Driving back from the Parish Council meeting last night, at about a quarter to midnight, I saw the moon again – only half a moon now, but it must have just risen, because it was huge and golden. It really was an amazing sight. I thought about taking the camera out when I got home, but I’ve taken so many pictures of it lately, and anyway, from here there isn’t a particularly attractive backdrop in that direction.
The moon does seem to have haunted me over the last couple of weeks. It always does, whenever I see it, or even if I don’t, it lurks in the back of my brain. Memories of moons past. It is always changing and always the same, over the years and wherever in the world I go, there it is, waiting for me. Sometimes I don’t see it for weeks, and sometimes, as now, it is insistent, always watching me.
I don’t know what the connection is, but these just lines popped into my head: ‘Night and day,/Under the hide of me,/There’s an oh such a hungry yearning,/Burning inside of me’. Great song. But I won’t be singing it in the show. I don’t do solos, too self-conscious, too little confidence, though sometimes I think my voice isn’t that bad, and maybe I could... But I like being in the chorus. There’s not so much pressure, and usually quite a good spirit of camaraderie, though there can be bitchiness too. The only times I get stage fright are during auditions, when I have to stand there on my own. I love singing. It’s like writing, I do it because I have to, not for anyone else.
The meeting was late again last night, because we started with a visit from two people involved with a major planning application for a business site just outside the village. Not that the PC’s opinion on a planning app carries much weight, but increasingly it seems that developers are trying to sweet talk the locals in advance, to create a good working relationship – or good PR, if you want to put it that way. The actual PC meeting proper didn’t start till 9:15, and then lasted over 2 more hours – we never seem to get through them in less. Hope it doesn’t put off the two new councillors too much. They seem very keen. But there are strict limits on what parish councils can do. They’ll learn.
Getting to sleep at about half past midnight, I slept through till just before the alarm went off at 6 – 5 and a half hours. That’s about average, for me, and at least it was uninterrupted.
Gabriella was confused by my strange sleeping patterns. ‘Aren’t you tired?’ Yes, I’m always tired. But I was waking about 5-5:30 every day, and there was no point in lying in bed waiting for two hours to get back to sleep when it would be time to get up. Actually, the whole time keeping of the camp was so lackadaisical that when the day’s work started most days I was ready to go back to sleep. I did have a nap one day – but naps aren’t the solution. I said to her once, ‘alcohol doesn’t help’, and she said ‘What does help?’ and to be honest I have no idea. I just keep going because – well, what else can I do?

I wonder if the coffee’s ready yet. I forgot to switch it on when I sat down to meditate, so I did it just before I came up here, then when I got here I found that although the computer had started up, the tool bar at the bottom of the screen was blank. I tried the power off button, but it would not switch off, and then I tried the reset button but that didn’t work either, it just sat and stared blankly at me, not responding, so that I was unable to do anything. In the end I switched the power off at the socket, and everything died, then back on again and it all fired up and went through the boot up sequence. So now, it is working again. Who knows what causes glitches like that?
Prior to that, I was just thinking, as I always do, about my life and trying to find that place inside myself where I can be happy just for life itself, to forget about desire and longing and loneliness and love, and just say, look, you’re alive, that should be enough for anybody, you can live without those other things, can’t you? Make the most of what you have, because this is what you have and you have got by all these years, stop wanting things you can’t have and be happy for this.
I woke just before 5 and got up. I’m tired, but there was no point in staying in bed, lying in bed awake for hours is the worst thing you can do. I must have had about 5 and a half hours’ sleep, that should be enough, it will have to be. But this evening I will have to concentrate hard because there is a PC meeting.
Now I have coffee, I just went down and got it. There is quite a lot of preparatory work I still need to do for this evening’s meeting, the finance report for a start, it just doesn’t add up and I will have to sort out where the problem lies. It should have been done and circulated in advance of the meeting, but I’ve been focusing on the minutes and actions arising from the other PC meeting last Monday before I went to Hungary, and it just didn’t happen. Not to mention the web design work which I’m supposed to be doing and haven’t even looked at yet. I told them I could start this week, I should at least make contact. But I’ll get it done, I hope they know me well enough to realise that and trust me.
Am I going to be able to take any time off this summer? I’ve had all my trips, they should be enough, they at least get me away from here and out of everyday life, and I have one more to come, in London, though that will be hard work. But I can’t see there being any time for just relaxing and letting go. I just have to be glad to be keeping busy.

When I opened my eyes after my meditation yesterday morning, I saw Ninja curled up on the sofa, gazing intently at the smoke rising from the incense stick. Well, he is a Zen master, after all. Many cats are, though not all – not Miko for instance, she’s just a Crazy Cat, a furry bundle of manic energy, in constant motion (except when she isn’t). They all seem to fall into one category or the other. Maybe it’s an age thing.
I’m late this morning, and tired. Slept badly, I was awake at 3:20 but didn’t get up, I lay in bed and played my fall-asleep tape – right the way through, which must be 45 minutes, and still no effect. I must have fallen back to sleep some time after that though, I dreamt disturbing, unsettling dreams until the alarm went off.
Good news is that yesterday I found my Cross pen. I’m hopelessly careless with pens, as I am with most things, and I had this one for Christmas (in a boxed set with a ‘Swiss army grooming set’, about 2 inches long with scissors, nail file, tweezers and tooth pick, just what you need when you’re living out in the back woods). Anyway, it’s not exactly Mont Blanc, but it’s a nice pen, and when I unwrapped it, I thought, ‘this is a bad idea, I’m bound to lose it!’ It disappeared a couple of months ago – before I went to Paris, because I couldn’t find it to take with me, and I thought ‘I knew it, it’s gone’ and I was quite upset. My daughter kept telling me it would turn up, but I was convinced I’d left it somewhere.
Then yesterday morning, there it was, on the desk. I think it must have been under/behind the monitor stand, but I don’t know why it suddenly surfaced again. But it’s here now, and I have to think about how I’m going to look after it in future. I put it in the cracked mug I use to hold my pens and assorted other stuff, but it came out covered with orange gel from a leaking gel pen, so maybe not such a good plan (though I have now cleaned it up.) Should have bought that marble pen stand from the antiques market in Brussels that Saturday morning – though it would have been a bit heavy to carry home on the train, and where would I put it among all the detritus of my study, anyway?
The next thing I want is a Moleskine notebook. Never even heard about them till 6 months ago, when the Folio Society were offering one as a ‘free’ gift if you bought some outrageously expensive collection of books. Since then, they keep popping up all over the place. One of my Czech friends got one and thought it was sufficiently exciting to put a post on Facebook about it. The young intellectual types I was hanging out with on my last night in Oxford were raving about them. The notebook of Hemingway, eh? Yes, I definitely must get one. When I’ve filled my spiral bound A5 Pukka Pad.

I started last night to type up the notes I made when I was in Hungary, with a view to blogging them eventually – but it was taking ages, and I’d only got as far as the first stop on the drive from the airport. So maybe it won’t be worthwhile blogging it, I don’t know.
I started thinking, as I did at one point while I was away, about how, when you start writing down all the words that pass through your head (or rather, some of them, because it’s impossible to catch them all), it takes over to such an extent that there is no time left for experiences, because you are spending all your time writing. It’s like having a map on the scale of one-to-one, it completely swamps what is actually happening. Is it like some mathematical series that tends to infinity.. or zero… or, I don’t know what this analogy means. I can never reach a perfect equivalence between the life of events and the life of words, because that would need two lifetimes, maybe more, because the process of writing can take longer than the process of experiencing. Or sometimes less, of course, it’s not necessary to record all the minutiae of existence, some of them can pass unrecorded – otherwise, how boring would it be to read?
Maybe I’ll save my Hungary notebooks for the times when there is very little happening, draw on them and drip, drip, drip them into my blog gradually.
What else to write about this morning? Because this space is for new words, not ones copied from a notebook, that is cheating, I can do that later (though I will probably run out of time), but first I must write 500 new words.
I didn’t get much work done yesterday, out of the mountains that need to be done. First day back, that is the excuse. I must not be so lax this morning. If I’m not careful, the rest of the summer will drift away from me and I will be struggling to finish off what I need to get done, to keep the wheels moving, and then it will be autumn again and everything will start to close in on me... It’s only myself I’m cheating after all, if I fritter away my days not getting on with things then I have no time left for relaxing. And it would be good to have some time to spend in the garden this weekend, I have been away for the last two weekends, I need to get back in touch with home again, so I mustn’t spend the time sitting over the computer.
But that’s the weekend, and it’s only Tuesday today, I’m getting far ahead of myself.
So, today I WILL focus on work, no slacking, no drifting off into blogland...

The moon which shone last night as we drove back from the airport was a little past full, a slight flattening along one edge if you looked carefully, as though someone had taken a knife and nicked off a little of the silver, not enough to notice in the everyday rough and tumble of trade. But it was the same moon I saw slipping behind the pink dawn clouds that morning, the same moon which a few hours earlier had crept round the edge of Istvan’s weekend house as we sat on the terrace wrapped in blankets and watched the distant lights of Budapest outshine the few stars which put in an appearance. (Was that really Jupiter, as he claimed, or just a satellite, as I, ever the cynic, ever the pessimist, believed?) The same moon which shone on Friday night over a bonfire in a camp in the woods, and through a thunderstorm the night before when rain beat on the roof of the log cabin while I crouched over the laptop on the spare bed, and the Doors played through the camp PA system. The same moon which must, last night, have been shining over other parts of the world as well as the M1 between Luton and Bedford.
So now I’m back here again, and it looks like a nice morning. The study is a mess, and there is too much to do, too many things which have been put off, not thought about till I was back again, including website work which will be fun and exciting, as well as minutes to write and correspondence to sort out and emails to check, and invoices to pay. And meals to cook and the house to clean and washing to do.
But later today I’ll see my daughter, and some of those messages will be ones I’ll want to read (I hope).
So, here I am, and I’m grateful for having had such a wonderful time and being able to bring home such memories (and photos – god knows how many – I kept uploading them onto Gabriella’s laptop and then my pendrive every night, and I filled the memory stick again yesterday, though it’s only a 128meg one because it’s an old camera.) But I don’t have time today for pruning, editing and gloating over photos, too much to do, too much to sort out.
So, I’m not resentful that real life has to reassert itself, I’m glad to be able to keep busy, even though I know that much of what I have to do will be frustrating and soul-destroying, it doesn’t have to be that way always, there will always be something. They have asked us to go back again next year and be included on the official programme, rather than just being squeezed in at the last minute as we were, and although I have some doubts about whether it will happen, the joke I had with Gabriella and Istvan yesterday was ‘next time’ – every time we had to make a choice about where to go and what to do and what to eat, we said, ‘we’ll do that next time’.

... trying to read the reply to my latest comment from a laptop with a seriously dodgy mobile connection in the depths of the forest on an island in the middle of the Danube...
But the reply is:
You said you had deep pockets
Now, should I let Gabi sleep, or wake her from her nap and drag her to the palinka tasting and blues concert...
or should I just go on my own???

Yesterday I did something I almost never do – I took a nap in the middle of the day. Or rather, I didn’t so much take it as have it thrust upon me. I was working away – it had got to about 1:15, and I was thinking I should really stop and get some lunch – then I thought that what I really needed was sleep and it was impossible to concentrate.
Rather than fall asleep at the desk, which I was on the verge of doing, I decided to lie on the bed, play my ‘insomnia buster’ tape (the one I’m supposed to play in the daytime, which lasts about 20 mins), and see what happened. What happened, of course, was that I was asleep before the 20 mins was up, slept through the rest of the 45 min cassette, which is filled with the ‘bedtime’ track, and didn’t wake until the phone rang about 2:45. Then I got up and had some lunch and a cup of tea.
Later in the afternoon there was a ‘strawberry tea’ for the school governors. A friend I was talking to there remarked that I looked more relaxed than usual. When I said I’d had a nap, she commented, ‘It’s good that you had time for a nap’. Well, no, I didn’t have time for it, it just happened all by itself.
I had to come back from there, and grab my stuff for the Parish Council meeting at 7:30, which finished at 10:45. It wasn’t so bad as sometimes. I didn’t lose it and threaten to resign. I think now the decision has been effectively made for me, it is easier in some ways because I know I just have to get on with it. I’ll make the most of it, for the time being at least.
I guess this is the way my life goes, drifting from one day, month, year to the next, every so often thinking about taking action but mostly going along with events. Perhaps this is the point of the idea of acceptance, taking events as they are instead of resenting them or struggling against them, I don’t know.
So today I need to pack (again), tie up any things which need to be tied up, go to a governors meeting (the other school). People keep saying, ‘Have a nice holiday’, and I know I’ll have a great time, I always do, but it’s not relaxing. I won’t get that sort of holiday this year, and I won’t be going anywhere with Hubby. I don’t mind that. Often when we’ve been on family holidays I’ve been restless and not been able to settle, wanting to do stuff and feeling constrained by having to go along with what he wants or what the children want. I like being on my own, though I won’t be on my own for the next few days, because I will be with my Hungarian friend. She emailed me yesterday and warned me to expect rain.
My flight is at 6:25 tomorrow, so I definitely won’t be blogging in the morning before I go. Exactly 24 hours from now, I should be taking off. Back late Sunday night, so I won’t be blogging until Monday morning. If anyone’s bothered.

Well, I’ve had an email from the guy in Berlin welcoming me to the project and saying he’s glad I’m going to be involved, which is nice of him.
But it’s obvious that there won’t be any work coming from Oxford, because there’s no money to pay me, even for what I’ve already done. Having tortured myself over whether I should give up the PC to give me more time to do the editing work, it looks as though that isn’t an option anyway. So, I’m stuck with what I’m doing, I have to just grit my teeth and get on with it.
The trouble is that all the organisations I do work for are non-profit making and largely run by voluntary effort, which makes me feel awkward about asking for money. The MOMD has loads of editing work that needs doing, but... Should I offer to do it anyway without expecting payment? After all, I was talking to the Head of Publications, and she said in a semi-accusatory tone, ‘Even I don’t get paid’. So why should I expect to? But all the other people involved are academics who are making a living in some other way, and can afford to do this for love. I feel grubby and mercenary, and yet I must be earning a hell of a lot less than any of them – not enough to be able to support myself.
The answer is, it seems, that there is no escape route, I just have to make the most of things as they are. I have two lines of a song running through my head: ‘Life would be easy, if it wasn’t so hard’, only I can’t for the life of me remember where it’s from or who sings it.
I think everything would fall into place if I was happy with my marriage, if I loved my Hubby it wouldn’t matter so much about being dependent on him, I could just get on and do whatever I want to do, maybe even just write, finish my novel, do my research, and not be fretting about how I can earn money.
So maybe I should try and stop myself thinking about wanting love, or sex, or romance, or whatever the hell it is that I’m hankering after, and be grateful for a nice place to live and not having to worry about paying the bills. Everybody has to make compromises, don’t they? Why should I think I can be any different?
It’s just that I have this feeling that things could be different and I could actually be happy with my life, not just enjoy some bits of it some of the time. But maybe that is all anybody can ever hope for. Shit, I don’t know. Why do I keep coming back to the same bloody question: do you change the circumstances of your life to find happiness, or do you accept things as they are? And if the latter (which I suspect is true), why is it so bloody difficult? Or is that just me?
I’ve remembered that song: ‘Dirty Town’ from the film Still Crazy, sung by Bill Nighy.

Did I get everything done? I never got round to making that list, so I don’t know. Registration starts at 12, so if I aim to leave home about 10, I should have ample time. Does that mean there is no lunch provided? I had better check the programme. It’s not the sort of place that does casual buffets; proper, two course sit down lunches with waitresses (though they’re probably called something like ‘servers’, I suspect). Long wooden tables in the centre of the hall, long benches which are tricky to negotiate in skirts, unless you sit at the end. Gothic arched windows – Victorian gothic, it’s fun to tease the Americans and Australians who get terribly breathless and starry eyed about the ‘sense of history’, and when you point out that it’s not really old, just a 150-year old pastiche, they don’t seem to get the point. ‘Hey’, I tell them, ‘my house is older than this - older than your countries!’ No sense of chronological perspective, these people.
Oh, and only one ladies’ loo. After all, what are women doing in a place of learning?
And on Saturday and Sunday, University of Wolverhampton, Telford campus. That should be an interesting contrast. Bet the ladies’ loos are spot on.
What else to say this morning? Nothing much that’s suitable for general consumption. Finally sent out the agenda and finance report for next Monday’s PC meeting at 9:30 last night. I hope they appreciate my efforts. But if I could focus more in the daytime when I should be getting on with my work, and didn’t spend so much time off on my flights of fancy, I wouldn’t have to work in the evenings. When Hubby works from home, he manages to maintain a clear distinction between work and non-work, a clear boundary.
I didn’t say goodbye to him this morning. I hovered around the breakfast table, told him, I’ll be back on Sunday evening, not sure when, I’ll give you a call. He didn’t look up from his breakfast, his paper. I thought, should I go round the table, give him a hug, there as he sits over his Shredded wheat and the Times? Do I want to? Not particularly, in fact, not at all. What should I say? I’d been muttering something inconsequential, about checking the route from Oxford to Telford last night on Multimap, it was as he’d said, M40, M6, M54, so no need to check the route back, because obviously that would be M6 too, and once I’m on the M6 I can find my way home. I forgot to remind him to feed the fish. What else should I say? ‘Bye, then’? But that might make him feel he was required to respond, a brusque ‘Bye’, interrupting his train of thought without requiring him to look up. Or was he secretly longing for me to throw my arms around him, kiss him, tell him I’ll miss him? Well, that would be a lie anyway. Is he distancing himself, just as I have, steeling himself, waiting for the announcement I’m too timid to make? Or is he just too bound up in his own concerns to even notice that something is a little awry with our marriage? Who knows?
Physically he may be there, but metaphorically he is back in the attic.

Errrmmm...
*Harrumph*
Shiver me timbers???