Month: June 2020

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Sleeping (or not)

Today I think I will plan on doing nothing – which is not the same as not planning to do anything, which is what I usually do. If it’s warm enough, I will sit in the garden – not sure about that at present, earlier it seemed nice and sunny, but has clouded over again. Yesterday I was cold most of the day – my therapist even commented on it, as she sat in her house on the Isle of Wight in a sleeveless summer top, and I huddled inside my cardigan in my living room. By the bay window, which is west facing, it can get warm in the afternoons, but the light is too bright for a good Skype picture, so I do it sitting on the sofa by the fireplace, at the opposite end of the room.

It’s not freezing cold, obviously, just a subtle discomfort – for example, since I sat down to write this, I’ve taken my cardi off once and just put it back on again. Also when talking (or thinking) about deep emotional stuff, it’s comforting to pull those two sides over at the front, like wrapping myself in a blanket. Maybe that’s why I prefer cardis to pullovers, or maybe it’s just for the convenience of taking them off and on.

Normally I’d say I’m quite insensitive to changes in temperature (or noise, light and other external conditions, but that’s a topic for another day), but this week I’ve been noticing it more than usual, and I’ve started wondering if it’s related to tiredness. I’ve noticed myself a couple of times almost dozing off in the day time, and always in the evening. I also got restless legs syndrome yesterday for the first time in ages.

I try not to get obsessed about sleep (or lack of it) but this morning I thought I’d check my sleep app, which confirmed that I’ve been waking up at half past four every morning (except Wednesday, when I slept in till quarter past five), and not properly getting to sleep till gone midnight. Long term, I know it’s not good for my energy levels, or my moods. I’ve stopped actively ‘watching’ telly after ten in the evening, but I listen to music through it, and wonder if that’s just as bad. In theory, my bedtime is eleven, but I get engrossed in crocheting and keep staying up to hear the next song.

My relationship with sleep has been messed up for most of my life, as you may already know if you’ve known me a long time. It is what it is, and worrying about it doesn’t help.

This morning I listened to the last three episodes of a serial that’s been downloaded on my phone for a long while. Sometimes listening to the radio sends me back to sleep, but not this time.

I need to call the garage today as they haven’t got back to me about the van. Otherwise, I think I’ll have a quiet day.

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Beach Walk

Why bother trying to draw a bus shelter?

Because it’s the only thing I can see that I stand a chance of drawing. This is a new notebook and I forgot it doesn’t have lines, which means it’s intended for drawing.

Sometimes I can draw, mostly it’s just crap. I can always write, but that’s mostly crap too.

Coffee’s too hot. Last time I thought it was because I filled it to the top with hot water, so today I left a gap. But it’s still too hot.

Sitting outside the Beach Café (or I was an hour ago when I wrote in my notebook. Now I’m transcribing at my desk).

In the sea, a boat so small it almost looks like a toy. Maybe it’s further away than it looks. It’s rushing off somewhere, nearly out of sight already.

Silver light on the sea and small patches of sky-blue sky between the clouds. I tried to think of a better way to describe the colour of the sky, but sky-blue is the best I can come up with. Matches the colour of the ink I’m writing with.

Half a dozen litter-pickers in hi-vis jackets carrying white plastic bags just came round the corner.

Coffee still too hot to drink even though I left the top off.

Sun out now and on my face, so I start to unzip my coat – the same coat I was wearing in the winter, but I put it on because it’s got a hood, although the weather app at six o’clock said ‘no precipitation for at least 120 minutes’.

Spent ages (of course) deciding whether to come for a walk, and then getting everything together: coffee; wallet; which bag? Shopping bag or hand bag, or handbag inside shopping bag, or shopping bag inside handbag, which is easiest to carry? How many shopping bags will I need? Notebook and pen, or puzzle book and pencil or both or neither? Life and energy frittered away on logistics and indecision – that’s what it comes down to.

Not so many people today, or perhaps I’m more prepared for them. Not so many wild swimmers, just the regulars. Suddenly the sky is full of gulls, wheeling and intersecting (but silently), then when I look up again it’s empty.

Coffee still hot. Catches in my throat and makes me cough. Hope no one notices. Then I touch my face. Remember all that? Does anyone still follow those guidelines?

Forget ‘A Room of One’s Own’ – I have a whole house. Forget £500 a year – I have more than that a month and then some – but it’s nearly a century since Virgina Woolf wrote about what a woman needs in order to write – necessary but not sufficient conditions.

I watched a TED talk someone sent me – an American woman talking about her abusive childhood, bouts of homelessness and drug dependencies, train-wreck marriages etc and the writing opportunities she pissed away. Guess what? She did it in the end. Guess what? I didn’t.

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Camper Van Woes – (and) an Epic Saga

Yesterday I called the garage because my camper van is due for its MOT on 18th June. They told me I didn’t need to get it done – I said I’d been told the grace period for MOTs stopped at the end of May. He’s going to check and get back to me.

They’ve still got the keys, because I tried to start it in March and couldn’t, so I dropped the keys round for them to look at it. He said yesterday that they’d done that, but they hadn’t told me – not that I could have done anything, because it was in that week when the lockdown started. I normally disconnect the battery when it’s standing over winter, but they put a new one in last autumn and the nut was screwed up too tight for me to turn it.

He’s going to find out about the MOT and call me back today.

I went on the camping club website to find out when the campsites will be opening – I’m assuming July. I checked the two sites I use most often to see if I could book, there was nothing to say I couldn’t, on the booking page it just said ‘click on the calendar’, but I tried that both times and nothing happened – I don’t know if that was because the links weren’t there or just because my wifi is so poor.

What are the campsites going to be like anyway? If I could find somewhere that’s guaranteed to be quiet it would be okay, but I don’t want to go anywhere that’s rammed with people. I haven’t even used my car since it was MOTed in March. I could take the van out for picnics rather than overnight stays, but I’m not sure where. It feels like it might make sense just to leave it in the garage for a while, maybe even SORN it, and get the MOT done when I’m ready to use it again.

I do wonder how I’m going to organise my life when things open up a bit more. It’s a strange world out there. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t make plans at the best of times. Euphoria, existential despair, or what-shall-I-have-for-dinner? (Good question – probably leftover curry and rice.) Zoom tai chi this evening – if the sound works – it didn’t last week, I struggled to follow it, but if that happens again I won’t bother.

Been listening to ‘Tumanbay’ on BBC Sounds, an epic saga set in an imaginary middle-eastern country – 1001 Nights without the magic but with lots of intrigue, spies, deception and violence. Radio 4 is currently broadcasting series 4, but I discovered it in 2017 when series 2 was being broadcast, didn’t think it was my kind of thing at first, but when I went back to series 1 it made more sense and I got hooked. I’ve spent the last two days binge-listening to series1 again, now I’m looking forward to the rest.

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The Ultimate Question

Just heard the national weather forecast which said more sunshine and a degree warmer everywhere today, but it’s pretty grey out there. My handy ‘Minutecast’ says ‘No precipitation for at least 120 minutes’, but ‘mostly cloudy’ and a high of 17 for the rest of the day. I spent some time yesterday sitting outside, but it was pretty chilly.

There I go, talking about the weather, clearly I’ve got nothing of importance to say – no change there. Not even any reflections on mirrors today (ooh, sorry! No I didn’t mean to say that, it was just the word that popped into my head. I wonder if that’s what happens though? That subconsciously my brain made that association and that’s why it gave me that word before I’d had time to think it through properly?)

Woke up thinking I had nothing to say, but then got to thinking (partly inspired by a response to Sunday’s post) about the Why Are We Here question. I’m sure I’ve said all this before – know I have, or at least thought it – but I’ll say it all again (maybe in a different form) because I haven’t got any other ideas today.

Do I believe we’re here for a reason? Yes, and that reason is cause and effect, ie we are here because our parents had sex and conceived us – maybe intentionally, maybe not, maybe they raised us, maybe they didn’t – some of us might have been conceived by IVF so the above is not strictly accurate, but whatever, it’s certainly true that we came from the conjunction of sperm and egg (unless there are any clones or aliens out there that on one’s told me about).

Do I believe we are here for a reason in the sense of having a purpose? No, except insofar as our parents chose to have us for their own reasons – to make them happy (a high risk expectation), complete the set, pass down the family business or whatever, or the evolutionary sense of passing on genes to another generation.

Am I an atheist? Yes. Do I believe in life after death? No. Does that bother me? No, because if I’m dead there won’t be a ‘me’ around to be bothered about it, or to regret the things I have or haven’t done, so why should I care now? Do I feel a responsibility towards my children? Yes, enough to have prevented me from attempting suicide in the past, and to know that I won’t in the future (as long as life is still physically bearable, but I’ve arranged for them to have power of attorney, so in extremis they can make their own decision about whether to keep me alive).

It’s amazing how little I can say in 500 words once I get going. Am I an existentialist? Am I a nihilist? As far as I understand those terms I would say: yes to the former, no to the latter.

Can I see myself ever changing these views? No.

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Mirror, Mirror

I was going to start writing this morning by saying: ‘Suddenly, nothing makes sense.’ But I realised that’s not true, there’s nothing ‘sudden’ about it. Individually, nationally, as a culture, as a species, we’ve been heading for disaster for – how long? God knows – ever, I suppose. Just when it feels as though things can’t get any worse… no, I’m not going to end that sentence.

Most mornings I coax myself out of bed by thinking of some joy-giving activity I can do in the day to come. Yesterday I didn’t find much joy in anything. So how about today?

There’s a mirror on my wardrobe door, facing the window, in front of which is a dressing table, with another mirror, and between the two is my bed. I lay in bed this morning, with my back to the window, looking at an image of the edge of the dressing table mirror and the curtain behind, and trying to work out which side of the mirror and curtain it was. I finally convinced myself that it was the same edge and bit of curtain that appeared a little to the right in the dressing table mirror, but somehow this seemed all wrong. Shouldn’t it be the other side? Of course it shouldn’t, because it was a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, so it ended up the same as the original reflection of the curtain, but it still disturbed me.

I’ve written before about life feeling like a hall of mirrors, or a labyrinth. It’s a bit of a cliche, but this morning for a moment I felt how disorienting that experience can be.

It made me think of crossing the road in a country where they drive on the other side – although reason tells you that the traffic on the side nearest will be coming from the opposite direction to where you’d expect it from, sometimes your brain just can’t handle it, and you have to think really hard about which way you normally look so you can look to the other one. When we first moved back from the US, I was very nervous about driving in Milton Keynes, because on the wide dual carriageways I panicked that I would turn into the wrong lane. It may, of course, just be me – possibly related to dyspraxia, though I don’t usually have problems with telling right from left.

And here I am struggling to write with a cat in front of the computer and a mouse which isn’t working and a brain full of mush. I’m used to working without a mouse on the laptop, but on the PC I’m really struggling – again, it’s something I can usually do without thinking about it. Having to sit with the keyboard on my lap or to one side because the cat’s in the way doesn’t help.

I have to wrap a present, write a card and take a parcel to the Post Office this morning. Those are my tasks.  

Happy Monday.

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Spitting into the Wind

Yesterday there was something in my head that I wanted to say, but I ended up saying something completely different, and thought I would save it for today. Then this morning I couldn’t remember what it was and started thinking on different lines. Then I got an inkling of that thing from yesterday, but not sure now if I want to say either of them.

In fact, I’ve just made the classic mistake of looking something up before continuing, and having wandered into and down the rabbit hole of Google and Wikipedia, I am even more confused. But I have discovered that although for years and years I have believed that Newton’s three laws were the same as the three laws of thermodynamics – they’re not. Bugger. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially if you only know the names and not what they actually mean.

However, on the subject of universal laws…

All living things must die, and everything must change (that’s where the three laws come in, but unfortunately not Newton, so I can’t use the quote: ‘God said let Newton be! And all was light’ which is by Alexander Pope, and the reason I was poking around the rabbit hole in the first place, because I couldn’t remember who said it).  

All living things must die. Everything must change. A flame only burns until it runs out of fuel (that’s what set me thinking about the three laws). And – spoiler alert – anyone who is listening to the current Quandary Phase of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Radio 4 extra should look away now – the Great God’s message to his creation is: ‘We apologise for the inconvenience’.

Any universal truth is fundamentally banal. (Who said that? Me. I don’t claim it to be original, but if I’ve stolen it I don’t know where from.)

It may be argued that true happiness means accepting the impermanence of all things and deciding that life is still worth living. On the other hand, maybe the route to true happiness is to stop thinking about all that bollox, be excellent to each other and party on dudes. Perhaps this is a fundamental difference between two types of people (the Cassandras and the Melindas) – or maybe (more likely, I’d say), there is a spectrum between the two, and we all find our own place.

Which has brought me back to the thing I was thinking about yesterday – or the bit I can remember – that for me, euphoria (Melinda) can’t be separated from existential despair (Cassandra). It’s over thirty years since I first sought professional help to ‘fix’ my psycho-emotional shortcomings, and the paradox is that any attempts to convince me that I’m ‘fine as I am’ miss the point that if I really was ‘fine’, I wouldn’t need to be convinced, I’d already know it. And if I’m not, any amount of wishing away that sense of ‘unfineness’ without accepting it as fundamental part of myself, is spitting into the wind.

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Chilli for Dinner

I had chilli for dinner.
The chilli was good.
I felt like a winner,
I knew that I should.

So I try and I try
and I fall down that hole,
and I cry and I cry
through this crack in my soul.

Linda Rushby 6 June 2020

Those first two lines popped into my head as I was making coffee (probably because the pan I cooked chilli in yesterday was still sitting on the stove). It came to me like a song, so I thought I’d write some more and that’s what happened. That’s what always happens when I write in rhyme. I think it needs some blues guitar behind it – or better still, to be buried in a deep, deep hole and quietly forgotten.

But the coffee’s good, and I’m drinking it from my ‘Enjoy the little things’ mug. (You can see the state of my desk hasn’t improved any). Miko is purring, the sun is shining, a (somewhat chilly) summer’s day lies ahead of me like a blank page from a posy hipster notebook, creamy white and unlined, waiting to be scrawled over and desecrated by a rubbish biro.

I have been trying to unravel why I am who I am, looking for a way to ‘fix’ myself before time runs out and I walk into that wall. How long might that be? Who knows? Could be today, could be another thirty years – neither of those is very likely, but neither is impossible.

I was thinking the other day about the old adage ‘…be careful what you wish for because it might come true…’ and all those cautionary ‘three wishes’ stories where the last wish has to be to undo the first two. I mean, how about being in a beautiful place and saying: ‘I wish I could stay here for the rest of my life’ and then a coconut falls from a tree, lands on your head and kills you instantly, or you try to be cunning and say: ‘I wish I could stay here for at least twenty years’ and you get arrested on a trumped up charge (or for a real crime) or grabbed by some psycho, and are imprisoned for twenty years? (Bugger, I’ve just given away the closest I’ve come to thinking of a plot for a short story in four years.)

Hmm, that’s not what I was going to write about at all. But on the same theme, when I moved in here I decided (and who doesn’t immediately after a big house move?) that this was the house where I’ll spend the rest of my life. Lately I’ve realised that that may not be possible – not because of any particular current concerns, but because who knows what might happen? But I think I’d like this to be the house I will live in for longer than any other in my life, which would be more than eighteen years (the time I lived with my parents) so that’s fifteen more years from now. That seems doable.

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Light Bulb Moment

Back from Tesco and realised that I haven’t written yet and need to do that before breakfast.

In case you’re wondering why shopping day has moved from Tuesday to Friday, last week there were no four pint bottles of semi-skimmed, so I got a six instead, which didn’t run out till yesterday.

Although I wasn’t late waking up (around 5.30), the day seems to have slipped somehow – not helped by me sitting and staring at the screen.

Yesterday I was talking about my parents, and the apparent contradiction between love and tolerance for mankind in general but severe judgement and criticism of individuals, and inability or unwillingness to see things from someone else’s perspective – lack of empathy, I suppose you could call it. Here’s a really trivial example that popped into my head a while back when I was trying to remember my childhood. Like many of the generation who lived through the war, my parents were keen on saving electricity (for financial reasons, not environmental). So at certain times of year, while we were eating our breakfast in semi-gloom, comments would be made about our neighbours in the house behind, on the lines of: ‘They’ve got that light glaring out again! That house is lit up like a Christmas tree! They must be made of money!’ etc. Since I’ve been living in my present house, (where the kitchen is at the back and faces east, but is also quite long, so that the kitchen end can be quite dark, though the sun may be coming into the dining area) I’ve been reminded of those conversations. Yes, the back room of my childhood home faced south, so the neighbours in a comparable house in the next street ate their meals in a room that faced north – but for some reason it was okay for my parents to pass moral judgements on them for having the lights on.

Well, yes, I did say it was very trivial, but I also think it’s quite illuminating (sorry about that!) When it occurred to me, it was a bit of a light-bulb moment (really, I just can’t help myself!) For a start, what gave my Mum and Dad the right to make these moral judgements? And even if that was okay, there was a reason why the neighbours’ experience was different from ours, so weren’t they entitled to behave the way they did?

I often feel that much of the unhappiness in my life has come from this sense that there is a set of ‘rules’ that sometimes I break consciously (and live with a morbid fear of being ‘found out’ and ‘punished’ for), but often I don’t even know what they are, or where the boundaries are drawn, so at any moment I might overstep them without even realising it and bring all that judgement crashing down on myself. And if I am ‘caught out’, what might the punishment be?

Where could that sense of shame and fear possibly have come from?

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Tolerance and Judgement

What am I going to write about today? Every day it’s like this – well, maybe not every day, but most days, I don’t really have an idea and something gradually appears, but by that time I’ve almost used up my 500 words – sometimes I go back over the drivel and edit out chunks so I can squeeze in what I want to say, but I don’t go over the limit. And I don’t go back and read what I’ve written previously before I start again.

But I remember that yesterday I’d got as far as wondering about how we learn to relate to other people, what advice our parents give us – specifically, what advice mine gave me – and by implication, what we pass on to our children. Thinking back, it seems to me that most training of that kind came either through example and observation, or through being told off for breaches of some rule that I might or might not have been aware of. Come to think of it, those methods were often in conflict – following what the grown-ups did was not always appreciated, and neither did they always follow the rules they laid down for us. There’s another layer of complexity to unravel.

Something I will say for my parents, which wasn’t typical of the time, class and place in which I grew up, was they were very opposed to racism. Not that we encountered many non-white people living in Scunthorpe in the 60s, but in the abstract, all men deserved the same respect and opportunities and the Apartheid regime was an abomination – actually, it went beyond race, to class, to a very deep-seated chapel socialism and republicanism (Dad was raised a Methodist), a belief in fairness and equality that has also always underlain my own personal and political values – to this day, my party loyalties may have wandered over the years, but I have never voted Tory (god forbid any party further to the right) and never will.

But what I was going to say was that this universal respect for the brotherhood of man in the abstract (and I use that terminology deliberately, because I think the attitude towards women was more problematic) didn’t necessarily extend to individuals – I’m not talking about racism now, but a lack of tolerance when it came to other people’s behaviour and what we might now call ‘lifestyle choices’. Maybe that’s not so contradictory, I’m not sure now. What I mean is that although my parents were opposed to prejudice and intolerance of groups of people in the abstract, they could be extremely judgemental about the people we knew, whether family, neighbours or workmates, and they would quite happily exchange gossip and criticism for any minor infractions of ‘the rules’. Maybe that also came from Methodism, but there was certainly no truck with: ‘hate the sin but love the sinner’ in our house.

Well, I thought today I was going to write about my inability write fiction, but that will keep.

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Human Relations

I opened the kitchen door for Miko, and she stood on the steps, sniffing the air for a couple of minutes, had a drink from her outside water bowl, then turned and came back in. I left the door open for her while I went upstairs for my morning practice, but when I returned she was curled up in her bed. I went to shut the door, and realised it was raining, very faint and light, but definitely there. And a good thing too. My improvised water butt (an obsolete plastic dustbin) is almost empty of the collected autumn and winter rains, and I’ve been anticipating a hosepipe ban (not that I use one anyway.) I checked the camping chair that’s been on the lawn and there were spots visible on it already, so I folded it up and put it in what’s still left of the shed.

Why do I try to share my feelings, when I know no one likes to read about them? Maybe it’s because I can’t talk about them – although I’ve had someone to talk to regularly for two years now, it’s still quite difficult. It’s hard to get beyond the banal – some days that’s true of writing too, but in general it’s easier and much less stressful to write than to speak, to engage with an unpredictable human being, to have to think about their responses and respond in turn. Easier to be honest in writing, when you don’t have to be constantly on guard for the pitfalls of conversation.

I’ve spent most of my life hiding behind masks, trying to pretend to be someone I’m not, or rather, letting other people make their own assumptions about what kind of person I am, and not bothering to correct them, trusting that I won’t get caught out too often. There again, ‘hiding behind masks’ is just a rather glib metaphor, because for most of the time I don’t know myself what it is that I’m trying to hide, or what I’m pretending to be, for that matter.

I want to think of something to say in the next 150 words, not necessarily something profound, not even particularly interesting, just something… what? Have to stop and think about that. Honest, maybe? Today I’ve done my morning practice before I sat down to write, unlike the last two days, so this isn’t unmediated early-rising stuff.

Human relationships baffle me. They say no one is taught to be a parent, but is anyone ever taught how to interact with other people? I’m sure I never was, or only on the level of: be polite; don’t say that; if you can’t think of anything nice to say, say nothing. I more or less picked up the Golden Rule: ‘treat others as you’d like to be treated’ and I try to stick to it, though it’s occurred to me in recent years that the way I’d like to be treated may not be what other people want, and vice versa.