First Writes

There were eighteen of us around a long arrangement of formica-topped tables. It was October, the sky darkening outside the tall, school-room windows. The teacher was reluctant to have the lights switched on. She said we should buy a small notebook, keep it by us and jot down images, as though we were taking snapshots. Jotting in the notebook was a good thing to do and we should make a habit of it. She asked us to think back to a place from childhood, capture an image and then write about it.

I wrote about a knitted lion. It had an orange and brown woollen mane, two red circles made of felt sewn onto its cheeks and black embroidered eyes. I wrote that the lion appeared to be smiling, that the eyes followed me around the bedroom and that its face shone in the moonlight that streamed through the narrow window above a forest of fir trees. The moon made the lion turn its head and look at me. It's face was also moon-like and looked a little pale behind the red cheeks. It took me in and knew my thoughts, and though it smiled, because this was the expression that had been stitched onto its face, the smile carried menace.

You have a good eye for detail, said the teacher. This is well-remembered and really evokes the inner world of a child.

The lion was not, in fact, from childhood. It sat on a pillow in my bedsit. Someone I knew had made it and generously given it to me as a present because I liked it so much. And it carried no menace in its being, I made that up to lend a sense of drama to the scene. The teacher said she enjoyed the disturbing vision of the apparently innocuous knitted lion as threatening and able to read thoughts. I sensed that the other students were less impressed but they were, in any case, waiting for their turn to read. If each of us took five minutes that would amount to one and a half hours, and several people took much longer than that.

Eventually lights were switched on. They were fluorescent, made our complexions look green and gave me a headache. I understood why the teacher had waited so long. One person after another gripped their notebooks or pieces of lined paper torn from some old school book, and read their piece: the teapot that had belonged to a grandmother, how mother had always used it for special occasions and one day a bit of spout was chipped off; an actual photograph - portrait of the artist as a young Scout, ready to dib dib dib and dob dob dob, and all about the different knots he learned to tie. I didn't mean you to think of an actual photograph, said the teacher - but that's good, that's very good.

I know, said the student, looking crushed, but that was the image that came to mind. He thought she thought he was being stupid.

Yes, she said, and it's very good - I just thought I'd point that out in case others had misunderstood.
 I didn't misunderstand, he said.

He was not the only one to refer to an actual photograph. There was a family holiday snapshot of a beach and another of a woman's father. The father was smiling in the photograph and a young child (the writer of the piece) sat on his knee.

He came into my bedroom most nights and touched me, and told me not to tell my mother. When I was fourteen he used to come and inspect my breasts, he -

You don't have to read it if it's upsetting for you, said the teacher

- tried to have intercourse with me. I will never forget the smell.

Sometimes, said the teacher, an image can hold all kinds of disturbing things. She looked at her watch and noticed that we had run overtime by almost an hour. Could the others perhaps wait until next time?

It was a mistake I would sometimes also make when I began to teach creative writing - holding work that students had written in class until next time. Already I was storing all this up for future use, taking stock of the situation: time-management was important; eighteen in a class was too many; everyone has something to say.

in the swim (3)

I've cancelled my membership to the exclusive country club swimming pool place. I couldn't rely on the pool temperature to be cool enough - swimming in warm chlorine soup was doing me no good at all and no amount of fluffy towels and Molton Brown body lotion was going to make that better. So today I went swimming in my local leisure centre and it was lovely - big and light with a sprinkling of children (most being at school), a few up-and-downers putting in the lengths, parents with toddlers or babies in the little pool on the side and a big boy with the face of an angel who wanted to show me how he could throw his locker key to the bottom of the pool and then retrieve it. No two-for-one pamper ladies and gents exchanging confidences in the jacuzzi or reading Marie Claire and Bella in the loungers between massage and exfoliation.

Thinking about the whole pamper-package and what it is that draws people, I have decided that it's a baby thing - about being treated like one, I mean. You offer yourself up to hands that minister to the more hidden parts of your body, your skin is creamed and pummelled and afterwards you are swaddled in big white towels and dressing gowns, all relaxed and ready for sleep. The only thing missing is a bottle or dummy and favourite teddy. Nothing wrong with that - or, as Miss Jean Brodie might have said: for those that like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. I'm sounding snooty, aren't I? Sour grapes because I couldn't hack it in the amniotic waters. I'd have been happy to carry on, all the difficulties because of M.E. notwithstanding, it was easy and convenient - expensive, but when you add it up not so very much more expensive than going regularly to the leisure centre, if one goes three times a week.
I'm glad to be back with the riff-raff though. Never quite comfortable with privilege, especially the pretend kind. It was as much as I could do to stop myself singing

I want to swim with common people,
I want to swim with common people - like you

On my way out I saw angel-face sitting by himself in the cafeteria eating a packet of crisps.
Bring on the revolution, Peeps.

in the swim

It's an experiment that might fall flat on its face or lay me flat, but so far so (tentatively) good. I swam four times last week, no ill effects and possibly some good ones. Muscle pains/fatigue are there, no worse than usual though, painkillers as per, when needed. I am being very careful indeed, bringing movement in, listening to what happens. I begin by swimming a little. The muscles become resistant and painful very quickly, but I have made an interesting, and possibly significant (for me), discovery. If I spend time sitting in the jacuzzi, which is very warm (and I only like it gentle, no energetic frothing), I can then go back and swim some more and the muscles feel lightened, cleared of the resistance. After the second swim I go back into warmth under the shower. The activity is about all I can substantially manage in the day, and I so there is constant danger of overdoing.

It occurs to me that I might be doing a version of the dreaded Graded Exercises. But what I am doing is particular to me at this moment in time, comes out of my own inner promptings rather than a prescription. It is not a "method" I would urge or advise for another PWME and I can only do it because I am relatively free of other commitments. And it's risky. I'll keep you informed.

Life goes on apace, though, it really does, it is still horribly cold but we are going into spring and sometimes I feel moved to ask everything to slow down - the seasons, the passage of time, how seeds fall, take root, things come to fruition - because I can't keep up. Like the poor frog prince who chased after the princess once he had restored her golden ball, and she cheated him by running off. Come back, he said, I can't run as fast as you. Come back with my life, your promise to me, turn me into what I was before this - a properly functioning human being. Well perhaps not like the frog prince, but this is extempore, on the hoof, it's a blog post dammit, and I am soon off to the Smoke, not even dressed yet, but there was something else I wanted to bang on about, because of a recent conversation with a friend:

Other People - doncha hate 'em? You know what I'm talking about: Les Autres. Of course I don't mean Us, dear reader, how could I? We are we, and Les Autres are the Others. You know, the ones that get in the way and bug us, lay their infernal acting-out-of-unconscious-unresolved-issues trips on us, or are just annoying and get in the way. How dare they. The bloke who fixes my car, for example, does the service, MOT etc. He suffers from a chronic anger condition which means that whatever the situation, anyone who deals with him is going to be given the 'you are a really bad person' message. I took the car to him the other day because it doesn't seem to be accelerating as it should. He took this as a complaint about his services, me saying that he hadn't done his job properly at the last service. Didn't matter what I said, the blood rushed to his face (it always does), he pressed his lips together, became defensive, looked mutant. When are you going to learn, says Mr. Signs, that trying to appease someone with anger issues never works because they want a reason to be angry and you're just spoiling it for them.


And then there are the annoying OPs, the ones that gather in gaggling groups (in nice, quiet swimming pools, for example, when I said I was the only riff raff I was wrong) and talk - shout - about their sex lives, depilatory creams, who ratted on who, they are like OPs who talk loudly into mobile phones on trains, no idea that anyone else might be around having their psychic space violated. And don't get me started on OPs who come storming into the scene with expectations and demands, those with a sense of entitlement who feel that the world (and you in particular) should make up for something or other in their lives that has nothing to do with you - no. Well that will do, for the moment. Said my piece. But watch this space.

I'm off to stay with my lovely daughter and her boyfriend, looking forward to the vegetarian meal she is cooking for me, tomorrow being mother's day.