Flooding Burn

Sorry, I was away from my blog for a while. We went for a holiday in York, and that was the week it flooded! Miraculously, our main road out of town was cleared hours before our departure, but we passed a couple of drowned fields on the way. The tops of the hedgerows barely cleared the water.

Now there are floods where we are, including the little burn out the back. It overflowed across the path, but has receded now, touch wood. I’m beginning to feel chased around by these muddy rushing rivers…

Hope to get myself sorted out soon, then I’ll get back to responding to blog comments.

The burn seen from our back gate.

Ask Me No Questions

or

Hail Fellow Ill Met

 
A few weeks ago:

When we were going home on the bus, I was writing a message to Mum on our conversation notepad. An elderly man got on the bus and stood for a while, tucking his ticket away. I felt his eyes on me and looked up, and smiled. Then I went back to the message I was writing. Mum jerked her head towards him suddenly, and gestured apologetically, with a half-turn of her head towards me. I could imagine her saying, “I’m sorry, she can’t hear you.” He sat down across from us, where I couldn’t see him, and for the rest of the journey they talked politely, their voices lost in the roar of the bus. After a while I put my conversation notepad away, my message unread.

When we reached our stop and Mum moved towards the exit, I glanced at the man, intending to say goodbye. But he sat with his head turned away, so I said nothing. I didn’t ask Mum who he was or what they were talking about, and she didn’t mention him… he was just a passing ship.

 
Two days ago:

We were walking in single file along a narrow footpath, when we came across a bearded man on a ladder who was preparing to trim a hedge. He and Mum exchanged jolly-sounding greetings. Powered by her presence, I breezed past in my turn with a cheery smile. But I thought about how, on my own, I would either not look at him, or would raise my hand in a polite salute.

A little way further along, when we came onto the road, another man stood nearby. Again he and Mum made friendly noises. “People are so kind!” said Mum, as we passed on.

 
Yesterday:

We went into Costa’s for coffee, but it was quite busy. All that was left for us was a small round table for two, wedged between a lady in the corner (reading a newspaper) and two gossiping boys. The woman looked up and smiled, and she and Mum talked for a little… I wondered if they knew each other. Then the lady went back to her newspaper, and Mum and I wrote to each other in our conversation notepad.

“It’s hotter than I thought,” said Mum. “Have you noticed that the students get younger every year?”

“I never looked,” I said.

Mum rolled her eyes good-naturedly, while I thought about the old man on the bus, along with years and years of students passing me by, unseen.

After a while I said, “You know why I don’t look at people? I don’t want them to think they can speak to me just because I smiled.”

Mum laughed and shook her head at me. “They don’t always — and don’t smile,” she said. “Just observe.”

 
A small mystery cleared up:

When we left, the woman reading the newspaper didn’t speak to us again — she was a stranger after all. But Mum later volunteered the information that she’d told us (when we came in looking for somewhere to sit) she’d been watching a single student taking up a table meant for four.

Oh, I so know the feeling! Especially when we are meeting my sister, and the three of us have to huddle (with two shopping trolleys) round a tiny table for two, while a skinny kid stretches out blissfully in a tasty piece of café ‘real estate’… and stays there forever.

Lady next to us — I share your frustration.

A Few of My Favourite Things

A WordPress weekly writing challenge.

Lemon Drizzle

Mum buys home-baking from local coffee mornings, and one of our favourites is Lemon Drizzle. It is moist and sweet without being too sweet. We fell in love with it, and I always make room for it in my daily calorie allocation. (I still manage to lose weight, and it makes me happy, so it’s not a problem)!

There are lots of recipes for Lemon Loaf online — I compared several before settling for this one from Daily Mail Online: Crunchy Lemon Cake.

It tastes very like the coffee morning cake, though I learned not to use a small food-processor for the batter! There isn’t enough room. Next time I’ll just use big mixing bowls and a hand blender.

Super Sad True Love Story (Gary Shteyngart)

I love my Kindle, but it would be nothing without the books.

One Kindle feature is that I can rate each book after finishing it. I keep a personal database of Kindle books (mostly so I can keep tabs on which books in a series I haven’t got) but I also note down the scores I give each book.

According to my database, the top scoring book on my Kindle is Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart — I gave it 45 points out of a possible 50. So far it’s the only book on the Kindle that I’ve given five stars.

I was interested in the ‘big brother’ aspect of the story (the scary thing is, I can imagine life turning into that). I liked the fact that the main character had a diary and was wrestling with issues similar to mine (logging the nice stuff and avoiding the bad)…. it just tickled my funny bone.

Although he begins by sounding like somebody you’d prefer to have nothing to do with, you can’t help feeling fascinated by his whole way of life… and you get very fond of him by the end. In fact he’s the most decent man in his social group.

Main characters in books don’t have to be young, beautiful, strong, clever, and sociable… in fact none of these qualities are necessary. They have to seem real and be vulnerable, have to have experienced things I recognize from my own life… and they have to be trying to be good rather than bad.

Perfection is not required in a human being, unless true perfection is having the right balance of imperfections! I think it may have been achieved in this book.

Piggin

…just because everybody needs Piggin Friends!

This boyo here has his own box of trinkets. The bigger and bulkier the trinket, the more he loves it. You don’t leave anything sparkly lying around, because it will disappear into Piggin’s treasure chest.

He has even snatched costume jewellery from beneath other customers’ noses. Mum bought a string of cheap bulky beads from a stall, and another lady said, “Oh, you beat me to it! That’s just the kind of thing I love!”

I said, “I don’t suppose you told her it was going to be worn by a Piggin?”

“No,” she said.

Good call.

Kindle Waffle

We meant to go to the supermarket this morning, but the car refused to start. Mum says the battery has gone flat (again). We don’t use it enough!

When I was glancing at my list of old Kindle purchases on Amazon, it said there was an update available for one of the ebooks. Any notes and highlights I made on that particular book would be wiped out… but I don’t care about that. I can always put them back in!

I’ve seen people saying on a Kindle forum that they are sometimes offered these ebook upgrades… but I don’t think I was notified about mine by email. I should check the full list of purchases in case there are other offers!

Mum has apparently been going crazy watching me share many happy hours with my Kindle, because she suddenly announced that she wanted one too. Instead of sitting around waiting for one to arrive through the post, she bought a Kindle Touch from Argos. (Reminds me of the Argos advert… she’ll be the one darting brightly through the door with Argos bags, while my house of cards tumbles down about my ears).

She wanted to make the font larger, as she can’t read very well in bed. It took us both a little time to find out where Amazon had put the font sizes… it’s right there on mine, but harder to find on hers.  Anyway, it’s all sorted now.

She seems to be reading Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death. Maybe I should do all the cooking for a while…

Letter to Myself

When I turned on the computer this morning, a surprise was waiting for me. iCal (my calendar) alerted me to a Letter to Myself that I wrote a year ago. And my first thought was, “oh no, do I really HAVE to read this?? I was going to get more work done on my drawing!”

I told myself off for being lazy, found the letter to myself, read it, and thought, “is that it? No blinding words of insight that will add something to my day? It’s all stuff I could have written yesterday (or could write tomorrow), though I do have glasses that work now (varifocals), and have found some (not all) of the books I was looking for.”

Unimpressed. Though that snippet about my father was of value, as I would have forgotten it otherwise.

I didn’t say much about it last year: Memory of a Garden. But below is the blog post I meant to post last year, and didn’t!

WordPress prompt:

“Write a short letter to yourself, to be read one year from now. You don’t have to post the entire letter, but you do have to:

(a) write it

(b) post about what surprised you the most about what you wrote

(c) whether you found the experience interesting or not…

…and don’t forget to set a reminder in your calendar to read it in one year.”

Thursday 21st July 2011

Dear Me,

I have no idea where you’ll be and what you’ll be doing, but I hope all of your current aches will have gone, and that you’re wearing glasses that work! (Right now I can’t read, write or draw well, with or without them). I hope you’ll have found and read the books on your ‘to track down’ list… Sean Thomas Russell, the missing Patrick O’Brian novels, Robin Hobb, Raymond E Feist and Janny Wurts.

I don’t know what else I hope for you, as I can’t wish a particular course in case it’s the wrong one. Que sera, sera, perhaps… but the newspaper article that Mum found today struck a chord… she handed it to me with a significant look.

Meet Generation X: Women born between 1965 and 1978 aren’t having children OR success in their careers… Why? (by Anna Pursglove).

After reading it, I was silent for a little, then said, “Obviously we haven’t flattened the men quite enough. I vote we start with [censored].

“Spoilt for choice!” said Mum, with a basilisk glare.

She said earlier today how men of previous generations did not like shopping — but my father ‘was unusual’ because he enjoyed it. I asked what was in it for him? Gadgets? And she said “I don’t know. Just enjoyed looking.” It lifted my heart to think of him enjoying such frivolity. Of course he always was warm and human, but it makes him seem even more so.

My main regret, I think, is that everything rushes by so fast — and sometimes you don’t fully understand or appreciate people, things or places till they are long in the past. To want them back seems useless — to fly in the face of how life is.

Regret is also futile in other regards — if I didn’t say or do certain things, I wouldn’t be me. Sometimes you read something bad you wrote, or find a depressingly poor picture you’d worked on for hours, but other times there’s a pleasant surprise or two. Today I found panoramic images I didn’t remember creating — of the garden and my bedroom! Rough, but evocative.

Just don’t give up on yourself… try to keep your ship afloat, like in this morning’s dream. It would have been easy to let it sink, but I kept on and was around to rescue someone who sank his own. Also, it’s such a cliche to say “you’re never alone,” but it’s true that you’re one speck among many who share similar experiences.

That last bit sounds detached and a little frightening, as though you could blow away at any moment and never be seen again through the swirling dust storm. But you’re still in there, along with people you know — the dust cloud is all of us.

I’m beginning to feel a bit lost in this message, and my pen has already run out, so I better stop. As you know, there is the blog and the private journal if you want to read more from the past! Asterix and Obelix are waving to you from the side trolley, as perhaps they are waving to me from wherever you are. The song in my head is ‘I Am, I Said’ by Neil Diamond, which is strangely apt.

Please keep blogging, reading, making pictures/videos, sitting in the sun outside, looking round the shops… enjoy life while you have it.

Lots of love,

Me.

To complete this assignment, I’m supposed to post about what surprised me the most about the above letter, and whether I found the experience interesting.

Previously I scoffed at myself, writing ‘…my entire journal is a letter to any future me who cares to read it.’ But some things came out in the letter that I was too lazy to write in my regular entry for the day… Mum’s words, the panoramic pictures and the newspaper article. I don’t mention my blurring eyesight much either, though it causes me problems every day. I wonder if it will be better a year from now, or worse? Will I have found a solution… bifocals??

Did anything surprise me about the letter? Yes, that it wasn’t longer and more waffly! That things like my dream fitted into what I was trying to say. That I wouldn’t tie myself down to anything more specific, such as a better career or a more organized life… as I know how life often isn’t what you expect.

Something I didn’t mention in either letter or private journal entry but which I found interesting… Apple is building what I would call a mini city or a Ringworld. Rather scary… but I wonder if there is room there for me. I could do a panoramic photo there…. “my new abode”.

Downtime

We were unlucky with our connection recently. First of all I thought our broadband connection was down for some reason, and it was two days before we discovered the phone line itself was down! While I was stamping around moving furniture to get at the cables freely, jiggling plugs and swapping lines and splitters, my mother was playing cards on her laptop, thinking “ah, peace! Nobody phoning me asking me for things….”

If I’d known no calls were coming in, I would have put two and two together, but I assumed it was business as usual.

Anyway, when my sister complained about an engaged tone and an automated male voice telling her to hang up, BT got on the act very quickly, and sorted it out… you keep hearing horror stories about how such issues get dragged out and fought over, but BT were here and sorting out the fault almost before we could say ‘Jack Robinson’. The engineer said the fault lay with something in the junction box, and was ‘comparatively rare’.

It was lovely to be able to get back online again, and all the things I was desperate to do ON THE INTERNET suddenly became of less importance, and I put them all on the back burner again, and just relaxed and played in Photoshop! It was like my cat’s attitude to my cheese… it was nice just to know I had the option.

Till the next morning, when I checked my email, and nothing happened….. we were offline again!!

I picked up my mobile phone (rusting through lack of use) meaning to send a text message to my sister, and found one already waiting for me… she said her phone and internet were both down. It was a relief to know it was something more general, and probably nothing to do with our original fault. We were offline most of the day… we would get in for a few minutes, and then ‘boom!’ it was gone again.

It’s holding steady now, but for a while I didn’t trust it at all! I had no intention of buying anything, for instance, till I knew it wasn’t going to suddenly duck out from under me mid-payment. Anyway, it reminds me not to take these things for granted.

Inner Rabbit

This is me… wearing Euphoria perfume and making mistakes! Missing words when I write and adding wrong endings such as ‘-ing’ and ‘-ed’ where they aren’t wanted. Making a multitude of typing errors on the flat Mac keyboard (ones that I don’t make on ordinary keyboards… in particular I seem to hit the comma when I’m aiming for the full stop. Worse, I scatter the letter ‘f’ through my words when trying to find my place by touch).

Trying to find somewhere on my desk to lay out a sheet of paper I’m copying from, but there’s no room. Then I remember I’ve got a nice solid copy holder somewhere, but I’m not sure where. Find it on my desk, sitting beside me. Prop the paper on it, not bothering to fasten it with the bar. This won’t take long.

*** *** ***

It’s half past 8 on a Tuesday night — feels more like it was Monday. Golden sunlight in the dimming outdoors, glancing off the tops of the clematis and off the sides of the trees. Sky a soft pale blue. Sun was pouring down through the loft hatchway upstairs, pooling in the middle of the soft gloom of the landing.

TV downstairs is on — one of those music shows of Simon Cowell watching dance groups that all look the same. A very nervous girl has just walked offstage in a skimpy outfit she’s not comfortable in — she looks as though in her mind she has already lost, and she is probably right. I don’t hear their remarks on the TV, or any of the music… though the music phantom in my muffled brain is playing some dignified, ‘big’, dramatic voiceless rock music that I know well and can’t identify. It’s one of the tunes that’s often there. Makes you think of sun setting slowly over heavy, glinting seas.

I’m drinking the dregs of yesterday’s coffee — it’s like stewed sawdust in water. There’s milk in it but no sugar. There are pigeons in the trees outside. Pecking, preening, flying off occasionally but always coming back. This is their home. They suffer somehow through the frosts of winter and are still here in the spring. I watch them and they watch me.

Mum is playing solitaire on her laptop. She’s moving the cordless mouse on a tray on her knee and is leaning back. It seems tired and disengaged. She said during the day she had a headache — perhaps it has not gone.

*** *** ***

My eyes smart a little, especially the left. I was at the opticians today, having a ‘full’ eye test. At one point in the proceedings she was shining a very white bright light in my eyes. The left eye stood up to it reasonably well, but the right eye kept fluttering and closing.

I nearly started whimpering in the middle of my interview with the optician — she pretended not to notice, but her bright cheeriness and warmth redoubled. I’d been upset all morning. I felt tired of trying to talk to people, maybe about important things like my eyesight, and not hearing anything they say unless they repeat fifty times or write it down. You miss things and make mistakes because of it, which results in repeat appointments etc… the very last thing you want.

I’d even got tired of pretending that I’m on board with everybody else — the polite nodding and smiling that smooths most of it over while feeling confusion about who people are and how they spend their time. Pretending I know whether a stranger has said “may I sit here?” or “is anybody sitting here?” to which the answer will be ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or ‘no’ or ‘yes’, depending. And all the time, a guilty, creeping boredom and resentment that has to be disguised.

Today I froze in the headlights, and waited for it all to stop.

I sighed and cheered up when the optician said my eyes were very healthy. I notice she didn’t add “for your age,” but I knew it was true. With my floaters, dry eyes, varifocals and blurring eyesight, it seemed an unlikely diagnosis. Especially when she said “you see better than 20/20 with your spex [sic]“, which my mother said she thought only Superman could do. Last week she said she and my sister have high blood pressure and that I might too… but I haven’t yet, it seems. Maybe because I’m the protected youngest, or because I was so sluggish this morning. “I felt like roadkill,” I said, and Mum said “you looked it.”

I suppose the thought of being deaf AND blind terrifies me. I wouldn’t be able to read what people say to me, and that would destroy what communications I have. It would just be me and the ‘music phantom’ in my head, and vague rumblings and vibrations in my environment. Perhaps a cat on my lap.

*** *** ***

It’s 0:20 the next morning and I’ve gone to bed. A Piggin leans on my shoulder. I’ve drained a glass of slightly too acid tomato juice — won’t buy that brand again. My Kindle is next to my bed in its pink Shocksock… I’m reading a rather poor whodunnit set in Egypt. But it’s not so poor that I need to stop.

The Kindle changes the way I buy books. I nearly bought an L.E. Modesitt Jr hardback for £1.50 from a charity shop, but when I noticed the stained pages, I put it back. I wonder, “do I really want MORE books taking up space, especially blemished ones that I’m too squeamish to touch? I could buy it for my eReader and highlight the bits I like, and leave it in my Amazon archive.”

It’s more comfortable reading and writing without my glasses. Everything at some sort of distance is a blur… shape, colour and a soft shine… no detail. Closer to, my hands and writing are clear. My long hair is a dark haze that frames my vision.

Last night I dreamed about white werewolves. As I watched a big one loping along, I grew nervous and asked myself why I was so relaxed? Then I remembered the werewolf was a friend who was helping me. I relaxed again, but then woke up and remembered the optician, and really didn’t want to go out.

Day came to an end eventually though, with golden sunlight and so on. It wasn’t all bad, any more than the werewolf was… though my inner rabbit waits behind my eyes, ready to pounce!

Gunk Confusion

When I went downstairs, Mum met me with a frown and said “I just put some horrible gunk in my mouth.”

“WHAT gunk?”

“Varnish… tastes like banana.”

Our Tea Collection

I’m afraid I’m enjoying being able to upload pictures straight to my blog (without having to copy them across to another machine).

Here I’m introducing you to our tea collection. I suspect that’s only part of it, if there are other boxes lurking in a cupboard!

As Thomas says, ‘click to imbiggen’.

Hair of the Old Sea-Dog

Was woken by Mum… didn’t especially want to get up, but I had promised.

When I arrived downstairs, she said my hair was standing on end. I replied that I couldn’t do anything about it… the girl gave me the wrong cut for my particular hair texture. It looks good for one day (if I use plenty of conditioner and my hairdryer) and thereafter it goes on the fritz.

Having put Mum in her place, I fetched a bowl of Cheerios, sat down with The Nutmeg of Consolation by Patrick O’Brian, and began reading where I left off. It said:

“The old sea-dog appeared on deck the next day at dawn, looking as some other old dogs do when they are roused untimely from their pad: uncombed, unbrushed, matted.”

Tried to tame it by slicking down the worst bits with water and drying it with my hairdryer. Marginally better. Then we went to town as it was Sunny (not Misty).