Solent Green – blog

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Day 28 – Work in Progress

I started this two days ago, couldn’t see where to take it or how to finish it, lost it because it was saved on my laptop instead of PC, realised I’d got nothing to post for today, found it again, read what I’d done, added a bit, still couldn’t see where it was going, but what the hell, maybe it’ll make sense another day, and this all I have for now.

In the draft I’d given it the title ‘Changes‘, but ‘Work in Progress‘ seems as good a title as any.

Sometimes I reflect
on the changes I’ve made in
my external life.
The things and the people
that I’ve left behind,
including: two husbands
three cats (two came back)
five flats and five houses,
three countries,
four counties,
two professions
one novel unpublished,
one novel unfinished.

The things that remain
are those in myself,
the voices that taunt me
for sixty years
the person inside,
the grief and the sadness
that come back to haunt me.

What changes, what stays?
Is there no final answer?
All the layers, the strata,
the sedimentation
that makes up the whole
of the soul that continues
the core of the woman
who can’t see the future
who can’t see the ending,
who has to keep going
who hopes to make progress
and someday, perhaps,
will rest on her laurels
and look at the whole
and see it completed?

Linda Rushby 28 April 2020
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Chaos in the Co-op

I keep thinking I’ll get up first thing and walk to the seafront. Delayed gratification – I know it will make me happier, but I still don’t do it.

Yesterday, I thought: I’ll run out of milk by the end of the day, so I’ll wait till tomorrow, and go to the shops on the way back. Because the lovely sunny mornings are here to stay, right?

I could hear the rain when I woke up. I dozed off again and woke at 7, and got up and dressed ready to go. I’ve been rotating around Co-op, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, it was Co-op week, and I remembered they don’t have self-checkout, but thought, I’ll go there anyway, they might have stuff I can’t get in the other two.

The plan is go-straight-there-and-get-it-done. No exercise, no writing, no breakfast, not even coffee. I started looking for my credit card, it’s not the only one I’ve got, but I get 1% cashback for using it in supermarkets. Looked everywhere – no sign. This is hardly unusual, but still annoying. I know the last place I used it was in Tesco last Tuesday. I checked my online banking and it hasn’t been used since then, so it’s probably still in the house. How desperate am I? Milk’s the main thing, and I’ve got a pint of UHT (for making yoghurt, but also as a backup). That’s ok then, I don’t have to go out after all. Leave it for another day, when I’ve got my card and it’s not raining.

Well in that case, I’ll revert to normal morning routine. Did my half hour tai chi/yoga/meditation and felt loads better. And it had stopped raining. Right then, it’s still only 9 o’clock, off to the Co-op after all.

There was no queue at the shop, but no baskets, just the things with wheels that the baskets are stacked in, and trolleys which require a pound, and I’d only brought my phone, credit card and loyalty card. I looked around for someone to ask, and saw someone using one of the basket holders as a substitute trolley, so thought, I’ll do that then.

I found most things I wanted, including the last bottle of Lea & Perrins but not Marmite. I got to the checkout and got into an altercation with the checkout lady about why I’d got the basket holder.

‘You should have got a basket, or a trolley.’

‘There weren’t any baskets.’

‘They’re just over there.’

‘There weren’t any when I got here.’

‘Well you should have asked.’

I got angry and swore. I knew it was myself I was angry at, not her, so I apologised. Then I tried to swipe my card but it was too much, then I used the wrong pin number because it wasn’t the card I normally use.

‘It’s getting to all of us’ said the checkout lady kindly. But I wanted to tell her: this isn’t who I am. Well, the chaos is, but not the rudeness.   

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Day 27 – Meeeow!!!

No poetry at all today, so here’s one I prepared earlier (last week in fact, same day as the Power Tools).

My cat listens.
She sits upright,
her paws just-so
her tail wrapped around
and looks me right in the eye.

‘It’s okay’ I tell her,
‘Don’t worry,
I’m not talking to you!’

Her eyes narrow.
Perhaps she’s thinking:
‘Silly old bag.
Don’t you realise
I’m just a cat?’

Linda Rushby 27 April 2020
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Quirky

Every post on this blog (except the individual poems) is exactly 500 words long. I started that when I first set it up – which I believe was two years ago (I’ll have to check). I keep an eye on the word count as I go, but sometimes when I get to the last sentence I have to go back and edit a bit to get the final total just right.

It’s quirky, I know, but it stops me going off into long rambling discourses which take half the day to complete. And… I want to be quirky. It satisfies my sense of myself. Also, I don’t go back and read what I wrote previously. While I’m in the process of writing, I prefer not to check what I’ve said, or look up information that would be easy to find (like when I started this blog or the name of that Bob Dylan song – it’s ‘When the Deal Goes Down’, if you’re interested). Quirky, right?

I suppose that’s because I don’t take this writing malarkey seriously, and that’s largely because I really don’t expect anyone to read it – however much I paste it on Facebook and Twitter, I can’t force it down people’s throats. And that gives me a lot of freedom to write what I want, how I want.

About the same time I started blogging, in autumn 2005, I also started a creative writing course, which ran on Monday mornings for two ten week terms a year. I did it for four years, and in about the second or third year the subject of blogging came up, in the context of the relationship between truth, fiction, factual writing, literary truth etc (at that time ‘fake news’ had not been invented, though there was already a lot of it flying about, and if it had been, it would certainly have been on the syllabus). The tutor said that blogs were fundamentally dishonest because online you can claim to be anyone, with the implication that all bloggers contrive to make themselves sound more interesting than they actually are. I argued that on the contrary, I am more open and honest about myself, my failings and insecurities on my blog than anywhere else, because of the freedom inherent in writing rather than speech (which requires direct social interaction, with a listener who may respond in any number of ways – actually, I think that might be a good topic for another time.)

Quickly glancing at the word count, I realise that I need to wrap things up, and I still haven’t got to the point I was thinking of when I sat down, which is this: yesterday I know I ended with two rhetorical questions, on the lines of: should I go for a walk or should I do housework? In case anyone thought these were genuine questions, the answer is that I did neither (though I did start cutting the hedge). But now I think I’ll have to leave that hanging again…

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Day 26 – A Close Shave

I was going to write something serious today, but this happened:

There are jobs I don’t mind doing,
and some I can’t be bothered.
I’m an independent woman
but I’ll take help when it’s offered.

Now in these troubled days, we all
must help our blighted nation,
and I wouldn’t put my friends at risk
in times of isolation.

So I thought I’d cut my hedge alone
to prove that I am able
and this is how much I got done
before I cut the cable.

Linda Rushby 26 April 2020
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Avoidance

I sat on the edge of my bed earlier and said, out loud: ‘I love you. Don’t do this to yourself’. At the time it didn’t make any difference, as I knew it wouldn’t. But thinking back on it now, and writing it down, it seems significant that even when I was trying to encourage myself, it was framed as a prohibition and inherent criticism.

In my head all this feels entangled with a kind of grief, and the stages of grief (which I’ve heard about so many times, but have only a hazy perception of now and am probably taking out of context). As I recollect there are four main ones: denial, anger, depression and acceptance. I feel as though my whole life (not just in lockdown) is a cycle of the first three, without ever reaching the final stage – or at least, only in a partial way. What feels like happiness to me is largely denial, avoidance, coping, filling life with distractions and temporary pleasures. Bob Dylan has a wonderful phrase for this, I think it’s: ‘transient joys’, but I’m not sure of that, or even what song it’s from. Maybe if I can let it run in my head for a few minutes I can pin it down. Aaagh, no, I’ll have to look it up and I’m not doing that now! There I go, getting distracted again, when what I was really thinking as I wrote that was – maybe that’s true of most of us? That the pleasures we seek out from whatever sources: work, play, art, creativity, writing, reading, entertainment, sex, sport, nature, food, drink and other addictions, maybe even the company of other people – are ways of burying existential sadness? Well, maybe that’s not everybody, but perhaps more people than would admit to it.

But for years I’ve been saying/thinking that all the activities with which I normally fill my life, (swimming, yoga, tai chi, writers’ groups, choir etc) are ways of forcing myself to go out, to be with people, and that I have to bully myself into doing them. At the start of the lockdown I speculated on how I would cope without them. The answer initially was that I was quite happy to have an excuse not to go out – I sit in the garden, I do my 30 minutes exercise/meditation in the mornings, I write, interact on social media, listen to the radio, crochet, etc. I don’t even take advantage of the ‘daily outdoor exercise’ we’re supposedly allowed. I go to the shop once a week when I run out of milk and that’s it.

So why don’t I make a flask of coffee and walk to the seafront, instead of sitting here moaning? Why don’t I at least get off my backside and do some housework?

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Day 25 – Reality Check

Not feeling poetic
or even writerly.
Out of touch
with reality.

Starting to wonder
what is this reality
we thought was so real?

And maybe one day
we’ll reach that reality
that’s really real,
and what happens then?

Linda Rushby 25 April 2020

Posted something on another blog this morning, and thought i would be able to share it on here, but apparently not.

And I couldn’t really think of a poem, so sorry about that.

https://southseastorytellers.news.blog/2020/04/25/treasure-trove/amp/

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Day 24 – Dark of the Moon

I woke.
It was dark.

I thought I would get up
and walk to the sunrise.
I stayed in my bed
and listened to the radio.

We all skate on the surface.
We walk on the knife edge.

Don’t look down,
don’t look back.
Shit happens,
keep smiling.
See the bright side.
half-full.
Stop thinking.
Stop doing.

You’ll never do enough.
You’ll never be
good enough.
You’re half full,
half empty.

Sun rises,
sun sets.
Moon wanes,
moon returns.
Spring rolls
into summer.

This is all there is.
Don’t fall off the edge,
Don’t shatter the glass.

Linda Rushby 24 April 2020

Now the words are coming and I can’t stop them – however banal, however dark. Why don’t I just ignore them? Why do I need to write them out? What happens if I don’t? I’m sure I’ve written about this before, somewhere back in the past, in the morass of words I’ve written and then never read again. Do all those unwritten words fester somewhere in the back of my mind? Things that go rotten do one of two things: they infect what’s around them and spread the rot, or they make compost for other things to grow in. What about my thoughts, my words? Which way do they go? Maybe both – but which predominates? They don’t seem to have borne much fruit so far.

Part of me thinks that writing them out helps in a way, it’s therapeutic, it helps to defuse those thoughts – maybe (but they still come back). There might be some value in writing them. But then, what about the next step, is there any point in trying to share them? What is that compulsion that makes me think it’s a good idea? Who reads them, and who of those really hears them, who responds, who finds them interesting, who is repelled by them, who ignores them and moves on? Anybody?

I want to be clear that none of this is directly related to the current situation. They’re just thoughts that come to me even in the best of times (and anyway, as I’ve said, these last few weeks of inactivity have suited me quite well.) Maybe the self-imposed pressure to write poetry has influenced the form that my thoughts are taking in terms of presenting themselves in lines and stanzas, I’m not sure – and the chain of connections from thinking that way, to writing them out, to blogging about them, and so on. Maybe.

Things have happened in the wrong order today. If I’d got up when I woke, at 4.30, how much would I have done already? At least, I would have had breakfast and gone for a walk to the sea. At 5.30 I checked the time for sunrise, and found it was 5.50, so only twenty minutes to get up, dress, make a flask of coffee and get there. I stayed in bed and listened to a play on podcast. Then got up and wrote. No coffee, shower, cat-feeding, yoga/tai chi, breakfast – just this drivel.

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Day 23 – Where Poems Really Come From

Naked in my bathroom,
water dripping from the ends of my hair.
The boiler gurgles as the tank refills
and the words in my head tumble over each other.

‘Write us!’ they screech.
‘You know you want to!’
I bat them away.

Why can I write nothing solid and finished?
Why do I care for these meddlesome words
which cluster around me like hungry gnats?

‘Write!’ say my friends.
‘You know you want to!
We know you can do it!
We all want to read it!’

So I write and I write,
but how can I judge it?
The things that I write are just worms in my mind
eating their way through my head to the surface
until they emerge at the awkwardest moments.

So what do I do?
Grab a towel and a coffee,
sit down at the keyboard,
and write the bastards out into daylight.

Linda Rushby 23 April 2020
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Day 22 – Power Tools

After pontificating about poetry in general before I’d had my breakfast, I just came up with two tongue-in-cheek poems one after another while sitting in the garden.

I decided to share this one as today’s contribution and keep the other one in hand for another day!

Power Tools

My neighbour has a chipper –
I think that’s what it is.
It whirs and whines and screeches,
and disturbs my garden bliss.

So many kinds of power tools
that in their sheds must lurk.
When will this hell be over
and they all go back to work?

Linda Rushby 22 April 2020