Category: writing

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In My Dreams

This morning, I remembered enough of a dream to make some sense of it. I was with a group of people (dream people) who were preparing and rehearsing a play. I didn’t get on with one woman in particular, who was constantly making snide remarks and putting me down (may I say, there have been many such people in my life, both men and women, but this wasn’t anyone I knew). I don’t know if this was supposed to be a professional or an amateur production, but I wasn’t being paid, I’d just been asked to do it as a favour, on the understanding that I wasn’t any good but I would do my best. I got angry with the snide woman and pointed this out to her, sticking up for myself, but I woke up before I heard her reply, woke up with a sense of anger and resentment towards this non-existent person, and lay there thinking: ‘wow, I was really pissed off, and now I’ve woken up!’

Once or twice in my life I have got really pissed off with people like that, and told them so, but it rarely improves matters, in fact it usually ends up with me in tears feeling even more resentful and humiliated. Actually, more than ‘once or twice’, a lot more, but it always makes me cringe to remember them. Mostly I just swallow it down and try not to cry, and try to avoid those situations in the future, mostly by keeping away from people. We’ll never know what might have happened with the woman in the dream, whether she would have developed a new respect for me, and I for myself – possibly, as I do seem to be much better at putting my point across and convincing people in my dreams than I am in real life.

I didn’t post yesterday because the previous evening I watched the Trump supporters marching around the Capitol in Washington on CNN, and though I wasn’t late going to bed (half past eleven, fairly normal) I did keep watching telly till that time (waiting for the police to take charge or the National Guard to show up or SOMEBDOY to take control of the situation), and then I couldn’t get to sleep and lay awake for hours. The result was that, when I finally got back to sleep, I slept in till nine, waking up feeling crap, as I always do after a really bad night, and didn’t bother with either the exercise or the writing part of my routine.

By the way, the motion sensitive light on the landing started working again after I put it back on the wall. And I unravelled the bit of my jumper I was taking about a few days ago and did it again. I showed it to my therapist yesterday but also said I will probably never wear it. I’m going to count all the things I’ve made over the last few years and don’t wear.

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Epiphany

I know today is Epiphany, but why is it called ‘Twelfth Night’? It’s the twelfth day AFTER Christmas Day – so, when did the drummers drum? Was that yesterday? Or how about the ‘First’ day of Christmas, when the partridge sat in the pear tree, was that really Boxing Day? Or does Twelfth Night literally refer to the twelfth night from Christmas Day, in which case, the Twelve Days ended at midnight last night, and did Twelfth Night end at midnight or at dawn this morning? So should I have already put my denuded (not that it was ever very well clothed) 20 centimetre fir tree in a pot out in the garden yesterday?

These questions bother me every year, yet no one else ever seems to notice. All I can say to that is: do the maths.

And why do I bother to ask, when there is now a source of answers for everything?

In most Western ecclesiastical traditions, Christmas Day is considered the “First Day of Christmas” and the Twelve Days are 25 December – 5 January, inclusive, making Twelfth Night on 5 January, which is Epiphany Eve. In older customs the Twelve Days of Christmas are counted from sundown on the evening of 25 December until the morning of 6 January, meaning that the Twelfth Night falls on the evening of 5 January and the Twelfth Day falls on 6 January. However, in some church traditions only full days are counted, so that 5 January is counted as the Eleventh Day, 6 January as the Twelfth Day, and the evening of 6 January is counted as the Twelfth Night. In these traditions, Twelfth Night is the same as Epiphany and is also known as the “Thirteenth Day”. However, some churches that fall in the latter category consider Twelfth Night to be the eve of the Twelfth Day (in the same way that Christmas Eve comes before Christmas), and thus consider Twelfth Night to be on 5 January.

Wikipedia

So why have I never bothered to check that before? I probably have, it’s just that I’d forgotten the answer.

I saw the waxing moon through the slats in the venetian blind when I was doing my morning exercises earlier. Which reminded me of another question which occurred to me during one of my beach walks a few weeks ago. The sea had clearly been high enough to throw bits of seaweed, pebbles, sand etc up to the sea wall and over onto the prom, which, due to the terracing of the beach, almost never happens. It must have been due to a storm, but it got me briefly thinking about the tides – in particular, that there must have been an exceptionally high tide – and then I remembered that the moon was in its dark phase, so how could it be high tide? Which also made me realise that the tides are not related to the phases of the moon at all, as I’d been assuming, because the moon is always there (when it’s on this side of the earth), it’s just that we can’t see the bit that is in earth’s shadow – and why would that make any difference to the gravitational pull between earth on the moon? So why do the tides change as the moon changes? This puzzled me mightily for a while, until it dawned on me that the tides must change with the distance of the moon from the earth, which I suppose interacts with the phases of the moon (in terms of how much we see) but isn’t directly linked.

I didn’t check that on Wikipedia (or anywhere else), but I was quite happy to have figured it out for myself. Welcome to the inside of my head.

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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.

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Cloudy

I decided this morning that if I ever publish another book, on the back cover, under the blurb, where real books have glowing reviews, I will place the following:

‘A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.’ W. Shakespeare.

Do I have plans to publish another book, maybe this year? Well, I might – at some indeterminate date between now and my final gasp – but I don’t have plans. Anything’s possible.

I do plan on finishing this jumper I started knitting on Christmas Day – though I’m a bit concerned at the moment about the size. Did I separate off the sleeves from the body too soon? I was aiming for the same number of stitches as the Christmas one I did for my daughter (it’s the same yarn) but stopped when the sleeves hit sixty, when the front and back for some reason were only at 112, although on the other one it was 120. I can’t really tell by looking, because of it being on circular needles, and that also makes it a pain to try on – and I’ve lost my spare circular needle, which is what I used last time (front on one and back on the other). Bigger better than smaller, surely?  Should I undo what I did yesterday, to be safe? Yesterday I undid two squares’ worth of weather-blanket backing that I’d done the day before, because I wasn’t happy with the way it was working out.

I’m thinking now about Penelope, at the end of ‘The Odyssey’, weaving by day, and in the night unravelling what she’d done the day before, waiting for her husband, Odysseus, to return from the Trojan War (spoiler alert: it took ten years, on top of another ten years for the duration of the war). The process matters more than the outcome, the journey is more significant than the destination (evidently so in Odysseus’s case, I’m not aware of any stories about what happened after he and P were reunited). The process of unravelling is a bit frustrating, and as it’s knitting, picking up the stitches is a lot more of a pain than the crochet equivalent, but as long as there is no deadline, it’s surely preferable to a finished garment that’s too small? (Or maybe not, given that I’ll probably never wear it?)

Incidentally, that last sentence was just highlighted by Word, presumably because it thought it was a double negative – not so clever, eh?

This isn’t what I was going to write about. No resolutions, no plans, no expectations – not that I was intending to write about any of those – on the contrary.

Gazing out of the window, I watch the slow procession of clouds drifting across the gap between the end terraced house across the road and the pub on the corner. A woman in black leggings, a lime green top and head phones runs past my line of sight. Will I be like the running woman or like the clouds this year? What do you think?

Cloudy’, Simon and Garfunkel

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First Sunday in January

Every morning, I wake up feeling myself to be at the bottom of a dark and muddy pit, and I have to drag myself out of it and face the day. That’s the meaning of the routine I described yesterday, because it gives me a sequence of things to do and ensures that I don’t have to make any choices until late morning (apart from deciding what to write on here, of course).

Last night I must have had quite a vivid dream, because I distinctly remember thinking: ‘this is really good, I know I’m dreaming but I can remember all that’s happened quite clearly and it all makes sense!’ I can remember that much, but not the content of the dream I felt I was living through at the time.

I keep seeing friends’ pictures on Facebook of their morning walks, but don’t feel the urge to go myself, even though this is the easiest time of year to see the sunrise. One set of pictures of the boating lake and beach on Friday morning just brought back a memory of walking by the Thames and going up in the London Eye on New Year’s Day morning in 2010 – the first anniversary of the post I shared a couple of days ago. Circles and spirals. On my own for a year, and looking down on a new world and a new decade (I personally think that, as the calendar is a cultural construct anyway, it makes sense for a decade to be defined by its third digit). Anyway, one year into my new life, I felt that the year ahead was going to be the one when things would really start to take off for me.

People (by which I guess I mean, ‘myself, but I don’t want to admit whatever it is I’m about to say’) always seem to put too much stress on that mark on the calendar (which reminds me, I haven’t even got one, because I still haven’t got round to organising it, probably too late now, and I haven’t taken the old one down from the wall).

I’ve observed it with a minimum of fuss this year, I suppose that’s largely down to being home alone. In the past I’ve been criticised for having expectations ‘…through the roof…’, though these days I have very few expectations of myself, or of the world. All those years of trying to change the external conditions of my life, then trying to change myself into a ‘better’ (in some nebulous way: More organised? More productive? Less selfish? More altruistic?) person, and finally trying to change how I felt about myself: (More accepting? More fulfilled? Happier? More at peace?) have not freed me from the early morning dark and muddy pit that I scrabble out of every day.

In my yoga session this morning, this question popped up: ‘Do you love me?’ and back came the reply: ‘of course I love you, now, bugger off and leave me alone’.

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Five Hundred Words

What can I say today that I haven’t said a million times before?

Every day: get up at seven (or thereabouts), feed cat and open the door for her to go out; half an hour of yoga, tai chi and meditation; shower; make coffee; come up here and write 500 words; brush teeth; get dressed; have breakfast while doing su doku. That gets me to any time between 10:30 and 12:00. At one o’clock on weekdays, there’s an hour of crime-and-thrillers drama on Radio 4 extra, so I sit in my armchair in the bay window overlooking the street (but behind the hedge) and listen to that, while crocheting the previous day’s weather blanket square. At two, I may get lunch (if I haven’t had it before one), or stay where I am and listen to whatever’s on next, then at three there’s another hour of a drama serial, and at four, some days I switch over to Radio 4 and listen to what’s on there, until PM comes on at five, which I usually listen to also. At weekends the routine is slightly different, as the drama on the radio doesn’t start till three, and then there’s an hour on Radio 4 followed by another hour and a half (Saturday) or hour (Sunday, followed by Poetry Extra, which I also listen to). At six I go into the kitchen and prepare, cook and eat dinner, then around seven I usually go back in the front room, switch the telly on, and knit or crochet till around ten, when I make hot chocolate, listen to music, and carry on either knitting/crocheting or reading until bedtime (between eleven and eleven thirty).

There are variations, of course, usually involving going out to the shops in the morning. Otherwise, that’s pretty much it – but I don’t want you to think that I’m saying my life is boring, not a bit of it. I like this routine. The ‘activities’ (if you can call them that) are all – well, mostly – things I enjoy doing. It’s an undemanding life. Nobody needs me for anything, I’m not required to interact or communicate with any other human being (mostly), I can just trundle along letting each day go by, like I used to when I was travelling.

But a comment on Facebook yesterday raised the question: What is the point of any of this? The comment was made about something specific (posting pictures daily on FB) but it applies to everything, and it throws a stark light on the fact THAT MY LIFE, THE THINGS THAT I DO, ARE ALL COMPLETELY POINTLESS.

I didn’t deliberately make that phrase upper-case – I was just typing away as I usually do, looking at the keyboard instead of the screen, then looked up (because I wanted to delete something I’d written after that) and realised I must have accidentally pressed caps lock. So I’m not trying to emphasise that sentence, it just emphasised itself, which seems appropriate.

And now – oh look – 500.

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Ghosts of New Years Past

The last post from ‘Husband or Cat’, posted twelve years ago today. I created a new blog immediately afterwards, under the name Melinda Solo.

I’ll be honest, I’m sharing it as an excuse not to write anything new today. Which, now I’m here, doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Some days it just feels like that.

New Year’s Day is quite a potent day for blogging. I feel as though I’ve left a mark on this day several times. The one for 2009 was obviously highly significant, and I’ve referred back to it a few times since.

The Spare Room

The Buddhist New Year party. An evening of reflection, meditation, poetry reading, sharing, wine, food, laughter, friendship. When Chris tentatively mentioned the idea a month ago, I leapt at it.

‘I’ll come, even if it’s only you me and Clare’ I said. ‘I won’t be doing anything else that night.’

It was a good evening, a positive evening, an unconventional evening. What more could you ask for? Better sober with good friends than drinking here alone… I wasn’t clear whether the invitation extended to sleeping over or not, so I took an overnight bag in case, but at around 1:30 the party broke up…

I got back around 2, the house in darkness. Hubby hadn’t left the light on for me, but at least he hadn’t bolted the door. I took my overnight bag into the second bathroom and unpacked my night things. And then I thought…

I went into the bedroom in the dark, got my dressing gown and hot water bottle. I could hear his breathing, soft and regular. This is it, the voice told me, now is the time. It makes perfect sense. Why bother climbing in beside him, one more night? There’s nothing there for either of you, is there?

So I took my things into the spare room. Laid the bag on the floor. Switched the radiator on – the heating was off, but it would be ready for morning. Looked around me.

Checked the wardrobe: full of rubbish, I can sort that out, give myself some storage space in here. I need a bedside cabinet, but for now the clock can sit on the floor.

This is my room now. Why put it off any longer?

Lying in the bed, stretching out, luxuriating. The feather duvet, I will have to swap them over, this is bad for my asthma, but I can survive one night. And I’ll bring my own pillow from the other room tomorrow. But for now, it will be OK.

I woke just after 6, the cat had found her way in and was walking over me and purring. Outside the window, I could hear the fountain in the fish pond. A transit place. I won’t be here forever. But it will do for now.

It was gone 7 before I got up, even though I knew there would be no more sleep. So I did the usual things, fed the cats, put the coffee on. I went back upstairs to meditate, but the mp3 player wouldn’t switch on. Must have left it on all night, I’ll have to recharge it. Then I heard him in the kitchen.

‘I slept in the spare room. Thought that was easier than disturbing you.’

‘OK. I didn’t know what was happening so I didn’t leave the light on.’

‘That’s fine, no problem.’

So polite. We are always so civil with one another. Never any animosity.

The coffee machine gave its sudden final burst of noise and steam. I lifted the lid. Still some filtering through.

He was sitting at the table eating Shredded Wheat.

‘Do you want your coffee pouring now?’

‘Yes please.’

I looked at the chair opposite him. Should I pull it out, sit down?

‘I need to talk to you today’.

‘OK.’ No curiosity, no reaction.

‘Do you want to do it now, or later?’

‘Later.’

OK then. Later it is.

by husbandorcat @ 2009-01-01 – 08:09:45

In the first post of the new blog, I described the actual conversation which I sprung on my husband. It was pointless asking him if he wanted to talk ‘now or later’, I knew that, just procrastination on both our parts. I’d been procrastinating long enough – I suppose we both had, but I couldn’t help but take all the blame onto myself. Also, of course, for me it was exciting, because I was about to embark on a new adventure – running away again. Whatever happened next in my life, I was sure, something good would come out of it.

The spooky thing is that I feel now as though I’m not completely alone, as though there’s someone else in this house who’s still asleep but will get up soon and need to be interacted with. And of course, the same old cat just came and rubbed against my legs.

Ghosts of New Years past. But it’s just an arbitrary mark on the calendar, and I haven’t even got one this year – the last few years I’ve had a Vistaprint one made of my own photos, but didn’t get round to it this time. I’ve honed that old procrastination thing to a fine art, over the years.

Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright

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Husband or Cat?

We moved into the house with the attic in 1999 – our last home as a family, though I wasn’t exactly the first one to leave it – that honour goes to our son, who left in 2004 to go to university, though he was back in the holidays for a few years, and also for the ‘industry’ section of his third year, in 2007.

I announced that the smaller attic room would be the birthplace of ‘…the first great novel of the twenty-first century!’ With a legacy from my parents (who had both passed away early in 1999) I bought a new computer (the first time I’d had one that was all my own, instead of sharing a family one), a leather-topped desk and captain’s chair (which I still have) and a suite of flatpack office furniture (which I assembled by myself, but which has suffered after multiple house moves since and has mostly gone). I filled the shelves with books and filled my time with housework, job applications and managing the activities and transport needs of two youngsters who were rapidly morphing into teenagers. I was living in a Grade 2 listed Georgian house and garden, beautiful beyond any realistic expectation I might have had, and I told myself every day how lucky I was.

Six years later, in the middle of an autumn night, I went up into my attic room, switched on my computer, Googled ‘free blogs’, found a site called ‘blog.co.uk’, created my first blog (which I titled: ‘Husband or Cat?’) and wrote the following:

Here’s my scenario…

I have had a cat for nine years. Before we got the cat, my husband always swore he didn’t want one, but since we have had it he has always got on very well with it and has never shown any animosity towards it.
I recently decided to get another kitten. My husband’s reaction went something like this:
Hubby: If we get another cat, we have to get rid of the old one.
Me: We’re not getting rid of the old one.
Hubby: In that case, I’ll go.
Me: OK, you go then.
In spite of this conversation, I went ahead and got the kitten on the assumption that my husband was not serious, and that he would learn to love the new cat just as he had with the old one.
However, he refuses to be in the same room as the kitten, to the extent that he will not eat a meal with myself and our daughter if the kitten is present. When he is not at work, he has taken to spending all his time in a room in the attic.
When I asked him how long he intended to keep this up, he announced that he did not wish to be in the same house as the kitten and would find somewhere and move out.
I offered to get rid of the kitten, but he replied that it was too late and he was going anyway.
This after 23 years of marriage, 28 years together, and never any hint in the past that he was dissatisfied with our relationship in any way.
No one would make this up. This is my life.
What happens next?

husbandorcat, blog.co.uk, 16 October 2005
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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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Rotting From the Roots

Sat down at the PC to start writing and remembered a) the mouse isn’t working and b) the top tool bar on word keeps appearing and disappearing and I can’t work out how to fix it. Weell… actually, after a few more minutes of trying the View tab and other things, I Googled it and found out that if I right click on the home tab it gives me a drop-down including ‘Minimize the ribbon’ which was ticked, so I unticked it and that worked. The first suggestion: press Ctrl F1, was stymied by the fact that I can’t see ‘F1’ on my keyboard. Don’t know how it got ticked in the first place, but I suspect it happened when I was thrashing around trying to get the mouse to work.

I suspect the mouse just needs a new battery, but spare batteries are downstairs and the mouse is upstairs, and by the time I got downstairs I’d forgotten I needed to get them. If I remember, I could take the mouse down when I go and do it then, but that would rely on me remembering to take it, remembering what I’d taken it for, then remembering to bring it back up again. For now, I’m getting more practised at using the touch pad.

Today, I feel the way this poinsettia looks. I used to buy a poinsettia every year, and this is how they always ended up looking. I think it’s down to over-watering – but you only have to do it once and there’s no getting back from the slippery slope. I’m always a bit erratic with my watering regime, I guess it’s to do with short term memory and lack of awareness. Some things die from lack of water, which is recoverable-from if you notice in time, but there’s no way back from over-watering.

I can tell you exactly how long I’ve had this one, because I bought it the day we went into Tier 3, the Thursday before Christmas. I know, because it was the day I took my cards to the post office and checked the local shops for a small turkey joint, then bought a little Christmas tree and this poinsettia on the way home. Then my family persuaded me to go to them for Christmas anyway, by promising to come and get me and bring me back, then two days later we went in Tier 4 and the plan changed again (but you already know that story).

In other words, this poor plant has been in my care for less than a fortnight, and this is what I’ve done to it.

However, that’s not why I’m feeling droopy, as though I’m rotting from my roots. It’s just that I woke up that way, as often happens. Maybe it’s because I’m always rotting from my roots, and I’m not sure whether there’s any way back from that. Well, nothing permanent, as far as I can tell, but at least I’m not actually dead yet.