Wish

I wish I didn't have to tell you this. But it's either silence or truth. My beloved therapist was murdered just over two weeks ago by her son. It is just that incomprehensible. I have not had the heart to come here but I miss you all. My relationship with G was profound and loving, and was helping me finally to heal old wounds. I don't know what else to say. Times are dark, and every night I light a candle to G. The tree glows and the fire burns bright and we know that tomorrow brings a new year. And for now that is all.

Mum

Surrounded by my mother's possessions, rug, lamp, vases, dishes, CDs, throw on the sofa, pictures, photographs, and have even been wearing her cardigan, I am comforted and discomforted in equal measure. I keep saying to L
I want my Mum back

On The Road

We are heading south today to make what we hope will be our final contribution to the clearing of my mother's flat, for which a buyer has been found. We shall return with a car full of stuff. CDs and a CD deck, books, lamps, filing cabinet containing all my mother's paperwork, a mirror, a clothes airer, a bread crock, bowls, vases and ornaments, pictures, curtains, food items, and goodness knows what else besides. Pragmatic, sad, slightly anxious, here I am, and in a couple of hours we'll be on the road. Tomorrow we'll go into London to visit my Mum for the afternoon. She has been diagnosed with early Alzheimers dementia, and I guess we're all slowly absorbing this information (except her I suspect).

Last Night

Last night I saw you in my dream
wrenching the hands off the clocks
Vicki Feaver  White Tulips

There you were in the dark
in a kind of frenzy, barefoot
in the kitchen and it could have been
midnight or four am, it was hard to tell,
you had all the clocks off the walls
off the mantelpiece off the sideboard,
had smashed their glass like dinner plates,
now getting hold of the hands,
wrenching them, prising them, pulling them off.
Some came easily - the kitchen wall clock
its hands like plastic chopsticks now
littering the red lino in the moonlight,
but the little ticking carriage clock
would not yield its hands to you
so now you had seized up a pair
of blue handled pliers and were
gripping the tiny spidery things,
twisting and yanking them off
and there was no time now.

Even the computer with its
secret digital clock in the corner
had been smashed to the floor.
You were all fury and determination
awake or sleepwalking,
I couldn't be sure as I stood
at the window staring in
through the uncurtained glass, aghast.
What now? Time is gone
but the moonlight moves
across the kitchen floor
inexorably, marking the passing
of minutes as surely as clock hands,
so will you come outside
and try to wrench it out of the sky?
What of the sun which in a few hours
will be climbing the sky in tiny increments,
minutes, seconds?

Lions

Into my dream come the lions
and wait for me outside school,
the hefty male lies down calmly
like a Trafalgar Square statue
the lioness stands ready.

Ready for me. I approach
terrified. These two could eat me
for breakfast, lick my bones.
Should I run, stand still, lie down?

What's to do?
The lioness is in my house
though I can't see her.
I duck in anticipation
of her leap from the wardrobe.

Sam Lee

Sleepless

Bought a loaf called Sleepless White (it cooks overnight) then went upstairs to the cafe where Kate Rusby's album Sleepless was playing. Drank tea then went to therapy where I talked about my dream about lions. Though not much.

Last night was every bit as bad as the bad old nights. Maybe three hours' sleep, looking at it as optimistically as possible. Listening to the Sleepio imaging recording (in your mind you go to a relaxing place - healthy-looking grass, little birds, a path leading down to a beach, take off your shoes and walk in the sand, feel the breeze and the sun on your shoulders...), reading Little O, listening to Radio 3 very quietly at 3.30am. Up at 5.50.

Solace

Weird time out of time. A day off work. Yesterday morning I took off sick after a strange night with stomach cramps, nausea and diarrohea (but all fairly mild) and almost no sleep. Camomile tea and hot water bottle at 2am. I was then advised by school I must be clear 48 hours before returning to work, hence today at home, listening to Sun Kil Moon and catching up with the Mum admin, and... still sipping camomile tea, as stomach not feeling normal just yet. Mum admin today involved a phonecall, a letter, sending a copy of the Power of Attorney, also responding to an email about her flat, which is about to go on the market. Tomorrow I go down to London to see her. More white lilies. I hope I find her up and about this time. A visit to rr after will bring great solace.

Amongst

Raindrops translucent berries amongst the dark, swaying on the elder bush. A glimpse of sun amongst moving grey and white cloud.

I carry them to your house on my back, uprooted 
flowers, I’m bent double with the weight of them.
(Aztec love song)

To you, I'm coming to you, to your house
with these uprooted flowers on my back
this golden rod, these willow herb,
the tall dying flowers of the moors and verges
in sheaves, in armfuls, tied into bundles
and slung across my back.
I'm bringing them to you with the earth
dropping in tiny crumbling granules
from their roots, to you, to show you
that their time is up and gone
no way to plant them again
in the ground, amongst the grass along the lanes.

They are uprooted and dying as I walk,
their roots exposed and drying
their leaves wilted and curling
they are for you, for you, and I will
bring them to your door, great mounds of them,
the weight of them bending me double
giving me backache, buckling my knees,
drenching me in sweat.
You need to see them, beautiful and dead,
smell their green sappiness,
smell the soil falling from their roots.
I will leave them at your door.

Enduring

Enduring Power of Attorney. We have this now, registered, for my mother. The strangeness of this state of affairs sinks in slowly, as I speak to the banks who look after her money, establish myself and my brother as its custodians. It seems matter-of-fact to walk into the local branch of her bank, and begin this process, just a bit of business, and then I catch sight of myself doing it, remember what it means. Or can't quite remember what it means...

She is doing alright at times, less so at others. Getting to know her fellow residents, but also telling my sister she's been there long enough now. Getting new hearing aids, but unable to manipulate them, needs larger ones, so a further delay. Getting a phone in her room. No idea how that will go, but I shall be able to phone her again. This is good, though I have, I will not lie to you, enjoyed the quiet time of her telephonelessness.

And I am thinking about my Dad, how much I loved him when I was a little girl, and he brought me picture books home from work and read me Edward Lear nonsense poems, how further and further apart we grew as I grew up, as my parents' marriage languished, died, was left behind. How we left him behind. How he let us. How he left the world. His choice. The last 25 years of my life marked by that choice. I can't explain to you how, or not briefly. But I think I have tried to know him in a way by becoming him, a tendency I have, a strength and a weakness in a therapist. To feel my way into people's skins, into their heads. Then you have to feel your way out again, regain perspective. I think maybe that is what is happening for me with my Dad. I am not you Dad. I am alive. I can live and grow and thrive. My life is my own. I am not doomed.

Racing

There's this thing, and it isn't dancing to strange music at a disco in a cricket club on a wet October night, but maybe some part of it, the moment when someone dropped a glass of aniseed smelling drink on the floor and we all had to dance away from that wet place, and the tiny pieces of glass and the aroma. And the young women who knew strange dance steps to music which might have been from another planet, so utterly unfamiliar to me was it. This thing, like catching the eye of someone for a moment, when some meaning you don't even recognise verbally is exchanged on the dance floor, which is still and always the dance floor of your youth on which miracles might have occurred but never did or not to you. And going to the bar to ask for a glass of tapwater please. Purest of requests and no money changing hands.

And as well, going to a poetry workshop and letting rip in a 15 minute writing exercise and feeling like you've snorted a line of speed, and the world and everything in it is yours yours yours. Racing.

Now red wine. Its seduction and the fire glowing orange and ticking gently.

Pyjamas

My Dad in my dreams and in the back of my mind trying to get forward, my Mum strange and out of reach, not sleeping very well, getting up at 5.45, the hour-long drive each way 3x per week, having to see clients without any break between (two and then two and then two - breaks between the twos, and actually I usually only book five not six, but still...), my tendency to merge and absorb. No, I don't want to go out tonight. I want to light a fire and put my pyjamas on, have a bath, open a bottle of wine, listen to music, go to bed...

Over Everything

Rain all over everything and I'm longing to say something without the least idea what. The nights are fairly drawing in and L is out extracting honey and I am too tired once again, as sleep has been troublesome a little again lately, though not in the same league as previously. I dreamed the night before last of my Dad lying dead face down on the green carpet near the French windows in the house where I grew up, which were flung open, a strong and somehow terrifying wind blowing the length of the room (which was long). I awoke with terror deep in my body, which seemed much more awake than my mind and to have far more knowledge of what was going on too. And then sleep was elusive as it took hours for the fear to ebb.

So, I'm here and I'm tired and it's autumn, clearly, with mists and mellow fruitfulness and all that, but not cold yet, not really, though we've had a few evening fires. I set off for work in the dark again now.

Heroine

Here We Go

I saw my Mum in her new setting on Saturday, and took her her white lilies. She was in bed, complaining of having no energy. She's safe and looked after and it is a decent place, is the good news. She is not interested in much, and is being rude to the other residents (when she gets up), is the bad. My own emotions too complex to attempt to relay here at the moment. A kind of grieving. Several kinds maybe.

I combined my visit with spending time with my dear friend rr. Who makes a mean spinach pesto it has to be said. And played me some interesting kora jazz. We talked much and played with an app relating to Bjork and David Attenborough.



My car has been restored to me after being pranged while parked, by a neighbour, last week and carried off on a transporter. All shiny and good as new - or good as before at any rate, which for a ten-year old car is about as much as can be expected. Goodbye to the white Fiesta, which smelt funny and had a manual gearbox. Too much strangeness.

It is autumn and windy, and I went out for my walk this morning wearing a woolly hat and gloves. Here we go.

Stop Making Sense

Fantasising about finding a way to use language that doesn't make sense but still resonates. Because I suppose I get very tired of making sense, or trying to.

Strange driving to work in a white Ford Fiesta not mine, with a manual gearbox, having to dig in my brain for those old skills, left foot pressing clutch, left hand shifting gear stick, knowing when to, remembering to, when first, when second, when depress clutch, when lift it, when apply hand brake. Body tense, the drive twice as tiring.

Awake half the night. The strange white car. The strange place where my mother is now housed. Imagining arriving with white lilies, asking for a vase.

Out Of Hand

And sometimes it all gets a bit out of hand. It flies across the distance between us like a slippery ball-bearing, wild and potentially dangerous.

Too much family in my face right now, trying to manage things with my siblings from here across the Channel, down the country. All the young people in transition, my mother in transition. My sister about to have an empty nest. Not sure what I'm about to have.

Wood burner going again anyway and pyjamas on. If in doubt, these, and wine, and 6 Music, and a bath.

Boards

Rain. A lot of rain this morning, and a slidy clay mud path along the edge of the inexplicable pit dug right next to the building where I work began the day with more challenge than I needed the day my Mum moved into a care home. Is this a metaphor for what we do here? I wondered. Boards were provided for students to walk somewhat safely to their appointments. They teetered and slid along and arrived with almost mud free shoes unlike my own which sat and dried on some cardboard in my room, while I conducted all sessions in my socks, only rather late in the day wondering if this seemed strange to the girls far too polite to say if so.

Watering the courgettes and beans and rocket, and dead-heading the petunias, in my pyjama trousers, Sleepio t shirt and favourite red and black check cardigan, as the sky briefly puts on a display of glorious flung cloud laced with pink. Walking around the gable end I feel the sun's heat radiating back at me from the stones that have absorbed it all day.

Night

Night, though so early, and I turn a daddy longlegs away at the door. Shoes, long trousers, jacket. All these strange items re-entering my field of awareness. There is nothing in this world but change.

First

I have just lit the woodburner for the first time of the season. I don't seem to have lost my touch.

Radio 6 music for company. Goldfrapp choosing lovely records - currently Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie. One of those tracks that makes you think you never need to hear anything else again ever.

Outside wind.

I am alone and cooking a chicken breast that I felt might be slightly past its sell by date, but have decided (guided by the nose) that it's ok. Marinaded in lemon juice, olive oil, chillie and garlic from the allotment. Cooking Charlotte potatoes also from the plot, chard and broad beans ditto. Considering pudding. Oral comforts for me. And the fire.

Can't get my brother to communicate about his latest experience, taking my Mum to visit the care home we like. I know he'll reappear but hard to wait at this crucial stage.

Drinking my mother's White Burgundy. Cheers, Mum.

Yourself

Your fingernails have grown far too long
and there is old food or worse underneath them.
I have brought clippers and I cut them for you,
pinching you only once,
leaving dull crescents
on the wooden bench.
Some fall through
the slats to the concrete slabs beneath.

When I have filed each nail,
and with a careful finger
you have checked for rough edges,
you tell me you feel like yourself again.

Old

Maybe these moments of feeling that nothing feels right, are not wrong. The wind sighing in the elder and honeysuckle, the sound of L pushing the mower, the smell of white lilies in a pot, and glorious late afternoon August sunshine. Yet my body feels like a badly tuned radio, not receiving correctly, all hiss and static. All crackle. My throat aches but has no idea what it wants to say or to cry about. Old, old, my body feels an old thing, a fragment of a time when nothing could be made right, when there was no comfort, as certainly there is now.

Fragments

You are you but not the same you,
alive, your hair and toenails growing,
your mind on other things.
You do not remember yesterday
can't imagine tomorrow,
watch with the absorption of an infant
the single magpie who hops towards us
across the grass, glorious in black and white,
say what a handsome fellow.

You no longer ask for anything
expect anything,
yet your need has not been greater
since you were a tiny child
dependent on others
for food, clothes and shelter.

Rain

I have written about rain before
but still I'm searching for the words
to evoke its whisper rising to a hiss
as momentum and volume grow,
like the shower being turned up,
the heavens, as they say, opening,
and water falling in streams,
small, narrow, distinct, parallel,
coursing through air that was dry,
is now wet, as I open my mouth
to taste and breathe and drink.

Rain like something
being expressed, an outpouring,
a communication, a quantity
of drops falling as if meant,
intended to say something,
to convey to earth, down into the soil
into the storm drains,
the rivers and canals and watercourses
and seas a message 
something from far away
descending to become part
of our realm, down here,
gravity bound,
falling to the lowest point,
finding its level,
not stopping until
it can go
no deeper.

Going

Narrowing it all down into words now, like a weed emerging from a tiny crack between the flagstones, so warm beneath my bare feet these summer evenings. Words feel very tiny for this sense of changing light, changing appetite, changing tempo. Six weeks of summer holidays from school may have something to do with it. My mother slowing down. I've more or less given up she tells me, slumped on her bed in summer shirt and trousers I seem to have known forever. Sweet-natured physios encourage her to stand and turn and sit, stand and turn and sit, bed to chair, chair to bed. She is by turns funny, and savage in her response to their gentleness. She pulls faces, she complains it's all such a fuss. Don't touch me she snarls. The young Asian physio, pulls her helping hand away, smiles quietly. Why are they so beautiful to me these young women, their enormous patience and kindness, their simple desire to help? My mother on the road to nowhere, puts herself in our hands entirely, and we must decide what is best now to do. Next weekend we three siblings will come together here to have this archetypal conversation, over wine and good food, strawberries, gooseberries, bilberries, all the plenty of West Yorkshire. Try to decide if our mother can go home, or where home is going to be now - a home?

And I am well, and I am intact, and I am, somehow, ready for this. Sad, oh yes. Sorry. Yes. But I confess (must it be a confession?) I am feeling an unexpected sense of liberation. The clinging, needy, demanding mother has gone. I no longer have to phone her twice a week, to hear the same refrain of how much it means to her to hear my voice, what a difference it makes. I no longer have to go and sit beside her watching tennis, drinking wine, dredging for conversation. Taking her white lilies. The sharp mixture of sadness and freedom is not what I would have guessed.

Now I take her hand, lean my head into hers, try to imagine what it feels like to begin the sentence I really feel I ought to be going... then taper off, unable to finish the thought, much less the sentence.

25

Off soon with our picnic of various Marks and Spencer's goodies (pork pies, marinated prawns, Greek style cheese pies, cherry frangipane slices), a little tub of salad, and a very cold bottle of Cava, complete with proper wine glasses. We shall sit in our place between the holly and the hawthorn, looking down into the greens of the trees in the clough, and celebrate our quarter of a century together, and be amazed!

Must Not Be Blank

A fly inches up the window. It is as if someone were pulling a little string, tug tug tug and sending it like a Christmas toy hilariously up the glass. Only it isn't Christmas. It's the other highly charged side of the year. Thirty-five years ago the unbearable tension in my home was about to erupt. The protracted process of my parents' separation would begin with my sister telling me that my mother wanted to leave my father. And then a few incomprehensible weeks of knowing this when my father didn't. That summer I left the school I'd attended for eight years, my best friend moved away, and suddenly I was faced with the prospect of leaving the house where I'd lived for eleven years, and going to live in another town, without my father. Carefree summer after the big exams, but I was lying awake at night crying, my childhood in ruins.

Diaries

An awkward pile of diaries of different sizes, spanning the years 1976 to 1985. A jumble of days from long ago.

Handmade Parade 2013

The theme this year was Myths, Mysteries and Mayhem, in four sections Earth, Air, Fire and Water. More words than that are I fancy not necessary. Click to enlarge images.

Tail

A cardboard fish tail, about three feet long and painted blue with silver scales, hangs from the fireplace. A blue fish on a stick poking out of the coal scuttle. Paints and sellotape, the stapler and strips of silver paper lie about the table. Must be the Handmade Parade tomorrow.

Pieces

L is away and I dream she falls with a crash through the rotten floorboards of an old house. I call down the hole. And call and call.

Then I dream of my first woman love, kissing the soft skin of her neck. She has come back for me.

Tomorrow the hospital and I have decided writing will be the way to deal with it, writing in my blue notebook on the train home. A place to put the pieces. Then here.

Don't Want

Fresh green leaves tremble, wonder if they got the season right. Tom Ravenscroft plays curious music on Radio 6 Music, always a little reminiscent of his late father John Peel. I drink a glass of the Wine Society's French Full Red. I ponder my refound ability to enjoy alcohol, which is entirely thanks to my refound ability to sleeeeep. Even when I am working. Even when my mother is languishing in Watford General. I never got there last weekend - stolen cable caused signal non function at our local station and I was unable to set out, so barring a repeat of that or some act of God or Godzilla, I shall go on Monday. Today's report from my sister is that my mother is VERY confused, almost ga-ga. I of course don't want to go/ don't want not to go/ don't want to feel I have no choice but to go/ don't want to be dealing with this/ don't want...

Rough With The Smooth

Kefalonia was dreamy. Sun was hot, sea was blue and wavy, sand was gritty, and I slept like a baby and relaxed completely.

Then I went to visit my mother last weekend (was it only last weekend?) Then on Monday evening she had a fall, and - has broken four bones in her foot and bruised her knee, is on the geriatric ward in her local hospital, and has became rapidly much more confused than she was before (which was only slightly). My sister is at the front line and on daily visiting duties, tonight sounding exhausted and discouraged. I am contemplating a there and back in a day visit on Saturday - 8 hour round trip on trains.

Follow The Sun

Off to Kefalonia tomorrow in search of sun, sea and sleep. Currently watching the wood burner die down for the night and have just put hottie in my bed. Hard to believe tomorrow we'll be arriving in 25 degree heat! I can't remember a more timely holiday.

Seeya!

One Track

Still in pursuit of better sleep, I seem to be expending all available online communication energy on the Sleepio site at the moment. Chatting about Sleep Restriction, reassuring novices about the Quarter Hour Rule (if you haven't gone to sleep after quarter of an hour - get up), encouraging each other when we have setbacks and feel like the walking dead. I have also been appointed a greeter, to welcome newcomers to the programme, for which I now get free access! And in the Graduates' Common Room, we even chat about other things than sleep - the progress of spring in the different corners of the world where we live; global warming; health problems!

Sometimes I get six hours' sleep and feel a lot better but still all too often four or five. There is progress though, but it's subtle and you have to maintain a very positive, determined and long view to stick with this programme. Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye (not forever...)

After Months...

When the wind blows I walk away
deep in my huge blue duffel coat
from a life reduced by two thirds
and crammed into a hopeless house.

Books but not so many
the same meals round a smaller table
scaled-down conversations about the future
one unhappy dog.

The wind catches my bare hands
pulls up the hairs on my arms
I shiver as I walk and do not know
where I am going to go.

Moment

Patti Smith is singing to me
last night I read the words, did you read them too?

It grows dark, so that I shall have to put a light on soon to (try to) avoid keyboard errors.

I spent my day on a training course, fighting sleepiness in a classroom. Awful. At home I can get up, dance, run up the stairs, do exercises, sing. In a classroom I just began to feel almost ill with the desire to close my eyes and the inner command not to. The day like some weird dream of being on a course. Not a bad course, but I couldn't as they say engage.

Sleep is improving little by little but 5 or 6 hour nights, though better than the 3 or 4 hour ones which preceded them, still result in a close acquaintance with depths and shades and nuances of tiredness previously unguessed at.

It is raining, roofs shining in the fading light.

The orange streetlight is a shower head, raindrops spraying out from it as if to wash a giant's hair.

Clear

It is frosty again this morning, and the day promises to be clear and sunny, as spring saunters in finally, better late than never. I'm going to a Feldenkrais into Dance workshop today. I'll tell you about it afterwards, but for now let's just say dancing is the order of the day, the order of this end of the week. Dancing for joy! Last Saturday I received a letter recalling me for Further Tests after routine breast screening (my first ever, having turned 50 in the last year). The appointment was on Wednesday morning. Four whole days and nights. Three friends had been recalled and found to be clear, one had been recalled and is now a breast cancer patient, veteran of two operations already, and embarking on chemotherapy, radiotherapy, herceptin, tamoxifen... the works.

Even now three days later, it is hard to recall exactly and to describe the different phases of terror, dread, anxiety, nervousness and sheer panic I experienced in those five days. I can also report that I had one afternoon - Monday, where I became calm and grounded and was able to be in the moment, where I did not know what was happening, and there was as yet nothing to be frightened about. I went to a very precious spot on a steep hillside above a clough where a beck comes rushing down over stones, a spot between a holly and a hawthorn, where L and I made our private vows almost five years ago now. And I lay on the grass, head on my fleece, and looked at the sky and felt the earth beneath me and the word clear came to me - clear clear clear. I felt clear inside and I knew somewhere that my tests would be clear. It didn't last in quite that form, but it sustained me somewhere inwardly, enabled me miraculously to get some reasonable sleep on Monday and Tuesday nights, and to remain relatively calm and not become hideously irritable, grumpy and reactive on the drive over to Bradford on Wednesday. I was called in almost as soon as we arrived at the Pennine Suite, where breast screening stage two takes place. I was given a plastic shopping basket in which to put my (above the waist) clothes and a very soft pale blue gown with a belt like a dressing gown to wear. I waited in a warm room with comfortable chairs, with first one, then later two and three exceptionally nervous women. Happily not for too long. A repeat mammogram (there's an area of your left breast we'd like to take a closer look at) was followed by ultrasound. X-rays, I was told are 2-D images of 3-D things (in this case breasts) and there can be... well, optical illusions. The second X-ray showed nothing. Nothing! So I lay on my side while the doctor moved the little ultrasound probe over the slippery gel on my left breast, round and round, back and forth, thinking wait, wait, just wait til he says it's ok, don't count your chickens... And then he said it - actually I can't even remember the exact words now but there was nothing there, nothing of concern, nothing to worry about, and I was FREE TO GO!! He gave me a mini lecture, looking right into my eyes as I lay there bare breasted, about being breast aware and not relying on the 3-year screening to catch all cancers, and to go to my GP about any changes, any at all. Yes, yes, oh yes, of course. Up I sat and wiped the gel off my irrepressibly healthy left breast, scrunched up the tissue paper I'd been given for the purpose, told the doctor he was my favourite person today, picked up my basket of clothes, and went to the changing cubicle, and thence back to L in the main waiting room, who looked entirely stunned to see me fully dressed and announcing our departure!

We eventually found our way from the door where we came out of the hospital, to the car park where we had left the car, sent a wave of text messages, and set off to drive home, singing and dancing to a party mix one of my friends made for my 50th. The relief, the sheer unadulterated happiness of being alive, well, free from cancer, free from breast screening and all its works, and released from the torment of worry of the last four days, is something I had never experienced before. Joy. The relaxing of muscles I didn't even know I'd been tensing. The sense of taking a full breath again. And another and another and another.

Brussels II

Brussels I

Click to see more detail.

Today In West Yorkshire

Note my neighbour's car almost entirely buried in the little carpark adjacent to our houses... Fortunately I parked mine on the street, knowing snow was coming, and having observed problems in the carpark before, though not quite of this magnitude.

Drifts

Thirty hours of snow and wind and still it flies past the window, still is sighs in the chimney. Massive wave-shaped drifts in exposed places, no snow to speak of on my car in the shelter of the house.

The sleep adventure continues. Averaging less than four hours all week I was taking sleepiness to a whole new level, and not just in the evenings. Fortunately yesterday the blizzards closed our school so I got a very welcome day of rest. A bit two-edged though as I was falling asleep reading, falling asleep in the bath, falling asleep doing the sudoku, falling asleep colouring, falling asleep watching programmes on the iPlayer. The only antidote to stand up, move about, dance. Then last night my body rebelled and I developed vertigo around 10.30. Not acute, but enough to tell me it was time for bed. I went at 11.30, an hour before my 'sleep window' and slept! 5.5 hours at this point seems a treasure trove of repose. The vertigo is still here, but not too bad this morning, and I am a little less abjectly exhausted and at least not sleepy just yet. Beginning to take this thing into my own hands. I think 11.30 will be the new bed time as 5.5 hours in bed was running me ragged with sleep deprivation, far far worse than when simply suffering from insomnia and that can't be right. 6.5 hours I can work with.

Restricted

Started sleep restriction last night - bedtime 12.30, get-up time 6.00. Every day. Got about three hours' sleep, if that. Idea is to reset body clock, and only be in bed for sleeping. Idea is you get out of bed if you're not sleeping and go somewhere else until sleepy.

Too tired to write in sentences. Too tired to comment at this stage.

Cooking Delia's fast roast pork with rosemary and apples, cider and creme fraiche. Tending a fire. Taking it one hour at a time. Half past midnight seems a long way off.

Dimming

Push my face into the pillow and force me to sleep
you know you can flatten me on the bed
and squash me to sleep
Blindfold me and stop my ears
kick me over the edge you know you want to
into the pit of forever into the dimming
dream

Obvious

Well, who'd have thought that signing up for a sleep improvement programme could entirely ruin one's sleep pattern, damaged and fragile as it already was? But that is what happened. From Saturday night, all the way through until Thursday night, my sleep average was around 4.5 hours a night. Believe me when I tell you this is not enough for a day's work, and yet and yet somehow I do cope, I do see all my clients, and I do believe (and I don't think I'm deluded) the work is good enough. Then I come home and crash, in all senses of the word (well maybe not all senses, but more than one). It makes life a little limited, keeps the old flu cough alive and well, and there are moments and hours of great physical and mental misery, especially the hour in the car on the way home, especially the bits sitting at red lights.

Anyway, then on Friday night I slept about 6 hours. And last night about 8!! Praise be to the dozy little pyjama-clad god of sleep. I thought I'd lost the ability to have anything one could accurately call a night's sleep.

So yesterday I undertook (or underwent) Sleepio session 2. Nothing much to report really, it was a series of blinding glimpses of the obvious. However, let's not be too scathing, it is always good to be reminded about caffeine, exercise, relaxation and so forth, though I do agree with some of my fellow travellers on the Sleepio website message board, that being told to make your bedroom dark, quiet and comfortable seems a little unnecessary and just a tad patronising. Do those clever CBT doctors not realise they are addressing seasoned insomniacs here? Too hot, light or noisy a bedroom, or too lumpy a bed might possibly be a problem you'd have eradicated at some earlier stage of the game, when you first began to wonder if there was anything obvious you could do to improve your sleep.

A more interesting development is that I have sworn off alcohol for the duration, since not only did Sleepio point out, but I also know from experience that drinking it is not at all sleep-friendly less than four hours before bed. Might make you sleepy at first, but then body goes into withdrawal in middle of night, and zip zap you're awake. Or in my case you're just awake and hot and awake and hot (and that was one glass of red wine last Saturday night). If I miss it too much I'll take up drinking at lunchtime. Seriously though, I hadn't had more than three glasses of wine since I got flu at the beginning of February, so I'm more or less weaned anyway, and have regularly stopped drinking for spells throughout my life. I like it, it just takes a while to get round to it. As so often in my life, on important matters - my body has spoken.

Another week on the sleep diary, and in theory addressing my 'negative thoughts' with something called a 'thought checker', which goes something like this:

1.My thought

2.This makes me feel...

3. A more accurate version

4. This makes me feel...

I will once again attempt to lay off the scathing tone, because there are moments when this sort of thing has its uses, when the thought is for example 'oh god, I can't sleep, and I will be such a wreck tomorrow and everything is going to hell in a handcart'. Which clearly makes me feel helpless, miserable, angry and anxious. I won't bore you with parts 3 and 4, but you know sometimes a blinding glimpse of the obvious is just what we need if we're not too darn sophisticated to take it in. 

Sleepio

The somnolently challenged amongst you may be interested to know that I have signed up for an online sleep improvement programme based on CBT techniques - called rather charmingly Sleepio!

I have fallen back into an old pattern of struggling to sleep on the nights before getting up early for work, averaging about four hours on these nights. I just about (but at a cost) manage to work adequately, but only really because I finish early and know I can then come home and lie down... I am fairly sure it was the impact of sleep deprivation on my immune system that contributed to my falling prey to such a vicious flu. From which I am still recovering, and the cough comes back when I get tired... The rest of the time sleep is usually adequate but with blips, and hormones are also a factor as I move from peri-menopausal to officially menopausal... Hmm. Time to do something, I decided this week, feeling pretty desperate. I have never wanted to resort to drugs, although I would if there was nothing else, so enter the darling psychological therapy of our times. Online! How 21st century can you get?

Every week I have a 20 minute online session with 'the Prof' - a cartoon character about two inches tall with a dog called Pavlov... Week one of the programme involves nothing more challenging than filling in a daily sleep diary, which gives you a picture of your 'sleep efficiency' - how many of the hours you spend in bed you are actually asleep. Expressed as a percentage. There will be relaxation techniques, and a tailored programme to improve the sleep efficiency, by limiting the hours spent in bed. There is also an online community of fellow travellers, which of course I've already joined. Last night, despite the fact that it was Saturday, I slept really badly, maybe four hours. Partly I was overly aware of the sleep diary I'd be filling in in the morning. Ho hum. I'll keep you posted.

Non-Leap

The end of February - always a bit like being pulled through a hedge backwards for me, and this year I even look a bit like that, having missed the moment for a much-needed haircut over half term, what with being ill and my hairdresser being something of a vortex (a major component of turbulent flow), and not appearing to me a useful part of my recovery process.

February stumbling towards March as only February can. These unmistakable harbingers of spring, the snowdrops and crocuses, the busier birds, the increased light - mingling uneasily with the temperature, the ice  in the puddles, the snow along the field sides. As a time for suicide it always strikes me as a moment, when if only he could have waited just a little longer, everything might have begun to look different. Or who knows, maybe the early breath of spring was more than he could bear.

The elusive spring and the elusive 29th disappearing together forever hand in hand.

Often I don't even think about it that much (last year yes this year not so much) but then my body feels it in the season, in the light, in the approach of another phase of our lives, another arrival at the end of winter. And the calendar always goes on about it - the truncated month looks so different - I get paid sooner, the date and day in February is echoed by the day and date in March in these non-leap years. And for some reason there are always suicide synchronicities - Sylvia Plath all over the radio this year. And I always find myself worrying about someone close to me killing themselves - unexpectedly, needlessly. I am thinking about other things, but my father's death is always nibbling at the edge of consciousness, a counterpoint to the rest.

Time

If I had to write a poem to save my life
it probably wouldn't be this one
that wildly points at the daffodils in the vase on the table,
swings round to include the dark logs
and flying flames in the fire box.

Instead the poem that's on the back of the tip
of my tongue when I wake up
and don't know the time
would suddenly spill out of me
onto the page - loud
like rubble from a tipper truck.

Nine

Prayer

Now I sit in something like an attitude of prayer, elbows on the table, palms pressed together, index fingertips to my nose, and search for words, or the right words. There's a thing about impermanence that my mind cannot leave alone every day just at the moment. A thing about the passing of time, and how I see it in the faces and bodies of those close to me, and those around me. The idea that we are all marching towards the grave. Nothing new about these thoughts, for me, for anyone, but a particular tone to my current preoccupation. A sense of something slipping away from me, a sense of inevitable ending... to everything. A sense of unreadiness.

Something too about woundedness. About hurt and how we work out ways to survive it and go forward to the next thing. And how I have always tried to hide my hurt. How hiding it has not made it go away. How again and again in the twists of my story my hurt has returned in different disguises and tried to make me listen, tried to make me unmask it, let it live in the light. How I've tried to do that but still always ultimately believed that the end goal of all that was to leave it behind, to get beyond it. How I now glimpse a way forward that is inclusive of all my hurts, and all my griefs and all my fears, all these parts of my experience I have thought I had to leave at the door when I went to work especially, but even when I went into the social world, into love and friendship.

I am three and I am eight, I am fifteen and I am twenty-five, I am thirty-seven and I am fifty. My losses and hurts have pierced my heart with unimaginable pain, have floored me, have left me feeling I have lost everything and will never get it back. They have shaped me, have limited and expanded me, they have shut me down and sometimes they have opened me up. They invite me to open up.

Interrupted

The steady snow outside the window and a cup of tea beside me. I try to reclaim my mind from the rubbish tip where flu has hurled it. I have only been outside the house twice in 12 days - once to move my car last Saturday when snow threatened last time, and I knew I'd need to be able to get it out easily on Monday to go to the surgery; and then on Monday to go for my doctor's appointment, main purpose to secure a sick note for the week. I need to go for a little walk but it will keep snowing and blowing an icy wind not conducive to my recovery. The doctor seemed a little out of step - when I mentioned my aching legs (still!) he said Why are your legs aching? Err, it's a symptom of flu I ventured I was just surprised it went on so long... And when I mentioned this was my first trip out of the house for ten days, he said Why haven't you been out of the house? Err, because I've felt too ill... Just as well all I needed was the sick note for work, I'd have been disappointed if I'd been hoping for anything else. He did listen to my chest, and declare it free from infection, though, which is good to know as I still have a hacking cough. And frankly am still not well - weak and bleak, and jelly-legged, my head still congested. I breathe steam two or three times a day and every time I do I blow my nose vigorously (not too vigorously obviously) and my ears crackle and pop encouragingly, only to revert to the partial deafness as if swimming under water that has been the norm for so long.

But the worst is the depression. My mind is easily hijacked in that direction at the best of times, and the monster has got a stranglehold on it - everything feels like a problem, and mostly the problems are my fault. I am useless and am letting everyone down. Nothing's any good any more and never will be again. So tedious, I just can't find anything loud enough to counter it. Sometimes Radio 3 or Radio 6 Music or Radio 4 works for while. If this is what never doing anything, hardly ever going out, and not having enough to think about does to you, I feel very sorry indeed for my mother whose pretty much permanent situation that is.

Monster

In bed on day 6 of a winter flu whose power and persistence has caused me to dub it Monster Flu. Never had one quite like this, though I've survived a couple of evil ones over the years. Or perhaps I have forgotten. Little energy for describing the aches and the sweats and the shivers and the restlessness, the headache and earache and swollen glands and the cough. The cough now in the ascendant as the other symptoms wane a little, has me sounding (but hopefully not looking)  like a forty a day octagenarian.

L has been looking after me like an angel. Hot water bottles, drinks, cuddles, home made soup, reading to me, and so much patience...

Whirlwind

The insane insufferable tiredness of sleep deprivation. Eyes hot and gritty, body sore and tired from battling gravity all day. Another Tuesday night saw me struggling before the return to work. Then a whirlwind day - outside a gale whistling round the portakabin, rain hurtling at the windows, and inside girls missing appointments, coming at wrong times, being double-booked, refusing to come, and in one case racing about my room with great glee on my wheeled desk chair.

Big Snow

Curtains open on a white world of whirling flakes, God and friends having a massive pillow fight, looking like the classic snow storm in the little glass bubble and everyone's movie idea of a white Christmas. The car is a fluffy thing says L. Sitting at work all day in fear of this coming before I headed for home, I am so happy now to watch it from inside my cosy house. Apparently next week it's going to be 10 degrees so the cold snap is leaving us with a flourish.

Drift

Tanyas

On Tuesday night I danced to the dear old Be Good Tanyas and it eased my troubled soul. Tonight we checked out their website to learn two things
a) they are playing Manchester on 1 February and it is sold out
b) Sam Parton was injured in a car accident in September and is currently unable to tour with them

If you don't know the Tanyas this won't mean much, but trust me it would be worth your while getting to know them....

Stress

Forecast is for more snow and probably rather a lot of it, just not clear exactly when. Really hoping it's sooner rather than later and the school just announces it is closed first thing, so I don't have to make an agonising decision about going in tomorrow (car? train? not at all?) Colleagues regaling me this morning with stories of walking home through blizzards really didn't help. They mostly live only a few miles away, I more than eighteen miles away.

Meanwhile sleep better but still a problem. Looking forward to the weekend more than usual!

Whiter

It is so quiet up on the tops, and there is no one around. One of the wind turbines moves at a desultory pace, the other not at all. The sun pours light onto the snow, which has been touched with frost overnight, and resembles a vast carpet strewn with tiny fragments of diamond, as if crushed underfoot by some careless giant. Loose and powdery with these feather-like crystals balanced on top, the snow still creaks under my wellies, but quietly.

White

The staring frank whiteness of the lilies L bought for me on my first day. Their scent. And baby's breath or gypsophila as we like to call it on these shores, also white, playing tiny and delicate to the huge bold statement of the lilies. And outside whiteness too. Snow. An inch or two. A little hat on the gatepost, a covering on the roofs and walls. Above clouds over blueness. Gentle now, but the forecast is for fierce ice.

And on we go.

The new job has begun well, though I have struggled with sleep. People are kind and welcoming and the journey is straightforward and almost free of traffic if I leave at 6.45!!

A fire is burning in the wood burner, and I am filled with gladness.

Epiphany

Conversation in the pub

FB You're in the gym at quarter to seven?? You get up at five o'clock!!??

P (Smiles slightly) Yes.

FB What time do you go to bed?

P About midnight...

FB You can manage on five hours' sleep?!!

P Sometimes I sit on the sofa when I get home and doze for ten minutes...

S Oh God I can't do that. I get horribly depressed if I go to sleep for a short time.... Anyway, FB how much sleep do you need?

FB I dunno - seven or eight hours I guess. (Thinks - or nine...)

P That's just habit...



I fear come Tuesday night my habit will be broken.