tick tock

Virus thing is hanging around and I almost have the sense that it is trying to re-boot. I am being, perforce, patient. Goodness knows if I have not learned that much in twenty five years then it would be a pretty poor show and it does not come as a surprise to find myself almost completely grounded with most reading and writing privileges denied on account of neurological disturbance. Blogging, it seems, is ok - in small doses. Apart from the pre-Valentine lunch on Sunday, I have not left Signs Cottage for a week and a half. I have cancelled two choir practices, two writing sessions, dentist, book group, weekend visitors, Brighton, a poetry reading. It suddenly feels as though my life - for a PWME, at any rate - has become too busy, though I am careful to have spaces in between things. For now, though, everything has stopped. If there were an old-fashioned Grandfather clock in the house I could listen to its tick and tock. Times when one watches the moments, listens to them as they pass: tick, and tick, and tick.

The solitude imposed by these times, in spite of the restrictions, is by now a familiar guest - a friend, almost. I would prefer it to come alone and unencumbered, without the attendant symptoms.

A present came through the post today: a white key in a black box. It looks beautiful and potent, talismanic. To unlock the space between tick and tock, slip through. Find the point of exit, of entry.

red carpet

I watched most of the very ghastly BAFTA awards thing, mainly because I wasn't properly up to doing anything else. I should have just gone back to bed and read the papers but I knew if I did that I might fall asleep early - and then I would risk waking in the small hours and doing the night watch . Now I should go to bed but feel wired and restless. I blame BAFTA and the state of heightened boredom it induces so that one feels obliged to chew through the best part of a box of wine gums. Paul McCartney looked in a shocking state, I thought, as though innerly propped up by something or other (drugs?) but not really in himself. In a thin voice, he promised us a "rockin' evening." The closest we got to that was Helena Bonham Carter hogging the space to receive best something-or-other (King's Speech etc). Bad behaviour does, after all, promise a measure of intrinsic interest. But she also looked in a bad way, as though on some kind of disorientating medication, not in herself but still up herself. Am I being a grumpy old blogger? Good.

The truth is that as far as I am concerned, nothing could be right after the glitz parade of designer frockage at the beginning when they all arrived and spilled themselves onto the red carpet. I know it is part of what happens, what one expects and what, presumably, every single person in the whole world apart from me really wants to see. But every time I allow myself to watch something like this I wish that just one of the actors would decide to turn up in the equivalent of my purple shell-suit trousers. It is very unlikely that I will ever be spilled out onto the red BAFTA carpet but if, for some unfathomable reason that none of us can forsee, this does ever happen I promise to you, my brothers and sisters who carry the torch for true artistic (not to mention aesthetic) integrity that I will not under any circumstances be dressed in designer clothes or any other glitz-schmatter that leaves my shoulders and most of my boobs bare. It is February, forsooth! I will be dressed in my Purples with matching cashmere jumper, string of pearls and grey hoodie if it is raining, fake Uggs on my feet or possibly Crocs with striped purple socks showing through the holes. So no-one will be able to accuse me of not having Style. But there will be none of the dreary glitz we were subjected to this evening.

But soft ye now, for we are almost in Valentine's day, and today being Valentine's Eve (it's almost another Christmas as far as hotels are concerned, so why not?) Mr. Signs and I went out to stuff our faces with sunday lunch at the local posh hotel. The pianist played right through the Sound of Music and followed up with the Godfather and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Mr. S ate rare roast beef and I my fillets of plaice on a bed of crushed new potatoes followed by poached pears and chocolate sauce. The French waiters (yes, all French) hovered and spun around us while outside the wind and rain lashed at the high bay windows and for one brief moment it might almost have been possible to imagine that we were in some well-rehearsed play in which we played our parts beautifully. We laughed and we love each other. Bring out the red carpets.

Am I going mad or is this some kind of revelation? My inner DJ, as you might expect, has been cranking up its (genderless) endeavours, as though to make up for my almost bed-ridden and totally housebound state. My inner DJ is a constant source of wonderment to me and the tactics it employs leads me to think that it is probably more sophisticated than I am though we do, at any rate, share a sense of humour. When I was in the process of separating from my first husband it played Tammy Wynette's D-I-V-O-R-C-E and Hold Me Close by David Essex on a continuous loop. Why? I had never paid any attention to Tammy or David, far less owned any of their music, but inner DJ made sure that those two numbers are securely held in the recesses of my inner jukebox. One scratch and they will replay.

So you will be wondering what the music is right now: it's South Park, the movie - one track in particular. Recent loft excavations unearthed daughter's old CD and I have been playing it through, remembering how much I loved South Park and thinking that a few wall-to-wall sessions of this might be just what I need. I am still (taking it slowly, perforce) on Candia McWilliam's new book and almost thought of getting Jane Shilling's memoir of middle-age but a) I can't get it (or anything much that I want) on Kindle, b) I suspect it's going to feel a bit insubstantial after Candia and c) perhaps I need something completely different. And what, you are asking, is inner DJ's response to this and the predicament of my enfeebled condition?

Here, for your delectation:



Looking for this on Youtube threw up all manner of interesting variations. There was the German version:



and a heart-stoppingly beautiful remix with images - which I now cannot find.

And so back to bed.

Notebooks

Clearly I'm not ok and I hear that the virus is a nasty one - the effects linger. I hunker down with bell, book and Kindle, little black radio, cat purring at the end of the bed. I should just lie back and let it all be, really. But I don't. I am not comfortable being there for too long, even though the bed itself is fine, the mattress good etc. Apart from the fact that too much lying down in the day usually makes my muscles feel worse, the room, already too small for the stuff that is in it, fills up with my restlessness. Get up, go downstairs, fetch hot water bottle, shiver, crawl up stairs but I have forgotten to bring a drink - down again, up again, listen to Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour and have no idea what anyone is talking about. I catch sight of myself in the mirror in my red and white pyjamas and grey V neck pullover that I probably found at the same time I found my purple trousers, in a charity shop. I look cool - yes, even in my reduced state - dramatic dark shadows around my eyes and the unmistakeable silver/grey halo framing my head, real roots, old brown Uggs on my feet.. I am still the Queen of Grunge.

Why have I got so many old notebooks lying around the place? I was trying to find something in them but damned if I can remember what. Something to do with teaching classes, I think. Open one at random and read an entry about encouraging students to keep writing in the holidays. I feel as though I'm spying on myself:

"They asked me what they should write about. I am weary but don't show it. Write about the candle you noticed bleeding wax onto the shag pile carpet. Write about the pine needle lodged in the arm of the sofa. Write about the crack in the turning of the year when things don't quite fit together and angels slip through and young men become werewolves howling in the forest and the girl in red treads a path through the trees. Write about your grandmother picking her teeth. Write what you see, write what you don't see, make believe. Pretend. Or don't pretend. Just watch. I don't believe in magic either but I pretend I do. Or rather, I do believe and pretend I don't and the pretence is killing me. That's why I write, to keep alive - what's your excuse?

Last year at Epiphany I went to hear the a poet who said he had woken up that morning with words speaking in his head from a dream. I took the words home and wrote them in my book with leather covers. They seemed like a key to something, or perhaps they were just words. Putting the words down on paper is important - a subversive act, especially if you don't get money or fame or nobody sees the words in your notebooks. At the end, when you are asked to account for yourself, you will have the notebooks along with the time you gave the last biscuit with jam on it to someone who looked sadder than you. Jack Kerouac said that only first drafts are preserved in heaven. In other words, the notebooks that never see the light of day."

And so to bed.

I have picked up some kind of throat virus - mild, but it just adds to the general difficulty of doing anything at all. I am not easily able to leave the house, the wet, cold and wind take stamina, or something that at present I do not have: substance. I like that word. I feel thinned-out, not that you would particularly think so to look at me. I am like a purse without coins, constantly on the forage for some other kind of currency to get me through the week. Things hurt. Body feels electric, not in a good way. All familiar, and to utter these things helps to get the measure of them.

cake therapy

No, I give in, I can't overcome the essential dreichness of the day. I know the weather is outside, gusting its grey murk around like an interminable wash-cycle of grubby clothing, and I know that I am inside the walls of dear old Signs Cottage and can, after a fashion, create my own climate-of-the-innerspace. But dreichness has seeped through the cracks and got under my skin. This is more likely to happen when there has been a night of disrupted sleep; and I have got myself over-tired (as if I'm ever under-tired) and overwrought. I drove to Brighton and back yesterday in order to meet with a friend and let her into Brighton flat, and lovely it was to see her, we haven't met for some months and she is a long-standing friend, but it follows as surely as night follows day that there will be payback for such extravagance; and today I have simply been unwilling to lie back and count my blessings or zone out on muscle-pain reducing medication. I have been trying to push on with the writing to no great effect as I began it too late in the day.

But - but - a potent smell of oranges is in the air because I have a couple of them simmering, the plan being to make one of my (Claudia Roden's) orange and almond cakes. I have been reading recently (I think it was in one of Julia Cameron's books) that it is impossible to make a cake and feel suicidal. Not, I hasten to add, that I feel suicidal. No. Beneath the myalgic invisibility cloak I am the same ray of sunshine as ever I was, the very incarnation of Polyanna. Wait. It is beginning to sound as though I am protesting too much. But I can prove what I say: for already the thought of cake begins to work its magic and I haven't even begun the mixing and stirring yet, and I am chewing a piece of Nicorette gum instead of rolling a nice tube of Golden Virginia. No-one who was even remotely suicidal would be doing that. Just take my word for it.

February

We are out of January - good. I woke early today and sat with my cat in the kitchen, she with a saucer of Whiskas cat milk, me with my home-brewed latte and notebook. Yesterday I talked with the Daughter about writing because this is what she is doing, with projects on the go and deadlines, and coming up against the things that writers face from time to time - the sabotaging sabre-rattlers that fill you with doubt. Of course we all know that the only way out is through - writing through it, that is. But sometimes it helps to be reminded of that and to get a little support. So thank you Natalie Goldberg, Julia Cameron, Annie Dillard and a few others who sit on the shelf above my computer. My very first book about writing was a slender thing called Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, written in the thirties. It is probably still the best and the one that got me started. As I spoke about the importance of writing first thing, I also reminded myself of this. The notebook is a lovely thing. Keyboard will never take its place and my back hurts when when I sit at it too much. But I am still drawn to the idea that the screen is a kind of Narnian door I can walk through.
In the morning, the silence here on Edge was beautiful. But I became aware of an absence of birds. There was a bit of twitter and song, a lone bird sending out tweets but nothing came back in reply. It led me, though, into the substance of my story, the project I am now working on. Then suddenly an intense fatigue came into me, it was not yet nine o'clock, and so much still to do, and I realised: so often I avoid doing this because I have to dip the pen into the ink of my vitality to get the story down. Still, because I began first thing, a decent writing session, and later on more of the same at weekly writing meet-up.

Prepared spiced chick pea supper, slept in the afternoon, sang Mozart's C Minor in choir later. Mr. Signs exceedingly busy with much on his plate. We are all, it seems, working hard.

Tomorrow I get my first Able and Cole fruit and veg box - Daughter's suggestion, to help simplify my life. I ordered milk, eggs, fish and cheese from them too. If all goes well this (plus slow-cooker at weekends) will significantly help with time-management.