Category: Prague

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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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Old Songs

Can’t find my reading glasses. I had them in bed, because I was reading for a while, I remember that. Now I can’t find them anywhere around the bed, or in the kitchen, or the spare room where I did my exercise. Not even in my dressing gown pocket, because I didn’t wear my dressing gown this morning. I can write okay with my varifocals as long as I don’t have to look at the screen – I just stare down at the keyboard.

I’ve thought once or twice recently about writing – proper writing, not this daily drivel. If nothing else, I suppose, I should finish off ‘The Long Way Back’. The first part – the return journey from Istanbul – is written and edited, and it feels as though I’ve cheated those kind people who have gone to the trouble of reading ‘Single to Sirkeci’ to leave it all dangling. My idea was to pad that out with an account of trying to piece my life together afterwards, hopefully coming to a positive conclusion and some lessons learnt. And so far I’ve edited enough material together to get me to May 2013, when I left for Prague. At one point I even thought I might turn it into three books, with a Prague instalment as well. But so many years have passed now – another three even since I published S2S – and so little changes, I’ve ‘learned’ so few life lessons from those experiences, my heart sinks at the thought. When I tried reading the blog posts from the Prague times, and realised how depressing that all was, it wasn’t something I wanted to revisit.

What about the famous thirty-years-in-progress fantasy novel? Or rather, fifteen years, from 1990 to 2005, because I haven’t touched it since then. It ground to a halt in October 2005, when I started a creative writing course and, coincidentally, started blogging, though I’ve never been able to fathom which (or possibly both) of those circumstances was responsible for the stasis.

But if this daily writing doesn’t help, then what’s it for? A question without an answer.

Old songs. My pre-bedtime wind-down habit of listening to Amazon Music through the telly has led me back into the past so that now I’m returning to songs of thirty, forty, fifty years ago. Vinyl albums in tattered cardboard sleeves stand in no particular order on my IKEA cube units, a shoebox with the marker-penned legend: ‘Cassettes Study’ by my side on the floor. The USB turntable and cassette player – both presents at different times from my ex-husband, the latter, from the final, fateful Christmas – spent many years stashed away in boxes, but earlier this week I ordered a new stylus cartridge for the turntable, and finally connected the cassette player up to my PC. The sound quality is pretty uneven, especially after thirty years of listening to CDs, but the songs and lyrics are the same.

So today I’m uploading Jon and Vangelis: ‘Somehow I’ll find my way home.’

One day.