Well then? Spontaneity?

Do you think I haven't written anything for 10 days?  Oh no, I've written lots, it's just that each post has been left as a draft as it's become too intimate for the blog - sorry my voyeuristic friends, even I have a smidgeon of self-protection occasionally.

It is quite interesting that, as I have observed before, when there's something on my mind I really cannot write.  I had two days on my own to write and I achieved (a) a submission (b) some TRF editing (c) a look at Vol1 with a view to beginning some sort of re-write... I found it really hard to write today.  Perhaps my break has been too long, but I also know that I will do nothing until the beginning of the month - I have Thursday and Friday to look forward to and digest, and then I will begin again.

The last 6-8 weeks have been a pretty apalling rollercoaster - losing a friend and another friend having a cancer diagnosis and then all the financial crises and so on, and the novel/agent angst... it's not surprising I have not been able to write.  We've also had a lot of people staying - it's certainly easier to be doing hospitality when there is no major writing going on.

The curious element is that in the past when I had something on my mind I would write it "out of my system". Now that doesn't seem possible, or at least not here, in front of an audience.  But perhaps more fundamentally, rather than trying to rationalise a problem, to draw its parameters and to understand it, as I did when I was younger, now I prefer to jam into into the great internal preserving pan and let it simmer away for a while - hoping that my intuition will bring forth some sort of homunculus... but the fact is, that when a problem is about a future event, one can draw out the possible alternative scenarios - and get nowhere.  One therefore cannot prepare oneself too far in advance for a future event whose parameters one cannnot know.  Spontanaeity is all!

The consolations of paella

This weekend started with the Friday hangover - a trip to the latest UpDown private view, where I felt completely flakey, drank one glass and fled - this was followed by a visit from friends, and an interesting political discussion about Wapping, the miners' strike and the defeat of the British working classes and the failure of the left and the unions to work out a better direction to go in...

Saturday was a day when many free delights were available in the vicinity - we went to the open day at the Theatre Royal, heard a talk on its history, then stormed back to R - sat in the garden, because it was nice and sunny - the garden looked fantastic - full of intense colours, and different greens and purples this year... then drifted over to the park for the May Fair - better than past ones - well frequented, saw a couple of people we knew, but not many... heard some music, necked some Gadds... The whole day up to that point had been a bit bad tempered - my fault I expect, even though I had been largely on the ginger beer last night, I was tetchy, and unhappy, and oppressed by the sense of all that I needed to do.  The day began very badly with a call about the mortgage - they know you are likely to be in on Saturday - so that's the day they ring.  "You're hard up, you're unemployed and your mortgage is in arrears - so why the hell do you think you should be allowed to have anything approaching a nice weekend?"

We spent a little time looking at the various scenarios and the woman asked me about the savings accounts - which belong to the boys.  I said I was unwilling to borrow money from them as Ned was off to university shortly and would be needing it.  At the end of the phone call I began to think again about selling the house and moving somewhere smaller and cheaper (North Korea perhaps).

Then I discovered that neither of the boys was going to be in to eat tonight - this meant we could eat exactly what I liked for a change (Mark's tastes are close to those of the boys - so he gets what he likes most of the time).  I decided I'd like paella - got some mussels from the harbour, lifted a recipe off the internet - and had a fruitless search for squid... but even without squid I made a very delicious paella in a regular frying pan.  Sitting down together, having paella, an ok Pinot Grigio and a salad somehow was very satisfying and after supper I felt positively happy - despite the mortgage problems.  I am weirdly convinced that being allowed for a change to eat what I liked was what made me feel better.  I don't think any of them realise how many dreary little sacrifices I make every day...don't want to come over all martyrish, but this issue came forth when I had two large teenage boys shouting at me today - after I had arranged a decent picinic and simply wanted to find somewhere not entirely hideous to eat it in.  But that's a different story...

The hydra-headed life... again

Sometimes you struggle to remove certain obstacles, problems from your life, and you think you've learned your lesson, or lost your illusions or whatever it was that was getting in the way of progress.  Feeling slightly proud to have done so, and perhaps ashamed not to have succeeded earlier, you feel you can leap up the next morning and make progress.

When you think this, you are probably wrong.  Pausing briefly to bubble blood and hiss, the hydra head springs up re-doubled.  Now two nasty poisoned tongues are flicking at you - reaching their utmost to get you back in their clutches.  You feel more assailed by them than ever.  Perhaps there is some small improvement, perhaps now the hydra is chained in a corner, and can't actually get at you - just menace you from behind whenever you turn your back on it.  The reality of the problem has gone, but it is leaving a psychic shadow.

I really ought to line myself up for a course with one of those self-help gurus.  My trouble is probably that I am always trying to help myself - and not looking for outside advice.  However, on this occasion, I have read the appropriate work on how to deal with hydras... so I shall be covering my stout, heroic club with burning pitch and tamping it down nice and hard on the hydra's necks each time I decapitate one.  Hissing blood and spitting venom, they should nevertheless, be unable to grow back.  And then?  Well, we'll see what happens next.

Life goes on...

I was sittin' in the bar, in the Empire Hotel
I was drinkin' for diversion, I was thinking for myself

Actually it was Miles's bar down on the Harbour - and I was with Tara, but the rest was true.  And she asked me "Is he still alive?"  It was mid-afternoon, somewhere towards the end of the first bottle - and I scented the psychic air and wondered.  "I'm not sure - " and then we went on to discuss intuitive and psychic stuff and out of body experiences (hers!) and more completely irrational stuff that we'd both experienced.

The following morning, Friday, Paul's mother rang me and said, her voice breaking "I just wanted to tell you that Paul died yesterday afternoon."  Family only funeral, the end.  There are some people you spend time with, know for years, and they annoy the hell out of you - and there are some people who are there in the background, the elective affinities... and you should spend more time with them, because they have a lot of goodness to share.  But it is the annoying people who ring you up and ask you for drinks, and the shy, kindly people who wonder if they dare.  Actually, there are plenty of people one wants to see more of, like Paul, but they are busy and you are busy and life goes on.

I could have another burst of Hopkins here - Goldengrove  always seems the right poem for deaths.  I absolutely must have it at my funeral - along with Now be Thankful by Fairport Convention.  I wasn't any sadder when I heard the news about Paul - the shock had come last Sunday - but I was sorry there wouldn't be a funeral to go to.  Apparently he's being buried in his father's grave, somewhere in Sussex - East Hoathley?  That name comes to mind - I didn't know it before, so it must have been what she said.  The church website is unhelpful - but it looks a nice square towered sort of medieval church - a simple building serving a simple community.  Where we all want to end our days perhaps.  Nicer than a municipal cemetery. And there we are, he goes, buried far from most of the people who know him.  How foolish we are in thinking a site, the spot of burial is somehow important.  Needless to say I haven't been near my mother's grave in the last 3-4 years - yet there is something very moving about seeing people standing at a grave of someone who's been dead for years.  My grandmother's grave was neglected after she died, although she'd been keen to far bella figura and kept my grandfather's grave well planted for years.  But modern municipal graves are nothing... any my father hasn't even had a stone done for my mother.  Why bother to be buried?  If she'd been cremated, where would we have scattered the ashes?  In the garden probably - very good for the soil - actually, apparently it isn't, human bodies are full of lead and mercury and not good for the soil at all.

I found myself imagining Paul's body - sunken, grey, the beautiful eyes closed for ever - and over the last few days, little glimpses of it, lying in a hospital bed have come to me.  I think his mother must have somehow passed me the image when we spoke.  He was so brave and good.  Mark said, rather cruelly "What did he have to look forward to?"  And objectively in material terms, he perhaps didn't have much - but one doesn't know the inner life - what his plans, his heartfelt desires were.  He was only 55 - he must have had some idea what he wanted to do, what would fulfill him in the future.  I don't think he had "given up" - like all of us he was finding the economic climate hard - but he had got going, found himself work as a carer (the most common source of work locally) and was finding that interesting - he told me stories about some of the people he'd seen - I think there's one on this blog somewhere.... have just hunted for it, but can't find it.  I thought "I ought to talk to him more."   Life is full of regrets.

Life & death, contd.

I was slightly dreading seeing Paul today - what on earth do you say to someone dying?  You don't have to say anything really - just let them talk, if they want, just keep them company.  That was my strategy - but at about 9.20 this morning I thought I ought to call him to see whether he would like me to bring him anything.  His voice immediately told me - he said "it's all happening much faster.  They haven't moved me, I'm still here..."  he said he didn't feel up to seeing anyone - so that's it.  That was our goodbye - and then I remembered I hadn't given him all the loves and good wishes of friends, so I sent a text, in case he felt a bit better later - but this is the modern age - death bed with mobile phones and text - Facebook and Twitter too if you have an Android or whatever....

The horrible thing about one's friends dying is that it should be about them, but you cannot help it becoming about you - your mortality, your death, your anxieties.  I suppose that is a sign of us all being in this together. We are reluctantly drawn to death, because we know it will happen to us to - we want a clue, what's it going to be like?  I feel very un-dead, very alive at the moment - partly because of the rollercoaster of life in the last few weeks - and endlessly changing perspective keeps one alert and thinking.  But at the same time, aware that what's happening to Paul, the "work of dying" I think someone called it, is a labour I am likely to have to undertake in some years time.

Fear of aging
I always thought I would grow old gracefully, that I would not be perturbed by the physical changes, the wrinkles etc. and I've been lucky - I went grey in my 30s and only started dyeing my hair 4 years ago - pledging to stop when I lost a decent amount of weight.  But I have become aware in the last few months that some of my behaviour is a last ditch attempt to hold back the ravages of age - and I can see it in some of my friends too - behaving outrageously in an attempt to prove one isn't on the way out yet, lying about age, all sorts of corny little tricks.  One ought to have integrity about these things - I know I'm wiser and more sensible than I was 4-5 years ago even - one ought to be majoring in wisdom and experience, rather than trying to prove one's still "young"... or at least only in early middle age.  Of course it's crap that 50 is the new 30 - we don't have to pretend that, but it isn't the same 50 that our parents experienced.  I am glad to have inherited some of my father's vitality - and some of my mother's thoughtfulness - a killer combination really for a comfortable old age, as long as my heart doesn't start playing up when the menopause finally occurs.

But the fears are simply: not achieving what I've begun to do, not seeing the world get a tiny bit better, becoming demented, or incapacitated in some way, not seeing how the story ends, not seeing a few descendants, having a dependent partner (Mark for example).  These are all monstrously selfish things - but the whole business about aging is a very personal, indiosyncratic thing... it's not really an issue where you can unite to fiight collectively against your fate - there are issues, campaigns one can join - but ultimately one's personal physical and mental decline (God forbid!) are, like death, an entirely personal matter, with very little remedy available.

So this is the still point of the turning world - where one is both happy to be alive and reasonably healthy and also aware of the path ahead.  One can fight it all off with projects and plans, these aren't displacement activities, after all one really can't spend the next 30 years thinking endlessly about age and dying, but I am beginning to wonder, as I age whether inevitably anything I write will begin to take on the tone of the Book of Ecclesiastes - grumbling and muttering "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity..." and refusing to engage with the modern world.

It's a sort of wonderful life....

I felt curiously elated today and I find it hard to know why.  The weekend began quite badly on Friday evening when for the first time ever (I think) I shrieked at Mark, stormed out of the house at supper time and drove off like a bat out of hell... I didn't go very far - Dumpton Gap where, at low tide, there was a nice long beach and some chalk platform to contemplate, some gulls, oyster catchers and sunlit clouds and a number of dog walkers.  I sat there for about an hour to let M stew a bit (and so that he could have supper with Sira and get that over)... I thought all the negative things one thinks, and couldn't see how I was going to achieve my ends.  Then I went home, ate supper and forgot about it all.  What had made me SO angry was the fact that he had said "you are starving yourself because of this bloody diet" and I thought he's spent the last 20 years encouraging me to lose weight... how very dare he!  For the record I am not starving myself, but I was very hungry and tired...and my feet hurt and he wasn't helping me when I needed it.

Last week, the tinkling sound you would have heard in my vicinity was the scales falling from my eyes as I realised something about someone else that changed my world view... today, by coincidence further evidence to reinforce my new world order as I learned that things I had intuited for the last couple of years were entirely true.  I think the weird elation I feel is that sense of vindication.  Always trust your intuition I was told years ago - by the famous Indian astrologer I visited in Delhi - on the whole I do, but am painfully aware that sometimes the narrative urge grabs an intuition and inflates it into a story.  I also realise that intuitions are only about now - not about the future (usually: occasionally they can point to it).  I am beginning to understand that I do have a bit of a rescuer complex... it isn't a la limerence that I seek gratitude - more that I can't bear to see people trapped and struggling whether in a situation or with their own personality, I get the urge to offer them a hand out of the bog, I only wanted to help... might be put on my gravestone.  Except that I have now turned into a selfish, single-minded bitch.... so - where are we?

Then the most appalling thing happened today - my friend Paul who went into hospital with acute leukaemia last week, told me that he had about a week to live.  He's going to a hospice and expects to be dead by Sunday.  I've had some difficult telephone conversations in the past - but this was a horror.  Because you feel your feelings, but it's not about you - it's about him - and what do you say?  I guess let them talk - be there to hear them out.  It is just so unspeakably unfair that a man of 55 should be slain like this - but it's not the first and won't be the last.  First there was Sue at 42 - but she was an anomaly really until first Strat had has incurable diagnosis - that was the worst thing, but still the two deaths last year Mike M and Roger were apallingly sad - since they were people I hoped to see again somehow and hang out with in the dim and distant future.   And with Mike's death and the ensuing conversations I discovered that a couple of others had died, not quite so close, but other friends of my 20s.  So, nothing new.

However, Paul's mortality did that trick of making me feel very alive and lucky and blessed and happy... it was rather terrible.  The other news has liberated me from something I really disliked - and Paul's imminent death has somehow propelled me towards a greater appreciation of what I have.  As a result M and I have had some really good, intense conversations about things today.   And whatever I may have said about M in the past, he still has the capacity to surprise and interest and engage me with new things.... even if does tend to repeat himself.

Better than all this - or rather - part of all this - I have had a great idea for a comedy film script - I don't know if it will work... but it could...it has been an extraordinary day, and I feel it may not be over yet.

Adult Facebook Etiquette

What I love about Facebook is the opportunity to discuss things with friends - what I hate about FB is how these discussions occasionally deteriorate due to participants forgetting where they are and who they are talking to - it's not just me listening you know!

Sometimes it's hard to remember online that we aren't invisible; sometimes it's hard to remember when we want to communicate something on FB, that a lot of people won't like what we say.  You cannot control other people's opinions of you - so it could be an idea to avoid saying things which will give them cause to dislike, despise or dismiss you, even if you are one of the lucky (?) ones who doesn't much care.  If you post on someone else's thread, all their friends - whom you may never meet - may develop a disagreeable opinion of you on the basis of one thoughtless, unpleasant observation.

People frequently put up posts that are controversial or irritating in some way.  If you have anything intelligent to say which adds to the debate, or a question to ask to further it in some way, then contribute. If you simply wish to take some exercise on a personal hobby horse try to restrain yourself.  Understand that this conversation is not for you, you are not the intended audience and although these people are your friends/relations/whatever this is not the place to re-hash your opinions (which they probably already know).  If one's FB friends have different opinions, your/my intrusion into their chat with other like-minded souls will not change their minds - a couple of sentences of my/your precious opinion will not shift positions that have been forged in the furnaces of experience and culture.

In the case of something racist or sexist or plain unkind I think trying to say something humorously undermining is better than abuse (although abuse may be a necessary last resort - followed by unfriending etc.).  I personally would intervene if I see something I know to be factually incorrect ... although a reverence for truth (or a near approximation of it) isn't too popular on the FB rumour threads.

We have probably all posted a great many things that are annoying to some of our FB friends - but our better friends have simply and graciously ignored them - this is clearly the right thing to do.  Plonking your rationalist boots into religious threads, or getting heavily Marxist on the "Wasn't Maggie wonderful" status just doesn't do.  (I may have been guilty of the latter...).  Of course a lot of people go onto FB to be noticed per se so getting into an argument is a good way of doing it and achieves their ends - so someone's happy anyway!

I suppose what I'm arguing for is a peaceful, less teenage FB.  I am privy to some teenage statuses and I don't always enjoy the levels of discourse and liberal interchange of views I see there.  I have noticed though that older teenagers understand better than many adults, what can be said publicly on FB and what should be the proper subjects for chat and direct messages.

Liking statuses can be a bit of a cringey love-fest sometimes - especially when people post sentimental statuses.  Nevertheless, a judicious use of the "Like" button can be supportive and a more subtle way of being noticed - and it shows you care, even if, quite frankly, you don't.  Good manners have always contained a high degree of hypocrisy - however much it grates with our desire to be "authentic" - and this is even truer of FB where your invisible audience is probably larger than the average pub saloon bar.  Nobody wants to be seen as a saloon bar bore, pontificating illiberally and not engaging with what other people are saying.  If you have any slight inclination in that direction, FB will show you up mercilessly.

FB offers a wealth of opportunities for self-expression - which need to be used carefully.  And now - here are the Staples Singers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1II2nPmBZJk

This piece isn't designed as a prescriptive ego trip - but something to widen debate a little - please comment, argue, discuss... if you want to!

Anna Karenina again!, Book launch and Common Purpose

Very interesting and jolly day today.  I continued my conversation with Eyvor about Anna K - we were at the launch for Stewart Ross's YA book The Soterian Mission, with Jane Clarke and we were actually talking about books - she was explaining why she didn't like AK  - or Levin... so my statement "we all like Levin" is untrue.  She said she always got stuck at the point when they got off the couch together... clearly it was over before it started. I must admit I had somehow missed this obviously significant sign of distaste - I had thought they were clearly destined to split not long after - they were clearly bored with each other.  But it is a good day when you can have 2 conversations about AK - I had one earlier with Kirstie - she loves the book. I was waxing lyrical about how about 20 pages before the end AK is dead, Vronsky's scampered off to Montenegro or wherever - and you wonder "how is it going to end now?" - and then he has that absolute genius of Levin's epiphany - his understanding of how everything fits together, how the world continues and everyone is part of one another etc.  And somehow that works brilliantly - especially since it is a casual comment by a peasant that sets him off.

I also met some people who have a conspiracy theory about Common Purpose... and well they might, except that the "sinister force" that seemed to be super-governmental etc. was, I felt, probably market capitalism rather than a band of EU trained bureaucrats who will take over in a "post-democratic Europe" (as one of the websites I found about it claimed).  CP look to me like a band of vaguely Tory conformists... but the fact that their initials are CP suggests that they are actually crypto Marxist (according to another website..).  I hasten to add that these people are not terribly worldly or knowledgeable... of course there may well be a sort of bureaucratic Illuminati just waiting to seize control of the UK as soon as the electorate have become too disillusioned to vote any more.  The idea that these uber-bureaucrats are (a) EU trained (b)  marxist and are (c) putting billions of taxpayers money into the pockets of their wealthy chums the bankers and privatisers er, does not compute...

The fact that Robert Peston is one of their alumni does give me pause for thought, but best not mention this to A in case he goes off on another BBC-related rant.  RP is exactly the sort of person you would expect to have gone on one of their courses, and I can guess a couple of other people I know who may have done this too. .

Along the electric wires the message came...

.... she is not much better, she is much the same.  

These are apparently lines written by a Bengali poet about the circumstances surrounding the death of Queen Victoria, but they sum me up today.  Well, not dead yet here at any rate - but have had a day of such vacuousness that I might as well be.  I hope they have Spider Solitaire in heaven, or I won't know what to do with myself during eternity. (Yes - I know, eternity doesn't mean the same as everlasting... but let's not have a row about that).

Yesterday I had a jolly chatty day with Anna T and Marion - and had my hair done by the v. agreeable Tim. I got up today - and after breakfast slumped into a sort of anomie for most of the day - apart from a constructive hour reading in the sunshine.   I took Finn to his cornet lesson, I chatted to various parties on Facebook.  I supervised Finn cooking supper - and washed up.  Then I just indulged in a bit of mild self-hatred - now I am going to watch tv, since compared with the majority of the day, it will feel constructive.

Tommorrow is another jolly social day - but I am too worried about impending doom to care.  I tried to think of something constructive to do about money - but all that was in my power was to buy a lottery ticket.  It will be all right the inner voice says - I do hope it's the Holy Spirit and not some magnificent delusion.

Mark is thinking of applying for a prestigious heritage related scholarship - he would have to go to California for at least 3 months... I am encouraging the application.  If he got it, Ned would be at university and I would just have Finn to quarrel with about A-levels and work etc.  An interesting prospect.