Category: walking

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Choices

For the second day running I have not gone to the beach for sunrise and then wished I had when it was too late. I was awake in plenty of time, then just lay there, and then read for a bit, and I had an idea for a poem, and when I got up I wrote it on the laptop (but don’t feel like I want to share it at the moment). I did it in Open Office, which reminded me that there are many features from Word which are missing from OO, but at least it works and I’ll be able to write in cafes or other places – come such time as I can do that again, which hopefully will return.

I should go out. I mean, I really should go out somewhere, the sun is shining today, I could walk to the beach and maybe get a take-away bacon butty somewhere. Yesterday I didn’t go out at all, or Sunday, only Saturday when I went to the shop. I know it’s not healthy to sit indoors all the time, and the weather is no excuse at the moment, but somehow… In normal times I would go out for breakfast just as motivation to get myself out of the door. In the summer I ate my breakfast in the garden most days, and stayed sitting out there with my crochet, which is better than never leaving the house.

I’ve been reading two books in parallel, one on the Kindle and one in print. After my conversation with the lady in the local bookshop just before lockdown, I felt quite ashamed of myself for continuing to support Amazon by having everything on Kindle, but it is so much more convenient. I’ve now compromised by deciding I will read from the Kindle in bed and proper books when I’m sitting. One of the big advantages of the Kindle is being able to adjust the size of the font. I have so many books that I’ve never read – mostly picked up second-hand – and I worry that my eyesight will go before I’ve read most of them. And of course I spend a lot of time listening to readings and dramas on the radio, so that I can knit or crochet at the same time.

The two books I’m currently reading both have subjects that sound quite dry – one about the history of the Hapsburg Empire (‘Danubia’ by Simon Winder – paperback) and one about DH Lawrence (‘Out of Sheer Rage’ by Geoff Dyer – Kindle) but they’re both written with such wit and humour that they’re great fun  – I think so, anyway. I’ve mentioned the Dyer one before, about how he keeps writing about how he can’t write this book. The bit I was reading this morning was about regret, and how he shares with Lawrence the knowledge that whatever choices he makes, he knows he will regret not doing the opposite. I don’t think I’m that bad.

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Starlings

I looked at the clock and it was 6:21. I looked at the Accuweather app and saw that no precipitation was expected for 120 minutes, it was currently 11° and sunrise would be at 7:27. So I immediately decided I would get up and go to the beach with a flask of coffee, and then thirteen minutes later I got out of bed and dressed, let Miko out for her morning constitutional, filled her food bowl, made coffee, put on my shoes and winter coat and walked to the beach, arriving on the dot of 7:27.

I hadn’t thought about the clouds. There was a grey curtain hanging over the sea, and white overlapping ones over the land. And a surprising number of people out and about – not so surprising really, because it’s always like that, but somehow it always surprises me. Even more surprisingly, I wasn’t the only person just walking on the beach for the sake of walking, on their own, without a dog, or a metal detector, or a litter grabber and plastic sack. When my parents were ill, and after they passed away, I would go out for walks by myself, just generally through the fields around the village where we lived then, and along the old railway track, and the people I met invariably had dogs, and I always felt self conscious, as though walking by myself was vaguely suspicious, and I must be up to no good somehow. Until this year, it’s always been like that on the beach too, but now it seems people do go out on their own walking without ulterior motive – even walking normally, in normal clothes, like me, rather than ‘power’ walking (or whatever it’s called) with their elbows flailing.

I sat behind the café, where I always sit, and gradually the white clouds became tinged with pink, which was strange because they were over the land and hence further north, but evidently the light was seeping out from behind the darker clouds as the sun crept up surreptitiously, with none of the usual showy light across the sea. I watched the gulls and listened to the waves and drank my coffee, wondering why there were no starlings on the street lamp this morning, then a few minutes later I heard them chattering and looked again. I counted five on the lamp, none on the wire, but gradually more turned up, and I’d just got my phone out to take a photo when they all flew up at once and formed a small cloud which passed out of my eyeline then reappeared over the park. Two women with a beagle on a lead came from behind me, past the café. The one holding the dog’s lead was trying to jog and her friend was trying to take a photo of her, but the dog wasn’t co-operating, and stopped for a pee against a bunch of seakale. When they’d passed by, the starlings came back, so maybe the dog disturbed them.

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Here We Go Round Again

So far this week: last yoga class before lockdown; last tai chi class before lockdown; last trip out in the van before lockdown. I mentioned last week about my yoga teacher being homeless and having to cancel classes – the next day she sent a text to say that someone had offered her a lift, then came the lockdown announcement, so there was a class on Monday evening, and ditto the tai chi yesterday morning, after which I picked up my camper van from the garage and drove to Queen Elizabeth Country Park on the A3 near Petersfield, and had a walk among the trees and a picnic. I love taking the van there, because there are car parks spread among the trees, often empty (on weekdays when I usually go), so although you can’t actually camp, you can get some of the feeling for a few hours.

The weather has turned dry and sunny but noticeably colder than it was, and today looks to be about the same, with a clear blue sky. I really should get out and do some tidying up in the garden, I tried cutting the hedge on Monday but the trimmer kept cutting out. Because it stopped and later started again, it had to be a loose wire. I took apart the connector that joins it where I cut through the cable in the spring, unscrewed the little screwy things inside, couldn’t see anything obviously loose, then got into a horrible dyspraxic muddle trying to put it back together and gave up for the day.

I read some more of ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, this time about creative blocks. The author suggests the usual things: keep trying, don’t self-edit, do a little every day, expect to fail, but keep going anyway. This is what I’ve been doing forever. Back to the old question of whether it matters that it never gets me anywhere? Apparently, it doesn’t. Either one day a miracle will happen and I’ll suddenly start writing something worthwhile, or I’ll be gone and someone will come along and wipe my hard drive and that will be that.

Last week I read the poem about the ‘Wild Thing’ to my therapist, and she said I should try to get it published. I haven’t done anything about it. Strictly speaking, I think posting it on here counts as publication, which disqualifies it from most competitions anyway.

I’ve been thinking about Daniel Defoe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’. I think this definitely counts as a ‘plague year’, but I don’t think this journal of mine is in the same class.

My current yoga teacher once said that destiny is what has to happen, but fate is what you make happen (or words to that effect). She is not having a great year, even worse than most of us. But she has faith in the fundamental goodness of the world, and I envy her for that. Today, I fear for the fate of us all.

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Tuesday plans

Reached the third of the month, and I haven’t yet mentioned NaNoWriMo. That’s because I haven’t got any plans to do anything about it. Two years ago I wrote 50k words, last year I read them and couldn’t see that there was anything I could do with them. Maybe this year I will think about The Long Way Back again – I think the last time I looked at it was in spring 2018. But one big ongoing project has been finished and gone this year. Maybe I could start thinking about it again. We’ll see.

I spent some time yesterday on the weather blanket, as I said I would. Every month (in the middle, not the beginning) I add a colour to the border – in two weeks time it will be the tenth and last. Quite a lot of my time yesterday was spent in untangling the previous nine. The only way I can see of avoiding that in the future would be to leave the border and do it all at the end, which would be massively tedious and probably mean that it wouldn’t be finished till about March. I have some plastic bobbins which are supposed to help, but only a few large ones. I will try to be more systematic about it next year.

The camper van went in for its MOT yesterday, and miraculously it passed on the first go (for the second year running). It was due in June, but was covered by the six months extension, which would have got it to January, but I wanted to avoid that because the tax is due then, and car insurance and MOT in March/April, so I decided to spread it out. The garage called me at about 5, and I didn’t really want to go and collect it then because that would have meant trying to reverse it into the garage in the dark (a nightmare) so I asked them to keep it for me till today. As the sun is shining – and the sky clear for the first time in ages – I am going to attempt to take it out for a picnic. I wasn’t sure if my season ticket for parking at the country park had been renewed or not, it was due in September but the direct debit didn’t go out. However I just had a rummage among my emails and found that they’ve extended it to the end of the year because of the closure for the first lockdown.

I will make sure I take a cup this time, and my coat. But I can’t stay too long, because I need to make sure I’m back before dark. I need to make sure I take it out at least once a month over winter, so it doesn’t end up in the same state as this spring and last. All this seems as good a reason as any to take it out today, before the next lockdown starts. A good sort of day.

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Order and Chaos

In the last week I have: walked to the beach twice; had breakfast out twice; had a cream tea out once; had a flu jab; walked to the garage to drop off the van keys (for MOT); been to a real live tai chi lesson at the community centre (just restarted after the teacher’s quarantine); resolved the initial issues and produced a reasonable stab at a first attempt on the website, to show to client; ditto the Christmas jumper (except the ‘client’ can’t see it because it’s going to be a surprise); phoned my sister; as well as writing every day (last Thursday’s effort handwritten in a notebook on the beach) and did at least some of my exercise and meditation routine every day (which reminded me to go and look in the spare room and check that I’d blown the candle out, which I had).

Also I notice that I haven’t been moaning about not being ‘motivated’, although I must admit the house is even more chaotic than usual. Earlier I filled the plastic water jug for the coffee pot while I was trying to tidy up around the sink, then moments later knocked it over and half the water went over the counter. I managed to mop that up and make sure it wasn’t too close to any of the electrical stuff, then turned round and knocked it again, with the rest of the water going over the floor. However, this is not to say that that’s in any way unusual, just that my feet and my dressing gown got wet.

Years ago, I remember a friend telling me that her cat disapproved of her standards of house-keeping, and kept giving her disapproving looks. I laughed at the time, and thought ‘crazy cat lady!’, but now understand exactly what she means. I feel so guilty sometimes watching my cat trying to pick her way around piles of junk on the floor – often knitting yarn, or books (or clothes – mostly in the bedroom) but also random other things which have fallen or been dropped or knocked off the furniture and not picked up, whereas I just step over it without even noticing it’s there. Also she is terrified of sudden movements and loud noises, which must make living with me a nightmare, as I blunder my way around the place.

All thoughts of trying to impose any kind of order on my life and my living space seem to have gone out of the (smeary, blurry, fly-specked) window. Having ‘projects’ to do somehow gives me licence to ignore that stuff – and go to the beach, or eat scones in a quiet café.

And yet… in the mornings, I feed my cat, do my exercises and meditation, write my blog. Every day (mostly) – and have done consistently for months. Yet making ‘to do’ lists and sticking with them is beyond me – I keep trying, but it all falls apart.

Sun shining this morning. Skype therapy at 2.00. That’s today.  

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Thresholds

After I’d finished writing yesterday, I looked up the dictionary definition of ‘liminal’ and found that it refers not just to borders, but specifically to thresholds, which pleases me, because of the ambiguity between the two – what I described yesterday as the ‘hazy, scary…’ nature of boundaries, their combination of both limiting aspects but also potential for discovery, change and new experiences.

It also made me think of a picture by William Blake, the frontispiece for his epic poem ‘Jerusalem’, which shows Los (his name for the embodiment of the poetic imagination) about to step through an archway, carrying a lantern into darkness.

About six this morning, as I was lying in bed and thinking, the word ‘edgy’ popped into my head, and I started to think about its implications – that combination of nervousness and excitement. When applied to people, it can imply a kind of fearfulness, a risk of tipping over into a chaotic and destructive state – most likely self-destructive, but not necessarily just that (does self-destruction ever not have repercussions for others beside the self?) But when ‘edgy’ is applied to actions, ideas, art, it implies courage, and is more likely to be complimentary, or at least ambivalent.

This whole idea of edges, boundaries, borders, liminality, the relationships between risk, fear, courage, change, uncertainty, danger, transformation , creativity, loss, immobility (in no particular order) has been haunting me recently as I try to deal with my ‘stuckness’ and lack of motivation and inspiration, not to mention my fear of not being able to find ways of dealing with the obstacles I keep coming up against.

Speaking of which, I think (only think) I may have got round the large ones with the website project, and that it shouldn’t (‘shouldn’t’) require too much more work. Having said that, I went out yesterday morning to walk on the beach and have breakfast out (instead of putting in the work) and realised how much that improved my mood. And then when I got home my broadband was down, so I abandoned websiting and spent the afternoon trying to sort out the design for the jumper, filling in the design on squared paper and then realising it would be far too big, so having to produce a smaller pattern which I think is going to work, but anyway it will all require a lot of time and effort (knitting doesn’t count as ‘work’) to put into practice.

Tai chi this morning, and I’ve just had a phone call from the GP’s surgery offering me a flu jab appointment at 2:15. I had to cancel the last one because I had a cold, so don’t want to miss it. And afterwards I might go and do some café-sitting and reading, or walking if the weather stays nice (which it looks as though it might).  Those things are important and I need to do more of them. But I’ll have a couple of hours between tai chi and lunch to do some website work.

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Wherever That River Goes…

No post yesterday, because I got up and took a flask of coffee to the beach, arriving a few minutes  late for sunrise (but there was low cloud over the sea anyway) and writing in a notebook, which I might or might not copy onto here, but today I’ve got other stuff in my head so will go ahead with that.

One of the songs from my youth that listening to Amazon music has reintroduced me to is ‘The Ballad of Easy Rider’ by the Byrds, and now it’s stuck in my head. It starts like this:

‘The river flows, it flows to the sea,
wherever that river goes,
that’s where I want to be.
Flow, river flow,
let your waters wash down,
take me from this road
to some other town.

All (s)he wanted was to be free
and that’s the way it turned out to be…’

‘The Ballad of Easy Rider,’ Roger McGuinn & Bob Dylan

Notice how I subtly changed the gender in that second verse? It’s true, all I wanted was to be free, and that is ‘the way it turned out to be’, though not quite the way I might have expected (or even hoped for.) But I’m still very grateful for the way it is – despite the warning from another song of the same era:

‘Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,
nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free…’

‘Me and Bobby McGee’, Kriss Krisstofferson

…a warning that kept me stuck in a sad but ‘safe’ situation for many years, which has brought another song to mind…

‘How often does it happen that we live our lives in chains
and never even know we have the key?’

‘Already Gone’, The Eagles

But that’s enough soft West coast country-rock from the late 1960s and early 70s for today.

Going to the sea yesterday morning did its magic of lifting my mood. I sat on my usual bench behind the beach café, writing in my notebook, and two people passing by said: ‘you’ve got a good spot there!’, and later on my way home I sat in the Rose Garden and read for a while, and another stranger said the same thing. But when I got home and started trying to tackle a project I’ve started, I had a massive setback which threw me into despair about how useless I am and what a charlatan because people have expectations of me and really I don’t have a clue what I’m doing and am scrabbling all the time to keep going, and everything is ten times harder for me and takes ten times longer than any normal competent person but nobody sees it and I hate myself and I hate being me.

I talked to my therapist in the afternoon about it, this massive fear I have of cocking everything up. She talked about adjusting to not being ‘needed’ any more, but I don’t want to be needed, I don’t want anyone to depend on me, I can’t stand the stress. I want to be free of all that. I want to run away again.

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Morning Walk

I went looking for the sunrise today, but I missed it by ten minutes – only I didn’t realise it at first because it was so cloudy.

I got to the beach at 5:50 and sat on the bench outside the Beach Café, staring at the thin strip above the sea and below the clouds at the horizon, expecting the sun to appear at any moment, till I checked the app on my phone and discovered it was due at 5:39, at which time I was walking towards the sea through the streets, where it’s almost impossible to see the sunrise because of all the houses in the way. I had noticed the clouds, but had told myself that clouds often make for interesting colours, and there probably was a brief flash of brilliance when the sun came up above the sea before it disappeared again behind the clouds, but I wasn’t there to see it.

So I sat and drank coffee from my thermos and watched the hi-vis litter pickers and the odd wild swimmer or dog walker or jogger, and tried to find something – anything – worth photographing. Even the waves were pretty subdued, and the gulls didn’t show up against the clouds.

I finished my coffee and put the flask back in my bag. The first café to open would be the Coffee Cup, fifteen minutes’ walk away down the beach. I could go there and get another coffee and a sausage roll, or maple and pecan plait, or toasted tea cake.

In retrospect (because I didn’t think of this at the time), I could have gone the other way, to the Co-op, which probably also opens at 7, and maybe I could have got a sandwich and even a coffee there and eaten it on the beach – except that I’d forgotten to take a mask or scarf.

I started walking along the beach, but then when I got near to the steps up to the prom, opposite the Rose Garden, I thought I’d go up and just walk home from there. I couldn’t cut through because the gates were still locked, so I turned left and walked past the model village and what I think of as the Mondrian beach huts (flat roofed and square and painted in bright colours, not pastels like the conventional pointy-roofed ones opposite the Coffee Cup). I sat on the wall and checked on my phone for the opening times of the nearest cafes. As I thought, the Coffee Cup would be open at 7, but the Beach Café, Tenth Hole and Tea and Thistle (which only reopened on Tuesday) wouldn’t be until 9. By this time it was 6.45, and a ten minute walk, so I wandered back to the beach and carried on.

I ordered coffee and a toasted teacake and sat outside. I felt some spots of water as I was finishing, so I didn’t hang about. Looking out of my window now, I can see it’s properly raining.

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Aspiration and Achievement

Woke up with odd fragments from a dream in my head this morning. I was standing on steps leading up, and there was water below me. The woman in front pointed out I was still holding my phone so I tried to throw it back to the ground, but it fell in the water. I asked her (it might have been my daughter) if she could dive, and she dived straight into the pool and got it for me. Now, those steps must have been to a diving board or a water slide, so why was I on them when I’m terrified of both those things? Then later I was on similar steps going up a hillside but they ran out and I had to go the rest of the way just on the hill itself.

Returning to my therapy session, the therapist asked what she called ‘the death question’ – if you knew you were facing death what would your reaction be? I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant but I had an answer – two, in fact. When I had cancer in 2017 I decided that the best thing to do was focus on doing the little things that made me happy each day – like: listening to the radio, knitting and crochet, reading etc – more or less the same things I’ve been doing for the last three months.

Then I remembered the feelings I had at the end of 2011, when everything significant in my life seemed to have fallen apart or be falling apart. There was a lot of nonsense around about the Mayan prophecies and the end of the world, and though I didn’t take it seriously, I thought: what would I do if I knew the world was going to end next year? And that gave me the impetus to go travelling.

These two things might seem quite different: focussing on the everyday versus making a huge leap into the unknown – but in the details they were very similar. The happiest memories I have of my travels are of those little everyday moments: sitting in cafes; looking through train windows; finding my way around unfamiliar places; walking through parks; reading my Kindle or writing on my laptop; su doku. Doing and going where I wanted, not having to deal with other people or think about their needs or what I ‘should’ be doing; being free; being myself.

Why does my mind keep being drawn back to those big gaps in my life: career, relationship, financial self-sufficiency, writing? I can’t rectify the first three now, it’s too late, I have tried to accept them and be glad that I can cope so well without them. The last one is the one that still nags at me.

There are two ways of dealing with that gap between aspiration and achievement: lower expectations and/or take steps to get closer to the goal. I am a past master of lowering expectations, but not so good at finding ways of making progress.

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Beach Walk

Why bother trying to draw a bus shelter?

Because it’s the only thing I can see that I stand a chance of drawing. This is a new notebook and I forgot it doesn’t have lines, which means it’s intended for drawing.

Sometimes I can draw, mostly it’s just crap. I can always write, but that’s mostly crap too.

Coffee’s too hot. Last time I thought it was because I filled it to the top with hot water, so today I left a gap. But it’s still too hot.

Sitting outside the Beach Café (or I was an hour ago when I wrote in my notebook. Now I’m transcribing at my desk).

In the sea, a boat so small it almost looks like a toy. Maybe it’s further away than it looks. It’s rushing off somewhere, nearly out of sight already.

Silver light on the sea and small patches of sky-blue sky between the clouds. I tried to think of a better way to describe the colour of the sky, but sky-blue is the best I can come up with. Matches the colour of the ink I’m writing with.

Half a dozen litter-pickers in hi-vis jackets carrying white plastic bags just came round the corner.

Coffee still too hot to drink even though I left the top off.

Sun out now and on my face, so I start to unzip my coat – the same coat I was wearing in the winter, but I put it on because it’s got a hood, although the weather app at six o’clock said ‘no precipitation for at least 120 minutes’.

Spent ages (of course) deciding whether to come for a walk, and then getting everything together: coffee; wallet; which bag? Shopping bag or hand bag, or handbag inside shopping bag, or shopping bag inside handbag, which is easiest to carry? How many shopping bags will I need? Notebook and pen, or puzzle book and pencil or both or neither? Life and energy frittered away on logistics and indecision – that’s what it comes down to.

Not so many people today, or perhaps I’m more prepared for them. Not so many wild swimmers, just the regulars. Suddenly the sky is full of gulls, wheeling and intersecting (but silently), then when I look up again it’s empty.

Coffee still hot. Catches in my throat and makes me cough. Hope no one notices. Then I touch my face. Remember all that? Does anyone still follow those guidelines?

Forget ‘A Room of One’s Own’ – I have a whole house. Forget £500 a year – I have more than that a month and then some – but it’s nearly a century since Virgina Woolf wrote about what a woman needs in order to write – necessary but not sufficient conditions.

I watched a TED talk someone sent me – an American woman talking about her abusive childhood, bouts of homelessness and drug dependencies, train-wreck marriages etc and the writing opportunities she pissed away. Guess what? She did it in the end. Guess what? I didn’t.