Love is . . .

When I first met Frog thirty-five and a half years ago I’d renounced deep human relationships, especially those with the opposite sex. They were too complicated, too painful. My life had fallen apart because of them – or perhaps because of one in particular – and I was concentrating on putting it back together again. I wanted to get my degree and then a proper job, and live a sensible, ordered life. Meeting Frog put paid to all those plans, much to my chagrin, and I gave him a year.

    Ellie is unlike any dog we’ve had before. She doesn’t lie at my feet in a companionable doze after our walk together so that I can get on with some writing. She flops around my work-room sighing, making it perfectly obvious she’s bored, or lies up against the wheels of my chair so that I can’t move for fear of running over her, making as much of a nuisance of herself as possible so that I have to notice her. If down in the kitchen/conservatory she whines for me to join her or barks loudly out of the window at anything that moves (insects, thistledown, birds, aeroplanes, rabbits, the horses in the field opposite, cars in the lane, clouds). She won’t go out in the garden without me – not because she’s frightened but because it’s boring on her own.

    The only way to get her to relax is to shut her in her crate in the alcove under the dresser – if necessary with a towel over the front so that she’s in the dark. I feel cruel doing that for long periods so, when Ellie is at home and I want to write, my day is a constant battle. I am up and down every hour or so, walking her, taking her for trips in the car to the post office and the farm shop, taking strolls round the garden with her, playing catch-the-bouncing-ball or tug-of-war.

    Recently I’ve been leaving her with the dogminder two days a week instead of her usual one in order to have some peaceful time on my own and really get into my writing. Unfortunately The Novel (and the blog, as you may have noticed) began to gutter and die. Last Sunday I had one of the worst migraines I’ve had for a long time and on Wednesday when Ellie went to the dogminder I missed her.

    Yesterday, when Ellie was at home, I planned a day of writing but I didn’t hold out high hopes. We went through our usual restless rigmarole but because I was still feeling the effects of the migraine I wasn’t strong enough to kick against it. And suddenly I found that The Novel was taking off again. Rather than interfering, the breaks were doing good.

    This morning at breakfast I was trying to explain this to Frog.

    ‘She keeps me human,’ I said. ‘She makes me laugh and she makes me cross.’

    ‘When I’m not around to do the job you mean,’ he said.

    How I laughed.

    Love’s never how you expect, is it.

Ellie as a puppy, two and a half years ago (and Frog, of course)

Spring

What can you say about spring – about the light, the sudden warmth of the sun, the breakfast birdsong, the uncomfortable stirrings that make you want to do more with your life than eat, the fact that the ground no longer feels like a sponge and the mud doesn’t reach to the top of your wellies – that hasn’t all been said before? So perhaps I won’t say anything and simply show you these pictures of the first frogspawn that I spotted in the ditch up the lane about ten minutes ago.

Tree skeletons

Several shades of yellow




Fields and trees near home, waiting for spring to green them up

 


Ivy in a hedge. Are these flower buds or immature fruit? Does anyone know?

Gorse flowers in the snow a few weeks ago





 

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.