Category: acceptance

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Boxing Day

Definitely not the worst Christmas ever, in fact I’m not sure I’d even add it to the list of ‘bad’ Christmases. Yes it was sad not having the family all together, but the Skyping worked well (after some initial glitches – and for some reason I couldn’t connect the laptop to the telly as I’ve been doing for months for tai chi), opened presents in the morning with my son and daughter-in-law, then later we had dinner ‘together’ (a bit later than I would have liked, as they were late putting their turkey in the oven), and we even watched a film on Netflix ‘together’ after dinner (which I fell asleep in the middle of, even more typical). It was fun cooking my own Christmas dinner, and being in my own home with my little cat – which reminds me that the last time I did that – ten years ago, with a different cat – I went for a walk in the sunshine with snow in the park by the river in Bedford – which I wouldn’t have been doing yesterday, given the reports of flooding. I could have gone for a walk by the seafront, but didn’t have time, what with all the Skyping.

Ten years – I can’t quite believe it. Life goes through its cycles – lying in bed this morning, I was thinking about the bad times – years, not specifically Christmases – and how they seem to come at intervals of three years: I’d started by remembering 2014, then 2011, and 2008… all of them particularly challenging for different reasons. And going forward, what happened in 2017? Oh yes, cancer treatment. So that I guess puts this year on the same trajectory. All of them led, in the early part of the next year, to major turning points: 2009 splitting with my husband, 2012 going travelling and 2015 moving to the south coast – (although 2017 was the exception, because 2018 was also difficult – though that was the year when I started with my current therapist, and was diagnosed with dypraxia, so maybe that was a good turning point too).

Whatever, a new year is a new year, a turning point of sorts, and currently we’re between the astronomical new year (lengthening daylight) and the calendrical one. Usually I wouldn’t be here for the latter either, but life is as it is.

I used to find Boxing Day a massive disappointment – all that anticipation, and suddenly the excitement was over. Today I think I will just take it easy – not that I ever do anything but that these days, but you know what I mean.

I’m not thinking too much about the new year – whatever it brings will come anyway. I’m not sure whether I’ll carry on with blogging – I can’t seem to raise much enthusiasm for it at the moment, that might be a temporary thing, in fact it probably is, given past experience. I guess you could say I’ve lost my sense of agency (and urgency) – but then, it is Boxing Day.

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Dinner Plans

I’m not reading in the mornings at the moment – I’m between books. Maybe this is why the dark morning clouds have settled in again – takes a lot of effort to fight through them. I’ve also been late getting to sleep the last couple of nights – going to bed at the usual time, but I just don’t settle.

On Monday I wrapped up my daughter’s Christmas jumper in a parcel and took it to the Post Office. I paid for Special Delivery for it to get there the next day, and yesterday I waited for a text from her saying it had arrived and thanking me. In the evening I texted and asked if her ‘parcel’ had arrived without saying what it was. She said two of the cards I posted last Thursday came yesterday. I checked the tracking app, which told me it had been received in Southampton – presumably a regional depot – at 1:19pm yesterday. Just checked again and it was received at Bedford (again, presumably the sorting office) earlier this morning (it is now 8:24) and should be delivered today. Hooray! In the circumstances, 48 hours rather than ‘next day’ is still pretty good.

After sorting out (sort of) the business over the new router yesterday I went to Tesco, then on the way back moved my car from the side street where it’s been parked (since I went to the hospital a fortnight ago, I think that’s the last time I used it) to a spot across the road where I can see it through the window as I type. Once I’d got it started, I thought I’d go and try a couple of shops which are outside my usual (in this weather) walking area. I couldn’t park near the butcher’s, but I tried another local Tesco, and then a slightly larger Co-op, where I managed to find a piece of steak – nothing special, but I don’t often have steak. I was thinking I’d do it with roasties and Yorkshire pudding (which reminds me I need to get eggs), and I’ve got parsnips and carrots, so although I’ll obviously cook the steak on the griddle, the trimmings will be more like a roast dinner (which I also don’t have very often). And I’ve got Christmas pudding, assorted nibbles and party food for tomorrow evening (and I’ll make pate today), enough boxes of biscuits to sink a battleship, and a couple of bottles of bubbly. I’ve also got smoked salmon, so thought I’d have scrambled eggs and salmon on toasted wholewheat for breakfast on the day, maybe with buck’s fizz (again, mustn’t forget to buy eggs).

So that’s sorted – or at least, in my head it is. Would stuffing balls and chipolatas wrapped in bacon (NOT to be confused with ‘pigs in blankets’, which should be sausages wrapped in pancakes) be too weird with steak? Maybe I should have got a chicken instead – but I prefer steak.

And this year, I’ll do exactly what I want – with what’s available.

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Tiers Before Bedtime

I started by saying: it’ll be fine. Whatever happens, I’ll be okay. Either way.

Then we went into Tier 3. And I thought: okay, that’s the way it’s going to be. I’ll manage, it’ll be fine, in a way it’s a relief. The decision is made. Just a shame I can’t find anything nice to cook for Christmas dinner. But hey, it’ll be okay.

Then my family had different ideas, and they made a plan, so I could still go, still be with them, still see them all. And I thought: aww, they really care, they really love me, they don’t want me to be alone and miss out. Bless them. That’s the way it’s going to be.

Then we went into Tier 4 and the goalposts moved. And I thought, okay, so this is the way it is after all. I’ll deal with it.

Can I get round the rules by having a ‘support bubble’ that I have to travel 140 miles to be with? Or even 50 miles, if they’re in Tier 2? Can I travel out of the area? Do I want to be the person who goes from Tier 4 into Tier 2, even if I’m going there and back in a day? Can I justify that? Is a ‘support bubble’ equivalent to a household, when it’s not just around the corner? Do I break the rules on the basis that ‘they can’t check every house…’ as someone (no names) suggested to me? Wouldn’t that make me part of the problem? And if I stayed away, and needed the catsitter to come in, where would they stand? Even if they weren’t strictly breaking the rules, they’d know I was, and what would their position be?

Enough. I don’t want to break any rules, or take any risks, or put anyone else at risk.

I think perhaps, because I’ve had so many times in my life when I’ve been unhappy and not been able to share it with anybody, and had to carry on and appear ‘fine, okay’ when I deeply wasn’t, even my nearest and dearest don’t realise how used I am to having to deal with a degree of sadness and disappointment that makes Christmas on my own seem trivial by comparison. I’m not saying I wouldn’t enjoy being with my family on Christmas Day, but it won’t destroy me. I’m not saying I won’t have to shed a few tears, just as I did on my birthday – as I have done already several times in the last twenty four hours. But it will come and it will go, and it won’t be the worst thing that could happen, and even if – as I said the other day – it turns out to be my last Christmas, well, it won’t be greatest regret.

If you pin your hopes on one thing – a particular day, a particular person, a particular wish – you’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of disappointment. Take it from someone who knows.

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Compensations of Reading

I don’t want to write today. I have nothing to say that I haven’t said a million times before, only the shit I think of every morning.

A while back I thought I would write about the Madwoman in the Attic, but I never did. What are the other things I’ve thought I might write about? I have a file with a list of quotes from my posts where I’ve started a new train of thought near the end of the 500 words and then I think – I’ll come back to that – so I copy and paste it into this table. But the only time I look at it is when I have something to add, and those seem to come in clusters, there’ll be a few close together and then I’ll forget about it again for months.

One day maybe, I’ll go back and read everything I’ve written and it will make a kind of sense, a picture of who I am and my life and my feelings and thoughts. Really? A kind of sense? Or just a god-awful mess?

I know, I know, it’s a shitty time of year, I’ve said that before, I’ve hated this time of year for ages – and no, it’s not just because I’m on my own – anyway, I’m not, I have my kids and grandkids.

Anyway, saying that is just too simplistic. This dread I’m feeling is no different really from the dread I always get before I have to do something, go somewhere, even when I’m going out in my camper van. I don’t want to have to pack, I panic when I know that I have to choose clothes for several days. I don’t want to have to sort out the house ready to leave it for a few days, with a virtual stranger coming in every day to feed the cat. I don’t want – god help me – to wrap presents. And I don’t want to drive to Bedford, but I definitely don’t want to go by train.

I want to get lost inside a book. I want that total absorption that only reading a good book can provide – but I have to ration myself because I have things to do. Even radio isn’t such a good substitute, and as for telly – I don’t know why I dislike it so much, and yet I still watch it every evening. I’m not even talking about the quality of the content – it’s something inherent in the technology, it’s too busy, it demands too much attention but somehow simultaneously it’s too distracting so my brain can’t focus on it and gets bored with trying to take it in and wanders off, and then I find I’ve missed something and get frustrated. Maybe it’s a dyspraxic thing. It happens with reading sometimes too, but in general I’d say reading is much more satisfying. This is why I managed without telly quite happily for ten years, but somehow I’ve got sucked back into relying on it.

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Xmas Plans

Yesterday I went to the beach in the morning. The boxes outside the beach café were too wet to sit on, but I found a bench on the prom where I could perch on the edge to drink my thermos of coffee. I walked back by my usual route, through the rose garden and the butterfly garden, and got to my usual café at ten past nine, to find they’ve put back their opening time till ten. In the greasy spoon across the road I had a fry-up that came with a pile of sauté potatoes. Afterwards I wondered if it was such a good idea.

I’m still making cards, so the mess is still over the table. Although I posted most of them last Friday, I’ve been making them for my son and daughter. I thought about making them for the grandchildren, couldn’t think what to do, then had an idea so started doing those. And I need a birthday card for my step-granddaughter, though she’s at an awkward teenage age. I’ve made three gluten free Christmas puddings as well – three, because I have small basins, cereal bowls, really. The mixture makes two medium sized ones, but one of those still contains last year’s failed effort (because all the dry ingredients were GF, but I still mixed it with Guinness and barley wine before I realised).

It’s ten years since I’ve spent Christmas, or let in the New Year, in my own home. This year I’ll definitely be home for the latter, and in the last couple of days I’ve become less sure about the former. The current plan is my daughter’s from the 23rd to Boxing Day, and then to my son’s till the 29th, but now I don’t know what to do – if any of us turn out to be in tier 3 after today, I think I’ll just stay here. If I do, I’m not sure what I’ll have for Christmas dinner. In 2010 I had a rolled and stuffed turkey breast joint from M&S, but don’t recall seeing anything like that in any of my local supermarkets. I’ll be all right for pudding, obviously, and also for booze.

I used to decorate my first flat on the Solstice, with candles, and evergreens picked from the old garden. In 2012, in my Fenland ‘penthouse’, my daughter and granddaughter brought me a tiny tree in a pot, which I kept, but which died of drought a couple of summers ago. Also I put up star lights in the windows, shining from the top of the building over the canal and the flat fields. But since then I’ve never bothered. This year, it will be a miracle if I manage to get the house looking tolerably tidy for the catsitter (should I need her), let alone faffing about with tinsel and pine needles.

Whatever happens, I’ll be fine. I think this year has taught me a lot, about accepting myself as I am and life as it is.

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Simple Things

One card to make out of the current batch, then I need to write in them, address them, stamp them and take them to the post office. If they go today, they’re a week ahead of the final posting date. Two more to make, for my children, which I want to make a bit more special, but haven’t got a clear idea yet what I’m going to do. Hopefully I’m going to be able to deliver them both in person, but if not… maybe I should plan on trying to get them posted in advance anyway, because who knows what might happen in the next fortnight?

Yesterday I showed my therapist the Christmas jumper, she seemed particularly excited that it was blue and not red or green. I’ve still got to weave in the ends. Over Skype, she couldn’t see that, or the way the stitches pull around the motifs – besides, she’s not a knitter, so she’s probably impressed that I managed to finish it at all. She said at one point that she was ‘in awe’ of me – I’d rather she admired my writing or my academic prowess than my knitting, but I don’t think she meant that anyway.

She said last week how impressed she was with my routine, how I get up and do my yoga, tai chi and meditation, and then my writing, and yesterday she added to this the way I do my crafting. I showed her the current weather blanket and she asked what I do with them when they’re finished, so I told her the first one is in the spare bedroom, last year’s one went to my son and daughter-in-law and this one’s going to my daughter – to mark for both of them the years in which they got married (my daughter’s idea).

But all of that: getting up at seven (when usually I’ve been awake for at least two hours already), the exercise and meditation, the five hundred words, the square for the weather blanket and other crafts (and the reading, listening to the radio and su doku as well) – is about self-preservation, keeping myself this side of the line that tips over into darkness. I do them because I need to. Yes, I’d quite like it if I was writing a novel, or some great academic treatise that would put the world to rights, but at least all these activities are doable and pretty harmless and don’t involve anybody else. One day, no doubt, I’ll stop doing one or more of them, and then this year will become, not just the (first) Covid-19 year, but the time when I ‘…used to do that stuff’.

Years ago, I used to do cross stitch, and I remember thinking my life was pretty sad on the days when that was the most satisfying thing I’d done – like the wife in the Paul Simon song for whom a good day ‘…ain’t got no rain’. But I’ve learned to appreciate losing myself in simple things.

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Superficial Stuff

Yesterday I received my first Christmas card of the season through the post, and it was from the friend I mentioned a couple of days ago (hers is always the first). There wasn’t a long letter this time, just a handwritten note in the card to say her Mum died in May. Luckily I hadn’t already sent my round robin letters, so I can write a personal note to her. It’s a worry when you don’t have any contact from one year’s end to the next and don’t know what might have happened in between.

I don’t have to go anywhere today, and although the sun is shining I doubt I’ll be tempted out of my burrow. Yesterday after my trip to the hospital in the morning, I made the mistake of going into the Range on the way back to see what Christmassy paper, cutting dies and stamps they had. Unfortunately, this hobby is really about buying stuff – which looks amazing and inspiring in the shop and then disappears into the cupboards when I get home. And then there was the depressing socially distanced queuing. Most of my shopping this year has been online. I had to buy a winter flowering shrub (skimmia), two boxes of coconut Lindors and a kilo of Fox’s biscuits to cheer myself up.

In the afternoon, I completed the interiors of three of the cards I made the exteriors for at the weekend (which means I now have a total of four usable cards), but got stuck on the remaining two because I thought I’d got a second sheet of the matching paper for the front, to do the internal decorations with, but couldn’t find it anywhere. After I’d spent an hour going through the mess on the table, it was getting near dinner time, so I left it, with a plan to start some new ones today with different paper in hope that the other will turn up, or if not I’ll think of something else to go on the inside.

This is why I have to allow so much time to do these things. Ten days from today to the last second-class posting date. Also I need to re-order some teas, coffees and hot chocolates from the Whittard’s website, because an order that I thought I’d sent over a week ago never turned up – when I checked, the order wasn’t registered, although I remembered doing it on the ‘Black Friday’ weekend, so I must have just put it all in the basket without confirming it.

Just had a text from someone I’d arranged to see next Monday in Bedford and hadn’t told her I won’t be going. Still haven’t rung up the steam train people to cancel the booking so I can get my money back (in the form of vouchers to go next year). At least I contacted the catsitter yesterday and rearranged that.

Not very deep today, am I? This is why my head is always in a mess.

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Creative Chaos

My head’s a bit of a mess today. I’m trying to focus.

Prompted by my efforts with the card making (which continued yesterday) I’ve been thinking about creativity, a topic I’ve been planning to tackle for a while. In fact the post which I wrote on Monday (but didn’t share) was about how difficult it is for me to see any value in anything I make. I was coming to the end of the Christmas jumper I’ve been knitting for my daughter, when I read a Facebook post by a lady who runs a local craft shop. She’d shared some photographs from a 1980s knitting pattern magazine, showing celebrities wearing jumpers with silly slogans and daft pictures – rather like the one I’ve just made, in fact. The comments were so mocking, and in a nasty ‘What were they thinking?’ way, not a gentle way, that I immediately felt ashamed and embarrassed by my efforts. What was I thinking? More to the point, what will my daughter think? God knows. But it’s done now, I said I would make her one and I did, I made up my own pattern and didn’t consult her so that it will be a surprise. If she hates it – openly or secretly – I still enjoyed making it.

That’s why this is the first time I’ve made cards for anybody other than my nearest and dearest – because what if they think they’re just naff? (Actually, two years ago, when the lino-printing classes were still running, I made some Christmas cards, but never sent any of them for exactly that reason.) Well, I suppose with these people I never see, it doesn’t matter what they might think, because who really cares that much about Christmas cards anyway? What really matters is that I enjoy the process. And that links in with what I was saying a while back about the quest and the prize, the journey and the destination, the process and the outcome.

So yesterday, I did some more, and because the one I’d done on Friday wasn’t too bad, I stuck with the same design, finishing the exteriors of six cards, although I also need to do more inside them. I made a conscious effort not to get stressed but just to enjoy it – even when I still kept losing things and making mistakes. There are lots of little bits and things to get lost, and lots of little steps that have to be done in the right order, and that is exactly the kind of thing which does make me stressed, because it’s hard for me to hold a plan in my head and remember what I need to do next – which is why it always takes me so long. But I took my time, tried not to give myself a hard time, and got into a rhythm.

Practice, repetition and routine is good. Anything creative is risky. What I do may be crap – there again, it might get better if I keep trying.

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Round Robin

I didn’t post on here yesterday, but I did write my annual letter, sent to a handful of people from years ago whom I’m still in touch with enough to send Christmas cards and write to once a year. I don’t really know if the recipients are pleased to get it or resent being sent a computer-written and printed ‘round robin’ style letter. I used to edit each one for the specific person it was going to, but as the years pass and the interval since I saw them all in person grows longer, I think – well, at least this is better than nothing. At least they know I’m still alive. One person sends me a similar letter, one sends me a handwritten letter, most just a card with maybe a few words or just the usual greetings.

The handwritten letter is from the longest-standing friendship of them all, a friend from school, who went to teacher training college in London for three years in the 1970s and returned afterwards to the village she’d left, married the brother of a girl we were at school with, and taught at the village school all her working life. The last time I saw her was at her silver wedding anniversary party in the village hall in 2004, and before that, her 21st birthday party. In the quarter-century in between, we’d lost touch, until my Mum, one day in the 1980s, had a phone call from her asking ‘are you the Mrs Rushby who used to live in…?’ and passed on my address.

The letter I wrote yesterday turned out to be a little longer (600 words) than these daily offerings, about how I’ve been, and what I’ve been up to (not a lot, apart from the wedding) and my plans for Christmas – which changed anyway in the course of writing because I got a message from my daughter saying that my granddaughter is now quarantined till the 16th because a child in her class has tested positive for Covid, so I won’t be going to see them next weekend. And as usual it’s a computer-produced letter, but I decided yesterday morning that I would make Christmas cards this year, using the vast array of card-making equipment (die-cutting machine, metal dies, stamps, inks, sheets of patterned card and paper, scissors, glue, stickers etc etc etc) which I’ve acquired over the last two years.

I won’t go into the background story of how I started that particular hobby (not today anyway), but I will say that although it’s fun some of the time, I also find it unbelievably stressful. This is partly because there is absolutely no way for me to avoid creating a massive mess with all the stuff, and also (and related) that it takes me ages to make anything because I am constantly looking for the thing that I had in my hand only ten minutes earlier.

Yesterday I started with a determination NOT to get stressed, to keep it simple, and tidy.

I will try again today.

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Seasonal Rant

I spent most of yesterday getting stressed over how much I hate this time of year. All the miserable and uncomfortable Christmases in my life, even though outnumbered by the happy ones, rise up from memory like a dark tidal wave, and completely overwhelm them. I spent the morning working on the weather blanket and listening to podcasts, and then in the afternoon telling the therapist how ashamed I am that that’s all I’ve been doing, as well as about all the dark Christmases there have been in in my life, and how much I hate this time of year – in between bouts of weeping.

We got into the usual argument about what I ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be doing (‘should’ is like a red rag to a bull for her) and when she asked if it wasn’t just those voices from the past telling me what to do, I got irritated, because, no, it isn’t just that – I know for myself that I would feel better if I did all those things that I ignore in favour of sitting and crocheting.

‘What do you think will happen?’ she asked.

‘Well, it’s not healthy is it? I’d just go into a downward spiral and sink down and down’ I told her, waving my finger round in circles.

‘What’s your worst fantasy of what might happen, if you took it to the extreme?’

To the extreme??? I thought. What a bloody stupid question – like the question about what do you really want from life if money and reality and the law of gravity were no object – what’s the point of asking that?

‘That by the time I was missed, someone would have to break into the house and find me rotting, surrounded by piles of rubbish, and with half my face missing because the cat’s eaten it’ was what I actually said.

I woke as usual at four this morning, but instead of filling the time with podcasts and reading, I spent an hour brooding, just like old times. Then at five, I started reading some more of ‘Out of Sheer Rage’, and to my surprise finished it, although my Kindle said I was only 85% through it – the last 15% was taken up with footnotes and a preview of another book. I was telling the therapist about it yesterday, and how much I’ve enjoyed it, and she asked if it made me feel less alone, which it did, but like the dyspraxia forum in a bittersweet way, because it IS good to know I’m not the only one, but also depressing in that it suggests to me that there really is no way out.

But there are so many bits that I wanted to highlight, and I will share this one:

‘thinking of giving up is probably the one thing that’s kept me going. I think about it on a daily basis but always come up against the problem of what to do when I’ve given up. Give up one thing and you’re immediately obliged to do something else. The only way to give up totally is to kill yourself but that one act requires an assertion of will equal to the total amount that would be expanded (sic) in the rest of a normal lifetime.”

“Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence” by Geoff Dyer