Limbering Up

Well folks, this is it. 

After all the angst, the drama, the arguments, the tears - I am finally calling time on this toxic, hurtful, heartbreaking relationship. I don't see that there is anything more I can do, anything else I can try. 

We have sketched out a financial deal. I have filed a divorce petition ("separation for 2 years") and he has signed the paper. The lovely house we restored together and made into our home is on the market.  I have made an offer on a new house - in a different part of town, thought that would be best. 

My Big Birthday passed without a big trip or a big celebration - drinks with friends, some nice meals out. He bought me a scented candle. I think you could divorce someone just for that.  I'm buying myself a house in France. No excuse not to follow my own dreams now, right? 

The Big Plan had been to wait until Thing 1 and Thing 2 were safely off to college but in the end I just couldn't hold out another two years.  We have just come back from our last family holiday all together (went OK actually, only one major argument). 

Sometimes I feel excited about what the future will hold. Sometimes I'm apprehensive. This is mainly because we plan to carry on working together and I'm not sure how that will pan out. It's also partly on account of the Brexit, the economic situation and what will happen in the business. 

One thing I have learned is that whatever I am feeling, writing always helps. So here I am, back on the page, strolling around at the jumping-off point. Another thing I'm learning is that there isn't one-big jump-off. It's a series of small mundane actions. There ought to be something that's like a wedding or a funeral, an occasion to mark the finish. Maybe I'll have to invent one.

Day. Break.

Takes a while, doesn't it, to get the hang of this life-malarkey.

A man can wake up one morning with a hard-on, and two fried duck-eggs smiling up at him from his plate like twin sunshines.  But not that much later, the paramedics can't resuscitate his dad, and he has to take a drive through the hills to a place he's never experienced before. 

So how can we make it bearable, this long slide from the light to the darkness?  Let's dance through the dull drag of days - hug and help one another, work and write, flirt and fuck. Do something - that's the thing to do. 

A time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and time to dance. 

Prune

Seems like I have reached that time of life where I look in the mirror in the mornings and think, "Surely not".  Despite face creams, exercise and fresh air, facials and all the rest of it, my whole body seems to have drooped into a limp, disappointed slump of middle age.

I suppose this might be connected to the fact that I sometimes feel like a limp, disappointed middle aged woman  -  but I hate it. All my features are fading into sepia, so drained and washed out that you can hardly notice I'm there without at least a smear of lipstick and mascara to point you in the right direction. Yet I am so full of life, chock-a-block with ideas and urges, blood hot and busy in the rich reds and purples of my arteries and veins. On the inside I am as fresh as raw meat, as brightly hued as a jungle bird. My inner landscape is not the grey of a November Monday but greens, purples and yellows, the roar and splash of waterfalls, the searing orange lava of volcanoes.

I want to laugh, to shout, to run in the rain, roll in the leaves, tumble into bed. I want to sweat, to tremble, to bite, to curse, to sing. I do not want my film to fade to grey, I want full-on action, right to the credits. I want to die with my boots on, and preferably my suspenders and basque as well.

Meanwhile people around me are giving in, giving up, or giving themselves over to the temptation to become a modern-day vampire. As if drinking the kisses of younger women will be like supping at the spring of eternal youth. (I don't think this works. The physical contrast is so visible that for neither of you to remark on it becomes a burden. And you cannot find something on telly that you both enjoy, to entertain you in the inevitable "in between" times that a younger man doesn't need).

Don't write us off, these faded autumn leaves of women. We are smart, and funny, and sexy, with the joie de vivre of the last-chance saloon. I'm not going gently. No way.

Comfort and Joy

Sometimes too much contemplation doesn't do anyone any good. The easy joys, the simple pleasures, get lost to view.

It's all very well to think about the sweep of time, the trajectory of a life, the arc of time passing  -  but there's a different way to look too.

Am I smiling? Right now this second? The answer is yes. And maybe that's all we need to know. It's actually really ridiculously easy to make me happy.

Last Dance

If you thought it was the last time you would see someone, would you do anything differently? Would you say things you wouldn't normally say? Or would you carry on as if everything was normal, and it was just an ordinary day?

I'm never good at goodbyes, not even au revoirs  -  I'm so concerned I'll get over-emotional that I tend to end up rushing off without really leaving properly. And I never look back: you mustn't. Who would want to turn into a pillar of salt? Or even worse, a person with regrets, who questions their decisions and keeps turning round to contemplate the roads not taken.

I reckon it's best to say the things you've got to say at the time they should be said, in the instant they come into your head (or your heart, or whichever part of the anatomy is running the show at any given juncture).  No point in storing things up for a right moment that might never come  -  as soon as you think something and don't say it, you've probably already missed the right moment.

Don't wait - in this stage of our lives, there are too many reminders that it's later than you think.

Simple

"Life is short. There is no time to leave important words unsaid."

Paulo Coelho

Be

Life is a series of moments all called now.

We don't know how many of these moments we have left. How many of them do we miss, thinking about the past, worrying about the future? How many of them do we waste doing nothing worthwhile? How many are ruined with unkindness, unpleasantness? Ticked away in boredom?

I know I'm alive when life takes me by the hand, grabs me by the throat, makes my heart skip a beat, kicks me in the guts, looks me in the eye and says: game on. I want to feel the blood rushing, the world spinning, to stay up all night, to stay in bed all day, to be all used up when I go.

I want to live rather than exist. I want to sing not whisper. I want to be the flame, not the moth. Dance with me.

Elastic

I like to say I have no regrets - that I am the sum total of my collective experiences, and that the choices I made have made me who I am. 

But I guess I do regret one thing - and that's the way some things turn out to be choices, without me ever realising I'd chosen them. There are things that happened by default, by accident, that I never would have chosen if someone had asked me to.  This is the story of the main one.

It's about a boy. Isn't it always? 

We were at school together. We were chalk and cheese, in a lot of ways.  He was rugby, I was reading. He was bravado and I was was brains. Yet there was something there, always something.  We liked each other, we really did.  He was cocky, funny, popular. I was none of these things. Heaven only knows what he saw in me, but we had a connection.  Any chance we got for a snog, we'd grab it.

He was easy to spend time with, in the boring days of summer when we had no money and all we could do was lie on the grass at the edge of the cricket pitch next to the squash club, talking shit and smoking with the rest of them. I didn't go out with him - he never asked me. I'm not sure I would have done, at school, for the simple stupid reason he was a few months younger, and therefore in the year below. Even in my nerdy swot uncoolness, I understood that a younger boyfriend might be social suicide.

It was ok because I was saving him for later.  I was saving him for when he left school. He was leaving before me, going into the army. After that it would be ok to go out with him. I was just waiting.

Stupidly, I didn't account for the fact that once he was in the army, he wouldn't be around any more, and that when he was around he would need to do family stuff. Stupidly, I didn't account for the fact that once he was in the army, and I was at university, his leave would not match with my end of term dates.  

I liked him even more after a few years. We wrote to each other a bit. We saw each other, Christmases mostly, when everyone else was around too. There was a sexual connection sparking between us, sometimes you could almost see it like a Ready-Brek glow, I was sure, but we never had much chance to follow it through. 

It was ok because I was saving him for later. It was ok because I fantasised about him. A lot. Not that he knew, but it kept him in scope.  I wanted him so, so badly.  That part he knew, that part he felt too, at that time. We only managed to get it together on one occasion. I say that casually but I could still tell you every moment. I could tell you the smell of his neck, the weight of him pressed against me, the cold at the small of my back on the cold hard centre-circle of the playing field. 

Then suddenly it was later than we realised. He was going out with a nurse. It was serious. Everyone said she was lovely. Well fuckit. I decided to marry one of my friends, and the last time I saw him was at my wedding. He brought a basket of flowers to the evening do.  It was a shame to leave them behind so we sat them on the dresser of the honeymoon cottage in Cornwall. They stared at me in silence and I already knew I had made a mistake.  Not because I should have married him instead, that isn't what I mean. Just that I shouldn't have married a man who couldn't eclipse my fantasies of a different man, even on our honeymoon. 

Then we were barely in touch. Maybe there wasn't a connection at all any more. I heard where he was stationed - Belize, Kosovo - and I always managed to find out that he had made it back ok. I wondered whether he thought of me like I thought of him. Pretty often.  He was my favourite fantasy. I wondered whether he sensed I was thinking of him, whether he got a brain-itch, a cock-twitch? I got divorced, but he was happy, married, kids. I left well alone.

We had a little flirt by email, for a couple of weeks, a few years later, then he disappeared off the radar. Lately I've been thinking about him more, since a strange coincidence put me back in touch with his brother. I didn't ask about him - I was afraid to give myself away. Only knew that he was "doing all right". I scoured the internet but he wasn't to be found. What would happen if I tracked him down?

1. He wouldn't remember who I was. I'd imagined a connection, an attraction that was completely one-sided. That would be awful.

2. He would remember who I was, but not remember any connection. He would have forgotten all that flirting and kissing, the superb once-in-a-lifetime sex. That would be awful.

3. He would remember who I was, and be angry I'd got in contact, tell me to leave him alone. That would be awful. 

4. He would remember who I was, and it would all be there, just as it was.  And we would be older and bolder, and determined to follow through. That would be awful.

Actually I'm lying, that would be brilliant, I expect, that last option, but you can't save someone else's husband for later, can you. Can you? 

He's the one that got away. He's the one regret. And for that, if for nothing more, he holds a special place. 

Season of Mists

Maybe it doesn't have the bright-green, brash optimism of spring, but autumn is perhaps the most beautiful season after all.

Five geese are flying in perfect formation alongside my train as it rolls through the green and gold of the Chilterns, and I stop my thoughts to notice this, the purposeful dark V through the orange of the leaves against a clear blue sky.

Every regret, every "that was the last time I....", every "now I realise I will never...." will be exorcised with a new, good thing to look forward to. I will have to manufacture these, conjure them from my imagination and hope that with an alchemist's spell, with a magical sleight of mind, I can convince myself that a trip to the Thames Barrier is just as good as a month of Caravaggios, pasta and horny sex in Venice with the Man Of My Dreams.

This could work, right?

Five things I will do this autumn.

1. Walk the path in the Chilterns
2. Have a drink at the Prospect of Whitby
3. Use my voucher for a farmhouse breakfast
4. See Little Venice and walk along the canal
5. Visit the church where my dad was a chorister

Lots of good things are yet to come.

Diminuendo

I suppose we have to reduce our expectations. I'm no mathematician, but I understand the Law of Diminishing Returns and I see that life slips past the point of the curve where things are going to get better.

We have to find a way to live with the fact that the best is not yet to come - it has already been and gone. Hope to goodness we enjoyed it at the time, even if we didn't recognise it for what it was.

One way to manage down the hopes, but without spending the next 25 years sunk in grey despair and disappointment, might be to recognise that perhaps the very best times passed unacknowledged, but there are still good times ahead. We will appreciate smaller joys much more than we did the greater ones, as our wisdom - albeit acquired too late  - has shown us that these moments need to be savoured and cherished.

Perhaps the art is to find happiness in the small details?

Unleashed

When I got home on Friday night, it was the first time in years that I had come back late without offering an explanation as to where I had been, who I was with, what I was doing, what time I would be back. I don't need to do that now, do I? As long as I have made sure the au pair is going to babysit, it's not his concern now, since we're "not in a couple" any more.

And, boy, does he hate it.

Not the "not in a couple" part of it  - at least I'm assuming not, since it was his idea. It's the loss of control. Not knowing the whereabouts of his chattel. It's only recently I've begun to realise how creepy he can be about this, trying to know absolutely everything I do, who I know, where I am.

Although I think I must have been aware at some level. I've always made sure to have my secrets, to have little corners of time, of life, that were just for me.

When I got in on Friday night, the house was in darkness, although it was before midnight.  I have been sleeping in the Little Un's room, as the two of them like to bunk in together (there is a troll behind the wardrobe, apparently, but I don't let that deter me).  I went in and started getting undressed.  Then he walked in. Walked over. Made a clumsy grab for my breasts. What the hell? I made it clear his sudden advance was most unwelcome.

Saturday morning we had arranged to have a Big Talk while the girls were out doing their thing. However all day long (I'd arranged for them to be out for the afternoon too) he was bustling about, ostentatiously fixing long-overdue problems in the house. Just as an example, the waste disposal in the kitchen has been broken since November. This means I have had to use the sink plunger every time I want to pour water down the sink, drain vegetables, wash things. To say it has been inconvenient would be an understatement.  All this sudden handiwork meant he was too busy to talk. Or too scared.

I saw later that in spite of all that busyness, he'd still found time to go through all the emails in my Personal folder of Outlook. 

Then he announced he would like to come to my poetry reading in the evening. Since he's resolutely refused to go to anything like this before, I was somewhat taken aback, but in our new mode of careful politeness, I didn't feel able to say no.  So along he came, and I did my reading.

It was less awkward in the car than I thought it would be, me, him and the Pet Poet. In fact he seemed to be looking forward to it, in an odd sort of way, and was eerily cheerful. The reading went well. He raved about it afterwards in the car.

"You were really great! Amazing! You sparkled, you came alive. You were funny and clever and full of life. And I thought that's the girl I used to know, where has she gone?"

There was a silence. That stretched and stretched.

The Pet Poet said to me afterwards, marvelling at his behaviour, "But that's the girl we all know. She's been there all the time. Why couldn't he see her?"

The theme for the evening was tigers, and she had penned a Tiger Triolet that was very close to the knuckle in her current personal circumstances. It did not escape his notice that it was close to the bone for me too. Another uncomfortable silence.

I am getting on with getting on with it. I reckon he's been an enemy of promise if ever there was one, far more so than the double buggy in the hall. I went to Homebase this morning and got some bits and pieces that will enable me to move upstairs to what will become my funky writer's lair. I'm looking forward to it.  I already feel like I'm starting to be me again.

And how do I feel? Peggy says it better than I ever could.

 The best way to explain how I feel

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.

Oasis

Sometimes in the unrelenting slog, life offers you an oasis.

Accept it, take it, seize it: willingly, joyfully. Good friends and simple pleasures are the things that will keep us going.

Breaking Through

Sometimes, even for a slow learner like me, eventually there's a breakthrough.  Don't get excited now, nothing enlightening, no amazing insights that will change your life.

People's parents are dying, going mad, getting ill. The smiling, delightful children we know are changing into sullen, moody, ungrateful teenagers.  The economy is going to take forever to recover. And now a man I know well, a business friend for 20 years, has had a massive stroke and is unlikely to pull through. About my age, no previous health problems. Same business issues, however, as so many of us now. 

The worst of it is the slow recognition, the gradual realisation that this is just the start. We are entering the period of shittiness.  For my generation, the best times have probably been and gone and were so busy at work we didn't even notice.

I spit in the face of new millennium wisdom about mindfulness. The very very last thing we want to do is become consciously aware of world around us and be completely present to every moment. 

Stop drinking? You're mad. Take up smoking instead. Start doing cocaine, smack. Butter the bread when you make your bacon sandwiches; get some chips on the side. Have sex while you still can - it might be your last erection.  Skid through the rest of life to the accompaniment of booze, loud music and selfishness.

We're more than half-dead anyway.

Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds

Time is elastic. Draws itself out interminably, stretching to an almost-breaking eternity - and yet you know it will spring back and be all-too-short when the day finally arrives.

Waiting should not become an activity in its own right, but when the distractions do not have the power of the anticipated event, then they fail to fulfil their purpose and the clock ticks and tocks in slow motion.

Minutes and eventually hours crawl by. Everything feels pointless, the sky itself is holding its breath. Not long, not long now, a mantra of reassurance.

Soon, soon.

Lying Awake, Thinking

Sometimes, though, I can identify specific points where the path forked. Sometimes I think I made a good choice, sometimes I wish I'd made a different one.

I say to myself that I live my life without If Onlys and What Ifs, but I don't think that's really true. I am trying to reassure myself that everything is ok. Nowadays I seize the moments that present themselves, but the path has less and less branches the more that time goes on.

I'd have liked to have tried some of the other routes. It is hard to consider other possibliities without feeling - wistful.

What Seems To Be The Hardest Word?

"You apologise too much to him", she said.

Damn. I really thought I'd stopped doing that.

I know a lot of things I'm apologising for are not my fault, or even my responsibility, in fact sometimes I don't even know what I'm apologising for - I'm just trying to stop him kicking off. This means, I expect, that I apologise more if other people are around, in an attempt to avoid an unpleasant scene.

Except that more than one of my friends has commented now that they find it an unpleasant scene to watch me being craven and grovelling in a usually-pointless attempt to keep things running evenly.

"He's a bully. He likes it when you apologise". She suggested I tried telling him I couldn't give a shit.

This weekend, in fact, no amount of apologising could prevent him from storming out of the restaurant mid-meal, dragging the children after him, and shutting himself in the bedroom for the rest of the night. And you know what? We couldn't give a shit. We had a nice bottle of wine, chatted and went in the hot tub, it was great. "Look what you did last night", he said the next morning. "You ruined the evening. I hope you're ashamed".

Even my dad, who is wiser than to comment on partners, spouses, children was moved after one particularly grim weekend to send me an email (I still have it) in which he told me "It breaks my heart to see you trying to please that man. You know you never will - that's his game. I wish you would stop playing it".

I like to think I am becoming more inclined not to play. I am going to perfect an enormous Gallic shrug, a disdainful upper-class sneer, and a range of choice Northern expressions - none of them containing the word Sorry.

Let's see how we get on!

Great Leap Forward

Ok here goes. I will hurl myself into the new year with the following resolutions. Some are large, some are small. All of them are achievable - particularly if I demonstrate a suitable degree of follow-through.

So, in no particular order, ten things:

• Do 15 minutes of tidying up every evening before bed


• Have a monthly facial


• Lose weight every week


• Do at least 2, preferably 3 sessions of bodypump each week


• Do 2/3 exercise sessions in home gym each week


• Make significant progress on my novel (I have had a mental breakthrough with this, and have also defined what I mean by "significant progress", more later)


• Identify and write down 3 things I've achieved each day (to become more positive about myself)


• Accept my personal situation for what it is, and what it is not (I think this might make me happier)


• Resolve the work/company situation


• Be a positive, optimistic, cheerful and supportive mum and friend

I suppose I need to work out now how to set specific goals, measure progress, identify my KPIs, all that. Sounds like I should get consultants in (always, always the right choice). I will need an expert in performance audit, it seems.

Resolve

The proper behaviour all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to.

P J O'Rourke

Drunk - but not that drunk. 1st January is a rubbish day for the new year to start. Everyone's tired and hungover and listless, and all one can do is slump on the sofa drinking milky coffee, eating toast and snoozing.

I am giving very careful consideration to my resolutions for this year - and indeed for this decade. I'm also reflecting on the year just gone, its downs and its ups.

I feel that things matter more than they did this time last month. In November I wouldn't have made any resolutions at all - didn't care enough, didn't have the confidence to believe I could achieve anything of note any more.

Now I feel this is a time of great potential - and I'm taking a deep breath and centring myself before diving in. I plan to start this January as an optimist, believing in myself and creating the possibility of a Happy New Year!

Precious

I might keep busy stealing watches, year after year, but time isn’t absolute. Some days it barely flows, lagging lazily like treacle from a spoon. The very hours we don’t want it to, it whips by in a blur - our perception of time is our reality.

Is it possible to savour the golden evenings, catch the drips of them in their amber glow and string them into a beautiful necklace of moments, to run through the fingers when time is creeping lonely-slow again?

Is there a way to freeze-frame the speedy flash of joy, to hold the hands of the clock while each instant is drunk to the last drop?

The scarcity of pleasure, the rare treat of stolen happiness, snatched from the gloom of these cold, dark days. Who knows how many hours of wonder are still to come, and how many are already crushed to dust in the pepper-grinder of the everyday humdrum?

Never has mindfulness, the stillness of living in the moment, struck such a powerful chord. These will be the golden days.