Category: best laid plans

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Alternative Reality

On Facebook recently, somebody shared a question on the lines of:

‘If you had the choice of going back to when you were ten but with the knowledge you have now, or $50k and fifteen years into the future, what would you do?’

My reaction was: it might be interesting to see what the world’s like by 2026, but why would I want to go back to the age of ten and live through all that shit again? What use would the accumulated wisdom of half a century be to a ten-year-old girl?

Anyway, what would I do differently? Skip the first marriage, obviously – but not the second, because of the children. And it was my first husband who pointed out to me the job advert which led me to Bedford and ultimately to Hubby 2. On the other hand, if I knew then what I know now, I could look out for that job in the early summer of 1975 and apply for it anyway. I could apply for that degree course in maths and linguistics that was in the list of degrees I looked at in 1971, instead of the one in economics and statistics in Southampton. I’ve often thought that might have been an interesting path to take – I can’t remember which university it was, but I’d be in a different place, with different people, my student life could have been completely different. And I could still have applied for that job in Bedford – assuming the rest of the world was still running on more or less the same tracks.

There was a film in the 1980s, called ‘Peggy Sue got Married’ in which a suburban American housewife (played, I think, by Kathleen Turner), disappointed with her cheating husband (ditto Nicholas Cage) and teenage children, is sent back in time to her high school days. In the climactic scene (spoiler alert), when she is trying to explain to her childhood sweetheart and would-be fiancé (the aforementioned cheating husband) why she doesn’t want to marry him, and how she knows for sure that he will be unfaithful, she pulls off the locket round her neck and shows him the pictures of their son and daughter as babies to prove the truth of her time-travelling tale.

‘But they’re us’ the puzzled lad replies. ‘Our moms must’ve given you those photos of us as babies.’

Cue big moment of realisation. She looks at the babies, and looks into his eyes, and says, breathily (in a young version of Kathleen Turner’s voice):

‘You’re right, they are us, they’re you and me!’

Or words to that effect – it must be over thirty years since I watched that film. I don’t remember how it ends – probably she awakes from a coma because it was all part of a concussion dream, or whatever, with her loving husband and children around her bed, and realises how lucky she is to have them all.

But no, I couldn’t write my children’s father out of my story.

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Calendar Puzzles

Imbolc, Candlemas, Ground Hog Day… my hatred of January used to extend to February too, but now I’m more relaxed about them both. February is the month when I: moved into my first flat (2009); ran away to Europe (2012); came back from Prague (2014); started chemo (2017)… I could go back further into previous lives and remember: broke off my engagement (1975); had a miscarriage (1985); lost my Dad (1999)… 1996 wasn’t that great either, for reasons I won’t go into, and no doubt I could dig out other disasters if I thought some more, but at least for this century 2009 and 2012 were positive, and 2017 was too, if not particularly pleasant at the time (actually 1975 was positive too, but the mistake was that I didn’t stick with that decision).

February… well we all know it’s the shortest month and the only one that has different numbers of days depending on the year (but still stays the shortest). Why, when the calendar was being designed, wasn’t it given a couple of extra days, taken from, say August and December, to make seven 30-day months and only five 31-days, or six of each in Leap Year? Even better, why not alternate them by making February, April, June, August, October and December 30 days , with the Leap Day added at the end of December? Aha, that rings a bell now, isn’t it the case that March used to be the first month, which would make February the last month, which would at least make sense of Leap Day being then?

The Celtic quarter days are at the beginnings of February, May, August and November, which are not exactly mid-way between the equinoxes and solstices, but do correspond to the beginnings of calendar months – isn’t this something to do with the adjustments that had to be made to the calendar to deal with the fact that somewhere in the middle of the last millennium it was noticed that the seasons had moved since Julius Caesar’s time because the solar year isn’t exactly 365-and-a-quarter days long, and hence we don’t need a Leap Year exactly every four years, but more like 97 years out of 400? Every time I start asking these calendar questions I know I could just look them up on Wikipedia, but I’m not Wikipedia and I like to raise the questions and make everybody else as confused as I am.

I’m also puzzled by the fact that according to some sources Imbolc/Candlemas is on the first of February, while others say it’s the second. Why worry about things which have their roots back in times when few people were literate anyway, and they were probably decided – quite arbitrarily –  by various factions of various religions, and not in some boring, rational unified way?

But why is Groundhog Day now so closely linked with time repeating itself? Is it just down to the Bill Murray film, and why did the writers decide to do that?

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Maybe

Some mornings I feel as though I’m balanced on a knife-edge. Maybe walking along a cliff edge is a better metaphor, since, clearly, no one can balance on a knife-edge. Maybe a tight-rope. Maybe I’m over-thinking this. Maybe I am digressing into choosing the right words because I’m evading the concept. And maybe the use of ‘some’ suggests that this experience is rare, which is not the case – or maybe that’s just an extreme version of an average morning.

I’ve just remembered trying to explain it once to a counsellor – the one I was seeing in 2006-7, which dates it – that I felt I was walking along a very narrow ridge running through a bog, and at any moment I could slip, and potentially disappear without a trace. That describes the feeling, better than a knife-edge (which is a cliché anyway, as well as being impossible) or a cliff edge. There are no degrees of falling off a cliff edge – unless you land in a tree or on a mattress or something else which breaks your fall. Falling into a bog can be fatal, but my perception is that there’s a better chance of being pulled back, providing there’s someone around to do the pulling, or a handy branch or edge or something to grasp onto and pull yourself.

Which is a complicated way of saying that my morning routine is my branch. Not always easy to drag myself away from the night and that ‘oh shit, I’m still here’ feeling that descends on waking, but I know what I’ve got to do, and I do it. And by the time I’ve posted my blog, and am downstairs with my porridge and su doku, I usually feel somewhat better.

I don’t know why I’ve written that this morning, which doesn’t feel any worse or better than any other day. I guess if I was trying to learn a lesson from it, I could say – do something so you know what you’re doing; try things and push yourself a little bit, but not too hard; give yourself time and be ready to stop when it starts to get to you; come back when you’re ready, it doesn’t matter whether that’s tomorrow or in five years time unless there’s some external commitment or deadline.

It strikes me now how different that is from the usual sort of advice about setting goals and getting things done. Maybe those things are really not so important in a life like mine (retired, living alone). If I find myself struggling with things (like the bookshelves, or the housework) maybe I can live without them for a bit longer. If I carry on struggling, I might come to hate whatever it is, and swear it’s impossible, I’m useless and incompetent and should never have started in the first place and I’ll never try it again. But if I stop, walk away, do something else, maybe I’ll be more inclined to try again later.

Lots of ‘maybes’ today.

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Bookshelves

Switched on the computer this morning and found that I’d never actually posted yesterday’s efforts. So I just did it now – which could be an excuse for not writing today. But I won’t chicken out like that, even though I haven’t got a clue what I’m going to write.

Sometimes, really big things happen, and there’s no real choice but to get on and do something about them. Most days, things happen which are annoying, depressing, frustrating at the time, but you either find a way of dealing with them or you have to let them go – and then, maybe, you find there is a way of dealing with them – or at least getting round them – after all. All this a pretty trite, I suppose, the sort of thing that only sounds profound when it’s staring you in the face.

Lots of frustrating things happened yesterday, but I don’t want to go into details. And I’ve finally put up my bookshelves. It took me three days – not three whole days, of course, but a period of time each day up until the point when I decided I’d have enough and would leave the rest till tomorrow. By that time yesterday, the shelves were all in except for the last one, because I didn’t have enough shelf supports. Then in the evening I noticed there was an extra shelf support sticking out one of the holes at the side. On the first shelf I did, I’d put this support in the wrong place, not lined up with the other side, but instead of taking it out, I’d left it there and put another one in the right hole, then went on to do the rest until I got to the last one and only had three supports left. I cursed Argos, and went on the website, but there was no way of ordering extra parts, like there is with IKEA, and because I’d had it for two months, there was no point in complaining. Maybe I could improvise with a nail or something where the support should be, or just make do with four shelves. It wasn’t such a big deal. But now, of course, I can put the other shelf in anyway.

There’s one fixed shelf in the middle, and I’d put some stuff on it on Sunday evening – not things that I intended to stay there, just for convenience. There used to be a small table in the corner, next to the sofa, which had accumulated a lot of junk, which is now scattered around the room. The table and the standard lamp are now in the other alcove on the other side of the fireplace, behind the telly.

Now I need to fill the shelves. The bottom one is quite tricky to get at, because there isn’t much room between it and the sofa. But it’s big enough for knitting patterns. And the next one can be for the random stuff that used to be on the table.

Every Day is Yours to Win, REM

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Still Holding That Thought?

Yesterday morning, I posed a question, started to explain what I meant and got distracted into another part of my past. I will try to answer before the end of these 500 words, but as I don’t know what I’m going to say till it happens, maybe I won’t.

I started thinking afterwards though: I mentioned (if not yesterday then recently) that I don’t like meeting new people and making small talk, but presumably I must have got over that to some extent when I was going to the networking meetings – yet I went from there to travelling alone, where I became the Invisible Woman. How did that happen?

There’s quite a simple explanation really, and one I’ve thought about a lot over the years. When I first started blogging, I described it as two different personalities, and gave them different names: Belinda and Melinda (later to be extended by the addition of Cassandra and, ultimately, Cat By-Herself). But that led me down some strange paths, to the idea that I could somehow do away with Belinda and become Melinda permanently – Bel symbolizing all the things I disliked about myself, and Mel some kind of happy-crappy life-and-soul fantasy me. Part of the thinking behind that was the times when people have commented that I’ve ‘changed’ dramatically when they got to know me better – telling me that I’ve become a ‘completely different person’ and that I mustn’t ‘go back into my shell’. What they were seeing was just that I had grown used to them, to the setting in which I interacted with them, and was more relaxed – which is clearly what happened with the networking group. It’s not the case that anything has changed within ‘me’, just that this is a process I always follow with new people. I meet someone, I don’t know them, they don’t know me, I don’t know if they’re going to like me, I don’t know if I’m going to like them, it takes time to negotiate all that to the point where I can be comfortable. It’s a scary process, and one which I’d really rather avoid. I don’t have a problem with being somewhere I don’t know anyone as long as I can stay the anonymous ‘Invisible Woman’ and don’t have to worry about whether or not they are going to accept me.

Also, I implied that nothing came out of the networking group for me, but that’s not strictly true. One week the speaker had just finished writing his autobiography, and was looking for an editor. I spoke up, said I could help him with that, had a chat with him, talked about self-publishing (about which he knew nothing and I knew very little more, but, I thought, enough to sound convincing) and he promised to send me some of his first draft. That was the first germination of the idea of Damson Tree Publishing, even though he never got back to me, and when I contacted him he’d employed someone else.

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What Changed?

When I returned to England at the end of July 2012, I found that not only had Ex-Hubby not put the house on the market, he wasn’t in any great hurry to do so. With a sigh of relief, I made plans to return to Central Europe the following year, not to Budapest, but Prague, where I’d found I could do a crash course in TEFL with a (potential, but at the time I thought it was definite) six month placement to follow. Neither of us knew then that it would be a further four years before things were finally settled. Looking back, I can see that he was procrastinating no less than I was, each in our respective Limbo, his of denial and inertia and mine of footloose running away. During those four years I was to live in five different locations: with our daughter; in the attic flat in the Fens; in Prague; sharing with him in the old house and finally renting a flat in Southsea.

Going through those old blog posts from 2008, I found one in which I shared an old fantasy about travelling across Europe until my savings ran out, in the hope that something would turn up before I had to come back. The same person who commented about me undervaluing myself had this to say:

I would guess that if you did take off and travel on your savings for 3, 6, 12 months or whatever it took to exhaust the piggy bank, at the end of it your circumstances would be vastly different. Your experiences during those months would have inevitably changed your outlook. Maybe for better, possibly for worse but I am willing to bet you would have found the time has led to any number of possible situations.

Maybe sitting in a cheap hotel on a Greek island, lap top at your side and your new found male friend opposite? Surrounded by people you have met during your travels who have altered your perceptions of who you are, what you want out of life and where you are going.

All I can say is – your state of mind would not be as it is now.

Comment on Husband or Cat, 17 October 2008

Well, although I stayed with existing friends in some places, I didn’t make any new ones, male or otherwise, or even have any racy encounters. On the contrary, rather than ‘possible situations’ and any alterations in my ‘state of mind’ or ‘perceptions of who I am’, what I discovered was that travelling is a great way of avoiding contact with other people. I became the Invisible Woman, anonymous and solitary, sitting on trains or in cafés, reading, writing, or doing killer su doku, living in cheap hotel rooms, behind whose doors I was safely insulated from the world. Now I have my own door to hide behind, complete with cat, and other hobbies to pass my time with, and the sense of isolation is not so different, except that the view doesn’t change.   

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Existential Choices

…I wanted stay in the flat in the Art Nouveau building with its courtyard and rickety lift, stroll to the café for breakfast every morning, and then along the river to the tram stop and ride somewhere, maybe across the bridge and up the hill to Buda Castle, and look down on the city. Walk down through the gardens of Gellért Hill, maybe go to the baths (I never did that) or walk back into Pest across the Elisabeth Bridge, rummage through the flea market and find a café to sip coffee Viennoise or hot chocolate, maybe even a glass of sweet white wine with my cake…

After I started that sentence yesterday, I kept thinking of the lines from Joni Mitchell’s  ‘A Free Man in Paris’:

‘…If I had my way, I’d walk out that door and
wander down the Champs Elysée,
going from café to cabaret…’

From ‘A Free Man in Paris’ by Joni Mitchell

Then I had to play the song, and after rummaging through the box of cassettes in the study, I found it in the sideboard drawer, right under the music centre, first place I should have looked.

Ah well. I never went to any cabarets, but I did sit in a lot of cafes.

Three weeks after leaving Budapest, I walked up the complex of white ramps to the roof of the Opera House overlooking Oslo harbour, thinking again about the future, and ‘home’, about the need to make a living, and the responsibilities of selling and buying houses – and about the weight of the past, the ‘stuff’ still waiting for me in the old house, which would need to be sorted out and disposed of and/or moved to… some indeterminate future place. In another three weeks I would be back in England, and then what? I was going back to live with my daughter, and I knew there was £20k waiting for me in the bank from the balance of what I’d had from Ex-Hubby before I left England, that should keep me for a while, until the house was sold, and/or I could find (against all past experience) a job, and in the meantime I could write, and one day maybe start to make a living from that? But buying a house would mean committing to one place, and the thought of all the stuff from the attic and elsewhere banged around in my head, a burden dragged around behind me like Mother Courage’s cart.  What about going back to Budapest and living and writing there, then what would happen to the stuff, I couldn’t take it with me, so where would it go? If the house sale went through in the next twelve months, say, it would all have to be resolved

Once again, there were existential choices to be made, and the whole point of running away was to escape them and come back with new ideas and fresh opportunities, a new path to follow, but inside nothing had changed, and I felt no closer to finding my future.

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Other Attics

My routine was disrupted yesterday: I was awake half the night then fell back to sleep when I should’ve been thinking about getting up, and slept through till eight, lay in bed till half past then got up and went to the shop, and when I got back I decided it was too late to write.

This morning, I’ve been looking at my desktop photos again. One came up that I didn’t recognise, it was of graffiti that read: ‘time you ENJOY wasting was not wasted’. I was trying to work out where it came from, I saw the date was 18 June, and thought maybe it was Copenhagen, then realised it was far too early for that because I was in Berlin on the summer solstice (when it poured with rain and I spent the whole day in the museums), so it must have been before then – I think it might have been Prague, though I haven’t checked yet. But if so it was probably the John Lennon graffiti wall, which surprised me because I remember looking for that the following year, when I was living there. I guess I must have passed it the first time without knowing anything about it. My memories of those few days I when I passed through Prague are a bit hazy, overwhelmed by later memories.

I will jump back into the Madwoman/Attic story now because I’ve described the beginning and the end without saying much about the times in between. Let’s start with Budapest, where I stayed for two weeks in a studio apartment a ten minute walk from the Pest bank of the Danube. That’s when I had the idea of going back, living there for a while, writing and maybe giving English conversation classes. Looking in the window of an estate agent’s near the flat, I worked out that I could buy somewhere similar (or a little bigger) for about £40k. Because, at the back of my mind was this awareness that at some point, the old house would be sold, and I would have my share of the proceeds, which would allow me to buy my own place, a proper home for myself, with no worries about where the rent was going to come from. It was a ‘some day, one day…’ fantasy, but it was also a reality, that one day I would be in that position – in fact, according to the divorce settlement, it should be happening very soon, within a matter of months. But the flip-side of that was that it would mean an end to my wanderings, and I wasn’t ready for that just yet – in fact, would I ever be? Ready for it? I couldn’t imagine that, how it would work, where I would be by then – I didn’t want to think about it.

I wanted to stay in the flat in the Art Nouveau building with its courtyard and rickety lift, stroll to the café for breakfast every morning, and then along the river…

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What Am I Worth – continued

‘From a feminist perspective’ (I’m paraphrasing again) ‘think about all the work on the undervaluing of unpaid labour in childrearing and housework’. Yes, the labour that goes into the ‘reproduction of labour’, I’d forgotten that phrase, hadn’t heard it for years, but by coincidence someone said it on a podcast I listened to yesterday afternoon.

In autumn 2008, I worked out all the money I earned from the five part-time jobs I was doing at the time, and worked out that my regular annual income was £8,500. I just looked that up in my old blog, and made the mistake of reading some of the surrounding posts, which has reduced me to tears. So many things still resonate, some are strangely prophetic, and many make me wonder how I got through that time, and fill me with gratitude that I’m in a far better place now. I remember a previous post (before I’d worked out the exact sum) when a fellow blogger had asked in response: ‘Why do you need money?’ I don’t have the exact response, but I did find this:

‘I’m sure people think I’m very mercenary/materialistic when I say I can’t leave because I won’t have enough money, as though I’m saying I don’t want to give up my skiing holidays/ Caribbean hideaway/ new car every couple of years (I don’t have any of those things, BTW, that was a joke)… People with comfortable middle class salaries don’t, I think, quite understand where I’m coming from… There have been times when we’ve not had much disposable income, or when I’ve not been earning anything in my own right, and I’ve managed without things, that’s not a problem, I can do that, if I can’t afford something I do without… But I’m scared of not having enough to live on, of having bills I can’t pay at the end of the month…’

Husband or Cat, 17 October 2008

One comment I got on this was: ‘…I really do not understand why someone of your obvious talents and abilities can under value yourself so much.’ To which I replied: ‘It’s not a question of me undervaluing my talents and abilities, but of prospective employers doing so…’

Three years prior to this, when my husband threatened to leave me over the cat, a door had seemed to open on a different life, but when I called his bluff, he said that he couldn’t leave because we/he couldn’t afford to pay for two places to live, which told me all I needed to know: until I could be financially independent, I was stuck, and I had to keep on compromising. I needed to find a real job before I could start to have a real life – or jump anyway, and trust to fate – which in the end is what I did.

Am I obsessed with money? Financial independence means freedom, autonomy, control of one’s own destiny, self-respect. So don’t talk to me about feminism, because if it’s not about all those things, what DOES it mean?

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What am I Worth?

What am I worth?

This was a question posed to me yesterday by my therapist.

‘Imagine it as a title on your blog’ she said. ‘What would you say? I’m trying to challenge you.’

She’d accused me of being obsessed with monetary value, with trying to apply a monetary value to who I am and the things I do.

‘Very early on in this process’ she said ‘maybe in the second session or so, you were quick to tell me that, although you’re financially comfortable, the money you were living off had come to you from your husband in the divorce settlement, and somehow it’s not due to your own efforts’ (or words to that effect – I’m paraphrasing, because I can’t remember exactly what she said).

Which is true. But what I’d just been talking about was the amount of time that goes into things which I know have no realistic possibility of a monetary return, specifically my knitting and crochet (and of course, so obvious that it wasn’t even brought into the conversation, my writing). I’d mentioned that earlier this week I’d been asked how much I would ‘charge’ to make something as a commission – a question I never know how to answer, because half the time I say too much and put them off, and the other half I aim too low, which can also put people off, or just leave me thinking that I’ve undersold myself and somehow failed in that way. Underlying this, I suppose, is an assumption that I am a professional person who sees the things I make in terms of exchange, and has a system for determining prices, whereas from my point of view, they’re just the (rarely useful, and occasionally embarrassing) results of me finding enjoyable ways to pass the time – in other words, hobbies. Incidentally, the word ‘amateur’ comes from the latin word for ‘love’, meaning someone who does something for the love of it, so that a century ago, ‘amateurs’ in most fields (particularly sport) were afforded more respect than supposedly self-serving ‘professionals’.

I know all this, I know that for creative work the price depends on what someone is prepared to pay, rather than the effort that went into doing it, and I also know the argument put forward by creative people that the workman is worthy of his hire. And I know that I’ve never been able to square this circle, and this is a big reason why I’ve never been able to make a success of business, and it all ties up with social anxiety, lack of self belief, and not being able to ask for anything from other people.

But I can’t see the leap from this to the suggestion that I’m fixated on monetary value. She mentioned the struggle to change the law so that it affords value to the traditionally unpaid work of housework and child-rearing, but to me, any capable adult should be able to pay for their own needs. To be continued…