The Spin And The Shine

Well I thought I had moved into what is euphemistically called a Better Patch, but I might have slithered back a bit.  Not actually into the Pit itself, but none of us (I am talking M.E. obviously) wants to be headed in that direction.  Still - it helps to put a spin on things.  That is probably true for most of us and has the virtue of being good for everyone else as well as oneself.  Some might say it is almost a duty.  In my church-going days (as a practising-because-I'm-crap-at-it-Christian) I liked the part where the priest said, Lift up your hearts!  The congregational response to that is, We lift them to the Lord, but I think just the lifting up in itself is probably good enough, and I bet my best china cake plate that the Lord concurs.  I would say that putting a spin is just doing that, really, and very much hope that it doesn't amount to the same thing as Positive Affirmations, which don't engage the heart and are therefore just lies.  There is no need to positively affirm anything.  Even if you are of the 'Life Is Shit And Then You Die' school,  heart-lift is achievable even if it is in spite of rather than because of.  Nothing wrong with that. 

I recently became Facebook friends with a certain well-known journalist (erstwhile 'hip, young gunslinger' at the NME, to give you a clue).  We don't know each other in RL but have a couple of FB friends in common so I took my chances and she is of a generous disposition.  There are many things to enjoy about her various writings and pronouncements and, speaking for myself, one can use a bit of vicarious cheer now and then, or even on a daily basis.  For a start, she begins each day with Boker TOV, Motekim! which is Hebrew for Good Morning, Darlings!  It somehow works particularly well in the Hebrew and gives a small shine to the moment, even when it is followed by a youtube link to a band singing a song one doesn't share an enthusiasm for.  As she lives in Brighton and loves eating, drinking and good cheer, I had a fleeting fantasy of meeting up with her at English's Oyster Bar, chewing the gossip plus several courses of delicious things and drinking Black Velvet, which is a champagne and Guiness combo the mater introduced me to at Sheekey's (another fish place) in London. You can't let too much reality bleed into a good fantasy so let us assume that I can still drink tankards full of Black Velvet, that I would not be fazed when we were joined by a group of her sparkly-witty friends, and that when I spoke about how I mostly write about sex and death (with the definite emphasis, these days, on death) I would make it sound like the fun kind.  I might also lob in that I was recently long-listed for the National Poetry prize (poem all about someone choosing his coffin), though I suspect that doing this would neither impress nor endear me.  In the end, my inner introvert would fuck things up. I would ask the wrong kind of questions - the kind that lead to dark places, as you'd expect of a sex-and-death merchant - and I would wince if the jokes became too cruel.  Or it would be nine o'clock and I would suddenly turn into a slipperless M.E. pumpkin.  Ah well - fun while it lasted.

But what am I going on about?  For this very evening Mr. Signs and I will be going out to a new gastropub eatery recommended by my friend the Cake Lady, in honour of his successfully reaching another milestone in Shrink-training.  And also, tomorrow being Mothering Sunday, today is Mother's Eve and a fine and proper time to celebrate.  I have already cheated and opened the beautiful card from my daughter, with words that bring a shine to the heart.  Sometimes you don't need the spin.  It's just all there, and manifest. 

Laila tov, motekim.

***

Being Mrs. Pepperpot

I am in Brighton getting the flat prepared for people coming to stay.  After driving here I knew I could go to the nearest Co-op and back because the walk would be flat, but no more.  They had no lettuce or any vegetable other than Savoy cabbage and the bread was Warburtons thick sliced - perfect for bacon.  So, a supper of bacon sandwiches with decaf tea, two cherry tomatoes.  This morning, fruit and coffee plus more of the same, or I may get a takeaway from the Moroccan salad bar. Then back to the forest for my book group.

I have been thinking about Mrs. Pepperpot who is Pepperpot by name and also shrinks to the size of one, conveniently or inconveniently depending on one's perspective, when her husband is out at work.  By hook or by crook she has to negotiate the tasks of the day, e.g. housework and the making of pancakes against seemingly insurmountable obstacles.  Fortunately she has this gift, that she is able to converse with animals and seems generally in harmonious relationship with the natural world, and even inanimate objects respond to her energetic commands.  Her predicament may have some resonance for someone with moderate M.E. who might appear to the world as a normally-functioning person and might well choose Mrs. Pepperpot's affliction over her own, for Mrs. P is in robust good health, whatever her size.  She also brings a cheerful acceptance to her predicament and this helps her to be creative and inventive.  Well one does what one can, and I enjoyed the bacon sandwiches.  But it is half past nine in the morning and I can already feel myself about to shrink.

License to Jump Queues

Oh for goodness sake, where have I been! Drawing out Lent, I should think not, as though privation were good for the soul, for this soul I mean (because no it isn't) or as though I am Greta Garbo, gawdssake, with a big loud megaphone blaring that I Vant To Be Alooooone! When actually, I don't, not really. I like the community of disparate souls that gather around the flames of blogfire and it wasn't my intention to banish myself forever to wander in the dark forest toute seule. At least not yet. At least I don't think so. And I say this with whatever shreds of strength are left to me by this wretched chronic Condition of mine, which I will neither go on about at great length nor seek in any way to deny, and this is quite a trick to pull off, so give me a few gold stars for this. I am not sure that I have been earning gold stars for much else. I have written some poems and taken them to workshops, I have given attention to workshopping other people's poems also and this continues to feel meaningful to me - in other words, like real work. And I am honing a skill that I have yet to find a title for, but let us call it Giving Myself License - GML for short. As things stand, this basically means that I park in places that strictly speaking I shouldn't, but I hope to find creative ways of extending this and will welcome all suggestions.

Went to see my GP the other day. Come back - what do expect me to blog about on my first post, post-Lent, and I can file it quite reasonably under the label Life and Stuff. Ahem. GP has been away from the practice for a while as he became the father of twins. A photograph showed from behind a box of index cards and I saw the crowns of two smooth baby heads. He looked tired but did not mind that I had come with a list of ten or so things. He is by no means the brightest button in the box but he is unfailingly courteous and does what he can with the limited resources allowed by the NHS. There needs to be dialogue between him and the specialist I see from time to time, and in order for this to happen I have to be on the case or things get stuck. So yes, much time is given over to health matters. I don't mind. I am still hopeful that if some of the issues underlying my symptoms can be addressed then a measure of wellness may be given back to me and will never believe that it was part of Anyone's masterplan that I should come into the world and be so ill for so long. When things go wrong, when something vital is lacking or malfunctioning you try and put it right and you go on trying while there is hope and while you can. That is all.

Meanwhile, you carry on and develop strategies. One of mine is to give myself license to break minor rules. Call it covert bad behaviour of the mostly uncriminal kind. If there is a queue anywhere I will, if possible, try to jump it. I park my car beside petrol pumps at Tesco Express when I just need some shopping but no petrol. I park in the bays at the back of the doctor's surgery, which are only supposed to be used by staff, when there are no spaces at the front. I do these things to save my strength and because there are times when walking up an incline can make me much worse, and standing in queues will always do that (if interested, see Orthostatic Intolerance). So yes, the other day I parked at the back of the surgery. Plenty of space there, no-one spotted me, no harm done. And you see that photograph at the top? That was taken by Mr. Signs on a lovely day in Brighton when we were having a walk and fancied a cone of Mr. Marrocco's ice cream (length of queue is testimony to how good it is). We went to the back of the queue, as one does. Then I asked Mr. S to wait while I went to investigate. Are you going to try and jump the queue? he asked. He knows me, doesn't really approve but is also realistic. Make mine a raspberry sorbet, he said. I hovered around the glass counter looking as though I was studying the various different flavours on offer. There was a kerfuffle of people choosing things and a bevy of scoop-wielding shop assistants. One of them spotted me and asked what I wanted. I walked out with two cones - simples. On our walk back we spotted the same person that had stood in front, still waiting and reckoned I must have saved us about half an hour.

Am I a bad person? This is rhetorical and not really up for discussion, at least not in my hearing. And, like I said, suggestions welcome.

***

Emergency Soup

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.

Substance

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.

**

Only Connect

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.

**

five reasons why you should follow me on Twitter

- 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.

Ravelling

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?

***

Hardcore

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.

breathing the spring

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.

Prognosis (2)

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.

esto nobis praegustatum in mortis examine

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.

all you need is .....

(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.

Virtual RL

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.

Changes

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.

Broken Banana

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.

Cheers

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.

not the last days

I barely had three hours sleep last night so am probably not to be held responsible for whatever might incontinently pour out of my fingers - as the actress said to the bishop. Or as the demented bishop might have said to the actress.

We went to IKEA again the other day - not saying that this accounts for lack of sleep, but just saying. It almost smelled like home though, so clearly something (apart from delinquent immune system) must be malfunctioning. We pushed the leaky boat out and bought the most expensive version of the Poang chair and footstool - with sheepskin cover - which is a clear statement, on my part at any rate, of a plan to couch-potato in extreme comfort when in the Brighton flat. To work, to work, autumn is rushing towards us like an ardent lover. Oh, Autumn! (as daughter, who prefers the summer, poignantly said on her Facebook page last year). Ask of me what you will, and I promise to deliver, but if I don't never blame me. This is one of the reasons why I need the new furniture - so I can Poang-potato after sustained endeavour in the field of words. In the last couple of days I have bashed out over five thousand words - well, copied them out from notebook, so they took longer than that to write. I am not sure where it is going and (almost) don't care any more what becomes of the writing, so long as the writing is happening and just one of the stories that press on me to be written are set down, for if it is not then I don't know how I will account for myself at the everlasting gates when St. Peter, with his great black ledger book, comes to do the reckoning. Not that I plan to be meeting St. Peter any time soon. I feel sure that life has more flotsam to chuck in my direction before that happens.

I am writing a story with a protagonist who is as little like me as it is possible to be, and whenever I write it I feel I am playing truant from the story I was writing last year in NaNo before I was clobbered with Swine flu. This probably helps me to keep writing it because I can trick myself into thinking that it's nothing very important, just something I'm doing for now. I need tricks like this because the thought of beginning another big thing and leaving it unfinished might make me lose heart, and if I do that then it really is all over and you may as well tell St. Peter to open the book.

What did you do in your last days on earth?

I reclined on my Poang chair and watched the boxed set of In Treatment.

And did this enrich the lives of any one of your fellow brethren?

It certainly passed the time agreeably for me - and that's not nothing!

Clang.

(It's suddenly gone very quiet. St. Peter - are you there?)

- and he is walking

I am in the classroom, writing with my fountain pen in the grey London County Council notebooks. I dip the pen in the ink well that nestles in the hole in my desk. When it runs dry Miss Routledge fills it again. You have to be good at writing to be given a fountain pen, some people still use pencils because their handwriting is not neat enough or their spelling is bad. Writing and spelling are my best things and arithmetic is my worst. Chandra sits beside me, she is my desk partner and she hasn't yet been given a fountain pen.

We made friends when I told her that I liked curry and rice. Shyly she told me that she and her sister ate curry and rice at home every day because her family was from Pakistan. She invited me to her house for tea. We ate rice with dall and a sauce with chicken wings that was so hot it made my tongue feel bitter and burned but I ate it anyway and said it was nice. Then her sister gave me a piece of something hard and white that tasted of old boiled milk, Chandra said it was a sweet. She lived in a basement flat where the electric lights were always on because there was hardly any light from the outside, and the electric heater was on, three bars of it, even in summer because it was cold in the basement and Chandra said her mother and older sisters felt cold all the time in England.

Chandra is writing in her notebook with a pencil, her fingers pressing on the stub as she concentrates. The paper has flecks of brown and shiny yellow. Miss Routledge says that paper is made of trees. I can see pieces of the tree in Chandra's notebook. I can see the words she has written: Humpty Dumpty is walking and he is going to see the wite rabit and he is walking and he is going to the play grond and he is walking.When Chandra came to my house I read her some of Alice in Wonderland, the part where the White Rabbit makes a flustered appearance, saying oh my paws and whiskers.
Rabbits don't wear gloves, said Chandra.
It's just a story, I said.
But rabbits can't wear gloves, said Chandra, because they haven't got fingers.
So I stopped reading and we went to the playground.

Humpty Dumpty is going to the swing and he is going to the bech and he is going to the party and he is walking.

In the summer holidays Chandra and her sisters went to Southend for a day and that was their summer holiday.
It isn't a holiday if you only go for a day, I said.
It was a holiday, she said, we went on the beach and we had ice cream.
I decide to copy everything that Chandra writes. I want to know what it is like being Chandra.

Humpty Dumpty is walking and he is going to the shop and he is walking and he is going to the play grond and he is walking.
I whisper, you already wrote that he is going to the playground. Chandra looks at me and smiles. Then she shrugs and carries on writing.
Humpty Dumpty is going to the bech and he is walking.
Chandra furrows her brow when she writes, she gives it all her concentration. Humpty Dumpty is walking, she writes. I begin to notice a pattern - an activity, or a particular destination, followed by the repetition of Humpty Dumpty walking. He doesn't seem ever to arrive at the beach, the playground, the rendezvous with the white rabbit, he is in a state of perpetual motion, walking always intending somewhere or other. The walking, though, is the thing, and we come back to it, Chandra and I, as I faithfully copy her words, mesmerised by the seeming purposelessness of Humpty Dumpty's walk, stirred to some extent by his persistence in always finding some new destination. I picture his large egg shape, eyes open and hopeful, his short legs with tartan trousers moving quickly, arms out at his sides.
Miss Routlege is standing behind me, looking over my shoulder.

What is this rubbish you are writing, she says? What do you think you are doing?

the day today

I have just eaten a bacon sandwich. This isn't meant as a confession - I don't feel virtuous about being a vegetarian, I just fell into being one because I stopped wanting to eat meat. Why it should feel more ok to have the occasional bit of cured pork rather than, say, a fillet steak (which I used to adore), I don't know; one of the reasons I stopped wanting to have meat was because I began to shudder at the notion of eating living, sentient creatures. And I once had an intense eye-to-eye encounter with a pig on an organic farm that I can only describe as a meeting of souls. Ah, go ahead, tell me I've got the soul of a pig! But the pig in question was a very intelligent one and quite clearly had a soul that was finer and infinitely more sympathetic than many human creatures one encounters (or perhaps I'm just turning into a veggie/misanthrope type). We had a connection.

It's a symptom of how things are. My already-delinquent immune system is misbehaving. I'll skip the dreary facts, but one of the side-effects is that I don't actually seem to be properly absorbing nutrients. I eat plenty fish, pulses, tofu and what-have-you but nothing ever seems to hit the spot. No wonder I'm thinking about cake and chocolate all the time. Or is that just greed? No, shut up, inner malicious voice, the malabsorption thing is an established fact - and greed also perhaps, but shut up anyway. I need to be kind to myself, and that means schokolade, kaffee und kuchen mit the odd roll-up cigarette (how the devil did that creep in?) and glass of prosecco. Actually, boringly, it means none of those things, it means regular, small, bland, low-fat, nutrient-dense snacklets, it means calming everything down, not doing the regular swimming thing, immune system clearly sees this as a call to arms.

I went into the sea twice with Daughter on the weekend. There is simply nothing like it and how many days in the year can one do that in Blighty anyway? Today, back on the Edge, the wind is gusting about, bending the top of our remaining cherry tree, reminding me that we must get it cut back this year. Everything wants to become forest here. The gravel path that leads to the lawn and apple tree is covered with bracken and something else that I don't know the name of.

It's too early for autumn.