Aw man, I've got a flat to see tomorrow and I really can't be arsed because it hasn't got a garden. But it's a good price, ground floor and with 'a view over a nice garden at the back' which means Bob will be able to get in and out. I wish we used floor space (in square yards or metres), here like they do in most countries in property transactions, but we don't. Probably because we have less per person than just about anybody. I ask how big it is and the agent says 'large' and won't be drawn further, so I have to go and look. He says there's a big kitchen, though god knows what that means - neither of the ones I've seen so far were half as big as the one I have at the moment and that's too small for a single fucking chair. In the end I think it would be the loss of space that would have the biggest negative impact, but now I'm worrying about Bob and a busy road out front. Some of the houses on this road are terraced but some are semi-detached.
It was good going for a day and a half without internet access, especially when combined with the day of 5 Rhythms and general hippy workshops that I did on Sunday. That took place right over the other side of London - Jesus, you couldn't have a greater contrast. Younger Daughter lives in a run down, cheap, rough, skanky area where people are crammed in right next to and on top of each other; the workshop was in a part of town that had been built centuries ago for the idle rich and they still live expansively in its golden stone mansions. Nothing in the (very elegant) shop windows had a price on - darling, if you have to ask, you clearly can't afford it. Everything oozed calm and comfort and beauty, but I restrained my revolutionary fervour in the name of having a day of nourishment for body and soul.(I realise I haven't written about the Occupy protests - the one here might get nasty, what with the Olympics, but the eyes of the world are on us, I hope, so who knows? Interesting times.)
Dancing and singing all day was blissful. We drifted into an altered state, me and my pal MG, and her pal J, and bloody lovely it was too, if somewhat difficult to convey. I still feel a deep sense of relaxation beyond the surface stress of the house and the daughters and all that unavoidable muddle of life. (My son in law has behaved like an unspeakable cunt over Daughter's increased mobility, crushing her spirit yet again.) Moving my body and using my voice in a safe place with nice music, where everyone was kindly disposed but not really interested, for four sessions over the course of the day nourished parts of me that sorely needed it. We started with an invitation to move around the room to this:
Early night now, to be up and out to view the flat.
Grateful for: seeing Bert back again (*waves*); email from cousin - we're planning a meet; spending time with MG without any children and being able to have long, long chats that got right into it; being able to not tidy up when I can't be arsed and nobody else being affected; only being pleasantly knackered after busy weekend
Monday, 31 October 2011
Living in the city
Wrote this on Saturday night:
One hour thirty five minutes of battery and no internet. I’m at Younger Daughter’s – her new place since she moved out of ‘supported accomodation’ and in with her boyfriend. It’s a basement, on a busy road in east London and I’ve been given a whole room to sleep in at the front. It sounds like the telly out there, honestly. Sirens and shouting then little lulls till it all starts up again. The boyfriend reassured me that there are bars on the windows, which was kind of scary in itself, but it just feels exciting. There’s a big venue about 100 yards away, where a heavy metal tribute band has just started up – could be Wishbone Ash – that kind of thing, sounds a bit familiar – Uriah Heep? – a band I used to hear but never was into that much. Lots of loose, sloppy cheering. Good natured so far.
We spent the day in a hotel restaurant which had been commandeered by the w o m e n and ms group, with Elder Daughter, grandson and Bloke, next door to the British Library, which I've always yearned to go in but couldn't remember exactly what for so didn't. I loved this statue outside though, massive and solid and about thinking, brilliant:
Tomorrow I’m going to a five rhythms day – big dance/meditation stuff, with MG – it’s all very hectic for a person used to a bit of pottering and a lot of telly.
ED had a fabulous day – she just blossomed once amongst her peers, man it was heart-breaking to watch. She’s great though, my girl. She didn’t waste a second on shyness – this was her afternoon with the gang whose motto for coping with MS is ‘Chin Up, Tits Out’, (which isn’t to say they deny the awfulness of MS, but they have a laugh and piss about as well). Grandson wasn’t getting involved with the other kids as they were either frilly girls under the age of ten, or teenage ‘big boys’. So he and YD played games about the place, like ‘spot the cupcake’.
The boyfriend has MS too (don’t even wonder what my take on that is, as I don’t know) , and this was the first time any of us had met him, so there was a lot going on. I like him so far – we’ve spent the evening here and he’s easy company, funny, interesting, a sculptor, which is a good start. It’s all been very quick which can go either way, but right now she’s happy and safe and for that I am content.
My problem is that I have no idea where the workshop is tomorrow and I can’t get on the internet and MG never turns her phone on. I assumed I’d be able to get online and read the email with the details and I don’t know anyone who’d be at home and awake at midnight on a Saturday that I can call to look it up for me. I need to be there by ten and it’s north London somewhere – Little Venice (a car is stopped in the traffic outside blasting heavy reggae loud enough to drown out the tribiute band) and the clocks go back tonight, which confuses things further as we only have the time on computers and mobile phones and none of us can remember for sure if they reset themselves.
I’m going to sleep now and will call Bloke first thing and ask him to look it up. Feel anxious about it, which is annoying as I’d like to just contemplate the day I’ve had and the one I’m looking forward to, rather than fretting about whether or not I’ll get there before lunch
One hour thirty five minutes of battery and no internet. I’m at Younger Daughter’s – her new place since she moved out of ‘supported accomodation’ and in with her boyfriend. It’s a basement, on a busy road in east London and I’ve been given a whole room to sleep in at the front. It sounds like the telly out there, honestly. Sirens and shouting then little lulls till it all starts up again. The boyfriend reassured me that there are bars on the windows, which was kind of scary in itself, but it just feels exciting. There’s a big venue about 100 yards away, where a heavy metal tribute band has just started up – could be Wishbone Ash – that kind of thing, sounds a bit familiar – Uriah Heep? – a band I used to hear but never was into that much. Lots of loose, sloppy cheering. Good natured so far.
We spent the day in a hotel restaurant which had been commandeered by the w o m e n and ms group, with Elder Daughter, grandson and Bloke, next door to the British Library, which I've always yearned to go in but couldn't remember exactly what for so didn't. I loved this statue outside though, massive and solid and about thinking, brilliant:
Tomorrow I’m going to a five rhythms day – big dance/meditation stuff, with MG – it’s all very hectic for a person used to a bit of pottering and a lot of telly.
ED had a fabulous day – she just blossomed once amongst her peers, man it was heart-breaking to watch. She’s great though, my girl. She didn’t waste a second on shyness – this was her afternoon with the gang whose motto for coping with MS is ‘Chin Up, Tits Out’, (which isn’t to say they deny the awfulness of MS, but they have a laugh and piss about as well). Grandson wasn’t getting involved with the other kids as they were either frilly girls under the age of ten, or teenage ‘big boys’. So he and YD played games about the place, like ‘spot the cupcake’.
The boyfriend has MS too (don’t even wonder what my take on that is, as I don’t know) , and this was the first time any of us had met him, so there was a lot going on. I like him so far – we’ve spent the evening here and he’s easy company, funny, interesting, a sculptor, which is a good start. It’s all been very quick which can go either way, but right now she’s happy and safe and for that I am content.
My problem is that I have no idea where the workshop is tomorrow and I can’t get on the internet and MG never turns her phone on. I assumed I’d be able to get online and read the email with the details and I don’t know anyone who’d be at home and awake at midnight on a Saturday that I can call to look it up for me. I need to be there by ten and it’s north London somewhere – Little Venice (a car is stopped in the traffic outside blasting heavy reggae loud enough to drown out the tribiute band) and the clocks go back tonight, which confuses things further as we only have the time on computers and mobile phones and none of us can remember for sure if they reset themselves.
I’m going to sleep now and will call Bloke first thing and ask him to look it up. Feel anxious about it, which is annoying as I’d like to just contemplate the day I’ve had and the one I’m looking forward to, rather than fretting about whether or not I’ll get there before lunch
Thursday, 27 October 2011
Another frustrating day of home-hunting. The flat I looked at was horrid - I assumed it was the whole ground floor, but some fucker has managed to squeeze two so-called one bedroom flats out of it. The bedroom was OK, but the other room included the kitchen and if I'd put my sofa and table in it you'd have had to stand sideways to squeeze between them. Today's near miss was in the same road as my friends M&S, in a terrace so gorgeous and unusual I've googled it and have learned that it was built in 1870, in the Italianate style. Aw maaaaan. I want to live there. Again it had the big rooms, high ceilings, fabulous windows, manageable rent. But it was on the second floor (third in American). I don't know why I got stuck on it - most agents have some kind of list and I'd spent the whole day dismissing anything above or below ground floor without noticing anything else about them. I decided it was because I'd done enough, long since and now I should stop and go home, but I almost cried about having to say that one was 'no good'.
And what pisses me off is that the two near misses haven't made it to the internet on any of the lettings pages - I've been in the office before they got that far. None of the agents have contacted me with any flats, though I've now been signed up with some for over a week and when I call in they have ones I've not heard of. There's a two mile stretch of road through the city that has dozens of letting agents strung along it. It's taken me six hours over two days to call in on them all. Some are national chains, some are ramshackle independent operations - any of them may or may not have my flat. In one place there was an older guy on the phone and a younger woman who invited me to sit but then said they had nothing to suit. As we were going through my spiel the guy started listening and butted in to mention tenants who were moving out of here in December and here in January. "Hassle me," said the woman. "Keep calling to make sure I remember you." But there's another road with a great long stretch of them too, that I haven't even looked at. Monday I shall do that.
I viewed a one bedroom house as well. Fuck me. That was even smaller than the flat I'd seen. Space.
I've got one to look at tomorrow - it's terrible - I started writing this three hours ago and keep thinking of different things to google in this search and each one throws up more and more, none of them of a decent size on the ground floor for a decent rent.
In the past I would have gambled. I still have a few (a very few, few enough to be declared and discounted by the benefits mob) thousand quid. I could say to myself, fuck this. I deserve to live in a decent place - I'm not going to live like a student again, now am I going to squeeze myself into a shoebox. I'll pay the extra few hundred (gulp) it will take to live somewhere decent and I'll just fucking have to find a way of keeping going. I commit to the belief that I live in a nice home and make it happen. Maybe I go two bedroom and (illegally) let out a room to a nice serious post-grad student, or take in language students for five days at a time.
Oh God, it's 1.50 and I've just found a place and sent an email. Tow bedrooms - fuck it, eh.
And what pisses me off is that the two near misses haven't made it to the internet on any of the lettings pages - I've been in the office before they got that far. None of the agents have contacted me with any flats, though I've now been signed up with some for over a week and when I call in they have ones I've not heard of. There's a two mile stretch of road through the city that has dozens of letting agents strung along it. It's taken me six hours over two days to call in on them all. Some are national chains, some are ramshackle independent operations - any of them may or may not have my flat. In one place there was an older guy on the phone and a younger woman who invited me to sit but then said they had nothing to suit. As we were going through my spiel the guy started listening and butted in to mention tenants who were moving out of here in December and here in January. "Hassle me," said the woman. "Keep calling to make sure I remember you." But there's another road with a great long stretch of them too, that I haven't even looked at. Monday I shall do that.
I viewed a one bedroom house as well. Fuck me. That was even smaller than the flat I'd seen. Space.
I've got one to look at tomorrow - it's terrible - I started writing this three hours ago and keep thinking of different things to google in this search and each one throws up more and more, none of them of a decent size on the ground floor for a decent rent.
In the past I would have gambled. I still have a few (a very few, few enough to be declared and discounted by the benefits mob) thousand quid. I could say to myself, fuck this. I deserve to live in a decent place - I'm not going to live like a student again, now am I going to squeeze myself into a shoebox. I'll pay the extra few hundred (gulp) it will take to live somewhere decent and I'll just fucking have to find a way of keeping going. I commit to the belief that I live in a nice home and make it happen. Maybe I go two bedroom and (illegally) let out a room to a nice serious post-grad student, or take in language students for five days at a time.
Oh God, it's 1.50 and I've just found a place and sent an email. Tow bedrooms - fuck it, eh.
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
There's been some emailing between me and my long lost cousin. I just offered to go and meet her - she lives about four hours away, but my old friend D lives twenty miles from her and says I can stay at hers and go from there.
I have this vision of our two dead mothers. Two sisters, Barbara and Brenda, who both died in their early twenties, who both left baby girls. And now (or soon at least), here we are, two middle-aged, motherless women, sitting on a bench somewhere, making our mothers happy. We made it, look at us, we're in our fifties, proper grown-ups. Can they see us? Have they grown older and wiser ahead of us, or is my mother still twenty-two? It's hard to imagine twenty-whatever-year-olds in the 1950s being as dippy as the modern ones (no disrespect, honest). They'd had rationing for most of their lives, no central heating, outside toilet - they missed so much. I can't help but believe it would please them, it will please them - how could it not? - to see us, their daughters, together at last.
Which isn't expressing a belief about what happens after death so much as a hope. All I believe is that we don't know, any of us, but some of us are optimistic, in a vague and incoherent fashion.
Anyway, apart from that I did some serious estate agent visiting today - two hours of it. For a while I had an appointment to view an amazingly awesome sounding flat in one of the most, if not the most beautiful Georgian terraces in the city, with a blissful, majestic front, steps away from the sea. Aw man, we'd written it down and everything and then I said, unasked, that I had a cat. No deal. The agent phoned the landlord to press my case but they weren't interested. No pets, no exceptions. So close, so fucking close.
I kept going and have actually got a place to view tomorrow, but I'm not as enthusiastic. It's a dive in comparison, but it's still a Georgian terrace so the rooms should be big and it's only one block up from the beach. You can see the sea from the doorstep, if not from indoors, well enough to tell how high the tide is and how rough it is. I like that - it's different every day. Back in the wind. Hmm...
There's still a whole load of agents I haven't been to that I'm going to try and hit tomorrow before I go to the viewing. I've started doing the Om Gum Ganapatyei Namaha mantra again - for help in the removal of obstacles from one's path. I let the other one slip when I went to Daughter's - it doesn't seem to occur to me to keep going with it there, which is tricky when aiming for forty consecutive days, considering how often I go there.
Grateful for: feeling supported, not alone in my endeavours; a great session with R (counsellor) today; a good long nap when I got in, with the cat, the bloody, flat-losing cat, all snuggled up and purring next to me; having had the opportunity to mother my children; hearing the rain lashing down on my poor, dry, neglected garden.
Sweet dreams xx
I have this vision of our two dead mothers. Two sisters, Barbara and Brenda, who both died in their early twenties, who both left baby girls. And now (or soon at least), here we are, two middle-aged, motherless women, sitting on a bench somewhere, making our mothers happy. We made it, look at us, we're in our fifties, proper grown-ups. Can they see us? Have they grown older and wiser ahead of us, or is my mother still twenty-two? It's hard to imagine twenty-whatever-year-olds in the 1950s being as dippy as the modern ones (no disrespect, honest). They'd had rationing for most of their lives, no central heating, outside toilet - they missed so much. I can't help but believe it would please them, it will please them - how could it not? - to see us, their daughters, together at last.
Which isn't expressing a belief about what happens after death so much as a hope. All I believe is that we don't know, any of us, but some of us are optimistic, in a vague and incoherent fashion.
Anyway, apart from that I did some serious estate agent visiting today - two hours of it. For a while I had an appointment to view an amazingly awesome sounding flat in one of the most, if not the most beautiful Georgian terraces in the city, with a blissful, majestic front, steps away from the sea. Aw man, we'd written it down and everything and then I said, unasked, that I had a cat. No deal. The agent phoned the landlord to press my case but they weren't interested. No pets, no exceptions. So close, so fucking close.
I kept going and have actually got a place to view tomorrow, but I'm not as enthusiastic. It's a dive in comparison, but it's still a Georgian terrace so the rooms should be big and it's only one block up from the beach. You can see the sea from the doorstep, if not from indoors, well enough to tell how high the tide is and how rough it is. I like that - it's different every day. Back in the wind. Hmm...
There's still a whole load of agents I haven't been to that I'm going to try and hit tomorrow before I go to the viewing. I've started doing the Om Gum Ganapatyei Namaha mantra again - for help in the removal of obstacles from one's path. I let the other one slip when I went to Daughter's - it doesn't seem to occur to me to keep going with it there, which is tricky when aiming for forty consecutive days, considering how often I go there.
Grateful for: feeling supported, not alone in my endeavours; a great session with R (counsellor) today; a good long nap when I got in, with the cat, the bloody, flat-losing cat, all snuggled up and purring next to me; having had the opportunity to mother my children; hearing the rain lashing down on my poor, dry, neglected garden.
Sweet dreams xx
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
If I were a rich girl
Today was a big-time duvet day. I did get up to make my grandson some breakfast before Bloke came and took him home to his mummy, but went straight back to bed and stayed there till it got dark again.
Spent a lot of time hunting online for a flat. I've not yet seen what I want, where I want it, at a price I'm able to pay, and I'm finding it impossible to decide which aspects to surrender. Infuriatingly, if I wasn't insisting on ground floor I could easily get everything else, but what about elder daughter? Like I say, infuriating. I think I'm going to stop ruling out places which have a small flight of steps up to the front door, on the basis that with my help she's been able to manage the steps out of her place, no matter how bad her legs have been. Not a whole between-two-floors flight, but some. There are masses of old buildings in this city, but virtually all of them have steps up to allow for a lower ground floor. Steps down are too steep and narrow (servants' steps), but the ones going up will just have to be manageable, unless the gorgeous goddess of affordable housing wishes to shine a kindly light on me and my endeavours to find a home fit for all my family.
Location is the other option for flexibility. I've been fixed on living near the beach, within easy walking distance - I'm only three-quarters of a mile away now, but coming back is all uphill, which has been far more of a deterrent than I anticipated when I moved here. But while I think living right on the front would enhance the quality of life, I don't really think it'll necessarily be diminished by continuing not to. I've decided while writing that I shall give it till the end of the month, holding out for the dream home, then start considering more options. It makes my bloody head reel, I tell you.
Today was my sister's twins' birthday, so it would have been Ma's 91st as well. Terrible. I wanted to phone sis but couldn't somehow.
That's all.
Spent a lot of time hunting online for a flat. I've not yet seen what I want, where I want it, at a price I'm able to pay, and I'm finding it impossible to decide which aspects to surrender. Infuriatingly, if I wasn't insisting on ground floor I could easily get everything else, but what about elder daughter? Like I say, infuriating. I think I'm going to stop ruling out places which have a small flight of steps up to the front door, on the basis that with my help she's been able to manage the steps out of her place, no matter how bad her legs have been. Not a whole between-two-floors flight, but some. There are masses of old buildings in this city, but virtually all of them have steps up to allow for a lower ground floor. Steps down are too steep and narrow (servants' steps), but the ones going up will just have to be manageable, unless the gorgeous goddess of affordable housing wishes to shine a kindly light on me and my endeavours to find a home fit for all my family.
Location is the other option for flexibility. I've been fixed on living near the beach, within easy walking distance - I'm only three-quarters of a mile away now, but coming back is all uphill, which has been far more of a deterrent than I anticipated when I moved here. But while I think living right on the front would enhance the quality of life, I don't really think it'll necessarily be diminished by continuing not to. I've decided while writing that I shall give it till the end of the month, holding out for the dream home, then start considering more options. It makes my bloody head reel, I tell you.
Today was my sister's twins' birthday, so it would have been Ma's 91st as well. Terrible. I wanted to phone sis but couldn't somehow.
That's all.
Monday, 24 October 2011
Keep our teeth nice and clean
I've been a good granny today, by and large, though I may not win any prizes for hair care:
While we were waiting for my acupuncture session, Grandson took one picture of me with each of the different settings on my camera and it's galling to admit that the one above is the most flattering. I'm gonna start looking for my hairbrush tomorrow, honest.
Some of us climbed trees in the park:
and some of us didn't.
It's been a good day - good pacing. Bloke brought GS back at about 11, just after I'd woken up. They brought me coffee in bed and we all hung out in my bedroom for quite a while, with the Bobcat right in the middle, purring loudly.
Bloke went off to do some work and me and GS got into our rhythm of amiable bickering and point scoring. He's cool to mooch about with - spots things I'd missed, like squirrels popping in and out of a hollow log and a cat in the kids' playground. He's much happier if I don't try and initiate the conversation - we just bimble along in comfortable silence then he'll come out with, "Granny, have you noticed that you can't tell the difference between boys and girls much more here than where I live?" which leads to a nice long analysis of clothes, hair, posture, city vs village, and god knows what else, with reference to everyone who catches our eye. In the end he said he still preferred it where he lives, where a girl is a girl and looks like one and vice versa, but he's twelve - he's sensitive to all that.
He's going home tomorrow - Grandad's taking him. I just don't have it in me. It's the computer games that kill it, that and the all day kids' TV. I don't have the energy to constantly wrestle him away from them and come up with alternative activities. My theory on childhood is that boredom generates creativity - given the choice I'd ban all the electronics, safe in the knowledge that he'd come up with something to do, but it's too hard when they're here. I'm just too tired and he'll play/watch all day unless I stop him. So he's better off at home with some mates and his bike. Shame though. I hope to do better next time, when I'll be in my new home, wherever that turns out to be and there'll be all sorts to explore.
My task for tomorrow is to read this fab book:
which I borrowed from my art teacher, with a view to doing some outdoor drawing/painting. Right at the beginning she says that most children (and some adult artists), are mainly concerned with form/shape/outline, whereas most (but not all), adult artists see things in terms of light and shade. This was such a relief to me. Most art teaching also assumes that tones are the most important thing, but I have a real struggle with all aspects of it. I shall continue to try and improve my use of light, but I won't obsess and get depressed about my struggle with it. Instead I will try and do lots more really free drawing, without considering that at all if it doesn't come spontaneously. That's the plan, at any rate, though when I read through this blog I am astounded at the plans I've had, most of which vanish into the ether the moment I've written them down.
When I googled that book to see when it was written (1966) and then clicked on images to see what the author had actually painted, a lot of pics from Victoria Wood's Made on TV (especially Acorn Antiques) came up on the first couple of pages. This is bollocks.
Grateful for: a good day with GS; the end of the feeling that in the immediate future more will be required of me than I can give without re-emptying my tiny supplies of energy; a growing feeling of excitement about moving; a productive chat with the nice housing benefit officer; that group I did, that taught me how to feel all right; and feeling a bit optimistic about ED.
Sweet dreams xxx
While we were waiting for my acupuncture session, Grandson took one picture of me with each of the different settings on my camera and it's galling to admit that the one above is the most flattering. I'm gonna start looking for my hairbrush tomorrow, honest.
Some of us climbed trees in the park:
and some of us didn't.
It's been a good day - good pacing. Bloke brought GS back at about 11, just after I'd woken up. They brought me coffee in bed and we all hung out in my bedroom for quite a while, with the Bobcat right in the middle, purring loudly.
Bloke went off to do some work and me and GS got into our rhythm of amiable bickering and point scoring. He's cool to mooch about with - spots things I'd missed, like squirrels popping in and out of a hollow log and a cat in the kids' playground. He's much happier if I don't try and initiate the conversation - we just bimble along in comfortable silence then he'll come out with, "Granny, have you noticed that you can't tell the difference between boys and girls much more here than where I live?" which leads to a nice long analysis of clothes, hair, posture, city vs village, and god knows what else, with reference to everyone who catches our eye. In the end he said he still preferred it where he lives, where a girl is a girl and looks like one and vice versa, but he's twelve - he's sensitive to all that.
He's going home tomorrow - Grandad's taking him. I just don't have it in me. It's the computer games that kill it, that and the all day kids' TV. I don't have the energy to constantly wrestle him away from them and come up with alternative activities. My theory on childhood is that boredom generates creativity - given the choice I'd ban all the electronics, safe in the knowledge that he'd come up with something to do, but it's too hard when they're here. I'm just too tired and he'll play/watch all day unless I stop him. So he's better off at home with some mates and his bike. Shame though. I hope to do better next time, when I'll be in my new home, wherever that turns out to be and there'll be all sorts to explore.
My task for tomorrow is to read this fab book:
which I borrowed from my art teacher, with a view to doing some outdoor drawing/painting. Right at the beginning she says that most children (and some adult artists), are mainly concerned with form/shape/outline, whereas most (but not all), adult artists see things in terms of light and shade. This was such a relief to me. Most art teaching also assumes that tones are the most important thing, but I have a real struggle with all aspects of it. I shall continue to try and improve my use of light, but I won't obsess and get depressed about my struggle with it. Instead I will try and do lots more really free drawing, without considering that at all if it doesn't come spontaneously. That's the plan, at any rate, though when I read through this blog I am astounded at the plans I've had, most of which vanish into the ether the moment I've written them down.
When I googled that book to see when it was written (1966) and then clicked on images to see what the author had actually painted, a lot of pics from Victoria Wood's Made on TV (especially Acorn Antiques) came up on the first couple of pages. This is bollocks.
Grateful for: a good day with GS; the end of the feeling that in the immediate future more will be required of me than I can give without re-emptying my tiny supplies of energy; a growing feeling of excitement about moving; a productive chat with the nice housing benefit officer; that group I did, that taught me how to feel all right; and feeling a bit optimistic about ED.
Sweet dreams xxx
Sunday, 23 October 2011
Sweet on the sofa
Home alone. Grin.
Bloody Younger Daughter is in lurve, which is great and all, but she spent the short time she was here either talking about him or to him on the phone, then fucked back off to London because she missed him.
Grandson and I lit a fire and burned things in the garden - logs, leaves, fennel seed-heads and marshmallows:
Bloke (aka Grandad) came round and we all went on the pier:
and under the pier:
and on the beach:
then I told Grandad I couldn't do any more so he took Grandson back to his for the night. I had a shower, ordered curried goat, peas and rice to be delivered and settled down with a big fat spliff, back on my lovely sofa, in a bit of peace and quiet. Phew.
Now it's an hour of being pleasantly irritated by Downton Abbey and off to bed for me.
Grateful for: ED being dead chirpy on the phone, whizzing up and down the ramp and the road; sleeping cat; email from cousin asking exactly the questions of me that I want to ask her: " i am curious as you are the only blood relative from my mum's side and i dont know many people who experienced the death of a mother when young. How old were you when Barbara died? do you remember her?" (me neither, 15 months and no)
Sweet dreams, dear peeps xx
* waving at person in Texas who reads loads*
Bloody Younger Daughter is in lurve, which is great and all, but she spent the short time she was here either talking about him or to him on the phone, then fucked back off to London because she missed him.
Grandson and I lit a fire and burned things in the garden - logs, leaves, fennel seed-heads and marshmallows:
Bloke (aka Grandad) came round and we all went on the pier:
and under the pier:
and on the beach:
then I told Grandad I couldn't do any more so he took Grandson back to his for the night. I had a shower, ordered curried goat, peas and rice to be delivered and settled down with a big fat spliff, back on my lovely sofa, in a bit of peace and quiet. Phew.
Now it's an hour of being pleasantly irritated by Downton Abbey and off to bed for me.
Grateful for: ED being dead chirpy on the phone, whizzing up and down the ramp and the road; sleeping cat; email from cousin asking exactly the questions of me that I want to ask her: " i am curious as you are the only blood relative from my mum's side and i dont know many people who experienced the death of a mother when young. How old were you when Barbara died? do you remember her?" (me neither, 15 months and no)
Sweet dreams, dear peeps xx
* waving at person in Texas who reads loads*
Saturday, 22 October 2011
I just looked up 'tired' in the thesaurus to see if there were any variations I haven't used in the last few months, but it seems I've covered all of them. Nothing new to say here then.
I did no better at sustaining any of my energy-conserving practises whilst at Elder Daughter's. Managing to shove a few words down here when they were all in bed was my token adherence to keeping things steady - no mantras, no drawing, no naps, no times out. I feel angry about this, though I'm not sure who I'm angry with. As I wrote that down I realised that it's not a 'who' it's just fate, isn't it? Or whatever you like to call it - the way things turn out. ED didn't ask to be in her situation and she certainly didn't ask me to exhaust myself on her behalf - she'd be mortified, distressed and angry herself if she knew. And I do no more than I want to, so it's not her and it's not me but I'd still like to punch someone to make it stop, but it wouldn't, nothing will.
I did good work though. She was scared of the ramp, which despite running the whole length of her plot (leaving the tightest of turning spaces at the end), is still at an angle that makes it seriously hard work to pull herself up. To get from the bottom of the ramp to the road involves several of these tight turns, including one between the corners of the house and the shed where the ground is uneven and there's no space for her to have her hands on the wheels. Uneven paving slabs then jammed up between the rails round the front steps and a cut-back, prickly load of shrubbery, then a sudden change in level between her plot and the road that she actually can't do unaided as, despite being unnoticeable to the able-bodied its just too steep not to tip the chair up. By this morning she'd got it all licked apart from that last bit, so SIL's job tomorrow is to get some concrete and smooth it out. She just needed me to be on guard, to cheer her on and to remind her that everything new is a bit scary.
I keep thinking my heart can't break any more, but it can and it does.
I did no better at sustaining any of my energy-conserving practises whilst at Elder Daughter's. Managing to shove a few words down here when they were all in bed was my token adherence to keeping things steady - no mantras, no drawing, no naps, no times out. I feel angry about this, though I'm not sure who I'm angry with. As I wrote that down I realised that it's not a 'who' it's just fate, isn't it? Or whatever you like to call it - the way things turn out. ED didn't ask to be in her situation and she certainly didn't ask me to exhaust myself on her behalf - she'd be mortified, distressed and angry herself if she knew. And I do no more than I want to, so it's not her and it's not me but I'd still like to punch someone to make it stop, but it wouldn't, nothing will.
I did good work though. She was scared of the ramp, which despite running the whole length of her plot (leaving the tightest of turning spaces at the end), is still at an angle that makes it seriously hard work to pull herself up. To get from the bottom of the ramp to the road involves several of these tight turns, including one between the corners of the house and the shed where the ground is uneven and there's no space for her to have her hands on the wheels. Uneven paving slabs then jammed up between the rails round the front steps and a cut-back, prickly load of shrubbery, then a sudden change in level between her plot and the road that she actually can't do unaided as, despite being unnoticeable to the able-bodied its just too steep not to tip the chair up. By this morning she'd got it all licked apart from that last bit, so SIL's job tomorrow is to get some concrete and smooth it out. She just needed me to be on guard, to cheer her on and to remind her that everything new is a bit scary.
I keep thinking my heart can't break any more, but it can and it does.
Friday, 21 October 2011
Friday night
Another busy day - took daughter to hospital for physio and for the blood test her MS nurse had requested to see whether or not "it's something else". Ho hum.
Had lunch in town and as usual dithered about, doing lots of little errands. Came home and cooked dinner for daughter's family and the neighbours, helped by these three lovely kids who have moved in along the road recently, dumped on their gran. They are 9, 10 and 13 and are turning into daughter's mates, coming in whether grandson is there or not. Really they did most of the cooking, under my instructions - beef stew and dumplings with a trifle-type pud to follow.
The neighbours are a very helpful couple - quite pleasant and jolly till he starts taking the piss out of her and she goes into this poor little me routine, which stops being amusing after a very short time, but sadly once started goes on and on till they eventually fuck off. People are weird. I just wanted to go to bed.
Home tomorrow with grandson and younger daughter arriving too. I predict a crash, but don't see how it can be avoided. It's half term and grandson needs some fun and distraction. He's a very wee soul at the moment, bless him.
The slippers turned up - she'd put them in the washing machine, but still no sign of the Uggs. Weird.
Had lunch in town and as usual dithered about, doing lots of little errands. Came home and cooked dinner for daughter's family and the neighbours, helped by these three lovely kids who have moved in along the road recently, dumped on their gran. They are 9, 10 and 13 and are turning into daughter's mates, coming in whether grandson is there or not. Really they did most of the cooking, under my instructions - beef stew and dumplings with a trifle-type pud to follow.
The neighbours are a very helpful couple - quite pleasant and jolly till he starts taking the piss out of her and she goes into this poor little me routine, which stops being amusing after a very short time, but sadly once started goes on and on till they eventually fuck off. People are weird. I just wanted to go to bed.
Home tomorrow with grandson and younger daughter arriving too. I predict a crash, but don't see how it can be avoided. It's half term and grandson needs some fun and distraction. He's a very wee soul at the moment, bless him.
The slippers turned up - she'd put them in the washing machine, but still no sign of the Uggs. Weird.
Thursday, 20 October 2011
Are you ready, boots?
It's been a long, long day. I kept waking up during the night feeling really cold, but not quite enough to get me out of bed waking other people up to find me more blankets. The temp suddenly dropped down to almost freezing and these mobile homes don't keep the heat in at all. Tonight I have a big pile of stuff ready to put on me bed - I'll probably boil myself to death.
The other major irritation is missing footwear. Daughter's feet are permanently cold, which is why I bought her some Uggs last winter. No sign of them anywhere, and in a home 45 by 15 feet, I think we can say we have fully searched the place. Then this evening her slippers, which she was wearing yesterday, have also vanished. WTF? We've turned the place over again and there's no fucking sign of them. Someone's pissing about - presumably grandson or one of his mates, but we can't get an admission out of anyone. This could drive me crazy if I let it, but I won't. I won't, I'm telling you, I bloody won't.
And I left my smoke at home. I'm wondering if I am addicted - though I don't really think so. I never take it abroad on holiday with me, but I am finding it hard here. It's a bit stressy here though, especially with a shoe thief on the loose. I might break into the booze cupboard.
Very agitated.
Laters x
The other major irritation is missing footwear. Daughter's feet are permanently cold, which is why I bought her some Uggs last winter. No sign of them anywhere, and in a home 45 by 15 feet, I think we can say we have fully searched the place. Then this evening her slippers, which she was wearing yesterday, have also vanished. WTF? We've turned the place over again and there's no fucking sign of them. Someone's pissing about - presumably grandson or one of his mates, but we can't get an admission out of anyone. This could drive me crazy if I let it, but I won't. I won't, I'm telling you, I bloody won't.
And I left my smoke at home. I'm wondering if I am addicted - though I don't really think so. I never take it abroad on holiday with me, but I am finding it hard here. It's a bit stressy here though, especially with a shoe thief on the loose. I might break into the booze cupboard.
Very agitated.
Laters x
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
Up at daughter's, knackered after long drive, walk in the woods and cooking two-course dinner. She's well though, back to walking a bit around the house. Very happy to have her Ma, bless her. I brought the firepot and some logs with me and lit it on the deck outside the back door. Bloody lovely. Early night now.
Grateful for: daughter's better health; the scent of wood smoke in my hair; having a grandson who, despite being a bit pre-teen hormonal, still hugs his granny with enthusiasm in front of his mates; furry slippers; apple crumble and ice cream
Sweet dreams xx
Grateful for: daughter's better health; the scent of wood smoke in my hair; having a grandson who, despite being a bit pre-teen hormonal, still hugs his granny with enthusiasm in front of his mates; furry slippers; apple crumble and ice cream
Sweet dreams xx
Tuesday, 18 October 2011
You make me wanna shout
I went in quite a few letting agents today, in search of my dream home. None of them would put me on the books - they don't have books - it's a landlord's market - far more tenants seeking flats than landlords seeking tenants, so the agents aren't prepared to do anything. Fuckers.
What makes it harder is that none of them answer their phones - you go straight to voicemail to leave a message that never gets a reply. Now I've been in the offices I see that they are all speaking on their phones, all the bloody time. I didn't get round many of them - there are a ridiculous number, dozens and dozens - why? But it makes me crazy that I can't speak to them on the phone, that the email alerts come too late, that the only way I'm going to find a place is by trudging round on a daily basis. Or maybe I'll try again to get some of them to keep me in mind as a tenant - I didn't even sit down in any offices today. Maybe I should take cake. Ach, I don't know. I'm going up to daughter's tomorrow, so that's my lot for this week.
Art was hard too. Honestly, that teacher. First lesson using colour and what does she give us to paint? Reflections:
My bit was this:
I don't know why I didn't do the top bit - I didn't even notice till the end of the class - I just painted what I did and left the rest. It was hard. My ability to look has grown, but I still don't have much control of what goes on the paper.
Laters xx
What makes it harder is that none of them answer their phones - you go straight to voicemail to leave a message that never gets a reply. Now I've been in the offices I see that they are all speaking on their phones, all the bloody time. I didn't get round many of them - there are a ridiculous number, dozens and dozens - why? But it makes me crazy that I can't speak to them on the phone, that the email alerts come too late, that the only way I'm going to find a place is by trudging round on a daily basis. Or maybe I'll try again to get some of them to keep me in mind as a tenant - I didn't even sit down in any offices today. Maybe I should take cake. Ach, I don't know. I'm going up to daughter's tomorrow, so that's my lot for this week.
Art was hard too. Honestly, that teacher. First lesson using colour and what does she give us to paint? Reflections:
My bit was this:
I don't know why I didn't do the top bit - I didn't even notice till the end of the class - I just painted what I did and left the rest. It was hard. My ability to look has grown, but I still don't have much control of what goes on the paper.
Laters xx
Monday, 17 October 2011
Out of the mystic
List form, starting chronological, but liable to drift:
1) Woken by phone call from Elder daughter's MS Nurse, arranging a meeting of everyone involved in November. ED, SIL, me, MSN, OT, and a whole load of other well-acronymed folk.
2) Doctor - who said I could really do with a month off, but meanwhile to try and take it as steady as poss.
3)Acupuncture - said much the same, but wants me to do enriching, replenishing things and to take 20 minute naps. If I let myself fall asleep in the day I tend to be out for hours and hours, so I will try this. Forgot today.
4) J came round for tea and cake and to discuss the fact that the scales have fallen from her eyes at last regarding her BF, but sadly his daughter, son-in-law and grandson are all now living in J's house. He has many good qualities. the BF, but ultimately he's a pisshead and his life revolves around getting wasted, yawn. Glad the end is in sight.
5) Text from ED, whose ramp was fitted!!!!! She can get outside! Onto the road!!! Or into a car driven by a volunteer!!
6) Did healing mantra
7) Arranged to have coffee with K after tomorrow's art class - he lives in the new eco-friendly flats above the place the class is held, so this shouldn't be an expenditure of too much energy. Looking forward to seeing him.
8) Call from Younger Daughter asking me to read the launch statement of her arts magazine's second edition (the first one having been a kind of trailer edition looking for contributors), which she needs by tomorrow lunchtime but hasn't written yet. Yeah, yeah.
9) Email from long lost cousin!!!!
10) Email from MG, just an attachment of a poem she's written (she's not prone to poetry, this is a first), expressing her existential despair quite powerfully, but with a few details (clumsy word order, telling not showing), that the English teacher in me wants to point out, but probably won't. She said she's going to call me in the morning.
11) Phone call from grandson (on bad connection), all upset because one of his back teeth is almost out but not quite and he twisted it and it hurts and he can't sleep and he can't swallow painkillers. Well, darling, it's about time you learned. A moment's unpleasantness, then the pain goes. Have a hot water bottle for the meantime. Thought: where's Mummy? and step-dad?
So I'm only just getting round to thinking, bloody hell, my never met first cousin, only living person with a blood connection via my real mother. Real mother died when I was a baby, leaving a sister and a brother, both of whom also died in their early twenties. My aunt had thought she was unable to have children so adopted, then immediately got pregnant, had the baby and died soon after. Her husband and my dad didn't keep in touch and I didn't even know what sex these cousins were, until my brother started searching for a long lost relative on his mother's side of the family. He paid some researcher forty quid and she came back with a phone number within the hour.
I emailed her as soon as I heard this - quick, before I could change my mind, and told her the story with all the names I knew. It took about ten minutes for her to find my uncle and give him my number and there we were, chatting on the phone.
Sadly, the last they'd heard of me was in 1973 when I'd recently married a foreign guy so that he could avoid conscription into his country's army (I may not have mentioned him - I often go years without a thought of him), and I could feel Uncle's initial enthusiasm waning as I summed up the key events of the past thirty odd years. You know, the marriages, the divorces, the kids - it all seemed like the right thing to do at the time (I was very stupid), but it doesn't come over well in a few sentences. I discovered that my adopted cousin was male, living in Wales with a family and that my 'blood' cousin was a female who had just bought a boat "in another of her hare-brained schemes" (liking the sound of her).
I had a bit of an email flurry with Male Cousin, but it fizzled out as I was sliding into Breakdown 2 (This time it's serious!). Then a couple of weeks ago, frie3nds-reunited (which I haven't used for years) emailed me and asked if I wanted to 'friend' him. Well - why not? So I did and we had another few emails, but he's a middle aged blokey bloke and I don't care and I don't need another one of those in my life. And it turns out that the blood connection matters to me. If we'd known each other all our lives I don't think it would - they'd both just be my cousins. Maybe if he was a she - I'm rubbish at advancing friendships with blokes.
Then today an email from her, female cousin. Female cousin whose mother also died when she was a baby.
I stopped writing then, and replied to her. Ooh, how exciting! I look at my kids and their cousins and see how Dad flickers through their faces, and Ma through the ones that are hers, and the pics Son brought back from his visit to Venezuela and all that side of his family. I want to see her face - I've always wanted that. I used to make up fantasies about people that looked a little like me - that we'd become friends then discover we were cousins...
So that was today. Not what I'd call restful, though I have spent a lot of it on the sofa.
Laters xx
1) Woken by phone call from Elder daughter's MS Nurse, arranging a meeting of everyone involved in November. ED, SIL, me, MSN, OT, and a whole load of other well-acronymed folk.
2) Doctor - who said I could really do with a month off, but meanwhile to try and take it as steady as poss.
3)Acupuncture - said much the same, but wants me to do enriching, replenishing things and to take 20 minute naps. If I let myself fall asleep in the day I tend to be out for hours and hours, so I will try this. Forgot today.
4) J came round for tea and cake and to discuss the fact that the scales have fallen from her eyes at last regarding her BF, but sadly his daughter, son-in-law and grandson are all now living in J's house. He has many good qualities. the BF, but ultimately he's a pisshead and his life revolves around getting wasted, yawn. Glad the end is in sight.
5) Text from ED, whose ramp was fitted!!!!! She can get outside! Onto the road!!! Or into a car driven by a volunteer!!
6) Did healing mantra
7) Arranged to have coffee with K after tomorrow's art class - he lives in the new eco-friendly flats above the place the class is held, so this shouldn't be an expenditure of too much energy. Looking forward to seeing him.
8) Call from Younger Daughter asking me to read the launch statement of her arts magazine's second edition (the first one having been a kind of trailer edition looking for contributors), which she needs by tomorrow lunchtime but hasn't written yet. Yeah, yeah.
9) Email from long lost cousin!!!!
10) Email from MG, just an attachment of a poem she's written (she's not prone to poetry, this is a first), expressing her existential despair quite powerfully, but with a few details (clumsy word order, telling not showing), that the English teacher in me wants to point out, but probably won't. She said she's going to call me in the morning.
11) Phone call from grandson (on bad connection), all upset because one of his back teeth is almost out but not quite and he twisted it and it hurts and he can't sleep and he can't swallow painkillers. Well, darling, it's about time you learned. A moment's unpleasantness, then the pain goes. Have a hot water bottle for the meantime. Thought: where's Mummy? and step-dad?
So I'm only just getting round to thinking, bloody hell, my never met first cousin, only living person with a blood connection via my real mother. Real mother died when I was a baby, leaving a sister and a brother, both of whom also died in their early twenties. My aunt had thought she was unable to have children so adopted, then immediately got pregnant, had the baby and died soon after. Her husband and my dad didn't keep in touch and I didn't even know what sex these cousins were, until my brother started searching for a long lost relative on his mother's side of the family. He paid some researcher forty quid and she came back with a phone number within the hour.
I emailed her as soon as I heard this - quick, before I could change my mind, and told her the story with all the names I knew. It took about ten minutes for her to find my uncle and give him my number and there we were, chatting on the phone.
Sadly, the last they'd heard of me was in 1973 when I'd recently married a foreign guy so that he could avoid conscription into his country's army (I may not have mentioned him - I often go years without a thought of him), and I could feel Uncle's initial enthusiasm waning as I summed up the key events of the past thirty odd years. You know, the marriages, the divorces, the kids - it all seemed like the right thing to do at the time (I was very stupid), but it doesn't come over well in a few sentences. I discovered that my adopted cousin was male, living in Wales with a family and that my 'blood' cousin was a female who had just bought a boat "in another of her hare-brained schemes" (liking the sound of her).
I had a bit of an email flurry with Male Cousin, but it fizzled out as I was sliding into Breakdown 2 (This time it's serious!). Then a couple of weeks ago, frie3nds-reunited (which I haven't used for years) emailed me and asked if I wanted to 'friend' him. Well - why not? So I did and we had another few emails, but he's a middle aged blokey bloke and I don't care and I don't need another one of those in my life. And it turns out that the blood connection matters to me. If we'd known each other all our lives I don't think it would - they'd both just be my cousins. Maybe if he was a she - I'm rubbish at advancing friendships with blokes.
Then today an email from her, female cousin. Female cousin whose mother also died when she was a baby.
I stopped writing then, and replied to her. Ooh, how exciting! I look at my kids and their cousins and see how Dad flickers through their faces, and Ma through the ones that are hers, and the pics Son brought back from his visit to Venezuela and all that side of his family. I want to see her face - I've always wanted that. I used to make up fantasies about people that looked a little like me - that we'd become friends then discover we were cousins...
So that was today. Not what I'd call restful, though I have spent a lot of it on the sofa.
Laters xx
Sunday, 16 October 2011
We shall overcome
Half watching Downton Abbey, which would be much better if they'd just picked a couple of aspects of WWI to illustrate via the Abbey's inhabitants (both upstairs and downstairs), and not tried to cram everything in. It's all getting a bit Eastenders.
I just read through this new blog of mine (this one you're reading, not another secret one) - it's only been going since Sept, so there's not much, but fucking hell - I am seriously mental. I need to give myself a week lying comatose on the sofa watching shite telly. Or maybe The Wire again, from beginning to end. There's been FAR too much 'I'll just do this, then have a rest afterwards.' Because I CAN manage to do stuff, but completing one minor objective in a day leaves me flat out. Or having two conversations about someone else's problems. I can do two, but after that my brain switiches off, going 'lalalalalala - not listening - can't hear you - system overloaded.' That's the worst part, actually.
Ah well. It was a good weekend. Went to a comedy gig on Friday with MH and Bloke and laughed out loud a lot, especially at the group of three teenagers in front of us who were gaspingly, gigglingly shocked at a lot of the material and the language.
Son arrived late Friday night, slept over and woke me up by bringing me coffee in bed. Lush. Had a day of mooching about with him before he went off to meet his NA guy. He's doing fine on the law course, loves it, is hungry for it and is putting into practice everything he's learned the hard way about keeping things steady. Like seeing his NA guy and his Ma once a fortnight.
Came home to discover that there were protests in 950 cities in 82 countries around the world saying exactly what I've been saying for YEARS - it's the mega-rich versus the rest of us and we ain't gonna take it no more. No idea where it will go - we still don't know what we're FOR, other than an end to this syphoning of the planet's resources and wealth into the hands of an increasingly small elite. But thrilling and exciting stuff, happening in our world, right now.
Today MH came round after some army fitness boot camp malarkey she's been doing in the park, and I made brunch. That was when weariness defeated me, after she left. I managed to get out and move my car off the double yellow lines, but not before I'd got another bloody parking ticket. I think that makes five since I've lived here, at thirty quid a pop.
Drawings. Last night - what I could see from my sofa - footstool full of stuff:
Ditto tonight, but after a big spliff and decision to stop trying so hard:
I notice that in the intervening hours I've picked up the baccy pouch, one of the shells has fallen off (the only one I could draw), I'm wearing the hair clip (I did cooking) and there's a different (but identical) coffee cup at a slightly different angle.
Then I moved it aside to draw my new slippers - worn for the first time today, a week since purchase:
Grateful for: having lived in this nice little house for four years (maybe five); having achieved some kind of basic tidiness and done nearly all the backlog of washing, including putting it away; Bloke coming round and trying to mend the airbed; the occupiers, sleeping in tents for us all; my digital camera.
Sweet dreams xx
I just read through this new blog of mine (this one you're reading, not another secret one) - it's only been going since Sept, so there's not much, but fucking hell - I am seriously mental. I need to give myself a week lying comatose on the sofa watching shite telly. Or maybe The Wire again, from beginning to end. There's been FAR too much 'I'll just do this, then have a rest afterwards.' Because I CAN manage to do stuff, but completing one minor objective in a day leaves me flat out. Or having two conversations about someone else's problems. I can do two, but after that my brain switiches off, going 'lalalalalala - not listening - can't hear you - system overloaded.' That's the worst part, actually.
Ah well. It was a good weekend. Went to a comedy gig on Friday with MH and Bloke and laughed out loud a lot, especially at the group of three teenagers in front of us who were gaspingly, gigglingly shocked at a lot of the material and the language.
Son arrived late Friday night, slept over and woke me up by bringing me coffee in bed. Lush. Had a day of mooching about with him before he went off to meet his NA guy. He's doing fine on the law course, loves it, is hungry for it and is putting into practice everything he's learned the hard way about keeping things steady. Like seeing his NA guy and his Ma once a fortnight.
Came home to discover that there were protests in 950 cities in 82 countries around the world saying exactly what I've been saying for YEARS - it's the mega-rich versus the rest of us and we ain't gonna take it no more. No idea where it will go - we still don't know what we're FOR, other than an end to this syphoning of the planet's resources and wealth into the hands of an increasingly small elite. But thrilling and exciting stuff, happening in our world, right now.
Today MH came round after some army fitness boot camp malarkey she's been doing in the park, and I made brunch. That was when weariness defeated me, after she left. I managed to get out and move my car off the double yellow lines, but not before I'd got another bloody parking ticket. I think that makes five since I've lived here, at thirty quid a pop.
Drawings. Last night - what I could see from my sofa - footstool full of stuff:
Ditto tonight, but after a big spliff and decision to stop trying so hard:
I notice that in the intervening hours I've picked up the baccy pouch, one of the shells has fallen off (the only one I could draw), I'm wearing the hair clip (I did cooking) and there's a different (but identical) coffee cup at a slightly different angle.
Then I moved it aside to draw my new slippers - worn for the first time today, a week since purchase:
Grateful for: having lived in this nice little house for four years (maybe five); having achieved some kind of basic tidiness and done nearly all the backlog of washing, including putting it away; Bloke coming round and trying to mend the airbed; the occupiers, sleeping in tents for us all; my digital camera.
Sweet dreams xx
Saturday, 15 October 2011
I've been doing good on the distractions - until I sit down here to write and it all wells up, but no.
I've spent a lot of time painting, from photos, which Younger Daughter has just informed me is Very Hard. She recommends copying other people's paintings if I haven't got it in me to go and paint outside.
I don't offer these pics, by the way, with any sense that they constitute good painting. I just like seeing how I've progressed since doing the Artist's Way course, and allowing myself to do lots and lots of bad drawing and painting as the only possible precursor to the possibility of doing anything good. That was ten years ago, at the age of forty-seven - ooh, that just made me think of Lucy Jordan, who "at the age of thirty seven/ she realised she'd never/ ride through Paris/in a sports car/ with the warm wind in her hair" which is one of the most consoling songs ever, when all seems dire (although I must admit I've never listened to the rest of the lyrics as those ones send me off somewhere else and now I discover that it's quite depressing. Jesus - I've been listening to that for over thirty years and never heard the rest of the lyrics. Yikes.).
But when I first heard that song, when I was knee-deep in nappies, I had already ridden in a sport's car through Paris, in 1976, at the age of twenty-two. The wind in my hair was bitterly cold, but it was a January dawn and the streets were empty and sparkling with frost as the manager of a long-distance lorry firm drove me from the depot to the railway station.
I was trying to get to Madrid (and sweet, sweet Jose) but had fucked up the travel details and it was only after the ten pm ferry had left Newhaven that I discovered that Dieppe would be closed when we arrived at 2 am. No trains, no sleeping in the station or the ferry terminal, everyone chucked out into the cold winter night. Luckily, after a mere moment or two of utter panic (I only had about a fiver on me, couldn't afford a b&b), I walked into a lorry driver, blurted out my woes and he gave me a lift to Paris.
We had to take a detour to Rheims to deliver the medical notes of one of his colleagues to the hospital where said colleague was hovering between life and death for reasons I no longer remember. He said he'd take me to the depot in Paris as someone would be bound to be going to Madrid and I'd be able to cash in my train ticket.
It was dark all the way to Rheims. All I could see was the small strip of road in the headlights, from way up high in the cab. When we reached the hospital, I climbed into the bunk behind the cab, rolled and smoked a small joint and fell asleep. I knew that theoretically this was risky behaviour, but the driver seemed just an ordinary working bloke, and what else was I going to do?
I woke up just as the sky was starting to lighten, in the depot, full of looming, intercontinental articulated lorries, and followed the driver into a steamy prefab hut, where loads of bleary-eyed blokes were smoking fags and drinking coffee. They all stopped talking and watched as my guy went to the desk and spoke to the manager in rapid and unexpectedly proficient-sounding French, obviously telling my tale, as all eyes moved from him to me, and then to the boss just as I recognised the word 'Madrid'. Bossman looked through the papers on his clipboard and said a name. The eyes all settled on a mild looking bloke, whose own eyes showed a rapid and disturbing flash of something nasty, but the boss immediately said, "Non!" and I was relieved to see that my guy and most of the others were in tacit agreement. There was a flurry of conversation then my guy said in English that no one wouldn't let their granny go round the block with him, the only driver heading for Madrid, but that the manager would take me to the station if I wanted.
I probably said the seventies version of 'whatever', as I was a particularly ungracious person back then, and I wasn't remotely interested in the sights he went out of his way to show me.
But whenever I hear that song I remember that journey with retrospective pleasure and gratitude and know I've had an adventurous life and it's not over yet.
I've spent a lot of time painting, from photos, which Younger Daughter has just informed me is Very Hard. She recommends copying other people's paintings if I haven't got it in me to go and paint outside.
I don't offer these pics, by the way, with any sense that they constitute good painting. I just like seeing how I've progressed since doing the Artist's Way course, and allowing myself to do lots and lots of bad drawing and painting as the only possible precursor to the possibility of doing anything good. That was ten years ago, at the age of forty-seven - ooh, that just made me think of Lucy Jordan, who "at the age of thirty seven/ she realised she'd never/ ride through Paris/in a sports car/ with the warm wind in her hair" which is one of the most consoling songs ever, when all seems dire (although I must admit I've never listened to the rest of the lyrics as those ones send me off somewhere else and now I discover that it's quite depressing. Jesus - I've been listening to that for over thirty years and never heard the rest of the lyrics. Yikes.).
But when I first heard that song, when I was knee-deep in nappies, I had already ridden in a sport's car through Paris, in 1976, at the age of twenty-two. The wind in my hair was bitterly cold, but it was a January dawn and the streets were empty and sparkling with frost as the manager of a long-distance lorry firm drove me from the depot to the railway station.
I was trying to get to Madrid (and sweet, sweet Jose) but had fucked up the travel details and it was only after the ten pm ferry had left Newhaven that I discovered that Dieppe would be closed when we arrived at 2 am. No trains, no sleeping in the station or the ferry terminal, everyone chucked out into the cold winter night. Luckily, after a mere moment or two of utter panic (I only had about a fiver on me, couldn't afford a b&b), I walked into a lorry driver, blurted out my woes and he gave me a lift to Paris.
We had to take a detour to Rheims to deliver the medical notes of one of his colleagues to the hospital where said colleague was hovering between life and death for reasons I no longer remember. He said he'd take me to the depot in Paris as someone would be bound to be going to Madrid and I'd be able to cash in my train ticket.
It was dark all the way to Rheims. All I could see was the small strip of road in the headlights, from way up high in the cab. When we reached the hospital, I climbed into the bunk behind the cab, rolled and smoked a small joint and fell asleep. I knew that theoretically this was risky behaviour, but the driver seemed just an ordinary working bloke, and what else was I going to do?
I woke up just as the sky was starting to lighten, in the depot, full of looming, intercontinental articulated lorries, and followed the driver into a steamy prefab hut, where loads of bleary-eyed blokes were smoking fags and drinking coffee. They all stopped talking and watched as my guy went to the desk and spoke to the manager in rapid and unexpectedly proficient-sounding French, obviously telling my tale, as all eyes moved from him to me, and then to the boss just as I recognised the word 'Madrid'. Bossman looked through the papers on his clipboard and said a name. The eyes all settled on a mild looking bloke, whose own eyes showed a rapid and disturbing flash of something nasty, but the boss immediately said, "Non!" and I was relieved to see that my guy and most of the others were in tacit agreement. There was a flurry of conversation then my guy said in English that no one wouldn't let their granny go round the block with him, the only driver heading for Madrid, but that the manager would take me to the station if I wanted.
I probably said the seventies version of 'whatever', as I was a particularly ungracious person back then, and I wasn't remotely interested in the sights he went out of his way to show me.
But whenever I hear that song I remember that journey with retrospective pleasure and gratitude and know I've had an adventurous life and it's not over yet.
Thursday, 13 October 2011
Wouldn't it be nice?
Today's explosion, lobbed into the limpid pool of my life (har har), was courtesy of the MS Nurse. She called me late afternoon to see if I could take Elder Daughter for a blood test as the neurologist thinks her progression is weird, even for MS which is totally idiosyncratic anyway. He thinks it may be something else. There was a brief pause after she said that - the opportunity for me to ask what he thought it might be. I didn't take it. A kaleidoscope of alternate futures flashed through my mind, the shutters went down and I asked about some other detail.
I haven't spoken to ED so I don't know how she's taking it, but the alternating rushes of hope and despair are unbearable for me, and as the results will take "a few weeks" to come through, I'm going to write about it here if I can and then try and distract myself from it as much as possible to stop me going proper mental.
It could be worse than MS - it could be terminal, but that's a bridge we'll only cross if we have to and not before. It could be something else as well as bloody MS. It could be more or less the same level of bastardry - god knows what, I have no idea - there are gazillions of rare diseases and syndrome out there - and it could turn out that yes, she has MS, it's just being even weirder than usual.
But it could be, it's not impossible for it to be, something which is curable, which is way way beyond anything any of us have dared hope for. Except ED. Every single time I ask her if there's anything she wants or needs, she always, always replies, "Yes, a new body," which either breaks my heart or irritates the shit out of me, depending on how it's going. Her inability to get her head round it in any way at all has been mind-boggling. She keeps saying, "It's wrong - I'm only thirty-three," as if that's got anything to do with anything. But maybe she's been right. Maybe she will walk again, and maybe run and dance and swim and chase the waves on the beach and clatter up and down the stairs.
We'll see.
I haven't spoken to ED so I don't know how she's taking it, but the alternating rushes of hope and despair are unbearable for me, and as the results will take "a few weeks" to come through, I'm going to write about it here if I can and then try and distract myself from it as much as possible to stop me going proper mental.
It could be worse than MS - it could be terminal, but that's a bridge we'll only cross if we have to and not before. It could be something else as well as bloody MS. It could be more or less the same level of bastardry - god knows what, I have no idea - there are gazillions of rare diseases and syndrome out there - and it could turn out that yes, she has MS, it's just being even weirder than usual.
But it could be, it's not impossible for it to be, something which is curable, which is way way beyond anything any of us have dared hope for. Except ED. Every single time I ask her if there's anything she wants or needs, she always, always replies, "Yes, a new body," which either breaks my heart or irritates the shit out of me, depending on how it's going. Her inability to get her head round it in any way at all has been mind-boggling. She keeps saying, "It's wrong - I'm only thirty-three," as if that's got anything to do with anything. But maybe she's been right. Maybe she will walk again, and maybe run and dance and swim and chase the waves on the beach and clatter up and down the stairs.
We'll see.
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
I was too tired to last out the art class yesterday - I came to the absolute end after an hour and a half of a two hour class, though I made myself press on, but it was no good so I left after another ten minutes - I even had a rest outside but I was truly done in. By the evening I was livid about this perpetual bloody fucking bastard exhaustion, googled and found 21 ways to replenish your energy , which, despite being irritating for so many reasons to a tired and livid person, actually had several pertinent suggestions. Aw man, this googling is tricky stuff - I've searched for solutions god knows how many times but never found anything that fitted between having full-on ME, where you're absolutely fucked soon after getting out of bed, or being fifteen without the sense you were born with. Whatever - I made it this time.
So this morning, I
1)phoned my pal MG, down in the west country, and we chatted, laughed, cried, moaned for an hour (No18: call a friend who’s cheerful and full of energy)
2)made myself egg, bacon and tomatoes on wholemeal toast (you need protein and carbs (good carbs) in the morning - I've been back on the muesli, but it's not as sustaining)
3)chanted the 'Om shree dhanvantre namaha' which I will do for forty days - it might seem a load of hippy shite, but some any of meditation is so brilliant I can't believe I let myself drift out of doing it every day
4)Counselling, where we did good stuff about finding a flat;
5)went to Tesco's to buy Bloke a kindle for his birthday - which was back in July, but we have the right to claim flexibility on birthday presents in our family. Bloke is part of our family in that he's the kids' stepfather and my ... well, bloke, I suppose. We've been best mates since we were 19, which is pushing forty years, lived together for twenty years, of which the last seven were AWFUL (seven fucking years, we must be mental), till I chucked him out, but that wasn't really any better for either of us, though it took about two more years before we acknowledged that, and now we are as you find us, spending a lot of time together, committed to the plan of living together again one day, but not yet.
Jesus - it's 2.20 am - this is silly, the days are getting shorter very rapidly - I don't want to live so much of my life in darkness.
6) I did drawings when I got home (after 7) making chicken soup for dinner) - suddenly drawn to pastels now I'm signed up for Pen and Wash for two terms.
Gladioli done with soft pastels:
with oil pastels:
this is done with a bit of everything, including water colours:
which is from this photo I took during that little Indian Summer last week:
I think I'm going to stick with that last one for a bit, do it again and again, see what happens.
Grateful for; a much, much better day; enough soup for dinner tomorrow; getting an artist-type groove on this evening; Bloke taking Bob to the vet while I was out for her flea jab, even if he did come back with capsules to empty directly onto her skin; making plans for fun with MG.
Sweet dreams xxx
So this morning, I
1)phoned my pal MG, down in the west country, and we chatted, laughed, cried, moaned for an hour (No18: call a friend who’s cheerful and full of energy)
2)made myself egg, bacon and tomatoes on wholemeal toast (you need protein and carbs (good carbs) in the morning - I've been back on the muesli, but it's not as sustaining)
3)chanted the 'Om shree dhanvantre namaha' which I will do for forty days - it might seem a load of hippy shite, but some any of meditation is so brilliant I can't believe I let myself drift out of doing it every day
4)Counselling, where we did good stuff about finding a flat;
5)went to Tesco's to buy Bloke a kindle for his birthday - which was back in July, but we have the right to claim flexibility on birthday presents in our family. Bloke is part of our family in that he's the kids' stepfather and my ... well, bloke, I suppose. We've been best mates since we were 19, which is pushing forty years, lived together for twenty years, of which the last seven were AWFUL (seven fucking years, we must be mental), till I chucked him out, but that wasn't really any better for either of us, though it took about two more years before we acknowledged that, and now we are as you find us, spending a lot of time together, committed to the plan of living together again one day, but not yet.
Jesus - it's 2.20 am - this is silly, the days are getting shorter very rapidly - I don't want to live so much of my life in darkness.
6) I did drawings when I got home (after 7) making chicken soup for dinner) - suddenly drawn to pastels now I'm signed up for Pen and Wash for two terms.
Gladioli done with soft pastels:
with oil pastels:
this is done with a bit of everything, including water colours:
which is from this photo I took during that little Indian Summer last week:
I think I'm going to stick with that last one for a bit, do it again and again, see what happens.
Grateful for; a much, much better day; enough soup for dinner tomorrow; getting an artist-type groove on this evening; Bloke taking Bob to the vet while I was out for her flea jab, even if he did come back with capsules to empty directly onto her skin; making plans for fun with MG.
Sweet dreams xxx
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
Tesday
For today's art class the teacher had borrowed some exhibits from the local natural history museum.
Our focus was texture - fur and feathers, which I found really hard.
Finding this hard too - nothing to say. Early night. Laters xxx
Our focus was texture - fur and feathers, which I found really hard.
Finding this hard too - nothing to say. Early night. Laters xxx
Monday, 10 October 2011
Spend a little time with me
Sometimes this tiredness scares the shit out of me - I feel I must be dying of some undiagnosed disease.
I have history of misdiagnosis - my ectopic pregnancy was treated as appendicitis and when I complained that it hurt more after the op, I was told to pull myself together as they'd had small children make less fuss.
The acupuncturist today said I'm not dying (not any more than the usual, at any rate), that I have "some surface energy but the foundations are still seriously depleted," which I try and hang onto, as the doctor has nothing to offer now all those tests have come back clean.
It would have been better to come straight home after my acupuncture session but I got a fixation on buying a few last luxury items before I go onto a proper tight budget for the foreseeable future. I'd like to think of it as a commitment to my confidence in a secure future, but in this post-spending period I'm having a wobble about it. I bought a new pair of sheepskin slippers (wild thing), tickets for this Friday's 'Best of Fest' night in the comedy festival, and some of the expensive rose-scented shower stuff that I gave Ma for Christmas just before she died. I found it unopened, reclaimed it, liked it and have eked it out for eighteen months. I can go back to supermarket own brand, at 5% of what I paid for this, but I'm not quite ready to give it up just yet. The only things I was planning on getting that I haven't are a sewing machine and a good waterproof coat. No idea where to start on the coat. I want something that will last - this is my commitment to having the energy and the desire to walk in all weathers, which WILL return.
My daughters are both well. I'm still living on tenterhooks to some extent, which is not great, but ED can see an end to her confinement, she can see possibilities in front of her, doors opening instead of closing in her face all the time. The other one has been off for the weekend to meet her new BF's parents, and to spend the night in a proper tent on a sandy beach, with a fire. We had a lovely long chat on the phone - she wanted to share her happiness (no puking signs at the back there, I can see you). She even told me what she's thinking about for her Beckett essay - she's fired up in all areas - hurrah for that.
I blame Beckett for her mental disintegration last year - if you're not feeling great to start off with, plunging into that great lake of hopelessness and isolation has to be a major contributing factor to falling right over the edge.
On which cheerful note I shall fuck off to bed. xxx
I have history of misdiagnosis - my ectopic pregnancy was treated as appendicitis and when I complained that it hurt more after the op, I was told to pull myself together as they'd had small children make less fuss.
The acupuncturist today said I'm not dying (not any more than the usual, at any rate), that I have "some surface energy but the foundations are still seriously depleted," which I try and hang onto, as the doctor has nothing to offer now all those tests have come back clean.
It would have been better to come straight home after my acupuncture session but I got a fixation on buying a few last luxury items before I go onto a proper tight budget for the foreseeable future. I'd like to think of it as a commitment to my confidence in a secure future, but in this post-spending period I'm having a wobble about it. I bought a new pair of sheepskin slippers (wild thing), tickets for this Friday's 'Best of Fest' night in the comedy festival, and some of the expensive rose-scented shower stuff that I gave Ma for Christmas just before she died. I found it unopened, reclaimed it, liked it and have eked it out for eighteen months. I can go back to supermarket own brand, at 5% of what I paid for this, but I'm not quite ready to give it up just yet. The only things I was planning on getting that I haven't are a sewing machine and a good waterproof coat. No idea where to start on the coat. I want something that will last - this is my commitment to having the energy and the desire to walk in all weathers, which WILL return.
My daughters are both well. I'm still living on tenterhooks to some extent, which is not great, but ED can see an end to her confinement, she can see possibilities in front of her, doors opening instead of closing in her face all the time. The other one has been off for the weekend to meet her new BF's parents, and to spend the night in a proper tent on a sandy beach, with a fire. We had a lovely long chat on the phone - she wanted to share her happiness (no puking signs at the back there, I can see you). She even told me what she's thinking about for her Beckett essay - she's fired up in all areas - hurrah for that.
I blame Beckett for her mental disintegration last year - if you're not feeling great to start off with, plunging into that great lake of hopelessness and isolation has to be a major contributing factor to falling right over the edge.
On which cheerful note I shall fuck off to bed. xxx
Sunday, 9 October 2011
Unedited, sorry
I've been using I done this today, great web site. They send you an email at 6pm every day, asking what you did that day and whatever you reply goes onto a calendar that's really easy to view. The home page has a big spiel about tiny steps towards a big project, but I started using it to keep a log of how much I do, with a view to doing less, and it's been brilliant. There's something about an email arriving - you don't have to remember for yourself to write anything down, just choose whether or not you want to continue detailing your activities in this way. And I do, as it's about recovery, full fucking recovery, quick, before I'm just too old to gad about like a nutter ever again.
Chris De Burgh is singing away on the telly as I write - a clip show of singer-songwriters at the BBC, from the 70s and 80s, with little snippets of info across the bottom of the screen. I discover that he was brought up in Argentina, which makes my urge to slap him almost vanish. Turns out he's not just a histrionic Irish dipstick, he's Latino, which gives it a different context. Still not my cup of tea, but I was interested to watch myself suddenly get where he was coming from, quite literally, and see the irritation just ebb away. I mean, what's that all about? It's still the same man, singing the same song. Not 'Lady in Red' - one I'd never heard before, but he still annoyed me as soon as he started - what am I really believing here about Irishmen and Hispanic men?
Nick Lowe's on now and I know I don't like him, though I did back then. He was on in the old codger's slot in the acoustic tent at Glasto one year and he came over as a right prick. Exactly the sort of old geezer I was moaning about last night, just fuck off, life's too short to spend any more of it with you. I'm less and less willing to tolerate misogyny, but blokes my age (57) or older grew up as I did when marriage was a deal in which the woman promised to obey in return for board and lodging. There was no such crime as marital rape - consent had been given and could not be revoked. That was my first, brief and thankfully childless marriage.
Straight men of that generation and those before them KNEW that women were there FOR them, so they've had a lot of changes to adapt to. Some have done so with more grace than others; some not at all. My ex-BIL won't allow his wife to have the internet installed, which the whole family seem to accept as 'one of those things - but what can you do about it?' I know many who are all mouth and trousers - but I bet they all have moments when they just wish they could have a wife like they'd been led to expect, who'd pick up after them without moaning and let them be the boss. Whether such women ever existed is another question, of course.
Anyway, I know a bit about how they feel, as, having lived a solid middle class childhood in the fifties and sixties, where work for females was presented at home and at school as a 'little job' to do until you got married and had children. Although no one, ever ever, said listen girls, choosing a bloke is the single most important decision of your fucking LIFE. If he's feckless, you're fucked. It was all about presenting yourself so as to be chosen, never mind who by. Anyway, I expected to be living in my own nice detached house with a big garden by now, till I was at least sixteen (when I read Germaine Greer - hurrah for books!), and that's in there, down in my emotional roots, beyond knowledge and experience. There's a little voice in me that every now and then screams that it's not bloody fair. Why haven't I got a man to do all the money stuff and keep a roof over my head? (I can't believe I wrote that down - the shame.)
And it's two o'clock again already, so I'm offski.
Grateful for: MH coming round for dinner; managing to slow roast some belly of pork without destroying the roast veg; still my bed - I do so love my bed; nights drawing in, seasons changing, not too cold yet; ED having access to the outside world - only to the deck so far, but she's been in and out all afternoon - her voice on the phone - this is HUGE
Sweet dreams xx
Chris De Burgh is singing away on the telly as I write - a clip show of singer-songwriters at the BBC, from the 70s and 80s, with little snippets of info across the bottom of the screen. I discover that he was brought up in Argentina, which makes my urge to slap him almost vanish. Turns out he's not just a histrionic Irish dipstick, he's Latino, which gives it a different context. Still not my cup of tea, but I was interested to watch myself suddenly get where he was coming from, quite literally, and see the irritation just ebb away. I mean, what's that all about? It's still the same man, singing the same song. Not 'Lady in Red' - one I'd never heard before, but he still annoyed me as soon as he started - what am I really believing here about Irishmen and Hispanic men?
Nick Lowe's on now and I know I don't like him, though I did back then. He was on in the old codger's slot in the acoustic tent at Glasto one year and he came over as a right prick. Exactly the sort of old geezer I was moaning about last night, just fuck off, life's too short to spend any more of it with you. I'm less and less willing to tolerate misogyny, but blokes my age (57) or older grew up as I did when marriage was a deal in which the woman promised to obey in return for board and lodging. There was no such crime as marital rape - consent had been given and could not be revoked. That was my first, brief and thankfully childless marriage.
Straight men of that generation and those before them KNEW that women were there FOR them, so they've had a lot of changes to adapt to. Some have done so with more grace than others; some not at all. My ex-BIL won't allow his wife to have the internet installed, which the whole family seem to accept as 'one of those things - but what can you do about it?' I know many who are all mouth and trousers - but I bet they all have moments when they just wish they could have a wife like they'd been led to expect, who'd pick up after them without moaning and let them be the boss. Whether such women ever existed is another question, of course.
Anyway, I know a bit about how they feel, as, having lived a solid middle class childhood in the fifties and sixties, where work for females was presented at home and at school as a 'little job' to do until you got married and had children. Although no one, ever ever, said listen girls, choosing a bloke is the single most important decision of your fucking LIFE. If he's feckless, you're fucked. It was all about presenting yourself so as to be chosen, never mind who by. Anyway, I expected to be living in my own nice detached house with a big garden by now, till I was at least sixteen (when I read Germaine Greer - hurrah for books!), and that's in there, down in my emotional roots, beyond knowledge and experience. There's a little voice in me that every now and then screams that it's not bloody fair. Why haven't I got a man to do all the money stuff and keep a roof over my head? (I can't believe I wrote that down - the shame.)
And it's two o'clock again already, so I'm offski.
Grateful for: MH coming round for dinner; managing to slow roast some belly of pork without destroying the roast veg; still my bed - I do so love my bed; nights drawing in, seasons changing, not too cold yet; ED having access to the outside world - only to the deck so far, but she's been in and out all afternoon - her voice on the phone - this is HUGE
Sweet dreams xx
Saturday, 8 October 2011
Getting all wound up about politics again today. There's a big demo tomorrow in London against the proposed bill which threatens to mortally wound the NHS, but I'm not going. There's not been a big demo for a while so I'd forgotten the loop - I decide to go, because this is important shit, stand up and be counted - I get all knotted up, which I eventually unpick as being down to undiluted fear, of the noise and the crowd and the unpredictability of events - I do a little rational fear vs irrational analysis and fucking hell - this fear is RATIONAL. Younger daughter was at the first anti-cuts demo last year, far too close to a line of police horses that charged the crowd. 'Kettling' occurs, when the police trap the crowd within a small area for hours and hours - Westminster Bridge is going to make that even easier. So I'm not going - don't even know anyone else going who I could tag along with - the final decider, as well as a further piss off. But then I forget all that when I read an article about it and decide again to go and I'm back at the beginning - which starts to get on your nerves after a while, but the demo's tomorrow so it'll pass soon.
So there's that. I'm quite excited by the occupation of Wall Street, though you'd never know it was happening if you relied on the BBC. And I've become increasingly agitated at the range of vile slogans about rape being put on T shirts and offered for sale. I've sat here for ages pondering how to discuss this without quoting them and it's not really possible, in any meaningful way. I wrote the company an email though. And I've emailed a Lord about the NHS bill, so I'm not completely sitting on the sofa shouting at the telly, just too close for comfort.
I did my five minutes sorting (decided I want to keep that whole pile, but it still counts), drew Henry Moore's sheep repeatedly, made fish and chips for dinner with fresh fish and potatoes, and have become embroiled in two separate email bouts with two separate distant male relatives, neither of whom are men I'd want anything to do with if they weren't family, and I'm not sure I can be arsed with them and their old bloke brains whoever they are. One of them wrote a whole long paragraph about his son then this, "The girls are working away. But there are no boyfriends in view." One of the 'girls' is about seven years into her training as a doctor, the other has a city job and a fantastic band that have just got a recording contract, and she's a lesbian, which he knows, so what the fuck? I used to think he did it to be ironic - maybe he does, but the joke's worn a bit thin.
Mind you, elder daughter's ramp to her front door, her escape route, is being built this weekend by a collection of uber-blokes, including SIL and ED's father, so I'd better shut up.
Grateful for: the cat backing off a bit now the heating's on and she doesn't need me as a hot water bottle; my Uggs (even if they are bastard spammers, still love my boots); a lift to the supermarket from Bloke (I know, I know, shut up); my kindle - I do really like it, though it gives me the existential creeps if I think about it; my lovely soft warm bed, calling me to it...
Sweet dreams xx
So there's that. I'm quite excited by the occupation of Wall Street, though you'd never know it was happening if you relied on the BBC. And I've become increasingly agitated at the range of vile slogans about rape being put on T shirts and offered for sale. I've sat here for ages pondering how to discuss this without quoting them and it's not really possible, in any meaningful way. I wrote the company an email though. And I've emailed a Lord about the NHS bill, so I'm not completely sitting on the sofa shouting at the telly, just too close for comfort.
I did my five minutes sorting (decided I want to keep that whole pile, but it still counts), drew Henry Moore's sheep repeatedly, made fish and chips for dinner with fresh fish and potatoes, and have become embroiled in two separate email bouts with two separate distant male relatives, neither of whom are men I'd want anything to do with if they weren't family, and I'm not sure I can be arsed with them and their old bloke brains whoever they are. One of them wrote a whole long paragraph about his son then this, "The girls are working away. But there are no boyfriends in view." One of the 'girls' is about seven years into her training as a doctor, the other has a city job and a fantastic band that have just got a recording contract, and she's a lesbian, which he knows, so what the fuck? I used to think he did it to be ironic - maybe he does, but the joke's worn a bit thin.
Mind you, elder daughter's ramp to her front door, her escape route, is being built this weekend by a collection of uber-blokes, including SIL and ED's father, so I'd better shut up.
Grateful for: the cat backing off a bit now the heating's on and she doesn't need me as a hot water bottle; my Uggs (even if they are bastard spammers, still love my boots); a lift to the supermarket from Bloke (I know, I know, shut up); my kindle - I do really like it, though it gives me the existential creeps if I think about it; my lovely soft warm bed, calling me to it...
Sweet dreams xx
Friday, 7 October 2011
In the Middle of the Night
A very good day today, one that has left me content.
I decided after I'd finished writing last night that I was going to have to commit to achieving something, no matter how small every single day.
I've kept up the daily blogging for six years (whether I have anything to say or not - I have to do this to hang on to a sense of myself as a writer, having already had to let go of being a teacher. Writers write) So I do have a certain level of self-discipline, even if it's not been immediately evident in the rest of my life recently, and I must summon this up and put it to good use.
I hereby commit to doing at least five minutes sorting through things every day, with a view to not carting a mountain of useless fucking stuff any further round the south of England.
I know five minutes is sod-all, but I want to succeed in this, so I'm starting small.
Today I did the pile of paper that had grown around my favourite spot on the sofa. Then had a spliff, put the radio on and got stuck into the kitchen - all the washing up, dried and put away, and a proper clean of the counter all down one side. That was enough - I'd thought I'd do it all, but I could recognise signs of imminent droopiness so headed for the sofa and a bit of shite telly.
I haven't left the house all day and no one's been round, which has been great, just what I needed. I've spoken to both my girls and they're both in a good place.
Then I did some drawing:
and thought I'd add a bit of colour:
which I'm quite pleased with - though I didn't even attempt to include the thick layer of dust lying on the leaves of this very forgiving houseplant.
Seeing some of Frida Kahlo's paintings up close the other day made me really want to be braver with colour, specifically to do so on a bigger canvas than an A4 sketchbook. I've got a few canvases kicking around, from the first art group I joined when I moved here. They are rubbish, really, and looking at them now I feel quite cross with the teacher. All she did was provide materials, a topic and the time and place to do it - which, to be fair, is all she claimed to offer. She didn't bring things in for us to look at, to copy from, nor did she give much in the way of advice. I left those sessions confirmed in my status as a non-artist, a messer who liked mucking around with paints as it's quite soothing.
Anyway, I found one of those canvases ("apply a landscape using modroc, then paint it"), which I had made into a mountain range and painted in three flat shades of green with a flat blue sky - hideous. I blocked it all out with white acrylic, then after I'd finished doing the plant, I sploshed the leftover water colours on:
Still not great, but better than it was. I may go over it with acrylic in proper colour, even improper colour, or I may go and buy enough white paint to go over the bigger canvases.
The other thing that I took from the exhibition was that Rivera had "encouraged" Kahlo to paint in the early days. I feel encouraged, for which I thank you.
I decided after I'd finished writing last night that I was going to have to commit to achieving something, no matter how small every single day.
I've kept up the daily blogging for six years (whether I have anything to say or not - I have to do this to hang on to a sense of myself as a writer, having already had to let go of being a teacher. Writers write) So I do have a certain level of self-discipline, even if it's not been immediately evident in the rest of my life recently, and I must summon this up and put it to good use.
I hereby commit to doing at least five minutes sorting through things every day, with a view to not carting a mountain of useless fucking stuff any further round the south of England.
I know five minutes is sod-all, but I want to succeed in this, so I'm starting small.
Today I did the pile of paper that had grown around my favourite spot on the sofa. Then had a spliff, put the radio on and got stuck into the kitchen - all the washing up, dried and put away, and a proper clean of the counter all down one side. That was enough - I'd thought I'd do it all, but I could recognise signs of imminent droopiness so headed for the sofa and a bit of shite telly.
I haven't left the house all day and no one's been round, which has been great, just what I needed. I've spoken to both my girls and they're both in a good place.
Then I did some drawing:
and thought I'd add a bit of colour:
which I'm quite pleased with - though I didn't even attempt to include the thick layer of dust lying on the leaves of this very forgiving houseplant.
Seeing some of Frida Kahlo's paintings up close the other day made me really want to be braver with colour, specifically to do so on a bigger canvas than an A4 sketchbook. I've got a few canvases kicking around, from the first art group I joined when I moved here. They are rubbish, really, and looking at them now I feel quite cross with the teacher. All she did was provide materials, a topic and the time and place to do it - which, to be fair, is all she claimed to offer. She didn't bring things in for us to look at, to copy from, nor did she give much in the way of advice. I left those sessions confirmed in my status as a non-artist, a messer who liked mucking around with paints as it's quite soothing.
Anyway, I found one of those canvases ("apply a landscape using modroc, then paint it"), which I had made into a mountain range and painted in three flat shades of green with a flat blue sky - hideous. I blocked it all out with white acrylic, then after I'd finished doing the plant, I sploshed the leftover water colours on:
Still not great, but better than it was. I may go over it with acrylic in proper colour, even improper colour, or I may go and buy enough white paint to go over the bigger canvases.
The other thing that I took from the exhibition was that Rivera had "encouraged" Kahlo to paint in the early days. I feel encouraged, for which I thank you.
Thursday, 6 October 2011
Blethering for Britain
I want to write but haven't done anything so don't know where this will go. This is me turning up at the page.
I'd like to do some 'writing' writing. Maybe. It seems such a long time since I did - though maybe that's just my memory being a bastard again.
I've got crapper and crapper at this whole 'resting' bollocks. I'm too cross. There's a disjuncture between my body and at least some parts of my mind. Or maybe not. Over here I know that it would be a good idea to start sorting ruthlessly through my belongings, especially clothes, books and mountains of paper. But over here, I don't want any part of having to move - ah here it comes, winkled out by the power of writing it down. I'm very resentful of having to, even though most of the decisions leading to my having to have been my own. But man, I've not been well and how have I arrived at a situation where I have to do this alone in a hostile market place? Why does it have to be so hard?
Then again, I have this conversation repeatedly. It always comes out in the same place - I have to move, so shut up moaning about it, stop feeling sorry for yourself and get on with it.
On the plus side, I did half the washing up on Monday (just the crockery and cutlery), intending to do the pots and pans on Tuesday, didn't, and have managed to not wash anything up since, apart from rinsing the pan I use for green veg under the tap. The amount of space taken up in my tiny kitchen for mugs seems worth it when I reach this level of can't-be arsed-ness. I'm trying to avoid a build-up of dirty dishes around the house, so the counters are becoming precarious, although the draining rack is almost empty again, so there's potential for another couple of days. I'd quite like to draw it - there's a good mix of shapes and textures, both man-made and natural - but there's nothing I can sit on that gives me a high enough view.
I was assertive today - I'd forgotten that. I have a dear friend called MG, who would be a much much dearer friend if we lived in the same town and could see each other very often for a few hours at a time. As it is, we speak on the phone for hours, several times a week and have visits every now and then which always end in tears, or at least in mental distress and seething unspoken fury. She has two sons, a husband and now a fucking big dog and they argue and manipulate and are so picky about food and - ach, it does my head in, yet I do love her and miss her and want to see her and am happy when I do. But when she called today to discuss plans for half-term and put forward the idea of all of them, including the fucking big dog, coming here, I said no. Her sons are young, 16 and 12, so always come too, which has its own set of stresses, but I can suck that up. It's the bloody husband, well not even him, just the horror (to me) of their relationship, when it's in the same small house as me, the power struggles, the trying to enlist me on their side - he was my friend first, over twenty five years ago, and didn't get round to introducing me and her till about three years later, so in his eyes I'm HIS friend first, but when it comes to choosing sides, you can both fuck off. My counsellor (who I've been seeing for a distressing number of years and visits to/from MG and her family) made me promise him never to have the whole lot of them to stay again. He didn't quite say listen bitch, if you have them again, don't think you can come to me with the same old story of how you suddenly notice that you've withdrawn right inside to a tiny safe place, while neutral words and calming platitudes pour out of your disconnected mouth and you are complicit in the elder boy's lies and the noise builds up and up until suddenly the word 'goodbye' echoes round the empty house and they are gone. Yeah, quite horrid and this is the first time I've remembered to say no.
Grateful for: a space to write and the habit of doing so regularly; nearly cold enough to shut the windows and keep all extraneous cats OUT; a bunch of sunflowers from my friend MH; breakfast at B's (best breakfast in town); the knowledge that this too shall pass.
Night night xx
I'd like to do some 'writing' writing. Maybe. It seems such a long time since I did - though maybe that's just my memory being a bastard again.
I've got crapper and crapper at this whole 'resting' bollocks. I'm too cross. There's a disjuncture between my body and at least some parts of my mind. Or maybe not. Over here I know that it would be a good idea to start sorting ruthlessly through my belongings, especially clothes, books and mountains of paper. But over here, I don't want any part of having to move - ah here it comes, winkled out by the power of writing it down. I'm very resentful of having to, even though most of the decisions leading to my having to have been my own. But man, I've not been well and how have I arrived at a situation where I have to do this alone in a hostile market place? Why does it have to be so hard?
Then again, I have this conversation repeatedly. It always comes out in the same place - I have to move, so shut up moaning about it, stop feeling sorry for yourself and get on with it.
On the plus side, I did half the washing up on Monday (just the crockery and cutlery), intending to do the pots and pans on Tuesday, didn't, and have managed to not wash anything up since, apart from rinsing the pan I use for green veg under the tap. The amount of space taken up in my tiny kitchen for mugs seems worth it when I reach this level of can't-be arsed-ness. I'm trying to avoid a build-up of dirty dishes around the house, so the counters are becoming precarious, although the draining rack is almost empty again, so there's potential for another couple of days. I'd quite like to draw it - there's a good mix of shapes and textures, both man-made and natural - but there's nothing I can sit on that gives me a high enough view.
I was assertive today - I'd forgotten that. I have a dear friend called MG, who would be a much much dearer friend if we lived in the same town and could see each other very often for a few hours at a time. As it is, we speak on the phone for hours, several times a week and have visits every now and then which always end in tears, or at least in mental distress and seething unspoken fury. She has two sons, a husband and now a fucking big dog and they argue and manipulate and are so picky about food and - ach, it does my head in, yet I do love her and miss her and want to see her and am happy when I do. But when she called today to discuss plans for half-term and put forward the idea of all of them, including the fucking big dog, coming here, I said no. Her sons are young, 16 and 12, so always come too, which has its own set of stresses, but I can suck that up. It's the bloody husband, well not even him, just the horror (to me) of their relationship, when it's in the same small house as me, the power struggles, the trying to enlist me on their side - he was my friend first, over twenty five years ago, and didn't get round to introducing me and her till about three years later, so in his eyes I'm HIS friend first, but when it comes to choosing sides, you can both fuck off. My counsellor (who I've been seeing for a distressing number of years and visits to/from MG and her family) made me promise him never to have the whole lot of them to stay again. He didn't quite say listen bitch, if you have them again, don't think you can come to me with the same old story of how you suddenly notice that you've withdrawn right inside to a tiny safe place, while neutral words and calming platitudes pour out of your disconnected mouth and you are complicit in the elder boy's lies and the noise builds up and up until suddenly the word 'goodbye' echoes round the empty house and they are gone. Yeah, quite horrid and this is the first time I've remembered to say no.
Grateful for: a space to write and the habit of doing so regularly; nearly cold enough to shut the windows and keep all extraneous cats OUT; a bunch of sunflowers from my friend MH; breakfast at B's (best breakfast in town); the knowledge that this too shall pass.
Night night xx
Wednesday, 5 October 2011
List form:
1) Intended to spend day Doing Nothing, in a big way.
2)Bloke offered trip to see Kahlo and Rivera exhibition that closes this weekend.
3) Went, in semi-dream-like state. Looked. I mean really looked. Not for long, but quite intently.
4) Came home, and drew, loads and loads. Lazy drawing, after dinner and spliff (don't think Sainsbury's cheapo cottage pie, on it's second journey through the oven, really merits the name dinner, but too late now). What I could see, done with/on what I could reach. Like my feet, sticking out the other side of my sketchpad as I lay on the sofa:
and the plant, gently dying across the room:
and the single slipper, abandoned on the rug:
Some coffee dregs which were within reach had a nice sharp edge when applied to paper:
I drifted into doodling:
Sweet dreams xx
1) Intended to spend day Doing Nothing, in a big way.
2)Bloke offered trip to see Kahlo and Rivera exhibition that closes this weekend.
3) Went, in semi-dream-like state. Looked. I mean really looked. Not for long, but quite intently.
4) Came home, and drew, loads and loads. Lazy drawing, after dinner and spliff (don't think Sainsbury's cheapo cottage pie, on it's second journey through the oven, really merits the name dinner, but too late now). What I could see, done with/on what I could reach. Like my feet, sticking out the other side of my sketchpad as I lay on the sofa:
and the plant, gently dying across the room:
and the single slipper, abandoned on the rug:
Some coffee dregs which were within reach had a nice sharp edge when applied to paper:
I drifted into doodling:
Sweet dreams xx
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
At risk of sounding like a soap opera, I have to report walking at speed into an invisible reinforced glass door. Really hard. Nose first.
Stumbled about in a daze, with blood all over my face, wiped it off in supermarket toilet and blundered off to art class. Where I got the mega-shakes and had to go home.
Tomorrow was going to be the day I went round the estate agents, with a view to impressing upon them my desirability as a tenant. My nose is still swelling - it's arrived at the point where I want to take my glasses off, but then I can't see. One of my front teeth is loose. I look like I've been in a fight. "Excuse the face - I walked into a door." Yeah, right. Never heard that before - Roddy Doyle wrote "The Woman Who Walked into Doors" about that very lie. There'll be a link if the page opens before I finish - got to get these glasses off. [It didn't]
So I'm not going round the agents tomorrow - which may be a good thing - I have been advised to leave it till later in October, but I want to DO something towards moving. Maybe I'll do some stuff in the garden - check out which plants I can take cuttings from now, dig up bits of the perennials.
On the plus side, dear NurseyBoy M came home from abroad and brought me a ten-pack of duty free baccy, at thirty per cent of the UK price, which he dropped off in passing. Yay for M.
Can't deny my spirits are a bit crushed, but I've had a big cry and tomorrow is another day.
Laters x
Stumbled about in a daze, with blood all over my face, wiped it off in supermarket toilet and blundered off to art class. Where I got the mega-shakes and had to go home.
Tomorrow was going to be the day I went round the estate agents, with a view to impressing upon them my desirability as a tenant. My nose is still swelling - it's arrived at the point where I want to take my glasses off, but then I can't see. One of my front teeth is loose. I look like I've been in a fight. "Excuse the face - I walked into a door." Yeah, right. Never heard that before - Roddy Doyle wrote "The Woman Who Walked into Doors" about that very lie. There'll be a link if the page opens before I finish - got to get these glasses off. [It didn't]
So I'm not going round the agents tomorrow - which may be a good thing - I have been advised to leave it till later in October, but I want to DO something towards moving. Maybe I'll do some stuff in the garden - check out which plants I can take cuttings from now, dig up bits of the perennials.
On the plus side, dear NurseyBoy M came home from abroad and brought me a ten-pack of duty free baccy, at thirty per cent of the UK price, which he dropped off in passing. Yay for M.
Can't deny my spirits are a bit crushed, but I've had a big cry and tomorrow is another day.
Laters x
Monday, 3 October 2011
Beside the seaside, beside the sea
Trying to write earlier as I've gone a bit too nocturnal - the clocks go back in a few weeks but I can't work out if that will make it better or worse.
Good day, today. Acupuncture session, always good. Walked to the beach - total of 1.86 miles (still loving mapometer,com) - ate nasty but cheap fish and chips, then hired a deckchair:
and chilled out for the afternoon. Floated in the sea between the piers - can't honestly call it swimming, but I am trying to be mindful of the instructions I have from all quarters to REST and only use energy that I actually have, whilst not being prepared to forgo this last day of unseasonable warmth. So I do a bit, rest a bit, do a bit more and try to be philosophical about it rather than LIVID, which is a very tiring emotion with no good outcome.
I sketched a bit - bloody people, they only sit still until you start drawing them, at which point they fuck off, even when they haven't seen they're being observed. I was trying to get these guys who were casting lines off that little jetty
and I swear they never noticed me (the beach was pretty busy) but they came and went like nobody's business. I drew lots of other people as well - I'd intended to draw the old-fashioned roundabout/carousel, being better at things that keep still, but it was all closed up under canvas for the winter. None of them much cop, but still, at least I have something to show my art teacher tomorrow, to demonstrate my enthusiasm.
Hope you are all well. Laters x
Good day, today. Acupuncture session, always good. Walked to the beach - total of 1.86 miles (still loving mapometer,com) - ate nasty but cheap fish and chips, then hired a deckchair:
and chilled out for the afternoon. Floated in the sea between the piers - can't honestly call it swimming, but I am trying to be mindful of the instructions I have from all quarters to REST and only use energy that I actually have, whilst not being prepared to forgo this last day of unseasonable warmth. So I do a bit, rest a bit, do a bit more and try to be philosophical about it rather than LIVID, which is a very tiring emotion with no good outcome.
I sketched a bit - bloody people, they only sit still until you start drawing them, at which point they fuck off, even when they haven't seen they're being observed. I was trying to get these guys who were casting lines off that little jetty
and I swear they never noticed me (the beach was pretty busy) but they came and went like nobody's business. I drew lots of other people as well - I'd intended to draw the old-fashioned roundabout/carousel, being better at things that keep still, but it was all closed up under canvas for the winter. None of them much cop, but still, at least I have something to show my art teacher tomorrow, to demonstrate my enthusiasm.
Hope you are all well. Laters x
Sunday, 2 October 2011
And don't it feel good
The last time I swam in the sea in October was on Oct 8th 1985. It was my first day at Uni. Son (11 mths) and Younger Daughter (17 mths) were in the creche on campus for the morning, Elder Daughter (7) was at First School in Smalltown where we lived. That first morning was a bit of a blur, but I remember picking up my grant cheque for £1500, which was a staggering amount of money to me - I'd never owned a whole grand before. And reading lists for my first two courses 'Critical Thinking' and 'The Biological and Social Bases of Sex Differences'. One of the happiest days of my life, being paid to get to the bottom of things that I'd wanted to know for years (I was 31). I went straight to the library and thrilled to the weight of knowledge in my bag
I was so fucking strong then. The creche closed for lunch (kept staffing costs down, made creche cheap for students), so I picked S and YD up at one, put them in their double buggy, made my way up and down hills to the campus cafeteria where we had lunch with another single mum and her son, then up and down more hills and a subway to the railway station, two trains (with just three minutes to get from one to the other), back to Smalltown, collect ED from school, over to Sis's place near the sea and down to the beach, quick while it was still warm. I have photos of son and his cousin standing naked on the wet sand, me all skinny in a bikini with dripping hair, and both my daughters splashing in the waves.
Yeah - I was thinking of that today as I floated about at that same beach - swimming in October off Britain is a gift, a blessing bestowed upon us by a merciful universe that can sometimes see when we need a bloody break. They reckon there'll be one more day of it and snow by the end of the month. Hah.
I made a proper dinner tonight, as per the plan - even did a supermarket shop without buying any pies or other crapola.
And made a list of key features of my new home. I started out with the essentials (ground floor, one bedroom), then added a few more that I'd like if possible, such as the bedroom being big, and the living room, and then I got carried away and put down everything I would choose for my dream home. Within reality, not fantasy. The living room will have a fireplace and patio doors which open onto a decent sized west facing garden. There will be a good sized entrance hall, also a kitchen with a bit more in the way of workspace and cupboards than I currently have, a gas hob and an electric oven, ideally a high level one with a separate grill, but that's getting very picky - the gas hob is what I care about. The bathroom has a proper shower and there's a separate toilet, nice and clean. This flat is dry and safe, on one of the roads that run off the sea front, where it's level, by the lawns - good swimming in summer and good walking all year round. Parking is at least as easy as here (I'm framing things positively and trying to keep it real), it's a long let, safe for my little Bobcat and with the possibility of my having a small dog as well.
Places exist exactly like that. I will be living in one soon. I hope and I pray.
Grateful for: having had good luck with housing in the past and hopefully the future; feeling better now I have a plan; having been to university under what now seems an idyllic regime; living by the sea; acupuncture tomorrow
Sleep well xxx
I was so fucking strong then. The creche closed for lunch (kept staffing costs down, made creche cheap for students), so I picked S and YD up at one, put them in their double buggy, made my way up and down hills to the campus cafeteria where we had lunch with another single mum and her son, then up and down more hills and a subway to the railway station, two trains (with just three minutes to get from one to the other), back to Smalltown, collect ED from school, over to Sis's place near the sea and down to the beach, quick while it was still warm. I have photos of son and his cousin standing naked on the wet sand, me all skinny in a bikini with dripping hair, and both my daughters splashing in the waves.
Yeah - I was thinking of that today as I floated about at that same beach - swimming in October off Britain is a gift, a blessing bestowed upon us by a merciful universe that can sometimes see when we need a bloody break. They reckon there'll be one more day of it and snow by the end of the month. Hah.
I made a proper dinner tonight, as per the plan - even did a supermarket shop without buying any pies or other crapola.
And made a list of key features of my new home. I started out with the essentials (ground floor, one bedroom), then added a few more that I'd like if possible, such as the bedroom being big, and the living room, and then I got carried away and put down everything I would choose for my dream home. Within reality, not fantasy. The living room will have a fireplace and patio doors which open onto a decent sized west facing garden. There will be a good sized entrance hall, also a kitchen with a bit more in the way of workspace and cupboards than I currently have, a gas hob and an electric oven, ideally a high level one with a separate grill, but that's getting very picky - the gas hob is what I care about. The bathroom has a proper shower and there's a separate toilet, nice and clean. This flat is dry and safe, on one of the roads that run off the sea front, where it's level, by the lawns - good swimming in summer and good walking all year round. Parking is at least as easy as here (I'm framing things positively and trying to keep it real), it's a long let, safe for my little Bobcat and with the possibility of my having a small dog as well.
Places exist exactly like that. I will be living in one soon. I hope and I pray.
Grateful for: having had good luck with housing in the past and hopefully the future; feeling better now I have a plan; having been to university under what now seems an idyllic regime; living by the sea; acupuncture tomorrow
Sleep well xxx
Saturday, 1 October 2011
Plan B
Well, sometimes you have to hit the bottom before you can pick yourself back up. Sometimes you need to stop coping and sit in the reality of it, for more than a quick moment, for long enough to have a look at it, see what it's made of. It can be categorised as either a) can't be changed (like ED having MS); b) old news (I'm knackered); or c) something I can change. I feel as if I had to go through feeling desperate again before I couldn't bear it and knew that there must be something I can do to move me out of this nastiness, and set about discovering what it is.
Food has become a real issue. I do all the cooking up at ED's when I'm there and it's the kind of cooking I can do in my sleep - nutritious, tasty food for four greedy people. Then I come home and it's just me and I'm really knackered and can't be arsed to cook proper food so I buy fish cakes or pies and just have them with potatoes and one veg. But that's a shite way to eat - where's the pleasure? Although it's two years now since YD left home, I still haven't settled into cooking a decent range of meals for one person. The only cookbook I can find is Delia's 'One is Fun' - a title so patronising it makes me want to stick two fingers up at her prissy bloody face and tell her to fuck right off. And it's decades old - all sorts of ingredients are available now (creme fraiche), but I think I might have to give it a go. It's the old self care thing, isn't it? Making a nice meal with love, for someone you care about to enjoy and be nourished by. Not just any old shite to fill you up. I need some new recipes though - I'm stuck on baked fish, chicken thighs and minced beef. So I will buy myself that poxy book - it will give me lots of info about cooking times for smaller portions, if nothing else.
The other thing is moving. I've been approaching it from the 'I can't be arsed' angle, but that's no longer the worst aspect. Knowing that I've got to move has taken all the pleasure out of being here. There's no point exhausting myself doing the garden and even pottering about just makes me sad as I won't be here to see the benefit and my experience so far is that the next occupier takes a chain-saw to it all, so it's not worth it. Moving is always a bit hideous, but being somewhere new is always exciting. So. My task for this week is to go round the estate agents who take clients on benefits (having been provided with a list by the benefits office) and persuade them that I will be a good tenant, one worth calling straight away, to save the cost of advertising. I shall write out an advert for me, listing my requirements and hope for the best.
That's my plan and I feel better for having one. Here I am, swimming crossly:
Sweet dreams xx
Food has become a real issue. I do all the cooking up at ED's when I'm there and it's the kind of cooking I can do in my sleep - nutritious, tasty food for four greedy people. Then I come home and it's just me and I'm really knackered and can't be arsed to cook proper food so I buy fish cakes or pies and just have them with potatoes and one veg. But that's a shite way to eat - where's the pleasure? Although it's two years now since YD left home, I still haven't settled into cooking a decent range of meals for one person. The only cookbook I can find is Delia's 'One is Fun' - a title so patronising it makes me want to stick two fingers up at her prissy bloody face and tell her to fuck right off. And it's decades old - all sorts of ingredients are available now (creme fraiche), but I think I might have to give it a go. It's the old self care thing, isn't it? Making a nice meal with love, for someone you care about to enjoy and be nourished by. Not just any old shite to fill you up. I need some new recipes though - I'm stuck on baked fish, chicken thighs and minced beef. So I will buy myself that poxy book - it will give me lots of info about cooking times for smaller portions, if nothing else.
The other thing is moving. I've been approaching it from the 'I can't be arsed' angle, but that's no longer the worst aspect. Knowing that I've got to move has taken all the pleasure out of being here. There's no point exhausting myself doing the garden and even pottering about just makes me sad as I won't be here to see the benefit and my experience so far is that the next occupier takes a chain-saw to it all, so it's not worth it. Moving is always a bit hideous, but being somewhere new is always exciting. So. My task for this week is to go round the estate agents who take clients on benefits (having been provided with a list by the benefits office) and persuade them that I will be a good tenant, one worth calling straight away, to save the cost of advertising. I shall write out an advert for me, listing my requirements and hope for the best.
That's my plan and I feel better for having one. Here I am, swimming crossly:
Sweet dreams xx
Just sayin'
I'd really like to write a funny entry, something a bit smart-arsey and maybe surprising. I'd like to feel that way, I am so so so so so sick of being the way I am, the way I have been for what seems like years. Heavy, weary to my bones. Today is the hottest October day since the dawn of time (or something - since last year maybe) and there's a voice in my head telling me to get to the beach, just get down there and be soothed and chilled by the inexorability of the waves on the shingle, the tide coming in and going out. But it's too far to walk and if I drive where will I park? Every fucker in the south-east will be heading for the beach. All my friends are busy - I stepped out of the loop with those weekends away at ED's and even Bloke has other plans (Class A Twitchers). Yes, it's a pity party going on here. Again. The sun is not high enough in the sky to get over my garden wall - that was plan B - to chill in the sunshine in the garden. I hate being me at the moment. I fucking hate it.
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