In the gardens I went to check on the fish in the pond. I saw the two big fellas – one black, one coppery – and looked out for the tadpoles clustering along the edge – there were still some, but not as many as before. I walked round to the other bit of the pond, below the waterfall, and saw a man holding a camera. I paused and realised why – I don’t remember there being a plastic heron over the other side of the pond before, and then it moved its head. The first time I saw the tadpoles, I remember being amazed by how many there were, and then thinking: ‘if a heron finds them, it could clear this lot’.

Something I was thinking of yesterday in the context of plans and failure was a story my therapist told me on Thursday, about a past client from years ago who, towards the end of her therapy, revealed something about her life that she hadn’t mentioned because, as the therapist said, it ‘didn’t fit in with the story’. I’ve been wondering what she meant by that: was it just to tell me that things can change, however stuck and entrenched they feel, or was she suggesting that I’m holding back something because it doesn’t fit my ‘story’, either from her or maybe from myself?

I haven’t expressed that very well, and now I can’t see the connections with the planning thing, though I’m sure there was one. If I keep writing, maybe it will come to me.

Then there was that quote about ‘living your way into a new kind of thinking…’ rather than ‘…thinking your way into a new kind of living…’ (I had to look it up again) which also seems relevant. That seems to me to put the emphasis on doing (living) rather than planning (thinking) – so that doing something – whether that be knitting or other crafts, writing, walking, gardening, even a jigsaw – is better for me than when I am thinking about what those actions are leading to, or how best to do them – which sounds either very profound or utterly banal.

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

Look back along the path that led you here,
the threads that came together in this place.
Though fire, water, earth and air you travelled,
to make your pilgrimage and find your fate.

But don’t be fooled in thinking this was ‘destiny’;
there is no mighty hand that guides your way.
Your thoughts and choices led you down the path you took:
to try, to give up, carry on or stay.

If you look for the path to lead you forward,
you’ll find no clarity from this point on,
each day is empty, open, there’s no map to read,
so take your chances as you’ve always done.

Linda Rushby 26 April 2021

You’ll notice that the style is quite different from the other poems in the sequence, with longer, more regular (iambic pentameter) lines; regular four line stanzas and a partial rhyming scheme of ‘a-b-c-b’. Now, I don’t want to imply any disrespect to rhyming poetry, I enjoy reading it and sometimes I wish I could write it, but whenever it starts to creep in, it bothers me, because I feel obliged to try and continue with it, and then I find myself choosing words just because they fit into a rhyme scheme, and then having to twist the lines to get them to work, and I’m almost never happy with the results.

I’ve been picked up on this in the past, and it always makes me defensive, feeling that I have to justify why I write the way I do, when in truth I don’t really know how it happens at all – I just write whatever comes into my head, then I tweak it a bit till I’m satisfied it’s as good as I can make it. I’ve been asked why I’ve written something as a poem rather than ‘something else’, but I’m never sure what ‘else’ my poems could be – they don’t usually tell stories and they’re too short and specific for essays, they just are what they are.

In the end, all I can say is – I write them because that’s what comes into my head. I must have written hundreds down the years that have never been read by anyone else (and failed to write hundreds more) but that doesn’t matter. I don’t write to be read, necessarily, I just write to write.

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.  

I got up early – 6:15 – because my cat came and got me. That’s not unusual, mostly I ignore her but today I got up because I needed a pee, and as soon as I got out of bed she ran in front of me to the top of the stairs. When I came out of the toilet, I looked over the banister, and there she still was, half way down the stairs, looking up at me meaningfully. So I followed her downstairs, went into the kitchen and opened the back door for her to go out.

This follows a strange incident yesterday evening. I was sitting in the front room crocheting and watching telly, she had gone out into the hall, and suddenly I heard a banging noise as of something being knocked over, and an almighty feline shriek. It sounded as though it was inside the house, so all I could think was that one of the neighbouring cats had got in while the back door was open earlier, they’d found one another and there’d been an altercation. I walked round the house calling her name quietly, and expecting a large ball of fur to fly past me, but I couldn’t find any cats or other signs of destruction. I came back downstairs and opened the side door, and then found her sitting outside, the other side of the catflap.

You may know that I had this catflap put into the ‘side’ door – so called (by me) not because it is actually on the side of the house but to differentiate it from the ‘back’ door which is at the end of the kitchen. The ‘side’ door is at the end of the hall which runs from the front door to the end of the front half of the house which is connected directly to the next house in the terrace. There is then another bit of hall going to the left, and the back part of the house, consisting of the kitchen/dining room downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs, is attached to the house on the other side, but on the side where the door is, there’s a narrow space – same width as the door – between my kitchen, and a wall, behind which is an equivalent space and the neighbour’s kitchen. (This is where – I suspect – my neighbours were sneaking out and smoking dope in the lockdown last summer, but that’s another story.)

She has never to my knowledge used this catflap, but I think that must be what happened last night. I guessed the shriek was because there’s a drop of a couple of feet on the other side. When it was installed, I built a ramp for her with bricks and a plank, but when my son was carrying bits of shed from the hall into the garden, I moved it out of the way.

I don’t suppose she’ll ever try that again.

Here is the last 40% of what was in my notebook from yesterday:

…

…

Eek, it’s not on the PC, because yesterday I sat downstairs and typed it on my laptop. There will be a brief delay while I run down and email it to myself…

…or maybe I’ll carry on with what I was going to say about napo first 9dammit, still got that problem with the keyboard and still haven’t ordered a new one).

When I started the NaPoWriMo poem(s) this year (consciously using the left shift key now), they kept coming every day, but I was aware that this was a risky strategy

Over the last few days, although only half way through the month, I felt that I had reached so far into the dark, that I was obliged to start coming out. By opening Pandora’s Box, and acknowledging the Hope that hides at the bottom, I started turning it around – although that wasn’t at all how I was feeling. Is it a good idea to have a crisis bang in the middle of a narrative? And after all, hope isn’t always to be trusted.

…Then I remembered that the gates to the garden behind the Natural History Museum were open when I passed the other day, and as that is quieter than the Rose Garden I decided to go there – it’s on my usual route. I found another sunny bench near the tree where I used to go to outdoor yoga classes last summer, and sat with my coffee and notebook, listening to the birds and the sound of tennis racquets and writing this (which I’m now transcribing at home).

I know it’s not unusual for people of my age to grieve for the past: the career, the family times, the children now grown up, and so on. But I think I grieve more for the future, or futures, in which I was going to raise a family; study for a PhD; live in a big house in the country; end my marriage and live my own life; go travelling alone across Europe; write and publish a book; move to the seaside. Now when I look to the future I see that my son-in-law is planning to build a ‘granny annexe’, so that when I’m no longer capable of looking after myself, I can return to Bedford and live with them. Which is reassuring, in lots of ways, but what else is there? What about the years – hopefully many – between now and then?

Linda Rushby 15 April 2021

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.

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.

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.

When to stop
and when to go.
When to try
and when to no.
Questions always in my mind,
seeking things I never find.

I used to think there’d come a day,
when things at last would go my way.
I’d show the world a happy face
and life would fall right into place.

That will not be,
it is not me.

I take the thoughts that come to hand,
and turn them into words that scan.
And though I struggle finding rhymes,
that happens too from time to time.

There was a trailer on Radio 4 yesterday for a programme about how going for a walk first thing in the morning can improve your health and wellbeing (I haven’t listened to the programme – yet).

I decided I would do it this morning (go for a walk, not listen to the programme), then lay in bed and listened to the second episode of ‘Sweeney Todd’ instead, and by the time I checked the sunrise time on Accuweather, it was almost six already and I had no time to get to the beach for 6:19 to see it. But I got up anyway, dressed, fed the cat, let her out into the garden, made a flask of coffee, found a notebook, let the cat back in, found my glasses, found a mask, found my notebook again, found a pencil etc etc and left the house, came back for the mask, came back for gloves, and was walking down the road shortly after seven.

It’s been a while since I had a morning walk – other than to the doctor’s for blood tests, which has happened twice in the last few weeks. The second time was last Friday, and I thought about walking on to the beach (I was half way there) but decided against it as it was grey and dull and I wanted to come home and hide. It was dull this morning when I left home, but the sun came out while I was sitting on the prom drinking coffee.

I’ve written two poems, one NaPoWriMo one came to me as I was on my way there – actually before I left home, when I put my hand in the pocket of my winter coat and pulled out some pebbles, which made me think of Virginia Woolf, who filled her coat pockets with stones before drowning herself in the river. The other popped into my head when I was in the loo after I got back, as you can see above.

I’ve been meaning to say some more about my NaNoWriMo poems, obviously I’ve made it to Day 11, I think it’s working okay so far, but yesterday I felt completely at a loss till I found the seeds in my desk drawer – which I haven’t planted yet, by the way. It feels very risky, setting myself this task – though of course it’s not really ‘risky’, I could stop right now and it wouldn’t matter…