Writing binges

Goodreads is a social networking site where people share opinions about books. At least, I think that’s what it is. I find it very confusing. I’ve joined in order to support Patrick Newman (mentioned in a post a few weeks ago in connection with his new book Tracking the Weretiger). Pat has been assiduous in posting book reviews and one which caught my eye was about Buzz Aldrin’s Magnificent Desolation, in no small part because of its magnificent title. I found it in the library and am reading it at the moment.

    I’d heard about the trouble astronauts have adjusting to life back on Earth and I’d always thought that was because they’d had such a profound spiritual experience while in space that normal existence paled by comparison. For Buzz, it wasn’t quite like that.

    The title is his description of both the moon and his reaction on returning. Having achieved in his thirties something as momentous as walking on the moon, something for which he’d been training all his life, he didn’t know what to do next. He began to suffer from depression and he began to drink.

    His description of the moon voyage is technical rather than emotional. As he says, they were trained to get the job done, not have feelings about it. (And with typical modesty he suggests that a poet, musician or journalist should go to the moon so that they can describe it properly for the world.) But it’s interesting nonetheless because of the detail – about the suits, the food, the metallic smell of moon dust, the fact that you can't stop dead when walking on the moon, the dicey machinery. (He had to replace a broken switch with a biro in order to take off from the moon.)

    What’s really struck me about his experiences however (and I’m only halfway through the book) is how secret he felt he had to keep his illness and how, once he did come clean and ask for help, his career in the Air Force was finished.

    Aren’t we all sick, to a greater or lesser degree? Health is a process, a process of experimentation and of adjustment to changing circumstances. You can always have more. And I think it was Jung who said that his patients never actually recovered. They just learnt to live with their condition and moved on.

    This morning at breakfast, I was trying to explain to Frog my current mental battles. (Breakfast is a good time to catch him. He’s half asleep and not distracted by all the things that usually distract him, like music, radio, practical tasks, television, books.) I was talking about the way I go into inspiration overload, how I seem to have to work myself into a frenzy in order to write, about how unpleasant that is, and about how unpleasant the comedown is (exhaustion, depression, migraine).

    ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Writing binges.’

    Wow, I thought. He was listening, and he’s encapsulated in two words everything I was trying to say. And, having been in the doldrums since Wednesday (‘I'm bereft of inspiration. I shall never write again’), I thought ‘blog post’.

    Whenever we have a strong wind our broadband disconnects. I reconnect it by clicking on a button labelled ‘connect’ on my computer. I find that incomprehensible. How can something physical – the effect of wind – be remedied by something virtual? Don’t I have to climb on to the roof and fiddle with wires?

    As I reconnected this morning, I thought - if only I could do the same with my brain. Why can’t I switch on the inspiration when I want to write and switch it off when I want to relax? Why does it all have to be so painful?

    Perhaps it doesn't. It's not as if I've been to the moon or anything.

Two more snowy pictures



I like this picture because of the view. We're on the hill behind the house and the grey smudge on the left-hand horizon is Dartmoor

 


'I can roll in this stuff AND make tunnels in it with my nose. It's SO exciting.'

And now I really will stop (unless we have any more snow). As you might be able to tell, I like the stuff too.


Garden tour

Inspired by the lovely Autumn Cottage Diarist blog and in imitation of the Ightham Mote Cobnuts Project blog which cleverly interweaves text and pictures, I thought I'd give you a tour of our garden. I should warn you however that it is nothing like the beautiful and beautifully tended plot at Autumn Cottage. (Links to both blogs in panel, right.)

I am ambivalent about flower gardening. I like my nature wild so I baulk at introducing non-native plants and then spending hours tending them. Nor do I like uprooting plants in the name of weeding. Frog's good at destructive gardening, preferably with a machine - hedgetrimming, mowing and chainsawing, but not keen on the detailed stuff. So our flowerbeds are a compromise, to say the least.

Note the birdfeeder in this bed, which was the stand for the For Sale sign outside our house when we bought it thirty-three years ago, never collected by the estate agents so turned upside down by Frog and put to good use.











My pride and joy are my raised vegetable beds, which I dug out myself from the steep slope that is our garden about five years ago (and then spent a month in agony lying on my front).

The beds vary in size because of the shape of the space but - in case you're interested - I have discovered that the ideal width is 2 1/2 to 3 feet. (Any wider and you can't reach the middle. Any narrower and you can't get much in.)

In the background of this picture (above right) you might see some scrap metal and a strange boat-shaped object lying in the hedge. These are variously an aerial, the rusting frame of a kit car and the base of a kit car. As I say, Frog always has lots of projects on the go . . .

You might also note the upward extension on the beds. Frog did this for me this autumn as rabbit-proofing (rabbits can't jump higher than about 18 inches I have discovered) and because the beds were starting to overflow.
And if you want an efficient, helpful and reasonably priced timber merchant in Mid Devon, I can thoroughly recommend Pennymoor Timber.
In the background of these pictures (left and above right) you can just see the mesh protecting my purple sprouting broccoli from pigeons and butterflies/caterpillars. Unfortunately when the snow landed on it last Friday the plants were completely flattened. I brushed all the snow off and I think they'll recover.

The beds were starting to overflow because, when I have time and when I want some strenuous exercise, I load them with compost and horse manure.

Both my compost bins and my horse-manure source (the stables next door) are at the bottom of hills - which means that full wheelbarrows have to be pushed uphill. Well, it's as good a way of working off the Christmas surplus as any.

In the picture on the right you might notice the fencing laid across the base of the hedge. This is Frog's attempt to stop the dog excavating rabbit holes and then coming home plastered in mud. Luckily the dog has found a way to climb on to the hedge and approach the rabbit holes from above. (I say 'luckily' because, if Dog is happy and busy, then so am I.)

Because our plot used to be an orchard, we are blessed with proper Devon hedge on all sides. Some of this is made up of elm which, as I'm sure you know, dies when it gets to a certain age. If you cut down the dead trees, the bases do sprout again, but we like to leave some of them for the woodpeckers.

Here (right) is some of Frog's scaffolding put to good use keeping pots out of the way of the rabbits.

(Plus a trellis cobbled together from some of what Frog calls 'racking'. It was being thrown out at one of the places where he works so perhaps I'd better not say too much about it. I tie my tomatoes to it in the summer.)

(Also some gutttering waiting to go up. Another project.)

This table is made of something called Plaswood which is recycled plastic. It has been sitting outside all year round for about ten years and is none the worse for wear. It is comfortable to sit on, being warm and non-splintery. And it also makes a good cutting surface when I want to remove roots etc from harvested vegetables.
Leaning against the table you might notice another piece of metal. This is part of a second-hand anemometer (wind-speed thingy) which Frog wants to get working again and put up. (Another project.)

And I think I'd better stop there before you fall off your seat with boredom.

Snow dog



Wild with excitement at this strange white stuff

Drifting snow and dog-tail



Spot the dog

Beams and motes

Being half-Norwegian my mother was ahead of her time with regard to health in so far as the British were concerned. We were pushed outside at every opportunity, even when in our prams. So much so that one of my sisters, with her tan, was taken for an Asian baby. The mainstays of our diet were potato soup, stewed apple and grated raw vegetables. She even managed to persuade my brothers’ prep school to introduce salad into their meals.

    In my teens and early twenties I suffered from anorexia and then compulsive eating. One of the ways I managed to cure myself was by concentrating on the quality of what I ate rather than the quantity. That led to an interest in complementary health and eventually I knew so much about the subject that I was paid to write about it – for magazines, encyclopaedias and partworks (the book/magazine hybrid that you buy in instalments).

    As a hangover from my eating disorder days however I can’t eat chocolate sensibly. I either have lots or I have none at all. I put up with this, allowing myself the occasional binge, as beating oneself up is part of the problem, and not beating oneself up part of the cure.

    On Monday I decided that, since I hadn’t had any chocolate since Christmas, it was time for a binge. I went down to the village shop and bought a mars bar, a mint aero, a small Cadbury’s milk chocolate and a small packet of chocolate raisins. (Posh chocolate is no good for binges. It has to be bog-standard stuff.) Back home I ate them all at once. I felt fine. After supper, I decided that I was still in binge mode, so I had four pieces of ryvita, butter and cheese, which I topped off with a handful of walnuts.

    During the night, my stomach – used to a near-vegan diet – started to complain. I felt violently sick and spent several hours hanging over the red-for-danger bowl that we keep for such purposes.

    The next morning as Frog and I ate our usual breakfast in bed we heard a news item (about a new-style Coca-Cola advertisement) which mentioned that two in three American adults are obese and one in three American children. I began to expound my theory about junk food, that because it lacks the necessary nutrients it doesn’t satisfy. Your body is looking for the vitamins, minerals and so on that it wants and so prompts you to keep eating. ‘A healthy diet is so important,’ I said.

    The room fell silent.

    ‘Ah,’ I said after a few minutes. ‘I’m a fine one to talk.’

    Luckily, Frog laughed otherwise I might have bopped him one.

A couple of the books to which I have contributed