Portugal to my right, Basque country to my left...
Thanks to Ilze from Lativa for the photo.

Last two pictures were taken today (New Year's Eve), I also found a wallflower and irises in the garden in flower.

I have stayed away from the computer for a week… not a particularly restful or enjoyable week exactly, just a week when lots of other things have been going on.
Here are some thoughts I wrote down in my note book on Tuesday:
I have been thinking in the night (I’m awake most nights) about how I go round and round in circles, and I’m still doing it, and it never seems to get any better, I don’t seem to make any progress. I don’t feel I’ve really changed since last year, and so it goes on, and how can I face the next year, when I’ll probably end up feeling the same.
Every year I think ‘this year it will be different, this is the year when I will finish the novel, find an agent/publisher, work out what the hell I’m doing with my life, learn to live with myself and be happy…’ of course, it never happens, I just stumble on not achieving anything and not feeling any better about myself or my life.
On Tuesday evening I finished reading ‘The Manticore’ by Robertson Davies (middle book of the Deptford Trilogy), and right at the end (after the hero has made a terrifying Christmas Eve crawl through a claustrophobic tunnel from a prehistoric cave system back to the world), he says:
‘… if we are really wise, we will make a working arrangement with the bear that lives with us, because otherwise we shall starve or perhaps be eaten by the bear… cherish your bear, and your bear will feed your fire.’
So what can I learn from that? To cherish my bear? Well, how the hell do I do that? And maybe that should be my New Year resolution. Maybe this year, instead of resolving that I will become the person I want to be (which never happens, of course), I should just aim to get through to the end of another year, without necessarily trying to make a drastic change (and inevitably failing), but without losing hope, just to get there, and maybe find some reasons to be happy along the way, because reasons to be happy can be quite small things really, but just to get to the end alongside the bear, and accept the bear for what it is.
And my ‘365 Tao’ book offers this for today:
‘Always finish what you start. That alone is discipline and wisdom enough…
‘When you come to the end of a cycle, a new one will begin… With each turn of the wheel you go further. With each turn of the wheel you free yourself from the mire of ignorance. With each turn of the wheel comes continuation.
‘Turn the wheel of your life. Make complete revolutions. Celebrate every turning. And persevere with joy.’
Happy New Year.

OK, now I've calmed down a bit, here's one thing that was probably behind my mood yesterrday.
As I said, my daughter is in the local panto, and the dress reheasal was on Monday night. The guy who is playing the dame, I have done shows with him before and never really liked him much, but from rehearsals daughter has said he is really nice and friendly. On Monday evening I realised why - this guy, who must be in his 40s, is all over the young girls, but can't be bothered even to be civil to old farts like me.
She is playing the principal boy's sidekick, and has the typical costume of fishnets, stillettoes and very short tunic - at one point she and and the PB (who is in her 20s) were walking up the backstage stairs while this guy was standing at the bottom with a group of other blokes, and he made a remark in my hearing. I probably should have said: 'You do realise she's my daughter, and only 16!' but I didn't because I hate confrontation.
Right, now i've got that off my chest... and the first night went really well last night (there was a whole Brownie pack in the audience, and they got really into it).

I'm spoiling for a fight this morning, which is most unlike me, I get depressed but I don't usually get angry with anyone apart myself. But today I am just feeling really p****d off with everything and everybody. (This is just a statement of how I'm feeling, not suggesting that my mood is directly related to anything that follows, because to be honest I don't know where it's come from)).
Got a neeeew keyboard on Sunday which iiis obviously more sensitive than what I'm used to as it keeeps multiple typing letters without me knowlingly leaving my fingers on the keys particularly long.
son has now been home for over 48 hours, and none of us has said anything to him about the little difficulty we were having a couple of mmmmonths ago, obviously we are deep in denial and back to playing happy families.
He lefffft his kkkkeybboard behhind at Uni, and 'borrowed' mine, we went to buy a cheap replacement in PC World and found we could get a cordless keboard and mouse for 5 quid more than the cheapest bogg standard keyboard, seemmmed like a good idea at the time, but looks like it will take some getting used to.
decorated the tree on Sunday and wondered why it is that I used to really love doing that and now it is just a chore, whatever I do to it it alwyas looks like a mess. Snatccch of a song (told you II have one for every occasion), 'once upon a winter time, I lost christmas in my mmmmind (the singer is Melanie, and it's from 30 odd years ago))...
The oooother thing with this keyboarrrrd is that the shift key doesn't always seem to work - maybe I take my finger off to soon.

(the multiple thing applllllies to the space bar and enter key too.)
I wantttt to curl up in a lllllittle corner somewhere and not have to go anywhere or do anything, just read and listen to music - but i have to go out every evening this week because my daughter is in the local panto and I am helping backstage with the dressing. Dress rehearsal was last night which meant we didn't get home till midnight, at least from now on it won't be so late.
have dreamt about my European group for the last two nights now, incluuding the french guy, on sunday it was just starting to get interesting when I woke up – at 3:45 – that always happens – you could say it’s the story of my life, I suppose, just when it starts to get interesting, it never quite happens!
Oh, the other thing I was going to mention was my new eyeshadow, couldn’t get it open then when I did my finger slipped and stuck into it, scattering it over the sink and getting it all over my finger, so I smudged it on (all over the lid as well as the crease to use it up) instead of using an applicator, ended up with a Goth effect, not an attractive look in a woman my age!! left me reflecting on my general clumsiness and incompetence.
Still,after tomorrow the days will start getting longer again...
Happy solstice.

Get a picture to appear on the top of my blog?
All it seems to have done is change the size of the font.

While in Brussels, and in the throes of a passion for all things Francophone, I bought a book (look, a book shop's a book shop, even if most of the stock is in either French or Flemish - incidentally, in Rome I spotted a bookshop open at 2:00AM - granted, I can't read Italian, but even so... any city that has those kind of facilities gets my vote!)
Anyway, this book pressed all my buttons (apart from the Francophile one) because it was called: 'Restez Zen: la Methode du Chat' and also had the word yoga on the cover - yoga, zen, cats, relaxation, sounds like my kind of thing.
I haven't actually opened it since I got home, but I'm sure the translation will be part of the meditation experience (and if I get stuck I can pass it on to CDA and let her worry about it - 10 years in Geneva must have been good for something!)

A few days ago I came across this in a book of Taoist meditations (365 Tao, by Deng Ming-Dao, hope I’m not breaking copyright by quoting it here).

‘Ask yourself each day, “What remains unexpressed within me?”
Whatever it is, bring it out. But be judicious. The rantings of mad people do not yield greater freedom. Those who are with Tao use expression to find greater understanding of themselves and so find liberation from ignorance and circumstance.
All that is good and unique in you should be brought out. Never hold back, thinking that you will wait for a better time. The good in you is like the water in a well: the more you draw from it, the more fresh water will seep in. If you do not draw from it, the water will only become stagnant.
What is dark, perhaps evil, inside you must be expressed in a proper way too. Lust, hatred, cruelty and resentment – these must all be carefully taken out of yourself, like finding a bomb and taking it to be detonated harmlessly. Your heart may be quite a minefield, but you must persevere in clearing it if you are to plant crops and frolic without concern.
Ask yourself each day, “What remains unexpressed within me?” Unless you can express it, you will not clarify your inner nature’.

So this is what I’m doing.
I love the idea of ‘frolicking without concern’… think I’ll adopt it as my goal in life!

I went to meditation last night ready to go off on one about being turned down for the job and how nobody wants me and what a waste of space I am. Unfortunately, the girl who told me about the job in the first place was there, so I probably should have held back, but I didn’t and launched into it anyway. She said that it went to an internal candidate and that she was prepared to put me in touch with the line manager if I wanted some feedback, and had I thought about volunteering to get my face known (the organisation is an NGO). All really sensible and helpful stuff, but I was off on one, I knew I was being irrational and probably making her wish she’d never mentioned it in the first place, but I was falling into that awful trough of self-pity and self-hate and couldn’t scrabble my way out, in fact knowing that I was making a complete arse of myself just made it worse and worse and I ended up in tears.
We did the ‘metta bahavana’ (‘cultivating loving kindness’), a meditation in which you start by feeling loving kindness towards yourself, then extending it out to other people. Only I just could not get any loving kindness to myself, there was just a huge wall of ‘you don’t deserve this’ and I couldn’t stop crying, until I started directing it towards the other people in the room instead (starting with this particular girl), by the time I had gone round the circle and back to myself I was feeling much calmer and it began to take effect, so by the end of the meditation I felt much better. One of the other women came up to me afterwards and gave me a hug and was really kind – then we stuffed our faces with all the yummy food people had brought in.
There is the old Catch 22 – how can you expect other people to believe in you if you don’t believe in yourself? - but how can you believe in yourself if you don’t believe in yourself? Where do you start? I have not been so far down into this pit for a while until the last few months, but it has not gone away. I used to liken it to the bit in 1984 when (this is from memory, so it may not be quite right), the interrogator holds a number of fingers up in front of Winston and he has to believe – really believe – that there are 3 fingers when in fact there are only two. I used to think about this a lot.
A few days ago I flippantly said ‘fear of rejection is a killer, isn’t it?’ but I think fear of rejection is what’s at the root of all this for me – terror that people won’t like me, won’t approve of me, won’t want me. Any kind of rejection – sexual, social, professional – it just kills me, because I have no reserves of self-esteem to fall back on.
Sorry about that.

I was suppposed to turn the gingerbread round after 20 minutes, set the kitchen timer, came up to the attic and got carried away, no idea how long it was in the oven for... still, it looks all right.
Hey, they're Buddhists, they won't complain.

Today I was awake at 5:00. Read my writing magazine for a while, started thinking about jobs… when I was accepted for the European project and the Parish Council clerk job, I thought I was on a roll, but in the last couple of months I have applied for four jobs and been turned down for all of them. I just hate it, I hate the whole process of trying to sell yourself, I hate the stress and uncertainty, I hate the rejection. I had two years of it when I finished my PhD, I went after over 100 jobs ranging from academic research to bog-standard admin, I had 12 interviews, but I was never offered one job. What employer wants to take on someone with my lousy track record? So I thought, OK, I’ll just sit back and see what happens. So I did get a job eventually, a two year fixed contract on a project which I really wasn’t that interested in, but it was a job. Only the contract wasn’t renewed – so I started beating myself up trying to find something else, then I thought, well, maybe this is my opportunity to take my life in a different direction, get on and finish that novel. But that just means another round of rejection. So I write this drivel instead, and then I find that maybe somebody somewhere wants to read it, which is great.
But it doesn’t solve my central dilemma, which is, what the hell am I doing with my life?
I tried explaining all this to Hubby and got the usual response.
So I got up and did some ironing, then had a shower, then had to take the daughter to school (she missed the bus), went for an interview… clerk to the Board of Governors of the lower school, at £150 per term it won’t change my lifestyle, but it fits in well with the parish council. Went to the post office. Sat down here and started to write all the stuff which has been rattling round my head for the last few days.
I have to make gingerbread today. My Buddhist meditation group is having its Christmas party this evening – as daughter would say, ‘How random is that?’ Actually it is just that it’s the last meeting of the year and we have been asked to bring ‘a small offering of vegetarian food’ – but I’ve had a special request for my famous gingerbread.
And before that, I’m going out to lunch… doesn’t happen often. This is a reunion of my old yoga group, we used to meet in a closed down pub (the teacher was the ex-landlady), the place was re-opened as a restaurant this summer, and we get together there about once a month. Not having any work colleagues, I don’t get many invitations to things like that, so I thought, what the hell. Nice excuse.
After typing all this up (in Word), I found that the Broadband connection was down. went to make gingerbread and restart the router, fortunately it seems to have worked. Son is coming home from Uni on Saturday, he is the whizz on this stuff.
So that’s my day in a nutshell – plus fitting in any housework I can manage, of course. And Christmas cards. Wrote 24 yesterday – to my friends from the euro project – couldn’t get to the post office to buy the appropriate stamps, so they will get posted today, which is too late, of course. And I only posted the one to the States today, which is DEFINITELY too late. And I haven’t even started on the UK ones. AAAAAARRRRGGGHHHH!

Jojo has said that her husband follows her about like ‘a sad little cloud’ – mine is happy, because he thinks he’s got me back. It set me thinking about our attitudes to our partners and to commitment.
I feel a sweeping generalisation coming on…
Maybe we women want commitment and support from our partners during the childbearing and raising years, but what happens when we have fought our way though that whole mess and come out the other side? We come blinking into the light and think – ‘there has to be something else, before it’s too late’. Our men, by this stage, are comfortable and happy and ready to settle down quietly, but we are ready to emerge from the chrysalis of maternity and become ourselves at last, without having to panic about getting pregnant, or failing to get pregnant, or fixing child care, or doing the school run. We are ready for our time, full of fire and passion and wanting to take on the world, and we’re stuck with the garden centre and Homebase and (if we’re lucky) maybe a Saga cruise or two. It’s the Shirley Valentine syndrome – but after all, Shirley Valentine was written by a man (maybe because only a man would believe that such a thing was achievable). OK, so this is a generalisation, but it’s no less plausible than other ‘biological’ explanations of human cultural norms.
So here is my modest proposal:
Women of child-bearing age should marry those older men who are established and settled and ready to make the commitment to a family. They can stick together through the years when commitment is essential, then the men can gracefully bow out when they’re no longer required, leaving behind a cohort of lively, feisty widows in the prime of life, ready to take multiple lovers from among all those spare young men who aren’t yet ready to settle down…
Naaah, it would never work, the old buggers would just hang on indefinitely out of spite.

Slept through till 6:30 this morning - that means I must have had about 7 hours uninterrupted sleep - can't remember the last time that happened.
That means I actually have some ENERGY this morning, an amazing feeling, I tend to liken an unbroken night's sleep to some kind of wonder drug. The usual pattern is: sleep for two or three hours, lie awake for two or three hours, then maybe drop off again for an hour or two before it's time to get up.
If I could rely on 8 hours sleep every night, I could take on the world.
At least it has given me the strength to cope philosophically with the job rejection that dropped through the letter box this morning.
The universe clearly doesn't want me to have a 'proper' job - just wish I could work out what the hell it DOES want me to do.

Now that the H/C dilemma seems to have been resolved, and my continental sojournings have come to an end, I’m beginning to wonder about the point of this. My adolescent fantasies about a Gallic charmer – who may have wanted to seduce me, or may not, but didn’t, and now never will – won’t hold anyone’s attention for long, not even mine.
Someone has said that I’m a ‘natural blogger’ – I’m not sure about that, in fact I’m not even sure that this is strictly speaking a ‘blog’. It’s more or less an extension of something I’ve been doing for years – pouring out my self-indulgent drivel, first in notebooks, then on my computer, and most recently in emails to selected friends.
In a previous lifetime, I was a computer programmer. In those days, oh Best Beloved, the only computers worthy of the name were mainframes, magnificent beasts which were worshipped in great temples and lovingly tended by armies of acolytes. When a problem occurred in the hidden interstices of a program, the systems programmers – an echelon of priests far more intelligent, or at least more highly trained, than humble applications programmers such as myself – would call for a ‘core dump’, a print out of the contents of every register within the central processing unit, a snapshot taken at the instant of the failure. This they would pore over for hours, searching for something unexpected, some indication of what had occurred in the hidden dark places of the beast’s soul. (Reader, I married that systems programmer).
So here I present my emotional core dump, an attempt to shine the cool light of reason into the dark alleyways of my CPU, and to expunge all the mixed metaphors and clichés I would never dare expose before my creative writing tutor.
And if I come across any good jokes along the way, I’ll pass them on too.

PS Sad old hippy time – in trying to find some suitable instrumental music for my daughter’s A level choreography course work, I am listening to ‘Tubular Bells 2’ (the original we only have on vinyl), and just reached the track with Alan Rickman’s voice… may have to lie down in a darkened room till the hot flush passes away…
‘And tubular bells!!’

Apologies to any recipients of my private posts yesterday who may think I was trivialising the fire at Hemel.
I honestly didn't have a clue at the time how serious it was - all i knew about were the local radio reports we heard en route between here and Hatfield, bizarrely, even at Hatfield there was nothing to see, presumably because of the way the wind was blowing. Couldn't believe it when I caught the picutres on the 10 o'clock news. Anti-telly though I am (well, not anti exactly, it's just that I feel I personally have better things to do with my time), i have to admit that pictures have one hell of an impact. Hubby's car is a Radio 4 desert, and it was easy to dismiss the whitterings of a local radio station with an exciting story on its patch.
Thank god (or whoever) that no one was killed.
Love to anyone underneath that cloud.

Just spent an hour and a half sorting out my emails inbox... (and sent folder).
To think this time last week I was in the Grand Place in Brussels, watching the light show, having a group hug and singing 'All you need is love'...
time to go and make the cocoa.

He has a gorgeous French voice....
But I guess it's better to have a sweet, sad, 'what if...' fantasy to look back on than an 'oh my god, I can't believe I made such a bloody idiot of myself' humiliation.
Au revoir

I’m back after four wonderful days in Brussels, the culmination of an amazing and life-changing project which I’ve been involved in (can’t say any more as I don’t want to blow my anonymity). Now it’s over, and though pledges of undying friendship have been exchanged, what will happen after real life reasserts itself? (Well, Christmas, for a start, but that’s another matter). Can the spirit of Melinda live on now Belinda has returned to her natural habitat?
On the last night, a Frenchman asked me how I would define flirting. What the hell kind of daft question is that? Well, I suppose I can see how it could be interpreted, but Belinda has never sussed out the rules of that particular game. She works on the assumption that no one could be seriously interested in playing it with her – well, no one who doesn’t fall into the ‘not if he were the last man on earth…’ category. And this guy is about as far from that category as you could wish for – sweet, sexy, funny, charming, intelligent … married with three kids. Ah. Like they say, nobody’s perfect. So what’s a girl to do? I didn’t have a clue – so I just ignored the question. Maybe I should have given a gallic shrug. Lying alone in my hotel bed in the middle of the night, I came up with a million smart, sassy responses and a million possible scenarios. But fear of rejection is a killer, isn’t it?
Deep inside, Belinda is still 15. She knows that there are signals that you should give out, that you should be able to pick up from other people, that there are ways to respond in certain situations, to make other situations happen. Everybody else knows how to recognise and give out these signals, everybody else knows how to respond. Sometimes she (or rather Melinda) gets lucky, and gets it right (about once in a million years). But what happens when you misinterpret the signals, or when you get the response wrong? Confusion and humiliation. So it’s better not to try. Or, rather, she just doesn’t know how to try.
Oh well. Don’t suppose I’ll ever see him again.
And anyway, we’re supposed to be trying to save this marriage. I showed someone I’d confided to about all this last time in Brussels the photo I included on the last posting (it was still in the camera). She said, ‘It never was about the cat, was it?’ Which of course was true. But I still haven’t found out what it was about.
In my last Brussels-related posting, I included a photo of myself… maybe I’ll risk my anonymity some more by uploading one from this time.

Caption to the last one was ‘was that lonely woman really me?’ The next lines of the song are:
‘Through the door there came familiar laughter,
I saw your face and heard you call my name.
Oh my friends, we’re older but no wiser,
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same…’

Have fun,
Mel/Bel

Before you ask, yes, same husband, same cat.
This does not mean everything is hunky-dory all of a sudden, but as someone said to me, there is now 'good will' on both sides. At least till Christmas is out of the way.
The lack of (cyber) communication is not because I have suddenly got less introspective but because I have been horribly busy and when I'm not i tend to hunker down in the kitchen rather than venturing into the frozen wastes of the attic where the computer is.
Tomorrow Melinda gets her last outing (for the foreseeable future) to Brussels. Have reverted into Belinda-mode sufficiently that I am feeling very apprehensive and stressed about it - also I hate packing.
Back on Tuesday - maybe there will be more updates after then.