Tag: personal

August Moon day 3: betting with pennies, calculated risk

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It was a gloomy day, or perhaps it just felt that way because I did.

In fact, I’m not sure that I could tell you what the weather was doing. It wasn’t raining; I’d have heard that. But I didn’t go outside. The curtains stayed shut. I moved from bed to computer to bed to television. Only very late in the evening I looked out of the window and saw the last rags of sunlight just brushing the tops of the leylandii.

I was refusing to feel guilty about it. I was ill. Not seriously ill; just the irritating sort of sore throat that made it hurt to talk much, and the lethargy that made venturing outside the house an exhausting prospect. I could have pushed myself, I knew, but I would have suffered for it later. I’d done that through the working week, taken one sick day and ignored two others I knew I needed. Better a day of utter boredom than months of never quite being well, of always being tired.

This had happened the year before, you see. I’d gone away for a few days and been ill when I came back. And somehow I’d never got better, and before I knew it summer had disappeared and autumn was hurrying after it, and Christmas was a burden I couldn’t shoulder. A year before, and here it came all over again. I couldn’t face it. I went to bed and shut the curtains.

You’d like to know, wouldn’t you, what was the end of the story. You’d like to know what would have happened if I’d dragged my shoes on, gone out to buy a loaf of bread. You’d like to know if I recovered faster because I let myself rest, or if I would have just got over it if I’d only pushed myself.

So would I. I don’t know. It was only yesterday.

August Moon day 2: the room with the doors

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Let me tell you what I am afraid of.

I am afraid of getting shut in. I am afraid of shutting myself in. I am afraid of closing any door, for fear that it, and only it, will turn out to have been the right door to go through.

I am afraid of shutting the door and being left in the dark. It’s possible, of course, that when the door shuts I will see the cracks of light around all the other doors, the ones I didn’t even know existed. But what if I don’t?

I am afraid of making the wrong choice, of knowing that it is my fault that things have gone wrong, because I made that choice.

For a long time I have known, in the part of my mind that knows facts, that staying in that cramped little room is as much a choice as walking through any of the doors, that if I stay there long enough the doors will open or close without my hand touching the handle, that I will have chosen without the privilege of choosing.

It is only this week that I have come to understand deep in my bones that the house is mine, and that I am free to choose walk through or to ignore any door I like. Even though I don’t know what’s on the other side…

I’m scared of what might be on the other side, yes. I think, though, that it might be slightly less terrifying than finding that all the doors have locked themselves while I was stuck in the middle of the room, thinking that I wasn’t allowed to touch them.

August Moon day 1: scared of the dark

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We begin our journey in the darkness. I am feeling… apprehensive.

There is so much out there that I don’t know. Standing here with one foot on the threshold, about to step out into the unknown, I can’t even begin to imagine what’s coming. The person who will experience the adventures of a month, a year, a decade hence, knows more than I do, has dimensions of wisdom that are far beyond me.

It’s a luminous, velvety, exciting darkness, full of unknown unknowns, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it coming, so you might as well meet it with curiosity and the intention to enjoy it.

I only realised the other day that I have been stopping myself wanting things for most of my life, declining to express preferences out of politeness or fear or goodness knows what. Setting out on my fourth decade with permission to make choices based on what I actually want… now there’s an adventure. I’m still in the dark as to what I want.

And then there’s the actual, literal, darkness. It’s out there already. I had to turn my bike lights on this morning. It’s been a wet, grey, day, and it’s a dark, dank evening. No moon, and no chance of seeing it even if there were one. Autumn is here already, I think.

I am one of those apparently rare people who prefers Greenwich Mean Time to British Summer Time. My mood is so tied to the sunlight that when the mornings become dark I find the arguments for getting out of bed less and less convincing. As the nights lengthen I look forward to that magical Sunday when the clocks go back and the morning is suddenly light again. It doesn’t last long – a fortnight, perhaps, before the darkness crawls back in – but it’s enough; it keeps me hanging on until the solstice, when I can tell myself that things are going to get better.

There’s a petition going around Facebook at the moment asking for permanent British Summer Time. It’s a genuinely terrifying prospect. I would lose the whole winter.

I am scared of the dark. I am scared of the dark that’s coming. The dark that’s already here is less intimidating, but more awesome.

Personal Ad for a Handbag

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(Or two handbags. One in black; one in brown or blue. You could be the same design in different colours, or you could be different designs, both of which match my specifications.)

You have a decent square or oblong base, and you are sufficiently bottom-heavy that you don’t tip over when I put you down.

You will fit into my bicycle basket without having to be put on end or tilted.

You have two handles, long enough for you to be carried comfortably over my shoulder, but not so long that you drag on the ground when I carry you in the hand.

You can be closed completely, but you are deep enough that stuff doesn’t fall out of you if you aren’t.

You can carry a large paperback book and my Filofax simultaneously, or a pair of size seven ballerina flats. You have a pocket for my purse, phone and keys, and another one for my work pass and travelcard.

You don’t have tassels. You don’t have writing on. You don’t have an ostentatious logo.

Any metal trim is silver coloured, not gilt, and there isn’t much of it.

I buy you in a shop. I don’t buy you online, and nobody else buys you for me.

You are made of leather. I want you to last.

Thoughts from the end of twenty-nine

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I think I’m a bit scared of entering my thirties.

Thinking back to myself at nineteen, staring twenty in the face, and how much I’ve done and how far I’ve come since then… I think I’m scared by the prospect of the next ten years, knowing that I won’t recognise myself at the end of it. No, that’s not quite what I mean, but knowing that by the time I get to forty I will have grown and changed in ways that I cannot imagine from where I am now, at twenty-nine.

I remember myself aged goodness knows how old, say ten, thinking I’d never go to university, because at that point I couldn’t imagine having the intellectual capacity to cope with university. I hadn’t learned that knowledge and wisdom accrue day by day, that by the time you actually get to wherever it is you have all the resources you need to be there.

I grew between ten and twenty, I’ve grown between twenty and thirty. I’ve discovered whole new dimensions in which to grow. The same thing will surely happen between thirty and forty, and it makes sense that it will happen in ways that I can’t see from where I am now, and it makes sense that I would be a little bit scared of that.

This, I think, is why people get so irritated about people who are younger than they are stressing about their next big birthday. There are lots of people who have got to forty who know that their thirties were brilliant and amazing, and they have forgotten that they didn’t know that at the time.

Expanding the Comfort Zone

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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the idea of expanding one’s comfort zone from within, as opposed to stepping out of it (useful posts here from Havi Brooks and Jem Bloomfield), in the context of singing – purely because I spend a lot of my spare time doing it.

I estimated a couple of months ago that I’ve averaged two hours of choral singing a week over the past decade. There have, of course, been lighter patches (2007, of which I spent a third in Spain and Germany not singing much at all, and my second and third years at university, when I decided that the need of the serving team was greater than the need of the chapel choir), but they are balanced out by the five years I spent in the choir at Holy Trinity, Guildford. During term time we did two services every Sunday, with a half hour or forty-five minute rehearsal before each one, and an hour’s practice every Thursday. As a result I know a lot of the standard church music repertoire inside out and back to front: if we assume that each piece was sung twice a year, once during a morning service and once at an evensong, then I’ve performed most of them ten times.

I was not at all confident when I joined. All my life I’ve been close to people who have more singing experience than I do and, while they have been nothing but supportive, I’ve always been able to see that their sightreading was better than mine, that they were more confident than I was, that they could hold a line against all comers and I couldn’t. Fortunately, when I joined Holy Trinity, there were plenty of other altos to follow.

I’ve joined two new choirs over the past year, and I’m still singing less than I was at Holy Trinity. They have both proved the expansion of my comfort zone, in very different ways.

The first one was one of the several choirs that run out of my parish church. The workload is considerably less: we sing one, maybe two, services every month, with an hour’s rehearsal beforehand, and a rehearsal on the preceding Friday. This is very much flying by the seat of the pants: a lot of sightreading, and no guarantee that there’ll be anyone else on your part to prop you up.

And that doesn’t scare me any more. Once upon a time I would have been too terrified even to consider joining this choir, but my comfort zone has expanded to encompass this method too.

Granted, some of this is stuff I already know from Holy Trinity. On Easter Sunday I was the only alto at evensong. That was fine: we did Blessed be the God and Father, which I have sung every Easter since 2008. On the other hand, I was the only alto at the previous evensong, and I was sightreading an anthem… I can’t remember what it was, only that I’d never seen it before in my life, and that the alto line contained several top Gs. The very first piece that I did with the new choir was Herbert Howells’ Requiem; that, thank goodness, had rather more rehearsal time dedicated to it.

The other choir is pretty much the complete opposite. In this choir, ten weeks to learn three pieces is presented as a frighteningly tight timescale. This is the workplace choir, set up by the social club and the excellent Workplace Choir Company. Its basic assumption is that nobody has sung anything since they were at school, when they were probably told by a teacher that they couldn’t. This seemed to be about right at my workplace. There was a question early on: who was in a choir already? I was one of perhaps three people who raised their hands. Three out of sixty, and the only one in the first altos.

There was the solo. (But I’ve done solos before, in front of people who would know exactly where I’d gone wrong.) There was the fact that I was doing the solo with a microphone. (That was new territory.) There was the responsibility. At one point the Director of the Executive Office told me, ‘You’re our leader’. I’m not even sure that she was joking. (I have never before in my life been the most experienced member of a large choir.) There was the assuring of everybody that everything was going to be fine.

And somehow I was able to meet it all with a general attitude of ‘Bring it on!’ Solo? Bring it on! Microphone? Bring it on! Teaching a tricky snippet to the rest of my section without reference to a piano? Bring it on! It’s being filmed? Wait, what? Er, bring it on! Thank you, comfort zone, expanding yourself while I wasn’t even looking.

I managed to appear calm through the performance, although it wasn’t until last week, when the high-quality video was made available, that I was able to see whether or not I’d cocked it up. I never know how a solo has gone after the event. I’d like to think that’s because I’m so absorbed in the music that I’ve no space left in my head to remember it, but it’s happened before when I’ve lost a bar in the middle of it.

Anyway, it turns out it wasn’t too bad, all things considered. Here’s the result. I’m the tallest soloist, in the green shirt, singing the alto part in the second verse. Me and my expanded comfort zone.

April Moon: day 15: permission to wish

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Permission to wish. Permission to really, really want something. I find this difficult. I have a superstitious conviction that letting myself really, really want something will alert some contrary-minded force to my desire, and I won’t get it.

It’s a defensive little monster in my mind, promising me that if I manage not to want something then I won’t be disappointed when I don’t get it. It’s first cousin to the Angel in the House (who has been quieter of late, but is still in there somewhere) who sits in my head telling me that whatever it is that I want cannot possibly be as important as whatever it is the other person wants, and that if I get it instead of the other person, it will all go wrong and will all be my fault.

Of course it doesn’t stop me wanting it. I catch myself thinking, ‘well, if I get it, I’ll…’ – or, more dangerously, ‘well, when I get it, I’ll…’ Wear this. Say that. Be able to do the other.

There’s nothing that I can do at this point to make it more or less likely to happen. These little mental tricks will make no difference to the outcome. All I can do is wait.

I tried forgetting about it, but it hasn’t worked. I’m still watching my emails, listening for the letterbox. (There’s a lot to hear from the letterbox at the moment, but it’s mostly Labour and the Lib Dems fighting for this marginal seat.)

Let’s try an experiment. There are ten days left of uncertainty. Let’s try really, really wanting it for those ten days, and risk the disappointment. Truth is, monster, I’ll be disappointed anyway.

Very well, then. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I wish…

Just for a second, I manage to really, really want it.

April Moon: day 14: water and trains

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‘Oh, I’m so lucky!’ my mother exclaims, whenever she remembers where she lives.

View over the English Channel from South Street, Ventnor
This is why.

Standing on her garden wall, you see Ventnor falling away below you in higgledy-piggledy terraces down to the sea, and the Channel stretching out. France is over there. Thataway.

I don’t have the English Channel, but I have taken to thinking the same way about the river Cam. I live three minutes away from this. I am still overwhelmed by the fact that I am lucky enough to live here, and I’ve been doing it for nearly a year so.

There’s something about living near water, I think. There’s the huge, calming vastness of the sea. The river doesn’t quite do that, but it’s full of life and activity. The ducks, the rowers, the houseboats, the swans – there’s always something going on, always something to look at, and you have to go out very late at night if you want to be sure of not meeting anybody.

The days draw out, and even on work days I leave home in daylight and I return in daylight, and I cycle to the shops, or I walk to the pub, or I sit by the river and eat an ice cream, and I watch the ducks flying downriver and the boats hauling upriver and the swans nibbling at the grass from the bank, and the trains pelting over the bridge, and I think, ‘Oh, I’m so lucky.’

I love living near water. One worries, vaguely, about flooding and cliff falls, but they haven’t happened yet. I’ve always lived either near water or within earshot of a railway, or, as now, both. The one time we did flood we were way out in the country, and that was the river Teme remembering its prehistoric course and coming straight through our cellar. It was all right: we lost the freezer, and that was about it.

I love the trains, too, but in a slightly different way. Water is huge and full of activity; the trains are contained. Human creations, orderly, predictable, going where they’re meant to go. They make me feel safe. Even in the awful bedsit, the worst place I ever lived, I heard the trains rattling past at night, down in the cutting underneath my window, and I could think, ‘I can get away. If it gets too bad, I can get away.’

Here, I have trains and water. This is what makes me feel lucky.

April Moon: day 13: false dichotomies

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Sometimes I wonder if I will ever… shh. Don’t wonder too hard. You’ll wake it, and it needs a rest. So do I. It’s asleep, curled up in a cave somewhere in the Mariana Trench. Don’t worry. It’ll come back when it’s ready.

We’re not talking about this today. We can talk in generalities.

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever make my living by writing – and then I realise very swiftly that I don’t want to.

Oh, I dream. I wander along the banks of the Cam and wonder which house would be the best to live and write in. I think of having a studio with a balcony and looking out at the swans and ducks and rowers. I imagine how my books will change people’s lives. I daydream about being interviewed in my beautiful home, and all that guff.

In the mean time, I write on the train to work.

Here’s a confession. Even in that dream life, I still go to work.

I was talking about other people’s expectations early in this round. I think there are just as many levied on artists, of whatever ilk, as there are on everyone else. Just as everybody assumes that the temp can’t be happy until they’ve found a real job, everybody assumes that the artist must really want to chuck in the real world and devote themself to art.

It’s the dream, isn’t it? Chucking in the [soulless bullshit job] and giving the whole to [one’s vocation]. But is it really the dream?

I have a friend who, in his forties, left the air conditioning trade and went to university (which is where I met him) to study French, with the ultimate aim of becoming a teacher. He tried teaching, hated it, and is now back in air conditioning, although with a life much improved (or so I believe) in other ways. Meanwhile, my uncle has left teaching to become a lorry driver. (He’s also an extremely accomplished musician and photographer.) Life is, as ever, more complicated than that. And people vary.

Personally (and I know I was ranting about the conflation of these concepts earlier in the round, as well) I would no more like to be a full time artist than I would a full time mother. I like my day job. I like getting out of the house and going to the big city. I like interacting with amusing, knowledgeable people. I like my forty-five minutes of writing time on the train. (Hush. Hush. It’s all right. Not you. I didn’t mean you. Nobody’s writing anything more on you at the moment.)

Even if there were a way to earn a living by writing without the nicotine and/or alcohol dependence and chronic financial insecurity that characterised the only household I knew where anyone tried it, would I want to? I don’t think so. I am learning to take better care of myself than that.

April Moon: day 12: when the sun and I are in the right place

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Cycling south and west, parallel to the river. The first cup of tea of the morning is beginning to kick in, or perhaps it’s just the cool air rushing past me. Swans squatting in the beer garden of the Green Dragon. The morning sunlight drenching the house on the corner of Ferry Lane and Water Street until its pale green paint glows.

It doesn’t happen every day. For three months of the year it’s dark when I ride down Water Street. Sometimes it’s raining. Sometimes it’s cloudy. On the days when the sun and I are in the right place and the right time, though, this is the best part of my day.