I can't remember what I was listening to yesterday - oh yes I can, it was BBC Radio 4's 'Word of Mouth' - and they were talking about speech bubbles. In comics, graphic novels and the like.
Apparently there's a cultural difference between 'Aaargh!' and 'Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!'
Meanwhile, there is a funny (as in odd-and-mildly-disturbing rather than ha-ha) dripping noise in the corner of the room just to the right of where I'm sitting. In a corner where no dripping should be (given that the corner where the dripping noise usually is is to the left of me and then only when when it's raining) . . .
Aieeeeeeeeeee.
Wednesday 30 April 2008
Saturday 26 April 2008
What I keep meaning to do
No. 1: write fewer lists. Meanwhile I must
- get down to the beach. It's only five minutes' walk away, for heaven's sake, and there have been days - today was one - when the sun shone and if I hadn't had to go to work and do some shopping on the way back so's to have something to eat in the house (and toilet paper) for the weekend and if I hadn't been hungry when I got in and had to make a ham and cheese sandwich and read the paper I'd have got there, really I would, only after I'd eaten the sandwich and drunk a couple of glasses of wine I was feeling so so tired (on account of having woken up at just gone five this morning and not been able to get back to sleep) that I had to go to bed for a couple of hours and by the time I surfaced it was just starting to rain and I had to dash to get the washing in that had been out since yesterday
- get down to the beach. Tomorrow - today now - the forecast is for warm sunshine. I've been reading Simon Gray's Smoking Diaries this week (in between Coal: a human history, Disobedience and a book about how to discover my inner artist), in which he spends a lot of time sitting watching people here and abroad and writing about who he imagines them to be and what he sees and hears and is reminded of. I could do that, I think. Except I don't know the Harold Pinters or have a past that anybody could possibly want to know about . . .
- get down to the beach. I had the whole thing planned out yesterday - down to the pencil I was going to take with me and the book I was going to write in and exactly where I was going to park the car and how the stones would feel under my bottom until I'd smoothed out a place for it to sit with my back against the sea wall and feel the sun on my face, but now I can't quite remember where yesterday went and why I didn't do it
- get down to the beach.
- get down to the beach. It's only five minutes' walk away, for heaven's sake, and there have been days - today was one - when the sun shone and if I hadn't had to go to work and do some shopping on the way back so's to have something to eat in the house (and toilet paper) for the weekend and if I hadn't been hungry when I got in and had to make a ham and cheese sandwich and read the paper I'd have got there, really I would, only after I'd eaten the sandwich and drunk a couple of glasses of wine I was feeling so so tired (on account of having woken up at just gone five this morning and not been able to get back to sleep) that I had to go to bed for a couple of hours and by the time I surfaced it was just starting to rain and I had to dash to get the washing in that had been out since yesterday
- get down to the beach. Tomorrow - today now - the forecast is for warm sunshine. I've been reading Simon Gray's Smoking Diaries this week (in between Coal: a human history, Disobedience and a book about how to discover my inner artist), in which he spends a lot of time sitting watching people here and abroad and writing about who he imagines them to be and what he sees and hears and is reminded of. I could do that, I think. Except I don't know the Harold Pinters or have a past that anybody could possibly want to know about . . .
- get down to the beach. I had the whole thing planned out yesterday - down to the pencil I was going to take with me and the book I was going to write in and exactly where I was going to park the car and how the stones would feel under my bottom until I'd smoothed out a place for it to sit with my back against the sea wall and feel the sun on my face, but now I can't quite remember where yesterday went and why I didn't do it
- get down to the beach.
Sunday 20 April 2008
Gone midnight on a Saturday
My neck creaks when I turn my head. The sound travels up into my ears and is loud.
On the desk:
- an empty packet of Tesco potato chips
- four shiny bright pennies in a stack
- a yellow highlighter
- The Very Best of Cat Stevens
- two ashtrays (one empty, one full)
- other empty things: a Games Workshop t-shirt packet and one that used to contain Sainsbury's breadsticks (or, because it's Sainsbury's and not Tesco, grissini), a glass, a can of John Smith's Original Bitter, a blue cigarette lighter, a one-pint plastic container of full-fat milk
- a tea towel
- the end of a roll of toilet tissue
- a tiny pillow made out of a shiny gold fabric with 'ANNIE X' written on it
- a hole punch
- some money-off Tesco vouchers
- several unpaid bills (including one from the Norwich Diocesan Board of Finance. The ground rent I owe it - from 2001 at £1.25 a year - is now £10), and some unanswered letters
- a phone
- speakers attached to the computer and music coming out of them:
Days (Kirsty MacColl)
There's a CD player on top of a fridge in a torrid Nicosia kitchen. It hasn't rained for months and everything is burning and I am in tears realising that there is nowhere to go from here except away. The children must have been in bed (they were very small then)
Out of time (Rolling Stones)
I am at a concert. Chris Farlowe continues singing this when the power fails and there's only his voice and the drums until it comes back on
Sun arise (Rolf Harris)
I can harmonise with this, but am ashamed to admit it
Stir it up (Bob Marley and the Wailers)
I am a teacher working at a high school in the Jamaican bush when I buy Johnny Nash's Greatest Hits and hear this for the first time. I am in my early 20s. Along with Guava Jelly, it introduces me to the idea that music can enter you via your ears and the soles of your feet and reach the parts that nothing else does.
My students take me to parties you can only get to by walking miles and miles and miles in pitch blackness because roads don't go anywhere near there and people are all very tall and dark and handsome and whisper things in your ear and dance far too close and hold you with a hand in the small of your back while they touch your body with theirs and yours wonders how on earth it can carry on doing this for a single moment longer because surely any minute now it'll dissolve and sink to the ground or somebody will notice and word will get back and you'll be out of a job . . . oh
One day some time later I leave the Johnny Nash LP too long in the sun and it melts.
Back in the high life (Steve Winwood)
I am driving very fast along tiny Norfolk by-roads to the hotel where I'm running a week-long training course for junior civil-service managers. The hotel is being renovated and there's no hot water and the group dynamic is becoming quite interesting. It's lunchtime and I've been home to have a shower. I am now on my way back. The car windows are open and I've turned the music up loud.
Later, after the scheduled training's finished and before we all go to our separate rooms to get ready for dinner, some of us are sitting in the bar and I'm drawn into conversation by someone who looks straight through my eyes and holds my hand and tells me things.
I am captivated.
+++
My mother used to tell me that I was too easily led. Maybe she just didn't want to believe that I rarely went anywhere I didn't want to go . . .
On the desk:
- an empty packet of Tesco potato chips
- four shiny bright pennies in a stack
- a yellow highlighter
- The Very Best of Cat Stevens
- two ashtrays (one empty, one full)
- other empty things: a Games Workshop t-shirt packet and one that used to contain Sainsbury's breadsticks (or, because it's Sainsbury's and not Tesco, grissini), a glass, a can of John Smith's Original Bitter, a blue cigarette lighter, a one-pint plastic container of full-fat milk
- a tea towel
- the end of a roll of toilet tissue
- a tiny pillow made out of a shiny gold fabric with 'ANNIE X' written on it
- a hole punch
- some money-off Tesco vouchers
- several unpaid bills (including one from the Norwich Diocesan Board of Finance. The ground rent I owe it - from 2001 at £1.25 a year - is now £10), and some unanswered letters
- a phone
- speakers attached to the computer and music coming out of them:
Days (Kirsty MacColl)
There's a CD player on top of a fridge in a torrid Nicosia kitchen. It hasn't rained for months and everything is burning and I am in tears realising that there is nowhere to go from here except away. The children must have been in bed (they were very small then)
Out of time (Rolling Stones)
I am at a concert. Chris Farlowe continues singing this when the power fails and there's only his voice and the drums until it comes back on
Sun arise (Rolf Harris)
I can harmonise with this, but am ashamed to admit it
Stir it up (Bob Marley and the Wailers)
I am a teacher working at a high school in the Jamaican bush when I buy Johnny Nash's Greatest Hits and hear this for the first time. I am in my early 20s. Along with Guava Jelly, it introduces me to the idea that music can enter you via your ears and the soles of your feet and reach the parts that nothing else does.
My students take me to parties you can only get to by walking miles and miles and miles in pitch blackness because roads don't go anywhere near there and people are all very tall and dark and handsome and whisper things in your ear and dance far too close and hold you with a hand in the small of your back while they touch your body with theirs and yours wonders how on earth it can carry on doing this for a single moment longer because surely any minute now it'll dissolve and sink to the ground or somebody will notice and word will get back and you'll be out of a job . . . oh
One day some time later I leave the Johnny Nash LP too long in the sun and it melts.
Back in the high life (Steve Winwood)
I am driving very fast along tiny Norfolk by-roads to the hotel where I'm running a week-long training course for junior civil-service managers. The hotel is being renovated and there's no hot water and the group dynamic is becoming quite interesting. It's lunchtime and I've been home to have a shower. I am now on my way back. The car windows are open and I've turned the music up loud.
Later, after the scheduled training's finished and before we all go to our separate rooms to get ready for dinner, some of us are sitting in the bar and I'm drawn into conversation by someone who looks straight through my eyes and holds my hand and tells me things.
I am captivated.
+++
My mother used to tell me that I was too easily led. Maybe she just didn't want to believe that I rarely went anywhere I didn't want to go . . .
Wednesday 16 April 2008
Opening windows
Windows are the things that stay between you and the outside world. Occasionally they shatter but most times they are just there.
After a long English winter, the temptation is to open them as soon as the sun shines. The idea is to let the warmth in.
(I used to work with someone called Bengt, who was Swedish. He told me that winter nights in Sweden are very very long and dark, and that the darkness lasts for months. The first time the sun shines in Spring, office workers all over the country abandon their desks. They can be seen on the streets, everywhere, turning their faces to the sky and soaking up its warmth.)
In England, when you open the windows - and the front door and the back door - the first time the sun shines after a long winter and the mornings are bright and blue-skied and it doesn't rain until four o'clock in the afternoon so you can get the washing dry if you're up early enough, one or more of the following things will happen:
- a cat will get in
- somebody will moan about how cold it is and wrap themselves in all the jumpers, duvets, gloves, hats and thermal underwear they couldn't possibly have worn when it was really cold and which, if they had when it was, could probably single-handedly have postponed global warming by at least 100 years
- you will think 'Ooo. I can send all these hair-brushings out of the bathroom window so that a passing bird can seize on them and recycle them cunningly into its nest'
- any hair-brushings sent out of the bathroom window will be blown back in
- the back door will crash shut every time you open the front so you'll have to use any conveniently placed draught-snake or pile of old newspapers to wedge them both open and prevent the kind of bang-type noise that will cause elderly neighbours to drop dead from heart attacks
- the cat that got in earlier will twine itself around your ankles and cause you to drop things
- you'll remember that you should have bought cat food when you were out and, because you didn't, the twining will go on until you do
- one or more of your children will creep up on you while you're sitting reading a book and minding your own business in the back garden and say 'For goodness sake, mother! ANYbody could have walked in!'
I like opening windows.
I've lived in hot countries where you only opened them at night, because night-time was the only time it was cool enough to let the air in. You could sit on the verandah after your children had gone to bed and watch the city's lights. Write love letters to someone you hadn't met yet, over and over again because the first one didn't quite say what you meant and you wanted to get it right. Buy a fountain pen because ballpoints are something you write shopping lists with and what you wanted to write was most definitely not a shopping list.
After a long English winter, the temptation is to open them as soon as the sun shines. The idea is to let the warmth in.
(I used to work with someone called Bengt, who was Swedish. He told me that winter nights in Sweden are very very long and dark, and that the darkness lasts for months. The first time the sun shines in Spring, office workers all over the country abandon their desks. They can be seen on the streets, everywhere, turning their faces to the sky and soaking up its warmth.)
In England, when you open the windows - and the front door and the back door - the first time the sun shines after a long winter and the mornings are bright and blue-skied and it doesn't rain until four o'clock in the afternoon so you can get the washing dry if you're up early enough, one or more of the following things will happen:
- a cat will get in
- somebody will moan about how cold it is and wrap themselves in all the jumpers, duvets, gloves, hats and thermal underwear they couldn't possibly have worn when it was really cold and which, if they had when it was, could probably single-handedly have postponed global warming by at least 100 years
- you will think 'Ooo. I can send all these hair-brushings out of the bathroom window so that a passing bird can seize on them and recycle them cunningly into its nest'
- any hair-brushings sent out of the bathroom window will be blown back in
- the back door will crash shut every time you open the front so you'll have to use any conveniently placed draught-snake or pile of old newspapers to wedge them both open and prevent the kind of bang-type noise that will cause elderly neighbours to drop dead from heart attacks
- the cat that got in earlier will twine itself around your ankles and cause you to drop things
- you'll remember that you should have bought cat food when you were out and, because you didn't, the twining will go on until you do
- one or more of your children will creep up on you while you're sitting reading a book and minding your own business in the back garden and say 'For goodness sake, mother! ANYbody could have walked in!'
I like opening windows.
I've lived in hot countries where you only opened them at night, because night-time was the only time it was cool enough to let the air in. You could sit on the verandah after your children had gone to bed and watch the city's lights. Write love letters to someone you hadn't met yet, over and over again because the first one didn't quite say what you meant and you wanted to get it right. Buy a fountain pen because ballpoints are something you write shopping lists with and what you wanted to write was most definitely not a shopping list.
Saturday 12 April 2008
I will go
I won’t stay long
I just have to
tune this guitar
I’ll fly in and out.
Honestly
you’ll never know I’m here
But I do
I won’t take up your space
or
breathe your air
But you do
Just ignore me. Pretend
you didn't see me come in
There are other rooms you could have chosen.
Empty ones.
Rooms where I am not.
It would have been kinder
I'll sit here in the corner.
When I'm sure
(despite your turned back)
I have your complete
undivided
attention
When I can tell
by the way your head tilts
(to the right)
and your eyes close
and you take a deep breath
and
will not look at me
(and not before)
I will go
I just have to
tune this guitar
I’ll fly in and out.
Honestly
you’ll never know I’m here
But I do
I won’t take up your space
or
breathe your air
But you do
Just ignore me. Pretend
you didn't see me come in
There are other rooms you could have chosen.
Empty ones.
Rooms where I am not.
It would have been kinder
I'll sit here in the corner.
When I'm sure
(despite your turned back)
I have your complete
undivided
attention
When I can tell
by the way your head tilts
(to the right)
and your eyes close
and you take a deep breath
and
will not look at me
(and not before)
I will go
Monday 7 April 2008
Inside, I am the woman who shrieks
When I walk down the street
(apparently and perfectly normal)
I am the one with bare feet in midwinter,
screaming silently at the cold
It’s me in the supermarket
forgetting I need bread until I pass Tea and coffee
and Table sauces
and having to go back
(Fresh fruit and vegetables
Dairy
Frozen
Cooking oils and spices)
It’s me
filling my basket
against hurricanes, holidays
and the end
of the world
Open my doors. See
store-cupboard perfection, a selection
of cant-do-without supplies:
pasta, rice, anchovies,
the cereal bars my daughter likes for breakfast,
the Shreddies my son used to but doesn’t seem to now,
tuna in sunflower oil.
Watch me at the checkout -
I don’t need help with my packing.
I can remember my PIN
and how to ask for cashback -
I don’t get in anybody’s way and when they get in mine
I hardly ever snarl
but inside my head the shrieking
never
stops
(apparently and perfectly normal)
I am the one with bare feet in midwinter,
screaming silently at the cold
It’s me in the supermarket
forgetting I need bread until I pass Tea and coffee
and Table sauces
and having to go back
(Fresh fruit and vegetables
Dairy
Frozen
Cooking oils and spices)
It’s me
filling my basket
against hurricanes, holidays
and the end
of the world
Open my doors. See
store-cupboard perfection, a selection
of cant-do-without supplies:
pasta, rice, anchovies,
the cereal bars my daughter likes for breakfast,
the Shreddies my son used to but doesn’t seem to now,
tuna in sunflower oil.
Watch me at the checkout -
I don’t need help with my packing.
I can remember my PIN
and how to ask for cashback -
I don’t get in anybody’s way and when they get in mine
I hardly ever snarl
but inside my head the shrieking
never
stops
Going back
The road running along the quayside is becoming narrower and its surface increasingly broken down. It is hard now to keep the car on a straight line.
Out of the mist over the harbour to the right looms the huge bulk of an ocean-going tanker, tied alongside. Further out in the estuary, the masts of a wooden tall ship needle into the sky. Its sails are furled.
The wind appears out of nowhere, tossing the fragile carcass of a small boat high into the air. I brake automatically and shut my eyes tight in case it hits me. I open them as it flies across my path and into the lagoon on my left.
The vehicle I'm driving seems to be made of nothing stronger than plastic and it's a struggle to keep it going straight. Nothing happens when I brake.
The roadway is now scarcely wider than the car I'm driving. It's become a pot-holed track, petering out into nothing where the land ends and the ocean begins. I have no way of stopping before it does.
+++
Abruptly the scene shifts. I am driving the same vehicle, but now on an industrial estate some miles inland from where the road ends. On one side of me, over the river, are huge and dilapidated brick-built warehouses, on the other small thrown-together shacks. The warehouses are deserted.
I am driving in reverse gear along what feels like an old airport runway. I desperately want to stop at one of the shacks so that someone can help me get the car out of reverse and fix the brakes. The harder I want to stop, the faster I go.
I can hear my tyres screeching on the tarmac and I know that the only way I am going to be able to bring myself to a standstill is to veer off the tarmac onto the gravelled roadside where the flimsy shacks are and crash into one of them.
This is what I do.
Nearby, a young man appears from one of the shacks I haven't hit. He turns out to be a motor mechanic and tells me I want to get my brakes fixed. He says I am lucky not to have hurt myself because my vehicle is so fragile and the shack I hit sturdier than it looks.
He sucks his teeth when I struggle out of my car. It will be some time before he can get the parts he needs to mend it and meanwhile I have no way of getting to where I want to be except to walk back the way I've come. Where I am is miles away from where I need to be, and there is no passing traffic. I am not sure that I will ever find my way back to him but I have no choice except to leave the car with him and turn my face towards the town.
It takes an age to retrace the journey I have just made, in reverse, in seconds. I don't see a soul on the way.
When I reach the town, it turns out to be a maze of tiny streets lined by shops and offices. The traffic is manic and the footpaths narrow. I can almost feel the cars as they pass me. I cannot find my way.
I ask a woman in a shop and she takes me to the door so she can show me. She wants me to go back the way I've come, navigate road-crossings where the traffic lights are always against me and there are no breaks in the streams of vehicles. I double back and come to the main road at another junction, but still can't find a way to cross. This is hopeless and I weep with frustration.
+++
The scene changes again. Now I am somewhere I know: I am in bed, in in my own bedroom at home. It's the middle of the night.
I hear voices outside the front door of the house and the sound of it slamming. My son and his friend are joining the crowds of people, in twos and threes, who are making their way past the house towards the centre of the small seaside town where I live. The night is obviously cold as everyone is huddled in thick coats, scarves and hats. They are either all coming back from somewhere or all going to the same place.
I get up, and dressed, and join the flow. Although some of the streets of the town are familiar, they are jumbled together with streets of houses from long-ago places and the coastline I eventually arrive at is not the one near where I live now.
The length of the pier to my right is illuminated by strings of white lights between the lamp posts all the way to the end. There are people swimming in the cold sea between the pier and a headland somewhere to my left where the waves crash. It's odd that there should be crashing waves half a mile away when the sea where the swimmers are is calm and clear.
A young man catches at the tail of a dolphin, one of a group of half a dozen teasing the nearby bathers with their sleek speed. A cheer goes up from the watching crowd as he makes contact with one hand, and a second as he secures his grip with the other. In seconds the dolphin has swished him away and out of sight.
I am walking along a broad promenade towards a place where lights shine and crowds gather but when I get there, I see no-one. I am completely alone. I pass boarded-up cafes and kiosks and the fairground, and few lights burn.
I turn for home, sad and cold and suddenly very very tired. I watch myself turn left just past the church into my road, and see the tears glistening on my face.
++++
When I wake up I feel broken. The parts of my body that should fit together are separated by tiny cracks. They have shifted so that each is no longer quite where it should be. I have dislocated.
+++
I go back to work the day after tomorrow, after four months away on sick leave. I have had periods of depression before but I have never been back to the same place afterwards. Depressions in the past have been the catalysts for major life changes, reasons to move on. This staying put is new and frightening and as if the illness has been for nothing, even if I know that the changes I need to make have simply been postponed.
I am afraid of what will happen when I go back.
I am afraid of not knowing what to do or who to be when I am back in a place that has caused me pain. Where there are people who knew me before but don't now. Where things seem superficially the same but have rearranged themselves subtly and mysteriously while I wasn't there into shapes I may recognise but that feel as different as I do.
Dis-located.
Out of the mist over the harbour to the right looms the huge bulk of an ocean-going tanker, tied alongside. Further out in the estuary, the masts of a wooden tall ship needle into the sky. Its sails are furled.
The wind appears out of nowhere, tossing the fragile carcass of a small boat high into the air. I brake automatically and shut my eyes tight in case it hits me. I open them as it flies across my path and into the lagoon on my left.
The vehicle I'm driving seems to be made of nothing stronger than plastic and it's a struggle to keep it going straight. Nothing happens when I brake.
The roadway is now scarcely wider than the car I'm driving. It's become a pot-holed track, petering out into nothing where the land ends and the ocean begins. I have no way of stopping before it does.
+++
Abruptly the scene shifts. I am driving the same vehicle, but now on an industrial estate some miles inland from where the road ends. On one side of me, over the river, are huge and dilapidated brick-built warehouses, on the other small thrown-together shacks. The warehouses are deserted.
I am driving in reverse gear along what feels like an old airport runway. I desperately want to stop at one of the shacks so that someone can help me get the car out of reverse and fix the brakes. The harder I want to stop, the faster I go.
I can hear my tyres screeching on the tarmac and I know that the only way I am going to be able to bring myself to a standstill is to veer off the tarmac onto the gravelled roadside where the flimsy shacks are and crash into one of them.
This is what I do.
Nearby, a young man appears from one of the shacks I haven't hit. He turns out to be a motor mechanic and tells me I want to get my brakes fixed. He says I am lucky not to have hurt myself because my vehicle is so fragile and the shack I hit sturdier than it looks.
He sucks his teeth when I struggle out of my car. It will be some time before he can get the parts he needs to mend it and meanwhile I have no way of getting to where I want to be except to walk back the way I've come. Where I am is miles away from where I need to be, and there is no passing traffic. I am not sure that I will ever find my way back to him but I have no choice except to leave the car with him and turn my face towards the town.
It takes an age to retrace the journey I have just made, in reverse, in seconds. I don't see a soul on the way.
When I reach the town, it turns out to be a maze of tiny streets lined by shops and offices. The traffic is manic and the footpaths narrow. I can almost feel the cars as they pass me. I cannot find my way.
I ask a woman in a shop and she takes me to the door so she can show me. She wants me to go back the way I've come, navigate road-crossings where the traffic lights are always against me and there are no breaks in the streams of vehicles. I double back and come to the main road at another junction, but still can't find a way to cross. This is hopeless and I weep with frustration.
+++
The scene changes again. Now I am somewhere I know: I am in bed, in in my own bedroom at home. It's the middle of the night.
I hear voices outside the front door of the house and the sound of it slamming. My son and his friend are joining the crowds of people, in twos and threes, who are making their way past the house towards the centre of the small seaside town where I live. The night is obviously cold as everyone is huddled in thick coats, scarves and hats. They are either all coming back from somewhere or all going to the same place.
I get up, and dressed, and join the flow. Although some of the streets of the town are familiar, they are jumbled together with streets of houses from long-ago places and the coastline I eventually arrive at is not the one near where I live now.
The length of the pier to my right is illuminated by strings of white lights between the lamp posts all the way to the end. There are people swimming in the cold sea between the pier and a headland somewhere to my left where the waves crash. It's odd that there should be crashing waves half a mile away when the sea where the swimmers are is calm and clear.
A young man catches at the tail of a dolphin, one of a group of half a dozen teasing the nearby bathers with their sleek speed. A cheer goes up from the watching crowd as he makes contact with one hand, and a second as he secures his grip with the other. In seconds the dolphin has swished him away and out of sight.
I am walking along a broad promenade towards a place where lights shine and crowds gather but when I get there, I see no-one. I am completely alone. I pass boarded-up cafes and kiosks and the fairground, and few lights burn.
I turn for home, sad and cold and suddenly very very tired. I watch myself turn left just past the church into my road, and see the tears glistening on my face.
++++
When I wake up I feel broken. The parts of my body that should fit together are separated by tiny cracks. They have shifted so that each is no longer quite where it should be. I have dislocated.
+++
I go back to work the day after tomorrow, after four months away on sick leave. I have had periods of depression before but I have never been back to the same place afterwards. Depressions in the past have been the catalysts for major life changes, reasons to move on. This staying put is new and frightening and as if the illness has been for nothing, even if I know that the changes I need to make have simply been postponed.
I am afraid of what will happen when I go back.
I am afraid of not knowing what to do or who to be when I am back in a place that has caused me pain. Where there are people who knew me before but don't now. Where things seem superficially the same but have rearranged themselves subtly and mysteriously while I wasn't there into shapes I may recognise but that feel as different as I do.
Dis-located.
Thursday 3 April 2008
The most peculiar thing
Well maybe not the most peculiar thing ever, but odd all the same.
The other night I was sitting here in my front room. The lights from the two anglepoise-type lamps were focussed on two of the pictures on the walls. It was late. My daughter had arrived home from her father's and was watching a movie upstairs with the best friend she's had ever since they were both dots and with whom she's planning on visiting California during their gap years.
(The friend is very organised; the daughter less so. The two of them arrived earlier in convoy with three others to whom I seem to have become a spare mother. There were many many hugs and you'd have thought they'd been away for a hundred years instead of two days. It was lovely.)
So they're upstairs watching Hairspray, snoodled up together in a duvet on the futon. I don't know where the cats are.
I am minding my own business.
Suddenly there's a bang - a loud one. It is so loud it echoes. It is the sort of noise a wok would make if it was knocked off the top of the stove with a pile of baking trays onto a hard floor by a cat being somewhere and doing something it wasn't supposed to, only louder and more echoey.
I am down the hallway and into the kitchen quite quickly. There is nothing on the floor and no sign of cats.
So if it's not the cats knocking the wok off the stove, it must be the lightbulb over the washbasin in the bathroom which fails every now and again loudly while I'm in the toilet not quite believing that a bulb blowing out can make that much noise. This is a lightbulb tested to the limits of its endurance by being left on 24/7 by a daughter who doesn't yet seem to have realised that there's no need for illumination in a room she is no longer in. The fact that I'm not in the toilet when I hear this particular bang temporarily fails to register.
When I go upstairs to check, the bathroom light is still on. I turn it off.
I go back down to the front room and finish checking my emails. I write half of one to somebody asking if I'd be interested in doing some research, and then there's another bang. Not quite so loud this time, and therefore more easily ignored.
I am obviously imagining things.
The following morning, when I go into the sitting room to clear up last night's mugs and put them into the dishwasher, everything feels somehow different and wrong.
The sun shines into that room early in the day at this time of year through a floor-to-ceiling double-glazed window that begs to be a pair of narrow old-fashioned French doors leading into the garden but isn't yet. It's divided into two, horizontally, halfway down its length. The top half opens, while the bottom half just sits there.
This morning, the bottom half has become frosted. The sunlight, instead of streaming through as it normally does, is fragmented. There are unfamiliar shadows on the white walls and I can't see the path outside.
It is the most peculiar thing.
The pane on the inside of the room is intact. The outer one has a mussel-shell sized hole in it and, around the hole, the glass is crazed all the way to all of its edges.
The other night I was sitting here in my front room. The lights from the two anglepoise-type lamps were focussed on two of the pictures on the walls. It was late. My daughter had arrived home from her father's and was watching a movie upstairs with the best friend she's had ever since they were both dots and with whom she's planning on visiting California during their gap years.
(The friend is very organised; the daughter less so. The two of them arrived earlier in convoy with three others to whom I seem to have become a spare mother. There were many many hugs and you'd have thought they'd been away for a hundred years instead of two days. It was lovely.)
So they're upstairs watching Hairspray, snoodled up together in a duvet on the futon. I don't know where the cats are.
I am minding my own business.
Suddenly there's a bang - a loud one. It is so loud it echoes. It is the sort of noise a wok would make if it was knocked off the top of the stove with a pile of baking trays onto a hard floor by a cat being somewhere and doing something it wasn't supposed to, only louder and more echoey.
I am down the hallway and into the kitchen quite quickly. There is nothing on the floor and no sign of cats.
So if it's not the cats knocking the wok off the stove, it must be the lightbulb over the washbasin in the bathroom which fails every now and again loudly while I'm in the toilet not quite believing that a bulb blowing out can make that much noise. This is a lightbulb tested to the limits of its endurance by being left on 24/7 by a daughter who doesn't yet seem to have realised that there's no need for illumination in a room she is no longer in. The fact that I'm not in the toilet when I hear this particular bang temporarily fails to register.
When I go upstairs to check, the bathroom light is still on. I turn it off.
I go back down to the front room and finish checking my emails. I write half of one to somebody asking if I'd be interested in doing some research, and then there's another bang. Not quite so loud this time, and therefore more easily ignored.
I am obviously imagining things.
The following morning, when I go into the sitting room to clear up last night's mugs and put them into the dishwasher, everything feels somehow different and wrong.
The sun shines into that room early in the day at this time of year through a floor-to-ceiling double-glazed window that begs to be a pair of narrow old-fashioned French doors leading into the garden but isn't yet. It's divided into two, horizontally, halfway down its length. The top half opens, while the bottom half just sits there.
This morning, the bottom half has become frosted. The sunlight, instead of streaming through as it normally does, is fragmented. There are unfamiliar shadows on the white walls and I can't see the path outside.
It is the most peculiar thing.
The pane on the inside of the room is intact. The outer one has a mussel-shell sized hole in it and, around the hole, the glass is crazed all the way to all of its edges.
Wednesday 2 April 2008
When I grow up
When I grow up, I will be tall and svelte and balanced. I will throw my feet ahead of myself as I walk, like models do. I will be perfectly groomed and grounded and I will hold my head high. I will wash my hair a lot and shower every day and be gracious.
I will do what I say I'm going to. I will not lose track of time and wonder where the days went while I wasn't looking.
I will have nobody to please except myself. It will be all right to be who I am and do what I do. If there's still a log in the passenger footwell of my car that fell out of the bag I was bringing home for the fire two years ago, nobody will notice except me and I won't mind.
I will buy my car tax on time.
I will love the people I love and let them love me back.
I will believe that when somebody says we'll drive in a convoy to Strawberry Fair in Cambridge next year that that's what we'll actually do.
(Last year it was all a bit new and the park-and-ride was brilliant but we didn't know quite where to get off the bus and ended up following the crowds and the sound of music as if we knew what we were doing and feeling a bit nervous and hot, and Joe and Ben had dressed up for the occasion and we walked and walked and walked until we got there and we were so so hungry and I bought jerk chicken and rice-and-peas for all of us and we sat on the grass and ate it while Joe and Ben got used to the idea that this was a big place and there were cheeses there who were even bigger than they were and gradually they detached themselves and looked less worried and found the tent where the King Blues were playing even before Annie and I did and then we met some people we knew and talked to them for a bit and suddenly that was enough and it was time to go home.)
I will learn how to drink less and smoke less and go to bed at sensible times and be a good example to my children and tidy up as I go and not let rubbish pile up into heaps where maggots grow and hatch into bluebottles that buzz madly against the windows.
When I grow up I'll be perfect.
I will do what I say I'm going to. I will not lose track of time and wonder where the days went while I wasn't looking.
I will have nobody to please except myself. It will be all right to be who I am and do what I do. If there's still a log in the passenger footwell of my car that fell out of the bag I was bringing home for the fire two years ago, nobody will notice except me and I won't mind.
I will buy my car tax on time.
I will love the people I love and let them love me back.
I will believe that when somebody says we'll drive in a convoy to Strawberry Fair in Cambridge next year that that's what we'll actually do.
(Last year it was all a bit new and the park-and-ride was brilliant but we didn't know quite where to get off the bus and ended up following the crowds and the sound of music as if we knew what we were doing and feeling a bit nervous and hot, and Joe and Ben had dressed up for the occasion and we walked and walked and walked until we got there and we were so so hungry and I bought jerk chicken and rice-and-peas for all of us and we sat on the grass and ate it while Joe and Ben got used to the idea that this was a big place and there were cheeses there who were even bigger than they were and gradually they detached themselves and looked less worried and found the tent where the King Blues were playing even before Annie and I did and then we met some people we knew and talked to them for a bit and suddenly that was enough and it was time to go home.)
I will learn how to drink less and smoke less and go to bed at sensible times and be a good example to my children and tidy up as I go and not let rubbish pile up into heaps where maggots grow and hatch into bluebottles that buzz madly against the windows.
When I grow up I'll be perfect.
Tuesday 1 April 2008
You know who you are
There are people who are good at waiting. They set up a scenario, watch it play out and then pounce.
They are usually very handsome.
They are the people who notice the dust on the top of the washing machine. The ones who apologise for taking the last slice of garlic bread but do it anyway. They play the guitar like angels, their fingers stroking the strings so softly you can feel them on your skin.
They come round to your house (or sometimes - occasionally - they will allow you into theirs). They act surprised a lot and need a great deal of reassurance.
You can feed them for a year, introduce them to all your friends and fall in love with them. You listen to everything they choose to tell you and ignore the bits that don't make sense because quite obviously it's you that's got it wrong, not them.
They say they hate one side of their face and because you want them to know how much that doesn't matter, you kiss it.
+++
One Spring evening, when the sun's shone all day after weeks of constant grey rain and you've sat outside in the morning soaking it up in between washing your pillows and trying to peg them out on the line only to have the pegs popping off because the feathers inside - which you weren't supposed to wash anyway - are too heavy when wet, they arrive. Take forever to get out of their car. Open the tailgate and rearrange what's inside. Finally knock on the door.
They do pleasantries. Smile. Acknowledge that you've noticed that their hair is a bit longer than it was before, and that it suits them. Make themselves just available enough, but not quite.
During the course of the evening, they disappear because they have something far more pressing to do than be here with you.
When you text them later to wonder whether they really meant to come back as they said they would only on account of the fact that they haven't come back yet you're starting to have doubts, they don't text back.
+++
Pouncing is what wild animals do. They make themselves small and match their contours to the landscape. They lie still. They understand watching and waiting and slowing their breathing. Somehow they can become anything anyone wants them to be while still being themselves. They crouch down in the long grass while the sun burns and you feel it warm on your back and through to your bones until you forget to be as wise as you thought you were.
They are usually very handsome.
They are the people who notice the dust on the top of the washing machine. The ones who apologise for taking the last slice of garlic bread but do it anyway. They play the guitar like angels, their fingers stroking the strings so softly you can feel them on your skin.
They come round to your house (or sometimes - occasionally - they will allow you into theirs). They act surprised a lot and need a great deal of reassurance.
You can feed them for a year, introduce them to all your friends and fall in love with them. You listen to everything they choose to tell you and ignore the bits that don't make sense because quite obviously it's you that's got it wrong, not them.
They say they hate one side of their face and because you want them to know how much that doesn't matter, you kiss it.
+++
One Spring evening, when the sun's shone all day after weeks of constant grey rain and you've sat outside in the morning soaking it up in between washing your pillows and trying to peg them out on the line only to have the pegs popping off because the feathers inside - which you weren't supposed to wash anyway - are too heavy when wet, they arrive. Take forever to get out of their car. Open the tailgate and rearrange what's inside. Finally knock on the door.
They do pleasantries. Smile. Acknowledge that you've noticed that their hair is a bit longer than it was before, and that it suits them. Make themselves just available enough, but not quite.
During the course of the evening, they disappear because they have something far more pressing to do than be here with you.
When you text them later to wonder whether they really meant to come back as they said they would only on account of the fact that they haven't come back yet you're starting to have doubts, they don't text back.
+++
Pouncing is what wild animals do. They make themselves small and match their contours to the landscape. They lie still. They understand watching and waiting and slowing their breathing. Somehow they can become anything anyone wants them to be while still being themselves. They crouch down in the long grass while the sun burns and you feel it warm on your back and through to your bones until you forget to be as wise as you thought you were.
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