Category: writing

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grim

I didn’t write yesterday. It was one of those utterly grim mornings when I couldn’t think of anything which wasn’t… utterly grim, so I couldn’t bring myself to say anything at all.

I did my napowrimo thing, but thought; what can I say/ it’s not even half way through the month, and if I’ve reached the darkest point already, what am I going to do for the next two and a half weeks? (Seventeen days counting today). To add to the frustration, the shift key on the right side of my keyboard has stopped working, which means it’s a pain to do the capitalisation for NaPoWriMo 9and if I don’t keep on top of it lots of other things go down the toilet, like question marks, brackets and i0.

But the keyboard thing isn’t really relevant to my general feelings of despair, and I just need to get round to ordering a new one. I came up with a Napo-etc poem yesterday, but couldn’t quite bring myself to use the word ‘hope’. That’s the problem, isn’t it? When you can’t see any hope you can’t wish it into existence from nowhere. It doesn’t matter how irrational that is, that sense of everything falling apart. What makes any one morning feel any worse than any other? All mornings are shit – if you choose to write in the morning, it’s not surprising if everything comes back to moaning.

But if I’m honest, I know exactly why yesterday was so hard – because it was the first session of tai chi in the park – as opposed to on Zoom – and I’d been dreading going out and interacting with other people – even a nice, friendly group of people whom I used to see every Tuesday morning. Did walking twenty minutes to the park make it somehow worse than three minutes to the community centre where the classes used to be? No, not particularly. Anyway, I could have driven, but that would have meant finding a parking place near the park, and another one near home when I got back, and I need the exercise. The fact that it was in a new place probably did enter into it somehow, even though it’s a place I’ve driven past many times, it’s still a new walk and a new location. But mainly it’s the experience I HAD AT THE END OF THE FIRST LOCKDOWN (not shouting, just demonstrating that because I’m trying to use the left hand shift key I keep getting caps lock instead without noticing. Also, on the sentence I started with ‘Anyway’, I accidentally hit the ctrl key, and when I glanced up everything I’d typed so far had disappeared, because it had done ‘select all’, and I carried on typing – I didn’t realise that was what had happened, but I managed to keep hitting ‘undo’ till it all came back).

I have to go out again today, for a Covid test, but at least that only requires the minimum of human interaction.

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Creative Spirit

I was going to walk down to the knitting shop today, but… looking out the window, I don’t think I’ll bother. This is a bit much even for me with my oh-we-often-get-snow-flurries-at-the-beginning-of-April smugness – not that we’ve got actual snow here, just freezing rain, but still, it’s a bit much. I wasn’t planning to buy more yarn (still working my way through the stash) but could do with a 5.5mm circular needle to replace the one I’ve been using, which is on the verge of breaking, but over the weekend I’ve started two more top-down jumpers (one knitted, one crochet) to go with the two I’ve got that I can’t make progress on (one because of the needle breaking and the other because of lack of the right yarn). Three of them are knitted, the latest one (started Saturday evening, pulled down and restarted yesterday) is an experiment to see if it’s possible to use the same general top-down approach but with crochet, and if it works will use up a load of yarn which I’ve had for about a year and have tried to start various projects which I’ve later abandoned.

Do I want/need/will I wear all these jumpers? Probably not, but that’s not the point.

I was going to write about creativity – I half started yesterday, at the end of ranting about something, I can’t remember what. If I’m making something, or thinking about something to try – it doesn’t much matter what – I can sort of keep my head above water – as long as I keep my expectations low, and don’t think that what I make will be wonderful when it’s finished, of course, but when it’s done, it can be pushed to the back of a cupboard and forgotten about – or, in the case of writing, in the back of some folder on my hard drive, or shared on Facebook, or even better, Twitter, where I have 200 ‘followers’ but none who ever respond to anything I share (that’s an exaggeration, I’ve had two ‘likes’ in the last two years, both from people I used to know personally but haven’t seen in years).

For most of my life I haven’t considered myself at all ‘creative’ – except for this half-arsed idea that I might have been a ‘writer’ if I’d ever worked at it, but even then I was always conscious that I didn’t have the guts, talent or chutzpah to stick at it and make it work as a career. When I read ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’ last year, I came across the idea of the ‘creative spirit’ which is crushed out of young children if they don’t get the chance to use it. This resonated with me, as I thought about my fear of judgement, of what I make never being good enough, of the ludicrous hubris of ever thinking I was ‘good enough’ at anything, the ‘who do you think you are?’ arrogance of that whole idea, and the ridicule that followed from it.

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Morning Walk

When to stop
and when to go.
When to try
and when to no.
Questions always in my mind,
seeking things I never find.

I used to think there’d come a day,
when things at last would go my way.
I’d show the world a happy face
and life would fall right into place.

That will not be,
it is not me.

I take the thoughts that come to hand,
and turn them into words that scan.
And though I struggle finding rhymes,
that happens too from time to time.

Linda Rushby 11 April 2021

There was a trailer on Radio 4 yesterday for a programme about how going for a walk first thing in the morning can improve your health and wellbeing (I haven’t listened to the programme – yet).

I decided I would do it this morning (go for a walk, not listen to the programme), then lay in bed and listened to the second episode of ‘Sweeney Todd’ instead, and by the time I checked the sunrise time on Accuweather, it was almost six already and I had no time to get to the beach for 6:19 to see it. But I got up anyway, dressed, fed the cat, let her out into the garden, made a flask of coffee, found a notebook, let the cat back in, found my glasses, found a mask, found my notebook again, found a pencil etc etc and left the house, came back for the mask, came back for gloves, and was walking down the road shortly after seven.

It’s been a while since I had a morning walk – other than to the doctor’s for blood tests, which has happened twice in the last few weeks. The second time was last Friday, and I thought about walking on to the beach (I was half way there) but decided against it as it was grey and dull and I wanted to come home and hide. It was dull this morning when I left home, but the sun came out while I was sitting on the prom drinking coffee.

I’ve written two poems, one NaPoWriMo one came to me as I was on my way there – actually before I left home, when I put my hand in the pocket of my winter coat and pulled out some pebbles, which made me think of Virginia Woolf, who filled her coat pockets with stones before drowning herself in the river. The other popped into my head when I was in the loo after I got back, as you can see above.

I’ve been meaning to say some more about my NaNoWriMo poems, obviously I’ve made it to Day 11, I think it’s working okay so far, but yesterday I felt completely at a loss till I found the seeds in my desk drawer – which I haven’t planted yet, by the way. It feels very risky, setting myself this task – though of course it’s not really ‘risky’, I could stop right now and it wouldn’t matter…  

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Seeds

Ennui

Today I feel nothing.
no words in my head,
no thoughts worth sharing
just a dull emptiness.

Why am I here,
staring at this screen?
The keys touch my fingers
but they won’t help,
they are mocking me.   

Why am I writing
staccato rhythm?
Short lines?
Empty words?

Yesterday the spinner
rolled out her thread
into this future,
which became
just a day,
like any other.

Linda Rushby 10 April 2021

On my desk I just noticed a seed pod. This must sound bizarre. How can there be a seed pod on my desk and me be surprised to see it there? Believe me, there could be anything on this desk and I wouldn’t know where it came from. But thinking back through the last few days, I remember emptying out a drawer from a cheap plastic chest of drawers, one of three which I bought in B&M the first summer I moved here, to store stuff in my flat, things which were in boxes which I was going to ‘sort out’ into these drawers, but in the event they just moved from one chaotic mess into another. And this week I decided I would empty one of the chests and put it out in my new shed, for storing shed stuff, with the vague sense that this would somehow make the chaos more manageable. Each chest had four drawers, some of them only contained things which were already in boxes which could be moved and put on top of the IKEA shelves. Another was mostly full of cassettes and CDs, a staple gun and various other junk which I piled up on the desk, including, apparently a seed pod, like an elongated, thin brown pea pod. Before I moved here, I collected all sorts of seeds from the garden of the old house, and put them all in envelopes with the names written on the front, but I have no idea what happened to any of them – I didn’t plant them, that’s for sure.

This long, thin brown pod looks vaguely familiar, as though I should know where it’s from. I might even have taken it from a plant in a park. There were still seeds inside it, I popped them out while I was thinking about what to write, and they are sitting in a cluster on my phone, about eight or ten of them at a guess, papery round the edges with a brown centre about a millimetre across. I could try planting them and see what happens, though after all these years it’s unlikely that anything will grow.

But I need to find a seed and make it grow, and this morning that feels really hard. I pick up the staple gun – I bought it over thirty years ago, when we were living in the USA, and I’m not sure whether I still have staples to fit it, and if so where they are. I probably can’t get any more now.

But I haven’t used it in thirty years anyway.

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Birthday Poem

Red light on the horizon
and the sound of birdsong
and a light, white, rime
on the cars and the low roofs
and the fence posts,
like cold glass
beneath my fingertips.

New morning, in a new place,
turning a new year in my life.
What can I say to the world, but
‘Here I am’?

Sometimes I think:
‘I would give the whole world
to be other than this.’
but that’s not a choice
which is given to me.

So I stand here,
and listen to the birds
and watch the changing sky
and lean on the fence
and stroke the smooth ice.

To welcome another day,
another year,
another chance for hope.

Linda Rushby 7 April 2021
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NaPoWriMo Time Again

My heart yearns for
the Dream Place,
the Crystal Space…

Linda Rushby 5 April 2021

I was in poetic mood earlier, in my yoga/tai chi/meditation time, with one of those moments of understanding who I am, and what I should be doing, which has faded somewhat now, as they always do, before I was able to get to the computer and capture what needed to be caught, but I will try.

This is the third year I’ve attempted NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month). I started in 2018, with haikus, because that seemed like the easy way (although I know that writing a good haiku is not something to be flippant about). I was so happy with the results that I had an idea about creating a hand-made book – I’d been on a bookbinding course and bought a bookbinding kit, and was going to lino print an image for the cover – but the only image I came up with was a forlorn daffodil, and I got frustrated and disheartened and never even opened the parcel with the bookbinding kit and gave up before I got started. Maybe one day.

The next year I didn’t even attempt the poetry challenge, but then last year I did, with no plan or ideas, I managed to turn out something for every day of the month, a motley collection of uneven quality. I have always said that poems come to me or they don’t, and I can’t make them happen, but one of my favourites, ‘Beachcomber’, came out of a challenge I was set to write a poem a day for five days on Facebook in summer 2015, the first summer after I moved to Southsea.

This year I wasn’t going to bother, but on the first day I wrote a very short poem, and posted it, not here but on another blog to which I sometimes contribute. That poem, entitled ‘Web’, is about the idea of a web of connections, not the electronic ‘world wide web’ so much as an older and more general sense of interactions between events, actions and people, which relates to my interest in systems thinking, the basis of my PhD, and the idea of ‘Crystal Space’ which I have played with for some years. Writing it out gave me the idea of pulling one of the threads in a web and seeing where it led – would it just attract the attention of some monstrous spider, or might it take me somewhere interesting? So the next poem was about Ariadne’s thread, and each day since some image or reference from the day before has triggered the next poem.

So far it seems to have led me back into my lifelong interest in Greek mythology, which is of course a very fertile seam for poetry. Each day’s poem is very short, but by the second day I had the idea that they might build into something interesting. On the other hand, I might just give up one day, but how will I know unless I try?

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Ducks in a Row

I am not two different people, or three or four, or however many I might have said at different times. Just want to make that clear. I am not Linda H OR Linda R; or Belinda, Melinda, Cassandra, Cat by Herself; I am both, all of them, or possibly even none, but in the end I am still me. When I switched on my PC this morning, Microsoft welcomed me as Linda H, while my laptop knows me as Linda R, but it’s just a matter of context. To family, Facebook, Twitter, close friends and acquaintances I’ve met since I moved to Southsea, I am R, but to most of officialdom (Portsmouth City Council, HMRC, DWP, DVLA, banks etc) and most people I know from Bedford days, I am still H – there is even a very small number of people I’m still in touch with who knew me from when I was ‘R’ before, forty years ago now.

I didn’t set out to write about my identity today, in fact I was intending to pull together some threads which I was thinking and writing about last week – so here goes. I was talking about card-making, and all the different items and processes involved in it that make it so unsuitable for anyone with dyspraxia and hence so stressful. Every time, I start intending to be more organised and keep a lid on the chaos, but it never works out that way.

But I was thinking about it as a microcosm of my life. There are things that need doing, and I have to think and decide about what’s the best order to do them in, and how I’m going to do them, and what I need to do them with, and by the time I’ve made a decision on any of those things, I’ve forgotten what I decided about the previous ones, and so I go round and round in circles.

I have spent a lifetime thinking that there are answers to these questions and that I should be able to get on top of them, that if I try just a bit harder I can make everything fall into place, and my life will become so much easier. Now I’m coming to accept that all the planning and to-do lists in the world are never going to change me, or change the way things are. There’s a saying going the rounds on Facebook (is ‘meme’ the correct word for that sort of thing?) which I’ve seen a couple of times: ‘Not only are my ducks not all in a row, I don’t even know where my ducks are!’ I’m not even sure whether I’ve got any ducks in the first place.

I sit in my chaos thinking about how to resolve it, and never manage to break out of those circles. Except sometimes I get an idea about one specific thing – like my google drive – and keep looking for an answer, however many times I fall down

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Problems of Affluence

Just been to Sainsbury’s to buy hot cross buns, because I realised last night I hadn’t got any – haven’t had any this year – and today is the day when it’s okay to have them for breakfast. I wanted those, and little prawns to go in my salmon en croute for dinner (but they only had king prawns, which won’t work, so it’ll be salmon, mushrooms and parsley en croute), and eggs and smoked salmon for breakfast one day over the weekend, and maple syrup to have with waffles another day, and chocolate for Sunday because I realised I hadn’t had any since I finished the Christmas leftovers – which has been quite a few weeks, but not necessarily the whole of Lent – actually, forget I said that, because I just remembered I had some chocolate truffles for Mother’s Day.

None of that would have been possible in my childhood, because the shops would have been shut on Good Friday, as well as Easter Monday and, of course, Easter Sunday, just like every other Sunday. (Actually, I have a feeling they might still be shut on Easter Sunday, but not sure about that.) I remember one year, when I must have been well into my teens, because I went into town on my own on Easter Saturday, and my Mum had asked me to pick up a loaf of bread, and everywhere I went was sold out, from which I learned the lesson to make sure you’ve got plenty of bread for Easter weekend, until the world moved on and made that obsolete. I was quite annoyed when the shops started opening on Good Friday, even though I wasn’t a Christian, because what’s the point of traditions if you’re going to ignore the fundamentals in that way?

Now I’m more relaxed, and anyway, I make my own bread. But when I was shopping earlier in the week, and planning today’s dinner, I bought cream for the sauce filling and was thinking what else I needed for today (except the hot cross buns, obviously) and it struck me – I always have fish on Good Friday, but making it so fancy is definitely observing the letter not the spirit of the tradition – salmon en croute is not exactly fasting. On the other hand, I guess it’s pretty tame compared with what the Renaissance popes might have had, so why should I worry?

That’s when I started thinking about Sunday as well, and chocolate, and my birthday, which is next week – the second one I’ve had in lockdown. Last year I didn’t plan anything special, but when the day came I went to Tesco and bought a cake and a bottle of prosecco, then ordered a Chinese takeaway for dinner. Tomorrow is my takeaway day (alternate Saturdays), but the question is, do I skip it this week and leave it till my birthday? Hadn’t thought about that. Seems daft to have two within a week of each other. Decisions, decisions – the problems of affluence

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Crafting Chaos

Yesterday I started off with one topic but didn’t finish it before I moved on to something else – okay, you could say that I never finish anything, and that’s true, but I didn’t really say what I wanted to say.

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

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

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

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

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

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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.