Category: lockdown

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Brain Freeze

Back in front of my PC after my weekly trip to the shop. Oddly calm in the morning the last couple of days. I think it’s because I’m slipping back into the lockdown peace, no stress, nowhere to go, nobody to see, just my own peaceful life. Won’t last, of course it won’t, it can’t, at some point the world will wake up and I’ll be forced to deal with it again, but not now. Can’t believe it’s only a week since I took the van out, it feels like ages ago.

The sun is shining at present. I didn’t mow the grass when I said I would – maybe I will today, if it stays sunny, though it must still be wet underfoot.

I’ve not been remembering my dreams recently. When I wake up, I know that I’ve been dreaming and now I’m awake, but the content of the dream is completely gone from my awareness. It’s like watching something on the telly, and you know you haven’t been asleep, but you haven’t got a clue what just happened, or what was said, and you have to rewind the last few minutes to find out. Of course, that also happens when I’m listening to the radio, or reading, or even in the middle of a conversation (though in that case there’s no rewind button), and as I now know, that’s all part and parcel of dyspraxia. But I’m sure I used to remember my dreams.

Incidentally, although for me the lack of short term memory had always seemed to be the key aspect of dyspraxia, from which all else follows, it’s only recently that I’ve started to think it might be the other way round. Starting from the premise that it’s due to faulty message processing in the brain, and that that makes it hard to focus on more than one thing at a time, this leads to the phenomenon of ‘absent-mindedness’, whereby I have no recollection of where I put my glasses, because when I put them down no part of my brain was processing the information : ‘I am putting my glasses on the bookshelf/back of the toilet/behind the fruit basket/they just fell on the floor’ and so doesn’t leave an imprint on my memory.  

Sounds like a good theory – it definitely reflects my personal experience, anyway. I expect somebody somewhere has thought of that before, but as I mentioned yesterday (I think), my PhD supervisor pointed out years ago that I struggle to accept things unless I can understand them from first principles. What I don’t think he understood at the time was that it wasn’t due to bloody-mindedness so much as that my brain couldn’t hold and process that information if I didn’t have the right pegs to hang it onto. Which sounds quite paradoxical, because although I can have enough flashes of insight to have achieved a PhD, there are times when my brain freezes and I’m incapable of absorbing what I’m being told.  

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Sunrise

Add to the list of things done this week: sunrise walk. I was awake from 4:30 anyway, so got up around six, got dressed and made coffee to take out in my flask. First day of lockdown, but there were quite a few people on the streets and at the beach – joggers, dog walkers, and the regular wild swimmers. I sat in my usual place to drink my coffee, then walked down to the waves’ edge to watch the sun come up behind the bank of cloud low over the sea. Walked along the beach and through the Rose Garden, then through the gardens behind the natural history museum (surprised to find the gates open so early). Nowhere to stop for breakfast, so I was home before eight – which meant that I thought maybe I should still write.

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.

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Here We Go Round Again

So far this week: last yoga class before lockdown; last tai chi class before lockdown; last trip out in the van before lockdown. I mentioned last week about my yoga teacher being homeless and having to cancel classes – the next day she sent a text to say that someone had offered her a lift, then came the lockdown announcement, so there was a class on Monday evening, and ditto the tai chi yesterday morning, after which I picked up my camper van from the garage and drove to Queen Elizabeth Country Park on the A3 near Petersfield, and had a walk among the trees and a picnic. I love taking the van there, because there are car parks spread among the trees, often empty (on weekdays when I usually go), so although you can’t actually camp, you can get some of the feeling for a few hours.

The weather has turned dry and sunny but noticeably colder than it was, and today looks to be about the same, with a clear blue sky. I really should get out and do some tidying up in the garden, I tried cutting the hedge on Monday but the trimmer kept cutting out. Because it stopped and later started again, it had to be a loose wire. I took apart the connector that joins it where I cut through the cable in the spring, unscrewed the little screwy things inside, couldn’t see anything obviously loose, then got into a horrible dyspraxic muddle trying to put it back together and gave up for the day.

I read some more of ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, this time about creative blocks. The author suggests the usual things: keep trying, don’t self-edit, do a little every day, expect to fail, but keep going anyway. This is what I’ve been doing forever. Back to the old question of whether it matters that it never gets me anywhere? Apparently, it doesn’t. Either one day a miracle will happen and I’ll suddenly start writing something worthwhile, or I’ll be gone and someone will come along and wipe my hard drive and that will be that.

Last week I read the poem about the ‘Wild Thing’ to my therapist, and she said I should try to get it published. I haven’t done anything about it. Strictly speaking, I think posting it on here counts as publication, which disqualifies it from most competitions anyway.

I’ve been thinking about Daniel Defoe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’. I think this definitely counts as a ‘plague year’, but I don’t think this journal of mine is in the same class.

My current yoga teacher once said that destiny is what has to happen, but fate is what you make happen (or words to that effect). She is not having a great year, even worse than most of us. But she has faith in the fundamental goodness of the world, and I envy her for that. Today, I fear for the fate of us all.

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Tuesday plans

Reached the third of the month, and I haven’t yet mentioned NaNoWriMo. That’s because I haven’t got any plans to do anything about it. Two years ago I wrote 50k words, last year I read them and couldn’t see that there was anything I could do with them. Maybe this year I will think about The Long Way Back again – I think the last time I looked at it was in spring 2018. But one big ongoing project has been finished and gone this year. Maybe I could start thinking about it again. We’ll see.

I spent some time yesterday on the weather blanket, as I said I would. Every month (in the middle, not the beginning) I add a colour to the border – in two weeks time it will be the tenth and last. Quite a lot of my time yesterday was spent in untangling the previous nine. The only way I can see of avoiding that in the future would be to leave the border and do it all at the end, which would be massively tedious and probably mean that it wouldn’t be finished till about March. I have some plastic bobbins which are supposed to help, but only a few large ones. I will try to be more systematic about it next year.

The camper van went in for its MOT yesterday, and miraculously it passed on the first go (for the second year running). It was due in June, but was covered by the six months extension, which would have got it to January, but I wanted to avoid that because the tax is due then, and car insurance and MOT in March/April, so I decided to spread it out. The garage called me at about 5, and I didn’t really want to go and collect it then because that would have meant trying to reverse it into the garage in the dark (a nightmare) so I asked them to keep it for me till today. As the sun is shining – and the sky clear for the first time in ages – I am going to attempt to take it out for a picnic. I wasn’t sure if my season ticket for parking at the country park had been renewed or not, it was due in September but the direct debit didn’t go out. However I just had a rummage among my emails and found that they’ve extended it to the end of the year because of the closure for the first lockdown.

I will make sure I take a cup this time, and my coat. But I can’t stay too long, because I need to make sure I’m back before dark. I need to make sure I take it out at least once a month over winter, so it doesn’t end up in the same state as this spring and last. All this seems as good a reason as any to take it out today, before the next lockdown starts. A good sort of day.

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Trying

I haven’t written for the last couple of days because I’ve been out. On Friday I went to Chichester, to an art exhibition which I’d been meaning to go to and when I finally got round to checking the gallery website on Wednesday I found out it finished today, so I booked a ticket for Friday. It was quite a grey and drizzly day, and apart from the exhibition I spent most of it sitting in a café, but at least I went, and had a damp walk round the Bishop’s Palace Gardens and took some photos.

Yesterday I did something I’ve been thinking about doing for ages, and psyching myself up for most of last week. A new book shop has opened since the summer, round the corner from the café where I used to go for breakfast on Sundays before the writers group meetings. The ‘psyching myself up’ part was to take my books and ask if they would stock them. I’ve been putting it off, so I thought I’d bribe myself by going out for breakfast first. On Wednesday I decided I would definitely go on Thursday, but when I woke up it was raining, and carrying a bag full of paperback books through the rain didn’t seem like such a good idea, and was enough of an excuse to back out of it.

But yesterday morning when I got up it was dry and bright, so despite the news about the lockdown, which was a perfectly good excuse, I steeled myself to do it. Passing the shop on the way to the café, I saw that they opened at ten. I got to the café about ten past nine, but although there were plenty of tables at that point, they were fully booked from 9:30 so couldn’t offer me a table. I walked around to find another café for breakfast, the first one I had in mind had a queue outside, so I kept going to an area where there are lots of cafes, and found a new one I hadn’t tried before. The service was a bit slow, but the food was good, I was quite happy till I looked out the window and realised it was pouring with rain. I checked the bus app to see if I could get a bus back to the book shop – there was one which would take me part of the way – or I could just get the normal one, going the other way, and go home. But it had become a mission, so I waited at the bus stop for about ten minutes, while two passed going the other way, then I gave up and walked through the rain back to the shop.

The lady in the shop was very nice, and we chatted for ages, but she didn’t want my books, especially with the news about the lockdown. Maybe some time in the future, whenever that might be. But at least I tried.

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Decisions

After I finished writing yesterday, I thought about how often I mention Monday in the titles of my Monday posts – I can’t be sure, but it feels like it happens that way more than any other day, or has done recently, at least. Years ago, in my major blogging days, I would sometimes use the day of the week as a title when I couldn’t think of anything else, and that was always a bad sign. Monday, specifically, has a bad reputation of course, as the first day of the conventional working week. But after I’d written yesterday, I worked out that it’s seventeen years since the last time I had that kind of Monday to Friday job, so why should it be an issue? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way, I have no expectation of finding an answer).

Tuesday is significant in two ways, one because it’s bin preparation day (they’re supposed to be out by bedtime for early morning collection) and the other because of Tuesday morning tai chi lessons at the community centre, except they only restarted after lockdown at the beginning of September, I went to the first one and then was in Cyprus for the second, and the teacher then went to Spain  for two weeks and has been self-isolating since she got back. So it should be starting next week – assuming things don’t go back into lockdown, which who knows, given the way things are going.

There is something else on Tuesdays, which is Zoom meditation in the evenings, which I haven’t done for a while because I don’t much like the person who usually leads it. But there will be Zoom tai chi tomorrow – I missed it last week when I was at my daughter’s.

I made some progress on both my projects yesterday – some. I’m trying to do the website on WordPress, because I don’t want to host it myself. When I was trying to do the website thing as a business, I used to set all the sites up as sub-folders on my hosting, but earlier this year I let go of the last one on there (the owner having passed away). It’s quite expensive to pay for hosting, and getting more so – and I don’t get much traffic on my own site, in fact this blog is the only thing which is really still ‘live’, so I keep questioning whether it’s worth continuing. I paid last year for two years’ hosting, so am now into the final year, and I need to make some decisions, which is not my favourite activity. It is a lot of money, as I said, but on the other hand I can afford it – just it seems daft to keep paying for something which I don’t really make use of – and if I do stop it at some point in the future, my client will be left having to find hosting from somewhere else (or rather I’ll have to do that for her).  

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Meltdown in Sainsbury’s

Let me start this post by stressing that I am not anti-mask. I don’t feel very comfortable wearing one, but I understand the reasons and am quite happy to conform – in principle. But today I had a bit of a meltdown in Sainsbury’s.

I’ve been wearing a scarf over my nose and mouth for shopping since the rules came in (and I’m still avoiding going into shops as far as possible anyway). When my daughter came to stay, and we were going out more often, she gave me two fabric masks that she had spare. They’re both in horrible flowery printed fabric, which I hate, but that’s probably why they were the ones she didn’t want either.

A few days ago I read about a study which tested the different types of face covering, and found that properly made fabric ones are the best, better than just a folded scarf like the ones I’ve been using. So I took the less hateful of the two to Sainsbury’s this morning, and put it on before I went into the shop.

The problem I had was that I couldn’t get the elastic to stay behind my left ear – and also my glasses kept falling off. I remember I had the same problem (with the elastic) the first time I tried to put it on, when my daughter was here, and she helped me with it and got it to stay on. This morning I was on my own, and had no idea what subtle thing she’d done to it to make it work. It was bad enough walking around the shop, but when I got to the self checkout it all went horribly wrong – I think partly because I was looking down – it kept popping off, and my glasses kept falling off, and I was trying to hold it on with my left hand and scan and put the stuff in the bags with just my right hand – a couple of times it came off altogether, but what could I do?

Writing this now, it occurs to me that I often have problems with the self checkout, so you might ask, why don’t I go to the staffed checkout? But the answer to that is that if I’m going to make an idiot of myself I would rather not have someone watching me – I know that the self checkout doesn’t make me invisible, but at least I don’t have to acknowledge and interact with another human being when I’m f*cking up the simplest tasks and being that crazy old lady that nobody wants in their shop.

And this is the thing that will never go away. There isn’t any way round it, no solution to the problem of me being me. I can try to hide – and that’s easier now than it used to be, now I can just hunker down and avoid going out into the world of rational human beings and mature adults, the world where the normal people are.

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Zoom Singing

I wasn’t going to write. I lay in bed telling myself that I didn’t have to write today. But here I am.

I didn’t write yesterday about the choir meeting on Friday. There were 43 participants and some of those were couples, so probably just under fifty people (about half the full choir) logged in I’m sure lots of people enjoyed it, but for me the singing part was truly awful. Because the way it works is that you can’t hear the other people singing, everyone is on mute apart from the musical director, so all you can hear is his instructions and the keyboard, and you sing your part along with that. For a start, I hadn’t realised that there was a link to the sheet music and audio files in the email, so I wasn’t prepared. The music was shared on the screen, but I couldn’t see it well enough to read without having to scroll round it all the time. We did two songs: ‘Panis Angelicus’ and ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, both of which I know (though I didn’t know the alto part for Over the Rainbow). I had got the music for ‘Panis Angelicus’ because we were rehearsing it for the Easter concert when lockdown started, so I was able to follow that, and I have sung it before, but as soon as I opened my mouth all that came out was a horrible scratchy squeak. Horrible. It was like being before an audition panel, except that no one could hear me – which is strange, if you think about it, because if no one can hear why would that make me nervous? The thing is, I can’t read music, so I’m dependent on picking up on the voices of the other people singing the same notes, whether that’s the whole choir or just the other ladies in the alto section. Even ‘Over the Rainbow’ – which I used to sing to my kids when they were little, so you’d think I’d know it – was a struggle, because if I sing it by myself it doesn’t matter if I’m in the wrong key, and anyway, as I said, I didn’t know the alto part.

Well, that’s what I should have written about yesterday, only I didn’t feel like it, and today… Today I was originally going to write about anger, how angry I am with everything, with the state of the country, with the state of the world, with everything, with myself. I’d be angry with God if I believed in him/her/it, but of course I don’t, so that’s someone I can’t blame.

On Facebook yesterday I saw a Wordsearch, and the instructions were to share the first three words you noticed because that says something about you. The first two I saw were: ‘One’, and ‘Lesson – I was intrigued to find out what this ‘one lesson’ was – and then I saw ‘Strength’. Oh great. So is that a lesson I’ve learned, or one I need to learn?

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Exit, Pursued By a Bear

Felt so wretched this morning. Try and list the reasons? Would that help? I don’t even know what they are. All the little frustrations and irritations of the week? Worry over my cat, who is still not eating well, refusing the kidney-friendly food recommended by the vet, and her old food if I try to sneak in her medicine? Apprehension at the opening up of the lockdown?

All of the above. The daily world has enough causes for anxiety without digging into the past. But the past never goes away, it’s in everything I do and feel, and the same emotions I was feeling fifty years ago well up again, the shame, frustration, self-hatred. I thought they would go away when I grew up, that they were caused by external circumstances, but they’re still there, and am I any better at dealing with them? Have I learnt anything over half a century? Maybe this: that whatever else may change, these feelings never do.

You know, you start something with good intentions, you make it a habit, and then a day comes when you think: ‘F*ck it, this isn’t working, I’m not doing it any more’.

This may be that day.

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Singing at a Distance

A few days ago I got an email from the committee of the Friday night choir I’ve been attending (on and off) since I moved here, saying that they are planning a Zoom rehearsal for tonight. I’ve used Zoom, for tai chi and occasionally for meditation (I prefer the Sunday evening meditation sessions, which are by Crowdcast, which means my picture doesn’t appear, the interaction is all through ‘chat’ and as no one can see me, I can carry on crocheting through the talking part). Even with the tai chi, though I’ve been doing that every week (except once when I honestly forgot) and do speak occasionally, it never seems to put me up on the main screen (thank goodness). I don’t know why this is, whether there is something technical to do with my laptop, or my speech isn’t loud or clear enough, or whether even the technology can recognise that it’s better not to put my face up onto people’s screens.

I don’t really understand how the choir thing is going to work. Of course, I sing a lot by myself when I’m by myself, but that doesn’t have to be in tune. At choir, I usually rely on the ladies around me to get it right, and hope I can blend in. The email said that the Musical Director has ‘some ideas of things we can do’. Knowing him, I’m sure he’ll make it fun. We have the music we were rehearsing for the Easter concert (which was cancelled, obviously). We were also supposed to be doing a concert at the Guildhall last month, but we never even started rehearsing that. I haven’t looked at any of it for four months, of course, but I know where it is.

The thing is… I’ve really appreciated having Friday evenings to myself, not having to think about going out and interacting – more so in that I have to go by car, and finding somewhere to park is a nightmare – not just at the rehearsal hall, but also around here when I used to get back at about quarter to ten. There’ve been Friday evenings when I’ve spent half an hour driving around looking for a spot, and ended up parking so far away that I then had a twenty minute walk to get home (though that has improved a bit since the residents’ parking permits were introduced eighteen months ago, although they’re not in operation by that time of the evening).

Choir is one of those things that has caused me massive amounts of stress – especially around concerts – but that I keep bullying myself into going to because – well, mostly I enjoy it once I get there, but also I feel I have to go out and interact with people. And actually, it is quite non-threatening, because chatting isn’t compulsory, in fact most of the time it’s frowned upon. And they are a very nice bunch – those I know enough to actually speak to.

We’ll see how it goes.