New Job, Christmas Loudness and Two Lovely Animals, Seasonally Snowed.

It’s been a strange set of times recently.  

There’s me undergoing a huge life change.  First outside the home job in 6 years, up at 5 a.m., back between 6.45 and 7.30 p.m., depending on the traffic or the invisible bus paradox, or the sudden cancelling of the exact train I was waiting for phenomenon.  A job where I’m around people all day (from relative solitude), to speaking to people all day (ditto), and then travelling for up to 4 hours a day (which is sometimes rather annoying, and would be very bad if I felt ill; but it’s very good for being alone [ish], and reading).  I am in a world full of small details, and procedures.  On the one hand this is comforting, I like to have processes around me to follow.  On the other hand, not being able to plainly speak my mind on solutions, outcomes etc…that is more…I am NOT going to say ‘challenging’, because (a) I hate what’s been done to that word, and (b) that does, in the new definition of that word, describe some of my customers, so I’ve ring-fenced (hee hee more jargon) that word for this purpose now.  No, not being able to cut through the vagueness and obtuseness of what I am saying sometimes makes me irritated: saying how something actually *is*, regardless of whether this will be liked, is a quicker, cleaner way of dealing with things.  Sometimes.  But not to be done.  Till I learn a more Sanza (see Game of Thrones, the books people, not the TV series) way of speaking, I will have to throttle my directness and carry on saying what’s needful, but feels a bit unclear.

When I get home, I catch up on the news.  The world has gone, it would appear, madder than usual in a bad way.  I can’t decide how much of that is down to reporting habits, fear mongering and the way the establishment wishes us to be perceiving whole groups of people and countries, for their own ends (i.e if we’re scared enough of them, we’ll stand by and let the government/s do whatever they want to those people and countries, usually for reasons other than those stated, for mineral or oil resources, for trade) – and how much is simply what’s happening.  I observe a dimming and a blurring going on between the bare facts (as much as they can be gathered) of what occurs when things happen, and then a bias, editorialising opinion-making reporting of these events.  So often I see opinions passed off as facts.  I see primary and secondary sources conflated.  I see things taken for granted that aren’t at all, things to be taken for granted.  I see that saying to myself ‘follow the money’ when I watch ANY news story still bears more fruit when finding motivation for slant and attempts to brainwash the viewing public to a gut-feeling point of view that seems so simple and common-sensical but evades even the barest deeper analysis.  Things are rarely black and white.  They are really annoyingly gradiated between grey, black, white, fog.  

Increasingly, bearing the insanity that is being portrayed to us in mind, I look to what I genuinely see around me.  People just wanting to get on and live their lives.  True, they don’t want to be interfered with much, specially by people they don’t know, or ‘figures of authority’, but at the same time – most people I meet and see behave decently.  They help when someone slips in the street.  They run after someone to give a dropped purse or wallet back.  If someone doesn’t have enough money to pay for something in a supermarket queue, and is fumbling with change and looking horribly embarrassed, your average person quietly gives over some money if they have it, with soft spoken words, trying to mitigate the horror of being helped by a stranger, “no no, don’t worry – you’d do the same for me…you could be my nan/my sister/my daughter…” etc.  This idea of chaos beating on the walls (the literal walls if some people had their way) around us, I don’t see it in our lives, not the way it’s painted.  I see a lot of quiet poverty, degrees of poverty, degrees of desperation, degrees of very difficult compromise.  But I don’t see humans as the worst kind of ruthless animals.  I don’t see yet, that Dawn of the Dead (the original, please - and that link there is an interesting article, go see) is true.

Saying that: I have felt a bit bombarded by consumerism this year.  Maybe it’s because I have been massively taken up, first with jobhunting, and then with doing this huge learning curve of a job.  The long commute.  The job has swallowed me whole, I’m not yet properly rebalanced.  Home is a mirage where I sleep worriedly, dreaming about callers and things they may say that I don’t yet know the answers to.  I wake up wondering how close to 5 a.m. it is.  But Christmas appeared to start in September, didn’t it?  That’s when I first heard carols in the shops.  And shortly after, the decorations began.  Then there was the whole imported ‘Black Friday’ thing the other week.  I was sitting in any old shopping centre in workplace area, having some quiet (ha ha) time away from the phones with my lunchtime sandwich, listening to announcements about DEALS, and registering that foot traffic was way up on usual for the time of day.  People pushing past one another, looking focussed, harassed and rather grumpy – not happy, I’d say, about DEALS, with many many bags.  I’m completely skint till my first paypacket, so I wasn’t taking part.  Did most of my Christmas shopping earlier, in anticipation of future skintness.  But every day, the carols seemed to get louder and more intense.

By the time I took Fluffhead to the Whitgift Centre in Croydon, I was feeling, and it sounds stupid, yes I know it does, attacked by Christmas being pushed at me as shopping and a feeling of forced jollity.  Adverts about family get togethers, huge boards advertising Sky movies, where sad things happened before families got together at the end and smiled while wearing green and red and surrounded by sparkling oh so sparkling and tinkly silver and gold things.  There were live carol singers, one week from a church outreach, another time from a homelessness project.  That was nice, hearing real voices sing.  But they fought against the taped and piped voices.  The mixing of genres.  ‘Santa Baby’ fought against ‘Good Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ against ‘Do They Know Its Christmas Time At All…’  Everything was shining at me, everything so loud.  Try a chocolate, try a mincepie, get your Sky package for Christmas!  This all MUST have been here in previous years, perhaps it’s simply that I’m very tired all the time at the moment – but I have never felt more Bah Humbug.

It’s not that ‘the real meaning of Christmas’ is getting lost.  Of course it IS, in the sense that it’s a Christian religious festival, I’m not Christian, I don’t go along with the idea, it belongs to them, not me[1].  It is lost in the sense that their Jesus didn’t pop down to remind us to not miss Black Friday and get our Sky package.  So yes, that’s a bit of a travesty.  But it’s perfectly possible to borrow lightly from the Christian festival, and come out with a pleasing secular idea of Christmas involving emphasis on giving things to people cos it makes you feel happy to do so.  Giving things to charities and those who have less (ditto, don’t pretend to be selfless; think of it as enlightened self-interest instead – there by the grace of whichever god go I etc).  Decorating because it’s fun to make a fuss of certain days – and it’s nice to celebrate red and gold and green and silver and make things sparkle. It’s nice to have friends and family over if you like and see them and maybe cook them dinner if you’d like to.  (Notice how lovely and ‘if you like’ that all was.  Ahhhh, if only.)  It’s nice and fun and good for us to be grateful for what we have, what we’ve been given, and to try and see the goodness in people.  Nice to see the wonder of the world and each other.  

I think both the Christian Christmas and the secular Christmas are being a bit bombarded by the COME AND BUY STUFF AND EAT FAR TOO MUCH  AND BE WITH YOUR WONDERFUL FAMILY THAT YOU *ADORE* messages.  You KNOW something is wrong when you start thinking the misery of an Eastenders Christmas Day episode is both more naturalistic and preferable than the saccharine and manipulative images you’re being forcefed are!  I really will do muchos shopping earlier than ever next year, and online.  It’s just not fun shopping (or just being out) when everyone is all stressed out and spending too much and grumpy and harassed, and all the children are really tiresome from waiting in line for 2 hours to get a present from Santa’s Grotto.  (Fluffhead did really well, actually.  He was only naughty twice, and most of the time was highly amused to watch some people dressed as reindeer on stilts wafting about.  WHY were they???  And a man in a bear costume collecting for a charity in a bucket, whose head was obviously on slightly wrong, so that he couldn’t see any of the children milling around before and below him tugging on him and waving at him, and was just wandering up and down, looking, even though I couldn’t see his face, dejected.  It was in the shoulders.)

I think it may have jinxed me, writing that post all those years back about how I loved Christmas when everyone around me didn’t much.  (See here – it is wonderfully enthusiastic.)  Since then, I have not had one Christmas that hasn’t been a bit odd.  Mum’s car accident that year (where she sat in terrible pain through Christmas dinner because the paramedics had missed the fact she had a broken collarbone, and then she was very sick after dinner, and eventually we ended up in Casualty).  This year, Stanley’s father has died not very long ago, so we appear to be still doing Christmas, though its chances of being anything other than strange, dour and gloomy are slight, as any forced occasion is.  That’s the really weird thing about Christmas – the way people seem to think they MUST do it in some way shape or form, even when it’s not appropriate for them at that particular time, because of its connotations of jollity and familial closeness.  My mother has been trying to have an alone Christmas ever since my dad died in 2008.  She just wants to rest and be quiet on that day and not have the pressure of everything unless she *chooses* it.  But every year it’s either been her here, because Stanley or I have been sick, or Fluffhead is too; or she’s had to go to her brother’s (a noisy extended family thing, several children).  Stanley and I are doing Christmas because of Fluffhead – if you do it lightly, its very fun for the little ones (he and I used to do our own kid Christmas brilliantly, as 2 overgrown children together).   

But we aren’t feeling it this year.  And that’s alright.  That will happen sometimes.  I shall stick with wonder at the natural world, and loving the green and red and gold and silver.  Not as dictated to me by others, but just because they really are beautiful.

 Image from: www.lovethispic.com

I am definitely off-balance at the moment though.  I’ll show you what I mean.  An incident from a couple of weeks ago.  You know when you feel you’ve made a connection with people, and you’re wrong?  That feeling?  Embarrassment, isolation, not exactly loneliness, but out of placeness?

There’s these Eastern European young men I see in Costa every morning at the station.  They get there either before me or very shortly after me.  Very young, early 20s.  Something very isolated about them too, just as there is about most Eastern European people I see, as if they are still partially elsewhere.  I don’t know if that’s because they wish they were elsewhere, or can’t forget good or bad things that happened elsewhere, or if we haven’t made them feel very welcome, or likely, a combination of all three.  They are always glued to each other talking in their own language, these two, separated from the rest of us, who are not talking all in the one language.  It must be nice, for privacy, to have another language, like being in another room without having to be.  I feel a sort of siege mentality from them sometimes.

I had occasion to speak to them one day a while back, I dropped something or they did or someone minded someone’s stuff while someone got more coffee or went to the bathroom.  They were all smiles and helpfulness; a real difference in their faces.  Lovely to see. Their reserve vanished on speaking to them.

Anyway.  They are too clean and well dressed to be construction workers.  Too casual and loose for office workers.  No bags with books and folders, so not students.  I wonder what they do, now they have piqued my interest by being so friendly suddenly.  

On the first day I was here at the coffeeshop after the minding or borrowing (which was it?), I smiled and nodded at them, and there began the daily smiling and nodding.  They usually left before me, so we always had the smiling and nodding on the goodbyes, as I sit by the exit so they come past me to leave.  Nothing more than that.  They don’t look for me, but when they do see me, they smile and wave, before becoming a mysterious and foreign speaking unit again.

As a person new to the area, new to my job and this entire section of my life, these small and apparently meaningless encounters MEAN something to me.  Same people everyday on the train platform; these men in Costa; the woman on the bus going home in the evening who recognised me: they make the start of routine, of familiarity.  Small patches of warmth in an uncertain and cooled newness.

So this morning, I stood in the queue for my coffee with the younger of the two men.  The one I think of as more mischievous and quick with his movements.  The other strikes me as more solid and dependable.  (Oh, first impressions – wouldn’t it be so funny if I was completely wrong?!)

He said hi.

I said “Hi!” back.  Bright smile.

“How are you?”  He says politely, eyes (I should have been warned) far away.

I make an extreme tired face.  He looks a little bit bored, but understanding, and mimes it back.

 “My shift is changing, so I won’t be seeing you guys after next week.”  I add.

He looks like I just said far too many words.  An expression passes over his face and I can’t decide if it’s pure boredom that that woman in the coffeeshop is speaking to him, or whether I just spoke so fast that I went further than his ability to process English.  I gibberished, maybe.

However, he’s still looking at me, so I try again, and repeat it a bit slower, with the chaser, “so I’ll be here much earlier, catching an earlier train; gone earlier.”

I really don’t know what I was expecting here.  A falling to the ground in abject sorrow with weeping and wailing, that they won’t be able to say hi to me in the morning.  That we’ll never be able to go beyond saying ‘hi’, to actually being acquaintances, progress to small talk.  I had a fond (and no doubt highly dubious) imagining that we’d eventually small talk ourselves to where they were from, and they’d teach me small throwaway phrases in that lovely language they speak so earnestly.  That I could ask them what they do here, and there would be no more mystery.  That they might laugh with me about how if it’s very windy or very rainy, I will get lots of calls about nothing but weather related damage all day, so that I feel like a barometer now when I’m out, keeping one eye always on the weather.  Oh the indignance of fallen trees.  Or if it snows, there will be 100 righteous demands for residential road gritting.  The little silly things that make up conversations.  The beginnings of connections with fellow humans.  Just a warm smile and slight, if thoroughly shallow, understanding of another’s life and current experience.  All stuff that’s fascinating to me.

Anyway.  So he looks like I said too many words again.  Not exactly irritated, but tired and surprised.  I say the thing about the earlier train.

I think I wanted him to say, like a polite old style English person would (see – cultural difference, that’s a hole easily fallen into): “oh no, shame, it’s been nice seeing you every day – hope all goes well for you, good luck, and bye!” – something like that?!  And I would ask where the beautiful accents come from, just to satisfy my endless curiosity.

Instead, he just continues to look completely nonplussed, a hassled barista gives him his coffee, and he nods at me in a brusque way with eyes averted, and goes off to his table.

I feel confused.  (Which is not exactly an uncommon state of affairs for me.)

Obviously I completely misjudged either his English, or his interest in any talking at all.  I hope he didn’t think I was flirting?

I’m an inveterate talker to people.  I’m usually pretty good at reading bog off signals too.  In the world of scary new job, where everyone is nice but I am waiting to fall flat on my face (and I will, because the training is huge and extensive but rushed and there’s not been enough consolidation time) – tiny scrappets of smiles and warmth were helping.

I realise I definitely did misjudge something, and all my usual waiting feelings of my out of placeness rise up.  I take my own coffee and deliberately go and sit down somewhere where I can’t see them and have my back to where they are.

Better they just go back to nodding and so do I.  I read my kindle.  When they leave, before me, as they always do, the solid more dependable one makes a point of saying ‘hi’ and ‘how are you’, but now I am hearing it sounding just like polite boys taught to not be rude by someone when small.  Just something you say (and something people never seem to want the actual answer to, which always perplexes me).  I have developed the habit of just smiling when people ask me that, then asking them back, or complimenting them on something (never hard to find something nice to say about a jacket or hair or pendant or just looking well).  It’s like a hurdle you have to get past, before you can have an actual conversation with people.

Its times like this, me thinking like this, that I miss Fry most.  His total unabashed social awkwardness mixed with a testosteroney ‘oh fuck it’ disposition.  He would have understood my reaction to this small and stupid exchange, my misreading of the situation, feeble attempts to make a tenuous connection.  And he would have shrugged at the end, at my sadness at the misunderstanding.  He would have said something to make me laugh.

In this new world, I keep hallucinating Stanley and Fry around the place.  When I’m in the shopping centre at lunchtime eating my pack lunch – on the one hand blessedly alone; on the other isolated and cut off in an invisible bubble, I see them out of the corner of my eye, going past, coming or going.  As if they just went for coffee and will be back in a minute.

I hold the images of them close.  Pretend it’s so and they are here.  I feel the warmth of Fluffhead on my lap having the ‘dressing hug’ he always stops in the middle of dressing to have, one of the best hugs of the day.  He’s not there, but I feel it.

It’s because I’m so tired I am feeling like this, and out of kilter this way; attaching vast significance to small incidents, small feelings.  Always the same.  Remember the tiredness factor. 

Finish the coffee. Off to work.  Do my best, try to help the people.  Be kind, be polite, be present.  And feel the invisible hugs.

See?  I’m not quite right at the moment and have to bear it in mind and be slow, be calm and be careful.

I had a wonderful time yesterday afternoon with Rosa, my closest Green Party friend, writing a small analysis of COP21 for the Sutton members newsletter.  There, I felt competent and calm.  We worked beautifully as a team, suggesting phraseology and where to put each point so it all flowed clearly and usefully.  She finds me funny, laughs at my silly jokes.  She’s ill, but exudes so much joy and energy (even when she can’t hold up her own head because she’s so tired) that whenever I leave I feel buoyed up and more able to take life as it comes, and see the happiness all over the place, the waiting of smiles.  There’s a Spirit of Christmas.  And people like that are All Year.  

I know many people who do their best in this totally confusing world with its contradictory messages.  Time Traveller, writing now her third book, always seeking answers, always questioning.  Alias True, with his willingness to overthink with me to a place of calm and plateau, where we look down and see events and the world for the lessons they all are.  They’re just the two who pop to mind immediately.  I think the world is a better place than we are told, despite all the nastiness definitely going on.  Much to hope for, much to believe in and work toward.

Strange and interesting times, for sure.  Hold fast, hold steady, be kind.  Be calm.  Out of the corner of my eye, Fluffy Cat who has been clawing the smallest tree in the garden, jumps three feet up in the air, which is quite miraculous seeing as she’s immensely huge, and then leaps sideways with a bit of a screech and dives into the hedge – gone.  Ehem.  Yes.  Be calm.  Do not follow the Ways of This Cat.  Or you will need much Brushing, Later.

Have a lovely Christmas, and a Peaceful New Year.

---

[1] Yes yes yes, don’t get me started on the pagan stuff came before the Christmas stuff and it’s all the same.  Yes, I know that.  For the purposes of this comment, I’m speaking as a person living in a nominally Christian country, where there’s been some strong arming of the ‘spirit of Christmas’.  Back to the main point.

Two Tiny and Precious Writing Memories

Did a very small amount of writing earlier last week.  Some very vague prompts produced these tiny writing memories, like small droplets in a pool, or small irregular stones in a flowerbed, hidden from sun.  Precious memories though.

Me: only younger…

 This from the brill website: www.oursindymuseum.com

Age 7.  I’m unsure exactly what I liked to do when 7, apart from writing.  I do remember that was the year I got the Sindy house for Christmas.  The one that was 2 bits of cardboard intersected to make a cross.  It made 4 segments, 4 rooms.  I had some furniture for the house too.  I remember an orange, dark orange plastic sofa.  It had pretend buttons and those indentations on fabric that come from pressed in buttons.  It was perfectly moulded.  It smelled incredible.  I knew, playing with it that Christmas, with mum and dad off to the right on the sofa in the background that this was a memory I had consciously ‘collected’: I would remember ‘this moment forever’, as it made me so happy.  Feeling safe, playing house, everything so orderly and simple.  And in telling myself that, I did.  I remember it to this day.

In this memory, I was still at that age where my dad and I got on like a house on fire.  I feel his love surrounding me.  His happiness that I am pleased with the present.  His pride in his little daughter and his ability to provide.

That Christmas morning’s totality completely escapes me.  But that moment I have so clear.

I used to love to write at this age.  I was writing something called ‘Jane and Baby’ stories for ages that year, as a sort of experiment.    They were a bit Topsy and Tim like – books I was (and still am) very fond of when younger, the first things I remember my mum reading to me.  They had a very definite structure, the Jane and Baby stories.  I think I must always have liked structure and order: I remember keeping my room very tidy and orderly too. 

The stories went like this: it would be 7 sheets of white paper, set to landscape, sideways.  They would be numbered 1/7, 2/7, 3/7 through to 7/7.  These were time segments of the day.  At 1/7 Jane and baby got up.  From 2/7 to 6/7 they would have breakfast, go out and go somewhere, have an adventure and come home again – having had lunch and dinner (important markers in the day).  By 7/7 they would be going back to sleep, tidily.  I arranged them on the floor in narrative flow order.  Pictures at the top of each page, neatly coloured in, and the words and story telling at the bottom half of each page.  I would show them to mum, who was always suitably proud and pleased.  Don't ask me why Jane, who appeared possibly about 12, was alone taking care of a baby sister.  I have no idea why I didn't feature parents - or any grown ups at all in these stories.  And no one ever asked the children where their parents were; they just went to The Tower of London, or on a picnic, or wherever else they went for their adventures, in their little matching colour co-ordinated outfits.  No questions asked.  The mind of the 7 year old me...

I went through a phase that year of writing little comics as well.  I would either fold over paper and stitch a seam in the middle with cotton, or I would staple the folded pages together.  There would be horoscopes, picture stories, craft articles, recipes, letter pages, a quiz – seasonal issues for Christmas and Easter.  Perfect little BlackberryJuniper mimics of the original comics I was reading (Bunty, Judy, Debbie, Misty, Tammy, Jinty etc). 

Incidentally, its often been commented, looking back, on the level of suffering the characters went through in these comics - Bella the gymnast in Tammy (you see her on the front cover there below), being used as a slave by her not-parents she was living with.  There was a great element of resilience needed, a sort of Victorian level of sentimentalism and stoicism needed to be a character in one of these comics.  I have no idea if this was to do with the fact that most (overwhelmingly, about 98%) of these comics were written by men (the same men who had the boy comic market sewn up, Dandy, Beano etc).  They put some of their more serious stories in the girl comics.  Apparently, the women  - I've seen quoted in interview, didn't want to come and work for the picture comics, as by the time the men got round to asking them, the world of Jackie and Patches etc was opening up, the next level comic - promising to be way more lucrative.  I've heard the women turned up their noses at the old sketch story girl comics, and went straight for the teenage love market comics.  This is partially because, the male authors said, that the women's stories were not 'hard-edged' enough; not 'cruel' enough, 'too soft'.  Hmmm.  I wonder why a good story is one that has to make you feel very depressed?!  So the women authors went away from the 'mere' comics, and went to Honey and 19 and the teenage love (read:soft) market.  Which did indeed prosper and outlast the picture comics.  But my main point in giving you this info just now was to note that when I did my BlackberryJuniper facsimiles of these comics, I (a) left out all the suffering in my stories - I gave the characters jeopardy and difficulty to overcome, which is different...but I didn't surround them with a life of grim slavery.  And (b) I drew very badly, except for several positions of iceskating and gymnastics, which I practiced relentlessly.  So in a way, I made the comics different, not perfect little mimics at all.

I would have harkback days to when I used to read Twinkle comic when even younger.  (Apparently I have had a tendency to nostalgia from the earliest age!)  To this day I collect them as I love the artwork and images of simplicity - and the countryside.  I would replicate whole issues but compose everything inside myself - I would just steal all the themes (spring, autumn, things to do on wet days, things to do when you're ill etc).

I was very pleased doing these also.  I seemed to spend a lot of time alone in the living room or my bedroom, but I was very nicely occupied, with these sorts of projects. These are sweet memories too – playing, writing, comfortable with myself.  Happy times.

I remember…

When I was living behind Oxford Street, in the office block at the top.  I used to sit on the balcony, that long concrete balcony overlooking so much of London, and write.

I don’t know what age I was, but I can’t have been too small though it was definitely before puberty proper, before BOYS ruined my focus and I started to feel hormone-led.  Maybe I was about 11 or 12.

Dad had given me a small fold up table that had been covered with a stick on wood backing.  Very tacky really; but easy to wipe in case of spills.  It was a bit ratty at the edges.  There was a small 3 legged stool I used to sit on[1].  I would sit out there, in the dry and airy spaciousness, six tall floors up, and fill exercise book after exercise book with my school stories.  Short stories.  A bit Enid Blyton.  A bit Trebizon.  There was a lead character called Kissy.

I was incredibly fluent with my writing in those days.  I was filled with hope and possibilities.  I had absolutely NO familiarity with an inner critic as related to my writing (though I was starting to feel an inner critic relating to the rest of me, shadows).  I could do plays, poetry, short stories.  I never finished a novel, but I was always writing one.  I never seemed to have the focus to finish; I was impatient and full of ideas and would move on to the next thing, happy enough.  I could work from almost any prompt, especially photographs.

I was regarded at school, by the English teachers, as full of brilliant potential, really talented in this one way.  I’m not being full of myself, it was so – I have never since been so validated on any subject by anyone; and their opinions mattered to me, they were talented people themselves, my English teachers.  Their obvious faith and pride in me made me feel confident and treasured.

I would sit on that balcony and the pen would write.  My hand would write.  I was written THROUGH.  It was as close as I have ever come to BLISS.  It was bliss.

It was good in a way, that I later discovered some of this early work, though a lot of it is lost.  I nowadays often tell myself I’ve lost my talent, have no ideas, burned out etc etc etc.  Finding this old work was a reality check.  A lot of it was – in hindsight – very bad.  Some of it was full of that potential.  And a lot of it was very very bad indeed: full of generic lazy writing, cliché and semi plagiarism.  Though one of my skills used to be that if I could absorb and submerge in someone else’s style of writing, I could pastiche it perfectly while the familiarity was still in my head.  (After I read Wuthering Heights, I wrote a huge short story cycle in the tortured style and mood of Emily Bronte – it was great fun.  For example.)

It was good to discover that early stuff of mine, because it means I understand that while I am pursued by demons when I write now, I actually – nonetheless and despite them – write a hell of a lot better than I used to!

The memory of sitting out on the balcony writing after school or on weekends, remains precious.  The enthusiasm and hope of this girl who knew she would grow up one day to be A Writer, and confidently just wrote whatever popped into her head…I love that girl.  I love how she felt; I love her pride and her verve.  I love her peace. 

I love the memory of the view.  On a clear day I could see St Pauls, the Post Office Tower.  I could see another office block a far way over, where another housekeeper’s daughter, older than me, would come out on summer days and sunbathe.  She wore a bright daffodil yellow bikini, she had a lush and curvy body that she was comfortable with (you could tell from the way she moved).  She would bring out a radio and listen to music while she lay there, huge RayBans covering her eyes.  From even as far away as I was, I could see she was glistening with oil or lotion.  If the wind was right, I could catch traces of whatever songs she was listening to.  I used to like it when she was out there, though far off.  Occasionally she’d wave at me.  It was like I had company, while my hand wrote.  The sun warm on my head, making my glass of water glitter.

 Someone was selling this lovely pic on etsy for $5, but its gone now, and I can't find a credit for it...I really enjoy the refracted light from the glass to the table; that cheap metal painted table; the cheap glass.  Things don't have to be top notch to provide enormous pleasure.

---

[1] I recently found the twin of the stool, and a matching jewellery box in a charity shop.  I paid through the nose for these alarmingly crap 70s oddities, as I loved the memories they evoked so much.  They were really quite ugly: dark stained wood, bevelled and shaped and generally chipped into – I think they were supposed to look a bit distressed and nautical.  Big iron nails or bolts (?) sticking out of the convex lid of the jewellery box.  Varnished dully.  They spoke to me of so much of the past.  In the same shop I found a painting my dad used to have on the living room wall: cheap and mass produced and this one a bit faded, but recognizably still the picture I remember from our childhood living room: a sea scene, orange sunset sky and a ship in silhouette on a quiet ocean.  I wonder if I will ever be able to stop chasing the past of my childhood, trying to re-feel and sink into those memories of peace I have?  I wonder if it’s sad to collect odd relics of the past here and there?  (I have nowhere to put these things; until further notice they are all in storage in the garage.)  Or if it’s healthy: a sort of memory palace, a good place to go in your head of when things were calm, so when you’re more turbulent, you can reconnect with those feelings?  I suppose it entirely depends how much you buy of these memories of the past, how much trigger you need.  When does trigger become trying to cloak yourself in the past and no longer engaging with the present?  It might be different for each person.

Bye Bye 2013

Not with a bang, but a whimper.  Who was that now?  Must look it up. 

My first thought in this likely to be very disorganised post is to give a totally random (in the proper old fashioned sense) piece of parenting advice to anyone who might be a parent or think of procreating: expose children to music of Mike Oldfield while tiny and still wriggly, and keep at it.  Early Mike Oldfield in particular, but nothing wrong with those later singles either.  Ability to fly in the head will result, simply taught, from a remarkably early age.  Also encourage to pay attention to music on TV and in film.  What seems to be background is running your consciousness, so be familiar.  Learn what you like and what presses your buttons, so you control it and not the other way round.  (And don’t only get addicted to sad or angry music.)

That’s completely aside from anything else I might say.  Which will be remarkably little.  I don’t have any resolutions this year.  I don’t have any thoughts on Christmas, or my unfashionable liking of it (which is starting to be more and more a thing of the past, a thing in my head, a bit of history).  I usually look on the approach of a New Year as a very spacious mental event.  I start to see a whole new segment appear.  Something curls round me and says: possibility.  All warm and furry.  This year, what I have is…none of that, or else it’s a dead cat, and its wet, and it’s starting to smell.  I will bury it, respectfully, as I love cats.

(Have never understood the whole thing about being a cat OR dog person.  I definitely enjoy cats a thousand times more; but dogs are fine, also good.  They are friendly – as a rule – they love with a seething bouncing loyal passion.  Nothing wrong with that.  And I get cross when people say they are stupid.  Any cat lover will have to admit for every time their cat is spectacularly intelligent suddenly, it will fall off a TV while licking its arse the next minute…I’m a cat person.  But dogs are fine too.  And both are quite possibly better than most people, eh?)

Myself and The Prince both have New Year funerals to attend.  Which could be seen as sort of an underlining of what’s gone and a greeting of the rest of the year, once you get home and loosen the tie, kick off the shoes etc.  I’m seeing mine as ill timed and depressing, but then I do tend to view things in this way.  Sometimes.  I’m in one of those times.

A friend on facebook put up an interesting status this morning.  She said usually she can look back on a year and…sort of quantify it; give it some adjectives, a flavour.  And this year she couldn’t.  She found this intriguing (which I read as thought provoking, rather than bothersome).  I can’t do mine either.  And I am bothered at that.  It feels chaotic in hindsight.  I remember a mad quest for TIME TO MYSELF that was vaguely successful only.  I remember a very successful reading of sequences of books; watchings of sequences of DVD film or TV series.  Themed music listening.  That was me desperate for order and control (and getting it, in those cases).  I feel there were constant interruptions, All Damn Year, to any time Stanley and I tried to have together.  We mourned the fact we were so short on personal time that when we had some, we mostly took it singly not together almost as a survival strategy, as we needed so badly to regroup and recharge – it became almost more precious than hugging time.  We have been running on fumes; we know it, we seem to be getting by; we’re surprised at this (being veterans of love lost for less and more than this).  We monitor.  This was the year we found little Fluffhead has difficulties.  You have to adjust your dreams and expectations when you find your child is developing differently.  That is fucking painful.  As is the fear you feel for them.

Fry has been travelling his own road.  His road worries me.  But it’s his road, so I’m not talking of it here, right now, anyway.  Nothing can cause you pain like your children can.  He said an interesting thing the other day, about your thirties being when you lose your hopes and dreams (this from a man in his early 20s).  I thought that a strange age to cite.  I feel like my 40s is me realising that I believe in very little indeed, realising just how much of what I used to take for granted, or chose to subscribe to, is redundant for me now.  Notice I don’t say its bullshit.  It just doesn’t fit me anymore.  Very little does.  I’m hoping this is a case of growing out of one thing and into another, a variety of others.  I haven’t lost everything: my love of green things, trees and nature and wanting to hug flowers and such is still very much with me; its grown and changed and is definitely different to its earlier naiver form – hence I liked that poem last post…there was mess and pain in there with the beauty: much more realistic to life.

I read in a very unlikely book the other day some weird and unexpected psychology of control, that I know to be at least partially true: “indifference is power”, “the secret to controlling any situation is manipulation of everyone involved, but successful manipulation of others begins with self-control”…i.e. not caring.  If you don’t care you can’t be hurt or controlled.  Something I’ve been after for a very long time, and have given up any hope of attaining. I care, therefore highs or contentment; I care, therefore lows or abysses.  No high without low, it seems.  So if I didn’t care, I might as well be dead, as I’d lose my sense of beauty and love.  Now, you wouldn’t expect a Charmed tie-in book to get me thinking along these lines would you?  Even one about troubled teens, foster homes and correctional facilities that turn out to be Darklighter training grounds[1]…

I’ve read some most interesting and possibly helpful work recently, for my ‘mentalisms’ (as my favourite other blogger Aethelread[2], calls his own issues; it tweaked my humour, so I’ve adopted it), and so you may yet see a more adjusted me sometime soon.  I never stop trying to be a calmer Blackberry Juniper.  Might even review the book/s maybe.  Best things I’ve read since Existentialism, which is tough tough tough (the way doing Zen Buddhism properly is like being slapped round the face by a real proper utterly dead wet fish…or cat, to stay with the earlier disturbing analogy – its hard stuff, not easy at all).  But…worth doing.  (And easier to deal with than hangovers, since your brain is actually with you as you try.)

And since this post had no direction whatsoever and is not developing any as we move along, I am going to go now…the next post will have more direction.  Once I decide what it’s about.  I just wanted to say goodbye to this year.  Even if in a rather confused, definitely depressed, fuffly way.  Not sure I’m quite up to welcoming the next one yet…but I have hope.  I live. Forlornly, in the bottom of Pandora’s Box.  I’m probably hiding, or trying to have a nap. 

I’m going to leave you with a tune that’s been in my head all day, and I’m finding it comforting, hypnotic and helpful. (One of the gifts of Stanley.  People who give music are always precious.  And coffee.  That last comment aimed at both Troubadour and Time Traveller.)

https://youtu.be/pXrjMaVoTy0

---

[1] Mist and Stone, by Diana G. Gallagher, 2003, Simon & Schuster, NY.  Charmed TV tie-in book.  Unexpectedly profound in places.

[2] See my blogroll.  If you haven’t read him, READ him. 

I Unfashionably Like Christmas; and heres at length, why...

I have a frisky and kittenish love of something about Christmas.  Its not the Christian part; except that its a birthday, and I like birthdays.  (I will post about birthdays another time.)  

I was brought up Christian, as I've mentioned before, and I do love carol services, though like lots of other people who go on to first lapse, then reject the religion of their birth, I did tend to doze off or become cross during the sermon parts.  Just sitting in whatever church and looking round at the decorations (always a nice emphasis on Christmassey florals and often, good smells, in churches), and sometimes hearing a small quartet or proper orchestra (my mother goes to a BIG church in central London, that's where I used to get taken to) play some part of a Christmas Oratorio, or some keening and ethereal piece by Messiaen, or Faure...The atmosphere was wonderful.  The warmth inside after the cold outside.  The smiles of the people as they greet each other.  (I realise now, of course, as I didn't till I was 10 or so, that the greetings were those of cultish followers  to one another, a tribal thing.  I started to think they were odd people with strange shiny eyes, and after a while, I couldn't even go to the carol services any more, as I found the people too odd.  But that's by the by.)  Standing up and singing carols (which of course, I inexplicably know by heart, since I must have had them brainwashed right through me whilst at primary and secondary school) with a full throated gusto, with other people....You may have gathered, I don't DO much at all With Other People.  I tend to feel a bad fit.  But I will sing with people.  These happy carols: the Holly and the Ivy, Ding Dong Merrilly on High etc - at school, I sang soprano descant to that one, always fun, descanting anything.  I tend to descant practically anything I sing now, I just make them up.  It annoys the hell out of Fry - he plays me a song, and if I like it, apparently, I then ruin it.  Tsk.  Unappreciative children.  Anyhow.  I now do carols on the radio, or via many CDs.  I'll listen to them while washing up, or when Fluffhead and I are drifting from room to room in the afternoon.  Its good to sing out, to smile and sing.

No, the Christianity bit doesn't agree with me anymore...Its the ambience of Christmas, as fed to me through a thousand sources, growing up. I'm not a purist - I will take a festival (anyone's, from any religion or philosophy) and adopt it if I like it, and do it my own way, make my own point with it.  The point of Christmas, to me, is bright colours, good food, making time to be with people you choose to (notice I don't stricture you to family; or indeed anyone).   If you can afford it and want to: the thoughtful selection of gifts for your loved ones.  Its fun to choose; it feels great to give.  Its a chillout winter festival, where ideally, there should be no pressure.  (Of course, it all goes wrong a thousand ways with the enforced togetherness with people you don't want to be with; or the cooking for too many, the over spending, the competing etc etc etc...But I am trying, year after year, to hone it more and more, to be what I think of as a Good Christmas - and that's less pressure, more relaxing, and doing the bits you like and leaving out the rest.  That's just my opinion!  And I'm happy to have that one and work on making it so.

I like the way shops start getting shiny in November.  Yes, I'm not going to crack into the shops for their commercialism.  It would be hypocritical...Shops are there to make money; Christmas has become a bit of buying fest.  You don't have to go along with it if you don't want to.  You can just wander through whatever shops you happen to have to go through, and think: shiny!!  Baubles!!  Pre-Christmas Sale!  Handy...  Good luck to the shops.  I will just enjoy the piped carols, and the old Hollywoodish Christmas songs they seem to specialise in.  Yes - Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, and so on.  I'm fine with all the assistants having to wear silly little red caps with white pom poms, or even sillier Christmas earrings (I would not like to get some of the bigger ones I've seen get caught on something in passing, though - OWWW!).

I like the way I suddenly think of sending cards to people that I haven't really bothered with much all year, for whatever reason (time usually; or I simply am growing far away from them...or they are family, and I have little in common with them!).  I like the fact I can send a properly heartfelt little message in the card, and will likely get one back - people tend to forgive crapness at staying in touch when it comes to Christmas.  Suddenly I'm very interested in what my long lost cousin Jules has been up to all year, though I didn't really think of her much all year at all.  But I didn't think ill of her; I always liked her.  Its nice to think she's out there somewhere, doing stuff, being happy (she's a happy solid sort of person).  The distant family and old friends are like little threads I catch up and reel in at Christmas, and on the end of each little silver thread is a small message from each person: what they have been doing, where they've been.  Even if they've been nowhere and done nothing - the way they write, I can feel them.  Formal, or stilted, or badly spelled, spiderly written - there they are, clear and real. 

I like thinking of making my own mince pies (though I never yet have). I get Nigella Lawson or Anjum Anand dreams of Kitchen Goddessery with regularity every single year.  The closest I have ever come to fulfilling these dreams is since I've been with Stanley.  We usually share the cooking of the Fat Bastard Lunch (as he has wisely, earnestly and accurately christened Christmas Day Dinner).  We eat veggie, so we each have our tasks: he has to always do the Brussels sprouts with the almonds and secret spice ingredient.  You have NOT tasted Brussels sprouts till you've tasted his!  I used to think (like lots of English people) that the Brussels sprout was a critter of very limited appeal - its over boiled and it stinks.  Like cabbage.  Reeks, in fact.  You either love it or you hate it.  But no longer!  Stanley cooks them properly!  As in, hardly much at all, and then after that, its all secret.  But they are heavenly.  I do the stuffings (3 different kinds).  And the bread sauce, and the cranberry, and the roast potatoes.  He does the veggie meatloaf type thing, or the nut cutlets, or the whatever the main bit is.  Some years there is no main bit, its a glorious array of endless veggie side dishes.  Sometimes we have kulfi for dessert (an Indian ice-cream - makes other ice cream look like an half hearted effort....This year I may actually attempt to make the kulfi, try and put the time in...).  Neither of us like Christmas Cake - urgh, all that rich over heavy stodginess.  Give me a Panettone any day...except we can't, as that's eggy, and Stanley's mostly vegan.  So its whatever we choose to make that counts as decadent.  And a tin of Quality Street, as I grew up with that at Christmas (my dad was a big fan of breaking teeth on bad toffee), so I insist on this limited tradition. 

I like the idea of making my own Christmas presents (which I actually do, sometimes).  Its easy to be all craftyfied, and combine simple things like epsom salts, rose petals, lavender petals, hints of essential oil to boost, and then out them in a pretty tub from a pound shop.  Its fun and its easy, and if you have loads of female friends who have a bath (falls a bit flat if they have a shower, as you can get away with saying you can use the epsom salts to scrub; but the petals - they'll just go everywhere and make a mess) it works out cheap to make.  I have done that a couple of Christmases.  Theres loads of things you can make if you want, and they don't all have to be expensive (as sadly, lots of the 'Make It At Home' Christmas gift books of the Kirstie Allsopp variety seem to be - defeats the purpose, I feel).  Of course, unless you're a grand knitter, men are harder...But if you feel like it, there's always something you can make someone...IF they are the kind of person to appreciate a made thing.  I always remember, once at school, a long long time ago, I gave Beatrice (yes that's her actual name!!  Hah!) a made Christmas present.  She was a girl in my class I was trying to make friends with.  I had judged the present carefully: was only a small thing, not freaky and over-eager.  And she looked at it, paused and said: 'didn't you have the money to buy a present?',  and gave it back to me!!!  Beatrice...May you have learned some bloody manners by now, woman!! 

I love hermitting away with my nuclear family unit - Stanley and me; now Stanley and Fluffhead and me.  Growing my own traditions with Stanley - that's a lovely feeling.  I had different traditions when I was with Alias Troubadour, and Fry.  Times move along.  We plan our Christmas viewing.  When I was little, my dad used to get the Christmas Radio Times and a big red marker pen.  He would read it like a book, seriously circling everything he wanted to watch and writing his name next to it.  Then it was mum's turn, same deal.  Then me.  In that order - as in: whatever he wanted to watch, if he was about and not napping, that's what We Will Watch.  Then mum - though her choices were usually acceded to because she spent all of Christmas day cooking.  (Her fondest Christmas wish now, is to spend Christmas alone, with a microwave meal, and not have to do a damned thing, just rest and feel peaceful.  She is finally going to get her wish this year; and I'm going to stock her up with pressies of her favourite TV shows, Lewis, Foyle's War, that sort of thing, so she doesn't get lonely.  But she won't.  She has amazing inner toughness, my mum.  I think she'll be loving the freedom to not have to do any of the 'rigmarole'.  She can listen to the backed up sermon tapes she has accumulated too, through weeks of going to church but helping out at the creche or Welcome Desk instead of being in the actual church bit...See?  Doing Christmas, finally, the way SHE wants to.  You go, mum!!!  Cheering for you.)

Stanley and I are going to watch old nostalgia Christmas TV: we have the Christmas Specials of Porridge, Morecombe and Wise, the Two Ronnies, Steptoe and Son.  I will listen to his Hancock's Half Hour's.  (I will run a mile from The Navy Lark, bloody awful!)  Something Christmassey with Stephen Fry will no doubt present itself.  I will introduce Fluffhead to A Muppets Christmas Carol.  The variations on Scrooge alone will keep us busy a bit - definitely the one with Patrick Stewart, definitely the one with Bill Murray.  When Stanley goes to his mancave, as no doubt he will, at some point, I will sneak on things like: White Christmas, Holiday Inn,  (yes, I know they're sort of the same, but I like that), Box of Delights; and definitely NOT Its a Wonderful Life, as I find the ending so utterly NOT What Would Happen that it really Annoys Me.  We have only just started with the list....for fillers, like when cooking, there are of course, the Futurama Christmas episodes - its not Christmas without Evil Robot Santa, come now!  Oh - the joy we will get from just making the list!!

I love the idea it might snow.  Snow is brilliant (if you aren't driving, yes).  Even Fry, who is one of the world's most unjustifiably cynical youths, gets all goose-pimpled by a good snow.  Everything looks new!  And clean, and calm, and quiet!  Its beautiful!  Fluffhead's first snow last year was a wonderful thing.  He just looked so surprised by it.

I love the wreaths, the candles, the Christmas tree, the decorations - small or ridiculous and over done.  (One year, I was left to do the decorations at home by my mum, already starting to get a case of early onset humbug over the whole preposterousness of it all.  This was just fine with me, as I had, and I have no recollection how or why,  just come into a vast hoard of very cheap garish plastic-y decorations from somewhere.  So I be-decked the living room.  It took me all day, and I did not know when to stop.  When mum came back from shopping, lugging a far too big turkey for storing in a bucket under the sink I seem to remember, she was horrified.  Then dad came in.  There was a bit of [rather unreasonable I felt] shouting.  About how the place looked like a Turkish Bordello now....as if he had any proper idea what a Turkish Bordello looked like.  Humpf.   I did appreciate that I had created a sort of drapy tent effect, by ending all my streams of decorations at the central light from wherever on the wall they were.  You couldn't see much left of the ceiling or the wall.  Anyway.  I was very proud of my efforts, and they did stay up, despite the muttering whenever dad came in the room, and his worries something would fall gently down when he wasn't paying attention, and catch light on his roll up, thereby burning down the flat and it being all my fault...)  I love the colours of Christmas - the emphasis on gold and green and red.  Or the silver/white/blue Ice Queen idea thats been here for a while - the cool and cucumbered type of Christmas.  Since Fluffhead, there's been few decorations.  But it doesn't matter - a little cluster of this and that, here and there - a glint of a shiny red bauble and some tinsel, a few cinnamon sticks...it all feels like the spirit of Shiny Christmas Prettiness.

I love the idea of champagne (more usually cider!); toasting Christmas Eve.  Opening one gift early, almost ceremonially, with Stanley.  The whole thing of Christmas Eve as a feeling - the anticipation.  The leaving Father Christmas a biscuit and some milk, and a carrot for the reindeer...I haven't got to do that since Fry was small, and soon I get to do it again!  (Who says Christmas is just for children?!!!)  (Well, Fry does, for one, but he is a Grumpy Thing of Much Humbug other than the snow, at Christmas.)

I love the presents!  Lets be honest!  I love to watch my loved people open stuff I went to trouble to think about.  Stanley loves a surprise, but also has an authorised List.  I am not partial to surprises (as what would happen if I didn't like the thing, and couldn't arrange my face quickly enough into a polite look of 'oh how nice' - what if the giver saw and had hurt feelings??  That would Not Do, its sad).  Nope.  I have a Proper Authorised List, with price bands!  So I can be made happy for 99p and above, its all very means-friendly!  Of course, plenty people have ignored the list, and sometimes they are lucky; and sometimes I think...Biscuits?  Again??  Or I have that thing where I once told a person I like horror films, so they think this means every horror film ever made...when I am quite genre specific...I clearly acknowledge that I am missing the point with that reaction.  And I always write nice thank you notes, regardless, as hurting someone's feelings unnecessarily is rude and unkind.  Its lovely to think, to get someone something they will like and want (and probably think is too decadent or unnecessary to get for themselves), and wrap it with love.  And bows and stuff.  Ok, I'm all girly about this.

By Boxing Day, I am not liking it much anymore.  The spectre of people promising (threatening)  to come over is now large.  I have to cook for other people (like, lots of people - more than 3!!), and sit about and watch things not on the list on TV.  Christmas East Enders is a spectacle too awful to think about, but I have had to live through it in the past.  (With Fry is the best way to get through that one...joke your way through its crass dreary depressingness, that's the way to cope with that...)  When people come over there's the whole: Not drink or drink when I don't or did fancy it; eating, ditto; keep Fluffhead up when he needs to sleep etc.  Yes, by Boxing Day I have caught the Bah Humbug most of the other people I know in life seem to have had already. 

...But just for the run-up, and those special 2 days of the Eve and the Day...I can play at making it How It Could Be, in my little unit, a thing OURS, a thing happy and shiny, and full of good food, cuddling...and, well, Pepto Bismol, probably. 
***


Apologies for the lack of all the links I could have done on this post.  No time - will try and do them later, ok?