The alarm goes off. I don’t want to get up, but I know I have to. I was still awake at 5:30, I must have been back to sleep since then because I’ve been dreaming. I swing my feet out and over the edge of the bed, past a cat, sit on the edge, head in my hands, elbow on knees.
I must get up.
As soon as one job is done, there is another waiting, a whole crowd of others, one after another, lined up waiting for me.
It would be horrible to have nothing to do. But with so many things to do, how can I ever find time to think about the things I want to think about? To get that wonderful buzz when the ideas form their pattern in my head, the dance of thought, as they line up and connect, one with another, and form a picture in words. There is nothing else in the world to match it, it is the greatest feeling, the mighty mental orgasm, the thrill of creation, the crackle that leaps from one pole to the other, the lightning strike that brings the monster to life.
The analogy develops. Mostly, for me, it is mental masturbation, but it works even better with a partner, someone who will take the ideas, add a few of their own, and throw them back to me, showing me something new and thrilling which was there all along but which I would not have spotted on my own.
But trapped alone in my room, the ideas batter themselves against the windows, while the cat of self-doubt watches them patiently, ready to pounce on the slightest sign of weakness.
Here I am, what can I do now, what can I write about? Life is so full of Stuff-to-do, great flocks of it, which gather around me, settling on my shoulders and dragging them down.
My chair is broken, it creaks and groans as I shift in my seat. There is a bolt coming loose underneath it, I try to adjust it while I’m still sitting, I pull my hand back and my fingers are black, I don’t know why, oil maybe.
I had some thoughts about my novel at the weekend, it felt wonderful, that excitement, but how can I ever get that feeling when every day is taken up with so many things that have to be done? I want to soar, but I have to crawl, down here among the daily grind of all the things that have to be done before I go to Paris next week, and after I come back too.
There is only one way to do it, and that is to do it, just get on with it, stop moaning about it, stop thinking about how life could be different.
There is a crash as the keyboard tray falls on the floor. Shit. That keeps happening. I don’t think I’m putting too much pressure on it, but somehow I must be. I think it has got bent out of shape somehow. I’ll ask my daughter to have a look at it, see if she has any ideas. She’s the practical one.

I got up early this morning and had a long meditation – well, long for one of my self-guided morning meditations, anyway, about twenty minutes. It’s misty outside the windows, the sort of grey that covers and clings to everything, the only touches of colour the red tiles on the roof of the bungalow opposite and the new green leaves breaking out on the horse chestnut tree.
Sometimes in the morning the mist rolls through the river valley even though a short distance away may be brilliant sunshine, leading to the bizarre situation where you need sun glasses and fog lights all at the same time. But there won’t be too many mornings now when I drive across the river to pick up my daughter from her boyfriend’s house, not now she has her own car. For as long as we’ve lived in this house – almost nine years – there have been mornings like that, before the boyfriend it was taking her to school when she had a late start or missed the bus, collecting her from other friends, or before that taking her to catch the bus to her previous school. But now she has her own transport, that era is at an end, no more mornings of watching the sun burn through the mist, one less thing she needs me for.
I hadn’t thought before about the fact that they will be much more of a rare event from now on, those mornings when you just know how good it is to be alive and able to appreciate the beauty of the morning. Something I’ve taken for granted for so long, which seems like a chore, even, can have its own beauty that you don't notice until it's gone.
I got home from rehearsals at 9:30 last night to an empty drive. No messages on the phone. I made myself a coffee, found my Grateful Dead CD, went looking for a book. I started ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ by Anthony Powell, recommended to me by a friend as her absolute favourite book (or series of books). I know it's considered a classic by lots of people, I’m not sure it’s really me, but I like to be broad in my reading. It’s a Folio Society hardback, with lots of lavish illustrations, so I won’t take it to Paris - damn, I just typed it as ‘Parish’ again! The original Poussin painting is in the Wallace collection, apparently, I must have seen it but I’d forgotten, maybe I’ll go and look at it next week when I’m in London.
Hubby rang at 10:30 from Basingstoke to say he was just leaving – I assumed he was ringing to say he was staying down there. I don’t know why he keeps driving backwards and forwards, I tell him he should stay. He says he comes home to see the cats. It was 1:15 when he got into bed, I felt him getting in but went straight back to sleep again. And now I can hear him getting up so he can drive back down there again. I suppose I should go down and talk to him over breakfast.
We are all caught up in the dance, like the seasons in the painting, holding hands and looking outwards with our backs to one another, circling round and round while the old man plays on his lyre and the babies laugh.
There is one painting in the Wallace Collection that I love, ‘The Shepherd Boy Paris’, I have no idea who it’s by. Of course, in one of my incarnations he is my little brother, but the feelings the painting evokes are not sisterly ones. Yes, I will go there next week if I get the chance. Put me in the right mood for Paris (the city, not the shepherd boy/Trojan prince).

I was reading AC Grayling’s ‘The Meaning of Things’ last night, about fidelity. He raised the same question I have pondered over many times: can and/or should fidelity be compelled? Or, rather, he didn’t express it as a question, he was unequivocal that it has to be ‘freely given, not demanded as a right by the other party’.
That could sound like special pleading, and does make you wonder about his personal life (I have no idea. I have a feeling he’s gay, not that that would make any difference, and I’m probably completely wrong anyway).
Anyway, Hubby has never demanded fidelity as a right, he’s just had it by default as my efforts at infidelity always come to nothing.
Could there ever be a man who would mean so much to me that I would know unequivocally that I didn’t want anyone else? I’d like to think so, but I’ve never met him and I don’t suppose I ever shall now. I might believe it in the throes of infatuation, but long term? Well, it’s all moot.

I still have this yearning to find a soul mate, someone who will mean everything to me, but I know that's not Hubby, and I don’t see how it can ever happen with anyone else. La Spice says I’ll never find someone while I stay where I am. That’s the problem, it’s the safety net, I don’t want to let go, I don’t want to make that leap into the dark, to let go of the ladder, oh what a mess of mixed metaphors . I'm like it with work too, other opportunites are coming up now, but I don't feel I can let go of the PC work, so I'm hanging on to it and taking on other stuff too which is why I'm so over-committed and stressed.
Maybe I’m too needy, too desperate for something else. Is that what drives them away?

It was good being out in the garden yesterday. I enjoyed the sunshine, got some weeding done, and found some inspiration for my novel.
It’s great when the words flow like that, there is no better feeling in the world – bar none. Life is wonderful when it feels like that.
But this morning, I’m not so sure. I’ve been awake since 4:30, I tried lying in bed and observing my thoughts, not engaging with them. I think I’m getting better at that. A comparative, judgemental term. But if you limit yourself to thinking in a purely non-judgemental way, how can you really understand anything? How can you appreciate anything? Even saying ‘thinking judgementally is bad’ is judgemental. You can lose yourself in a tangle of thoughts that can’t be unravelled, because there is no starting point.
My mind is restless, but it gets fixated on things, it gets trapped, the flow of my thoughts falls into a gyre and goes round and round. ‘The slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe’. ‘Round and round I go/Down and down I go...’
What is the answer? Does there have to be an answer? No, of course there doesn’t. That assumes a much more benign, less chaotic view of the universe than is really plausible. If I believe that the world follows its own paths, dictated by cause and effect, chaos and randomness, and that meaning is only imposed by the observer, then I have to accept that there is no guarantee that anything will ever be resolved, no karma, no just reward for our actions. What does that mean? That the onus is back on us to create order, to make meaning for ourselves? To find a life we want to live and live it, because this is the only chance we have.

I reach out my hand across the pillow, and it touches his head. So, he made it home then, eventually. And now I can hear his breathing in the darkness next to me. I prop myself up slightly so that I can see the clock past his body: 3:30.
My head aches.
That’ll be the brandy. It seemed like a good idea at the time, slipped down easily, joyously. I’d said to my daughter, ‘I shouldn’t be drinking without Dad here, I shouldn’t drink on my own’. ‘You’re not on your own, I’m here, I’d have one with you, if I didn’t have to go to work’. Well, all right then. But what about after she went to work?
The evening passed remarkably quickly. I remember listening to the Archers, and then... what after that? Going down to make coffee. Doing a graceful descent to the floor on the way back up, dropping coffee and brandy over the stair carpet. I remember mopping some of it up, there didn’t seem to be very much, I’ll have to look at the damage in the daylight. And then… what? I don’t remember chatting to anyone, or reading anything in particular, or posting anything much… except a bit from my novel. I had to go looking for it, that must have taken a bit of time. My files aren’t very well organised, there are bits here and there, some of them are just included in journal entries, filed under the date they were written. Tying them all together will be a job in itself, never mind writing any more.
I don’t feel well. I really didn’t think I‘d drunk that much. It creeps up on you. But that is not a road I’m going to go down. Just sometimes, it happens. It feels good, and you think, well, I’ll have another one, oh, that one’s gone too… only it’s not so much thinking as just doing it without thinking.
What happens today? My turn to cook dinner. Hubby will go to Tesco’s. I should do some work. I’m not as far forward as I need to be, and some stuff for the magazine is starting to come in. It’s going to be a big issue this time, lots of work, how can I possibly get it all done? Everything is drifting away from me again, I’m scared, how can I hold on to it all?
I have to do the housework, today or tomorrow. I should do some gardening. The weather should be good, so they say, it looks it now, if I turn my head and look out the window, sun shining, birds singing…
What else can I write this morning, to get to the end of my 500 word quota? My daily discipline. Here I am, every day, clattering away on this keyboard. I’m looking at a cartoon coaster that Lady Lucy sent me years ago. ‘Let’s not age, let’s just marinate’.
Pass the brandy.

Our Thursday meditation sessions are a fairly ad hoc mixture of teaching and discussions about Buddhism and meditation practice. I don’t consider myself a Buddhist, but I am very drawn to the philosophy and quite interested in the history. At the last couple of sessions, we’ve had some quite intense teaching about the history, and about the more mythological aspects, although when I say ‘mythological’, they are relevant to meditation because they draw attention to different psychological aspects.
Anyway, last night, the usual ‘leader’ (not a great name, but I don’t know how else to describe him) wasn’t there, so someone else (who is also very good) led the session. He announced at the start that because everybody there was quite experienced, we would have a ‘practice’ session of short meditations, some sitting and some walking, and that he wouldn’t talk us through them, we would just more or less guide ourselves. But before we got started, a new person turned up, someone who knew nothing about Buddhism but said he had felt drawn to it for years and had come to find out more. He had also never done any meditation.
Nevertheless, the leader went ahead with his original plan, and didn’t give this guy any particular guidance. I was sitting next to him, and I felt awkward and uncomfortable for him, wondering how he was finding it. This disturbed my own meditation, because I was thinking about him all the time. But in observing my own feelings, I guess I recognised that I was being quite compassionate in empathising with him in this way. In observing myself, I found myself feeling quite warmly towards myself, which was helpful, because it’s not something I find very easy.
And in the tea break, the leader spent a long time chatting to the new bloke, so hopefully he did get something out of it and will come back again. He did seem quite enthusiastic.
In the last short sitting meditation we did, when we were extending our thoughts out to all living things, he suggested we start with the people in the room, then people we know, and move out from there. This set me off thinking about the 6 degrees of separation idea, where if you think about all the people you know, and all the people they know, it only takes 6 stages before you have reached everyone in the world. This seems inherently implausible, but has been well studied, and I once tried doing the maths on the basis that everyone knows 100 people (a conservative estimate when you start to think about it), and that maybe 50% at each stage will overlap (a generous estimate) and the numbers really do build up remarkably fast.
Anyway, I brought this up in the tea break, when a couple of people were swapping notes about their knowledge of people from the 60s folk scene. One dear old lady is very friendly with Donovan, and her son works in the music business and has loads of contacts, while it turns out that another of the group was very involved in the folk club scene in Luton at that time, and had met all sorts of interesting people from then. The same guy also pointed out that my encounter with Ken Clarke last weekend puts me only 2 steps removed from Maggie Thatcher and her crew, which I wasn’t terribly thrilled about, but it’s quite impressive when you think of all the people she/they must have encountered.

I haven’t been burning incense for my meditation since I was ill a couple of weeks back, because my throat is still very sensitive and I don’t want to irritate it. But I thought I would try some incense cones which I picked up at meditation group. They are literally small, solid cones, about a centimetre high. I wasn’t sure what to do with them, but I assumed you just stand them on their base and light the pointy bit as you would a normal stick, which is what I did. When I finished and opened my eyes, the thing still seemed to be sitting there, except that it was grey. But when I went to pick it up, it crumbled between my fingers, because it was all ashes, just in that same perfect cone shape. And it had scorched a black circle on the wooden holder it was standing on.
I’m not sure what is the point of that, except that I didn’t know what to write, so that’s what I started with! I suppose some kind of metaphor, that things may look as though they’re still there, still the same shape as they always were, but when you touch them you find they’re just ashes and they fall apart.
Outside the window, it looks like a beautiful morning. It was raining here yesterday morning – probably not delighting too many shepherds after all – but it brightened up into a nice day. About time too. Maybe we’ll get the barbecue out tomorrow. Friday is barbecue day in the summer. I casually mentioned it to my daughter last week, and she got quite excited. Talking to her yesterday, she said she was looking forward to it. These small rituals of family life are still important, even when you’d think everybody is too mature to care about them. Actually, since she has become an adult, she has rediscovered all these small things that she would not have admitted to caring about a few years ago. She is a lovely young woman, and I feel very privileged to be her mother. We don’t always agree, and I wish she was a bit more clear about what she wants to do with her life, she isn’t making things any easier for herself, but it’s not for me to tell her what to do, and if I tried, that would be counter-productive anyway, it always was. All I can do is try and support her in any way I can.
Sometimes I wonder about confiding in her, opening up to her about my feelings about her dad. She knew about all the problems at the time of the cat, of course, she was still living here then. I felt bad afterwards that I shouldn’t have confided in her so much. I think she knows that things are still not great between us.

It was a beautiful day yesterday. The weather seems to have caught up with the calendar at last – for now, at least. I drove home from pilates through a gorgeous sunset. ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight’. We’ll see.
Stuck in the study all morning, I hadn’t realised how nice it was. I went out for a meeting at 3 o’clock in my winter coat, boots and scarf, and thought: ‘I don’t really need these!’
It always takes me a while to adjust what I wear to the changing seasons. I get into habits, and don’t really think about changing them.
I did one of those quizzes on Facebook yesterday: ‘what is your chakra?’ apparently mine is the crown chakra, which isn’t located in the body, but just above the top of the head. Sounds about right. I’m always out of my head. Beyond cerebral. This could make me charismatic. Or not.
Towards the end of last year, I used to spend a lot of time on Facebook. The people I know on Facebook are friends in the Real World, not like here, but mostly ones I don’t often see in the Real world.
I don’t know why I got so drawn back into Blogland. I didn’t really intend to. It’s a strange kind of activity, a strange way of spending time and energy, this roaming inside the internet, a place of words and images. Interesting how we always use that geographical metaphor, we talk of ‘being here’ and ‘meeting people’. There must be other metaphors we could use, though it’s hard to see what they could be.
Lost in cyberspace, tangled in the web… all without leaving my chair, my study, this messy place where the jackdaws call from the chimney and the cat watches through the window. Cats have an endless fascination for windows. ‘Cat telly’ I call it, when they sit, staring in fascination at the world through the glass. At least their virtual world is accessible, if someone opens the door for them, or they can be bothered to drag themselves through the cat flap. I stare though glass at my virtual world, through a different kind of Windows. Yet, is it there, or is it inside my head? The physical portal, the transfer station from in-here to out-there seems almost invisible, irrelevant, transparent, until I start to consciously think about it, to see the dirt on the keyboard and under the keys, or the mess of abandoned work and other detritus scattered across and around the desk.
Will I have a look at Facebook again this morning? I went there yesterday because I had a message from my Latvian friend… then I remembered that I’d missed another friend’s birthday, on Sunday, which I felt bad about, because she remembered mine. I will see them in Paris in a fortnight. I just typed an ‘h’ on the end of ‘Paris’. It’s automatic. I was chatting to the vicar at a school governors meeting recently (she’s a very nice lady), and she was saying that she’d sent someone an email about taking her son, Chris, swimming, and had automatically typed ‘t’ at the end of his name, which amused the recipient, who had an image of Jesus sitting in the back of her car with his water wings (not that he would need them, of course). Occupational hazard.

Lying awake this morning, from about 5 onwards, I tried to practise mindfulness; to acknowledge my thoughts as they came up, and then let them go, rather than engaging with them and following where they led. I think I’m getting better. Yes, that is a judgemental thing to say, but sometimes you can’t avoid making judgements, making comparisons. Trying to avoid thinking in terms of ‘this is better/worse than that’ ties you up in knots and gets frustrating.
Suzee said something about happiness being a gift, and there is a tendency these days for it to be seen as something you have to ‘do’, that some people are better at than others, an achievement, another goal to strive for. Am I being unduly cynical here? Oh, almost certainly, cynicism is what I do, after all! Except that, I am cycnical and hopelessly romantic, all at the same time, but that’s another issue.
I finished reading Jon Kabbat Zinn, ‘Wherever you go, there you are’ last night. I say ‘finished’, but I will probably go back to the beginning and start it again. I got it for Christmas, and I’ve been reading it on and off, around other things, I haven’t tried to sit down and read it from start to finish.
He was talking about acknowledging your feelings, not trying to suppress or deny or ignore them, including the negative ones, like pain, fear, depression, loneliness, anxiety, anger. This is what I do (you may have noticed!). I think it helps.
There is a school of thought that says dwelling on those feelings leads to brooding on them and drags you further down, and maybe that has happened to me in the past. But lately I seem better at bouncing back than I used to be. I can write out my feelings as I did on Sunday, but then work my way through them and move on. It’s not always easy to see how this can be done, it’s not always easy to see the path, but I keep trying. Humour helps, of course. Sometimes the only thing I have to laugh at is myself, but if I can do that, at least that is something positive. This can come over as self-deprecation or self... what’s the word I’m looking for? ‘Putting myself down’ I guess. Some people (who ARE these mythical ‘some people’ I keep referring to?) don’t seem to like this, I have been criticised for it in the past, for being unduly negative about myself, but it’s my way of coping, or one of them, it’s my way of lightening the atmosphere. And it works. Well, it’s not a panacea, obviously, because I can’t always get access to it, sometimes things are too bleak and I can’t actually find the way to it. But when I can, it helps.
So, I am learning, perhaps, I’m getting ‘better’, if I can use another judgemental, comparative, relative term. All that I have learned, all I’ve been told, or gleaned, or noticed from observation, in decades of self-study and reading and counselling, it’s all there somewhere, it percolates through my consciousness at times and bubbles up into these morning ramblings.

If I could rewind my life, and live it again, what would I do differently? The question popped into my head this morning when I was meditating, and I haven’t thought about it or come up with an answer because, well, I was meditating, so I just squirreled it away and thought I would write about it now, as I didn’t know what I was going to write about.
What would I change?
I don’t know, I really don’t know that there’s anything. It would be easy to say ‘I wouldn’t have married Hubby’, but what would have been different if I hadn’t? I wouldn’t have had the children for a start, and life without them would be unimaginable, so that is a non-starter. I could say, I wouldn’t have married my first husband, but what would be the repercussions of that – if I hadn’t gone back to him after I broke off our engagement in the last year at university, I wouldn’t have known about the job in Bedford, I would never have met Hubby, and then the children would never have been born etc etc. It’s hard to imagine what the alternative would be like – better or worse?
At any one time, what are the forces which compel us to make one decision rather than another? A combination of personality and circumstance. The only really strong, clear, critical point which I can see when I look back is when I walked away from my first marriage, something I definitely wouldn’t change. If the personality was the same, and the circumstances were the same, at any time, why would things be any different?
I guess this gets me round to free will, and it sounds as though I’m saying it doesn’t exist. But I believe it does, because we are all capable of behaving irrationally, unpredictably. Certainly, I don’t think the behaviour of individuals is predictable – it may be in a generalised sense, but never with absolute certainty. But then, what does absolute certainty mean anyway?
This is all getting a bit deep for a Monday morning. I didn’t really mean to get on to thinking about free will.
I guess I was really thinking about the film ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’. She had the chance to go back, but in the end she didn’t change anything because of the children. At the time I saw it, I was rooting for her to change things, but now I look at my kids, and I’m thinking, well, I don’t think I would.
But what now? This is what this is really all about, I suppose. We can’t change the past, but what about the future? Where does life go looking forwards? The children don’t need us to stay together any more, they are adults and can relate to us separately as adults, there are no longer really any joint decisions which we need to make on their behalf, at least, not ones that couldn’t be made amicably if we were apart. But…
I’m not going to start thinking about that again. Not just now. And I didn’t really come up with an answer to my original question. Maybe if I could go back far enough to change the way in which my personality developed… but then, would that be me? How would that be?

I find myself struggling to keep afloat, to hold onto that person. She drifts away from me, she will not stay, she vanishes and leaves me here without a word, and I don’t understand how I can continue without her, how can I carry on, I cry and my tears form lakes and puddles, an ocean perhaps, even though I don’t know where they come from or what they are for. How can anyone love me when I feel like this? Why should I expect them to? I try to love myself, but I know it’s too difficult. I try to love others, but I can think only of myself, which brings guilt and more pain. I am trapped in the hall of mirrors again, clutching the thread which brought me here, how can I ever find my way out? I cannot follow it back up to the sunlight, it is too tangled and knotted, it leads back into itself and round and round.
I want to write of happiness. I want to write about the talk I gave yesterday, about the journey, about the people I met, about the thoughts I had. But this sadness arises and blots out everything else. It is self indulgent, I know, I know. No one wants to read about this, why would anyone find it interesting? I’m falling apart, and I’m doing it to myself, it’s my own fault and no one else’s. ‘Love isn’t lying/It’s loose in a lady/Who lingers, saying she is lost’.
It’s grey outside the window today, grey and foggy, although the birds are singing. They have to sing, they are compelled, it doesn’t matter what the weather is like or what is happening, it’s only our romanticism that sees a sunny day and hears the birds and imposes motivations on them. It is not the joy of spring that causes them to sing. Life is good, oh yes, it’s so good, so sweet, but that isn’t why they sing. So we should sing even when it isn’t, smile though your heart is breaking, is that right? Does that work? Keep smiling, keep acting happy, however you feel, whistle a happy tune, pretend and the pretending will make it so? Is that how it works? So they say.
I want to say something funny, engaging, entertaining, witty,I want to amuse and interest you, whoever you are, if you’re there, reading this. But today all I can find to say is this again, this loneliness and self-pity, self hatred and guilt.
I am who I am, and sometimes that is this confused and lonely woman who struggles to find a sense of joy or purpose, or sometimes doesn’t even try, just gives up the struggle and lies down in the corner, watching the world drift away and doing nothing to try and call it back.

Driving to Nottingham today to give a talk to the women graduates. A friend from Cambridge asked if I would be staying overnight, but it’s only eighty miles, less than a couple of hours. I went for an interview there once and arrived ridiculously early because I had misjudged how long it would take. I suppose our perceptions of distance are coloured by familiarity. To me it doesn’t seem very far at all, because it is firmly fixed in my mental map, midway between here and the part of Lincolnshire where I grew up. I thought about going by train – especially as the talk is in part about sustainability – but in the end convenience won out, mainly because I just didn’t get round to sorting out tickets. I’ll go up the motorway, as per the directions I’ve been given, but I’m planning to come back along country roads.
The cat is staring out of the window. She beat me in here this morning. Now the second pane of glass has gone, she can put her front paws right on the window sill and get a better view out into the garden and across the village. She had a mouse in the bedroom last night. By the time I heard her and got it away from her, it was dead, but she was still batting it around.
I caught the end of a piece on the Today programme yesterday morning, an interview with Mike Leigh about his new film, and a psychologist, about happiness. All the conventional methods of increasing happiness were being trotted out: putting others’ needs before your own; seeing the glass half full rather than half empty; counting your blessings. I think there was something else, but can’t remember what it was. All proven remedies, according to the expert. I know the theory well enough, but for me they seem to have the opposite effect, just thinking about them plunges me into gloom. I guess I’m just perverse. Jenray said a couple of weeks ago that when she felt depressed she thought she was going mad, but for me it’s the reverse. When I’m in that mood it feels as though I’m seeing the world with a perfect, dreadful clarity.
Maybe my mood this week has just been apprehension about giving this talk. It could be. I’ll see how I feel when it’s over, I’m sure it will feel much better. I just have to get through today. But I don’t feel so bad about it now. Only I wish I didn’t have the after-lunch slot, the ‘graveyard shift’. Well, maybe I won’t get any difficult questions. When it’s over I can start focussing on my other work again, start concentrating on what needs to be done.

Meditation was good last night, and I really needed it. I missed last week because of the Parish Council, but apparently they were talking about symbolism, and last night was a follow on from there. We talked about the symbolism of the elephant, how it keeps going no matter what, solid and persistent, pushing through obstacles. This has been a theme for me this week, to keep going even if I don’t see the value of what I’m doing, even if there don’t seem to be any tangible results, even if I can’t see what the results might be, dogged persistence, on and on and on, don’t give up.
I felt very strong last night. It’s not often I get that feeling. We did a walking meditation in the middle of the sitting meditation, and I remembered when the children were small and I struggled every day to keep myself from going crazy with frustration, the image I held on to then was putting one foot in front of the other, just taking the next step, then the next step, then the next, over and over. This is what we do in walking meditation. And I thought, I have never really had to struggle with outside circumstances, as some people have to, my struggle has always been with myself, and even though I no longer have to deal with the day to day pressures of parenting small children, I am still struggling. Why should that be? I have no idea, just that this is how I am. Before I had children, I struggled with my desire to have them, before then, uncertainty over the decision of whether or not that was what I truly wanted, the seeming impossibility of it, what would happen if it never happened, what would happen if it did? It’s so long since I thought about those feelings, so long since I thought about the feelings I had when they were small. Now I stand here in this place and look at my life, and still nothing is clear.
Also last night we talked about the symbolism of the Buddha’s right hand in those depictions where it is pointing down towards the earth. This symbolises drawing strength from the earth, from the past, from the history which has brought you to this place. This seemed to me to be the mirror image of the symbol of the elephant, because it is talking about what brought you here, whereas the elephant is taking you into the future, a continuous process. And it is a path of growth, a progress, a development, even if it falls into doldrums sometimes and spins you round in circles, bringing you apparently back to the same places, there are changes, even if you can’t see them.
Tomorrow I am giving a talk about the European project (have I said this before? Probably, it has been on my mind all week, and in the back of it for ages). I’m used to doing such things, I don’t mind it, really I don’t, I know it will be fine, yet I am always apprehensive. Maybe everyone feels like that, I don’t know. I have found it very hard to concentrate this week, I have struggled to keep going with the things I needed to keep going with, to get anything done at all, although actually when I think about it I have achieved quite a lot.
I saw my daughter yesterday. She drove round in her boyfriend’s car – they have got the insurance sorted out after all. She is definite that she doesn’t want to go to uni, doesn’t want to stay at college, though she doesn’t know what she wants to do. Graphic design, apparently, is not for her after all, or so she says now. She doesn’t think she is good enough to do what she would really like to do with it, so she will try something else. How does anyone ever find out what they want to do? How do any of us get through our lives, get through the day?
Persistence.

No idea what to write about. All I have in my head this morning is an idea of circles and cycles – day and night, winter and spring, sorrow and joy, the in breath and the out breath, one after another, repeated again and again. However far down you are, it gets better; however far up you are, it gets worse.
I guess the down times don’t happen as much or last as long as they used to. That’s good, isn’t it? A step in the right direction?
The cat is on the desk again. She sniffs at the pane of glass which I took down yesterday. It’s propped in the gap between the back of the desk and the slope of the roof.
I love this room, but I take it for granted, all I notice is how untidy and messy it is. Shelves crammed with books, box files, ring binders, piles of papers on desk and floor, filing cabinets overflowing, random detritus on the shelves, boxes of old floppy disks. And dust everywhere, when was the last time I cleaned properly in here? Don’t think about it. Glancing up I see the card the Crazy Frog sent me, two years ago, it’s still there, on the shelf. Not the only one, there are plenty more, so it doesn’t look too obvious. Stacks of post cards bought all over the world, brought back and shoved into desk drawers or squeezed between books or squashed behind stacks of recordable DVDs. A memory stick, a candle in the shape of an owl, a pair of reading glasses with a broken frame, another memory stick, a 40gig usb back up drive, pulled out of the USB hub to make way for something else and now lying abandoned on the shelf. Hole punches, old envelopes, an oil burner, a cup of water to top up the oil burner, from last week when I was burning eucalyptus and tea tree oil and trying to clear my head and throat.
I could go on. I already have, for far too long.
There is little else to say. I have my son’s old keyboard, he brought it back from uni for me this time, because I spilt coffee over mine, the wireless one that I really liked, I had to cannibalise one from my daughter’s computer, the one she doesn’t need now she has the laptop.
We promised her a Mac when she went to uni, and then I was going to have her laptop, but now what is going to happen? She seemed to be really enjoying herself, to know what she wanted to do, and now it’s all fallen apart again. Some time she has to stop, even if just for a little while, and stick with something for a time. University is good for that, if gives you that transition time, that time when you don’t have to know for sure what you are going to do, but if you don’t have that, what then?
I try not to worry too much about her. I can’t stop myself.
The cat is squeezing herself behind the book case. This room is a mess. The keyboard is filthy. What has come from my son’s hands onto this keyboard? I don’t want to know, I don’t even want to think about it, how is it so dirty?

I walk into the study, the cat is sitting on the desk, and I can hear an angry buzzing coming from the window. Somehow, a bee or bluebottle has got in between the makeshift arrangement of secondary double glazing – an additional sheet of glass wedged into the dormer and taped around the edges to keep out the winter draughts. The bee batters itself against the outer glass. The cat follows it with her eyes, every muscle tense, alert, twitching. The drone of the buzzing is continuous.
‘It’ll drive you crazy, Miko’, I say, as I sit down in front of the keyboard.
The bee, trapped between the glass; the cat, trapped in her desire to get at it, and I... trapped in what? Trapped in my same old circles of thought, back here again.
After yesterday’s outburst, I thought: ‘Why do I keep doing this? Why do I keep coming back? What purpose am I serving, what am I achieving? Why, why, why? Back, again and again, to the same old questions.
When I look back over my life, I can see that there has never been an extended period when I have been happy, or contented, with life-as-it-was. Brief moments of intense joy and excitement flash upon long, long periods of dull, dissatisfaction – I was going to say ‘despair’, but that is too intense, it’s not usually as exciting as that.. Whether it is the circumstances of my life, or something in my personality, I don’t really know, though I would say it’s most likely to be the latter. A deep personality flaw. Where it comes from, or what I can do about it, are the great puzzles of my life, the ones I ponder over again and again, but never come to any answers. Changing the circumstances of my life, I suppose, would be easy by comparison with changing that.
Where/how do other people find happiness? In their work, their relationships and families, their hobbies and passions, their beliefs, their religious faith. For me, all of these are flawed in some way, none of them lasts, all may be capable of giving very brief, intense highs, but there is no long term, solid, underlying strain of contentment to be found in any of them. Yet that is the conventional wisdom, that is where happiness is to be found, so people say, and those I read, those I listen to, seem to be fairly consistently in agreement.
Yet it seems to me to be hopelessly unrealistic to expect to find that kind of longterm satisfaction. Are all these people deluding themselves, then? It doesn’t seem so, I meet people who seem genuinely satisfied with their lot, capable of finding happiness.
So, why do I keep on asking these questions? Am I any nearer to a solution, a resolution?
The bee has gone quiet. Whether it has found a way out, killed itself through its frantic efforts, or is just resting, I don’t know. The cat has got bored eventually, walked over to the door, made her soft squeaking noise and stared at me until I got up and walked over to the door to let her out.
Why do I come back here every day? To keep trying. Sometimes it is important to keep trying, even when you can’t see the way out, or the possibility of a way out. Sometimes just the act of trying can be beneficial in itself, the repetition of routine, knocking a thousand times on the same door because maybe the thousandth knock is the one which will be answered. Sometimes, maybe, it’s better to let go. But I don’t think the time to let go has come, not just yet.
I read this in Writing Magazine yesterday evening, a quote from a children’s writer called Markus Zusak, someone I’ve never heard of, who from his photo could be young enough to be my son:
‘Don’t be afraid to fail. I fail every day. I failed thousands of times writing ‘The Book Thief’, and that book now means everything to me. Some of what I feel are the best ideas in it came to me when I was working away for apparently no result.’
I unsealed the glass, took the pane away, opened the window and let the bee out. It seemed confused, a little stunned perhaps, but still alive. Hubby will moan that I've broken the seal, and I'll have to put up with the draught, but hey, summer's coming. and bees need all the help they can get.

I can feel myself sliding again. I don’t really know what brought this on, this dull everything-feels-hollow-and-empty-and-pointless feeling. Maybe it’s blogging. Maybe I should stop again. Maybe I should never have started.
It’s what Lady Lucy used to call my old ‘guilt trip’. Thinking about contentment and counting my blessings and being grateful for what I’ve got. It always has this effect, this feeling of, ‘Is that it, is that the best I can hope for, this dull, achey feeling, day after day?’ Not even thinking about going to Paris cheers me up, because I know how I’ll feel afterwards.
Shit.
Back here again, I hate it, I hate it, and I can’t see a way out, not one that makes any sense. Condemned to cling onto crumbling ledges by my fingertips, and look around wildly in the darkness. Or whatever it was I said.
It’s hard, when I start to feel like this, to pull myself up by my bootstraps and get on with it. Because that’s part of the problem, all there is to hang on to.
And I can’t write this morning, the words have given up on me in disgust, nothing makes sense, nothing has any point or value. I don’t even want to try and find enthusiasm for anything, the old cynicism has taken me warmly by the throat and won’t let go.
Look, the sun is shining, it’s a beautiful spring day. The garden is full of weeds and I can’t be arsed to do anything about it, even if I had time, which I don’t. I’m not ill any more, apart from a bit of a cough I feel so much better than last week. I’m going to Paris in three weeks – which means I’ve got one hell of a lot of work to get out of the way before then.
My daughter passed her driving test yesterday – but she can’t afford a car, and we can’t afford to buy one for her, and now she’s decided she doesn’t want to go to uni after all, in fact she doesn’t even want to stay at college and do her HND, she doesn’t know what she wants to do except that she doesn’t want to do what she’s doing. She won’t accept that she’s got to stick at something, to put up with the crap sometimes to have a chance of finding what she really wants to do, or end up being a waitress or a shop assistant for the rest of her life. Sometimes crap is the only game in town.
Then I thought about the parents of those girls in the bus crash in Ecuador, but all I could do was feel sad for them, not happy for myself.

I slept through till 15 minutes before the alarm. I rose a little earlier than usual, I meditated a little longer.
You have to strive for contentment. I know, I know. ‘Contentment’ always seems such a hollow word, too close to ‘resignation’ for my liking. Be content that you don’t have cancer, that you’ve never lost a child, that you have a roof over your head and food in your belly… this makes you so much better off than most of the people in the world. I know, I know, And I’m not ungrateful, really I’m not. But...
It’s the ‘but’ that haunts me, that won’t let me go. That creeps up behind and yells in my ear. It will always be there, because that is what makes me who I am, that restlessness, ‘the restlessness of water’, I like that phrase, it’s not original, it comes from a song (‘Night Swimming’, by REM), I don’t remember the context, just that one phrase, but it sums up how I feel this morning, and yesterday… and today???.
I dreamt about swimming. About being on jury duty, and swimming. Oh, there’s some connection somewhere, no doubt. The jury, I guess, comes from listening to the Archers. Water in dreams usually signifies the unconscious. I have been descending into my unconscious again – except I don’t think I did. I dreamt about being by a pool, but I’m not sure I ever actually got in. Maybe it’s just about needing a holiday, something as simple as that. I know I won’t get one again this year, not a conventional one, anyway, not with hubby. Does that matter? I always say I’d rather not be with him, anyway.
Find life where you are, find contentment here, make your own happiness. Or change it. I don’t feel so trapped as I used to, or rather, I still feel trapped, but not in the same way. I’m trapped by my own choices. If I want to break out, it’s up to me. I have to think about what that would mean, what I would have to give up, and whether it would be worth it. And I guess the conclusion is always that it wouldn’t be. But that doesn’t stop me thinking. That sentence doesn’t really end there, yet I put a full stop anyway. Thinking what? Thinking about how… life could be different.
Life is changing, in tiny, incremental, infinitesimal ways. I sent off three poems to another competition yesterday, after getting a rejection from a magazine in the week. It won’t change my life, and yet, it’s a start. I have started to submit my poetry for publication. A tiny, huge step. Print them out, put them in an envelope, stick them in the box. Probably nothing will happen. If anything happens, it won’t be dramatic. And yet, I have moved into a slightly different path, done something different, and now that I have done it, it doesn’t seem so strange, it seems banal in fact, ‘oh yes, I sent off some poems yesterday’.

Each day we start again, each day is a new beginning. No matter what has gone before, we start again, this day can be different, the old patterns can be broken for once and something new can appear. There is always that possibility. The hot water pours over us, washing away all that went before, bringing the promise of something new. The sun rises again and bounces off the rooftops. The birds sing again, calling to one another and to the morning. This might be an extraordinary day, because every day is extraordinary, even if it is only extraordinary in its ordinariness.
I get lost inside my head, I enter that place of timelessness and I drift into reverie. What can I do? I am tired, sleep calls. If I tried, could I give into it for once? Would it pull me in today, take me back down into its soft folds?
I can’t write today. Everything is a struggle. I listen to the birds in the chimney. I hear their small noises, as though they are talking to each other. I was out in the garden yesterday, but I didn’t see them. The chimney is very high and hard to see clearly from the ground, obscured by the angle of the roof.
When I was downstairs in the sitting room, doing my meditation, the old cat came in, and sat on the table in the window, looking out into the garden. Here, two floors up, the young one is doing the same, sitting on the desk and looking out across the village. It’s as though they have divided up the duties between them, he will be with me on the ground floor, she up in the attic.

A lethargy has come over me. It happened in the garden yesterday. I went out, and there was so much to do, I didn’t know where to start, so I wandered aimlessly, or sat with the secateurs and half heartedly cut back the hypericum. I can’t take a job, grab it, get on with it, get it done. I drift, my mind floats away, I can’t focus. It happens with everything. There is so much that needs to be done, and I am paralysed.
I am repeating myself, again and again I come back to the same themes, the same ideas, the same complaints. Trapped in the endless circles. The world changes around me, the morning has come again, the spring has come again, the days follow one another relentlessly, insidiously, inexorably. There is no way of stopping them. I watch them pass, helplessly. How do I ever get anything done? How do I ever get from here to there? I don’t, 'there' just comes up to meet me, whether I do anything about it or not. Always busy, always tired, always staring at the time and wondering what I am doing here. An old complaint, but it doesn’t change, it doesn’t get easier, it doesn’t get harder, I stumble through my life, and the days pile up behind me, while the pile of days to come shrinks at the same rate, although I have no idea how high that pile is, I have no way of knowing, all I can know for sure is that it is shrinking and that nothing can reverse that.

It’s good to have routines. But it’s good to know when it’s OK to break them. And sometimes, with the best will in the world, they just get broken anyway, through force of circumstance, and it’s good to know that that’s OK too.
As you can tell, this is by way of making excuses. Some time between 5 and 5:30, I unset the alarm. I told myself, if I was still awake to hear the church clock strike at 6, I would get up, but otherwise, I would leave it and see what time I woke. In the event, it was 7:30, though I drifted in and out until Hubby started getting up around 8. (His routine is immutable. 7 on week days, 8 at weekends, he doesn’t need an alarm, he just does it. Well, except for the times at the weekends when I climb back into bed with him again and disrupt it).
So, my writing is late today, and I haven’t meditated. I may find I regret it, but that’s OK. Sometimes you have to let the routine slide in order to appreciate how important it is.
My study is up in the attic, and there is a boarded up fireplace on one wall (there are in most of the rooms, except where they’re not boarded up). There are usually birds nesting in the chimney, one year it was jackdaws, but it’s mostly starlings. I can tell the babies have hatched, because I can hear the noises they make when the parents come back with food for them, the scrabbling as the big ones fly in and out, the squawking of the babies when they know they’re going to be fed. It’s fun, I like it. They started a couple of days ago. Some time when I’m out in the garden I must check to see what they are. One good thing about this as a nesting place is that they’re well away from the cats. The young one sits on my desk and watches them flying past the window, or listens to the noises in the chimney and tries to get to them, but she can’t do anything about it.
It looks beautiful out there this morning. Probably it’s cold again, but at least there was no frost overnight, the roofs of the cars on the drive weren’t frosty this morning. A day to get out and do some gardening. Cooking, gardening and housework are my Saturday routines. Nice, quiet, domestic stuff. Next Saturday I’m going to Nottingham to talk about my euro project. I haven’t decided yet whether to drive or take the train. Either is easy from here.
I started a poem in the night. I don’t remember anything about it now, I got up and wrote it down. I think it was quite a self-pitying one, I wasn’t in a very cheerful mood. I tried my ‘just noticing’ meditation when I was lying awake. It’s not an instant solution, it takes a while, but I think it does help. When I noticed the thoughts weren’t popping up any more, I started focusing on the chakras instead. I only got as far as the third one, I must have fallen asleep around there.
.

I did some work on my presentation yesterday. At least, what I did was spend half the morning going through all the photos, trying to find some I can use. This probably wasn’t the most effective use of my time. It also made me quite sad, particularly the ones from Cyprus. By going through other people’s pictures on Facebook and flickr, I came across a few I hadn’t seen before, some good ones of the Crazy Frog (including one where he was asleep), and one of the Polish toy boy in surfer shorts and Hawaiian shirt – though not the one of me posing with him in my swimsuit!
That was an amazing week. But good times will come again. I’m sure Paris will be great.
I felt a lot better yesterday, my throat and voice are much better, though my sinuses are blocked, and I’ve shaken off the slight feverish feeling that was coming and going. Which was lucky, because I needed my wits about me for the Parish council meeting last night. Another of the councillors resigned – so that makes two down in one of my parishes, and one in the other – they’re dropping like flies. I just realised I didn’t say goodbye properly to the chap who resigned last night – he’s a nice guy but now that he and his wife have both retired they are travelling a lot and he can’t make it to all the meetings. Because it’s not my village, I’m not sure I’ll be bumping into him much.
I hope I can really get my head down and get the minutes done today, and most of the action points too, hopefully. I’m beginning to wonder seriously if I should keep track of the amount of time I’m spending on this. I’m only paid for 20 hours a month, but I put in a lot more. I always think that’s mainly because I’m so inefficient, that if I wasn’t such a dreamer – or such a perfectionist – I should be able to get it done in a lot less. I don’t know. The amount of money I get is quite pathetic for the effort involved. Not that I am driven by money, if I was I would be living a very different life from the one I do (and not one that I find at all appealing). But my lack of financial independence does bother me. It narrows my options in life. Is that a bad thing? Maybe it’s just as well that I’m still here. Maybe that other life is better left just as a fantasy.

Yes, we are the same person, but different personalities, so I like to keep the names separate. You can call me Cass if you find that less confusing, but it’s not my ‘real’ name, none of them are.
‘Husbandorcat’ is really jus