Category: writing

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Dodgy Knee

I think my version of hibernation is waking three hours before sunrise and lying in bed listening to podcasts or reading from my Kindle until about seven then getting up, doing my exercises, making coffee and coming on here to write this blog. Three hours before sunrise is pretty much the same time as sunrise was six months ago, when I was waking around the same time but it wasn’t dark. The advice I had from the insomnia clinic, years ago, was to get up rather than lying in bed, so that my brain would be trained to associate bed with sleep, but that ship has not only sailed, but long ago disappeared below the horizon, and I might as well just listen or read. Sometimes I do drift back to sleep again, and some days, like today, it gets to this time (it’s half past eight) and I think – maybe I could go back to sleep now (except I can’t, because I’ve got wet hair and a towel round my head, and anyway if I lay down on the bed I probably wouldn’t get back to sleep, just waste another half hour or so trying to, and even if I did I’d hate it when I did wake up, because I’d have wasted half the day).

Geoff Dyer’s book ‘Out of Sheer Rage’ makes me alternately laugh out loud and cringe, because of his rambly stream-of-consciousness style, and because I relate to so much of what he writes about himself – and it’s all the worst bits – maybe not the worst bits of him, but the worst bits of me. One that struck a chord with me this morning was when he was complaining about his dodgy knee – the right one, whereas mine is the left. He had terrible problems with it when he was in Italy (I think – or maybe Mexico) and he saw a doctor who showed him two exercises that would help if he did them regularly, except of course he didn’t, so it got worse, then when he was back in England he went to his GP who sent him to a knee specialist, who sent him to a physiotherapist, who showed him the same exercises, which he still didn’t do. Four years ago (nearly five now), I started to notice pains in my leg, so I went to the GP and was referred to the physio, and I saw her monthly for a while, but didn’t like to admit I wasn’t doing the exercises in between, but by the end of the year I had cancer anyway which kind of trumped the leg thing, except that a couple of weeks ago I woke up one morning with so much pain in my left knee I could barely stand – I put it down to spending the previous day in a low armchair doing stuff on my laptop on a stool in front of me – it gradually eased and now it comes and goes but is bearable.

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Je Ne Regrette Rien

This morning I got up and walked to the beach. I was there in time for the sunrise, but the cloud cover was solid, and there was nothing to see. I sat on my usual bench, but the wind seemed to be blowing directly at me, and I didn’t feel comfortable enough to drink my coffee, so I walked down to the tideline and tried to photograph the waves, which were pretty fearsome. They were licking at the remains of a sandcastle, which seemed bizarre – who had been there building a sandcastle at this time of year?

I left the beach to cross the esplanade and drink my coffee in the Rose Garden, which is more sheltered, and as I turned to look back, I saw the clouds moving and parting, and a brief burst of light came from the gap and shone momentarily on the sea.

I think I finished yesterday saying something about regret, and Geoff Dyer saying that whatever you do, or don’t, there are always regrets. But I part company with him there – I think I’m quite good at avoiding regrets, over the big things, anyway. Of all the major changes I’ve made over the last twelve years, I don’t think there are any which I would undo, were such a thing possible, even the ones whose consequences were painful at the time. Not that that spares me from agonies when I have to make a choice, but that’s another matter. The torments I went through before I decided to move here – which seem ludicrous looking back from this perspective – were only finally settled when I realised that if I didn’t at least try it, I would always wonder what would have happened if I had. And now I know.

I read somewhere – a few years ago now – that it is part of human psychology to see major life choices – marriage, house purchase, choice of job, divorce – in a positive light once they’ve been made and committed to. It’s the ‘it was meant to be…’ syndrome: ‘I was meant to meet you, move here, do that – because look what happened!’ I was saying this a couple of weeks ago, I think, when I talked about fate and fatalism. We know the consequences of those decisions, and can’t really imagine what the alternatives might have been like. Of course, this isn’t universal, and I can’t remember the research and references off the top of my head, but I can see how it has worked out in my life.

In the time before I left my husband, I bought a greeting card with the legend: ‘The only things I’ll regret are the things I don’t do’, and stuck it to the wall behind my computer. It also became the tagline for the new blog I started when I moved out. I’ve still got that card, in fact if I look over my left shoulder, I can see it on a shelf. I think it’s a pretty good motto.

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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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Dream Thingy

Where did that dream come from, of travelling alone across Europe and writing as I went? I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, pulling together many threads from different parts of my life, even back as far as my Dad’s wild ‘holiday’ ideas of semi-spontaneously piling us all into the car and driving off to some remote (for us) region, finding a bed-and-breakfast when we got there. And of course there’s that recurring leitmotif, of Running Away in search of an ill-defined ‘different life’.

After I left my husband in 2009, I had equally ill-defined hopes and expectations of finding a new job/career and becoming financially self-sufficient; starting a new relationship (either with a ‘soul-mate’, or perhaps a series of lovers who would all remain good friends until the inevitable time when the ‘soul-mate’ would enter my life); and, naturally, writing novels. Travelling was bound up in that, because it was only when I was travelling on my own (which I was doing increasingly from the mid to late 1990s onwards) that any of those things began to feel remotely possible. The irony that none of them have happened, despite my efforts to create the conditions in which they might, has dominated the decade just past.

In 2010-11, in between job-hunting, temping, and part-time admin jobs, I tried to start a business selling my graphic and web design skills to other small business owners. I soon found out I was just as incapable of attracting potential clients as potential employers or lovers, but I got involved in a small business networking circuit, through which I made some contacts and met some nice people (as well as picking up a habit of getting up early and going out for delicious but dangerously unhealthy breakfasts).

One of these nice people was a lady who described herself as a life coach, who asked me what my ‘dreams’ were, to which I answered that I didn’t have ‘dreams’ any more, because experience had taught me that dreams never turn out the way you think they will. This was slightly disingenuous, because despite everything, I still had those underlying dreams of getting a decent job, finding a lover, writing a novel etc but I sensed this wasn’t the kind of dreams she could help me with. So when she’d explained to me that I needed a dream, or dreams, that that was what my life was lacking and why I felt so aimless and lost, I blurted out that I wanted to travel across Europe and live by the sea – and maybe I mentioned writing, too.

The next stage was to construct one of those dream thingies, where you cut out images from magazines and what-not and stick them onto a big sheet of paper – except that this was 2011 and I did it virtually by finding images online and downloading them into a folder. I think I’ve probably still got that folder somewhere, might even be able to find it (or not).

PS I didn’t find it, but did find a random poem from around that time (or a bit later), which is equally appropriate today, although, bizarrely, it must have been written in Bedford (I seem to remember I was walking home from the swimming baths when it came to me):

A new day, and seagulls calling,
grey-white and lost against the clouds.
Water in air, mingling elements,
and I, pedestrian, earthbound.

Linda Rushby 9 November 2011
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Dreams and Achievements

In the process of digging out the poem I shared a couple of days ago (titled ‘I Had a Dream’ and posted when I was in Berlin in 2012, about my fears and dread of having to come back to England with nothing resolved and no plans for what to do next), I read the comments in response to it from other bloggers. This was one:

hmm, sounds a bit pessimistic. Maybe it depends on how well formed our dreams are when we go after them, how high our expectations are. If we do not know why we have the dream, then when we go after it we do not know what to do when we “achieve” it, and do we even recognise achievement?

no idea really, not sure I have consciously gone after a dream.

22 June 2012

I was irritated when I read it, thinking that the poster didn’t seem to have much empathy, and wondering what kind of life it is if you never ‘… consciously go after a dream…’ I probably felt much the same at the time, because I hadn’t bothered to reply. But reading it again now, what did she say?

  1. How well formed was my dream? To go travelling across Europe, overland (no flying), visiting various places, staying with friends in some of them and ‘…hopefully making new ones along the way…’ (which, not surprisingly, never happened).
  2. Why did I have the dream? A whole complex mess of reasons I suppose, but fundamentally because I was unhappy with the person I was and the life I was living, and thought that by this massive act of ‘running away’ I would ‘…turn my life around…’ – a phrase I initially included in the blurb to Single to Sirkeci but later removed because it didn’t work out the way I hoped. And what way was that? By finding a new man, or a new place, or a new purpose in my life.
  3. Did I know what to do when I’d ‘achieved’ it? No
  4. Did I even recognise it as an achievement? No.

So, it pains me to admit it, but I can’t really argue with the things she said. I couldn’t explain why I had that particular dream; initially it wasn’t very ‘well formed’, although it became clearer once I’d started to ‘make it real’; I didn’t know what I’d achieved or what to do afterwards – although the same person later gave me a great phrase when I was closer to returning, and she said I would be ready to ‘…hit the ground running…’ and my reaction was ‘…or like a lead balloon…’ so that ‘Hitting the Ground’ became a title for the blog I wrote after my return.

But I did enjoy the experience – sometimes. And I did write the book – eventually (but only published the first part). Travelling and writing about it – or staying in the same place and writing about it. That’s what I’m still doing.

And hoping. That’s what’s important.

PS The featured image is a screenshot of what came up on Firefox when I opened it to post this. I recognised it instantly, because I’ve been there and taken multiple versions of the same view: it’s the Old Bridge (Stari Most) in Mostar, Bosnia/Herzegovina, which I would never have visited if I hadn’t followed my ‘dream’.

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Knitting News (Not the Meaning of Life)

The good news is – the Christmas jumper is now almost long enough, so I can leave out those other design items I had in mind, and move on to doing the bottom rib. The right sleeve – which I’ve been picking at on and off over the last couple of weeks – is also nearly long enough, although I’ve hardly started the left one. On straight needles, I would do both sleeves at the same time next to one another on the needles, to make sure they’re the same, but that wouldn’t really work with circular needles so I’ll just have to keep checking it matches the right one. This doesn’t mean I can get it finished in a couple of days, but the end is in sight, it should be done by mid-December at the latest. Then I’ll have to concentrate on catching up on the weather blanket, which is way behind.

Enough of knitting and crochet news, and the poem which I still haven’t found, because I didn’t look for it on the laptop, didn’t get round to it. I’m not sure what’s on there anyway, but maybe that’s where all the missing blog posts from 2016 are, it makes sense. Which reminds me that I need to convert all the Word files on my new(ish) laptop to Open Office or Word 2007 before Thursday, when my year’s free trial of Office 365 (or whatever it’s called) expires, and Microsoft start demanding money with menaces. I’m quite content with my legitimate copy of Office 2007, bought in good faith ten years ago and still perfectly adequate for my needs, except I can’t install it on the new laptop because there isn’t a CD player to load the software from. This time last year I wasn’t bothered because I knew I had a full year to work out how to install it on the laptop, or adapt to using Open Office, but somehow I slipped into the bad habit of using Office 365 because it was there. But a decision has been made, and I’m sticking to it.  

Well, none of that is very deep, although I do need to sort it out. I’ve not been putting it off because I particularly don’t want to do it or am nervous about it – in fact I started earlier in the week on some of my files, to confirm it was quite straightforward and wouldn’t take long – it’s just that other things seem more important and/or interesting.

And I will get back to Destiny and the Meaning of Life at some point (no, I haven’t finished with that, even though I’ve stated categorically that I don’t think there’s anything mystical behind it all). Come to that, a Destiny which was predetermined and inevitable really wouldn’t be worth talking about, would it?

I’m just going to throw out this thought for now: all the wisdom life teaches us seems quite banal when you think about it – maybe that’s why it’s so hard to live by.

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Process and Outcome (and losing a poem)

It’s a cliché to say that the quest is more important than the prize, the journey matters more than the destination. This is the meaning of the story of the Crescent Moon Bear, (retold by Clarissa Pinkola Estés), with the added subtlety that it is the hardships the protagonist experiences through the journey that give her the skills she needs to keep going and deal with her challenges (which are still there when she returns home).

In the process of trying to re-evaluate my life in order to better understand who I am and how I got here, this strikes a chord. There were things I was going to say. But earlier I remembered a poem that I thought I would dig out and now I can’t find it. This is the second time this has happened to me in the last few months and it is worrying. I have so many poems and they can be anywhere – well, I think there are a certain number of places where I would have saved them, but I’ve looked in all those and still no luck. Emily Dickinson wrote hers on paper, and shoved them in a drawer where her sister found them after she’d gone, but who’s going to bother trawling through my computer for mine?

I’ve gone through my assorted ‘poetry’ or ‘poems’ folders, but no sign of it – I can’t remember a title for it, which doesn’t help. I remember that I wrote it in my flat on Beach Road, which narrows the date down to between May 2015 and October 2016. And there’s no 2016 sub-folder in my Blog folder on Google Drive, so does that mean I didn’t write any blog posts in 2016? Of course, I would have been using my old laptop then, so it could be on there. But it was unfinished at the time, and then I’m sure I’ve gone back to it in the last couple of years and tweaked the last bit, so that implies it would be somewhere I’ve accessed more recently.

Well that’s blown out of my mind what I wanted to say. Process and outcome. My PhD is a classic example of a hugely significant process with an outcome that no one was interested in – not only if we assume that the ‘outcome’ was the thesis, but if we take ‘an academic career’ as the outcome I was striving for – well, that never happened either. I used to say that the process of doing a PhD is like having your brain extracted, tied in knots, and put back again so you can never see things in the same way ever again. Maybe that was just my experience.

If I think back to the time before, from the point when one of my OU tutors asked whether I’d ever considered a career in research, my aim was always to ‘do’ a PhD, rather than to ‘have’ a PhD – which reminds me of another poem, which hopefully I can locate…

I had a dream.
And then what?
I made it real.
And then what?
Dreams in daylight
turn to dust.
And then what?
How long does it take
to make a new dream?
And then what?

Linda Rushby 22 June 2012
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Calling

Sunshine outside the window, and Miko has just come to join me at the computer. I thought last night that maybe I would get up and walk to the seafront for sunrise this morning, but although I was awake in plenty of time, I didn’t do it. Maybe I’ll go later, but probably I won’t.

The word ‘hibernation’ comes from the same root as the French hiver, winter, so it literally translates as ‘wintering’, but is mainly used to describe the ways in which some animals adapt to winter conditions by slowing down, conserving energy, and in some species entering an extreme state which can last several months (I’m not a zoologist, this is just my layperson’s understanding of the term). I don’t know why I just wandered into saying that, all of which I’m sure you already know, it’s just the link with hiver that I find interesting. I thought that was going to take me somewhere, but I’m not sure where – or to put it another way, I don’t have a bloody clue.

Sitting here staring past my computer and out of the window and thinking about the Purpose of Life, and wondering how to say that I don’t believe there is one – I’m pretty sure mine doesn’t have one, anyway. Last night I was listening to the Paul Simon song ‘Slip Slidin’ Away’ and thinking I’d never noticed before quite how nihilistic it is – especially the verse about the woman who ‘…became a wife…’

Like Descartes, the only thing I can say for sure is that I must exist, because I am always thinking, and something must generate those thoughts – plus I receive sensory messages which tell me I have a physical body which interacts with an external world; accumulated memories of past events; and the ability to anticipate and prepare for future ones. I have experienced joy and despair, but never anything which convinced me of the existence of any higher power or God outside of those created by human cultures or explicable by science – although I don’t think this has affected my appreciation of the beauty of the world. So I’ve never felt ‘called’ by any such higher power, and insofar as I’ve ever felt ‘called’ to anything, I suppose I could say it was to writing. It may seem a little harsh not to mention my children at this point, but although since they appeared, my commitment to them has  been total and overwhelming, they came as the result of choices made by myself and their father, and I can see alternative lives in which I didn’t have them (though of course I am eternally grateful that I did).

Back to writing then – the one thing which has always been there, the closest I’ve ever been to having a ‘calling’ or to ‘following my bliss’. And here I am, still following it, doing it every day, in however limited a fashion.

And wondering what it was that I meant to say about hibernation.  

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Not Writing, but Blogging

Where does this stuff come from? I sit down with a vague idea and the words come out in a completely different direction – like starting from a conversation about the role of fate and chance in an individual life and going off on one about Isaac Asimov and the fates of galaxies (not to mention Planet Earth).

Lately much of my time is being taken up with obsessing over getting this jumper finished – so much so that I haven’t even touched the weather blanket for a week. And a fair amount of that time, of course, is taken up with untangling wool, although yesterday I felt as though there was a better balance, and that I made reasonable progress (admittedly it was a less complicated part of the design). In fact it even feels as though I may be approaching the end – although I still have to do the sleeves, which always take longer than expected. I’ve made a start on one of them (when the body got too stressful) and I’ve decided to incorporate small candy canes into the pattern to relieve the boredom.

I still have moments (or even hours) of panic that she’s not going to like it. But then I think – too late to go back now, I might as well just keep on the way I’m going, knowing that whatever my daughter’s opinion, I’ll be embarrassed by it when it’s done. She asked for it, I tell myself, and she knows well enough it will probably turn out to be a mess.

But I’ve decided to stop worrying about the quality of the things I make (which goes for my writing too, which is why I’m still writing this blog). Also I heard on the radio the other day that only ten of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime, but almost 1800 were discovered by her sister after her death. What does it matter?

This takes me back again to ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, and the idea of the poetic imagination, or Wild Spirit, (or whatever you want to call it) being stolen or given away or strangled at birth. Looking back over my life – which I still haven’t delved into in depth – has shown me how much I’ve repressed, denied, pushed away, belittled that side of myself, while simultaneously longing for it. So I’ve decided just to do what I can without thinking too much about it or expecting anything from it. Lockdown helps, of course – as it did in the spring: I feel a lot less stressed and more content when I don’t have to go out and interact with other people. That’s something else Dickinson is famous for – it’s said she rarely left her bedroom –at least I have a whole house to myself.

Despite longing for the life of a wild bohemian, I never had the nerve or the opportunities. I’ve always been more Emily Dickinson than Bloomsbury – and at least it requires a lot less energy.  

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Foundation and Pandemic

No dreams to report today.

I have to go out today and tomorrow: this morning, to take Miko to the vet’s for a checkup and blood test to monitor how she’s getting on; and tomorrow I’m going for a mammogram at the hospital. I don’t mind too much – we are both getting older and creaky, and it’s good to know someone is looking out for our health. Miko is less than thrilled, as she can’t have breakfast because of the blood test – I wish I’d got an earlier appointment than 10:30, I didn’t think about it till it was too late to change – must remember next time. The vet is checking her quarterly at the moment, though it seems to have gone fast since the last time.

Yesterday I started talking about fate. My yoga teacher once said that Destiny is what is supposed to happen and Fate is what happens due to our actions, which sounds as though it makes sense, but doesn’t really when you start to think about it. Is Destiny what’s going to happen, or isn’t it? If it can be changed, by individual actions or collective, then in what sense was it ‘predestined’? I’ve been described by people as a ‘gloom and doomer’, particularly with regard to climate change, but I’ve never claimed that it was inevitable, just that trends in the scientific understanding and a knowledge of human behaviour have made it increasingly so over the three (nearly four) decades I’ve been observing it.

When I was an undergraduate, almost half a century ago, I read the ‘Foundation’ trilogy by Isaac Asimov, in which an interplanetary federation developed computer systems powerful enough to model all physical, social and economic trends and predict the future of the galaxy. In the story, the ability to plan for and control the threads of destiny was disrupted, initially by a mutant human who developed psychic abilities and took over supreme power, and although he eventually got his comeuppance (I forget how), events were never returned to their original trajectories. Since then, a lifetime of experience and observation has convinced me that it doesn’t take a mutant dictator to throw Destiny into confusion, just the usual work-in-progress of individuals and groups interacting and living and doing what people do without understanding, or caring about, the outcomes of their collective actions – all conspiracies collapse under the weight of sheer unadulterated human cock-up.

For years, scientists have been warning that we were overdue for a global pandemic – it could have been ebola, it could have been SARS, or bird flu, or swine flu – it wasn’t any of those, but the stories popped up every couple of years in the news, and were forgotten by most members of the public, (apart from geeky doomer-types still harbouring the soul of an over-excitable 18 year old statistics student). Medical and population trends continued to predict it was bound to happen – sooner or later.

Welcome to sooner – and funnily enough, no-one was prepared for it.