Category: blogging

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Making Stuff

If you should happen to see me sitting and apparently doing nothing, I can pretty much guarantee that I won’t be ‘resting’. My mind will still be whirling around, jumping from one thought to the next and doubling back on itself without ever reaching any conclusions. I might be re-running an ancient conversation in my head, thinking of what I could have said differently to prove my point irrefutably, or composing a poem or a blog post, but most likely I will be thinking about what I should be doing instead of sitting there and thinking. This was brought home to me yesterday when I was facing the state of my kitchen table in the wake of a week spent (intermittently) making two birthday cards.

The process of making cards, while both creative and fun, is also quite stressful, and the clearing up afterwards even more so. It involves a lot of processes, with lots of bits of equipment and materials, some of them very small, others which are messy (glue and ink), and great potential for things getting lost, spilt, sticking to each other, hiding behind each other etc. As well as that, the creative process itself, the design of the thing, from sitting down with a mental connection such as: ‘Laura – tea and cakes’, ‘Chris – fishing’, ‘Simon- robots and/or dinosaurs’ (my 34 year-old son, by he way, though it could equally be my 5 year-old grandson), assembly of any materials relevant to that topic and trying to come up with something significantly different from last year’s effort is quite taxing in and of itself. Because I’m making them to give to other people – this has really only just occurred to me – it’s a lot more stressful than starting a jumper or blanket or whatever in knitting or crochet, when I know that it doesn’t matter what a pig’s ear I make of it, because no one has to see it but me.

Now, that is an interesting though. Making cards always implies the intention of creating something to give to someone else. Perhaps I should spend some time on using stamps, cutting dies and paper just for the fun of the process without producing anything which might be seen and/or judged by anyone else? When I started doing this craft, I was going to classes and workshops, where I was just making for the sake of it – I have stacks of cards made at those events hidden away in the cupboard, which I wouldn’t dream of giving to anyone else.

This is not what I started to write about – but I think it is a valuable insight, and it applies to lots of things I do – including writing this blog. I can do it because I know it is just for myself, although theoretically it could be read by anyone, very few people ever actually do read it, and so it doesn’t matter, there’s no requirement for it to reach a certain standard of quality, it is just itself.

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Everything in the Garden…

I’ve already been to the Co-op today. I managed to avoid going all last week, because I stocked up the week before when I was having visitors for the weekend. And by using up supplies of longlife and evaporated milk, and Elmlea (which I’d bought to put on trifle – for my visitors – till I went to the shops again and managed to get real fresh cream); taking dinners from the freezer backlog of all those ‘chef’s surprise’ slow-cooker meals which have been building up; and a take away curry delivery on Saturday, I held out without needing to go until today. Saturday’s dinner in the slow cooker will be belly pork with cannellini beans, celery, red pepper, carrots and maybe sweet potatoes cooked in cider, because too many of the ‘chef’s surprises’ seem to have sauces based on tinned tomatoes, and I fancied a more radical change.

I have been getting discouraged about a lot of things lately – mainly the garden. My Facebook memories keep showing all the lovely things which were in flower at this time last year. Someone said to me the other day that my garden is ‘blooming’, but he was judging it from Facebook, where I have posted pictures of every single flower I’ve seen so far – sometimes several pictures of the same one, over a number of days, as I’m still trying to post a photo every day. The actual total of flowers so far has been: one yellow and three white daffodils on the forecourt, and in the back garden one blue hyacinth and a handful of mini daffodils; two hellebores (one single and, more recently, one double flower), a few blossoms on the rosemary which were only visible if you looked very carefully and a couple of yellow celandines under the camellia (which I only just remembered). The rest is a desert of weeds, rotting planks and general junk currently in transit between the sheds. Is this disaster down to the hot, dry summer last year, or a total lack of interest and attention? I assume most likely a combination of the two.

It’s the curse of social media. However honest I try to be about my general worthlessness and self loathing, it seems that people want to keep seeing me in a more positive light. Which is very frustrating – but on the other hand, if they could see me more clearly, they wouldn’t want to be my friends anyway. And then I’d feel even worse.

I honestly don’t know how to shake off these feelings, and more and more it seems that there isn’t any escape. The effort required feels overwhelming, but so is the effort to pretend to be what I’m not: brave, positive, upbeat, hopeful, happy etc. Feelings always take control over intentions to change, to find a better way to be.

I almost didn’t write today. Perhaps it would be better if I didn’t throw all this out into the void. But I usually feel better afterwards

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Eating Elephants

This is what happened yesterday: it felt as though writing my 500 word post in the morning was the most significant thing I did all day. Some days are just like that. Around midday it got quite sunny, and I went out and pulled a few more bits off the old shed, in the process breaking the chisel for the second time, so that now there isn’t really enough of it left to get behind the planks and lever them off, which is what I’ve been doing up till now. It was an old chisel anyway, which I found in the shed when I was emptying it out, presumably left behind by the previous owner. After it broke I decided that was a sign that I could stop for the day – I’d been there for about an hour, I guess.

I keep picking away at it, not the most efficient way of doing it, I know, but I do as much as I can stand and then leave it in the hope that eventually it will get done (like the bookshelves which have, unsurprisingly, now filled up with clutter in the absence of me tackling them in an organised manner). The front and half a side (of the shed, that is) have now gone, leaving a shell which looks as though any self-respecting storm will blow it away, except that, remarkably for this time of year, we have had no strong winds for the last week. I’d quite like it if the back (left hand side in the photo above) could stay standing as there is no fence behind it, just a small wall, but that’s probably too much to hope for. Eventually, the new shed will go along that boundary, but I need to get rid of the old one first. In the mean time, half of the stuff that came out of it is still in the garden or the kitchen (depending on how hygienic I considered it to be) waiting for the new shed to be moved to its final position, along with the accumulating debris of the old one.

In the afternoon, I made some small progress on the jumper I’ve been knitting (still not sure about the design, which I keep having to re-do), then the yarn cake fell apart (as they tend to do when approaching the end) and descended into an impenetrable tangle, which I spent half the evening trying to sort out till I fell asleep over it on the sofa. I also started on a new crochet pattern for a blanket, which requires working with three cakes at once – what could possibly go wrong with that? The plan is to convert three of the many cakes I bought online last year into a blanket which will be of no use to anyone and shoved somewhere in the spare room if it ever gets completed.

Well, baby steps, hare and tortoise, eating an elephant, etc. And another 500 words bites the dust.

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Vyšehrad

The other evening when I was cooking dinner, Radio 4 Extra was on in the background, playing ‘Soul Music’ – a programme which you can only imagine being made by the BBC. Each episode takes a piece of music which has a ‘powerful emotional impact’, with a handful of speakers talking about it and what it means to them. It is a wonderfully eclectic programme, and the musical pieces come from everywhere: ‘Life on Mars’, ‘Once in a Lifetime’, ‘I Wonder as I Wander’, ‘Sunshine on Leith’ (I’ve never heard of that one), ‘Lean on Me’ and ‘Dock of the Bay’ plucked from a list on the website.

This week it was a classical piece which at first I didn’t recognise and wasn’t paying much attention to, when I heard a voice saying something about a hill which was supposed to be the site of the original castle, rather than the current castle further down the river on the other side, but this was just part of the foundation myth of the city… and it dawned on me that they were talking about Prague. Then it cut to a piece of music which I definitely recognised, but couldn’t have told you the name or composer, and I heard the words: ‘Vltava’ and I knew before I heard it that the site they were talking about was Vyšehrad.

Vyšehrad was one of my favourite walking places when I wanted to avoid the tourist crowds. It was directly across the river Vltava from my flat, something that I only realised when I was there and looking back to my side of the river managed to pick out the funny little church across the road from me. But to get there I had to take one tram to the interchange at Novy Smichov, near the big Tesco, and then change to get across the river bridge, get off and either catch another tram back up the river or walk along that side. Once, not so long ago, I could have told you all the tram numbers, but I don’t remember now.

But I have to tell you first that the music was by Smetana, one of the three great classical Czech composers, the other two being Dvořák and Janáček. Smetana was the only one I’d never heard of before I went to Prague. ‘Vyšehrad’ and ‘Vltava’, I learned from ‘Soul Music’, are two of six ‘symphonic poems’ that make up a patriotic symphonic cycle called ‘Má vlast’ (‘My Fatherland’), inspired by the history, legends and landscapes of Bohemia.

I have seen his grave in the cemetery on Vyšehrad, overlooking the vineyards reaching down the castle mound towards the river. I wrote at least one blog post about it, but on a blog which is now defunct (though I still have the content somewhere). I was walking there on a Sunday afternoon in February, seven years ago, when I read the text from my daughter that brought me home to England by the next Wednesday…

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Throwaway Writing

Sun shining this morning. I have been to Tesco, my least favourite of the three supermarkets within five minutes walk, but it has the right kind of cat food (unlike Sainsbury’s) and self-checkouts (unlike Co-op), reducing the need for social interaction. In general, I find the Co-op has the best stock for my needs, but some mornings that risk of social interaction is enough to drive me in the other direction.

I raised that question about controlling my thoughts a couple of weeks ago, but here is a related one which was bugging me when I woke up this morning: do thoughts control emotions, or emotions control thoughts? Which is the chicken in this arrangement, and which the egg? But this question is just as impossible to answer as the original, given all the feedbacks between the two states.

If I’ve learnt anything about this topic, I would say that trying to control emotions by thinking alone – in other words, wishing them away – is a waste of effort. The fake-it-till-you-make-it idea of slapping on a happy face and banishing all that negativity has always failed and frustrated me, but I’ve discovered from experience that there are activities that improve my mood. Finding the ones that work and can be done with the resources you already have is a great gift.

Writing can be one of those things – although sometimes the mood improvement doesn’t come until after it’s done, rather than in the process. When it’s going well, it’s the best feeling in the world, but when it’s a slog, it’s hellish. There isn’t really a basic process to follow that can make it happen if it doesn’t come spontaneously, except this sort of stream-of-consciousness brain-dumping that I do every morning, and which has yet to cohere into anything tangible. What I’m thinking of here is that I can at any moment pick up a hook and a ball of yarn and start to make something, or continue with what’s already started, and that doesn’t really require any thought. It might go wrong, and that might seem enough to induce frustration and disappointment, but somehow it doesn’t – I just unravel it and do it again differently, or put it away and do something else till I feel ready to get back to it. There’s always something I can do, and if it doesn’t work out, it’s no big deal, I can leave it and do something else.

But isn’t that what I’m doing every morning? Maybe this is my way of applying that approach to writing. Now, that’s something that I’ve just thought of in this process, that wasn’t in my head when I sat down to write, or even when I started that last paragraph. This is my throwaway writing, it doesn’t matter whether it means anything to me or anyone else – but it’s not really ‘thrown away’, I just shove the words to the back of a digital ‘folder’, it doesn’t take up any space, not even ink and paper.

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Maybe

Some mornings I feel as though I’m balanced on a knife-edge. Maybe walking along a cliff edge is a better metaphor, since, clearly, no one can balance on a knife-edge. Maybe a tight-rope. Maybe I’m over-thinking this. Maybe I am digressing into choosing the right words because I’m evading the concept. And maybe the use of ‘some’ suggests that this experience is rare, which is not the case – or maybe that’s just an extreme version of an average morning.

I’ve just remembered trying to explain it once to a counsellor – the one I was seeing in 2006-7, which dates it – that I felt I was walking along a very narrow ridge running through a bog, and at any moment I could slip, and potentially disappear without a trace. That describes the feeling, better than a knife-edge (which is a cliché anyway, as well as being impossible) or a cliff edge. There are no degrees of falling off a cliff edge – unless you land in a tree or on a mattress or something else which breaks your fall. Falling into a bog can be fatal, but my perception is that there’s a better chance of being pulled back, providing there’s someone around to do the pulling, or a handy branch or edge or something to grasp onto and pull yourself.

Which is a complicated way of saying that my morning routine is my branch. Not always easy to drag myself away from the night and that ‘oh shit, I’m still here’ feeling that descends on waking, but I know what I’ve got to do, and I do it. And by the time I’ve posted my blog, and am downstairs with my porridge and su doku, I usually feel somewhat better.

I don’t know why I’ve written that this morning, which doesn’t feel any worse or better than any other day. I guess if I was trying to learn a lesson from it, I could say – do something so you know what you’re doing; try things and push yourself a little bit, but not too hard; give yourself time and be ready to stop when it starts to get to you; come back when you’re ready, it doesn’t matter whether that’s tomorrow or in five years time unless there’s some external commitment or deadline.

It strikes me now how different that is from the usual sort of advice about setting goals and getting things done. Maybe those things are really not so important in a life like mine (retired, living alone). If I find myself struggling with things (like the bookshelves, or the housework) maybe I can live without them for a bit longer. If I carry on struggling, I might come to hate whatever it is, and swear it’s impossible, I’m useless and incompetent and should never have started in the first place and I’ll never try it again. But if I stop, walk away, do something else, maybe I’ll be more inclined to try again later.

Lots of ‘maybes’ today.

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Stream of Consciousness

I got a bit distracted yesterday – or maybe I didn’t. Maybe you were enthralled by my ramblings about: what was that actor’s name, and should I try knitting jumpers based on William Morris designs, or would they look like shit, and would that matter anyway, as long as I had fun doing it? (I missed out the bit about looking up stroke symptoms on Google).

I can’t really work out whether the fact that my mind works like that is unusual or not, given that I can’t get inside anyone else’s head to find out how they think. Up until a few years ago, I assumed that’s the way everyone thinks, that constantly rolling narrative, the barrage of words running through the head, and when I discovered that some people actually think in pictures  (allegedly most people, though I find that hard to believe) it – well – blew my mind. I mean, maybe partially – I can ‘visualise’ some things, but I have to make a conscious effort to do – but as a main way of thinking? How do you visualise abstract concepts? I had this conversation with a friend a while back, and he said that he sees the words as he thinks them. To me that sounds bizarre.

But I started this train of thought by thinking about whether I can control my thoughts. The theme of those pep talks I used to listen to over a full English was that it is possible to control your thinking and by doing so change your life, but my mind seems to have a mind of its own. The actors’ names and knitting designs kind of thoughts don’t bother me at all – except when they interfere with my ability to do more important stuff (which is quite often). I don’t even particularly mind the might I have a stroke and will the cancer come back thoughts too much – they’re awful at the time, of course, but tend not to come very often or last very long.

The ones that really get to me are the regular, unavoidable ones that come in the early hours, or occasionally in the day time, the: I hate myself and wish I was dead, why has everything I’ve ever tried to do with my life come to nothing, why do I always give up on everything, why can’t I write anything apart from this drivel? Those are the ones I’d really like to be able to control. Daylight and doing things can sometimes blow them away – knitting, crochet, reading etc are usually pretty reliable; walking by the sea can be too, but it requires effort to get myself out of the house (not always easy, even when there isn’t a lockdown). Being with other people can be, but it’s risky, it can also have the opposite effect, so in general being by myself is safer.

Writing these daily essays – I think that helps too. I usually feel better afterwards, anyway, even if I don’t have anything to say.

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What Changed?

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

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

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

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

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

Comment on Husband or Cat, 17 October 2008

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

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Blogging about Blogging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Not Thinking of an Elephant

If I start typing, what will come out of my fingers? What have I been thinking about in the two hours since I woke up? I don’t want to remember, and you don’t want to know. I tried to fix the motion-sensitive, darkness sensitive light on my landing by replacing the batteries and it still doesn’t work. Last time this happened, I took it down and left it on my dressing table for a couple of years, then picked it up one day and changed the batteries again, and it miraculously came on, and has been working ever since until yesterday. I don’t know if I can be bothered to leave it on my dressing table again for another couple of years.

I once tried a blog thing (I think it was a group set up by someone else) where you wrote fifty words about something positive and uplifting. I did it a few times, then gave up, and I think everyone else in the group did pretty much the same. If I have to think happy thoughts before I write, I can’t write anything at all. Don’t have that sort of imagination. It’s like the inverse of that thing the pop-psychologists say about ‘…try not to think of an elephant…’ I have heard that so many times that these days, it doesn’t immediately conjure up an image of a pachyderm so much as an infuriatingly chirpy self-help guru whose face needs a good slapping.

Wow, look at that, 250 words, half way already.

The days when I wake up without this dark cloud of gloom over my head are vanishingly rare – I think there might have been one I wrote about a couple of months ago when I’d been reading in bed and actually felt good by the time I started writing? Not sure, it was probably more recently than it feels. I do, admittedly, often feel better by the time I’ve finished writing. I really noticed this in the summer, when most days I could take my breakfast out into the garden and eat in the sunshine. Won’t be doing that today, however.

Bin day today, which means I will get as far as the front gate this evening. I actually can’t remember the last time I left the house (and garden and forecourt) – I think I had a couple of visits to the shops between Christmas and New Year, but don’t think there have been any since. All this is my choice, of course, there isn’t really anything to stop me walking to the sea front except apathy and general can’t-be-arsedness.

Yesterday I had a go at trying on my jumper, and concluded that I had separated the sleeves from the body too soon, as I suspected, so I undid all the work I’d done on it the previous day. I’m happy with that decision.

Just read a tweet which says: ‘Freedom is nothing but only a chance to be better.’ Better in what way? I wonder.