April Come She Will

.... and go! So much for the April blogging challenge. There have been other fish to fry and I have kept meaning to come here and say so. I have found a room in town for my therapy practice and it's been an exciting and rather tense process, looking at a few possibilities, weighing up pros and cons, saying yes and saying no and then getting clear. It looks like I'll have it from July, which gives me time to prepare, mentally and emotionally and in the IKEA sense!!

I'll try to get here again in the next few days, but there seems to be a lot to do and think about before we go off on holiday on Friday. Skiathos beckons.... So if I don't get here before, I'll see you when I return.

In other news - clearing four inches of snow off the car yesterday morning was certainly a memorable finale for an exceptionally cold April!

Love after Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

Back

A lapse in the project, caused by the indisposition of the laptop on Tuesday evening, which threatened to be terminal so L swung into frantic backing-up mode as we hadn't done any for some time and felt at risk of losing all kinds of documents and photographs. In fact, the machine has at least for now made a full recovery, but it is ageing and who knows what's around the next corner?

And yesterday I just didn't get it together, partly because I joined a meditation group in the evening, and upon my return, though peaceful and happy, felt entirely devoid of inspiration.

In other news, I am looking at business premises around town, with a view to taking my work out of my home. A radical step if it happens, and I think it will, and I suspect it will be a turning point. Finding the right place is a tricky thing, especially determining the general quietness of the building, and sound-proofness of the walls.

And ... I am the almost proud first time owner of a smart phone. Not so proud to have twice inadvertently phoned my sister whilst trying to enter her various numbers. The back of my phone is red.

And I'm reading Wallace Stevens

and Knausgaard of course.

Energy

Today I planted out broad bean seedlings, as the wind began to stir their bluish green leaves. On our walk, the lapwings and curlews were evasive, and we saw ten lambs running up and down a field as if in a race. The sun was warm, the air still cool. We are beginning to think about our Greek holiday in May, which now feels close!

Wordless Saturday Night

Today

A beautiful morning, with clear blue sky and dazzling spring sunshine, so I went off for my walk early. Also in order to be back for another delivery of logs, most of which hopefully we won't burn until the autumn now. Then I stacked them, which took forty minutes and was not popular with my back. Better than L doing it with me though, since it isn't popular with her nose! I've also made bread today, which is in the oven and will be ready very soon. I always have to eat a crust of bread fresh from the oven, as it never again has the same wonderfully crisp crust and melting warm crumb. Mmm.

Synchronistically, if that is indeed a word, I have made contact thanks to the wonders of Google, with one of the people I worked with many years ago at Neal's Yard Bakery, in Covent Garden, and so I wrote her an email this morning, and felt the amazement of realising it is thirty years or thereabouts since that time.

This afternoon I went to my friend J's house, to find she had most touchingly saved me the very last slice of her birthday cake, her birthday having been Tuesday. It was lovely sponge with a mascarpone cream and fresh raspberries, baked by her partner, and was delicious.

Knausgaard

I have just finished the first part of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle cycle A Death In The Family. I have to tell you this is the most brilliant book I have read in a long time, and I am about to start the second part without delay! They're around five hundred pages a go,without chapters, and I have been gripped from start to finish, immersed in the interior life of Karl Ove, who begins to feel like an intimate friend. I keep thinking that this is just not like anything else I have ever read, and surely that alone is exciting and inspiring.

Some reviews have dwelt critically on the number of words, lines or pages Knausgaard devotes to the mundane details of life, like making a cup of coffee, lighting or putting out a cigarette, or cleaning a filthy house. This is one of the things I love. Knausgaard knows no fear of showing the mundanity of existence exactly as it is, and devotes page space proportionate to the amount of awareness it takes up in our daily lives. It's almost an exercise in mindfulness at times. Descriptions of cigarette ash falling to the ground, or the colour of tea swirling into the boiling water in a cup become almost meditations in their own right, without being required to serve the narrative or plot development in any special way.

But more so much more than this, Knausgaard lets us inside his mind and his body, the moment by moment impressions, feelings and experiences of an adolescent in love with music, enchanted by alcohol, fascinated and puzzled by girls. Later, the intimate experience of learning of the death of his father in his late twenties, and the process of dealing with the aftermath of the death with his older brother in the following days. I have never read an author so willing to reveal the workings of his mind, his emotional reactions, his idiosyncratic observations, and weird personal associations with what he observes. The only writer who comes to mind at all is WG Sebald, whom I also greatly admire. There's a sort of brooding mood, an awareness of the deep significance apparently ordinary events and impressions can assume in the mind when they touch off memory, emotion and literary or artistic associations.