I started writing, but after about 100 words looked up and realised nothing was happening, the last couple of sentences I’d typed weren’t there. I thought I must have accidentally overwritten it, as sometimes happens when I’m not paying attention, then I found that my mouse wasn’t working, tried the touchpad on my keyboard and that wasn’t working, nothing was working, I had no cursor. I waited for a while, then tried alt-del-ctrl and that didn’t do anything either, everything was frozen, so I switched off and started it up again. When I finally got back into Word, what I’d written wasn’t autosaved, so I had to start all over again, even though I didn’t really want to write this morning anyway.

When I got home on Tuesday I called my cat a few times, but she didn’t respond. This isn’t like her, when I’ve been away she’s usually really pleased to see me, but I didn’t worry, thinking she would come out when she was ready. I spent about an hour in the kitchen, very excited to have wifi in there at last – my son installed a booster for me when he was here on Saturday, and I now have wifi in the kitchen and bedrooms, which has been a huge bugbear for me in the four years I’ve been living here. I thought she’d appear, but she didn’t, so I went round everywhere calling her name and looking in her usual hiding places. Got my dinner – and hers – then afterwards went into the front room for my evening telly-watching. Still no cat. About eight o’clock I went all round upstairs again, and in the study (I’d been in there before) I found a little face peeping out nervously from the bottom of a book case hidden in the corner behind piles of junk and stuff.

I need to do something about this room. It is so awful. I just leave it and leave it and let it get worse.

Thursday, 06 May 2021

That’s what I got to yesterday and then gave up. Maybe today I’ll just fill up what’s left. This week I don’t seem able to come up with a full 500 words on any day. The words are there, they always are, but the inner critic keeps batting them away as being too boring or too depressing or whatever.

I got a text from my daughter, asking if I want to go and stay with them after the 17^th but before she goes back to work. I told her about losing and finding the cat, and about the mess in the study. She and her sister-in-law want to go away without the kids and husbands for a few days, maybe to the cabin and I have a key now, so I could get the train and she could meet me at the station. Or she might come here and help me sort out the study, then take me back with her. I sent her photos of the mess.

I’ve been to Sainsbury’s already this morning to find that they didn’t have any of the usual cat food (trust me, it’s not worth buying any other kind), and, more seriously that they didn’t have any Marmite. I asked a young man who was restocking the bakery shelves, and he showed me where it should be and said ‘it’s in short supply everywhere isn’t it?’ Is it? I didn’t know, and I’ve completely run out. ‘You could try one of the larger stores, or’ and he lowered his voice confidentially and pointed across the road: ‘Tesco’s!’

I will return to Tesco, but I wasn’t about to go over there with my three bags of shopping from Sainsbury’s, so I came home.

I had a bad night last night – they’re never good, but this was particularly bad, and I don’t know why. I tried listening to two programmes I’d downloaded, and they were both pretty depressing, one the fifth episode of a series, and I’m not sure if it’s the last or just the last I’ve downloaded, and the other the start of the second series of something else. They were oddly similar, both about feisty women in history, one being Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the other a fictional Icelandic woman from some period in history, which come to think of it could be about the same. The actresses sounded very similar, both with Northern English accents (in Eleanor’s case, presumably to emphasise her provincial back ground) – I suppose it could even have been the same actress, but I haven’t checked. I’m not sure I want to listen to any more of either of them, not even in the early hours – as I said, they were both very depressing, although Eleanor was the less sympathetic of the two.

Although I’ve lived with this insomnia all my life, so that it’s part of my life, I still keep wondering if there is any better way of dealing with it. I lay there doing my downwards-counting in my head, and thought: well, soon it should be warm enough to be worth getting up and sitting in another room when I can’t sleep, even though it’s never helped when I’ve tried it before. But I feel so tired when I’m lying there, I don’t have the energy to get out of bed – and that of course carries over to the morning as well, I never want to get up, but I also hate lying awake.

I say it’s interesting because instinct tells me that my tendency to procrastinate is somehow linked to dyspraxia, but the stern voices in my head say: ‘no, that doesn’t make sense, it’s just because you’re a lazy cow and you’re trying to make excuses by blaming dyspraxia for everything’. The tendency to dither, take too long over things, and get easily distracted is certainly related to dyspraxia, as is the generation of so much chaos in your surroundings that you learn to ignore it and accept it as a fact of life – not to mention feelings of exhaustion and lack of energy to tackle any of it.

I also believe that lockdown has been responsible for encouraging this kind of procrastination. It creates a sense of unlimited time and reduces stress by eliminating the need to leave the house and engage with the world, while also removing the enforced motivator of anticipation that outsiders might come into the house and see what a shithole it is, which is usually a major driver for me to engage with housework.

That said, I’ve been making more of an effort against the washing-up-sitting-in-the-sink phenomenon. In my dim-and-distant days as a Young Mum, I was well known for my inability to sit down and relax with a drink until after the washing up had been dealt with. These days I can’t wait to get out of the kitchen-dining room and retreat to the sofa, my latest project and a couple of episodes of ‘Law and Order’ (my latest retro-catch-up series from twenty years ago, which has intriguing plots and engaging characters without the visceral gore that’s obligatory these days). In the last few months I’ve been struggling to revive that past diligence by at least making an effort to leave pots and pans standing for no longer than one day – last week I even found myself one morning spontaneously cleaning the top of my gas hob while I was waiting for the coffee machine.

The neighbouring house on the side that shares a wall with my kitchen is rented out on short-term lets, so the tenants change quite frequently, and I don’t have much contact with them. The last few mornings I have heard the sound of a plug being inserted in a socket the other side of the wall while I’m having breakfast, and then the drone of a hoover. Every. Single. Day.

Is it me, or is that ‘normal’?

Well, all that happy news has got me started, but I don’t know where I’m going from here. Except that I’ve just discovered that I have two avatars on WordPress – possibly three, if ‘Southsea Storytellers’ also counts. Sorry, I just got distracted again, into trying to work out how the ‘community’ feature works on WordPress. I really know nothing about the software I use every day – except the bits I use every day. I’m probably using it all wrong.

But that’s how I found out about the other avatar – from the community feature. I saw a picture of my own face from 2008 in Paris, not a bad picture but terrible resolution when it was squeezed onto an avatar. I clicked on it and it took me to ‘Gravatar’ which , rather disturbingly, had a ‘Contact me’ followed by an email address I still use – fortunately, no one has bothered to contact me through that route, as far as I’m aware – or maybe they’ve all been trapped by the spam filter.

I don’t really know what I’m doing and I don’t know what to say about it. Pretty much sums up my attitude to life this morning. I don’t know why I write 500 words a day. Sometimes it works and sometimes it just goes horribly wrong. Mostly I feel better for doing it, but today it is just a massive slog.

Sunny at the moment. I’ve got no plans to go anywhere today. I might go to the knitting shop – I said that last Monday, when they opened after lockdown, then I found out that I have to make an appointment (it’s a really tiny space) and I didn’t feel like committing myself to a specific time so didn’t do it, even though I’d been waiting for it to open to get a 5.5mm circular needle, which I need for one of the jumpers I’m making (the old one is on the verge of breaking, with one of the needle ends coming away from the connecting plastic wire, if that means anything to you). But I’ve got plenty of other projects I can be getting on with, and even if I finish it I won’t want to wear it till next winter, so there’s no rush.

I just remembered I haven’t typed up the poem I wrote yesterday morning. A couple of the words were quite hard to read, I think I’ve got them now, but I’d probably better write it up soon – if I want to keep it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ennui

Today I feel nothing.
no words in my head,
no thoughts worth sharing
just a dull emptiness.

Why am I here,
staring at this screen?
The keys touch my fingers
but they won’t help,
they are mocking me.   

Why am I writing
staccato rhythm?
Short lines?
Empty words?

Yesterday the spinner
rolled out her thread
into this future,
which became
just a day,
like any other.

On my desk I just noticed a seed pod. This must sound bizarre. How can there be a seed pod on my desk and me be surprised to see it there? Believe me, there could be anything on this desk and I wouldn’t know where it came from. But thinking back through the last few days, I remember emptying out a drawer from a cheap plastic chest of drawers, one of three which I bought in B&M the first summer I moved here, to store stuff in my flat, things which were in boxes which I was going to ‘sort out’ into these drawers, but in the event they just moved from one chaotic mess into another. And this week I decided I would empty one of the chests and put it out in my new shed, for storing shed stuff, with the vague sense that this would somehow make the chaos more manageable. Each chest had four drawers, some of them only contained things which were already in boxes which could be moved and put on top of the IKEA shelves. Another was mostly full of cassettes and CDs, a staple gun and various other junk which I piled up on the desk, including, apparently a seed pod, like an elongated, thin brown pea pod. Before I moved here, I collected all sorts of seeds from the garden of the old house, and put them all in envelopes with the names written on the front, but I have no idea what happened to any of them – I didn’t plant them, that’s for sure.

This long, thin brown pod looks vaguely familiar, as though I should know where it’s from. I might even have taken it from a plant in a park. There were still seeds inside it, I popped them out while I was thinking about what to write, and they are sitting in a cluster on my phone, about eight or ten of them at a guess, papery round the edges with a brown centre about a millimetre across. I could try planting them and see what happens, though after all these years it’s unlikely that anything will grow.

But I need to find a seed and make it grow, and this morning that feels really hard. I pick up the staple gun – I bought it over thirty years ago, when we were living in the USA, and I’m not sure whether I still have staples to fit it, and if so where they are. I probably can’t get any more now.

But I haven’t used it in thirty years anyway.

The coming of spring should be a source of joy, so why am I so grumpy? Partly because of the shambles in the garden, I guess – not that I’m ungrateful for my snazzy new shed, but it’s brought home to me the amount of work that needs to be done everywhere else. Gardening is one of those things that I have in times past been very enthusiastic about – or enthusiastic about planning, thinking and fantasising about, at least. Like most things which require sustained effort and attention, I rapidly lose interest when the results don’t live up to my hopes – or just generally lose interest when other things take over my time and attention.

A recent discussion on the dyspraxia Facebook page centred on the word ‘dyspraxia’ itself, which has been concocted from Latin or Greek (maybe both) to mean ‘bad at doing’, just as ‘dsylexia’ translates as ‘bad at reading’ or dyscalculia ‘bad at arithmetic’. (BTW, I did pick on the fact that I mistyped ‘dyslexia’, but left it because it amused me.) To me, ‘bad at doing’ sums up everything perfectly, but some contributors to the discussion found it excessively negative, and were arguing for the use of the term preferred in the US, which is ‘Developmental Co-ordination Disorder’, or DCD. I don’t like this at all, and not just because it’s American. ‘Developmental’ makes it sound as though it’s something that occurs in the developing child, and hence the implication is that you can ‘grow out of it’, which I can confirm is a long way from the truth. Then ‘Co-ordination’ puts the stress on the physical effects on gross motor skills, reminiscent of the old term: ‘clumsy child syndrome’, whereas the main impacts for me are those on brain functions: working memory, planning, organisation, absorbing and retaining information, time management, lack of concentration etc.

Not to mention, shit at gardening.  

I have been getting discouraged about a lot of things lately – mainly the garden. My Facebook memories keep showing all the lovely things which were in flower at this time last year. Someone said to me the other day that my garden is ‘blooming’, but he was judging it from Facebook, where I have posted pictures of every single flower I’ve seen so far – sometimes several pictures of the same one, over a number of days, as I’m still trying to post a photo every day. The actual total of flowers so far has been: one yellow and three white daffodils on the forecourt, and in the back garden one blue hyacinth and a handful of mini daffodils; two hellebores (one single and, more recently, one double flower), a few blossoms on the rosemary which were only visible if you looked very carefully and a couple of yellow celandines under the camellia (which I only just remembered). The rest is a desert of weeds, rotting planks and general junk currently in transit between the sheds. Is this disaster down to the hot, dry summer last year, or a total lack of interest and attention? I assume most likely a combination of the two.

It’s the curse of social media. However honest I try to be about my general worthlessness and self loathing, it seems that people want to keep seeing me in a more positive light. Which is very frustrating – but on the other hand, if they could see me more clearly, they wouldn’t want to be my friends anyway. And then I’d feel even worse.

I honestly don’t know how to shake off these feelings, and more and more it seems that there isn’t any escape. The effort required feels overwhelming, but so is the effort to pretend to be what I’m not: brave, positive, upbeat, hopeful, happy etc. Feelings always take control over intentions to change, to find a better way to be.

I almost didn’t write today. Perhaps it would be better if I didn’t throw all this out into the void. But I usually feel better afterwards

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

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

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

She’s getting old. We all get old and resigned to the way things are. I guess that’s the way I’m feeling at the moment – except when I’m in a panic over something or other. Lockdown lethargy.

On my desk there’s an oyster shell. I don’t know where it came from – well, the beach, obviously, and before that in the sea, wrapped around an oyster. But how did it come to be on my desk? My house is full of oyster shells, and ‘interesting’ pebbles, picked up from beach walks. But this one in particular… I don’t know – it must have fallen out of a box of ‘stuff’ or something. I don’t know what it is about oyster shells – I used to think they were ugly, not like the pretty little scallops, rosy pink and smaller than my thumbnail, or the slipper limpets with their oddly shaped cavity. They are rough and monochrome and no two are ever alike, but if you turn them over and the light catches in just the right way, sometimes the gleam of mother-of-pearl will take you by surprise. I used that image in my poem ‘Beachcomber’. The document on my computer has it as:

The shimmer of an oyster shell,
Like tears for a lost pearl.

Linda Rushby July 2015

That’s funny – I could have sworn I used ‘gleam’. Maybe I changed it. Poems are not immutable. But when I check the book, I find that I published it as:

‘Oyster shells shimmer
Like tears for a lost pearl.

‘Beachcombing‘, Linda Rushby April 2016

Well well well. That scans better, and it has the alliteration too, but I still like ‘gleam’, it has a lovely sound.

Which reminds me, someone bought a copy of ‘Beachcombing’ from Amazon last year, the first time it’s sold other than sales I’ve made in person.