Solent Green – blog

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NaPoWriMo Time Again

My heart yearns for
the Dream Place,
the Crystal Space…

Linda Rushby 5 April 2021

I was in poetic mood earlier, in my yoga/tai chi/meditation time, with one of those moments of understanding who I am, and what I should be doing, which has faded somewhat now, as they always do, before I was able to get to the computer and capture what needed to be caught, but I will try.

This is the third year I’ve attempted NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month). I started in 2018, with haikus, because that seemed like the easy way (although I know that writing a good haiku is not something to be flippant about). I was so happy with the results that I had an idea about creating a hand-made book – I’d been on a bookbinding course and bought a bookbinding kit, and was going to lino print an image for the cover – but the only image I came up with was a forlorn daffodil, and I got frustrated and disheartened and never even opened the parcel with the bookbinding kit and gave up before I got started. Maybe one day.

The next year I didn’t even attempt the poetry challenge, but then last year I did, with no plan or ideas, I managed to turn out something for every day of the month, a motley collection of uneven quality. I have always said that poems come to me or they don’t, and I can’t make them happen, but one of my favourites, ‘Beachcomber’, came out of a challenge I was set to write a poem a day for five days on Facebook in summer 2015, the first summer after I moved to Southsea.

This year I wasn’t going to bother, but on the first day I wrote a very short poem, and posted it, not here but on another blog to which I sometimes contribute. That poem, entitled ‘Web’, is about the idea of a web of connections, not the electronic ‘world wide web’ so much as an older and more general sense of interactions between events, actions and people, which relates to my interest in systems thinking, the basis of my PhD, and the idea of ‘Crystal Space’ which I have played with for some years. Writing it out gave me the idea of pulling one of the threads in a web and seeing where it led – would it just attract the attention of some monstrous spider, or might it take me somewhere interesting? So the next poem was about Ariadne’s thread, and each day since some image or reference from the day before has triggered the next poem.

So far it seems to have led me back into my lifelong interest in Greek mythology, which is of course a very fertile seam for poetry. Each day’s poem is very short, but by the second day I had the idea that they might build into something interesting. On the other hand, I might just give up one day, but how will I know unless I try?

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Ducks in a Row

I am not two different people, or three or four, or however many I might have said at different times. Just want to make that clear. I am not Linda H OR Linda R; or Belinda, Melinda, Cassandra, Cat by Herself; I am both, all of them, or possibly even none, but in the end I am still me. When I switched on my PC this morning, Microsoft welcomed me as Linda H, while my laptop knows me as Linda R, but it’s just a matter of context. To family, Facebook, Twitter, close friends and acquaintances I’ve met since I moved to Southsea, I am R, but to most of officialdom (Portsmouth City Council, HMRC, DWP, DVLA, banks etc) and most people I know from Bedford days, I am still H – there is even a very small number of people I’m still in touch with who knew me from when I was ‘R’ before, forty years ago now.

I didn’t set out to write about my identity today, in fact I was intending to pull together some threads which I was thinking and writing about last week – so here goes. I was talking about card-making, and all the different items and processes involved in it that make it so unsuitable for anyone with dyspraxia and hence so stressful. Every time, I start intending to be more organised and keep a lid on the chaos, but it never works out that way.

But I was thinking about it as a microcosm of my life. There are things that need doing, and I have to think and decide about what’s the best order to do them in, and how I’m going to do them, and what I need to do them with, and by the time I’ve made a decision on any of those things, I’ve forgotten what I decided about the previous ones, and so I go round and round in circles.

I have spent a lifetime thinking that there are answers to these questions and that I should be able to get on top of them, that if I try just a bit harder I can make everything fall into place, and my life will become so much easier. Now I’m coming to accept that all the planning and to-do lists in the world are never going to change me, or change the way things are. There’s a saying going the rounds on Facebook (is ‘meme’ the correct word for that sort of thing?) which I’ve seen a couple of times: ‘Not only are my ducks not all in a row, I don’t even know where my ducks are!’ I’m not even sure whether I’ve got any ducks in the first place.

I sit in my chaos thinking about how to resolve it, and never manage to break out of those circles. Except sometimes I get an idea about one specific thing – like my google drive – and keep looking for an answer, however many times I fall down

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Problems of Affluence

Just been to Sainsbury’s to buy hot cross buns, because I realised last night I hadn’t got any – haven’t had any this year – and today is the day when it’s okay to have them for breakfast. I wanted those, and little prawns to go in my salmon en croute for dinner (but they only had king prawns, which won’t work, so it’ll be salmon, mushrooms and parsley en croute), and eggs and smoked salmon for breakfast one day over the weekend, and maple syrup to have with waffles another day, and chocolate for Sunday because I realised I hadn’t had any since I finished the Christmas leftovers – which has been quite a few weeks, but not necessarily the whole of Lent – actually, forget I said that, because I just remembered I had some chocolate truffles for Mother’s Day.

None of that would have been possible in my childhood, because the shops would have been shut on Good Friday, as well as Easter Monday and, of course, Easter Sunday, just like every other Sunday. (Actually, I have a feeling they might still be shut on Easter Sunday, but not sure about that.) I remember one year, when I must have been well into my teens, because I went into town on my own on Easter Saturday, and my Mum had asked me to pick up a loaf of bread, and everywhere I went was sold out, from which I learned the lesson to make sure you’ve got plenty of bread for Easter weekend, until the world moved on and made that obsolete. I was quite annoyed when the shops started opening on Good Friday, even though I wasn’t a Christian, because what’s the point of traditions if you’re going to ignore the fundamentals in that way?

Now I’m more relaxed, and anyway, I make my own bread. But when I was shopping earlier in the week, and planning today’s dinner, I bought cream for the sauce filling and was thinking what else I needed for today (except the hot cross buns, obviously) and it struck me – I always have fish on Good Friday, but making it so fancy is definitely observing the letter not the spirit of the tradition – salmon en croute is not exactly fasting. On the other hand, I guess it’s pretty tame compared with what the Renaissance popes might have had, so why should I worry?

That’s when I started thinking about Sunday as well, and chocolate, and my birthday, which is next week – the second one I’ve had in lockdown. Last year I didn’t plan anything special, but when the day came I went to Tesco and bought a cake and a bottle of prosecco, then ordered a Chinese takeaway for dinner. Tomorrow is my takeaway day (alternate Saturdays), but the question is, do I skip it this week and leave it till my birthday? Hadn’t thought about that. Seems daft to have two within a week of each other. Decisions, decisions – the problems of affluence

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Crafting Chaos

Yesterday I started off with one topic but didn’t finish it before I moved on to something else – okay, you could say that I never finish anything, and that’s true, but I didn’t really say what I wanted to say.

I thought I had a great start going, I’d been thinking it in my head a couple of previous days but then discovered I had other stuff to say when I got onto the keyboard. That’s how it works. I can’t remember what I said that was so good, because once it’s written it goes, and that’s how it works too. I could open yesterday’s file and read it back but I don’t usually do that.

This coffee is weak. I only drink decaff, but that’s not the issue, it’s the flavour. It’s disappointing. I must have misjudged the amount of grounds I put in the machine. It was getting down to the bottom of the tin.

This is my mind, and the way it works all the time. That’s what I wanted to write about, about how exhausting it is to bounce around inside my head like this all the time and not have anything to show for it. I do nothing, I achieve nothing, but I’m not resting, not relaxing.

I sat and stared at all the mess on my kitchen table, trying to work out how to sort it all out. Some things have to be done before other things can be done (that’s also true of the process of card making, which I also mentioned yesterday – now I’m beginning to remember). I have to sort out in my head which is the best order to do it in and what I need to do first. There are tools, like the scissors, tweezers and the pokey tool (apparently that’s its official title), they all go in one of the small drawers, which are somewhere in the mix, but should I do those first? There are piles of paper, card, sticky-back paper, stamps, cutting dies; packets for the stamps to be put away in; packets for the dies, which come in sets; packets containing dies or stamps which I got out but didn’t use; ink pads; plastic wallets containing scraps of paper; scraps of paper left over from cutting, some of which can go into those plastic wallets but some which should probably just go in the bin; bits of backing from used sticky-back paper; plates from the rolling machine; envelopes; finished cards; the machine itself; two guillotines; the cutting mat; the craft knives…every time I think I’ve finished the list, I remember something else.

It makes sense to put the small things together in piles eg one of dies, one of stamps… but there isn’t any space left on the table, so things spread further around the kitchen. The stamps and dies from a specific set can be collected together and put into their packet, if I can find the packet, which is somewhere on the table…  

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Making Stuff

If you should happen to see me sitting and apparently doing nothing, I can pretty much guarantee that I won’t be ‘resting’. My mind will still be whirling around, jumping from one thought to the next and doubling back on itself without ever reaching any conclusions. I might be re-running an ancient conversation in my head, thinking of what I could have said differently to prove my point irrefutably, or composing a poem or a blog post, but most likely I will be thinking about what I should be doing instead of sitting there and thinking. This was brought home to me yesterday when I was facing the state of my kitchen table in the wake of a week spent (intermittently) making two birthday cards.

The process of making cards, while both creative and fun, is also quite stressful, and the clearing up afterwards even more so. It involves a lot of processes, with lots of bits of equipment and materials, some of them very small, others which are messy (glue and ink), and great potential for things getting lost, spilt, sticking to each other, hiding behind each other etc. As well as that, the creative process itself, the design of the thing, from sitting down with a mental connection such as: ‘Laura – tea and cakes’, ‘Chris – fishing’, ‘Simon- robots and/or dinosaurs’ (my 34 year-old son, by he way, though it could equally be my 5 year-old grandson), assembly of any materials relevant to that topic and trying to come up with something significantly different from last year’s effort is quite taxing in and of itself. Because I’m making them to give to other people – this has really only just occurred to me – it’s a lot more stressful than starting a jumper or blanket or whatever in knitting or crochet, when I know that it doesn’t matter what a pig’s ear I make of it, because no one has to see it but me.

Now, that is an interesting though. Making cards always implies the intention of creating something to give to someone else. Perhaps I should spend some time on using stamps, cutting dies and paper just for the fun of the process without producing anything which might be seen and/or judged by anyone else? When I started doing this craft, I was going to classes and workshops, where I was just making for the sake of it – I have stacks of cards made at those events hidden away in the cupboard, which I wouldn’t dream of giving to anyone else.

This is not what I started to write about – but I think it is a valuable insight, and it applies to lots of things I do – including writing this blog. I can do it because I know it is just for myself, although theoretically it could be read by anyone, very few people ever actually do read it, and so it doesn’t matter, there’s no requirement for it to reach a certain standard of quality, it is just itself.

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Life Systems

I haven’t returned to what I was saying about fractals the other day because every time I sat down to write I found other stuff to write about, and anyway, although it seemed very clear to me at the time when I had the initial thought, it had got hazy by the time I was at the keyboard..

I don’t think fractals was such a great metaphor for what I was trying to say anyway, because they are identical at different levels, and what I was talking about isn’t identical, just nested, like Russian dolls (which, come to think of it, are pretty identical), or ‘worlds within worlds’, the way that our conceptions of sub-atomic particles orbiting a nucleus depict them as being like planets around stars. And if that was the metaphor, what was the subject I was trying to describe? I’m even hazier about that but… my thoughts and actions, I think. Does that make any kind of sense? No, I don’t think so either, not logically, but in the analytical part of my brain, I can sort of see it.

It’s forty years now since I started studying systems thinking, in a module from the Open University, which I’d signed up to as a one-off (or so I thought at the time) – I think I was described as an ‘Associate Student’ (something like that), and I was just doing this second-level course, partly out of curiosity and partly as a precursor to doing a third-level course on ‘Systems Modelling’, which I thought would help me with a new role I’d taken on in my job – it didn’t, not directly, but it led me, after two years, to sign up for a degree with the OU which ultimately led me to a PhD and my thwarted attempts at an academic career.

Okay, so now I’m talking about my life, which doesn’t directly get me back to the whole ‘fractal thinking’ thing. Except, in a different way, maybe it does. I look back on my life, and I see it in chunks that overlap and interact with each other – the people, the places, the activities, and the different threads of cause-and-effect that run through them. In my teens and early twenties, I had no ‘plan’ for an academic career, beyond undergraduate level – and that, as I’ve mentioned before, I saw more as a way of getting away from the constrictions of my parents and my home town – and (rather ironically as it turned out) finding a husband and/or career which would set me up for an ‘adult life’ (or whatever conception of that I had at that time). Consequently, as I’ve also mentioned before, I messed up my first degree, and was lucky to get a reasonably good job (but less lucky with my choice of husband – the first one, I mean, not the second).

I still don’t think I’ve answered the question – actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure that I’ve even asked one yet. TBC

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Lost Hour

On a clear, bright morning in spring, it would be good to set out on a new adventure, in search of a new life.

But today is neither clear nor bright, just dull and grey with the sound of the wind between the rooftops. And there are no new adventures in the offing, nor, most likely, any new lives to be had which are substantially different from the present one.

Just to say, that first sentence popped into my head as I sat down at the computer. I know it sounds like the start of something, but I’m buggered if I know what. Except that the first phrase – up to ‘spring’ – has a nice lilt to it, as though it could be the first line of a poem. Quite clichéd though, like all those folk songs that start on the lines of ‘One morning in May…’ but which, come to think of it, descend into tales of lust and seduction (when sung by Steeleye Span), and sometimes betrayal, revenge and horrible death.

Well, that’s got those cheery thoughts out of the way.

I put my bedside clock forward last night at bedtime, and when I woke it said 5:20, which was good because I thought I could get up at my usual time and slip quite easily into the new time frame – but in reality I ended up lying in bed anyway listening to podcasts and not getting up till seven. Then I messed about with changing the central heating clock, which was easier than I expected, but as I’ve been doing it every six months for the last four years I should have got a bit more proficient by now. The thing that still bothers me though is that there are two programmes, one for Monday-to-Friday and one for weekends, and I can’t work out how to get onto the weekend programme to change it. At the moment I have it coming on at 6:30 in the week but not till 7:00 at weekends, it took me a while to realise why it was still cold when I got up on Saturdays and Sundays. The instructions I have are on the inside cover of the little box, small print and hard to see, so I have to take it off the wall and into a well-lit area in order to read them, but even then I can’t find out what I need to know. I can override it by pushing the ‘up’ or ‘down’ buttons to adjust the thermostat, so that’s what I do in the mornings if it feels too chilly, but I would like to sort it out.

Other than that – and something falling through the basket of the dishwasher and jamming the rotating arm so that everything which should have come out clean is covered with crud which has baked on during the drying part of the cycle – there aren’t enough words left to say anything else – except I had to unravel my jumper again yesterday.

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Life-Writing, Fractals and Plasterers’ Vans

I’ve been listening to Maya Angelou’s autobiographies, which have been serialised on BBC Sounds, each volume in five fifteen minute episodes. I’ve just played the first episode of a new volume, I think it’s the fifth, and I’ve worked out she is about thirty when it starts.  

I’m not going to say any more about it, and obviously I’m not in any way comparing myself to her in terms of either writing skill or inherent interest of the story, but it did set me thinking about the issues of writing about one’s own life. This is of course because I’m psyching myself up to go back to working on The Long Way Back (when I’ve finished with my current editing job, and if I don’t get caught up in anything else). Maybe when the cafés open again, and I can take my notebook style laptop (bought in late 2019 to encourage myself to go out and do just that, hah! What great timing that was!)

The thing about writing about your own life is the clash between the time it takes to write about it and the time it takes to live it- something I remember writing about at the time when I was travelling, and berating myself for not spending enough time writing. Time has this trick of passing no matter what your intentions or what you actually do (or don’t do) with it. And how do you ever stop? How do you write some kind of conclusion? You make a decision, you find a way to tie up the loose ends which are still dangling from the narrative, but if you don’t jump on it and get it done (and I am clearly not a jump-on-it-and-get-it-done kind of person), events overtake you, and how do you account for them?

I just got distracted by a van parked across the road, with the front passenger door open and covering part of the company name, so that it looks like: ‘X&Y PUG limited’ and I’ve been waiting for someone to close the door so I can see what it really is – I keep thinking ‘Pugh’ except that I can see there’s no ‘h’ on the end and there are some letters covered up, so that makes no sense. But when the full name’s revealed, it’s ‘X&Y PLASTERING’, my eyes had just conflated the beginning of the L with the end of the N to make U. How boring.

I intended to carry on what I was writing about yesterday, and not get distracted into life-writing and plasterers’ vans. I couldn’t see the connection between the former and the ideas of granularity and fractals that were rattling around my brain, but then I realised there was a connection. Writing about your own life is like having a hypothetical map of the world on a scale of 1:1 – it covers the whole world. If the grains are fine enough, doesn’t it appear continuous? So how to structure it into a narrative? TBC…

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Pinball

My new glasses had been missing for over twenty-four hours. Five minutes before my Skype therapy session, I picked up a glasses case from the bookcase in the hall, which I knew I’d picked up in a previous search, but at that time I shook it and thought it was empty, this time I opened it and there they were.

I went into the front room to set up my laptop for the Skype session, for which I wore my reading glasses, but I knew I needed the varifocals for the session proper. When Skype was open, I took off my readers to put the other ones on. They weren’t on the sofa next to me, they weren’t on the bookcase. I went back into the hall, just to make sure I had actually picked them up and brought them into the front room. I had walked maybe four metres up the hall and into the front room with them. I went back into the front room and checked the sofa again. Sitting on the sofa, I glanced round and saw a black glasses case on the rosewood table, just in my eyeline. Was that it? I walked over and picked it up and opened it – yes, there they were. I must have put them down on the table (amongst all the other junk, including another glasses case) as I walked past it en route to the sofa and the laptop. From start to finish, this took less than five minutes, but I had no recollection of where I’d put it down because things like that don’t register in my head.

Now, you’re probably thinking: ‘Oh, that happens to me all the time!’ or ‘We all have days like that!’ but that is not the point. My entire life revolves around things like this happening, so frequently that I couldn’t possibly count how many times a day (and I’d forget to anyway). Why am I focussing on it this morning? Because it’s symbolic.

I am thinking about fractals and granularity. Incidents like this happen at a microscopic level, but if I zoom in or out on my life, I can see them happening in different ways, at different granularities, over different time periods. They bounce around my head and it’s impossible to impose any structure over them, or to focus on more than one at a time, or to string them together into any kind of rational order. I have been card-making all week and that is all about tiny things and tiny actions, but what order do I need to do them in, and where are the things I need, and now I’ve found this, where did I put that which I had in my hand only minutes ago?

My therapist says: ‘that’s because you’re multi-tasking’ but with dyspraxia ‘multi-tasking’ is impossible, because you can only focus on one thing at a time and you lose track of everything else, and so you constantly bounce around like a pinball.

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Spring Thoughts

Sun shining again this morning. There’s something sneakily deceptive about the tail end of winter and start of spring because, although it might be sunny, it’s not actually warm enough to throw off coats and jumpers, until that day when you find yourself walking down the street in your winter coat and notice that other people are out with bare arms and legs (scrub the latter because these days there are some English blokes who will go out in shorts at any time of year – very different from how it was in my childhood). Oh look, the grammar checker wants me to change ‘bare’ to ‘bear’ in that previous sentence – must be thinking about the US Constitution (or is it the Bill of Rights?) Either that, or it’s about men walking around with fat arms covered in dense fur, like bears – that’s an image that’s now lodged into my brain and won’t go away in a hurry. The explanation given is: ‘possible word choice error’ – nope, sorry mister grammar checker, I said exactly what I intended to say, and I’m right and you’re wrong, as usual.

The coming of spring should be a source of joy, so why am I so grumpy? Partly because of the shambles in the garden, I guess – not that I’m ungrateful for my snazzy new shed, but it’s brought home to me the amount of work that needs to be done everywhere else. Gardening is one of those things that I have in times past been very enthusiastic about – or enthusiastic about planning, thinking and fantasising about, at least. Like most things which require sustained effort and attention, I rapidly lose interest when the results don’t live up to my hopes – or just generally lose interest when other things take over my time and attention.

A recent discussion on the dyspraxia Facebook page centred on the word ‘dyspraxia’ itself, which has been concocted from Latin or Greek (maybe both) to mean ‘bad at doing’, just as ‘dsylexia’ translates as ‘bad at reading’ or dyscalculia ‘bad at arithmetic’. (BTW, I did pick on the fact that I mistyped ‘dyslexia’, but left it because it amused me.) To me, ‘bad at doing’ sums up everything perfectly, but some contributors to the discussion found it excessively negative, and were arguing for the use of the term preferred in the US, which is ‘Developmental Co-ordination Disorder’, or DCD. I don’t like this at all, and not just because it’s American. ‘Developmental’ makes it sound as though it’s something that occurs in the developing child, and hence the implication is that you can ‘grow out of it’, which I can confirm is a long way from the truth. Then ‘Co-ordination’ puts the stress on the physical effects on gross motor skills, reminiscent of the old term: ‘clumsy child syndrome’, whereas the main impacts for me are those on brain functions: working memory, planning, organisation, absorbing and retaining information, time management, lack of concentration etc.

Not to mention, shit at gardening.