I slept badly, maybe because I stayed up too late chatting (you know who you are) when I should have been relaxing and listening to my ‘insomnia buster’ track. I fell asleep listing to the ‘whole night’ track, but hadn’t put it on repeat, and woke at 2:20 to the sound of one of the ‘white noise’ tracks, not music, at least. I got up after a while and went downstairs to read, then came back about 3:30 and put the track on ’repeat’, I think I pulled it out/switched it off before I fell asleep though.
Then I woke just before the alarm at 6. When it went off, hubby got up, but I lay still in bed until he came back up to clean his teeth and shave, before I dragged myself out of bed and went downstairs.
I was standing by the Aga fiddling with the mp3 player and drinking a glass of water when he came into the kitchen. He picked up his bags, his sandwiches, his coffee mug, his phone, his keys.
‘Bye, see you on Friday’ he said as he walked past me, not meeting my eye, not making any form of contact. As he passed through the kitchen door he cleared his throat in that way he has. I heard him unlocking the back door.
I was scanning through the mp3 player, looking for the meditation track I wanted to use today, the 10 minute one, not much time but more than I will have tomorrow, so I wanted to make sure I did it.
I glanced up and through the kitchen window and saw a cloud of exhaust smoke filling the gateway, I don’t remember seeing it like that before, it must be the weather, it coiled and drifted, seeming almost solid for a while, strange and strangely significant as I watched it disperse.
After meditating, I caught sight of my William Morris (repro, of course) vase as I left the sitting room, and remembered an instant from last night’s dream. We were sitting in a room which seemed familiar, but wasn’t in this house, though it contained some of my things (as you’ll hear), there was quite a crowd, maybe our children, my siblings and their families, because it seemed like a party or gathering of some kind. Something was being thrown from hand to hand – Hubby was leading the throwing - and I said something like:
‘If you must play that, be careful you don’t break…’ and I looked around the room and started to make a list, my grandmother’s Chinese vase was the first, then my William Morris vase, then all the things in that room which were fragile and mattered to me, though I can’t now remember what they were. Things which might be broken.
The bin men took away my mother’s mirror yesterday. Bad luck to break a mirror. But the mirror wasn’t broken. Just the frame.
I have now been approached by both ‘sides’ in BCUK’s notorious breakup. One invited me to be a friend, one did not. I accepted the invitation, but I am still neutral. Am I being manipulated? Probably. I always pride myself on being able to see both sides of a story. I will listen sympathetically to whoever wishes to talk to me. I try not to judge. Let she who is without stain cast the first stone.
At 2 today my daughter will take me to the station, to catch the train down to London where I will spend the night with a friend. Tomorrow morning I fly from City airport to Berlin, meeting on Thursday, home on Friday. Will this lead to something? Everything leads to something, little stepping stones that take you from one state, not quite to another state, just to a slight alteration in the starting conditions. Maybe one day I will find a bridge and cross that. Who knows?

... but at least I found it.
first one I checked, in fact (after spending ages yesterday looking for it without success).
Must be fate.
I had paraphrased in my head, of course.
And it's a lot less hopeful than I thought it was.
'Aaaahhh love, I need you, I need you, I need you...'

I woke at quarter to 5 this morning – not too surprising, I guess. More surprising is that I was late going to bed last night – fell asleep on the sofa. I have an alarm on my phone that goes off at 8 (in the evening) to remind me to go and make a cup of coffee; one at 9:15, which I keep snoozing, to wake me up if I’m falling asleep too early; and one at 10:45 to tell me it’s time to go to bed. At some point last night I must have slept through the ‘wake up’ alarm and failed to snooze it, so that when I thought I heard it go off, it was actually the ‘go to bed’ alarm. And I hadn’t got ready for bed or made my horlicks which I normally do at 10. I guess it sounds rather pathetic that I have these strict routines, but they all come from when I used to go to the sleep clinic. They do help, and the tapes help. I think my relationship with sleep is much healthier than it was a few years ago.
Anyway.
I spent quite a lot of time yesterday working on job applications – just the two, the research one and another one that I’ve found, marketing copywriter for a small engineering firm, less money, less high powered, less stress. ‘What’s taking so long? How complicated can it be?’ I hear you cry, but this is a big thing for me, a big challenge, something I haven’t thought about for years. I thought I’d got the copywriter one sorted, then I started reading the agency’s ‘tips for CV writing’ and started revising everything… I really like the sound of that one. But I got so I couldn’t bear to think about it. The other one is done, it just needs checking over and submitting, I’ll do them both today, but by the end of yesterday I was so confused I didn’t know if I were coming or going.
I want to do this on my own. I don’t want Prince Charming to come and rescue me, I have to rescue myself, from the tug of expectations and life-as-it-has-always-been. To be by myself, to wander through galleries alone, to sit in cafes and smile at strangers, to eat Ritz crackers and peanut butter and drink endless cups of tea. Yes, I know that last one makes no sense, but why does everything have to make sense? Why does anything?
And I’m so much further on than I was, even a few months ago. I sometimes think that friends who see me dithering by this gate don’t realise the long, long path I have had to walk even to get here. When I look back, I can recognise to what extent I’ve succeeded in stilling those voices that used to hold me, the ‘shan’t’s and ‘can’t’s and ‘mustn’t’s – yes, they’re still there, but once they were wrapped around me so tightly that not even a chink of light was allowed in, but now there are cracks here and there, and maybe it is only a matter of time, maybe it just needs one more push, one more effort, one more sign, a little more assistance from the universe outside, for the pieces of the shell to break away and I will rip through the membrane and walk free at last.
Maybe.

We write scenarios in our heads all the time: ‘If I do this, then he will do this, and that will happen’. But what if the rest of the world hasn’t read our script? I have two lines running though my head from, I think, a Leonard Cohen song, though I have no idea which one: ‘No one knows where the wind is blowing/And no one knows where the wine is flowing’. Or probably something completely different from a totally different song not by LC at all. But it’s in my head.
I’m up early because of course I woke at normalish time, about a quarter to 5. It occurred to me that if I’d changed my phone time last night I could have had the alarm going off at 6 GMT instead of BST, so I might have had the chance to go back to sleep. I could have got up and changed it, I should have got up but of course I didn’t get up at all till quarter to 6 and by that it seemed better to make use of the extra hour in the day rather than try to sleep more. I must be more disciplined about getting up though. When I did get up, I did the full meditation of loving kindness.
I have been experimenting with my mp3 player, getting it to repeat tracks. With the sleep tracks, there is a ‘whole night’ track which runs for about 80 minutes, you play it on repeat, one of the reasons I got the mp3 player in the first place. I downloaded it yesterday and copied it on there. The difficulty of course is that while I’m sharing a bed with Hubby I have to sleep with headphones to keep it going all night, but I have fallen asleep with them in a couple of times. And the other night I forgot to switch the thing off (though I didn’t have the headphones in) and left it running all night. Also, when I’m away next week and sleeping alone I can experiment with it, especially as I will be in a strange place and probably not sleeping much anyway.
I wrote all that stuff about hubby yesterday because I’d read something about men who are unable to communicate and was relating it to my preference for communicating in writing, although I want to communicate it is easier not to try and so I guess I have learned not to. I was trying to understand something about how we relate to each other, or don’t, what it is that we take for granted, what we leave well alone, the silences between us. ‘Two lost souls living in a fish bowl/Year after year’. But I didn’t come to any conclusions, develop any insights.
When we are being civil to one another, rather than ignoring one another, how is that? It is at least easy and relatively comfortable. Better than nothing? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s enough though.
This longing for something different isn’t new, it isn’t something I’ve just talked myself into, although that is one of the messages that I keep telling myself. When I think back, it has been there for years, but it has never seemed feasible, never seemed as though there was anything I could do about it. Is there now?

I’ve been thinking about Hubby, trying to remember why I once loved him, not what attracted me to him, but what it was that convinced me that he was the one I wanted to be my life partner and the father of my children. And I think the answer is: his practical kindness. He is not (and never has been) much good at romantic gestures, but very good at anticipating that something needs to be done and doing it without being asked (well, some things, but I’ll come to that). Because I’m so forgetful and disorganised, I would often panic that I hadn’t done something only to find that he had taken care of it. And unlike many men of our generation (my brother in law, for starters), he has always helped out with the housework, does the shopping, shares the cooking, irons his own shirts, etc. This was particularly important when the children were small and I was prostrate with exhaustion and despair, when he took over everything, as well as going out to work.
I’m sure for many women this makes him sound like the perfect husband, and this is certainly how some of my women friends have regarded him in the past, including my next door neighbour, who once told a mutual friend: ‘He does what he’s told”. And of course, he loves to play up to that image. It adds to the burden of gratitude I feel towards him, and the fact that it no longer makes me happy, but instead, frankly, rather irritated by it all, just adds to my guilt and self loathing. After all, how can I not love someone like that, how can I possibly be unhappy with this relationship?
Over recent years, I have come to see that there are two downsides. The first is that in a way it is a form of control, because it is only ever done on his terms. He decides what he is going to do and how he is going to do it, for example, when he was commuting 5 days a week to Basingstoke and I offered to do the shopping instead, he insisted that he would do it on Saturday mornings. Also, if I ask him to do something, he almost invariably refuses – this is also true for traditional ‘male’ household jobs such as decorating or maintenance – unless it’s his own idea, I have to do it myself. And when it comes to maintenance, he is very good at denial and ignoring problems until they become catastrophes – particularly if I mention them first. In fact, anything I notice and try to draw his attention to, like the leak in the dining room ceiling from the shower, is routinely ignored and dismissed.
The second, related problem, and one which was pointed out to me years ago by a counsellor, but which I dismissed at the time – is the impact this has on my self–esteem, because the implication, and one I have always gone along with, is that it’s necessary for him to do these jobs because I’m incapable of doing them for myself. This was especially true when my parents were alive, they were always reminding me how lucky I was to have him to look after me because, of course, I would never manage if it was left to me. When he comes in while I’m cooking and starts to clean up around me, it feels like a rebuke because it means I am too chaotic and incompetent to do it for myself. Well, I know this is true but being reminded of it in this way makes me feel even worse, like a useless waste of space. And then I feel guilty because, how can I be so ungrateful, how can I not love someone who is so kind and thoughtful?
In many ways our relationship is the inverse of the classic mid-life marital crisis. He is comfortable in his domesticity, no longer interested in sex (not that he ever was, particularly), happy with a pipe-and-slippers kind of life, to coast into old age in companionable silence, digging the garden and watching ‘Antiques Road Show’. I am restless, dissatisfied, wanting something more from life, with an insatiable longing to be loved, desired, worshipped and adored, to be told that I am wonderful. So I tell myself that I’m wrong to expect and want those things, that I should be grateful for what I have, and that I’m a bitch for wanting life to be any different.

Two months to Christmas, and the clocks go back today.
A long meditation this morning, as it’s Saturday, I sat through the whole of the meditation of loving kindness, although mostly I focussed on trying to feel loving kindness towards myself. Very selfish of me. I was once told that my self loathing is so pathological that it is a kind of egomania, that I’m obsessed with how much I hate myself, just as some people are obsessed with how much they love themselves, that I am the centre of my own universe but in a negative way. Yet another thing to feel guilty about.
When I reached the final stage: ‘May all beings be well, may all beings be happy, may all beings be free from suffering…’ I thought, this makes no sense, all beings can’t be free from suffering, it’s hard enough for any beings to be free from suffering, suffering is the first noble truth. But it’s the intention to wish all beings well that the meditation is trying to cultivate – and to wish myself well.
‘Taking things as they are’: does that mean, just accepting everything and not trying to change anything, just passivity? I’ve always been one for taking things as they are, but I can’t say it’s ever really brought me happiness. I think about Hamlet: ‘Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and…’ I have a mental block there, I don’t know why, actually I think it’s something very simple, like ‘…and by opposing, end them’. Yes, I’m sure that’s right. I’ve never noticed before how tangled the metaphors are in that. It really is a bit over the top. I mean, how do you take arms against the sea? But what about the principles behind it? Aye, there’s the rub. He just poses the question, and doesn’t offer any answers. Which is it to be? (or not to be?) To be passive and accept life as it is, or to try and fight back, change your external circumstances?
Maybe the mixed metaphor is deliberate. Maybe he talks about taking arms against a sea of troubles just to show how futile it all is.
Maybe the answer for me is just to take it as it is and use this space as a place to vent all these feelings of frustration and loneliness. Say, ‘Yes, I hate my life, but it’s my life and it’s all I’ve got so I’d better just get on with it’. Is that the brave way out, the coward’s way out, the lazy way out, the strong way out? The easy way out?
Well, ‘I hate my life’ is not a good thing to admit, people don’t like to hear that, I mustn’t hate my life, I must look on the bright side, I must find reasons to love it. It’s the only one I’ve got and will ever have, as far as I know and believe, so I shouldn’t be wasting it like this, feeling like this.
What else can I say?

The tag on my tea bag yesterday said: ‘Happiness is taking things as they are’. That’s what I’ve been trying to do for years. Why is it so difficult, when I’ve got so much to be grateful for? It must be a fault in me, some character flaw that prevents me from seeing the good things, my negative mental attitude. I try and I try and I struggle and I battle with it but I can never win, I can never get beyond this great dark fog that wraps around me and leaves me stumbling and lost. So why try to change my life, why bother to do anything, I can’t escape from myself, whatever I do this will always follow me around. There is no solution. Nothing can save me from myself. I’ve discovered a new song about myself, the Sunday Times gave away the Doors’ ‘Strange Days’ a couple of weeks ago, I hadn’t heard the whole album before but there’s this song: ‘Unhappy girl’ – ‘Lost in a prison of your own device’. That’s me all right, how can I break down the walls and escape? Am I stuck here forever?
I spent yesterday morning trying to write about how wonderful I am and how perfect I would be for this job. It sounds stressful. Am I ready for that? Would it be better just to take off with a laptop, fulfil my fantasy?
In the five years since I left my last full time job, I haven’t finished my novel, I haven’t done my independent research, what have I done, what have I achieved, did it make me happy? I’ve started three blogs. I’ve written some of my novel, a few short stories and quite a lot of poetry. I’ve made some progress with my research, I’ve published a few papers. Met some interesting people. Travelled around Europe. Made new friends. Seen my children through the last of their adolescence and watched them take their first steps in adult life.
If I take this next step, there are no guarantees.
I almost forgot, a couple more things to add to the list: weaned myself off anti-depressants, started to learn to meditate, found ways to deal with my insomnia.
So, there are no guarantees for the next step. So, do I say, ‘Every time in the past that I got what I wanted, it never made me “happy”, so why should I expect this to? Why not just accept things the way they are?’
Well, accepting things the way they are has never made me happy, either, has it?
Am I giving up too easily? No, I don’t think so. I have tried so hard.
If I get this job, take this next step, what then, will I find it so stressful that I can’t deal with being on my own as well? Would that be another excuse for deferring a decision? It would be a radical change in my life, that’s for sure. Suddenly to be fulfilling an ambition I had long ago given up on. Would that be a fulfilment at last, or another disappointment, a source of stress? Am I strong enough now?

There was an ad in the local paper for a job at my old university, an admin job share, three days a week. I thought about applying for it, then decided against, then thought about it again. Three days a week would give me two days to carry on with my freelance stuff and would let me drop the clerking, it would be similar work but less bitty and so hopefully less stressful, and it would be better paid. So yesterday I decided to go for it after all.
I went onto the website to find the application form, and out of curiosity, when I got to the jobs section, I clicked on ‘Research’ to see what there was. And they are looking to recruit three Research Fellows for a new centre on environmental risk. The requirements are a PhD and two years’ post-doc – my famous ‘qualifications’ are the bare minimum. I’ve read the description and I’m sure I could do the job, it would be challenging and it would stretch me and use my ‘talents and abilities’ to the full and then some, and no doubt I would be in a constant state of panic, but it’s a real job that I could really do.
So now I have to think about how to fill in the application form, and I got nothing done yesterday afternoon because I was fretting over it, I thought I’d leave it to simmer and get on with other stuff but I ended up just sorting out my college notes and doing some of the javascript homework.
Oh, and the salary is £28-31k – I think I could be independent on that.
I was home yesterday evening, no meetings, unusual for a weeknight. I finished ‘Black Dogs’, it’s hard to describe, It was moving and thought-provoking in places, at the end he talked about contingency and chance and how the strands of cause and effect weave into one another and lead us to the places where we end up. That’s how I interpreted it anyway, but then that’s something I often think about – the ‘fast-running rivers of choice and chance’.
The herbal tea bags I drink in the morning have little sayings on the tags, and yesterday I got something like: ‘Find happiness through making others happy’. Well, I’ve tried that, but making others happy, or trying not to avoid hurting others, never seems to have brought me happiness. I must be doing it wrong, or not trying hard enough, or something.
We had dinner together last night, that’s unusual for a weekday too, usually I’m out by the time he gets home. I told him about the job application, and we talked about whose turn it is to cook on Saturday and what we need from Sainsbury’s, usual stuff. And the cats. We always talk about the cats. And he said if L can’t take me to the train station on Tuesday he could swap his working from home day and go to Nottingham on Monday, but he needs to let them know today, and I said I thought L would be OK to take me, and he said he didn’t know when he would see her.
We talk civilly to one another when we see one another, should I be happy with that? Is that enough? Am I being unrealistic to want something different? The emptiness is within me, how am I ever going to escape from myself, no matter where I run to?

Slept till the alarm today, so I am running a little late.
I was talking the other day about the book ‘Black Dogs’ by Ian McEwen, which I picked up at the study centre on Monday. I read a bit more of it yesterday evening instead of going online when I got back from college at 9:30. I’m not reading much these days, spending too much time either online or doing the Kenken out of the Times (a more interesting version of su doku). And I’m out most evenings. There will be a time when I go back to reading again.
Anyway, I read a bit more of ‘Black Dogs’. When I first saw the title, I assumed it was to do with the ‘black dog’ in Churchill’s sense, ie depression, which is one of the things that attracted me – well, really I was just attracted because it was sitting there and I’d never seen a Bookcrossing book before, but the title intrigued me as well. There was a passing reference to Churchill last night – the narrator saying that that was what he had thought the first time he heard someone make reference to the ‘black dogs’, but that’s not really what it is, though it is generally about people dealing with their emotional lives and each others. Hard to know how to describe it, really, I think I am digging myself a deeper and deeper hole.
Anyway, what I meant to say is that there was an incident in the bit I read yesterday about the narrator sitting in a café in France and observing a French couple with their 8 year old son. I don’t really know how to explain this except to say, go and read it for yourself. But basically the parents were being abusive towards the child, first verbally, then with threats and smacks and finally the father knocked him out of the chair and sent him flying across the room. The narrator, who had lost both his parents at the age of 8, described how he felt with the loneliness and despair of the child, particularly the way he was trying not to cry because his parents were threatening him with worse if he should start, and the mother said something to the effect that he was wilful and just trying it on. I’m writing this from memory because I try to make these posts spontaneous and I don’t have the book to hand.
Now, I’m not saying my parents ever abused me, certainly not physically, When I think back as I knew them when I was an adult, I’m sure they loved me, though I didn’t feel that as a child. As a child all I ever felt was that I was a nuisance and a disappointment who got in everyone’s way and it would have been better if I had never been born. The first counsellor I saw said that my personality was like that of an adult who had been abused as a child, but I honestly don’t know why and I don’t want to traduce my parents, they were kind people and I’m sure they loved me and did the best they could.
But this all reminded me of an incident, not from my childhood, but from 20 years ago, when I was pregnant with my daughter and I was visiting my brother and sister in law with my mum and dad (hubby wasn’t there). It was dinner time and I had just struggled to get my 2-year old son to sleep so I was late to the table and my brother made some remark about me which was supposedly a joke only I was tired and stressed and feeling embarrassed because I was late and didn’t laugh and then he flew into a rage about what a bloody rude guest I was and I couldn’t take a joke dee dah dee dah and I burst into tears in front of my parents and brother and sister in law and their daughters (who were about 8 and 9 at the time) and I felt so humiliated and lonely and desperate and the only person who came to me and put her arms round me and hugged me and told me it was OK was my sister in law while my parents sat there and muttered something about ‘it was only a joke’ and yet again I was causing a scene and I just wished I was dead. I was 34 at the time.

After yesterday’s relatively upbeat post it was inevitable that by today reality would reassert itself and I would be back to normal again. I have been trying to do the loving kindness meditation, day after day, trying to wish myself well, is this going to do any good? I know it works for other people but it doesn’t seem to work for me.
I am so sick of it all. How many times a day do the words: ‘I wish I was dead’ run through my head or out of my mouth? Not that I’m going to do anything about it, it’s just words, a kind of mantra, an idea that comes back again and again when I think about all the things in my life.
How the hell did I end up like this? It goes on and on and doesn’t get any better, the better bits come and go but there is no long term solution, the worse bits come back again and there they are, staring at me. How do I deal with them? I guess what I do do with them is wrong, because they keep on coming back, but I have no idea what I should be doing with them, if there is any way of resolving this, of finding a way of living life that doesn’t do this to me all the time?
‘Life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it’.
Maybe everybody really feels like this but I’m the only one honest enough to admit to it, or maybe the only answer is that there is no answer and the only way to keep going is to grab the good feelings when they come even though there is no way of making them stay or making them come.
How else can I live my life? If I don’t know by now, when the hell am I ever going to work it out?
I have something to look forward to next week, but what happens when that is over and I am back staring into the void? When the next thing to look forward to is Christmas, god help me?
I heard Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish you were here’ on the radio the other day: ‘Two lost souls living in a fish bowl, year after year’. And that just reminded me of a Far Side cartoon, of three fish standing outside a fish bowl which is on fire, and one’s saying: ‘Well, at least we all got out alive. Of course, now we’re equally screwed’.
Will I ever get out alive, or if I do will I just find out I’m equally screwed because there’s no way I will ever escape from myself, no matter how far I run?
No one ever gets out alive, that’s one thing for sure. And what do you do while you’re still here? How do you make the most of it? Find out what makes you happy and stick with it. But the things that make me happy don’t last and don’t lead me anywhere, they just send me stumbling and crashing back here again.

Monday morning. It sounds wild out there. In one respect, it’s nearly the end of October. Next weekend is the last weekend, even though the last day is almost a fortnight away, so presumably next weekend is when the clocks change.
Woke up feeling strangely elated. Maybe because I slept through almost to the alarm, who knows? It happens sometimes. Life is not unremitting doom and gloom, however much it might seem like it at times. I have things to look forward to, Berlin next week. Of course, I haven’t had any feedback on what I did for them before, maybe they didn’t like it, maybe it’s not what they were after. I don’t want to start thinking like that.
What is the worst that can happen? Don’t start thinking like that, either. Though sometimes it helps to face up to the worst and realise you can cope with it.
Writing this morning. Last week she told us about our end of term assignment – a short story, 1500 words, based on one of the exercises we’ve done this term. I looked at the two pieces I’d written so far and neither suggested anything I could expand. But during the class – when we were continuing to think about the one-word character description that she’d given us the week before to free write around – a plot started to develop round this character (my word was ‘sanctimonious’). We did a role playing exercise in a three where we had to be that character while the other two asked questions, and that gave me more ideas. So by the end of Monday I had it all pretty well worked out.
It happens like that sometimes.
The other thing that happened at writing on Monday is that I came in through the back door – as I always do – the study centre is an old house with a long garden which stretches between two roads, I always park a little way away and walk in through the garden and then through the conservatory/coffee shop. Last week I met another lady at the gate and walked through the garden with her. When we reached the patio she continued round the side of the house to the front door, but I went to the conservatory door as I always do. ‘It’s not always open that way’ she said. ‘It usually is when I try it,’ I replied, and in fact I’ve never found it locked. So I went in that way as I always do, and as I passed through the empty coffee shop, I saw a book on one of the tables with a big sticker on it saying: ‘I’m FREE, I’m not lost!’
I’d heard about Bookcrossing, this is a scheme that started a few years ago where hundreds of books have been ‘released’, left in public places, the idea being that anyone can pick them up, read them, and then leave them somewhere else. Each has a number, and there’s a website you can go to to find out where ‘your’ book has been, and register where you found it and where you left it. But this was the first time I’d actually seen one.
The book is ‘Black Dogs’, by Ian McEwen, quite short, less than 200 pages. I’ve started it. I’ve never read one of his novels before. Part of it is set in Berlin when the wall came down, which seems like a bit of a coincidence – or synchronicity, if you prefer. I’m planning to finish it and then leave it at the airport next week. Who knows where it might go next?
http://www.bookcrossing.com/

when I was dusting the bedroom this afternoon, I picked up Mum's hand mirror from the dressing table. The one which was/is the only surviving relic (so she told me) of the tortoiseshell dressing table set which Dad gave her as a 21st present. Which would make it 75 years old (as of yesterday).
the one where the first bit of tortoiseshell chipped off the edge and disappeared up the hoover in the days when I was still working full time and could employ a cleaner to destroy my heirlooms for me. where the second chip of tortoiseshell had come off and was lying loose on the dressing table to be glued back on 'some time'. where the rest of the tortoiseshell rim is pulling away as I dust. Where the mirror itself is so scratched and remote, giving a blurred and unappealing reflection of the world.
the one whose intrinsic value is now zilch. I hate to think what the know-it-alls on Antiques Road Show would say, any serious dealer would be reduced to paroxysms of mirth.
Mum, I don't need this any more. Can you hear me? How would you feel? You didn't even ask me to take it, it could have gone to the charity shop along with everything else. But I kept it. And now? I don't even want half the stuff from my life, let alone yours.
I dropped it in the bin. Then I fished it out, polished it so that I could see my face (and the next bit of tortoiseshell rim fell off with the motion), dropped it back in again. Sat down on the dressing table stool and the tears came.
What would you think? Can you see my unhappiness? I did this once before, didn't I? I wish I could walk away in just the clothes I stand in, but I'm 32 years older now, and it's hard, so much harder to walk away. I thought that you would never understand, never forgive me, never hug me again. But you loved me. I didn't understand that then, I didn't understand till I was a mother myself what that meant.
It's a mirror, old and empty. Can I let it go? It doesn't mean I miss you less, love you less. It's just about my life, the way it is and the way I want it to be. Please, will you let me let it go?

I’ve been thinking about Kate.
Kate is an Australian woman I met the first time I went to the Royal Geographical Society conference, two years ago. She latched on to me at the free wine reception on the first night, we chatted, found out we were staying in neighbouring rooms, and ended up swapping life stories over a bottle of red back at the hall of residence. She was a few years younger than me, in the middle of her PhD, married with three sons in their late teens/early twenties, and three cats. We became buddies, the sort of thing that happens at conferences when you don’t know anybody to start with.
Because one of her grandparents was Welsh, she had a British (and hence EU) passport, as well as her Australian one. After the RGS, she was due to present a paper at a conference in Oxford, and her plan after that was to take off across Europe for a few months, just travelling round, meeting people, picking up experiences (sound familiar?)Her husband was sending her a monthly allowance, and other than that she was planning to do casual work wherever she could.
On the last night of the conference, she asked me to go with her (standing by the Albert Memorial, we had hatched a plan – largely mine, I suspect – to do a tour of phallic memorials – starting with the AM, then Nelson’s column, Eiffel Tower... you get the general idea). Anyway, this woman I’d known for three days asked me to take off with her into the wild blue yonder.
Well, obviously the whole thing was impossible. I couldn’t even imagine inviting her to stay at our house, I couldn’t begin to picture how hubby would react, and I wasn’t sure I wanted her there either. So I declined.
And a couple of days after I’d gone home, when she was still in London, I got a phone call saying that there was a problem with the youngest boy and she was flying back to Oz, not even giving the paper in Oxford. And that was that.
Our communications after that were very erratic, she isn’t much of a one for email, but every now and again I would receive an extravagant parcel full of silly little bits and pieces, fridge magnets, car stickers, key rings, pens, books, once a small cuddly kangaroo. In summer 07 she wrote and told me her marriage was over and she was leaving her husband. She was progressing with her PhD, and had been offered a six month internship by the UN somewhere impossibly exotic like the Dominican Republic (I don’t remember exactly where). Her career was taking off.
Then, about this time last year, around the time when Chris died and I was off to Cyprus, I got an email from her saying that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was going to be operated on. She had stuck with the husband, and he emailed me progress reports while she was in hospital.
As I said, communication has always been erratic. The last I heard from her was in March, when a belated Christmas parcel full of bits and pieces turned up, and about a month later an Easter card. I replied, but nothing since. I don’t even know if she’s still alive.

Recently I have been in several conversations, both online and face to face, in which I have tried to articulate the reasons why I don’t want to hurt my husband, or, more generally, why I believe that other people’s feelings are more important than my own and at all costs I must avoid doing anything which will inconvenience or distress them in any way. The answer really just comes down to – because that’s the way to behave, that’s what we’re supposed to do, that’s the way it should be. As with anything when we start to subject it to scrutiny, this begins to seem less and less tenable the more I try to justify it. Surely this is the way the world works? I’m not the only one who thinks like this? Isn’t this the way we’re all supposed to feel? Isn’t it at the root of all morality, whether Christian, Buddhist, secular or whatever?
Yesterday I tried a small experiment. I left a post on ‘Ask or answer’ as follows:
‘Is it OK to do something because you want to?
Is that ever a sufficient justification for anything?’
The answers I got back overwhelmingly (with the exception of Foxy, who presumably recognised the subtext) confirmed my expectations: ‘Yes, as long as by doing that you don’t hurt anyone else’.
So, respondents to this very unscientific poll are in agreement with my suspicions, that other people’s feelings should take priority over one’s own, or at least, that is what they recognise as being the correct/expected response to such a question. Do these people live up to this credo in their own lives? I have no idea. Are we all just hypocrites? What do we do when faced with an actual real life situation where the choice is between our own happiness and someone else’s? Am I actually taking it to an irrational extreme to say that I can’t put my own happiness first?
One of my respondents – Lost Johnny – also reminded me that the root of suffering is desire. I know that it is the desire for change, for things to be different, for a life I can’t have, which makes me unhappy. I have tried and tried to subjugate that desire and be happy with what I have.
This too is part of my ‘morality’, if you want to call it that, the code I think I am expected to live by. ‘Expected by whom?’ is another question I don’t know the answer to. By good people, I suppose, by people who know right from wrong and know how life should be lived.
But I have spoken about this lately to people I consider to be ‘good’, people I respect, and they are not telling me this is what I ‘should’ be doing. This all sounds crazy, doesn’t it? It does to me. Doesn’t it to you? ‘Good’ people are non-judgemental, but how can you say ‘this is good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ without judging? And why should I listen to other people anyway?

I’m sure people think I’m very mercenary/materialistic when I say I can’t leave because I won’t have enough money, as though I’m saying I don’t want to give up my skiing holidays/ Caribbean hideaway/ new car every couple of years (I don’t have any of those things, BTW, that was a joke). I got a few sarky comments at the conference in Oxford in July for saying I hadn’t made any progress on my research because I’d been having to concentrate on earning money, and when I said that I couldn’t do the editing work unless they could pay me for it, I got the comment: ‘I’m head of publications, and I don’t even get paid!’ Well, yes, but you have a secure academic income. People with comfortable middle class salaries don’t, I think, quite understand where I’m coming from. I saw Mary last night and told her that I’d sat down and worked out what I earn and she said: ‘Oh, that’s a positive step!’, and when I started to say ‘but..’ she said, ‘No buts, remember, you’re not allowed to say but!’ so I said: ‘and, it’s about eight and a half thousand’. Oh, that did take the wind out of her sails a bit. She could understand the problem when it was expressed like that.
There have been times when we’ve not had much disposable income, or when I’ve not been earning anything in my own right, and I’ve managed without things, that’s not a problem, I can do that, if I can’t afford something I do without, I’ve never got into the shop-till-you-drop culture, having lots of stuff for it’s own sake doesn’t interest me. But I’m scared of not having enough to live on, of having bills I can’t pay at the end of the month.
At the group last night, one of the guys was talking about someone who had just found out he had only three months to live. Oh, I would know what to do in that case. I would take off across Europe and visit my friends, buy a laptop and travel from place to place, writing and writing. I could live happily for three months. It’s knowing that you’ll still have to live after that that’s the challenge.
Which is why I wondered about the idea of just going anyway and living for as long as I can on as much as I’ve got, and then if nothing turns up before I run out, taking my own life. There’s a real appeal to that one, it seems practical and doable. After all, why bother to carry on living if there seems little prospect of things getting better? I said I wouldn’t do that to my kids, but it still has its attractions. Of course, probably they wouldn’t let it happen, they would bale me out if it came to it, but it would be terribly selfish to rely on that.
I had a look at the job pages again last weekend. My old university is looking for an administrative assistant, it’s a job share, 3 days a week. I could do it. But they’re asking for education to A level or equivalent. Wonder what they’d make of me?

When someone suffers an awful, traumatic loss or personal disaster, it may plunge them into despair and it’s easy to see the cause, there is a reason behind it all, and then they have to find a way of working through and coming out the other side, knowing that there is another side to get to because they came from another side in the first place.
What do you do when you can’t see what caused it, when you don’t know where you’re going to because you don’t know where you’re coming from, when you can’t get over it because you don’t know what ‘it’ is that you need to get over? What do you do if this is all you know?
About six months after my parents died, around the time when we were moving house, the insomnia got so bad that I went to the doctor. I was getting light headed/dizzy spells in the daytime because I was only having 3 or 4 hours sleep, night after night, day after day, many times I thought I was going to pass out.
They referred me for six sessions of counselling, which was the most the NHS had to offer. I didn’t even know where to start. At the first session, she asked me what I hoped to achieve. How could I answer that? Just not to feel so crap all the time. She focussed on the bereavement, although I realised that I was so unhappy I hadn’t even started to grieve, I’m not sure I ever have, there was just so much shit inside there was no room for anything else.
Whenever I’ve been in counselling, I’ve always found it difficult at the start of each session to say how I was feeling, just as, whenever someone says to me ‘How are you?’ I will always say: ‘Fine thanks’ or ‘OK’ or something innocuous like that, because what else can you say? It takes me a while to get into a session and then by the time I get going it’s time to stop again. Maybe it’s just part of that keeping-a-lid-on-it idea, that I can’t go around thinking about how unhappy I am all the time, even though sometimes I do, I have to get on with life so I have to try not to think about it.
Moving into this house was one of the things that was supposed to make me happy, there have always been things I’ve wanted that I thought would make me happy, I’ve always got them and they never have. This idea of leaving and being on my own is just the latest. I look at it and I look at life and I say, ‘this is just a romantic idea, even if I got it it wouldn’t make me happy, any more than getting married or having kids or coming home from the States or getting a PhD or moving house or getting a job ever made me happy, that’s not the way life works’. If I’m going to be miserable whatever happens, I might as well be miserable in comfort with no money worries. The only way I am ever going to find happiness is by changing inside myself and I don’t know how to do that, I’ve tried and tried and it never works.

Despite what I said in answer to Life Traveller’s comment yesterday (and I really hope she didn’ take it the wrong way, because I do appreciate her friendship and value her comments), I don’t think I’m depressed. The whole issue of identification and labelling of mental illness is very fraught. There have been times when I’ve thought/hoped/wished there was a medical ‘solution’ to who I am, but no attempts to resolve my problems in this way have ever resulted in anything approaching a ‘cure’. This is not to say that I don’t believe that there are many people who can be helped in this way, just that experience has led me to think I’m not one of them. In many ways life would be so much easier if all I needed to do was to take the right medication, or stick with the right treatment. But that is not the way it works for me. I am chronically lonely and chronically unhappy and whatever it is that causes this is buried very deep within my psyche and has been with me for as long as I can remember ever being conscious of such things, at least since I started school, when I was five, and presumably from before then. In fact whenever I have asked for help I have got frustrated with the process I had to go through, the assumption that this is something temporary and easy to resolve.
But that’s life. As I said yesterday, most of the time I manage to keep a lid on it all. It probably seems worse to anybody who reads this blog (and I guess I have to believe there are a few, though often it doesn’t feel like it), because they bear the brunt of it. But I will try to stop off loading quite so much of it as I have the last few days because I don’t suppose it’s much fun to read.
Well, I slept through till half past five this morning, so that has probably helped my mood.
I’ve just read that back to try to decide what else to say this morning. It got me thinking for some reason about people who don’t know me very well who say things like ‘don’t keep saying sorry’ or ‘don’t be so hard on yourself’ as though saying that will change anything for me. Usually when someone says it, I’m a little surprised because all I am doing is being myself,there is nothing significant about it. If I say sorry it’s because I feel I’ve done something to inconvenience them in some way, and I’m just being polite. If they don’t want to take offence at it, that’s fine,. But to me it’s important that I acknowledge that I might be at fault. When I’m supposedly ‘being hard on myself’ usually I am just acknowledging that I have done something less well than I would like. I’m just being honest about my assessment of myself and my shortcomings. I am very untidy, I am very clumsy, I am very forgetful, I am often insensitive to other people, why should I not acknowledge these things? Isn’t that better than going through life ignoring them?

The coffee tastes rough this morning. Probably because it’s been sitting too long. What time must it have been when I started it? About 20 past to half past five, I guess. Three quarters of an hour, maybe not quite that long.
I decided to do the metta bhavana, loving kindness meditation today, I sat through the whole thing, don’t know how long it is. Usually I only sit for ten or fifteen minutes, but today I got up not long after five, instead of lying in bed awake.
When I was talking to Mary last Thursday, she asked if I ever do the metta bhavana, and I said no, I didn’t even have it on my mp3 player, and anyway it’s too hard, I can’t feel loving kindness towards myself. And she said, but that’s what you need, and I said, yes, but I can’t do it, and she said, ‘Don’t say can’t! If you were training for a marathon, what would you do, you’d start by running round the block, you wouldn’t just say, ‘Well, I’ll start by walking to the shops because running round the block is too hard”, would you? That wouldn’t get you anywhere!’
So I tried, I went through the whole thing still trying to focus on loving kindness for myself, rather than moving on to other people through the various stages as you’re supposed to do, but it doesn’t matter how long I sit there for, it’s never going to happen.
Is there any way out of this? No, because wherever I go I will always carry these feelings with me, there is no escape. When I was very, very young I used to think that I would find someone who would be the other half of me who would be able to take all this away and make me feel part of a whole, who would be able to neutralise my sadness and loneliness and make it all better, but that was a childish fairy tale. Everything in life that I have ever thought would make me happy didn’t. I will only ever find happiness if I can find it within myself and I have no idea how to even start. Well, I have started lots of times in lots of ways but none of them has ever worked. It comes back to this, every time. Maybe if I launched myself off out into the blue with what money I have, as Ran seems to think I should do (see Melinda http://melinda-in-surreality.blog.co.uk/2008/10/11/money-4856921), I would find what I’m looking for, but what if I don’t? Maybe I could live for a couple of years and then at the end of that go for the monks hood option, maybe that’s what I need, to get to that point again, before anything can get any better.
Why am I saying all this? This is the abyss that I skate over every day and every night, keeping it all suppressed, feeling the dragons fighting in the depths, this is how I live my life and have for the last fifty years. Nothing will change now.
http://husbandorcat.blog.co.uk/2006/05/26/here_be_dragons~831184

How can I write, from the place where I am now? What did I ever want to do? To write, that’s all, to finish my novel, to finish my research, to show my thoughts to the world and have the world say: ‘Yes, that’s who she is, that’s what she thinks, isn’t she amazing? Isn’t it all so true? Don’t we love her?’ but I can’t, can’t, can’t, I can’t do it, not now, not here, now it will never happen, it was always never going to happen, I knew all along I could never do it, so this is me and what can I do about it? Nothing, nothing, everything is shit and the world is a prison and life is a bad joke.
Nobody wants my tears, who wants to see tears? Take them away, hide them away. I have to be happy, not for me, because what I want doesn’t count, for my parents, children, husband, friends, everybody wants to see me happy, come on, put on a happy face, look on the bright side, count your blessings, can’t you see how lucky you are? You have no right to this unhappiness, it’s just self indulgence, wallowing in your own misery, snap out of it, get on with life, you don’t know you’re born, you don’t know what real misery is.
He can’t handle my tears, my unhappiness, he never has been able to. I remember in the early days, crying night after night and him going and sleeping in the spare room, and me thinking: ‘this is his house and his bed, and now I’ve driven him from his own bed, I shouldn’t be here, I don’t belong here, I don’t belong anywhere’.
Mary says: ‘We see you week after week, bringing all this unhappiness with you’. No one wants my unhappiness, I mustn’t keep inflicting it on everyone. Come on, have a laugh, have a joke, stop apologising, stop that ‘can’t’, just get on with it.
Lying in bed, crying silently, I remember one of the counsellors I’ve seen at various times over the last twenty years, the one who didn’t like my silent crying, ‘Why are you holding it all in like that? It’s like you’re constipated and you don’t want to let it go. Go on and scream’, but I couldn’t I can’t. I cry silently because I am ashamed, but it’s not conscious, it’s how I cry, always trying not to and yet I can’t stop it won’t go away. I remember times at school when I felt so humiliated and the tears would come and I would feel even worse because I was sure everyone could see that I was crying and that was more humiliating than ever, I remember being made to stand in front of the class once while the teacher asked me why I was crying, I don’t even remember what started it now, it was awful.
My Dad hated to see me cry, he thought that tears were manipulation, ‘That won’t work on me, you’re not going to get round me that way, you can stop right now with those games’. Of course I couldn’t stop, I can never stop, when I start I can’t stop, it comes and comes and won’t go away however much I try to hold it in. And now I know I mustn’t hold it in either, I have to scream and let it out, and I can’t do that either, whatever I do is wrong.
Stop it, stop it, stop all this wallowing, this won’t get you anywhere, this won’t get anything done, this won’t help anything you’re hurting yourself, not that that matters, that’s just life, you’re used to that, it’s OK as long as nobody else knows, as long as nobody else sees and knows what a fucking mess you’re in.

Late blogging today, late night last night (60th birthday party), bed half past midnight, sleep about 1 till 3:30, awake till 5:30/6ish, knew it would be like that so didn’t set the alarm, woke about 8:30.
Spent a lot of time when I was awake thinking about my monetary thoughts from yesterday.
It’s depressing to think that the parish councils, with all the stress and crap they give me, earn me less than four grand a year. The school governors are not so stressful, but for the two of them I get £1400 all together. Then there’s the magazine, which is dying on its legs as the organisation tries to cut corners – for very good reasons, because it’s in a financial mess.
I worked out my savings, which come to about £15k altogether, in Nationwide and Triodos (an ethical bank) so hopefully they should be safe, or at least covered by the government’s guarantee. And I’ve got some shares in Granada (from when I worked there) and some in Barclays (at several removes from one of the building society conversions) and an ethical maxi Isa which started as £2k and I think might have just about got back up to that from falling in the last shock, god knows what it’s worth now, but quite honestly I don’t even count any of those. I could live for a year or so on the fifteen grand I guess (I think I heard somewhere recently that a single person needs about £13k for a tolerable standard of living), but given that I have no pension, I would be reluctant to do anything like that.
I wondered if I would qualify for some kind of benefit, income support or whatever, if I were on my own. But if we were only separated, I suspect Hubby’s income would still count against me, and my savings, such as they are, would too.
I thought about trying to find a sugar daddy, but if it comes to that I might as well stick with the one I’ve got. So, in the dark hours of the early morning the solution appeared to me: Option 5, stay where I am and try to make the most of it. Take advantage of the fact that I have a roof over my head and my bills paid for me, that he doesn’t stand in my way if I get the chance to go to Paris or Brussels or Hungary or Berlin. Carry on living life the way I have for the last few years, try to be grateful, try to count my blessings, try to make the most of things, find small reasons to be cheerful. Looks like it’s that or Option 2, the one that Usky warned me to avoid at all costs, to take any old crappy job that I would probably hate.
I have a friend, younger than me, early forties, also with a PhD but never married, no kids, who lives hand to mouth, going from one crappy temping job to the next. That is what I can see my life being like if I go.
So, here I am again, all my dreams crumbled to dust – sorry, I’m even slipping into cliché now, unforgivable. If I have to stay, maybe I should follow Trevor’s advice and attempt (again) some kind of reconciliation, try to talk to him, try to revive some of the affection. Yet again.