In fact, I’ve just discovered that it wasn’t yesterday, it was the day before, I didn’t post anything at all yesterday. On the other hand, I have a feeling that I wrote an extra poem last year so maybe it balances out.

I seem to have a problem with integrating my soshul meeja – my last blog post didn’t automatically get shared on Facebook, as it used to (as recently as the previous post from 26 February), but did go automatically on Twitter. Instagram, however, which I’ve been using to post a daily photo since the start of the year, has NOT given me the option to share on Twitter since 10 February, although prior to that it was doing so automatically. If anybody has any idea how I can rectify this, I’d love to know.

I didn’t think I was going to do this – a bit late in the day for me to start. But as you can see (if you’ve been here before) I spent this morning sorting out a few changes to this blog. It’s part of a process – long overdue – of attempting to overhaul my online presence in general, including buying a new domain name (lindarushby.com), sorting out what’s worth keeping and what needs doing to it, and transferring it all to new and hopefully more cost effective hosting – quite a challenge after over twelve years in one place, and I’ve got about three months left to get it done before letting go of the old damson-tree.co.uk stuff. Which is a bit over-optimistic given that I’ve also sort-of committed myself to finishing The Long Way Back by the end of the year. We shall see.

But last week I wrote a new poem, in response to one I found printed on an A4 sheet among some other stuff. I don’t know where it came from, I can’t remember the name of the writer, and I Googled what I thought was the title this morning without finding anything relevant, but I expect at some point I’ll find that A4 sheet again and be able to give credit where credit is due.

In the mean time, I now have two poems to offer for this year’s NaPoWriMo.

Of them all, I guess this one is my favourite. It’s semi-private – except it isn’t really, because I do share it on Facebook and Twitter – but I write honestly on the premise that I can say what I want because no one is ever going to read it – which is in fact a good assumption because so few people ever do.

But against that, I’m not writing – not really writing anything – because of the old, old issue that I just can’t think of anything to write about. Except that here I am again, finding myself writing once more about my inability to write.

I have sort of committed myself to completing TLWB this year. Which in a sense I might do because a lot of it is already ‘written’, but what do I add, what do I take out, and, hardest of all, where and when do I finish? If I can answer those questions I might get somewhere.

But that’s an aside. What I was really thinking about when I started this was the question of whether ‘…’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take words against a sea of writer’s block, and by opposing end it?’ (with apologies to WS). Sorry, don’t know where that came from – well, obviously I do, it came from Hamlet, but I don’t know why it popped in my head at that moment, except that it seemed to follow naturally from using the word ‘whether’ (words are tricky like that). What I was REALLY thinking was whether it’s worth writing stuff out of my head like this, as I used to for so many years, and spewing it out into the ether, or whether my time could be better spent in other ways. I mean, is writing this drivel every now and again preferable to writing nothing at all, or just a waste of effort and time which could be better directed at finding more original ways of avoiding the housework?

#notwriting

The above is as far as I’d got before I decided to a) make a coffee and b) have my morning crap, which entailed finding my Kindle and reading the next chapter of The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde while sitting on the toilet (and incidentally downloading a sample of The Terracotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri, which came up as a ‘you might enjoy…’ recommendation. I discovered the other day that at some point in the past I’d read the first of Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano books, but I couldn’t remember when or why or anything about it or why I hadn’t chosen to download the next one. So, if I have the sample – and the title did catch my attention – I might read it sometime and decide to buy the whole book – or not, but if I don’t I never will and that might be a shame.

Anyway.

What was that first sentence again?

‘…every now and then ‘ I think maybe I will (start writing again), or perhaps it was going to be: every now and then the thought strikes me that maybe I should, but usually I get involved in doing something else and time passes and it goes away again without me doing anything about it. And reading that back, it occurs to me that it could be a metaphor for sitting on the toilet (or vice versa)

Anyway.

I think I was going to make a serious point, and end up with sharing a poem I wrote a few years ago, which may or not be relevant. A point about making goals and plans for the year and trying to satisfy other people’s expectations (which is a hiding to nothing, it seems to me).

I don’t do goals and plans any more. I never was very comfortable with them – I’ve blogged about that times without number – and at my stage of life, honestly, why should I? Who cares what I do with my time, if I don’t?

There are, in theory, at least two books which I ‘should’ be trying to finish. The start of a year is supposedly a spur to effort, but at my age it is also a reminder that my remaining stock of years is steadily going down, and raises the question whether it really matters that much how I spend them? It’s not as though the ‘dreams and plans’ I’ve made in the past have made much difference to the world.

So here I am, a week into 2023 – not even starting on the first of the year, as far as those things matter, fifty words short of my arbitrary target of 500 per day, and not even having said what I was intending to say. I’ll see if I can find that poem and share it.

#notwriting

I found by experiment that the Damson Tree and Phyllida Fogg blogs were still accessible, and so was the Southsea Storytellers, so I could have continued blogging if I’d wanted to, but it seemed like a good time to give up, and that’s what I did. I carried on writing a journal for a while, just something where I wrote (at first every day) but didn’t share it with anybody (or rather didn’t put it anywhere where other people could potentially read it even if they wanted to), but after a couple of months that just fizzled out too. I think I may have jotted down a couple of poems since then, but don’t really know what happened to them. I removed writing from my life as a hobby, as I’d been drifting towards for several years, and deleted ‘writer’ from the tagline on my FB profile, though I left in ‘poet’.

This morning I saw that I’d had an email from my hosting provider saying that I needed to update the PhP version on my whole site before the 9th February. I almost didn’t renew it when it came up in September, because I hadn’t done anything with the site in so long, but then I paid for another two years, almost out of inertia, and from a superstitious dread that if I didn’t, I’d regret it.

Anyway, I almost didn’t read the email, but having paid up in the autumn I thought I’d better. It also gave a link to how to do it, so I tried it, though it didn’t look any different from what I’d done before. But hey presto, suddenly I have my blog back…

Except that…

Now it appears that the Damson Tree blog isn’t working any more (but with a different error message). which means the ‘bookshop’ isn’t either.

Not that I have any plans of writing anything – or any expectations of selling any copies of my books.

PS: I had a brainwave and changed the php version on Damson-tree.co.uk back to the one it was before. Now all the blogs seem to be working. Go figure.

There was quite a storm in the night, I heard the wind at one point, it was really wild. It looked as though the rain was settling in for the day, but now the sun’s shining. Still, it will take a while before the benches dry out, and it’s not worth going out to sit on a damp bench to eat breakfast, plus the cafés will be getting pretty full by this time, so I’ll stay here and write.

I was going to write some more about planning and failing, but in the shower I started thinking about ‘The Long Way Back’ again. I said I would start work on it when I’d finished my proof reading job, then I read a few old blog posts and got very depressed remembering those times, and now it looks as though I’m going to be pretty tied up with family things until the middle of next week (or the week after next, depending on when you think ‘this week’ starts) which gives another delay to getting properly started, and when the cafes are properly open I can take my laptop somewhere to get stuck in, which is always a nice way to do it.

I have been ‘planning’ and procrastinating over this for so long now, years in fact. I came to the end of the pre-Prague section early in 2018, I remember it quite distinctly. I went to the café where I used to go for breakfast on Sunday, before the writing group meetings (not one of my usual writing cafes, but it was en route to the dentist, where I’d been for an appointment) and took with me printouts of the early Prague posts, which is when I had the idea that there was just too much, and maybe I’d write a separate book about my time in Prague. Or was that 2019?

This is the problem with writing autobiography – though ‘S2S’ and ‘TLWB’ are strictly speaking memoirs, the distinction being that an autobiography is the story of a whole life, but memoirs are just a specific part of a life, either in terms of time or of an interest which may cover different periods. But as a memoirist, I find it hard to see how an autobiography can ever be finished, unless the author is still writing it on their deathbed (which in my case might well happen).

Life feeds writing, and writing feeds life, like Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail.

The reason I’ve been thinking about him this morning was that he would sometimes give The Talk – there was always a ten minute talk over breakfast, usually given by a guest speaker – who, when I look back now, were probably drafted in from other groups in the region or more widely spread (it was that sort of organisation). I’m guessing that possibly part of Charles’s role was to stand in when no other speaker was available, and his talks were always on a similar theme, the gimmick being that the titles consisted of an increasing number of words beginning with P. This had obviously started long before I’d joined, and would always induce a groan (in the nicest possible way) from the assembly. Anyway, what set me on this train of thought was that a typical example would be: ‘Perfect Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance’ or words to that effect.

And the connection is: that as I was lying in bed this morning I was thinking about my inability to plan anything whatsoever. At five thirty I was reviewing my options: walk to beach; take van out for a picnic; stay home and start on editing of TLWB (reading Prague blog posts) etc. The conclusion was to stay home and get on with gardening, which I didn’t do a lot of yesterday, just half an hour or so’s weeding and not planting of plants purchased (I’m starting to sound like Charles), which should really be a Priority (definitely one of the words he would have used) as they will Probably die otherwise.

So I got up shortly after six, did my exercises, made coffee and here I am, doing my daily Post (Pontification? Pronouncement?) – which, incidentally, I am still doing, despite moaning last week,  because – it feels important to Persist, in fact, maybe (or even Perhaps) Persistence is Paramount. Some days I dread it, but I always feel better afterwards – no matter what it is, however trivial, or complaining, or ranting, or self-Pitying  – even Pathetic or Pointless – the results. I write every day – as long as I’m home, and sometimes even when I’m not – and I stick to my 500 words because it is a discipline, and that’s that. And I Plan to keep on doing so.

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.  

Thursday, 22 April 2021n the Windows logn screen eing part of the same, instead of both yrtnewswf what is ectrum  sf te ends si are somehow at oppentertainmentport’ and enas though .ekt do you remember from the news this wekhenthing in betwSport to entertainment and everr: ayinessage here was a  PC this morningon my…

When I glanced up from typing, the above gobbledygook was on my screen. How it got so mangled I have no idea – clearly in some places I had hit the ‘up arrow’ and taken my cursor – and hence my typing – up to the line above – something that frequently happens when I’m typing without paying attention, often leading to whole lines being overwritten and I have to copy what’s there onto the ‘clipboard’ and carefully go back through ‘undo’ to get back what’s disappeared. If I untangle the mess, I think what I was trying to say was this:

‘On the Windows login screen on my PC this morning there was a message saying: Sport to entertainment and everything in between, what do you remember from the news this week?’ as though ‘sport’ and ‘entertainment’ are somehow at opposite ends of a spectrum of ‘the news’ as opposed to being both at the same end…’ and I was intending to go on to write something about the implication that the genuinely important stuff about what’s happening in the world can somehow be dismissed as less significant  – but I’m not going to go into that now because I’m just amazed at the madness I seem to have unleashed, and would like to make the analogy that that is pretty much what it feels like inside my mind most of the time. (Forgot tpo mentione that somehow I also caused this paragraph to go to double spacing, but I’ve corrected that. ‘to mention’.)

Well.

I have written two poems (one for today, on efor tomorrow – maybe) on my notebook with my black crayon pencil while still in bed. This new technology of discovered is still working find, though no doubt the ‘lead’ will snap soon. ‘one for’ not ‘on efor’ and ‘I’ve’ not ‘of’. It’s interesting to note that writing words that sound vaguely like the one I intended to write seems to be quite a new phenomenon in my wrting/typing’. ‘fine’ not ‘find’. ‘writing’ not ‘wrting’. And so it goes. My typing is becoming, at first glance, almost as illegible as my handwriting. I now the right words perfectly well, they just come out wrong. ‘know’, not ‘now’ – and I promise you I am not doing this deliberately, just not making the corrections when I notice them. And Word spell checker just automatically corrected ‘diong’ to doing’ – but not that time. Interesting.

Well, that has taken up most of 500 words this morning, writing about my terrible typing. I once wrote about this before and read it out at a writers group and everyone laughed. It’s mortying when everyone supposedly laughing ‘with’ you fails to notice you’re not laughing. Mortifying.

I thought I had a great start going, I’d been thinking it in my head a couple of previous days but then discovered I had other stuff to say when I got onto the keyboard. That’s how it works. I can’t remember what I said that was so good, because once it’s written it goes, and that’s how it works too. I could open yesterday’s file and read it back but I don’t usually do that.

This coffee is weak. I only drink decaff, but that’s not the issue, it’s the flavour. It’s disappointing. I must have misjudged the amount of grounds I put in the machine. It was getting down to the bottom of the tin.

This is my mind, and the way it works all the time. That’s what I wanted to write about, about how exhausting it is to bounce around inside my head like this all the time and not have anything to show for it. I do nothing, I achieve nothing, but I’m not resting, not relaxing.

I sat and stared at all the mess on my kitchen table, trying to work out how to sort it all out. Some things have to be done before other things can be done (that’s also true of the process of card making, which I also mentioned yesterday – now I’m beginning to remember). I have to sort out in my head which is the best order to do it in and what I need to do first. There are tools, like the scissors, tweezers and the pokey tool (apparently that’s its official title), they all go in one of the small drawers, which are somewhere in the mix, but should I do those first? There are piles of paper, card, sticky-back paper, stamps, cutting dies; packets for the stamps to be put away in; packets for the dies, which come in sets; packets containing dies or stamps which I got out but didn’t use; ink pads; plastic wallets containing scraps of paper; scraps of paper left over from cutting, some of which can go into those plastic wallets but some which should probably just go in the bin; bits of backing from used sticky-back paper; plates from the rolling machine; envelopes; finished cards; the machine itself; two guillotines; the cutting mat; the craft knives…every time I think I’ve finished the list, I remember something else.

It makes sense to put the small things together in piles eg one of dies, one of stamps… but there isn’t any space left on the table, so things spread further around the kitchen. The stamps and dies from a specific set can be collected together and put into their packet, if I can find the packet, which is somewhere on the table…