Last week, I found the card the Crazy Frog sent me last year, when he said: ‘the world was quiet until [Melinda] decided to ... change everything’. I mean, what does that mean? Surely it means what it sounds like it means. Or maybe I can just accept that, at least, and be happy for it, and not keep wondering and worrying about it.
Of course, I've never seen or heard from him since (apart from 'public' type emails), and I don't suppose I'll ever see him again. But it still gives me a nice warm glow just thinking about it.
Like somebody else holding up the traffic to give me his twinkly grin. It is nice to feel desired, and desirable. That’s what I want, really. I don’t want to have sex with him, I just want to know that he wants me.
Or do I????

Sap, that is.
Went to Cambridge yesterday with a friend (61 year old divorcee) whose recent holiday must have done her a lot of good, because she suddenly announced, 'Let's go and find some men!'
Later we met up with another friend (69 year old divorcee)who, when discussing the 30-something Greek boyfriend of another (much younger!) acquaintance) suddenly said 'Isn't he GORGEOUS!' at which she and I discovered that we both have a penchant for Greek men, but have both noticed that the gorgeous young ones seem to suddenly morph into paunchy baldness (except my Greek-Amercian friend Demetri, who is holding up pretty well, it has to be said).
I don't recall ever having conversations on these lines with either of these ladies before!
After returning home, had a rather disturbing conversation with Hubby. I mentioned that my older friend had invited me to her 70th birthday bash, and said that he was invited too, if he is into socialising, which he isn't.
Hubby: 'I don't mind socialising'
Me: 'Just not with my friends'
H: 'Not with some of your friends. I wouldn't minds socialising with...' (HeWhoClearlyNeedsAPseudonym)
Me: 'Not sure I count him as one of my friends'.. but by this time Hubby had left the room, so not sure whether he heard it.
This is worrying. Could he have picked up on the vibes? He hasn't seen us together, so must be from something I've said. I will have to be careful.
After all that, last night I dreamt about the Crazy Frog (remember him?)

After a pretty miserable week, I have crawled back to the horizon (or x-axis – see below) and gained enough perspective to see that what I’ve been experiencing lately is just what I was talking about earlier, only in microcosm. Within the space of a couple of weeks I have gone from elation to despair and back to ‘normal’ again, and the high, which was great, was doomed to crash and burn. And I can also see that most of what happened at last week’s meeting wasn’t about my ideas being ‘side-lined’ but about my own sense of awkwardness at having got caught up in the flirtatious silliness, which made me feel defensive and a bit too confrontational – in fact, I could barely manage to be civil to the guy, despite (or because of) the mournful little voice inside telling me that I liked him as much as ever, and my behaviour was the best way of antagonising him and wrecking our friendship.
So, the good feelings never last, and the only thing that carries me over the bad times is just thinking: ‘Well, the bad times don’t last either’, and they don’t, but it still never feels like that when you’re going through them. And the choice, as I was saying to Suzee a couple of weeks ago, seems to be between staying on an even keel and not getting to the highs, or experiencing the highs and accepting the lows that follow them. I don’t want to reduce the fluctuations if that means I have to miss out on the good times. But wouldn’t it be good if there were some way to raise the whole curve, make it Sin(x)+c, where c>0?

I do envy Suzee. I know her circumstances aren’t perfect, but to be able to achieve the sort of integrated long term happiness she talks about seems to me to be wonderfully fortunate. My options seem to be either a dull, mustn’t-grumble resignation or fluctuation between mildly manic highs and mildly depressive lows, occasionally subsiding into seriously depressive lows. I say ‘options’, but that implies that I have some choice in the matter, which, if that is the case, I have no idea how to exercise it.
When I was bubbling over about being flirtatious last week, I guess I knew at the back of my mind that it was all too good to last. When we had a meeting on Tuesday, I felt awkward to start with, and things just went from bad to worse. Probably I had just built something up in my head that didn’t really exist outside of my imagination, I don’t know. But I got more and more despondent as the evening wore on. I could feel myself sliding into a fit of sullenness (is there such a word? I can’t think of a more appropriate one). The other people around me must have wondered what the hell was going on – or probably they didn’t, because why would they take any notice of my feelings?
I felt my ideas were being sidelined, which I find very frustrating when I’m talking about something I actually know a lot about – does that sound arrogant? I suppose it does, but it’s the Cassandra syndrome. I really hate confrontation, and most of the time I will keep quiet, unless there is something where I am absolutely sure of my ground, and then when I can’t convince people I get so frustrated because I think, well, should I just give up and let them have it their own way, knowing that it’s wrong and will probably cause problems down the line? Or do I try to think of other ways to convince them and probably end up becoming incoherent and getting angry with myself and convincing nobody? Then, when I’m proved right further down the line, I worry that I should have said something more forceful to have convinced them at the time and stop them making the wrong decision in the first place.
Anyway, that’s all by the by, really. What happened was that I continued to get more frustrated and feel more pissed off, and I couldn’t think how to make things better. And afterwards I reflected over other situations and wondered, how can it be that sometimes I can find the way to be so charming and even sexy, and have people around me (men and women) loving me and hanging on my every word, and how wonderful and powerful that feels, and then at other times I can completely lose touch with that and feel isolated and lost and frustrated (sorry, I’ve got to use that word again because I can’t think of a substitute) and like a sulky child? Which becomes self-reinforcing because I know I’m doing it and get angry with myself, but don’t know how to stop.
That has just reminded me of something – and probably it is just me going all pop-psychology again – but I thought about when I was a child, and how whenever I was upset about something and tearful, my father’s reaction was to get angry and tell me off, which of course upset me even more, and made him even more angry. His attitude was that crying was a deliberate act, something I had control over and, I suppose, that I was doing to defy him, when to me it was an uncontrollable expression of sadness and shame. I remember even as a child thinking how bizarre it was that he should think the way to stop me doing it was to make me feel even sadder and more ashamed.

This refers to the Sunday Times article I linked to below, here’s the link again:
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/ariel_leve/article1622259.ece
(note: I haven’t actually read the book – just this article – so I’m not presuming to criticise it specifically, just my experience of that genre of self-help).
I was struck by the line: ‘If it’s something that makes her feel better, why did I need her to see the downside?’
So, why DO I need to be so cynical about these positive-thinking … things? (sorry for that lame word ‘things’, but the only word I could think of was ‘scams’, and I thought I’d better not put that ).
I guess if other people want to believe in it, I shouldn’t be so scathing, I should let them get on with it, and hey, maybe it will work for them, and that’s great. Perhaps my antagonism is mainly sour grapes because it doesn’t work for me.
I think there are three main problems from my point of view. One is that I’m too rational and can’t see how it would work. Well, I can see how it affects people in face to face situations, so that if you act confidently, they will respond differently to you. But as far as affecting causality at a distance is concerned, forget it, that is just mumbo-jumbo
Second thing, I have tested it empirically, I have tried it and it has let me down.
Third – how DO you actually control your emotions? That is the toughest one, I think. I am far too governed by my emotions, and I really struggle to see how to control them. So, forcing myself to think positively is a real struggle and always feels inauthentic and fraudulent. Which is not to say I’m incapable of feeling that way spontaneously, of course, it’s just the whole business of MAKING yourself act/think/feel a certain way that I rebel against. But I am working on it.
There’s a fourth – which I’ve just thought of – and this is probably the reason why I react so strongly – it’s that some people are so damned evangelical about the whole thing that it gets right up my nose!

Watched ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ last night. I hadn’t seen it before and didn’t know what to expect (except that the Oneword film programme guys are always raving over it). I’m not sure what I thought about it as a film, and I won’t go into any details about it, except to pose the question: if you could erase memories, which ones would you go for, the bad ones or the happy ones which remind you that life is not like that now?
Coincidentally, when it was on I got a text from my Greek friend (wishing me a belated happy birthday). We haven’t been together since December 2005. Will we all meet up again? Will it be this year? (There are plans for meetings in Cyprus in September and Brussels in October, but they depend on funding being available). If not this year, then, I suspect, probably never. Will I ever go to the States again, and see the friends I have over there? I really don’t know, but again, it definitely won’t be this year.
So, is it better to blot out the memories of the good times, do they make things worse in the here-and-now, the humdrum? Maybe it’s better not to erase any memories, even the bad ones, because they are part of what you are, and messing with the mind is tricky. Anyway, at my age, my memories have a disturbing way of eliminating themselves when I can least afford to lose them!

Could this be the moment the worm turns???
Are Lizzie and Nigel going to adopt Ruairi? (Myself, I think Ian and Adam should have him).
And can I persuade you-know-who that being a town crier is vital to his ambitions of becoming a parish councillor??? (can't stop thinking about those breeches - and the tricorn hat, of course).

But I wish I could have said it so well!!!
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/ariel_leve/article1622259.ece

Almost a year ago, Goingsomewhere 'tagged' me to produce a list of ten fantasy shags. I only got as far as 8, then gave up and never posted it.
I was reminded of it tonight when watching Dr Who (the connection is in number 2 - which has now been amended - see below - and David Tennant doesn't come into it). So I had to find the list, and I think it's a great testament to my filing system (or packrat syndrome) that I managed to do so - voila!

Fantasy shags
1 No contest; Michael Wood, the telly historian. Looks, brains, and a man of my own age who still has his hair. What more could a girl ask? And it would probably take place half way up either the Himalayas or the Andes – Shangri-La, here I come! (in a manner of speaking…).
2 The young Will Shakespeare… as long as he looks like Joseph Fiennes (yet another reason to hate G Paltrow…).
NB this should now be replaced by the guy who was on Dr Who tonight
3 Jim Morrison… obviously. Had to be. Just hope he wouldn’t be too stoned to perform (or I would be too stoned to care)
4 Casanova – just, for once in my life, to know what it’s supposed to feel like.
5 Han Solo – in a galaxy far, far away.
6 Malcolm McDowell, circa 1972 (a fantasy from my girlhood).
7 Antonio Corelli – I guess. A tricky one, this, but I thought I had to include him though it would be the lifelong romantic devotion I’d go for, more than the shag. BTW, did I mention he has acquired a voice as well as a body –singing Portuguese rather than Italian, and playing acoustic guitar rather than mandolin, but hey, this is MY fantasy!
8 Tommy Lee Jones, circa 1980 something. A fantasy from my twenty/thirties. Mmmm….

So, I never got as far as 9 or 10, though I did toy with the idea of 'the one who got away' from my student days for number 9 (his name was Jonathan, and I wonder what he's doing now?)

As for 10??? I guess I'm still waiting for him to come along...

Went to see the counsellor again yesterday. I was talking about how I had settled into that ‘contented’ plateau, but now I feel I want to move out of it and get back to the dizzy heights, but I’m afraid that it won’t be sustained and I will descend back down into the depths. But maybe that is just the pattern of my life, which I have to accept.
And maybe (it occurred to me) this is the point of acceptance. There is this tension between acceptance and – well, striving, but I’m sure I thought of a really good alliterative word in the night (Achievement? Aspiration?). In trying to achieve ‘acceptance’, I thought it was about accepting things as they are and life as it is and making the most of it – the word the counsellor came up with was ‘resignation’ – making the most of things, counting your blessings, looking on the bright side, in that Pollyanna-ish way which pisses me off so much. So I thought I had to stay on that ‘contented’ plateau because I knew that if I tried to move off it I would start to want more, to be in the dizzy heights all the time, and to crash when I had to go back to ‘normality’, and then struggle to get back to ‘contentment’ again.
But maybe what I have to accept is that that is the pattern of my life, the way it works, and that anticipating the negatives is part of it, as long as I just acknowledge that they will come and not use them as a reason not to try for the positives. And she pointed out that the ‘contented’ plateau won’t stay a plateau forever, but will start to decline eventually anyway, and slide me back into the depths. So trying to cut off that side of me that wants to get to the heights won’t really help anyway in the long run. And although at times the heights seem unattainable, life has a habit of throwing up opportunities when you least expect them, I just have to be alert to that and take advantage of them.

I have roused myself from my hibernal somnolence into developing friendship with a guy (not gay – I assume not, anyway) in the village. Here is the sordid story so far:
· When I only knew him by sight, I thought he had a lovely smile.
· When we landed up on a committee together, I thought he had a lovely voice.
· When he offered to buy me a drink after a meeting to make up for pissing me off (he hadn’t, but I wasn’t going to protest), I found out what we have in common, viz, that he is over-educated, frustrated, and struggling to find gainful employment.
· When (precedent having been set), we ended up chatting over a beer in the snug after another meeting, I persuaded/cajoled/bullied him into standing for the Parish Council.
· When I sent him a jokey email, he responded in kind, and a dialogue has been set up.
· When I was walking up the High Street and he was driving the other way, he stopped his car, wound the window down and grinned at me inanely until I pointed out that he was obstructing the traffic.
Okay, so ‘Sienna’s Lovers’ it ain’t, but I feel I could be drifting into Joanna Trollope (or Midsomer Murders) territory.