… so much stuff belonging to my father. And yet there is still so much left.
I should start by saying that most of the hard work of getting rid of things has been done by my brothers, and I have mostly been saying goodbye at the point of seeing a familiar item in the auction catalogue and going, “oh, yes, that…”
That’s accounted for a lot of the bulky items. Some stuff has gone to the tip. The rest of it…
If you ever met my father, you probably saw one of these stickers. He stuck them on everything – suitcase, diary, camera bag – and had been doing so since the mid 1970s, when his bus was part of the artichoke sponsored Tour de France publicity caravan. There is still a huge stash left.
There is a lot of stuff like that: cool story, no monetary value to speak of, about twenty times as much as anyone ever needed to keep. Or, in some cases, quite possibly some monetary value, if only one could find the person who wants it and work out how to get it to them. Or, of no interest whatsoever except to the family.
My next door neighbour died a couple of months ago. Her son rented a skip. Everything went in the skip. The house is now up for sale.
Could we learn from him? Probably. Except… I myself rescued a chair and two icons from the skip, the icons because it felt sacrilegious to leave them there (they can go to a charity shop) and the chair because it was far too beautiful to be thrown away. So no, I’m probably constitutionally incapable of chucking everything in a skip. Particularly when today I went through the 78rpm records and claimed one of Amelita Galli-Curci singing Julius Benedict’s La Capinera. Or, a rare recording of one of the greatest singers of all time singing an all but forgotten piece by my great-great-great-grandfather. No, it’s not going in a skip.
So we’ll still be saying goodbye to stuff into 2025. But please, please, not much longer.
How easy the return to work was. Transition back to work was fine, my brain switched gears beautifully, working part time is challenging but helps me keep a sense of proportion, and the infant has taken to nursery better than I ever dared hope.
(Portsmouth skyline not really relevant, unless you want to talk about the Isle of Wight catamaran as a liminal space or something like that.)
This is an almost offensively photogenic bowlful, but don’t be fooled. I never used to be much of a one for yoghurt, but I’m still breastfeeding so I need the calcium. And I’m trying to keep my gallbladder from tying itself in a knot, so it’s zero fat. The fruit (Tesco ‘perfectly imperfect’, would be nicer without strawberries, which don’t freeze well and probably weren’t all that in the first place, but it’s perfectly adequate) is there to make it bearable. Greek style is, I have discovered, nicer than the normal sort, but neither is as good as proper full fat yoghurt. Occasionally I lick the spoon after doling out the toddler’s portion, just to make sure.
This has been a year of minor but inconvenient health problems, of which the gallstones have been the most serious. They first made their presence felt after last year’s Christmas dinner, got increasingly uppish through the next month, and put me in hospital with an infection and weird liver markers at the end of January. Since then I’ve been on the waiting list for removal of the gallbladder, and not eating sausages. The trick has been not to cut out fat altogether – still breastfeeding, after all – but to spread it (ha) out through the day. Most of the time I get it right. When I don’t it’s excruciatingly painful. Apparently this is a known thing among people who have recently had babies. Now you know.
I’ve also had mastitis twice, tripped over a park bench and bruised my sternum, and picked up a couple of coughs and colds from the nursery germ pool. As I say, nothing serious – in fact, in terms of overall fitness I’m probably better than I have been since 2021 – some of it a bit silly, in fact – just tedious, really. The list of things I’m looking forward to being able to eat again continues to grow.
I went out for a walk this afternoon, climbing from sea level, or just below, to the heady height of about twenty metres above. When I came down again I could almost believe that we had a range of hills the far side of the fen.
I also saw a spectacular shadow and several good dogs, of whom one is featured here:
My habit of observing 1 November, All Saints, as the beginning of winter often feels just as ridiculous as using the winter solstice. This year was no exception: the beginning of the month was unremittingly gloomy, but not what you’d call cold. But here we are, three weeks in and not even touching Advent yet, and it’s got properly cold (by British standards, anyway). We didn’t get the surprise snowfall that hit much of the country; instead, it’s been bright and sharp, there was a very thin layer of frost on the ground, and my ears got thoroughly chilly when I went out on the bike this morning.
Last week the weather – if you can even call it that – was so depressingly grey that today I’ve been particularly grateful for two bright days in a row. This isn’t anywhere special; this path runs from the bypass to a car park, and I’ve cropped another car park out of the photo. But just look at it.
This lunchtime I walked – briskly; there was a chilly wind – to Camley Street Natural Park. I had passed it many times, but never turned up the little side street to find the entrance until today. It’s a tiny sliver of wildness wedged between two great railway stations, St Pancras and King’s Cross – a managed wildness, but a wildness none the less.
The rushes are tall, and the trees are tall, and mostly still in leaf, and though you can look across the canal and see diners eating expensive lunches in the new King’s Cross development, or look into the canal and see a discarded shoe, and hear the whine of electric trains coming into and going out of St Pancras, it still has the sense of being a place set apart. I looked up, and saw fluffed-up bluetits; down, and saw coots dabbling; across, and saw a bold blackbird. I’ll be going back.
This summer I rather unexpectedly found myself coordinating and curating an exhibition. This is a first for me, and I’m rather pleased with the result.
Ventnor Fringe was on. I was going to be there. So was 3267, in the guise of the Book Bus. So far, so normal. I’d missed last year, the baby being just too tiny, and was looking forward to returning to my summer arts hit.
Ventnor Fringe has been getting bigger every year, in terms of both space and time, and this year it was going to be ten days long. It was only going to be reasonably practicable to make the bookshop happen for four days of that, and the preferred distribution of those four days was both Fridays and both Saturdays. Which left a five-day gap in the middle. Perhaps we could have some sort of an exhibition to fill it…
Such was the situation as described to me in mid-June, and to my delight the creative bit of my brain, which has been in and out and mostly out for the past two years, immediately rushed in. Various other people were having ideas too. Brilliant! My brain was coming up with a grand overarching idea to pull it all together:
This bus is usually a bookshop. So what do you get if you take the books out of a bookshop? And what if that space is something that has seen a lot in its time?
A title appeared. Espace Libre. Free Space. Maybe Espace Livre? No, trying too hard. Let it speak for itself. This is just another way to express what I’ve been trying to do with Book Bus Stories, assuming I ever finish the thing. If I had finished the thing it would make an exhibition in itself. But it could make a little part of one, maybe…
I angled for the job of coordinating it all – perhaps a trifle ambitious, trying to do it all from the mainland and with a baby clinging to my legs, but I wasn’t going to let that worry me – and the rest of the gang were extremely happy to let me do it.
So off I went. I selected (extremely select) quotations from my father’s accounts of how he got the bus this side of the Channel in the first place. I polished up three of my own Book Bus Stories to make a small display – and commit myself to finishing the rest of the damn things in time for next year. I spent quite a lot of money on boards and various forms of adhesive. I bought chain and cable ties in the DIY bit of our wonderful local department store, and if the assistant thought it was in any way weird she didn’t let on. I printed out everything I’d written. I posted the whole lot to Ventnor. And I chased and chased and chased the other contributors, and/or my family members who had undertaken to organise the other contributors for me.
Then I got to the Isle of Wight and spent a frantic couple of evenings sticking photos and cards to boards, or, in one case, making holes in a board with a corkscrew and attaching books with string, chain, and cable ties, while the baby was in bed. And we moved the whole lot onto the bus on Sunday morning.
In short, I had a lovely time.
This was a combination of the kind of project and people organising I do in my day job, and the kind of creative work I do in my free time, and it was the first time since I’d gone on maternity leave that I’d got my teeth into either of them in a big way. My brain had come back, and, since I’d been a bit worried that it had dissolved and dribbled out of my ears some time between COVID and quickening, this was incredibly exciting. I can do this kind of thing. Not only is this reassuring in the context of my return to work next week, it’s also encouraging to think that I might be able to return to some of the three or four books I have been attempting to write on and off since 2021.
I’m not going to have a huge amount more free time in which to use reclaimed creative powers. I get a couple of train journeys and a couple of lunch hours every week, and all the fruit trees need pruning. I will aim to get something done. I hope to post here more frequently, too. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, here’s a look at The Book Bus: Espace Libre.
I have about one hour in every day in which I have both hands free, and writing has been coming a long way down the list of things I could do in it. And it’s never the same hour for very long: I don’t seem to be able to adjust to the ever-changing routine quickly enough to get much done. Sometimes I see the moment and grab it, but not often.
Why am I not writing?
So much of my life at the moment is focused on the baby, dependent on the baby. That’s why I’m not writing much here. I don’t want her to embark on life to find that the internet already knows all about her. This time is private.
Why am I not writing?
It just doesn’t seem very important at the moment. There’s nothing in particular that needs to be written by me, now. No idea has yet grabbed me by the throat and insisted I write it.
Little by little. More and more, week by week. Even when I wasn’t writing at all, I was writing. I’ve kept my diary up to date all this past year, and never had to catch up more than a week at a time. Even when I had to write in very large letters to fill a day, or just stick in a picture instead. I’ve written reports. I’ve written letters – fewer than I’d have liked, but some. I’ve even opened up some of my pre-baby projects and added a line here and a line there. There hasn’t been one big bam! I’m writing again! moment – or, rather, there have been several, but they haven’t released an exciting new flood of words. More an occasional dribble.
But I’m writing.
And even if I wasn’t…
… that would be fine. There’s more to me than writing, more than I know about yet. And, while writing is one of the most important ways in which I find out about myself, it isn’t the only way. This last year – these last four years – has been a time of huge transition for me, in many different dimensions. I’m still emerging.
I’m still here, still not getting more than about ten minutes at a time in which to get things done, and mostly having to spend those ten minuteses on things that aren’t writing. I do have a vague plan for a return to blogging, but in the meantime, here’s a cat picture.
Kathleen Jowitt 