Do I want/need/will I wear all these jumpers? Probably not, but that’s not the point.

I was going to write about creativity – I half started yesterday, at the end of ranting about something, I can’t remember what. If I’m making something, or thinking about something to try – it doesn’t much matter what – I can sort of keep my head above water – as long as I keep my expectations low, and don’t think that what I make will be wonderful when it’s finished, of course, but when it’s done, it can be pushed to the back of a cupboard and forgotten about – or, in the case of writing, in the back of some folder on my hard drive, or shared on Facebook, or even better, Twitter, where I have 200 ‘followers’ but none who ever respond to anything I share (that’s an exaggeration, I’ve had two ‘likes’ in the last two years, both from people I used to know personally but haven’t seen in years).

For most of my life I haven’t considered myself at all ‘creative’ – except for this half-arsed idea that I might have been a ‘writer’ if I’d ever worked at it, but even then I was always conscious that I didn’t have the guts, talent or chutzpah to stick at it and make it work as a career. When I read ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’ last year, I came across the idea of the ‘creative spirit’ which is crushed out of young children if they don’t get the chance to use it. This resonated with me, as I thought about my fear of judgement, of what I make never being good enough, of the ludicrous hubris of ever thinking I was ‘good enough’ at anything, the ‘who do you think you are?’ arrogance of that whole idea, and the ridicule that followed from it.

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…  

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…

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?

Then I felt the urge to listen to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Judgement of the Moon and Stars’, which I’ve been listening to on cassette in the kitchen, and I thought I must have uploaded onto the PC when I was doing that a few months ago. I couldn’t find it, but I did find the files for her album ‘Hejira’, and played ‘Amelia’, which got me into a sad and thoughtful mood, which wasn’t necessarily where I wanted to go.

By that time, Office was reconfigured and Word was open. I suspect it’s now reconfiguring every time I restart the PC (which should be every day, but I must admit sometimes I forget to switch it off properly and it stays in hibernation till the next morning). I don’t use the PC much in the daytime after I’ve finished blogging, now that I’ve got the laptop downstairs, where the wifi’s better and it’s warmer – I don’t have the radiator switched on in here because it’s under the window, behind the desk and printer. Ironic to think that I bought the laptop at the end of 2019 so I could take it out and sit in cafes to write – one of many small ironies of the last twelve months.

Maybe what I’m doing here is reconfiguring my mind every morning. It’s a thought.

In telling the story of the Madwoman in the Attic, I flitted around quite a bit chronologically, and I think I may have missed out completely the time in Prague. I started going through the blogs from that time about three years ago, after I finished the first draft of ‘The Long Way Back’, but I gave up on it quite quickly. Maybe that should be a task for this year – or would be, if I was setting myself tasks, which I’m not.

The gist, I suppose, of the Madwoman idea, was that through those limbo years until I moved into this house in October 2016, the Stuff was always hanging around in the dusty corners of my mind, along with the knowledge that at some time the house would be sold, and it would come home to roost, but also I would be in a position to buy a permanent home for it (and me). And yet, although I’m here, and it is too, the chaos remains unresolved.

Amelia, Joni Mitchell

Which might sound as though I see ‘Belinda’ in a negative light, and ‘coming out of my shell’ as progress, when actually I’m coming to recognise that both of them are so integral to my personality that I need to embrace them both.

The other thought that struck me was that these days, and for the last several years, the issues I have are largely concerned with ‘transitions’ in the other direction, when people who think they know ‘me’ are surprised by encountering Belinda – the ‘this isn’t like you! This isn’t who you are at all!’ reaction that I get when I share my self doubt, fear and sense of inadequacy. Though now I come to think of it, that’s not recent at all – it’s been an undercurrent that’s been there for decades, at least as far back as my mid-thirties.

It seems that a pattern is now starting to form: timid Belinda dominated in my childhood, when Melinda, or the Wild Spirit described in ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’ (incidentally, I think the author should have made more effort to find a synonym for ‘Run’ which starts with a W) was systematically crushed and squeezed out on the grounds that A) ‘good girls’ didn’t behave that way; and B) her aspirations weren’t realistic for such a mousy little nonentity (here I can’t help thinking of Janis Ian’s song: ‘I learned the truth at seventeen/That love was meant for beauty queens…’).

Melinda (and I’m annoyed with myself that I’ve slipped back into using that dichotomy, but it is very convenient) crept out cautiously when I slipped out from under the parental yoke and ran away to the comparative freedom of university, where ‘A’ was no longer being so closely monitored, though I was still often stymied by ‘B’. Then I got married and started work, and found myself staring down the barrel of adult life…

I’ve just got into my stride, and the word limit is looming. And I still haven’t answered the question I asked two days ago: ‘Do I control my thoughts, or do my thoughts control me?’ I think the answer is quite clear – it’s my thoughts which are in charge, and there isn’t a great deal I can do to bring them into line, any more than I can give precedence to either Belinda or Melinda.

‘A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.’ W. Shakespeare.

Do I have plans to publish another book, maybe this year? Well, I might – at some indeterminate date between now and my final gasp – but I don’t have plans. Anything’s possible.

I do plan on finishing this jumper I started knitting on Christmas Day – though I’m a bit concerned at the moment about the size. Did I separate off the sleeves from the body too soon? I was aiming for the same number of stitches as the Christmas one I did for my daughter (it’s the same yarn) but stopped when the sleeves hit sixty, when the front and back for some reason were only at 112, although on the other one it was 120. I can’t really tell by looking, because of it being on circular needles, and that also makes it a pain to try on – and I’ve lost my spare circular needle, which is what I used last time (front on one and back on the other). Bigger better than smaller, surely?  Should I undo what I did yesterday, to be safe? Yesterday I undid two squares’ worth of weather-blanket backing that I’d done the day before, because I wasn’t happy with the way it was working out.

I’m thinking now about Penelope, at the end of ‘The Odyssey’, weaving by day, and in the night unravelling what she’d done the day before, waiting for her husband, Odysseus, to return from the Trojan War (spoiler alert: it took ten years, on top of another ten years for the duration of the war). The process matters more than the outcome, the journey is more significant than the destination (evidently so in Odysseus’s case, I’m not aware of any stories about what happened after he and P were reunited). The process of unravelling is a bit frustrating, and as it’s knitting, picking up the stitches is a lot more of a pain than the crochet equivalent, but as long as there is no deadline, it’s surely preferable to a finished garment that’s too small? (Or maybe not, given that I’ll probably never wear it?)

Incidentally, that last sentence was just highlighted by Word, presumably because it thought it was a double negative – not so clever, eh?

This isn’t what I was going to write about. No resolutions, no plans, no expectations – not that I was intending to write about any of those – on the contrary.

Gazing out of the window, I watch the slow procession of clouds drifting across the gap between the end terraced house across the road and the pub on the corner. A woman in black leggings, a lime green top and head phones runs past my line of sight. Will I be like the running woman or like the clouds this year? What do you think?

Cloudy’, Simon and Garfunkel

Now my mind is wandering and I’m not actually typing. Oh, I fixed the mouse, by the way, it was just a new battery that it needed. I remembered them and even got as far as bringing them up (I wasn’t sure if it needed AA or AAA so brought both), when I remembered that I needed to bring up the loo cleaner – which I also brought up. Wonder how long it will take me to remember to take the spare batteries downstairs again? Or to clean the loo? (Only kidding, I put the loo cleaner in as soon as I got upstairs).

I told you most of the words in my head aren’t worth preserving. They’re either stuff like that, or things I’ve already said before.

Why do I tag myself as the ‘Madwoman in the Attic’? Especially as the house where I live now doesn’t even have an attic? It’s partly, of course, a literary  reference to Jane Eyre, in which Mr Rochester keeps his first wife locked up in the attic (which probably was a kinder option than sending her to one of the notorious ‘madhouses ‘ of the time). Ironically, I’ve just realised that in the ‘Husband or Cat?’ incident of 2005, it was my ex-husband who voluntarily moved himself into the attic –I’ve never noticed the irony before, but that’s a story for another time. Anyway, our attic had two rooms, and he confined himself to the larger one, which wasn’t my study, and had a telly and VHS in addition to a computer.

The whole attic thing went back much further than that, however, to a time when I thought it was romantic for writers to starve in attics (or ‘garrets’ – I’m not sure what the difference is between the two). I’d long dreamt of having an attic to write (though not necessarily starve) in. As soon as we saw that house, I knew it was going to be my room – the ‘Room of One’s Own’ as recommended by Virginia Woolf for any woman who wanted to write (literary references coming thick and fast today).

When I left, it also became the repository for all the junk I left behind… but this is the start of a much longer story…

I’m currently reading a really enjoyable novel by a reliable writer, the sort I like to read on holiday. His books wouldn’t be for everybody – they’re a bit creepy and gruesome in places – you might even class them as ‘horror’ if you wanted to be crude, but that’s not what I like about them – bloodthirstiness for its own sake doesn’t interest me at all. They’re more like mystery thrillers with a supernatural element, I’d say ‘contemporary’, except that most of the ones I’ve read were written and are set in the 1990s (which I guess doesn’t quite count as the present day any more), set in a recognisable version of this country as it was a couple of decades ago, often in semi-rural settings such as Glastonbury or the Peak District, where late twentieth early twenty-first century characters become entangled, unwittingly or through hubristic meddling, with older forces beyond their control. Gripping plots, engaging characters and a wry, intelligent writing style that never makes me cringe by striking a bum note – perfect escapism, in other words. And he seems to have a massive back catalogue, which is great because whenever I want a good read I just download another one. In fact, come to think of it, it’s become a bit of a habit for me to read one of his books at Christmas, which may be why I thought of it now – they often have a bleak-midwinter setting (although I also read one on holiday in Cyprus in September).

Anyway, as you can tell, I really like these books, and as I’m being nice about the writer, and not slagging him off (as I did a bit with somebody else a few months back) I’ll give him a name check: Phil Rickman.

Well, if I was trying to write fiction, it wouldn’t be a good idea to spend an hour or so reading a novel before I start writing in the morning, but as fiction seems to be beyond me at the moment (by ‘the moment’ I’m including the last five years), I might as well indulge myself a bit, going back to the roots of why l’ve always loved books, because – well – I just love a good story, and reading or hearing one is the greatest and simplest pleasure I know, and always has been.

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