Category: time

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Beach Walk

Why bother trying to draw a bus shelter?

Because it’s the only thing I can see that I stand a chance of drawing. This is a new notebook and I forgot it doesn’t have lines, which means it’s intended for drawing.

Sometimes I can draw, mostly it’s just crap. I can always write, but that’s mostly crap too.

Coffee’s too hot. Last time I thought it was because I filled it to the top with hot water, so today I left a gap. But it’s still too hot.

Sitting outside the Beach Café (or I was an hour ago when I wrote in my notebook. Now I’m transcribing at my desk).

In the sea, a boat so small it almost looks like a toy. Maybe it’s further away than it looks. It’s rushing off somewhere, nearly out of sight already.

Silver light on the sea and small patches of sky-blue sky between the clouds. I tried to think of a better way to describe the colour of the sky, but sky-blue is the best I can come up with. Matches the colour of the ink I’m writing with.

Half a dozen litter-pickers in hi-vis jackets carrying white plastic bags just came round the corner.

Coffee still too hot to drink even though I left the top off.

Sun out now and on my face, so I start to unzip my coat – the same coat I was wearing in the winter, but I put it on because it’s got a hood, although the weather app at six o’clock said ‘no precipitation for at least 120 minutes’.

Spent ages (of course) deciding whether to come for a walk, and then getting everything together: coffee; wallet; which bag? Shopping bag or hand bag, or handbag inside shopping bag, or shopping bag inside handbag, which is easiest to carry? How many shopping bags will I need? Notebook and pen, or puzzle book and pencil or both or neither? Life and energy frittered away on logistics and indecision – that’s what it comes down to.

Not so many people today, or perhaps I’m more prepared for them. Not so many wild swimmers, just the regulars. Suddenly the sky is full of gulls, wheeling and intersecting (but silently), then when I look up again it’s empty.

Coffee still hot. Catches in my throat and makes me cough. Hope no one notices. Then I touch my face. Remember all that? Does anyone still follow those guidelines?

Forget ‘A Room of One’s Own’ – I have a whole house. Forget £500 a year – I have more than that a month and then some – but it’s nearly a century since Virgina Woolf wrote about what a woman needs in order to write – necessary but not sufficient conditions.

I watched a TED talk someone sent me – an American woman talking about her abusive childhood, bouts of homelessness and drug dependencies, train-wreck marriages etc and the writing opportunities she pissed away. Guess what? She did it in the end. Guess what? I didn’t.

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Camper Van Woes – (and) an Epic Saga

Yesterday I called the garage because my camper van is due for its MOT on 18th June. They told me I didn’t need to get it done – I said I’d been told the grace period for MOTs stopped at the end of May. He’s going to check and get back to me.

They’ve still got the keys, because I tried to start it in March and couldn’t, so I dropped the keys round for them to look at it. He said yesterday that they’d done that, but they hadn’t told me – not that I could have done anything, because it was in that week when the lockdown started. I normally disconnect the battery when it’s standing over winter, but they put a new one in last autumn and the nut was screwed up too tight for me to turn it.

He’s going to find out about the MOT and call me back today.

I went on the camping club website to find out when the campsites will be opening – I’m assuming July. I checked the two sites I use most often to see if I could book, there was nothing to say I couldn’t, on the booking page it just said ‘click on the calendar’, but I tried that both times and nothing happened – I don’t know if that was because the links weren’t there or just because my wifi is so poor.

What are the campsites going to be like anyway? If I could find somewhere that’s guaranteed to be quiet it would be okay, but I don’t want to go anywhere that’s rammed with people. I haven’t even used my car since it was MOTed in March. I could take the van out for picnics rather than overnight stays, but I’m not sure where. It feels like it might make sense just to leave it in the garage for a while, maybe even SORN it, and get the MOT done when I’m ready to use it again.

I do wonder how I’m going to organise my life when things open up a bit more. It’s a strange world out there. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t make plans at the best of times. Euphoria, existential despair, or what-shall-I-have-for-dinner? (Good question – probably leftover curry and rice.) Zoom tai chi this evening – if the sound works – it didn’t last week, I struggled to follow it, but if that happens again I won’t bother.

Been listening to ‘Tumanbay’ on BBC Sounds, an epic saga set in an imaginary middle-eastern country – 1001 Nights without the magic but with lots of intrigue, spies, deception and violence. Radio 4 is currently broadcasting series 4, but I discovered it in 2017 when series 2 was being broadcast, didn’t think it was my kind of thing at first, but when I went back to series 1 it made more sense and I got hooked. I’ve spent the last two days binge-listening to series1 again, now I’m looking forward to the rest.

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Mirror, Mirror

I was going to start writing this morning by saying: ‘Suddenly, nothing makes sense.’ But I realised that’s not true, there’s nothing ‘sudden’ about it. Individually, nationally, as a culture, as a species, we’ve been heading for disaster for – how long? God knows – ever, I suppose. Just when it feels as though things can’t get any worse… no, I’m not going to end that sentence.

Most mornings I coax myself out of bed by thinking of some joy-giving activity I can do in the day to come. Yesterday I didn’t find much joy in anything. So how about today?

There’s a mirror on my wardrobe door, facing the window, in front of which is a dressing table, with another mirror, and between the two is my bed. I lay in bed this morning, with my back to the window, looking at an image of the edge of the dressing table mirror and the curtain behind, and trying to work out which side of the mirror and curtain it was. I finally convinced myself that it was the same edge and bit of curtain that appeared a little to the right in the dressing table mirror, but somehow this seemed all wrong. Shouldn’t it be the other side? Of course it shouldn’t, because it was a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, so it ended up the same as the original reflection of the curtain, but it still disturbed me.

I’ve written before about life feeling like a hall of mirrors, or a labyrinth. It’s a bit of a cliche, but this morning for a moment I felt how disorienting that experience can be.

It made me think of crossing the road in a country where they drive on the other side – although reason tells you that the traffic on the side nearest will be coming from the opposite direction to where you’d expect it from, sometimes your brain just can’t handle it, and you have to think really hard about which way you normally look so you can look to the other one. When we first moved back from the US, I was very nervous about driving in Milton Keynes, because on the wide dual carriageways I panicked that I would turn into the wrong lane. It may, of course, just be me – possibly related to dyspraxia, though I don’t usually have problems with telling right from left.

And here I am struggling to write with a cat in front of the computer and a mouse which isn’t working and a brain full of mush. I’m used to working without a mouse on the laptop, but on the PC I’m really struggling – again, it’s something I can usually do without thinking about it. Having to sit with the keyboard on my lap or to one side because the cat’s in the way doesn’t help.

I have to wrap a present, write a card and take a parcel to the Post Office this morning. Those are my tasks.  

Happy Monday.

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Happy Days (Part 2)

In some ways these last few days have been quite idyllic. Wake up in sunshine, morning routine, breakfast in the garden – with su doku – blends effortlessly into sitting in the garden and crocheting, which blends into an afternoon of listening to the radio and crocheting, preparing dinner, eating dinner (sometimes in the garden), and watching telly for a couple of hours and crocheting, then listening to music and crocheting till it’s time for bed. Okay, yesterday I went to the shop, but that’s become more of a regular variation on the routine, rather than a major disruption.

These are the kind of summer days it’s easy to fantasise about in the winter, or on any cold, rainy or generally stressful days at any time of year, so I’m deliberately appreciating them and not taking them for granted.

The obsession with crochet could, of course, be something else, like reading, writing, su doku, gardening, cooking, weaving, cross-stitching, tapestry, jigsaws, drawing, painting, decorating, tidying… Why don’t I pour my heart and soul into any of those? It can be done, but at the moment I don’t feel drawn in any of those directions.

Is it because I find it easy? But that’s just practice. It doesn’t always work out. I’ve learnt to let it go, pull it down and try again, put it on one side and try something else, or shove it to the back of the cupboard and forget about it.

I guess that’s what I do with my writing as well – shove it to the back of the electronic cupboard and forget about it. And this morning it’s not working at all. The words don’t want to come. I am looking at specks of dust on my computer, looking out the window at the street (which still seems remarkably empty). Wandering round my head to see if I can pick up any scraps of thought that might be worth recording.

Emptying your head of thoughts is not a bad thing – I spend ten minutes every morning trying to do just that.

I’ve just remembered a moment from last night, just before midnight. I’d been sitting up too late crocheting and listening to music, and when I went into the kitchen, I remembered I’d left the door open for Miko, and she was still outside, so I stepped out into the garden. Despite the neighbours’ fairy lights and the still-illuminated windows, there was mystery out there, no moon (it’s too new) but a few stars in the stillness of the night air. I called her name, and heard her scraping the gravel before I saw her. It could have been any animal sound, but she came to me and jumped up into the patch of light on the steps and ran into the house. I thought of owls (though I hear none here in the town) and night and summer, and the cool air and the mysterious life of cats, and thought about a poem but it didn’t come.  

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Happy Days

I promise no politics today, not even by implication.

I’ve just been to Sainsbury’s. It was open this week (see last week), but there are orange barricades all along the edge of the pavement. There is a small gap, and it doesn’t go round the corner, so it’s open at the junction. Presumably there’s some highway work planned, but it does seem perverse that pedestrians are being funnelled along a narrow strip of pavement. The other shops on that stretch of road (barbers etc) are closed anyway, but it must be affecting that branch of Sainsbury’s.

I mentioned a while back that I’d lost my credit card, the one that gives me 1% cashback in the supermarkets. I eventually got round to ordering a replacement, and it came a few days ago, but after last week’s trip to Tesco where I spent over £50, and worked out on the way home that having to use the other card (which gives me 0.5% on everything) had cost me 28p. Today I had my new card, signed it before I left the house, then remembered in the shop that I needed to activate it online before first use. I tried doing it via the phone app, standing in a quiet aisle (they’re all quiet at 8.30 in the morning, but occasionally you see another person), but it didn’t give me that option, so I tried using the card anyway, and it was rejected. This time it cost me 18p. Sounds petty, but I bet it’s added up over the last month or however long it’s been. If you average those two shops to about £46 (which is actually a bit higher than usual, because sometimes I can do contactless), that’s 23p/shop, or over 6 weeks, or £1.38.

First world problems.

Yesterday, after blogging, I had breakfast outside in the sun, stayed outside and crocheted. When even I felt it was getting a bit uncomfortable in the sun, I got my camping chair and put it in the shade by the fence. I stopped for a while and did a bit of weeding, then went back to sitting, crocheting, and listening to the neighbours’ music coming from their kitchen. Then in the afternoon I sat indoors and listened to 4 extra and carried on with my crochet till I’d turned my octagon into a square, and at about 5 o’clock I went and cooked my dinner. I could even tell you what that was, but I won’t.

It was a good day. I also did a load of washing. I wonder why I write about these minutiae of my life, of no conceivable interest to anyone. Maybe one day I’ll write a novel and this will all be useful atmosphere – or maybe not. I have a sort of idea for how I could write a novel that would incorporate some stuff from my blog, but don’t know how I’d end it.

Sometimes my thoughts lead to interesting stuff, but not today, it appears.

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Tai chi in the Garden

I’m not going to the shop today. This is a chain of events triggered because I made lasagne on Friday, which meant I used a pint of milk, which meant I ran out of milk early, so I started one of the cartons of long-life milk which I bought to make yoghurt, but also for emergencies; so I’ve still got plenty of milk so I don’t need to go to the shop today.

I opened the door to let Miko out into the garden. The sun was up, of course, but not shining through the clouds. I stepped out onto the steps that go down to what I laughingly call the ‘patio’, although it’s not paved, but gravelled, and if you poke through the gravel you’ll find compacted builder’s rubble – not that that deters the weeds.

There was no wind, and a blackbird was singing into the empty, quiet air – that beautiful, haunting sound, as though the space between the earth and clouds is hollow, and the music is an echo without a source.

On an impulse I kicked off my slippers and walked down the second lot of steps to the grassed area (I hesitate to call it a ‘lawn’, though I did mow it a few days ago, for the first time in weeks). I took a few slow, deep breaths then began my tai chi practice. Tai chi, as you may know, consists of a sequence of movements which is known as a form (or ‘the form’ for each specific tradition, though there are multiple traditions). As a beginner, you learn a small number of moves one at a time and gradually learn new ones as you perfect the earlier ones – so it is a challenge to the memory and concentration as much as the body. I started learning it towards the end of 2015, went for a year then took a break for most of 2017 after I started chemo. In 2018 I went to a beginners’ class with the same teacher, slowly worked my way up to the point I’d reached before, then added on more moves. It’s not unusual for the same class to have students at different levels, and I liked the class, it was convenient and suited me, and the teacher was happy for me to continue with them.

Since the start of lockdown, we’ve been doing Zoom classes on a Wednesday evening, usually only about six of us, at all stages. I’ve discovered that when the classes stopped, I’d reached a point just before a whole sequence of movements in the form is repeated, but I don’t know the connecting move before that happens. I’ve tried to pick it up from Zoom, but I know I’m fudging it. I should probably try and find it on Youtube.

I started writing about the garden, but ended up with tai chi. Both deserve a bit more attention, but this writing randomly is so much easier and more enjoyable than staring at the screen.  

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Day 37 – Migrants

Unexpectedly came over all poetic while sitting in the garden, even though it’s not April any more.

Away above the clouds
and the gulls with their shanties,
black dots against the blue,
too high and fast to see.

Riding on the sun’s wake,
all the way from Africa
the swifts are returning
with summer on their wings.

Linda Rushby 7 May 2020
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May Day

Today’s memory is from a year and a day after the previous one (a lot can happen in that time – in fairy tales, at any rate).

On the beach at sunrise with a smallish group of friends and friends-of-friends, one of them a Pagan celebrant who led us in a ceremony of welcome to the sun on May Day morning. I remember chanting, facing in the four directions (towards the sea, the land, the sun and… towards the pier? -it’s all I can think of in that direction!) There was also singing, djembe banging, some mandolin playing, probably dancing and definitely consumption of brandy supplied by her partner (not something I normally do at six in the morning, not even on May Day!) And breakfast in the Beach Café.

Thinking back, I realise I hardly ever see that group of people any more. When the world passed around the sun again, I had entered the year of my own personal self-isolation, of chemo and surgery and radiotherapy, and when I emerged from that into 2018, it seemed as though everyone’s life had changed, not just mine, the dance had shifted, we had all taken up new positions and our paths no longer intersected – except sometimes on Facebook, repository of friendships and social medium of choice for my generation.

That wasn’t the only memorable thing that happened that May Day, however. When I got home to the flat, I had an email from my ex husband, saying that he’d received and provisionally accepted an offer on the old family home; obviously my formal agreement was needed, but that was hardly in doubt. The beginning of the real end of that chapter of my life, a summer of driving up and down between here and there, clearing out everything, including the attic where so much of my past had accumulated; helping him initially to move into his new place in Bedford (and in the interim our son and his fiancée from their tiny studio flat in Guildford to a two-storey maisonette), and finally, in October, moving into this house, with one van of stuff transported professionally from the flat, and another trip for me up to Bedford, another rented van loaded and driven down by my daughter’s partner, another drive back southwards in my Micra with another terrified cat in a basket on the passenger seat.

If I’d known on that spring morning that it would be almost another six months before I was finally settled in my own home… well, I don’t know what I would have done. But it happened, all the dusty accumulation of the past, the physical stuff and the emotional clutter which had haunted me, all moved, all resolved, and here I was.

Maybe the stress of that year contributed to my body’s next bombshell – who knows? But I got through that too. And here I stand, and every day, whether May Day or any one of 365 others, the future still knocks on my door.

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Day 24 – Dark of the Moon

I woke.
It was dark.

I thought I would get up
and walk to the sunrise.
I stayed in my bed
and listened to the radio.

We all skate on the surface.
We walk on the knife edge.

Don’t look down,
don’t look back.
Shit happens,
keep smiling.
See the bright side.
half-full.
Stop thinking.
Stop doing.

You’ll never do enough.
You’ll never be
good enough.
You’re half full,
half empty.

Sun rises,
sun sets.
Moon wanes,
moon returns.
Spring rolls
into summer.

This is all there is.
Don’t fall off the edge,
Don’t shatter the glass.

Linda Rushby 24 April 2020

Now the words are coming and I can’t stop them – however banal, however dark. Why don’t I just ignore them? Why do I need to write them out? What happens if I don’t? I’m sure I’ve written about this before, somewhere back in the past, in the morass of words I’ve written and then never read again. Do all those unwritten words fester somewhere in the back of my mind? Things that go rotten do one of two things: they infect what’s around them and spread the rot, or they make compost for other things to grow in. What about my thoughts, my words? Which way do they go? Maybe both – but which predominates? They don’t seem to have borne much fruit so far.

Part of me thinks that writing them out helps in a way, it’s therapeutic, it helps to defuse those thoughts – maybe (but they still come back). There might be some value in writing them. But then, what about the next step, is there any point in trying to share them? What is that compulsion that makes me think it’s a good idea? Who reads them, and who of those really hears them, who responds, who finds them interesting, who is repelled by them, who ignores them and moves on? Anybody?

I want to be clear that none of this is directly related to the current situation. They’re just thoughts that come to me even in the best of times (and anyway, as I’ve said, these last few weeks of inactivity have suited me quite well.) Maybe the self-imposed pressure to write poetry has influenced the form that my thoughts are taking in terms of presenting themselves in lines and stanzas, I’m not sure – and the chain of connections from thinking that way, to writing them out, to blogging about them, and so on. Maybe.

Things have happened in the wrong order today. If I’d got up when I woke, at 4.30, how much would I have done already? At least, I would have had breakfast and gone for a walk to the sea. At 5.30 I checked the time for sunrise, and found it was 5.50, so only twenty minutes to get up, dress, make a flask of coffee and get there. I stayed in bed and listened to a play on podcast. Then got up and wrote. No coffee, shower, cat-feeding, yoga/tai chi, breakfast – just this drivel.

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Easter Sunday

I wrote a poem yesterday evening, and announced it on Facebook. But now I don’t know if I want to share it – it’s a bit personal.

Seems a waste, though, if it means I have to write another one today.

I haven’t done my yoga etc half hour yet, because when I got up I thought I had something to say and if I didn’t say it, it would annoy me because I’d forget what it was and have to think of something else. So here I am.

It’s just that I was thinking: have I done this long enough to prove that I can do it? Have I done it long enough to prove that there’s no point? I suppose it kills the time – but then time passes anyway, whether I do anything or not – it has no regard for human intentions. Now I remember that when I was downstairs feeding the cat and getting a cup of water – or rather, after that -I forgot to bring the washing basket up from the kitchen.

When you write a journal, is it/should it be about momentous things which have happened, or just whatever rubbish pops into your head at the time of writing? The latter is easier, and sometimes it throw up some surprises. That’s my excuse, if I need one.

I need excuses for everything I do. I feel pressure to justify my actions, even though, realistically, I know that no one cares or is interested. My life trundles along its predictable daily paths, and if it wasn’t for social media, no one would know – or probably care. That’s significant, that I think my actions and thoughts are of no interest to anyone. I am anonymous and invisible, even more so at the moment. If anything happened to me, I wonder who would be the first to notice, how they would notice, how long it would take, and what would they, or even could they, do about it?

My main concern is what would happen to my poor little cat. Anyone else concerned can look after themselves, but I worry about her, trapped here alone and starving. Perhaps she would finally be brave enough to go out through the cat flap, and once out there, she’d probably be a lot tougher and more resourceful than I give her credit for. They’re like that, aren’t they, cats? Someone would find her and maybe take her to a vet, where they’d scan her and get my details from her chip, and try and contact me. Maybe that’s when they’d realise I wasn’t responding, and call the police, and they’d come round and find me? Or maybe not, in these times, when everyone has more important things to worry about than a stray cat – or a stray woman, come to that. One more or less in the grand scheme of things. Who knows what might happen? And I didn’t write about moths. Maybe I should keep that one for tomorrow now.