There is a lesson in this! - Saturn returns

Had a lovely evening yesterday - even though we talked about ghosts and seeing things or feeling things generally.  Tara seems to see anything that's ghostly - in our house she spotted a "vicar" with long flowing white collar leaning against the chimneypiece.  He must be one of the Wesleyans that lived here, if so he is probably apalled by the strong language and strong drink that are taken here.

We also had a brief discussion about Saturn returns - so what I am about to say is perhaps a bit confused, because (a) I haven;'t arrived at my Saturn return yet - (b) Saturn is currently in my first house, in my birthchart it is in my 2nd house.  The idea of a Saturn return - I thought - was that it was a period of consolidation, of getting established in someway.  One's first Saturn return is often a time when people get married - 28-30. It is a time when one enters adult life fully.  The second one - which I expect to experience from November 2015 to December 2016 - is apparently the time when one reaches maturity.   Now, because Saturn is 2nd house I would expect it to be about money - but it seems to me that I am getting plenty of money lessons now - so I suspect that the Saturn return in my case will be a time when some of our financial matters will finally stabilise - or the lessons will have been learned.   I do hope that doesn't mean I will have to wait another 2 years for financial stability.  However Saturn enters the 2nd house a bit sooner than that - in January 2014 - so I will have to hope for some improvements then.   I suppose the symbolism of having Saturn in the second house is that one has to learn a lot of lessons through money... some say it is bad thing, some that it's a good thing... I don't know.  But perhaps, just perhaps, it will mean the end of the line, a time when I have finally learned not to waste money, not to have flashes of extravagance.   On the other hand, I would say my behaviour around money is pretty Saturnian just now.  Heavy, leaden restraint. I am usually on the case - although I still blench at the idea of looking at the bank statement, and would rather hide my head in the sand than look at some of the letters that arrive for us.  But eventually I do deal with them, although they seem to be very hard work.

So perhaps with my S return will come fiscal maturity - and money?  I live in hope - just another year or two of rejections then...I'm learning the lessons now so that I don't squander it all at once when it comes.

Human pinball

You know how pinball machines are - the ball careers around, slamming against different objects and rebounding, all the time drifting gradually downwards, then a frail flipper catches it and repells it - sending it back up again - and then around, on a different trajectory - drifting down again - and it continues until eventually the flipper fails and the ball disappears into the darkness.

That's me that is!   The downward trajectory has been marked in the last few weeks, with the complete absence of any job prospects at all for Mark - apart from the distant prospect of Jam in the form of the HLF bid - which we may or may not be included in, may or may not win etc.   However, a frail flipper protruded and gave me a tiny shove upwards, and, I thought the prospect of an exiguous - but welcome - regular income.  However, this flipper has now failed, apparently I was only be trained to do holiday cover.  This it must be said was never made clear to me, until yesterday, when I asked when I might next be required to work.  So I am careering off again, striking different objects, and wondering why a period of my life that astrologically speaking was said to be full of new opportunities, seems to be one actually of cul-de-sacs...

Others have worse situations!

Actually, this has been a bit of a disastrous period for a number of people I know - two of Finn's friends have lost their fathers young in the last few months, and one of them's mother has been killed by her father, last week.  There's the Philippines hurricane of course, and two people have had diagnoses of dreadful diseases - and only this morning my elderly cousin M has spent an evening in A&E - not good, and Anna's mother is very very ill. These things do occur in clusters - and I should be grateful that I'm not too close to all this.  

Another gentle flip up...

Since I wrote the above I've had a flip up - and found that instead of earning £24, I've earned £80 and Mark has earned £40 for something he did on a volunteer basis a couple of weeks ago.  This is a very nice surprise - so I am flipping upwards again - and will start crashing about again shortly.

My life as a medieval peasant

There is something medieval about trudging through the woodlands, carrying a sack (in this case an enormous plastic sack from John Lewis, rather than a hempen sack woven by my goodself) and gathering kindling for the fire, we also found a few larger bits of firewood - but for substantial pieces you have to go to the industrial estates and raid the skips - there are usually cast-off pallets being thrown out.  

I have always thought that our weird lifestyle - working from home, having a "family business" in which I occasionally labour etc., had elements of a medieval lifestyle.   This year with the decline of the central heating and our need to shroud ourselves in ever thicker shawls, jumpers, cloaks, we are looking decided medieval.   Stick gathering is just the outward sign of our grim lifestyle - increasing amounts of porridge, lentils and beans are other factors!

What I achieved today

I got up, bottled my quince jelly, then prepared the quince liqueur I'm making.  Then I finished my entry for the Bookseller's essay competition - not a hope in hell, but a great essay anyway!

Then I discovered I didn't have to do Deer Park - but took stuff over to Sheree, and then went to a supermarket to buy useful things like tea and bacon, and then to the farm shop for a vast sack of spuds.  When I came home M and I went to Chatham to have a meeting about Finn - which was a bit tricky, because Finn was being tricky.  We went home for tea, and I let F go out for half an hour to have a smoke.  Then he helped me defrost the freezer - after 3 years I suspect!  And then I photographed the ice pile and had jolly banter on FB.

So, although I haven't made any money today (I did investigate selling books on Amazon), I have done some literary work, some family/emotional work, and some domestic work, and some pre-Christmas preparations and had a bit of a social time.  So all good really!  Now, cook supper and have a drink with a quiet conscience.

Unfortunately I was not allowed to enjoy my quiet conscience, my gin, my supper, my coffee or my evening, because Finn, enraged at being grounded until he tidied his room spent a great deal of time snarling at me and bullying and cajoling me to unground him.  It was really horrible - no amount of speaking to him about it would deal with the problem, eventually M sacrificed his evening to cleaning up with Finn - I don't feel good about that either.  What an unpleasant end to a constructive day.

A dream of bungalows - and emptiness

I think I've had this dream before, I was in a place - some sort of garden centre, but the end of the plot was filled with bungalows - they were rectangular, flat-roofed structures, that seemed to be made out of plywood - painted yellows and creams,  with contrasting coloured window frames. More like over-sized Wendy houses or seaside chalets than real houses They were shuttered up and empty - and they were very 1920s-30s in appearance.  Additionally they were jammed together with no gardens.  There were gravelled alleys up the side, if you went up this they would end in another bungalow running paralell, blocking the view.  Occasionally behind the bungalows through a sort of hoarding with glass, you could glimpse an old swimming pool, which was empty.  For some reason I withdrew rapidly from the sight of this, it upset/frightened me.

The swimming pool was built on a grand scale, with brick arches around the inside of the pool - but I couldn't see the bottom from where I stood.  I knew it had been built for the bungalow people, as an amenity - but I worried that now that it had been emptied it would decay.  Further around I caught another glimpse of it, this time I could see some men at work on the ground nearby, and saw that the bottom of the pool, which was rounded at this point, contained a round, dark pool of muddy water.   I walked away from the bungalows, and back towards the garden centre, where there was a small lawn between the paths, with two large tree ferns, one a conventional one, one with pink spotted leaves.  A mother was saying proudly to her small son "That's the one we've got in our garden - a dicksonia grandiflora".  I thought that was strange because ferns do not flower (or not in any obvious way).

This was such a depressing dream that I woke up.  To me it seems obvious - houses usually represent oneself, but all these houses are "dead" - uninhabited, closed up, they are about the past - the sense of a once-thriving holiday community that's closed up and gone, abandoned.  The swimming pool is presumably one's emotional life - it's drained, empty apart from a muddy mess - I found beauty and relief in seeing the grass and the ferns, but even there I was reminded of a sort of sterility.  The woman with the child is perhaps me too, with a little boy, trying to teach him - "our garden" being the sense of the miniature paradise one tries to create in a family.

It is true - there is a part of me that feels very emotionally drained - and shutting myself up in some ways is how I deal with it - but this horrible sense of sterility - a lack of life.  Perhaps the green space was reminding me that family life was worthwhile - a source of growth.  At the moment, Finn's depression and so on make it hard for me to cope with anything.  I have been concentrating on dealing with the creditors one by one, and raising money where I can.  

The cold begins

Today was the first day I have felt cold all day, at least until I went into the kitchen at lunchtime.  I feel proud that I didn't turn on the fan heater - but the tip of my nose is cold, and my fingers.  Perhaps I should have done more typing.

We turned the heating on, morning and evening only, at the end of October when we had a BnB guest.  She left, but we kept the heating on.  Finn has stopped complaining about it - he has finally got it that we don't have it on all the time.  I have put it on during the day for visitors, but mostly we are managing by closing doors, more layers etc.  This won't last of course, it will get so cold that we won't be able to manage.  And I guess over the Christmas hols we will have it on a bit more.

I discovered that EDF the energy company offers poor customers a discount of £150 - this is great, unfortunately, our monthly bill is £230 - so £12.50 a month won't  make very much difference to us.   But I am aware that we can still do more to keep warm - I could, for example, wear boots rather than shoes, and get the thermal leggings on -  but I am keeping them for a really serious cold snap.

There really is nothing more we can do at present - but soon we will go out around the skips to find wood for the fires.  And perhaps, weather permitting, to the woods to get kindling.

Love, life and death

A friend of mine's husband died today.  He was 90 and had been ill for several years, and getting worse, so it was a blessing.  He was an old miner, he'd lost an arm in a pit accident - he was a traditional trade unionist, a socialist of the kind one now feels are passing away.  She once told me he was a womaniser - and he certainly had a bit of residual twinkle whenever I saw him.

They are the mysterious couple who stay together forever and she is about 85 I think - she really looked after him in the last years - hardly going out unless she could get one of their children to sit with him.  I dare not ask if she'd always loved him when I talk to her - their marriage was certainly eventful... they had 4 children - or was it 6 - I've never met any of them, but I've heard so much about them, although I'd be hard put to say which was which.

It's quite symbolic, dying at midday on the day of the solar eclipse - new moon.

While he was dying I was chatting with the local rabbi - and a lovely woman who runs the Montefiore Society - but chiefly the rabbi about why Jews weren't bothered about the afterlife... he said, inter alia, that looking for the afterlife was a poor reason for living an ethical life.  I think that's true - although I believe it's something.   He also told me a great many interesting things - a generally unbelieveably fascinating conversation.  He also told me some terrible stories about going on a tourist coach around Israel, where the bulk of the passengers were American Fundamentalists... at one point the guide - an Israeli - mentioned the apostle Jacob - then swiftly corrected himself to James - the American were ruminating on this, so the rabbi turned around and said "You know - Jacob is the hebrew name for James - that's why the followers of King James were called Jacobites".... blank looks, grumbling "Well, I've never heard anyone else say that before..." and general expressions of disbelief.   "At that point we decided we weren't going to bother with trying to educate them"... there were other anecdotes that made one wonder whether these people were of normal intelligence.

Love - yes, I was going to say something about Love too.  I was going to mention that in the last couple of days the pesky Love Object has been flittering into my brain again. I fear we will be seeing each other at one funeral or another within the next year.  I really haven't thought about him at all sometimes for days - which is a relief.  For some reason since seeing him in April (or was it May) I've not thought about him so much, perhaps because that meeting answered some of my questions about him - and I feel able to shelve him.  I'd love to see him again of course, but I don't look forward to the events which will precipitate such a meeting.