I take the second pudding from the bottom oven of the Aga, where it has been steaming all night. Take off the lid of the steamer and carefully lift out the basin. Water splashes on my chin, lucky it isn’t actually boiling. There is a metal cross which supports the basin, there is a name but I can’t quite think of it – maybe it’s a trivet? That sounds about right. A handle of string to make it easier to lift, I’ve learnt from experience that the gap between the edge of the basin and the edge of the pan is too tight for fingers in oven gloves. I ease the basin out onto the tiled work surface.
With a fork, (because I have no fingernails to speak of, too weak and brittle) I unpick the knot of the string holding down the foil cover. Why do I do that, why not just cut the string and throw it away, get some more when it’s cool and dry and ready to be wrapped up with clean paper and foil and put into the cold dresser in the utility room. Why? Because string is string, and this is the way I’ve always done it.
I came into the kitchen looking for Hubby. I heard him through my meditation, getting his breakfast. Why do I want to see him? I don’t know. Maybe for him to notice my unhappiness, maybe because I feel we should be talking, we have something that needs to be talked about, and yet we won’t talk. Maybe because for those few seconds it seemed as though he was better than nobody.
He wasn’t there. I sorted out the pudding and went up to the attic, where I noticed the cold, and the cardi I usually put over my knees in the morning wasn’t there. It was in the bedroom, because I wore it yesterday. I went back down to the bedroom to get it. He was still there, in his suit, ready to go, in a haze of YSL pour homme. I noticed in the bathroom the bottle was almost empty. Should I buy him some more for Christmas? Why? It’s the fragrance I associate with him from 30 years ago. And he has plenty of other bottles of aftershave. He doesn’t need more, and he wouldn’t appreciate it, and what would it say if I bought it for him now?
‘Right, see you later tonight, bye’. Cursory, monotonous, a formula which has to be recited, got through
‘See you later’ I reply. But he is already gone.
L came round briefly yesterday. We sat in the kitchen.
‘I don’t want to be here any more’ I said.
And yet in some ways I still love it. I walked around the neglected garden at the weekend (well, my bits are neglected, not the vegetable garden, of course). The winter jasmine cuttings that I planted against the archway between the front and back gardens is flowering for the first time, two tiny yellow stars against the wall.
‘It’s not home any more, you’re not happy here’ she said.
‘But if this isn’t my home, where is? I don’t have a home.’ My eyes started to fill with tears.
‘Find somewhere and make yourself a home, just for you. That’s what you need’.
What does a nineteen year old know about life?

Well I’ve done two interviews already today, not bad considering it’s only 6 o’clock now, that is the last of the Australian ones done, and two of the three that I was asked urgently (on Thursday) to do for tomorrow. – I’d better get them typed up. The third one is in Halifax (Canada, not Yorks), at least that’s only a 4 hour time difference, I’ll try and do it about 2 o’clock today, a good time, I’ve got another one booked in Ottawa at 3. then if I can I’m hoping to round off the day by calling Vancouver at 6 this evening, the best day to do it as I just have pilates tonight and won’t go till gone 7, other days I need to go out earlier than that, I don’t like calling people earlier than 10 their time if I can avoid it.
Well, I’ve now done 9 out of 19 interviews, so I’m almost half way, though three of those are waiting to be typed up.
The magazine has to go to the printers tomorrow. I got an email yesterday from the president with a whole list of things she wants changing, then a phone call from the editor when I was trying to think about my presentation for my interview – it’s got to be sent to them by Thursday. At one point she was whingeing: ‘I can’t work under these conditions, I haven’t had a chance to write a single Christmas card today!’ at which point I shouted at her down the phone: ‘I haven’t BOUGHT a single Christmas card yet, nor a single present, as far as I’m concerned Christmas will have to be cancelled this year because I just don’t have time for it!’ and she laughed. I told hubby and he started to laugh and I said: ‘She laughed at me and I felt like saying: “You think I’m joking, but I’m deadly serious!”’ which I was and am.
I woke up at 2, I think he was kicking me, I don’t know why, maybe I was talking in my sleep, I don’t think I was over his side of the bed or anything. I’ll ask him this morning.
Well, I feel better for having got those calls out of the way, but I will get another call from the editor some time this morning, when she has had comments back from the other proof reader, she will expect me to have made the changes we discussed yesterday, but my priority has to be to get these interviews written up.
Another irritating thing she said was: ‘I try to get as much done in advance as possible, you should do that too’ well I try to too if there’s time, she just doesn’t have the first idea of what my life is like.
Sorry, there I go moaning again. But this is my moaning place, you know that by now.
Oh, and I made Christmas puddings yesterday, well, the mixture anyway, it has to be left overnight and then I will steam them today. It makes three but I make the full amount because they keep, even up to two years, if you put them in a cool place. It’s Delia Smith’s recipe from her original cookery course of the early 80s, when we were first together. I’ve lent the tatty old paperback version to my daughter, all my cookery books are falling to bits, the pages that get used are covered with spatters and stains, the edges of pages and covers are fraying and going fuzzy. We have on the dining room bookshelf the hardback omnibus edition, inherited from Hubby’s Mum, it is in perfect and pristine condition, I tried to keep it away from any actual food so as not to make it messy, but still managed to get a few splashes of water on it when I was washing up.
And why was I making Christmas puddings, of all things? God knows. Just saying life is normal, I guess, though clearly it isn’t. Why do we do anything?

I didn’t set the alarm again, today I woke at 5:40 and it only took me half an hour to get out of bed. Tomorrow I will have to get up early to call Australia again, but I have been spared that over the weekend.
How did I spend yesterday? Oh, in front of the computer as usual. Sorting out the correspondence for the week, and trying to write the agenda for Thursday’s meeting. I don’t understand how that can have taken me so long, what else was I doing? I tidied up a bit, not everything, I filed away everything for the magazine that I’ve been working on, oh, and I created a spreadsheet so I can track progress on my international project, which interviews I’ve done and which ones are arranged and which ones I have to go back to, and which ones are written up. I have got some planned for tomorrow. How everything else will fit around it and the rest of the week will pan out, I don’t have a clue. I will get by, I will get through it, there will be a time when it’s not like this. There will, surely there will?
So today’s plan is: driving over to the other village to drop something off with one of the councillors and put stuff on the noticeboards; writing this agenda and circulating it; making Christmas pudding; cooking dinner; maybe calling my sister; maybe doing the housework; and writing up the rest of the reports on the interviews I’ve already done and sending them to Yves. I’ve done 7 out of 19 so far.
Oh, and think about my presentation for my interview. Yes, I need to start that, I haven’t even thought about that yet. I was going to set aside some time to do that today because I’m rapidly running out of time. So, I guess that has to be a priority. But the agenda is a priority too, that has to go today. Shit, what DID I do yesterday, how come I got so little done? I sit around and piss about and do nothing, nothing nothing, just think about how miserable I am and try to find someone to talk to, but everyone else is busy with their real lives and no one has time for me. No, that’s not fair, that’s just me whingeing, other people have shit in their lives too.
I want to stop, take a breath, cry. I want to find a place where I can leave this behind and just be me, but it’s going to get worse, much, much worse before it ever gets better again and I’m scared and I’m tired and I’m so bloody lonely.
I checked my bank account online yesterday and my expenses from Berlin has been paid in, this is good for two reasons, one because, obviously, I now have the money and they haven’t forgotten about it and I don’t have to hassle them, but more importantly because it shows that the process works, I know the numbers and codes that I have to put on my invoice to get the money paid in which I will need to get paid for this work for Yves. And financially I am very well off, for me, I have just had my school governors money paid in too, money is coming to me just it’s not enough and regular enough to pay for rent and my own bills.
I’ll buy a laptop and a dongle and just go and write in cafes and write on trains and run away from all this.

I've decided to change it back again.
Let's see if it makes a difference.

I was late to bed last night, so decided not to set the alarm, and woke up at 20 past 6. I should have got up then, but lay there thinking, as I do, not resolving anything, just thinking and when I looked at the clock again it was 10 past 7. Almost a whole hour, just lying there. I disappear off into thoughts about this, that and everything, and that is why I never have any time to do anything and why I always feel stressed.
I went out yesterday evening with my friend J, one of my strong, single women friends, I haven’t seen her since the Mikado, a couple of years ago (actually, almost three).It was only a quiz night and fish and chip supper in aid of our next production, 'Carousel', but it was good to get out and do something different. Because we didn’t have a team we were put with six other people we didn’t know, two young married couples and two young women, all friends. They were nice though, and we came third in the quiz with 74, not bad given that the winners only got 81.
I did my meditation of loving kindness as usual. I have changed my attitude towards it. I used to focus on trying to feel loved, which was difficult, then on trying to feel the love I was sending, which wasn’t much easier. But recently I’ve realised that ‘the focus is on the intention to feel loving kindness’, and to have a better grasp on what that means. The mere act of saying I WANT to feel loving kindness towards myself and others is something worth acknowledging in itself, a step along the way.
I’m struggling to find words this morning, they don’t want to come. I was looking down at my fingers and caught sight of my wedding ring and eternity ring. I started to slide them down my finger, covered them with my thumb, and wondered how it would feel to be free of them. How it will feel.
I sent an email to Himself yesterday, suggesting another possible meeting, but haven’t had a reply. How do I play this? I’m not used to this game. At the moment, I’m telling myself that probably he just hasn’t seen it (I don’t know if that’s his main email address or not, I have lots of addresses and they don’t all get checked as regularly as others). Or maybe he needs to check his diary or something before he can reply. There could be lots of reasons why he can’t reply straight away. Though he didn’t answer my text about my interview either.
I want to hold myself back, I don’t want to care because I don’t want this to matter to me. I’m sick of all that. I don’t want another repeat of the Crazy Frog (or his many predecessors), where I am lost in longing and longing and never knowing where I stand. Though the difference is at least in this case I have had a couple of nights of shagging to look back on.

It’s 6:36, I’ve been up for almost two hours, and I’ve made three phone calls to Australia – one of which was actually successful in that I got an interview, even though the person at the other end pointed out that it was almost 5 o’clock on a Friday afternoon.
That SHOULD have been the last of the Australian ones, except that I got an email yesterday from Yves about the additional bit of the project that they wanted me to do that they wanted the initial scan report back for last Thursday – which I did, though I didn’t get any response/acknowledgement/feedback – with a list of three that they wanted me to follow up further, two of which are in Australia. And they want the report for next Tuesday.
It has really been a horrible week. The magazine has to go to the printers on Tuesday, yesterday I was on and off the phone with the editor, then she said ‘You’re going to send it to Doreen for proof reading aren’t you’, well I sent as much as I had to Doreen on Saturday, I thought, OK (this was about half past two) I could get it done and get to the post office, then I remembered that I had a governors meeting at 3:30 and there was no way I could get it done before then, thought it would have to be posted today which would mean she wouldn’t get it till tomorrow so she wouldn’t be able to do it and get it back to the ed for Monday, everything is falling apart, anyway, the meeting only lasted forty minutes and I was home again by 4:35, managed to get it done and printed out, stuck a first class stamp on it and walked across to the box, when I got back in the house I saw the post man going to empty it so it has gone.
And I had evening meetings on Monday and Wednesday and the minutes are all stacking up there are still some from a fortnight ago which I haven’t finished yet but I also haven’t typed up my phone interviews from today and yesterday and I need to do at least one more today. And write a report on the 6 I’ve done.
Oh yes, I’ve not done very well getting the interviews this week, seem to have spent a lot of time on Skype trying to get hold of people, last week I did 4, this week so far I’ve only got two, one to Melbourne yesterday and one to Adelaide today – I think – as far as I can remember. I was supposed to call someone in Manchester yesterday, but forgot, thought she was gong to call me. So far I’ve done 6 of the 16 (well 19 if you count the three extra ones), they wanted it done by the end of the month (ie November, ie Sunday).
Going out this evening to a Quiz Night, seeing an old friend I haven’t seen for a couple of years that should be fun anyway.

‘You’re a miserable cow’ someone told me yesterday. ‘you need to lighten up, loosen up and get a shag’.
Well hell, tell me something I don’t know.
If I keep staring into the black hole, will there ever be a way I can make sense of it, start to fill it or heal it or whatever it is I need to do with it? Or is it better to ignore it and hope that one day it will decide to go away of its own accord?
I don’t expect you to like me. I’ve told you that. I don’t like myself. There doesn’t seem to be much I can do about that, I try and I try and I try but it never quite happens, it never works out, not really. I know myself too well, I see through the layers, the surface of shyness and reserve and self sufficiency then through that, when you get to know me and I get to know you, to the smile, the sense of humour, the sense of fun, the wit and the intelligence. But get deeper still and you find you’re staring into the abyss, and that’s when people back off and don’t want to know. And that’s how it grows because it says, ‘Look, you did it again, there goes another one, you do this every time’ and I fold in on myself, everything is drawn inwards, I don’t need them, I don’t need anybody, nobody wants me anyway, I’ll run away and hide.
Here I sit and wonder whether there can ever be any escape. No, how can I escape from myself? Wherever I go, I’ll always be there hounding myself, punishing myself, hating myself.
Every day I sit and try and love myself, try to fill the hole try try try. I hear a voice saying: ‘don’t try, just do it!’ who said that? A counsellor, I think, one of the many. Even counsellors don’t really want to talk about the black hole, we never really get on to discussing that, they want to sort out the top layer and encourage the second layer, look, you can do this, you can be happy and attractive and draw people to you, there you are then, why don’t you just do that? Lighten up, loosen up, get a shag? Better not to disturb all that other stuff, bury it, leave it alone, there’s nothing you can do about it, if you pretend it’s not there you can get on with your life.
But it doesn’t stay buried, it rumbles and grumbles away and picks off little bits of this and that, it stops me from picking up the phone or going to see someone, or speaking up at a meeting because, what if you open your mouth and all that comes out is garbage? You know that’s true, don’t you, you know that’s what’s likely to happen because it’s happened before, and don’t you feel like a fool when it does? Why bother trying to make a friend, you know they’ll hurt you or you’ll hurt them and it’ll never work will it? So don’t even try.

I still have to call Melbourne and Adelaide. I decided last night that if I was awake, I would do it this morning, but that after the last two nights I wouldn’t set the alarm early, and I slept through till about quarter to 6. So tomorrow I will set the alarm and do it, though I haven’t had answers to my emails from either of them.
I had a frustrating time yesterday afternoon, trying to get hold of people and getting voicemails, or ‘Send me an email…’ So I’ve still only done 4 out of the 16 interviews I’m supposed to do. The work was wanted for the end of this month (ie this week), I haven’t yet properly written up the ones I have done. All the other work is bouncing around in my head, I haven’t done the actions from the two PC meetings I had a couple of weeks ago, writing letters to residents, etc, and for one of them the next meeting is next week. And the magazine editor is back from her holiday – we got our wires crossed, I thought she wasn’t back till this weekend and she thought the artwork had to go to the printers yesterday – because I told her it was the Tuesday after she got back. In one respect it’s good to have her there because she can edit things as she wants them and there’s a lot to do because all the reports on the speakers from last Tuesday are far too long, but the downside is that she goes in for hour long phone calls that disrupt my concentration and eat up time. So everything bounces around, and I have my interview in two weeks and I’ve been sent a questionnaire to fill in for it and I have to write a 10 minute presentation on how my career so far will contribute to the post and how I see it progressing further…
And as for the emotional side of things – well.
Marian tells me not to give in. If I gave in, I wouldn’t be here. Seriously. When the blackness takes over it is completely absorbing and all-enveloping, it blocks out everything else. And it is almost irresistible, which is why I call it a black hole. It is hard to show it because, I think, it both frightens people and makes them angry. Or maybe that’s just me being egotistical again, and they actually just don’t care. Or if they do care, they feel helpless. Anyway, I’m very, very grateful to the people who dared and cared enough to respond.
It’s hard to explain or justify what brings it on, but I think that quite often it’s simple envy, the thought that other people are more loved, more lovable, have something I don’t and can never find. Which is often nonsense, I know, everyone has their dragons to fight, it’s just that, as Lady Lucy one told me: ‘most of us just tell them to piss off’. The question, as she put it, is: who is going to rule your life, you or it? And she had the biggest dragon of all to fight.
So I hate and despise myself for having these feelings, for admitting them, I try to hide them and when the barriers break down I feel so ashamed of myself and angry with myself. And this is what fuels the vortex.

I lay in bed for three quarters of an hour after the alarm went off, unable to force myself to venture out into the cold. I was awake from 3:30 till gone 5. Then I dreamt about job hunting, and about that exam again, the reading list, all the work I hadn’t done for it, the terror of knowing that I wasn’t prepared and never would be.
Yesterday evening, before the parish council meeting, I was a mess of tears, loneliness and hurt and envy eating away at me, I couldn’t stop myself, I wiped and wiped at my eyes hoping it wouldn’t show, driving to the meeting I started again, but luckily when I got there no one noticed, and I managed to survive through the meeting, though once or twice I felt myself starting again.
I got home and went to bed full of bitterness and bile and loneliness and despair, woke at half past three, my body wracked with sobs. I had never noticed that before, in my silent crying, how the tension starts deep in the stomach and rolls up my torso like a great wave till it hits my throat and stops my breath then comes out in a great crash (but not out loud, never out loud, I mustn’t disturb anybody)and starts again.
What can I do? I try to breathe calmly, to hear the words in my head, ‘May I be happy, May I be well’. It’s nothing, nothing, empty, meaningless sounds, not even sounds because I don’t say them out loud, just impulses in my brain that have no reality and no effect.
There is a great black hole that sucks in kindness and caring and swallows it down, losing it in unfathomable depths. It would suck in love, too, if it could find it, but there is never any to be had. Would love, if it existed, go some way towards filling the hole, to healing it, or would that just be swallowed up too and lost forever?
I know that that hole can never be filled, I’ll never find anyone who can fill it, and how can I fill it for myself? The best I can do is skate around the edges, try to ignore it, put up orange tapes and ‘Danger: Keep away’ signs. Distract myself with sex and friendship and try to stop myself from getting too close, peering into the depths, though it’s hard to resist at times.
‘Lots of men would want you’ I’ve been told more than once, well, maybe they might think they did, maybe they would want my breasts and my mouth and my bodily holes for a while, there are websites you can go to to advertise your wares, no doubt I could find one or two who would oblige me.
But no one would want to look into my black hole, would even attempt to fill that for me.
Which is why I should be grateful that I found one who will ignore it, not shout at me and get angry and tell me what a fool I am what a pathetic, self-obsessed, egomaniacal fool.

I’ve been castigated yet again for my lack of self esteem. People tell me about it as though it’s something I’m not already aware of, as though I’ve just been waiting for them to tell me so and then I will be able to change it. But my feelings about myself are mostly rooted in my experience. I’ve been told that I’m attractive, maybe even beautiful or sexy, and sometimes I feel it to be true, but in general (as I’ve said many times) my experience with men contradicts this. Similarly, my experience with job hunting suggests that employers are rarely impressed by what I have to offer. Maybe I’m just too weird, spiky, strange, who knows for either men or employers to want to take me on.
I was awake last night from 3 till 5, then I dreamt I was on a training course of some kind, it was getting to the end, probably this is related to the fact that I have the last of my writing classes today, but it was much more serious than that. Then at the end I realised that there was an exam and it was really important and that I hadn’t taken anything in or allowed any time for revision. Quite a familiar panic dream.
I’ve got an extra PC meeting tonight, some developers are coming to talk about their plans for an old MOD site on the edge of the village. Actually, I’m going out every evening this week: meeting tonight, college tomorrow, governors meeting on Wed, pilates/meditation on Thurs, and on Friday, a quiz night for my singing/theatre group. I decided to go to the quiz night even though I don’t usually go out on Fridays, and I fixed up to go with a friend I haven’t seen for ages. Hope it will be fun.
I can’t think of much to write about today, you can tell. I’m tired and not feeling very upbeat. I will have to try and do some more phone interviews this afternoon. The work is supposed to be finished by the end of this week, so is the magazine. There are still a couple of reports to come in from last Tuesday’s meeting (the one in London that I missed), and I need a photo of the Royal Institution for the front cover, I was supposed to take one but of course couldn’t. People airily say, ‘Take one from the website’, but of course there is such a thing a copyright. Apparently quite a few people were taking photos, but I don’t know who or how to get hold of them. I’ve put the word out, maybe some kind person will think to send me something.
There are places on the web that have non-copyright photos available, I got one of the Bank of England a couple of years ago. I might have to resort to that.
Another exciting week ahead then. Meanwhile, Christmas is getting closer and I don’t have a clue what I want for myself or what to get for anyone else – apart for my daughter, we have got a Wii Fit for her.

I've had a couple of nice comments (which are much appreciated) about the profile photos I put up on Friday. And they are nice photos, but I've been wondering why it is that they are so at odds with my image of myself.
And the answer, of course, is that a photo is literally a 'snap', it catches what is in front of it in one particular instant, and freezes that. So, those photos were taken under very specific circumstances, and capture the way I was in those split-second moments.
So, for the sake of honesty and clarity, I thought I should post a picture which is more typical of the Linda I know.

Snow on the ground and on the cars. Not much, not enough to leave a complete covering, not even a very thin one, but snow nonetheless. I saw some yesterday in town, I had to go to the sorting office to make sure something got the last post, and there were little patches of snow on the pavement outside the sorting office. But today it’s here.
‘The focus of this meditation is the intention to wish yourself and others well’. The intention, not the achievement of feeling loving towards yourself, that’s too much to expect. I feel lost here. I feel myself pushing away everyone who tries to be kind to me, does this loneliness become a self-fulfilling prophecy? I become unlovable because I feel unloved. I have detached myself, I look around at the house and garden that used to give me such joy and it means nothing to me, or rather, what it means is hateful.
I can hear my Dad’s voice.
‘Why are you always so hateful all the time?’ he said, I can still hear it very clearly. I don’t know what brought it on, I had just said I hated my brother, probably he had been teasing me as usual, making me feel hurt and lonely and humiliated. That’s no reason to hate somebody, is it? It’s only a bit of fun. You don’t hate someone just for teasing you, not even if you’re 10, or 12 or 14 or however old I was then. If you start hating them for it, you’re the one doing the hating, the fault lies in you, you are a hateful person. So you turn the hate onto yourself. And then you get ‘why are you always so hard on yourself?’ and you think, I mustn’t be hard on myself, that’s something else I do wrong, that’s something else to hate myself for and you feel guilty because whatever you do you can’t get it right and then you get: ‘don’t get on the guilt trip’ and you think Christ, it gets worse and worse and you feel guilty for feeling guilty and you can’t see how to stop it all you get into this cycle. And then you think ‘Look, lots of people have it much harder than you do, so what makes you think you’re so important why is what happens to you so bad as to make you entitled to feel this way?’ and you go down and down and down.
So don’t even think about trying to be happy in the middle of all that mess.
I can feel the tension in my body, I’m hunched and closed in, all the pain held inside, all the silent tears that won’t stop coming however tightly I squeeze my eyes to hold them back.
Last night, half in my sleep and half awake I felt someone get into the bed beside me and for I moment I didn’t know who it was, and then I realised, I remembered and moved away. If I reached out and held him, would that make things better again, resolve all these feelings? No, I know it wouldn’t make them go away, not for good. We’ve been down that road too many times. I can imagine his voice saying: ‘What’s wrong?’ but how could I tell him, how could I make him see and understand, when he never has before.

I did something very stupid last night… staying up far too late, till gone 1 o’clock, in fact. Then of course I woke up at the normal time – 5:15 – so I probably got less than 4 hours’ sleep.
I was trying to do (or play, or whatever it is that you call it) ‘Second Life’, but I just got thoroughly confused by the whole thing and gave up. I think it’s time to reinvent myself, to create a new persona. But having said that, were any of the others ‘invented’, or did they invent themselves? They are just aspects of me. I wanted to create someone who would be completely new, to escape from the tyranny of myself. But I found myself struggling to work out how to do even the simplest things. Not so different from First Life, then.
So if ever you find yourself on Avatar Island and see a woman wandering around in circles or stuck to the ceiling wearing half a dress, giver her a hand, will you?
In the end, there is no escape from our selves. They follow us and haunt us. Only Peter Pan was ever fortunate enough to escape from his shadow, and he wasn’t happy until he got it back again.
Ahhhh, happy. Again and again, coming back to that word. How do we find happiness? Internal or external changes? External changes don’t come with any guarantee. Maybe they will make things better, maybe they won’t. How do you know when you’ve reached that point of no return, when you will never be able to change things back to the way they were before, never run back into shelter and security, but be forced to step out into terra incognita? And what will you find? Is it naïve to hope for something better?
If I listen to the voices (and they are legion, but the most powerful one is the Voice of Reason, or Common Sense), it’s all too clear what I should do. ‘The grass is always greener on the other side’ they say, (they are not much given to originality and wit), and ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. In times like these, you can’t be too careful, hold on to what you’ve got, don’t throw it all away for… what?’
I’ve listened to them too long. But that doesn’t necessarily make them wrong, does it?
My mother would want me to be happy, of course she would. But would she say: ‘Look at what you’ve got, and be happy for that. Be happy that you’ve got a good man who looks after you and will never let you down’. But I saw her climb onto Dad’s hospital bed and cover his face with kisses, I saw the light come back into his eyes for one last time, even though the stroke had left him incapable of speaking or moving, his eyes could still smile with love for her. To have that love for over 60 years of your life. How could she understand how I feel?

'Hello!' said Hubby, pulling out his chair for dinner.
'Oh, she's sitting on yours, is she?' I asked. 'Usually it's mine!'
Then I realised that it WAS mine. Since we've been in this house, we've always sat side by side at the kitchen table, and the children used to sit opposite us - when they were here.
'That's because you're Mummy's girl, aren't you?' he said, as she stepped delicately from chair to chair then down to the floor.
'No, she's definitely Daddy's girl' I said.
Some couples stay together for the sake of the children.
But staying for the sake of the cats???

The moon is just a sliver now through the landing window, shining through a cloudy halo. I haven’t seen it for a few days, it was almost full the last time it watched me on my way up the stairs. Time passes.
I dreamt last night that Hubby was holding me and asking what was wrong. And I felt, no I don’t want this, what can I do, what can I say, how am I going to tell him?
In the study, the makeshift secondary double glazing, secured (or not) by thick brown sticky tape, creaks back and forth in the draught. I heard the wind screeching last night. When I settled myself for meditation, orange light flickered through the window, as though the street lamp were faulty, but it was the branches of the chestnut tree blowing past it alternately shutting out and letting through the light.
Meditation merged into just sitting and thinking, words passing through my head, the inescapable tyranny of the words, thinking planning, what am I going to write about? What was said yesterday? How am I feeling? ‘I wish I was dead’. No, no you can’t say that, you can’t wish that, that's not allowed. ‘May I be happy, May I be well’.
The window is getting livelier, more active. I turn to look, wondering if it is about to blow down completely, but it settles back into its grooves. The lights of a car coming up the hill reflect into the room.
L came round to see me yesterday, only for an hour or two. The first time I’ve seen her since last Friday, she is so busy at work again, the landlady hasn’t done the rotas for next week yet, so she doesn’t know when she’ll have another day off, but she knows she’ll be working all weekend, that she’ll have to stay at the pub again, because the landlord’s son is getting married on Saturday and they will be away. She loves the job, the staff, the locals, but she hates the way they take advantage of her.
She hugs me and I hold on to her for so long, squeezing myself into her, trying to absorb the love. It shouldn’t be this way round. ‘How have you been?’
‘Not great’.
We sit on the floor in front of the Aga, both stroking the cat, who isn’t sure whether or not she wants this attention.
At meditation last night, I gave Mary her glasses back. We told Clare the saga of how I’d picked them up when she left them behind last week how I’d arranged to take them round after writing on Monday and then I forgot to take them.
‘She rang and asked if I still wanted her to come round!’ Mary told Clare laughing.
Put like that, I suppose it did sound a bit silly.
‘Put like that, I suppose you couldn’t have said no, that would have been too rude’ I said.
She looked at me.
‘That’s what the voices in my head say’ I continued, ‘you’re a nice person, so you wouldn’t want to say no, so I don’t know whether you really wanted to see me or not’.
‘Then you need to change the voices in your head, don’t you? You can change them, you know’.
‘But I have to put other people’s feelings before my own, because if I put mine first that would be selfish and selfish people are bad people. That’s what my mother taught me’.
‘But would your mother want you to be unhappy?’
‘No, but...’
‘Well then.’
It’s not till this morning that I realise the answer to this puzzle.
My mother would tell me I should be happy, I have to be happy, to look at what I have and be happy for that.

I just had two attempts to call Australia via Skype. The first time I could hear something but just noises, not any kind of proper speech, then it went dead. The second time I got an engaged tone. What do I do now?
What I did was try the test call, which worked OK, then try calling here, which was very iffy. I crawled under the book case and made sure the head set was pushed in properly. Tried again. It was engaged. Left it on redial. Eventually it got through.
Talked to Australia for 15minutes and it cost 22p. Not bad.
So that is now two down and 14 to go. This one really wasn’t very relevant, but I have got some answers to the generic questions I have been asked to use. I can write up another little report.
I’ve had an email reply from Calgary saying someone will call me in the next two working days. I need to check the time difference – they will be calling afternoon or evening, I hope they’ll be sufficiently aware to make it afternoon. I’ll be out this evening from 6. Tomorrow we would normally have wine for dinner, but if they haven’t called by then maybe I shouldn’t have any.
Walking back up the stairs with my cup of coffee, it occurred to me that this is all very surreal.
I woke at 4:15, which was good, I’d set the alarm for 4:40 anyway, but it was good to be awake and ready. I was a while getting off to sleep last night, possibly because I was thinking about having to make this call. I really don’t like having to do it. I have definitely ‘stepped outside of my comfort zone’, to use the horrible jargon.
It’s so long since I’ve done anything like this, since I’ve felt myself being really stretched in this way. It’s good that I’ve got this, because it is preparing me in a way for if I get the job (or at least for the interview), because if I do, I won’t necessarily be doing things like this exactly, but I will have to do other unfamiliar and probably even more scary things. Am I ready, at my age, to stretch and grow some more?
Last night at dinner, Hubby asked if I was OK. I’d been pushing the last bit of chicken around my plate, I really wasn’t hungry, but that was because I’d binged on oatcakes while I was cooking. Stupid thing to do. I just asked him if he wanted my last bit of chicken, which he took.
I move through life in this strange kind of limbo. I don’t understand how I got here or where I go next, I just live from day to day. I don’t know how I manage to keep functioning, to get things done, but somehow I do. I want Himself, but I never hear from him and I don’t know when/if I’ll see him again. What I will do I have to do alone. And before then, there’s Christmas.

I never know what the title is going to be for this until after I’ve written it, which is why the titles often refer to something near the end. I was going to call this ‘procrastination’, but I thought that might suggest it was about something else. Not that it matters what I call it, I suppose.
A strange morning today, a day for doing things in the wrong order. First, I poured out a glass of grapefruit juice when I got into the kitchen this morning, when it should have been water – grapefruit juice is breakfast. I put it in the fridge, but then I drank it after meditation, when it should have been coffee. And I just opened Yahoo when I always go straight to Word and start typing this before I check my emails – though there were no new ones, so it didn’t matter.
I slept through till the alarm, but I found it took quite a while to get to sleep last night. Strange, given that I’d been awake from 3:40. Maybe it was the two mochachinos I had at college, or maybe it was because I was on the computer too late. Who knows?
Some of the work I’m doing for Yves came on much better yesterday, and some of it was harder and I made less progress than I thought. But on balance I was pleased with it, though I still have to make those phone calls.
I need to get on with the magazine as well because the deadline for that is looming. I wonder what is happening about the follow up to the Berlin meeting as well, I thought Alexander was going to send me some questions but they haven’t come yet, am I supposed to act on my own initiative and prepare something anyway? I haven’t even thought about it.
It is strange doing something that actually challenges me, that I really have to think about, rather than it being semi-mechanical, like the clerking work, or even the dtp. I’ve been experiencing that sense of vertigo/panic, what if I can’t actually do this, what if what I do is not what they want, what if I let them down? Research is always a bit like that though, even if you’re applying recognised techniques, you’re never too sure what is going to come out of it, and researching on the net is terribly ad hoc; what if you don’t find anything, what if you miss something vital, when do you stop looking, and how do you keep looking if you don’t find what you needed the first time? How do you know whether there’s nothing there or whether you were just looking in the wrong place, or gave up too soon? Actually, that’s not so different from researching from documents, and it’s a lot quicker.
I’ve been trying to send out emails to the people I need to talk to, just so they don’t feel I’ve cold called them, but it’s not always easy to tell who it should go to. Maybe it’s a way of procrastinating because I don’t want to make these phone calls. But I must start today. It will be better once I’ve got started.
I think I should try to get as much information from the websites as possible before I call. Or is that another form of procrastination?

PS I just checked my Outlook, and I have had the first answer to one of my emails - from a lady in Sydney. She sounds very nice. She doesn't have Skype, but will be available to chat on the 20th after 4:00pm Sydney time. when the hell is that? I suspect that's 4:00AM tomorrow here. I'd better check.

It was 3:40 this morning, I didn’t get back to sleep, and I (stupidly) didn’t get up till 5:20. If I crash half way through the day, so be it.
Yesterday morning, by the time I left for writing, I had a plan.
I will have the talk with Hubby, after Christmas, but before S goes back to university. I will move into the spare room. I will give Hubby the choice of whether we continue to have meals together – which mainly only happens at weekends these days anyway – or separately. Maybe he will retreat into the attic again, in a way that would suit me, but I will let him decide. If I get a job before then, I can start looking for a place to live. If I don’t, well, I still have my current jobs and a reasonable cushion of savings. So, I can still look for somewhere, possibly lodgings rather than renting a place of my own. Not too far away, because this will still have to be my office for a while at least, removing everything will be a major upheaval. I can carry on job hunting, and if worse comes to worst I can fall back on the JK Rowling option – finish the bloody novel, who knows, maybe it will turn out to be a best seller?
This idea cheered me up immensely, and I went to writing with a light heart, full of my usual dazzling wit and repartee, very unlike the last couple of sessions.
Afterwards I popped in to see Mary, who lives round the corner from the study centre, although some of the sparkle had worn off by then. I told her about the interview, and the job, and how stressful it will be.
‘So you’re already talking yourself out of it?’
‘No, I’m just trying to be realistic’.
‘Well why don’t you envisage yourself getting that job and doing it and doing it well?’
I bridled at all that Noel Edmonds guff.
‘I’m not saying there’s some miraculous force, but if it changes your attitude, it can only help. It does work, you know. Sometimes. We make our own karma. Already you’re here with the “buts”’.
‘But… if I do get it it will be mega-stressful and I get stressed enough about the silly little jobs I do already’.
‘So, at the moment you’re stressed and badly paid, and you could be stressed and well paid. Which do you think you should go for?’
Fair point.
When I got home I got on with the parish magazine articles. There were a couple of emails from Yves. The clients are putting pressure on, and they’ve come up with something else. When can I have it done by?
‘I’ll be in London all day Tuesday…’
I shouldn’t have gone to Mary’s, I should have come home to work – but she would say: ‘Spending time with a friend, that’s important too’.
I keep working till 7. Maybe I shouldn’t go to pilates, maybe I should just stay here and keep working all evening. There’s the magazine too, remember, I haven’t touched that for days. Was supposed to do it at the weekend, but ended up blogging instead Just because I enjoy it doesn’t mean it’s going to do itself and I don’t have to think about fitting it in.
On the way to pilates, I think – I won’t go to London. I’ve already found out that I would be too late for the morning tour of the Royal Institution, because they’ve changed the rules for the cheap train tickets and I can’t leave before 9:40. And in the afternoon, the seminar in Westminster ends at 4, so I won’t get back to St P in time for the 4:18 and will have to wait till 7 before I can get the train home. Which means I‘d have to miss college. And it’s not as if I was going to see Himself – or anyone else I particularly care about seeing.
Cancel it, and for the sake of missing a 2 hour seminar, I will gain a whole day to get on with this work.
Sorted.

I had a terrible night last night, the worst I remember for a while, I was awake from 2:30 till gone 5. I’ve had a letter from the sleep clinic asking me to take part in trials of a new drug, and my first reaction was to say yes, I’d do it, but when I started to think about it I’m not sure. For one thing, my sleeping is nowhere near as bad as it used to be, so I’m not sure I’d make such a good subject. Would I have to stop listening to the tapes to make it more of a fair test, and what would that do to me? Also, what if there were side effects of the drugs themselves, what if they made my sleep worse, or I found that my body became used to them and at the end of the trials I had to keep taking them? I’m glad that I’ve been able to control (or at least learn to live with) my insomnia without taking drugs, I don’t really want to start now.
I’m nervous about this work for Yves, and about the interview – or, worse, about how it might be if I got the job. I realise it’s a long time since I’ve had to face up to something I really don’t want to do, or, rather, that I’m really not sure whether I can do . The spectre of failure, of finding myself out of my depth, is looming over me. I try to think of past achievements, but because they’re done, they’re done, because I’ve done them, they don’t seem very special, even if they were intimidating at the time.
I’ve said I don’t want to fall in love again. Well, I would like to have the feeling of being in love, I suppose, but I don’t want the inevitable consequences: rejection, pain, disillusionment, disappointment, frustration, humiliation… the list goes on. I’m sure I had more words than that in my head, they pushed their way in there when I was trying to sleep, when I was trying to meditate (a more realistic mantra than ‘may I be happy, may I be well…’).
Have I never had any positive experiences of love? Well, my most enduring relationship has been my marriage, and, when I think about it, most of those words apply pretty well. Other than that, every single experience of love I’ve had has been unrequited, mostly on my side, very rarely the other way round, which is also painful. Why should I want to put myself through that again, even if the opportunity arose?
I have no idea how Himself feels about me – other than that he likes having sex with me – although our meeting and first night together were the most ‘romantic’ experience of my life. Still, it’s nice to have been told how much he enjoyed making love to me. At least I’ll be able to go to my grave knowing that I wasn’t a total dead loss in the bedroom department, which I couldn’t have done otherwise.
Friendship and occasional sex (if I’m lucky) and the love of my children. I can’t hope for anything more than that.

Dark night of the soul again yesterday evening. Why does that so often happen on Saturdays? Is it the gin? Or is it that ‘everyone else’ feeling, that Saturday is the night when ‘everyone else’ is having a good time, going out and enjoying themselves, a weekly version of the New Year’s Eve ‘everyone else’ feeling? Even though I know that, logically, that is ridiculous, I’m not the only one washed up by the tide and stranded on the abandoned beach of the weekend (something not quite right in that metaphor, but it’ll do for here and now), logic is powerless when set against such feelings.
Two feelings were uppermost last night: jealousy/envy (I will conflate the two, although really they have very distinct meanings) and rejection. Why can’t I resist the temptation to compare myself with others? Temptation is too mild a word. Maybe drive, urge, imperative would be more appropriate. She is more beautiful than me, he is stronger than me. Love me, please? Please? Ignore them. I want to be the centre of your attention, of your universe, whoever you are. Push them aside and take me instead. The most primitive of demands, like a nestful of baby birds, beaks agape, demanding more and more Yes, yes, they’re my brothers and sisters, but I’ll push them out of the nest if that will give me a bigger share of you.
I see this in myself and I despise it, I loathe myself for my lack of beauty and strength and for my spiteful selfishness and I pull myself down, down into the quicksand and away from the light till I cannot see any more.
I find myself distracted by the toolbar, there are icons down here that I never noticed before, toggle buttons and list boxes, what are they for? Perhaps they relate to form design, And why am I thinking about them and not about whatever it was I was talking about before? Could it be that I’m getting too close to something too painful?
I am wary of love. I will not let myself fall in love, I can’t bear to be so vulnerable. I want to learn how to live without love, or the expectation or hope of love. I won’t be demanding, I won’t expect anything. I should be used to that, I have had thirty years of tailoring my expectations: ‘It’s just the way he is, I know he loves me really, he just can’t show it, but it’s there, I mustn’t ask for more’. I texted Himself on Friday when I found out about the interview, (I told him about the job over dinner that night), but he hasn’t replied, maybe he doesn’t have his phone switched on at the weekends, maybe he hasn’t had an opportunity, maybe he doesn’t know what to say. He’s not one for texting or emails, I’ve noticed that, but it doesn’t make it any less wonderful when I’m with him, I know how much he wants me, and I hear those excuses again in my head, it’s the way he is, I have to accept that, and I think, here we go again.
So, I will not love, I will not make myself vulnerable again, I’ll learn not to.

Two things have come up in the last couple of days. On Thursday I had an email from Yves in Brussels about the project I did some preliminary work on for him. Because I was a bit late doing it, and I hadn’t heard anything back from him, I thought it wasn’t good enough and he was disappointed with it. I knew there was supposed to be some follow up, but I wasn’t sure if he was going to ask me to do it and I was wondering whether I would get paid for what I did do and how to negotiate it with him.
Anyway, I got an email on Thursday asking me to carry on, the next stage being to call the people involved with a short list of the projects I identified through my initial web search. When I say ‘call’, I’m talking about organisations in the US, Canada and Australia as well as UK.
I sat and looked at the email on Thursday morning and thought: ‘This is going to be very stressful for me, I hate talking to people on the phone, doing phone interviews is going to be a bit of a nightmare, and I have so much else on’ – he was asking for it to be done by the end of the month. And what about the cost of the phone calls? Well, I tried out the headset I bought a month ago and got that working, then checked out what the costs would be to do it via Skype – some of them might have Skype, in which case it would be free, but for the ones who don’t I would need to call from Skype to their landline. But that way it would be separate from our phone bill, and I wouldn’t have to wait for the quarterly phone bill to come through to work out what the costs were. So, I thought, I should do this, and then include it in my invoice. L turned up while I was still thinking about this, and I talked to her about it. I decided I would email him and say, I’d be happy to do the work, but I’m very busy, and I don’t want to let him down, so at least I was honest, and also to ask him about the Skype. And he came back and was absolutely fine about it all and wants me to go ahead.
Then yesterday, I got an email inviting me for an interview for the Research Fellowship job I applied for at my old university. When I’d more or less given up on it, because I applied before I went to Berlin, and I hadn’t heard a dickie bird since.
So that’s something else I have to worry about. They said they would follow up references before the interview because I’d said that was OK. And Yves is one of my referees. So I’m glad I agreed to do his work.
I spent yesterday trying to get some of my other crap out of the way, sat down and made myself type up minutes, two PC meetings one after the other, pretty mind numbing. I didn’t quite finish the second set, so there’s that, my writing assignment which needs to be finished by Monday, two parish magazine articles which have to be sent in by Tuesday (and need to be checked by the councillors before I submit them), proof read my son’s project report, and do some more on the magazine. Oh, and there are quite a few action items form the PC minutes, letters to write, etc. So I need to get all that lot out of the way asap, go to London for the day on Tuesday, and get on with Yves’ work. Oh, and there’s the minutes to do for Thursday’s governors’ meeting and the agenda to do for the next one… and I just realised I didn’t circulate the agenda for the other school that should have gone out on Wednesday, I just cleared it with the Chair and the Head but then never sent it out generally. Shoot, better do that today.