Stolen

The sun is warm on my back, and bright on the laptop screen, showing unforgivingly just how dirty it is. Both dusty and apparently spattered with who knows what vile liquid.

Washing on the line outside - sheet, pillow cases and duvet cover which will smell of sunshine on our bed tonight. Bluest sky. We walked down into town and back, picked up mail from the old house, visited friend E's house (she being in Tasmania), returned DVDs (Doubt, and The Secret Life of Bees) to the library, bought coffee, daffodils, rare breed pork chops, and baguettes, and L had a much-needed haircut. I saw a friend who was on her way to have a massage. I asked how she was. She said she would be much better in an hour's time. Maybe I should have a massage...

Nearly time to go to Guardian Jobs online for my first visit of the week. In a while we'll try to hang the last curtain in the kitchen. Improvised from a piece of material we've had for ages, (which just happens to go brilliantly with the colours in our kitchen), and an IKEA easy to fit curtain rod...

None of this is really what I want to say, but I want to say something rather than nothing, and it's these small everyday details that have saved me on occasion.

I want to say I just don't feel right. I try to let myself enjoy the sunshine, the daffodils, the house, the view, the air, the completely beautiful place where we live. But I just feel like weeping. I feel as though something has been stolen from me.

Juice

No creative juice. Just whisky, my father's evening tipple, and the salted peanuts he used to throw into his mouth, head tilted back, handfuls from the jar in the larder - an old Nappisan jar with a turquoise blue plastic lid, like the ones for the raisins and the flour and the red lentils.

Taste

Intermittent availability of Blogger continues. Anyone else having this trouble? Two days off one day on sort of pattern. Still this is two days on in a row, so maybe the sickness is subsiding. I try to see it as some kind of lesson in not taking things for granted.

I take things for granted all the time. I said to L I thought I took her for granted, wished I didn't. She asked what I meant. What it appeared I meant was I'm self-absorbed when I'm struggling. 'Forget' to give, to notice, to consider. Sending my attention away from myself could be a place to start curing the current ill, I'm sure. Focusing somewhere else.

I have felt for so long that I can't take in or give out as much as I would like. Look and can't properly see. Listen and can't completely hear. Read and can't absorb. Can't tune in, can't concentrate. Know that I have a lot of good stuff to contribute but often don't. Stay away, stay quiet, feel awkward. Then feel dissatisfied, as if only partly living.

What I'm noticing is that the sun is slanting into the room, highlighting the startling green of a bottle of mineral water, the liquid inside trembling as I type. Spring will come, it says, and I sense myself longing for and dreading its arrival, with its attendant demand to open and expand. No-one has been more vocal than I about winter outstaying its welcome, yet the actual taste of the early spring brings unease as well as relief.

Logging Back In

That's a relief - just had to log out and back in as 'New Post' button had disappeared. Blogger is certainly keeping me guessing with its weird tricks. No access again all day yesterday. There seems to be no way to find out why.

I'm listening to Nick Drake which doesn't necessarily mean I'm depressed, more that I'm trying to find the way out of depression as it seems to me all of Nick's music is about that. Making the melancholy beautiful and uplifting.

So, what comes to me to do here is to try to give life to this state - breathe life into words to breathe life into myself. Because this state is somehow a negative of life - light is dark, dark is bleached out, everything is distorted yet familiar. I feel I'm waiting for things to right themselves, yet they never do, and somehow they always do - the key being I have to do something other than wait. Like this...

I sip wine and it tastes sour and sweet, it feels good and bad. I both forgive and reprimand myself for drinking it on a Thursday night on my own. I know my life's thread is still here somewhere, though I've lost it for now. The music. The wine. The self-reproach and self-forgiveness. The attempt to pick up the thread. All of this I've been doing a long time. Here in my new house, I am lost, but half glimpse how this space offers a possibility of finding something new in myself. What I know and don't want to know is that it's up to me what I do here. I walk into my vast kitchen, with a sense of walking onto a stage each day. But I say to myself I'm not ready yet. Don't know what to do with this space - this opportunity. It feels too big, too bright, too full of potential. I am dazzled, agoraphobic. Want to hide. Repudiate the knowledge that this is mine. Lose myself in some sort of guilt about having so much, a great way not to have it.

Grief is the remedy for grief, says my wise old friend. Yes. And just out of view, somewhere behind my back sits the knowledge of my father's anniversary approaching, dodging away, playing grandmother's footsteps, and preparing to disappear again as he did. Somewhere between Sunday and Monday - a whisper. My immediate grief for my job or the self-esteem it brought, or for myself, my hurt at being treated like a criminal, being sold down the river, being dropped like a worthless thing. From one day to the next no longer entitled apparently to this huge part of my identity. Stripped of it. Suspended, then dropped. Bad taste. Nightmare. A recurrent feeling that everything is turning bad. Anxious dreams of messy journeys, forgotten characters from my past appearing unexpectedly, good people becoming menacing, not being able to scream...

How to grieve? Maybe like this...

Arriving

I have had no access to Blogger for the last 2 or 3 days - to my blog or anyone else's. Inexplicably. Anyway, that's all water under the bridge now and too boring to write about. It was very frustrating at the time, and added to a mood of stuckness and disengagement.

Moving house is a complicated matter. After the practical things are all done, or mostly done (still a big trip to IKEA in the offing, once the weather calms down), and the dust, literal and metaphorical has settled, there's the emotional fall-out. After what happened to me in November, when I was forced to resign from my job over my blog, the opportunity to throw myself into all things house-related was welcome. There was always something to do, for weeks and weeks. We packed boxes, we moved stuff up here, we liaised with all the contactors, we chose carpets, we cleaned and did various odd jobs in the other house in preparation for our tenant. We were busy, we were tired, we were excited. Also sad, and disoriented and stressed. But I was not thinking about what had happened with the job, and that was a relief.

Now we are not so busy, and although I have a small amount of work, it has only been occupying 3 half days a week so far. I have felt all of a sudden, very empty, lost and rootless. All through November, December and January I had no heart, time, energy or creativity for writing and now feel very disconnected from it. My only job application did not even result in an interview. And the weather has just gone on and on and on being cold, frequently icy, snowy, foggy, and now today, bitter winds are howling down the chimney. Hard times. Nothing takes away from the excellence of our choice in moving up here. We have space, and light and views. Nonetheless the adjustment will take time. Bigger rooms make me feel expansive, but at times I miss the cosiness of the old house. Being further from town means it is rural and beautiful here, with lovely views and enormous skies. But sometimes I feel far away from the old neighbourhood and the pleasure of trotting down the hill to town in 5 minutes flat.

Carpets are being laid this week, which will at last allow us to use all the rooms of the house, one of which is my own small, blue room. I think I need that private, reflective space, to write and dream and collect myself. And I certainly need to be able to unpack the rest of my stuff that remains in boxes and bags. Sometimes I can't even remember what I've got, but just sense that things are missing. This may be more an internal than a real state, but it is certainly mirrored in the need to unpack and rediscover my possessions.

Heaven I'm In Heaven

... that's it really. The stress of moving, and of having men constantly working on the house, the attendant mess, dust and recurrent need to move everything around, the fact that the decorating isn't finished and that therefore we can't get the sitting room in order, that carpets are needed for three rooms upstairs and that these won't arrive for a week or more... the fact I've been feeling so exhausted I've been in bed by 9.30 most nights this week... all of the above are amply offset by the fantastic sunshine pouring into the kitchen this morning, dazzling me as I put the kettle on, by the space and pleasing proportions of the rooms, by the views, by the walks straight up onto the tops from the door... by the fact that town is still just a 25 minute walk away and that there are also 3 buses an hour... by the mantelpiece full of cards wishing us well in our new home, and the enthusiasm of all our visitors for what they find when they get here! The mess, dust and exhaustion will fade, along with the paint fumes (decorator back tomorrow - deep breath...), but we shall be here long after that, loving this astonishing new nest we have flown into!

I am sitting in the library, so this feels like hurling out a message in a bottle. Our phone line was installed yesterday so should be online at home soon, but L's attempts this morning were unsuccessful so need technical support...

All is strangeness. The wonderful light in our new kitchen, and the views of sky and hills keep me sitting and gazing for long periods. I love the house but the constant dust and the apparent endlessness of the work to be done is wearisome. However, it should be drawing to a close this week... I have been feeling poorly in a rather amorphous way and am worried about friends J and C. C broke her ankle in two places when out walking just over a week ago, had to have an operation, and is still in hospital having now developed a mystery virus involving vomiting, headache, tingling hands and breathlessness. Both are anxious and desperate for her to be able to come home, but she is too weak to even practice walking on her crutches never mind manage to look after herself at home. J driving over to nearby town B (but not that near) every evening.

I started my temporary job last week, then got ill, and have just started again today. No blogging about work is the rule, but it's good to have some purposeful and paid activity again!

The house will be wonderful, but it will be a while before we can empty all boxes and bags as we need new furniture, shelves etc to accommodate our stuff. And the decorator needs to finish the sitting room... And, most urgently the plumber needs to fix the mystery leak which has at last been tracked down and has been seeping a cup of water a day into an internal wall. Tomorrow should see that sorted, and that will remove a worry, though I'm sure it'll take a while to dry out.

I'm rambling and the library is noisy with kids fresh from school, so I can't concentrate, but normal service should be resumed in the next few days!!