Category: circles

Posted on

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

Posted on

Wishes and Banishments

Some years ago – when I was living in the flat in Bedford, between leaving Ex-Hubby and going to Europe – I gave some thought to what I wanted to banish from my life. I was quite cautious when making my choice, aware that wishes have to be thought through very, very carefully or they will almost certainly backfire, and I didn’t tell anyone, because I’m also aware that to do that is to jinx the process, but after ten years I guess it’s quite safe to share. It was a fairly long list, but I boiled it all down to two things: fear and loneliness. Note that I wasn’t wishing ‘for’ a lover, knowing that they often bring more trouble and heartache than they’re worth, but ‘against’ loneliness, and realising that if I could learn to manage that, it wouldn’t matter whether or not I was ‘with’ someone.

Where have I got to, roughly a decade later? I think I’ve handled the loneliness pretty well, not perhaps in the way I hoped for at the time, but that’s why I was cautious and non-specific. And as for fear, I’ve come to acknowledge that it too is just an inevitable part of life. What am I most afraid of? Disappointment, failure, rejection… which is odd, because I’m so used to all those things, shouldn’t that make me less afraid of them?

I don’t know where my mind is going this morning. I thought of this as a topic to write about a few days ago – probably when I was writing about love – and I thought I’d tackle it today because I couldn’t think of anything else.

I don’t think I’m afraid of death. There have been a very few occasions – mostly in 2017 – when I’ve gone to bed thinking that I might never wake up, and that is a very visceral fear – but if it comes to me again, I hope I will be able to see how irrational it is. My life will come to an end one day, that’s inevitable – why should I worry about what I might or might not do between now and then? I’ve got the rest of my life to sort that out, and if I don’t, well… it’s not going to be my problem anymore, is it?

Where am I now, in my life, staring at this screen, thinking about going downstairs and getting breakfast? I took some sunrise pictures outside my back door this morning when I got up. I found a photo of myself as a little girl a couple of days ago when I was looking for photos of snow in Dallas. That day I also put together the bits of my tapestry frame – a present from Ex-Hubby before he was even Hubby, about forty years ago. There’s an uncompleted tapestry on it – not quite that old, probably mid 1990s. Will I start it again, maybe even finish it? Will I take that off the frame and start something new?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT6mw4GaPYQ
Posted on

Groundhog Day All Over Again

Two days late to talk about Groundhog Day, but that’s just par for the course for me.

Groundhog Day is one of those weird North American customs – like Thanksgiving and the Superbowl – which only enter the consciousness of most of us because of the all-pervading presence of the USA in popular culture. It was first explained to me forty years ago by a young woman I worked with (I was young then too, but she was a couple of years younger still), whose father worked in the diplomatic service, so she’d lived a lot of her life hitherto abroad, including part of her childhood and adolescence in Canada. According to her, groundhogs come out of their hibernation burrows on the 2nd February, and if they see their shadows, they run back underground and hide for another six weeks (or some period like that), but if not, they stay above ground and that is the signal for spring to start. In other words, if it’s sunny on Groundhog Day, paradoxically, spring will be late.

The film of the same name was made in 1993 and starred Bill Murray as a reporter who goes to a small town to report on the behaviour of the local ground hogs, and finds himself waking up the next morning in the local hotel and living the same day over again. He finds that whatever he does that day, by the next time he wakes up, it’s all been forgotten by everyone but himself. At first he’s desperate to get away, but over time he uses this weird condition to his advantage by changing his behaviour, avoiding mistakes, learns to play the piano, woos a girl… It’s a clever gimmick, and a funny film, though ironically, it doesn’t bear watching too many times before it gets very irritating.

It’s that endless repetition that sticks in my head, and that I associate now with Groundhog Day, rather than the arrival of spring (though it was gloomy here on Tuesday, which is supposedly a good sign).

Over the last year, like many people I’ve felt stuck in some endless loop, where every day I get up and do mostly the same things, with occasional variations. The character in the film starts off cynical and bitter, but gradually uses his repeated day to learn new skills, become a better person, fall in love, pursue happiness, and in the end he gets the girl and his life moves on. But what have I learnt, how have I developed?

Well, I’m learning lots of new crochet and knitting skills. On Monday evening I started unravelling the fair isle jumper that I made too small, and yesterday I finished getting it back to the point before I separated it for the sleeves (which was a lot more complicated than you might think) and was able to start knitting it again. I guess you could say I’ve learnt patience, acceptance and perseverance, but only in that very specific context.

Still, today’s another day.

Posted on

Calendar Puzzles

Imbolc, Candlemas, Ground Hog Day… my hatred of January used to extend to February too, but now I’m more relaxed about them both. February is the month when I: moved into my first flat (2009); ran away to Europe (2012); came back from Prague (2014); started chemo (2017)… I could go back further into previous lives and remember: broke off my engagement (1975); had a miscarriage (1985); lost my Dad (1999)… 1996 wasn’t that great either, for reasons I won’t go into, and no doubt I could dig out other disasters if I thought some more, but at least for this century 2009 and 2012 were positive, and 2017 was too, if not particularly pleasant at the time (actually 1975 was positive too, but the mistake was that I didn’t stick with that decision).

February… well we all know it’s the shortest month and the only one that has different numbers of days depending on the year (but still stays the shortest). Why, when the calendar was being designed, wasn’t it given a couple of extra days, taken from, say August and December, to make seven 30-day months and only five 31-days, or six of each in Leap Year? Even better, why not alternate them by making February, April, June, August, October and December 30 days , with the Leap Day added at the end of December? Aha, that rings a bell now, isn’t it the case that March used to be the first month, which would make February the last month, which would at least make sense of Leap Day being then?

The Celtic quarter days are at the beginnings of February, May, August and November, which are not exactly mid-way between the equinoxes and solstices, but do correspond to the beginnings of calendar months – isn’t this something to do with the adjustments that had to be made to the calendar to deal with the fact that somewhere in the middle of the last millennium it was noticed that the seasons had moved since Julius Caesar’s time because the solar year isn’t exactly 365-and-a-quarter days long, and hence we don’t need a Leap Year exactly every four years, but more like 97 years out of 400? Every time I start asking these calendar questions I know I could just look them up on Wikipedia, but I’m not Wikipedia and I like to raise the questions and make everybody else as confused as I am.

I’m also puzzled by the fact that according to some sources Imbolc/Candlemas is on the first of February, while others say it’s the second. Why worry about things which have their roots back in times when few people were literate anyway, and they were probably decided – quite arbitrarily –  by various factions of various religions, and not in some boring, rational unified way?

But why is Groundhog Day now so closely linked with time repeating itself? Is it just down to the Bill Murray film, and why did the writers decide to do that?

Posted on

Mind Full of…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on

Hold That Thought…

Do I have control over my thoughts or do my thoughts control me?

When I was going to ‘business networking’ breakfasts, ten years ago, the speakers often emphasised the importance of having the right attitude: plan for success, visualise what you want to achieve, believe in yourself, banish negativity etc. Softer, gentler life-coach types would also add things like: practise gratitude, be in the moment, take care of yourself; but the general thrust was pretty much the same – you can do this if you think you can. Think right, and everything will fall into place.

Needless to say, I struggled with all this. I would go to the meetings, listen to the talks, chat to people, get a momentary buzz of: ‘I can do this!’ and then go home and remember: I had no clients, I didn’t know how to persuade people to buy my services, and I wasn’t sure that what I could do would be ‘good enough’. And, also needless to say, I blamed myself – I was never going to get anywhere with an ‘attitude’ like mine, if all these shiny, happy people could make it work for them, what was wrong with me? And the answer was: this is what’s wrong with me, the fact that I have to ask: ‘what’s wrong with me?’ and so it goes, round and round and round.

But I met some nice people, and I ate some good breakfasts (not necessarily a healthy habit to get into) and gradually – mainly in retrospect – I came to realise that they were mostly in the same boat as me – scrabbling around trying to get business from other people who were also scrabbling around trying to get business, in the belief that by behaving like ‘business people’, they would magically find success, by ‘investing’ their hard earned profits into subscriptions that accumulated up and up the pyramid to the people at the top. I was ‘invited’ to be a local organiser, which meant my subscriptions were halved in return for a few hours spent every fortnight sending out invitations, following up to check who was coming, getting there early and checking people off the list as they arrived, collecting £10 from each and paying the venue for the breakfasts, then passing on the balance to the regional organiser. And every day of the week, in a different venue, there would be another one of these meetings, where I could go and pay £10 for another breakfast, another pep talk, and maybe meet a different group of people, but most likely many of the same, and so on. At least I felt I belonged to something.

I seem to have digressed a bit into reminiscing about those days. I’ve never been happy about meeting people, or good at making small talk, but I suppose I bit the bullet and got on with it and it didn’t kill me, though it didn’t make me a business person, either.

But that’s not what I was intending to write…

Posted on

What Changed?

When I returned to England at the end of July 2012, I found that not only had Ex-Hubby not put the house on the market, he wasn’t in any great hurry to do so. With a sigh of relief, I made plans to return to Central Europe the following year, not to Budapest, but Prague, where I’d found I could do a crash course in TEFL with a (potential, but at the time I thought it was definite) six month placement to follow. Neither of us knew then that it would be a further four years before things were finally settled. Looking back, I can see that he was procrastinating no less than I was, each in our respective Limbo, his of denial and inertia and mine of footloose running away. During those four years I was to live in five different locations: with our daughter; in the attic flat in the Fens; in Prague; sharing with him in the old house and finally renting a flat in Southsea.

Going through those old blog posts from 2008, I found one in which I shared an old fantasy about travelling across Europe until my savings ran out, in the hope that something would turn up before I had to come back. The same person who commented about me undervaluing myself had this to say:

I would guess that if you did take off and travel on your savings for 3, 6, 12 months or whatever it took to exhaust the piggy bank, at the end of it your circumstances would be vastly different. Your experiences during those months would have inevitably changed your outlook. Maybe for better, possibly for worse but I am willing to bet you would have found the time has led to any number of possible situations.

Maybe sitting in a cheap hotel on a Greek island, lap top at your side and your new found male friend opposite? Surrounded by people you have met during your travels who have altered your perceptions of who you are, what you want out of life and where you are going.

All I can say is – your state of mind would not be as it is now.

Comment on Husband or Cat, 17 October 2008

Well, although I stayed with existing friends in some places, I didn’t make any new ones, male or otherwise, or even have any racy encounters. On the contrary, rather than ‘possible situations’ and any alterations in my ‘state of mind’ or ‘perceptions of who I am’, what I discovered was that travelling is a great way of avoiding contact with other people. I became the Invisible Woman, anonymous and solitary, sitting on trains or in cafés, reading, writing, or doing killer su doku, living in cheap hotel rooms, behind whose doors I was safely insulated from the world. Now I have my own door to hide behind, complete with cat, and other hobbies to pass my time with, and the sense of isolation is not so different, except that the view doesn’t change.   

Posted on

More About the Madwoman

When I left my husband and both cats, I didn’t exactly walk out with just the clothes I was wearing – that might have been more dramatic and romantic, but it’s not what happened (not that time at least – but that’s another story).

I found a flat in the nearest town, I had enough money saved up to pay for six months rent in advance, and I moved out in February 2009 (actually collected the keys on 14th February, also another story – or several). I hired a van, took some basic furniture from the house (agreed with Hubby): desk and chair, bed, small sofa, wardrobe, dressing table etc, and with help from my daughter, her boyfriend and his parents (and Hubby), moved in for good on the 22nd.  It was a Sunday. I remember us all sitting round the big kitchen table in the old house drinking tea, then I drove back into town to find the chippy wasn’t open (I found another one that was).

I also bought some things – a coffee table, various kitchen items (mostly from charity shops or Wilkinson’s, which was a handy 5 minute walk from the flat), and a laptop and pay-as-you-go dongle. I gradually transferred various bits and pieces from the house over the next few months, as I went back and forth quite a lot – my main computer was still there, in the attic. In April, when my daughter and her boyfriend hired another van to move into their own flat, they brought some more stuff for me, including the office furniture and computer, which I set-up in my ‘study’, (the larger of the two bedrooms in the flat).

But an awful lot of stuff got left behind. I always intended to ‘sort it all out’ one day. I did purge some things, but mainly it was to be done in the future, when everything was resolved, when the divorce was settled, when the house was sold… After three years I left the flat to go travelling, and the things I’d taken with me – and acquired over the intervening time – got packed up and taken back, stacked in the spare room and attic. Six months later I came back to England, moved in with my daughter and granddaughter for a few weeks till we drove one another to distraction, then found another flat, which was all attic, fluffy carpeted and pointed ceilinged like a prism, with three windows looking out over the Fens and a flashing star in the top window at Christmas. I intended to sort out the Stuff in the house, and made a few attempts, including throwing out my mother’s and grandmother’s knitting needles and paraphernalia (which I hadn’t used for years, but was to start replacing only a couple of years later).

The decree absolute came through that year (2012), and part of the divorce agreement was that the house would go on the market in the August – when I returned from travelling. That didn’t happen… To be continued.

Posted on

Blogging about Blogging

I do this every morning, supposedly first thing, but in fact I’ve usually already been awake for two or three hours, lain in bed thinking, listened to the radio, fed the cat, exercised, showered, prepared porridge, loaded the dishwasher…

This morning I answered a comment and made a comment on a friend’s post on our group blog, changed my profile picture, then noticed that the second comment wasn’t appearing, realised I hadn’t saved it anywhere else and didn’t want to have to retype it from scratch; thought maybe it was there but needed to be approved by an admin. Tried logging into the email account for the group blog; couldn’t get the password right; tried hunting for the bit of paper with the password on, which I was sure I’d seen in the last few days; decided to go downstairs and use the laptop because I was sure the email and password were saved on there; they weren’t, but the admin account was the saved login, so I managed to get into the group blog and confirm that the comment had never been saved; came back up here, typed it again (as best I could remember), posted the comment.

I could change the password for the group blog – no, it’s not the blog password I need but the gmail account – I can change the password for that, because I think I’m the only person who ever uses it, but it’s annoying me now and I don’t want to. That bit of paper must be around here somewhere.

I have a thing about not wanting to retype something I’ve already written – which is why I always do blog posts in Word first and save them, so I don’t have to do it again. Even a three sentence comment, I want to be sure I’m doing it the same way as I did the first time (or maybe even better, but I can’t know that if I don’t have a record of the original). It’s a foible of mine.

None of which is what I was intending to write about before I sat down at the computer (well, maybe the first paragraph was). My friend’s comment and his post had got me thinking about how and why I write this blog, because he said ‘Your words often make me wonder if you are searching for direction and whether or not I should be following a dream again.’ Then in his own post (referring to himself or a generic ‘you’, I presume, not me specifically) :

‘But really, the question means: what have you done with your life so far? And what are you going to do with what’s left of it?’

Well, what I write is just what comes into my head at the time, and some of that leads to thoughts of my life so far. As for what’s left of it – which is kind of what I thought I would write about, before I got distracted – I’ll start that tomorrow.

Posted on

First Sunday in January

Every morning, I wake up feeling myself to be at the bottom of a dark and muddy pit, and I have to drag myself out of it and face the day. That’s the meaning of the routine I described yesterday, because it gives me a sequence of things to do and ensures that I don’t have to make any choices until late morning (apart from deciding what to write on here, of course).

Last night I must have had quite a vivid dream, because I distinctly remember thinking: ‘this is really good, I know I’m dreaming but I can remember all that’s happened quite clearly and it all makes sense!’ I can remember that much, but not the content of the dream I felt I was living through at the time.

I keep seeing friends’ pictures on Facebook of their morning walks, but don’t feel the urge to go myself, even though this is the easiest time of year to see the sunrise. One set of pictures of the boating lake and beach on Friday morning just brought back a memory of walking by the Thames and going up in the London Eye on New Year’s Day morning in 2010 – the first anniversary of the post I shared a couple of days ago. Circles and spirals. On my own for a year, and looking down on a new world and a new decade (I personally think that, as the calendar is a cultural construct anyway, it makes sense for a decade to be defined by its third digit). Anyway, one year into my new life, I felt that the year ahead was going to be the one when things would really start to take off for me.

People (by which I guess I mean, ‘myself, but I don’t want to admit whatever it is I’m about to say’) always seem to put too much stress on that mark on the calendar (which reminds me, I haven’t even got one, because I still haven’t got round to organising it, probably too late now, and I haven’t taken the old one down from the wall).

I’ve observed it with a minimum of fuss this year, I suppose that’s largely down to being home alone. In the past I’ve been criticised for having expectations ‘…through the roof…’, though these days I have very few expectations of myself, or of the world. All those years of trying to change the external conditions of my life, then trying to change myself into a ‘better’ (in some nebulous way: More organised? More productive? Less selfish? More altruistic?) person, and finally trying to change how I felt about myself: (More accepting? More fulfilled? Happier? More at peace?) have not freed me from the early morning dark and muddy pit that I scrabble out of every day.

In my yoga session this morning, this question popped up: ‘Do you love me?’ and back came the reply: ‘of course I love you, now, bugger off and leave me alone’.