Up betimes for another blood test and the usual prodding about to find a suitable vein. I could never have had a career as a mainlining junkie, is what I keep telling myself. The health centre nurse is always slightly reproachful about what she calls my lady-like veins. I would like a good result. Wouldn't we all.

Nice one, though, in the form of a letter telling me that one of my poems is to be included in an anthology (of which more anon). Unexpected and welcome. I would like to feel that this is an auspicious sign but can barely muster the strength because truth is that I am feeling - what is the right euphemism? A little under the weather. I have decided to go with the spirit of it and leave the kitchen floor to carry on crunching underfoot, the small piles of clutter and newspaper all over the house carry on gathering the dust that blows in from the bumpy, unmade road that is good for nothing but forcing cars to crawl and making a safe place for children to play.

I haven't swum since Friday and am not sure where to go with this. Aerobicness is making my situation measurably worse - so obvious (M.E. - duh!) it is hardly worth noting. But I am not quite ready to give up on the experiment yet. Choosing exactly the right time seems to be crucial. I will wait for the next window of opportunity and have another stab. When in Brighton there is, of course, the sea. But realistically this will probably live as a delicious possibility rather than something I do very much of.

I have fallen into a new piece of writing that has nothing to do with last year's aborted NaNo novel attempt. It lends itself to being written in short bursts and when I am writing it I do not feel as if I am hauling sacks of coal up a hill (though I do of course have to go to the coal face). So I am going with it, plotless and clueless, seeing what it might become. I will be writing poems at the end of the week when Ms North comes to stay for a couple of nights because when we meet that's what we do.

But tomorrow I have to go and prepare Brighton flat for friends of friends who will be staying there for a week. And today I have to carry on reading Herta Mueller's Land of Green Plums, which I am loving, and make spinach dall with some of the spices that Son sent me from India.

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.

shoppa-looza

Something is on hold at the moment, but I am not sure what. Life does go on, but the getting and shopping involved in establishing the newborn Brighton flatlet is all-consuming because, basically, I want it over and done with so I don't have to look at another catalogue, compare the price of this to that, think about stuff, stuff and more stuff. Cups and saucers, dustpan and brush, chairs, bins, pillowcases. We are all out of money so the stuff has to be cheap - at least that's one thing we don't have to make a decision about: Regency rosewood or IKEA bog-standard? Easy. But if I was a reluctant shopper before this, I am now well on the way to becoming a shopaphobic and when this is done I never want to buy another Thing as long as I live. When we moved to Signs cottage the stuff from our London home came with us and we just added things as and when it became necessary. Nothing particularly went with anything else but over the years a place acquires a kind of look, an ambience, made of a whole number of things, including the life that's being lived in it. So the ugly grey lamp from Argos is still with us, casting a glow as I type (with a proper incandescent bulb, some things I really do insist on), and now that it has lived here a while and served us to the best of its ability the ugliness is to some extent redeemed. It has become better looking. Or at any rate, it doesn't announce itself, it is just part of the scene; just as the incongruous rose print curtains, quickly got and ready-made when the study was, for a short period, a little bedroom for my daughter when she was ten, are part of the scene. They have found their place. And that's the way I like to get things: as and when, allowing them to find their place, not giving them more than an occasional nod to say thanks for, you know, being ok curtains, a good enough lamp. I've never had to kit a place out from scratch. And the TV, there's a thing. We still have our old analogue one and I had no idea you couldn't get those in shops any more. All the new ones cost hundreds of pounds. Hurrah for Gumtree where one can pick them up for a song. Except that we will have to think about that again in a couple of years when they will become obsolete and unusable.

No really, there are plenty of other thoughts, things going on in the mind of Signs. But there is neither the space nor the desire to go into them at the moment for they ask much of me, or they press on the heart. I am swimming, becoming stronger. Did a stretch of fifteen minutes without stopping today. I still feel ill most of the time, but differently ill and probably no worse. The experiment, therefore, is worth continuing. The next step is to get myself organised and learn how to exercise better judgements in the minefield of human relationships. It is surely never too late to recreate oneself.

But the shopping really has to stop. And soon.

in the swim (2)

So I have been doing the swimming for the best part of a month and need to decide whether to sign on the dotted line and become a Member of the exclusive little place. The swimming, while I'm actually doing it, is bliss and I am getting better at it, stronger, feel as though I am flying, in slow motion, bird on the wing of blue water. Chlorinated blue water, but still, it is the element and I am in it.

M.E. god is displeased. I hear him rumble and growl, a great wailing and gnashing of teeth, like Grendel and his mother both, howling for blood. That word again. But it is as though something is moving in the blood and a battle is being played out, David and Goliath, Daniel and the Lion. David and Daniel had the Lord on their side and won. The question is, will the Lord be on my side in the Battle of the Swimming Pool or will I be left gasping and bed-ridden with everything worse and the blinds all pointing south. Bravery in the face of M.E. god is never rewarded, we all know everything there is to know about this.

But the inner prompting is firm and insistent and says, do this; or, as my old grandma used to say: "Be heppy! Things can only get vorse!" Meaning that whatever you do things are going to go pear-shaped, so do the thing (that makes you happy) anyway. Well, she didn't mean exactly that, she meant shut up and be grateful for small mercies, especially the bean and potato soup I just made. But a little poetic license is appropriate, I feel, in the translation.

The thing is, I feel ill, my muscles flare and hurt, and some days I think oh gawd (sorry Lord), this is the beginning of something dreadful, back to how it was at the beginning. But muscle pain and feeling ill, c'est normale, and a couple of days and a few drugs later inner prompting says, get out and do it again while the coast is clear, be quick about it, make yourself stronger while no-one's looking. So I do. And it is all I can do. The writing is fast and furious, squeezed into tiny pockets. And inner prompting says, sometimes there is a door, and sometimes you can choose to go through it. Do not be afraid.
Why not? I ask.
Because fear is the devil.
Will I survive?
I don't know.
Why now?
Because now.

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.