What Fresh Hell?

I've been listening mostly to Eels, these last days.

Having no privacy and not being able to write or blog has made me feel like I'm developing a personality disorder. Yes, I know. Another one.

And the main thing I was looking forward to  - well, it may be off the agenda now.

I'm tired of the old shit  -  let the new shit begin.

Deck The Halls

T'is the season to be jolly, after all.

All the girl-jobs are pretty much done. Selecting and ordering the food, buying and wrapping all the presents (including a couple for me so it doesn't look too obvious that I haven't got any), liaising with the relatives, sorting out the schedule, all that: all done.

The tiny number of boy-jobs? Not done. Not even commenced. And let's face it, we're not talking about much here. Replacing some missing bulbs in the lamps before the visitors come. Getting the TV fixed. Unblocking the kitchen sink.

I asked him, when he was in town, to pick up four nice Christmas cards.  Cue eye-rolling, moaning, groaning.

"Don't you have any cards at home? Can't you get some next time you're out? I'm really busy. Who are they for?"

Your son, your daughter, your mother and your brother actually.

Ho, ho, woe.

Keep a Straight Face

Holy crap. I have committed the crime of Laughing In The Kitchen.

The sentence for this appears to be a night on the sofa.  I'm not sure if that might be a blessing rather than a punishment.

For heaven's sake. The man is a complete nightmare.

Kurinji

I started this blog 14 months ago, after attending a writing workshop.  I wanted to make some changes in my life. One of those changes was to start taking my writing seriously. 

Now just over a year later, I have achieved several of my objectives. One important development is that my writing is starting to come together, and other people are beginning taking it seriously too.

To reach this point, I had to make decisions in other areas of my life too. How I spend my time, how I sustain myself, how I balance all the conflicting demands I'm trying to meet.

For a brief time, it all came together and the writing was flowing.  When the conditions are right, suddenly the meadow can burst into bloom after all those barren years.

Mink

Something Christmassy, boys?

Not really. I know she's called Holly, but it's just a ruse to get your attention   -  I know it worked.  And there is in fact a tenuous link.

I have found the answers you have been seeking to the complex and confusing nature of relationships and emotions and all that icky stuff.  I have consulted the interweb and through this exciting new hi-tech information medium I have been introduced to the world authority on the topic.

His name is Ramon, The Mink Of Love.

(See what I did there?)

He has devised a quiz for men to help them understand their Love Personality.  It's short enough to match any boy's attention span, and will make you laugh your pants off even if doesn't help you become wiser in the ways of the world.

Love

John knows.

How Do I Love Thee?

Let me count the ways.

“Do you love her?” I asked him.

“I don’t know what that means. Define it. Give me some objective tests”.

Oh god, here we go again. These men and their reasoning brains. As I heard on the radio only yesterday, if you give a man a book called Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, he’s likely to point out that atmospheric conditions on both these planets do not support gender-differentiated life-forms.

So we kicked around some yes/no questions that might test the proposition. Some of these we felt might be friendship, or fondness, or lust. Some of them, I thought, might be love - but he was less than certain. I tried the old listen-to-your-heart, but he just pulled That Face.

I posited my theory that love has many shades and hues. That it does not exist for one person in one way; that the human capacity for love is enormous, boundless; that we can love many people in many ways. But he was making That Face again.

Saying it like it is: love is the one area where our gender stereotypes flip into reverse. If a woman loves you, she’ll tell you. Look you right in the eye and say it straight out, no messing.

Men get all angst-y and anguished; over-analyse and wonder whether they have really, truly loved anyone; worry about what expectations might be raised if they say it; fret about how it might be received and whether it’s the right moment and whether it means something else will have to happen. For heaven’s sake, boys! You hate it when we do this.

I reckon it’s best to judge a man’s love - or otherwise - by his deeds rather than his words, no matter how articulate he might be in other respects. And, men, it’s an easy test. If you can’t work out how you feel about someone, look at what you do, how you act, the way you behave when you’re with her.

You’ll soon realise the answer to the question is easier than you thought.

Seven Reasons

I was a looking at an article on MSN the other day entitled Men: Seven Reasons You’re Not Having Sex. Go on, admit it. You're curious too. 

Written by a man, it suggests the following.  (Look it up and see him expand on these if you so desire). Guys, it could be:

1. Your bedroom isn’t sexy any more
2. You’re too busy
3. You don’t like your body
4. You spend too long looking at porn
5. You’re bored of sex
6. You have too much entertainment
7. Your partner doesn’t want to

I thought a wife's perspective might be useful here, so I've come up with my own variants on these seven.

1. Your bedroom isn’t sexy any more: it’s filled with piles of car magazines, partly-worn clothes of yours, the cardboard insides of toilet rolls that you never throw away and a number of hardback books you will never read. And you... watching sport, or in bed working on the laptop or making shouty business calls.

2. She’s too busy: running around doing laundry, shopping, mum-taxi, running the household. Oh, and holding down a full time executive job.

3. You don’t like your body. She doesn’t like your body. You don’t like her body. She doesn’t like her body. Neither of you are 22 any more. Shocker.

4. You’ve spent so long looking at porn, you can’t muster a decent erection now unless you’re surrounded by Scandinavian lesbians with no body hair.

5. You’re boring at sex. Maybe you’ve always been boring, but now she’s bored of faking, so you’ve only just realised after all these years that perhaps you’re not very good.

6. She has better things to entertain her: good wine, good friends, good conversation, a good book.

7. You don’t want to.

You know what? I was looking for a photo to illustrate this post, and I searched in Google Images for "not having sex any more". There are 154,000,000 results. So it's probably not just you...

Whispers in the Dark

When you are gone, I bury my face in the pillow where you slept so I can smell your skin.

Sometimes when I turn my head, the scent of you is in my hair where I lay against your chest.

And when your eyes are closed, I mouth the things I must not speak in a silent voice you cannot hear and only your eyelids see.

My fingers curl small so you could fold your hand around them, and my shoulders wait for the wrap of your arm.

I listen to your actions, and I count your kindnesses as the words you do not say.

November Wordle

It'll open in a new window if you click on it - but only on a PC, not on an iPhone.

Some Kittens Are On The Pitch

It was one of the most surreal moments I've had in this most surreal of relationships.

He's giving the Literary Lodger advice on How To Leave A Man. I'm listening carefully, to see if I can pick up some tips. 

Actually he's being kind and concerned, thinking hard about what to say. And I have one of those moments, you know, where you think - maybe I'm wrong? Maybe he's ok. Maybe he's nice. Maybe I'm not trying hard enough? Maybe it's me?

"Hmmm," he ponders. "How do you win a woman?"  As if she was a prize, a trophy, a game.

"See, it's like a sport. You can still win, even right at the end, with a late goal in the last ten seconds. We're always trying to win in the final score: it's what we do.

"Men don't get it if you try to maintain a rapport, stay friends. You have to move out, leave, go, cut them off. If you're kind and gradual they just don't get the message, they think the game hasn't finished yet".

Spin

Gravity is broken. I am an astronaut watching life in the laughter-lit windows of the space station, as I tumble in slow motion downwards and away, turning and drowning in the cold darkness, spinning silently into starry black.

Grasp

I am shrinking.

Becoming smaller and smaller. The walls are closing in until soon my whole existence will fit into a shoe box, maybe even a match box.  The bonds I had with the rest  of the world are stretching thin and distant, people seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Umbilical connections that fed me my lifeblood are pulling away.  

I see you through a pane of thick glass. Only at arm’s reach: I can still touch my fingertips to yours, but I cannot feel their warmth, or the surge of your pulse, or mine. Just the cool transparent smoothness.

Departure Lounge

I'm done.

If I need gallons of wine, handfuls of Prozac and industrial doses of painkillers just to get through the day, that can't be right, can it?

The last straw, by definition, is a tiny thing in the end, isn't it? Of itself, unremarkable. But you just know.

It's not quite the right moment, but the right moment is coming.  Soon.  After Christmas, after January. I'm in the departure lounge.

October Wordle

It's a summary of October's posts. I like this way of looking at things.

Click on the picture and it opens in a full window.

A Bigger Splash

We'd started off talking about Jude Law, actually. How he was dumped by Susan Sarandon (*sigh*) in Alfie, what a lovely dad he was in The Holiday.  The Broken-Hearted Sicilian had been swooning over him only last weekend in Closer, she said.

It's one of my favourite films. Probably because it's not really a film at all, started its life as a play. This accounts for the truly excellent dialogue.  "Oh I prefer Clive Owen", I said. "I like him - he's sleazy".

Thing 2 did that bloody irritating thing that kids do, where they are deaf to every request to put stuff away, clear plates, hang up coats and so forth,  but will suddenly have the antennae of a bat, ears a-flap, just at the time you don't want them to.

"What does sleazy mean, mummy?"

Hmmm, that's kind of hard to explain.  I gave it my best shot.  I was hoping for some help from the Literary Lodger, but she was folded up with silent laughter and enjoying watching me dig myself into an ever-deeper hole.  I was reduced, after a couple of truly pathetic attempts, to google a few definitions and read them out.

"So why would you like someone like that? That doesn't sound very nice".

It doesn't really, does it? That's the mystery of attraction, I guess.  I saw a sneaky chance for revenge.

"She'll be able to explain it better", I nodded at the Literary Lodger, still giggling. "She's a writer, and she used to be a teacher so she will be able to tell you". Muahahaha.

"It's like jumping in a puddle", she said. "You know you're not supposed to, and you'll get all splashed and dirty, but just for that moment it feels good".

"Well mummy, she's definitely better at explaining stuff than you are".  

I'm still not convinced we've entirely conveyed it, though...

Quiet

And all night in my head, the metallic trundling of shutters rolling down at the end of the day, doors slamming, the rattle of Venetian blinds. The sounds of closing off, entrances being blocked, windows obscured.

Then silence as you slip beneath the surface of the sea, your lips still moving under the water, your eyes beseeching. And I reach out my hand but you are sinking, dropping away with a cloud of silver-sad fish spiralling around you, and I see your words are small bubbles still floating up, but I cannot hear their message.

Inspiration

Inspire:  a breathing-in.


I went to a writing workshop on Saturday. It's the longest time I've ever devoted to thinking about where I want to head with my writing. Lots of excellent food for thought, but a couple of points that really struck home.

The first was in a session about writers and how they live their lives, do their work.  Several people have been advising me to give up my job, or reduce it back. And I've felt myself that somehow a Proper Writer would be wandering lonely as a cloud, or languishing in a garret, or sitting in a Greek fisherman's cottage and in any and each of these settings concentrating deeply and purposefully on writing. Dedicated, focussed, single-minded, no interruptions.

This scenario has always filled me with panic.

I don't do anything else in this way. I've always had multiple things going on, priorities to juggle, projects to manage, people to see, deadlines to meet. I just can't imagine sitting in front of the screen or page for hours at a stretch, struggling for inspiration. I generally find it's the other way around. That writing is bubbling up inside of me and I'm waiting, waiting for a moment when I can get it down.

Listening to a poet explain how she had perhaps one day a week to devote to writing itself, in between all the other stuff she did to earn enough to be able to write, was a great place to start. Day a week: that seems possible.  Even better, she was followed by a science professor running a university department who managed to write novels (ten so far) whilst holding down a senior job and raising a family (not sure how much raising he does, but we'll take it on trust for now, heh?)  Best of all, he said that when he got funding to stop university work for a year and write, he dossed about, lost his focus in all areas of his life, hardly achieved anything at all, got depressed and panicky. I just know I'd be like that too.

I reckon for me it's a question of finding a balance.  A re-jigging of time and priorities, a gradual transition rather than a sudden sea change. This feels more manageable, more realistic, more achievable.  The danger of waiting for a pure solution, clean time, is that it never happens and I never write.

Which leads me on to the second insight.  It was a session about writing in digital environments, including some discussion on blogging. I explained that I wrote, and I also blogged (sometimes about my writing, more often than not a drivelling-on about nothing in particular). I find it easy to write my blog, and often hard to progress with my novel.  And frequently the quality of writing dashed down in fifteen minutes in one of my Postcards strikes me as better than a carefully crafted, agonised-over paragraph of lonely-as-a-cloud wandering.  What advice could the panel offer?

Wisdom and insight.  "You need to make your writing feel like blogging. You need to look at tools that help you to write small scenes or episodes as the mood takes you, and juggle these around. You need Scrivener software". I looked this up and she was dead right.  However now I also need either a Mac to run it on (oooh tempting....) or the patience to wait until March 2011 when it comes out of beta and is properly launched on the Windows platform. Aaargh.  Not sure I can manage either of these things.

It was also suggested that I print out the blog as individual pages and lay them all out on the floor (a big floor) so I can arrange them by themes, try them out in different groupings, see if there is a way to create links and connections between them so they hang together in a more structured way.  I'd already been thinking about this. 

What I need next is some help with this, another pair of eyes, a critical friend, some constructive feedback.

I feel excited, energised and enthused. I'm in the zone.

ReThink

I need to talk to someone. I need to talk to someone about my business, I need to talk to someone about my life.

I am lost and bewildered in a disorienting landscape, with decisions I must make - and my compass is broken. Part of the problem is, I don’t know what I want.

I have a lot of things that other people want, and I worry that there is something wrong with me for not being happy with situations that many others profess to long for: good job, good health, plenty of money, nice house, nice cars, nice holidays, good friends. It sounds ridiculous to say it’s not enough.

And actually it’s not about enough. It’s about instead. I have a good job but what I really want to do is write. I don’t know whether I can be good enough to do that as my main activity, whether there is any point. With a little more effort, I could push forward with my business, my career, to the point where my financial future is completely taken care of and I am free to do what I like after that, including writing for 25 years without ever earning a penny from it. That has a certain appeal, but there is a delayed reward and in the meantime my writing output may have to remain at its current level rather than increase. I don’t know whether this will have an impact on quality, or just quantity.

There are some big decisions to be made on the business front, and I don’t have anyone to talk to. All my friends who would understand the professional issues are drowning in their own work and we simply don’t have time to unpack the situation and go through the pros and cons of the thing without collapsing from exhaustion or indeed boredom. Far better to do what we do, a wry grimace at how was your day? then a glass of wine, talk about something else, try to forget about it for a while.

Same deal on the home front. I’m a giver. Kindness, friendship, support, love, attention, gifts, affection, hugs, kisses, really horny sex. I want to give these things, I need to give them, it's what I like to do, it's what makes me happy. Easy enough to find people who will pick from the list as if I’m an a la carte, a pick’n’mix, the salad bar off to the side, with all the Proper Couples sitting down in pairs for the main meal. Sometimes I feel like that’s ok, it’s modern, it’s fun. Then I realise no-one has ever wanted the whole package.

Sometimes I just feel like the all-of-me has somehow come together wrong. I need to talk to someone.

Compound

It would be a great job, wouldn't it? And someone, somewhere, must have it. Official inventor of words for new things.

I don't mean the natural evolution of language and the emergence of new words, absolutely fascinating although that is to me. I'm talking about the purposeful naming of something new. As our language is already formed, we tend to use compounds for this (moon-walk, handset, mail-order). 

I saw a beautiful illustration of the power and impact new word-combinations can have, in one of the Poems on the Underground recently called Whalesong.  Do click through and read it: it made my day.  There are also the irritating, lazy ones (Brangelina, J-Lo, Tom-Kat) created to keep the character-count down in a world which feeds on vacuous celeb-goss (see, anyone can do it!) that will fit onto a mobile phone screen.

The one that's intriguing me lately though is waterboarding.  See, this is wrong. It sounds like it's going to be fun: some sort of combination of snowboarding, wakeboarding, water ski-ing. How can something that sounds so fresh and sportive and outdoorsy be so hideous and sinister? It doesn't hint at any of the threat or terror. Call me cynical, but I reckon it's a deliberately inocuous term so that it can be discussed and used as if it were something quite reasonable.

I had a client once who had a warehouse on his site full of barrels. What's in these unmarked barrels? By-products from the nuclear processing industry. But you don't have a license to keep or transport nuclear waste here, do you? It's a decommissioned site.  It's not nuclear waste, he said. We don't have a license for that. It's strategic material. See?

Hair Today

It's supposed to signify something, changing your hair.

At least, it says so in the women's magazines. Hair is important in fairy tales too.  And when I googled "what does it mean when a woman cuts her hair?" just now, there seem to be all sorts of old wives' tales and urban myths about power and sexuality.

I don't think it's that, though.

I reckon it's something simpler. There's no question that women get new hairstyles at significant times in their lives, watershed moments, times of crisis. The end of a relationship is a typical example (Diana), the end of a period of your life (Emma, looking UnHermione, above). In my opinion, a dramatic change of hairstyle is an easy way of saying to the world: "Look, I've changed".

So what does it mean that last week I had my hair cut and coloured at a new hairdressers, and came out with a shorter, blonder style? Which I then decided I didn't like, so went back to my old hairdressers today to have it re-coloured? Going local turning out, in the end, to be a false economy of epic proportions, as I have now spent £366 on it in the last fortnight - unbelievable.

Was last week the pivotal moment? Or this week? Or both?  It's been a time of leaving things behind and moving on to new stages. It's left my hair feeling confused, but underneath the reddish, blondish, and sometimes greyish strands, my head is in the right place.

Monday

Everything will be ok.

The Business of Waiting

I wrote a poem, and for once I was pretty pleased with it.  I've decided to put it forward to a publication though, so I can't publish it on here after all. Blink and you missed it (or ask me nicely and I might email it to you).

Lone Star

Despite the workwhirl and busyrush, the alwaysnoise and the smilefake, I was lonely.

Click Refresh

I'm not too busy, in my frenzy of work, to check my emails a hundred times an hour.  It's the 21st century equivalent of the lovesick teenager standing by the phone, I suppose.  I don't have the patience to wait for it to refresh every ten minutes. It's like a nervous tic, an OCD. And all day the music blasting through the headphones.  And all the while, time is passing: at different speeds in different places, the way time does.

Je Travaille

I know how to speed up time. I know how to make the next few days whip by in a blurry flash.

I have signed myself up for back-to-back, wall-to-wall, bumper-to-bumper deadlines. If I get my head up for three seconds betweeen tasks, it will be a miracle. I will surely pay the price for this later, but for now it's what I need. A headlong, mindless lurch to 9am Monday with no room to think in between.

Some days, days like these, I want them to last forever. Other days, like now, I can't get them over quickly enough.

My head is down, my shoulder is to the wheel. Tick tock, tick tock.

Woodentop

When I look back through my diaries, my scribbles, my notebooks, it’s always been there. The knowledge that deep down, there is nothing to find. Nothing interesting, nothing good, nothing worthwhile.

Getting to know me is like the dread childhood experience of being given a matryoshka. What could be at the centre of something so interesting, so carefully crafted, so intriguing? Work your way through the elaborately decorated layers to reach the middle, and all you find is a nub of plain wood.

The whole of my life is designed around trying to conceal this fact.

Don’t bother to come close, dig down. You’ll only end up disappointed, like everyone who went before you.

Mommie Dearest

Cold. Dark. November. A Monday morning of torrential rains and gale force winds, mud on the roads, leaves on the line.

“Mummy, are you coming to my concert tonight? It’s at 4 o’clock. I’m doing three solos”.

Entirely uninformed of this event, I am about to disappear to a series of meetings and workshops that will only bring me back just before bed time. And Daddy is overseas. I explain this as gently, as kindly as I can.

"If you were a proper mummy, you would come to my concert instead of going to work”.

She’s crestfallen, understandably. I deaden my inner howl of anguish and explain that I would love to come to the concert, but that I am working hard so that they have the chance to go to such a lovely school with all the opportunities for music lessons and dancing and performances and so forth.

“But if we didn’t go to private school, you wouldn’t have to go to work so much. You could do your writing in the daytime and pick us up in the afternoons. We could go to the park together and have hot chocolate, and we’d still get good marks because you could help us with our homework. It would be like when you have a day off and you are making tea while we are doing our maths, and it’s all cosy in the kitchen and we’re laughing”.

Well, yes.

I went to my meetings. Two workshops with small businesses struggling in the construction sector. An OFSTED inspection at the College where I am a governor, which provides vocational training in deprived areas of the inner city and is fighting for survival. I thought that, on balance, they were lucky girls.

I watched the solos later, when I finally got home. Grainy mobile phone footage and crackly sound. It still brought tears to my eyes. All sorts of reasons.

Start the Week

The kitten begins the week with her tail between her legs. Has listened to some unpleasant home truths and is on a verbal warning.

School Daze

I go through phases where I think I've done a good job bringing up my girls, and then periods where I think I'm making a bit of a hash of it.  The main priority I've always given myself is to make sure that they don't grow up feeling as negative about themselves as I and many of my generation do.  I'm sure this must be where my Impostor Syndrome began  -  it's taken us lot a long time to become comfortable in our own skins, and even now we're very unforgiving of ourselves.

My older daughter had her first period last month  -  and I quietly congratulated myself on the fact that she was confident, unfazed, laid back and there was a general absence of drama about the whole thing.  I didn't want it to be the dirty, mysterious, somewhat shameful monthly occurence that it was when I was her age.

I remember I started on 14 November 1978. I had won the form prize the year before, and it was Speech Day that evening.  I had to walk across the stage to collect my plaque, and remembered having agonies of self-consciousness and concerns that you can only begin to imagine.  Thing 1, having been fully prepared and kitted out in advance, just casually mentioned at bed time "I started my periods today" and it was all a bit of a non-event.

Not for her the enormous towels the size of a mattress, attached by a system of belts and loops that was incredibly complicated yet totally failed to maintain the damn thing in anywhere near the right position.  Not for her the monthly horror of the requirement to run the gauntlet of Michelle and Renetta and their sinister fiefdom of the toilets.  Not for her the terror of the sanitary incinerator with its fiery roar and the big metal chute that we called the Jaws of Hell.

Still seems a shame though, growing up so quickly, to have started menstruating while you're still wearing Mickey Mouse pants. Girls these days have a different set of challenges.

Thing 2, on the other hand, makes that 18 months between them look like a million miles. She phoned me when I was on the train to complain that she couldn't finish her maths homework because she had a really bad neck ache.  Like any mother, I immediately assumed she had meningitis, and started grilling her about whether she had a headache if she looked at the light.

"I can't look at the light, my neck hurts too much if I try to do that".   Panic.  I'm on my way, fast as I can.

When I arrived home, all however seemed fine, and the neck ache had gone. "It only hurts when I do my maths". Ah, that sort of neck ache: I think I know that. "But I haven't finished my maths yet, so now you're back, you can help me".

We went upstairs together to the computer. For the first time ever, the maths homework had been issued electronically, on the new school memory stick.  How times change  -  I started doing maths with a slide rule and log book. The source of the neck ache became immediately obvious. Thing 2 was attempting to complete the homework from the memory stick whilst still wearing the memory stick on the nice blue school lanyard around her neck.

"We were told not to take it off the Lampard", she explained.  "The lanyard", I corrected. "Yes, the Lampard".   Her head was almost resting on the keyboard (our USB port is in the side of the screen) and so it was hard for her to type and look up at the sums from this angle. I could see it was indeed hurting her neck a lot.  We decided to try it by leaving the memory stick on the Lampard as instructed, but removing the whole affair from around her neck so she could sit up properly.  She smiled and gave me a hug. "Mummy you are so amazingly clever". Oh yes.

"Something exciting happened to me today", she said. "I have been chosen to put a wreath on the war memorial, from the school".  That's nice. "In England, we have poppies for remembrance. In France they have a different flower, and it's our school flower so we're going to have a circle of those made up and I am going to march up and put it on".  What is this school flower, then? "It's a cauliflower".

A wreath of cauliflowers for Remembrance Sunday? Really?????

She was insistent.  Outraged at my questioning.  In the end, I did the unthinkable and asked Thing 1. What's the school flower?

"The cornflower". Ah.

Venus and Mars?

I was going to say I hate books like this, but I realise I've never actually read one.  Mainly because I feel I would hate it. Usually I'm against facile gender stereotyping  -  and anyway I'm superb at reading maps.

However I do sometimes wonder whether they may be some truth in these things.  My elder daughter, for instance, as soon as she could speak asked me to buy her a pink sparkly top and a toy ironing board.  After that she wanted a toy vacuum cleaner, toy dustpan and brush and toy cooker.  Imagine my disgust.

Then my nephew arrived, cast his eyes around the playroom and siezed the broom in his hand. Pulled off the head, and triumphantly announced "I've got a sword, and I'm going to kill you all". (We don't have guns in the playroom, but I do still let the kids have soldiers with their boiled eggs, rather than peacekeepers).

My book-writer friend teased me when he saw my notes, listing one of the themes for my novel as "the women do all the tough stuff and the men are a bit crap".  I admit I deserve to be ribbed about that. 

His latest work, on the other hand, is going to be a boy's-own tale of adventure and derring-do. "Are there any women at all?" I wondered. "Erm, yes...." he mumbled. "There is one. She's housebound".

Hmmmm.

I think between us, we could write a set of well-rounded characters.  And then everyone could find them boring, rather than just half the reading public.

Breach

Once again, he’s been looking through my things. My bedside drawers. My Writing folder on my laptop. The Personal folder in my Outlook. My diaries even, who knows?

My sense of horror is palpable. Of all the conventions he breaks in our relationship, I feel this is the worst. The invasion of my privacy by a person whose constant mantras are “give me space”, “leave me alone”, feels like an outrage.

I would never do this. Never look in his wallet, never open his post, never snoop through his drawers or his laptop or his phone. Surely everyone is allowed their personal space?

Oddly, I feel it may be the straw that finally breaks this camel’s back. The lack of respect for me as a private individual who would be allowed my own things is I suppose just a confirmation of the way he treats me in other ways. Like a child, like a chattel.

Is it, I wonder, possible to live with someone who cannot afford me even that basic degree of courtesy? Is it, I wonder, possible to live in a house where I may not feel at home? I would rather be on my own.

I discovered this at the weekend and I’ve been mulling it over the last couple of days. I don’t want to jump to a hasty conclusion. But I don’t think I want to be with a man who would not take any of the things I offered, but would steal my private thoughts without asking.

I am the closest I have ever been to leaving. Just to work out what to do about the girls.

Map of the Human Heart

Opinion was pretty conclusive on this week's quiz, wasn't it? 

How to find the way to a man's heart? If he wants you there, he'll show you.  So to follow that logically through, if he doesn't show you, you'd better conclude he doesn't want you there.

And to follow through my no-effort film-title theme going on here, I refer you to the film illustrated above. A vacuous and shallow piece which spend 100 minutes or so conveying the message that if a guy acts like he's just not that into you, you can spend ages with your girlfriends trying to interpret his message, but it will turn out to be that, quite simply, he's just not that into you.

Unfortunately, as I've pointed out before, I'm a slow learner.

Bitter Pill

Ash in my mouth. Every millimetre of the surface of my tongue blotted to dustry dryness.

I have swallowed some hard medicine these last days. Choke it down, choke it down.  How much is a thirst for things I cannot have, and how much is the pills?  How much is it the gulping back of tears, a hollow in the pit of my stomach where part of my inside has been blasted out, imperceptible to the outside world?  How much is the dry mouth of fear at the prospect of walking on with the ground cut from beneath my feet?  This is the sour, metallic taste of humiliation.

It is hard to tell the poison from the cure, sometimes.  Meanwhile I try not gag on this bitter pill.

Geography Lesson

Rutland Water, resting gently blue in its valley of soft greens and early golds, is completely man made. The triumph of creating something that looks so natural seems not just a feat of engineering, but a trompe-l’oeil that compels you to look ever more closely until you can find the artifice. On the Sunday afternoon, I drove to the dam: even right there, I couldn’t see it. Bounded by a ruler-straight edge of water, it was plain on the map; but from the road alongside, it appeared just another rolling slope of grass and trees amongst the others.

There was nothing to give a clue that this is an immense, carefully built structure of clay and stone, with underpinning and escape drains and tunnels and inner strengthening. This hillock, imperceptible in the landscape, dams back hundreds of thousands of tonnes of water yet sits calmly under the weight of the enormous pressure, holding back, holding back, holding back.

People are like this, by the time you get to our age. You can only guess at what they were like before they had created the complex structure of dams and berms and fences and boundaries that get them through. Traffic is re-routed to skirt areas which may not withstand incursion. After a while the raw scars settle down as a new landscape and then it is hard to tell how the original map might have been.

And as adults, we recognise the delicate structure of some else’s geography. We want to be close, but we want to do no harm, breach no carefully-woven hedgerows, burst through the walls of none of the lagoons where pain has been so carefully dammed up.

Delicate as dentists, we are able to keep - with oh such attentive care - to the narrow paths. We can talk, just talk, with no shouting or crying or reproaches or anger. We can find a way to read one another’s maps, to see the expert construction and landscaping skills that were needed to create a human being that can make it through the days, through the long dark winters. Gently guiding, hand-in-hand or arm around the shoulders: look here, but don’t go in. Don’t press here, it will hurt me. Steer away from there, it will hurt you. This is an old part, I’m so used to it now, I almost forget I made it. This a fresh wound, it needs to be left for the grass to grow over: not yet.

Quietly, carefully, we talk, we learn. We don’t expect, at this time of our lives to run free, to ride roughshod, over someone else’s inner landscape. And therefore we can afford to unfurl our maps a little, understanding this can make things simpler rather than more complicated.

We can cope, nowadays, with the contradiction, and the paradox, and the loose ends. We realise that life is untidy and ragged, and we can embrace its messiness. We can allow people the right be exactly the way they are, and gladly accept what is offered, and walk the path together for a while.

Route Map

your name here

So if you wanted to find the way to a man’s heart, how would you go about it?

I suppose it would be sensible to start with a man who you know has a heart in there somewhere to begin with, a capacity for warmth and tenderness, for passion. That’s already ruled out a few chaps we know.

Then the exploring would begin. It’s a blindfold journey with only a few clues along the route. Perhaps it’s the way he listens more carefully to a particular story, the way his eyes light up when he talks on a certain topic, the catch in his voice when he tells you about a memory. The way he softens in your arms at a particular touch, his look when his eyes meet yours at a certain moment.

Sometimes you can find the way. Sometimes you can get close. Sometimes it's like the centre of a maze: tantalisingly slipping into view and then as suddenly away again.

Some men want you to find a different part of the body, lower down. Some men want you on the outside: they don't want you coursing through their veins, echoing their beat. Some men have an invisible tattoo on their heart that says "Closed". Some men have a heart that's open for business, but with a sign out saying "No Vacancy".

To assist with the unravelling of this mystery, I've made it the new Quiz of the Week. Safe for anyone to take part. Even Americans.

Clarity

The buried church at Rutland Water

Sometimes I dig myself into such a place, I wonder how I'll ever get out of it.

But today I feel that expecting less is probably the key. Accept what is offered, while it is there.

And accept (this is the hard part) that in the face of irresistible competition the only way I can maintain my dignity is to lose gracefully.

I wept, I raged. Oh god, you don't know the half of it. Tore myself to pieces inside, took myself to the edge of insanity  -  or maybe even over the edge, we'll never be sure.

And then I thought: the universe will not shift its ways for me. I sit where I sit in the pecking order of life and love. If the waters are rising around me, all I can do, rooted to my spot, is shore myself up.

You're not the only one who's counting down the days, you know.

Lost

"Listen", she said softly, "I don't like to
speak out of turn".

She sat down opposite my desk, closed the door.

"I've seen you every day, worked for you, it's eight years now". Time flies... "This person who comes in here with red eyes every day and goes upstairs and closes the door so we can't see her crying, this is not you. We've lost you. Where are you?"

"Oh don't worry," I warbled cheerily. "I'm fine when I go out to meetings. I'm not like this when I'm out representing the public face."

"I know", she said. "That's not my point. You are suffering from depression: you are ill. You are worrying about things you don't need to worry about. You are thinking in ways that don't make sense. It's not as bleak as it all seems - it's only inside your brain that it's dark".

I didn't say anything. Inside my head it was too dark to see.

"You're going to the doctor", she said. "And not that stupid Yvonne woman". That's a relief.

"Try not to worry. Everything will be ok. You are a good, happy person. We'll get you back".

Maybe everything will be ok.

In the meantime, a promise to myself. I will triangulate my list of worries with the tiny list of people who give a shit, and I will only worry about the things they tell me are worth worrying about. There are good things,I know. Just hard to see them in the dark.

Reassurance

"Are you fishing for reassurance?"

Heck, isn't everyone?

I don't imagine I'm the only person in the world who wants someone to put their arms around me and tell me everything is going to be ok.  Cautious, sensible people won't do that, I suppose.  Too rational to make promises about factors completely beyond their control. Fair enough.

But how about "this particular thing will be ok"? Or how about "if things aren't ok, I will put my arms around you"?  Or something?

I'm scared about lots of things at the moment. I wrote them down to confront my fear head-on. They looked even worse in harsh black-and-white, winking malevolently at me from the screen.

I don't seem like a person who is scared, or like someone who needs reassurance. I'm like a hedgehog. I'm like a conker. I'm like a kitten in a cold hard submarine. I know.

Even just the arms round me, I'd settle for that.



Fishing

River Len where it flows into the lake

Tries harder.

I've kept every personal letter anyone has ever sent me.  Even the only one I ever received from my mother (which told me she thought there were fleas in my carpet).   Some of my favourites are from my cousin who lived in Maidstone -  she's kept all mine too.

Dear Freckles

I am sorry you have all gone home now and it will be boring again.  Mum did another one of her special recipes (errrr) it was a berlati (?) bean bake and it was horrible. We fed it to Fred when she wasn't looking and later he was sick on one of her cushions, the new ones with the ribbon. Cathy had put it on the floor for doing headstands. Well she went mad. Her and dad had a screaming row and we couldn't even watch Doc. Who. She realized what we had done because of all beans in the dog-sick!

The fishing was fun again wasn't it? I saw those boys but I was on my bike so I just rode off really quick. Next time if you can get nets from the beach shop that would be better because the thing with the tights gets all sludgy doesn't it. Greg said he caught an actual trout but we don't believe him.

I have a new plan. At exactly precisely 7.00pm on Monday night you pinch Soppy Sister W and I will pinch Soppy Sister C. We have not finished getting them yet, no way.

I have asked my dad and the thing about the Free House is definitely not true, so that is the end of that plan.

See you in two weeks, countdown 14 and backwards.

M xxx

We used to fish in the stream by the waterfall in Mote Park, just around the corner and over the road from their house. We made fishing nets by threading a metal coathanger through the top of a nylon popsock (American Tan, no doubt), twisting it into a loop, and then ramming the twist of metal into the top of bamboo cane.  These nets we dragged endlessly in the mud and occasionally caught a stickleback.

Sometimes we would look down and realise that a leech had attached itself to our skinny ice-cold calves. We knew the remedy and had already pinched a couple of cigarettes and a box of matches from my dad. Light up, take a couple of puffs to make the end nice and red, then touch it onto the leech: taking care not to touch it onto your own skin in the process.  Then pretend to smoke, by putting the cigarette in between your lips and trying hard not to breathe whilst looking as if you were.

The places are all still the same. Maybe kids still fish for sticklebacks in the park? Or maybe that's so last-century. I don't suppose I will stand in a stream again, fishing with an old stocking until my feet turn blue with cold. These days feel like yesterday, and a lifetime ago.

Half of life has passed, maybe, likely, more. And maybe there will be less first-times, and an ever-growing proportion of last-times. And for some things it's already been the last-time, even if we don't know it yet.

I struggle to accept this. I do.

Sunday

My neediness is repellent. I make myself feel sick.

Gloom

Strange that a feeling so grey and drear could be woven from these threads.

An ache that echoes someone else's pain.
A knowledge that I couldn't make things better.
A lurch of recognition of all day saying the wrong words, the wrong way.
Bed on my own, early even after a night out.
Painkiller doses creeping into red.
Clouds and rain and darkness. October.

Keep me company?

Paradox

Not entirely without self-awareness, I do realise that I would be so much easier to love if I didn't want it so much.

The Anniversary Waltz

If I had stuck it out with Husband # 1 I'd have just passed my 20th wedding anniversary now. What a strange thought  - for many reasons. I don't feel old enough to have been doing anything for twenty years, although actually I've been running my business for more than fifteen so I guess it must be true. That first wedding seems a world away  -  I'm a completely different person now, and so, I imagine, is he. No wonder we're not still together.

But lots of people still are, aren't they? How many of them, do you think, choose to stay together because they have grown up and outwards in the same direction, and love each other and love to be together? 

And how many are together for the children? Or, children up and gone, are still together through inertia? Well, these are the questions we don't ask. Facades must be maintained at all times, otherwise our nice middle-class professional world will implode.

My twentieth wedding anniversary should have been celebrated with the gift of China. I imagine after twenty years you've stopped giving each other decent, touching, personal gifts. Or maybe you are chucking so much china around that a replacement batch would be timely.  Luckily I scored the Royal Doulton in my divorce settlement. However he got the cutlery so I had to wait till my second wedding to get some decent knives and forks.

I'd be in the run-up (miserable slip-and-slide?) to my 25th, my Silver Wedding, now.  21 years is Nickel or Brass apparently (so old now that you are collecting crappy fireside ornaments?) 22 is Copper (likewise, maybe a little pikey kettle to go on your hearth?) 23 Silver Plate (replacing your wedding cutlery, I suppose?) 24 is Musical Instruments (nearly at retirement, time to take up a new hobby?) and then your 25th which is Silver, as any fule kno.  Maybe a trophy for having made it to a quarter of a century without killing each other or yourselves.

Are you gonna make it that far?

I of course am on the second spin of the roundabout, and only recently. Talk about the triumph of hope over experience.  My first anniversary, which passed in the summer, was Paper. Since the whole shebang was prompted by tax and inheritance issues, and was therefore a business deal, how very very appropriate.  My second will be Cotton. Bandages, maybe? 

Taking me up to the Seven Year Itch (otherwise known as Woop!!! The moment when Child # 2 goes to college and I am free!!) we can celebrate year 3 with Leather (interesting....), 4 is Fruit or Flowers (see, giving in so early with crap gifts  -  banana, anyone?), 5 is Wood, 6 is Iron and 7 is Wool or Copper. Enough said.

Child #1 asked me the other day "Mummy, next time you get married, I will be your chief bridesmaid, won't I?"

I explained that I wasn't thinking of getting married again (oh so many reasons).  "But you should, you really should!" she urged.

"Oh look!" I exclaimed. "I think that's a chaffinch on the bird-feeder".  Sometimes it's best just to change the subject.