this too

Moving on - well, trying to

2006-05-12T11:54:00.000+01:00

PLEASE VISIT MY NEW BLOG: http://thistoo.typepad.com/this_too/

The blurt below was probably the nadir of my introspection, I don't think I'll go there again, although you never know. The blog as therapy, or as significant other for those of us who don't have one, is an interesting phenomenon. I've found it powerful and see that others also do, although many might not choose to read. Those of you who did, and left comments or linked to me, are amazing. Your generous and thoughtful responses warm my heart and keep me company.

Those who said I was describing them too, to some extent - well, you made me feel human. Thank you. No words suffice. As a student of the dharma myself, Leslee's and Isabel's wise words bring a message I can't hear too often, whose truth I've touched and known and will continue to reach for. Greg makes an excellent point: since I like to write, I might try writing something more cheerful! I'd really like to do that.

This was the end, the heart of something. It isn't going to go away. But life makes room alongside, or it doesn't. Even as I wrote it, and then spent much of the following few days thinking about it, the season turned here in London and we had the first really warm days. The sun shone strongly on the ghastliness and the beauty of everything, and I can choose to feel I'm part of it all - or not.

So, I'm choosing to try and move on and, as a gesture in that direction, finally getting around to a long-planned move to TypePad.

PLEASE VISIT MY NEW BLOG: http://thistoo.typepad.com/this_too/

Commitment-phobe

2006-05-05T13:26:00.000+01:00

It’s been hard to write anything recently. Well, you can figure that out from the little written here. Too much going on, both at work, which doesn’t get any less busy and stressful, and in life, with major changes hovering about but not yet materialising. Perhaps the particular recent possibilities for moving home will not materialise. I don’t know yet and the uncertainty is pretty draining. But thinking them through has certainly brought the reality of coming change much closer. What’s more, these challenges of stress and change have brought me up hard and shockingly against my own primal and inexorable blocks and limitations. This is a snapshot of facing those blocks. It isn't how I feel all the time.

When I was a child, I felt completely safe and secure. My parents were deeply motivated by a Protestant ethic of duty to work, family and ‘decent’ standards of behaviour. Both of them clever, but ill-educated, they worked in entry-level clerical jobs which no doubt bored and humiliated them. They were never out of work for more than a few weeks, never late, almost never off sick, and I’m sure they were hugely conscientious. Although there was barely enough money, it was budgeted carefully: food on the table, on the dot, three times a day. If bills could not be paid, I never heard about it. I think they were paid, thanks to rigorous scrimping and saving, few clothes, no treats, no hobbies. In the eighteen years we lived together, I remember my parents going out in the evening perhaps twice. They didn’t get along and clearly didn’t make each other happy, but decent people, decent parents, didn’t separate.

What a huge sacrifice they made! I wish I was more grateful. It’s hard to be grateful because decency doesn’t include kindness, and it doesn’t include fun. The security I felt as a child was security under a cloud of unhappiness, a cloud whose darkness I only fully realised when I stepped out from under it.

If the total security of childhood home and family is also really miserable, if you escape from it eventually, when you can’t stand it any longer, it can mean you’ve internalised unbearable contradictions. To know again the security of home and kin and being in your place is both what you most want and what you most dread. This is, dispiritingly, my case. I’m wary, fickle, indecisive and elusive, both emotionally and materially. I touch, withdraw and always in the end remain alone. This is the pattern, over and over, only clearer as the years advance. Self-awareness is worth little unless it changes behaviour.

Change behaviour? Look at everybody else, how entwined, how anchored you are in family, lovers, home and obligations. The gulf between us is just too great now. Loner is a man: knight, cowboy, tramp. Woman as loner is nothing. Yes, how can this belief coexist with an adult lifetime of ardent feminism? But it does. I feel wispy, barely here, after so many years of drifting. Moving to the country, home, community, spiritual community, words, writing, communication: sometimes, often, these seem no more than a dream.

Looking back, seeing where this comes from, I am sorry, sorry to be bitter. Fucking up my life is my responsibility. Of course it is. Not my parents’. I wish I could pluck out the past, be someone else. Except that, in the end, like most of us, I think, I’ve never really wanted to be someone else, just a happier version of myself.

Breathe deeply, then, and take a firm grip on the handle of the door to change. My hand passes straight through it. Trying so hard not to be here, I have turned myself into a ghost.

One or more

2006-05-04T17:55:00.000+01:00

What?

2006-05-03T12:04:00.000+01:00

I’ve been half deaf this past week, from an ear infection; probably not even half, more like a quarter. Not so much deaf as ‘hard of hearing’ - and it’s much harder than I imagined.

Monday morning: zipped into office persona, click-clack efficient, not really me, but I’m good at pretending. When I pick up the phone I hear a muffled murmur. What? sorry? could you…? Tired from a night of sleep disturbed by pain, I drop the phone while transferring it from my blocked right ear to my good left ear. I NEVER hold the phone to my left ear; it feels all wrong. Every reflex of automatic, easy functioning in the world protests.

My friend, my good friend at work, comes in looking anxious and intense. Closes the door behind her. Something on her mind. It’s often not easy to move from professional mode to ‘really talking’, but today it’s much more difficult than usual. Unclear consonants slide away and I keep saying: what did you say? I can see she thinks it’s her strong Russian accent, that it must be extra strong today for some reason. She peters to a halt, embarrassed, undermined. It’s not you. It’s me. My ear’s blocked. She’s unconvinced. Meaningful conversation fails to flower.

So, here we are, in the early evening, at the Buddhist Centre. Diamonds of sunlight blink on the carpet inside the circle of cushions and dapple the Buddha’s bronze belly. I want to breathe softly and stroke all of it, all of us, with gentle fingertips. After meditation, we move into pairs to talk about a rather deep, subtle issue raised by the teacher. I haven’t met this woman next to me before, and I like the look of her. I’d like to say something warm and perceptive that sends her home feeling heard, attended to, with food for thought. But here, surrounded by half a dozen other sotto voce conversations, I can barely distinguish her words at all. So it’s mostly what? again, drawing all her puzzled, sympathetic attention to myself, and having to explain: it’s my ear… I’m not comfortable introducing a stranger to my ear. It provokes all kinds of vulnerable, embarrassed feelings.

What? - the week’s refrain. Think of it as the Zen koan: what is this? Many answers; no answer. Well, it’s more than I thought; a small thing, but its impact far from small. Coming up hard against habits and emotions, it’s been one of those fleeting, interesting glimpses the sick or injured able have of disability. We say we didn’t realise, we’ll remember this… and usually we don’t.

Wood anemones

2006-05-02T13:08:00.000+01:00

My favourites, I think. They blink like stars beneath the trees - different from last year, not spread so thickly on the woodland floor, but each flower bigger, brighter, wider open.

Delicatesse

2006-04-28T13:29:00.000+01:00

A statue by John Gibson. Not generally my kind of thing. But somehow, her delicacy, in the light gently filtered through the opaque windows of the Royal Academy’s Sackler Wing… lovely.

Spring Sale

2006-04-27T20:05:00.000+01:00

Sweet

2006-04-25T17:43:00.000+01:00

A good man

2006-04-17T10:27:00.000+01:00

Norman Kember, the British peace worker kidnapped in Iraq with Tom Fox, the American who was murdered by their captors, and two Canadian colleagues, was interviewed on the radio a couple of days ago.

The media picked up and repeated endlessly two quite predictable things he said (approximate quotations only):

Do you think you underestimated the risk of kidnap?
Yes, we probably did.

How did you feel about the SAS group that rescued you?
I was grateful. It's ironic, of course - me, a pacifist who disapproves of the army, owing my life to men from the SAS, the most violent group of all. But of course I was happy to see them and am grateful.

I wondered if I'd heard the same interview. How grossly the media fail sometimes. What lingered in my mind was the quality of the man. How he didn't try to impress or justify, but quietly told the facts, with no care for making an impression.

No passionate stating of his case, but only 'Most Iraqis are fine people. We felt so sorry for them, and wanted them to know that.'

Most strikingly, no impulse to manage his own image, to make himself the hero of a story. How many of us could resist that? How many of us would have said, ruefully, when asked about his relationship with fellow captives, 'Well, this isn't very nice, but after a while [after several weeks of days spent sitting in a row, backs to a wall, handcuffed together], I couldn't bear the Canadians' accent - I expect they felt the same about mine'.

His simplicity touched my heart. I think I will remember Norman Kember. I keep hearing his dry, undramatic voice and how it gave way, when asked about his wife, to silence and a gulping sob.

Reflecting

2006-04-13T19:27:00.000+01:00

Being more open, more exposed – I’m intrigued by the way reflecting on my possible move to an open, blowy landscape has shifted into wider reflections on this theme. There’s probably nothing more important to any chance of change, communication, useful action. I’ve spent most of my life, you see, shutting myself down, pretending hard that I’m not here.

What a wonderful refuge imagination has proved. Without it’s sheltering arms, and later those of literature, how unbearably miserable I would have found life. And so, a solitary person, living mostly in my mind, is who I’ve been.

And, as well as a great blessing, it’s been a great curse, of course. Much of adult life has been a battle to come out and meet the world: a battle sometimes won, because of dear people happening along, because of passionate political feelings, because of a job that took me all over the world, the magic of the strange and new demolishing my reserve; and a battle often lost in drifts of depression and isolation.

What really made the tide start to turn a bit in recent years was beginning to practice Buddhist meditation – a practice of meeting the body, the breath, the air, in the present; of opening the heart to the here-and-now, to self, to others; setting up a pattern counter to that other pattern of closure adopted early in life. It was the ineffable encounter with the right thing at the right time. Sometimes I have a mad urge to be an evangelist for it – one of those dreadful street preachers with a megaphone. But the right thing at the right time is something so personal, not to be foisted on anyone.

However, it is time to say again that the online group I’m part of, over at 100 Days meditation blog, will start a new 100 days on Saturday 15 April. New meditators, in any tradition, are welcome then or at any time.

What is the wind?

2006-04-11T14:26:00.000+01:00

The wind rushes to meet you across these wide open spaces, taking your breath away, slicing into you.
Break you open or tear you apart - is there a difference, except in the words chosen to describe it?
Is the harsh wind to be viewed as aggressor or as an exciting, provocative companion? - as attacker or merely as pushing you hard, to a place beyond resistance?
Attracted, repelled, reminded of all the other conflicting forces that buffet you, you hesitate.
Hover long enough in the doorway of new experience, and the wind will take you anyway.
Fly with it, then - or turn and run for your life!

I found great resonance in Isabel’s comment here yesterday: “I […] moved to a wide open landscape in middle age and found it both exhilarating and intimidating to relearn how to live without cover… exposed.”

In a long, intense meeting on Sunday with my companions in this possible venture to make a new home, I pushed myself, full of trepidation, to express my discomfort with the overexcited and inconsiderate way we had been exchanging views, interrupting each other. Didn’t say it especially well and soon after I said it I, in my turn, forgot myself and spoke roughly in just the way I had drawn attention to. But I was glad I had spoken, felt exposed, but also held and appreciated by the group - the tight, closed feeling of discontent replaced by honesty and warmth.

This is the way I want to be. If being in a wide open, windy place were to prove a support to this, I would be glad of it.

Fens

2006-04-10T13:07:00.000+01:00

Fens [this is an explanatory link to Wikipedia]. Flat. Endless vistas, wide skies, SPAAACE – I love that. It pleases me aesthetically, and can lift my heart. A horizon is a wonderful thing, which I have often missed and craved while living in London. But cold. The wind shrieks cruelly with nothing for a long, long way to the East to stem it’s force. This landscape isn’t gentle; doesn’t shelter. I love this place as long as I feel strong and energetic. In more vulnerable moods, it’s not always an easy place to be.

This may become home. It’s the best possibility to arise in ages. We will know within the next few weeks, probably, whether it can happen.

Dying swans

2006-04-06T14:33:00.000+01:00

So, the lethal strain of bird flu has been confirmed today in Scotland in a dead Mute Swan (the native British species - I think this is one).

I remember the lurking thoughts of the virus at the back of my mind when I took this picture in Windsor Great Park some months ago, drawn to the common but always appealing beauty of a whole flock of them. A new and deeper fear replacing vague memories of being warned as a child that swans, if disturbed, might peck me.

Most immediately, I feel for the farmers who fear a re-run of the terrible experience of the most recent Foot-and-Mouth epidemic and the way it was dealt with here: the chaotic slaughter, the countryside filled with stinking piles of corpses and smoking pyres, the livelihoods lost overnight, the government seen as enemy not safety net, the ministry so reviled it had to change its name.

Despite the blanket media coverage over many months, I find I have little idea, really, of the level of risk. Perception of risk - the degree to which we are taught to fear crime and strangers, for example - is so commonly, so massively distorted.

I read the comments from my friends Pica and Dale with ever-so-slight indignation, thinking: well, I know that, I didn't mean I don't know that, I do read the more thoughtful newspapers, what I don't know is... then I realised I'd fallen into the trap of what I was criticising. Risk means WE DON'T KNOW. The "knowledge society" deals very badly with not knowing and would rather catastrophise than admit to uncertainty.

Perspectives

2006-04-05T13:17:00.000+01:00

There’s something so beguiling and satisfying about views through archways, down corridors. Their symmetry delights the eye, and something deeper than the eye. They offer what life so utterly lacks, but the human spirit never learns to stop seeking. Edges. Frames. Tidy, finite, fixed perspectives. A sense of being held, but - with a view away into the distance - not of constraint. A pleasure indeed to look at, but important to see the illusion.

St John's & Trinity Colleges, Cambridge

Somewhere here?

2006-04-03T13:44:00.000+01:00

Here is a place. Bright, but gusty, in these wild and not yet welcoming early days of nearly-Spring. Could this be home?

For several years I’ve longed to move away from London, but, with no compulsion, no prescribed destination, floundered over doing it. After many explorations and contacts, some possibilities have gradually emerged. And now, suddenly, there are two – two concrete, interesting, tempting, different options.

So hard to imagine. So hard to want. Wanting means risking disappointment. Emotional investment in a possibility is something I fear, but know I soon must make. So in the coming weeks I’ll be hanging out a bit in both places, letting myself imagine, letting myself want, opening to intimations of what it would be like.

But, assiduously as I may research the social and cultural facilities, the local development plan, long as I may linger in the town cafes and explore the country walks, much as I may close my eyes and open my heart to atmosphere, that great intangible that is ‘feeling at home’ will not become predictable. It will be a leap, a risk. And I who am timid, who have let life push me around – do I have it in me to leap?

(No, I'm not actually contemplating living on a barge)

I have loved a place, as deeply and wholly as I have loved a person. But it didn’t happen overnight. I long to have that again, but know it isn’t something you can will.

Things have been sticky lately and I’m feeling tired and a bit shut down – not unhappy, but signally lacking in outgoing energy and enthusiasm, as evidenced by recent inability to choke out more than the odd sentence on this here blog. The longing for a new home and a different lifestyle has got itself somewhat submerged under coping from day to day. How, in this mood, do I open to these new possibilities? All muffled up still in my Winter clothes, how do I rub up against these places and see how they feel?

Labels

2006-03-31T14:46:00.000+01:00

If not permanent, unmoving, at least, for months and years. A gentle under-note to the swirling clamour of words, both spoken and written: the gloom and fear, officiousness and hard sell of the public sphere, the staccato, self-referential chatter of the private. Words that hang there, enduring and weathering and alluding to things beyond their original intention.

The thirty-nine questions

2006-03-30T12:31:00.000+01:00

Had to do this, so I could use the photo.
Some people claimed it was forty questions – where's No. 14, guys?

1) Who is the last person you high-fived?
Don’t think I’ve ever done this.

2) If you were drafted into a war, would you survive?
I would refuse to be drafted - would flee if possible and face the music if not.

3) Do you sleep with the TV on?
I used to – one of the reasons I don’t have one now.

4) Have you ever drunk milk straight out of the carton?
No. Not out of fastidiousness. I don’t like the taste of milk or cardboard.

5) Have you ever won a spelling bee?
No. I don’t think we had those.

6) Have you ever been stung by a bee?
Yes. In the armpit when it flew out of a pillow case I was changing. Very nasty.

7) How fast can you type?
75 wpm. Tried really hard to get to 80, but this seems to be my natural limit.

8) Are you afraid of the dark?
I was as a kid. Now I like the dark - not enough of it in the city.

9) What colour are your eyes?
Blue.

10) Have you ever made out at a drive-in?
No - I’m British.

11) When is the last time you chose a bath over a shower?
Couple of days ago. Could cope with giving it up to save water, though.

12) Do you knock on wood?
Yes.

13) Do you floss daily?
No, though I should.

14) Can you hula hoop?
Don’t know. I was quite good 40 years ago.

15) Are you good at keeping secrets?
Yes. But don’t find it easy.

16) What do you want for Christmas?
To be preparing for January meditation retreat in India

17) Do you know the Muffin Man?
No, but I used to.

18) Do you talk in your sleep?
Yes, at length, I believe.

19) Who wrote the book of love?
Marilynne Robinson – “Gilead” is the book that springs to mind, since I read it very recently.

20) Have you ever flown a kite?
Mmm, yes, lovely – it’s been too long.

21) Do you wish on your fallen lashes?
Huh?

22) Do you consider yourself successful?
No. I try not to think in those terms, but the conditioning goes deep.

23) How many people are on your contact list of your mobile?
Don’t have a mobile.

24) Have you ever asked for a pony?
Probably, but not very seriously.

25) Plans for tomorrow?
It’s Friday. I’ll be looking forward to the weekend.

26) Can you juggle?
Well, only two balls with two hands – that’s an achievement with my physical coordination.

27) Are you missing someone now?
Yes.

28) When was the last time you told someone I Love You?
Yesterday.

29) And truly meant it?
Can’t imagine saying it if I didn’t.

30) How often do you drink?
Maybe once a week - wine.

31) How are you feeling today?
Not too bad. Spring is coming.

32) What do you say too much?
Hopefully, ….

33) Have you ever been suspended or expelled from school?
No. I nearly was from university. Not for anything interesting – I left the job in France for which I was allowed to take a year off.

34) What are you looking forward to?
Spring.

35) Have you ever crawled through a window?
Yes. I was terrified of getting stuck.

36) Have you ever eaten dog food?
Ugh, no!

37) Can you handle the truth?
I hope so.

38) Do you like green eggs and ham?
What? Is that an American thing?

39) Do you have any cool scars?
One near my eye from walking into a lamp post – rather a nice cliché.

Like butterflies

2006-03-28T13:57:00.000+01:00

Window on the world

2006-03-27T12:39:00.000+01:00

Randomised

2006-03-24T13:18:00.000Z

Random recent photos. And completely random is how I feel: thence the lack of anything substantive here of late. The shell is standing up, walking around, emitting words from time to time, but shell is what it is – knock on me and I’ll reverberate, or crack, perhaps, if you knock too hard. The skin is standing up, but inside there the organs, vessels, fibres are sleeping on their feet like horses. Sporadically, words and images bubble to the surface, but there’s no theme. I’ve lost the plot. There was a plot, wasn't there? I'm sure there was. It’ll come back to me, I suppose. Rest in the randomness. Let it be. It’ll all come back to me.

Inside

2006-03-23T13:50:00.000Z

click to enlarge

My friend T inside yesterday's window.
Just because I like the photo.

Outside

2006-03-22T15:23:00.000Z

click photo to enlarge

Misty, faint and lovely,
like the background in a Renaissance painting,
it's further off than you think.

I wrote a whole lot more. I didn't like any of it. So I looked for an image as shut in as I felt, but with some beauty and some possibilities.

Living in this space

2006-03-17T14:44:00.000Z

This morning the blogosphere handed me this timely piece which spoke very loudly to what I said yesterday. Yup, I’ll try to feel the cold air on my face as a stimulus and challenge, not just an ache, and appreciate the wonder of the seasons – all of them!

Still between

2006-03-16T17:31:00.000Z

Willing Winter to end seems wrong. Cold days, surely, are not less precious. But, oh, this cold - not bright, frosty cold, but iron-grey cold that pokes into the bones and needles the weariness already entrenched there! Brave shoots and flowers are everywhere. Braver than me. This cold March is the last straw and I'm wishing I could weave the straw into a cosy nest and take a small, last-minute hibernation until it warms up.

It’s the Spring Equinox on Monday. Perhaps a little invocation ceremony is in order. Or, if anyone is in need of a new displacement activity, apparently there is a traditional belief, most often attributed to the Chinese, that you can stand a raw egg on end during the equinox. This derives from the notion that, due to the sun's equidistant position between the poles of the earth on the first day of Spring, special gravitational forces apply.

Waiting for the snow that doesn't come

2006-03-15T18:21:00.000Z

The other side of my street.

Mirrored

2006-03-14T13:05:00.000Z

Too busy to think, too busy to blog, I catch sight of this reflection in the mirror-glass window of an office block as I scuttle by, and am drawn to stop and stare. It mirrors my current feelings: complex, distorted and confusing, but not without interest, not without openings

Tom Fox

2006-03-13T14:24:00.000Z

Photo: AP

Sent there by Dave, I'm reading the blog of Tom Fox, the American peace worker kidnapped and killed in Iraq. The numbing, ungraspable horror of it all gives way briefly to sorrow for one man.

Quiet night breath

2006-03-08T13:40:00.000Z

In the quiet of the night, breath. Breathe in the night-time quiet.
At 10, fall into heavy sleep. At 2, wake with the mind striking match after match to peer at tasks undone that must be done tomorrow.
Toss and curse and toss and, giving up, sit up.
Here is the night, not quite dark, but quiet. Here, breath after breath, breathe past the racing thoughts. Breathe in the night-time quiet. Breathe out the edge of self.
Here is my practice, coming to meet me in the night. I thought I was alone, but here are breath and silence and I am glad.
Look! I and here and breath are one. In the night-time quiet, breathe.

Behind your back

2006-03-07T15:40:00.000Z

Between

2006-03-06T12:37:00.000Z

It had been a chill week, fretfully spitting hard little flakes of icy snow.
But the sun, when it came, poked its fingers into pockets of bud and blossom.

Year of the Fire-Dog

2006-02-28T14:06:00.000Z

I found out by chance that Tibetans celebrate the start of a new year today: Losar. Always a cheerful thought – the idea of purging negativity and ceremonially marking a new start somehow never goes amiss, does it? So weighed down we feel, yet so endearingly ever-ready to cast it all off and begin again.

Today begins the Tibetan Year of the Fire-Dog. A quick web-search tells me that, like the Chinese year, each Tibetan year is identified by an animal: hare, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, ape, bird, dog, pig, mouse, bull, tiger. In addition, each year is identified by an element: fire, earth, iron, water, wood. Finally, the gender alternates every other year, in a sixty year cycle. This Fire-Dog Year is Male. Next comes the Female Earth-Pig Year - MUST remember to celebrate that!

Exposed

2006-02-27T18:08:00.000Z

Hell of a week. Still too tired to clear the work backlog that still keeps on growing and sits there glowering at me. By Friday I feel just dreadful and it’s obvious I’m sickening for something. Should have realised how vulnerable I was at this time of year and being so run down after previous bouts of illness. Should have been downing industrial quantities of Vitamin C and Echinacea, but that was one more thing I was too tired to do.

So, Friday night, out for dinner with three friends I’m very fond of. Should have gone straight home to bed too, but I haven’t seen them for ages and what is life if it’s all work and being ill? - just too miserable!

After an hour or so of pleasant conversation, pleasant food and drink, I feel MUCH better, winding down fast – perhaps a little TOO fast, because before I know it the word ‘blog’ has passed my lips.

"What?" "You have?" "Why haven’t we seen it?".

Uh-oh. A whole year and I hadn’t told a soul. I’m kind of embarrassed, I guess, because it’s all about me – hardly a riveting subject. If it’s only other bloggers who read it – well, some, at least, have similar tendencies to self-absorption.

Too ill all weekend to dwell on it – some kind of nasty virus: raging temperature and stomach like a witches’ cauldron. Now it comes back to me: oh dear, this is no longer my secret vice!

Mimosa

2006-02-21T14:30:00.000Z

Further to my post before last, I see Ruth has some beautiful photos today of mimosa from the Cote d'Azur. Sigh.

Walking: latest

2006-02-20T13:50:00.000Z

Week 6
Miles walked: 10 (target 20)
Total miles walked: 122.5 (target 120)
Miles remaining: 877.5

I was ill

Week 7
Miles walked: 18 (target 20)
Total miles walked: 140.5 (target 140)
Miles remaining: 859.5

I was better, but still feeling weedy and also very overworked due to having had time off. An object lesson in the benefits of getting ahead when you can!

February

2006-02-20T13:06:00.000Z

February, ugh. Trudging through cold porridge towards a distant Spring. The grim month in Northern Europe. Just once, the year I was 20, I travelled South in February into the sun, and every year about this time I remember and feed on it.

A train and a boat and an overnight train and waking in the early morning to blue sky over the Mediterranean. At Cannes station a lanky nervous woman in a swirling cape picks me up in a clanking Renault 4 with a hole in the floor and we go bumping inland along narrow roads where the driving style, I note with sleepy alarm, is to keep to the middle of the road, stare the oncoming motorist in the eye, and the one who blinks first shoots to the side at the last minute.

In the hallway of a pale house, with tiled floors and little furniture and so much light, stand two tiny girls. They’re 2 and 3, but look more like twins, in miniature ribbed sweaters and checked dirndel skirts about 6 inches long and baggy woollen tights. Two mops of hair, one blonde, one dark, with the birds-nest mussiness of toddlers who fling themselves at life head-first. "Angele, Julie, dites bonjour". Two small mistrustful stares.

As the clanking car zooms off again to deliver them to school, I’m left alone in my bedroom to unpack, with sinking heart at the strangeness of everything and little feeling that this could be home, but find myself drawn to the window, standing in the light that climbs brighter and brighter over the hill.

Then we size each other up over coffee, Michelle and I, talking shyly and wondering if we might be friends - and she, no doubt, if this stiff English girl will be kind to her daughters. My eyes must be drawn still to the window, for soon she suggests I take a walk around the neighbourhood and I find myself dawdling, tiredly but with dawning happiness, up a hillside lane, smelling for the first time growing aromatic herbs and seeing everywhere… mimosa, clouds of flowering sunlight.

My senses open in the mid-morning warmth and my heart opens in hope. It’s not a vain hope, for we will be good friends. Michelle's loping elegance hides a gentle, wounded woman in much need of a friend on hand, and I am less immature and conventional than I look. It is perhaps the most important friendship of my youth, because I learn from her what I most need to know: that troubled people who find life difficult are not for that less lovable. If I can love her, with all her inadequacies, for her warmth and honesty and vivid mind and the many tastes and feelings we share, perhaps I too can be loved, although I am odd and struggle with life and fear I’m mad.

And the children wind themselves quickly around my heart, which has never known little children and heard for 20 years that I’m selfish and unfeminine… and believed it. I easily find the wellspring within me of nurturing love for very small, vulnerable people. I never knew. I had no idea. And all this in the bright, bright light around us and inside me too. The next six months are full of sunshine.

The arriere-pays, the Riviera hinterland, nearly became my home, but in the end I didn’t stay and there’s never been another Spring so bright. But once you know, it lingers always just behind the eyelids.

Spatially challenged

2006-02-17T17:42:00.000Z

I can’t tell if a space is wide enough to drive through, sometimes not even if it’s wide enough to walk through. Other humans don’t seem to need whiskers.

I have enormous, hair-tearing, head-banging difficulty processing information on more than two axes, eg determining the best of 4 dates for 6 busy people to meet.

And there are some things I should never order on line, because I don't grasp until I see them that two boxes of 100 large ones is going to be so much bigger than two boxes of 100 small ones.

A year rushes by

2006-02-15T12:25:00.000Z

Like heavy traffic on a wet day, time rushes by splattering me with mud and it’s a year today since I decided that I too must definitely have a blog and jumped in. A strange decision, a strange activity, and I still don’t really have a handle on it, but I know it has proved a great gift and made this semi-technophobe unequivocally happy nearly every day to be connected to the internet.

I wanted, mostly, a framework for regularly trying to write a bit - and in this I have been deeply disappointed and frustrated with myself. I’ve found the time and energy so briefly and sporadically, lacking the space to reach inside for it and knowing that it’s not really the space - since it’s not in the same dimension as my other daily activities - but the motivation that I lack. This has been painful. But here I still am, so I haven’t given up hope.

On the other hand, buying a digital camera was a whim, an add-on, and taking photos (which I’d almost never done before) has proved a delight, a new opening into seeing and touching and playing with the present. My world will never look the same again as the patterns and colours keep growing and changing and swirling around me. An escape from words into a different dimension of head and heart. It’s lovely.

And most of all this new navel-gazing activity has miraculously proved to be very far from just that, brought new friends and contacts on every continent through their blogs and comments and emails, and some of them right here in London in the flesh - precious people I never would otherwise have met. It’s a village I can visit every day: what a sweet discovery for someone tired of the anonymity of the big city who longs for community. It’s a flood of writing and photos – skilful and moving, hilarious and immediate, experienced quite differently from reading a book. It is hands that reach out from the computer screen and take mine. Amazing.

And what comes next I’ve no idea. As Spring approaches some doors seem to be opening for me, if I don’t take fright and turn away. In that context, a place to reflect and process and connect and let off steam feels like a good thing to have.

That damned illusion of control

2006-02-14T10:03:00.000Z

Being ill, even a little ill, scares me. Not pain or weakness. Not even the imaginative person’s curse of hypochondria. No, what scares me is that illness disrupts the oh-so-precious, oh-so-foolish illusion of control. The illusion that if I work hard, keep lists, do my best, keep trying harder, I’ll get everything done, feel satisfied, stop worrying and receive only positive feedback.

Naturally, I never get everything done or feel satisfied or stop worrying. The lists are never complete. My best is indefinable. Feedback tends only to arrive when someone else’s worry or bad temper gets the better of them, and therefore to be negative.

Nevertheless, I persist in the illusion that any day now I’ll reach the point of being in control. And I know I’m not alone in this. It’s at heart an attempt to comfort ourselves, I suppose. But the effect is just the opposite. Because there is no control. Because the unexpected always happens. Everything is fragile, tomorrow it all changes, and life is beautiful and precious because of this, not in spite of it.

All this I would be the first to tell you, when I come to think quietly about it. But not in the thick of all the day-to-day rushing about. As long as this-and-this-and-this-and-this get done, it’ll all be fine, I keep telling myself. And every time a new this arises unexpectedly and one of the existing thises falls off the bottom, my heart and stomach turn over and a loud warning siren goes off, and then, if my energy and resilience levels are up to it, I do a rapid juggling act, redefine today’s list, today’s parameters for a bearable level of supposed control. And it’s all in my head, all self-inflicted, and I wish I could stop it.

Nothing wrong with making lists or setting priorities, setting realistic aims and trying to fulfil them. But they’ll never be more than indicative. They aren’t magical charms. Experience suggests that life will intervene over and over.

So, life intervened. Feeling sick and destroyed and lying down doing nothing for several days. And the deadlines and the commitments and the piles and piles of paperwork continued to arrive at an unabated rhythm.

I return to work and look at the piles and piles of paper and the overflowing email box. And I think: how do I get back in control? If I work three hours overtime every day, and all day Saturday and Sunday, how long will it take me to make up the 35 hours missed? And I work it out, and I throw myself in. And half way through Saturday I start to feel faint and weak and my mind shuts down and by Sunday I can hardly move, feeling quite as ill as I did a week ago. Did I really think the quickest route to recovery lay through merciless extra effort? No, not really. But I let myself be motivated by the loss of control which was scaring me much more than the physical symptoms.

Having got myself out of bed and back to my desk for a second time, can I try to look at it differently? Start from the knowledge that control is lost. Here, now, I’ve lost it, I’m naked. Breathe that in. Still alive? Surprisingly, yes. Loss of control can be survived. It’s a great relief, even. Teetering nervously in the gateway of an unknown garden where I’ve ventured only a few times, in the extremes of love and fear and grief that I’ve mostly managed to avoid. Could I, dare I, come here more often?

Around there (Brixton)

2006-02-10T15:56:00.000Z

click to enlarge - if you're a vegetarian, better not.

Not far from here. Not at all suburban.

Crumbling at the edges

2006-02-09T13:41:00.000Z

Been feeling seriously (though it wasn't serious) and demoralisingly ill. Much better now, but seriously and demoralisingly Behind with Everything. However, back to the walking today, enthusiasm undiminished, and here is a report on last week's:

Walking a thousand miles in 2006 - Week 5
Miles walked: 19 (target 20)
Total miles walked: 112.5 (target 100)
Miles remaining: 887.5

And here's a link to an inspiring walker and poet.

Around here

2006-02-03T17:14:00.000Z

It’s an almost intact Victorian suburb. Here and there a block of flats or a few new houses, built on what was a garden too large for today’s tastes. Here and there a group of prefabs where a bomb fell more than sixty years ago – meant to last ten years and still, astonishingly, serving someone well. But these are few, amid mile after mile of red-brick terraces – large and small, two storeys, three storeys, four, some with carved wooden gable-edges or fancy plaster-work and some without, some still single-family houses and some chopped into two or three apartments. Solid and in good condition after much more than a hundred years, with their big windows and high ceilings, overlooking widish roads and generous gardens. It’s all on a human scale and rather soothing in its uniformity.

The Victorians built parks too; within a mile or so of here are two large green spaces, laid out along with the first housing estates, with huge old trees, lawns and lakes now undergoing expensive restoration. For we are restoring, gentrifying, going up market finally. Long a shabby, unmodish area because there is no tube link, the journey to work in Central London a lengthy, congested bus-ride through depressed inner city, we are becoming fashionable at last. Cheap property brought young professionals, single house-sharers and couples with small children - not the affluent, but not so poor either - and new businesses sprang up to cater to them. The tatty butchers and greengrocers closed down and re-opened as silly, sparkly trinket shops, the pubs sprouted new facades and tapas menus. Then the trinket shops turned back into butchers and greengrocers – expensive organic ones – and we were really on our way. Half the front gardens have been bulldozed and concreted over for car-parking, laden builders’ skips clutter up the streets as wooden floors and ‘shaker’ kitchens are installed, loft conversations rise and conservatories sprawl.

It’s all much better than depression and decay – a modest, decent place to live, just as it was when new. It’s a dormitory, though, not a community. A lot of uncared-for ugliness flourishes between the titivated houses and there’s a tacky fragility to the bright new shop-fronts. A Victorian suburb is at heart a grey-brown, gloomy place. And more starkly gloomy, perhaps, under sodium streetlamps, than ever it was by gaslight.

Snug and smug

2006-02-03T12:39:00.000Z

These raw mornings when I turn out and go to work, the cat eats a leisurely breakfast, cleans her whiskers and goes back to bed. I know she's well past retirement age, but really. Grrr.

Tamar and Mary have written so tenderly this week about their cats, and of course I'm just as soft on this wee thing, even at her most annoying...

Three

2006-02-01T13:14:00.000Z

Punts

summer afternoons
of lazy youth remembered
sun on weathered wood

Crossing

crossing the river
leaving then to be with now
may not be easy

Meditation for existentialists

wake early and sit
wrapped warmly in a blanket
being nothingness

Ninety-nine, one hundred

2006-01-31T21:34:00.000Z

At around 7 pm, about a mile from the office, I clocked up one hundred miles walked in January. So I went to have a celebratory drink. Feeling good about this. An eminently reachable, but worthwhile goal. Gonna get healthier. A fine thing. Then I saw the open front page of someone’s evening paper, saw the words ‘one hundred’ echoed there. Yesterday the one-hundredth British soldier died in Iraq. I knew this. So how did I forget, and focus on my private satisfaction? Because that’s what we do. We foreground the smaller trials and victories of our personal lives. Hardly wicked. Only natural. But it’s how they get away with it. Why we aren’t all out there screaming right now, rolling on the ground outside the Houses of Parliament, violating the brand-new law that bans unauthorised demonstrations within one mile of Westminster. ‘Not in my name’, as they say. It is, though, isn’t it? In my name. I’m the one who danced in the street in 1997 when this government was elected after all those long years of the other lot. Damn.

Keeping on Walking

2006-01-31T09:38:00.000Z

I've been standing for 45 minutes on a crowded bus and when I get off I'm like an old, tired tortoise, stiff and hunched on the pavement with my bag on my back. So I shake out my hands and let my shoulders and my tail-bone drop, and I think of the puppet-strings lifting my head and my knees, and my joints loosen and clank as though they were wood and metal. And then I can feel my soft clothes against my skin and the cold air nipping my nose and ears and see my breath steaming in front of my face. And then I can walk.

Walking a thousand miles in 2006 - Week 4
Miles walked: 20.5 (target: 20)
Total miles walked: 93.5 (target: 80)
Miles remaining: 906.5

Pop

2006-01-29T20:16:00.000Z

My father used to call him Pop – the Americanism learned in wartime and a joke, for there were only a few years between them and Harry, my mother’s father, was a boyish figure half his size. He was a small man, my Grandad, with a bald head and a nut-brown outdoors face. He wore collarless shirts with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and braces. He’d be out on his vegetable patch or pouring over the horse-racing pages, his yellow-stained fingers constantly rolling his own with Rizlas and Golden Virginia.

He was my pal, my flirt, always up for long leaping squealing games of volleyball over the washing-line, teaching me tenderly about his plants, telling jokes and riddles, teasing and laughing. A countryman from the Midlands, he fought overseas as a youngster in World War One and never spoke of it, then learned horses and gardens as groom and gardener on a large estate. He married Flo, who was the cook there, and they left for London where he worked as a labourer on the railways. Living in rented rooms with three small children, they qualified for one of the first council houses, ugly grey stucco but spacious with a large back garden. They stayed there through the Second War, the Blitz, with nights in the metal Anderson shelter that still in the 1960s squatted half-buried next to his runner beans and cabbages.

After thirty years in London, they still seemed country people, he and my plump rosy Gran, as short as him but twice as wide, her eternal respectable hats firmly anchored with a huge pin. Over their broad voices lay a soft measured primness quite unlike their city neighbours, learned, I suppose, from the land-owning family with whom they’d been ‘in service’.

He died, my playmate and my history, when I was eleven from lung cancer – glum and scared and losing interest in his garden, his bright blue eyes growing paler and paler. Dying eyes, once seen never forgotten. I didn’t attend his funeral. Sparing me this was kindly meant, but wasn’t kind. I wish my last memory wasn’t his scared dying eyes, that I’d kissed his bald head and seen that he was gone and cried - but tears, we used to say, were for crocodiles. It still makes me sad, forty years later. I was glad, then, to read this.

Monk

2006-01-27T13:08:00.000Z

Such strange light in this photo that I hesitated to post it when I took it, back in July. It was probably just the inadequate artificial basement lighting, but I couldn't shake off the idea that he was emanating something... Retrospectively, I'm less spooked by this - even if he was.

Back to front

2006-01-26T13:44:00.000Z

No Woman's Land

2006-01-25T12:28:00.000Z

I’m looking at the comments left here yesterday, when I said I never saw the same people twice on my walk to work. “I'm amazed you don't begin to recognise anyone.” “This will change: didn't you have ‘nodding acquaintances’ with people on buses and the tube who rode the same route at the same time every day?”. Well, no. Really. I examine my perceptions, all too aware of my negative prejudices and the ease with which I edit out what doesn’t conform to them. But no, really.

This is London. Four years of exactly this daily bus-journey to work and back. Every day the same bus-stop at precisely the same time. I can count on the fingers of one hand the people seen more than once. And god knows I’d notice – not much else to do at a bus-stop. There’s an elderly woman who gets my bus perhaps once a month. A mother and her chubby son who started secondary school back in September. They chat nervously. He doesn’t like the new school, clearly. She goes with him to make sure he gets there. I’ve seen them 5 or 6 times over the months. Another mother and her teenage daughter: half a dozen times over as many years, the girl transmuting from spindly schoolgirl to fashion-model elegance, while the mother disappears in spreading clumps of flesh and anorak.

That’s all. For this is the megalopolis. Even it’s small corners have no edges. We drift like particles and never coalesce. Only the most structured intersections bring people together for long enough to call it a meeting.

And now, walking to work, I get to know the timing of the traffic lights, the reflections in certain windows, the handful of leaves left on a tree, the crooked manhole cover that threatens to trip me. But not the people. Many of them walk the pavements between 8 and 9 am, though fewer in the evening. People live as well as work in this central district I walk through, just South of the Thames. Estates of social housing. Student residences. South-Asian, Cypriot and Italian shop- and cafe-keepers. I notice them, watch them. Many races. Many costumes. The way they bump together in pairs and groups. But I never see the same ones twice. It’s all too big. They are too many. We do not intersect. It’s not hostility. Not even deliberate indifference. We’re just not very present – or present perhaps to a conceptual entity called London, but not to a physical spot within it.

And there's freedom, of course, in this floating existence. That's what brings and keeps people here - the ones who have a choice. It's been pretty joyless at times, but I've grown here, while I might have withered somewhere more constricting.

Extra miles

2006-01-24T10:37:00.000Z

I'm walking a thousand miles in 2006 - that's just under 20 miles a week. Most of this will be by walking 2 miles each way of my daily weekday commute.

Week 3
Miles walked: 30.5 (target: 20)
Total walked: 73 (target: 60)
Miles remaining: 927

This was an atypical week. A welcome sunny weekend, the first for ages, lured me out for long walks on Saturday and Sunday, making up for the two weekdays when I only walked 2 of the planned 4 miles. I need to get ahead now. I worry about hot weather and my inability to walk then. But this isn't meant to be an extra source of worry. Hold the goal lightly; be motivated, but not fixated.

I like the rhythm, the pavement passing under my feet. It gets easier, the 2 miles morning and evening seem shorter. Some mornings, though, I feel tired, slowed by the steep trudge out of the Waterloo underpass and onto the bridge.

There's no scope for varying my route - only one direct road from Elephant to the river. So it grows in a way familiar - the shops, the office and college facades, the cracks and bumps in the pavement surface, the shapes of things and the shapes between things. Never, in the fluctuating, fast-paced blur of the city, do I see the same people twice. No one sees me pass or says Good Morning. I make no impression; the impression made on me is shallow.

It feels good to walk fast, take in energy, take on pace. Dave, Loren and Zinnia wrote comments last week about the value and pleasure too of slow and meditative walking. Oh yes, I like to dawdle, dawdled on Sunday in the woods, sensing the scurrying and flapping of crowds of creatures in the undergrowth on a briefly warmer day and the soft, drying mud under my feet, blinking up at the blue-black trees against the pink, misty sky. And I'm familiar with walking meditation - the studied, formal kind, as practised in the zendo and the monastery cloister, and its less formal cousin, as practised in the gardens at Gaia House. The city-centre streets are not for this, I feel. And the aging, overweight and office-bound like me do need some aerobic exercise. But it was a good reminder to return, whatever the speed, to the body and the breath, not always to the goal. This step. Now. And the next.

No title

2006-01-20T16:29:00.000Z

Naïve expectations?

2006-01-19T17:10:00.000Z

This is a poke around inside a moment’s feelings, not a reasoned consideration, which would require much more time and thought.

I only catch up on the global news a couple of times a week now. It’s so horrifying and dispiriting. I don’t think I could go on if I listened, as I did for many years, before getting out of bed every morning. So anything that qualifies as ‘good news’ is precious, cradled, pondered over. Such was my immediate reaction to the election of Michelle Bachelet as President of Chile. Wow, a woman – and an unconventional one at that, in such a conservative country - and a member of the Socialist Party! And in Chile: like South Africa, always in the heart of all who grieved and campaigned from afar for the return of democracy.

Then I wondered at my impulsive reaction, since it’s a long time (well, 1997, probably) since I expected anything much from politicians. And anyone who expects a politician to be more humane or radical just because she’s a woman… well, where have they been for the past 30 years? And I don’t mean just Right-wingers. I tend to feel that the kind of person who can survive in politics (hyper-energetic, skin like a rhinoceros, love of the limelight) is just not likely to share many of my perceptions and priorities, not deep down or long term, even if they start out principled and well-intentioned. Back in the early 1980s, I had the opportunity to work for a few days with the first Minister for Women to be appointed in a European country – perhaps the most overtly feminist minister and ministry there has been. She was emphatically NOT a nice person. She shook up some assumptions in her country, though, in ways that have partially stuck. So does it matter if she was a nice person? I guess I think it does.

Why would women politicians, just because they’ve not been at it as long as men, be more humane or idealistic? Expecting this is similar to having different, higher, expectations of women bosses. My closest friend at work and I have talked a lot about how we always expect more of women in authority because we identify with them and unconsciously look to get the same kind of empathy back.

It’s a naïve assumption that we should perhaps let go of - just like the naïve assumption that a woman politician and someone who defines herself as Left of Centre will strive for a real impact on social and economic polarisation in Chile, or anywhere else. But I’m never sure, really, whether I should try to let go of it. Perhaps not to let go of it, but to cherish its origins in hope and solidarity, whilst nonetheless cultivating a wider and more realistic awareness. There is something to be said for naïvety. There are other, less condescending, words for it: simplicity? optimism?

Of course, I don’t think a Centre-Left coalition government in Chile is the same thing as a government of the Right - ANY degree of interest in defending freedom and democracy and trying to mitigate the hardships of the poorest is worth having, worth voting for.

And I’ll always owe a certain gut-level solidarity to Michelle Bachelet JUST because she’s a woman – if only because of those niggling paragraphs I find in every news report, like the last in this (ugh!!!).

Walking a thousand miles

2006-01-17T13:42:00.000Z

I’ve been inspired by Tom Montag, The Middlewesterner. Well, I’m usually inspired by Tom – by his writing and his love of home. But this time I was inspired by his exercise programme. He and his marathon-runner daughter, Jess, who walked a marathon together last year, had a brilliantly motivating idea. They’ve made a commitment to walking (Tom) or running (Jess) one thousand miles in 2006.

That’s just less than 20 miles a week, and it got me thinking. For several months now I’ve been aiming to walk some of the way to and from work each day. From Elephant and Castle , the concrete-jungle roundabout at the South-Eastern edge of Central London, to my office just North of Waterloo Bridge (worth waiting if this takes a minute to download) is about 2 miles each way. In practice, I’ve only been walking it a couple of times a week. But, hey: 4 miles a day, 5 days a week, that’s… Yes, I could very feasibly do one thousand miles in a year! There’ll surely be days when I don’t walk it both ways, because I’m ill or late or have a lot to carry. But there’ll be all the weekends, when I also walk a lot, since I don’t have a car. I COULD DO THIS.

So on my return to work after the long Christmas/New Year holiday, I began.
Stats so far (to be updated weekly):

Week 1
miles walked: 18 (target: 20)
miles remaining: 982

Week 2
miles walked: 24.5
total walked: 42.5 (target: 40)
miles remaining: 957.5

I was tired and took a day off from walking on Sunday. I missed it. I feel my body falling into the rhythm, just as it falls into the stillness of meditation.

I’m slow! Two miles take me 35 minutes. But it was even slower when I started two weeks ago. I’d rather be walking on quiet open roads, like Tom. But London is a good city for walking – decent pavements everywhere, though much time is spent waiting at crossing lights.

So, what with the walking and the meditation and the diet, it’s all rampant self-improvement. This gives me pause. After all, meditation, my primary commitment, is about self-acceptance, not self-improvement; being present, not constantly aspiring; believing that I’m fine as I am and everything’s fine as it is, and thus, paradoxically, creating space for movement as well as for stillness. The potential for self-absorption is alarming also. I hope awareness of these contradictions will mitigate them. I hope this is about feeling better - not different, not fixated on the future, but more present and more me; not more in-turned, but lighter and more available to life. We’ll see. I hope I can do this. One thousand miles in 2006.

In the details

2006-01-17T10:43:00.000Z

Passed on Waterloo Bridge this morning: a fat pale-faced man in a black tracksuit, head shaven apart from two red, gel-stiffened horns. Still wishing I’d looked back to see if he had a tail. Just as well not to know, perhaps.

Warm

2006-01-15T17:35:00.000Z

In the beautiful old glasshouse at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden
I hope the current restoration work will leave its charm intact.

Random

2006-01-13T16:07:00.000Z

We’re on the bus.
It’s after 8 pm
and everyone is tired,
heads leaning, banging
on the window panes,
and mobile phones compete
like slanting lasers:
nasty travesties
of well-known tunes.

and drifting off
and coming to

Loud voices here:
two young black men
in woolly hats
disputing evil. ‘Christ’, I hear,
and ‘snake’ and ‘serpents’ teeth’.
Arms wave in overemphasis.
Quite mad, they sound,
or off their heads
on something strong.

and drifting off
and coming to

Some older men,
handshakes all round,
eye contact and intensity.
Short, fair-skinned, dark-haired men -
where are they from?
A language I don’t know.
I crave that place – or…
no, such male bonds
would shut me out.

and drifting off
and coming to

The disputatious pair
are up and swaying
off, and now the others –
gone. From where? To where?
Such feelings, questions,
random tired thoughts
while sitting rocking slowly home
and drifting off
and coming to again.

Soaring in the blogosphere

2006-01-13T13:42:00.000Z

Do mermaids soar? oh well, I liked the photo...

Among the chronicles of everydayness, often beguilingly well evoked, stand out some stunning full-blown literary and photographic works that take the breath away: MB Whitaker’s poem on Home at Quarrtsiluni, Teju Cole’s temporary blog about his recent return home to Nigeria and qB’s photos of her trip to Cyprus.

Not today

2006-01-12T17:25:00.000Z

Nearly dark

2006-01-11T17:29:00.000Z

Looking forward, shakily

2006-01-08T11:39:00.000Z

Difficult emotions, to say the least, in facing this past first week of the new year back at work. When you don’t like your job it’s always painful and dispiriting to return after a substantial break. Then there’s the fact that back in June I set myself a deadline ‘for ending this craziness, for leaving the job. I’m setting it for the end of 2005. I don’t like deadlines. Self-imposed ones seem like pointless stress. But I have to make this solid and real, so I can believe in it, see it and touch it.’ Ha. So real and tangible did this turn out to be that it had no effect at all, and here I still am more than six months later in exactly the same place. If I was immortal, this degree of inertia might be excusable.

For the past several years, I’d escaped the Christmas/New Year binge and inevitable accompanying burst of self-pity for my family-less state by going to a Buddhist retreat. This time it was going to be a new Buddhist centre in South-West France. But the journey, just before Christmas, turned out to be so expensive and difficult – there didn’t seem to be any way I could get there in one day – that I ended up cancelling and staying at home. After a frantic round of socialising in December (well frantic for me, which I suppose is not actually all that frantic), things were very quiet over the 11-day break from work. Dinner with friends on Christmas Day and that was it, really. A time for lots of sleep, meditation, walking, reading and thinking.

If nothing else, this was physically hugely beneficial. After a week of it, gosh, I slept all night and woke up without a headache. Is it reasonable to find this shocking? Almost everyone I know has some kind of chronic pain or illness pretty certainly related to their chronically hyperactive and stressful lifestyle. Every one of them seems to feel it is there own fault and not indicative of generalised stupid social assumptions. I find it hard to agree, but perhaps my expectations are unfeasibly high. Perhaps, too, masochism is a fundamental, ineradicable human trait. Anyway, I stopped striving to be ‘normal’ a long time ago, didn’t I? If feeling lousy all the time is normal, it’s not a decision I can regret.

Oh dear, I don’t mean to sound such a misanthropic grouch. On the whole, though a somewhat introverted and prickly type, I do tend to like people and, looking at the strained faces and hearing the plaintive voices around me, I just wince with compassion and feel sad. And these, my friends and colleagues, are not poor or lonely or unsuccessful people; on the contrary.

One of my friends at work, for example, has not returned after the break. Not long before Christmas, her knee started seizing up, got steadily worse and now she can barely walk a few steps and is on extended sick leave pending probable surgery. I wouldn’t automatically attribute this to stress. But this time last year it was her neck. And the time before…, but the details are beside the point. I see a gentle, sensitive, talented person who works relentlessly long hours, undertakes a lot of international travel with no time to get over the jet-lag and socialises furiously at the behest of her restlessly sociable partner. Living at this pace suits some people, but not everybody. I see someone who, despite being successful and beloved, feels exhausted and victimised. I see her getting sick because it’s the only way she feels ‘allowed’ to stop. I find myself wanting to scream at her. Of course, I don’t scream at her. I’m calm and sympathetic and will only ever say any of this with caution and at a moment that seems appropriate (I hope).

No, obviously, I can’t change other people. Only myself. The only thing to do is to choose to live differently, to be something different - demonstrate it, not talk about it. Some of us, if we’re free to do so, not constrained by the financial or practical needs of dependents, can say: ‘I want to do less. My mind and body don’t thrive on hyperactivity and sleep-deprivation. This makes me hurt, it makes me tired and ill and eventually it’s probably going to kill me. I’m prepared to have less in order to do less’. It’s not easy. The social pressure and disapproval. The prevalent deeply internalised sense of obligation to keep doing and keep consuming. These are not negligible. They are, after all, how control is kept in our supposedly free society. No one’s going to tell me: ‘yes, it’s ok, you can stop’. But I can see that some people have stopped. And I could join them, become another visible marker of the alternative.

After the decision – that one so many former drop-outs and hippies and radicals took in the late 70s – to join the mainstream, work for the political opposition, try to make changes slowly from within, after doing all that for years and years, and achieving nothing but a social environment of unprecedented cynicism, here I am back with what we preached as youthful subversives: the politics of prefigurative forms. Go out and create something different, on however small a scale, all by yourself if necessary. That’s all you can do. Be quieter and poorer and kinder yourself, and hope it may be contagious.

Yes, I want OUT. I have nothing to lose: no partner, no family, no professional status, minimal financial security. Probably not all the way out, but quite a long way out. I can certainly envisage living in a fairly minimal structure (be specific – alright, caravan? yurt?), consuming much less, buying only second-hand, reducing requirements enough to be able to work quite a lot less. I’m entirely serious and realistic about this – old enough to have few illusions, which is all to the good.

This is what I believe, but not what I do. What I do is think about it and long for it and keep on working and commuting and consuming and getting exhausted and getting up each day and doing it all again. And think about it and long for it…

And yet, I don’t quite rise and bang my head on the wall at this point. Perhaps this isn’t all. I avidly follow the accounts of people who chuck it all in and look for something else. And, as well as successful migrations to new places and livelihoods, I see the repeated story of the poor soul who escapes from everything only to be shocked by the realisation that you can’t escape from yourself. Any journey that doesn’t begin with this firmly in mind is not worth undertaking. Any journey that doesn’t begin from a place where you’re basically okay already is not going to lead anywhere fruitful.

So this is how I feel at this point, what I’ve been pondering in the quiet Christmas and New Year’s break: I haven’t been doing nothing all these months. I’ve been looking for a steadier place inside myself, for ways to be okay right here and now. And only then can I leave with the tools, with half a chance at trying to live differently. I cannot leave until I’m really here. And becoming ‘really here’ is a long journey in itself because as far back as I can remember I’ve been withdrawing, protecting myself, trying to pretend I wasn’t here. No wonder it’s been difficult. Writing, taking photographs, establishing a stable meditation practice, cultivating habits of more exercise, better eating, better energy flow, and above all of greater calm and kindness: perhaps these have been not putting off the journey, but the beginning of the journey.

This may be an entirely self-deceiving optimism. But on good days I think it isn’t and look forward, somewhat shakily but determinedly, to the next step.

Molecules of winter

2006-01-06T12:11:00.000Z

Go together like

2006-01-03T16:27:00.000Z

Day one

2006-01-01T13:18:00.000Z

To be here now in silence for a few minutes every day. And perhaps in time find yourself touching the here and now a little more often in daily life - just being, instead of reacting, jumping up, flinching away, keeping busy. Being just a little more alive - that's what regular meditation practice means to me. Since first attending a meditation class some seven years ago, I've known that I'd found something more powerful than psychotherapy, more powerful than force of will, truly known from time to time small intimations of change, small openings to greater peace, more connection, more kindness. Uncomfortable with fervent positivity, I look around at this point for something cynical to say. Really, I have nothing. It's not easy to hold the daily practice, though, amidst busyness and weariness and ever-changing moods. I've lost it many times and come back to it, most recently when Dale had the brilliant idea of a meditation blog, 100 days, a daily check-in point for anyone wanting to practice sitting meditation. Five minutes daily or 50. All backgrounds and traditions welcome - anyone who'd like to start or strengthen a daily meditation practice. A new 100-day commitment begins today, but you can join in at any time.

No clear picture

2005-12-31T19:03:00.000Z

And so this illusion of an ending and a new beginning. This sudden shuffling of fuzzy everydayness into arbitrary clear distinctions. Like this photo: all the nuance of rosy brick buildings and green gardens on a winter afternoon cast by a moment's trick of the low sunlight into an illusion of sharp relief, which satisfies only aesthetically. No endings, really. No beginnings. No clear picture. Thank goodness.

Happy New Year!

So near and yet

2005-12-30T23:17:00.000Z

Reading All of These People, the memoir of the very well-known BBC journalist Fergal Keane, an Irishman – a book as eloquent about his own home and background as it is about South Africa, Rwanda, Iraq... Odd really, that bits of my heart have been left in places I never expected to see: Peru and Guatemala, Zimbabwe and Senegal, but I’ve never been to Ireland.

One of my close woman friends is Irish. Her warm, clever garrulousness, her deep anchor in her large family, are that country to me. And a man, a dearly loved colleague for many years; his very Irish face, blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked, that unnervingly vulnerable, rubbery flexibility to his features.

Just off the edge of my country and my consciousness: shadows of violence on wet green landscapes, alarmingly rapid economic growth, and that strange thing - charm. One day I must go and have a look.

Flat

2005-12-29T18:51:00.000Z

Flat sky with seagulls:
a glass-half-empty morning.
Drink this hot tea, smile.

Ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum

2005-12-28T22:47:00.000Z

A Christmas present giving me delight
is Stephen Fry’s new book on how to write
in verse, or worse, and yes this does bode ill
for days when I have nowt to say, but still
have time for rhyme.

Merry Christmas

2005-12-24T15:07:00.000Z

Wishing everyone peace and light amid the festive flurry!

Tinsel taps (festive faucets)

2005-12-21T11:55:00.000Z

Where is everyone? Echoing hush in a near-empty office building. I seem to be the Solstice Cinderella. Just me and, keeping me company, a sparkly string of seasonal delights : wall-to-wall Bach ; a lovely topical blogpost from Zinnia on this first day of gay Civil Partnership ceremonies in England ; and a spare, enthralling Solstice poem from Kasturi.

Sunday in the cold

2005-12-19T12:32:00.000Z

Sleeping fitfully, waking with thumping head and clammy under too many bedclothes to midwinter blue-white light, low flames of sunshine. Waking to meditate with cold air whispering on my skin and in my lungs, planes echoing above, slammed car doors and hurried voices, and a high, tinny birdsong. Gulping hot, milky, spicy tea, shuffling into yesterday’s clothes and walking fast around the park to get some blood, some thoughts, some energy flowing. Close the doors and turn up the heating and plunge for the day into other countries of, strangely enough, intenser cold, where Nordic computer workers comment in quiet, crooked-English aphorisms on their 'psychological contract' with their very modern employer (it’s a magnum scholarly opus that I’m copyediting) and nomadic Siberian reindeer herders gather in their tents after the longest of all working days when the sun never sets and the ice never melts and make a psychological contract with fate, tossing libations of vodka onto the fire (this gorgeous book I’m reading, of which more later). Typing and reading, typing and reading, as the flames of sunshine lengthen and the blue-white light dims, and night and quiet and cold and words, words, words, until my eyes droop, too tired for more, but my mind flits on in dreams through high-strung cities of high-tech offices and out into the empty lands of ice.

Rediscovering the ordinary: photography and meditation

2005-12-16T12:04:00.000Z

Photo by Stephen Batchelor, from his website gallery - click to enlarge

The Buddhist scholar and teacher Stephen Batchelor is also a photographer and I was very happy to see that the latest update of his website includes a gallery of his photographs, along with an extract from Meditation for Life, a recent book with text by his wife Martine Batchelor and photos by Stephen:

As practices, both meditation and photography demand commitment, discipline and technical skill. Possession of these qualities does not, however, guarantee that meditation will lead to great wisdom any more than photography will culminate in great art. To go beyond mere expertise in either domain requires a capacity to see the world in a new way. Such seeing originates in a penetrating and insatiable curiosity about things. It entails recovering an innocent, childlike wonder at life while suspending the adult’s conviction that the world is simply the way it appears.

The pursuit of meditation and photography leads away from fascination with the extraordinary and back to a rediscovery of the ordinary. Just as I once hoped for mystical transcendence through meditation, so I assumed exotic places and unusual objects to be the ideal subjects for photography. Instead I have found that meditative awareness is a heightened understanding and feeling for the concrete, sensuous events of daily existence. Likewise, the practice of photography has taught me just to pay closer attention to what I see around me everyday. Some of the most satisfying pictures I have taken have been of things in the immediate vicinity of where I live and work.

Yes! That’s exactly why I find such joy both in meditation and in taking photographs, and hope they will both continue to play a big part in my life.

The retreats I’ve attended led by Martine and Stephen, who are both guiding teachers at Gaia House, have truly helped me to “rediscover the ordinary”. Thank you.

Still skaters

2005-12-14T15:17:00.000Z

Today this is my favourite - and I wonder why it wasn't yesterday.

Obsession is...

2005-12-13T17:10:00.000Z

... not realising you've gone numb with cold snapping the skaters

Order and disorder

2005-12-09T13:17:00.000Z

Some of my friends are so ordered - everything they touch so tidy and perfect, from their even handwriting to the serried ranks of books on their shelves and spices in their kitchen cupboards; bare polished desks, bare vacuumed carpets, uncluttered tables and sofas, well-weeded gardens and, one supposes, well-weeded minds. What a pleasure to dwell in this order with so much space for peace, for choice, for undistracted action or inaction. Of course that isn’t always the whole story. Some of them will tell you at the drop of the hat about the terrible looming chaos they constantly fear and fight - their ordered possessions and surroundings a bastion against the world’s frightening disorder and the even more frightening disorder of their own hearts.

Then there are the wild, often artistic ones who live with piles of dust and papers and dirty dishes and no order at all – so many better things to do than tidying up; who do everything at the last minute, or after the last minute, but often with creativity and originality. Most of them, though, get bogged down from time to time in the disorder they allow to breed.

I try not to judge, but to glory in diversity. We need both kinds of people, and every gradation in between. The important thing is finding the environment, the habits, where each of us is comfortable and can flourish. Important too to compromise a bit for the sake of the group’s, as well as the individual’s, comfort and flourishing.

Oh yes, I have this thoughtful, gentle, liberal view of the issue. Not at all what I grew up with. Cleanliness and tidiness were next to godliness – not a matter of enlightened self-interest, but a moral rule. Endless battles of will, where I screamed and stamped, aged 3, in the face of inflexible demands to tidy up and put away and “do it again, properly”… and screamed and stamped aged 10, aged 15, aged 18… And at aged 19 a disordered, crumb-ridden student room with crumpled clothes crammed in the wardrobe and unwashed dishes in the sink. Subjected to unswerving demands and discipline, I’d learned nothing about choice or balance or a reasonable degree of deferred gratification.

The worst of it is: things haven’t improved a great deal. The thoughtful, gentle, liberal view, the middle way, is just a theory. The practice is an adult lifetime of desperate neurosis around this issue. A helter-skelter ride through peaks of frantic, shamefaced, clearing up and troughs of messy home, messy work, messy mind and all the energy drained by that – and no idea, still, of how much order is my real comfort level.

This is one area where age has brought no wisdom, no progress. Even since I started to frequent Buddhist retreat centres, loving their sparse perfectionism and the quiet inner space that fosters. It’s been home from these to the clutter and disorder of my flat, my office and my very large handbag. For this, I think, has become a major repository of all my hang-ups. As I steadily pursue what’s probably an average amount of putting aside inner pain and turmoil and striving to assume an outer persona of energy, decisiveness, calm and efficiency… well, this is where it all goes. Put the hurt, the chaotic emotions, over there on the teetering, collapsing pile of books or clothes or dishes. Keep the despair and inadequacy out of work and hobbies and relationships by diverting their expression to this one area where I have no control at all.

So bringing the peace of meditation out into the quality of daily life will definitely require bringing greater order to my physical environment. And it’s going to be really, really, irrationally, disproportionately hard. It’ll mean approaching this mess (and that mess, and that one, and all the messes in my rooms and drawers and cupboards and computer files) and looking each of them in the face, and feeling as powerless as an angry 3-year-old, and breathing through the feeling, and getting stuck in. Yeech.

Still point

2005-12-07T14:05:00.000Z

Mind, words, everything turning inwards, as December gropes towards the solstice. Thinking – no not thinking, feeling – towards… something. Change, perhaps. Or perhaps acceptance that there’s no change to be made.

The journey from sleep to wakefulness is a long one on these chill, echoing mornings of steaming frost. Just getting out of bed and assuming some semblance of a person and going out into the world feels hard. That’s one dynamic.

The other dynamic is gratitude. Feeling very, very grateful for the recent return to daily meditation practice, and sticking with it, and feeling permeated by it, thanks to dear friends here. Coming back to the still point, the sense of spaciousness, at least once or twice daily. Remembering that it’s always there - that the rushing, the fretting, the alternating waves of inertia and adrenaline, are not all there is - is a huge thing. Really HUGE.

And now: how to move this spaciousness out from the centre and into the rhythm of the days? I need to sit quietly in it for while before I know - hibernate on my cushion, drawing my blanket around me, like a grey cat’s tail.

Um

2005-12-02T13:52:00.000Z

The dinosaur - one of these - has been excised. What possessed me to post something so ugly?

Blog against Racism

2005-12-01T16:00:00.000Z

Pictures from UNESCO's Virtual visit to Gorée

Today has been nominated Blog against Racism Day and I was wondering how I might contribute. Then a conversation with a friend yesterday (he was deeply irritated by the sanitised depiction of slavery in a US TV drama) provoked me to recall my visit, some 15 years ago, to the Slave House on the island of Gorée off the coast of Senegal.

From the 15th to the 19th century, ruled in succession by Portuguese, Dutch, English and French, this was the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast. It’s now a quiet and picturesque tourist resort. Many elegant old houses built for the slave traders still stand. So do some grim reminders of the conditions in which captured men, women and children were held for months before the terrible journey to the “New World”.

UNESCO has an excellent website with pictures and a video guided tour of the Slave House. It evoked strong memories from that visit: heat and dust and sadness and unease and growing horror.

I went to Dakar to help organise an international political conference and visited Gorée with some of the delegates. I had to interpret the guide’s French visit commentary into Spanish for some Latin Americans and struggled with this, I remember [oh shit, what’s the Spanish for menottes (manacles)?…]. In retrospect, I was glad I’d had a task to focus on. Some of ‘my’ delegates were in poor shape by the time we exited the house. Looking at the UNESCO photos, it all came back: the desperate, damp, claustrophobic cells; the view through slits of windows over the endless sea, the dreadful future.

I remember afterwards not knowing where to put myself. Discomfort in the face of my friendly hosts. And one feeling I remember particularly strongly. Senegal, I suppose, is the most ‘exotic’ place I’ve ever visited. Pink and sweaty in my crumpled summer frock, there I was surrounded by tall, good-looking people, many sporting a fashionably updated version of traditional African dress. I really did feel foreign, that the people around me were elegantly, wonderfully ‘different’. But standing in the doorway of those stinking, claustrophic cells and imagining the horror, imagining the feelings of their occupants, I thought: the same as I would feel, the same…

Hope

2005-11-28T12:10:00.000Z

In the funny, nice way this happens, it was Brenda in Toronto who pointed me to the blog of Rachel, a London advertising executive who was in one of the underground carriages blown up on 7 July. And Rachel’s blog sent me to read her article in yesterday’s Sunday Times. She’s a wonderful writer and it’s a shocking, upsetting read, but also hopeful. I’m glad I read this.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2005-11-23T13:24:00.000Z

Peckham Rye Park, South-East London, November 2005

High among the things I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving are the kind, talented, interesting people encountered and the beautiful, surprising, funny, sometimes searing writing and artwork discovered in the past year of on-line wandering.

I've been feeling tired and depleted by an awful cold and high fever, as well as many practical worries (nothing dreadful). Going through the motions of the days, with nothing left over for blogging. But will be back.

Frozen roses

2005-11-22T12:59:00.000Z

On an ordinary cold day, a throat-clenching, swan-song beauty : frost melting on full blown roses

Words. Poems. Hands.

2005-11-11T16:27:00.000Z

Susan wrote once about an experience I know well. Normally an avid reader, she went to a bookshop and alarmingly found nothing that appealed. Strange how this sometimes happens. I know by now not to fear that it will last. It never does. One day: nothing. Next visit: new treasures on every side; excited anticipation; must contain myself and not be too extravagant.

It’s the same with blogs (except that they’re FREEEE!!!). Long periods go by when I just keep reading and enjoying the same dear friends. Then suddenly I’ll find a whole load of new bloggers who I know at once will become well-loved, frequent ports of call. I recently mentioned a few new blogs I’m thrilled about. And I’ve also been finding, through happy, serendipitous links, some people who’ve been there all along - I should have known them and I didn’t, but I’m so glad I do now.

Just three for now. Through Moose, I found another fine poet, Stranger Ken. I haven’t really ever been a big reader of poetry. But just now I’m reading more poetry than anything, buying books, going to readings, and it’s all down to blogging poets like Dave, Ernesto, Leslee, Susan, and most recently Moose.

Then, because she linked to me and someone else linked to both of us, I found Adriana. She started blogging right when I did, and we have a lot of links in common, and I can’t think why I haven’t been reading her all along.

And today, I happened to click on Claude’s blogroll, and found L’Homme Qui Marche whom I knew at once I’d keep returning to. And, yes, look, of course he’s linked to some of my favourites - how enchanting and enchanted this international circle is. What drew me first was his post and PHOTO, Doigts, which reads, translated:

I was on the underground and I found the woman opposite me very beautiful, especially her hands. I took some photos of them, discreetly. Then she took a camera-phone out of her bag and took a photo of me. Exchange of smiles. No words spoken. She got off at “Place de Clichy” and I got off at “Liège”.

Here

2005-11-11T14:08:00.000Z

More shots from the same spot as yesterday's

click on pictures to enlarge

Black and blue

2005-11-10T13:57:00.000Z

Unretouched. Really. The light so cold and clear, making everything sharp outlines and dense contrasts. The trees are fed by traffic fumes, shaded and channelled upwards by tall, old buildings, concentrated into patterns on the sky. Stare up at them long enough and when you look down the garish shop windows and full-colour people seem all wrong. You expect to see Javanese shadow puppets.

Self-portraits

2005-11-08T11:19:00.000Z

Riveting stuff in the National Portrait Gallery’s current exhibition of self-portraits. That look. The steely, sometimes sidelong, sometimes straight-on look. The deep, defiant, shifty look we only give ourselves. How unusually quiet the rather crowded gallery was, people murmuring at most in their companions’ ears, more often wrapped in their own trance of staring, catching, looking back.

And then Mr Munch at the Royal Academy, also including many self-portraits. What a harsh, unblinking, but rarely unkind gaze into his own face. What unexpectedly glorious colour and pattern and cold, dense Northern light. Our fixation on The Scream seems like a typical media obsession with only the bad news. (okay, The Vampire is pretty unforgivable).

So self-portrait paintings, the ultimate in self-obsession, reach out by compelling attention and empathy. Does the same apply to self-portraits in words? Which brings me back to qualms about self-exposing blog-posts, qualms which linger despite moving links and unexpected positive feedback. Oh well, done now. Let them go.

By himself

2005-11-07T11:34:00.000Z

Edvard Munch at the Royal Academy.

High and low

2005-11-04T15:52:00.000Z

Made myself late for work today because I stopped to take photos. (Not to mention nearly falling over backwards in the process, trying to take the very, very top of the tree). Must resist this. Or leave home earlier.

But recording what I see on the journey to and from work may be useful. I find the journey so exhausting and traumatic. Looking at these two photos together - a minute, a few yards, between them - I think one reason for this is the contrasts. The almost endless walls of concrete and walls of noise shutting off space and fresh air and growing things. And the surviving patches of trees and sky and river, of grand and interesting architecture. It’s a struggle to hold these two realities that jostle together so richly and bewilderingly.

Maybe the main reason I find the city increasingly not for me is not so much a craving for beauty as a craving for simplicity.

Alison and Horatio

2005-11-02T19:01:00.000Z

Weeks after its unveiling, and although I work just up the road, I only got to see the much discussed new statue in Trafalgar Square last weekend. Ready to love this work for showing a disabled woman naked, pregnant and beautiful, even if it wasn’t great art, I found her grave and entrancing. She’s measured up, I think, to the monumental backdrop, settled in. The pigeons think so too, lighting on her back like tattoos, on her hair like ribbons. I like this very much.

Tamar's just words have been much in my mind today. In this context, the decision to put this tribute to a beautiful, brave, creative woman up there alongside Trafalgar Square's monuments to military might does give me a little bit of hope.

Light relief

2005-11-01T13:55:00.000Z

Dulwich Park, 28.10.2005 (click on photo to enlarge)

Rather obvious, but perhaps it bears repeating: as long as there's the utter joy in an ordinary moment of light, welling from the stomach or the heart or wherever it wells from, things will probably be ok. Maybe the greatest gulf is not between success and failure, good and ill fortune, or even strength and weakness. Maybe it's a matter of whether you have the ability to lose yourself in beauty, pleasure, empathy - something outside yourself.

I have a strong memory, from when I was 9 or 10, of watching my aunt (the 'sister' in the previous post) sink with a sigh into an armchair, put her feet up and slowly, lasciviously, unselfconsciously, drink a hot cup of tea. In that moment she gave herself up totally to pleasure. "I've never seen my Mum do that", I thought. It really struck me. I knew which of them I wanted to be like.

When last we met

2005-10-31T14:10:00.000Z

To say I’m ambivalent about blogging this is an understatement. Maybe it’ll force me to close this blog. Or maybe I’ll be able to move on. I don’t know. There’s so much else I’d like to write about - exercise my imagination and vocabulary, play more. But I can’t seem to write anything else until I’ve written this.

Imagine I’m a man and this is my wife. We’ve been married a long time and unhappy almost from the start. I first left her more than ten years ago. Her father died a few weeks later, she phoned me and I went back, went through the motions, through the dry, resentful funeral, and stayed. We lived together under a cloud. She was bored and shrill and bitter. I was depressive, uncommunicative, indecisive, knowing I should go, not going.

It is 1984. I left again, went back, left, went back. Finally, two years ago, I left for London and a new job. It is not a great success. Neither my wife nor I has formed a new relationship. Every now and then we meet and talk about trying again. A day together is usually enough to remind us why we shouldn’t.

It is Christmas. She persuades me we should spend it together, at her recently widowed sister’s home by the sea in Somerset. I am fond of her sister, after all, and of the sea. A quiet, relaxing place to be together and try not to rub each other up the wrong way. I have no plans for Christmas. I am prey to sentimental expectations of the holiday and keenly feeling my single state. I agree.

Bad mistake. BAD mistake. Her sister is caretaker of a seaside holiday park. Fifty empty wooden chalets. Deserted. Cold. Bleak. We have a chalet. Unheated. Furnished sparsely, for holidaymakers who spend most of their time outside. She’s told her sister we will sleep together, we are giving it another go. So only one bed has bedclothes. We do not sleep together. We divide the bedclothes and freeze. She will not tell her sister. I may not ask for more blankets. I bury myself in coats, escape into uneasy sleep. She lies awake, chilled, brooding on her own intransigence.

I am angry with myself for agreeing to this. I shut myself in the bathroom with a bottle of whisky. Keep warm by staying under water. Get very drunk, then very sick. Alarmed by this – I don’t usually drink a lot - my wife tries to be pleasant, but cannot. She opens her mouth and the frogs and serpents of a lifetime’s bitterness rush out. Her sister, who looks depressed and clearly wishes we hadn’t come, cooks an inedible Christmas dinner. When not snowing, it rains. I walk on the long grey beach. It is a nightmare.

My wife’s nephew comes to visit his mother. A frail youth of twenty, lost without his father, for whom he used to work. Looking at my frozen, furious face, and trying, really trying, not to turn her tongue on me, my wife turns on him. She has a nose for vulnerability, nags him relentlessly over breakfast, lunch and dinner about what a failure he is, how he must shape up and be a better support to his mother. On the third day of this he stands up, palely silent, leaves in the middle of a snowstorm and drives across Dartmoor to his sister’s place. Really dangerous. Better than staying. Good for him.

I have watched her do to him what she usually does to me, felt so sorry, so indignant, and said not a word in his defence. I leave the next day, soberly appalled at my own weakness, and I think: no more, I can’t bear this woman and I can’t bear who I am in her presence. We do not meet again.

Twenty years have passed. My ex-wife remarried, was widowed some years ago, began to phone me again. Whenever she is ill or lonely there will be an answerphone message. Sometimes I phone back. Sometimes she tells me I’m evil. Sometimes she carps inanely as though we saw each other yesterday. Always she makes me shudder, and I have little to say in return. I hold the phone as though it's a heavy saucepan of boiling water, longing to let it fall, exerting all my effort not to let it fall.

Maybe you think she should leave me alone after all these years. I should change my phone number. No, you don’t, I don’t. Because this is not my ex-wife. It’s my mother. Not my ex-mother. There is no divorce.

The unspoken

2005-10-28T12:29:00.000+01:00

I’ve had nothing to say, as shown by the random proliferation of photos. It seems I’ve lost the will to speak and can only regain it by speaking the unspeakable.

Tamar yesterday evoked the wise therapist she used to see. He sounds like a good ‘un and made me think of the wise, gentle counsellor in my own life. I hadn’t seen her for a long time, but I went to see her this week because I’ve been feeling so depressed.

I looked into her kind face, explained that I’m very depressed because I’m not managing to move forward as I would wish with changing my life situation, and suddenly found myself blurting: “I suppose I believe that I can’t ever have a better life because my mother has put a curse on me!” (she didn’t blink).

Oh lord. Is that really what I believe? How appalling. But I feel better for having voiced it. Nothing is so bad it can’t be faced. But the unspoken, and therefore unfaced, has limitless power.

I am estranged from my mother, who is now 82, and have been for more than 20 years. It was I who initiated this state of affairs, in that I was the one who decided: no, I can’t do this any more, I can’t survive this relationship any longer, and I would really, really like to survive. I suppose I might equally say, though, that she initiated it, by being so extremely nasty that each time we met I lost the will to live.

It is dreadful. It is worse than divorce, since our culture does not accept (I don’t know of any culture that does) that we can 'divorce' our parents. It is inexcusable, unspeakable and ever-present, like phantom pain from a missing limb. If I have no compassion for my own mother (well, I do have some compassion for her, but apparently not enough to make me end what she once termed the ‘life sentence’ I had imposed on her), this makes a mockery of everything I cleave to, everything I have learned from Buddhists about the cultivation of loving kindness and compassion. It goes beyond guilt. It goes, apparently, as far as feeling that I’ve brought a curse upon myself.

A curse that has turned me to stone. I’d like to leave London, stop working full-time in a city office, and I have strong and feasible ideas about alternatives. I’ve known this for several years. And I do nothing about it, just carry on and on with a lifestyle in which I now find neither joy nor reason. A massive wall of apathy and resistance lies between me and the actions necessary to change things. It’s absurd. It’s beyond understanding or endurance that I’ve let it go on for so long. I can’t explain it. Except perhaps by reference to something psychic, irrational, malevolent.

There. How awful.

Travels of a donkey

2005-10-27T12:58:00.000+01:00

Travelling

Now in London

Previously in Venice

Photo-mural by Paola Pivi

Muted

2005-10-26T14:03:00.000+01:00

Muted
grey gardens
you sadden me

Waiting
for Winter
to strip you

The
last flower
now terribly fragile

Still empty

2005-10-25T17:19:00.000+01:00

Empty

2005-10-25T13:41:00.000+01:00

Façade

2005-10-24T16:27:00.000+01:00

What a thing of beauty the department store is, recently restored to all its art deco glory. A palace of cool and quiet on Sunday morning. Gracious curves and softly filtered light. And no you may not take a photo Madam. And no not one of the twenty-odd sweaters fits. And no not one of the shelves and shelves of different shades of sheets matches these pillow cases. Dwarfed by grandeur and bemused by the gulf between promise and delivery, between beauty and discontent.

Lassooed

2005-10-21T14:46:00.000+01:00

Elsewhere

2005-10-20T13:52:00.002+01:00

I escaped yesterday and went to an afternoon showing of Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy, a new digitally remastered version of a film made in 1977 among Tibetan communities in India, Nepal and Ladakh. An afternoon in another world of colour, space, sonority, desert, devotion, of wide skies and small, dark monastery chambers.

Nearly twenty years ago. Here was a chubbier, more mortal Dalai Lama. Here were ancient rhythms of monks’ horns and voices and ancient work chants of labourers hoeing. Faces of plain, naked beauty, sometimes with tears in their eyes as they sang – or was it just the incense, the biting wind? The painful knowledge that this was then, that these communities must be much changed by now. But also that Tibetan Buddhism has since touched hearts and minds around the world, and, seeing those rows upon rows of monks’ faces, that women are now a little more visible in the structures of devotion. The light, the colours look like my photos after I’ve clicked on ‘sharper’, ‘saturate’ and ‘glow’. Women working in the fields in tall hats, weird silhouettes against the sun. And then I remember: women in Wales, where I think my family comes from, used to wear tall hats. Remember: just about the same time this was shot, I worked in fields with Portuguese women, their hard trilby hats tied on over headscarves. Such a little time ago, back then when I was young. It ends with a death ritual, brutally tender. The old man’s tiny body stretchered to an open, rocky place. The body turning to ash in daring close-up, and we seem to see blood flowing in the flames.

Sat for two-and-a-half hours immobile, just breathing, with a lump in my throat.

There’s a DVD.

Not about happiness

2005-10-18T13:44:00.000+01:00

Spot the semi-anonymous legs

The recent fashion for researching happiness and its causes fascinates me. I’m inclined to think the causes of happiness are ineffable, but it's interesting that so many are giving it thought.

Having just read a disturbing and provocative article on the subject, I sat down to write about it. Then thought, no, I can’t. I picked up the article, you see, from a blog I read. It’s the blog of someone I know. I sometimes talk to him about blogging, but he doesn’t know (I hope) about mine.

So I can’t link to him, because then he’ll find out. So I won’t be able to acknowledge where I read about this. And the more I think about it, I can’t write about it at all, at least not right now - if this is a current preoccupation of this other blogger's, he might wonder who else is blogging about it and do some searching… and I’m vaguely recognisable, even though I thought better of my picture and removed it.

In fact, I may have said too much already.

How difficult and uncomfortable. I concluded, and continue to feel, that I wouldn’t be comfortable with complete self-revelation or with complete anonymity. But semi-anonymity is really not satisfactory either.

OK, Moose. Here, without further comment, is the article: http://www.cis.org.au/Policy/spring05/polspr05-2.htm

The wrong trousers

2005-10-17T17:32:00.000+01:00

Since I managed to lose some weight over the Summer, all my Winter clothes are baggy. Baggy is a good look, I think, if you're thin and angular. If you're tubby, though not as tubby as before, it's not such a good look.

I have these trousers. They're corduroy with 10% lycra - the only kind I could fit into last year. Baggy lycra is a particularly bad look. They kind of stand there on their own...

Word-lifting?

2005-10-14T13:17:00.000+01:00

Pond in Windsor Great Park, near where I spent last weekend

I’ve really enjoyed writing a bit more for the blog this week, since things quietened down around here. Quietened down comparatively, that is – not very much really. But I like finding time to write, even when I’m busy. Wish I did so more often. It makes me feel calmer, less jangling and fragmented.

I don’t often think about why I like to write. It’s a bit like why I like to breathe.

I could wax lyrical about my humble little bit of creative instinct and how allowing it space is deeply fulfilling. And this would be true.

I could also say, though, that it’s all about reducing experience, feelings, to words on the page; tying up chaos to a satisfying pattern. In a word: control. Writing calms me because it gives an illusion of control.

Doesn’t sound too healthy, does it? Perhaps there’s another way of putting it: exercise. Writing is a mental work-out. Stretching out the sore, tense muscles of my mind, and afterwards they feel better. Mmm.