Category: remembering

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Not a Competition

In a chat on Zoom, I mentioned that I suspect I’m going to be facing my second consecutive birthday in lockdown, and got this response from one participant:

‘We all are!’

‘That depends on when your birthday is’ I stuttered, not having expected this somewhat aggressive response.

‘Well, none of us were allowed parties!’ she shot back.

There I go again, showing my self-pity. I should know by now to keep my mouth shut. But the only reason I’d been thinking about it was that next week it will be my sister’s first birthday in lockdown – last year she and her husband went for a holiday in Devon, and for my birthday I was looking forward to a canal holiday on a narrow-boat with my son and daughter in law. When it had to be cancelled, I thought: ‘oh well, not the end of the world, it’s just another day, I’m used to being on my own at home after all’ etc etc, but on the day itself it hit me harder than I’d expected. It was near the beginning of the first lockdown, and over the last few weeks I’ve been wondering whether this current situation will still be in place by then. But, first-world-problems, what do birthdays matter when people are facing much worse problems: illness and death, losing loved ones, losing jobs?  Maybe this lady had problems I wasn’t aware of, and my remark about my birthday was insensitive?

‘It’s not a competition’ my therapist said when I told her about it. ‘Whatever’s going on in her life, that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to feel sad! And instead of self-pity, why not think of it as “self-care”?’

Still, I think I should keep my mouth shut. It’s safer. Which is ironic, because as a child, and even later when I was a young woman, I was always being told to speak up for myself (except when I said things the other parties didn’t want to hear, as in this case, and how was I supposed to anticipate when that might happen?) Better to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself, when to share them might invoke other people’s anger, and hence my shame, or even laughter, and my humiliation – or sometimes both shame and humiliation at the same time.

Yet I come on here and talk about my feelings every day. Why is that? I’ve been through this before – because I can, with a near certainty that no one is going to respond.

I have a friend who occasionally contacts me on What’s App, who has severe physical disabilities and is in a far worse position than me. Sometimes she amazes me with her positivity and resilience, but this week she was very low. I tried to tell her how I felt for her, I didn’t belittle her suffering, I told a funny story against myself, I said I’m here if she ever wants to share. What else could I do? It’s not a competition.

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Lost Photos

Today my computer informs me that:

There is insufficient memory or disk space. Word cannot display the requested font.

As far as I’m aware, I haven’t ‘requested’ any special font, I’ve just opened Word as I do every morning. I close the message, and the usual one about my cloud storage being full. The blank page appears in ‘draft’ format – the right-most of the format icons on the bottom tool bar. I click on the left-hand icon, which is apparently called ‘print view’, and the page appears in the normal format. This is the second time this has happened lately.

I check, just in case, on File Explorer, and note that my hard drive has 718 GB free out of 918 GB – in other words, oodles of spare capacity. I should really do something about the cloud space though, delete some more photos from Google photos, but it will only fill up again – it’s been like this since at least before I got my current phone, which regularly reminds me how many weeks it is since it’s been able to backup to the cloud – well over two years’ worth, if I remember correctly.

Speaking of which, I mentioned the other day that it was surprising that my rotating desk top photos didn’t include any from the last part of my journey. I decided to correct that, and had a look in the ‘Europe 2012’ file on my external hard drive, when I had a shock. This drive holds the contents of the old hard drive of my original laptop, made for me before I went travelling by an IT guy (met through those networking breakfasts) who advised me on a replacement laptop. He offered to take the old laptop off my hands and put the drive into a casing for an external hard drive, so I could keep all the data from the original laptop, and also use it as a backup drive. When I was travelling I backed up my photos, notes and blog posts onto it, and I still have it attached to my current PC, which is where I found the desk tops file. The shock came when I realised I didn’t have any folders at all for the later places: my last few days in Norway, then Hamburg, Amsterdam and Brussels. Nor did I have any backups of the ones taken in the following years including all the ones I took when I lived in Prague.

Those photos should all be on the laptop I used in those years, until the beginning of 2015, just before I moved here, when I got a new one (the one I spilt coffee over and replaced with this PC in 2017). Fortunately I still have that laptop which I took travelling, the one I call my Old, Old laptop. I’ve seen it – and had it working – in the last year. I’ve been looking for it for two days (well, on and off). It must be in this study somewhere…

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Calendar Puzzles

Imbolc, Candlemas, Ground Hog Day… my hatred of January used to extend to February too, but now I’m more relaxed about them both. February is the month when I: moved into my first flat (2009); ran away to Europe (2012); came back from Prague (2014); started chemo (2017)… I could go back further into previous lives and remember: broke off my engagement (1975); had a miscarriage (1985); lost my Dad (1999)… 1996 wasn’t that great either, for reasons I won’t go into, and no doubt I could dig out other disasters if I thought some more, but at least for this century 2009 and 2012 were positive, and 2017 was too, if not particularly pleasant at the time (actually 1975 was positive too, but the mistake was that I didn’t stick with that decision).

February… well we all know it’s the shortest month and the only one that has different numbers of days depending on the year (but still stays the shortest). Why, when the calendar was being designed, wasn’t it given a couple of extra days, taken from, say August and December, to make seven 30-day months and only five 31-days, or six of each in Leap Year? Even better, why not alternate them by making February, April, June, August, October and December 30 days , with the Leap Day added at the end of December? Aha, that rings a bell now, isn’t it the case that March used to be the first month, which would make February the last month, which would at least make sense of Leap Day being then?

The Celtic quarter days are at the beginnings of February, May, August and November, which are not exactly mid-way between the equinoxes and solstices, but do correspond to the beginnings of calendar months – isn’t this something to do with the adjustments that had to be made to the calendar to deal with the fact that somewhere in the middle of the last millennium it was noticed that the seasons had moved since Julius Caesar’s time because the solar year isn’t exactly 365-and-a-quarter days long, and hence we don’t need a Leap Year exactly every four years, but more like 97 years out of 400? Every time I start asking these calendar questions I know I could just look them up on Wikipedia, but I’m not Wikipedia and I like to raise the questions and make everybody else as confused as I am.

I’m also puzzled by the fact that according to some sources Imbolc/Candlemas is on the first of February, while others say it’s the second. Why worry about things which have their roots back in times when few people were literate anyway, and they were probably decided – quite arbitrarily –  by various factions of various religions, and not in some boring, rational unified way?

But why is Groundhog Day now so closely linked with time repeating itself? Is it just down to the Bill Murray film, and why did the writers decide to do that?

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Life Writing

When I was travelling, I wrote erratically, and never felt I had very much to say. When I got back to England, and tried editing it all into a book, I realised that although I had far more material than I’d thought – more than enough for two books, even by the fourth edit – what I had wouldn’t make a coherent book. It was a series of anecdotes and reflections, some more or less interesting than others, but it had no real narrative, no dramatic tension, no resolution, no plot. It was held together only by the sequence of events and places I moved through; it was a journey, but it wasn’t a Hero’s Journey (or even a Heroine’s).

It is similar in that way to this and the other blogs and journals I’ve written down the years. I’ve wondered casually whether what I’m writing is the basis for an autobiography – or at least, memoirs – but it would be a very scrappy one, because there are large and significant portions of my life – like living in Dallas, or when I was doing my PhD – when I wrote very little, and others, like now, when little happens but I write about it quite intensively. The same happened when I was travelling – there are places I went to which, when I went through my notes and blogs, I found I’d written hardly anything about at the time, but when I was writing the first draft, it was quite recent in time, so I managed to scrape something together, often using my photos as aides memoires, and picking up additional information from the internet. Towards the end (of both the travelling and the writing) there are places (such as Kristiansund, Oslo, Hamburg and Amsterdam) that I skimmed through with very little attention and interest, but these are mainly in the still-unpublished second half, The Long Way Back.

Interestingly (perhaps), since I’ve had the selected photos rotating on my desktop, I’ve noticed there are also very few from the last weeks included in the sequence – not because I didn’t take any then, but because I never bothered to go through them, select them, edit for size and add them to the folder. On the other hand, there’s a preponderance of Brussels, Paris, Brittany and San Sebastian, the first places on the itinerary.

January comes to an end today. I used to hate this time of year, but that was when I set a lot of store by Christmas, and found the new year always an anticlimax. Now I find that this can be quite a hopeful time – even though it usually has the worst weather of the year, at least the light is slowly coming back. A daffodil opened in my forecourt a couple of days ago, but was immediately so battered and droopy it hardly deserved a photo. I can confirm that this has been the coldest and gloomiest beginning in the four years I’ve been crocheting weather blankets.

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Home to Roost

In my study, but once again, Microsoft decided it needed to reconfigure my version of Office, so I had to wait. I spent the time picking some more books to go downstairs on the new shelves, and looking for more yarn to match the cardigan (or maybe it will be a blanket) I started crocheting two days ago, when I realised the fair isle jumper was going to be too tight, so I gave up on it till I decide whether I’m going to pull it back to the armpits and do it again, or leave it unfinished like so many other things I’ve started in my life.


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

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Dichotomy and Transitions

Thinking of what to write today, and how to carry on with the thread of the last few days, it occurred to me that the two examples I gave as people noticing a ‘transition’ from ‘Belinda’ to Melinda’ were from my twenties and thirties. Not only that, but it might seem that both refer to a single period of change – which isn’t correct, because the conversation where I was warned ‘not to go back into my shell’ happened long before my first meeting with the other person, so I’d obviously slipped right back into my shell by that time – just as I did between the networking and the travelling.

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.

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Hold That Thought…

Do I have control over my thoughts or do my thoughts control me?

When I was going to ‘business networking’ breakfasts, ten years ago, the speakers often emphasised the importance of having the right attitude: plan for success, visualise what you want to achieve, believe in yourself, banish negativity etc. Softer, gentler life-coach types would also add things like: practise gratitude, be in the moment, take care of yourself; but the general thrust was pretty much the same – you can do this if you think you can. Think right, and everything will fall into place.

Needless to say, I struggled with all this. I would go to the meetings, listen to the talks, chat to people, get a momentary buzz of: ‘I can do this!’ and then go home and remember: I had no clients, I didn’t know how to persuade people to buy my services, and I wasn’t sure that what I could do would be ‘good enough’. And, also needless to say, I blamed myself – I was never going to get anywhere with an ‘attitude’ like mine, if all these shiny, happy people could make it work for them, what was wrong with me? And the answer was: this is what’s wrong with me, the fact that I have to ask: ‘what’s wrong with me?’ and so it goes, round and round and round.

But I met some nice people, and I ate some good breakfasts (not necessarily a healthy habit to get into) and gradually – mainly in retrospect – I came to realise that they were mostly in the same boat as me – scrabbling around trying to get business from other people who were also scrabbling around trying to get business, in the belief that by behaving like ‘business people’, they would magically find success, by ‘investing’ their hard earned profits into subscriptions that accumulated up and up the pyramid to the people at the top. I was ‘invited’ to be a local organiser, which meant my subscriptions were halved in return for a few hours spent every fortnight sending out invitations, following up to check who was coming, getting there early and checking people off the list as they arrived, collecting £10 from each and paying the venue for the breakfasts, then passing on the balance to the regional organiser. And every day of the week, in a different venue, there would be another one of these meetings, where I could go and pay £10 for another breakfast, another pep talk, and maybe meet a different group of people, but most likely many of the same, and so on. At least I felt I belonged to something.

I seem to have digressed a bit into reminiscing about those days. I’ve never been happy about meeting people, or good at making small talk, but I suppose I bit the bullet and got on with it and it didn’t kill me, though it didn’t make me a business person, either.

But that’s not what I was intending to write…

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What Changed?

When I returned to England at the end of July 2012, I found that not only had Ex-Hubby not put the house on the market, he wasn’t in any great hurry to do so. With a sigh of relief, I made plans to return to Central Europe the following year, not to Budapest, but Prague, where I’d found I could do a crash course in TEFL with a (potential, but at the time I thought it was definite) six month placement to follow. Neither of us knew then that it would be a further four years before things were finally settled. Looking back, I can see that he was procrastinating no less than I was, each in our respective Limbo, his of denial and inertia and mine of footloose running away. During those four years I was to live in five different locations: with our daughter; in the attic flat in the Fens; in Prague; sharing with him in the old house and finally renting a flat in Southsea.

Going through those old blog posts from 2008, I found one in which I shared an old fantasy about travelling across Europe until my savings ran out, in the hope that something would turn up before I had to come back. The same person who commented about me undervaluing myself had this to say:

I would guess that if you did take off and travel on your savings for 3, 6, 12 months or whatever it took to exhaust the piggy bank, at the end of it your circumstances would be vastly different. Your experiences during those months would have inevitably changed your outlook. Maybe for better, possibly for worse but I am willing to bet you would have found the time has led to any number of possible situations.

Maybe sitting in a cheap hotel on a Greek island, lap top at your side and your new found male friend opposite? Surrounded by people you have met during your travels who have altered your perceptions of who you are, what you want out of life and where you are going.

All I can say is – your state of mind would not be as it is now.

Comment on Husband or Cat, 17 October 2008

Well, although I stayed with existing friends in some places, I didn’t make any new ones, male or otherwise, or even have any racy encounters. On the contrary, rather than ‘possible situations’ and any alterations in my ‘state of mind’ or ‘perceptions of who I am’, what I discovered was that travelling is a great way of avoiding contact with other people. I became the Invisible Woman, anonymous and solitary, sitting on trains or in cafés, reading, writing, or doing killer su doku, living in cheap hotel rooms, behind whose doors I was safely insulated from the world. Now I have my own door to hide behind, complete with cat, and other hobbies to pass my time with, and the sense of isolation is not so different, except that the view doesn’t change.   

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Existential Choices

…I wanted stay in the flat in the Art Nouveau building with its courtyard and rickety lift, stroll to the café for breakfast every morning, and then along the river to the tram stop and ride somewhere, maybe across the bridge and up the hill to Buda Castle, and look down on the city. Walk down through the gardens of Gellért Hill, maybe go to the baths (I never did that) or walk back into Pest across the Elisabeth Bridge, rummage through the flea market and find a café to sip coffee Viennoise or hot chocolate, maybe even a glass of sweet white wine with my cake…

After I started that sentence yesterday, I kept thinking of the lines from Joni Mitchell’s  ‘A Free Man in Paris’:

‘…If I had my way, I’d walk out that door and
wander down the Champs Elysée,
going from café to cabaret…’

From ‘A Free Man in Paris’ by Joni Mitchell

Then I had to play the song, and after rummaging through the box of cassettes in the study, I found it in the sideboard drawer, right under the music centre, first place I should have looked.

Ah well. I never went to any cabarets, but I did sit in a lot of cafes.

Three weeks after leaving Budapest, I walked up the complex of white ramps to the roof of the Opera House overlooking Oslo harbour, thinking again about the future, and ‘home’, about the need to make a living, and the responsibilities of selling and buying houses – and about the weight of the past, the ‘stuff’ still waiting for me in the old house, which would need to be sorted out and disposed of and/or moved to… some indeterminate future place. In another three weeks I would be back in England, and then what? I was going back to live with my daughter, and I knew there was £20k waiting for me in the bank from the balance of what I’d had from Ex-Hubby before I left England, that should keep me for a while, until the house was sold, and/or I could find (against all past experience) a job, and in the meantime I could write, and one day maybe start to make a living from that? But buying a house would mean committing to one place, and the thought of all the stuff from the attic and elsewhere banged around in my head, a burden dragged around behind me like Mother Courage’s cart.  What about going back to Budapest and living and writing there, then what would happen to the stuff, I couldn’t take it with me, so where would it go? If the house sale went through in the next twelve months, say, it would all have to be resolved

Once again, there were existential choices to be made, and the whole point of running away was to escape them and come back with new ideas and fresh opportunities, a new path to follow, but inside nothing had changed, and I felt no closer to finding my future.

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Other Attics

My routine was disrupted yesterday: I was awake half the night then fell back to sleep when I should’ve been thinking about getting up, and slept through till eight, lay in bed till half past then got up and went to the shop, and when I got back I decided it was too late to write.

This morning, I’ve been looking at my desktop photos again. One came up that I didn’t recognise, it was of graffiti that read: ‘time you ENJOY wasting was not wasted’. I was trying to work out where it came from, I saw the date was 18 June, and thought maybe it was Copenhagen, then realised it was far too early for that because I was in Berlin on the summer solstice (when it poured with rain and I spent the whole day in the museums), so it must have been before then – I think it might have been Prague, though I haven’t checked yet. But if so it was probably the John Lennon graffiti wall, which surprised me because I remember looking for that the following year, when I was living there. I guess I must have passed it the first time without knowing anything about it. My memories of those few days I when I passed through Prague are a bit hazy, overwhelmed by later memories.

I will jump back into the Madwoman/Attic story now because I’ve described the beginning and the end without saying much about the times in between. Let’s start with Budapest, where I stayed for two weeks in a studio apartment a ten minute walk from the Pest bank of the Danube. That’s when I had the idea of going back, living there for a while, writing and maybe giving English conversation classes. Looking in the window of an estate agent’s near the flat, I worked out that I could buy somewhere similar (or a little bigger) for about £40k. Because, at the back of my mind was this awareness that at some point, the old house would be sold, and I would have my share of the proceeds, which would allow me to buy my own place, a proper home for myself, with no worries about where the rent was going to come from. It was a ‘some day, one day…’ fantasy, but it was also a reality, that one day I would be in that position – in fact, according to the divorce settlement, it should be happening very soon, within a matter of months. But the flip-side of that was that it would mean an end to my wanderings, and I wasn’t ready for that just yet – in fact, would I ever be? Ready for it? I couldn’t imagine that, how it would work, where I would be by then – I didn’t want to think about it.

I wanted to stay in the flat in the Art Nouveau building with its courtyard and rickety lift, stroll to the café for breakfast every morning, and then along the river…