Monday 23 November 2009

Life, interrupted, backwards, makes no sense.

Sometimes I ask myself, Why, Grit, Why?

I must have some serious anal-obsessive-compulsive-dishwashing-drama stashed beyond my skeleton closet.

Because it does not matter to me what the day, what the date, what the time. It's no matter.

It makes no difference to me whether this is September, January, December or the day we all put out frogs on the doorstep. Any convention, expectation, social norm? Things we should all do? It makes no difference. I have to do this. Post on blog dates gone backwards.* I am a driven woman.

Apart from the time I fell off the calender in Yemen - and only then because blabbing a quasi diplomatic life would probably cause a sorry incident somewhere - this blog has been going day after day after day.

And I am already sick and tired. So why, Grit, why? Why bother?

It's because I simply have only this way to escape the chaos for an hour and tell myself a story that makes sense.

I cannot dash into the car, drive to London, and reflect upon the times. I cannot wander the shops alone to speculate whether I might look good in red velvet. I cannot visit an art gallery to muse silently upon every future. I cannot dump the children somewhere and run.

I am here, and interrupted every five minutes of my life. I have had no single line of thought sustained from beginning to end for ten years. Everything inside my head winds up

like

spaghetti string.

And I am already an old lady, writing herself notes. I don't want the children to find my purse in the oven, or my shoes in the freezer. I need to make sense of chaos; remember what I do, where I live, who I am.

So I blog. Because today blogging is a toe hold on organisation, on memory, on order; a weapon against the day I reach for those shoes and think they are too hot to wear; I'd better cool them down.

And I need to remember Dig, because here is the day that Dig arrives homes from India, drops his bags on the office floor, sits heavily in front of the office computer, sighs, and books five tickets for us all to travel to London tomorrow night to the Royal Festival Hall to hear the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the choir Ex Cathedra perform The Dream of Gerontius, a story of a man who dies and is led to heaven by an angel.

And then Dig says, and of course I cannot bathe the children. I have to stay up late, he says, because I must book tickets for Madrid. We leave on Wednesday.

Remind me, which Wednesday is that?

* So today my post is for Monday 23rd November. But my diary says it is the 30th. C'est la vie.