‘Fail to plan and plan to fail’ was another piece of wisdom which I acquired from my business networking days and totally failed to learn from. I reflected on this yesterday when I was digging holes for my newly bought plants and tenderly packing the soil around them. I plan to fail, not because that’s what I want to happen, but because that’s my expectation, on the basis of past experience. It wasn’t that I had no plan at all when I was walking around B&Q on Wednesday with all the other Diamond Card holders, all waving our ten-pounds-off-when-you-spend-over-thirty coupons – there were certain things I knew I wanted to buy, like compost, basket liner, and a 40 cm diameter pot, but when it came to plants, I was mainly driven by spontaneity – well, within bounds –mostly what I bought were pretty predictable: begonia, petunias, geraniums. But I still didn’t have any specific ideas about where any of them were going, and so I was making it up as I went along.

There’s a lot to be said for spontaneity, impulse, intuition – well, I would say that, given my aversion to planning. No, that’s not right, ‘aversion’ isn’t quite the right word: it’s not that I don’t want to make plans, it’s more that from experience I know the stress that planning causes, the struggle to sort it all out, to impose order and make sense, to remember the stages, to decide on the appropriate actions, to implement them without flying off in all directions, and to judge the outcomes. All those things that make perfect sense rationally, intellectually, academically and succumb to chaos when they hit the real world, that great, spinning distributor of ordure.

Having said that, it occurs to me that the major, dramatic changes in my life, the ‘leap before you look moments’, like starting a PhD, leaving a husband (both of them), travelling, moving to Prague and Southsea etc, were all preceded by years of ‘planning’, just not in the organised, logically –sequenced, rational fashion – more on the lines of: ‘…if I could, I would… if only…’ At New Year 2015, I met a lady and told her that I was hoping to move to Southsea one day, then when I announced in March that I was moving, her comment was: ‘you’re a fast worker!’, even though the idea had been in my head for three years.

There’s more I wanted to say, but as usual I started writing and then wandered off at a tangent. But I’d like to share a quote that I heard on Thought for the Day on Radio 4 earlier while I was making coffee: “You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.” It was attributed to Henry Nouwen, a name which means nothing to me (apparently he was a Catholic priest, but I won’t hold that against him.)

I’ve often been told I think too much… TBC

Yesterday I was debating over whether to take the van out to the country park for a picnic, or the car to B&Q to spend some coupons on stuff for the garden, or a combination of the two or something completely different. In the end, I went to B&Q in the car, and it was lucky I didn’t try to combine that with a picnic, because by the time I’d finished (after almost an hour), I felt quite worn out. I came home with compost, basket liners and enough plants to hopefully ensure one or two of each type might survive my half-hearted and inconsistent attempts at gardening.

I sorted out a few things into larger pots during the afternoon, the rest are lined up in a tray supported by two upturned buckets, along the fence, along with some sweet peas and other stuff in trays that I’d bought earlier from the Co-op as I walked past on my way home from tai chi sessions in the park.

They say a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, and I did that, but gardening fits into the same category for me. Maybe the same conditions apply to both – a lack of attention to nurturing the first time around, or, in the case of gardening, of all previous attempts.

Today I need to get out there and do some weeding to make space for my new purchases. As usual, there was minimal planning and organisation behind the things I bought. There are three wall-mounted baskets, two small and one large, on the wall outside my kitchen window, along the little alley between my house and the neighbours, which had trailing begonias in my first year living here, but which have deteriorated over the last few years until there were just a dead fuchsia and some very straggly geraniums, which didn’t flower at all last year. It’s not an ideal spot for geraniums, because, squashed between the two houses, it doesn’t get much sunshine. I can’t remember when the begonias gave up, but over the years I have made various attempts to replace them, but this is the first time I’ve replaced the liners, so hopefully that will help, and maybe give me something attractive to look at while I’m doing the washing up.

The large one was screwed to the wall, so I left it in situ and just reached up (it’s just slightly above my eye level) to put the new liner, compost and plants into it. I took the two smaller ones off, as they were just hooked over the nails, but didn’t think about the fact that one of them had come loose from one of the nails and was dangling at an angle from the other one, until after I’d filled them both and went to try and put them back. The first one was okay, but there was no second nail in the wall for the other, it had rusted or come away altogether.   

Today I have a decision to make.

It’s not earth-shattering – it’s this: should I take my camper van to the country park, have a walk through the trees and a picnic? Should I go to B&Q, buy some compost and plants, come home and do some gardening? Should I do both, drive the camper van to B&Q en route to the country park and hope to find a parking place not too far from home when I get back, so it’s not too much of an effort to carry the compost etc home? Should I take the car (camper van too tricky to park) and go to the garden centre that’s en route to the country park (if I can remember where it is, I’ve only been a couple of times, and that was years ago), and if I do, does my parking season ticket for the country park cover the car as well?

Yesterday I bought rolls and individually wrapped flap jacks in preparation for this picnic that I was planning. But – isn’t the country park getting a bit boring? I don’t want to drive the other way, to the New Forest, because that is a full day out, and does mean driving along the M27, which can be stressful. And putting the van back into the garage is always stressful. It’s only a couple of weeks since I moved the van, so it shouldn’t have seized up yet – though I did leave the battery connected up in the expectation that I’d be taking it out again in the near future. I won’t be taking it out next week, though, because I’m going up to Bedford – on the train, because hopefully my daughter will be bringing me back to stay a few days and help with sorting out the study.

I was going to go to B&Q because I have a coupon, and Wednesday is Diamond Card day, but of course you can’t combine the offers, and anyway if you read the small print the coupon only applies if you spend £30 on full price items, so it’s not great if you want to combine lots of small things, when some of them are likely to be on multi-buys anyway, so I’d spend all my time trying to work out what to spend it on.

I like the idea of going to the garden centre, but from what I remember the parking is pretty awful, so as I said, I wouldn’t want to take the van.

I’m just trying to give examples here of what my mind is like all the time. I think I’ll give myself a treat, but it takes so long to think through all the options, implications, ramifications and potential consequences that I start to dread it, even when the object is something I know I would enjoy – unless, of course, I don’t enjoy it at all and end up wondering what on earth I’m doing there, wherever it is. Which is quite likely.

Hey ho, switched on the computer and it took me four attempts to realise that the reason it wasn’t accepting my password was because the caps lock was on. When it occurred to me, I thought: ‘surely there’s usually a message to tell you that’ and then saw that there was one but I hadn’t noticed it. It hadn’t been switched off properly, so when I got on it went straight to Facebook and I started scrolling through that, ‘loving’ friends’ pictures of their cats and laughing at cartoons.

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.

Just been to Sainsbury’s to buy hot cross buns, because I realised last night I hadn’t got any – haven’t had any this year – and today is the day when it’s okay to have them for breakfast. I wanted those, and little prawns to go in my salmon en croute for dinner (but they only had king prawns, which won’t work, so it’ll be salmon, mushrooms and parsley en croute), and eggs and smoked salmon for breakfast one day over the weekend, and maple syrup to have with waffles another day, and chocolate for Sunday because I realised I hadn’t had any since I finished the Christmas leftovers – which has been quite a few weeks, but not necessarily the whole of Lent – actually, forget I said that, because I just remembered I had some chocolate truffles for Mother’s Day.

None of that would have been possible in my childhood, because the shops would have been shut on Good Friday, as well as Easter Monday and, of course, Easter Sunday, just like every other Sunday. (Actually, I have a feeling they might still be shut on Easter Sunday, but not sure about that.) I remember one year, when I must have been well into my teens, because I went into town on my own on Easter Saturday, and my Mum had asked me to pick up a loaf of bread, and everywhere I went was sold out, from which I learned the lesson to make sure you’ve got plenty of bread for Easter weekend, until the world moved on and made that obsolete. I was quite annoyed when the shops started opening on Good Friday, even though I wasn’t a Christian, because what’s the point of traditions if you’re going to ignore the fundamentals in that way?

Now I’m more relaxed, and anyway, I make my own bread. But when I was shopping earlier in the week, and planning today’s dinner, I bought cream for the sauce filling and was thinking what else I needed for today (except the hot cross buns, obviously) and it struck me – I always have fish on Good Friday, but making it so fancy is definitely observing the letter not the spirit of the tradition – salmon en croute is not exactly fasting. On the other hand, I guess it’s pretty tame compared with what the Renaissance popes might have had, so why should I worry?

That’s when I started thinking about Sunday as well, and chocolate, and my birthday, which is next week – the second one I’ve had in lockdown. Last year I didn’t plan anything special, but when the day came I went to Tesco and bought a cake and a bottle of prosecco, then ordered a Chinese takeaway for dinner. Tomorrow is my takeaway day (alternate Saturdays), but the question is, do I skip it this week and leave it till my birthday? Hadn’t thought about that. Seems daft to have two within a week of each other. Decisions, decisions – the problems of affluence

I’ve already been to the Co-op today. I managed to avoid going all last week, because I stocked up the week before when I was having visitors for the weekend. And by using up supplies of longlife and evaporated milk, and Elmlea (which I’d bought to put on trifle – for my visitors – till I went to the shops again and managed to get real fresh cream); taking dinners from the freezer backlog of all those ‘chef’s surprise’ slow-cooker meals which have been building up; and a take away curry delivery on Saturday, I held out without needing to go until today. Saturday’s dinner in the slow cooker will be belly pork with cannellini beans, celery, red pepper, carrots and maybe sweet potatoes cooked in cider, because too many of the ‘chef’s surprises’ seem to have sauces based on tinned tomatoes, and I fancied a more radical change.

I have been getting discouraged about a lot of things lately – mainly the garden. My Facebook memories keep showing all the lovely things which were in flower at this time last year. Someone said to me the other day that my garden is ‘blooming’, but he was judging it from Facebook, where I have posted pictures of every single flower I’ve seen so far – sometimes several pictures of the same one, over a number of days, as I’m still trying to post a photo every day. The actual total of flowers so far has been: one yellow and three white daffodils on the forecourt, and in the back garden one blue hyacinth and a handful of mini daffodils; two hellebores (one single and, more recently, one double flower), a few blossoms on the rosemary which were only visible if you looked very carefully and a couple of yellow celandines under the camellia (which I only just remembered). The rest is a desert of weeds, rotting planks and general junk currently in transit between the sheds. Is this disaster down to the hot, dry summer last year, or a total lack of interest and attention? I assume most likely a combination of the two.

It’s the curse of social media. However honest I try to be about my general worthlessness and self loathing, it seems that people want to keep seeing me in a more positive light. Which is very frustrating – but on the other hand, if they could see me more clearly, they wouldn’t want to be my friends anyway. And then I’d feel even worse.

I honestly don’t know how to shake off these feelings, and more and more it seems that there isn’t any escape. The effort required feels overwhelming, but so is the effort to pretend to be what I’m not: brave, positive, upbeat, hopeful, happy etc. Feelings always take control over intentions to change, to find a better way to be.

I almost didn’t write today. Perhaps it would be better if I didn’t throw all this out into the void. But I usually feel better afterwards

I was going to go to the shop, but slept in and didn’t get up till half past seven, so decided to skip my exercise routine and get dressed straight away. But when I looked at the shopping list, I thought: I’m not desperate for any of these things, I haven’t got enough milk to last the day but I’ve got some long-life in the cupboard, and whatever else I need will depend on what I’m going to eat over the next few days, and I can’t think about planning what I’m going to eat so I’ll leave it till tomorrow – except tomorrow I have to go to the doctor’s for half past eight to get a blood test to check on how my cholesterol’s doing – so better not have anything too cheesy for dinner tonight – and I guess I can go to the shop after the doctor’s, it will be a bit later than usual but hopefully not too busy.

But what am I going to have for dinner tonight, or the next few days? What’s in the freezer? It’s full of plastic boxes, and since the start of the year I’ve been making a list of what’s in there and tallies to tick things off, but there are no labels on the boxes so I have to guess. Because on alternate Saturdays (I have takeaway on the others) I make a casserole in the slow cooker, and put three quarters of it into plastic boxes and freeze them. But which is which? They look pretty much the same. This one has cannellini beans, I think that’s from before the time I started writing them down, and it’s either lamb hotpot or belly pork in cider. It’ll do.

The sun is shining and the dead heads of the hydrangea are looking at me through the window, the ones I didn’t cut back in the autumn. If I cut them now, will I cut off the new shoots as well so it doesn’t flower?

What to do? Make a cup of coffee, prepare porridge and put it in the microwave ready for later, and put away the things from the drainer because they must be dry by now. Like any other day. Then I’ll go on the computer and delete some more files, because the backup from the phone will be on there by now, or will be as soon as the phone’s connected to the wifi. And write? Or do I feel too shit to share?

When I get upstairs I remember I need to do the washing today, and it’s sunny, so I sit on the bed and think – what needs to go in and what am I going to forget and kick myself about later? Two pairs of ripped jeans should be in the bin, I forgot them last week and again today because the bin men have already gone.

Groundhog day all over again. Spring is coming, but what changes? At least I’m up and dressed.

Sun shining this morning. I have been to Tesco, my least favourite of the three supermarkets within five minutes walk, but it has the right kind of cat food (unlike Sainsbury’s) and self-checkouts (unlike Co-op), reducing the need for social interaction. In general, I find the Co-op has the best stock for my needs, but some mornings that risk of social interaction is enough to drive me in the other direction.

I raised that question about controlling my thoughts a couple of weeks ago, but here is a related one which was bugging me when I woke up this morning: do thoughts control emotions, or emotions control thoughts? Which is the chicken in this arrangement, and which the egg? But this question is just as impossible to answer as the original, given all the feedbacks between the two states.

If I’ve learnt anything about this topic, I would say that trying to control emotions by thinking alone – in other words, wishing them away – is a waste of effort. The fake-it-till-you-make-it idea of slapping on a happy face and banishing all that negativity has always failed and frustrated me, but I’ve discovered from experience that there are activities that improve my mood. Finding the ones that work and can be done with the resources you already have is a great gift.

Writing can be one of those things – although sometimes the mood improvement doesn’t come until after it’s done, rather than in the process. When it’s going well, it’s the best feeling in the world, but when it’s a slog, it’s hellish. There isn’t really a basic process to follow that can make it happen if it doesn’t come spontaneously, except this sort of stream-of-consciousness brain-dumping that I do every morning, and which has yet to cohere into anything tangible. What I’m thinking of here is that I can at any moment pick up a hook and a ball of yarn and start to make something, or continue with what’s already started, and that doesn’t really require any thought. It might go wrong, and that might seem enough to induce frustration and disappointment, but somehow it doesn’t – I just unravel it and do it again differently, or put it away and do something else till I feel ready to get back to it. There’s always something I can do, and if it doesn’t work out, it’s no big deal, I can leave it and do something else.

But isn’t that what I’m doing every morning? Maybe this is my way of applying that approach to writing. Now, that’s something that I’ve just thought of in this process, that wasn’t in my head when I sat down to write, or even when I started that last paragraph. This is my throwaway writing, it doesn’t matter whether it means anything to me or anyone else – but it’s not really ‘thrown away’, I just shove the words to the back of a digital ‘folder’, it doesn’t take up any space, not even ink and paper.

Switched on the computer this morning and found that I’d never actually posted yesterday’s efforts. So I just did it now – which could be an excuse for not writing today. But I won’t chicken out like that, even though I haven’t got a clue what I’m going to write.

Sometimes, really big things happen, and there’s no real choice but to get on and do something about them. Most days, things happen which are annoying, depressing, frustrating at the time, but you either find a way of dealing with them or you have to let them go – and then, maybe, you find there is a way of dealing with them – or at least getting round them – after all. All this a pretty trite, I suppose, the sort of thing that only sounds profound when it’s staring you in the face.

Lots of frustrating things happened yesterday, but I don’t want to go into details. And I’ve finally put up my bookshelves. It took me three days – not three whole days, of course, but a period of time each day up until the point when I decided I’d have enough and would leave the rest till tomorrow. By that time yesterday, the shelves were all in except for the last one, because I didn’t have enough shelf supports. Then in the evening I noticed there was an extra shelf support sticking out one of the holes at the side. On the first shelf I did, I’d put this support in the wrong place, not lined up with the other side, but instead of taking it out, I’d left it there and put another one in the right hole, then went on to do the rest until I got to the last one and only had three supports left. I cursed Argos, and went on the website, but there was no way of ordering extra parts, like there is with IKEA, and because I’d had it for two months, there was no point in complaining. Maybe I could improvise with a nail or something where the support should be, or just make do with four shelves. It wasn’t such a big deal. But now, of course, I can put the other shelf in anyway.

There’s one fixed shelf in the middle, and I’d put some stuff on it on Sunday evening – not things that I intended to stay there, just for convenience. There used to be a small table in the corner, next to the sofa, which had accumulated a lot of junk, which is now scattered around the room. The table and the standard lamp are now in the other alcove on the other side of the fireplace, behind the telly.

Now I need to fill the shelves. The bottom one is quite tricky to get at, because there isn’t much room between it and the sofa. But it’s big enough for knitting patterns. And the next one can be for the random stuff that used to be on the table.

Every Day is Yours to Win, REM

Just been for my first trip to the shops this year. The last time was New Year’s Eve, when I arrived outside Sainsbury’s at ten past eight to find that they weren’t opening till nine, so I went to the Co-op instead. Not sure why they had different opening hours for New Year’s Eve – New Year’s Day is a holiday, but not the day before. Anyway, the Co-op was open as normal.

And today, I went to Sainsbury’s. Ten days – no, eleven – I must have stocked up really well – not just on Christmas stuff, but milk too, because that, as usual, was the indicator that sent me out this morning.

We all live in our own worlds, that’s what I was thinking earlier, before I went to Sainsbury’s. ‘We have just one world/But we live in different ones’, to quote Mark Knopfler (Brothers in Arms). Each of us has our own personal world inside our head, which evolves over time, partly from genetics, partly from the environment we live in, partly from our experiences of interaction with all the other worlds surrounding us, the physical, social, economic and cultural worlds (all of which can be considered as constituting the ‘environment’ to our personal world). Each of us has a world of incredible complexity inside our heads, whether we consciously realise it or not, even before we factor in the ways in which our internal world interacts with all those other internal worlds of all those other beings with whom we interact.

I was going to say ‘people’, but I said ‘beings’ because – well, even my little cat has her own world in her head, which leads her to predictable actions but is largely impenetrable to me – such as the way she was in the living room when I got home from the shop, but while I unpacked the shopping and made coffee, she came upstairs and was sitting on the landing outside the study door, waiting for me to come up and switch on the computer. She can predict my behaviour almost better than I can predict hers – sometimes we surprise each other, but given that our relationship is based on observation rather than verbal communication, it’s surprisingly mutual and very close – even more so since last year and my periods of lock-down.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this this morning (although in a way it is the basis of my PhD thesis). How do we understand all those other worlds that we crash into and bounce away from like billiard balls? The default position, I would suggest, is that we start from an assumption that our own world is ‘true’, and that other people’s experiences of and relationships with the world are broadly similar to ours – at least those with whom we are in close contact. In fact, we have to start from that assumption, that our own perceptions are based in some kind of shared reality, otherwise how can any kind of communication be possible?