Loungewear Monday

I spent the morning re-fashioning a poem for tomorrow's workshop.  Result: something better than the original but I can't be sure, I am still too close to it.  I would have liked to carry on with other writing but really, a morning's work is the most I could do and in order to do it I had to not get properly dressed but go straight to it after my morning coffee before the small egg-timer of energy substance ran out.

I am still in my brown yoga suit, which serves for sleepwear on cold nights and also as loungewear in the daytime when one is not going out or expecting to receive guests.  Loungewear is a delicious word, all the better for being a euphemism and, in the context of my life at any rate, completely ridiculous, especially as I do not have a lounge but a sitting room.  Leisurewear was also a contender but perhaps taking it a step too far and when I am doing Leisure I get properly dressed.  I find that I am missing my purple 'crushed-silk-effect' shellsuit trousers and can't remember why I eventually decided they had to go.  I could wear them anywhere - in bed, outdoors, with a sweatshirt or with cashmere jumper and pearls.  I have looked for something similar on eBay, without success.

There is a thin layer of snow on everyone's garden shed.  Winter is not loosening its grip yet.

back to purple

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

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

**

rolled purples

There is something about being cold in summer that is much more chilling than being cold in winter. Another day of the claustrophobic and cold white sky weather. Sun seems well and truly blocked out, rain is on the way, I have just switched on the central heating. I grow old, I grow old, I will wear the bottom of my purples rolled – which reminds me, there is more T.S. Eliot on the box tonight. It clashes with a film called Signs, but what do I need to watch a spooky film about crop circles for? The Signs are spooky enough in my own front garden: there is something wrong with our beautiful apple tree. Some of the leaves have shrivelled and look burnt to a crisp. The tree doctor says if it is caused by insect infestation it will survive, if it is our deadly enemy Honey Fungus the tree will most likely have to be cut down. We lost a silver birch last year to that. This comes hard after the loss of our cherry tree,

two weeks it flowered in my kitchen, the scent of it painful,
like losing a sister,
like taking a bride from the altar, husbandless

– a snippet from work in progress. I observe that when I write about beauty it usually comes with pain and I also observe that I don’t write many funny poems, or if they are funny then it’s not obvious to anyone but me (someone did once say I had a kind of sly humour but neither of us were sure if that was a compliment).

And back to the trees: our next neighbour but one has cut down an ash tree. I’m sure there was a good reason for it but it has quite changed the view when one looks out of the window at the back of the house. There is always a tree issue in these parts, the forest is all around us and everything that is not forest wants to be. What with that and keeping the elementals happy one has one’s work cut out.

It has been a difficult week, I’ve been myaligicmusclebound and mainly housebound – without the former the latter would be fine in my little house, albeit with compromised view, but my neighbour (not the hot cross bun one) has had scaffolding put up by the side of his house which is hard by the side of our house. There have been days of banging, scraping and raucous banter, and I am spoiled with so much silence and birdsong, not used to the noise.

Certainly it is time for the rolled purples.

Sartorial

I still favour my trademark purple shellsuit trousers but have to say that pyjamas are coming a close second, and it is only a pity that one can’t go out in them. I was given a splendid pair of polka dot pyjamas for Christmas, but the ones I really feel connected to (it does take time, I find, to build a proper relationship with clothes) are my red and white flannel ones with tinsel threaded into the weave. I bought them at Peacocks in a post-Christmas sale, so they were reduced from £8 to £4, in other words cheap and fun, and I didn’t think (though I should perhaps have guessed) that one day they would occuply a significant place in the Signs sartorial repertoire.

I bought them in order to go on a cinema outing organised by a friend who was conducting an Artist’s Way group. We were to go dressed in pyjamas, preferably bringing a teddy bear with us. This was to give us connection with the inner child. Are you still here? So there I was in the car park at the back of the cinema somewhere in darkest east Sussex. I spotted one other person from the group looking miserable. He said he felt ridiculous and embarrassed, even though all he wore was loose jogging bottoms, and he had no teddy bear. I linked arms with him, which made it worse. He didn’t want to be seen with me in that get-up. We joined the others in a burger bar. They were dressed in their PJs and ordering chips and cola, but I sensed that nobody was feeling as comfortable in their clothes as I was. Years of practice I suppose, pyjama days having been a way of life for some years since getting M.E. It seemed a small step to go outside in them. The small teddy bear (a gift from my daughter) in my top pocket added a slightly delinquent touch and made me think of Courtney Love gone off the rails after the death of Kurt Cobain.

The film we saw was called Confetti. We ate popcorn, we laughed in the right places, it was good to have something other than ourselves to focus on. At the end we bustled out of the cinema looking like a group of people who had come dressed in pyjamas. The embarrassed one needn’t have been, no-one paid us any attention. I am not sure that anything changed in terms of the relationship with my inner child (it is actually my inner adult who is elusive), but the pyjamas became my preferred leisurewear. When I grow old I will not necessarily always be wearing purple.

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 Lovely This Way Comes

A brown parcel arrived today with my name on it. What could it be?

A birthday present from Cusp! A live, sentient creature!

The cat is curious. She likes brown boxes very much.

Do you see her? Sitting on the desk of my writing shed with her purple notebook and quill pen, beside a lit candle and a copy of Nathalie Goldberg's Wild Mind. Do you see the label around her wrist? Her name is Fraulein Poesie and she speaks german. She says she is a poet who writes mainly about nuts and forests and likes a glass of wine or two in the evening.

She is wearing her favourite purple trousers and pearl earrings, and look - she has a necklace of variously-coloured glass beads.

Poesie meets a couple of the housemates. They have never met anyone this cool (apart from me).

Poesie is no fool. She keeps a wary eye on the cat, who has already shown an interest in Poesie's tail. They talk, but keep a respectful distance.

Signs puts on her purple "crushed silk" shellsuit trousers. Poesie says, "Wow!" They gaze at each other in mutual admiration. Signs is holding Poesie's writing book which is a beautiful, matching colour of purple. Oh, you should see her lovely button eyes close up (press on pictures to enlarge).

Cusp - I don't know what to say. A beautiful present, such as I have never had before. And she is Real.

How is it that you do not yet have a Creative Blogger Award? Please pick one up immediately from my sidebar.

And Poesie, who is now my writing and blogging partner, has asked that you also pick up a Nice Blogger Award as well. She says you are "ein sehr nettes Madchen" (we had the umlaut but it seems to have got lost somewhere) and she is sending you her love.

p.s. It looks as though there are some of Poesie's relatives (sockmonkeys) up for adoption.

A Hint of Purple

I am preparing my house to be “viewed”. Having previously imagined it as a faithful wife long past her prime, I now feel she is a girl I am trying to prepare for the marriage market. People will soon be coming to assess her suitability as future wife. That she is too thin they will already understand from the measurements provided by the “go-between.” But they, being of modest means, will be realistic. They will look for her good qualities. What can I say? She is disobedient, untidy, unpredictable and hums to herself in unseemly fashion. But she makes people smile and how airily she looks over the tops of trees and houses. In her garden there are apples, cherries and cobnuts and the fine limb of a studio that is without spot or blemish. Two friends came today in order to help prepare for her coming out. The clutter is stashed in boxes. She holds her breath. I have not yet found a house to replace her.

I already feel houseless, or only half here. But perhaps that is also the excarnating after-effect of trying to show willing and be sociable at a Sunday lunch party of more than 40 loud people at the top of a restaurant where we were all instructed to “circulate.” No sooner had one established the ground for some form of tolerable mutual exchange than it was time to move on and begin again with someone else. I wonder how I would manage with speed dating. At one point I interrupted someone in full flow to say that I had to go outside. I told her I had M.E. and could no longer understand what was being said to me. This is unlike me. She is not someone I know or am likely to meet again so there was no need to volunteer this information. I could have professed an urgent need to go to the loo or done something or other - what anyone else does at parties when they want to extricate themselves. Perhaps this is the M.E. equivalent of becoming old and wearing purple. Or it is the beginning of the kind of incontinence manifested by the Ancient Mariner who felt compelled to tell his tale.
Oh dear, said the woman, I didn’t know, have you tried cutting out yeast, I once knew someone who –
Certainly it is easier to hold someone with a glittering eye and tell one’s tale than to listen. I went outside. I saw my daughter smoking a Marlborough. I asked her for a drag. It was good. I went back inside. I drank an Americano in one and had cake. I got second wind. I looked at the faces of my two children, my son up for the day from university. All manner of things will be well. If only one were still smoking cigarettes.

My kingdom for a Camel.