We awoke to find a crust of snow outside; it decayed rapidly over the course of the morning and now it’s disconcertingly mild outside, and raining.
And well, that’s one to the pathetic fallacy, because this Christmas season does feel like a bit of a washout. I’ve spent too much of it feeling ill, worried about making myself ill, preparing for my operation, or feeling wiped out or (damn it) almost as sick as I used to, to have managed festivity for more than about an hour at a time. I missed most of the food, and (which I was looking forward to more) the midnight service. This morning I couldn’t keep my breakfast down and didn’t even feel well enough to watch the livestreamed service for Epiphany; so now I’ve missed that too.
Except, of course, Epiphany is also a season, and it has only just begun. Except, of course, my reflections on recent weeks tell you more about my mood at this moment than about what really happened. Except this morning was better than yesterday and so far my timid attempts at lunch and supper have been successful. Except I have celebrations to look forward to this coming weekend, and in a couple of days I’ll probably feel well enough to get excited about them. Except there were plenty of joyful moments in there, and I just have to trust that I’ll remember them, when I’m feeling a little better. Soon.
I’ve embarked on one of last year’s Christmas presents, Everyday Nature by Andy Beer. This has a couple of paragraphs for each day, each examining a different natural phenomenon.
This being the week it’s been, I haven’t been able to act on much of it. New Year’s Day, for example, we were encouraged to go out for a nature walk. Not a hope. Today’s entry is on Venus: it’s cloudy.
But never mind. This morning on the bird feeders I saw: bluetits, a robin, a starling, and something that might have been a dunnock. (I am not very good at telling the difference between sparrows and dunnocks.) There were two grey squirrels chasing each other along the back fence. Yesterday there was a wren on the trellis.
This evening I returned to my goldfinch sock (self-striping yarn from West Yorkshire Spinners). Goldfinches were in the book for 2 January: I didn’t see any on Thursday (maybe I’ll get a nyger seed feeder to encourage them) but I can at least enjoy their sense of style.
I’m feeling quite a lot better today. Well enough, in fact, to face with equanimity the prospect of not being entirely well for quite a long time yet. I suppose it makes sense: the first few days, you couldn’t do much more than flop on the sofa even if you wanted to; after that, you have to put significant effort into not doing very much.
To be clear, my operation went well, my wounds seem to be healing, and I’m no longer blown up like a balloon. Everything is as it should be. I am coming to terms with the surgeon’s advice not to do any heavy lifting (i.e. more than 5kg – about a third of the weight of a toddler) for the next four to six months, which came as something of a shock, not having been mentioned before the day of the operation. I am coming to understand that in a few more days I will be feeling fine and having to put significant effort into remembering not to lift anything heavier than 5kg.
In the meantime, I’m playing with the idea of convalescence.
And the last few years have shown us that society does not place any value on recovery time, and so I will need to be aware of external and internal pressure to get better, now, and resist it.
Not for the first time, either. When I caught Covid for the first time in 2022, it took me ages to get better. I didn’t get long Covid, but it was several months before I could go for a walk without needing a lie-down afterwards. It was some time in that spring that I plugged convalescence into an anagram generator, and got back, among other delightful possibilities, lac coven scene. (This is yet another technique I have borrowed from the ever-excellent Havi, who has in fact just been writing about it.)
Back then, it sounded vaguely Arthurian to me, and I decided that I rather liked the idea of going to sleep under a hill until the country needed me. Now, having read the whole Chalet School series one and a half times through in the last eighteen months, it is clearly an exhortation to take a rest cure in a female-dominated environment in Switzerland, to prioritise my health, and to take the time I need to get better.
Lest anyone was in any doubt, I cannot literally go to Switzerland at this moment. It would take a lot of money that I have earmarked for other things and effort that I could better use on recovery. This does not matter. Never going to Switzerland did not stop Elinor M. Brent-Dyer from setting well over half the books there. She travelled via Baedeker instead.
I also don’t have the option of doing nothing any more. I have a toddler. This is where the coven comes in. My mother has been staying this week and has helped me work out a number of strategies (purchase of a little set of plastic steps to facilitate access to highchair; getting down on the floor with the child as an alternative to picking her up… ) More generally, I am just going to have to get used to the idea of getting people to do things for me. It takes a village. Or at least a coven.
I began my virtual stay in Switzerland yesterday, before I’d even remembered about my lac coven scene, by watching Alpine Train at Christmas. Most of my friends who have seen this programme report an immediate desire to take the Bernina Express, but I am too tired to plan train adventures, and just enjoyed watching the snowy mountains go by (and got depressed about the receding glaciers).
What else might I do, in pursuit of not-doing? I could get Switzerland’s Amazing Railways down from the shelf and become very interested in spiral tunnels. I could re-read or re-watch On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (nothing like watching James Bond be energetic when you’re not feeling particularly so yourself). I have got stuck on A Chalet Girl from Kenya but, now I can eat fatty foods again, rather fancy something involving ‘featherbeds of whipped cream’, and, indeed, most of the Chalet School diet. But I do find myself moved to revisit whichever Sadlers Wells book it is where Ella has a term at finishing school. I could find more slow travel videos – mountain railways, or steamers on the Alpine lakes (we saw the New Year in watching the P. S. Waverley sailing up the Clyde). Either way, a retreat to the sofa seems indicated. I shall rejoin the coven at the lac scene. See you all later.
By way of contrast with yesterday, today’s weather was everything that early January ought to be: cold, clear, and lit with gentle gold sunlight. I always struggle, when in recovery, with finding the balance between “keeping active” and “overdoing it”: today’s walk was probably about a kilometre, which was about right. More to the point, it put me in the company of the sun, and the bluetits, and the wagtails, and these trees.
I’ve been feeling pretty sore and wiped out today, and the weather’s been horrible: driving rain before lunch, and a cold wind afterwards. In a different year I would have been in Winchester for the Friends of King Alfred Buses running day; in a different state of health I’d at least have been out for a bracing walk. But there’s something to be said for easing into the New Year with what is, after all, just as longstanding a tradition; for galvanising my intention to make some more music this year (and it needs galvanising: I’ve signed up to sing two duets in little more than a week’s time); for taking time to heal; and for letting pleasure and whimsy and beauty come to me. So we watched the New Year’s Concert from Vienna this morning, and this afternoon I crashed out, first in bed and then on the sofa, and I can’t say that I have any complaints at all about how I’ve spent New Year’s Day.
Still working on this year’s compass, but I have enough to be going on with. Mystery for Christmas, Jubilation for Lammas and my birthday, and Inspiration for the whole year.
When I was thinking about this, I thought something like this: “I want something about space. Breathing space. Exactly that. That moment when you take a breath between verses. Oh. Yes. Of course. That’s what inspiration literally means.”
So I’m thinking of INSPIRATION as something active, something in which I can make a conscious effort to participate, not just something that happens to me. I have to say that it all feels a bit daunting at the moment, and perhaps I should put in something like RECOVERY or RETREAT at north east, but there’s still time to think about that, and in the meantime I’ll concentrate on the “breathing space” aspect of INSPIRATION.
… the NHS, stubbornly caring for millions of people in the face of fifteen years of callous, deliberate underfunding, and meaning that I only have to worry about how I wrangle a toddler with a hole in my abdomen, and not how I’m going to pay for it all.
The original prompt is singular, but I get dreadfully stressed when I have to pick just one thing I want, so let’s remove the limit and see how far I get.
1. Health for myself and my loved ones, with (where needed) the persistence to shake the system until a useful result falls out; 2. Peace for the world, and respect for human life and dignity; 3. A joyous celebration of this (ceremonial, probable) mid point in my lifespan; 4. The time and headspace to read; 5. The time and headspace to write; 6. The continued expansion of my comfort zone; 7. To get out on my road bike; 8. To tie up loose ends, receive the important decisions (I *think* I know how the big one’s going, but I could be wrong) and be at peace with them, and move gracefully through the year and into the next one.
‘Prehabilitation’ is an expression with which I have recently become familiar. Part of me is rolling my eyes; another part finds it a useful way of saying something quickly: in this case, that making sure that one is as well as possible before the operation means that one will recover from it more quickly.
I’m over my cold, so that’s a good start. And I’ve spent considerably more than the suggested twenty minutes ‘walking outside as you are able’ today. And I’m going to bed very soon, honestly. Because yes, rest is important and I’d like to be doing more of it.
But in actual fact I’ve mostly been preparing by turning the heel of the latest sock so I have some easy knitting to do while I wait for my gallbladder removal (laparoscopic cholecystectomy, if you want to be fancy about it). Call it a displacement activity. I am a bit nervous.
In the meantime, yes, rest. I can only aspire to feline levels of rest, but it’s a noble aspiration.
I’ve been fascinated by shades of grey today, my gaze drawn to the misty sky and the subtle gradation of silhouetted trees, and remembering what silver looks like before it’s polished, a dull white.
Kathleen Jowitt 