Have just spent half an hour looking up the story of Vortigern’s tower on Wikipedia, and I suspect that my memory from Mary Stewart’s ‘The Crystal Cave’ is a little faulty, but I’ll give you the gist because that’s what set me off on this line of thinking.
Vortigern tried to build a tower at Dinas Emrys (‘Fort of Ambrosius’) in North Wales, but it kept collapsing overnight. His advisors told him that he needed the blood of a boy with no father to mix with the mortar in order for the tower to stand. They brought to him the boy wizard (no not that one), Aurelius Ambrosianus (aka Merlin, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, and M Stewart), who told him instead to dig under the foundations of the fort, where the workmen found a pool, at the bottom of which were two dragons, whose fighting caused the tower to collapse.
Last night it occurred to me that Vortigern’s tower was a good metaphor for my psyche/soul/personality, whatever you want to call it. However hard I try to build it up, down at the bottom of the pool there is a dragon which refuses to give me any peace.
I may appear on the surface to be coping well, to be getting on with life, ignoring what’s going on down there, but the dragon, though it may be asleep, never actually goes away, and night after night it comes back to do battle.
I believe ‘The Hobbit’ has some comments to make about dragons, though I can’t be arsed to look them up after the struggle to check out Vortigern. I never really took to ‘The Hobbit’, probably because I read it at just the wrong time, in my late teens, when it struck me as too much of a kids’ book - a few years earlier or later and no doubt I would have loved it.
Anyway, I digress. Dragons are tricky beasts, and I guess the dilemma with them is this: is it better to leave them alone while they’re asleep, and just hope they won’t wake up, or to fight them and try to destroy them, given that in order to fight them, you have to wake them up and bring them out into the open?
John Bunyan (a good old Bedford boy, BTW) would probably name my dragon ‘Dragon Self-doubt’ – a catchier moniker than ‘Dragon Negative-Mental-Attitude’, IMHO. However, his advice for dealing with it would probably involve me putting my faith in the Lord – not something that Cassandra or I am comfortable with
My dragon is capable of sleeping for long, long, periods, and sometimes I manage to kid myself that it’s gone away altogether – but it never actually does. Even when it’s quiescent, it still affects my self-esteem and assertiveness. Occasionally people will notice and say things like: ‘You should stick up for yourself more’, or ‘Promise me that next time someone interrupts you, you won’t apologise’, or ‘I don’t like the way you begin you profile with the word “failed”’, or ‘If you describe yourself as “unemployable”, you will be’. I’m sure they’re all very well-meaning, but what happens is that they wake the dragon. While it’s asleep, it only really affects myself, it might make me miserable, and stop me living a truly satisfying life, but hey, I say to myself, who has a really happy and satisfying life anyway, what makes me so special that I should be entitled to happiness?
But when people notice and say to me: ‘but why aren’t you happy, you deserve happiness?’, I start to wonder if maybe I could be happy, as in long-term, everyday satisfaction with my life that doesn’t evaporate at 2:00AM every night; as in waking up every morning looking forward to what the day will bring…

Then up leaps the dragon, and I have to fight it again and again, and it wears me down, night after night it comes back and I can’t escape.
So, it would probably be better if I could get rid of the dragon permanently, but I don’t know how to do that. Nothing I’ve tried has ever worked for long.
It may, though, be weakening slightly compared to how it used to be. For example, I haven’t seriously considered suicide for a long time, and I don’t think I despise and loathe myself quite as much as I used to; these days I tend more to get angry and frustrated with myself, which I think is an improvement. But at this rate of change I don’t think I have enough time left to get rid of it for good. So maybe I’ll try to go back to ignoring it, or at least stop inflicting it on other people. As long as people can accept that this is how I am, and not expect me to suddenly turn into Pollyanna.

True to form, although I went back to bed at 4:30, it still took me the standard 2 hours to get back to sleep – finally dozed off around 6:30, to be woken again at 7:30.
So, I was awake for 4 hours, and slept for a total of 4 hours.
I remembered the other thing that p*sses me off about all this, apart from feeling spaced out, headachey, unable to concentrate and forgetting everything.
Waking at 5 is OK, because then I can get up at a reasonable time. But waking at 2 or 3, as I have been doing lately, is the pits, because I do eventually fall back to sleep, but then I wake up late (usually around 8-8:30, though yesterday it was 9, and I was going out at 9:45), which means I get a really late start on working, which messes me about for the rest of the day.

Monday, 22 May 2006, 4:16 AM
Hmm, 34 visitors, 165 pageviews, not one comment. Think I have stunned everyone into silence.
I know, ‘it’s not about the stats…’
Am trying to be positive and ‘embrace’ my insomnia. I have emptied the dishwasher, sorted out the washing, oiled the kitchen work surface. Maybe I can turn into an obsessive cleaner in the wee small hours, kill two birds with one stone.
I can see that conceptualising and naming something as a Problem will turn it into one. But on the other hand, how am I to consider my attitudes and feelings about life? Should I just ignore them and hope they’ll go away, pretend they don’t exist and that I’m perfectly happy and that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds?
Am I over-dramatising my insomnia, my poor self image, and my unhappiness? Am I turning myself into a victim? I have been told that before: ‘You’re not a victim, but you act as though you are’. But isn’t that a ‘Problem’ in itself? Given that that is how I feel and how I have always felt, isn’t it a good thing that I’m acknowledging it and trying to find ways to change it?
Do I have a Real Problem that I need to do something about, or don’t I? Obviously, it is all about what goes on in my head, but how can you change that? Not by just wishing it to be so. Maybe by taking drugs, though they have never helped me in the past. And somehow, that seems like a cop-out, not a real solution.

I wonder, is it really possible to change your attitude to life – permanently? I don’t really know much about cognitive behavioural therapy – or maybe I do without realising it, the Eric Berne Transactional analysis stuff could be part of it, and neuro-linguistic programming. I know a bit about both of those. But I don’t see any way of using them to change things.
Is change possible? A lady at meditation last Thursday said that she felt she had changed through going there, and one of the other women said last summer that I had changed while I’d been going – but that was before all the upsets happened and I lost any progress I might have made. I suspect she had just seen different aspects of me, as she got to know me better. This has happened before, people have told me I changed as I grew more relaxed with them, but the changes never really last – I am still just as awkward with other people.
So is real change, real deep down, fundamental, irreversible change, possible for me? When I went to hypnotherapy, I seemed to change in the short term, my attitude seemed to change. But the change in attitude wasn’t matched by a change in the circumstances of my life, my supposed increase in confidence (which was supposed to grow more and more every day) withered away in the absence of reinforcement. The supposed virtuous circle, of greater confidence leading to greater success and greater self-esteem, never took off. It ground to a halt again, bogged down in the mires of self-doubt.
But in the short term, I know that meditation, yoga, singing, even gardening, lots of things can improve my mood, temporarily, at least. So, if I keep practising, even if it doesn’t seem to go anywhere, might it lead to a real long-term change, to a fundamental shift which would be irreversible? A step change? That seems to be the implication of what I’ve read. I stuck at yoga for years before I began to feel the real benefits in my body. Maybe I need to stick with meditation longer before I feel any real benefits in my psyche.
The day after I wrote all this stuff about change in my diary, I started thinking about counselling, and my experiences of it. I have tried various sorts of counselling to try and improve my self-esteem, my attitude to life, to try and develop a ‘positive mental attitude’, if you like.
Because how do you do that? Negative mental attitude and low self-esteem is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but, as I’ve said before, the trouble with self-fulfilling prophecies is that they are constantly being reinforced. Whereas virtuous circles are very hard to get going. My hypnotherapy tapes tell me how my subconscious mind is going to help me and how my confidence will increase with every day that passes, and how it is going to help me to cope so much better with life… bollocks, I have been playing those tapes for years. When I listen to them now, I know they didn’t work – my self esteem and confidence hasn’t increased.
Kandamoist made a comment about ‘clinical’ and ‘non clinical’ uses of counselling. Why does he assume that my need for counselling is ‘non clinical’? Do I have a problem, or don’t I? These self esteem issues are not ones I can solve with a new dress or new hair do. So what is the obvious thing to do? Try and get help? I would have thought so. I actually started thinking about describing the counselling I’ve had because I assumed that if anyone read this, someone would say: ‘Have you tried counselling?’ And the answer is, yes I have, but I’ve never found anything that works.
So, is anything ever going to work, or am I going to continue to feel like this for the rest of my life? And I guess the answers must be: no, and yes. So I might as well just give up.
This is me and my life, and this is who I am and how it is, how it’s always been and how it always will be. To think it could have been different or could be different makes it worse because if I acknowledge that, I have to face up to the fact that it’s my fault that I turned out the way I did. The problem does not lie with my marriage or my career, it lies with me and the person I am, the person I cannot change.
The kind lady who made the comment on Sunday about getting a cleaner emailed on Monday to ask if she could help. I have ‘known’ her for years, but she has never known me. I am very usually good at keeping myself hidden, except, bizarrely, on this blog.
I am just ranting into the void, because of the impossibility of happiness and change and development. I am just ranting because I don’t know what else to do.

Friday 19th May 06, 4:00AM
I was feeling really positive yesterday, I got a lot done and then I went to meditation and it all seemed possible, but now here I am awake again. And I’ve got a headache.
Purple Dragon made a comment about self-image, saying everything springs from that, that she can achieve anything if she feels gorgeous. And I can see exactly what she means, except, of course, that I hardly ever feel ‘gorgeous’. So I have to get by anyway and just get on with it, just as I have to get by on 4 hours sleep.
So, why don’t I feel gorgeous? Is it because I just don’t try? Or I don’t know how? I look at the stuff my daughter does with makeup and her hair and clothes and I am completely clueless by comparison. I have people who have told me I’m beautiful – though recently it’s mostly other women. But it doesn’t really make sense to me, I just can’t see myself in that way. Well, I didn’t when I was younger, now I sort of can, but I still don’t really connect with the idea.
I don’t quite understand why. When I was a little girl I thought I was plain. If anyone said I was pretty I said ‘No I’m not, I’m plain’. I had this thing about my hair, because my Mum always kept it short, I thought it made me look like a boy. When I was old enough to have it how I wanted (about 16, I suppose), I let it grow, but it was always greasy and straggly and horrible. I used to twist it round my fingers and it all got broken at the back so there was a big gap in the back where it was a lot shorter. I’ve never been able to do things with it, I’ve never learned how to curl it, whenever I tried it looked worse than ever (there weren’t such things as straighteners in those days).
I guess my attitude to my hair typified my attitude to clothes, make up, everything. I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t want to spend time over them, whenever I tried I just seemed to end up looking worse than ever, as far as I could see. I also had this feeling that I shouldn’t spend time over them, that somehow it was morally wrong to fuss over my appearance, and that people should just accept me the way I was. I often used to get mistaken for a boy, which reinforced those feelings. If boys told me they fancied me, it didn’t really make sense to me, because why would they, I just assumed there was something wrong with them. That was where this business of settling for whoever I could get came from. Though looking back I can see that I was probably quite attractive. But I have never believed it.
Which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess. But how do you get away from self-fulfilling prophecies? Given that they are constantly being reinforced..
I also remember being quite threatened by the thought of being fancied by men. Much easier to stay hidden in the background, not noticed. Because I didn’t expect anyone to fancy me, so I felt I had to learn to come to terms with that and just get on with life.

You may have gathered that I don’t get out much, - as in socialising, meeting people, ‘hanging out’, as opposed to council meetings, pilates, meditation etc. On Monday, I had an email from one of the guys who was in the Mikado saying that someone was organising a ‘reunion’ at a restaurant in town on Wednesday evening at 9 (to allow some people to go to the rehearsal for the next show first), and to call Pete at a certain number by Tuesday so that he could let the restaurant know the numbers.
I have an aversion to talking to people on the phone (even friends), so I kept putting it off, then other things got in the way, and it got round to Tuesday morning and I hadn’t called But, given that it was a mobile number, I thought that it would be OK to text, which I did. I didn’t get a reply, but I figured that worst case the restaurant could squeeze in an extra one.
The next challenge was deciding what to wear – I’m really ambivalent about going out, it’s always a bit of an effort to make myself do it, though I tell myself I’ll enjoy myself when I get there. Then I fretted about getting there at the right time – I hate being too early or too late, I hate being conspicuous, I just wanted to be some time in the middle and sneak in without being noticed. At the last minute, I couldn’t find my phone, so that made me a few minutes later than I intended. But I got to the restaurant about 5 to 9.
And – there was nobody there. The restaurant had no bookings. They asked how big the party was, and of course I had no idea, but anyway they had no bookings at all. They said there was a football match on and maybe everyone was at home watching the telly. They offered to lend me the phone to call and find out what was happening, but I told a white lie and said I hadn’t got the number with me. I had, but I was too embarrassed to call. I went to the chippy and then came home.
I’m not so paranoid as to think it was done deliberately. I guess the arrangements changed, maybe because of the footy – and nobody thought to call me. Maybe he never read my text, so didn’t know I was planning to go (though as it was a mobile number, you’d expect that he would check for texts). Maybe I got the number wrong. It was probably my fault for not ringing up and actually speaking to Pete in person in the first place. I thought about going to the rehearsal hall and seeing if anyone was there, but I was too embarrassed. I just went home.

Monday 15th May
I know it’s unfair to rant at people. Sometimes I just feel so stressed and tired and pissed off that I feel I have to rant.
I just have to keep doing things a bit at a time, ‘eating the elephant’, as someone once said. Hope that I’m making progress and the To Dos aren’t growing faster than the Dones.
I feel sad, and I don’t know why. A wave of sadness just crashing over me and seeping into me. Life’s too short, of course it is, I know it is. I wish I could be more upbeat and positive. Or do I ‘enjoy’ wallowing in it? I guess it seems like that. I don’t know any more.
I’m very good at keeping awake when I shouldn’t. There seems to be a disconnect between the signals telling me I need to sleep and actually losing consciousness. I think I have got so good at carrying on when I feel exhausted, just because I have to, at suppressing the signals and staying awake, , that it happens when it shouldn’t.

Monday,15/05/06 4:30AM
A woman at meditation last week said you have to ‘have faith in the process’, keep on trying even if it doesn’t feel as though you’re ‘doing it right’ or as though it’s taking you anywhere. And there was a man who was there for the second time who said he’d been trying to meditate for 11 years and he felt as though he kept going full circle, back to the beginning again. So maybe the fact that I feel like that after 16 months isn’t so bad after all.
The advice about ‘having faith in the process’ seems to apply to lots of things in life – or, at least, in my life. I keep on trying in the hope that if I keep on trying, in the end something will work, something will get better. Keep on keeping on. Beating your head against a brick wall. Putting one foot in front of the other. Because what the hell else can you do? The mass of Stuff To Do is always there, it doesn’t really diminish, you just have to keep trying to push back the tide, to hope that you can keep it from getting too much bigger.
The latest of the singers from my youth whom I’ve rediscovered through downloading is Ralph McTell (anybody remember him?) He had a great image: ‘I’m running up a spiral staircase, drilling a hole in the ground’. Like the Red Queen, running as fast as you can to stay in one place. What else can you do?
Another of his songs mentions a lady who ‘wears her hair in the 1940s style’, even though it’s changed from red to grey. Thinking about when that was written, it’s about as long ago now as the 1940s were from when it was written. So I could now be that lady (not that I wear my hair in a 1970s style, but I’ve gone back to listening to music from then). Thinking about time can do you head in.

The first counsellor I went to was in the days when ‘recovered memory syndrome’ was all the rage. She thought I had been abused as a child and repressed it.
The second counsellor I went to told me during the first session that my problems stemmed from my marriage.
I was referred to the third counsellor by my GP for a standard NHS 6 sessions after my parents died. She offered me bereavement counselling, but with the backlog of problems I had I hadn’t even started to grieve at that point.
The fourth counsellor was a colleague when I was working at the university who was also a practising hypnotherapist. We had difficulty organising sessions, and I felt awkward because she refused to accept payment.
The fifth and most recent counsellor was also a hypnotherapist, whom I went to two years ago. She did not offer any analysis, but put me under and told me that my confidence would grow daily and I would be able to cope so much better with life (I still have the tapes). It was surprisingly effective for a while, though it had no impact on the insomnia, and was blown out of the water by last autumn’s crisis, when all the old questions came flooding back.

Went back to sleep some time after 5, woken at 6:15 by the sound and subsequent smell of the cat retching; evidently he went out and found himself a snack somewhere.
Woken again at 9 by Hubby with a cup of coffee, kitchen roll and bottle of 1001: ‘Thought I’d give you this so you didn’t put you feet in it when you got up…’

Sitting in the kitchen trying to ignore the cat who wants feeding but is overweight already, and needs grooming, because I haven’t got round to doing it for ages and God knows when I will.
Trying to ignore the crickets chirping under the dresser.
Trying to ignore the daughter screaming and crying because she can’t get back to sleep, thinking, ‘I feel like that every BLOODY night’.
Remembering when she was a baby and Hubby got up one night to find me walking around the kitchen kicking each of the cupboards in turn because what I really wanted to do was bash her head against the wall.
Remembering how tired and stressed I was then and wondering if it is ever going to get any better.
Thinking how I hate living in this tip and how I can’t keep ignoring the mess, I am going to have to do something about it.
No, this is not a guilt trip, it is desperation and frustration and exhaustion.
Sorry, I know there are lots and lots and lots of people who are so much worse off than I am and I have so much to be grateful for and I am so lucky, but right now I am so PISSED OFF.

No romping occurred, that was just a pathetic attempt at grabbing your attention.
No romping, but much head-shaking, teeth-sucking and bad-mouthing of the previous incumbent, coupled with sonorous pronouncements that we had ‘had a lucky escape’ (he hasn’t seen Hubby’s eyelashes).
Apparently, the heat sensor for the safety cutout had been located UNDER the burner – even my 30+ year old O-level physics tells me that is not such a good idea.
Anyway, it has now been thoroughly de-sooted and restored to health (and the sensor moved to a more effective position), and at least I know who to call next time. ('Soot-busters!')
The cats freaked out and hid in the attic because he had a Jack Russell sitting in the cab of his van; they even managed to bury their differences and stay in the same room without fighting for an hour.

I wrote this about 3 weeks ago (Day 112 in the Tao book, which would have been April 22nd), typed it up but evidently overlooked it in my posting session yesterday evening.
Anyway, thought I would post it now as it is sort of relelvant to the exchange I had earlier with Lady Lucy.
‘Put forth your effort with no thought of gain… Hold no expectations then the rewards will come. If one strives for power and gifts, no true results will come, and one will be lost in lust.’ (Day 112). Pretty much the opposite of ‘Write what you want on a piece of paper and shove it under your pillow’.
Just goes to show you can pretty much believe what you want and the world will confirm it for you. It’s called ‘framing’, you view the world in a certain way which gives you particular expectations, so you notice things which confirm those expectations and tend to ignore anything that falls outside of your framework. Meanwhile, the world just carries on in its own sweet way and does what the hell it likes.
Anyway, that wasn’t what I was going to say. Obviously, they are referring to spiritual rewards, but when I read the first sentence I thought of financial/material gain, and thought (not for the first time) how strange it is that in my life (certainly for the last 20 years) my main efforts have been completely detached from financial gain. So the conventional motivators don’t apply. My material security has been independent of the work that I do – except for brief and minor periods. In some ways it sounds pretty good – to have security and pursue the things you want – though of course, it isn’t quite as simple as that – housework, for example, is not something I ‘want’ to do, jut something that has to be done to keep life ticking over in an acceptable manner. And my way of ‘earning my keep’. The other things fall into the categories of things I have offered to do and then feel obliged to continue (the Parish Council kind of falls into this category, though I also get paid for it), things I do because I feel driven to do SOMETHING with my life – ie) writing; and things I do for pure enjoyment (like singing, reading and listening to the radio – few and far between lately). Though all the other things have some enjoyable aspects.

But the other motivator (sorry, this shouldn't be italics any more but I can't seem to switch them off), which I hadn't really articulated till I started replying to Lady L's comment earlier today, is the feeling that I have to keep trying things which MIGHT lead somewhere one day - the networking, the contacts, the piece of informatyion or skill which I might pick up through doing something and which might come in handy at some time.
so I keep on beating away at this brick wall - because if I ever stop, then I really will have nothing to keep going for.

My role on summer Friday evenings is to sit with a beer as guardian of the barbecue. I did it for the first time last week. But this year, I’ve discovered there’s a downside to sitting in the garden on a beautiful evening.
I just can’t help noticing the weeds.
The house and the garden look neglected and it all just seems too big and difficult and I don’t know where to start, I feel like I’m never going to get on top of it, there’s never going to be a time when I can sit back and say, ‘Right, that’s done’.
The house is a mess, the garden is a mess, and I just hate it. I’m not at all houseproud, but even I hate to see it like this, everywhere dusty and crappy and the floor all bitty because it hasn’t been hoovered.
I have been thinking about the idea that we have a choice in life, and how unrealistic it is. In the most fundamental ways, we are just driven along by circumstances, our choices are terribly circumscribed. Often what appear to be choices are just between a very limited set of equally unappealing options. Everything is a compromise. We are not in control of our own lives. There may be some people who find lives that make them happy, but they are in the minority. It is all random and it is all about struggle and everything else is self-deception.
At the moment, everything seems hopeless and pointless. This will pass. It will get better again, and it will get worse again. The world just is. Sometimes it’s crap and sometimes it’s OK and very, very occasionally it is good and there are flashes of joy, but don’t hold your breath. Mostly it just IS, what happens happens, and it is entirely indifferent to our hopes and fears and desires. All we can do is get on with it.

Was having a cup of tea with someone I go to pilates with. She was saying, with respect to pilates, ‘I know they say it’s not a competition, but I get annoyed with myself if I don’t do the hardest level, I always have to do that with everything’.
After she’d gone, I started noticing things around the kitchen, things that weren’t ‘perfect’ enough. It seems like it’s a moral thing. But why should it be? If it doesn’t bother me, why should I care about what other people think? Well, obviously it DOES bother me – but why?
When I went to counselling, I was told to get rid of all the ‘shoulds’. But that’s judgemental in itself. I ‘shouldn’t’ let it bother me, ‘shouldn’t’ think/feel like that.
I know what the answer ‘should’ be – to accept yourself as you are (when did this switch into the second person?), and not try to be anything in particular. But it doesn’t matter how often you tell yourself that. Do I agree with this other woman’s attitude to life? No. So why should I care what she thinks about me?

By following one of the 'ads' on my blog, I found this site:
http://www.theteahouse.co.uk/link/white_tea.html
apparently, white tea has about 20mg of caffiene per cup, as opposed to 25mg for green tea and 50mg for black (and none for rooibosch).
Thought I'd also post my photo of 'La Maison de The' in Brussels, which I'm quite proud of (I've had it as my wallpaper for months, but as it's quite busy, I keep losing my folders on it!)
However, even though I've deleted several photos, it still tells me I've reached my storage limit. Damn.

‘Life acquires meaning when we face the conflict between our desires and reality.
We all have different personalities vying for predominance in our lives. Some come out at just the right moment. At other times, our aspirations and our fondest hopes find little support in our environment. Only a few can truly say that they are living their lives exactly according to their desires. For the majority of us, life is a series of conflicts between our inner ideas and outer constrictions. How will we test ourselves against the flexing of external circumstances?’

365 Tao, Day 130, Deng Ming-Dao

I have been advised (at different times by different people) to ‘take a lover’, ‘find a job’ (or even ‘get a life’), as though either of those were within my control, something which I could decide on and then just go ahead and do, regardless of external circumstances. But my effort to find the second have led me nowhere, while my attempts at the first are just laughable.
We are at the mercy of the external circumstances in which we find ourselves. Our ability to change those circumstances is severely limited – the control we have in our lives is over how we live within those circumstances.
I was asked long ago by a counsellor (the one who gave up on me) what I wanted from life, and when /I began my reply with ‘I wish…’ he interrupted with: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride: what do you WANT?’ Why did I say ‘I wish’ and not ‘I want’? Because the things I was thinking of – a soulmate, a satisfying career – depend too much on circumstance or luck or fate or whatever you want to call it. They are not the sort of things you can just reach out for, that you can decide one day that you will get them, and there they are.
There have been times in my life when I have done things, made decisions, which have changed the course of my life, I guess – walking out on my first marriage would be an obvious example, doing a PhD would be another. The PhD is an interesting one because I decided on that before I knew how to go about achieving it, and my best efforts to find a way to do it led me nowhere, but in the end the opportunity just popped up out of the blue. And I suppose deep down that’s how I feel things happen, that if something is going to happen, the circumstances will arise eventually, and if they don’t, there’s not a lot you can do to make them happen.
I am 12 years away from statutory pension age. I don’t deny that a lot can happen in twelve years, but on the evidence of the last 12 (or even 24 or 36) I have no way of judging what that might be. If I could untangle the skein of complexity which has led me here, I still wouldn’t be capable of projecting it forwards to where it might lead – other than to ‘more of the same’, to a continuation of this stumbling around in the fog: ‘So we sit here in the storm and drink a toast to the slim chance of love’s recovery’ (Indigo Girls).
And now what? Here I am again, in the middle of the night, pursuing the same hares round and round the same track, never quite catching up, never quite losing sight of them, never really knowing what else to do or where else to go.

Aparently I have had 22 visitors and 238 pageviews today.
this is SERIOUSLY spooky.
And the other day I had a weird message about a comment with a link to some site that sells pharmaceuticals.
Could I have been infiltrated???
Help!!!!!

Woken at 4:30 yesterday by the smoke alarm. In the kitchen, the towel which was hanging over the front rail of the Aga was still there but black and charred with a few glowing specks. Removed it with the barbecue tongs, and it fell into sooty shreds. The Aga was still going. Opened some windows and went back to bed (though not to sleep).
Got up in the morning and the Aga had gone out. Had to go to a conference-organising meeting the other side of Cambridge, but Hubby was working from home, so I left him with instructions for re-lighting it. The kitchen was full of little black sooty specks, but I didn’t have time to do much about cleaning it up. The Aga has been due for servicing since September, but the guy who used to do it doesn’t do them any more. I didn’t get an answer from the number he gave me, and I haven’t been able to find anybody else.
Got home after 5 yesterday. Hubby had had several attempts at relighting it without success, or rather, it kept lighting and then going out again. Finally, at about 4:00, he lit it and, as he said, there was a massive blow back and the flames burnt his arm and face, he wasn’t seriously hurt but his eyebrows, lashes and the front of his hair were scorched. Great clouds of sooty specks had come out. Everything in the kitchen has this fine coating of black specks which are very hard to get rid of. The old cat refuses to go in there because of the smell.
I suspect the blow back was because the oil had been pumping through all day. Hubby says maybe that has cleared whatever was causing the blockage (ie the soot) and that was why it hasn’t gone out again.
So, one of my tasks for today was to try and find an Aga engineer. There seem to be a couple in Milton Keynes. I have rung the number the old guy gave me again and left a message.
The towel was very old and was shedding tiny fibres. I wondered if some of them had got sucked in and caused the problem. It happened a couple of weeks ago as well, but that time the towel just got scorched before the Aga went out.
I thought I had to try and explain this because it was so dramatic, but my powers of description seem to have deserted me, so all I can do is just write it as it happened. And it all sounds pretty crazy. I don’t know enough about how it works to explain what happened.
When I was trying to find service engineers on the Web, I found references to a site that tells how to do a ‘DIY Aga service’ – apparently, it’s not as hard as you might think.
Don’t think either of us fancies the idea, though – especially Mr No-Eyebrows!

A writers’ magazine has published a letter I wrote saying that it is not hard to find the motivation TO write, the problem is finding the motivation to STOP writing and get on with other things that have to be done.
Ironic, given that now the 'other things' have taken over to such an extent that I have had no time for writing at all just lately.
This has been a horrible couple of weeks – made more frustrating by the gorgeous weather which I have just not been able to take advantage of. I thought I had got on top of the ‘little shit’ which I was moaning about a while back, but as soon as I had that reasonably under control, a whole load of other stuff has landed on me.
It WILL get better – won’t it?

Made myself a yummy bowl of popcorn (with the new popcorn machine my darling son got me for my birthday), and a cup of coffee (decaff, naturally), took the milk and poured it… over the popcorn instead of in the coffee.
Trying to tell myself that it’s not THAT different from melted butter… (it is).
Half way through typing up the school governors’ minutes from last night, before the PC meeting tonight, another 11 conference applications arrived today to add to the 18 from yesterday which I haven’t processed yet.
Haven’t done any housework this week, daren’t walk away from the computer (even if I could afford the time to) because everywhere is such a mess and I can’t bear to see it, I think the cats have left home because I never show them any attention. I’m sort of conscious that it’s a beautiful day outside but fat chance of getting out there to enjoy it
Anyone out there who thinks working from home is a breeze, fancy trying a life-swap????