- and when it rains I think of you

I can't be absolutely sure of this, but I think my very first valentine card probably came from my father. When I was at boarding school he sent me one with a thick, embossed heart on it, signed it "love, Daddy" and drew a heart made out of kisses. He and my mother had been separated for some years and he was about to marry someone else, a woman only thirteen years older than I was. So this gesture, these tokens, were particularly good things, and I did love him dearly. But even I could see that it might have been more to my credit, in the eyes of my peers, had the card been from some anonymous admirer, albeit I was only eleven years old. In the classroom, valentines were left under the lids of the wooden desks, or ostentatiously lying on the top. I had two: one from a boy in the class who was sweet on me (he put his initials in the corner so I would know) and one from the class teacher, a dotty, good-hearted woman who had an eye out for anyone who might possibly be left out, and I was clearly a possible candidate. She drew it herself and composed a verse where each line had a letter from my name. This was a Steiner school, remember. Friends wrote in each others' autograph books, things like:

An elephant never forgets, they say,
And neither do I on St. Valentine's Day.

Enemies (or sophisticated kids who knew how to spar and banter) left anonymous scraps saying:

Roses are red, violets are blue,
And when it rains I think of you:
Drip! Drip! Drip!

Thankfully, I did not receive anything like this, but the words etched themselves into my consciousness and I later used it in a story I wrote. The thought of anyone actually receiving a message like this was, at the time, too much for me to fully digest - someone coming to their desk hoping for words that suggested, however obliquely, at love, friendship, some good quality in oneself revealed, celebrated, and finding instead: Drip! Drip! Drip!

Here on the edge, every restaurant, inn, pub and, actually, anywhere that sells anything, is screaming at us to remember Valentine's Day, just as they will be screaming about Mother's Day, Father's Day, not to mention the ancient festivals that still figure, somehow, in our calendars. We will be reminded to buy cards, chocolates, flowers, wine, treats. Of course anyone with sense and sensibility knows it for what it is. But even so, it is possible to reclaim something - to have our special days and small festivals. I did, as it happens, get a card for Mr. Signs, an image of two birds on a telephone line (they looked like the blue tits that come and lodge in our bird house every spring), and I left this with a bowl of fruit salad for him to find in the morning before he went to Shrink-school. He drew a red heart on an orange background with chalk pastels and wrote a verse about difficult choices (bathroom taps, kitchen tiles) versus easy ones (being with me). It kind of works, you'll just have to take my word for it.

Light Flight

We went to Brighton today, later than intended because I was only up and ready after mid-day. The light here on the edge of the forest was soft and benign, though there was a sharpness in the air, it is still winter. I dressed in my elephant-motif quilted coat, wore pashmina and knitted gloves. The business that took us to Brighton is our new place: a one-bedroom, large-windowed, beautiful flat not far from the sea, which is to serve as the Signs pied-a-terre and possible workspace for Mr. Signs and me. It has needed a lot doing, is not yet ready, but the walls have all been plastered and the living room painted a colour that is almost white, but with a gentleness in the hue. Every time I see the place I feel happy, and lucky. We walked along the sea front, and the clear light from sea and sky - the light! So different from forest light, it went right into me, spirits rose effortlessly to meet it. We had late lunch in an old Edwardian sea food restaurant, ate oysters on ice with lemon wedges and tabasco sauce. The sun began to go down, Mr. Signs missed the match between Arsenal and Chelsea, but Arsenal (his team) lost anyway, we listened to snatches of it on the radio driving home.

Yesterday, a poetry group meeting in Lewes, a new beginning in a room above a pub. Someone said, the buds are beginning to appear, and I know she was talking about real buds out in nature, but somehow I took it personally, as a kind of positive diagnostic assessment of the inner aspect of things.

In the coming week, things are needing, wanting my attention. I wish for strength and vitality, beyond wildest dreams (used to dream I could fly, we all have those). If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride or, in some versions of the rhyme, they would fly. Let them be horses then. I'll ride, fly.

A Random Insult

I don't usually pay much attention to anything Kathryn Flett says in her weekly Observer Column. Leafing through the Sunday magazine has become a bit of a habit, one that I should probably lose in order to save precious brain space for for more nourishing fare. She is one of those who had an illness (she believes was M.E.) that laid her low for three years, recovered from it and
now says:

"Though it manifests physically, I strongly believe there is a psychological component to ME – a point of view that will entirely fail to endear me to the soi-disant community of ME sufferers which occasionally seems slightly more interested in trying to persuade the still-largely-uninterested medical profession to take it seriously than in, say, trying to get sufferers to take more responsibility for their own individual recoveries, by any means necessary."

She clearly anticipates some kind of response from the "soi-disant community", and perhaps that is the whole point of putting out something like this - it will upset people and presumably get a bit of attention coming her way. It isn't called Yuppie Flu these days, and the illness is now taken much more seriously by the medical profession. The recent news of Lynn Gilderdale, who had severe M.E. for many years, has highlighted (for those who were unaware) what the reality of what this illness can be. But we are still, apparently, up for grabs and it's still ok to disrespect people with M.E.
For Kathryn Flett's information:

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (which is not the same as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) is a neurological disease which has been recognised by the World Health Organisation since 1969 as a distinct neurological disorder, characterised by damage to the central nervous system. Even where some recovery is manifest, it is a lifelong disability where relapse is always possible. Check out the Hummingbirds Foundation for M.E. for more information, and then consider whether an apology might be appropriate.

Of all the people I have known with this disease, I have not encountered a single one who has not done everything in their power to bring about recovery. Persuading the medical profession to take M.E. seriously is just one of the things we do, and many of us also see this as a duty that is laid on us - so that others in the future do not suffer as we have done.

getting my oats

Still on the subject of porridge, it having been Burns night and all: we went to our neighbours-over-the-road for the annual haggis-stabbing and a bit of song and dance. Mr. Signs, who is tone deaf, sang his Burns party piece (The Belles of Mauchline) to my guitar accompaniment, Scottish host sang a reggae version of Scots Wha Hae and a lesser-known version of Auld Lang Syne, I sang May You Never (after John Martyn) neighbour-next-door got six of us (though I chickened out half way through) to do a circle dance, following a whisky-tasting session. We ate two different kinds of haggis with neeps and mash, followed by three different kinds of pudding. On the morning of that day I had porridge for breakfast, there was oatmeal in the haggis and in one of the puddings. You could say that I was oatmealed and porridged out, but I have never worried about getting too much of a good thing.
I was too ill to write much last week, but did some editing on a couple of short stories and sent them off, and today went back to the lovely notebook, my big story still warm and waiting for me.
Here's the actual John with the actual song. I can never get too much of this either.

Doing Porridge

No news is perhaps good news because it means I'm doing The Writing. There was Christmas, the befores and afters of which seem to go on longer than in days of yore, not entirely sure why that is, the shopping thing hasn't got any worse than it was. I am ambivalent about the whole thing. What I like: tree, holy nights, cards, connections, mulling, carols. Don't like: shopping, waste, stuffed-up fridge, getting fat. So basically there's more to like than not, but some of what I like - seeing people, fitting that in over the Season, as though the world might end after epiphany - leaves me well into the red, vitalitywise. I begin to feel like one of those wraiths from Lord of the Rings, all gone on the inside (but without the malevolence, obviously). All gone on the inside and fat on the outside. Not a good way to be. So I have taken up eating porridge. I recently discovered how to make it properly and it is my new best friend, except that I like it with cream and muscovado sugar or maple syrup. Never mind, I am on the right road, and porridge is part of my new year's new regime, to which I have given the working title of How To Get Out Of Bed.


1. Wake up. By ordinary standards, late - can't be helped, c'est la vie M.E. - but whenever that is, imagine Gustav Holst's Planets playing as I rise to the new day, even if it is close to mid-day.

2. Eat porridge. Do not smoke a cigarette (especially when this packet of Golden Virginia is finished - a small seasonal blip). Have coffee, but only if immediately progressing to stage 3.

3. Write. Do not switch on computer, and do not get dressed. This is important, getting dressed plus ablutions, will stall me. Go straight to soft brown Moleskine Cahier and pick up Papermate Flexigrip ballpoint.

And so on. You are thinking, probably, that this must be some kind of Shangri-la existence I have here, but bear in mind that these three activities (waking up counts as one) might be the most I can reasonably expect of myself in one day and I haven't even touched on the other stuff of daily life, the duties and the pleasures thereof, all requiring energy - inner substance. I also want to

4. Read. At the moment I have Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah for my book group next week, Kay Syrad's The Milliner and the Phrenologist and Herta Mueller's The Appointment on the go. And poetry: John Burnside's The Hunt in the Forest. Not to mention this quarter's Granta. I've only read the first Petina Gappah stories and don't yet feel as blown away as I might have expected, but this may change. The rest of my list - good, good stuff, is as much a review as I can give in the circumstances, and they are all waiting to be finished. As time goes on, I find reading more difficult than writing, this not helped by failing eyesight (eye test scheduled) but mostly not helped by ongoing neurological crappiness. By the time I get to the newspapers, if I get to them, I am tearing through them, trying to get stuff, take something in, before the curfew.

The snow was intense here, being in the south east, our road quite impossible, Mr. S trudged into the village for newspaper and bread, but mainly we managed with what we had. Too feeble to venture out in it much, my life was not particularly disrupted, and the view from the windows was pretty. Milder weather, however, might mean that I can

5. Walk. Keep one foot moving in front of the other.

Snow on the Edge

Inspired by Cuspie, some photos of where I be, in deepest Sussex. Cheating, because they are taken by my neighbour-over-the-road who has a talent for this sort of thing.

The last photo is of Signs Cottage, the lit up window our living room.

Life Goes On - Bra

I recently went to a shopping mall - I had to, the bra situation wouldn't wait any longer. I went to the M & S lingerie department for a "fitting". A nice woman, softly-spoken with a look in her eyes that suggested she had seen it all before (the state of my underwear, my soul, me) took my measurements and brought me a selection. I tried them on for size, decided they would do and bought the lot because, as I told the nice woman, I didn't want to be coming back for another three years or so. There was a depth of understanding in her nod. You have to be in the right frame of mind for a bra-fitting, she said. Which I never am. Nor in the right frame of body, and I am not talking about the size of my Bristols. If I had spilled the beans right there in the cubicle, about the sheer cliffs of fatigue and how the mere notion of shopping mall finds me perpendicular in Babylon as I remember Zion (may the words of my mouth, O Lord, be acceptable in Thy sight), she would have sat with me and wept. At such times one depends and projects mightily on the kindness of strangers. But anyway, the story does not end there, for when I got home I found that two of the bras did not fit and had nasty hard plastic things that dug into my armpits, so back I go today for refund, for swap. Business concluded I return to the car and find myself trapped on level five for forty five minutes, it is a quarter to five, everyone wants out and there is gridlock. I telephone Mr. Signs who telephones the shopping mall who promise to alert Security. The situation resolves eventually, as things do.
Brighton tomorrow, taking mother shopping the day after, meal out with writerfriends on Thursday, curry night with neighbours on Friday, carol concert Saturday - life really does go on. And my story too, bursting to be written and asking for my undivided attention.