Radical Manoeuvres in the Dark

Yesterday, I did something radical. 

I was tidying up the big spare room which used to be my son’s room, and is now my office and early morning retreat space. In here, as well as laptop, desk, Edwardian walnut wardrobe and dresser that don't really fit but I can’t seem to get rid of, is a pile of books. 

I’m an early morning reader. My favourite start to the day used to be bringing a cup of tea back to the guest bed and reading for an hour or so before having to start the day proper. Mabel would come and join me, purring and kneading like a wind up toy. All would be cosy and calm. 

The to-be-read pile sat on the bedside table and was never less than 4 deep. On the shelf underneath, there would be another 5 or so. I enjoyed that. I liked knowing there was something to read, the visible sign of my love of books and how much they mattered to me. 

On the dressing table would be the pile of books I’d read that month. 

Yesterday, tidying my way around the house, I stopped in front of these piles. The Read pile has remained static since February, the To-Be-Read since January. And all of a sudden, I felt oppressed by both of them. 

Obligated by what I was supposed to be reading at a time when my concentration doesn’t even extend to Twitter, and mocked by the paucity of what I had managed to read. 

I took the Read pile downstairs and carefully put them on the shelves (alphabetical order, naturally; I haven't completely lost my senses) and sat with the To-Be-Read for a little while longer. Did I really think I was going to make it through a history of Orkney, the saucier side of the Victorians or the autobiography of a woman unfortunate enough to marry Philip Roth? How about that novel about the cafe in Japan, or Hamnet, or the one about Death’s assistant?

No. 

Reader, I put them away. 

They haven’t gone away but they are tidied away, back onto the shelves. There is space on the table that I’ve filled with red anemones from the garden. I breathe more easily, no longer feel defined by the that pile.

Still can’t concentrate on a blasted thing, mind. Maybe I'll try poetry. 

This is the time to be slow, 

Lie low to the wall

Until the bitter weather passes. 

 

Try, as best you can, not to let

The wire brush of doubt

Scrape from your heart

All sense of yourself

And your hesitant light. 

 

If you remain generous, 

Time will come good;

And you will find your feet

Again on fresh pastures of promise, 

Where the air will be kind

And blushed with beginning. 

John O'Donohue 

Through It

 Yesterday was my last day at work. To be clear, it was my last day in my current employment. I am now officially Freelance. 

This year has been unlike anything I’ve ever known before. Rollercoaster years are not unknown to me, with my chequered, swift moving, changing past. But I don’t think I’ve ever gone from over the top excited to utter despair so quickly. 

Dad has left this massive blank space behind him and we live from moment to moment, simply moving around the edges of it. It's never going away but we find ways to accommodate it. 

Sudden death robs you of the opportunity for final words, for the last considered hug, for adjustment to the not-there-ness that will follow. We had none of that. One day he was there and I had thought "I must phone Mum and Dad this week." The next morning he was not and I missed that chance. The last time I held his hand, he was already cold.

I'm not sure when I'll be able to forgive myself for that. 

There is no way through this but through it. One step, one decision, one hour at a time if needs be. I make plans, book tickets for things later in the year, send messages to friends that say "yes, we really do need to meet up!" but I find it hard to believe that I will.

 And in a horrible twist of be-careful-what-you-wish for, I find myself the owner of a shed. Dad was a man of several sheds because he'd been a man of many activities. The main shed stored the lathe he brought a few years ago (I have some things he carved on it before the tremors in his hands got too bad). This little shed was home to random pieces of wood, the purpose of which we'll never know now. 

The little shed is coming to my allotment. 

My son has the first set of shelves he ever made me at his new home in Sunderland. They moved with me into adulthood and my own homes, and I find it comforting that they still have a home in the family. 

I phone Mum every day, aware that as the funeral recedes from memory, people will let themselves think that she is adjusting and fine. She is and she is not. They were married when she was 18, had been together for just 3 days shy of 46 years. She is keeping busy but she feels his absence like a physical pain. How do you adjust to that?

We both find walking into either of the sheds comforting and not. I don't believe in life after death but he is so vividly there, the smell of the oil, wood and metal mingles to bring him back and I hear his voice in my head most clearly when I'm in there. 

He did see my allotment. He liked it. I think he would be happy the shed is going there. 

All of the cliches are spoken. Of course they are. They are cliches because they contains kernels of wisdom or truth that still resonate with us. It's what he would have wanted (it is and we know this because we knew him). He would have been happy with that. Take it one day at a time. Time is a great healer. 

It might be but it has lost almost all meaning for us, moving slowly and speeding up at the same time. How are we 6 weeks since it happened, since that dreadful morning, the ambulance, the flurry of masked men, chest compressions and incomprehensible words? That mad dash from my house to theirs, still too late? How am I able to write, to work, to make plans for the future?

There is no way through it but through it. We take a step at a time and know, deep in our bones, that he would have wanted us to. We laugh when we remember things, cry at others. We stumble and fall on this new path, sometimes literally. 

I have lost track of the things I have tripped over because I've stopped being able to see things.

Some days the grief is a heavy weight, others a feather-light ache. On all of them we try not to look too far ahead. We do a lot of looking back. A lot of rearranging our heads around that big blank space. We try not to look down into it.

What Matters

This grief contains such a fierce energy, I would take over any number of towns, storm any building and raze any state to the ground just for the chance to have him back, to hear him laugh again. 

It leaves me curled in tight balls under duvets, blankets or coats, my throat is raw. 

I tell myself that if I curl up small, it won’t find me. I’ll escape it’s notice. But I can't.

Time is ridiculous. It’s permanently stood still at 9am 19th February 2021, yet it’s also rushing me away from him, the minutes carrying me away from him. It feels like it happened both moments and months ago.

The stupid thing is, I now realise it doesn't matter how comfortable you are with death in the abstract, how many death cafes you've attended, how many articles you've read. All of your knowledge, insouciance, training, it's worthless in the actual face of it and all that's left is a hard fact, colder than any polar region. 

My Dad is dead. 

I want my Dad back. 

And sometimes I'm able to, not forget, but to step aside from myself, from reality for a moment. I will laugh at something, make a plan, type an email. And then the tsunami comes, that hot wave of grief that rolls me over with it, leaving me shaking and small again. 

And angry. I'm angry with the doctors that didn't monitor his condition properly. With the traffic that got in my way as I sped over to their house that morning. With the government whose slow and patchwork response to lockdowns robbed me of time with him. With myself for spending more time on Instagram in the past year than I did with him. He was invincible to me. 

The strongest man I knew, picking up children, dogs and gnerators with equal ease. Rarely succumbed to an illness. Treated everyone with the same easy manner. I cycled foreign streets with him, climbed hills, rode horses and swam in seas. Played frustrating games of scrabble because, while not a wordy man, he was competitive and played to win. 

His laugh was loud, immoderate and ready. 

I dreamt about him 5 days after he died, surrounded by friends he hadn't seen for years, I was finally able to give him the hug social distancing had stopped me from doing for nearly a year. 

And that is the hardest part: I thought I was doing the right thing, keeping them safe by keeping my distance and it didn't matter, it never mattered and I should have been there every single week because I can't remember the last time I hugged him and I can't remember what we spoke about the last time I called. 

I don't have a conclusive ending for this post. A pithy line that sums up how I feel because oceans aren't enough to contain that. There's no neat precis, no wry acknowledgement or dry oneliner. There's just this gap that won't be filled and a feeling of absence that never goes away.

A little change here, a big change there...

To everyone who has been within conversational reach of me recently, and there’s not been that many thanks to lockdown, the following will not come as a surprise. 

I stopped liking my job last year.

And in that, I'm not alone. The pandemic has affected people's attitudes to their work worldwide: the pressure of working, often the only person left as everyone else was furloughed, balancing the needs of the museum with the safety of the volunteers and team just became overwhelming and triggered a minor breakdown. 

When that happened, it also triggered a small epiphany: the only thing that gave me any sense of satisfaction was working outside with plants and nature. The allotment became everything and, rather than fading as life attempted a return to normal, that remained constant. 

I tried changing my hours, throwing myself into new projects, delegating more, but nothing worked. It wasn't satisfying and I was frustrated by the lack of flexibility that came with being tied to one building, 4 days a week, 9 till 5. I knew I wanted a career change, I knew I wanted to work outside and I knew I wanted fulfilment. 

In short, I wanted to work with plants and the only thing that held me back was my lack of knowledge. That and my lack of time. 

So I've reached a turning point in my path. A crossroads, if you must. I could continue with my salaried job and a gnawing sense of time wasted, or I could forge my own way, accept instability and welcome the flexibility to learn something completely new. 

 

It might not surprise you to know that I've chosen the latter. As from April, I will be a freelance museum consultant, entirely dependent on my own ability to charm people into giving me work but also entirely free to start training and getting some experience in the plant world. 

And, heavens help me, am I terrified! I've never done this before. Never freelanced, never charmed outside of an interview, never faced a new venture without knowing where my income is coming from. This is scary stuff but I'm ready for it. 

 I think. 

It does mean that my grand plans for the allotment are on hold. This year it will be more about ticking over, planting and digging rather than constructing elaborate fruit cages, buying trees or even getting my shed. Oh my shed! I stand on the plot and dream of it, painted blue with yellow door (not looking at all like an IKEA, no matter what my friend says), a shelf for potting, hooks for hanging tools and a wheelbarrow (also currently existing only in my head) resting neatly on the side. 

I've promised myself that for every job I get, I'll put 10% aside for shed, shed-related purchases and general pursuing of dream plant-based job. 

All that's left to do now is hustle some work my way. 

If you are feeling particularly generous or flush, and you'd like to see the shed manifest itself, there's now a Ko-fi link at the top of the blog page where you can click through and donate. But no pressure, no expectation, just undying gratitude to anyone who wanders that way..

Wish me luck!

There's a whole world of shed love on Pinterest - most of them compeltely unrealistic

I almost wanted to change my search terms to "normal sheds" or "working sheds"

Still, how nice would they be on the plot?

Sigh

January Reading: 2021 in Books

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I managed to read in January. Immediately post-op, in December, I was fine and ploughing through, if at a slightly slower pace. Come the first week in January, an infection set in and scattered my concentration like so many marbles. Nothing written would stick. 

It took me a week to get through The Box of Delights, something that would normally only take me a day. The Living Mountain was even worse, all that lovely lyrical prose... I’d manage a sentence and then put it down in preference for staring, glassy eyed, at the wall. 

 

I'd treated myself to Ring the Hill after enjoying Cox's 21st Century Yokel, and which proved to be a wandering, strange and oddly compelling as that. I do like the way he fits himself into a landscape, actively seeking it out regardless of the challenges. Once my health began to return, I tore through it. 

"A hill is not a mountain. You climb it for you, then you put it quietly inside you, in a cupboard marked 'Quite A Lot Of Hills' where it makes its infinitesimal mark on who you are."

But what really kicked my reading arse into gear was the ever reliable Pym. Some Tame Gazelle was the first I read of hers, decades ago, and returning to it was like returning to an old friend, one who made no judgement but allowed you to find your feet again. 

That was enough to send me back to The Living Mountain which is almost an antithesis of all those men-and-mountain books around. I could amost feel the snow against my face as I read it - just wonderful. A friend lent me the 3 Monica Dickens books, tales of her times as a junior report, cook and trainee nurse, which were hilarious and eye opening. 

Mudlarking finished the month with Laura Maiklem's ode to the Thames and the treasures she's found on its shore. A museum person to the core, I can think of nothing nicer than getting to see her own mudlarking museum, a richness of finds, the lost and thrown away of lives stretching all the way back to the Romans.

 Right now, I have Diary of a Disappointed Man and Homecoming on the go, not to mention Claudia Roden's Book of Jewish Food, which is fascinating. I think I'm almost back to normal, but I'm still hugely distracted by anything that doesn't require much concentration. One sentence at a time, eh?

And at least I'm not having to force my way through a Philippa Gregory like my friend is (she does not give up on books she doesn't like and is growing gradually more annoyed). So tell me, what are you reading right now?

Getting Back To It

It was with some relief that I returned to work this week. As I'm working from home and it involves sitting at a laptop, this is something I can do without worrying about being asked to lift anything heavy. The heaviest thing I lift is the kettle (filled to the minimum required for a coffee boost). I may still be banned from doing any yoga, digging or anything interesting, but I can still use my brain. 

And my brain is glad that I can because it was getting impatient. I could almost feel it itching with ideas and plans, which is always a good sign I'm recovering. That said, one podcast recording, one meeting and an afternoon of emails completely wiped me out, leaving me yawning and barely able to hold a crochet hook by 7pm. 

I'm so much better that I was even allowed out for a walk all by myself last week. True, I did try leaving the house in my slippers (got 3 paces out of the door and realised what I'd done), the pace is slow and the distance not far, but the joy of being able to get out into the air is not to be underestimated. 

 

And then it snowed! And got very icy! A fear of slipping kept me from going outside again for 3 days - I really do not need to fall over right now. Although, I managed to almost take a tumble in my own home by getting my foot tangled with a phone charger cable, so maybe I just shouldn't be allowed to stand up on my own. Or at least move from my seat without supervision. Sadly N wasn't taken with the idea of being my personal watchdog - "mind out for the wool! There's a pile of books to your left!" - on the grounds that he has a proper job what pays the mortgage. 

He has promised that we'll take a trip up to the allotment at the weekend though, so I can't complain about him. 

So far in lockdown we've had surprisingly few rows. The most recent involved him playing The Idles very loudly while he hoovered and I dealt with laundry upstairs. I loathe that band. I mean, really hate them. They make me want to tear off my ears and beat the lead singer into silence with them. I don't know why, I just do. So I did the only reasonable thing and sat upstairs, seething, until the album ended and I could go back downstairs and tell him to put his damn earphones in.

 

It could be said that he was reasonable in asking why I hadn't mentioned it at the start, instead of waiting until the end, by which time I was in the right frame of mind to throw things (I didn't, credit me with some dignity, if not rationality). But I was not in a mood to be reasonable. At least, not until several hours and a bottle of wine later. 

This morning saw a lovely doorstep visit from my son and his boyfriend. They delivered and received belated Christmas presents, and he received a pile of post he hasn't thought to have redirected. That is something he's going to have to deal with soon as they are moving up to Sunderland at the end of Feb. I am trying to gather the tatters of my rationality around me about this - he's not moving to Australia, the house they're getting has a spare room for visits, he's healthy and happy - but it's a close thing. 

Not helped by my recent afternoon organising all my photos into neat digital files. I tumbled right down memory lane to the time when it was just him and me, and the places we visited, the hills we climbed and the books we shared. Lockdown or no, I will be giving him a hug goodbye before he goes. 

 

In other breaking lockdown news, I took a pair of scissors to my fringe in between meetings on Tuesday and instantly regretted it. Usually I trim mere millimeters off so it rests just below my eyebrows, hiding my massive forehead and enabling me to see, but I'd got fed up with seeing all that hair, so grabbed the blunt kitchen scissors and hacked off a centimetre, without factoring in the spring-back effect. 

Oh dear. Released from the weight of itself, the rest of the fringe has sprung up even further, leaving me looking perpetually surprised and slightly lopsided. I find myself tilting my head to one side in Zoom meetings, trying to disguise it. It'll settle down and grow back again, I know but my eyebrows are seriously traumatised by the sudden exposure and my neck is developing a crick in it. 

Really, it's just a symptom of wanting something to change and I'm craving a bigger chop to my hair all over. I'm thinking to the ears, nothing too drastic (I shaved my head once in the mistaken belief I would look like Winona Ryder with her pixie crop - I very much did not), but enough to rid me of all this hair. I keep picking up scissors and putting them down...N may have to hide them before the week is out. 

My attempts at sourdough have all failed miserably. The starters I started refused to develop, lying sulky under a sour brown liquid and giving off a smell that no mother could love. I do not have much luck with bread making under normal circumstances. My loaves always resemble dwarf bread (see Terry Pratchett for that running gag) and could potentially be classed as weapons if dropped from any height over 2 foot. So I called it a day on that Earth Mother dream and ordered some instead. I will feed back (pun fully intended) if it's any good. 

I did once think I'd be an Earth Mother sort of person: keeping chickens, baking bread, hoard of angelic children being homeschooled around me. Then I discovered that chickens smell (and are quite deranged), I can't bake a bread worth eating and children really get in the way of your reading time. And I don't think clogs are acceptable footwear. Besides, I'm not a one for labels - they always seem too much to live up to. 

All photos from a handful of the museums, galleries, hills and beaches I've visited with the Kid. Yes, I am milking this.

Just Waiting

This is the first morning I've woken up feeling even vaguely human and not covered in a thin film of sweat that made me want to scrape my own skin off. 

Yes, last Tuesday the universe looked at how my recovery was going and decided to throw an infection in to see how I reacted. That morning I'd woken up and thought "well, that's a bit odd" as I scrabbled from under suddenly oppressive covers and felt the room ever so slightly tilt on it's axis. Being me, I shrugged this off with a couple of paracetamol and got on with my big plans for the day, i.e. moved from the bed to the sofa, via the kettle. 

By mid afternoon my temperature was spiking around 37.7 (that's Celsius for all you non-metric fans) and I was shivering under 2 blankets on said sofa (a piece of furniture I'm really growing to detest as I spend so much time on it and it begins to feel more like a prison). Wednesday, I caved and phoned the doctors, who promptly sent me to hospital for tests and, 4 hours later, confirmed that it was indeed an infection, go home and take these mega anti-biotics. 

Since then I've done little apart from lying upon the detestable sofa, watching reruns of Poirot and Miss Marple, feeling my brain atrophy between hot flushes. I tell a lie, I did spend an hour one morning weeping gently because I couldn't find the new jar of peanut butter. When I finally did, hidden behind a jar of jam, I spent another 10 minutes weeping gently in relief. That is the level my brain is at right now. 

Reading is right out. I've managed The Dark is Rising, The Living Mountain and The Box of Delights, but anything else is beyond me. A friend dropped round some books and I'd ordered myself Ring the Hill, but I can only manage a page or two at most before going back to doom scrolling or sleeping. 

N's refrain this winter has been "you are ILL, will you please behave like you're ill". This is the first time in years when I've been afforded that luxury and it's been a massive relearning. That there is someone else in the house who can do the hoovering, cooking, emptying of bins, get the shopping in, rather than a minor whom I'm supposed to be looking after...well, it's taken some adjusting to. 

The plus side, apart from arms made colourful by various attempts to draw blood from my stone-like veins, is that the world feels very distant and news isn't sending me into a tailspin. I wonder if this is how alien life (if it exists) feels, looking down on us? "Would you look at what those stupid people are up now? Good grief, it's chaos down there!" "Yes yes Xerbaital5, humans are crazy like goital fish, now, put down those knurd-glasses and come to the table, your frimpt is getting rubbery."

All that being said, the situation over those preposterous and pathetic “free” school lunches which amounts to nothing short of a scandal. If you’re as angry as me about it, you can donate to Fareshare (https://fareshare.org.uk/) an organisation most definitely not lining its own pockets. 

I am quite proud that, despite all of this, I have manage to stick to my pledge of no-gluten. Well, mostly. But honestly, if you're going to leave a tube of Pringles out right near where I could stumble and, reaching out to save myself from a fall, find my hand wedged into the tube and coming out clutching several that then, due to the motion of the stumble, find their way into my mouth, what do you expect?

And yes, Pringles are covered, covered I tell you, in wheat flour. Which seems especially cruel of the makers. A surprising amount of stuff is. 

And through all this, I'd love to tell you that Mabel has been a constant, purring presence by my side, keeping me company and generally being a lap cat. But this is Mabel and lap cat she is not. I get 5 minutes purring, nudging attention in bed in the morning, and then she's off out exploring. Or chasing off the persistent tabby that comes into the garden. Or launching ambushes on Big Old Thor. Or sitting on the fence, like a furry watchful guardian, monitoring the comings and goings of our neighbours. She's even taken to leaping up the fence when she hears R next door coming along his garden path, so she can meow down at him. 

I'm not sure R likes this as he never says hello to her. Thor certainly doesn't and will rush out when he sees her up there, uttering his strange hoarse croak that's supposed to be a meow, telling her off for her daring. 

As you can tell by the length of this nothing-in-particular post, I am now feeling much better. After a few days of feeling really ill, a few more of being at the Laurie Lee level of melodramatically-ill,  I now feel human again. Lee was a master of sickroom melodrama, well into his old age and there's an hilarious passage in Cider with Rosie where he imagines the celebrations in the street at his recovery. 

I've managed a short walk outside this week. The clouds were a bobbly blanket across the sky and reflected in the water, the air felt sharp and damp, and it was just good to be outside. N was distinctly uninspired by the murky canal, lowering grey skies, bare branches and sloppy paths. "It just all looks dead." It's not dead at all, of course - as I pedantically told him. It's all just waiting for the right moment to start the business of life again.

There's a metaphor in there somewhere, if only I could scramble the brain cells together to find it. 

This is quite my favourite bridge over the canal - I love the brickwork for some
reason - and the end point of yesterday's walk.