Category: writing

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Routines and Decisions

Structure and chaos. Rules and freedom. Dyspraxia and social inadequacy – nature and nurture. Cats and husbands. This and that. Writing and not-writing.

I’ve been awake for two hours already, but I observe my routines. Time is open-ended – until 1pm, when the afternoon’s radio marathon begins (though I can delay that by setting the TiVo to Radio 4 Extra so that it can be paused and rewound if I miss anything). Little happens in the mornings beyond the routine of: feed cat; half hour yoga, tai chi and meditation; shower; coffee; blogging; breakfast (which can end up being at 11, or even later). Except for shopping days, of course, but that was yesterday. There are other day-related things, apart from shopping (which isn’t strictly day-related, but has fallen into that pattern because it takes me exactly a week to use up two litres of milk), like putting the bins out (Tuesday), Zoom tai chi (Wednesday), Skype therapy (Thursday), but they all happen in the afternoon or early evening.

This is very different from pre-lockdown routine, when on most days I needed to be up and ready to go out by a certain time. Which may mean – if those activities eventually resume in a similar format to before – that post-lockdown life (which, may I say, I’m not anticipating any time soon), will be different again.

None of which is what I was thinking about in those two hours before I sat down at the keyboard.

By the way, the Joni Mitchell song I quoted from the other day wasn’t ‘The Blonde in the Bleachers’, as I said, but the one that begins:

‘Two waitresses both wearing black diamond earrings
talking about zombies and Singapore sleeves.
No trouble in their faces, not one angry voice,
none of the crazy you get from too much choice,
the thumb and the satchel or the rented Rolls-Royce…’

Joni Mitchell

But surprisingly, even though I can now hear it clearly in my head, I can’t get as far as the refrain to remember what it’s actually called (nor do I have a clue what ‘Singapore sleeves’ are) – and I still haven’t got round to looking it up.

Choice as tyranny, that’s what I was going to write about. The comfort of routines versus the horror of being forced to make a decision. That’s why I cling to them in the mornings; though I don’t always wake – or get up – at the same time, the sequence of activities is quite consistent. Otherwise I lie in bed and do nothing – which is not, repeat NOT healthy for my emotional wellbeing.

I still have to make decisions, of course, and I find the two most terrifying are: what to wear, and what to have for dinner; terrifying because they are relentless. And every decision (however trivial) entails judgement: options must be evaluated, probabilities and utilities assigned; projected outcomes considered (especially unanticipated ones) in order to identify and attain an optimal solution.

It’s exhausting. Better to sit in the sun and drink coffee.

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Coffee Angst

‘Stay alert.’ Your country still needs lerts.

I won’t make political observations on this blog, unless it becomes unavoidable.

How is the world this morning? The sunshine has returned, after a day’s conspicuous absence, but the wind is rough and bitterly cold. Probably no breakfast in the garden today.

My stovetop espresso pot has let me down twice in a row. I am concerned. Did I just not screw it up tightly enough? Twice in a row? Does the seal just need a good clean, or replacing? I used to have a spare seal, among the stuff that got moved from place to place, one of those things that you don’t expect to use so shove it somewhere and forget about it. I’ve checked the kitchen drawers, it’s nowhere obvious. It came in a pack of two from the Italian supermarket in Bedford, reminder of happy times in my first flat. I wonder if it’s open? Not that I can drive a 250 mile round trip to buy another even if so. I can’t remember how old the pot is, but it’s had a long and useful life, maybe time to let go. Once I was surrounded by coffee-making devices, but all I can find now are the Portmerion cafetiere, which is too big for one person, and the Tassimo, which requires pods, and I have a limited supply. Anyway, the espresso pot is my favourite. I will check the Caffe Nero and Whittard’s online shops, though I wonder how much they charge.

Coffee is important to me, it contributes significantly to my quality of life and sense of wellbeing, but when I start to think about the conditions of its cultivation, processing and transport across half the globe I feel a sense of gloom and angst stealing over me. Tea is probably no better, not to mention chocolate. We take these things for granted, these products from the other side of the world, we expect to pick them off the supermarket shelves in their shiny packaging and not give them another thought.

The mug from which I’m drinking bears the message: ‘Save water, drink Prosecco’. Enough said. I am lucky, I have a good life, I like to think I am a good and thoughtful person, I like to laugh, I like to drink coffee and eat chocolate and enjoy a glass of wine with my dinner. Sometimes I get a glimpse from another place and think: is this a fools’ paradise I’m living in? Am I part of the problem?

The wind howls and rattles its way round the edges of the window, the wires radiating out from the telegraph pole vibrate ominously.

I don’t know where these thoughts come from, or what I will write when I sit at my computer in the morning. Every morning it happens this way. I may plan one thing, but I ride the current and it takes me to another place.

Happy Monday friends, and always remember: our country needs lerts.

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Writing Joy

Everything I say or write
comes from a thought,
a spark inside my mind.

That almost – almost – follows a haiku structure. Just needs a little tweaking to fit it into that 5/7/5 syllable pattern. That’s what the words do, when they occur to me, they often lay themselves out in a rhythmic structure – usually iambic, often in short, sharp lines like these. Sometimes I’ll combine them together into longer lines, hexameter or even heptameter, and then I might throw the odd shorter line here and there, maybe at the end of a stanza. So, in the three lines above, the first two could be combined into a single line with six feet, followed by one of three.

Don’t ask me why I’m sitting here analysing my own poetry style this morning, god knows, it’s not as though I don’t have other things to write about – though having said that, I can see why I did it that way, it was just that the first sentence that came into my head when I sat down at the keyboard did so in that rhythmic way, so just for fun I laid it out as a poem – albeit a pretty trivial one.

You may have noticed that when I’m writing prose, I often go in for long, rambling sentences, lots of embedded clauses, lists of this and that, shamelessly long processions of adjectives and adverbs, diversions and distractions, self-references, repetitions and contradictions, mixing metaphors with abandon, alliterating whenever I can get away with it, indulging myself in ways that no decent editor would stand for thirty seconds. That’s when you can tell that I’m writing for myself, for the sheer joy of the words and the exhilaration of it all and because – well – I just can’t stop myself. Personally, that’s when I think my writing is at its best, when I read it back and it makes me smile for the fun of it and the magic of it. That’s what I think of as my Tristram Shandy style, and I hope you (if there is a ‘you’, whoever and wherever you may be) enjoy it too, and don’t find it too irritating or forced, because it isn’t forced, not at all, even though (as now) it may sometimes be self-conscious, that’s not because I’ve deliberately set out to write this way so much as I’ve stepped into that stream and allowed myself to be taken along by the current, because I’m enjoying myself.

Isn’t that something like what I was writing about yesterday? I remember using the metaphor of being a surfer – being carried by the waves of thought, not able to control them but managing my responses to them. Oh, so much I thought about saying before I sat down in front of this keyboard this morning, and none of it has been said, or will be said in the twenty words remaining to me. But I’m glad I’ve written this, and hope you who’ve read it are glad too

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Day 37 – Migrants

Unexpectedly came over all poetic while sitting in the garden, even though it’s not April any more.

Away above the clouds
and the gulls with their shanties,
black dots against the blue,
too high and fast to see.

Riding on the sun’s wake,
all the way from Africa
the swifts are returning
with summer on their wings.

Linda Rushby 7 May 2020
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How Not to Write a Story

‘What happened that day will stay with me all my life.’

Sounds like a good opening line for a story? It popped into my head first thing, in that limbo space between waking and sleeping, and I lay in bed for a while, thinking I was onto something. Maybe this was the trigger that would break my four year drought and get me writing creatively again?

I thought about my childhood home, and then I imagined a bright red car pulling up outside our house, and a lady getting out and coming to the door. Mid to late 1960s, so how would she be dressed? Not like my Mum, that’s for sure. Elegant or hippyish? Mum would be astonished to see her – would she hug her? I don’t remember her ever going in for that sort of thing, but maybe the other lady would do it to her before she could avoid it? The name ‘Hetty’ popped into my head.

‘This is your Aunty Hetty.’ (My real Mum didn’t have any long lost relations called Hetty – as far as I know. And isn’t ‘Hetty’ a bit American? Maybe ‘Betty’? Anyway, Mum’s old friends were often ‘Aunties’ without any blood connection.)

Then she’d probably do something awful like bending to kiss me, smelling of scent and face powder and leaving lipstick marks that I’d have to rub off quick. And she’d say something cringe-making like: ‘This can’t be your little Linda? She was a baby last time I saw her!’

Or maybe she wouldn’t, maybe she would talk to me as though I was a real person, not infantilising me in the third person. That would have made it more memorable.

She would talk ‘posh’, or relatively so, like my real aunties (Dad’s sisters) who moved to Buckinghamshire before the war and married southerners, or like people off the telly.

Lying in bed thinking, I wanted it to become magical realist, maybe a timeslip, maybe the lady was my future self? No, couldn’t be that, because I wanted her to be glamorous, not like me. And there was something in her driving a red car, because I feel that it would stand out in our street, that it was fairly unusual for a woman to be driving a car, though maybe that’s just because my Mum never did.

But where is this story going? I try to remember the stories I wrote as a child, and they were full of talking animals, toys and everyday objects coming to life, and magical worlds that could be reached through rabbit holes and wardrobes, like the ones I enjoyed reading.  

So what would Aunty Hetty say to my pre-pubescent self, what adventure would she take me on that would bring a different meaning and purpose to the subsequent fifty to sixty years? Or would I just be an observer, of the interaction between these two adult women, that would help me see the different possibilities life can hold?

Who knows? I don’t do fiction.

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Day 30 – Columbine

I had three haikus up my sleeve for today, but this one popped out randomly when I was eating breakfast in the garden.

And it shows I can rhyme – sometimes – but only with my tongue firmly in my cheek! 😉

Columbine, where is your Pierrot?
Waiting at the theatre door?
You will find him, never fear; oh
love will triumph evermore.

You deserve a ream of sonnets,
so delicate and pinkly pretty,
but you’re really granny’s bonnets,
so please accept this little ditty!

Linda Rushby 30 April 2020
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Day 29 – Paper Flowers

Wrote this yesterday evening. Spent most of the morning clearing a space on the table from my previous papercrafting projects.

May or may not be finished today – don’t hold your breath!

Tomorrow I will make a paper sunflower.
I have the stamps, the dies,
the coloured paper.
A small act of creation
with glue and pencils, paper, ink
a little effort.

It may not be
a thing of beauty.
Just a pleasant way
to spend the time.
But there are worse things
I could do.

Linda Rushby 29 April 2020
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Day 28 – Work in Progress

I started this two days ago, couldn’t see where to take it or how to finish it, lost it because it was saved on my laptop instead of PC, realised I’d got nothing to post for today, found it again, read what I’d done, added a bit, still couldn’t see where it was going, but what the hell, maybe it’ll make sense another day, and this all I have for now.

In the draft I’d given it the title ‘Changes‘, but ‘Work in Progress‘ seems as good a title as any.

Sometimes I reflect
on the changes I’ve made in
my external life.
The things and the people
that I’ve left behind,
including: two husbands
three cats (two came back)
five flats and five houses,
three countries,
four counties,
two professions
one novel unpublished,
one novel unfinished.

The things that remain
are those in myself,
the voices that taunt me
for sixty years
the person inside,
the grief and the sadness
that come back to haunt me.

What changes, what stays?
Is there no final answer?
All the layers, the strata,
the sedimentation
that makes up the whole
of the soul that continues
the core of the woman
who can’t see the future
who can’t see the ending,
who has to keep going
who hopes to make progress
and someday, perhaps,
will rest on her laurels
and look at the whole
and see it completed?

Linda Rushby 28 April 2020
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Day 27 – Meeeow!!!

No poetry at all today, so here’s one I prepared earlier (last week in fact, same day as the Power Tools).

My cat listens.
She sits upright,
her paws just-so
her tail wrapped around
and looks me right in the eye.

‘It’s okay’ I tell her,
‘Don’t worry,
I’m not talking to you!’

Her eyes narrow.
Perhaps she’s thinking:
‘Silly old bag.
Don’t you realise
I’m just a cat?’

Linda Rushby 27 April 2020
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Quirky

Every post on this blog (except the individual poems) is exactly 500 words long. I started that when I first set it up – which I believe was two years ago (I’ll have to check). I keep an eye on the word count as I go, but sometimes when I get to the last sentence I have to go back and edit a bit to get the final total just right.

It’s quirky, I know, but it stops me going off into long rambling discourses which take half the day to complete. And… I want to be quirky. It satisfies my sense of myself. Also, I don’t go back and read what I wrote previously. While I’m in the process of writing, I prefer not to check what I’ve said, or look up information that would be easy to find (like when I started this blog or the name of that Bob Dylan song – it’s ‘When the Deal Goes Down’, if you’re interested). Quirky, right?

I suppose that’s because I don’t take this writing malarkey seriously, and that’s largely because I really don’t expect anyone to read it – however much I paste it on Facebook and Twitter, I can’t force it down people’s throats. And that gives me a lot of freedom to write what I want, how I want.

About the same time I started blogging, in autumn 2005, I also started a creative writing course, which ran on Monday mornings for two ten week terms a year. I did it for four years, and in about the second or third year the subject of blogging came up, in the context of the relationship between truth, fiction, factual writing, literary truth etc (at that time ‘fake news’ had not been invented, though there was already a lot of it flying about, and if it had been, it would certainly have been on the syllabus). The tutor said that blogs were fundamentally dishonest because online you can claim to be anyone, with the implication that all bloggers contrive to make themselves sound more interesting than they actually are. I argued that on the contrary, I am more open and honest about myself, my failings and insecurities on my blog than anywhere else, because of the freedom inherent in writing rather than speech (which requires direct social interaction, with a listener who may respond in any number of ways – actually, I think that might be a good topic for another time.)

Quickly glancing at the word count, I realise that I need to wrap things up, and I still haven’t got to the point I was thinking of when I sat down, which is this: yesterday I know I ended with two rhetorical questions, on the lines of: should I go for a walk or should I do housework? In case anyone thought these were genuine questions, the answer is that I did neither (though I did start cutting the hedge). But now I think I’ll have to leave that hanging again…