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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yesterday I experienced something I haven’t been aware of in a long time: boredom. I finished bringing my financial spreadsheet up to date, but didn’t feel as satisfied as I expected. The afternoon plays on Radio 4 and 4 Extra respectively were: the first episode of a three-part adaptation of ‘Tess of the Durbervilles’ (well done, but hard to avoid the sense of impending doom) and a thirty-year-old drama about a divorced sixty-something woman with breast cancer who is reunited with an old admirer, has a mastectomy and moves to Australia (either breast cancer treatment has improved a lot since the early 1990s, or the writer didn’t have much idea of what he was writing about – no chemo or radiotherapy, just straight to the knife).

Ironically, I also listened to a programme on boredom, but I didn’t take much of it in.

I’m getting bored with the jumper I’ve been knitting, the one I pulled down because it didn’t fit, and I haven’t quite caught up to where it was before. I’m not looking forward to doing the sleeves, which are going to be fiddly, but I want to get it done so I can wear it at least once before the weather gets too warm. If current trends continue, it may be even smaller by next winter (think about it).

Which reminds me, on this morning’s weather forecast they said that it will get a lot warmer, maybe as high as 17^o  this week, which would be white and green within a week!

I saw a picture on a Facebook crochet group last week of a blanket with an amazing spiral pattern. There was no pattern attached, and I couldn’t work out from the photo how it was done, so I Googled it, and found a simple technique for making a four-colour spiral – not quite the same, but still interesting. I made a start with four colours of cotton yarn leftover from last year’s weather blanket (I have changed to using a different, lighter yarn this year), and it’s given me the spark of an idea.

I also saw a cartoon on Facebook yesterday titled something like: ‘The Mind/Body problem’, showing a man sitting on a sofa, with a thought bubble coming from his head saying ‘Get up!’ and one from his body saying ‘Nope!’ or words to that effect – exactly summing up my mood, but I can’t remember where it came from.

But for this morning I have some editing – which will be interesting and, being a commission for someone else, takes priority over housework, decluttering, study-tidying or any of those other multitudes of Jobs That Needs Doing.

I keep thinking of things I could do, hobbies that I could take up or restart, projects that I would enjoy getting stuck into, most of which I already have the materials and equipment for, or could easily get hold of online. Books to read, jigsaws to do, projects to complete, all at my fingertips, but can I be bothered?

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.

What can I say today that I haven’t said a million times before?

Every day: get up at seven (or thereabouts), feed cat and open the door for her to go out; half an hour of yoga, tai chi and meditation; shower; make coffee; come up here and write 500 words; brush teeth; get dressed; have breakfast while doing su doku. That gets me to any time between 10:30 and 12:00. At one o’clock on weekdays, there’s an hour of crime-and-thrillers drama on Radio 4 extra, so I sit in my armchair in the bay window overlooking the street (but behind the hedge) and listen to that, while crocheting the previous day’s weather blanket square. At two, I may get lunch (if I haven’t had it before one), or stay where I am and listen to whatever’s on next, then at three there’s another hour of a drama serial, and at four, some days I switch over to Radio 4 and listen to what’s on there, until PM comes on at five, which I usually listen to also. At weekends the routine is slightly different, as the drama on the radio doesn’t start till three, and then there’s an hour on Radio 4 followed by another hour and a half (Saturday) or hour (Sunday, followed by Poetry Extra, which I also listen to). At six I go into the kitchen and prepare, cook and eat dinner, then around seven I usually go back in the front room, switch the telly on, and knit or crochet till around ten, when I make hot chocolate, listen to music, and carry on either knitting/crocheting or reading until bedtime (between eleven and eleven thirty).

There are variations, of course, usually involving going out to the shops in the morning. Otherwise, that’s pretty much it – but I don’t want you to think that I’m saying my life is boring, not a bit of it. I like this routine. The ‘activities’ (if you can call them that) are all – well, mostly – things I enjoy doing. It’s an undemanding life. Nobody needs me for anything, I’m not required to interact or communicate with any other human being (mostly), I can just trundle along letting each day go by, like I used to when I was travelling.

But a comment on Facebook yesterday raised the question: What is the point of any of this? The comment was made about something specific (posting pictures daily on FB) but it applies to everything, and it throws a stark light on the fact THAT MY LIFE, THE THINGS THAT I DO, ARE ALL COMPLETELY POINTLESS.

I didn’t deliberately make that phrase upper-case – I was just typing away as I usually do, looking at the keyboard instead of the screen, then looked up (because I wanted to delete something I’d written after that) and realised I must have accidentally pressed caps lock. So I’m not trying to emphasise that sentence, it just emphasised itself, which seems appropriate.

And now – oh look – 500.

One card to make out of the current batch, then I need to write in them, address them, stamp them and take them to the post office. If they go today, they’re a week ahead of the final posting date. Two more to make, for my children, which I want to make a bit more special, but haven’t got a clear idea yet what I’m going to do. Hopefully I’m going to be able to deliver them both in person, but if not… maybe I should plan on trying to get them posted in advance anyway, because who knows what might happen in the next fortnight?

Yesterday I showed my therapist the Christmas jumper, she seemed particularly excited that it was blue and not red or green. I’ve still got to weave in the ends. Over Skype, she couldn’t see that, or the way the stitches pull around the motifs – besides, she’s not a knitter, so she’s probably impressed that I managed to finish it at all. She said at one point that she was ‘in awe’ of me – I’d rather she admired my writing or my academic prowess than my knitting, but I don’t think she meant that anyway.

She said last week how impressed she was with my routine, how I get up and do my yoga, tai chi and meditation, and then my writing, and yesterday she added to this the way I do my crafting. I showed her the current weather blanket and she asked what I do with them when they’re finished, so I told her the first one is in the spare bedroom, last year’s one went to my son and daughter-in-law and this one’s going to my daughter – to mark for both of them the years in which they got married (my daughter’s idea).

But all of that: getting up at seven (when usually I’ve been awake for at least two hours already), the exercise and meditation, the five hundred words, the square for the weather blanket and other crafts (and the reading, listening to the radio and su doku as well) – is about self-preservation, keeping myself this side of the line that tips over into darkness. I do them because I need to. Yes, I’d quite like it if I was writing a novel, or some great academic treatise that would put the world to rights, but at least all these activities are doable and pretty harmless and don’t involve anybody else. One day, no doubt, I’ll stop doing one or more of them, and then this year will become, not just the (first) Covid-19 year, but the time when I ‘…used to do that stuff’.

Years ago, I used to do cross stitch, and I remember thinking my life was pretty sad on the days when that was the most satisfying thing I’d done – like the wife in the Paul Simon song for whom a good day ‘…ain’t got no rain’. But I’ve learned to appreciate losing myself in simple things.

I spent most of yesterday getting stressed over how much I hate this time of year. All the miserable and uncomfortable Christmases in my life, even though outnumbered by the happy ones, rise up from memory like a dark tidal wave, and completely overwhelm them. I spent the morning working on the weather blanket and listening to podcasts, and then in the afternoon telling the therapist how ashamed I am that that’s all I’ve been doing, as well as about all the dark Christmases there have been in in my life, and how much I hate this time of year – in between bouts of weeping.

We got into the usual argument about what I ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be doing (‘should’ is like a red rag to a bull for her) and when she asked if it wasn’t just those voices from the past telling me what to do, I got irritated, because, no, it isn’t just that – I know for myself that I would feel better if I did all those things that I ignore in favour of sitting and crocheting.

‘What do you think will happen?’ she asked.

‘Well, it’s not healthy is it? I’d just go into a downward spiral and sink down and down’ I told her, waving my finger round in circles.

‘What’s your worst fantasy of what might happen, if you took it to the extreme?’

To the extreme??? I thought. What a bloody stupid question – like the question about what do you really want from life if money and reality and the law of gravity were no object – what’s the point of asking that?

‘That by the time I was missed, someone would have to break into the house and find me rotting, surrounded by piles of rubbish, and with half my face missing because the cat’s eaten it’ was what I actually said.

I woke as usual at four this morning, but instead of filling the time with podcasts and reading, I spent an hour brooding, just like old times. Then at five, I started reading some more of ‘Out of Sheer Rage’, and to my surprise finished it, although my Kindle said I was only 85% through it – the last 15% was taken up with footnotes and a preview of another book. I was telling the therapist about it yesterday, and how much I’ve enjoyed it, and she asked if it made me feel less alone, which it did, but like the dyspraxia forum in a bittersweet way, because it IS good to know I’m not the only one, but also depressing in that it suggests to me that there really is no way out.

But there are so many bits that I wanted to highlight, and I will share this one:

‘thinking of giving up is probably the one thing that’s kept me going. I think about it on a daily basis but always come up against the problem of what to do when I’ve given up. Give up one thing and you’re immediately obliged to do something else. The only way to give up totally is to kill yourself but that one act requires an assertion of will equal to the total amount that would be expanded (sic) in the rest of a normal lifetime.”

“Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence” by Geoff Dyer

The good news is – the Christmas jumper is now almost long enough, so I can leave out those other design items I had in mind, and move on to doing the bottom rib. The right sleeve – which I’ve been picking at on and off over the last couple of weeks – is also nearly long enough, although I’ve hardly started the left one. On straight needles, I would do both sleeves at the same time next to one another on the needles, to make sure they’re the same, but that wouldn’t really work with circular needles so I’ll just have to keep checking it matches the right one. This doesn’t mean I can get it finished in a couple of days, but the end is in sight, it should be done by mid-December at the latest. Then I’ll have to concentrate on catching up on the weather blanket, which is way behind.

Enough of knitting and crochet news, and the poem which I still haven’t found, because I didn’t look for it on the laptop, didn’t get round to it. I’m not sure what’s on there anyway, but maybe that’s where all the missing blog posts from 2016 are, it makes sense. Which reminds me that I need to convert all the Word files on my new(ish) laptop to Open Office or Word 2007 before Thursday, when my year’s free trial of Office 365 (or whatever it’s called) expires, and Microsoft start demanding money with menaces. I’m quite content with my legitimate copy of Office 2007, bought in good faith ten years ago and still perfectly adequate for my needs, except I can’t install it on the new laptop because there isn’t a CD player to load the software from. This time last year I wasn’t bothered because I knew I had a full year to work out how to install it on the laptop, or adapt to using Open Office, but somehow I slipped into the bad habit of using Office 365 because it was there. But a decision has been made, and I’m sticking to it.  

Well, none of that is very deep, although I do need to sort it out. I’ve not been putting it off because I particularly don’t want to do it or am nervous about it – in fact I started earlier in the week on some of my files, to confirm it was quite straightforward and wouldn’t take long – it’s just that other things seem more important and/or interesting.

And I will get back to Destiny and the Meaning of Life at some point (no, I haven’t finished with that, even though I’ve stated categorically that I don’t think there’s anything mystical behind it all). Come to that, a Destiny which was predetermined and inevitable really wouldn’t be worth talking about, would it?

I’m just going to throw out this thought for now: all the wisdom life teaches us seems quite banal when you think about it – maybe that’s why it’s so hard to live by.

Every morning (mostly) I sit down with a blank screen and the faint hope that by the end of 500 words I will have said something worthwhile. Admittedly, five hundred words isn’t much, though some days it’s a struggle to fill it. Sometimes something occurs to me just at the end, which is why the title (always written afterwards) often refers to the final paragraph. Maybe I should carry on beyond 500 words? I tried that two years ago, and I don’t recall it being any more productive. I have a file (Word table) containing extracts taken from these posts that I think might be worth expanding, and the dates when they were posted, but I never look at it. Maybe that’s a project for one day, but I’m guessing there’ll be a lot of repetition and few surprises.

I’ve been thinking about the word ‘should’, which is anathema to my therapist, and most other therapists, coaches and others of that ilk I’ve come across. A couple of weeks ago she asked me whose standard I’m trying to emulate – but when I ask: ‘what should I do?’ I’m asking for help, not to be set a goal. There are many things which, if I did them regularly would I’m sure help make my life less chaotic and more satisfying, but, in the phrase she used last week, I ‘can’t be arsed’. But if she, or anybody else, tried to tell me to do them, I would feel patronised and insulted and do anything to avoid it.  

Half way through, and I gave in and looked at what I wrote yesterday. Ah yes, the quest of the Crescent Moon Bear, and what did you learn from the journey? I enjoy reading her analysis of the stories but don’t find her suggestions of how to apply the lessons to your own life very helpful in a practical sense. This is also true of every self-help book I’ve ever read. I remember my PhD supervisor commenting that I have to think things through from first principles – I didn’t know then what he meant, but I think it’s because I can’t understand an argument unless my head can get inside it and see where it’s coming from, but once I can do that, it seems obvious and I don’t know why everybody else can’t see it as well. It’s like the time I spent last night (about two hours) extracting one single thread from the tangle of the border threads for my blanket. I thought I had them all separated only last week, but somehow just by taking it out of the bag each day, attaching a new square and putting it back again, I now have a hopeless mess. I honestly can’t understand how it happens – presumably it’s dyspraxia-related but I don’t see how.

My thoughts and words don’t want to play the game today either. But putting things down and coming back to them later, trite though it sounds, does work sometimes.

Reached the third of the month, and I haven’t yet mentioned NaNoWriMo. That’s because I haven’t got any plans to do anything about it. Two years ago I wrote 50k words, last year I read them and couldn’t see that there was anything I could do with them. Maybe this year I will think about The Long Way Back again – I think the last time I looked at it was in spring 2018. But one big ongoing project has been finished and gone this year. Maybe I could start thinking about it again. We’ll see.

I spent some time yesterday on the weather blanket, as I said I would. Every month (in the middle, not the beginning) I add a colour to the border – in two weeks time it will be the tenth and last. Quite a lot of my time yesterday was spent in untangling the previous nine. The only way I can see of avoiding that in the future would be to leave the border and do it all at the end, which would be massively tedious and probably mean that it wouldn’t be finished till about March. I have some plastic bobbins which are supposed to help, but only a few large ones. I will try to be more systematic about it next year.

The camper van went in for its MOT yesterday, and miraculously it passed on the first go (for the second year running). It was due in June, but was covered by the six months extension, which would have got it to January, but I wanted to avoid that because the tax is due then, and car insurance and MOT in March/April, so I decided to spread it out. The garage called me at about 5, and I didn’t really want to go and collect it then because that would have meant trying to reverse it into the garage in the dark (a nightmare) so I asked them to keep it for me till today. As the sun is shining – and the sky clear for the first time in ages – I am going to attempt to take it out for a picnic. I wasn’t sure if my season ticket for parking at the country park had been renewed or not, it was due in September but the direct debit didn’t go out. However I just had a rummage among my emails and found that they’ve extended it to the end of the year because of the closure for the first lockdown.

I will make sure I take a cup this time, and my coat. But I can’t stay too long, because I need to make sure I’m back before dark. I need to make sure I take it out at least once a month over winter, so it doesn’t end up in the same state as this spring and last. All this seems as good a reason as any to take it out today, before the next lockdown starts. A good sort of day.