Afternoon on the Beach With Ginette
Morning Walk
I remember in a previous life – about ten or twelve years ago – having a conversation with a man at a conference in Oxford. I wouldn’t say he was a friend, exactly, but I had met him at previous conferences. The gist of his message to me was this: that I was unhappy because my life was chaotic, and he suggested imposing some structure on myself by getting up early and going for a walk with him and a group of other conference attendees.
I said he wasn’t ‘… a friend, exactly…’ but looking back now I can see he had a deeper understanding and empathy than most of the other people I met at those events, who were eager to tell me how great I was, but never noticed what was going on under the surface.
Anyway, I don’t think I met up with them, due to some mix-up rather than intent, but I remember walking alone by the canal, taking pictures of the narrow boats.
The other day I mentioned that I’d gone for a walk, with that same intention of improving my well-being. I don’t think I said that afterwards I had a miserable morning, full of buried rage, but I’m sure that was just coincidental.
Today I woke around the usual time (four-thirty to five), but some time after six, when I was thinking about getting up once the heating came on at six-thirty, I dozed off again and slept in till half past seven.
I got up and dressed, and instead of doing my yoga/tai chi routine I decided that I would make a flask of coffee and go for another walk. As I walked, I thought about the mornings when I used to walk to the swimming pool – which is now closed, of course, and has apparently done so for good.
I walked to the beach, and then along the beach, briefly thinking of doing tai chi in the stretch of damp sand and scattered pebbles between the waves and the ridge which marks the usual high-tide line. It was later than I usually walk, there was at least one wild swimmer, but also two ladies in anoraks with bicycles behind the cafe, who I thought could have been two of the regulars, now presumably dried and warmly wrapped up.
I went up the steps by the crossing opposite the Rose Garden, my usual route. I hadn’t stopped outside the cafe with my coffee, as I usually do, because there were clearly people there preparing to open up. I’m not sure what the rules are now, but I know they’ve been operating a take-away service, and they have tables outside. I found a bench in the sunshine in the Rose Garden, and spoke to a robin – I invited him back to my garden, but warned him that I have a cat, albeit an elderly, dopey one, and he cocked his head and looked at me, but didn’t take up my offer.
Everything in the Garden…
I’ve already been to the Co-op today. I managed to avoid going all last week, because I stocked up the week before when I was having visitors for the weekend. And by using up supplies of longlife and evaporated milk, and Elmlea (which I’d bought to put on trifle – for my visitors – till I went to the shops again and managed to get real fresh cream); taking dinners from the freezer backlog of all those ‘chef’s surprise’ slow-cooker meals which have been building up; and a take away curry delivery on Saturday, I held out without needing to go until today. Saturday’s dinner in the slow cooker will be belly pork with cannellini beans, celery, red pepper, carrots and maybe sweet potatoes cooked in cider, because too many of the ‘chef’s surprises’ seem to have sauces based on tinned tomatoes, and I fancied a more radical change.
I have been getting discouraged about a lot of things lately – mainly the garden. My Facebook memories keep showing all the lovely things which were in flower at this time last year. Someone said to me the other day that my garden is ‘blooming’, but he was judging it from Facebook, where I have posted pictures of every single flower I’ve seen so far – sometimes several pictures of the same one, over a number of days, as I’m still trying to post a photo every day. The actual total of flowers so far has been: one yellow and three white daffodils on the forecourt, and in the back garden one blue hyacinth and a handful of mini daffodils; two hellebores (one single and, more recently, one double flower), a few blossoms on the rosemary which were only visible if you looked very carefully and a couple of yellow celandines under the camellia (which I only just remembered). The rest is a desert of weeds, rotting planks and general junk currently in transit between the sheds. Is this disaster down to the hot, dry summer last year, or a total lack of interest and attention? I assume most likely a combination of the two.
It’s the curse of social media. However honest I try to be about my general worthlessness and self loathing, it seems that people want to keep seeing me in a more positive light. Which is very frustrating – but on the other hand, if they could see me more clearly, they wouldn’t want to be my friends anyway. And then I’d feel even worse.
I honestly don’t know how to shake off these feelings, and more and more it seems that there isn’t any escape. The effort required feels overwhelming, but so is the effort to pretend to be what I’m not: brave, positive, upbeat, hopeful, happy etc. Feelings always take control over intentions to change, to find a better way to be.
I almost didn’t write today. Perhaps it would be better if I didn’t throw all this out into the void. But I usually feel better afterwards
Tackling the Chaos: Memories Lost and Overwhelmed
Clicking through photos again to track down another one which came up on my desktop recently, I thought it was from Sête in Provence, but it was a little further east along the coast, at Le Grau du Roi in the Camargue, taken on a very grey and damp Spring Equinox in 2012 (of course). Which reminds me of my late friend Douglas Jeal, who, after hearing my tales, went to the south of France at around the same time the following year, then grumbled at me because the weather was horrible. What did he expect? Well, he had lived in Barcelona for a while, which has its own microclimate, so I suppose he can’t be blamed for thinking it might be similar a few hundred miles along the Mediterranean coast.
What else does that remind me of? A few days ago the image on my desktop was of a map of that corner of the Med, a mural on the wall of Bordeaux station, where I was stranded for a couple of hours or so during a train strike when I was en route from Brittany to northern Spain. Something piqued my interest when I saw it again, but I couldn’t remember what it was, so I opened the file in Photoshop to check, and still can’t see why. It’s quite a poor quality photo – from an old, pre-Smart Nokia phone – so zooming in hasn’t helped. Maybe it will come to me.
I’ve mentioned before about the Magic Refilling Data pot, and how my efforts at clearing space on my google Drive by downloading photos from Google photos to my hard drive and then deleting them from Google photos were being thwarted because every morning my phone was being backed up to another file on Google Drive. Over several days (because it takes a long time to select and delete that many photos and my PC is four years old and quite creaky – and also it was refilling again every morning with the ones I hadn’t backed up and removed from my phone) I managed to get all the photos up to the end of 2020 from my phone, onto my hard drive, and removed from the backup file on Google drive. The day came when I logged on to my computer, opened my Gmail, and was informed that I had used 11 Gb of my 15Gb allocation. That lasted a couple of hours before the messages started to appear telling me that my Google Drive was full again.
I listed all files in descending file-size, and found that the photos I’d already deleted were still appearing on the list. By clicking on each file, I was given a side panel with details, including the folder where the file was located. Clicking on the name of the folder led me up the tree to the folder where it was, and so on until I reached a folder called ‘Desktop’, and above that, another one called ‘Computers’… tbc
Not a Competition
In a chat on Zoom, I mentioned that I suspect I’m going to be facing my second consecutive birthday in lockdown, and got this response from one participant:
‘We all are!’
‘That depends on when your birthday is’ I stuttered, not having expected this somewhat aggressive response.
‘Well, none of us were allowed parties!’ she shot back.
There I go again, showing my self-pity. I should know by now to keep my mouth shut. But the only reason I’d been thinking about it was that next week it will be my sister’s first birthday in lockdown – last year she and her husband went for a holiday in Devon, and for my birthday I was looking forward to a canal holiday on a narrow-boat with my son and daughter in law. When it had to be cancelled, I thought: ‘oh well, not the end of the world, it’s just another day, I’m used to being on my own at home after all’ etc etc, but on the day itself it hit me harder than I’d expected. It was near the beginning of the first lockdown, and over the last few weeks I’ve been wondering whether this current situation will still be in place by then. But, first-world-problems, what do birthdays matter when people are facing much worse problems: illness and death, losing loved ones, losing jobs? Maybe this lady had problems I wasn’t aware of, and my remark about my birthday was insensitive?
‘It’s not a competition’ my therapist said when I told her about it. ‘Whatever’s going on in her life, that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to feel sad! And instead of self-pity, why not think of it as “self-care”?’
Still, I think I should keep my mouth shut. It’s safer. Which is ironic, because as a child, and even later when I was a young woman, I was always being told to speak up for myself (except when I said things the other parties didn’t want to hear, as in this case, and how was I supposed to anticipate when that might happen?) Better to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself, when to share them might invoke other people’s anger, and hence my shame, or even laughter, and my humiliation – or sometimes both shame and humiliation at the same time.
Yet I come on here and talk about my feelings every day. Why is that? I’ve been through this before – because I can, with a near certainty that no one is going to respond.
I have a friend who occasionally contacts me on What’s App, who has severe physical disabilities and is in a far worse position than me. Sometimes she amazes me with her positivity and resilience, but this week she was very low. I tried to tell her how I felt for her, I didn’t belittle her suffering, I told a funny story against myself, I said I’m here if she ever wants to share. What else could I do? It’s not a competition.
Hold That Thought…
Do I have control over my thoughts or do my thoughts control me?
When I was going to ‘business networking’ breakfasts, ten years ago, the speakers often emphasised the importance of having the right attitude: plan for success, visualise what you want to achieve, believe in yourself, banish negativity etc. Softer, gentler life-coach types would also add things like: practise gratitude, be in the moment, take care of yourself; but the general thrust was pretty much the same – you can do this if you think you can. Think right, and everything will fall into place.
Needless to say, I struggled with all this. I would go to the meetings, listen to the talks, chat to people, get a momentary buzz of: ‘I can do this!’ and then go home and remember: I had no clients, I didn’t know how to persuade people to buy my services, and I wasn’t sure that what I could do would be ‘good enough’. And, also needless to say, I blamed myself – I was never going to get anywhere with an ‘attitude’ like mine, if all these shiny, happy people could make it work for them, what was wrong with me? And the answer was: this is what’s wrong with me, the fact that I have to ask: ‘what’s wrong with me?’ and so it goes, round and round and round.
But I met some nice people, and I ate some good breakfasts (not necessarily a healthy habit to get into) and gradually – mainly in retrospect – I came to realise that they were mostly in the same boat as me – scrabbling around trying to get business from other people who were also scrabbling around trying to get business, in the belief that by behaving like ‘business people’, they would magically find success, by ‘investing’ their hard earned profits into subscriptions that accumulated up and up the pyramid to the people at the top. I was ‘invited’ to be a local organiser, which meant my subscriptions were halved in return for a few hours spent every fortnight sending out invitations, following up to check who was coming, getting there early and checking people off the list as they arrived, collecting £10 from each and paying the venue for the breakfasts, then passing on the balance to the regional organiser. And every day of the week, in a different venue, there would be another one of these meetings, where I could go and pay £10 for another breakfast, another pep talk, and maybe meet a different group of people, but most likely many of the same, and so on. At least I felt I belonged to something.
I seem to have digressed a bit into reminiscing about those days. I’ve never been happy about meeting people, or good at making small talk, but I suppose I bit the bullet and got on with it and it didn’t kill me, though it didn’t make me a business person, either.
But that’s not what I was intending to write…
Blogging about Blogging
I do this every morning, supposedly first thing, but in fact I’ve usually already been awake for two or three hours, lain in bed thinking, listened to the radio, fed the cat, exercised, showered, prepared porridge, loaded the dishwasher…
This morning I answered a comment and made a comment on a friend’s post on our group blog, changed my profile picture, then noticed that the second comment wasn’t appearing, realised I hadn’t saved it anywhere else and didn’t want to have to retype it from scratch; thought maybe it was there but needed to be approved by an admin. Tried logging into the email account for the group blog; couldn’t get the password right; tried hunting for the bit of paper with the password on, which I was sure I’d seen in the last few days; decided to go downstairs and use the laptop because I was sure the email and password were saved on there; they weren’t, but the admin account was the saved login, so I managed to get into the group blog and confirm that the comment had never been saved; came back up here, typed it again (as best I could remember), posted the comment.
I could change the password for the group blog – no, it’s not the blog password I need but the gmail account – I can change the password for that, because I think I’m the only person who ever uses it, but it’s annoying me now and I don’t want to. That bit of paper must be around here somewhere.
I have a thing about not wanting to retype something I’ve already written – which is why I always do blog posts in Word first and save them, so I don’t have to do it again. Even a three sentence comment, I want to be sure I’m doing it the same way as I did the first time (or maybe even better, but I can’t know that if I don’t have a record of the original). It’s a foible of mine.
None of which is what I was intending to write about before I sat down at the computer (well, maybe the first paragraph was). My friend’s comment and his post had got me thinking about how and why I write this blog, because he said ‘Your words often make me wonder if you are searching for direction and whether or not I should be following a dream again.’ Then in his own post (referring to himself or a generic ‘you’, I presume, not me specifically) :
Well, what I write is just what comes into my head at the time, and some of that leads to thoughts of my life so far. As for what’s left of it – which is kind of what I thought I would write about, before I got distracted – I’ll start that tomorrow.
Ghosts of New Years Past
The last post from ‘Husband or Cat’, posted twelve years ago today. I created a new blog immediately afterwards, under the name Melinda Solo.
I’ll be honest, I’m sharing it as an excuse not to write anything new today. Which, now I’m here, doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Some days it just feels like that.
New Year’s Day is quite a potent day for blogging. I feel as though I’ve left a mark on this day several times. The one for 2009 was obviously highly significant, and I’ve referred back to it a few times since.
The Spare Room
The Buddhist New Year party. An evening of reflection, meditation, poetry reading, sharing, wine, food, laughter, friendship. When Chris tentatively mentioned the idea a month ago, I leapt at it.
‘I’ll come, even if it’s only you me and Clare’ I said. ‘I won’t be doing anything else that night.’
It was a good evening, a positive evening, an unconventional evening. What more could you ask for? Better sober with good friends than drinking here alone… I wasn’t clear whether the invitation extended to sleeping over or not, so I took an overnight bag in case, but at around 1:30 the party broke up…
I got back around 2, the house in darkness. Hubby hadn’t left the light on for me, but at least he hadn’t bolted the door. I took my overnight bag into the second bathroom and unpacked my night things. And then I thought…
I went into the bedroom in the dark, got my dressing gown and hot water bottle. I could hear his breathing, soft and regular. This is it, the voice told me, now is the time. It makes perfect sense. Why bother climbing in beside him, one more night? There’s nothing there for either of you, is there?
So I took my things into the spare room. Laid the bag on the floor. Switched the radiator on – the heating was off, but it would be ready for morning. Looked around me.
Checked the wardrobe: full of rubbish, I can sort that out, give myself some storage space in here. I need a bedside cabinet, but for now the clock can sit on the floor.
This is my room now. Why put it off any longer?
Lying in the bed, stretching out, luxuriating. The feather duvet, I will have to swap them over, this is bad for my asthma, but I can survive one night. And I’ll bring my own pillow from the other room tomorrow. But for now, it will be OK.
I woke just after 6, the cat had found her way in and was walking over me and purring. Outside the window, I could hear the fountain in the fish pond. A transit place. I won’t be here forever. But it will do for now.
It was gone 7 before I got up, even though I knew there would be no more sleep. So I did the usual things, fed the cats, put the coffee on. I went back upstairs to meditate, but the mp3 player wouldn’t switch on. Must have left it on all night, I’ll have to recharge it. Then I heard him in the kitchen.
‘I slept in the spare room. Thought that was easier than disturbing you.’
‘OK. I didn’t know what was happening so I didn’t leave the light on.’
‘That’s fine, no problem.’
So polite. We are always so civil with one another. Never any animosity.
The coffee machine gave its sudden final burst of noise and steam. I lifted the lid. Still some filtering through.
He was sitting at the table eating Shredded Wheat.
‘Do you want your coffee pouring now?’
‘Yes please.’
I looked at the chair opposite him. Should I pull it out, sit down?
‘I need to talk to you today’.
‘OK.’ No curiosity, no reaction.
‘Do you want to do it now, or later?’
‘Later.’
OK then. Later it is.
by husbandorcat @ 2009-01-01 – 08:09:45
In the first post of the new blog, I described the actual conversation which I sprung on my husband. It was pointless asking him if he wanted to talk ‘now or later’, I knew that, just procrastination on both our parts. I’d been procrastinating long enough – I suppose we both had, but I couldn’t help but take all the blame onto myself. Also, of course, for me it was exciting, because I was about to embark on a new adventure – running away again. Whatever happened next in my life, I was sure, something good would come out of it.
The spooky thing is that I feel now as though I’m not completely alone, as though there’s someone else in this house who’s still asleep but will get up soon and need to be interacted with. And of course, the same old cat just came and rubbed against my legs.
Ghosts of New Years past. But it’s just an arbitrary mark on the calendar, and I haven’t even got one this year – the last few years I’ve had a Vistaprint one made of my own photos, but didn’t get round to it this time. I’ve honed that old procrastination thing to a fine art, over the years.
Round Like a Circle in a Spiral
I wrote yesterday, nothing much, and when I got close to the end I wanted to include a quote from Polar Express (which I saw for the first/only time at my daughter’s last Christmas). I only remembered it because I read it somewhere recently, in a file that I’d obviously saved it to because I found it interesting. I thought I remembered reading it on my laptop, so guessed it was one of the Word files that I wanted to save in none-365 format. Just been looking for it, in all the places I could think of that it might be – I even thought I might have saved it on my phone, but no luck. Came on the PC to start writing, Googled ‘Polar Express quotes’, opened the third link down, and it was the second quote on the list:
‘One thing about trains: It doesn’t matter where they’re going. What matters is deciding to get on.’
The Polar Express
But the question is – given that the only reason I didn’t post what I wrote yesterday (apart from it being the usual pointless drivel) was because I wanted to find that quote, then I got caught up in doing something else and never got back to it – should I post that now or not? Should I do that instead of trying to write something today? Except… I’m almost half way to 500 words already.
What I write is throw-away, but sometimes, reading back through old posts, I find something interesting. Like that quote – okay, it’s not exactly Schopenhauer, but it’s interesting, right? In looking for it, I also found another quote that I thought was interesting, which I’d taken from a strange documentary about Jim Carrey that I watched last Boxing Day – but I’m not going to quote that now because it’s on the laptop, which is downstairs in the front room and I’m upstairs on the PC.
When things become self-referential, they create a sort of spiral effect, or maybe a hall of mirrors, to use a familiar metaphor I’ve often used before – and there I go again. But does it just take me up my own back passage, or somewhere different? Because a spiral (I used that word deliberately) is not a circle – it doesn’t take you back to exactly the same place as before – something has changed, it might be infinitesimal, but the circumstances, the conditions are not identical. Back to cause and effect again, and the Buddhist idea of ‘conditionality’, the connectedness of all things. Which set me off looking up definitions, and led me to a book I might buy.
I feel as though I’ve strayed away from the point somehow, but then, I can’t remember what point I was trying to make. So that’s kind of a good thing, I think: it doesn’t matter so much where the train is going, what matters is that I got on.
I’ve completed nine cards so far, and printed five letters which are now in envelopes ready to be posted.
Superficial Stuff
Yesterday I received my first Christmas card of the season through the post, and it was from the friend I mentioned a couple of days ago (hers is always the first). There wasn’t a long letter this time, just a handwritten note in the card to say her Mum died in May. Luckily I hadn’t already sent my round robin letters, so I can write a personal note to her. It’s a worry when you don’t have any contact from one year’s end to the next and don’t know what might have happened in between.
I don’t have to go anywhere today, and although the sun is shining I doubt I’ll be tempted out of my burrow. Yesterday after my trip to the hospital in the morning, I made the mistake of going into the Range on the way back to see what Christmassy paper, cutting dies and stamps they had. Unfortunately, this hobby is really about buying stuff – which looks amazing and inspiring in the shop and then disappears into the cupboards when I get home. And then there was the depressing socially distanced queuing. Most of my shopping this year has been online. I had to buy a winter flowering shrub (skimmia), two boxes of coconut Lindors and a kilo of Fox’s biscuits to cheer myself up.
In the afternoon, I completed the interiors of three of the cards I made the exteriors for at the weekend (which means I now have a total of four usable cards), but got stuck on the remaining two because I thought I’d got a second sheet of the matching paper for the front, to do the internal decorations with, but couldn’t find it anywhere. After I’d spent an hour going through the mess on the table, it was getting near dinner time, so I left it, with a plan to start some new ones today with different paper in hope that the other will turn up, or if not I’ll think of something else to go on the inside.
This is why I have to allow so much time to do these things. Ten days from today to the last second-class posting date. Also I need to re-order some teas, coffees and hot chocolates from the Whittard’s website, because an order that I thought I’d sent over a week ago never turned up – when I checked, the order wasn’t registered, although I remembered doing it on the ‘Black Friday’ weekend, so I must have just put it all in the basket without confirming it.
Just had a text from someone I’d arranged to see next Monday in Bedford and hadn’t told her I won’t be going. Still haven’t rung up the steam train people to cancel the booking so I can get my money back (in the form of vouchers to go next year). At least I contacted the catsitter yesterday and rearranged that.
Not very deep today, am I? This is why my head is always in a mess.