Dreamtime

I wake as it gets light, feeling refreshed and relaxed. I have nothing planned for today, nothing I have to do. I didn’t have to lie awake in the night making lists. I don’t have to leap out of bed, already worried about how I’m going to fit everything in. Daytime doesn't stamp on Dreamtime and tell it it's worthless. Instead, it wraps itself around Dreamtime, keeping Dreamtime’s riches safe.
    I put on my fluffy pink dressing-gown and go down to the kitchen, Dreamtime's secret warmth inside me. Something good is going to happen today but I can’t remember what it is.

    Frog and I have breakfast in bed as usual but today we take our time, chatting about Life past, present and future.

    Ellie is now perfectly trained. She doesn’t whine at the bottom of the stairs, impatient to be off out, expecting me to entertain her every moment of the day. She doesn’t chase sheep either or jump up at people and cover them in muddy paw prints. I can walk where I like and meditate while I walk and think about my writing rather than about her and the mischief she might be up to.

    The wind is westerly today so I don’t hear or smell the motorway. Actually, now I come to think of it, the motor car is defunct. Vanished. Gone to meet its maker in the sky. Silence reigns and the air smells sweet.

    Much of the countryside has reverted to nature and Ellie and I ramble freely through woods, beside streams, along overgrown hedgerows, across heaths and moorland, past ruined cottages covered in ivy. We meet plenty of animals but none of the human variety.

    My mind takes off, a hot-air balloon released from its moorings, and words start to clatter into it like telex messages. I get out my notebook and pencil and write them down as I walk. I don’t judge them and I don’t panic when they stop. I know that I only have to take a few more steps and the next lot will be ready.

   Because I myself am creating, I feel part of the creativity all around. The Great Spirit is speaking to us all. I can hear it in the birdsong, see it in the wind that moves the grass. I am not an alien any longer, an interloper who can only destroy. I belong. I am good.

    When I get home it is dusk. Frog has lit a fire in the sitting-room. We sit beside it and watch the sun setting behind the hill. We know that we will live forever.



Me (right) and two friends, all dressed up.
(Thanks to Chris for unearthing the picture.)



My big fat Greek cardigan

This post is for Nina (http://www.ninafenner.blogspot.com/ ) – and of course for anyone else interested in the minutiae of customising clothes.

    About fifteen years ago while on holiday in Greece I bought a cardigan, hand knitted in wool from Greek mountain sheep with wooden – olive wood? – buttons.

I loved its colours – bright purple with emerald green – but not its shape. It stopped in tight ribbing just below stomach and bum, and made me look as if I was about to give birth. Never mind. I could probably alter it.

    If I’d been my sister or my mother I would have unpicked the bottom and reknitted it but knitting is not my forté and I didn’t have the confidence. I could see at best an awful ridge where I’d tried to pick up the stitches or at worst the entire garment unravelling. Over the next few years I tried various other solutions, like stretching the ribbing or knitting an insert for the sides, but nothing worked. I was going to have to be brave.

    All the way round the cardigan above the ribbing I sewed a piece of tape, and above that I sewed another piece. I then cut between the tapes all the way round. Phew. The ribbing was off.

    I then folded up the bottom of the cardigan, using the tape to make a neat(ish) hem, and tried the cardigan on. Wonderful. It fitted much better.

It was still lacking around the neck area however. I like interest in the neck area. It disguises the fact I have no bust. And I still had a long strip of ribbing that I didn’t want to waste. Brainwave. I would use the ribbing to make a collar.

    I did, and it worked. The tape already along one edge of the ribbing disguised the join. I used the whole length of ribbing and it fitted around the neck perfectly so you can see how tight it was around the hips.

I wore the cardigan every day during the cold spells of the last two winters. As well as being wonderfully warm and cheering, it felt just right, like mine now, and every time I put it on I admired my handiwork.

Afraid I'm not going to pose with the cardigan on.
I haven't got the hang of self-portraiture yet and my hair needs washing.

   

Sorry, I’m sounding smug. Perhaps I’d better tell you about the chest I have of sewing that didn’t work. But at least the material can be cannibalised and used to adapt other garments.

Mr and Mrs Duck

In my neighbour's wild garden this morning: the ducks who have made their home there.

They didn't want to be photographed and kept hiding round the other side of the pond's island then peeping round the corner to see if I was still there. I still was and eventually they got used to me.

Significant moments

Karma is a funny thing.

    Forty (blimey) years ago I was in my first year at Exeter university and struggling. I had spent much of my adolescence in my bedroom filling out my chart of food-and-drink-consumed, in the grip of anorexia. I was not equipped for being thrown in with several thousand of my contemporaries.

    Now my lovely niece, who spent much of her adolescence languishing at home with ME, is going through the same. And not only is she studying at Exeter, she is in the same hall of residence that I was (and the chairs in the television room haven’t changed).

    These however are kinder times. She has changed her course, she may change universities, and her family are making frequent visits to keep her spirits up. With any luck the next few years won’t degenerate for her into the disaster that they did for me.

    Yesterday my niece and I went for a walk by the sea. She borrowed my camera to take photographs. Actually, as I’ve explained before, it isn’t my camera. It was chucked out by my brother – my niece’s father – because it didn’t work, and repaired by Frog. The photograph above is one of hers.

    Trish Currie in her blog ‘What’s cooking?’ (http://www.trishcookingcurrie.blogspot.com/) writes about significant moments, the moments of each day that you remember and which in her case she turns into her exquisite almost-daily posts.

    I have many lovely memories from yesterday but one stands out from the others. Ellie playing in the waves with her new friend, a chocolate spaniel called Indie. Me talking to Indie’s ‘owners’. And my niece smiling in the sunlight.

Here goes

‘You try too hard,’ said my hairdresser Michelle as she worked something called ‘craft clay’ into my hair and mussed it all up.

    She was talking about my hair, but I haven’t been able to get her words out of my head.

    I’m terrified of doing anything to The Novel (always in capitals, note) in case nothing comes to mind. In case I can’t do it. I try to impose words on to the page. I don’t wait for them to come. I try too blxxdy hard.

    The paralysis has even extended to The Blog (as you may have noticed) – something which came so easily to start with.

    Yesterday I had my once-every-three-weeks collapse in bed – not quite a migraine this time – nausea and headache, yes, but not quite the black pall of all-over wretchedness that signals migraine – so today I feel good, back in touch with myself, liberated from the ‘to do’ list. I spent a day in bed and the world didn’t collapse. Maybe I could do more just for myself.

    Writing – when it works – gives me the same feeling. So here goes. Blog post first (good or bad) and then Novel.