Solent Green – blog

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Everything in the Garden…

I’ve already been to the Co-op today. I managed to avoid going all last week, because I stocked up the week before when I was having visitors for the weekend. And by using up supplies of longlife and evaporated milk, and Elmlea (which I’d bought to put on trifle – for my visitors – till I went to the shops again and managed to get real fresh cream); taking dinners from the freezer backlog of all those ‘chef’s surprise’ slow-cooker meals which have been building up; and a take away curry delivery on Saturday, I held out without needing to go until today. Saturday’s dinner in the slow cooker will be belly pork with cannellini beans, celery, red pepper, carrots and maybe sweet potatoes cooked in cider, because too many of the ‘chef’s surprises’ seem to have sauces based on tinned tomatoes, and I fancied a more radical change.

I have been getting discouraged about a lot of things lately – mainly the garden. My Facebook memories keep showing all the lovely things which were in flower at this time last year. Someone said to me the other day that my garden is ‘blooming’, but he was judging it from Facebook, where I have posted pictures of every single flower I’ve seen so far – sometimes several pictures of the same one, over a number of days, as I’m still trying to post a photo every day. The actual total of flowers so far has been: one yellow and three white daffodils on the forecourt, and in the back garden one blue hyacinth and a handful of mini daffodils; two hellebores (one single and, more recently, one double flower), a few blossoms on the rosemary which were only visible if you looked very carefully and a couple of yellow celandines under the camellia (which I only just remembered). The rest is a desert of weeds, rotting planks and general junk currently in transit between the sheds. Is this disaster down to the hot, dry summer last year, or a total lack of interest and attention? I assume most likely a combination of the two.

It’s the curse of social media. However honest I try to be about my general worthlessness and self loathing, it seems that people want to keep seeing me in a more positive light. Which is very frustrating – but on the other hand, if they could see me more clearly, they wouldn’t want to be my friends anyway. And then I’d feel even worse.

I honestly don’t know how to shake off these feelings, and more and more it seems that there isn’t any escape. The effort required feels overwhelming, but so is the effort to pretend to be what I’m not: brave, positive, upbeat, hopeful, happy etc. Feelings always take control over intentions to change, to find a better way to be.

I almost didn’t write today. Perhaps it would be better if I didn’t throw all this out into the void. But I usually feel better afterwards

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Struggling

I dreamt last night, and remembered it for once. I think I’d moved house – at any rate, I was living in a different house from this, a more modern one, though to me ‘modern’ means any time from the 1970s onwards, I’m not used to anything more ‘modern’ than that. I don’t think I’d been living there very long, and I kept finding things in unexpected places – I know that’s not unusual with my memory, but among them were things I definitely didn’t recognise. The only explanation was that there was someone else in the house, or coming into the house, moving things around and leaving things that weren’t mine – I’m sorry this is very sketchy but my memory for dreams is never very clear. I was trying to explain to somebody – in person or on the phone, I can’t remember – about this sense of another person coming into my house, when I found a young blonde woman with a little girl was there with me, and she seemed to think it was her house, – she wasn’t the person I’d bought it from, but she clearly had a key. I tried to reason with her but she got angry. Then I thought I should call the police and get them to come while she was still there, but I couldn’t find my phone and while I was looking for it I woke up.

I lay in bed for quite a while and got up late. I felt overwhelmed with anger and despair, as I sometimes do in the mornings. I have got a lot of medical stuff to deal with over the next few weeks, I need to make appointments for blood and Covid tests, which I tried to ring up about yesterday (the GP and hospital respectively) but couldn’t get through. And I need to book my car in for its MOT, and started to think: the MOT is due by the 7th, and I have to go to the hospital on the 17th, and need a Covid test within 72 hours, so what if I book the test for the 15th but then find the car fails the MOT, then I would have to take the van, but the drive through testing at the hospital is under cover, so would I be able to take the van? And will the van even start? I need to know this well in advance so I can tell the hospital I’ll need an alternative non-drive through test. All the what-ifs, what-ifs, what-ifs and all the phone calls I need to make to sort it all out hang around me like a lead collar, and this is why I get so angry with myself. I thought I would get better with this stuff as I got older, but I never do.

I know that everyone’s struggling at the moment, but I can’t help feeling as though everyone is now just getting a glimpse of what it feels like to be me.

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Eating Elephants

This is what happened yesterday: it felt as though writing my 500 word post in the morning was the most significant thing I did all day. Some days are just like that. Around midday it got quite sunny, and I went out and pulled a few more bits off the old shed, in the process breaking the chisel for the second time, so that now there isn’t really enough of it left to get behind the planks and lever them off, which is what I’ve been doing up till now. It was an old chisel anyway, which I found in the shed when I was emptying it out, presumably left behind by the previous owner. After it broke I decided that was a sign that I could stop for the day – I’d been there for about an hour, I guess.

I keep picking away at it, not the most efficient way of doing it, I know, but I do as much as I can stand and then leave it in the hope that eventually it will get done (like the bookshelves which have, unsurprisingly, now filled up with clutter in the absence of me tackling them in an organised manner). The front and half a side (of the shed, that is) have now gone, leaving a shell which looks as though any self-respecting storm will blow it away, except that, remarkably for this time of year, we have had no strong winds for the last week. I’d quite like it if the back (left hand side in the photo above) could stay standing as there is no fence behind it, just a small wall, but that’s probably too much to hope for. Eventually, the new shed will go along that boundary, but I need to get rid of the old one first. In the mean time, half of the stuff that came out of it is still in the garden or the kitchen (depending on how hygienic I considered it to be) waiting for the new shed to be moved to its final position, along with the accumulating debris of the old one.

In the afternoon, I made some small progress on the jumper I’ve been knitting (still not sure about the design, which I keep having to re-do), then the yarn cake fell apart (as they tend to do when approaching the end) and descended into an impenetrable tangle, which I spent half the evening trying to sort out till I fell asleep over it on the sofa. I also started on a new crochet pattern for a blanket, which requires working with three cakes at once – what could possibly go wrong with that? The plan is to convert three of the many cakes I bought online last year into a blanket which will be of no use to anyone and shoved somewhere in the spare room if it ever gets completed.

Well, baby steps, hare and tortoise, eating an elephant, etc. And another 500 words bites the dust.

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The Long Way Back

Yesterday was the anniversary of one of my most vividly-remembered days described in ‘Single to Sirkeci’, when I arrived at Port Camargue. Earlier in the week I was remembering Prague, and it all set me thinking about ‘The Long Way Back’, and whether I’m ever going to finish it. I’ve been thinking about it for years – or, more accurately, I’ve been avoiding thinking about it. At first I used to start each year with the resolution that: ‘this is the year I’ll finish and publish it!’, but gradually I got over that, and recently I have been trying to learn to let it go, along with all my other failures.

I spent about six months, from autumn 2017 to spring 2018, trying to make something of it. It started with the ‘rump’ of around forty thousand words describing the return half of the journey from Istanbul back to England, which I’d chopped from the sixth draft of ‘Single to Sirkeci’. Prior to deciding to split the manuscript, I’d spent a couple of years on the herculean task of trying to edit the 200k word first draft down by half, and after brushing off multiple suggestions of chopping it into two books, and stalling at 140k, I gave in to the inevitable.

When I published ‘S2S’ in early 2017, the plan for ‘The Long Way Back’ was to combine the material I had on the return journey with a briefer description of what had happened after my return; my time in Prague; my moving to Southsea; and some reflections on lessons learned from the ‘life journey’ (if I could think of any) – I even wrote an introduction and blurb to that effect, which I must dig out some time when I need a good laugh at the ironies of over-ambition.

Giving myself six months to deal with cancer and chemo, I started in September 2017 to go through blog posts from the time between returning ‘home’ at the start of August 2012, and departing for Prague in May 2013. Rather than the planned précis, I found myself editing a tale of disappointment, depression and yearning, as I struggled to come to terms with life – while, in the present, also struggling to come to terms with moving on from cancer. This resulted in a further fourteen thousand words to add to the forty, and I hadn’t even started on Prague – which, when I went back to it, was also a saga of depression and disappointment, although alleviated in places just by the fact of being in Prague. Then there was the year after, living back with my ex (working title: ‘Madwoman in the Attic’), mystery illness, moving to Southsea – and then what?

For a while I toyed with the idea of turning Prague into a third volume, and spent some time trying to find three–syllable words starting with either ‘B’ or ‘R’ to make a catchy title: ‘Bohemian Something-or-other’ but with no luck.

Then I just stopped. I just stopped writing.

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Desultory Equinox

Yesterday I was thinking about Prague – in fact it has been in my mind on and off for the last few days. Often, when I was there, I used to question why I was there, and what I was doing. If I could have found a compelling reason to stay, I think I would have, but my presence always felt anomalous; I wasn’t a tourist, but nor did I ever become a resident, nor even an ‘ex-pat’, just this invisible woman who slipped around the city with no-one really noticing whether I was there or not – except possibly my landlord, when he made his monthly visits to collect the rent (in cash). In the end, coming back to be near my daughter and granddaughter and make some efforts towards selling the old house and ‘moving on with my life’ had to take priority

Those same questions keep coming up lately: Why am I here? and What am I doing? At least now I have some answers which make sense superficially: I’m just another retiree who’s decided to come and live near the sea, buy a house, make this place my home. After six years, the deeper questions don’t seem quite so compelling – I’m retired, with a comfortable pension, and the sale of a large family home enabled me to buy my little Edwardian mid-terrace outright, so why shouldn’t I be here as much as anywhere else? It’s a lot more congenial than either of the two places where I’ve spent most of my life.

This lockdown has felt harder than the one which started this time last year, but I think I’ve become ‘harder’ too, more settled with being at home on my own – most of the time. But if you asked me – if I ask myself – what I’ve been up to, what I do with my time, I’m hard pushed to come up with an answer that makes any kind of sense. I’ve got my editing job, which I’m doing two chapters at a time as the client sends them to me, and each chapter takes about an hour; I do my half hour of exercise and write my 500 words most days; I listen to the radio; crochet my blanket (which also takes about an hour each day) and mess about with other craft projects in a desultory way. Since I finished the blue fair isle jumper, I’ve picked up another top-down jumper, in different yarn on a bigger needle, which I started and abandoned about six months ago. Because it’s a ‘cake’ style yarn, with long stretches of colours blending into each other, I decided to do a design on the front with different stitches, rather than different yarns, but I’ve tried one idea, pulled it back and tried another, and that isn’t going very well either.

But this is just a temporary setback – isn’t it? Something will happen soon. That’s the way it goes, I’ll break some more bits off the old shed and keep going.

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Vyšehrad

The other evening when I was cooking dinner, Radio 4 Extra was on in the background, playing ‘Soul Music’ – a programme which you can only imagine being made by the BBC. Each episode takes a piece of music which has a ‘powerful emotional impact’, with a handful of speakers talking about it and what it means to them. It is a wonderfully eclectic programme, and the musical pieces come from everywhere: ‘Life on Mars’, ‘Once in a Lifetime’, ‘I Wonder as I Wander’, ‘Sunshine on Leith’ (I’ve never heard of that one), ‘Lean on Me’ and ‘Dock of the Bay’ plucked from a list on the website.

This week it was a classical piece which at first I didn’t recognise and wasn’t paying much attention to, when I heard a voice saying something about a hill which was supposed to be the site of the original castle, rather than the current castle further down the river on the other side, but this was just part of the foundation myth of the city… and it dawned on me that they were talking about Prague. Then it cut to a piece of music which I definitely recognised, but couldn’t have told you the name or composer, and I heard the words: ‘Vltava’ and I knew before I heard it that the site they were talking about was Vyšehrad.

Vyšehrad was one of my favourite walking places when I wanted to avoid the tourist crowds. It was directly across the river Vltava from my flat, something that I only realised when I was there and looking back to my side of the river managed to pick out the funny little church across the road from me. But to get there I had to take one tram to the interchange at Novy Smichov, near the big Tesco, and then change to get across the river bridge, get off and either catch another tram back up the river or walk along that side. Once, not so long ago, I could have told you all the tram numbers, but I don’t remember now.

But I have to tell you first that the music was by Smetana, one of the three great classical Czech composers, the other two being Dvořák and Janáček. Smetana was the only one I’d never heard of before I went to Prague. ‘Vyšehrad’ and ‘Vltava’, I learned from ‘Soul Music’, are two of six ‘symphonic poems’ that make up a patriotic symphonic cycle called ‘Má vlast’ (‘My Fatherland’), inspired by the history, legends and landscapes of Bohemia.

I have seen his grave in the cemetery on Vyšehrad, overlooking the vineyards reaching down the castle mound towards the river. I wrote at least one blog post about it, but on a blog which is now defunct (though I still have the content somewhere). I was walking there on a Sunday afternoon in February, seven years ago, when I read the text from my daughter that brought me home to England by the next Wednesday…

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Floods of Dreams (or Dreaming of Floods)

This morning I fell back to sleep and had a dream and remembered (some of) it.

I was living on my own but not here, in a house I didn’t recognise. A man came to my door, someone I knew from the past, a fellow student when I was doing my PhD, around twenty-five years ago. The last time I saw him must have been in 1998. He had changed, but he didn’t look older so much as smarter. He was wearing a suit, had a tidy hair-cut and was clean shaven, though when I knew him he used to shave his head and had a straggly bear. But I knew it was him because, of course, this was a dream. Sorry, I just read that back and realised I said he had a ‘straggly bear’. I know you realise I meant ‘beard’, but I’m not going to change it because I know you know that, and I like the idea of a straggly bear – and if anyone was going to have one following around, it was him – more likely than being clean shaven with nice hair and wearing a suit, anyway.

I asked him why he had tracked me down and he said: ‘because I remember you were beautiful’, which put me off my stride because I had to think he must be confusing me with someone else.

We were starting to get reacquainted when I realised there was a strange woman with a small child in my room, and I asked her what she thought she was doing in my house, and she was rude as though it was none of my business who was in my own home. Then I went into another room and there were more strangers, and I got really angry with them and told them they had to leave. Then I looked out of the window and realised the land was flooded and my house was the only one still dry, and I felt ashamed of myself for not wanting to take in these poor people. We all went out into my back garden and there was a terrace which was a wide, flat boat, which we all got into and sailed over the countryside. I realised then that we weren’t on the coast but in the Cambridgeshire Fens, where I lived eight years ago before I went to Prague, in a flat at the top of a Victorian flour mill. It was flooded at this time of year when I lived there, but not high enough to come to my fifth-floor windows. Still, I remember making jokes about my plans to move to the seaside (which finally happened two years later,) and saying maybe I should just stay where I was and wait for the seaside to come to me.

I took some photographs of the floods at the time, I thought I couldn’t share them because they’re on my old old laptop, then remembered they were in an old blog post.

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Any Dream Will Do

Yesterday the high temperature in Southsea was 15°C (or 59°F if you live in the USA or the twentieth century). This makes today a doubly exciting day for the weather blanket: a new colour (green) as well as the 17th of the month, which means the beginning of a new row, an extension of the border, and a new colour (lilac) in the border. The green is slightly strange, because there’s a very limited range in the green/blue range of the new yarn I’m using this year, so that will be interesting to see.

I dreamt last night and woke up at around half past six with no recollection of what I’d been dreaming about, just the knowledge that I had been dreaming, and that it might have been quite exciting. I always hope that one day I will dream the perfect plot for a novel (or even short story) and that it will still be just as good in daylight. My unfinished novel was triggered by a dream over thirty years ago, and the (sort of) finished-but-crap one I wrote in the 1970s-90s came, as far as I can remember, from a combination of a dream and a picture of hills in the bedroom of the flat I was living in at the time. Who came over that hill? That was the start, and the answer was: men on horseback, but why were they there? It took me twenty years to finish that one.

Why can’t I finish anything? I have – I think – two unfinished cardigans and another one which didn’t fit when I finished it and I was planning to pull it down and re-use the yarn, but I don’t know where it is. There may be more – there’s a square from the back of one that I started and then abandoned – I think I decided the hook was too small, and I started again with a larger hook and different yarn and I did finish that one, then unravelled some of the first one to do the variegated fair isle pattern on the jumper which I finished last week.

This morning, I thought about this and wondered: does it matter, really, that I keep starting things and not finishing them? I picked up one of the unfinished cardis in the bedroom – I’d started one sleeve, but only did a little, and I’m wondering whether it works as a waistcoat, and if so, whether it would be better with a cap sleeve (as it has on one side) or no sleeve (as it has on the other), or should I finish both sleeves? Any way would produce a garment of sorts which I might wear one day, or possibly not.

Why do I start new things? Is it because I get bored easily? Or because starting something new is always a lot more interesting and fun than finishing something else? Because I run out of ideas – that’s what normally happens with writing – or have too many new ones?

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New Glasses

Something remarkable happened today: I got up feeling quite upbeat, almost chipper even, or at least not as down as I usually do. I don’t know why – I didn’t get any more sleep than usual, woke up at my current ‘normal’ time, about half past four (though I had gone to bed a bit earlier, after falling asleep on the sofa in front of the telly). I listened to quite a nice, cheerful play on the radio, which was engaging, if a bit soppy, read some nice posts on Facebook – nothing that made me too angry – (well, except for one woman ‘boasting’ about her and her husband’s new French-made blue UK passports – I refrained from saying that I’m grateful my burgundy EU one doesn’t have to be replaced until 2028 – though sadly it no longer conveys the rights and privileges it used to). But apart from that, nothing too irritating or depressing. And I did some puzzles on my phone, even thought about going to the beach for the sunrise, but decided against it because it was raining, and stayed in bed till after the heating came on at half past six.

I picked up my new glasses yesterday, but I’m still wearing my old readers, which is a bit daft. I think part of me was thinking I’d keep the new ones downstairs and the old ones upstairs, but as my PC is upstairs and I look at my phone a lot in bed, that doesn’t make much sense. I think they need to be consigned to ‘emergency’ status and I’ll have to continue carrying the new ones up and down stairs with me.

The optician was quite surprised when I told her that I wanted reading glasses as well as varifocals, but I just don’t like using varifocals for close work, and especially for screen work. I don’t know, maybe the gradient is in the wrong place, or I wear them in the wrong place, or hold my head at the wrong angle. I get very stressed in eye tests, especially the bit where they keep changing the lenses and asking which one is clearer. It’s like everything else I suppose: what if I say the wrong thing? I’ll end up with the wrong glasses and spend a lot of money and get more headaches and have to keep squinting all the time (specially if I don’t wear the new ones). But I can never trust my own judgement, and I panic when I’m asked to make choices, even with something like that where nobody but me can say whether it’s right or wrong – worse, even, because no one can correct me so I have to live with it.

The shed is up now, but it’s not in the place where I want it – which is where the shell of the old one is still standing. I haven’t put any stuff into the new one yet, except the shelves, because it will need to be moved at some point.

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Soundscape

Today is the day my son and daughter-in-law are coming to put up the new garden shed. They will be staying the night, but it’s all legit, because they are my ‘support bubble’ and even though I haven’t seen them since September, I haven’t had any other visitors to my house since before the current lockdown started, so I’m not breaking any rules. Plus, of course, I’ve had my first vaccination, which I know doesn’t affect the legal requirements, but does make me feel more comfortable about the situation.

Quite what’s going to happen to the weather, I’m not sure. It’s not raining at the moment, in fact it’s lovely and sunny, but the wind is still loud enough to be audible, and the draughts are coming through my double glazing as though it was tissue paper.

Incidentally, I know about listening to the wind in the trees, but what causes the sound in an urban area? I’m looking through the window at a city street with no trees in view, but the wind gusts almost drown out the traffic noise. There are wires across the street, and they are definitely moving, but can they be responsible for that much noise? It seems to come from the wind itself, rather than contact with anything more solid.

Yet another day when I’m looking out the window because I don’t know what to write about.

I just heard the sound of a ship’s warning signal, also known as a ‘fog horn’, although there’s no fog today, so presumably it’s being sounded for something else – surely nobody is sailing a little boat out on the Solent in this wind and getting in the way of the ferries? Fog horns and strong winds are the two signature sounds of Southsea, in my experience. Oh, and gulls – one just flew sideways across my eyeline, but it wasn’t screeching for once. I love the sound of the gulls – and the fog horns too, funnily enough – they remind me that I finally found my heart’s home, but that there’s still a big wild world out there.

I wrote three versions of that last sentence – first it was ‘came’ home, then I changed it to ‘found my home’ to emphasise that I hadn’t ‘come back’ here, because I’d never lived here before almost six years ago (though I had lived further along the coast in Southampton), then ‘found my heart’s home’ because, even though it sounds a bit corny, that’s the sort of connection I feel to where I live now, as though something within me has always yearned to be here.

I think about the time I lived in Prague. I loved the city, but not the life I was living, because I knew that I couldn’t stay forever. On the darkest days, I would step out my door, take the first tram that came along, and always find somewhere beautiful at the end of it.

Here I can take that step and walk to the sea.