Decrepitude

The 1950s were not a comfortable time. Loopaper was brown and shiny like the stuff you wrap parcels with - only worse, central heating and duvets hadn’t yet reached the UK, domestic appliances - if you had them -  tended to go wrong at crucial moments, and cars didn’t start if the weather was at all cold or damp – which was most of the time. Both Frog and I were brought up in old houses with high ceilings, big rooms and draughty windows and doors, which only made things worse.

    Consequently, as soon as we were in a position to buy a house of our own, we went for something modern. And then, whenever we had any spare money, we ditched the old furniture we had acquired from friends, family and skips, and replaced it with shiny new stuff from Habitat and later Ikea. Antique shops with their smell of mould gave us the horrors: they were all too reminiscent of the pain of our youth.
     A couple of years ago however we discovered a programme on Quest TV called ‘Salvage Hunters’. It is fronted by a real person, not a presenter – the delightful Drew Pritchard. Drew ‘scours the country’ (as the intro says) – junkyards, the back rooms of statelies and museums, defunct circuses and theatres, factories, farms, schools - for antique items to sell from his warehouse in North Wales and on the internet. But not just any antiques. On Wednesday’s programme for instance he bought sacks of hundred-year-old twine. He buys ancient metal cupboards with the paint peeling off, tumbledown sheds, manky wooden tables covered in stains, rusty garden furniture. And then he leaves them just as they are. (He calls it ‘patina’.) And people snap them up.

    I know, I know. We’re a bit out of date aren’t we. Decrepitude isn't really that weird any more. But it is to Frog and me. But slowly, under the influence of Drew, we too are beginning to see its value: it’s fun, it’s quirky, and it’s more natural than brand spanking new.
    What's more, I've recently inherited a couple of pieces of antique furniture from my mother and immediately they arrived the house looked more mellow, more comfortable even.
    Which is why, when we started recently to research making over our forty-year-old bathroom, the last thing we wanted was modern, white and square. We wanted a cave, we decided, inspired by the new bathroom of my brother J. Then when we found some pebbled flooring we decided ‘underwater’ was our theme. Then we found a mirror made from a porthole. And it all came together.

    We are going to have a shipwreck cave - a cave furnished with items apparently from a shipwreck. And our first job is to head to the beach and find some driftwood – and perhaps some other Drew-like items that can be put to good use.

A tumbledown shed which I've passed almost every day for the last thirty years on my dogwalks but didn't really see until yesterday.

As I head for my mid-sixties, I can only hope that the current fashion for decrepitude applies to humans as well.

Dreamy woods and exploding skulls

Writing for me is bipolar. I have to wind myself up so that the ideas flow and then, once they do, they flow faster and faster until I make myself ill and come back down to earth with a horrible thud. The illness in my case is migraine.

It’s as if I’m fighting myself. Energy rises and then gets stuck in my right temple where it causes pain and nausea. Something is stopping me letting it flow safely on, upwards and out. I fear what all that energy will do when it reaches the top. Will it take me over? Will I go mad? Will I fall apart?

It’s the same fear that stopped me ever taking acid (LSD), even though when I was in my early twenties lots of my friends were taking it and living to tell the tale. I had too many dark corners in my psyche, too many monsters.

And it’s the same fear that stopped me ever responding properly to the hypnotherapy I tried in my late thirties. (Long story.)

Last week however, as I sat under an oak tree having signed off from the blog for a few days and with the migraine that had been dragging me down for days threatening to blow a hole in my skull, I thought bugger it. What could be worse than this?

I didn’t care any more. I’d spent the last forty years avoiding things because they ‘gave me migraines’. What if I stopped doing that and pushed myself over the edge instead? So what if my skull exploded? It was exploding anyway. So what if I went mad? I wasn't exactly sane now.

I did everything I could think of to disperse the blockage. I visualised the pain as a blood clot and massaged it with love so that it could relax. I did a chakra meditation: I imagined the energy rising smoothly, flowing out of my crown, and then falling back down like silver rain.  I sent my intention to the universe.

     

That evening my migraine vanished.

 

A couple of days ago, because I was bookless, I picked up my copy of The Magician’s Nephew, the first in C S Lewis’s Narnia series, to reread. I couldn’t finish it. It’s not one of my favourites (not like Prince Caspian  or The Silver Chair or of course The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) but one bit intrigued me. The two children are transported by magic rings to a wood:

    It was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine. There were no birds, no insects, no animals, and no wind. You could almost feel the trees growing.

    Digory wanted to stay but Polly disagreed:

    ‘This place is too quiet. It’s so – so dreamy. You’re almost asleep. If we once give in to it we shall just lie down and drowse for ever, and ever.’

    That’s exactly how I feel when I’m not writing, when I’m avoiding life because of my migraines, when I'm on my relaxing walks with the dog. It’s pleasant, it’s peaceful, it’s safe. But you can't stay there.

The dreamy wood Ellie and I went to this morning

 So here goes. I'm picking up the magic ring. I'm heading back to the real world. Wish me luck.

Cobwebby days

Some days cobwebs are everywhere. They’re probably everywhere all the time but it’s a heavy dew that's showing them up. Monday was one such day. Here is a selection of what I saw.

It was the multiple guy-ropes (if you can see them in this picture) that intrigued me about this one

This complex structure is similar to an even bigger one that a certain butterfly or moth makes for its caterpillars, so whether it's a spider's web or not I don't know

This one caught my eye because it was balanced so precariously between two dead cow-parsley stalks. (Spot the dog . . . )

The next three pictures were taken one January (2013) and included in this blog at the time. I think they're worth repeating.

I’m afraid I’ve been bombarding you with posts recently. I shall try and take a break – at least for a few days.