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!!

One

Gradually dismantling all the final things here - stereos, computer, and all the last things in the kitchen. Taking home apart and reassembling it up the road. In fact we began the reassembling yesterday. Some of our new kitchen cupboards are already full! So the transition from home to home is strangely seamless, and today I had fantasies of cooking dinner up there, though of course I wouldn't have missed last dinner here for the world. And the sparky came back and sorted almost everything that still needed sorting, and was very much gentler and easier to deal with in the absence of other (male) contractors... And our lovely new table arrived. And we hung the bedroom curtains so when the time comes tomorrow we shall be able to fall into bed without the need to climb a stepladder! Oh my, this is something to go through, and I'm proud of how well we've risen to all the challenges, and although I am very tired, I still have gas in the tank for tomorrow, and beyond!!

There will now be a possible interlude of up to two weeks, though it is also possible I shall seize some opportunity to blog away from home!

Two

We drove to Halifax in dazzling (and entirely unforecast) sunshine this morning, and to our surprise found the tiles we wanted for our kitchen at B&Q for about a third the price of the others we were looking at. Most of this afternoon we have been up at the new house, mopping floors again, and wiping surfaces, and cleaning the bathroom. I suspect we'll be cleaning up plaster dust for months to come, but it's getting better.

The gradual process is well under way of withdrawal of energy from this house where we've lived so snugly for five years, and investment in the new one. With this comes sadness. And immense excitement. I think the experience of living up there will be very different in many ways. The house is bigger, each individual room is bigger. The rooms are full of light and there are big views, and it is unbelievably quiet.

This evening friends E and A are cooking roast chicken for us, four doors up the road. We shall miss being so close, but we really aren't going that far. My exhaustion level is such that I fear this may not make the most interesting reading. But it is a kind of record of a particular and strange time. And the slightly pedestrian writing is symptomatic of 99% of my energy going elsewhere. I'm amazed I've kept this up at all!

Three

Too tired for coherence... Off to Nelson's wine bar for food and wine with friend J. We have power at the new house... and heat... and lots of dust. Multiple floor moppings required. And lots of builder's bits and pieces everywhere, and paint tins and little piles of screws in unexpected places... Nonetheless we move in on Monday and we do at least have a curtain pole in the bedroom! And it is gorgeous. Just have to keep letting go, letting go, letting go. It isn't finished, but in a few weeks it will be, so no matter. It rained most of the day from clouds that seemed to be about head height. Finished with a lovely sunset though. So much sky up there.