Solent Green – blog

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Hedgehog Song

I’ve got into the habit of ending the evening by listening to Amazon music. I try to avoid watching telly after 10 o’clock, though I’m not always very good at sticking to that. I don’t really understand how these streaming services work, obviously they go on the basis of what you’ve chosen before but the random playlists can be extremely random. It’s moved on from giving me lots of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills and Nash, Cat Stevens and Fleetwood Mack to deciding I like early 70s folk-rock, which is quite intelligent of it really, though I haven’t heard a lot of those artists for a very long time. In particular it’s picked up on the Incredible String Band, which I didn’t know much about and I find their songs pretty mixed.

Last night it flashed up ‘The Hedgehog’s Song’ (by ISB) which made me laugh, because it reminded me of Nanny Ogg’s Hedgehog Song from the Discworld books. But as soon as the music started, I knew it instantly, though I don’t think I ever knew what band it was associated with. It was just one of those songs that everybody sang in the folk clubs of fifty years ago:

‘Well, you know all the words, and you’ve sung all the notes,
but you never quite learned the song’ she sang.
‘I can tell by the sadness in your eyes
that you never quite learned the song.’

Incredible String Band

Naturally, I sang along, as I’d probably done dozens of times in my youth in smoky clubs and pubs – it had a jaunty tune, quirky rhythm, and apparently silly but actually quite thoughtful lyrics. I thought about my eighteen, nineteen, twenty year old self not giving a thought to the woman who would be singing it half a century later and ruefully reflecting how accurate it was.

Sometimes with these songs from those days I think about the fact that the people who wrote them, if I could see them now at the age they were then, would seem ridiculously young, but at the time they were so much older and more mature than me, role models I admired and hoped to emulate. But here I am with all these years, experience and supposed wisdom, still haunted by adolescent confusion and doubt. I knew all the words, and I sang all the notes, but I never quite learned the song. You can tell by the sadness in my eyes, I never quite learned the song.

No, that wasn’t going to be me. I wasn’t going to turn out to be that sort of sad old lady.

An old friend commented on yesterday’s post that maybe heartache is harder to recover from than heartbreak. I think she’s right, because a broken heart is an acute trauma, that you have to deal with and move on from, but heartache is something that lingers, a chronic condition that fluctuates but never completely goes away. Maybe that’s why my therapist used that word. Interesting.

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New Morning

Wasn’t really expecting a poem today, but here it is:

New Morning

Coming out of the darkness, temptation whispers
how good it would be to return to oblivion
and slide back down into happy dreams.

‘That’s not how it works’
cries Morpheus, slamming
the door on your pleading.
He won’t take you back
any more than the womb
will take back the newborn.
This is the new day.
You’re on your own.

Though the smiley sun
may peep round the curtains,
the darkness still hovers
at the back of your mind.
Thoughts cluster like midges,
buzzing and nipping
with spiteful glee
as you pull round the blankets,.

There is no escape from
the heartache that lingers,
the memories that creep near
and poke bony fingers
at the half-healed bruises
you thought you’d forgotten.

You must make the choice
(though you know there’s no option,
and choice an illusion),
or regret it forever.

Every day, every morning,
the same demons taunt you
till you gather your strength,
and all of your will power
and get out of bed.

Linda Rushby 14 May 2020

And here’s one I opened at random yesterday and found left on the computer when I started it up this morning:

Look Inside

What do you see when you look inside?
Fear, frustration, disappointment?
All of those.
Loneliness, anger, regret?
Not so much as once there was.

After all this time and striving,
don’t you think it should be clearer?
After all this time and striving,
this is as clear as it is.

Do you long for the striving to end?
Do you think of what that means?

Linda Rushby 17 January 2016

From the tone (and especially the last two lines) I thought it was a ‘chemo’ poem (I’ve got at least one of those, and probably others lurking around), but was surprised to realise it was a year earlier, from January 2016. I don’t really remember it, but it definitely feels like another first-thing-in-the-morning poem.

This is pretty much how every day starts for me – any time between about 4 and 7, that limbo of ‘should I get up now?’ or ‘I’m sure if I stay here I’ll doze off again’, and sometimes I do, but mostly I don’t and realise after a couple of hours that there’s no putting it off any longer. Today was perhaps a bit worse than usual because of quite a heavy therapy session yesterday, in which at one point the therapist said: ‘you’ve had quite a lot of heartache’ which is why that word popped up, and in retrospect, I think: she doesn’t know even the half of it, and do I want to go back through my emotional life and dig it all up and show it to her, including the most painful, shameful and embarrassing bits? But maybe that’s what I need to do.

Aside from that, I’ve said in the past that sometimes I think getting up in the morning is the most difficult and stressful thing I do all day, and this is what I mean.

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Corrections and Clarifications

The anger came back this morning, in the I-should-get-out-of-bed-but-not-yet time. I suppose it may have been partly triggered by the new uncertainty caused by images of commuters on trains and station platforms. However, as always, it was turned against myself. How can I keep writing about my real feelings and put it on show? How can I come on here and share my true thoughts, take that risk of being seen for who I am, all that self-pity and negativity and doubt? I’ll stop, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll give up again as I always do with everything.

But I got up and did my half hour practice, and when I went downstairs and made coffee I realised how valuable that is, that it actually does help – or something does. Routine and discipline, you see – it makes life possible. Which I guess includes this as well. Here I am at my keyboard with Miko on the desk beside me, supervising the street outside, both of us listening to a sudden outburst of gulls. Blue sky and sunshine, and I can’t really tell whether there are more people and traffic, though I can see that there are at least six empty parking places across the road whereas they’ve been full for the last few weeks, but I guess the consolation is that at least six drivers aren’t taking the bus.

I didn’t speak to my daughter yesterday, but I assume she for one hasn’t gone back to work. She’s not waitressing any more, but she still works in the leisure/hospitality business, her job involves visiting pubs, so I’m guessing she’s reprieved until they reopen. Anyway, she has two children at home.

I am still in my cosy bubble, for as long as it takes. I may never come out. I still feel that life is less stressful like this, but I keep panicking that eventually I will have to engage with the world again, and wonder what exactly that will mean. It’s like when I was travelling and would every so often get a reminder that, at some point, I would have to come back and face up to life again.

Just remembered that I have some corrections and clarifications for my quote from the Joni Mitchell song yesterday (I finally looked it up). The song is Barangrill and the corrections are: it’s three waitresses (not two); they’re talking about Singapore SLINGS (which makes so much more sense than ‘sleeves’, a mistake I’ve been making for almost 50 years), and there’s ‘not one ANXIOUS voice’ (I think I said ‘angry’).

So there you go, I’m not perfect (as if I ever claimed to be).

Oh my goodness, I just glanced through the window, (checking for swifts) and saw a plane flying over – it looks like a commercial airliner, rather than anything naval/military. Strange how something so familiar can disappear without being missed until suddenly it’s there again.

Check out Barangrill, if you like Joni. I hadn’t heard it in years.

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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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Hors de Combat

I’m back from my weekly Tuesday morning shopping expedition. The emergency run for cat food two days ago doesn’t count, because I couldn’t bring myself to do the sensible thing and work out a full shopping list before I went, so I ran out of fresh milk yesterday as usual.

Before I left, I prepared breakfast for my return, and, in the process of slicing the end crust of the loaf into two to fit the toaster, cut my left index finger. I held it under the cold tap, wrapped it in kitchen roll, and kept pressing it and moving the kitchen roll as it became soaked in blood. Then went looking for plasters, which I found in the form of continuous strips in the downstairs bathroom. Hunted for the scissors – on the kitchen table, among all the card-making stuff. Cut a biggish strip off and wrapped it over the wound and round the end of my finger.

Collected together bags, wallet, phone, checked I had the right cards, filled Miko’s water bowl, made sure she was inside, she started running around manically so I spoke to her gently and sat down with her for a few minutes to calm her down, checked the list (on my phone), picked up the scarf I’ve been using as a face mask, wrapped it round, left the building, and in locking the door realised there was fresh red blood dripping down my arm. I must have put pressure on the wound somehow, probably when pulling up the door handle.

So I went back into the house, and tried to work out where I’d left the plasters and the scissors. I noticed that everywhere I’d walked there were perfectly spaced, perfectly round bright red drops of blood on the floor. They looked like tiddlywinks.

I thought: never mind wrapping a scarf round my face, I really can’t go round Tesco dripping blood everywhere. I decided I was hors de combat, and could justifiably excuse myself from shopping duty – the main priority was milk, and I’d got a carton of UHT (bought for making yoghurt, but also as an emergency reserve) and a tin of evaporated.

I found the plasters back in the bathroom cabinet, but only at the second iteration – the box was lying down behind the lip at the bottom of the cupboard, and I didn’t recognise it. I stuck another one over the first and that seemed to do the trick. Might as well go shopping after all, as I’d psyched myself up.

So, once again I went through the whole palaver of remembering everything I needed to take, including the scarf which I’d discarded over the back of a chair, and this time I opened, closed and locked the front door without injury.

I haven’t even got enough words left to tell you what happened en route to the supermarket and after I got there. Give me rules to follow, and I’ll panic about getting them wrong. Thoughts for another day.

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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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Thinking About Thoughts and Other Stuff (tbc)

How can you tell the difference between denial and acceptance?

How can I learn to control my thoughts?

No, I don’t like the word ‘control’. How can I learn to cope with, manage, ride the waves of my mind? ‘Manage’ is also too strong. Manage the way I react to the vagaries of my mind? But what is there to do the ‘managing’ if not my mind? What is my ‘mind’ anyway?

I like the idea of riding the waves. I’ve never tried surfing, never even felt a desire to, but I enjoy the sensation of floating on waves – I also like riding in a hot air balloon (an experience I’ve had three times in my life and would happily do again). A balloon pilot or surfer (or sailor, wind-surfer, hang-glider, glider pilot etc) cannot control the movements of the wind and/or waves, but can control the behaviour of his or her craft in response to the conditions that it’s experiencing.

I did something sneaky earlier by referring to ‘thoughts’ in the second paragraph then going on to talk about ‘mind’. What’s the difference? Is it that my thoughts are equivalent to the wind and waves, and is my mind the sum total of all those thoughts, or is it the mechanism I use to ‘manage’ them? Isn’t it both at the same time? Not only that, but if the ‘management’ I’m referring to is about choosing the best responses to the thoughts that arise, what do those responses consist of? Okay, sometimes they may be physical, like getting a drink in response to the thought ‘I’m thirsty’, but don’t they also involve thoughts, at least initially?

Ah well, I’ve just done another sneaky thing (or my ‘mind’ has done it without me noticing at the time) by introducing the word ‘choosing’. How much choice do we have over our responses? Choice is the essence of freedom, but it is also a tyrant (‘…the crazy you get from too much choice/the thumb and the satchel or the rented Rolls-Royce…’ Joni Mitchell, I think it’s from The Blonde in the Bleachers).

That’s what I was thinking of when I sat on the edge of my bed an hour or ago, the comfort of routine versus the panic of having to make a decision. Should I go straight to the shop and get cat food, or give Miko the only stuff we have left, which is a choice between meat in jelly (bought by mistake) which she refuses to eat, or fish in gravy, which she also turns her nose up at? That led into a whole can of worms (which I don’t think they sell in the pet shop, but I’m sure she wouldn’t eat anyway.)

Enough, or I’ll miss my word limit. I’m trying to show that decisions (however apparently trivial) scare me because of the possibility of getting them wrong. It’s not just other people who do that to me, I can do it to myself.

Hold that thought.

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The Hermit (Part 2)

Weekly therapy session on Skype yesterday. The evening before, I was feeling quite down, but by the time lunchtime rolled around I was wondering what we were going to talk about.

She remarked that for the second week running I seemed to be quite happy and content with life. This week I did my shopping in Sainsbury’s, and used the self checkout, so I didn’t even have to interact with the checkout person, as I did last week in the Co-op. Not having to be with people suits me. I think about good friends I’ve known, how much I’ve enjoyed spending time with them, some who’ve helped, bullied or cajoled me onto new paths through my life, and the joy of my children and grandchildren, I’m aware of all those things, but still I think: enough, now it’s enough just to be on my own, doing what I want, when I want, how I want. ‘Snow can hurt your eyes, but only people make you cry.’ I’m even managing to be kinder to myself, less judgemental over the chaos, quietening the critical voices. I think about the times when I was travelling, how I revelled in just being, in anonymity and invisibility, looking out of the window of a train, or sipping coffee on a café terrace, just to be somewhere without feeling I needed to justify myself to anyone. That’s how it is now: sitting in my garden in the sunshine, or in my bay window listening to the radio and crocheting, or at my PC in the mornings pouring out my words from the wellspring of my soul. This is who I am.

I talked to her about my thoughts on the stages of grief, somewhat apprehensive that I’d taken it the wrong way, or that she’d say it was outdated or I was oversimplifying (a little knowledge is a dangerous thing). But she was genuinely interested in what I was saying, she explained some of the background, where the original ideas had come from and, yes, it has been distorted and misused but it still has application, and no, it’s not just ‘pop psych’. She said I’d latched on to the crucial point that it can be hard to distinguish between ‘denial’ and ‘acceptance’, that it can be cyclical and it’s not always a straight progression to a nirvana of acceptance.

I think perhaps this time of being home alone, of not pushing myself out into the world to interact with others, has been exactly what I need. So much of my emotional life has been taken up with that sense of incompleteness and failure as a person, the hopeless quest for a soulmate to fill the void in myself. Enough.

But the time will come when I’ll have to go out there again, and I will have to be with people, and things will happen that will bring me down. I don’t know how to prepare for that. But at least now I recognise the danger.

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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