Category: writing

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Any Dream Will Do

Yesterday the high temperature in Southsea was 15°C (or 59°F if you live in the USA or the twentieth century). This makes today a doubly exciting day for the weather blanket: a new colour (green) as well as the 17th of the month, which means the beginning of a new row, an extension of the border, and a new colour (lilac) in the border. The green is slightly strange, because there’s a very limited range in the green/blue range of the new yarn I’m using this year, so that will be interesting to see.

I dreamt last night and woke up at around half past six with no recollection of what I’d been dreaming about, just the knowledge that I had been dreaming, and that it might have been quite exciting. I always hope that one day I will dream the perfect plot for a novel (or even short story) and that it will still be just as good in daylight. My unfinished novel was triggered by a dream over thirty years ago, and the (sort of) finished-but-crap one I wrote in the 1970s-90s came, as far as I can remember, from a combination of a dream and a picture of hills in the bedroom of the flat I was living in at the time. Who came over that hill? That was the start, and the answer was: men on horseback, but why were they there? It took me twenty years to finish that one.

Why can’t I finish anything? I have – I think – two unfinished cardigans and another one which didn’t fit when I finished it and I was planning to pull it down and re-use the yarn, but I don’t know where it is. There may be more – there’s a square from the back of one that I started and then abandoned – I think I decided the hook was too small, and I started again with a larger hook and different yarn and I did finish that one, then unravelled some of the first one to do the variegated fair isle pattern on the jumper which I finished last week.

This morning, I thought about this and wondered: does it matter, really, that I keep starting things and not finishing them? I picked up one of the unfinished cardis in the bedroom – I’d started one sleeve, but only did a little, and I’m wondering whether it works as a waistcoat, and if so, whether it would be better with a cap sleeve (as it has on one side) or no sleeve (as it has on the other), or should I finish both sleeves? Any way would produce a garment of sorts which I might wear one day, or possibly not.

Why do I start new things? Is it because I get bored easily? Or because starting something new is always a lot more interesting and fun than finishing something else? Because I run out of ideas – that’s what normally happens with writing – or have too many new ones?

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New Glasses

Something remarkable happened today: I got up feeling quite upbeat, almost chipper even, or at least not as down as I usually do. I don’t know why – I didn’t get any more sleep than usual, woke up at my current ‘normal’ time, about half past four (though I had gone to bed a bit earlier, after falling asleep on the sofa in front of the telly). I listened to quite a nice, cheerful play on the radio, which was engaging, if a bit soppy, read some nice posts on Facebook – nothing that made me too angry – (well, except for one woman ‘boasting’ about her and her husband’s new French-made blue UK passports – I refrained from saying that I’m grateful my burgundy EU one doesn’t have to be replaced until 2028 – though sadly it no longer conveys the rights and privileges it used to). But apart from that, nothing too irritating or depressing. And I did some puzzles on my phone, even thought about going to the beach for the sunrise, but decided against it because it was raining, and stayed in bed till after the heating came on at half past six.

I picked up my new glasses yesterday, but I’m still wearing my old readers, which is a bit daft. I think part of me was thinking I’d keep the new ones downstairs and the old ones upstairs, but as my PC is upstairs and I look at my phone a lot in bed, that doesn’t make much sense. I think they need to be consigned to ‘emergency’ status and I’ll have to continue carrying the new ones up and down stairs with me.

The optician was quite surprised when I told her that I wanted reading glasses as well as varifocals, but I just don’t like using varifocals for close work, and especially for screen work. I don’t know, maybe the gradient is in the wrong place, or I wear them in the wrong place, or hold my head at the wrong angle. I get very stressed in eye tests, especially the bit where they keep changing the lenses and asking which one is clearer. It’s like everything else I suppose: what if I say the wrong thing? I’ll end up with the wrong glasses and spend a lot of money and get more headaches and have to keep squinting all the time (specially if I don’t wear the new ones). But I can never trust my own judgement, and I panic when I’m asked to make choices, even with something like that where nobody but me can say whether it’s right or wrong – worse, even, because no one can correct me so I have to live with it.

The shed is up now, but it’s not in the place where I want it – which is where the shell of the old one is still standing. I haven’t put any stuff into the new one yet, except the shelves, because it will need to be moved at some point.

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Soundscape

Today is the day my son and daughter-in-law are coming to put up the new garden shed. They will be staying the night, but it’s all legit, because they are my ‘support bubble’ and even though I haven’t seen them since September, I haven’t had any other visitors to my house since before the current lockdown started, so I’m not breaking any rules. Plus, of course, I’ve had my first vaccination, which I know doesn’t affect the legal requirements, but does make me feel more comfortable about the situation.

Quite what’s going to happen to the weather, I’m not sure. It’s not raining at the moment, in fact it’s lovely and sunny, but the wind is still loud enough to be audible, and the draughts are coming through my double glazing as though it was tissue paper.

Incidentally, I know about listening to the wind in the trees, but what causes the sound in an urban area? I’m looking through the window at a city street with no trees in view, but the wind gusts almost drown out the traffic noise. There are wires across the street, and they are definitely moving, but can they be responsible for that much noise? It seems to come from the wind itself, rather than contact with anything more solid.

Yet another day when I’m looking out the window because I don’t know what to write about.

I just heard the sound of a ship’s warning signal, also known as a ‘fog horn’, although there’s no fog today, so presumably it’s being sounded for something else – surely nobody is sailing a little boat out on the Solent in this wind and getting in the way of the ferries? Fog horns and strong winds are the two signature sounds of Southsea, in my experience. Oh, and gulls – one just flew sideways across my eyeline, but it wasn’t screeching for once. I love the sound of the gulls – and the fog horns too, funnily enough – they remind me that I finally found my heart’s home, but that there’s still a big wild world out there.

I wrote three versions of that last sentence – first it was ‘came’ home, then I changed it to ‘found my home’ to emphasise that I hadn’t ‘come back’ here, because I’d never lived here before almost six years ago (though I had lived further along the coast in Southampton), then ‘found my heart’s home’ because, even though it sounds a bit corny, that’s the sort of connection I feel to where I live now, as though something within me has always yearned to be here.

I think about the time I lived in Prague. I loved the city, but not the life I was living, because I knew that I couldn’t stay forever. On the darkest days, I would step out my door, take the first tram that came along, and always find somewhere beautiful at the end of it.

Here I can take that step and walk to the sea.

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The Sixth Age

The rain has stopped, the sun is out, but I can still hear the wind – which isn’t good, because tomorrow my son and daughter-in-law are coming to put up the new garden shed. Will it stand in this wind? Anybody’s guess. I hope so, because we get storms every winter.

I have been gradually emptying out the old shed over the last two weeks. There’s not much stuff left in there, and I’m planning to get it out today or tomorrow morning before they get here. That’s the plan.

I was talking a while ago about the Madwoman in the Attic years, those times when there were issues in the future that were going to resolve everything (if positive, like getting a job, finding a new lover, travelling, publishing a book, living by the seaside) or were being ignored (if scary, like settling down and finding a home for all my Stuff). In the last few years, I have come to accept that the former group are either never going to happen (the job and the lover), or have happened without really resolving things as I’d hoped they would (the travelling, the books and living at the seaside – though I don’t regret any of them, especially the last). In fact it’s been the settling down and finally having a place that feels like ‘home’ which has been the saving grace for me, though managing the Stuff is a big issue which still needs to be resolved.

The first year and a half of living in the flat near the beach felt in many ways like a continuation of the travelling years – or maybe the first year did, because the last six months was taken up with the stress of house buying, emptying out the old house in Bedford, and arranging for all the Stuff to come to rest here. Then the next year was taken up with dealing with cancer. So I suppose I could say I’ve had three years to date of adjusting to the ways my life is now. People talk about ‘the Third Age’, but in Shakespearean terms, I see this as the Sixth Age – the penultimate one.  

Why am I thinking in these terms today? A couple of weeks ago my therapist asked me what I want to do with my future, what I would do if money was no object. But money isn’t the problem – I have enough money for anything I need, and I can’t think of anything I want that would require money I don’t have. If I came into more money unexpectedly, I would probably give it to my children, or maybe put it in trust for my grandchildren. Perhaps I’ll have some nice holidays when travel becomes a possibility again, though I’ll never be able to travel as freely as I did before.

I spoke too soon about the weather. Rain and hail are driving against the window. Shed emptying, dismantling and erecting might not be possible this weekend after all.   

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Tackling… a Metaphor

Today Backup and Sync tells me that it can’t sync 7107 items, but it is syncing 7130 of 18221. Or something like that. The numbers change every time I look. But I think this is a good thing, because yesterday it couldn’t sync 20837, which I think means that the numbers of files it wants to sync has gone down, and I take that to mean that some of the files which were formerly on the google drive are no longer there – so my deletions have achieved something. But, the space is still full. Is this because of what’s being uploaded from my phone?

Why do I keep harping on about this? Because I’m sure there has to be a solution somewhere, somehow. It’s a problem I’ve ignored for a long time, but always assumed there was a simple solution. Now I’ve decided to try and resolve it, it’s turning out to be a lot more challenging than just deleting some old emails and photos.

I have just taken what feels like the nuclear option. I have disconnected my account from Backup and Sync. But is that really what I wanted to do? Does this mean that I can’t now access my files on Google Drive, even to delete them? What does that mean for my emails? And my photos? And sharing files between my PC and other devices?

I have written an awful lot of words on this topic (I’m guessing about 4,000, but I haven’t checked). It’s not the only thing going on in my life at the moment – I can walk away at any time and forget about it for hours on end. But it feels symbolic. If the issue is about stuff lying around on my electronic ‘desktop’, isn’t that very similar to the state of my physical desktop, my study, my whole house? Things which have just been left to lie where they are, no real system of filing or tidying away, just overwhelming clutter? And what about my mental state – isn’t it all a perfect metaphor for that too?

I have been ignoring the messages relating to my emails for years, with only occasional bursts of enthusiasm for going through and deleting them when the warnings become too dire. My old Yahoo email currently has 7,526 unread emails – that’s right, unread, not undeleted. But taking yesterday as a typical example, I received 12 new ones, of which two, relating to an online order for cat food, are of significance. What about the rest? None of them are actually malicious or a nuisance (unless there were others that got sent directly into the spam folder), they’re mostly from companies I have accounts with or organisations that send out newsletters I don’t want to unsubscribe from because you never know when there might be something that I’m interested in. There’s even one from someone who wants to tell me how to stop procrastinating – I might unsubscribe from that if I ever get round to it.

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Tackling the Chaos – the Saga Continues

I started yesterday talking about the latest part of the Google drive saga, with the discovery of the ‘Desktop’ folder, which was inside the ‘My computer’ folder, which was inside the ‘Computers’ folder. There were two other folders in the ‘My computer’ folder, one called ‘Documents’ and one called ‘Pictures’. I opened ‘Documents’ and it contained one other folder, called ‘Bridport’, which rang a vague bell, but when I opened it, it was empty. I tried drilling down through some of the folders in ‘Desktop’ too, and found that they were also empty.

It was very puzzling, but I went back to the list of files in descending order by size. At the top were some music files, which I didn’t want to delete because I regularly access them from my phone, but I had a go at deleting some of the photo files again. I started getting warning messages telling me that the files would be deleted ‘…from all devices…’ which spooked me a bit. Did this mean they would be deleted from my hard drive ‘Desktop’ as well? I decided to leave that until I could confirm that they were still there, and went back to copying all the photos from my phone to my computer and then deleting them from Google photos, and the ones from the latest phone backup from my phone into the ‘USB devices and SD cards folder’. This got the storage down to about 11GB again, and I left it at that.

The next day when I restarted the computer, the usual messages about my cloud space being 99% full came up. I opened Google Drive and went to the Desktop folder. Inside it was a complete list of the folders on my computer desktop, including the ‘Backup photos’ folder which I had specifically created to save the photos I’ve been downloading and deleting from Google Drive to save space. I opened it, and it contained files which I had created only the day before.

At this point, I need to explain how I organise the files on my computer. My virtual desktop is pretty similar to the state of my physical desktop (and you’ve seen photos of that). Although I am quite organised in having folders for important stuff: individual projects, my blog, poems, accounts, novel, etc etc, I create them on the Desktop and shove the lower folders and various files inside them – although I also have a tendency to save files to the desktop ‘temporarily’, so there are always quite a few odd documents or photos lying around which I don’t sort out, so that the whole thing becomes a bit of a mess, and I rely heavily on the ‘recently accessed files’.

And it seemed as if not just my phone, but all the files from my desktop (in other words, all the files I had put – and was continuing to put – on my terabyte of hard drive) were being automatically backed up to the 15gb of cloud space… tbc

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Tackling the Chaos: Memories Lost and Overwhelmed

Clicking through photos again to track down another one which came up on my desktop recently, I thought it was from Sête in Provence, but it was a little further east along the coast, at Le Grau du Roi in the Camargue, taken on a very grey and damp Spring Equinox in 2012 (of course). Which reminds me of my late friend Douglas Jeal, who, after hearing my tales, went to the south of France at around the same time the following year, then grumbled at me because the weather was horrible. What did he expect? Well, he had lived in Barcelona for a while, which has its own microclimate, so I suppose he can’t be blamed for thinking it might be similar  a few hundred miles along the Mediterranean coast.

What else does that remind me of? A few days ago the image on my desktop was of a map of that corner of the Med, a mural on the wall of Bordeaux station, where I was stranded for a couple of hours or so during a train strike when I was en route from Brittany to northern Spain. Something piqued my interest when I saw it again, but I couldn’t remember what it was, so I opened the file in Photoshop to check, and still can’t see why. It’s quite a poor quality photo – from an old, pre-Smart Nokia phone – so zooming in hasn’t helped. Maybe it will come to me.

I’ve mentioned before about the Magic Refilling Data pot, and how my efforts at clearing space on my google Drive by downloading photos from Google photos to my hard drive and then deleting them from Google photos were being thwarted because every morning my phone was being backed up to another file on Google Drive. Over several days (because it takes a long time to select and delete that many photos and my PC is four years old and quite creaky – and also it was refilling again every morning with the ones I hadn’t backed up and removed from my phone) I managed to get all the photos up to the end of 2020 from my phone, onto my hard drive, and removed from the backup file on Google drive. The day came when I logged on to my computer, opened my Gmail, and was informed that I had used 11 Gb of my 15Gb allocation. That lasted a couple of hours before the messages started to appear telling me that my Google Drive was full again.

I listed all files in descending file-size, and found that the photos I’d already deleted were still appearing on the list. By clicking on each file, I was given a side panel with details, including the folder where the file was located. Clicking on the name of the folder led me up the tree to the folder where it was, and so on until I reached a folder called ‘Desktop’, and above that, another one called ‘Computers’… tbc

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Oyster Shell

Yesterday morning I took the cat to the vet’s for a ‘Senior Wellness check’. This used to be called a ‘Senior Health check’ and I couldn’t help imagining them burning aromatherapy candles, playing soothing music and maybe giving her a back massage. I had to drop her off at the surgery because of current lockdown conditions, and wait till they called me back to come and collect her. Because of the blood tests she wasn’t allowed anything to eat after ten the night before, which usually means pleading looks until it’s time to go, but in fact she just stayed out of the way, and when it was time to go allowed me to pick her up and put her in the basket with no struggles or complaints. In fact, she was unnaturally subdued, and still is this morning. When I collected her, the nurse asked if she could take her home to teach her own cat a lesson in manners, which is a far cry from this time last year when I dropped her off and went to the Co-op, then got a phone call from the vet asking for permission to sedate her because she was kicking up such a fuss.

She’s getting old. We all get old and resigned to the way things are. I guess that’s the way I’m feeling at the moment – except when I’m in a panic over something or other. Lockdown lethargy.

On my desk there’s an oyster shell. I don’t know where it came from – well, the beach, obviously, and before that in the sea, wrapped around an oyster. But how did it come to be on my desk? My house is full of oyster shells, and ‘interesting’ pebbles, picked up from beach walks. But this one in particular… I don’t know – it must have fallen out of a box of ‘stuff’ or something. I don’t know what it is about oyster shells – I used to think they were ugly, not like the pretty little scallops, rosy pink and smaller than my thumbnail, or the slipper limpets with their oddly shaped cavity. They are rough and monochrome and no two are ever alike, but if you turn them over and the light catches in just the right way, sometimes the gleam of mother-of-pearl will take you by surprise. I used that image in my poem ‘Beachcomber’. The document on my computer has it as:

The shimmer of an oyster shell,
Like tears for a lost pearl.

Linda Rushby July 2015

That’s funny – I could have sworn I used ‘gleam’. Maybe I changed it. Poems are not immutable. But when I check the book, I find that I published it as:

‘Oyster shells shimmer
Like tears for a lost pearl.

‘Beachcombing‘, Linda Rushby April 2016

Well well well. That scans better, and it has the alliteration too, but I still like ‘gleam’, it has a lovely sound.

Which reminds me, someone bought a copy of ‘Beachcombing’ from Amazon last year, the first time it’s sold other than sales I’ve made in person.

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Tackling the… Whatever

Some days when I start writing without knowing what to say, it develops, and by the end I feel as though I’ve written something interesting – or at least not too shameful. Then there are days like yesterday when I start but stop half way through because I’m not getting anywhere and, honestly, I just can’t be arsed.

There are many mornings when I start off wondering what I’m going to write and my head is so full of worry and fear about things that no one but me could possibly think were worth being worried or fearful over, but the worry and fear are there anyway, so do I write about them? I am trying to stop beating myself up over this, but it’s become apparent that it isn’t really just the ‘beating up’ that’s the issue, it’s the fact that the feelings are there anyway, it’s the things that I have to do, and the things that I fail to do, and the flotsam that swirls on the dark churning maelstrom of memory.

Planning and organisation are anathema to the dyspraxic brain, because while the attention is fixed on one thing, action or requirement and trying to assemble the others required to precede and follow it, the rest of the mind-stream is charging off into completely different paths, cul de sacs and labyrinths. ‘Write it down!’ I hear you cry, but any attempt to do that initiates mind-block and stasis – a Mexican stand-off while the focussed brain tries to remember what it was thinking of in the first place.

The only way to make things stick is through rote learning and repetition, so the same things are run through over and over again. ‘Planning’ consists of reminding oneself multiple times that ‘something’ needs to be done before a certain date, which induces panic that it will be forgotten, or done incorrectly, or will take a lot longer than the time allowed, and ‘writing down’ becomes a substitute for action.

In situations like this, ‘self care’ can only mean ignoring all that and doing something pleasantly mindless (or mindful) while all that other stuff goes to hell in a hand basket. Which famous author said: ‘I love deadlines, I love the swooshing noise they make as they pass by’? Can you remember? No, neither can I.

Incidentally, the Word grammar checker wants me to change that last ‘I’ to ‘Me’. Grammar checker, in this instance you are wrong, so wrong. How about if I turn it into a question? Can I? See, you can’t object to that, can you?

Why do I even leave the grammar checker turned on? Because it’s the default, and I can’t be arsed to change it, so I just ignore it because I have more confidence in my own understanding than in its – except sometimes I can’t see what it’s objecting to, so I follow the explanation and have a good laugh at its incompetence.

The routine is: write 500 words. And so I have.

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Tackling the… What was the question?

I know that most of the things I worry about are unimportant. I know that the worst scenarios will probably never happen.

My attention bounces from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next ad infinitum, and I can’t retrace my steps to see how I got there, and I can’t see where it’s going, and the track of my thoughts goes round and back and crosses and intersects and spirals down then shoots off into another dimension and still I am no more secure in what I know, I have reached no conclusions, made no plans, discovered no revelations and… what was the question again?

So far today I have: dropped a match into a candle glass and left it to burn because the glass still contained wax but no wick and I thought the match would act as a wick, but minutes later there was a crack and bits of broken hot glass on the floor (fortunately the flame had gone out); then in the shower I picked up a bottle, saw the opening was at the bottom (the only indicator that usually works and I specifically noticed it), squeezed some of the contents onto my fingers, rubbed it into my hair and then realised it wasn’t lathering because it was conditioner, not shampoo. I’m not saying either of those actions was disastrous – on the contrary, they are both perfectly normal, and I cleared up the broken glass (when it was cool enough to touch) and thoroughly rinsed my hair before trying again and getting the right bottle this time. Oh, and I lost my reading glasses in between coming out of the spare room where I do my yoga and into the bedroom to get towels for the shower, and had another look in the spare room before finding them on the book shelves in the bedroom where I must have put them all of thirty seconds earlier. As I said, perfectly normal.

So where is this train of thought taking me? And is it anywhere that I – or you, my putative reader – would choose to go?

Once again, I stare at the clutter on my desk in search of inspiration ‘A tidy desk is the sign of a tidy mind.’ Evidently, the converse is also true, as mine perfectly depicts the state of my mind. The clear space in the centre front is where my phone was, which I had to move in order to take the photo. As soon as I brought it into this room, and within reach of the wifi, it sent me a message informing me that my data cannot be backed up because my cloud storage is full, and I need to upgrade it – the Magic Data Pot in action once again. I have now downloaded all my photos up to 2019 to my hard drive, and deleted them from the cloud and my phone. When the will to live returns, I’ll do the same for last year…