Of Much Wiffling And Signifying Very Little Other Than Thinking Aloud

Ah, 2014.  And I greet it as tired, bleary eyed and secretly hopeful as any other year.  I say secretly because I only just realised I felt a bit hopeful; and it flies in the face of a few actual developments in life.  On the other hand, things being about 60% what you choose to think about them/ focus on/ make of them…it could all be way worse, and therefore I shall right this instant say that so far, all goeth, y’know, ok-ish…(and that’s as much deviation to positive thought from actual reality I will give you!).

The Prince has moved out into his sparkly new flat near his work.  My book room is denuded of other people’s bags of alien possessions.  He also did me the grand favour of borrowing a large beanbag Stanley bought me for Christmas the year before, but which turned out to have nowhere to live in the entire house, so ended up sitting there in a massive box on the side of my book room, irritating me beyond patience with the amount of space its taking up.  Now, if I get my arse to hoovering, I can do yoga on the floor again.  Just as Stanley and I thought we could start wandering about naked again, groping on the sofa in small snatched moments or generally picking our noses wherever, it seems the house may not be empty of guest for long.  Not 24 hours after The Prince had left the building, we had a distress call from Another.  We'll see what happens.

Not so small Fluffhead is happy to be back at nursery – he didn’t really get the concept of Christmas holiday; I think he simply thought we were meanly withholding his friends from him for no apparent reason, and only presents distracted him from this.  But now he comes home daily covered with Pritt stick and glitter paint again, and is very happy.  (I wonder how long it will take him to get his next dripping 10 week cold…?!)  He also accrued 3 new words in 3 days flat: more, four and door.  Which is definitely a good start to the year for him.  He'll be four at the end of the month, too.

In a return to routine, to a degree, Time Traveller and I yesterday haunted Coffeehouse.  I waffled on something chronic about my problems and asked her opinion, and she listened with all the intensity and kind wisdom I generally associate with her, before pronouncing: ‘that’s a tough one, conflicted.’  We sat thoughtfully for a moment in silence, before I waffled on again.  She always thinks she’s the waffler, hogging the conversation; but its not so.  I don’t think either of us does.  We both don’t seem to mind listening, and we’re both nosy, as writerly types are.  It occurs to me I could do such a good character study and story from things going on right now around me – which I don’t mean to be vague about, here…but that’s the point:   I’m not one of those writers (yet, anyway) who will steal wholesale their friends and family and stuff them in a story and stick it right out there, whilst said people are still going through all their most interesting trauma that I have nosed out of them while I counsel them.  This may make me a failed writer; possibly it makes me an ok human being?!  It’s annoying though, I have at least 2 magnificently rounded characters (that is to say: real people I have unintentionally studied in depth; and I don’t want to disguise or fictionalise them so I can use them now, I sort of want to leave them as they are, they are just wondrous fascinating already, as people and characters).  Time Traveller is doing way better than me with her writing, at which I am most pleased and dead envious – but mostly pleased (which is uncharacteristically charitable of me, I note), as she is such a good writer I wouldn’t want anything to interfere with her flow.

I look out the window at the garden, battered and waterlogged from days on and off of rain and wind, and I wonder if the storm of 2013 is slowing and calming, or if this is just a lull.  Like I said, I am starting to get a slight feeling of spaciousness, extremely cautious optimism.  I’m starting to engage with the feel of the season.  I saw a small fox in the garden this morning; another yesterday morning, running fast away from me, all dark orange and paddy feet and scared eyes.  I really like foxes (despite the gross poo they keep kindly leaving me in the garden – I’m always having to run about and do Poo Search before Fluffhead can barrel out and charge over the grass, as there’s always some and I don’t want him stepping in it and slipping and bringing it back in the house).

I still have a cough from a cold I got at the end of November.  Which is most irritating.  It comes and goes.  Days it’s gone, almost a week sometimes, and I imagine that’s that and I’m better, then it tickles and there’s chestiness again and IRRITATION, its back.  In this spirit, I give you this cough syrup remedy.  It definitely does quell the tickling (for a short time), and annoyingly tastes so nice you may want to keep drinking it for pleasure, which means there won’t be much left …if you don’t, and just take a couple of teaspoons here and there, it’ll last a week in the fridge.  I didn’t invent this one, Kate West did, see footnote for reference:

HOME MADE COUGH SYRUP:

• Take the juice of 1 orange and 2 lemons,
• 2 tablespoons of glycerine (from your chemist),
• 2 tablespoons of honey (locally made is best),
• ½ a crushed cinnamon stick,
• 6 cloves,
• a large pinch of grated nutmeg,
• and ½ a teaspoon of grated ginger. 
• Heat gently for 10-20 minutes, stirring all the time.  Do not allow to boil. 
• Strain and place in a clean jar to cool. 
• Children as young as 5 can have this – but their dose should be diluted with 3 times as much water[1].

I also made up some seasonal room and body mist, and some bath salts.  I like to feel like I smell like the parts of the natural world I like (for instance, no plans to smell like seasonal fox poo anytime soon) – since I spend so much time indoors in front of screens or just generally pacing up and down while Fluffhead does stuff; this makes me feel more connected to the larger blowier colder wetter (currently) outside world.  In a partial and romanticised way of course (but that’s all focus is: editing, picking what you choose to look at and using it to make you feel good/ better/ however.  That thought apropos of nothing.)

I was wondering if I should do a sort of look ahead thing, about what sort of posts I plan to do this year.  Then I realized that whilst I have a tiny tiny cautious feeling of possibility, I’m still pretty directionless, and feeling my way.  All I can actually promise, is a continuation of whatever series I’m already doing.  So there’ll be more reviews of Dr Who books (which will incite bored weeping and happy cheers from various people I know, respectively).  Probably more herbs posts.  Probably reviews of other books and TV or film I’m watching, specially if I get addicted to something.  There’ll likely be some posts about art or writers, I’m planning to get out more and go to some exhibitions and bring you back my one sided impressions.  There’ll be some guest posts, and maybe another Season of Love, we’ll see.  I realize I haven’t done a Things That Irritate Me post for almost a year.  Which is amusing, as plenty of things have annoyed the hell out of me – but whilst stress makes me shouty and a bit argumentative, I haven’t actually felt like laying out my precise thought case for any of these things.  Maybe I will this year; maybe I won’t.  Maybe I’ll start a Things That Give Me Joy series too – there’s definitely plenty of those, also.  Other than that…its whatever takes my fancy and engages my brain…and failing that, posts like this, Of Much Wiffling And Signifying Very Little Other Than Thinking Aloud In A Disorganised Way. 

Happy New Year.  Be well, and May The Force Be With You.

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[1] The Real Witches Year, by Kate West (Minnesota: Llewellyn, 2008), p.4.  This is the second imprint of her book; despite the American publisher, the first imprint was an English publisher over here, and all her recipes etc are given in English measurements as she’s English.

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

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[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.