I’ve been to Sainsbury’s already this morning to find that they didn’t have any of the usual cat food (trust me, it’s not worth buying any other kind), and, more seriously that they didn’t have any Marmite. I asked a young man who was restocking the bakery shelves, and he showed me where it should be and said ‘it’s in short supply everywhere isn’t it?’ Is it? I didn’t know, and I’ve completely run out. ‘You could try one of the larger stores, or’ and he lowered his voice confidentially and pointed across the road: ‘Tesco’s!’

I will return to Tesco, but I wasn’t about to go over there with my three bags of shopping from Sainsbury’s, so I came home.

I had a bad night last night – they’re never good, but this was particularly bad, and I don’t know why. I tried listening to two programmes I’d downloaded, and they were both pretty depressing, one the fifth episode of a series, and I’m not sure if it’s the last or just the last I’ve downloaded, and the other the start of the second series of something else. They were oddly similar, both about feisty women in history, one being Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the other a fictional Icelandic woman from some period in history, which come to think of it could be about the same. The actresses sounded very similar, both with Northern English accents (in Eleanor’s case, presumably to emphasise her provincial back ground) – I suppose it could even have been the same actress, but I haven’t checked. I’m not sure I want to listen to any more of either of them, not even in the early hours – as I said, they were both very depressing, although Eleanor was the less sympathetic of the two.

Although I’ve lived with this insomnia all my life, so that it’s part of my life, I still keep wondering if there is any better way of dealing with it. I lay there doing my downwards-counting in my head, and thought: well, soon it should be warm enough to be worth getting up and sitting in another room when I can’t sleep, even though it’s never helped when I’ve tried it before. But I feel so tired when I’m lying there, I don’t have the energy to get out of bed – and that of course carries over to the morning as well, I never want to get up, but I also hate lying awake.

Poems written at that time of day tend to dissipate quickly however hard I try to hold on to them, so I grabbed a notebook and black Crayola colouring pencil (all the pens in my desk having dried up – a reflection either on modern technology or my dependence on it) and wrote it down.

I wanted to share it, as an accurate reflection of my inner feelings towards myself after listening to the words of one of the greatest female writers of my lifetime, but I thought of the likely reaction to my honest thoughts about myself, especially the ones that come first thing in the morning, and thought better of it. I will, however, type it up, pack it away and probably read it to my therapist on Thursday.

One of the lines I rejected included the words: ‘I wish I could believe I deserved…’ – at the time I thought it was part of a killer ending, then forgot it, then remembered it while doing yoga, and realised it was best forgotten.

‘What a string of woolly verbs!’ I thought to myself. Let’s take them in reverse order, as being the closer to the object of the line (which was probably another verb: ‘to be’, followed by some complimentary and hence wholly unrealistic hypothetical idea of myself). First, ‘Deserved’ what does that mean? It’s completely subjective. Does a convicted murderer ‘deserve’ a second chance at life; to rot in jail for the rest of his/her natural days; or a speedy execution? ‘It all depends…’ which is why we have jury trials and other complicated (and expensive) systems of justice to decide such matters for us. You can’t talk about whether anybody ‘deserves’ any particular outcome without taking it from a specific point of view.

Next: ‘believe’, which is also subjective, though in this case it’s clear that the subject, ie) the one doing (or failing to do, or incapable of doing) the ‘believing’ is myself. Why am I incapable of believing I deserve whatever goodies (probably praise, or love, or happiness) I had in mind? Arguably, ‘belief’, or ‘disbelief’ just is what it is, but if I had to justify or rationalise it, I would probably say it was based on the evidence of a life-time of living inside this head, and as no one else has access to that mental space, their ‘beliefs’ can be discounted.

And finally: ‘wish’ the woolliest of the lot – enough said.

When to stop
and when to go.
When to try
and when to no.
Questions always in my mind,
seeking things I never find.

I used to think there’d come a day,
when things at last would go my way.
I’d show the world a happy face
and life would fall right into place.

That will not be,
it is not me.

I take the thoughts that come to hand,
and turn them into words that scan.
And though I struggle finding rhymes,
that happens too from time to time.

There was a trailer on Radio 4 yesterday for a programme about how going for a walk first thing in the morning can improve your health and wellbeing (I haven’t listened to the programme – yet).

I decided I would do it this morning (go for a walk, not listen to the programme), then lay in bed and listened to the second episode of ‘Sweeney Todd’ instead, and by the time I checked the sunrise time on Accuweather, it was almost six already and I had no time to get to the beach for 6:19 to see it. But I got up anyway, dressed, fed the cat, let her out into the garden, made a flask of coffee, found a notebook, let the cat back in, found my glasses, found a mask, found my notebook again, found a pencil etc etc and left the house, came back for the mask, came back for gloves, and was walking down the road shortly after seven.

It’s been a while since I had a morning walk – other than to the doctor’s for blood tests, which has happened twice in the last few weeks. The second time was last Friday, and I thought about walking on to the beach (I was half way there) but decided against it as it was grey and dull and I wanted to come home and hide. It was dull this morning when I left home, but the sun came out while I was sitting on the prom drinking coffee.

I’ve written two poems, one NaPoWriMo one came to me as I was on my way there – actually before I left home, when I put my hand in the pocket of my winter coat and pulled out some pebbles, which made me think of Virginia Woolf, who filled her coat pockets with stones before drowning herself in the river. The other popped into my head when I was in the loo after I got back, as you can see above.

I’ve been meaning to say some more about my NaNoWriMo poems, obviously I’ve made it to Day 11, I think it’s working okay so far, but yesterday I felt completely at a loss till I found the seeds in my desk drawer – which I haven’t planted yet, by the way. It feels very risky, setting myself this task – though of course it’s not really ‘risky’, I could stop right now and it wouldn’t matter…  

But today is neither clear nor bright, just dull and grey with the sound of the wind between the rooftops. And there are no new adventures in the offing, nor, most likely, any new lives to be had which are substantially different from the present one.

Just to say, that first sentence popped into my head as I sat down at the computer. I know it sounds like the start of something, but I’m buggered if I know what. Except that the first phrase – up to ‘spring’ – has a nice lilt to it, as though it could be the first line of a poem. Quite clichéd though, like all those folk songs that start on the lines of ‘One morning in May…’ but which, come to think of it, descend into tales of lust and seduction (when sung by Steeleye Span), and sometimes betrayal, revenge and horrible death.

Well, that’s got those cheery thoughts out of the way.

I put my bedside clock forward last night at bedtime, and when I woke it said 5:20, which was good because I thought I could get up at my usual time and slip quite easily into the new time frame – but in reality I ended up lying in bed anyway listening to podcasts and not getting up till seven. Then I messed about with changing the central heating clock, which was easier than I expected, but as I’ve been doing it every six months for the last four years I should have got a bit more proficient by now. The thing that still bothers me though is that there are two programmes, one for Monday-to-Friday and one for weekends, and I can’t work out how to get onto the weekend programme to change it. At the moment I have it coming on at 6:30 in the week but not till 7:00 at weekends, it took me a while to realise why it was still cold when I got up on Saturdays and Sundays. The instructions I have are on the inside cover of the little box, small print and hard to see, so I have to take it off the wall and into a well-lit area in order to read them, but even then I can’t find out what I need to know. I can override it by pushing the ‘up’ or ‘down’ buttons to adjust the thermostat, so that’s what I do in the mornings if it feels too chilly, but I would like to sort it out.

Other than that – and something falling through the basket of the dishwasher and jamming the rotating arm so that everything which should have come out clean is covered with crud which has baked on during the drying part of the cycle – there aren’t enough words left to say anything else – except I had to unravel my jumper again yesterday.

I’m not going to say any more about it, and obviously I’m not in any way comparing myself to her in terms of either writing skill or inherent interest of the story, but it did set me thinking about the issues of writing about one’s own life. This is of course because I’m psyching myself up to go back to working on The Long Way Back (when I’ve finished with my current editing job, and if I don’t get caught up in anything else). Maybe when the cafés open again, and I can take my notebook style laptop (bought in late 2019 to encourage myself to go out and do just that, hah! What great timing that was!)

The thing about writing about your own life is the clash between the time it takes to write about it and the time it takes to live it- something I remember writing about at the time when I was travelling, and berating myself for not spending enough time writing. Time has this trick of passing no matter what your intentions or what you actually do (or don’t do) with it. And how do you ever stop? How do you write some kind of conclusion? You make a decision, you find a way to tie up the loose ends which are still dangling from the narrative, but if you don’t jump on it and get it done (and I am clearly not a jump-on-it-and-get-it-done kind of person), events overtake you, and how do you account for them?

I just got distracted by a van parked across the road, with the front passenger door open and covering part of the company name, so that it looks like: ‘X&Y PUG limited’ and I’ve been waiting for someone to close the door so I can see what it really is – I keep thinking ‘Pugh’ except that I can see there’s no ‘h’ on the end and there are some letters covered up, so that makes no sense. But when the full name’s revealed, it’s ‘X&Y PLASTERING’, my eyes had just conflated the beginning of the L with the end of the N to make U. How boring.

I intended to carry on what I was writing about yesterday, and not get distracted into life-writing and plasterers’ vans. I couldn’t see the connection between the former and the ideas of granularity and fractals that were rattling around my brain, but then I realised there was a connection. Writing about your own life is like having a hypothetical map of the world on a scale of 1:1 – it covers the whole world. If the grains are fine enough, doesn’t it appear continuous? So how to structure it into a narrative? TBC…

This week it was a classical piece which at first I didn’t recognise and wasn’t paying much attention to, when I heard a voice saying something about a hill which was supposed to be the site of the original castle, rather than the current castle further down the river on the other side, but this was just part of the foundation myth of the city… and it dawned on me that they were talking about Prague. Then it cut to a piece of music which I definitely recognised, but couldn’t have told you the name or composer, and I heard the words: ‘Vltava’ and I knew before I heard it that the site they were talking about was Vyšehrad.

Vyšehrad was one of my favourite walking places when I wanted to avoid the tourist crowds. It was directly across the river Vltava from my flat, something that I only realised when I was there and looking back to my side of the river managed to pick out the funny little church across the road from me. But to get there I had to take one tram to the interchange at Novy Smichov, near the big Tesco, and then change to get across the river bridge, get off and either catch another tram back up the river or walk along that side. Once, not so long ago, I could have told you all the tram numbers, but I don’t remember now.

But I have to tell you first that the music was by Smetana, one of the three great classical Czech composers, the other two being Dvořák and Janáček. Smetana was the only one I’d never heard of before I went to Prague. ‘Vyšehrad’ and ‘Vltava’, I learned from ‘Soul Music’, are two of six ‘symphonic poems’ that make up a patriotic symphonic cycle called ‘Má vlast’ (‘My Fatherland’), inspired by the history, legends and landscapes of Bohemia.

I have seen his grave in the cemetery on Vyšehrad, overlooking the vineyards reaching down the castle mound towards the river. I wrote at least one blog post about it, but on a blog which is now defunct (though I still have the content somewhere). I was walking there on a Sunday afternoon in February, seven years ago, when I read the text from my daughter that brought me home to England by the next Wednesday…

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.

This is not quite what I mean when I say I hear words in my head, or have arguments with myself. Despite all the stuff about Belinda, Melinda, Cassandra and Cat-By-Herself, or about gremlins, I know all that is metaphorical, and at all times I am just me, myself. Admittedly, at different times my thoughts – and the words in my head – manifest in different kinds of behaviour, and I don’t have any control over that, I can’t choose who I am going to be at any particular time. I wish I could. I think about the times when I thought I could ‘reinvent’ myself, focus on one of those aspects (usually Melinda) and let her have her head – when I was doing my PhD, or after I left my husband, or went travelling, or moved here – my ‘running away’ times, in other words. In many ways they were when I was at my ‘happiest’, because even though I still had bad patches within that, I had hope that somehow I was moving towards a sunlit plateau where the world was full of joy and light.

Yeah, I know, embarrassingly unrealistic.

The play was described as ‘darkly comic and heart-warming’ (I read the description afterwards) and had a sweet, hopeful ending, as the man makes friends with a neighbour who draws him out of himself and out of his flat into the world outside.

The writer had worked with MIND and with people who hear voices in this way while developing the play, and also played the pivotal role of the neighbour. The description says:

‘A diagnosis of voice hearing has long been stigmatised in western culture, but in recent years there’s been a new approach that helps hearers to understand who their voices are and where they come from.’

It made me think about how strange the workings of the human mind are, how little we really know about what goes on in others’ minds, or our own, come to that. How much of what we experience is down to underlying conditions like dyspraxia and autism, how much is triggered by early childhood experiences and trauma, how do these interact and continue to interact and develop through our experiences of relating to other people as we pass through life? Who among us is ‘normal’, after all?

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?

First, let me freely acknowledge that I don’t feel I have ‘…a purpose…’ in any profound sense. But how much does that matter?  

This is a time of year when there can be a lot of pressure to set goals, make resolutions, plan new habits and behaviours, and generally beat yourself up and set yourself up for failure and disappointment. Well, that’s how I’ve always found it. I don’t want to detract from anyone else’s desire to do those things, but for me – hey, I’m retired, I live alone, and the joy of both those states is the peace not to feel obliged to follow anyone’s expectations but your own.

That said… my purpose last week was to complete and submit my tax return, which I did on Saturday. Now it’s to bring my accounts up to date, which I haven’t touched for the last two months, even though it’s a task I quite enjoy. Moving data between spreadsheets, checking totals and hunting for errors when things don’t tally – to me, it’s fun, it’s satisfying, there’s always a ‘right’ answer, and if it doesn’t work out, there’s always a reason which can be found – it’s like a puzzle, a more complicated version of killer su doku, but one which has a ‘purpose’ beyond just filling the time. Sometimes I think: I could have been happier as a book-keeper rather than as a failed book-writer, and maybe that’s a path I should have chosen years ago, but too late now, I don’t have the right qualifications – (and no, I have no intention of studying for the qualifications now – given my experiences of retraining in new skills during my fifties – creative writing, web design, graphic design, TEFL etc – and knowing where that got me).

Another potential ‘purpose’ would be to put together the book case which I bought from Argos in the Black Friday sales and which has now spent almost two months in two large cardboard boxes in my narrow hall. At one time I considered making it a post-Christmas project, but I decided to start knitting myself a jumper instead (which is coming along nicely, by the way). I’ve been walking past the boxes for long enough now, I don’t notice them any more, and a further disincentive from putting together the bookcase is that I might then feel obliged to put something on it, which might lead me to think about sorting out the stuff in the study, which could very well precipitate a complete emotional breakdown, so probably best not to go there.

So my plan for the day after I’ve posted this is: brush teeth; dry hair; get dressed; eat breakfast; mess around with my spreadsheets for a couple of hours (depending how much time is left after I’ve finished the aforementioned); spend the afternoon in my chair knitting and listening to the radio; get dinner; do bins (mustn’t forget); watch telly. ‘Purpose’ settled – job done.