As part of my daily routine, when I sit down at the computer in the morning I have a pot of herbal/fruit tea to ‘flush out my system’. I have bought a packet of white tea, but this may have been a mistake; apart from the fact that it doesn’t taste that special, I suspect that, like green tea, it probably has as much caffeine as the black stuff. I’m not paranoid about caffeine, but my body really doesn’t like it, so I try and steer clear as much as I can.
As it’s a beautiful morning, I decided to start as I used to last summer, in my more ‘positive’ period, by taking my first cuppa for a wander round the garden. It was quite uplifting – especially spotting the little froggy face peeping out of the small pond – but also reminded me of all the additional work that really needs doing out there that I have been neglecting. Then on the way back in I dropped and smashed my cup in the utility room, and while clearing up the pieces, I reminded myself how badly the utility room needs cleaning and thought about all the odd little corners of the house (some of them not exactly little) that I almost never get round to cleaning…
Someone I was talking to the other day, who works full time but also manages to keep her house absolutely spotless (admittedly she lives alone and has a much smaller house than mine), said that she plans every moment of every day so she can fit everything in. I do have a structure to my days, but I still never seem to get enough done. Where DOES the time go? When people ask me what I do, I never know what to tell them. My mind is always running, the tape is always running through my head, I have been trying over the last few months to write it all down, I succeed in writing some of it, but what is the point of that, isn’t it all just a bit banal? To keep on writing my life instead of actually living it.
Now I have confirmed my place at the conference in Oxford, there is just a huge amount of work I have to do for that on top of all the other things, and I have also committed myself to something which I have been hmming and hawing about for months, getting involved with a group in the village. They are currently designing a questionnaire to go round the households, and I have offered my ‘expertise’ (hah!), so I will have to take a look at that. Unpaid, of course, but it ‘will look good on my CV’ – as if anyone ever bothers to read my CV…
So, having moaned about all the things I have to do, I spent yesterday morning going to a lecture on Matisse, the afternoon compiling a list of favourite books (I’ve worked out how to do bloglists, but you’ll have to check Melinda’s blog as she is the artsy fartsy literary type!) and the evening prancing about as an ersatz Japanese schoolgirl. So I have answered my own question. OK, the bloglist was a mistake, and maybe the talk was too. But the main problem is probably that I can’t get down to concentrate on things because of being permanently exhausted and having no energy. My sleep pattern has changed a bit because when I come in after a performance I actually can’t get to sleep till about 1, I do then usually sleep through, though last night I was awake about 4:30. But I will be living for the rest of the week at least on adrenalin.

Apparently, the average British woman 'devotes 2hr 23min each day to cleaning, compared with 52min a day on her personal appearance.'

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2148882.html
I don't get even close on either of those counts!
so, could this be why I feel frustrated and unfulfilled???
Naaaahhhh!!!
Even MY life is more interesting than that!

At risk of sounding like what my son would call a 'Noob', I'm seeking advice on the precise meaning of the expression 'lol'.
I thought it meant 'laugh out loud', but that doesn't always seem to make sense in the contexts I've seen it in.
Any suggestions?

Was talking to the hairdresser last week about the daughter dropping half her A level subjects, and he said: ‘I’m surprised you let her’.
Well now. She is 17. She is not remotely interested in academia at present. She got through last year with 10 good GCSEs (which at one time didn’t seem like it was going to happen.) She went to sixth form because she wanted to continue doing textiles and dance, and because she had to do 4 AS subjects chose double ‘Health and social care’ because she didn’t want to do any of the other subjects available and thought it would be very practical and hands on. But around Christmas we had a major crisis, when she announced that she hated it and didn’t want to do it any more. We had endless discussions with her and her teachers, pointing out that sometimes you just have to stick with things, and work through them, that she wouldn’t be allowed to stay on next year if she dropped half her subjects, that there were no other subjects she wanted to do instead, etc etc etc. If we had tried to ‘force’ her to stick at it (not sure how that would work anyway), what sort of motivation would she have had to work at it? She would probably have spent most of last term bunking off anyway.
So, we offered her all the reasonable, sensible arguments about why she should stick at it, but in the end, it had to be her decision, and she made it. She may regret it at some future date, who knows, but it won’t be the end of the world. She now has a place at the local FE college to do BTEC Art and Design starting in September. She has a weekend job waitressing in the village pub, where they can’t stop singing her praises and telling us what a hard-working, mature sensible girl she is and a pleasure to be around.
Where did we go wrong?????

Woke at 3:40 today so I thought, right, I won’t just lie here for once, I’ll get up and do something.
Went down to the kitchen, made a cup of Valerian tea – removed cat from table – wrote half a page in my journal – removed cat from table again – watched last week’s Dr Who (which I hadn’t got round to playing back) –and the opening of last night’s, which I missed - removed cat from tea cup – removed cat from my shoulder. (Note to subzzz – when dogs’ eyes look like that, is it because their pupils are dilated? I always thought they just had big black eyes. Never really looked into a dog’s eyes for donkey’s years though - since I was discovered by cats, I’ve never been quite the same).
Went back to bed about 5:10, but of course, I still couldn’t get back to sleep, by then my head was buzzing too much. Finally got back to sleep some time after 6 – till just before 9.
The conventional advice on insomnia usually includes something like – ‘don’t go to bed until you’re ready to go to sleep’ – but how do you know when you’re ready to go to sleep, this has always puzzled me. I can be totally exhausted and still lie there for a couple of hours completely unable to drop off.

If I could get myself back into the state of mind where gardening and listening to the radio and doing cross stitch is all I need to make me happy…, if I could just get my head back into that place.
Suzee has said: ‘… even considering infidelity was a shock for me that made me question and realise … that our roots were not entwined.’ But I have always felt tempted to infidelity. I had a conversation with a Danish friend in Brussels who said: ‘we all feel attracted to other people, we all like to flirt, but I’m never tempted to take it any further because I know the man waiting for me at home is the only one I really want.’ How come I don’t feel that? If I had a realistic chance of an affair, I would grab it, but there just isn’t anybody. I have had 5 one night stands over the years (2 with the same guy a year apart!) I may have had a few near misses, but I’m not really sure – if I had known how to be sure, they might not have been misses! And I have had crushes at various times. But mostly I just don’t have the opportunity – and hard though it is to admit, that’s what keeps me faithful. As Oscar Wilde said: ‘I can resist anything except temptation’.
So which is the more ‘honourable’ course? To say, OK, if that’s how I honestly feel, then this is not a good relationship for either of us and I should just go? Or to say, he wants me to say, I owe him my loyalty, I will make the most of things?
Don’t answer that.

At my yoga group the other day, one of the ladies was saying that her eldest son has been accepted for journalism college. She was worried about him looking after himself – she said: ‘What I want is a little old lady who’ll fuss over him and make sure he’s all right’.
I’m sorry, but my attitude with mine is, right, if you don’t know how to look after yourself by now, it’s high time you find out. I’m sure his hygiene standards leave much to be desired, and his diet would make a nutritionist want to slit her writs in despair, but generations of young men have lived to tell the tale, now it’s his turn.
Yes, I admit it - I’m an unfit mother.

Traumatised the cats with my Aretha Franklin impression by dancing around the kitchen while doing the washing up, listening to the ‘Blues Brothers’ soundtrack (after a campari and soda and half a bottle of Ozzy Merlot).
Also traumatised the son, who came in to find out what I was shouting: (‘cut ‘em out, ride ‘em in… Rawhide!!!’)
Confirmed my view that while Dan Ackroyd is an actor who portrayed a singer, John Belushi was a singer AND an actor AND a great loss to us all.

‘When my sky was full of grey / And my day was full of blue,/ There was nothing I could do/ To see myself through. / Now my head is full of springtime / And my heart is full of you. / Goodbye lonely blue, / It shall all come true.’ (‘Love has brought me around’, James Taylor).
I remember the first time I felt like that, thinking, ‘This is it, now everything will fall into place’. But it didn’t. That feeling comes and goes, it doesn’t come and stay. Either it goes because the other party loses interest, or because you do. That’s how it’s always happened to me, anyway. There never seems to be a time when it’s all sorted, so you just keep going, because there’s always too many other things to think about and worry about and do. Or maybe, when it is all sorted out, that just becomes boring, and you need extra stimulation, extra excitement. Someone who doesn’t take you for granted, who you don’t take for granted. The Crazy Frog is no more inherently attractive than Hubby – though the fact that he is so much younger than me is immensely flattering. It’s that feeling of being wanted. Yet Hubby wants me too – he’s made that clear – so that’s not all. What do I want? If I don’t want him, what DO I want?
Doctor Iannis summed it up:
‘Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is… Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two. But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after 6 months, a year, three years that the trees have had no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment’ (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, p281).
I remember when I was our daughter’s age wondering how I would know when I was ‘in love’, how do you ever know you’re not just deceiving yourself? So how do you know that you still love someone? If you have any doubts at all, what does that say? Surely, there should be no doubts after almost 30 years, how can there possibly still be doubts?
He wants to make me happy, he tries to make me happy. I know he will keep trying because he wants to keep me. I feel I should give him credit for trying. It would be easier if I could hate him – well, it would be easier to make a decision. As long as he is being kind, there’s not much I can do but go along with it. And feel guilty that I don’t feel more grateful.
It seems whatever I do, it’s not very laudable, is it? Whatever I do, my motives aren’t very good. As Suzee says, only I can know if it’s enough. But how can I know if anything else would be any better, how could I give up everything just on the off chance that things might be better? I suppose I could turn it around and say, how can I know it will get any better just through me hanging in there and wanting it to be so? I don’t know. So I will always go for the easy way.

‘Snoopy has a child’s capacity to wonder and exult, but his exultation is tempered by an adult awareness of the inherent sadnesses of life’ (‘Exuberance’,p85). But isn’t it naïve to think that children have no understanding of sadness, isn’t that just a romanticisation of childhood? I can’t remember there ever being a time when I didn’t recognise the sadnesses of life. Children have their own sadnesses – nothing in adult life can measure up to the desolation of being picked on and bullied, being the kid everyone wants to laugh at and no one wants to laugh with. That is a loneliness that never goes away.
I’ve been wondering if all this bogging is actually making things worse, making me brood over things? It takes up time and causes extra stress, allowing me to be more self-indulgent, making me feel even more dissatisfied. I don’t know.
What about this dissection of my marriage? But is that the cause of my unhappiness? My unhappiness goes back long before then. Listening to ‘Mud Slide Slim’ has reminded me of that. This is what it comes down to, that it’s unfair to expect him to make me happy. It’s naïve to expect that anyone could make me happy, and at least he tries.
But why didn’t the anti-depressants work on me? And if they didn’t work, will anything? That sort of messing about with the brain seems very hit and miss, though it obviously works for some people.
Am I making things worse for myself? Would it be better just to run away from it all and try not to think about it – if I could? How would I do that? How can I stop myself thinking? Only by finding something else to think about. Would that work? I have too much to think about already. I wish I could stop thinking.

I went to meditation on Thursday evening, having missed two weeks, and I almost felt I was back at square one. That’s silly, when it was only 2 weeks, but I was feeling very tired and needy. . I ought to try and meditate on my own, I need to prioritise, but would it help? I don’t know.
Last year, at the end of summer, when I'd been going about 8 months, one of the women in the group said I’d changed while I’d been going – but I think I lost the progress I’d made and reverted back to how I was. Is it the time of year? I don’t think so, because I’ve been depressed in the summer as well.

I keep reading and hearing stuff about ‘cosmic ordering’ – the idea that if you just tell the Universe what you want, the Universe will give it to you. Apparently Noel Edmonds swears by it – says it all really. On the Today programme last week There was a ‘positive psychology’ chappie talking about it, saying that what you wish for has to be realistic - and once you are clear about your goals (provided they are ‘realistic’), you find, or recognise, ways to move towards them. But I don’t have any faith in my ability to control the circumstances of my life.
The Goddess of Love, in her ‘happy birthday’ email, said: if I define what it is that I want, that is what she wishes for me. But how to define it?
So, I don’t really know what I want and I don’t know how to get it. I can’t tell the universe what I want till I know what that is. Sounds like a pretty good recipe for frustration.
Looked out of the study window, and the clouds look like a range of hills (in Beds????) A friend said the other day, that when you’re in the mountains, you can’t see them.
I had such a lot of nice emails and cards for my birthday, from all over. What do I do to inspire that sort of friendship? Why do people think I’m so wonderful – some people, at least?

I have been thinking about time. I started by thinking about the ending of Captain Corelli, and the way time drifts away from you, and you find that years and years have gone by and you don’t quite know what happened: ‘And then one day you find/Ten years have gone behind you/No one told you when to run/You missed the starting gun’ (Pink Floyd). An hour has already passed since I woke up this morning, an hour of me just lying here with my mind wandering around not really getting anywhere or doing anything.
With Hubby on holiday we have been getting up far too late, and I have still had a lot to do, but I haven’t been getting started till 10 or even 10:30. It used to be that when he was on holiday, I had a break too, but that doesn’t seem to be happening this time, I just feel stressed all the time. We have been out a couple of times, only to Milton Keynes and the shops and the garden centre, but that means I haven’t got round to doing the housework and everywhere is a mess. There doesn’t seem to be any distinction between ‘work’ and ‘non work’, at the moment, there are always things lurking in my mind that I have got to do so I never get to relax properly.
The garden has been on my conscience. Children and plants grow and change and if you’re not careful you miss the crucial moments. Lots of the plants in the garden room have died because I’ve just let things go. I haven’t kept on top of things because of the way I’ve been feeling. We only got the onion and garlic sets yesterday, they should have gone in ages ago. I seem to have become disconnected from the garden as I have from so much else.
I would probably feel happier if I spent more time in the garden. But it has become another thing that has to be done and that I don’t have time for.
Why is life so frantic? Well, not really frantic, I think it is just me. If I did things in a more organised way and spent less time in my head thinking these idiotic thoughts that don’t get me anywhere, and more time getting on with the things I ought to be doing. If I actually slept in the night so I could get up earlier in the morning and still have energy. If I didn’t waste so much time, I could get the things I have to do done and would have more time to relax.
One of the guys at meditation was saying how happy he is now he’s given up work. I wish I could feel like that. Maybe I’ve just taken on too much. I want to spend time doing the things I want to do, but I end up doing so many things I have to do. I feel I am going through this time and I just hope something better will emerge after it.
When I think of all the things I have to/want to do, it frightens me that I’ll never have enough time… never mind time to ‘smell the flowers’.
Life is full of lots of things I want to do. Maybe if I can just focus on them, then some of the other things will just fall away. Maybe it will all fall into place.

At 7 o’clock on Friday morning I was making pate. After an hour of lying awake trying to decide what to do, I got up and got on with it. Not very suitable for Good Friday, I thought. I would have made hot cross buns but I couldn’t find the recipe I tore out of the paper. I’ve made Delia’s recipe for years, but I don’t like the crust, too hard, so I thought I’d try a different one. But I couldn’t find it. So I made pate instead, which I needed for the beef Wellington I cooked for dinner yesterday.
I can’t claim Buddhism as an excuse for making it on Good Friday, because if I was actually a Buddhist, I wouldn’t eat it at all!
Anyway, apparently I’m going to the 6th circle of Hell, with the heretics. How appropriate.
And now? Which particular circle of Hell am I in at the moment? It was good to be out in the garden, planting garlic and watching the kitten chasing bumble bees. It’s good to watch her pleasure in life, her ‘exuberance’ even (tough on the bumble bees, though, but cats will be cats).
You get on with things. But it is very hard to get things in perspective when you’re constantly tired. I wish I could get everything straight and sorted.

‘In between what might have been and what has come to pass,/ A misbegotten guess, alas, and bits of broken glass’ James Taylor must still have been quite young when he wrote that. I smile every time I hear Neil Young sing: ‘I’m twenty four, there’s so much more’, yet he still went on to pontificate about life, the universe and everything. Perhaps at that age we just think we know everything. Or maybe we know as much as we ever will know about emotions and relationships – maybe what comes after is just reinforcement and repetition of what we’ve already experienced. Life trying to teach us the same lessons over and over again, yet we’re still not listening.
After writing that, I went to Wikipedia to find out how old JT actually was when he released ‘Mud Slide Slim’, and found he must have been 22 or 23 (1971).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Taylor

But also, by that time he had been committed to a mental hospital for depression, lost a friend to suicide (commemorated in ‘Fire and Rain’), and later become addicted to heroin. So maybe he knew more about life than the average 23 year old.

I took loads of photos when I went for a walk in the country park last week, and I’ve enjoyed playing around with them, I’m really proud of them, but what can I do with them? I thought about creating a sort of ‘photo-essay’ and putting it on the web - well, why not? If I enjoy doing it, why not? It’s no different from doing anything like cross stitch, or scrap booking, or sticking them in a photo album. Except that other people could look at them – maybe they’d like to. After all, some people read my blog. Maybe all we have to do is just try, shout into the void. Because if you don’t, you’ll definitely never hear the echo.
Last night I was reading the book Lady Lucy sent for my birthday, ‘Exuberance – The passion for life’, by Kay Redfield Jamison. I was reading about a chappie who took photos of snowflakes – about five thousand of them altogether. And here’s me thinking I’m weird because of my photos of the country park. That’s the sort of obsession I need, something all consuming. But I always pull back from committing myself completely to something like that. I have the ideas, but I lose interest, or I give up, I think it’s just not practical and it’s not taking me anywhere, or I should be spending my time on something more worthwhile, or I’ve got too much else to do.
I was telling Hubby about my idea for making a photo-essay of my walk in the country park, and he said, well, it keeps me out of mischief and it’s harmless and it doesn’t cost much. So is that what my life comes down to, doing things which are harmless and don’t cost too much? Is that the best I can hope for?

Out of curiosity, I dug through my diary for this time last year, the time when I THOUGHT I was 'happy'...
‘...I think the biggest problem is other people’s expectations. I could quite enjoy my life in itself, until people start asking me what I’m doing and making me feel guilty, a failure etc. They seem to think I should be doing something and try to chivvy me into doing stuff …. But why can’t I just be happy as I am? Because when they ask me I start to get defensive, I guess they assume that I’m unhappy. But the unhappiness comes mainly from the feeling that I should be doing more. What does it matter, really?’ (21/3/05).

‘I keep thinking that I have everything I need to have a happy life, but I’m not sure how to go about it, ie having a happy life. Makes no sense, does it?’ (22/04/05).

‘This is how my life is, and it is OK… I have got a bit of a headache at the moment, but I will get through it. The sun is not shining, but it’s not raining either. Maybe I will get out in the garden this afternoon. If not, I will do some studying … So life is OK. There are enough good things I can do, that I can get on with. And enough useful things I can do so I don’t have to feel too dissatisfied. I will get there.
It is so hard to explain how I feel though. But how much of it is dealing with other people’s expectations? And anyway how do I know what their expectations are? It’s just my expectations of their expectations.’ (20/04/05)

‘I have had a bit of a crisis of confidence this morning, talking to daughter last night, I was saying I didn’t think I would go for the audition this time round, she had a go at me about confidence and not being able to do things because you believe you can’t – do I want to be lectured on this by a 16 year old? I know this is the conventional wisdom, but what about the situation when you really aren’t very good at something, is it not better to just accept that? I really am not that great, I need people to understand it. Thinking about the hypnotherapy I went to last year, about trying to build my confidence. I’m not sure that confidence building is what I need. What is the point of building confidence if it gives you unrealistic expectations? Is it not better to accept who you are, your limitations? Who can I talk to about this? Nobody ever wants to know. What would they say? Accept yourself. Try to blot out those ideas. Negativity. Positive thought. (26/04/05)

‘A wander round the garden, on a sunny spring morning, with a cup of tea in my hand. All the things I need to make me happy, so why aren’t I happy? A bit like the feeling I get sometimes on holiday – I am in a wonderful place, everything is lovely, why don’t I feel wonderful?
Didn’t want to get up this morning, couldn’t wake up this morning. I didn’t think I had that bad a night, Was awake and went back to sleep quite early. I am trying to have a routine – loo, read for half an hour, try and meditate for half an hour, then try and go back to sleep. Emphasis on the ‘try’ on both counts. My mind wanders anyway, whether I am ‘trying’ to meditate or not. (27/04/05).

OK, so I went off on one and started pulling out bits from last year’s diary. What’s the good of that? Just wasting more time. Nothing ever changes.
But in the autumn I had idea that life could be different... except it isn't. It just goes back to how it was. And it never seems to get any further forward.

It’s true that it’s the little things that make life worthwhile, just as it is the little things that can drive you to distraction. Our lives are made up of an endless succession of ‘little things’, of individual moments, good and bad, that we negotiate our way through.
But what about those times when it is hard to connect to the ‘little’ things and they don’t seem to have the effect they should?
I wrote this last week:
‘I feel somewhat detached from life – I can’t seem to engage with things, with my daily life, the way I would like to. Disengagement, yes, that’s the word I was thinking of. Everything that happens seems to be at one remove and I don’t get pleasure from it.’
Then, a few hours later I was writing this:
‘Feeling strangely and inexplicably cheerful this morning. When I say ‘inexplicably’, of course there are lost of reasons why I should feel cheerful – it’s a beautiful day, for a start –it’s just that they don’t seem to have been working lately. It’s not as if I have had a good night’s sleep. I just feel quite up and positive.’
Nothing lasts.
So how do we negotiate our way through this?
Is it possible to turn your life around just by focussing on the good bits? Or is that just a way of covering up a deep and underlying unhappiness, and if so, is it dishonest?
For a while last year, I felt that I was pretty satisfied with life – or is that just rose-coloured glasses? How satisfied WAS I with my life as it was, really? I honestly don’t know. I wasn’t sleeping. And how was I deep down, if I could be so unsettled by what happened?

Is the answer to forget about the big stuff, and focus on the moments - If you can get enough moments, will it make the rest go away? Or if you let the simple pleasures get in the way of the misery, do they devalue the experience? Like realising you’ve been fighting a war which means nothing, just a terrible waste? Or that you won’t get other people’s sympathy if they think you’re OK? That you’re trying to bury the sadness, but it never really goes away, and how do you deal with it? Maybe that’s the point. I’m not dealing with it any more.

Finally made it out to the garden today, and watching the Tabby Terror jump at bumbe bees reminded me that life is worth living after all...
But don't spread it around - I'd hate to lose my reputation for misery!

The same person who made the comment about 'going down that road again' said 'maybe things are looking up' when I told her we went out for my birhtday.
Well... not really - to either of those.
Sometimes it's better and sometimes it's worse and that's just the way it is. It's never wonderful and it's never a total disaster. It just is.

I am fed up with being so BLOODY tired, I can’t think straight, I can’t plan anything properly, it takes me ten times as long to do anything as it should, Have just spent over an hour trying to decide what to cook next week so I could do the shopping list, I can’t make the simplest decisions and I’ve got so much that needs to be done, I just sit around feeling like a waste of space and not getting anything done, and not resting either because I can’t relax because there are so many things I should be doing and if I’m not doing them they’re not going to go away, they’re still going to have to be done some time..
SHIT!!!
Sorry.

I am having another ‘little shit’ day today, doing battle with the minutes when I really don’t feel like it, I think I’m pissed off because Hubby is on holiday and can sit watching the telly – not that I want to sit and watch the telly, but you know what I mean. The kitten can't settle, probably because it’s cold and raining and miserable, she keeps going into the utility room and meowing, then going out the cat flap and coming back wet and meowing some more…Have downloaded James Taylor’s ‘Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon’ and listening to it is reminding me of my youth and making me feel… well, let’s say it’s not helping!
I got onto thinking about Captain Corelli again, sorry about this obsession. After all, Antonio Corelli is a figment of Louis de Berniere’s imagination, but somehow he has become a part of my imagination too, he has resonated with something I want to believe is true, perhaps an idea of how I would ideally like a man to be, charming and sensitive and funny. Then, in the last part of the book, something happens that doesn’t correspond to my idea of how that man would behave, and I feel cheated, and here I am making excuses for him, almost as though I know better how he would behave than his creator does…
I definitely need to get out more.
Or maybe I am just looking for displacement activity so I don’t have to finish these bloody minutes…

Friday 7th April
Had quite a nice birthday in the end, though I wasn’t expecting to when I woke up at 6:40 with a splitting headache and feeling thoroughly pissed off.
My main present is a voucher for a de-stress day at Henlow Grange, the local health farm. Given that I couldn’t think of anything to ask for (a sure sign that I’m depressed), it was a lovely surprise, he still has this knack of proving that he is more sensitive than I give him credit for. Everybody was here in the morning to give me my pressies before daughter went to work, they even dragged the son out of bed, and both kids had taken notice of the hints I’d dropped and got me really nice pressies too. And I had a card from a friend in Milton Keynes who I haven’t seen for ages saying we should get together for lunch, and emails from Ilze in Riga and Afroditi in Athens and Bev in Omaha, Nebraska, who I haven’t heard anything from for AGES. And Hubby took me out to dinner at the village pub, which given the fiasco on Sunday I wasn’t really expecting, the restaurant is a cut above the average country pub level, it was all yummy and we staggered home afterwards up the hill. We should do that more often.
He’s a good man really, he tries, it’s not his fault if he doesn’t know how to make me happy, I don’t know myself. So, is that what life’s about, and love, and happiness? Just to keep going? To accept what is, and just carry on doing whatever it is you have to do?
Sometimes, it’s enough. If only it was always that easy.

Catching up with my blog at the weekend, ie typing up the stuff I've written by hand during the week, is a bit weird sometimes because sometimes things have moved on a bit (though they do have a habit of going round in circles), but I try to give an honest reflection of the way I was feeling when I first wrote it (if you can follow that twisted logic...)
anyway, on Thursday morning I had an appoimtnet with my GP to ask if she would refer me to the sleep clinic, and this is what I wrote about it at 4:00AM (appropriately enough).

This morning I’ve got my doctor’s appointment. I don’t really know what to say.
I just hate being in situations where I have to ask somebody for something. The thought of going to my GP and saying: ‘Please can you refer me to the sleep clinic’ just really bothers me. I feel like I’m going to have to go through this long explanation and I’m dreading it. It’s the same as the bullshit thing I was talking about a couple of weeks ago, I’m going to have to talk about something and explain it in a convincing way and I’m sure I’m going to make a mess of it and it will come out all wrong. It’s always like that when I have to talk to people, whoever they are.
But I also have a specific problem with going to my GP and asking for something, after all, she’s the expert and what do I know? It’s as though I’m trying to tell her her job.
I hate having to ask for help, I hate challenging someone’s authority, and I hate having to explain about my insomnia. As soon as I talk about it I feel as though my problems are my own fault and I shouldn’t be making a fuss about them. On the one hand, I’m resentful when other people don’t take it seriously and on the other I hate making a fuss. When I start complaining about any part of my life, I just think I should shut up and get on with it, after all, what are my problems by comparison with what other people have to put up with, it’s probably just me making an unnecessary fuss, there’s probably something really simple that I haven’t tried (though I don’t know what it could be). Maybe I don’t deserve to solve my problems. I should just shut up and stop moaning and get on with life.

PS As it happened, she was fine about it, though she said that GPs are no longer supposed to refer people directly, but she will see what she can do. She asked if I am stressed, I guess the answer to that is yes, but it is more or less a permanent condition, and I cannot see what to do about it.

Thursday 6th April, 4:00AM
I went for a walk on Wednesday morning, supposed to be with the local Wildlife Trust group, they go the first Wednesday of every month, but I was late getting to the meeting place and they had already left, so I went for a walk on my own.
It was a lovely morning, and I was thinking, why isn’t it enough to be in a beautiful place on a spring morning? It was supposed to fill me with the joys of spring, but it really didn’t.
I stopped on a bridge over the weir coming out of the lock and I watched the foam moving and merging together and splitting up and coming back together, like amoebae, and I thought, I could actually just jump in there, what would happen if I just jumped into that water, and I thought, well, there has to be hope, doesn’t there?
I thought about when my Mum and Dad were ill and after they died, when I used to go for long solitary walks. That was the time a couple of years after I finished my PhD when I was beginning to realise that I wasn’t going to get a job and I had to let go of it and try and move on. And the other thing that was going on at that time was that we were supposed to be house hunting, but Hubby was refusing to do anything about putting the house on the market. So I just used to go and wander around the countryside by myself when the kids were at school, and try and make sense out of everything.
That summer was the first time I seriously tried to get help for my insomnia. I was given temazepam, which was absolutely useless, and 8 sessions of NHS counselling, which was basically bereavement counselling, though as I told the counsellor, I didn’t think I’d even started to grieve for my parents. And underlying it all, the thing that I wasn’t even able to own up to to anybody, I was struggling to deal with a broken heart, with knowing that I would never see again someone who had become a part of my life (and I don’t mean my parents).
While I was doing my PhD, I used to say, no one is going to give me a job, why would they? I don’t think I really believed it, but that is what happened anyway. Was it my ‘negative’ attitude that caused it? I don’t know, I really tried to be positive and confident when I was applying for jobs and going for interviews. I think I always thought at the back of my mind that worst case there would be something for me in the department, that I would be able to stay where I was if I couldn’t find anything better, but of course that didn’t happen either. Why was that? Was it my fault? Half of me wanted to ‘Get the hell out’ (as my supervisor urged me to do), but the other half of me didn’t want anything to change. But as it turned out, the worst option of all, the one I hadn’t really seriously contemplated, that I wouldn’t be able to get any kind of job at all and would have to go back to being a housewife, was the one that actually happened.
The second time, when my two year contract came to an end, was easier, because I knew how hard it would be and wasn’t really expecting anything else. I knew that I could survive without a job, and that having a job hadn’t made me happy and solved all my problems, it wasn’t the be-all and end-all.
Oh, this sense of a wasted life and a pointless existence. Why do I always have to justify myself and explain myself? I want to do something wonderful, and I have this nagging sense that maybe I COULD have done something wonderful, but I never actually did, and now I never will.
So why ISN’T it enough to be in a beautiful place on a lovely spring day? What about just being here and loving life – it’s all you have to do really. I can do that, can’t I? And if not, why not?
It must be my fault. I probably need someone to give me a kick up the backside and tell me to stop being such an idiot and be happy for what I’ve got, and think how lucky I am by comparison with other people and stop being so self pitying and self centred and self indulgent. I know, I know, I’ve heard it a billion times. It should help but it doesn’t. I’m, sorry, I’m just sorry I’m not a better person, and that I’m such a mess, and that I’m so ungrateful for what I’ve got. It’s not the circumstances of my life, is it, it’s about the person I am, the sort of person who is never going to be happy no matter what, and it’s all my fault.

Wednesday 5th April, 8:15 AM
The Tao meditation book says, whatever your spiritual practice, do it every day. Well, I don’t meditate every day, but I do write every day.
I was talking to a friend on Tuesday night about the incident on Sunday and she said: ‘don’t say you’re going down that road again’. I don’t honestly know if we’re going down ‘that road’, the underlying problems have never actually gone away, we just bury them and ignore them most of the time. Until about 10 years ago I always assumed that the problems were all on my side, that he was a saint for putting up with me. I remember the day my EMBM said to me: ‘You’re never going to leave him are you?’ and the way me heart sank. But that idea of an independent life is just a silly fantasy.
People have said to me: ‘You’re having a hard time lately’ and ‘You’re going through a bad patch’ but actually, this kind of soul searching is normal for me, this is how I get through life. The brief flashes of happiness are the exception. What is unusual is that I am documenting it and sharing it in a semi-public domain. Anybody who has seen the beginning of this blog – assuming they haven’t given up on me long ago – has heard it all before.

Wednesday 5th April, 7:10AM
How do you stop your mind from running in the same tracks? Like water wearing gullies into a rock, thoughts always go into the same direction, and as the gullies become deeper, so the more likely it is that the water will go that way. Occasionally though there may be floods, when the water over-flows its fam