Heatwave

The humidity and heat - 28 degrees and rising - bring with them a fretful quiet, a slowing of activity. Of necessity. Impossible to think clearly and quickly, to move at a pace beyond minimal. My office is up four flights of stairs, on the top floor of a converted 18th century townhouse. No airconditioning. The south facing sash window is jammed wide open in the vain hope of capturing a breeze, the sunblinds drawn. As an emergency measure we set up an electric fan on a folding chair between our two desks, taking care as we come and go not to trip over the cable. In spite of natural inclinations the work rate slows and I put off anything beyond the basics, the simple. My margins are very thin in high temperatures. The fan's turbulent air blows papers off the desk and dries the eyes.

My office colleague is American, born in the desert lands of the South-West. She loves this weather, flourishes in the heat, goes to the sauna regularly in winter for physical and emotional health. We manage our thermostatic differences and make allowances for each other - I dress in layers for flexible temperature control, she brings extra woollens. I sweat occasionally for her, she shivers from time to time to keep me happy.

****

A first appointment with a local shiatsu practitioner this afternoon in the ongoing quest for spasm-free muscles. Shiatsu worked miracles for my lower back in 1993. The first session was a Wednesday evening and I had to take the rest of the week off work, nose and eyes were running so much afterwards. A continuous stream. Not a cold, or flu. Detox.

Later in the year, in the October, a major life change occurred for which I am thankful to this day. I still believe an apparently unrelated series of events including the fact that I am alive now - a tad melodramatic but possibly true - were in some way triggered in a treatment room in a basement flat in North London that evening in May sixteen years ago.

In my book, everything is connected and in ways we can't begin to imagine.

Mouse II

An upsetting Friday at the now very part-time and occasional job. The backwash turned yesterday into something of a convalescence. Rest, light housework, repotting plants. Don't think. Follow a gentle routine. Eat properly. Don't think. Drink water. Let it go. Don't think.

Today, feeling stronger, I summoned up the courage to plug in the vertical mouse.

It works. A bit hypersensitive compared with my old mouse, but we'll get used to each other. Ugly and cumbersome, yes, but who cares. As we all know by now, looks aren't everything.

Mouse control is mainly via the hand and fingers. No twisting of the arm. My biceps brachii are cautiously optimistic. Not to mention the acromioclavicular joint and associated muscles and ligaments.

Better days.

And Then

A farewell speech, a homemade cake, a present. Embarrassed shuffling of feet. Strange, as I will in fact be back working there for a few days towards the end of January, and periodically again after that. And I meet a former colleague for lunch next week and another at yoga class on Tuesdays. Nonetheless it is the closing of a chapter. And a stepping into a void.

I'm lucky. Small pensions kick in over the coming months which will pay just a few of the bills. I have skills, including massage - ostensibly the latter is the reason for leaving a nearly full-time desk job. Pass out cards. Offer tasters. Get a massage or two myself. Do yoga. Speak to people. Prepare the paperwork. More than anything else, trust. Listen for the nudges that indicate a way forward, even if, especially if, it is in a direction I don't expect. Be content to breathe and walk and garden until then. I can temp while I wait.

What of the waiting times? And the uncertainty? That's where life is lived, not in the illusion of plans and goals. More of a challenge when you live alone and there is no-one to chivvy you, and when you tend towards worry.

I want to cultivate both the garden and my friendships.I started working almost immediately when I moved here and have put little effort into finding and nurturing friendships, a community, a tribe. Like work, this takes work.

I need, really need to read more. Much more.

Don't know where the blog and blogging fit into all this, if at all. On verra bien..

Create. Create. Create. Anything.

****

This morning, while I typed, the sky caught fire. The frost has vanished and a west wind is blowing. Beneath the horizon, invisible, a full moon.

Wall

Two people in the office, one of whom is me. There should be eight. Staff shortages. Illness. Holidays. The phones don’t stop. Clients arrive at the wrong times for their appointments. Apart from one five minute meltdown in private, automatic pilot takes over. Long hours. Uber-stressed. Dreaming of handing in my notice and living in penury on porridge and baked beans. I feel diminished, powerless, when life shrivels down to just one thing. Work.

And yet. I like to be working for the common good, and this organisation definitely is. To be part of a close team. To have structure. They are a democratic and friendly bunch, no heirarchies. My request for a three day week is, allegedly, on the cards for next spring. It would be sensible to wait and see.


****


Impossible to even think of anything except work, never mind write it down. Zhoen comes to the rescue with a satisfyingly minimalistic meme.

The sixth photograph from the sixth folder.

A wall. Hmmm.

But what a wall, made of downland flint, inseparable from chalk and created over vast stretches of time on the ocean bed. Flint placed to show the patterning to its best advantage, small pieces of red tile as contrast, set in mortar like so many jewels in velvet.

Taken near Chichester Harbour. Early 2006. A lifetime ago. I’d recently acquired the digital camera .....

If the meme appeals, just run with it.

Sunday

Houseplants watered.

****

Something Understood is a modest radio gem from the BBC.
Gentle, contemplative, conducive to reflection.

The frustration is in the timing, as the 30 minute programme goes out on Sundays at 6.00am or 11.30pm. I’m either half awake or asleep, so I miss the presenter - Mark Tully, always worth hearing - as he introduces words and music, from all faiths and none, on life, hope, despair, prayer. And so on. The big stuff.

The good news is that the Beeb now has an iPlayer facility, so I can sleep in and catch the programme over the first coffee of the day. Just click on the link above.

This week’s subject: Happiness. Contributions from Sophocles, a Tibetan singer, an Islamic scholar, Tracy Chapman. Several modern compositions, including an achingly beautiful setting of the Beatitudes from the Taize Community. An interview with the Abbot of Worth Abbey on the monastic tradition, boredom and the difference between the robustness of the intention to do good and the fragility of feeling good. Readings.

And a musical setting of this:

Xaipe 65

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of allnothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e e cummings

Not sure if the iPlayer works outside the UK or not. I hope it does.

Respite

The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk but divert yourself by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise.

Thomas Jefferson


Sunrise. Day off, the last one ahead of a work scramble to meet a deadline. For the first time for aeons the rain has stopped and the sun is shining. I need to get out of the house. Throw on clothes, a parka and wellington boots and head for the fields with the camera. Nothing like photography, with the focus and attention on the present that it demands, to curb - if not stop - obsessive thinking.

The air is cool and fresh, the sky a pale blue. Puffballs of cloud blown along by a gusty south-west wind periodically hide the sun and the drop in temperature at these times is noticeable. The morning light extraordinary, as it so often is. Crows pass overhead, cawing, then drop from the sky onto a newly ploughed field. A faint deep throb of machinery from the small industrial estate hidden behind a barrier of trees can be felt, rather than heard.

No-one else to be seen. It is midweek, after all, and most people are at work.

Just past the railway bridge, a touch of the surreal.


The river flooded recently. My guess: an angler’s chair, temporarily moved to higher ground. A group of mallards are swept downstream by the force of the current and I watch them until they disappear from view. They speed past, imperturbable, bobbing on the surface of the water. I stop and turn around, looking for my visual touchstone, the ridge of the Black Mountains on the western horizon. The wind strengthens, buffets a mass of gold-brown leaves on the oak tree, but they cling on tightly, reluctant to leave their branches.

At the hawthorn bush I turn for home. Under the arches of the bridge, a hint of the macabre. A doll’s leg half buried in the mud, left behind by the floodwater. No sign of the torso.

****

A lunch meeting in town. Good talk. Then back to prune the ivy that grows up the side of the house. It is starting to grow over the electricity and gas meter boxes and must be cleared. Cut back the lavender and trim the dead fuchsia stalks, raw material galore for the compost heap.

The cat sits in the November sun and makes a show of supervising my efforts, but his heart isn’t in it. After a few minutes, with a twitch of the tail, he wanders back indoors.



I didn’t have high expectations for the day. It surprised me with its perfection.

Anxiety

Stressed. Work. Uncertainty and indecision.

So, once again, it’s a walking, not a cycling, day. What convinced me was pedalling full tilt into the side of a slow moving car recently when the concentration was elsewhere. Fortunately no harm done to self or bicycle or car, and the driver was touchingly concerned about my physical welfare - and my mental state probably, though he didn’t say so.

I crave the rhythmic action of walking. Steady and regular. One foot in front of the other, right, left. The autumn morning, damp and so still, the trees enveloped in their auras of gold and ochre and russet, the earth solid beneath my feet, reassuring. People pass. I exchange greetings with one or two.

The brain still runs in dark circles and the stomach remains a black hole. The exercise doesn’t make the symptoms go away, not at all. Yet it becomes a wordless instruction on surviving a future that seems to crouch somewhere ahead, menacing and waiting to pounce.

Keep going. One step. Then the next. Walk right towards it.

Journeys

Northamptonshire two weeks ago, South Wales for a massage training this coming weekend. At the end of next week the train to the North of England for a few days break with an old friend and former work colleague.

This is the first time since the move that I have travelled further afield than Bristol or Cardiff. The globetrotting days are largely over but in the future it should still be possible to walk in the Welsh mountains or take the National Express coach to London to stay with N for a few days, or even visit Birmingham (never been!).Or do some conservation volunteering. Or rent out the house and go to India for a year.

Or, most daring of all, catch the local bus and spend ten days with these people ...

***

Each day the mind climbs into its hamster wheel and runs and runs. Uncertain, draining times. I need to bite the bullet and ask difficult questions when I return to work briefly next week. One way or another, hard decisions need to be taken.

***

Repeating patterns. The older I get the more they are apparent. When I switch on the news. In my own life. The work. The addictions, greater and lesser. Loves chosen and rejected. The supposed free choices made.

Maybe real freedom is simply to know this, to understand, and with this knowledge to move into the unknown.

Time to go to work.

Next Thing

It takes being sick, if only for a few days, to remind me how healthy I generally am, and thus how fortunate. I can't remember the last time I was off work due to illness. It hasn't always been like this.

I've had to leave some time-critical job tasks undone, which I'm fretting over. I'll probably go in tomorrow for a couple of hours, just to clear them. In any event it always comes back to doing the next thing, slowly and gently.

Trying to let go. Being open to - praying for would be more accurate - a change in perception.

Five

1. Seriously large leaves. Magnolia macrophyllia, or Big Leaf Magnolia,a native of the south-eastern United States and one of the hundreds of trees from around the world at the local arboretum. Sunshine. Walking in the woods. Feeling heard. Listening in return. Good advice. More pictures on Flickr.

2. Friday 13th lived up to its reputation. A catalyst of a day that ended in tears. My colleagues are as hard working and caring as any I have come across but good management is vital. An organisation simply can't function without it. That's all I'm saying.

3. I meant to blog about this extraordinary photograph and article when it first appeared last month. The subject is a Premiership footballer who had just scored a decisive penalty goal and who had lost his mother earlier that same week. The author is The Times's art critic. On the quiet I'm a follower of soccer, but even if you aren't, do read it. The commenters debate whether the piece is celebrity-fawning or superb artistic analysis. My inclination is towards the latter.

4. The shoulder pain has lessened. Oddly enough, apart from the deep tissue work, what seems to have turned it around was tackling a full body massage myself and not listening to the internal voices that told me I shouldn't because of the injury. I went ahead. The friend was effusive. I loved it and am almost pain-free. We're doing it again.

5. I need to register as self-employed.

R & R

Bank holiday weekend. I've changed plans and stayed close to home, mainly out of fatigue. Intermittently I've gardened, cleaned house and pottered. The last weeks at work have been difficult. Much distress and upheaval, not involving me directly but the cumulative effect has been draining. Until recently I've enjoyed this job: the organisation's work ethos is an excellent one and the people are more than compatible. In fact they've been a gift, which makes it worse. One day the acceptance will come that this is how life is sometimes.

Early morning. In my dressing gown I take a cup of tea outside and sit on the patio. It rained during the night and the paving stones are still damp, the sky heavy and overcast. The temperature is comfortably warm: for the last few days - the first time this year - there's been no temptation to switch on the heating. Daisies and dandelions have sprung up overnight on the lawn, scatterings of white and gold, and the scent of the blossom from the next door neighbour's fruit trees permeates the morning to the point of sensory overload. I sit back and try to disentangle the threads of birdsong: blackbird and thrush are simple, the rest need work.

That evening I go to take out the scraps for the compost. The blue crocs - kept outside for garden wear - have been comandeered.

Cycles

8.40 am. Off to work. Time for a quick photo.

Given escalating petrol costs and my disinclination to return to full time work, it's looking increasingly unlikely that I'm going to be able to afford to run a car. It would mean cutting back so drastically in other areas that it's not worth it. And I've never enjoyed driving. And I'm pretty dark green, environmentally speaking.

Two colleagues, K and V, are in the same position. We're lucky in that we all live in town, on bus routes, that we've all got bicycles - and that the topography around here is river-plain flat. Not good for floods but excellent for unfit cyclists.

So V brings up the subject of electric bicycles as a way of going further afield and even negotiating the occasional steep hill. In the face of her enthusiasm I've done a little research on the net. This could be a possibility.