Category: life

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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.

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Rabbit in the Headlights

Later this morning, I’ll be going to the hospital for my annual mammogram, postponed from last month because of the lockdown. I don’t want to go – not that it’s that painful (though it’s never comfortable), but I don’t want to go to the hospital, or anywhere really – just as I didn’t particularly want to take the van out last week, but this time I really have no choice.

The card-making didn’t go so well yesterday, partly because I was, like Friday afternoon, trying something different (for the inside of the cards), and I only completed one. So I’m still not ready to send off my letters, which feels a bit as though time’s running out.

Thinking about all this yesterday after I’d posted – and when I was getting frustrated with how I was going to do it, and panicking a little in case I did anything that would ruin anything I’d done so far – it struck me that there is a distinct ‘first world problem’ side to all this. It’s all so trivial, isn’t it, on the global scale? Yet it feels so important to me. It feels – at risk of sounding melodramatic – like an act of courage, something I’ve had to psych myself up for, and have to keep motivating myself to continue. Now, not that long ago I would have been berating myself for that, feeling stupid, frustrated and angry with myself for making such a big deal over it. I’m trying not to do that, though several times over the last few days I’ve been struck by panic about it all. I honestly know how ridiculous and irrational all this sounds. This is a side of me that nobody knows about (unless they read this blog, and even then they probably won’t take it seriously). These are the sort of battles that I have with myself all the time, to ‘get over myself’, in that weird phrase that just popped into my head.

This is the rabbit-in-the-headlights me that somehow – not sure how – I manage to hide from other people a lot of the time. Life is easier if I don’t set her challenges, and there are enough challenges in everyday life to try to protect her from (though fewer during lockdown). I can never get rid of her – I’ll never ‘grow out’ of her if it hasn’t happened by now. She is the essence of me, and I’m not sure whether referring to ‘her’ in the third person is such a good idea, but there again, it does convey the point that ‘I’ don’t have a lot of control over her – I can threaten her and bully her but doing that always has consequences for me, because I’m the one who feels the pain (even more so when I get angry with her). But there are things which she/I now can deal with and enjoy only because I/she have persisted in making her/myself do them.

Little battles can be as difficult as big ones. I have to keep trying.

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Creative Chaos

My head’s a bit of a mess today. I’m trying to focus.

Prompted by my efforts with the card making (which continued yesterday) I’ve been thinking about creativity, a topic I’ve been planning to tackle for a while. In fact the post which I wrote on Monday (but didn’t share) was about how difficult it is for me to see any value in anything I make. I was coming to the end of the Christmas jumper I’ve been knitting for my daughter, when I read a Facebook post by a lady who runs a local craft shop. She’d shared some photographs from a 1980s knitting pattern magazine, showing celebrities wearing jumpers with silly slogans and daft pictures – rather like the one I’ve just made, in fact. The comments were so mocking, and in a nasty ‘What were they thinking?’ way, not a gentle way, that I immediately felt ashamed and embarrassed by my efforts. What was I thinking? More to the point, what will my daughter think? God knows. But it’s done now, I said I would make her one and I did, I made up my own pattern and didn’t consult her so that it will be a surprise. If she hates it – openly or secretly – I still enjoyed making it.

That’s why this is the first time I’ve made cards for anybody other than my nearest and dearest – because what if they think they’re just naff? (Actually, two years ago, when the lino-printing classes were still running, I made some Christmas cards, but never sent any of them for exactly that reason.) Well, I suppose with these people I never see, it doesn’t matter what they might think, because who really cares that much about Christmas cards anyway? What really matters is that I enjoy the process. And that links in with what I was saying a while back about the quest and the prize, the journey and the destination, the process and the outcome.

So yesterday, I did some more, and because the one I’d done on Friday wasn’t too bad, I stuck with the same design, finishing the exteriors of six cards, although I also need to do more inside them. I made a conscious effort not to get stressed but just to enjoy it – even when I still kept losing things and making mistakes. There are lots of little bits and things to get lost, and lots of little steps that have to be done in the right order, and that is exactly the kind of thing which does make me stressed, because it’s hard for me to hold a plan in my head and remember what I need to do next – which is why it always takes me so long. But I took my time, tried not to give myself a hard time, and got into a rhythm.

Practice, repetition and routine is good. Anything creative is risky. What I do may be crap – there again, it might get better if I keep trying.

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Round Robin

I didn’t post on here yesterday, but I did write my annual letter, sent to a handful of people from years ago whom I’m still in touch with enough to send Christmas cards and write to once a year. I don’t really know if the recipients are pleased to get it or resent being sent a computer-written and printed ‘round robin’ style letter. I used to edit each one for the specific person it was going to, but as the years pass and the interval since I saw them all in person grows longer, I think – well, at least this is better than nothing. At least they know I’m still alive. One person sends me a similar letter, one sends me a handwritten letter, most just a card with maybe a few words or just the usual greetings.

The handwritten letter is from the longest-standing friendship of them all, a friend from school, who went to teacher training college in London for three years in the 1970s and returned afterwards to the village she’d left, married the brother of a girl we were at school with, and taught at the village school all her working life. The last time I saw her was at her silver wedding anniversary party in the village hall in 2004, and before that, her 21st birthday party. In the quarter-century in between, we’d lost touch, until my Mum, one day in the 1980s, had a phone call from her asking ‘are you the Mrs Rushby who used to live in…?’ and passed on my address.

The letter I wrote yesterday turned out to be a little longer (600 words) than these daily offerings, about how I’ve been, and what I’ve been up to (not a lot, apart from the wedding) and my plans for Christmas – which changed anyway in the course of writing because I got a message from my daughter saying that my granddaughter is now quarantined till the 16th because a child in her class has tested positive for Covid, so I won’t be going to see them next weekend. And as usual it’s a computer-produced letter, but I decided yesterday morning that I would make Christmas cards this year, using the vast array of card-making equipment (die-cutting machine, metal dies, stamps, inks, sheets of patterned card and paper, scissors, glue, stickers etc etc etc) which I’ve acquired over the last two years.

I won’t go into the background story of how I started that particular hobby (not today anyway), but I will say that although it’s fun some of the time, I also find it unbelievably stressful. This is partly because there is absolutely no way for me to avoid creating a massive mess with all the stuff, and also (and related) that it takes me ages to make anything because I am constantly looking for the thing that I had in my hand only ten minutes earlier.

Yesterday I started with a determination NOT to get stressed, to keep it simple, and tidy.

I will try again today.

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Shoulds

I can see from my window that it must have been a glorious sunrise, but even though I was awake in time – even though I was up in time – I didn’t go to the sea to watch it, and now I wish I had. Wait, didn’t I say a while back that I didn’t do regret? I think you’ll find I said that the only things I regret are the ones I don’t do, and I didn’t go to see the sunrise.

Yesterday was such a nice sunny day that I thought, I should really have taken my van out – I thought that at about half past eleven, when it was really too late, so I told myself that today I’d plan to go out and take a picnic, because if I tell myself in advance there’s a better chance that I’ll do it. But then yesterday evening and first thing this morning I looked at the weather forecast, and it said it was going to be cloudy, so I more or less convinced myself that that was a good enough excuse not to do anything about it, to stay home again listening to the radio and sorting out my weather blanket. Now I can see sunshine on the roofs opposite and a clear sky behind and I’m not so sure that that excuse is valid.

Taking the van out always feels like it’s going to be a chore, to make sure the battery doesn’t pack up and avoid getting a telling off from the guys at the garage. It’s taking up time that I could be spending sitting in the armchair crocheting. Because yesterday I finished the Christmas jumper – apart from annoying tasks like sewing in the ends, and I’m not seeing my daughter till Friday week, so there’s plenty of time to sort those out.

Now that shaft of bright sun has disappeared, and I can see that what looked like a ‘clear’ sky is actually a solid sheet of high, light cloud – but it still doesn’t look bad enough to use as an excuse. And it’s a month since I took it out – once a month over winter should be enough to keep it ticking over. Do I have to go all the way to the country park? My parking season ticket is still valid. I can go into Sainsbury’s on the way and buy a picnic, drive there and park under the trees, make a cuppa and sit inside the van if it’s raining.

I know that’s what I should do. Here we go again, about the ‘shoulds’. This is not just what some voice from childhood is muttering into my inner ear. It’s something that I know will make me feel better once I’ve done it, and that I also know won’t be as bad as it seems once I get started – but I still don’t want to do it. Which is the story of my life – so really, I know I have to go.

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Home Decor (continued)

Yesterday I wrote but didn’t post, because I felt it was too miserable, just read it again and it doesn’t seem so bad, should I post it instead of writing anything today? Because I don’t feel any better today than I did when I wrote that. Or should I try and write something innocuous, about bookshelves, maybe?

I said on Sunday that I’d been thinking I needed some shelves in the front room – despite the fact that only last year I finally got someone to come and take away the unit which was in there, which had shelves and cupboards at the bottom and a smoked glass fronted cupboard at the top, because I thought it was taking up too much space. But when I started thinking about shelves again, I had in mind something that could go in one of the alcoves either side of the fireplace, which would be more out of the way. The study is full of IKEA ‘Kallax’ cube units, which I bought because they’re so versatile – they’re a good size for box files, jigsaws, albums (the vinyl, musical kind and the photographic kind, both of which I’ve got lots of), and you can get extra storage things to fit in them, like soft boxes which you can stuff with knitting wool, and internal shelves, and drawers, and little doors to turn them into cupboards… except, of course, mine have just got stuff dumped indiscriminately on them. I could fit a two-by-four sized one into that alcove, but maybe something else would be better?

On our way back from the trip to IKEA, my daughter and I dropped in at her Dad’s place, to pick up the grandson whom he’d collected from school, and were talking about this dilemma, when my ex said:

‘Would the ones I got from Argos be what you’re looking for?’ So we went into his dining room and looked at two quite simple, basic, nice-looking bookcases, which is why, on Saturday when I was looking to buy them online, I looked at the Argos ones, and ordered one from there instead of IKEA – despite the fact that we bought cheap furniture from Argos years ago, and it was always a bit rubbish – but hey, I’m not anticipating a spread feature in Better Homes and Gardens, so anything I can just shove stuff onto in the corner will suit me fine.

It was delivered, in two boxes, on Sunday morning, and in a fit of enthusiasm I opened the box and read the instructions. All looks pretty straightforward, and I was tempted to launch into assembling it straight away, then thought: is it sensible to start doing this straight away when there are so many other things I’ve got to do?

So I now have two large cardboard boxes lying on the front room floor, which I ignore and step over, and the cat is slowly learning to navigate around, or stare at until I push them out of her way.

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Home Decor (Part 1)

In a mad moment yesterday, I ordered a book case from Argos. It’s being delivered this morning.

Actually it wasn’t as spontaneous as that made it sound. I’ve been thinking I needed some shelves in my front room for some time now – more or less since my therapist commented on how little she can see of my room on Skype, while I can see quite a lot of hers – bookshelves, and pictures on the wall, and so on. But that is presumably because she sits at a computer which is against a wall or window and is hence facing into the room, whereas I sit on the sofa with my laptop on a stool in front of me, so that I’m facing the room and the screen is facing the blank wall behind me. In other words it depends on perspective – to me her room is elegant and attractive and mine is full of junk which has been shoved out of the way, but to her, mine looks stark, almost Spartan, and gives away nothing about me.

I still haven’t put up many pictures even though I’ve been here four years – I’ve mentioned this before, about the walls being two hard to knock in nails or hooks, and lots of people have advised me to get Command strips, which I did, although first I got cheap Velcro ones which didn’t work, then I got the Command ones and in the summer my daughter helped me to put up one poster and a mirror which I bought in a closing down sale, but I still haven’t done any of the others, mostly because I just don’t think about it. I have a nice picture to go into my spare bedroom/exercise and meditation room, I’ve chosen the perfect spot for it and written it on my to do list, and copied onto the new list whenever I get round to making a new list, but it’s still there because it hasn’t been done yet.

When I was staying with my daughter at the beginning of October, we went to IKEA and I bought a new frame for one of my Paris pictures, because I’d taken it downstairs (in the summer when I was thinking about putting them up), and left it propped in the hall because I didn’t know where to put it or whether I trusted the Command strips to hold such a heavy frame, and it was propped against the wall for a couple of weeks until one day when both the front and back doors were open at the same time and the wind blew it over and the glass broke. So I bought a new frame in IKEA and then realised it was too big to go in my suitcase, and I was going home by train and didn’t want to carry it with me, so it’s still at my daughter’s house waiting for me to go back again and take the car (or for her to drive here, whichever happens first).

Close-up of sofa and blank wall, as seen on Skype
That end of the room in its full glory

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Part of an Explanation

In the post-waking and pre-getting up time between 4:30 and 7:00 this morning, because I hadn’t yet started reading anything new on the Kindle, or downloaded the next bit of the podcast I’m listening to (I have to do that in the wifi area, ie front room or study), I was browsing Facebook. On the dyspraxia group there was a post from a 77-year old lady whom I’ve chatted to before (let’s call her Jane, because that’s not her name), with a photo of a letter explaining to her that she isn’t entitled to a diagnosis on the NHS. I feel bad for her, because she can’t afford to get one privately, as I did, but she wants to be assessed to convince her family that she has real problems and isn’t just being difficult, in order to improve her relationships with them, who apparently don’t treat her very well.

But from my experience, quite honestly, my expensive diagnosis doesn’t hold much water with most of the people I’ve tried to explain it to – which is hardly surprising, because, hey, I’m dyspraxic, and not being able to explain things clearly and convincingly is part of who I am. Because there’s so little awareness, and because it’s in many ways more nebulous than, say, dyslexia or ADHD, and the ‘symptoms’ (poor short term memory, poor organisation, poor punctuality, problems with absorbing and processing information which manifest as not listening, not paying attention etc etc etc) appear as the kind of ticks and habits which are frustrating both for the dyspraxic individual and the people they come into contact with – the kind of habits that for most people can be overcome with a little thought and effort, but for someone like me appear insurmountable…

What was I saying before I launched into that mammoth sentence? Oh yes, convincing people that these are real problems that are hard for you to manage, and can they please cut you some slack. Even my therapist doesn’t always get how hard it is to find people who will respond positively to this. She once said: ‘But you have a severe learning disability and you can prove it because you’ve been formally assessed’ – which raises the question: how can that be true when I also have a PhD? (although nobody takes that seriously either). The brain (anybody’s brain, not just mine) is a huge mystery, and the more we learn about it the less it all seems to make sense.

I started wanting to write a comment to my Facebook friend Jane, to tell her that having a diagnosis probably wouldn’t improve her relationships with her family, and the support she gets from the Facebook group is likely to be more valuable. Mine hasn’t allowed me to go back and make more of the opportunities I missed, or help me find new ones, or taken away the sense that my life has been a bit of a shambles – it’s just part of an explanation of why I’m me.  

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Seasonal Rant

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
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Dodgy Knee

I think my version of hibernation is waking three hours before sunrise and lying in bed listening to podcasts or reading from my Kindle until about seven then getting up, doing my exercises, making coffee and coming on here to write this blog. Three hours before sunrise is pretty much the same time as sunrise was six months ago, when I was waking around the same time but it wasn’t dark. The advice I had from the insomnia clinic, years ago, was to get up rather than lying in bed, so that my brain would be trained to associate bed with sleep, but that ship has not only sailed, but long ago disappeared below the horizon, and I might as well just listen or read. Sometimes I do drift back to sleep again, and some days, like today, it gets to this time (it’s half past eight) and I think – maybe I could go back to sleep now (except I can’t, because I’ve got wet hair and a towel round my head, and anyway if I lay down on the bed I probably wouldn’t get back to sleep, just waste another half hour or so trying to, and even if I did I’d hate it when I did wake up, because I’d have wasted half the day).

Geoff Dyer’s book ‘Out of Sheer Rage’ makes me alternately laugh out loud and cringe, because of his rambly stream-of-consciousness style, and because I relate to so much of what he writes about himself – and it’s all the worst bits – maybe not the worst bits of him, but the worst bits of me. One that struck a chord with me this morning was when he was complaining about his dodgy knee – the right one, whereas mine is the left. He had terrible problems with it when he was in Italy (I think – or maybe Mexico) and he saw a doctor who showed him two exercises that would help if he did them regularly, except of course he didn’t, so it got worse, then when he was back in England he went to his GP who sent him to a knee specialist, who sent him to a physiotherapist, who showed him the same exercises, which he still didn’t do. Four years ago (nearly five now), I started to notice pains in my leg, so I went to the GP and was referred to the physio, and I saw her monthly for a while, but didn’t like to admit I wasn’t doing the exercises in between, but by the end of the year I had cancer anyway which kind of trumped the leg thing, except that a couple of weeks ago I woke up one morning with so much pain in my left knee I could barely stand – I put it down to spending the previous day in a low armchair doing stuff on my laptop on a stool in front of me – it gradually eased and now it comes and goes but is bearable.