Was that a wobble?

Sometimes I think I have had my gutsfull of bad experiences. A child who screams I hate you is horrible enough, but a husband who says, I want to be here with you, then packs his bag and buggers off to someone somewhere better, is worse. Then there is stuff not fit for consumption in a public space.

Most of this bad life experience, probably just like you, I console myself with repetition, for at least it made me human.

But my alarm predictor is pulling off-centre again, and I feel I will be in trouble, again, this year. I think this is less intuition and more a sensing: I imagine it must be when your feet feel a distant vibration that heralds the earthquake. Just wait out the time, let it rumble, stand powerless to stop it, then watch the earth fold away while you're flipped up into the air and sent spinning into space. Then you can say, I knew that was coming. I could feel it in my bones.

Of course it could be something much more likely than an impending earthquake. I sometimes fancy I have an evil imp who sits above my head, maybe on a dense cloud, and when I move, it moves with me, a menacing cloud and resident imp, but there's no guardian angel to do battle with the imp, maybe the angel's off having a cup of tea and a lie-down, so the imp can play as it likes.

In this state of musing - What bad thing is going to happen next? - on today's walk I take photographs of happy things, so I can look back and think, okay I knew the earthquake was coming, but at least I've enjoyed the sight of an arch.

(That last photo is bird song, but you try photographing bird song.)

The January greys

I shall be glad when this weather has done with grey.

Swallowing fistfulls of sunlight in tablet form, I scurry off to soak in rays of happy light from my fake daylight bulb in the upstairs kitchen. Just thirty minutes prevents all gloom!

This is what I believe, so do not take it from me with your tales of cold logic or calculating science.

But I must have an everyday of positive thinking! Come hell or high water, damn and blast this planet. Yes it will be this creative, positive, bright and breezy, shining day, and I will fashion it from my meagre resources. Or die in the attempt.

So I try my daily walk (in the rain), cut short (the rain) to the local Tesco. (Even though I know that Tesco are false friends who will not miss me when I die.)

I decided to photograph the street debris en route. Photo number one is of three pieces of meat. Some things are beyond explanation. I wondered, on the way home, too late, whether someone had laced them with cat-killing poison.

Take my feet as an elegiac couplet in a correspondence with the weather.

But I then wondered if it could be poetry that lifted my soul? So here is my poem, post-Tesco visit, called Shopping List.

Baking Pots
 Reduced Price
Haddock
Cucumber Whole
Crusty White
Bananas, Loose.

My last resort is close. Dangle fake diamonds from my ears and drink rum.

But then! I save the day! I manage to fix my eyeball onto my snake box.

(It's a work in progress.)

I put this off till Sunday, hoping Sunday could make a difference

Hoisted aloft with rage. In fact, it has been difficult for Dig and the family to coax me down from the ceiling.

The third second after I found out, I took up my new residence there, two meters up, third arm of the faux-chandelier, building my lair of exquisite rage with snarling bare-fangs and sprouted facial hair.

Growling, in my opinion, is better than Shark - my beautiful, strong, sensitive girl who withstands all - suffering maximum distress by Mother Marching, bull-direct at school gates, swinging baseball bat to herald The Speech of The Abused, or what I bloody well think, all knuckle-fisted, bare-boned, sharp-toothed; filled with the ferocity of foul revenge screaming Where is the FUCKING ENGLISH LESSON?

What should be in your English lesson? IMHO those precious 50 minutes should acknowledge the identities of women, girls, and make a space for a clear line of words from a woman's head through her level eye and from her equal mouth.

Shark should be given that space, and if she is not, then I'm laying down the motorway to our woman souls and flattening the way ahead so she - daughter of mine - can stand upright on that surface and walk its length, and know it is right to say, this is Me, this is my-who-I-am and this voice is Mine. It is Woman Voice and you shall not take it from me.

Strangely, having written it out here in hieroglyphs, I feel slightly better, or fractionally less unhinged, and will write an email to the English teacher instead that begins, Dear Jane,

Wherever in the world you roam

I spend my Saturday in joyful, artful, restful peace, quietly composing and stitching Wherever in the world you roam. Made with you in mind: for the person who travels far away, yet is reminded that love stays at home.

Yes! I have a stall at the magnificent Handmade and Vintage, held in the big indoor square in front of John Lewis in Central Milton Keynes, March 4-5.

The big, busty shows where you can buy anything from a repaired juke-box to a metal-twisted wand.

Save the date!

And if you'd like to fondle my leather and net,

See you at Stall 13.

Love, Knicker Drawer Note Books.

(Who, according to my customers, should be in Vogue.)

xx

A turn round the park

I live in a community where people solve their problems with a practical immediacy, yet it's a place where the community resources are becoming more subject to control by others.

Since I deduce this state of political control on the basis of a bit of string, a public notice, and an abandoned shopping trolley, I allow that my deductions might be open to other interpretations.


I mean, I'm not exactly Sherlock. I've missed loads of the bleeding obvious, even when it's stared me in the face.


See what you think. Here is the bit of string.

Holding up the Victorian iron railings. Probably no money to mend these, or in a budget not available. But I really like this resourceful, problem-solving approach of the common man/woman, in the style of Honey, I fixed it.

As to the sawn-off stump in the park, purpose pre-stump, I can only guess. The stump was supplied by a manufacturer in Ayrshire, if you'd like to supply a clue. These days the toddler play park is over the other side of the park, so I can't see the stump showing me the ghost of an old carousel. I like the way it's just left there for you, to trip over in the dark.

Next to the park, I see BT is taking down the phone box. They gave 42 days for us to ring them up and plead for its survival, from September last year.

What I liked about this was this box's proximity to an entire line of old GPO exchange boxes, all standing in a terminal line on the other side of the wall, property of the local museum. This is the line of the dead, and the fence dividing them is no barrier at all. I wonder if anyone called to save this remnant of the public payphone era?

On the other hand, the local primary school is bounded by a set of four fences and two gates of varying  heights and steel mesh. This border is policed by Boundary Gate and Barrier Contracts. I think it definitely tells me something about the way our neighbourhoods are changing, and I don't need to be Sherlock for that.

But finally! A practical solution of a long standing variety. Bring your shopping home in a supermarket trolley then dump the trolley on top of the garage.

There's something quietly comforting about that.

Good for the soul

I am eagerly anticipating the creative payoff that will result from my daily wanderings.

This is one of my rules: you walk about briskly for an hour in your Exploratory Excursion not only as a way of making sure you put on pants and leave the house - but to rest your mind and liberate your soul. Or whatever it is, that moment that makes me think, I wonder how I can stitch in a twist of sinister darkness to the Journal of the Travelling Woman?

Aiming for a twist of sinister darkness, I took the left-hand turn because I know where the right-hand turn leads.

I admit I did not particularly did not feel comfortable walking under the bridge, with its whoo-whooo sounds echoing and bouncing between the walls like a ghost trapped between the girders. As it is also the pigeon-roost neighbourhood, I was jolly glad my coat had a hood.

And I found an aqueduct! Water sluicing down the hill, calibrating the level of the Grand Union Canal. Strangely satisfying.

Forking paths. Which would you choose?

Obviously we chose the same. And encountered the marks left from the ghost-tribes, with the hands impulsed by the neolithic, who still meet at the underpass.

Then a proper Gothic moment, by the arch, and the decision to enter the deep, dark tunnel with its who-knows-what ahead.

Seriously, there is no way as a single woman walker that I would choose this path, so I am feeling the Exploratory Excursion has come up smiling today, bringing with it such adventures into uncomfortable territory as this.

 

Satisfying then, to emerge back home, contemplating my stitching room and in some tiny way, changed.

The realities of choice

Dispiriting. Getting out of bed before dawn and getting Shark to school.

Shark is equally glum, and still considering her options. She's had a few sparkling days of living normally. Organising her own time, following her interests, playing with her thermistor, and asking herself, I wonder what will happen next?

Now, she says, she knows. The school will find ways to waste her time. Her time will be micro-managed, interests will be guided on someone else's terms, the day is chopped into another's organisation, and she is back in the inescapable company of the dreadful Maths teacher, the teacher who cannot communicate even a passing interest, let alone passion. Roll on 3pm.

Dispiriting indeed.

I use my brief time with her for my words of motherly wisdom. I tell her to make up her own mind and we will support her, regardless of her choice.

More usefully, perhaps, I tell her, if she is undecided, don't fret. At some point she will know. A line will be crossed - violating the way she creates her life, striking against the principles she uses to guide her choices, bringing a depth of emotional pain or a physical threat - and then the decision will be clear. This person, this place, this circumstance, it is all doing more violence to a state of being, than the rewards they bring.

Street walk

My daily walk through town.

Just as I was thinking how walking is an act of theatre - ipso facto I am walker, actress, audience and critic - I come across the remains of a previous performance.

Who uses flour bombs? Seems only right to make a stop at our local second-hand bookshop to browse the theatre shelf.

I am not sure whether grubbing through used books for half-an-hour counts as Exploratory Walk. (Subdivision: Woman in Landscape / Urban/Rural / Flameuse / Walking Lit&Lang.) Whatever, I just have to carry about in my backpack a rather lumpy C. Day-Lewis along with Women in Technology.

Then I turned left and took the back road, looking to see if I could drop down to follow the canal.

Not here, evidently. I walk as dictated by whimsy (one of the walking rules). But the signage caught my eye, regularly placed along what feels like a border fence.

Designed to tell me I'm now on private land in a 'gated community' without gates (but with signs), so clear off.

And if I was walking in anyone's company, you'd have to listen to a soapbox full of opinion about the horrors of this experience with its implied threat via these border notices that if I do anything that someone doesn't like, I'll be fined and imprisoned.

So I took a lot of photographs of the signs, half-hoping a security guard would appear and I could have a right set-to with moral righteousness and illegality both on my side, all at the same time. Bliss.

I also enjoyed a good grumble in my own head about the complicities or resistances of people involved in the privatisations of public land and the steady way that unaccountable private companies might work to control social behaviours.

As it was, no-one tuned up to turf me out the 'gated community' without gates (but with signs). Even though I stood in the road for 15 minutes, waiting.

I then walked along a public footpath next to land locked up behind green railings, owned by the old Railway Works. Or, with my local knowledge, I'm assuming the Works owns this land: there's no sign to say, so it could be owned by a giant squirrel protecting their nut stack. (Unlikely.)

But I look at the heavy green railing, determined to protect what's inside and keep me out. I see those tree branches, like the fingers of the imprisoned, poking through the bars, tentatively wondering if what is on the other side is liberty.

Memo to self: charge the camera battery in the mornings

Did as advised by two men (with a book to plug), and had fun with my time management.

I Pomodoro'd my working morning.

Except I had to cheat. You are supposed to split your working time into 25-minute blocks, then take a 5-minute break, and start on another 25-minutes, and so on, until your book is written/ the house is painted/ the accounts complete/ whatever you promised yourself you would do in 2005. Voila! Finished!

The first 25 minutes flew by, and I didn't want to stop, so didn't, until I'd done my book-stitchery for an hour or so, then I went to have a 10-minute break.

Unfortunately - and I suspect, a duty not held by two men with a book to plug - I had then to make coffee for our Travelling Aunty and put the laundry on.

By the end of 15 minutes I was into the washing up from yesterday's breakfast. (Left on the hopeful happenchance that elves would come along and sort it out. No such luck.)

After the coffee-making duties, the laundry, the washing up, some more washing up, and a disinfecting of the kitchen surfaces in a pathetic attempt to clear out the rat that has taken residence in the property, nearly an hour had passed.

I bet two men (with a book to plug) organise their days while assuming these sort of jobs are done for them. I am growing increasingly resentful about that, and am using 2017 to regain my proper womanhood. Well, that's the plan, obviously. I haven't started on it yet.

But I did go for a walk, because now I am a flaneuse.

I go where I fancy, in the nature of the dérive. It is just as well my drift includes rural as well as urban, because even though I had not planned my path, my feet directly for the local field, made a straight path of it downhill and found a new bird hide.

I thought it would be a straightforward affair to come home by simply returning on the route I'd come, but I got embarrassingly lost in the damn field and had to make my way round all the fences, like a woodlouse tracks its borders, looking for the hole that leads out.

Anyway, have the illustrated record of my drift. Before the camera battery died.

 

This time, with feeling

Hurrah! 2017! I can feel my flurry of new resolutions coming on.

I wonder if I could do that bloggy-thing again. Post, not for posterity, but for the bewilderment of my children, every bleeding day!

Not sure. Last time I writted about home education (for years, possibly), I not only wanted to impart how life can be from the vantage point of implementing a bastard strong-armed educational righteousness vis-à-vis Real Life, I also wanted to Prove Dig Wrong.

In 2006, Dig said I wouldn't keep any record past the first week. And I just needed to show him what an iron streak of bloody-minded Oppositional Defiance Disorder can do.

But this time, it all feels different. My ball of determined rage/anguish/singlemindedness is gone. I have softened, remoulded by experience, and willing to take on a few new shapes. So this time, Dig might be right. If I started up the daily blog again, for it to last nearly one week before I reappeared in July, it wouldn't even bother me! Life moves on, and this time, it couldn't be all about an education.

But who can tell what happens next. I am open to a feeling for this, and a feeling for that.

And that is what I want. I'm going to make 2017 a year, unpredictably, full of it.