Category: Beachcombing

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Oyster Shell

Yesterday morning I took the cat to the vet’s for a ‘Senior Wellness check’. This used to be called a ‘Senior Health check’ and I couldn’t help imagining them burning aromatherapy candles, playing soothing music and maybe giving her a back massage. I had to drop her off at the surgery because of current lockdown conditions, and wait till they called me back to come and collect her. Because of the blood tests she wasn’t allowed anything to eat after ten the night before, which usually means pleading looks until it’s time to go, but in fact she just stayed out of the way, and when it was time to go allowed me to pick her up and put her in the basket with no struggles or complaints. In fact, she was unnaturally subdued, and still is this morning. When I collected her, the nurse asked if she could take her home to teach her own cat a lesson in manners, which is a far cry from this time last year when I dropped her off and went to the Co-op, then got a phone call from the vet asking for permission to sedate her because she was kicking up such a fuss.

She’s getting old. We all get old and resigned to the way things are. I guess that’s the way I’m feeling at the moment – except when I’m in a panic over something or other. Lockdown lethargy.

On my desk there’s an oyster shell. I don’t know where it came from – well, the beach, obviously, and before that in the sea, wrapped around an oyster. But how did it come to be on my desk? My house is full of oyster shells, and ‘interesting’ pebbles, picked up from beach walks. But this one in particular… I don’t know – it must have fallen out of a box of ‘stuff’ or something. I don’t know what it is about oyster shells – I used to think they were ugly, not like the pretty little scallops, rosy pink and smaller than my thumbnail, or the slipper limpets with their oddly shaped cavity. They are rough and monochrome and no two are ever alike, but if you turn them over and the light catches in just the right way, sometimes the gleam of mother-of-pearl will take you by surprise. I used that image in my poem ‘Beachcomber’. The document on my computer has it as:

The shimmer of an oyster shell,
Like tears for a lost pearl.

Linda Rushby July 2015

That’s funny – I could have sworn I used ‘gleam’. Maybe I changed it. Poems are not immutable. But when I check the book, I find that I published it as:

‘Oyster shells shimmer
Like tears for a lost pearl.

‘Beachcombing‘, Linda Rushby April 2016

Well well well. That scans better, and it has the alliteration too, but I still like ‘gleam’, it has a lovely sound.

Which reminds me, someone bought a copy of ‘Beachcombing’ from Amazon last year, the first time it’s sold other than sales I’ve made in person.

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Passing Time

Today I’m looking through my window at grey clouds and black birds (maybe jackdaws- I can’t see them clearly enough, but they’re too big to be blackbirds)  flying across them, and I truly have no idea what to write about.

Struggling to find anything of significance in my life at the moment – and I don’t mean that in a bad way, because I like a peaceful life – I remember about the fair-isle jumper I was knitting, which I think I’ve mentioned before, and may even have posted a picture of. Well, the news on that is that I’ve given up on it – probably temporarily, but who knows – because I tried it on and realised that it is going to be too small to be comfortable (yes, I should have checked earlier, but I was having fun developing the pattern). The best I can do with it is unravel it all the way back to where the sleeves join the body and keep on increasing the stitches for a bit longer , until it will comfortably accommodate my ever-expanding bulk. I can’t remember exactly when I made this discovery, but it was at least ten days ago, because I knew about it before my therapy session last week. In the mean time I have started and abandoned a couple of small things trying out different stitches, and also started a crochet cardigan using some yarn which I bought a couple of years ago for making blankets and never used. Again, I’m making up the pattern as I go along, basically the same as the cardigan I finished just before Christmas, but with brighter colours in a chunky yarn. However, I’m not sure whether that is going to work out either, because the weight of the yarn makes it less flexible, and if not, I might return to the original plan and make a blanket instead.

You might wonder what is the point of going into such detail about this, but I’ve already pointed out that I can’t think of anything interesting to write, and also I was trying to draw a lesson from it – that when you enjoy the process of doing something, it doesn’t really matter so much if you’re not happy with the end result and either abandon it or go back and try again – well, at least, not if you’re in the happy position of having an abundance of materials (especially if they can be re-used) and time, as I am. I don’t get stressed over crochet and knitting projects – even when they don’t work out – as I did with the bookshelves, for example.

Also, I’ve brought my accounts up to date till the end of December, and in checking my Lulu (self-publishing) account, I’ve found that I sold three copies of my books last year that I didn’t know about (four in total, but I knew about the first one). The money hasn’t appeared in my account yet because the total hasn’t reached the magic $5 required.

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Control

I finished yesterday’s post with a rhetorical question – which I intended to continue today – I remember that, but I can’t remember what it was. Excuse me while I have a quick check…

…

‘Why not just let it all go, accept that I am who I am, not cut out to be A Writer. After all, I’ve given up on so many ideas about how my life should have been (happy relationship, career, financial independence etc), why do I keep picking away at this one?’

Ah right, yes, that is what I was going to write about. It’s been in my head quite a lot and I thought I had an answer…

The main one, I think, is that that is the only one of the four which is still within my control. I could argue over whether any of them are realistically feasible, but I’m not going there today, beyond saying that all of them rely on huge amounts of luck, but also, more significantly, on other people – potential lovers, potential employers, potential clients. One thing I have learnt to accept in life is that any situation where I have to persuade or convince anyone else is stressful, unlikely to end well for me and hence best avoided.

But I can write. I can even ‘publish’ – even if it’s only posting these daily 500 word mini-essays about this, that and nothing in particular, it’s still publication in the sense of putting it into a public space where anyone with access to the internet can potentially read it. I can even go further, I can gather my words together and dump them into e-books, or have them printed into paperbacks which I can put on my shelves with my name on the spines. The technologies and processes are all at my fingertips.

A couple of years ago I met a life coach who suggested I visualise writing a best-seller, then plan the steps to get there. I don’t really know why I reacted the way I did, but I got very angry – she was trying to help me, but setting extremely unrealistic aspirations just seems frustrating and depressing, not motivating, as far as I’m concerned. I suppose it’s the tired old chestnut about the glass of water again – the significance of the gap seems overwhelming compared to that of the contents.

What I really long for is that buzz of excitement from creating a world in my head, finding out what’s going to happen next, bringing it all together. There really is nothing in the world quite like it – except the buzz of intellectual discovery, the moment when the ideas interconnect and click together and suddenly some small part of the world makes sense in a way it didn’t before – I’ve felt that too, but not for many years.

So, all I can do is to keep going, doing what I can, not being distracted by what I can’t. Letting go of expectations, and letting the words take control.

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A Poem That I Meant to Write

‘The net that links us

Is not the web that binds us’

Linda Rushby (unfinished)

I thought that was going to be the start of a poem, but after an hour of rattling around, nothing else has appeared. So now I’m sitting at the keyboard, and – I don’t think this has struck me before – although I usually write as I go directly on the computer (which is why my posts ramble quite as much as they do), it doesn’t work that way with  poems. Mostly they come into my head fully formed, and then I have to write them down before I forget them – like a line from a Paul Simon song of 50-odd years ago :

‘I was twenty one years when I wrote this song.

I’m twenty two now, but I won’t be for long…’

Paul Simon, ‘The Leaves That Are Green’

You said it, Paul. And the first time I heard it I was even younger – sixteen, I believe – though the song had already been around for a few years. I think it was the first time I grasped – or at least caught a glimpse of – an adult understanding of the passing of time. That and Neil Young’s ‘Old Man’ from about the same: ‘I’m twenty four and there’s so much more’. (To me at that time, even twenty seemed impossibly mature).

How did I get here from there? Oh yes, ‘The Leaves That are Green’:

‘Once my heart was filled with the love of a girl.

I held her close, but she faded in the night

Like a poem I meant to write

And the leaves that are green turn to brown.’

That one: ‘Like a poem I meant to write.’ Exactly. If you don’t grab them while they’re there, they get away from you – Poems, I mean, not girls (or boys). I wrote once about ‘catching the words in flight’. It may be in ‘Single to Sirkeci’ or it may just have been a blog post. It might be the one I wrote in Tulcea, on the Danube Delta – which would have gone into ‘The Long Way Back’ – if I’d ever got round to finishing it. Or maybe it was just a random, throw away blog post that at most a handful of people might have read.

Do poems matter more than people? That’s a bit contentious – though once out they’re out there, they can live forever – I’m not claiming this for mine, I hasten to add, but I was thinking of the likes of Wordsworth (whose birthday is next Tuesday – I have a reason for knowing that which some of you might work out), Ovid (who was exiled to and died on the Black Sea Coast at Constanta, from where I went to Tulcea) or even poor Sylvia Plath (enough said).  Even mine will still hang around for a while after I’ve gone, out on the internet and in unsold copies of ‘Beachcombing’. Some have already lasted far longer than the relationships that provoked them – but that’s another matter.

Of course – a haiku!

‘When we are ourselves.’

Linda Rushby