Category: madwoman in the attic

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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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Everything in the Garden

How am I to deal with the mornings? Exercising first thing is supposed to get the endorphins going. I keep trying, but I’m not convinced that’s working for me any more. I went out into the garden to water the plants but got depressed at how scraggy and tired everything looks, how little colour there is (except for the red valerian – which isn’t really valerian, but I can never remember its real name, and it spreads everywhere).

Every day I struggle to find something decent to take pictures of – I committed myself at the start of the year to posting a photo on Facebook for every day of the year, but as I don’t go anywhere it has become a chore to find anything, especially as I can’t see anything on my phone when I’m outdoors, so have to keep pointing and clicking then half the time come back in and find I’ve completely missed the intended subject or chopped it in half. So I’m posting a lot of pictures of my cat, who can be relied on to be photogenic, and as far as the garden goes, sometimes I’m able to get close up to individual flowers before they give up and die (quite often they are weeds anyway) and no long shots of the garden to show how little interest it holds.

The hydrangea is the next thing which has flowers currently in bud, opening one floret at a time. I’ve also got another hydrangea which doesn’t do so well, the last two years it hasn’t flowered at all, and apparently gives up and dies around mid-July, though it has dragged itself back to life in late spring both years. The lavender has no flower buds at all that I can see – I pruned it last year to stop it getting over-straggly, I did it immediately after the flowers died, which I thought was what you’re supposed to do so it doesn’t affect the next year’s flowers, but that doesn’t seem to have worked. The sedums are in bud though, so I suppose I have those to look forward to. I think there used to be some day lilies in one of the beds, but can’t see any signs of flower buds yet, just a confused lot of leaves which I can’t identify. Last year I let the red valerian have its head – because it’s colourful, at least – and it has pretty much taken over everything, along with the weedy white cranes-bill geraniums which sprout up all over the ‘lawn’ (in between the buttercups) and pretty much everywhere else.

I have thought about having the ‘patio’ properly paved, but it’s quite interesting seeing the range of weeds that push up through the gravel. I forgot to mention the fennel, something else that appears everywhere. And the white snapdragons that I found (in the gravel) when I hacked back some of the valerian – I took some pictures, none were good enough to share, and they haven’t flowered since.

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Parallels

Staring at the screen trying to think of something ‘nice’ to say. Growing sense of discomfort all week, not just because of the heat – which even I have to admit tipped over into ‘hot’ yesterday – might even be in the red today (thirty plus), if the forecasts are correct.  

Looking back, I often put forward my travelling times in 2012 and 2013 (counting my sojourn in Prague as a continuation) as a happy time of my life, but it wasn’t always idyllic. Partly that was because of the irritations and frustrations of planning and organisation: finding accommodation; co-ordinating with friends and family I was hoping to visit; deciding routes; booking tickets; etc etc. There was also a degree of guilt over the pointlessness, self-indulgence and irresponsibility of what I was doing (although the blog posts I wrote at the time did lead – eventually – to the completion of ‘Single to Sirkeci’, and there’s still potential in there for another book – or two). The third source of stress was the knowledge that the life I was living would have to end at some time and I would be forced to return to the life I’d run away from – or some hazily understood and recognised version of it.

Perhaps you can see where this train of thought is going. There are clearly parallels between the feelings I had then, and the ones I’m having now. Daily life has its irritations and frustrations – though not quite as dramatic as working out where I’m going to be sleeping tomorrow night, and where travelling to after that. I’m certainly feeling guilt over the way I spend my days, the worthlessness of my life and the activities (or inactivity) I engage in, although that seems more forgivable now I’m officially ‘retired’, ie I’m no longer obliged to look for paid work in order to pay the bills (I do feel guilt over that in itself, but I’ve learned to come to terms with it). The third point, of course, is uneasiness about what happens next, moving back into a life of having to engage with the external world more directly after this period of quiet, solitude and reflection, of pleasing myself.

I look inside myself to see if I’m any better prepared than I was when I came back in 2012, or from Prague in early 2014. Every morning I check myself and think: nope, I’m still me, no sign of any miraculous transformation yet. I poke around in the past and I think I’m gaining a better understanding of who I am and the factors that made me, but still can’t find any way of unravelling the threads and exorcising the demons.

I didn’t want to write anything this morning. One of those mornings when it didn’t seem possible to find anything ‘nice’ to say. However, as I approach my quota, I’m not too dissatisfied with what I have written.

Over three months of this ‘lockdown diary’, I must have written about 45,000 words. Maybe there’s something in there worth saving.

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Same Old Same Old

Every day starts the same, same old stuff to get out of bed to.

Same old effort to justify myself to myself, to occupy myself – my time, hands, part of my brain that doesn’t need to be taxed too much. Just ‘do’ it, whatever ‘it’ is, get on with it. Going through the same old pointless motions. Trying to manage the thoughts in my head. Trying to drag out words from the back of my brain, words that never add up to anything, words that no one wants to read. Piling them up inside my computer, words upon sentences upon paragraphs and on and on, words that might last forever out in cyberspace but will never be consigned to ink on paper.

Trying not to think.

But when there is something else to do, something else I need to do, or feel I ‘should’ do, it’s even worse. Then I panic, because I don’t want to be dragged out into the world.

What a sorry specimen I am.

Yesterday I knew to expect a parcel delivery. But I ate breakfast in the garden anyway. And when I came inside there was a note through the door from UPS saying they were sorry they’d missed me, but the parcel is now at Costcutter on Such-and-such street, and if I don’t collect it within ten days it will be returned to the sender. Bugger.

It’s a big heavy parcel, too. So I’ll have to take the car – I had a similar one last year and tried walking with it, and wished I hadn’t. But the car hasn’t moved since I got it back from its MOT right at the start of lockdown, in late March. What if it doesn’t start? Then I’ll have to call the guys from the garage. When can I pick up the parcel? Not till tomorrow (ie, today now). I couldn’t spend 24 hours worrying about whether or not the car would start. So I had to drive it somewhere.

That took effort. But it did start. Which was a relief, because what if it hadn’t, and I had to go through the same conversation with the garage guys that I have every spring about the van (which as far as I know is still immobile. I spoke to them about the MOT a couple of weeks ago, and they confirmed that it doesn’t need to be done now till December, but although there are two sets of keys, and they have one from when I asked them to get it going pre-lockdown, and I have the other, I can’t get into it because they have the only one for the garage.)

But the car started. And I drove it about the back streets for a while, but all the roads are a mess because they’re laying 5g cables everywhere. So today I will have to think of a different route to go and collect my parcel.

And for this I’m getting wound up. I am a wreck.

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Socially-Distanced Yoga

After I finished blogging yesterday, I got a text from my yoga teacher to say that she was holding a socially-distanced class in the park in the evening and would I be interested? So I answered yes, and then spent the whole day stressing over the fact that I’d committed myself to going out and interacting with other people.

I went early, thinking I could go to the seafront to take pictures or take something in the park, because I’m rapidly running out of anything photogenic in my garden for my daily Facebook photo post, but I saw them all sitting around when I got there and couldn’t think of a way to avoid joining the group. We sat around for quite a while chatting because we were waiting for the last two people – as it turned out they hadn’t been able to find places to park. I was surprised at how busy the park was, and I presume the beach (two minutes walk further on) must have been the same. There were seven of us in the end: the teacher, her daughter, me and four others, two of whom I knew by sight, but I wasn’t sure about the last two, though presumably I’ve met them before. I don’t know any of them very well, and I didn’t say very much.

I thought it might just be a short session, but no, it was the full hour and a half, including lying down at the end. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it – though I felt a bit awkward during the chanting (given that there were other people around, although we were in quite a secluded part of the park). I’d dressed in my usual leggings, tee shirt and sweatshirt, thinking it would be colder later when I had to walk home, I felt a bit overdressed at first by comparison with some of the others, but it did cool down before the end so I was grateful for that.

I went telling myself that I always come back from the sessions in normal times with a smile on my face, the five-minutes-just-round-the-corner community centre sessions. I didn’t feeling exactly elated walking back from the park, but thinking about it now, I’m glad I did it and I guess I’ll go again.

I was very unsettled all day yesterday, I suppose partly in anticipation. Today all I have to anticipate is taking the bins out and Zoom meditation for an hour at seven. I need to go to the health food shop to see if they have whole wheat flour – my last loaf had to be all white because that’s all I could get in Tesco. And I thought I’d go and check if the florist is open, as they sell garden plants too – in normal times – and my sad garden needs something to brighten it up. But who knows how many of those small shops will be opening again?

So maybe I’ll go out today – or maybe not.

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Hang it all.

I wait in the darkness
hoping for an answer.

Linda Rushby 22 June 2020

…popped into my head. Actually, it went through a couple of edits before I wrote it out. The first version of the second line was ‘trying to find an answer’, but that felt a bit unbalanced, so it became ‘Searching for an answer’ then I asked myself: am I really ‘searching’? So it became ‘hoping’, or it could have been ‘waiting’, both much more passive.

Don’t even know why I thought that in the first place, because the last thing I can remember thinking about was hanging pictures, which has been in my mind a lot recently because a large part of the mess in the study is piles of the things, which haven’t been put up in the three and a half years I’ve lived here and they’re all around me when I’m writing (incidentally, that reminds me of something I thought earlier about using the passive voice as a way of absolving yourself of responsibility, like saying to the cat: ‘your water hasn’t been changed, has it?’ instead of ‘I haven’t changed your water’, which was an actual conversation I had when I was feeding her this morning).

And may I say that anyone who is now thinking: ‘Poor old bat, this lockdown thing really has sent her loopy’ doesn’t know me at all well, because that is exactly the kind of thing I have always done, lockdown or not.

So, as I was saying, although I’ve lived here three and a half years I still haven’t put pictures on the walls, except in the kitchen, where there were already quite a few picture hooks when I moved in. That’s the clue – the lack of picture hooks, and my inability to put them up – inability, not laziness, because for some reason I have lost that skill with the hammer which I must have had at one time, because I put up loads of picture hooks in my flat in Bedford, but now all that happens when I try is that I beat the hooks flat or knock bits of plaster off, or, of course, painfully smash my digits. I put this down mostly to the walls being too hard, but dyspraxia and failing eyesight probably come into it too.

When I was in my last (rented) flat, I bought some Velcro stuff that’s supposedly made for hanging pictures, but never used it because I thought that would probably make just as much mess on the walls (if not more) than knocking nails in. Yesterday I found it, in only the fourth desk drawer I looked in (amazing!) But looking at it now, I can’t believe it would be strong enough – certainly not for the biggest of my black and white Paris photos in the chunky black frames.

Maybe I’ll have a rummage, and see what I’ve got. Some are framed cross stitch and tapestries, which I’d happily consign to the loft. But I must have some things worth hanging.

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Jigsaws

Said a painter called Vincent Van Gogh,
‘My surname sounds just like a cough!
It causes such trouble,
because foreigners struggle,
and some of them don’t even know.’

Linda Rushby, 21 June 2020

Well, I’ve got that off my chest.

Very late this morning. I woke about the usual time but haven’t been able to get anything in gear so far.

Lay in bed thinking; ‘Why do I bother to do anything?’ Exercise, meditation, shower, blog… nothing particularly unpleasant about any of them, all likely to make me feel better, if anything, but I couldn’t be arsed. Who knows, let alone cares, if I don’t do those things? Only me. I am in sole control of how I start my Sunday morning – any morning – the only obligations are the ones I left off the list: feed cat and open the door to let her out, and even if I missed those for once, there wouldn’t be any sanctions, but I would feel pretty mean.

The sun is shining – once those things are completed (and I’m currently on the last one), I can sit outside and eat breakfast, and then the day is my own. Any day is my own. What shall I do with this one?

I need a new project – all the ones currently on the go are beginning to bore me. Maybe this passion for crochet is waning, and I need to find a new one. Current best guess is jigsaws – I started one on Friday. Some weeks ago, when lockdown was well bedded in and I was responding by frivolous online shopping, I ordered three jigsaws from ads on Facebook, none of which have yet turned up. Having cleared the kitchen table of the card-making/paper-crafting stuff which had been there since the beginning of March, I thought that maybe if I started doing one of the many jigsaws I’ve acquired in the past and never done, that would speed them on their way. I chose the most recent one, which is of Van Gogh’s painting of the café terrace at night – which is what inspired me to pen the limerick above,

Of course, I could also put my energies into something practical and useful, like tidying the study. I started on that yesterday – emptied a whole box of old photos and albums and stuck them on a shelf, then put the box in the recycling bin – which sounds good, but I only put that particular box in here last week some time, prior to that it had spent some time in the hall, after I took it out of the Chinese cabinet in the front room so I could clear away some of the bags of yarn and half finished crochet projects. Okay, slow progress, but it is progress.

Yesterday I ordered a replacement stylus for my turntable. When that comes, I can start playing my old records again, maybe transfer them to the PC. There’s a project. Hope they’re not too damaged.

I could even sort them into alphabetical order.

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Happy Solstice

The northern hemisphere summer solstice, as you probably know, is usually on the 21st June, but fluctuates because the convention that Earth’s orbit around the sun takes 365 times as long as each rotation is an approximation – the real figure is closer to 365.24, but with the addition of an extra day every four years, it’s a pretty good approximation to keep things consistent within the average human lifetime – though it does go adrift over the centuries, hence the introduction in the Gregorian calendar of another fix to remove a day from three centuries in four – an improvement adopted by the English less than three centuries ago, years after the rest of Europe, and then only with much grumbling, propagation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, and rioting in the streets. Plus ҫa change.

There I go again. Nobody likes a smart-arse. But the point is… when I’m doing the Cassandra smart-arse thing, it’s not that I’m trying to show off – well, maybe it is, but only because in the normal run of things, I feel there is so little I can show off about. In the normal run of life I am so chaotic, clumsy, awkward, forgetful, messy, slow, disorganised… dyspraxic. That’s who I am, it’s who I’ve been all my life, and (though I’m not a big fan of putting labels on people) it’s a relief to have a word for it.

When I started seeing my therapist, I told her all this and she began by trying to find a more positive word than ‘chaotic’ (though the one she came up with: ‘ditsy’ – didn’t strike me as an improvement). Like most people I’ve tried to speak to about this, she was making the assumption that it was just a story I was told as a child, and that I’ve been repeating to myself ever since, it’s not who I really am.

One day, after I’d been seeing her for a couple of months, she suddenly said: ‘What you’re saying reminds me of another client I used to see – I think you might be dyspraxic.’ So I looked it up and read the characteristics associated with dyspraxia – and saw myself laid out, even down to strange apparently random things like: not being able to read my own handwriting; lacking confidence in my appearance because I can’t do hair, make-up and have no dress-sense; took years to learn how to ride a bike…

I find it difficult to explain this to people. It sounds like excuses, doesn’t it? I think that’s probably been the problem all my life – I am so conscious of my shortcomings because surely, with a little more effort, I could find ways round them? So I try and fail and get frustrated and hate myself.

Maybe I should come back to this another day. Because what I started to write about was the Cassandra thing, because sometimes it feels as though a head full of useless knowledge is about the only thing that I’m good for.  

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Pointless Pills

I was going to try sitting with my anger again this morning, then I got lured into Facebook by two private messages. You get into these conversations and then… you don’t know how to bring them to an end.

Then because I had the browser open to answer the messages, I started looking at the ‘highlights’ which Firefox puts on the page when you open a tab, and some of them look really quite interesting, so today I’ve already opened three… I must stop, I really must, or I won’t be able to write anything.

Well, what can I say, does it matter if I do or don’t write anything? Yes, some days it’s good, some days it’s not. It may be helping with the therapeutic self-understanding process, but it isn’t stimulating me into making progress on any of my three suspended writing projects, or to start anything new. Just more of the same.

It rained in the night, but the sun is starting to come through the clouds now. The outside table and chairs will be damp. What time will it be by the time I’ve finished this and had breakfast? I have no idea. What will I do with the rest of the day? Ditto.

I wonder how I’d be now if I’d carried on taking antidepressants? I started in 2001 – almost twenty years ago – and took them till the end of 2004, though I never felt they helped in any way, didn’t even improve my sleeping (which was why I started taking them). I kept going back to the GP and saying they didn’t help and he told me to take more, till I was taking four a day. I was taking them all the way through the two-year research contract I had from 2001 to 2003, last full time job I ever had, and when the contract ran out I knew there was no future for me in academia, though I kept on applying for jobs for a couple of years more.

In the summer of 2004 I went to see a hypnotherapist, she said she could solve my problems in six sessions. I did feel somewhat better and started to wean myself off the pointless pills. In that time I ducked out of auditioning for ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’, and she said that was good because I was ‘learning to say no’, but actually it was because I made the choice not to put myself through the stress and humiliation. Then later when I turned up to help backstage the producer asked why I wasn’t singing, made me promise to audition for the next show, ‘Titanic’, which I did, opened my mouth in front of the panel and what came out was so pathetic that the musical director got cross and made me start again. Completely humiliated – as expected.

So I weaned myself off the antidepressants, and didn’t notice any different, finished at the end of December 2004, joined a meditation group in January 2005