Category: routine

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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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Sunday Morning

What have I done already today?

Tried to take a photo of the sunrise from my bedroom window. Opened the window to get a better view, and a credit card and train ticket fell out of my phone wallet onto the flat roof of the extension below. Fortunately, a few days ago I found in my bedroom a litter grabber which I bought when I was living in the flat and had a similar accident with something on the roof of the bay window. I couldn’t manage to pick the card up, but I did succeed in knocking it off onto the patio/gravel. Went downstairs in my dressing gown and opened the door, saw credit card immediately over by the garden table. Walked over gravel in bare feet and picked it up. Went back inside and picked gravel off my feet.

Checked the credit cards in my phone and realised my Barclaycard (the one I most often use) was missing. The last time I used it was in the knitting shop yesterday, where I went to buy some yarn for my weather blanket. I emptied my coat pockets and handbag but couldn’t find it, looked around all the obvious places, still no sign. Went back out into the garden, couldn’t see it anywhere on the gravel, peeped through a gap in the fence at next door’s patio but it wasn’t obviously there. It started to rain. I rummaged around in some plants/weeds (false valerian, which is pretty in small doses but grows like a weed) between the edge of my steps and the fence, and found my Barclaycard.

Went back inside, picked gravel off my feet again, went back to bed, and back to sleep, although it was nearly six o’clock by this time. Had a dream, which was very interesting when I woke up, but I’ve now forgotten. Woke up shortly before eight and got up. Fed cat, let her out. Did yoga/tai chi. Picked up clothes from bedroom floor, found a complete set of clean bed linen (including matching pillow cases) and had first attempt at changing the duvet cover.

Took washing basket downstairs and loaded the contents into the washing machine. Tried to pull out the dispenser drawer – which is filthy and I’ve been thinking for a while it needs cleaning – but it got stuck half way and then I couldn’t get it back in and couldn’t get it all the way out. I used to have a Persil ball but lost it somewhere, and bought a large bottle with another one, but lost that too, so I took a top from a fabric conditioner bottle, filled that and balanced it on the washing then switched on the machine. Had shower and washed hair. Made coffee.

Now here I am, still in my dressing gown (but clean), writing my blog and drinking coffee. I can’t remember what I was thinking about while I was doing my exercises, two hours ago, but I don’t suppose it was important.

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Morning Walk

I remember in a previous life – about ten or twelve years ago – having a conversation with a man at a conference in Oxford. I wouldn’t say he was a friend, exactly, but I had met him at previous conferences. The gist of his message to me was this: that I was unhappy because my life was chaotic, and he suggested imposing some structure on myself by getting up early and going for a walk with him and a group of other conference attendees.

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.

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grim

I didn’t write yesterday. It was one of those utterly grim mornings when I couldn’t think of anything which wasn’t… utterly grim, so I couldn’t bring myself to say anything at all.

I did my napowrimo thing, but thought; what can I say/ it’s not even half way through the month, and if I’ve reached the darkest point already, what am I going to do for the next two and a half weeks? (Seventeen days counting today). To add to the frustration, the shift key on the right side of my keyboard has stopped working, which means it’s a pain to do the capitalisation for NaPoWriMo 9and if I don’t keep on top of it lots of other things go down the toilet, like question marks, brackets and i0.

But the keyboard thing isn’t really relevant to my general feelings of despair, and I just need to get round to ordering a new one. I came up with a Napo-etc poem yesterday, but couldn’t quite bring myself to use the word ‘hope’. That’s the problem, isn’t it? When you can’t see any hope you can’t wish it into existence from nowhere. It doesn’t matter how irrational that is, that sense of everything falling apart. What makes any one morning feel any worse than any other? All mornings are shit – if you choose to write in the morning, it’s not surprising if everything comes back to moaning.

But if I’m honest, I know exactly why yesterday was so hard – because it was the first session of tai chi in the park – as opposed to on Zoom – and I’d been dreading going out and interacting with other people – even a nice, friendly group of people whom I used to see every Tuesday morning. Did walking twenty minutes to the park make it somehow worse than three minutes to the community centre where the classes used to be? No, not particularly. Anyway, I could have driven, but that would have meant finding a parking place near the park, and another one near home when I got back, and I need the exercise. The fact that it was in a new place probably did enter into it somehow, even though it’s a place I’ve driven past many times, it’s still a new walk and a new location. But mainly it’s the experience I HAD AT THE END OF THE FIRST LOCKDOWN (not shouting, just demonstrating that because I’m trying to use the left hand shift key I keep getting caps lock instead without noticing. Also, on the sentence I started with ‘Anyway’, I accidentally hit the ctrl key, and when I glanced up everything I’d typed so far had disappeared, because it had done ‘select all’, and I carried on typing – I didn’t realise that was what had happened, but I managed to keep hitting ‘undo’ till it all came back).

I have to go out again today, for a Covid test, but at least that only requires the minimum of human interaction.

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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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Lost Hour

On a clear, bright morning in spring, it would be good to set out on a new adventure, in search of a new life.

But today is neither clear nor bright, just dull and grey with the sound of the wind between the rooftops. And there are no new adventures in the offing, nor, most likely, any new lives to be had which are substantially different from the present one.

Just to say, that first sentence popped into my head as I sat down at the computer. I know it sounds like the start of something, but I’m buggered if I know what. Except that the first phrase – up to ‘spring’ – has a nice lilt to it, as though it could be the first line of a poem. Quite clichéd though, like all those folk songs that start on the lines of ‘One morning in May…’ but which, come to think of it, descend into tales of lust and seduction (when sung by Steeleye Span), and sometimes betrayal, revenge and horrible death.

Well, that’s got those cheery thoughts out of the way.

I put my bedside clock forward last night at bedtime, and when I woke it said 5:20, which was good because I thought I could get up at my usual time and slip quite easily into the new time frame – but in reality I ended up lying in bed anyway listening to podcasts and not getting up till seven. Then I messed about with changing the central heating clock, which was easier than I expected, but as I’ve been doing it every six months for the last four years I should have got a bit more proficient by now. The thing that still bothers me though is that there are two programmes, one for Monday-to-Friday and one for weekends, and I can’t work out how to get onto the weekend programme to change it. At the moment I have it coming on at 6:30 in the week but not till 7:00 at weekends, it took me a while to realise why it was still cold when I got up on Saturdays and Sundays. The instructions I have are on the inside cover of the little box, small print and hard to see, so I have to take it off the wall and into a well-lit area in order to read them, but even then I can’t find out what I need to know. I can override it by pushing the ‘up’ or ‘down’ buttons to adjust the thermostat, so that’s what I do in the mornings if it feels too chilly, but I would like to sort it out.

Other than that – and something falling through the basket of the dishwasher and jamming the rotating arm so that everything which should have come out clean is covered with crud which has baked on during the drying part of the cycle – there aren’t enough words left to say anything else – except I had to unravel my jumper again yesterday.

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Desultory Equinox

Yesterday I was thinking about Prague – in fact it has been in my mind on and off for the last few days. Often, when I was there, I used to question why I was there, and what I was doing. If I could have found a compelling reason to stay, I think I would have, but my presence always felt anomalous; I wasn’t a tourist, but nor did I ever become a resident, nor even an ‘ex-pat’, just this invisible woman who slipped around the city with no-one really noticing whether I was there or not – except possibly my landlord, when he made his monthly visits to collect the rent (in cash). In the end, coming back to be near my daughter and granddaughter and make some efforts towards selling the old house and ‘moving on with my life’ had to take priority

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.

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Tackling… a Metaphor

Today Backup and Sync tells me that it can’t sync 7107 items, but it is syncing 7130 of 18221. Or something like that. The numbers change every time I look. But I think this is a good thing, because yesterday it couldn’t sync 20837, which I think means that the numbers of files it wants to sync has gone down, and I take that to mean that some of the files which were formerly on the google drive are no longer there – so my deletions have achieved something. But, the space is still full. Is this because of what’s being uploaded from my phone?

Why do I keep harping on about this? Because I’m sure there has to be a solution somewhere, somehow. It’s a problem I’ve ignored for a long time, but always assumed there was a simple solution. Now I’ve decided to try and resolve it, it’s turning out to be a lot more challenging than just deleting some old emails and photos.

I have just taken what feels like the nuclear option. I have disconnected my account from Backup and Sync. But is that really what I wanted to do? Does this mean that I can’t now access my files on Google Drive, even to delete them? What does that mean for my emails? And my photos? And sharing files between my PC and other devices?

I have written an awful lot of words on this topic (I’m guessing about 4,000, but I haven’t checked). It’s not the only thing going on in my life at the moment – I can walk away at any time and forget about it for hours on end. But it feels symbolic. If the issue is about stuff lying around on my electronic ‘desktop’, isn’t that very similar to the state of my physical desktop, my study, my whole house? Things which have just been left to lie where they are, no real system of filing or tidying away, just overwhelming clutter? And what about my mental state – isn’t it all a perfect metaphor for that too?

I have been ignoring the messages relating to my emails for years, with only occasional bursts of enthusiasm for going through and deleting them when the warnings become too dire. My old Yahoo email currently has 7,526 unread emails – that’s right, unread, not undeleted. But taking yesterday as a typical example, I received 12 new ones, of which two, relating to an online order for cat food, are of significance. What about the rest? None of them are actually malicious or a nuisance (unless there were others that got sent directly into the spam folder), they’re mostly from companies I have accounts with or organisations that send out newsletters I don’t want to unsubscribe from because you never know when there might be something that I’m interested in. There’s even one from someone who wants to tell me how to stop procrastinating – I might unsubscribe from that if I ever get round to it.

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Tackling the… Whatever

Some days when I start writing without knowing what to say, it develops, and by the end I feel as though I’ve written something interesting – or at least not too shameful. Then there are days like yesterday when I start but stop half way through because I’m not getting anywhere and, honestly, I just can’t be arsed.

There are many mornings when I start off wondering what I’m going to write and my head is so full of worry and fear about things that no one but me could possibly think were worth being worried or fearful over, but the worry and fear are there anyway, so do I write about them? I am trying to stop beating myself up over this, but it’s become apparent that it isn’t really just the ‘beating up’ that’s the issue, it’s the fact that the feelings are there anyway, it’s the things that I have to do, and the things that I fail to do, and the flotsam that swirls on the dark churning maelstrom of memory.

Planning and organisation are anathema to the dyspraxic brain, because while the attention is fixed on one thing, action or requirement and trying to assemble the others required to precede and follow it, the rest of the mind-stream is charging off into completely different paths, cul de sacs and labyrinths. ‘Write it down!’ I hear you cry, but any attempt to do that initiates mind-block and stasis – a Mexican stand-off while the focussed brain tries to remember what it was thinking of in the first place.

The only way to make things stick is through rote learning and repetition, so the same things are run through over and over again. ‘Planning’ consists of reminding oneself multiple times that ‘something’ needs to be done before a certain date, which induces panic that it will be forgotten, or done incorrectly, or will take a lot longer than the time allowed, and ‘writing down’ becomes a substitute for action.

In situations like this, ‘self care’ can only mean ignoring all that and doing something pleasantly mindless (or mindful) while all that other stuff goes to hell in a hand basket. Which famous author said: ‘I love deadlines, I love the swooshing noise they make as they pass by’? Can you remember? No, neither can I.

Incidentally, the Word grammar checker wants me to change that last ‘I’ to ‘Me’. Grammar checker, in this instance you are wrong, so wrong. How about if I turn it into a question? Can I? See, you can’t object to that, can you?

Why do I even leave the grammar checker turned on? Because it’s the default, and I can’t be arsed to change it, so I just ignore it because I have more confidence in my own understanding than in its – except sometimes I can’t see what it’s objecting to, so I follow the explanation and have a good laugh at its incompetence.

The routine is: write 500 words. And so I have.

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Tackling the… What was the question?

I know that most of the things I worry about are unimportant. I know that the worst scenarios will probably never happen.

My attention bounces from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next ad infinitum, and I can’t retrace my steps to see how I got there, and I can’t see where it’s going, and the track of my thoughts goes round and back and crosses and intersects and spirals down then shoots off into another dimension and still I am no more secure in what I know, I have reached no conclusions, made no plans, discovered no revelations and… what was the question again?

So far today I have: dropped a match into a candle glass and left it to burn because the glass still contained wax but no wick and I thought the match would act as a wick, but minutes later there was a crack and bits of broken hot glass on the floor (fortunately the flame had gone out); then in the shower I picked up a bottle, saw the opening was at the bottom (the only indicator that usually works and I specifically noticed it), squeezed some of the contents onto my fingers, rubbed it into my hair and then realised it wasn’t lathering because it was conditioner, not shampoo. I’m not saying either of those actions was disastrous – on the contrary, they are both perfectly normal, and I cleared up the broken glass (when it was cool enough to touch) and thoroughly rinsed my hair before trying again and getting the right bottle this time. Oh, and I lost my reading glasses in between coming out of the spare room where I do my yoga and into the bedroom to get towels for the shower, and had another look in the spare room before finding them on the book shelves in the bedroom where I must have put them all of thirty seconds earlier. As I said, perfectly normal.

So where is this train of thought taking me? And is it anywhere that I – or you, my putative reader – would choose to go?

Once again, I stare at the clutter on my desk in search of inspiration ‘A tidy desk is the sign of a tidy mind.’ Evidently, the converse is also true, as mine perfectly depicts the state of my mind. The clear space in the centre front is where my phone was, which I had to move in order to take the photo. As soon as I brought it into this room, and within reach of the wifi, it sent me a message informing me that my data cannot be backed up because my cloud storage is full, and I need to upgrade it – the Magic Data Pot in action once again. I have now downloaded all my photos up to 2019 to my hard drive, and deleted them from the cloud and my phone. When the will to live returns, I’ll do the same for last year…