February is the cruellest month

T S Eliot in The Waste Land says that April is the cruellest month and I’ve always agreed with him, finding the mixture of winter’s torpor and spring’s stirrings almost unbearable at times, particularly when I was in my early twenties and so lost and confused.
 
Then I met Frog and for forty-four years he propped me up. Now I’m on my own again and returning to that difficult time, learning all the lessons that I didn’t learn then.
 
Yesterday I took refuge in My Secret Wood. I haven’t been there for a while because it’s dark and damp over the winter. I had one of my migraines and couldn’t manage any of my usual prayers and affirmations and spiritual musings. So I just sat there, on the ground, and Ellie sat with me, twitching her nose. Luckily, now she’s twelve and a half, she doesn’t need to rush around all the time.
 
The first bluebell leaves were pushing through and I realised that it’s now February that’s cruel. With climate change, spring starts two months earlier. And, with the start of spring, comes the conflict between old and new.

I know from experience that I feel closest to Frog when I accept - even welcome - my current circumstances and the fact that he's gone to another place, wherever and whatever it is. But it's hard to let go of my grief. It's almost like an illness that has to run its course.

People say that the grief never goes. Instead, you build a new life around it; you get better at dealing with it.

Spring comes in fits and starts, and so does recovery, I suppose.

My Secret Wood

The first bluebell leaves on the floor of My Secret Wood

Lifelines

At times, the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and months since Frog’s death have felt like one long nightmare, a black tunnel without an exit. Three things have kept me from going under.

The first, and perhaps the most important, is my connection – however shaky ‒ to a spiritual world. In particular, my affirmations. I won’t tell you what these are as that might reduce their power, but I can say that I first learnt about them from Louise Hay’s wonderful book You Can Heal Your Life.

My edition of the book

The edition on Amazon at the moment

I bought the book, which came out in 1984, many years ago, but only started using it seriously about 4 years ago in an effort to cure my migraines. Well, the migraines have virtually gone, and I wonder now whether I was also working through the book in unconscious preparation for the times I’m going through now. It’s a mad thought, but the world is stranger than we can ever imagine. I know that now because I never expected Frog to drop down dead in front of me at the age of 69. Perversely, that unexpectedness is another comfort: who knows what my future holds?

My gateway to the spiritual world is nature, to which I'm led every day by my beloved Ellie, and in particular my secret wood, which I’ve mentioned many times before in this blog.

My secret wood, in a steep valley carved by two small streams

My secret wood, with Ellie and bluebells

Thankfully, it’s spring at the moment and, even though spring doesn’t seem quite as glorious as usual and half the time I’m stuck in my own desperate inner world, it has its moments.

The wild cherry tree in my garden a few weeks ago

My third lifeline is people: family, neighbours, friends, counsellor. I never realised before how much I needed people. Because of what happened 44 years ago when Frog and I wanted to marry, we retreated. We kept ourselves to ourselves and I dreamt of the two of us living somewhere really remote like an uninhabited island in the Pacific, instead of the Devon countryside, however beautiful. Now, people seem to have forgiven me my unsociability and flocked to my aid.

I’ve mentioned my lovely sisters and brother and how much they've been helping me, but I've not mentioned my counsellor before. I see her once a week in the village and she’s amazing. I can say anything to her and cry all I like. I leave each session feeling like a new person. At the moment we’re working on emotions, using a wheel.

The version of the Wheel of Emotions that I'm using at the moment.
There are many others, some with better words. 

It’s as if my emotions have been frozen for decades (which of course didn’t help Frog and me. I’ll do better next time – if I get a chance. Please, God) and now my heart has burst open. I have no experience of dealing with such a tumult and my counsellor is helping me to learn.

Two days ago a former sister-in-law (she used to be married to an in-law of mine) dropped in with her now-husband on their way to Cornwall. They left me these flowers . . .

. . . and sent me this stunning picture from their holiday.

Cornwall, yesterday

Every kindness, like that, does something to fill the hole left by Frog’s death.

Writing this blog helps too.

Turning something old into something new: a to-do list for October

I am a workaholic. I was brought up to think that the day must be filled with ‘useful’ activities. This of course is anathema to creativity as the best ideas come (to me) when I’m doing something ‘useless’, like lying on the bed resting, walking aimlessly, sitting in the car, watching television.

Recently however I’ve run out of ‘useful’ things to do. I think I might have created this situation deliberately, in an attempt to leave space for new things. That doesn’t however make it any less painful and, as I said to Frog yesterday morning, I feel like I’m stumbling round a dark house.

‘Life’s catching up with you,’ he said.

I liked that. It made sense.

In the meantime, before I regain my sense of direction, I have to fill my days somehow. (Don’t I?) So when I read Kate’s ‘To-do list for October’ (see her blog 'I live, I love, I craft, I am me' ) I thought I’d compile one of my own. I didn’t intend to publish it, but Kate – who’s done so much to keep us all going, through the lockdown - suggested I did ‘so that we can all support each other as we go along’.

So here it is.

Garden/pool

I started off by listing all the jobs that needed doing (eg clear and clean the greenhouse, fetch manure, put winter cover on pool, put garden furniture away) and then I decided that was against the whole spirit of the exercise and nothing like Kate’s inspiring list. So I decided instead to say:

Bed garden and pool down for the winter – lovingly.

Sewing

By now I was better at the exercise so, instead of listing jobs, I decided that for me the purpose of sewing was to have fun. 

Even though I do occasionally follow patterns, like this new one that I’m turning into a purple shirt for Frog . . .

. . . they’re only starting points. I need to remember my first love – making do and mending – turning something old into something new.

I’m also at the moment craving a sewing room – something light and spacious, instead of a darkish corner of my study. Even though I can’t imagine where we’d put one or when we’ll ever be able to afford to build one, there’s no harm in starting to plan what I’d like.

 

Writing

Here, I listed my aims, which are:

-To change the direction of this blog. As I have mentioned in earlier posts, I want to dig deeper.

-To continue with my Secret Blog. This is something I’m writing just for me. At the moment it’s what you could call a ‘stream of negative consciousness’ but I’m letting it go where it will in the hope that it turns into something.

-To keep alert to stories, so that I can start a New Novel.

In my experience stories come to you; you can’t go looking for them. As Stephen King says in his hilarious On Writing which I’m reading at the moment (more about that another time, perhaps):

‘There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun.’

-To build my confidence. Confidence creates ideas. Lack of confidence kills them.

For the last two years I’ve been working hard with affirmations, under the guidance of the wonderful Louise Hay and her book You Can Heal Your Life.

But, as Frog pointed out recently, affirmations are just a starting point. You have to then put them into practice as this makes them real and proves them and gives you confidence in them, and creates a benign circle so that you carry on healing. So between us we decided that I could do something every day that’s new or scares me. Hence this post, I suppose!

 

Dog-walking

Because I do the main dog-walk mid-morning, I’m usually hungry and longing to get back for my lunch. Consequently I don’t always walk as far as both Ellie and I might like. I could change this routine.

Even though Frog and I have been adventurous recently, trying new walks when we go out, at home (when it’s just me and Ellie) I’m limited, but perhaps I could make small changes, such as doing walks backwards.

In other words, I can turn dogwalking from a chore to something new and confidence-boosting.

 

Cooking

I used to enjoy cooking supper because I combined it with my daily glass of wine. Since early August however I’ve cut alcohol out of my life, partly because it just wasn’t agreeing with me (however little I had) and I was feeling slightly jaded all the time (not to mention getting far too many migraines) and partly because I decided that blurring the edges of my life wasn’t helpful at the moment. I was following the ethos of my parents – work hard, drink hard and don’t think too much – but it wasn’t mine.

Now, I have to enjoy cooking for itself which I don’t particularly but I do enjoy eating and creating healthy food for Frog and me, so I decided to see cooking as time filled with something productive (I’m trying not to say ‘useful’) instead of time wasted. Another chore that I can turn into a pleasure.

 

Sorry about all this woffle. This post is something new for me, and I’ve let my thoughts and feelings run instead of marshalling them with my usual rigour. Thank you for reading it, and I hope that in some tiny way it might have helped you, or at least echoed something you feel yourself.

I realise too that I haven’t mentioned anything about autumn or the Lockdown (which featured in Kate’s list). But they do come into it. Another time perhaps.

Anger management

Frog and I have become involved in watching a Channel 4 programme called SAS: Who Dares Wins in which women and men who hope to join the SAS are put through gruelling physical and mental tests. Last night’s episode concentrated on aggression and anger - when to use them, when not to use them, and how to switch them on and off. I was riveted.

In my post ‘A solstice walk’ I wrote about how women aren’t supposed to be unhappy. In my experience they’re not allowed to be angry either. Of course we women do get angry, and in a lot of cases we have more right than men to do so, but because we have no way of expressing it we turn it against ourselves. And internalised anger is I think behind the migraines I’ve suffered for forty years.

My internalised anger is specifically against men. Of course I get angry with women too but that anger doesn’t last. Sometimes I can talk to the woman in question, sometimes she apologises, sometimes it just fades with time. But with men the anger festers. It never leaves me. I’m still having imaginary arguments with my father even though he’s been dead for a decade. And I think this is because the fight is unequal, because I have a sense of powerlessness, because I’m frightened of what will happen if I do fight back.

Almost every day it seems I come up against some man for some reason or other, and add to the load I carry.

There is the man who has set up a fencing business one field away from us. Whenever he sees me he finds something about me to criticise. I hate him for this, for his fences that are enclosing the hedges around here, trapping wild animals and me and defacing the countryside, and for the overflowing skip, concrete rubble, rolls of chicken wire, rusty metal gates and general litter lining the footpath opposite the gate to his yard that I walked past this morning.

Then on Friday there was the man who stopped Frog and me and told us we couldn’t walk on the Avalon marshes nature reserve to which we were headed, and for which we’d driven an hour and a half, because we had a dog with us. I did have an argument with him at the time, pointing out that according to the Ordnance Survey map I was holding in my hand the route in question was a long-distance public path. ‘Oh, we don’t bother with the map round here,’ he said. I’m still arguing with him too, in my head.

I used to campaign and I’ve always written – letters, articles, books. But I’m not sure that any of it was ever heard, or made a difference. And I certainly don’t feel any better. I do affirmations, I try to forgive. But I’m obviously not very good at either as nothing changes in me.

Perhaps I should take a leaf out of the book of one of Frog’s nieces who does weight training and can lift a heavy suitcase above her head. Or that of the woman in the programme last night who was made to box with one of the male recruits and in doing so healed some of the mental damage inflicted by a violent partner. She fought back. She landed a punch, and she was praised for it.

I’m fed up with this anger that comes between Frog and me. I’m fed up with migraines. I’m fed up with the world being run by and for men. But what’s to do about it? I’d love to know.

A floater, flashes and a magical wood

On Saturday a large spider-like floater appeared in my right eye. It was accompanied by disconcerting lightning-like flashes in the corner of the eye. On Monday both symptoms were still there so I rang the opticians and they advised me to come in for a check since – at worst – they can be signs of a ‘detached retina’, which sounds terrifying.

    Part of the check involved putting drops into the eye to dilate the pupil so that the optician can see through it to the retina behind. I was pronounced OK, and told that such symptoms are more likely as you get older (oh dear, something else) and if you’re short-sighted (which I am). Frog then had to drive me home as the vision is disturbed by the dilated pupils, and the effects take four hours to wear off. And I couldn’t read my computer screen either for the rest of the day.

    So that was Monday.

    On Tuesday I went back to the opticians to order some computer glasses as recommended by the optician on Monday. Computers cause a lot of eyestrain because of the glare and because they sit at an awkward place between reading distance (when I don’t wear glasses) and the far distance (when I do). This strain can cause migraines, she said. Special glasses worth a try, I thought.

    So that was Tuesday.

    I brought forward my contact lens check to this Friday as my eyes are very dry and I wanted to be sure this wasn’t contributing to the above symptoms.

    So that will be Friday.

    Today (Thursday) I have two pre-arranged appointments (which I should now be preparing for) so it looks like that’ll be today gone.

    Which is all preliminary to letting you know that I may not be posting another chapter of the novel this week. I do have half a chapter done (yesterday) and, if I find some time in which to finish it, I will. But it doesn’t look likely.

    In the meantime, here are some pictures from a small nearby wood which is totally magical at the moment.

Only a neighbour and I visit the wood and she goes to a different bit from me, so I can be pretty sure of having it to myself.

Just me and the bluebells

As the wood grows around a valley cut by a small stream

This tunnel for the stream is one of the few signs of human interference in the wood

lots of it is too steep for me

A near-vertical bank down to the stream

but Ellie leaps around all over the place like a mountain goat.

Spot the dog

I spend most of my time just sitting on the ground among the bluebells, feeling happy, and sometimes Ellie joins me.

Ellie looking wistful. ‘Why can’t we do something? Why do we have to just sit here?’

There hasn’t been much sun during the wood’s bluebell season so far this year, but here is the wood at the same time last year in sun, looking equally magical.

The wood in sun this time last year

As I sit, the birds and butterflies return to going go about their business, ignoring me, and I start to see strange things – a dormouse looking at me from a branch, a hairy-legged satyr striding along the edge of the wood, a little man in brown trousers standing watching me. When I look again, I realise they are illusions created by the tangle of fallen trees and ivy (but I haven’t photographed them because it seems intrusive) . . .

The one that got away

There is no extract from the novel this week. The chapter I was hoping to post didn’t work out. (This usually means it’s not the right place for it and that it will come later in the novel.) I took a day out to reset my brain with a new chapter and fell ill with one of the dreaded migraines.

There may have been a connection as the chapter that got away deals with a painful subject. However I’m also doing a lot of clearing out of my psychical attic since my mother’s death (two years ago) with the help of the wonderful Louise Hay (and her book You Can Heal Your Life) and I’d got in a bit of a tizz about several things.

In the meantime, the weather here has been divine, with spring bursting out all over. On Friday Frog dragged me from my sick bed and we went for a (very slow – with lots of rests) walk by the sea. I hoped to take some pictures for you to make up for the lack of Novel but as most of my energy was occupied with keeping upright, the results were slightly low key. Here they are anyway.

The view from the cliffs.
The sea was glassy calm and several people were trying to swim
(standing with their swimmers on, in water up to their knees, egged on by their dogs).

Blue gromwell, a rare wildflower at its northernmost here by the sea in the south-west.
I'm always pleased to see it again each year. It's related to lungwort.

Blackthorn blossom and some very pregnant sheep.
'Enjoy the lambing experience' said a sign at the field gate. I wondered what that meant.

I hope to be back with Jane and co next week.

SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 2 A gargantuan breakfast, two walks and a swim

Breakfast the next morning (included in the price of our room) was gargantuan. A buffet, laid out in the centre of the hotel’s formal dining room, it included: fruit from all over the world; bowls of plain and fruity yoghurts; muesli; croissants, home-made biscuits and fresh waffles; darkest-brown home-made bread stuffed with seeds; darkest-brown home-made crispbread stuffed with seeds; jams and marmalade; Norwegian cheeses; smoked salmon and smoked mackerel; salamis; tomato, cucumber and lettuce; eggs stuffed, boiled, fried and scrambled; bacon, sausages, meatballs; coffee, tea.

    Gluten-free bread and cereal were available but you wouldn’t want to have been a vegan. Luckily, I’m a very weak one, especially when away from home.

    It was a far-cry from my memories of Norwegian food: black rye bread, smelly goat's butter and balls of reconstituted fish with the texture of tofu (fiske-boller*), occasionally leavened with shrimps or mackerel from the fishing boats.

    ‘Golly,’ I said. ‘We won’t want lunch.’

    ‘You think not?’ said Frog, never known to be without an appetite, loading up his plate.

    We ate in the conservatory, pulling a curtain against the glare and watching the morning sun silvering a dead-calm sea. The small black heads of the early swimmers glided about like seals.

We had the day to ourselves as the rest of the family wasn’t arriving till the next day, the day of the party. I’d arranged that deliberately so that I’d have time to recover from the journey before the excitement (or perhaps I should say agitation) of meeting lots of people. I was terrified of coming down with a migraine and wasting the whole trip. For the same reason I was back on the beta-blockers, which on the first attempt I’d abandoned after a month because of the horrible side-effects. Those effects hadn’t kicked in to start with however and I was now on only a short course of a half-dose, so I was hoping for the best. Even so, I didn’t like taking them. I didn’t feel like myself.

    We decided, after our breakfast, to explore the environs, so took a path that led out of the hotel garden around the back of the beach. As we scrambled over rocks, up steep wooden steps and into a pinewood where we found wild raspberries, I was back in my childhood. Then however we’d gone everywhere in bare feet as they were the best way to negotiate the smooth granite surfaces. Now, I wore my stout walking sandals.

    The wood came out at the back of the village so we decided to look for a shop. I, as navigator, needed a map as the one I was using came from my mother’s house and was dated 1976. Frog had fallen in love with the pennant he’d seen flying from the hotel, a stylised triangular version of the Norwegian flag, and wanted one for his collection.

    We didn’t find a shop, or a church, or a village hall, or any sign of communal activity. We didn’t even see many people. Was that because this was a village of holiday homes? But if that was the case, where were the crowds, the ice-cream kiosks, the stalls selling buckets and spades, the cafés? It was all very strange.

    What we did find, up a turning into another wood, was a lake. It wasn’t stunningly beautiful, but it was dead quiet and deserted. There was a jetty from which I presumed people swam, but nothing would have induced me to swim there. The water was black and I hardly dared put my hand in it for fear of the creatures I might disturb. We sat on a stone picnic table and thought about fairy tales.

The lake, the jetty and the stone picnic table (and Frog)

But we did swim, that afternoon, in the sea. Remembering how hearty the Norwegians were, I hadn’t expected it to be warm, but it wasn’t bad at all, and it was free from the stinging jelly-fish (brenn-munnet) that had terrified me as a child. After the swim, Frog caught up on some sleep and I lay with my head in the shade on the lawn outside our room and tried to read. I wasn’t ready for the beach and all the bronzed, blond, beautiful Norwegians.

In the evening after supper, we took a footpath around the coast the other way and came to a small harbour filled with boats. Again, even though there were houses, we saw only a handful of people. We walked back at 10pm in daylight.

    We’d survived another day.

* I’m spelling Norwegian words phonetically because I learnt them not from reading but by ear, as a child, and I don’t know how to spell them properly.

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Giant spells and magic pills: writing blogs and novels, taking beta-blockers for migraines

Writing blog posts is like casting a small spell. I detail a development in my life and then publish it. The publishing makes the development real. It is recorded for posterity (whatever that is). I can’t back out or slide back. I have placed my foot on another rung of the ladder.

Writing novels is like casting a giant spell. You write what you want to happen, or even what is happening while you are writing (the real and the imaginary lives are hard to tell apart), but neither takes effect until the novel is published. The publishing is a vital part of the spell.

Unfortunately.

Because I’ve worked in publishing, I’m loath to entrust my baby to it. Is it ready for the commercial world? Is the commercial world ready for it?

But it’s got to be done.

And, yes, I’ve finished the latest draft of The Novel, and now I have to try and get it out there, somehow.

With the completion of The Novel I decided that I really had to do something about my migraines as, for the last few years, I’m been feeling ill most of the time. It’s become a vicious circle. I’m stressed because life is piling up while I’m too ill to do anything about it. I’m depressed because I have to back out of so much ‘in case it gives me a migraine’. I’m exhausted by the illness. And the stress, depression and exhaustion lead to the migraines. They are both the cause and the result.

I’ve had migraines for forty years and for forty years I’ve pursued the complementary way. I wanted to deal with the migraines myself. It didn’t seem right to take some magic pill. They started for a reason and I needed to find out what that was and mend it. Taking a magic pill, say the complementary therapists, only stores up trouble for the future.

Well, I’m 64. When does my future start? How much future do I have? I want to be well NOW. I need something to break me out of the vicious circle and show me a better way to live.

‘I want to be completely free of migraines,’ I said to Frog this morning. ‘I don’t ever want to have to be thinking “I can’t do that because I might get a migraine”.’

    ‘It’s like a parent,’ he said, ‘holding you back all the time.’

Which is a very interesting thought – since that’s what the novel’s about.

As I said, it’s hard to separate the real and the imaginary worlds.

So, 10 days ago I went to the doctor and she prescribed me beta-blockers. And I’ve sent the novel to a couple of publishers.

. . .