Tag: personal

December Reflections 15: difficult day in 2020

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network of bare tree branches, lit up greenish in winter sunlight, with clear blue sky beyond

I used this photo earlier, posted it as number 350 of my 366 days of delight.

If my difficult day is today, it’s because 2020 has been kinder to me than it has to many other people I know, or know of. And it’s because I can be sad and slow even on beautiful sunlit afternoons with clean blue skies. If this is as bad as 2020 gets, then I will have got off lightly. And I would also have liked to have been able to take a shower this morning without crying about it. No morning walk for me today. No morning prayer. If today has not been very difficult, it has not been easy.

It may be that strange thing that depression does to memory, by which I can only bring to mind a very narrow now and the current emotion convinces me it’s permanent. I went back through my diary, looking for other difficult days. There were plenty in which I felt more or less like this – 16 July, for example, reads:

presumably this day happened? (i was not happy)

reading all of the internet

Zoom mimealong to Steal Away

I didn’t write, but I remember, that I had to go and cry on the stairs halfway through that.

On 17 June there’s:

FEELING ABSOLUTELY AWFUL

which I think was fatigue rather than anything to do with mental ill health.

There was a Monday in which I broke my phone and a kitchen knife and received an unsolicited review request for a deeply distasteful lesbian Nazi mystery novel followed by a Tuesday in which I had to deal with an ant infestation. There was the week clouded by worry when my father was in hospital back in March.

(And I know all of that’s very small beer compared with what some people have had to deal with, this year in particular.)

But today, because I’m in it, feels like a difficult day, if not the most difficult day. A slow day, a sad day, a day in which it took me an hour to get out of bed and tears to get me into the shower. The first day in a long time it’s been as bad as that. A day in which I did some little work, but also read a lot of irrelevant Tweets.

A day in which I wore silver shoes to go to the postbox. A day in which the sky was a clean clear blue and the trees were as lovely without leaves as they were with them.

December Reflections 14: mask selfie!

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person with face almost obscured by - from the top - a black trilby hat, a pair of sunglasses, and a face mask with a pattern of black and white piano keys. Also wearing a bright purple coat

I’ve had an extensive collection of hats for a long time. Masks, not so much. And I have to say that I enjoy wearing masks considerably less than I do hats. But here we all are.

I’m lucky in that, working from home, I mostly don’t have to – it’s just trips to the shops, or church, or (as here) the post office. I’m also lucky in that I can see without my glasses if I really need to, so I do have options if I can’t keep the fogging under control.

And it’s quite fun to be an international woman of mystery. I’m sure you’ll all be pleased to know that, after months of meticulous preparation, I was able to make the drop well before zero hour.

December Reflections 13: reindeer

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Model reindeer made from logs and twigs of wood, wearing a red bow around its neck, standing outside a blue door.

We haven’t put any Christmas decorations up yet: this reindeer belongs to one of our neighbours – one of the few we’ve actually met in person.

It’s been a bit of an odd year to move house, and not least among the ways it’s been odd has been the way that we haven’t got to meet our new neighbours. We’ve met next door, on either side, over the road, and behind us. Everyone else remains a mystery. We might have seen any or all of them in town, but we wouldn’t know.

Which is not to say we don’t know them. There’s a WhatsApp group, via which people swap recommendations (and jigsaw puzzles). There was socially-distanced trick-or-treating at Hallowe’en. They seem a very friendly bunch. Next year I hope to meet them.

December Reflections 12: best decision of 2020

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A tarmac path leading out of sight between trees. A streak of sunlight breaks across a grassy area and illuminates three of the trees.

This hasn’t been a year for huge decisions. The one that’s made the most enduring, most positive difference, was the commitment I made back in May, to go for a walk before breakfast every work day.

I haven’t managed every day: illness, bad weather, and the increasingly tardy sunrise have occasionally stopped it happening. But I’ve managed most days in the average week, and it’s made a difference.

Usually I take the same route: south along the footpath that runs behind our house, and back again. Sometimes I go all the way to the main road; sometimes, if time is short, I turn around part way. Occasionally I go up into town instead and explore the back streets. But mostly I’m walking the same path, out and back, every week day morning, home in time for a shower and breakfast and to join Morning Prayer over Google Meet.

I’ve walked through three seasons. I’ve walked through the silence of the first lockdown and the hum of rush hour. I’ve walked through rain and frost and sunshine, freezing fog and sultry heat. I’ve come to recognise the dogs and their walkers and the young couple with cropped trousers and reusable coffee cups.

Some more photos:

I’ve come to understand a little more about where I live now, have grounded myself in space and time by taking a very small journey through the one, moving through the other the only way I can. And I return a little more awake, a little less wound up about the state of the world.

As for last year’s decisions, which I was a bit vague about at the time, one was ‘which house to buy’, and has worked out very well so far. The other unmade itself, very decisively, in January. (There’s an argument for calling that this year’s biggest decision, but it didn’t feel like a decision at all from where I was.) They were both big, and took up a lot of my headspace, and it’s something of a relief that this year has only involved little ones.

December Reflections 11: ink

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the last page of a handwritten letter, which reads '...will be a different person. Who? Don't laugh at me. No, do. Laugh, & keep going. With love, & hope, Kathleen/ 2343, 31st December 2008

I wrote this letter on the last day of 2008, to be opened on the last day of 2018. It took me until well into 2019 to remember about it, at which point I took it out of the box with all the other important documents, wasn’t brave enough to open it, put it down, and promptly lost it.

It turned up again a couple of weeks ago when I unpacked the last but one box from my study at the old house (in the sitting room at the new house, not that it’s really relevant). This time I opened it and read it. I didn’t laugh at my poor curious twenty-three year old self, not really. I wanted to reach back through time and give her a hug. She was so grimly cheerful, so resolutely clinging on, so obviously scared that she wouldn’t keep on doing that.

It’s an interesting mixture. Curiosity about my own future (in answer to my questions: yes, though it takes a year to find one to stick, but that one really sticks; no; yes – funny you should mention epidemics, though; yes, finished, self-published – bet you weren’t expecting that! or that I’d prefer it that way!; no, if anything it’s got worse but I type most things these days; yes, but then it went away again; yes, no; not in any practical way; haven’t tried). Gossip (no; yes; not that I know of; yes, and would you believe four children; haha, no; yes; very well; some of them; yes; OK so far as I know; ahahahahaha, no; yes, most of them, every now and again.) And a gloomy fatalism:

I’m guessing that life isn’t going to get easier. I almost wish you could write back – but not quite. I don’t want to know.

It’s probably just as well that I can’t. I don’t know that I’d have been able to convince her that, though we’re twelve years closer to the end of the world, I’m a thousand times happier than she was. I could tell her that I’ve fallen on my feet over and over again, that I have some of the things on the list of things that she wanted for me, that I very much don’t want some of the others, and that actually some of them are none of her business. I could tell her that all the things on the list of things that worked for her still work for me. But would she believe me if I told her not to worry: we were going to make it? Because look, she was worried that we wouldn’t:

What do I want to tell you? Not to give up, I suppose. Because if you give up, I might as well not even try. To live, to love, to be what I can be – what you can be, I mean – & not to make excuses. To hold on to what is good & true.

She had her excuses. Good ones. 2008 was an awful year – she knows that, she listed the reasons at the opening of the letter. I think she’d be wary, rather suspicious, of my compassion for her; she’d worry that I was letting us off too easy.

And of course I wonder what my self of twelve years hence would make of both of us. I don’t know that I’d write another letter. I notice that I’m just as wary of hearing back from her as my twelve years gone self was of hearing from me, though for rather different reasons. But I do wonder what she’d see me hiding from myself, what she’d read between the lines that I wouldn’t be aware of having written between them.

Assuming, of course, that either of us could read my handwriting. Perhaps I’d better type it.

December Reflections 10: warm fuzzies

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a woman's hand and arm, wearing a navy blue dressing gown with the cuff turned up

I was tempted to skip this day. I am in no way the kind of person who talks about ‘warm fuzzies’. I know the concept that other people are referring to when they do. It’s possible that I even experience it myself, but, you know, I’d never admit to it.

Possibly I am a stony-hearted snob.

Actually, I think part of the issue – beyond the unbearable tweeness of the phrase – is the fact that I don’t experience that sort of intense emotion as fuzziness. Rather the opposite. Clarity. And light rather than heat. Even when it’s generated by concentrated contentment it doesn’t feel fuzzy to me.

‘I don’t know about warm fuzzies!’ I told my husband. ‘You married one!’ he told me.

That’s his dressing gown I’m wearing in the picture, except it’s mine now. We swapped years ago. He has the big fluffy white one.

We’ve both been working from home through this year, ever since we moved into this new house and the lockdown came in, keeping each other company from opposite ends of the landing, occasionally dropping in on each other. It’s been very pleasant.

December Reflections 9: silver

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A woman with short grey hair, looking away from the camera

The greying is genetic. My mother found her first grey hair at fourteen, and I was younger than that when I found mine. One of my brothers is going the same way.

Through my teens, my hair was very dark. In my wedding photos (age 23) there’s a grey streak visible if you know where to look, springing back from each temple. Through my twenties and into my thirties the white has been spreading steadily, working its way around the sides, not quite so dominant at the base or the crown. It’s a different texture, thicker and springier than the dark, and I think it may be faster growing, too.

I’ve been adamant for a long time that I wasn’t going to dye it. Or that maybe I’d wait for it all to go white and then start playing with exciting colours. (This year someon told me that white hair doesn’t take dye so well. Heigh-ho.) Whatever, I wasn’t going to get into a running-to-stand-still situation trying to keep it the colour it was when I was fourteen. (Could be worse, anyway. I was bald until the age of three.) I just let it go white.

It’s worked surprisingly well for me. Grey hair even came into fashion a couple of years ago. Women a decade younger than me were paying good money to get their hair looking like mine. It makes interesting highlights and lowlights, meaning that all my hairdresser (when I have one) has to do is cut. (Excuse the horrible job I’ve made at the base of my skull: that’s lockdown for you.) People who didn’t know me when my hair was brown are surprised to learn that it just grows like this.

It avoids awkward situations when I’m trying to buy wine or scissors (I did get carded the other day, but then I took my hat off and everything was fine). It confuses creepy men because they can’t tell how old I am. I, meanwhile, feel pretty damn glamorous.

And then there was this year, when not having a dye habit proved to be a great blessing: it looked the same as it always does (if a bit straggly), and I didn’t have a slowly widening tidemark getting me down.

It’s true, I do have to get it cut more often, because it doesn’t look so good long (mind you, I’m not sure that my dark hair wouldn’t have looked better short, come to that).

But I like it. Maybe it’s that I’m happier in my thirties than I was in my twenties. Maybe it’s that I have a more robust sense of my own style. Or maybe there is something about silver, after all.

December Reflections 7: on my wish list

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map showing most of western Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands, with major rail routes

I’ve been trying to take a trip down the Rhine ever since 2018 – when I got very close, but was thwarted by train delays. In 2019 we were saving to buy a house, and also just weren’t very efficient. 2020 – well, no. I was quite sufficiently twitchy about going to the Isle of Wight: crossing any international borders would have been too much.

And I have to admit that things aren’t looking great for 2021, either. (Plan B for next year is to hire a car and see how many of the Great Little Trains of Wales we can get around.)

Still, we’ve put together a convincing itinerary; we just need to find a convincing week-and-a-bit to slot it into. Maybe that’ll be next year. Maybe it’ll be some other time. Anyway, the Rhine is staying on my wishlist until I actually manage it.

December Reflections 5: biggest lesson from 2020

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Rosehip with a drop of water gathered at its base. The blue sky and brown branches are reflected in the water.

2020 hasn’t really been a year for lessons – at least, not the sort that you can wrap up in a sentence and paint on a wall. I know less about who I am and what I’m meant to be doing than I did at the beginning of the year. Nothing’s crystallised for me; the only epiphanies have shown me where not to go. I have no words of wisdom – at least, none that I think anybody else won’t have worked out for themselves.

I cannot say that in 2020 I learned that…

Which is not to say that 2020 has not been a year for learning.

I have learned how…

… to change a tap and paint a wall

… the security light on the garage works

… an apple or a pear will just come off in your hand when it’s ready to be picked

And I have learned about…

… staying in the same place for a long time

… walking the same walk, summer and winter, morning and noon, rain and sun and snow

… going deeper rather than broader

… time and space, time and space

… finding large things in small spaces

Putting that into small words, one lesson, is at present beyond me. Perhaps that will come next year. Perhaps it doesn’t need to happen at all.

December Reflections 4: red

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This year we moved into the first place we’ve owned, and we brought plenty of stuff with us. The curtains, for example. My mother made them for the high Victorian windows of my childhood home; I used them to cheer up the horrible bedsit I rented when I first moved out; turned them up to fit the french windows in the 1960s maisonette that was our last rented property. They’ve always been comforting: good for hiding behind when I was small; good for keeping the draughts out now; bold and cosy.

A glass-fronted wooden cabinet. Behind it, floor-length wooden curtains in a pattern of blue and red curlicues on a gold ground.

Then there was the pig picture, inherited from my beloved godmother Héloïse. Her house used to be full of vibrant, mischievous pictures: this was my favourite. And there, at the middle of it, is that bright red lobster.

A print of a painting featuring a large pig nosing at a bright red lobster on a picnic cloth while a boy sleeps

This was not the only picture we brought with us. It wasn’t even the only one with a red element to it. We also had a drawing of the two of us that we’d had done, in true tacky tourist fashion, at Montmartre, on our honeymoon.

A drawing in red pencil of a man in glasses and a woman in a headscarf

The new house had its own contributions to make. Most of the fanlights in the conservatory were decorated with a stained glass red rose.

A fanlight with a red rose of Lancaster in stained glass

With all that, it became obvious pretty quickly that the dining room wall – an insipid lavender when we moved in – needed to be red. We bought a pot of paint in our first week, on 17 March. We painted the wall on 25 May, bank holiday Monday.

Room, seen through an arch, with one red-painted wall, dark wood dining table and chairs, just a corner of the curtains from above, and the whole of the print with the pig and the picnic

My new book goes beautifully with my red wall, though in fact I didn’t plan it that way. That started with stained glass flowers rather than with domestic decor. I’d had my eye on the passion flowers in one of the windows of the south aisle at my previous/current church (it’s complicated!) for ages, wanting to replace the more realistic one on the cover of my first book. But if it was going to be a series then I was going to have to find other stained glass flowers to match. I knew I wanted this one to be red, but it was surprisingly difficult to find ones that weren’t roses (made it look too much like a historical novel) or poppies (also made it look too much like a historical novel). I eventually found these ones at a church I popped into on last year’s narrowboat holiday. I’m not sure what they’re meant to be – maybe carnations? – but anyway, I’m really pleased with them.

Really, when it comes to it, I’m just very, very fond of red.