In the gardens I went to check on the fish in the pond. I saw the two big fellas – one black, one coppery – and looked out for the tadpoles clustering along the edge – there were still some, but not as many as before. I walked round to the other bit of the pond, below the waterfall, and saw a man holding a camera. I paused and realised why – I don’t remember there being a plastic heron over the other side of the pond before, and then it moved its head. The first time I saw the tadpoles, I remember being amazed by how many there were, and then thinking: ‘if a heron finds them, it could clear this lot’.

Something I was thinking of yesterday in the context of plans and failure was a story my therapist told me on Thursday, about a past client from years ago who, towards the end of her therapy, revealed something about her life that she hadn’t mentioned because, as the therapist said, it ‘didn’t fit in with the story’. I’ve been wondering what she meant by that: was it just to tell me that things can change, however stuck and entrenched they feel, or was she suggesting that I’m holding back something because it doesn’t fit my ‘story’, either from her or maybe from myself?

I haven’t expressed that very well, and now I can’t see the connections with the planning thing, though I’m sure there was one. If I keep writing, maybe it will come to me.

Then there was that quote about ‘living your way into a new kind of thinking…’ rather than ‘…thinking your way into a new kind of living…’ (I had to look it up again) which also seems relevant. That seems to me to put the emphasis on doing (living) rather than planning (thinking) – so that doing something – whether that be knitting or other crafts, writing, walking, gardening, even a jigsaw – is better for me than when I am thinking about what those actions are leading to, or how best to do them – which sounds either very profound or utterly banal.

Writing that date jogged something in my memory, and I’ve realised what it was: my wedding anniversary, 38 years ago today.

But that’s not how I intended to start.

As far as I can remember (I was planning to start) it’s over five years since I wrote a ‘story’, by which I mean a short piece of prose with a beginning, middle and an end, worthy of submitting to an anthology, reading out loud or sharing with an online group (though I have written quite a lot of poems in that time, some of them not bad).

Sitting behind the café, with traffic passing, and dog walkers and joggers and wild swimmers, the sun is warm on my face and the wind mercifully calm. I can even hear the waves during lulls in the traffic, though to get the full impact I would have to walk down the beach past the terrace of pebbles, where there’s nowhere to sit except on the ground, and hence nowhere to write. From this vantage, I can see the sea, but not the water’s edge. I can’t even see how far the tide is in.

I’m drinking coffee from my flask. The café won’t be open till nine o’clock, as it’s a week day. I check my phone. It’s bang on eight. I don’t know whether there is anywhere else that’s open already, possibly the Coffee Cup, but I don’t like their breakfasts.

I set off to walk, in the opposite direction, heading for the pier. I pass the café and a couple of kiosks, but none of them are open.

But the pier is open, so I walk to the end, where, clearly in expectation of a busy summer (or at any rate more so than last year), more fairground rides have been erected. When I first moved here, the pier was closed for renovations, and re-opened in 2017, since when attractions have come and gone, but I don’t remember seeing this many before.

It was quite surreal, to be walking around them alone, apart from a couple of guys fishing, and one lady sitting outside the cafe at the end of the pier, who told me it would be open at nine. I leant on the railings for a while watching the sea, and the Isle of Wight ferry, then walked back along the other side of the pier and turned left on the prom.  

I’m getting a massive sense of déjà vu now, not so much about the actual moving day but because I think I must have written about this every 30^th April for the last five years, and I’m sure I’ve read it not that long ago. I stayed overnight on a camp bed in the flat then drove back up to Bedford the next day to collect the rental van and fill it with stuff, then on the day after that I drove down in my car with my ginger cat in a basket on the seat beside me, via Guildford, where I picked up my son, while my daughter and her then partner (now husband) drove down in the van, which had to be parked at the end of the road, because there was no room outside the flat, and the furniture and other stuff carried through the drizzle and up the stairs into the flat.

Every year I feel as though I should mark this date in some way, which I’ve done today by going for a walk, retracing some of the steps of the first day – except that that was really a coincidence because I only thought about it when I was sitting on the bench behind the café drinking coffee from my flask (because the café doesn’t open till nine on week days).

What I did think about when I was walking was how my regular walking route has changed from when I lived in the flat. That first day I walked along the beach to the Coffee Cup and then turned inland, and walked past the cemetery and along the road which passes the end of the road where I live now, past all the shops and then the traffic lights where I turned back towards the sea again. That first summer, my walks were mostly in the opposite direction from where I was today, through the Rock Gardens, past the castle and across Southsea Common towards Portsmouth Harbour. Over the last year, while I haven’t even been going to the swimming pool, I’ve stopped going over that way altogether.

Maybe it’s time to start revisiting some of my old haunts again.

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.

Quite what’s going to happen to the weather, I’m not sure. It’s not raining at the moment, in fact it’s lovely and sunny, but the wind is still loud enough to be audible, and the draughts are coming through my double glazing as though it was tissue paper.

Incidentally, I know about listening to the wind in the trees, but what causes the sound in an urban area? I’m looking through the window at a city street with no trees in view, but the wind gusts almost drown out the traffic noise. There are wires across the street, and they are definitely moving, but can they be responsible for that much noise? It seems to come from the wind itself, rather than contact with anything more solid.

Yet another day when I’m looking out the window because I don’t know what to write about.

I just heard the sound of a ship’s warning signal, also known as a ‘fog horn’, although there’s no fog today, so presumably it’s being sounded for something else – surely nobody is sailing a little boat out on the Solent in this wind and getting in the way of the ferries? Fog horns and strong winds are the two signature sounds of Southsea, in my experience. Oh, and gulls – one just flew sideways across my eyeline, but it wasn’t screeching for once. I love the sound of the gulls – and the fog horns too, funnily enough – they remind me that I finally found my heart’s home, but that there’s still a big wild world out there.

I wrote three versions of that last sentence – first it was ‘came’ home, then I changed it to ‘found my home’ to emphasise that I hadn’t ‘come back’ here, because I’d never lived here before almost six years ago (though I had lived further along the coast in Southampton), then ‘found my heart’s home’ because, even though it sounds a bit corny, that’s the sort of connection I feel to where I live now, as though something within me has always yearned to be here.

I think about the time I lived in Prague. I loved the city, but not the life I was living, because I knew that I couldn’t stay forever. On the darkest days, I would step out my door, take the first tram that came along, and always find somewhere beautiful at the end of it.

Here I can take that step and walk to the sea.

I left the beach to cross the esplanade and drink my coffee in the Rose Garden, which is more sheltered, and as I turned to look back, I saw the clouds moving and parting, and a brief burst of light came from the gap and shone momentarily on the sea.

I think I finished yesterday saying something about regret, and Geoff Dyer saying that whatever you do, or don’t, there are always regrets. But I part company with him there – I think I’m quite good at avoiding regrets, over the big things, anyway. Of all the major changes I’ve made over the last twelve years, I don’t think there are any which I would undo, were such a thing possible, even the ones whose consequences were painful at the time. Not that that spares me from agonies when I have to make a choice, but that’s another matter. The torments I went through before I decided to move here – which seem ludicrous looking back from this perspective – were only finally settled when I realised that if I didn’t at least try it, I would always wonder what would have happened if I had. And now I know.

I read somewhere – a few years ago now – that it is part of human psychology to see major life choices – marriage, house purchase, choice of job, divorce – in a positive light once they’ve been made and committed to. It’s the ‘it was meant to be…’ syndrome: ‘I was meant to meet you, move here, do that – because look what happened!’ I was saying this a couple of weeks ago, I think, when I talked about fate and fatalism. We know the consequences of those decisions, and can’t really imagine what the alternatives might have been like. Of course, this isn’t universal, and I can’t remember the research and references off the top of my head, but I can see how it has worked out in my life.

In the time before I left my husband, I bought a greeting card with the legend: ‘The only things I’ll regret are the things I don’t do’, and stuck it to the wall behind my computer. It also became the tagline for the new blog I started when I moved out. I’ve still got that card, in fact if I look over my left shoulder, I can see it on a shelf. I think it’s a pretty good motto.

I hadn’t thought about the clouds. There was a grey curtain hanging over the sea, and white overlapping ones over the land. And a surprising number of people out and about – not so surprising really, because it’s always like that, but somehow it always surprises me. Even more surprisingly, I wasn’t the only person just walking on the beach for the sake of walking, on their own, without a dog, or a metal detector, or a litter grabber and plastic sack. When my parents were ill, and after they passed away, I would go out for walks by myself, just generally through the fields around the village where we lived then, and along the old railway track, and the people I met invariably had dogs, and I always felt self conscious, as though walking by myself was vaguely suspicious, and I must be up to no good somehow. Until this year, it’s always been like that on the beach too, but now it seems people do go out on their own walking without ulterior motive – even walking normally, in normal clothes, like me, rather than ‘power’ walking (or whatever it’s called) with their elbows flailing.

I sat behind the café, where I always sit, and gradually the white clouds became tinged with pink, which was strange because they were over the land and hence further north, but evidently the light was seeping out from behind the darker clouds as the sun crept up surreptitiously, with none of the usual showy light across the sea. I watched the gulls and listened to the waves and drank my coffee, wondering why there were no starlings on the street lamp this morning, then a few minutes later I heard them chattering and looked again. I counted five on the lamp, none on the wire, but gradually more turned up, and I’d just got my phone out to take a photo when they all flew up at once and formed a small cloud which passed out of my eyeline then reappeared over the park. Two women with a beagle on a lead came from behind me, past the café. The one holding the dog’s lead was trying to jog and her friend was trying to take a photo of her, but the dog wasn’t co-operating, and stopped for a pee against a bunch of seakale. When they’d passed by, the starlings came back, so maybe the dog disturbed them.

I did take a notebook and pen out with me, by the way, but didn’t feel inclined to write anything on the beach. Didn’t do much of anything really, just sat and walked and watched for the first appearance of the spot on the horizon where the light came through a crack in the clouds.

Being there is important. Getting there doesn’t always feel that easy. The urge has to be followed when it arises.

I wrote something at bedtime last night – onto my phone, so I wouldn’t forget. This is it: ‘I have to keep reminding myself that, although fundamentally nothing ever really changes, some days, hours, moments are better than others, so I have to believe that those are worth hanging on for’.

It’s a privilege to be able to get up in the morning and walk to the beach in time to see the sun rise over the sea. It never gets boring – god knows how many photos I’ve taken of it over the last five years since I moved here. But the motivation isn’t always there. Today, for some reason I can’t explain, it just felt like the obvious thing to do. But most mornings are not like that.

Being on the south coast, it’s possible to see both the sunrise and the sunset over the sea, but I’m not usually out for the latter.  

Granny Weatherwax has something to say about sunrises, but I can’t remember exactly what. I think it’s in reply to being asked what she believes in, and she says: ‘sunrises mostly’ or words to that effect. Which just reminded me of some good advice given to me years ago by one of my first meditation teachers: ‘if you’re still breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong’. If the sun rises, there’s more right with the world than wrong. Another breath, another day, another spring and summer to come (eventually).

I still haven’t quite got back to cause and effect, destiny and fate, Taoism and whatever else I’m always on the brink of mentioning. Today might have been a good opportunity for that. But there’ll always be another sunrise to walk towards.

Also I notice that I haven’t been moaning about not being ‘motivated’, although I must admit the house is even more chaotic than usual. Earlier I filled the plastic water jug for the coffee pot while I was trying to tidy up around the sink, then moments later knocked it over and half the water went over the counter. I managed to mop that up and make sure it wasn’t too close to any of the electrical stuff, then turned round and knocked it again, with the rest of the water going over the floor. However, this is not to say that that’s in any way unusual, just that my feet and my dressing gown got wet.

Years ago, I remember a friend telling me that her cat disapproved of her standards of house-keeping, and kept giving her disapproving looks. I laughed at the time, and thought ‘crazy cat lady!’, but now understand exactly what she means. I feel so guilty sometimes watching my cat trying to pick her way around piles of junk on the floor – often knitting yarn, or books (or clothes – mostly in the bedroom) but also random other things which have fallen or been dropped or knocked off the furniture and not picked up, whereas I just step over it without even noticing it’s there. Also she is terrified of sudden movements and loud noises, which must make living with me a nightmare, as I blunder my way around the place.

All thoughts of trying to impose any kind of order on my life and my living space seem to have gone out of the (smeary, blurry, fly-specked) window. Having ‘projects’ to do somehow gives me licence to ignore that stuff – and go to the beach, or eat scones in a quiet café.

And yet… in the mornings, I feed my cat, do my exercises and meditation, write my blog. Every day (mostly) – and have done consistently for months. Yet making ‘to do’ lists and sticking with them is beyond me – I keep trying, but it all falls apart.

Sun shining this morning. Skype therapy at 2.00. That’s today.  

Found out over the weekend that my local swimming pool won’t be reopening. When I moved to Southsea it was on my doorstep, and I started going in the mornings, then having a bacon butty and pot of tea afterwards at the local seafront café. When I first moved from the flat into this house, I stopped because it seemed too far to walk and I didn’t want to drive there. Then in spring 2018, after I’d finished my cancer treatment, I started going again, walking (it was only 20minutes away) first thing in the morning, only once or twice a week. The café had changed hands, but everything else stayed the same, and I would come out of the pool and stop for a few moments on the prom watching the sea and filling myself with love for this place. Then my writers’ group started meeting at the library on Monday mornings, so I would walk from the seafront into the town centre, and in the process found another café for breakfast. During that time, first John Lewis and then Debenham’s closed down, and our Sunday meetings moved from Debenham’s café to the library as well as the Monday ones.

I’ve lived in Southsea for well over five years now – in this house for four years next month. To me, it doesn’t feel very long, but in that time, so many of the things that I felt made the place special have gone or changed – of course, this year has accelerated that, but many went before that – in fact, of the things listed in the previous paragraph that have now changed or gone, only the pool and the second breakfast café (the one in the town centre) have closed as a direct result of the lockdown – and both were already in financial difficulty – this has just been the final blow.

Places change – that’s how it is. The sea is still there, and the park, I can walk there whenever I wish. Most of the people I’ve met over five years are probably still here, even if I’ve lost touch with them.

I came here intending to start a new life, and I’ve done that in many ways, and I guess I can do it again, even if so many things and places I treasured/took for granted have now slipped into memory (like riding my bike over the Common in that first summer and having coffee overlooking the harbour, watching the Isle of Wight ferries and other boats coming in and out – and when the weather got colder I started going swimming instead). I’d come out of a period when there was very little stability in my life, and the future had always seemed fluid and unknowable. Well, I guess that’s always true, but the human heart likes to kid itself that it isn’t.

I didn’t know when I sat down that this is what I would write today.