Solent Green – blog

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Life and Writing

I was going to go to the beach, out for breakfast and then to the shop on the way home, but it was raining. I got up and went to look out of the window, and thought: ‘That’s a large cat sitting on the flat roof of the sheds behind the back wall’, then it got up and turned so I could see it sideways on, and I realised it was a fox. That’s the second time I’ve seen one in the last few months.

There was quite a storm in the night, I heard the wind at one point, it was really wild. It looked as though the rain was settling in for the day, but now the sun’s shining. Still, it will take a while before the benches dry out, and it’s not worth going out to sit on a damp bench to eat breakfast, plus the cafés will be getting pretty full by this time, so I’ll stay here and write.

I was going to write some more about planning and failing, but in the shower I started thinking about ‘The Long Way Back’ again. I said I would start work on it when I’d finished my proof reading job, then I read a few old blog posts and got very depressed remembering those times, and now it looks as though I’m going to be pretty tied up with family things until the middle of next week (or the week after next, depending on when you think ‘this week’ starts) which gives another delay to getting properly started, and when the cafes are properly open I can take my laptop somewhere to get stuck in, which is always a nice way to do it.

I have been ‘planning’ and procrastinating over this for so long now, years in fact. I came to the end of the pre-Prague section early in 2018, I remember it quite distinctly. I went to the café where I used to go for breakfast on Sunday, before the writing group meetings (not one of my usual writing cafes, but it was en route to the dentist, where I’d been for an appointment) and took with me printouts of the early Prague posts, which is when I had the idea that there was just too much, and maybe I’d write a separate book about my time in Prague. Or was that 2019?

This is the problem with writing autobiography – though ‘S2S’ and ‘TLWB’ are strictly speaking memoirs, the distinction being that an autobiography is the story of a whole life, but memoirs are just a specific part of a life, either in terms of time or of an interest which may cover different periods. But as a memoirist, I find it hard to see how an autobiography can ever be finished, unless the author is still writing it on their deathbed (which in my case might well happen).

Life feeds writing, and writing feeds life, like Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail.

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…Plan to Fail

‘Fail to plan and plan to fail’ was another piece of wisdom which I acquired from my business networking days and totally failed to learn from. I reflected on this yesterday when I was digging holes for my newly bought plants and tenderly packing the soil around them. I plan to fail, not because that’s what I want to happen, but because that’s my expectation, on the basis of past experience. It wasn’t that I had no plan at all when I was walking around B&Q on Wednesday with all the other Diamond Card holders, all waving our ten-pounds-off-when-you-spend-over-thirty coupons – there were certain things I knew I wanted to buy, like compost, basket liner, and a 40 cm diameter pot, but when it came to plants, I was mainly driven by spontaneity – well, within bounds –mostly what I bought were pretty predictable: begonia, petunias, geraniums. But I still didn’t have any specific ideas about where any of them were going, and so I was making it up as I went along.

There’s a lot to be said for spontaneity, impulse, intuition – well, I would say that, given my aversion to planning. No, that’s not right, ‘aversion’ isn’t quite the right word: it’s not that I don’t want to make plans, it’s more that from experience I know the stress that planning causes, the struggle to sort it all out, to impose order and make sense, to remember the stages, to decide on the appropriate actions, to implement them without flying off in all directions, and to judge the outcomes. All those things that make perfect sense rationally, intellectually, academically and succumb to chaos when they hit the real world, that great, spinning distributor of ordure.

Having said that, it occurs to me that the major, dramatic changes in my life, the ‘leap before you look moments’, like starting a PhD, leaving a husband (both of them), travelling, moving to Prague and Southsea etc, were all preceded by years of ‘planning’, just not in the organised, logically –sequenced, rational fashion – more on the lines of: ‘…if I could, I would… if only…’ At New Year 2015, I met a lady and told her that I was hoping to move to Southsea one day, then when I announced in March that I was moving, her comment was: ‘you’re a fast worker!’, even though the idea had been in my head for three years.

There’s more I wanted to say, but as usual I started writing and then wandered off at a tangent. But I’d like to share a quote that I heard on Thought for the Day on Radio 4 earlier while I was making coffee: “You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.” It was attributed to Henry Nouwen, a name which means nothing to me (apparently he was a Catholic priest, but I won’t hold that against him.)

I’ve often been told I think too much… TBC

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Plan to Plan

Ten years ago, when I was going to business networking meetings, I was part of a team of three people organising meetings in a local pub on alternate Wednesday mornings. I was in charge of sending out email and text invitations, chasing up invitees to confirm numbers, collecting payments and paying the pub for breakfasts consumed, working with a woman in her forties who was an area rep, in charge of a number of fortnightly groups locally. The third member was a an older man (older than  I was then but probably younger than I am now), whom I’ll call Charles (I can’t remember whether that was actually his name) who chaired the meetings and was a general figurehead for the group.

The reason I’ve been thinking about him this morning was that he would sometimes give The Talk – there was always a ten minute talk over breakfast, usually given by a guest speaker – who, when I look back now, were probably drafted in from other groups in the region or more widely spread (it was that sort of organisation). I’m guessing that possibly part of Charles’s role was to stand in when no other speaker was available, and his talks were always on a similar theme, the gimmick being that the titles consisted of an increasing number of words beginning with P. This had obviously started long before I’d joined, and would always induce a groan (in the nicest possible way) from the assembly. Anyway, what set me on this train of thought was that a typical example would be: ‘Perfect Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance’ or words to that effect.

And the connection is: that as I was lying in bed this morning I was thinking about my inability to plan anything whatsoever. At five thirty I was reviewing my options: walk to beach; take van out for a picnic; stay home and start on editing of TLWB (reading Prague blog posts) etc. The conclusion was to stay home and get on with gardening, which I didn’t do a lot of yesterday, just half an hour or so’s weeding and not planting of plants purchased (I’m starting to sound like Charles), which should really be a Priority (definitely one of the words he would have used) as they will Probably die otherwise.

So I got up shortly after six, did my exercises, made coffee and here I am, doing my daily Post (Pontification? Pronouncement?) – which, incidentally, I am still doing, despite moaning last week,  because – it feels important to Persist, in fact, maybe (or even Perhaps) Persistence is Paramount. Some days I dread it, but I always feel better afterwards – no matter what it is, however trivial, or complaining, or ranting, or self-Pitying  – even Pathetic or Pointless – the results. I write every day – as long as I’m home, and sometimes even when I’m not – and I stick to my 500 words because it is a discipline, and that’s that. And I Plan to keep on doing so.

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Triumph of Hope

Yesterday I was debating over whether to take the van out to the country park for a picnic, or the car to B&Q to spend some coupons on stuff for the garden, or a combination of the two or something completely different. In the end, I went to B&Q in the car, and it was lucky I didn’t try to combine that with a picnic, because by the time I’d finished (after almost an hour), I felt quite worn out. I came home with compost, basket liners and enough plants to hopefully ensure one or two of each type might survive my half-hearted and inconsistent attempts at gardening.

I sorted out a few things into larger pots during the afternoon, the rest are lined up in a tray supported by two upturned buckets, along the fence, along with some sweet peas and other stuff in trays that I’d bought earlier from the Co-op as I walked past on my way home from tai chi sessions in the park.

They say a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, and I did that, but gardening fits into the same category for me. Maybe the same conditions apply to both – a lack of attention to nurturing the first time around, or, in the case of gardening, of all previous attempts.

Today I need to get out there and do some weeding to make space for my new purchases. As usual, there was minimal planning and organisation behind the things I bought. There are three wall-mounted baskets, two small and one large, on the wall outside my kitchen window, along the little alley between my house and the neighbours, which had trailing begonias in my first year living here, but which have deteriorated over the last few years until there were just a dead fuchsia and some very straggly geraniums, which didn’t flower at all last year. It’s not an ideal spot for geraniums, because, squashed between the two houses, it doesn’t get much sunshine. I can’t remember when the begonias gave up, but over the years I have made various attempts to replace them, but this is the first time I’ve replaced the liners, so hopefully that will help, and maybe give me something attractive to look at while I’m doing the washing up.

The large one was screwed to the wall, so I left it in situ and just reached up (it’s just slightly above my eye level) to put the new liner, compost and plants into it. I took the two smaller ones off, as they were just hooked over the nails, but didn’t think about the fact that one of them had come loose from one of the nails and was dangling at an angle from the other one, until after I’d filled them both and went to try and put them back. The first one was okay, but there was no second nail in the wall for the other, it had rusted or come away altogether.   

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Decisions

Today I have a decision to make.

It’s not earth-shattering – it’s this: should I take my camper van to the country park, have a walk through the trees and a picnic? Should I go to B&Q, buy some compost and plants, come home and do some gardening? Should I do both, drive the camper van to B&Q en route to the country park and hope to find a parking place not too far from home when I get back, so it’s not too much of an effort to carry the compost etc home? Should I take the car (camper van too tricky to park) and go to the garden centre that’s en route to the country park (if I can remember where it is, I’ve only been a couple of times, and that was years ago), and if I do, does my parking season ticket for the country park cover the car as well?

Yesterday I bought rolls and individually wrapped flap jacks in preparation for this picnic that I was planning. But – isn’t the country park getting a bit boring? I don’t want to drive the other way, to the New Forest, because that is a full day out, and does mean driving along the M27, which can be stressful. And putting the van back into the garage is always stressful. It’s only a couple of weeks since I moved the van, so it shouldn’t have seized up yet – though I did leave the battery connected up in the expectation that I’d be taking it out again in the near future. I won’t be taking it out next week, though, because I’m going up to Bedford – on the train, because hopefully my daughter will be bringing me back to stay a few days and help with sorting out the study.

I was going to go to B&Q because I have a coupon, and Wednesday is Diamond Card day, but of course you can’t combine the offers, and anyway if you read the small print the coupon only applies if you spend £30 on full price items, so it’s not great if you want to combine lots of small things, when some of them are likely to be on multi-buys anyway, so I’d spend all my time trying to work out what to spend it on.

I like the idea of going to the garden centre, but from what I remember the parking is pretty awful, so as I said, I wouldn’t want to take the van.

I’m just trying to give examples here of what my mind is like all the time. I think I’ll give myself a treat, but it takes so long to think through all the options, implications, ramifications and potential consequences that I start to dread it, even when the object is something I know I would enjoy – unless, of course, I don’t enjoy it at all and end up wondering what on earth I’m doing there, wherever it is. Which is quite likely.

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Finding the Way (or not)

Now my proof-reading job has finished, I was planning to get on with ‘The Long Way Back’. But I’ve reached the time when I was in Prague, and even starting to read back the blog posts from that time has reminded me of how stressed I was over the teaching course, interviews, flat, etc, not to mention the accident when I fell on my face and the problems with my teeth. There’s a story there to be told, but it’s not a very cheerful one, nor is the year that followed it, and I’m back with a sense of not wanting to touch it, as I had the last time I tried, three years ago. But if I leave it like that, I guess in a way it will always haunt me, and I have to draw a line under it somehow.

Yesterday I ended by quoting from a post on a Facebook group for dyspraxics which bothered me, about how people like me should stop apologising and feeling ashamed, and sorry for ourselves. That is me in a nutshell, right there, but how do I stop? If I am to be true to my nature, that is how I have always been, and always will be. I can’t be strong and proud of myself, because this is who I am, this is my lived experience: that I try things, mess them up, break things, am constantly late, messy, chaotic, forgetful, all those things. I read other people’s posts on the group, where they talk about repeatedly failing at interviews, hopelessly looking for jobs but never being accepted for anything that matches their qualifications, getting bullied at work and at home for being slow, chaotic, etc, and so on, and so forth. Is it so surprising that we are apologetic, full of shame, sorry for ourselves? Don’t we deserve somewhere, one place at least, among our peers, where we can share these stories and feelings?

But at the same time I can see where this person is coming from. I despise myself when I feel sorry for myself – I have written about this before, the horrible vicious circle that makes it so hard to have any kind of self-love or self-belief. That’s what is so stark when I read the blog posts from Prague: how out of depth and hopeless I felt. I now know where those feelings originate from – but knowing that there’s nothing I can do to change the way I am doesn’t help.

In the ‘affirmative’ ending to my ‘Square Peg’ poem I wrote that I’ll never find a space to fit my edges unless I ‘make one for myself’. By that I am acknowledging that no one else can help me to find a way of accepting myself – I no longer fantasise about finding an ‘other half’ who will make me whole at last – but I still don’t know how to do it for myself, except, as I’ve always done, by running away and hiding .

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Walking Into the Wind

Walking the other way, the way I used to go every Monday morning, towards the leisure centre and the now defunct swimming pool.

The wind is coming from the sea and right up my street, the way it wasn’t on Friday. More wind means more waves and that’s more usual than Friday’s calm. Even in the Rock Gardens, which always used to be a haven, I can still feel it, or at least hear it. A flock of pigeons skitters in the sky, crossing each other’s paths then dispersing in a shower of squawks. A ribbon of toilet paper flutters across the path, but later it seems miraculously to have been blown into a ball, wedged against a rock marking the edge of a flower bed.

Before I left home, the weather app promised me no rain for at least 60 minutes, so why can I feel splashes on my face, too far from the beach to be spray?

I glance at my watch: 8.25, half an hour till the cafes open, so I head for the shelter on the prom. Is it raining? I still can’t tell, the clouds are grey enough, and the gulls are flying high, circling against their dark backdrop. The flagpole outside the Lifeguard Station keeps up its tattoo of rope against metal as the waves continue to roar majestically, and the sun reappears, silvering the surface. I watch someone from the cafe pushing a sack-barrow, moving a plant pot to the edge of the seating area – it must have been moved to safety overnight to stop it being blown over.

When I step outside the shelter, the wind comes back again, full force. I walk back to the Rock Gardens, to the bench where I was before, still no rain, and I notice how close it is to the fish pond, which I had my back to before, so didn’t consider as a source for the droplets.

I think I’ll wait for the cafe to open at nine, then realise that I’d still have to sit outside on the prom to eat my breakfast, so give up and walk home.

I read this on the Dyspraxia Facebook group:

I’m done with shame and feeling sorry for myself. I will no longer apologise and be a victim to it. You don’t see a wheelchair user apologise for using a chair. So why should we apologise for how our wires connect in our brain ? Which is outside of our control. We either work with it or struggle against it. Either way we owe no one an apology for how we’re wired.

At first reading I felt irritated by it, because after all, shame, apologising and self-pity have been a way of life for me. Looking at it again, I can see it’s not a personal attack on me, in fact it’s a perfectly sensible attitude, but somehow it struck a nerve, maybe because I’ve always judged myself on those criteria and come up wanting.

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Sunday Morning

What have I done already today?

Tried to take a photo of the sunrise from my bedroom window. Opened the window to get a better view, and a credit card and train ticket fell out of my phone wallet onto the flat roof of the extension below. Fortunately, a few days ago I found in my bedroom a litter grabber which I bought when I was living in the flat and had a similar accident with something on the roof of the bay window. I couldn’t manage to pick the card up, but I did succeed in knocking it off onto the patio/gravel. Went downstairs in my dressing gown and opened the door, saw credit card immediately over by the garden table. Walked over gravel in bare feet and picked it up. Went back inside and picked gravel off my feet.

Checked the credit cards in my phone and realised my Barclaycard (the one I most often use) was missing. The last time I used it was in the knitting shop yesterday, where I went to buy some yarn for my weather blanket. I emptied my coat pockets and handbag but couldn’t find it, looked around all the obvious places, still no sign. Went back out into the garden, couldn’t see it anywhere on the gravel, peeped through a gap in the fence at next door’s patio but it wasn’t obviously there. It started to rain. I rummaged around in some plants/weeds (false valerian, which is pretty in small doses but grows like a weed) between the edge of my steps and the fence, and found my Barclaycard.

Went back inside, picked gravel off my feet again, went back to bed, and back to sleep, although it was nearly six o’clock by this time. Had a dream, which was very interesting when I woke up, but I’ve now forgotten. Woke up shortly before eight and got up. Fed cat, let her out. Did yoga/tai chi. Picked up clothes from bedroom floor, found a complete set of clean bed linen (including matching pillow cases) and had first attempt at changing the duvet cover.

Took washing basket downstairs and loaded the contents into the washing machine. Tried to pull out the dispenser drawer – which is filthy and I’ve been thinking for a while it needs cleaning – but it got stuck half way and then I couldn’t get it back in and couldn’t get it all the way out. I used to have a Persil ball but lost it somewhere, and bought a large bottle with another one, but lost that too, so I took a top from a fabric conditioner bottle, filled that and balanced it on the washing then switched on the machine. Had shower and washed hair. Made coffee.

Now here I am, still in my dressing gown (but clean), writing my blog and drinking coffee. I can’t remember what I was thinking about while I was doing my exercises, two hours ago, but I don’t suppose it was important.

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Space

Yesterday I went for a walk in the morning, and wrote in my notebook, then came home and typed up what I’d written, and started to carry on describing the walk, but stopped because I had some proof reading to do, so did that, and now that project is over and done with, and that’s a relief, but in the rest of the day I never got back to writing.

I guess I could be finishing it now, but I woke up thinking about the struggle between my dyspraxia and daily functioning in the real world, how it’s always there and how it consumes so much energy. I had several attempts at writing the first half of that sentence without explicitly mentioning ‘dyspraxia’ – my first inclination was to talk about my ‘true nature’, which sounded very airy-fairy, then my ‘natural tendencies’, but I settled on just calling it ‘dyspraxia’ because I’ve come to realise, by comparing notes with other people in the online group, how many aspects of my personality and behaviour which I used to find awkward and hard to explain or justify are common among the group, and how many other people in that group also find life a struggle because of them.

In my therapy session on Thursday, I read out the ‘Square Peg’ poem which I wrote last week. Her response was that it’s quite upbeat and ‘affirmative’ because of the ending, and I wondered why it didn’t feel that way to me. I thought about other similar poems I’ve written, like ‘The Awkward One’ and ‘Declaration’, where overall the message is so grim that I’ve tried to turn them around at the end by suggesting that I’m on top of it all. I tried to explain this, and she said: ‘So you’re saying that you try to make the ending more upbeat for the sake of the reader?’ which didn’t really sound right, but I didn’t know what else to say.

I guess that in each case there is a kind of aspiration in those endings, but a hidden doubt as to whether those aspirations are achievable. They’re also very angry poems, I notice, along with another one I remembered, ‘The Answers’, which I also looked up and realised that it didn’t have an optimistic turn at the end (and in case you’re wondering what ‘answers’ it refers to, it’s about dealing with chemotherapy, so it could be argued that there was a ‘happy ending’ but anyone who’s been through it can probably tell you that that is hard to hang on to at the time).

So, where do I stand with regard to the ending of ‘The Square Peg’?

My edges are what
make me who I am;
they fuel the restless longing
for a space where I could fit;
a space I’ll never find
unless I make it for myself.

Linda Rushby 1 May 2021

How much progress do I feel I’ve made with respect to ‘finding’ or ‘making’ that space?

What can I say? Watch this space.

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Walking

Friday, 07 May 2021

Writing that date jogged something in my memory, and I’ve realised what it was: my wedding anniversary, 38 years ago today.

But that’s not how I intended to start.

As far as I can remember (I was planning to start) it’s over five years since I wrote a ‘story’, by which I mean a short piece of prose with a beginning, middle and an end, worthy of submitting to an anthology, reading out loud or sharing with an online group (though I have written quite a lot of poems in that time, some of them not bad).

Sitting behind the café, with traffic passing, and dog walkers and joggers and wild swimmers, the sun is warm on my face and the wind mercifully calm. I can even hear the waves during lulls in the traffic, though to get the full impact I would have to walk down the beach past the terrace of pebbles, where there’s nowhere to sit except on the ground, and hence nowhere to write. From this vantage, I can see the sea, but not the water’s edge. I can’t even see how far the tide is in.

I’m drinking coffee from my flask. The café won’t be open till nine o’clock, as it’s a week day. I check my phone. It’s bang on eight. I don’t know whether there is anywhere else that’s open already, possibly the Coffee Cup, but I don’t like their breakfasts.

I set off to walk, in the opposite direction, heading for the pier. I pass the café and a couple of kiosks, but none of them are open.

But the pier is open, so I walk to the end, where, clearly in expectation of a busy summer (or at any rate more so than last year), more fairground rides have been erected. When I first moved here, the pier was closed for renovations, and re-opened in 2017, since when attractions have come and gone, but I don’t remember seeing this many before.

It was quite surreal, to be walking around them alone, apart from a couple of guys fishing, and one lady sitting outside the cafe at the end of the pier, who told me it would be open at nine. I leant on the railings for a while watching the sea, and the Isle of Wight ferry, then walked back along the other side of the pier and turned left on the prom.