A place of magic

It’s a funny thing but good art – whether writing, painting, music or anything else – is inspiring, in the sense that it inspires you (or rather me) to do the same. It makes me feel creative. You’d think it would be the opposite. You’d think it would make you despair of ever reaching those heights. But it doesn’t. I suppose it’s the same with people. Good people are the ones who make you feel better about yourself and the world, and bad people – however beautiful, rich, famous or talented – make you feel worse. Or at least that’s my yardstick.

    Yesterday evening quite by accident I caught a feature on BBC2’s ‘Autumnwatch’. A nature writer (I didn’t catch his name) was talking about a man in the 1950s (I didn’t catch his name either) who wrote about the peregrine falcons of his native Essex. Both the commentary and the extracts read out were fabulous, and while watching I felt those familiar creative stirrings and remembered an incident from earlier in the day that hadn’t seemed important at the time but I now realised was a highlight.

The last nine days since Ellie was injured have been ghastly.

    Because the gash is in her side she hasn’t been allowed to run or jump as this might rip it open, so can’t be let out except on the lead and can only be walked for three ten-minute episodes a day. Because she is on the lead, so am I. Because she can’t run and jump, neither can I. Neither of us is free.

    We have to try and roll up her onesie as much as possible so that the wound gets some air but with her onesie rolled up she has to be watched because if she licks the wound it could get infected. Even worse, she could tear out the stitches. So, if Ellie is to have any fun at all and any fresh air during the day when she’s not walking, I have to be in the garden with her and there’s not much you can do when you have to keep your eyes on a licky dog.

Ellie with her onesie rolled up and her wound exposed

I’ve felt that my life was on hold and plunged into a depression that I hoped had been left behind with my orphaning.

Yesterday because Frog was at home I disappeared into Exeter saying I had to do some errands. He could look after the dog for a change. I needed a break.

    I didn’t enjoy Exeter. It’s always swarming with people but yesterday because of half-term it was even worse. I didn’t find anything I wanted in the shops so decided to buy some lunch and sit somewhere nice to eat it. I had an hour’s parking left and didn’t want to go home.

    In the past I would have gone to the cathedral green but most of it is now fenced off while the Royal Clarence Hotel which burnt down last November is rebuilt. And anyway, the last time I sat on cathedral green a seagull swiped my sandwich out of my hand. (It was a rather nice prawn one too and, as the woman sitting next to me drily remarked, the seagull had good taste: it didn’t want her pasty.)

    As I wandered, sarnies firmly clasped, I passed some ruins. I’d never explored them before so stopped to read the information board. It was all a bit complicated but as far as I could make out they were the remains of a medieval church and almshouses bombed in the war, with Roman remains underneath. They’d been left in the centre of Exeter as a memorial to those who had died in the war.

    I ventured further in, sat on a bit of ruined medieval wall in the sun and wrestled with the sandwich packet. No one else was around. A blackbird fluttered out of a tangle of clematis and hopped further into the ruins to a barred-off place not open to the public where some feeble-looking grass and a handful of wildflowers straggled through the gravel. I could probably squeeze through those bars, I thought. If I were homeless I might pitch my tent in there. The sounds of the city had vanished as if a perspex wall had slid up between me and the crowds that surged past. And, suddenly, I was in a place of magic.

Exeter's ruined medieval almshouses.*

That feeling was what I remembered when I watched the feature on ‘Autumnwatch’.

    Was it the place that created the feeling or is it a part of me that I don’t go to often enough? How long is it since I’ve taken time out – really out – just for myself?

If you want to visit the ruins for yourself, they're behind Wagamama.

* Sadly this isn't my picture as I didn't have my camera with me. It comes from this site.

 

 

Not-living and living

‘Why can’t I live on my own?’ I said to Frog. ‘It would be so much easier.’

    I’d been watching Chris Packham’s documentary about his Asperger’s and envied him his ordered solitary life, just him and nature and a clutter-free house.

    ‘Because you’d turn into a crabby old ratbag,’ said Frog.

    ‘Aren’t I that already?’ I said. ‘Anyway, why does it matter?’

    ‘We’d both be a disaster if we lived on our own,’ said Frog, trying another tack. 'We need each other in order to be human.'

    ‘Why do we need to be human?’ I asked.

Frog sighed. ‘Sometimes you just have to trust.’

    ‘You mean, that’s what we’re here for even if the rewards aren’t immediately obvious.’

    He sighed again. ‘Something like that.’

Perhaps we all have autistic traits, but sometimes I feel that I have no idea how to live. It’s only because of Frog who, by his own admission, is all-too-human that I manage to pass for normal most – some – of the time. (Or perhaps I don’t.)

    Sometimes I wonder if I even want to live. I feel that I’ve fudged things most of my life, avoiding the truth and taking the easy way out.

    I stopped breathing a few hours after my birth and it was only because of my aunt who noticed that I was turning blue, grabbed me by the legs and turned me upside-down, that I’m here today. Was that a warning of things to come? Was I setting a pattern? Even at that age, did I somehow see not-living as easier than living?

On Tuesday Ellie goes to day care. When she was younger and more troublesome it was a way of getting her used to other dogs and of giving me a break, but now I miss her and it’s only because she appears to enjoy it so much that we continue to send her off one day a week.

    At lunchime on Tuesday this week there came a telephone call.

    ‘Ellie’s been hurt. I think she needs to go to the vet for some stitches.’

    ‘I’ll come straightaway,’ I said.

    She’d been bitten by another dog – in play – and had a golf-ball-sized hole in her side. The vet kept her in for the afternoon, hoping to be able to deal with the wound with sedation only but eventually having to administer a general anaesthetic. (Ellie is rather excitable.)

    Frog and I fetched her in the evening, a wobbly shadow of her former self, dressed in a fetching onesie to stop her scratching or licking the wound.

Ellie in her onesie today. It fits rather cleverly over both her head and all four legs and then poppers round her tail.

She moaned and shivered most of the evening, not wanting to eat or go out for her ablutions before bed. She didn’t want to go out the next day either and I realised that because of Ellie being poorly and because of a whole load of other things that had come to either a pause or a stop, I had absolutely nothing urgent that I had to do. I couldn’t remember when that had last happened.

    ‘I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life,’ I wailed to Frog.

    ‘That sounds nice,’ he said.

    I walked over to see my neighbour S.

    ‘Are you writing anything at the moment?’ she asked, ‘apart from your blog of course.’

    S runs a small publishing company and contributes to magazines, so we often talk about writing.

    No,’ I said, and than I launched into all the reasons why I shouldn’t start another novel: they take over your life, there’s no guarantee they’ll ever be published (and  I already have two unpublishable novels languishing on a shelf), and while the highs are amazing the lows are atrocious.

    But perhaps I’m just fudging things again.