tackling the Chaos: Part 1 of …?

My Google Drive is permanently full, and has been for years (literally, in the literal sense, years). Every so often I purge some files, photos or emails and somehow it stumbles on, but I opened a new gmail account – I think it was in 2017 – which is what I mostly use for email these days. However, I still have the old one as there are people and organisations who have that as my email address (like the yahoo email which I’ve had for over twenty years to the best of my knowledge and which still gets lots of emails every day, but I don’t want to close because some contacts only have that address).

I’ve had my current phone since 2018 – when I returned to Android after a two-year flirtation with iPhone – and in all that time it has never been backed up because it always tries to back it up to my old gmail account, and every so often sends me a message to tell me that the backup has failed because there is no space, and that it hasn’t been backed up for 700-and-something days. Last week I managed to change the settings so it will backup to my current account (which may ultimately prompt the necessity to start another gmail account), but I couldn’t find out how to change the photo backup, which still goes to the original gmail account and is still permanently full.

This week, in a fit of displacement from thinking about doing anything about the actual physical chaos in my life, I started trying to clear out my Google Drive space. As I said, I’ve made previous efforts: deleting all emails with attachments; deleting files which I put on Google drive to share access between devices; downloading and deleting some old photographs, and so on. (Incidentally, I have 707gb free of 918gb total on my hard drive, so it makes sense to stick my photos on there rather than pay to increase my 15gb Google drive). Also, I’d been kind of hoping that I might find those photos from 2012 that I mentioned the other week, but they’d obviously gone in a previous purge (still haven’t found my old-old laptop, by the way)  – there were just a handful of photos from pre-2015, so I put those all into a folder together on the hard drive a couple of weeks ago, and this week started methodically downloading all photos from 2015 onwards, copying them into a folder called ‘Photo backups’, deleting them from Google drive and then emptying the Google drive bin. I’ve been doing this a month at a time – sometimes having to do two downloads for a month because the download limit for one zip file is 500, which I have occasionally exceeded in a month.

I finished 2015, and was getting messages to say my Google Drive was now 70% full, which was very reassuring, until the next morning, when I logged on and found it was 99% again… to be continued

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Listing

I’m still doing my lists – sort of, though I’ve slipped a bit this week.

You may or may not be aware that I have a ‘long list’ (written in a ‘Things to do Today’ notebook that I bought eight years ago, when I was living in the Fens – I know that because I have a distinct memory of buying it in the Wilko in Huntingdon – and have used intermittently since) and a page-a-day (except weekends) A6 sized diary that I bought online last month. The former is where I write things as they occur to me – which may vary in scale and/or importance from ‘Sort out study’ or ‘car insurance’ to ‘Empty dishwasher’ (that one not so much now I have a diary). Items on this list may or may not have a do-by date next to them, and the ‘system’ used to be that when the page was full I copied those which hadn’t been completed on to a new page and threw the old one away – or sometimes, when I was trying to be more organised, I started a new page every Monday, copying things as before – but this always feels like a waste of paper. Now I have a diary, the ‘system’ is that every morning I copy into it items from the long list that need to be completed that day, and/or others that I feel I can tackle that day, and/or carry-overs that didn’t get done the previous day – as well as things not worth putting on the long list, like ‘empty dishwasher’. Plus, of course, appointments and deadlines and things like ‘pay credit card bill’ get written in when the dates are set.

That’s the system – in theory. I have tried many, many systems down the years – most of which didn’t last long, as you can tell, and also attended many courses on ‘personal organisation’. I have a horror of lists, but I do understand the logic behind them. When I was employed in offices, I suppose I must have organised my workload somehow – even more so when I was doing multiple jobs from home (though my daughter and ex-husband would probably say I just never stopped working). Managing life in retirement – not to mention lockdown – is a different ball game.

As you can probably guess, lots of items from the long list never make it beyond being copied to the new long list when the old page is full – sometimes not even that. There’s a theory that things that have been on the list that long probably don’t need to be done anyway – that’s one thing I learnt from all those courses, and it may be reasonable in a busy work setting where there are lots of priorities to be juggled and, crucially, other people who eventually notice if the whatever-it-was really was important.

There’s a sense that the writing of an item onto a list is an action in itself, and once that’s done, it can safely be forgotten

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Untangling

I didn’t write yesterday, and I don’t want to write today. The emotions and thoughts that swirl around in my head are probably best kept to myself. Everything is complicated and tangled up together, and if I find a way through and come out the other side, I daren’t look over my shoulder because I know it will drag me back in again.

I like that metaphor, and here’s another one. When you have a tangled ball of yarn (which happens to me a lot), in order to untangle it you have to start with an end. Ends aren’t always easy to find, but you can make one, by choosing a thread at random and cutting it. You now have two ends, and you pick one – maybe the one that has a longer ‘tail’ – and tug gently on it. You should then see a movement of one of the threads in the tangle, so you put your thumb and finger through the gap nearest to the movement, take hold of the thread that just moved, and pull it through the gap – if you’ve got the right thread, the cut end will follow, and now the tail is a little longer, so you repeat the process and watch for the next movement. The tail gets longer, and eventually you have to start rolling it into a ball, or else it might create another tangle. But then you have to pass the whole ball through the tangled loops – you can’t just pull on it from inside the tangle any more, because the ball will just unroll. At that point, I hold the ball in my hand and slide my hand through the loops, so that they’re effectively wrapped around my wrist. In this way, I can gradually free up more of the tail – or rather, of the ever-growing ball.

Sometimes, in the middle of the tangle, you come across a knot in one of the threads. You might be able to pull it open with your finger nails, or slide a needle under one of the loops and gently pull it looser, and in that case, once you’ve made one of the knot-loops big enough to pass the ball through, you can get rid of it. If it’s in a single thread, it’s easier just to leave it there, but if it’s two (or even more) knotted together, it’s got to be dealt with. However what’s even worse is when two threads have rubbed against each other long enough to effectively become stuck together, but not actually knotted in the sense of being wrapped around each other. These can be a nightmare to prise apart. If you can work out which ends belong to which thread, sometimes it’s possible to grasp both ends of one thread in one hand, and of the other in the other hand, and tug them apart, but then they’ll both be left with a fluffy bobble attached. And of course, they might snap – or you can cut it.

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Mind Full of…

The question I posed was: ‘Do I control my thoughts or do my thoughts control me?’ and the answer is fairly obvious – my thoughts define me, determine my experiences and control my life: I am my own story. How could it be otherwise? I think, therefore I am – how could I know I was alive if I didn’t think it? Although, of course, I only think that was the question – I may have misremembered it. I could go back and check, but I’m choosing to trust my memory on this occasion.

The ‘I’ who is typing this and the ‘me’ I’m describing are the same person, that goes without saying, indicated by use of the first person singular pronouns. Why did I say that? I have no idea. My thoughts are the outcome of genetic predispositions, my life experiences and external conditions, and they feed back on themselves and go round and round and make me who I am.

But can I control them? To some extent, I suppose I do – I can decide to concentrate on one particular subject or activity – like cooking a meal, for example, which involves performing a set of tasks. But even as I’m performing them, my thoughts don’t necessarily stay in one place –while I’m chopping an onion or stirring a pan, my thoughts can be anywhere – possibly planning the next task, but in my case, more likely thinking of something completely different.

Consider what my thoughts have been doing since I started writing this – reading the titles of a pile of DVDs which I found in the study yesterday and put on my desk; considering watching Gosford Park because I haven’t seen it in years and can’t remember anything about it except that I enjoyed it and it has an exceptional cast; trying to remember the surname of the actor named Tim who was in The Shawshank Redemption, knowing it’s not Burton (he’s a director) although I always get confused between them, wondering whether they’ve ever worked together, reading on the back of the box that it’s Tim Robbins and thinking ‘oh yes, of course!’, noticing how young he looks in the picture, and also how young Morgan Freeman looks, and wondering what Tim Robbins has done since. Then picking up a book of Victorian needlepoint patterns based on William Morris designs, and thinking how lovely they are, wondering if I could somehow incorporate them into my knitting, or if I should take up needlepoint again, and whether I should try to visit William Morris’s house at Kelmscott when things open up again, because I’ve never been there…

A gull flies right to left across a grey patch of cloud outside my window and catches my eye, leading it towards a plane crossing the other way, much higher, across the distant blue.

There’s a much misused and misunderstood concept called ‘mindfulness’, which derives from Zen Buddhism, and means focussing completely in the present moment. I’ve been trying to learn it for sixteen years.

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Rotting From the Roots

Sat down at the PC to start writing and remembered a) the mouse isn’t working and b) the top tool bar on word keeps appearing and disappearing and I can’t work out how to fix it. Weell… actually, after a few more minutes of trying the View tab and other things, I Googled it and found out that if I right click on the home tab it gives me a drop-down including ‘Minimize the ribbon’ which was ticked, so I unticked it and that worked. The first suggestion: press Ctrl F1, was stymied by the fact that I can’t see ‘F1’ on my keyboard. Don’t know how it got ticked in the first place, but I suspect it happened when I was thrashing around trying to get the mouse to work.

I suspect the mouse just needs a new battery, but spare batteries are downstairs and the mouse is upstairs, and by the time I got downstairs I’d forgotten I needed to get them. If I remember, I could take the mouse down when I go and do it then, but that would rely on me remembering to take it, remembering what I’d taken it for, then remembering to bring it back up again. For now, I’m getting more practised at using the touch pad.

Today, I feel the way this poinsettia looks. I used to buy a poinsettia every year, and this is how they always ended up looking. I think it’s down to over-watering – but you only have to do it once and there’s no getting back from the slippery slope. I’m always a bit erratic with my watering regime, I guess it’s to do with short term memory and lack of awareness. Some things die from lack of water, which is recoverable-from if you notice in time, but there’s no way back from over-watering.

I can tell you exactly how long I’ve had this one, because I bought it the day we went into Tier 3, the Thursday before Christmas. I know, because it was the day I took my cards to the post office and checked the local shops for a small turkey joint, then bought a little Christmas tree and this poinsettia on the way home. Then my family persuaded me to go to them for Christmas anyway, by promising to come and get me and bring me back, then two days later we went in Tier 4 and the plan changed again (but you already know that story).

In other words, this poor plant has been in my care for less than a fortnight, and this is what I’ve done to it.

However, that’s not why I’m feeling droopy, as though I’m rotting from my roots. It’s just that I woke up that way, as often happens. Maybe it’s because I’m always rotting from my roots, and I’m not sure whether there’s any way back from that. Well, nothing permanent, as far as I can tell, but at least I’m not actually dead yet.

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Monday Mouse Mayhem

‘This is the way the world turns…’

There was a line to go after that, it came into my head while I was making coffee, and went on for a little way, and I thought: this could be going somewhere, let’s follow it for a bit… But by the time I was sitting at the keyboard, I’d forgotten what I’d done with that second line, and so it’s gone, another aborted poem, and my head throws me a line: ‘…every song in my heart dies a bornin’.., not one of mine but from a song I knew fifty-odd years ago, and I have to sing it in my head till I get to the refrain and remember it’s ‘The Last Thing on my Mind’, by Tom somebody (not Lehrer) a sad little heart-brakey song which I always thought fitted will with Dylan’s ‘Don’t Think Twice, it’s Alright’, and if I was a singer I would sing them both at tonce, one after the other, two siodes of the same coin, but I never did because I’m not a singer.

Now something has happened to the mouse, it’s not working and it’s so long since I used the touch pad on this keyboard (even though I use the one on the laptop every time and don’t even know where the laptop mouse is), I just can’t seem to get it, and so everything since ‘…every…’ is now in italics and I can’t work out how to change it back.

Also did I mention that the top toolbar keeps disappearing, unless I move the cursor up there, which given what I just said about the mouse and not knowing how to use the touchpad, is tricky. But at least you can see that I’ve now rectified the italics, and also went back and corrected a lot of the typoes, but left just a few in to keep you on your toes, and also as a general illustration of my dyspraxia-fuelled nonsense, which I usually manage to cover up quite easily.

What an odd, yet oddly typical, start to the day. Also when I started the computer, my desktop was showing the image I was talking about a few weeks ago, the one of a harbour that I couldn’t place, but thought was either Italy or the south of France, and then couldn’t find and spent ages scrolling through the folder. This time I did identify it, checked the properties and found out it was taken on 10 March 2012, which I thought meant San Sebastian or Barcelona. Then I started looking for drafts of Single to Sirkeci  and couldn’t find where the files were, which is worrying. I found a very early version on the external hard drive, which I couldn’t open because it’s a different version of In Design, then I found a pdf of that draft, but that didn’t have the dates on each section, which I did in the later drafts…

Just realised I’ve written way over 500 words. Stopping now.

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Christmas at Home

Well here it is…

First time I’ve had Christmas in my own home for ten years. Not the first time I’ve blogged on Christmas Day but I can’t really think of what to say. Earlier I could, but now I’m not so sure. I think I’ll just go and get breakfast.

I feel I should write something to explain how I feel, except that… I don’t think I can express it very well. I can say I’m fine, and really I think I am, and the more I say on that theme, probably the less convincing it will seem, so maybe it’s best to say nothing.

I’m expecting Skype calls with both families today, and I got a turkey crown yesterday in the Co-op – not the same Co-op that had the sign saying none of their stores were selling turkeys, but my usual one. So I bought it though it will serve six, and the steak is consigned to the freezer!

I decided I needed some lights for my tiny little tree (which is about as long as between my elbow and hand), so on Tuesday I had a look for the box with all the Christmas stuff in the cupboard under the stairs – it wasn’t there, but I did find a large plastic folder with some of my artistic efforts from a few years back, lino prints and drink-and-draw sessions and some feeble attempts at watercolour from years earlier. I found a couple of poems scribbled on pages in sketchbooks too, neither of which I think had ever been typed up or turned into anything. I was going to blog one of them with the awful picture it came with, but didn’t get round to it.

As I couldn’t find the box, on Wednesday I ventured up into the loft. Getting the ladder down is enough of a challenge, but I did that and got my head into the loft, where I could see the box I wanted without going through the hatch, so pulled it towards me, then had to turn it end on to get it through, then tried to go down the steps, but couldn’t hold the box, thought I was going to trap my arm, then that I would trap my fingers, then let the box fall, then lost my balance and fell myself (from about halfway up the ladder). Plastic box shattered with a mighty crash, shards of red plastic (and glitter) everywhere, but miraculously, a set of four glass tumblers in a cardboard carton were intact, as were two boxes of glass baubles from Prague. The only casualty seemed (at first sight) to be a tree topper star which lost one of its arms, and was no great loss, but later I discovered that one of the banister posts had broken in the middle, which I guess must have been caused by my body rolling into it – I don’t remember that happening, but nothing else heavy enough got that close.

But my tree has lights.

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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.

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Compensations of Reading

I don’t want to write today. I have nothing to say that I haven’t said a million times before, only the shit I think of every morning.

A while back I thought I would write about the Madwoman in the Attic, but I never did. What are the other things I’ve thought I might write about? I have a file with a list of quotes from my posts where I’ve started a new train of thought near the end of the 500 words and then I think – I’ll come back to that – so I copy and paste it into this table. But the only time I look at it is when I have something to add, and those seem to come in clusters, there’ll be a few close together and then I’ll forget about it again for months.

One day maybe, I’ll go back and read everything I’ve written and it will make a kind of sense, a picture of who I am and my life and my feelings and thoughts. Really? A kind of sense? Or just a god-awful mess?

I know, I know, it’s a shitty time of year, I’ve said that before, I’ve hated this time of year for ages – and no, it’s not just because I’m on my own – anyway, I’m not, I have my kids and grandkids.

Anyway, saying that is just too simplistic. This dread I’m feeling is no different really from the dread I always get before I have to do something, go somewhere, even when I’m going out in my camper van. I don’t want to have to pack, I panic when I know that I have to choose clothes for several days. I don’t want to have to sort out the house ready to leave it for a few days, with a virtual stranger coming in every day to feed the cat. I don’t want – god help me – to wrap presents. And I don’t want to drive to Bedford, but I definitely don’t want to go by train.

I want to get lost inside a book. I want that total absorption that only reading a good book can provide – but I have to ration myself because I have things to do. Even radio isn’t such a good substitute, and as for telly – I don’t know why I dislike it so much, and yet I still watch it every evening. I’m not even talking about the quality of the content – it’s something inherent in the technology, it’s too busy, it demands too much attention but somehow simultaneously it’s too distracting so my brain can’t focus on it and gets bored with trying to take it in and wanders off, and then I find I’ve missed something and get frustrated. Maybe it’s a dyspraxic thing. It happens with reading sometimes too, but in general I’d say reading is much more satisfying. This is why I managed without telly quite happily for ten years, but somehow I’ve got sucked back into relying on it.