Category: music

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Home to Roost

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


Then I felt the urge to listen to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Judgement of the Moon and Stars’, which I’ve been listening to on cassette in the kitchen, and I thought I must have uploaded onto the PC when I was doing that a few months ago. I couldn’t find it, but I did find the files for her album ‘Hejira’, and played ‘Amelia’, which got me into a sad and thoughtful mood, which wasn’t necessarily where I wanted to go.


By that time, Office was reconfigured and Word was open. I suspect it’s now reconfiguring every time I restart the PC (which should be every day, but I must admit sometimes I forget to switch it off properly and it stays in hibernation till the next morning). I don’t use the PC much in the daytime after I’ve finished blogging, now that I’ve got the laptop downstairs, where the wifi’s better and it’s warmer – I don’t have the radiator switched on in here because it’s under the window, behind the desk and printer. Ironic to think that I bought the laptop at the end of 2019 so I could take it out and sit in cafes to write – one of many small ironies of the last twelve months.


Maybe what I’m doing here is reconfiguring my mind every morning. It’s a thought.


In telling the story of the Madwoman in the Attic, I flitted around quite a bit chronologically, and I think I may have missed out completely the time in Prague. I started going through the blogs from that time about three years ago, after I finished the first draft of ‘The Long Way Back’, but I gave up on it quite quickly. Maybe that should be a task for this year – or would be, if I was setting myself tasks, which I’m not.


The gist, I suppose, of the Madwoman idea, was that through those limbo years until I moved into this house in October 2016, the Stuff was always hanging around in the dusty corners of my mind, along with the knowledge that at some time the house would be sold, and it would come home to roost, but also I would be in a position to buy a permanent home for it (and me). And yet, although I’m here, and it is too, the chaos remains unresolved.

Amelia, Joni Mitchell

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Bookshelves

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

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Existential Choices

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

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

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

From ‘A Free Man in Paris’ by Joni Mitchell

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

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

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

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

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Cloudy

I decided this morning that if I ever publish another book, on the back cover, under the blurb, where real books have glowing reviews, I will place the following:

‘A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.’ W. Shakespeare.

Do I have plans to publish another book, maybe this year? Well, I might – at some indeterminate date between now and my final gasp – but I don’t have plans. Anything’s possible.

I do plan on finishing this jumper I started knitting on Christmas Day – though I’m a bit concerned at the moment about the size. Did I separate off the sleeves from the body too soon? I was aiming for the same number of stitches as the Christmas one I did for my daughter (it’s the same yarn) but stopped when the sleeves hit sixty, when the front and back for some reason were only at 112, although on the other one it was 120. I can’t really tell by looking, because of it being on circular needles, and that also makes it a pain to try on – and I’ve lost my spare circular needle, which is what I used last time (front on one and back on the other). Bigger better than smaller, surely?  Should I undo what I did yesterday, to be safe? Yesterday I undid two squares’ worth of weather-blanket backing that I’d done the day before, because I wasn’t happy with the way it was working out.

I’m thinking now about Penelope, at the end of ‘The Odyssey’, weaving by day, and in the night unravelling what she’d done the day before, waiting for her husband, Odysseus, to return from the Trojan War (spoiler alert: it took ten years, on top of another ten years for the duration of the war). The process matters more than the outcome, the journey is more significant than the destination (evidently so in Odysseus’s case, I’m not aware of any stories about what happened after he and P were reunited). The process of unravelling is a bit frustrating, and as it’s knitting, picking up the stitches is a lot more of a pain than the crochet equivalent, but as long as there is no deadline, it’s surely preferable to a finished garment that’s too small? (Or maybe not, given that I’ll probably never wear it?)

Incidentally, that last sentence was just highlighted by Word, presumably because it thought it was a double negative – not so clever, eh?

This isn’t what I was going to write about. No resolutions, no plans, no expectations – not that I was intending to write about any of those – on the contrary.

Gazing out of the window, I watch the slow procession of clouds drifting across the gap between the end terraced house across the road and the pub on the corner. A woman in black leggings, a lime green top and head phones runs past my line of sight. Will I be like the running woman or like the clouds this year? What do you think?

Cloudy’, Simon and Garfunkel

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Five Hundred Words

What can I say today that I haven’t said a million times before?

Every day: get up at seven (or thereabouts), feed cat and open the door for her to go out; half an hour of yoga, tai chi and meditation; shower; make coffee; come up here and write 500 words; brush teeth; get dressed; have breakfast while doing su doku. That gets me to any time between 10:30 and 12:00. At one o’clock on weekdays, there’s an hour of crime-and-thrillers drama on Radio 4 extra, so I sit in my armchair in the bay window overlooking the street (but behind the hedge) and listen to that, while crocheting the previous day’s weather blanket square. At two, I may get lunch (if I haven’t had it before one), or stay where I am and listen to whatever’s on next, then at three there’s another hour of a drama serial, and at four, some days I switch over to Radio 4 and listen to what’s on there, until PM comes on at five, which I usually listen to also. At weekends the routine is slightly different, as the drama on the radio doesn’t start till three, and then there’s an hour on Radio 4 followed by another hour and a half (Saturday) or hour (Sunday, followed by Poetry Extra, which I also listen to). At six I go into the kitchen and prepare, cook and eat dinner, then around seven I usually go back in the front room, switch the telly on, and knit or crochet till around ten, when I make hot chocolate, listen to music, and carry on either knitting/crocheting or reading until bedtime (between eleven and eleven thirty).

There are variations, of course, usually involving going out to the shops in the morning. Otherwise, that’s pretty much it – but I don’t want you to think that I’m saying my life is boring, not a bit of it. I like this routine. The ‘activities’ (if you can call them that) are all – well, mostly – things I enjoy doing. It’s an undemanding life. Nobody needs me for anything, I’m not required to interact or communicate with any other human being (mostly), I can just trundle along letting each day go by, like I used to when I was travelling.

But a comment on Facebook yesterday raised the question: What is the point of any of this? The comment was made about something specific (posting pictures daily on FB) but it applies to everything, and it throws a stark light on the fact THAT MY LIFE, THE THINGS THAT I DO, ARE ALL COMPLETELY POINTLESS.

I didn’t deliberately make that phrase upper-case – I was just typing away as I usually do, looking at the keyboard instead of the screen, then looked up (because I wanted to delete something I’d written after that) and realised I must have accidentally pressed caps lock. So I’m not trying to emphasise that sentence, it just emphasised itself, which seems appropriate.

And now – oh look – 500.

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Monday Morning

Back here again. Why? Because half the time I swear I’ve given up for good and then one morning I think I might try again. Just this once. On the understanding that it’s the same old nonsense and, basically, a complete waste of my time writing and yours (whoever you are) for reading it.

But we both still have a chance. You can stop right here – or I could, in which case you wouldn’t have the chance either way, because obviously I wouldn’t bother to post this. But I probably won’t – stop, that is. Though with another potential 400 words… Who knows?

It’s nine o’clock now (I went to the Co-op before starting) and it’s Monday. Does that mean I can play music without worrying about disturbing the neighbours? There again, they might work shifts, for all I know.

Okay, now I’m playing Roxy Music’s ‘Flesh and Blood’, that being the first cassette I pulled out of the shoebox at random that I haven’t already transferred to the PC. Still haven’t done anything about replacing the stylus on my turntable.

Reached the second track, ‘Oh Yeah’, and the sound quality is pretty awful. I have the original album somewhere, so if I get my finger out and do something about that stylus, I can play that. But I still feel a bit wary about playing these old albums – they’ve been kept for all these years and moved from place to place, and maybe it’s all been a waste of time because they’re ruined anyway.

Next track, ‘Same Old Scene’, isn’t much better.

How do I manage to do anything? Repetition, routine, and constant self-bullying. I bullied myself into going to the Co-op this morning. I bullied myself into putting the shopping away when I got back, and starting a ‘to-do’ list. The weight of the things I don’t do is always in my head, because I’m always thinking about them, except the times when I let myself off and sit in the sun or listen to the radio and/or crochet. Or else I’m thinking about other things, worse things, that I’ve read or heard or people have said or done to me that make me angry or sad or hopeless.

I think constantly about these things, but never do anything – worse, the thinking itself is completely aimless and futile, it’s not even as if by thinking I ever produce a coherent plan of action which I then proceed to complete. Except – well, I did start making that to-do list. If I completed some of those things, I suppose I’d be happier. But a more reliable way of becoming happier is by quietening the thinking – and the way to do that is by doing things that make me happy directly – like sitting in the sun, listening to the radio, and/or crocheting – all of which I may do later after I’ve had breakfast.

The second side of the album sounds better than the first one did.

Think it’s time for breakfast.

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Musings

Memory plays funny tricks. I’ve been transferring some of my old cassettes onto the PC, via a USB cassette player, bought for me by ex-hubby as a Christmas present, but which has spent most of the last decade stored away in its box. I haven’t been doing it the last few days – since the weekend in fact – because I realised the rooms on either side of my study were probably used as bedrooms and I didn’t want to disturb my neighbours too early in the morning.

But when I sat down this morning I had Joe Jackson’s ‘Breaking Us In Two’ in my head and thought: I don’t want to copy anything this morning, just do what I normally do, which is to shuffle the list and let Windows media player go randomly through my music. But when I opened it, the song which started up was ‘Breaking Us In Two’, so presumably it was the last track played and had stuck at the back of my mind from four or five days ago, or whenever the last time was that I sat here with music playing.

I started writing yesterday but everything I was thinking was so dark that I didn’t really want to go on. Feeling much the same again today. I think I am coming towards the time when this all seems so overwhelmingly futile that I give up altogether. ‘If you can’t think of something nice to say, don’t say anything’. It’s been quite a good run: four months, roughly 120 days (barring those I missed), 60k words.

‘I’m reading a book which puts forward evidence from research in neuroscience to show that what we call the ‘self’ is not single and fixed for any individual but rather plural and malleable, and hence, in a sense, illusory. I don’t find this contentious, in fact I’m rather surprised that anybody would. It’s rather like saying ‘there’s no such thing as society’ – there may be no specific institution or body which bears that name, but the influence of the web of interactions, rules, structures, relationships etc on the actions of people and organisations leads to impacts in the physical world.’

That’s how I started yesterday, which I suppose isn’t too grim, but the rest of what I was thinking was. I read some more of the book after that, and found that the author was saying that the ‘self’ is created by contrast with everything which is outside the self. Which surprised me, because there I was thinking the other way round, that it is embedded in a network of influences (nature and nurture) and is the product of those. I’m not a psychologist, and maybe I’m not understanding the terms properly – what’s the difference between the ‘self’ and the ‘personality’, for example?

He went on to say that the left brain operates by looking for patterns and telling stories. Which sounds very like me.

Maybe I will keep writing – at least, when I’ve read some more.

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Every Day is New Again

Today is different. Every day is. Feeling quite good, which is noteworthy because so unusual. Wish I could tell you why, what makes today different from the norm, but I have no idea. I didn’t get any more sleep than usual – fell asleep around 12.20 (according to the app) and awake 4.30, so if anything slightly less. Don’t have to go anywhere today (except possibly yoga this evening if the ground isn’t too wet), so nothing to feel apprehensive about. I had a go at making a birthday card for my granddaughter yesterday, which has been lurking at the back of my mind for a while as something that needed doing – that probably helps.

Remembering the REM song, ‘Every Day is Yours to Win’:

‘Every day is new again
every day is yours to win,
that’s how heroes are made…’

I don’t anticipate being a hero today, or any time soon, but inclined to look for the good bits this morning – maybe I can have breakfast in the garden?

Still no idea what I’m going to write about. Yesterday I wrote about dyspraxia, which I’ve tentatively started on a couple of times before. Yesterday I went into more detail. It’s hard to explain because I’m still trying to get my head around it myself – and quite honestly, it doesn’t seem very well understood scientifically as yet, compared to dyslexia and dyscalculia, which have been studied for much longer. And (naturally), I’m not very good at explaining it to other people. When I try to talk about it, mostly they seem to think it’s snowflakey, self-justificatory nonsense and just an excuse for continuing to be lazy, scatty, disorganised and inconsiderate of others – or alternatively, that I’m being unnecessarily ‘hard’ on myself, and I’m really not any of those things, and I should stop ‘worrying’ about it. This is where writing comes in, because it’s so much easier to explain things when I have time to think and compose what I want to say without being face to face with somebody interrupting and asking questions and throwing me off-track (which usually results in me feeling tongue-tied, stupid and frustrated).

Now I’m staring at the screen wondering if I want to go on, and if so how, and looking again at that Paul Nash postcard, the one of the bird looking into a mirror on a cliff top. What you can’t see from my photo (because of the poor light in here) is that in the mirror there is the reflection of another bird, this one flying away in the distance.

I like art which shows the impossible, or what appears to be impossible, or at least unexpected. I’m not a fan of Dali (possibly coloured by what I know of his politics), but I quite like surrealism in general. I like pictures that get you thinking and seeing things in other ways. The literary equivalent is magical realism – I like that too, set in the ‘real world’ but with impossible bits.

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No Answers

What am I doing? If I censor myself to write only what I think people want to read, can I write at all?

Round and round in the same old circles. I sit and stare at the colourful icons across the bottom of the screen.

I feel as though I could go back to sleep. Maybe I could – it’s nine o’clock now, so I’ve been awake for about four hours. But if I went and laid my head down on the pillow – which I can’t anyway, because my hair’s wet – no, I won’t, I’d just spend another frustrating hour or so lying on the bed wanting to sleep and then feel like I’d wasted the morning.

Earlier, when I was doing my yoga/tai chi/sitting practice, I had a line from a song stuck in my head: ‘and I, I have no answers…’ I had no idea where it was from, or who, or how it went on from there (except that I knew there was some awkward phrasing in the next line). So I’ve just googled it – which didn’t help much, because do you know how many songs include the phrase: ‘no answers’? My search threw up a link to a web page listing songs with that phrase in the lyrics – 12,414 of them. But while scrolling through them, I had a flash of memory which told me it was called ‘A Thousand Roads’ and it’s by David Crosby. Then I remembered when I discovered it, which was about ten years ago, because it was when I was living in my flat in Bedford – and I remembered blogging about it then. I still couldn’t remember that awkward next line, so went back to Google, and it’s: ‘I’ve got no patented path to set you free’ – it was the ‘patented path’ bit that didn’t sound right when sung – iffy meter, stress in the wrong place.

Well, that has taken up most of today’s quota, I’ve managed to skate away from the angst again. Who can I share my angst with? No one. No one wants to deal with my angst, ever (unless I pay them). I’m stuck with it, first thing in the morning, every morning – well, most mornings.

I want to play that David Crosby song – on Youtube, because I haven’t got it anywhere. But yesterday I was playing music while I wrote, because all week I’ve been digitising my old cassettes and transferring them to the PC – and while I’m doing that I have the volume turned on so I know when it finishes, and also because I want to hear these songs I haven’t heard for years. But then someone in the equivalent room next door started playing music, and it occurred to me that they could probably hear mine too, and not everybody is up and about at this time in the morning, especially at the weekend, and I don’t want to piss off my neighbours.

Once again, I’ve managed to fill 500 words with non-contentious rubbish.

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More Stuff About Writing

I didn’t post on here yesterday, but I wrote a very short piece about my first love, inspired by hearing Donovan’s ‘Catch the Wind’ on Amazon music the previous evening, and I posted it, with a link to the song, on the blog for my regular writers’ group, with an automatic link to their Facebook page, which I then shared on my timeline and another FB writers’ group. It seemed appropriate because it was sort of a short story, or at least fast fiction (though it wasn’t fiction – is there such a thing as ‘fast memoir’? There is now.)

I can’t seem to get my head round how to link the WordPress blogs together, though they’re both set up to share on FB and Twitter. I think it might be something to do with this blog, like my other two (yes, there are three altogether, though I don’t write to the other two any more) being self-hosted. I also have a WordPress.com blog, from about ten years ago, that has hardly anything on it, because I realised I could (in theory) get a better Google ranking by having it on my domain name. But my WordPress.com identity is still out there, though under my married name.

Three members of the writers’ group are registered on the group blog, but only two of us ever post to it, though when I set it up I sent an email invitation to all the members. I guess they don’t know what to do with it – probably not helped by the fact that I set it up immediately before the lockdown, so we didn’t have a meeting at which I could give a demo. We don’t use the Facebook page very much either, although we have two collections of stories and poems under our collective belt (‘Southsea Soup’ and ‘Of Life and Love’), and a third, ‘Flights and Fancies’, coming out imminently. (I’m currently proof reading, but have already managed to knock a cup of coffee over my copy).

Sometimes I think it might be fun to get a bit more pro-active with all of this, but then…

IF I do start writing properly (and I’m not saying I will, that depends on what sort of inspiration comes to me, if any), it will probably be more memoir to start with – specifically, ‘The Long Way Back’, the first half of which is largely done, and the first draft of the rest, except – guess what? – I don’t know how to end it.

A friend commented (on Facebook) about my previous post that she has two novels that will never be finished, but she doesn’t ‘beat herself up’ about it. So why do I? Why not just let it all go, accept that I am who I am, not cut out to be A Writer. After all, I’ve given up on so many idealised dreams about how my life ‘should be’ (happy relationship, career, financial independence etc), why do I keep picking away at this one?