Category: persistence

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Hollyhock Quest

Almost two decades ago, when I was a novice blogger, in a different place, in a different life, I wrote a post titled ‘Hollyhocks, Schmollyhocks’. I remember that some of the content was quite momentous in its way, but not why I chose that title. That blog is no longer online, but somewhere in my archives I have a copy of what I wrote, which I could relatively easily read again, but don’t intend to till after I finish writing and posting this.

But yesterday saw the culmination of my five year quest to grow hollyhocks in my garden, which happened as follows:

2018: I bought a tray of six small hollyhock plants from B&Q, and planted them along the sunny fence in my garden. None of them grew to more than a few inches high.

2019: In the spring, I searched along the fence for any signs of my hollyhock plants. They had all survived the winter, and I hoped that at least one would grow, but by the autumn, the only one which was still showing any sign of (rather stunted) life was the one nearest the house. I bought some hollyhock seeds.

2020: In the spring, I sought out the last surviving plant, the one nearest the house, and tended, watered and fed it, determined that I would coax it into growth at last. I guess that might have worked, if the snails hadn’t got to it (which in retrospect I concluded might have been what happened to the others). I also sowed the seeds I’d bought, but the measly few seedlings that grew big enough to be put outside in pots were also snipped off by my mollusc friends. In the autumn, on a day out in Chichester, I collected some seed pods from a 7 foot high hollyhock growing on a grass verge.

2021: In the spring, I tried to find that one plant that had been there the previous year, but with no success. I planted half the seeds I’d collected, but when they were starting to appear, I went away to visit my family, and when I came back, all the seedlings had shrivelled up. I planted some more, and managed to coax them into living long enough to make a nice tasty salad for the marauding molluscs. I still had some seeds left, and picked a few more pods on a late summer return visit to Chichester.

2022: In the spring, I planted seeds again and grew them in pots in the kitchen. When the time came to put them outside, I researched anti-mollusc methods and discovered that slugs and snails are attracted by alcohol and can be trapped by leaving out beer in shallow containers, which they fall into and drown – in fact, it’s not so much the beer as the yeast/fermentation smell that lures them, so I started putting out a concoction of yeast, sugar and water in plastic takeaway boxes around the garden, and it did the trick, to some extent.

I also bought a fairly well grown (about two feet) plant from a local garden centre – the first time I’d seen a semi-mature plant on sale. It even had flower buds, but sadly when I got off the bus I found that the tallest stem had broken, and it never did flower (last year). But it was still alive, and quite tough-looking and sturdy, so I came up with a scheme to protect it.

In my garden I have a stack of decorative border edging ceramic tiles, left behind by the previous owner. I dug out a small patch of grass by the shady fence, a square the size of one tile on each edge, put some rotted compost and plant food in the bottom, planted the hollyhock, and packed it round with coffee grounds (which are supposed to deter slugs and snails). I’m not sure why I thought the tiny walls would keep them out, given that they happily climb up the fence behind, but it made me feel better. I made another mini-wall next to the first, and two more against the sunny fence on the other side of the garden, and planted the three toughest-looking of my hollyhock seedlings, one in each. I kept them topped up with coffee grounds and watered during last summer’s drought – and the last month.

2023: Yesterday I was rewarded by my first hollyhock flowers – not from the plant I bought, but from one of the seedlings I grew myself. The spot on the sunny fence seems to suit it better than the shady side. I had no idea what colour the flowers would be until a couple of days ago, but I’m very happy with this lovely pink. The other three also have flower buds – even the two growing in the shade, so maybe there’ll be other colours too.

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Life and Writing

I was going to go to the beach, out for breakfast and then to the shop on the way home, but it was raining. I got up and went to look out of the window, and thought: ‘That’s a large cat sitting on the flat roof of the sheds behind the back wall’, then it got up and turned so I could see it sideways on, and I realised it was a fox. That’s the second time I’ve seen one in the last few months.

There was quite a storm in the night, I heard the wind at one point, it was really wild. It looked as though the rain was settling in for the day, but now the sun’s shining. Still, it will take a while before the benches dry out, and it’s not worth going out to sit on a damp bench to eat breakfast, plus the cafés will be getting pretty full by this time, so I’ll stay here and write.

I was going to write some more about planning and failing, but in the shower I started thinking about ‘The Long Way Back’ again. I said I would start work on it when I’d finished my proof reading job, then I read a few old blog posts and got very depressed remembering those times, and now it looks as though I’m going to be pretty tied up with family things until the middle of next week (or the week after next, depending on when you think ‘this week’ starts) which gives another delay to getting properly started, and when the cafes are properly open I can take my laptop somewhere to get stuck in, which is always a nice way to do it.

I have been ‘planning’ and procrastinating over this for so long now, years in fact. I came to the end of the pre-Prague section early in 2018, I remember it quite distinctly. I went to the café where I used to go for breakfast on Sunday, before the writing group meetings (not one of my usual writing cafes, but it was en route to the dentist, where I’d been for an appointment) and took with me printouts of the early Prague posts, which is when I had the idea that there was just too much, and maybe I’d write a separate book about my time in Prague. Or was that 2019?

This is the problem with writing autobiography – though ‘S2S’ and ‘TLWB’ are strictly speaking memoirs, the distinction being that an autobiography is the story of a whole life, but memoirs are just a specific part of a life, either in terms of time or of an interest which may cover different periods. But as a memoirist, I find it hard to see how an autobiography can ever be finished, unless the author is still writing it on their deathbed (which in my case might well happen).

Life feeds writing, and writing feeds life, like Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail.

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…Plan to Fail

‘Fail to plan and plan to fail’ was another piece of wisdom which I acquired from my business networking days and totally failed to learn from. I reflected on this yesterday when I was digging holes for my newly bought plants and tenderly packing the soil around them. I plan to fail, not because that’s what I want to happen, but because that’s my expectation, on the basis of past experience. It wasn’t that I had no plan at all when I was walking around B&Q on Wednesday with all the other Diamond Card holders, all waving our ten-pounds-off-when-you-spend-over-thirty coupons – there were certain things I knew I wanted to buy, like compost, basket liner, and a 40 cm diameter pot, but when it came to plants, I was mainly driven by spontaneity – well, within bounds –mostly what I bought were pretty predictable: begonia, petunias, geraniums. But I still didn’t have any specific ideas about where any of them were going, and so I was making it up as I went along.

There’s a lot to be said for spontaneity, impulse, intuition – well, I would say that, given my aversion to planning. No, that’s not right, ‘aversion’ isn’t quite the right word: it’s not that I don’t want to make plans, it’s more that from experience I know the stress that planning causes, the struggle to sort it all out, to impose order and make sense, to remember the stages, to decide on the appropriate actions, to implement them without flying off in all directions, and to judge the outcomes. All those things that make perfect sense rationally, intellectually, academically and succumb to chaos when they hit the real world, that great, spinning distributor of ordure.

Having said that, it occurs to me that the major, dramatic changes in my life, the ‘leap before you look moments’, like starting a PhD, leaving a husband (both of them), travelling, moving to Prague and Southsea etc, were all preceded by years of ‘planning’, just not in the organised, logically –sequenced, rational fashion – more on the lines of: ‘…if I could, I would… if only…’ At New Year 2015, I met a lady and told her that I was hoping to move to Southsea one day, then when I announced in March that I was moving, her comment was: ‘you’re a fast worker!’, even though the idea had been in my head for three years.

There’s more I wanted to say, but as usual I started writing and then wandered off at a tangent. But I’d like to share a quote that I heard on Thought for the Day on Radio 4 earlier while I was making coffee: “You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.” It was attributed to Henry Nouwen, a name which means nothing to me (apparently he was a Catholic priest, but I won’t hold that against him.)

I’ve often been told I think too much… TBC

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Plan to Plan

Ten years ago, when I was going to business networking meetings, I was part of a team of three people organising meetings in a local pub on alternate Wednesday mornings. I was in charge of sending out email and text invitations, chasing up invitees to confirm numbers, collecting payments and paying the pub for breakfasts consumed, working with a woman in her forties who was an area rep, in charge of a number of fortnightly groups locally. The third member was a an older man (older than  I was then but probably younger than I am now), whom I’ll call Charles (I can’t remember whether that was actually his name) who chaired the meetings and was a general figurehead for the group.

The reason I’ve been thinking about him this morning was that he would sometimes give The Talk – there was always a ten minute talk over breakfast, usually given by a guest speaker – who, when I look back now, were probably drafted in from other groups in the region or more widely spread (it was that sort of organisation). I’m guessing that possibly part of Charles’s role was to stand in when no other speaker was available, and his talks were always on a similar theme, the gimmick being that the titles consisted of an increasing number of words beginning with P. This had obviously started long before I’d joined, and would always induce a groan (in the nicest possible way) from the assembly. Anyway, what set me on this train of thought was that a typical example would be: ‘Perfect Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance’ or words to that effect.

And the connection is: that as I was lying in bed this morning I was thinking about my inability to plan anything whatsoever. At five thirty I was reviewing my options: walk to beach; take van out for a picnic; stay home and start on editing of TLWB (reading Prague blog posts) etc. The conclusion was to stay home and get on with gardening, which I didn’t do a lot of yesterday, just half an hour or so’s weeding and not planting of plants purchased (I’m starting to sound like Charles), which should really be a Priority (definitely one of the words he would have used) as they will Probably die otherwise.

So I got up shortly after six, did my exercises, made coffee and here I am, doing my daily Post (Pontification? Pronouncement?) – which, incidentally, I am still doing, despite moaning last week,  because – it feels important to Persist, in fact, maybe (or even Perhaps) Persistence is Paramount. Some days I dread it, but I always feel better afterwards – no matter what it is, however trivial, or complaining, or ranting, or self-Pitying  – even Pathetic or Pointless – the results. I write every day – as long as I’m home, and sometimes even when I’m not – and I stick to my 500 words because it is a discipline, and that’s that. And I Plan to keep on doing so.

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Triumph of Hope

Yesterday I was debating over whether to take the van out to the country park for a picnic, or the car to B&Q to spend some coupons on stuff for the garden, or a combination of the two or something completely different. In the end, I went to B&Q in the car, and it was lucky I didn’t try to combine that with a picnic, because by the time I’d finished (after almost an hour), I felt quite worn out. I came home with compost, basket liners and enough plants to hopefully ensure one or two of each type might survive my half-hearted and inconsistent attempts at gardening.

I sorted out a few things into larger pots during the afternoon, the rest are lined up in a tray supported by two upturned buckets, along the fence, along with some sweet peas and other stuff in trays that I’d bought earlier from the Co-op as I walked past on my way home from tai chi sessions in the park.

They say a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, and I did that, but gardening fits into the same category for me. Maybe the same conditions apply to both – a lack of attention to nurturing the first time around, or, in the case of gardening, of all previous attempts.

Today I need to get out there and do some weeding to make space for my new purchases. As usual, there was minimal planning and organisation behind the things I bought. There are three wall-mounted baskets, two small and one large, on the wall outside my kitchen window, along the little alley between my house and the neighbours, which had trailing begonias in my first year living here, but which have deteriorated over the last few years until there were just a dead fuchsia and some very straggly geraniums, which didn’t flower at all last year. It’s not an ideal spot for geraniums, because, squashed between the two houses, it doesn’t get much sunshine. I can’t remember when the begonias gave up, but over the years I have made various attempts to replace them, but this is the first time I’ve replaced the liners, so hopefully that will help, and maybe give me something attractive to look at while I’m doing the washing up.

The large one was screwed to the wall, so I left it in situ and just reached up (it’s just slightly above my eye level) to put the new liner, compost and plants into it. I took the two smaller ones off, as they were just hooked over the nails, but didn’t think about the fact that one of them had come loose from one of the nails and was dangling at an angle from the other one, until after I’d filled them both and went to try and put them back. The first one was okay, but there was no second nail in the wall for the other, it had rusted or come away altogether.   

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Keeping On (or not)

Just done my poem for today, and I think I know what I’m doing for the final three days, though I’m not happy with the one for tomorrow – but then, I wasn’t happy with the one for today when I woke up, though I had a vague idea, a title and a few lines, it wasn’t until this morning that it fleshed out so it (sort of) made sense. Maybe I can do something with the one I wrote yesterday for tomorrow… or it won’t seem so bad when I read it again.

It has been an interesting challenge, I must say. I didn’t know where it was going to go when I started, but it got me writing and I think it all hangs together surprisingly well, so that it might be worth doing something else with it, but I’m not sure what. In 2018 I did haikus for NaPoWriMo, and I had an idea of producing a hand-made book and I went to a book-binding workshop and bought a book-binding kit (and an online book-binding course), but I’ve never really done anything with it since. I had a title: ‘Month of Fools’, and I wanted to do a lino-print for the cover, but then I completely stalled because the lino-print was so poor, I gave up on lino-printing, book-binding and the whole idea and haven’t touched it since. The lino-printing course was cancelled not long after anyway, and though I have equipment I could use by myself, without the tutor telling me exactly what to do I just can’t get my head around it.

Anyway, if I’m going to do anything these days, I just stick to knitting and crochet, because I can do that without getting too stressed.

Keeping going at something and not getting discouraged or disappointed with the results is the hardest thing for me. I suppose that is one of the themes of my NaPoWriMo (I can’t quite decide if it’s a long poem with 30 stanzas, or a cycle of 30 individual poems, or how to describe it). It’s all very well to write about grasping the flame and letting it burn you again and again, but that’s just a poetic metaphor, and I’m such a coward. I could say to myself: ‘I managed to stick at that, and I’m quite pleased with the result, so why not try something else, like going back to lino printing, or doing this book, or going back to my novel…?’ but, but, but… I’m such a coward. And yesterday, for example, by the time I’d posted the poem, I couldn’t face writing a post for here as well.

None of this is important, I know that. Nothing I do matters, I could not write another word as long as I live, and the world would be no worse off.

Yesterday I went back to the jigsaw puzzle I started in last year’s lockdown and haven’t touched since goodness knows when. I made quite good progress, too.  

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Creative Spirit

I was going to walk down to the knitting shop today, but… looking out the window, I don’t think I’ll bother. This is a bit much even for me with my oh-we-often-get-snow-flurries-at-the-beginning-of-April smugness – not that we’ve got actual snow here, just freezing rain, but still, it’s a bit much. I wasn’t planning to buy more yarn (still working my way through the stash) but could do with a 5.5mm circular needle to replace the one I’ve been using, which is on the verge of breaking, but over the weekend I’ve started two more top-down jumpers (one knitted, one crochet) to go with the two I’ve got that I can’t make progress on (one because of the needle breaking and the other because of lack of the right yarn). Three of them are knitted, the latest one (started Saturday evening, pulled down and restarted yesterday) is an experiment to see if it’s possible to use the same general top-down approach but with crochet, and if it works will use up a load of yarn which I’ve had for about a year and have tried to start various projects which I’ve later abandoned.

Do I want/need/will I wear all these jumpers? Probably not, but that’s not the point.

I was going to write about creativity – I half started yesterday, at the end of ranting about something, I can’t remember what. If I’m making something, or thinking about something to try – it doesn’t much matter what – I can sort of keep my head above water – as long as I keep my expectations low, and don’t think that what I make will be wonderful when it’s finished, of course, but when it’s done, it can be pushed to the back of a cupboard and forgotten about – or, in the case of writing, in the back of some folder on my hard drive, or shared on Facebook, or even better, Twitter, where I have 200 ‘followers’ but none who ever respond to anything I share (that’s an exaggeration, I’ve had two ‘likes’ in the last two years, both from people I used to know personally but haven’t seen in years).

For most of my life I haven’t considered myself at all ‘creative’ – except for this half-arsed idea that I might have been a ‘writer’ if I’d ever worked at it, but even then I was always conscious that I didn’t have the guts, talent or chutzpah to stick at it and make it work as a career. When I read ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’ last year, I came across the idea of the ‘creative spirit’ which is crushed out of young children if they don’t get the chance to use it. This resonated with me, as I thought about my fear of judgement, of what I make never being good enough, of the ludicrous hubris of ever thinking I was ‘good enough’ at anything, the ‘who do you think you are?’ arrogance of that whole idea, and the ridicule that followed from it.

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NaPoWriMo Time Again

My heart yearns for
the Dream Place,
the Crystal Space…

Linda Rushby 5 April 2021

I was in poetic mood earlier, in my yoga/tai chi/meditation time, with one of those moments of understanding who I am, and what I should be doing, which has faded somewhat now, as they always do, before I was able to get to the computer and capture what needed to be caught, but I will try.

This is the third year I’ve attempted NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month). I started in 2018, with haikus, because that seemed like the easy way (although I know that writing a good haiku is not something to be flippant about). I was so happy with the results that I had an idea about creating a hand-made book – I’d been on a bookbinding course and bought a bookbinding kit, and was going to lino print an image for the cover – but the only image I came up with was a forlorn daffodil, and I got frustrated and disheartened and never even opened the parcel with the bookbinding kit and gave up before I got started. Maybe one day.

The next year I didn’t even attempt the poetry challenge, but then last year I did, with no plan or ideas, I managed to turn out something for every day of the month, a motley collection of uneven quality. I have always said that poems come to me or they don’t, and I can’t make them happen, but one of my favourites, ‘Beachcomber’, came out of a challenge I was set to write a poem a day for five days on Facebook in summer 2015, the first summer after I moved to Southsea.

This year I wasn’t going to bother, but on the first day I wrote a very short poem, and posted it, not here but on another blog to which I sometimes contribute. That poem, entitled ‘Web’, is about the idea of a web of connections, not the electronic ‘world wide web’ so much as an older and more general sense of interactions between events, actions and people, which relates to my interest in systems thinking, the basis of my PhD, and the idea of ‘Crystal Space’ which I have played with for some years. Writing it out gave me the idea of pulling one of the threads in a web and seeing where it led – would it just attract the attention of some monstrous spider, or might it take me somewhere interesting? So the next poem was about Ariadne’s thread, and each day since some image or reference from the day before has triggered the next poem.

So far it seems to have led me back into my lifelong interest in Greek mythology, which is of course a very fertile seam for poetry. Each day’s poem is very short, but by the second day I had the idea that they might build into something interesting. On the other hand, I might just give up one day, but how will I know unless I try?

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Ducks in a Row

I am not two different people, or three or four, or however many I might have said at different times. Just want to make that clear. I am not Linda H OR Linda R; or Belinda, Melinda, Cassandra, Cat by Herself; I am both, all of them, or possibly even none, but in the end I am still me. When I switched on my PC this morning, Microsoft welcomed me as Linda H, while my laptop knows me as Linda R, but it’s just a matter of context. To family, Facebook, Twitter, close friends and acquaintances I’ve met since I moved to Southsea, I am R, but to most of officialdom (Portsmouth City Council, HMRC, DWP, DVLA, banks etc) and most people I know from Bedford days, I am still H – there is even a very small number of people I’m still in touch with who knew me from when I was ‘R’ before, forty years ago now.

I didn’t set out to write about my identity today, in fact I was intending to pull together some threads which I was thinking and writing about last week – so here goes. I was talking about card-making, and all the different items and processes involved in it that make it so unsuitable for anyone with dyspraxia and hence so stressful. Every time, I start intending to be more organised and keep a lid on the chaos, but it never works out that way.

But I was thinking about it as a microcosm of my life. There are things that need doing, and I have to think and decide about what’s the best order to do them in, and how I’m going to do them, and what I need to do them with, and by the time I’ve made a decision on any of those things, I’ve forgotten what I decided about the previous ones, and so I go round and round in circles.

I have spent a lifetime thinking that there are answers to these questions and that I should be able to get on top of them, that if I try just a bit harder I can make everything fall into place, and my life will become so much easier. Now I’m coming to accept that all the planning and to-do lists in the world are never going to change me, or change the way things are. There’s a saying going the rounds on Facebook (is ‘meme’ the correct word for that sort of thing?) which I’ve seen a couple of times: ‘Not only are my ducks not all in a row, I don’t even know where my ducks are!’ I’m not even sure whether I’ve got any ducks in the first place.

I sit in my chaos thinking about how to resolve it, and never manage to break out of those circles. Except sometimes I get an idea about one specific thing – like my google drive – and keep looking for an answer, however many times I fall down

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Making Stuff

If you should happen to see me sitting and apparently doing nothing, I can pretty much guarantee that I won’t be ‘resting’. My mind will still be whirling around, jumping from one thought to the next and doubling back on itself without ever reaching any conclusions. I might be re-running an ancient conversation in my head, thinking of what I could have said differently to prove my point irrefutably, or composing a poem or a blog post, but most likely I will be thinking about what I should be doing instead of sitting there and thinking. This was brought home to me yesterday when I was facing the state of my kitchen table in the wake of a week spent (intermittently) making two birthday cards.

The process of making cards, while both creative and fun, is also quite stressful, and the clearing up afterwards even more so. It involves a lot of processes, with lots of bits of equipment and materials, some of them very small, others which are messy (glue and ink), and great potential for things getting lost, spilt, sticking to each other, hiding behind each other etc. As well as that, the creative process itself, the design of the thing, from sitting down with a mental connection such as: ‘Laura – tea and cakes’, ‘Chris – fishing’, ‘Simon- robots and/or dinosaurs’ (my 34 year-old son, by he way, though it could equally be my 5 year-old grandson), assembly of any materials relevant to that topic and trying to come up with something significantly different from last year’s effort is quite taxing in and of itself. Because I’m making them to give to other people – this has really only just occurred to me – it’s a lot more stressful than starting a jumper or blanket or whatever in knitting or crochet, when I know that it doesn’t matter what a pig’s ear I make of it, because no one has to see it but me.

Now, that is an interesting though. Making cards always implies the intention of creating something to give to someone else. Perhaps I should spend some time on using stamps, cutting dies and paper just for the fun of the process without producing anything which might be seen and/or judged by anyone else? When I started doing this craft, I was going to classes and workshops, where I was just making for the sake of it – I have stacks of cards made at those events hidden away in the cupboard, which I wouldn’t dream of giving to anyone else.

This is not what I started to write about – but I think it is a valuable insight, and it applies to lots of things I do – including writing this blog. I can do it because I know it is just for myself, although theoretically it could be read by anyone, very few people ever actually do read it, and so it doesn’t matter, there’s no requirement for it to reach a certain standard of quality, it is just itself.