Category: remembering

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Tackling the Chaos: Memories Lost and Overwhelmed

Clicking through photos again to track down another one which came up on my desktop recently, I thought it was from Sête in Provence, but it was a little further east along the coast, at Le Grau du Roi in the Camargue, taken on a very grey and damp Spring Equinox in 2012 (of course). Which reminds me of my late friend Douglas Jeal, who, after hearing my tales, went to the south of France at around the same time the following year, then grumbled at me because the weather was horrible. What did he expect? Well, he had lived in Barcelona for a while, which has its own microclimate, so I suppose he can’t be blamed for thinking it might be similar  a few hundred miles along the Mediterranean coast.

What else does that remind me of? A few days ago the image on my desktop was of a map of that corner of the Med, a mural on the wall of Bordeaux station, where I was stranded for a couple of hours or so during a train strike when I was en route from Brittany to northern Spain. Something piqued my interest when I saw it again, but I couldn’t remember what it was, so I opened the file in Photoshop to check, and still can’t see why. It’s quite a poor quality photo – from an old, pre-Smart Nokia phone – so zooming in hasn’t helped. Maybe it will come to me.

I’ve mentioned before about the Magic Refilling Data pot, and how my efforts at clearing space on my google Drive by downloading photos from Google photos to my hard drive and then deleting them from Google photos were being thwarted because every morning my phone was being backed up to another file on Google Drive. Over several days (because it takes a long time to select and delete that many photos and my PC is four years old and quite creaky – and also it was refilling again every morning with the ones I hadn’t backed up and removed from my phone) I managed to get all the photos up to the end of 2020 from my phone, onto my hard drive, and removed from the backup file on Google drive. The day came when I logged on to my computer, opened my Gmail, and was informed that I had used 11 Gb of my 15Gb allocation. That lasted a couple of hours before the messages started to appear telling me that my Google Drive was full again.

I listed all files in descending file-size, and found that the photos I’d already deleted were still appearing on the list. By clicking on each file, I was given a side panel with details, including the folder where the file was located. Clicking on the name of the folder led me up the tree to the folder where it was, and so on until I reached a folder called ‘Desktop’, and above that, another one called ‘Computers’… tbc

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Oyster Shell

Yesterday morning I took the cat to the vet’s for a ‘Senior Wellness check’. This used to be called a ‘Senior Health check’ and I couldn’t help imagining them burning aromatherapy candles, playing soothing music and maybe giving her a back massage. I had to drop her off at the surgery because of current lockdown conditions, and wait till they called me back to come and collect her. Because of the blood tests she wasn’t allowed anything to eat after ten the night before, which usually means pleading looks until it’s time to go, but in fact she just stayed out of the way, and when it was time to go allowed me to pick her up and put her in the basket with no struggles or complaints. In fact, she was unnaturally subdued, and still is this morning. When I collected her, the nurse asked if she could take her home to teach her own cat a lesson in manners, which is a far cry from this time last year when I dropped her off and went to the Co-op, then got a phone call from the vet asking for permission to sedate her because she was kicking up such a fuss.

She’s getting old. We all get old and resigned to the way things are. I guess that’s the way I’m feeling at the moment – except when I’m in a panic over something or other. Lockdown lethargy.

On my desk there’s an oyster shell. I don’t know where it came from – well, the beach, obviously, and before that in the sea, wrapped around an oyster. But how did it come to be on my desk? My house is full of oyster shells, and ‘interesting’ pebbles, picked up from beach walks. But this one in particular… I don’t know – it must have fallen out of a box of ‘stuff’ or something. I don’t know what it is about oyster shells – I used to think they were ugly, not like the pretty little scallops, rosy pink and smaller than my thumbnail, or the slipper limpets with their oddly shaped cavity. They are rough and monochrome and no two are ever alike, but if you turn them over and the light catches in just the right way, sometimes the gleam of mother-of-pearl will take you by surprise. I used that image in my poem ‘Beachcomber’. The document on my computer has it as:

The shimmer of an oyster shell,
Like tears for a lost pearl.

Linda Rushby July 2015

That’s funny – I could have sworn I used ‘gleam’. Maybe I changed it. Poems are not immutable. But when I check the book, I find that I published it as:

‘Oyster shells shimmer
Like tears for a lost pearl.

‘Beachcombing‘, Linda Rushby April 2016

Well well well. That scans better, and it has the alliteration too, but I still like ‘gleam’, it has a lovely sound.

Which reminds me, someone bought a copy of ‘Beachcombing’ from Amazon last year, the first time it’s sold other than sales I’ve made in person.

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Awake, Alone, Aware

I wake alone, aware…

Sounds quite poetic, doesn’t it? Because of the similarities of the words? It would be even better if that was ‘awake’ – how would I work that into it?

‘I lie awake, alone and aware…’ yes, that works, – or, if it’s a poem, even just : ‘Awake, alone, aware…’

What was I aware of? How did that thought continue? Aware that… this is how it is. This is life – my life. And it’s another morning.

Still in bed, I read, via a friend’s Facebook post, an article in the Guardian about women who choose to be single, to live alone and forego marriage and children, defying the outdated concept of spinsterdom. But of course, the lives of today’s single women, even those who’ve never had a live-in relationship or children, are expected to be very different from those of the stereotypical ‘spinster’ – changes in social conditions and mores have utterly transformed that. A spinster in the Victorian (and also most of the twentieth century) mode could be presumed to remain eternally virgin, whereas modern single women are assumed to have (or have had) active sex lives just as single men are.

The article was focussing on women for whom the single, childless life has been a deliberate choice – something else that has massively changed over the last fifty to sixty years, as women’s opportunities for employment and self-determination have improved out of all recognition. But I’d guess that the majority of women living alone are like me – divorced, with marriage or cohabitation in the past, and maybe grown-up children who don’t live with them anymore.

Did I choose the life I’m living now? I don’t want to revisit the territory I explored last Sunday, but – no, not really – or only in part. Fifteen ten, maybe even as recently as five years ago, this was not the kind of life I was hoping for in my sixties, but it is what it is. The longer I am alone, the more I appreciate the advantages, and given my experiences of living in relationships, I think on balance this suits me better than that did. As the song goes: ‘you can’t always get what you want/But if you try sometimes/you just might find you get what you need’.

So, what is it about waking up alone? What was/am I aware of?

That sometimes we choose our lives, and sometimes they choose us, I suppose. That life is far more complex than we like to think; the future is far more unpredictable than we like to acknowledge, and that our choices are both more circumscribed and yet at the same time more potentially disruptive than we can ever understand. The forces which constrain our choices are not just the physical laws of the universe and chance (which can’t be circumvented) or the man-made laws of behaviour (which can be, but not without consequences) and of interaction with other self-determining beings.

I’ll stop there because I’ve confused myself.

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Tackling the Chaos: Part 1 of …?

My Google Drive is permanently full, and has been for years (literally, in the literal sense, years). Every so often I purge some files, photos or emails and somehow it stumbles on, but I opened a new gmail account – I think it was in 2017 – which is what I mostly use for email these days. However, I still have the old one as there are people and organisations who have that as my email address (like the yahoo email which I’ve had for over twenty years to the best of my knowledge and which still gets lots of emails every day, but I don’t want to close because some contacts only have that address).

I’ve had my current phone since 2018 – when I returned to Android after a two-year flirtation with iPhone – and in all that time it has never been backed up because it always tries to back it up to my old gmail account, and every so often sends me a message to tell me that the backup has failed because there is no space, and that it hasn’t been backed up for 700-and-something days. Last week I managed to change the settings so it will backup to my current account (which may ultimately prompt the necessity to start another gmail account), but I couldn’t find out how to change the photo backup, which still goes to the original gmail account and is still permanently full.

This week, in a fit of displacement from thinking about doing anything about the actual physical chaos in my life, I started trying to clear out my Google Drive space. As I said, I’ve made previous efforts: deleting all emails with attachments; deleting files which I put on Google drive to share access between devices; downloading and deleting some old photographs, and so on. (Incidentally, I have 707gb free of 918gb total on my hard drive, so it makes sense to stick my photos on there rather than pay to increase my 15gb Google drive). Also, I’d been kind of hoping that I might find those photos from 2012 that I mentioned the other week, but they’d obviously gone in a previous purge (still haven’t found my old-old laptop, by the way)  – there were just a handful of photos from pre-2015, so I put those all into a folder together on the hard drive a couple of weeks ago, and this week started methodically downloading all photos from 2015 onwards, copying them into a folder called ‘Photo backups’, deleting them from Google drive and then emptying the Google drive bin. I’ve been doing this a month at a time – sometimes having to do two downloads for a month because the download limit for one zip file is 500, which I have occasionally exceeded in a month.

I finished 2015, and was getting messages to say my Google Drive was now 70% full, which was very reassuring, until the next morning, when I logged on and found it was 99% again… to be continued

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Wishes and Banishments

Some years ago – when I was living in the flat in Bedford, between leaving Ex-Hubby and going to Europe – I gave some thought to what I wanted to banish from my life. I was quite cautious when making my choice, aware that wishes have to be thought through very, very carefully or they will almost certainly backfire, and I didn’t tell anyone, because I’m also aware that to do that is to jinx the process, but after ten years I guess it’s quite safe to share. It was a fairly long list, but I boiled it all down to two things: fear and loneliness. Note that I wasn’t wishing ‘for’ a lover, knowing that they often bring more trouble and heartache than they’re worth, but ‘against’ loneliness, and realising that if I could learn to manage that, it wouldn’t matter whether or not I was ‘with’ someone.

Where have I got to, roughly a decade later? I think I’ve handled the loneliness pretty well, not perhaps in the way I hoped for at the time, but that’s why I was cautious and non-specific. And as for fear, I’ve come to acknowledge that it too is just an inevitable part of life. What am I most afraid of? Disappointment, failure, rejection… which is odd, because I’m so used to all those things, shouldn’t that make me less afraid of them?

I don’t know where my mind is going this morning. I thought of this as a topic to write about a few days ago – probably when I was writing about love – and I thought I’d tackle it today because I couldn’t think of anything else.

I don’t think I’m afraid of death. There have been a very few occasions – mostly in 2017 – when I’ve gone to bed thinking that I might never wake up, and that is a very visceral fear – but if it comes to me again, I hope I will be able to see how irrational it is. My life will come to an end one day, that’s inevitable – why should I worry about what I might or might not do between now and then? I’ve got the rest of my life to sort that out, and if I don’t, well… it’s not going to be my problem anymore, is it?

Where am I now, in my life, staring at this screen, thinking about going downstairs and getting breakfast? I took some sunrise pictures outside my back door this morning when I got up. I found a photo of myself as a little girl a couple of days ago when I was looking for photos of snow in Dallas. That day I also put together the bits of my tapestry frame – a present from Ex-Hubby before he was even Hubby, about forty years ago. There’s an uncompleted tapestry on it – not quite that old, probably mid 1990s. Will I start it again, maybe even finish it? Will I take that off the frame and start something new?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT6mw4GaPYQ
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Listing

I’m still doing my lists – sort of, though I’ve slipped a bit this week.

You may or may not be aware that I have a ‘long list’ (written in a ‘Things to do Today’ notebook that I bought eight years ago, when I was living in the Fens – I know that because I have a distinct memory of buying it in the Wilko in Huntingdon – and have used intermittently since) and a page-a-day (except weekends) A6 sized diary that I bought online last month. The former is where I write things as they occur to me – which may vary in scale and/or importance from ‘Sort out study’ or ‘car insurance’ to ‘Empty dishwasher’ (that one not so much now I have a diary). Items on this list may or may not have a do-by date next to them, and the ‘system’ used to be that when the page was full I copied those which hadn’t been completed on to a new page and threw the old one away – or sometimes, when I was trying to be more organised, I started a new page every Monday, copying things as before – but this always feels like a waste of paper. Now I have a diary, the ‘system’ is that every morning I copy into it items from the long list that need to be completed that day, and/or others that I feel I can tackle that day, and/or carry-overs that didn’t get done the previous day – as well as things not worth putting on the long list, like ‘empty dishwasher’. Plus, of course, appointments and deadlines and things like ‘pay credit card bill’ get written in when the dates are set.

That’s the system – in theory. I have tried many, many systems down the years – most of which didn’t last long, as you can tell, and also attended many courses on ‘personal organisation’. I have a horror of lists, but I do understand the logic behind them. When I was employed in offices, I suppose I must have organised my workload somehow – even more so when I was doing multiple jobs from home (though my daughter and ex-husband would probably say I just never stopped working). Managing life in retirement – not to mention lockdown – is a different ball game.

As you can probably guess, lots of items from the long list never make it beyond being copied to the new long list when the old page is full – sometimes not even that. There’s a theory that things that have been on the list that long probably don’t need to be done anyway – that’s one thing I learnt from all those courses, and it may be reasonable in a busy work setting where there are lots of priorities to be juggled and, crucially, other people who eventually notice if the whatever-it-was really was important.

There’s a sense that the writing of an item onto a list is an action in itself, and once that’s done, it can safely be forgotten

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Snow in Texas

When I switched on the radio this morning, I heard a meteorologist from Houston explaining what ‘black ice’ is, which struck me as somewhat surreal.

But I know they get snow in Texas, I’ve experienced it. Ex-Hubby and I lived in Dallas from March 1985 till May 1989, so we spent four winters there, during which time we twice saw snow lying on the ground for several days, which was about as much as we could expect to see in Bedford (and a lot more than I’ve seen in Southsea in six years).

The clearest in my memory was at the beginning of March 1989, the weekend before I was due to give birth, when the baby shower had to be cancelled because nobody wanted to risk driving – least of all me, who didn’t fancy risking walking either. I have a distinct memory of stepping gingerly over compacted and frozen snow ridges to get to my car, though goodness knows where I was going that was so urgent

I’m sure there must be photos somewhere – but I have been looking for them in the study and have now given up the will to live. I pulled out the albums from that time, and found the one from March 1989 which should have had some, but couldn’t find any with snow on, just lots of baby pictures. There didn’t seem to be an album covering December 1987, which would have been the other snowy occasion – there must have been one, but goodness knows where.

Once I’d got all the albums off the shelf and flicked through them, I couldn’t face putting them back. In my defence, getting to the shelf required me to lean over a pile of junk on the floor and hurt my back. I did manage to get to another shelf which was slightly easier to get at, but just dumped them on there without any attempt to put them in order, which of course will make it even harder to find the next time I want to. This is why my life is such a mess, and yes, I am my own worst enemy, and no, I never get any better.

I am feeling lost now, lost in the past and the chaos and detritus of my life, and my emotions, and an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. Which tells me I don’t want to do any more today. So I put my arms around my cat – who is sitting on the desk right in front of me – and bury my face in her fur. To my amazement, although she wriggles a little, she doesn’t try to get away. I do it again, gently, and she lets me stay for several seconds, then turns to look out of the window, and I let her go. I follow her gaze into a drizzly February day, and watch the steam curling out from a pipe just under the roof eaves of the pub across the road against the grey sky.

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Looking for Love

Recently I realised that this year marks ten years since the last time I fell ‘in lurve’. It started in February, and was finished at the end of July, when the other party’s (supposedly) estranged wife decided she wanted him back, and he went.

A friend had tried to warn me quite early on (towards the end of April, when I was beginning to believe I’d finally met a man who genuinely cared about me) not to ‘…get involved in someone else’s train wreck…’, but of course, I was the fool who went rushing in. I’d been on my own for two years, I was tired of chatting to men online, meeting them once and convincing myself that they were really nice, interesting guys who were worth getting to know, only to find that they disappeared without a word or made it obvious that all they wanted from me was sex. Yes, I knew that he was jumping straight into a new relationship, and that that was dangerous, but I’d had my time in the wilderness, and I was sure that if I just gave him time and space to see how well we fitted together…

Well, if I ever meet that woman, I will thank her from the bottom of my heart, because if we’d stayed together, I wouldn’t have caught the Eurostar nine years ago today and gone travelling, never have lived in Prague, never have moved to Southsea… Of course, at that time, I wasn’t expecting it to be the last romantic relationship of my life. I thought maybe I’d been trying too hard, I should stop looking for love, I should just give up and wait for it to happen naturally – I was a free spirit, I would take my pleasure wherever it came my way, I would live the Bohemian life I’d always dreamt of, and some day, I’d fall in love again.

I won’t say I can count the number of times men have ‘come on’ to me in those years on the fingers of one hand – I can count them on my thumbs. The first was the old boy on the bus in Rome (‘Single to Sirkeci’, p165). The other was in my first summer in Southsea, one Friday afternoon in a pub overlooking the harbour, as I was settling myself with a pint of cider, and waiting for my fish and chips, when a creepy middle-aged man plonked himself down at my table with the words: ‘I don’t mind sharing if you don’t!’. (In case you’re wondering, there were plenty of empty tables, and I removed myself to one straight away).

For a few years, I still hankered after the fantasy of finding love – or at least, occasional male company. I used to wonder: what’s so awful about me that no one wants me? Is it my looks, personality, intellect, expectations too high, or too low? Is it just bad luck – or maybe good luck – that I’m the way I am?

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Happy Days

I called my brother yesterday morning. We have this thing of checking in with each other on the first Sunday of the month, which sometimes we forget, but mostly at least one of us remembers and is available. He and his wife, who both turned seventy last year, have had their first vaccinations, and so has their eldest daughter, who has been shielding because of a history of autoimmune problems. I should be in the next cohort, but haven’t heard anything yet.

We talked about the calm of hunkering down in lockdown, and I heard myself saying the words: ‘I’m happy…’, knowing in that moment it was true, and wondering what he would make of it. Looking back, I can see that at any moment of the conversation, with a carelessly chosen phrase he might have completely shattered that sense of wellbeing, but it didn’t happen. He said: ‘…it feels as though this is what retirement should be like…’, which this time last year (when he was planning to leave for Antarctica within the week) would have sounded bizarre, coming from a man who ‘officially’ retired in his fifties, and has spent the years since recreating the bustle and stress of his business life in numerous ways. I reminded him of the plaque our Dad put on the wall when he retired: ‘How good it feels to do nothing and then… rest afterwards’ and we shared a chuckle.

I know this is not a sustainable situation. Every morning I have to get up and do battle with my demons, dragons, bogies, black dogs, gremlins, negative vibes… whatever you want to call them. During the day, as long as I can escape interacting with others, avoid the news (and most of social media), don’t give too much attention to the ambient chaos, focus on doing the things I enjoy and give myself time and space to do the things that make me stressed (including being prepared to abandon them mid-stream and try again tomorrow), life feels okay.

Five minutes ago, while I was pondering that sentence I noticed a single white speck floating past my window. Now they are coming in ones and twos every few seconds. If this is going to be snow, it’s the first I’ve seen in three years. The sky does have that look to it, but we shall see.

I know this situation – the sense of peace, not the possibility of snow – is not sustainable. At some point, the world will start to intrude again.  The madwoman in the attic can only be ignored for so long. But happiness is about les petits bonheurs (and I wish I’d thought to say that to my brother yesterday, a missed opportunity to show that I’m also capable of being pretentious and intellectual), the pleasurable moments. Looking out of a window, whether of a train passing through the Dinaric Alps or counting the snow specks falling on passing cars, knowing I have nowhere to go, except downstairs for breakfast.

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Alternative Reality

On Facebook recently, somebody shared a question on the lines of:

‘If you had the choice of going back to when you were ten but with the knowledge you have now, or $50k and fifteen years into the future, what would you do?’

My reaction was: it might be interesting to see what the world’s like by 2026, but why would I want to go back to the age of ten and live through all that shit again? What use would the accumulated wisdom of half a century be to a ten-year-old girl?

Anyway, what would I do differently? Skip the first marriage, obviously – but not the second, because of the children. And it was my first husband who pointed out to me the job advert which led me to Bedford and ultimately to Hubby 2. On the other hand, if I knew then what I know now, I could look out for that job in the early summer of 1975 and apply for it anyway. I could apply for that degree course in maths and linguistics that was in the list of degrees I looked at in 1971, instead of the one in economics and statistics in Southampton. I’ve often thought that might have been an interesting path to take – I can’t remember which university it was, but I’d be in a different place, with different people, my student life could have been completely different. And I could still have applied for that job in Bedford – assuming the rest of the world was still running on more or less the same tracks.

There was a film in the 1980s, called ‘Peggy Sue got Married’ in which a suburban American housewife (played, I think, by Kathleen Turner), disappointed with her cheating husband (ditto Nicholas Cage) and teenage children, is sent back in time to her high school days. In the climactic scene (spoiler alert), when she is trying to explain to her childhood sweetheart and would-be fiancé (the aforementioned cheating husband) why she doesn’t want to marry him, and how she knows for sure that he will be unfaithful, she pulls off the locket round her neck and shows him the pictures of their son and daughter as babies to prove the truth of her time-travelling tale.

‘But they’re us’ the puzzled lad replies. ‘Our moms must’ve given you those photos of us as babies.’

Cue big moment of realisation. She looks at the babies, and looks into his eyes, and says, breathily (in a young version of Kathleen Turner’s voice):

‘You’re right, they are us, they’re you and me!’

Or words to that effect – it must be over thirty years since I watched that film. I don’t remember how it ends – probably she awakes from a coma because it was all part of a concussion dream, or whatever, with her loving husband and children around her bed, and realises how lucky she is to have them all.

But no, I couldn’t write my children’s father out of my story.