Category: life stories

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Catflap Incident

Tuesday again – tai chi again. I’m more relaxed about it this morning.

I got up early – 6:15 – because my cat came and got me. That’s not unusual, mostly I ignore her but today I got up because I needed a pee, and as soon as I got out of bed she ran in front of me to the top of the stairs. When I came out of the toilet, I looked over the banister, and there she still was, half way down the stairs, looking up at me meaningfully. So I followed her downstairs, went into the kitchen and opened the back door for her to go out.

This follows a strange incident yesterday evening. I was sitting in the front room crocheting and watching telly, she had gone out into the hall, and suddenly I heard a banging noise as of something being knocked over, and an almighty feline shriek. It sounded as though it was inside the house, so all I could think was that one of the neighbouring cats had got in while the back door was open earlier, they’d found one another and there’d been an altercation. I walked round the house calling her name quietly, and expecting a large ball of fur to fly past me, but I couldn’t find any cats or other signs of destruction. I came back downstairs and opened the side door, and then found her sitting outside, the other side of the catflap.

You may know that I had this catflap put into the ‘side’ door – so called (by me) not because it is actually on the side of the house but to differentiate it from the ‘back’ door which is at the end of the kitchen. The ‘side’ door is at the end of the hall which runs from the front door to the end of the front half of the house which is connected directly to the next house in the terrace. There is then another bit of hall going to the left, and the back part of the house, consisting of the kitchen/dining room downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs, is attached to the house on the other side, but on the side where the door is, there’s a narrow space – same width as the door – between my kitchen, and a wall, behind which is an equivalent space and the neighbour’s kitchen. (This is where – I suspect – my neighbours were sneaking out and smoking dope in the lockdown last summer, but that’s another story.)

She has never to my knowledge used this catflap, but I think that must be what happened last night. I guessed the shriek was because there’s a drop of a couple of feet on the other side. When it was installed, I built a ramp for her with bricks and a plank, but when my son was carrying bits of shed from the hall into the garden, I moved it out of the way.

I don’t suppose she’ll ever try that again.

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Health Matters

Today I have to go to the hospital for the sixth and last of my six-monthly ‘infusions’, ie mini-chemo sessions. I can’t believe it’s six months since the last time, which followed a year after the previous one, because the one I should have had this time last year was cancelled due to Covid restrictions. But this time – this time – should definitely be the last – or at least, the last one related to the breast cancer which I had in 2016/17 (who can ever predict about the future?). It’s also the last of the series of medical appointments (for various conditions) which I’ve had over the last few weeks – the last that are on the calendar, anyway, given that I haven’t yet heard back about the results of the heart monitor, or had a call from the GP about my second Covid vaccination, though it’s about ten weeks since the first one. I’m expecting the surgery to call about that, as they did with the first one, given that it’s supposed to be done within twelve weeks, but other people I’ve spoken to (though not with my GP) have either booked both appointments online, or were given the second appointment when they had their first.

I had a phone consultation with the doctor on Thursday, about my cholesterol, and the blood test I had for that, and she said that it’s still a lot better compared with what it was when they first flagged it up in late 2019, and to carry on with the current pills at the current dosage, but I should try to get more cardio-type exercise, which needs to be more strenuous than just more walking. A least she didn’t tell me I had to give up cheese, though I have been trying to cut down. She didn’t know anything about the heart monitor, in fact she wasn’t the same doctor who sent me for it, but when I made the appointment I was told it would be a long wait for an appointment with the other one. In fact I only had this consultation because when I rang the surgery to book a blood test in advance of today’s infusion (to save an extra trip to the hospital), the receptionist told me there was a note on my file to say that I needed to book a consultation with the doctor. In the event she (the doctor) was clearly just looking at my records and giving out some fairly general advice, but I don’t say that as a criticism. I have met her several times when I used to live in the flat, and always got on well with her, it’s just that she’s not the one I’ve been seeing about this cholesterol/heart stuff.

It is all quite confusing, but I guess if the blood tests had shown anything serious, they would have been more proactive in getting in touch. In fact they seem to have got things pretty well organised in the circumstances.

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Problems of Affluence

Just been to Sainsbury’s to buy hot cross buns, because I realised last night I hadn’t got any – haven’t had any this year – and today is the day when it’s okay to have them for breakfast. I wanted those, and little prawns to go in my salmon en croute for dinner (but they only had king prawns, which won’t work, so it’ll be salmon, mushrooms and parsley en croute), and eggs and smoked salmon for breakfast one day over the weekend, and maple syrup to have with waffles another day, and chocolate for Sunday because I realised I hadn’t had any since I finished the Christmas leftovers – which has been quite a few weeks, but not necessarily the whole of Lent – actually, forget I said that, because I just remembered I had some chocolate truffles for Mother’s Day.

None of that would have been possible in my childhood, because the shops would have been shut on Good Friday, as well as Easter Monday and, of course, Easter Sunday, just like every other Sunday. (Actually, I have a feeling they might still be shut on Easter Sunday, but not sure about that.) I remember one year, when I must have been well into my teens, because I went into town on my own on Easter Saturday, and my Mum had asked me to pick up a loaf of bread, and everywhere I went was sold out, from which I learned the lesson to make sure you’ve got plenty of bread for Easter weekend, until the world moved on and made that obsolete. I was quite annoyed when the shops started opening on Good Friday, even though I wasn’t a Christian, because what’s the point of traditions if you’re going to ignore the fundamentals in that way?

Now I’m more relaxed, and anyway, I make my own bread. But when I was shopping earlier in the week, and planning today’s dinner, I bought cream for the sauce filling and was thinking what else I needed for today (except the hot cross buns, obviously) and it struck me – I always have fish on Good Friday, but making it so fancy is definitely observing the letter not the spirit of the tradition – salmon en croute is not exactly fasting. On the other hand, I guess it’s pretty tame compared with what the Renaissance popes might have had, so why should I worry?

That’s when I started thinking about Sunday as well, and chocolate, and my birthday, which is next week – the second one I’ve had in lockdown. Last year I didn’t plan anything special, but when the day came I went to Tesco and bought a cake and a bottle of prosecco, then ordered a Chinese takeaway for dinner. Tomorrow is my takeaway day (alternate Saturdays), but the question is, do I skip it this week and leave it till my birthday? Hadn’t thought about that. Seems daft to have two within a week of each other. Decisions, decisions – the problems of affluence

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Life Systems

I haven’t returned to what I was saying about fractals the other day because every time I sat down to write I found other stuff to write about, and anyway, although it seemed very clear to me at the time when I had the initial thought, it had got hazy by the time I was at the keyboard..

I don’t think fractals was such a great metaphor for what I was trying to say anyway, because they are identical at different levels, and what I was talking about isn’t identical, just nested, like Russian dolls (which, come to think of it, are pretty identical), or ‘worlds within worlds’, the way that our conceptions of sub-atomic particles orbiting a nucleus depict them as being like planets around stars. And if that was the metaphor, what was the subject I was trying to describe? I’m even hazier about that but… my thoughts and actions, I think. Does that make any kind of sense? No, I don’t think so either, not logically, but in the analytical part of my brain, I can sort of see it.

It’s forty years now since I started studying systems thinking, in a module from the Open University, which I’d signed up to as a one-off (or so I thought at the time) – I think I was described as an ‘Associate Student’ (something like that), and I was just doing this second-level course, partly out of curiosity and partly as a precursor to doing a third-level course on ‘Systems Modelling’, which I thought would help me with a new role I’d taken on in my job – it didn’t, not directly, but it led me, after two years, to sign up for a degree with the OU which ultimately led me to a PhD and my thwarted attempts at an academic career.

Okay, so now I’m talking about my life, which doesn’t directly get me back to the whole ‘fractal thinking’ thing. Except, in a different way, maybe it does. I look back on my life, and I see it in chunks that overlap and interact with each other – the people, the places, the activities, and the different threads of cause-and-effect that run through them. In my teens and early twenties, I had no ‘plan’ for an academic career, beyond undergraduate level – and that, as I’ve mentioned before, I saw more as a way of getting away from the constrictions of my parents and my home town – and (rather ironically as it turned out) finding a husband and/or career which would set me up for an ‘adult life’ (or whatever conception of that I had at that time). Consequently, as I’ve also mentioned before, I messed up my first degree, and was lucky to get a reasonably good job (but less lucky with my choice of husband – the first one, I mean, not the second).

I still don’t think I’ve answered the question – actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure that I’ve even asked one yet. TBC

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Life-Writing, Fractals and Plasterers’ Vans

I’ve been listening to Maya Angelou’s autobiographies, which have been serialised on BBC Sounds, each volume in five fifteen minute episodes. I’ve just played the first episode of a new volume, I think it’s the fifth, and I’ve worked out she is about thirty when it starts.  

I’m not going to say any more about it, and obviously I’m not in any way comparing myself to her in terms of either writing skill or inherent interest of the story, but it did set me thinking about the issues of writing about one’s own life. This is of course because I’m psyching myself up to go back to working on The Long Way Back (when I’ve finished with my current editing job, and if I don’t get caught up in anything else). Maybe when the cafés open again, and I can take my notebook style laptop (bought in late 2019 to encourage myself to go out and do just that, hah! What great timing that was!)

The thing about writing about your own life is the clash between the time it takes to write about it and the time it takes to live it- something I remember writing about at the time when I was travelling, and berating myself for not spending enough time writing. Time has this trick of passing no matter what your intentions or what you actually do (or don’t do) with it. And how do you ever stop? How do you write some kind of conclusion? You make a decision, you find a way to tie up the loose ends which are still dangling from the narrative, but if you don’t jump on it and get it done (and I am clearly not a jump-on-it-and-get-it-done kind of person), events overtake you, and how do you account for them?

I just got distracted by a van parked across the road, with the front passenger door open and covering part of the company name, so that it looks like: ‘X&Y PUG limited’ and I’ve been waiting for someone to close the door so I can see what it really is – I keep thinking ‘Pugh’ except that I can see there’s no ‘h’ on the end and there are some letters covered up, so that makes no sense. But when the full name’s revealed, it’s ‘X&Y PLASTERING’, my eyes had just conflated the beginning of the L with the end of the N to make U. How boring.

I intended to carry on what I was writing about yesterday, and not get distracted into life-writing and plasterers’ vans. I couldn’t see the connection between the former and the ideas of granularity and fractals that were rattling around my brain, but then I realised there was a connection. Writing about your own life is like having a hypothetical map of the world on a scale of 1:1 – it covers the whole world. If the grains are fine enough, doesn’t it appear continuous? So how to structure it into a narrative? TBC…

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Eating Elephants

This is what happened yesterday: it felt as though writing my 500 word post in the morning was the most significant thing I did all day. Some days are just like that. Around midday it got quite sunny, and I went out and pulled a few more bits off the old shed, in the process breaking the chisel for the second time, so that now there isn’t really enough of it left to get behind the planks and lever them off, which is what I’ve been doing up till now. It was an old chisel anyway, which I found in the shed when I was emptying it out, presumably left behind by the previous owner. After it broke I decided that was a sign that I could stop for the day – I’d been there for about an hour, I guess.

I keep picking away at it, not the most efficient way of doing it, I know, but I do as much as I can stand and then leave it in the hope that eventually it will get done (like the bookshelves which have, unsurprisingly, now filled up with clutter in the absence of me tackling them in an organised manner). The front and half a side (of the shed, that is) have now gone, leaving a shell which looks as though any self-respecting storm will blow it away, except that, remarkably for this time of year, we have had no strong winds for the last week. I’d quite like it if the back (left hand side in the photo above) could stay standing as there is no fence behind it, just a small wall, but that’s probably too much to hope for. Eventually, the new shed will go along that boundary, but I need to get rid of the old one first. In the mean time, half of the stuff that came out of it is still in the garden or the kitchen (depending on how hygienic I considered it to be) waiting for the new shed to be moved to its final position, along with the accumulating debris of the old one.

In the afternoon, I made some small progress on the jumper I’ve been knitting (still not sure about the design, which I keep having to re-do), then the yarn cake fell apart (as they tend to do when approaching the end) and descended into an impenetrable tangle, which I spent half the evening trying to sort out till I fell asleep over it on the sofa. I also started on a new crochet pattern for a blanket, which requires working with three cakes at once – what could possibly go wrong with that? The plan is to convert three of the many cakes I bought online last year into a blanket which will be of no use to anyone and shoved somewhere in the spare room if it ever gets completed.

Well, baby steps, hare and tortoise, eating an elephant, etc. And another 500 words bites the dust.

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The Long Way Back

Yesterday was the anniversary of one of my most vividly-remembered days described in ‘Single to Sirkeci’, when I arrived at Port Camargue. Earlier in the week I was remembering Prague, and it all set me thinking about ‘The Long Way Back’, and whether I’m ever going to finish it. I’ve been thinking about it for years – or, more accurately, I’ve been avoiding thinking about it. At first I used to start each year with the resolution that: ‘this is the year I’ll finish and publish it!’, but gradually I got over that, and recently I have been trying to learn to let it go, along with all my other failures.

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.

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Vyšehrad

The other evening when I was cooking dinner, Radio 4 Extra was on in the background, playing ‘Soul Music’ – a programme which you can only imagine being made by the BBC. Each episode takes a piece of music which has a ‘powerful emotional impact’, with a handful of speakers talking about it and what it means to them. It is a wonderfully eclectic programme, and the musical pieces come from everywhere: ‘Life on Mars’, ‘Once in a Lifetime’, ‘I Wonder as I Wander’, ‘Sunshine on Leith’ (I’ve never heard of that one), ‘Lean on Me’ and ‘Dock of the Bay’ plucked from a list on the website.

This week it was a classical piece which at first I didn’t recognise and wasn’t paying much attention to, when I heard a voice saying something about a hill which was supposed to be the site of the original castle, rather than the current castle further down the river on the other side, but this was just part of the foundation myth of the city… and it dawned on me that they were talking about Prague. Then it cut to a piece of music which I definitely recognised, but couldn’t have told you the name or composer, and I heard the words: ‘Vltava’ and I knew before I heard it that the site they were talking about was Vyšehrad.

Vyšehrad was one of my favourite walking places when I wanted to avoid the tourist crowds. It was directly across the river Vltava from my flat, something that I only realised when I was there and looking back to my side of the river managed to pick out the funny little church across the road from me. But to get there I had to take one tram to the interchange at Novy Smichov, near the big Tesco, and then change to get across the river bridge, get off and either catch another tram back up the river or walk along that side. Once, not so long ago, I could have told you all the tram numbers, but I don’t remember now.

But I have to tell you first that the music was by Smetana, one of the three great classical Czech composers, the other two being Dvořák and Janáček. Smetana was the only one I’d never heard of before I went to Prague. ‘Vyšehrad’ and ‘Vltava’, I learned from ‘Soul Music’, are two of six ‘symphonic poems’ that make up a patriotic symphonic cycle called ‘Má vlast’ (‘My Fatherland’), inspired by the history, legends and landscapes of Bohemia.

I have seen his grave in the cemetery on Vyšehrad, overlooking the vineyards reaching down the castle mound towards the river. I wrote at least one blog post about it, but on a blog which is now defunct (though I still have the content somewhere). I was walking there on a Sunday afternoon in February, seven years ago, when I read the text from my daughter that brought me home to England by the next Wednesday…

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New Glasses

Something remarkable happened today: I got up feeling quite upbeat, almost chipper even, or at least not as down as I usually do. I don’t know why – I didn’t get any more sleep than usual, woke up at my current ‘normal’ time, about half past four (though I had gone to bed a bit earlier, after falling asleep on the sofa in front of the telly). I listened to quite a nice, cheerful play on the radio, which was engaging, if a bit soppy, read some nice posts on Facebook – nothing that made me too angry – (well, except for one woman ‘boasting’ about her and her husband’s new French-made blue UK passports – I refrained from saying that I’m grateful my burgundy EU one doesn’t have to be replaced until 2028 – though sadly it no longer conveys the rights and privileges it used to). But apart from that, nothing too irritating or depressing. And I did some puzzles on my phone, even thought about going to the beach for the sunrise, but decided against it because it was raining, and stayed in bed till after the heating came on at half past six.

I picked up my new glasses yesterday, but I’m still wearing my old readers, which is a bit daft. I think part of me was thinking I’d keep the new ones downstairs and the old ones upstairs, but as my PC is upstairs and I look at my phone a lot in bed, that doesn’t make much sense. I think they need to be consigned to ‘emergency’ status and I’ll have to continue carrying the new ones up and down stairs with me.

The optician was quite surprised when I told her that I wanted reading glasses as well as varifocals, but I just don’t like using varifocals for close work, and especially for screen work. I don’t know, maybe the gradient is in the wrong place, or I wear them in the wrong place, or hold my head at the wrong angle. I get very stressed in eye tests, especially the bit where they keep changing the lenses and asking which one is clearer. It’s like everything else I suppose: what if I say the wrong thing? I’ll end up with the wrong glasses and spend a lot of money and get more headaches and have to keep squinting all the time (specially if I don’t wear the new ones). But I can never trust my own judgement, and I panic when I’m asked to make choices, even with something like that where nobody but me can say whether it’s right or wrong – worse, even, because no one can correct me so I have to live with it.

The shed is up now, but it’s not in the place where I want it – which is where the shell of the old one is still standing. I haven’t put any stuff into the new one yet, except the shelves, because it will need to be moved at some point.

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The Sixth Age

The rain has stopped, the sun is out, but I can still hear the wind – which isn’t good, because tomorrow my son and daughter-in-law are coming to put up the new garden shed. Will it stand in this wind? Anybody’s guess. I hope so, because we get storms every winter.

I have been gradually emptying out the old shed over the last two weeks. There’s not much stuff left in there, and I’m planning to get it out today or tomorrow morning before they get here. That’s the plan.

I was talking a while ago about the Madwoman in the Attic years, those times when there were issues in the future that were going to resolve everything (if positive, like getting a job, finding a new lover, travelling, publishing a book, living by the seaside) or were being ignored (if scary, like settling down and finding a home for all my Stuff). In the last few years, I have come to accept that the former group are either never going to happen (the job and the lover), or have happened without really resolving things as I’d hoped they would (the travelling, the books and living at the seaside – though I don’t regret any of them, especially the last). In fact it’s been the settling down and finally having a place that feels like ‘home’ which has been the saving grace for me, though managing the Stuff is a big issue which still needs to be resolved.

The first year and a half of living in the flat near the beach felt in many ways like a continuation of the travelling years – or maybe the first year did, because the last six months was taken up with the stress of house buying, emptying out the old house in Bedford, and arranging for all the Stuff to come to rest here. Then the next year was taken up with dealing with cancer. So I suppose I could say I’ve had three years to date of adjusting to the ways my life is now. People talk about ‘the Third Age’, but in Shakespearean terms, I see this as the Sixth Age – the penultimate one.  

Why am I thinking in these terms today? A couple of weeks ago my therapist asked me what I want to do with my future, what I would do if money was no object. But money isn’t the problem – I have enough money for anything I need, and I can’t think of anything I want that would require money I don’t have. If I came into more money unexpectedly, I would probably give it to my children, or maybe put it in trust for my grandchildren. Perhaps I’ll have some nice holidays when travel becomes a possibility again, though I’ll never be able to travel as freely as I did before.

I spoke too soon about the weather. Rain and hail are driving against the window. Shed emptying, dismantling and erecting might not be possible this weekend after all.