Category: time

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Dinner Plans

I’m not reading in the mornings at the moment – I’m between books. Maybe this is why the dark morning clouds have settled in again – takes a lot of effort to fight through them. I’ve also been late getting to sleep the last couple of nights – going to bed at the usual time, but I just don’t settle.

On Monday I wrapped up my daughter’s Christmas jumper in a parcel and took it to the Post Office. I paid for Special Delivery for it to get there the next day, and yesterday I waited for a text from her saying it had arrived and thanking me. In the evening I texted and asked if her ‘parcel’ had arrived without saying what it was. She said two of the cards I posted last Thursday came yesterday. I checked the tracking app, which told me it had been received in Southampton – presumably a regional depot – at 1:19pm yesterday. Just checked again and it was received at Bedford (again, presumably the sorting office) earlier this morning (it is now 8:24) and should be delivered today. Hooray! In the circumstances, 48 hours rather than ‘next day’ is still pretty good.

After sorting out (sort of) the business over the new router yesterday I went to Tesco, then on the way back moved my car from the side street where it’s been parked (since I went to the hospital a fortnight ago, I think that’s the last time I used it) to a spot across the road where I can see it through the window as I type. Once I’d got it started, I thought I’d go and try a couple of shops which are outside my usual (in this weather) walking area. I couldn’t park near the butcher’s, but I tried another local Tesco, and then a slightly larger Co-op, where I managed to find a piece of steak – nothing special, but I don’t often have steak. I was thinking I’d do it with roasties and Yorkshire pudding (which reminds me I need to get eggs), and I’ve got parsnips and carrots, so although I’ll obviously cook the steak on the griddle, the trimmings will be more like a roast dinner (which I also don’t have very often). And I’ve got Christmas pudding, assorted nibbles and party food for tomorrow evening (and I’ll make pate today), enough boxes of biscuits to sink a battleship, and a couple of bottles of bubbly. I’ve also got smoked salmon, so thought I’d have scrambled eggs and salmon on toasted wholewheat for breakfast on the day, maybe with buck’s fizz (again, mustn’t forget to buy eggs).

So that’s sorted – or at least, in my head it is. Would stuffing balls and chipolatas wrapped in bacon (NOT to be confused with ‘pigs in blankets’, which should be sausages wrapped in pancakes) be too weird with steak? Maybe I should have got a chicken instead – but I prefer steak.

And this year, I’ll do exactly what I want – with what’s available.

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First World Frustration

Two things I have to do today: call Virgin Media to try and sort out my broadband issues; and try to find something for dinner on Christmas day. Neither of these is an exciting prospect, and both I’ve already spent too much time on yesterday.

Of the local shops, I’ve already tried the Co-op, the Romanian butcher and Sainsbury’s. I may head for Tesco shortly, but without much hope. On Sunday I saw a boneless turkey crown joint for six people in the Co-op. I didn’t buy it, because it was clearly way too big, but I did have regrets afterwards. I’ve got some pre-made pastry, because I was planning on having salmon en croute for New Year’s Day, but now thinking that I can get a steak and have steak en croute – or just steak. But I can’t find any decent steak either. First world problems. I can always get something out of the freezer, curry or casserole or something. Still got a couple of days to sort it out, but I don’t want to go to any of the big supermarkets and battle with the queues, or to walk twenty minutes through the rain to the butchers.

I may go and ring Virgin now. I got more worthwhile interaction from them in the morning yesterday – in other words, I got to speak to a human being. I didn’t when I tried again in the afternoon – because the guy had said ‘try this and if it doesn’t show any improvement in a couple of hours, call back’. Yeah, right. I tried calling back again around four, and got lost in that awful endless loop of listening to options and pressing buttons, then snagged on the request to enter characters from a password that presumably I was told five and a half years ago but have no recollection of now.

…

I abandoned writing, and went to call again. When it asked for the password, I sat and held the phone until it gave up waiting and transferred me to a young woman whose job presumably was to be shouted and sworn at by angry old women (or was this morning, at any rate). She said she’d send me an email with a link to change my password, and handed me over to a young Scottish man who asked for my password. I told him I was waiting for the password reset email, which he told me could take up to five days. I told him I didn’t have five days because if I wanted to cancel the new contract I’d have to do it this week. Then he asked me some security questions, looked at the new contract, compared it to my current usage, asked if I really wanted the features I’d never used, and managed to reduce it by £20, which made it less than my previous contract. He also said that I can get boosters online, but they are introducing new ones in January.

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Tiers Before Bedtime

I started by saying: it’ll be fine. Whatever happens, I’ll be okay. Either way.

Then we went into Tier 3. And I thought: okay, that’s the way it’s going to be. I’ll manage, it’ll be fine, in a way it’s a relief. The decision is made. Just a shame I can’t find anything nice to cook for Christmas dinner. But hey, it’ll be okay.

Then my family had different ideas, and they made a plan, so I could still go, still be with them, still see them all. And I thought: aww, they really care, they really love me, they don’t want me to be alone and miss out. Bless them. That’s the way it’s going to be.

Then we went into Tier 4 and the goalposts moved. And I thought, okay, so this is the way it is after all. I’ll deal with it.

Can I get round the rules by having a ‘support bubble’ that I have to travel 140 miles to be with? Or even 50 miles, if they’re in Tier 2? Can I travel out of the area? Do I want to be the person who goes from Tier 4 into Tier 2, even if I’m going there and back in a day? Can I justify that? Is a ‘support bubble’ equivalent to a household, when it’s not just around the corner? Do I break the rules on the basis that ‘they can’t check every house…’ as someone (no names) suggested to me? Wouldn’t that make me part of the problem? And if I stayed away, and needed the catsitter to come in, where would they stand? Even if they weren’t strictly breaking the rules, they’d know I was, and what would their position be?

Enough. I don’t want to break any rules, or take any risks, or put anyone else at risk.

I think perhaps, because I’ve had so many times in my life when I’ve been unhappy and not been able to share it with anybody, and had to carry on and appear ‘fine, okay’ when I deeply wasn’t, even my nearest and dearest don’t realise how used I am to having to deal with a degree of sadness and disappointment that makes Christmas on my own seem trivial by comparison. I’m not saying I wouldn’t enjoy being with my family on Christmas Day, but it won’t destroy me. I’m not saying I won’t have to shed a few tears, just as I did on my birthday – as I have done already several times in the last twenty four hours. But it will come and it will go, and it won’t be the worst thing that could happen, and even if – as I said the other day – it turns out to be my last Christmas, well, it won’t be greatest regret.

If you pin your hopes on one thing – a particular day, a particular person, a particular wish – you’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of disappointment. Take it from someone who knows.

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Crockery

Good start to the day. I’m preparing porridge – I have some flavoured packets of porridge (gingerbread, Sainsbury’s own brand) and plain porridge oats in a jar on the counter by the fridge. I get the measuring cup for the loose oats, then decide to have a packet of gingerbread flavour instead. I tear the top of the packet, but only the corner opens – it will take ages to shake it all out from that small opening, so I try tearing it again. But I lose my grip on the packet, it falls to the floor, and in the next instant the bowl, which was standing on the counter, falls and smashes on the floor. Typical early morning dyspraxident – my grasp and co-ordination are particularly bad first thing after getting up. I pick up the packet, notice the contents are still intact, so I get a new bowl, intending to use them, then promptly start measuring oats from the jar.

The bowl is a red one, fresh out of the dishwasher, a nicely hemispherical, high sided shape, one of four (red, green, blue and purple) which I bought in the big Tesco at the Novy Smichov mall in Prague, three tram stops (or was it four?) from my flat.

I have four matching plates as well, though I didn’t buy them as a set – just started with the blue bowl and plate when I was still sharing a house – I think I had a blue mug as well, and a red one, but I’m not sure about the other colours. If I had more, I can’t remember breaking them, though I must have had mugs, and I can’t remember any others, apart from one with cats on which I still have, and one from Berlin which I broke while I’ve been living in this house. The purple bowl also got broken a couple of years ago – but I have another purple bowl, from Wilko, in a similar shape, slightly bigger and not the right shape to stack with the Tesco ones.

The order is: red, green, blue, purple (alternating the primary and secondary colours, which were bought later, and with purple at the end because it’s not stackable), and the matching bowls are stacked in the dishwasher, in the correct order, so that they can be taken out and placed on the shelf on the right of the plate rack, and the plates are stacked in the same order, both in the dishwasher and on the plate rack. The purple plate is on the end because when I get to it I have to take the bowl from the other shelf. Now this system is wrecked and I don’t know how I’ll cope – except that I have three different coloured bowls (turquoise, purple and teal), with matching plates and mugs, which I’ve bought individually from the Whittards outlet shop in Gunwharf Quays.

Why am I so fanatically orderly about this, when I’m so chaotic otherwise? I have no idea.

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Decisions

She isn’t dead! I knew it! Well, I kept hoping – I’ll admit, I was starting to question my intuition, pretty well given up in fact, then I started the next chapter and – there she was! Only I ran out of time (it was time to get up) so I don’t know yet how she managed to get out of the car wreck (though I know who she’s with now) and she’s clearly been out of it for the last few chapters and only just regained consciousness, because everyone’s been assuming she was dead (whose was the body they dragged out of her car, then?) but that’s something to look forward to, this evening, or tomorrow morning, or maybe I’ll have a crafty read some time today…

Sorry, got a bit carried away there. I told you I was reading a good book. I love it when it grabs you like that – that’s the joy of reading.

Well, yesterday both Portsmouth and Bedford went into Tier 3 Covid restrictions. Which means… well, over Christmas (23rd-27th) the special rules are still in place, so I can legally go. But I’d made a pact with Fate, or the Universe (as I often do when I’m forced to make a decision) that if any of us went into Tier 3, I’d hunker down and spend Christmas here, just me and the cat.

So, decision made, I texted my daughter to tell her I wasn’t coming, then talked it over with my therapist in our weekly Skype session. It was a relief, really, I told her, and myself, because the decision was taken out of my hands. My main worry was how my daughter would react, but I’d decided. At least I’d got rid of that stress over packing etc, and driving.

‘…the stress which you would have anyway, whatever you do…’ she pointed out. Hmm, yes, she knows me too well – that’s her job after all.

After the session, I wrote the family Christmas cards – with a little note in my granddaughter’s saying ‘…sorry I can’t be with you…’ walked to the post office and popped them in the box. Looked (in vain) in Tesco and the Co-op on the way home for anything nice for my Christmas dinner. Bought a small poinsettia and tiny tree in the florist.

Four Christmases ago, when I was waiting for the results of the biopsy, people asked me why I was going away when I might be called back to hospital at any time? And I thought then: ‘this might be my last Christmas, why would I want to spend it on my own?’

In the evening my daughter texted again, and then rang and said she’d spoken to her brother, and even though it’s my choice, they’re prepared to come and get me and bring me home so I don’t have to drive, and even her Dad said: ‘…she’ll regret it if she doesn’t…’

So the decision changes again. But this time it feels right.

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Compensations of Reading

I don’t want to write today. I have nothing to say that I haven’t said a million times before, only the shit I think of every morning.

A while back I thought I would write about the Madwoman in the Attic, but I never did. What are the other things I’ve thought I might write about? I have a file with a list of quotes from my posts where I’ve started a new train of thought near the end of the 500 words and then I think – I’ll come back to that – so I copy and paste it into this table. But the only time I look at it is when I have something to add, and those seem to come in clusters, there’ll be a few close together and then I’ll forget about it again for months.

One day maybe, I’ll go back and read everything I’ve written and it will make a kind of sense, a picture of who I am and my life and my feelings and thoughts. Really? A kind of sense? Or just a god-awful mess?

I know, I know, it’s a shitty time of year, I’ve said that before, I’ve hated this time of year for ages – and no, it’s not just because I’m on my own – anyway, I’m not, I have my kids and grandkids.

Anyway, saying that is just too simplistic. This dread I’m feeling is no different really from the dread I always get before I have to do something, go somewhere, even when I’m going out in my camper van. I don’t want to have to pack, I panic when I know that I have to choose clothes for several days. I don’t want to have to sort out the house ready to leave it for a few days, with a virtual stranger coming in every day to feed the cat. I don’t want – god help me – to wrap presents. And I don’t want to drive to Bedford, but I definitely don’t want to go by train.

I want to get lost inside a book. I want that total absorption that only reading a good book can provide – but I have to ration myself because I have things to do. Even radio isn’t such a good substitute, and as for telly – I don’t know why I dislike it so much, and yet I still watch it every evening. I’m not even talking about the quality of the content – it’s something inherent in the technology, it’s too busy, it demands too much attention but somehow simultaneously it’s too distracting so my brain can’t focus on it and gets bored with trying to take it in and wanders off, and then I find I’ve missed something and get frustrated. Maybe it’s a dyspraxic thing. It happens with reading sometimes too, but in general I’d say reading is much more satisfying. This is why I managed without telly quite happily for ten years, but somehow I’ve got sucked back into relying on it.

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Xmas Plans

Yesterday I went to the beach in the morning. The boxes outside the beach café were too wet to sit on, but I found a bench on the prom where I could perch on the edge to drink my thermos of coffee. I walked back by my usual route, through the rose garden and the butterfly garden, and got to my usual café at ten past nine, to find they’ve put back their opening time till ten. In the greasy spoon across the road I had a fry-up that came with a pile of sauté potatoes. Afterwards I wondered if it was such a good idea.

I’m still making cards, so the mess is still over the table. Although I posted most of them last Friday, I’ve been making them for my son and daughter. I thought about making them for the grandchildren, couldn’t think what to do, then had an idea so started doing those. And I need a birthday card for my step-granddaughter, though she’s at an awkward teenage age. I’ve made three gluten free Christmas puddings as well – three, because I have small basins, cereal bowls, really. The mixture makes two medium sized ones, but one of those still contains last year’s failed effort (because all the dry ingredients were GF, but I still mixed it with Guinness and barley wine before I realised).

It’s ten years since I’ve spent Christmas, or let in the New Year, in my own home. This year I’ll definitely be home for the latter, and in the last couple of days I’ve become less sure about the former. The current plan is my daughter’s from the 23rd to Boxing Day, and then to my son’s till the 29th, but now I don’t know what to do – if any of us turn out to be in tier 3 after today, I think I’ll just stay here. If I do, I’m not sure what I’ll have for Christmas dinner. In 2010 I had a rolled and stuffed turkey breast joint from M&S, but don’t recall seeing anything like that in any of my local supermarkets. I’ll be all right for pudding, obviously, and also for booze.

I used to decorate my first flat on the Solstice, with candles, and evergreens picked from the old garden. In 2012, in my Fenland ‘penthouse’, my daughter and granddaughter brought me a tiny tree in a pot, which I kept, but which died of drought a couple of summers ago. Also I put up star lights in the windows, shining from the top of the building over the canal and the flat fields. But since then I’ve never bothered. This year, it will be a miracle if I manage to get the house looking tolerably tidy for the catsitter (should I need her), let alone faffing about with tinsel and pine needles.

Whatever happens, I’ll be fine. I think this year has taught me a lot, about accepting myself as I am and life as it is.

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Reading for Love

I’ve slipped back into the habit of reading in bed, in that couple of hours between waking up (usually between four and five thirty or so) and getting up (which I do around seven). At one time I was listening to podcasts, but that was when I was trying to get back to sleep. I’ve now given up on that idea – for the time being, at least. At various times in the past, I’ve thought I’d found a way of dealing with my insomnia – it might work for a while but then the patterns change, which will probably happen again, but for the time being, this is what I do.

I’m currently reading a really enjoyable novel by a reliable writer, the sort I like to read on holiday. His books wouldn’t be for everybody – they’re a bit creepy and gruesome in places – you might even class them as ‘horror’ if you wanted to be crude, but that’s not what I like about them – bloodthirstiness for its own sake doesn’t interest me at all. They’re more like mystery thrillers with a supernatural element, I’d say ‘contemporary’, except that most of the ones I’ve read were written and are set in the 1990s (which I guess doesn’t quite count as the present day any more), set in a recognisable version of this country as it was a couple of decades ago, often in semi-rural settings such as Glastonbury or the Peak District, where late twentieth early twenty-first century characters become entangled, unwittingly or through hubristic meddling, with older forces beyond their control. Gripping plots, engaging characters and a wry, intelligent writing style that never makes me cringe by striking a bum note – perfect escapism, in other words. And he seems to have a massive back catalogue, which is great because whenever I want a good read I just download another one. In fact, come to think of it, it’s become a bit of a habit for me to read one of his books at Christmas, which may be why I thought of it now – they often have a bleak-midwinter setting (although I also read one on holiday in Cyprus in September).

Anyway, as you can tell, I really like these books, and as I’m being nice about the writer, and not slagging him off (as I did a bit with somebody else a few months back) I’ll give him a name check: Phil Rickman.

Well, if I was trying to write fiction, it wouldn’t be a good idea to spend an hour or so reading a novel before I start writing in the morning, but as fiction seems to be beyond me at the moment (by ‘the moment’ I’m including the last five years), I might as well indulge myself a bit, going back to the roots of why l’ve always loved books, because – well – I just love a good story, and reading or hearing one is the greatest and simplest pleasure I know, and always has been.

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Simple Things

One card to make out of the current batch, then I need to write in them, address them, stamp them and take them to the post office. If they go today, they’re a week ahead of the final posting date. Two more to make, for my children, which I want to make a bit more special, but haven’t got a clear idea yet what I’m going to do. Hopefully I’m going to be able to deliver them both in person, but if not… maybe I should plan on trying to get them posted in advance anyway, because who knows what might happen in the next fortnight?

Yesterday I showed my therapist the Christmas jumper, she seemed particularly excited that it was blue and not red or green. I’ve still got to weave in the ends. Over Skype, she couldn’t see that, or the way the stitches pull around the motifs – besides, she’s not a knitter, so she’s probably impressed that I managed to finish it at all. She said at one point that she was ‘in awe’ of me – I’d rather she admired my writing or my academic prowess than my knitting, but I don’t think she meant that anyway.

She said last week how impressed she was with my routine, how I get up and do my yoga, tai chi and meditation, and then my writing, and yesterday she added to this the way I do my crafting. I showed her the current weather blanket and she asked what I do with them when they’re finished, so I told her the first one is in the spare bedroom, last year’s one went to my son and daughter-in-law and this one’s going to my daughter – to mark for both of them the years in which they got married (my daughter’s idea).

But all of that: getting up at seven (when usually I’ve been awake for at least two hours already), the exercise and meditation, the five hundred words, the square for the weather blanket and other crafts (and the reading, listening to the radio and su doku as well) – is about self-preservation, keeping myself this side of the line that tips over into darkness. I do them because I need to. Yes, I’d quite like it if I was writing a novel, or some great academic treatise that would put the world to rights, but at least all these activities are doable and pretty harmless and don’t involve anybody else. One day, no doubt, I’ll stop doing one or more of them, and then this year will become, not just the (first) Covid-19 year, but the time when I ‘…used to do that stuff’.

Years ago, I used to do cross stitch, and I remember thinking my life was pretty sad on the days when that was the most satisfying thing I’d done – like the wife in the Paul Simon song for whom a good day ‘…ain’t got no rain’. But I’ve learned to appreciate losing myself in simple things.

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Round Like a Circle in a Spiral

I wrote yesterday, nothing much, and when I got close to the end I wanted to include a quote from Polar Express (which I saw for the first/only time at my daughter’s last Christmas). I only remembered it because I read it somewhere recently, in a file that I’d obviously saved it to because I found it interesting. I thought I remembered reading it on my laptop, so guessed it was one of the Word files that I wanted to save in none-365 format. Just been looking for it, in all the places I could think of that it might be – I even thought I might have saved it on my phone, but no luck. Came on the PC to start writing, Googled ‘Polar Express quotes’, opened the third link down, and it was the second quote on the list:

‘One thing about trains: It doesn’t matter where they’re going. What matters is deciding to get on.’

The Polar Express

But the question is – given that the only reason I didn’t post what I wrote yesterday (apart from it being the usual pointless drivel) was because I wanted to find that quote, then I got caught up in doing something else and never got back to it – should I post that now or not? Should I do that instead of trying to write something today? Except… I’m almost half way to 500 words already.

What I write is throw-away, but sometimes, reading back through old posts, I find something interesting. Like that quote – okay, it’s not exactly Schopenhauer, but it’s interesting, right? In looking for it, I also found another quote that I thought was interesting, which I’d taken from a strange documentary about Jim Carrey that I watched last Boxing Day – but I’m not going to quote that now because it’s on the laptop, which is downstairs in the front room and I’m upstairs on the PC.

When things become self-referential, they create a sort of spiral effect, or maybe a hall of mirrors, to use a familiar metaphor I’ve often used before – and there I go again. But does it just take me up my own back passage, or somewhere different? Because a spiral (I used that word deliberately) is not a circle – it doesn’t take you back to exactly the same place as before – something has changed, it might be infinitesimal, but the circumstances, the conditions are not identical. Back to cause and effect again, and the Buddhist idea of ‘conditionality’, the connectedness of all things. Which set me off looking up definitions, and led me to a book I might buy.

I feel as though I’ve strayed away from the point somehow, but then, I can’t remember what point I was trying to make. So that’s kind of a good thing, I think: it doesn’t matter so much where the train is going, what matters is that I got on.

I’ve completed nine cards so far, and printed five letters which are now in envelopes ready to be posted.  

Round, like a circle in a spiral…