Category: The Long Way Back

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Thursday 16 May 2013 – Here I am

Cafe table with iced coffee by the River Vltava, with Prague Castle in the background

I arrive at the main station in Prague at 9.30AM, after an 11 hour night train journey from Cologne, to be met by a little slip of a girl (Jitka) from the language school, who can just about manage my tote bag of bits and pieces, while I lug the backpack and suitcase through two metro journeys, one bus ride, and a 5 minute uphill walk from the bus stop to ‘the TEFL house’. At least my room is on the ground floor.

The accommodation is a large but not exceptional residential house built on the hill. The front door is lower than the road, so although my room is on the right of the door, the view through the window is of people’s feet on the pavement. As well as two floors above mine, there are steps down to a basement which holds another bedroom and a large kitchen-dining room with patio doors at the back opening out onto an unkempt garden and paved area with barbecues.

So far I’ve met four of my fellow-trainees, all American, all quite a lot younger than me, one couple and two other young men. There are four or five more to come.

After I’ve showered and changed, I go out walking. There doesn’t seem to be much to see around the house, so I take the bus down to the shopping mall near the Metro station and set off exploring from there. The sun’s bright, but with a surprisingly chilly wind, and I don’t trust the sky. I start by getting lost – I make it a policy to get lost on my first day in a new place, so I can get my bearings. But I have a travel pass for public transport, a map, and details of the buses

I stop in a quiet square and sit on a bench with the intention of checking the map, but at that moment the sun comes out, so I sit and let it warm my face, watching the trams, the people, and the birds, and thinking what a joy it is to be in a place where it’s normal for people to sit out in public reading books rather than glaring at their phones.

The weather gets hotter, or at least relatively so by comparison with Cologne, Brussels (where I was on Tuesday) and home. I haven’t a clue where I’m walking, but in a city of hills with a river passing through the middle it’s not hard to work out that going downhill should eventually take you towards the main artery. I soon find myself leaning on a concrete wall over-looking the River Vltava, watching the constant traffic of boats, counting bridges, and trying to work out which way is most likely to lead towards the Old Town – or more importantly, a cafe. With the twin towers of the cathedral at the top of the bank opposite, instinct tells me to head left, past the first bridge (a concrete construction covered with traffic) and beyond that to the statue-and-tourist encrusted Charles Bridge. I find a place to sit on the river bank with an iced coffee and marvel at the fact that I’m here, and who knows when I’ll be leaving?

In the shopping mall near the Metro station there’s a large Tesco where I shop for essentials, and then catch the bus back to the house. I’ve unpacked and distributed stuff round my little room – I’ll be staying here for a whole month, after all.

Friday 17 May 2013 To the Castle – (or not)

I’m breakfasting in the communal basement kitchen on grapefruit juice, yogurt, bread and jam and black tea (no milk – I forgot to buy any). Jacob, one of the American boys, has just come in through the patio doors from eating his breakfast outside to announce that ‘it’s hot’. Already.

Jitka said it’s possible to walk to the Castle, so that’s my mission for today. I struggle a bit with the incline, but console myself that at least it will be downhill on the way back. I seem to be just trudging through more residential areas, all houses and a noticeable dearth of tempting cafes and worse still, tram routes. I tell myself the views will be amazing when I get there (wherever ‘there’ is), but right now I can’t see past the houses.

I come to a crumbling closed down sports stadium, and a path in front of a wooded area behind a chain-link fence. There’s a way in between the trees, to a park with paths, streams, a fish pond with a fountain in the shape of a seal, and views over rooftops and distant river-bridges. It has to be Petrin Park, where I walked on a Sunday in June last year.

Sitting on a bench, on the top of the park, on top of the world. Below me, white walls, red roofs, copper-green domes and spires, bells ringing, trees and trees and trees, in light, dark, bursting, glorious leaf. Is there any other city which is built inside a forest, as this one seems to be? I wonder what it’s like in autumn? I’ll find out. I can see the castle at last, although I can’t work out how to get there. That’s for another day.

Further along, I find the rose garden, where the buds are just starting to open, and feel the excitement bubble up as I realise that I am here and can come as many times as I want over the summer to see these beautiful places. There’s no rush.

I head downhill to the river, cross the bridge and turn right. There are steps leading down to the lower embankment, where there’s an outdoor cafe, wooden tables by the river, a bar and barbecue and a sign saying: ‘Live music every day 15.00 – 22.00’. I settle myself on a bench right by the water’s edge. There is a middle-aged white guy with grey dreadlocks trailing down his back, playing the guitar and singing ‘Black Magic Woman’. A waiter comes over and I order a hot dog from the barbecue and a pint of Staropramen. The wind whips up a spray from the river, but the sun is warm as I sip my beer and watch the swallows dipping to catch insects from the surface. A swan lumbers up into the air with a mighty flapping of wings, then flops down again a few metres upriver. I watch a tourist boat passing, and trams crossing the bridge, smiling to myself every time the guitarist starts another song that comes back to me from the past, and I silently mouth the words to myself and love the fate that has brought me here.

In the evening – after another trip to Tesco on my way back – I spend some time chatting online to my daughter, and then typing up some notes about my impressions so far. About an hour ago I realised I hadn’t had any dinner, so went to the kitchen and got myself a cheese sandwich and a glass of Moravian red. The Czechs are really better known for their beer, but I’m determined to give it a chance.

Linda Rushby, The Long Way Back (WIP)

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Work In…

Tomorrow marks the end of the official first quarter of the year (91 days this time). So does that mean that I’m a quarter of the way through the work I need to do to publish my book before the end of the year, as I semi-committed myself to? Probably not – in fact, not by a long way. Since I published ‘Single to Sirkeci’ in 2017, the proposed sequel, ‘The Long Way Back’ has not so much been a work in progress as in regress – or at best, stasis

When I first envisaged turning my blog posts into a book about my travels, I massively underestimated the amount of work and time it would take. By about a year and a half after I got back from the original journey, I’d finished my third editing pass through, and began the process of laying it out as a book. That was when I realised that I still had almost 200,000 words – twice what was reasonable for a book of this type.

Around that time, I had a conversation with my artist friend Douglas Jeal about knowing when a piece of creative work is ‘finished’, and the danger of continuing to ‘tweak’ it, a topic which also came up at a meeting of writers which I went to a few days ago. To me it seems there is a difference between a painting or sculpture and a book, which needs a satisfying narrative conclusion, as well as a recognition of that ‘sweet spot’ where nothing more needs to be done.

I couldn’t help thinking that my book didn’t score well on either of those. I had just said a sad farewell to Prague, and moved back in with my ex-husband in the hope that I could nudge him into finally putting the house on the market (which was still not resolved two years after the divorce was granted), so that we could finally draw a line under our marriage, and go our separate ways for good.

While I continued to hack away at the text, I was acutely aware that life was continuing to happen to me, and that a ‘happy ending’ – or even a vaguely positive and upbeat one – still seemed out of my reach…

…to be continued (perhaps)

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Blogging

At the latest count, I have two blogs which are still current (by which I mean I’ve posted at least once in the last two years), as well as another one which I set up for a group, of whom only one other person has ever posted to it (and he hasn’t done so lately). I’m sure there are a few others around that I’ve created at various times and subsequently abandoned (or the entire platform has gone out of business and thus they’ve been obliterated).  And now I’m contemplating setting up a whole new website.

Of them all, I guess this one is my favourite. It’s semi-private – except it isn’t really, because I do share it on Facebook and Twitter – but I write honestly on the premise that I can say what I want because no one is ever going to read it – which is in fact a good assumption because so few people ever do.

But against that, I’m not writing – not really writing anything – because of the old, old issue that I just can’t think of anything to write about. Except that here I am again, finding myself writing once more about my inability to write.

I have sort of committed myself to completing TLWB this year. Which in a sense I might do because a lot of it is already ‘written’, but what do I add, what do I take out, and, hardest of all, where and when do I finish? If I can answer those questions I might get somewhere.

But that’s an aside. What I was really thinking about when I started this was the question of whether ‘…’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take words against a sea of writer’s block, and by opposing end it?’ (with apologies to WS). Sorry, don’t know where that came from – well, obviously I do, it came from Hamlet, but I don’t know why it popped in my head at that moment, except that it seemed to follow naturally from using the word ‘whether’ (words are tricky like that). What I was REALLY thinking was whether it’s worth writing stuff out of my head like this, as I used to for so many years, and spewing it out into the ether, or whether my time could be better spent in other ways. I mean, is writing this drivel every now and again preferable to writing nothing at all, or just a waste of effort and time which could be better directed at finding more original ways of avoiding the housework?

#notwriting

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Life and Writing

I was going to go to the beach, out for breakfast and then to the shop on the way home, but it was raining. I got up and went to look out of the window, and thought: ‘That’s a large cat sitting on the flat roof of the sheds behind the back wall’, then it got up and turned so I could see it sideways on, and I realised it was a fox. That’s the second time I’ve seen one in the last few months.

There was quite a storm in the night, I heard the wind at one point, it was really wild. It looked as though the rain was settling in for the day, but now the sun’s shining. Still, it will take a while before the benches dry out, and it’s not worth going out to sit on a damp bench to eat breakfast, plus the cafés will be getting pretty full by this time, so I’ll stay here and write.

I was going to write some more about planning and failing, but in the shower I started thinking about ‘The Long Way Back’ again. I said I would start work on it when I’d finished my proof reading job, then I read a few old blog posts and got very depressed remembering those times, and now it looks as though I’m going to be pretty tied up with family things until the middle of next week (or the week after next, depending on when you think ‘this week’ starts) which gives another delay to getting properly started, and when the cafes are properly open I can take my laptop somewhere to get stuck in, which is always a nice way to do it.

I have been ‘planning’ and procrastinating over this for so long now, years in fact. I came to the end of the pre-Prague section early in 2018, I remember it quite distinctly. I went to the café where I used to go for breakfast on Sunday, before the writing group meetings (not one of my usual writing cafes, but it was en route to the dentist, where I’d been for an appointment) and took with me printouts of the early Prague posts, which is when I had the idea that there was just too much, and maybe I’d write a separate book about my time in Prague. Or was that 2019?

This is the problem with writing autobiography – though ‘S2S’ and ‘TLWB’ are strictly speaking memoirs, the distinction being that an autobiography is the story of a whole life, but memoirs are just a specific part of a life, either in terms of time or of an interest which may cover different periods. But as a memoirist, I find it hard to see how an autobiography can ever be finished, unless the author is still writing it on their deathbed (which in my case might well happen).

Life feeds writing, and writing feeds life, like Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail.

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Plan to Plan

Ten years ago, when I was going to business networking meetings, I was part of a team of three people organising meetings in a local pub on alternate Wednesday mornings. I was in charge of sending out email and text invitations, chasing up invitees to confirm numbers, collecting payments and paying the pub for breakfasts consumed, working with a woman in her forties who was an area rep, in charge of a number of fortnightly groups locally. The third member was a an older man (older than  I was then but probably younger than I am now), whom I’ll call Charles (I can’t remember whether that was actually his name) who chaired the meetings and was a general figurehead for the group.

The reason I’ve been thinking about him this morning was that he would sometimes give The Talk – there was always a ten minute talk over breakfast, usually given by a guest speaker – who, when I look back now, were probably drafted in from other groups in the region or more widely spread (it was that sort of organisation). I’m guessing that possibly part of Charles’s role was to stand in when no other speaker was available, and his talks were always on a similar theme, the gimmick being that the titles consisted of an increasing number of words beginning with P. This had obviously started long before I’d joined, and would always induce a groan (in the nicest possible way) from the assembly. Anyway, what set me on this train of thought was that a typical example would be: ‘Perfect Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance’ or words to that effect.

And the connection is: that as I was lying in bed this morning I was thinking about my inability to plan anything whatsoever. At five thirty I was reviewing my options: walk to beach; take van out for a picnic; stay home and start on editing of TLWB (reading Prague blog posts) etc. The conclusion was to stay home and get on with gardening, which I didn’t do a lot of yesterday, just half an hour or so’s weeding and not planting of plants purchased (I’m starting to sound like Charles), which should really be a Priority (definitely one of the words he would have used) as they will Probably die otherwise.

So I got up shortly after six, did my exercises, made coffee and here I am, doing my daily Post (Pontification? Pronouncement?) – which, incidentally, I am still doing, despite moaning last week,  because – it feels important to Persist, in fact, maybe (or even Perhaps) Persistence is Paramount. Some days I dread it, but I always feel better afterwards – no matter what it is, however trivial, or complaining, or ranting, or self-Pitying  – even Pathetic or Pointless – the results. I write every day – as long as I’m home, and sometimes even when I’m not – and I stick to my 500 words because it is a discipline, and that’s that. And I Plan to keep on doing so.

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Finding the Way (or not)

Now my proof-reading job has finished, I was planning to get on with ‘The Long Way Back’. But I’ve reached the time when I was in Prague, and even starting to read back the blog posts from that time has reminded me of how stressed I was over the teaching course, interviews, flat, etc, not to mention the accident when I fell on my face and the problems with my teeth. There’s a story there to be told, but it’s not a very cheerful one, nor is the year that followed it, and I’m back with a sense of not wanting to touch it, as I had the last time I tried, three years ago. But if I leave it like that, I guess in a way it will always haunt me, and I have to draw a line under it somehow.

Yesterday I ended by quoting from a post on a Facebook group for dyspraxics which bothered me, about how people like me should stop apologising and feeling ashamed, and sorry for ourselves. That is me in a nutshell, right there, but how do I stop? If I am to be true to my nature, that is how I have always been, and always will be. I can’t be strong and proud of myself, because this is who I am, this is my lived experience: that I try things, mess them up, break things, am constantly late, messy, chaotic, forgetful, all those things. I read other people’s posts on the group, where they talk about repeatedly failing at interviews, hopelessly looking for jobs but never being accepted for anything that matches their qualifications, getting bullied at work and at home for being slow, chaotic, etc, and so on, and so forth. Is it so surprising that we are apologetic, full of shame, sorry for ourselves? Don’t we deserve somewhere, one place at least, among our peers, where we can share these stories and feelings?

But at the same time I can see where this person is coming from. I despise myself when I feel sorry for myself – I have written about this before, the horrible vicious circle that makes it so hard to have any kind of self-love or self-belief. That’s what is so stark when I read the blog posts from Prague: how out of depth and hopeless I felt. I now know where those feelings originate from – but knowing that there’s nothing I can do to change the way I am doesn’t help.

In the ‘affirmative’ ending to my ‘Square Peg’ poem I wrote that I’ll never find a space to fit my edges unless I ‘make one for myself’. By that I am acknowledging that no one else can help me to find a way of accepting myself – I no longer fantasise about finding an ‘other half’ who will make me whole at last – but I still don’t know how to do it for myself, except, as I’ve always done, by running away and hiding .

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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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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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Life Writing

When I was travelling, I wrote erratically, and never felt I had very much to say. When I got back to England, and tried editing it all into a book, I realised that although I had far more material than I’d thought – more than enough for two books, even by the fourth edit – what I had wouldn’t make a coherent book. It was a series of anecdotes and reflections, some more or less interesting than others, but it had no real narrative, no dramatic tension, no resolution, no plot. It was held together only by the sequence of events and places I moved through; it was a journey, but it wasn’t a Hero’s Journey (or even a Heroine’s).

It is similar in that way to this and the other blogs and journals I’ve written down the years. I’ve wondered casually whether what I’m writing is the basis for an autobiography – or at least, memoirs – but it would be a very scrappy one, because there are large and significant portions of my life – like living in Dallas, or when I was doing my PhD – when I wrote very little, and others, like now, when little happens but I write about it quite intensively. The same happened when I was travelling – there are places I went to which, when I went through my notes and blogs, I found I’d written hardly anything about at the time, but when I was writing the first draft, it was quite recent in time, so I managed to scrape something together, often using my photos as aides memoires, and picking up additional information from the internet. Towards the end (of both the travelling and the writing) there are places (such as Kristiansund, Oslo, Hamburg and Amsterdam) that I skimmed through with very little attention and interest, but these are mainly in the still-unpublished second half, The Long Way Back.

Interestingly (perhaps), since I’ve had the selected photos rotating on my desktop, I’ve noticed there are also very few from the last weeks included in the sequence – not because I didn’t take any then, but because I never bothered to go through them, select them, edit for size and add them to the folder. On the other hand, there’s a preponderance of Brussels, Paris, Brittany and San Sebastian, the first places on the itinerary.

January comes to an end today. I used to hate this time of year, but that was when I set a lot of store by Christmas, and found the new year always an anticlimax. Now I find that this can be quite a hopeful time – even though it usually has the worst weather of the year, at least the light is slowly coming back. A daffodil opened in my forecourt a couple of days ago, but was immediately so battered and droopy it hardly deserved a photo. I can confirm that this has been the coldest and gloomiest beginning in the four years I’ve been crocheting weather blankets.

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Home to Roost

In my study, but once again, Microsoft decided it needed to reconfigure my version of Office, so I had to wait. I spent the time picking some more books to go downstairs on the new shelves, and looking for more yarn to match the cardigan (or maybe it will be a blanket) I started crocheting two days ago, when I realised the fair isle jumper was going to be too tight, so I gave up on it till I decide whether I’m going to pull it back to the armpits and do it again, or leave it unfinished like so many other things I’ve started in my life.


Then I felt the urge to listen to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Judgement of the Moon and Stars’, which I’ve been listening to on cassette in the kitchen, and I thought I must have uploaded onto the PC when I was doing that a few months ago. I couldn’t find it, but I did find the files for her album ‘Hejira’, and played ‘Amelia’, which got me into a sad and thoughtful mood, which wasn’t necessarily where I wanted to go.


By that time, Office was reconfigured and Word was open. I suspect it’s now reconfiguring every time I restart the PC (which should be every day, but I must admit sometimes I forget to switch it off properly and it stays in hibernation till the next morning). I don’t use the PC much in the daytime after I’ve finished blogging, now that I’ve got the laptop downstairs, where the wifi’s better and it’s warmer – I don’t have the radiator switched on in here because it’s under the window, behind the desk and printer. Ironic to think that I bought the laptop at the end of 2019 so I could take it out and sit in cafes to write – one of many small ironies of the last twelve months.


Maybe what I’m doing here is reconfiguring my mind every morning. It’s a thought.


In telling the story of the Madwoman in the Attic, I flitted around quite a bit chronologically, and I think I may have missed out completely the time in Prague. I started going through the blogs from that time about three years ago, after I finished the first draft of ‘The Long Way Back’, but I gave up on it quite quickly. Maybe that should be a task for this year – or would be, if I was setting myself tasks, which I’m not.


The gist, I suppose, of the Madwoman idea, was that through those limbo years until I moved into this house in October 2016, the Stuff was always hanging around in the dusty corners of my mind, along with the knowledge that at some time the house would be sold, and it would come home to roost, but also I would be in a position to buy a permanent home for it (and me). And yet, although I’m here, and it is too, the chaos remains unresolved.

Amelia, Joni Mitchell