I did actually go out and do some gardening yesterday, it was such a beautiful day. Well, I had a go at cleaning out the pond. This is one of those jobs which has been gnawing at the back of my mind for a few weeks, but when I got started I was quite happy, probably because the weather was so nice. I took the cover off, lifted out the plants (the ones which have become overgrown), cut them back and split them, pulled out dead leaves, blanket weed etc with my bare hands. The pond is terribly silty and muddy, I don’t really know what to do about it. We had some stuff from the garden centre, called ‘mud muncher’, need to go and get some more but they don’t have it in our nearest garden centre so it’s a bit of a trek to get it. I’m not sure how effective it is, maybe it would be even worse without it, one of those things you’re never too sure about. Anyway, I just sat enjoying the sunshine, messing about getting muddy and smelly, quite happy, though I’m not sure how efficient or useful or anything else I was actually being. The fish just hid in the bottom, minding their own business. I wondered afterwards if I should have changed some of the water, that would have meant baling it out and filling it up again. I cleaned out the filter as well for the fountain. It did look better when I’d finished.
The other thing I had to do yesterday was the Treasurer’s report for my women graduates group. I had to sort out the accounts, which I don’t mind doing, but of course it took longer than expected, in fact I didn’t really get it finished so I’ll have to do it today, although paid work must take priority. But I really didn’t want to come in and go on the computer yesterday, I would much rather have stayed outside in the garden.
Nothing else really to say, nothing profound or soul searching today, except to repeat what I’ve said before, about not using my time properly and not getting things done, I start dong something and I just drift off, as I did with the pond yesterday, I had poetry ideas and blogging ideas and all sorts drifting through my head as I sat in the sun messing about aimlessly, not really knowing what I was doing, and none of the ideas came to anything either.

I don’t know what to write about today. I really don’t. Not a clue.
The sun is shining. Looks like it’s going to be a nice day. Maybe I’ll try and spend some time out in the garden. Can I get back into that again? At the moment, gardening is one of those things I can’t motivate myself to do. Once I get into it, I know I’ll be fine, like writing. But at present I just can’t seem to get started – on either of them. And gardens, like children and pets, don’t respond well to neglect. I have this tendency to disappear into a world of my own and other things just get left, but that doesn’t work with living things, it tends to cause problems. Actually, it causes problems with everything, housework, work, life. Maybe this is what mindfulness is about, keeping on top of things, being aware of what you’re doing and what’s happening, staying in touch with the world and not going through it in a bubble. Which is what I do most of the time. ‘Lost in a world of her own’ could be written on my tombstone, not that I’m planning to have one, a tree will do for me, that’s what I’d like, a bio-degradable coffin in a woodland burial. But not for a long, long time.
Realistically, though, what I have left is limited. So what should I be doing with it to make sure it’s better than what went before? To get to the end and think – is that it? No, I don’t want to do that.
What I will leave behind, to show that I’ve been here in the world, will be my kids and my words. What else is there that matters? My words accumulate and grow. They are here, they are in notebooks, they are on my hard drive – where else? Nowhere, really. It would be nice to think that some of them might have wormed their way into some people’s heads and hearts, who knows?
Perhaps my words have made a difference to somebody, out there in the bigger world, have affected their life in some way. I don’t have any great ambitions or delusions. But someone might have read something which made them smile or made them think, which triggered something else in themselves or their lives. Why not? It has happened to me, from stuff I’ve read here. Just enough to tip them onto a different path, I don’t mean anything dramatic, but each of these encounters changes the world in an infinitesimal way, and who can say where those changes might lead?

I went to a meeting of Town and Parish clerks and councillors yesterday. After I’d finished my free lunch and thought I should be getting home and back to work, I was going for my coat when a man came up to me and said: ‘You used to work for G**, about 25 years ago. You must have been straight out of college.’ (Bless!) ‘You were in the Computer Services department, you worked in the OR team, with Steve H*’. I stared at him, but I couldn’t place him at all. He pulled a hankie from his pocket and wiped a breadcrumb from his chin. I asked him who he worked for then. ‘I was in Marketing, across the other side of the landing.’ I muttered something about ‘Well, it’s a small world, but I have to get off now’ and scurried away.

When I was repeating the story to my daughter later, she said, ‘Wow, that’s something, that he could still recognise you after all this time!’ and I thought, yes, I suppose it is. Especially as I have no recollection of him at all. He wasn’t that unattractive, must be a few years older than me, I suppose, judging from the context in which he remembered me, but he still had hair, which is always a bonus I admit I was quite flattered by the ‘straight out of college’ line, but I guess the mere fact that someone who can only ever have known me by sight when I was in my 20s could still recognise me after all this time, well, that’s quite flattering too, when you think about it.
The other funny thing was that I was chatting with my friend Val over lunch, and also to another guy on our table, whom I didn’t know (don’t think Val knew him either). The age profile of Clerks is that, although some of the women are a bit younger, the men are almost universally retired from some other job, so they are predominantly in their 50s and 60s, but the chap on our table said, ‘Oh that’s the motorbike man over there’, and Val and I both instantly swung round to see who he was talking about. And no, it wasn’t some hunk in leathers! Oh well, we don’t get any better, do we?

I just had one of those naked dreams. You know the sort I mean, the ones where you’re totally naked. Nothing erotic, you just do normal stuff, working in an office, walking into shops, it’s just that you’re not wearing any clothes. I think it probably means I’m feeling vulnerable.
I think my problem at the moment is that I don’t have any passion in my life, I don’t feel passionate about anything. I don’t mean people, though that too. But I don’t really, deeply care about anything. I don’t want to save the world, it’s bent on destruction anyway, nothing I do is going to make a difference. I don’t want to make my village a better place to live, again, there are too many people wanting different things, some things are bound to get worse and some might get better, and life goes on and that’s just the way it. I don’t want to save my marriage, ditto. There is just nothing in my life at the moment that I really care about – well, I care about my kids, but I don’t feel that requires me to do anything just at present, if they need anything from me, they’ll let me know.
Maybe this is another aspect of that sense of detachment I was talking about a couple of weeks ago. The world goes on without me. I can be as nihilistic as I choose, and no one will take any notice. It doesn’t matter. Well, maybe nihilism is too strong a word. Maybe it’s just good old honest-to-goodness apathy. I’m not even passionate enough to be nihilistic.
A couple of years ago, I was feeling that I was wasting my life because I wasn’t dong anything externally, a proper ‘job’. Now I am doing plenty of those, and being appreciated for it by others, though I think the value of what I’m doing is pretty questionable. But what am I doing inside myself? I’m doing nothing for me, nothing that grabs me and fires me and sets my soul alight and my heart singing, and all those other clichés, after all, how can a heart sing, mostly all they do is make a ‘whump, whump, whump’ noise.
I’m struggling to write this morning. Only 400 so far. Where are the words when I want them? They’re still there, don’t worry, they’re always there. As long as you don’t think, as long as you don’t try to say anything profound, or interesting, you can say what the hell you want. But I haven’t done any disciplined writing for ages and ages. This stuff doesn’t count, it just takes me anywhere, anywhere it wants to go, and I shrug and go along with it, too apathetic to put up any resistance. And I still haven’t quite hit the magic 500 yet. So, turn the crank again, let another couple of sentences spew out, then that’s it.

Going back through old blogs – as I have been doing – is a strange experience. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Yet I can see that I am very different from two years ago in many ways. I have more opportunities now, even though I’m still not clear where they are leading. Reading my initial qualms about applying to the first conference in Oxford was quite amusing. It is the curve balls that life throws you which cause the most seismic shifts. Yet reading my comments on my novel was depressing. I seem to be no closer to completing it than I was then, and now I have less chance of doing so because I have less time.

Sometimes time passes frantically, like water swirling down the plughole, and at others it seeps out, drip, drip, drip through the cracks, but wherever it goes and however it goes, it goes. Managing time is something I always wrestle with. My mind is on a different time line from the rest of the world, it lives in a place where everything is in the now and it loops and coils back on itself, while linear time forges on around me with grim determination to get from the start of each day to the end and then start again. This has only really become apparent because of writing a journal and going back through it. But it becomes obsessive, repetitive, another way of chewing up the time and spitting it out again.

I had to go into town yesterday to the bank to transfer money between two of the parish council accounts before the end of the financial year. I had a couple of other errands to do too, but I didn’t expect it to take me over an hour, as it did. Time spent standing in queues, time spent wandering from a to b, trying to remember if there was anything else I needed while I was there, going into shops just in case the perfect pair of boots was sitting there waiting for me... and all this while I know that I have so much to do and should be getting on with it. Yet somehow I have managed to meet my deadlines, even if it is only by forcing myself out of necessity.

I also reflected on how strange it is, really, to have spent so much of my life, over half of it, on and off, living in and around such a nondescript place, a place I have no real feeling for or attachment to. I can’t say I’ve ever felt I belonged to it, there again, I’ve lived in villages rather than the town itself. When I lived in Dallas, I was homesick for England, and for my own house, but not specifically for Bedford. Why did I ever end up here, the place I came to for my first job, to still be here over 30 years later? Married a local man, that’s what I did. But somehow I never thought this was where my life would be spent.

Anyway, one good thing I did yesterday, I booked my hotel room in Paris

I wake early and lie there for an hour while the words surge through me, demanding to be heard, demanding to be captured, to be written down, displayed, presented, though I don’t believe that anyone will take any notice, except myself perhaps, two years from now, or whenever, reading them again and marvelling and thinking, ‘that’s how I felt, but what happened next? It didn’t take me anywhere; I’m still here, still fighting with those same words’. Thick and fast they come, riddled with cliché, falling, tumbling over themselves. How can I ever remember them?
Sometimes they line up in my head, waiting to be transcribed, transferred from the world-in-there to the world-out-here (though this is really just another ‘inside’ world, just inside somewhere else and slightly more accessible to others, if others there be who care to access it). Sometimes I have no idea until I sit here what they will be or where they will come from. Sometimes the same ones come back again and again, and I type them out again forgetting that I’ve already said them some other time in some other way, or maybe in the same way.
How was I feeling, when I lay in bed, listening to the birds singing, and a cat crying (was it one of my mine? What did it want? Was it just passing through? I didn’t hear it for long) And Hubby’s gentle breathing, so close beside me yet so far from my heart (what was I saying about clichés?).
I feel gauche and unlovely, yet I know that doesn’t define who I am, that I can be so much more, that I can be admired, desired even, if I knew how to capture the essence of that person, the one that seems to be liked and admired and desired. But she runs away and laughs at me, I can’t keep up with her, I sigh, I think ‘why can’t I be happy just to be a good woman and love my husband and my kids and my house and my job, and take my happiness from that?’ though I know I never will, and there will always be something more out there that I can never quite grasp.
And those other ones, the ones who look at me (if they see me at all) as though I were something unmentionable sticking to their Manolo Blahniks (whatever they are, my favourite footwear comes from Primark), do they feel the same inside, well, not the same, but do they have their own insecurities? I’m quite sure they do, though it doesn’t help to remember that, not as it ought to.
And I bounce back and forth, I think about walking through Brussels on the first afternoon, the last time, alone with my words, unable to get in touch with anybody, so I walked alone through the city streets, across the Grande Place, through the elegant arcade thinking, ‘What do I do now?’ I didn’t have a book or notebook with me, I could have sat in a café alone with a hot chocolate, but without a book in front of me, without the comfort of words, either ones to read or some way of writing my own, I felt bereft and horribly alone. And I thought, is this how it would be, to be alone? Though I knew the answer, that it might be some of the time, but it wouldn’t be all of the time. And I thought of Seal’s song ‘Don’t cry, You’ll always be loved’, and I thought, yes, surely there would always be someone, if I made the leap, I’m not so unlovely, after all, and there is one love in my life that I will never lose and that is my daughter, not so much my son, though I know I have his love too, it’s not a love I can do anything with, too much like his father’s love, it is a massive, solid, impenetrable thing which I cannot fall into and embrace and make my own.

So, life sort of goes back to normal today. Hubby is on holiday for the rest of the week, but me? I think I’ll at least try and get one of those sets of minutes done, and answer some emails, and see what the post brings, and send off an abstract, and maybe start thinking about the talk I have to give next month. The boundary between ‘work’ and ‘life’ is pretty fluid. I know that’s not good, I always said I wouldn’t let it get like that, that I would keep them distinct, but as I have taken on more, it has become harder to make that distinction. Of course, it works both ways, in that I don’t have a problem with taking a few hours mid week to go to the hairdresser’s, or an afternoon to go to the theatre in Cambridge (well, depending on how things are going). Although hubby also mostly works from home, he is much better at keeping the boundaries fixed. It used to be, when I wasn’t doing so much, that when he was on holiday, I would make sure I took time off as well, but these days, it’s not as if we would be doing anything together.
I sent off three of my poems to a magazine yesterday. This is part of my decision to submit something every month. I don’t have much hope, but I set myself the challenge and I will stick with it. I went through the last couple of issues of Writers’ News and set up a database on Access with competitions/magazines and their submission dates. Then in the afternoon I was playing about with the website for the meditation group, putting up photos from the meditation days we had recently. So, I wasn’t ‘working’ as in paid work, but I was still sitting at the computer doing the usual sorts of things.
When I was doing the Hoovering, I was thinking about what somebody said to me when I came back from Cyprus, that the good times are never really as good as we think they are, and the bad times are never really that bad either. And I thought, although I have some wonderful memories of that time – and some painful ones, too – I have to just accept it for what it was, and say, it’s good to have times like that, but life can’t be like that all the time, and we have to be glad for the good moments and just deal with the rest. Because I was feeling quite sad yesterday, and things seemed rather bleak. But each morning is a new start, and we get up and go through the old rituals, and face another day. Because we never know what the day may bring, it could be sadness, it could be joy.
The year is not even a quarter of the way through yet, and so far I have oscillated between hope and despair – well, nothing new there. Hanging on to hope is the hardest thing to do, though I started the year thinking about hope. It’s too easy to give in to despair, to think that everything is going down from now on, that some kind of threshold has been crossed and we are tipping over into darkness. Which is ridiculous, because the sun always rises, and the spring always comes back (eventually!) Why should it be so hard to hang on to that?

Chatting to La spice got me thinking (yet again)about the central dilemma of my life – do I stay, or do I go (and if so where, and how, and what would I do, and how would I cope…) Will I ever be truly happy if I stay? No. But will I ever be truly happy if I go? Is anyone ever truly happy? What does truly happy mean? So I ask myself more and more questions which drive me further and further away from actually having to take action.
A nice lady rang up yesterday, I don’t think I know her, but she asked if I would do front of house at the show next week. I haven’t actually been in a show since the Mikado two years ago, I’ve kind of fallen out of the loop and I never know when the auditions are so I’ve missed out on a couple I would have liked to do. And I usually do back stage when I’m not performing (dresser, to be precise), not front of house. Someone rang the other day when I was out and left a message about helping backstage, I hadn’t got back to her though I’d been thinking about it, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll do front of house and I’ll go to the party and maybe audition for the next show.
Well, singing makes me happy, and being involved with shows is fun and I was wondering where I could find some fun.
Talking to a friend on Thursday who completed her PhD last year, about all the stuff I’m doing now compared to a couple of years ago, and she said that I do all this to distract myself because it stops me from writing and writing is really hard. But I’ll repeat what I always say, that writing is really easy, it’s writing about something worthwhile which is hard.

Why does everything always take so much more time than I expect it to or feel it ought to take? Is it because I’m so careful and meticulous that I want everything to be perfect, so I double and triple check everything I do and spend time wondering about how best to do whatever it is? Is it because I’m such a dreamer I drift off into a world of my own instead of concentrating on what I should be doing? Is it because I throw myself so intensively into what I’m doing that I enter another world and get lost in it? Is it because I am easily distracted? Is it because I panic and don’t know where to start or what to do next and get paralysed, and spend ages thinking about what I should be doing rather than getting on and doing it? Is it because I don’t plan, or because I over-plan? Is it because I’m so untidy I spend half my time looking for the things I need to use? Is it because I’m just generally incompetent and badly organised?
Well, all of the above – not necessarily all at the same time, though, some of them are contradictory, after all.
I’ve been planning to do these VAT forms since the start of the year – the idea was to do them on the calendar year so that I would get the refunds back by the end of the financial year. Well, that didn’t happen, but I knew it needed doing before the end of the year.
I was going to try and get them done by the end of last week, I wanted to get them in the post on Thursday but it became obvious it wouldn’t happen, so I thought, OK, I have all day Friday to do them, I’ll do them then and get them into Saturday’s post and they should be there for Tuesday. So I started on Friday thinking, I have all day to do this, it will be a breeze, and of course by mid afternoon I was still on the first one (though I had done other things like sorting through the correspondence which had been piling up – to try and find some of the invoices – and tidying up the desk, in case there were any invoices lurking there…)
So I thought, OK, now I just need to complete the forms, I can do that in the morning before the post goes…
So I got started over breakfast yesterday, and I finished one by 9, and I thought, OK, I’ve got an hour to do the other one, that’s fine, no problem, but of course, once I started, I realised there were all sorts of things I hadn’t actually resolved, and I had to go back through the study looking for stuff, and then the numbers didn’t add up, and I had too much for one form so I had to print out another copy of the form and and… Well, in the end I had to drive into town with them to catch the latest post at 12:00.
Then in the afternoon I was cooking. I enjoy cooking, and recently I haven’t had much time to spend over it, so I did enjoy myself, but I know it shouldn’t really take a whole afternoon to cook a meal, not even three courses. And I did do other things as well, like listen to a play on the radio (which actually was rather awful), and clean out the grate, and I was planning to do some other house work too, and I kind of made a start, but the thing with house work is that when you haven’t done it for a while it seems so awful and intimidating that you really don’t even want to start.
And I was thinking, this is how it is, when you’ve been really intensively busy on something, when it’s done, you want to be able to stop, but then you see all the other things that you haven’t been doing while you’ve been doing it, and you think, oh, now I should be doing them, and then you think, is there going to be a time when I can just do something I want to do because I enjoy it, and if so, what would that be?

It’s wild again out there, the draught through the cat flap blows the kitchen door open, the temperature is low on the Aga, I hope it’s not going to go out again, it should be ok after its service last week, but who knows. In the study, the wind comes straight through the windows. Because the house is listed, we can’t have sealed unit double glazing, so we improvise. In here, there is a sheet of secondary double glazing which just fits, but it’s held on with wide sticky tape, and the wind has blown it loose so it creaks and moves backwards and forwards. My shoulders ache from hunching over the keyboard and bracing myself against the draught, I wish someone would give me a massage.
Outside, the trees and the church tower are grey outlines as though seen through a dirty net curtain. The snow is coming down at an angle of 45 degrees, falling urgently, driving towards the ground.

I want to change the description that appears at the top of my blog, (not my profile, I've done that), but I can't work out how to do it, though I know I've done it in the past.
And I wish the stats were a bit more reliable, because I just checked and apparently I've already had 72 visitors today, which is clearly bollo... ... blooming inaccurate

I woke this morning to daylight in the room. At first I thought I must have forgotten to set the alarm, but when I looked at the clock it was 5:50.
Of course, it’s the equinox (well, I don’t know exactly whether it’s today or tomorrow, but I guess it’s today because today is a day later anyway because of the leap year – if you see what I mean!) After the clocks change next weekend, the mornings will be darker again for while, but the trend is in that direction.
It’s the start of the long weekend. I still have so many things to catch up on, though the magazine has gone, and the book has gone but it has been bounced back again a couple of times with minor things, that’s all right, I’ve just done them and bounced it back to him again. I need to get my head round all the things which are coming up over the spring and summer, to work out how I can get everything done, to catch up on my backlog, get some filing done and clear up the study, because my desk is a joke, even more so than usual, files and piles of paperwork so high the cat can hide behind them as she watches the birds through the window.
And then there’s the housework, which I haven’t done any of for three weeks, the dust on the headboard you could write your name in, the basket of washing which has been next to the Aga since Monday, the bits on the carpet, the stains on the kitchen floor…
What about relaxation? What about fun? I think about it, and I think, well, when’s that going to get fitted in? And what would I do anyway? So better not to even think about it.
I was thinking yesterday about all the things I do now by comparison with two years ago, and I thought, maybe it’s time to update the description on my blog.

...not full yet, but getting there. I saw it as I was walking to the village social club for my Parish Action Plan meeting. I don’t know why we have our meetings there. Not as convenient as the Village Hall, and not as cosy as the pub. Well, I guess the reason is that we would have to pay for the Village Hall, whereas at the club we just make a donation by buying beer, not too great a hardship. And it has proper meeting tables, unlike the pub. And the beer’s cheaper. Still prefer the pub, though.
We finished the meeting by 8:30, and I turned down the offer of another drink from my one-time favourite councillor. I puzzled over my motivation on the way home. This time last year I would have leapt at the opportunity of a tete a tete with him. He’s still my best option of a frog in my real life. But these days, flirting with him is the last thing on my mind.
Anyway.
Yesterday afternoon was the last class in my creative writing course. Last Monday’s session was cancelled because the tutor was ill, so she squeezed in this extra session to make up for it. It was a bit of an anti-climax, really. I’ve now been going to classes with her for three years, she’s great and I really enjoy the group. She has three years’ worth of courses which she does in a cycle, and at the moment it’s not clear whether next year she will do something different, in which case it will be worth my while going, or start the cycle again, in which case it really won’t. The funding is also in doubt, because the rules are changing, and the fees are likely to go up exponentially because the subsidy is being taken away. So I don’t know what’s going to happen.
I was chatting with some of the other ladies over tea afterwards. Some of them have been good friends, and I don’t want to lose touch, but inevitably I’m sure we will. I’m not good at keeping in touch with people. I have too many friends who I never see any more, I get involved in other things and I find it hard to motivate myself to stay in contact, and then I end up complaining about how lonely I am.
Anyway.
Someone asked how I would spend my Monday mornings from now on, whether I would spend them writing, but I thought, well, I know I won’t, they’ll just get soaked up by all the other too-much-stuff-to-do stuff that takes up all the rest of my time. I really, seriously, am never going to finish this bloody novel, am I? Oh, I know that’s defeatism and negative mental attitude and all that, or maybe it’s realism and not raising false hopes and facing up to the responsibilities and the realities that I have.
Che sera sera.

I've written so much this morning it's ridiculous, but it's mostly about work and what I've been doing, so is anyone going to want to read it? does anyone ever want to read anything? Oh, what the hell, might as well post it all anyway.
I always seem to start these musings recently by saying how I’ve slept – how boring, no wonder no one ever reads them. Anyway, all I want to say on those lines this morning is that I slept really well, I woke several times, glanced at the clock and went straight back to sleep till the alarm went off.
I dreamt about Chris/Lady Lucy last night, I was on holiday somewhere, and I needed to go back to the hotel for something, I ended up at the beach looking for car keys (as you do), when someone came up to me and said, it was her funeral, and did I want to drop by and pay my respects? We went to the hospital and they wheeled her in on a trolley, then someone said something and next thing they were restarting her heart, and she was sitting up and talking to me as though it was the most natural thing in the world, looking just as she always had, except that she was bald.
I had a good day yesterday, a lot of things I’d been struggling with finally came to some kind of end, I got the magazine proofs from the printers, checked them and faxed back to ask them to go ahead with the printing, they should be done for despatch on Thursday to get to head office by Tuesday, at least, if they don’t, it won’t be my fault, because I’ve met every deadline I’ve been set – not bad when I had to fit round Brussels. And I finished the editing for the MOMD and sent that off, only two business days late (it was due by Friday), he seems happy (though I haven’t had feedback on the final thing yet), and says there’s plenty more where that came from, and I enjoyed doing it, if I could do three of those a month I could earn more than I do from both Parish Councils put together. And I sorted out my notes from the London meeting and fed them back to the Italian guy who was also taking notes, and caught up with a lot of correspondence, so now I only have 4 lots of minutes to catch up with and an abstract to submit and I can think about relaxing (or about the presentation I’m doing in Nottingham next month – and I’ve been told there will be about 30-40 people coming to that, which is a lot more than I was anticipating).
Oh, and I got a phone call from Italy yesterday afternoon from one of the organisers of the European project, partly asking about how it went in London and also about the work he wants me to do on the website, and saying we probably won’t have time to talk in Paris or Brussels because time is so tight at those meetings, so we’ll have to have a meeting later in the summer, so my website design might be starting to take off, and who knows, I might even get a trip to Rome.
And I did an unguided mediation this morning, mainly because I’ve mislaid the tape, and I just had some music instead to give me an indication of time. I thought about the lake mediation again, and how the idea is that the surface is ruffled but there is an inner calm which you tap into, and I thought again that the swan metaphor is more appropriate, calm on the surface but paddling frantically underwater.
Oh, and the Aga man came yesterday, so we have heat in the kitchen and to cook with and hot water, though it was only the Aga that got serviced and not the Aga man, though he is getting more friendly than he used to be, much more chatty yesterday, telling me about his 15 year old son, and I couldn’t help thinking, he IS rather sweet.

At writing yesterday, I mentioned about the sense of detachment I felt in the restaurant on Sunday evening (I don’t know why it came up, it just seemed relevant at the time). The tutor put a positive spin on it by saying ‘that’s because you’re an observer, I get that feeling too sometimes’.
I think that’s too kind a description of how it was. I don’t think I’m an observer, I’m not sure I observe very much at all, apart from myself. I think it has more to do with being a misfit who has never really worked out how to relate to other people, or maybe I just don’t want to play other people’s games.
It occurred to me that those feelings are the opposite of the ones that the loving kindness meditation, ‘metta bhavana’, is supposed to encourage, a sense of oneness and loving for yourself and all living things. So I thought that was what I should try to do this morning.
The first stage of the meditation is to develop that sense of loving kindness towards yourself, then towards a good friend, then all living beings(in the shortened version), or, more fully, after the good friend you extend it to a neutral person and a person you find difficult. This morning I struggled to think of a good friend to include. In the end I decided on my daughter, but then the batteries died before I’d really got into it anyway.
This feeling of alienation is bothering me. I hope I’m not descending into depression again. I tell myself it’s just due to tiredness and stress. I need more fun in my life, but as soon as I decide that, and try to think about ways of finding fun, nothing seems like fun any more.
I don’t want to sink back into self analysis. There has to be some way to drag myself back out of this, but at the moment all I can see is to throw myself into work. Well, that’s easy, I’ve got more than enough that needs doing. Or meditation, I guess. The cultivation of positive emotions Try to generate a bit of living kindness for myself. That is the biggest challenge of all.

I read something from a meditation book last night about meditating on the image of a lake, how a lake may be ruffled on the surface but still in its depths, and to think of what this means in terms of your emotions. But when I thought about it this morning I remembered the story of Vortigern’s tower and the dragons fighting at the bottom of the lake, which I blogged about a couple of years ago when I was going through my last big depression. And I thought, my lake has some pretty turbulent depths.
At the meditation day on Saturday, someone asked what ‘should’ we be dong and experiencing, and one of the two leaders, predictably, said he didn’t like the word ‘should’, you just take it as it comes, what is right for you. But the other guy said, sometimes you do need some discipline in what you’re dong, it’s a question of getting the balance right.
So I tried to put more effort into my meditation this morning, helped by the fact that I did actually sleep better last night. And I imagined the lake, and I got slightly distracted into thoughts about waves and tides and the fact that even a non-tidal lake has waves, because waves operate on a different scale from tides… and I went back to my breath, and didn’t think about dragons.
And then I thought about people, and how, when you’ve been in love with someone, however fleetingly, and however ridiculously, you don’t want to let go of the person you thought they were, even though you can see that that person was only in your mind, you still want them to be real.
But the morning comes and the sun shines and it’s another day, and another week, and maybe this one will be better than the last.

We went out to dinner as a family last night, as a joint celebration for the daughter’s birthday on Saturday and the son being home for Easter. Sitting in Frankie and Benny’s and watching the people around us I had this sudden feeling of ‘who am I, and what am I dong here watching these people, what does my life and experience have in common with theirs?’ It’s hard to explain. It’s happened before, and it’s like a great wave of detachment and alienation from the rest of humanity, even my own family. As though, if I were to try and strike up a conversation with any one of these people, we would be speaking two completely separate languages, and would be unable to converse in any way which made sense to either of us. I get the same feeling sometimes when I read other people’s blog conversations.
I don’t know where these feelings come from, maybe from tiredness, maybe from stress, but they go very deep, right back for as long as I can remember. Great waves of loneliness and isolation, of being cut off behind a glass barrier that allows me to see the world but not be a part of it, so that things I hear and things I read have no meaning that I can discern.
Oh, going for an evening out with me is a laugh a minute, I can tell you
Except, of course, that I didn’t say any of this, I still managed to function around it, and I don’t suppose anyone noticed anything, other than that maybe I was a bit quiet, and if they’d commented, I would have said, ‘I’m just tired’, and my daughter would have said ‘you work too hard, I worry about you, you’re working yourself into the ground’ (which, come to think of it, she did say anyway).

I was awake just after 4, for the first time since Brussels, stayed awake till just before 6, then dozed off, the alarm went off, switched it off but stayed in bed and carried on dozing till almost 7 before I got up. Now I feel the day is messed up already. I hate this feeling, I like to feel in control of at least some parts of my life (even though in others I long for a bit of madness).
Things have been too chaotic lately, I don’t like this stress, I’m not dealing with it well, though maybe better then I would have done 12 months ago, when the stress was lower but felt just as bad if not worse. But I wish I were more in control.
I went to the third and last of a series of meditation days yesterday. I have missed my Thursday evening meditation sessions for the last couple of weeks, first because I was in Brussels and then because of the PC. My morning meditation has not been so good either, I skipped it completely when I was in Brussels and on Thursday when I had to get the train for London. When I have been doing it, I’ve been trying to get it over with and cut corners.
I need to renew my commitment, because I know that it helps me. I felt good after yesterday, but the effects didn’t last as long as I would have liked, perhaps negated by an evening’s blogging.
I have to think about what I’m getting out of this. Sometimes it’s great, but more often recently it is getting frustrating and irritating again. It goes in phases, I guess. Is now the time to bow out again? God knows I don’t really have the time to spare, and if I’m not enjoying it, why do it?
I need to try and get this editing for the MOMD finished. I promised it would be done by the 14th (Friday), but up till then I hadn’t done anything on it for a month. It's not a big job, but it does take concentration, and it's been pushed out by other things. I'm angry with myself for making a commitment to him and then letting him down, I want to keep on his good side because I think he can help me professionally, and anyway, he's a lovely guy. If I get my head down today I should be able to finish it off, then that will be one less thing to worry about.

What do I want from my life? Someone asked me this recently, and I’ve asked myself constantly down the years. I’m always stymied by the thought of what needs to happen in the outside world before I can find what I want inside myself. So, if I want to find a man, or a job, or a publisher, those are not things I can make happen, I am to some extent at the whim of outside circumstances. How do I create opportunities, or make myself open to opportunities? And if those opportunities don’t arise, what then? I try to grab at any opportunities that do, however far they may be from the ideal I have in my head, to see where they may lead. And where they lead, if they lead anywhere, may be pretty interesting for a while, but more often than not they lead back into myself and the place where I am.
When I was in my twenties, I had two visions of my future. One was very conventional, big old house in the country, devoted husband, happy children. I look around and think, OK, done that one, tick the box, now what? What is wrong with this picture? Well, I know what’s wrong, the part of the picture which is out of focus, and I have tried to fix it so many times, but it drives me back into myself and into this place where I sit pouring out my soul to a machine.
The alternative view was of myself as a famous but reclusive writer, living on a Greek island somewhere, alone and independent, with a succession of younger men. The Lady Hester Stanhope scenario (OK, she lived in a desert rather than on an island, but the basic concept is the same). What makes me smile when I remember my thoughts about this one is the assumption I made at the time that by the time I was 50 I would no longer care about sex. Ah, the naivety of the young!
About 20 years ago, when I was living in the States, I watched a TV series on PBS with Joseph Campbell (already ‘the late’ when the programmes were broadcast) talking about the power of myths and the way we write the stories of our lives. He spoke about ‘following your bliss’, finding the thing that makes you who you are and pursuing it throughout your life. Well, I’ve always known what my ‘bliss’ is, but I have never found the way to follow it truly. The pull of the conventional life has always been too strong, the life of a roof over your head and possessions around you, and the bills being paid, and no need to worry. Of doing what’s expected and what would make your parents proud, of getting on with your neighbours and giving something back to the community, of two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard, now everything is easy ‘cause of you… Except the you is not the right you, and everything is not easy. And how do you break the bonds of a life like that and go soaring?

London was fairly horrible, the tube in rush hour was a joy as always, and reminded me why I avoid going at that time of day. The guy in front of me was wearing a thick coat, I’m sure he didn’t notice that my breasts were jammed into his back.
My presentation went OK, in that I felt I presented it without making an idiot of myself, but we got no reaction whatsoever from the audience, which was frustrating. We were the last session of the morning, and because everything else had over run, we were told the amount of time we had was cut right back. My colleague said we should go up to people during the lunch break and try to get their reactions individually, but I hate talking to people cold like that, so I chickened out, then felt bad about it. It’s all part of the same thing, whether shmoozing or flirting, I don’t like to put myself out there. If people want to come to me, that’s fine, but I never know how to initiate anything. I just run away. Which is crazy, and I should really work on it, yesterday should have been a perfect opportunity to practise (the schmoozing, not the flirting), because I did have some idea what to say, but still I chickened out, and now I feel bad about it.
well, when I say 'not the flirting', maybe both actually, I certainly spent a lot of the boring after-lunch session trying to suss out the guy on my left with the French Christian name and Dutch surname who looked and sounded French (aha, you might think, clearly Belgian!) but lives in the Netherlands. I suppose I could have initiated a conversation by asking him. But I didn't.

...again.
And i have to be in London for 9:00 tomorrow. which means leaving here by 7:00. so I probably won't post anything tomorrow morning (unless I'm awake about 5).
and when I come home I have a PC meeting tomorrow evening. Oh joy.
Off to put my feet up with a good book and a mug of horlicks.

It’s a question I frequently ask myself.
At the moment I feel I am on some kind of wild ride, picked up by life and tossed around, without any clear idea of where I’m heading or what will happen when I get there, or if I’ll ever find my way back again. I go from day to day doing the things that have to be done, and failing to do lots of things that should be done, bouncing from one place to another.
When I was still going to counselling – about a year ago – we spoke one week about ‘contentment’. I said I was finding it, of a kind, and she said ‘that’s a new word for you’, but I tried to explain that to me it was an empty feeling, not a positive one, a dullness, a sense of resignation. Will I ever get to the sunlit uplands, where things-as-they-are are just as I want them to be – or as close to how I want them to be that I no longer have these feelings of emptiness and need? And if I got there, what then?
There was a beautiful crescent moon last night, I watched it as I was driving to and from pilates. Somehow I don’t often seem to notice the crescent, maybe because it is a transient stage, perhaps a night or two of perfection between the darkness and the fullness.
Today would have been Lady Lucy’s 50th birthday. I have been getting the messages from BCUK for the last week. I think about her still, of how life threw her this awful thing, this bad joke, and left her to deal with it. And I know how lucky I am to be able to get up every morning and have nothing worse to deal with than a sore throat, and the aga has gone out; I need to renew my car insurance; I have to speak at this meeting tomorrow and I don’t know what to say; I’ve fallen behind with the minutes again but at least the artwork has gone to the printers; I promised the MOMD I’d finish his editing by the end of this week; and I wish I was back in L’Ultime Atome drinking mojitos and catching the eye of that guy a few tables away, and maybe this time I would smile back and not turn back to my friends like a startled rabbit caught in the headlights….
And the windows creak and rattle, the cat sits on the desk among all the debris and watches through the window, lost in her own thoughts, because who can tell what a cat is thinking? Yesterday I heard someone on Radio 4 talking about his new book, ‘The Dog Delusion’, about the expectations we impose on our pets, and parallels with the religious impulse, how we create these beings in our minds as reflections of ourselves, and I think, that sounds cool, must read that, and then I think, sounds a bit like blogland…

Not very happy about this, but i need to get these minutes done before tomorrow afternoon, and as I have a training course in the morning, now is the only time I can do it.
so why am I doing this instead?
And playing 'Golden Brown' over and over on Youtube.

Parish Council meetings really shouldn't go on till 11:00PM.
My minute-taking ability is severely compromised after about 9:30.
Having had an enforced blog break of 3 days, I'm now wondering whether I should restart the discipline of posting on here every day, as I have done through the year to date.
Even when there's nothing to say?
We'll see.