Stories that make sense
Everyone else seems to have been talking about January going on forever, but that wasn’t my experience. In fact, it just seems to have disappeared. Between recovering from surgery and recovering from a cold, with a party in the middle, I haven’t been waiting for January to be over so much as for myself to be well enough to enjoy things regardless of the calendar.
I shall not complain. The days are getting longer, the snowdrops are out, and everyone suddenly seems much more cheerful.
Saturday was ridiculously beautiful, and also ridiculously busy. It concentrated almost all the busyness for the month of January into one day. I went to a Cursillo training day in the morning (I’m not on the staff this time; I was just showing up to show support) and a party in the afternoon, and in between I practised two duets and made a chilli.
It was also really quite cold. This beautiful hazy morning sharpened and brightened, and the grass was hard and lumpy underfoot, and while we were singing and playing and dancing the fog rolled in and when we left we couldn’t see further than about twenty feet.
And it turns out that what I really needed in order to feel satisfied that winter has happened properly was a) a cold snap; and b) an exuberant party. Which this was. I sang Rossini (sure, it was the Cats’ Duet, but it’s not easy) and danced a Horse’s Brawl. It was great. I went back to work today (from the dining table) and it felt entirely appropriate. The festive season is concluded in style and I am now happy to get on with the rest of the year.
Another cold day, but clear and sunlit, and all the trunks and branches of the trees glowing – the silver on the birches, the golden lichen on the hazels and oaks, and the moon between them. I walked – not as far as yesterday, but further than I’ve managed on other days – and kept going further than I strictly needed to because it was too beautiful to stop so soon. It’s so good to be able to do that again.
I took a slightly longer walk today, long enough for my legs to stop feeling wobbly and then start feeling wobbly again. I came out from the corridor of trees and stopped at the road for longer than I usually would, noticing the pull of the flat land beyond the A10. It was cold, and there was no sun so it felt colder, and I would have liked to cross the main road and walk out under the grey sky towards the band of pale pink. Instead, I carried on, noticing how very cold it was, how very bare the trees, how very spiky their twigs. I reminded myself that I wasn’t going to feel this weak forever, that this wasn’t COVID or pregnancy, that it was going to be a matter of days rather than months. Thought that I ought to pump up the tyres of my road bike for when I should be ready to cross the road, but not yet. Then, in the trees, birdsong: I guessed it was a robin, and then looked up, and up, and saw it at the very top.
My writing brain started up good and proper yesterday. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s having managed to post here every day for a month and more. Maybe it was having a day in which I’d promised myself I’d do no work and only minimal Cursillo admin. Maybe it’s because it’s almost eighteen months since the baby was born and that’s just how long it takes for a brain to get going again. Maybe it’s because I did some actual proper singing and it unblocked some metaphorical tubes. Or maybe I’d just knitted some arbitrary length of combined sock. Who knows.
Anyway, in the morning I found myself rereading some things I’d written. I fixed an plot hole in one of them. And I found myself thinking more and more about the project I was working on up until, well, a little more than eighteen months ago. Actually, it’s been bouncing around in my head for the last few days, but yesterday it started demanding my attention. And now it’s telling me I need to read the book on the Dance Band Era, and get hold of a wind-up gramophone and play the 78s, and rescue all the rest of the dance band 78s, and read I don’t know, who survived the First World War and wrote about it? Siegfried Sassoon, read Siegfried Sassoon, and oh yes, definitely David Blaize, and probably pick up that First World War history that I got about as far as 1915 in, and find out about twilight sleep and would an upper middle class woman be expected to breastfeed in 1924, and work out a better name for my hero (he is called Julian at the moment, which is a bit misleading)… And probably reread Romeo and Juliet just for the hell of it except that’s probably not the best use of my limited time, or rewatch it, except goodness knows I never get three straight hours free these days. And I would say read Surprised by Joy if I hadn’t just read it and concluded that, while I’m very pleased for C. S. Lewis that he got out an environment that was making him miserable, it would have been useful for me if he’d stayed on and could have written about what it was like being at school and watching form by form carted off to war, knowing your time was coming. (And good grief I don’t think his Professor Kirkpatrick as written would have let him get away with the logical fallacies in Mere Christianity, but that’s not remotely relevant.)
I started getting lines writing themselves again. I found myself wanting to reread what’s already there to make sure I hadn’t written them already, or written something that they would contradict. The cogs were turning, turning, getting up to speed. The writing brain was well and truly running. It kept me up mapping what fandom (such as there is) calls the Montacrew onto early twentieth century public school dynamics (let the reader understand). And then the toddler woke up and insisted on a really, really long feed.
You recall that I am meant to be resting and recovering. So yes, today was a washout (although I did some more singing practice and am feeling a lot better about my impending performance – and finished reading Touch Not The Cat, which is very slightly relevant.) So no, I haven’t actually added any new words to this project yet. But I’m so very glad to see it again.
The earth tips back and the light reaches back out to the north, stretches, spreads over us. The sun stays past four o’clock, just a little bit more than eight hours now. The solstice marked the turning point; now I begin to notice.
It’s cold, though. I walked out earlier, just a little way. My loose silky trousers, practical for a healing abdomen, are not so practical for a January walk; I am grateful for my brother’s long-ago recommendation of long-john base layers. I realised, half-way out, that my mind was singing me the enquiry of the Three Kings, the steady four-four of Mendelssohn’s setting keeping pace with my footsteps. Say, where is he born the king of Judea, for we have seen – for we have seen – have seen his star – have see-een his star and are co-ome to ado-ore him – have see-een his star and are co-ome to adore him… These Magi are walking, I think; it isn’t the swaying three-four camel-gait of We Three Kings. Too late, too slow, looking in the wrong place, but getting there in the end.
I caught a glimpse of the cathedral between two houses (you can see it from most places, if you look hard enough) and the flag on the west tower was streaming straight out in a rectangle, like a child’s drawing. The moon, just shy of a quarter, winked through a window of cloud and went away again. I turned, left it at my left shoulder, and turned back towards the sun, and into the wind.
In the garden, the cyclamen have bloomed: sturdy stems, delicate mauve flowers shaped like fantastic head-dresses springing from a rolled band, more outlandish than you’d see in any nativity play. I planted them under the most troublesome of the apple trees, hoping to introduce a little colour against that gloomy fence if nothing else. Suddenly, I’m vindicated.
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.
Kathleen Jowitt 