From the window. 7.30 am

Silence. Nothing moves. A thin layer of frost covers the gardens, rigid washing on the line, the sky the palest of ice-blues.

Suddenly, shockingly, a continuous cloud of steam escapes from a house where the gas boiler has been switched on.  Warmth and moisture, free and unchallenged, ever-mutating, meet a frozen world.

Someone else is awake. A diffuse yet clear and strong white light from the east.  Sun up. 

Friday

The honour crimes campaigner Jasvinder Sanghera has just been talking on Desert Island Discs about her life and her relationship with/estrangement from her family.  Extraordinary and moving, and I was caught up in her story of how fear and inflexibility can close hearts and what grace and forgiveness entail. Both, in their way, equally terrifying. She chose a couple of memorable tracks, too.  Losing My Religion by  REM and Moonshadow by Cat Stevens.  Blasts from the past.

****

A chill wind still blows from the east, cutting through however many layers of clothing one happens to be wearing when venturing outside.  The birds seek shelter in the evergreen bush in the garden, only emerging for food when they must. Soup simmers in the stockpot in the kitchen and I have been comfortable in the armchair listening to the radio and admiring this week's daffodils in their vase.  After emotional storms yesterday, anxiety has retreated to low-tide level.  But it is lapping away on the horizon, too distant for me to hear this morning but I know it is there.  Ebb and flow. 

Lungwort

 noun

1a bristly herbaceous European plant of the borage family, typically having white-spotted leaves and pink flowers which turn blue as they age.

[so named because the leaves were said to have the appearance of a diseased lung]

Oxford Dictionary

 

In the garden the lungwort is flowering under stress. It has been ambushed by the weather, having been lulled into a false sense of optimism by the few relatively warm days we experienced earlier in the month.  I'm fond of it. I was given a couple of plants about five years ago and they've spread like wildfire.  With its mottled leaves and small, delicate heads of two-tone flowers it makes for great ground cover, plus it's hardy and resilient with a long flowering season.

I've some fellow feeling with the lungwort. It's been a rough couple of days spent folded up in the armchair with gut and back pain, wrapped in a duvet and drinking lots of water and hot ginger tea.  According to the naturopath the root cause of all this is dybiosis (the GP simply doled out repeat prescriptions for industrial strength antacids).  It will take time and persistence to crack.   I was in a bad way - worse than I realised at the time - in January when I started the treatment.  There has been improvement but flare-ups happen, and may well always do so to a degree.  Persistence is all.

****

At almost a month in I'm glad to be blogging again. I'm doing it almost entirely for myself, which for me is the only genuine motivation, though I'm always delighted and appreciative when old and new commenters drop by. But if one person reads what I have written, that's enough; in the real world I'm not one for crowds.   It's becoming a lifeline, the writing and the photography, that I'm grabbing onto to haul myself back to what passes for a more normal existence. No, I don't have exciting or deep things to write about but that's not the point.  The point is that I'm doing it.  Practice.  Like the Buddhists. The way I was put to the piano as a child morning and evening to practise my scales. 

Most importantly of all, it's a way of stepping into the current of life, of sticking two fingers up to pain and weakness and all that goes with it.   Each post, each photograph taken, builds momentum. 

Colour and Warmth

On the third day of spring, when the sky is leaden and the slushy overnight snow is melting slowly and grudgingly and we are told by the news bulletins to take care because it will all freeze tonight and the roads will be treacherous and a wicked easterly wind straight from the Urals is forecast and power supplies may have to be rationed if this weather continues, I am hunting around for colour and warmth.

Candles help.  So do red peppers.

Contrast

 


Cardiff 2008.  The nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.

A Victorian port, Cardiff, built on the coal from the valleys.  My grandfather was as Welsh as they come, born and bred here in the 1870s (this makes me feel really, really old), my grandmother an incomer from Devon, orphaned at age seven when she was packed off across the Bristol Channel to live with an aunt and uncle in the city.   Poor little mite.  She eventually became a teacher, met my grandfather and married him.

He was born into a large, bilingual working-class family, Welsh and English, but the Victorian education system was definitely not inclined to pander to wishy-washy notions of cultural identity.  English was the language of progress, of advancement and enlightenment.  Accordingly the children were forbidden to speak Welsh in school and punished if they did so, and eventually English took over their lives completely and, yes, he did indeed advance, got a good job and after the First World War moved his family to London.  Yet he returned to his origins, to Cardiff, with his second wife when he retired.  In his eighties he did try to relearn his lost mother tongue.  Too late, perhaps, he couldn't do it.

As I recall he disapproved of much of the modern world - pop music, football players - but he'd be surprised and delighted at how much of the Welsh language there is around the place in 2013. 

Waiting

The back is a bit stronger; the camera has been dusted off; the new PC/printer installed, and there's been a totally satisfying decluttering of my little office. I'm doing more. 

But decades of comfort eating and stress have caught up with me of late, brought to a head by the last three years of opiate painkillers for the back and glucose energy drinks.  Plus a couple of courses of antibiotics for good measure.  Grappling with some horribly tenacious digestive issues and a very inflamed and temperamental gut which triggers migraine-like headaches.  (If you're reading this and you're prone to both stress and overdoing the sugar, don't be like me and think it won't catch up with you ).  The positive news: I've been able to stop the painkillers and hospital tests show nothing dramatically nasty in the stomach.  So for now I'm  living on good quality protein, home made chicken bone broth as recommended by the naturopath I'm seeing, and lots of vegetables, probably the healthiest diet I've been on since mother's milk.   And vitamin supplements plus a probiotic at night. No sugar. No yeast.  No grain.

There has been improvement. But it's taking a long time.  Some days (quite a few actually) are distinctly yukky.

***

Three weeks of Mercury retrograde finishes this coming Sunday, so maybe more of a sense of movement.   Looking forward to spring. 

Flowers. Daffodils - pale cream this week.   They come to my door each Saturday during the season with the online groceries.  Last week's were an intense egg-yolk yellow, standing straight and resolute in their blue vase.

   
Taken a few years ago, this one.  National Museum of Wales coffee shop, Cardiff.

Anniversary

 It was the speed and suddenness of the whole thing.

One year ago today, a Friday just before midday, he was sleeping.  He suddenly awoke and went straight into his first ever full-blown seizure, flailing on the floor, rigid, pupils black and unseeing, his body jerked this way and that by an invisible force.  It probably only lasted a minute or two but seemed to go on for hours.  He came to eventually in his own urine, disoriented and dazed.  It took him time to be able to stand.

I knew there and then what I had to do.  He was eighteen years old with a history of failing kidneys and the resulting toxins had built up in his brain. The prognosis was that there would be more seizures and a general deterioration. I phoned the vet and asked for a home visit.

The car pulled up at around 2.30pm. A knock on the door. The veterinary nurse was with him.

They did it so well.  They both sat on the rug in the centre of the lounge  and arranged a few towels around them.  The cat, ever curious, wandered over unsteadily to investigate.  The nurse stroked him, talked softly and tickled him under his chin.  He rolled over onto his side on one of the towels in ecstasy, eyes closed, purring.  The vet prepared the hypodermic and very gently inserted it into his belly.  No need to restrain him in any way. He didn't notice the needle going in, his chin was still being tickled, his paws were kneading the nurse's uniform.   Then, peacefully, he drifted into sleep, still purring.  After two or three minutes the vet checked his heart with the stethescope. 

A perfect end.  And that was it.   I thanked them both as well as I could.  Mainly just by repeating thank you, thank you.

If a cat could ever be said to have good manners, he did.  Affectionate, quirky, self-contained, never pushy, a friend for all of the fifteen years we lived alongside one another.  And, as a bonus, he was very beautiful. 

I have his ashes still, which I will scatter in the river when I am able to walk there. Occasionally as I go around the house I talk out loud to him.  It's a happy thing to do, he's part of the fabric of this place and of my life and his presence still lingers.

May Blossom

  

 A cup and saucer, a sugar bowl and a small milk jug, all decorated with a blue and white floral pattern.  Underneath the saucer is the potter's mark, Leighton Pottery, and the pattern name, May Blossom.

My mother kept them in her special cupboard for tableware that was brought out for visitors but she never used these, probably because there was only one cup and saucer.  I've always had a weakness for florals and for blue and white cups and mugs, so I keep them on a shelf in the kitchen where I can see them every day.

A rummage around Google informs me that Leighton Pottery was in existence from 1940 to the mid-1950s, that the May Blossom series was made by the process of transferware.  I'm guessing they might have been a wedding present.  My parents didn't throw them out but they didn't cherish them.  I do.

I'm adding May Blossom crockery to the list of Things I Love.  This list, and its companion, Things I Want to Do are the rough drafts of the directions I want to take when I'm stronger. A  form of magic perhaps, to conjure up a bright future.

Not Quite Motionless

Contary to my worries, clever Blogger, new format and all, has somehow followed me over to my just-delivered new PC without my needing to remember the login details.  Good.  

Cold afternoon. A uniformly grey sky, no wind.   Motionless backgarden, washing hanging limply and dispiritedly on the rotary close drier.  Even the birds have been rendered mute.  When I was really ill I didn't have the energy to be anything other than more or less motionless myself but now that just a hint of strength is returning, like Noah's dove with the olive leaf, I can't settle.  I read for ten minutes, then back to the TV.  Then I come upstairs to the computer.  Not yet strong enough to clean house or go out and about or lead anything like a normal life, so writing seems like a good compromise.

I don't know if anyone is out there after all this time.  There is a whole list of bloggers from years ago that I still follow on my feeds and whose posts still speak to me, but like so many other areas of my life, my online world is one that will need some slow and steady rebuilding.  I'd like to get into the habit of just showing up here regularly and writing even if, on the surface, I don't have much to write about.  At least for now.