Category: self-analysis

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Hollyhock Quest

Almost two decades ago, when I was a novice blogger, in a different place, in a different life, I wrote a post titled ‘Hollyhocks, Schmollyhocks’. I remember that some of the content was quite momentous in its way, but not why I chose that title. That blog is no longer online, but somewhere in my archives I have a copy of what I wrote, which I could relatively easily read again, but don’t intend to till after I finish writing and posting this.

But yesterday saw the culmination of my five year quest to grow hollyhocks in my garden, which happened as follows:

2018: I bought a tray of six small hollyhock plants from B&Q, and planted them along the sunny fence in my garden. None of them grew to more than a few inches high.

2019: In the spring, I searched along the fence for any signs of my hollyhock plants. They had all survived the winter, and I hoped that at least one would grow, but by the autumn, the only one which was still showing any sign of (rather stunted) life was the one nearest the house. I bought some hollyhock seeds.

2020: In the spring, I sought out the last surviving plant, the one nearest the house, and tended, watered and fed it, determined that I would coax it into growth at last. I guess that might have worked, if the snails hadn’t got to it (which in retrospect I concluded might have been what happened to the others). I also sowed the seeds I’d bought, but the measly few seedlings that grew big enough to be put outside in pots were also snipped off by my mollusc friends. In the autumn, on a day out in Chichester, I collected some seed pods from a 7 foot high hollyhock growing on a grass verge.

2021: In the spring, I tried to find that one plant that had been there the previous year, but with no success. I planted half the seeds I’d collected, but when they were starting to appear, I went away to visit my family, and when I came back, all the seedlings had shrivelled up. I planted some more, and managed to coax them into living long enough to make a nice tasty salad for the marauding molluscs. I still had some seeds left, and picked a few more pods on a late summer return visit to Chichester.

2022: In the spring, I planted seeds again and grew them in pots in the kitchen. When the time came to put them outside, I researched anti-mollusc methods and discovered that slugs and snails are attracted by alcohol and can be trapped by leaving out beer in shallow containers, which they fall into and drown – in fact, it’s not so much the beer as the yeast/fermentation smell that lures them, so I started putting out a concoction of yeast, sugar and water in plastic takeaway boxes around the garden, and it did the trick, to some extent.

I also bought a fairly well grown (about two feet) plant from a local garden centre – the first time I’d seen a semi-mature plant on sale. It even had flower buds, but sadly when I got off the bus I found that the tallest stem had broken, and it never did flower (last year). But it was still alive, and quite tough-looking and sturdy, so I came up with a scheme to protect it.

In my garden I have a stack of decorative border edging ceramic tiles, left behind by the previous owner. I dug out a small patch of grass by the shady fence, a square the size of one tile on each edge, put some rotted compost and plant food in the bottom, planted the hollyhock, and packed it round with coffee grounds (which are supposed to deter slugs and snails). I’m not sure why I thought the tiny walls would keep them out, given that they happily climb up the fence behind, but it made me feel better. I made another mini-wall next to the first, and two more against the sunny fence on the other side of the garden, and planted the three toughest-looking of my hollyhock seedlings, one in each. I kept them topped up with coffee grounds and watered during last summer’s drought – and the last month.

2023: Yesterday I was rewarded by my first hollyhock flowers – not from the plant I bought, but from one of the seedlings I grew myself. The spot on the sunny fence seems to suit it better than the shady side. I had no idea what colour the flowers would be until a couple of days ago, but I’m very happy with this lovely pink. The other three also have flower buds – even the two growing in the shade, so maybe there’ll be other colours too.

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Still Here

If I started writing again… every now and then…

The above is as far as I’d got before I decided to a) make a coffee and b) have my morning crap, which entailed finding my Kindle and reading the next chapter of The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde while sitting on the toilet (and incidentally downloading a sample of The Terracotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri, which came up as a ‘you might enjoy…’ recommendation. I discovered the other day that at some point in the past I’d read the first of Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano books, but I couldn’t remember when or why or anything about it or why I hadn’t chosen to download the next one. So, if I have the sample – and the title did catch my attention – I might read it sometime and decide to buy the whole book – or not, but if I don’t I never will and that might be a shame.

Anyway.

What was that first sentence again?

‘…every now and then ‘ I think maybe I will (start writing again), or perhaps it was going to be: every now and then the thought strikes me that maybe I should, but usually I get involved in doing something else and time passes and it goes away again without me doing anything about it. And reading that back, it occurs to me that it could be a metaphor for sitting on the toilet (or vice versa)

Anyway.

I think I was going to make a serious point, and end up with sharing a poem I wrote a few years ago, which may or not be relevant. A point about making goals and plans for the year and trying to satisfy other people’s expectations (which is a hiding to nothing, it seems to me).

I don’t do goals and plans any more. I never was very comfortable with them – I’ve blogged about that times without number – and at my stage of life, honestly, why should I? Who cares what I do with my time, if I don’t?

There are, in theory, at least two books which I ‘should’ be trying to finish. The start of a year is supposedly a spur to effort, but at my age it is also a reminder that my remaining stock of years is steadily going down, and raises the question whether it really matters that much how I spend them? It’s not as though the ‘dreams and plans’ I’ve made in the past have made much difference to the world.

So here I am, a week into 2023 – not even starting on the first of the year, as far as those things matter, fifty words short of my arbitrary target of 500 per day, and not even having said what I was intending to say. I’ll see if I can find that poem and share it.

#notwriting

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Wind on My Face

Monday morning, sunny, I walked to the rock gardens again, like last week. I was later than usual – didn’t leave home till after eight – so instead of taking a flask, I went to the kiosk and bought tea and a bacon bap and took them to my favourite bench, passing the café on the way, and noticing that the doors were open, although I thought it wasn’t open until nine. Maybe it was special early opening for today. Still, I was okay in the garden. I’d also noticed, after I ordered tea, that the kiosk is run by a coffee shop I’ve been to a couple of times, so their coffee is probably decent coffee – normally I avoid buying it from the kiosks because I assume it will be instant. Of course, decaff is often instant anyway, but next time I go that way I’ll ask.

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.

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Life and Writing

I was going to go to the beach, out for breakfast and then to the shop on the way home, but it was raining. I got up and went to look out of the window, and thought: ‘That’s a large cat sitting on the flat roof of the sheds behind the back wall’, then it got up and turned so I could see it sideways on, and I realised it was a fox. That’s the second time I’ve seen one in the last few months.

There was quite a storm in the night, I heard the wind at one point, it was really wild. It looked as though the rain was settling in for the day, but now the sun’s shining. Still, it will take a while before the benches dry out, and it’s not worth going out to sit on a damp bench to eat breakfast, plus the cafés will be getting pretty full by this time, so I’ll stay here and write.

I was going to write some more about planning and failing, but in the shower I started thinking about ‘The Long Way Back’ again. I said I would start work on it when I’d finished my proof reading job, then I read a few old blog posts and got very depressed remembering those times, and now it looks as though I’m going to be pretty tied up with family things until the middle of next week (or the week after next, depending on when you think ‘this week’ starts) which gives another delay to getting properly started, and when the cafes are properly open I can take my laptop somewhere to get stuck in, which is always a nice way to do it.

I have been ‘planning’ and procrastinating over this for so long now, years in fact. I came to the end of the pre-Prague section early in 2018, I remember it quite distinctly. I went to the café where I used to go for breakfast on Sunday, before the writing group meetings (not one of my usual writing cafes, but it was en route to the dentist, where I’d been for an appointment) and took with me printouts of the early Prague posts, which is when I had the idea that there was just too much, and maybe I’d write a separate book about my time in Prague. Or was that 2019?

This is the problem with writing autobiography – though ‘S2S’ and ‘TLWB’ are strictly speaking memoirs, the distinction being that an autobiography is the story of a whole life, but memoirs are just a specific part of a life, either in terms of time or of an interest which may cover different periods. But as a memoirist, I find it hard to see how an autobiography can ever be finished, unless the author is still writing it on their deathbed (which in my case might well happen).

Life feeds writing, and writing feeds life, like Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail.

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…Plan to Fail

‘Fail to plan and plan to fail’ was another piece of wisdom which I acquired from my business networking days and totally failed to learn from. I reflected on this yesterday when I was digging holes for my newly bought plants and tenderly packing the soil around them. I plan to fail, not because that’s what I want to happen, but because that’s my expectation, on the basis of past experience. It wasn’t that I had no plan at all when I was walking around B&Q on Wednesday with all the other Diamond Card holders, all waving our ten-pounds-off-when-you-spend-over-thirty coupons – there were certain things I knew I wanted to buy, like compost, basket liner, and a 40 cm diameter pot, but when it came to plants, I was mainly driven by spontaneity – well, within bounds –mostly what I bought were pretty predictable: begonia, petunias, geraniums. But I still didn’t have any specific ideas about where any of them were going, and so I was making it up as I went along.

There’s a lot to be said for spontaneity, impulse, intuition – well, I would say that, given my aversion to planning. No, that’s not right, ‘aversion’ isn’t quite the right word: it’s not that I don’t want to make plans, it’s more that from experience I know the stress that planning causes, the struggle to sort it all out, to impose order and make sense, to remember the stages, to decide on the appropriate actions, to implement them without flying off in all directions, and to judge the outcomes. All those things that make perfect sense rationally, intellectually, academically and succumb to chaos when they hit the real world, that great, spinning distributor of ordure.

Having said that, it occurs to me that the major, dramatic changes in my life, the ‘leap before you look moments’, like starting a PhD, leaving a husband (both of them), travelling, moving to Prague and Southsea etc, were all preceded by years of ‘planning’, just not in the organised, logically –sequenced, rational fashion – more on the lines of: ‘…if I could, I would… if only…’ At New Year 2015, I met a lady and told her that I was hoping to move to Southsea one day, then when I announced in March that I was moving, her comment was: ‘you’re a fast worker!’, even though the idea had been in my head for three years.

There’s more I wanted to say, but as usual I started writing and then wandered off at a tangent. But I’d like to share a quote that I heard on Thought for the Day on Radio 4 earlier while I was making coffee: “You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.” It was attributed to Henry Nouwen, a name which means nothing to me (apparently he was a Catholic priest, but I won’t hold that against him.)

I’ve often been told I think too much… TBC

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Plan to Plan

Ten years ago, when I was going to business networking meetings, I was part of a team of three people organising meetings in a local pub on alternate Wednesday mornings. I was in charge of sending out email and text invitations, chasing up invitees to confirm numbers, collecting payments and paying the pub for breakfasts consumed, working with a woman in her forties who was an area rep, in charge of a number of fortnightly groups locally. The third member was a an older man (older than  I was then but probably younger than I am now), whom I’ll call Charles (I can’t remember whether that was actually his name) who chaired the meetings and was a general figurehead for the group.

The reason I’ve been thinking about him this morning was that he would sometimes give The Talk – there was always a ten minute talk over breakfast, usually given by a guest speaker – who, when I look back now, were probably drafted in from other groups in the region or more widely spread (it was that sort of organisation). I’m guessing that possibly part of Charles’s role was to stand in when no other speaker was available, and his talks were always on a similar theme, the gimmick being that the titles consisted of an increasing number of words beginning with P. This had obviously started long before I’d joined, and would always induce a groan (in the nicest possible way) from the assembly. Anyway, what set me on this train of thought was that a typical example would be: ‘Perfect Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance’ or words to that effect.

And the connection is: that as I was lying in bed this morning I was thinking about my inability to plan anything whatsoever. At five thirty I was reviewing my options: walk to beach; take van out for a picnic; stay home and start on editing of TLWB (reading Prague blog posts) etc. The conclusion was to stay home and get on with gardening, which I didn’t do a lot of yesterday, just half an hour or so’s weeding and not planting of plants purchased (I’m starting to sound like Charles), which should really be a Priority (definitely one of the words he would have used) as they will Probably die otherwise.

So I got up shortly after six, did my exercises, made coffee and here I am, doing my daily Post (Pontification? Pronouncement?) – which, incidentally, I am still doing, despite moaning last week,  because – it feels important to Persist, in fact, maybe (or even Perhaps) Persistence is Paramount. Some days I dread it, but I always feel better afterwards – no matter what it is, however trivial, or complaining, or ranting, or self-Pitying  – even Pathetic or Pointless – the results. I write every day – as long as I’m home, and sometimes even when I’m not – and I stick to my 500 words because it is a discipline, and that’s that. And I Plan to keep on doing so.

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Triumph of Hope

Yesterday I was debating over whether to take the van out to the country park for a picnic, or the car to B&Q to spend some coupons on stuff for the garden, or a combination of the two or something completely different. In the end, I went to B&Q in the car, and it was lucky I didn’t try to combine that with a picnic, because by the time I’d finished (after almost an hour), I felt quite worn out. I came home with compost, basket liners and enough plants to hopefully ensure one or two of each type might survive my half-hearted and inconsistent attempts at gardening.

I sorted out a few things into larger pots during the afternoon, the rest are lined up in a tray supported by two upturned buckets, along the fence, along with some sweet peas and other stuff in trays that I’d bought earlier from the Co-op as I walked past on my way home from tai chi sessions in the park.

They say a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, and I did that, but gardening fits into the same category for me. Maybe the same conditions apply to both – a lack of attention to nurturing the first time around, or, in the case of gardening, of all previous attempts.

Today I need to get out there and do some weeding to make space for my new purchases. As usual, there was minimal planning and organisation behind the things I bought. There are three wall-mounted baskets, two small and one large, on the wall outside my kitchen window, along the little alley between my house and the neighbours, which had trailing begonias in my first year living here, but which have deteriorated over the last few years until there were just a dead fuchsia and some very straggly geraniums, which didn’t flower at all last year. It’s not an ideal spot for geraniums, because, squashed between the two houses, it doesn’t get much sunshine. I can’t remember when the begonias gave up, but over the years I have made various attempts to replace them, but this is the first time I’ve replaced the liners, so hopefully that will help, and maybe give me something attractive to look at while I’m doing the washing up.

The large one was screwed to the wall, so I left it in situ and just reached up (it’s just slightly above my eye level) to put the new liner, compost and plants into it. I took the two smaller ones off, as they were just hooked over the nails, but didn’t think about the fact that one of them had come loose from one of the nails and was dangling at an angle from the other one, until after I’d filled them both and went to try and put them back. The first one was okay, but there was no second nail in the wall for the other, it had rusted or come away altogether.   

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Decisions

Today I have a decision to make.

It’s not earth-shattering – it’s this: should I take my camper van to the country park, have a walk through the trees and a picnic? Should I go to B&Q, buy some compost and plants, come home and do some gardening? Should I do both, drive the camper van to B&Q en route to the country park and hope to find a parking place not too far from home when I get back, so it’s not too much of an effort to carry the compost etc home? Should I take the car (camper van too tricky to park) and go to the garden centre that’s en route to the country park (if I can remember where it is, I’ve only been a couple of times, and that was years ago), and if I do, does my parking season ticket for the country park cover the car as well?

Yesterday I bought rolls and individually wrapped flap jacks in preparation for this picnic that I was planning. But – isn’t the country park getting a bit boring? I don’t want to drive the other way, to the New Forest, because that is a full day out, and does mean driving along the M27, which can be stressful. And putting the van back into the garage is always stressful. It’s only a couple of weeks since I moved the van, so it shouldn’t have seized up yet – though I did leave the battery connected up in the expectation that I’d be taking it out again in the near future. I won’t be taking it out next week, though, because I’m going up to Bedford – on the train, because hopefully my daughter will be bringing me back to stay a few days and help with sorting out the study.

I was going to go to B&Q because I have a coupon, and Wednesday is Diamond Card day, but of course you can’t combine the offers, and anyway if you read the small print the coupon only applies if you spend £30 on full price items, so it’s not great if you want to combine lots of small things, when some of them are likely to be on multi-buys anyway, so I’d spend all my time trying to work out what to spend it on.

I like the idea of going to the garden centre, but from what I remember the parking is pretty awful, so as I said, I wouldn’t want to take the van.

I’m just trying to give examples here of what my mind is like all the time. I think I’ll give myself a treat, but it takes so long to think through all the options, implications, ramifications and potential consequences that I start to dread it, even when the object is something I know I would enjoy – unless, of course, I don’t enjoy it at all and end up wondering what on earth I’m doing there, wherever it is. Which is quite likely.

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Finding the Way (or not)

Now my proof-reading job has finished, I was planning to get on with ‘The Long Way Back’. But I’ve reached the time when I was in Prague, and even starting to read back the blog posts from that time has reminded me of how stressed I was over the teaching course, interviews, flat, etc, not to mention the accident when I fell on my face and the problems with my teeth. There’s a story there to be told, but it’s not a very cheerful one, nor is the year that followed it, and I’m back with a sense of not wanting to touch it, as I had the last time I tried, three years ago. But if I leave it like that, I guess in a way it will always haunt me, and I have to draw a line under it somehow.

Yesterday I ended by quoting from a post on a Facebook group for dyspraxics which bothered me, about how people like me should stop apologising and feeling ashamed, and sorry for ourselves. That is me in a nutshell, right there, but how do I stop? If I am to be true to my nature, that is how I have always been, and always will be. I can’t be strong and proud of myself, because this is who I am, this is my lived experience: that I try things, mess them up, break things, am constantly late, messy, chaotic, forgetful, all those things. I read other people’s posts on the group, where they talk about repeatedly failing at interviews, hopelessly looking for jobs but never being accepted for anything that matches their qualifications, getting bullied at work and at home for being slow, chaotic, etc, and so on, and so forth. Is it so surprising that we are apologetic, full of shame, sorry for ourselves? Don’t we deserve somewhere, one place at least, among our peers, where we can share these stories and feelings?

But at the same time I can see where this person is coming from. I despise myself when I feel sorry for myself – I have written about this before, the horrible vicious circle that makes it so hard to have any kind of self-love or self-belief. That’s what is so stark when I read the blog posts from Prague: how out of depth and hopeless I felt. I now know where those feelings originate from – but knowing that there’s nothing I can do to change the way I am doesn’t help.

In the ‘affirmative’ ending to my ‘Square Peg’ poem I wrote that I’ll never find a space to fit my edges unless I ‘make one for myself’. By that I am acknowledging that no one else can help me to find a way of accepting myself – I no longer fantasise about finding an ‘other half’ who will make me whole at last – but I still don’t know how to do it for myself, except, as I’ve always done, by running away and hiding .

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Walking Into the Wind

Walking the other way, the way I used to go every Monday morning, towards the leisure centre and the now defunct swimming pool.

The wind is coming from the sea and right up my street, the way it wasn’t on Friday. More wind means more waves and that’s more usual than Friday’s calm. Even in the Rock Gardens, which always used to be a haven, I can still feel it, or at least hear it. A flock of pigeons skitters in the sky, crossing each other’s paths then dispersing in a shower of squawks. A ribbon of toilet paper flutters across the path, but later it seems miraculously to have been blown into a ball, wedged against a rock marking the edge of a flower bed.

Before I left home, the weather app promised me no rain for at least 60 minutes, so why can I feel splashes on my face, too far from the beach to be spray?

I glance at my watch: 8.25, half an hour till the cafes open, so I head for the shelter on the prom. Is it raining? I still can’t tell, the clouds are grey enough, and the gulls are flying high, circling against their dark backdrop. The flagpole outside the Lifeguard Station keeps up its tattoo of rope against metal as the waves continue to roar majestically, and the sun reappears, silvering the surface. I watch someone from the cafe pushing a sack-barrow, moving a plant pot to the edge of the seating area – it must have been moved to safety overnight to stop it being blown over.

When I step outside the shelter, the wind comes back again, full force. I walk back to the Rock Gardens, to the bench where I was before, still no rain, and I notice how close it is to the fish pond, which I had my back to before, so didn’t consider as a source for the droplets.

I think I’ll wait for the cafe to open at nine, then realise that I’d still have to sit outside on the prom to eat my breakfast, so give up and walk home.

I read this on the Dyspraxia Facebook group:

I’m done with shame and feeling sorry for myself. I will no longer apologise and be a victim to it. You don’t see a wheelchair user apologise for using a chair. So why should we apologise for how our wires connect in our brain ? Which is outside of our control. We either work with it or struggle against it. Either way we owe no one an apology for how we’re wired.

At first reading I felt irritated by it, because after all, shame, apologising and self-pity have been a way of life for me. Looking at it again, I can see it’s not a personal attack on me, in fact it’s a perfectly sensible attitude, but somehow it struck a nerve, maybe because I’ve always judged myself on those criteria and come up wanting.