This Year

Moving house in the snow and ice
Fleeting poorly paid but gratefully accepted employment in a very cold office, wearing wool socks
Unemployment - official. Fortnightly and later weekly visits to the dispiriting Jobcentre ('plus' as it is hopefully called...)
Long slow days
Learning the views from the house
Keeping going and more keeping going
Hearing myself say I can't afford to do things again and again
Discovering Edinburgh
Camping in Pembrokeshire and a small spirit of adventure
Poetry refuses to die
Some work some precious work
Self-employment - official
Snow and ice
Thaw
Kind friends and the most loyal partner ever
Goodbye 2010

Thaw

Silent ice yields,
dies in phlegmy looking puddles,
the world returns to the colours of earth
and we are shrouded now in cloud,
cannot see two fields away.
A fly in the bathroom refuses to die,
buzzes dark behind the thin curtain.

Boxing

If you keep beating 'round the bush
you lose your push
Listening to dear Captain Beefheart, rest his soul. 69 seems young to die these days. What can I say about the Captain?
Big eyed beans from Venus
don't let anything get in between us
Wild man, loose imagination, wonderful blues voice. Exciting and liberating both then and now to listen to music which tears up every rule book.

And last night we watched the documentary about Eddie Izzard 'Believe'. He too at his best is possessed of a wild imagination, a capacity for surreal flights - following them wheresoever they may go.

Longing for some of this creative freedom. Longing to lose control. Ridiculously anxious at the moment. About snow and ice. About work. About life. What am I doing with it?

I'm now working my way through my Dad's army letters for the second time, attempting to catalogue them in some way as I go. Having read my way through maybe 150 letters it is nigh on impossible without doing so ever to find again the parts that I want to revisit. And there are many. My father at 20/ 21 a trooper in the 40th Royal Tank Regiment, an ex public schoolboy, interrupted in his Oxford undergraduate studies by being called up for the last month of WW2, suddenly must share his life with working class lads whose language and behaviour he finds 'coarse, uncouth and licentious'. Yet he believes passionately in the equality and brotherhood of all men - as an ideal. He struggles to find common ground with his fellow soldiers and sometimes finds it in one to one conversation, though in group situations he is always the outsider, clearly seen as aloof and snobby. He characterises them as interested only in alcohol and sleeping with women, and occupies the high moral ground of a strict Anglican, sounding distinctly prudish at times. Yet he longs to be free of many social conventions he considers hypocritical and empty. He wants 'all men' to be happy, recognises the part played by Capitalism in the misery of the 'masses', and dreams of a kind of Christian Communism, whose ultimate aim would be to allow everyone to work only a few hours a day, giving them plenty of time 'to themselves' (a fantasy that marked his character throughout his life)...

Yet he seems to find it hard to imagine that a 'working class man' could already possess intelligence, integrity or dignity - without the precious (public school) 'education' he has been taught to believe is the only route to becoming a useful citizen, a good person... There is so much to find absurdly snobbish, classist, sexist, naive, and yet... here he is, entirely and inevitably the product of his time and upbringing and education, suddenly thrown into the levelling experience of army life, doing the best he can to be tolerant and helpful, to make sense of a world of which until now he has only seen such a small sheltered corner, and which has just come through a war.

He's also devouring books, dreaming of writing them, making his parents laugh (I hope) at funny stories of this strange army life, wondering what his brother back home is getting up to, sightseeing in Italy and Greece, swimming and sunbathing, playing cricket, and generally wondering what on earth is the purpose of his being there, as the months roll by and still he isn't demobilised.

My young young Dad, just a few years before he met my young young Mum, and the two of them got married and very soon started our family.

Babes in the wood.

Christmas Eve

The gammon is simmering in a pan with celery, onion, cloves and bay leaves, and L is making cranberry sauce with clementines and port to go with the turkey tomorrow. The turkey is currently residing in the back of the car! The carols on Radio 4 have just finished. In a couple of hours we shall go down to town for the carols in the Square. Hopefully they won't go on longer than half an hour, since the forecast is now for -11C tonight! We'll go for a drink with friend S and then return to glaze, bake and eat the gammon with a nice bottle of red wine.

I am having a strange and moving time reading my father's letters home to his parents from his time in the army from 1945-1947, based in Italy, Greece and Palestine. He was called up and joined the ranks just 28 days before the end of the War, and then had to wait over two years to be demobilized. He was 20 in 1945. I have had these letters for years in a pink cardboard folder, and never read them. I cannot explain why. It's a very intense experience - a meeting across time and beyond death, with a young man I feel I both do and do not know... He is sensitive, thoughtful to a fault, devours books and writes about them, an aspiring writer, wildly idealistic, a Christian with a strict moral code, also a Communist by inclination if not affiliation. He's lonely and anxious and completely out of his social comfort zone as a trooper in the British army. When I have read them all and had time to digest them, I will try to write more about them here.

In the mean time, Merry Christmas everyone! Enjoy peace, feasting and kindness, and I hope 2011 brings us all many blessings.

Winter Wonderland

Incredible ice crystals - frost on snow. I've never seen anything like these long feathery structures sitting lightly on top of the powdery snow. Click to enlarge, though even then it may be hard to get the full effect.

Weather as promised.

More or less. Certainly the temperature predictions are correct.

Solstice

Wow!



In fact the five day weather forecast is exactly the same but that won't embed. Gonna be an ice-cold sunny Christmas... Haslingden by the way is about 10 miles away from here in Lancashire, but is obviously the nearest weather monitoring station.

Hatworld

It's back to the land of people who wear hats. In my case a very unbecoming purple fleecy Peter Storm one, that sits like a large pudding on my head. Unbecoming but warm. Sub-zero for several days now, and no sign of a let-up. One big fall of snow on Friday night. The roads are well-gritted as always and getting out and about not a problem. It's beautiful too, with all sorts of different effects of sunlight on snow. Today a strange combination of brightness and foggy clouds so that on our walk this morning we were in bright sunlight, while the valley below had disappeared into a greyish pink mass of cloud. We walked with care, with walking poles, and it was a pleasure, and we remembered to take some old apples for the horses, and one of the special pleasures was the feeling of warm horse-lips on my hand. But it takes about ten minutes to get ready to go out and another ten to remove all the outer layers, boots, hats and so forth when you return. It is hard work living with ice. And it uses up energy like crazy - ours and the planet's. We just had a massive gas bill, the closing one before switching to a (hopefully) cheaper provider. Also hoping that the loft insulation will now begin to make an appreciable difference. It certainly feels warmer, especially upstairs, especially overnight. The heating's off for about nine hours, and yet some appreciable warmth is retained.

I have a work related meeting tomorrow evening and then I'm on holiday for more than two weeks. A strange phenomenon really for me, who works so very little at the moment anyway. I'll put in some time thinking about how I'd like to structure the work at the school - I told them I'd come up with some proposals. And L and I plan to 'brainstorm' about my work situation generally, and other things I might be doing to generate more. Otherwise there will be much time for reflection, writing, resting, reading, cooking, eating, walking, sorting out piles of papers and the enormous backlog in my email inbox. I feel myself drawing in breath, preparing for new beginnings. In the mean time, at times I feel my mind revert to default setting of looking for something to worry about, to dread, or second option on my inner menu - feeling guilty about everything. More meditative pursuits (if that's not an oxymoron) like Feldenkrais help, by nudging me into the experience of the moment, into awareness, out of monkey-mind. Remembering to make that time is always quite a feat.

Merry And Bright And Cold

We stumbled about a ferociously cold garden centre this morning, gasping at the prices and vastness of most of the Christmas trees until we could manage it no longer, and heaved a smallish 'Serbian spruce' in a pot onto a trolley, added a snow shovel for good measure, and went to the till where I'm happy to say we got change from £25! Tomorrow morning we'll do the decorating. There are already lovely little red and white lights adorning the dresser in the kitchen and we ate lebkuchen with our tea this afternoon. 'Walking in a winter wonderland' is earworm of the day after hefty exposure at the garden centre. All in all it must be Christmas. I've even written almost all my cards. Certainly all the ones that require posting. I think... Actually I've just remembered one more...

Ice is everywhere. Little icicles dangle off the bottom of everyone's car, and all yesterday's puddles are solid. No more snow though, as it's been a wonderfully bright and sunny day. I've pulled out of various things I was supposed to be doing to give myself more rest and recuperation time. Still going out to eat at the home of friends just down the road tonight, and welcoming friends from even closer by to eat with us tomorrow. My friend J is coming over tomorrow afternoon as well. And there's a Christmas concert at the local Baptist-chapel-now-community-music-venue just along the road in our village on Sunday afternoon. Sounds like quite enough, so I am pleased with my decision not to meet the poets today and not to meet the therapists tomorrow (which involved a lot of travelling), though I'm sad not to see all these people before Christmas. Still, it is true I still don't feel 100% well, so that has to be what guides my choices for now.

Christmas Present

I drove over to the school in torrential rain this morning, which turned to rattling hail just as I drew up in the carpark. The meeting went well, and I am going to start doing a couple of counselling sessions a week for them in the new year, initially for ten weeks, and then see where we go from there. Which I think translates as if things go well, they might well want more of my time... The vibe was friendly and informal in the school, the senior teacher I met with very easy to talk to, able to listen and to think! That of course in the teeth of the constant ringing of the phone, babbling of the walky talky and knocks at the door! Ah, schools... I am so happy to have secured some regular work, albeit on a small scale. I think this is how it's going to be - small but significant pieces of a patchwork of freelance work, rather than conventional employment.

A light covering of snow fell shortly after I got home, so everything outside is pale again if not uniformly white. There's more snow forecast, so I'm very happy there is nowhere much I have to go beyond local shops and friends for the next couple of weeks.

Shakin' All Over

Having maintained my recovery pretty well up to that point, yesterday evening I had a very strange episode of uncontrollable shivering and shaking. I'd gone to bed, been asleep a little while, woke up, went to the toilet, got back into bed, and began to feel very unwell in an intangible way. I turned on the light and called to L who was in the bathroom, who came and held my clammy hand while the shakes overtook me. I've never known the like. So stange when one's body feels altogether out of control. Great waves of shiver rolling down my spine. Couldn't be still, couldn't be warm. Eventually, with hot water bottle and many layers of clothing and bedclothes, it subsided. I still felt unwell and unable to settle back to sleep til around 3am, but no fever. My stomach felt a little tender, but nothing else developed. Mystery. Wiped out today, but mostly just sleep-deprived I think, and no recurrence of the shaking to date.

Weather forecast says the mercury's going down again. With possible snow. I'm hoping not tomorrow morning on my way over to Halifax for my school meeting...

One

I have just realised that something else has slipped by - the first anniversary of The Phoenix! I had forgotten that I started it quite so much in the middle of the fallout - before even my 'official' last day in the job. The anniversary of that has now passed too, I'm happy to say. It has been a tough year, but I'm proud I got myself here, kept writing even when it all felt beyond me.

I'm still depleted from my flu, and have an unusually busy week this week, so I'm trying to pace myself. I have a meeting on Thursday about the possibility of doing some counselling in a local school. Fingers crossed something comes of this. I'll have more to say when this week is over!

Sliding By

The first few Christmas cards have arrived. While I've been languishing in my pyjamas, drinking gallons of pale pink juice, the days of Advent have been sliding by. I have little concept of Christmas actually happening in two weeks time, but I know it will manage to manifest somehow. It always does. I know I will feel better, will buy a tree, will go shopping, collect the turkey, buy some stocking fillers for L and so forth. Just glimpsing the light at the end of the flu tunnel today, as the aches in my legs, arms and back finally recede, and my head begins to feel a little less like a hot air balloon. In the end I had to cancel everything this week. Which, ironically included two meetings about potential work opportunities, one voluntary, one paid. Ironically because there are many weeks when nothing so progressive is scheduled. Luckily, people are understanding about illness, wish me warm and well, wait to meet me next week. This is the moment, right now, when my young client usually runs along the path and knocks heartily on the door. I almost expect to hear her now, but sadly I have had to ask her to wait til next week too.

My World

Plaid pyjamas
Flannelette sheets
Aching legs, aching arms, aching back
Hot water bottles
Radio 4
Paracetamol used sparingly as I can manage
Sleep (aided by paracetamol)
Coughing
Balsam tissues
A hoarse voice
Reading 'Tender Morsels' by Margo Lanagan - a juicy reworking of the Snow White and Rose Red fairy tale - being carried off to another world
Peeking out at the white world outside
Sneezing painfully
More balsam tissues

Nest

Suffering some sort of lurgy. Sore throat and swollen glands are my main symptoms and just feel a bit woozy and a bit achey, so I'm staying in the warm house. I haven't left it since the pub trip on Friday night, for which three friends joined us in the end, all the others staying home in their jammies... Not sure if I picked this thing up in the pub or whether I'd already been incubating it, but one way or another I am jolly glad I didn't travel south on Friday.

The snow is still lying thick on the fields and gardens, mostly just slush on the pavements, though some of it refreezes and then it's dangerous, the gritted roads clear, side roads mostly treacherous with ice. It is like living in another country. One where all the inhabitants wear hats. The birds enjoy the food L puts out for them every day, and we enjoy watching them. It turns out dear little robins can be pretty aggressive.

As for the mouse problem, we caught one very small specimen in a trap a few nights ago, and I took it out and left it to its doom in the snow. It was very sweet and bright-eyed, but we had to say goodbye! Since then, no more captives, and no more tell-tale mouse poo around the kitchen. So maybe it was just a lone chancer, come in out of the bad weather to munch on our apples, and hide out behind the cupboards. Too soon to be absolutely certain, but I'm beginning to think there was not a nest full of babies after all. Good.

Snowbound

I haven't gone down south, and here's why!

We had about a foot of snow on Wednesday. It's very beautiful, and ferociously cold and icy. -10C last night, or that's what was forecast and I think it wasn't far off. I hummed and hawed for a while, listened to the radio, checked weather, travel and news websites obsessively, heard stories of people stranded overnight on trains, saw that severe weather warnings were ongoing into the weekend... and ultimately decided to stay home in the warm, and try to get down to my Mum's another time. My Mum, though disappointed, was relieved not to have to be worrying about my safe passage (as she would certainly have done), and so was I. It's my friend K who I think is taking it hardest. Understandably. Her friend has now gone into the local hospice, and I dearly wish I could have spent some time with her to give her such support and courage as I can. And hugs. But I can't. Not this time anyway. K is a very determined, dogged individual, and a very seasoned traveller, and would probably have braved it in my place, which makes me feel a bit crap about this. Yet, I still know it's the right decision for me. As for the group lunch, well, it's sad, but they do meet four times a year, so I'm hoping I may be able to join them in the spring!

So, I'm here to see this.

And this.

And to put on five or six layers to go the five minute walk along the road to the pub this evening to meet at least one friend. Hopefully half a dozen, if they can be persuaded to brave the cold and come up here! The buses are running so there's no excuse really.