Solent Green – blog

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Two Days in One (Again)

Wednesday, 05 May 2021

I started writing, but after about 100 words looked up and realised nothing was happening, the last couple of sentences I’d typed weren’t there. I thought I must have accidentally overwritten it, as sometimes happens when I’m not paying attention, then I found that my mouse wasn’t working, tried the touchpad on my keyboard and that wasn’t working, nothing was working, I had no cursor. I waited for a while, then tried alt-del-ctrl and that didn’t do anything either, everything was frozen, so I switched off and started it up again. When I finally got back into Word, what I’d written wasn’t autosaved, so I had to start all over again, even though I didn’t really want to write this morning anyway.

When I got home on Tuesday I called my cat a few times, but she didn’t respond. This isn’t like her, when I’ve been away she’s usually really pleased to see me, but I didn’t worry, thinking she would come out when she was ready. I spent about an hour in the kitchen, very excited to have wifi in there at last – my son installed a booster for me when he was here on Saturday, and I now have wifi in the kitchen and bedrooms, which has been a huge bugbear for me in the four years I’ve been living here. I thought she’d appear, but she didn’t, so I went round everywhere calling her name and looking in her usual hiding places. Got my dinner – and hers – then afterwards went into the front room for my evening telly-watching. Still no cat. About eight o’clock I went all round upstairs again, and in the study (I’d been in there before) I found a little face peeping out nervously from the bottom of a book case hidden in the corner behind piles of junk and stuff.

I need to do something about this room. It is so awful. I just leave it and leave it and let it get worse.

Thursday, 06 May 2021

That’s what I got to yesterday and then gave up. Maybe today I’ll just fill up what’s left. This week I don’t seem able to come up with a full 500 words on any day. The words are there, they always are, but the inner critic keeps batting them away as being too boring or too depressing or whatever.

I got a text from my daughter, asking if I want to go and stay with them after the 17th but before she goes back to work. I told her about losing and finding the cat, and about the mess in the study. She and her sister-in-law want to go away without the kids and husbands for a few days, maybe to the cabin and I have a key now, so I could get the train and she could meet me at the station. Or she might come here and help me sort out the study, then take me back with her. I sent her photos of the mess.

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Bank Holiday

My first Bank Holiday Monday in Southsea, I walked to the seafront and had breakfast sitting on the prom outside Rocksby’s, watching the sea and the boats and the Isle of Wight, the first of many (discounting one previous occasion when I went there for breakfast as a visitor); then walked along the seafront past the castle and the common to the Square Tower, where the annual ‘May Fly’ arts festival was in progress.

This year I’m with my son, daughter-in-law and the ‘boys’ (dogs) at the ‘cabin’ (the name we seem to have settled on as sounding less pretentious than the ‘lodge’) in the Surrey Hills – hopefully another ‘first of many’. I came for a couple of odd days when they first picked up the keys and for my birthday, when things were still in lockdown. Now it’s busier – the swimming pool is open, but for pre-booked sessions for single-cabin-only groups, and yesterday morning I booked a slot and had my first swim since September in Cyprus, all by myself in the empty pool. It was glorious, but the changing rooms aren’t open, so I had to walk back with my clothes on over a wet swimsuit – which was okay, apart from the seat of my jeans, which got soaked, and I hadn’t brought a spare set of bottoms because I’m travelling on the train and had shoved everything into my backpack – including my swimsuit and towel, which my son scoffed at but I really enjoyed that swim. My daughter-in-law kindly lent me a pair of trousers while they dried over the radiator.

It’s close enough for me to easily come over for a day, and I have my own key now so I can come whether or not they’re here. Admittedly it’s a hundred mile round trip, but not a bad one, mostly on the A3.

Tuesday 4 May 2021

I didn’t finish writing yesterday because the others got up and I never got back to it. So I’ll cheat today and just add to what I’ve already written.

There’s not much to say. We went out for a lovely walk across the fields in the sunshine, came back and then the weather changed and it was wild and stormy all afternoon. We played board games, laughed and got grumpy as families do. The wind is still wild now, but it’s not raining.

Going home today. It’s been a flying visit, but a peaceful one. Home today, on the train. Never want to leave, never want to go back. I don’t know how to get round that. I don’t know how to fight off the great waves of hopelessness that well up from time to time. Is there an answer? I’ve been looking for one for so long. Being with people helps sometimes; sometimes it makes it worse. Ditto being on my own, the advantage being not having to consider and deal with the reactions of others.

The wind howls around me, but the sun is still shining.

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May Day, M’Aidez

Well, it’s May Day, how did that happen? How are we already a third of the way through the year?

And another anniversary, and not just of the second day of the move, but a year later, when I got an email from my ex-husband saying that he’d had an offer on the house, which set the wheels in motion towards my finally moving into this house – with all the Stuff from the attic and both cats – but not till another six months later.

On my walk yesterday, I wrote a poem in my notebook while sitting behind the café, but didn’t post it on here, because I had to do the final NPWM as well (I’m tired of that acronym and the alternating shift-key-no-shift-key palaver). I will type it now and see what the word count is, and decide whether I need it to fill out this post or I’ve got enough to say otherwise.

Just the one poem. I mentioned in my therapy session that I came up with four poems on my walk last Saturday. The therapist didn’t respond directly, but later referred back to me casually mentioning it, as though it was nothing much, whereas to her it seemed like it was some kind of achievement. But then, what was it? It was just me going to the trouble of writing down some stuff that came into my head – that’s all my poems ever are, after all. If I’d casually mentioned that I’d hoovered my whole house, or cleaned all the windows, inside and out, now that would be a remarkable achievement.

I can’t repeat this often enough: I don’t know where my writing comes from, I have no control over it (especially poems). It’s all about this torrent of words in my head. That’s how I manage to churn out these 500 words a day – how I even once managed to produce five thousand words in thirty days (and what a massive waste of time that was). I know sometimes I say that I don’t know what to write about, but that’s usually not because there is nothing there but because what is there is stuff I’m either embarrassed to show or something which might cause trouble in some way if I did share it. Sometimes it comes in a kind of rhythm, and then it might be the start of a poem, and it might go on to be a poem.

The Square Peg

You’ll never file my edges off
to make me fit the hole
you planned for me,
however hard you try.

I tried so many years
to mould myself
into the space I thought
I ought to fill.
I always failed, and
took the failure on myself,
and blamed myself for failing
every time.

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

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Anniversary

Six years today since I came to Southsea and picked up the keys for the flat. It was a Thursday, and the sun was shining, I think it was probably a bit warmer than today, but the wind must have been cold, because it always is. I walked out of the flat, five minutes to the sea, through the Rock Gardens, onto the prom, past the pier (which was closed for renovations), along the beach, I might have crossed the road and gone through Canoe Lake Park and into the Rose Garden from the other side, then back out onto the prom again – I’m not quite sure, but I vaguely remember reading the notice about the Cockle Shell Heroes and sitting on a bench for a while, reminiscing about the rose gardens in Prague.

I’m getting a massive sense of déjà vu now, not so much about the actual moving day but because I think I must have written about this every 30th April for the last five years, and I’m sure I’ve read it not that long ago. I stayed overnight on a camp bed in the flat then drove back up to Bedford the next day to collect the rental van and fill it with stuff, then on the day after that I drove down in my car with my ginger cat in a basket on the seat beside me, via Guildford, where I picked up my son, while my daughter and her then partner (now husband) drove down in the van, which had to be parked at the end of the road, because there was no room outside the flat, and the furniture and other stuff carried through the drizzle and up the stairs into the flat.

Every year I feel as though I should mark this date in some way, which I’ve done today by going for a walk, retracing some of the steps of the first day – except that that was really a coincidence because I only thought about it when I was sitting on the bench behind the café drinking coffee from my flask (because the café doesn’t open till nine on week days).

What I did think about when I was walking was how my regular walking route has changed from when I lived in the flat. That first day I walked along the beach to the Coffee Cup and then turned inland, and walked past the cemetery and along the road which passes the end of the road where I live now, past all the shops and then the traffic lights where I turned back towards the sea again. That first summer, my walks were mostly in the opposite direction from where I was today, through the Rock Gardens, past the castle and across Southsea Common towards Portsmouth Harbour. Over the last year, while I haven’t even been going to the swimming pool, I’ve stopped going over that way altogether.

Maybe it’s time to start revisiting some of my old haunts again.

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Bleuuurrrgggh

Hey ho, switched on the computer and it took me four attempts to realise that the reason it wasn’t accepting my password was because the caps lock was on. When it occurred to me, I thought: ‘surely there’s usually a message to tell you that’ and then saw that there was one but I hadn’t noticed it. It hadn’t been switched off properly, so when I got on it went straight to Facebook and I started scrolling through that, ‘loving’ friends’ pictures of their cats and laughing at cartoons.

I’ve been to Sainsbury’s already this morning to find that they didn’t have any of the usual cat food (trust me, it’s not worth buying any other kind), and, more seriously that they didn’t have any Marmite. I asked a young man who was restocking the bakery shelves, and he showed me where it should be and said ‘it’s in short supply everywhere isn’t it?’ Is it? I didn’t know, and I’ve completely run out. ‘You could try one of the larger stores, or’ and he lowered his voice confidentially and pointed across the road: ‘Tesco’s!’

I will return to Tesco, but I wasn’t about to go over there with my three bags of shopping from Sainsbury’s, so I came home.

I had a bad night last night – they’re never good, but this was particularly bad, and I don’t know why. I tried listening to two programmes I’d downloaded, and they were both pretty depressing, one the fifth episode of a series, and I’m not sure if it’s the last or just the last I’ve downloaded, and the other the start of the second series of something else. They were oddly similar, both about feisty women in history, one being Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the other a fictional Icelandic woman from some period in history, which come to think of it could be about the same. The actresses sounded very similar, both with Northern English accents (in Eleanor’s case, presumably to emphasise her provincial back ground) – I suppose it could even have been the same actress, but I haven’t checked. I’m not sure I want to listen to any more of either of them, not even in the early hours – as I said, they were both very depressing, although Eleanor was the less sympathetic of the two.

Although I’ve lived with this insomnia all my life, so that it’s part of my life, I still keep wondering if there is any better way of dealing with it. I lay there doing my downwards-counting in my head, and thought: well, soon it should be warm enough to be worth getting up and sitting in another room when I can’t sleep, even though it’s never helped when I’ve tried it before. But I feel so tired when I’m lying there, I don’t have the energy to get out of bed – and that of course carries over to the morning as well, I never want to get up, but I also hate lying awake.

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Writing Poems

I mentioned yesterday that I had some ideas for the last three days of NaPoWriMo, and that I’d already written a poem for today, but I wasn’t entirely happy with it. Later, I found something that I’d written in my notebook previously and forgotten about, which was starting on the same theme, but hadn’t developed very far. I compared it with the other one and took some bits from both to make something more complete, which is what I’ve shared. But I also thought I’d share the (semi) ‘complete’ poem on here so anyone who wants to can compare and contrast (and also it lets me off the hook for writing a full 500 words today).

Look back along the path that led you here,
the threads that came together in this place.
Though fire, water, earth and air you travelled,
to make your pilgrimage and find your fate.

But don’t be fooled in thinking this was ‘destiny’;
there is no mighty hand that guides your way.
Your thoughts and choices led you down the path you took:
to try, to give up, carry on or stay.

If you look for the path to lead you forward,
you’ll find no clarity from this point on,
each day is empty, open, there’s no map to read,
so take your chances as you’ve always done.

Linda Rushby 26 April 2021

You’ll notice that the style is quite different from the other poems in the sequence, with longer, more regular (iambic pentameter) lines; regular four line stanzas and a partial rhyming scheme of ‘a-b-c-b’. Now, I don’t want to imply any disrespect to rhyming poetry, I enjoy reading it and sometimes I wish I could write it, but whenever it starts to creep in, it bothers me, because I feel obliged to try and continue with it, and then I find myself choosing words just because they fit into a rhyme scheme, and then having to twist the lines to get them to work, and I’m almost never happy with the results.

I’ve been picked up on this in the past, and it always makes me defensive, feeling that I have to justify why I write the way I do, when in truth I don’t really know how it happens at all – I just write whatever comes into my head, then I tweak it a bit till I’m satisfied it’s as good as I can make it. I’ve been asked why I’ve written something as a poem rather than ‘something else’, but I’m never sure what ‘else’ my poems could be – they don’t usually tell stories and they’re too short and specific for essays, they just are what they are.

In the end, all I can say is – I write them because that’s what comes into my head. I must have written hundreds down the years that have never been read by anyone else (and failed to write hundreds more) but that doesn’t matter. I don’t write to be read, necessarily, I just write to write.

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Keeping On (or not)

Just done my poem for today, and I think I know what I’m doing for the final three days, though I’m not happy with the one for tomorrow – but then, I wasn’t happy with the one for today when I woke up, though I had a vague idea, a title and a few lines, it wasn’t until this morning that it fleshed out so it (sort of) made sense. Maybe I can do something with the one I wrote yesterday for tomorrow… or it won’t seem so bad when I read it again.

It has been an interesting challenge, I must say. I didn’t know where it was going to go when I started, but it got me writing and I think it all hangs together surprisingly well, so that it might be worth doing something else with it, but I’m not sure what. In 2018 I did haikus for NaPoWriMo, and I had an idea of producing a hand-made book and I went to a book-binding workshop and bought a book-binding kit (and an online book-binding course), but I’ve never really done anything with it since. I had a title: ‘Month of Fools’, and I wanted to do a lino-print for the cover, but then I completely stalled because the lino-print was so poor, I gave up on lino-printing, book-binding and the whole idea and haven’t touched it since. The lino-printing course was cancelled not long after anyway, and though I have equipment I could use by myself, without the tutor telling me exactly what to do I just can’t get my head around it.

Anyway, if I’m going to do anything these days, I just stick to knitting and crochet, because I can do that without getting too stressed.

Keeping going at something and not getting discouraged or disappointed with the results is the hardest thing for me. I suppose that is one of the themes of my NaPoWriMo (I can’t quite decide if it’s a long poem with 30 stanzas, or a cycle of 30 individual poems, or how to describe it). It’s all very well to write about grasping the flame and letting it burn you again and again, but that’s just a poetic metaphor, and I’m such a coward. I could say to myself: ‘I managed to stick at that, and I’m quite pleased with the result, so why not try something else, like going back to lino printing, or doing this book, or going back to my novel…?’ but, but, but… I’m such a coward. And yesterday, for example, by the time I’d posted the poem, I couldn’t face writing a post for here as well.

None of this is important, I know that. Nothing I do matters, I could not write another word as long as I live, and the world would be no worse off.

Yesterday I went back to the jigsaw puzzle I started in last year’s lockdown and haven’t touched since goodness knows when. I made quite good progress, too.  

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Procrastination

An interesting question came up on the dyspraxia Facebook page, as someone commented that their procrastination had: ‘…gotten (sic) out of control’, especially in relation to washing up. The first person to comment said; ‘You’re punishing yourself, stop it’, and the second asked what they were doing instead; was it something else on their to-do list? (to which the answer was: watching telly). Mine of course would be: knitting, or crochet. Or maybe, as the temperature is now gradually creeping up, sitting in the garden in the sunshine (though not actually doing any gardening).

I say it’s interesting because instinct tells me that my tendency to procrastinate is somehow linked to dyspraxia, but the stern voices in my head say: ‘no, that doesn’t make sense, it’s just because you’re a lazy cow and you’re trying to make excuses by blaming dyspraxia for everything’. The tendency to dither, take too long over things, and get easily distracted is certainly related to dyspraxia, as is the generation of so much chaos in your surroundings that you learn to ignore it and accept it as a fact of life – not to mention feelings of exhaustion and lack of energy to tackle any of it.

I also believe that lockdown has been responsible for encouraging this kind of procrastination. It creates a sense of unlimited time and reduces stress by eliminating the need to leave the house and engage with the world, while also removing the enforced motivator of anticipation that outsiders might come into the house and see what a shithole it is, which is usually a major driver for me to engage with housework.

That said, I’ve been making more of an effort against the washing-up-sitting-in-the-sink phenomenon. In my dim-and-distant days as a Young Mum, I was well known for my inability to sit down and relax with a drink until after the washing up had been dealt with. These days I can’t wait to get out of the kitchen-dining room and retreat to the sofa, my latest project and a couple of episodes of ‘Law and Order’ (my latest retro-catch-up series from twenty years ago, which has intriguing plots and engaging characters without the visceral gore that’s obligatory these days). In the last few months I’ve been struggling to revive that past diligence by at least making an effort to leave pots and pans standing for no longer than one day – last week I even found myself one morning spontaneously cleaning the top of my gas hob while I was waiting for the coffee machine.

The neighbouring house on the side that shares a wall with my kitchen is rented out on short-term lets, so the tenants change quite frequently, and I don’t have much contact with them. The last few mornings I have heard the sound of a plug being inserted in a socket the other side of the wall while I’m having breakfast, and then the drone of a hoover. Every. Single. Day.

Is it me, or is that ‘normal’?

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Gobbledygook

Thursday, 22 April 2021n the Windows logn screen eing part of the same, instead of both yrtnewswf what is ectrum  sf te ends si are somehow at oppentertainmentport’ and enas though .ekt do you remember from the news this wekhenthing in betwSport to entertainment and everr: ayinessage here was a  PC this morningon my…

When I glanced up from typing, the above gobbledygook was on my screen. How it got so mangled I have no idea – clearly in some places I had hit the ‘up arrow’ and taken my cursor – and hence my typing – up to the line above – something that frequently happens when I’m typing without paying attention, often leading to whole lines being overwritten and I have to copy what’s there onto the ‘clipboard’ and carefully go back through ‘undo’ to get back what’s disappeared. If I untangle the mess, I think what I was trying to say was this:

‘On the Windows login screen on my PC this morning there was a message saying: Sport to entertainment and everything in between, what do you remember from the news this week?’ as though ‘sport’ and ‘entertainment’ are somehow at opposite ends of a spectrum of ‘the news’ as opposed to being both at the same end…’ and I was intending to go on to write something about the implication that the genuinely important stuff about what’s happening in the world can somehow be dismissed as less significant  – but I’m not going to go into that now because I’m just amazed at the madness I seem to have unleashed, and would like to make the analogy that that is pretty much what it feels like inside my mind most of the time. (Forgot tpo mentione that somehow I also caused this paragraph to go to double spacing, but I’ve corrected that. ‘to mention’.)

Well.

I have written two poems (one for today, on efor tomorrow – maybe) on my notebook with my black crayon pencil while still in bed. This new technology of discovered is still working find, though no doubt the ‘lead’ will snap soon. ‘one for’ not ‘on efor’ and ‘I’ve’ not ‘of’. It’s interesting to note that writing words that sound vaguely like the one I intended to write seems to be quite a new phenomenon in my wrting/typing’. ‘fine’ not ‘find’. ‘writing’ not ‘wrting’. And so it goes. My typing is becoming, at first glance, almost as illegible as my handwriting. I now the right words perfectly well, they just come out wrong. ‘know’, not ‘now’ – and I promise you I am not doing this deliberately, just not making the corrections when I notice them. And Word spell checker just automatically corrected ‘diong’ to doing’ – but not that time. Interesting.

Well, that has taken up most of 500 words this morning, writing about my terrible typing. I once wrote about this before and read it out at a writers group and everyone laughed. It’s mortying when everyone supposedly laughing ‘with’ you fails to notice you’re not laughing. Mortifying.

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Catflap Incident

Tuesday again – tai chi again. I’m more relaxed about it this morning.

I got up early – 6:15 – because my cat came and got me. That’s not unusual, mostly I ignore her but today I got up because I needed a pee, and as soon as I got out of bed she ran in front of me to the top of the stairs. When I came out of the toilet, I looked over the banister, and there she still was, half way down the stairs, looking up at me meaningfully. So I followed her downstairs, went into the kitchen and opened the back door for her to go out.

This follows a strange incident yesterday evening. I was sitting in the front room crocheting and watching telly, she had gone out into the hall, and suddenly I heard a banging noise as of something being knocked over, and an almighty feline shriek. It sounded as though it was inside the house, so all I could think was that one of the neighbouring cats had got in while the back door was open earlier, they’d found one another and there’d been an altercation. I walked round the house calling her name quietly, and expecting a large ball of fur to fly past me, but I couldn’t find any cats or other signs of destruction. I came back downstairs and opened the side door, and then found her sitting outside, the other side of the catflap.

You may know that I had this catflap put into the ‘side’ door – so called (by me) not because it is actually on the side of the house but to differentiate it from the ‘back’ door which is at the end of the kitchen. The ‘side’ door is at the end of the hall which runs from the front door to the end of the front half of the house which is connected directly to the next house in the terrace. There is then another bit of hall going to the left, and the back part of the house, consisting of the kitchen/dining room downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs, is attached to the house on the other side, but on the side where the door is, there’s a narrow space – same width as the door – between my kitchen, and a wall, behind which is an equivalent space and the neighbour’s kitchen. (This is where – I suspect – my neighbours were sneaking out and smoking dope in the lockdown last summer, but that’s another story.)

She has never to my knowledge used this catflap, but I think that must be what happened last night. I guessed the shriek was because there’s a drop of a couple of feet on the other side. When it was installed, I built a ramp for her with bricks and a plank, but when my son was carrying bits of shed from the hall into the garden, I moved it out of the way.

I don’t suppose she’ll ever try that again.