Category: Writings

I am assailed by it, I have been most of my life. It reduces me, shrinks me. And yet, it is part of me. Others might call it vulnerability, sensitivity – and not necessarily a bad thing. I try to not let it stop me living, trying, trying to be brave. I create but doing so scares. I need to follow the lines some days, allow though I’ve always been crap at doing so. Even when I used to ‘colour-in’ as a child, I couldn’t stay within the lines, my colouring crayon would always go over and it would mortify me. I need to write today. It is my job, my living, if a sparse one. And then there is this project – this great scary monster of thing that is forcing me to encounter one of my worst fears -computers and unfamiliar computer software. Try it, she advises, give it a go, play around abit. She makes it sound fun. To me it isn’t. I am terrified, even downloading it, if the blurb is to be believed, is dangerous. Is there someone out there would could help me? I have the ideas and want to make them happen but how? Oh, and to make something trite and amateurish is worse, worse of all. Breathe. There are other things to concentrate on today. Oh, God make me brave.

It’s ages since we spoke, she and I. I got through. She has another cold. Their Christmas was quiet though they had unexpected visitors. I felt her distress over this, I too am a retiring soul like her. I love to see people, to converse but on my terms, not unexpectedly. But she managed it, though it, and the impromptu take away Indian the friends brought, played havoc with their digestions. There is something 19th century about her and her small life, as there is about me and mine. Kindred souls. She asked after me too. How I like her, cherish her even. Keep her safe. And me. And him. And her. And her.

I leave notes for myself, usually of something, a word, phrase of title of a book that I heard on the radio. Sometimes these notes, generally tiny yellow post-it squares, sit on a page in my filofax (yes, I still have one, finding it preferable to putting such information into my phone) and either are responded to or get moved on till there is time to deal with them directly. The Bald Prima Donna note was written down after hearing a programme about Surrealist Theatre in which one of the contributors had said it was Ionescu’s best work. I loved The Chairs, both to read and to see (I saw it in the Ustinov studio in Bath a while back – how many years? Ten?) It is marvellous spare writing. The Theatre of the Absurd. If only I’d had the courage all those years ago…..Still it is in me, that training, those ideas have been ingested. They stay in me. And life, after all, is a compromise. I shall look the play out. One day.

I want a quiet day today. I shall need courage tomorrow. It will be my first review for them and writing about ceramics always makes me a little nervous. Do I know enough? Am I charlatan? I asked him pretty much that same question at breakfast. Should I be embarking on a project where the principal method of communication is wholly new to me? He said, of course. And I know this, I know that many artists use other people’s expertise to produce their work. It has been so for centuries. It’s a control thing and a fear thing. But if I am to break out of the smallness of my experience I need to reach out beyond, into the unknown. Isn’t that so? The ideas, the concept, the initiation and graft will be mine. Won’t that make it mine also?

Enough with the worrying. There is a cardigan to mend (much loved) then a pot of tea to make and then sewing to do. Nice. Today it is enough.

We thought they were feathers. A bird, I said as he was locking our door, it’s probably been caught by a cat. They were everywhere. Our communal hall was full of them. But as we got closer I realised that they were in fact pine needles, great clumps of them. Someone had clearly dragged a dead Christmas tree through and not bothered, or felt obliged to clean up afterwards. And just after I’d begun reading the monk’s book about cleaning too. He wouldn’t approve. Though perhaps would not, being a Buddhist have passed judgement. He got agitated, and so did I. And yet, what is the point? We could clean it ourselves. Or get in touch with the agency and report it. All our actions impact on others. There is no getting away from it. But also we need to accept that people’s standards are different. I just want to be at peace. Let it be, eh?

I love the randomness of the words that my subconscious choses to express. Moire Soup was supposed to be the name of shop or business that someone in my dream told me we had worked for. Where did that come from? Lots and lots of dreams that really and truly pull me under. Dreams of friends in Norway – I so often go there in my dreams – conversing with them, working things through with them. One involved a toilet door I thought I’d locked but she came in regardless.

I have begun it. I’ve walked into it – started it on its rolling course. What did Goethe say about beginnings? I try to remain a little detached. It is both exciting but deeply frightening. (Is it really excitement I feel? Is that honest? Excitement is too strong an emotion to feel in my present ‘Winter-blue’ state but I’m intrigued and interested in the challenge it will set me. And the opportunity to converse with people – I love that. I always have. What a conundrum – and me such a solitary, diffident being. We shall see. I can let it be. Do the work, see the detail and wait and see. As with all these things there is so much I do not know. Can I find people to help me?

I’ve had a coffee, now it is time for some tea then down to the nitty-gritty sending out my feelers. Godspeed.

I woke from my dream realising that I hadn’t managed to photograph the horses. They weren’t real horses but sculptures of them made from wicker. They’d been placed on top of hill and I’d kept intending to slip out and take an image of them but the house I was living in was busy so that I was distracted. People kept coming in and out, visitors from foreign lands mostly. Just before waking I’d been saying goodbye to them. I think they were on a large ship and somehow I’d gone aboard the ship even though they’d set sail to bid them a proper adieu. I hugged and kissed each one, though I didn’t know them that well, but none of them seemed to appreciate it or indeed, welcome my intimacy. Most were scowling as they huddled together. I continued to be as warm towards them as I could be despite the chill coming from them. I woke disconcerted however, and a gloomy bleakness overtook me.

I try to manage these winter blues, if that is what they are. I don’t hide from them or try to smother them. I walk with them, investigate them, shine a light on them, anything to find a strategy of living with them and managing them. They assail me. They weigh me down, my feet feel leaden, but worse they take the fire out of my courage, my willingness to take on challenges by kindling my innate desire to hide, to hunker down and just exist. Will they pass? It is still so so black outside. And today I must face the clumsy beginnings of my idea for the project, and worse, worst of all begin to engage with the ACWs guidelines. Such language represents the worst kind of authority for me, rigid, uncompromising and often unkind. I take my tender ideas to them knowing that they may be crushed, stamped on, made ridiculous but do it I must. And bravely. How I long to run, to escape. I could. But I won’t.

I sat in the cafe alone, even the owners were elsewhere. No radio, no sound. It felt calm. Soon she came, walking fast, open and friendly. Tea with soya milk. It was cold, and I was glad for my wrap. I chatted to her, feeling duty bound though I wanted to begin work. She is sweet and was distressed by the violent attack in the town, her town, on Saturday night. He was just left for dead, she said, who would do that? We talked about cleaning windows and the efficacy of vinegar and newspaper. My Mum used to do that, she said. Customers dribbled in. Two loud women sat in the booth next to me and talked about upholstery and overeating at Christmas. I couldn’t get into my trousers, said one. I worked steadily trying to push through my inner judgement. He said he was proud of what I’d done. Then work and the taciturn young singer. Then the carpenter. A nice lad, a climber.

I survived the day. The returning after the holidays. It is enough. Now it is time to make some sense of what I wrote. But coffee first.

It was the last thing that was said in my dream as I woke. I’d said it to the actor who plays the Prof in The Archers and who’d played a character the Agatha Christie radio adaptation of And Then There Were None that I’d listened to yesterday. Why not go for Jane Eyre? I said. I’d been suggesting that he acted the part of Jane Eyre, that I do know, and at the time had not thought it odd that I should do so. Perhaps it was the influence of listening to Rupert Everett on Desert Island Discs and his recounting playing Titania and his dressing up as Mary Poppins in one of his mother’s tweed skirts. I love the idiosyncrasy of dreamscapes – anything goes, anything is possible.

I’m nervous about beginning work again today. Not only going into the studio but initiating this potential project. It feels huge. A huge mountain. I want it but at the same time I want to run a mile. To hide. I don’t feel brave. Does it matter? Can I do these potentially big things without courage? There is such a pull in me between needing to create, to challenge myself and to step beyond the confines of what I know to be safe and this, at times, overwhelming desire to hide, to shrink down and wait life out. I feel like one of those push-me-pull-mes of Dr Doolittle’s, so uncertain which part of myself to follow that I end up going nowhere. And yet, I love the charge I feel when I am fired up with the prospect of something – the engagement, the opportunity to step outside of my small inner self but oh, the pain of not knowing whether I will do it well enough. There is no way around it I have to straddle the two selves and manage the best I can. Acknowledging each of their two separate presences and needs is part of it, I think, listening to both and trying to find some kind of compromise. So, this is where I am, here now, vulnerable, uncertain, scared but willing to give it a go. It’s life after all. Well, as far as I know it to be.

The sparkly things have come down, though some will do it today. Have they resolved when twelfth night is yet? Meanwhile the dark reigns supreme. Though there will be snowdrops and crocuses and daffodils soon. Amen to that.

You’re such a sensitive girl, he tells me, as I recount yet another radio programme that I have listened to that has moved me. But it’s not about me, I want to say, and sometimes do, it’s about those whose lives have been shared with me, and what they have had to endure, such as the woman yesterday, that child of a liaison between a married white British woman and a black GI during the Second World War. Her tale was harrowing from her ‘father’s’ (he thought she was his till her skin changed colour) and then her mother’s rejection of her, the children’s home, her adoptive parents and, what I found most shocking, the blatant racism she encountered from one particular primary school teacher. She would be just a little older than he is and yet her voice still breaks when she recounts it. Such cruelty. Why did we do it, still do, this abusing of those who appear different to us?

We’ve been watching Sanditon and this too is attempting to ‘deal’ with racism, namely the slave trade that made so many of the British landowners wealthy. Otis, the lover of Miss Lambe, talks to Charlotte of the man who gave him his ‘freedom’ and an education. And of course, there is Miss Lambe herself, the daughter of a black female slave and a white plantation owner in Antigua. It is only her 100 thousand pounds that makes her acceptable in white society. Though when she is apart from those who know her wealth, as she was when she tried to get a coach to London, she is seen as just a mulatto.

We spend too long concentrating on our seeming ‘differences’ and not enough on that which binds us, joins and entwines us. Give us grace to learn this, and just be kind. It is enough.

He told him a few days later that they would be coming round to discuss a bypass with him. He hasn’t said anything further except for text moaning that he couldn’t ‘kip’. He tells me that is what hospitals are like. He had the same experience when he was there in A&E for three days.

My laptop is playing up again. I try to keep calm though I feel the stress rising like a tide in me. He is so kind, so patient with me. It will be solved. Eventually. Meanwhile no one answers the phone. The curse of the Christmas period.

Give me peacefulness and a serenity. And the ability to trust. And yet, even in this panic I know that there are so many in terrible situations that I cannot even begin to comprehend. May they too find peace.

He called him during supper to say that he’d had a heart attack. The paramedics were with him, he told him, and they were going to take him to hospital in Swansea. He sounded a little shaken but chattered away sometimes to him and sometimes to the female paramedic whom we could hear in the background. This lady, he said, has just put something in my ear. There is a hospital just up the road, but apparently, and again we heard the paramedic talking, ‘they’re taking everyone there (the hospital in Swansea) now’. He wanted to help, understandably so he is kind, and reminded him to take his ipad and charger. How long they will keep him there who knows. I shrink from his encroachment, and am embarassed, and indeed ashamed of it. He is alone with this (one daughter lives in the US and the other is in London). But there is something chaotic about him, there always has been. He feels it too and has admitted as much. But I too want to be kind. It is frightening when things like this happen to your body, unbidden. He is ill already but a heart attack was not on the cards. Help me to be more compassionate, to put others needs before my own convenience. Let my boundaries, my barriers soften. For in the end it is only fear.

Yesterday was dread-filled. An unknown, unformed dread assailed me. I’m embarrassed by it. I have no reason to be so fearful. I am safe, loved and nurtured. I listened to an excellent programme on the radio called Last Christmas – a series of spoken essays curated by Greg Wise and Emma Thompson. They were heart-rending, stories from refugees, a homeless man, a heart-surgeon, comic and from Wise and Thompson themselves. I need to listen to such narratives, I need to be taken beyond the small confines of my blessed existence – to feel for others and stand in their shoes awhile.

Still so so dark. I light candles like my Norwegian forbears would’ve done and wait it out. I finished the sampler, but with loads of mistakes. Your learning, he would say. One more to go. A labour of love. A gift. Will she like it? Them? It’s in place of words I struggle to say and she is reluctant to hear. Let it, them, speak on my behalf. A covert offer of love, of constancy of thought. I have always thought of you, always. Know this.

Whenever I ask her a question she begins each sentence with ‘so’. I know it is a habit that many people have picked up, not unlike the ‘you know’ that used to prevail when I was young. So many people end up doing it that you don’t notice that you are also. I like her and don’t like to criticise. He would say it isn’t a criticism but an observation. I wait for her to say it. I ask questions to fill the silence and as a way of acknowledging her presence while she scans our shopping. She mentioned her partner this morning. I hesitated to say ‘he’, who knows these days, but then she said it and so I continued. They live together, he is also doing a filling-in job until they can each begin their careers. He studied Maths, apparently. I immediately think he must be bright. Is that always the case? It’s nice to think of them starting out together. She with her curvy body and lovely soft spoken voice and a name from a Leonard Cohen song and he? Well I know nothing of him but I try to imagine him. Has he a beard? I don’t know why he would. He comes from the valleys, so Welsh then. It is a distraction thinking of other people’s’ lives. I remember that spirit of youthful optimism, where anything might be, and indeed was, possible. Is she optimistic? She doesn’t betray much enthusiasm, she is balanced, even-tempered, nice to be around. I was so brave when I was young. No, that isn’t strictly true, I took risks, certainly, sometimes and only sometimes I felt invincible. Not any longer. I tread carefully, no longer certain of my capacity to see things through. My energy is shorter-lived. But that is how it should be, I am older, much older and life is a little more daunting.

I light candles and the fairy-lights, anything to dispel the gloom. The walk was still. No one was about. I walked through the area that they have cordoned off for the ice-skating rink. The castle and the playground are alight with bright oranges, greens and blues. It is a kind of empty fairyland. It finishes tomorrow and all the Christmas sparkles come down on Sunday. Then there is January, February and March to survive. Still no lighter. It will come, Spring will come sure as day. Won’t it?