My ladies’ social/educational/cultural group in Cambridge is winding up because of lack of interest. At a committee meeting in February, I mentioned that we could have a garden party at my house, if people would like to do that, we agreed to do it on a bring-and-share basis rather than me doing all the catering, and the date was set for 9th August (a week on Saturday). I’ve been so preoccupied with other stuff I haven’t really given it much thought, but the day I left for Oxford, I got a circular letter from the programme secretary asking people to say what kind of food they would bring, so I thought, ‘Good, she’s got it all under control’, and that was that.
Yesterday I thought I’d better ring her and find out what was happening.
‘Oh, I’m not organising it, Maureen is’.
‘I didn’t think Maureen was coming’. I could have sworn she told me she was going to be away on holiday.
‘No, she’s definitely doing it. I haven’t had time.’ She then launched into a complicated tale about all the things she’s been doing since I saw her at Telford.
OK, better ring Maureen.
‘Me? No, I’m going to be in Paris, I told you that ages ago. Where on earth did she get the idea from that I was organising it?’
‘That’s what I thought’.
So, now I’m stuck with the problem of having to ring round people – which I hate, but most of the ones who are likely to come aren’t on email - think about food and organisation, send out directions…
I guess this all sounds rather churlish. After all, it was my suggestion in the first place.
But I honestly can’t be bothered just at the moment, it feels like too much extra hassle, rather than a nice enjoyable social occasion, and hassle is one thing I don’t need. And I know at least two of the people I’d most like to see (including the one who’s going to Paris) won’t be able to make it. And I can’t find the letter she sent with the suggested list of food, because it came as I was leaving for Oxford and I didn’t read it through properly because life has been so hectic since then.
Oh well, mustn’t let it get to me. No point getting stressed over it, I’ve got plenty enough to get stressed over as it is.
So, what to say for my last 100 words? Slept reasonably OK again, the first time I looked at the clock was 5:15 but I dozed some more and didn’t get up for another half an hour, so I had a good 6 hours again. Can’t ask for much more than that, hope it continues. I copied one of my new CDs onto cassette so I can listen to it on my trusty old Walkman, I really need an mp3 player, but don’t know when I’ll get round to getting one. That’s it. No deep thoughts today, good or bad.

I had over 6 and a half hours’ sleep last night, I slept through till almost 6 o’clock. Went to pilates last night, I’m aching in a few places now because it’s the first time I’ve done it properly for a month, but my bum was fine. And I got some new meditation CDs yesterday through the post. Feeling a lot more cheerful this morning.
Funny – or maybe not so funny – how often that happens, how a particularly sad and grim outburst is followed by something much more positive. Not so funny, because, when you’ve hit the bottom, how can you go anywhere but up? Ah, but when you’re at the bottom, you don’t necessarily know that it’s the bottom, you might feel that you are only half way down and that things will keep going down indefinitely, or will hit a plateau – or should that be a valley? – no a ledge – and keep bouncing along at the same level.
Well, cautious optimism today, because optimism always has to be cautious because we never know what life has in store, but the world does seem a little brighter.
Well, having said that, what else can I say? What is so interesting as misery?
The words have gone, dried up, run away. I’m less than half way to my target, and I don’t know what to talk about. Why do I say ‘talk’ and not ‘write’? I use that kind of language a lot, that auditory imagery (if that makes sense – is ‘imagery’ the right word there?) In neuro-linguistic programming, the kind of words you use is supposed to be significant of different types of personality – I don’t know much about it, only had a couple of introductory days, and I know a lot of people think it’s mumbo-jumbo. I’d never noticed before that I use that sort of language. It’s hard to recognise it in yourself because immediately you become self-conscious about it, how do you know whether that is really how you think or just what you’re saying at that time? But maybe I’ll look up what it’s supposed to signify – if I get time, which I shouldn’t really, because I need to get on with work. I haven’t achieved much over the last two days, too easily distracted. I’m still messing with this website, haven’t got beyond the first page, dithering between Front Page and Dreamweaver, yesterday I couldn’t get an image to display and I had no idea what the problem was, it drove me nuts
Well, back to NLP, or not. I think maybe my use of auditory imagery is just to do with blogging, because blogging feels to me like a conversation, so it seems like a natural form of description to use.
To anyone reading this who remembers Trolly (Guin), I had a message from her yesterday on Facebook. She is getting two kittens (can’t think why she thought I would be interested in knowing that!), and is starting a part-time MA in creative writing in September. We’ve only met in person once, but used to chat a lot on Facebook at one time.
Well, that’s my quota done. No deep thoughts today.

The show I’m singing in, which is a collection of Cole Porter songs, is set in a nightclub, at an indeterminate time between the 1920s and today, and we have been asked to provide our own outfits – something elegant with plenty of ‘bling’. I don’t do elegance – or bling – largely because I never go anywhere to wear it. I do have one Posh Frock, which I had for my graduation ball (my PhD graduation, only 11 years ago). It’s red crushed velvet, quite fitted round the boobs and waist, with a long skirt swirling out from the hips, bare shoulders and spaghetti straps. I’ve put on quite a lot of weight since I had it (though I have lost some recently), so I thought I’d better try it on before rehearsals last night. It is a bit tight round the top half, but I was impressed that I managed to get into it at all.
Without warning, I walked into the kitchen wearing it, where Hubby was reading the paper and waiting for his dinner. I made some quip about not dressing for dinner, and he glanced up and back at his paper again, without reacting either way.
‘Well, what do you think?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know, do I? You’re better able to judge than I am, you know what the others will be wearing.’
‘Well, does it fit OK?’
He looked up again, briefly.
‘Yes, I’d say so.’ That was it, no emphasis, no enthusiasm, just irritation of the ‘why are you bothering me when you can see I’m reading the paper?’ kind.
Well hey, I’m used to it, aren’t I? When was the last time he showed the least interest in the way I look? Forget it, it’s not worth even asking the question, the only answers I can come up with are a few examples from when we were first together, and they only stand out because they were so unusual, even then.
Anyway, who cares about his opinion. My daughter will come round today, I’ll see what she says.
I read this yesterday in ‘What’s Bred in the Bone’ by Robertson Davies, a Canadian writing (in this part of the novel) about England in the 1930s. It rang horribly true:
‘Like several other girls he had seen in Oxford, she might have been a beauty if she had possessed any firm conception of beauty, and related it to herself, but in her the English notion of neglected womanhood was firmly in command’.
Oh, that sounds like me, all right.
I woke at 4 again, but this time I didn’t manage to get back to sleep, I got up, went back to bed, played a tape, got up at 5:40, fed cats, didn’t meditate, sat and cried, felt sorry for myself, thought about where life is going and can’t see any possible scenario which doesn’t revolve around unhappiness, either the unhappiness I’m used to or a different kind of unhappiness, either mine or other people’s or both, because how could I be truly happy if I’d made someone else miserable? So, here we go again, accept life as it is and make the most of it, and stop wanting something more.

The following was actually written at 7 though.
And now I'm supposed to be starting work

Woke at 4, which is really too early. Lately the pattern has been 4:30-5, which isn’t too bad for getting up. If I could have a routine of always waking at 5:30, that would be perfect (6 is too unrealistic). But 4 means I have to try to get back to sleep, even though I know it won’t be for long and I’ll feel terrible when the alarm goes off.
So, I got up and went downstairs. Forgot to take anything to read, so I sat on the sofa and tried not to fall asleep – perversely, that’s what you need to do. When it got to about 5, I went back to bed, and I must have judged it about right because I don’t remember lying awake at all, I went straight back to sleep and was dreaming when the alarm went off. Maybe it’s getting better.
Had a bit of a snooze in the hammock yesterday afternoon, and also on the sofa in the evening, so maybe that’s why I woke early. And it was hot last night.
Sitting here yawning now and wondering what to say.
While I was away, my daughter and her boyfriend went on holiday to Norfolk. She told me last week that the last time she saw her Dad before she went, when she wasn’t going to see him for a week, she tried to hug him, but he didn’t respond, he ‘just stood there in the doorway. And I thought: “don’t love me then, if you don’t want to”’.
I wanted to say to her: ‘Of course he loves you, you’re his little girl, even if he doesn’t show it, he’ll always love you’.
And then I thought, I guess that applies to me too, maybe he’ll always love me, even if he doesn’t show it, and I should just accept that and take it on trust, as I’ve always had to.
But that’s not I want. I want someone who WILL show it. If I talked to him, told him how I feel, give him an ultimatum, tell him to start showing it or else I’ll go – what would happen then?
Oh, been there, done that. We’ve tried it before, most recently after the cat incident. It works for a while, but it never lasts. Do I really want it to last? Do I really want to work at it? What happened after last time, two years ago? That dull acceptance of life, that contentment which yet wasn’t happiness, that suppressed restlessness, suppressed energy, eating away at me. Is that what I want? Or am I making things more difficult between us to give myself an excuse for resentment, for wanting to stray, to find a way out, to find someone else? Is that what this is really all about, me looking for ways to justify myself when really at heart I’m a tart who likes to flirt, who likes to play games, but doesn’t really have the courage to walk away?

Until relatively recently, my weekend morning routine was: get up same time as on a weekday, do all my usual weekday stuff, then, about 8 o’clock, make two cups of coffee, take them back to bed, wake Hubby with a cuddle, maybe have sex. Sometimes it was better than it had ever been, possibly because I was subconsciously thinking ‘I’m only doing this to have sex, I might as well enjoy myself’. But then he started getting up at 7:30, maybe to avoid such encounters, maybe not, I couldn’t possibly guess.
Yesterday morning, I thought, maybe I should try it again, but earlier, take him by surprise before he gets up. But what sort of message might he take from it? And if he really is trying to avoid me, presumably nothing would happen anyway, just more frustration. Anyway, while I was deciding what to do, he got up.
There have been periods all through our marriage when we haven’t had sex for months and months. I always used to assume it was my fault, that I wasn’t good enough for him in some way. We never talked about it. Usually it resolved itself in the end, like with everything else, we just keep going, and sometimes it doesn’t seem too bad, and I think, well, I guess it’s just me and my unrealistic expectations of life, I should just be happy for what I’ve got.
The last time was this time last year after my op. I suppose he thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to touch my breast, and it wasn’t at first, but it went on for months until I took the initiative, round about November time, I think, certainly after I came back from Cyprus. And then for a while, as I said, when it did happen, it was better than it had ever been.
Maybe it’s all just down to stress and tiredness, him travelling all that way every day and working stupid hours on this project that’s giving him so much grief, and me tied up with all my other stuff. And even though I really want sex, I don’t want to push it because I would probably find myself back in this situation again:
http://melinda-in-surreality.blog.co.uk/2007/08/

Well, there I go, drivelling on about my non-existent sex life, I know I shouldn’t, but I tell myself that no one will actually read this anyway so it doesn’t matter. What should I put in the title line? Hmmm… something nice and innocuous, I think. What the hell am I doing, anyway, talking about this stuff? Once again, I think how bizarre this whole thing is, and wonder what drives me to do it.
Maybe I should try and write a poem. Only, somehow, the situation doesn’t seem to lend itself to poetry, apart from that one above. And poems write themselves, or else they don’t. Well, maybe that’s not quite true. I’m sure if I put my mind to it I could come up with something. Only I don’t think I can be bothered. Somehow, none of it seems important enough.

I overheard something on the radio the other day, just a snippet, I didn’t catch the rest of the report or any details, so I am gratuitously quoting out of context, but what I heard was that the divorce rate is adding to the isolation of older people, but that among older women, single women suffer less depression and mental health problems than married ones. I think about my friends, and this rings true. There again, what do I know about my friends’ lives? I am too self-absorbed for lasting friendships, people wander into my life and I enjoy their company for a while, I’m pathetically grateful even, but then they drift away from me, and I make no effort to hold on to them. I complain about loneliness, but I don’t work hard enough at any of my relationships.
I woke at 4:30, got up at 5. Probably about 5 hours sleep. I went out into the garden, looking for the moon, and found it behind the house. The sky was light, it was lighter outside than in the house. Ninja came over and rubbed against my legs, then sat on the front door step. But I didn’t have the key to let him in that way, I had come out through the dining room French window.

I started work on the website design for the European project yesterday. Didn’t make much progress. It’s always like that at the start of anything creative, how do you get going? Starting and finishing, those are the hardest, in the middle usually isn’t so bad. I wonder if it’s such a good thing to be paid for something you enjoy doing after all? It creates pressure which detracts from the pleasure you would normally feel, you know it has to be done in such a way to satisfy the clients, but you don’t really know what will please them. I think I can blag my way with the Italians – I look at what they did for the previous project, and I’m sure I can come up with something better. But the German guy knows what it’s all about, it’s going to be hard to impress him.
And anyway, how do you come up with ideas when you’re trying to start something like that? I messed about with colour schemes, played some of the Dreamweaver video tutorials, which left me completely confused. Lots of messing around with no concrete result. In the end I went back to the PC work, paid a few invoices, sorted out the correspondence, checked the bank statement. Sometimes you just need to do something relatively mindless.
I’ve got a mosquito bite on my right knee, and I’ve picked the top off and I keep picking it off whenever it scabs over. Now it’s getting really sore. A metaphor, I guess. If you keep picking at it, it will never heal. What will it take for me to heal? Well, if I could identify the wound, maybe that would be a start, better than this dull ache.

Driving back from the Parish Council meeting last night, at about a quarter to midnight, I saw the moon again – only half a moon now, but it must have just risen, because it was huge and golden. It really was an amazing sight. I thought about taking the camera out when I got home, but I’ve taken so many pictures of it lately, and anyway, from here there isn’t a particularly attractive backdrop in that direction.
The moon does seem to have haunted me over the last couple of weeks. It always does, whenever I see it, or even if I don’t, it lurks in the back of my brain. Memories of moons past. It is always changing and always the same, over the years and wherever in the world I go, there it is, waiting for me. Sometimes I don’t see it for weeks, and sometimes, as now, it is insistent, always watching me.
I don’t know what the connection is, but these just lines popped into my head: ‘Night and day,/Under the hide of me,/There’s an oh such a hungry yearning,/Burning inside of me’. Great song. But I won’t be singing it in the show. I don’t do solos, too self-conscious, too little confidence, though sometimes I think my voice isn’t that bad, and maybe I could... But I like being in the chorus. There’s not so much pressure, and usually quite a good spirit of camaraderie, though there can be bitchiness too. The only times I get stage fright are during auditions, when I have to stand there on my own. I love singing. It’s like writing, I do it because I have to, not for anyone else.
The meeting was late again last night, because we started with a visit from two people involved with a major planning application for a business site just outside the village. Not that the PC’s opinion on a planning app carries much weight, but increasingly it seems that developers are trying to sweet talk the locals in advance, to create a good working relationship – or good PR, if you want to put it that way. The actual PC meeting proper didn’t start till 9:15, and then lasted over 2 more hours – we never seem to get through them in less. Hope it doesn’t put off the two new councillors too much. They seem very keen. But there are strict limits on what parish councils can do. They’ll learn.
Getting to sleep at about half past midnight, I slept through till just before the alarm went off at 6 – 5 and a half hours. That’s about average, for me, and at least it was uninterrupted.
Gabriella was confused by my strange sleeping patterns. ‘Aren’t you tired?’ Yes, I’m always tired. But I was waking about 5-5:30 every day, and there was no point in lying in bed waiting for two hours to get back to sleep when it would be time to get up. Actually, the whole time keeping of the camp was so lackadaisical that when the day’s work started most days I was ready to go back to sleep. I did have a nap one day – but naps aren’t the solution. I said to her once, ‘alcohol doesn’t help’, and she said ‘What does help?’ and to be honest I have no idea. I just keep going because – well, what else can I do?

I wonder if the coffee’s ready yet. I forgot to switch it on when I sat down to meditate, so I did it just before I came up here, then when I got here I found that although the computer had started up, the tool bar at the bottom of the screen was blank. I tried the power off button, but it would not switch off, and then I tried the reset button but that didn’t work either, it just sat and stared blankly at me, not responding, so that I was unable to do anything. In the end I switched the power off at the socket, and everything died, then back on again and it all fired up and went through the boot up sequence. So now, it is working again. Who knows what causes glitches like that?
Prior to that, I was just thinking, as I always do, about my life and trying to find that place inside myself where I can be happy just for life itself, to forget about desire and longing and loneliness and love, and just say, look, you’re alive, that should be enough for anybody, you can live without those other things, can’t you? Make the most of what you have, because this is what you have and you have got by all these years, stop wanting things you can’t have and be happy for this.
I woke just before 5 and got up. I’m tired, but there was no point in staying in bed, lying in bed awake for hours is the worst thing you can do. I must have had about 5 and a half hours’ sleep, that should be enough, it will have to be. But this evening I will have to concentrate hard because there is a PC meeting.
Now I have coffee, I just went down and got it. There is quite a lot of preparatory work I still need to do for this evening’s meeting, the finance report for a start, it just doesn’t add up and I will have to sort out where the problem lies. It should have been done and circulated in advance of the meeting, but I’ve been focusing on the minutes and actions arising from the other PC meeting last Monday before I went to Hungary, and it just didn’t happen. Not to mention the web design work which I’m supposed to be doing and haven’t even looked at yet. I told them I could start this week, I should at least make contact. But I’ll get it done, I hope they know me well enough to realise that and trust me.
Am I going to be able to take any time off this summer? I’ve had all my trips, they should be enough, they at least get me away from here and out of everyday life, and I have one more to come, in London, though that will be hard work. But I can’t see there being any time for just relaxing and letting go. I just have to be glad to be keeping busy.

When I opened my eyes after my meditation yesterday morning, I saw Ninja curled up on the sofa, gazing intently at the smoke rising from the incense stick. Well, he is a Zen master, after all. Many cats are, though not all – not Miko for instance, she’s just a Crazy Cat, a furry bundle of manic energy, in constant motion (except when she isn’t). They all seem to fall into one category or the other. Maybe it’s an age thing.
I’m late this morning, and tired. Slept badly, I was awake at 3:20 but didn’t get up, I lay in bed and played my fall-asleep tape – right the way through, which must be 45 minutes, and still no effect. I must have fallen back to sleep some time after that though, I dreamt disturbing, unsettling dreams until the alarm went off.
Good news is that yesterday I found my Cross pen. I’m hopelessly careless with pens, as I am with most things, and I had this one for Christmas (in a boxed set with a ‘Swiss army grooming set’, about 2 inches long with scissors, nail file, tweezers and tooth pick, just what you need when you’re living out in the back woods). Anyway, it’s not exactly Mont Blanc, but it’s a nice pen, and when I unwrapped it, I thought, ‘this is a bad idea, I’m bound to lose it!’ It disappeared a couple of months ago – before I went to Paris, because I couldn’t find it to take with me, and I thought ‘I knew it, it’s gone’ and I was quite upset. My daughter kept telling me it would turn up, but I was convinced I’d left it somewhere.
Then yesterday morning, there it was, on the desk. I think it must have been under/behind the monitor stand, but I don’t know why it suddenly surfaced again. But it’s here now, and I have to think about how I’m going to look after it in future. I put it in the cracked mug I use to hold my pens and assorted other stuff, but it came out covered with orange gel from a leaking gel pen, so maybe not such a good plan (though I have now cleaned it up.) Should have bought that marble pen stand from the antiques market in Brussels that Saturday morning – though it would have been a bit heavy to carry home on the train, and where would I put it among all the detritus of my study, anyway?
The next thing I want is a Moleskine notebook. Never even heard about them till 6 months ago, when the Folio Society were offering one as a ‘free’ gift if you bought some outrageously expensive collection of books. Since then, they keep popping up all over the place. One of my Czech friends got one and thought it was sufficiently exciting to put a post on Facebook about it. The young intellectual types I was hanging out with on my last night in Oxford were raving about them. The notebook of Hemingway, eh? Yes, I definitely must get one. When I’ve filled my spiral bound A5 Pukka Pad.

I started last night to type up the notes I made when I was in Hungary, with a view to blogging them eventually – but it was taking ages, and I’d only got as far as the first stop on the drive from the airport. So maybe it won’t be worthwhile blogging it, I don’t know.
I started thinking, as I did at one point while I was away, about how, when you start writing down all the words that pass through your head (or rather, some of them, because it’s impossible to catch them all), it takes over to such an extent that there is no time left for experiences, because you are spending all your time writing. It’s like having a map on the scale of one-to-one, it completely swamps what is actually happening. Is it like some mathematical series that tends to infinity.. or zero… or, I don’t know what this analogy means. I can never reach a perfect equivalence between the life of events and the life of words, because that would need two lifetimes, maybe more, because the process of writing can take longer than the process of experiencing. Or sometimes less, of course, it’s not necessary to record all the minutiae of existence, some of them can pass unrecorded – otherwise, how boring would it be to read?
Maybe I’ll save my Hungary notebooks for the times when there is very little happening, draw on them and drip, drip, drip them into my blog gradually.
What else to write about this morning? Because this space is for new words, not ones copied from a notebook, that is cheating, I can do that later (though I will probably run out of time), but first I must write 500 new words.
I didn’t get much work done yesterday, out of the mountains that need to be done. First day back, that is the excuse. I must not be so lax this morning. If I’m not careful, the rest of the summer will drift away from me and I will be struggling to finish off what I need to get done, to keep the wheels moving, and then it will be autumn again and everything will start to close in on me... It’s only myself I’m cheating after all, if I fritter away my days not getting on with things then I have no time left for relaxing. And it would be good to have some time to spend in the garden this weekend, I have been away for the last two weekends, I need to get back in touch with home again, so I mustn’t spend the time sitting over the computer.
But that’s the weekend, and it’s only Tuesday today, I’m getting far ahead of myself.
So, today I WILL focus on work, no slacking, no drifting off into blogland...

The moon which shone last night as we drove back from the airport was a little past full, a slight flattening along one edge if you looked carefully, as though someone had taken a knife and nicked off a little of the silver, not enough to notice in the everyday rough and tumble of trade. But it was the same moon I saw slipping behind the pink dawn clouds that morning, the same moon which a few hours earlier had crept round the edge of Istvan’s weekend house as we sat on the terrace wrapped in blankets and watched the distant lights of Budapest outshine the few stars which put in an appearance. (Was that really Jupiter, as he claimed, or just a satellite, as I, ever the cynic, ever the pessimist, believed?) The same moon which shone on Friday night over a bonfire in a camp in the woods, and through a thunderstorm the night before when rain beat on the roof of the log cabin while I crouched over the laptop on the spare bed, and the Doors played through the camp PA system. The same moon which must, last night, have been shining over other parts of the world as well as the M1 between Luton and Bedford.
So now I’m back here again, and it looks like a nice morning. The study is a mess, and there is too much to do, too many things which have been put off, not thought about till I was back again, including website work which will be fun and exciting, as well as minutes to write and correspondence to sort out and emails to check, and invoices to pay. And meals to cook and the house to clean and washing to do.
But later today I’ll see my daughter, and some of those messages will be ones I’ll want to read (I hope).
So, here I am, and I’m grateful for having had such a wonderful time and being able to bring home such memories (and photos – god knows how many – I kept uploading them onto Gabriella’s laptop and then my pendrive every night, and I filled the memory stick again yesterday, though it’s only a 128meg one because it’s an old camera.) But I don’t have time today for pruning, editing and gloating over photos, too much to do, too much to sort out.
So, I’m not resentful that real life has to reassert itself, I’m glad to be able to keep busy, even though I know that much of what I have to do will be frustrating and soul-destroying, it doesn’t have to be that way always, there will always be something. They have asked us to go back again next year and be included on the official programme, rather than just being squeezed in at the last minute as we were, and although I have some doubts about whether it will happen, the joke I had with Gabriella and Istvan yesterday was ‘next time’ – every time we had to make a choice about where to go and what to do and what to eat, we said, ‘we’ll do that next time’.

... trying to read the reply to my latest comment from a laptop with a seriously dodgy mobile connection in the depths of the forest on an island in the middle of the Danube...
But the reply is:
You said you had deep pockets
Now, should I let Gabi sleep, or wake her from her nap and drag her to the palinka tasting and blues concert...
or should I just go on my own???

Yesterday I did something I almost never do – I took a nap in the middle of the day. Or rather, I didn’t so much take it as have it thrust upon me. I was working away – it had got to about 1:15, and I was thinking I should really stop and get some lunch – then I thought that what I really needed was sleep and it was impossible to concentrate.
Rather than fall asleep at the desk, which I was on the verge of doing, I decided to lie on the bed, play my ‘insomnia buster’ tape (the one I’m supposed to play in the daytime, which lasts about 20 mins), and see what happened. What happened, of course, was that I was asleep before the 20 mins was up, slept through the rest of the 45 min cassette, which is filled with the ‘bedtime’ track, and didn’t wake until the phone rang about 2:45. Then I got up and had some lunch and a cup of tea.
Later in the afternoon there was a ‘strawberry tea’ for the school governors. A friend I was talking to there remarked that I looked more relaxed than usual. When I said I’d had a nap, she commented, ‘It’s good that you had time for a nap’. Well, no, I didn’t have time for it, it just happened all by itself.
I had to come back from there, and grab my stuff for the Parish Council meeting at 7:30, which finished at 10:45. It wasn’t so bad as sometimes. I didn’t lose it and threaten to resign. I think now the decision has been effectively made for me, it is easier in some ways because I know I just have to get on with it. I’ll make the most of it, for the time being at least.
I guess this is the way my life goes, drifting from one day, month, year to the next, every so often thinking about taking action but mostly going along with events. Perhaps this is the point of the idea of acceptance, taking events as they are instead of resenting them or struggling against them, I don’t know.
So today I need to pack (again), tie up any things which need to be tied up, go to a governors meeting (the other school). People keep saying, ‘Have a nice holiday’, and I know I’ll have a great time, I always do, but it’s not relaxing. I won’t get that sort of holiday this year, and I won’t be going anywhere with Hubby. I don’t mind that. Often when we’ve been on family holidays I’ve been restless and not been able to settle, wanting to do stuff and feeling constrained by having to go along with what he wants or what the children want. I like being on my own, though I won’t be on my own for the next few days, because I will be with my Hungarian friend. She emailed me yesterday and warned me to expect rain.
My flight is at 6:25 tomorrow, so I definitely won’t be blogging in the morning before I go. Exactly 24 hours from now, I should be taking off. Back late Sunday night, so I won’t be blogging until Monday morning. If anyone’s bothered.

Well, I’ve had an email from the guy in Berlin welcoming me to the project and saying he’s glad I’m going to be involved, which is nice of him.
But it’s obvious that there won’t be any work coming from Oxford, because there’s no money to pay me, even for what I’ve already done. Having tortured myself over whether I should give up the PC to give me more time to do the editing work, it looks as though that isn’t an option anyway. So, I’m stuck with what I’m doing, I have to just grit my teeth and get on with it.
The trouble is that all the organisations I do work for are non-profit making and largely run by voluntary effort, which makes me feel awkward about asking for money. The MOMD has loads of editing work that needs doing, but... Should I offer to do it anyway without expecting payment? After all, I was talking to the Head of Publications, and she said in a semi-accusatory tone, ‘Even I don’t get paid’. So why should I expect to? But all the other people involved are academics who are making a living in some other way, and can afford to do this for love. I feel grubby and mercenary, and yet I must be earning a hell of a lot less than any of them – not enough to be able to support myself.
The answer is, it seems, that there is no escape route, I just have to make the most of things as they are. I have two lines of a song running through my head: ‘Life would be easy, if it wasn’t so hard’, only I can’t for the life of me remember where it’s from or who sings it.
I think everything would fall into place if I was happy with my marriage, if I loved my Hubby it wouldn’t matter so much about being dependent on him, I could just get on and do whatever I want to do, maybe even just write, finish my novel, do my research, and not be fretting about how I can earn money.
So maybe I should try and stop myself thinking about wanting love, or sex, or romance, or whatever the hell it is that I’m hankering after, and be grateful for a nice place to live and not having to worry about paying the bills. Everybody has to make compromises, don’t they? Why should I think I can be any different?
It’s just that I have this feeling that things could be different and I could actually be happy with my life, not just enjoy some bits of it some of the time. But maybe that is all anybody can ever hope for. Shit, I don’t know. Why do I keep coming back to the same bloody question: do you change the circumstances of your life to find happiness, or do you accept things as they are? And if the latter (which I suspect is true), why is it so bloody difficult? Or is that just me?
I’ve remembered that song: ‘Dirty Town’ from the film Still Crazy, sung by Bill Nighy.

Did I get everything done? I never got round to making that list, so I don’t know. Registration starts at 12, so if I aim to leave home about 10, I should have ample time. Does that mean there is no lunch provided? I had better check the programme. It’s not the sort of place that does casual buffets; proper, two course sit down lunches with waitresses (though they’re probably called something like ‘servers’, I suspect). Long wooden tables in the centre of the hall, long benches which are tricky to negotiate in skirts, unless you sit at the end. Gothic arched windows – Victorian gothic, it’s fun to tease the Americans and Australians who get terribly breathless and starry eyed about the ‘sense of history’, and when you point out that it’s not really old, just a 150-year old pastiche, they don’t seem to get the point. ‘Hey’, I tell them, ‘my house is older than this - older than your countries!’ No sense of chronological perspective, these people.
Oh, and only one ladies’ loo. After all, what are women doing in a place of learning?
And on Saturday and Sunday, University of Wolverhampton, Telford campus. That should be an interesting contrast. Bet the ladies’ loos are spot on.
What else to say this morning? Nothing much that’s suitable for general consumption. Finally sent out the agenda and finance report for next Monday’s PC meeting at 9:30 last night. I hope they appreciate my efforts. But if I could focus more in the daytime when I should be getting on with my work, and didn’t spend so much time off on my flights of fancy, I wouldn’t have to work in the evenings. When Hubby works from home, he manages to maintain a clear distinction between work and non-work, a clear boundary.
I didn’t say goodbye to him this morning. I hovered around the breakfast table, told him, I’ll be back on Sunday evening, not sure when, I’ll give you a call. He didn’t look up from his breakfast, his paper. I thought, should I go round the table, give him a hug, there as he sits over his Shredded wheat and the Times? Do I want to? Not particularly, in fact, not at all. What should I say? I’d been muttering something inconsequential, about checking the route from Oxford to Telford last night on Multimap, it was as he’d said, M40, M6, M54, so no need to check the route back, because obviously that would be M6 too, and once I’m on the M6 I can find my way home. I forgot to remind him to feed the fish. What else should I say? ‘Bye, then’? But that might make him feel he was required to respond, a brusque ‘Bye’, interrupting his train of thought without requiring him to look up. Or was he secretly longing for me to throw my arms around him, kiss him, tell him I’ll miss him? Well, that would be a lie anyway. Is he distancing himself, just as I have, steeling himself, waiting for the announcement I’m too timid to make? Or is he just too bound up in his own concerns to even notice that something is a little awry with our marriage? Who knows?
Physically he may be there, but metaphorically he is back in the attic.

Errrmmm...
*Harrumph*
Shiver me timbers???

Wake up and taste the coffee. Stand by the door and feel the beauty of an English summer morning. Remember how lucky you are to be in this lovely place. How many people dream about having a home like this? I used to dream about having a home like this.
The sleep tapes let me down. Awake at 4. Still, that’s just one night. Probably doesn’t help that my cheap headphones don’t fit properly, they’re not adjustable – well, they are, but even on the shortest setting they seem designed for coneheads – the ear pieces sit somewhere around my jaw, unless I prop them with my fingers.
Interesting messages yesterday. First, the long-awaited one from Italy, outlining the work Carlo wants me to do, the payment is 3,000 Euros, and I will need to attend a meeting in Berlin in the autumn.
When Hubby gets home, just before 8, I track him down in the kitchen, where he’s eating the dinner I left in the bottom of the Aga for him. ‘That’s about a month’s work’ he says. ‘Well, at commercial rates it would be about 2 weeks, but I realise it isn’t a commercial organisation and there are constraints’. Never mind that. If someone offers me money to do interesting work that I would enjoy, I’m hardly in a position to quibble over it am I? He is on a different planet.
I wonder yet again what it would be like to have a Proper Job, with a reliable salary. Despite the advantages, somehow it doesn’t seem all that appealing.
Second message was on Facebook. The Crazy Frog has broken his silence of – how long now? – must be at least 6 months. No, longer than that. I didn’t hear anything from him at Christmas. Must have been his birthday, last November, just after the last time he was with us in Brussels.
What brought this on? I tagged a photo of him a few days ago, an old one, I don’t know why, I was going through my albums and noticed I hadn’t tagged him, so I did. He asks how I enjoyed Paris. Resisting the urge to write ‘Would have been better with you, you miserable bastard’, I answer with a single word – Wonderful! – and point him to the three albums of photos I uploaded. But why does he need to see photos of Paris, when he can see it any time?
Right, so what about all the things I needed to get done yesterday? Didn’t even make the list. I just drifted into the Parish Council zone, where simple jobs take hours and hours and hours because you just can’t motivate yourself to get on with them and so you’re constantly thinking of other things and getting distracted and then you get to the end of the day and nothing has been done and I really can’t afford the time for this and… zzzzz
Need to pack. Need to find out how to get from Oxford to Telford on Saturday. Need to remember to take all the stuff for Telford as well. Back to back conferences. Pain in the….
No, I don’t really mean that. It’s good to get away.
Berlin in the autumn .

Monday morning. Two days to get everything done that needs to be done before I go to Oxford on Wednesday.
Life is all ups and downs lately. I felt very bleak for a while yesterday, but it doesn’t take much to cheer me up again. Funny old life. It was showery, so I spent most of the day indoors – and hence, on the computer (though I also did housework and cooking) - rather than in the garden. I even managed to write a scene for my novel. I made myself sit and write it, almost 700 words, though it was a bit of a struggle and I don’t think it’s very good. It’s an important scene, a big, dramatic, climactic one. Now that’s done – even if it’s only in draft form – will it make it easier, will it free me up to get on with the rest?
I’ve been on this journey for so long, and I wonder whether the end will be worth it, even if I ever actually reach it. Maybe it would be a huge best seller and give me the independence I keep saying I crave? Or maybe not. Life drifts, it is still drifting. I sit here, surrounded by books, I gaze around me at the shelves and see the card I bought with a picture of the Eiffel Tower: ‘The only things I’ll regret are the things I don’t do’. Well, maybe not strictly correct. I do do things I regret sometimes, but they’re little things, thinking specifically of something I’ve done recently which stopped me from doing something I really wanted to, so what does that count as?
To write and let the words out. I keep coming back to this. Letting them out, catching them, which is it? Hmmm. ‘Letting them out’, I think. Feeling them roll around inside my head, banging against the inside of my skull. But yesterday I was trying to catch them. That was hard.
I should make a list of all the things that need to be done today and tomorrow. But then I will get away and leave the lists behind – and though it’s only to Oxford and not exactly glamorous, still it will be nice to get away and be with different people again, rather than here, day after day. Not that I don’t appreciate the people whom I ‘meet’ when I’m here. But it’s hardly the same, and it doesn’t feel terribly healthy. I worry that I need to get a life. When was the last time I actually went out with friends, while I was here, at home, rather than off on my travels? I have the show, my Wednesday evening rehearsals, but I don’t go to the pub afterwards, I don’t hang around with the others. Maybe I should – maybe I will. But I won’t be there for the next couple of weeks, anyway.
There’s an old friend who recently got back in touch, I should call her, am I going to leave her dangling, let it slide, let her drift away again? So many friends I have carelessly let go of down the years, for want of reaching out, of making that contact.
Maybe I’ll call her today.

A tad late this morning, and I skipped meditation. I slept in till 6:30 – which is quite remarkable because I slept through the alarm. My first thought was that I must have forgotten to set it, but I have a distinct memory of doing so. Then I remembered dreaming about hearing an alarm. Possibly I even switched it off in my sleep.
Anyone who isn’t familiar with my weird sleeping patterns might be wondering why I would set an alarm on Sunday morning anyway – and no, I’m not a vicar, my post from yesterday should make that fairly clear. But I suffer from chronic insomnia, and to deal with it I have a very strict bedtime and waking routine, with the alarm going off at 6 every morning, seven days a week. Most days I am awake long before that. A few weekends recently, when I’ve had long periods awake in the night, I’ve switched the alarm off and allowed myself to sleep in later in the mornings, but this is not really a good idea.
I have tried just about every remedy you can think of, and for 15 months I attended the sleep clinic at Papworth hospital outside Cambridge, where one of the things I was taught was this business of having a strict routine of sleeping and waking times.
I’ve recently acquired some new sleep tapes, which I haven’t said anything about before because I’ve been waiting to see how effective they are. There is one which you play in the daytime, one for just before you go to sleep, and another one which, when the pattern is established, you are supposed to play continuously through the night. I’m not sure that I can manage this last one, because I only have an old-fashioned tape Walkman, so I can’t set it to play continuously, and I can’t play it without headphones because of Hubby. But I’ve been using the other two.
The last few nights I’ve been sleeping through till 5, which is pretty good. Last night, though, I was awake at 3:30. However, I suspect that this might be because my period started yesterday, and I had to get up to change my tampon. Afterwards I got back into bed and played the falling asleep tape again. Usually once I’m awake I’m awake for a couple of hours at least, but I don’t remember anything of that sort last night, obviously I was awake for a while, possibly an hour or so, but that’s all. And when I went back to sleep, I evidently slept deeply enough to sleep through the alarm.
So, cautious optimism. If I can crack this problem, it will be a huge thing for me, but I’ve tried so many things which haven’t worked, and anyway, I’m a born sceptic (comes of having an over active brain which always wants to understand things from first principles). Part of me wonders, if this technique really does work, how come they didn’t know about it at Papworth?
But faith and attitude play a big part in anything to do with the brain. How many times have I been told ‘If you expect it not to work, it won’t’? But how do you break out of that vicious circle? Nothing works, so you don’t expect it to work, how do you make yourself believe it will?
But, on recent evidence… cautious optimism.

My daughter was telling me yesterday about her boyfriend’s sister, who has just broken up with her partner. She had cheated on him, not once, but several times, apparently, and he had had enough.
‘I couldn’t believe it’ my daughter said, ‘It’s not like her at all, she’s such a nice person’.
A nice person. People who are unfaithful to their partners are not nice people. What about those who long for infidelity, but never quite succeed in achieving it? I think about the times I’ve though about confessing to her about my feelings. What would be her reaction? If I lost her love and respect, how would that feel?
It feels like an echo from thirty years ago: ‘What would my parents think?’ Am I still living my life according to what I think other people think I should do and be? Of course I am. It’s summed up in that sentence I carelessly typed a couple of minutes ago: ‘If I lost her love and respect, how would that feel?’ Put like that, it is too great a thing to risk.
And what about self-love and self-respect? I don’t feel myself to be a ‘nice’ person, and I never have. I have always had these feelings, even when I was her age, whatever relationship I was in, I always wanted something else, or someone else. I used to tell myself – even until very recently – that this was just because I’d never found ‘the Right One’, that I needed to find someone I could be faithful to painlessly, someone who would be everything to me and there wouldn’t have to be any kind of thought or struggle or wrestling with my conscience because he would just be there and that would be all I needed.
But why should that happen now, if it has never happened in thirty years? And if it isn’t going to happen, what does that mean? That I might as well just stay where I am, because even if I could find another relationship, it probably wouldn’t be any more satisfactory than this one? (Though I might at least get some sex, which could be a bonus – oh stop it woman, why do you have to bring it down to that level?)
Stay here, and be a Nice Person, in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of my children?
They are the only people in the world whom I truly love. But is love a trap? Is putting someone else’s feelings before your own, living for them, the truest way to find happiness, as I have read, or is it self-negation?
I remember another conversation, on another, apparently very different topic. Just after the Parish Council meeting where I tried and failed to resign, when I was told that they couldn’t manage without me. I was talking to another friend, who said: ‘Nobody is indispensable’. Am I indispensable to my husband? I assume I am, but how is he feeling? I make excuses – he’s under a lot of stress, he has all these worries at work, things will get better again when that settles down, - because I’m too scared to speak to him, to ask him how he’s feeling, and more importantly, to tell him how I’m feeling. And I think about all the huge and intimidating practicalities, about the house, and how would it feel to leave the house, and where would I go and what would I do and how would I feel about that, and it’s all too much and so I put aside my fantasies and carry on as though nothing is wrong.
As though I were a nice person.

We who inhabit this place live through words; our own words, other people’s words. We know each other (or think we do) through words. We show ourselves (or think we do) through words. Is this a strange and unnatural way to live? Or, if we accept that language is one of the defining features of humanity, does it make us more intensely human?
It is a dangerous way to live, because when we read someone else’s words, we can never be sure that what we are reading is what they intended to say, or, worse, whether they are being honest and saying what they feel, or deliberately setting out to deceive us. So we trust, and sometimes our trust is rewarded, but more often we find that our understanding is wide of the mark, that we have built up ideas in our heads which do not correspond to reality.
I keep saying ‘we’, but I guess maybe this is just ‘I’.
I worry that my life ‘In Here’ is too significant. Most of my emotional life takes place in here, and that is definitely not good. Well, when I’m travelling, outside is good, but during the normal humdrum, outside life feels dreary, something to be got through. And this is certainly not a healthy situation.
I made a post on Ask or Answer yesterday – unintentionally, I meant to put it on Melinda or Cassandra, but that was where it ended up, and it provoked quite a reaction which it probably wouldn’t have done elsewhere. What I was asking was, if you keep taking chances, keep trying, and keep failing, do you eventually get used to the disappointment? And the reactions I got were on the lines of – why would you keep on trying? Why would you want to keep making the same mistakes over and over again? Someone actually used the expression ‘a loser’, and maybe that sums up what I am.
So what is the answer, then? Accept defeat, don’t try any more? Is that good advice?
Usually the advice that helpful people give me is that I should take more chances, try more things. So, encouraged, I try, and then I fall flat on my face.
Does this make me so unusual? Is this not a general experience of life? Judging from the reactions to my post about disappointment, it appears not. If it’s ‘normal’ for people to find their way through life by trying things and succeeding at them, and not being let down and disappointed and hurt, then it’s no wonder I’m so unhappy. But why is it that my life doesn’t work that way? What the hell is it that I keep doing so wrong?
The answer, so I’m told, is acceptance, acceptance of the way life is and the way things are, that suffering exists, that shit happens, that you just have to deal with it. It seems as though the options are keep trying and keep failing, or give up trying and resign yourself to how things are.
Is there really no other way out?