Vaut le detour?

Everything happens for a reason, they say. 

I'm beginning to wonder whether all the multiple problems and difficulties I'm experiencing in my attempt to buy a house in France might be the universe's way of telling me I'm making a dreadful mistake. 

I thought I wanted to be here. I love it here. I thought I would be calm here, and centred. I thought I would be able to relax, write, be myself. 

But now I think perhaps this is not my place. I will have to rely on other people to help me - all the time.  I will be a drain on their time and a drag on their goodwill. I'll just be getting in the way of other people's lives. I don't have anything useful to contribute. All the skills and competences I have developed are pointless here, they will be of no value or use to me, and of no interest to anyone else. I will be an outsider.  I will be an interloper. I will be a laughing stock. 

I was brimful of ideas about the house, the garden, the things I might do here. But it turns out these are all wrong. There are all sorts of sensible reasons why they won't work out - and it just makes me realise I will be out of my depth and making a mess of everything. 

At least in the UK I seem to be able to muddle through the car-crash of my life, pulling it off most of the time with a reasonable amount of dignity and sometimes even with panache.  Here I will be a novice at everything. I might be able to appreciate the finer points of French poetry but I don't even know how to ask for my cheque book in the bank or explain my own mortgage. 

I think perhaps I am too old to make a fresh start. What is the point? It's not as if there's anything to head towards, any meaningful milestones along the way.  

I thought that a place in France would help me improve my writing: but I don't seem to have anything to say. 

Comeback

Then suddenly, after a long, cold absence, it's here again.  

It's hard to explain how you know when it's back.  First of all it's just a feeling, a kind of inner shift like a loosening of the bowels, an itch, a hum at the back of the mind.

It starts to build and will not be resisted. Words are sprouting everywhere and cannot be held back.  They take up all the headspace and start spilling out onto scraps of paper, the notepad on the phone, demanding to get onto the page. Insistent, relentless.

I am beginning to think that I understand why this happens. I hold myself tightly closed so much of the time. Safe. Nothing can get in that way. Romping around inside my submarine, closed away in the dark depths.  You can't see in, you can't get to me.

But nothing inside can get out, either. 

So now I am uncoiling again, opening up. What was a fist, fingernails cutting tight into palms, is uncurling. It's been taking a while, but it's here now. Sunshine helped, and some other things.  I'm welling up in a surge of turquoise waves, a breaking of buds, a crescendo. 

Couch Potato

I've been seeing a counsellor. 

She thinks that I need to work on acknowledging my emotions. She thinks that the putting-things-into-boxes-then-ignoring-them strategy may not be a sustainable approach in the long term. She thinks there are too many boxes now, and the things inside the boxes are banging to come out, and the boxes are rattling and the lids are coming up and oh my god it's like that scene in Poltergeist where all the bodies start bursting up out the bottom of the swimming pool and and and....

Even writing about the boxes opening makes me feel a bit panicky.  I've spent my whole life boxing. Why would I stop now? 

Well yes, there is the small matter of the breakdown. Of the being tracked down by the police. Of the escorting to hospital. Of the nearly being sectioned.  That. 

I insist on referring to it as a "meltdown". Somehow that isn't as scary, and makes it sound rather wry and perhaps more like a tantrum or a bad day. As I explained to the emergency psychiatrist, I'm not mad: just sad, scared, lonely and really fucked off. 

Three months on, I don't feel any different.  Most of the time I don't feel anything at all.  If I open myself to those feelings, it will be horrible, won't it?

"Have you tried writing things down?" she asked me.  That's when it really struck me how far I was from myself. Three months of seeing a counsellor and I hadn't even told her I'm a writer. 

Write Now

Anyway, my counsellor pointed out that if not-writing makes me feel as if I don't exist, it might be a good idea to consider writing.

It's quite a bold assumption - do I want to acknowledge that I do indeed still exist? I suppose I can't float around in limbo forever, physically vital, heart beating, head aching whilst my mind is a dead, flat fog. 

So here I am. 

I'm trying. The rest of my life still ahead of me, dammit. There it is in the picture: a blank page. 

I had better write myself better, write myself a better story.  Keep your fingers crossed for me. 

Absence Has a Weight of its Own

Ah writing, how I've missed you. My dear friend, my old familiar, my comfort blanket. And why deny myself this comfort when there is so little comfort to be had? 

I need to challenge my thoughts about writing. It's a treat that must be withheld until I've done enough drudge to deserve it. It's a vice. It's an addiction that must be fought, a siren-song that will lure me away from life.

But it builds and it builds. The itch inside the brain, a scribble here and a jot there. It sneaks in through the chinks like sunshine through the knot-holes in grandad's shed. Until I am choked up with the words. I will burst like a confetti-bomb. Shoot out poems like a bunchberry. 

In the end it is an irresistible force.  I am up at 3am in the spare room. I give in: I'm a writer.

[The richly resonant heading of this post is the title of Daniel  Sluman's brilliant collection from Nine Arches Press. Everyone should read this. Everyone.]

Busman's Holiday

London. In which the Kitten is ironically, pointlessly, upgraded to an Executive Plus room (Plus what?) which she is enjoying in splendid, pristine and virginal isolation. Proving that her charms still work on hotel receptionists  -  although that appears to be as far as they stretch, nowadays.

Technically, I am still on holiday in Somerset (as you can see).  Lightly interspersed with a bit of lecturing and a board meeting.  Hell, I'd much rather facilitate a workshop on sourcing strategies than have a nice day in Somerset with my Terrible Tweenagers and my lovely friends. Wouldn't I? Ho hum.  This hotel is the largest Holiday Inn in the world (wow!) but it still doesn't feel like a holiday. Maybe I'm not trying hard enough.

Being away from work for a few days has given me the space and time to stop worrying so much about work, and start worrying about other things instead. My writing, mainly. Who would have thought it would be this easy to find another whole field in which to feel like an impostor? So many new things to fail at. The world is truly my lobster.

The World's Your Lobster

Blue Monday, that's what they call it nowadays: today is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year.  I don't know how they work it out, and I'm so lethargic I can't even be bothered to Google, but it can't be rocket science, can it?

It's a Monday, in January. Far enough away from Christmas to have failed already at some of the New Year Resolutions and still feeling the flab of the festive season but having forgotten the fun.  Everyone is skint and drinking decaff and trying to stay off the booze, and inevitably it will be raining. What's to like?

Personally, I thought last Monday was worse. I had one of those days today where time seemed to fly, due to its scarcity in relation to the amount of work to be completed to specific clock and calendar tyrannies.  I was still reeling somewhat, today, from the spookiness of Sunday.

Now, you know I just don't do spooky.  Not usually.

I went to a poetry workshop. I was seeking inspiration, looking to improve and learn some new techniques.  It was in a photographer's gallery, and was about using photographs to spark creative writing: you might have noticed my interest in the juxtaposition of the visual and the word.  The first exercise we had to do was to choose one of the photographs and describe it.  Not in a poem, simply focusing on detailed observation of the physical.  Then we had to imagine what was happening just outside the frame, what might have happened just before, what would happen just afterwards, bring some imagination into the shot.  And I started to write.

Not a poem, no. Because you won't have failed to notice from my eternal whingeing, whining, bedwetting angst that I can't write any more.

Anyhow, moving swiftly on....(sob).... I started to write notes, a stream of thought, and suddenly it was about my grandad, and the day he died, and my mum. And I thought about how it might have been, that day that we never quite understood, and I felt sad for my mum and I sat thinking for a while about her, and grandad, and thought how nice it would be to see her and tell her what I was thinking.

Then we carried on with the workshop for a while longer, and she was still in my thoughts. And when I came out, there was a message on my phone saying, Hurry home, your mother is here. She had got into the car and driven 100 miles, unplanned, unexpected, unannounced, on the offchance I would be in.  She just felt she wanted to see me  -  couldn't really explain why.

I found it rather unnerving, but it meant I had the chance to read her what I'd written. It made her cry, which then made me think that perhaps I should have kept it to myself  -  but she said she cried because she liked it. 

If I could get it to coalesce into a poem, I'd be a hell of a lot happier. Maybe my Monday could make it all the way to violet, or even pink.

Clam

She'd been battened down for as long as she could remember.

She didn't mind. It was safe. No-one could reach her. And inside, it was just exactly how she wanted it to be: private, quiet, and writing on every surface. On the walls and ceilings and floors, the looped hand of ideas and thoughts and dreams. On the seats of chairs and the underside of tables, around the handle of the teapot, on the shells of eggs and the skins of bananas. In steam on the shower screen, condensation on the windows, in lipstick on the mirrors and in biro on the back of her hands, all the way up her arms to the elbows. Words and words and words.

After a long, long time she thought she wanted to be reached.  She came out, naked from the shell, and said "Here I am, world, this is me". And to her surprise, the world answered back, extended its hand, and she discovered that being reached was good.  She blossomed and bloomed in this unfamiliar sunshine, from tight green knot to white and yellow daisy. And all the words inside tumbled out, and all the ideas and thoughts and dreams flowed down her outstretched arms and into her pen and onto the page in perfect order, and she laughed out chapters of her novel, and breathed out a poem with every smile.

Then the world said the thing she'd always feared it would. "I'm sorry, there has been a mistake. All this wasn't for you  -  you can't have that. What were you thinking? Go back".  And she wasn't even surprised, and bowed her head and opened the hatch and went back inside her submarine. Ran her fingers over the familiar surfaces, worn to mother-of-pearl gloss under her touch. And she did not cry, because that is the way of the world, and no-one sheds tears over the setting of the sun or the fall of leaves in autumn or the melting of the snow.

She had thought that the words would still flow out of her fingertips, to be freed out from the airlock like underwater butterflies. But they were limp and dead, all the colour and flight leached out from them in the dark salty teardrops of the sea.  And she tried and tried, but the words were clogged to a standstill; leaves that fell in a red and bronze swoop of beauty but turned to dark sludge in the gutters.

And she realised that she had nothing to say, and no-one to listen to the whispers in the dark.

Prozaic

Three months now since I started taking the tablets. Do I feel better?

It's hard to say. External factors beyond my control were the things that were getting me down, in the main. Anti-depressants won't solve the recession, unless you're a major shareholder in a pharmaceutical company (now there's an idea...) And I made my bed so I'd damn well better lie in it, at least until I work out a better plan.

Some of the issues that were making me feel low, I've worked hard to tackle them. Now they have been replaced by other issues instead  -  and so it goes.   It is lonely again at home now Christmas is over and the Literary Lodger has left, although the Broken-Hearted Sicilian has returned and is slightly less broken-hearted, with a mysterious smilewhich I plan to investigate in due course.

The Terrible Tweenagers are fighting raging hormones this week and so am I, suffering the impact of that dastardly plan of nature to synchronise the cycles of women who live together. What a bad evolutionary idea, it's amazing humankind progressed at all and didn't end millennia ago in some weeping family catastrophe.

At least everyone is back in the normal routine, and some semblance of stability can be restored. Not that I want things to carry on the way they are, but at least there is a rhythm to the week again now, rather than the formlessness of hanging around at home with no schedule and no bedtime and no meetings. It all feels rather like one long round of cooking and laundry and picking up shoes otherwise.

I suppose in the last three months, I have had some success of sorts. I did not jump off Beachy Head, I did not hit anyone, I survived Christmas, I came to work every day.  I've been dieting. I've been exercising. I've been working. I've been reading about poetry to try and refine my skills. I am trying to be good.

I have not been writing. It just won't come.

Sloathsome

It's that feeling of going back to work after Christmas. Fed up of staying at home, eating and drinking the wrong things. And fed up of being back at work with all the shit that entails. I'm sure fresh air and exercise would be the answer, and I'm trying, honest.  The Tweenage Tearaways are back at school today and everyone is back on the treadmill. Not that I've been off it really, with a Saudi client who wanted a project to a Jan 4th deadline, irrespective of a faraway religious festival in which he has no interest.

During the season of goodwill and bad feeling, I have written nothing. My blood is sludgy in my veins and the likelihood of achieving creative flow, or indeed any other kind, seems scant. I haven't exactly kick-started the year, but then I rarely do. Perhaps a gentler beginning will do no harm in the end.

I won't feel normal until after the weekend, don't think. The regular timetable will be fully resumed and I will have been on my first trip to London. I will breathe easier after that.

And I have signed up for a poetry workshop later this month, and been asked to take part in another reading.  I would like to develop a collection this year  -  if I can regain sufficient sparkle to write. I know what makes me feel confident and powerful and capable of anything.

And I know how I feel when it's missing.

Petrified

I don't know how to turn my hot flesh to cold marble.

My blood stands still in my veins and no writing can flow. The Pause button is depressed, and we hang in a state of suspended animation on the screen of our lives, mouths open mid-sentence, conversation unfinished, the journey to map the private landscape interrupted, incomplete.

The only instructions I can find urge me to keep calm and carry on. So I write specifications for birth-simulation scenarios, and artificially squeeze out globs of wordage onto the electric page and no whisper of pain passes my life-identical plastic lips.

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.

I Don't Like Mondays

I wake at 3 or 4am, irrespective of the lengths I might have gone to in an attempt to exhaust myself into a full night's sleep. Long walks up hill and down dale, followed by (quite unbelievably, I know) a run, still can't get me through the night.

But come getting-up time, I struggle to haul myself out. This morning I had arranged myself two things to get up for  -  if you don't count the school run, which I don't. Push comes to shove, they could go on their own if they had to, these days.

I managed to get up, get washed, get dressed. Yay me.

By 10am both the things I had got up for were postponed to another day.  That might be a good reason to get up on Friday, but what's today for, now?

I am spending the rest of the day waiting until it is time to put my head back under the covers and pretend big parts of my life aren't really happening for me.  I lie there and think about the parts I like, and try to blank the rest of it.

I did not blog because I had nothing to say. I did not write because I can't be bothered.

Now I have constructed reasons to get up Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.  That takes me through to a whole new month. 

Day by day, isn't it.

Much Too Far Out

Not Waving But Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Stevie Smith.

Absent

Sea Change

Skagen: where two oceans meet

I have had a breakthrough.

As of tomorrow, I am going to stop not-writing by thinking of writing as a treat I don't deserve, and start working-at-my-writing.

Seeing that beautiful, lyrical, moving poetry can take shape in an office, using flipcharts, and Post-It notes, and plans, has shown me that I knew how to write all along.

It looks like planning and hard work. I know how to do that.

Conditional: Tense

Long ago, in a land far, far away lived a girl who liked to play games. They were private games that she played alone, in the weird, wild, wonderful landscapes of her mind.

One of the games she liked to play was deal-making. "If you finish this, then you can do that". "You can have your fun after the washing up". It was a game for getting things done. She didn't trust herself to get anything done at all without the games.

Life for the girl became a series of Pavlovian dog-munchies.

The way to get the really hard things done was to hold back something very desirable. "You can't do that until you've done this". The girl thought she was lazy, couldn't be relied upon to cross stuff off the list under her own steam. So she withheld what she loved, to keep her moving.

Boxed were ticked and time tocked by. Sad and missing her favourite pastime, she cheated a little at the game and sneaked it in under the wire. "If I do it like this, it won't count".

Now she is applying her ingenuity to finding a new deal that starts with the pastime, and ends with a different reward. Clunk, clunk, clunk go the cogs of her conditional deal-making machine.

She is running out of excuses.

This Page Is Intentionally Blank

“Just do it”, he said.

“Of course you can write, it’s easy. All you have to do is start”.

Where this expertise comes from, I’m not sure. But he’s very authoritative, and that must be a bit like being an author, no?

I want to argue. To ask why he has to be such a damn expert on things he manifestly knows nothing about. To ask him to explain why he will be so vocally supportive when other people are there, yet was outraged when I said I wanted to go on a writing course this year, and felt sure I would be too busy at work to find the time.

However I feel that he is accidentally, unknowingly right about this.

So I decide there is no time like the present to make a start. The office is clean, the laundry is in the machine, the dinner is simmering away on the hob, the girls are quietly upstairs watching TV and so is he.

I limber up by playing the piano for a few minutes, just to switch the neurons into action. Then I come into my quiet, empty office and open up the potential of a clean white page.

He comes downstairs. Turns the hifi on, full blast. Comes into the office. Starting moving piles of papers around. Shredding. Chatting. He never “chats”.

The number of times I’ve been sitting here by myself, working while the life of the family bubbled past outside the door. What I wouldn’t have given for a bit of company, a friendly word.

Ironic? Or deliberate? Or me being difficult, seeing the worst in every situation, attaching the most negative motivations to every behaviour?

Who knows. Irritation factor: 10/10. Writing: nul.

Say What You Mean

I encountered a lot of euphemism and speaking in forked tongues today.

"The team aren't comfortable with technology", he opined, and I concealed my scorn as they allocated their tasks on white forms, green forms, yellow forms, tear off strips - and lost all the jobs they didn't like down the back of the radiator.

"We've had a mixed experience with that service", said one of their key customers, and then outlined a project which was budgeted at £x, and ended up a year late, costing £2x and not really fit for purpose at that.

"Some of the team are better than others". Do you want to be more specific? No.

I think we English have a mastery of the understatement, the damning with faint praise. "They're not the worse service here".

And I'm becoming more and more interested in the things people don't say. Quite a few situations lately where we Don't Mention It. Sometimes the absence of mention is booming, deafening, resounding round all the spaces in the conversation. I find it fascinating, how easy it is to hear the things that aren't being said.

The Two Rs

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read".

If you know me at all, you know that I'm not exactly a lover of dogs..... to say the least. But I am a big lover of books. You're no better off, in many respects, loving books than you are loving men. They can both disappoint you and fail to meet your expectations, and seem full of promise at the start but fizzle out badly towards the end so that it hardly seems worth the bother of limping through to the final page.

Anyway I'm trying to write about reading, so let's come back to the point here.

One reason I originally looked into blogging was so that my "Virtual Book Group" could communicate about the books we were reading without sending 50 circular emails a day (my Inbox was collapsing under the strain). Now I'm a GoodReads junkie and the problem is solved.

Now, my reading choices are ecletic (if we're being pretentious) or to be more accurate, randomly voracious. Some books I have read for pleasure, others I've read for work or learning. Some I've enjoyed tremendously, others I've hated, some left me cold. I'll leave you to ask if you're interested. I think books are like food - junk, sandwiches and late night kebabs all have their place just as much as haute cuisine or a Nigella extravaganza. Unlike food, a book will not add to your waistline, and indeed I saw an article today which said that exciting and/or sexy books burn off around 900 calories due to the adrenaline which temporarily increases your metabolic rate. Excellent!

For my new diet, I am going to lie in bed reading Anita Blake books until I am a size 12. I imagine this will be no more unsuccessful than any of my previous diets. (Actually joking apart I am WAY too busy to be doing self-indulgent stuff like eating or sleeping, so all my clothes are too big for me now).

I would appreciate suggestions about what to read next - and whether it's in the bag-of-crisps or Michelin-star category. And obviously a few calorie burners too, to help me along.

I chose this photo because of my friend/writing coach who told me about Philip Pulllman's wise advice which I hadn't heard before. Almost as good as the quote at the start (Mark Twain - if you're interested).

"Read like a butterfly. Write like a bee".

Message received and understood. I think I have been getting these things the wrong way around.