Reading the Signs

Pith in the Wind

2012-01-30T09:32:00.008Z

Awake at five - no choice but to go with it: fruit, coffee, quality time with the cat who appreciates the early breakfast. Fruit and coffee is not the best breakfast and could play havoc with blood sugar. But I forestall this by having a second breakfast of bacon and egg. Between first and second breakfasts I gather bits and pieces for a poetry idea I have brewing. I do it quickly and haphazardly but with a certain kind of method born of long practice: the words have been whispering themselves in the small hours, I get them down before they grow thin as smoke and disappear. Remembering them later will not be the same as being in their presence. I look up a couple of references, but don't get stuck on this. Whatever you do, don't walk through the magic door of the computer screen and lose yourself in the internet or La Belle Dame Sans Merci will have you palely loitering, all words lost.

I am writing a short sequence about my stepfather, who died last year, drawing on memories (his and mine) and imaginings. I want to set down things for which I have no adequate vocabulary because they are closely related to a landscape I never really inhabited. But I have discovered that the hard, spiky grass growing on the dunes by the sea at Montrose in the north-east of Scotland is called Marram grass. It is good to be able to name things, but for much else I will have to rely on commonplace words like stone, water, wind, mist, and bring my imaginative eye close, so as to feel their particularities.

My stepfather, who was mostly my ex-stepfather for the many years that I knew him, more or less disappeared ten years ago, when he cut off contact with everyone apart from the one person he lived with. It was a loss felt keenly by his friends and family who learned of his death ten months after the event. So the bits and pieces I am putting together are possibly an attempt at some kind of restoration. The imagined past, he once said, reflects the lived present.

I just remembered that I promised something short, pithy and unspeakably heroic - and this is hardly that. Damn. But on the other hand, these few words and the others are probably the most I can do in the short time available. And considering the mountain (well, small hill) of other tasks that clamour for my energy and attention, there is something of the heroic here, even with the lack of pith. But you can't have everything.

**

How Things Are in January

2012-01-27T18:24:00.010Z

I have decided to be kinder to myself. If a family member, friend or (come to think of it) anyone were to commit to doing something and then couldn't, I would not berate them. I would not treat them as I have treated myself, pushing them to keep going as though kicking a poor, worn-out donkey. Shame on me for having done that. I am as deserving of consideration as the donkey. A digression: in our family the donkey has a special place. My daughter and I both had donkeys as our special stuffed animal transitional comfort creature. More than transitional, they accompanied us through childhood. We love the donkey and support the Donkey Sanctuary. Son used to send them his pocket money. End of digression.

I have not been strong or well enough to consider working on my novel project right now. It will have to wait until things change for the better. I am carrying on with poetry work though this too is circumscribed, for at the moment my bed and dear little Macbook Air is the centre of operations. I do get up from time to time - for essentials plus writerly engagements - but the earth's rotation and gravity have to be negotiated.

Signs Cottage is not necessarily the best place for me, it has stairs and other inconvenient things. But Mr. Signs works from home several days a week, and cat is here. Life, still. Sweet.

Tomorrow is the mater's 89th birthday bash (meal in a local posh hotel). She does Pilates and aqua aerobics and is in rude health and sprightly as a pixie.

Back soon with posts from the front. They will be short, pithy - and unspeakably heroic.

(The title of this post refers, quite shamelessly, to the title of Ros Barber's poetry collection: How Things Are on Thursday)

never mind the title

2012-01-22T11:50:00.003Z

Sticking my head in the door to say hello here. Hello to who? You, obviously, but to me too. People say that Tweeting is something akin to talking to oneself, and I have often thought this about blogging too. But in talking to oneself is there not the sense of some listening presence - an intimate other - or what some creative writing practitioners would call your 'ideal reader'?

Here at House of Signs we are quite happy with the less-than-ideal, or if not happy then realistic. At least I did not make any stupid resolutions that would now have been broken. But strength is once again at a low ebb. I am looking out of the window as I write this, at my neighbour with her young sons, digging in the garden, she in a green puffer jacket, the oldest boy in red and the toddler in blue. Grandma is there too in a mustard puffer. All are digging. I want to be digging too, not literally perhaps, but working my own patch of land, making grow the things I want to cultivate. A number of things come against this. Even sticking my head around the door like this is not without its difficulties. For one thing, I have to be sitting upright. No, seriously.

It has been one of those mornings when everything that is waiting to be written, sung or planted, the etheric spirits of them all, gathered around my bed singing their various possibilities. We are ready, they said, to incarnate. These voices. They have never listened to reason. They know nothing about Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. By this afternoon there won't be a trace of them. They stay only for the possibilities.

But this piece, all about someone doing something against all the odds, has made me feel very happy.

**

Signs and Labels

2012-01-05T19:09:00.002Z

I have been looking at the various labels on my sidebar. Here are the top ten:

1. Writing
2. Life and Stuff
3. M.E.
4. Reasons to be Cheerful
5. Creativity
6. Food
7. How to Live
8. The Signs
9. Poetry
10. Process

Interesting (to me) that Writing is number one, though perhaps not surprising. When I am not writing, it is always what I want to be coming back to. And even if too ill to be doing much, I love thinking and reading about it, and talking about it with others who are on a writing path of one kind or another. When I began this blog, five years ago, I was having a gap year from teaching creative writing. The gap turned into something more permanent even though I had accepted a post to teach at a university, and even though I loved doing what I did. Still, the fact of not teaching any more has not diminished my interest in in creative language, process - and people. There are so many ways, hidden and manifest, to be and think creatively, even if (particularly if?) one finds oneself on a path that is not of one's choosing.

I have a small window of time each day when it feels possible to attend to something that is properly creative. I have been liking the word 'properly' recently, as you might have noticed. I think what I mean by 'properly' here is: with my whole heart. But also with enough vital forces at my disposal for me to be able to put my heart into whatever it is. And actually, I only have this window on a good day.

On new year's eve we threw the coins, as we always do. The I Ching says I have to "inquire of the Oracle again" to see if I possess "sublimity, constancy and perseverance." I think I can tick the last two. Full marks for constancy and perseverance, and I don't need the Oracle to pronounce on that. As for sublimity - posterity will tell. Or not, as the case may be. Perhaps I will throw the coins again after all, to get a sneak preview.

**

Ghost of Christmas

2011-12-24T14:03:00.002Z

Finding the kindling - the wick - keeping the flame alight. Believing in it.

back to purple

2011-12-21T00:06:00.004Z

This is more of a tweet than a post, and it is again after midnight. There are too many things to get done in the few hours where doing is possible. But it seemed important to let you know that I no longer want the Sarah Lund sweater. Call me fickle, but I am now properly in love with a pair of rainbow woollen slipper socks and fingerless gloves - handmade by a friend who lives (and this is the honest truth) in an igloo without any of the mod cons that we all take for granted. I received them yesterday in the post, since when I have not taken them off. And I have stopped thinking about the sweater. Someone sent me a tip-off that they were selling replicas in H & M but actually, on investigation it seems that the star and snowflake motif is in every shop one looks at. Everyone wants a piece of Sarah Lund's jumper. It would obviously be terrible for my reputation if I were to be seen following the common herd, so back I go to the trusty purples shell-suit trousers.

And the other thing I wanted to say is: how is it possible that every tumbler in the house has disappeared? I simply accept that this happens with ballpoint pens and socks. But this is too much. I am drinking water from a mug. Something very weird is going on.

want it

2011-12-12T00:53:00.004Z

I can't sleep and have got it into my addled brain that all I really want for Christmas is this original Sarah Lund sweater. Actually, I have got it into my addled brain that if I could only have this sweater then everything might suddenly come right. I have felt this before - when I was about nine years old, I think. Then it was a talking doll that I wanted. It had a string that you pulled at the back and it said things like, my name is Little Poppet and it cost five pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence - a fortune. Just as well I didn't get it, the let-down would have been dreadful and I would have been stuck with her. I want this sweater bad. Why? I enjoyed The Killing, but not nearly as much as most people seem to, and I don't really want to be the Sarah Lund character. I am not even sure that the sweater would be right for my shape. I still want it. I have trousers and a jacket that would go perfectly with it. I would wear it as it is supposed to be worn - all the time - because that comes naturally. When I have something I like I tend to bond with it (e.g. purple trousers) and see no reason to ring the changes. It is made of good, Faroese, breathable wool. It costs 280 euros - 320 with postage and packing - and is therefore out of the question. Knitting it myself is also out of the question.

But I keep looking at it. The wool is just right. The funny star pattern also. Right for what, though?

What ridiculous thing do you really want for Christmas?

Beyond the Dry White Whine

2011-12-09T17:30:00.005Z

I was just about to share with you a fulsome complaint about the state of the Signs barnet (I am having a bad hair month) when I was struck by a profound thought. Bear with me, as they teach them to say at call centres, especially when it looks as though there may be trouble ahead and no possibility of resolution (our fridge light is not working, it has been kaput for several months, we have a British Gas kitchen appliance service agreement that should deal with this, they are apparently working 'night and day' to resolve etc etc). There is much that I could be complaining about. The state of my fake Ugg boots, fact of the heel being conspicuously worn when I hardly, I mean to say, really walk any length to brag about; I have put on weight and it isn't even Christmas yet; it is cold in the Signs bedroom because the loft has never been properly lagged and we just can't - etc; and so on, including the hair and the fridge light, as outlined above.

The profound thought that barged into my consciousness is this: complaining is really a luxury activity. Don't get me wrong - I am all for complaining often and loudly, especially about poorly-administered service agreements. My 'musn't grumble' stance is ironic, not from the heart or from any conviction that there is merit in keeping stumm about the variety of aggravation that life throws at you. But complaining, if you are going to do it properly, takes energy, life forces, sure ground beneath your feet of the sort that stems from a feeling that all is fundamentally well, were it not for the malfunctioning fridge light (the sound on my computer has gone mute btw, and there is a crack in our recently-acquired toilet seat, just so you know).

Consider this: when you are in your mid-thirties you complain about the fact of getting older. You crack on about how you are now, technically, middle-aged, you don't stay up all night drinking as you did in your teens and twenties and you can't so easily ignore the bronchial cough from all the cigarettes you smoke. In your mid-forties you are much less loud about all this. You paint over the grey bits and generally stop drawing attention to age-related matters especially as some of them might have become embarassing. In your mid-fifties you either kind of shut up about it or you say something properly interesting, or write poety. You understand in your soul that we are mortal and memento mori becomes a mantra worth considering. It is all too close to the bone for mere complaint.

When life becomes properly hard, with fear, pain, illness or hunger as constant presences, things go quiet, or something quite different happens.

The silver swan, who living had no note,
when death approached unlocked her silent throat.

I do not think you will easily find someone with M.E. complaining about what the disease has done, is doing, to their lives. You disagree, perhaps - think that there is an endless stream of complaint from the M.E/CFS community, enough to make you want to switch off, but what you see does not touch on the heart of the matter.

I have said this before and will say it again: there are people living the severe version of the condition you have heard referred to as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and what they endure is unspeakable and heroic. Some, with difficulty and extraordinary tenacity, manage to write about it, speak the truth. When they do, the words are song-like. They give utterance to something mysterious: how we can be in seemingly impossible conditions, maligned and forsaken, and yet bear witness. Lament is the purest form of song I know.

Greetings to y'all this newly starlit Advent - and to you, the singers: I listen, I hear, I lend my voice.

**

Cuckmere Haven

2011-12-04T20:32:00.002Z

I like the sea in all its aspects. Yesterday the surface of it was wind-prickled, unsettled, a hard metallic shining in slow motion, a severity of grey along the curve of the horizon.

I have always thought: if you look at something for long enough you do, to some extent, become it for a space. I wanted not to be this human thing stranded on dry land with my two thin legs, the laces of my Doc Martens all unravelling on the rough stones by the mouth of the river that comes and comes to the father/lover rush of sea. I was jealous - landlocked in unsuitable footwear, I wanted to be seagull. There is something hidden in deep sea that even the sky can't read. It is said that the moon has power over sea, but I don't believe it.

I wrote: I could have been stone at the bottom of your bed, moved from this place to that, grey flint with a hole in my heart, a grain of sand - something, or almost nothing. This yearning on the shore by white cliffs is the farthest I can go - the closest I can get.

**

2011-11-28T16:31:00.000Z

White whine alert: where have all the four-exing sixty-watt light bulbs gone? The proper, incandescent ones, I mean, I still can't abide the save-the-planet ones no matter how much better people say they are. This kind of thing can have me slithering helter skelter into a rant about things in general that I find difficult about the now, looking back with rose-tinted spectacles to the proper lightbulb days of yore. We didn't have computers then, much, or mobile phones. How did we live though? I can't remember. But I do know that it was generally ok to pick up the phone to make or break an arrangement whereas now it seems an indecently intrusive thing to do. This comes to mind because there is someone from the lightbulb days who has for some time - most of the year, actually - been trying to make an arrangement for us to meet up again. Considering where we both are, this should be fairly straightforward, but it hasn't been. Small difficulties that might easily be sorted by having a short conversation become something else when one is texting (her preferred method of communication) back and forth. Emails get lost or passed over. First one who picks up the phone is a mashed potato, and I don't want to be it.

Nanowrimo has passed me by, but I am back into my novel - in my fashion. Short bursts and a bit of plod plod. But is has ignited in me again and I have found a way forward after a lovely writing time with the daughter, who is working on another play. Sometimes one just needs a small shift to get unstuck. To keep going is the thing. I have no real sense of how achievable it is, the satisfactory completion of such a task as this, but the travelling (the carrying on, the writing), rather than the arrival is really the thing, and without it I feel strangely lost.

nudnik

2011-11-24T19:14:00.003Z

This morning someone asked me by the by how I was. I said I was in 'mustn't grumble' mode and we both laughed. Only a nudnik* answers a question like that in a fulsome and truthful way. And anyway I do not properly know how I am, all I know is that I am on that Mickey Mouse precipice again. Or am I being disingenuous, even to myself? I am - or was, at any rate, for several years - a trained bereavement counsellor. I know how when someone dies weird things happen. But it is only today that I have articulated to myself that this present weirdness is the bereavement kind - a very particular bespoke kind, as it always is. Not helpful to speak in terms of generalities, and this person that is gone from me and the world is hard to put a label on. He was an erstwhile stepfather but that says very little - and very little is what I want to be saying. So here I am saying it. But sometimes it is best just to bow with a small flourish and go back behind the curtain.

Back anon - when I can lay my hands on the red nose that I seem to have mislaid and when I have dedided what the hell costume to wear. Not to mention remembered my lines.

*nudnik - someone who if you ask them how they are, they tell you. Yiddish, obviously.

Emergency Soup

2011-11-14T11:45:00.003Z

This was never intended as a daily/weekly update on goings-on and goings-out. But inevitably things crop up and one talks about them - and inevitably a picture emerges of the person who wears the persona of Signs. We are not overly shy about the Personal, me and the persona who we can call the Supposed Self. We even, on occasion, embrace the Confessional. But everyone knows (blogging peeps, I mean) that though one may appear to be telling the whole truth (albeit slant), behind the scenes Things happen. In Life, I mean (I am using a lot of capital letters and brackets today, I know). Sometimes a thing comes up and for one reason or another you can't possibly blog about it, but the thing is so big and so wide and so tall that it is like a fully-grown elephant in a small room and you can't carry on sipping your tea and eating your crustless cucumber sandwiches.

On the weekend I found out that someone died at the end of January this year. He came along when I was nine years old and the significance of him in my life cannot be overstated. For the last ten years or so - for reasons that are too complicated and strange to set down - he has been out of communication with everyone, apart from one person who took complete control over every aspect of his life. He was a respected, influential figure, well known, and there have been no obituaries because until a couple of days ago his death was kept secret (by the one person). News of his death came to me in the oddest way, the details around it would not be out of place in a Hardy novel, and it fell to me to pass the news on. It is like a firework that goes off and one spark creates uncountable others, each one an explosion that creates more sparks, more explosions. In the world generally there is much anger and grief, looking for a place to home in. I want and need to keep my head below the parapet, in this particular and a number of other situations. The parapet keeps tumbling down, leaving me exposed. Clear boundaries and protective structures never my strong point.

Mr. Signs and I went to the lovely Duke of Yorks cinema in Brighton yesterday to see the new Wuthering Heights, but after a while I began to shiver and it wasn't just the bleakness of the wet, windy moor and the fact that the cinema was (unusually) a bit cold. After the cut-off, I used to think I saw him, this man who promised he would not go without saying goodbye (he knew I couldn't stand it) from the car window or just turning a corner in the street where I walked - the grief/loss thing. After a while it stopped. Yesterday I thought I saw him slumped in the empty seat near me. But that wasn't why I was shivering. I don't mind apparitions, have often wished for them - not like Heathcliff wanted Cathy's ghost, but with my own kind of passion. I thought if he was dying or dead he would find a way of letting me know. I also thought my dead father would come and visit me in dreams. Neither have obliged.

I left Mr. Signs to watch the rest of the film and went back, caught a phone call from the man's son, who I have been close to, spoke about a memorial service, neither of us can face doing anything until next spring. He says he feels lighter, feels closure. I don't. We all process things differently. There was nothing in the house for supper. I found some red lentils in the cupboard and some old carrots and celery in the fridge. Put them into a pot with boiling water and Marigold bouillon, cooked until soft then pulverised with a potato masher. It did the trick. Emergency Soup. Sometimes you just have to go with what you have.

(un)ravelling

2011-11-07T22:44:00.006Z

Back on the front line again - fearless on the battlefield. Meaning that I have been laid up and mostly in bed. This is when we (pwme) have to be brave and free ourselves from fear, become incredibly zen and dispassionate about the hours and days that slip into a continuum and there is no telling how long this will last - it might be a week or several months. I walked a short distance along the path by the golf course that leads into the forest. A small moment of overreaching craziness when I was tempted to keep walking, it would have been downhill for a stretch before the uphill climb into forest proper, and then on and on with the possibility of getting lost. Everyone here seems to have a story about getting lost in the forest. But I walked back the way I came, before the rain came down, before I landed myself in a spot where coming back would be an endless uphill slog, before a pointless unravelling.

I feel an analogy coming on - don't you?

I have wandered too far from my story again - the one I should have been working on had I not gone down with this. Story never cares about reasons and excuses for not writing, however justified they might be. Story fleshes out and becomes real when you give it energy and attention and becomes pale and ghostly when you leave it alone for too long. The plot unravels. Getting back is an uphill climb that requires real, physical effort. And today was just weird, hard to pin down: all day waiting for the vet to call back because Cat of Signs was hyperventilating last night; then today she wandered out for an unusually long time and I had thoughts of her perhaps losing her breath again, breathing her last, without the strength to get back. I wandered around and into the neighbour's garden bleating her name. She was fine, scratching her claws on a wooden post. A man came to look at a couple of things that need doing, one of them being to properly lag the loft so the bedrooms are warmer when the cold comes. But he gave me the strangest look as he came in, as though he knew me from some previous and deeply troubling incarnation. Mr. Signs ushered him upstairs and they spoke of this and that. On the way out he gave me the same look, though I smiled nicely and did a faultless hello/goodbye. Trying to think where on earth I might have met him. Perhaps he was once a student of mine and I said something about his work that he didn't like? No, I would remember. Then laptop began to malfunction and made everything look like hieroglyphics, and it was as though I stared at a wall and could not read the Signs. It went on like that for an hour or so, and then righted itself. Sometimes things just do, and leaving things alone to sort themselves out is the best way.

While tapping out this post, a whole chunk of it began to unravel and delete itself. I feel another analogy coming on.

'Home'

2011-11-03T19:17:00.004Z

I was clearing out our tiny study space the other day and came across bits and pieces of notebook-writing from sessions with a friend about six years ago. One of the things we did was to have a pick-and-mix of words, and I think this piece probably came from the word 'Home'. We used to go back and underline bits afterwards, for whatever reason. I have kept those in.

The question of how to keep the fire burning is ongoing:

I still don't know where it is. Am only just beginning to feel that England may after all be it, because after all, where else? Germany - but we were nearly wiped out there, and home should never be in a place where they once tried to kill you off. And anyway, this is where I am - this England, this particular village which I may or may not move from. I have a restlessness inside that both looks for home and seeks to avoid it. I want roots, to feel connected to a place, yet I don't want to be tied and constrained, unable to leave in case a move kills me. You have to be careful with roots. P (friend) always talks of renewing the ancient hearth. He has a ready-made hearth, one that he also tends, at (place of work). My hearth is where I light my candle or, failing that, where I come alight in a group of people with something to share that is more than just a box of chocolates. Though, a box of chocolates can be a hearth too, for a few minutes, and perhaps in this time and place we can't expect more than a series of temporary homes and hearths. The I Ching has told me, The wanderer has no place to lay his head; and once I wrote, I lay my head on my lover's shoulder, it smells of grass and reminds me of home.

When you lose a lover, a marriage partner, a close friend, you feel a sense of exile. The lay of the land is suddenly different. I feel this all the time, the ground shifting beneath my feet; also, the fear of coming home to oneself and no fire in the hearth, no lamp lit, nothing to eat. I have my own hut, and a good one too, but the walls have gaps in them where the wind whistles through and I forget to bring in the wood so I have something to burn, to make fire with. Without fire, no home.

**

clobbered

2011-11-02T23:35:00.003Z

It's November, novel-immersion month - and guess what? I am clobbered with the mother and father of all colds and have a temperature. I am not overly superstitious but I have noticed that this kind of thing tends to happen immediately after I say anything to suggest that I might have been feeling a bit, you know, brighter. For most of this year I have been post-viral or post-dental anaesthetic. I know this is just a bastard cold, but everyone by now knows that PWME don't get colds like other people do. It isn't the cold itself but the aftermath that we fear. Ditto dental work and anaesthetic.

Ok, dizzy now. Be seeing you.

Bump in the Night

2011-10-31T14:58:00.003Z

It's Hallowe'en and I'm unashamedly promoting this lovely vid made by the Zig Zag Birds. It's a band that Son is in, see if you can guess which one is him (clue: torn white T , hollow eyes and you don't see him very much but he looks distinctively intense). If you like it, pass it on.

There is a small but hopeful-looking pumpkin sitting outside in the rain waiting to be given a face. But Mr. Signs is clobbered with a cold, and pumpkin-carving isn't one of the things on my C.V. On the other hand, I have stocked up with a few goodies to give the Hallowe'en knockers - but the kids are polite here and if they don't see a lit pumpkin they won't knock. And if they don't knock, I will have to eat all the goodies myself, which I would love to do but it is bad for me.

Tomorrow is the beginning of NaNoWriMo, which I am signing up for, if only to be along in spirit. There is no way I can bash out fifty thousand words in a month, if I manage between five and ten thousand I will be pleased. But I like the idea of a novel-writing month. It's good to tell stories. It's good to feel one is in the flow and swim of things, and I intend to be. In my fashion.

Postscript: While I was putting up this post Mr. Signs did something to the pumpkin. Punk art, people - and expressive!

Beat, Broken and sometimes Mickey Mouse

2011-10-25T14:08:00.004Z

This is a pyjama day - my red, white and tinsel ones that go on surviving, a bit like my Purples, or like me. I have been winging it for a couple of months, meaning that I have not been spending most of every day lying down and that I have been seen out and about (shops and stuff, a poetry reading), and with my new short hair people say, oh you look well, you look better, you look - well, whatever, clearly I look brighter. And if someone asks me how I am, I say good, even though there are substantial grammatical issues around this ('good' is actually more correct than 'well' but we won't go into this now) - because while I have ME/CFIDS it is not truthful to say that I am well, but there are days that are, for whatever reason, good. And therefore I am. In my 'winging it' times I can move through the day as long as I keep, in some way, moving. The moment I rest or sit down I feel something more akin to the true state of things. Gravity homes in, sucks at my limbs; electricity, and all the strange manifestations of the malfunctioning body that goes by the name of me, begin to buzz, twitter and growl.

When I write, I can also (sometimes) feel as though I am winging it, as long as I keep going, like Mickey Mouse walking off the edge of the cliff - as long as I don't look down. I have used this image before, probably several times. But it does so perfectly represent how things are when one is like this. It isn't as though the ground (abyss) is not there, just that while in the air it is better not to look down and see it. If I believe I can keep going, the chances are I will get to the other side.

My Dad once wrote a play with a character who had the ability to walk on the ceiling and did so, going against logic and the law of gravity, until someone insisted that what he did was impossible. It only took a split second - the realisation that this was, in fact, impossible - for him to fall to the ground. He lived his life ever after according to the laws of gravity, with only footprints on the ceiling bearing witness to what he had been able to do. Perhaps I should stop before I stray into the murky territory of the positive-thinking self-help manual - when all I really wanted to say is that sometimes I am Mickey Mouse. Ok?

I have been enjoying the Twitter thing, unexpectedly, considering initial misgivings before I understood how it worked and thought it would feel like being trapped in a room with hundreds of people all talking at the same time. It is somehow easier than Facebook, not so much in your face, and one can dip in and out more smoothly. I came across the Railroad Poetry Project there - as far as I can gather, they are a couple of Kerouac-loving, Beat poetry true-hearts who have started an online magazine for people and poets who are "beat, broken and beautiful" and they asked for submissions. Well how could I resist? So a couple of my poems will be there at the end of the month, and I'm listed now as one of the contributors. It's pretty obvious which one is me - and I seem to be the only one who wrote the bio in first person.

Soap and Philosophy

2011-10-20T22:54:00.003Z

I've been trying to buy a bar of soap. Anyone else noticed that these are becoming increasingly difficult to find? Apparently what we all now want is liquid soap that can be pumped out of a spout. And if we must have bar soap then what we want is twenty different varieties of Dove. Pootling around the streets of Brighton, I ended up in the enormous Boots chemist on North Street where a shop assistant pointed at the rows of Dove, shook her head and reminisced about the good old days of Palmolive, Lux, Knight's Castile and Camay - especially Camay, with the rich lather and the sillouhette of a gracious lady on the packet. They all want the liquid stuff now, she said, handing me a double-pack from a newly-arrived consignment of Cusson's Imperial Leather as though it were contraband. We reminisced about the old TV adverts for that: the rich couple in their private jet up to their necks in suds as they sat in their marble baths, soaping themselves luxuriously while the rabbling hordes shouted and agitated outside. They want the Imperial Leather, said she; clearly, said he, before giving the pilot instructions to bugger off to Bermuda (best place for them, probably).

But anyway, I'd like to know what the world is coming to when you go into a chemist for a bar of soap and come face to face with a pamphlet called Philosophy, which is all about skin care products on the one hand - but on the other hand seems to be peddling a serious nouveau new-age take on every aspect of your life. Under bath and shower products, for example:

remember to dance in your nightgown, sing in the shower, ride a bike, fly a kite and take an occasional "wind bath" in your bare skin, give those you love big kisses, huge hugs and the words "i love you" often and always.

Under antioxidant moisturising is offered the insight that

where there is hope there can be faith - where there is faith miracles can occur.

Would you expect anything less from a manufacturer ("a skin care entrepreneur and visionary") that produces a shampoo called Unconditional Love?

Just take me to Bermuda. Though actually, Brighton pied-à-terre does very nicely for me just now - clear, fresh and bright, as I would like to be, but sans Philosophy. Mr. Signs joining me tomorrow. Another poetry reading on Sunday. Then back to the forest edge.

Substance

2011-10-14T10:58:00.005Z

Fabulous day here on edge, pristine blue/gold autumn with a touch of sting in the air. What to do with it? Or, more specifically, how to use the time available before energy meter times out? (Esp as this is in part borrowed from cup of coffee). I could: go for a walk on the beautiful forest; do last night's washing up; write another three A4 sides of novel, which has clocked up a surprising number of words considering I have not been able to give it much of me; write a poem; pre-prepare the evening meal; or I could sit here and do a blog post. You catch me, so to speak, in medius res, doing just that - PWME in action. Of a kind.

There is no right way with this. You make your choice and feel bad about the other things you have opted not to do. Or you make your choice and decide not to feel bad about anything because you are doing your best. I no longer understand how everyone else (without M.E.) lives. This is strange, because when I was in Monaco looking at all the super-rich peeps on their yachts I could quite easily begin to imagine how it might be if one had unimagineable amounts of money so that you could, for example, spend a quarter of a million just on getting the right kind of fridge/freezer for your floating monstrosity. Monstrous perhaps, but I could imagine it. Money is just another kind of energy. So why can't I get my head around the idea of an ordinary day in the life of someone who does not have to negotiate with the bastard disease? How do you work, shop, clean, go to the gym, see a film/play, get on a train, do admin, cook a meal, talk on the phone - all in one day? How do you even do two of those things and feel ok? Energy aside, I do not know how anyone can process everything without becoming overwhelmed. I belong to the one-a-day club, whose members can really only do one thing a day. Even so, I break club-membership rules. I push myself, do more, pay for it - can't do the pacing thing, stupid me, but on the other hand, the moments, each splinter and fragment - I want them so much.

Cat of Signs is now taking a daily pill (cunningly hid in sliver of tuna fish) for her hyperthyroid condition. We discovered also that her increasingly wretched state was due to fleas, picked up from the cattery in August. Dealt with. But she won't leave the kitchen and basically lives in an empty Abel and Cole vegetable box. The vet says that this is because she associates the rest of the house with fleas. Also, that we need to vacuum the house every day paying particular attention to corners and edges (yeah, right) so as to avoid a nasty infestation situation once central heating is switched on. And that we should be spraying something (toxic) around the skirting boards - just to make sure. Strategies.

If I say fuck off enough times, will the fleas get the message?

If I bring C of S's daily saucer of cat milk up to the living room will she leave her Cinderella abode and come back to us?

Because otherwise, I don't know what.

**

- just because

2011-10-06T15:06:00.002Z

I happened to come across it today (beautiful world and universe) and confess that from time to time this is the sort of thing I pure and simple need, for restoration, and I am not talking dentistry, though I have been there today for restoration, and it is national poetry day and although poetry will not confine itself to solace, restoration and beauty, it often seems that people come to poetry for these things or for a breath of air from 'yon far country', which is paradise never-quite-lost - and because I love the animals and the birds much more now, as I have said, probably too many times, but it bears repeating and anyway I want to, and because there seems to be no evidence at all that the meek will inherit the earth, and the creatures may teach us how to become more human, it may be so

2011-10-04T17:52:00.005Z

Word has got through to Headquarters at M.E. Central, and the powers that be have been alerted: I have been Doing Too Much. This comes with penalties, as any M.E. fule kno. But it was festival time on the Edge and much to see and be involved with. I didn't sleep much. Why would I? It's in the small print (Headquarters again) - if you go ahead and do things don't expect to sleep. Sleep comes after, the long, heavy kind.

But I am still better than I was heretofore, the betterness having begun several weeks ago for no discernible reason and it is not a particularly trustworthy state, relying to some extent on being a little excarnated or in the air, like Mickey Mouse strutting off the edge of a cliff, and it's ok to keep on walking as long as you don't look down. I probably shouldn't say the B word at all. Headquarters doesn't like it.

And there are Things on my mind. Does it get longer, I wonder, as one clocks up the years, the litany of Things? Probably not, but one is less easily distracted. One of the Things is Cat of Signs, whose over-active thyroid is becoming increasingly manifest. Her once beautiful coat is thin and scraggy, as she herself is. Having been a dainty picker before, she now eats like a horse but grows leaner by the day. Sometimes she goes outside and lies stretched on the wooden patio table, but mostly she has taken up residence on the kitchen table and won't go upstairs any more. We are treating her homeopathically (as per Vet's prescriptions) in the hope that her condition can be, if not cured, managed. Other options are: feeding her pills twice a day (impossible, she won't), surgery (too old) or radioactive iodine. This last offers the chance of a good outcome but is hideously expensive and, disorganised hippies that we are, we never did organise pet insurance.

So what to do? Though not exactly loaded, we could raise the money. But spending nearly two grand on our sixteen-year-old cat seems inappropriate.
We love her, though, and in her animal heart there is love for us too. I have never loved an animal before and it is a significant love because it has opened my eyes and changed me and my relationship to all animals.

She stands four-legged by the window
looking at the moon. Her heart is full
and empty, she cries like a human

Writing from Source

2011-09-26T10:21:00.006Z

The phrase/title has been echoing in my head: What Lies Beneath - because of London smoke-friend and her recent blog post, and yes I know it is also the title of a horror film that I never saw. The blog post speaks about an art exhibition beneath Waterloo station that I would love to see, but it ends today and getting to London is for me in any case, you know, a big deal so I don’t do it much. It is a literal underground place - but also speaks some larger message “about the dank, dirty, unexplored places where art comes from, under ground, under consciousness...”

I have been thinking about this recently in connection to my own writing project (see how I shy away from the word ‘novel’). It draws deeply from my own, early life which was, as I experienced it, full of magic but also full of danger and darkness. In her book, Writing as a Way of Healing, Louise de Salvo cautions against being too casual about dipping your pen into the vein of troubled experience. I picture a manhole, the cover of which is lifted - and out come the monsters and creatures that you never expect to see above ground, and you are suddenly defenceless, disarmed, made small and weak again by their potent presences. I think one of the reasons I loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer was that it covered this terrain and drew on powerful archetypes. At some point you probably, if you are going to Make Art, have lift the cover or go down there because the underground life will undoubtedly find a way of making its presence felt, will emerge from the Beneath and challenge you to engage with it or go dry and wordless - and if you write, you can’t have that. How to do that, and have the right defences in place so that you are not overwhelmed, is a challenge and not for the faint-hearted.

The creativity coach, Eric Maisel says that an artist is someone who must learn to manage her/his emotions and if there is any truth in the notion that artists tend to be several skins short of a a sausage then it is particularly important that they learn to do this sooner rather than later. I am doing it later, but never mind. You have to begin where you are, and I am here, at the tail end of my fifties, raw and undisciplined (still), and I never learned how to kick-box. What I did learn, by hook or by crook, and by deep immersion in fairy tale, was to trust the story - that it would take you to the place where you needed to go, and that it would, if you allowed, stay with you and be your sword; and how, if you undertook to make a journey, you would find helpers en route. And how if you found yourself out in the dark forest completely naked, the stars would see you and throw down their gold.

Only Connect

2011-09-24T12:50:00.003Z

Reading Ms Baroque’s latest post this morning; one of the things she speaks about is how difficult it is to keep up with everything in the poetry world and having a finger on the pulse as to who is doing what, let alone getting anything written. Sometimes I wonder how I would be living if I hadn’t needed to negotiate with M.E./CFIDS for the past quarter of a century or so. It can baffle me, in any case, to think of how anyone gets anything done, and with the virtual world making it so easy to be instantly in touch with what is happening, it is easy to lose that shut-away state of being that you need in order to dive deep into the well of your own creative source.

There are times I long to be one of those who can flit from one point of focus to another with a kind of perpetually adjustable tunnel vision: now I am chopping the parsley and coriander for a kedgeree; now I am working on my novel-in-progress; now I am moving into the substance of a poem or arranging the contents of my sock drawer. This last is for illustration - I do not have a sock drawer, but if I were such a person then perhaps I would have one.

I know a writer who describes herself as having ADHD and believes that it is a blessing in her case because it gives her the ability to do many things. She brings tunnel-vision to whatever it is that she is working on and can achieve much more than most in twenty minutes. How useful this would be. But I am not one of those and require a substantial amound of dream-time, which you might think I have in abundance, but I separate good-quality dream-time from laid-up ill-time where thinking is scrambled and one is too much in the body, with its delinquent demands and malfunctions.

And where, in all this, does social networking fit in? Earlier in the year I joined Facebook and now it is Twitter. Last night I watched snippets from Old Grey Whistle Test on BBC4 and began tweeting about it! Why? Because it was fun, is the obvious answer. With the hash tag thing, I saw who else was tweeting, made a sparky connection with someone I don’t know and most likely won’t see again - we shared a moment that brought a smile to each of us, is all - is enough. But there is another impulse: I want to feel connected - whatever that might mean - to the world as it is now. I don’t think social networking is necessary for this but it is something that offers itself easily. I can’t physically zip about to poetry and other cultural events, but I can to some extent keep up with what is happening in a way that would not otherwise be possible. Yes, sometimes I very much love the internet. And sometimes I am very much aware that I have to be careful not to lose myself in it, remember that Notebook is my best friend, steady and true, always giving my proper reflection back to me, waiting and listening with a golden ear for the words that come into its pages.

“We are in it for the long haul,” says London smoke-friend. And the loneliness of the long-distance writer, especially when there is no end yet in sight, and no guarantee at all that persistence will bring what the world calls success, is something to be nourished and embraced.

I am still learning about the Mac. Had my first lesson at the Apple store yesterday with a courteous but slightly bored young geek and there was something about him slightly at odds with the cult-like upbeatness of the Apple environment. I have retained a fraction of what he taught me. We will no doubt cross paths again.

Cat o' Nine Signs. Arrrrr!

2011-09-19T17:27:00.004Z

Blisterin' barnacles, me buckos! It be Talk Like A Pirate Day and not one o' ye scurvy varmints seen fit to remind me? Time was when I'd have sent y'all to dance wi' Jack Ketch, but let it pass, for Cap'n Hooker is of a mind to be lenient. Now where's me grog? I'd be hoistin' the Jolly Roger, but truth to tell, Cat o' Signs has got a pox-ridden mange or some peculiar baldy thing on one of her ears, and as it ill befits a Cap'n o' my stature and standin' to have a creature that's half bald I went to have a parley with the vet hereabouts, no matter that it be the third time in as many weeks and costin' a heap o' doubloons on account of her scurvy thyroid gland. She be gettin' on in years, but not yet old enough to be feedin' the fish, and what with the cost o' homeopathic pills an' potions the vet will be kissin' the gunner's daughter if we don't get a result sharpish, arrr!

Sail-ho, me hearties, that's all ye be gettin' out o' this sea-dog now, but I'll be back ere the mold on me mizzen falls off, firin' a cannon through yer porthole before ye can say yo ho ho an' a bottle o' rum.

So watch it.

**

member of the wedding

2011-09-18T19:05:00.004Z

All day at a wedding yesterday - in Bethnal Green, where I lived in my twenties. The town hall is now a hotel and one can do the whole wedding bash there. We filed into the old magistrates court/town hall chamber where the wedding took place and waited for the show to begin. Every part of the ceremony had been rehearsed. My daughter and the other bridesmaids, all decked out in shades of Peacock, stepped in to the sound of Regina Spektor singing Fidelity, and then it began, the weeping. It was us, the wedding guests, unprepared for the power of ceremony and the thing that happens sometimes in a church or a theatre, when a production is perfectly choreographed, directed and orchestrated and we are lifted out of the mundane world. The groom's voice broke as he made his vows, the bride stated that she had loved him in her heart from the outset, the registrar presided like a midwife or a ministering angel. Afterwards, over fizzy champagne and small talk across a white linen-covered table competing with a cacophony of echoing voices, where we conversed with people whose only real connection to us was the experience we had just shared, we reduced it: beautiful wedding, bride looked lovely, the flowers - oh - the dress, and isn't it strange, we said, how it is back in fashion again, the wedding, and someone talked about how she ran out of tissues because of the crying. I smirked, or tried to smile (the wedding breakfast was not until 3pm, crucifixion-time for the adrenally-challenged chronically-fatigued). I didn't say about the residual ache located just beneath my breastbone, as though someone very much loved from miles of separating years had appeared and then disappeared, or a snatch of conversation had been heard in a language one had almost forgotten. It felt like homesickness. I can't think what else. I think at times like this we are in Babylon and remember Zion. This is not fitting for small talk, or perhaps even any kind of talk at all. And in any case, what words would we use to express such a thing? I ate vichyssoise with truffle, fillet steak, panna cotta, cake. It receded, the homesickness.

Home again, I was up till the small hours, limbs and muscles refusing to settle, then awake again early. I was beyond tired today, but kept afloat in a small frenzy, attending to this and that, admin things and making a vegetable and barley soup to make up for yesterday's cream, sugar and caffeine.

Autumn, its urgency, begins to move in and around me. Body hurts but I whisper it to buoyancy and don't let myself lie down. The year has been too long, too hard. I want to keep going.

five reasons why you should follow me on Twitter

2011-09-15T10:45:00.003Z

- Because I might be famous one day. If for some reason that is not immediately apparent this should happen, then you will really wish you had followed sooner rather than later. It just looks better and nicer.

- Because it's nice to be nice. True - nice is back in fashion, and this is not just me getting old or even a bit less rock an roll. Nice is like Christmas and birthday cards, and exquisite cakes with your coffee, it puts a small glow in the middle of you, where a glow should be, but sometimes one struggles (does one not, now and then) to keep it there. Re cards and cakes, anyone want to tell me about paper wastage and blood sugar levels - don't. Be nice.

- Because I have had a radical new hair cut. Yes, on Twitter you can see the beaming, new-look Signs, cropped and salt and pepper grey. You can also see a small gap at the side where a tooth is missing. It adds to the character, trust me.

- Because if you follow me then I might follow you back. That is actually almost a certainty. I was about to say that beggars can't be choosers, but what I really mean is that I am in the first flush of enthusiasm, not to mention New Kid on the Block, and will therefore say yes to anyone, unless it seems obvious that you are going to be a seriously unpleasant person or dangerous psychopath. And right now I am actually interested in all this and - potentially - you. Which may not be the case if I become famous like, say, Stephen Fry who everyone seems to follow. For he has over three million followers, and how could he possible be interested in all of them?

- Because you are very curious to see what a 'fatigue-artiste and martyr*' actually does with herself, and this will give you a hotline to the Life of Signs, not to mention the odd line of verse and piece of poetic prose.

*Quentin Crisp described himself as "exhibitionist and martyr". If you have never watched the film The Naked Civil Servant, then you must. Having M.E./CFIDS does not carry the same danger as being a homosexual in the earlier part of the twentieth century did. But it carries its own stigma, is widely misunderstood - and it is an artistic work-in-progress to be living with it, in creative relationship.

Wordswork

2011-09-13T19:02:00.008Z

I met with a couple of local poets today to talk about readings coming up at the village literary festival. Over barm brack and tea, we tossed some poems about to see what we might read. I continue to feel ambivalent about poetry readings. On the one hand there is something about speaking the words, putting them into the realm of sound, and the listening ear. But not all poets are good speakers of their work, and some poems ask rather for the intimacy of one-on-one relationship to words on the page. It is often said that the poem only comes properly to life when spoken aloud. I don't necessarily agree. There is another kind of voice that sounds in the ear when one is alone with a poem on the page. It is an aspect of the unique relationship we build with a writer, so that the words, if we make a connection to them, sound in us as though we ourselves are the very source of them.

As a child, I would sometimes copy out poems - verses that I liked - and feel as though it was written by me - that I owned the words as much as the one who composed them. If words are bread of a kind, then in a sense I did own them for I had ingested them and they were now a part of me (one benefit, had I known, of learning by heart). Some of A Child's Garden of Verses did sustain the soul-life of me in ways I could not have articulated.

The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all,
And the star of the sailor, and Mars,
These shown in the sky, and the pail by the wall
Would be half full of water and stars.

This was probably not the first of such experiences, but the pail that was "half full of water and stars" was an initiation into the power of metaphor. It was a poetry-shock: something could be itself on a mundane level, and yet be a doorway to magic and otherworld. Luckily I did not hear it read out loud at school. When teachers read verse they put on a 'poetry voice' and deadened it.

I remember the poet George Szirtes at a reading, saying that he did not do "cabaret." I think I understood what he meant. He was there to read his poems, not to deliver entertainment or do Performance poetry. I squirmed a bit, though, because the truth is that I find poetry readings with an element of performance much easier to take in. This is partly because poetry is often dense with meaning and also because (having M.E.) I am cognitively challenged and brain can get quite suddenly overloaded. But mainly I think it is because not all poets are able to stand fully in their words and deliver them. Well, and why should they? The words we write are sometimes better than we are, and when written they are (and really should be) gone from us.

free flame

2011-09-07T19:57:00.003Z

I would like to tell you that I am writing this post from my sweet and slender new Mac Air book. I have one, it is up and running, lying with the cat on my bed, as it happens. But I don't yet properly know how to use it. I have to go to classes at the Apple place, not joking. For a not entirely modest amount you can get a year's worth of unlimited tuition, which is what I have got. But in the joy of the purchase (esp as not with my money but in return for certain services rendered - don't ask), and in an atmosphere of almost cult-like upbeat positivity (the shop assistants, if one can call them that, really believe in all things Mac and are radiant with the faith) it just seemed as though I would beam myself there and back, Tardis-like, whenever. Ha ha, I hear you say. Yes, and so I have not actually learned how to do the Mac word-processing thing yet. So this comes to you from my trusty Dell P C.

Well, so I am back, with a radical hair cut, short and spiky, all the old colour gone and the grey is - though I say it myself - pleasing. I was actually only away for a week, cavorting in Monaco harbour, the yachting playground of the disgustingly rich. The yacht that we were on was a mere dinghy in comparison with some of the floating hotels I saw. It was horribly hot and humid, but sailing out into the bay, swimming in the sea, was very good, and I slept well on the boat. But enough of that, I don't want to be telling you about what I did in my summer holidays. No, I have more pressing things on my mind.

Autumn is upon us, says the wind that has been tearing about in these parts, bending the boughs of the oak and ash. It is early, and summer didn't have much of a look-in, but never mind, it is here; and so it is time to review, re-dedicate and focus on what next because that is what I do in autumn, whether or not it seems practical because of the restrictions imposed by M.E. My plan is always, in any case, to be feeling, by whatever degree, better. If that is scuppered it won't be by me, but by M.E. So:

Out comes the new notebook and the intention of doing the Morning Pages again, because doing them is a good thing as long as one does not fall into a pit of writing only about illness and despair, and I do not intend to. My focus will be on process (creative) and the lovely incidentals of life in ordinary, which is good for the soul and for poetry.

The novel is progressing - so slowly that you can hardly see it move, and I've been so hammered with one thing and another that it hasn't been given much time, but still - the evidence is there in black and white word count that it is progressing, and it is still alive in me, the characters have not wasted away, as can sometimes happen when you don't give a story enough attention. A sizeable chunk is waiting to be transferred from notebook to computer. I still find composition best to do with pen and paper and even the beautiful Mac is unlikely to change this.

Not writing much new poetry. Can't be helped, I have promised the novel that it will get the best of my sustained attention. But there are readings coming up - one at the end of this month and another in October, and there is enough to be working on and revising.

Courtesy of lovely Kindle, I have been reading Titus Groan, the first part of the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake, a wonderful, fantastical, poetic creation. From time to time the narrator makes an observation that I take to be Mervyn Peake, writer and artist, speaking about how it is when mind is fully present and engaged in the creative act. Here, one of the characters, a young girl called Fuchsia, entering her secret attic place:

As Fuschia climbed into the winding darkness her body was impregnated and made faint by a qualm as of green April. Her heart beat painfully.

This is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or of a woman for their world. For the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame.

It is always a work in progress for most of us, I think, to reclaim or inhabit that world more fully. To this, with the strong breath of autumn, I re-dedicate myself.

**

Quand Meme

2011-08-16T20:05:00.005Z

What has happened to the Meme? You know - those things that people used to tag you with and you had to list anything from three to a hundred random things about yourself that could include anything from your favourite colour to embarassingly personal revelations about underwear and sexual preferences. Well you can forget about any of that. Apart from my fidelity to the purple chav trousers (they have never let me down) the preferences of Signs are nothing if not fluid and changeable. But I do like a good List. If nothing else, they do away with the need to think about having anything of import to say in a post. Put something in the context of a List and it becomes strangely eloquent. You can also get away with making pronouncements about things you might otherwise be wiser to shut up about. With no Meme, it all begins to sound humdrum, but there is so much I could have told you:

Wearing a bra with wire underneath might make your breasts look glad and uplifted, but at the end of the day you will have a red rim underneath them.

Eating a lot of vegetables for several months is almost certainly a very good thing but it is unlikely to be a cure for M.E.

Solitude is a fine thing, but when you find yourself having many serious conversations with a stuffed bear it is time to review the situation.

Giving up cigarettes doesn't necessarily mean that you will ever stop wanting them. Giving up sugar, though, probably does.

I seem to use the words 'probably' and 'perhaps' a lot.

My Dell laptop has suffered a clutch of Blue Wall attacks and is probably dying.

I want a Mac Airbook.

I am going on holiday to France.

Meanwhile I wish you the serenity of the season. We need serenity, without it we get into deep trouble. That's So Pants says something about this. It is the fifth birthday of her lovely blog today.

Be seeing you.

**

Riots in Hackney

2011-08-09T19:47:00.014Z

Just a few of the photos that Son took last night. Both my kids live in Hackney.

doth make my soul to thrive

2011-08-08T19:13:00.005Z

Came back from Brighton yesterday evening to find that our apple tree had fallen down. It was a good friend. The children used to climb it, fruit made lovely jelly. With us for nearly twenty years, it was always precariously connected to the earth as its other half had fallen, years back, in a storm. Something had been eating away at it - the honey fungus, perhaps, that has been stalking our garden for a few years.

There are riots in London, and lootings and burnings, everyone talking about it on Facebook. I am uneasy. Daughter says there is a siren a minute. Another shop burned down. Someone said that the youth of the Middle East riot for freedom, the youth of the UK riot for 42 inch HD TV. But the sickness goes deeper than that, I think. Certainly it is opportunistic. What is it saying to us, though - that they are disconnected, alienated and don't care? It goes further back than the Cuts. Kids on barren housing estates with what kind of culture?

Mercury is in retrograde, someone said. This means little to me, but apparently it is significant. In the words of the I Ching, it does not further one to cross the great water. Stay at home and put the kettle on, keep an eye on the news.

I lay on the trunk of my apple tree, palms against its skin. My first tree hug - my last, perhaps.

Life Goes On - Bra (2)

2011-08-03T19:58:00.003Z

It is that time again – why? It is writ in black and white that I bought enough bras in December 2009 to last me several years, but now they are all – how can I put it? – unsatisfactory, and they make my bosoms look sad. You may think that I have more pressing issues than sad bosoms at this moment, especially if you have been reading my blog this year; for it has been something of an annus horribilis in the health and vitality department, and no mistake. But sometimes attention to the small (38 double D, if you want to know) details in one’s life can bring uplift of several kinds, and Mr. Signs and I have a short holiday planned. Unlikely as it seems, we have been invited to stay on someone’s boat in the south of France, and I need a few glad-rags. Even my knickers have holes in them and look miserable.

So back I go to M and S, this time in Brighton, which is convenient. I get white linen trousers, summery tops, cotton nightshirt, multipacks of knickers. I have to be focussed and not get diverted into Primark or any of the more interesting Brighton boutiques because after an hour or two I will turn into a pumpkin. The woman in the bra department says she is run off her feet and has no time to do a fitting. I say, that’s ok because I know my size. She asks to see what bra I’m wearing and when I take my top off she says the strap is riding up my back, which is a very bad thing. I have chosen to try on something called a T shirt bra, not the kind of thing I would usually get as it is padded and has wire underneath but I have been reliably informed (by someone whose bosoms looked glad and uplifted) that they were just the thing for wearing under summer tops, and they are only £16 for a pack of two. But the wire rides up and presses unkindly, the padded bit perches above the bosom and I can’t see how anyone manages to wear something like this. Moreover, between the time it took to get the bra and try it on, I have turned pumpkin and have to sit down. From the other side of the cubicle door, the bra department woman asks how it’s going, I say I’m not sure and she says ok and not meaning to rush me but there’s people waiting to get in and would I like to make an appointment for a fitting later on or tomorrow?

Never mind. I did not get all the things in one day. I have taken the best part of the week to do the shopping thing because I know how it goes – and the sandals I bought (not M and S but Birkenstock) needed to be taken back and exchanged because the leather cut into my ankle (and yes I know about Birkenstocks and how you need to wear them in).

But the sun has properly shown its full-on, beautiful face; I have done a bit of writing; second root-canal treatment seems to have done the trick and it almost seems as though, for a short space at any rate, I will not have to visit the dentist again; two good writing friends visited today. Apart from that, I have been on my own since Monday, and will be until the weekend. Twilight. A great canopy of lilac sky. The mew of seagulls.

Tomorrow – Bravissimo!

Ravelling

2011-07-25T09:27:00.004Z

A glorious Brighton morning and I should really be out in it, somehow. But last night there was very little sleep, and now I am preparing for another week of dentist, trying every few minutes to get through to the surgery on the phone, because clearly things are not right.

Even so, I see possibilities for getting it righter with M.E.-related life and stuff. I have lost the plot a little, allowed myself to become innerly unravelled by the past year’s relapse, the on-goingness of it and the vague state-of-emergency feeling about health issues generally. I have not brought the necessary acceptance that allows one to live the situation with a measure of serenity and grace. Because there are times when I do manage this, I know the difference. In saying this, I am not blaming myself for the unravelling, and I am doing the best I can. But inner Zen master needs to come and sound the bell, light the candle, remind me not to be afraid or discouraged.

I have had a nice response from a poetry editor. Whether it will lead to anything substantial I can’t say, especially as it depends on the quality of energy and focus I can bring to new work. But it is not nothing – actually, it is something, especially in today’s difficult climate – when an editor takes enough interest to really engage with one’s work. I still can’t bring myself to decide on whether to focus primarily on poetry or prose project. I am unwilling to give up either, but at some point I need to decide because I can’t do both. At the moment it is rather academic because I can scarcely attend to anything very much. I have moments, but not enough for sustained work or focus. This too, I can probably get righter.

Out in the world of the working well, things also go pear-shaped, as we know. I have been following the extraordinary business at the Poetry Society who, if they don’t get their house in order, seem to be in danger of losing the funding that keeps them in operation. Some of these funds have (needlessly, it seems) been spent on employing the same lawyers that Rupert Murdoch has been using. Anyone interested can get a pretty clear picture over at Jane Holland’s. This has not been brilliant P.R. for poets generally, and the Guardian, as George Szirtes says, has been having a right good snigger at them all, even though many of those involved are not actually poets themselves.

I do recall, though, Ros Barber (poet and now also novelist) saying something to the effect that being in the company of novelists was lovely after the poetry scene, which resembled a knife fight in a phone box. Another good reason, if one had a choice, to stay on the edge?

***

Whine and Roses

2011-07-22T21:07:00.001Z

I have just had: a mug of sweet tea with milk, a portion of chips from the kebab van in the village and three Co-op Truly Irresistible stem ginger cookies. And you know what? I feel wonderful. Too wonderful, I'm very well aware, I am having what is known as a sugar high. It is particularly high, in the context of my sugar-free, hardcore health regime. But today was a post-dental anaesthetic very bad day coupled with over an hour at the vet's trying to take in what he was saying about our beloved cat's hyperthyroid condition and her forty per cent weight loss. It was a homeopathic consultation, hence the length of time. Mr. S was there too so at one point I asked to go into the waiting room to lie down, but a noisy wolfy dog kept barking. I went outside and breathed in the scent of roses, I remembered them from another summer, fragrant and comforting. Back at the ranch there were other things to fix: a broken loo seat, unravelling holiday arrangements, my root-filled tooth feeling as though the nerve is still in there, jumping, and no-one at the surgery able to put hand on heart to swear that every bit of nerve has been removed - so it may be I have to go through this again next week. And I have spent, you know, many hundreds on this tooth. So, as you can imagine, I was ready to go outside and shoot myself in the head - but chips, cookies and sweet tea (plus co-proxamol, yes, that too) suddenly seemed like the better option. The body screamed for sweetness.

Just as soon as seems decently possible, I would like to have a really chilled white whine. Only recently heard about this particularly first world activity where, in the words of my informant, "we complain of things such as the internet connection on my phone breaking up if I get a phone call into it while I'm online, or that my iPad weighs so much in my back pocket that it tends to pull my tracksuit bottoms down in an unsightly fashion." Love it. Can't wait to indulge. Need to clear the decks a bit first though.

***

the less travelled

2011-07-21T15:17:00.002Z

Just had a phone call from Son - somewhere in the middle of a rain forest (Trinidad) - on low battery. Bless the boy, but it's lovely to hear from him, and at least his companion has battery. Ridiculous that I should be thinking this way (in India he was in the desert on low battery), but now that they are with us, the mobiles, even a day trip to Bognor would probably feel risky on low battery. Because what if -

I am not well-travelled, and twenty-five plus years of chronic illness has made me cautious about any kind of journey. I am trying to remember what I dreamed of doing when I was little. I don't think that travelling was a motif. In my teens I wanted to be somewhere wild and remote, and self-sufficient, but with a red enamel kettle and wooden kitchen utensils. Well, I have partially achieved that - hardly anyone has heard of or knows where Edge-on-the-Weald is, and it is (after a fashion) pretty wild. I have the wooden utensils. The red enamel kettle, though, is missing. I have a serviceable electric one.

When Son was little he said to me that he wished Mr. Signs were an explorer: because then I could go with him on his journeys. We talked about what he wanted to be when he grew up: an astronaut, a train driver, a farmer; and he wanted to travel - to Australia, Greenland, Canada and Scotland.
He wondered: what had I, as a child, wanted to be when I grew up? One of my answers would most certainly have been a ballerina - why, I can't think because when my aunt took me to see Swan Lake (Rudolf Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn), I was bored. It was probably the standing on points, and the illusion of weightlessness; the fact that I had always wanted to be able to fly.

When Daddy was little, did he want to be a person who worked in a office?

I remember the question, but not what I answered. I told Mr. Signs about it. How we laughed!

***

In the Teeth (2)

2011-07-17T20:23:00.005Z

In Brighton for the first time in weeks, laid up - in particular, because of recovering from dental anaesthetic. Tooth trouble, and more to come - root canal etc. which may or may not work.

In the dentist's room I try to have the conversation (he being new to me and my Condition) about M.E. and after-effects of things like anaesthetic and antibiotics. He picks up that something, at any rate is amiss (I had seemed so nice, grateful, amenable), and fears that I might be about to make some kind of scene. He doesn't begin to have a clue what I am on about. Never mind, for something has to be done, whatever.

I am bruised and super-myalgic from injections, and the rogue nerve is still in me causing toothache. More treatment and injections next week - a two-hour appointment, but at times like this toothache is king.

The food regime continues, after a fashion, though it scarcely seems possible to be eating vegetables plus prescribed amounts of protein and carbs every two hours (to calm the blood sugar situation, to alkalinise the environment that is me). So I cheat, with spelt crackers and oat cakes. What? Those plus hummus and a carrot stick equal carb, protein and veg. Today's fish and chips at lunch do not, but give me a break. The cup of decaf tea with milk and a knife-end of honey is also not kosher, but I am in dire need of the small comfort it gives me - and it washes down the Anadin I have just swallowed.

Son of Signs is in Trinidad right now, where the warm rains come down monsoon-like for a short space most days. Brighton monsoon rain is a more dreary affair, but still, it caught my attention this afternoon. A lone pigeon was sheltering on the railing outside the bedroom window and giving me the eye. We kept each other company for a good half hour until I asked Mr. Signs to take a photograph, and then it turned its back.

Soapstone Vase

2011-07-13T19:22:00.004Z

For these few minutes, pretend
I am your daughter, you my good mother,
rough and grainy against my palm.
I could be small enough
to climb inside.

Though you are whole and perfect
and I am only human,
adopt me. Feel how you grow
warm in my hands.
We are made for each other.

***

summer

2011-07-11T17:09:00.000Z

Remembering another summer, much hotter than this. Outside it was nearly a hundred degrees in the shade. I was an office Temp, in the coolness of a dark office, with filing cabinets and electric typewriters that went clackety clack. The office was near Hyde Park. In my lunch hour I ate salmon and cucumber sandwiches there. My dress was blue with white polka dots and there was a bow at the front, by the breast. It was short and showed off my tanned legs. I had a husband I was soon to be separated from. We were twenty-two and decided to go our own ways, live apart for a while. People said, if you do that you'll never get back together again, but still we decided to do it. We'll go on seeing each other, we said.

Heat wave nights, lying under a polyester sheet, talking about who would have the coffee cups, the tea set, the Joni Mitchell records, and what to do with the wedding presents left on ice for the house that we would never buy. We still reached for each other and I woke in the night with a shock, felt him next to me and was relieved: not apart yet. What do you know at twenty-two about the bonds between people who love, have loved each other?

July was our last month living together. We went to parties, danced until three in the morning, joked that we would have a splitting up party and drink champagne. At one party, a group of gatecrashers stormed through the house. The girls who lived there asked my husband to help get the gatecrashers out. They were drunk and belligerent, one of them punched him and he folded up onto a floor-cushion, winded. I fell to my knees beside him and screamed. Stop screaming, said someone, they've gone now, but I had to put my hand over my mouth to stop.

I don't remember how we said goodbye or when it became autumn and winter. We were together in the first days of August, dividing up the things we had, watching Old Grey Whistle Test at night, eating chocolate biscuits in bed in the morning - then we were in different places and everything became cold and quiet. I went to his rented room in south London, we made love on his single bed; in the morning he said, I feel fragmented.

I got a chest infection, then asthma, went away to recuperate, wrote him a letter saying, I love you and I think of you, please come. The letter never arrived. he had no telephone. I waited for him. He waited for me. The moments came and passed and were gone.

Now I think that you can't marry someone and still love them and then split apart, and I can't remember how we did that. When you are twenty-two you think you can do everything. We waited for each other but he didn't get a letter, and he didn't come to me.

Then we met other people.

swan song

2011-07-06T14:29:00.004Z

Life - the further I move from it the fiercer my longing. I narrow my eyes to slits. I am on a ship, sailing into unfathomable blue, the shoreline receding, I have no idea where I am travelling - to what country - and it seems unlikely (they have told me it is unlikely) that I will ever return. I watch the shoreline, the houses where people live. Everything is becoming smaller.

I am afraid that the country we are sailing to is called Death. I ask the question, but no answer comes back. Soon there will be nothing but blue, as far as the eye can see, just a line between sky and water to remind me that I am still alive, and we have not yet arrived at the place that might be Death. But perhaps this voyage is all I will ever know from now on: the receding land, the line between blue and blue, the changing colour of the water.

Life, even at this distance, I love you.

I went to see the wise woman who follows the ley lines in the body and listens with her hands to what is living there. She said that I was not properly there in the body, not sufficiently incarnated.
If I am not here, I said, where am I?
The question to ask, she said darkly, is: if you are not here, who is? And what - if there is no-one at the gate to see them off? The door is open for all kinds of trouble.
I have, I said, all kinds of trouble.
I can see that, she said. I can see that very clearly.
I have a picture in my head, I said, of a dusty room, a basement where there is very little light, and the furniture in the room is broken.
That is, she said, the situation.
I said, sometimes everything is so dark. I don't know how to make it lighter.
She said, you must light a candle. Wherever there is flame, the forces of the will are strong. You must build a fire in the grate and keep it burning.

But there is nothing in the room to burn, and I have no kindling.

Some people live in basement rooms and make their own light, build fires, light candles, find their existence in the circle of light cast by an anglepoise lamp on a wooden desk, the soft grain of it visible, or they find a door through a computer screen and set up home there. But I have no kindling; there are no switches for me to flick; there is no way out of this room that I can discover. Through the bars of a small window I see the shadows of legs and feet moving above me in the street where people live and go from one place to the next, conducting their busy lives.

I am so grateful for my illness, says the born-again nutritional therapist . It taught me how to appreciate the moments. You must learn to appreciate the moments.
I have taken, I said, the advanced course.

I have a white handkerchief and I wave at the shoreline, calling one after another to see if my voice carries, if anyone can still hear me. But we are too far out, my voice won't travel the distance.

In that country, people go about their lives. They imagine I will be back some time, any time soon, and that they will hear my knock on the door.

The silver swan who living had no note,
when death approached unlocked her silent throat.

But I have been singing for a very long time now. The sound is no longer beautiful, and it engenders trouble in the soul.

There is no conclusion.

vegetable wars

2011-06-29T21:26:00.001Z

I like my new Health Practitioner. This is good because I feel committed to this road I have unexpectedly taken, and may be with her for some time. I have nothing to lose except money, and she is better value than Shrink, whatever the outcome. M.E. god is offended and fighting me with every means at its disposal. I am fighting back with vegetables and a conviction that things have got to be better than this, and will be. I am not sure where the conviction comes from. It rather goes against what one knows about M.E. But I am nothing if not open-minded (just don't remind me about the Lightning Process). I am changing the environment of me, the inside of me I mean, you know - guts, tubes, intestines and whatnot - working from the inside out. I'll keep you informed.
So this is the project right now. Mr. Signs is away in the States on business and I have given myself body and soul to my own business, which is food preparation and trying to get the eating of it (timing, quantities) right. The cat is happy because I spend more time in the kitchen, which she likes, or in bed. She never did like me staring at a screen and tapping keys.

I met a woman in the village today who I haven't seen for some years. She said, you used to write all those - things, didn't you? I don't know if she had actually read or heard any of my things, but I suppose one has a reputation. She wanted to know if I was still doing that. I said yes. Because it's still what I'm for, the Writing, and will be - when I get stronger.

Finding Susan

2011-06-27T22:01:00.002Z

So - I promised I would shout if there was any improvement. Reader, I can't even give you a squeak. I was in a bad way before the new Regime and I am still in a bad way, just differently. No electricity - good, very good; more fatigue, fog-in-the-head and general M.E.malaise - not brilliant.. It is of course early days. With the exception of some lovely time spent with Daughter on the weekend, most of my waking time and available energy is given to the getting and preparing of the food concoctions I'm supposed to be having. I can safely say that vegetables and I seem to get on ok but I don't know about anything else. I'm not really thinking about sugar any more, haven't touched it in a while - craving is all directed at getting better. I feel as though I have gone backwards into the earlier years of M.E. This is perhaps to be expected, but I was scared then because I was frantic about what had happened to me and desperate to be well enough to look after my baby and toddler; I have spent this year mostly housebound and do not want any further deterioration. On I go - hope is my middle name. Actually, Susan is my middle name, as I revealed here before. It means 'joy of life'. Yes.

Hardcore

2011-06-19T09:48:00.008Z

If my tone has been brash of late, it is because there has been no real possibility of touching base, coming down to earth, to home ground. We who live with chronic illness find different ways of managing to live with it. Mine has often been to fly above it, at some level. There are benefits to this - one connects to another winged, or at any rate less encumbered, self. But in doing this one also leaves the suffering and disabled self lonely. For if we who suffer (I use the word to mean 'put up with') chronic illness cannot be alongside ourselves, then we become bereft. It is hard enough to be so long in the world, substantially cut off from life and living, without bereaving ourselves of ourselves to boot. I picture myself at the foot of my bed looking down on the person lying there in her red and white, tinsel-threaded pyjamas (June but still cold in Blighty), saying:
look, I'm sorry but I can't come here any more - ok? I really like and respect you but it drags me down and, to be quite honest, it's boring. You only get up to do essential things like washing and preparing your increasingly dull meals - we don't do enough fun things together. I've got stuff to do. I'll send a postcard - bye.
Before you go, I say, what actually are you planning to do?
She scratches her head, distracted. She is wearing my Purple Trousers, Weird Fish hoodie and Adidas trainers.
Long walks on the South Downs - I want to get a dog, did I tell you? Staying with a friend in her caravan in Scotland. Signs Cottage needs attention, plan to sort that out. Theatre, poetry gigs, concerts - and swimming again, in the sea this time.
Sounds good. What else? Anything you missed out?
Writing, she says. Lots and lots of writing - my novel, and poems.

And then the truth strikes. She needs me for that. Wherever she flits in the astrality, if she wants to write, she has to come home to the ground of her being, which is the person lying there in the pyjamas.

I am seeing a nutritional therapist and am on a really impressive hardcore regime, almost everything you can think of cut out, morning smoothie includes linseeds, quinoa flakes, rice milk - you get the picture. The therapist is a medical doctor who was herself chronically ill for ten years. She comes recommended. Any substantial improvement, I'll be shouting about it.

more sugar

2011-06-13T19:17:00.003Z

Lawks! This is one of those untranslateable words - a bit like the Anglo-Saxon Hwaet! that you might find at the beginning of a narrative poem. The literal meaning of Hwaet is 'what' but what it really means is right then, folks, listen up! Wiktionary says that Lawks is an expression of surprise, a stereotypical utterance of a cockney house-servant in literature, particularly 19th and early 20th century. Whatever. I use it to mean something like, oof - well here I am again!

Or, perhaps - here I am, still, having absolutely nothing to declare but my genius! This is perhaps stretching the Lawks a bit, especially if one hasn't actually done anything in particular to prove one's genius. Never mind, I am testing the boundaries of sugar addiction. I am alone in Brighton with a packet of sweets - mint crumbles - that a friend left lying in the cupboard after her stay here as a gesture of appreciation. Actually, she left walnut whips and booze as well. Alcohol gives me such a headache these days it is easy to leave that alone. Mr. Signs ate the walnut whips as I sat and shivered. He is not here right now and I have eaten a mint crumble - just the one. Instant bliss, and a kind of shine hovering around. There is elevation. It will not last for more than half an hour and is very interesting to observe. I used to work in a drugs crisis centre where people were withdrawn from whatever they were on before going on to long-term rehab. Withdrawing someone physically from a drug is actually the easy part. If an addiction is established, the deep, visceral longing for a drug is written into the body and won't be so easily erased. For a sugar-sensitive person, sugar affects brain function the same way that heroin does. First the sugar high - the feel-good rush that addicts crave, then the withdrawal. I am learning all about it, remembering how, over twenty years ago, I told a homeopath I was seeing that I was concerned about the amount of sugar I seemed to need. She said it was ok - if you need sugar, then have it. But the feel-good rushes grow less over time, you need more of the stuff, a steady supply that increases. Then the insulin receptors become deranged and mere anarchy is loosed upon the system. The centre will not hold, the falcon will not hear the falconer - etc. My guess is that W.B. Yeats probably knew something about blood sugar disorder.

This is all so rockanroll, isn't it? Makes a change from boring old M.E., at any rate. Not that boring old M.E. has moved out, but looking on the bright side, I have something else to bang on about now - the pain and ecstasy of it all. More pain than ecstasy, but - Peeps, I can feel a Youtube coming on.

But laptop - or something - won't allow me to embed. Bugger.

"I'm waiting for my man ....."

sugar me

2011-06-03T18:24:00.004Z

It's been all go here at M.E. Central. Picture it like this: I've been assigned to a particularly long and arduous project that takes most of my time and energy. There is no remuneration or job satisfaction, it's boring and unpleasant, but - well - I've been chosen, and my employer has made me an offer I can't refuse. It's not much of an offer really: either knuckle under or risk feeling even worse. Still, one grabs a moment here and there to look at the sky which, at time of speaking to you, is as blue as sky can be, and I am in Brighton by the heavenly windows.

My London Smoke-and-Writer friend came for a visit and we talked about The Writing, which for my part has mainly been going on in my pea-souper, pillow-pressed head. I have not put finger to keyboard for a month or two but had some pages scrawled in an orange A4 Silvine notepad (I like Silvine, we go back a long way), so I read that out, and in spite of the clear first-draftiness of it, the place of story is there, waiting for me. It is as though M.E. Headquarters got wind of this and has hit back hard. It is, as I have said before, a jealous God. Ah well, I have been here before, though not quite this bad for some time, and have lifted up again. The worst symptom is the feeling of electricity in head and limbs. Well, it is not just a feeling, there really is electricity: I have seen it go into the dials on a wristwatch which went whizzing round. One of those weird things - don''t ask. I'm not the only one. Walking barefoot in the summer is good, helps it to discharge.

The new food regime is going slowly. I am making myself have proper breakfast every day. First steps. And the sugar does, of course, have to go - though I do, of course, love it so, being addicted to the White Lady. Letting her go now. It will be better so.

Rose Garden

2011-05-18T13:26:00.005Z

Greetings, y'all. Have you missed me? No, well, er - I have missed me. I've been gone into the illest illirium of Illsville. Of course I exaggerate, but if one can't get mileage out of a bit of self-pity in extremis then what's the point of anything, so cut me a bit of slack - thank you. Extremis is not a good place to be, don't go there. I am still in it really, but am snatching a moment between sufferings (even in the depths of hell they allow you that much) to speak to you, so that I don't lose the habit entirely, for if left too long I think the not-blogging can become like the not-phoning-a-friend and in the end one leaves it so long that the very idea becomes an impossibility.

I am going to quote my old grandma again. Sorry, but it is just so worth repeating, I really think it should be everyone's mantra: Be heppy! Things can only get vorse. Ach Mutti (we used to call her Mutti, don't know why, and she wasn't really the maternal type), if I never really heard you then, I hear you now.

M.E. is probably one of the least kinds of fun you can have on earth and the deeper into it you are, the truer this becomes; and then you think of all the other times when, relative to this time, you were still in the land of the functioning moderates and didn't appreciate all the privileges; and then you think of how far it may still be possible to fall, and you see from the corner of your eye M.E. God smirking, as only He can smirk, and hear him singing in your ear: I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden, and you feel yourself falling onto the first level of the pit of despair which, Gawd knows, is the place of mortal sin itself. What to do, Peeps - que faire? Begin a new regime, of course.

I have begun a new regime. It has to do with seemingly boring things like sugar and food intolerances as well as slightly more interesting (though strange) things concerning the potato. Yes, naturally I have been down the road of food intolerance before now, but this time I am doing it differently, and I believe (am telling myself) that by following this new path I am creating a new possibility. It's good to hope. It's essential. And yes, things can always get vorse. But they can get better too, innit.

Say yes for me, please.

M.E./CFS Awareness

2011-05-13T17:31:00.003Z

late bluebells

2011-04-27T09:29:00.004Z

A season of intemperate brain squall, of which all one can say is that it will pass, like weather. The late bluebells are nice.

The bluebell remark is really to indicate a disinclination to communicate anything of substance right now. I could speculate on the reasons for this, but then I would be communicating something of substance. Heigh ho. My inner (is there an outer?) introvert seems to be in the ascendant, pressing me, perhaps, to husband my resources for various tasks I have laid on myself. I have made this sound a little heavy, but they are tasks that I wish to engage with wholeheartedly and with as much strength as I can bring to them.

When a theatre is between one production and the next, I think it is described as being "dark", and this is one of those times in the Theatre of Signs.

Be seeing you sooner or later.

breathing the spring

2011-04-20T14:54:00.002Z

Not meaning to be a wilting tulip here but blogger is still in anti-poetry mode, and the Moment has now passed. I discovered that the squashed version of the poem thing I meant to put up and then deleted is still on Googlereader. Wha'evah!

So where was I? I am on the edge of this amazing, ancient forest that becomes intense at this time of year, breathing the spring at you like some fine and fragrant lover so you could almost lose yourself in it and if you didn't have M.E. then you really might just do that. Even with M.E., even from the window or walking a short distance - it's good. The postvirals keep piling up in one though, and Mr. Signs has been under the weather. So it still feels as though one is waiting for the winter to go, for the year to begin. But I have, so to speak, been preparing the ground and adding to my new opus, bit by bit, keeping it alive-alive-oh - much easier this time, as the roots are autobiographical. I have ordered a long out-of-print German children's story from Abebooks (Deutschland) and am excited about this for the substance of it is in what I am writing and I haven't seen it since I was about seven years old. The book must have got lost in one of our many moves but I carried it in my consciousness along with the other important stories, the fairy tales.

De-cluttering is still on the agenda, and probably should be hereafter, as a matter of routine, because I feel the difference. Objects have a forcefield of energy around them and take up psychic space. Plans are in place for the (modest, perforce) re-organisation of Signs Cottage. For the time being I am perching myself with notebooks (no computer) in Son's room, he only using it occasionally as he lives in London now. I am near to the sky and look over treetops. It is not only outer space that must be organised and claimed - inner space too needs this attention.

I saw the liver specialist this morning, following the most auspicious of blood test results - the meds are working, PBC under control, no liver transplant on the horizon. But we can't, he shrugs, do anything about the fatigue. Some people have transplants for that reason alone, but of course in your case - . Need we say more? Not that he knows much about M.E., looks baffled at the idea that autoimmune disease may be connected and, really, I cannot be arsed to enlighten him, nor would he be interested. There is a coffee machine in the waiting area, I press the button that says Mocha, help myself to a biscuit, make an appointment at the desk to come back next year. Done and dusted, like one's shelves.

2011-04-18T21:21:00.002Z

I put up a post, poem and all. But Blogger is not allowing line breaks of any kind right now. Just squashes everything together. I have noticed this and tried to get round it by going into Html. Tant pis - tired now. Will try again anon.

Prognosis (2)

2011-04-13T14:42:00.003Z

Life is what happens while you're making other plans and waiting for viruses (please don't tell me the plural is viri - I looked it up, and it isn't) to fade away. But sometimes there is the spooky sense that life is a long-playing record (you probably don't remember those) where the needle gets stuck and repeats things over and over. Spying on myself this time last year, blog post reads:

Life is disconcertingly beautiful right now, primarily because of spring and all its attendant glories of bud, leaf and clear sky after such a long and unforgiving winter that it seemed the White Witch had gotten dominion and even I (one of its greatest erstwhile fans) turned my back on it.

You said it, Signs-of-Yesteryear - and snap, it's just about the same situation this year. Are you surprised? You weren't to know, but we had another White Witch of a winter, probably longer and harder than the one you just experienced, and don't you know everything is lovely in the garden again. But from my vantage point of being one year ahead of you I just have to say: no matter how disconcertingly beautiful Life looks to you right now, S-o-Y, most of your optimistically visualised plans and projects will not come to anything very much because White Witch will still hold sway in the realm of your neurologically diseased body; you will have to give up the swimming, your own personal Graded Exercise Therapy, which you have convinced yourself represents some new way forward; at this very point when all the tree in you is preparing to open up exquisite and radiant, there are elements waiting to cut, shrivel and freeze you, branch, leaf and flower, people and situations you should not trust, bitter lessons to learn (and really, it is high time). But dammit, I rather like you, and with a few caveats am set on almost the same road that you were: with the plans, I mean - the Writing.

Recent virus seems to have manifested some kind of afterbirth, or left a dark shadow of itself behind. Choir practice last night left me flattened and coughing, I left early, probably to the relief of the altos and tenors on either side of me. Another dental appointment cancelled (he will stop loving me, for sure), glands up, throat hot - etc. Saturday is several hours of afternoon rehearsal followed by concert. How shall I manage it and what would you do, Signs-of-Yesteryear - you'd go for it, wouldn't you - take drugs and go for it, eh girl, and believe in the best of all possible outcomes? We're so alike.

how to win

2011-04-09T15:56:00.004Z

House of Signs is having a winning streak. Fifteen minutes before the start of the race, Mr. Signs decided to have a flutter on the Grand National. We chose two horses, put a fiver on each and one came second so basically we have got back what we spent, plus £1.25. Not a lot one can get for that, and Mr. S treated himself to a Feast ice lolly which cost £1.20, so we are richer now by 5p, and I don't think you can even get a box of matches for that. But never mind, for the Signs are Auspicious - as this undoubtedly proves. If the horse had come first they would have been even more Auspicious and the winnings might have paid for a meal out, but I'm not complaining - a win is a win. I didn't follow the race very well, caught by the sight of the riderless horses, beautiful creatures, as they carried on galloping around the track, no-one to tell them that there was any reason for them to stop.

This king and queen of all colds is having a party in me but just now I don't care. It will pass and I have decided to apply my parking spaces capability to the rest of life. Have I told you about this? I began to develop it after someone told me that whenever she said, "hail Mary full of grace, please give me a parking space" one always manifested for her, and this even though she was by no means a Believer. Of course I had to try this out for myself - and it worked, even when I didn't bother about saying the hail Mary, just kind of expected a parking place to manifest. Ah well, perhaps there are times when it doesn't, but the significant times (ones I choose to remember) are when it does, and expecting a good outcome is better all round than fearing a bad one. Either way can make one bonkers, but who in their right mind would want to choose the path that leads to anxiety disorder? And the Signs, as has been demonstrated (and I have the 5p to prove it) are auspicious. It's good to win.

wtf

2011-04-07T17:08:00.003Z

So, nasty muscle-paining, throat-swelling, nose-blocking, head-swimming virus thing is back, and I've more or less only just got over the last one. wtf? Sorry about textspeak, but allowances should be made in the circs. For years, I have never really got proper colds as such and fondly imagined that if I ever did it would be a healthy Sign. This, however, is not that. Patience, patience, my soul, all will be well and all manner of thing shall (and will) be well - in the next incarnation perhaps, even if not in this one.

Plans, plans - I don't think I will be going anywhere in the next few days. Another workshop, the last of this run - cancelled. A dental appointment tomorrow also cancelled. The receptionist informed me of the 48-hour cancellation policy and that a fee would therefore be due (and please bear in mind that I pay big, big money here, this is the Rolls Royce of dental surgeries). How much, I asked, was the fee. The full whack? Because if so, then I would uncancel, come along and breathe on everyone but it was only fair to warn them that I was probably quite infectious (sneeze). Wait, wait, she said, I'll just have a word. Mumble, mumble. Well, she said, if you're genuinely ill, then it's ok - don't come. What, no fee then? No. Which is a relief, because though the idea is very amusing, in truth I wouldn't have been up for it.

I've been in bed with cat and Kindle. Have downloaded Mill on the Floss for free and remembered that this is one of the Kindle perks. You can get all the classics you want for free - anything published before the copyright laws kicked in. So I have been reading - but only because I already know the book. Head not really up to it, or this, but being ill is so very, crucifyingly boring as well as being unpleasant.

Friend and helper-in-the-house came to clear out and rearrange the kitchen cupboards this morning. Big plates which were always at the back and therefore difficult for a muscle-challenged person to reach are now at the front. Either my friend has extraordinary intelligence or I have extraordinary lack of it. Whatever, just knowing that the cupboards are clean and clear has got to be marvellous Feng Shui.

space

2011-04-06T15:10:00.005Z

I think I was beginning to forget about the seasons and the fact that one doesn't always live in winter or post-winter when there is no more snow or ice but the cold goes on until one just takes it for granted that this is how it is and will be. Today being properly fine and lovely I took my first real walk of the year, this made doubly attractive by the invitation to have cake and vanilla-infused coffee at a friend's house. I have a hot, scratchy feeling in my throat and a buzzing in the limbs that threatens something or other, but I am ignoring it - not in the sense of doing anything stupid, but sometimes these virusy shadows move on without turning into the real thing and if I pay it no attention it might just naff off.*

I have been doing too much but so it goes. No way that I could have missed the readings in London, which took place at the Art Workers Guild in one of those lovely squares surrounded by Georgian houses. Trying to remember if I ever won first prize at anything before: some kind of ski-ing competition when I was fifteen comes to mind - a race I should never have won and can't think for the life of me why I thought to enter it. But in a race like that it is quite clear - first one through the barrier wins it. A poem depends in large part on the person judging (thank you, Myra Schneider, who I met for the first time on Saturday). That night I stayed over at my friend's house and talked about The Writing: friend is on the brink of lovely things to do with her completed novel, with associated heady feelings of joy, and also a kind of vertigo. I am also on the brink - of something I feel I can properly commit to, even though it is still early days, however long it takes me. Next day, at the Daughter's flat after celebratory mother's day breakfast, there was an impromptu reading of a play she had just written and was preparing to send off - Son, Daughter's boyf and me taking the three parts. Fun! Afterwards, an arduous Sunday journey back to the Edge.

And life goes on - the other life, I mean, the spaces on the wall calendar that fill up with dental and blood test appointments, Signs Cottage repair work, choral practice, workshops (and I have just realised I need to get a poem writ by Saturday), whatnots, and the long spaces where one must do nothing or very little other than monitor the progression of dust motes from bedroom window, not the bit of life where one actually sits down and does The Writing. But this is what I intend to do, by hook or by crook, and by a bit of cunning re-organising of actual, physical space.

Watch this space.

* update on virusy shadow which has, in the space of a few hours, turned into a complete bastarding cold. So the not paying any attention to it didn't work. Dang and blast.

esto nobis praegustatum in mortis examine

2011-03-29T15:54:00.007Z

Here on Edge in deepest Sussex, everything is announcing the fact of the Spring's arrival and suddenly the apple tree is again covered with a dusting of green. The long, long winter means that many things will grow very well after all that deep, nourishing sleep. My Good Friday buns neighbour is out every day with her grandchildren, gardening, her favourite thing to do. My other neighbour is re-building his extension. In the village there are two new cafe places, one macrobiotic and the other full of artisan breads, deli whatnots and outrageously handsome cakes. I wonder how much longer I can describe myself as living on edge when every time I look another bijou place has opened and what with antique shops, estate agents, upmarket eateries, not to mention a film society that has won all the awards, never mind that it is still on slightly uncomfortable chairs in the village hall (but that is part of its charm, and you can get wine and organic chocolate to have while you watch). You get the picture. The scruffy cottages that make up part of the delightful and crater-ridden bit of unadopted road where I live are where the not-so-well-off and living-on-a-shoestring people are. We no longer fall into the latter category but don't have enough money to get the house re-wired, new boiler etc. Well how could we with second home and Lamborghini to maintain? Only joking about the Lamborghini, but you know. Can I still really claim to be a margin-dwelling hippy punkster in the middle of all this? Yes I bloody well can, courtesy of an exclusive (actually fairly inclusive) and fascinating-to-nobody-but-the-Afflicted- Elect neurological disease. I am still on Edge and the solitary forest walks that I can't wait to take up again, soon please, have a particular meaning for me.

And further: were I to be, for some reason that no-one can possibly imagine, made suddenly well and whole and cast into obscenely rude health, for which believe me I still pray daily (because I do not, will never accept the situation, in spite of all the clear evidence stacked against me, sorry Gawd, and especially sorry Buddha) then I will keep a goodly portion of my Edge-acquired introverty habits. Nothing very much will change. I will just be able to work - and swim, and walk where and when I please, and everything will be illuminated.

I will be giving a reading in London on Saturday at the Second Light Spring Festival, courtesy of my prize-winning poem, and I have to decide which poems to bring. Feeling strangely nervous about it. Not as though I haven't done readings before, but never in the Smoke. There will be some terrific poets there. Afterwards I will stay with my good London writerfriend and we will talk, as we always do, about The Writing. Next day being Mothering Sunday, I will go to Daughter's flat for breakfast, and from thence back to the Edge, with Son. All good things and, as always, I rely on the angels to get me through.

Lovely Montag has told me that the person I referred to as Renaissance Dame is actually Sibil of Delphi, "seriously appalled by what the news of the Future is, and she realizes it just might be too late." Ach! Or, as my dear old grandma, might have said: dass fehlt uns noch! So I won't put her up again. You were getting sick of the sight of her anyway, weren't you, be honest. And you don't really want to hear any more of the Mozart's Mass either, do you? I can just tell. Well never mind, I am putting up the Mozart's Ave Verum (we are singing that too), with the score, so you can sing it - as I will be doing, tonight.

But now I go to make cabbage and potato soup. It's what you do when Abel and Cole keep giving you Savoy cabbages, and we do have to eat. There is always that.

Jesu Christe!

2011-03-26T20:33:00.003Z

- and here is The Wish by Josephine Haslam (runner up, joint second place with Matthew Sweeney) in the National Poetry Comp. I put it up because it is the kind of poem that makes me say, oh yes - I wrote that! Meaning not that I am claiming authorship or any wish to plagiarise, but when you read a poem that hits home it almost feels as though one could have written it. It comes in and speaks from the centre of you. Only a woman could have written this, was my first thought. Not necessarily true, but still - 'twas my first thought.

I give you my wish; my half of the bird’s
fused clavicle picked clean of flesh. I give
you its winged thinness and its seed head curve
to stand for everything I own and love.
And though I want it most to be the one
that brings you back as surely as the bird
that turns for home, it isn’t that.
Nor is it the unearthed bone from Grimm
that speaks the truth and knows its provenance;
but only what we’ve taken from the supermarket hen
we cooked for lunch. Still, it’s this
they say will bring you all you long for.
But if that doesn’t happen, know that every bone I have
is for you a wishing bone and every wish,
for you, the best there is. And if
when it comes down to it and we’re all done
the bone is all that’s left, I’ll give you my tibia
and fibula, the femur, knuckle, pelvic girdle, skull,
this finger with its ring on, spine that holds me up,
every part in fact of the empty cage that’s held
the inner workings of the heart, the breathing lungs.

So I think we will skip the Gratias and zoom straight on to the Jesu Christe. It's really short, but asks for every bit of breath in one's body to sing it. The alto line is the dominant one. Turn the volume up and imagine this coming from the breast of Signs on a Tuesday night. A whole week's worth of breath in one enormous whoosh. I trust that someone up there (hello Gawd) is listening and notching up gold stars.

- and perhaps someone can tell me who this Renaissance dame might be.

Gloria

2011-03-25T14:59:00.003Z

But here is a lovely thing - the winner of the National Poetry Competition is an unpublished poet, Paul Adrian, with this fine poem:

Robin in Flight

Let's imagine for a second that the robin
is not a contained entity moving at speed
through space, but that it is a living change,
unmaking and remaking itself over and over
by sheer unconscious will, and that
if we were to slow down the film enough
we would see a flying ball of chaos,
flicking particles like Othello counters,
air turning to beak in front just as tail transforms to air behind,
a living being flinging its changes at a still universe.
This would require infinite alignments. Each molecule
privy to the code of its possible settings,
the capacity of a blade of grass to become
the shadow of a falling apple by pure force
of the tree's instinct. Every speck of world with the potential
to become stone, dog's breath, light twisted through glass,
filth under fingernails, the skin's bend at the bullet's
nudge the moment before impact,
the thought of a robin in flight,
the thought of the thought of a robin in flight.

In the act of imagining, of pure thought, the creation. A good place to leave you with today's offering: Gloria.

Kyrie

2011-03-24T21:59:00.005Z

So, my plan is to take you through the different choral parts of Mozart's C minor Mass, leaving out the Qui Tollis which I have already put up. It is what I sing on Tuesday nights, and will be until middle of April when we perform it in Edge village church.

Normal service suspended as energies are otherwise engaged - creatively, it should be said, and I include Kindling sessions on the train and sunbeam dust-mote observation through wooden slats as well as the Writing and the Workshopping.

Ubi Sunt?

2011-03-16T16:09:00.002Z

Really I would like this to be an intelligent but heartfelt meditation on mortality and life's transcience. But instead I will just say

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago? Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?Hwær cwom symbla gesetu? Hwær sindon seledreamas?

which, as you undoubtedly already know, means

Where is the horse* gone? Where the rider? Where the giver of treasure?Where are the seats at the feast? Where are the revels in the hall?

Where indeed? And where are the bloggers of yesteryear? You may well ask. For when I first began this game, the blogging I mean, there were many bloggeurs and bloggistes at work whose names I do not see now, or the blogs themselves are there, like monuments to "temps jadis." But the people who wrote the words? Ubi sunt?

On the other hand the blogging itself, as a respectable activity, has now come of age. Everyone who is anyone is at it. Makes you think, doesn't it? Because erstwhile, when we, mes semblables, were young, it was generally sniffed at, not considered a proper pursuit at all for respectable, thinking, artistically-inclined peeps but now those very sniffers are not only blogging for their lives (and to promote their books, obviously) but twitteriing like demented birds, in a cacophony of tweets.

Perhaps not blogging is the new blogging and people who don't do it will be considered a bit, you know. So in order to be cutting edge you have to not do it - but only if you have, already, if you get my drift. If you never did in the first place then you just have to find something else to not do.

And here is the lovely George Brassens, singing about the Dames of Yesteryear. Wait for me George - I'm coming there too!

*you know who you are

After

2011-03-13T22:17:00.005Z

Japan. In the wake of this, one does not know what to speak about. Watching the news as the grey wave rolled in and took everything, I felt my mouth fall open. And were there people in those houses at that moment or had they got away? This, and not being able to turn one's head away, in the grip of a terrible fascination.

It is something that has often been said - how life always just goes on. I hear that the earth has shifted on its axis. I carry on thinking about toothbrushes, how the bristles are too soft or too hard but sometimes I find one that is just right, Goldilocks in the house of the bears, concerned about oral hygiene. In the cottage my toothbrush is lilac and in Brighton it is green. We are thinking about having a proper holiday this year, somewhere away in the sun, looking at Tripadvisor, Rough Guide, Lonely Planet. And so on.

A thin mist hung over the road this morning. The white houses seemed to dissolve in it. A quiet, chilly but soft Brighton Sunday, the intermittent cry of seagull. Something tugging at me. Beautiful world.

Voodoo Lily

2011-03-08T15:59:00.006Z

They are back again. Sweet neighbour came and alerted us yesterday. Well, she has an interest because one of them grows near her garden. They smell of rotting corpses, you see - not that I have ever smelled one of those, but it is apparently an established fact that this is what they smell of and I can vouch that it is probably one of the worst smells ever. Flies love them, as you would expect. They are also known as Dracuncula Vulgaris - good name, lots of appropriate resonances.

It does make you wonder, I think, what kind of a god could have conceived of such a thing. It is both ugly and ridiculous with its ostentatious black penis surrounded by faux Hawaii shirt. It is something that was cobbled together as a bad joke, like sending a really vulgar stripogrammer, unnanounced, to someone's house :

Let us fashion something flamboyant and horrible that stinketh to high heaven, saith god. And this year, let us put it right back in Signs's garden in the place from which it was painstakingly dug up last year, by the roots.

Why have you done this, god?

Because I can, s/he saith, can't you take a joke?

So anyway, someone (not me) is going to have to dig them up again before they manifest their peculiar properties. Sorry god.

It being Shrove Tuesday, one of Mr. Signs's favourite religious festivals, I have prepared batter, fabulously caramelised stewed plums, got the creme fraiche, maple syrup, lemons and caster sugar. It is all we are having for supper tonight before Mr. S watches the Arsenal match tonight and I go back to choir. I have added an extra egg - turns out better that way.

Marching (oh when the saints ... etc.)

2011-03-06T10:12:00.005Z

Time to take stock again. This has been another difficult winter for me, for people with M.E. generally, here in Blighty, up against shabby untruth and those in positions of power who would, for diverse reasons, obscure the truth about M.E. So on we go, with scant resources, lucky if we have the love and understanding of family/close friends and/or the proper attention of someone in the medical profession.

But everywhere, and always, people turn their faces away. Not that one holds one's incurable Condition in front of people. Mostly we are at (literal) pains to carry on with every bit of life in a way that doesn't refer to illness and disease. As a deer pants for the water (if you'll bear with the biblical resonances), so our souls long for the good life, meaning the everyday, precious, taken-for-granted, walking-on-the earth-and-doing-of-this-and-that life. But with the best will in the world, the most determined effort not to make people feel uncomfortable, the truth of the situation will manifest, and it is bad news. It is not good P.R. to admit or reveal the extent of it, the truth of how M.E. compromises a life, it frightens, angers, repels people. And 'compromises' is a nice, civilised word to put at the entrance of M.E. reality. But on the other hand, one does learn to accommodate - must, or go mad. So we do, in a sense, become very strong.

John Falk has recently 'come out' about having M.E. There will be no rewards for doing this, as he undoubtedly knows. If he gets away without being openly maligned, cut off and discredited he will be lucky. I see that he too has done the round of useless (because they need educating) Shrinks: "I spend my money and more importantly my precious energy stores educating them on CFS while they in turn struggle to fit me into a paradigm of psychological dysfunction." I wish him well and hope that others speak out, stop being ashamed and own up to having M.E. Better for us all if the truth, the extent of it, comes out. But I also hope that not everyone with a fatigue-related condition jumps on the M.E. wagon and speaks, especially those who have been "cured" after a year or two and want to tell us Like It Is.

I say "us", as though there is a comfortable base of 'usness' where we are together in mutually supportive harmony. There are all kinds of M.E. online support groups and many PWME who now blog about it. But the debates around M.E. make for a volatile scene and there are spats and fights, inevitably. And we are all, perforce, alone with it and the particularities and degrees of incapacity.

For myself, I confess that I am ambivalent about the giving and receiving of "support". I do not even know that "support" is actually what I want. For M.E. to be recognised, believed and understood - yes; for there to be a ground of truth on which we can stand - yes; and for proper recognition and respect so that I no longer feel ashamed to say how things are - oh yes! And to this end I want to give a measure of energy. But I don't want to spend the little strength I have focussing on all the particulars of my or another's M.E. I can see that this might be good at certain times for certain people, but it is not good for me now, at this time. For now, I need to put my focus, if possible, elsewhere.

Time does not only fly. It presses. There are things I still want to do, the limitations notwithstanding. And never mind the rest of my life, there are things I want to do in the next couple of months: writings, poetry readings, workshops, choral singing, trips to London to see the lovely, musical things my kids are putting on or appearing in. We will see what is possible.

silver lining

2011-03-04T11:45:00.003Z

I have a meeting with my dentist shortly. The situation is complicated. My usual dentist is no longer able to do what they call 'precision work' - the kind that I need and have been putting off, not just because of my problems with the treatment, but because he keeps changing his mind about what needs to happen. So there are a couple of new, younger guys to take his place. I will meet one of them today for an in-depth talk and kick off a new, expensive but hopefully less complicated relationship. I ought to be trying to make myself look good (it matters, you see, if you look good people often thing you are good and treat you better - that's what they say), but a) I'm sitting here talking to you and b) I went to the hairdresser yesterday and came out with hair looking even more yellow than last time. The silvering of Signs is going to be a slow process, but worth it in the end. Inner DJ is on a roll with this one:

"You're everywhere and nowhere baby, that's where you're at
going down the bumpy hillside in your hippy hat,
flying across the country and getting fat,
saying everything is groovy while your tyres are flat" - oh yeah!

Me and My Hat

2011-02-28T20:33:00.002Z

I have been meaning to put this up for a while - my heather-on-the-moors rainbow hat. It was made for me by a friend, she who also made a shawl of similar hues to sit on my shoulders, and it goes with me everywhere, on my head, apart from when the cold is really perishing in which case I put on the dense brown mohair hat that Son gave me for Christmas. Yesterday, as I sat in a fish restaurant in Worthing, sharing a platter of fish mezze with Mr. Signs, I suddenly became aware that rainbow hat was neither on my head nor by my side or in my bag. I projected myself astrally into the car's interior and did not see it there either. I felt uneasy, this not helped by the huge quantity of fish in front of me - cod, trout, salmon en croute, mackerel, prawns, and this after a mezze starter that included gefilte fish, deep fried calamari, halloumi and feta cheese salad. Plus, there was a giant-sized bowl of deep sizzled chips. It was all fabulous and all too much, and the too muchness of it had the effect of making me lose my appetite. I needed a double espresso after just to help digest the thought of it all, and I kept thinking about my hat. Cold rain bucketed down on the way back to the car and hat wasn't there. It's probably back in the flat, said Mr. Signs, but I remembered leaving with it on my head and I remembered taking it off in the car when I felt too hot. If I were a detective or investigative journalist (thinking about the Dragon Tatoo one) I would be one of those who needed ample time to just sit, think and allow whatever was living in the ether to speak to me. I don't know what made me unbuckle my seat belt and get out of the car. There on the roof of it sat my hat, no worse for the rain and smiling at me in a peep-oh kind of a way. Some good person had put it there. A bit mysterious, but that's how it is sometimes with these special things. My son, aged seven, nearly lost a much-loved cap (also rainbow, very faded) on Brownsea Island. But someone found it on a bit of deserted beach and handed it in to whoever was in charge, and one way and another it got back to us. Who says that things aren't people too?

counting backwards

2011-02-26T14:35:00.004Z

I've been in Brighton for a week and have lost any real sense of time. I could have been here for a couple of nights or a month. There have been visitors so not sure why this is. But I have been to some extent immersed in the Writing. There is the great big window and masses of sky (more sky here than on forest terrain), the sense of being apart but also a part of everything, always something happening outside, just enough to feel oneself a member of this bit of world but not enough to be intrusive. Until last night.

Students who live in the house next door decided to throw a party which most of Brighton's student population probably attended, spilling out into the street at the front and the garden at the back, the air pounding with retro music (I recognised most of it from my own party days in another life) until about seven in the morning. Not much use plugging myself in to Paul McKenna's 'I Can Make You Sleep' CD. And why, in any case, does he insist that one counts backwards from 300 while listening?

Mr. Signs, who understands the subtle workings of the human mind - or at any rate he understands me - told me I was not a good subject for hypnotism. Always wanting to take issue with or about something. I can suspend that, I said, I can give it a go. But he was right. My nit-picky mind finds something to argue with and will not let me succumb to the drone that is Paul McK's hypnotic voice. It was the same years ago when I tried it in the early days of M.E., thinking that hypnotism might make me feel better. We were doing ok with the relaxation and the zoning out until Mr. Hypnotist began talking about ironing shirts, not just once but several times, he had a thing about it. I had to imagine myself ironing a (husband's) shirt and feeling very well and happy while doing it. Even before M.E. I never ironed shirts unless there was an extraordinary and pressing reason to do it, and my take on husband's shirts was that he could perfectly well do his own, and anyway most of his were drip dry and didn't show creases much. Hypnotist was insistent that I did as I was told and pictured the ironing. How many shirts, I wondered, did I have to in my imagination do? Because the thing was, I had orthostatic intolerance (though I didn't know the name for it then) and wouldn't be able to stand for long. And so on. We didn't get very far. He saw shirt-ironing as some kind of bench mark and it kept cropping up. Paul McK doesn't go on like that, he says a number of perfectly good things and I know for a fact he has helped a couple of people I know. But, but, but.

all you need is .....

2011-02-23T18:43:00.008Z

(The Holstee Manifesto - go Google)

1. Thanks for the advice, I bet you love giving it and go around dishing it out often.

2. I don't like simplistic pronouncements that pretend to tell the truth about life. Good enough?

3. How do you even know how much TV I watch?

4. All emotions are not beautiful. Some are very ugly, get over it.

5. I have a ghastly premonition about your inspiring dream, but fire away.

6. I don't want to travel often, I have M.E. and Brighton is close.

7. Share my passion? You'll be lucky if I even share a packet of Monster Munch. Pickled onion flavour, if you want to know, very nice - for those that like that sort of thing, which I do. There, I've shared something.

Ah, cobblers.

oh sugar!

2011-02-22T19:43:00.003Z

I wrote a long and diverting post all about seagulls and fried doughnuts (with vanilla sugar) - and somehow it has got itself disappeared and I can't restore it. So you will just have to imagine what it is that I have said, and perhaps what you imagine will be better than the post actually was. Though nothing can beat the actuality of a hot fried doughnut on Brighton Pier under a smoke-gry sky with a needling wind in your face.

PACE Disgrace

2011-02-19T02:05:00.007Z

Not surprising that I am doing the Night Watch, with all the crap in the news about PACE trials and their bogus findings in favour of Graded Exercise Therapy and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for people with "CFS/ME". Where to begin to take issue? Action for M.E. and the M.E. Association have clearly spoken against these findings and concern has been expressed about the way in which the results are being reported in media headlines as it is bound to lead some doctors to advise inappropriate exercise regimes that will cause a serious relapse.

This is not a good day for people with ME/CFS.
They have a complex multisystem illness that requires a range of treatment options based on their individual symptoms as well as the stage and severity of their illness.
(Dr. Charles Shepherd, Hon Medical Advisor at the MEA)

Interestingly, the subjects chosen had to name fatigue or lack of energy as their main problem in order to qualify. This should already sound loud alarm bells because, as any PWME fule know, fatigue and lack of energy is only one of the symptoms - and is almost certainly not the most serious one! How much longer do we have to shout this out?

Or did they just choose people with post-viral or other fatigue-related conditions?
Or did they decide not to discriminate between those and people with M.E.?

I have barely been able to crawl up the stairs recently. But that is not the point. Sometimes I walk for forty five minutes at a stretch, sometimes I swim - yes, last year I conducted my very own graded exercise experiment. Findings? If you have M.E. and do aerobic exercise you are playing with fire. I knew this, but. The point is that even when I am able to walk and swim I have symptoms that make it impossible for me to go out to work and do things in the house most people who can walk and swim would take for granted. As I have so often said: I am one of the lucky ones, only moderately afflicted, but - I am daily in pain, have muscle spasms and take prescription medicine for that and for autoimmune malfunction affecting my eyes, thyroid and liver, suffer a clutch of bewildering symptoms and sensitivities (to certain kinds of light, noise, smells) that have constantly to be monitored and accommodated - this is down to having an incurable (at time of posting) neurological disease and no amount of CBT or GET is going to address that particular issue.

Thank goodness for this response by Professor Malcolm Hooper.

Five million smackeroos of tax-payers' money was spent on the PACE shenananigans. Why? The simple answer would be to say that in the long run it will save money. I suspect there are other darker, more complex reasons also, but for the moment the simple one may be enough and, as Professor Hooper has pointed out, "Professor White and his co-Principal Investigators all have financial links with the health insurance industry..."

Tired now.

p.s. And excuse me but - "fatigue" is not a word that represents the terrifying (do I use qualifying words for no reason?) malaise and exhaustion that all PWME have to negotiate to a greater or lesser degree.

I have spoken.

dickory dock

2011-02-17T18:03:00.004Z

Time to venture out of doors, though I cannot stand or walk for long periods. Friend-from-the-village came to clean - strange how the atmosphere in a house changes after floors and surfaces have been given attention. Into the village for lunch in the community centre where they dish up a roast lamb dinner. I have it but don't like the sensation of chewing on meat, think of the animal, the flesh, the deadness of it, remember myself as a child when first encountering English school dinners, dead man's leg stew etc. Afterwards, a trip to the Co-op for a few provisions but I begin to feel dizzy, orthostatically unstable, and blood sugar swing sends urgent Get Sugar Now messages. Why are there no cut-price post-Valentine chocolates? The shelves are stacking up, already preparing for Easter, the Lindt reindeer having morphed into bunnies. I buy a box of over-priced Black Magic, get into the car, tear off the cellophane and eat several at once. A man with a bycicle and a woolly hat sees me through the car window, bares his teeth at me and chuckles.
"That bad is it?"
I bare my teeth back at him and nod. Is what that bad? The Black Magic do their work but leave me jittery and the fruit creams hurt my teeth. Worth it, though.

A couple of people have asked me if I don't go stir-crazy from being in the house so much. No, because I have had many years of practice and sometimes there are times like this. Also it is good to look out of the window and see evidence of the forest, the natural world all around me. I remember visiting a woman with severe M.E. who mostly lay on a sofa and looked out of her window at the sky and noticed all the different cloud shapes. Her husband left a plate of sandwiches and a jug of water so that she would have something to eat in the day. To be upright, even to sit, made her dizzy. She asked me to bring some leftover soup, if I ever made it. She missed the taste of fresh vegetables. It was too difficult to read or listen to radio. She had been refused disability allowance because she was seen to be able to take herself to the lavatory and back. She had appealed and was waiting for a response. Meanwhile there was the window and the shape-changing clouds. Whatver the life you have, you live it. Usually that is how it goes.

I am still cancelling - no poetry workshop on Saturday. A few days in Brighton. And then, next week, begin again. That is the hope.

tick tock

2011-02-15T22:54:00.003Z

Virus thing is hanging around and I almost have the sense that it is trying to re-boot. I am being, perforce, patient. Goodness knows if I have not learned that much in twenty five years then it would be a pretty poor show and it does not come as a surprise to find myself almost completely grounded with most reading and writing privileges denied on account of neurological disturbance. Blogging, it seems, is ok - in small doses. Apart from the pre-Valentine lunch on Sunday, I have not left Signs Cottage for a week and a half. I have cancelled two choir practices, two writing sessions, dentist, book group, weekend visitors, Brighton, a poetry reading. It suddenly feels as though my life - for a PWME, at any rate - has become too busy, though I am careful to have spaces in between things. For now, though, everything has stopped. If there were an old-fashioned Grandfather clock in the house I could listen to its tick and tock. Times when one watches the moments, listens to them as they pass: tick, and tick, and tick.

The solitude imposed by these times, in spite of the restrictions, is by now a familiar guest - a friend, almost. I would prefer it to come alone and unencumbered, without the attendant symptoms.

A present came through the post today: a white key in a black box. It looks beautiful and potent, talismanic. To unlock the space between tick and tock, slip through. Find the point of exit, of entry.

red carpet

2011-02-14T00:11:00.001Z

I watched most of the very ghastly BAFTA awards thing, mainly because I wasn't properly up to doing anything else. I should have just gone back to bed and read the papers but I knew if I did that I might fall asleep early - and then I would risk waking in the small hours and doing the night watch . Now I should go to bed but feel wired and restless. I blame BAFTA and the state of heightened boredom it induces so that one feels obliged to chew through the best part of a box of wine gums. Paul McCartney looked in a shocking state, I thought, as though innerly propped up by something or other (drugs?) but not really in himself. In a thin voice, he promised us a "rockin' evening." The closest we got to that was Helena Bonham Carter hogging the space to receive best something-or-other (King's Speech etc). Bad behaviour does, after all, promise a measure of intrinsic interest. But she also looked in a bad way, as though on some kind of disorientating medication, not in herself but still up herself. Am I being a grumpy old blogger? Good.

The truth is that as far as I am concerned, nothing could be right after the glitz parade of designer frockage at the beginning when they all arrived and spilled themselves onto the red carpet. I know it is part of what happens, what one expects and what, presumably, every single person in the whole world apart from me really wants to see. But every time I allow myself to watch something like this I wish that just one of the actors would decide to turn up in the equivalent of my purple shell-suit trousers. It is very unlikely that I will ever be spilled out onto the red BAFTA carpet but if, for some unfathomable reason that none of us can forsee, this does ever happen I promise to you, my brothers and sisters who carry the torch for true artistic (not to mention aesthetic) integrity that I will not under any circumstances be dressed in designer clothes or any other glitz-schmatter that leaves my shoulders and most of my boobs bare. It is February, forsooth! I will be dressed in my Purples with matching cashmere jumper, string of pearls and grey hoodie if it is raining, fake Uggs on my feet or possibly Crocs with striped purple socks showing through the holes. So no-one will be able to accuse me of not having Style. But there will be none of the dreary glitz we were subjected to this evening.

But soft ye now, for we are almost in Valentine's day, and today being Valentine's Eve (it's almost another Christmas as far as hotels are concerned, so why not?) Mr. Signs and I went out to stuff our faces with sunday lunch at the local posh hotel. The pianist played right through the Sound of Music and followed up with the Godfather and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Mr. S ate rare roast beef and I my fillets of plaice on a bed of crushed new potatoes followed by poached pears and chocolate sauce. The French waiters (yes, all French) hovered and spun around us while outside the wind and rain lashed at the high bay windows and for one brief moment it might almost have been possible to imagine that we were in some well-rehearsed play in which we played our parts beautifully. We laughed and we love each other. Bring out the red carpets.

2011-02-11T15:50:00.008Z

Am I going mad or is this some kind of revelation? My inner DJ, as you might expect, has been cranking up its (genderless) endeavours, as though to make up for my almost bed-ridden and totally housebound state. My inner DJ is a constant source of wonderment to me and the tactics it employs leads me to think that it is probably more sophisticated than I am though we do, at any rate, share a sense of humour. When I was in the process of separating from my first husband it played Tammy Wynette's D-I-V-O-R-C-E and Hold Me Close by David Essex on a continuous loop. Why? I had never paid any attention to Tammy or David, far less owned any of their music, but inner DJ made sure that those two numbers are securely held in the recesses of my inner jukebox. One scratch and they will replay.

So you will be wondering what the music is right now: it's South Park, the movie - one track in particular. Recent loft excavations unearthed daughter's old CD and I have been playing it through, remembering how much I loved South Park and thinking that a few wall-to-wall sessions of this might be just what I need. I am still (taking it slowly, perforce) on Candia McWilliam's new book and almost thought of getting Jane Shilling's memoir of middle-age but a) I can't get it (or anything much that I want) on Kindle, b) I suspect it's going to feel a bit insubstantial after Candia and c) perhaps I need something completely different. And what, you are asking, is inner DJ's response to this and the predicament of my enfeebled condition?

Here, for your delectation:

Looking for this on Youtube threw up all manner of interesting variations. There was the German version:

and a heart-stoppingly beautiful remix with images - which I now cannot find.

And so back to bed.

Notebooks

2011-02-09T19:43:00.002Z

Clearly I'm not ok and I hear that the virus is a nasty one - the effects linger. I hunker down with bell, book and Kindle, little black radio, cat purring at the end of the bed. I should just lie back and let it all be, really. But I don't. I am not comfortable being there for too long, even though the bed itself is fine, the mattress good etc. Apart from the fact that too much lying down in the day usually makes my muscles feel worse, the room, already too small for the stuff that is in it, fills up with my restlessness. Get up, go downstairs, fetch hot water bottle, shiver, crawl up stairs but I have forgotten to bring a drink - down again, up again, listen to Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour and have no idea what anyone is talking about. I catch sight of myself in the mirror in my red and white pyjamas and grey V neck pullover that I probably found at the same time I found my purple trousers, in a charity shop. I look cool - yes, even in my reduced state - dramatic dark shadows around my eyes and the unmistakeable silver/grey halo framing my head, real roots, old brown Uggs on my feet.. I am still the Queen of Grunge.

Why have I got so many old notebooks lying around the place? I was trying to find something in them but damned if I can remember what. Something to do with teaching classes, I think. Open one at random and read an entry about encouraging students to keep writing in the holidays. I feel as though I'm spying on myself:

"They asked me what they should write about. I am weary but don't show it. Write about the candle you noticed bleeding wax onto the shag pile carpet. Write about the pine needle lodged in the arm of the sofa. Write about the crack in the turning of the year when things don't quite fit together and angels slip through and young men become werewolves howling in the forest and the girl in red treads a path through the trees. Write about your grandmother picking her teeth. Write what you see, write what you don't see, make believe. Pretend. Or don't pretend. Just watch. I don't believe in magic either but I pretend I do. Or rather, I do believe and pretend I don't and the pretence is killing me. That's why I write, to keep alive - what's your excuse?

Last year at Epiphany I went to hear the a poet who said he had woken up that morning with words speaking in his head from a dream. I took the words home and wrote them in my book with leather covers. They seemed like a key to something, or perhaps they were just words. Putting the words down on paper is important - a subversive act, especially if you don't get money or fame or nobody sees the words in your notebooks. At the end, when you are asked to account for yourself, you will have the notebooks along with the time you gave the last biscuit with jam on it to someone who looked sadder than you. Jack Kerouac said that only first drafts are preserved in heaven. In other words, the notebooks that never see the light of day."

And so to bed.

2011-02-08T09:01:00.003Z

I have picked up some kind of throat virus - mild, but it just adds to the general difficulty of doing anything at all. I am not easily able to leave the house, the wet, cold and wind take stamina, or something that at present I do not have: substance. I like that word. I feel thinned-out, not that you would particularly think so to look at me. I am like a purse without coins, constantly on the forage for some other kind of currency to get me through the week. Things hurt. Body feels electric, not in a good way. All familiar, and to utter these things helps to get the measure of them.

cake therapy

2011-02-05T16:57:00.002Z

No, I give in, I can't overcome the essential dreichness of the day. I know the weather is outside, gusting its grey murk around like an interminable wash-cycle of grubby clothing, and I know that I am inside the walls of dear old Signs Cottage and can, after a fashion, create my own climate-of-the-innerspace. But dreichness has seeped through the cracks and got under my skin. This is more likely to happen when there has been a night of disrupted sleep; and I have got myself over-tired (as if I'm ever under-tired) and overwrought. I drove to Brighton and back yesterday in order to meet with a friend and let her into Brighton flat, and lovely it was to see her, we haven't met for some months and she is a long-standing friend, but it follows as surely as night follows day that there will be payback for such extravagance; and today I have simply been unwilling to lie back and count my blessings or zone out on muscle-pain reducing medication. I have been trying to push on with the writing to no great effect as I began it too late in the day.

But - but - a potent smell of oranges is in the air because I have a couple of them simmering, the plan being to make one of my (Claudia Roden's) orange and almond cakes. I have been reading recently (I think it was in one of Julia Cameron's books) that it is impossible to make a cake and feel suicidal. Not, I hasten to add, that I feel suicidal. No. Beneath the myalgic invisibility cloak I am the same ray of sunshine as ever I was, the very incarnation of Polyanna. Wait. It is beginning to sound as though I am protesting too much. But I can prove what I say: for already the thought of cake begins to work its magic and I haven't even begun the mixing and stirring yet, and I am chewing a piece of Nicorette gum instead of rolling a nice tube of Golden Virginia. No-one who was even remotely suicidal would be doing that. Just take my word for it.

February

2011-02-02T00:00:00.001Z

We are out of January - good. I woke early today and sat with my cat in the kitchen, she with a saucer of Whiskas cat milk, me with my home-brewed latte and notebook. Yesterday I talked with the Daughter about writing because this is what she is doing, with projects on the go and deadlines, and coming up against the things that writers face from time to time - the sabotaging sabre-rattlers that fill you with doubt. Of course we all know that the only way out is through - writing through it, that is. But sometimes it helps to be reminded of that and to get a little support. So thank you Natalie Goldberg, Julia Cameron, Annie Dillard and a few others who sit on the shelf above my computer. My very first book about writing was a slender thing called Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, written in the thirties. It is probably still the best and the one that got me started. As I spoke about the importance of writing first thing, I also reminded myself of this. The notebook is a lovely thing. Keyboard will never take its place and my back hurts when when I sit at it too much. But I am still drawn to the idea that the screen is a kind of Narnian door I can walk through.
In the morning, the silence here on Edge was beautiful. But I became aware of an absence of birds. There was a bit of twitter and song, a lone bird sending out tweets but nothing came back in reply. It led me, though, into the substance of my story, the project I am now working on. Then suddenly an intense fatigue came into me, it was not yet nine o'clock, and so much still to do, and I realised: so often I avoid doing this because I have to dip the pen into the ink of my vitality to get the story down. Still, because I began first thing, a decent writing session, and later on more of the same at weekly writing meet-up.

Prepared spiced chick pea supper, slept in the afternoon, sang Mozart's C Minor in choir later. Mr. Signs exceedingly busy with much on his plate. We are all, it seems, working hard.

Tomorrow I get my first Able and Cole fruit and veg box - Daughter's suggestion, to help simplify my life. I ordered milk, eggs, fish and cheese from them too. If all goes well this (plus slow-cooker at weekends) will significantly help with time-management.

Virtual RL

2011-01-31T22:05:00.000Z

Once in a while I receive emails from people who either pass through Signsville or look in quite regularly and prefer to say something out of the box. And it's lovely to get these. I see that many more people look in than comment. In spite of having Sitemeter and Statcounter, I am not an accomplished stat-checker and unless it is made very obvious, I have no idea where everyone comes from, what pages they view or how regularly they visit. Since beginning the blogging, I have learned that some people will go to great lengths to hide the evidence of their visit and also to monitor and track the visitors that come to them. I suppose I can sort of understand the appeal of an invisibility cloak but I have never really got the point of the tracking thing - unless one is running a blog as a commercial enterprise, and then I suppose it might be useful.

Blogging, social networking and all - it's a new way of being in the world and it's still early days. We are learning about how it all might work, for and against us. On Youtube one sees strange, hostile threads that seem peopled by those who are looking for a place to offload their anger and resentment. But on blogs people mostly (there are always exceptions) make the effort to be courteous and thoughtful in comments and responses. To meet the other is not always easy. Unless one is constantly putting out platitudes there is the impulse to speak truly as one finds but this may sometimes involve taking issue with something and one then risks giving offence. Or there might be an impulse to make a pronouncement on a post which did not set out to ask for any such thing. There are spaces in the conversations one has online which allow for a degree of thoughtfulness not always possible in RL. But still, too much carefulness inhibits the natural flow and spontaneity. I do every so often (as some will know) wonder if I should stop blogging, and the end of last year could have been a natural point at which to end it. But having done this for four years it does seem to have become one of those things that I now just do, and it would feel stranger to stop than to carry on. So you could say it is in the realm of RL rather than just virtual.

free lunch

2011-01-30T10:19:00.003Z

More of this perishing cold weather but the sun shineth and I have a casserole - pork with orange and star anise, ready in the slow cooker which has been doing its slow thing through the night in preparation for a visit to Brighton flat by Mater and spouse. Pork, you might say, is a funny thing for a vegetarian to be preparing, but I have relented somewhat. That isn't the right word but I prefer it to 'relapsed' which doesn't feel right either. The cold weather plus cooking for others means casserole, means meat. I am ok eating it occasionally but do not find I want it more than this. Mater's spouse simply wouldn't know what to do with a chick pea.

I went to a poetry workshop in the large Quaker meeting house near the sea front yesterday - the workshop leader someone I know well. The room we sat in was so reminiscent of the kind of rooms I used to teach in, and indeed the room where I attended my very first writing workshop. A combination of shabby and generous, high ceilings, old boards made of compressed sawdust, painted blue, with dog-eared notices about watercolour and meditation classes. Central heating radiators enormous and inefficient. Someone left urns full of boiled water, but nothing to make coffee or tea with. The class happened to coincide with a Make Brighton Healthy day - lovely free lunch for anyone who wanted (veg soup, tabbouleh, salads, fresh juices) and complementary therapies.

Sometimes there is such a thing as a free lunch.

Teaching Classes

2011-01-28T14:07:00.001Z

When I first began to teach writing classes, in the early days, long before the new achievement-measuring, paperwork-obsessed regimes, and no-one even asked to see your lesson plans let alone learning outcomes, I used to keep a record of what happened in each class. I noted the paticularities of each student and these would inform the kind of lesson plans I created. At one point I was teaching three classes a week and because each group was different, so were the lesson plans. I had the freedom to change direction at any point if that seemed right. Later on, that would prove difficult to do because if you had put one thing on your Scheme of Work form and were then seen to have done something else it would create all kinds of confusion. What if an Inspector came and noted the discrepancy? How could anything be Measured unless you stuck to your pre-constructed Plan? Later on I would find ways to circumnavigate these difficulties, but in the early days I just kept notebooks. My brief - the one I gave myself - was to create an environment where whatever it was that wanted to emerge for a particular student could be enabled, that people should experience the intense play that is a part of the process of working creatively with words and language, that they should begin to express themselves in a way that was authentic.

The other day, in a hunt for something else relating to the project I'm now working on, I came across one of my notebooks where I had recorded the progression of a particular class. Lots of descriptions of students that bring them again vividly to mind, and I realise a large part of the work was this holding in my consciousness of the different people. So much of what happens in a class, or any group (or relationship, for that matter) moves invisibly, and slowly, before anything concrete or substantial manifests. Which really makes a nonsense of the idea that you can state a learning objective for a particular student at the beginning of the class and then measure to what extent it had been achieved at the end.

At one point, in the notebook, I recorded that "they want to know where I come from. No, not London, Primrose Hill, Hackney, but where I really come from, you know, originally, because of that look about me. Something foreign. And the way I speak. I tell them my parents were refugees from Germany before the war, but that I am from here and that I lived in Germany for some years as a child.
"Oh," she says, "I thought you had a speech impediment." Everyone laughs loudly to cover the indelicacy of such a remark and she doesn't understand why they are laughing. She noticed something about the way I lightened on the letter L and thought it was a speech impediment. That's all. She doesn't see what is funny about that."

LOL :)

qui tollis

2011-01-26T17:04:00.004Z

I miss movement and swimming, walking in the forest. Decided yesterday to begin walking again, the weather was dreich today but I walked with a friend after cake and coffee rather than toughing it out on my own. Dreich is a good old Scots word and today being the day after Burns Night feels like the right time for it. Instead of the usual haggis and whisky fest at the neighbours, this year I was back at choir practice singing the Qui Tollis from Mozart's Mass in C Minor, nothing else would have dragged me back, and it seems fitting to slot in with the Qui Tollis. Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, receive our prayers. And lift this heavy condition from my muscles. Not being flippant here - well not entirely; though goodness knows Lamb of God has been petitioned before now concerning this and I have not heard back on the subject. The singing, though, was good. As a Burns treat a few choir members got up at the end to sing something - there was Parcel o' Rogues and songs of love and melancholy - how those go together, particularly as we are still in the dreich, dark days with more cold weather on the way. This being so, it is as good to go deep into the melancholy as it is to walk deep into the forest.

I am reading Robin Robertson's latest collection, The Wrecking Light - bleak and wonderful. In an interview he said,

"I grew up with a very strong sense of place, in a landscape that seemed freighted with significance, mystery and power. Everything since has seemed a displacement: a deracination."

I have been thinking about this, and how that place of displacement is so often the place from which the sort of writing that I like best comes; and also the place from which I most often write, when I can.

lift-off

2011-01-21T15:53:00.003Z

Well at last - something. Meaning that I have actually felt able to sit down and do a couple of hours at the notebook; a small idea that came to me the other day in Brighton as I stared out of the window. Nothing to do with immediate surroundings, but everyone knows the importance of having time to stare out of windows. Not so much an idea as a title out of which something can be unpacked that I may be able to work with - taking into account the limited strength available to me. I will shut up about it now, I have a tendency to ramble a little incontinently when beginning or thinking about something new and it really does not help to talk too much about a newly-born idea, especially if one tends, as I do, to write out of a kind of inner pressure. Talk about it and the pressure subsides, or the idea itself suffers from exposure.

I will not stop to think about the number of half-baked projects that have been left to go cold or in a state of suspended animation. The reason is M.E./CFIDS and not lack of will, in spite of which I can thread small achievements like pearls on my necklace of shining things, which I wear close to the heart.

And something else: you see the shadowy image there in my profile - me walking on the beach in Caithness, not so very long ago? I'm blonder than that now, since the day before yesterday, in preparation for the silvering of Signs. No more artificial colour - not that I wouldn't have been happy to continue for some time to come. It is part of my genetic inheritance that we silver up early, before we are ready for it. But even the least toxic product I can find makes me feel bad afterwards and is too much for me to process. The hairdresser's name is Marie. She is young, French, slender, thoughtful, pale - her raven-black hair is certainly from a bottle and it suits her. Looking at my parting she smiles. It is a good colour, you are lucky. Many women like you are turning to silver.

Meanwhile, until the rest grows out, it has been lightened with blonde streaks (my first time in foils), looks rather yellow and a bit - I don't know - Worzel Gummidge. Still hot, though, obviously - if Worzel Gummidge floats your boat.

Rainy Monday

2011-01-17T20:24:00.003Z

Alone in Brighton, doing what I needed to do, which was very little. Woke early, went over the road to the lovely, retro corner shop that is like the corner shops I remember from London childhood, with the same smell of mints and cigarettes and grumpy-but-friendly hunchback woman behind the till. Forgot about being a vegetarian and bought a packet of Walls bacon, six eggs, and a couple of oranges for squeezing. Relentless rain. A new antique shop has opened opposite our flat. Yesterday we bought a small wooden clothes horse there and the woman recognised me today in the road. I probably didn't smile enough so she asked me if I was all right. I said yes and remarked on the weather, wondering if a small transaction and the fact of her knowing that our flat is opposite her shop is enough reason for her to put such a question to me. But remembered also that people used to accost me in the street all the time when I was younger, telling me to cheer up. After breakfast and just one side of notebook-writing, fatigue and muscle pains drove me back to bed. Slept until nearly three, so not many hours of daylight today.

I am enjoying Candia McWilliam's new book, even though I haven't read very far. She was a successful writer and quite a beauty, then became an alcoholic and was afflicted with a strange condition that meant she could no longer open her eyes. She turns her gaze on herself - her past, her family relationships, and she looks inside herself, is honest and unflinching. I am wondering if it is more intrinsically satisfying to know about where people fall and fail, and how they deal with that, than about success and achievement. I don't know. The writer Susan Hill has been in the papers recently - her life an extraordinary catalogue of achievements, though she was never glamorous. Even so, she often worked through, and out of, pain and bereavement. One of her best books, In the Springtime of the Year, was written after the sudden death of a man she deeply loved. She lost a prematurely born daughter.

She had no patience, she said, with writers who moaned about how difficult it was to write - made a song and dance about it. Just get on with it, is the thing. After all, you don't have to do it. I don't know what she would have made of my one-page effort today.

Tomorrow a gathering at Sussex University - to launch Poetry South East.

"no way out but through"

2011-01-16T19:50:00.004Z

Already over two weeks into the new year, I'm still reviewing the one just gone. A difficult year, though we took possession of the Brighton flat, which continues to give us and others its light and beauty. The difficulties are not easy to name - not because one is coy about the naming but because they do not offer themselves up easily for it. Something my sister and I recently found ourselves in agreement about, and something it has taken this long for us to properly acknowledge (we are both in our fifties) is that we carry an almost imponderable, impenetrable something from being children of holocaust survivors. To say anything more than this is to risk either being unforgiveably glib or having to write a whole book in order to make sense of the predicament.

At my poetry workshop yesterday the workshop leader said, in response to the piece I brought, that my poem made her feel ill. This was not an insult - she was alive to something in it that may be experienced as illness, though a couple of people have also experienced it as beautiful. And she did like the poem. Someone wondered whether it was inspired by Greek mythology. No, she said, this comes from fairytale - and she was right, though it didn't come from any tale one could give a name to. I have always, in a sense, known what it is to be lost in the forest, both powerless and powerful, learning how to read the signs because my life depended on it, or might. Grimms fairy tales I took from the big black book in the living room, but reading them I knew I was already in the territory. No way out but through. Someone put a notice with those words on the inside of the toilet door at the place where we have the poetry workshops, and when you think about it what a perfect place to put such a notice.

Just now, a day at a time is probably the best way forward. And one foot in front of the other, as before, but this time, perhaps, with a little more - what is the word? Attitude.

2011-01-14T09:47:00.001Z

Well I may as well come right out and say it: I am having a bad spell. After close to a quarter of a century of this disease it isn't exactly news. People who have M.E./CFIDS have bad spells, and I'm not speaking of the severely afflicted who rarely, if ever, have anything else. It is not something one particularly shares with others any more because that is one of the things about a chronic condition: after a few years there is nothing more you or anyone can say about it. But still - here I am saying it.

The relapsing seems to have become a January thing whereas my worst months used to be in the summer. Actually, I no longer know what my worst/best months are. I think I am less able to override these days. There are several poetry-related projects I would like to turn my attention to, places where I am scheduled to be in the next few days - but I need to be better than this.
Fortunately I have a packet of magickal incense wands - a Christmas present - and I am hoping that these, plus incantations of the uplifting and melodious kind in a ritual of my own devising, will do the trick. But on the other hand, I don't think I'm in a fit state to conduct this yet.

Pass the co-proxamol.

small boat

2011-01-09T07:30:00.007Z

I woke up early, a few minutes after six. Anything before six counts as night-time so at least I made it to morning - but with only five hours sleep. Whenever I plan to do something on a particular day, I wake early. Today I am having some poetry people over for lunch in Brighton. The flat is set up for uncomplicated cooking. I have prepared vegetarian chilli and coleslaw with dill dressing. Will make beetroot with chopped herbs, and saffron rice. Fruit crumble for dessert, I have used plums and added some brandy butter left over from Christmas.

I walked into Brighton town yesterday, thinking to do various errands all at once. I exchanged some Moroccan slippers (lumpy inside so not comfortable) for a kilim cusion cover that I will probably take back to Signs Cottage. I went to Waterstone's to pick up a book I had ordered: What To Look For In Winter by Candia McWilliam, highly recommended to me, and the ability to read and focus has improved somewhat. Hallelujah, even though I can't read anywhere near as much as I once did. At Waterstone's I thought I would have a coffee then do a food shop for today's lunch. PWME are familiar with the wall of exhaustion that one can run into. I could feel it coming (a tsunami wall) and tried to ignore it. Ridiculous, as was the notion that I could have got myself plus shopping up the steep incline. A taxi back from town is very cheap and makes this kind of excursion possible. Near the Clock Tower there is always a small line of taxis waiting. I took one. Brighton is kind in so many ways, and beautiful. The Brighton Waitrose, however, is not a good experience - nothing like the one I pictured here which is still more or less supermarket heaven. Bad muscles and malaise after, and what is sweetly referred to as "emotional lability" - one of the side-effects of neurological disorder. The image: a small boat in bad condition suddenly having to negotiate storm conditions; you look out and see nothing but a grey wall made of water that may at any moment engulf you. This was actually a real situation, on my return from Gozo via Malta about twenty years ago, returning from a wedding I should probably not have attended in the first place. The boat was a relic from the second world war and a small group of us nearly perished in the sea. But lived to tell the tale. As one does.

Outside, a brilliant blue sky today. Timely and welcome.

Changes

2011-01-06T16:11:00.003Z

There are moments when I think I might have said everything that I am ever going to say. As if to give weight to this thought, the sky this morning, when I was writing, grew dimmer and dimmer. Lit candles were not enough, I had to switch lights on. If there is nothing left that I want to say, would that matter so much? Put down the pen, box up the notebooks: will the world take breath, feel the loss of my scribbled or tapped out words? I do not think so. It would not be so terrible. It is a work enough in progress to keep step with the meticulous work of a day's rising and falling.

Outside, the crows have been making their unseemly noise that sounds like heckling complaint from a raw throat. The ice has melted and life is presumably easier for them. What sounds like complaint is probably exultation. They have found sustenance of some kind. My dead butt of Golden Virginia, hidden in the long grass. Not that. They will ignore that. I will ignore it: a blip. I will give it up again, along with the other bad habits. I will give up cream in my porridge, the extra scoop of coffee in the morning, the sugar later in the day, the butter, the biscuits, the negative thoughts that clamber claw around hamster-like on a thin metal wheel, going fast and nowhere.

It isn't true. I have no real intention of giving up my bad habits. To acquire good ones is what I should advise myself to do. But why should I? Shed a little light on the situation, is all. Learn from the click of the switch as the electic light comes on and makes everything clear. The natural light from candles does not shine so brightly but at least one can see to read and write. Learn from the sugar fix and caffeine scoop that get you through the moment, the pain-killing medicine that gives you an hour or two of believing that nothing is going to hurt so much that you can't keep moving forward. Learn from the tin-a-ling of the mobile phone when a text message comes: instant connection to someone or something; the sliding switch of the Kindle - words appear on the screen as if by magic. You can buy a book, or several, by pressing a few buttons. Learn from the jars of spices already ground, labelled and ready to throw into the pot. Who says you must take pestle and mortar, get substance by the sweat of your brow?

We do not need luxury, said someone. We do not need expensive holidays, furnishings, fine wines, boxes of chocolate wrapped in silk. We need light, space and air, an apple and a glass of water. But if we cannot get these, say I, if they are harder to come by than the naming of them suggests, then flicking a switch, opening a can, unwrapping a chocolate from the expensive gift box, are also acceptable and may do one good.

The I Ching says it furthers one to have somewhere to go, and then changes (it is The Book of Changes) to it does not further one to go anywhere. It says that the times are not auspicious for setting out, risking, making oneself too visible. One should rather stay put, hold fast, not draw attention to oneself, lie low. Anything else is unsafe. Learn from the inanimate object that remains itself in all but the most extreme conditions. Learn from the stone that warms when the sun shines and grows cold when it withdraws. Learn from the objects that lie for years under beds, sofas and cupboards, gathering dust but remaining what they are, ready for use when the time comes for them to be uncovered; from the golden angel who did not sit on the Christmas tree this year but stayed in a cardboard box and did not mind. The ultimate Zen attitude.

Learn from the sun and moon that allow themselves to be eclipsed.

splitting apart

2011-01-03T18:35:00.006Z

So lets talk about lard. I have jars of it in the fridge, courtesy of an unimaginably expensive goose that we cooked for Christmas. I have been eating some of it (temporarily lapsed vegetarian) on toast. It reminds me of the schmalzbrot I used to eat as a child. In case you don't know, schmalz means lard - pork lard, usually, made flavoursome with onions, apples and juniper berries, perhaps. It doesn't figure much in what most people hereabouts nowadays think of as a healthy diet. But if you're going to kill a goose at least give it the respect of eating and appreciating every bit of it, even if most of it is lard. I boiled up the carcass and made two substantial soups out of that. The lard, though, is going to be a problem unless I can find a way of sharing it around, unlikely as I'm surrounded on all sides by vegetarians. People used to make soap out of goose fat and ashes, or rub it on wounds. Perhaps I'll get to work making useful products out of lard and set up a stall in the village centre where there is much enthusiasm for recycling of all kinds. I might even recycle myself as I am fast turning into a tub of schmalz. Yes indeed, I feel a meltdown coming on. Actually, lets stop talking about lard. But lardy cake, just saying, is a wonderful thing, especially if you want to gain a pound or two in the eating. Which I don't.

So lets talk about resolutions. You don't need to have made any to talk about those, but I actually did make some on the cusp between last year's end and this one's beginning, which is already feeling some distance away. Something to do with managing my emotions better so as to conserve energy - and what writing project to focus on. Poetry was what I decided but, like I said, that was then, and I am drawn also by the idea of continuing with prose project. Last year I wanted a clear Sign as to which way I should go and I did win a poetry prize. But on the other hand I also got a story short-listed. On the third hand, poetry is probably going to win because it's simply more practical for me to focus on that now. So managing emotions is going to be much more of an issue, but as I've made a resolution about those it's all in the bag. Sorted.

The post heading, by the way, is from I Ching and the less said about it the better, although it could by a stretch of the imagination be referring to my trousers if I carry on with the lard. The judgement says: "It does not further one to go anywhere."

"it furthers one to have somewhere to go"

2010-12-31T21:08:00.003Z

From the tail end of the year, from the middle of the holy nights that probably no shepherd or wise man is watching, from the most pure and pristine exhaustion whereby mortal coil is all but shuffled off, from the Edge, the razor edge, the margin, from no-man's-land - greetings to y'all, dear peeps, and may the new year find you as it leaves me: hopeful and trusting that great goodness in all its extraordinary manifestations will find us open-hearted and ready, but please god not so stupid in the hereafter as in the heretofore and with clout enough to kick the enemy a good one up the tucchus should need arise.

Getting ready to consult the I Ching oracle now - and if the Signs are not manifestly and exceedingly auspicious then I'll be calling on the ghost of Richard Wilhelm to tell me the reason why.

snow on snow

2010-12-20T20:49:00.003Z

bread sauce

2010-12-17T09:23:00.001Z

Jack Frost has been painting the rooftops and bare branches - he has covered each blade of grass on the lawn. The air, even in centrally-heated Signs Cottage has that hard, white feeling that says King Winter is back for a space. Mr. Signs got back in the small hours from a work stint in Romania, his connecting plane in Munich having been delayed a couple of hours. Even though it was one in the morning, he had some hot soup and I ate half a loaf of the sweet Romanian Christmas bread he brought back. I have barely slept, and this is what regularly happens after I have had a short run of nights when I have had proper, substantial amounts of sleep.

Hovering on the edge of waking and sleeping it is strange how the really stupid, small things crowd round as though wanting to mock me with their petty but persistent claims on my attention. Bread sauce niggles about whether or not to make it ahead of time and will there be room in the oven for goosefat roast potatoes as well as vegetable oil. A notch up from this is the Boxing Day lunch where we join with the sister and her family and with the mater and her spouse. There will not be the possibility of getting drunk because a) I can hardly drink a glassful these days, and shouldn't and b) someone will need to drive mater and spouse to and from the gastro-pub lunch venue. On the other hand, there is the distinct possibility that mater and spouse will take umbrage and absent themselves from the occasion. Every way you look at it you lose, Mrs. Robinson. Christmas itself, though, (whether I sleep or not) is going to be good. The Signs children will be with us, is the main thing, and plus they are doing all the cooking. Even so, monkey mind will not be diverted from fretting about bread sauce and potatoes.

Coming up to the end of another year, and it will have been my fourth year of blogging. Whether to continue with this or stop, is a question that has been moving in and out of consciousness. But in my present unslept state it is probably not one I should think about now. And I have to get out of PJs, have a writing morning, collect Son from station - do stuff.

Midwinter - the Festival

2010-12-15T09:45:00.004Z

I don't know how one can do the Christmas thing in the southern hemisphere. I hear about opening presents and pulling crackers on the beach, Santas and reindeer flashing through hot and steamy nights. Or it is somewhat adapted to suit a midsummer festival, which Christmas is simply not. It is a midwinter festival and, as such, necessary to us. I realise this is making a pronouncement on behalf of absolutely everyone but I'm not talking about the Christian festival, which Christmas really isn't, not for most peeps at any rate. Or the Christian element does its thing somewhere on the margins, or vibrating inconspicuously as metaphor: extraordinary light and possibility in the darkest and most inauspicious of times and circumstances. We need the darkness, you could say, for this to be doing its work, for us to carry it into the realm of the human condition. You could say that all the tat surrounding the season is part of the darkness, but we're only human and what, in any case are we meant to do, those of us who are not ascetic contemplatives living in some remote or hidden place? We have to live as we find, and I find a certain gleeful hallelujah moment in the truly dreadful blue flashing lights that beam annually into the bedroom from the house opposite, come advent. God with us, prepare and make straight his paths. Actually, this last really belongs to the feast of St. John (remember that one?) which is a midsummer thing. Some might argue (and actually some do) that southern hemisphere should have their Christmas in June and do something else in December, but it would make life complicated and the card and flashing light industries probably wouldn't stand for it.

Meanwhile, on we go with our difficult lives and circumstances, and this time I feel confident about pronouncing for everyone because I can't think of anyone who is treading an easy path or going fishing "with the sail set fair and an understanding crew," and if they say they are then they are either on drugs or have gone completely wrong and we should be praying for their souls. Ever since we were thrown out of the garden (and thank you, Blake, for taking issue with this), we earn our bread with difficulty, are hurt, violated, misunderstood and at war with each other. (Digression: I am sitting at the window of Brighton flat looking at a parking official who is nosing around trying to find someone to nick, very easy here if you don't have resident's permits, and we are still waiting for ours. I have a temporary voucher perched on the inside of my windscreen but am running out of those. So anyway, he has nicked some other poor sod and is writing out a ticket.) Yes, at war with each other, e'en within our own families, communities and friendship groups - e'en in our relationships with goddam Shrinks! The betrayal of trust and innocence (I am not talking about the parking official, he just doing his job) goes on everywhere and is hardest to bear when closest to home, to the heart. It is enough to extinguish even the most persistent flame, if one did not take care to strike the match and keep it lit, or to notice that - actually - it does not really go out and is there, even by virtue of our need and wish for it. I need this midwinter festival.

On a more mundane note: I am nowhere near making a dent in my Christmas "preparations." I have ordered a goose. I am leafing through vegetarian alternatives for me and the daughter's boyf who is veggie but prefers not to have nut roast. I will probably have a bit of the goose anyway. In terms of available energy, there are very few hours in the day available to me and weather news has it that the intense cold cometh back again. Mr. Signs is in Romania and returns late tomorrow night. Son is planning to look in on Friday and play cello in his old childhood orchestra for their annual carol concert. Daughter is thinking of writing a blog next year, and her friend is doing (for the love of it) a Christmas blog. It's all good.

Broken Banana

2010-12-09T11:38:00.002Z

Yesterday a small boy in the vegetable section of the health food shop was having a tantrum. His mother was young, sweet-faced and doing her best, struggling to get him into the back part of the double buggy, the front being occupied by baby sibling. I held the door open for her, made sympathetic noises. The boy was holding half a peeled banana, waving it in the air. He is upset, said the mother, because the banana is in two pieces. Broken, screamed the boy, you broke it! I said something like oh dear and then he kicked me - not hard, but the mother was mortified. You shouldn't kick the lady, she said. He rushed at me and kicked again. It's ok, I said, I know what it's like. Meaning not just the situation of trying to manage with two little children, a double buggy in a shop, tantrums and such, but also the broken banana and how hard it might be to explain why that mattered. His vision, I am guessing, was to have eaten it all of a piece with one half peeled, holding the other half in his fist as he ate. I used to give them to my children as snacks and sing (an old TV advert) "when you feel like having a snack - unzip a banana!" A small flourish as I handed the half unzipped fruit over for eating. Or I would cut it up into pieces with orange, apple and grapes, set the plate on the living room floor and call it a fruit pic-nic. I think I was lucky in that my kids were really quite easy to please, not particularly faddy or fussy about food. But sometimes one didn't get it right. My daughter coveted the packed lunches she saw her friends bring to school and my worthy wholemeal sandwiches with lettuce and tomato falling out were not the thing. She wrote me a note saying, plese can i hav a packlunsh wit wite bred a bisgit and a jingk in a bottel. You have to try and get what you want in life.

There isn't any way, said the mother of the small boy, that I can put the banana together again. If she could have she undoubtedly would.

I've been looking at the story of Goldilocks for the purposes of a poem I have been trying to develop. An earlier version of the story had an ugly, dirty, foul-mouthed old vagrant woman as the intruder, rather than a golden-haired little girl. Who knew? Not Bruno Bettelheim, who didn't like the Goldilocks story, believing it to be an escapist one that thwarts the child reading it from gaining emotional maturity. The story of the girl trying one bowl of porridge/chair/bed after another until she gets the one that is "just right" has a certain something satisfying about it. There is a small thrill to be had from the idea of the ugly crone doing the same thing, but on the other hand one has to face the fact that what is sauce for the chick is not necessarily sauce for the older bird.

So you won't find me going around wild-eyed and shrieking, brandishing the naked half of a broken banana - though sometimes, quite honestly, I might feel tempted to do just that.

Hallelujah

2010-12-04T23:25:00.001Z

Essentials

2010-12-02T11:51:00.000Z

There is nothing like a call from one's mater to say that she had run out of smoked salmon and double cream to focus the mind on what is really important. Mr. Signs and I trudged to the end of our road where his car was parked to make the perilous journey into the village for provisions. If no smoked salmon, she said, then Parma ham would do. There was basically nothing fresh to be had - no veg apart from spinach and certainly nothing like bread or milk. But lo! There was one solitary tub of double cream and there was, inexplicably, Parma ham. There is a Sign here somewhere - a clue to the kind of things one should look for in perilous times: luxuries, clearly. If I need to go to the chemist while this weather lasts it will be for Chanel No. 5. For ourselves we stocked up on biscuits, Supernoodles, peanuts, Monster Munch - plus a few sensible things, and I mean to say, who ever starved while there were lentils and rice in the cupboard.

The snow carries on falling and when I look out at the front I can only see a tiny bit of the middle of the Signsmobile as most of it is buried in white. Tomorrow, by hook or by crook, we have to get ourselves to London to meet up with Daughter and others to see Son performing the romantic lead in West Side Story at the Greenwood Theatre in London Bridge. Today all the trains are cancelled, so it has simply got to stop snowing in time to allow us clear passage. We will leave the cat alone, the central heating on. All will be well.

Narnia again

2010-11-30T15:47:00.004Z

I seem to have walked through the wardrobe and found myself here again. The trees are becoming heavy with snow which is predicted to continue. The BBC weather forecast says the temperature here in deepest east sussex will plummet to minus ten by Friday, which is when we are due to go to London to see son play the romantic lead in West Side Story. The launch of a poetry anthology I was to have attended today has been cancelled because of weather. Leaving aside other considerations I would not, in any case, have been able to get my car out of the road.

I am uneasy in my soul - for other reasons than those listed above, and also for no clear reason, but the wintry landscape does serve as metaphor. It is Narnia in the grip of the White Witch, and Aslan is not in evidence. Of course, this is the real advent experience, everything getting darker and more difficult. It is just at this time (at these times) that you have to light the candle, that substance inside you, the wax and wick of it. I have lost my box of household matches, and here - conveniently - is another metaphor. I do not have the werewithal to light the candle. Well, ok, I lit it from the gas stove, but you get my drift.

There is food in the house, enough for today at any rate, and it is warm here. If I could just get myself out of the cold forest. But on the other hand, I have been there before and know the terrain.

Go deep and you are on hard ground.
You know the way the air grows cold,
it’s always winter and the light burns low
in a single lantern on a post, and you are
lost again. Flame won’t flicker, heart won’t beat.

The wardrobe is dreaming you out, pushing you
from the nest of your familiars to wander in the
dark wood. You have no compass. It is good.
Your breath is white, the ghost of owl calls
from the forest. Who walks in the night?

only human

2010-11-26T19:55:00.006Z

London writerfriend came for a Brighton sleepover. We had a delicious time - meaning, of course, nice food, including the oyster late breakfast (creme caramel for desert) followed by a beach walk - the sun always shines on these oyster breakfasts and I am thinking there must be some correlation here. Meaning also that we had a delicious time talking about life and stuff - and The Writing. I have given up on Nano in the sense that I am no longer adding up the word count and realising for the second time of trying that pushing myself in that way is incompatible with having ME/CFIDS and is therefore unlikely to work But on the other hand, having a month where one focusses on the novel, or any creative project, is a good thing and potentially sets something up for (slowly) working on - in bed, eating lots of toast (I listen to you, Ms Pants).

I am reading my first Kindle book. I have had the Kindle (birthday present from Mr. Signs) since September but have struggled to find what I wanted and find it extraordinary and frustrating that I couldn't get books by Tim Winton, Marilynne Robinson, Lorrie Moore and various other good, well-known writers. The book I am reading is not a novel but a kind of buddhist self-help book called How To Be Sick by Toni Bernhard. No surprises, it basically peddles the route of acceptance and positive thinking and it is perhaps a measure of how recently clobbered I have been with Symptoms that I pressed the order button for it, having seen it recommended on various sites. But the writer does herself have M.E. and it is strangely reassuring to be reminded of what we are up against and the importance of being kind and forgiving to oneself. I do not accept, though, the notion that when bad things happen there is inevitably some kind of silver lining or higher purpose. Sometimes shit just happens and it is just shit. And sometimes it is right and fitting to give utterance to this in ways that might not seem immediately compatible with Upekkha (equanimity; a mind that is at peace in all circumstances). And I do have a sneaking suspicion that those who continually harp about the benefits of the Ten Steps and things of that kind do perhaps protest too much and that Metta (loving-kindness, wishing well to others and to ourselves) can manifest in mysterious and apparently contradictory ways because, peeps, we are human and therefore complex, innit. I was at a poetry reading the other day, reading some of my own stuff as well as listening to others. One of the readers announced that she used to write miserable poetry until she discovered - well I won't say what, but you know the kind of thing - and now she just writes happy poetry. Nuff said. And another thing. My current Shrink (whose days are definitely numbered), on learning my interest in the teachings of a certain Jeepers of Nazareth drew my attention to the time he threw over the tables of the money-lenders in the Temple, not the first time my attention has been drawn to this when someone wants to make some point about the Son of God being angry and therefore human, just like us. But I prefer the story about when he blasted the fig tree to damnation for not giving him fruit when he wanted it. Now there's a Son of Man for you.

What was the point I was about to make? I have forgotten. And I have a script to read - something devilishly good written by the daughter. Oh yes.

Birdie

2010-11-19T12:43:00.008Z

Well, so this is how it is, Peeps - yesterday, intending to put up a small post, I wrote:

"Brighton in winter is lovely. Did I know this? Apparently not, or I would not find myself so surprised by unpeopled beaches, the pristine quality of the cold clear air, a kind of hush over everything that allows the natural world to reveal itself more completely.

I reached the afternoon threshold beyond which new creative work is exceedingly difficult and unlikely. But I did really want those oysters, feel something or other that's in them does me good - and I did really want to get out with the sky so suddenly clear."

And then a pigeon flew into the fireplace - a live, beady-eyed beauty of a bird, Father Christmas in pre-festive disguise perhaps, a winged messenger from the gods, or perhaps even the holy spirit him/her/itself (though it was not white so unlikely). But whatever, a bird. And thank goodness for the fire guard in its place, though we have not yet lit a fire in the grate and had e'en the night before the bird's appearance spoken of getting a chimney sweep in preparation.

Bird and I stared at each other, I in my human fashion, straight on, and bird in its fashion, turning its head from side to side. After a short while it got fed up and hopped from the grate, pushing at the fire surround with its beak and pecking at the ground at some ancient bits of grit. Not being a natural bird-grabber, in spite of having done night shifts on a kibbutz turkey farm years back, I went looking for helpful neighbours and found one in the flat immediate above. He was half way to the shower and late for the dentist but promised he would look in. Meanwhile bird and I communed. I dropped some pieces of bread down, which it snaffled up. The eye that beheld me kept filming over as the head tilted in that suggestive way pigeons have. It was a good-looking bird, but still, I wouldn't have wanted to touch it with a barge pole, I had promised the flat to friends for the weekend and had visions of it flying around the room, bashing into the floor to ceiling windows and crapping on the IKEA furniture. Sweet upstairs neighbour turned up, tried to grab the creature through carrier bags but in the end we trapped it under a waste paper basket and shoved a baking tray underneath before setting it free on the balcony.

Now the thing is, I really do have to Read the Signs in this. My paternal grandmother, a Jungian Analyst, died when I was six and foretold her own death by means of a bird (I don't know what kind) falling down her chimney. In her case, though, the bird was dead on arrival whereas my bird was alive-alive-oh! It's a case of 'physician heal thyself' when a Sign-reader can't read a Sign that literally stares her in the face.

So it's up for grabs. Any thoughts?

(M.E. is being a complete bastard at the moment, btw, and is hating any sniff of sustained creative endeavour. Had intended to bang on about that before bird interrupted).

Cheers

2010-11-16T15:46:00.003Z

The writing is going well. I say this based on a good session yesterday when I felt I hit the seam again after much seemingly pointless hacking about. And I reminded myself that meandering digressions, inconsistencies, abrupt changes in tone are all fine while one is at the stage of discovering the story. I have almost completely abandoned the word count thing and my aim is now to simply keep on with this particular idea for the month of November. If I decide to continue with it after that then I will be prepared for it to take a long time. Still working within constraints of M.E. so bursts of energy, if at all, are short and if I don't catch time in the morning then I am unlikely to do it (composition, I mean), later in the day. Evenings may be ok for poetry revision, though, and I have recently done a little of that too. The result - a short poem I am pleased with.

In other, completely different news, I have another little project on the go: briefly, to disengage more effectively with certain people in certain situations; to get myself a set of shiny feathers, the better for allowing negative projections to be water that runs off a duck's back. Small measures, small steps. Any blame knocking around looking for a place to go? We are no longer open for business.

Friends, familiars and gentlefolk - I carouse to your fortune.

Cap'n's Log (2)

2010-11-10T18:56:00.004Z

Things would be easier if Real Life, in the form of hospital appointment, eye infections, empty fridge syndrome etc. did not get in the way of artistic endeavour. To anyone who has recently tried finding a place in a hospital car park - respect, I know what you have endured and wonder if, like me, you have gone through the barrier of one car park, been unable to find a space and then been unable to leave through the exit barrier because you have not paid. But why should you have paid if you haven't been able to park and need to look elsewhere? Not their problem. Not anyone's problem except yours. At reception you have to fill in a four-page form but pootling around in the freezing rain trying to negotiate your way back to the right department (they sent you a letter explaining how to do that but the letter never arrived - not their problem, yours), feeling like Tess of the D'Urbervilles on a particularly inclement day when Angel is nowhere and has in any case dumped you, takes its toll, makes you late and your varifocals keep steaming up. Everyone in the waiting room looks miserable, in spite of the water dispenser (which has in any case run out of plastic cups), and the copy of Literary Review lying next to the Daily Mail. And it does not make the situation any better, here in deepest mid-Sussex, to know that things are immeasurably worse in London. Just saying, because the receptionist told me that, meaning that I should be grateful and count my blessings. I do, actually. Count my blessings. But no reason to tell her that, especially as there was no toilet paper in the loo.

Anyway, back to the endeavour. Eye infection probably not helped by staring at a screen. The writing not helped by it either, so back I go to the notebook and see how the words begin to flow again, probably helped by the company of my two very trusted writing companions, one of whom is also doing Nano. We have decided to do the thing at our pace. Sufficient unto the month the dedication thereof. I will not be aiming to produce fifty thousand words. Today's output was around nine hundred, which is quite respectable.

Update

2010-11-07T14:10:00.003Z

Nothing is static and I am changeable as the wind, and probably less predictable. Artist's Temperament, as before, meaning it is a smokescreen and of course I know that what Artists actually do is get down to work, and I have been and will. A little more sanguine about the project today, having had a small pause as Son has been here collecting things for his new flat. One needs the pauses as much as the wordage. The characters need them, as we need sleep in order to process almost everything. Nanowrimo does not really allow for pauses, but that's ok. It's about getting a certain habit of working into your system, and it's about naming an objective and overcoming fear. So it's all good, and I say this because it is almost certain that there will be trouble ahead, and I won't want to face the music and dance. But I probably will.

Cap'n's Log

2010-11-06T16:34:00.002Z

I have been clocking up the words so all is, one could say, going to plan. But I am not exactly enjoying the process. Truth to tell, other than the grim satisfaction of updating my word count each time I have bashed out the required number, I am feeling quite miserable about it, and the deeper into story I go, the more something or other (I really don't know what) presses on me and in me. It feels strange and personal, like grief - a big word, I know, but I can't think of another that fits. I have not plotted out my story at all but am writing from scratch, working with an idea and allowing it to unfold as it goes along. But it is not a natural, organic unfolding. If nothing emerges, then I make something happen or find something or other to bring to utterance because otherwise I would fall behind, and I have committed to the game, am playing it seriously. There is a sense, though, that in pushing on in the direction it is going I am leaving something else behind, and that something else may be the real, the actual heart of the thing that first suggested itself to me. I am making myself believe that it (the story behind the story) will hold fast.

And I am very tired. It is tiring to do this every day. No strength to spare and the cupboard is perilously bare.