small hours

If it is already tomorrow, but it is the small hours and you have not yet slept, does putting up a post count as tomorrow's post or yesterday's?  And does it in any case count as a post to say that it is already tomorrow and you have not yet slept? I would say yes.  Especially as I did not post yesterday, which is still today as it does not really become tomorrow until there has been a period of sleep between now and then.  So what I have come here to say is that although it is tomorrow it is actually still yesterday, or it is neither and I am therefore sitting inside the Tardis otherwise known as Signs Cottage wondering if I still exist or whether I slipped into a black hole between the stroke of midnight and the second that followed.  That is not actually what I have come here to say.  But let it stand, because the fact of my saying anything at all is a) proof that I do in fact exist and b) counts as yesterday's post.  So I am still on track.  And anyone who wants to argue with that is, in fact, a mashed potato.  Thank you.

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.

Grr-attitudes

Awake again in the small hours, on a whim I reached into the cupboard of my bedside cabinet and found my journal from 2005. I have been in the habit for a number of years of keeping a fairly perfunctory daily record, but on the Christmas before this particular year I had been given a hefty slab of a thing called The Sacred Journey - subtitle: Daily Journal For Your Soul. It was given as a thank you gift by a student and I appreciated the gesture. But the journal begins and ends with the assumption that lists of gratitudes and affirmations are the order of the day. I entered into the spirit of the thing somewhat half-heartedly - I don't really need reminding of what I'm grateful for and what with one thing and another, the fact that I have kept on keeping on is enough of an affirmation of some kind of faith in life's essential goodness. On re-reading, what stares back at me is the sheer determination of the person who wrote the journal entries. I was teaching classes then and was involved in a number of projects that asked for focus, engagement and creative input, intensely grieving my dad who had died the year before, running the home and fretting about the daughter who had not long left it. I was, by anyone's standards, desperately ill and pretending not to be. There was sabre-rattling fall-out from the dysfunctional wing of extended family. In place of affirmations I began to jot down supper menus for the week to come (dear old spag bol and sausages with coleslaw and baked pots, I kind of miss you). Under monthly/weekly resolutions I put things like "write three poems" and recorded the titles of poems that got writ. I had teeth pulled. I got flu just in time to scupper plans for a writing retreat on a Scottish island. Just ordinary stuff but I don't know - truly I don't - how I managed it. Life now seems stupidly serene in comparison. But some things don't change. Under Gratitudes at the beginning of that year I mentioned Mr. Signs - his constancy, tenderness and brown eyes; my children - for everything they are, have been, will be; true friends; my beloved father.

I would put those same things again now. And life is easier - though I have had to give up things I would rather not, I am grateful. But I would like to sleep through the night on a regular basis. Thanking you, Universe, in anticipation, and lying awake counting one's enemies is often much more effective than counting sheep or blessings. Just saying.

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?)

Sleepless in Brighton

I want you to know that I'm still on duty: keeping the night watch so you can all rest easy in your beds. You probably were already doing that (unless you are one of my transatlantic friends, in which case hello, I hope you are having a nice day), but I'm just saying. It reminds me of working night shifts when I was an auxilliary nurse in a psychiatric unit. We had to do a month of nights every so often and by the end of one of those I felt like one of the undead, a lone, prowling creature of the night (though when I was working shifts there were usually others prowling on the ward and we would play drafts together). By the time I got used to ordinary life it was time for night shifts again.

It is an hour later than it says on blogger, by the way - just so you don't think I'm bleating about being up a few minutes after midnight. Even the seagulls have stopped their ullulations, and the barbequeuing revellers a few gardens away have gone inside. Mr. Signs has been asleep for over two hours, a good thing too as he is off to Shrink school again tomorrow. They are doing Personality Disorders this weekend and he has brought home one of those at-a-glance print-outs. I've been studying it trying to work out whether I'm Borderline, Narcissistic or Schizoid and have decided I'm none of them, especially not Schizoid, but everyone else I know is somewhere on the spectrum.

On the other hand, just looking at the column View of Self: Borderline people are helpless victim/caretaker/unloveable, Narcissists are special/inferior and worthless, Schizoids are outsider, "alien"/independent and self-sufficient/little needy baby.

No question about it, tonight I am definitely Schizoid. And suddenly blissfully tired. It is 1.43, whatever Blogger says.

Sleepless-on-Edge

I am talking to you from the middle of the middle of the night - the small hours when it is no longer today but not yet tomorrow and there is absolutely no-one awake in the whole of the universe except for you. But in this case it's me. I am doing the insomnia shuffle, so you don't have to. Well somebody has to, that is understood. Here is an interesting fact: whenever there is something I particularly want or need to do the next day the odds are that I will have insomnia the night before, either the kind where I can't get to sleep or where I fall asleep only to wake up an hour or two later feeling as though I've just had a couple of double espressos - wired. Today - or last night, if we're going to be precise about this - it was the former. I was tired enough when head went down but once it met pillow - bang: wired. I have a number of remedies up my sleeve for this kind of thing, all manner of things both natural and unnatural, and sometimes the remedies do the trick, especially if I act quickly before insomnia demon has properly grabbed me.

Tomorrow, or later today, in about nine hours time to be exact, I am supposed to meet Mr. Signs, who will be coming straight from Shrink school, at a venue on Brighton sea front where there is to be a university (his) reunion lunch party. I will know some of the people from when we lived in London. It will be jolly, or might be if I were now sleeping instead of talking to you.
Off I go to kick Morpheus's backside.

Sweet dreams, peeps.

Le Weekend

A period of insomnia, the kind that has me waking at three in the morning. Three o'clock, either end of the day, is always difficult, a friend calls it "crucifixion time", and it does seem to nail me to something or other. I try never to plan for anything at three in the afternoon, and when I worked night shifts in a hospital it was the time when all worst things happened. But last night, after another trip to IKEA that lasted until closing time (I won't explain, believe me you won't want to know), I was so overtired I couldn't actually get to sleep until nearly three. I then woke four hours later, and decided to seize the day: swim, writing session, food shop. I bought two large rainbow trout from the new local fishmonger who catches them locally and Mr. Signs cooked them Meuniere-style, while I slept, and we had them for supper. Being vegetarian now (apart from fish), this amount of concentrated protein left me feeling strangely breathless, as though I myself were a fish out of water gasping for my own element. I didn't like it - the feeling, I mean. The fish was actually delicious. And this evening I've been re-drafting a poem where trout came in the form of some creature's mottled skin.

A Lewes workshop day tomorrow, and much else to get done. Monday we spend our first night in the Brighton flat. Excited.

Signs and Blunders

It isn’t good to fall asleep after one in the morning and wake up shortly after four. It gets worse when you take your second herbal sedative and it has no effect, dawn comes as dawn always does and it’s too late for the last-resort 2mg valium. I think Fleur Adcock does a good job of nailing the condition in her poem Things:

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse
and worse.

In my particular case, though, it isn’t just the worse things that come stalking in but the stupid trivial things and the whole catalogue of mundane tasks that need to be addressed at some point. True, the vegetable rack in the kitchen has been falling apart for a long time and we should get a new one – but fretting about this and similar at five a.m.? I should talk about this with Shrink, obviously, but he is one of the Things I fret about. Our relationship is going through a testing time, a bit like that of a newly married couple when the honeymoon is over and the bickering begins. Well never mind, I’m sure this is all very auspicious and we’ll carry on slugging it out until the day I shake hands with him Woody Allen-style and agree to call it a draw.

Meanwhile, it may or may not be the end of the world, but everyone keep calm. Something is happening underground – a collision of protons that will “usher in a new era of physics”. People are worried that the planet is going to be destroyed in the process, but no-one has actually gone around waving banners or chaining themselves to railings and the end is very probably not nigh. We carry on, folks – thinking about property prices, the effects of climate change, remembering to bring used polythene bags with us to the supermarket, putting plastic milk bottles in the special tray at the top of the wheelie bin and taking the daily vitamin pill at breakfast. We carry on having birthdays and saving the gift-wrapping paper for future use.

If there is no Big Bang, that doesn't necessarily mean there is nothing to worry about - the end might come like a slow fertilisation and a period of waiting while the thing that is to happen forms itself before hatching out. But as far as I’m concerned it’s not over till the fat lady sings and Signs and Wonders appear in the sky, and I do not count the fact of relentless rain and miserable skies as either a Sign or a Wonder. It is either global warming or just one of those things; it scuppered the holiday plans of anyone hoping for a sunny break in Cornwall and it ruined a number of homes but we go on. I think, all things considered, I am glad about this.

When it does come, the last breath, the bang, the end of all the cycles of birth and rebirth and the beginning of nothing or a fall into destruction, I would like to have the opportunity to say goodbye – not just to the sky, forest, lakes and all the people that watch, run, swim and breathe, but to the particulars: polythene bags; a metal key ring shaped like a dolphin; a withered carrot in the blue vegetable rack that has been coming apart so the trays keep falling on each other; the bird that flew against my friend’s window one day and left on the pane of glass a shadow: the impression of its face.

Moving my Eyeballs

A couple of weeks ago I had a session with someone who showed me how to lie on the floor, breathe and move my legs a bit whilst doing some boring pelvic floor thing reminiscent of ante-natal classes. Anyway, I thought I’d acquitted myself rather well so felt justified in saying I was now doing Pilates. Today I went to a class in a local sports centre, dressed in my trusty purple trews, having been told that the class would be gentle as it was for Older Women – and yes, they did all look older than me. But even in the warm-up session I could tell that these babes were not just fitter than me, I wasn’t even in their league. Just holding my arms out to the side for more than a second was a challenge, let alone the other things that came after. I lay on the mat while Pink Floyd played on the CD player. I felt like Edina Monsoon from Absolutely Fabulous who got herself a personal fitness trainer but found that the only thing she was able to do was move her eyeballs. I could have done with Pats at my side to tell me well done when, after ten minutes, I grimaced my apologies and crept away. Which just goes to show that you can’t always tell a book from its cover (though these days, actually, you often can). I mean I look, you know, more or less ok. The muscles will not have it, though. I am living a double life, the mind seeming to do one thing and the body another. Of course, I’m used to living a substantial amount of time out of the body, else I’d have gone quite bonkers before now. But stone me, it’s unwelcoming when I go into it.

Also, I am quite done in with lack of sleep. Some say the moon has been playing tricks, what with the recent eclipse and all, and that this accounts for everything. But then everyone would be walking around bog-eyed, and I can see they are not. The moon just has it in for me, as I suspected all along.

Something is Illuminated (but I may be mistaken)

Somebody has to do it I suppose, the night watch, but I am hoping this is going to be a temporary run. Knives in the head is not a good feeling to wake up to, well nothing much is at three in the morning. Then, when I’m properly awake, it’s the usual routine: tea, toast, cigarette, trip over cat, read, brood, have illuminating thoughts which I should really write down and turn into a book. I suspect, though, that the Illuminating Thoughts of a Temporary Insomniac might turn out to be the kind of thing that you think is quite brilliant when you are in the process of writing and high on something – and when you take a sober look at it the next morning you find that all you have done is write your name or I love Marmite over and over.

But still, I feel moved to share: I have decided to ditch the Doppelganger woman I have been carrying around as main character in the Thing that I have been sporadically working on. I haven’t killed her off, just replaced her with someone I would rather work with who isn’t quite so much like me in the details. We had no contract so I can do what I want. Characters have no rights – well, this one hadn’t really been around long enough to assert them. I think it was the Australian writer Kate Grenville who said that you didn’t have to like your characters but you had to love them, allow for human complexity, give them respect. I don’t think that this was going to happen with Doppelganger. I say she was like me, but she was a less interesting version, to my mind; and obviously it's my mind that matters as I was writing her, not the other way round (just saying, though I will have to eat my words if I discover that she is the real author and I'm just a figment of her imagination). I liked her enough, but I was never going to love her.

This new one is a different kettle of fish. She likes, for example, shopping, and would never wear something without a name – and not just any name. Even knickers have to come in a perfumed bag from La Senza. Bigger things are Fiorucci, Chloe, Diesel, shoes by Prada. She feels it says something about her, the names she wears (don’t be expecting complexity just now – trust me, it will unfold). Some people will know where I stand with shopping. I am Pricerite and Heart Foundation and do not know anyone who cares as little about brand name as I do and means it*. My pale blue Adidas shell suit which came to me new, was one of the few branded items I have possessed, a gift in the eighties when they were briefly fashionable. I wore it for over ten years (it improved with age, took on a strange, crushed elegance) until the shiny fabric began to crumble. I become attached to my old clothes and wear them until they fall from me of their own accord. It is the reverse with her: once a garment has become part of her, loses the pristine, just-bought, never-been-touched smell of the shop she begins to itch for something else. She has deep cupboards filled with names, all neatly folded, reeking faintly of Shalimar and Donna Karan’s “Mist”. If we went for coffee together we would laugh about all this and secretly feel sorry for each other.

Anyway. These are notes for myself really, the shopping isn’t going to come into it, I’m just saying that she is different – though I am lending her a number of things from my life. The thing is I know her, we have met before. She is a character from something I was writing a few years ago and when she knocked and asked for the part I gave it to her at once because we work together well and she has not really been properly put to the test as we all must be at one time or another, if we can bear it. She seems to be asking for this and I have more confidence in her than in Doppelganger - though of course one can never be sure. The idea has been hovering for the past day or so.

When I spoke about illuminating thoughts, I didn’t necessarily mean for you, dear reader who has read this far and may be expecting something more in the way of epiphany and revelation. I’m just doing the night watch, mulling, thanks for listening. Hope your night was unbroken.

*with the possible exception of Ms Pants - who is currently profiled on Normblog.

The Small Hours

Times are, in life’s long sojourn, when there are good reasons to stay up until the dawn chorus and the coming of a new day’s light; I think you know what I mean. Well, eye infection, neuralgia and general anxiety disorder aren’t one of them, though strictly speaking I should say that my anxieties are of a particular rather than general nature and hardly a disorder. It’s just that at three in the morning almost everything can seem like a disorder. It is the hour of the Lord of Misrule who whispers in your ear that there is trouble ahead and things can only get worse; I think you know what I mean. So up you jump, saying bollocks to the Lord of Misrule, disturbing the cat who asks nothing but to be left sleeping on the landing outside your bedroom (or at the end of your bed, depending on what takes her fancy), you make yourself a cup of the very best Ceylon tea (unbleached bags, organic, the best), a couple of slices of wholemeal toast with butter and Marmite and, if you are really in the mood for sticking two fingers up at life, the universe and everything, you light a cigarette (preferably Marlborough Menthol, a mysterious manifestation as you are no longer a smoker) and go against house rules by smoking it indoors. Tomorrow you will apologise to Him Upstairs sleeping for the stale tobacco smell but although it is light it is not yet tomorrow. It is not today or yesterday either. Anything goes. The cat, who thinks she is your soul and probably is, blinks herself awake and pads around in the wake of your footsteps. It has thrown the routine whereby she comes and sings you awake in the morning, but whatever you do is ok by her.

In the small hours, things happen, heat up, cool down, become wonderful or terrible. Or nothing happens, and you wake up to the night side. I once worked in a hospital psychiatric unit. Night shifts were when you came up against the true soul-life of the people there, staff as well as patients, the line was sometimes thinly drawn in the witching hour when there were no schedules to structure us, no meal times, doctor’s rounds or occupational therapy. The sectioned schizophrenic who hovers around the nurses’ station is just a girl called Mary Ann who loves a boy called Ivan and waits for him to come and fetch her away from this terrible and lonely place, this life. The charge nurse is homesick for St. Lucia and steals amphetamines to keep himself awake, barbiturates to get his head down. He makes himself some porridge with syrup and shakes his head. This life. The full-time insomniacs push draughts around a chequered board and smoke (times were) in the day room where there is permanent Radio One, you can’t switch it off and we all know the advertisements by heart and join in with the jingles, and in spite and because of it all we keep each other company in the small hours where nothing happens, until something happens – a scream, an “incident,” an emergency admission, to break the night and bring on the day, and real-time kicks in.

Keeping watch in the small hours, one’s thoughts (the doors) become a bit unhinged; but once I stayed awake all night just to watch the sun come up, to catch the moment of first bird and light. It seemed to me, at that moment with the night vision still on me, nothing short of miraculous. You can’t, though, go through the day with your eyes seeing nothing but doom or glory. You’d go mad, or become a prophet, or a poet like Christopher Smart with his extraordinary Jubilate Agno. Now there’s a thought.