Category: time

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Life-Writing, Fractals and Plasterers’ Vans

I’ve been listening to Maya Angelou’s autobiographies, which have been serialised on BBC Sounds, each volume in five fifteen minute episodes. I’ve just played the first episode of a new volume, I think it’s the fifth, and I’ve worked out she is about thirty when it starts.  

I’m not going to say any more about it, and obviously I’m not in any way comparing myself to her in terms of either writing skill or inherent interest of the story, but it did set me thinking about the issues of writing about one’s own life. This is of course because I’m psyching myself up to go back to working on The Long Way Back (when I’ve finished with my current editing job, and if I don’t get caught up in anything else). Maybe when the cafés open again, and I can take my notebook style laptop (bought in late 2019 to encourage myself to go out and do just that, hah! What great timing that was!)

The thing about writing about your own life is the clash between the time it takes to write about it and the time it takes to live it- something I remember writing about at the time when I was travelling, and berating myself for not spending enough time writing. Time has this trick of passing no matter what your intentions or what you actually do (or don’t do) with it. And how do you ever stop? How do you write some kind of conclusion? You make a decision, you find a way to tie up the loose ends which are still dangling from the narrative, but if you don’t jump on it and get it done (and I am clearly not a jump-on-it-and-get-it-done kind of person), events overtake you, and how do you account for them?

I just got distracted by a van parked across the road, with the front passenger door open and covering part of the company name, so that it looks like: ‘X&Y PUG limited’ and I’ve been waiting for someone to close the door so I can see what it really is – I keep thinking ‘Pugh’ except that I can see there’s no ‘h’ on the end and there are some letters covered up, so that makes no sense. But when the full name’s revealed, it’s ‘X&Y PLASTERING’, my eyes had just conflated the beginning of the L with the end of the N to make U. How boring.

I intended to carry on what I was writing about yesterday, and not get distracted into life-writing and plasterers’ vans. I couldn’t see the connection between the former and the ideas of granularity and fractals that were rattling around my brain, but then I realised there was a connection. Writing about your own life is like having a hypothetical map of the world on a scale of 1:1 – it covers the whole world. If the grains are fine enough, doesn’t it appear continuous? So how to structure it into a narrative? TBC…

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Spring Thoughts

Sun shining again this morning. There’s something sneakily deceptive about the tail end of winter and start of spring because, although it might be sunny, it’s not actually warm enough to throw off coats and jumpers, until that day when you find yourself walking down the street in your winter coat and notice that other people are out with bare arms and legs (scrub the latter because these days there are some English blokes who will go out in shorts at any time of year – very different from how it was in my childhood). Oh look, the grammar checker wants me to change ‘bare’ to ‘bear’ in that previous sentence – must be thinking about the US Constitution (or is it the Bill of Rights?) Either that, or it’s about men walking around with fat arms covered in dense fur, like bears – that’s an image that’s now lodged into my brain and won’t go away in a hurry. The explanation given is: ‘possible word choice error’ – nope, sorry mister grammar checker, I said exactly what I intended to say, and I’m right and you’re wrong, as usual.

The coming of spring should be a source of joy, so why am I so grumpy? Partly because of the shambles in the garden, I guess – not that I’m ungrateful for my snazzy new shed, but it’s brought home to me the amount of work that needs to be done everywhere else. Gardening is one of those things that I have in times past been very enthusiastic about – or enthusiastic about planning, thinking and fantasising about, at least. Like most things which require sustained effort and attention, I rapidly lose interest when the results don’t live up to my hopes – or just generally lose interest when other things take over my time and attention.

A recent discussion on the dyspraxia Facebook page centred on the word ‘dyspraxia’ itself, which has been concocted from Latin or Greek (maybe both) to mean ‘bad at doing’, just as ‘dsylexia’ translates as ‘bad at reading’ or dyscalculia ‘bad at arithmetic’. (BTW, I did pick on the fact that I mistyped ‘dyslexia’, but left it because it amused me.) To me, ‘bad at doing’ sums up everything perfectly, but some contributors to the discussion found it excessively negative, and were arguing for the use of the term preferred in the US, which is ‘Developmental Co-ordination Disorder’, or DCD. I don’t like this at all, and not just because it’s American. ‘Developmental’ makes it sound as though it’s something that occurs in the developing child, and hence the implication is that you can ‘grow out of it’, which I can confirm is a long way from the truth. Then ‘Co-ordination’ puts the stress on the physical effects on gross motor skills, reminiscent of the old term: ‘clumsy child syndrome’, whereas the main impacts for me are those on brain functions: working memory, planning, organisation, absorbing and retaining information, time management, lack of concentration etc.

Not to mention, shit at gardening.  

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Everything in the Garden…

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

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The Long Way Back

Yesterday was the anniversary of one of my most vividly-remembered days described in ‘Single to Sirkeci’, when I arrived at Port Camargue. Earlier in the week I was remembering Prague, and it all set me thinking about ‘The Long Way Back’, and whether I’m ever going to finish it. I’ve been thinking about it for years – or, more accurately, I’ve been avoiding thinking about it. At first I used to start each year with the resolution that: ‘this is the year I’ll finish and publish it!’, but gradually I got over that, and recently I have been trying to learn to let it go, along with all my other failures.

I spent about six months, from autumn 2017 to spring 2018, trying to make something of it. It started with the ‘rump’ of around forty thousand words describing the return half of the journey from Istanbul back to England, which I’d chopped from the sixth draft of ‘Single to Sirkeci’. Prior to deciding to split the manuscript, I’d spent a couple of years on the herculean task of trying to edit the 200k word first draft down by half, and after brushing off multiple suggestions of chopping it into two books, and stalling at 140k, I gave in to the inevitable.

When I published ‘S2S’ in early 2017, the plan for ‘The Long Way Back’ was to combine the material I had on the return journey with a briefer description of what had happened after my return; my time in Prague; my moving to Southsea; and some reflections on lessons learned from the ‘life journey’ (if I could think of any) – I even wrote an introduction and blurb to that effect, which I must dig out some time when I need a good laugh at the ironies of over-ambition.

Giving myself six months to deal with cancer and chemo, I started in September 2017 to go through blog posts from the time between returning ‘home’ at the start of August 2012, and departing for Prague in May 2013. Rather than the planned précis, I found myself editing a tale of disappointment, depression and yearning, as I struggled to come to terms with life – while, in the present, also struggling to come to terms with moving on from cancer. This resulted in a further fourteen thousand words to add to the forty, and I hadn’t even started on Prague – which, when I went back to it, was also a saga of depression and disappointment, although alleviated in places just by the fact of being in Prague. Then there was the year after, living back with my ex (working title: ‘Madwoman in the Attic’), mystery illness, moving to Southsea – and then what?

For a while I toyed with the idea of turning Prague into a third volume, and spent some time trying to find three–syllable words starting with either ‘B’ or ‘R’ to make a catchy title: ‘Bohemian Something-or-other’ but with no luck.

Then I just stopped. I just stopped writing.

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Desultory Equinox

Yesterday I was thinking about Prague – in fact it has been in my mind on and off for the last few days. Often, when I was there, I used to question why I was there, and what I was doing. If I could have found a compelling reason to stay, I think I would have, but my presence always felt anomalous; I wasn’t a tourist, but nor did I ever become a resident, nor even an ‘ex-pat’, just this invisible woman who slipped around the city with no-one really noticing whether I was there or not – except possibly my landlord, when he made his monthly visits to collect the rent (in cash). In the end, coming back to be near my daughter and granddaughter and make some efforts towards selling the old house and ‘moving on with my life’ had to take priority

Those same questions keep coming up lately: Why am I here? and What am I doing? At least now I have some answers which make sense superficially: I’m just another retiree who’s decided to come and live near the sea, buy a house, make this place my home. After six years, the deeper questions don’t seem quite so compelling – I’m retired, with a comfortable pension, and the sale of a large family home enabled me to buy my little Edwardian mid-terrace outright, so why shouldn’t I be here as much as anywhere else? It’s a lot more congenial than either of the two places where I’ve spent most of my life.

This lockdown has felt harder than the one which started this time last year, but I think I’ve become ‘harder’ too, more settled with being at home on my own – most of the time. But if you asked me – if I ask myself – what I’ve been up to, what I do with my time, I’m hard pushed to come up with an answer that makes any kind of sense. I’ve got my editing job, which I’m doing two chapters at a time as the client sends them to me, and each chapter takes about an hour; I do my half hour of exercise and write my 500 words most days; I listen to the radio; crochet my blanket (which also takes about an hour each day) and mess about with other craft projects in a desultory way. Since I finished the blue fair isle jumper, I’ve picked up another top-down jumper, in different yarn on a bigger needle, which I started and abandoned about six months ago. Because it’s a ‘cake’ style yarn, with long stretches of colours blending into each other, I decided to do a design on the front with different stitches, rather than different yarns, but I’ve tried one idea, pulled it back and tried another, and that isn’t going very well either.

But this is just a temporary setback – isn’t it? Something will happen soon. That’s the way it goes, I’ll break some more bits off the old shed and keep going.

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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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Tackling the… Whatever

Some days when I start writing without knowing what to say, it develops, and by the end I feel as though I’ve written something interesting – or at least not too shameful. Then there are days like yesterday when I start but stop half way through because I’m not getting anywhere and, honestly, I just can’t be arsed.

There are many mornings when I start off wondering what I’m going to write and my head is so full of worry and fear about things that no one but me could possibly think were worth being worried or fearful over, but the worry and fear are there anyway, so do I write about them? I am trying to stop beating myself up over this, but it’s become apparent that it isn’t really just the ‘beating up’ that’s the issue, it’s the fact that the feelings are there anyway, it’s the things that I have to do, and the things that I fail to do, and the flotsam that swirls on the dark churning maelstrom of memory.

Planning and organisation are anathema to the dyspraxic brain, because while the attention is fixed on one thing, action or requirement and trying to assemble the others required to precede and follow it, the rest of the mind-stream is charging off into completely different paths, cul de sacs and labyrinths. ‘Write it down!’ I hear you cry, but any attempt to do that initiates mind-block and stasis – a Mexican stand-off while the focussed brain tries to remember what it was thinking of in the first place.

The only way to make things stick is through rote learning and repetition, so the same things are run through over and over again. ‘Planning’ consists of reminding oneself multiple times that ‘something’ needs to be done before a certain date, which induces panic that it will be forgotten, or done incorrectly, or will take a lot longer than the time allowed, and ‘writing down’ becomes a substitute for action.

In situations like this, ‘self care’ can only mean ignoring all that and doing something pleasantly mindless (or mindful) while all that other stuff goes to hell in a hand basket. Which famous author said: ‘I love deadlines, I love the swooshing noise they make as they pass by’? Can you remember? No, neither can I.

Incidentally, the Word grammar checker wants me to change that last ‘I’ to ‘Me’. Grammar checker, in this instance you are wrong, so wrong. How about if I turn it into a question? Can I? See, you can’t object to that, can you?

Why do I even leave the grammar checker turned on? Because it’s the default, and I can’t be arsed to change it, so I just ignore it because I have more confidence in my own understanding than in its – except sometimes I can’t see what it’s objecting to, so I follow the explanation and have a good laugh at its incompetence.

The routine is: write 500 words. And so I have.

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Tackling the… What was the question?

I know that most of the things I worry about are unimportant. I know that the worst scenarios will probably never happen.

My attention bounces from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next ad infinitum, and I can’t retrace my steps to see how I got there, and I can’t see where it’s going, and the track of my thoughts goes round and back and crosses and intersects and spirals down then shoots off into another dimension and still I am no more secure in what I know, I have reached no conclusions, made no plans, discovered no revelations and… what was the question again?

So far today I have: dropped a match into a candle glass and left it to burn because the glass still contained wax but no wick and I thought the match would act as a wick, but minutes later there was a crack and bits of broken hot glass on the floor (fortunately the flame had gone out); then in the shower I picked up a bottle, saw the opening was at the bottom (the only indicator that usually works and I specifically noticed it), squeezed some of the contents onto my fingers, rubbed it into my hair and then realised it wasn’t lathering because it was conditioner, not shampoo. I’m not saying either of those actions was disastrous – on the contrary, they are both perfectly normal, and I cleared up the broken glass (when it was cool enough to touch) and thoroughly rinsed my hair before trying again and getting the right bottle this time. Oh, and I lost my reading glasses in between coming out of the spare room where I do my yoga and into the bedroom to get towels for the shower, and had another look in the spare room before finding them on the book shelves in the bedroom where I must have put them all of thirty seconds earlier. As I said, perfectly normal.

So where is this train of thought taking me? And is it anywhere that I – or you, my putative reader – would choose to go?

Once again, I stare at the clutter on my desk in search of inspiration ‘A tidy desk is the sign of a tidy mind.’ Evidently, the converse is also true, as mine perfectly depicts the state of my mind. The clear space in the centre front is where my phone was, which I had to move in order to take the photo. As soon as I brought it into this room, and within reach of the wifi, it sent me a message informing me that my data cannot be backed up because my cloud storage is full, and I need to upgrade it – the Magic Data Pot in action once again. I have now downloaded all my photos up to 2019 to my hard drive, and deleted them from the cloud and my phone. When the will to live returns, I’ll do the same for last year…

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Tired

Why can cats sleep for so much of the time and I sleep for so little?

Why do I lie in bed for so long in the mornings even though I don’t get back to sleep and I know that lying awake in bed for two hours isn’t going to make me happier, in fact quite the reverse?

Yesterday morning I made up my mind that this morning I wouldn’t lie in bed, but would get up and go to the beach to watch the sunrise, and I could have done it, I was awake in plenty of time and it wasn’t raining, but still I didn’t, I just lay there thinking about it and then got up just before seven and did the usual stuff and felt angry with myself. Well, I did listen to half an hour of radio, but even after that, I still had plenty of time to get up and go if I’d made myself do it.

They say two hours of deep sleep is the minimum you need to stay healthy, and I’ve been getting an average of 90 minutes over the two years I’ve been able to monitor it My fit-bit broke towards the end of last year, and I’ve lost all that historical data, but I got a new one this month which shows my average overall sleep for the last few weeks is six and a half hours, including an hour and a half of deep sleep, which is about the same as it was before.

I am tired – permanently tired – is all I’m trying to say, but I think most people who know me understand that already, I’ve moaned enough about it down the years. I’m tired and I look through tired eyes, and I have no energy or enthusiasm to do anything at all, but I hate myself for sitting and doing nothing and I wonder, if this is the endgame of my life, what then? Of course, there’s no reason to assume that this is the ‘endgame’, but I can’t see the future, I don’t know what it holds or what it potentially could hold, or how I could influence it in any way, or how I would even want it to be if it’s not going to be more of the same. All that running away has brought me here – I don’t mean geographically (I’m happy with that) but psycho-emotionally, I am the same person I kept running away from. Geographically I think I’ve found as good a place as I could have hoped for, but on those other terms I am as stuck as ever I was. All those things that were going to make me a different person, change my feelings about myself and allow me to grasp my destiny – children, PhD, leaving my husband, travelling across Europe, writing a book, moving to the south coast – haven’t made a scrap of difference to the sense that I’m as much a disaster as I always was.

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Poetic Rage

Maybe I won’t write today, not let it out of my head.

There’s a nice rhythm to that, I thought, as I was getting out of the shower (and thinking: I can’t be arsed, why do I even bother?) Two lines, seven syllables each. Where are the stresses? First, fourth and last syllable of the first line: MAYbe I WON’T write toDAY – Tum, ta, ta, tum ta, ta, like a waltz, three-four time, then a final TUM and a pause for breath.

What about the second line? I fiddled with that a bit as I repeated it in my head. It had started as ‘I’ll not’ or maybe ‘I won’t’ (I can’t exactly remember), but I didn’t like the unstressed first syllable, and I counted syllables on my fingers and realised that if I dropped it, the rhythm was exactly the same again: ‘NOT let it OUT of my HEAD’, but I didn’t like the ‘not’ at the start of the line, it seemed clumsy like that, but how about ‘won’t’ again? ‘WON’T let it OUT of my HEAD’? Now I have repetition of the second stressed syllable of the first line as the first word of the second line, and I like that, I like it a lot.

I am thinking like a poet, and when asked, as I have been in the past ‘What makes it a poem rather than anything else?’ I can say: the rhythm, of course, but also the brevity, because it expresses something in a very short space – I hope so, anyway, I hope it gives you a flavour of how I’m feeling this morning, even if I don’t write another word all day.

I notice that all the words are monosyllabic, except for the first and last words of the first line, and the stresses are at the start and end of each line, with another one bang in the middle. They’re not iambic stresses, not alternating, they have those two quick syllables in between, which is what creates the three-four rhythm, and somehow makes the stressed words harder and the whole thing more staccato, full of pent-up energy, rage, frustration and… another word which flashed into my head and has now gone – resentment, yes, I think that’s it. Resentment that I have set myself this task of writing every day and I can’t be arsed, I really can’t, I have nothing to say, nothing to write about except all this… rage, frustration and resentment.

I don’t want to let it out of my head – or rather, I want it all gone, but I don’t want to have to sit in front of the computer and let it out, because I don’t want to do anything any more, I can’t find the enthusiasm and motivation to carry on doing the things I do every day. But do I want to share it? What else is there in my head right now? What am I going to do with the rest of my life?