dickory dock

Time to venture out of doors, though I cannot stand or walk for long periods. Friend-from-the-village came to clean - strange how the atmosphere in a house changes after floors and surfaces have been given attention. Into the village for lunch in the community centre where they dish up a roast lamb dinner. I have it but don't like the sensation of chewing on meat, think of the animal, the flesh, the deadness of it, remember myself as a child when first encountering English school dinners, dead man's leg stew etc. Afterwards, a trip to the Co-op for a few provisions but I begin to feel dizzy, orthostatically unstable, and blood sugar swing sends urgent Get Sugar Now messages. Why are there no cut-price post-Valentine chocolates? The shelves are stacking up, already preparing for Easter, the Lindt reindeer having morphed into bunnies. I buy a box of over-priced Black Magic, get into the car, tear off the cellophane and eat several at once. A man with a bycicle and a woolly hat sees me through the car window, bares his teeth at me and chuckles.
"That bad is it?"
I bare my teeth back at him and nod. Is what that bad? The Black Magic do their work but leave me jittery and the fruit creams hurt my teeth. Worth it, though.

A couple of people have asked me if I don't go stir-crazy from being in the house so much. No, because I have had many years of practice and sometimes there are times like this. Also it is good to look out of the window and see evidence of the forest, the natural world all around me. I remember visiting a woman with severe M.E. who mostly lay on a sofa and looked out of her window at the sky and noticed all the different cloud shapes. Her husband left a plate of sandwiches and a jug of water so that she would have something to eat in the day. To be upright, even to sit, made her dizzy. She asked me to bring some leftover soup, if I ever made it. She missed the taste of fresh vegetables. It was too difficult to read or listen to radio. She had been refused disability allowance because she was seen to be able to take herself to the lavatory and back. She had appealed and was waiting for a response. Meanwhile there was the window and the shape-changing clouds. Whatver the life you have, you live it. Usually that is how it goes.

I am still cancelling - no poetry workshop on Saturday. A few days in Brighton. And then, next week, begin again. That is the hope.

Shingle Thursday

Perhaps Shingles didn’t feel I was giving it enough respect. Anyway, it seems to have kicked in a bit more now. I feel I am having the real experience. If you are going to go down with something, you may as well go down with it good and proper so as to have something interesting to talk about later on. In some respects, though, I am fine with things being boring: saw the doctor again today because of something under the eyelid. Keep an eye on it, she said cheerfully, (eye: geddit?) we don’t want you going blind. I told her that I would and agreed that no we didn’t, went to the chemist to replenish my stock of Anadin and homoeopathic stuff and wandered into the village community centre café for some lovely home-made fish pie, then back home for an intense, head-throbbing sleep.

I dreamed I was in the sitting room of the flat I lived in when I was thirteen, looking out of the large sash window over to Primrose Hill. The Blue Meanies, said someone behind me. It’s ok, I said, I like them. Then the estate agent rang and woke me – damnation, and I would so much like to have stayed there, listening to Sergeant Pepper on the record player. It was looking at the Youtube film that Cusp put up on her blog the other day – an excerpt from the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine - that must have done it. It hadn’t been made yet when I was thirteen, but dreams are not constrained by details. And the voice behind me, I think, belonged to a woman called Jill. She and her friend Thomasina were employed by my mother to keep me company while I had chicken pox. Connections!

Jill and Thom must have been in their late twenties. They worked for a TV company, as set designer and P.A. but were on a break. My mother and sister must have been away, the au pair too, because there were only the three of us in the flat for several weeks and Jill and Thom slept in my mother’s double bed. I had only heard the word “Lesbian” once in the context of a very curious conversation with someone a year previously who asked me whether I had ever heard of a woman getting married to another woman. Well, she told me, one of the women pretends she’s a man and they sleep in the same bed and it’s really disgusting. I pictured one of the women with a moustache and beard and then my imagination fogged out. Being a late developer and almost unbelievably innocent, I had only just cottoned on to the word sex, without really knowing what it meant.

One day, while we were all sitting on the floor watching Top of the Pops, Thom with a headache, Jill got up, knelt behind her and began to massage her neck and shoulders. Thom shut her eyes, leaned back and smiled, then turned to look up at her. It was a long time they took to look into each other’s eyes, Jill’s hands still touching her neck – and then I knew, or it was the beginning of something understood: they were lesbians and what was between them had something to do with sex as much as, and perhaps more than, the things I heard my friends whispering about.

The estate agent was ringing to tell me that the prospective buyer who has offered us much less than the asking price, is still interested and wants to re-negotiate. In the circumstances, I am finding it hard to muster enthusiasm. I am shingling and thinking about my daughter in London who has much on her plate and a cloud over her head, and Sergeant Pepper’s band who blasted the Blue Meanies, and the hills being alive “wid dee sound of muzeeeeek”.

she said what?

We had just about decided to withdraw the old house from the market place for a while when up turns a woman with two children (about the same ages as ours were when we moved here) who seems to want to buy it. She wants to make sure first, however, that she can have an extension built onto the back. I know I should shrug at this but can’t push from my mind that it will be pretty rough on the neighbours, living cheek by jowl as we do, having new people and a temporary building site to get used to. On the other hand, it’s exactly what we might have done at some point if we’d had the money.

I have noticed that the new wave of incomers here don’t seem short of a bob or two, cluttering up the village centre with their 4 x 4s, opening up antique shops and children’s toyshops that only people like them can afford to patronise, employing the local girls (my daughter when she was here) and sacking them the week after for wearing the wrong kind of jeans, not realising that what goes around comes around and the one you sacked or bad-mouthed last week is very likely to be the barmaid you just ordered your vodka and cranberry from. Anyway, I ramble. I am feeling unsettled, have continuous headaches and cannot read the signs. I am dealing with this by eating too many biscuits, and they are not even the biscuits I really want because I would either have to make those or go and get them from a specialist baker which I can’t be bothered to do, so it’s just Maryland cookies, which is better than a poke in the eye, I suppose. One musn’t grumble – though why the hell not on one’s own blog I can’t think.

So what else is wrong? Well nothing, really. I have lost the plot again with writing focus and even my doppelganger seems to have gone quiet on me, but tomorrow – headache or not – I plan to inhabit the delectable garden studio that has been neglected of late and go back to the shocking pink notebook that has also been neglected and write my way into a better frame of mind with caffeine, pink pills and cookies, whatever it takes. And lest I should fall into miserable speculations along the lines of I am a talentless pretender with nothing to say, or if I have then I’ve forgotten, I will remind myself of the night out I had in Brighton on Sunday, and the bottle of wine I won on account of one of my verses (task being to compose a love “ode” to someone by the name of Nicola) which went something like :

You wouldn’t pickle ‘er,
but catch a glimpse of lovely Nicola
you’d wish that you could drink and bottle ‘er.
Now give me the wine or I’ll throttle yer!

- and has a kind of kick to it, I think. Even though I say it myself as shouldn’t.

The Good, The Bad and the Usual

The Good: Mr. Moon Topples’ competition, (now closed to entries and voting begins). Points win prizes but prizes aren’t the point and it’s nice to be in good company. I have also sent off one short story and done some work on another that has been lying around gathering dust.

I am going on a Scottish island adventure holiday the day after tomorrow. Adventure in the sense that, apart from the first couple of nights, we haven’t yet decided where to go or where we’ll stay. It will feel like being in Easy Rider, but in the relative comfort of the Signsmobile. I have bought myself some new waterproof trousers, anticipating long flat stretches of remote beach where I will be able to walk.

The Bad: My cat is unwell and is on a course of painkillers. She will like being in a cattery even less than usual. The bank holiday emergency vet was wonderful – kind and efficient – but the one today called her behaviour “aggressive” (poor, frightened animal) and didn’t seem to know how to hold or examine a cat, even with a nurse to help her.

My son has had his bike stolen.

My hair is going pink.

The Usual: Milady House is still without a sniff of a buyer and I am wondering, not for the first time, if everything they say about St. Joseph (who is still front of house, underground) is true. A friend brought me a statue from Ireland and by my reckoning we ought to have the business sewn up by now. I am beginning to shrug my shoulders about it all (it’s nice here) – but can’t ignore the fact that M.E. muscles do not like all the steep stairs. We may have to sell the house for a song, cut our losses and run. But sometimes I forget to care or think about it. Bof!

*

I will be taking my Doppelganger and my laptop with me to Scotland and may practice posting up some photos. Not of the Doppelganger, but of places. I will of course be reading the signs.

House Bonne Femme

What shall I do with her, this house that people come to view and will not buy? I have prepared her each time so as to draw attention to her best features and though not possessing the propertyspeak “wow factor”, her virtues are plain to see. Her defects also. And the people who come are not, I sense, people without a bob or two to spend on something with fuller dimensions. She will appeal to worthy hippies of modest means. Where the devil are they? According to instructions, I have buried my figure of St. Joseph (and dashed good-looking he is, too) upside down at the front of the house. I have shown due respect and wrapped him in a polythene bag to protect from the damp earth, but have forgotten to mark the exact spot so hope I will be able to dig him up again when the time comes so as not to incur the wrath of the heavenly saints – if I have not already done so.

I have let things slip a little, it has to be admitted. I can’t keep the house as pristine as it should be. It is clean but cluttered – by showroom standards, that is. There are things on surfaces, books everywhere and sheaves of paper for the non-existent “to do” file lying around like indolent teenagers that won’t get their act together. The cat’s latest hobby is eating prickly grass to regurgitate on the carpet. It leaves marks. Because the house is on an unadopted, unmade road it gets easily dusty, which I don’t mind, but you can’t show a house off without washing its face, and I forget to.

It occurs to me, not for the first time, that I didn’t have a proper upbringing. My mother had people to “do” for her – a cleaner that came most weekdays plus a live-in mother's help/au pair. She wasn’t rich, it was just how people like her lived then and, one supposes, labour was cheap. For much of the time she worked and, in between husbands, she was a single parent so it undoubtedly made life a little easier than it might have been. I can’t remember ever seeing her doing the cleaning and she only really cooked for high days and dinner parties – exotic things like salade nicoise and fondue. She shopped at a German delicatessen for things like salami and stollen and went to Selfridges for asparagus and smoked salmon. I’m not complaining. Our dysfunctional relationship had nothing to do with her lack of hands-on housewifery. But I never absorbed the skills. The cooking thing I picked up myself – doing it was fun and at the end of it you had good things to eat. It was the cleaning up after that got me. It took me years to learn that there were other ways of removing burnt sugar from a pan than scraping with a knife or that you could clean windows with vinegar water, that there were better ways of maintaining lavatory hygiene than pouring a bottle of bleach down it once a month, that sweeping a floor worked better if you worked from the outside into the middle. Still, I came of age at a time when women were no longer, in theory at least, expected to take all this on their shoulders and never lived among people who considered a dirty front step the sign of bad character. Or if I did, I didn’t notice or care. Him Outdoors has always done his share, and more in the days with young children and me not strong enough. So it’s fine. But I could do with a bit of help from Stepford Wife right now – just while I’m giving the old house a bit of a push, until a new match is secured for her.

Temporary Sky

They are back. For a short while it seemed as though I had imagined them all coming over the threshold, creeping around the house, dreaming by the kitchen window, looking out at the apple tree or lingering in the room at the top where you can look at treetops and sky, asking me questions about the chimneys and who my neighbours are. The Invasion of the House-Viewers. They come, they are charmed, then they go away and think about dimensions, stairs and the fact that you would need to go to Japan to find a smaller bathroom.

When they come, the house smells of sandalwood, geranium and lavender with a subtle background of coffee and there are poetry books on the tables and shelves. This is not a ruse. I like burning good-smelling oils, I always have fresh coffee in the morning and I read a fair bit of poetry, what with workshops and such. So it’s authentic – the house, with its original fireplaces, one wooden beam in the kitchen (never actually worked out why it’s there), its mouldings around the mantelpieces and original sash windows; and me, the real article with my books, my beads and my nag champa incense sticks. One woman came yesterday on behalf of her friend – casing the joint, as it were.
“Oh, I can picture her here,” she said. “She is artistic, are you artistic? It feels as though you are.” Well that’s me, lady, Spasticus Artisticus, only I don’t mention the illness and how it’s getting harder to crawl up and down the stairs. But she wasn’t looking at the books or the rose quartz so exquisitely placed in relation to the amethyst with its purple teeth glinting in the afternoon sun. No, she was looking at the hand-thrown pottery vase and the pictures on the wall, mostly bestowed on us by my late mother-in-law who was, god bless her, very artistic and made beautiful pottery artefacts as well as buying nice pictures for her walls. They lend me a quality that may or may not belong to me. It doesn’t matter. It’s lifestyle, supposed or actual, that people want to sense. Hence the notion of coffee and freshly-baked bread, flowers on the table. It’s all crap, you could say. Illusion.

But – everyone knows, or most people do, that you go into houses and can sense atmosphere, even when the people that live there are not present. Some have a smile you can feel in your body as you walk around the place and some make you feel as though you’d just walked onto the set of The Shining. This house smiled at me. I tried to shrug it off because of the dimensions, the stairs and etc. but it called me back to have another look. The woman who lived here before was an organic gardener. She showed my children where the blackberries were. The house was quite bare, hardly a picture, but the few things that were around – a piece of tree trunk she used as a stool and the wooden kitchen table (both of which she left us) were good and we felt the life in the house was good. She took it with her, the life she made, but left some essence of it behind too.

So I am glad people are charmed by the house. When we finally sell it we will leave something of our substance behind, but we’ll also be taking it with us. “Under purgatory’s temporary sky,” says Osip Mandelstam, “we often forget/that the happy repository of heaven/is a lifelong house that you can carry everywhere.”

Just Do It

I am feeling anxious and unwedged. Nothing I can’t name, and naming the demons does give a certain hold on things. Not enough of a hold, however, to let me get on with writing, the other sort, I mean. Some people write to keep themselves sane but I need all my sanity to feel centred enough to do it. On the other hand, doing it can also help centre me. On the third hand, I do not do writing as therapy. On the fourth hand, just do it. I need to write a poem by Saturday. I have plenty to work on, but it has been too long since I made a new one and this Saturday is workshop day. I never usually sit down to write a poem knowing what it is I want to write about. Very occasionally I do feel, as a poet friend of mine has described it, “with poem”, as though I am about to give birth to one. Usually it is by setting myself a certain task, going to the coalface, that I hit a seam. I know that a fixed routine helps but M.E. makes its own agenda and is unpredictable. I have to work around it.

There is a steady trickle of people coming to look over the house. They are charmed by it in for the same reasons as I am. They also notice the things that have contributed to the decision to up and move. Our last viewer was a woman whose husband had died two years ago. She said the house was lovely, looked over the treetops from the room with the extraordinary view and said “oh” several times when she went up and down the steep stairs. I wanted to say don’t even think about it. She is not young and doesn’t look like the aerobic and pilates type. The stairs will be too much for her. “I will think about it,” she said. “If it is meant to be, it is meant to be.” Buying houses does this sort of thing to people.

Another woman said she couldn’t wait to see the garden studio “where you do all your writing.” As I hadn’t said a word about writing this threw me a bit. I didn’t tell her that I don’t actually do my writing there in the winter, preferring the snugness of the tiny room in the house. She kept staring at me open-mouthed. It was odd. Like I said, I’m a bit unwedged.

On the Market

Damn, I am having to keep the place tidy. I was reminded of this when the estate agent rang at the ungodly hour of 9.30 am to schedule in another house-viewer. I have been going around dusting with old vest, feeling like one of those women from Last of the Summer Wine or Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, telling the cat not to breathe on the furniture. I lit a sandalwood joss stick and the place smelled as though someone had just been smoking dope. Hippy chic, makes a change from coffee and freshly-baked bread. Vacuuming is out of the question. But I have emptied wastepaper bins, cleared surfaces and stuffed things under beds. Someone came with baby in the crook of her arm. The house spoke to her, I could see by the way she looked out of one of its windows. Imagining.
“It’s lovely,” she said. I nodded glumly.
“Yes, I think so.”
“But the stairs are steep.” We went back downstairs. “The stairs are really steep.” I couldn’t disagree. It’s one of the reasons I need to move.
“You get used to them,” I said. It is sort of true. They are a pain and I am used to them, it doesn’t make them any easier.
“Why are you moving,” she asked.
“Work reasons and, you know, time for a change, children at college (don’t mention illness).
“Must feel like such a wrench after all this time.”
“Um - ”
Outside, she cocked her head and listened. Only the faint sea-roar of traffic in the distance.
“It’s quiet here,” she said. “What kind of tree is that?”
“Apple,” I said. We make apple jelly in the autumn.

Of course, she probably won’t come back because of the stairs. And this will pass.

ever after

The Good Day lasted about 3 hours. Then I realised: What with pretend lattes and herbal tea, having been without fresh ground for a few days, I’d forgotten about the temporary high of the caffeine kick.

I came down to earth in Argos (this sounds like something from Star Trek, or perhaps it is the possible first line of a poem). Sheer pull of gravity, a dizzy head and pain in muscles made standing looking through catalogue deeply unpleasant. I was looking for calico curtains to cover the open-to-view “wardrobe” area because of house now being on the market. Had nearly nailed the items needed when I was approached by a bright-eyed teenage girl in a wheelchair. She asked could I move to another desk as this one was low down and therefore suitable for her and her friend, also in a wheelchair. All the other desks were occupied. I hesitated.
“I’ll just be a minute,” I said.
“We’re in wheelchairs,” she said, “this is the right height for us.” I moved. By the flat-screen TV screens I sat down. I looked at the lovely, chattering girls in their wheelchairs. The mother of one of them was leaning down, listening. She looked up at me, baffled.

The house has been viewed twice today. I am feeling too full of M.E. to think about it very much – hey ho, silver lining. But in other respects, a perfect Sunday afternoon because I sat in a cosy picturehouse with popcorn and a good friend, watching the new Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore romcom, and it was everything the reviewers on rottentomatoes say it is. But today it was just the ticket.

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.

Her Indoors

I need a new house. The stairs (too many, too steep) and other reasons. The trouble is I love the house. The trouble is I think she is human and loves me too. I feel as though I’m about to trade in a good and faithful wife for a new model. I feel like a complete bastard.

The new one must be pleasing to the eye, undemanding and low maintenance. I will look at photographs of her, study her dimensions and assess her character. I don’t want one who has let herself go.

My old house is shabby but good. Her skin is cracked and wrinkled. The wooden frames around her windows are rotten. She has chimneys and fireplaces you can burn coal and wood in. I have caught her on a windy day singing to herself. She has many virtues but is modest. I complain about her: she is too tall, too thin and I can’t fit more than a handful of people in her rooms, though the kitchen once gathered ten of us around a table at Christmas. She sometimes achieves the impossible.

When I am alone with her she folds herself around me. I can hear her heart beating. She is close friend to my cat who loves her unquestioningly and would be happy to remain within her sanctuary for the rest of her days. She is the only house I have lived in for so many years. She is the most home I have ever had. She waits for me when I am out.

When I sell her she will wait. She is patient. New people will come and strip her, give her a facelift, pull out the old appliances, but she will think that at any moment I am coming back, bringing the cat with me. When I don’t she will be confused. She won’t know herself. Her heart will start beating to a different rhythm. One day I will go back and look at her and she will no longer know who I am. It may be that I look at her and wish myself back with her, but it will be too late because she won’t be mine.

On the other hand, perhaps she’s cool about the idea. It’s just me losing the plot.