Solent Green – blog

Posted on

How Not to Write a Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who knows? I don’t do fiction.

Posted on

Business is Business

Just had a one-sided conversation in the shower (not that unusual) about the winding up of one project for a long-standing client (her proof copies have just arrived) and another job she asked me to think about to create a website related to her book. I told her I’d give it some thought, which I haven’t really over the three weeks we’ve been waiting for the proofs, but now I have to, I think I’ll suggest setting something up on WordPress.

My hosting is still paid for until September 2021, but every time it comes up for renewal I have this inner debate over whether it’s worth continuing. I don’t host sites for anybody else any more, and my own has been pretty much in limbo for years. I had a go at tarting it up a couple of years ago, when I added an online shop (through which not one single copy of any of my books has been sold), and created this blog. The cost of hosting keeps going up, and although I can still afford it, I do get this sense of good-money-after-bad. I don’t need to make a living any more (not that I was ever much good at that anyway) and although I used to enjoy the challenge, I never thought that what I produced was much good (which to be fair is true of anything I do).

One of the issues that has always bothered me over design work is that by and large my clients were people like me, individuals with small businesses, scrabbling in the marketplace to try and sell their services. I had the suspicion that they thought having a bespoke website would raise their profile and bring new clients flooding in, whereas I knew from personal experience that that was pretty unrealistic. So I was torn between wanting to do a professional job, put in the time, make things as good as I possibly could, and the feeling that I was acting under false pretences, that if I charged a professional rate for my time, they would never make back the money they were paying me. So I would only ask for what I thought they could afford to lose, but still put the work in as long as they wanted me to, and told myself I was still learning, and some day I would feel confident enough to charge a realistic rate. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t – and conversely, sometimes I still priced it too high and lost work that way.

What goes for web design also goes for print – who really cares about the aesthetics of a book, now that self-publishing is so easy? And who wants to pay someone like me to take the time over the details, when there’s so little potential financial payback? Just because I want to weep when I see another badly designed, amateurish self-published book doesn’t mean anybody else gives a crap.  

Oops there I go, completely blowing my business credibility.

Posted on

Garbage In, Garbage Out

The Solent was less boring than usual this morning, and not just because I haven’t seen it in over a month (five weeks tomorrow.) There were some quite exciting waves – the wind was so rough before I went out that I didn’t leave the door open for Miko to come back in and she had to come round to the side door, which is more sheltered. Of course, the waves don’t show up very well in the photos I took, it’s always hit and miss with waves – and gulls.

I slept in till about six, no night-time disturbances for once. I knew it was cloudy because the sun wasn’t shining in the window. I then checked the weather on my phone because I wanted to know what it was going to be like (rather than how it was then, which I could have seen by getting out of bed and opening the curtains). I noticed it said that rain was expected in 113 minutes, which amused me. Reminded me of a conversation from my programming days in the 70s, when I had to explain to a ‘user’ (ie, someone who worked outside of the IT – Data Processing in those days – department and used the information supplied by the computer) that the time displayed on the monitors wasn’t reliable, because it had to be set by the operators according to the computer room clock – or their own watches – every time the mainframe was rebooted.

‘Well why does it show it to a thousandth of a second if it’s not even right?’ he asked, irritably, obviously not grasping the concept that computers are brilliant at spurious precision, but rely on humans to provide accurate base data – in other words, GIGO, or ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out). Of course these days, time has been handed over to the atomic clock, they know it better than we do, and the operator’s watch has more calculating power than the state-of-the-art IBM 370/145 he (there was a team, but they were always male) then served.

Well I thought that was interesting as I stood and watched the waves. I read that forecast well over 113 minutes ago, and I can vouch for the fact that there has been no rain in my little patch of Southsea in that time, though checking Accuweather again I see it now says: ‘no precipitation for at least 120 min’ so perhaps I didn’t read it carefully enough last time. Human error. The computer was covering its back – or rather, at some point in the development process some human programmer had thought that one through a little more carefully.

Not sure why I went down that particular rabbit hole today – I’m trying to make quite a deep and important point but don’t think I’ve put it over very well.

Anyway, I went for a walk to the sea this morning. The wild swimmers were there as usual, dodging the wilder than usual waves. And I stopped at Sainsbury’s on my way home.

Posted on

Reading (Part 2)

On any normal Monday… I’d be getting out of the pool around now. Except that it wouldn’t be a normal Monday, it’s Bank Holiday – not that that makes much difference to me. Five years ago (261 weeks) it was Bank Holiday, and I had breakfast at Rocksby’s, sitting outside on the prom, watching the sea and the boats and the Isle of Wight across the water and marvelling that I was here and how exciting it all was, never mind all those boxes I had to unpack. Rocksby’s is gone now, or rather, the basic structure and a couple of the staff are still there, but even when it’s open, it’s not the same, and the bacon sandwiches are terrible. Everything changes.

I rang my brother yesterday, it’s a thing we’ve done on and off over the years since I’ve been on my own, ringing each other on the first Sunday morning of the month. It’s been a bit erratic over the last couple of years while I’ve been going to writers’ group on Sundays, but as he said last month, now he knows where to find me on Sundays (or any other day). I told him that I’m enjoying not having to go out and interact with people, and he said something like: ‘that must be a blessing’ which was such an unusual word for him to use that I had to ask him to repeat it. But it’s a good word, appropriate, because yes, I have been feeling blessed, living in my cosy, stress-free bubble.

I told him I’d thought of him because on Saturday I heard a play on the radio about the life of Arthur Ransome, who wrote the Swallows and Amazons books, which I know he loved, and his daughters loved, and my sister loved too, though to be honest I was never all that interested in them (though I didn’t say that to him). It was one of those things that my two elder siblings did that I felt I should do as well (like staying married to the same people for fifty years), but didn’t really appeal to my nature.

That got me thinking about the kind of books I did read in childhood, and at first I could only think of Narnia and The Wind in the Willows. Partly, I realised, that was because they predominantly came from the library, we didn’t have many books of our own and the ones we did were mainly Ladybird and Observer books, things like that, vaguely educational. It’s not that Mum and Dad didn’t read books, they did (though, as I realise now, it’s not always so easy for adults to find the time), but they also got them from the library – books weren’t a high priority for spending limited cash, when there was an abundant supply which could be borrowed, and were reserved for birthday and Christmas presents.

My preference in books was always magical, which I may come back to another time.

Posted on

Reading (Part 1)

I woke at about 2.30 filled with a strange dread which I now can’t remember at all, I just know that I experienced it and it wasn’t a dream. I did what I usually do in the middle of the night, and started to listen to radio programmes I’ve downloaded onto my phone. I can’t listen directly because the wifi doesn’t reach to the bedroom, and when I first moved here I kept running out of mobile data, but the downloads work fine as long as I remember to keep them stocked up by downloading them when I’m in the wifi zone. Most of them are only streamed for a month, but there’s always plenty more.

I’ve downloaded episodes of Hilary Mantel’s ‘The Mirror and the Light’, third of her Thomas Cromwell books, read (abridged) in fifteen 15 minute episodes on Radio 4 last month. I’d played back the first few, when I found out yesterday that they’re only available till tomorrow. The 15 minute serials are good for listening to in bed, because if I fall asleep I only miss a few minutes, whereas if I fall asleep half an hour into a two hour drama I have to start it all over again another time, or worse, sometimes I wake up again while it’s still running and I’ve missed great chunks of the plot, or hear the denouement and spoil it for when I try to listen to the whole thing.

Anyway, life being what it is, I’ve got a good excuse to spend some time today and tomorrow listening to the last eight episodes.

I’m two thirds of the way through reading ‘Wolf Hall’, the first of the trilogy, on kindle, and I’ve seen the TV series (which I think was the first two books). The radio version is read by Anton Lesser, who has a wonderful voice and a great face for radio (as the saying goes). I could listen to him all day. In the telly version he played Sir Thomas More, but now I will always associate him with Cromwell – it’s not first person, but very much written from his point of view, and very sympathetic to it – which most historians haven’t been.

I wonder why I don’t spend more time reading, but the real answer is that these days I like being read to, for the simple reason that I can do that and crochet at the same time, whereas I can’t read and crochet – it’s mostly to do with holding the book and turning pages, (whether real or virtual). There’ve been times when reading has been the greatest joy in my life. It makes me quite sad to see ‘read a book’ appearing on lists of goals of ‘improving’ things to do during lockdown, an achievement to be proud of, when the essence of reading for me has always been that it’s an indulgence, and a great pleasure, something to be done for love and the excitement, satisfaction and happiness it brings.  

Posted on

The Hermit

In our Skype session on Thursday, my therapist commented that I seem much more relaxed and comfortable than when we used to meet in her office. Then, apparently, I was always fretting about my phone, or my keys, or something, always apologising for being two minutes late. Maybe so, but it’s not just that. Our first couple of Skype sessions were pretty stressful too.

This life suits me. Sometimes I just slip into quietness – in a good way, a happy, here-and-now way, a ‘mindful’ way, I guess. Well, it could be just tiredness, but even then it’s a healthy, dozy, peaceful sleepiness, not a mind-buzzing agitated fatigue.

I told her about the worst thing that happened in the week – the encounter with the checkout lady in the Co-op – and realised then that she was the only actual real world person I had encountered since our session the week before. I explained that it’s being with other people that bothers me, though I felt ashamed to admit it.

‘Why do you think that’s shameful?’ she asked.

I blustered a bit.

‘Well, it’s not good to be… misanthropic, is it?’ (though I realised as I said it that’s not a good word, I don’t exactly hate other people in general, I’m just not comfortable about interacting with them) ‘…it’s not right… it’s… inhuman!’

‘Why do you think it’s inhuman?’

Because good people like other people and like being with people. Don’t they? Isn’t that what makes us human?

Well… sometimes I like being with people. What about all those happy pictures I post of myself with friends and family? Ahh, but you can never judge anyone’s mood, personality or attractiveness by looking at the pics they post on social media. Not mine, anyway. Obviously, I only share the ones where I’m looking vaguely human, which gives a completely distorted image of what I see when I look in the mirror.

Now I’ve allowed myself to be distracted from what I was going to say, which is – for example, take the May Day gathering I mentioned yesterday, I enjoyed that – but I can guarantee that I was apprehensive beforehand. Being with other people is always stressful for me, however well I know them, it’s an ordeal because I’m on eggshells in case I do or say something stupid, like taking the wheeled basket-holder in the supermarket, when I should have asked for a normal basket. But I used to work at a regular job, how did I manage then? Because most of the time I got away with it. – but I still felt that sense of dread every day.

I think I’ve tapped into something very deep here, something that goes way beyond introverted vs extroverted. It’s hard to admit, because it does sound quite bizarre, but it explains a lot.

And as my therapist pointed out, in spite of all that, I’m prepared to share this here, with anyone who bothers to read it – perhaps because I don’t really believe anyone will.

Posted on

May Day

Today’s memory is from a year and a day after the previous one (a lot can happen in that time – in fairy tales, at any rate).

On the beach at sunrise with a smallish group of friends and friends-of-friends, one of them a Pagan celebrant who led us in a ceremony of welcome to the sun on May Day morning. I remember chanting, facing in the four directions (towards the sea, the land, the sun and… towards the pier? -it’s all I can think of in that direction!) There was also singing, djembe banging, some mandolin playing, probably dancing and definitely consumption of brandy supplied by her partner (not something I normally do at six in the morning, not even on May Day!) And breakfast in the Beach Café.

Thinking back, I realise I hardly ever see that group of people any more. When the world passed around the sun again, I had entered the year of my own personal self-isolation, of chemo and surgery and radiotherapy, and when I emerged from that into 2018, it seemed as though everyone’s life had changed, not just mine, the dance had shifted, we had all taken up new positions and our paths no longer intersected – except sometimes on Facebook, repository of friendships and social medium of choice for my generation.

That wasn’t the only memorable thing that happened that May Day, however. When I got home to the flat, I had an email from my ex husband, saying that he’d received and provisionally accepted an offer on the old family home; obviously my formal agreement was needed, but that was hardly in doubt. The beginning of the real end of that chapter of my life, a summer of driving up and down between here and there, clearing out everything, including the attic where so much of my past had accumulated; helping him initially to move into his new place in Bedford (and in the interim our son and his fiancée from their tiny studio flat in Guildford to a two-storey maisonette), and finally, in October, moving into this house, with one van of stuff transported professionally from the flat, and another trip for me up to Bedford, another rented van loaded and driven down by my daughter’s partner, another drive back southwards in my Micra with another terrified cat in a basket on the passenger seat.

If I’d known on that spring morning that it would be almost another six months before I was finally settled in my own home… well, I don’t know what I would have done. But it happened, all the dusty accumulation of the past, the physical stuff and the emotional clutter which had haunted me, all moved, all resolved, and here I was.

Maybe the stress of that year contributed to my body’s next bombshell – who knows? But I got through that too. And here I stand, and every day, whether May Day or any one of 365 others, the future still knocks on my door.

Posted on

Day 30 – Columbine

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

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

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

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

Linda Rushby 30 April 2020
Posted on

Home

Five years ago today, it was a Thursday. At least, I remember that the subsequent two days were Friday and Saturday. So this is one of those odd combinations of years when the days are the same after five years, not six – a moment’s thought makes it obvious, because those five contained two leap years.

I remember taking Flick to school and walking the dog. Laura must have been working an early shift at the care home, and I would have stayed at hers the night before. I sat in my car outside her house and thought – this is it. It may have been drizzly – I don’t remember the drive – I would have been concentrating because it wasn’t familiar then. There were road works on the A34 at Milton, south of Oxford – they went on for years – the southbound traffic was diverted off the dual carriageway, and I stopped at the Costa.

In Southsea, the sun was shining. I went straight to the agent’s, signed the paperwork, picked up the keys, drove to the flat. The doors were open, the landlady was there with her little dog, and someone was putting up a curtain rail. It was the first time we’d met, so introductions and a few minutes of polite chat were obligatory, till I walked out, turned right, found the alley between the houses, where the wisteria wasn’t quite open, a quick right and left at the end, crossed the esplanade, through the rock gardens, and reached the sea. I could hardly believe it was so close.

I walked along the seafront as far as the Coffee Cup, then turned inland down the quiet road that leads to Eastney and the Highland Road roundabout – I remember passing the strange cake shop. Turned left onto Highland Road, past the cemetery and the junk shop, then onto Albert Road, the bike shops, the crystal shop, the church with the Italian bell tower, on the corner of where I live now. I was looking for a road leading towards the sea, but I’d missed them all, until I came to the traffic lights which I knew would take me back to the flat.

I had the small fold out bed (or maybe just the mattress), a camping chair, kettle, toaster, radio, laptop (but no wifi) – microwave? I couldn’t carry much in the Micra. I walked the empty rooms planning where the furniture would go. I must have eaten that evening – fish and chips, of course – did I know the chippy was there, just round the corner, or was it instinct? There was bound to be one, and I had the car, I would have found something.

Next morning, I drove back to Beds, collected and loaded the van with Laura and Chris, and on Saturday drove back with Murka in a basket on the passenger seat, via Guildford where I picked up Simon.

In memory, banal days become significant, and significant ones banal. Thirtieth April 2015 holds both in balance.  

Posted on

Day 29 – Paper Flowers

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

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

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

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

Linda Rushby 29 April 2020