Category: Joni Mitchell

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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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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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The Women That I Was

When I do my morning practice, thoughts often turn up in my head, potential poems, phrases from somewhere else, or bits of songs. This morning I decided to put all my incense cones into one box and mix them up, and while looking for a box I found a tiny box of matches which I remember once set me off into reminiscence and caused me to write a poem, some time last year, I think. Memory squared. I’m going to look out that poem later.

I had the song ‘Dust in the Wind’ in my head when I woke up (a song for our times if ever there was one) and as I started on my yoga stretches, and was thinking about that and the poem inspired by the matchbox, the phrase ‘the woman that I was’ popped into my head. I knew that it, or a phrase very like it, was from a song; the word wasn’t ‘woman’, but it was sung by a woman, and it wasn’t Joni Mitchell, but if I could work out what that two-syllable word was, I’d know. Then it came to me in a flash that it was ‘Gypsy’ by Stevie Nicks. I’ll have to fish that out later as well. And ‘Dust in the Wind’ – which is by Kansas, but I always forget that, or I think it’s Toto, and when it popped up on Amazon Music the other evening I had a laugh because I saw the connection between the two and why I mix them up.

The poem was about the woman that I was, though it wasn’t so long ago, about ten years. And the woman I was in it was who I was for a very short time and I’m not her any more – all we are is dust in the wind. I liked her, I liked being her. She was a bit wild, Bohemian, a dreamer, and she called herself Melinda – she came and went – like Ruby Tuesday – and she had a Bohemian adventure in 2013, but it didn’t work out the way she was dreaming of – nothing ever did – and perhaps that was her last gasp. So who am I now? Cat-by-Herself is my current persona, she emerged from the shadows – ooh, how long ago? Somewhere on a train, between the Camargue and the Balkans, perhaps, or Sofia and Istanbul, or on the shore of the Black Sea. She was the fourth corner (according to CG Jung, all threes need a fourth for completeness) – and she was the resolution of what someone flatteringly called ‘the Lovely Triad’.

I thought I’d left them all behind – Belinda, Melinda, Cassandra – but they all pop up from time to time. Melinda is the poet, after all; and Cassandra, the gloomy prophetess, the brain-the-size-of-a-planet whom no one listens to, but who still gets excited over the flash of intellectual connection; and sad Belinda sitting in chaos with her permanently aching heart. I still need to find a way to reconcile them.

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Corrections and Clarifications

The anger came back this morning, in the I-should-get-out-of-bed-but-not-yet time. I suppose it may have been partly triggered by the new uncertainty caused by images of commuters on trains and station platforms. However, as always, it was turned against myself. How can I keep writing about my real feelings and put it on show? How can I come on here and share my true thoughts, take that risk of being seen for who I am, all that self-pity and negativity and doubt? I’ll stop, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll give up again as I always do with everything.

But I got up and did my half hour practice, and when I went downstairs and made coffee I realised how valuable that is, that it actually does help – or something does. Routine and discipline, you see – it makes life possible. Which I guess includes this as well. Here I am at my keyboard with Miko on the desk beside me, supervising the street outside, both of us listening to a sudden outburst of gulls. Blue sky and sunshine, and I can’t really tell whether there are more people and traffic, though I can see that there are at least six empty parking places across the road whereas they’ve been full for the last few weeks, but I guess the consolation is that at least six drivers aren’t taking the bus.

I didn’t speak to my daughter yesterday, but I assume she for one hasn’t gone back to work. She’s not waitressing any more, but she still works in the leisure/hospitality business, her job involves visiting pubs, so I’m guessing she’s reprieved until they reopen. Anyway, she has two children at home.

I am still in my cosy bubble, for as long as it takes. I may never come out. I still feel that life is less stressful like this, but I keep panicking that eventually I will have to engage with the world again, and wonder what exactly that will mean. It’s like when I was travelling and would every so often get a reminder that, at some point, I would have to come back and face up to life again.

Just remembered that I have some corrections and clarifications for my quote from the Joni Mitchell song yesterday (I finally looked it up). The song is Barangrill and the corrections are: it’s three waitresses (not two); they’re talking about Singapore SLINGS (which makes so much more sense than ‘sleeves’, a mistake I’ve been making for almost 50 years), and there’s ‘not one ANXIOUS voice’ (I think I said ‘angry’).

So there you go, I’m not perfect (as if I ever claimed to be).

Oh my goodness, I just glanced through the window, (checking for swifts) and saw a plane flying over – it looks like a commercial airliner, rather than anything naval/military. Strange how something so familiar can disappear without being missed until suddenly it’s there again.

Check out Barangrill, if you like Joni. I hadn’t heard it in years.