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.

full makeup

Oh good, the full makeup look is back, says Hilary Mantel (Friday Guardian)*, and now we can go back to doing what we did until "a flat-footed and scowling version of feminism" came and spoiled it by making us feel like whores. I say 'us.' For I personally was never particularly big on the makeup, apart from when I was trying to cover teenage spots with Max Factor pan stick, and the feminists I got to know were into heavy-duty eyeliner and mascara - I came late to it (feminism) on account of being flat-footed and a late developer. No good trying to do the full makeup now, I can't focus without my titanium varifocals and obviously if I have them on I couldn't be applying the shadow, mascara and what have you - though transformation can apparently also be brought about by wearing the right kind of foundation cream:

There are few failures so bleak that they cannot be brightened by Touche Eclat or Dior Skinflash.

I have nothing against the idea of trying to reinvent oneself, I do it a lot, sometimes several times a week. This doesn't mean to say that I am frivolous, it's just giving myself the best chance of something actually sticking - and look, I really have given up smoking, and I am still (I know it's only been ten days or so) a vegetarian. I commit to writing projects that are sabotaged by immune-system-on-the-warpath but although the big picture fails, things get written and it all counts - for me, at any rate, because that is what I do, will always be doing, one way or another. At the moment it seems to be another. But I am open to the possibility of change for the better - new strategies. If I were in Colditz or some high security jail I suppose I would be one of those who is constantly scratching away at some new escape route. Just to be clear, I am not speaking of "cure," as things stand this seems highly unlikely. Just possibilities.

So I have got myself a month's temporary membership to a private swimming pool - a kind of spa place attached to a posh hotel, where the pool is empty, quiet and warm, there are towels, lotions and everything needful so you don't need to bring anything except a swimsuit. Swimming in public baths doesn't work for me, I get cold, exhausted and have to mix with the riff raff. At private pool, I am the only riff raff. I have been swimming twice this week. Sheer bliss while I was in the pool - the strange freedom given to the limbs, moving through water with ease, as though there were no impediment. It's a dangerous undertaking, of course. Anything remotely aerobic can get the sickness moving around the body like a swarm of wasps, so I have to be careful, and the muscles, the base of the skull, the usual hot spots, feel bruised. But I woke one morning with a voice in my head telling me to begin swimming, just as I woke one morning last year with a voice telling me to "eat light-filled foods" (it wasn't entirely clear to me what this was but the poetry of it pleased me and I assume I'm on the right path with becoming veggie). There is a chance that I am going bonkers (if the voice begins to tell me that I am the new messiah you will be the first to know), but for the moment I feel as though I don't have much to lose by following these inner promptings. If I don't actually feel any worse, then that will be a progress of sorts.

If it all goes pear-shaped I can just get myself some Touche Eclat.

* blogger isn't letting me put a link at the moment

Vegetarian

I don't know how this happened. The crunch was a tiny piece of bone in an IKEA meatball on Wednesday evening when we went to look at sinks and sofabeds. IKEA is exhausting, just as all large stores are exhausting, something to do with the lighting and formaldehyde, or chemicals in the furnishings, I have stopped trying to work it out, and mostly try not to go to these places. The meatballs and lingonberry sauce, have always been our consolation prize. Bleached out on a lime-green sofa, staring into a rectangular oblong of porcelain (but how does the water run out?), it was ok because in a minute we would go and have meatballs with lingonberry and chips. The bone fragment shouldn't have been there, it was a one-off, but fate arranged it so that we would come up against each other when I was wavering and vulnerable - about the whole business of eating meat, I mean. I have found myself wanting it less and less, choosing the vegetarian option when we went out, sensing an unfamiliar squeamishness in myself when looking at a tray of skinned chicken thighs and latterly (before Jonathan Safran Foer exploded into the scene) questioning whether I felt ok about eating animals at all. I used to. I began not to. I don't know why. It's not as though anything much has changed, and for many years (apart from IKEA meatballs and the occasional hamburger) I've bought responsibly-sourced, organic meat.

It was the piece of bone. It made me think of death, I felt like death. I remembered being five years old and how meatballs used to smell of snot and smoke. I thought about the mangledness of the once-living animal, the fact of it. A shudder was engendered, it is still there and I am not eating meat or wanting to.

I wonder if this will last. I hope so.

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.

A Work in Progress

Life, what? You decide to go along one path and then something presents itself which indicates that it would be better to go back the way you came and choose another. Obviously the New Black Dress look is not a good idea if it is going to hurt peoples' eyes to look at it, or make it impossible to read. So for the moment it's back to white. But I have a cunning plan, which may require that I consult with a certain bloggiste of my acquaintance who has a starry night background, but the text itself is black on white. But if it involves doing something complicated I might not bother.

The Writing is not going straightforwardly. As if it would. Leaving a novel-in-progress for any length of time is never a good idea, it can lose warmth, grow cold and die on you, I've had it happen before. You have to keep feeding it with your attention and your words and I haven't been doing this, sustained effort of that kind being scuppered by long aftermath post-swine flu, and then another 24-hour thing. Also, the new flat-by-the-sea, a lovely thing, but requiring much attention before it can be habitable. Stuff. I am gathering some bits and pieces of poetry and a couple of stories for the sending off, but there are too many unfinished scraps lying around or lost in the hard disc disaster of last year.

I come back to it all, though - the big story, the little stories, the scraps. And to the blogging. And (did I mention this?) Shrink. Yes, he and I are an item again, for the time being. I think there is probably a persistent streak in me. My colours may change, but I remain

yours faithfully,

Reading the Signs

The New Black

The background has, as you can see, gone dark here.* I felt like a change and was thinking about a poet whose study, the place where she did her writing, was a windowless room in the basement where the only source of light was from the computer screen. I would perhaps find that difficult, but see that it can lend you a kind of tunnel-vision state which is conducive to creative work. Whenever I am fully engaged in something the focus is like this. Even when sitting at the kitchen table with a notebook, there are moments, if all is going well, when everything around me goes dark and I feel as though I am inside the language. I experience this more often with a notebook than when writing straight onto a computer screen. This may in part be because if I am in front of a screen for any length of time I am affected by the - what do you call them - emissions, or something, especially with a laptop. A pity, because I do like the notion of screen as magical doorway into otherspace. But notebook is good too, the soft brown Moleskine cahiers with densely-textured creamy paper or larger A4 hardback.

There is also a simplicity about black - the little black dress that I never actually owned, but I can understand its appeal, the core of simplicity which you can build on. Here every possible moment, which is to say the moments that I am able to "do" anything, is taken up with the stuff of daily life and the getting together of our soon-to-be new place by the sea. A whole day can be spent getting handles for kitchen units. I didn't know. Signs Cottage is, by ordinary standards, unmodernised. I have only just realised this. So in every possible way, there is the urge to simplify, to have what is necessary, beneficial - essential. Working on it.

*nice for a day or two, but too hard on the eyes.

The Night-Side

I like winter. I like cold. I like night. But this year the winter feels too hard and I am not sure why - it isn't the snow. Sometimes the winter feels like a long night, and the nights are already so long when one doesn't sleep properly. The longest night I ever had was when I was five and went to have my tonsils out. After the operation I was sick. The nurse was angry. My throat ached and we had to eat ice cream. There was a bitter medicine to take, it made one of the other children cry, but afterwards we were given glucose. When my father came for me I thought I had stayed for one night but he said I'd been there a week. No-one visited, you didn't visit children in hospital then, it was thought less upsetting for everyone. Anyway, I was used to being left with strange people. If I was there a week, it was always night. When you are ill a long time, it feels as though you are living in the night. Floyd Skloot wrote a book called The Night-Side - he got the title from Susan Sontag, who wrote "Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship." There are weeks, months, years, waiting for the day which never comes. Times when you behave as though it does come, you talk about the weather, what is coming into leaf and bud in the garden and forest, lemonade on the patio drinking in the blue sky and light. But soon you are tipped back into night and it is as though the day was a brief space in some parallel existence that occasionally opens for short, intense moments. In the night, you keep telling yourself that the day will come, and you wait for that because if you told yourself that this is how it will be for ever you would lose hope. And you can't do that.

I am reading The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson. I will echo Ursula le Guin's review: it is the most beautiful and satisfying novel I have read for a very long time. The words come into me and find no resistance. I have need of this language.