Decided that over-dosing on Robert Palmer is NOT conducive to equanimity, and felt compelled to resort to Cat Stevens - who, although in his younger days exemplified the seeming paradox that bearded men can be sexy (see cover photo for 'Teaser and the Firecat', which adorned my wall for many a year), is nevertheless soothingly spiritual ('Kathmandu' being particulalry effective in calming the beast). That, followed by several iterations of 'Dust in the wind' by Kansas put me in a better frame of mind for cocoa and a good book yesterday evening.
Actually, having tracked down the aforementioned photo, maybe it's just that my taste has changed in 30-odd years...
http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://discosantigos.com/PortfolioCOR/1971_CatStevens.JPG&imgrefurl=http://discosantigos.com/PortfolioCOR/1971_CatStevens.html&h=600&w=632&sz=58&tbnid=-Hiie_p4L7EJ:&tbnh=128&tbnw=135&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcat%2Bstevens%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D&oi=imagesr&start=1
Right, off to do my creative writing exercise and make some phone calls.

After a blog-free and email-free 24 hours, due to technical problems, I am trying to get kick-started again.
Spent most of Thursday and yesterday feeling idiotically cheerful – I have now had 3 consecutive good nights’ sleep (though of course it won’t last…)
Been thinking about Lady Hester and how in fiction I will always root for a heroine (or hero) who steps out into the unknown, but in my own life I think I’ll stay where it’s safe and cosy, thank you very much (I never claimed to be consistent!)
Apologies for the contentious title, and bear in mind that anything said is based on my own, very personal, criteria.
On the way to yoga the other day, I had forgotten to put the CDs back in the car, and there was nothing interesting on the radio, so I picked up an old cassette lying in the cubby hole and put it in the player. Who should blast out of the speakers at me but Robert Palmer, singing ‘Some like it hot’. I still carry in a secret place in my heart the memory of him performing ‘Some guys have all the luck’ on Top of the Pops wearing tight leather trousers – aah, those formative experiences! Wind forward a few years, and I remember the first time I gave a lift to the ‘male best mate’ who has appeared in these pages a few times recently – he saw the box (no I don’t clean my car out very often – even though it was a different car!) and said: ‘I might have known you were a Robert Palmer fan!’ Now what did he mean by that? That I’m a lecherous middle aged female with sophisticated taste?
Sadly, RP is now RIP. Wonder if he and Jimbo ever gig together on the other plane? Somehow I can’t quite see it. I still love them both, anyway, which I guess shows how eclectic my tastes are. Ladies, just try curling up in front of a log fire and listening to ‘Aeroplane’ or ‘Riders on the Storm’ over and over again. It works for me.

Thanks to everybody who has been so caring and put up with my outbursts over the last few days. But now I've got all that out into the open, life seems much better and calmer again.
My one time male ‘best friend’ once predicted that, if I didn’t leave my husband, within 5 years (ie by about 2002), I would be an alcoholic. Well, I didn’t and I wasn’t and I’m not. I haven’t even been on anti-depressants for over a year now. I’m still here, and on balance, I probably laugh at myself more than I cry. When things get bad, I retreat into my head and into my computer. I used to worry that it made things worse, but now I realise it’s cathartic – especially when I can bounce the results off other people. I write what I feel, and I think ‘I can’t possibly post that’, but I do, and it’s fine.
So, I have my cats, and my garden, and my singing and my books, and the odd half bottle of red wine (but only the odd one!) And ‘with all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, this is still a beautiful world’. Ultimately, the most important relationship in my life is the one with myself. Once I’ve got that one sussed, the world will be my oyster.

I rang the vet and made an appointment for her to be spayed a week on Friday.
I just don't like the way she's been eyeing up next door's tabby from the kitchen window....

How the hell did we get on to this? Oh well, here goes.
What does love mean to me? Just wanting to be with someone, I guess, paring it down to its simplest form. Forget the guff about caring more for their happiness than your own – that’s hopelessly unrealistic, obviously. Forget sex, which is a completely different can of worms (though it might be nice…) Several people have told me communication is important. I suppose it would be great to have someone who would listen to your thoughts, ideas and dreams, someone you could share them with, but I realised long, long ago that wasn’t an option in this marriage – which may be why I’ve started writing them instead (much less threatening and easier to handle than actually speaking to anybody).
I used to know a man who had several affairs, although never with me (at one time I wished he would). We went away together to a conference in the States – his first time over there, but not for me, as I’d lived there for four years. Everything which I just took for granted he found new and exciting – and he constantly interpreted it through his wife’s eyes, telling me how she would react. In fact, he never stopped talking about her, except when he was actually talking TO her, on the phone. I was just happy to be there with him, and barely gave a second thought to hubby and kids.
That wasn’t the first (or last) time I started wondering about the state of my marriage, but it’s probably the most dramatic illustration. Another example. Last year, when I was in Brussels, I was chatting to another woman who was telling me about her husband, how he was still her ‘best friend’ after years of marriage, how she might be attracted to other men and flirt, but she would never be tempted to be unfaithful because she knew what she had to go back to was more important than anything.
Now, that to me sounds like love. Is it really that unusual for people to feel like that about their partners? Seems to me that there are two kinds of ties which keep relationships together, some of which are strong, and some are weak. Strong ties are that knowledge that your partner is so important that nothing would be worth giving them up for; even if you might have affairs, you would still always go back to them. I don’t only mean being ‘in love’, or sexual passion, or romantic fluff, but an enduring sense of confidence in the strength of the relationship. Maybe that feeling is very rare, so most people rely on the weak ties, the sense of obligation, the shared history, responsibility to the children, the sheer complexity and difficulty of untangling lives which have grown into each other. Not to mention fear of being alone.
Maybe the strong feeling changes according to circumstance (it’s so long since I felt it, I couldn’t really say), so there are times when you just have to buckle down and go along with the weak ties in the hope that the strong tie-feeling will come back one day.
So is that what love is about? Just sticking at it, even though the communication is lousy and the sex is not great and the shared activities are limited to going to the garden centre every now and again?
I suppose you could call it love.

I've decided I want a new persona, so here she is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Hester_Stanhope

Of course it does. No one would argue with that. No one expects to feel the same at 50 as they did when they were 20. Romantic love doesn’t last. We all know that.
But I’d feel a bit more confident if I actually missed him when I was away from him – as people do seem to do with their partners. If my happiest times actually included him, instead of being the times when I’m with other people, or on my own. If I hadn’t felt so excited when he threatened to leave, and so resigned when he said he wanted to stay and try again and I knew I wouldn’t have the courage to be the one to go.
My friends – the ones who knew about what was going on – all seem relieved and happy that we are staying together. I suppose they think I’m happy about it too. And I suppose I should be.
Look, I thought you understood by now. This isn’t about my feelings about him undergoing some miraculous transformation and me realising that I do ‘love’ him after all. It’s about, well, this is the easiest road to take, so make the most of it. Basically, it is about selling out.
Maybe one day it will get better, who knows? Or maybe not. If I ever wake up one day and think, 'I do love him after all!' I'll let you know.
But where does all this leave ‘to thine own self be true’???

This is the response to Suzeemoon’s comment on ‘I wouldn’t say I’m bi-polar, but..’
You have hit the nail right on the head!
I spent a lot of time last summer going on about how lucky I was and how wonderful my life was. It was only in retrospect that someone pointed out to me that having to work SO HARD to count your blessings smacks a bit of… desperation.
That whole Pollyanna/Dr Pangloss/ ‘always look on the bright side’ approach to positive thinking might work for some people, but is fundamentally dishonest.
I much prefer the Buddhist approach – the first Noble Truth is that suffering exists – of course it does. You can’t wish it away, or pretend it isn’t happening. As long as we are engaged with the world we must acknowledge that. But it is only through accepting the world as it is that we can accept all the wonderful things in the world as well – but do it honestly, not through self-delusion.

As everything seems to have got very heavy lately, thought I would lighten the tone a bit, so I took the camera out in the garden.
Didn't think hebe was supposed to flower in January.

At meditation last night, we were told that we need to create ‘empty spaces’ in our lives, of 5-10 minutes every day, on a regular basis, and report back next week about the effect they’ve had.
Trouble is, I have plenty of empty spaces, but they’re not positive, constructive empty spaces, just blank, draughty empty spaces where nothing gets done, but I don’t actually feel any benefit (see yesterday’s post, ’Wet January afternoon’).
Had to take daughter to a dance show practice in Northampton at 7:00, so I drove straight from there back to Bedford for meditation (hubby collected her later). I arrived about 10 minutes late, and driving for an hour and a quarter non stop didn’t seem to be conducive to good meditation. We were doing ‘mindfulness of breathing’, and I got into the first stage really well. But after that I started feeling physically uncomfortable and fidgety and couldn’t settle and just wanted it to end. I used to feel like that a year ago when I first started, but haven’t for a very long time.
The leader was talking a bit about that afterwards – how sometimes that happens and you just have to stop trying too hard. I hadn’t told him that was how I was feeling, though he did say it was a very long meditation (about 50 minutes). It is all about perseverance, isn’t it? Going back to the well. Seems to be the theme for this year (which reminds me, must do my creative writing assignment for Monday, which is about ‘themes’.) Just keep trying and don’t give up. Never give up.
Having finished writing that in my notebook this morning, I picked up this month’s ‘Writing Magazine’ to read over my coffee, and the next article was about keeping yourself motivated when you’re writing a novel. Stuff like: ‘my advice to any writer who needs motivating would be, don’t waste your time writing superficial fluff, or about small subjects. Use your big life experiences instead’. Hmmm. The stuff I’m writing about at the moment may not be ‘big’, but it is deep and important to me. My life is made up of this stuff.
Further down the article someone else is quoted: ‘… sometimes you simply have to sit down and make yourself write’. Well, that’s what I’m doing. That’s what’s happening to me at the moment. Keep going. Keep on pushing through. ‘Break on through to the other side’ (thanks, Jim).

When I think about my dilemma in the middle of the night, it all seems very clear, but during the day I just get on with things. I suppose that’s just the way it always goes. ('You always smile, but in your eyes the sorrow shows...' - sorry, added that in later when I read it back)
So how do I see my situation? I started to write it down the other day, and as soon as I started it didn’t seem so bad. I’m married to a man I don’t love any more. I don’t actually hate him, and most of the time we get on OK, he doesn’t do anything I absolutely hate, but I don’t feel I really want to be with him. Does that matter? I don’t know. I keep coming back to that, I just don’t know. If it really bothers me, why don’t I just leave him? Because I’m scared of the alternative. It could be wonderful, but how do I know that? And there’s the sheer weight of what I would have to give up – my home, financial security, a comfortable life.
There’s the practicality of it all, how would I deal with even the process of doing it. I would have to get a job. But to get a job (quite apart from all the stress of finding one) I would have to give up the freedom I have at the moment to pursue my interests. Not that I’m doing a very good job of pursuing my interests at present, the weight of other stuff I have to do is just too great. But there are so many things I want to do with my life that I need time and financial security to do. If I was working full time, they would just go out of the window – I know that from experience.
So that is my dilemma. I stick with an unsatisfactory marriage so I don’t have to go out to work Which makes me feel like a prostitute. So at the same time as all these practicalities, I am dealing with the same old self-esteem problems, which never really go away. The ‘what makes you think you’re so special, everybody has to struggle in their own way’ idea. Shit happens, life sucks, suffering exists. Put up or shut up. If you don’t like your life, do something about it, or put up with it, but don’t keep moaning about it.

This is what I wrote in my notebook a few hours after the previous entry:
If you’re feeling like crap, is there anyone out there who really finds it helps to be ‘thankful for what you’ve got’? Because it seems to me that feelings don’t work like that. If you hate who you are, being told that you’re lucky and you have a wonderful life is really not helpful. Listen, I have hated myself for my whole life, for as long as I can remember. I actually remember saying ‘I hate myself’ when I was a teenager, though I guess I’d been feeling it for a long time before then. I remember my mother saying ‘well, change yourself into someone you DO like’, but I never quite managed it. Don’t suppose I ever will now. Oh God, what a mess.

We were asked to think about what had happened in 2005 and what we wanted from 2006. When I started looking back over 2005, I realised how much it had been dominated by the events - positive and negative - of the last three-four months, which completely swamped what had gone before. So I had to try and see behind that, to the earlier part of the year. And I remembered the time in the early summer when I was feeling very positive and upbeat (for a while!) and about the summer evenings at meditation, when we went out in the garden and did walking meditations and had great discussions, and going to Canterbury with someone who at that time I only vaguely knew but who has since become a good friend, and gardening, and lots of nice, positive things, that sense of calm and quiet that preceded the storm.
And then, what do I want for 2006? And I thought about what I was saying a couple of weeks ago, about just getting through another year – which sounds terribly negative when put like that, and I don’t see it as negative, it’s very positive, it’s about appreciating the life that I have and the good things as they come along – the ‘treasures’, one of the people in the group said, which seems to me a lovely way of putting it. Not to put pressure on myself, not to say ‘I must do this, this and this’ and then beat myself up when I fail, but just to accept and be happy.

I have decided to post this even though i wrote it over a week ago... i will catch up with this backlog eventually!
I was going to post some comments about my meditation session last night, then realised I hadn't said anything about last week's either..but this was the prelude to last week's session:

First session of meditation this evening, what am I going to say to them? How am I feeling?
That life just seems to keep going round in a circle, I feel I am in the same place I was when I started last year, I don’t seem to have got any further forward. So what is that place? I was just gong through it in my head.
I am married to a man I don’t love any more, but he loves me and is kind and thoughtful 99% of the time, we have a nice house and financial security. But it doesn’t make me happy. So what do I do about it? Once I’d written it down, the next thing I was going to say seemed ridiculous. I was going to say, the only way for me to get out of this situation would be to get a job, move out, sell the house. But would that make me happy? The whole business of getting a job is a can of worms in itself. I don’t want to get a job, but as things stand I have no financial independence. But I do have financial security, which means I can do things I want to do – in theory, though I am so committed to other things I still don’t have time. And feel stressed constantly, and so tired I can’t even think about decisions like, what to cook for tea?
If I’m not happy with the situation, the answer should be to get out. But I made the decision (or cop out) to stay, because I couldn’t face all the disruption. So here I am, and I’m not being true to myself, or am I? Now I’m arguing myself round in a circle, but this may not be a bad thing. I’m arguing myself round to the position that staying and getting on with it is the best thing I can do.
Why did I start on this in the first place? Because I thought the other night: ‘I don’t love him’ and that’s what it comes down to. So am I letting myself down by staying, or am I just selling myself out, or prostituting myself? Am I living a lie?
No wonder I despise myself.
So maybe all I can say is, I am here, and it will get better (well, no, actually, that’s not necessarily true. There is really no iron law that says things must get better. In fact, they are quite capable of getting much, much worse!)
But, to paraphrase the Buddha (and I'm quite sure he won't hold it against me), the first noble truth is: ‘shit happens’. I am living a life which does not give me happiness and satisfaction, but that is probably true of millions of people, and there’s no guarantee that any other life I could find for myself would be any better, and I’m not prepared to make that leap, so I have to grit my teeth and get on with it.
There you go, sums it all up, really.

Interestingly, from the perspective of this Friday (as opposed to last Thursday), and a discussion about 'happiness' which I just had with LL, (and probably the fact that I got into the Mikado after all!), I feel I have definitely moved on from this position - but thought I'd share it just the same as a record of where I have been recently.

Read this last week, hope you can access it:
http://www.newstatesman.com/nssubsfilter.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newDisplayURN=200601090023

In case you only got the introduction, he goes on to talk about a couple of bands I've never heard of, but then cites Neil Young's 'After the Goldrush' as one of 'these select few [which] are the key to lifting yourself clear out of the January doldrums'.

Since reading that I've thought of a few other examples - first the Eagles' song 'Desperado', and then, I realised, the album 'Automatic for the People' by REM, which has not only 'Find the River' and 'Everybody Hurts' but also 'Try not to Breathe' and, my favourite, 'Sweetness Follows':
'It's these little things, they can pull you under,
Live your life full of joy and thunder.
We were all together,
Lost in our little lives.'

Hang on in there folks, we'll get there in the end.

Having the sort of day when there are so many things I SHOULD be doing which I don't want to do that I spend all my time fretting about which one to put off first. This is the other side of the coin from last week when so many things HAD to be done that I didn't have time to think about procrastinating. Now the pressure is off slightly there is more time to worry about the things that AREN'T being done.
Just got very distracted by noticing the photo on the front cover of the Cambridge Arts Theatre programme. Now, there's a woman who looks like she knows a thing or two about passion... I'll see if I can find it for you online.
http://www.cambridgeartstheatre.com/pages/sp-jane-eyre.html

Yep, there she is - hope you can follow the link. Hmmmm. Can I have some of what she's having, please?
'...locked up in the attic of her imagination lives a woman so passionate and so full of longing she must be guarded night and day for fear of the havoc she would wreak.' Well, bless my soul, said the little red hen.

Must say she doesn't look much like my idea of Jane Eyre.

BTW, I found my Doors CD - I'd left it in the car.

A bit of a late start today, for various reasons, and not a brilliant night’s sleep, considering it was Tuesday and pilates (awake from 3:00 till 4:30), but there’s lots to say, so I’ll get on with it.
When I was getting dressed this morning, I was thinking about the chaos demons, and the fact that I’m beginning to feel as though I’m inching away from them slightly. I did the copy for the parish magazine (though I must check with the chairman about that so I can send it), got as much editing as I have had so far out of the way (though no doubt there will be some proof-reading today), and submitted the conference abstract. So yesterday afternoon I got to a stage where I felt some of the fires had been extinguished, some of the alligators destroyed, and I could start thinking about draining the swamp (or starting to, anyway), starting to get some of this filing sorted out. I actually quite like (relatively) mindless administrative jobs, but when they keep being put off they become huge and intimidating.
Which was where Billy Liar came in. Anybody out there read ‘Billy Liar’ – the original book, by Keith Waterhouse, not the film or TV series or play or any other manifestation. I read it in my late teens, which was exactly the right age to identify with Billy – the dreamy post-adolescent, not quite adult, trying to work out how to deal with life (actually that still sounds like a good description of me now!). The bit that struck the chord this time (and my memory is hazy because it’s 30 years since I read it) was about some letters or something (no! They were calendars! It’s coming back!), which he was supposed to have posted, and hadn’t for some reason (in his job as an office boy), and these calendars became a huge problem for him because he couldn’t shake off the guilt and the fear that he was going to be found out. Anyway, in the book it was hilarious but also excruciatingly painful, and that’s the way I’ve been feeling about my filing, so I’m quite excited to have the opportunity to slay that particular dragon (though of course, here I am drivelling away, and anyway I also still have to finalise the programme and do the mailing out and check my emails, and check to see if any proof-reading has come in the post …)
But anyway, that got me into thinking more generally about Billy Liar. The crux of the plot, as I recall, was about Billy trying to decide whether he would head off for a life of excitement and possibility in London with one of his girlfriends (played in the Tom Courtney film by somebody impossibly glamorous, like Julie Christie), or resign himself into settling down into a ‘normal’ life, the sort his parents would expect of him, and he was being sucked inexorably into that boring, normal life.
Wow, I’ve just remembered something else, about when I started at university, and my room mate/best friend Corinne and her boyfriend, Keith – who became an early manifestation of a recurring theme in my life, platonic male ‘best mates’. Keith also loved Billy and really identified with him, it was a bond between us. We persuaded Corinne to read it, and she had a completely different take on it; she was just irritated by him, and couldn’t understand how we could possibly identify with someone so hopeless (a bit like Lady Lucy berating me for identifying with the guy in the Times the other week who was writing about depression).
Anyway, I suppose the dilemma of choosing between the thrilling unpredictabilities and wildness of life and the boring, set in stone, inevitabilities of life is also a recurring theme for me, and lies at the heart of the Melinda/Belinda dichotomy. Melinda is Julie Christie (or whoever), Ruby Tuesday, Joni Mitchell; and Belinda…. isn’t. At that age, it seemed to me that becoming an adult meant giving up any hope of ever becoming Melinda, and accepting that the reality of life is about being Belinda and accepting it. Elizabeth David vs Delia Smith. Ruby Tuesday vs Lucy Jordan. Now I know that life is far more nuanced than that, but I still don’t have the courage to ever truly BE Melinda.
There is another take on this, pointed out to me by an environmental scientist I used to know (though I doubt that he originated the idea.) It is related to the position we humans occupy in the food chain, an ambivalent position, being both predators and prey. As prey, we feel the need for security and safety and concealment and a nice, safe, predictable life without too much danger. But as predators we yearn for risk and danger and excitement and control over our own destinies. (This is terribly anthropomorphic, I guess predators don’t really yearn for any of that stuff, they’re just trying to get by the only way they can.) But I always thought that was quite a cool take on life.
But for now I’d better go and deal with all that day-to-day STD, or I’ll get myself into a panic again.
Oh my god, I need to keep my camera by me at all times, the kitten is perched on top of the monitor (I can see why she likes it there, when I take her off it she is like a miniature radiator) and she just stuck her head over the front edge and gave me SUCH a look!!

Someone mentioned ‘going with the flow’. Looking back, I guess I’ve always been a ‘go with the flow’ sort of person, drifting along aimlessly and occasionally reaching out and grabbing whatever happens to be floating by. That said, lots of the things I’ve wanted to happen seem to have ended up happening, though usually in a ‘be careful what you wish for, it might come true’ way.
The self-help gurus, of course, say that you should be clear about your goals, work out a strategy for achieving them, and stick to it. As if.
I do seem to find myself drifting off into ox-bow lakes quite often…
But REM put it much better than I can:

‘Me, my thoughts are flower strewn
Ocean storm, bayberry moon.
I have got to leave to find my way.
Watch the road and memorize
This life that pass before my eyes.
Nothing is going my way.
The ocean is the river’s goal,
A need to leave the water knows
We’re closer now than light years to go.
I have got to find the river,
Bergamot and vetiver
Run through my head and fall away.
Leave the road and memorize
This life that pass before my eyes.
Nothing is going my way.’

Funny what you think about when you're doing the hoovering.

PS One thing has gone my way this week… I passed the audition to be a lady of the chorus in ‘The Mikado’ – with some really nice people. I was so chuffed, I even went to the pub with them afterwards. First proper rehearsal is tomorrow night.
That’s a lesson in perseverance if ever I’ve had one – maybe I’ll tell you about it some time.

I notice someone has tagged my blog as 'cute cat'.
'cute cat' indeed!!!
how about 'existential angst'?

I slept in till 7:15 this morning (well, I woke and looked at the clock at 1:30 and 5:40, but must have gone straight back to sleep again.) Probably because it was the first session of pilates last night (though that doesn’t always follow). But it did mean a bit of a late start (well, half an hour), because I didn’t leap straight out of bed, tried to do my writing in my notebook (but only got as far as a couple of pages) and drink my coffee before getting in the shower. But at least I didn’t have to take her ladyship to school.
So I should be feeling reasonably energetic today, and I’m not THAT late in getting started (today will be an editing day).
I have been talking to somebody I once confided in, but who doesn’t really seem to have a clue about who I am, who doesn’t seem capable of grasping the first thing about me. Does that sound arrogant? Maybe it is. There is that old doormat vs prima donna thing again, isn’t there. When I try to explain myself and then realise that the other party is just not understanding at all what I’m trying to say. Maybe my brain works on a completely different plane. I can think that, but of course I can’t say it. A lot of the time the doormat thing is about accepting other people’s understandings and explanations, even though I know they’re wrong, because in the past when I’ve been feeling strong and positive and assertive and tried to say it as I see it, I just come up against a brick wall. It gets me nowhere. Maybe it is me being particularly bad at explaining myself. I get so frustrated because I know I’m right, but I don’t know how to convince them, and in the end I just have to bite my tongue. Because somebody has to be the one to back down, and it has to be me, because I’m the one who recognises what is going on in the situation. And I think, well, they’ve got a lot of crap going on in their lives too, and they probably mean well, and they’re just trying to get by and make sense of life in their own way, and I should be a bit more sensitive and tolerant and non-judgemental. Very often it is the exact same people I have this problem with who tell me that I should ‘stick up for myself more’.
So the obvious response to this would be to say: ‘You arrogant bitch, stop thinking you’re so special, get your head out of your arse and try to appreciate other people’s problems and feelings for a changes’ (this is to myself, of course, I just realised it could be interpreted as being what I would say to the other party!) This is what I would normally have done in the past. But I am trying to move beyond that. But I still have to deal with the frustration and irritation, given that there is nothing I can say to the other party which will actually resolve the situation in a way which will make me feel better. In fact, it is more than likely that anything I do say will make me seem even more ridiculous and make them pity and despise me even more than they do already. I know this, because this is the way it has worked in the past.
AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!!
Do you want some specifics? If I describe them, they’ll probably seem really trivial, but there were a couple of things that irritated me and I had to bite my tongue over. One, she asked how I’d been and I said ‘Busy’. Normally she asks what I’ve been doing lately and I say ‘same as usual’ because I can’t even begin to explain, it’s not worth it. The response was a quite incredulous sounding: ‘Busy??’… ‘There’s always too much to do and not enough time to do it in’ was my response, though I know she thinks I don’t have enough to do and my life is incredibly dull and boring. Maybe I should have told her I’ve been mentally masturbating, see what she thought to that! But actually, I’ve had less time for mental masturbation this week because of all the practical things I’ve had to get on with.
The other one was that she asked me how the weight was going. (I got on the scales before Christmas, and I was 11 stone 12 then, but I just haven’t checked since.) Now, somebody asked me on the blog the other day if I was ‘fat’, and I thought about it and came up with what I thought was a good answer, but I just hadn’t got round to posting it. I can think about my weight in two ways, depending on mood. I can beat myself up about being 12 stone and a size 16. Or I can look in the mirror and say, ‘Everything’s in proportion, where’s the problem?’ Tried this on her, the response was: ‘In proportion with what?’ and laughter. I mean, I’m healthy, I don’t eat stupidly, I get a reasonable amount of exercise, I look like a woman, not a stick or a load of blubber – where IS the problem???? Then she gave me that horribly patronising ‘Good for you!’ attitude which is supposed to be encouraging but is actually deeply undermining and demeaning.
AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!

I think my head is going to burst if I don’t find a way to switch it off. Lady Lucy said last week ‘It is what is happening in our heads that drives this, not proximity to a computer’. But there is ALWAYS something going on in my head, a permanent torrent of words tumbling over each other to get out. If I can get to a computer – or a pen and notebook, as I have started to resort to – I can let them out, but as soon as they have gone, more flood in to take their place. It may be trivial and repetitive, a mish-mash of odds and ends that float up from the depths, but it is a constant narrative.
‘Flotsam and jetsam’ is a cliché, but in this case, it seem highly appropriate. ‘Flotsam’ is the stuff that floats, but ‘jetsam’ is what has been deliberately thrown overboard, and this is a real mixture of the two.
Switching metaphors back to one which is becoming very familiar, there is the well, drawing out of that well, so that as soon as it has gone, more floods in. Well or ocean? Both seem appropriate. Now, I was just thinking, in the ‘well’ it is the water which is flooding in, but when I was talking about the ocean, it was the stuff in the water that I referred to. Maybe the flotsam and jetsam are the bits and pieces of everyday life that drift through this, while the watery part is the expression of my psyche. Or verbal diarrhoea, if you want to put it like that. Outflow from a sewage farm. Another appropriate metaphor – a bovine sewage farm! Outflow from a slurry pit.
Now, the whole last page and a half of my notebook is an excellent case in point, because, although I had some idea of what I was going to say before I started, all the stuff about flotsam and jetsam didn’t appear until after I started. (Not only that, but typing it up now, I realised I had forgotten all about it – but now I’ve captured it and it won’t escape again).
The question is, I suppose, whether the inlet for this flow can be diverted from the slurry pit to something a bit more… positive? Constructive? That’s not quite what I mean, because I think this is all very positive and constructive. Saleable, is that the word I was looking for? No, that sounds both mercenary and faintly ludicrous, I mean, the idea that anyone would pay to read anything I’ve written is bizarre in the extreme. Literary, maybe that’s what I mean. Something that can be fitted into a coherent narrative, publishable, that’s really what I’m trying to say.
At creative writing yesterday morning, somebody said: ‘do you hear voices in your head?’ Yes, constantly, that is what it is about, it is always there. I can write 500 words of what is happening in my head, but as soon as it is done, there is always another 500 to follow. That’s what keeps me awake.

Woke from a dream of chaotic and disparate elements (a brood of goslings, a German cameraman – the Crazy Frog’s sidekick- a police state, sandwiches, a book and an extendable feather duster) at 4:55 - which is a funny time, too early really for a 'normal' start, but too late for any hope of getting back to sleep. I probably should have done what I did on Friday, get up and go straight on the computer, but for some reason going up in the attic at that time in the morning is just not as attractive as the dining room, so I couldn't quite get myself up there, and it’s amazing how easy it is to waste an hour and a half with your mind just churning round and round and not achieving anything.
Now this is bizarre. The old cat has just tipped over the bin (in the bedroom - this was originally written in my notebook in bed on Monday morning) and he has got his head right in the bottom of it. Obviously something in there smells exciting, but what? OK, now I know, it’s the paper wrapper off a valerian tea bag. He has been known to climb on the kitchen table to sniff the cup and get the tea bag out. In my herb book, under growing valerian, it says: 'attracts cats'. Hubby just came in and saw him chewing the paper and rolling round the floor and said, 'Is that what it does to you?' Wow, I wish! Doesn't even help me sleep.
Passion, I was thinking about passion when I was lying awake. Lady Lucy and I had a long discussion about passion last summer, when I was feeling (for me) relatively upbeat and calm and thought I was approaching some kind of contentment with life.
(Now he's ripped it to shreds, and chewed it up and is licking himself all over, glad his little sister can't see him, what sort of an example is that? And now he's stuck his head in the bin to see if he can find any more).
Yes, I thought I was content and I didn’t want to know about passion, thank you very much, been there, done that. Now I can feel myself in danger of developing an obsession. No, no, no, put it on the shelf, you don’t really want THAT do you? Especially when you know it is completely pointless and wouldn’t lead anywhere even if there were any possibility of continuing it, which there isn’t… So the old old question is, how to bring that excitement into life, without rocking the boat too far, and without resorting to the equivalent of whatever it is the valerian tea bags do for the cat. Because, apart from the odd G&T and half bottle of Cotes du Rhone, I’m not interested in direct modification of the brain chemistry – been there, done that, it didn’t help and it’s not a road I want to go down.

The chaos demons have been out in force this week, crowding round me, biting my ankles and disupting life. I've broken two mugs, two spoons have gone down the waste disposal (after 20 years of having a waste disposal during which probably only 3 or 4 pieces of cutlery have ever gone down it, now 2 in one week!), the cordless phone makes a high pitched screech and I can't find the book to find out what I've done wrong, so now have to run round the house when the phone rings because there is no socket in the study; I thought I'd broken the coffee machine by putting the grounds in without the filter, causing it to leak constantly, though it now seems to be fixed..
O K, none of this is earth shattering. But I have been constantly stressed out by having just too many things to do. Even this blog has now become another thing which is permanently in arrears. I have kept writing, have written at least 500 words every day, some of it in Word docs, some in a notebook, but what I haven't managed to do is put any of it on the blog. So there must be over 2,500 words now waiting to be posted - not counting responses I wanted to make to people's comments. And it is all important - OK, that is debateable, most of it is ludicrously trivial, I suppose - but it is thoughts that I captured that I felt I really needed to capture at the time.
I wish... I need to escape, to break out of this cycle, to get on top of it all, to feel in control, but how can I possibly do that? To feel less frantic. To be organised. Why do I set myself these challenges, take on so much, when I know I can't cope? why take on these clerical jobs when I know how bad I am at being organised and efficient? The study is full of piles of stuff which needs sorting out, filing, dealing with, I keep thinking 'i'll do that later', there are always higher priority things cropping up, this week I have been editing aritcles for the newsletter and sorting out the programme of events, then yesterday I had a meeting with the Chariman of the PC to get some cheques signed because I forgot to take the cheque book to the meeting last week, then i had to take in the forms for the Clerkship to the school governors, which I have also taken on. There is so much stuff in my head that other stuff just keeps falling out all the time, that's my excuse. I want to write an abstract for a paper for a conference in London in the summer, about the European project, it is only a 250 words abstract, but it has to be in by wednesday, and tomorrow we're taking son back to Uni and Monday morning is creative writing and monday afternoon is housework and taking daughter to the doctor's and then to dancing (anyway, I don't do creativity in the afternoons), so that gets me round to tuesday...
So this afternoon I am having a bit of a blog-fest, trying to decide what of that 2,500 words is worth inflicitng on you... before I have to go and start cooking dinner.
On the radio in the car on the way back from Tesco, heard the song: 'You think I'm strong... but you're wrong, you're wrong'. I think it was Robbie Williams. I remember when it was out (however many years ago that was), thinking how appropriate it was, it was after I'd finished my PhD and everybody seemed to think I was this amazing person who going to have a wonderful career and I just KNEW how wrong they all were...

this is why he's difficult to live with, no, he's not difficult to live with, it's me, I know, why does he have to sulk when he knows he's in the wrong about somehting, it's so petty, why should I care, AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!! Lady Lucy has just told me I should do the opposite of what I know I'm gong to do, but what the hell...
I'll go and eat pudding now.
sorry, please ignore this rant.

Son’s computer has died, he has ordered the appropriate part but it will take a couple of days to get here. To fill the time (as he’s lost without it) he started having a look at various things that need sorting out with mine.
I went to get on it this morning to find a download running for some anti-virus software that he is going to install. I thought I could run that in the background but when I went into Word it all went a bit pear-shaped. I’m sure restarting the computer would fix it, but don’t want to interrupt this download.
I don’t want to wake him yet as I know he was still reading at 5:00 this morning. At the time I left him because I thought, the longer he sleeps in today, the more time I’d have on the computer.
Never mind. It will all get sorted eventually. I even thought about resorting to pen and paper, but as daughter will be out all day (friend’s this morning, then Hubby will pick her up from there and take her to dance practice) I should be safe here. Except I had to throw the kitten off the chair to sit down. That’s her problem.
Moved my computer back up to the attic yesterday in time for the ritual of Saturday dinner in the dining room.
Hubby just came into the room and was fretting about me throwing the kitten off the chair, checking where she’d gone and whether she was comfortable, and making the bed for her to lie on. For god’s sake! I told him she doesn’t need this degree of mollycoddling. Beginning to think I preferred him the way he was.
I am determined