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.