counting backwards

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.

oh sugar!

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.

Birdie

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).

From Brighton notebook:

Woke with lines from Canticle of Francis of Assissi:

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sisters Moon and Stars;
In the heavens you have made them bright
And precious and fair.

Awake with gratitude for particulars. I put my hand on the fabric of the brown sofa, it holds me in the best possible way; birch wood table and chairs, clean white walls, a slow wind moving the curtains: the coloured leaves, someone's design and conception, printed on the linen. People have given their work for these things. Some may have given it with satisfaction, others are just putting in the hours because they need to make a living and this is what they do - assemble the sofa, the bed, pack the curtains, mix the paint to the correct colour of cloud-white. All praise. I am grateful for all of it. There are people alive at this moment who have no idea how much their work has given to me and to the people who come and stay.

And mother-in-law is here, the ceramic things she made, the chair and table she chose. The flat she lived in at the end of her life, before she went into residential care, did not have the grace of this one, I was never happy about it. You could just about see the sea, obliquely, from the balcony, but the inside had a strange, flat personality. One didn't feel one was anywhere. Somewhere to live before you die. But it had no soul. An angel of some kind or another took up residence there, an invisible lodger, a young man, who talked to her about God and Jesus, and she an atheist all her adult life. But she seemed to like him, and she was concerned and insulted on his behalf because he was in chains. They put the chains on him. We never discovered who They were. The Authorities. She wondered openly why it was necessary for him to be kept like that. She seemed, though, to like having him around.

Back on Edge, and going to Germany today - a wedding, a medical appointment, staying in a hotel hard by the old wall, and in an artist's colony.

view from the balcony

It is like being on holiday but without any of the stress that Hadley Freeman experienced this year. Reassuring to read this because I just thought it was me getting old, but she is a chit of a girl and now knows something it takes others a lifetime to learn: going on holiday is a bad idea. Lucy Mangan, another Guardian chit, found this out even earlier. I have becoming almost phobic about airports - not flying, just the airport experience. With our Brighton place we'll never have to go anywhere ever again. All we need to do is pack a small case, climb into the car and drive for about three quarters of an hour. Hey presto - holiday. The gulls ullulate our arrival and call intermittently, possibly for others' delight also and not just ours.

I pushed the boat out, so to speak, taking this photograph from our bit of balcony. What I mean is I have come to terms with the idea that photography will probably never be something I do well, temporarily given up trying to understand how to use my digital camera and snapped this with the mobile. That lovely blue wall at the end there is the sea, obviously. It gives me great pleasure just to know it is there at the end of the road - several roads, actually. I would also have liked to take a photograph of the high windows, how it is to look out of them, capture the feeling of space here. But the essence of the place won't easily be captured, at least not by me. This photo does not begin to give a real impression.

Tomorrow is Brighton Pride. I will be here, but not there.