Wrap

Each moment might be a moment of revelation, but most are not. Epiphanies. The sense of things being hidden rather than revealed, as if they were presents with almost recognisable shapes, wrapped in enticing paper. But you can't quite recognise them, and you can't unwrap them - tantalising, out of reach.

The repetition of dates, months, seasons. Every year has its 30th of December, and every year it's dark at 4.30 and there's always a Christmas tree twinkling in a darkened room downstairs, when everyone is in other rooms.  The year is dying. Always at this time. So many other December 30ths underlay this one that it is hard to believe in its specific reality. It's a December 30th. But it's truly this December 30th. This one is a one-off, unique. This Christmas too, but Christmas is so overdetermined, it can never be just this Christmas. It comes with the massive pass the parcel weight of each year's wrapping paper - the music stops on December 25th, and you add another layer. 2011. So you can never remember what was inside the parcel, under all the paper - what Christmas was when it was new, unwrapped, naked.

Loose Ends

Picking up the year's loose ends and trying to tuck them in, or trace them back or trim them off. The fire is fierce and hot, and there are sensible jobs to be done as well as dreaming, reading, eating, walking. I take the pieces of paper out of my in-tray basket, one at a time, and consider them. There's nothing overdue or overlooked, and I can see where to put most of them away. Relief. Next the drawer that is my other in-tray!

Begin

Ooh err, suddenly I'm in the new look Blogger set-up. I may have tentatively clicked something, but I hadn't really contemplated such a big change. Yes, I am a creature of habit, fond of the familiar. Be still my racing heart, all is well...

Afternoon, just beginning to grow dark, though it has not been very light all day, mist and rain prevailing, warmer than recently, patches of snow and ice melting steadily in the downpour. The tops are no longer visible, a shroud of fog closing in just beyond the stand of poplars perhaps 100 yards away. A dog barks outside the post office, its voice deep, its tone agitated, fast, frequent barks of displeasure.

My intercostal muscles and diaphragm are tender from coughing. From time to time I misinterpret what I'm feeling as indigestion. This cold, or virus, or whatever it should properly be called, is a mean and moody shape-shifter, and is currently in the coughing and nose-blowing phase. I've run through nearly an entire box of balsam tissues enriched with soothing aloe vera. This phase also involves being awake from 3 or 4am. Tiring. I get up after a time, and make a fresh hot water bottle and a cup of camomile tea with honey, take them back to bed, read, and, if the cough will loosen its grip, eventually get some more sleep around 6 or 7. It's hard work, but I don't feel actually ill. I swear sometimes and grumble, and get exasperated when I knock my glass of water over, when reaching for the light. But I am not unhappy. No. Under the veil of this cold, I sense I am returning to myself, feel the stirrings of enormous energy and connection. I have a sense that at last, after a long time of feeling it was all over, I can begin (again). You wouldn't believe how many times I've written and rewritten the last two sentences. This is not easy to put into words...

Holly

We walked down the frozen field, the sky birthday blue, to a holly bush near a stile, sheep gathering on the ridge almost yellow in the angled light. Each with a pair of secateurs, we cut sprigs of holly heavy with red berries in great clusters, filled our two supermarket bags. Glad, we walked up the next field, singing deck the halls and talking about being jolly, jollity, jollification...

And on the way back over the cobbles near Mitchell Brothers Mill, having taken L's word that it really wasn't slippery, my feet suddenly slid away from under me, and somehow, through sheer instinct and the miracle of semicircular canals, and a measure of luck, I managed to stay upright, walking on laughing, my legs shaking, my stomach newly turned.

Bob Barks

It was a false dawn, the virus had not finished with me and now here I am in pyjamas with an intermittently functional voice, and a head heavy with cold. And yet and yet... this week I have felt the stirrings of a kind of ecstasy in being alive that I had, I think this is true, forgotten.

Bob, the dog next door, barks. There is mist over the tops, and a delicate dusting (I can think of no other word) of snow over the higher fields, like icing sugar on a cake, the green still entirely visible, its tone muted. Every now and then, a snowflake falls slowly past the window. They have the look of the seeds of willow herb in early autumn, floating and unhurried.

I am 'off sick', officially excused from all activity today. And L is on her way down to London for a retirement party at the school where she used to work. In a sense it's the retirement party she never had, the collapsed school where she ended her career unable to celebrate and honour her as she deserved. A travesty. So, I am alone, and enjoying the warm house, my pyjamas, lots of tea, and the freedom to return to bed for a spell later on if I feel like it.

Sleep, Tom, Signs

My throat hurt indescribably for less than 24 hours, then I slept about 15 out of the next 24. Now a bit snuffly, a bit tired, but sort of ok. I liked having permission to spend a lot of time in bed, and let go some of the activity of the week. This on the back of a challenging visit to my mother's.

On the way home on the train, in ecstasy listening to Tom Waits' Real Gone on the MP3

I'm gonna take the sins of my father

I'm gonna take the sins of my mother

I'm gonna take the sins of my brother

down to the pond

I'm gonna wash them...

til the water runs clear

Driving home in the near dark today, a red temporary traffic light shines out, above a red sign with white lettering saying when red light shows wait here, and one of those white arrows on a blue background to tell you to go round the obstacle not plough straight into it. Reflecting the red of the traffic light. The wet road, the stillness of stopping after hurtling along, and these traffic signs shining out their meanings to whoever happens to be there to see them. Something about that blue and that red that excite me today exactly as they did as a child being driven at night, or on winter's afternoons.

Who Needs TV?

The wood burner ticks intermittently as it heats up, and now begins to cool again, as I let it go for the night. I am learning its voice, its needs, its ways. I stare for long minutes into the silvered glow of the consuming logs, breaking down into cuboid glowing chunks of fire red fire orange. Something almost tactile in the pleasure of looking, alongside the frightening knowledge of the harm touching would do. Flames lick upwards.

Outside snow.

Uneasing

I learned of yet another death today - a woman I knew from the Sacred Song group I go to once a month, died of cancer in November. I hadn't known. We sang and remembered her gently. She leaves a stroke-affected wheelchair-bound husband. What with the old school friend's brother, two friends' fathers, one friend's mother, a colleague's husband and a friend's grandchild (a late miscarriage), this feels like the greatest concentration of deaths in one short period I can ever remember, albeit none of them affecting me immediately. Uneasing, and I dreamed the school friend's brother was murdered and last night that bears came in and were trying to maul L, until someone shot one of them dead, a scarlet hole in its furry breast.

Ugly

There's so much more, there's so much more, there's really so much more.

Wild west wind blowing down the stony ear of the chimney and no-one can relax

and no-one can spell no-one, and the fire is burning hot hot hot

(the Stovax stove pipe thermometer said so). So much more.

Chocolate advent calendar and a newly converted attic room

and my friend is home from seeing her father out of this world,

her cat is tracking her closely to ensure she doesn't leave again.

When can I retire, oh maybe never maybe not ever, maybe just die.

A little power monitor tells me how much electricity we are swallowing

up, and my oh my how the year flies to its end, how it dies how it leaves.

A boy I knew, not now a boy, a man in his fifties is dead dead dead

and what I remember about him is he was my beautiful friend's boyfriend,

he was a mechanic, he had eyes like the sea and waves in his hair,

and he drove a Citroen Diane, yellow, known as the flying banana

goodbye S, rest in peace. I dreamed you were murdered, I hope not so.

Death pressing its ugly face up at the window this month, last month

and Christmas coming.

World AIDS Day

Not usually a campaigning blog, but hey, there are no rules. Today is World AIDS Day and if, like me, you were under the misapprehension that AIDS is all under control now, or there is no longer a stigma attached to being HIV+ please visit the website and raise your awareness.

No Rules

It occurred to me that one of the things I love about blogging is that there are no rules. (It immediately strikes me that I have learned the hard way that there is one cardinal rule - don't allow your work place to be identifiable.) No rules about what, when, how much, in what style, to what purpose you write here. Individual bloggers make their own of course, to suit themselves - create a house style, a theme or series of themes, things they do and don't do. But these can and do change. And as for me, I have made a point of making as few as possible. Then I don't have to apologise for breaking them. I experiment here. Sometimes I play, sometimes I seek attention, sometimes I explore creative possibilities or chat about what I think or feel about things. Sometimes I just show up in the new post box without a plan, and sometimes the result is very exciting, sometimes not. But the blog is mine and I don't have to explain or define, praise or blame its content.

When I was 17 I wore a little badge on my lapel that said there are no rules. It might have been pinned on my jumble sale waistcoat, which I wore over a collarless khaki shirt or a blue and white striped prisoner's shirt, red needle-cord Levi's, and big boots, first hand made crepe soled ones, later Doc Marten's. My hair was cut short and I was already 6 foot tall. Some boys in the school used to laugh at me as a matter of policy, loudly every time they passed me on the stairs, on a corridor, or out in the grounds, and I can tell you now that it hurt. Even though I knew they were the fools, I still felt foolish.

I liked the idea that I didn't have to follow anyone else's rules about my appearance or anything else. The idea, mind you - the many rules we unconsciously follow are hard to spot at any age, especially in your teens. Family rules, social rules, cultural rules. The badge was a kind of statement of intention - to explore life outside the rules, to question the rules, to break the rules and not to care if people laughed.

Coal

All the logs seemed to be damp, or something wasn't right, and my fires kept going out, so we went down to the coal merchant's yard and bought some coal, and have now got a lovely glowing coal fire going in the multi-fuel burner, to give it its correct title. Good to learn how to do this before the cold weather strikes, when we shall want to be able to keep it in overnight, and other such advanced skills. Alarming how upsetting I found the failure of my log fire this afternoon. I felt about three and ready for a tantrum. My great new love, the wood burner had failed me, or had I failed, or had the log man? Don't know, but coal to the rescue!!

Strike

Sorry to be so shallow but I am at this moment so happy to learn that next Wednesday's strike will close the school where I work, thereby giving me a morning off. I do of course support the strikers, and at the same time I will of course lose a lot of money by not working that day, but right now this little respite in my next week is making me feel (in anticipation) a lot more relaxed. It's Friday night and I'm barely coherent but made it through another week, so good...

Mind Is On The Blink

So tired of being tired, though also getting used to it.

In the pub with J, by a roaring log fire, the landlord fond of throwing anything and everything onto it including our empty tomato ketchup sachets, George the dog chews up beer mats, thrown to him to stop him barking, loud, harsh, single barks.

Today I learned that the husband of someone I work with had died unexpectedly, a blood clot in his leg travelling to his heart, felling him as he went to get into his car to drive to his first day in a new job. Really, we never know the day or the hour (and I know this originally referred to the return of Christ but still... what is the return of Christ if not a metaphor for death anyway?) This saw me beginning my day stunned, sorry and chastened.

Hats arrived today - lovely, cosy and astonishingly ornate hats. And suddenly everyone in town is wearing hats, as the temperature dips a little lower than the amazingly mild temperatures of recent days and I begin to believe I'll need a hat soon to keep my ears warm. Maybe it will also soothe my mind.

Grinding Halt

Ho well, it was good while it lasted, and I never made any promises anyway, so there we go.

I scraped that post out late in the evening on Monday, then deleted it, and there I was banjaxed! But I was trying to say something very very good, so it's a bit of a shame. And then Marcheline felt I was being a cruel tease, and I hadn't even thought of that! Truth is I got in trouble for blogging, rather unjustly, it had devastating implications, and now I am recovering step by step. The Phoenix rises slowly, and sometimes sinks and then has to rise again.

Now I'm having to teach my students a mini version of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and though it amuses me greatly to be the one to deliver this, and though I think it's probably not what 18 year-old students need to be doing, I find I am curiously susceptible to these ideas just at this moment of my life. Or at any rate it is giving me pause for thought. Habit 2: Begin With The End In Mind is the main part of the teaching session I'm doing. It's about planning and goal-setting, and visualising where you want to get to. What it makes me realise is how I have never done these things in any significant way. Never had a career path, never had a game plan, never had goals, short or long term... And there are many reasons for this. Many reasons why I could never actually imagine a future at all, in which to visualise myself doing anything. And it has been in many ways the work of my adult life so far to understand this, to see what has happened to me, and maybe finally to have some other choice. To have hope at any rate. Even to think about looking ahead, planning ahead, thinking about what I want and going for it - all this is so revolutionary I can hardly believe I'm even thinking of it now. But I am. And only incidentally related to Mr Covey's formula! I am imagining how I might develop my work with young people, contact other schools, do a training. These thoughts are very new, but I feel a kind of hope and excitement I haven't even glimpsed for years.

Mean

A horse in a field means what? Freedom? Captivity? The instinctual life? A horse in a field is just a horse in a field of course and means nothing at all until the beholder adds meaning. Likewise a boy on a bike, a dog on a lead, the setting sun, a baby. What do I mean? I mean it's up to us how we interpret the world, I suppose. Glass half full or half empty. The way we can sit for years in a prison whose door is all the time open wide. But it takes a long long time to see what you do, even longer to accept it, and then what? Then you forgive yourself that's what.

Credit

I did write a post last night. It was about how far I've come from the situation I found myself in two years ago. How much I've achieved, despite the imperfection of the present state of affairs. L read it and counselled caution about how explicit I'd been about what happened. I was tired, and decided to err on the side of caution, and pressed delete. It was called 'Credit' and was about giving myself some for how far I've come. Sorry not to have posted it. Today will have its own post - later.

Labyrinth

Taking down the birthday cards, except Lucy's lovely flying bird, still hanging from a hook on the dresser. The mantelpiece looks a little bare, but I don't feel much about it. Intermittent conversations about how best to celebrate the 50 next year. Not at all sure, except for one thing - do not want big party! Friend S suggests taking the Turkish baths in Harrogate for a day. I have a hankering to be by the sea with friends. We shall see. I guess this is a sign of hope, to be thinking about it at all, in one whose predominant impulse at the moment is to crawl into a cave and hide. I'd say under a duvet, but I spend so many wakeful hours under one each night at the moment that the appeal has lessened. S has given me some Passiflora (homeopathic remedy) and it may have helped a little last night, not sure. I woke at 2am after three hours' sleep, and was predictably awake for some time, perhaps an hour and a half, but then did fall into the sleep-wake-sleep-wake pattern that is another familiar part of my recent experience. Maybe half an hour's sleep at a time, maybe less, waking with a vivid dream fragment, wide awake again for a time, then back for another vivid dream. It's not terribly restful but it sure beats lying awake for three or four hours at a stretch.

Need to start sorting out the information for the tax return. Need to get a haircut. Need to sort out the over-stuffed filing cabinet, thus enabling the sorting of my drawer and my basket, my two day-to-day in-trays, whose organisation is never complete because there's no room in the filing cabinet to put anything away.

The forecast is for glorious sunshine but we are currently shrouded in mist. Last night a bright autumn moon, just past full.

Currently life makes no sense and I can find no joy, except in lighting the wood burner, and food. One foot in front of the other in the labyrinth, hoping eventually to find the way out.

Wordless

Round Here

10

Still here despite all. Sleep continues faulty, invariably awake for one, two, three hours some time after three - essentially hormonal perturbation. Everything feels a struggle at the moment. At odds with three of my different jobs, not exactly at ease with the others but better. At odds with myself. Trying to untangle some mighty big knots at the moment. Back in therapy, as was just not doing well at the end of the summer. Tentatively job-hunting again...

L has been to IKEA and purchased a Poang chair and footstool to go in front of the wood burner, a cushion, a chopping board, an oven-proof dish, lots of candles and tea lights, two cutlery drainers and two fleecy throws she plans to make into a door curtain, plus curtain pole. I am so happy I didn't have to go. Instead I had a therapy client and a meeting with a CBT therapist.

Too Tight

I put my sweatshirt on back to front

too tight at the neck

thought about learning to dress myself.

I still remember learning to tie my shoelaces,

the boy who taught me, his great wisdom.

In the bath looked at my great big leg

thought about how my thigh's the size

of my whole baby self.

Night

I haven't been sleeping brilliantly for weeks, so I'm resorting to Kalms Night, which announce on their box:

Traditional herbal medicinal product used for the temporary relief of sleep disturbances.

Based on traditional use only

Whatever that means. It's valerian in fact, though there's nothing traditional about an oval tablet in a blister pack. I took one last night and it did nothing detectable at all, so I've taken two tonight and shall very soon be in bed, and let us hope drifting off to sleep.

Night.

In Between

In between day and night, where birds hop onto the honeysuckle, and fly away making it tremble damply. In between work and leisure, where stuff I need to do starts breathing down my neck, stupid lesson plans on the table beside me. In between solitude and company, L heading home soon from a misty walk and tea with friends. I expect she'll be on the next bus. In between autumn and winter, where the temperature spikes and dips like crazy, and now my feet feel cool and the cold mist is falling over the tops. In between the past and the present, where I don't know if I'm 9 or 19 or 49, or maybe nine months. In between the old life and the new, where I am contemplating starting job-hunting again, where the current collection of pieces of work rattle oddly about my week, where I feel lonely, under-supported and under appreciated - oh and underpaid.

I am drinking tea from a very large cup, a Cath Kidston one if you must know, though I never drink it all up, which is a bit perverse perhaps. In between full and empty I suppose.

Amen

Plot

Today. This day. Now. Remember remember the fifth of November. A day that draws attention to itself.. Later, the big firework display in town, and crowds will descend on the park and pay to churn its grass to liquid mud, eat smelly hot food, drink beer. Wait a long time for half an hour of big bright loud fireworks which can for nothing be seen from many vantage points all around town. This old curmudgeon will probably stay in looking at the wood burner instead. We have a little firework display up here in our village that I don't quite think of as a village tomorrow night, so I think I'll settle for that.

Next year's diary pages arrive from big internet retailer threatening to take over the world. Another year so swiftly added, seamlessly promising to continue on where this one leaves off. I am hoping it will be easier to navigate than this.

Lovely scabious, white and dark red, from the garden, in a vase on the table, many with wiggly stems that still manage to hold them up.

It is nine minutes past three and I have just experienced that moment when you first sense the coming of darkness, that subtle shift in the light, towards dying.

L is out at a lino-printing workshop. I look forward to seeing her creations.

Remember

A girl waits in a house, the dark pressing cold against the windows. She knows the glass will keep the dark outside. She hears the distant popping of fireworks. Later her father will let off rockets, roman candles and catherine wheels in the garden and she and her friends will shriek and gasp, and write their names in the air with sparklers, bright lines etched on the retina for a moment then gone. The garden will be damp and cold and it will be good to get back inside to eat cake and play pass the parcel by the fire. For now she is alone and thinks about her small body, a dot in the vastness of the universe, and then stops thinking of this because it is making her feel like she's falling off something.

This Day

This day comes every year, when the leaves lie thin and wet in the gutter, lining the road with shining ochre and ginger, and suddenly it is getting dark at half past three and you drive home from somewhere with your headlights on and the windscreen wipers on intermittent, and you feel something in yourself fold into the dark, something resist it, trying to smell or taste next spring underneath it all.

Still Point

Sit down in the city

become a still point

people walk past

birds fly over

the river flows by

the man with a fistful

of pizza slices

wanders towards,

seagulls whirling

shrieking round his head.

Down on the beach

below Gabriel's Wharf

a woman with a plastic bag

picks up pebbles.

A couple walk down the jetty

with a photographer

to pose in front of boats

trees, the buildings

on the north bank.

She fluffs up her hair

he shifts from foot to foot

and as they return,

looks furtively to see

who has seen.

All Saints' Day

Half my family seem to think I'm 50... but that's next year!! Obviously.

Last Monday Afternoon On A Bench Near The Oxo Tower

As a consequence of that - err

Yes I went to a party here y'know once

Careful don't go through the bars or anything (to small child)

I sort of stop myself from doing a lot - and sort of protect myself...

...because we were very Christian-based kind of...

They refuse to

Ow! (little girl who walked alongside railings and into a pillar at foot of pier)

Sounds like it was...

Second year you're doing some sort of like psychology

St Paul's Cathedral's up here innit?

So - a scoop down the middle! (laughter)

Me? I'm waiting for your instruction.

Cutting through complexity - KPMG reads the legend on the side of a river cruiser, causing me to smile as my sister works for them...

A man walks by with a little red flag on a stick

Shall we go to the beach?

No!

...and there's a little like pizza restaurant under the bridge - you need to get alongside the river and head east... tell me what street you can see? Are you on Waterloo Road at the moment, are you?

Man with fistful of pizza slices passes, followed by birds...

I'm not doing any of that but you know, obviously...

...said hello as if we didn't just spend the last two days together...

Noisy wheeled suitcase...

Rhys always sings that

Who?

Rhys

It's only a five minute walk according to that thing

She was like dead serious

...where we'll stay - just at the end of the road.

Snaps

Big green square fields, edged with dark stone walls, laid out slant in the rationed light. Cows browsing. A carved pumpkin on the windowsill.

Memory of the man with a fistful of pizza slices on the South Bank, the seagulls whirling white and noisy about his head. A bite for him, a bite for them. His bushy beard and camouflage trousers. Me still on my bench, sticking my feet out to try and stop people walking in front of me, as I gazed out at the boats, buildings and beachcombers. Recording snatches of conversation in my notebook...

City Mystery

I dance around people on dusty pavements,

avoiding the woman with the wheeled suitcase,

the three-abreast hand-in-hand family.

Whose street is this, I wonder, whose bus-stop?

The cyclist pulling into the space

ahead of the cars pedals free on empty tarmac.

The man sitting alone on a bench

in Tavistock Square has taken his jacket off

as I pass on the top deck of a 59 bus

heading for the wall of traffic on the Euston Road.

What about the homeless man you see on the steps

of the Opera House on Tuesdays, his dancer's grace

and pale lips, the pound you give him each week?

Back

You will begin to think I spend all my evenings drinking in front of the wood burner, but it's not true... and yet here I am again basking in the glow of burning logs, sipping a glass of something red and French from a bottle with a picture of a lovely old horse on the label. And, oh dear, feeling sorry for myself. I am tired and overwrought with work, and now, after the med students tomorrow, I must climb aboard a train heading south and go and visit my Ma, and thence on to visit A even further south. I love them both, but both are currently in need of my ministrations, emotional and possibly physical (well certainly my Ma), and sometimes I just don't know what I have left to give...

It seems to be taking about all I've got to keep my own little ship steady doing five different jobs. Well, two jobs, two schools where I freelance, and a little private practice. But still, five settings, five projects. Five changes of direction every week. (Though not next week as it's half term - hurrah!) It will all, of course, be fine, the train journey giving some gentle transition time, and my Ma taking me out to dinner when I get there, and unlikely really to make massive demands. And I am very glad to be seeing A for the first time since he came out of hospital, to see for myself how he's doing. I know he's having a hard time, but all in all I think he's handling it very well, considering the summer he had. Living independently and studying - things it was hard to imagine him doing only a few weeks ago... And my trip ends with a precious evening in London with dear old friend K, which will be a treat and a chance to debrief as well as catch up.

All is well. But setting out on this journey is inevitably evoking memories of the many anxious and upsetting trips I made through the summer, and being in Canterbury again is bound to bring it all back. Hopefully seeing A so much better will replace them with better ones.

City

The city is strange with droves of dark-clad people

assembled outside buildings, in car parks.

Sullen sky reflects in the puddles of recent rain.

Sirens streak the air and a silent ambulance

drives away blue lights flashing.

You climb aboard a train and sit down.

A woman unable to open the doors

swears in two languages.

People stand on the platform

hopeful, shut out, while

the carriages are coupled with a jolt.

You are leaving the city,

racing a tram for a moment,

passing graffiti-covered brick walls,

trees fiery with dying leaves,

tower blocks, signal gantries.

Head

Having five jobs is doing my head in, and I am trying to learn not to worry about A, but no success there. Well, maybe a little. Because the worry-space in my head is only so big, and mostly during the week it's full of work-related this and that, except at 4 or 5 am when it is full on a rotational basis of jobs 1-5 and A. And my tax return, my mother, my poverty etc etc.

So, Merlot and the wood burner. And no I'm not at the writing event (see previous post and comments) and I'm not writing. Well, I'm blogging in a rather self-pitying manner and drinking Merlot. So. And L is at her book group discussing The Long Song by Andrea Levy.

I wish I could say something more positive than that.

The Road To Hell?

So many good intentions about writing more here, and here we are Friday and it's almost been a week... But I must must tell you about the wonderful reading at our local library on Wednesday night with Jackie Kay who is quite without doubt one of my favourite poets, authors, women, lesbians, human beings EVER. She read a number of extracts from her Memoir Red Dust Road, in which she goes to Nigeria to meet her birth father for the first time in her forties, having tracked him down (easily) on Google. She performs with humour and tenderness, with energy and impact. She makes you laugh even while you feel keenly the pain or poignancy of the moment - her father is a religious fanatic and sees her, his illegitimate daughter, as tainted, sullied by a sin from which he has long ago been cleansed. She makes his praying and dancing, his exhortations for her to accept Jesus into marvellous theatre, whilst never letting us lose touch with the hurt, the disappointment, the sheer emotional intensity of this encounter. And she reads chillingly the section where a young fascist aims racist abuse at her on a London tube platform, and then hits her (white) friend who tries to intervene. Jackie asks a business man with briefcase and raincoat if he isn't going to do something and he replies No, we support them. Her willingness to be so open about this very personally painful incident (in which she ended up feeling guilty about her friend's injury) in order to expose and explore the horrifying mystery of racism is brave, moving, enlightening. She also read a few poems (more would have been wondrous, but she gave her all so no complaining), and answered many audience questions with great attention, thoughtfulness and clarity. She's also incredibly funny, very warm, down to earth and utterly inspiring to me as a writer, about how one can use one's life experience as material for writing, memoir or poetry, the delicacy of judgement involved in negotiating relationships with living friends and family when writing about them, the personal and creative importance of the process. OK, I could go on, but I can't, because now I am sleep-deprived at the end of a long week, and having got up at six with only a few hours sleep in the bank to go and teach my medical students. Which went well, I'm happy to say and let us hope I will sleep in future weeks as this is very hard on the body and mind. Fortunately I only teach in the morning, and the crash only comes in the afternoon - about now in fact!! The Point about Jackie Kay though, is the inspiration. And this Sunday there's an event in town called Not For The Faint Hearted, billed as

the writing workshop that will put you on the spot... You have no choice - you have to write poems or short stories for a set amount of time and you HAVE TO perform them... Yes, we're scared too. Who knows what will happen? It's an exercise in writing with adrenaline and driving out those pesky inner whining critics for an evening.

What do you think readers? It is currently my intention to go.

Nocturne

A ladder in front of me, a roaring fire behind.

Now and then, now and then comes a fool such as I.

L throws little granules on the floor

and keeps marching up and down the room.

The smell of wood smoke. A vase of garden flowers.

Use it or lose. The writing muscle atrophies.

A car draws up along the road, red indicator light

winking in the early dusk. The clouds descend

lower over the moors, over the fields.

Why not write? Why not reflect? Why not try?

The wedge-shaped log burns with slender tongues

of orange flame licking over its edges.

Writing is keeping myself company

without it I grow lonely, empty, dull.

Nobody else can say what I say.

I say all the flower stalks are tangled underwater,

I say flowers in October are a joyful thing.

I say maybe everything's gonna be alright.

Mother myself, support myself, believe in myself.

The elder tree so cold and green, the wind blowing

back its leaves like the feathers of a stranded bird.

I can't remember why I came in this room, says L.

I can't remember why I came in this world.

The bus drives past, the legend Old Town B glowing

above the driver's head, windscreen wipers

smoothing away raindrops, like stick insect mothers.

Mixed

Want to say something not sure what. Life is very full, very rich, very hard ... to mix a string of metaphors. I'm busy, and my head and heart are full. It is an intense time with a lot to digest. It does not easily yield its pleasures and joys, though they are nonetheless there, waiting to be prised out of the ground. Specifically? Work is a strange dance with many movements, and takes me well out of the proverbial comfort zone several times a week. Especially tomorrow when I start with my first group of medical students. Deep breaths and Sauvignon blanc (tonight the Sauv, the deep breaths both now and then!) And A is going through storms, with his feet on the ground and his face forward, wet with rain and tears. And I am here at the end of a phone, firmly tied by heart-strings, and going down to see him and hug him in a couple of weeks.

The fire glows gloriously red in the wood burner, the wind intense in its urgent whisperings, today a symphony of hail and rain, sun and rainbows.

Show And Tell

So here I am in my life and I wish I could show it to you. Because it's so like yours and in other ways so different, and I know, because this is one of the ways we're alike, that you find that interesting. The similarities, the differences. I'll show you my kitchen, where I can just hear the wind in the flue, newly installed for the woodburning stove. On the chair is my mat with my gradually wearing out healthy back bag. I'm just back from my Feldenkrais class, where we lifted and lowered our pelvises in different orientations, lying and kneeling. Where I somehow shed the anxiety that had plagued me all day, and began to breathe more deeply, and ended up with my feet on the ground. Where I thought how amazing it is that I've been doing this class faithfully for maybe six years now, while a changing cast of classmates has come and gone, returned, departed. How committed I can be when something is right.

On the table a small vase of sweet peas from the garden. How the bright spotlights over in the cooking area cast funny long shadows on the cupboards, shadows of the door knobs which are unpainted wood. The inch of white wine in the bottom of a bottle of Sauvignon, brought to dinner by friends on Friday, and not, inexplicably, finished, then or since. A honey and sunflower loaf defrosting for me to take to my poets' meeting tomorrow, where we never normally have lunch, but this time plan to, to accommodate the host's changed schedule for the day. She will make soup, I will bring bread, and brie from Lidl, where we went today and bought fizzy water, tinned tomatoes, apple juice and Mr Choc caramel and biscuit bars, over which purchase we had much debate... but still bought them in the end. My credit card bill, the unfinished sudoku from Saturday's Guardian, a book about neuroscience research and therapy that I'm trying to get back to after a gap of a few months. A pile of papers, notebooks, folder relating to one of my jobs, my diary on top on the little four legged stool we use as a coffee table.

While outside autumn slowly devours the tail end of summer, breathing warmly, chasing bright leaves scratchily along the road.

All is well.

Look Out

Indian summer is giving way slowly to the inevitable march of autumn, the sky subdued today, a little more wind picking up, a gradual drop in the temperature. The unseasonable heat has been a little confusing to body and mind, whilst certainly delightful and welcome after the disappointing summer. Sun cream in October - when did that happen before? 1985 I read somewhere, but I certainly don't remember if so.

Webs

I have now got so many small jobs, I actually struggle to answer the question how many? I work in five different settings, one of them being my home where my private practice is based. Another job, though working for an organisation in a nearby town, mostly involves working from home. There are two schools and a university. At the moment my head feels a messy jumble of fragments of work-related information. Most of the work is new, and there is much I don't yet know or understand, loads I need to do and haven't yet got to grips with. I don't like the way this is making me feel. I fear I may not have the right temperament for a 'portfolio career'. But at least I have work. When I look back a year, I am at least very grateful for that.

Spiders everywhere. In their webs in corners, at the tops of window frames, between car wing mirrors and cars. Wherever I am, on a train, in a room, driving, I seem to look up and see the striped legs of a spider, when I'm walking invisible webs brush my face.

A starts a Masters degree tomorrow at the university where he did his first degree. You can imagine my pride and pleasure, and my slight trepidation...

Warm weather just this side of the equinox. Golden autumn days, and t shirts, cut-offs and sandals get a reprieve from stowing away for the winter.

We went to see the new Almodovar film, The Skin I Live In, on Sunday. The man's a genius in my book. He's just 62, and the older he gets, the more accomplished his work becomes. I don't really do reviews, but I recommend it very highly. A few adjectives to whet your appetite. Theatrical, balletic, mythic, absurd, mysterious, subtle, grotesque, beautiful, disturbing, strange.

I will try to write here more again. It has been an odd time. I need to find a prompt to get me in the New Post box regularly.

The Best Email I've Ever Had

From A's most excellent friend B this afternoon:

Hi Everyone,

I picked A up from the hospital today for the last time! He is all moved out and back at his flat full time. The improvement in him in just a week is really incredible; he is, as far as I can see, back to his old self... calm and relaxed...

I feel like hanging out flags and singing. I have lit a beautiful blazing fire in the woodburner and will play some joyful music. May he go from strength to strength.

Rainbow

So, it looks likely that A will be allowed to go home on Monday, and the next chapter will begin. I am weary, devoid of thought, relieved, unable to be entirely relieved. The intensity of the last two months and more has exhausted my capacity for anxiety, for now at least. I am happy for him that he can return to his beloved flat, will have privacy, autonomy, choice restored to him. His recovery is not complete, but considerable, and being out of that disturbing environment will, I hope, allow another phase of healing to begin.

An old friend has tracked me down via the internet. It's the second time this has happened to me. Last time it was a university friend, and we had a rather intense flurry of correspondence some years ago, which culminated in a couple of meetings, then gradually faded away. This time it's a sixth form friend with whom I lost touch when we all went off to university, and maybe more significantly when I moved with my mother to London around the same time. I am enjoying a rather frequent exchange of bits of our life-stories, memories and updates about mutual friends. I don't expect to sustain it, but it's rather compelling for now, and has steeped me in memories of that time, and in some strange sense of connection, of the simple continuation of all our lives in parallel. We'll all be fifty in the next year or so, along with my dear old earlier school friends. A time to ponder the passing of time, the coming and going of friendship, the ordinariness and specialness of all our lives. I find I feel validated, made more real in some odd way by this exchange.

A lovely rainbow appears as I write, the third or fourth we've seen this week - I go to the door and stand with my face upturned to the rain and the sunlight. A perfect arc, and the hint of another above it. Raindrops on my glasses now as I write.

Autumn

Storm force winds now beginning to die down, still sighing in the chimney, as our first truly successful fire settles to a glow in the woodburner.

So today at last L made jam, something she has been talking about and saving jars for for - well for years actually. We even moved house with a box of jars! It's plum jam. She made five jars, sweet and red. And I remembered this - the poem and the time, many years ago now in another Yorkshire house, my sister-in-law making the jam, my lovely A the boy with cool hands.

Plum Jam

That one afternoon in the heart of autumn

When the light bled away from the windows

As we all sat together stoning plums

In a warm kitchen with condensation on the glass.

The growing heap of plum-halves in the shining pan,

The pale stones drying at my elbow

As you poured white cascades of sugar.

The smell of simmering fruit,

My back to the door, feet under the table,

And the boy with cool hands who came in moccasins

To perch on my knee.

Sweet

Sweet peas in a white vase, while the wind hurls itself at the trees, roars in the newly lined chimney.

How to write when the known world has dissolved?

Then A texts Chat? and I call him. He's looking forward to seeing me on Thursday, but the reception is bad and we get cut off, I try again. The wind is howling in the sitting room so I go upstairs for a better signal. We talk some more, he says he'd like to go out for a meal with me and his friend B. I've just been told today by a member of ward staff he has two hours' leave a day, but by B that he won't make it to meet me for dinner, will probably meet for a drink later with his girlfriend who has just started her first teaching job. As always, I must wait and see what is actually possible. Mostly I shall just be happy to be with him again.

Happy Birthday

It is A's 24th birthday, and I am happy to say he will not spend it in hospital, as he has been granted a day's leave, and will be out and about with six of his friends. The friends are thoughtful, and will spend much of the day with him in pairs, all coming together for a big picnic. The forecast for his part of the world is hot and sunny, a blessing he richly deserves. I will try not to engage in auntly anxiety about the need for sun cream and calm.

I think nothing could have prepared me for this last two months, and I hope I am learning from them. As I gradually take up my various pieces of work again, and in one case for the first time, my mind is necessarily and usefully engaged in other things, thoughts of A must be put aside for hours at a time, and I rediscover (so far at least) a competent professional identity from which I draw much strength. I shall travel south once more next week to visit my mother, on to Kent to see A, and then back to my mother's before returning home. I am very tired, and stress has left its mark, but I need to see them both.

Now

Now, a pair of red socks hangs beside a white sheet

in sunlight whose warmth heads off autumn

and you are painting the gate before the rain returns.

Not All Doom And Gloom

L cleans a lot of brown gunge out of the oven, whose origin we cannot quite divine. She studies the instructions on a container of oven cleaning product, which recommend working in a well-ventilated room. She says she won't do it now. It is after all after nine on a Bank Holiday Monday night. I say this is not the time for meaningful oven cleaning. We agree there is to be only meaningless cleaning for now, and laugh.

We also laughed when watching an episode of Miranda on the i-Player. Slapstick can still be funny! And big woman humour done by a big woman...

A has a new mobile phone - a cheap temporary one bought for him by a true friend, since his has gone missing (temporarily we hope) in the move from one hospital to another. We text and talk, and this is good, as the patients' phone in the main sitting area of the ward is far too public. He asks about our garden, and I tell him we have lots of courgettes growing. I also tell him we have been to see Arrietty, the latest production from Studio Ghibli and that it is good but not as good as Spirited Away which we both loved. He says he wants to go to the cinema himself, and I tell him that soon he will, though at the moment the poor boy can't even get outside for a cigarette. He is thinking of his birthday too, which is next weekend. We are all thinking of that.

Kaleidoscope

Late summer, and all the vegetables so plentiful and delicious - our own potatoes, beetroot, chard, salad leaves, radishes and courgettes, and from our lovely local organic veg box peas, beans, lettuce, carrots, onions and purple kale, as well as delicious silken plums I made into a crumble last night.

A has suffered a setback and is back on antipsychotic medication. Meanwhile, we are all supporting him to start a masters degree this autumn if he is able. Something to aim for. The whole situation is like an ever-changing kaleidoscope image - recognizable pieces again and again in new arrangements. We struggle to know what to do to help. We struggle with our own feelings of desperation. Longing, as my brother said to me last night, for this all just to stop now. To see A well and growing. To be able to stop worrying about him, to stop wondering what we could have done differently at every stage.

Frankly I worry for my own stability. Weeding the allotment today was grounding, and we have a dear old friend staying with us, one who has experience of mental illness in the family, and who is wise and calm. But I feel wretched somewhere deep inside where nothing reaches, and my concentration is not great. This level of disturbance in the family disturbs everyone deeply, and makes normal functioning very very hard, including clear thinking and decision-making about the situation itself, which is why friends are so helpful, especially when they have experience to share.

Bits And Bats

Carrot and coconut cake - the old Neals Yard Bakery recipe - to think I used to make 8 of these at a time in a giant mixer. It's still gorgeous - sticky and chewy and cinnamony and not overly sweet.

A shiny round waterproof combination padlock for the new log store, has a dial like a safe, reminds me of old movies. The new log store is half full of logs. The new woodburning stove (or multifuel stove to be entirely accurate) is looking elegantly at home, and as if it had always been in the broad inglenook fireplace in our kitchen-dining-living room. So far we have had one of the recommended 'small' fires you light to burn off toxic fumes from the paint. One reason to look forward to the colder weather...

There is, quite unmistakably, a hint of autumn in the air. The sun is at times warm, but there's a fresh coolness to the air which does not speak of summer, but of what is to come.

I resolve not to drink tonight, then E phones to say she and A are back in town after a couple of months, and would we like to join them at the Hare and Hounds tonight. What's a girl to do? Drinking J2O with E and A doesn't quite cut it.

Money worries compound nephew worries, and threaten to bring me to my knees under their dull weight, pressing down on my head. I resolve to put my energy into generating more work not more worry. I must pay my professional indemnity insurance premium, and resign myself to the overdraft. My new job will probably be starting the week after next.

Gouge

I have somehow managed to gouge a chunk out of my finger, which is hampered now as I type by a large plaster which spans the knuckle joint. I think I gouged it somehow on the handle of the toilet door, when I visited a 20p loo in town, after buying haddock, chorley cakes and kalamata olives from the market, and on my way back to the allotment realised I would enjoy my tea (in flask) and chorley cake much more if I took advantage of the (overpriced) facilities I passed en route. It cost me not only 20p but a piece of my finger to boot...

Dear A is still in hospital, or rather in a different hospital in a different town (a sudden and unsettling move necessitated by 'bed management' issues). He has what you might call clear spells and cloudy spells. He wants to go home. Who could blame him. An acute psych ward is no-one's choice of billet. On Monday, after being transported late the previous evening to this unfamiliar environment, he spent the day walking around with his backpack on, approaching the door whenever anyone came in or went out. He borrowed my pen to write me a note saying

Dear P, this is a hospital. Let's leave, A.

So many moments to break your heart. I am trying to find the bigger picture, the longer view. If I don't I am going to burn out fast.

A Nice Surprise

The rainclouds sit like steam over the tops, beneath them green, the fields, the darker trees. Across the clouds stretch the electricity wires, five, radiating out from their tall pole to our row of houses.

Stillness, coolness, my feet in socks. No alcohol tonight for the first time in many a day, and I feel a little gain in strength from the intention and its fulfillment.

My brother has been visiting my nephew, his son today, will stay in a hotel tonight, and I imagine him lonely in the city I am coming to know rather well, looking for a place to eat. I wait for his reply to my text. I think of our boy in his temporary home, with its hard wood floors and locked doors, in the muddle his life for now has become, the muddle that starts to clear, then descends again like the rainclouds over the tops, obscuring the view.

Being at home for a few days, I feel the ground pushing up against my feet again, my rattling thoughts begin to settle. Yes, I buy chocolate now and then, succumb to Galaxy cake bars, a sucker for checkout queue temptation in the Co-op, and yes, my alcohol intake is way beyond recommended levels these last few weeks (if not today), but I am calming down a little, the knot in me unclenching just a little, the fear easing some. I try to remember wholesome ways to 'de-stress'. Need to go and look at something lovely, listen to music, lie on the floor, take long candlelit baths, have fun (remember fun?) Something in me rebels then says how can I have fun when he is in that place day after long day? but I know that getting depressed, morose, heavy is not going to help him. The question also of how to take some fun to him. He needs music, I must ask if there are restrictions on i-Pods. There are restrictions on most things. I don't want to get him one and load it with music (his having gone missing) only to find he can't listen to it. My brother just texted he is surprisingly well this evening - A nice surprise.

August

This is not helping

Spade

My nephew is on a low secure psychiatric ward, recovering from a drug-induced psychosis. I have been cagey of saying this but, you know, there is a whole history of secrecy around mental illness which has placed its heavy burden on enough people already. Still does in some circles. It was not that which held me gagged, but the feeling of intense concern for his privacy. Of which I continue to be mindful. My need is to say that this is one of the hardest things I've experienced. His fragility, his powerlessness, his confusion, the distance, the mental health system, the uncertainty of the prognosis, the dubious merits of psychiatric medication. My deep bond with him from babyhood. His mother's early death.

I have never felt so parental, though I've always felt him to be the nearest I have to a child of my own. When someone you love becomes unable to take responsibility for himself, the intense way in which one suddenly feels responsible to them, even for them, is a thing my heart had no preparation for.

I head south again on Friday or Saturday, and hope to be able to stay in his flat, which will make things much easier on all fronts than having to stay at the Travelodge... All I want is to be able to visit him every day. For a few days at a time I shall be able to do so.

Perplexed

You, bearded with unbrushed hair,

hunched and shuffling in the wrong slippers,

searching once again for clues to decipher the riddle

of your being here in this large room

with its vinyl-covered sofas its ping-pong table

and the Jeremy Kyle Show shouting

even now about the unexpected paternity

of someone's wretched child.

Your t shirt does not feel like yours.

It hangs loose on your bony back, is not your colour.

You look down, read Lonsdale from your chest.

You take it off and sit bare-chested, put it on the table

with the bag of Kent cherries I have brought you,

some of them over-ripe and squashy.

One has made a red wet hole in the paper, protrudes.

Look, it's trying to get out, I say.

What do you mean it's trying to get out?

you ask perplexed, slowly turning your eyes on me,

a blue million miles.

Dark

L has gone across the road to the community centre to find out what new-age kurling might be, and I am sitting here pretending to be warm enough in a short-sleeved shirt and sandals. Summer has gone AWOL again. At least it is not throwing rain down by the bucketful today.

I went to meet the manager of a project, where I have landed myself another job for the portfolio, this morning. Yes, another six hours' work, running the counselling service for an HIV charity. They all seem nice there, and the building is pleasant and so forth. Mind not on the job yet, but I don't have to start for a few weeks so that is ok.

I'm away down South again on Friday, taking in family and friends and then more family in the shape of my nephew in Kent, to bring him what solace I can. To have the dearest young person in my life in distress is nearabouts more than I can bear, yet bear it I do and must. He is the closest I have to a child of my own, and I have no peace while his life is in turmoil. Nowhere I can rest my mind. Except on the thought of being with him for a few hours next week.

Get Knotted

My therapist once told me I reminded her of a pretzel. Look closely at one and you will see. Knottedness.

This knot is an awkward one to undo. I cannot blog about what consumes most of my attention at the moment, but it is hard to blog about anything else. I'm starting to miss being here. I feel shut out by the need for privacy.

I loathe being cryptic, so already I feel this is not going well.

Trying to work out how to be here nonetheless.

And another thing -- tomorrow is L's and my 23rd anniversary. I'm giving her a card with a picture of a pair of turtle doves.

Giant Pretzel

I am eating a giant pretzel, sipping a glass of cold white wine. I feel a bit like a giant pretzel myself.

Weather

Rain clears the air, trickles in gutters, wets my trouser legs. The honeysuckle and lady's mantle glow in the dimmed light. Charcoal grey clouds hurry over the tops. The rain stops, the light grows, the basil leans towards the window. Now a slant of sunlight on the fields, picking out the stripes where the hay's been mown.

Packing a bag, making a plan, looking for a map to follow.

Wordless

Time For Reflection

The Sea

We're home. The holiday was lovely. The sea was enough really, but the wild flowers, birds, reading and eating were also very much enjoyed. It wasn't hot mostly, but is now that we are home...

I am resolved to spend less time on the computer, since a week without it saw my neck and shoulders ease.

I have lots to say but a busy week ahead. My nephew is sad and so therefore am I, and I have a bit of new work, and a job application to send in, and a dear old friend visiting at the weekend. So posting may be scant for a while.

Handmade Parade

As promised pictures from the Handmade Parade on Saturday. The theme this year was YUM! The Fabulous Feast. Not sure what else I can say.


Where else are you going to see a grown man dressed as a portion of chips? It's R to be precise, who is coming to mend our fence and construct a couple of raised beds for us tomorrow! Pursued by a burger monster...

Greedy mouths...

The bees section, featuring L in perhaps her weirdest costume to date!

King prawn.

Four and twenty blackbirds...

The Parade ends in our local park, where things get steadily more surreal as the finale gets under way. Don't ask. The message is green...

The Beer Prize

I went to the Arts Festival box office on Saturday before the Handmade Parade to buy tickets for Moishe's Bagel. I was asked if I'd like to enter a prize draw. I said I would and filled in the required form, and thought no more about it. I didn't even ask what the prizes were, since I never win raffles, prize draws etc...

So, you could have knocked me down with a feather when we got back from the parade on Saturday evening to find a message saying I'd won the 'beer prize'! Well, how nice, I said to L, I expect it'll be a bottle or two of that local beer.

After her Pilates class this morning L went to collect the beer prize for me, and came staggering home under the weight of no less than six bottles of Little Valley Brewery beer, each one different. I especially like the way each one has a different coloured top. Click to enlarge to see them in their full glory.

At the age of 48 my first ever prize draw win! And it's something I really like. Thankyou.

Now back to the job application.

Handmade Parade photos coming soon.

Flaming June

Rain all day

soaking cold

windows covered in drops.

A cow in the field shakes herself

sends fine spray flying.

Dwell

I just broke a glass while washing up. It slipped from my wet rubber-gloved grasp as I reached to put it to drain on the folded tea towel that serves as draining rack overflow, fell hard enough from high enough to break, though it only fell onto the worktop not onto the floor. A big chunky IKEA tumbler used every day, it will be missed, but at least that sort of glass doesn't break into a million tiny shards like the wine glass full of white wine I knocked over and broke a few weeks ago. I don't want to have broken a glass! I exclaimed wearily, if one can exclaim wearily.

I am on an email service from my therapists' organisation, which alerts you to jobs in your area. They emailed me details of one this morning. It's 6 hours a week managing a counselling service for people with HIV/ AIDS. There are many things about it that are unclear, but one thing that is already clear is that 6 hours is not enough time to do what is in the Job Description, though it is probably all they can afford. I have worked for many charities and a kind of weariness creeps over me. However, it is more the sort of job I expected to be doing than teaching medical students, and it's nearer to home, and and and. I do and don't want to apply. Mostly I just feel a kind of mental chaos at the idea of having to start yet another new thing any time soon. Could I cope with that and two mornings of teaching starting in September, one morning at the school and two private clients?

L meanwhile is busy preparing for this year's Handmade Parade. It's on Saturday, and she has been painting bees onto cardboard since last night (she did go to bed in between) and has now gone off to today's community workshop to complete her costume and help children and parents with theirs. We hope the rain will stay away...

The glass, and the turmoil about jobs, and the fact that I can never seem to be comfortable on any chair, that my lower back and my neck and shoulders, and my upper back all seem to be taking turns feeling sore or stiff, make me cross and impatient. I have to keep coming back to my new resolve to check in regularly with myself and remind myself to be kind, to be gentle, not to bully and criticise.

In just over a week's time we go on holiday and will dwell by the sea for a week in Northumberland. This feels timely.

Breathing Space

It's funny, but I think I have a narrative going on in my psyche that says I should be doing better than this by now. Not actually funny at all, a major stressor being under that kind of pressure. The pressure to be alright by now. Of course, as soon as I see that in black and white I recognise it as one of the lessons of my childhood - you can be upset briefly, and receive comfort, but you will receive far more ongoing rewards for being happy, cheerful, able to offer solace to others. Early conditioning for being a therapist. Only of course a therapist needs also to be at home with her more difficult feelings. And relatively speaking, I am. Relative to many people, relative to my earlier self. But ever and again I see myself trying to wriggle out of engagement with discomfort, with disappointment, with loss and unhappiness.

Eighteen months ago, a dreadful thing happened to me, which shipwrecked my working life and left me entirely stranded, financially and professionally. The trauma sent shock waves through my whole being and rattled my never very steady confidence. There was damage which I am still repairing. I have three strands of work now, and all are well-paid and interesting. The school, the university, and private practice. But they are all very new still, and doing each for so little time makes it hard ever to settle in one place, get used to the people, the environment (except private practice where it's just me at home...) And the university job is now finished for a three-month summer, and my total work commitment is two half-days a week. In and out of modes I go, and at times straight back to 'unemployed' mode, feeling lost, adrift, structureless, demoralised. And here we go again, I have the feeling I should be feeling better by now. I read something yesterday in a therapy publication, in which someone mentioned that the worst thing that had ever happened to them was a nervous breakdown in their 40s, that had taken 'several months' to recover from... Comparing oneself with other people rarely helps, or not in a competitive way anyway. I very unconsciously understood this as a message that I am taking an unreasonably long time to recover from my -- what shall we even call it? -- disaster...

I'd like to get out from under this particular cosh. When I begin to bully and criticise myself, all that happens is that I compromise my recovery, feel worse, do less. Vicious circle beckons. I start to doubt that the work I am doing is ok, or that I'm able to do it, and off we go on another bareback ride on the wild horse of self-loathing. I hesitate to write that, but that is what it amounts to. And I don't, consciously at any rate, loathe myself, quite the reverse; but these are old and deeply worn ruts we unwittingly fall back into when the going gets rough. It's so hard to keep noticing, and intervene before the damage is done, to forgive myself when I realise I haven't noticed and damage has been done ('look what you've done again') and off we go again.

Today I am noticing. One thing that helped was Jean's comment about painful mental states and I thought 'yes, these are painful mental states, am I acknowledging this?' No, I had been just suffering them and somehow thinking I shouldn't be. The other thing that helped was a Feldenkrais lesson, which helped me become more aware of where I'm tightening, overworking parts of my body, and very gently, and without criticism, to explore these and to consider things that could help.

Edge

Two curlews circling wide looping

shrieking whooping, so close above my head

I can see their curved beaks,

the prehistoric arc

at the lower edge of their wings.

Sheep stare at me in the path

then turn abruptly

leading lambs

at a trot into the heather,

the muted drumming of their feet

on the hard earth.

Standing on the edge all the time

and teetering,

just pulling myself back

with pictures, with gentler thoughts,

from the plunge.

Pale Sky

I dream of a dead baby on a train and wake up thinking this cannot be good. The baby is in a pushchair and the parents bring it aboard the train at Rochdale. I cannot go near it.

Courgette plants in pots on the windowsill, growing reassuringly.

I try to sort out my 'intray' - actually a wicker basket that sits on the floor near the dresser and into which I dump things - reading material, bank statements, stuff related to my self-employment, stuff stuff stuff. Sorting it out was supposed to make me feel better... I end up not knowing what to do with half the stuff. I realise I need a big sort-out at the next level - the filing cabinet. Horror. But I know eventually somewhere in the process, I will feel better...

The sun is once again hidden from view by pale but dense cloud, and this dim light seems to seal me into my mood of dissatisfaction and unease. Actually, I want to weep. It is also windy. I wish it would be still.

Picture This

I want to show you a picture but I can't find the picture, the night black at the window, the cold-sounding wind in the chimney, I want to mention gooseberries and Ian Dury and to try to explain the endlessness of procrastination, and the calves chasing each other around the field, chasing and mounting, kicking up their heels in the yellow light, sickly and thundery around eight o'clock. Dusting the dresser and putting back each pebble, each cup and plate and shell, noticing the soothing. Parsley, mint and basil. I want to show you the smell of lovage as I weed round the beetroot, and the sound of two women talking but not the words as I earth up the potatoes. And memories of London in August four years ago, the toy people walking over the Millennium Bridge, and a man dressed as Salvador Dali outside Tate Modern.

Uneasy

The heat is returning after a month off, and with it some nameless anxiety in me. Maybe it isn't nameless, let's see if my final one-to-one meetings with the students tomorrow will set it to rest. I've been doing some Pilates exercises L has taught me and my shoulders are stiff, and I have a residual low-back/ hip discomfort from hard digging a few weeks ago on the allotment, which I now realise I have to avoid. All in all I don't feel quite right.

Yesterday a birthday walk and picnic in a beautiful spot in Wharfedale, for friend S on the occasion of her 61st. Most of the women there over 60, and again this aging thing gives me pause. Theirs, mine, everyone's. S boldly donned her swimming costume and swam in the icy waters - a fine way to celebrate! Some of us paddled, others just watched, there was much laughter and food and good conversation, and the sun came out, the warmer spell beginning in S's honour.

Tomorrow L's coming in to Leeds to meet me after I finish my morning's work and have lunch, and then a look around the city art gallery. Getting to know this other great city at the opposite end of the train line from Manchester, little by little.

Once In A Lifetime

I am very struck at the moment by the terrible inevitability of aging. There is probably no way to say something new on this subject. Yet it seems to be all my thoughts circle around, return to again and again like birds. The passing of time. All the people who have already gone, and those who are beginning to steer in that direction. And my own surprising collection of years - it is always surprising, as each year passes, yet the more years in the collection the greater the surprise, or so it seems. The surprise now is realising how much of it is already over, this life of mine. How little of it has been anything like I expected (what did I expect?) How little idea I have what to expect now.

My nephew at 23, with his life ahead of him (as they say), with big dreams but not much apparent sense of direction (not apparent to me, but he has always played his cards close to his chest), reminds me of the time in my own life when time didn't seem to be an issue. There was plenty of time to find out what I wanted to do, plenty of time to do it, plenty of time to find love, work, a way to be creative. Now approaching the end of the fifth decade, there is clearly more behind than ahead, and it seems infinitely more important I should know what I want, and have some idea how to go about finding it, doing it, being it. All I've been putting energy into for the last 18 months is finding work, discovering how to become self-supporting again. That has been my one and only goal, dimly accompanied by a hope that maybe I'd be happier than this eventually. And now I have work, albeit not enough work, but I am more or less paying my way again, more or less standing on my own two feet. More rather than less. And hope ('the thing with feathers') has begun to fly again - the hope that I can not just survive, but even thrive. And so, in true Maslovian style I am once again able to consider my higher needs (!)

I want to feel as if I've learned something, as if I can contribute to the world both personally and professionally. I want to be able to feel better than I did when I was younger. I want to feel less anxious, less insecure, less haunted by ghosts, less troubled about how others see me, freer to experiment. I want to feel excited and be able to bring my excitement to my relationships, my creativity, my way of being in this weird (let the word serve) world. I want to let go of all the crippling fear and self-doubt that have held me back, and believe in what I am capable of. As a partner, friend, poet, as a therapist, maybe even as a teacher...

Nostalgia and longing are breaking over me like waves. Longing for some other time, when it seems to me life was more intense, when everything was full of meaning, of immanence. If I trace this I think it comes down to an association with other people in whom I experienced qualities of passion, intensity, and in whose presence I could discover more of these qualities in myself. Meaning after all is a participle, not just a gerund. You have to participate. Our meaning is our doing, is our intention, is how we live. You can't look for meaning outside yourself, though other people may inspire or mirror - you have to mean it.

Under Between

Under the weather

watching the flag stream

from its pole

the clouds break and gather

the sun find chinks

to shine through.

Another day

melts the clock's stiff hands,

the butter in the airless kitchen

losing its edges

shining hopelessly

under its lid.

You get up in the night

to look at your diary

to remember which days

you are between,

to fill in the blanks

that threaten.

Teaching

Up to my ears in human factors, situational awareness, mental models, error chains and red flags. Why so much jargon for 'people make mistakes, get distracted, don't notice obvious things, make assumptions... one thing leads to another, and there are warning signs when things are going wrong'?

PS I hate Powerpoint

All

All that there is

the wind in the chimney

my feet in my slippers

all that there is

darkness settling

round the shoulders of night

all that there is

the last but one song I heard

the taste of peppermint tea

all that there is

my hands

my chair

the ticking clock

my heart

Missing

When I'm dead I'll miss this rain

that blows horizontal over the fields,

and tipping my head back

to pour the last drop of wine

into my mouth, meeting the taste

of cheddar cheese and water biscuit

on my tongue. The strange thought

of alcohol entering my bloodstream

altering my brain chemistry

as it warms my scalp and blurs my mind.

My cold bones will miss my body.

Work In Progress

My head feels full. The school has asked me to stay on after the completion of my trial period, and I am pleased about this. And two sessions may extend to three at some stage. A secondary school is not the easiest environment to work in, but I've made my little quiet space in the midst of the hurly burly, and have enjoyed the work with the kids so far, and will be starting with a new one next week, another after half term, when my current young client goes on study leave for GCSEs. This week I have had two adult referrals for counselling/ therapy in my private practice. The only one to date never showed up, so I am hoping this time I'm going to get off the blocks with this part of my work. The work at the university is challenging, and comes with a big 'do not blog about this' label attached, since I have already mentioned where and what department. Certainly there is much to learn, and these slightly older young people are interesting and likeable too.

With all of this going on, I don't seem to have much head space for creativity. Poetry continues to whisper and suggest. All I really need is to make some space, get out the notebook and pen and let happen. Maybe this weekend, since I have no major plans. A walk with a friend tomorrow, a walk with L today if the rain eases, a very short one if it doesn't. Next weekend I'm off to visit my Ma for the first time in a while, as the Census prevented me from going away at weekends for over a month, and now we're waiting for the French Open to be on, so we can do our favourite companionable mother-daughter thing of watching tennis together. I shall also see my aunt and uncle while I'm there, which is a rare treat these days.

The allotment's doing splendidly with calabrese, beetroot and spring onions now romping away, the potatoes beginning to show a few leaves, the broad beans surviving well and flowering like mad despite the pea and bean weevil, the savoy cabbages getting quite big now, and the strawberries flowering promisingly, rhubarb growing great big pink muscular stalks.

We watched Inside The Human Body on the i-Player last night. Despite such gimmickery as the blue sperm and the rugby players looking competitively at theirs wriggling about on a big screen in Trafalgar Square, the awesomeness of human conception and birth shone through. The tiny tiny chance of ever becoming a fertilised egg at all, of ever making it to become a viable human foetus, of ever starting on this so very strange adventure at all.

Butterfly

Not many words just now. New beginnings and transitions with the spring. Mulling. I enjoy the rain that comes to damp down the dust and tinder dry moorland where wild fires have been rolling. I sense the nearness of poetry, but like that word on the tip of your tongue, or a butterfly, can't catch it. I am not chasing, will wait quietly.

Howl

The boiler at our other house has already cost us more money than I care to think about, and our local plumber has now given up. Today the boiler company are charging us an arm and a leg to get it going again, and L is down at the house now attending the engineer, as our tenant is currently away (fortunately as it turns out, since it's taking so long to sort it). After this chapter is concluded, I'll head off for my penultimate round of Census collecting. I shall be so happy to finish tomorrow. I am truly grateful for the opportunity to earn some regular money for a few weeks, but knocking on doors becomes wearisome after a time, especially when they are the same doors over and over again. The wind has been making the job awkward these last couple of days too, threatening to wrest my sheets of addresses from my clipboard, and whirling my hair into a charming 'hedge backwards' look.

I am not good at occupying myself in odd little interim chunks of time like this one. I can't make a nice cup of tea or coffee, as one of my Census routines has been a kind of nil by mouth strategy for a few hours before going out, to avoid the need for a toilet, since there are no public ones in the vicinity. I am struggling to get into anything much with the prevailing feeling of just wanting to get my last two Census shifts over and done. Then comes Wednesday, when I return to the school, and Friday when I make my teaching debut at the university. Even though it is quite a laid-back course, and the content not overly challenging, I am still nervous. I am not by any means a teacher. I've done training with volunteers - quite a lot of that really, so I'm not afraid of standing up and talking to a group of people. But medical students are an unknown quantity. I have at least met them, and on the whole liked them.

I went to see Howl on Thursday. I loved it, though the critics have not been overly kind. Imagine making a film of a poem - how audacious! Some of the animated sequences which accompany the section by section reading of the poem, were a bit silly, but I kind of got into them as it went along. And the other strands - the young Ginsberg reading Howl for the first time in a club; the only slightly older Ginsberg being interviewed about the poem and the creative process; and the obscenity trial which followed the poem's publication - all worked beautifully. Interesting, moving, inspiring. And the poem was indeed the star of the show, raw visionary rant that it is, full of wildness, flight and the sheer joy of language.