Category: self awareness

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Madwoman Out of the Attic

Writing is easy – just listen to the words in your head and transcribe them. That’s the way I do it, anyway. Never a time when there aren’t any words in my head, though admittedly most of them aren’t worth preserving. Which begs the question… but I’m not going down that road again, because I’ve asked it too many times and never found an answer. It’s just a habit – something I do every morning (or almost every morning) like tai chi, or feeding the cat, or listening to ‘Thought for the Day’, or defecating. (actually, the only one of those I absolutely can’t avoid doing is feeding the cat, as long as I’m here, though if I’m not here, someone else comes in to do it.)

Now my mind is wandering and I’m not actually typing. Oh, I fixed the mouse, by the way, it was just a new battery that it needed. I remembered them and even got as far as bringing them up (I wasn’t sure if it needed AA or AAA so brought both), when I remembered that I needed to bring up the loo cleaner – which I also brought up. Wonder how long it will take me to remember to take the spare batteries downstairs again? Or to clean the loo? (Only kidding, I put the loo cleaner in as soon as I got upstairs).

I told you most of the words in my head aren’t worth preserving. They’re either stuff like that, or things I’ve already said before.

Why do I tag myself as the ‘Madwoman in the Attic’? Especially as the house where I live now doesn’t even have an attic? It’s partly, of course, a literary  reference to Jane Eyre, in which Mr Rochester keeps his first wife locked up in the attic (which probably was a kinder option than sending her to one of the notorious ‘madhouses ‘ of the time). Ironically, I’ve just realised that in the ‘Husband or Cat?’ incident of 2005, it was my ex-husband who voluntarily moved himself into the attic –I’ve never noticed the irony before, but that’s a story for another time. Anyway, our attic had two rooms, and he confined himself to the larger one, which wasn’t my study, and had a telly and VHS in addition to a computer.

The whole attic thing went back much further than that, however, to a time when I thought it was romantic for writers to starve in attics (or ‘garrets’ – I’m not sure what the difference is between the two). I’d long dreamt of having an attic to write (though not necessarily starve) in. As soon as we saw that house, I knew it was going to be my room – the ‘Room of One’s Own’ as recommended by Virginia Woolf for any woman who wanted to write (literary references coming thick and fast today).

When I left, it also became the repository for all the junk I left behind… but this is the start of a much longer story…

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Creative Endeavours

Last evening my cat and I huddled together listening to the storm, which shares its name with my eldest great-niece. This morning all is calm, and the sky, though pale, is mostly clear with patches of cloud, rather than the other way round. Whether Bella has spent her wrath on us, or is rampaging further up the country, I couldn’t say.

Worryingly, when I switched my computer on this morning, it didn’t show the Windows log on screen. I thought I was going to have to go downstairs and type this on my laptop, but after a few rounds of switching off and on again, it slowly and reluctantly opened up, though is still running more slowly than usual, so there’s a delay between my typing and its appearance on the screen.

Two days before Christmas, I finished off a crochet cardi which I’d started before my daughter’s Christmas jumper, and which had been hanging around waiting to be finished. It didn’t work out quite as well as I hoped, and I knew I was going to need a new project over Christmas, so have been thinking about it and planning, and started knitting on Christmas Eve, with a couple of false starts and re-starts since. It’s another one that I’m making up as I go along, a jumper using the same top-down techniques and mainly the same yarn as the Christmas one (I bought way too much) but I’m changing the neck and obviously won’t be doing any Christmas motifs, but a sort of fair-isle pattern, which I’m working out on squared paper, and for which I will use partly white yarn and partly a variegated yarn that I bought during the first lockdown. We’ll see how it goes. If I do finish it, I probably won’t wear it, because I don’t like jumpers, I prefer cardigans that are easy to take off and put on, but that’s not really the point anyway – the point is the process of making.

As a way of channelling creativity, it’s maybe not as highbrow as writing a novel or artistic as painting and drawing, but equally it’s not as challenging or stressful. There is of course a whole debate about the boundaries between craft and art, and the downgrading of skills which are stereotypically seen as ‘women’s work’, which I’m too weary to engage with at the moment. My discovery last week of abandoned sketch books containing my abortive and depressing attempts to produce visual art has led me once again back to wondering if I should make more efforts in that direction. I have drawers full of materials (mostly dried up and useless) and shelves full of books leftover from past attempts, and I wonder if I should try again, but I think I’ll stick to knitting.

Here’s one of the poems I found in the sketchbooks, written in coloured pencils, different colours for the different stanzas:

I draw flowers.
These are all I know.
They are not real, just sketches of shapes.

And on the back, I find
the beginnings of a painting,
house roofs, sky,
the empty outlines of a tree,
I scrape the brown pencil
over the ridges of the paper,
colouring in.

This is nonsense.
I channel words,
that’s all I can do.

I cannot draw, I cannot paint,
I cannot love, I cannot write,
I cannot tell you how I feel.

Linda Rushby, date unknown, probably 2015?
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Christmas at Home

Well here it is…

First time I’ve had Christmas in my own home for ten years. Not the first time I’ve blogged on Christmas Day but I can’t really think of what to say. Earlier I could, but now I’m not so sure. I think I’ll just go and get breakfast.

I feel I should write something to explain how I feel, except that… I don’t think I can express it very well. I can say I’m fine, and really I think I am, and the more I say on that theme, probably the less convincing it will seem, so maybe it’s best to say nothing.

I’m expecting Skype calls with both families today, and I got a turkey crown yesterday in the Co-op – not the same Co-op that had the sign saying none of their stores were selling turkeys, but my usual one. So I bought it though it will serve six, and the steak is consigned to the freezer!

I decided I needed some lights for my tiny little tree (which is about as long as between my elbow and hand), so on Tuesday I had a look for the box with all the Christmas stuff in the cupboard under the stairs – it wasn’t there, but I did find a large plastic folder with some of my artistic efforts from a few years back, lino prints and drink-and-draw sessions and some feeble attempts at watercolour from years earlier. I found a couple of poems scribbled on pages in sketchbooks too, neither of which I think had ever been typed up or turned into anything. I was going to blog one of them with the awful picture it came with, but didn’t get round to it.

As I couldn’t find the box, on Wednesday I ventured up into the loft. Getting the ladder down is enough of a challenge, but I did that and got my head into the loft, where I could see the box I wanted without going through the hatch, so pulled it towards me, then had to turn it end on to get it through, then tried to go down the steps, but couldn’t hold the box, thought I was going to trap my arm, then that I would trap my fingers, then let the box fall, then lost my balance and fell myself (from about halfway up the ladder). Plastic box shattered with a mighty crash, shards of red plastic (and glitter) everywhere, but miraculously, a set of four glass tumblers in a cardboard carton were intact, as were two boxes of glass baubles from Prague. The only casualty seemed (at first sight) to be a tree topper star which lost one of its arms, and was no great loss, but later I discovered that one of the banister posts had broken in the middle, which I guess must have been caused by my body rolling into it – I don’t remember that happening, but nothing else heavy enough got that close.

But my tree has lights.

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Dinner Plans

I’m not reading in the mornings at the moment – I’m between books. Maybe this is why the dark morning clouds have settled in again – takes a lot of effort to fight through them. I’ve also been late getting to sleep the last couple of nights – going to bed at the usual time, but I just don’t settle.

On Monday I wrapped up my daughter’s Christmas jumper in a parcel and took it to the Post Office. I paid for Special Delivery for it to get there the next day, and yesterday I waited for a text from her saying it had arrived and thanking me. In the evening I texted and asked if her ‘parcel’ had arrived without saying what it was. She said two of the cards I posted last Thursday came yesterday. I checked the tracking app, which told me it had been received in Southampton – presumably a regional depot – at 1:19pm yesterday. Just checked again and it was received at Bedford (again, presumably the sorting office) earlier this morning (it is now 8:24) and should be delivered today. Hooray! In the circumstances, 48 hours rather than ‘next day’ is still pretty good.

After sorting out (sort of) the business over the new router yesterday I went to Tesco, then on the way back moved my car from the side street where it’s been parked (since I went to the hospital a fortnight ago, I think that’s the last time I used it) to a spot across the road where I can see it through the window as I type. Once I’d got it started, I thought I’d go and try a couple of shops which are outside my usual (in this weather) walking area. I couldn’t park near the butcher’s, but I tried another local Tesco, and then a slightly larger Co-op, where I managed to find a piece of steak – nothing special, but I don’t often have steak. I was thinking I’d do it with roasties and Yorkshire pudding (which reminds me I need to get eggs), and I’ve got parsnips and carrots, so although I’ll obviously cook the steak on the griddle, the trimmings will be more like a roast dinner (which I also don’t have very often). And I’ve got Christmas pudding, assorted nibbles and party food for tomorrow evening (and I’ll make pate today), enough boxes of biscuits to sink a battleship, and a couple of bottles of bubbly. I’ve also got smoked salmon, so thought I’d have scrambled eggs and salmon on toasted wholewheat for breakfast on the day, maybe with buck’s fizz (again, mustn’t forget to buy eggs).

So that’s sorted – or at least, in my head it is. Would stuffing balls and chipolatas wrapped in bacon (NOT to be confused with ‘pigs in blankets’, which should be sausages wrapped in pancakes) be too weird with steak? Maybe I should have got a chicken instead – but I prefer steak.

And this year, I’ll do exactly what I want – with what’s available.

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Decisions

She isn’t dead! I knew it! Well, I kept hoping – I’ll admit, I was starting to question my intuition, pretty well given up in fact, then I started the next chapter and – there she was! Only I ran out of time (it was time to get up) so I don’t know yet how she managed to get out of the car wreck (though I know who she’s with now) and she’s clearly been out of it for the last few chapters and only just regained consciousness, because everyone’s been assuming she was dead (whose was the body they dragged out of her car, then?) but that’s something to look forward to, this evening, or tomorrow morning, or maybe I’ll have a crafty read some time today…

Sorry, got a bit carried away there. I told you I was reading a good book. I love it when it grabs you like that – that’s the joy of reading.

Well, yesterday both Portsmouth and Bedford went into Tier 3 Covid restrictions. Which means… well, over Christmas (23rd-27th) the special rules are still in place, so I can legally go. But I’d made a pact with Fate, or the Universe (as I often do when I’m forced to make a decision) that if any of us went into Tier 3, I’d hunker down and spend Christmas here, just me and the cat.

So, decision made, I texted my daughter to tell her I wasn’t coming, then talked it over with my therapist in our weekly Skype session. It was a relief, really, I told her, and myself, because the decision was taken out of my hands. My main worry was how my daughter would react, but I’d decided. At least I’d got rid of that stress over packing etc, and driving.

‘…the stress which you would have anyway, whatever you do…’ she pointed out. Hmm, yes, she knows me too well – that’s her job after all.

After the session, I wrote the family Christmas cards – with a little note in my granddaughter’s saying ‘…sorry I can’t be with you…’ walked to the post office and popped them in the box. Looked (in vain) in Tesco and the Co-op on the way home for anything nice for my Christmas dinner. Bought a small poinsettia and tiny tree in the florist.

Four Christmases ago, when I was waiting for the results of the biopsy, people asked me why I was going away when I might be called back to hospital at any time? And I thought then: ‘this might be my last Christmas, why would I want to spend it on my own?’

In the evening my daughter texted again, and then rang and said she’d spoken to her brother, and even though it’s my choice, they’re prepared to come and get me and bring me home so I don’t have to drive, and even her Dad said: ‘…she’ll regret it if she doesn’t…’

So the decision changes again. But this time it feels right.

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Xmas Plans

Yesterday I went to the beach in the morning. The boxes outside the beach café were too wet to sit on, but I found a bench on the prom where I could perch on the edge to drink my thermos of coffee. I walked back by my usual route, through the rose garden and the butterfly garden, and got to my usual café at ten past nine, to find they’ve put back their opening time till ten. In the greasy spoon across the road I had a fry-up that came with a pile of sauté potatoes. Afterwards I wondered if it was such a good idea.

I’m still making cards, so the mess is still over the table. Although I posted most of them last Friday, I’ve been making them for my son and daughter. I thought about making them for the grandchildren, couldn’t think what to do, then had an idea so started doing those. And I need a birthday card for my step-granddaughter, though she’s at an awkward teenage age. I’ve made three gluten free Christmas puddings as well – three, because I have small basins, cereal bowls, really. The mixture makes two medium sized ones, but one of those still contains last year’s failed effort (because all the dry ingredients were GF, but I still mixed it with Guinness and barley wine before I realised).

It’s ten years since I’ve spent Christmas, or let in the New Year, in my own home. This year I’ll definitely be home for the latter, and in the last couple of days I’ve become less sure about the former. The current plan is my daughter’s from the 23rd to Boxing Day, and then to my son’s till the 29th, but now I don’t know what to do – if any of us turn out to be in tier 3 after today, I think I’ll just stay here. If I do, I’m not sure what I’ll have for Christmas dinner. In 2010 I had a rolled and stuffed turkey breast joint from M&S, but don’t recall seeing anything like that in any of my local supermarkets. I’ll be all right for pudding, obviously, and also for booze.

I used to decorate my first flat on the Solstice, with candles, and evergreens picked from the old garden. In 2012, in my Fenland ‘penthouse’, my daughter and granddaughter brought me a tiny tree in a pot, which I kept, but which died of drought a couple of summers ago. Also I put up star lights in the windows, shining from the top of the building over the canal and the flat fields. But since then I’ve never bothered. This year, it will be a miracle if I manage to get the house looking tolerably tidy for the catsitter (should I need her), let alone faffing about with tinsel and pine needles.

Whatever happens, I’ll be fine. I think this year has taught me a lot, about accepting myself as I am and life as it is.

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Simple Things

One card to make out of the current batch, then I need to write in them, address them, stamp them and take them to the post office. If they go today, they’re a week ahead of the final posting date. Two more to make, for my children, which I want to make a bit more special, but haven’t got a clear idea yet what I’m going to do. Hopefully I’m going to be able to deliver them both in person, but if not… maybe I should plan on trying to get them posted in advance anyway, because who knows what might happen in the next fortnight?

Yesterday I showed my therapist the Christmas jumper, she seemed particularly excited that it was blue and not red or green. I’ve still got to weave in the ends. Over Skype, she couldn’t see that, or the way the stitches pull around the motifs – besides, she’s not a knitter, so she’s probably impressed that I managed to finish it at all. She said at one point that she was ‘in awe’ of me – I’d rather she admired my writing or my academic prowess than my knitting, but I don’t think she meant that anyway.

She said last week how impressed she was with my routine, how I get up and do my yoga, tai chi and meditation, and then my writing, and yesterday she added to this the way I do my crafting. I showed her the current weather blanket and she asked what I do with them when they’re finished, so I told her the first one is in the spare bedroom, last year’s one went to my son and daughter-in-law and this one’s going to my daughter – to mark for both of them the years in which they got married (my daughter’s idea).

But all of that: getting up at seven (when usually I’ve been awake for at least two hours already), the exercise and meditation, the five hundred words, the square for the weather blanket and other crafts (and the reading, listening to the radio and su doku as well) – is about self-preservation, keeping myself this side of the line that tips over into darkness. I do them because I need to. Yes, I’d quite like it if I was writing a novel, or some great academic treatise that would put the world to rights, but at least all these activities are doable and pretty harmless and don’t involve anybody else. One day, no doubt, I’ll stop doing one or more of them, and then this year will become, not just the (first) Covid-19 year, but the time when I ‘…used to do that stuff’.

Years ago, I used to do cross stitch, and I remember thinking my life was pretty sad on the days when that was the most satisfying thing I’d done – like the wife in the Paul Simon song for whom a good day ‘…ain’t got no rain’. But I’ve learned to appreciate losing myself in simple things.

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Round Like a Circle in a Spiral

I wrote yesterday, nothing much, and when I got close to the end I wanted to include a quote from Polar Express (which I saw for the first/only time at my daughter’s last Christmas). I only remembered it because I read it somewhere recently, in a file that I’d obviously saved it to because I found it interesting. I thought I remembered reading it on my laptop, so guessed it was one of the Word files that I wanted to save in none-365 format. Just been looking for it, in all the places I could think of that it might be – I even thought I might have saved it on my phone, but no luck. Came on the PC to start writing, Googled ‘Polar Express quotes’, opened the third link down, and it was the second quote on the list:

‘One thing about trains: It doesn’t matter where they’re going. What matters is deciding to get on.’

The Polar Express

But the question is – given that the only reason I didn’t post what I wrote yesterday (apart from it being the usual pointless drivel) was because I wanted to find that quote, then I got caught up in doing something else and never got back to it – should I post that now or not? Should I do that instead of trying to write something today? Except… I’m almost half way to 500 words already.

What I write is throw-away, but sometimes, reading back through old posts, I find something interesting. Like that quote – okay, it’s not exactly Schopenhauer, but it’s interesting, right? In looking for it, I also found another quote that I thought was interesting, which I’d taken from a strange documentary about Jim Carrey that I watched last Boxing Day – but I’m not going to quote that now because it’s on the laptop, which is downstairs in the front room and I’m upstairs on the PC.

When things become self-referential, they create a sort of spiral effect, or maybe a hall of mirrors, to use a familiar metaphor I’ve often used before – and there I go again. But does it just take me up my own back passage, or somewhere different? Because a spiral (I used that word deliberately) is not a circle – it doesn’t take you back to exactly the same place as before – something has changed, it might be infinitesimal, but the circumstances, the conditions are not identical. Back to cause and effect again, and the Buddhist idea of ‘conditionality’, the connectedness of all things. Which set me off looking up definitions, and led me to a book I might buy.

I feel as though I’ve strayed away from the point somehow, but then, I can’t remember what point I was trying to make. So that’s kind of a good thing, I think: it doesn’t matter so much where the train is going, what matters is that I got on.

I’ve completed nine cards so far, and printed five letters which are now in envelopes ready to be posted.  

Round, like a circle in a spiral…

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Superficial Stuff

Yesterday I received my first Christmas card of the season through the post, and it was from the friend I mentioned a couple of days ago (hers is always the first). There wasn’t a long letter this time, just a handwritten note in the card to say her Mum died in May. Luckily I hadn’t already sent my round robin letters, so I can write a personal note to her. It’s a worry when you don’t have any contact from one year’s end to the next and don’t know what might have happened in between.

I don’t have to go anywhere today, and although the sun is shining I doubt I’ll be tempted out of my burrow. Yesterday after my trip to the hospital in the morning, I made the mistake of going into the Range on the way back to see what Christmassy paper, cutting dies and stamps they had. Unfortunately, this hobby is really about buying stuff – which looks amazing and inspiring in the shop and then disappears into the cupboards when I get home. And then there was the depressing socially distanced queuing. Most of my shopping this year has been online. I had to buy a winter flowering shrub (skimmia), two boxes of coconut Lindors and a kilo of Fox’s biscuits to cheer myself up.

In the afternoon, I completed the interiors of three of the cards I made the exteriors for at the weekend (which means I now have a total of four usable cards), but got stuck on the remaining two because I thought I’d got a second sheet of the matching paper for the front, to do the internal decorations with, but couldn’t find it anywhere. After I’d spent an hour going through the mess on the table, it was getting near dinner time, so I left it, with a plan to start some new ones today with different paper in hope that the other will turn up, or if not I’ll think of something else to go on the inside.

This is why I have to allow so much time to do these things. Ten days from today to the last second-class posting date. Also I need to re-order some teas, coffees and hot chocolates from the Whittard’s website, because an order that I thought I’d sent over a week ago never turned up – when I checked, the order wasn’t registered, although I remembered doing it on the ‘Black Friday’ weekend, so I must have just put it all in the basket without confirming it.

Just had a text from someone I’d arranged to see next Monday in Bedford and hadn’t told her I won’t be going. Still haven’t rung up the steam train people to cancel the booking so I can get my money back (in the form of vouchers to go next year). At least I contacted the catsitter yesterday and rearranged that.

Not very deep today, am I? This is why my head is always in a mess.

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Rabbit in the Headlights

Later this morning, I’ll be going to the hospital for my annual mammogram, postponed from last month because of the lockdown. I don’t want to go – not that it’s that painful (though it’s never comfortable), but I don’t want to go to the hospital, or anywhere really – just as I didn’t particularly want to take the van out last week, but this time I really have no choice.

The card-making didn’t go so well yesterday, partly because I was, like Friday afternoon, trying something different (for the inside of the cards), and I only completed one. So I’m still not ready to send off my letters, which feels a bit as though time’s running out.

Thinking about all this yesterday after I’d posted – and when I was getting frustrated with how I was going to do it, and panicking a little in case I did anything that would ruin anything I’d done so far – it struck me that there is a distinct ‘first world problem’ side to all this. It’s all so trivial, isn’t it, on the global scale? Yet it feels so important to me. It feels – at risk of sounding melodramatic – like an act of courage, something I’ve had to psych myself up for, and have to keep motivating myself to continue. Now, not that long ago I would have been berating myself for that, feeling stupid, frustrated and angry with myself for making such a big deal over it. I’m trying not to do that, though several times over the last few days I’ve been struck by panic about it all. I honestly know how ridiculous and irrational all this sounds. This is a side of me that nobody knows about (unless they read this blog, and even then they probably won’t take it seriously). These are the sort of battles that I have with myself all the time, to ‘get over myself’, in that weird phrase that just popped into my head.

This is the rabbit-in-the-headlights me that somehow – not sure how – I manage to hide from other people a lot of the time. Life is easier if I don’t set her challenges, and there are enough challenges in everyday life to try to protect her from (though fewer during lockdown). I can never get rid of her – I’ll never ‘grow out’ of her if it hasn’t happened by now. She is the essence of me, and I’m not sure whether referring to ‘her’ in the third person is such a good idea, but there again, it does convey the point that ‘I’ don’t have a lot of control over her – I can threaten her and bully her but doing that always has consequences for me, because I’m the one who feels the pain (even more so when I get angry with her). But there are things which she/I now can deal with and enjoy only because I/she have persisted in making her/myself do them.

Little battles can be as difficult as big ones. I have to keep trying.