Category: gardening

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New Glasses

Something remarkable happened today: I got up feeling quite upbeat, almost chipper even, or at least not as down as I usually do. I don’t know why – I didn’t get any more sleep than usual, woke up at my current ‘normal’ time, about half past four (though I had gone to bed a bit earlier, after falling asleep on the sofa in front of the telly). I listened to quite a nice, cheerful play on the radio, which was engaging, if a bit soppy, read some nice posts on Facebook – nothing that made me too angry – (well, except for one woman ‘boasting’ about her and her husband’s new French-made blue UK passports – I refrained from saying that I’m grateful my burgundy EU one doesn’t have to be replaced until 2028 – though sadly it no longer conveys the rights and privileges it used to). But apart from that, nothing too irritating or depressing. And I did some puzzles on my phone, even thought about going to the beach for the sunrise, but decided against it because it was raining, and stayed in bed till after the heating came on at half past six.

I picked up my new glasses yesterday, but I’m still wearing my old readers, which is a bit daft. I think part of me was thinking I’d keep the new ones downstairs and the old ones upstairs, but as my PC is upstairs and I look at my phone a lot in bed, that doesn’t make much sense. I think they need to be consigned to ‘emergency’ status and I’ll have to continue carrying the new ones up and down stairs with me.

The optician was quite surprised when I told her that I wanted reading glasses as well as varifocals, but I just don’t like using varifocals for close work, and especially for screen work. I don’t know, maybe the gradient is in the wrong place, or I wear them in the wrong place, or hold my head at the wrong angle. I get very stressed in eye tests, especially the bit where they keep changing the lenses and asking which one is clearer. It’s like everything else I suppose: what if I say the wrong thing? I’ll end up with the wrong glasses and spend a lot of money and get more headaches and have to keep squinting all the time (specially if I don’t wear the new ones). But I can never trust my own judgement, and I panic when I’m asked to make choices, even with something like that where nobody but me can say whether it’s right or wrong – worse, even, because no one can correct me so I have to live with it.

The shed is up now, but it’s not in the place where I want it – which is where the shell of the old one is still standing. I haven’t put any stuff into the new one yet, except the shelves, because it will need to be moved at some point.

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Soundscape

Today is the day my son and daughter-in-law are coming to put up the new garden shed. They will be staying the night, but it’s all legit, because they are my ‘support bubble’ and even though I haven’t seen them since September, I haven’t had any other visitors to my house since before the current lockdown started, so I’m not breaking any rules. Plus, of course, I’ve had my first vaccination, which I know doesn’t affect the legal requirements, but does make me feel more comfortable about the situation.

Quite what’s going to happen to the weather, I’m not sure. It’s not raining at the moment, in fact it’s lovely and sunny, but the wind is still loud enough to be audible, and the draughts are coming through my double glazing as though it was tissue paper.

Incidentally, I know about listening to the wind in the trees, but what causes the sound in an urban area? I’m looking through the window at a city street with no trees in view, but the wind gusts almost drown out the traffic noise. There are wires across the street, and they are definitely moving, but can they be responsible for that much noise? It seems to come from the wind itself, rather than contact with anything more solid.

Yet another day when I’m looking out the window because I don’t know what to write about.

I just heard the sound of a ship’s warning signal, also known as a ‘fog horn’, although there’s no fog today, so presumably it’s being sounded for something else – surely nobody is sailing a little boat out on the Solent in this wind and getting in the way of the ferries? Fog horns and strong winds are the two signature sounds of Southsea, in my experience. Oh, and gulls – one just flew sideways across my eyeline, but it wasn’t screeching for once. I love the sound of the gulls – and the fog horns too, funnily enough – they remind me that I finally found my heart’s home, but that there’s still a big wild world out there.

I wrote three versions of that last sentence – first it was ‘came’ home, then I changed it to ‘found my home’ to emphasise that I hadn’t ‘come back’ here, because I’d never lived here before almost six years ago (though I had lived further along the coast in Southampton), then ‘found my heart’s home’ because, even though it sounds a bit corny, that’s the sort of connection I feel to where I live now, as though something within me has always yearned to be here.

I think about the time I lived in Prague. I loved the city, but not the life I was living, because I knew that I couldn’t stay forever. On the darkest days, I would step out my door, take the first tram that came along, and always find somewhere beautiful at the end of it.

Here I can take that step and walk to the sea.

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The Sixth Age

The rain has stopped, the sun is out, but I can still hear the wind – which isn’t good, because tomorrow my son and daughter-in-law are coming to put up the new garden shed. Will it stand in this wind? Anybody’s guess. I hope so, because we get storms every winter.

I have been gradually emptying out the old shed over the last two weeks. There’s not much stuff left in there, and I’m planning to get it out today or tomorrow morning before they get here. That’s the plan.

I was talking a while ago about the Madwoman in the Attic years, those times when there were issues in the future that were going to resolve everything (if positive, like getting a job, finding a new lover, travelling, publishing a book, living by the seaside) or were being ignored (if scary, like settling down and finding a home for all my Stuff). In the last few years, I have come to accept that the former group are either never going to happen (the job and the lover), or have happened without really resolving things as I’d hoped they would (the travelling, the books and living at the seaside – though I don’t regret any of them, especially the last). In fact it’s been the settling down and finally having a place that feels like ‘home’ which has been the saving grace for me, though managing the Stuff is a big issue which still needs to be resolved.

The first year and a half of living in the flat near the beach felt in many ways like a continuation of the travelling years – or maybe the first year did, because the last six months was taken up with the stress of house buying, emptying out the old house in Bedford, and arranging for all the Stuff to come to rest here. Then the next year was taken up with dealing with cancer. So I suppose I could say I’ve had three years to date of adjusting to the ways my life is now. People talk about ‘the Third Age’, but in Shakespearean terms, I see this as the Sixth Age – the penultimate one.  

Why am I thinking in these terms today? A couple of weeks ago my therapist asked me what I want to do with my future, what I would do if money was no object. But money isn’t the problem – I have enough money for anything I need, and I can’t think of anything I want that would require money I don’t have. If I came into more money unexpectedly, I would probably give it to my children, or maybe put it in trust for my grandchildren. Perhaps I’ll have some nice holidays when travel becomes a possibility again, though I’ll never be able to travel as freely as I did before.

I spoke too soon about the weather. Rain and hail are driving against the window. Shed emptying, dismantling and erecting might not be possible this weekend after all.   

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Wenesday Morning

I was going to go to the shop, but slept in and didn’t get up till half past seven, so decided to skip my exercise routine and get dressed straight away. But when I looked at the shopping list, I thought: I’m not desperate for any of these things, I haven’t got enough milk to last the day but I’ve got some long-life in the cupboard, and whatever else I need will depend on what I’m going to eat over the next few days, and I can’t think about planning what I’m going to eat so I’ll leave it till tomorrow – except tomorrow I have to go to the doctor’s for half past eight to get a blood test to check on how my cholesterol’s doing – so better not have anything too cheesy for dinner tonight – and I guess I can go to the shop after the doctor’s, it will be a bit later than usual but hopefully not too busy.

But what am I going to have for dinner tonight, or the next few days? What’s in the freezer? It’s full of plastic boxes, and since the start of the year I’ve been making a list of what’s in there and tallies to tick things off, but there are no labels on the boxes so I have to guess. Because on alternate Saturdays (I have takeaway on the others) I make a casserole in the slow cooker, and put three quarters of it into plastic boxes and freeze them. But which is which? They look pretty much the same. This one has cannellini beans, I think that’s from before the time I started writing them down, and it’s either lamb hotpot or belly pork in cider. It’ll do.

The sun is shining and the dead heads of the hydrangea are looking at me through the window, the ones I didn’t cut back in the autumn. If I cut them now, will I cut off the new shoots as well so it doesn’t flower?

What to do? Make a cup of coffee, prepare porridge and put it in the microwave ready for later, and put away the things from the drainer because they must be dry by now. Like any other day. Then I’ll go on the computer and delete some more files, because the backup from the phone will be on there by now, or will be as soon as the phone’s connected to the wifi. And write? Or do I feel too shit to share?

When I get upstairs I remember I need to do the washing today, and it’s sunny, so I sit on the bed and think – what needs to go in and what am I going to forget and kick myself about later? Two pairs of ripped jeans should be in the bin, I forgot them last week and again today because the bin men have already gone.

Groundhog day all over again. Spring is coming, but what changes? At least I’m up and dressed.

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Rotting From the Roots

Sat down at the PC to start writing and remembered a) the mouse isn’t working and b) the top tool bar on word keeps appearing and disappearing and I can’t work out how to fix it. Weell… actually, after a few more minutes of trying the View tab and other things, I Googled it and found out that if I right click on the home tab it gives me a drop-down including ‘Minimize the ribbon’ which was ticked, so I unticked it and that worked. The first suggestion: press Ctrl F1, was stymied by the fact that I can’t see ‘F1’ on my keyboard. Don’t know how it got ticked in the first place, but I suspect it happened when I was thrashing around trying to get the mouse to work.

I suspect the mouse just needs a new battery, but spare batteries are downstairs and the mouse is upstairs, and by the time I got downstairs I’d forgotten I needed to get them. If I remember, I could take the mouse down when I go and do it then, but that would rely on me remembering to take it, remembering what I’d taken it for, then remembering to bring it back up again. For now, I’m getting more practised at using the touch pad.

Today, I feel the way this poinsettia looks. I used to buy a poinsettia every year, and this is how they always ended up looking. I think it’s down to over-watering – but you only have to do it once and there’s no getting back from the slippery slope. I’m always a bit erratic with my watering regime, I guess it’s to do with short term memory and lack of awareness. Some things die from lack of water, which is recoverable-from if you notice in time, but there’s no way back from over-watering.

I can tell you exactly how long I’ve had this one, because I bought it the day we went into Tier 3, the Thursday before Christmas. I know, because it was the day I took my cards to the post office and checked the local shops for a small turkey joint, then bought a little Christmas tree and this poinsettia on the way home. Then my family persuaded me to go to them for Christmas anyway, by promising to come and get me and bring me back, then two days later we went in Tier 4 and the plan changed again (but you already know that story).

In other words, this poor plant has been in my care for less than a fortnight, and this is what I’ve done to it.

However, that’s not why I’m feeling droopy, as though I’m rotting from my roots. It’s just that I woke up that way, as often happens. Maybe it’s because I’m always rotting from my roots, and I’m not sure whether there’s any way back from that. Well, nothing permanent, as far as I can tell, but at least I’m not actually dead yet.

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Brain Freeze

Back in front of my PC after my weekly trip to the shop. Oddly calm in the morning the last couple of days. I think it’s because I’m slipping back into the lockdown peace, no stress, nowhere to go, nobody to see, just my own peaceful life. Won’t last, of course it won’t, it can’t, at some point the world will wake up and I’ll be forced to deal with it again, but not now. Can’t believe it’s only a week since I took the van out, it feels like ages ago.

The sun is shining at present. I didn’t mow the grass when I said I would – maybe I will today, if it stays sunny, though it must still be wet underfoot.

I’ve not been remembering my dreams recently. When I wake up, I know that I’ve been dreaming and now I’m awake, but the content of the dream is completely gone from my awareness. It’s like watching something on the telly, and you know you haven’t been asleep, but you haven’t got a clue what just happened, or what was said, and you have to rewind the last few minutes to find out. Of course, that also happens when I’m listening to the radio, or reading, or even in the middle of a conversation (though in that case there’s no rewind button), and as I now know, that’s all part and parcel of dyspraxia. But I’m sure I used to remember my dreams.

Incidentally, although for me the lack of short term memory had always seemed to be the key aspect of dyspraxia, from which all else follows, it’s only recently that I’ve started to think it might be the other way round. Starting from the premise that it’s due to faulty message processing in the brain, and that that makes it hard to focus on more than one thing at a time, this leads to the phenomenon of ‘absent-mindedness’, whereby I have no recollection of where I put my glasses, because when I put them down no part of my brain was processing the information : ‘I am putting my glasses on the bookshelf/back of the toilet/behind the fruit basket/they just fell on the floor’ and so doesn’t leave an imprint on my memory.  

Sounds like a good theory – it definitely reflects my personal experience, anyway. I expect somebody somewhere has thought of that before, but as I mentioned yesterday (I think), my PhD supervisor pointed out years ago that I struggle to accept things unless I can understand them from first principles. What I don’t think he understood at the time was that it wasn’t due to bloody-mindedness so much as that my brain couldn’t hold and process that information if I didn’t have the right pegs to hang it onto. Which sounds quite paradoxical, because although I can have enough flashes of insight to have achieved a PhD, there are times when my brain freezes and I’m incapable of absorbing what I’m being told.  

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Hot Water

Trying to assemble my thoughts to check whether there are any worth sharing.

Yesterday I didn’t write because of a domestic crisis – when I got up, the radiators weren’t on, but I just thought that it wasn’t cold enough to trigger the thermostat – that’s happened a lot this autumn, because it’s been so mild. But then I tried to run some hot water to rinse out Miko’s food bowl, and realised that wasn’t working either. There was an error message on the boiler saying: ‘Low water pressure’, so I Googled that to see if I could find any advice, but nothing was very clear. Disaster – I was going to have to call someone! I scanned my phone contacts to see if I could identify the man who fixed my shower last year, but I could only find ‘Rob Heating’, and I was pretty sure he was the one who wasn’t much help – confirmed by the call record, which showed I’d called him once but there was no reply. After looking through old emails, trying to remember when it was, googling unidentified numbers on my phone to see if any related to a plumbing business, going through my accounts to see if I’d got an invoice from him, looking on ‘Checkatrade’ to see if any name rang a bell and wondering whether I should take a punt on anybody, and if so which one… I had another look on the phone contacts and spotted ‘Jon’, with ‘heating’ in small type underneath. I called him and he was able to put me right with what I needed to do, which was quite straightforward once I’d managed to look underneath the boiler (which was quite tricky, because it’s in a cupboard, and needed a torch, which when I found it needed batteries, so I had to find them as well…etc). But after all that I decided that was a good enough excuse to skip the writing for once, because the morning had already been disrupted enough.

Other excitement yesterday included: walking to the vet’s to pick up Miko’s thyroid medicine; having another go at cutting the hedge (think I’ve done enough on that now, except get rid of the clippings, which I’ve swept to the back of the forecourt between the bay and the wall); cutting back the clematis and passion flower which have been trailing over the lawn all summer, standing up the metal frame and pushing the top half into the ground so they can scramble over that (a temporary measure because I don’t suppose it will escape the winter storms, even though it’s now only half as tall as it was); and cutting with shears the grass that was underneath and around them. Today I might even run the lawnmower over the patch of long grass and miscellaneous weeds that covers the central section of my back garden.

Nothing very deep there. I had plenty of deep thoughts earlier, but decided that wittering on about trivial practicalities was safer today.

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Here We Go Round Again

So far this week: last yoga class before lockdown; last tai chi class before lockdown; last trip out in the van before lockdown. I mentioned last week about my yoga teacher being homeless and having to cancel classes – the next day she sent a text to say that someone had offered her a lift, then came the lockdown announcement, so there was a class on Monday evening, and ditto the tai chi yesterday morning, after which I picked up my camper van from the garage and drove to Queen Elizabeth Country Park on the A3 near Petersfield, and had a walk among the trees and a picnic. I love taking the van there, because there are car parks spread among the trees, often empty (on weekdays when I usually go), so although you can’t actually camp, you can get some of the feeling for a few hours.

The weather has turned dry and sunny but noticeably colder than it was, and today looks to be about the same, with a clear blue sky. I really should get out and do some tidying up in the garden, I tried cutting the hedge on Monday but the trimmer kept cutting out. Because it stopped and later started again, it had to be a loose wire. I took apart the connector that joins it where I cut through the cable in the spring, unscrewed the little screwy things inside, couldn’t see anything obviously loose, then got into a horrible dyspraxic muddle trying to put it back together and gave up for the day.

I read some more of ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, this time about creative blocks. The author suggests the usual things: keep trying, don’t self-edit, do a little every day, expect to fail, but keep going anyway. This is what I’ve been doing forever. Back to the old question of whether it matters that it never gets me anywhere? Apparently, it doesn’t. Either one day a miracle will happen and I’ll suddenly start writing something worthwhile, or I’ll be gone and someone will come along and wipe my hard drive and that will be that.

Last week I read the poem about the ‘Wild Thing’ to my therapist, and she said I should try to get it published. I haven’t done anything about it. Strictly speaking, I think posting it on here counts as publication, which disqualifies it from most competitions anyway.

I’ve been thinking about Daniel Defoe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’. I think this definitely counts as a ‘plague year’, but I don’t think this journal of mine is in the same class.

My current yoga teacher once said that destiny is what has to happen, but fate is what you make happen (or words to that effect). She is not having a great year, even worse than most of us. But she has faith in the fundamental goodness of the world, and I envy her for that. Today, I fear for the fate of us all.

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Gloomy Monday

I am here again – today, anyway, though it remains to be seen whether I will post this or just rant to myself. I went to stay at my daughter’s for the early part of last week, after my infusion at the hospital – quite a last minute decision, to do with me going to see their new house before she goes back to work full time, and not knowing when we might be able to meet again. I came back on Wednesday and came down with a cold Wednesday evening, which I’m now over except for an embarrassing cough, a nasal whine and a cloud of gloom that I’m struggling to get out from under.

Aha, autumn, increasing darkness, getting colder, and nothing to look forward to in the next six months but more of the same. Yes to all of that, but also commitments; an Xmas jumper promised to one person and a website to another, both of them started over the weekend, neither of them particularly well.  

One of the joys of combined singledom and retirement is not having regular commitments to do things for other people. Although it has been said to me that the best way to make yourself happy is to make other people happy, for me it just creates so much stress and worry beforehand, and the outcome is so uncertain – what if they don’t like what I’ve done when I’ve done it? What if it all turns out to be crap? For example, if I’m crocheting something for myself and I hate it when it’s finished, I can either unravel it or shove it into the back of the wardrobe and never have to look at it again (which is what mostly happens with the things I make). But if I’m doing something for someone else, I have a certain responsibility, and they have certain expectations which I have to meet. And what would happen if I fail to meet those expectations? Another failure to throw on the ever-growing pile, but with the added sense of shame and guilt of knowing that my failure is not just a private one but visible to others.  And even if they say they like it, how can I ever know that they’re being honest and not just trying to spare my feelings?

A crowd of starlings just flew past my window and over the roof – or the roof of the next house down the terrace perhaps. There’s a word for it – isn’t it ‘murmuration’? Or is that when they all get together and make a noise?

Yesterday was sunny but chilly. I stayed indoors, though I know there’s lots that needs doing in the garden to stop it descending further into an ugly green mess. Will the weeds die back in the winter? There’s no guarantee of that. Today it’s grey and gloomy, which is a good enough excuse to stay in. Already been to Sainsbury’s, and committed to going to yoga this evening. That’ll be enough.

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Leaf Upon the Water

Poem today. Not sure why. Sometimes it happens like that. Feels like this is the first one in a while

The photo was taken in the water lily house at Kew Gardens in 2015. The flowers and small leaves in front are lotuses, the large leaves behind are from giant water lilies. I was tempted to use a photo of a water lily from my old garden pond, but thought some smart Alec might point out that it wasn’t actually a lotus (that’s the sort of thing I’d do, anyway).

Also ‘The lotus flower grows from shit’ is only one of many interpretations of the mantra ‘Om mane padme hum‘ but it was the one explained to me by my first meditation teacher, and it makes for a great metaphor.

Leaf Upon the Water

The lotus flower grows from shit,
the silt of a thousand fishes, living
and dead, their shimmering scales,
dulled and darkened,
sinking through the cloudy waters
to the home of the scuttling things,
sliding into and becoming
the black, unspeakable ooze
that clings and clods
and welcomes into its bitter embrace
the scattered seed
that cracks and bleeds
in its agony of birth,
sending its silvery roots into the darkness
to trap the rotting death-food and to grow
new life that rises,
green and fecund
to break the surface,
unfurl its leaves
and open its lovely face towards the sun.

I am the leaf upon the water,
held in the magic of the meniscus,
I will not struggle
I will trust the power of the water,
I will lie back and let it hold me
until my season is done.

Om mane padme hum.
The lotus flower grows from shit.

Linda Rushby 30 September 2020