never mind the title

Sticking my head in the door to say hello here. Hello to who? You, obviously, but to me too. People say that Tweeting is something akin to talking to oneself, and I have often thought this about blogging too. But in talking to oneself is there not the sense of some listening presence - an intimate other - or what some creative writing practitioners would call your 'ideal reader'?

Here at House of Signs we are quite happy with the less-than-ideal, or if not happy then realistic. At least I did not make any stupid resolutions that would now have been broken. But strength is once again at a low ebb. I am looking out of the window as I write this, at my neighbour with her young sons, digging in the garden, she in a green puffer jacket, the oldest boy in red and the toddler in blue. Grandma is there too in a mustard puffer. All are digging. I want to be digging too, not literally perhaps, but working my own patch of land, making grow the things I want to cultivate. A number of things come against this. Even sticking my head around the door like this is not without its difficulties. For one thing, I have to be sitting upright. No, seriously.

It has been one of those mornings when everything that is waiting to be written, sung or planted, the etheric spirits of them all, gathered around my bed singing their various possibilities. We are ready, they said, to incarnate. These voices. They have never listened to reason. They know nothing about Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. By this afternoon there won't be a trace of them. They stay only for the possibilities.

But this piece, all about someone doing something against all the odds, has made me feel very happy.

**

- and he is walking

I am in the classroom, writing with my fountain pen in the grey London County Council notebooks. I dip the pen in the ink well that nestles in the hole in my desk. When it runs dry Miss Routledge fills it again. You have to be good at writing to be given a fountain pen, some people still use pencils because their handwriting is not neat enough or their spelling is bad. Writing and spelling are my best things and arithmetic is my worst. Chandra sits beside me, she is my desk partner and she hasn't yet been given a fountain pen.

We made friends when I told her that I liked curry and rice. Shyly she told me that she and her sister ate curry and rice at home every day because her family was from Pakistan. She invited me to her house for tea. We ate rice with dall and a sauce with chicken wings that was so hot it made my tongue feel bitter and burned but I ate it anyway and said it was nice. Then her sister gave me a piece of something hard and white that tasted of old boiled milk, Chandra said it was a sweet. She lived in a basement flat where the electric lights were always on because there was hardly any light from the outside, and the electric heater was on, three bars of it, even in summer because it was cold in the basement and Chandra said her mother and older sisters felt cold all the time in England.

Chandra is writing in her notebook with a pencil, her fingers pressing on the stub as she concentrates. The paper has flecks of brown and shiny yellow. Miss Routledge says that paper is made of trees. I can see pieces of the tree in Chandra's notebook. I can see the words she has written: Humpty Dumpty is walking and he is going to see the wite rabit and he is walking and he is going to the play grond and he is walking.When Chandra came to my house I read her some of Alice in Wonderland, the part where the White Rabbit makes a flustered appearance, saying oh my paws and whiskers.
Rabbits don't wear gloves, said Chandra.
It's just a story, I said.
But rabbits can't wear gloves, said Chandra, because they haven't got fingers.
So I stopped reading and we went to the playground.

Humpty Dumpty is going to the swing and he is going to the bech and he is going to the party and he is walking.

In the summer holidays Chandra and her sisters went to Southend for a day and that was their summer holiday.
It isn't a holiday if you only go for a day, I said.
It was a holiday, she said, we went on the beach and we had ice cream.
I decide to copy everything that Chandra writes. I want to know what it is like being Chandra.

Humpty Dumpty is walking and he is going to the shop and he is walking and he is going to the play grond and he is walking.
I whisper, you already wrote that he is going to the playground. Chandra looks at me and smiles. Then she shrugs and carries on writing.
Humpty Dumpty is going to the bech and he is walking.
Chandra furrows her brow when she writes, she gives it all her concentration. Humpty Dumpty is walking, she writes. I begin to notice a pattern - an activity, or a particular destination, followed by the repetition of Humpty Dumpty walking. He doesn't seem ever to arrive at the beach, the playground, the rendezvous with the white rabbit, he is in a state of perpetual motion, walking always intending somewhere or other. The walking, though, is the thing, and we come back to it, Chandra and I, as I faithfully copy her words, mesmerised by the seeming purposelessness of Humpty Dumpty's walk, stirred to some extent by his persistence in always finding some new destination. I picture his large egg shape, eyes open and hopeful, his short legs with tartan trousers moving quickly, arms out at his sides.
Miss Routlege is standing behind me, looking over my shoulder.

What is this rubbish you are writing, she says? What do you think you are doing?

rhythm of life

I spent a considerable part of the day throwing things out: books I will give to a charity shop, paper to the recycling. However much I throw away, there always seems to be more - stuff that I don't need or use, no-one else would want it, but it seems wasteful to just throw out. I am trying to simplify in every way possible, and bring some kind of stability to my days, an underlying rhythm that will support what I need to do. Difficult with M.E., which behaves predictably only in the sense that it will almost certainly scupper long-term plans.
When I was growing up I envied children who had predictable lives. When I was thirteen I came home from boarding school and went to a crammer in Hammersmith. Things were chaotic at home, I never had breakfast, ate sweets and chocolate bars in the few minutes between lessons, scuttling from one room to the next, then nothing very much until supper.

In the underground, I would try to choose the same carriage every day, judging the distance along the platform from the tunnel. This was so that I would see two girls that always got on a couple of stations after mine. They were dressed in school uniform and went to St. Paul's School for Girls. Their conversation was trivial (by whose standards I was judging this I can't think): to do with last night's homework, what they ate for supper or breakfast and how the new stocking tights already had a small ladder at the side. I found it mesmerising, though, and listened as if caught in a trance, knowing that on a Tuesday they had French, so there would be talk about that and possibly a recitation of some irregular verb. On Wednesday there was Latin and on Friday there was chemistry. On Friday there was the additional spice of some possible revelation about what they were doing at the weekend. There would be nothing more interesting than a teatime visit to or from an aunt, a trip to the shoe shop with mother to buy some new school shoes and, of course, more homework. The more ordinary and mundane the detail the greater my satisfaction in hearing about it.

I pictured the bedroom of the larger girl, who always sat down with a comfortable plump before arranging and patting her skirt. I imagined that she would have a soft, fluffy candlewick bedspread, cream or pastel pink, that matched her slippers and dressing gown; one of those ceramic hedgehog night lights, perhaps, left over from childhood; everything very neat. As the train came out into the open and drew near to our destination she always, at exactly the same point, drew a dark beret from her school bag and began the business of arranging it on her head. It had to lie flat at the back and be slightly raised at the front, never just pulled on. She would be patting and adjusting for a good five minutes before it was just as it should be. Her friend always came with beret already in place. The patting and adjusting was more, I sensed, that just putting the beret on for the purposes of adhering to school regulations (what troubles lay in store for those caught beret or tie-less), but was a way of becoming the person she needed to be in order to go through the day as she needed to. It was like putting on armour before the battle, checking the point of the sword, buckling up.I did not want her life, that was for sure. But sometimes I wanted to feel what I though it must be like to be her - to have no thought for the next day other than the completely predictable - just to know what that might be like.

The rockanroll life goes on.