Household

Household castle refuge home

behind a square of chipboard

or a taped up letterbox

up clanging metal stairs

broken concrete steps

decking with a slat missing,

along a rutted dustblown track,

patrolled by a snarling rotweiler

a slender whippet or a yapping Jack Russell,

it's your place where you close

the door the blinds the curtains,

fill it with smoke music people

the smell of bacon,

sit outside on a dying armchair,

call across the road to your neighbour

small naked child under your arm,

claiming your outside space with radio

barbecue the shouts and wailing

of children the laughter of bare-chested boys.

In the end it's where you come back to

to find your place catch your breath

drink tea make chips

tinker with the car

hang the washing do the vacuuming

feed the cats talk on the phone.

You pay the rent the mortgage

the bills the council tax,

you put out the rubbish,

let the dandelions grow round your door,

leave your shoes on the step,

the kids' toys wellies bikes.

You sit on your step in the sun

looking out at your view

and you are home.

Gaping

The early heatwave has given way to some much needed rain, and a temperature many degrees cooler. Strange to be suddenly in summer in the middle of spring for the last couple of weeks. A chance to rediscover just what a heaven we live in up here. And what with the garden and the allotment and the Census, I have rarely spent so much time outside in April, and have changed colour slightly as a result.

On Easter Day we planted the first potatoes - earlies. Digging the trenches and throwing in comfrey leaves evoked throwing flowers into a grave. The comfrey dying to give life to the potatoes. It all became a sweet twist on the Easter story. Satisfying metaphors of renewal and rebirth. Pea and bean weevil is nibbling the edges of the broad bean leaves decoratively, but we hope not too damagingly. Otherwise all progresses well. We ate the first rhubarb over the weekend. The strawberries are starting to flower. Calabrese seedlings are almost ready to go into the ground, and beetroot, spring onions and chard won't be far behind. Time to sow French beans and lettuce. On the allotment is the one place I feel consistently happy so needing to go there more and more as the season burgeons is just fine with me.

Census collecting manages to be boring and interesting by rapid turns. Knocking on doors where people are not home again and again and again is tiresome and tedious. When people answer, it is always at least a little bit interesting, sometimes very. And I've enjoyed getting to know kids on their bikes who endlessly ride around their little closes, crescents and rises. For several days a giant television lay smashed on the pavement of a street I had to keep returning to. It appeared to have been dropped from a great height. Lots of glass and plastic fragments. Later, it had been tipped up on its side, revealing the gaping emptiness behind the shattered screen.

The Unthanks

My friend K came to stay this week and on Tuesday night we went to see the Unthanks at Hebden Bridge Picture House on the last night of their tour. Oh. They are truly wonderful. Northumbrian sisters steeped in their own tradition but not afraid to play with the music, add to and subtract from it, and as a band they have now evolved this glorious almost orchestral sound, and the lovely northern brass trumpet threading through. Their own original songs, like this one, full of story, humour, and love.

Bouncing

A child's voice calling across the fields,

four clear sing-song syllables repeated,

a small tune crossing the air again and again,

as if calling two dogs whose names I can't catch.

I look in the direction of the voice,

see a child's small form rising and falling

as she calls the same four notes,

two names or two words as she jumps.

Collecting

Hot sun and blossom on trees on street corners. People sit in gardens, kneel down to tend gardens, children cycle about their small domains, kick footballs, bounce on trampolines. Blue sky. Music from inside, washing hangs on lines. Tulips in a terraced garden up above the road, red and glowing. Daffodils still. Houses where no-one is ever in, blinds down, gates locked. The water from a washing machine overflows a drain, pours down the path, soapy. Children fetching parents from deep inside their houses to talk to me. Sleepy semi-dressed people who work nights. Many kinds of dressing gowns. Many kinds of doors, wooden and plastic, many kinds of doorbells, letterboxes, gates, front steps, house numbers. Pebble dash. Brick. Stone. Weed filled yards and lovingly tended gardens. Old toys, rubbish and dog shit on the threshold, bins in front of doors, washing hanging in front of doors, doors open, doors closed, people emerging to find me there, surprised. Dogs, barking, yapping, quiet, tied up, roaming, behind gates, on leads.

Walling

The large pile of stones that used to be our kitchen wall, that has sat outside our kitchen window for over a year, has at last been carried, stone by stone, to the back of the house, and made into a garden wall... partly to give us a bit more of a separation from the street, partly to deter the dogs which like to wander onto the grass and use it as a toilet. L did a dry-stone walling course last summer and has been promising to do this ever since.

First L dug the trench for the foundations, then she and J began to lay the stones. I made coffee, and later lunch, and in between times continued to carry stones from front to back.

Choosing the next stone...

Getting there...

And yesterday L and I completed the project! It will have some soil put into the cracks and crevices, and eventually small alpine plants will grow there. We'll have to find homes for the spare stones too!

Overcoming

This Census thing seems to be having an unexpectedly positive impact on my spirits. I think it's partly just that thing of feeling a bit busier, a bit more purposeful. Also overcoming fears and mastering something. I was sent to an area I found at first sight a little 'challenging'. Got a bit anxious about my car being vandalized, scary dogs and so forth. I spent a few hours knocking on doors there yesterday afternoon in the sunshine, and all was gentle. A little girl on a bike became my guide, finding the next house for me, knocking on some of the doors for me, giving a view on whether these or these people would be home. The scariest it got was a couple of people cynical and a little surly about the purpose of the Census. I got my doorstep routines off pat, and ended up quite enjoying myself. Then the car wouldn't start, and I realised I'd left my mobile phone behind, and the sun was pounding down, car like an oven. And by then I was very ready to go home, and rather in need of the toilet. I remained (for me) calm, and gave it a few minutes before trying the ignition again. And again, and playing the gas pedal a little, and - it started!! Not quite sure what this is about - it's happened a few times lately, but always starts at the third or fourth attempt. Anyway, I took this as a good sign, this obstacle so swiftly removed.

I've also got my preparation to do for the first teaching session with the medical students after Easter. It's about team working, and de Bono's 6 hat model. It's not the most exciting material ever, but I'm having a think about what I might add to it from my own experience of teams and groups. Again, nice to feel purposeful, and, well ... employed! On another very positive note I received a big cheque from the school for my work in March. It will pay off my overdraft anyway! Should get first Census pay on Friday, and then maybe I can begin to retrieve the financial fiasco.

Too Bright For Me

Sleep was in short supply last night, but not for the same reason as before. Oh yes, I have a portfolio of insomnias. This one was largely hormonal. Ironic to get the better of the panics only to have oestrogen jump in (or possibly jump out) and wreck it all.

Here in West Yorkshire we seem to have taken the shortcut to summer today. I sit here with the door open, the sky is cloudless blue, the sun strong and bright. It's beautiful, and it's bit of a shock. My body is till creeping out of winter, especially when it hasn't had enough sleep, so the brightness, the heat, and the mood of elation out in the world feels a bit exposing, a bit exhausting. Better now I'm home. L started a migraine yesterday. This is how it goes with her - she gets a hole in her vision and the aura of zigzags and flashing lights, but only the mildest of headaches and no nausea. But she has to go to bed in a darkened room, and stay there til night comes, and beyond. She's just back from a short walk with sunglasses and hat, and seems to be ok.

I Shall (Not) Wear Purple

So I started Census collecting this afternoon, and of course, as you know, I can tell you nothing about it. Except that some people don't have letterboxes, most people don't have doorbells, and a significant proportion don't have house numbers. The first important lesson I learned about how to approach the job was to make sure to choose a decent pair of knickers to wear, one which does not creep slowly down around your hips towards your thighs as you walk about your enumeration district, carrying a clipboard and a shoulder bag, thereby necessitating inelegant hitching, probably not destined to present the 2011 Census operation in the very best light. Also perhaps not to wear purple. It was pointed out to me that I was colour-co-ordinated with the Census logo. Urk.

Excellent news on the sleep front. It was friend J's birthday on Tuesday night, so we went to the pub for beer and food, early because she was in the middle of her working week. Home by about nine, and in bed by about quarter to ten. I got a bit twitchy to start with, felt the old panic thing in belly and chest. But somehow I managed to let go of it and settle to a halfway decent night's sleep. Not top of the range, but serviceable. I felt elated in the morning just to feel normal not sleep-deprived, as I headed off to work at the school... Tomorrow's my other work morning, so let us hope I can repeat the performance tonight. Then university Fridays will be over for a few weeks, and only one more school Wednesday. Then it'll be Census all the way til early May, but at only 15 hours a week, I reckon I'll be able to feel on holiday a bit too.

Caliban

How I feel, at times, like a mad person, ungrounded, obsessional, checking, going over details, imagining. How I don't relax into the moment. The dead mouse in the black trap, instrument of death. Why not pink? The snap of the trap I didn't hear because I wear earplugs, but people say they do hear them in the night (that's all I need...) Now there is muted light and the sound of children's voices from the school playground. There is ink flowing from a pen, and wind funneling down a flue. And there are daffodils, large and yellow, their petals now beginning to curl and brown faintly at the edges. It's lunchtime for some though the taste of coffee and of strawberry jam is still vivid. Resignation settles on me as a man walks past with his hands clasped behind his back, the way he always walks. The man with short white hair and a sombre face who walks round here a lot. What is this immense sadness? We are tantalised somehow by the just unreachable beauty of life, like Caliban crying to dream again. I think of J whose mother has just died, and my own father dead 23 years. And of A now alive just that long - six months longer than my father has been dead. So much of it comes to me grimly. Death and separation and what is not. The ivy shivers on the school wall. The sound of an unidentified power tool. I am grateful. But these things can't save me. Cheerful A who came to measure up for a new fence, a log store and raised beds - his bounce and almost theatrical enthusiasm. He left me feeling briefly charged, excited, as though perhaps life could be a series of adventures and challenges.

Poor Mousy

Setting the traps again with their peanut butter bait. Abiding image of my day has been the stocky looking mouse, caught by the neck before ever getting to enjoy the PNB, we disposed of this morning. Strange mixed feelings of horror, shame and satisfaction.

Poor mousy lies dead in the dustbin...

Epic

Insomnia on an epic scale last night leaves me tonight at home while L goes out for drinks with our gang of friends. I'm listening to Rufus Wainwright and sipping a beer, and feeling not too bad as long as I don't have to do anything much, and gently anticipating the earliest of nights. It's such a relief when these episodes pass, it's tempting to put them out of mind, but I'm doing my best to talk about the problem to L as much as I can, because I just have to deal with this or it's going to deal with me. Two hours' sleep is not even close to enough, and worse than that, spending half the night in simmering panic is just ruinous for the nervous system. I get away with it (just) because I only work mornings at the moment. It's the afternoon when I plummet from sleep-deprivation. Next week could see the advent of proprietary sleep medicines in these parts.
I really do fear that I'm dying
I really do fear that I'm dead
singeth Rufus. Oh, there are such moments...